Roman drama

“ 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. ”

“ Of a primitive drama we have a vigorous tradition. Simple comic farces were in existence in the village festivals both north and south of Rome—and likely enough at Rome too, though the city preferred to forget its primitive amusements as it grew into a metropolis. Unfortunately the tradition regarding the early Latin drama was vitiated by some early quasi-scholar—apparently Accius—who mingled futile hearsay with a line or two of an early record about Etruscan dancers and with the Aristotelian theory of how Greek drama grew up. ”

“ It was impossible that those alterations of visage, which are hidden by a mask, could have been distinctly perceived by one-tenth of the 40,000 spectators of a Roman play. The feelings portrayed in the ancient drama were neither so tender nor versatile as those in modern plays, and the actors did not require the same flexibility of features—there were fewer flashes of joy in sorrow, fewer gleams of benignity in hatred. ”

“ Song, drama, and dialogue are inevitable forms, given human nature, and the forms were at hand and were taken over by the Latins, as they were once more by the Italians at the end of medieval days, when learning disclosed the worth of Rome’s literature. ”

“ With the rich national traditions and history to inspire this, we can account for the failure to develop a native Roman tragedy only upon the assumption that the Roman lacked the gift of dramatic invention, at least to the extent of originating and developing great dramatic plots and characters, which form the essential elements of tragic drama. ”

“ Fortunate was it for the dignity of Rome that the face of the emperor was concealed behind a mask which, unlike the performers in the mimes, the pantomimic actors always wore. The players not only exhibited the human figure in the most graceful attitudes, but represented every passion and emotion with such truth, that the spectators could without difficulty understand the story. Sometimes the scenes represented were founded upon the Greek tragic drama ”

“ This attempt to christianise the drama did not produce an immediate effect; but the Roman dramatic art could not fail to degenerate with the Roman empire; and the actors themselves were but the descendants of the mimi, a race of infamous buffoons, objects of the horror and the excommunication of the primitive fathers.2
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In the obscurity of the medieval period, the origin of these sacred dramas in Europe is lost. They are only incidentally noticed by those who had yet no notions of the drama. ”

“ But the number of these national dramas remained small, and that species of composition soon disappeared from the stage; the scanty legend and the colourless history of Rome were unable permanently to compete with the rich cycle of Hellenic legends. Respecting the poetic value of the pieces we have no longer the means of judging; but, if we may take account of the general poetical intention, there were in Roman literature few such strokes of genius as the creation of a Roman national drama. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The heroic story of Greece was indeed able for a time to attract general attention at Rome from the novelty of the dramatic representations in which it was introduced. But even Roman tragedy, to judge from the testimony of Cicero and others, seems to have owed more of its popularity to the grave spirit by which it was animated and the Roman strength of will exhibited in its personages, than to the legitimate sources of interest in a drama, viz. the play of human motives and the vicissitudes of human fortunes. ”

“ All we know is that towns not far from Rome—and therefore presumably Rome as well—had simple drama before Livius began to translate Greek plays.
Such were the germs of the lyric, epic, and drama, vital and capable of growth when and if the [13] times should be favorable. But what is a favorable time? Why, for instance, had not literature come to life among others of the countless tribes about the Mediterranean except the Greeks and Hebrews? ”

“ From the æra in which the dramatic productions of Livius appeared, theatrical representations formed the object of a peculiar art. The more regular drama, founded on that of Magna Græcia, or Sicily, being divided into tragedy and comedy, became, in a great measure, the province of professional players or authors, while the Roman youths of distinction continued to amuse themselves with the Fabulæ Atellanæ, and Exodia, a species of satirical medley, derived from the ancient Etruscans, or from the Osci, the nature and progress of which I shall hereafter have occasion more particularly to examine. ”

“ The passion of the Romans for shows and exhibitions, the love of action, and of stirring business-like occupation, which characterizes them, would make the drama popular, and it would harmonize with the public entertainments, in which they had been accustomed to take pleasure from the earliest times, when tradition informs us that the founder of their race instituted the solemn games to the equestrian Neptune, and 78invited all the neighbours to the spectacle ”

“ 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 Roman Drama, as illustrated by the works of the early tragedians, from 240 to the first century B. C.: Andronicus Nævius, Ennius, Pacuvius, Accius. The later tragedians to the close of the first century A. D.: Pollio, Varius, Ovid, Maternus, Secundus, Lucan, and Seneca. The writers of comedy, second century B. C.: Plautus and Terence.
1. How did the civilization of Rome in 454 B. C. compare with that of Greece? 2. How did Rome's conquest of the Greek colonies in Italy help the development of Italian literature? 3. How did the First Punic War affect this development? 4. ”

“ Their interest, in so far as they have any interest at all, lies in the light they throw on the gradual progress of dramatic art in this domain. And they illustrate it pretty fully, and show it passing through some of the main general phases that may be traced in the evolution of the Elizabethan Tragedy as a whole. At the outset we have one specimen of the Roman play in which the legitimate drama is just beginning to disengage itself from the old Morality, and another in which the unique Senecan exemplar is transformed rather than translated to suit the primitive art of the time. ”

“ The sixth and seventh centuries of Rome, the period cov [Pg 308] ered by the present chapter, saw the birth of the regular drama and its decline; the earliest attempts at epic and satiric poetry; and the rise of a vigorous prose. Livius Androni’cus paraphrased Greek tragedies; Nævius and Ennius not only contributed to dramatic literature, but called epic poetry into being; Plautus and Terence set forth a feast of good things in their comedies; Lucilius, the father of Roman satire, lashed vice and corruption unsparingly in his hexameters; and Cato laid the foundations of Latin prose. ”

“ Cicero’s soldier brother composed four on a fortnight’s journey to Gaul. But these were only employed to bore one’s friends at dinner. Original literary dramas were even{138} less often staged at Rome than they are in London. Plautus and Terence for comedy, and Pacuvius, Attius, and Ennius for tragedy, had already become classics and were still regularly performed. The drama died stillborn at Rome.
Historians of Rome, fortified by Juvenal and Petronius, love to depict the vices of the emperors and the imperial period. The later Republic can show us a morality no more exalted. ”

“ Extemporaneous effusions were more convenient for amateurs than regular plays, and joke and jest than tragic earnest. The new custom introduced by Livius elevated the drama above the region of ribaldry and laughter, but the art and skill requisite confined the work to the professional performer. The young Romans, therefore, left to the stage-player the regular drama, restored their old amusement as an exodium or after-piece, and did not suffer it, as Livy says, to be “polluted” by the interference of histriones. ”

“ The primary attraction, by means of which the tragic drama established itself at Rome, must have been the power of scenic representations to convey a story, and to produce novel impressions on a people to whom reading was quite unfamiliar. In Homer, the cyclic poets, and the Attic dramatists, there existed for the Romans of the second century B.C. a new world of incident and human interest quite different from the grave story of their own annals. ”

“ The real object of the worship is by the majority forgotten. But still the Greeks were habituated unconsciously to be affected by the drama, as by a development of religious sentiments. With the Romans, the theatre was merely a place of secular amusement. ”

“ DIRECT BORROWINGS FROM SENECAN TRAGEDIES
We need give but little space to remarks upon the extent to which English dramatists borrowed directly from the Roman tragedies, for such borrowings were of far less moment in the evolution of the modern drama than the more fundamental imitation of form and structure already noted; their chief interest indeed lies outside the scope of dramatic study, and is to be found in the fact that they serve to mark English sympathy for certain phases of Roman thought. ”

“ 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." ”

“ There is still another branch of literature which, however it may have been modified, has descended to us from the middle ages. It has been remarked more than once in the course of this book, that the theatre of the Romans perished in the transition from the empire to the middle ages; but something in the shape of theatrical performances appears to be inseparable from society even in its most barbarous state, and we soon trace among the peoples who had settled upon the ruins of the empire of Rome an approach towards a drama. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Art was with them a slave, well fed, well clad, well housed, well paid, to make power more powerful, to dazzle the people, to proclaim the universal dominion of Rome over the world. The Roman character was dry and geometrical, and therefore in its artistic taste architectural and monumental. Anything that could serve, by means of technical perfection, to promote art, was encouraged, adopted, and supported by the Romans. ”

“ The historic drama at Rome thus had no opportunity for a vigorous life, even could tragedy have severed its main course from the Greek literature of which it has been well called a “free-hand copy.” The praetextae of which we know chiefly treat—possibly here and there helped to form [1] —legends of a hoary antiquity, or celebrate battles chronicled in family or public records [2] ; and in the end the species died a natural death. ”