The Historians' History of the World 06

We have no adequate information regarding the dramatic poetry of the Augustan period, for everything which won the applause of contemporaries has been lost. What has been preserved to us from this period, namely the tragedies handed down to us under the name of Seneca, has all the faults which a depraved taste brings with it; sensational plots and scenes based on sensual and sentimental emotions; figures without life, but of many words and speeches; a treatment without knowledge of dramatic technicalities; and yet withal a harmony of words and verses, highly polished versification and diction, and the whole magnificent apparatus belonging to the schools of rhetoric in periods, antitheses, similes, and plays upon words. It is decidedly to the credit of the lower classes if they turned away from these dramas, leaving them to the lifeless declamatory exercises of the so-called educated classes, and in so far as the taste for the drama still existed, preferred to amuse themselves with a simpler entertainment and the familiar pieces of the older poets, which had long ceased to be sufficiently refined and elegant for people of cultivation.

Nor did the epic produce anything really great. Virgil (P. Vergilius Maro, born on the 15th of October, 70 B.C., died the 22nd of September, 19 B.C.) did indeed make an attempt to create a national epic in the Æneid

. But it is no more genuine than its fundamental idea of connecting the founder of the new empire with the father of Italian civilisation. Virgil studied under the Alexandrians and all that was to be learned he learned. He created the language and the verse structure which remained the standard for many centuries, so long as and wherever Latin poetry was cultivated. The form is throughout noble, and the poet was thoroughly acquainted with Homer and the Greek epic poets, nor is it without taste that he, as a man of learning, has drawn on this treasure; his ideas are pure and noble and he had learned to know his country and the legends of his forefathers better than many before or any after him, so that a certain national colouring is to be found in his work. But there was one thing which he did not possess; the creative genius which divines rightly in the choice of subject and arranges and treats its material with a light but master hand; as the subject was ill-chosen, so the poet never felt any hearty enthusiasm for it; everything has been thought out and very coldly and soberly thought out; beautiful pictures and striking comparisons are indeed presented; but they are sentimental and studied, and often look strange in their setting.

In the first place the hero is no hero, and the Roman patricians of even the time of the Scipios would have been revolted by this weakling who is feeble and sentimental like the poet himself, and not much more than a puppet in the hands of his divine mother. Such a weak figure gives no opportunity for strength in the treatment, which is accordingly languid, and the twelve cantos are spun out with monotonous tedium, so that to every one acquainted with Homer the reading of them is a mere task to be got through somehow. And if, from the standpoint of learning, the language and verses seem irreproachable, classical, and even worthy of imitation, all pleasure in them is lost by the fact that we are continually aware of the trouble and labour which they cost the poet.

It is characteristic of the times that Virgil possessed a canonical consideration with high and low, and poets and prose writers vied with one another to steal from him. From this fact we may guess the rest, and the loss in this field which has been recorded can have been no great one.