Page:The Theatre of the Greeks, a Treatise on the History and Exhibition of the Greek Drama, with Various Supplements.djvu/336

 310 ON THE ROMAN THEATRE. in the comic department. Sublimity of expression is apt to turn out somewhat awk- wardly in an untutored language ; it may be reached, however, by an effort ; but to hit off the careless gracefulness of social wit requires natural humour and fine cultiva- tion. We do not possess (any more than in the case of Plautus and Terence) even a fragment of a version from an extant Greek original, to help us to a judgment of the accuracy and general success of the copy ; but a speech of some length from Attius' Pro7netheus Unlound is nowise unworthy of ^schyliis; its metre ^ also is much more careful than that of the Latin comedians usually is. This earlier style was brought to great perfection by Pacuvius and Attius, whose pieces seem to have stood their ground alone on the tragic stage in Cicero's times and even later, and to have had many ad- mirers. Horace directs his jealous criticism against these, as he does against all the other more ancient poets. The contemporaries of Augustus made it their ambition to compete with the Greeks in a more original manner ; not with equal success, however, in all depart- ments. The rage for attempts at Tragedy was particularly great ; works of this kind by the Emperor himself are mentioned. There is therefore much to favour the con- jecture, that Horace wrote his Epistle to the Pisos, principally with a view of deterring these young men, who, perhaps without any true call to such a task, were bitten by the mania of the day, from so critical an undertaking. One of the chief tragedians of this age was the famous Asinius Pollio, a man of a violently impassioned character, as Pliny says, and who was partial to the same character in works of fine art. He it was who brovight with him from Rhodes and set up in Rome the well-known group of the Farnese Bull. If his Tragedies bore but about the same relation to those of Sophocles, as this bold, wild, but somewhat overwrought group does to the still sublimity of the Niobe, their loss is still very much to be lamented. But Pollio's political greatness might easily dazzle the eyes of his contemporaries as to the true value of his poetical works. Ovid tried his hand upon Tragedy, as he did upon so many other kinds of poetry, and composed a Medea. To judge from the drivelling common-places of passion in his Hemides, one would expect of him, in Tragedy, at best an overdrawn Euripides. Yet Quintilian asserts, that here he showed for once what he might have accomplished, if he had but kept himself within bounds, rather than give way to his propensity to extravagance. These and all the other tragic attempts of the Augustan age have perished. We cannot exactly estimate the extent of our loss, but to all appearance it is not extra- ordinarily great. In the first place, the Greek Tragedy laboured there under the disadvantage of all transplanted exotics : the Roman worship indeed was in some measure allied to that of the Greeks (though not nearly so identical with it as many suppose), but the heroic mythology of the Greeks was altogether indebted to the poets for its introduction into Rome, and was in no respect interwoven with the national recollections, as it was in such a multitude of ways among the Greeks. There hovers before my mind's eye the Ideal of a genuine Roman form of Tragedy, dimly indeed and in the back-ground of ages, as one would figure to one's- self a being, that never issued into reality from the womb of possibility. In significance and form, it would 1 But in what metres may we suppose these tragedians to have translated the Greek Choral Odes ? Pindar's lyric metres, which have so much resemblance to the tragic, Horace declares to be inimitable in Latin. Probably the labyrinthine structure of tlie Choral Strophes was never attempted : indeed neither Eoman language nor Roman ears were calculated for it. Seneca's Tragedies never take a higher flight from the anapaests, than to a Sapphic or choriambic verse, the monotonous reiteration of which is very disagreeable.