Comparative Literature/Book 3/Chapter 2

by Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett

CHAPTER II.

CLAN SURVIVALS IN THE CITY COMMONWEALTH.

§ 47. With what kind of literary stock did the Athenians start upon their career of literary production? Without some such stock-taking we cannot know much about their real losses and gains, for losses as well as gains the spirit of this ideal city commonwealth certainly experienced.

To such stock-taking the true literary artist—and he is the deepest sympathiser with Athenian feelings—is no doubt altogether opposed; and to mark the difference between scientific and artistic handling of Athenian history we have purposely used an expression which suggests an inartistic but truthful treatment. "Art," says Goethe, "is called art simply because it is not nature;" and wherever the artistic view of social and personal character prevails we may be prepared for a good deal of feigned history, a good many ideas claiming universal sway on account of their approaching the artist's standard of the beautiful. Theognis made the Muses and the Graces chant as the burden of their song—

 

"That shall never be our care
Which is neither good nor fair;"

 

and it has been well said that the lines express the essence of that Greek feeling for the beautiful which in Athens reaches its culminating point. But such a feeling, whether expressed in words or music, in colours or in marble, in the sensuous ideas of a poet or in the naked generalities of a philosopher, contains a latent hostility to the spirit of historical truth. He who loves the beautiful with heart and soul is not likely to watch its development from rude beginnings with pleasure, or even to admit that its nature is so perishable as to have had a beginning at all. To pry into its secret growth were almost as painful to the true artist as to look upon its decay and death.

It is a noble sentiment, worthy of greater and better beings than men, thus to reserve enthusiastic worship for that which looks immortal. But it is also a sentiment full of sad delusions, ever adorning with wreaths of eternal spring that which at a touch crumbles into dust, building everlasting ice-palaces which a few rays of even human reason melt away. In truth, the artist lives and must live, if he will act at all, a life of limitation fancied to be limitless. If he should know and feel his limits, if he should eat of the fatal tree of science and his eyes be opened, the ideas he expresses are likely to be revealed ephemeral in their essence, and his hands are apt to lose their cunning in a craft which has lost its divinity. For, however paradoxical it may appear, the true glimmerings of human divinity are visible, not in the creation of the artist, but in the reflection of the critic. The former is limited by the particular conditions of space and time, individual and social character, in and through which he works. The latter through a thousand of these shadows may catch an infinitely distant glimpse of the light which the artist imagines in the little day of the group for which he works. The artist deals with τὰ πρὸς δόξαν, with appearances, simply because he is an artist, controlled by average language and thought, not a scientific discoverer delving at will for new ideas, and labelling them when found with strange word-marks. The critic also deals with τὰ πρὸς δόξαν, but their range is for him far wider, and he possesses a certain scientific freedom of treatment in idea and language. The artist of Japan or China must work with the materials his social condition offer; the artist of Athens possessed a far finer quarry, but his materials were also socially limited; the true critic, the "discerner," compares and contrasts the most divergent types of social and individual character at will, and, if the development he observes is fatal to any universal aesthetic standard and deprives him of the enthusiasm such a standard might supply, he is at least superior to the artist alike in the range and quality of his knowledge.

The critic cannot, therefore, allow the art-conception of literature to stand for a moment between him and the object of his study, whether the champions of that conception are found among the Athenians themselves or their modern disciples.^[1] And so, to return to our prosaic question, we ask again, With what kind of literary stock did the Athenians start upon their career of literary production?

§ 48. In the first place, the Athenians, as Ionians, possessed a dialect which, carried by their kinsmen to the Ionic cities of Asia Minor, became the earliest vehicle of prose in the literary history of Greece—the Ἑπτάμυχος of Pherecydes of Scyros was the first attempt at a prose treatise in Greek. In common with other Ionians, also, they possessed certain religious festivals—the Thargelia and Pyanepsia of Apollo, the Anthesteria and Lenæa of Dionysus, the Apaturia, Eleusinia, and others. The federations of early Ionians may indeed be compared with Arab and Hebrew tribe-leagues marking their federal union by sacred festivals; and the eponymous ancestor of such leagues was long as highly respected in Athens as in Israel or Arabia. The Ion of Euripides, it has been remarked, was designed to extol the pure blood of Athenians, and to show that the Ionic stock from which they claimed descent was not, as represented in ordinary legends, that derived from the Hellenic stranger Xuthus, but had originated from Apollo himself; and though the ordinary legends probably went much nearer the truth (just as Ezekiel in his denunciations of Israel reminds his countrymen of their hybrid origin, "Thy father was an Amorite and thy mother a Hittite "), the eponym Ion and the purpose for which the story is dramatised seem to mark the influence of clan ideas in Athens, even in an age when her old religion and clan morality were being rapidly undermined by individualised thought. But the Athenians had something more than the mere instrument of literature in common with their Ionic kinsfolk of the East; from them they learned the A B C of philosophy, history, poetry. Among the Eastern Ionians chronicling had commenced at Miletus, the birthplace of the earliest philosophers of Greece—Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, An Ionic poet of the East, Callinus of Ephesus, has left the earliest extant specimen of the elegy. Archilochus, the creator of iambic poetry, and the next iambic poet, Simonides of Amorgos, were both East-Ionian satirists. But though the political and literary growth of Athens came later than that of her wealthy kinsfolk, though East-Ionian soil and climate were greatly superior to those of Attica, the progress of literature was to depend, as it ever depends, upon social freedom no less than wealth; and, while Asiatic conquerors subdued the Ionians of Asia, and warlike races preferred to turn to the fertile plains of Argos, Thebes, and Thessaly, the shallow and rocky soil of Attica allowed a peaceful though manly development of social life to the Attic village communities.

How far the old village life of Attica had given way to that of the city commonwealth, how far that marked opposition of men of the country to men of the town which so powerfully affected later Athenian life had disclosed itself in Solon's time, we shall not attempt to estimate. Suffice it to say that at this time the literature of Athens may be said to begin with the elegies and gnomic poetry of the great reformer himself. As a pioneer of Athenian literature, Solon seems to resemble an Oriental prophet rather than a literary artist. The strange delivery of the Elegy of Salamis, composed about 604 B.C., reminds us of the symbolical action with which the Hebrew nâbi sometimes accompanied his impassioned speech.^[2] Nor is this the only respect in which Solon's poetry typifies the infancy of Athenian literature. Another elegy (quoted by Demosthenes in his speech on the Embassy) describes the misery of the poor in terms which might have been applied to the debt-oppressed plebs of Rome, and seems to imply a conflict of clanned and clanless, men of property and the proletariate, which at one time augured as badly for Athenian as for Roman literature. But Athenian factions were to be fused into tolerable unity by internal tyranny and external war—two disciplining influences which also come out in Solon's poetry, the former in an elegy which foretells the coming tyranny, the latter in the martial spirit of many of his verses, which have been contrasted in this respect with the effeminate tone of Mimnermus, one of his East-Ionian contemporaries. In Solon, then, we see Athenian literature beginning in the rough but manly expression of a social spirit, a spirit in which collective interests leave as yet but little room for that personal and artistic poetry which the individualism of the East-Ionians had created.

But in Solon's age the Athenian people needed to be fused into social unity; and it was the work of the Peisistratids to effect this fusion against themselves. Mr. Mahaffy, in his Social Life in Greece, has called attention to the work of the tyrants in diffusing artistic taste through Greece; and in Athens their fondness of art was sufficiently proved by their building the temple of the Olympian Zeus. But their patronage of poetry and music more directly interests the student of Greek literature. The character of the poetry thus patronised should not escape notice. It was not the drama in its rude beginnings, which, especially in comedy, required a popular inspiration; it was the lyric of Anacreon, Simonides, Lasus, so much better suited to the sphere of a court. And, whatever truth is to be found in the Peisistratidean redaction of the Greek epics, it is equally significant that the Peisistratids "were unquestionably the first to introduce the recital of the entire Iliad and Odyssey at the Panathenæa." The heroic songs of the Homeric bards were more in keeping with the tyrant's court than the dramatic spectacle. But the Athenian people had not yet expressed itself in any literary voice, and when that voice should make itself heard it was to be something very different from the personal lyric of the tyrants or the epic of the ancient kings.

Thus, in reply to our question, with what kind of literary stock did the Athenians start on their career of literary production, we have found that, so far as literary form is concerned, the epic, lyric, and iambic forms of poetry were known to them chiefly through their East-Ionic kinsfolk, and that prose in a somewhat poetic dress may be reckoned among the formal elements which their literary capital owed to the same source. East-Ionic prose, prior to the destruction of Miletus at the beginning of the fifth century B.C., was being developed in narrative and philosophical forms which have been contrasted by Mure with the rhetorical prose of Athens in her literary age. The Makâmât of Al Harîri, however, proves that rhetorical prose may be developed where Ekklêsia and law-courts such as those of Athens are unknown. Still, in Miletus we have a municipal centre of Greek intellect widely differing from Athens in its social and physical conditions—a metropolis which, if undestroyed, would in all probability have produced a literature differing widely from that of Athens alike in form and spirit.

But a more important question than that of poetical or prose forms now awaits us; it is this: What stock of ideas did the Athenians at the beginnings of their literary production as a people possess? It is here that survivals from the clan age and the village community come thickly upon us.

§ 49. In the first place, the Athenians inherited from the days of their village communities the idea of inherited guilt, which, strange to say, never seems to have received among them the angry repudiation we find in the Hebrew Ezekiel. Nay, what is still more remarkable, the idea comes upon us in Athenian literature with almost fresher vitality than in the Homeric poems. In the most striking Homeric reference to the Wehrgeld, a passage from the Iliad already quoted, the old communal liability has been cut down into the banishment of the individual criminal from his δῆμος, or village community, until the Wehrgeld is accepted by the kindred of the murdered man; unlike the system of the Arab Thâr, no one can now suffer in the murderer's stead, but he is personally exiled for a time to avoid any pollution attaching to his group. This personal liability in the Homeric age ought to be contrasted with the dramatic prominence of inherited guilt at Athens probably three centuries later; for the contrast shows that, whatever social and intellectual progress had taken place in other parts of Greece and under different political or physical conditions, the clan spirit of the old Athenian dêmes retained sufficient strength even in the days of Sophocles to make itself felt in spectacles the pivot ethical conception of which is communal responsibility. While individualism elsewhere in Greece had been developed under the rule of kings or tyrants, the Athenian townsmen had retained enough of the primitive communal spirit to make it the life of their drama. Moreover, in this late survival of communal morality we may discover at least a partial explanation of one strange fact in Athenian literary development—the sudden burst and rapid decay of Attic genius.

After the rule of the tyrants and the successful resistance to Persian invasion had given to Athens social unity and the hegemony of states greatly her superiors in civilised refinement, the communal morality of old Athenian life was suddenly exposed to an influx of new ideas unknown to the early poverty and isolation of Attica. Hence a conflict set in between old Athenian sentiments and the individualism which had long before been developed in other parts of Greece, especially among the East-Ionians; and the material progress of Athens in wealth, which followed the Persian war and showed itself so notably during the administration of Pericles, allowed greater personal independence and far more leisure for debate than the early Athenians had possessed. It is in this conflict between things old and new that we find the chief source of Athenian genius; and if we are asked why that sunburst of creative power was so ephemeral, and why it was so soon obscured by clouds of verbal trifling and pedantic logomachy, we shall reply that the rapid destruction of old communal morality, when once the full force of Greek individualism had been let in on it, put an end to that duel of egoistic with altruistic thinking in which throughout the world's history the brightest sparks of genius have been struck out, and by completely individualising Athenian intellect and imagination made one-sided the later culture of Attic genius. As Müller observes, the traditional maxims of Athenian morality were, at the beginning of the Peloponnesian war, subjected to a scrutinising examination by a foreign race of teachers, chiefly from the colonies of the East and West; and we can easily understand how the exposure of clan ethics to this widened circle of comparison and contrast was certain to awake Athenian consciousness to defects in their old beliefs. The Socratic questioning is an outcome of this conflicting consciousness; the Platonic universalism is a dogmatic answer to the difficulties it raised; and the customary offering thrown into the sea for the sins of the Athenian people does not more graphically bring before us the early Athenian morality of vicarious punishment than Socratic speculations on the relation of law to morality,^[3] or the contrast of customary with subjective morality,^[4] bring before us the days of subtle debaters, when the simple ethic of her clan age was as impossible for Athens as it would be for an adult to force himself back into the ideas of his infancy. It was not to be expected that primitive doctrines of vicarious punishment and inherited sin could long retain their hold upon people accustomed to debate recondite problems of personal intention in their courts of law or legislative assembly. It was not to be expected that simple belief in the ancient morality could be retained while ties of kinship were steadily giving way to action from self-interest, and sophists were aiding the cleverness of Athenians bent on comparing the institutions and ideas of the various Greek states or analysing their own subjective thought. It made little difference whether the sophist was a Protagoras, ready to demonstrate the impossibility of truth from the conflict of Greek ideas alike claiming divinity, or a subtle Socrates prepared to raise moral problems. which he could not, or at least did not, solve. In either case old ideas were being undermined; and the struggles of men like Aristophanes to ridicule the new notions out of sight were but efforts, tragically comic, to restore life to the ancient morality by choking attempts to answer problems which had been forced upon Athenian attention by altered social conditions and not merely suggested by hair-splitting sophists.

§ 50. But besides conceptions of inherited guilt and vicarious punishment, positive signs of the early communal life, the clan age left on Athenian thought a negative mark which deserves to be noticed in connection with the decay of Athenian morals. This is the absence of any profound belief in a future state of personal reward or punishment. Considerable progress toward the conception of such a state had been made in the interval between the Odyssean age and that of Pindar. In the Nekuia, or eleventh book of the Odyssey, the gathering-place of the clans^[5] is as yet by no means divided into abodes of happiness and suffering. We are indeed introduced to the sight of suffering in Hades; but the persons singled out for punishment are not men, but demi-gods. Ulysses sees Tituos, son of far-famed Earth, outstretched many a rood, while two vultures on each side tear his liver for the wrong he had done to Latona. He sees Tantalus, expressly called a δαίμων,^[6] thirsting while the water touches his chin, and putting forth his hands to touch the fruits which a wind "scatters to the shadowing clouds." Sisyphus, too, he sees, rolling with both hands the enormous stone that always falls back to the plain. But mere human personality is not yet distinguished in Hades by punishment or reward. The dead are but empty images of mortal men;^[7] to be king of their myriad clans is worse than to be a serf on earth; and if Hercules is better off it is not because he is in Elysian fields, but because only his image (εἴδωλον) dwells in the cheerless Shadow-land, "while he himself with the immortal gods enjoys the feast and lovely-ankled Youth." The gathering-place of the clans, with its pale reflection of the life then known, has not yet been separated into the torture-place of the Evil and the paradise of the Good, though Minos, holding his golden sceptre, sits like any earth-king giving his inspired commands to the dead (θεμιστέυων νέκυσσιν), "while those around seek decisions (δίκας) of the king."

So far the Greek conception of a future state was not greatly in advance of the Hebrew Sheôl. But the break-up of clan ties and the progress of individualism were to bring out the need of such sanctions for personal morality as the future state can create. In truth, the Heaven and Hell conceptions were to develop in parallel lines with the development of social life. In the poems of Pindar the punishments and rewards of a future state are no longer confined to dæmons and demi-gods; plain human personality is to suffer for the evil it has wrought, or to enjoy a paradise of holiness which is neither the abode of the gods nor confined to translated heroes like Hercules. In a famous passage of Pindar's second Olympian ode we have an evidence of this ethical progress worth quoting in full.^[8] "But if one possesses wealth aright he knows the future lot, that reckless souls of men who died on earth pay straightway their wehrgelds' (ποινάς),^[9] for one there is who by a hateful fate pronouncing sentences awards the penalties for deeds committed in the realm of Zeus; but the good, enjoying sunlight ever equally by night and day, receive a life more free from griefs than ours, not harassing earth with strength of hand nor ocean wave for scanty sustenance. But all who joyed in keeping of their oaths, among the honoured of the gods rejoice in tearless life; the others bear affliction too dreadful to be looked upon. They who have thrice endured on either side the grave to keep their souls unsullied by injustice, pursue the road of Zeus to Kronos' tower; there the ocean breezes blow round the islands of the blest, and the golden flowers are glowing, some on land from glistening trees, some the water nourishes; there with chaplets made of these the blest twine their hands and heads by the just decrees of Rhadamanthus, whom Father Kronos, spouse of Rhea, throned above all gods, keeps as assessor ever ready by him." Fragments of the Pindaric Threnoi contain similar ideas, for example one^[10] which Professor Conington has translated thus—

 

"But the souls of the profane,
⁠Far from heaven removed below,
Flit on earth in murderous pain
⁠'Neath the unyielding yoke of woe;
While pious spirits tenanting the sky
Chant praises to the mighty one on high."

 

But Athenian life was not destined to popularise such ideas. In the Frogs of Aristophanes we have, though of course in caricature, a picture of Hades little in advance of the Odyssean. Bacchus, with a lion's skin thrown over his saffron-coloured robe and armed with a club, imitates Hercules, and, as Hercules had gone to fetch the dog Cerberus, descends to bring back Euripides from the infernal world. On his way, Bacchus inquires of Hercules "what entertainers he had met when he went to fetch Cerberus, what harbours, bakers' shops, lodging-houses, springs, roads, cities, hostesses"—earthly associations well kept up when Proserpine's servant tells the pseudo-Hercules that "the goddess, when she heard of his arrival, began baking loaves, boiled some pots of soup of bruised peas, broiled a whole ox, and baked cheese-cakes and rolls." But two innkeepers of Hades think they recognise in the pseudo-Hercules "the villain who came into our inn one day and devoured sixteen loaves, twenty pieces of boiled meat at half an obol apiece, and vast quantities of garlic and dried fish." For these depredations the innkeepers determine to take vengeance; and Bacchus, in fear of the coming evil, gets his slave Xanthias to assume the lion's skin and club of Hercules. Æacus, attended by three myrmidons, now enters; but the slave-hero holds his own, tells Æacus to go to the mischief, and as a proof of innocence offers Bacchus, now supposed to be his slave, to be tortured for evidence in true Athenian fashion. Xanthias and Æacus, farther on in the play, congratulate each other on the delight they take in prying into their masters' secrets, and then "blabbing them out of doors;" and Æacus tells his fellow-servant of the quarrel between Æschylus and Euripides, with whose famous contest the rest of the play is taken up. "There is a law established here," says Æacus," that out of the professions, as many as are important and ingenious, he who is the best of his own fellow-artists should receive a public maintenance in the Prytaneum and a seat next to Pluto's." Æschylus had held the "tragic seat," as being "the best in his art;" but Euripides, when he came down," began to show off to footpads, and cutpurses, and parricides, and housebreakers—a sort of men there is a vast quantity of in Hades—and they, hearing his objections and twistings and turnings, went stark mad and thought him the cleverest. So Euripides was elated, and laid claim to the throne on which Æschylus was sitting."

It has been remarked that in this thoroughly Athenian Hades, with its Prytaneum and Athenian law giving public maintenance to such as excelled their fellow-artists, "the under-world is an exact copy of the upper;" but the remark by no means exhausts the significance of the Frogs as an index to average Athenian notions of the future state. The treatment of the under-world as a mere reflection of Athenian life shows what little way the Athenians had made towards utilising the future state as the most solemn sanction for personal morality. Hercules, indeed, at the opening of the play, makes a passing allusion to those who "have wronged their guests, beaten their parents, sworn false oaths, or transcribed a passage of the dramatist Morsimus," as "lying in the mud" by way of punishment; but the jocular allusion to Morsimus is not calculated to make us think of the Athenian conception of future retribution as at all a serious matter. We must regard such theories as those of Plato in his Phædo as expressing the deep reflection of a very few who, like the philosopher, felt the need of sanctions for personal morality. But outside esoteric circles, such as the initiated in the Eleusinian mysteries, there was little opportunity for earnest belief in the moral sanctions of a future state; and one great obstacle to the popularity of such belief is to be found in Athenian slavery. The prominence of the slave in the Frogs, among all sorts and conditions of Athenian men and women in Hades, is a sharp reminder of this obstacle. How could the master of slaves picture himself in Hades either with or without his slaves? If they accompanied him into Hades, all the social distinctions of Athenian life would logically follow, and the exact reflection of Athens in Hades would be too grotesque even for the most pious and least sceptical of minds. If, on the other hand, there were no slaves in Hades, how could the freemen of Athens realise without inward ridicule a privilege which any of them might lose with his civil status? But, over and above this hostility of slavery to a future state, Athenian ideas of future reward and retribution had to meet another cause of weakness. In the political life and poetical sentiments of Athens clan facts and feelings were long retained; and as long as men believed in the inheritance of guilt in groups—as during the height of Athenian power and dramatic genius the Athenians undoubtedly did on the average believe—there was little moral need for the personal rewards or punishments of the under-world. The very strength of this survival from the clan age concealed the want of sanctions for personal morality till it was too late for Athenian intelligence to do more than debate, as some among us are now debating, scientific bases for morality.

§ 51. While survivals from the clan spirit supply the ethics of Athenian tragedy, while the conflict between such survivals and growing individualism produces the masterpieces of Athenian philosophy, the clan spirit in Rome brings about very different effects in Roman character and, through character, in Roman literature. Where Solon and Peisistratus had commenced the conservative patricians of Rome were determined to remain, and for a long time did remain. Clan life, retained and in some respects hardened in the Roman familia, left little scope for either literary or philosophic progress where childen sub potestate, women in perpetuâ tutelâ, wives sub manu viri, showed how personal independence and character were still in communal leading-strings. While Roman life was socially ruled by the familia and politically ruled by patrician gentes, there was little opportunity for any literature save that of sacred hymns and religious law-books such as the priestly castes of the East have so frequently produced; indeed, if the clanless element at Rome had not been sufficiently strong to modify this social and political system, there is little reason to think that Rome, physically or intellectually, would have risen above the level of these Eastern priest-oligarchies. But, though the conflict between plebeian and patrician could not strike out Athenian intelligence, it saved the "urbs æterna" from such a fate; it struck out that vigorous political life of law-court and assembly in which Roman prose and jurisprudence were developed by a permanent progress remarkably unlike the sudden outburst and decay of Athenian genius.

When the personal relations of Roman citizens under the despotic system of the familia are clearly realised Rome's need of external aid in the development of her literature is manifest. Mommsen has said with truth that the culminating point of Roman development was reached without a literature; and two causes are sufficient to explain this fact—the rigid family system which among full citizens proscribed individualised action and thought, and the deadly enmity between these full citizens and the clanless proletariate, so far as it prevented an enthusiastic political union which might have made itself felt in popular song. If the conflict of plebeian with patrician was needed to break down gentilic exclusiveness, it at the same time retarded and perhaps altogether prevented the rise of a popular Roman literature. Not until the Persian war had fused Athenians into a political unity they might otherwise never have attained did the fruits of Attic genius show themselves; and, had internal clan distinctions survived the age of Solon and Peisistratus in anything like their patrician vitality at Rome, Athenian verse and prose would probably never have attained any remarkable degree of beauty and symmetry. The reason for the absence of literature in early Rome has been sought in "the original characteristics of the Latin race;" but, like the answer of Molière's famous doctor, or M. Renan's explanation of Hebrew and Arab monotheism by "Semitic instinct," this explanation simply repeats the problem in another form. The true explanation must be found in causes affecting the general character of men and women at Rome; and any student of Roman law and early social life need not be at a loss for such causes. The conscious contrasts of patrician, plebeian, alien, and servile status, and the strong conservatism of clan character, are the primary causes of that unimaginative life which made the Roman law-court the fountain-head of European jurisprudence, but compelled the mistress of force to look for literary guidance to the mistress of intellect. Without any store of common sympathies which plebeian and patrician might feel alike, Rome had no social ideals such as literature desires; and if she had heroes of her own, they only served to summon up recollections of kingly or aristocratic despotism.

The production of Roman literature, about the middle of the third century B.C., opened with a stock of materials and ideas meagre in the extreme. No kinsmen of Rome had created a vehicle of verse like the hexameter, iambic, or elegiac of Greece; the rude Saturnian seems to have been the only metre known. Nor had any Miletus of the West laid the foundations of Roman prose; chronicles, of the barest kind conceivable, and laws, apparently without note or comment, seem as yet to have been the only types of Latin prose. Dionysius,^[11] indeed, speaks of πάτριοι ὕμνοι as still sung in his own time by Romans; and Cicero twice refers to a passage in Cato's Origines which speaks of old Roman songs sung at banquets to the accompaniment of a tibia in praise of great men. But, in spite of Niebuhr's and Macaulay's inferences from these authorities, it cannot be seriously maintained that Rome ever possessed a popular ballad-poetry. For, in the first place, Rome possessed no background of myth which such early poetry might have used as its wonderland. This absence of myth has been attributed to the nature of Rome's early religion; and it must be admitted that such transparent names as Saturnus (Sowing), Fides, Terminus, were not likely to aid the creation of poetic mythology. But deeper reasons for the absence of heroic mythology in early Rome are discoverable in her ancient social life. Whatever germs of epic poetry may have existed in the private hymns or songs of patricians, they had no opportunity to ripen into a genuine epic among the constant conflicts of clansmen, who had "Fathers" to celebrate, with the clanless plebs. The traditional stories of Roman gentes were too closely interwoven with political associations to be quietly gathered into the beautiful poetic forms of the Greek myths, which might never have reached their æsthetic perfection had they been so closely bound with things of daily life. Niebuhr's conception of a Roman ballad-poetry overlooks the fact that the true home of the ballad, out of which the epos may grow, is not the life of a city, nor that of clans seeking to keep up their exclusiveness in the presence of city life, but the halls}} as still sung in his own time by Romans; and Cicero twice refers to a passage in Cato's Origines which speaks of old Roman songs sung at banquets to the accompaniment of a tibia in praise of great men. But, in spite of Niebuhr's and Macaulay's inferences from these authorities, it cannot be seriously maintained that Rome ever possessed a popular ballad-poetry. For, in the first place, Rome possessed no background of myth which such early poetry might have used as its wonderland. This absence of myth has been attributed to the nature of Rome's early religion; and it must be admitted that such transparent names as Saturnus (Sowing), Fides, Terminus, were not likely to aid the creation of poetic mythology. But deeper reasons for the absence of heroic mythology in early Rome are discoverable in her ancient social life. Whatever germs of epic poetry may have existed in the private hymns or songs of patricians, they had no opportunity to ripen into a genuine epic among the constant conflicts of clansmen, who had "Fathers" to celebrate, with the clanless plebs. The traditional stories of Roman gentes were too closely interwoven with political associations to be quietly gathered into the beautiful poetic forms of the Greek myths, which might never have reached their æsthetic perfection had they been so closely bound with things of daily life. Niebuhr's conception of a Roman ballad-poetry overlooks the fact that the true home of the ballad, out of which the epos may grow, is not the life of a city, nor that of clans seeking to keep up their exclusiveness in the presence of city life, but the halls of chiefs where individual character is surrounded by a divine halo which the democratic intercourse of the city cannot tolerate.

§ 52. The semi-dramatic Fescennine Dialogues, the Saturæ, Mimes, and Fabulæ Atellana (the last, according to Livy, exclusively in the hands of freeborn citizens and not polluted by professional actors), show that even at the beginnings of Roman literature city life, in spite of gentile aristocracy, was roughly producing its characteristic literary product—the drama. But here, too, the patrician clan spirit opposed the progress of the Camenæ and left a clear way for the Muses of Greece. It would have been untrue to Roman social life to have exhibited as Roman the relations of father and son, husband and wife, as Plautus and Terence borrowing from Greek models exhibit them always on a thoroughly Greek stage. The scene of the Amphitruo is at Thebes, of the Asinaria probably at Athens, of the Aulularia at Athens; of the Bacchides, Casina, Epidicus, Mercator, Mostellaria, Persa, Pseudolus, Stichus, Trinumus, Truculentus, at Athens; that of the Captivi in Ætolia, of the Cistellaria at Sicyon, of the Curculio at Epidaurus, of the Menæchmi at Epidamnus, of the Miles Gloriosus at Ephesus, of the Panulus at Calydon, of the Rudens in Africa near Cyrenæ; so that not one of the twenty extant plays attributed to Plautus has its action in Italy, much less in Rome. The Greek places, names, characters, of the Plautine and Terentian dramas are to be accounted for not merely by the desire of avoiding offence and by their close imitation of Greek models, but also by the comparative absence of such characters and personal relations at Rome as would suit the dramatist. Neither the Roman son, whose peculium reminds us rather of a slave's status than that of a free man, nor the Roman father, with the solemn despotism of patria potestas, nor above all the Roman matron, wife, or daughter, in their perpetual tutelage, possessed that kind of freedom which was required by the drama of individualised life. The Roman drama, tragedy and comedy alike, had to wear Athenian livery in order to get out of associations which met dramatic freedom at every turn with the cold status of patrician life.

Thus the clan spirit in Athens and Rome affected the beginnings of Athenian and Roman literatures very differently. Not strong enough in Athens to keep the city divided into hostile camps, yet strong enough to remain the inner life of traditional morality, it sets Athenian genius on fire by its conflict with individualised ideas pouring in from all parts of Greece, and required by the rapidly altering conditions of Athenian social life. Too strong in Rome to allow even physical, much less intellectual, freedom, it stops the progress of Roman unity and literature alike, and forces the founders of the Roman drama to seek in Greece the social and personal characteristics their art requires.

Footnotes

1. "The students of antiquity," says Mr. J. A. Symonds (Greek Poets, Second Series, p. 303), "attached less value than we do to literature of secondary importance. It was the object of their criticism, especially in the schools of Alexandria, to establish canons of perfection in style. … Marlowe, according to their laws of taste, would have been obscured by Shakspere; while the multitude of lesser playwrights, whom we honour as explaining and relieving by their comradeship the grandeur of the dramatist (ὁ τραγῳδοποιὸς they might have styled Shakspere, as their Pindar was ὁ λυρικός), would have sunk into oblivion, leaving him alone in splendid isolation. Much might be said for this way of dealing with literature. By concentrating attention on undeniable excellence, a taste for noble things in art was fostered, while the danger that we run of substituting the historical for the æsthetic method was avoided." Mr. Symonds, however, forgets that in their unhistorical criticism the Greeks committed the far more serious error of substituting the aesthetic method for the historical—an error which, decked in the beauty of Greek art, has done more to check the growth of historical science in modern Europe than can be easily estimated.
2. "Suddenly appearing in the costume of a herald, with the proper cap (πιλίον) on his head, and having previously spread a report that he was mad, he sprang in the place of the popular assembly upon the stone where the heralds were wont to stand, and sang in an impassioned tone an elegy which began with these words: "I myself come as a herald from the lovely island of Salamis, using song, the ornament of words, and not simple speech, to the people" (K. O. Müller, Lit. of An. Greece, ch. x. § 11). Müller might have added that the practice of poetic recitation was used by Xenophanes and Parmenides to disseminate their philosophic views. While writing is known to the very few (in East and West alike at first probably to the priests alone) and no reading public exists, the speech in verse or rhythmical prose, whether of Arab Râwy, Hebrew Nâbi, or Athenian reformer, is an effective appeal to an unlettered audience.
3. Xenophon Memorabilia, bk. i. ch. ii. § 42, sqq.
4. Ib. Cf. bk. i. ch. iii., and bk. ii. ch. ii. § 13.
5.  Cf.
   ⁠περὶ δ᾽ ἄλλαι ἀγηγέραθ᾽, ὅσσοι ἅμ᾽ αὐτῷ
   Οἴκῳ ἐν Αἰγίσθοιο θάνον καὶ πότμον ἐπέσπον.

   (Od., xi. 388.)
   In Ezekiel's famous picture of the fallen nations (ch. xxxii.) Hades admits not only clan but national distinctions.
6. Od., xi. 587.
7.  
   πῶς ἔτλης Ἄϊδόσδε κατελθέμεν, ἔνθατε νεκρὸι
   ἀφραδέες ναίουσι, βροτῶν ἔιδωλα καμόντων;

   (Ib., 475.)
8. εὖ δέ μιν ἔχων τις οἶδεν τὸ μέλλον, κ.τ.λ.
9. Cf. the Homeric use of ποινή. The transference of the Wehrgeld to Hades recalls the presence of Blood-revenge in the spirit-world of the Grendel. See passage from Beowulf translated above.
10. ψυχαὶ δ᾽ ὰσεβέων ὑπουράνιο
    γαίᾳ πωτῶντᾱι ἐν ἄλγεσι φονίοις, κ.τ.λ.
11. Cf. Macaulay, preface to Lays of Ancient Rome, pp. 13 and 15, notes.