The Roman Way Read online

  The

  ROMAN WAY

  Edith Hamilton

  TO

  D · F · R ·

  —nostrorum sermonum

  candide iudex

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  I

  Comedy’s Mirror

  II

  Ancient Rome Reflected in Plautus and Terence

  III

  The Comic Spirit in Plautus and Terence

  IV

  Cicero’s Rome: The Republic

  V

  Cicero Himself

  VI

  Caesar and Cicero

  VII

  Catullus

  VIII

  Horace

  IX

  The Rome of Augustus as Horace Saw It

  X

  The Roman Way

  XI

  Enter the Romantic Roman: Virgil, Livy, Seneca

  XII

  Juvenal’s Rome and the Stoics

  XIII

  The End of Antiquity

  Chronology

  References

  PREFACE

  If a personal confession may be allowed, although I have read Latin ever since my father, who knew nothing about methods for softening the rigors of study, started me at the age of seven on Six Weeks’ Preparation for Caesar, I have read it, except during the brief intermission of college, for my own pleasure merely, exactly as I would read French or German. I open a volume of Cicero or Horace or Virgil purely for the enjoyment of what they write, not in the slightest degree because they write in Latin or because they are essential to a knowledge of Roman history. What the Romans did has always interested me much less than what they were, and what the historians have said they were is beyond all comparison less interesting to me than what they themselves said.

  It was inevitable, therefore, that when I came to think about the outline of The Roman Way, I should see it entirely as it was marked out by the Roman writers. I have considered them alone in writing this book. It is in no sense a history of Rome, but an attempt to show what the Romans were as they appear in their great authors, to set forth the combination of qualities they themselves prove are peculiarly Roman, distinguishing them from the rest of antiquity. A people’s literature is the great text-book for real knowledge of them. The writings of the day show the quality of the people as no historical reconstruction can. When we read Anthony Trollope or W. S. Gilbert we get an incomparably better view of what mid-Victorian England was like than any given by the historians. They will always be our best text-books for an understanding of the force back of those years of unparalleled prosperity for the favored few—the character and the outlook of the upper-class Englishman.

  That is the kind of text-book I have depended upon exclusively. For each period I have taken only the accounts given by contemporary writers. The contents of the book are the result of a selection based not upon personal preferences but upon how much a writer shows of the life and character of the men of his own times. Plautus and Terence from this point of view are of the greatest importance, as they not only paint the very first picture we have of Rome, but do so in great detail. The century in between Terence and Cicero is, of course, passed over, since none of the writings have survived. Cicero’s Rome is taken up at greater length than any other period because his letters are the best source of information we possess for any age, not of Rome only, but of all antiquity.

  The force Rome had to mould her people is evident on every page of her literature. All her men of letters were Romans first, individual artists only second. Different, of course, from each other, as Cicero, for instance, is different from Tacitus, or Horace from Juvenal, their differences are yet superficial compared to their fundamental resemblances. During the four centuries which saw the beginning and end of Latin Literature as it has come down to us, every writer shows the main outlines of the Roman way.

  The

  ROMAN WAY

  I

  Comedy’s Mirror

  When the curtain rings up for the stupendous drama which we know as Ancient Rome, it is raised surprisingly on two comic writers. They are the first to make their appearance on that mighty stage. The oldest piece of Roman literature we have is a collection of comedies. Only two earlier writers are known to us and of their work a few lines is all that is left. Not only Latin literature, but our own direct knowledge of Rome, have their source in comedy, and that not of a rude, popular sort, but sophisticated, a true comedy of manners. The fact, seldom meditated upon, is a little disturbing. We all have our idea of the Romans, implanted by education, by many books: an indomitable people, stern and steadfast and serious beyond all others. It is disconcerting that the fountainhead of our knowledge should be the very reverse of all this. Our notion of the proper beginning for the literature of the mistress of the world would be something martial and stirring, old ballads of valiant men and warlike deeds with spirited bards to sing them, culminating in a great epic, a Latin Iliad. But it actually begins as far away from that as the wide realm of letters allows, in a series of comedies which are avowedly founded upon the popular Greek comedy of the day.

  No other great national literature goes back to an origin borrowed in all respects. In Greece the development was the natural one, from songs and stories handed down by word of mouth and added to through unknown ages. There was a spontaneous desire in the people—the farmers, shepherds, fighting men—for imaginative expression, which ultimately took literary shape and was preserved. With the Romans it was just the other way about. The literary shape came first, across the sea, from Greece. The desire for expression was secondary, following upon the discovery of an appropriate form ready-made to hand. The fact is full of significance for the Roman mentality.

  Roman literature appears suddenly, during the third century B.C., in the generation after the First Punic War, and not only comedy, but everything else as well is modelled upon the Greek. There is hardly even a suggestion anywhere of a native product supplanted by the imported. We find, indeed, a metre never met with elsewhere which the first translator from the Greek used, and a few references in later writers to old ballads heard in boyhood, but that is all. Whether the truth is that the Roman shepherds and farmers, with the strong practical bent that later marked them, had little inclination to spend valuable time in singing songs and making up stories, or whether the literary men when they finally appeared despised the popular productions as beneath the notice of writers who were out to bring culture to Rome and bring it quick, the fact is equally illuminating. A sense for poetry was not strong in the Roman people. Their natural genius did not urge them on to artistic expression. Rome was said to have been founded in the year 753 B.C., and the earliest piece of literature we know about is a translation of the Odyssey made at the end of the First Punic War, some five hundred years later. For all these centuries it would seem that the Romans felt little impulsion to express in any form what the world was showing them and life bringing them. Later Roman critics speak of a native comedy, dramatic improvisations at festivals, but there is no warrant for supposing that it was ever written down and it is certain that it had no direct literary descendants.

  For us, Roman literature begins with Plautus, writer of comedies after the Greek fashion, and what he shows us of Roman life is the first glimpse we have of Rome. It is a brief glimpse. The curtain raised for him and his successor, Terence, is quickly lowered. When it is raised again we are looking at the age of Cicero. With the exception of a treatise on agriculture, curiously the one surviving work of the indomitable old censor of morals, Cato, we have only fragmentary bits of the literature in between, no secure basis upon which to reconstruct the city that was already the dominating power in the world. It is true that while Terence, the younger of the two comed
ians, was producing his plays the Greek Polybius was writing a great history on the rise and growth of the Roman power, of which a considerable part remains, but his concern is with Rome’s wars and with the Romans as men of war. The only contemporary information given us about the rest of Roman life up to the first century B.C. comes from the work of the two playwrights.

  We may perhaps account ourselves fortunate that comedy was the survivor. There is no better indication of what the people of any period are like than the plays they go to see. Popular drama shows the public quality as nothing else can. But comedy does more. It must present the audience, as tragedy need not, with a picture of life lived as they know it. The comedy of each age holds up a mirror to the people of that age, a mirror that is unique. Ancient comedy, made up for us of four playwrights whose work alone has survived, the Greek Aristophanes and Menander, and the Roman Plautus and Terence, is a mirror where may be seen vividly reflected the Greek and Roman people in periods of notable significance to us: the great day of Greece, an influence still felt in all our thought and our art, together with the age directly succeeding it; the Rome of a hundred years later, when Carthage had been twice defeated and the foundations were solidly laid of the Roman civilization to which our own goes directly back. What we want most of all to know about these two greatest nations of antiquity, is the kind of people that made them up, the every-day men and women, and this history in its concern for wars and laws does not give us. They were the theatre crowd, above all, the comic theatre. It is there we can find them. Popular comedy reflects the average person.

  If the Greek tragedians had been lost and we had only Aristophanes left, we should have a very fair idea of the private citizen in Periclean Athens. How little resemblance he had to the theatre-going man elsewhere, what a completely different sort of amusement he wanted, may be seen in every one of Aristophanes’ plays. Aristophanes has his own receipt for comedy, unlike, so he himself tells us, all that went before him and certainly never followed by any dramatist since. In choruses of the Wasps and the Peace, the methods are described which were used by the most popular playwright in Athens to draw his public:

  Your poet in all of his plays has scorned to show you upon the stage

  A few paltry men and their mean little ways. A great theme he gave you—the age.

  He has stripped bare the monster with eyes flaming red, foul vice with its vile perjured band.

  He has battled with spectral shapes, the pains and pangs that are racking our land.1

  It was he that indignantly swept from the stage the rabble that cluttered its boards,

  Greedy gods, vagabonds, swindling scamps, whining slaves, sturdy beggars, despicable hordes.

  Such vulgar, contemptible lumber at once he bade from the theatre depart,

  And then like an edifice stately and grand he raised and ennobled the art.

  High thoughts and high language he brought to the stage, a humor exalted and rare,

  Nor stooped with a scurrilous jest to assail some small-man-and-woman affair.2

  Here is clearly written what Aristophanes and his audience wanted from the Comic Muse. In their eyes she was great Comedy, fit to stand beside Tragedy, of equal dignity and with essentially the same deep seriousness. The Old Comedy of Athens stands alone. It is as unlike the comedy of all other countries and periods as the age of Pericles is unlike all others. No small-man-and-woman affair for Aristophanes. Great themes, a grandiose conception of the world, belonged to Comedy, as he saw her, just as much as they did to Tragedy, as Æschylus saw her. That rabble he swept from the stage, those stock characters, each with his fixed form of antics, his thread-bare joke—“a few paltry men and their mean little ways”—gave place to marvelous figures: birds building a city in the sky that put all earthly cities to shame; a band of tight-waisted buzzing wasps to show up the law-courts; radiant Peace in all her beauty; the inexorable world of the dead where art receives its final award. This was Aristophanes’ idea of Comedy’s province. It died with him and was never found again within the theatre.

  The old kind of fun-making came to the fore when he and his audience were gone. That edict of banishment he had proclaimed in great Comedy’s name did not hold beyond his lifetime. Back came the exiles, the tricky servant, the braggart, the quack, the drunkard, the cunning thief, familiar stock characters, so his words tell us, four hundred years and more before Christ. The depth of our ignorance about the past is not often so vividly brought to mind. None of that crowded, busy theatre is known to us, nothing of what must often have been brilliant entertainment made by brilliant minds. A marvellous sense for the absurd and a very genius for observing and characterizing human nature put first upon the stage the personages which have held their place there ever since, with the brief exception of Aristophanes’ lifetime. Latin comedy and through it all modern comedy have drawn upon the figures of fun unknown Greek playwrights made in the dim past. The small-man-and-woman affair, too, disdained by the great Athenian and his age, took lasting possession not only of the stage, but of literature as well. Aristophanes stands alone indeed. The men who fought at Salamis and planned the Acropolis and carved the Parthenon sculptures gave the laws to the Athenian drama, and when they died there was no audience any more for great Tragedy and great Comedy.

  Athens, we are always told, was a democracy, based, of course, upon slavery because that was the pre-requisite to civilized life in the ancient world, but except for that, a place where all men were free and politically equal. But there are democracies and democracies. The Periclean pattern was not like that which succeeded it. There is a marked difference between a young and a full-grown democracy. In the first, aristocracy still lingers. Aristocratic standards are abroad. The democracy of Washington at Mt. Vernon wears another look from that of Mr. Coolidge in Vermont. Pericles was an aristocratic democrat and there is an extremely qualified democracy in Plato’s young men. The theatre audiences of that day were people of highly cultivated tastes who could not be amused with the commonplace. But fourth century Athens was another matter. The aristocrats were gone and democracy was in secure possession. There was no need of fighting and suffering in its behalf. Athens was comfortable and undistinguished; life was lived on an easy middle-class level. The New Comedy, one ancient writer after another assures us, reflected the age, in especial the chief ornament and exponent of the innovation, Menander. An enthusiastic Alexandrian exclaims: “O Life, O Menander, which of you two was the plagiarist?”

  Of all his fellow artists he alone has survived, but only in small part. No complete play has come down to us. Indeed, up to a few years ago he was directly known through short extracts merely, lines cited to illustrate some point, and the like. Indirectly, however, much was deduced from the unqualified praise and devoted imitation of him by ancient critics and writers. But the discovery of nearly the whole of one play and considerable portions of several others has made it dubious how far that great reputation was deserved. They are pleasantly written, these plays, the characters not infrequently drawn with skilful and delicate touches, the dialogue occasionally entertaining, the plot contrived with some ingenuity, but more than that cannot be said of them at their best and at their worst they are very dull indeed. They are not funny. They are little dramas of little folk; a miniature art done in very quiet tones; subdued pictures of a well-to-do, completely commonplace society, showing the bad punished and the good rewarded, but moderately as the vices and virtues are moderate, and always a happy marriage to bring down the curtain. What would Aristophanes have made of them, one wonders. There is not the faintest reminiscence of his soaring imagination, not the most distant echo of his roaring laughter. The difference between the two playwrights illumines as nothing could better the change that had come over the Athenians in the space of hardly fifty years.

  That brief flowering of genius, the golden age not of Greece alone but of all our western world, had been brought about by a lofty and exultant spirit, conscious of heroic deeds done and full of joyous
courage for great enterprises to come. It had lived in the audiences who shouted at Aristophanes’ riotous nonsense, who delighted in every brilliant bit of his satire, appreciated each delicate parody, with minds keen to follow his master mind. But the flame, so intense, so white-hot, quickly sank, leaving behind only a comfortable fireside warmth. Menander’s audiences wanted nothing in the very least Aristophanic. They were out for pleasant, unexciting entertainment, reassuringly like their every-day life, and, above all, guaranteed to make no demands upon the intelligence. Comfort, prosperity, safety, was the order of the new day that produced the New Comedy. Under their soothing influence the Athenians changed so swiftly they were themselves surprised and seeking for a cause laid it to Sparta’s account. The world ever since has echoed them, but to read Menander is to understand perfectly how inevitable was the passing of the Periclean age, to perceive other far more potent causes than the victory of Sparta in the Peloponnesian War.

  In Rome, comedy has an even greater significance for us. The two Roman comedians are immensely important, beyond the Greek even from one point of view, in that they made the actual models upon which European comedy formed itself. With them we enter the great sphere of Latin influence, mighty in moulding our civilization, direct and all-penetrating as never was that of Greece. Aristophanes founded no school. He had no followers, ancient or modern. Menander has lived only as a shadow in Roman plays. Plautus and Terence were the founders of the drama as we know it today.

  But how far they hold up comedy’s mirror to the life of their own times is a matter not easily determined. As has been said, they are all the literature of that period which we possess. There is not one contemporary record by which their credibility can be tested as a source of information about Rome. The question how closely they imitated the Greek New Comedy, to what degree they translated or followed their own genius, is one to delight the scholarly mind because it never can be settled by scholarly standards. The battle of the learned can be waged forever. Too little is left of Menander’s work for even the most erudite to give the victory on that score to either side, and of his fellow-comedians nothing is left at all. However, the absence of clear-cut facts, with which alone the scholars are really concerned, is not fatal to the argument. In deciding the matter there are certain general aspects of the question which cannot be passed over and they tell conclusively for the originality of the two Romans.