Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/244

 the Greek to the Roman spirit rather than the Roman to the Greek, Nævius, whom Plautus, in the Miles Gloriosus, calls an "un-Greek poet," followed the example of Livius. A native of Campania, the home of the Atellanæ, Nævius brought out his first play at Rome in 235 ; and, though his works were mainly comic translations from the Greek, his desire to Romanise Greek culture will be seen not only from his introduction of the prætexta, or drama based on Roman history, two specimens of which (Clastidium and Romulus) are known to us by name, but also from his celebrated epic on the First Punic War, written in Saturnian verse.

§ 59. But this effort to Romanise the Greek spirit was necessarily a failure. Greek literature in general, and the drama in particular, had long been the expression of an intensely individualised life; and in the comedies of Philemon, Menander, Diphilus, subtle analyses of personal character had banished the heroic types of the old Athenian stage, while the display of personal motives exactly reflected a state of society in which the ephemeral life of the individual had swallowed up all thoughts of common destiny. The development of legal status at Rome (so far as we can now recover it) proves, indeed, that the gentile and family life of the patricians had advanced some way towards individualism before Greek thought acquired any considerable influence at Rome. But this slow progress was now to be expedited by contact with a spirit centuries its senior in evolution. Not only, therefore, was it impossible to bring down the Greek spirit to the level of the Roman, as Livius and Nævius had hoped to do, but only Romans whose social and political eminence allowed them wider and deeper experiences than most of their fellow-citizens could appreciate the new modes of thought so unlike those