in her course of Italian conquest, she had finally come into conflict with those Greek colonists who had long since been taking peaceful possession of Italy along the southeastern border. These Græco-Roman struggles in Italy, which arose in consequence, culminated in the fall of Tarentum, BC 272; and with this victory the conquest of the Italian peninsula was complete.
This event meant much for the development of Italian literature; it meant new impulse and opportunity—the impulse of close and quickening contact with Greek thought, and the opportunity afforded by the internal calm consequent upon the completed subjugation of Italy. Joined with these two influences was a third which came with the end of the first Punic War, a generation afterward. Rome has now taken her first fateful step toward world empire; she has leaped across Sicily and set victorious foot in Africa; has successfully met her first great foreign enemy. The national pride and exaltation consequent upon this triumph gave favorable atmosphere and encouragement for those impulses which had already been stirred.
The first Punic War was ended in 241 BC In the following year the first effects of the Hellenic influence upon Roman literature were witnessed, and the first literary work in the Latin language of which we have definite record was produced at Rome. This was by Livius Andronicus, a Greek from Tarentum, who was brought to Rome as a captive upon the fall of that city. He came as the slave of M. Livius Salinator, who employed him as a tutor for his sons in Latin and Greek, and afterward set him free to follow the same profession independently. That he might have a Latin text from which to teach that language, he himself translated into the Roman tongue the Odyssey of Homer and some plays of the Greek tragedians—the first professor of Latin on record! These same translations, strangely enough, remained school text-books in Rome for centuries.
His first public work, to which we have referred above, was the production of a play; but whether tragedy or comedy we do not know. It was at any rate, without doubt, a translation into the crude, unpolished, and heavy Latin of his time, from some Greek original. His tragedies, of which only forty-one lines of fragments, representing nine plays, have come down to us, are all on Greek subjects, and are probably only translations or bald imitations of the Greek originals.
The example set by Andronicus was followed by four Romans of marked ability, whose life and work form a continuous chain of literary activity from Nævius, who was but a little younger than Andronicus, and who brought out his first play in 235 BC; through Ennius, who first established tragedy upon a firm foundation in Rome; through Pacuvius, the nephew of Ennius and his worthy successor, to the death of Accius in (about) 94 BC, who was the last and greatest of the old Roman tragedians.
As to the themes of these early tragedies, a few of them were upon subjects taken from Roman history. Tragedies of this class were called fabulæ prætextæ, because the actors wore the native Roman dress. When we think of the great value which these plays would have to-day, not only from a literary but also from a historical point of view, we cannot but regret keenly their almost utter loss. In the vast majority of cases, however, the old Roman tragedy was upon subjects taken from the traditional Greek cycles of stories, and was closely modeled after the Greek tragedies themselves. Æschylus and Sophocles were imitated to some extent, but Euripides was the favorite.
While these tragedies were Greek in subject and form, it is not at all necessary to suppose that they were servile imitations or translations merely of the Greek originals. The Romans did undoubtedly impress their national spirit upon that which they borrowed, in tragedy just as in all things else. Indeed, the great genius of Rome consisted partly in this—her wonderful power to absorb and assimilate material from every nation with which she came in contact. Rome might borrow, but what she had borrowed she made her own completely, for better or for worse. The resulting differences between Greek literature and a Hellenized Roman literature would naturally be the differences between the Greek and Roman type of mind. Where the Greek was naturally religious and contemplative, the Roman was practical and didactic. He was grave and intense, fond of exalted ethical effects, appeals to national pride; and above all, insisted that nothing should offend that exaggerated sense of both personal and national dignity which characterized the Roman everywhere.
All these characteristics made the Romanized Greek tragedies immensely popular; but, strangely enough, this did not develop a truly national Roman tragedy, as was the case, for instance, with epic and lyric literature. We have already seen how meager was the production of the fabulæ prætextæ. With the rich national traditions and history to inspire this, we can account for the failure to develop a native Roman tragedy only upon the assumption that the Roman lacked the gift of dramatic invention, at least to the extent of originating and developing great dramatic plots and characters, which form the essential elements of tragic drama.
We shall not weary the reader with quotations from the extant fragments of old Roman tragedy, fragments which, isolated as they are, can prove next to nothing as to the development of the plot or the other essential characteristics of a drama. A play is not like an animal: it cannot be reconstructed from a single fragment. It will be profitable, however, to dwell upon a few of these fragments, in order to get some idea of the nature and contents of all that is left of an extensive literature.
There is a very dramatic fragment of the Alexander or Paris of Ennius. It represents Cassandra, in prophetic raving, predicting the destruction which her brother Paris is to bring upon his fatherland. It is said that Hecuba, queen of Troy, before the birth of Paris, dreamed that she had brought forth a firebrand. Remembering this, Cassandra cries out at sight of her brother:
Here it is; here, the torch, wrapped in fire and blood. Many years it hath lain hid; help, citizens, and extinguish it. For now, on the great sea, a swift fleet is gathering. It hurries along a host of calamities. They come: a fierce host lines the shores with sail-winged ships.
Sellar.
Several of the fragments show a certain measure of descriptive power and poetic imagination in these early tragedians. The following passage from the Argonautæ of Accius shows this to a marked degree. It is a description of the first ship, Argo, as she goes plowing through the sea. It is supposed to be spoken by a rustic who from the shore is watching the vessel's progress. It should be remembered that the great boat is as strange a sight to him as were the ships of Columbus to the natives of newly discovered America. Hence the strange and seemingly strained metaphors.
The mighty mass glides on,
Like some loud-panting monster of the deep;
Back roll the waves, in eddying masses whirled.
It rushes on, besprinkling all the sea
With flying spray like backward streaming breath;
As when one sees the cloud-rack whirled along,
Or some huge mass of rock reft off and driven
By furious winds, or seething whirlpools, high
Upbeaten by the ever-rushing waves;
Or else when Ocean crashes on the shore,
Or Triton, from the caverns of the sea,
Far down beneath the swelling waters' depths,
A rocky mass to upper heaven uprears.
Miller.
Sellar, in speaking of the feeling for natural beauty, says of Accius: "The fragments of Accius afford the first hint of that enjoyment of natural beauty which enters largely into a later age"; and quotes the following passage from the Oenomaus as "perhaps the first instance in Latin poetry of a descriptive passage which gives any hint of the pleasure derived from contemplating the common aspects of nature":
