Volume 1 — CHAPTER VI.
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THE ROMAN DRAMA.
In proportion as the Romans yielded to the habit of imitating the Greeks, they advanced into refinement, and receded from their characteristic roughness and ferocity. Their pace, however, was very slow, for imagining rudeness and brutality to be synonimous with independence, they indulged and prided themselves in an adherence to their original coarseness and despised the manners of the Grecians, as the latter did those of the Persians, for their extreme refinement and effeminacy. Of the drama there is not to be found a trace on the records of Rome till more than three hundred and fifty years after the building of the city. The people had revels and brutal debauches at which rude compositions filled with raillery and gross invective were sung, accompanied with indecent action and lascivous gestures. But the raillery they used was so personal and calumnious that riots constantly ensued from the resentment of the injured parties, in consequence of which the senate passed a law, in the three hundred and second year of the city, condemning to death any person who should injure the reputation of his neighbour.
It was a full century after that law when, on occasion of great public calamity, they, in order to appease the divine wrath instituted feasts in honour of the gods, and those feasts for the first time exhibited a sort of irregular theatrical performances, composed wholly of imitation. The actors in those may in all probability be placed on a level with those called Mummers in Great Britain, and Livy describes them as Balladines who travelled to Rome from Tuscany. Though their merit could not have been great, they were very much applauded. Applause produced improvement, and they soon formed themselves into companies called histrioni, who performed regular pieces called satires. These, which were at best entitled to no higher rank than bad farces, kept exclusive possession of the public regards for a hundred and twenty years.
It was at the end of that period, and about two hundred and forty years before the Christian æra that the first play performed after the manner of the Greeks, was brought forward in Rome, by Livius Andronicus, the earliest of the Roman dramatic poets. He turned the personal Satires and Fescenine verses so long the admiration of the Romans, into regular form and dialogue, and though the character of a player, so long valued and applauded in Greece, was reckoned vile and despicable among the Romans, Andronicus himself acted a part in his dramatic compositions. At the time of Cicero the works of this poet were obsolete; yet some passages of them are preserved in the Corpus Poetarum.
It is related of Livius Andronicus that he at first formed and sung his pieces in the manner of his predecessors, despairing of being able to accomplish any improvement in the Roman theatre, but that one day being surrounded by the multitude and excessively fatigued, he called a slave to relieve him while he recovered his breath. Displeased with the bungling manner in which the slave performed this new task, Livius rebuked him very severely, the slave justified, the master replied, and a dialogue ensued which the spectators imagining to be a part of the plan of the piece, greatly applauded. The drama at once broke upon their view in a new and superior aspect—they perceived that it was in familiar colloquial communications, such as men use in real life, that human affairs and the hearts of men could be justly imitated, and Andronicus taking advantage of this singular and felicitous incident, composed and represented regular dramas in dialogue.
To Livius Andronicus is due the praise of having first refined the Roman taste in dramatic poetry, as Ennius had but a short time before done in Epic, by introducing the Greek model, as the standard of literature. Both were, according to Suetonius, half Greeks, and were masters of both languages. The taste for tragedy, however, held its ground but for a short time; for the Romans, as fickle as ferocious, soon grew weary of it, and were falling back into their barbarous enjoyment of gladiators and cruel spectacles, when the poet Pacuvius arose, and restored tragedy as far as it could be restored among such a people. He was a nephew of Ennius, and, by descent, tinctured with the Grecian manner. Pacuvius was not only a poet of considerable merit, but a painter also, whose productions were greatly admired; particularly his decorations of a temple of Hercules, which Pliny has mentioned with lavish praise.
To Pacuvius succeeded his disciple Accius, whose first drama appeared in the very same year that Pacuvius produced his last. By the advice of his master he chiefly adhered to the subjects which had before made the business of the dramatists of Athens, translated several of the tragedies of Sophocles into the Latin language, and wrote a vast number of pieces, some of which were comedies. Thus he gained a considerable share, and in fact reaped the harvest of which Andronicus and Pacuvius had sown the seed. Thus it often happens in life that the fruits of one man's virtues, genius, and industry are devoured by a successor.[A]
Yet Accius was unquestionably a lofty and excellent poet, though his style was censured for harshness. Being told of this fault by Pacuvius, he replied "I have no cause to be ashamed of it: I shall hereafter write the better for it. It is with genius as with fruit, that which is sour, grows sweet as it ripens, while that which is early mellow rots before it ripens."
No man was held in higher respect than Accius. He received the greatest marks of honour at Rome. A high magistrate severely reprimanded a man for uttering the name of Accius without reverence; and an actor was punished for mentioning his name on the stage. His exalted opinion of his own dignity may be inferred from the following anecdote respecting him, transmitted to posterity by Valerius Maximus. Once when Julius Cæsar entered an assembly of poets, Accius alone abstained from rising to do him homage. He respected Cæsar as much as any of them, but he thought that in an assembly of the learned, the superiority lay on the part of the poets, and the grandeur of the greatest conqueror was diminished before the lustre of the best writer.[B]
As the writings of Livius Andronicus, Pacuvius and Accius constitute the first epoch in the Roman drama, they are generally spoken of together, and the best critics of antiquity mention them with high commendation and respect. Of the first, much less is known than of the other two. He is nowhere, that we know of, spoken of directly, but often collaterally. He is sometimes coupled with Ennius—the praise of invention is generally allowed him, and his name is brought forward by Horace rather for the purpose of marking an æra than of giving an opinion of his talents.
Ambigitur quoties uter utro fit prior; aufert Pacuvius docti famam senis, Actius alti: Dicitur Alfrani toga convenisse Menandro; Plautus ad exemplar siculi properare Epicharmi, Vincere Cœcilius gravitate, Terentius arte Hos ediscit, et hos areto stipata theatro Spectat Roma potens: habet nos numeratque poetas Ad nostrum tempus, Livi scriptoris ab ævo.[C]
From which lines it appears that in the time of Horace learning was considered to be the characteristic feature of Pacuvius and loftiness of thought that of Accius; and Quintilian speaks of both in the following terms. "Those splendid writers combined sublimity of conception with vigorous style in their tragedies; and on the whole if they have not diffused through their compositions more gracefulness, it was not their fault, but the fault of the age they lived in."
Unquestionably the first dramatic poets of Rome laboured under great disadvantages. They had not only to form a drama, but to mould to a taste for the reception of it a barbarous people, whose softest and most luxurious enjoyments partook of that ferocity which rendered that race terrible in the eyes of the world, but to the philosophic mind not truly great—never, in the slightest measure, amiable or estimable. Nature, moreover, had been ransacked by the Greek poets, so that nothing but imitation was left for the Romans, who in letters, science, or arts, and particularly in the drama, attained no excellence but in proportion as they copied their Grecian predecessors. Even their copies are allowed by their own best authors to be wretched productions when compared with the works of the great originals.[D] Compared with Menander Terence was frigid and unaffecting, in sublimity even Accius was incomparably inferior to Eschylus, Pacuvius in philosophic knowledge to Euripides, and the whole body of the tragic writers of Rome, including Seneca, sink when put in competition with Sophocles.
A poet of the name of Seneca wrote some tragedies—but it yet remains, and in all likelihood will ever remain, undecided whether it was Lucius Annœus Seneca, the same who distinguished himself as a philosopher, and whose admirable moral sentiments have been given to the world in an English dress and arrangement, by Sir Roger Lestrange. There have not been wanting critics of considerable eminence to maintain that the name of Seneca was assumed in order to conceal that of the real author. Quintilian ascribes to him the tragedy of Medea. The Troas and the Hippolytus are also said to be of his composition, while the Agamemnon, the Hercules Fureus, and the Thyestes and Hercules in Oeta, are supposed to have been written by his father Marcus Annœus Seneca, the declaimer. Be the author of them who he may, there can be but one opinion on the merit of the compositions. The style is nervous and replete with beauties, but, according to the corrupted taste of the time in which they were written, abounds too much with ornament, is often turgid and inflated. Those tragedies, however, contain much good morality, conveyed in brilliant sentences and illustrated by lofty and glowing imagery.
As it became the fashion of every writer of eminence, as well as every pretender to letters, among the Romans to dabble with the drama, there were a multitude of tragic poets whose names were soon forgotten, and many whose names alone are incidentally mentioned while their works shared the fate of their bodies, and were buried in their graves. Gracelius wrote a tragedy called Thyestus; Catullus one intitled Alemeon; Cæsar Adrastus; Augustus Ajax; Mæcenas Octavio; and Ovid Medea. Marcus Attilius translated the Electra of Sophocles into Latin verse, and wrote some comedies also, but in language so barbarous and unintelligible that it procured him the name of Ferreus, or the iron poet. A poet of the name of Publius Pontonius, a relative and bosom friend of Pliny, wrote tragedies which were greatly admired by the emperor Claudius: and he was of so bold and independent a temper, that when ordered by the emperor to strike certain passages out of one of his plays, he peremptorily refused, and said he would appeal to the people. This man was a great soldier as well as a poet, and once had the honour of a triumph.
There were many others—Diodorus an Alexandrian of whom Strabo speaks handsomely, and Sulpitius whose eloquence Cicero has praised, calling him the tragic orator. All those had their day of celebrity, as our Lewises, Reynoldses, &c. &c. have now, but their productions have long since been buried in oblivion, and there is reason to believe that the world has greater cause to rejoice at, than regret their loss.