The Portable Roman Reader (Portable Library) (2 page)

The proper conduct of life was a matter of
gravitas, pietas,
and
virtus
—three words that look as if they meant “gravity,” “piety,” and “virtue,” which they do not.
Gravitas
means much the same as “dignity,” though the quality was more important to the Romans than to us. Pietas was close to “duty”; it meant performing one’s duties in every relationship: as father, son, soldier, citizen, friend, slave-owner, worshiper. Toward the gods it required neither beliefs nor morals, but the proper performance of the proper ceremonies. But toward mankind it meant giving every man his due, one of the greatest legacies that Rome has left to us. It was Rome who first formed the concept of the Law of Nations, the idea that beyond the statutes of any particular locality there was an abstract standard of right and wrong which all men recognized and were bound by. Greece had conceived the equality of citizens before the law, but it was Rome that constantly extended the rights of citizenship. A Greek had no rights outside his own city; under the Roman Empire, Paul, a Jew of Tarsus, could make a provincial governor revoke his sentence of a flogging by merely saying, “I am a Roman citizen”; he could say, “I appeal to Cæsar,” and receive the only possible answer, “Thou hast appealed unto Caesar; unto Cæsar shalt thou go.” The Romans first conquered their neighbors in their own peninsula, and then led those conquered neighbors to fight as loyal Romans against the strangers beyond the seas and mountains—strangers who would in their turn be made vassals, then subject allies, then Roman citizens.

Virtus was the quality that distinguished the man,
vir,
from the mere human creature, homo. There is no exact word for it; but if we wish to know what a nation admires we can go to its nursery tales, the old stories of Washington and the Cherry Tree, Alfred and the Cakes, Bruce and the Spider. For the Roman, such stories were those Livy tells of the beginnings of the Republic; they are concerned not with truthfulness or democracy or perseverance, but with valor and complete devotion to country. Every Roman schoolboy knew the stories of Horatius at the Bridge, of Quintus Curtius leaping his horse into the gulf, of Lucius Junius Brutus, who commanded and witnessed the execution of his own sons for conspiracy against the city. There was the story of the other Horatius, who supplied the subject of a play by Corneille; in the service of the city, he killed the man his sister loved, and killed his sister because she mourned for him; he was sentenced for the killing of his sister to a purely nominal punishment, that justice might be preserved. There was Gaius Mucius, who slipped into the camp of the besieging Lars Porsena with intent to kill him, but killed one of his followers by mistake and was taken prisoner. He declared to Lars Porsena that though he had failed, there were three hundred men in Rome who had sworn to attempt Porsena’s life, one after the other. When Porsena threatened him with torture unless he revealed their names, he smiled and held his own right hand in the brazier until it was burned off. Lars Porsena thought it wiser to come to terms with the Romans, and Mucius was given the name of Scævola, or Left-handed, which was borne by his descendants down to imperial times.

The story is important as showing what the Romans admired, even though I think it is probable that it was invented later to explain a nickname “Lefty” bestowed in the ordinary way. There was a similar story about the name Brutus, which means “Stupid” or “Brutish”—Hamlet’s pun to Polonius was better than he knew. The story is that Lucius Junius Brutus, like Hamlet, feigned idiocy to escape the suspicion of his uncle, the last of the kings. Possibly; but the original Lefty and Stupid may have been called so for no such complimentary reason. The Romans had a schoolboyish aptitude for names based on personal peculiarities. Cicero means “Warty”; Cæsar probably “Hairy.” It is part of the quality in them which led, on the one hand, to the only two art forms they invented, the portrait bust and the satire; and on the other, to the abuse and smut of some of the epigrams. For, as Aristotle says, every virtue is a mean between two vices, one consisting of its defect, the other of its excess, and, it may be added, the virtue and the excess are sometimes present in the same person. It is not hard to see the excess in the stories of Horatius’s murder of his sister, and even of Brutus’s execution of his sons. To us, the phrase “a Roman father” implies a somewhat doubtful virtue. As the Romans might have said if they could have thought of it, in their anxiety not to be unmanly they became inhuman. Even in their carefully maintained indifference to death and pain there came to be something almost theatrical, an attitude that reaches its full expression in the epic poets of the Silver Age, and in the tragedies of Seneca, whose characters are the ancestors of all the declamatory seventeenth-century heroes, Corneille’s and Dryden’s. And from disregarding their own pain they came to disregard that of others, or to enjoy it. Their
virtus
was always liable to be stained by the vice to which the soldier is tempted, ruthlessness and cruelty. Julius Cæsar was in general a humane commander, but once he cut off the hands of his prisoners, to teach them not to revolt. The cruelty of the arena, at first occasional, became habitual, so that it could be said of one of the late emperors, “he never dined without human blood.”

The soldier’s vices are two, cruelty and loot; and of the two the loot was probably the more serious for Rome. The King of Brobdingnag, looking at Rome with the superiority that comes of being sixty feet high, might have said that, from the Punic Wars on, her internal history is that of a successful gang of cutthroats quarrel ing over the division of the swag. Already, before the end of the Republic, the raped wealth had begun to pour into Italy. The rich got richer and the poor got poorer; the struggle between the Haves and Have-Nots led to the civil wars which brought an end to the Republic. Under the Empire, the appetite for wealth grew by what it fed on; men already rich spent their lives fawning on others for more riches. Tacitus, Suetonius, and Juvenal have left us a picture of the final corruption of Roman society. No doubt it is somewhat exaggerated, but it is a fact that with those three names Roman literature comes to a virtual end. The Roman Empire of the West lasted some three hundred years more, but the spirit had gone out of it. Scattered here and there are the beginnings of something new, writing that should be called Romanesque rather than Roman; but the old Roman world is like the men whose souls Dante met in Hell though their bodies were still walking about on earth.

In choosing the material for this volume, my aim has been twofold: to give so far as possible a comprehensive picture of Roman literature; and to produce a readable book. If these seemed to conflict, I have perhaps weighted the scales a little in favor of the latter, feeling that, as Horace says that silver buried in the ground is of no color, so a book which is not read has no real existence. At best too many of us feel about Roman authors generally as the lieutenant in
Tom Jones
did about Homer, even though we might not express it so vigorously: “Don’t talk to me of Homer! I have the marks of him in my a—yet” (I follow Fielding’s spelling) . I have tried to overcome this prejudice by finding passages which are readable both in themselves and in their English rendering. In some cases the difficulty or impossibility of this has led to what may seem, or may be, faults of proportion. The
Odes
of Horace, for instance, by their absolute importance in literature, deserve more space; but Horace is the most translated and most untranslatable of poets; it seemed better to leave him underpresented than misrepresented. For the other shortcomings in this, the apology has been made once for all by Æschylus: τχνη δ‘νγℵης σθενεστρα µαℵρ—“Art is far weaker than Necessity.”

PART I

THE BEGINNINGS AND THE AGE OF CICERO (240 B.C.—42 B.C.)

I
T IS not often that the beginning of a literature can be precisely dated; but it can be said that the first work of Latin literature—except for a handful of charms, the first piece of Latin writing—appeared in 240 B.C., the year after the end of the First Punic War, and was the work of a Greek freedman bearing a Roman name. Both facts are almost too obviously significant. All through history the conquered Greeks were to be Rome’s teachers and models; and Rome had no time to spare for literature until she had defeated her immediate neighbors. The Roman conquest of Italy was completed by the Pyrrhic War, which ended in 272 B.C. with the capture of Tarentum; besides bringing the whole of the Italian peninsula under Roman domination, this war brought the Romans into contact with the Greeks of southern Italy. A certain Andronicus, a Greek of Tarentum, was taken to Rome as a captive and became the slave of a Roman named Livius; Andronicus acted as tutor to his children, was rewarded for his services with the gift of his freedom, and, as was customary, added to his own name that of his late master, by which he is known. (The Greeks customarily bore one name apiece, the Romans three.) Livius Andronicus continued to act as a teacher of Greek and Latin, and also as an actor and stage manager. For his theater he translated Greek plays, and the first of these were produced in 240 B.C., a comedy and a tragedy, which someone spoke of with surprise as “plays with plots!” Livius also translated the
Odyssey
into the rough Roman Saturnian meter. Native Roman verse was based not, like Greek, upon quantity or longs and shorts, but, like ours, upon stress accent; one of their favorite meters was the Saturnian, which is approximately that of the feminine lines in “Sing a song of sixpence”—“The queen was in her parlor, eating bread and honey.”

Five years after the first production of a play by Livius there appeared a native Roman writer called Nævius. He also did translations or adaptations of Greek plays; besides this, he wrote a long poem on the subject of the Punic War, also in the Saturnian meter. In his first two books he goes back to the founding of Rome, and (according to a surviving account) anticipates Virgil in making Venus appeal to Jupiter on behalf of Æneas, and Jupiter give a promise of the greatness of Rome. Already the Romans had begun to think of their state as a City of Destiny. But most of his work, so far as we can judge from what is left of it, was a jog-trot chronicle.

Both these authors survive only in scraps of a dozen lines or so, but enough to show that in what is lost we are not missing much. The same may be said of Ennius, “the Father of Latin Poetry.” He produced Greek adaptations in many forms, but his chief claims to the paternity of Latin poetry are the somewhat contradictory ones that he domesticated the Greek hexameter and that he originated the only distinctive Roman form, the literary satire. The word comes from
satura,
a hodgepodge, and was originally applied to a sort of informal entertainment at the harvest festival, consisting of songs and personal banter, much of it coarse and even obscene. These
saturæ
were driven off the stage by Livius’s astonishing innovation, a play with a plot; Ennius adopted the fugitive and adapted it to a written form, writing in a go-as-you-please fashion and making fun of his neighbors. This was the beginning of the form which was to serve the elegant persiflage of Horace and the savage indignation of Juvenal. Ennius’s most important work is the Annals, a history of Rome from the arrival of Æneas down to 172 B.C., only three years before his own death —toward the end he must have been racing to keep up with events, like Upton Sinclair’s Lanny Budd saga, For this he used the quantitative hexameter employed by the Greeks, and his success, or else the prestige of the Greek originals, was so great that the native accentual verse was driven underground and did not reappear until the tottering Empire was giving way to the earliest Middle Ages, It is really an astonishing phenomenon. It is as though certain Elizabethan experimenters had succeeded in their attempt to write English verse on the French model, basing it on number of syllables instead of stress, and as if the whole body of subsequent English poetry had managed to ignore the fact that English is a stress-accented language. But the spirit of the Latin language makes itself heard, in the preponderance of long syllables, which make its hexameters move much more heavily than the Greek. It is the Roman gravitas.

As with Livius and Nævius, only small fragments of Ennius are left, and, as with them, one cannot honestly say that one is hungry for more. The first Roman writer who is survived by completed works is Plautus, Ennius’s slightly older contemporary, and the second is Terence, a generation later than Plautus. Both these men are writers of ooxnedies modeled on the late Greek form known as the New Comedy, to distinguish it from the comedy of Aristophanes, which was more like musical comedy with a satiric plot. The New Comedy is a school of farce, made up of situation comedies and stock characters. The young man, with the advice of his clever slave, gets the better of the heavy father, or of the girl’s heavy father; twins are mistaken for each other; it turns out that the slave girl is the long-lost daughter of one’s neighbor, so one may safely marry her. Among the characters we meet the Boastful Soldier, the Sponge, the Hen-pecked Husband, and so on. It is noteworthy that without exception the plays have settings which are nominally somewhere in Greece, and, indeed, the world they depict—the world of young lovers, confidential slaves, witty courtesans, and cowardly soldier-braggarts—is Alexandrine Greece rather than Rome. Nevertheless, like the wood in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
which is nearer to England than to Athens, the setting of these plays is actually nearer to Rome than to Greece. Magistrates appear with Roman titles, ædiles and
tresviri;
characters speak of walking in the Forum and visit the Capitol; they worship the Roman household gods and speak contemptuously of the Greeks. If it is a Greek world, it is inhabited by Roman characters. The characters are Roman because that is what the audience knew and cared for; the world is Greek because in that way Roman dignity could be maintained. It is all very well to show an Athenian heavy father hoodwinked by a clever slave, or a Theban husband cuckolded by Jupiter; it would never do to show a Roman in such situations.