The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) · Chapter 148Chapter XII (3)
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It is a remarkable fatality, that this man of extraordinary talents, far superior in originality of poetic endowments to most if not to all his contemporaries, fell upon an age in which he felt himself strange and forlorn, and in consequence of this made the most singular mistake in the selection of a subject. The system of Epicurus, which converts the universe into a great vortex of atoms and undertakes to explain the origin and end of the world as well as all the problems of nature and of life in a purely mechanical way, was doubtless somewhat less silly than the conversion of myths into history which was attempted by Euhemerus and after him by Ennius; but it was not an ingenious or a fresh system, and the task of poetically unfolding this mechanical view of the world was of such a nature that never probably did poet expend life and art on a more ungrateful theme. The philosophic reader censures in the Lucretian didactic poem the omission of the finer points of the system, the superficiality especially with which controversies are presented, the defective division, the frequent repetitions, with quite as good reason as the poetical reader frets at the mathematics put into rhythm which makes a great part of the poem absolutely unreadable. In spite of these incredible defects, before which every man of mediocre talent must inevitably have succumbed, this poet might justly boast of having carried off from the poetic wilderness a new chaplet such as the Muses had not yet bestowed on any; and it was by no means merely the occasional similitudes, and the other inserted descriptions of mighty natural phenomena and yet mightier passions, which acquired for the poet this chaplet. The genius which marks the view of life as well as the poetry of Lucretius depends on his unbelief, which came forward and was entitled to come forward with the full victorious power of truth, and therefore with the full vigour of poetry, in opposition to the prevailing hypocrisy or superstition.
-Humana ante oculos foede cum vita iaceret In terris oppressa gravi sub religione, Quae caput a caeli regionibus ostendebat Horribili super aspectu mortalibus instans, Primum Graius homo mortalis tendere contra Est oculos ausus primusque obsistere contra. Ergo vivida vis animi pervicit, et extra Processit longe flammantia moenia mundi Atque omne immensum peragravit mente animoque-.
The poet accordingly was zealous to overthrow the gods, as Brutus had overthrown the kings, and "to release nature from her stern lords." But it was not against the long ago enfeebled throne of Jovis that these flaming words were hurled; just like Ennius, Lucretius fights practically above all things against the wild foreign faiths and superstitions of, the multitude, the worship of the Great Mother for instance and the childish lightning-lore of the Etruscans. Horror and antipathy towards that terrible world in general, in which and for which the poet wrote, suggested his poem. It was composed in that hopeless time when the rule of the oligarchy had been overthrown and that of Caesar had not yet been established, in the sultry years during which the outbreak of the civil war was awaited with long and painful suspense. If we seem to perceive in its unequal and restless utterance that the poet daily expected to see the wild tumult of revolution break forth over himself and his work, we must not with reference to his view of men and things forget amidst what men, and in prospect of what things, that view had its origin. In the Hellas of the epoch before Alexander it was a current saying, and one profoundly felt by all the best men, that the best thing of all was not to be born, and the next best to die. Of all views of the world possible to a tender and poetically organized mind in the kindred Caesarian age this was the noblest and the most ennobling, that it is a benefit for man to be released from a belief in the immortality of the soul and thereby from the evil dread of death and of the gods which malignantly steals over men like terror creeping over children in a dark room; that, as the sleep of the night is more refreshing than the trouble of the day, so death, eternal repose from all hope and fear, is better than life, as indeed the gods of the poet themselves are nothing, and have nothing, but an eternal blessed rest; that the pains of hell torment man, not after life, but during its course, in the wild and unruly passions of his throbbing heart; that the task of man is to attune his soul to equanimity, to esteem the purple no higher than the warm dress worn at home, rather to remain in the ranks of those that obey than to press into the confused crowd of candidates for the office of ruler, rather to lie on the grass beside the brook than to take part under the golden ceiling of the rich in emptying his countless dishes. This philosophico-practical tendency is the true ideal essence of the Lucretian poem and is only overlaid, not choked, by all the dreariness of its physical demonstrations. Essentially on this rests its comparative wisdom and truth. The man who with a reverence for his great predecessors and a vehement zeal, to which this century elsewhere knew no parallel, preached such doctrine and embellished it with the charm of art, may be termed at once a good citizen and a great poet. The didactic poem concerning the Nature of Things, however much in it may challenge censure, has remained one of the most brilliant stars in the poorly illuminated expanse of Roman literature; and with reason the greatest of German philologues chose the task of making the Lucretian poem once more readable as his last and most masterly work.
The Hellenic Fashionable Poetry
Lucretius, although his poetical vigour as well as his art was admired by his cultivated contemporaries, yet remained—of late growth as he was—a master without scholars. In the Hellenic fashionable poetry on the other hand there was no lack at least of scholars, who exerted themselves to emulate the Alexandrian masters. With true tact the more gifted of the Alexandrian poets avoided larger works and the pure forms of poetry—the drama, the epos, the lyric; the most pleasing and successful performances consisted with them, just as with the new Latin poets, in "short- winded" tasks, and especially in such as belonged to the domains bordering on the pure forms of art, more especially to the wide field intervening between narrative and song. Multifarious didactic poems were written. Small half-heroic, half-erotic epics were great favourites, and especially an erudite sort of love-elegy peculiar to this autumnal summer of Greek poetry and characteristic of the philological source whence it sprang, in which the poet more or less arbitrarily interwove the description of his own feelings, predominantly sensuous, with epic shreds from the cycle of Greek legend. Festal lays were diligently and artfully manufactured; in general, owing to the want of spontaneous poetical invention, the occasional poem preponderated and especially the epigram, of which the Alexandrians produced excellent specimens. The poverty of materials and the want of freshness in language and rhythm, which inevitably cleave to every literature not national, men sought as much as possible to conceal under odd themes, far-fetched phrases, rare words, and artificial versification, and generally under the whole apparatus of philologico-antiquarian erudition and technical dexterity. Such was the gospel which was preached to the Roman boys of this period, and they came in crowds to hear and to practise it; already (about 700) the love-poems of Euphorion and similar Alexandrian poetry formed the ordinary reading and the ordinary pieces for declamation of the cultivated youth.(19) The literary revolution took place; but it yielded in the first instance with rare exceptions only premature or unripe fruits. The number of the "new-fashioned poets" was legion, but poetry was rare and Apollo was compelled, as always when so many throng towards Parnassus, to make very short work. The long poems never were worth anything, the short ones seldom. Even in this literary age the poetry of the day had become a public nuisance; it sometimes happened that one's friend would send home to him by way of mockery as a festal present a pile of trashy verses fresh from the bookseller's shop, whose value was at once betrayed by the elegant binding and the smooth paper. A real public, in the sense in which national literature has a public, was wanting to the Roman Alexandrians as well as to the Hellenic; it was thoroughly the poetry of a clique or rather cliques, whose members clung closely together, abused intruders, read and criticised among themselves the new poems, sometimes also quite after the Alexandrian fashion celebrated the successful productions in fresh verses, and variously sought to secure for themselves by clique-praises a spurious and ephemeral renown. A notable teacher of Latin literature, himself poetically active in this new direction, Valerius Cato appears to have exercised a sort of scholastic patronage over the most distinguished men of this circle and to have pronounced final decision on the relative value of the poems. As compared with their Greek models, these Roman poets evince throughout a want of freedom, sometimes a schoolboy dependence; most of their products must have been simply the austere fruits of a school poetry still occupied in learning and by no means yet dismissed as mature. Inasmuch as in language and in measure they adhered to the Greek patterns far more closely than ever the national Latin poetry had done, a greater correctness and consistency in language and metre were certainly attained; but it was at the expense of the flexibility and fulness of the national idiom. As respects the subject-matter, under the influence partly of effeminate models, partly of an immoral age, amatory themes acquired a surprising preponderance little conducive to poetry; but the favourite metrical compendia of the Greeks were also in various cases translated, such as the astronomical treatise of Aratus by Cicero, and, either at the end of this or more probably at the commencement of the following period, the geographical manual of Eratosthenes by Publius Varro of the Aude and the physico-medicinal manual of Nicander by Aemilius Macer. It is neither to be wondered at nor regretted that of this countless host of poets but few names have been preserved to us; and even these are mostly mentioned merely as curiosities or as once upon a time great; such as the orator Quintus Hortensius with his "five hundred thousand lines" of tiresome obscenity, and the somewhat more frequently mentioned Laevius, whose -Erotopaegnia- attracted a certain interest only by their complicated measures and affected phraseology. Even the small epic Smyrna by Gaius Helvius Cinna (d. 710?), much as it was praised by the clique, bears both in its subject—the incestuous love of a daughter for her father—and in the nine years' toil bestowed on it the worst characteristics of the time.
Catullus
Those poets alone of this school constitute an original and pleasing exception, who knew how to combine with its neatness and its versatility of form the national elements of worth still existing in the republican life, especially in that of the country-towns. To say nothing here of Laberius and Varro, this description applies especially to the three poets already mentioned above(20) of the republican opposition, Marcus Furius Libaculus (652-691), Gaius Licinius Calvus (672-706) and Quintus Valerius Catullus (667-c. 700). Of the two former, whose writings have perished, we can indeed only conjecture this; respecting the poems of Catullus we can still form a judgment. He too depends in subject and form on the Alexandrians. We find in his collection translations of pieces of Callimachus, and these not altogether the very good, but the very difficult. Among the original pieces, we meet with elaborately-turned fashionable poems, such as the over-artificial Galliambics in praise of the Phrygian Mother; and even the poem, otherwise so beautiful, of the marriage of Thetis has been artistically spoiled by the truly Alexandrian insertion of the complaint of Ariadne in the principal poem. But by the side of these school-pieces we meet with the melodious lament of the genuine elegy, the festal poem in the full pomp of individual and almost dramatic execution, above all, the freshest miniature painting of cultivated social life, the pleasant and very unreserved amatory adventures of which half the charm consists in prattling and poetizing about the mysteries of love, the delightful life of youth with full cups and empty purses, the pleasures of travel and of poetry, the Roman and still more frequently the Veronese anecdote of the town, and the humorous jest amidst the familiar circle of friends. But not only does Apollo touch the lyre of the poet, he wields also the bow; the winged dart of sarcasm spares neither the tedious verse-maker nor the provincial who corrupts the language, but it hits none more frequently and more sharply than the potentates by whom the liberty of the people is endangered. The short-lined and merry metres, often enlivened by a graceful refrain, are of finished art and yet free from the repulsive smoothness of the manufactory. These poems lead us alternately to the valleys of the Nile and the Po; but the poet is incomparably more at home in the latter. His poems are based on Alexandrian art doubtless, but at the same time on the self- consciousness of a burgess and a burgess in fact of a rural town, on the contrast of Verona with Rome, on the contrast of the homely municipal with the high-born lords of the senate who usually maltreat their humble friends—as that contrast was probably felt more vividly than anywhere else in Catullus' home, the flourishing and comparatively vigorous Cisalpine Gaul. The most beautiful of his poems reflect the sweet pictures of the Lago di Garda, and hardly at this time could any man of the capital have written a poem like the deeply pathetic one on his brother's death, or the excellent genuinely homely festal hymn for the marriage of Manlius and Aurunculeia. Catullus, although dependent on the Alexandrian masters and standing in the midst of the fashionable and clique poetry of that age, was yet not merely a good scholar among many mediocre and bad ones, but himself as much superior to his masters as the burgess of a free Italian community was superior to the cosmopolitan Hellenic man of letters. Eminent creative vigour indeed and high poetic intentions we may not look for in him; he is a richly gifted and graceful but not a great poet, and his poems are, as he himself calls them, nothing but "pleasantries and trifles." Yet when we find not merely his contemporaries electrified by these fugitive songs, but the art-critics of the Augustan age also characterizing him along with Lucretius as the most important poet of this epoch, his contemporaries as well as their successors were completely right. The Latin nation has produced no second poet in whom the artistic substance and the artistic form appear in so symmetrical perfection as in Catullus; and in this sense the collection of the poems of Catullus is certainly the most perfect which Latin poetry as a whole can show.
Poems in Prose Romances
Lastly, poetry in a prose form begins in this epoch. The law of genuine naive as well as conscious art, which had hitherto remained unchangeable—that the poetical subject-matter and the metrical setting should go together—gave way before the intermixture and disturbance of all kinds and forms of art, which is one of the most significant features of this period. As to romances indeed nothing farther is to be noticed, than that the most famous historian of this epoch, Sisenna, did not esteem himself too good to translate into Latin the much-read Milesian tales of Aristides—licentious fashionable novels of the most stupid sort.
Varro's Aesthetic Writings
A more original and more pleasing phenomenon in this debateable border-land between poetry and prose was the aesthetic writings of Varro, who was not merely the most important representative of Latin philologico-historical research, but one of the most fertile and most interesting authors in belles-lettres. Descended from a plebeian gens which had its home in the Sabine land but had belonged for the last two hundred years to the Roman senate, strictly reared in antique discipline and decorum,(21) and already at the beginning of this epoch a man of maturity, Marcus Terentius Varro of Reate (638-727) belonged in politics, as a matter of course, to the institutional party, and bore an honourable and energetic part in its doings and sufferings. He supported it, partly in literature—as when he combated the first coalition, the "three-headed monster," in pamphlets; partly in more serious warfare, where we found him in the army of Pompeius as commandant of Further Spain.(22) When the cause of the republic was lost, Varro was destined by his conqueror to be librarian of the library which was to be formed in the capital. The troubles of the following period drew the old man once more into their vortex, and it was not till seventeen years after Caesar's death, in the eighty-ninth year of his well-occupied life, that death called him away.
Varros' Models
The aesthetic writings, which have made him a name, were brief essays, some in simple prose and of graver contents, others humorous sketches the prose groundwork of which was inlaid with various poetical effusions. The former were the "philosophico- historical dissertations" (-logistorici-), the latter the Menippean Satires. In neither case did he follow Latin models, and the -Satura- of Varro in particular was by no means based on that of Lucilius. In fact the Roman -Satura- in general was not properly a fixed species of art, but only indicated negatively the fact that the "multifarious poem" was not to be included under any of the recognized forms of art; and accordingly the -Satura- poetry assumed in the hands of every gifted poet a different and peculiar character. It was rather in the pre-Alexandrian Greek philosophy that Varro found the models for his more severe as well as for his lighter aesthetic works; for the graver dissertations, in the dialogues of Heraclides of Heraclea on the Black Sea (d. about 450), for the satires, in the writings of Menippus of Gadara in Syria (flourishing about 475). The choice was significant. Heraclides, stimulated as an author by Plato's philosophic dialogues, had amidst the brilliance of their form totally lost sight of the scientific contents and made the poetico-fabulistic dress the main matter; he was an agreeable and largely-read author, but far from a philosopher. Menippus was quite as little a philosopher, but the most genuine literary representative of that philosophy whose wisdom consisted in denying philosophy and ridiculing philosophers the cynical wisdom of Diogenes; a comic teacher of serious wisdom, he proved by examples and merry sayings that except an upright life everything is vain in earth and heaven, and nothing more vain than the disputes of so-called sages. These were the true models for Varro, a man full of old Roman indignation at the pitiful times and full of old Roman humour, by no means destitute withal of plastic talent but as to everything which presented the appearance not of palpable fact but of idea or even of system, utterly stupid, and perhaps the most unphilosophical among the unphilosophical Romans.(23) But Varro was no slavish pupil. The impulse and in general the form he derived from Heraclides and Menippus; but his was a nature too individual and too decidedly Roman not to keep his imitative creations essentially independent and national.
Varro's Philosophico-Historical Essays
For his grave dissertations, in which a moral maxim or other subject of general interest is handled, he disdained, in his framework to approximate to the Milesian tales, as Heraclides had done, and so to serve up to the reader even childish little stories like those of Abaris and of the maiden reawakened to life after being seven days dead. But seldom he borrowed the dress from the nobler myths of the Greeks, as in the essay "Orestes or concerning Madness"; history ordinarily afforded him a worthier frame for his subjects, more especially the contemporary history of his country, so that these essays became, as they were called -laudationes- of esteemed Romans, above all of the Coryphaei of the constitutional party. Thus the dissertation "concerning Peace" was at the same time a memorial of Metellus Pius, the last in the brilliant series of successful generals of the senate; that "concerning the Worship of the Gods" was at the same time destined to preserve the memory of the highly-respected Optimate and Pontifex Gaius Curio; the essay "on Fate" was connected with Marius, that "on the Writing of History" with Sisenna the first historian of this epoch, that "on the Beginnings of the Roman Stage" with the princely giver of scenic spectacles Scaurus, that "on Numbers" with the highly-cultured Roman banker Atticus. The two philosophico-historical essays "Laelius or concerning Friendship," "Cato or concerning Old Age," which Cicero wrote probably after the model of those of Varro, may give us some approximate idea of Varro's half-didactic, half-narrative, treatment of these subjects.
Varros' Menippean Satires
The Menippean satire was handled by Varro with equal originality of form and contents; the bold mixture of prose and verse is foreign to the Greek original, and the whole intellectual contents are pervaded by Roman idiosyncrasy—one might say, by a savour of the Sabine soil. These satires like the philosophico-historical essays handle some moral or other theme adapted to the larger public, as is shown by the several titles—-Columnae Herculis-, —peri doxeis—; —Euren ei Lopas to Poma, peri gegameikoton—, -Est Modus Matulae-, —peri metheis—; -Papiapapae-, —peri egkomios—. The plastic dress, which in this case might not be wanting, is of course but seldom borrowed from the history of his native country, as in the satire -Serranus-, —peri archairesion—. The Cynic- world of Diogenes on the other hand plays, as might be expected, a great part; we meet with the —Kounistor—, the —Kounorreiton—, the 'Ippokouon, the —'Oudrokouon—, the —Kounodidaskalikon— and others of a like kind. Mythology is also laid under contribution for comic purposes; we find a -Prometheus Liber-, an -Ajax Stramenticius-, a -Hercules Socraticus-, a -Sesqueulixes- who had spent not merely ten but fifteen years in wanderings. The outline of the dramatic or romantic framework is still discoverable from the fragments in some pieces, such as the -Prometheus Liber-, the -Sexagessis-, -Manius-; it appears that Varro frequently, perhaps regularly, narrated the tale as his own experience; e. g. in the -Manius- the dramatis personae go to Varro and discourse to him "because he was known to them as a maker of books." as to the poetical value of this dress we are no longer allowed to form any certain judgment; there still occur in our fragments several very charming sketches full of wit and liveliness— thus in the -Prometheus Liber- the hero after the loosing of his chains opens a manufactory of men, in which Goldshoe the rich (-Chrysosandalos-) bespeaks for himself a maiden, of milk and finest wax, such as the Milesian bees gather from various flowers, a maiden without bones and sinews, without skin or hair, pure and polished, slim, smooth, tender, charming. The life-breath of this poetry is polemics— not so much the political warfare of party, such as Lucilius and Catullus practised, but the general moral antagonism of the stern elderly man to the unbridled and perverse youth, of the scholar living in the midst of his classics to the loose and slovenly, or at any rate in point of tendency reprobate, modern poetry,(24) of the good burgess of the ancient type to the new Rome in which the Forum, to use Varro's language, was a pigsty and Numa, if he turned his eyes towards his city, would see no longer a trace of his wise regulations. In the constitutional struggle Varro did what seemed to him the duty of a citizen; but his heart was not in such party-doings— "why," he complains on one occasion, "do ye call me from my pure life into the filth of your senate-house?" He belonged to the good old time, when the talk savoured of onions and garlic, but the heart was sound. His polemic against the hereditary foes of the genuine Roman spirit, the Greek philosophers, was only a single aspect of this old-fashioned opposition to the spirit of the new times; but it resulted both from the nature of the Cynical philosophy and from the temperament of Varro, that the Menippean lash was very specially plied round the cars of the philosophers and put them accordingly into proportional alarm—it was not without palpitation that the philosophic scribes of the time transmitted to the "severe man" their newly-issued treatises. Philosophizing is truly no art. With the tenth part of the trouble with which a master rears his slave to be a professional baker, he trains himself to be a philosopher; no doubt, when the baker and the philosopher both come under the hammer, the artist of pastry goes off a hundred times dearer than the sage. Singular people, these philosophers! One enjoins that corpses be buried in honey— it is a fortunate circumstance that his desire is not complied with, otherwise where would any honey-wine be left? Another thinks that men grow out of the earth like cresses. A third has invented a world-borer (—Kosmotorounei—) by which the earth will some day be destroyed.
-Postremo, nemo aegrotus quicquam somniat Tam infandum, quod non aliquis dicat philosophus-.
It is ludicrous to observe how a Long-beard—by which is meant an etymologizing Stoic—cautiously weighs every word in goldsmith's scales; but there is nothing that surpasses the genuine philosophers' quarrel—a Stoic boxing-match far excels any encounter of athletes. In the satire -Marcopolis-, —peri archeis—, when Marcus created for himself a Cloud-Cuckoo-Home after his own heart, matters fared, just as in the Attic comedy, well with the peasant, but ill with the philosopher; the -Celer- — -di'-enos- -leimmatos-logos—, son of Antipater the Stoic, beats in the skull of his opponent— evidently the philosophic -Dilemma—-with the mattock.
With this morally polemic tendency and this talent for embodying it in caustic and picturesque expression, which, as the dress of dialogue given to the books on Husbandry written in his eightieth year shows, never forsook him down to extreme old age, Varro most happily combined an incomparable knowledge of the national manners and language, which is embodied in the philological writings of his old age after the manner of a commonplace-book, but displays itself in his Satires in all its direct fulness and freshness. Varro was in the best and fullest sense of the term a local antiquarian, who from the personal observation of many years knew his nation in its former idiosyncrasy and seclusion as well as in its modern state of transition and dispersion, and had supplemented and deepened his direct knowledge of the national manners and national language by the most comprehensive research in historical and literary archives. His partial deficiency in rational judgment and learning— in our sense of the words—was compensated for by his clear intuition and the poetry which lived within him. He sought neither after antiquarian notices nor after rare antiquated or poetical words;(25) but he was himself an old and old-fashioned man and almost a rustic, the classics of his nation were his favourite and long-familiar companions; how could it fail that many details of the manners of his forefathers, which he loved above all and especially knew, should be narrated in his writings, and that his discourse should abound with proverbial Greek and Latin phrases, with good old words preserved in the Sabine conversational language, with reminiscences of Ennius, Lucilius, and above all of Plautus? We should not judge as to the prose style of these aesthetic writings of Varro's earlier period by the standard of his work on Language written in his old age and probably published in an unfinished state, in which certainly the clauses of the sentence are arranged on the thread of the relative like thrushes on a string; but we have already observed that Varro rejected on principle the effort after a chaste style and Attic periods, and his aesthetic essays, while destitute of the mean bombast and the spurious tinsel of vulgarism, were yet written after an unclassic and even slovenly fashion, in sentences rather directly joined on to each other than regularly subdivided. The poetical pieces inserted on the other hand show not merely that their author knew how to mould the most varied measures with as much mastery as any of the fashionable poets, but that he had a right to include himself among those to whom a god has granted the gift of "banishing cares from the heart by song and sacred poesy."(26) the sketches of Varro no more created a school than the didactic poem of Lucretius; to the more general causes which prevented this there falls to be added their thoroughly individual stamp, which was inseparable from the greater age, from the rusticity, and even from the peculiar erudition of their author. But the grace and humour of the Menippean satires above all, which seem to have been in number and importance far superior to Varro's graver works, captivated his contemporaries as well as those in after times who had any relish for originality and national spirit; and even we, who are no longer permitted to read them, may still from the fragments preserved discern in some measure that the writer "knew how to laugh and how to jest in moderation." And as the last breath of the good spirit of the old burgess-times ere it departed, as the latest fresh growth which the national Latin poetry put forth, the Satires of Varro deserved that the poet in his poetical testament should commend these his Menippean children to every one "who had at heart the prosperity of Rome and of Latium"; and they accordingly retain an honourable place in the literature as in the history of the Italian people.(27)