R. W. Browne

“ Livy, the good, the affectionate, the romantic, was precisely the popular historian for such times as these. His countrymen looked naturally for panegyric rather than for criticism. They were not in a temper to bear one who could remorselessly tear open and expose to view all the faults and blemishes which blotted the pages of their history; who could be a morose and querulous praiser of times gone by, never to return, at the expense of their present greatness and prosperity. He lived in happy times, before Rome had learnt by sad experience what the tyranny of absolutism really was. ”

“ A love for old Roman literature remained amongst the goatherds of the hills and the husbandmen of the valleys and plains, in whose memories lived the old songs which had been the delight of their infancy: it survived amongst the few who could discern merit in undisciplined genius; but the rising generation, who owed their taste to education, admired only those productions by which their taste had been formed. Greek literature had now an open field in which to flourish: it had driven out its predecessor, although as yet it had not struck its roots deeply into the Roman mind ”

“ At an early age he went to Rome, probably for education, but his warm temperament and strong passions plunged him into the licentious excesses of the capital. During this period of his career, passed in the indulgence of pleasure and gayety, and in the midst of a dissipated society, he had no more serious occupation than the cultivation of his literary tastes and talents. The elegant tenderness of his amatory poetry made him a favourite with the fair sex, for its licentiousness was not out of keeping with the sentiments and conversation prevalent in the Roman fashionable world. ”

“ In the Æneid the legends of the world of spirits seem but vulgar marvels and popular illusions. Tartarus and Elysium are too palpable and material to be believed; their distinctness dispels the enchantment which they were intended to produce; it is daylight instead of dim shadow. We miss the outlines, which seem gigantic from their dim and shadowy nature, the appalling grandeur to which no one since Æschylus ever attained, except the great Italian poet who has never since been equalled.
To this rich store of Greek learning Italy contributed her native legends. ”

“ Here was first painted in such touching colours the self-devoted patriotism of Regulus, whom (although love of historic truth refuses to believe the legend) the poet represents as sacrificing home and wife and children to a sense of honour, and as submitting to a torturing death for the sake of his country. Probably many other heart-stirring legends and tales of prowess which had cheered the nightly bivouac of the soldiers and inspirited them in the field, were embodied in this popular epic. Not that he disdained any more than Virgil the aid of Homer. ”

“ The fidelity expected of the historian circumscribes the creative power of the poet. To the poet who constructs his work out of the materials of epochs which are beyond the reach of history, the whole field of the past is open. The only limits within which he must restrain his genius are those of the probable: within these bounds he may conjure up the most magnificent ideal forms; he may use the most gorgeous imagery, the most supernatural machinery: the whole wears an air of historic truth ”

“ He was, like his friends Cato the Censor and Scipio Africanus the elder, a man of action as well as philosophical thought. He was not only a poet, but he was a brave and stout-hearted soldier. He had all the singleness of heart and unostentatious simplicity of manners which marked the old times of Roman virtue; he lived the life of the Cincinnati, the Curii, and Fabricii, which the poets of the luxurious Augustan age professed to admire, but did not imitate. Rome was now beginning to be wealthy, and wealth to be the badge of rank ”

“ He could not restrain himself from following the example of Lucilius: he could not dam up the torrent of his vehement and natural eloquence. Whether his subject is noble or disgusting, his word-painting is perfect: we feel his sublimity—we shudder at his fidelity. The nature of the subject causes his language to be frequently gross and offensive; but his object always is to lay bare the deformity of vice, and to render it loathsome. He never indulges in indecency, in order to pander to a corrupt taste or to gratify a prurient imagination. ”

“ But there is no genius, no inspiration, no thrilling fervour, no thoughts that breathe or words that burn. He never rises above a dead level. Every thing is in accordance with decent and direct propriety. He has some talent as a descriptive poet: his versification is harmonious, and he attains to those superficial excellencies which are found in the prize poem of a pains-taking, ingenious, and well-educated scholar. Virgil was an imitator: that is, his taste, like Roman taste, universally was formed and trained by imitation; but his spirit disdained these trammels, and soared to originality. ”

“ The state of political affairs, which synchronized with the death of Attius, was less congenial than ever to the tragic muse. Real and bloody tragedies were being enacted, and there was no room in the heart of the Roman people for fictitious woes. If it was improbable that a people who delighted in the sanguinary scenes of the amphitheatre should sympathize with the sorrows of a hero in tragedy, it was almost impossible that tragedy should flourish when Rome itself was a theatre in which scenes of horror were daily enacted. ”

“ After awhile, indeed, political circumstances again became more favourable—the dangers which paralyzed genius and talent, and prevented their free exercise under Tiberius and his tyrannical successors, diminished, and a more liberal system of administration ensued under Vespasian and Titus. Juvenal and Tacitus then stood forth as the representatives of the old Roman independence; vigour of thought communicated itself to the language; a taste for the sublime and beautiful to a certain extent revived, although it did not attain to the perfection which shed a lustre over the Augustan age. ”

“ Ovid was popular as a poet, successful in society, and possessed all the enjoyments which wealth can bestow. He had a villa and estate in his native Sulmo, a house on the Capitoline hill, and suburban gardens, celebrated for their beauty. At some period of his life he travelled with Macer into Asia and Sicily; and, in his exile, recalls to mind with sorrowful pleasure the magnificent cities of the former, and the sublime scenery and classic haunts of the latter. ”

“ Elaborate polish may, perhaps, overcome life and freshness, but no one who possesses any correctness of ear or appreciation of beauty can prefer the limping hexameters of Ennius to the musical lines of Virgil, or his later style to the refined eloquence of the Augustan age. As Quintilian says, we value Ennius, not for the beauty of his style, but for his picturesqueness, and for the holiness, as it were, which consecrates antiquity, just as we feel a reverential awe when we contemplate the huge gnarled fathers of the forest. ”

“ As the conquest of Magna Græcia, Sicily, and, finally, of Greece itself, first directed to the pursuit of intellectual cultivation a people whose national literature, even if it deserved to be so called, was of the rudest and most meager description, Roman literature was, as might be expected, the offspring of the Greek, and its beauties a reflexion of the Greek mind; and although some portions were more original than others, as being more congenial to the national character—such, for example, as satire, oratory, and history—it was, upon the whole, never anything more than an imitation. ”

“ He stored himself with the learning of the ancients, and caught their inspiration; but their severe taste was to him a trammel to which he was too self-willed and self-complacent to submit. The prevalent taste for elegiac poetry pointed out the style which was suited to his caliber; for one cannot help feeling that his genius was incapable of mastering the gigantic proportions of a true epic, and, notwithstanding the favourable criticism of Quintilian, of soaring to the sublimity of tragedy. ”

“ The picture of Roman manners, as painted by the glowing pencil of Juvenal, is truly appalling. The fabric of society was in ruins. The popular religion was rejected with scorn, and its place was not occupied even by the creed of natural religion. Nothing remained but the empty pomp, pageant and ceremonial. The administration of the state was a mass of corruption: freedmen and foreigners, full of artful cunning, but destitute of principle, had the ear of the sovereign, and filled their coffers with bribes and confiscation. ”

“ Together with all the assumptions and absurdities of astrology are mingled extensive knowledge of the state of astronomical science in his day: gleams of truth shoot like meteors athwart the darkness. The subject which he has chosen is as unpromising for poetical effect and embellishment as that of Lucretius; but he does not handle it so successfully: he has neither the boldness of thought, the dignity of language, nor the imaginative grandeur which marked the old poet philosopher. ”

“ The process of remodelling a national literature, including the very language in which it is expressed, and the metrical harmonies in which it falls upon the ear, is almost like reforming the modes of thought, and reconstructing the character of a people. Such a work must be gradual and gentle: a nation’s mind will not bend at once to new principles of taste and new rules of art. 93To attempt a violent revolution would be absurd, and argue ignorance of human nature. The poet who attempted it would fail in gaining sympathy, which is an essential element of success. ”

“ He delighted in the pure and refined pleasures of literature, and his intimate associates were men of taste and genius; and yet he was the slave of his sensual passions, and indulged in the grossest profligacy. He was candid, friendly, confiding, generous; but he was attracted by brilliant talents, and the qualities of the head, rather than the affections of the heart. The mainspring of his conduct as a general and a statesman exhibits a strong will and perfect self-reliance ”

“ But these lays and legends must not be compared to those of Greece, which had probably taken an epic form long before they furnished the groundwork of the Iliad and the Odyssey. In Roman tradition there are no traces of elevated genius or poetical inspiration. The religious sentiment was the fertile source of Greek fancy, which gave a supernatural glory to the effusions of the bard, painted men as heroes, and heroes as deities; and, whilst it was the natural growth of the Greek intellect, twined itself round the affections of the whole people. ”

“ It cannot, indeed, be asserted that tragedy was never, to a certain extent, an acceptable entertainment at Rome, but only that it never flourished at Rome as it did at Athens—that no Roman tragedies can, notwithstanding all that has been said in their praise and their defence, be compared with those of Greece, and that the tragic drama never maintained such a hold on the popular mind as not to be liable to be displaced by amusements of a more material and less intellectual kind. ”

“ Love in the days of Ovid had nothing in it chivalrous or pure—it was carnal, sensual. The age in which he lived was morally polluted, and he was neither better nor worse than his contemporaries. Great and noble as was the character of the Roman matron, the charms of an accomplished female education were almost as rare as at Athens. She had sterling worth; but she had not often the power to fascinate those numbers who considered woman the minister to the pleasures of man. ”

“ His language is what that of an old Roman ought to be, such as we might have expected from Cato and Scipio had they been poets: dignified, chaste, severe, it rises as high as the most majestic eloquence, although it does not soar to the sublimity of poetry.
The parts in which he approaches most nearly to his great model, or, as he believed, the source of his inspiration, were in his descriptions of battles. Here the martial spirit of the Roman warrior shines forth; the old soldier seems to revel in the scenes of his youth. ”

“ Poetry naturally deals with the beauties and terrors of external nature—with the emotions and passions, whether of a tender or violent kind—the sober practical rules of life are scarcely within its sphere. True it is that when all literature was poetical, the precepts of moral and physical philosophy, and even the dry commands of laws and institutions, were embodied in a metrical form; but when literature divides itself into poetry and prose, the subjects appropriated to each other become spontaneously separate likewise. ”