Nationalism and Culture (69 page)

Hellas, o'erpowered, o'erpowered her unlettered masters,

Carrying art into Latium gently to conquer it.

Crude Saturnine verse disappeared. Finer taste then expelled

The harsh and repellant, though long did the traces still show there

Of earlier rudeness, and have not yet utterly vanished;

For the Roman's mind tardily turned toward Grecian letters.

After the Punic wars, languidly resting, he thought to inquire

What he could use out of Sophocles, Thespis, and Aeschylus.

Soon he was trying to clothe them worthily in Latium's speech.

* There is nothing new under the sun. Today we have Julius Streicher, the bosom friend of Hitler, with whom anti-Semitism has taken an actually pathological form, asserting that the Jewish physicians have entered into a conspiracy to poison the German people.

No, Rome could not escape this peaceful invasion of a higher culture, more perilous to the Roman spirit than Hannibal or the incursions of the barbarians. The developing pan-Hellenism caused a profound change in the rubbishy beginnings of primitive Roman poetry. Whole troops of Greek architects, painters, sculptors, goldsmiths, bronze-founders, ivory-carvers, worked in the palaces of the Roman aristocracy—among them many slaves who had been forcibly dragged to Rome. And among these slaves were a large number equipped with all the riches of Hellenic education, who seemed called to bring to their masters a higher intellectual and spiritual culture. For all this, the Romans never progressed in their practice of the arts beyond a slavish imitation of foreign originals} and it is characteristic that in the whole history of Rome, a history of more than twelve hundred years, we find not more than half a dozen really great artists, that is, artists inspired with ideas of their own, while almost every Grecian city—Sparta alone excepted—can marshal a whole troop of them.

Even the so-called "Golden Age" has little to offer that can be designated as truly Roman art. Joseph Strzygowski has shown conclusively that Roman art in the time of the empire was merely the last phase of declining Hellenism, whose centers were to be found in Asia Minor, Syria and Egypt. At that time there were manifest in Hellenism strong Oriental influences gradually leading to the creation of the so-called Byzantine art, which in its essence was not Roman.^ Only in architecture did the Romans actually produce a new style j but even here we must not forget that most of the show buildings of the time of the empire were constructed under the direction of foreign architects. At first the Romans borrowed their building art from the Etruscans, as is shown clearly by the characteristic form of their earlier temples. Later, when the influence of late Hellenic culture was growing constantly stronger in Rome, the Grecian spirit became more plainly operative in architecture, although the Etruscan type long remained unmistakably present. From the Etruscans the Romans learned the art of building arches and vaults, which the former had brought with them from the East. It was by the practical application and further development of this art that they were later able to carry through those mighty public works which even today strike us with astonishment. The art of vaulting led, then, in its further development to the construction of the cupola, which presented a new principle in architecture. The magnificent effect of this style reached its highest expression in the Roman Pantheon, the erection of which is attributed to Apollo of Damascus.

That in painting the Romans never got beyond mediocrity is known to everybody. They never had any profound feeling for music. As late as 115 B.C. the old-Roman patriots in the Senate forbade the use of musical

'Joseph Strzygowski, Orient oder Rom? 1901.

instruments—only the primitive Italian flute found grace in their eyes. Of course this measure was not permanently enforced, it disappeared before the advance of Hellenism, but even much later music was still consigned entirely to the hands of Grecian slaves. It was quite characteristic that in the field of plastic art the Romans failed almost completely. Although they adorned their cities with the stolen glories of Greece, they left sculpture entirely in the hands of Hellenic artists whom they had brought to Rome as slaves. So there developed in Rome the neo-Attic school which produced quite outstanding works. All the world-renowned works of that period, the caryatides of the Pantheon, the Borghese gladiator, the Venus de Medici, the Farnese Hercules, were made by Greeks. It is true we do not know the creator of the Apollo Belvedere, but there is no doubt that he was a Greek j the bungling efforts of the Romans in plastic art permit no other conclusion.

No people is entirely original in its artistic creation. Even the Greeks were intellectually stimulated and fertilized by other cultures j but they used the foreign matter in their own way, so that it became a part of their own thought and feeling. This is the reason why when we look at a Greek work of art which we know to have been produced under foreign influence we do not feel the foreign element, or at most perceive only a slight disturbance of the intrinsically Hellenic determination of the work. With the Hellenes one never feels that they are imitating foreign stuff j everything is experienced, sympathetically felt, inside them. With the Romans one can generally lay his hand on the imitation at once. This is not a matter of the lack of technical knowledge j it is evidence, rather, of the utter lack of sympathetic understanding with which the Roman artist really viewed the foreign original. Even during the blossoming period of Roman culture the educated Roman got no closer to the essence of Greek art. Friedlander, in his Sittengeschlchte RomSy remarks with full justice:

As a matter of fact, in spite of all the old and new artistic pomp of Rome and the Roman dominion, representative art never acquired an influence on the Roman population as a whole; Roman literature when viewed in its entirety gives convincing and unanswerable proof of this. Out of so large a number of poets and writers of various periods, most of whom stand at the peak of the education of their period and serve us as fully accredited representatives of it, hardly one betrays either interest or understanding for formative art. In this so highly varied literature, covering a period of centuries and touching all important tendencies and interests, which during the first centuries after Christ (that is, in the period of the empire before the dominance of Christianity) directed its attention especially upon the present, and even searched into its intellectual status with manifold praisings and Warnings, there is found scarcely a trace of understanding of the true essence

of art and no expression of a comprehension of the splendor of its achievements. Wherever it is mentioned it is either with outright misunderstanding or at least without warmth or sympathy. However many individual Romans may have succeeded in penetrating into the essence of Greek art, for Roman culture at large it remained always remote and strange.

This misjudgment of art, which with Cato and the Old-Roman party passed over into openly avowed contempt, is found everywhere. The writings of Cicero are strewn with contemptuous remarks about art and artists. The gigantic development of slavery in Rome led naturally to a profound contempt for labor, in which the prosaic Romans also included art. A well-known saying of Plutarch is in this connection extraordinarily significant. (By the way, this alleged teacher of the Emperor Hadrian was a born Greek, in whose work, however, the Roman way of thinking often achieves surprisingly clear expression.)

"No respectable young person," says Plutarch, "who sees the Zeus in Pisa or the Hera in Argos will on that account wish to be a Phidias or an Apellesj for though a work may be acceptable and pleasing to us it by no means follows that its creator deserves our envy."

The same phenomena manifest themselves in the literature of the Romans. Despite its many-sidedness it remains on the whole a literature of imitations. One looks in vain for a Sophocles, an Aeschylus, an Aristophanes j with a few exceptions it all breathes the spirit of dullest mediocrity. On the whole, literature was in Rome always one of the luxuries of a privileged minority and was never able to strike root in the people itself. The Golden Age (from 80 b.c. to 20 b.c.) offers no exception to this. In Athens the production of a play by Sophocles or Aristophanes was an event that stirred the whole population. In Rome there was hardly any feeling for such matters, and Horace complains bitterly that the people would rather be entertained by the performance of a ropedancer or a street clown than be instructed by the production of a drama. Like everything in Rome, so also literature served, above all, the purposes of the state. Cato the Elder declared this openly and devoted a whole work to it. In the time of the republic literature amounted to littlej under Caesarism it was in the service of the court. No other literature, therefore, is so filled with the most disgusting flattery of the great ones of the earth as is the Roman. In no other does the spirit of servility and boot-licking display itself so openly and sliamelessly. There never was a time in which poet and artist rolled so deep in the dust as in that Golden Age.

A genuine literature was first produced in Rome through Greek influence, on which account the Roman literature has with justice been called a dim reflection of dying Hellenism. What had previously appeared in Rome as literature hardly deserves the name. This holds good especially for the Saturnine verses, inartistic holiday songs with meager content and

of a wooden lifelessness. An epic such as most peoples possess was altogether lacking to the Romans. There exists no connection between the mythical history of Rome and Roman literature. (The attempt to create an epic was first undertaken in the time of the empire to flatter the vanity of the Caesars.) Then came the Fescennines, burlesque wedding songs, usually recited extemporaneously, and later the Atellanes, named for the Oscan city of Atella, in which already Greek influences made themselves felt. But these early starts toward a primitive literature vanished entirely from the canvas when Hellenism made its way into Rome and Greek education became the shibboleth of the privileged castes.

The first poets, who are usually regarded as the founders of Roman literature, were Livius Andronicus, Gnaeus Naevius and Quintus Ennius, three Greeks, the first of them a manumitted slave who translated Homer into Latin. It is a unique phenomenon that a people that played in history such a long and world-dominating part should owe the beginnings of its literature to foreigners. Plautus and Terence, the immediate successors of these three, were completely permeated by the Hellenic spirit and presented in their work chiefly paraphrases of Greek originals. Moreover, Terence came from Carthage and was brought to Rome as a slave, where he was later freed by his master in recognition of his merit.

But the opportunities for the development of dramatic art were not the same in Rome as in Greece, and especially in Athens. In Hellas the drama was able to attain great heights only because its natural development was subjected to no external restraints. Every art requires the utmost conceivable freedom in order to maintain its life at its full greatness— dramatic art more than any other. Such freedom never existed in Rome. In Athens there was a most intimate connection between the theater and the public life of the community, and even a Pericles, like any other man, had to endure complacently the attacks from the stage. In Rome such audacity would have been regarded as assault upon the sanctity of the state. When one of the first dramatists in Roman literature, the Greek Naevius, dared, in one of his comedies, to ridicule a distinguished patrician, he was forced to make public apology and sent into exile, where he died. For this reason the drama could never strike root among the people. What interest could the average Roman find in it? The stuff that was presented to him on the stage was borrowed from the life of a foreign people in whose mental and spiritual experience he was not able to participate. Material which would have been able to seize and hold his attention, the representation of the actual occurrences of public life in which he himself was involved, was banned from the stage.

The poets of the time of the republic were completely under the domination of the Hellenic literature, and by far the greater part of their work is confined to the more or less free translation of original Greek

texts. The single literary type which then and later showed a degree of independence was the satire, especially after Lucillius had given it the form of the satiric poem, in which, of course, he also took his hint from Greek prototypes. Under the empire literature fell completely under the patronage of the court. Even its most important representatives, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Tibullus, Propertius, could not free themselves from these unworthy fetters, and despite their ability were compelled to burn incense before the emperor and his favorites and to celebrate their godlike virtues. Thus the famous and greatly over-praised Aeneid of Virgil, in which he tried—in imitation of Homer—to create for the Romans a national epic, would probably never have been written if it had not occurred to the poet to elevate the Trojan Aeneas to the position of progenitor of the Julian family from which the Emperor Augustus was descended. From the circumstance that Virgil, in his will, directed that his still unpublished heroic poem should be burned, one could almost conclude that the poet had in an outburst of self-respect felt ashamed of his debasement. The poets of the Golden Age were separately and collectively dependent on the rich and the powerful in the state, whose favor could be purchased only by self-abasement and contemptible flattery. After Messala, Maecenas, Augustus had gathered about them whole courts of poets who basked in the gracious effulgence of their patrons, it became in time the fashion for every rich upstart to keep his own poets, for whose success he provided and who in turn attended to his deification. Horace, who always tried to resist the enticements of Augustus (whom, nevertheless, he deified most unworthily), has confided to us in his Epistles how the prosaic need of bread spurred him to poetic creation. Having told us how fate drove him from his "good Athens" back to Rome, the poet comes to his confession: