Semper et inventam patriis exponere chartis[64].
The master-pieces of the Augustan literature were not the products of that vivid and rapidly-working creative energy which marked the Ciceronian Age. There never was an age in which great writers trained themselves so carefully for their office, strove so much to conform to recognised principles of art, reflected so much on the plan and purpose of their compositions, or used more patient industry in bringing their conceptions to maturity. The maxim ‘nonum prematur in annum’ illustrates the spirit in which the great artists of that age worked. The cultivated appreciation of Greek art and poetry—the essential condition of the creative impulse of Italy—then reached its highest point, produced its supreme effect in a national Roman literature of similar perfection of workmanship, and, after that, rapidly declined and passed away from the Roman world as a source of literary inspiration, leaving however the educating influence of this new literature in its place. The Greek language had indeed been studied at Rome for nearly two centuries before the Ciceronian Age. The earliest Roman writers—Naevius, Ennius, Pacuvius, etc.—had [pg 40]used the epic and dramatic poetry of Greece as a kind of quarry for their own rude workmanship. The age of Laelius had imbibed much of the humanity and wisdom of Greek speculation. But it was not till the age of Cicero and Catullus that the long process of education and the largely increased intercourse between the two nations had raised the Roman mind to a full sense and enjoyment of artistic excellence, as revealed both to the eye and to the mind. The men of that age, in the midst of all their active pursuits, were moved by this foreign influence as the men of the Renaissance were moved by the recovery of classical literature. In the case of some among them the passion for accumulating books and works of art became the absorbing interest in their lives. Though in some of the orators and men of letters, e.g. Memmius, as we learn from Cicero, their Greek tastes fostered an affected indifference to their own nationality, yet on the best minds, such as those of Cicero himself, Lucretius, and Catullus, this intimate contact with Greek genius acted with a vivifying power by calling forth the native genius of Italy. It was the peculiarity of the Roman mind to be capable of receiving deep and lasting impressions from other nations with whom it came in contact, without sacrifice of the strong individuality of its own character. What Columella says of the Italian soil, ‘that it is most responsive to the care bestowed on it, since, through the energy of its cultivators, it has learned to yield the products of nearly the whole world[65],’ might be said with equal truth of the Italian mind. This adaptability to foreign influences, without loss of native genius and character, enabled Rome to exercise spiritual supremacy over the world for more than a thousand years after the loss of her temporal supremacy. In the age of Cicero and the following age this adaptability to another form of spiritual influence gave to Rome a great national literature.
Virgil, Horace, and their immediate contemporaries devoted themselves to Greek studies with even more ardour than their [pg 41]immediate predecessors. Education and preparation for a career in literature was a more elaborate process than it had ever been before, perhaps we might add, than it has ever been since. Virgil was still an unknown student, carefully preparing himself for the labour of his life almost till he reached the age at which Catullus died. Horace at the age of twenty-three was, to use his own words, still ‘seeking for the truth among the groves of Academus.’ The taste for literary leisure was greatly developed among the educated classes by the suppression of all active political life; while at the same time the establishment of public libraries made the access to books more easy and general. Women equally with men made themselves familiar with at least the lighter fancies of the learned Greeks. There are none of his Odes into which Horace is so fond of introducing his mythological allusions as those in which some real or fictitious heroine, Galatea or Asterie, Lyde or Phyllis, is addressed. The poems of Propertius which celebrate his love for Cynthia could only be appreciated by the possessors of much recondite learning.
Though the greatest poets of the Augustan Age drew much of their inspiration from the purer sources of Greek genius, especially from Homer and the early lyric poets, yet the period of Greek literature which was most familiar to the Romans of the Augustan Age was the Alexandrian. It was nearest to them in point of time; it was most congenial to the taste of the learned Greeks who now gathered from the widely-scattered centres of Greek culture to Rome, as they had formerly done to Alexandria; it was of all the forms of Greek literature the most cosmopolitan, or rather the least national, in spirit, and thus most easily adopted by another race; it was moreover, like that of the Augustan Age, the literature of a courtly circle enjoying the favour and contributing to the glory of a royal patron. The earliest imitators of this poetry were Catullus and the other poets contemporary with him, such as Calvus, Caecilius, Cinna, and Varro Atacinus, the author of the epic poem of Jason. In the Augustan Age Gallus had not only [pg 42]obtained distinction as the author of original elegics in the style of the amatory poetry of Alexandria, but had translated a poem of Euphorion of Chalcis[66], whom Cicero holds up as the type of effeminacy in literature in contrast with the manliness of Ennius[67]. Tibullus to a certain extent, but still more Propertius and Ovid, followed in the same line. From the Alexandrine poets they derived the form and many of the materials of their art. Virgil, while familiar with the whole range of Greek poetry and pressing it all into his service, has used the Alexandrians more freely than any other Greek writers, with the exception of Homer. Horace is most independent of them; there are no direct traces of their works in any of his writings. The Greek authors to whom he acknowledges his debt are the early Lyrists and Iambic writers, the poets of the New Comedy, the philosophic writers of the later schools which arose out of the teaching of Socrates, and especially Aristippus. Yet even in him the influence of the Alexandrine tone is apparent, especially in his treatment of the subjects taken from the Greek mythology.
This poetry of Alexandria, or rather this poetry of the Greek race in its latter days, was, to a much greater extent, the artificial product of culture and knowledge than the manifestation of original feeling or intellectual power. The very language in which it was written was artificial, far removed, not only in phraseology but in dialectical forms, from the language of common life. Poetry was pursued as the recreation of scholars and men of science; its chief aim was to satisfy a dilettante curiosity:—
Cetera quae vacuas tenuissent carmine mentes, etc.[68]
The writers of this school whose names are most familiarly known are Callimachus, one of the Battiadae of Cyrene, Euphorion of Chalcis, Philetas of Cos, Aratus of Soli, Hermesianax [pg 43]and Nicander of Colophon, Apollonius of Rhodes[69], Lycophron of Chalcis, Eratosthenes of Cyrene, from whom Virgil takes a passage about geographical science, Zenodotus of Ephesus, a grammarian,—names suggestive of the widely-diffused culture of the Hellenic race, and at the same time indicative of the absence of any great centre of national life such as Athens had been in former times. To these are sometimes added the more interesting names of Theocritus of Syracuse, and of the idyllic poets Moschus of Syracuse and Bion of Smyrna, although they are more associated with the fresh woods and pastures of Sicily and Southern Italy. The chief materials used by the Alexandrine writers in their poetry were the tales and fancies of the old mythology and the results of natural science; the modes of human feeling to which they mainly gave expression were the passion of love and the sensibility to the beauty of Nature.
Nothing attests more forcibly the original power and richness of faculty which shaped the primitive fancies of the Greek mythology into legend, poetry, and art, than the perennial vitality with which this mythology has reappeared under many forms, satisfying many different wants of the human mind, at various epochs, from the time of its birth even down to the present day. In the contrasts often drawn between the classical and the romantic imagination, it is sometimes forgotten that this Greek mythology was richer in romantic personages, situations, and incidents, than the mythology or early legends of any other race. In the nobler eras of Greek literature, after the creative impulse ceased out of which the mythology and its natural accompaniment epic poetry had arisen, the legends and personages of gods and heroes supplied to the lyrical poets an ideal background by connexion with which they glorified the passions and interests of their own time: to the tragic poets of Athens they supplied beings of heroic stature, situations of transcendent import, by means of which [pg 44]they were enabled to give body and shape to the deepest thoughts on human destiny. The Alexandrians, and those Greek writers who came long after them, such as Quintus Calaber and Nonnus, did not seek to impart any recondite meaning to the legends which they revived, but rather to divest them of any sacred or ethical associations, and to present them to their readers simply as bright and marvellous tales of passion and adventure. They endeavoured, either in the form of continuous epics or in the more appropriate form of ‘epyllia’ or epic idyls, to enable their readers to escape in fancy from the dull uniformity of their own time into a world of action in the bright morning of the national life. They sought especially to satisfy two impulses of the Greek nature which still survived out of the more powerful energies which had given birth to art and poetry,—the childlike curiosity (Ἕλληνες ἀεὶ παῖδες) which delights in hearing a story told, and the artistic passion to make present to the eye or the fancy distinct pictures and images of beauty and symmetry.
The later development of the Greek intellect was however more critical and scientific than creative. Science, learning, and criticism were especially encouraged and cultivated at Alexandria. The impulse given by Aristotle to natural observation and enquiry, and the large intercourse with the East which followed on the conquests of Alexander and the establishment of the kingdoms of his successors, led to a great increase of knowledge, or, in the absence of definite knowledge, of curiosity and speculation. The spirit of enquiry no longer, as in the days of the older philosophers, endeavoured to solve the whole problem of the universe, but to observe and systematise the phenomena of the special sciences. Natural history, botany, and medicine were studied zealously and successfully; the subjects of astronomy and meteorology excited equal interest, though the want of the appliances necessary for these studies made them more barren in results. A great advance was made in the knowledge of remote places of the earth and of their various products. The novelty of these enquiries, and [pg 45]of the knowledge resulting from them, stimulated curiosity and the imaginative emotion which accompanies it; and the enthusiasm of science combining with the enthusiasm of literary criticism gave birth to a new kind of didactic poetry, which aimed at expounding the phenomena of Nature in the epic diction of Homer. Among the best-known authors of this didactic poetry are Aratus, Callimachus, and Nicander,—the last described as being a poet, a grammarian, and a physician, a combination characteristic of the spirit in which both science and literature were cultivated. These writers supplied materials which Virgil used in the Georgics, and in the special examination of that poem it will be seen that he adopted other characteristics of the Alexandrine learning. The description by Ovid of the poem of Aemilius Macer in the lines
Saepe suas volucres legit mihi grandior aevo,