Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 20.djvu/740

Rh 716 ROMAN LITERATURE individual authors noticed stand to the whole subject, i.e., to the collective literary expression, so far as they found an expression, of the action, the ideas, the character, the various feelings, passions, and moods, of ancient Rome and of the races which it absorbed, so long as that literature has a distinct unity and individuality. The actual beginning of Roman artistic literature can be assigned to a definite date, the year 240 B.C., when Livius Andronicus produced on a Roman stage a drama with a regular plot, instead of the unconnected dramatic dialogues (saturse) by which the holidays of the people had previously been enlivened. Yet the germs of an indi- genous literature had existed independently at an earlier period in Rome and in the country districts of Italy. Although these cannot be said to have exercised any marked influence on the subsequent development of litera- ture, they have an importance as indicating natural wants in the Italian race, which were ultimately satisfied by regular literary forms. The art of writing was first em- ployed in the service of the state and of religion for the preservation of the sacred hymns, books of ritual, treaties with other states, the laws of the XII. Tables, &c. An approach to literature was made in the Annales Maximi, although it cannot be supposed that the pontifex maximus in drawing up the dry records of the prodigies and events of the year had any thought of gratifying intellectual curi- osity or imparting intellectual pleasure. But in the satis- faction they afforded to the commemorative and patriotic instincts they anticipated an office afterwards performed by the national epics and the works of regular historians. A still nearer approach to literature was probably made in oratory, as we learn from Cicero that in the generation before the first regular dramatic representation a speech delivered by Appius Claudius Csecus was given to the world. Appius was also the author of a poem of an ethical and didactic character, which Cicero tells us (Tusc., v. 2, 4) was praised by Panaetius. No other name associated with any form of literature belonging to the pre-literary age has been preserved by tradition, and it is to be borne in mind that Appius lived on till the wars with Pyrrhus, when the first active collision between Rome and Greece took place. This premature stirring of literary ambi- tion is like the occasional anticipation by individual thinkers of some important discovery or some great intel- lectual movement before the world around them is ready to receive it. But it was rather in extemporaneous effusions than in written compositions that some germs of a native poetry might have been detected. The most genuine indication of that impulse which ultimately finds its realization in artistic literature appears in the use of a metre of pure native origin, the Saturnian, which by its rapid and lively movement gives expression to the vivacity and quick apprehension of the Italian race. This metre appears to have been first used in ritual hymns, which seem to have assumed definite shapes out of the exclamations of a primitive priesthood engaged in a rude ceremonial dance. It was also employed by a class of bards or itinerant sooth- sayers known by the name of " vates." It was used also in the "Fescennine verses," which gave expression to the coarse gaiety of the people and to their strong tendency to personal raillery and satiric comment. This tendency, which under the stern censorship of the patrician rulers of the early republic was repressed by stringent laws, found ultimately its legitimate outlet in Roman satire. The metre was also employed in commemorative poems, accom- panied with music, which were sung at funeral banquets in celebration of the exploits and virtues of distinguished men. These had their origin in the same impulse which ultimately found its full gratification in Roman history, Roman epic poetry, and that form of Roman oratory known as " laudationes," and in some of the Odes of Horace. The latest and probably the most important of these rude and inchoate forms was that of dramatic saturx (medleys), put together without any regular plot, and consisting appa- rently of contests of wit and satiric invective, and perhaps of comments on current events, accompanied with music ("saturas impletas modis," Liv., vii. 2). These have a real bearing on the subsequent development of Roman literature. They prepared the mind of the people for the reception of regular comedy. They may have contributed to the formation of the style of comedy which appears at the very outset much more mature than that of serious poetry, tragic or epic. They gave the name and some of the characteristics to that special literary product of the Roman soil, the "satura," addressed to readers, not to spectators, which ultimately was developed into pure poetic satire in Lucilius, Horace, Persius, and Juvenal, into the prose and verse miscellany of Varro, and into something approaching the prose novel in Petronius. First Period : from 240 to about 80 B.C. The historical event which brought about the greatest change in the intellectual condition of the Romans, and thereby exercised a decisive influence on the whole course of human culture, was the capture of Tarentum in 272. After the capture many Greek slaves were brought to Rome, and among them the young Livius Andronicus, Li who was employed in teaching Greek in the family of his Andror master, a member of the Livian gens. From that time cus< to learn Greek became a regular part of the education of a Roman noble. The capture of Tarentum was followed by the complete Romanizing of all Southern Italy. Soon after came the First Punic War, the principal scene of which was Sicily, where, from common hostility to the Carthaginian, Greek and Roman were brought into friendly relations, and the Roman armies must have become familiar with the spectacles and performances of the Greek theatre. In the year following the conclusion of the war (240), after the armies had returned and the people were at leisure to enjoy the fruits of victory (" et post Punica bella quietus," Hor., JEp., ii. 162), Livius Andronicus "took the bold step" ("ausus est primus argumento fabulam serere," Liv., vii. 2) of substituting at one of the public festivals a regular drama translated or adapted from the Greek for the musical medleys (saturse) hitherto in use. From this time dramatic performances became a regular accompaniment of the public games, and came more and more to encroach on the older kinds of amuse- ment, such as the chariot races. The dramatic work of Livius was, however, merely educative ; it can hardly be called in any sense of the word literary. The same may be said of his later work, which was still used as a school- book in the days of Horace, the translation of the Odyssey ; and probably the religious hymn which he was called upon to compose in the latter part of the Second Punic War had no higher literary pretension. He was, however, the first to make the old name of poet a title of honour instead of reproach ; and by familiarizing the Romans with the forms of the Greek drama and the Greek epic he determined the main lines which Roman literature followed for more than a century afterwards. His immediate successor, Cn. Naevius, was not, likeNseviu Livius, a Greek, but either a Roman citizen or one who enjoyed the limited citizenship of a Latin, and who had served in the Roman army in the First Punic War. His first appearance as a dramatic author was in 235. He adapted both tragedies and comedies from the Greek, but the bent of his genius, the tastes of his audience, and the condition of the language, developed through the active