The Portable Roman Reader (Portable Library)

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  PART I - THE BEGINNINGS AND THE AGE OF CICERO (240 B.C.—42 B.C.)

  PLAUTUS

  TERENCE

  LUCRETIUS

  CAESAR

  CICERO

  CATULLUS

  PART II - THE AUGUSTAN AGE

  VIRGIL

  HORACE

  LIVY

  OVID

  PART III - THE SILVER AGE

  SENECA

  LUCAN

  PETRONIUS

  MARTIAL

  TACITUS

  JUVENAL

  PART IV - THE END

  LUCIUS APULEIUS

  ANONYMOUS

  SAINT AUGUSTINE

  BOËTHIUS

  FOR THE BEST IN PAPERBACKS, LOOK FOR THE

  THE VIKING PORTABLE LIBRARY ROMAN READER

  Each volume in The Viking Portable Library either presents a representative selection from the works of a single outstanding writer or offers a comprehensive anthology on a special subject. Averaging 700 pages in length and designed for compactness and readability, these books fill a need not met by other compilations. All are edited by distinguished authorities, who have written introductory essays and included much other helpful material.

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  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published in the United States of America

  by Viking Penguin Inc. 1951

  Paperbound edition published 1959

  Reprinted 1961,1962,1963,1964, 1966 (twice),

  1967, 1969,1970 ,1972, 1974, 1975

  Published in Penguin Books 1977

  Copyright 1951 by Viking Penguin Inc.

  Copyright © renewed Viking Penguin Inc., 1979

  All rights reserved

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Davenport, Basil, 1905—1966, ed.

  The Portable Roman reader.

  1. Latin literature—Translations into English.

  2. English literature—Translations from Latin.

  I. Title.

  [PA6163.D38 1977] 870’.8 76-48083

  eISBN : 978-1-101-17375-6

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  Acknowledgments

  The editor wishes to thank the following for permission to use excerpts from English translations of Latin texts:

  George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., London: Poems VIII and LVIII, Catullus, Translations from Latin Poetry, translated by R. C. Trevelyan.

  Cambridge University Press, London: Poems IX and LXXXV, Catullus, translated by Hugh Macnaghten; and F. L. Lucas and the Cambridge University Press: Pervigilium Veneris, translated by F. L. Lucas.

  Dodd, Mead & Company, New York: extracts from Trimalchio’s Dinner (Petronius) by Harry Thurston Peck, copyright 1898 by Dodd, Mead & Company (copyright renewed).

  E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., New York, and J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., London: excerpt from On the Nature of Things, Lucretius, translated by William Ellery Leonard; and E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc.: Poem XLVI, The Poems of Catullus by William Appleton Aiken, copyright 1950 by William A. Aiken.

  Harvard University Press, Cambridge: excerpts from volumes in the Loeb Classical Library: Gallic War, Caesar, translated by H. J. Edwards ; De Senectute, Cicero, translated by William A. Falconer; In Catilinan, Cicero, translated by Louis E. Lord; Roman History, Livy, translated by B. O. Foster; Germania, Tacitus, translated by William Peterson; Annals, Tacitus, translated by John Jackson.

  Henry Holt and Company, Inc., New York, and The Society of Authors, London, as the Literary Representative of the Trustees of the Estate of the late A. E. Housman: Ode IV:7, Horace, The Collected Poems of A. E. Housman, copyright 1936 by Barclays Bank, Ltd., 1940 by Henry Holt and Company, Inc.

  Longmans Green & Co., Limited, and the Representatives of the late Andrew Lang, London: Poems XXXI and CI, Catullus, The Poetical Works of Andrew Lang.

  Routledge and Kegan Paul, Ltd., London: epigrams, Martial, The Twelve Books of Epigrams by J. A. Pott and F. A. Wright.

  Russell & Volkening, Inc., New York: Ode 1:7, Horace, translated by Lord Dunsany.

  The University of Chicago Press, Chicago: “Medea,” Tragedies of Seneca by Frank Justus Miller.

  Introduction

  NOT long ago I was talking to a young friend of mine, a college graduate, intelligent, well read, and very fond of books. He happened to speak of The Ides of March, Thornton Wilder’s novel of Caesar and Cleopatra, and referred to it as illustrating conditions “toward the end of the Roman Empire.” I was more than startled. The idea that anybody at all could suppose that Julius Cæsar flourished toward the end of the Roman Empire filled me with the same sort of horror and pity that filled the elder Mrs. Day at the thought that in a Christian country anybody could miss being baptized. These emotions remained with me, and led me to reflect both on the probable number of men of my friend’s age who knew no more of Rome than he did, and on why it seemed to me such a loss for them.

  A generation ago the answer to the latter question would have been prompt. One must know the history of Rome because one learned valuable lessons from it. Upon further inquiry as to what one learned, it appeared to be that from the rise of Rome one learned how to build a great state, and from the fall of Rome how to keep it from falling. Moreover, if the answer was given by an Englishman or an American, it was with a comfortable sense that the first of these lessons had been well learned, and there would be no need for the second just yet. We were still as confident as Gibbon, when, in finishing his Decline and Fallofthe Roman Empire, he congratulated himself that there were no powerful barbarians ready to overrun civilization; if he had dared, he might have added that the Christianity he saw around him did not seem sufficiently enthusiastic to be a menace to the state. Now, with the barbarians at the gate, when we inquire what did cause the fall of Rome, we are given a bewildering choice of answers. Rome fell because of persecuting the Christians, and of being converted by them; because of the invasions of the Goths, and of the Anopheles mosquito; because of bread and circuses, and of the natural aging of an organism. All of us who have old-fashioned church-going upbring ings can remember earnest preachers maintaining (like Thomas Wolfe’s schoolma‘am, who declared that the wages of Falstaff’s sin was death at a ripe old age) that the crimes of Nero led to the fall of Rome some four centuries later; and perhaps some of us have found Gibbon more brilliant, but no more convincing. What we can be sure of is, first, that Rome established what, considering the conditions of communication, can be called a world state, a society of many peoples and languages united in a common citizenship, and that for some hundreds of years she gave them peace and on the whole good government; and, second, that the Empire was established at the cost of a period of civil wars, political assassinations, secret denunciations, and party purges, and was later maintained by
a bureaucracy so efficient that it kept the Empire alive when it is quite arguable that it would have been better dead. Compared with our grandfathers, we are nearer the world state as an ideal, and nearer the blood baths in reality.

  The Rome that did this is one of the great formative facts of our world. Not to know Rome is not to know the character of one of one’s own immediate ancestors—an ancestor who has of late been less thought of than Athens and Jerusalem, and deservedly so, but an ancestor all the same, whose traits keep turning up in his descendants. And not to know Roman history is not to know one of the great historic dramas. The story of Rome is not indeed a tragedy in Aristotle’s sense. Greece of the Golden Age, and the Southern Confederacy, are examples among the nations of the Aristotelian tragic hero—the great man who by a certain flaw in his nature is brought to a downfall greater than he deserved. And, like classic heroes, both the Golden Age and the Confederacy fell with a crash. Rome is like George Eliot’s Tito Melema, the brilliant young man whose flaw grows and grows until his downfall is deserved; Rome is like Ethan Frome, the cripple who goes on living too long. It is a tragedy, perhaps, even more to the modem taste. And both the history and the mind of Rome are reflected, more, probably, than those of any other people, in its literature. Sherlock Holmes’ ideal reasoner, who from a single drop of water could deduce an Atlantic or a Niagara, could undoubtedly deduce the rise, greatness, and decline of Rome from reading, in order, Plautus, Virgil, and Juvenal; and without being an ideal reasoner one can still feel, in every work of Latin literature, the quality of Romanness. Ex pede Herculem—from the foot alone you may infer Hercules.

  In the beginning, and for a long time thereafter, the Romans were a nation of soldiers. Throughout her history Rome was almost continuously at war somewhere along her lengthening or shrinking frontiers, and during the Republic every Roman was a soldier—potentially at least, and most often actually. That may be the reason for a certain hard-bitten realism and practicality in the Roman attitude toward life. Their plastic arts are for the most part imitated from the Greeks, and coarsened in the imitating; their great contributions are the arch, the aqueduct, the Roman road—and the portrait bust, which shows not an ideal athlete but an actual general or emperor, warts and all. One of the earliest pieces of Roman literature is a treatise on practical farming by the elder statesman Cato; one of the masterpieces of the Golden Age is the Georgics of Virgil, a solitary instance of a treatise on practical farming which is also fine poetry. The Works andDays of the Greek Hesiod is much less complete and more mythological; it opens with a myth of the Origin of Evil—which, as in Genesis, is why farming is necessary. In passing, it is significant that Hesiod is writing as a man who farms his own acres, Virgil as a gentleman farmer whose land is tilled by slaves; the Roman, at least the Roman who read and wrote, was far richer than the corresponding Greek. In this connection it is also significant that the practical Cato lays it down as a maxim that a slave should be either working or sleeping, and also recommends selling off old slaves for what they will fetch, to save their keep. Roman philosophy, in contrast to the metaphysical and aesthetic speculations of the Greeks, is almost entirely concerned with ethics. The exception, the great Roman philosopher Lucretius, is entirely concerned with two points: the Nature of Things—not the Nature of Reality but the way things actually are, as a matter of observation and deduction; and the eminently practical goal of Peace of Mind. And in both comedy and tragedy, the Romans delighted in sententiæ, short, pithy observations on the proper conduct of life.

  The proper conduct of life was a matter of gravitas, pietas, and virtus—three words that look as if they meant “gravity,” “piety,” and “virtue,” which they do not. Gravitasmeans much the same as “dignity,” though the quality was more important to the Romans than to us. Pietas was close to “duty”; it meant performing one’s duties in every relationship: as father, son, soldier, citizen, friend, slave-owner, worshiper. Toward the gods it required neither beliefs nor morals, but the proper performance of the proper ceremonies. But toward mankind it meant giving every man his due, one of the greatest legacies that Rome has left to us. It was Rome who first formed the concept of the Law of Nations, the idea that beyond the statutes of any particular locality there was an abstract standard of right and wrong which all men recognized and were bound by. Greece had conceived the equality of citizens before the law, but it was Rome that constantly extended the rights of citizenship. A Greek had no rights outside his own city; under the Roman Empire, Paul, a Jew of Tarsus, could make a provincial governor revoke his sentence of a flogging by merely saying, “I am a Roman citizen”; he could say, “I appeal to Cæsar,” and receive the only possible answer, “Thou hast appealed unto Caesar; unto Cæsar shalt thou go.” The Romans first conquered their neighbors in their own peninsula, and then led those conquered neighbors to fight as loyal Romans against the strangers beyond the seas and mountains—strangers who would in their turn be made vassals, then subject allies, then Roman citizens.

  Virtus was the quality that distinguished the man, vir, from the mere human creature, homo. There is no exact word for it; but if we wish to know what a nation admires we can go to its nursery tales, the old stories of Washington and the Cherry Tree, Alfred and the Cakes, Bruce and the Spider. For the Roman, such stories were those Livy tells of the beginnings of the Republic; they are concerned not with truthfulness or democracy or perseverance, but with valor and complete devotion to country. Every Roman schoolboy knew the stories of Horatius at the Bridge, of Quintus Curtius leaping his horse into the gulf, of Lucius Junius Brutus, who commanded and witnessed the execution of his own sons for conspiracy against the city. There was the story of the other Horatius, who supplied the subject of a play by Corneille; in the service of the city, he killed the man his sister loved, and killed his sister because she mourned for him; he was sentenced for the killing of his sister to a purely nominal punishment, that justice might be preserved. There was Gaius Mucius, who slipped into the camp of the besieging Lars Porsena with intent to kill him, but killed one of his followers by mistake and was taken prisoner. He declared to Lars Porsena that though he had failed, there were three hundred men in Rome who had sworn to attempt Porsena’s life, one after the other. When Porsena threatened him with torture unless he revealed their names, he smiled and held his own right hand in the brazier until it was burned off. Lars Porsena thought it wiser to come to terms with the Romans, and Mucius was given the name of Scævola, or Left-handed, which was borne by his descendants down to imperial times.

  The story is important as showing what the Romans admired, even though I think it is probable that it was invented later to explain a nickname “Lefty” bestowed in the ordinary way. There was a similar story about the name Brutus, which means “Stupid” or “Brutish”—Hamlet’s pun to Polonius was better than he knew. The story is that Lucius Junius Brutus, like Hamlet, feigned idiocy to escape the suspicion of his uncle, the last of the kings. Possibly; but the original Lefty and Stupid may have been called so for no such complimentary reason. The Romans had a schoolboyish aptitude for names based on personal peculiarities. Cicero means “Warty”; Cæsar probably “Hairy.” It is part of the quality in them which led, on the one hand, to the only two art forms they invented, the portrait bust and the satire; and on the other, to the abuse and smut of some of the epigrams. For, as Aristotle says, every virtue is a mean between two vices, one consisting of its defect, the other of its excess, and, it may be added, the virtue and the excess are sometimes present in the same person. It is not hard to see the excess in the stories of Horatius’s murder of his sister, and even of Brutus’s execution of his sons. To us, the phrase “a Roman father” implies a somewhat doubtful virtue. As the Romans might have said if they could have thought of it, in their anxiety not to be unmanly they became inhuman. Even in their carefully maintained indifference to death and pain there came to be something almost theatrical, an attitude that reaches its full expression in the epic poets of the Silver
Age, and in the tragedies of Seneca, whose characters are the ancestors of all the declamatory seventeenth-century heroes, Corneille’s and Dryden’s. And from disregarding their own pain they came to disregard that of others, or to enjoy it. Their virtus was always liable to be stained by the vice to which the soldier is tempted, ruthlessness and cruelty. Julius Cæsar was in general a humane commander, but once he cut off the hands of his prisoners, to teach them not to revolt. The cruelty of the arena, at first occasional, became habitual, so that it could be said of one of the late emperors, “he never dined without human blood.”

  The soldier’s vices are two, cruelty and loot; and of the two the loot was probably the more serious for Rome. The King of Brobdingnag, looking at Rome with the superiority that comes of being sixty feet high, might have said that, from the Punic Wars on, her internal history is that of a successful gang of cutthroats quarrel ing over the division of the swag. Already, before the end of the Republic, the raped wealth had begun to pour into Italy. The rich got richer and the poor got poorer; the struggle between the Haves and Have-Nots led to the civil wars which brought an end to the Republic. Under the Empire, the appetite for wealth grew by what it fed on; men already rich spent their lives fawning on others for more riches. Tacitus, Suetonius, and Juvenal have left us a picture of the final corruption of Roman society. No doubt it is somewhat exaggerated, but it is a fact that with those three names Roman literature comes to a virtual end. The Roman Empire of the West lasted some three hundred years more, but the spirit had gone out of it. Scattered here and there are the beginnings of something new, writing that should be called Romanesque rather than Roman; but the old Roman world is like the men whose souls Dante met in Hell though their bodies were still walking about on earth.