Chapter VI: The Language as Recorded (2)

2. Words occurring only, or for the first time, in Tacitus. These are
for the most part new formations or compounds from stems already in
use, especially verbal substantives in -_tor_ and -_sor_, -_tus_ and
-_sus_, -_tura_ and -_mentum_, with new frequentatives.

3. Words used with a meaning (a) not found in earlier prose, but
sometimes borrowed from the poets, e.g. _componere_, "to bury";
_scriptura_, "a writing"; _ferratus_ "armed with a sword"; (b)
peculiar to later writers, e.g. _numerosus_, "numerous"; _famosus_,
"famous"; _decollare_, "to behead"; _imputare_, "to take credit for,"
&c.; (c) restricted to Tacitus himself, e.g. _dispergere_ =
_divolgare_.

Generally speaking, Tacitus likes to use a simple verb instead of a
compound one, after the fashion of the poets, employs a pluperfect for
a perfect, and (like Livy and sometimes Caesar) aims at vividness and
variety by retaining the present and perfect subjunctive in indirect
speech even after historical tenses. Collective words are followed by
a plural far more commonly than in Cicero. The ellipse of a verb is
more frequent. The use of the cases approximates to that of the poets,
and is even more free. The accusative of limitation is common in
Tacitus, though never found in Quintilian. Compound verbs are
frequently followed by the accusative where the dative might have been
expected; and the Virgilian construction of an accusative with middle
and passive verbs is not unusual. The dative of purpose and the dative
with a substantive in place of a genitive are more common with Tacitus
than with any writer. The ablative of separation is used without a
preposition, even with names of countries and with common nouns; the
ablative of place is employed similarly without a preposition; the
ablative of time has sometimes the force of duration; the instrumental
ablative is employed even of persons. A large extension is given to
the use of the quantitative genitive after neuter adjectives and
pronouns, and even adverbs, and to the genitive with active
participles; and the genitive of relation after adjectives is
(probably by a Graecism) very freely employed. In regard to
prepositions, there are special uses of _citra_, _erga_, _iuxta_ and
_tenus_ to be noted, and a frequent tendency to interchange the use of
a preposition with that of a simple case in corresponding clauses. In
subordinate sentences _quod_ is used for "the fact that," and
sometimes approaches the later use of "that"; the infinitive follows
many verbs and adjectives that do not admit of this construction in
classical prose; the accusative and infinitive are used after negative
expressions of doubt, and even in modal and hypothetical clauses.

Like Livy, the writers of this time freely employ the subjunctive of
repeated action with a relative, and extend its use to relative
conjunctions, which he does not. In clauses of comparison and
proportion there is frequently an ellipse of a verb (with _nihil aliud
quam_, _ut_, _tanquam_); _tanquam_, _quasi_ and _velut_ are used to
imply not comparison but alleged reason; _quin_ and _quominus_ are
interchanged at pleasure. _Quamquam_ and _quamvis_ are commonly
followed by the subjunctive, even when denoting facts. The free use of
the genitive and dative of the gerundive to denote purpose is common
in Tacitus, the former being almost limited to him. Livy's practice in
the use of participles is extended even beyond the limits to which he
restricts it. It has been calculated that where Caesar uses five
participial clauses, Livy has sixteen, Tacitus twenty-four.

In his compressed brevity Tacitus may be said to be individual; but in
the poetical colouring of his diction, in the rhetorical cast of his
sentences, and in his love for picturesqueness and variety he is a
true representative of his time.

70. _Suetonius._--The language of Suetonius is of interest as giving a specimen of silver Latinity almost entirely free from personal idiosyncrasies; his expressions are regular and straightforward, clear and business-like; and, while in grammar he does not attain to classical purity, he is comparatively free from rhetorical affectations.

71. _The African Latinity._--A new era commences with the accession of Hadrian (117). As the preceding half century had been marked by the influence of Spanish Latinity (the Senecas, Lucan, Martial, Quintilian), so in this the African style was paramount. This is the period of affected archaisms and pedantic learning, combined at times with a reckless love of innovation and experiment, resulting in the creation of a large number of new formations and in the adoption of much of the plebeian dialect. Fronto and Apuleius mark a strong reaction against the culture of the preceding century, and for evil far more than for good the chain of literary tradition was broken. The language which had been unduly refined and elaborated now relapsed into a tasteless and confused patch-work, without either harmony or brilliance of colouring. In the case of the former the subject matter is no set-off against the inferiority of the style. He deliberately attempts to go back to the obsolete diction of writers like Cato and Ennius. We find compounds like _altipendulus_, _nudiustertianus_, _tolutiloquentia_, diminutives such as _matercella_, _anulla_, _passercula_, _studiolum_, forms like _congarrire_, _disconcinnus_, _pedetemptius_, _desiderantissimus_ (passive), _conticinium_; _gaudeo_, _oboedio_ and _perfungor_ are used with an accusative, _modestus_ with a genitive. On the other hand he actually attempts to revive the form _asa_ for _ara_. In Apuleius the archaic element is only one element in the queer mixture which constitutes his style, and it probably was not intended to give the tone to the whole. Poetical and prosaic phrases, Graecisms, solecisms, jingling assonances, quotations and coinages apparently on the spur of the moment, all appear in this wonderful medley. There are found such extraordinary genitives as _sitire beatitudinis_, _cenae pignerarer_, _incoram omnium_, _foras corporis_, sometimes heaped one upon another as _fluxos vestium Arsacidas et frugum pauperes Ityraeos et odorum divites Arabas_. Diminutives are coined with reckless freedom, e.g. _diutule_, _longule_, _mundule amicta el altiuscule sub ipsas papillas succinctula_. He confesses himself that he is writing in a language not familiar to him: _In urbe Latia advena studiorum Quiritium indigenam sermonem aerumnabili labore, nullo magistro praeeunte, aggressus excolui_; and the general impression of his style fully bears out his confession. Melanchthon is hardly too severe when he says that Apuleius brays like his own ass. The language of Aulus Gellius is much superior in purity; but still it abounds in rare and archaic words, e.g. _edulcare_, _recentari_, _aeruscator_, and in meaningless frequentatives like _solitavisse_. He has some admirable remarks on the pedantry of those who delighted in obsolete expressions (xi. 7) such as _apluda_, _flocus_ and _bovinator_; but his practice falls far short of his theory.

72. _The Lawyers._--The style of the eminent lawyers of this period, foremost among whom is Gaius, deserves especial notice as showing well one of the characteristic excellences of the Latin language. It is for the most part dry and unadorned, and in syntax departs occasionally from classical usages, but it is clear, terse and exact. Technical terms may cause difficulty to the ordinary reader, but their meaning is always precisely defined; new compounds are employed whenever the subject requires them, but the capacities of the language rise to the demands made upon it; and the conceptions of jurisprudence have never been more adequately expressed than by the great Romanist jurists. (A. S. W.; R. S. C.)

For the subsequent history of the language see ROMANCE LANGUAGES.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The grounds for this pronunciation will be found best stated in
Postgate, _How to pronounce Latin_ (1907), Arnold and Conway, _The
Restored Pronunciation of Greek and Latin_ (4th ed., Cambridge,
1908); and in the grammars enumerated in § 28 above, especially the
preface to vol. i. of _Roby's Grammar_. The chief points about _c_
may be briefly given as a specimen of the kind of evidence. (1) In
some words the letter following c varies in a manner which makes it
impossible to believe that the pronunciation of the _c_ depended upon
this, e.g. _decumus_ and _decimus_, _dic_ from Plaut. _dice_; (2) if
_c_ was pronounced before _e_ and _i_ otherwise than before _a_, _o_
and _u_, it is hard to see why _k_ should not have been retained for
the latter use; (3) no ancient writer gives any hint of a varying
pronunciation of _c_; (4) a Greek [kappa] is always transliterated by
_c_, and _c_ by [kappa]; (5) Latin words containing _c_ borrowed by
Gothic and early High German are always spelt with _k_; (6) the
varying pronunciations of _ce_, _ci_ in the Romance languages are
inexplicable except as derived independently from an original _ke_,
_ki_.

[2] The inscription was first published by Helbig and Dümmler in
_Mittheilungen des deutschen archaol. Inst. Rom._ ii. 40; since in
_C.I.L._ xiv. 4123 and Conway, _Italic Dial._ 280, where other
references will be found.

[3] This inscription was first published by Dressel, _Annali dell'
Inst. Archeol. Romano_ (1880), p. 158, and since then by a multitude
of commentators. The view of the inscription as a curse, translating
a Greek cursing-formula, which has been generally adopted, was first
put forward by R. S. Conway in the _American Journal of Philology_,
x. (1889), 453; see further his commentary _Italic Dialects_, p. 329,
and since then G. Hempl, _Trans. Amer. Philol. Assoc._ xxxiii.
(1902), 150, whose interpretation of _iouesat = iurat_ and _Opetoi
Tesiai_ has been here adopted, and who gives other references.

[4] The most important writings upon it are those of Domenico
Comparetti, _Iscriz. arcaica del Foro Romano_ (Florence-Rome, 1900);
Hülsen, _Berl. philolog. Wochenschrift_ (1899), No. 40; and
Thurneysen, _Rheinisches Museum_ (Neue Folge), iii. 2. Prof. G.
Tropea gives a _Cronaca della discussione_ in a series of very useful
articles in the _Rivista di storia antica_ (Messina, 1900 and 1901).
Skutsch's article already cited puts the trustworthy results in an
exceedingly brief compass.

[5] For further information see special articles on these authors,
and LATIN LITERATURE.

[6] Cicero also refers to certain _scripta dulcissima_ of the son of
Scipio Africanus Maior, which must have possessed some merits of
style.

[7] The study of the rhythm of the _Clausulae_, i.e. of the last
dozen (or half-dozen) syllables of a period in different Latin
authors, has been remarkably developed in the last three years, and
is of the highest importance for the criticism of Latin prose. It is
only possible to refer to Th. Zielinski's _Das Clauselgesetz in
Cicero's Reden_ (St. Petersburg, 1904), reviewed by A. C. Clark in
_Classical Review_, 1905, p. 164, and to F. Skutsch's important
comments in Vollmöller's _Jahresberichten über die Fortschritte der
romanischen Philologie_ (1905) and _Glotta_ (i. 1908, esp. p. 413),
also to A. C. Clark's _Fontes Prosae Numerosae_ (Oxford, 1909), _The
Cursus in Mediaeval and Vulgar Latin_ (ibid. 1910), and article
CICERO.

LATIN LITERATURE. The germs of an indigenous literature had existed at an early period in Rome and in the country districts of Italy, and they have an importance as indicating natural wants in the Italian race, which were ultimately satisfied by regular literary forms. The art of writing was first employed in the service of the state and of religion for books of ritual, treaties with other states, the laws of the Twelve Tables and the like. An approach to literature was made in the _Annales Maximi_, records of private families, funeral orations and inscriptions on busts and tombs such as those of the Scipios in the Appian Way. In the satisfaction they afforded to the commemorative and patriotic instincts they anticipated an office afterwards performed by the national epics and the works of regular historians. A still nearer approach to literature was probably made in oratory, as we learn from Cicero that the famous speech delivered by Appius Claudius Caecus against concluding peace with Pyrrhus (280 B.C.) was extant in his time. Appius also published a collection of moral maxims and reflections in verse. No other name associated with any form of literature belonging to the pre-literary age has been preserved by tradition.

But it was rather in the chants and litanies of the ancient religion, such as those of the Salii and the Fratres Arvales, and the dirges for the dead (_neniae_), and in certain extemporaneous effusions, that some germs of a native poetry might have been detected; and finally in the use of Saturnian verse, a metre of pure native origin, which by its rapid and lively movement gave expression to the vivacity and quick apprehension of the Italian race. This metre was employed in ritual hymns, which seem to have assumed definite shapes out of the exclamations of a primitive priesthood engaged in a rude ceremonial dance. It was also used by a class of bards or itinerant soothsayers known by the name of _vates_, of whom the most famous was one Marcius, and in the "Fescennine verses," as sung at harvest-homes and weddings, which gave expression to the coarse gaiety of the people and to their strong tendency to personal raillery and satiric comment. The metre was also employed in commemorative poems, accompanied with music, which were sung at funeral banquets in celebration of the exploits and virtues of distinguished men. These had their origin in the same impulse which ultimately found its full gratification in Roman history, Roman epic poetry, and that form of Roman oratory known as _laudationes_, and in some of the _Odes_ of Horace. The latest and probably the most important of these rude and inchoate forms was that of dramatic _saturae_ (medleys), put together without any regular plot and consisting apparently of contests of wit and satiric invective, and perhaps of comments on current events, accompanied with music (Livy vii. 2). These have a real bearing on the subsequent development of Latin literature. They prepared the mind of the people for the reception of regular comedy. They may have contributed to the formation of the style of comedy which appears at the very outset much more mature than that of serious poetry, tragic or epic. They gave the name and some of the characteristics to that special literary product of the Roman soil, the _satura_, addressed to readers, not to spectators, which ultimately was developed into pure poetic satire in Lucilius, Horace, Persius and Juvenal, into the prose and verse miscellany of Varro, and into something approaching the prose novel in Petronius.

_First Period: from 240 to about 80 B.C._

Livius Andronicus.

The historical event which brought about the greatest change in the intellectual condition of the Romans, and thereby exercised a decisive influence on the whole course of human culture, was the capture of Tarentum in 272. After the capture many Greek slaves were brought to Rome, and among them the young Livius Andronicus (c. 284-204), who was employed in teaching Greek in the family of his master, a member of the Livian gens. From that time to learn Greek became a regular part of the education of a Roman noble. The capture of Tarentum was followed by the complete Romanizing of all southern Italy. Soon after came the first Punic war, the principal scene of which was Sicily, where, from common hostility to the Carthaginian, Greek and Roman were brought into friendly relations, and the Roman armies must have become familiar with the spectacles and performances of the Greek theatre. In the year after the war (240), when the armies had returned and the people were at leisure to enjoy the fruits of victory, Livius Andronicus substituted at one of the public festivals a regular drama, translated or adapted from the Greek, for the musical medleys (_saturae_) hitherto in use. From this time dramatic performances became a regular accompaniment of the public games, and came more and more to encroach on the older kinds of amusement, such as the chariot races. The dramatic work of Livius was mainly of educative value. The same may be said of his translation of the _Odyssey_, which was still used as a school-book in the days of Horace, and the religious hymn which he was called upon to compose in 207 had no high literary pretensions. He was, however, the first to familiarize the Romans with the forms of the Greek drama and the Greek epic, and thus to determine the main lines which Latin literature followed for more than a century afterwards.

Naevius.

His immediate successor, Cn. Naevius (d. c. 200 B.C.), was not, like Livius, a Greek, but either a Roman citizen or, more probably, a Campanian who enjoyed the limited citizenship of a Latin and who had served in the Roman army in the first Punic war. His first appearance as a dramatic author was in 235. He adapted both tragedies and comedies from the Greek, but the bent of his genius, the tastes of his audience, and the condition of the language developed through the active intercourse and business of life, gave a greater impulse to comedy than to tragedy. Naevius tried to use the theatre, as it had been used by the writers of the Old Comedy of Athens, for the purposes of political warfare, and thus seems to have anticipated by a century the part played by Lucilius. But his attacks upon the Roman aristocracy, especially the Metelli, were resented by their objects; and Naevius, after being imprisoned, had to retire in his old age into banishment. He was not only the first in point of time, and according to ancient testimony one of the first in point of merit, among the comic poets of Rome, and in spirit, though not in form, the earliest of the line of Roman satirists, but he was also the oldest of the national poets. Besides celebrating the success of M. Claudius Marcellus in 222 over the Gauls in a play called _Clastidium_, he gave the first specimen of the _fabula praetexta_ in his _Alimonium Romuli et Remi_, based on the most national of all Roman traditions. Still more important service was rendered by him in his long Saturnian poem on the first Punic war, in which he not only told the story of contemporary events but gave shape to the legend of the settlement of Aeneas in Latium,--the theme ultimately adopted for the great national epic of Rome.

Plautus.

His younger contemporary T. Maccius Plautus (c. 254-184) was the greatest comic dramatist of Rome. He lived and wrote only to amuse his contemporaries, and thus, although more popular in his lifetime and more fortunate than any of the older authors in the ultimate survival of a large number of his works, he is less than any of the great writers of Rome in sympathy with either the serious or the caustic spirit in Latin literature. Yet he is the one extant witness to the humour and vivacity of the Italian temperament at a stage between its early rudeness and rigidity and its subsequent degeneracy.

Ennius.

Thus far Latin literature, of which the predominant characteristics are dignity, gravity and fervour of feeling, seemed likely to become a mere vehicle of amusement adapted to all classes of the people in their holiday mood. But a new spirit, which henceforth became predominant, appeared in the time of Plautus. Latin literature ceased to be in close sympathy with the popular spirit, either politically or as a form of amusement, but became the expression of the ideas, sentiment and culture of the aristocratic governing class. It was by Q. Ennius (239-169) of Rudiae in Messapia, that a new direction was given to Latin literature. Deriving from his birthplace the culture, literary and philosophical, of Magna Graecia, and having gained the friendship of the greatest of the Romans living in that great age, he was of all the early writers most fitted to be the medium of conciliation between the serious genius of ancient Greece and the serious genius of Rome. Alone among the older writers he was endowed with the gifts of a poetical imagination and animated with enthusiasm for a great ideal.

First among his special services to Latin literature was the fresh impulse which he gave to tragedy. He turned the eyes of his contemporaries from the commonplace social humours of later Greek life to the contemplation of the heroic age. But he did not thereby denationalize the Roman drama. He animated the heroes of early Greece with the martial spirit of Roman soldiers and the ideal magnanimity and sagacity of Roman senators, and imparted weight and dignity to the language and verse in which their sentiments and thoughts were expressed. Although Rome wanted creative force to add a great series of tragic dramas to the literature of the world, yet the spirit of elevation and moral authority breathed into tragedy by Ennius passed into the ethical and didactic writings and the oratory of a later time.

Another work was the _Saturae_, written in various metres, but chiefly in the trochaic tetrameter. He thus became the inventor of a new form of literature; and, if in his hands the _satura_ was rude and indeterminate in its scope, it became a vehicle by which to address a reading public on matters of the day, or on the materials of his wide reading, in a style not far removed from the language of common life. His greatest work, which made the Romans regard him as the father of their literature, was his epic poem, in eighteen books, the _Annales_, in which the record of the whole career of Rome was unrolled with idealizing enthusiasm and realistic detail. The idea which inspired Ennius was ultimately realized in both the national epic of Virgil and the national history of Livy. And the metrical vehicle which he conceived as the only one adequate to his great theme was a rude experiment, which was ultimately developed into the stately Virgilian hexameter. Even as a grammarian he performed an important service to the literary language of Rome, by fixing its prosody and arresting the tendency to decay in its final syllables. Although of his writings only fragments remain, these fragments are enough, along with what we know of him from ancient testimony, to justify us in regarding him as the most important among the makers of Latin literature before the age of Cicero.

Cato.

There is still one other name belonging partly to this, partly to the next generation, to be added to those of the men of original force of mind and character who created Latin literature, that of M. Porcius Cato the Censor (234-149), the younger contemporary of Ennius, whom he brought to Rome. More than Naevius and Plautus he represented the pure native element in that literature, the mind and character of Latium, the plebeian pugnacity, which was one of the great forces in the Roman state. His lack of imagination and his narrow patriotism made him the natural leader of the reaction against the new Hellenic culture. He strove to make literature ancillary to politics and to objects of practical utility, and thus started prose literature on the chief lines that it afterwards followed. Through his industry and vigorous understanding he gave a great impulse to the creation of Roman oratory, history and systematic didactic writing. He was one of the first to publish his speeches and thus to bring them into the domain of literature. Cicero, who speaks of 150 of these speeches as extant in his day, praises them for their acuteness, their wit, their conciseness. He speaks with emphasis of the impressiveness of Cato's eulogy and the satiric bitterness of his invective.

Cato was the first historical writer of Rome to use his native tongue. His _Origines_, the work of his old age, was written with that thoroughly Roman conception of history which regarded actions and events solely as they affected the continuous and progressive life of a state. Cato felt that the record of Roman glory could not be isolated from the story of the other Italian communities, which, after fighting against Rome for their own independence, shared with her the task of conquering the world. To the wider national sympathies which stimulated the researches of the old censor into the legendary history of the Italian towns we owe some of the most truly national parts of Virgil's _Aeneid_.

Terence.

Lucilius.

In Naevius, Plautus, Ennius and Cato are represented the contending forces which strove for ascendancy in determining what was to be the character of the new literature. The work, begun by them, was carried on by younger contemporaries and successors; by Statius Caecilius (c. 220-168), an Insubrian Gaul, in comedy; in tragedy by M. Pacuvius (c. 220-132), the nephew of Ennius, called by Cicero the greatest of Roman tragedians; and, in the following generation, by L. Accius (c. 170-86), who was more usually placed in this position. The impulse given to oratory by Cato, Ser. Sulpicius Galba and others, and along with it the development of prose composition, went on with increased momentum till the age of Cicero. But the interval between the death of Ennius (169) and the beginning of Cicero's career, while one of progressive advance in the appreciation of literary form and style, was much less distinguished by original force than the time immediately before and after the end of the second Punic war. The one complete survival of the generation after the death of Ennius, the comedy of P. Terentius Afer or Terence (c. 185-159), exemplifies the gain in literary accomplishment and the loss in literary freedom. Terence has nothing Roman or Italian except his pure and idiomatic Latinity. His Athenian elegance affords the strongest contrast to the Italian rudeness of Cato's _De Re Rustica_. By looking at them together we understand how much the comedy of Terence was able to do to refine and humanize the manners of Rome, but at the same time what a solvent it was of the discipline and ideas of the old republic. What makes Terence an important witness of the culture of his time is that he wrote from the centre of the Scipionic circle, in which what was most humane and liberal in Roman statesmanship was combined with the appreciation of what was most vital in the Greek thought and literature of the time. The comedies of Terence may therefore be held to give some indication of the tastes of Scipio, Laelius and their friends in their youth. The influence of Panaetius and Polybius was more adapted to their maturity, when they led the state in war, statesmanship and oratory, and when the humaner teaching of Stoicism began to enlarge the sympathies of Roman jurists. But in the last years during which this circle kept together a new spirit appeared in Roman politics and a new power in Roman literature,--the revolutionary spirit evoked by the Gracchi in opposition to the long-continued ascendancy of the senate, and the new power of Roman satire, which was exercised impartially and unsparingly against both the excesses of the revolutionary spirit and the arrogance and incompetence of the extreme party among the nobles. Roman satire, though in form a legitimate development of the indigenous dramatic _satura_ through the written _satura_ of Ennius and Pacuvius, is really a birth of this time, and its author was the youngest of those admitted into the intimacy of the Scipionic circle, C. Lucilius of Suessa Aurunca (c. 180-103). Among the writers before the age of Cicero he alone deserves to be named with Naevius, Plautus Ennius and Cato as a great originative force in literature. For about thirty years the most important event in Roman literature was the production of the satires of Lucilius, in which the politics, morals, society and letters of the time were criticized with the utmost freedom and pungency, and his own personality was brought immediately and familiarly before his contemporaries. The years that intervened between his death and the beginning of the Ciceronian age are singularly barren in works of original value. But in one direction there was some novelty. The tragic writers had occasionally taken their subjects from Roman life (_fabulae praetextae_), and in comedy we find the corresponding _togatae_ of Lucius Afranius and others, in which comedy, while assuming a Roman dress, did not assume the virtue of a Roman matron.

General results from 130 to 80.

The general results of the last fifty years of the first period (130 to 80) may be thus summed up. In poetry we have the satires of Lucilius, the tragedies of Accius and of a few successors among the Roman aristocracy, who thus exemplified the affinity of the Roman stage to Roman oratory; various annalistic poems intended to serve as continuations of the great poem of Ennius; minor poems of an epigrammatic and erotic character, unimportant anticipations of the Alexandrian tendency operative in the following period; works of criticism in trochaic tetrameters by Porcius Licinus and others, forming part of the critical and grammatical movement which almost from the first accompanied the creative movement in Latin literature, and which may be regarded as rude precursors of the didactic epistles that Horace devoted to literary criticism.

Oratory.

The only extant prose work which may be assigned to the end of this period is the treatise on rhetoric known by the title _Ad Herennium_ (c. 84) a work indicative of the attention bestowed on prose style and rhetorical studies during the last century of the republic, and which may be regarded as a precursor of the oratorical treatises of Cicero and of the work of Quintilian. But the great literary product of this period was oratory, developed indeed with the aid of these rhetorical studies, but itself the immediate outcome of the imperial interests, the legal conflicts, and the political passions of that time of agitation. The speakers and writers of a later age looked back on Scipio and Laelius, the Gracchi and their contemporaries, L. Crassus and M. Antonius, as masters of their art.

History.

In history, regarded as a great branch of prose literature, it is not probable that much was accomplished, although, with the advance of oratory and grammatical studies, there must have been not only greater fluency of composition but the beginning of a richer and more ornate style. Yet Cicero denies to Rome the existence, before his own time, of any adequate historical literature. Nevertheless it was by the work of a number of Roman chroniclers during this period that the materials of early Roman history were systematized, and the record of the state, as it was finally given to the world in the artistic work of Livy, was extracted from the early annals, state documents and private memorials, combined into a coherent unity, and supplemented by invention and reflection. Amongst these chroniclers may be mentioned L. Calpurnius Piso Frugi (consul 133, censor 108), C. Sempronius Tuditanus (consul 129), Cn. Gellius, C. Fannius (consul 122), L. Coelius Antipater, who wrote a narrative of the second Punic war about 120, and Sempronius Asellio, who wrote a history of his own times, have a better claim to be considered historians. There were also special works on antiquities and contemporary memoirs, and autobiographies such as those of M. Aemilius Scaurus, the elder, Q. Lutatius Catulus (consul 102 B.C.), and P. Rutilius Rufus, which formed the sources of future historians. (See further ANNALES; and ROME: _History_, _Ancient_, § "Authorities.")

Summary of the period.

Although the artistic product of the first period of Latin literature which has reached us in a complete shape is limited to the comedies of Plautus and Terence, the influence of the lost literature in determining the spirit, form and style of the eras of more perfect accomplishment which followed is unmistakable. While humour and vivacity characterize the earlier, and urbanity of tone the later development of comedy, the tendency of serious literature had been in the main practical, ethical, commemorative and satirical. The higher poetical imagination had appeared only in Ennius, and had been called forth in him by sympathy with the grandeur of the national life and the great personal qualities of its representative men. Some of the chief motives of the later poetry, e.g. the pleasures and sorrows of private life, had as yet found scarcely any expression in Latin literature. The fittest metrical vehicle for epic, didactic, and satiric poetry had been discovered, but its movement was as yet rude and inharmonious. The idiom of ordinary life and social intercourse and the more fervid and elevated diction of oratorical prose had made great progress, but the language of imagination and poetical feeling was, if vivid and impressive in isolated expressions, still incapable of being wrought into consecutive passages of artistic composition. The influences of Greek literature to which Latin literature owed its birth had not as yet spread beyond Rome and Latium. The Sabellian races of central and eastern Italy and the Italo-Celtic and Venetian races of the north, in whom the poetic susceptibility of Italy was most manifest two generations later, were not, until after the Social war, sufficiently in sympathy with Rome, and were probably not as yet sufficiently educated to induce them to contribute their share to the national literature. Hence the end of the Social war, and of the Civil war, which arose out of it, is most clearly a determining factor in Roman literature, and may most appropriately be taken as marking the end of one period and the beginning of another.

_Second Period: from 80 to 42 B.C._

The last age of the republic coincides with the first half of the Golden age of Roman literature. It is generally known as the Ciceronian age from the name of its greatest literary representative, whose activity as a speaker and writer was unremitting during nearly the whole period. It is the age of purest excellence in prose, and of a new birth of poetry, characterized rather by great original force and artistic promise than by perfect accomplishment. The five chief representatives of this age who still hold their rank among the great classical writers are Cicero, Caesar and Sallust in prose, Lucretius and Catullus in verse. The works of other prose writers, Varro and Cornelius Nepos, have been partially preserved; but these writers have no claim to rank with those already mentioned as creators and masters of literary style. Although literature had not as yet become a trade or profession, an educated reading public already existed, and books and intellectual intercourse filled a large part of the leisure of men actively engaged in affairs. Even oratory was intended quite as much for readers as for the audiences to which it was immediately addressed; and some of the greatest speeches which have come down from that great age of orators were never delivered at all, but were published as manifestoes after the event with the view of influencing educated opinion, and as works of art with the view of giving pleasure to educated taste.

Cicero.

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.