Sunt magnae, topper confringent importunae undae.
He was appointed also, on one occasion, near the end of the Second Punic War, to compose a hymn to be sung by 'virgines ter novenae,' which is described by Livy, the historian, as rugged and unpolished[8].
Livius was the schoolmaster of the Roman people rather than the father of their literature. To accomplish what he did required no original genius, but only the industry, knowledge, and tastes of an educated man. In spite of the disadvantage of writing in a foreign language, and of addressing an unlettered people, he was able to give the direction which Roman poetry long followed, and to awaken a new interest in the legends and heroes of his race. It was necessary that the Romans should be educated before they could either produce or appreciate an original poet. Livius performed a useful, if not a brilliant service, by directing those who followed him to the study and imitation of the great masters who combined, with an unattainable grace and art, a masculine strength and heroism of sentiment congenial to the better side of Roman character.
Cn. Naevius is really the first in the line of Roman poets, and the first writer in the Latin language whose fragments give indication of original power. It has been supposed that he was a Campanian by birth, on the authority of Aulus Gellius, who characterised his famous epitaph as 'plenum superbiae Campanae.' But the phrase 'Campanian arrogance' seems to have been used proverbially for 'gasconade'; and as there was a plebeian Gens Naevia in Rome, it is quite as probable that he was by birth a Roman citizen. The strong political partisanship displayed in his plays seems favourable to this supposition, as is also the active interference of the tribunes on his behalf. Weight must however be given to the remark of Mommsen, 'the hypothesis that he was not a Roman citizen, but possibly a citizen of Cales or of some other Latin town in Campania, renders the fact that the Roman police treated him so unscrupulously the more easy of explanation.' On the other hand it has been observed that had he been an alien the tribunes could not have interfered on his behalf. He served either in the Roman army or among the Socii in the First Punic War, and thus must have reached manhood before the year 241 b.c. Cicero mentions that he lived to a good old age, and that he died in exile about the end of the third century b.c.[9]. The date of his birth may thus be fixed with approximate probability about the year 265 b.c. No particulars of his military service are recorded, but it is most probable that the scene of his service was the west of Sicily, on which the struggle was concentrated during the later years of the war. If we connect the newly developed taste for the drama with the intercourse of Romans with Sicilian Greeks during the war, we may connect another important influence on Roman literature and Roman belief which first appeared in the epic poem of Naevius with the Phoenician settlements in the west of Sicily. The origin of the belief in the mythical connexion of Aeneas and his Trojans with the foundation of Rome may probably be attributed to the Sicilian historian Timaeus; but the contact of the Romans and the Carthaginians in the neighbourhood of Mount Eryx, may have suggested that part of the legend which plays so large a part in the Aeneid, which brings Aeneas from Sicily to Carthage and back again to the neighbourhood of Mount Eryx. The actual collision of Roman and Phoenician on the western shores of Sicily, of which Naevius may well have been a witness, if it did not originate, gave a living interest to the mythical origin of that antagonism in the relations of Aeneas and Dido.
The earliest drama of Naevius was brought out in b.c. 235, five years after the first representation of Livius Andronicus. The number of dramas which he is known to have composed affords proof of great industry and activity, from that time till the time of his banishment from Rome. He was more successful in comedy than in tragedy, and he used the stage, as it had been used by the writers of the old Attic comedy, as an arena of popular invective and political warfare. A keen partisan of the commonalty, he attacked with vehemence some of the chiefs of the great senatorian party. A line, which had passed into a proverb in the time of Cicero, is attributed to him,—
Fato Metelli Romae fiunt consules;
to which the Metelli are said to have replied in the pithy Saturnian,
Dabunt malum Metelli Naevio poetae.
In the year 206 b.c. Q. Caecilius Metellus was Consul, his brother M. Metellus Praetor Urbanus, an office that held out an almost certain prospect of the Consulship; and it has been suggested[10], with much probability, that it was against them that this sneer was directed. The Metelli carried out their threat, as Naevius was imprisoned, a circumstance to which Plautus[11] alludes in one of the few passages in which Latin comedy deviates from the conventional life of Athenian manners to notice the actual circumstances of the time. While in prison, he composed two plays (the Hariolus and Leon), which contained some retractation of his former attacks, and he was liberated through the interference of the Tribunes of the Commons. But he was soon after banished, and took up his residence at Utica, where he is said by Cicero, on the authority of ancient records, to have died, in b.c. 204[12], though the same author adds that Varro, 'diligentissimus investigator antiquitatis,' believed that he was still alive for some time after that date[13]. It is inferred, from a passage in Cicero[14], that his poem on the First Punic War was composed in his old age. Probably it was written in his exile, when removed from the sphere of his active literary efforts. As he served in that war, some time between b.c. 261 and b.c. 241, he must have been well advanced in years at the time of his death.
The best known of all the fragments of Naevius, and the most favourable specimen of his style, is his epitaph:—