Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 20.djvu/742

Rh 718 ROMAN LITERATURE that thoroughly Roman conception of history which re- gards actions and events not in relation to their causes or their general human interest but as incidents in the continuous and progressive life of the state. Such is the conception of the past in Livy and Tacitus, and in Ennius and Virgil. But in one respect Cato seems to have formed a truer conception of his subject than any of these writers except Virgil, who, availing himself of the labours of Cato, realized and perfected his conception. Cato felt that the record of Roman glory could not be isolated from the story of the other Italian communities, which, after fighting against Rome for their own independence, shared with it the task of conquering the world. To the wider national sympathies which stimulated the researches of the old censor into the legendary history of the Italian towns we owe some of the most truly national parts of the JSneid. There is another point of contact between the work done by Cato and that of Virgil, although they may be regarded as the most dissimilar in intellectual and imaginative gifts in the whole range of Roman literature, the one being the most realistic and prosaic, the other the most idealistic and imaginative. While the ideal charm of the old rural life and industry of Italy still lives in the Gevrgics, the practical utilitarian prose of that life may best be learned from the De Re Rustica of Cato. Naevius, Plautus, Ennius, and Cato not only represent but may be said actually to have been the contending forces which strove for ascendency in determining what was to be the character of the new literature. Although their combined activity was spread over nearly a century, yet so vigorous was their vitality and so prolonged their career that they may be spoken of as contemporaries. Cato, the youngest of the four, was a man of mature years, actively engaged in the service of the state, when Naevius was still in the full vigour of his powers, and before Plautus had reached the most productive period of his career. It is characteristic of the time that the genius of all these writers was ripest in their old age. They were thus able partially to overcome the difficulties incident to the beginning of their art. They acquired by the rude attempts of their earlier activity the faculty which they exercised with unabated natural force till the end of their lives. In their prolonged career of intellectual energy they remind us of some of the early philosophers and travellers of Greece. The work begun by them was carried on by younger contemporaries and successors, that of Plautus by Caecilius Statius and others, the tragedy of Ennius by his kinsman, Pacuvius, and, in the following generation, by Accius. The impulse given to oratory by Cato, Sulpicius Gallus, and others, and along with it the development of prose composition, went on with increased momentum till the age of Cicero. But the interval between the death of Ennius (169) and the beginning of Cicero's career, while one of progressive advance in the apprecia- tion of literary form and style, was much less distinguished by original force than the time immediately before and Terence, after the end of the Second Punic War. The one complete survival of the generation after the death of Ennius, the comedy of Terence (185-159), exemplifies the gain in literary accomplishment and the loss in literary freedom. Terence has nothing Roman or Italian except his pure and idiomatic Latinity. His relation to the Greek authors whom he copied is that of a fine engraver to the great painters of another age and time. The Athenian elegance of Terence affords the strongest contrast to the Italian rude- ness of Gate's De Re Rustica. By looking at them together we understand how much the comedy of Terence was able to do to refine and humanize the manners of Rome, but at the same time what a solvent it was of the discipline and ideas of the old republic. What makes Terence an important witness of the culture of his time is that he wrote from the centre of the Scipionic circle, in which what was most humane and liberal in Roman statesman- ship was combined with the appreciation of what was most vital in the Greek thought and literature of the time. Cicero tells us that the peculiar glory of that age was the purity of its Latinity; and it is natural to ascribe to the members of that aristocracy of birth and culture the senti- ment ascribed to Caesar a century later, that to maintain the purity of the Latin tongue was due to the sense both of personal and of national dignity. The comedies of Ter- ence may therefore be held to give some indication of the tastes of Scipio, Lselius, and their friends in their youth. The influence of Panaetius and Polybius was more adapted to their maturity, when they led the state in war, states- manship, and oratory, and when the humaner teaching of Stoicism began to enlarge the sympathies of Roman jurists. But in the last years during which this circle kept together a new spirit appeared in Roman politics and a new power in Roman literature, the revolutionary spirit evoked by the Gracchi in opposition to the long-continued ascendency of the senate, and the new power of Roman satire, which was exercised impartially and unsparingly against both the excesses of the revolutionary spirit and the arrogance and incompetence of the extreme party among the nobles. Roman satire, though in form a legitimate development of the indigenous dramatic satura through the written satura of Ennius and Pacuvius, is really a birth of this time, and its author was the youngest of those admitted into the intimacy of the Scipionic circle, C. Lucilius of Lucilii Aurunca (166 ? 1 -102). Among the writers before the age of Cicero he alone deserves to be named with Nsevius, Plautus, Ennius, and Cato as a great originative force in literature. For about thirty years the production of the satires of Lucilius, in which the politics, morals, society, and letters of the time were criticized with the utmost freedom and pungency, and his own personality was brought immediately and familiarly before his contemporaries, was much the most important event in Roman literature. The years that intervened between his death and the beginning of the Ciceronian age are singularly barren in works of original value. The general results of the last fifty years of the first Gener period, from c. 1 30 to c. 80, may be thus summed up. In resu] poetry we have the satires of Lucilius, the tragedies of Accius and of a few successors among the Roman aristocracy, who thus exemplified the affinity of the Roman stage to Roman oratory; the "comcedia togata" of Afranius, in which comedy, while assuming a Roman dress, did not assume the virtue of a Roman matron ; various annalistic poems intended to serve as continuations of the great poem of Ennius ; minor poems of an epigrammatic and erotic char- acter, unimportant anticipations of the Alexandrian tend- ency operative in the following period ; works of criticism in trochaic tetrameters by Porcius Licinus and others, forming part of the critical and grammatical movement which almost from the first accompanied the creative move- ment in Roman literature, and which may be regarded as rude precursors of the didactic epistles that Horace devoted to literary criticism. The only extant prose work which may be assigned to the end of this period is the treatise on rhetoric known by the title Ad Herennium, a work indicative of the attention bestowed on prose style and rhetorical studies during the last century of the republic, and which may be regarded as a precursor of the oratorical treatises of Cicero in the following generation and of the work of Quintilian in the first century of the empire. But the great literary pro- 1 The reasons for rejecting the date usually assigned to his birth (148) have been given under the heading LUCILIUS.