Part 9 (1/2)
If you wish a thing well done, You must do it yourself, you must not leave it to others!
We may leave our present notice of Ennius with a glance at the epitaph which he wrote for himself. It is cla.s.sed with his epigrams, but it may properly be considered in connection with the medley of his satires. In it he claims that unsubstantial immortality of remembrance and of mention among men which is even now, as we write and read, being vouchsafed to him.
Behold, O friends, old Ennius' carved stone, Who wrote your father's deeds with lambent pen; Let no tears deck my funeral, for lo, My soul immortal lives on lips of men.
We have seen that the spirit of invective in Lucilius, which became in his hands the spirit of satire, is traceable to the old Greek comedy.
The poetic form (the dactylic hexameter in which he wrote twenty of the thirty books of his satire) had already been naturalized in Roman literature by Ennius in his great epic poem. But to Lucilius is due the credit of being the first to incarnate this spirit in this form, and thus to establish an entirely new type in literature.
His satires contain invectives against luxury, avarice, and kindred vices, and prevalent superst.i.tions; an attack upon the rich; ridicule of certain rhetorical affectations; grammatical remarks, and criticisms on art; observations upon the Stoic philosophy; the poet's own political experiences and expectations, also other anecdotes and incidents gathered from his own experience; an interesting account of a journey to Sicily, from which Horace probably obtained the model for his famous journey to Brundisium. These and many other subjects filled his pages, and suggest by their wide range the old-time medley-satire.
The poet lived in stirring times. Born in 180 B. C., eleven years before the death of Ennius, he died about 103 B. C., three years after Cicero's birth and the year before the birth of Caesar. He was thus contemporary with some of the most important and striking events in Roman history--the third Macedonian War; the Third Punic War; the Numantian War, in which he himself served as a knight under Scipio Africa.n.u.s in 133 B. C.; the troubled times of the two Gracchi; the Jugurthine War, and the rise of Caius Marius. He was of equestrian rank, and lived on terms of intimacy with some of the best men at Rome, notably the younger Scipio and Laelius. With such backing as this, of family and friends, he was in good position to direct his satire against the wicked and unscrupulous men of his time, regardless of their rank, without fear or favor.
What did the Romans themselves think of Lucilius? To judge from the frequency and character of their references to him, the poet must have made a profound impression upon his countrymen. A study of these references shows that in the main this impression was favorable. He is _doctus_, that is, profoundly learned in the wisdom of the Greeks; and, according to Aulus Gellius, he was equally well versed in the language and literature of his own land. He is to Juvenal the _magnus_, the ”father of satire,” who has well-nigh preempted the field, to follow whom requires elaborate explanation and apology on the part of the would-be satirist. He is to Cicero _perurba.n.u.s_, preeminently endowed with that subtle something in spirit and expression which marks at once the polished man of the world. He is to Fronto remarkable for his _gracilitas_, that plainness, directness, and simplicity of style which, joined with the ”harshness” and ”roughness” of his ”eager” spirit and of his righteous indignation, made his satire such a formidable weapon against the vices of his day. Persius says of him that he ”slashed the citizens of his time and broke his jaw-teeth on them.” And the testimony of Juvenal is still more striking: ”But whenever Lucilius with drawn sword fiercely rages, his hearer, whose soul is cold within him because of his crimes, blushes with shame, and his heart quakes in silent fear because of his guilty secrets.”
Like those of so many of his predecessors in literature, the works of Lucilius remain to us only in the merest fragments. For these we are indebted largely to the Latin grammarians, who quote freely from him, usually in ill.u.s.tration of the meaning of some word which they may be discussing. A comparatively small number of the fragments have come down to us through quotations on account of their sentiment, as when Cicero says: ”Lucilius used to say that he did not write to be read by either of the extremes of society, because one would not understand him, and the other knew more than he did.”
We shall now examine a few of the more important of the fragments which have been preserved to us. The following has been thought to be a vivid picture of the unworthy struggle of life as he saw it in the Rome of his own time. Lactantius, however, whose quotation of the fragment has saved it, thinks that the poet is portraying in a more general way the unhappy, unrestful life of mankind, unrelieved, as Lucretius would say, by the comforting reflections of philosophy.
But now, from morning to night, on holidays and work days, in the same place, the whole day long, high and low, all busy themselves in the forum and never depart. To one and the same pursuit and practice have they all devoted themselves: to cheat as guardedly as possible, to strive craftily, to vie in flattery, to make a pretense of being good men, to lay snares just as if they were all the foes of all.
There was a certain t.i.tus Albucius, who, it seems, was so enamored with everything Greek that he was continually affecting the manners and language of that country. Such running after foreign customs and speech has not yet wholly disappeared. This weakness is the object of the poet's wit in the following pa.s.sage, in which he tells how Scaevola, the propraetor of Asia, once ”took down” the silly Albucius in Athens:
A Greek, Albucius, you would be called, and not a Roman and a Sabine, a fellow-townsman of Pontius and Tritanius, though they are both ill.u.s.trious men, and first-rate standard-bearers. And so, as praetor at Athens, when I meet you, I salute you in the foreign style which you are so fond of: ”+chaire+!”[A] I say; and my lictors and all my retinue inquire: ”+chaire+?” Fie, Albucius! for this thou art my country's foe, and my own enemy!
[A] Hail.
The fourth satire, says an ancient scholiast, was an attack upon luxury and the vices of the rich. The following pa.s.sage might well have been the opening lines of this satire, representing Laelius as exclaiming in praise of a vegetable diet and against gluttony:
”O sorrel, how praiseworthy art thou, And yet how little art thou really known!”
over his mess of sorrel Laelius the wise used to cry out, chiding one by one the gluttons of our day.
And that he did not hesitate to call the glutton and spendthrift by name is shown by this fragment, which is evidently a continuation of the same diatribe:
”O Publius Gallonius, thou spendthrift,” said he, ”thou art a wretched fellow. Never in all thy life hast thou dined well, though all thy wealth on that lobster and that sturgeon thou consumest.”
The last selection which we shall present from Lucilius is the longest extant fragment. The pa.s.sage is a somewhat elaborate definition of _virtue_ as the old Roman understood it. We use the translation of Sellar.
Virtue, Albinus, consists in being able to give their true worth to the things on which we are engaged, among which we live. The virtue of a man is to understand the real meaning of each thing: to understand what is right, useful, honorable for him; what things are good, what bad, what is unprofitable, base, dishonorable; to know the due limit and measure in making money; to give its proper worth to wealth; to a.s.sign what is really due to office; to be a foe and enemy of bad men and bad principles; to extol the good, to wish them well, to be their friend through life. Lastly, it is true worth to look on our country's weal as the chief good; next to that the weal of our parents; third and last, our own weal.
2. QUINTUS HORATIUS FLACCUS
Horace well sustains the character of preacher whose function it has already been said that satire performs. He found in his world the same frail human nature which had aroused the righteous scorn of Lucilius, and had led him to those bitter attacks upon the follies of his time for which his satire was justly dreaded. But Horace is cast in a different mold from Lucilius. While he sees just as clearly the shortcomings of society, he has a realizing sense that he himself is a part of that same society, guilty of the same sins, subject to the same criticism.
This consciousness of common frailty leads to moderation on the part of the preacher. He manifests a kindly sense of human brotherhood for better or for worse, which forms one of his most charming characteristics, and differentiates him from his great predecessor as well as from those who followed in the field of satire. It is true that Horace is sufficiently strenuous and severe in his polemics against the prevalent frailties of society as he saw them; but he has a habit of taking his hearers into his confidence at the end of his lecture, and rea.s.suring them by some whimsical jest or the information that the sermon was meant as much for himself as for them. He had no idea of reforming society from the outside as from a separate world; but he proceeded upon the principle that, as real reformation and progress must be the result of reformed internal conditions, so the reformer himself must be a sympathetic part of his world.
It was in a homely and wholesome school that our poet learned his moral philosophy. In a glowing tribute of filial affection for his father, he tells us how that worthy man, who was himself only a freedman--a humble collector of debts by trade, or possibly a fishmonger, away down in his provincial home in Apulia--decided that his son should have a better chance in life than had fallen to his own lot. The local school in the boy's native village of Venusia, where the big-boned sons of retired centurions gained their meager education, was not good enough for our young man. He must to Rome and afterward to Athens, and have all the chances which were open to the sons of the n.o.blest families of the land.
And so we have the pleasing picture of the sensible old father, not sending but taking his boy to Rome, where he was the young student's constant companion, his ”guide, philosopher, and friend,” attending him in all his ways, both in school and out.