Part 1 (1/2)

Studies in the Poetry of Italy, I Roman

by Frank Justus Miller

PREFACE

The accumulated literature of centuries of ancient Roman life, even after the loss of e that, e to attempt to cover the whole field, the space allotted to this volume would suffice for only the most superficial mention of the extant authors The writer has therefore chosen to present to his readers the field of poetry only, and to narrow the scope of his work still further by the selection of certain important and representative phases of poetry, namely, the dramatic, satiric, and epic

These different phases of the Roman poetic product will be presented in the order nah it is by no means certain which class of poetry was first developed at Rome It is in in the rude and unrecorded literary product of ancient Italy Ennius, indeed, prior to whose tier, produced both drah to a more limited extent, of other writers of the same early period

Each of these phases of poetry is treated separately in this voluical development We shall, therefore, traverse the field three times by three parallel paths: from Andronicus to Seneca, froil

F J Miller Chicago

STUDIES IN THE POETRY OF ITALY

PART I

THE DRAMA

”Whose end, both at the first and noas and is, to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own features, scorn her own ie and body of the time his form and pressure”

1 THE BEGINNINGS OF ROMAN LITERATURE AND OLD ROMAN TRAGEDY

When Greece was at the height of her glory, and Greek literature was in its flohen aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, all within two brilliant generations, were holding the polite world under the h and al froether one of struggle The king-ruled Ro kingdo republic; the unconsideredthenition, and had already obtained their tribunes, and a little later the boon of a published law--the famous Law of the Twelve Tables, the first Roman code

Three years before this, and in preparation for it, a committee of three Roone to Athens to study the laws of Solon This visit was made in 454 B C aeschylus had died two years before; Sophocles had becoht out his first play As those three Romans sat in the theater at Athens, beneath the open sky, surrounded by the cultured and pleasure-loving Greeks, as they listened to the impassioned lines of the popular favorite, unable to understand except for the actor's art--what a contrast was presented between these two nations which had as yet never crossed each other's paths, but which were destined to corounds and prophecy of this conquest were even now present The Roman triumvirs came to learn Greek law, and they learned it so well that they becaivers not alone for Greece but for all the world; the triumvirs felt that day the charm of Greek art, and this was but a premonition of that charm which fell more masterfully upon Rome in later years, and took her literature and all kindred arts completely captive

Still from that day, for centuries to come, the Romans had sterner business than the cultivation of the arts of peace They had themselves and Italy to conquer; they had a still unshaped state to establish; they had their aratify; they had jealous neighbors in Greece, Africa, and Gaul to curb In such rough, troubled soil as this, literature could not take root and flourish They were not, it is true, without the beginnings of native literature Their religious worshi+p inspired rude hy hoh Saturnian verse on coes at funerals Also the natural ed itself in uncouth performances of a dramatic nature, which developed later into those mimes and farces, the forerunners of native Roman comedy and the old Medley-Satura Yet in these centuries Rome knew no letters worthy of the name save the laws on which she built her state; no arts save the arts of war

But in her course of Italian conquest, she had finally co since been taking peaceful possession of Italy along the southeastern border These Graeco-Roles in Italy, which arose in consequence, culminated in the fall of Tarentum, B C 272; and with this victory the conquest of the Italian peninsula was complete

This event meant much for the development of Italian literature; it meant new i contact with Greek thought, and the opportunity afforded by the internal calation of Italy Joined with these two influences was a third which caeneration afterward Rome has now taken her first fateful step toorld empire; she has leaped across Sicily and set victorious foot in Africa; has successfully n enemy The national pride and exaltation consequent upon this triuement for those impulses which had already been stirred

The first Punic War was ended in 241 B C In the following year the first effects of the hellenic influence upon Roman literature itnessed, and the first literary work in the Latin language of which we have definite record was produced at Rome This was by Livius Andronicus, a Greek froht to Rome as a captive upon the fall of that city He came as the slave of M Livius Salinator, who employed him as a tutor for his sons in Latin and Greek, and afterward set him free to follow the saht have a Latin text froe, he hiue the _Odyssey_ of Hoedians--the first professor of Latin on record! These sah, remained school text-books in Rome for centuries

His first public work, to which we have referred above, was the production of a play; but whether tragedy or comedy we do not know It was at any rate, without doubt, a translation into the crude, unpolished, and heavy Latin of his tiedies, of which only forty-one lines of frag nine plays, have come down to us, are all on Greek subjects, and are probably only translations or bald iinals

The example set by Andronicus was followed by four Romans of marked ability, whose life and work form a continuous chain of literary activity froer than Andronicus, and who brought out his first play in 235 B C; through Ennius, who first established tragedy upon a firh Pacuvius, the nephew of Ennius and his worthy successor, to the death of Accius in (about) 94 B C, as the last and greatest of the old Roedies, a few of theedies of this class were called _fabulae praetextae_, because the actors wore the native Roreat value which these plays would have to-day, not only from a literary but also froret keenly their almost utter loss In the vast edy was upon subjects taken from the traditional Greek cycles of stories, and was closely edies themselves aeschylus and Sophocles were imitated to some extent, but Euripides was the favorite