Chapter I: The Rome of Nero (2)

The only work of Cato's which has been preserved in its integrity is that variously known under the titles _De Re Rustica_ or _De Agri Cultura_. It is one of a number of treatises of a severely didactic nature, which he published on various subjects--agricultural, sanitary, military, and legal. This treatise was primarily written for a friend who owned and cultivated farms in Campania. It consists of a series of terse and pointed directions following one on another, with no attempt at style or literary artifice, but full of a hard sagacity, and with occasional flashes of dry humour, which suggest that Cato would have found a not wholly uncongenial spirit in President Lincoln. A brief extract from one of the earlier chapters is not without interest, both as showing the practical Latin style, and as giving the prose groundwork of Virgil's stately and beautiful embroidery in the _Georgics_.

_Opera omnia mature conficias face. Nam res rustica sic est; si unam rem sero feceris, omnia opera sero facies. Stramenta si deerunt frondem iligneam legito; earn substernito ovibus bubusque. Sterquilinium magnum stude ut habeas. Stercus sedulo conserva, cum exportabis spargito et comminuito; per autumnum evehito. Circum oleas autumnitate ablaqueato et stercus addito. Frondem populneam, ulmeam, querneam caedito, per tempus eam condito, non peraridam, pabulum ovibus. Item foenum cordum, sicilimenta de prato; ea arida condito. Post imbrem autumni rapinam, pabulum, lupinumque serito._

To the Virgilian student, every sentence here is full of reminiscences.

In his partial yielding, towards the end of a long and uncompromising life, to the rising tide of Greek influence, Cato was probably moved to a large degree by his personal admiration for the younger Scipio, whom he hailed as the single great personality among younger statesmen, and to whom he paid (strangely enough, in a line quoted from Homer) what is probably the most splendid compliment ever paid by one statesman to another. Scipio was the centre of a school which included nearly the whole literary impulse of his time. He was himself a distinguished orator and a fine scholar; after the conquest of Perseus, the royal library was the share of the spoils of Macedonia which he chose for himself, and bequeathed to his family. His celebrated friend, Gaius Laelius, known in Rome as "the Wise," was not only an orator, but a philosopher, or deeply read, at all events, in the philosophy of Greece. Another member of the circle, Lucius Furius Philus, initiated that connection of Roman law with the Stoic philosophy which continued ever after to be so intimate and so far-reaching. In this circle, too, Roman history began to be written in Latin. Cassius Hemina and Lucius Calpurnius Piso have been already mentioned; more intimately connected with Scipio are Gaius Fannius, the son-in-law of Laelius, and Lucius Caelius Antipater, who reached, both in lucid and copious diction and in impartiality and research, a higher level than Roman history had yet attained. Literary culture became part of the ordinary equipment of a statesman; a crowd of Greek teachers, foremost among them the eminent philosopher, afterwards Master of the Portico, Panaetius of Rhodes, spread among the Roman upper classes the refining and illuminating influence of Greek ideas and Attic style.

Meanwhile, in this Scipionic circle, a new figure had appeared of great originality and force, the founder of a kind of literature which, with justifiable pride, the Romans claimed as wholly native and original. Gaius Lucilius was a member of a wealthy equestrian family, and thus could associate on equal terms with the aristocracy, while he was removed from the necessity, which members of the great senatorian houses could hardly avoid, of giving the best of their time and strength to political and administrative duties. After Terence, he is the most distinguished and the most important in his literary influence among the friends of Scipio. The form of literature which he invented and popularised, that of familiar poetry, was one which proved singularly suited to the Latin genius. He speaks of his own works under the name of _Sermones_, "talks" --a name which was retained by his great successor, Horace; but the peculiar combination of metrical form with wide range of subject and the pedestrian style of ordinary prose, received in popular usage the name _Satura_, or "mixture." The word had, in earlier times, been used of the irregular stage performances, including songs, stories, and semi-dramatic interludes, which formed the repertory of strolling artists at popular festivals. The extension of the name to the verse of Lucilius indicates that written literature was now rising to equal importance and popularity with the spoken word.

Horace comments, not without severity, on the profuse and careless production of Lucilius. Of the thirty books of his _Satires_, few fragments of any length survive; much, probably the greater part of them, would, if extant, long have lost its interest. But the loss of the bulk of his work is matter of sincere regret, because it undoubtedly gave a vivid and detailed picture of the social life and the current interests of the time, such as the _Satires_ of Horace give of Rome in the Augustan age. His criticisms on the public men of his day were outspoken and unsparing; nor had he more reverence for established reputations in poetry than in public life. A great deal of his work consisted in descriptions of eating and drinking; much, also, in lively accounts of his own travels and adventures, or those of his friends. One book of the _Satires_ was occupied with an account of Scipio's famous mission to the East, in which he visited the courts of Egypt and Asia, attended by a retinue of only five servants, but armed with the full power of the terrible Republic. Another, imitated by Horace in his story of the journey to Brundusium, detailed the petty adventures, the talk and laughter by roads and at inns, of an excursion of his own through Campania and Bruttium to the Sicilian straits. Many of the fragments deal with the literary controversies of the time, going down even to the minutiae of spelling and grammar; many more show the beginnings of that translation into the language of common life of the precepts of the Greek schools, which was consummated for the world by the poets and prose-writers of the following century. But, above all, the _Satires_ of Lucilius were in the fullest sense of the word an autobiography. The famous description of Horace, made yet more famous for English readers by the exquisite aptness with which Boswell placed it on the title-page of his _Life of Johnson_--

_Quo fit ut omnis
Votiva pateat veluti descripta tabella
Vita senis--_

expresses the true greatness of Lucilius. He invented a literary method which, without being great, yields to no other in interest and even in charm, and which, for its perfection, requires a rare and refined genius. Not Horace only, nor all the satirists after Horace, but Montaigne and Pepys also, belong to the school of Lucilius.

Such was the circle of the younger Scipio, formed in the happy years--as they seemed to the backward gaze of the succeeding generation--between the establishment of Roman supremacy at the battle of Pydna, and the revolutionary movement of Tiberius Gracchus. Fifty years of stormy turbulence followed, culminating in the Social War and the reign of terror under Marius and Cinna, and finally stilled in seas of blood by the counter-revolution of Sulla. This is the period which separates the Scipionic from the Ciceronian age. It was naturally, except in the single province of political oratory, not one of great literary fertility; and a brief indication of the most notable authors of the period, and of the lines on which Roman literature mainly continued to advance during it, is all that is demanded or possible here.

In oratory, this period by general consent represented the golden age of Latin achievement. The eloquence of both the Gracchi was their great political weapon; that of Gaius was the most powerful in exciting feeling that had ever been known; and his death was mourned, even by fierce political opponents, as a heavy loss to Latin literature. But in the next generation, the literary perfection of oratory was carried to an even higher point by Marcus Antonius and Lucius Licinius Crassus. Both attained the highest honours that the Republic had to bestow. By a happy chance, their styles were exactly complementary to one another; to hear both in one day was the highest intellectual entertainment which Rome afforded. By this time the rules of oratory were carefully studied and reduced to scientific treatises. One of these, the _Rhetorica ad Herennium_, is still extant. It was almost certainly written by one Quintus Cornificius, an older contemporary of Cicero, to whom the work was long ascribed. It, no doubt, owes its preservation to this erroneous tradition. The first two books were largely used by Cicero in his own treatise _De Inventione_, part of a work on the principles of rhetoric which he began in early youth.

Latin history during this period made considerable progress. It was a common practice among statesmen to write memoirs of their own life and times; among others of less note, Sulla the dictator left at his death twenty-two books of _Commentarii Rerum Gestarum_, which were afterwards published by his secretary. In regular history the most important name is that of Quintus Claudius Quadrigarius. His work differed from those of the earlier annalists in passing over the legendary period, and beginning with the earliest authentic documents; in research and critical judgment it reached a point only excelled by Sallust. His style was formed on that of older annalists, and is therefore somewhat archaic for the period, Considerable fragments, including the well-known description of the single combat in 361 B.C. between Titus Manlius Torquatus and the Gallic chief, survive in quotations by Aulus Gellius and the archaists of the later Empire. More voluminous but less valuable than the _Annals_ of Claudius were those of his contemporary, Valerius Antias, which formed the main groundwork for the earlier books of Livy, and were largely used by him even for later periods, when more trustworthy authorities were available. Other historians of this period, Sisenna and Macer, soon fell into neglect--the former as too archaic, the latter as too diffuse and rhetorical, for literary permanence.

Somewhat apart from the historical writers stand the antiquarians, who wrote during this period in large numbers, and whose treatises filled the library from which, in the age of Cicero, Varro compiled his monumental works. As numerous probably were the writers of the school of Cato, on husbandry, domestic economy, and other practical subjects, and the grammarians and philologists, whose works formed two other large sections in Varro's library. On all sides prose was full of life and growth; the complete literary perfection of the age of Cicero, Caesar, and Sallust might already be foreseen as within the grasp of the near future.

Latin poetry, meanwhile, hung in the balance. The first great wave of the Greek impulse had exhausted itself in Ennius and the later tragedians. Prose had so developed that the poetical form was no longer a necessity for the expression of ideas, as it had been in the palmy days of Latin tragedy. The poetry of the future must be, so to speak, poetry for its own sake, until some new tradition were formed which should make certain metrical forms once more the recognised and traditional vehicle for certain kinds of literary expression. In the blank of poetry we may note a translation of the _Iliad_ into hexameters by one Gnaeus Matius, and the earliest known attempts at imitation of the forms of Greek lyrical verse by an equally obscure Laevius Melissus, as dim premonitions of the new growth which Latin poetry was feeling after; but neither these, nor the literary tragedies which still were occasionally produced by a survival of the fashions of an earlier age, are of any account for their own sake. Prose and poetry stood at the two opposite poles of their cycle; and thus it is that, while the poets and prose-writers of the Ciceronian age are equally imperishable in fame, the latter but represent the culmination of a broad and harmonious development, while of the former, amidst but apart from the beginnings of a new literary era, there shine, splendid like stars out of the darkness, the two immortal lights of Lucretius and Catullus.

IV.

LUCRETIUS.

The age of Cicero, a term familiar to all readers as indicating one of the culminating periods of literary history, while its central and later years are accurately fixed, may be dated in its commencement from varying limits. Cicero was born in 106 B.C., the year of the final conquest of Jugurtha, and the year before the terrible Cimbrian disaster at Orange: he perished in the proscription of the triumvirate in December, 43 B.C. His first appearance in public life was during the dictatorship of Sulla; and either from this date, or from one ten years later when the Sullan constitution was re-established in a modified form by Pompeius and Crassus in their first consulate, the Ciceronian age extends over a space which approximates in the one case to thirty, in the other to forty years. No period in ancient, and few even in more modern history are so pregnant with interest or so fully and intimately known. From the comparative obscurity of the earlier age we pass into a full blaze of daylight. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the Rome of Cicero is as familiar to modern English readers as the London of Queen Anne, to readers in modern France as the Paris of Louis Quatorze. We can still follow with unabated interest the daily fluctuations of its politics, the current gossip and scandal of its society, the passing fashions of domestic life as revealed in private correspondence or the disclosures of the law courts. Yet in the very centre of this brilliantly lighted world, one of its most remarkable figures is veiled in almost complete darkness. The poem of Lucretius, _On the Nature of Things_, though it not only revealed a profound and extraordinary genius, but marked an entirely new technical level in Latin poetry, stole into the world all but unnoticed; and of its author's life, though a pure Roman of one of the great governing families, only one or two doubtful and isolated facts could be recovered by the curiosity of later commentators. The single sentence in St. Jerome's _Chronicle_ which practically sums up the whole of our information runs as follows, under the year 94 B.C:--

_Titus Lucretius poeta nascitur, posted amatorio poculo in furorem versus cum aliquot libros per intervalla insaniae conscripsisset quos postea Cicero emendavit, propria se manu interfecit anno aetatis xliiii._

Brief and straightforward as the sentence is, every clause in it has given rise to volumes of controversy. Was Lucretius born in the year named, or is another tradition correct, which, connecting his death with a particular event in the youth of Virgil, makes him either be born a few years earlier or die a few years younger? Did he ever, whether from a poisonous philtre or otherwise, lose his reason? and can a poem which ranks among the great masterpieces of genius have been built up into its stately fabric--for this is not a question of brief lyrics like those of Smart or Cowper--in the lucid intervals of insanity? Did Cicero have anything to do with the editing of the unfinished poem? If so, which Cicero--Marcus or Quintus? and why, in either case, is there no record of the fact in their correspondence, or in any writing of the period? All these questions are probably insoluble, and the notice of Jerome leaves the whole life and personality of the poet still completely hidden. Yet we have little or nothing else to go upon. There is a brief and casual allusion to him in one of Cicero's letters of the year 54 B.C.: yet it speaks of "poems," not the single great poem which we know; and most editors agree that the text of the passage is corrupt, and must be amended by the insertion of a _non_, though they differ on the important detail of the particular clause in which it should be inserted. That the earlier Augustan poets should leave their great predecessor completely unnoticed is less remarkable, for it may be taken as merely a part of that curious conspiracy of silence regarding the writers of the Ciceronian age which, whether under political pressure or not, they all adopted. Even Ovid, never ungenerous though not always discriminating in his praise, dismisses him in a list of Latin poets with a single couplet of vague eulogy. In the reactionary circles of the Empire, Lucretius found recognition; but the critics who, according to Tacitus, ranked him above Virgil may be reasonably suspected of doing so more from caprice than from rational conviction. Had the poem itself perished (and all the extant manuscripts are copies of a single original), no one would have thought that such a preference could be anything but a piece of antiquarian pedantry, like the revival, in the same period, of the plays of the early tragedians. But the fortunate and slender chance which has preserved it shows that their opinion, whether right or wrong, is one which at all events is neither absurd nor unarguable. For in the _De Rerum Natura_ we are brought face to face not only with an extraordinary literary achievement, but with a mind whose profound and brilliant genius has only of late years, and with the modern advance of physical and historical science, been adequately recognised.

The earliest Greek impulse in Latin poetry had long been exhausted; and the fashion among the new generation was to admire and study beyond all else the Greek poets of the decadence, who are generally, and without any substantial injustice, lumped together by the name of the Alexandrian school. The common quality in all this poetry was its great learning, and its remoteness from nature. It was poetry written in a library; it viewed the world through a highly coloured medium of literary and artistic tradition. The laborious perfectness of execution which the taste of the time demanded was, as a rule, lavished on little subjects, patient carvings in ivory. One side of the Alexandrian school which was largely followed was that of the didactic poets--Aratus, Nicander, Euphorion, and a host of others less celebrated. Cicero, in mature life, speaks with some contempt of the taste for Euphorion among his contemporaries. But he had himself, as a young man, followed the fashion, and translated the _Phaenomena_ of Aratus into wonderfully polished and melodious hexameter verse.

Not unaffected by this fashion of the day, but turning from it to older and nobler models--Homer and Empedocles in Greek, Ennius in Latin-- Lucretius conceived the imposing scheme of a didactic poem dealing with the whole field of life and nature as interpreted by the Epicurean philosophy. He lived to carry out his work almost to completion. It here and there wants the final touches of arrangement; one or two discussions are promised and not given; some paragraphs are repeated, and others have not been worked into their proper place; but substantially, as in the case of the _Aeneid_, we have the complete poem before us, and know perfectly within what limits it might have been altered or improved by fuller revision.

As pure literature, the _Nature of Things_ has all the defects inseparable from a didactic poem, that unstable combination of discordant elements, and from a poem which is not only didactic, but argumentative, and in parts highly controversial. Nor are these difficulties in the least degree evaded or smoothed over by the poet. As a teacher, he is in deadly earnest; as a controversialist, his first object is to refute and convince. The graces of poetry are never for a moment allowed to interfere with the full development of an argument. Much of the poem is a chain of intricate reasoning hammered into verse by sheer force of hand. The ardent imagination of the poet struggles through masses of intractable material which no genius could wholly fuse into a metal pure enough to take perfect form. His language, in the fine prologue to the fourth book of the poem, shows his attitude towards his art very clearly.

_Avia Pieridum peragro loca nullius ante
Trita solo; iuvat integros accedere fontes
Atque haurire, iuvatque novos decerpere flores
Insignemque meo capiti petere inde coronam
Unde prius milli velarint tempora Musae:
Primum quod magnis doceo de rebus, et artis
Religionum animum nodis exsolvere pergo,
Deinde quod obscura de re tam lucida pango
Carmina, musaeo contingens cuncta lepore._

The joy and glory of his art come second in his mind to his passionate love of truth, and the deep moral purport of what he believes to be the one true message for mankind. The human race lies fettered by superstition and ignorance; his mission is to dispel their darkness by that light of truth which is "clearer than the beams of the sun or the shining shafts of day." Spinoza has been called, in a bold figure, "a man drunk with God;" the contemplation of the "nature of things," the physical structure of the universe, and the living and all but impersonate law which forms and sustains it, has the same intoxicating influence over Lucretius. God and man are alike to him bubbles on the ceaseless stream of existence; yet they do not therefore, as they have so often done in other philosophies, fade away to a spectral thinness. His contemplation of existence is no brooding over abstractions; Nature is not in his view the majestic and silent figure before whose unchanging eyes the shifting shadow-shapes go and come; but an essential life, manifesting itself in a million workings, _creatrix, gubernans, daedala rerum_. The universe is filled through all its illimitable spaces by the roar of her working, the ceaseless unexhausted energy with which she alternates life and death.

To our own age the Epicurean philosophy has a double interest. Not only was it a philosophy of life and conduct, but, in the effort to place life and conduct under ascertainable physical laws, it was led to frame an extremely detailed and ingenious body of natural philosophy, which, partly from being based on really sound postulates, partly from a happy instinct in connecting phenomena, still remains interesting and valuable. To the Epicureans, indeed, as to all ancient thinkers, the scientific method as it is now understood was unknown; and a series of unverified generalizations, however brilliant and acute, is not the true way towards knowledge. But it still remains an astonishing fact that many of the most important physical discoveries of modern times are hinted at or even expressly stated by Lucretius. The general outlines of the atomic doctrine have long been accepted as in the main true; in all important features it is superior to any other physical theory of the universe which existed up to the seventeenth century. In his theory of light Lucretius was in advance of Newton. In his theory of chemical affinities (for he describes the thing though the nomenclature was unknown to him) he was in advance of Lavoisier. In his theory of the ultimate constitution of the atom he is in striking agreement with the views of the ablest living physicists. The essential function of science--to reduce apparently disparate phenomena to the expressions of a single law --is not with him the object of a moment's doubt or uncertainty.

Towards real progress in knowledge two things are alike indispensable: a true scientific method, and imaginative insight. The former is, in the main, a creation of the modern world, nor was Lucretius here in advance of his age. But in the latter quality he is unsurpassed, if not unequalled. Perhaps this is even clearer in another field of science, that which has within the last generation risen to such immense proportions under the name of anthropology. Thirty years ago it was the first and second books of the _De Rerum Natura_ which excited the greatest enthusiasm in the scientific world. Now that the atomic theory has passed into the rank of received doctrines, the brilliant sketch, given in the fifth book, of the beginnings of life upon the earth, the evolution of man and the progress of human society, is the portion of the poem in which his scientific imagination is displayed most astonishingly. A Roman aristocrat, living among a highly cultivated society, Lucretius had been yet endowed by nature with the primitive instincts of the savage. He sees the ordinary processes of everyday life--weaving, carpentry, metal-working, even such specialised forms of manual art as the polishing of the surface of marble--with the fresh eye of one who sees them all for the first time. Nothing is to him indistinct through familiarity. In virtue of this absolute clearness of vision it costs him no effort to throw himself back into prehistoric conditions and the wild life of the earliest men. Even further than this he can pierce the dim recesses of the past. Before his imagination the earth rises swathed in tropical forests, and all strange forms of life issuing and jostling one another for existence in the steaming warmth of perpetual summer. Among a thousand types that flowered and fell, the feeble form of primitive man is distinguished, without fire, without clothing, without articulate speech. Through the midnight of the woods, shivering at the cries of the stealthy-footed prowlers of the darkness, he crouches huddled in fallen leaves, waiting for the rose of dawn. Little by little the prospect clears round him. The branches of great trees, grinding one against another in the windy forest, break into a strange red flower; he gathers it and hoards it in his cave. There, when wind and rain beat without, the hearth-fire burns through the winter, and round it gathers that other marvellous invention of which the hearth-fire became the mysterious symbol, the family. From this point the race is on the full current of progress, of which the remainder of the book gives an account as essentially true as it is incomparably brilliant. If we consider how little Lucretius had to go upon in this reconstruction of lost history, his imaginative insight seems almost miraculous. Even for the later stages of human progress he had to rely mainly on the eye which saw deep below the surface into the elementary structure of civilisation. There was no savage life within the scope of his actual observation. Books wavered between traditions of an impossible golden age and fragments of primitive legend which were then quite unintelligible, and are only now giving up their secret under a rigorous analysis. Further back, and beyond the rude civilisation of the earlier races of Greece and Italy, data wholly failed. We have supplemented, but hardly given more life to, his picture of the first beginnings, by evidence drawn from a thousand sources then unknown or unexplored--from coal-measures and mud-deposits, Pictish barrows and lacustrine middensteads, remote tribes of hidden Africa and islands of the Pacific Sea.

Such are the characteristics which, to one or another epoch of modern times, give the poem of Lucretius so unique an interest. But for these as for all ages, its permanent value must lie mainly in more universal qualities. History and physical science alike are in all poetry ancillary to ideas. It is in his moral temper, his profound insight into life, that Lucretius is greatest; and it is when dealing with moral ideas that his poetry rises to its utmost height. The Epicurean philosophy, in his hands, takes all the moral fervour of a religion. The depth of his religious instinct may be measured by the passion of his antagonism to what he regarded as superstition. Human life in his eyes was made wretched, mean, and cruel by one great cause--the fear of death and of what happens after it. That death is not to be feared, that nothing happens after it, is the keystone of his whole system. It is after an accumulation of seventeen proofs, hurled one upon another at the reader, of the mortality of the soul, that, letting himself loose at the highest emotional and imaginative tension, he breaks into that wonderful passage, which Virgil himself never equalled, and which in its lofty passion, its piercing tenderness, the stately roll of its cadences, is perhaps unmatched in human speech.

_"Iam iam non domus accipiet te Iaeta, neque uxor
Optima, nee dulces occurrent oscula nati
Praeripere et tacita pectus dulcedine tangent:
Non poteris factis florentibus esse, tuisque
Praesidium: misero misere" aiunt, "omnia ademit
Una dies infesta tibi tot praemia vitae...."_

"'Now no more shall a glad home and a true wife welcome thee, nor darling children race to snatch thy first kisses and touch thy heart with a sweet and silent content; no more mayest thou be prosperous in thy doings and a defence to thine own: alas and woe!' say they, 'one disastrous day has taken all these prizes of thy life away from thee'--but thereat they do not add this, 'and now no more does any longing for these things beset thee.' This did their thought but clearly see and their speech follow, they would release themselves from great heartache and fear. 'Thou, indeed, as thou art sunk in the sleep of death, wilt so be for the rest of the ages, severed from all weary pains; but we, while close by us thou didst turn ashen on the awful pyre, made unappeasable lamentation, and everlastingly shall time never rid our heart of anguish.' Ask we then this of him, what there is that is so very bitter, if sleep and peace be the conclusion of the matter, to make one fade away in never-ending grief?

"Thus also men often do when, set at the feast, they hold their cups and shade their faces with garlands, saying sadly, 'Brief is this joy for wretched men; soon will it have been, and none may ever after recall it!' as if this were to be first and foremost of the ills of death, that thirst and dry burning should waste them miserably, or desire after anything else beset them. For not even then does any one miss himself and his life when soul and body together are deep asleep and at rest; for all we care, such slumber might go on for ever, nor does any longing after ourselves touch us then, though then those first beginnings through our body swerve away but a very little from the movements that bring back the senses when the man starts up and gathers himself out of sleep. Far less, therefore, must we think death concerns us, if less than nothing there can be; for a greater sundering in the mass of matter follows upon death, nor does any one awake and stand, whom the cold stoppage of death once has overtaken.

"Yet again, were the Nature of things suddenly to utter a voice, and thus with her own lips upbraid one of us, 'What ails thee so, O mortal, to let thyself loose in too feeble grievings? why weep and wail at death? for if thy past life and overspent has been sweet to thee, and all the good thereof has not, as if poured into a pierced vessel, run through and joylessly perished, why dost thou not retire like a banqueter filled with life, and calmly, O fool, take thy peaceful sleep? But if all thou hast had is perished and spilt, and thy life is hateful, why seekest thou yet to add more which shall once again all perish and fall joylessly away? why not rather make an end of life and labour? for there is nothing more that I can contrive and invent for thy delight; all things are the same for ever. Even were thy body not yet withered, nor thy limbs weary and worn, yet all things remain the same, didst thou go on to live all the generations down, nay, even more, wert thou never doomed to die'--what do we answer?"

It is in passages of which the two hundred lines beginning thus are the noblest instance, passages of profound and majestic broodings over life and death, that the long rolling weight of the Lucretian hexameter tells with its full force. For the golden cadence of poesy we have to wait till Virgil; but the strain that Lucretius breathes through bronze is statelier and more sonorous than any other in the stately and sonorous Roman speech. Like Naevius a century and a half before, he might have left the proud and pathetic saying on his tomb that, after he was dead, men forgot to speak Latin in Rome. He stands side by side with Julius Caesar in the perfect purity of his language. The writing of the next age, whether prose or verse, gathered richness and beauty from alien sources; if the poem of Lucretius had no other merit, it would be a priceless document as a model of the purest Latin idiom in the precise age of its perfection. It follows from this that in certain points of technique Lucretius kept behind his age, or rather, deliberately held aloof from the movement of his age towards a more intricate and elaborate art. The wave of Alexandrianism only touched him distantly; he takes up the Ennian tradition where Ennius had left it, and puts into it the immensely increased faculty of trained expression which a century of continuous literary practice, and his own admirably clear and quick intelligence, enable him to supply. The only Greek poets mentioned by him are Homer and Empedocles. His remoteness from the main current of contemporary literature is curiously parallel to that of Milton. The Epicurean philosophy was at this time, as it never was either earlier or later, the predominant creed among the ruling class at Rome: but except in so far as its shallower aspects gave the motive for light verse, it was as remote from poetry as the Puritan theology of the seventeenth century. In both cases a single poet of immense genius was also deeply penetrated with the spirit of a creed. In both cases his poetical affinity was with the poets of an earlier day, and his poetical manner something absolutely peculiar to himself. Both of them under this strangely mixed impulse set themselves to embody their creed in a great work of art. But the art did not appeal strongly to sectaries, nor the creed to artists. The _De Rerum Natura_ and the _Paradise Lost_, while they exercised a profound influence over later poets, came silently into the world, and seem to have passed over the heads of their immediate contemporaries. There is yet another point of curious resemblance between them. Every student of Milton knows that the only English poet from whom he systematically borrowed matter and phrase was a second-rate translator of a second-rate original, who now would be almost forgotten but for the use Milton made of him. For one imitation of Spenser or Shakespeare in the _Paradise Lost_ it would be easy to adduce ten--not mere coincidences of matter, but direct transferences--of Sylvester's Du Bartas. While Lucretius was a boy, Cicero published the version in Latin hexameters of the _Phaenomena_ and _Prognostica_ of Aratus to which reference has already been made. These poems consist of only between eleven and twelve hundred lines in all, but had, in the later Alexandrian period, a reputation (like that of the _Sepmaine_ of Du Bartas) far in excess of their real merit, and were among the most powerful influences in founding the new style. The many imitations in Lucretius of the extant fragments of these Ciceronian versions show that he must have studied their vocabulary and versification with minute care. The increased technical possibilities shown by them to exist in the Latin hexameter--for in them, as in nearly all his permanent work, Cicero was mastering the problem of making his own language an adequate vehicle of sustained expression--may even have been the determining influence that made Lucretius adopt this poetical form. Till then it may have been just possible that native metrical forms might still reassert themselves. Inscriptions of the last century of the Republic show that the saturnian still lingered in use side by side with the rude popular hexameters which were gradually displacing it; and the _Punic War_ of Naevius was still a classic. Lucretius' choice of the hexameter, and his definite conquest of it as a medium of the richest and most varied expression, placed the matter beyond recall. The technical imperfections which remained in it were now reduced within a visible compass; its power to convey sustained argument, to express the most delicate shades of meaning, to adjust itself to the greatest heights and the subtlest tones of emotion, was already acquired when Lucretius handed it on to Virgil. And here, too, as well as in the wide field of literature with which his fame is more intimately connected, from the actual impulse given by his own early work and heightened by admiration of his brilliant maturity, even more than from the dubious tradition of his critical revision of the poem, the glory of the Ciceronian age is in close relation to the personal genius of Cicero.

V.

LYRIC POETRY: CATULLUS.

Contemporary with Lucretius, but, unlike him, living in the full whirl and glare of Roman life, was a group of young men who were professed followers of the Alexandrian school. In the thirty years which separate the Civil war and the Sullan restoration from the sombre period that opened with the outbreak of hostilities between Caesar and the senate, social life at Rome among the upper classes was unusually interesting and exciting. The outward polish of Greek civilisation was for the first time fully mastered, and an intelligent interest in art and literature was the fashion of good society. The "young man about town," whom we find later fully developed in the poetry of Ovid, sprang into existence, but as the government was still in the hands of the aristocracy, fashion and politics were intimately intermingled, and the lighter literature of the day touched grave issues on every side. The poems of Catullus are full of references to his friends and his enemies among this group of writers. Two of the former, Cinna and Calvus, were poets of considerable importance. Gaius Helvius Cinna--somewhat doubtfully identified with the "Cinna the poet" who met such a tragical end at the hands of the populace after Caesar's assassination--carried the Alexandrian movement to its most uncompromising conclusions. His fame (and that fame was very great) rested on a short poem called _Zmyrna_, over which he spent ten years' labour, and which, by subject and treatment alike, carried the method of that school to its furthest excess. In its recondite obscurity it outdid Lycophron himself. More than one grammarian of the time made a reputation solely by a commentary on it. It throws much light on the peculiar artistic position of Catullus, to bear in mind that this masterpiece of frigid pedantry obtained his warm and evidently sincere praise.

The other member of the triad, Gaius Licinius Macer Calvus, one of the most brilliant men of his time, was too deeply plunged in politics to be more than an accomplished amateur in poetry. Yet it must have been more than his intimate friendship with Catullus, and their common fate of too early a death, that made the two names so constantly coupled afterwards. By the critics of the Silver Age, no less than by Horace and Propertius, the same idea is frequently repeated, which has its best-known expression in Ovid's beautiful invocation in his elegy on Tibullus--

Obvius huic venias, hedera iuvenilia cinctus
Tempora, cum Calvo, docte Catulle, tuo._

We must lament the total loss of a volume of lyrics which competent judges thought worthy to be set beside that of his wonderful friend.

Gaius Valerius Catullus of Verona, one of the greatest names of Latin poetry, belonged, like most of this group, to a wealthy and distinguished family, and was introduced at an early age to the most fashionable circles of the capital. He was just so much younger than Lucretius that the Marian terror and the Sullan proscriptions can hardly have left any strong traces on his memory. When he died, Caesar was still fighting in Gaul, and the downfall of the Republic could only be dimly foreseen. In time, no less than in genius, he represents the fine flower of the Ciceronian age. He was about five and twenty when the attachment began between him and the lady whom he has immortalised under the name of Lesbia. By birth a Claudia, and wife of her cousin, a Caecilius Metellus, she belonged by blood and marriage to the two proudest families of the inner circle of the aristocracy. Clodia was seven years older than Catullus; but that only made their mutual attraction more irresistible: and the death of her husband in the year after his consulship, whether or not there was foundation for the common rumour that she had poisoned him, was an incident that seems to have passed almost unnoticed in the first fervour of their passion. The story of infatuation, revolt, relapse, fresh revolt and fresh entanglement, lives and breathes in the verses of Catullus. It was after their final rupture that Catullus made that journey to Asia which gave occasion to his charming poems of travel. In the years which followed his return to Italy, he continued to produce with great versatility and force, making experiments in several new styles, and devoting great pains to an elaborate metrical technique. Feats of learning and skill alternate with political verses, into which he carries all his violence of love and hatred. But while these later poems compel our admiration, it is the earlier ones which win and keep our love. Though the old liquid note ever and again recurs, the freshness of these first lyrics, in which life and love and poetry are all alike in their morning glory, was never to be wholly recaptured. Nor did he live to settle down on any matured second manner. He was thirty-three at the utmost--perhaps not more than thirty--when he died, leaving behind him the volume of poems which sets him as the third beside Sappho and Shelley.

The order of the poems in this volume seems to be an artificial compromise between two systems--one an arrangement by metre, and the other by date of composition. In the former view the book falls into three sections--the pure lyrics, the idyllic pieces, and the poems in elegiac verse. The central place is occupied by the longest and most elaborate, if not the most successful, of his poems, the epic idyl on the marriage of Peleus and Thetis. Before this are the lyrics, chiefly in the phalaecian eleven-syllabled verse which Catullus made so peculiarly his own, but in iambic, sapphic, choriambic, and other metres also, winding up with the fine epithalamium written for the marriage of his friends, Mallius and Vinia. The transition from this group of lyrics to the _Marriage of Peleus and Thetis_ is made with great skill through another wedding-chant, an idyl in form, but approaching to a lyric in tone, without any personal allusions, and not apparently written for any particular occasion. Finally comes a third group of poems, extending to the end of the volume, all written in elegiac verse, but otherwise extremely varied in date, subject, and manner. The only poem thus left unaccounted for, the _Atys_, is inserted in the centre of the volume, between the two hexameter poems, as though to make its wild metre and rapid movement the more striking by contrast with their smooth and languid rhythms. Whether the arrangement of the whole book comes from the poet's own hand is very doubtful. His dedicatory verses, which stand at the head of the volume, are more probably attached to the first part only, the book of lyrics. Catullus almost certainly died in 54 B.C.; the only positive dates assignable to particular poems, in either the lyric or the elegiac section, alike lie within the three or four years previous, and, while no strict chronological order is followed, the pieces at the beginning of the book are almost certainly the earliest, and those at the end among the latest.

Among the poems of Catullus, those connected with Lesbia hold the foremost place, and, as expressions of direct personal emotion, are unsurpassed, not merely in Latin, but in any literature. There are no poems of the growth of love among them; from the first, Lesbia appears as the absolute mistress of her lover's heart:

_Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus,
Rumoresque senum severiorum
Omnes unius aestimemus assis.
Soles occidere et redire possunt;
Nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux
Nox est perpetua una dormienda:--_

thus he cries in the first intoxication of his happiness, as yet ignorant that the brief light of his love was to go out before noon. Clodia soon showed that the advice not to care for the opinion of the world was, in her case, infinitely superfluous. That intolerable pride which was the proverbial curse of the Claudian house took in her the form of a flagrant disregard of all conventions. In the early days of their love, Catullus only felt, or only expressed, the beautiful side of this recklessness. His affection for Clodia had in it, he says, something of the tenderness of parents for their children; and the poems themselves bear out the paradox. We do not need to read deeply in Catullus to be assured that merely animal passion ran as strong in him as it ever did in any man. But in the earlier poems to Lesbia all this turns to air and fire; the intensity of his love melts its grosser elements into one white flame. There is hardly even a word of Lesbia's bodily beauty; her great blazing eyes have only come down to us in the sarcastic allusions made to them by Cicero in his speeches and letters. As in a few of the finest lyrics of Burns, with whom Catullus, as a poet of love, has often been compared, the ardency of passion has effected for quintessential moments the work that long ages may work out on the whole fabric of a human soul-- _Concretam exemit labem purumque reliquit aetherium sensum atque aurai simplicis ignem_.

But long after the rapture had passed away the enthralment remained. Lesbia's first infidelities only riveted her lover's chains--

_Amantem iniuria talis
Cogit amare magis;_

then he hangs between love and hatred, in the poise of soul immortalised by him in the famous verse--

_Odi et amo: quare id faciam fortasse requiris;
Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior._

There were ruptures and reconciliations, and renewed ruptures and repeated returns, but through them all, while his love hardly lessens, his hatred continually grows, and the lyrical cry becomes one of the sharpest agony: through protestations of fidelity, through wails over ingratitude, he sinks at last into a stupor only broken by moans of pain. Then at last youth reasserts itself, and he is stung into new life by the knowledge that he has simply dropped out of Lesbia's existence. His final renunciation is no longer addressed to her deaf ears, but flung at her in studied insult through two of the associates of their old revels in Rome.

_Cum suis vivat valeatque moechis
Quos simul complexa tenet trecentos
Nullum amans vere, sed identidem[2] omnium
Ilia rumpens--_

so the hard clear verse flashes out, to melt away in the dying fall, the long-drawn sweetness of the last words of all--

_Nec meum respectet ut ante amorem
Qui illius culpa cecidit, velut prati
Ultimi flos, praetereunte postquam
Tactus aratro est._

Foremost among the other lyrics of Catullus which have a personal reference are those concerned with his journey to Asia, and the death in the Troad of the deeply loved brother whose tomb he visited on that journey. The excitement of travel and the delight of return have never been more gracefully touched than in these little lyrics, of which every other line has become a household word, the _Iam ver egelidos refert tepores_, and the lovely _Paene insularum Sirmio insularumque_, whose cadences have gathered a fresh sweetness in the hands of Tennyson. But a higher note is reached in one or two of the short pieces on his brother's death, which are lyrics in all but technical name. The finest of these has all the delicate simplicity of an epitaph by the best Greek artists, Leonidas or Antipater or Simonides himself; and with this it combines the specific Latin dignity, and a range of tones, from the ocean-roll of its opening hexameter, _Multas per gentes et multa per aequora vectus_, to the sobbing wail of the _Atque in perpehtum frater ave atque vale_ in which it dies away, that is hardly equalled except in some of Shakespeare's sonnets.

It is in these short lyrics of personal passion or emotion that the genius of Catullus is most eminent; but the same high qualities appear in the few specimens he has left of more elaborate lyrical architecture, the _Ode to Diana_, the marriage-song for Mallius and Vinia, and the _Atys_. The first of these, brief as it is, has a breadth and grandeur of manner which--as in the noble fragment of Keats' _Ode to Maia_--lift it into the rank of great masterpieces. The epithalamium, on the other hand, with which the book of lyrics ends, while very simple in structure, is large in scale. It is as much longer than the rest of the lyrics as the marriage-song which stands at the end of _In Memoriam_ is than the other sections of that poem. In the charm of perfect simplicity it equals the finest of his lyrics; but besides this, it has in its clear ringing music what is for this period an almost unique premonition of the new world that rose out of the darkness of the Middle Ages, the world that had invented bells and church-organs, and had added a new romantic beauty to love and marriage. With a richness of phrase that recalls the Song of Solomon, the verses clash and swing: _Open your bars, O gates! the bride is at hand! Lo, how the torches shake out their splendid tresses!... Even so in a rich lord's garden-close might stand a hyacinth-flower. Lo, the torches shake out their golden tresses; go forth, O bride! Day wanes; go forth, O bride!_ And the verse at the end, about the baby on its mother's lap--

_Torqutatus volo parvulus
Matris e gremio suae
Porrigens teneras manus
Dulce rideat ad patrem
Semihiante labello--_

is as incomparable; not again till the Florentine art of the fifteenth century was the picture drawn with so true and tender a hand.

Over the _Atys_ modern criticism has exhausted itself without any definite result. The accident of its being the only Latin poem extant in the peculiar galliambic metre has combined with the nature of the subject[3] to induce a tradition about it as though it were the most daring and extraordinary of Catullus' poems. The truth is quite different. It stands midway between the lyrics and the idyls in being a poem of most studied and elaborate artifice, in which Catullus has chosen, not the statelier and more familiar rhythms of the hexameter or elegiac, but one of the Greek lyric metres, of which he had already introduced several others into Latin. As a _tour de force_ in metrical form it is remarkable enough, and probably marks the highest point of Latin achievement in imitation of the more complex Greek metres. As a lyric poem it preserves, even in its highly artificial structure, much of the direct force and simplicity which mark all Catullus' best lyrics. That it goes beyond this, or that--as is often repeated--it transcends both the idyls and the briefer lyrics in sustained beauty and passion, cannot be held by any sane judgment.

How far elaboration could lead Catullus is shown in the long idyllic poem on the _Marriage of Peleus and Thetis_. Here he entirely abandons the lyric manner, and adventures on a new field, in which he does not prove very successful. The poem is full of great beauties of detail; but as a whole it is cloying and yet not satisfying. For a few lines together Catullus can write in hexameter more exquisitely than any other Latin poet. The description in this piece of the little breeze that rises at dawn, beginning _Hic qualis flatu placidum mare matutino_, like the more famous lines in his other idyllic poem--

_Ut flos in septis secretum nascitur hortis,
Ignotus pecori, nullo contusus aratro,
Quem mulcent aurae, firmat sol, educat imber;
Multi illum pueri, multae optavere puellae--_