The Portable Roman Reader (Portable Library) Read online

  A NOTE ON SELECTIONS AND TRANSLATIONS

  In choosing the material for this volume, my aim has been twofold: to give so far as possible a comprehensive picture of Roman literature; and to produce a readable book. If these seemed to conflict, I have perhaps weighted the scales a little in favor of the latter, feeling that, as Horace says that silver buried in the ground is of no color, so a book which is not read has no real existence. At best too many of us feel about Roman authors generally as the lieutenant in Tom Jones did about Homer, even though we might not express it so vigorously: “Don’t talk to me of Homer! I have the marks of him in my a—yet” (I follow Fielding’s spelling) . I have tried to overcome this prejudice by finding passages which are readable both in themselves and in their English rendering. In some cases the difficulty or impossibility of this has led to what may seem, or may be, faults of proportion. The Odes of Horace, for instance, by their absolute importance in literature, deserve more space; but Horace is the most translated and most untranslatable of poets; it seemed better to leave him underpresented than misrepresented. For the other shortcomings in this, the apology has been made once for all by Æschylus: τχνη δ‘νγℵης σθενεστρα µαℵρ—“Art is far weaker than Necessity.”

  PART I

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

  EDITOR’S NOTE

  IT IS not often that the beginning of a literature can be precisely dated; but it can be said that the first work of Latin literature—except for a handful of charms, the first piece of Latin writing—appeared in 240 B.C., the year after the end of the First Punic War, and was the work of a Greek freedman bearing a Roman name. Both facts are almost too obviously significant. All through history the conquered Greeks were to be Rome’s teachers and models; and Rome had no time to spare for literature until she had defeated her immediate neighbors. The Roman conquest of Italy was completed by the Pyrrhic War, which ended in 272 B.C. with the capture of Tarentum; besides bringing the whole of the Italian peninsula under Roman domination, this war brought the Romans into contact with the Greeks of southern Italy. A certain Andronicus, a Greek of Tarentum, was taken to Rome as a captive and became the slave of a Roman named Livius; Andronicus acted as tutor to his children, was rewarded for his services with the gift of his freedom, and, as was customary, added to his own name that of his late master, by which he is known. (The Greeks customarily bore one name apiece, the Romans three.) Livius Andronicus continued to act as a teacher of Greek and Latin, and also as an actor and stage manager. For his theater he translated Greek plays, and the first of these were produced in 240 B.C., a comedy and a tragedy, which someone spoke of with surprise as “plays with plots!” Livius also translated the Odyssey into the rough Roman Saturnian meter. Native Roman verse was based not, like Greek, upon quantity or longs and shorts, but, like ours, upon stress accent; one of their favorite meters was the Saturnian, which is approximately that of the feminine lines in “Sing a song of sixpence”—“The queen was in her parlor, eating bread and honey.”

  Five years after the first production of a play by Livius there appeared a native Roman writer called Nævius. He also did translations or adaptations of Greek plays; besides this, he wrote a long poem on the subject of the Punic War, also in the Saturnian meter. In his first two books he goes back to the founding of Rome, and (according to a surviving account) anticipates Virgil in making Venus appeal to Jupiter on behalf of Æneas, and Jupiter give a promise of the greatness of Rome. Already the Romans had begun to think of their state as a City of Destiny. But most of his work, so far as we can judge from what is left of it, was a jog-trot chronicle.

  Both these authors survive only in scraps of a dozen lines or so, but enough to show that in what is lost we are not missing much. The same may be said of Ennius, “the Father of Latin Poetry.” He produced Greek adaptations in many forms, but his chief claims to the paternity of Latin poetry are the somewhat contradictory ones that he domesticated the Greek hexameter and that he originated the only distinctive Roman form, the literary satire. The word comes from satura, a hodgepodge, and was originally applied to a sort of informal entertainment at the harvest festival, consisting of songs and personal banter, much of it coarse and even obscene. These saturæ were driven off the stage by Livius’s astonishing innovation, a play with a plot; Ennius adopted the fugitive and adapted it to a written form, writing in a go-as-you-please fashion and making fun of his neighbors. This was the beginning of the form which was to serve the elegant persiflage of Horace and the savage indignation of Juvenal. Ennius’s most important work is the Annals, a history of Rome from the arrival of Æneas down to 172 B.C., only three years before his own death —toward the end he must have been racing to keep up with events, like Upton Sinclair’s Lanny Budd saga, For this he used the quantitative hexameter employed by the Greeks, and his success, or else the prestige of the Greek originals, was so great that the native accentual verse was driven underground and did not reappear until the tottering Empire was giving way to the earliest Middle Ages, It is really an astonishing phenomenon. It is as though certain Elizabethan experimenters had succeeded in their attempt to write English verse on the French model, basing it on number of syllables instead of stress, and as if the whole body of subsequent English poetry had managed to ignore the fact that English is a stress-accented language. But the spirit of the Latin language makes itself heard, in the preponderance of long syllables, which make its hexameters move much more heavily than the Greek. It is the Roman gravitas.

  As with Livius and Nævius, only small fragments of Ennius are left, and, as with them, one cannot honestly say that one is hungry for more. The first Roman writer who is survived by completed works is Plautus, Ennius’s slightly older contemporary, and the second is Terence, a generation later than Plautus. Both these men are writers of ooxnedies modeled on the late Greek form known as the New Comedy, to distinguish it from the comedy of Aristophanes, which was more like musical comedy with a satiric plot. The New Comedy is a school of farce, made up of situation comedies and stock characters. The young man, with the advice of his clever slave, gets the better of the heavy father, or of the girl’s heavy father; twins are mistaken for each other; it turns out that the slave girl is the long-lost daughter of one’s neighbor, so one may safely marry her. Among the characters we meet the Boastful Soldier, the Sponge, the Hen-pecked Husband, and so on. It is noteworthy that without exception the plays have settings which are nominally somewhere in Greece, and, indeed, the world they depict—the world of young lovers, confidential slaves, witty courtesans, and cowardly soldier-braggarts—is Alexandrine Greece rather than Rome. Nevertheless, like the wood in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which is nearer to England than to Athens, the setting of these plays is actually nearer to Rome than to Greece. Magistrates appear with Roman titles, ædiles and tresviri; characters speak of walking in the Forum and visit the Capitol; they worship the Roman household gods and speak contemptuously of the Greeks. If it is a Greek world, it is inhabited by Roman characters. The characters are Roman because that is what the audience knew and cared for; the world is Greek because in that way Roman dignity could be maintained. It is all very well to show an Athenian heavy father hoodwinked by a clever slave, or a Theban husband cuckolded by Jupiter; it would never do to show a Roman in such situations.

  Roman literature seems now to be well launched. The Romans have learned to write from the Greeks, but they have learned well; they have developed their own themes, characters, even their own form; everything is going swimmingly. Then, suddenly, there is a gap of half a century when nothing of importance appears. Roman literature began when the frontiers, where the wars were always going on, were pushed out far enough so that the fighting was not on Rome’s doorstep. Roman literature paused when fighting broke out in Italy again, the civil wars which did not really stop until the overthrow of the Republic, although the Age of Cicero marks a period of apparent peace, when the war, as has been said of diplomacy, was carried on by other means. The expansion of Rome meant, of course, that the Republic must sooner or later come to an end. Just as an amoeba is bound to split in two when its area needs more food than its perimeter can supply, the Republic was bound to break down when it tried to administer a state the size of Italy by the methods of the town meeting. Even if they had thought of representative government, that would hardly have helped unless they had also been able to invent some form of rapid transport. But the end of the Republic was quicker and more bitter because of the strife between the Haves and Have-Nots. The spoils of Empire were changing Rome from a landed to a money economy. The great proprietors, enriched by the wars, were working their vast estates like factories, with slave labor; to do this they turned off their free tenants and bought up their poor neighbors by fair means or foul. The city of Rome, the only place where it was possible to cast a vote, became full of landless men; men with legitimate grievances to place before the legislators, but men who were peculiarly liable to be misled by the promises of any man whose platform was cheap bread, and let the Italians pay the taxes.

  The old general Marius, who had covered himself with glory in the wars against the kingdom of Numidia, became involved in the intrigues of two demagogues, turned against them, and went into retirement for a while, until he thought he saw a chance to regain his lost prestige by getting the command of the war in the East against Mithridates, the command that had been given to the younger general Sulla. He succeeded in getting the popular assembly to vote him in. Sulla, however, was the actual commander of the army. He marched it on Rome; Marius fled; and with Sulla and his army at the doorstep the popular assembly reversed its decree and confirmed Sulla in his command. Sulla went off to fight his war. As soon as he was at a safe distance Marius returned, at the head of his anti-Senatorial or popular party, and murdered the leading men of the Senate and the governing class, a blood bath from which the Senatorial order never recovered. By the time Sulla returned victorious, Marius was dead, but Sulla had his revenge upon everybody else. He had already shown for the first time that the man who commanded the army could put himself in command of Rome. Now he taught another lesson to those who came after him; he had himself appointed dictator without conditions.

  The office of dictator was fundamental in the Roman constitution. That constitution, like the American, originated in opposition to kingship and was a system of checks and balances; but the checks were so effective that sometimes it was impossible to get anything done at all. At the head of the Republic, for instance, were two consuls, each with a right to veto the other. Considering this and other veto powers, the Romans found that in time of emergency it was necessary to vest extraordinary powers in one man. He was appointed dictator, or virtual autocrat, but was still subject to certain limitations; he could not touch the treasury, he was accountable at the end of his term, and none of the early dictators kept his office for more than six months. Sulla had the title granted to himself without restrictions, a precedent for the legal fictions by which the Republic was transformed into an empire.

  This was the background of the Rome of Julius Caesar and Cicero—Cicero, a conservative by inclination and connections, and Caesar, the ambitious young politician, nephew by marriage of Marius. Sulla was dead, after putting through some conservative reforms, but the struggle went on and broke out into violence in such affairs as the conspiracy of Catiline. Catiline was a ruined noble, ruined, like so many nobles before and since, partly by his own dissipation, partly by the change from a land economy and from a rural to an urban culture. In the early days of the Republic, land-owners had been content to live on their holdings; when they wished to live in the city, they borrowed on their lands, and the interest on the mortgages soon outran the income from the estates. Catiline and a group of others first tried to push through a law containing the simple and revolutionary measure of an arbitrary reduction of all debts; and when he failed in this, gathered a private army and plotted to murder the leading members of the government, and increase the confusion by firing their houses. Cicero got wind of the conspiracy, denounced it, and secured passage of the emergency decrees: “Let the Consuls see to it that the Republic take no harm”—the last legitimate use of the old. limited dictatorship; and after the arrest of the conspirators Cicero himself was guilty of an unconstitutional act in having them strangled without giving them the right to appeal against the death penalty to the assembly of the people.

  The conspiracy of Catiline was followed by others, by riots and the use of private armies of gangsters on one side and the other. The situation had become desperate through the failure of the executive, and the only hope seemed to be to invest one man with full power to make the laws and see that they were obeyed—then, perhaps, they could go back to constitutional government. For this position there were two obvious candidates, the two successful generals Pompey and Julius Cæsar. Pompey was backed by the Senate and the old land-owning class; Cæsar by the opposition. When their rivalry led to a civil war in which Pompey was defeated, Cæsar was the only man in Rome. He consolidated his position by following the example of Sulla: he was Dictator, Pontifex Maximus or Supreme Head of the Church, Commander-in-Chief of the Army, and, like Pooh-Bah, several minor officials as well. Of all these, the most important was commander-in-chief; witness the fact that the Latin word for it, imperator, gave us the title “emperor.” Cæsar was killed by a group of conspirators who hoped to restore the Republic; but it was too late for that.

  The great prose writers of this time were two of the great actors in it, Caesar and Cicero. There were also two poets, who, like most great poets, are not of an age but for all time, Lucretius and Catullus. Lucretius’ work is that unique epic of thought, On the Nature of Things. It is very different from the brilliant speculations and myths of the Greeks. Zeno of Elea, for instance, maintained that if Achilles, the swiftest of mortals, tried to overtake a tortoise, he could never catch it, since before he could go the whole distance he must go half, and there would always be half of some distance remaining; this and a series of other paradoxes had a serious purpose, to show that the very natures of time, space, and motion were self-contradictory. Plato explains love by saying that we are all made double and split apart, and one wonders how far to believe him. The Roman Lucretius looks straight at the world and tries to see how it is made. In his own way he is no less astonishing than Plato. The atomic theory, organic evolution and the Mendelian principle, the origin of kingship with a foreshadowing of Rousseau, a theory of dreams—they are all here. And here is the triumphant, rapturous denial of immortality, stated with such eloquence that while one reads, at least, it really seems what it seemed to Lucretius, good news.

  Catullus was the most brilliant of a circle of brilliant young men who cultivated Greek literature and wrote imitations of it. Through the body of his verse it is possible to know him as one knows few men in history. He shares with us the rapture of first love, the anguish of disillusionment, the pang of bereavement, even his friendships and his quarrels. Catullus, Lucretius, and the philosophic writings of Cicero remind us of what is so hard to remember in reading history—that even in periods of the greatest crisis men still ponder abstract themes, they still fall in love.

  PLAUTUS

  (Titus Maccius Plautus, 254? B.C.-184 B.C.)

  Amphitryon

  Translated by Sir Robert Allison

  CHARACTERS

  MERCURY, disguised asSosia

  SOSIA, slave of Amphitryon

  JUPITER, disguised as Amphitryon

  ALCMENA, wife of Amphitryon

  AMPHITRYON, leader of the Theban army

  BLEPHARO, a pilot

  BROMIA, maid-servant of Alcmena

  THESSALA (persona muta), a maid-servant

  SCENE: A street in Thebes in front of the house of Amphitryon.

  PROLOGUE

  MERCURY (disguised as Sosia): As you in all your mer

  chandisings wish,

  Whether you buy or sell, that I should help

  And render aid in everything you do,

  And see that all your businesses and plans

  Should turn out well, whether they be at home

  Or else abroad, and bless you with a rich

  And full reward in all you are engaged,

  Or will engage in, still to you and yours

  Bring tidings of success, and still report

  Of all that may be for your common good;

  For you already know the gods have given

  And granted me a preference as to news

  And trade; and, as you wish, I still should try

  To bless, and bring to you perpetual gain;

  Listen in silence to this comedy,

  As fair, impartial arbiters should do.

  Now I will tell at whose command I come,

  And wherefore, and will give my name as well.

  Jove is my master; Mercury my name;

  He sent me here as his ambassador;

  Although he knew his word would be for you

  As good as a command, and that you fear

  And reverence his name, as well you should;

  But still he bid me now to come to you,

  Entreatingly, with kind and gentle words.

  For sure this Jove as much as any one

  Of you, dreads ill mischance; born as he is

  Like you of mortal mother, mortal sire,

  ‘Tis nothing strange, if he fears for himself.

  And I too, I who am the son of Jove

  Infected am with this same dread of ill.

  Therefore with kindly feeling ’tis I come

  And bring the same to you; from you I ask