the whole theatre broke out into frantic applause. So too in a well-known passage of the speech pro Sestio he tells from hearsay how the great tragic actor Aesopus, acting in the Eurysaces of Accius, was again and again interrupted by applause as he cleverly adapted the words to the expected recall from exile of the orator, his personal friend.[502] The famous words "Summum amicum, summo in bello, summo ingenio praeditum," were among those which the modest Cicero tells us were taken up by the people with enthusiasm,—greatly, without doubt, to the detriment of the play. The whole passage is one of great graphic power, and only fails to rouse us too to enthusiasm when we reflect that Cicero was not himself present.
From this and other passages we have abundant evidence that tragedies were still acted; but Cicero nowhere in his correspondence, where we might naturally have expected to find it, nor in his philosophical works, gives us any idea of their educational or aesthetic influence either on himself or others. He is constantly quoting the old plays, especially the tragedies, and knows them very well: but he quotes them almost invariably as literature only. Once or twice, as we shall see, he recalls the gesture or utterance of a great actor, but as a rule he is thinking of them as poetry rather than as plays. It may be noted in this connexion that it was now becoming the fashion to write plays without any immediate intention of bringing them on the stage. We read with astonishment in a letter of Cicero to his brother Quintus, then in Gaul, that the latter had taken to play-writing, and accomplished four tragedies in sixteen days, and this apparently in the course of the campaign.[503] One, the Erigona, was sent to his brother from Britain, and lost on the way. We hear no more of these plays, and have no reason to suppose that they were worthy to survive. No man of literary eminence in that day wrote plays for acting, and in fact the only person of note, so far as we know, who did so, was the younger Cornelius Balbus, son of the intimate friend and secretary of Caesar. This man wrote one in Latin about his journey to his native town of Gades, had it put on the stage there, and shed tears during its performance.[504]
When we hear of plays being written without being acted, and of tragedies being made the occasion of expressing political opinions, we may be pretty sure that the drama is in its nonage. An interesting proof of the same tendency is to be found in the first book of the Ars Amatoria of Ovid, though it belongs to the age of Augustus. In this book Ovid describes the various resorts in the city where the youth may look out for his girl; and when he comes to the theatre, draws a pretty picture of the ladies of taste and fashion crowding thither,—but
Spectatum veniunt: veniunt spectentur ut ipsae.
And then, without a word about the play, or the smallest hint that he or the ladies really cared about such things, he goes off into the familiar story of the rape of the Sabine women, supposed to have taken place when Romulus was holding his ludi.
It is curious, in view of what thus seems to be a flagging interest in the drama as such, to find that the most remarkable event in the theatrical history of this time is the building of the first permanent stone theatre. During the whole long period of the popularity of the drama the government had never consented to the erection of a permanent theatre after the Greek fashion; though it was impossible to prohibit the production of plays adapted from the Greek, there seems to have been some strange scruple felt about giving Rome this outward token of a Greek city. Temporary stages were erected in the Forum or the circus, the audience at first standing, but afterwards accommodated with seats in a cavea of wood erected for the occasion. The whole show, including play, actors, and pipe-players[505] to accompany the voices where necessary, was contracted for, like all such undertakings,[506] on each occasion of Ludi scaenici being produced. At last, in the year 154 B.C., the censors had actually set about the building of a theatre, apparently of stone, when the reactionary Scipio Nasica, acting under the influence of a temporary anti-Greek movement, persuaded the senate to put a stop to this symptom of degeneracy, and to pass a decree that no seats were in future to be provided, "ut scilicet remissioni animorum standi virilitas propria Romanae gentis iuncta esset."[507] Whether this extraordinary decree, of which the legality might have been questioned a generation later, had any permanent effect, we do not know; certainly the senators, and after the time of Gaius Gracchus the equites, sat on seats appropriated to them. But Rome continued to be without a stone theatre until Pompey, in the year of his second consulship, 55 B.C., built one on a grand scale, capable of holding 40,000 people. Even he, we are told, could not accomplish this without some criticism from the old and old-fashioned,—so lasting was the prejudice against anything that might seem to be turning Rome into a Greek city.[508] There was a story too, of which it is difficult to make out the real origin, that he was compelled by popular feeling to conceal his design by building, immediately behind the theatre, a temple of Venus Victrix, the steps of which were in some way connected with his auditorium.[509] The theatre was placed in the Campus Martius, and its shape is fairly well known to us from fragments of the Capitoline plan of the city;[510] adjoining it Pompey also built a magnificent porticus for the convenience of the audience, and a curia, in which the senate could meet, and where, eleven years later, the great Dictator was murdered at the feet of Pompey's statue.
In spite of the magnificence of this building, it was by no means destined to revive the earlier prosperity of the tragic and comic drama. Even at the opening of it the signs of degeneracy are apparent. Luckily for us Cicero was in Rome at the time, and in a letter to a friend in the country he congratulates him on being too unwell to come to Rome and see the spoiling of old tragedies by over-display.[511] "The ludi," he says, "had not even that charm which games on a moderate scale generally have; the spectacle was so elaborate as to leave no room for cheerful enjoyment, and I think you need feel no regret at having missed it. What is the pleasure of a train of six hundred mules in the Clytemnestra (of Accius), or three thousand bowls (craterae) in the Trojan Horse (of Livius), or gay-coloured armour of infantry and cavalry in some mimic battle? These things roused the admiration of the vulgar: to you they would have brought no delight." This ostentatious stage-display finds its counterpart to some extent at the present day, and may remind us also of the huge orchestras of blaring sound which are the delight of the modern composer and the modern musical audience. And the plays were by no means the only part of the show. There were displays of athletes; but these never seem to have greatly interested a Roman audience, and Cicero says that Pompey confessed that they were a failure; but to make up for that there were wild-beast shows for five whole days (venationes)—"magnificent," the letter goes on, "no one denies it, yet what pleasure can it be to a man of refinement, when a weak man is torn by a very powerful animal, or a splendid animal is transfixed by a hunting-spear? … The last day was that of the elephants, about which there was a good deal of astonishment on the part of the vulgar crowd, but no pleasure whatever. Nay, there was even a feeling of compassion aroused by them, and a notion that this animal has something in common with mankind."[512] This last interesting sentence is confirmed by a passage in Pliny's Natural History, in which he asserts that the people were so much moved that they actually execrated Pompey.[513] The last age of the Republic is a transitional one, in this, as in other ways; the people are not yet thoroughly inured to bloodshed and cruelty to animals, as they afterwards became when deprived of political excitements, and left with nothing violent to amuse them but the displays of the amphitheatre.
Earlier in this same letter Cicero had told his friend Marius that on this occasion certain old actors had re-appeared on the stage, who, as he thought, had left it for good. The only one he mentions is the great tragic actor Aesopus, who "was in such a state that no one could say a word against his retiring from the profession." At one important point his voice failed him. This may conveniently remind us that Aesopus was the last of the great actors of tragedy, and that his best days were in the early half of this century—another sign of the decay of the legitimate drama. He was an intimate friend of Cicero, and from a few references to him in the Ciceronian writings we can form some idea of his genius. In one passage Cicero writes of having seen him looking so wild and gesticulating so excitedly, that he seemed almost to have lost command of himself.[514] In the description, already quoted from the speech pro Sestio, of the scene in the theatre before his recall from exile, he speaks of this "summus artifex" as delivering his allusions to the exile with infinite force and passion. Yet the later tradition of his acting was rather that he was serious and self-restrained; Horace calls him gravis, and Quintilian too speaks of his gravitas.[515] Probably, like Garrick, he was capable of a great variety of moods and parts. How carefully he studied the varieties of gesticulation is indicated by a curious story preserved by Valerius Maximus, that he and Roscius the great comedian used to go and sit in the courts in order to observe the action of the orator Hortensius.[516]
Roscius too was an early intimate friend of Cicero, who, like Caesar, seems to have valued the friendship of all men of genius, without regard to their origin or profession. Roscius seems to have been a freedman;[517] his great days were in Cicero's early life, and he died in 61 B.C., to the deep grief of all his friends.[518] So wonderfully finished was his acting that it became a common practice to call any one a Roscius whose work was more than usually perfect. He never could find a pupil of whom he could entirely approve; many had good points, but if there were a single blot, the master could not bear it.[519] In the de Oratore Cicero tells us several interesting things about him,—how he laid the proper emphasis on the right words, reserving his gesticulation until he came to them; and how he was never so much admired when acting with a mask on, because the expression of his face was so full of meaning[520].
In Cicero's later years, when Roscius was dead and Aesopus retired, we hear no more of great actors of this type. With these two remarkable men the great days of the Roman drama come to an end, and henceforward the favourite plays are merely farces, of which a word must here be said in the last place.