The Roman Way

CHAPTER I
COMEDY'S MIRROR

When the curtain rings up for the stupendous drama which we know as Ancient Rome, it is raised surprisingly on two comic writers. They are the first to make their appearance on that mighty stage. The oldest piece of Roman literature we have is a collection of comedies. Only two earlier writers are known to us and of their work a few lines is all that is left Not only Latin literature, but our own direct knowledge of Rome, have their source in comedy, and that not of a rude, popular sort, but sophisticated, a true comedy of manners. The fact, seldom meditated upon, is a little disturbing. We all have our idea of the Romans, implanted by education, by many books: an indomitable people, stern and steadfast and serious beyond all others. It is disconcerting that the fountainhead of our knowledge should be the very reverse of all this. Our notion of the proper beginning for the literature of the mistress of the world would be something martial and stirring, old ballads of valiant men and warlike deeds with spirited bards to sing them, culminating in a great epic, a Latin Iliad. But it actually begins as far away from that as the wide realm of letters allows, in a series of comedies which are avowedly founded upon the popular Greek comedy of the day.

No other great national literature goes back to an origin borrowed in all respects. In Greece the development was the natural one, from songs and stories handed down by word of mouth and added to through unknown ages. There was a spontaneous desire in the people-the farmers, shepherds, fighting men-for imaginative expression, which ultimately took literary shape and was preserved. With the Romans it was just the other way about. The literary shape came first, across the sea, from Greece. The desire for expression was secondary, following upon the discovery of an appropriate form ready-made to hand. The fact is full of significance for the Roman mentality.

Roman literature appears suddenly, during the third century B.C., in the generation after the First Punic War, and not only comedy, but everything else as well is modelled upon the Greek. There is hardly even a suggestion anywhere of a native product supplanted by the imported. We find, indeed, a metre never met with elsewhere which the first translator from the Greek used, and a few references in later writers to old ballads heard in boyhood, but that is all. Whether the truth is that the Roman shepherds and farmers, with the strong practical bent that later marked them, had little inclination to spend valuable time in singing songs and making up stories, or whether the literary men when they finally appeared despised the popular productions as beneath the notice of writers who were out to bring culture to Rome and bring it quick, the fact is equally illuminating. A sense for poetry was not strong in the Roman people. Their natural genius did not urge them on to artistic expression. Rome was said to have been founded in the year 753 B.C., and the earliest piece of literature we know about is a translation of the Odyssey made at the end of the First Punic War, some five hundred years later. For all these centuries it would seem that the Romans felt little impulsion to express in any form what the world was showing them and life bringing them. Later Roman critics speak of a native comedy, dramatic improvisations at festivals, but there is no warrant for supposing that it was ever written down and it is certain that it had no direct literary descendants.

For us, Roman literature begins with Plautus, writer of comedies after the Greek fashion, and what he shows us of Roman life is the first glimpse we have of Rome. It is a brief glimpse. The curtain raised for him and his successor, Terence, is quickly lowered. When it is raised again we are looking at the age of Cicero. With the exception of a treatise on agriculture, curiously the one surviving work of the indomitable old censor of morals, Cato, we have only fragmentary bits of the literature in between, no secure basis upon which to reconstruct the city that was already the dominating power in the world. It is true that while Terence, the younger of the two comedians, was producing his plays the Greek Polybius was writing a great history on the rise and growth of the Roman power, of which a considerable part remains, but his concern is with Rome's wars and with the Romans as men of war. The only contemporary information given us about the rest of Roman life up to the first century B.C. comes from the work of the two playwrights.

We may perhaps account ourselves fortunate that comedy was the survivor. There is no better indication of what the people of any period are like than the plays they go to see. Popular drama shows the public quality as nothing else can. But comedy does more. It must present the audience, as tragedy need not, with a picture of life lived as they know it. The comedy of each age holds up a mirror to the people of that age, a mirror that is unique. Ancient comedy, made up for us of four playwrights whose work alone has survived, the Greek Aristophanes and Menander, and the Roman Plautus and Terence, is a mirror where may be seen vividly reflected the Greek and Roman people in periods of notable significance to us: the great day of Greece, an influence still felt in all our thought and our art, together with the age directly succeeding it; the Rome of a hundred years later, when Carthage had been twice defeated and the foundations were solidly laid of the Roman civilization to which our own goes directly back. What we want most of all to know about these two greatest nations of antiquity, is the kind of people that made them up, the every-day men and women, and this history in its concern for wars and laws does not give us. They were the theatre crowd, above all, the comic theatre. It is there we can find them. Popular comedy reflects the average person.

If the Greek tragedians had been lost and we had only Aristophanes left, we should have a very fair idea of the private citizen in Periclean Athens. How little resemblance he had to the theatre-going man elsewhere, what a completely different sort of amusement he wanted, may be seen in every one of Aristophanes' plays. Aristophanes has his own receipt for comedy, unlike, so he himself tells us, all that went before him and certainly never followed by any dramatist since. In choruses of the Wasps and the Peace, the methods are described which were used by the most popular playwright in Athens to draw his public:

Your poet in all of his plays has scorned to show you upon the stage

A few paltry men and their mean little ways. A great theme he gave you-the age.

He has stripped bare the monster with eyes flaming red, foul vice with its vile perjured band.

He has battled with spectral shapes, the pains and pangs that are racking our land.*

It was he that indignantly swept from the stage the rabble that cluttered its boards,

Greedy gods, vagabonds, swindling scamps, whining slaves, sturdy beggars, despicable hordes.

Such vulgar, contemptible lumber at once he bade from the theatre depart,

And then like an edifice stately and grand he raised and ennobled the art.

High thoughts and high language he brought to the stage, a humor exalted and rare,

Nor stooped with a scurrilous jest to assail some small-man-and-woman affair.┼

*Wasps, v. 1027.

┼Peace, v. 739.

Here is clearly written what Aristophanes and his audience wanted from the Comic Muse. In their eyes she was great Comedy, fit to stand beside Tragedy, of equal dignity and with essentially the same deep seriousness. The Old Comedy of Athens stands alone. It is as unlike the comedy of all other countries and periods as the age of Pericles is unlike all others. No small-man-and-woman affair for Aristophanes. Great themes, a grandiose conception of the world, belonged to Comedy, as he saw her, just as much as they did to Tragedy, as Æschylus saw her. That rabble he swept from the stage, those stock characters, each with his fixed form of antics, his thread-bare joke-"a few paltry men and their mean little ways"-gave place to marvelous figures: birds building a city in the sky that put all earthly cities to shame; a band of tight-waisted buzzing wasps to show up the law-courts; radiant Peace in all her beauty; the inexorable world of the dead where art receives its final award. This was Aristophanes' idea of Comedy's province. It died with him and was never found again within the theatre.

The old kind of fun-making came to the fore when he and his audience were gone. That edict of banishment he had proclaimed in great Comedy's name did not hold beyond his lifetime. Back came the exiles, the tricky servant, the braggart, the quack, the drunkard, the cunning thief, familiar stock characters, so his words tell us, four hundred years and more before Christ. The depth of our ignorance about the past is not often so vividly brought to mind. None of that crowded, busy theatre is known to us, nothing of what must often have been brilliant entertainment made by brilliant minds. A marvelous sense for the absurd and a very genius for observing and characterizing human nature put first upon the stage the personages which have held their place there ever since, with the brief exception of Aristophanes' lifetime. Latin comedy and through...