Read Ebook: The Oxford Book of Latin Verse From the earliest fragments to the end of the Vth Century A.D. by Garrod H W Heathcote William Editor

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Ebook has 1812 lines and 187705 words, and 37 pages

Editor: Heathcote William Garrod

The Oxford Book Of Latin Verse

From the earliest fragments to the end of the Vth Century A.D.

Chosen by

H.W. Garrod

Fellow of Merton College.

Oxford

At the Clarendon Press

FIRST PUBLISHED 1912

REPRINTED 1921, 1926, 1934, 1940 1943, 1947, 1952, 1964, 1968

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN

Ergo alte uestiga oculis et rite repertum carpe manu, namque ipse uolens facilisque sequetur si te fata uocant.

Non aspettar mio dir pi? n? mio cenno.

H.W.G.

INTRODUCTION

If we are to understand the character, then, of Roman poetry in its best period, in the period, that is, which ends with the death of Augustus, we must figure to ourselves a great and prosaic people, with a great and prosaic language, directing and controlling to their own ends spiritual forces deeper and more subtle than themselves. Of these forces one is the Greek, the other may for convenience be called the Italian. In the Italian we must allow for a considerable intermixture of races: and we must remember that large tracts at least of Northern Italy, notably Transpadane Gaul and Umbria, have been penetrated by Celtic influence. No one can study Roman poetry at all deeply or sympathetically without feeling how un-Roman much of it really is: and again--despite its Hellenic forms and its constant study of Hellenism--how un-Greek. It is not Greek and not Roman, and we may call it Italian for want of a better name. The effects of this Italian quality in Roman poetry are both profound and elusive; and it is not easy to specify them in words. But it is important to seize them: for unless we do so we shall miss that aspect of Roman poetry which gives it its most real title to be called poetry at all. Apart from it it is in danger of passing at its best for rhetoric, at its worst for prose.

adest, adest fax obuoluta sanguine atque incendio: multos annos latuit, ciues, ferte opem et restinguite. iamque mari magno classis cita texitur, exitium examen rapit: adueniet, fera ueliuolantibus navibus complebit manus litora.

molle atque facetum Vergilio annuerunt gaudentes rure Camenae.

I will not mention Lesbia by the side of Dido. The Celtic spirit too often descends into hell. But I will take from Catullus in a different mood two other examples of the Italic romanticism. Consider these three lines:

usque dum tremulum mouens cana tempus anilitas omnia omnibus annuit,

--'till that day when gray old age shaking its palsied head nods in all things to all assent.' That is not Greek nor Roman. It is the unelaborate magic of the Celtic temperament. Keats, I have often thought, would have 'owed his eyes' to be able to write those three lines. He hits sometimes a like matchless felicity:

She dwells with Beauty, Beauty that must die, And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips Bidding adieu.

But into the effects which Catullus just happens upon by a luck of temperament Keats puts more of his life-blood than a man can well spare.

ut missum sponsi furtiuo munere malum procurrit casto uirginis e gremio, quod miserae oblitae molli sub ueste locatum, dum aduentu matris prosilit, excutitur; atque illud prono praeceps agitur decursu, huic manat tristi conscius ore rubor,

--'as an apple, sent by some lover, a secret gift, falls from a maid's chaste bosom. She placed it, poor lass, in the soft folds of her robe and forgot it. And when her mother came towards her out it fell; fell and rolled in headlong course. And vexed and red and wet with tears are her guilty cheeks!'

That owes something, no doubt, to Alexandria. But in its exquisite sensibility, its supreme delicacy and tenderness, it belongs rather to the romantic than to the classical literatures.

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 ...

Note the dragging cadences, the pathetic iteration, the scarce-concealed agony of longing. Yet this five-line poem ends in a couplet of intolerable obscenity.

There once more you have the unpredictable Celtic temperament--obscenity of wrath dissolving in the tenderness of unbidden tears, fond regret stung suddenly to a rage foul and unscrupulous.

Perhaps no poetry of equal power and range is so deeply infected with rhetoric as the Roman. A principal cause of this is, no doubt, the language. But there are other causes, and we shall most easily penetrate these if we consider what I may call the environment of Roman poetry.

These are not mere words: and this was not, in the Roman, an idle faith. It was a practical faith; that is to say, he acted upon it. Upon this faith was based, at any rate in the early period of Roman history, the whole of the Roman system of education. The principal business of the Roman schoolmaster was to take the great poets and interpret them 'by reading and comment'. Education was practically synonymous with the study of the poets. The poets made a man brave, the poets made a man eloquent, the poets made him--if anything could make him--poetical. It is hardly possible to over-estimate the obscure benefit to the national life of a discipline in which the thought and language of the best poetry were the earliest formative influences.

There is much here which is truly and tellingly said. We ought never to forget that the system of patronage sprang from a very lofty notion of patriotism and of the national welfare. It implies a clear and fine recognition among the great men of affairs of the principle that a nation's greatness is not to be measured, and cannot be sustained, by purely material achievements. It is true, again, that the system of patronage did not originate with Augustus or the Augustans. Augustus was a patron of letters just as Scipio had been--because he possessed power and taste and a wide sense of patriotic obligation. So much is true, or fairly true. But if it is meant, as I think it is, that the literary patronage of the Princeps was the same in kind as, and different only in degree from, that exercised by the great men of the Republican period--if that is meant, then we have gone beyond what is either true or plausible.

postquam res Asiae Priamique euertere gentem immeritam uisum superis, ceciditque superbum Ilium, et omnis humo fumat Neptunia Troia; diuersa exsilia et desertas quaerere terras auguriis agimur diuum, classemque sub ipsa Antandro et Phrygiae molimur montibus Idae, incerti quo fata ferant, ubi sistere detur.

The end of the century gives us Claudian, and a reaction against this triviality. 'Paganus peruicacissimus,' as Orosius calls him, Claudian presents the problem of a poet whose poetry treats with real power the circumstances of an age from which the poet himself is as detached as can be. Claudian's real world is a world which was never to be again, a world of great princes and exalted virtues, a world animated by a religion in which Rome herself, strong and serene, is the principal deity. Accident has thrown him into the midst of a political nightmare dominated by intriguing viziers and delivered to a superstition which made men at once weak and cruel. Yet this world, so unreal to him, he presents in a rhetorical colouring extraordinarily effective. Had he possessed a truer instinct for things as they are he might have been the greatest of the Roman satirists. He has a real mastery of the art of invective. But, while he is great where he condemns, where he blesses he is mostly contemptible. He has too many of the arts of the cringing Alexandrian. And they availed him nothing. Over every page may be heard the steady tramp of the feet of the barbarian invader.

After Claudian we pass into the final darkness. The gloom is illuminated for a brief moment by the Gaul Rutilius. But Rutilius has really outlived Roman poetry and Rome itself. Nothing that he admires is any longer real save in his admiration of it. The things that he condemns most bitterly are the things which were destined to dominate the world for ten centuries. Christianity is 'a worse poison than witchcraft'. The monastic spirit is the 'fool-fury of a brain unhinged'. The monasteries are 'slave-dungeons'.

It was these 'slave-dungeons' which were to keep safe through the long night of the Middle Ages all that Rutilius held dear. It was these 'slave-dungeons' which were to afford a last miserable refuge to the works of that long line of poets of whom Rutilius is the late and forlorn descendant. Much indeed was to perish even within the fastnesses of these 'slave-dungeons': for the monasteries were not always secure from the shock of war, nor the precious memorials which they housed from the fury of fanaticism. Yet much was to survive and to emerge one day from the darkness and to renew the face of the world. Rutilius wrote his poem in 416 A.D. If he could have looked forward exactly a thousand years he would have beheld Poggio and the great Discoverers of the Italian Renaissance ransacking the 'slave-dungeons' of Italy, France, and Germany, and rejoicing over each recovered fragment of antiquity with a pure joy not unlike that which heavenly minds are said to feel over the salvation of souls. These men were, indeed, kindling into life again the soul of Europe. They were assisting at a New Birth. In this process of regeneration the deepest force was a Latin force, and of this Latin force the most impelling part was Latin poetry. We are apt to-day, perhaps, in our zeal of Hellenism, to forget, or to disparage, the part which Latin poetry has sustained in moulding the literatures of modern Europe. But if the test of great poetry is the length and breadth of its influence in the world, then Roman poetry has nothing to fear from the vagaries of modern fashion. For no other poetry has so deeply and so continuously influenced the thought and feeling of mankind. Its sway has been wider than that of Rome itself: and the Genius that broods over the Capitoline Hill might with some show of justice still claim, as his gaze sweeps over the immense field of modern poetry, that he beholds nothing which does not owe allegiance to Rome:

Iupiter arce sua totum cum spectat in orbem, nil nisi Romanum quod tueatur habet.

NVMA POMPILIVS

DIVOM templa cante, diuom deo supplicate.

QVOME tonas, Leucesie, prae tet tremonti. quor libet, Curis, decstumum tonare?

CONSE, ulod oriese: omnia tuere, adi, Patulci, coi isse: Sancus Ianes Cerus es. Duonus Ianus ueuet po melios, eu, recum.

THE ARVAL BROTHERHOOD

ENOS, Lases, iuuate, enos, Lases, iuuate, enos, Lases, iuuate. neue lue rue, Marmar, sins incurrere in pleoris, neue lue rue, Marmar, sins incurrere in pleoris, neue lue rue, Marmar, sers incurrere in pleoris. satur fu, fere Mars: limen sali: sta berber, satur fu, fere Mars: limen sali: sta berber, satur fu, fere Mars: limen sali: sta berber, semunis alternei aduocapit conctos, semunis alternei aduocapit conctos, semunis alternei aduocapit conctos. enos, Marmor, iuuato, enos, Marmor, iuuato, enos, Marmor, iuuato. triumpe, triumpe, triumpe, triumpe, triumpe.

ANONYMOUS

EGO tui memini, medere meis pedibus: terra pestem teneto, salus hic maneto in meis pedibus.

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