Other writers now first endeavoured to hand down in Latin a history of Rome from her foundation, or from early periods of her existence. Such were C. Licinius Macer, Q. Claudius Quadrigarius, and Q. Valerius Antias, all born about the beginning of the last century before the Christian era. The works of these and other annalists were used and swallowed up by the history of Livy, who was born, probably at Padua, in the year 59 B.C., and belongs to the imperial era of Augustus.
Some few writers in this same period began to cultivate grammatical and philological studies. The founder of these pursuits at Rome is reputed to be L. Ælius Stilo, the friend of Q. Metellus Numidicus and his companion in exile. He was closely followed by Aurelius Opilius, a freedman, who attended Rutilius Rufus into exile, as Stilo had attended Metellus. But the man whose name is in this department most conspicuous is M. Terentius Varro of Reate. He was born in 116 B.C., ten years later than Cicero, whose friendship he cultivated to the close of the great orator’s life. Varro was a laborious student, and earned by his successful pursuit of all kinds of knowledge a reputation not deserved by his public life. From the first he adhered to the cause of Pompey. After Pharsalia, Cæsar received him with the same clemency that he had shown to all his foes, and employed him in promoting the plans which he had formed of establishing a public library at Rome. After the death of Cæsar he retired to the country, and confined himself to literary pursuits; but this did not save him from being placed on the proscription list. He escaped, however, to be received into favour by Octavian, and continued his studies in grammar, philology, and agriculture, till he reached the great age of eighty-eight, when he died in peace. Of his great work on the Latin language, originally consisting of twenty-four books, six remain to attest the industry of the man and the infantine state of philological science at the time. His work on agriculture in three books, written when he was eighty years old, is still in our hands, and forms the most accurate account we possess from the Romans of the subject. Fragments of many other writers on all kinds of topics have been handed down to justify the title given to Varro—“the most learned of the Romans.”
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.”