The Roman Poets of the Augustan Age: Virgil

by W. Y. Sellar

But just as historical composition, regarded as a branch of art, though originating in the imitation of Greek models, has assumed in the works of Livy and Tacitus a distinctively Roman type, in conformity with certain characteristics of the race and with the weight of new matter which it has to embody, so, too, the type of epic poetry realised by Virgil has acquired a distinctive character as a vehicle of Roman sentiment and material. To appreciate the native, as distinct from the foreign element in the mould in which Virgil’s representation is cast, it is necessary to attend to certain instincts and tendencies which [pg 283]were calculated strongly to affect any form of narrative poetry amongst the Romans, and also to take a rapid survey of the history of their narrative poetry from the beginning of their literature to the Augustan Age.

In the first place, the strong national sentiment of Rome was a feeling which could not fail to be appealed to in any works which aimed at securing both general and permanent interest. The heroic story of Greece was indeed able for a time to attract general attention at Rome from the novelty of the dramatic representations in which it was introduced. But even Roman tragedy, to judge from the testimony of Cicero and others, seems to have owed more of its popularity to the grave spirit by which it was animated and the Roman strength of will exhibited in its personages, than to the legitimate sources of interest in a drama, viz. the play of human motives and the vicissitudes of human fortunes. But to sustain the interest of a long narrative, as distinct from a dramatic poem, it was necessary to act on some deep and general feeling. Not only did the hearers require to be thus moved to attention, but the poet himself could only thus be inspired and sustained in the unfamiliar task of literary composition. Now, looking to other manifestations of Roman energy, we see that whatever force was not employed on present necessities, was given, not as among the Greeks to ideal creation, but to the commemoration of events of public importance, and to the transmission of the lessons as well as of the history of the passing time. The connexion between the past and the future was maintained by monuments of different kinds, by public inscriptions, written annals, fasts, or festivals recording some momentous experience in the history of the State. All that we know and can still see of Roman work suggests the thought of a people who had an instinctive consciousness of a long destiny; who built, acted, and wrote with a view to a distant future. A national history was the legitimate expression of this impulse; but before the language was developed into a form suited for a continuous work in prose, it was natural that the tendency to realise the [pg 284]past and hand down the memory of the present should find an outlet for itself in various forms of narrative poetry.

Again, the Romans had a strong personal feeling of admiration for their great men. They were animated by that generous passion to which, in modern times, the term hero-worship has been applied. And corresponding with this feeling on the part of his countrymen, there was in the object of it a strong love of glory, a strong passion to perpetuate his name. Through the whole course of Roman history we recognise this motive acting powerfully on the men most eminent in war, politics, and literature, and on no one more powerfully than on the Emperor Augustus. The memory of the great men of Rome and of their actions was kept alive by monuments, statues, coins, waxen images preserved in the atrium of the family house, by the poems sung and speeches delivered among funeral ceremonies, by inscriptions on tombs (such as that still read on the tomb of Scipio Barbatus), by family names (such as that of Africanus) derived from great exploits, and, under the Empire, by the great triumphal arches and columns which still excite the admiration of travellers. The Roman passion for glory received its highest gratification in the triumph which celebrated great military exploits. The culmination of the tendency to glorify actual living men, or men recently dead, is witnessed in the deification of the Emperors. With the development of literature we find, as we should expect, this tendency of the imagination allying itself with poetry, from the time when Ennius devoted one work to the celebration of Scipio down to the panegyrists of Augustus, Messala, or Agrippa[436] under the early Empire. A new direction and a new motive were thus given to narrative poetry—a direction and motive which had no inconsiderable influence in determining Virgil to the choice of the subject of the Aeneid.

Another characteristic of the race was likely to impress itself on the form and execution of their narrative poetry, viz. [pg 285]their love of works of large compass and massive structure. Vastness of design and solid workmanship are as distinctive properties of Roman art, as harmony of proportion and beauty of form are of the works of Greek imagination. To compose a literary work which should be representative of the genius of Rome, it was necessary that the author should be not only imbued with Roman sentiment and ideas, but also endowed with the Roman capacity for patient and persevering industry. Concentration of purpose on works conceived and executed on a great scale, with a view both to immediate and permanent results, was an essentially Roman quality. The Romans built their aqueducts and baths for the commonest needs of life, and constructed their roads and encampments, in such a way as to astonish the world after the lapse of nearly two thousand years. With similar energy and persistence of purpose they built up their greatest literary works. This characteristic favoured the growth among them of a type of epic poetry as distinct from that of Greece as the Coliseum was from the Parthenon.

If Roman epic poetry was not to be a mere imitation of the Greek epic, we should accordingly expect that it should exhibit some or all of these characteristics,—that it should seek that source of interest which secures permanent attention to a long narrative poem in national sentiment; that it should strive to restore the memory of the past history and traditions of the State and at the same time to give expression to the ideas of the present time; that it should magnify the greatness of eminent living men or of those who had served their country before them; and that it should be conceived on a large scale, and be executed perhaps with rude, but certainly with strong and massive workmanship. The first original narrative poem in Latin literature—the Punic War of Naevius—treated of a subject of living interest, and at the same time glorified the mythical past of Rome; and, while rude in design and execution, it was conceived and executed on a scale of large dimensions. The example was thus given of a Roman epic based on a legendary foundation, but mainly built out of the materials [pg 286]of contemporary history. We can imagine that, at the time when this poem was composed, a more vivid interest would be felt in the fictitious connexion between Rome and Troy from the fact that it was in the First Punic War that this connexion appears first to have been generally recognised. The legend had not as in Virgil’s time the prestige of two centuries, but it had the force of novelty to recommend it for poetic purposes. At the same time the great struggle between Rome and Carthage, on which the attention of the world was fixed at the time when Naevius wrote, must have given a peculiar meaning to the early relations between the two imperial States, as they were first represented in his poem.

The poem of Naevius gave the germinative idea and some of the materials to the first and fourth Books of the Aeneid; it established also the principle of combining in one work a remote mythical past with a subject of strong contemporary interest. At the same time it gave the example, followed by the Roman national epic, before the time of Virgil, of taking the main subject of the poem from the sphere of actual history. This confusion between the provinces of poetry and prose had been avoided by the instinct of Greek taste. Among the large number of Greek epic writers from the age of Homer to that of Nonnus, we hear of only one or two who treated of actual historical events. The general neglect of those poems which in ancient and modern times have treated of historical events and characters in the forms of epic poetry shows that the Greek instinct in this, as in all other questions of art, was unerringly right. The choice and treatment of such a subject are equally fatal to the truth and completeness of historical representation and to the ideality and unity of a work of art. Though the objection does not equally apply to dramatic art, yet the modern instinct, which selects for that mode of representation subjects remote from our own times, confirms the judgment in accordance with which the Athenians fined their tragic poet for reminding them of a too recent sorrow.

The Roman writers recognised the analogy between epic and [pg 287]historic narrative,—and the way in which they apprehended the alliance between them was as injurious to the truthfulness of their history as to the symmetry of their early poetry,—but they did not before the time of Virgil recognise the artistic distinction between them. The Roman epic and Roman history originated in the same feeling and impulse—the sentiment of national glory, the desire to perpetuate the great actions and the career of conquest, which were the constituent elements of that glory. The impulse both of poets and historians was to build up a commemorative monument; not, as among the Greeks, to present the spectacle of human life in its most animated, varied, and noble movements. To a Roman historian and to a Roman poet the character and the fate of individuals derived their chief interest from their bearing on the glory and fortune of the State. In the Greek epic, on the other hand, the interest in Achilles and Hector is much more vivid than that felt in the success of the Greek or Trojan cause. In Herodotus the interest felt in the most important historical crisis through which the world has ever passed is inseparably blended with that felt in a great number of individual men, among the enemies of Greece, no less than among Greeks themselves. In the History of Livy we do not expect to find truthful delineation or sagacious analysis of the characters of the leading men of Rome; still less do we expect to find impartial and sympathetic delineation of the enemies of Rome; but we seek in his pages the image of the nation’s life in its onward career of conquest and internal change, as pride and affection shaped it on the tables of the national memory. The idea of Rome, as the one object of supreme interest to gods and men, in the past, present, and future, imparts the unity of sentiment, tone, and purpose which is characteristic of the type of Roman epic poetry and of Roman history.

Naevius in selecting for his epic poem the subject of the First Punic War, and in connecting that war with the events which were supposed to connect the Roman State immediately with a divine origin and destiny, was the first Roman who was moved [pg 288]to write by this powerful impulse. But the man who first gave full expression to the national idea and feeling, who first made Rome conscious of herself, and who was the true founder of her literature, was Ennius. The title which he gave to his epic—Annales—perhaps the most prosaic title ever given to a work of genius, indicates the character of his work and his mode of treatment. The inspiration under which it was written is more truly indicated by the other name—Romais—by which, according to the testimony of an ancient grammarian[437], it was sometimes known. He took for his subject the whole career of Rome, from its mythical beginning in the events which followed the Trojan war onward to the latest events in his own day. The work was recognised as a great epic poem, and at the same time fulfilled the part of a contemporary chronicle. It was a true instinct of genius to feel that the only material suitable for a Roman epic was to be sought in the idea of the whole national life. That alone could supply the essential source of epic inspiration, the sympathy between the poet and those to whom his poem is addressed, by which the epic poet receives from, as well as gives back to, his audience. But on the other hand, while he has the true poetic impulse,—the ‘vivida vis’ and the strong conceptions of a poet,—he came too soon to acquire the tact and delicacy of conception and execution equally essential to the creation of works destined for immortality. The subject was too vast to be treated within the compass of a poem, which demands to be read as a whole, and to be contemplated as one continuous mental creation. The treatment of a long series of actions in chronological order is incompatible with artistic effect; the treatment of contemporary history is incompatible with the ideality of imaginative representation. The workmanship of the poem, as exhibited in many fragments, is powerful, but at the same time rude and unequal. Yet Ennius was a true representative writer. He appealed powerfully to the national sentiment; he revived the mythical and historic fame of the past; he perpetuated the memory and interpreted the [pg 289]meaning of his own time; he enhanced the glory of the great men and the great families of Rome; and he produced a work of colossal proportions and massive execution. Till his place was taken by a successor who united the fervour of a national poet to the perfect workmanship of an artist, he was justly regarded as the truest representative in literature of Roman character, sentiment, and ideas.

Other narrative and historical poems were known by the name of ‘Annales;’ one in three Books, written by Accius, the tragic poet; another written by A. Furius of Antium, which extended to a greater length, as Macrobius (ii. 1. 34[438]) quotes from the tenth and the eleventh Books lines appropriated by Virgil,—one of many proofs of the manner in which the genius of Virgil, acting upon great reading, absorbed the thoughts and diction of his predecessors. The most important of the historical poems which continued the mistake of treating recent history in the form of a metrical chronicle appears to have been the Istrian War of Hostius, the grandfather of the Cynthia of Propertius, and alluded to by him in the line,

Splendidaque a docto fama refulget avo.