Roman literature

“ For what literature, unless it be that of Greece, presents so rich and so complete a portrait gallery of all the types of its people as the literature of Rome? From Virgil, who gives us the ploughman and vinedresser, and Cæsar, through whose pages marches the Roman soldier, to Livy, Sallust, Tacitus, Juvenal, and Horace, we have a score of writers in whose pages all the virtues and vices, the grandeur and the shame, the nobility and the grovelling sensuality, of Rome are spread before us [3] in language so attractive and so grand as to promise to outlast many modern masterpieces. ”

“ The Roman mind possessed the germs of those faculties which admit of cultivation and improvement, such as taste and genius, and the appreciation of the beautiful, and their endowments rendered them capable of attaining literary excellence; it did not possess the natural gifts of fancy and imagination, which were part and parcel of the Greek mind, and which made them in a state of infancy, almost of barbarism, a poetical people. ”

“ The main characteristics of Roman, as of Alexandrian, world-literature are its individualism and the colossal personality of the emperor, who, in an age when force alone held the community together, absorbed as the world-god all the divinity Roman courtiers could feel. In the satirists of Rome we have the spirit of this individualism crying aloud, a spirit which only takes permanent possession of a community when a profound belief in human selfishness has become the terrible substitute for a creed. ”

“ Rome may seem to be more of a copyist than any of her successors; but then they have among other models Rome herself to follow. The way in which Roman taste, thought, and expression have found their way into the modern world, makes them peculiarly worthy of study; and the deliberate method of undertaking literary composition practised by the great writers and clearly traceable in their productions, affords the best possible study of the laws and conditions under which literary excellence is attainable. ”

“ They were not a people of whom we can say, as we can of the Greeks, that they were born to art and literature.... The characteristic Roman triumphs are the triumphs of a material civilisation.' Rome's rôle in the world was 'the absorption of outlying genius.' Themselves an unimaginative race with a language not too tractable to poetry, they made great poetry, and they made it of patient set purpose, of hard practice. ”

“ The Roman Plautus and Terence are practically plagiaries of the Greek Menander and his like. Latin literature is, in a very large degree, Greek literature borrowed, adapted to inferior taste, played upon like studies with variations.
When Rome became the mistress of the world, it aspired to greater glory than mere conquest can ever impart, to the glory of culture and the arts. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But while the form and expression of all Roman literature were moulded by the teaching of Greek masters and the study of Greek writings, it may be urged, with some show of truth, that the debt incurred by the poetry and philosophy of Rome was much greater than that incurred by her oratory and history. The two latter assumed a more distinct type, and adapted themselves more naturally to the genius of the people and the circumstances of the [4] State. They were the work of men who took an active and prominent part in public affairs ”

“ The Roman mind, naturally vigorous and active, was still uncultivated, when, about two centuries and a half before the Christian era, [1] conquest made the inhabitants of the capital acquainted, for the first time, with Greek science, art, and literature; and the last rays of classic taste and learning ceased to illumine the Roman world before the accession of the Antonines. ”

“ There is a manifest tendency to study subjects in an historical point of view. It will be seen hereafter that it is not like the Greek, original and inventive, but erudite and eclectic. The historic principle is the great characteristic feature of the Roman mind; consequently, in this branch of literature, the Romans attained the highest reputation, and may fairly stand forth as competitors with their Greek instructors. ”

“ Had the Romans, indeed, possessed a literature of their own, when they first grew familiar with the works of the Greek poets, their native productions would no doubt have been improved by the study and imitation of the masterpieces of these more accomplished foreigners ”

“ Rome’s story is less startling, must perforce be, since like ours, it was subsequent. One does not discover the North Pole or Betelgeuse twice. When the Romans reached the stage of self-consciousness, when they felt the desire to express themselves they found in well-nigh perfect mold the natural forms of expression, developed with sure taste by the Greeks out of song, dance, march-hymn, devotional prayer, dirge, entertaining narrative, or mimic representation. ”

“ The works of the tragic poets aided the development of the Roman language. They communicated new ideas and experience, and fostered among the mass of the Roman people the only taste for serious literature of which they were capable. They may have exercised a beneficial influence also on the thoughts and lives of men. ”

“ If accounts of battles and invasions are peculiarly the business of princes, the useful or elegant arts are not to be neglected2.” If, then, in the literary history of Rome, we do not meet with those dazzling events, and stupendous results, which, from their lustre and magnitude, still seem, as it were, placed at the summit of human affairs, we shall find in it more intelligence and order, in consequence of its progress being less dependent on passion and interest. ”

“ The Roman literature, though partly imitative, is not only original in some of its types, but original throughout as a manifestation of the Latin genius in the speech which that genius moulded; and abounds in works of poetry and prose which must always rank as masterpieces. An unguarded champion of the classics once said of them that "they utterly condemn all false ornament, all tinsel, all ungraceful and unshapely work." That statement, though quite true in a general sense, is not true without exception; the classics are not perfect, any more than other human productions ”

“ We might ask how it was that authors did not choose subjects outside the sphere of danger. There were still forms of art and science which had not been worked out. The Natural History of Pliny shows how much remained to be done in fields of great interest. Neither philosophy nor the lighter kinds of poetry could afford matter for provocation. But the answer is easy. The Roman imagination was so narrow, and their constructive talent so restricted, that they felt no desire to travel beyond the regular lines. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It can only be acquired by familiarity with those written monuments, which are at once the flowers and conservatories of the idioms, in which they breathe a life immortal. Of these the Romans have left us many of imperishable excellence, to which we must ever point as the most perfect exponents of their language, as the armories of the Roman mind. And these are yet to add wholesome vigor to the intellect of youth, and consolation to the failing strength of age. ”

“ In the following study I have taken up the account of the production of books in Europe from the time of the downfall of the Empire of the West. I have endeavoured to show by what means, after the disappearance of the civilisation of the Roman State, were preserved the fragments of classic literature that have remained for the use of modern readers, and to what agencies were due the [ix] maintenance, throughout the confusion and social disorganisation of the early Middle Ages, of any intellectual interest or literary activities.
I find such agencies supplied in the first place by the scribes of the Roman Church, the organisation of which had replaced as a central civilising influence the power of the lost Roman Empire. ”

“ Notwithstanding their outward conformity to the canons of a foreign language, the most powerful and characteristic measures of Roman poetry,—such as the Lucretian and the Virgilian hexameter, and the Horatian alcaic,—are distinguished by a grave, orderly, and commanding tone, symbolical of the genius and the majesty of Rome. ”

“ It seems to me that the chief reason for the eternal fascination of the history of Rome is this, that it includes, as in a miniature drawn with simple lines, well defined, all the essential phenomena of social life; so that every age is able there to find its own image, its gravest problems, its intensest passions, its most pressing interests, its keenest struggles; therefore Roman history is forever modern, because every new age has only to choose that part which most resembles it, to find its own self. ”

“ Though we have seen the work of the Græco-Romans bearing evidence of combined influence and instruction, there was even at that very epoch a school, or powerful class of artists, in Rome, who retained their own individuality, who were Romans of Rome, and from whose hands, and from their successors, we have inherited grand cameos and intaglios, portraying their emperors, statesmen, philosophers, mythological subjects, and occasionally groups recording important events in Roman history. ”

“ And the Roman plays appear definitely Roman only because the strength of Rome was the eternal strength of the world,—pure family life, sustained by agriculture, and defended by simple and fearless manhood. ”

“ They all said that the public was quite out of touch with Roman affairs. On the contrary, facts have demonstrated that also in this age, in aspect so eager for things modern, people of culture are willing to give attention to the events and personages of ancient Rome. ”

“ But the task of the poet is more than this. To our imagination, that is, to the abstracting intellect roused by sympathy to a semi-creative state, he must present the haughty Roman so as to fill us with an image of him that shall in itself embody that momentous hour in the being of the young republic. He must dilate us to the dimensions of the man and the moment; he must so enlarge and warm our feeling that it shall take in, and delight in, the grandeur of the time and the actors. The life of Rome, of Rome yet to be so mighty, is threatened by one of her own sons. ”

“ As the Greek is great through the idea of Art, the Hebrew through the idea of one most holy God; so the Romans are great through the idea of their eternal Rome; great, wheresoever they have fought, written or builded in the inspiration of this idea. The greater Rome grew, the more this idea dilated: the individual lost himself in it: the great men who remain eminent are borne up by this idea, and it makes the littleness of the little men more pronounced. ”

“ The collision of minds fraught with learning, in that high state of excitement which the genius of the place produced on the coldest imaginations, together with those innumerable brilliant and transitory topics which were never elicited in any other city, made the Roman conversations a continual exercise of the understanding. The details of political intrigue, and the follies of individuals, excited but little interest among the strangers in Rome. ”

“ My father said it would take a lifetime of patient study to learn thoroughly all that can to-day be learned of what we call ancient Rome—the Rome of the Cæsars; and how many Romes existed before that, of which we can know nothing, save through legend and tradition! 'Now, will it not be best,' he asked, 'that we read all we can of legend and the chief points of Roman history up to the present time, so that the subject of Rome get into our minds and hearts ”

“ The idea of Rome, as the one object of supreme interest to gods and men, in the past, present, and future, imparts the unity of sentiment, tone, and purpose which is characteristic of the type of Roman epic poetry and of Roman history. ”

“ Being eclectic, it embraced all gods,—although this is not to say that every Roman worshipped all of these,—and those peoples whom she conquered were not ravished with violence from their creeds and forced to kneel at unlike altars. Each nation might find a parallel for its gods in Rome's pantheon, and so might be brought without shock into Rome's fold. For, take a man's gods from him, whatsoever they may be that he worships, and give him nothing in return to which he can hold, and at once you take from him all that anchors him to the rationalities of life. ”

“ They furnish us a simple and direct record of the life and the aspirations of the average man, the record of a life not interpreted for us by the biographer, historian, or novelist, but set down in all its simplicity by one of the common people themselves.
These facts lend to the ancient Roman epitaphs their peculiar interest and charm. They give us a glimpse into the every-day life of the people which a Cicero, or a Virgil, or even a Horace cannot offer us. They must have exerted an influence, too, on Roman character, which we with our changed conditions can scarcely appreciate. ”