The Roman Poets of the Republic, 2nd edition

by W. Y. Sellar

But, although oratory and history may have been more essential to the national life of the Romans, and more adapted to their genius, their poetry still remains their most complete literary monument. Of the many famous orators of the Republic one only has left his speeches to modern times. The works of the two greatest Roman historians have reached us in a mutilated shape; and the most important epochs in the later history of the Republic are not represented in what remains of the works of either writer. Tacitus records only the sombre and monotonous annals of the early Empire; and the extant books of Livy contain the account of times and events from which he himself was separated by many generations. Roman poetry, on the other hand, is the contemporary witness of several important eras in the history of the Republic and the Empire. It includes many authentic and characteristic fragments from the great times of the Scipios,—the complete works of the two poets of finest genius, who flourished in the last days of the Republic,—the masterpieces of the brilliant Augustan era;—and, of the works of the Empire, more than are needed to exemplify the decay of natural feeling and of poetical inspiration under the deadening pressure of Imperialism. And, besides illustrating different eras, the Roman poets throw light on the most various aspects of Roman life and character. They are the most authentic witnesses both of the national sentiment and ideas, and of the feelings and interests of private life. They stamp on the imagination the ideal of Roman majesty; and they bring home to modern sympathies the charm and the pathos of human life, under conditions widely different from our own.

Roman poetry was the living heir, not the lifeless reproduction of the genius of Greece. If it seems to have been a highly-trained accomplishment rather than the irrepressible outpouring of a natural faculty, still this accomplishment was based upon original gifts of feeling and character, and was marked by its own peculiar features. The creative energy of the Greeks died out with Theocritus; but their learning and taste, surviving the decay of their political existence, passed into the education of a kindred race, endowed, above all other races of antiquity, with the capacity of receiving and assimilating alien influences, and of producing, alike in action and in literature, great results through persistent purpose and concentrated industry. It was owing to their gifts of appreciation and their love of labour, that the Roman poets, in the era of the transition from the freedom and vigour of the Republic to the pomp and order of the Empire, succeeded in producing works which, in point of execution, are not much inferior to the masterpieces of Greece. It was due to the spirit of a new race,—speaking a new language, living among different scenes, acting their own part in the history of the world,—that the ancient inspiration survived the extinction of Greek liberty, and reappeared, under altered conditions, in a fresh succession of powerful works, which owe their long existence as much to the vivid feeling as to the artistic perfection by which they are characterised.

From one point of view, therefore, Roman poetry may be regarded as an imitative reproduction, from another, as a new revelation of the human spirit. For the form, and for some part of the substance, of their works, the Roman poets were indebted to Greece: the spirit and character, and much also of the substance of their poetry, are native in their origin. They betray their want of inventiveness chiefly in the forms of composition and the metres which they employed; occasionally also in the cast of their poetic diction, and in their conventional treatment of foreign materials. But, in even the least original aspects of their art, they are still national. Although, with the exception of Satire and the poetic Epistle, they struck out no new forms of poetic composition, yet those adopted by them assumed something of a new type, owing to the weight of their contents, the massive structure of the Roman language, the fervour and gravity of the Roman temperament, and the practical bent and logical mould of the Roman understanding.

They were not equally successful in all the forms which they attempted to reproduce. They were especially inferior to their masters in tragedy. They betray the inferiority of their dramatic genius also in other fields of literature, especially in epic and idyllic poetry, and in philosophical dialogues. They express passion and feeling either directly from their own hearts and experience, or in great rhetorical passages, attributed to the imaginary personages of their story—to Ariadne or Dido, to Turnus or Mezentius. But this occasional utterance of passion and sentiment is not united in them with a vivid delineation of the complex characters of men; and it is only in their comic poetry that they are quite successful in reproducing the natural and lively interchange of speech. There is thus, as compared with Homer and Theocritus, a deficiency of personal interest in the epic, descriptive, and idyllic poetry of Virgil. The natural play of characters, acting and reacting upon one another, scarcely, if at all, enlivens the divinely-appointed action of the Aeneid, nor adds the charm of human associations to the poet's deep and quiet pictures of rural beauty, and to his graceful expression of pensive and tender feeling.

The Romans, as a race, were wanting also in speculative capacity; and thus their poetry does not rise, or rises only in Lucretius, to those imaginative heights from which the great lyrical and dramatic poets of Greece contemplated the wonder and solemnity of life. Yet both the epic and the lyrical poetry of Rome have a character and perfection of their own. The Aeneid, with many resemblances in points of detail to the poems of Homer, is yet, in design and execution, a true national monument. The lyrical poetry of Rome, if inferior to the choral poetry of Greece in range of thought and in ethereal grace of expression, and scarcely equalling the few fragments of the early Aeolic poetry in the force of passion, is yet an instrument of varied power, capable of investing the lighter moods or more transient joys of life with an unfading charm, and rising into fuller and more commanding tones to express the national sentiment and moral dignity of Rome. Didactic poetry obtained in Lucretius and Virgil ampler volume and profounder meaning than in their Greek models, Empedocles and Hesiod. It was by the skill of the two great Latin poets that poetic art was made to embrace within its province the treatment of a great philosophical argument, and of a great practical pursuit. The Satires and Epistles of Horace showed, for the first time, how the didactic spirit could deal in poetry with the conduct and familiar experience of life. The elegiac poets of the Augustan age, while borrowing the outward form of their compositions from the early poets of Ionia and the later writers at the court of Alexandria, have taken the substance of their poetry to a great extent from their own lives and interests; and have treated their materials with a fluent brilliancy of style, and often with a graceful tenderness of feeling, unborrowed from any foreign source. It may thus be generally affirmed that the Roman poets, although adding little to the great discoveries or inventions in literature, and although not equally successful in all their adaptations of the inventions of their predecessors, have yet left the stamp of their own genius and character on some of the great forms which poetry has hitherto assumed.

The metres of Roman poetry are also seen to be adaptations to the Latin language of the metres previously employed in the epic, lyrical, and dramatic poetry of Greece. The Italian race had, in earlier times, struck out a native measure, called the Saturnian,—of a rapid and irregular movement,—in which their religious emotions, their festive and satiric raillery, and their commemorative instincts found a rude expression. But after this measure had been rejected by Ennius, as unsuited to the gravity of his greatest work, the Roman poets continued to imitate the metres of their Greek predecessors. But, in their hands, these became characterised by a slower, more stately, and regular movement, not only differing widely from the ring of the native Saturnian rhythm, but also, with every improvement in poetic accomplishment, receding further and further from the freedom and variety of the Greek measures. The comic and tragic measures, in which alone the Roman writers observed a less strict rule than their models, never attained among them to any high metrical excellence. The rhythm of the Greek poets, owing in a great measure to the frequency of vowel sounds in their language, is more flowing, more varied, and more richly musical than that of Roman poetry. Thus, although their verse is constructed on the same metrical laws, there is the most marked contrast between the rapidity and buoyancy of the Iliad or the Odyssey, and the stately and weighty march of the Aeneid. Notwithstanding their outward conformity to the canons of a foreign language, the most powerful and characteristic measures of Roman poetry,—such as the Lucretian and the Virgilian hexameter, and the Horatian alcaic,—are distinguished by a grave, orderly, and commanding tone, symbolical of the genius and the majesty of Rome. In such cases, as the Horatian sapphic and the Ovidian elegiac, where the structure of the verse is too slight to produce this impressive effect, there is still a remarkable divergence from the freedom and manifold harmony of the early Greek poets to a uniform and monotonous cadence.

The language, also, of Roman poetry betrays many traces of imitation. Some of the early Latin tragedies were literal translations from the works of the Athenian dramatists; and fragments of the rude Roman copy may still be compared with the polished expression of the original. Some familiar passages of the Iliad may be traced among the rough-hewn fragments of the Annals of Ennius. Even Lucretius, whose diction, more than that of most poets, produces the impression of being the immediate creation of his own mind, has described outward objects, and clothed his thoughts, in language borrowed from Homer and Empedocles. The short volume of Catullus contains translations from Sappho and Callimachus, and frequent imitations of other Greek poets; and, from the extant fragments of Alcaeus, Anacreon, and others of the Greek lyric poets, it may be seen how frequently Horace availed himself of some turn of their expression to invest his own experience with old poetic associations. Virgil, whose great success is, in no slight measure, due to the skill and taste with which he used the materials of earlier Greek and native writers, has reproduced the heroic tones of Homer in his epic, and the mellow cadences of Theocritus in his pastoral poems; and has blended something of the antique quaintness and oracular sanctity of Hesiod with the golden perfection of his Georgics.

But besides the direct debt which each Roman poet owed to the Greek author or authors whom he imitated, it is difficult to estimate the extent to which the taste of the later Romans was formed by the familiar study of a foreign language so much superior to the rude speech spoken by their fathers. The habitual study of any foreign language has an influence not on style only, but even on the structure of thought and the development of emotion. The Roman poets first learned, from the study of Greek poetry, to feel the graceful combinations and the musical power of expression, and were thus stimulated and trained to elicit similar effects from their native language. It is for this gift, or power over language, that Lucretius prays in his invocation to the creative power of Nature,—

Quo magis aeternum da dictis, diva, leporem;

and it is this which Catullus claims as the characteristic excellence of his own poems.