No More Learning

We
can scarcely hesitate to pronounce that the magnificent,
pathetic, and truly national legends, which present so striking a
contrast to all that surrounds them, are broken and defaced
fragments of that early poetry which, even in the age of Cato the
Censor, had become antiquated, and of which Tully had never heard
a line.

That this poetry should have been suffered to perish will not
appear strange when we consider how complete was the triumph of
the Greek genius over the public mind of Italy. It is probable
that, at an early period, Homer and Herodotus furnished some
hints to the Latin Minstrels; but it was not till after the war
with Pyrrhus that the poetry of Rome began to put off its old
Ausonian character. The transformation was soon consummated. The
conquered, says Horace, led captive the conquerors. It was
precisely at the time at which the Roman people rose to
unrivalled political ascendency that they stooped to pass under
the intellectual yoke. It was precisely at the time at which the
sceptre departed from Greece that the empire of her language and
of her arts became universal and despotic. The revolution indeed
was not effected without a struggle. Naevius seems to have been
the last of the ancient line of poets. Ennius was the founder of
a new dynasty. Naevius celebrated the First Punic War in
Saturnian verse, the old national verse of Italy. Ennius sang the
Second Punic War in numbers borrowed from the Iliad. The elder
poet, in the epitaph which he wrote for himself, and which is a
fine specimen of the early Roman diction and versification,
plaintively boasted that the Latin language had died with him.
Thus what to Horace appeared to be the first faint dawn of Roman
literature appeared to Naevius to be its hopeless setting. In
truth, one literature was setting, and another dawning.
The victory of the foreign taste was decisive; and indeed we can
hardly blame the Romans for turning away with contempt from the
rude lays which had delighted their fathers, and giving their
whole admiration to the immortal productions of Greece. The
national romances, neglected by the great and the refined whose
education had been finished at Rhodes or Athens, continued, it
may be supposed, during some generations to delight the vulgar.
While Virgil, in hexameters of exquisite modulation, described
the sports of rustics, those rustics were still singing their
wild Saturnian ballads. It is not improbable that, at the time
when Cicero lamented the irreparable loss of the poems mentioned
by Cato, a search among the nooks of the Appenines, as active as
the search which Sir Walter Scott made among the descendents of
the mosstroopers of Liddesdale, might have brought to light many
fine remains of ancient minstrelsy. No such search was made. The
Latin ballads perished forever. Yet discerning critics have
thought that they could still perceive in the early history of
Rome numerous fragments of this lost poetry, as the traveller on
classic ground sometimes finds, built into the heavy wall of a
fort or convent, a pillar rich with acanthus leaves, or a frieze
where the Amazons and Bacchanals seem to live. The theatres and
temples of the Greek and the Roman were degraded into the
quarries of the Turk and the Goth. Even so did the ancient
Saturnian poetry become the quarry in which a crowd of orators
and annalists found the materials for their prose.

It is not difficult to trace the process by which the old songs
were transmuted into the form which they now wear. Funeral
panegyric and chronicle appear to have been the intermediate
links which connected the lost ballads with the histories now
extant. From a very early period it was the usage that an oration
should be pronounced over the remains of a noble Roman. The
orator, as we learn from Polybius, was expected, on such
occasions, to recapitulate all the services which the ancestors
of the deceased had, from the earliest time, rendered to the
commonwealth. There can be little doubt that the speaker on whom
this duty was imposed would make use of all the stories suited to
his purpose which were to be found in the popular lays. There can
be as little doubt that the family of an eminent man would
preserve a copy of the speech which had been pronounced over his
corpse. The compilers of the early chronicles would have recourse
to these speeches; and the great historians of a later period
would have recourse to the chronicles.