Roman poet

“ No Roman poet has so entirely sunk himself and the remembrance of his own fortunes in absorption in his subject. But his strong personal force and individuality have penetrated deeply into all his representation, his reasoning, and his exhortation. From the beginning to the end of the poem we feel that we are listening to a living voice speaking to us with the direct impressiveness of personal experience and conviction. ”

“ The Roman poet combined with a delicate temperament the education of his age, and tried to show to his countrymen, the already weary masters of the world, the victims of an over-luxurious civilization, that in farming lay a potent charm and a remedial grace. ”

“ It was a true instinct of genius to feel that the only material suitable for a Roman epic was to be sought in the idea of the whole national life. That alone could supply the essential source of epic inspiration, the sympathy between the poet and those to whom his poem is addressed, by which the epic poet receives from, as well as gives back to, his audience. ”

“ His successors, in spite of his example, understood them still less. It has been said that no events are of themselves unsuited for epic treatment, simply because they are modern or historical. [50] This may be true; and yet, where is the poet that has succeeded in them? The early Roman poets were patriotic men; they chose for subjects the annals of Rome, which they celebrated in noble though unskilled verse. Naevius. Ennius, Accius, Hostius, Bibaculus, and Varius before Virgil, Lucan and Silius after him, treated national subjects, some of great antiquity, some almost contemporaneous. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The clever boys are, as a rule, well provided for; but, even for them, the methods of this book have been found to be the shortest road to accuracy and style in translation. Moreover by this means they have gained a firsthand acquaintance with Latin literature and the sources of Roman history.
It is impossible here to enter into ‘the question of the close and striking correspondence between the history, the literature, and the language of Rome. It was not until the history of Rome threw its mantle over her poetry that the dignity of the poet was recognised and acknowledged. ”

“ Nor are these indications of individual character confined to the poets who profess to communicate their own feelings, and to record their own fortunes. All the works of Roman poetry bear emphatically the impress of their authors. While the finest Greek poetry seems like an almost impersonal emanation of genius, Roman poetry is, to a much greater extent, the expression of character. ”

“ The thought and sentiment of Rome have thus been engraved on her poetical literature, in deep and enduring characters. And, notwithstanding all manifest traces of imitation, the diction of the greatest Roman poets attests the presence of genuine creative power. A strong vital force is recognised in the direct and vigorous diction of Ennius and Lucretius; and, though more latent, it is felt no less really to pervade the stateliness and chastened splendour of Virgil, and the subtle moderation of Horace. ”

“ Further, in the fervour and dignity of their moral feeling, the Roman poets are true exponents of the genius of Rome. Their spirit is more authoritative, and less speculative than that of Greek poetry. They speak rather from the will and conscience than from the wisdom that has searched and understood the ways of life. Greek poetry strengthens the will or purifies the heart indirectly, by its truthful representation of the tragic situations in human life; Roman poetry appeals directly to the manlier instincts and more magnanimous impulses of our nature. ”

“ The two greatest among the Roman poets had many feelings in common,—the love of Nature, the love of study, especially the study of ancient poetry and of science, a natural shrinking from the pomp and luxury of city-life and from the schemes of worldly ambition, an abhorrence of the crimes and violence of civil war. ”

“ A still further consideration to be borne in mind in connection with the slow development of Roman literature, is the attitude of Roman writers to their work. Many of those whose names are best known to us would have felt themselves lowered to be classed as authors. They were statesmen, advocates, men about town, or, if you will, simple citizens, who gave some of their leisure hours to literary pursuits. To the Greek author, whether poet, philosopher, or historian, literature was an avocation, an honored and honorable profession. ”

“ But it may still be answered that the poets of Rome have another kind of value. There is a charm in their language and sentiment different from that which is found in any other literature of the world. Certain deep and abiding impressions are stamped upon their works, which have penetrated into the cultivated sentiment of modern times. If, as we read them, the imagination is not so powerfully stimulated by the revelation of a new world, yet, in the elevated tones of Roman poetry, there is felt to be a permanent affinity with the strength and dignity of man's moral nature ”

“ The chief interest of Roman poetry, considered as the work of men of natural genius and cultivated taste, and as the expression of great national ideas or of individual thought and impulse, ceases with the end of the Augustan age. Under the continued pressure of the Empire, true poetical inspiration and pure feeling for art were lost. ”

“ It is only in their appreciation of the living beauty of the world for its own sake (and apart from divine or human associations) that the great Roman poets possess an interest beyond that of the poets of any other age or country, with the exception of the English poets of the present century. ”

“ Other Roman poets have produced works of more elaborate composition, and have shown themselves greater interpreters of Nature and of human life: none have expressed so directly and truthfully the great elemental affections, or have uttered with such vital sincerity the happiness or the pain of the passing hour. He presents his own simple experience and emotions, uncoloured by idealising fancy or reflexion, and the world accepts this as among the truest of all records of human feeling. ”

“ It thus appears that, over and above their higher and finer excellences, the Roman poets have this additional source of interest, that, more than any other authors in the vigorous times of antiquity, they satisfy the modern curiosity in regard to personal character and experience. ”

“ A new birth of Roman poetry took place during the brief lull between the storms of the first and second civil wars. The new poets arose independently of the old literature. They appealed not to popular favour, but to the tastes of the few and [page 25] the educated; they gave expression not to any public or national sentiment, but to their individual thought and feeling. Their works reflect the restless agitation of a time of revolution; but they show also all the vigour and sincerity of republican freedom. ”

“ The state of society in Rome was, in this point, far happier; and the Latin literature partook of the superiority. The Roman poets have decidedly surpassed those of Greece in the delineation of the passion of love. There is no subject which they have treated with so much success. ”

“ Roman poetry owes also a considerable part of its substance to Greek thought, art, and traditions. This is the chief explanation of that conventional character which detracts from the originality of some of the masterpieces of Roman genius. The old religious belief of Rome and Italy became merged in the poetical restoration of the Olympian Gods; the story of the origin of Rome was inseparably connected with the personages of Greek poetry; the familiar manners of a late civilisation appear in unnatural association with the idealised features of the heroic age. ”

“ What the Roman poets cared for they cared for with all their heart, and strength, and mind. They seem to have written from more enduring, if less abundant, sources of affection than other poets. Their hearts thoroughly realised what they idealised in imagination. This strong realism and constancy of feeling explains the labour with which they perfected their art, as the strong love of his small portion of land explains the labour which the ideal husbandman of the Georgics bestows on it. ”

“ From one point of view, therefore, Roman poetry may be regarded as an imitative reproduction, from another, as a new revelation of the human spirit. For the form, and for some part of the substance, of their works, the Roman poets were indebted to Greece: the spirit and character, and much also of the substance of their poetry, are native in their origin. They betray their want of inventiveness chiefly in the forms of composition and the metres which they employed; occasionally also in the cast of their poetic diction, and in their conventional treatment of foreign materials. ”

“ There is no feeling so characteristic of the works of Roman genius as the sense of majesty. This feeling is called forth by the idea or outward manifestation of strength, stability, vastness, and order; by whatever impresses the imagination as the symbol of power and authority, whether in the aspect of Nature, or in the works, actions, and institutions of man. It is in their most serious and elevated writings, and chiefly in their epic and didactic poetry, that the Romans show their peculiar susceptibility to this grave and dignified emotion. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Great as is the force of native, unadorned eloquence, vigorous common sense, honest truthfulness, and indignant passion, nature would give way to art as taste became more cultivated. Nor could the Romans long have the finished models of Greek eloquence before their eyes, without transferring to the forum or the senate-house somewhat of their simple grandeur and majestic beauty.
The first efforts of the Roman historians were devoted to the transfer of the records of poetry into prose, as their more appropriate and popular vehicle. ”

“ The ruined Roman sits among the ruins; he flies to no green garden; he does not look to heaven; if his intent is defeated, if he is less than he meant to be, he lives no more. The names which end in “us,” seem to speak with lyric cadence. That measured cadence, — that tramp and march, — which are not stilted, because they indicate real force, yet which seem so when compared with any other language, — make Latin a study in itself of mighty influence. The language alone, without the literature, would give one the thought of Rome. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ So, too, in literature; all their greatest poetry has a strictly practical object, and bears directly on human life. The great philosophical poem of Lucretius was meant to rescue the Romans from religious superstition; the object of the Æneid of Virgil, of which I shall have more to say in another chapter, was to recall the degenerate Roman of that day to the sense of duty in the home and in the State. Their one original invention in literary form was satire, by which they meant comment, friendly or hostile, on the human life around them. ”

“ 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. ”