The Historians' History of the World 05

We will close this sketch of the prose literature of the last age of the republic with a notice of Cicero’s writings. Of his oratory and of his epistles something has been said in former pages; and it is to these productions that we must attribute the great orator’s place in the commonwealth of letters. Of his poems it were better to say nothing. Of his memoirs and historical writings little is known, unless we count the fragments of The Republic in this class. But his rhetorical and philosophical essays each fill a goodly volume; and the writings have been the theme of warm admiration for ages past. Yet it is to be doubted whether the praises lavished upon them are not chiefly due to the magic influence of the language in which they are expressed. The Brutus doubtless is extremely interesting as containing the judgment of Rome’s greatest orator on all the speakers of his own generation and of foregoing times. The dialogues on The Orator are yet more interesting as furnishing a record of his own professional experience. But the philosophical works of Cicero are of little philosophical value. They were written not so much to teach mankind as to employ his time at moments when he was banished from the city. Their highest merit consists in that lucid and graceful style which seduced the great Italian Latinists at the end of the fifteenth century to abjure all words and phrases which did not rest on Ciceronian authority, and which led Erasmus himself, who resisted this pedantry, to “spend ten years in reading Cicero.”

THE DRAMA

Roman Terra-cotta Statuette of a Comedian

The dramatic art fell more and more into dishonour. We hear, indeed, of two illustrious actors, Æsopus and Roscius, who were highly honoured at Rome, and died in possession of large fortunes. But it was from the great families that their honours and the means of making money came. The theatres, as we have before observed, remained mere temporary buildings till the second consulship of Pompey, when the first stone theatre at Rome was erected by one of his wealthy freedmen. The pieces represented were more of the nature of spectacles. Those in which Roscius and Æsopus acted must have been old plays revived. In this period hardly one name of a dramatic author occurs. It was not in theatres, but in amphitheatres, that Rome and Roman towns sought amusement. Not only is the Flavian amphitheatre the most gorgeous of the remains of imperial Rome, but at all places where Roman remains are preserved, at Verona in Transpadane Gaul, at Arles and Nismes in “the Province,” at Treves on the distant Moselle, it is the amphitheatre that characterises the Roman city, as it is the theatre that marks the Greek.

During this period, indeed, a new kind of dramatic representation was introduced, which enjoyed a short-lived popularity. This was the mime. The name at least was borrowed from the Greeks of Sicily. The Greek mime was a kind of comic dialogue in prose, adapted to the purposes afterwards pursued by the Roman satire. But while the Greek mime in the hands of Sophron assumed a grave and dignified character, so that Aristotle classes him among poets though he wrote in prose, the Roman mime was generally coarse and licentious. Sulla was particularly fond of these productions and their authors. After his time, Dec. Laberius, a knight, strove to give them greater dignity. His mimes, as the fragments show, were in iambic verse, and differed from comedy chiefly in their absence of plot and their relation to the topics of the day. The fame of Laberius was rivalled by Publilius Syrus, a freedman who acted in his own mimes, whereas the knighthood of Laberius forbade this degradation. Cæsar, however, on the occasion of his quadruple triumph, thought fit to order Laberius to enter into a contest with Syrus; and the knight, though a man of sixty years, dared not refuse. His sense of the indignity was strongly marked by a fine passage in the prologue, still preserved:

“The Gods themselves cannot gainsay his might;

And how can I, a man, think to gainsay it?

So then, albeit I’ve lived twice thirty years

Free from all taint of blame, I left my house

At morn a Roman knight and shall return

At eve a sorry player. ’Faith, my life

Is one day longer than it should have been.”

In the course of the dialogue he expressed himself with freedom against the arbitrary power of the great dictator:

“And then, good people, we’ve outlived our freedom.”

And in another line almost ventured to threaten:

“It needs must be

That he fears many, whom so many fear.”

Cæsar, however, took no further notice of these caustic sallies than to assign the prize to Syrus.

POETRY

In poetry, the long period from the death of Lucilius to the appearance of Virgil and Horace—a period of about sixty years—is broken only by two names worthy of mention. But it must be admitted that these names take a place in the first ranks of Roman literature. It is sufficient to mention Lucretius and Catullus.