BOOKS.
THE ROMAN POETS OF THE REPUBLIC.* THE ROMAN POETS OF THE REPUBLIC.* To many of those who see the title of this book for the first time, it will appear an entirely new idea that the Roman poets of the Republic should form a distinct class by themselves, apart from the Roman poets of any other time. The Augustan age, with its majesty, its polish, and its atmosphere of courtly adulation—the satirists of a century later, with reproof for the vices, and thunder for the ill-breeding, of their time—the poets of the decline, with the sleepy flow of their epics and their tasteful epigrams on cookery, seem all to possess some common shape and tone. But are the poets of the Republic in any sense its representatives? Have Ennius and Catullus any common ground of feeling or expression which can be fairly traced to the similarity of the extremely dissimilar institutions under which they lived? On the whole, this is the point which Mr. Seller chiefly fails to make out ; and there seems to be little reason for forcing the appearance of a connection. The Republican literature extended from the days of Livia', when the country people mixed remnants of Oscan in their talk, to the days of Catullus, when Greek was as much read as Latin. In no respect whatever has the form of government at Rome moulded her poetic offspring into likeness. Ennius wrote on the glories of his country, Catullus on the beauty of his mistresses. The verses of Lucilius were rough ; the Peleus and Thetis is smooth. The works of Nsevius were full of politics; Lucretius has but one political allusion in seven thousand lines. Mr. Seller's book is a most valuable contribution towards our acquaintance with ancient literature ; but to profess to see in its title anything more than a mere measure of date would be much to the same purpose as composing a treatise on Valerius Flacons and Virgil as the Roman posts whose names begin with V.
The origin of literature at Rome is a toilsome topic at the best, and upon this part of his suhject Mr. Seller has not been able to throw much new light, though he has brought together the known facts with a remarkably skilful hand. In doing 16 3 he speaks so strongly as to the thoroughly national and Italian character of early Roman poetry, that it is hard to follow his enthusiasm throughout. But as regards the hypothesis of a ballad literature, it is delightful to find some one who will speak out. There was never, in all probability, an opinion which was received with so little examination of its truth as the famous suggestion of Niebuhr, afterwards worked out by Lord Macaulay in the preface to the" Lays of Ancient Rome," that the traditions of the kingly and some of the later times are preserved in regular historical compositions, which were committed to memory and sung at Roman banquets. Long as we had doubted the existence of this ballad literature—at least its existence to the extent which Macaulay conceived—it is almost startling to perceive how slender are the foundations on which the belief in it must rest. Such notices as there are tend, as Mr. Seller points out, quite against the conclusions of Niebuhr. Cicero and Verso speak of short lyrical piece:, and not a detailed narrative ; and it is among patrician families and within the walls of the city, and not in plebeian houses and among the peasantry of Italy, that they would find the fittest home. The fact is, that whatever traces there exist of an early poetic art among the Romans are, in our own judgment, by no means iudigenous ; and almost the first mention of poetry in any Roman writer speaks of it as a profession which a vagabond might naturally adopt. Mr. Seller urges the fact that Lucilius was honoured with a public funeral as an argument to prove the popularity of early Roman literature ; and he somewhat strangely concludes that, if popular, it must have been original. But all the evidence is the other way. Lucilius was not born till the year after Cato died. His funeral was celebrated at a time when the deluge of foreign thought and manners bad poured for a century over Italy, and intellectual Greece had long. ago "taken her cruel conqueror captive." In such days as those ofLucilius it is hardly too much to say that the very population of Rome had undergone a total change. How many of those patrician families were still extant who might once have cheered to the echo the tunes of their national ballads, if there had been any national ballads to cheer? It is by mixed races that the world has been ever renovated, and the crowd who thronged to hear the Gracchi speak, and decreed their great satirist a burial, were as much a mixed race as the English who fought at Crecy, or the mulattoes who will in fifty years become • The Roman Poets of the Republic. By W. Y. Seller, ILA., Professor of Greek ta the University of St Andrkw's, and late Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford. Edinburgh :
the aristocracy of Jamaica. When Mr. Seller can mention the name of any one Italian poet who was buried eitherin public or in private before the period of the Punic wars, we shall be more in- clined to share his belief in the indigenous character of the poetry of Rome.
What, then, becomes of the traditions, when the poetry which
was supposed to contain them is taken away? They simply vanish. The heroes of the pre-historic time go to the same limbo to which so many other brave but shadowy men have passed way—
"Quo pins lEneas, quo dives Tnllus et Aneus;" whither King Led and King Bladud have gone, and all the glory of Arthur, and all the glamour of Merlin. We know little, says Mr. Seller, of the power of oral tradition in a time which, while orderly and civilized, is not yet literary. We certainly know little and are inclined to believe still less. The more we do dis- cover on the subject of tradition, the more untrustworthy we find it. Year by year students are beginning to attach less im- portance to it, and to discover, whether in civilized Europe, or in central Africa, or the islands of the Pacific, fresh proofs of its delusive way wardness. Tradition, with its mushroom growth and its venerable form, is steadily losing ground as an element of historic knowledge. Like Jonah's gourd, it grows up in a night, but it vanishes when the light of day sets in. And if ever there was a complete instance of its unfaithfulness more glar- ing than any other, it is to be found in the works of the poets to whom we are introduced in the work before us. It is certain that the Romans knew nothing of a Trojan war beyond what they read in Greek writers. It is certain that they know nothing of Greek writers till about two centuries before Christ. And, never- theless, every Roman in the time of Julius Ctesar was as fully convinced that he was descended from /Eneas as every decent Irishman is that he is descended from Brian Boru. It was a genuine faith of the people, of apiece with their belief in Phcebus who spoke at Delphi and Pallas who protected Athens ; and it was completely of foreign importation and of indisputably recent growth.
To attempt to know too much is a pitfall into which it is but too easy for an historian to fall, whether of literature or of poli- tics. "Putting this and that together" often ends in the con- struction of a literary mermaid or griffin. It is, perhaps, some- thing more than a coincidence that the greatest authors of the world are men of whom we know little or nothing. With the life of the chief poet with whom Mr. Seller is concerned it is pleasant to find that he takes no intrusive liberties, and the value of his remarks does not suffer from the self-restraint. The chapters on Lucretius are the best in the book, and are really masterly. They are careful, original, and, if the expression will not seem a strange one, generous. Lucretius is an author peculiarly hard to appreciate at his true value. He was a writer in describing whom paradoxes seem to suggest themselves naturally. A positivist among theorists, he was yet a theorist himself, and a dogmatic one. He was an enemy of the popular religion, a materialist, an Epicurean ; and yet he was an enthusiast and a lover of his race. His verse is rough and ungainly, and yet Virgil borrowed from it some of his choicest pieces ; the whole work bears traces of careful arrangement, and yet it reads as a fragment. But no series of paradoxes will ever serve as a description of a human being, and Mr. Seller is not content to observe his author merely in his relations to others. He describes him as one who has thoroughly understood his poem, and whose estimate is a serious and candid one. It is some Lime since an exposition of any ancient author has appeared at once so luminous and so suggestive. It happens that we cor- dially agree with every word that Mr. Seller writes upon Lucretius; but whether this were the case or not, we should feel in reading such criticism as his that we were sitting at the feet of a master.
It is interesting sometimes to speculate upon the spirit in which
such poems as that of which we have been speaking must have been received by Roman society, and the nature of the popularity they enjoyed. One fact is very suggestive in connection with this subject—the higher social rank from which the poets of the last half century before our era were drawn. From Terence and Ntevius to Horace and Catullus is the step from Shakespeare to Pope. Patronage, however, has its caprices as well as vulgar applause. The world of fashion in the days of our own great- grandfathers saw every grace in Matthew Prior. It is at first ! sight, indeed, difficult to account for the conviction we feel that?' the best of the Roman poets are in our hands. The literary society over which Mtecenas ruled was critical enough to condemn the very bad, and the large circulation which attended every its- ,portant work could hardly allow what was. very good to ass
unnoticed. But to judge by mere circulation, we should be obliged to rank Tupper and Longfellow at the head of modern English bards, and the elaborate praise of a few was very nearly making Tannhaiiser a standard work. As it is, we know that one of the best of the contemporaries of Virgil, the poet Varius, has left no proof of hie greatness to our time. But there is every reason to think that the best of all remain to us. When we find Virgil read as a school-book and Horace quoted as a classic within one or two generations after their death, we may feel sure that their popularity was not the result of accident. Whether it may be fairly attributed to the qualities upon which Mr. Seller lays the chief emphasis is another question. He praises their moral energy, and points out their national spirit. We confess that we can see neither the one nor the other. Horace rises, he observes, above his irony and epicureanism to point out the purity of Sabine households and the noble death of Cato. But still more con- spicuous is the promptness with which he sinks back again from his Sabine households to the more congenial cheeks of Lydia. Virgil, he urges, was fond and proud of Italy. It is difficult to prove a negative, but we doubt whether an impartial reader would consider Italian enthusiasm to be one of the chief charac- teristics of the "./Eneid." It is hard to help feeling that the reverse is rather the case; that the poems which became popular at Rome achieved their success rather in consequence of the foreign ele- ment they contained than in regard of their national spirit, and that the lack of moral power which they exhibit only served to detract from an intrinsic greatness, which the poets themselves were not as slow as their admirers have been in modern times to attribute with all candour to the inspiration of Parnassus and Helicon.
Previous page
