Part 19

The Atellan plays, which are mentioned even before the end of the fourth century, are to us a distinct sign of a national literature. The statement that they were extemporised, is surely correct. Thus, before the great change of manners in Italy, there was often some improvisation interwoven with the pantomimes. As in the Atellanæ they possessed a sort of comedy, so in the _prætextatæ_, they had not only a native, but also a most ancient national tragedy. I believe that there is no mistake in connecting with the _prætextatæ_, the solemn processions at funerals, in which the masks of deceased men, who had curule ancestors (_jus imaginum_), were represented in the dress of their rank by men of similar size; yet even without any reference to this, we may ascribe to them a very great antiquity. The first poet whom we know to have treated them according to the rules of art, was Attius: earlier _prætextatæ_ than his are not mentioned; yet this is no proof that they did not exist a long time before.

The translation of Greek poetry into the Latin tongue was a step of immense consequence. That Livius Andronicus had been taken prisoner at Tarentum, may be a mistake, as he is perhaps confounded with M. Livius Macatus; Livius Andronicus could at that time have been but a mere child. The accounts of him are very uncertain; in the earlier ages, little heed was bestowed upon the lives of the first poets, and their sayings and doings were only gathered afterwards: thus it still happened with Plautus and Terence. As far as we can judge from his fragments, he seems not even to have attained to the Greek form at all. The Odyssey, which, from its reference to the native country of the Romans, went indeed nearer home to their hearts, and had greater attraction for them than the Iliad,[39] he seems not to have translated at full length, but to have made an abridgment of it, which was also in the homely Italian measure. The great poem of Nævius was likewise in the saturnian rhythm. Besides the Odyssey, there are only tragedies mentioned of Livius, which, however, like the Atellanæ, were not acted in the theatre, but on a stage in the circus.

Nævius blended the history of the most recent times with Greek mythology; in his great historical poem, for instance, he brought in the myth of the giants. Besides this, he wrote tragedies as well as comedies, as we may see from the titles. That he was a good poet, we may indeed believe on Cicero’s word, who, on the whole, found the old writers very little to his taste.

When Nævius was an old man, Plautus, who was undoubtedly one of the greatest poetical geniuses of ancient times, was growing up by his side. This poet takes Greek plays and treats them with a finished irony, not making a mere version from the original, but displaying in his characters the peculiarities of Roman life, which is that of the lower orders, freedmen, strangers, and naturalized citizens. The

## scene is at Athens, or Epidamnus, or elsewhere; but he has also Greek

characters (for instance, the parasite is thoroughly Greek), and then one is again reminded that one is in the midst of Romans. The cleverness with which he managed this, and with which, on the slippery path where he might so easily have stumbled, he always hits the right point, is quite miraculous. We see how wonderfully rich and refined his language was, a proof that even before his time it had been very much cultivated, otherwise it would not have been changed so quickly. For we have a _senatus consultum_ of the fifth century,[40] and the epitaph of Scipio Barbatus, with which we may compare his style, and we find a remarkable difference.

Livius was a foreign client; Nævius a moneyed man, a maniceps; being too bold for a foreigner, he was prosecuted because he had given offence to one of the Metelli.[41] Of Plautus, we do not even know whether he was a Roman citizen: he must have been poor; but the story of his having worked at a mill does not rest upon any trustworthy authority. The first who really was a Roman citizen, being somewhat younger than Nævius, but standing in quite a different position from his, was Ennius, a _gentleman_,[42] and certainly a member of the tribes: he lived with Scipio, Fulvius Nobilior, and the first men, and was treated with the highest distinction. It is he who gained for poetry and literature the respect and esteem of the Romans. Among his fragments, there are some very fair pieces; his poetry, however, was not directed to higher objects: in comedy he seems to have been weak, nor does he appear to have held it in particular regard; in epic poetry, on the other hand, he has decided merit. Some of his things were written in a purely Roman form,--this was probably the case with the _Sabinæ_,[43] and also with the _Saturæ_,--yet he followed out quite a different idea. Plautus’ metres are by no means thoroughly Greek, though they very often coincide with the latter: the scansion by long and short syllables is Greek, but the Romans were not so strict in their measures, not having the quick ear of the Greeks. A trochaic or iambic movement was of native use among the Romans, and was not measured in the same way as among the Greeks: so it is with anapæsts among the modern Greeks, and with all the metres among some of the Slavonic nations. The _senarius_ may be Greek, and as little peculiar to the Romans as to us (Germans). Even as Plautus introduced the latter, so did Ennius the hexameter, which was quite foreign; and this brought about just such revolution in metres as with us. His hexameters were still clumsy and full of faults, and without any _cæsura_, or with a false one, though not so bad as in Klopstock. Much as I like the old _numeri_, the verses of Ennius have something in them which is unpleasing to me. Besides the metres which are properly lyric, he has tried all the _rhythmi_; and indeed he has done it with much greater trueness than the older dramatists. The _senarius_ has already more of measured syllables, which gave it a firmer hold; but there is between the verses of Ennius and those of Virgil, as wide a gulf as between the first attempts of Klopstock and that height of perfection in metrical art, to which Count Platen has reached. A peculiarity of the old versification which as yet is far from being clearly made out, was the slurring of the short syllables (_ecthlipsis_): _ego_ was pronounced as one syllable, like the Italian _io_; _accipito_, as a dactyl.

Ennius was not an original genius; yet he surely does not deserve the contempt with which Horace speaks of him. He had had a Greek education in Calabria; Greek was his second mother tongue, while the Roman was for him only an acquired language: he therefore wished to help the Romans to a translated Greek literature. If we compare it with what the Greek literature then was, that of the Romans was very brilliant. The Alexandrine period was now already past. Callimachus was dead, when Livius Andronicus began; Antagoras[44] and Aratus were dead; Eratosthenes was a mere versifier. On the other hand, the Romans had a great deal of freshness, and there would have been still more, had not Ennius caused the foreign influence to get so much the upperhand.

Somewhat younger than Ennius was Pacuvius, his sister’s son, justly called the Deep. He scorned the pieces of Euripides, which Ennius had chosen, and only took those of Æschylus and Sophocles, thus putting himself altogether in opposition to the taste of the Greeks of that age.

Q. Fabius Pictor and L. Cincius Alimentus then wrote the history of their own nation in Greek. Dionysius, who finds fault with Fabius as an historian, has never made any objection against his language; on the contrary, the fact that Dionysius wrote his own history only down to the beginning of the first Punic war, when Fabius was getting to be more diffuse, proves that the latter was very readable. Of the same standing was Acilius. The great Scipio wrote in the form of a letter to Philip the history of his own wars,[45] and so did his son-in-law Scipio Nasica that of the war with Perseus. Greek grammarians, statuaries, and painters were brought in already by Æmilius Paullus for the education of his children.

WAR WITH THE LIGURIANS; WITH THE CELTIBERIANS. THE THIRD MACEDONIAN WAR. PEACE WITH THE RHODIANS. FURTHER WARS IN SPAIN. STATE OF AFFAIRS AT HOME.

During these changes, when on all points a sudden and thorough revolution had taken place in the manners of the people, the Romans were not backward in widening their sway: whilst the state was falling to pieces, they did not know what to do, unless they were making conquests. The evil had become so deep-rooted, that it could hardly have been got rid of; but as it was, nothing was done to heal it, and the degeneracy quickly increased.

The war against the Ligurians is not only insignificant, when measured by the standard of other wars, but it is also obscure, owing to our very defective knowledge of the geography of the country. It has some resemblance to undertakings against the Caucasian tribes of which we now (1829) read; and although the Apennines are not such a high mountain-range as the Caucasus, they yet likewise give great advantages to the inhabitants. As is always the case when a powerful state has once determined upon subjugating a people, the Ligurians also were crushed. Their tribes in fact had their abodes as far as the Rhone; but the Romans, who were chiefly anxious to secure the Tuscan frontier, reduced only the Genoese territory. These wars did not reach beyond the borders of Provence; the hostilities against the Salyans in the neighbourhood of Marseilles belong to a later period.[46] These tribes fought for their freedom with such determination, that the Romans had no other course but to drive them out of their fastnesses,--booty there was none to be got there,--and the consuls Cornelius and Bæbius[47] led away fifty thousand Ligurians from their homes into Samnium where Frontinus,[48] as late as in the second century met with their descendants under the names of the Cornelian and Bæbian Ligurians. The war was ended before that of Perseus. For the especial purpose of commanding Gaul, the highway of Flaminius, which went as far as Ariminum, was now lengthened as the _via Æmilia_ to Placentia; and the whole country south of the Po was filled with colonies, so that the Celtic population disappeared.

All this time, the Romans were likewise establishing their rule in Spain, where they regularly kept troops. This beginning of standing armies had a decided influence, not only upon warfare, but also on all the relations of civil life. In former days, the real burthens of war had fallen upon all ranks alike: every one who was able to bear arms, had served for a time, and he became a citizen again, when the legion was disbanded at the end of the contest; which had this advantage, that the soldier was not separated from the citizen. But now the men remained for a long term of years in Spain, married Spanish women, and became estranged from Italy: many of them never returned. The Roman sway spread itself over Catalonia, Valencia, and Andalusia, as far as the Sierra Morena; for when they waged war with the Celtiberians, the latter had traversed the country of the neighbouring tribes. These wars were therefore not so much for acquisition as for consolidation. Their rule over the nations seems to have become somewhat slippery; but Cato, during his consulate in 557, gained them back by his uprightness. Roman generals who behaved in this way, always won the confidence of the Spaniards; and these would submit, until the injustice of the Romans again drove them to shake off the yoke: the people always appears in a very noble light. Cato, however, was also cunning, this being a feature in his character, as well as in that of the Romans as a nation. He strengthened the power of Rome by circulars which he sent to seventy or eighty Spanish towns, all of which were strongly fortified, and in case of rebellion hard to take, so that they were apt to combine with their neighbours. In these letters, which were all of them to be opened on one and the same day, as containing a secret of very high importance, was the command to pull down their walls forthwith under the threat of a siege and of bondage. The order was generally obeyed; and before they became aware that it was a stratagem, the work of demolition had already made considerable progress.

In the year 575, Ti. Sempronius Gracchus, a son of him who in the war with Hannibal had won a brilliant victory over Hanno and had nobly fallen, and also the father of the two ill-fated brothers, became consul, and went to Spain. (It was he who had deeply deplored that P. Scipio tried to set himself above the law, but who did not wish him to be punished like any other citizen; and Scipio had afterwards chosen him for his son-in-law.) At that time, the feeling of hostility had already been more widely kindled. The Celtiberians, who had spread from the sources of the Ebro to the threefold border of the Mancha, Andalusia, and Valencia, and chiefly dwelt in New Castile and Western Aragon, in the provinces of Soria and Cuença, had never been subject to the Carthaginians, but had furnished them with mercenaries, as they also did the Romans: they now got involved in war with the Romans, who endeavoured to reduce them. They were the bravest people in Spain. With them Gracchus concluded a peace, the conditions of which are unknown to us; but they were so fair, that these tribes, who in reality had no wish whatever for war, ever afterwards looked upon it as the greatest good which could befall them, if they were only allowed to have them. The whole family of the Gracchi is distinguished for an extraordinary mildness and kindness, which otherwise are quite foreign to the Roman character. Had his successors kept the peace, the Celtiberians would have become as true and as useful allies to the Romans as the Marsians and Pelignians. Other generals, however, extended the Roman rule in the west of Spain: the Vaccæans north of the Tagus and the Lusitanians must have been brought under subjection between 570 and 580; yet this was not for long, owing to the extortions of the generals.

In the meantime, a new thunderstorm gathered in the east. Philip’s reign had lasted a long while; but he made an excellent use of his time to strengthen his kingdom. His expectations from the war against Antiochus had not been fulfilled; but he had considerably enlarged his dominions: he was again in possession of Demetrias and of part of Magnesia, so that he hemmed in Thessaly; the Dolopians had remained under his sway (although they were detached from his country); he also had Athamania; and he had gotten again the Greek towns on the Thracian coast, Ænos, Maronea, Abdera, and others, which had formerly been Egyptian. The Romans had let him go on quietly for a while; but now they began craftily to undermine his rule. They gave their encouragement when Amynander drove the Macedonian garrisons from Athamania; they received embassies which they themselves had set on foot, from Thessaly and the towns on the Thracian coast, bearing complaints of Philip’s encroachments. They must have held the conviction, that he had no other object, but thus to strengthen himself until he should be able to regain his former might; but Philip, in all his preparations, was too cautious to run foul upon the treaty.

## Particularly hostile to Philip was Eumenes, who longed to have the

towns on the Thracian coast, that he might extend his territory to the frontiers of Macedon. Philip heard that many ambassadors were gathering in Rome, and he sent his son Demetrius thither, who had formerly been with the Romans as a hostage, and in that way had made a good many connexions there. These transactions--as was always managed by the Romans at that time with ruthless dexterity--led to nothing; the decision was to be given in Macedonia by Roman commissioners. During that time, there was now a great anxiety not to do anything that might have seemed unfriendly to the Romans. These commissioners were received by Philip with great bitterness: some things he yielded which he could not help; in others, he made evasions, and sought to gain time; misfortune had taught him wisdom. He had carried on the first war with the Romans, in which he might have done them much harm, sluggishly, and without having his heart in it; he had also engaged quite unprepared in that which had been directed against himself, so that after one defeat, every thing was lost for him; but from 555, during the eighteen years which elapsed to his death, he was always preparing himself. On both sides, they vied with each other in faithlessness. Philip set on the Thracians to surprise the Roman army which was coming from Asia, and to rob it of its _impedimenta_: the Romans tried to strip him of his possessions. He therefore strove to make himself as unassailable as possible; and as he was not allowed to have a fleet, and therefore was exposed to constant attacks by sea, he formed the plan of abandoning the sea-port towns, which were by no means strong, and of drawing the inhabitants into the interior: he also directed his whole attention to getting money. For this purpose, he settled in Thrace, where he worked the mines with redoubled activity, and the arsenals were filled with arms: on the other hand, he caused Thracians to emigrate to the wasted Macedonian countries. At the same time, he negotiated with other nations; yet he did not turn his eyes towards the powerless East, but to the Getæ and Bastarnians. The latter then dwelt in Dacia, the present Moldavia and Wallachia: the great move of the Sarmatian peoples on the Dnieper, had made those tribes inclined to leave their abodes. Philip therefore tried to get them to fall upon Italy, a scheme which was carried out seventy years afterwards by the Cimbrians. These transactions had already gone very far, nor would they have been abortive but for the death of the king; and in fact this would have been the only means of assailing Rome. The Romans were universally hated, and they deserved it. The people among whom in former days justice had been the corner-stone of religion, had not even a spark left of their ancient virtue: they tried to stir up infamous intrigues in the free states, and in the families of princes; they everywhere took the bad under their protection, and cheered them on to venture everything on the strength of it. Thus, in the royal house of Macedon, there arose a quarrel between the two sons of Philip, the elder of whom was Perseus, and the younger, Demetrius; the former being the son of a concubine, the latter begotten in lawful wedlock. Demetrius became suspected by the king of being a partisan of the Romans; and the hatred between the two brothers broke out with so much the greater fierceness--Perseus being maddened against the Romans--the more Demetrius took their part. After years of horrid accusations and treacherous wiles, Perseus at last carried the day, and had Demetrius poisoned by his father. Whether Demetrius really engaged in guilty plots, or whether there was nothing more than a passing impulse, cannot be made out now; if we judge from the morality of those times, his complete innocence is not likely: that the charges against the father and Perseus in Livy, according to which Perseus tells false-hearted slanders against his brother to the king, are highly exaggerated, however beautifully they read, may be asserted with the greatest probability. Thus it is no doubt one of those unjust insinuations which we meet with but too often, when the _mors opportuna_ of Philip is spoken of. How frequently, when such a _mors opportuna_ happened, was it represented as having been intentionally brought about! Philip had reached the age when he might very well have died a natural death; he was sixty years old when he died (573): he is said to have deeply rued the foul deed which he had committed against Demetrius, and to have died of a broken heart. And it still remains a question, whether, and how far, he could have had the thought of passing over his son, who was no fool, and bequeathing the kingdom to his cousin, a son of Antigonus Doson. In short, the country was left to his son Perseus in a state of power and greatness, which no one could have dreamed of at the beginning of his reign, and still less at the time of the disadvantageous peace with Rome.

It is difficult to form a correct opinion of Perseus, who was an inconsistent character. A marked feature in his disposition was avarice: he could not tear himself away from his treasures, even when there was the strongest necessity for it, and he grudged them when they might have gotten him the most formidable troops; and this is

## particularly the case when he promises subsidies to foreign peoples.

Moreover, he showed himself wavering in war, which indeed was partly the result of circumstances, but was also deep-rooted in his nature. He was no general; for he had no presence of mind in an emergency: as long as circumstances were not appalling, he was very clever in hitting upon and doing the right thing; with regard to his courage the ancients themselves differed in their judgment. In his first years, it was his endeavour to win the hearts of the Greeks, in which he was signally successful: he gained over the Achæans, Bœotians, Acarnanians, Epirotes, and Thessalians, one after another, and besides these, even the Rhodians and other islanders. Here he did not indeed show his avarice: he remitted taxes, recalled convicted persons from banishment, and opened Macedon as a refuge for unfortunate and exiled Greeks. Thus he got adherents among all the Greeks, and we meet everywhere with a Roman and a Macedonian party. Among the Achæans there even arose three factions, a Roman, a Macedonian, and a third one of the patriots, which was hated by the other two. Thus Perseus came to Greece, and was welcomed with enthusiasm, as the Roman rule grew more oppressive every day. The Greeks looked upon him as the man who would restore the old Macedonian sway, and drive the Romans back again across the Adriatic. With Carthage also he entered into negociations: but things had already come to that pass that there was not much to be expected any more even from a general coalition; for although Rome’s moral power was blighted, yet she had acquired the influence of a wealthy state, being able to hire and to arm troops in distant lands.