Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 20.djvu/745

Rh ROMAN LITERATURE 721 been a political partisan and had taken some part in making history before undertaking to write it ; and he gives us, from the popular side, the views of a contem- porary on the politics of the time. In following the development of Roman literature we have seen it become the prose organ of great affairs, but since the appearance of the Annals of Ennius, in whom the poetry of national life had originated, no work of great and original poetical genius had appeared. The powerful poetical force which for half a century continued to be the strongest force in literature, and which created masterpieces of art and genius, first revealed itself in the latter part of the Ciceronian age. The strength with which it burst forth seems indicative of latent sources of imaginative feeling and conception long suppressed in the Italian temperament, owing perhaps to the absorption of the mind and passion of the race in war, politics, and ,ue- practical affairs. The conditions which enabled the poetic Lucretius (99-55) were entire seclusion from public life and absorption in the ideal pleasures of contemplation and artistic production. He produces the impression of a man so possessed by intellectual and imaginative enthusiasm as to have separated himself from the active interests and social pleasures of his time, and to have passed that period of his life which was given to literary production in study- ing the laws and watching the spectacle of nature, and in the active exercise of imaginative thought on the problems of human life. This isolation from the familiar ways of his contemporaries, while it was, according to tradition and the internal evidence of his poem, destructive to his spirit's health, resulted in a work of genius, unique in character, which was a second birth of imaginative poetry in Italy, and still stands forth as the greatest philosophical poem in any language. In the form of his poem he followed a Greek original ; and the stuff out of which the texture of his philosophical argument is framed was derived from Greek science ; but all that is of deep human and poetical meaning in the poem is his own. His sense of the grace and beauty of language had indeed been educated by the sympathetic study of Homer and Euripides ; but the philosophical guidance which he followed and his reverence for his guide were rather a hindrance than an aid to his art, and were the cause of his presenting the pure ore of his own genius overlaid with great masses of alien alloy. While we recognize in the De Serum Natura some of the most powerful poetry in any language and feel that few poets have penetrated with such passionate sincerity and courage into the secret of nature and some of the deeper truths of human life, we must acknowledge that, as com- pared with the great didactic poem of Virgil, it is crude and unformed in artistic design, and often rough and un- equal in artistic execution. Yet, apart altogether from its independent value, by his speculative power and enthusiasm, by his revelation of the life and spectacle of nature, by the fresh creativeness of his diction and the elevated movement of his rhythm, he exercised a more powerful influence than any other on the art of his more perfect successors. While the imaginative and emotional side of Roman poetry was so powerfully represented by Lucretius, atten- tion was directed to its artistic side by a younger genera- tion, who moulded themselves in a great degree, though -'a llus. not exclusively, on Alexandrian models. Of this small group of poets, who were bound together by common tastes and friendship, one only has survived, fortunately the man of most genius among them, Valerius Catullus (84 1 -54). He too was a new force in Roman literature. 1 The reasons for accepting 84 rather than 87 as the date of his birth have been given in the article CATULLUS. Although of a family probably originally Roman, and although brought early in his career into intimate rela- tions with members of the great Roman families, he was a provincial by birth, and was apparently moved in his earliest youth by that fresh enthusiasm for culture which in his own and the following generation enabled Cisalpine Gaul to do so much to enrich Roman literature. His nature, in which sensuous passion and warm affection were united, made him fall a victim to the fascinations of the famous Clodia, whom -he has celebrated, under the name of Lesbia, in some of the most powerful and charming love poetry found in any language. The subjects of his best art are taken immediately from his own life, his loves, his friendships, his travels, his animosities, personal and political. His most original contribution to the substance of Roman literature was that he first shaped into poetry the experience of his own heart, as it had been shaped by Alcaeus and Sappho in the early days of Greek poetry. No poet has surpassed him in the power of vitally repro- ducing the pleasure and pain of the passing hour, not recalled by idealizing reflexion as in Horace, nor overlaid with mythological ornament as in Propertius, but in all the keenness of immediate impression. He also introduced into Roman literature that personal as distinct from poli- tical or social satire which appears later in the Epodes of Horace and the Epigrams of Martial. The sting in Catullus, at least in his iambics and phalaecians, is more concentrated than in the later writers. He anticipated Ovid in recalling the stories of Greek mythology into a second poetical life. His greatest contribution to poetic art consisted in the perfection which he attained in the phalsecian, the pure iambic, and the scazon metres, and in the ease and grace with which he used the language of familiar intercourse, as distinct from that of the creative imagination, of the " rostra," and of the schools, to give at once a lifelike and an artistic expression to his feelings. He has the interest of being the last poet of the free re- public. In his life and in his art he was the precursor of those poets who used their genius as the interpreter and minister of pleasure ; but he rises above them in the spirit of personal independence, in his affection for his friends, in his keen enjoyment of natural and simple pleasures, and in his power of giving vital expression to these feelings. Third Period : Augustan Age, 42 B.C. to 17 A.D. The poetic impulse and culture communicated to Roman literature in the last years of the republic passed on with- out any break of continuity into the literature of the succeeding age. One or two of the circle of Catullus sur- vived into that age ; but an entirely new spirit came over the literature of the new period, and it is by new men, educated indeed under the same literary influences, but living in an altered world and belonging originally to a different order in the state, that the new spirit was ex- pressed. The literature of the later republic reflects the Influence sympathies and prejudices of an aristocratic class, sharing of im - in the conduct of national affairs and living on terms of P ( equality with one another ; " that of the Augustan age, both in its early serious enthusiasm and in the licence and levity of its later development, represents the hopes and aspira- tions with which the new monarchy was ushered into the world, and the pursuit of pleasure and amusement, which becomes the chief interest of a class cut off from the higher energies of practical life, and moving in the refining and enervating atmosphere of an imperial court. The great inspiring influence of the new literature was the enthu- siasm produced first by the hope and afterwards by the ful- filment of the restoration of peace, order, national glory, under the rule of Augustus. All that the age longed for seemed to be embodied in a man who had both in his XX. 91
 * u, genius of Italy to come to maturity in the person of