The History of Rome by Theodor Mommsen (highly recommended books TXT) 📖

spared the Homeric invocation of the Muse. The epic machinery is fully set agoing; after the battle of Cannae, for instance, Juno in a full council of the gods pardons the Romans, and Jupiter after obtaining the consent of his wife promises them a final victory over the Carthaginians. Nor do the "Annals" fail to betray the neological and Hellenistic tendencies of the author. The very employment of the gods for mere decoration bears this stamp. The remarkable vision, with which the poem opens, tells in good Pythagorean style how the soul now inhabiting Quintus Ennius had previously been domiciled in Homer and still earlier in a peacock, and then in good physicist style explains the nature of things and the relation of the body to the mind. Even the choice of the subject serves the same purpose—at any rate the Hellenic literati of all ages have found an especially suitable handle for their Graeco-cosmopolite tendencies in this very manipulation of Roman history. Ennius lays stress on the circumstance that the Romans were reckoned Greeks:

-Contendunt Graecos, Graios memorare solent sos.-

The poetical value of the greatly celebrated Annals may easily be estimated after the remarks which we have already made regarding the excellences and defects of the poet in general. It was natural that as a poet of lively sympathies, he should feel himself elevated by the enthusiastic impulse which the great age of the Punic wars gave to the national sensibilities of Italy, and that he should not only often happily imitate Homeric simplicity, but should also and still more frequently make his lines strikingly echo the solemnity and decorum of the Roman character. But the construction of his epic was defective; indeed it must have been very lax and indifferent, when it was possible for the poet to insert a special book by way of supplement to please an otherwise forgotten hero and patron. On the whole the Annals were beyond question the work in which Ennius fell farthest short of his aim. The plan of making an Iliad pronounces its own condemnation. It was Ennius, who in this poem for the first time introduced into literature that changeling compound of epos and of history, which from that time up to the present day haunts it like a ghost, unable either to live or to die. But the poem certainly had its success. Ennius claimed to be the Roman Homer with still greater ingenuousness than Klopstock claimed to be the German, and was received as such by his contemporaries and still more so by posterity. The veneration for the father of Roman poetry was transmitted from generation to generation; even the polished Quintilian says, "Let us revere Ennius as we revere an ancient sacred grove, whose mighty oaks of a thousand years are more venerable than beautiful;" and, if any one is disposed to wonder at this, he may recall analogous phenomena in the successes of the Aeneid, the Henriad, and the Messiad. A mighty poetical development of the nation would indeed have set aside that almost comic official parallel between the Homeric Iliad and the Ennian

Annals as easily as we have set aside the comparison of Karschin with Sappho and of Willamov with Pindar; but no such development took place in Rome. Owing to the interest of the subject especially for aristocratic circles, and the great plastic talent of the poet, the Annals remained the oldest Roman original poem which appeared to the culture of later generations readable or worth reading; and thus, singularly enough, posterity came to honour this thoroughly anti- national epos of a half-Greek -litterateur- as the true model poem of Rome.

Prose Literature

A prose literature arose in Rome not much later than Roman poetry, but in a very different way. It experienced neither the artificial furtherance, by which the school and the stage prematurely forced the growth of Roman poetry, nor the artificial restraint, to which Roman comedy in particular was subjected by the stern and narrow-minded censorship of the stage. Nor was this form of literary activity placed from the outset under the ban of good society by the stigma which attached to the "ballad-singer." Accordingly the prose literature, while far less extensive and less active than the contemporary poetical authorship, had a far more natural growth. While poetry was almost wholly in the hands of men of humble rank and not a single Roman of quality appears among the celebrated poets of this age, there is, on the contrary, among the prose writers of this period hardly a name that is not senatorial; and it is from the circles of the highest aristocracy, from men who had been consuls and censors—the Fabii, the Gracchi, the Scipios—that this literature throughout proceeds. The conservative and national tendency, in the nature of the case, accorded better with this prose authorship than with poetry; but here too—and particularly in the most important branch of this literature, historical composition—the Hellenistic bent had a powerful, in fact too powerful, influence both on matter and form.

Writing of History

Down to the period of the Hannibalic war there was no historical composition in Rome; for the entries in the book of Annals were of the nature of records and not of literature, and never made any attempt to develop the connection of events. It is a significant illustration of the peculiarity of Roman character, that notwithstanding the extension of the power of the Roman community far beyond the bounds of Italy, and notwithstanding the constant contact of the noble society of Rome with the Greeks who were so fruitful in literary activity, it was not till the middle of the sixth century that there was felt the need and desire of imparting a knowledge of the deeds and fortunes of the Roman people, by means of authorship, to the contemporary world and to posterity. When at length this desire was felt, there were neither literary forms ready at hand for the use of Roman history, nor was there a public prepared to read it, and great talent and considerable time were required to create both. In the first instance, accordingly, these difficulties were in some measure evaded by writing the national history either in the mother-tongue but in that case in verse, or in prose but in that case in Greek. We have already spoken of the metrical chronicles of Naevius (written about 550?) and of Ennius (written about 581); both belong to the earliest historical literature of the Romans, and the work of Naevius may be regarded as the oldest of all Roman historical works. At nearly the same period were composed the Greek "Histories" of Quintus Fabius Pictor(56) (after 553), a man of noble family who took an active part in state affairs during the Hannibalic war, and of Publius Scipio, the son of Scipio Africanus (about 590). In the former case they availed themselves of the poetical art which was already to a certain extent developed, and addressed themselves to a public with a taste for poetry, which was not altogether wanting; in the latter case they found the Greek forms ready to their hand, and addressed themselves —as the interest of their subject stretching far beyond the bounds of Latium naturally suggested—primarily to the cultivated foreigner. The former plan was adopted by the plebeian authors, the latter by those of quality; just as in the time of Frederick the Great an aristocratic literature in the French language subsisted side by side with the native German authorship of pastors and professors, and, while men like Gleim and Ramler wrote war-songs in German, kings and generals wrote military histories in French. Neither the metrical chronicles nor the Greek annals by Roman authors constituted Latin historical composition in the proper sense; this only began with Cato, whose "Origines," not published before the close of this epoch, formed at once the oldest historical work written in Latin and the first important prose work in Roman literature.(57)

All these works, while not coming up to the Greek conception of history,(58) were, as contrasted with the mere detached notices of the book of Annals, systematic histories with a connected narrative and a more or less regular structure. They all, so far as we can see, embraced the national history from the building of Rome down to the time of the writer, although in point of title the work of Naevius related only to the first war with Carthage, and that of Cato only to the very early history. They were thus naturally divided into the three sections of the legendary period, of earlier, and of contemporary, history.

History of the Origin of Rome

In the legendary period the history of the origin of the city of Rome was set forth with great minuteness; and in its case the peculiar difficulty had to be surmounted, that there were, as we have already shown,(59) two wholly irreconcileable versions of it in circulation: the national version, which, in its leading outlines at least, was probably already embodied in the book of Annals, and the Greek version of Timaeus, which cannot have remained unknown to these Roman chroniclers. The object of the former was to connect Rome with Alba, that of the latter to connect Rome with Troy; in the former accordingly the city was built by Romulus son of the Alban king, in the latter by the Trojan prince Aeneas. To the present epoch, probably either to Naevius or to Pictor, belongs the amalgamation of the two stories. The Alban prince Romulus remains the founder of Rome, but becomes at the same time the grandson of Aeneas; Aeneas does not found Rome, but is represented as bringing the Roman Penates to Italy and building Lavinium as their shrine, while his son Ascanius founds Alba Longa, the mother-city of Rome and the ancient metropolis of Latium. All this was a sorry and unskilful patchwork. The view that the original Penates of Rome were preserved not, as had hitherto been believed, in their temple in the Roman Forum, but in the shrine at Lavinium, could not but be offensive to the Romans; and the Greek fiction was a still worse expedient, inasmuch as under it the gods only bestowed on the grandson what they had adjudged to the grandsire. But the redaction served its object: without exactly denying the national origin of Rome, it yet deferred to the Hellenizing tendency, and legalized in some degree that desire to claim kindred with Aeneas and his descendants which was already at this epoch greatly in vogue;(60) and thus it became the stereotyped, and was soon accepted as the official, account of the origin of the mighty community.

Apart from the fable of the origin of the city, the Greek historiographers had otherwise given themselves little or no concern as to the Roman commonwealth; so that the presentation of the further course of the national history must have been chiefly derived from native sources. But the scanty information that has reached us does not enable us to discern distinctly what sort of traditions, in addition to the book of Annals, were at the command of the earliest chroniclers, and what they may possibly have added of their own. The anecdotes inserted from Herodotus(61) were probably still foreign to these earliest annalists, and a direct borrowing of Greek materials in this section cannot be proved. The more remarkable, therefore, is the tendency, which is everywhere, even in the case of Cato the enemy of the Greeks, very distinctly apparent, not only to connect Rome with Hellas, but to represent the Italian and Greek nations as having been originally identical. To this tendency we owe the primitive-Italians or Aborigines who were immigrants from Greece, and the primitive- Greeks or Pelasgians whose wanderings brought them to Italy.

The Earlier History

The current story led with some measure of connection, though the connecting thread was but weak and loose through the regal period down to the institution of the republic; but at that point legend dried up; and it was not merely difficult but altogether impossible to form a narrative, in any degree connected and readable, out of the lists of magistrates and the scanty notices appended to them. The poets felt this most. Naevius appears for that reason to have passed at once from the regal period to the war regarding Sicily: Ennius, who in the third of his eighteen books was still describing the regal period and in the sixth had already reached the war with Pyrrhus, must have treated the first two centuries of the republic merely in the most general outline. How the annalists who wrote in Greek managed the matter, we do not know. Cato adopted a peculiar course. He felt no pleasure, as he himself says, "in relating what was set forth on the tablet