Roman comedy

“ The character, too, gave scope for those jests and scurrilities, which seem to have been indispensable ingredients in a Roman comedy, but which would be unsuitable in the mouths of more dignified persons. They were, in fact, the buffoons of the piece, who avowed without scruple their sensual inclinations and want of conscience; for not only their impudence, but their frauds and deceptions, seem to have been highly relished by the spectators. ”

“ The diversity of ranks among the Romans, politically, was very strongly marked, and the opulence of private individuals was frequently almost kingly; their women lived much more in society, and acted a much more important part than the Grecian women did, and from this independence they fully participated in the overwhelming tide of corruption which accompanied external refinement. The differences being so essential, an original Roman comedy would have been a remarkable phenomenon, and would have enabled us to see these conquerors of the world in an aspect altogether new. ”

“ The existing works of the two great writers of Roman comedy have an acknowledged value of their own, but even the fragments of this early literature, originally scattered through the works of many later authors, and collected together and arranged by the industry of modern scholars, are found to possess a peculiar interest. They recall the features of the remarkable men by whom the foundations of Roman literature were laid, and the Latin language was first shaped into a powerful and symmetric organ. They present the Roman mind in its earliest contact with the genius of Greece ”

“ It is ascribed to a freedman named Livius Andronicus, a Greek by birth, who is said to have brought out, in the year 240 B.C., the first regular comedy ever performed in Rome. Thus we trace not only the Roman comedy, but the very rudiments of dramatic art in Rome, either direct to the Greeks, or to the Grecian colonies in Italy. With the Romans, as well as with the Greeks, the theatre was a popular institution, open to the public, and the state or a wealthy individual paid for the performance ”

“ At its representation, the audience leaped to their feet and shouted their applause.
But Rome was no genial home for the tragic drama, and both tragedy and comedy soon began to languish. With Terence, the glory of the Roman theatre expired. Rope-dancing, buffoonery, and the games of the circus, offered superior attractions; and as the Republic lapsed into the Empire, the degenerate taste of the people sought gratification in the sports of the arena, where gladiators fought together or with wild beasts hardly more of brutes than themselves. ”

“ Livius Andronicus, Ennius, and Pacuvius, all produced comedies at Rome, as did other writers of tragedies, but of these works only scanty fragments remain. Three writers, Plautus, Cæcilius, and Terence, devoted themselves exclusively to comedy, and it is from the extant plays of the eldest and the youngest of these, Plautus and Terence, that most of our knowledge of Roman comedy is derived. ”

“ The comic poets of Rome alone inherited, like the epic poets of Greece, a vehicle of expression formed by the improvised utterance of several generations. The greater fluency of style and the greater ease of rhythmical movement, thus enjoyed by the early comedy, is the most obvious explanation of its permanent hold on the world. ”

“ Tragedy and comedy began, reached their full development, and decayed in the short period of a century and a half between the first play of Livius Andronicus and the death of Accius. It was therefore advisable to give a connected account of dramatic literature at Rome for this entire period, and to reserve for separate treatment the beginnings of prose literature, which, though less rapid in its growth, had a far longer life and was a much truer expression of the national genius. ”

“ Comedy an imported product. There had, to be sure, been improvised dialogues of more or less dramatic nature even before Livius Andronicus, but these, about which a few words will be said later, have nothing to do with the origin of Roman comedy, which is an imitation of the new Attic comedy as it existed at Athens after the time of Alexander the Great, being at its best from about 320 to about 280 B. C. No plays of the new Attic comedy are preserved in the original Greek, but there are fragments which supplement the knowledge we derive from the Latin imitations. ”

“ The contemplative poet may find his delight, and his reward, in the mere effort of imagination, but the poet of the drama must seek them in the applause of the multitude. He must stoop to men—be the mover of human hearts—and triumph by the living and hourly passions of our nature. Now, in the days of Plautus, the smiles of the polite critic were not enough for a Latin comedian, because in those days there were few polite critics at Rome; he required the shouts and laughter of the multitude, who could be fully gratified only by the broadest grins of comedy. ”

“ We find in that historian a little interesting narrative of the theatrical history of the Romans; when the dramatic performances at Rome were becoming too sentimental and declamatory, banishing the playfulness and the mirth of Comedy, the Roman youth left these graver performances to the professed actors, and revived, perhaps in imitation of the licentious Satyra of the Greeks, the ancient custom of versifying pleasantries, and throwing out jests and raillery among themselves for their own diversion. ”

“ The Greek comedy which formed its basis was morally so far a matter of indifference, as it was simply on the same level of corruption with its audience; but the Roman drama was, at this epoch when men were wavering between the old austerity and the new corruption, the academy at once of Hellenism and of vice. ”

“ It was no easy task to present before the old Catonian society comedies revolving about Roman men and women, and to rival the plays of Plautus which could legitimately appropriate all the attractive plots of Hellenistic Athens. Donatus remarks naïvely that realistic Roman comedy of the old day, unlike the Greek comedy, could not picture slaves as more clever than their masters. ”

“ No special accusation may be brought from a historico- moral point of view against the poets, nor ought it to be made matter of individual reproach to any particular poet that he occupies the level of his epoch: comedy was not the cause, but the effect of the corruption that prevailed in the national life. But it is necessary, more especially with a view to judge correctly the influence of these comedies on the life of the Roman people, to point out the abyss which yawned beneath all that polish and elegance. ”

“ The Roman mimes were laughable imitations of manners and persons. So far they combined features of comedy and farce; for comedy represents the characters of a class—farce those of individuals. Their essence was that of the modern pantomime; mimicry and burlesque dialogue were only accidentally introduced. Their coarseness and even indecency [445] gratified the love of broad humour which characterized the Roman people. They became successful rivals of comedy, and thus came to be admitted on the public stage. ”

“ As the Roman mime corresponds to the loose tableaux of the pieces of the day, nothing being too good and nothing too bad for either the one or the other, so we find in both the same traditionally classic tragedy and comedy, which the man of culture is in duty bound to admire or at least to applaud. The multitude is satisfied, when it meets its own reflection in the farce, and admires the decorative pomp and receives the general impression of an ideal world in the drama; the man of higher culture concerns himself at the theatre not with the piece, but only with its artistic representation. ”

“ The popularity of his plays revived again after the death of Terence, and maintained itself till nearly the end of the Republic, a proof that his genius was not only in harmony with his own age, but satisfied a permanent vein of sentiment in his countrymen, so long as they retained anything of their native vigour and republican spirit. The fact that Roman comedy was not congenial to the educated taste of the early Empire is no proof of its want of originality. ”

“ Even here we are bound to admit that the spirit is Greek, the spirit of the old comedy, of bold assault upon the evils of government, of society, of individuals. But still satire, as a form of literature, is the Roman's own; and beginning with Lucilius, the father of satire in the modern sense, the long line of satirists who followed his lead sufficiently attests the strong hold which this particular form of literature gained upon the Roman mind. ”

“ Tragedy, as well as comedy, took its subjects from the Greek; but though comedy had the advantage of a far greater popularity, and also of a partially native origin, there is reason to believe that tragedy came the nearer of the two to a really national form of art. In the fullest and noblest sense of the word Rome had indeed no national drama; for a drama, to be truly representative, must be based on the deepest chords of patriotic and even religious feeling. ”

“ Roman comedy was discovered." In Rome as in Greece an idea of sacredness long attached to the drama. "'Varo,' says St. Augustine, 'ranks theatrical things with things divine.'" This conception of sacredness, however, was congruous with their conceptions of the gods, and widely different from sacredness as understood by us.
"The subjects of the pantomime were taken from the myths of gods and heroes, the actor having to represent male and female characters by turns, while a choir, accompanied by flute-players, sang the corresponding canticum." ”

“ But though Lucilius probably, like Horace after him, studied the old comic poets 'Eupolis, Cratinus and Aristophanes,' to catch something of their spirit and manner in his satire, Roman satire was not an imitation of Greek comedy. Where Roman literature professes to be an imitation of Greek, it is the form and the metre much more than the spirit and matter that are reproduced. Greek comedy and Roman satire were the independent results of freedom of speech and criticism in different ages and countries. ”

“ Perhaps warned by the experience of Nævius, Roman comic poets turned to the perfectly colorless and safe society plays of the New Comedy for translation and imitation. They not only kept within the limitations of these plays as to spirit and plot, but even confined the scene itself and characters to some foreign city, generally Athens, and for the most part were careful to exclude everything Roman or suggestive of Rome from their plays. ”

“ These different phases of the Roman poetic product will be presented in the order named, although it is by no means certain which class of poetry was first developed at Rome. It is more than likely that satire and comedy had a common origin in the rude and unrecorded literary product of ancient Italy. Ennius, indeed, prior to whose time the extant fragments are exceedingly meager, produced both drama, satire, and epic. ”

“ The titles of his comedies are—Coccus, Fullones, Hortensius, Quintius, Varus, Gemina, Iurisperita, Prilia, Privigna, Psaltria, Setina, Tibicina, Velitema, Ulubrana. From these we should infer that his peculiar excellence lay in satirizing the weaknesses of the other sex. As we have before implied, this type of comedy originally arose in the country towns and maintained a certain antagonism with the Graecized comedy of Rome. ”

“ In so far it is perhaps justifiable to date a new era in Roman literature—the real essence of which lay not in the development of Latin poetry, but in the development of the Latin language—from the comedies of Terence as the first artistically pure imitation of Hellenic works of art. The modern comedy made its way amidst the most determined literary warfare. The Plautine style of composing had taken root among the Roman bourgeoisie ”

“ He was obliged to have recourse for his subjects to foreign mythology and unknown history. Iphigenia and Orestes were always more or less strangers to a Roman audience, and the whole drama in which these and similar personages figured, never attained in Rome to a healthy and perfect existence. Comedy, on the other hand, addressed itself to the feelings of all. There were prodigal sons, avaricious fathers, and rapacious courtezans, in Rome as well as in Greece340. But it requires a certain cultivation of mind and tenderness of heart to enjoy the representation of a regular tragedy. ”

“ The 'leno insidiosus' and the 'improba lena' are probably much the same in all times and countries; but there is a vigorous brutality and inhuman hardness about Ballio and Cleaereta which seem more true to Roman than to Greek life. The kind of life which comedy represents must have had great attractions for a race of vigorous organisation like the Romans, after continued success and prosperity had broken down the old restraints on conduct and desire, and the accumulated wealth of the world had become the prize of their energy. ”

“ Jason.
[calling after as she vanishes] .
Speed on through realms of air that mortals never see:
But heaven bear witness, whither thou art gone, no gods
can be.
3. ROMAN COMEDY
We have already said that the natural mimicry of the Italian peasantry no doubt for ages indulged itself in uncouth performances of a dramatic nature, which developed later into those mimes and farces, the forerunners of Roman comedy and the old Medley-Satura. We have also shown how powerfully Rome came under the influence of Greek literature and Greek art ”