Ancient Rhetoric and Poetic

Chapter VII Poetic in Ancient Drama and Narrative

The classical practise of poetic in the two modes distinguished by Aristotle, dramatic and narrative, has a twofold significance. It has the claim of all great art for its own beauty; and it reveals certain fundamentals of literary form and literary influence. Classical influences on later art have been defined sometimes vaguely, sometimes amiss, for lack of clear grasp of classical practise. Yet the vitality of classical poetic art is hardly more proverbial than its definiteness. Without circumscribing in formulas its creative variety, we can discern quite clearly its artistic habits in these two enduring modes.

Into such a survey recent questions as to literary forms need not enter. How far a literary form may be modified or extended without losing its character, how suggestive a recognized form is to the composing imagination, are questions important rather for those modern times in which the artist is much concerned with individual self-expression than for the centuries in which he was more the spokesman of a community. Even if Brunetière’s transference of the word genre from biology to literature be only analogy, even if Croce’s denial that a literary form is directive of the artist be justified, we must still use the terms drama and epic. From Aristotle down, criticism has used them not only for convenience, but because in fact there were two typical ways of extensive imaginative composition in words, varying in detail but constant essentially, and always sharply distinct. Whether these should rather be called types or modes than forms is a question for later consideration. For the purposes of the present review the terms drama and epic connote only habits of composition universally recognized.

The two discussed by Aristotle as types are in fact seen as types to persist. The habits of drama have remained typically distinct from those of narrative, and have changed far less. To add Senecan tragedy to its Greek prototype, and to mark the distinctive traits of Latin comedy, will both fill out Aristotle’s summary and show in what forms classical influences came first to modern drama. Narrative in the ancient world developed along few lines. Its poetic art long remained epic. This art was at once followed by Vergil and recreated. The Æneid is the great exemplar of all that is fruitful in literary influence. The Hellenistic art that Vergil rejected was cultivated by Apuleius and ran to seed in the Greek prose romances. Meantime it was practised with facile brilliancy by the Latin poet whom the middle ages knew better even than they knew Vergil—Ovid. Setting aside, then, all minor forms, and in the two major forms all but what is typical, we may venture to survey ancient poetic, first in Greek tragedy, with Senecan tragedy for contrast and Latin comedy for supplement, then in Vergilian epic, with Ovidian narrative for contrast and Apuleius for divergence.

I. Drama

A. Greek Tragedy1

At first glance Greek tragedy strikes the modern student as finished. Its historical period is definite. It grew; it matured; it died. Its strictly dramatic influence appears to be sharply limited. Inoperative as a mode of representation, indeed almost unknown, in the middle ages and the early Renaissance, it seems at first to have been revived in modern times only for archæological reproduction, as the models of Greek architecture in museums. Even if such a view were just—and it is not—Greek tragedy would compel attention by sheer artistic eminence. It can no more be ignored than Gothic architecture. It is one of the great artistic achievements of the human spirit. But no such artistic achievement is ever finished in the sense of being relegated to a museum. Its eminence constitutes a presumption of vitality. Gothic architecture, though held in abeyance and even forgotten for centuries, is again operative. It compels attention to-day not only in reproductions, but in creation. Greek tragedy has profoundly influenced modern playwriting. Its increasing reappearance to-day in revivals, and the distinction of certain imitations such as Samson Agonistes, are less important than its influence on modern dramaturgy, as in Racine and again in Ibsen and finally in certain striking plays of our own time. This vitality implies that the Greek experience, in especially happy conditions of stage and audience, through a period of extraordinary artistic competition, was fruitful not merely in skilful adaptation to those conditions, but in dramatic principles.

(1). Theater and Audience

The emotions that are enhanced by representation before a crowd are typically such as are best felt by the crowd together, such as are communal.2 Greek drama began, according to tradition, in the rites celebrated by the whole village to honor Dionysus, the god of fertility and enthusiasm. In the shouting, singing chorus there were at first no actors in the modern sense; but that was because in a broader sense all were actors. There was rude, impromptu mimic action. There was probably a good deal of improvised verse by individuals, and probably a good deal of recurring refrain by the whole crowd. Out of this communal impersonation of the story of Dionysus grew very naturally individual impersonations of the god and of his more prominent mythical attendants, the crowd responding with impromptu variations of the familiar refrain. Every crowd produces a leader. The leader of the Greek chorus became an actor in the modern sense of taking, a fixed part. In time other fixed parts were assigned to individuals, till the mimic action had a definite dialogue; but the chorus persisted as representative of the whole community.

Then, as always, came the individual genius to discern the capacity of what had grown up among the people, to reveal and enlarge that capacity, and to fix a great form of art. The shaping of drama by Æschylus and its development by Sophocles and by Euripides expressed, indeed, individual genius; but no less they expressed the ideals of the Greek race and remained answerable to the original popular impulse. The Greek audience during the great period of drama felt not only that the chorus chanting in the orchestra was its representative, but that it was itself as a body assisting at a communal celebration. Always the enacting of legend or history known to every spectator by heart, the drama was always judged sternly not only by its poetic beauty, but by its faithfulness to communal beliefs and feelings. Its success was measured by the feeling of the community.

So the great open-air Greek theater was made for the community. It superseded the unfurnished hillside as the community passed more and more from participants to spectators; but it remained, to a degree rarely realized in modern times, communal. For Greek tragedy, even at its height, never lost its reminiscences of ritual. Every representation being an act of religion, the theater crowd, united by a common rite, was the more sensitive to common sympathies. That the theater is for the crowd, not for the individual, has been realized by playwrights of every age; but the first great age of drama opened this peculiar opportunity of dramaturgy widest because its crowd was unified. The communal sense of tradition was focused by religion.

(2). Diction

Remembrance of this fact has led many modern readers who have never seen a Greek play to conceive Greek tragedy as formal and rigid. This is much the same error as supposes Greek architecture and statuary to have been white. It is an illusion of time. Greek buildings and statues became white when no hands were left to restore their colors. Greek tragedies became formal and rigid when they passed from the stage to the closet, when they lost the rhythms of dance and of phrase. With every revival of them upon the modern stage the illusion is dispelled. Indeed, it can be broken by merely reading them aloud.

Nevertheless, though they show to an exceptional degree that larger movement which Aristotle found to be a dramatic essential, they were stately in gesture and in lines. Even without the associations of religion, the very size of the theater would have precluded the facial play that is a main reliance of modern acting, and induced in the open air a delivery sometimes oratorical and always large. The tragic mask and cothurnus were adaptations to a great open-air space. To the same physical conditions were adapted the rendition and the lines themselves.3

The diction of Greek tragedy, though varying widely of course from poet to poet, has certain recognizable constants. It is generally sonorous, sententious, and, to a degree never surpassed, direct. It realizes fully the emotional appeal of rhythm; for though its dialogue has less rhythmical variety than Shakspere’s, it rarely lapses into monotony, and it is relieved by the abundant imagery and metrical variety of the chorus. Greek tragic dialogue is typically austere. It rarely amplifies, for it is poetry, not oratory;4 but it makes every word count dramatically. The ideal of economy is felt even in the diction. Passages of narrative, such as those of messengers, are made dramatically effective not only by situation, but by variations of tone and tempo. Effects of style may seem to have preoccupied criticism too much unless we remember that the Athenian audience was habitually sensitive to rhythm, and that it was never distracted by novelty of story from attention to the dramatist’s art. That the final touch of this art was the rhythmical finishing of the lines there can be no doubt.

Nor is dramatic verse a mere traditional convention.5 Obviously it is appropriate to historical dignity; but beyond this we become aware, even from reading, much more from hearing, that the verse subtly and constantly enhances the emotion by enriching the connotation. It is not merely rhythm added to force, though how much rhythm, even in prose, is worth dramatically every good actor knows. It is not even poetry added to drama. It is an element permeating and integral. Good dramatic verse, to say nothing of the best, is not a lyrical addition, not a decoration, but as truly a dramatic means as the other means of characterization. That is why the tradition of every great stage, such as the Comédie Française, lays distinct stress on rhythmical rendition; and that is why the dramatic rhythms of Greek tragedy are still inspiring.

Nor is even this the final value of verse in Greek tragedy. Such verse enhances the characterization not only in detail by widening the opportunity of the actor to convey mood and emotion, but generally by enhancing the poetry. The typical method of Greek tragic characterization is to idealize. The mighty figures of the past, remote from the urgencies of our confusing present, confirm our faith that man may dominate and direct his world for good, or, when they too fail, reveal with larger truth the tragic flaws of humanity and the hope of its regeneration. Modern history plays, as well as ancient, are poetic in diction ultimately because they are poetic in conception, as Greek drama was at once tradition and poetry. The word audience, which in its etymological suggestions has seemed inappropriate to a modern crowd gathered rather for seeing than for hearing, is entirely appropriate to the Greek theater. The visual values of representation were, indeed, realized in gesture and pose, though less in scenery and spectacle; they were realized as never, perhaps, since in group movements; but the auditory values, the sounding line, the phrase harmony of the chant, always enhanced representation by strong rhythmical suggestion. A Greek tragedy was in a real sense, though its music was simply melodic, a symphony.

(3). Chorus

The symbol of the communal import of Greek tragedy and of its characteristic form is the chorus. From being almost the whole the chorus dwindled dramatically to a subordinate part. The inference, however, that it was outgrown, that except for historical study it is negligible, is unwarranted. Even Euripides used the chorus dramatically; and Aristotle urges, not that it be abolished, but that it be made an integral part, one of the actors. Nor were the practise and the theory mere concession to Greek convention. The chorus was in fact dramatic.6 Too readily conceiving it in terms of our meager modern experience, as in opera, critics often seem to have forgotten that the Greek chorus furnished not primarily tableau or grouping or even pageantry in a wider sense, but chanting and dancing. That dancing may be highly dramatic we have but recently rediscovered. Aristotle7 knew dance as compassing the whole range of bodily expression. Far from being merely a lyric interlude, the chorus offered distinct dramatic possibilities.

To begin with, the combination of choral dance and chanting has a direct appeal to the simpler emotions that are communal; and in Greek drama it enhances the idealizing of communal fears and beliefs and aspirations. The idealism of Greek tragedy is conveyed largely by the chorus. Then the chorus is used to enhance the emotion of a preceding scene by iterating it sympathetically, or by recoiling in protest, or by reflecting on it sub specie æternitatis. Thus are achieved the relief of variety and also an intermediary effect, the effect of spectators of the action itself interpreting to the spectators of the play. The variety brought about by the choral throng was the more marked because the actors were few. In the chorus were many opportunities for representation of the human world about these isolated individuals, and for dramatic symbolism through the group movements of the dance. The choral dance, always symbolic, had been developed from simple, primitive forms to a fine art. The preliminary to every dramatic production was the public granting of a chorus; and the training of this chorus by the dramatist himself was a main part of rehearsal. The chorus is associated in every one’s thought of Greek tragedy inevitably and fitly. It is not merely an archaic convention; it is not merely a lyric accessory to drama; it has dramatic possibilities which may yet, if large open-air theaters win again a place in communal life, be revived.

(4). Themes and Personæ

The rhythmical effects of diction and of choral dance are hardly more characteristic of Greek tragedy than its unvarying use of legendary themes and persons. Euripides is thought to have chafed within these confines, to have been hampered by the conventional prescription of old bottles for his new wine. In any age the playwright who insists on ideas in advance of his crowd thereby sacrifices something of the communal appeal. But even Euripides kept outwardly the unwritten law, and Aristotle8 accepted it as part of his theory. It is evident that such themes and such persons were a tragic convention; but the convention was still recognized in the middle ages;9 it was accepted by the Renaissance; it was formally adopted by the French seventeenth century; and its being a convention does not prove it any the less dramatic. Without disparaging the gain to modern tragedy from the widening of the tragic field we may take account of the typical values of the field of tradition.

The field of tradition is ipso facto the field of communal memories and aspirations and, even in modern times, of myth. Though the re-creation of myth may be artificial and remote, that it need not be so, that it may on the contrary originally express both the poet and the conceptions of his audience, has been proved many times, and very convincingly in our own time by William Vaughn Moody’s Fire-bringer. The fire of Prometheus is there seen, even after Æschylus, even after Shelley, to be undying. The modern science of anthropology, indeed, gives good ground for thinking both that myth is constantly human and that by its very persistence, as of a primitive trait, it opens opportunities for drama.

The modern study of folklore, by recovering some lost echoes in Greek tragedy, has enhanced its significance. Folk superstitions, though they retire from public gaze before more sophisticated conventions, are slow to die. Those which have become mere curious lore are of course dead dramatically; but those which express persistent human yearnings may be all the more vital dramatically because they are primitive. Such, for instance, is the folk-tale of the fairy mistress, the woman of unearthly beauty who has the magic to enrich the man she loves with joy and power. Widespread over western Europe in the middle ages, it has roots in remote antiquity. Euripides made it, not as the medieval writers the story of the delusion of the man, but the tragedy of the woman. In varying forms it has recurred again and again. In Walter Map’s amazing tale of Gerbert10 it concludes upon penance and renunciation. In Fouqué’s Undine its native force is dissipated in sentiment. A dead superstition, on the other hand, has no dramatic appeal. Though we admire the steadfast piety that agonizes over the unburied body of a brother, we can no longer appreciate the situation of Antigone as fully tragic; for we have lost irrevocably the ancient superstition from which it springs. But Medea with her power to bless and ban her lover, and with her unearthly capacity for suffering, who will venture to say that she is dead? That she is primitive gives her only the more power to walk the stage to-morrow.

Mythical idealizing is readily symbolic. But in Greek tragedy direct symbolism, except in the chorus, is not common. Rather than as symbolical, the legendary figures appear as typical. It is as typical that the “illustrious persons” are recommended by Aristotle and represented by the dramatists that he expounds. Prometheus, Heracles, Agamemnon, Medea, are chosen as eminent not in rank, as some French dramatists are accused of thinking, but in typically human traits. They show grandly and conspicuously what obscurely is suffered by us all. “There you and I and all of us fell down.” They are race heroes; we communally feel in them the race ghost. And the more mythical they are, the more we can feel the struggle of all human kind. For the very limitations on themes sets Greek tragedy in sharper relief against modern as exhibiting the dramatic vitality of legend.

Personages so fixed do, indeed, tend to preclude both novelty and subtlety of characterization. In this regard Euripides, especially in his Medea, is sometimes exceptional. Generally the characterization of Greek tragedy is broad and simple. The personæ are taken full-blown, at some revealing crisis. But modern experience with plays and with novels confirms the impression that broad characterization is generally more effective before an audience; subtle, minute, or cumulative, with an individual reader. In this application, too, we may take Aristotle’s saying that plot is more important in drama, character in epic. But lest we separate character from plot unduly, we must remember that the movement of Greek tragedy is not merely of events, but of human will. Will is the exhibition of character in action. It is the mainspring of every tragic crisis. At once the simplest and the strongest expression of character, it animates Greek tragedy because it animates almost all tragedy.11 Æschylus in Prometheus Bound promises the victory of heroic fortitude. Sophocles in King Œdipus conveys the agony of assertive individuality at finding the struggle for self-fulfillment vain, and brings even innocent willfulness to wreck. Euripides sees the tragic conflict of the traditional bloodwite with reverence to a mother as leading to madness. Within the compass of the few dramas left to us from the Greek stage the tragedies of human will in a few typical personages are seen to be as various as they are convincing. Even the rich variety of the great Elizabethan period does not make them seem meager.

Rather they exhibit the dramatic richness of the typical. By the very fact of being embodied in flesh and blood any “illustrious person” begins to be real. Even the allegorical figure of Everyman in the mediæval morality—and the Greek dramatis personæ were never allegorical—has held modern audiences because each spectator recognized himself with his secret foes and friends. That the persons of the Greek stage were few and familiar, then, was not of itself a disadvantage. The tragedies of a few famous families can strike pity and fear into all families who know the bitterness of hate. Moreover, the restriction to familiar themes, the exclusion of novelty from plot, focused attention upon conception and movement. Playwright and audience alike looked for originality not in subject, but in art. Comparison of play with play was readier and more specific; and the competition of the stage was almost purely artistic.

(5). Plot

Plot in Greek tragedy, the movement of the whole play, is discussed so extensively by Aristotle that little need be added. For his preoccupation with Sophocles hardly makes his exposition the less comprehensive. Later criticism has generally accepted Sophocles as historically midway between the occasional archaism of Æschylus and the occasional modernism of Euripides, as typical of Greek dramatic habits, and as the greatest Greek master of plot. Sophocles, as has been often pointed out, intensified drama by making his unit not the trilogy, but the single play, by developing a single theme with a clear conflict, and by making its interaction self-sufficient through the use of a third actor. Euripides, on the other hand, seems to care less for totality, though he achieves it in some plays, notably in the Medea. His use of a separable prologue instead of dramatic exposition within the play has been condemned as impatient;12 and the vividness of his lines, especially in description, has been disparaged as distracting. In all this the art of Sophocles is no more eminent than it is typical. He is the shining example of Greek artistic economy.

This characteristic economy of Greek tragic art makes it permanently inspiring to playwrights. Modern audiences, being less conscious of art, may find the economy sometimes too close; but playwrights discern in it both a triumph of technic and an example. For the revolt against even the “unities” of the French classic stage spent its force long ago. Meantime the war of the romanticists against the classicists should make clear, what the greatest dramatists have always understood, that unity in drama is valuable only as a means to coherence. Its only raison d’être is to clear the way for steady movement and to lead that movement to a convincing issue. Now in this compelling force of movement Greek drama, especially in the hands of Sophocles, remains by common consent a model of tragic art. That even audiences habituated to variety and tolerant of looseness will still feel this force is suggested by revivals of increasing frequency, by the eminence, even in a period of very different dramatic habits, of such plays as Othello, and by the deliberate preference of some recent dramatists13 for the Greek model. But whether single, steady movement through a limited time be a permanent dramatic principle or not, at least it is characteristically Greek. What one editor says of the Antigone of Sophocles might be said of Greek tragedy generally: “there is no halting in the march of the drama.”14

This effect is brought about technically by focusing on a single scene and a continuous critical period.15 The whole tragedy, as has been quaintly said, is compressed within the fifth act; or, to speak in still more modern terms, the Greeks composed their tragedies as long one-act plays. Such a play differs from Henry IV or A Winter’s Tale essentially; it differs from Othello only in removable accidents. The characteristic is not brevity, nor even unity, but continuity. That the habit of continuity was fostered by Greek stage conditions, the habit of discontinuity by Elizabethan, there can be no doubt; but neither can there be any doubt that the Greek stage conditions were modified more than once by a dramatist, or that the Elizabethan stage conditions did not determine the growth of Shakspere’s art. In both great ages a dramatist took the stage as he found it, but built up his dramatic technic as he chose. The continuity of Greek tragedy is not merely a fact of archæology; it is an achievement of technic.

The limiting to a single place and time has been objected to as forcing off-stage some events that the audience would like to see, and as unnaturally crowding the action. In a word, the one-act form, for an action of some magnitude, has been called artificial. Any form may seem artificial if it is realized imperfectly; and the limits of this form impose merely a higher degree of the difficulty inherent in any dramatic form, the difficulty of focus. Even a five-act play imposes limits, prescribes selection, by the very conditions of the stage itself. The peculiar opportunity arising from the stage conditions of the Greek theater was discerned to be emotional intensity. Intensity has even been urged as the characteristic opportunity of all drama. Whether this be granted or not, undoubtedly the Greeks conceived drama so, and developed their technic accordingly. They worked for intensity. Though they were not content with two actors, they were content with one stage set and with one period of time. Not only so, but the difficulties of their form stimulated their art. In these conditions playwrights heightened intensity by a technic of progressive continuity.

So much for the idea behind the objections. The particular charges seem hardly to hold. What is forced off the stage of Greek drama, or of any drama? Surely nothing that the dramatist wishes to have on-stage, or his art is imperfect. That the frequent murders are only heard, not seen, is due not to any exigencies of form, but to social convention and to the idea that dying is less tragic than death. For the rest, to put shifting human life on a fixed stage, even with liberty to represent more than one place and time, always involves foreshortening. Art cannot have the diffuseness of life. It works by selection. The Greek tragic artists chose to carry selection to the highest degree. That this event or that of the tragic story is reported by a messenger, not enacted before our eyes, is not a hindrance to the tragic march, not the makeshift conceded to an intractable form. Let the speech of a Greek messenger be read aloud, or better, let it be acted; and it will no longer be called undramatic.16 Add its dramatic value in context, its relation to the scene that it enters; and no doubt will remain. The possibilities of narrative on the stage, though they seem to have been forgotten by many English playwrights, are clear. But the Greek dramatist did make a virtue of necessity. He sometimes used a messenger, dramatically indeed, but perforce. What we hear from a messenger we could not see without change of scene. This was the dramatist’s sacrifice, not to formalism, but to continuity. To that end he would have made even greater sacrifice.

The speeding of the action beyond the normal pace of life is not confined to this form. It is a condition of all drama. Nor does Greek drama seem either crowded or hurried. Though events may follow thick and fast, the Greek movement is typically unhurried. It has steadiness from careful preparation; it gains momentum as it advances; it culminates swiftly; it diminishes to a slow and quiet close.

That tragedy should have a full close, carrying the action through to a καταστροφή, or state of rest, must have been with the Greeks a principle; for it was an almost invariable habit. Though the tragedies of other and later nations do not always end so, they too have the full close often enough to suggest that audiences generally desire it.17 Whether or not this is true of audiences, it seems true of playwrights in proportion as they work, as the Greeks worked, for singleness. In Greek tragedy the end crowns the work in the sense that the close completes the interpretation. The close of the action is the issue of the characterization. Characterization in Greek tragedy, more consistently than in any other, is motivation. In some Greek plays it offers hardly anything else. The characters are drawn for the play, not for themselves. The “part” is subordinated to the theme. When we see that this is true even for Medea, a “part” to be coveted by any modern actress, we realize that the significance of the whole play was habitually in the Greek conception the main object. This explains the full close as the goal of a steady movement, and as the final stage of the idealization which habitually shaped both characters and plot. And where a modern playwright has worked with the same intention, we find again and again, as in Othello, the same full close.

The ultimate technical question, then, is What is continuity worth? Euripides composed sometimes as if it were worth less than salience. He has even been called romantic; and the influence of Greek tragedy, since it was overwhelmingly his among the Romans and in the middle ages, may seem after all to be hardly the influence of Sophoclean movement. But the great influence of Euripides is largely of his poetry apart from his dramaturgy. It reigns through a time when tragedy was waning, and through a later time when there was hardly any drama at all. He is still the most interesting of Greek dramatists to read. On the other hand, those of his plays which are now most effective as stage performances have the typical Greek continuity; nor does he often depart from the type very far. That the type has a controlling idea of continuity is evident. To the Greek dramatists generally continuity seemed to be worth much technical labor and even much sacrifice. The crown of their technical skill was to carry the theme, to develop it, to fulfill it at the last.

Behind this technic is an ideal of singleness. The sacrifice to continuity springs from that ascesis which has been remarked in other fields of Greek art. It has aroused—it will always arouse—the protest of the romantics. An art of singleness, lucidity, cogency, seems to them, as perhaps it seemed already to Euripides, too far removed from life. And not the romanticists only, but after them the realists, have demanded a drama more like life itself, freer, more various, less composed. Perhaps there is no ultimate reconciliation, or perhaps the two conceptions are complementary; but the Greek tragedians seem to answer from their plays: art is not life; it is idealization.

B. Senecan Tragedy18

How far the Latin tragedy of the actual stage followed the great Greeks we can only speculate from a few fragments and from the references of critics. That the lost Medea of Ovid was Greek in more than name the habit of composition seen in the Heroides leaves much doubt. Certainly the tragedies of Seneca, while they revive the great names of Agamemnon, Hippolytus, and Medea, never enter the great art of Athens. Indeed, their relevance at this juncture is for contrast. A Senecan prologue is not only a separable prefix; it may be a summary of the whole plot, as the prologue of Latin comedy. Separable the Senecan chorus is always in providing lyric interludes. It would thereby interrupt the action if the tragedy had the Greek onward course; but instead Seneca’s violent scenes are themselves separable, and his dialogue is sometimes a collection of speeches. Seneca wrote tragic scenes and spaced them with lyric pauses;19 he did not gather momentum for a total impression. He made his personæ utter their feelings; he did not make them interact. The familiar names, the familiar stories, only heighten the contrast. Senecan tragedy is like Greek tragedy only in non-essentials. The essentials of Greek dramatic composition are not here.

What is here is not poetic, but rhetoric. That these pieces were written for recitation, not for acting, the external evidence is strong, though not conclusive,20 but the internal evidence is abundant.21 Most significant is the feebleness of plot. More obvious is the rhetorical method of characterization by typical traits,22 the method of the character sketches (ἠθοποιίαι) in schools for boys as it was expanded in the schools for men under the masters of declamatio. A method essentially oratorical, it developed under the declamatores of the Empire not creative conception, but inventive ingenuity and a preoccupation rather with striking expression than with consistency. Most obvious of all, written large on every page, is the swelling rhetoric of the style. Not for nothing did this poet bear the name of Seneca.23 To deny that such writing has a certain force is to forget what it might become in the mouth of a trained speaker and before an audience taught to admire its distinctive effects; to forget also how eagerly Seneca was appropriated fifteen centuries later; to forget finally that oratory in the theater has not yet lost all its appeal. But while we grant to rhetoric some share in the poetic art, we cannot put Senecan tragedy beside the tragedy of Athens without seeing unmistakably that such art as it has is not the distinctive art of drama.

C. Latin Comedy

The plays of Plautus and Terence keep the dramaturgy known as the New Comedy,24 the comedy of Menander. Its figures, alike in Greek and in Latin, are types. Such individualizing as may be discerned, in the Menæchmi for instance, or the Self-tormentor, stands out as exceptional. Comedy, perhaps, tends more than tragedy to the typical. At any rate, Latin comedy has a set of personæ quite fixed:25 two fathers, two sons in love and in debt, two daughters of romance or of pleasure, and two slaves to stir the intrigue. There might be a matron, a slave-trader, and a braggart soldier; and there would be pretty surely a parasite.

Stock figures involve conventionality also in plot. One of them may have a double,26 and the plot may consist largely of mistaking one for the other; or the long-lost daughter, as in the declamationes and the Greek romances, may have been kidnapped by pirates. Typical is the plot of Terence’s Phormio:

One Chremes had a brother Demipho,
who wishing for some cause abroad to go,
had left his son young Antipho at home
at Athens, while it pleased him thus to roam.
This Chremes had a wife and daughter too
in Lemnos domiciled, that no one knew;
another one at Athens, and an heir
that desperately loved a harper fair.
From Lemnos came the mother with the maid
to Athens, and there died. The daughter paid
the last sad rites (now Chremes was away).
And so it came about that on that day
young Antipho the orphan child espied,
fell deep in love and took her for his bride.
(’twas through a parasite ’twas brought about).
The brothers coming home with rage broke out,
gave thirty minæ to the parasite
to take her off and marry her outright.
With this they buy the girl that Phædria prized;
the other keeps his bride now recognized.27

In essentials this is the plot of any Latin comedy. That the Greek originals of the New Comedy were less crystallized is suggested by larger fragments recovered recently; and that Menander was a creator of plots may be inferred from the saying reported by Plutarch: “I have made my comedy; for the plan is arranged, and I have only to write verses for it.”28 Even with so few situations as in Latin comedy there is room for variety of handling. Early commentators distinguish the modus motorius,29 the kinetic mode, from the statarius, or static, and find that Terence, except in the Phormio, tends to the latter. But even the movement of Plautus is rather bustle and go than onward progress. Dramatic movement will hardly be compelling where motivation is so much from circumstances and so little from character. Modus motorius seems to imply rather liveliness than sequence. To the large, miscellaneous, and turbulent Roman audience, it has been plausibly suggested, there would have been little appeal in cogency of plot.

A certain dulness in the audience is suggested by the fact that Terence was reproached for combining two Greek plots in one Latin play. He protests, naturally, that this is his right; and the Phormio shows his ability to weave an intrigue clearly and attractively. The dramatic lack mistakenly ascribed to his stories is rather of salience, especially of visibly significant action before our eyes. That this can vivify even conventional characters in a conventional plot is the chief dramatic message of Plautus. He trusts the intelligence of his audience so little as to make his prologue an oral program, a catalogue raisonné, explicit to the last degree.30 With Terence he resorts to the aside, the soliloquy, and the convention of people on the stage together who do not see each other—all these when they could be obviated by a little dramatic ingenuity. Where Plautus spends his ingenuity is on lively realism of detail, on abundance of stage “business.” He holds a scene, turning and returning a situation, until he has used its whole value. Though this is sometimes tiresome for reading, it shows good theatrical sense of the actual audience. He may have learned it from acting. Nothing is more instructive to playwrights than this filling of a simple outline. The habit is almost the opposite of the compression of Greek tragedy, and the New Comedy is doubtless inferior to tragedy in every point of plot; but none the less it vindicates clearly the value and the Plautine method of imaginative amplification.

Foot-Notes

Canterbury Tales, B. 3163.

II. Narrative

A. The Æneid

(1). Epic

Epic is now often divided into “primitive,” “authentic,” or “popular” epic, such as the Iliad, and “artistic,” or “literary” epic, such as the Æneid. Of the former the great example is Homer. The Iliad and the Odyssey remain, for us as for the ancients, supreme. Meantime the western European nations emerging in the early middle age expressed themselves in epics of original native force: the Roland, the Beowulf, the Nibelungenlied, and some of the Norse sagas. To put these beside Homer is to become aware of specific differences within a general likeness. Homer is both more ample and more finished. Primitive he certainly is not in any sense now recognized by anthropology. Even the word popular has for us implications quite inapplicable to the circulation of his day. The classification of certain epics as primitive, authentic, or popular is based on the idea that these are characteristically communal, expressing more the emotions of a whole homogeneous community, less those of the individual poet. It has even been held1 that such epic began in aggregation of tribal lays, and that even the form in which it has come down to us is less the creation of any individual than the final artistic shaping of successive anonymous versions. The theory of communal composition, in this literal and extreme sense, has been sharply challenged. Without denying the use of traditional material and form, one may remain convinced that the Iliad or the Odyssey is the work of a single man, whom we may as well continue to call Homer, and that he was not merely the mouthpiece of a community, but a conscious and skilful artist. That his art was not wasted on his community, that this community was far from primitive, there is ample evidence in the remains of its other arts.

The same direction of study leads to a similar conclusion for the later epics of this class. The more we know of the middle ages, the less warrant we find for calling these epics primitive. True, they are less finished than the Iliad; true, they show clearer traces of old war-songs; but neither their art nor the society for which it was shaped can accurately be called primitive. Alike the literary conventions of the poems themselves and the social conventions of their times rule such a characterization out. The “Gothic night” fancied by supercilious eighteenth-century critics, the “dark ages” of imperfect historians, are found to have had considerable illumination.

Nevertheless the twofold classification of epic, in spite of the inaccuracy of its terms, has some significance. Earlier epic, what we might call primary epic, is in fact more directly answerable to a homogeneous community. Its unknown poets evidently felt themselves to be spokesmen of communal emotions and achievements; and the world that they saw they expressed with less intervention. As if they were transmitters rather than creators, they expressed not themselves so much as their people. This people, too, was in that stage of civilization in which foray and warfare by small groups brought out individual heroes and kept life precarious and simple. Booty and food, a fine sword and a fine web, still had immediate appeal; and the physical sensations of battle-strain and sweat, of ceaseless surf and darkening deep, were still common experience. Thus primary epic, communal and objective, has the directness of immediacy. Arising from those simpler emotions which we all feel together, primitive perhaps in that sense, and expressing them in terms of familiar physical sensations, it has its own inimitable flavor.

Later, or secondary, epic is not the transmission of legends still active, but the re-creation of a past already remote. Still appealing to a communal sense of the heroic, it adapts the old epic mode to an audience more sophisticated not only in life, but in poetic art. The poet is thus at once more imitative and more original. He binds himself by traditions of subject-matter, of form, and of style; but within this recognized mode he composes with more individual freedom and to a more definite end. Relying less on scenes in a series, he selects and manipulates toward more artistic sequence. Since his descriptions must be less immediate, he develops the art of narrative. Endeavoring to remain the spokesman of his people—for otherwise he must forfeit the communal mainspring of epic—he interprets their past by his own message for their future. Thus he may be all the more a poet, or maker. He cannot hope for the fresh immediacy of primary epic; but in compensation he has greater opportunity to move his people by his own vision. Milton’s conception, vast as is its scope, is essentially the same. He interprets the Bible as the epic of mankind in terms of a Puritan theocracy. Tasso re-creates a departed chivalry to animate a vision of devotion and redemption. Vergil, the great example of secondary epic, makes of the Trojan story, of Roman legend, of myth and cult and drama and history, of all that enriched the Roman past, a progressive vision of Roman destiny.

Primary epic and secondary epic, though thus distinguishable, are both epic. They are complementary. They reveal different capacities of a single artistic mode. Epic is constant. It was; it was again; it is; for aught that we can see, it will be. Extended poetic narrative of great deeds for communal inspiration, though it has never been common, has never been extinct. Primary epic seems inevitable. The minstrel in the hall of Hrothgar is poetically identical with the minstrel in the hall of Alcinous.2 Both hint to us of what epic was made, and how; both show us its constancy. This primary form of epic can never, of course, recur. It has been civilized away. But meantime it has established a poetic art that is permanent. The word epic still connotes a distinct mode. To this Vergil deliberately conformed, and Milton. Secondary epic is still epic.

What, then, are seen to be in ancient practise the essentials of epic? First, its inspiration and its appeal are communal. By contrast the modern novel, which is also extended narrative and also within Aristotle’s definition of poetic, is seen to be individual; or, where in exceptional cases it is broader and simpler,3 is often distinguished by criticism as having epic appeal. Then, epic is in style objective. It narrates habitually without interposition, by images visual, auditory, motor. Its scenery is merely the background of heroic activity. Its speeches are in primary epic for characterization, not for plot. There is no plot in the dramatic sense for the whole; and such as there is for component parts is only to bring out persons. The object of epic being persons, its commonest descriptive details are of personal activity: attitude, movement, speech, gesture. The method is to suggest that heroic life by its physical sensations, to make the characters, as Aristotle says,4 reveal themselves. Epic gives few reflections. It does not comment even on Helen’s coming to the Scæan gates, or on Hector’s parting from Andromache; it merely describes. This objectivity is a main means of epic directness.

The characteristic form of epic5 is for scope and variety. Drama is intensive; epic is extensive. It has time to give us a sense of the fulness of life; and its movement does not preclude excursions. We meet many people and see them in various aspects. We can linger over a scene for itself without being urged forward. Continuity may be but leisurely succession from scene to scene. A scene may within itself have dramatic progress; but the movement of the whole has not the dramatic causal compulsion. Drama has its characteristic force through unity. Unity in epic is neither compelling nor compulsory. In fact, to stretch the term unity over epic tends to deprive it of all force. No epic poet has ever composed more carefully than Vergil, or with keener awareness of the ways of drama. The Æneid was composed as a whole; its parts were carefully adjusted to a plan, and its plan was controlled by a single idea. Epic has never gone further toward unity; and Homer never dreamed of going so far. But even such dramatization of epic as Vergil’s has time for the funeral games, and does not sacrifice to the story of Rome the story and the person of Dido. In poetic, unity means nothing unless it means unity of form. This epic cannot have as a whole. Nor does any one regret the lack, or think it a fault. The unity of drama is for intensity; the object of epic is the realization not of a crisis, but of great persons in a long and various course.

So the style of epic is typically sonorous and high. Height of style may be attained by simplicity, and epic is simple often, but not always. To speak of epic as characteristically simple is to belie much of Homer and most of Vergil and Milton. Epic is not characteristically, nor even usually, simple. It may be very elaborate. It begins by assuming a language recognized as on a higher plane than that of ordinary speech. The epithets of the Iliad or the Beowulf are a poetical convention; and the style of epic proceeds always by conscious art. Here is the poet who, daring to sing great deeds, means to sing them greatly. That the effort may end in frigidity or bombast means only that there is bad epic as well as good; it does not mean that epic should be simple. Epic poets have never thought so. The poets of primary epic, no less than Vergil or Milton, were occupied with style. For the term epic has always implied greatness. It is a word of praise. It means a story of greatness told greatly.

Homer was for the ancient Greek world, and Vergil became for the Roman world, a Bible of style. Both were conned in school not only for the examples of their great persons, but for the study of language. That their connotation was immeasurably enriched, their “sublimity” heightened, not only by rhythm, but by verse, no one will deny. It is even possible to feel in Milton’s verse a beauty separable from that of his ideas, and greater, lifting his narrow and political theology to wider import. Aristotle6 remarks upon the appropriateness to epic of the Greek dactylic hexameter. Dionysius7 even finds control of rhythms to be Homer’s main poetic means. We are more inclined to admit this view for Milton; but the ultimate truth is that we should not, except for analysis, separate verse from the other elements of style. That every great epic poet has been a masterly metrist means rather that for “the height of this great argument” he felt the need of all that verse can add of suggestiveness. Though prose epic, as Aristotle admits by implication, is quite conceivable, it has to move on a lower plane. The Norse sagas are more direct even than Homer, starker in narrative force as if stripped for action, equally expressive of communal emotions, equally vivid in characterization. They have all the epic means but one. That single lack does not, indeed, relegate them to a different class; but it shows by contrast that for its full realization epic demands verse.

(2). the Conception and Scope of the Æneid

The whole poetic art of ancient epic is exhibited in the Æneid. Setting aside those interesting historical questions of epic origins, growth, and transmission which in the study of Homer can hardly be ignored, and on the other hand including the whole range of epic, secondary as well as primary, we can learn best from the great poet who devoted his mature years to conceiving, planning, and reshaping the epic of Rome. The artistic scope of the Æneid, as well as its artistic eminence, long secure beyond cavil, has been reaffirmed by recent criticism. Sainte-Beuve calls Vergil “le poète de la Latinité tout entière.”8 Mackail, whose studies have been primarily Greek, exalts the Æneid afresh.9 Woodberry, whose criticism has been mainly of English literature, says: “The distinctive feature of the ‘Æneid’ is the arc of time it covers, the burden of time it supports,” and again, “The ‘Æneid’ is, I think, the greatest single book written by man because of its inclusiveness of human life, of life long lived in the things of life.”10

The idea of Roman destiny, animating the Æneid throughout, is something larger than the nationalism of other epics. It is imperialism, and of a spirit generous enough to win the sympathy of Dante. It has not the occasional character of such a nationalist story, for instance, as Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniæ. In a time of corrupt politics it is above political opportunism. Its Rome is not merely the throne of Augustus; it is the government of the world. Its Romanism is less political than religious. “Pius Æneas” is more typical than “much-enduring Odysseus” of the struggle of man for an abode of justice and peace. This, more than the personal glory that humanism centuries afterward read from the classics, is the conception of the Æneid. The destiny of Rome reveals the hope of mankind; and the Æneid has the whole epic scope. Hardly less than Milton, Vergil justifies the ways of God to man.

(3). the Narrative Movement of the Æneid11

That the Æneid has a controlling idea implies that it is artistically shaped to stricter continuity than appears in the Homeric model. The Iliad and the Odyssey are everywhere freer. Homer writes a scene for itself; Vergil also for its significance in a progress.12 Salience is sought by careful subordination. The Carthaginians, for instance, are not elaborated as are the Italian tribes.13 The slaughter of the last night of Troy is confined to a few vivid scenes. Using Hellenistic versions and evidently studious of their art, Vergil deliberately rejects their decorative detail and sentimental dilation. He reduces the mating of Æneas with Dido to a grave summary,14 in order to give salience to those other emotions which for the Æneid as a whole were leading. Æneas does, indeed, in the fourth book yield his position as protagonist to the queen who among Vergil’s personæ is the great individual; but even so strong an impulse of creative inspiration does not drive the poet from his main purpose. One of the few great love-stories, the fourth book is still held, as it were by force, to the larger story of mission.

The same art deals with the gods. They were for Vergil necessary to epic; they embodied at once the traditional sense of supernatural response in natural forces and Vergil’s own sense of divine guidance. But they rarely interpose, and never interrupt. They work through men; and the course of events is always amply explained by human motive. The foundations of Troy were shaken by divine wrath; but we see them dislocated by human agency. The revengefulness of Juno, the protection of Venus, seem the more plausible because they operate through the passion of Dido. The one yields in the end, and the other prevails, because Æneas realizes his mission. Olympus, now ordered within itself under a calm and absolute ruler, expresses and animates, not interrupts, the progress of human order. Thus Vergil’s gods are more than “epic machinery,” and more than personification. The thoughts of men are not merely expressed conventionally in archaic personal shapes; they are seen at once as determining each decisive action and as inspired by divine purpose. For not only has the Æneid a more consistent theology than the Iliad; it is also more religious.

The most frequent examples of Vergil’s subordination are in his fine art of description. Picturesque with brilliant color, as well as with the Homeric light and motion,15 and as precise as they are vivid, his descriptions are rarely separable. Not only are they contributory to the action; they are also inwoven.16 Vergil’s sensitiveness to the details of nature transpires in a sentence, even in single words,17 which describe while they narrate. Here he discerned the artistic rightness by which Homer describes every thing movable as in motion,18 and applied the principle with more careful attention to narrative continuity. He dispenses with Homer’s superfluous mechanism of transition.19 Memorable as are the descriptions—and nothing in the Æneid is better remembered—very few can be detached from the context for separate admiration.20 The detailing of architecture and decoration, though it unduly seized the fancy of the middle ages, is hardly an exception. The Carthaginian pictures of Troy, the palace of Latinus, are there not for scene-painting, but for historic suggestion. They serve the story. Thus Vergil’s descriptive art is at once less ample than Homer’s and more specifically subsidiary. The Hellenistic tableau—ἔκφρασις is its ominous name—appears in the glittering conventional pauses of Ovid. Vergil had put it aside. This is the more remarkable because the ancients seem generally to have regarded certain scenes—battle, for instance, conflagration, storm, thwarted love—as rather description than narration.21 Vergil, while he works even more than Homer to make us realize a scene by sharing in it as actors,22 works also to avoid interruption of the story.

Similar is the constant care to avoid interruption of time or place.23 Vergil’s unremitting prevision and revision have obviated any time-lapse that is insignificant for the action. The Homeric device of bringing in antecedent action by retrospective narrative is used more artistically. While it covers ground, extending the time-lapse beyond the stage, the narrative of Æneas heightens the love of Dido before our eyes.

She loved me for the dangers I had passed;
And I loved her that she did pity them.

It is a larger achievement, one of the greatest,24 to heighten epic by suggesting vast reaches of time, from tribal wanderings through wars of conquest to the reign of law. Here is the artistic significance of the visit in Book VI to the world of the dead and the unborn, which, as Mackail says, “slips in the keystone.” To compare the visit of Odysseus to the shades is to see Vergil’s higher art of composition. But the suggestion of the great loom of time (tot volvere casus) is not confined to a single artistic device; it is pervasive from the opening words through a hundred careful allusions; and it makes the Æneid wider than the Iliad or the Odyssey by making it constantly suggestive of the whole struggle of history. It reveals more explicitly the struggles of heroic men as the struggle of man.

Thus the oft-repeated objection that the Æneid breaks into halves is superficial. The break would not have been thought of if Vergil had not been seen to be working for a continuity stricter than Homer’s. Stated baldly by Tyrrell, the idea that the Æneid is an Odyssey plus an Iliad presupposes a sort of imitation to which Vergil shows himself everywhere superior. It would be as near the truth to reply that the Æneid is neither an Odyssey nor an Iliad. But prototypes aside, how and how far is the Æneid held together? Surely by the most careful articulation ever seen in epic, but surely not to the degree of drama. Among the evidences of revision are indications that the plan for the wanderings of Æneas was first achieved25 when much of the poem was already written. The adjustment of this part to the whole course, a technic hardly explored by Homer, and the abbreviations of the wanderings by careful selection, are of a piece with the consistent connection by repetition of the theme, from the opening lines,

          Trojæ qui primus ab oris
Italiam, fato profugus,

throughout the whole poem. True, the seventh book invokes Erato for scenes of battle.

          Maior rerum mihi nascitur ordo;
Maius opus moveo.

The following scenes are different, but not the theme. The art that deliberately avoided Homer’s succession of battles by interposing such scenes as Evander’s achieved more than variety. It suggests again and again what the battles were for. The close upon the tragic death of Turnus becomes more than the personal victory of the hero; it is the triumph, over violentia, over such individual prowess as Homer glorified, over personal ambition thwarting the state, of fortitude bringing in religion and law.

But to ask therefore that the whole movement of the Æneid should be unified is at once to recognize Vergil’s art of continuity and to demand for epic the strictness of drama. That Vergil understood drama, that his art learned not only from Greek epic, but from Greek tragedy, was pointed out by Nettleship and is important to remember. But he is too great a master of his chosen form to sacrifice epic scope.

How, then, is the Æneid dramatic? In the composition of the whole only by such preparations and recurrences as add to the vividness of parts suggestions of their bearing. Having planned a progress of events, not merely a series, Vergil marks that progress by such articulation as had been used to this extent only in drama. In the composition of the parts singly his art is more dramatic. The Æneid as a whole is not dramatically unified, and could not be. What is unified is each book.26 For purposes of recitation, epic had to be composed, whether as a whole or not, in distinct parts. Of this necessity Vergil made a virtue. He advanced the narrative art of situation by applying some of the technic of drama. This is conspicuous in his frequent use of peripety. Again, the memorable and well remembered Laokoön scene is interposed between the Sinon scenes. Each is made to heighten the other, and both to give first suspense and then compelling motive to the bringing in of the fatal horse. Again and again Vergil will be found thus to intensify his narrative by the technic of drama. The most obvious instance is the distinct group of scenes at Carthage. The entrance of Dido is in the dramatic sense and by dramatic methods prepared. First, Æneas hears of her from his goddess mother, and is kindled by her having achieved his own epic mission—dux femina facti. Follows his view of the city, big already in achievement, big also to every Roman listener with menace. Then the decorative pictures at once review the tragedy of Troy and reveal in this strong queen a propitious sympathy. Upon all this, as to a waiting stage and a waiting audience, enter Dido.27 Moreover in the Dido scenes, instead of contenting himself with that mere strife of emotions which was familiar in Hellenistic poetry28 and became a rhetorical commonplace with Ovid, Vergil advances and heightens the leading emotion steadily, as in a play, up to its tragic close. The close is the inevitable result of something more than thwarted passion because Dido has been presented dramatically, without concession to the Hellenistic narrative dilation, by what she said and did. Vergil’s Dido is a creation every way beyond the Medea of Apollonius. She must be placed beside the Medea of Euripides. In her consistent tragic nobility, in the higher morality of her appeal, perhaps she must be placed above. For the fourth book of the Æneid, as fully as the Antigone, is tragic in its purgation of pity and fear.

Thus to apply drama to narrative without sacrificing the typical epic opportunities of fulness and scope is among the greatest achievements of poetic. It is an art so far beyond any other ancient narrative as to remain solitary until Dante; and Dante’s guide was Vergil. It guided also the creative hand of Milton. And not for epic only, but for all imaginative story, the art of the Æneid remains a test and a guide. In this sense he who became for medieval Latinists the poet, as Cicero was the orator, remains Master Vergil.

(4). Characterization in the Æneid

To turn from the narrative movement to the persons is to descend. At once we feel that the achievement is less and that the method is less fruitful for narrative art because it is less distinctively poetic. Vergil’s narrative composition has universal validity; but his characterization, for the most part, is only Latin. It had none the less influence on the middle ages—perhaps all the more; but it had the less inspiration for later creations.

To estimate Vergil’s characterization fairly, it is necessary first to remove certain misconceptions. He has been reproached for leaving in our minds few outstanding figures: Turnus, Evander, Mezentius, Pallas, Nisus and Euryalus. Some of these, like the Camilla whom Dante remembers, are only sketched; and most of them are secondary. Now though this is paucity beside the populous pages of Homer, we must remember that Vergil’s whole roster of heroes is smaller deliberately because, much more than Homer’s, they are dramatis personæ. He makes the dramatic innovation of focusing on a few and of subordinating the development even of these to the development of the theme.

A more frequent objection is that throughout the latter part of the poem the hero is no longer Æneas, but Turnus. This is to use the word hero in a sense that Vergil would hardly have understood. Seeing Turnus through centuries of romance, we are so occupied with his bravoure as readily to forget that Vergil’s Æneas is not meant to have the interest or the significance of King Arthur. Nor, we should add, is he meant to have the interest of Achilles. His individual prowess is only incidental to his dominant fortitude. The achievement of personal glory is behind him. “He has outlived his personal life.”29 His work is to found the Roman people. The characterization of Æneas, moreover, shows a certain development.30 He shows more growth than “much-enduring Odysseus.” The battle frenzy of the return to the doomed city (arma amens capio), the vacillation at Carthage, are put forever behind. He becomes progressively more steadfast. Always pius, he enlarges his pietas into calm assurance of mission. As for the story, so for the characterization of the hero, the sixth book is the critical stage of a progress.

The creative power of Vergil is amply vindicated by Dido. One may feel that she is too vivid for her function, that she takes the stage, as actors say, away from Æneas, that through her the nice planning of the whole is quite warped. We shall doubtless never be able to judge this as Romans. Perhaps even they were more absorbed than Vergil intended in his tragic queen.31 Perhaps Vergil himself was swerved by his own creation. But all this only reinforces the testimony to a compelling characterization. There may be difference of opinion as to Dido’s part in the story; there can be none as to Dido herself.

But our estimates thus duly corrected, we cannot but feel that Dido stands out among the figures of the Æneid because she is exceptional. We feel her to be drawn not only better, but often differently. And this should lead to scrutiny of Vergil’s habitual method. To begin with, it is everywhere apparent that he cares less than Homer for individuality. A certain expansiveness in Homeric dialogue often keeps the story waiting to give the individual his say. Vergil shifts the proportions. He rejects long dialogues because he is more interested in narrative economy than in personal expressiveness. Further, the speeches are often more reasoned than Homer’s, more orderly, less like conversation and more like oratory.32 Sinon’s are very naturally elaborate pieces of special pleading, and the rhetoric of Drances against Turnus is appropriate in a deliberative assembly; but the making of successive points, and the careful adaptation of style not only to the speaker, but to the hearer, are habitual, as even in the speech of Allecto to Turnus. In this reasoned order, rather than in any mere elaboration, Heinze finds Vergil to be rhetorical. Instead of following the pace of emotional utterance, abrupt and disjointed, he sometimes holds even violent emotion to a steady course. By thus composing emotional expression he sometimes sacrifices directness of characterization.33

Indeed, Vergil is generally less concerned than Homer with creating individuals, and more concerned with showing his persons as types. Whether the loss in individual distinctness is compensated by a gain in common consent opens a long debate. Modern taste inclines rather to Homer than to Vergil; but between stretch centuries of Latin habit, and that habit, best exemplified in Vergil, is to characterize typically. This method of idealization may in Vergil’s case have Stoic preoccupations;34 but more generally it is rhetorical. To characterize by age, sex, race, occupation, etc., is a prescription of rhetoric35 fixed in recipes and school exercises. It was dilated into ingenious fictions by the declamatores. Ovid’s characterization hardly rises above the schools. Vergil was too great to move on that level; but even he is preoccupied with that ideal and generally content with that method. He carried the method as far, perhaps, as it will go. That except in subordinate sketches he departed from it only in one surpassing instance is doubtless the fundamental reason for our finding his characterization inferior to his composition.

(5). Epic Diction

Generations have felt in the Æneid, first of all, high and constant beauty. No other great poem has seemed more infallibly beautiful. The beauty has sometimes, indeed, been acknowledged with a certain disparagement, as if it implied the less strength; but so perverse an antithesis cannot delay attention except to the fact that Vergil is beautiful even to his detractors. The worst that has been said of his style is that it is sometimes inappropriately elaborate.36

          atque arida circum
Nutrimenta dedit, rapuitque in fomite flammam.
Tum Cererem corruptam undis Cerealiaque arma
Expediunt fessi rerum; frugesque receptas
Et torrere parant flammis et frangere saxo.

I. 175.

This, it must be admitted, seems comparatively remote and unreal beside similar meals in Homer, and absolutely too high a style for camp cookery. Nor is it safe to urge that Vergil is holding his style to the epic level; for that plea opens the way to such mere etiquette as centuries later quite deviated the discussion of epic from its main issues, and, besides, Vergil himself does not thus describe Dares and Entellus. No, the plea must be rather of confession and avoidance. Such passages are not beautiful, and their style is not epic; but they are so few that to call them characteristic is quite unfair. Nor are they to be ascribed to preoccupation with rhetoric. Vergil is, indeed, sometimes more oratorical37 than we wish; but he is not, in our modern sense rhetorical, and his rhetoric, no less than his poetic, must have found such passages inferior. Rather we may think that these few “rubs and botches in the work” were what led him to wish it burned; for after all his revision he was acutely conscious that it was unfinished. Unfinished in form it certainly is not. Unfinished in style it is here and there. But what a sense of beauty had the artist who could not bear even so few blemishes!

Not elaborateness, then, is characteristic of Vergil’s style, but certainly elaboration. His tireless revision is testified by the tradition that he composed first in prose, and that he spent on the Æneid ten years.38 No style is more highly charged. It is made to suggest at once vivid descriptive imagery and the sanctions of history and religion. Not only the story, but the diction, is full of Rome. His use of the language of Roman ritual39 is characteristic of an expression piously preservative of cult. “By instinct and temper a ritualist,”40 he is continually suggesting the significance of traditional forms. The Iliad and the Odyssey are in a special dialect. The Faery Queene has a language of its own. To achieve such suggestions in the Æneid with but the slightest resort to archaism is in itself a great achievement of language; but it is only part of a consistent allusiveness, an extraordinary connotation, ranging the whole gamut from sharp physical sensations to spiritual significance. A style eminently classic in precision and harmony is yet felt to be above all rich. No other poet seems more nearly infallible with the right word; no other so well to have charged classic restraint with romantic exuberance by the energy of his expressiveness. The influence of Vergil, immediate, wide, and long, is indubitably the influence of his style. Later ages, unappreciative of the poetic art of his composition, felt the spell of his imagery and rhythm almost as an incantation. “Virgil is that poet whose verse has had most power in the world.”41

(6). Originality in Imitation

The notion that imitation must be subversive of originality betrays a crude conception of both. Yet it lingers in such criticism as thinks the Æneid to be a Latin Iliad and Odyssey. To measure it so is to miss not only the art of a single great poem, but much of all poetic art. For since all art works in forms received and recognized, less by invention than by transformation, it is of cardinal significance to distinguish, in a poem conspicuously imitative and conspicuously original, just what artistic imitation is. Therefore what has been implied in the preceding sections may here be drawn together in summary.

Imitation is always of movement or style; it has nothing to do with material. To preface this should be superfluous; but many quests for “sources” have left some confusion. Vergil took much of the Trojan story from Homer. To be sure, he used other sources too. Nothing is more remarkable in the Æneid than the wealth and variety of its material. Its sources are beyond the dreams of Homer. But even if Vergil’s material were all Homeric, he would not on that account be the more imitative. Ancient literature, and mediæval too, generally make freer with preceding stories than modern. The material is not thought to be any one’s property. In this respect Vergil is singularly independent. He uses more sources; he is more selective; and what he adopts is often a composite. He works in the modern way rather than in the ancient; but he is not on that account either more or less imitative. Some of Shakspere’s plays derive their plots from single sources; some are in plot composite; but all are alike original. A modern French tragedy took the plot not only of an ancient story, but of the best known of all ancient plays. It is none the less original; and its imitation, as all artistic imitation, is of the ancient technic.

Imitation in art, then, means following certain artistic ways. To begin with, Vergil evidently set out to write an epic, and undoubtedly looked to Homeric epic as a type. This is important not only in his case, but throughout literary history. Though its importance may be exaggerated in Brunetière’s évolution des genres, evidently epic meant something controlling to Vergil because of Homer, and has meant something wider ever since because of Vergil. To any poet, to Tasso and Milton as to Vergil, epic necessarily implies a pattern. It directs and limits personæ and diction; but it does not hamper artistic progress, for it does not limit interpretation. Vergil remade not only the epic material, but the epic form, to a new end. His Sinon42 is a typical instance of artistic rehandling. Drawn doubtless from several ancient sources, he has become through his new function and motivation creatively original. Battles there must be in epic, even battles of the Homeric sort; but Vergil does not rely on the general mêlée; he modifies it subtly in the direction of the more organized Roman fighting, and he changes the Homeric series into a progress. In short, even where he is perforce most dependent on Homer, his imitation is never repetition. Imitation is creative when it adapts the art of the past to the interpretation of the present. The Æneid is not a Latin Iliad; it is a Roman epic.

Vergil’s adaptation of the epic movement involves a departure from Homer in the direction of drama.43 How, and how far, imitation of drama can serve extended narrative we learn fully from him because he imitates selectively. He does not try to make his story a play, or merely a series of plays; he finds how far epic can be conducted dramatically without sacrificing its epic appeal. No less selectively he rejects the Hellenistic technic of Apollonius.44 Epic diction, he discerns, in order to have the old communal appeal, must sound traditional; but echo of Homeric style would make it sound merely conventional. He gives it traditional connotation by means of his own. His diction, therefore, is far less imitative than his composition. In fact, it is rarely imitative at all. In the limits, no less than in the method, of his imitation his art runs true. Through that obedience which great artists yield to the art that they inherit he shows the way to imaginative freedom.

B. The Narrative Poetry of Ovid

Among the Latin poets Vergil has the siege perilous. He achieved that high poetic emprise beside which others must seem less. In comparison no one suffers more than Ovid.45 Yet he who presented the gods without seeing their divinity, and retold the myths instead of recreating them, has literary qualities not only striking, but at once typical of his time and very widely influential. Vergil has been revered; but Ovid has been imitated and absorbed. Without attempting to measure his brilliancy, it is necessary to distinguish the characteristic habits of a poetic whose influence spread over western Europe.

That poetic is seen at once to be unfailingly expert in every artistic detail. Its metrical facility, proverbial46 from the first and instructive of the verse of many centuries and many lands, is only the most obvious skill of a man who loved style. Though he does not make a habit of the elegiac tendency to rime, he plays variously upon alliteration and other consonance;47 and his use of refrain suggests those stanza patterns set centuries later by French courtly makers in rondel48 and ballade.49 For though he knows the subtlest spells of sound, Ovid is never neglectful of such notes as must catch the ear. His verse is more than popular; but it is popular, and many a Spaniard, Gaul, and Briton has been grateful to feel its music running in his head.

Equally obvious is Ovid’s decorative description. Its bent is not toward epic suggestion of character by attitude, gesture, and action, but toward picturesqueness. Bright imagery garnishes the familiar. Groves and streams and their tutelary nymphs, men, women, and gods, are not individualized; they are merely realized. But what exuberance of suggestion! To open dull eyes and spur jaded feelings, to vivify a legendary scene, to dilate a conventional mood, to redecorate an old landscape, Ovid had an inexhaustible fund.

For he elevated poetic convention to a fine art. A storm at sea50 lacks none of the properties; a fainting heroine or hero,51 no appropriate gesture. The pallor of love can move once more,52 and the golden age53 make the over-civilized pensive. “Mortal art thou, or divine?” was said by Odysseus to Nausikaa when gods walked with men; but Ovid had the art to repeat it54 when the gods were dead. Repeat? He himself became the pattern of these things for centuries. Not only is he forever the poet of “Gather ye roses while ye may,” but “Stay, dawn; why must thou haste?”55 echoed across Europe,56 was heard in the cry of Chaucer’s Troilus57 and Shakspere’s Juliet,58 and still reverberates.

The Alexandrian59 dilation of such description60 appears also in the long-drawn emotions of soliloquy.61 The fixing of this as a literary type must have been promoted by the prevalence of the schools of declamatio,62 where Ovid had studied. Practised in elementary form even by Roman schoolboys, developed by declamatores in exhibitions of virtuosity, the fiction of what so-and-so must have said on such-and-such an occasion is still a rhetorical exercise. As an exercise it has some value in promoting poetic appreciation; but it seems hardly the way toward poetic creation. Ovid, at any rate, hardly creates persons. The address of Sol, for instance, to Phaëthon,63 is only a more extended and more professional school theme; and the mixture of allegorical personification with myth64 shows him rather as a rhetorician65 than as a poet. That he is not a myth-maker, only a myth-teller, may be seen by putting any of his demigods beside the Prometheus of Æschylus—or even the Prometheus of Shelley. For re-creation Ovid lacked what the Great Unknown66 thought to be the primary source of expression, intellectual vigor of conception. Thus his mythical persons, though always appropriate and sometimes vivid, are not alive.

More has been claimed for his story-telling. Cruttwell67 says of the Metamorphoses: “The skill with which different legends are woven into the fabric of the composition is as marvellous as the frivolous dilettantism which could treat a long heroic poem in such a way.” The skill of the weaving is indisputable; but is it more than an art of transition? To call the Metamorphoses a long heroic poem suggests a cruel comparison with the Æneid, and partly begs the question. What Ovid seems to have intended, and what he achieved, is a deftly articulated collection. It is not a single poem in the sense of having emotional progress or totality, nor is any other of Ovid’s collections. His distinctively narrative art, therefore, is to be sought not in the connection between stories, but in the composition of each one. It is even probable that this art was the more popular because it offered, not a long sustained narrative, but many separable short tales.

The “vivid inventiveness” and “unflagging animation” urged by Owen68 as characteristic of Ovidian narrative may be accepted without discussion, and should not be undervalued. Inventiveness was overvalued, indeed, in the melodramatic fictions of declamatio, and implies an art rather facile than creative; but it is none the less sure of popularity. As for animation, whatever else a story may be, it may not be dull. Here Ovid often wins by his very levity. He makes no demands. No one can be followed more easily; for he moves on the surface. Where he skates on thin ice, he does so quite simply for excitement. There is none of the modern pretense of exploration. His problems are purely artistic, problems not of motive, but of interesting mood and attitude, of appropriate and various utterance. His animation, partly rhythmical, partly descriptive, is more largely unflagging expressiveness. Always expressive, his people can always be understood without effort. He holds attention without provoking thought.

The “rapid movement” claimed by Owen is often mere succinctness, rarely the speed gained by modern narrative use of dramatic technic. For that he usually has too much separable description, too much soliloquy, too little motivation. He seeks intensity less often than expansiveness. Nevertheless, though he pauses deliberately for description or tirade, he does not lag. There is no clumsy prosing or deviation. He has the art, more valued in ancient and medieval times than in modern, of lucid, fluent narrative, the art of the tale. That he does not follow it oftener is due to his readers’ fondness, and his own, for dilation. The onward movement of poetic is thus sacrificed to rhetoric. The parts become more important than the whole. For Ovid was a rhetorician, not only bred in the schools, but habitually thinking of poetry less as composed movement than as lucid and brilliant, as ample and harmonious style.

C. The Metamorphoses of Apuleius

Sighting from the Metamorphoses of Ovid through the Metamorphoses of Apuleius,69 one clearly discerns the coming of the Greek Romances. So runs the Alexandrian narrative line from decorative description and expansive emotion, through exciting incident and uncontrolled variety,70 to sheer violence. Ovid’s stories are sometimes like dreams; the Greek Romances are nightmares. Apuleius, between the two, already seeks the violent and the bizarre. His metamorphoses are no longer mythical, nor in the least allegorical; they are mere sorcery. The appetite of his time for horrors and other excitement had been both fed and whetted by declamatio.71 Ovid, too, knew declamatio; but Apuleius, himself a rhetor, was less restrained by earlier literary standards from giving rein to the sensational.

Though the bulk of his extant work is narrative, Apuleius devotes no attention to onward narrative movement. Superficially continuous, his Metamorphoses are nevertheless often quite separable, as is evident in the most famous of them, Cupid and Psyche. Such course of plot as there is eddies in harangues, tirades and decorative descriptions. The abundant dialogue is uncontrolled by dramatic concision. Everywhere Apuleius is orally expansive. A rhetor telling stories, he goes little beyond the poetic of the platform: work for excitement, relying on lust and witchcraft; expand what is showy, emphasizing each part without regard to sequence; use dialogue for variety, letting prosopopœia suffice for characterization; and if nevertheless the tale lags or becomes confused, make a fresh start by bringing on brigands. This habit of mind, and not the incidental satire, explains the narrative looseness. Apuleius is no Rabelais; he is only a facile second-century rhetor carrying the rhetorical fiction of his time to greater length. In style, though habitually diffuse, he is sometimes charming and often lively; but in composition he merely extends a meretricious convention.

During his lifetime Iamblichus wrote the Babylonica, or Rhodanes and Sinonis (166-180); and, soon after, Chariton of Aphrodisias the Chæreas and Calirrhoe (before 200).72 Thus was established the mode followed later by Heliodorus and Achilles Tatius, the perverted narrative known as the Greek Romances. Any one who has the patience for these phantasmagoria of passion, horror, and adventure will see their likeness to the Metamorphoses of Apuleius, and will probably reproach him the more for ignoring that onward causal movement without which the art of narrative seems to lapse.

Foot-Notes

          Lucet via longo
Ordine flammarum, et late discriminat agros. XI. 143.

Adspirant auræ in noctem, nec candida cursus
Luna negat; splendet tremulo sub lumine pontus. VII. 8.

Tristia, IV. x. 25.

Heroides, x. 82.

Amores, iii. 6, 61.

Notes

1 All the larger histories of Greek literature appraise Greek tragedy, trace its history, and cite monographs for special study. The study of Greek tragedy as drama should begin with the plays themselves. These should be read—and with happily increasing frequency they may even be seen—before reading further about them; for they are now available not only in many editions, but also in many translations. Translation, though it must fall short or go wide of the original diction, conveys the larger dramatic movement, the characteristic dramaturgy; and Sir Gilbert Murray’s translation of Aristotle’s main example, Œdipus Rex, seeks especially the dramatic values. Very instructive comparisons may be made by reading all eight tragedies presenting the story of Orestes and his house, the “Oresteia”: the Agamemnon, Choephoræ, and Eumenides of Æschylus, the only extant trilogy; the Electra of Sophocles; and the Orestes, Electra, Iphigenia in Aulis, and Iphigenia in Tauris of Euripides. Beside the Œdipus Rex of Sophocles most critics would place his Antigone; and beside the Medea, the most popular play of Euripides, his Alcestis and his Trojan Women. But it is no great task to read all extant Greek tragedies.
The general character of Greek dramaturgy and its historical place are outlined at once concisely and suggestively by Brander Matthews in his Development of the Drama (New York, 1903), chapter ii, to which may be added chapters iii, v, viii, ix, and xiii of his Study of the Drama (New York, 1910). T. D. Goodell’s Athenian Tragedy (New Haven, 1920) is admirable. Gilbert Murray’s Euripides and His Age (London and New York, 1913) discusses Greek dramaturgy generally in chapters iii, viii, and ix. More inclusive works for English readers are A. E. Haigh’s The Attic Theatre, 3d edition revised by A. W. Pickard-Cambridge (Oxford, 1907), and R. C. Flickinger’s The Greek Theatre and Its Drama (Chicago, 1918).
These few books are selected as specifically informing and suggestive for dramaturgy. A longer selective list will be found in L. VanHook’s Greek Life and Thought (New York, 1923), pages 310-312. A comprehensive bibliography, so many are the historical significances of Greek tragedy, would fill a volume.

2 This paragraph and the following are adapted from the author’s Writing and Speaking, pages 412-415.

3 “The words are so composed that their full effect can be appreciated only through the clear and rhythmical enunciation of an actor who relies mainly on his voice.” J. T. Sheppard, The Œdipus Tyrannus of Sophocles translated and explained, Cambridge University Press, 1920, page ix.

4 See pages 126, 127 above on the distinction made by pseudo-Longinus (xi-xii) between poetry and oratory.

5 Parts of this paragraph and the following are taken from the author’s A Note on the History Play, in Shakesperian Studies, Columbia University Press, 1916.

6 This has nowhere been better expounded than in the ninth chapter of Gilbert Murray’s Euripides and His Age, London and New York (Home University Library), 1913.

7 Poetic, 1447 a. See above, pages 140, 143.

8 Poetic, 1453 a. See above, pages 135, 144, 155.

9 For instance, Chaucer’s Monk says in his prologue:
Tragedie is to seyn a certeyn storie,
As olde bokes maken us memorie,
Of him that stood in greet prosperitee
And is yfallen out of heigh degree
Into miserie, and endeth wretchedly.

10 De Nugis Curialium, IV. xi. Map’s collection contains several other forms of the same story or of related stories.

11 Brunetière’s point (Annales du Théâtre, 1893) is well interpreted by Brander Matthews, The Development of the Drama, page 20, and again in A Study of the Drama, chapter v.

12 As to this see Gilbert Murray, Euripides and His Age, page 205.

13 See above, page 163.

14 E. S. Shuckburgh’s edition of the Antigone, Cambridge University Press, 1908, page xvii.

15 Not that there were never lapses of time or shifts of place (see Matthews, A Study of the Drama, Chapter xiii, and Goodell, page 82), but that Greek tragedies move habitually without time-break and in a single stage-setting.

16 Murray, op. cit., page 212.

17 See above, pages 147, 149, 150, 161.

18 The plays ascribed to L. Annæus Seneca (distinguished as “the younger” or “the philosopher,” circ. 4 B.C.-65 A.D.) are Œdipus, Phœnissæ, Medea, Hercules Furens, Hippolytus (or Phædra), Hercules Œtæus, Thyestes, Troades, Agamemnon. Their authorship is discussed by E. C. Chickering in An introduction to Octavia Prætexta, New York, 1910 (Columbia dissertation), which also contains a brief account of Roman tragedy, reviews the question of the stage production of Seneca, and discusses his rank as tragedian. Ella I. Harris’s Two tragedies of Seneca, Medea and the Daughters of Troy, rendered into English verse, Boston, 1898 (all ten, New York, 1904), summarizes Senecan influence on English drama. See further J. W. Cunliffe’s The influence of Seneca on Elizabethan tragedy, New York, 1893. All the Senecan tragedies are included in The tragedies of Seneca translated into English verse, to which have been appended comparative analyses of the corresponding Greek and Roman plays... by F. J. Miller, introduced by an essay on the influence of the tragedies of Seneca upon early English drama by J. M. Manly, Chicago, 1907. Miller’s translation is published also in the Loeb Classical Library.

19 Chickering suggests (page 45) a resemblance to grand opera.

20 It is reviewed by Chickering.

21 “Ce sont des exercices de déclamation, des recueils factices de morceaux de bravoure écrits pour la lecture.” G. Michaud, Le génie latin, Paris, 1900, page 116.

22 See above, pages 71-2 and foot-note 8. “Quant aux caractères c’est du stoicisme découpé en personnages.” E. Nageotte, Histoire de la littérature latine, page 469.

23 Seneca “the elder,” or the rhetorician, in his collection of Controversiæ, is the chief source of our knowledge of declamatio. See Chapter IV. II.

24 See Legrand, P. E., Tableau de la comédie grecque pendant la période dite nouvelle—κωμῳδία νέα; translated as The New Greek Comedy by James Loeb, with introduction by John Williams White, London and New York, 1917. An earlier study quoted below is Lallier, R., La comédie nouvelle, introduction à l’étude du théâtre de Térence (leçon d’ouverture), Toulouse, 1876.
Recent English translations of Plautus are: by Paul Nixon in the Loeb Classical Library (2 volumes issued); by E. H. Sugden of Amphitruo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi, London, 1893; by H. O. Sibley and F. Smalley of Trinummus, Syracuse, N. Y., 1895; by B. H. Clark of Menæchmi, New York, 1915. W. H. D. Rouse has reprinted William Warner’s Elizabethan translation of Menæchmi with the Latin text for the study of Shakspere’s Comedy of Errors, London, 1912.
A second edition of F. Leo’s Plautinische Forschungen zur Kritik und Geschichte der Komödie appeared in Berlin, 1912. More recent studies are: Brasse, M., Quatenus in fabulis Plautinis et loci et temporis unitatibus species veritatis neglegatur... Greifswald, 1914 (Breslau thesis); Schild, Erich, Die dramaturgische Rolle der Sklaven bei Plautus und Terenz, Basel (thesis), 1917; Blancké, W. W., The dramatic values in Plautus, Geneva, N. Y., 1918 (Pennsylvania thesis); Cole, Mrs. H. E., Deception in Plautus, a study in the technique of Roman comedy, with bibliography, Boston, 1920 (Bryn Mawr thesis).
A complete translation of Terence was privately printed for the Roman Society, 1900, 2 volumes, with brief notes and partial bibliography. The most useful available translation is that of the Phormio by M. H. Morgan, Cambridge, Mass., 1894, with the Latin text and reproductions of the Vatican miniatures of costumes. This play has been translated also by Clark, B. H., New York, 1915; The Self-tormentor, by Shuckburgh, E. S., Cambridge, 1869, and by Ricord, F. W., New York, 1885. The Loeb Classical Library publishes the translation of John Sargeaunt in 2 volumes. See also Michaut, G., Sur les tréteaux latins (histoire de la comédie romaine), Paris, 1912; Knapp, C., References in Plautus and Terence to plays, players and playwrights, Classical Philology, xiv, number 1 (Jan., 1919); and a charming popular study by Lemaître, J., “Térence et Molière,” in Impressions de théâtre, vi (1898) 15-27. The better to define ancient conceptions of comedy, Lane Cooper reconstitutes An Aristotelian Theory of Comedy, with an adaptation of the Poetics and a translation of the ‘Tractatus Coislinianus,’ New York, 1922.

25 See the quotation from Apuleius on page 228. The Onomasticon of Julius Pollux enumerates 44 masks sufficient for all the rôles and all the situations of the New Comedy: 10 for old men, 10 for young men, 7 for slaves, 3 for old women, 14 for young women. There are even stock names, e.g., Davos and Chremes. Miles gloriosus was taken over by Latin comedy and again by French seventeenth-century comedy, though in fact neither society had this Athenian type. Over against him is the parasite, often the mover of the intrigue. The slave and he are the most active of the personæ. (This note is derived from Lallier.)

26 The extreme case is the Amphitruo of Plautus with its two Amphitryos and two Sosias. In Menæchmi the servants are doubled; in Bacchides, the courtesans.

27 Greenough’s translation of the argument, prefacing Morgan’s translation of the play.

28 Plutarch, Mor., De gloria Atheniensium, 347 F.

29 Michaut (139) cites Evanthius De Fabula IV. 4 and Donatus. Statarius seems to be used, in the prologue to the Adelphi and in a passage cited by Michaut from Cicero’s Brutus xxx. 116, of acting. Knapp cites the prologue to the Self-tormentor.

30 “Qui sim, cur ad vos veniam paucis eloquar,” prol. to Bacchides; and the play opens with both ladies together on the stage, so that there can be no mistake. Terence, who devotes his prologue usually to rebuttal of detraction, sometimes devotes his whole first act to exposition.

1 See F. B. Gummere’s Beginnings of Poetry. The controversy which was spread by the Homeric studies of Wolf, has lately shifted to the popular ballad. See G. L. Kittredge’s introduction to his one-volume selection of the English and Scottish Popular Ballads from the collection of Child, Boston, 1904, and the recent studies of Professor Louise Pound. J. A. Scott maintains The Unity of Homer in his University of California Lectures, 1921.

2 C. S. Baldwin, Introduction to English Medieval Literature, New York, 1914, pages 16-18.

3 As I write, Knut Hamson’s The Growth of the Soil has just been called epic.

4 Poetic, xxiv.

5 Aristotle, Poetic, xxiv. See page 158 above.

6 Poetic, xxiv.

7 See above, page 106.

8 Opening of the Étude sur Virgile.

9 Lectures on Poetry, London, 1911.

10 “Vergil,” in Great Writers, New York, 1912.

11 W. Y. Sellar in The Roman Poets of the Augustan Age, Virgil, Oxford (3d edition), 1908, analyzes under convenient headings Vergil’s position in Latin literature. Henry Nettleship’s discussions in Lectures and Essays, Oxford, 1875, 1885, have not been superseded, though they have evidently been suggestive to more recent critics. Sainte-Beuve’s Étude sur Virgile, Paris, n. d., and T. R. Glover’s Virgil, London, 1904 (4th edition, 1920), appeal more to the general reader. R. Y. Tyrrell’s chapter in his Latin Poetry, Boston, 1895, is unsympathetic with Vergil the artist. Most of the innumerable editions of the Æneid have little to say of his poetic art. This is specifically the subject of M. Marjorie Crump’s The Growth of the Æneid, Oxford, 1920, which, though little developed, is a distinct contribution to technical study. But the book on Vergilian epic is the exhaustive work of Richard Heinze, Virgils epische Technik, Leipzig, 1902 (2d edition. 1908, 3d edition, 1915). References are to pages of the third edition.

12 Heinze, 319, compares in this aspect the Homeric duel of Paris and Menelaus with Æneid xii. Typically, he points out, Vergil’s “Handlung fortschreitet,” and the composition is “szenenhaft.”

13 Paul LeJay, L’Énéide, Paris, 1919, page lix. Heinze, 381, shows the minuteness of this care in cases where two scenes are chronologically parallel. One of the two is always subordinated; and the first to be presented is always carried to a state of rest before turning to the second.

14 Heinze, 361.

15 The exactness, brilliancy, and range of Vergil’s color words are studied by T. R. Price, The Color-System of Vergil, American Journal of Philology, volume 4, number 13 (1882). See the more extensive work of Hugo Blümner, Die Farbenbezeichnungen bei den römischen Dichtern, Berliner Studien, volume 13 (1891).

16 This is the technical secret of the distinction that Sainte-Beuve expresses as “sobriété... rien que le nécessaire,” Étude sur Virgile, 93.

17 Glover, 16, repeats Henry’s praise of

Quale per incertam lunam sub luce maligna. VI. 270.

Surcharged precision intensifies

But the same distinctness, at once precise and picturesque, may be found almost anywhere in the Æneid; it is Vergil’s habit, and it is never obtrusive.

18 Lessing, Laokoön, especially chapters xvi and xvii.

19 Heinze, 406.

20 The famous description of the harbor under the cliffs (Est in secessu longo locus. I. 159) is really less characteristic than

21 Heinze, 396.

22 Heinze, 374.

23 Heinze cites the handling of Fama in IV, and of Allecto in VII.

24 See above, page 199.

25 Heinze, 94. Miss Crump analyzes the probable changes of revision. Her theory that Book III survives from an earlier plan in which it stood first, and that Vergil probably intended to revise it entirely, has grave difficulties.

26 Paul LeJay, L’Énéide, lxviii; Heinze, 263. For the detail of the composition of single books and groups see also Heinze, 180, 448, 453. For instances of peripety, see Heinze, 223, 323.

27 Heinze, 120, is hardly extravagant in maintaining that this is beyond any other ancient achievement of the kind.

28 Heinze, 133.

29 Woodberry, 132. See also J. R. Green, “Æneas, a Virgilian Study” in Stray Studies from England and Italy, 227.

30 Heinze, 271 seq.; W. Warde Fowler, The Religious Experience of the Roman People, lecture xviii.

31 Ovid (Tristia, II. 535) says that the fourth book was the most popular.

32 Sellar, 395. For careful discussion of this whole aspect of Vergil’s diction, see Heinze, 410-427.

33 That even Dido’s desperate plea, as well as the calm reply of Æneas, proceeds from point to point, not all readers will agree with Heinze (425-6, on Æneid IV. 305). The variations of rhythm in this passage would surely be used by a sympathetic reciter to suggest agitation. But Vergil’s general neglect of the familiar means of asyndeton and hyperbaton (see, for example, De sublimitate, xxi-xxii) to suggest emotional disorder shows a characteristic distrust of incoherence.

34 Heinze, 279.

35 How freely Latin authors transferred it to poetic may be seen in Horace’s Ars Poetica (see below, Chapter viii). Compare Plutarch, Quomodo adolesc., x, below, page 244.

36 Sellar, 101, quotes Comparetti: “an elaboration of language which disdains or is unable to say a plain thing in a plain way.”

37 See above, page 210.

38 “During all the years in which Virgil brooded over it and wrought upon it, he kept his material... in fusion, not crystallized and hardened into final shape” (Mackail, 78); i.e., he continued to adjust.

39 Eximios tauros, farre pio, etc., noted, among other critics, by E. Nageotte, Histoire de la littérature latine, 334. Apropos of Vergil’s incomparable command of the resources of his language, Nageotte adds happily that a “tache de rouille antique a son effet prévu dans la gamme des couleurs environnantes” (324).

40 Woodberry, 125.

41 Woodberry, 111.

42 See above, page 206.

43 See above, page 205.

44 See above, page 203.

45 Ovid has a large place in every comprehensive history of Latin literature (e.g., in W. Y. Sellar’s volume on Horace and the Elegiac Poets in his Roman Poets of the Augustan Age, Oxford, 1892), and is discussed at least briefly in the compends (e.g., C. T. Cruttwell’s History of Roman Literature, American edition, New York, 1890). The last edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica has an extensive appreciation by S. G. Owen, whose critical edition of Tristia provides a bibliography of Ovidiana. Of English translations the most accessible are those in the Loeb Classical Library: of Heroides and Amores by Grant Showerman, of Metamorphoses by F. J. Miller, both with introductions and bibliographical notes.

46 Sponte sua carmen numeros veniebat ad aptos,
Et quod tentabam dicere versus erat.

is almost as familiar as “lisped in numbers, for the numbers came.”

47 Morsque minus pœnæ quam mora mortis habet.

48 Ilia, pone metus; tibi regia nostra patebit,
  Teque colent amnes. Ilia, pone metus.
Tu centum plures inter dominabere nymphas;
  Nam centum aut plures flumina nostra tenent.

Rime in Latin elegiac poetry is well summarized by K. P. Harrington in his volume of edited selections, The Roman Elegiac Poets, New York, 1914, page 61.

49 E.g., at the close of Heroides, ix, Impia quid dubitas Deianira mori? in line 146 is repeated in lines 152, 158, 164, i.e., in every sixth line.

50 E.g., Metam. xi. 494.

51 Metam. vii. 826.

52 Ars Amat. i. 729.

53 Metam. i. 89, Amores, iii. 8, 35.

54 Metam. iv. 320.

55 Amores, i. 13. 3.

56 See, for example, Rudolph Schevill, Ovid and the Renascence in Spain, University of California Publications in Modern Philology, vol. 4, number 1 (November, 1913), pages 24 and 95.

57 Troilus and Criseyde, iii. 1415-1470.

58 Romeo and Juliet, III. v.

59 Owen in Encyclopedia Britannica speaks of Ovid as “the most brilliant representative of Roman Alexandrinism.”

60 A typical ἔκφρασις is “dira lues” in Metam. vii. 523.

61 E.g., Byblis in Metam. ix. 474, Myrrha in Metam. x. 320.

62 Discussed above in Chapter IV. II. Cruttwell says of the Heroides: “They are erotic suasoriæ, based on the declamations of the schools.” History of Roman Literature, 306; and Heinze, “die Gattung der poetischen declamatio inaugurierte.” Virgils epische Technik, 434. Cf. Sellar, 331, 356; Carl Brück, De Ovidio scholasticarum declamationum imitatore, Munich, 1909.

63 Metam. ii. 33.

64 Iris, Tisiphone, Luctus, Pavor, Terror. Metam. iv. 480. The method seen more largely in Invidia (Metam. ii. 760), essentially a school exercise, passed through the Roman de la Rose into medieval habit.

65 Heinze discusses more generally the rhetorical habit of Ovid in Virgils epische technik, 434.

66 See above, page 126.

67 History of Roman Literature, 309.

68 Encyclopedia Britannica.

69 Apuleius, born about 125 A.D., and probably educated at Carthage, where he passed much of his life, became a rhetor at Rome about 150, and soon thereafter published the Metamorphoses. Florida is the title given to a collection of excerpts from what we should call his lectures (see Chapter VIII, 230). Nettleship (in an essay on Nonius Marcellus, Lectures and Essays, 282) calls him “a very striking representative of his age.” Though his work is largely translation or compilation, he has caught the fancy of several English literati, and was made by Pater one of the personæ in the twentieth chapter of Marius the Epicurean. Adlington’s translation (1566) of the Metamorphoses has been reprinted with an introduction by Seccombe, and revised for the Loeb Classical Library by Gaselee. The separable Cupid and Psyche chapters (Books IV-VI), often translated, appear in the fifth chapter of Pater’s Marius, and have been again translated by Purser (London, 1910), with a suggestive introduction on Apuleius as a rhetor. Butler has translated also the Florida.

70 “L’art de composition faiblit, comme il arrive toujours quand la sincérité du sentiment diminue; car c’est la préoccupation sincère d’une idée dominante qui maintient d’un bout à l’autre l’unité de ton et l’harmonie; quand le bel esprit l’emporte, il s’amuse aux détails, il s’attache au ‘morceau,’ et n’a plus la force de lier l’ensemble.” Croiset, Histoire de la littérature grecque, vol. V (Période Alexandrine), page 158.

71 See Chapter IV. II.

72 These dates are taken from Wolff’s admirable summary of the Greek Romances as an Alexandrian derivative in the opening chapter of his Greek Romances in Elizabethan Fiction (New York, 1912, Columbia University Press).