William Young Sellar

“ The combative energy, the sense of superiority, the spirit of satire, characteristic of him as a Roman, unite with his loyalty to Epicurus to render him not only polemical but intolerant and contemptuous in his tone toward the great antagonists of his system, the Stoics, whom, while constantly referring to them, he does not condescend even to name. With his admiration of the genius of others he combines a strong sense of his own power. ”

“ The permanent literary interest of Martial’s epigrams arises not so much from their verbal brilliancy, though in this they are unsurpassed, as from the amount of human life and character which they contain. He, better than any other writer, enables us to revive the outward spectacle of the imperial Rome. If Juvenal enforces the lesson of that time, and has penetrated more deeply into the heart of society, Martial has sketched its external aspect with a much fairer pencil and from a much more intimate contact with it. ”

“ But his conception even of the ancient gods and of their indirect influence on human life is more worthy than the popular one. He conceives of them as living a life of eternal peace and exemption from passion, in a world of their own; and the highest ideal of man is, through the exercise of his reason, to realize an image of this life. Although they are conceived of as unconcerned with the interest of our world, yet influences are supposed to emanate from them which the human heart is capable of receiving and assimilating. ”

“ Love, in the form of pathetic sentiment rather than of irregular passion, is the chief motive of his pieces. His great characteristics are humanity and urbanity, and to this may be attributed the attraction which he had for the two chief representatives of these qualities in Roman literature,—Cicero and Horace. It was through the comedies of Terence that the finer influences of the Epicurean philosophy—the friendliness, the tolerance, the consideration for the feelings of others, inferiors as well as equals, inculcated by that philosophy—entered into Roman life and literature. ”

“ Even those who greatly admire his genius, and find the freshest interest in his representation of Roman life and his sketches of manners and character, do not attempt to palliate his faults, though they may partially account for them by reference to the morals of his age and the circumstances of his life. The age was one when literature had either to be silent or to be servile. Martial was essentially a man of letters: he was bound either to gain favour by his writings or to starve. Even Statius, whose writings are in other respects irreproachable, is nearly as fulsome in his adulation. ”

“ If the Roman aristocracy of his time had lost much of the virtue and of the governing qualities of their ancestors, they showed in the last years before the establishment of monarchy a taste for intellectual culture which might have made Rome as great in literature as in arms and law. A new taste for philosophy had developed among members of the governing class during the youth of Lucretius, and eminent Greek teachers of the Epicurean sect settled at Rome at the same time, and lived on terms of intimacy with them. ”

“ In the case of an author drawing originally from life, it might seem improbable that he should have written six comedies, so true in their apprehension and delineation of various phases of human nature, between the ages of nineteen and twenty-five. But the case of an imitative artist, reproducing impressions derived from literature, is different; and the circumstances of Terence's origin and early life may well have developed in him a precocity of talent. ”

“ Nothing can be more unlike the religious and moral attitude of Lucretius than the old popular conception of him as an atheist and a preacher of the doctrine of pleasure. It is true that he denies the doctrines of a supernatural government of the world and of a future life. But his arguments against the first are really only valid against the limited and unworthy conceptions of divine agency involved in the ancient religions; his denial of the second is prompted by his vital realization of all that is meant by the arbitrary infliction of eternal torment after death. ”

“ We learn from these prologues that the best Roman literature was ceasing to be popular, and had come to rely on the patronage of the great. A consequence of this change of circumstances was that comedy was no longer national in character and sentiment, but had become imitative and artistic. The life which Terence represents is that of a well-to-do-citizen class whose interests are commonplace, but whose modes of thought and speech are refined, humane, and intelligent. His characters are finely delineated and discriminated rather than boldly conceived, as they are in Plautus. ”

“ Many ideas and expressions of the Sicilian have been reproduced by the Roman poet; and the same tone of impassioned solemnity and melancholy seems to have pervaded both works. But Lucretius, if less original as a thinker, was probably a much greater poet than Empedocles. What chiefly distinguishes him from his Greek prototypes is that his purpose is rather ethical than purely speculative; the zeal of a teacher and reformer is more strong in him than even the intellectual passion of a thinker. ”

“ Terence was by birth a Phœnician, and was thus perhaps a fitter medium of connexion between the genius of Greece and that of Italy than if he had been a pure Greek or a pure Italian; just as in modern times the Jewish type of genius is sometimes found more detached from national peculiarities, and thus more capable of reproducing a cosmopolitan type of character than the genius of men belonging to the other races of Europe. ”

“ It is rare to find any one endowed with so quick a perception of the ridiculous who is so little of a caricaturist. He was himself singularly free from cant, pedantry or affectation of any kind. Though tolerant of most vices, he had a hearty scorn of hypocrisy. There are few better satirists of social and literary pretenders in ancient or modern times. ”

“ No writer certainly is more purely Roman in personal character and in strength of understanding. His silence on the subject of Roman greatness and glory as contrasted with the prominence of these subjects in the poetry of men of provincial birth such as Ennius, Virgil and Horace, may be explained by the principle that familiarity had made the subject one of less wonder and novelty to him. ”

“ Honour and sincerity (fides and simplicitas) are the qualities which he most admires in his friends. Though many of his epigrams indicate a cynical disbelief in the character of women, yet others prove that he could respect and almost reverence a refined and courteous lady. His own life in Rome afforded him no experience of domestic virtue; but his epigrams show that, even in the age which is known to modern readers chiefly from the Satires of Juvenal, virtue was recognized as the purest source of happiness. ”

“ Living in the interval between Ennius and Lucilius, whose original force and genius survive only in rude and inartistic fragments, he produced six plays, which have not only reached our time in the form in which they were given to the world, but have been read in the most critical and exacting literary epochs, and still may be read without any feeling of the need of making allowance for the rudeness of a new and undeveloped art. ”

“ The poets of the Augustan age, who were deeply interested both in his philosophy and in his poetry, are entirely silent about the tragical story of his life. Cicero, by his professed antagonism to the doctrines of Epicurus, by his inadequate appreciation of Lucretius himself and by the indifference which he shows to other contemporary poets, seems to have been neither fitted for the task of correcting the unfinished work of a writer whose genius was so distinct from his own, nor likely to have cordially undertaken such a task. ”

“ MARTIAL (Marcus Valerius Martialis) , Latin epigrammatist, was born, in one of the years A.D. 38–41, for in book x., of which the poems were composed in the years 95–98, he is found celebrating his fifty-seventh birthday (x. 24) . Our knowledge of his career is derived almost entirely from himself. Reference to public events enables us approximately to fix the date of the publication of the different books of epigrams, and from these dates to determine those of various important events in his life. ”

“ No one shows a truer humanity and a more tender sympathy with natural sorrow.
The peculiarity of the poem of Lucretius, that which makes it unique in literature, is that it is a reasoned system of philosophy, written in verse. The prosaic title De Rerum Natura, a translation of the Gr. περὶ φύσεως, implies the subordination of the artistic to a speculative motive. As in the case of nearly all the great works of Roman literary genius, the form of the poem was borrowed from the Greeks. ”

“ The best judges and the greatest masters of style in the best period of Roman literature were his chief admirers in ancient times. Cicero frequently reproduces his expressions, applies passages in his plays to his own circumstances, and refers to his personages as typical representations of character. [2] Julius Cæsar characterizes him as "puri sermonis amator." Horace, so depreciatory in general of the older literature, shows his appreciation of Terence by the frequent reproduction in his Satires and in his Odes of his language and his philosophy of life. ”

“ Though he acknowledges pleasure to be the law of life, yet he is far from regarding its attainment as the end of life. What man needs is not enjoyment, but “peace and a pure heart.” The victory to be won by man is the triumph over fear, ambition, passion, luxury. ”

“ TERENCE. P. Terentius Afer (185?–159 B.C.) holds a unique position among Roman writers. No writer in any literature has gained so great a reputation who has contented himself with so limited a function. He lays no claim to the position of an original artist painting from life or commenting on the results of his own observation. His art has no relation to his own time or to the country in which he lived. ”

“ Martial was merely following a general fashion in paying his court to “a lord,” and he made the best of the custom. In his earlier career he used to accompany his patrons to their villas at Baiae or Tibur, and to attend their morning levées. Later on he went to his own small country house, near Nomentum, and sent a poem, or a small volume of his poems, as his representative at the early visit. The fault of grossness Martial shares with nearly all ancient and many modern writers who treat of life from the baser or more ridiculous side. ”

“ In the Epicurean system of philosophy he believed that he had found the weapons by which this war of liberation could be most effectually waged. Following Epicurus he sets before himself the aim of finally crushing that fear of the gods and that fear of death resulting from it which he regards as the source of all the human ills. ”

“ He recriminates upon his adversary as one who, by his literal adherence to his original, had turned good Greek plays into bad Latin ones. He justifies himself from the charge of plagiarizing from Plautus and Nævius. In another prologue he contrasts his own treatment of his subjects with the sensational extravagance of others. He meets the charge of receiving assistance in the composition of his plays by claiming, as a great honour, the favour which he enjoyed with those who were the favourites of the Roman people. ”