CHAPTER VIII.

THE ROMAN EPIC BEFORE THE TIME OF VIRGIL.

THE distinction between what is called the primitive and the literary epic has become one of the commonplaces of criticism; and no distinction can well be more fundamental. The two kinds of epic poem belong to totally different epochs in civilisation; they are also the products of very different national temperaments and faculties. It is somewhat remarkable that those literatures which are richest in literary epics-the ancient Latin, the modern Italian, and the English-are those which possess few or no native poems of the type realised in the Iliad, the Niebelungen-Lied, and the Song of Roland; nor is there, in connexion with the earlier traditions of the Italian or the English race, that cycle of heroic adventure and personages in which such poems have their origin. The composition of the Aeneid and of the Paradise Lost implies powers of combination, of arranging great masses of materials, of concentration of the mind on a single object, more analogous to those which produced the vast historical work of Livy and 'The Decline and Fall' of Gibbon, than to the spontaneity, the naïveté, the rapidity of conception and utterance, and that immediate sympathy between poet and people, to which we owe the continuous poems developed out of some germ of popular ballad or national legend. It was the peculiar glory of Greece, that in the earlier stage of her literary development she manifested not

only a perfection of expression and of art, but a maturity of intelligence, a true insight into the meaning of life, a nobility of imagination in union with a clearness and sanity of judgment, which the most advanced eras of other literatures scarcely equal. Thus the early Greek epics, while exhibiting, better than any other writings, man and the outward world in 'the first intention,'-man in the energy and buoyancy of the national youth, and Nature in the vividness of impression which she makes on the mind and sense in their most healthy activity,-are at the same time masterpieces of art and great monuments of the national mind. The Greek imagination with no appearance of effort produced works of such compass and harmonious proportion as only long years of labour and reflection in collecting and combining materials in accordance with a predetermined purpose produced in other literatures.

We are not called upon to consider here the conditions out of which the primitive epic is developed, or to enquire why the Latin race failed to create at least some inartistic legendary poem of sufficient length to be ranked in that form of literature. Perhaps no answer could be given to the question excepting that the early Latin race had not sufficient creative force to produce such a work,-which is simply another way of stating the fact that it did not produce epic poems. The Romans were from a very early period interested in their past history and traditions. They seem to have shaped, either out of real incidents in their national and family history, or out of their chief national characteristics, stories of strong human interest 1, which only want the 'vates sacer' to be converted into poems. Every great family seems to have had its own traditions, glorifying the exploits and preserving the memory of illustrious ancestors; and whatever may have been the case in regard to the legendary stories connected with the fortunes of the State, some of these traditions

1 e. g. those of Lucretia, Virginia, Coriolanus, Brutus, T. Manlius, etc.

were undoubtedly expressed in rude Saturnian verse, and chanted at family gatherings and at funeral banquets. The memory of these ancestral lays-if we may apply that word to them-survived till the time of Cicero, Horace, and apparently even of Tacitus', though no actual trace of them appears to have existed even in the age of the elder Cato. But the influence of these rude germs of poetry-if they exercised any influence on Latin literature at all was confined to the structure of Roman history. An enquiry into the origin and growth of Roman epic poetry need not concern itself with them.

Neither is it necessary here to go back into the vexed and probably insoluble question of the genesis of the Homeric poems. That these stand in most intimate relation with the Virgilian epic is a patent fact; and the nature of this intimate relation will be examined in some of the subsequent chapters. But they first began to act on the Roman imagination and art many centuries after they assumed their present form. The Romans accepted them as they did the lyrical and dramatic poetry of Greece, and were absolutely unconcerned with the questions as to their origin which interest modern curiosity. For the adequate understanding of the form and substance of the Roman epic as it was shaped by its greatest master, a competent knowledge of the Iliad and Odyssey must be presupposed; but it is unnecessary in a work on Latin literature to discuss the origin and character of the epic poetry of the Greeks to such an extent as their idyllic and didactic poetry have been discussed in previous chapters.

But just as historical composition, regarded as a branch. of art, though originating in the imitation of Greek models, has assumed in the works of Livy and Tacitus a distinctively Roman type, in conformity with certain characteristics of the race and with the weight of new matter which it has to embody, so, too, the type of epic poetry

1 Cf. Annals, iii. 5, 'Veterum instituta.. meditata ad virtutis memoriam carmina,'-quoted by Teuffel.

realised by Virgil has acquired a distinctive character as a vehicle of Roman sentiment and material. To appreciate the native, as distinct from the foreign element in the mould in which Virgil's representation is cast, it is necessary to attend to certain instincts and tendencies which were calculated strongly to affect any form of narrative poetry amongst the Romans, and also to take a rapid survey of the history of their narrative poetry from the beginning of their literature to the Augustan Age.

In the first place, the strong national sentiment of Rome was a feeling which could not fail to be appealed to in any works which aimed at securing both general and permanent interest. The heroic story of Greece was indeed able for a time to attract general attention at Rome from the novelty of the dramatic representations in which it was introduced. But even Roman tragedy, to judge from the testimony of Cicero and others, seems to have owed more of its popularity to the grave spirit by which it was animated and the Roman strength of will exhibited in its personages, than to the legitimate sources of interest in a drama, viz. the play of human motives and the vicissitudes of human fortunes. But to sustain the interest of a long narrative, as distinct from a dramatic poem, it was necessary to act on some deep and general feeling. Not only did the hearers require to be thus moved to attention, but the poet himself could only thus be inspired and sustained in the unfamiliar task of literary composition. Now, looking to other manifestations of Roman energy, we see that whatever force was not employed on present necessities, was given, not as among the Greeks to ideal creation, but to the commemoration of events of public importance, and to the transmission of the lessons as well as of the history of the passing time. The connexion between the past and the future was maintained by monuments of different kinds, by public inscriptions, written annals, fasts, or festivals recording some momentous experience in the history of the State. All that we know and can still see of Roman work suggests the thought of a

people who had an instinctive consciousness of a long destiny; who built, acted, and wrote with a view to a distant future. A national history was the legitimate expression of this impulse, but before the language was developed into a form suited for a continuous work in prose, it was natural that the tendency to realise the past and hand down the memory of the present should find an outlet for itself in various forms of narrative poetry.

Again, the Romans had a strong personal feeling of admiration for their great men. They were animated by that generous passion to which, in modern times, the term hero-worship has been applied. And corresponding with this feeling on the part of his countrymen, there was in the object of it a strong love of glory, a strong passion to perpetuate his name. Through the whole course of Roman history we recognise this motive acting powerfully on the men most eminent in war, politics, and literature, and on no one more powerfully than on the Emperor Augustus. The memory of the great men of Rome and of their actions was kept alive by monuments, statues, coins, waxen images preserved in the atrium of the family house, by the poems sung and speeches delivered among funeral ceremonies, by inscriptions on tombs (such as that still read on the tomb of Scipio Barbatus), by family names (such as that of Africanus) derived from great exploits, and, under the Empire, by the great triumphal arches and columns which still excite the admiration of travellers. The Roman passion for glory received its highest gratification in the triumph which celebrated great military exploits. The culmination of the tendency to glorify actual living men, or men recently dead, is witnessed in the deification of the Emperors. With the development of literature we find, as we should expect, this tendency of the imagination allying itself with poetry, from the time when Ennius devoted one work to the celebration of Scipio down to the panegyrists of Augustus, Messala, or Agrippa1 under the early Empire. 1 Cf. Horace's Ode, 'Scriberis Vario,' etc., which shows at least that Agrippa desired to have a poem written in honour of his exploits.