No More Learning

After Claudian we pass into the final darkness. The gloom is illuminated
for a brief moment by the Gaul Rutilius. But Rutilius has really
outlived Roman poetry and Rome itself. Nothing that he admires is any
longer real save in his admiration of it. The things that he condemns
most bitterly are the things which were destined to dominate the world
for ten centuries. Christianity is 'a worse poison than witchcraft'. The
monastic spirit is the 'fool-fury of a brain unhinged'. The monasteries
are 'slave-dungeons'.

It was these 'slave-dungeons' which were to keep safe through the long
night of the Middle Ages all that Rutilius held dear. It was these
'slave-dungeons' which were to afford a last miserable refuge to the
works of that long line of poets of whom Rutilius is the late and
forlorn descendant. Much indeed was to perish even within the fastnesses
of these 'slave-dungeons': for the monasteries were not always secure
from the shock of war, nor the precious memorials which they housed from
the fury of fanaticism. Yet much was to survive and to emerge one day
from the darkness and to renew the face of the world. Rutilius wrote his
poem in 416 A. D. If he could have looked forward exactly a thousand
years he would have beheld Poggio and the great Discoverers of the
Italian Renaissance ransacking the 'slave-dungeons' of Italy, France,
and Germany, and rejoicing over each recovered fragment of antiquity
with a pure joy not unlike that which heavenly minds are said to feel
over the salvation of souls.
These men were, indeed, kindling into life
again the soul of Europe. They were assisting at a New Birth. In this
process of regeneration the deepest force was a Latin force, and of this
Latin force the most impelling part was Latin poetry. We are apt
to-day, perhaps, in our zeal of Hellenism, to forget, or to disparage,
the part which Latin poetry has sustained in moulding the literatures of
modern Europe. But if the test of great poetry is the length and breadth
of its influence in the world, then Roman poetry has nothing to fear
from the vagaries of modern fashion. For no other poetry has so deeply
and so continuously influenced the thought and feeling of mankind. Its
sway has been wider than that of Rome itself: and the Genius that broods
over the Capitoline Hill might with some show of justice still claim, as
his gaze sweeps over the immense field of modern poetry, that he beholds
nothing which does not owe allegiance to Rome:

Iupiter arce sua totum cum spectat in orbem,
nil nisi Romanum quod tueatur habet.




NVMA POMPILIVS (? )

715-673 B. C.


_1. Fragments of the Saliar Hymns_

_i_

DIVOM templa cante,
diuom deo supplicate.

_ii_

QVOME tonas, Leucesie,
prae tet tremonti.
quor libet, Curis,
decstumum tonare?

_iii_

CONSE, ulod oriese:
omnia tuere,
adi, Patulci, coi isse:
Sancus Ianes Cerus es.
Duonus Ianus ueuet
po melios, eu, recum.