Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 20.djvu/741

Rh ROMAN LITERATURE 717 intercourse and business of life, gave a greater impulse to comedy than to tragedy. ISTaevius tried to use the theatre, as it had been used by the writers of the Old Comedy of Athens, for the purposes of political warfare, and thus seems to have anticipated by a century the part played by Lucilius. Satiric and censorious criticism rather than a humorous sense of the comedy of human life and character was apparently the chief motive of his representation. But the state censorship, which in a more revolutionary time tolerated the free criticism of public men in works addressed to a select class of readers, arrested at the out- set all such criticism addressed to the mass of the people assembled in the theatre; and Naevius, after being im- prisoned, had to retire in his old age into banishment. He was not only the first in point of time, and according to ancient testimony one of the first in point of merit, among the comic poets of Rome, and in spirit, though not in form, the earliest of the line of Roman satirists, but he was also the oldest of the national poets. Besides cele- brating the success of Marcellus in 225 over the Gauls in a play called Clastidium, he gave the first specimen of the "fabula prsetexta" in his Alimonium Romuli et Remi, based on the most national of all Roman traditions. Still more important service was rendered by him in his long Saturnian poem on the First Punic War, in which he not only told the story of contemporary events but gave shape to the legend of the settlement of ^Eneas in Latium, the theme ultimately adopted for the great national epic of Rome. 'litus. His younger contemporary Plautus (d. 184) was the greatest comic and dramatic genius of Rome, and is still read as one of the great comic and dramatic writers of the world. He lived and wrote only to amuse his contempo- raries, and thus, although more popular in his lifetime and more fortunate than any of the older authors in the ultimate survival of a large number of his works, he is less than any of the great writers of Rome in sympathy with either the serious or the caustic spirit in Roman literature. Yet he is the one extant witness to the humour and vivacity of the Italian temperament at a stage between its early rudeness and rigidity and its subsequent degeneracy. Thus far Roman literature, of which the predominant characteristics are dignity, gravity, and fervour of feeling, and which more than any other literature aimed at forti- fying and elevating the character, seemed likely to become a mere vehicle of amusement adapted to all classes of the people in their holiday mood. But a new spirit came over the Italian Camente in the time of Plautus, which hence- forth became predominant. Roman literature ceased to be in close sympathy with the popular spirit, either in political partisanship or in ministering to general amuse- ment, but became the expression of the ideas, sentiment, and culture of the aristocratic governing class. It was inus. by Q. Ennius (239-169) of Calabria that a new direction was given to Roman literature and new and deeper springs of emotion were elicited from the native genius. Deriving from his birthplace the culture, literary and philosophical, of Magna Grsecia, having served with distinction in the Roman armies, and gained the friendship of the greatest of the Romans living in that great age, he was of all the early writers most fitted to be the medium of conciliation between the serious genius of ancient Greece and the seri- ous genius of Rome. Alone among the older writers he was endowed with the gifts of a poetical imagination and animated with enthusiasm for a great ideal. With the widest culture and knowledge among all the men of his generation, he had also the justest discernment of the rela- tion of culture and knowledge to actual life and to the work which he had to accomplish. First among his special services to Roman literature was the fresh impulse which he gave to tragedy. He turned the eyes of his contemporaries from the commonplace social humours of later Greek life to the contemplation of the heroic age. But he did not thereby denationalize the Roman drama. He animated the heroes of early Greece with the martial spirit of Roman soldiers and the ideal magnanimity and sagacity of Roman senators, and im- parted weight and dignity to the language and verse in which their sentiments and thoughts were expressed. Al- though Rome wanted creative force to add a great series of tragic dramas to the literature of the world, yet the spirit of elevation and moral authority breathed into tragedy by Ennius passed into the ethical and didactic writings and the oratory of a later time. Another work, the Trapepyov of his serious activity, was the saturx, written in various metres, but chiefly in that which came nearest to the spoken language of Rome, the trochaic tetrameter. He thus became the inventor of a new form of literature ; and, if in his hands the satura was rude and indeterminate in its scope, it was a proof of the practical bent of his understanding that he found a vehicle by which to address a reading public on matters of the day, or on the materials of his wide reading, in a style not far removed from the language of common life. His greatest work, which made the Romans regard him as the father of their literature, was his epic poem, in eighteen books, the Annales, in which the record of the whole career of Rome was unrolled with idealizing enthusiasm and realistic detail. The idea which inspired Ennius was ultimately realized in both the national epic of Virgil and the national history of Livy. And the metrical vehicle which he conceived as the only one adequate to his great theme was a rude experiment, which was ultimately de- veloped into " the stateliest metre ever moulded by the lips of man." Even as a grammarian he performed an important service to the literary language of Rome, by fixing its prosody and arresting the tendency to decay in its final syllables. Although we know his writings only in fragments, these fragments are enough, along with what we know of him from ancient testimony, to justify us in regarding him as the most important among the makers of Roman literature, the most important indeed among Roman authors before the age of Cicero. There is still one other name belonging partly to this, Cato. partly to the next generation to be added to those of the men of original force of mind and character who created Roman literature, that of M. Porcius Cato (234-149), the younger contemporary of Ennius. More than Nsevius and Plautus he represented the pure native element in that literature, the mind and character of Latium, the plebeian pugnacity, which was one of the great forces in the Roman state. He had no poetic imagination, and set himself in antagonism to the literature of imagination created by Ennius. He strove to make literature ancillary to politics and to objects of practical utility, and thus started prose literature on the main lines which it after- wards followed. Through his industry and vigorous understanding he gave a great impulse to the creation of Roman oratory, history, and systematic didactic writing. He was one of the first to publish his speeches and thus to bring them into the domain of literature. Cicero speaks of 1 50 of these speeches as extant in his day. He praises them for their acuteness, their wit, their conciseness. He speaks with emphasis of the impressiveness of Cato's eulogy and the satiric bitterness of his invective. As an orator he seems to have been akin in spirit to Naevius and Lucilius, and to the last genuine representative of the native temper in literature, the satirist Juvenal. Porcius Cato also heads the roll of the Roman historians, at least of those whose works were ranked as literature. His Origines, the work of his old age, was written with