O My friends, whoso in Acragas's beautiful city Have your dwelling aloft; whose hearts are set upon virtue; Girt with fillets about, and crowned with wreaths of rejoicing. There I of women and men am revered. By thousands they follow, Since they have long been racked with the grievous pangs of Crave that I utter the charm whose power is sovran in all things. — If I surpass mankind, who are mortal and utterly wretched? A OTHER FRAGMENTS FROM THE POEM ON NATURE ND thou shalt learn all the drugs that are a defense against ills and old age, since for thee alone shall I accomplish all this. Thou shalt arrest the violence of the weariless winds that arise and sweep the earth, laying waste the cornfields with their breath; and again, when thou so desirest, thou shalt bring their blasts back again with a rush. Thou shalt cause for men a seasonable drought after the dark rains, and again after the summer drought thou shalt produce the streams that feed the trees as they pour down from the sky. Thou shalt bring back from Hades the life of a dead man. Fools! for they have no far-reaching thoughts who deem that what before was not comes into being, or that aught can perish and be utterly destroyed. For it cannot be that aught can arise from what in no way is, and it is impossible and unheard-of that what is should perish; for it will always be, wherever one may keep putting it. I shall tell thee a twofold tale. At one time things grew to be one only out of many; at another, that divided up to be many instead of one. There is a double becoming of perishable things, and a double passing away. The coming together of all things brings one generation into being and destroys it; the other grows 5474 up and is scattered as things become divided. And these things never cease, continually changing places, at one time all uniting in one through Love, at another each borne in different directions by the repulsions of Strife. For of a truth, they [i. e., Love and Strife] were aforetime and shall be; nor ever, methinks, will boundless time be emptied of that pair. And they prevail in turn as the circle comes round, and pass away before one another, and increase in their appointed turn. For if thou takest them [trees and plants] to the close recesses of thy heart and watchest over them kindly with faultless care, then thou shalt have all these things in abundance throughout thy life, and thou shalt gain many others from them; for each grows ever true to its own character, according as its nature is. But if thou strivest after things of a different kind, as is the way with men, ten thousand woes await thee to blunt thy careful thoughts. All at once they will cease to live when the time comes round, desiring each to reach its own kind: for know that all things have wisdom and a share of thought. It is not possible for us to set God before our eyes, or to lay hold of him with our hands, which is the broadest way of persuasion that leads into the heart of man. For he is not furnished with a human head on his body, two branches do not sprout from his shoulders, he has no feet, no swift knees, nor hairy parts; but he is only a sacred and unutterable Mind, flashing through the whole world with rapid thoughts. A FROM THE POEM OF PURIFICATIONS ND there was among them a man of rare knowledge, most skilled in all manner of wise works, a man who had won the utmost wealth of wisdom; for whensoever he strained with all his mind, he easily saw everything of all the things that are now [though he lived] ten, yea, twenty generations of men ago. But at the last, they appear among mortal men as prophets, song-writers, physicians, and princes; and thence they rise up as gods exalted in honor, sharing the hearth of the other gods and the same table; free from human woes, safe from destiny, and incapable of hurt. D ENNIUS (239-169 B. C.) BY WILLIAM CRANSTON LAWTON SOUBTLESS every human race-surely every Aryan clan felt, and in some measure gratified, the need of lyric utterance, in joy, in grief, and in wrath. The marriage song, the funeral chant, the banqueters' catch, the warriors' march, the hymn of petition and of thanksgiving - these must have been heard even in early Latium. Yet this Latin peasant soldier was surely as unimaginative a type of man as ever rose to the surface of selfconscious civilized life. His folk-song, like his folk-lore generally, must have been heavy, crude, monotonous, clinging close to the soil. Macaulay's Lays still stir the boyish heart, though Matthew Arnold did repeat, with uncharacteristic severity, that he who enjoyed the barbaric clash of their doggerel could never hope to appreciate true poetry at all! But good or bad, they are pure Macaulayese. No audible strain has come down, even of those funeral ballads and festival lays whose former existence is merely asserted, without illustration, by Cato and by Varro. At the threshold of Hellenic literature stand the two epics whose imaginative splendor is still unrivaled. The first figure in Roman letters, seven centuries later, is a Greek slave, or freedman, Livius Andronicus, translating into barbarous Saturnian verse the Iliad and Odyssey, and rendering almost as crudely many a famous tragedy. Next Nævius sang, in those same rough Saturnians, the victory of Rome in the Punic wars. Joel Barlow's Columbiad' and "meek drab-skirted» Ellwood's 'Davideis' might have made room between them for this martial chant, if it had survived. Then Plautus, funmaker for the Roman populace, "turned barbarously" into the vulgar speech plays good and bad, of the Middle and New Attic Comedy. The more serious of these dramas, like the 'Captivi,' seem like a charcoal reproduction upon a barn door of some delicate line engraving, whose loss we must still regret. Yet much of the real fun in Plautus is Roman, and doubtless his own. Moreover, he or his Greek masters - probably both knew how to make a comedy go in one unpausing rush of dramatic action, from the lowering to the raising of the curtain. But to true creative literature these versions of Menander and Philemon bear about the same relation as would adaptations of Sardou and Dumas, with local allusions and « in Plattdeutsch, for the Hamburg theatre. In gags," The next figure in this picturesque line is Ennius, who like nearly all the early authors is no Roman gentleman, not even a Latin at all. Born (239 B. C.) in the village of Rudiæ of far-off Calabria, he heard in this cottage home the rough Oscan speech of his peasant race. This language held for them somewhat the position of Aramaic among the fisher folk of Galilee two centuries and a half later. both lands, Greek was the ordinary speech of the market-place; Latin, at most, the official language of the rulers. The boy Ennius seems to have been educated in the Hellenic city of Tarentum. Even there, he may not yet have spoken Latin at all. Cicero apparently confesses in the 'Archias' (62 B. C.) that his native speech had even then made no headway "beyond the narrow boundaries" of Latium. In Magna Græcia, Ennius probably often heard classic Greek tragedy acted, as Virgil intimates he still did in his time. We have referred elsewhere to the dramatic incident, that Cato the Elder brought in his train from Corsica the man who, more than all others, was to establish in Rome that Hellenic art most dreaded by the great Censor. Cato was the younger of the two. Ennius was just "Midway upon the journey of our life.» He was then a centurion in rank; that is, he had fought his way, no doubt with many scars, to the proud place at the head of his company. (A young Roman gentleman, invited by the general to join his staff, knew little of such campaigning.) This was at the close of Rome's second and decisive struggle with Carthage, so long the queen of the Western Mediterranean. Ennius lived on, chiefly in Rome, as many years longer; his death coinciding with the equally decisive downfall of Macedonia (168 B. C.). His life, then, spans perhaps the greatest exploits of Roman arms. This was doubtless also the age in which the heroic national character reached its culmination-and began to decay. Of this victorious generation the Scipios are probably the best type. Its chief recorder was their friend and protégé, the Calabrian peasant and campaigner. Of all the missing works in the Latin speech, perhaps not even the lost books of Livy would be so eagerly welcomed-so helpful in restoring essential outlines, now lacking, of Roman action and character- as the 'Annals' of Ennius, in eighteen books, which followed the whole current of Roman tradition, from Æneas and Romulus down to the writer's own day. And this work was, at the same time, the first large experiment in writing Homeric hexameters in the Latin speech! So true is it, that the Hellenic Muse was present at the birth of Roman literature. Though no work of Ennius survives save in tantalizing fragments, he is the manliest, the most vivid figure in the early history of Latin letters. Gellius preserves a saying of Ennius, that in his three mother tongues he had three hearts. But his fatherland had accepted in good faith, long before, the Italian supremacy of Rome. His love for the imperial city quite equaled that of any native. He became actually a citizen through the kindness of his noble friend Fulvius, who as one of the triumvirs appointed to found Potentia, enrolled Ennius among the "colonists" (184 B. C.). "Romans we now are become, who before this day were Rudini!» is his exultant cry, in a line of the 'Annals.' > It is not likely that he had any assistance on this occasion from Cato, who had already discovered his own grievous error. Some years earlier one of the Fulvii had taken Ennius with him on a campaign in Greece (189 B. C.); but evidently not as a centurion! It is of this Fulvius that Cicero says in the 'Archias, "He did not hesitate to consecrate to the Muses memorials of Mars." The alliteration suggests a poetic epigram; and Cato is known to have complained in a public oration that Fulvius "had led poets with him into his province." Ennius might have been useful also as an interpreter, as a secretary, and as a table companion. One of the longest fragments from the 'Annals' describes such a friend of another Roman general. Gellius, who preserves the lines, quotes good early authority for considering them as a self-portraiture by Ennius. S° PORTRAIT OF A SCHOLAR 10 HAVING spoken, he called for a man, with whom often and gladly Table he shared, and talk, and all his burden of duties, When with debate all day on important affairs he was wearied, Whether perchance in the forum wide, or the reverend Senate; One with whom he could frankly speak of his serious matters,— Trifles also, and jests,- could pour out freely together Pleasant or bitter words, and know they were uttered in safety. Many the joys and the griefs he had shared, whether public or secret! This was a man in whom no impulse prompted to evil, Whether of folly or malice. A scholarly man and a loyal, Tactful, speaking in season, yet courteous, never loquacious. Vast was the buried and antique lore that was his, for the foretime Made him master of earlier customs, as well as of newer. |