No More Learning

Of these literary records nothing has survived to us:
even of epitaphs preserved to us in inscriptions none is earlier than
the age of Cato. So far as our knowledge of Latin literature extends we
pass at a leap from what may be called the poetry of primitive magic[3]
to Livius Andronicus' translation of the _Odyssey_. Yet between the
work of Livius and this magical poetry there must lie a considerable
literary development of which we know nothing. Two circumstances may
serve to bring this home to us. The first is that stage plays are known
to have been performed in Rome as early as the middle of the fourth
century. The second is that there existed in Rome in the time of Livius
a school of poets and actors who were sufficiently numerous and
important to be permitted to form a Guild or College.

The position of Livius is not always clearly understood. We can be sure
that he was not the first Roman poet. Nor is it credible that he was the
first Greek teacher to find his way to Rome from Southern Italy. To what
does he owe his pre-eminence? He owes it, in the first place, to what
may be called a mere accident. He was a schoolmaster: and in his
_Odyssey_ he had the good fortune to produce for the schools precisely
the kind of text-book which they needed: a text-book which was still
used in the time of Horace. Secondly, Livius Andronicus saved Roman
literature from being destroyed by Greek literature. We commonly regard
him as the pioneer of Hellenism. This view needs correcting.
We shall
probably be nearer the truth if we suppose that Livius represents the
reaction against an already dominant Hellenism. The real peril was that
the Romans might become not too little but too much Hellenized, that
they might lose their nationality as completely as the Macedonians had
done, that they might employ the Greek language rather than their own
for both poetry and history. From this peril Livius--and the patriotic
nobles whose ideals he represented--saved Rome. It is significant that
in his translation of the _Odyssey_ he employs the old Saturnian
measure. Naevius, a little later, retained the same metre for his epic
upon the Punic Wars. In the epitaph which he composed for himself
Naevius says that 'the Camenae', the native Italian muses, might well
mourn his death, 'for at Rome men have forgotten to speak in Latin
phrase'. He is thinking of Ennius, or the school which Ennius
represents. Ennius' answer has been preserved to us in the lines in
which he alludes scornfully to the _Punica_ of Naevius as written 'in
verses such as the Fauns and Bards chanted of old', the verses, that is,
of the old poetry of magic. Ennius abandons the Saturnian for the
hexameter. Livius and Naevius had used in drama some of the simpler
Greek metres. It is possible that some of these had been long since
naturalized in Rome--perhaps under Etrurian influence. But the
abandonment of the Saturnian was the abandonment of a tradition five
centuries old. The aims of Ennius were not essentially different from
those of Livius and Naevius. But the peril of a Roman literature in the
Greek language was past; and Ennius could afford to go further in his
concessions to Hellenism. It had been made clear that both the Latin
language and the Latin temper could hold their own. And when this was
made clear the anti-Hellenic reaction collapsed.