Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/252

 expressed on the legal side by appeals to the JusNaturale (a fusion, as Sir Henry Maine has so well explained, of the old Jus Gentium of Rome with the of the Greek Stoics), was on the literary side expressed by the scepticism of Ennius (209–169 ), Pacuvius (220–132 ), and, in lesser degree, Accius (170–94 ). To these tragic poets Euripides supplied the same recurring model as Menander had supplied to the comedians. In their tragedies the strongly individualised spirit of Euripidean Athens was transferred to the home of men under the lifelong sway of the father's power, and women never freed from perpetual tutelage. The friendship of Ennius and Scipio Africanus symbolises the union of this individualised literature with the growth of personal independence from all restraints of gens or familia; and Ennius' translation of Euêmerus (the rationaliser of the Greek myths) expresses almost as clearly as his denial of a guiding providence in human affairs that purely personal conception of destiny which is fatal to every kind of social creed. "But superstitious seers and brazen-faced soothsayers," says Ennius in one of his plays, "lazy or mad, or forced by poverty, men who cannot see the path for themselves, point out the way for others, and ask a drachma from those to whom they promise wealth." In another fragment of the play which contains this vigorous attack on the seers and soothsayers of the old Roman religion, Ennius speaks thus: "A race of gods there is, I said, and always shall declare, but I think they care not what the human race is doing; for, if they cared, the good should get the good things and the evil bad, which is not so." Evidently communal morality and slavery proved in Rome as fatal to the future life as