No More Learning

viii the earliest
'Dinner with a Nouveau-Riche'. In all this, and in much else in Roman
Satire, we must recognize Alexandrian influence. Yet even so we can
distinguish clearly--much more clearly, indeed, than in other
departments of Latin poetry--the Roman and the primitive Italian
elements. 'Ecquid is homo habet aceti in pectore? ' asks Pseudolus in
Plautus. And Horace, in a well-known phrase, speaks of _Italum acetum_,
which the scholiast renders by 'Romana mordacitas'. This 'vinegar' is
the coarse and biting wit of the Italian countryside. It has its origin
in the casual ribaldry of the _uindemiatores_: in the rudely improvized
dramatic contests of the harvest-home. Transported to the city it
becomes a permanent part of Roman Satire. Roman Satire has always one
hero--the average _paterfamilias_. Often he is wise and mild and
friendly. But as often as not he is merely the _uindemiator_, thinly
disguised, pert and ready and unscrupulous, 'slinging vinegar' not only
at what is morally wrong but at anything which he happens either to
dislike or not to understand. The vices of his--often
imaginary--antagonist are recounted with evident relish and with parade
of detail.

It is not only in Satire that we meet this _Italum acetum_. We meet it
also in the poetry of personal invective.
This department of Roman
poetry would hardly perhaps reward study--and it might very well revolt
the student--if it were not that Catullus has here achieved some of his
most memorable effects. In no writer is the _Italum acetum_ found in so
undiluted a sort. And he stands in this perhaps not so much for himself
as for a Transpadane school. The lampoons of his compatriot Furius
Bibaculus were as famous as his own. Vergil himself--if, as seems
likely, the _Catalepton_ be a genuine work of Vergil--did not escape the
Transpadane fashion. In fact the Italian aptitude for invective seems in
North Italy, allied with the study of Archilochus, to have created a new
type in Latin literature--a type which Horace essays not very
successfully in the _Epodes_ and some of the _Odes_. The invective of
Catullus has no humbug of moral purpose. It has its motive in mere hate.
Yet Catullus knew better than any one how subtle and complex an emotion
is hate. Two poems will illustrate better than anything I could say his
power here: and will at the same time make clear what I mean when I
distinguish the Italian from the Roman temperament in Latin poetry.

Let any one take up the eleventh poem of Catullus:

cum suis uiuat ualeatque moechis,
quos simul complexa tenet trecentos,
nullam amans uere sed identidem omnium
ilia rumpens.

There is invective. There is the lash with a vengeance. Yet the very
stanza that follows ends in a sob:

nec meum respectet, ut ante, amorem,
qui illius culpa cecidit uelut prati
ultimi flos, praetereunte postquam
tactus aratrost.

Turn now for an inverse effect to the fifty-eighth poem:

Caeli, Lesbia nostra, Lesbia illa,
illa Lesbia, quam Catullus unam
plus quam se atque suos amauit omnes . .