It was a basic purpose of the Scipionic circle to encourage literature as well as philosophy, to mold the Latin tongue into a refined and fluent literary medium, to lure the Roman muses to the nourishing springs of Greek poetry, and to provide an audience for promising writers of verse or prose. In 204 Scipio Africanus proved his character by welcoming to Rome a poet brought there by Cato, the strongest opponent of everything represented by the Scipios and their friends. Quintus Ennius had been born of Greek and Italian parentage near Brundisium (239). He had received his education in Tarentum, and his enthusiastic spirit had been deeply impressed by the Greek dramas presented on the Tarentine stage. His courage as a soldier in Sardinia attracted Cato, who was quaestor there. Arrived in Rome, he lived by teaching Latin and Greek, recited his verses to his friends, and found admittance to the circle of the Scipios.
There was hardly a poetic form that he did not try. He wrote a few comedies and at least twenty tragedies. He was in love with Euripides, flirted like him with radical ideas, and plagued the pious with such Epicurean quips as, “I grant you there are gods, but they don’t care what men do; else it would go well with the good and ill with the bad—which rarely happens”;28 according to Cicero the audience applauded the lines.29 He translated or paraphrased Euhemerus’ Sacred History, which argued that the gods were merely dead heroes deified by popular sentiment. He was not immune to theology of a kind, for he announced that the soul of Homer, having passed through many bodies, including Pythagoras and a peacock, now resided in Ennius. He wrote with verve an epic history of Rome from Aeneas to Pyrrhus, and these Annales became, till Virgil, the national poem of Italy. A few fragments survive, of which the most famous is a line that Roman conservatives never tired of quoting:
Moribus antiquis stat res Romana virisque—
“the Roman state stands through its ancient morals and its great men.” Metrically the poem was a revolution; it replaced the loose “Saturnian” verse of Naevius with the flowing and flexible hexameters of Greek epic poetry. Ennius molded Latin to new forms and powers, filled his lines with the meat of thought, and prepared for Lucretius, Horace, and Virgil in method, vocabulary, theme, and ideas. To crown his career he wrote a treatise on the pleasures of the palate, and died of gout at seventy, after composing a proud epitaph:
Pay me no tears, nor for my passing grieve;
I linger on the lips of men, and live.30
Ennius succeeded in everything but comedy; perhaps he took philosophy too seriously, forgetting his counsel that “one must philosophize, but not too much.”31 The people rightly preferred laughter to philosophy, and made Plautus rich and Ennius poor. For like reasons they gave little encouragement to the tragic drama in Rome. The tragedies of Pacuvius and Accius were acclaimed by the aristocracy, ignored by the people, and forgotten by time.
In Rome, as in Athens, plays were presented to the public by state officials as partial celebration of a religious festival or as the obsequies of some distinguished citizen. The theater of Plautus and Terence consisted of a wooden scaffolding supporting a decorated background (the scaena), and, in front of this, a circular orchestra, or platform for dancing; the rear half of this circle formed the proscaenium, or stage. These flimsy structures were torn down after each festival, like our reviewing stands today. The spectators stood, or sat on stools they had brought, or squatted on the ground under the sky. Not till 145 was a complete theater built in Rome, still of wood and roofless, but fitted with seats in the Greek semicircular style. No admission was charged; slaves might attend, but not sit; women were admitted only in the rear. The audience in this period was probably the roughest and dullest in dramatic history—a jostling, boisterous crowd of “groundlings”; it is sad to note how often the prologues beg for quiet and better manners, and how the crude jokes and stereotyped ideas must be repeated to be understood. Some prologues ask mothers to leave their babies at home, or threaten noisy children, or admonish women not to chatter so much; such petitions occur even in the midst of the published plays.32 If an exhibition of prize fighting or rope walking happened to compete, the play, as like as not, would be interrupted until the more exciting performance was over. At the end of a Roman comedy the words, Nunc plaudite omnes, or some variant, made plain that the play was finished and that applause was in order.
The best feature of the Roman stage was the acting. The leading part was usually played by the manager, a freeman; the other performers were mostly Greek slaves. Any citizen who became an actor forfeited his civic rights—a custom that lasted till Voltaire. Female parts were taken by men. As audiences were small, actors in this age did not wear masks, but contented themselves with paint and wigs. About 100 B.C.., as audiences grew larger, the mask became necessary to distinguish the characters; it was called persona, apparently from the Etruscan word for mask, phersu; and the parts were called dramatis personae—masks of the play. Tragedians wore a high shoe, or “buskin” (cothurnus), comedians a low shoe, or “sock” (soccus). Parts of the play were sung to the obbligato of a flute; sometimes singers sang the parts while actors performed them in pantomime.
The Plautine comedies were written in rough and ready iambic verse, imitating the meter as well as the matter of their Greek models. Most of the Latin comedies that have come down to us were taken directly, or by combination, from one or more Greek dramas; usually from Philemon, Menander, or other practitioners of the New Comedy in Athens. The author and title of the Greek original were usually named on the title page. Adaptations of Aristophanes and the Old Comedy were ruled out by a law of the Twelve Tables punishing political satire with death.33 It was probably fear of this lethal legislation that led the Latin playwrights to keep the Greek scenes, characters, customs, names, even coins, of their originals; but for Plautus Roman law would have banished Roman life almost completely from the Roman stage. This police supervision did not exclude coarseness and obscenity; the aedile wished to amuse the crowd, not to elevate it; and the Roman government was never displeased by the ignorance of the multitude. The audience preferred broad humor to wit, buffoonery to subtlety, vulgarity to poetry, Plautus to Terence.
T. Maccius Plautus—literally, Titus the flat-footed clown—had made his first entrance in Umbria in 254. Coming to Rome, he worked as a stage hand, saved his money, invested it eagerly, and lost it. To eat he wrote plays; his adaptations from the Greek pleased by the Roman allusions scattered through them; he made money again and was given the citizenship of Rome. He was a man of the people and the earth, exuberantly jolly, Rabelaisianly robust; he laughed with everyone at everyone, but felt a hearty good will toward all. He wrote or refurbished 130 plays, of which twenty survive. The Miles Gloriosus is a jolly picture of a braggart soldier, whose servant feeds him hopefully with lies:
Servant: You saw those girls who stopped me yesterday?
Captain: What did they say?
Servant: Why, when you passed, they asked me,
“What! is the great Achilles here?” I answered,
“No, it’s his brother.” Then says the other one,
“Troth, he is handsome! What a noble man!
What splendid hair!” . . . and begged me, both of them,
. . . To make you take a walk again today,
That they might get a better sight of you.
Captain: ’Tis a great nuisance being so very handsome! 34
The Amphitryon turns the laugh upon Jove, who, disguised as Alcmena’s husband, calls upon himself to witness his own oath and offers pious sacrifice to Jupiter.35 The day after he seduces the lady she bears twins. At the end Plautus asks the god to forgive him and to take the lion’s share of the applause. The story proved as popular in the Rome of Plautus as in the Athens of Menander, the Paris of Molière, or the New York of our own time. The Aulularia is the tale of a miser’s hoard, told with more sympathy than in Molière’s Avare; the miser collects the parings of his nails, and laments the wasted water in the tears he has shed. The Menaechrm is the old story of twins and their climactic recognition—a source for Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors. Lessing thought the Captivi the best play ever staged;36 Plautus, too, liked it, and made its prologue say:
It is not hackneyed or just like the rest;
It has no filthy lines one must not quote,
No perjured pander, and no wicked wench.
It is true; but the plot is so intricate, so dependent upon improbable coincidences and revelations, that a mind allergic to dead history may be forgiven for passing it by. What made these comedies succeed was not their ancient plots but their wealth of humorous incident, their rollicking puns as bad as Shakespeare’s, their boisterous indecency, their gallery of precipitate women, and their occasional sentiment; in every play the audience could rely upon finding a love affair, a seduction, a handsome and virtuous hero, and a slave with more brains than all the rest of the characters put together. Here, almost at its outset, Roman literature touches the common man, and reaches, through Greek disguises, to the realities of daily life as Latin poetry would never do again.
Probably in the year of Plautus’ death (184), Publius Terentius Afer was born at Carthage of Phoenician, perhaps also of African, blood. We know nothing more of him until he appears as the slave of Terentius Lucanus in Rome. This senator recognized the shy lad’s talent, gave him an education, and freed him; the youth in gratitude took his master’s name. We get a pleasant note of Roman manners when we hear how Terence, “poor and meanly clad,” came to the house of Caecilius Statius—whose comedies, now lost, were then dominating the Roman stage—and read him the first scene of the Andria. Caecilius was so charmed that he invited the poet to dinner and listened admiringly to the rest.37 Terence soon won a hearing from Aemilianus and Laelius, who sought to form his style in the polished Latin so dear to their hearts. Hence gossip said that Laelius was writing Terence’s plays—a report which the author, with tact and prudence, neither confirmed nor denied.38 Moved perhaps by the respectful Hellenism of the Scipionic circle, Terence adhered faithfully to his Greek originals, gave his plays Greek titles, avoided allusions to Roman life, and called himself merely a translator39—a modest understatement of his work.
We do not know the fate of the play that Caecilius liked so well. The Hecyra, which Terence wrote next, failed because its audience slipped away to watch a bear fight. Fortune smiled in 162 when he produced his most famous play—the Heauton Timoroumenos, or “Self-Tormentor.” It told the story of a father who had forbidden his son to marry the girl of his choice; the son married her nevertheless; the father disowned and banished him, and then, in self-punishing remorse, refused” to touch his wealth, but lived in hard labor and poverty. A neighbor proposes to mediate; the father asks why he takes so kindly an interest in the troubles of others; and the neighbor replies in a world-renowned line which all the audience applauded:
Homo sum; humani nihil a me alienum puto—
“I am a man; I consider nothing human alien to me.” In the following year The Eunuch was so well received that it was performed twice in the same day (then a rare event), and earned Terence 8000 sesterces ($1200) between morning and night.40 A few months later appeared the Phormio, named from the witty servant who saved his master from paternal ire, and became the model for Beaumarchais’ lusty Figaro. In 160 Terence’s last play, the Adelphi, or “Brothers,” was performed at the funeral games of Aemilius Paulus. Soon afterward the playwright sailed for Greece. On the way back he died of illness in Arcadia, in his twenty-fifth year.
His later plays had suffered in popularity because Hellenism had won in him too full a victory. He lacked the vivacity and abounding humor of Plautus; he never thought to deal with Roman life. There were no lusty villains in his comedies, no reckless strumpets; all his feminine characters were handled with tenderness, and even his prostitutes hovered on the brink of virtue. There were fine pithy lines and memorable phrases: hinc Mae lacrimae (“hence those tears”), fortes fortuna adiuvat (“fortune favors the brave”), quot homines tot sententiae (“as many opinions as men”), and a hundred more; but they required for their appreciation a philosophical intelligence or literary sensitivity which the African slave found wanting in the Roman plebs. It did not care for his comedies that were half tragedies, his well-built but slowly moving plots, his subtle studies of strange characters, his quiet dialogue and too even style, and the almost insulting purity of his language; it was as if the audience felt that a breach, never to be healed, had been opened between the people and the literature of Rome. Cicero, too near to Catullus to see him, and too prudent to relish Lucretius, thought Terence the finest poet of the Republic. Caesar estimated him more justly when he praised the “lover of pure speech,” but deplored the lack of vis comica—the power of laughter—in Terence, and called him dimidiatus Menander—“half a Menander.” One thing, nevertheless, Terence had achieved: this Semitic alien, inspired by Laelius and Greece, had molded the Latin language at last into a literary instrument that would in the next century make possible the prose of Cicero, and Virgil’s poetry.