Nil credo auguribus, qui auris verbis divitant Again, the view of common sense in regard to dreams is expressed by the interpreter to whom Tarquinius applies when alarmed by a strange vision- Rex, quae in vita usurpant homines, cogitant, curant, vident, Quaeque agunt vigilantes agitantque, ea si cui in somno accidunt Minus mirum est 2. Besides the characteristics already exemplified, one or two passages may be appealed to, as implying the more special gifts of a poet-force of imagination, and some sense of natural beauty. There is considerable descriptive power in the following lines, for instance, in which a shepherd, who had never before seen a ship, announces the first appearance of the Argo Tanta moles labitur Fremebunda ex alto, ingenti sonitu et spiritu: Prae se undas volvit, vortices vi suscitat: Ruit prolapsa, pelagus respergit, reflat3. There is an imaginative apprehension of the active forces of nature in this fragment Sub axe posita ad stellas septem, unde horrifer There is a fresh breath of the early morning in the lines from the Oenomaus Forte ante Auroram, radiorum ardentum indicem, Cum e somno in segetem agrestis cornutos cient, 1 'I trust not those augurs, who enrich the ears of others with their words, that they may enrich their own houses with gold.' There is of course a pun on the auris and auro. 2 O king, what men usually do in life, what they think about, care about, see, their pursuits and occupations, when awake,—if these occur to any one in sleep, it is not wonderful.' So huge a mass is approaching-sounding from the deep with a mighty rushing noise; it rolls the waves before it, forces through the eddies, plunges forward, throws up and dashes back the sea.'-Quoted in Cic. De Nat. Deor. ii. 35 Lying beneath the pole by the seven stars, whence the blustering roar of the north-wind drives before it the chill snows.' Ut rorulentas terras ferro rufidas Proscindant, glebasque arvo ex molli exsuscitent '. This is perhaps the first instance in Latin poetry of a descriptive passage which gives any hint of the pleasure derived from contemplating the common aspects of Nature. Several other short fragments betray the existence of this new vein of poetic sensibility, as, for instance, the following: Saxum id facit angustitatem, et sub eo saxo exuberans The early expression of this kind of emotion seems to have been accompanied with some degree of affectation, or unnatural straining after effect, as in this fragment:— Hac ubi curvo litore latratu Unda sub undis labunda sonit. The following lines, quoted by Cicero (Tusc. Disp. i. 28) without naming the author, are probably from Accius :— Caelum nitescere, arbores frondescere, Vites laetificae pampinis pubescere, Rami bacarum ubertate incurviscere, Segetes largiri fruges, florere omnia, Fontes scatere, herbis prata convestirier. We note also many instances of plays on words, alliteration, and asyndeton, reminding us of similar modes of conveying emphasis in Plautus, as in the following: Pari dyspari, si impar esses tibi, ego nunc non essem miser. It remains to sum up the most important results as to the early tragic drama of Rome, which have been obtained from a consideration of ancient testimony and of the fossil remains of 16 'By chance before the dawn, harbinger of burning rays, when the husbandmen bring forth the oxen from their rest into the fields, that they may break the red, dew-sprinkled soil with the plough, and turn up the clods from the soft soil.' 2 That rock makes the passage narrow, and from beneath that rock a spring gushing out sweeps past the river's bank.' this lost literature, as we find them collected and arranged from the works of ancient critics and grammarians. The Roman tragedies seem to have borne much the same relation to the works of the Attic tragedians as Roman comedy to the new comedy of Athens. The expression of Quintilian, 'in comoedia maxime claudicamus',' following immediately on the praise which he bestows on Pacuvius and Accius, implies that in his opinion the earlier writers had been more successful in tragedy than in comedy. But a comparison between the fragments of the tragedians and the extant works of Plautus and Terence, proves that, in style at least, Roman comedy was much the most successful; and this superiority is no doubt one main cause of its partial preservation. The style of Roman tragedy appears to have been direct and vigorous, serious, often animated with oratorical passion, but singularly devoid of harmony, subtlety, poetical refinement and inspiration. There is no testimony in favour of any great dramatic conceptions or impersonations. The poets appear to have aimed at expressing some particular passion oratorically, as Virgil has done so powerfully in his representation of Mezentius and Turnus, but not to have created any of those great types of human character such as the world owes to Homer, Sophocles, and Shakspeare. The popularity and the power of Roman tragedy, during the century preceding the downfall of the Republic, are to be attributed chiefly to its didactic and oratorical force, to the Roman bearing of the persons represented, to the ethical and occasionally the political cast of the sentiments expressed by them, and to the plain and vigorous style in which they are enunciated. The works of the tragic poets aided the development of the Roman language. They communicated new ideas and experience, and fostered among the mass of the Roman people the only taste for serious literature of which they were capable. They may have exercised a beneficial influence also on the thoughts and lives of men. They kept the national ideal of duty, the 'manners ' Inst. Or. x. i. 99. 1 of the olden time,' the 'fas et antiqua castitudo' (to use an expression of Accius), before the minds of the people: they inculcated by precept and by representations great lessons of fortitude and energy: they taught the maxims of common sense, and touched the minds of their audiences with a humanity of feeling naturally alien to them. No teaching on the stage could permanently preserve the old Roman virtue, simplicity, and loyalty to the Republic, against the corrupting and disorganising effects of constant wars and conquests, and of the gross forms of luxury, that suited the temperament of Rome: but, among the various influences acting on the mind of the people, none probably was of more unmixed good than that of the tragic drama of Ennius, Pacuvius, and Accius. CHAPTER VI. ROMAN COMEDY. PLAUTUS. ABOUT 254 TO 184 B. C. THE era in which Roman epic and tragic poetry arose was also the flourishing era of Roman comedy. A later generation looked back on the age of Ennius and Plautus as an age of great poets, who had passed away :— Ea tempestate flos poetarum fuit Qui nunc abierunt hinc in communem locum1. 4 And among these poets the writers of comedy were both most numerous and apparently the most popular in their own time". Besides the names of Naevius, Plautus, Caecilius, and Terence, we know the names of other comic poets of less fame3, and from allusions in the extant plays of Plautus and in the prologues of Terence we infer that there were other competitors for public favour whose names were unknown to a later generation. In the Ciceronian age the works of these forgotten playwrights were for the most part attributed to Plautus, probably with the view of gaining some temporary popularity for them. In the time of Gellius no fewer than 130 plays passed under his name; among these, twenty-one were regarded as undoubtedly his, nineteen more as probably genuine, and the rest as spurious. They were however all of the class of 'Licinius and Atilius are placed before Terence in the Canon of Volcatius Sedigitus. 4 E. g. Pseudolus, 1081: 'Nugas theatri: verba quae in comoediis Solent lenoni dici, quae pueri sciunt.' Cf. also Captivi, 778. |