Part 8

Thus the speeches of M. Tullius Cicero (106-43) belong to the domain of literature quite as much as to that of forensic or political oratory. And, although Demosthenes is a master of style unrivalled even by Cicero, the literary interest of most of Cicero's speeches is stronger than that of the great mass of Greek oratory. It is urged with justice that the greater part of Cicero's _Defence of Archias_ was irrelevant to the issue and would not have been listened to by a Greek court of justice or a modern jury. But it was fortunate for the interests of literature that a court of educated Romans could be influenced by the considerations there submitted to them. In this way a question of the most temporary interest, concerning an individual of no particular eminence or importance, has produced one of the most impressive vindications of literature ever spoken or written. Oratory at Rome assumed a new type from being cultivated as an art which endeavoured to produce persuasion not so much by intellectual conviction, as by appeal to general human sympathies. In oratory, as in every other intellectual province, the Greeks had a truer sense of the limits and conditions of their art. But command over form is only one element in the making of an orator or poet. The largeness and dignity of the matter with which he has to deal are at least as important. The Roman oratory of the law courts had to deal not with petty questions of disputed property, of fraud, or violence, but with great imperial questions, with matters affecting the well-being of large provinces and the honour and safety of the republic; and no man ever lived who, in these respects, was better fitted than Cicero to be the representative of the type of oratory demanded by the condition of the later republic. To his great artistic accomplishment, perfected by practice and elaborate study, to the power of his patriotic, his moral, and personal sympathies, and his passionate emotional nature, must be added his vivid imagination and the rich and copious stream of his language, in which he had no rival among Roman writers or speakers. It has been said that Roman poetry has produced few, if any, great types of character. But the Verres, Catiline, Antony of Cicero are living and permanent types. The story told in the _Pro Cluentio_ may be true or false, but the picture of provincial crime which it presents is vividly dramatic. Had we only known Cicero in his speeches we should have ranked him with Demosthenes as one who had realized the highest literary ideal. We should think of him also as the creator and master of Latin style--and, moreover, not only as a great orator but as a just and appreciative critic of oratory. But to his services to Roman oratory we have to add his services not indeed to philosophy but to the literature of philosophy. Though not a philosopher he is an admirable interpreter of those branches of philosophy which are fitted for practical application, and he presents us with the results of Greek reflection vivified by his own human sympathies and his large experience of men. In giving a model of the style in which human interest can best be imparted to abstract discussions, he used his great oratorical gift and art to persuade the world to accept the most hopeful opinions on human destiny and the principles of conduct most conducive to elevation and integrity of character.

The _Letters_ of Cicero are thoroughly natural--_colloquia absentium amicorum_, to use his own phrase. Cicero's letters to Atticus, and to the friends with whom he was completely at his ease, are the most sincere and immediate expression of the thought and feeling of the moment. They let us into the secret of his most serious thoughts and cares, and they give a natural outlet to his vivacity of observation, his wit and humour, his kindliness of nature. It shows how flexible an instrument Latin prose had become in his hand, when it could do justice at once to the ample and vehement volume of his oratory, to the calmer and more rhythmical movement of his philosophical meditation, and to the natural interchange of thought and feeling in the everyday intercourse of life.

Caesar.

Among the many rival orators of the age the most eminent were Quintus Hortensius Ortalus and C. Julius Caesar. The former was the leading representative of the Asiatic or florid style of oratory, and, like other members of the aristocracy, such as C. Memmius and L. Manlius Torquatus, and like Q. Catulus in the preceding generation, was a kind of dilettante poet and a precursor of the poetry of pleasure, which attained such prominence in the elegiac poets of the Augustan age. Of C. Julius Caesar (102-44) as an orator we can judge only by his reputation and by the testimony of his great rival and adversary Cicero; but we are able to appreciate the special praise of perfect taste in the use of language attributed to him.[1] In his _Commentaries_, by laying aside the ornaments of oratory, he created the most admirable style of prose narrative, the style which presents interesting events in their sequence of time and dependence on the will of the actor, rapidly and vividly, with scarcely any colouring of personal or moral feeling, any oratorical passion, any pictorial illustration. While he shows the persuasive art of an orator by presenting the subjugation of Gaul and his own action in the Civil War in the light most favourable to his claim to rule the Roman world, he is entirely free from the Roman fashion of self-laudation or disparagement of an adversary. The character of the man reveals itself especially in a perfect simplicity of style, the result of the clearest intelligence and the strongest sense of personal dignity. He avoids not only every unusual but every superfluous word; and, although no writing can be more free from rhetorical colouring, yet there may from time to time be detected a glow of sympathy, like the glow of generous passion in Thucydides, the more effective from the reserve with which it betrays itself whenever he is called on to record any act of personal heroism or of devotion to military duty.

Sallust.

In the simplicity of his style, the directness of his narrative, the entire absence of any didactic tendency, Caesar presents a marked contrast to another prose writer of that age--the historian C. Sallustius Crispus or Sallust (c. 87-36). Like Varro, he survived Cicero by some years, but the tone and spirit in which his works are written assign him to the republican era. He was the first of the purely artistic historians, as distinct from the annalists and the writers of personal memoirs. He imitated the Greek historians in taking particular

## actions--the _Jugurthan War_ and the _Catilinarian Conspiracy_--as the

subjects of artistic treatment. He wrote also a continuous work, _Historiae_, treating of the events of the twelve years following the death of Sulla, of which only fragments are preserved. His two extant works are more valuable as artistic studies of the rival parties in the state and of personal character than as trustworthy narratives of facts. His style aims at effectiveness by pregnant expression, sententiousness, archaism. He produces the impression of caring more for the manner of saying a thing than for its truth. Yet he has great value as a painter of historical portraits, some of them those of his contemporaries, and as an author who had been a political partisan and had taken some part in making history before undertaking to write it; and he gives us, from the popular side, the views of a contemporary on the politics of the time. Of the other historians, or rather annalists, who belong to this period, such as Q. Claudius Quadrigarius, Q. Valerius Antias, and C. Licinius Macer, the father of Calvus, we have only fragments remaining.

Varro.

The period was also remarkable for the production of works which we should class as technical or scientific rather than literary. The

## activity of one of these writers was so great that he is entitled to a

separate mention. This was M. Terentius Varro, the most learned not only of the Romans but of the Greeks, as he has been called. The list of Varro's writings includes over seventy treatises and more than six hundred books dealing with topics of every conceivable kind. His _Menippeae Saturae_, miscellanies in prose and verse, of which unfortunately only fragments are left, was a work of singular literary interest.

Lucretius.

Since the _Annals_ of Ennius no great and original poem had appeared. The powerful poetical force which for half a century continued to be the strongest force in literature, and which created masterpieces of art and genius, first revealed itself in the latter part of the Ciceronian age. The conditions which enabled the poetic genius of Italy to come to maturity in the person of T. Lucretius Carus (96-55) were entire seclusion from public life and absorption in the ideal pleasures of contemplation and artistic production. This isolation from the familiar ways of his contemporaries, while it was, according to tradition and the internal evidence of his poem, destructive to his spirit's health, resulted in a work of genius, unique in character, which still stands forth as the greatest philosophical poem in any language. In the form of his poem he followed a Greek original; and the stuff out of which the texture of his philosophical argument is framed was derived from Greek science; but all that is of deep human and poetical meaning in the poem is his own. While we recognize in the _De Rerum Natura_ some of the most powerful poetry in any language and feel that few poets have penetrated with such passionate sincerity and courage into the secret of nature and some of the deeper truths of human life, we must acknowledge that, as compared with the great didactic poem of Virgil, it is crude and unformed in artistic design, and often rough and unequal in artistic execution. Yet, apart altogether from its independent value, by his speculative power and enthusiasm, by his revelation of the life and spectacle of nature, by the fresh creativeness of his diction and the elevated movement of his rhythm, Lucretius exercised a more powerful influence than any other on the art of his more perfect successors.

Catullus.

While the imaginative and emotional side of Roman poetry was so powerfully represented by Lucretius, attention was directed to its artistic side by a younger generation, who moulded themselves in a great degree on Alexandrian models. Such were Valerius Cato also a distinguished literary critic, and C. Licinius Calvus, an eminent orator. Of this small group of poets one only has survived, fortunately the man of most genius among them, the bosom-friend of Calvus, C. Valerius Catullus (84-54). He too was a new force in Roman literature. He was a provincial by birth, although early brought into intimate relations with members of the great Roman families. The subjects of his best art are taken immediately from his own life--his loves, his friendships, his travels, his animosities, personal and political. His most original contribution to the substance of Roman literature was that he first shaped into poetry the experience of his own heart, as it had been shaped by Alcaeus and Sappho in the early days of Greek poetry. No poet has surpassed him in the power of vitally reproducing the pleasure and pain of the passing hour, not recalled by idealizing reflection as in Horace, nor overlaid with mythological ornament as in Propertius, but in all the keenness of immediate impression. He also introduced into Roman literature that personal as distinct from political or social satire which appears later in the _Epodes_ of Horace and the _Epigrams_ of Martial. He anticipated Ovid in recalling the stories of Greek mythology to a second poetical life. His greatest contribution to poetic art consisted in the perfection which he attained in the phalaecian, the pure iambic, and the scazon metres, and in the ease and grace with which he used the language of familiar intercourse, as distinct from that of the creative imagination, of the _rostra_, and of the schools, to give at once a lifelike and an artistic expression to his feelings. He has the interest of being the last poet of the free republic. In his life and in his art he was the precursor of those poets who used their genius as the interpreter and minister of pleasure; but he rises above them in the spirit of personal independence, in his affection for his friends, in his keen enjoyment of natural and simple pleasures, and in his power of giving vital expression to these feelings.

_Third Period: Augustan Age, 42 B.C. to A.D. 17._

Influence of imperial institutions.

The poetic impulse and culture communicated to Roman literature in the last years of the republic passed on without any break of continuity into the literature of the succeeding age. One or two of the circle of Catullus survived into that age; but an entirely new spirit came over the literature of the new period, and it is by new men, educated indeed under the same literary influences, but living in an altered world and belonging originally to a different order in the state, that the new spirit was expressed. The literature of the later republic reflects the sympathies and prejudices of an aristocratic class, sharing in the conduct of national affairs and living on terms of equality with one another; that of the Augustan age, first in its early serious enthusiasm, and then in the licence and levity of its later development, represents the hopes and aspirations with which the new monarchy was ushered into the world, and the pursuit of pleasure and amusement, which becomes the chief interest of a class cut off from the higher energies of practical life, and moving in the refining and enervating atmosphere of an imperial court. The great inspiring influence of the new literature was the enthusiasm produced first by the hope and afterwards by the fulfilment of the restoration of peace, order, national glory, under the rule of Augustus. All that the age longed for seemed to be embodied in a man who had both in his own person and by inheritance the natural spell which sways the imagination of the world. The sentiment of hero-worship was at all times strong in the Romans, and no one was ever the object of more sincere as well as simulated hero-worship than Augustus. It was not, however, by his equals in station that the first feeling was likely to be entertained. The earliest to give expression to it was Virgil; but the spell was soon acknowledged by the colder and more worldly-wise Horace. The disgust aroused by the anti-national policy of Antony, and the danger to the empire which was averted by the result of the battle of Actium, combined with the confidence inspired by the new ruler to reconcile the great families as well as the great body of the people to the new order of things.

While the establishment of the empire produced a revival of national and imperial feeling, it suppressed all independent political thought and

## action. Hence the two great forms of prose literature which drew their

nourishment from the struggles of political life, oratory and contemporary history, were arrested in their development. The main course of literature was thus for a time diverted into poetry. That poetry in its most elevated form aimed at being the organ of the new empire and of realizing the national ideals of life and character under its auspices; and in carrying out this aim it sought to recall the great memories of the past. It became also the organ of the pleasures and interests of private life, the chief motives of which were the love of nature and the passion of love. It sought also to make the art and poetry of Greece live a new artistic life. Satire, debarred from comment on political action, turned to social and individual life, and combined with the newly-developed taste for ethical analysis and reflection introduced by Cicero. One great work had still to be done in prose--a retrospect of the past history of the state from an idealizing and romanticizing point of view. For that work the Augustan age, as the end of one great cycle of events and the beginning of another, was eminently suited, and a writer who, by his gifts of imagination and sympathy, was perhaps better fitted than any other man of antiquity for the task, and who through the whole of this period lived a life of literary leisure, was found to do justice to the subject.

Although the age did not afford free scope and stimulus to individual energy and enterprise, it furnished more material and social advantages for the peaceful cultivation of letters. The new influence of patronage, which in other times has chilled the genial current of literature, become, in the person of Maecenas, the medium through which literature and the imperial policy were brought into union. Poetry thus acquired the tone of the world, kept in close connexion with the chief source of national life, while it was cultivated to the highest pitch of artistic perfection under the most favourable conditions of leisure and freedom from the distractions and anxieties of life.

Virgil.

The earliest in the order of time of the poets who adorn this age--P. Vergilius Maro or Virgil (70-19)--is also the greatest in genius, the most richly cultivated, and the most perfect in art. He is the idealizing poet of the hopes and aspirations and of the purer and happier life of which the age seemed to contain the promise. He elevates the present by associating it with the past and future of the world, and sanctifies it by seeing in it the fulfilment of a divine purpose. Virgil is the true representative poet of Rome and Italy, of national glory and of the beauty of nature, the artist in whom all the efforts of the past were made perfect, and the unapproachable standard of excellence to future times. While more richly endowed with sensibility to all native influences, he was more deeply imbued than any of his contemporaries with the poetry, the thought and the learning of Greece. The earliest efforts of his art (the _Eclogues_) reproduce the cadences, the diction and the pastoral fancies of Theocritus; but even in these imitative poems of his youth Virgil shows a perfect mastery of his materials. The Latin hexameter, which in Ennius and Lucretius was the organ of the more dignified and majestic emotions, became in his hands the most perfect measure in which the softer and more luxurious sentiment of nature has been expressed. The sentiment of Italian scenery and the love which the Italian peasant has for the familiar sights and sounds of his home found a voice which never can pass away.

In the _Georgics_ we are struck by the great advance in the originality and self-dependence of the artist, in the mature perfection of his workmanship, in the deepening and strengthening of all his sympathies and convictions. His genius still works under forms prescribed by Greek art, and under the disadvantage of having a practical and utilitarian aim imposed on it. But he has ever in form so far surpassed his originals that he alone has gained for the pure didactic poem a place among the highest forms of serious poetry, while he has so transmuted his material that, without violation of truth, he has made the whole poem alive with poetic feeling. The homeliest details of the farmer's work are transfigured through the poet's love of nature; through his religious feeling and his pious sympathy with the sanctities of human affection; through his patriotic sympathy with the national greatness; and through the rich allusiveness of his art to everything in poetry and legend which can illustrate and glorify his theme.

In the _Eclogues_ and _Georgics_ Virgil is the idealizing poet of the old simple and hardy life of Italy, as the imagination could conceive of it in an altered world. In the _Aeneid_ he is the idealizing poet of national glory, as manifested in the person of Augustus. The epic of national life, vividly conceived but rudely executed by Ennius, was perfected in the years that followed the decisive victory at Actium. To do justice to his idea Virgil enters into rivalry with a greater poet than those whom he had equalled or surpassed in his previous works. And, though he cannot unroll before us the page of heroic action with the power and majesty of Homer, yet by the sympathy with which he realizes the idea of Rome, and by the power with which he has used the details of tradition, of local scenes, of religious usage, to embody it, he has built up in the form of an epic poem the most enduring and the most artistically constructed monument of national grandeur.

Horace.

The second great poet of the time--Q. Horatius Flaccus or Horace (68-8) is both the realist and the idealist of his age. If we want to know the actual lives, manners and ways of thinking of the Romans of the generation succeeding the overthrow of the republic it is in the _Satires_ and partially in the _Epistles_ of Horace that we shall find them. If we ask what that time provided to stir the fancy and move the mood of imaginative reflection, it is in the lyrical poems of Horace that we shall find the most varied and trustworthy answer. His literary

## activity extends over about thirty years and naturally divides itself