Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 11.djvu/889

* LATIN LITERATURE. 605 LATIN LITERATURE. I. The PKE-LiTiiRARY Pekiod. (Crude begin- nings.) The native character of the Italic peoples, in contrast with that of the Greeks, was unimaginative and wholly practical. The agri- cultural and pa.storal life and the arts of war engrossed all their faculties to the e.cliision of literary cfTort. Only in connection with their simple communal religious rites do we fiml the dawning of a literary sense, and this of the crudest type. While the Hellenic world, includ- ing the powerful Greek cities of Southern Italy, was steeped in the poetry of its great epic, lyric, tragic, and comic writers, Rome and Central Italy had not risen above the simplest ballads, farces, and mimes. Yet here we must seek the beginnings of Latin literature, the earliest germs of the drama. At the country festivals of the Latin and Oscan villages and towns, the native wit and repartee found its expression in simple public shows, where the young men sang, danced, and recited for the edification of the nierr}'- makers. These performances, at first sponta- neous, gradually assumed loose plots, around which the actors were free to indulge to the full their spirit of ribaldry, abuse, and fun. They wore mask? or painted their faces; their songs and dances were accompanied by the notes of the tibia; and their dialogue was in the rough Saturnian metre, which from its looseness readily admitted of improvisation. Several varieties of these early farces are mentioned, all of which found their way to Rome, and some of which later assumed a really literary character. There were the {Versus) Fescennini among the Falis- cans just north of Rome — full of abuse and coarse jokes; the (Fabulo') Afellanw of the Oscan peasants in Campania, imcouth and indelicate, with their comic descriptions of rustic life, gradually assuming a sort of plot with fixed characters; the Satiira-. perhaps native to Latium itself — more dramatic in style than the Fesceniiiiii and AteUanw — a sort of medley or 'vaudeville' of songs and dances interspersed with stories; and the ilimi, probably introduced from Magna Grsccia, a sort of farce performed on a rude stage. These, with a few bits of early ritual, such as the '"Arval Song" preserved in the record of the Fratrcs Arvalrs of the time of Elagabalus. represent the literary level of the Romans liefore an active and direct contact with Greek culture made them aware of their literary and artistic deficiencies. II. The Early, or Pre-Clas.sicai, Period. (From the end of the First Punic War, c.240 B.C., to Sulla, C.84 B.C.) With the end of the First Punic War and the humiliation of her enemy Carthage. Rome began to enjoy a period of repose, which, with a sense of her growing great- ness among nations, and the rise of ,a leisure class, led to a realization of the cnidity of life in Rome and. a longing to know somctliing of the beauty and culture of Greek life anil art. The first attempts at real Latin literature were translations from the Greek into the rough Saturnian metre, the work of a Greek captive, Livius. dronicus (e.2S4-204 B.C.), brought to Rome after the taking of Tarentum in b.o. 272. and employed as a teacher of Greek in the family of his master, in all probability M. Livius Salinator, whose nomoi he took when freed. The work in question was a translation of Homer's Odiifirirn : and the fragments that hap- pily survive show no high degree of genius, and demonstrate clearly that the rough native Latin metre was but ill adapted to express the versa- tility and lightness of touch of the great original. The literary successors of Andronicus broke the ground along new lines; discarding the Saturnian metre, they attempted the far more difficult task of adapting the Greek metres to the heaN-y, archaic Latin speech, and instead of mere trans- lalicais, produced new works based on Greek originals. The real founder of Latin poetry was Gnaus Naevius ('!-!'.)'.) B.C.), a native of Cam- pania, writer of tragedies and comedies in the Greek hexameter verse. The majority of these were derived from Greek sources; but in two of the tragedies we have examples of the so-called (Fabula) Prwtexta, or plot derived from purely Roman events; namely, the Cldstidiinti, on the victory won at that place by M. Marcellus in B.C. 222, and the Alinic/nium RomuH ct Itemi, dealing with the legendary events of the found- ing of Rome. But N.Tvius had the hardihood to attack in his plays the policy of the powerful Metelli, for which he was imprisoned and exiled. Besides his plays, he wrote also an epic poem in the Saturnian metre, the Bellum Pvcnicum, re- lating the events of the First Punic War, in which he had himself taken part. His works long remained popular at Rome ; from the few fragments that survive we are able to detect the originality and force of his talent. A younger contemporary of Nievius was Titus Maccius Plautus (c.254-184 B.C.), whose sur- passing importance for us rests on the fact that no fewer than twenty of his plays have sur- vived in whole or in part. Hence, while our estimate of early Roman tragedies must be based almost wholly on the testimony of ancient writers, that of Roman comedies is drawn from original sources; for besides the twenty plays of Plautus we have also six by his more polished successor. Terence. Plautus, like all the great Latin writers, was not a native of Rome. He was born at Sarsina, a small town of Umbria, in poor circumstances, but early came to Rome, where he secured employment as a stage-ear- penter. How he got his Latin education is a mystery, especially as he is said to have lost his savings in speculation and even to have worked in a treadmill to tide over his financial troubles. Xone the less, his literary activity continued unabated until his deatli in B.C. 184. His popu- larity was very great ; and, as is so apt to hap- pen, many plays were foisted on him, in later times, that were not from his pen. In the Ciceronian age, the scholar and critic Varro (see below) selected from the large numl>er that passed under Plautus's name a list of twenty-one as genuine. They include all those that are still extant (Amphitruo, Asinuria, Atilularia, Bac- rliidcs, Ctiiitiri, Curciilio, Casina, CistcUaria, Fjiidicus, Mostellaria, Mcn<rchmi, MUcs Glorio- stis, Mcrcator. Pscudolus, Painiltis. Pcr.ia, Iltidens, Stichu.t. Trinummits, Truculi iitiis). and the ViduUiria that was lost in the Middle Ages. From the crude beginnings of a Livius An- dronicus and the talented but experimental plays of a X;pvius to the well-developed art of Plautus is a long step, but it was accomplished within a single generation. This is partly due to the source from which Plautus drew his plots, but largely also to the versatile genius of the man himself, and his command nf the cumbersome Latin language, as then spoken, which he molded