Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 20.djvu/743

Rh ROMAN LITERATURE 719 duct of this period was oratory, developed indeed with the aid of these rhetorical studies, but itself the immediate outcome of the imperial interests, the legal conflicts, and the political passions of that time of agitation. The speakers and writers of a later age looked back on Scipio and Ltelius, the Gracchi and their contemporaries, L. Crassus and M. Antonius, as masters of their art. We can only judge of what they were by the fame of their speeches and a few unimportant fragments. But as we infer from the artistic excellence of the Homeric poems that many poets of power and genius, whose names were soon forgotten, preceded the great master ; as we know that the art of Shakespeare did not come without due preparation into the world ; so from the mature perfection of the art of Cicero we may, in a measure, judge of the power and accomplishment of the orators who came before him, from whom he professes to have learned much, and whom he regarded with generous admiration. In history, regarded as a great branch of prose literature, it is not probable that much was accomplished, although, with the advance of oratory and grammatical studies, there must have been not only greater fluency of composi- tion but the beginning of a richer and more ornate style. Yet Cicero, so candid and indulgent in his estimate of early Roman poetry and oratory, denies to Rome the existence, before his own time, of any adequate historical literature. Nevertheless it was by the work of a number of Roman chroniclers during this period that the materials of early Roman history were systematized, and the record of the state, as it was finally given to the world in the artistic work of Livy, was extracted from the early annals, state documents, and private memorials, combined into a coherent unity, and supplemented by invention and re- flexion. There were also special works on Roman anti- quities and contemporary memoirs, which formed the sources of future historians. Although the artistic product of the first period of Roman literature which has reached us in a complete shape is limited to the comedies of Plautus and Terence, the influence of the lost literature in determining the spirit, form, and style of the eras of more perfect accom- plishment which followed is unmistakable. While humour and vivacity, which were not surpassed in the more ad- vanced stages of literature, had characterized the earlier, and an urbanity of tone, with which Horace by frequent imitation acknowledges his sympathy, characterizes the later development of comedy, the tendency of serious literature had been in the main practical, ethical, com- memorative, and satirical. The higher poetical imagina- tion had appeared only in Ennius, and had been called forth in him by sympathy with the grandeur of the national life and the great personal qualities of its representative men. Some of the chief motives of the later poetry, such as the love of nature and the pleasures and sorrows of private life, had as yet found scarcely any expression in Roman literature. The fittest metrical vehicle for epic, didactic, and satirif poetry had been discovered, but its movement was as yet rude and inharmonious. The idiom of ordinary life and social intercourse and the more fervid and elevated diction of oratorical prose had made great progress, but the language of imagination and poetical feeling was, if vivid and impressive in isolated expressions, still incapable of being wrought into consecutive passages of artistic composition. Although the impulse which awoke the literary energy of Rome had come from the semi-Greeks of the south of Italy, the character of the literature was in the main Roman and Latin ; and to this may be attributed the preponderance of the prosaic over the poetical element in it. The Sabellian races of central and eastern Italy and the Italo-Celtic and Venetian races of the north, in whom the poetic susceptibility of Italy was most manifest two generations later, were not, until after the Social War, sufficiently in sympathy with Rome, and were probably not as yet sufficiently educated to induce them to contribute their share to the national literature. Hence the end of the Social War, and of the Civil War which arose out of it, is most clearly a deter- mining factor in Roman literature, and may most appro- priately be taken aa marking the end of one period and the beginning of another. Second Period: from 80 to 42 B.C. The last age of the republic coincides with the first half of the Golden Age of Roman literature. It is generally known as the Ciceronian age from the name of its greatest literary representative, whose activity as a speaker and writer was unremitting during nearly the whole period. It is the age of purest excellence in prose, and of a new birth of poetry, characterized rather by great original force and artistic promise than by perfect accomplishment. The five chief representatives of this age who still hold their rank among the great classical writers are Cicero, Caesar, Sallust, Lucretius, and Catullus. The works of other prose writers, Varro and Cornelius Nepos, have been partially preserved ; but these writers have no claim to rank with those already mentioned as creators and masters of literary style. Although literature had not as yet become, as it did in the age of Martial, and to a certain extent in the age represented in the Epistles of Horace, a trade or pro- fession, an educated reading public already existed, and books and intellectual intercourse filled a large part of the leisure of men actively engaged in affairs. Even oratory was intended quite as much for readers as for the audiences to which it was immediately addressed ; and some of the greatest speeches which have come down from that great age of orators were never delivered at all, but were pub- lished as manifestoes after the event with the view of in- fluencing educated opinion, and as works of art with the view of giving pleasure to educated taste. Thus the speeches of Cicero (106-43), more certainly than Cicero, any modern speeches, belong to the domain of literature quite as much as to that of forensic or political oratory. And, although Demosthenes is a master of style unrivalled even by Cicero, the literary interest of most of Cicero's speeches is greater than that of the great mass of Greek oratory, a result of what from a forensic point of view would now be regarded as a serious defect. Thus it is with justice urged that the greater part of the Defence of Archias was irrelevant to the issue and would not have been listened to by a Greek court of justice or a modern jury. But it was fortunate for the interests of literature that a court of educated Romans could be influenced by the considerations there submitted to them. In this way a question of the most temporary interest, concerning an individual of no particular eminence or importance, has produced one of the most impressive vindications of literature ever spoken or written. Oratory at Rome assumed a new type from being cultivated as an art "which endeavoured to produce persuasion not so much by intellectual conviction as by appeal to those general human sympathies which are the subject-matter with which literature has to deal. In oratory, as in every other intellectual province, the Greeks had a truer sense of the limits and conditions of their art. But command over form is only one element in the making of an orator or poet. The largeness and dignity of the matter with which he has to deal is at least as important. The Roman oratory of the law courts had to deal not with petty questions of disputed property, of fraud, or violence, but with great imperial questions, with matters affecting the wellbeing of large provinces and the honour and safety