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LAYS OF ANCIENT ROME.

BY

THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY.

LAYS OF ANCIENT ROME.

PREFACE.

mans and the three Albans, the purchase of the Sibyline books, the crime of Tullia, the simulated madness of Brutus, the ambiguous reply of the Delphian oracle to the Tarquins, the wrongs of Lucretia, the heroic actions of Horatius Cocles, of Scævola, and of Clolia, the battle of Regillus won by the aid of Castor and Pollux, the fall of Cremera, the touching story of Coriolanus, the still more touching story of Virginia, the wild legion about the draining of the Alban lake, the combat between Valerius Corvus and the gigantic Gaul, are among the many instances which will at once suggest themselves to every reader.

In the narrative of Livy, who was a man of fine imagination, these stories retain much of their genuine character. Nor could even the tasteless Dionysius distort and mutilate them into mere prose. The poetry shines, in spite of him, through the dreary pedantry of his eleven books. It is discernible in the most tedious and in the most superficial modern works on the early times of Rome. It enlivens the dulness of the Universal History, and gives a charm to the most meager abridgments of Goldsmith.

THAT what is called the history of the kings | in the sacred grove, the fight of the three Ro and early consuls of Rome is to a great extent fabulous, few scholars have, since the time of Beaufort, ventured to deny. It is certain that, more than three hundred and sixty years after the date ordinarily assigned for the foundation of the city, the public records were, with scarcely an exception, destroyed by the Gauls. It is certain that the oldest annals of the commonwealth were compiled more than a century and a half after the destruction of the records. It is certain, "therefore, that the great Latin writers of a later period did not possess those materials, without which a trustworthy account of the infancy of the republic could not possibly be framed. They own, indeed, that the chronicles to which they had access were filled with battles that were never fought and consuls that were never inaugurated; and we have abundant proof that, in those chronicles, events of the greatest importance, such as the issue of the war with Porsena, and the issue of the war with Brennus were grossly misrepresented. Under these circumstances a wise man will look with great suspicion on the gend which has come down to us. He will, erhaps, be inclined to regard the princes who are said to have founded the civil and religious institutions of Rome, the son of Mars, and the husband of Egeria, as mere mythological personages, of the same class with Perseus and Ixion. As he draws nearer and nearer to the confines of authentic history, he will become less and less hard of belief. He will admit that the most important parts of the narrative have some foundation in truth. But he will distrust almost all the details, not only because they seldom rest on any solid evidence, but also because he will constantly detect in them, even when they are within the limits of physical possibility, that peculiar character, more easily understood than defined, which distinguishes the creations of the imagination from the realities of the world in which we live.

Even in the age of Plutarch there were discerning men who rejected the popular account of the foundation of Rome, because that account appeared to them to have the air, not of a history, but of a romance or a drama. Plu tarch, who was displeased at their incredulity, had nothing better to say in reply to their arguments than that chance sometimes turns poet, and produces trains of events not to be distinguished from the most elaborate plots which are constructed by art. But though the existence of a poetical element in the early history of the Great City was detected so many ages ago, the first critic who distinctly saw from what source that poetical element had been derived was James Perizonius, one of the most acute and learned critics of the sevenThe early history of Rome is indeed far teenth century. His theory, which, in his own more poetical than any thing else in Latin lite-age, attracted little or no notice, was revived in rature. The loves of the Vestal and the God the present generation by Niebuhr, a man who of War, the cradle laid among the reeds of Tiber, the fig tree, the she-wolf, the shepherd's cabin, the recognition, the fratricide, the rape of the Sabines, the death of Tarpeia, the fall of Hostus Hostilius, the struggle of Mettus Curtius through the marsh, the women rushing with torn raiment and dishevelled hair between their fathers and their husbands, the nightly meetings of Numa and the Nymph by the well

des o dei de ARLOTεiv, THY TÚ bras, o * Ὕποπτον μὲν ἐνίοις ἐστὶ τὸ δραματικὸν καὶ πλασματ a novos ¿t.-Plut. Rom. viii. This remarkable passage has been more grossly misinterpreted than any other in the Greek language, where the sense was version of Amyot, the old English version by several hands, and the later English version by Langhorne, are all equally destitute of every trace of the meaning of the is a poem. They all render it an event 2 x 2

so obvious. The Latin version of Cruserius, the French

original. None of the translators saw even that in

533

guages.

would have been the first writer of his time, through many revolutions, minstrelsy retained if his talent for communicating truths had its influence over both the Teutonic and the borne any proportion to his talent for investi- Celtic race. The vengeance exacted by the gating them. It has been adopted by several spouse of Attila for the murder of Siegfried eminent scholars of our own country, particu- was celebrated in rhymes, of which Germany larly by the Bishop of St. David's, by Professor is still justly proud. The exploits of Athelstane Malden, and by the lamented Arnold. It ap- were commemorated by the Anglo-Saxons, and pears to be now generally received by men those of Canute by the Danes, in rude poems, conversant with classical antiquity; and in- of which a few fragments have come down to deed it rests on such strong proofs, both in- us. The chants of the Welsh harpers preternal and external, that it will not be easily served, through ages of darkness, a faint and subverted. A popular exposition of this theory doubtful memory of Arthur. In the highlands and of the evidence by which it is supported of Scotland may still be gleaned some reliques may not be without interest even for readers of the old songs about Cuthullin and Fingal. who are unacquainted with the ancient lan- The long struggle of the Servians against the Ottoman power was recorded in lays full of The Latin literature which has come down martial spirit. We learn from Herrera that, to us is of later date than the commencement when a Peruvian Inca died, men of skill were of the second Punic war, and consists almost appointed to celebrate him in verses which exclusively of words fashioned on Greek mo- all the people learned by heart, and sang in dels. The Latin metres, heroic, elegiac, lyric, public on days of festival. The feats of Kurand dramatic, are of Greek origin. The best roglou, the great freebooter of Turkistan, reLatin epic poetry is the feeble echo of the Iliad counted in ballads composed by himself, are and Odyssey. The best Latin eclogues are known in every village of Northern Persia. imitations of Theocritus. The plan of the most | Captain Beechey heard the bards of the Sandfinished didactic poem in the Latin tongue was wich Islands recite the heroic achievements of taken from Hesiod. The Latin tragedies are Tamehameha, the most illustrious of their bad copies of the master-pieces of Sophocles kings. Mungo Park found in the heart of Africa and Euripides. The Latin comedies are free a class of singing men, the only annalists of translations from Demophilus, Menander, and their rude tribes, and heard them tell the story Apollodorus. The Latin philosophy was bor- of the great victory which Damel, the negro rowed, without alteration, from the Portico and prince of the Jaloffs, won over Abdulkader, the the Academy; and the great Latin orators con- Mussulman tyrant of Foota Torra. This spestantly proposed to themselves as patterns the cies of poetry attained a high degree of excelspeeches of Demosthenes and Lysias. lence among the Castilians, before they began to copy Tuscan patterns. It attained a still higher degree of excellence among the English and the Lowland Scotch, during the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. But it reached its full perfection in ancient Greece; for there can be no doubt that the great Homeric poems are generically ballads, though widely indeed distinguished from all other ballads, and, indeed, from almost all other human compositions, by transcendant merit.

But there was an earlier Latin literature, a literature truly Latin, which has wholly perished-which had, indeed, almost wholly perished long before those whom we are in the habit of regarding as the greatest Latin writers were born. That literature abounded with metrical romances, such as are found in every country where there is much curiosity and intelligence, but little reading and writing. All human beings, not utterly savage, long for some information about past times, and are delighted by narratives which present pictures to the eye of the mind. But it is only in very enlightened communities that books are readily accessible. Metrical composition, therefore, which, in a highly civilized nation, is a mere luxury, is, in nations imperfectly civilized, almost a necessary of life, and is valued less on account of the pleasure which it gives to the ear than on account of the help which it gives to the memory. A man who can invent or embellish an interesting story, and put it into a form which others may easily retain in their recollection, will always be highly esteemed by a people eager for amusement and information, but destitute of libraries. Such is the origin of ballad-poctry, a species of composition which scarcely ever fails to spring up and flourish in every society, at a certain point in the progress towards refinement. Tacitus informs us that songs were the only memorials of the past which the ancient Germans posFessed. We learn from Lucan and from Ammianus Marcellinus, that the brave actions of e ancient Gauls were commemorated in the verses of Bards. During many ages, and

As it is agreeable to general experience that, at a certain stage in the progress of society, ballad-poetry should flourish, so is it also agreeable to general experience that, at a subsequent stage in the progress of society, balladpoetry should be undervalued and neglected. Knowledge advances: manners change: great foreign models of composition are studied and imitated. The phraseology of the old minstrels becomes obsolete. Their versification, which, having received its laws only from the ear, abounds in irregularities, seems licentious and uncouth. Their simplicity appears beggarly when compared with the quaint forms and gaudy colouring of such artists as Cowley and Gongora. The ancient lays, unjustly despised by the learned and polite, linger for a time in the memory of the vulgar, and are at length too often irretrievably lost. We cannot wonder that the ballads of Rome should have altogether disappeared, when we remember how very narrowly, in spite of the invention of printing, those of our own country and those of Spain escaped the same fate. There is, indeed, little doubt that oblivion covers many English songs equal to any that were published by Bishop

Percy, and many Spanish songs as good as the best of those which have been so happily translated by Mr. Lockhart. Eighty years ago England possessed only one tattered copy of Childe Waters and Sir Cauline, and Spain only one tattered copy of the noble poem of the Cid. The snuff of a candle, or a mischievous dog, might in a moment have deprived the world for ever of any of those fine compositions. Sir Walter Scott, who united to the fire of a great poet the mirute curiosity and patient diligence of a great antiquary, was but just in time to save the precious reliques of the Minstrelsy of the Border. In Germany, the lay of the Nibelungs had been long utterly forgotten, when, in the eighteenth century, it was, for the first time, printed from a manuscript in the old library of a noble family. In truth, the only people who, through their whole passage from simplicity to the highest civilization, never for a moment ceased to love and admire their old ballads, were the Greeks.

That the early Romans should have had ballad-poetry, and that this poetry should have perished, is, therefore, not strange. It would, on the contrary, have been strange if it had not come to pass; and we should be justified in pronouncing them highly probable, even if we had no direct evidence on the subject. But we have direct evidence of unquestionable authority.

Ennius, who flourished in the time of the Second Punic War, was regarded in the Augustan age as the father of Latin poetry. He was, in truth, the father of the second school of Latin poetry,-of the only school of which the works have descended to us. But from Ennius himself we learn that there were poets who stood to him in the same relation in which the author of the romance of Count Alarcos stood to Garcilaso, or the author of the "Lytell Geste of Robin Hode" to Lord Surrey. Ennius speaks of verses which the Fauns and the Bards were wont to chant in the old time, when none had yet studied the graces of speech, when none had yet climbed the peaks sacred to the Goddesses of Grecian song. "Where," Cicero mournfully asks, "are those old verses now?"

Contemporary with Ennius was Quintus Fabius Pictor, the earliest of the Roman annalists. His account of the infancy and youth of Romulus and Remus has been preserved by

"Quid? Nostri veteres versus ubi sunt ?
Quos olim Fauni vatesque canebant,

Cum neque Masarum scopulos quisquam superarat, Nec dicti studiosus erat.'" Cic. in Bruso, cap. xviii. The Muses, it should be observed, are Greek divinities. The Italian Goddesses of verse were the Camanæ. At a later period, the appellations were used indiscriminately; but in the age of Ennius there was probably a distinction. In the epitaph of Nævius who was the representative of the old Italian school of poetry, the Caminæ, not the Muses, are represented as grieving for the loss of their votary. The "Musarum scopali" are evidently the peaks of Parnassus.

Scaliger, in a note on Varro (De Lingua Latina, fib. vi.) suggests, with great ingenuity, that the Fauns who were represented by the superstition of later ages as a race of monsters, half gods and half brutes, may really have been a class of men who exercised in Latium, at a very remote period, the same functions which belonged to the Magians in Persia and to the Bards in Gaul.

Dionysius, and contains a very remarkable re ference to the old Latin poetry. Fabius says that, in his time, his countrymen were still in the habit of singing ballads about the Twins. "Even in the hut of Faustulus," so these old lays appear to have run,-"the children of Rhea and Mars were, in port and in spirit, not like unto swineherds or cowherds, but such that men might well guess them to be of the blood of kings and gods."*

Cato the Censor, who also lived in the days of the Second Punic War, mentioned this lost literature in his lost work on the antiquities of his country. Many ages, he said, before his time, there were ballads in praise of illustrious

* Οἱ δὲ ἀνδρωθέντες γίνονται, κατά τε ἀξίωσιν μορφῆς καὶ φρονήματος δικον, οὐ συοφορβοῖς καὶ βουκόλοις τοι κότες, ἀλλ ̓ οἷους ἄν τις αξιώσειε τοὺς ἐκ βασιλείου τε Φύντας γένους, καὶ ἀπὸ δαιμόνων σπορᾶς γενέσθαι νομίζος μένους, ὡς ἐν τοῖς πατρίοις ὕμνοις ὑπὸ Ῥωμαίων ἔτι καὶ va dera-Dion. Hal i. 79. This passage has sometimes been cited as if Dionysius had been speaking in his own person, and had, Greek as he was, been so industrious or so fortunate as to discover some valuable remains of of his age regretted as hopelessly lost. Such a suppothat early Latin poetry which the greatest Latin writers sition is highly improbable; and indeed it seems clear from the context that Dionysius, as Reiske and other bus Pictor. The whole passage has the air of an extract editors evidently thought, was merely quoting from Fafrom an ancient chronicle, and is introduced by the words, Κόϊντος μὲν Φάβιος ὁ Πίκτωρ λεγόμενος, της yo

Another argument may be urged which seems to deserve consideration. The anthor of the passage in question mentions a thatched but which, in his time stood between Mount Palatine and the Circus. This hut, he says, was built by Romulus, and was constantly kept in repair at the public charge, but never in any res pect embellished. Now, in the age of Dionysius there certainly was at Rome a thatched hut, said to have been that of Romulus. But this hut, as we learn from Vitruvius, stood, not near the Circus, but in the Capitol. (Vit. in his own person, we can reconeile his statemen. with ii. 1.) If, therefore, we understand Dionysius to speak that of Vitruvius only by supposing that there were at Rome, in the Augustan age, two thatched huts, both believed to have been built by Romulus, and both carefully repaired, and held in high honour. The objections to such a supposition seem to be strong. Neither Dionysing nor Vitruvius speaks of more than one such hut. Dio tration of Augustus, the hut of Romulus caught fire. Cassius informs us that twice, during the long adminis(xlviii. 43. liv. 29.) Had there been two such huts, would he not have told us of which he spoke? An EngQueen's College without saying whether it was at lish historian would hardly give an account of a fire ai Queen's College, Oxford, or at Queen's College, Cam bridge. Marcus Seneca, Macrobius, and Conon, a Greek writer from whem Photius has made large extracts, mention only one hut of Romulus, that in the Capitol. (M. Seneca, Contr. i. 6; Macrobius, Sat. i. 15; Photius. Bibl. 186.) Ovid, Petronius, Valerius Maximus, Lucius Seneca, and St. Jerome mention only one hut of Rom

us without specifying the site. (Orid, Fasti, iii. 183, Petronius, Fragm.; Val. Maz. iv. 4 ; L. Seneca, Consola tio ad Helviam; D. Hieron. ad Paulinianum de Didymo.

The whole difficulty is removed, if we suppose that Dionysius was merely quoting Fabius Pictor. Nothing

is more probable than that the cabin, which in the time

of Fabins stood near the Circus, might, long before the age of Augustus, have been transported to the Capitol. as the place fittest, by reason both of its safety and of its sanctity, to contain so precious a relique.

The language of Plutarch confirms this hypothesis. Ile describes, with great precision, the spot where Romulus dwelt between the Palatine Mount and the Circus: but he says not a word implying that the dwelling was still to be seen there. Indeed, his expressions imply that it was no longer there. The evidence of Soli nus is still more to the point. He, like Plutarch, describes the spot where Romulus had resided, and says expressly that the hut had been there, but that, in his time, it was there no longer. The site, it is certain, was well remembered; and probably retained its old name, as Charing Cross and the Haymarket have done This is probably the explanation of the words, "casa Romuli in Victor's description of the Tenth Region of Rome, ander Valentinian.

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