Introduction.
[sect. 1]
Early Lyric Poetry at Rome.
[1]
1. The beginnings of lyric poetry among the Romans reach back to the
prehistoric period of the city, and were as rude and shapeless as was
the life of her people. Amid the rough farmer-populace of the
turf-walled village by the Tiber the Arval Brethren and the Salii
chanted their rude litanies to the rustic deities, - for even then
religion was a prime cause in moving men toward poetry. In roughly
balanced Saturnian verses men spoke regret and panegyric for the dead
and praises for the valorous deeds of the living. The mimetic passion
and rude wit of the Roman led him also into boisterous personal satire
and into epigram more pungent than polished. But until the last few
decades of the Republic these products of the Muse are either
anonymous or connected with names well-nigh forgotten, and the
remnants that have come down to us display no striking poetic
excellence.
[2]
2. The progress of a national literature is perhaps rarely by fits and
starts, even though it appears so to be. But the front advances in
such a uniform line, that only now and then, when one wave sweeps out
far beyond the rest, is the general advance of the tide remarked. So
it would probably be unjust to the unknown poets of the Roman Republic
to believe that their work did not mark a continual advance from
period to period in lyric feeling and expression. Yet only in the
first half of the last century before Christ did Latin poetry enter
upon its first period of brilliancy. Amid the hot passions, the
vigorous hatreds, the feasts and brawls, the beauty and the coarseness
of life in the capital during this most active period in the history
of Rome, there arose a school of writers who, though often
conservatives in politics, were radicals in poetry. The tendencies of
the traditional Roman past were by them utterly
disregarded. Inspiration was drawn from the stirring life into which
they were plunged, as well as from the sympathetic study of the
sources of poetic art among both the earlier Greeks and the
Alexandrians. As was to be expected, their models of rhythm were not
the rude hexameters and ruder Saturnians of their Roman predecessors,
but the more polished versification of the Greeks; and their subjects
were sometimes their own personal experiences and emotions, and
sometimes themes suggested by their Greek prototypes. So a new school
of Roman poetry arose and flourished, to be superseded in turn by the
polished Augustans, who cultivated the niceties of elegance, but at
the expense of verve.