Tenney Frank

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 peroration of the speech, a very courageous exposure of the brutalities of the Sullan régime, which gives evidence of a keen insight into social psychology, proves that Cicero fully understood the evils of the dictatorship.
There is not one among you who does not comprehend that the Roman people, formerly humane even in the treatment of enemies, is now suffering from a wave of cruelty here at home.... This not only has resulted in the utterly brutal murder of many citizens, but has destroyed in our people, once so compassionate, the capacity to feel any pity. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Propriety of diction is after all a quality that could hardly be foreign to a people who had for centuries respected the triumphal garb, the fasces, and the august pontifical ceremonies, and it was not a quality that could be acquired from foreign teachers who did not know the tone of Latin words. We must also bear in mind that what Roman statesmen were eager to learn from men like Panaetius and Polybius and what these men desired to teach was not some clever trick of phrasing but the essence of political philosophy and of ethics. ”

“ Rome’s beginnings in self-expression are not so fascinating as those of Greece. The Greeks somehow outstripped all competitors. In mental vigor, in imaginative creativeness, in sureness of taste, they seem to have reached a point 2500 years ago that the more advanced of modern racial groups are still hoping to attain. The sudden flowering of literature as soon as the capacities of the recording art were realized can only be comprehended on the assumption that singing, reciting, narrating, and disputing had proceeded for ages among their ancestors before the alphabet came into use. ”

“ Here, too, the best intellects of the nation were exercised in the debate; here, too, the gravity of the theme and the demands of aristocratic audiences required dignified expression, while the constant necessity of winning the populace required entire clarity and lucidity of expression. The struggle was not indeed for eternal salvation, but it often involved the question of life and death, and always the future of the state. And from men like Cato, the Gracchi, Cicero and Brutus, the state claimed and won a devotion more intense than religion could. ”

“ Ennius too, like Naevius, told Rome’s story in verse. One’s impulse is to discount the accuracy of any history that employs artifice. And one must grant of course that a poet will select his incidents with a view to their dramatic values and picturesqueness. One must remember, however, that poetry had a serious place in all early literature for the reason that, before the day of much writing, all teachable things, even history and philosophy, were put into verse for mnemonic purposes. The works of Solon and Heracleitus would not have contained different matter if they had been put into prose. ”

“ In our own day when every dramatist is compelled to create a new plot it is easy to underestimate the originality of men like the Greek Euripides, the Roman Accius, the French Racine, the English Shakespeare, who all in varying degrees were satisfied [46] to use old plots, even old plays, and to give all their attention to a personal and original interpretation of the inner meaning of a familiar story and of the motives that impelled the characters. ”

“ Those are qualities that do not belong to the expression of revolutionary reformers who have but a year or two in which to perform a great life-work. They must come with leisure and tranquility when men have time to try the sound and taste of phrases in patient reiteration. Meanwhile Latin prose had been fortunate in finding men like Cato and Gracchus to make it vivid, clear, versatile, and vibrant. After these two men and the scores of speakers that they drew into the arena, [23] no Roman could again write Latin with the shambling gait of Ennius’ Euhemerus without serious apology. ”

“ We need not take such faith very seriously. With the problem of the survival of the soul—except for a brief toying with a Platonic Myth in the De Republica—Cicero did not concern himself till very late in life. Like most Romans he explained to himself the phrases of the Greek mystics in a simple formula of “Gloria,” which, when analyzed, resolved itself into something like the “immortality of fame.” [18]
We all know how great a rôle the insistence upon fame and reputation played in the education of the aristocracy at Rome. ”

“ He becomes so absorbed in his work that he sits the night out phrasing what he has beheld, and finally when he drops to sleep his dreams are still of the vision of creation.
At the very outset however, we stumble upon a deep puzzle in attempting to picture the man in his setting. How could he suppose that fear of punishment after death was the determining factor in social ethics, when the Romans of this period had not yet developed any clear eschatological system, and when only the learned had begun to read the Platonic myths and Stoic fancies regarding a possible future life? ”

“ Never has sentimentalism gone farther in foreign politics. It would not be an overstatement to find in the plays of Euripides produced in translation on the Roman stage the chief factor in this unreasonable wave of enthusiasm for a foreign cause.
But this love of things Greek—which resembles the English enthusiasm for French culture in the Restoration—overshot its mark. The armies that served in Greece and in Asia Minor learned foreign ways too rapidly and brought back too much. ”

“ Modern biology insists upon the reality of inheritance, though it also warns us that this inheritance is so complex that it has hitherto escaped analysis and predetermination. We all admit that the study of social or literary atmosphere or of individual training will not explain the passionate force of Catullus, the voluble humor of Plautus, or Cicero’s ear for harmony of sound. However, like Horace in his Ars Poetica, we can do little but admit the facts, recognize the qualities, and proceed to the study of the provocative stimuli. ”

“ As for Cicero’s dependence upon the theories of his predecessors, it must be admitted that no Roman knew them better or received more from them. But professors who delve in books all their lives are apt to over-estimate the effect of written theory and of tralatician ideas, and to under-estimate the momentum of facts that compel practical men to take quick and unpremeditated action. Very often Cicero saw the value of an idea in Plato or Panaetius only after an experience of his own had thrown him pell-mell upon the realities that disclosed the meaning of their abstract ideas. ”

“ In less than a generation it came to be the accepted story at Rome—and Naevius, comprehending its literary purport, set out to write the epic of Rome with this legend as his preface. Rome had become conscious and expressive, the third of the western peoples to begin literary creation.
But progress in art is slow. In Greece there was a long silence after Homer. In England there were vast wastes with a few narrow garden spots in the five centuries between Beowulf and Chaucer. Rome had a scanty population of hard-working citizens constantly being recruited for war. ”

“ We do not ask for finality in science, though like Lucretius the young scientist of each new generation seizes upon the latest hypothesis and assumes it to be true. The theory of electrons, whether right or wrong, seems to some of us to have justified itself not only because of its power to awaken the imagination, but in its capacity as a solvent that could disintegrate preceding dogmatism by seeming to prove itself more efficacious. ”

“ The slave of comedy usually is a very clever rascal, very loyal to his young master for whose least pleasure he will trick parents and police; he is amazingly resourceful, quick of wit, possessed of a sauciness that we cannot associate with early Roman custom, and capable of enduring blows if he has a good conscience from having successfully perpetrated his crimes. In sophisticated Athens this character is wholly plausible; at Rome in the day of Plautus he is not. It is true that Menander’s fragments use slaves less than the Plautine plays ”

“ We may illustrate the old method of procedure by examining Seneca’s Medea, since here we have a complete Latin play which shows what even an uninspired Roman dramatist might do by way of re-reading an ancient legend. Medea in the old unvarnished myth of the barbaric age was apparently a bundle of natural passions, a savage creature gifted with superhuman powers. Jason owed her his life, but since a Greek prince could hardly wed a barbarian and make her his queen, he might reasonably, according to Greek standards, abandon her when his “higher” duties to state and position demanded it. ”