Tenney Frank

“ In the days of the early republic the Mediterranean world consisted of hundreds of independent city-states, and in the second century Rome numbered more than a hundred allies in her federation and perhaps as many more states in her circle of "friends," while on the periphery were countless semi-barbaric tribes ever ready to serve as catalytic agents of war. When one remembers that modern nations must employ all the arts of diplomacy to keep peace with their few neighbors, one is surprised not at the number of wars Rome fought but at the great number of states with which she lived in peace. ”

“ It is not an accident that genuine realistic tragedy failed to find its fully accepted place upon the stage till the nineteenth century, in a word not till thoroughgoing democracy, by preaching the equality of men, had persuaded us of the dignity of the mere human being, and through the prose novel taught the man on the street to concern himself with his fellows as worthy themes of art. ”

“ There is little of the sentimental rapture that the eighteenth century discovered for us. Vergil is not likely to stand in postures before the awful solemnity of the sea or the majesty of wide vistas from mountain tops. Italian hill-tops afford views of numerous charming landscapes but no scenes of entrancing grandeur or awe-inspiring desolation, and the sea, before the days of the compass, was too suggestive of death and sorrow to invite consideration of its lawless beauty. ”

“ Catullus at first fed on the same fare, but one stirring experience set him free. Thereafter he wrote songs that no Greek could have claimed. They have the lilt, beauty, and precision of his models, but a natural freedom, a lucidity, and a convincing passion that make the epigrams of the Garland seem lucubratory. They obviously spring out of a society that is less artificial and out of a life that grows in a young world.
Lucretius again refuses to fall into a conventional pattern. He has no standards, no proportions, no models. ”

“ Untrained in metaphysical processes of thought, ignorant of the tools of exact science, the Romans had as yet been granted no answers to their growing curiosity about nature except those offered by a hopelessly naïve faith. Stoicism had first been brought over by Greek teachers as a possible guide, but the Roman, now trained by his extraordinary career in world politics to think in terms of experience, could have but little patience with a metaphysical system that constantly took refuge in a faith in aprioristic logic which had already been successfully challenged by two centuries of skeptics. ”

“ It is a very petty humanism that dares insist that no one may touch Vergil or Spenser except and only for aesthetic delight and judgments. It is of course wholly legitimate to read Dante for his haunting lines and his stupendous imagery, but many of us insist on the added privilege of transporting ourselves into his mysterious world of strange ideas if only to read him as did his contemporaries. The true humanist in any case is interested in more than artistic expression, and the humanist who deals with remote literature must be, perforce. ”

“ Sextus Pompey still held Sicily and the central seas, ready to betray the state at the first mis-step on Octavian's part. At Rome itself were many citizens in high position who were at variance with the government, quite prepared to declare for Antony or Pompey if either should appear a match for the young heir of Caesar. Clearly the great epic of Rome could not have matured in that atmosphere of suspicion, intrigue, and selfishness. The convulsions of the dying republic, beheld day by day near at hand, could only have inspired a disgust sufficient to poison a poet's sensitive hope. ”

“ Doubtless the young men, who could see the Plautine plays on the three or four holidays each year when they were given, enjoyed vicariously a release of spirit which they could comprehend because they were human beings. But not one of them had actually lived at home in the atmosphere reproduced on the Plautine stage. It is not surprising, therefore, that Plautus kept the Greek setting. There was little to draw upon from Roman life. Had he put his people in Roman dress the incongruity would have been ludicrous; and the censors would have realized the danger to morality and suppressed the plays. ”

“ Earth's great orb had he shaken in war, the kings and peoples of Asia had he broken, grievous slavery was he bringing even to thee, O Rome,—for all else had fallen before that man's sword,—when suddenly, in the midst of his struggle for mastery, headlong he fell, driven from fatherland into exile. ”

“ Thus it was that Roman tragedy became even more like modern opera than the tragedy of the Greek stage had been. These early men of Rome, who mean so little to us, had developed a form which was capable of carrying on the work of Greek tragedy on a primitive stage, and capable also of growing into a richer drama as soon as the resources of the small city should permit. They made the drama possible for Rome.
As a composer of tragedies and epic verse, Ennius succeeded Naevius, but, writing in an era of enthusiastic philhellenism, he came near yielding too much to a great foreign influence. ”

“ The clear expressive diction of Catullus' lyrics, full of old-fashioned turns, the sound social ideals of Vergil's Georgics, the buoyant idealism of the Aeneid and of Livy's annals speak the true language of these people. It is not surprising then that in Vergil's youth it is a group of fellow-provincials—returning sons of Rome's former emigrants—that take the lead in the new literary movements. They are vigorous, clever young men, excellently educated, free from the city's binding traditionalism, well provided also, many of them, with worldly goods acquired in the new rich country. ”

“ Materialism has been called an unpoetic theme. To us it may be, but to a Roman brought up in the dull mazes of polytheism and the ludicrous nursery-tales that masqueraded as cosmology, it was a sudden liberation. He had found a theme of the highest poetic worth, the epic story of the origins of life; and Vergil who half rejected his arguments still was poet enough to see that Lucretius had discovered the sublimest of all poetic themes—Felix qui potuit. ”

“ He seems even to have made an effort to be socially congenial. There is intimate knowledge of courtly customs in the staging of his epic; and in Horace's fourth book a refurbished early poem in Philodemus' manner pictures a Vergil—apparently the poet—as the pet of the fashionable world. But these things had no attraction for him. Rome indeed appealed to his imagination, Roma pulcherrima rerum, but it was the invisible Rome rather than the fumum et opes strepitumque, it was the city of pristine ideals, of irresistible potency, of Anchises' pageant of heroes. ”

“ For the hero will remind you of a beggar, and it would be desecration to set mere man upon the stage made for the demigods. Common man belongs in comedy; you may laugh at him and with him, but life’s great lessons are illustrated only in the characters of the great. And that is where Euripides stopped—was doubtless compelled to stop. And it is nearly where Shakespeare found the outward boundary of his tragedies. His tragic plots derive from old Chronicles or from Ancient Rome, or from foreign lands sufficiently removed from his audience by mists of unknown space to make them suitably heroic. ”

“ The Aeneid has none of the meretricious involutions of plot, none of the puzzling half-uttered allusions to essential facts, none of the teasing interruptions of the neoteric story book. The poet also learned to avoid the danger of stressing trivial and impertinent pathos, and he rejected the elegancies of style that threatened to lead to preciosity. What he kept, however, was of permanent value. The new poetry, which had emerged from a society that was deeply interested in science, had taught Vergil to observe the details of nature with accuracy and an appreciation of their beauty. ”

“ For instance, the scholar who studies classical prose forms has often kept his eye so intent upon the accumulation of rhetorical rules from Gorgias to Cicero that he has given us a history of a futile scholastic mechanism and not of an ever-vitalized prose which in fact re-created its appropriate medium with every new generation. The scholastic critics of the Roman lyric are sometimes so intent upon tracing external conventions through the centuries that they miss the soul of the poetry that assumes temporarily the mold of the convention. ”

“ But to the clear of vision Stoicism immediately took from nature with one hand what it had given with the other. Invariably, its rule of "follow nature" had to be defined in terms that proved its distrust of what the world called nature. As a matter of fact the Stoic had only scorn for naturalism. Physical man was to him a creature to be chained. Trust not the "scelerata pulpa; peccat et haec, peccat!" cries Persius in terror.
The earlier naïve animism of Greece and Rome had contained more of aesthetic value, for it was the very spring from which had flowed all the wealth of ancient myths. ”

“ Comedy paves the way somewhat. When the great may not be laughed at, it is well that comedy should present the foibles and deformities of the common man, if it be merely for ridicule. Slaves served the purpose of comedy for Menander and Plautus, though they were careful not to compromise the dignity of their art by giving title rôles to such humble fellows. Yet as a matter of fact the study of mean subjects contributed directly and very largely to the understanding of the ordinary character as material for tragedy. ”

“ It is indeed difficult to escape the very old persuasion that a sorrow so sympathetically expressed must be more than a mere Theocritan reminiscence. If we could find some poet—for Daphnis must be that—near to Vergil himself, who met an unhappy death in those days, a poet, too, who died in such circumstances during the civil strife that general expression of grief had to be hidden behind a symbolic veil, would not the poem thereby gain a theme worthy of its grace? ”

“ The Romans, like all builders of empires, were avid readers and writers of history. Their first two epics were the stories of the growth of Rome; the numerous autobiographies of the Republican period were the political apologiae of public men like Marius, Sulla, Scaurus, and Lucullus, who had given all their time to the affairs of state; before Livy composed his great work, at least a score of historians had written bulky accounts, now all lost, of the whole or some part of Rome’s amazing story. ”

“ It might be Maecenas, the holder of the purse-strings, a man who could not check his ambition to express himself whether in prose or verse. This Etruscan, whose few surviving pages reveal the fact that he never acquired an understanding of the dignity of Rome's language, that he was temperamentally un-Roman in his love for meretricious gaudiness and prettiness, might have worked incalculable harm on this school had his taste in the least affected it. But whether he withheld his dictum, or it was disregarded by the others, no influence of his can be detected in the literature of the epoch. ”

“ If the human race is more than 300,000 years old, man’s artistic literature is less than 3000: our segment of sure knowledge is less than one per cent of the amazing tale. If the biologist is willing to pry into the strata of a hundred million years to trace the evolution of plant and animal life, it is hardly conceivable that the humanist should disregard any part of our pitifully meager record of spiritual endeavor. ”

“ It is the great past, illustrated by the pageant of heroes and the prophetic pictures of Aeneas's shield, that kindles the poet's imagination. His sympathies are generous enough to include every race within the empire and every leader who had shared in Rome's making, from the divine founder, Romulus, and the tyrannicide, Brutus, to the republican martyrs, Cato and Pompey, as well as the restorers of peace, Caesar and Augustus. He has no false patriotism that blinds him to Rome's shortcomings. ”

“ It was in Sicily that the Roman soldiers had learned the Greek story of how Rome had been founded by Trojan refugees. The stories of Hector, of the Trojan horse, Achilles, Ajax, Iphigenia, and the rest were therefore not without personal interest in the barbaric city. The unlettered shoemakers, smiths, and carpenters at Rome, men whose modern equals could hardly be expected to sit patiently through a performance of Gilbert Murray’s Trojan Women, eagerly listened to the half-comprehended lines of Livius’ translation. ”

“ Epicureanism on the other hand by employing the theory of evolution was able to unite man and nature once more. And since man is so self-centered that his imagination refuses to extend sympathetic treatment to nature unless he can feel a vital bond of fellowship with it, the poetry of romance became possible only upon the discovery of that unity. This is doubtless why Lucretius, first of all the Romans, could in his prooemium bring back to nature that sensuousness which through the songs of the troubadours has become the central theme of romantic poetry even to our day. ”

“ Livius is merely a name, which is unfortunate, since we know that he deserved well of Roman civilization. Naevius is less shadowy, a personality whose creative work left an impress on such powerful men as Cicero and Vergil two centuries later. He wrote not only plays, but an epic, condensing Rome’s history in an annalistic poem, the climax of which was the great victory over Carthage in which he had had a share. ”

“ What would we not barter of all the sesquipedalian epics of the Empire for a few pages written by Cornelius Gallus, a thousand for each! This brilliant, hot-headed, over-grown boy, whom every one loved, was very nearly Vergil's age. A Celt, as one might conjecture from his career, he had met Octavius in the schoolroom, and won the boy's enduring admiration. Then, like Vergil, he seems to have turned from rhetoric to philosophy, from philosophy to poetry, and to poetry of the Catullan romances, as a matter of course. ”

“ In the Greek the husband simply informs the audience, with suitable comment, that his wife, jealous of her slave maid, has had her sold to get her out of the house. There is of course no great depth to the husband’s emotions, though the range from pity to sarcasm is well enough brought out. The Latin version stresses this variation of mood by a constant shift of meters, the verse running speedily from the tripping trochaic septenarii through cretics, bacchiacs, cretics again, and then iambics. The man comes on shouting to music that changes its rhythm with every line. ”