LATIN LITERATURE
BY
J. W. MACKAIL
I.
THE REPUBLIC.
II.
COMEDY: PLAUTUS AND TERENCE.
Great as was the place occupied in the culture of the Greek world by
Homer and the Attic tragedians, the Middle and New Comedy, as they
culminated in Menander, exercised an even wider and more pervasive
influence. A vast gap lay between the third and fifth centuries before
Christ. Aeschylus, and even Sophocles, had become ancient literature in
the age immediately following their own. Euripides, indeed, continued for
centuries after his death to be a vital force of immense moment; but this
force he owed to the qualities in him that make his tragedy transgress
the formal limits of the art, to pass into the wider sphere of the human
comedy, with its tears and laughter, its sentiment and passions. From him
to Menander is in truth but a step; but this step was of such importance
that it was the comedian who became the Shakespeare of Greece. "Omnem
vitae imaginem expressit" are the words deliberately used of him by the
greatest of Roman critics.
When, therefore, the impulse towards a national literature began to be
felt at Rome, comedy took its place side by side with tragedy and epic as
part of the Greek secret that had to be studied and mastered; and this
came the more naturally that a sort of comedy in rude but definite forms
was already native and familiar. Dramatic improvisations were, from an
immemorial antiquity, a regular feature of Italian festivals. They were
classed under different heads, which cannot be sharply distinguished. The
"Satura" seems to have been peculiarly Latin; probably it did not differ
deeply or essentially from the two other leading types that arose north
and south of Latium, and were named from the little country towns of
Fescennium in Etruria, and Atella in Campania. But these rude
performances hardly rose to the rank of literature; and here, as
elsewhere, the first literary standard was set by laborious translations
from the Greek.
We find, accordingly, that the earlier masters -- Andronicus, Naevius,
Ennius -- all wrote comedies as well as tragedies, of the type known as
"palliata", or "dressed in the Greek mantle," that is to say, freely
translated or adapted from Greek originals. After Ennius, this still
continued to be the more usual type; but the development of technical
skill now results in two important changes. The writers of comedy become,
on the whole and broadly speaking, distinct from the writers of tragedy;
and alongside of the "palliata" springs up the "togata", or comedy of
Italian dress, persons, and manners.
As this latter form of Latin comedy has perished, with the exception of
trifling fragments, it may be dismissed here in few words. Its life was
comprised in less than a century. Titinius, the first of the writers of
the "fabula togata" of whom we have any certain information, was a
contemporary of Terence and the younger Scipio; a string of names, which
are names and nothing more, carries us down to the latest and most
celebrated of the list, Lucius Afranius. His middle-class comedies
achieved a large and a long-continued popularity; we hear of performances
of them being given even a hundred years after his death, and Horace
speaks with gentle sarcasm of the enthusiasts who put him on a level with
Menander. With his contemporary Quinctius Atta (who died B.C. 77, in the
year of the abortive revolution after the death of Sulla), he owed much
of his success to the admirable acting of Roscius, who created a stage
tradition that lasted long after his own time. To the mass of the people,
comedy (though it did not err in the direction of over-refinement) seemed
tame by comparison with the shows and pageants showered on them by the
ruling class as the price of their suffrages. As in other ages and
countries, fashionable society followed the mob. The young man about
town, so familiar to us from the brilliant sketches of Ovid, accompanies
his mistress, not to comedies of manners, but to the more exciting
spectacles of flesh and blood offered by the ballet-dancers and the
gladiators. Thus the small class who occupied themselves with literature
had little counteracting influence pressed on them to keep them from the
fatal habit of perpetually copying from the Greek; and adaptations from
the Attic New Comedy, which had been inevitable and proper enough as the
earlier essays of a tentative dramatic art, remained the staple of an art
which thus cut itself definitely away from nature.
That we possess, in a fairly complete form, the works of two of the most
celebrated of these playwrights, and of their many contemporaries and
successors nothing but trifling fragments, is due to a chance or a series
of chances which we cannot follow, and from which we must not draw too
precise conclusions. Plautus was the earliest, and apparently the most
voluminous, of the writers who devoted themselves wholly to comedy.
Between him and Terence a generation intervenes, filled by another
comedian, Caecilius, whose works were said to unite much of the special
excellences of both; while after the death of Terence his work was
continued on the same lines by Turpilius and others, and dwindled away
little by little into the early Empire. But there can be no doubt that
Plautus and Terence fully represent the strength and weakness of the
Latin "palliata". Together with the eleven plays of Aristophanes, they
have been in fact, since the beginning of the Middle Ages, the sole
representatives of ancient, and the sole models for modern comedy.
Titus Maccius Plautus was born of poor parents, in the little Umbrian
town of Sarsina, in the year 254 B.C., thus falling midway in age between
Naevius and Ennius. Somehow or other he drifted to the capital, to find
employment as a stage-carpenter. He alternated his playwriting with the
hardest manual drudgery; and though the inexhaustible animal spirits
which show themselves in his writing explain how he was able to combine
extraordinary literary fertility with a life of difficulty and poverty,
it must remain a mystery how and when he picked up his education, and his
surprising mastery of the Latin language both in metre and diction. Of
the one hundred and thirty comedies attributed to him, two-thirds were
rejected as spurious by Varro, and only twenty-one ranked as certainly
genuine. These last are extant, with the exception of one, called
"Vidularia", or "The Carpet-Bag", which was lost in the Middle Ages; some
of them, however, exist, and probably existed in Varro's time, only in
abridged or mutilated stage copies.
The constructive power shown in these pieces is, of course, less that of
Plautus himself than of his Greek originals, Philemon, Diphilus, and
Menander. But we do not want modern instances to assure us that, in
adapting a play from one language to another, merely to keep the plot
unimpaired implies more than ordinary qualities of skill or
conscientiousness. When Plautus is at his best -- in the "Aulularia",
"Bacchides", or "Rudens", and most notably in the "Captivi" -- he has
seldom been improved upon either in the interest of his action or in the
copiousness and vivacity of his dialogue.
Over and above his easy mastery of language, Plautus has a further
Claim to distinction in the wide range of his manner. Whether he ever
Went beyond the New Comedy of Athens for his originals, is uncertain;
But within it he ranges freely over the whole field, and the twenty
Extant pieces include specimens of almost every kind of play to which
the name of comedy can be extended. The first on the list, the famous
"Amphitruo", is the only surviving specimen of the burlesque. The
Greeks called this kind of piece [Greek: ilarotrag "oidia] -- a term for
Which "tragedie-bouffe" would be the nearest modern equivalent;
"tragico-comoedia" is the name by which Plautus himself describes it
in the prologue. The "Amphitruo" remains, even now, one of the most
masterly specimens of this kind. The version of Moliere, in which he
did little by way of improvement on his original, has given it fresh
currency as a classic; but the French play gives but an imperfect idea
of the spirit and flexibility of the dialogue in Plautus' hands.
Of a very different type is the piece which comes next the "Amphrituo" in
acknowledged excellence, the "Captivi". It is a comedy of sentiment,
without female characters, and therefore without the coarseness which (as
one is forced to say with regret) disfigures some of the other plays. The
development of the plot has won high praise from all critics, and
justifies the boast of the epilogue, "Huiusmodi paucas poetae reperiunt
comoedias". But the praise which the author gives to his own piece --
"Non pertractate facta est neque item ut ceterae,
Neque spurcidici insunt versus immemorabiles,
Hic neque periurus leno est nec meretrix mala
Neque miles gloriosus -- "
is really a severe condemnation of two other groups of Plautine plays.
The "Casina" and the "Truculentus" (the latter, as we know from Cicero, a
special favourite with its author) are studies in pornography which only
the unflagging animal spirits of the poet can redeem from being
disgusting; and the "Asinaria, Curculio", and "Miles Gloriosus" are broad
farces with the thinnest thread of plot. The last depends wholly on the
somewhat forced and exaggerated character of the title-role; as the
"Pseudolus", a piece with rather more substance, does mainly on its
"periurus leno", Ballio, a character who reminds one of Falstaff in his
entire shamelessness and inexhaustible vocabulary.
A different vein, the domestic comedy of middle-class life, is opened in
one of the most quietly successful of his pieces, the "Trinummus", or
"Threepenny-bit". In spite of all the characters being rather fatiguingly
virtuous in their sentiments, it is full of life, and not without
gracefulness and charm. After the riotous scenes of the lighter plays, it
is something of a comfort to return to the good sense and good feeling of
respectable people. It forms an interesting contrast to the "Bacchides",
a play which returns to the world of the bawd and harlot, but with a
brilliance of intrigue and execution that makes it rank high among
comedies.
Two other plays are remarkable from the fact that, though neither in
construction nor in workmanship do they rise beyond mediocrity, the
leading motive of the plot in one case and the principal character in the
other are inventions of unusual felicity. The Greek original of both is
unknown; but to it, no doubt, rather than to Plautus himself, we are
bound to ascribe the credit of the "Aulularia" and "Menaechmi". The
"Aulularia", or "Pot of Gold", a commonplace story of middle-class life,
is a mere framework for the portrait of the old miser, Euclio -- in itself
a sketch full of life and brilliance, and still more famous as the
original of Moliere's Harpagon, which is closely studied from it. The
"Menaechmi", or "Comedy of Errors", without any great ingenuity of
plot or distinction of character, rests securely on the inexhaustible
opportunities of humour opened up by the happy invention of the
twin-brothers who had lost sight of one another from early childhood,
and the confusions that arise when they meet in the same town in
later life.
There is yet one more of the Plautine comedies which deserves special
notice, as conceived in a different vein and worked out in a different
tone from all those already mentioned -- the charming romantic comedy
called "Rudens", or "The Cable", though a more fitting name for it would
be "The Tempest". It is not pitched in the sentimental key of the
"Captivi"; but it has a higher, and, in Latin literature, a rarer, note.
By a happy chance, perhaps, rather than from any unwonted effort of
skill, this translation of the play of Diphilus has kept in it something
of the unique and unmistakeable Greek atmosphere -- the atmosphere of the
"Odyssey", of the fisher-idyl of Theocritus, of the hundreds of little
poems in the Greek Anthology that bear clinging about their verses the
faint murmur and odour of the sea. The scene is laid near Cyrene, on the
strange rich African coast; the prologue is spoken, not by a character in
the piece, nor by a decently clothed abstraction like the figures of
Luxury and Poverty which speak the prologue of the "Trinummus", but by
the star Arcturus, watcher and tempest-bearer.
"Qui gentes omnes, mariaque et terras movet,
Eius sum civis civitate caelitum;
Ita sum ut videtis, splendens stella candida,
Signum quod semper tempore exoritur suo
Hic atque in caelo; nomen Arcturo est mihi.
Noctu sum in caelo clarus atque inter deos;
Inter mortales ambulo interdius".
The romantic note struck in these opening lines is continued throughout
the comedy, in which, by little touches here and there, the scene is kept
constantly before us of the rocky shore in the strong brilliant sun after
the storm of the night, the temple with its kindly priestess, and the
red-tiled country-house by the reeds of the lagoon, with the solitary
pastures behind it dotted over with fennel. Now and again one is reminded
of the "Winter's Tale", with fishermen instead of shepherds for the
subordinate characters; more frequently of a play which, indeed, has
borrowed a good deal from this, "Pericles Prince of Tyre".
The remainder of the Plautine plays may be dismissed with scant notice.
They comprise three variations on the theme which, to modern taste, has
become so excessively tedious, of the "Fourberies de Scapin" -- the
"Epidicus", "Mostellaria", and "Persa"; the "Poenulus", a dull play,
which owes its only interest to the passages in it written in the
Carthaginian language, which offer a tempting field for the conjectures
of the philologist; two more, the "Mercator" and "Stichus", of confused
plot and insipid dialogue; and a mutilated fragment of the "Cistellaria",
or "Travelling-Trunk", which would not have been missed had it shared the
fate of the "Carpet-Bag".
The humour of one age is often mere weariness to the next; and farcical
comedy is, of all the forms of literature, perhaps the least adapted for
permanence. It would be affectation to claim that Plautus is nowadays
widely read outside of the inner circle of scholars; and there he is read
almost wholly on account of his unusual fertility and interest as a field
of linguistic study. Yet he must always remain one of the great
outstanding influences in literary history. The strange fate which has
left nothing but inconsiderable fragments out of the immense volume of
the later Athenian Comedy, raised Plautus to a position co-ordinate with
that of Aristophanes as a model for the reviving literature of modern
Europe; for such part of that literature (by much the more important) as
did not go beyond Latin for its inspiration, Plautus was a source of
unique and capital value, in his own branch of literature equivalent to
Cicero or Virgil in theirs.
Plautus outlived the second Punic War, during which, as we gather from
prefaces and allusions, a number of the extant plays were produced. Soon
after the final collapse of the Carthaginian power at Zama, a child was
born at Carthage, who, a few years later, in the course of unexplained
vicissitudes, reached Rome as a boy-slave, and passed there into the
possession of a rich and educated senator, Terentius Lucanus. The boy
showed some unusual turn for books; he was educated and manumitted by his
master, and took from him the name of Publius Terentius the African. A
small literary circle of the Roman aristocracy -- men too high in rank to
need to be careful what company they kept -- admitted young Terence to
their intimate companionship; and soon he was widely known as making a
third in the friendship of Gaius Laelius with the first citizen of the
Republic, the younger Scipio Africanus. This society, an informal academy
of letters, devoted all its energies to the purification and improvement
of the Latin language. The rough drafts of the Terentian comedies were
read out to them, and the language and style criticised in minute detail;
gossip even said that they were largely written by Scipio's own hand, and
Terence himself, as is not surprising, never took pains to deny the
rumour. Six plays had been subjected to this elaborate correction and
produced on the Roman stage, when Terence undertook a prolonged visit to
Greece for the purpose of further study. He died of fever the next year --
by one account, at a village in Arcadia; by another, when on his voyage
home. The six comedies had already taken the place which they have ever
since retained as Latin classics.
The Terentian comedy is in a way the turning-point of Roman literature.
Plautus and Ennius, however largely they drew from Greek originals, threw
into all their work a manner and a spirit which were essentially those of
a new literature in the full tide of growth. The imitation of Greek
models was a means, not an end; in both poets the Greek manner is
continually abandoned for essays into a new manner of their own, and they
relapse upon it when their imperfectly mastered powers of invention or
expression give way under them. In the circle of Terence the fatal
doctrine was originated that the Greek manner was an end in itself, and
that the road to perfection lay, not in developing any original
qualities, but in reproducing with laborious fidelity the accents of
another language and civilisation. Nature took a swift and certain
revenge. Correctness of sentiment and smooth elegance of diction became
the standards of excellence; and Latin literature, still mainly confined
to the governing class and their dependents, was struck at the root (the
word is used of Terence himself by Varro) with the fatal disease of
mediocrity.
But in Terence himself (as in Addison among English writers) this
mediocrity is, indeed, golden -- a mediocrity full of grace and charm. The
unruffled smoothness of diction, the exquisite purity of language, are
qualities admirable in themselves, and are accompanied by other striking
merits; not, indeed, by dramatic force or constructive power, but by
careful and delicate portraiture of character, and by an urbanity (to use
a Latin word which expresses a peculiarly Latin quality) to which the
world owes a deep debt for having set a fashion. In some curious lines
preserved by Suetonius, Julius Caesar expresses a criticism, which we
shall find it hard to improve, on the "halved Menander," to whom his own
fastidious purity in the use of language, no less than his tact and
courtesy as a man of the world, attracted him strongly, while not
blinding him to the weakness and flaccidity of the Terentian drama. Its
effect on contemporary men of letters was immediate and irresistible. A
curious, if doubtfully authentic, story is told of the young poet when he
submitted his first play, "The Maid of Andros", for the approval of the
Commissioners of Public Works, who were responsible for the production of
plays at the civic festivals. He was ordered to read it aloud to
Caecilius, who, since the death of Plautus, had been supreme without a
rival on the comic stage. Terence presented himself modestly while
Caecilius was at supper, and was carelessly told to sit down on a stool
in the dining-room, and begin. He had not read beyond a few verses when
Caecilius stopped him, and made him take his seat at table. After supper
was over, he heard his guest's play out with unbounded and unqualified
admiration.
But this admiration of the literary class did not make the refined
conventional art of Terence successful for its immediate purposes on the
stage: he was caviare to the general. Five of the six plays were produced
at the spring festival of the Mother of the Gods -- an occasion when the
theatre had not to face the competition of the circus; yet even then it
was only by immense efforts on the part of the management that they
succeeded in attracting an audience. The "Mother-in-Law" (not, it is
true, a play which shows the author at his best) was twice produced as a
dead failure. The third time it was pulled through by extraordinary
efforts on the part of the acting-manager, Ambivius Turpio. The prologue
written by Terence for this third performance is one of the most curious
literary documents of the time. He is too angry to extenuate the repeated
failure of his play. If we believe him, it fell dead the first time
because "that fool, the public," were all excitement over an exhibition
on the tight-rope which was to follow the play; at the second
representation only one act had been gone through, when a rumour spread
that "there were going to be gladiators" elsewhere, and in five minutes
the theatre was empty.
The Terentian prologues (they are attached to all his plays) are indeed
very interesting from the light they throw on the character of the
author, as well as on the ideas and fashions of his age. In all of them
there is a certain hard and acrid purism that cloaks in modest phrases an
immense contempt for all that lies beyond the writer's own canons of
taste. "In hac est pura oratio", a phrase of the prologue to "The
Self-Tormentor", is the implied burden of them all. He is a sort of
Literary Robespierre; one seems to catch the premonitory echo of
well-known phrases, "degenerate condition of literary spirit,
backsliding on this hand and on that, I, Terence, alone left
incorruptible." Three times there is a reference to Plautus, and always
with a tone of chilly superiority which is too proud to break into an
open sneer. Yet among these haughty and frigid manifestoes some
felicity of phrase or of sentiment will suddenly remind us that here,
after all, we are dealing with one of the great formative intelligences
of literature; where, for instance, in the prologue to the lively and
witty comedy of "The Eunuch", the famous line --
"Nullumst iam dictum quod non dictum sit prius --
drops with the same easy negligence as in the opening dialogue of "The
Self-Tormentor", the immortal --
"Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto -- "
falls from the lips of the old farmer. Congreve alone of English
playwrights has this glittering smoothness, this inimitable ease; if we
remember what Dryden, in language too splendid to be insincere, wrote of
his young friend, we may imagine, perhaps, how Caecilius and his circle
regarded Terence. Nor is it hard to believe that, had Terence, like
Congreve, lived into an easy and honoured old age, he would still have
rested his reputation on these productions of his early youth. Both
dramatists had from the first seen clearly and precisely what they had in
view, and had almost at the first stroke attained it: the very
completeness of the success must in both cases have precluded the
dissatisfaction through which fresh advances could alone be possible.
This, too, is one reason, though certainly not the only one, why, with
the death of Terence, the development of Latin comedy at once ceased. His
successors are mere shadowy names. Any life that remained in the art took
the channel of the farces which, for a hundred years more, retained a
genuine popularity, but which never took rank as literature of serious
value. Even this, the "fabula tabernaria", or comedy of low life,
gradually melted away before the continuous competition of the shows
which so moved the spleen of Terence -- the pantomimists, the jugglers, the
gladiators. By this time, too, the literary instinct was beginning to
explore fresh channels. Not only was prose becoming year by year more
copious and flexible, but the mixed mode, fluctuating between prose and
verse, to which the Romans gave the name of satire, was in process of
invention. Like the novel as compared with the play at the present time,
it offered great and obvious advantages in ease and variety of
manipulation, and in the simplicity and inexpensiveness with which, not
depending on the stated performances of a public theatre, it could be
produced and circulated. But before proceeding to consider this new
literary invention more fully, it will be well to pause in order to
gather up, as its necessary complement, the general lines on which Latin
prose was now developing, whether in response to the influence of Greek
models, or in the course of a more native and independent growth.
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