The Roman Poets of the Republic
9781465519368
367 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
GENERAL CHARACTER OF ROMAN POETRY. A great fluctuation of opinion has taken place, among scholars and critics, in regard to the worth of Latin Poetry. From the revival of learning till the end of last century, the poets of ancient Rome, and especially those of the Augustan age, were esteemed the purest models of literary art, and were the most familiar exponents of the life and spirit of antiquity. Their works were the chief instruments of the higher education. They were studied, imitated, and translated by some of the greatest poets of modern Europe; and they supplied their favourite texts and illustrations to moralists and humourists, from Montaigne to the famous English essayists who flourished during the last century. Up to a still later period, their words were habitually used in political debate to add weight to argument and point to invective. Perhaps no other writers, during so long a period, exercised so powerful an influence, not on literary style and taste only, but on the character and understanding, of educated men in the leading nations of the modern world. It was natural that this excessive deference to their authority should be impaired both by the ampler recognition of the claims of modern poetry, and by a more intimate familiarity with Greek literature. They have suffered, in the estimation of literary critics, from the change in poetical taste which commenced about the beginning of the present century, and, in that of scholars, from the superior attractions of the great epic, dramatic, and lyrical poets of Greece. They were thus, for some time, the objects of undue disparagement rather than of undue admiration. The perception of the large debt which they owed to their Greek masters, led to some forgetfulness of their original merits. Their Roman character and Italian feeling were insufficiently recognised under the foreign forms and metres in which these qualities were expressed. It used to be said, with some appearance of plausibility, that Roman poetry is not only much inferior in interest to the poetry of Greece, but that it is a work of cultivated imitation, not of creative art; that other forms of literature were the true expression of the genius of the Roman people; that their poets brought nothing new into the world; that they enriched the life of after times with no pure vein of native feeling, nor any impressive record of national experience. It is, indeed, impossible to claim for Roman poetry the unborrowed glory or the varied inspiration of the earlier art of Greece. To the genius of Greece alone can the words of the bard in the Odyssey be applied, αὐτοδίδακτος δ' εἰμί, θεὸς δέ μοι ἐν φρεσὶν οἴμας
