Page:The Theatre of the Greeks, a Treatise on the History and Exhibition of the Greek Drama, with Various Supplements.djvu/338

 312 ON THE ROMAN THEATRE. the spectator ; he was glutted with the most violent scenes of blood. On nerves thus steeled what effect could be produced by the finer gradations of tragic pathos ? It was the ambition of the grandees to display to the people, in a single day, the enormous spoil of foreign or civil wars, on stages which were generally destroyed immediately after the use so made of them. What Pliny relates of the architectural decora- tions of that erected by Scaurus borders on the incredible. When pomp could be carried no further, they tried to stimulate by novelty of mechanic contrivance. Thus a Roman at his father's funeral solemnity had two theatres built with their backs resting on each other, each moveable on a single pivot in the middle, in such a manner, that at the end of the play they were wheeled round with all the spec- tators sitting in them, and formed into a circus, in which games of gladiators were exhibited. In the gratification of the eyes that of the ears was wholly swallowed up : rope-dances and white elephants were preferred to every kind of dramatic enter- tainment; the embroidered purple robe of the actor, Horace tells us, was received with a general clapping, and so far from attentive and quiet was the great mass of the people, that he compares their noise to the roar of the ocean or of a forest-covered mountain in a storm. Only one specimen of the talents of the Romans for Tragedy has come down to us ; but it would be unfair to form a judgment from this of the lost works of better times : I mean, the ten Tragedies which pass under the name of Seneca. Their claim to his name seems to be very ambiguous : perhaps it is gi'ounded only on a circumstance which ought rather to have led to a contrary conclusion, viz. that Seneca himself is one of the dramatis personge in one of them, the Octavia. The learned are divided in their opinions on the subject. Some assign them partly to the philosopher, partly to his father the rhetorician ; others assume the existence of a poet Seneca distinct from both. In this point all are agreed, that the plays are not all from one hand, but belong to different ages even. For the honour of Roman taste, one would fain hold them to be after-births of a very late sera of antiquity : but Quintilian quotes a verse from the Medea}, which we actually find in the extant piece of that name, so that the plea will not hold good for this play, which seems, however, to be no great deal better than the rest. We find also in Lucan, a contemporary of Nero, the very same style of bombast, which distorts every thing great into nonsense. The state of constant outrage in which Rome was kept by a series of blood-thirsty tyrants, led to similar outrages upon nature in rhetoric and poetry. The same phenomenon has been observed in similar epochs of modern history. Under the wise and mild government of a Vespasian and a Titus, and still more of a Trajan, the Romans returned to a purer taste. But to whatever age these Tragedies of Seneca may belong, they are beyond all description bombastic and frigid, utterly devoid of nature in character and action, full of the most revolting violations of propriety, and so barren of all theatrical effect, that I verily believe they were never meant to leave the schools of the rhetoricians for the stage. With the old Tragedies, those highest of the creations of Grecian poetical genius, these have nothing in common but the name, the exterior form, and the mythological matter: and yet they set themselves up beside them in the evident intention of surpassing them, in which attempt they come off like a hollow hyperbole 1 The author of this Medea makes his heroine strangle her children coram populo, in spite of Horace's warning, who probably when he uttered it had a Eoman example before his eyes, for a Greek would hardly have committed this error. The Roman tragedians must have had a particular lust for novelty and effect to seek them in such atrocities.