The Roman Poets of the Republic, 2nd edition

by W. Y. Sellar

But there is one thing significant in the literary character of this period, otherwise so barren in works of taste and imagination. Those by whom the art of verse was practised are no longer 'Semi-Graeci' or humble provincials, but Romans of political or social distinction. The chief authors in the interval between the first and second era of Roman poetry are either members of the aristocracy or men of old family belonging to the equestrian order. And this connexion between literature and social rank continues till the close of the Republic. The poets of the Ciceronian age,—Hortensius, Memmius, Lucretius, Catullus, Calvus, Cinna, &c.—either themselves belonged to the governing class, or were men of leisure and independent means, living as equals with the members of that class. This circumstance explains much of the difference in tone between the literature of that age and both the earlier and later literature. The separation in taste and sympathy between the higher classes and the mass of the people which had begun in the days of Terence, grew wider and wider with the growth of culture and with the increasing bitterness of political dissensions. It was only among the rich and educated that poetry could now expect to find an audience; and the poetry written for them appealed, for the most part, to the convictions, tastes, pleasures, and animosities which they shared as members of a class, not, like the best Augustan poetry, to the higher sympathies which they might share as the depositaries of great national traditions. But if this poetry was too exclusively addressed to a class—a class too, though refined by culture, yet living for the most part the life of fashion and pleasure—it had the merit of being the sincere expression of men writing to please themselves and their equals. It was not called upon to make any sacrifice of individual conviction or public sentiment to satisfy popular taste or the requirements of an Imperial master.

But though barren in poetry this interval was far from being barren in other intellectual results. This was the era of the great Roman orators, the successors of Laelius, Carbo, the Gracchi, &c., and the immediate predecessors and contemporaries of Cicero. It was through the care with which public speaking was cultivated that Latin prose was formed into that clear, exact, dignified, and commanding instrument, which served through so many centuries as the universal organ of history, law, philosophy, learning, and religion,—of public discussion and private correspondence. While Latin poetry is quite as much Italian as Roman, both in spirit and manner, Latin prose bears the stamp of the political genius of Rome. It was the deliberate expression of the mind of men practised in affairs, exercised in the deliberations of the Senate, the harangues of the public assemblies, the pleadings of the courts,—of men accustomed to determine and explain questions of law and to draw up edicts binding on all subjects of the State,—trained, moreover, to a sense of literary form by the study of Greek rhetoric, and naturally guided to clearness and dignity of expression by the orderly understanding, the strong hold of reality, and the authoritative bearing which were their birthright as Romans. The effort which obtained its crowning success in the prose style of Cicero left its mark on other forms of literature. History continued to be written by members of the great governing families to serve both as a record of events and a weapon of party warfare. The large and varied correspondence of Cicero shows how general the accomplishment of style had become among educated men. And if this result was, in the main, due to the fervour of mind and temper elicited by the contests of public life, the systematic teaching of grammarians and rhetoricians acted as a corrective of the natural exuberance or carelessness of the rhetorical faculty.

Perfection of style attained in one of the two great branches of a national literature cannot fail to react on the other. It was the peculiarity of Latin literature that this perfection or high accomplishment was reached in prose sooner than in poetry. The contemporaries of Cicero and Caesar, whose genius impelled them to awaken into new life the long silent Muses of Italy, were conscious that the great effort demanded of them was to raise Latin verse to a similar perfection of form, diction, and musical cadence. What Cicero did for Latin prose, in revealing the fertility of its resources, in giving to it more ample volume, and eliciting its capabilities of sonorous rhythmical movement, Lucretius aspires to do for Latin verse. Although Catullus in forming his more elaborate style worked carefully after the manner of his Greek models, yet we may attribute something of the terseness, the idiomatic verve, the studied simplicity of expression in his lighter pieces to the literary taste which he shared with the younger race of orators, who claimed to have substituted Attic elegance for Asiatic exuberance of ornament.

During all this interval, in which native poetry was neglected, the art and thought of Greece were penetrating more deeply into Italy. Cicero, in his defence of Archias, attests the eagerness with which Greek studies were cultivated during the early years of the century; 'Erat Italia tunc plena Graecarum artium ac disciplinarum, studiaque haec et in Latio vehementius tum colebantur quam nunc iisdem in oppidis, et hic Romae propter tranquillitatem reipublicae non neglegebantur.' With the reviving tranquility of the Republic these studies also revived. Learned Greeks continued to flock to Rome and to attach themselves to members of the great houses,—the Luculli, the Metelli, Pompey, &c.; and it became more and more the custom for young men of birth and wealth to travel or spend some years of study among the famous cities of Greece and Asia. This new and closer contact of the Greek with the Roman mind came about, not as the earlier one through dramatic representations, but, in a great measure, through the medium of books, which began now to be accumulated at Rome both in public and private libraries. Probably no other cause produces so great a change in national character and intellect as the awakening of the taste and the creating of facilities for reading. By the diffusion of books, as well as by the instruction of living teachers, the Romans of this generation came under the influence of a new class of writers, whose spirit was more in harmony with the modern world than the old epic and dramatic poets, viz. the exponents of the different philosophic systems and the learned poets of Alexandria. These new influences helped to denationalise Roman thought and literature, to make the individual more conscious of himself, and to stimulate the passions and pleasures of private life. While the endeavour to regulate life in accordance with a system of philosophy tended to isolate men from their fellows, the study of the Alexandrine poets, the cultivation of art for its own sake, the exclusive admiration of a particular manner of writing fostered the spirit of literary coteries as distinct from the spirit of a national literature. But making allowance for all these drawbacks, it is to the Alexandrine culture that the education of the Roman sense of literary beauty is primarily due. Along with this culture, indeed, the taste for other forms of art, which was rapidly developed and largely fed in the last age of the Republic, powerfully cooperated. Lucretius specifies among the 'deliciae vitae'

Carmina, picturas, et daedala signa;[337]

and, in more than one place, he writes, with sympathetic admiration, of the charm of instrumental music,

Musaea mele per chordas organici quae

Mobilibus digitis expergefacta figurant.[338]

The delicate appreciation of the paintings, statues, gems, vases, etc., either brought to Rome as the spoils of conquest, or seen in their original home by educated Romans, travelling for pleasure or employed in the public service, was not without effect in calling forth the ideal of literary form, realised in some of the master-pieces of Catullus. We may suppose too that the cultivation of music had some share in eliciting the lyrical movement in Latin verse from the fact mentioned by Horace, that the songs of Catullus and Calvus were ever in the mouths of the fashionable professors of that art in a later age. If the life of the generation which witnessed the overthrow of the Republic was one of alarm and vicissitude, of political unsettlement and moral unrestraint, it was, at the same time, very rich in its capabilities of sensuous and intellectual enjoyment. The appetite for pleasure was still too fresh to produce that deadening of energy and of feeling, which is most fatal to literary creativeness. The passionate life led by Catullus and his friends may have shortened the days of some of them, and tended to limit the range and to lower the aims of their genius, but it did not dull their vivid sense of beauty, chill their enjoyment of their art, or impair the mastery over its technical details, for which they strove.

As the bent given to philosophical and literary studies developed the inner life and personal tastes of the individual, the political disorganisation of the age tended to stimulate new modes of thought and life, which had not, in any former generation, been congenial to the Roman mind. While the work of political destruction was being carried on along with the most strenuous gratification of their passions by one set among the leading men at Rome—such as Catiline and his associates, and, somewhat later, Clodius, Curio, Caelius, Antony, etc.—among men of more sensitive and refined natures the pleasures of the contemplative life began to exercise a novel fascination. The comparative seclusion in which men like Lucullus and Hortensius lived in their later years may, perhaps, be accounted for by other reasons than the mere love of ease and pleasure. It was a symptom of that despair of the Republic which is so often expressed in Cicero's letters, and of the consequent diversion of thought from practical affairs to the questions and interests which concern the individual. In the same way the unsettlement and afterwards the loss of political life at Athens gave a great impulse both to the various philosophical sects on the one hand, and to the literature of the new comedy, which deals exclusively with private life, on the other. In Rome this alienation from politics naturally allied itself, among members of the aristocracy, with the acceptance of the Epicurean philosophy. The slow dissolution of religious belief which had been going on since the first contact of the Roman mind with that of Greece, awoke in Rome, as it had done in Greece, a deeper interest in the ultimate questions of the existence and nature of the gods and of the origin and destiny of the human soul. We see how the contemplation of these questions consoled Cicero when no longer able to exercise his energy and vivid intelligence on public affairs. He discusses them with candour and seriousness of spirit and with a strong leaning to the more hopeful side of the controversy, but scarcely from the point of view which regards their settlement as of supreme importance to human well-being. But they are raised from much greater depths of feeling and inward experience by Lucretius, to whom the life of political warfare and personal ambition was utterly repugnant, and who had dedicated himself, with all the intensity of his passionate and poetical temperament, to the discovery and the teaching of the true meaning of life. The happiest results of his recluse and contemplative life were the revelation of a new delight open to the human spirit through sympathy with the spirit of Nature, and the deepening beyond anything which had yet found expression in literature of the fellow-feeling which unites man not only to humanity but to all sentient existence. The taste, so congenial to the Italian, for country life found in him its first and most powerful poetical interpreter: while the humanity of sentiment, first instilled through the teaching of comedy, and fostered by later literary and ethical study, was enforced with a greatness of heart and imagination which has seldom been equalled in ancient or modern times.