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or from the variety of measures of which it was composed-a more professional and artistic exhibition than the Fescennine banteringmatches, but far removed from the organized completeness of even the earlier drama. It was on this narrow ground that the independence of the Roman genius was destined to assert itself. Whether from a wish to take advantage of the name, or to preserve a thing, once popular, from altogether dying out in the process of improvement, a feeling which we know to have operated in the case of the exodia or interludes introduced into the representation of the Atellane plays, Ennius was led to produce certain compositions which he called satires, seemingly as various both in character and in versification as the old dramatic medley, but intended not for acting but for reciting or reading—in other words, not plays but poems. All that we know of these is comprised in a few titles and a very few fragments, none of which tell us much, coupled with the fact that in one of them Life and Death were introduced contending with each other as two allegorical personages, like Fame in Virgil, as Quintilian remarks, or Virtue and Pleasure in the moral tale of Prodicus. Little as this is, it is more than is known of the satires of Pacuvius, of which we only hear that they resembled those of Ennius. What was the precise relation borne by either to the later Roman satire with which we are so familiar can but be conjectured. Horace, who is followed as usual by Persius, ignores them both as satirists, and claims the paternity of satire for Lucilius, who, as he says, imitated the old Attic comedy, changing merely the measure; nor does Quintilian mention them in the brief but celebrated passage in which he asserts the merit of the invention of satire to belong wholly to Rome. This silence may be taken as showing that neither Ennius nor Pacuvius gave any exclusive or decided prominence to that element of satire which in modern times has become its distinguishing characteristic— criticism on the men, manners, and things of the day; but it can scarcely impeach their credit as the first founders of a new and original school of composition. That which constitutes the vaunted originality of Roman satire is not so much its substance as its form: the one had already existed in perfection at Athens, the elaboration of the other was reserved for the poetic art of Italy. It is certainly not a little remarkable that the countrymen of Aristophanes and Menander should not have risen to the full conception of familiar compositions in verse in which the poet pours out desultory thoughts on contemporary subjects in his own person, relieved from the trammels which necessarily bind every dramatic production, however free and unbridled its spirit. That such a thing might easily have arisen among them is evident from the traditional fame of the Homeric Margites, itself

apparently combining one of the actual requisites of the Roman medley, the mixture of metres, with the biting invective of the later satire—a work which, when fixed at its latest date, must have been one of the concomitants, if not, as Aristotle thinks, the veritable parent, of the earlier comedy of Greece. In later times we find parallels to Roman satire in some of the idylls of Theocritus, not only in those light dialogues noticed by the critics, of which the Adoniazusae is the best instance, but in the poem entitled the Charites, where the poet complains of the general neglect into which his art has fallen in a strain of mingled pathos and sarcasm which may remind us of Juvenal's appeal in behalf of men of letters, the unfortunate fraternity of authors. But Greece was not ordained to excel in everything; and Rome had the opportunity of cultivating a virtually unbroken field of labour which was suited to her direct practical genius, and to her mastery over the arts of social life. There can be no question but that the conception of seizing the spirit of comedy-of the new comedy no less than the old-the comedy of manners as well as the comedy of scurrilous burlesque-and investing it with an easy undress clothing, the texture of which might be varied as the inward feeling changed, was a great advance in the progress of letters. It would seem to be a test of the lawful development of a new form of composition from an old, that the latter should be capable of including the earlier, as the larger includes the smaller. So in the development of the Shaksperian drama from the Greek the chorus is not lost either as a lyrical or as an ethical element, but is diffused over the play, no longer seen indeed, but felt in the art which heightens the tone of the poetry, and brings out the moral relations of the characters into more prominent relief. So in that great development which transcends as it embraces all others, the development of prose from poetry, the superiority of the new form to the old as a general vehicle of expression is shown in the expansive flexibility which can find measured and rhythmic utterance for the raptures of passion or imagination, yet give no undue elevation to the statement of the plainest matters of fact. And so it is in the generation of satire from comedy: the unwieldy framework of the drama is gone, but the dramatic power remains, and may be summoned up at any time at the pleasure of the poet, not only in the impalpable shape of remarks on human character, but in the flesh-and-blood fulness of actual dialogue such as engrosses several of the satires of Horace, and enters as a more or less important ingredient into every one of those of Persius. Or, if we choose to regard satire, as we are fully warranted in doing, in its relation not only to the stage but to other kinds of poetry, we shall have equal reason to admire it for its elasticity, as being capable of rising without

any ungraceful effort from light ridicule to heightened earnestnesspassing at once with Horace from a ludicrous description of a poet as a marked man, to an emphatic recognition of his essential greatness; or with Juvenal from a sneer at the contemptible offerings with which the gods were commonly propitiated, to a sublime recital of the blessings which may lawfully be made objects of prayer. This plastic comprehensiveness was realized by the earlier writers, as we have seen, by means of the variety of their metres, while the later were enabled to compass it more artistically by that skilful management of the hexameter which could not be brought to perfection in a day. But the conception appears to have been radically the same throughout; and the very name satura already contains a prophecy of the distinctive value of Roman satire as a point in the history of letters.

If, however, the praise of having originated satire cannot be refused to Ennius, it must be confessed as freely that the influence exercised over it by Lucilius entitles him to be called its second father. It belongs to one by the ties of birth-to the other by those of adoption and education. Unlike Ennius, the glories of whose invention may well have paled before his fame as the Roman Homer and the Roman Euripides, Lucilius seems to have devoted himself wholly to fostering the growth and forming the mind of the satiric muse. He is thought to have so far departed from the form of the old medley as to enforce a uniformity of metre in each separate satire, though even this is not certainly made out; but he preserved the external variety by writing sometimes in hexameter, sometimes in iambics or trochaics, and also by a practice, seemingly peculiar to himself, of mixing Latin copiously with Greek, the language corresponding to French in the polite circles of Rome. It is evident, too, both from his numerous fragments and from the notices of the early grammarians, that he encouraged to a large extent the satiric tendency to diversity of subject—at one moment soaring on the wing of epic poetry and describing a council of the gods in language which Virgil has copied, the next satirizing the fashion of giving fine Greek names to articles of domestic furniture,-comprehending in the same satire a description of a journey from Rome to Capua, and a series of strictures on his predecessors in poetry, whom he seems to have corrected like so many school-boys;—now laying down the law about the niceties of grammar, showing how the second conjugation is to be discriminated from the third, and the genitive singular from the nominative plural; and now talking, possibly within a few lines, of seizing an antagonist by the nose, dashing his fist in his face, and knocking out every tooth in his head. But his great achievement, as attested by the impression left on the minds of his Roman readers,

was that of making satire henceforward synonymous with free speaking and personality-he comes before us as the reviver of the Fescennine licence, the imitator of Cratinus and Eupolis and Aristophanes. There seems to have been about him a reckless animal pugnacity, an exhilarating consciousness of his powers as a good hater, which in its rude simplicity may remind us of Archilochus, and certainly is but faintly represented in the arch pleasantry of Horace, the concentrated intellectual scorn of Persius, or of the declamatory indignation of Juvenal. Living in a period of political excitement, he plunged eagerly into party quarrels. The companion of the younger Scipio and Laelius, though a mere boy, and himself of equestrian rank, he attacked great consular personages who had opposed his friends: as Horace phrases it, he tore away the veil from private life and arraigned high and low alike-showing no favour but to virtue and the virtuous-words generally found to bear a tolerably precise meaning in the vocabulary of politics. It was the satire of the republic, or rather of the old oligarchy, and it was impossible that it could live on unchanged into the times of the Empire. But the memory of its day of freedom was not forgotten: the ancient right of impeachment was claimed formally by men who intended no more than a common criminal information; and each succeeding satirist sheltered himself ostentatiously under an example of which he knew better than to attempt to avail himself in practice.

It was to Lucilius, as we have already seen, that Persius, if reliance is to be placed on the statement of his biographer, owed the impulse that made him a writer of satire. Of the actual work which is related to have produced so remarkable an effect on its young reader, the tenth book, scarcely anything has been preserved; while the remains of the fourth, which is said to have been the model of Persius' third satire, comparatively copious and interesting as they are, contains nothing which would enable us to judge for ourselves of the degree of resemblance. Hardly a single parallel from Lucilius is quoted by the Scholiasts on any part of Persius: but when we consider that the aggregate of their citations from Horace, though much larger, is utterly inadequate to express the obligations which are everywhere obvious to the eye of a modern scholar, we cannot take their omissions as even a presumptive proof that what is not apparent does not exist. On the other hand, the Prologue to the Satires, in scazon iambics, is supposed, on the authority of an obscure passage in Petronius, to have had its prototype in a similar composition by Lucilius; and it is also a plausible conjecture that the first line of the first satire is taken bodily from the old poettwo distinct proclamations of adhesion at the very outset, in the ears of those who could not fail to understand them. There is reason, also,

for believing that the imitation may have extended further, and that Persius' strictures on the poets of his day, and in particular on those who affected a taste for archaisms, and professed to read the old Roman drama with delight, may have been studied after those irreverent criticisms of the fathers of poetry, some of which, as the Scholiasts on Horace inform us, occurred in this very tenth book of Lucilius. On the ethical side we should have been hardly prepared to expect much similarity there is, however, a curious fragment of Lucilius, the longest of all that have come down to us, containing a simple recital of the various constituents of virtue, the knowledge of duty no less than its practice, in itself sufficiently resembling the enumeration of the elements of morality which Persius makes on more than one occasion, and showing a turn for doctrinal exposition which was sure to be appreciated by a pupil of the Stoics. So there are not wanting indications that the bold metaphors and grotesque yet forcible imagery which stamp the character of Persius' style so markedly may have been encouraged if not suggested by hints in Lucilius, who was fond of tentative experiments in language, such as belong to the early stages of poetry, when the national taste is in a state of fusion. The admitted contrast between the two men, unlike in all but their equestrian descent,— between the premature man of the world and the young philosopher, the improvisatore who could throw off two hundred verses in an hour, and the student who wrote seldom and slowly,-may warrant us in doubting the success of the imitation, but does not discredit the fact. Our point is, that Persius attempted to wear the toga of his predecessor, not that it fitted him.

The influence of Horace upon Persius is a topic which has, in part, been anticipated already. It is a patent fact which may be safely assumed, and I have naturally been led to assume it as a help towards estimating other things which are not so easily ascertainable. Casaubon was, I believe, the first to bring it forward prominently into light in an appendix to his memorable edition of Persius; and though one of the later commentators has endeavoured to call it in question, cautioning us against mistaking slight coincidences for palpable imitations, I am confident that a careful and minute study of Persius, such as I have lately been engaged in, will be found only to produce a more complete conviction of its truth: nor can I doubt that an equally careful perusal of Horace, line by line and word by word, would enable us to add still further to the amount of proof. Yet it is curious and instructive to observe that it is a point which, while established by a superabundance of the best possible evidence, that of ocular demonstration, is yet singularly deficient in those minor elements of probability to which we are

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