War of Hostius, the grandfather of the Cynthia of Propertius, and alluded to by him in the line, Splendidaque a docto fama refulget avo. This poem was written early in the first century B.C., in three Books, and took up the treatment of Roman history where the Annals of Ennius ended. In the earlier part of the Ciceronian Age, the decay of public spirit, and the strong tendency which had set in of advancing individual claims above the interest of the State, and of looking to individual leaders rather than to established institutions, gave a new direction to narrative verse. The passion for personal glory became the principal motive of those poems which treated of recent or contemporary history. Eminent families and individuals secured for themselves the services of poets, native or Greek. Even before this time, Attius, as we learn from Cicero1, was closely associated with D. Brutus, and it seems not unlikely that the choice of the subject of one of his tragedies,-Brutus,-was made as a compliment to his friend and patron. The Luculli and Metelli retained the services of Archias, as their panegyrist,—a fact referred to by Cicero in one of his letters to Atticus, not without a slight touch of jealousy2. Pompey was served in the same way by Theophanes of Mitylene. The patronage of the great to men of letters was thus by no means so disinterested as our first impressions might lead us to suppose. Cicero himself with his extraordinary literary activity wrote in his youth a poem on his townsman Marius, and failing to find any other Greek or Roman to undertake the task, composed a poem in three Books on his own Consulship 3, with a result not fortunate to his reputation either for modesty or taste. In a letter to his brother Quintus, we find him encouraging him to the composition of a poem on the 1 Pro Arch. 11. 2 Ep. ad Att. i. 16: 'Epigrammatis tuis, quae in Amaltheo posuisti, contenti erimus, praesertim quum et Chilius, nos reliquerit, et Archias nihil de me scripserit; ac vereor, ne, Lucullis quoniam Graecum poema condidit, nunc ad Caecilianam fabulam spectet.' 3 Also one on his exile. Invasion of Britain by Julius Caesar. The passage is worth attending to as indicating the materials out of which those poems which aimed at celebrating contemporary events were framed :-" 'Quos tu situs, quas naturas rerum et locorum, quos mores, quas gentes, quas pugnas, quem vero ipsum imperatorem habes. Ego te libenter adiuvabo, et tibi versus quos rogas mittam1.' This passage may be compared with two passages in Horace, showing that the same kind of thing was expected from a poetical panegyrist under Augustus. The first of these is from Sat. ii. 1, lines II etc., where Trebatius advises Horace, Caesaris invicti res dicere to which advice the poet answers, Cupidum, pater optime, vires The other passage from Horace (Epistles, ii. 1. 250) has a closer resemblance to the passage in Cicero : Nec sermones ego mallem Repentes per humum quam res componere gestas, Auspiciis totum confecta duella per orbem, etc. Horace expresses his contempt for this style of poem in other passages of his Satires, as (ii. 5. 41), seu pingui tentus omaso, Furius hibernas cana nive conspuet Alpes 2; and also (Sat. i. 10. 36–37), Turgidus Alpinus jugulat dum Memnona, dumque The most prolific writer of epics in the latter half of the Ciceronian Age was Varro Atacinus, the first Transalpine 1 Epist. ad Q. Fratrem, lib. ii. 16. 2 The Furius' mentioned here is supposed to be M. Furius Bibaculus, the reputed author of a poem on the Gallic War, as well as of the Epigrams, ' referta contumeliis Caesaris,' of which Tacitus speaks (An. iv. 34). Gaul who appears in Roman literature; the same who is mentioned by Horace as having made an unsuccessful attempt to revive the satire of Lucilius: Hoc erat, experto frustra Varrone Atacino, etc.1 He had served under Julius Caesar in Gaul, and wrote a poem on the war against the Sequani in the traditional form. He also opened up to his countrymen that vein of epic poetry which had been wrought by the Alexandrians. The most famous poem of this kind in the literature of the Republic was the Jason of Varro, imitated probably from the Argonautics of Apollonius. Propertius speaks of this poem in a passage where he classes Varro also among the writers of amatory poetry before his own time, such as Catullus, Cinna, Gallus, and Virgil in his Eclogues : Haec quoque perfecto ludebat Iasone Varro, He is thus as a writer of epic poems, on the one side, of the native school of Ennius and the Annalists; on the other, he is the originator of that other type of Roman epic which appears under the Empire in the Thebaid and Achilleid of Statius and the Argonautics of Valerius Flaccus. The two great poets of the later Ciceronian era introduced a great change into Roman poetry,-the practice of careful composition. They are the first artistic poets of Rome. The rapidity of composition which characterised all the earlier writers was, in the rude state of the language at that time, incompatible with high accomplishment. We read of Cicero writing five hundred hexameters in a night, and of his brother Quintus writing four tragedies in sixteen days. The true sense of artistic finish first appeared in Lucretius, and to a greater degree in Catullus, and the younger men of the Ciceronian Age, Licinius Calvus, Helvius Cinna, etc. The contempt with which the younger school regarded the old fashion of composition appears in Catullus' references-neither delicate nor complimentary-to the 'Annales Volusi,' the ponderous annalistic epic of his countryman (conterraneus) Tanusius Geminus1. But in this younger school, poetry separated itself entirely from the national life, or dealt with it only in the form of personal epigrams on the popular leaders and their partisans. The dignity of the hexameter was reserved by them for didactic or philosophic poetry and short epic idyls treating of the heroic legends of Greece. Didactic poetry, directing the attention to contemplation instead of action, established itself as a successful rival to the old historical epic, in the province of serious literature. The latter, however, still found representatives in the following generation. Thus Anser, the panegyrist of Antony, is familiarly known, owing to one of the few satiric allusions which have been attributed to Virgil: Nam neque adhuc Vario videor nec dicere Cinna : Varius, with whom he is by implication contrasted in those lines, is characterised by Horace as 'Maeonii carminis ales,' at a time when Virgil was only famous as the poet of rural life. He was the author of a poem on the death of Julius Caesar. We hear also of other specimens of the contemporary epic produced in the Augustan Age, one by Cornelius Severus treating of the Sicilian Wars, one by Rabirius treating of the Battle of Actium, and one by Pedo Albinovanus treating of the voyage of Germanicus 'per oceanum septentrionalem2.' We find Horace repeatedly excusing himself with selfdisparaging irony, while exhorting younger poets to the task of directly celebrating the wars of Augustus,-e. g. Epist. i. 3. 7 Quis sibi res gestas Augusti scribere sumit? Bella quis et paces longum diffundit in aevum ? 1 Schwabe, Quaestiones Catullianae, p. 279. 2 Mentioned by W. S. Teuffel. Perhaps the best known poem in our own literature of this type is 'The Campaign' of Addison. Horace does indeed celebrate some of the military as well as the peaceful successes of the Augustan Age, in the only form in which contemporary or recent events admit of being poetically treated, viz. lyrical poetry. But considering how eager Augustus was to have his wars celebrated in verse and how strong in him was the national passion for glory, and considering that Virgil and Horace were pre-eminently the favourite poets of the time and the special friends both of the Emperor himself and his minister, it is remarkable how they both avoid or defer the task which he wished to impose on them. This reluctance arose from no inadequate appreciation of his services to the world, but from their high appreciation of what was due to their art. Virgil had been similarly importuned in earlier times by Pollio and Varus, and had gracefully waived the claim made on him by pleading the fitness of his own muse only for the lighter themes of pastoral poetry. He seems to have hesitated long as to the form which the celebration of the glories of the Augustan Age should take. How he solved the problem, how he sought to combine in a work of Greek art the inspiration of the national epic with the personal celebration of Augustus, will be treated of in the following chapter. |