Chapter 5 INTRODUCTION AND EARLY SATIRE

What prophecy was to the ancient Hebrews, the drama to the Greeks, the purpose-novel and the newspaper editorial to our own day, satire was to the Roman of the republic and the early empire-the moral mentor of contemporary society.

This conception of the prophet as the preacher of his day is often obscured by the conception of him as one who could reveal the future; but a closer study of the life and times of these great religious leaders shows them to have been men profoundly interested in current life, who gave all their energies to the task of raising the standard of the religious and social thought of their own day. The function of Greek tragedy was ever religious. It had its very origin in the worship of the gods; and the presence of the altar as the center of the strophic movements of the chorus was a constant reminder that the drama was dealing with the highest problems of human life. Added to the general religious atmosphere of tragedy were the direct moral teachings, the highest sentiments of ancient culture, which constantly sounded through the play. Greek comedy, especially of the old and middle type, also served a distinct moral purpose in society. It did not, indeed, sound the same lofty notes as did its sister tragedy; but it was the lash which was mercilessly applied, at first with bolder license to individual sinners in high places, and afterward in a more guarded manner to the vices and follies of men in general. In either case, the powerful stimulus of fear of public ridicule and castigation must have had a real effect upon the manners and morals of the ancient Greeks.

When we turn to our own time, we find the literary preacher at the novelist's desk or in the editor's chair. The influence of the purpose-novel and the editorial can hardly be overestimated. In the generation immediately preceding our own, a very direct influence upon the public social life of his day was wielded by the pen of Dickens. His eyes were open to abuses of every kind-in educational, charitable, legal, and criminal institutions; and he used every weapon known to literary art to right these wrongs. In this task he was ably assisted by men like Thackeray, Reade, Kingsley, and others. And there can be little doubt that the improved conditions in the England of to-day are due in generous measure to the work of these novelist preachers. The editor's function is still more intimately and constantly to hold the mirror up to society, revealing and reproving its faults. And to-day there is probably no more potent force acting directly upon the opinions and conduct of men than the daily editorial.

Now, the literary weapon of the Roman moralist was satire. It flourished in all periods of Roman literature, both the word satire and the thing itself being of Latin origin. In other fields of literature there is a large imitation of Greek models. Roman tragedy was at first but little more than a translation of the Greek plays, and the same is true of comedy. Cato, Varro, Vergil, and the rest who wrote of agriculture, had a Greek prototype in Hesiod, who in his Works and Days had treated of the same theme; Lucretius was the professed disciple and imitator of Epicurus; Cicero, in oratory, had ever before his eyes his Demosthenes, and in philosophy his Plato and Aristotle; Vergil had his Homer in epic and his Theocritus in pastoral; Horace, in his lyrics, is Greek through and through, both in form and spirit, for Pindar and Anacreon, Sappho, Alc?us, Archilochus, and the whole tuneful line are forever echoing through his verse. Ovid, in his greatest work, only succeeded in setting Greek mythology in a frame of Latin verse, though he told those fascinating stories as they had never been told before; while the historians, the rhetoricians, the philosophers-all had their Greek originals and models.

But in the field of satire the Romans struck out a new literary path for themselves. Even here we are bound to admit that the spirit is Greek, the spirit of the old comedy, of bold assault upon the evils of government, of society, of individuals. But still satire, as a form of literature, is the Roman's own; and beginning with Lucilius, the father of satire in the modern sense, the long line of satirists who followed his lead sufficiently attests the strong hold which this particular form of literature gained upon the Roman mind.

We have said that Lucilius was the father of satire in the modern sense; but the name at least, together with many of the features of his satire and that of his successors, reaches far back of him into the recesses of an ancient Italian literature, long since vanished, of which we can gain only the faintest hints. These hints as to the character of that ancient forerunner of the Lucilian satire come to us from two sources-the discussions of the Latin grammarians as to the derivation of the word satura (satire), and the remote reflections and imitations of the old satura in later works.

These far-off imitations give some idea of the character of the genuine satire of the earliest time,-that of a medley of verse of different meters, intermingled with prose, introducing words and phrases of other languages, and treating of a great variety of subjects. This literary medley or jumble probably had its origin in the farm or vineyard, where, in celebration of the "harvest home" or other joyous festival, it would be brought out, perhaps accompanied by some kind of musical recitation, and of course loaded with the rude wit of the time.

Such, then, we may suppose, was the character of the rude satire of ancient Italy. But alas for any real personal knowledge which we may gain of it, those merry, clumsy jests, those rustic songs, are vanished with the simple sun-loving race which produced them. The olive orchards still wave gray-green upon the sunny slopes, the vineyards still cling to every hillside and nestle in every valley; but the ancient peasantry who once called this land their home, whose simple annals old Cato loved to tell, and who could have given us material for precious volumes upon the folk-lore and customs of their times, have gone, and left scarcely a trace of their rude, unlettered literature.

The first tangible literary link that binds us to the old Roman satire is found in the poet Ennius, who flourished about two hundred years before Christ. The story of his life is outlined elsewhere in this book. His satires seem to have been a sort of literary miscellany which included such of his writings as could not conveniently be classified elsewhere.

The merest handful of fragments of these satires remains, although there is good ground for believing that there were six books of these. No adequate judgment can therefore be formed as to their character. It can with safety be said, however, that they were in a sense the connecting link between the early satire and the literary satire of the modern type. As has been said above, they were a literary miscellany or medley, and as such contain some salient features of their predecessors; and it is highly probable that they contained attacks upon the vices and follies of the time, in which respect they looked forward to a more complete development in Lucilian satire.

A most interesting fragment of the Epicharmus describes the nature of the gods according to the philosophy of Ennius:

And that is he whom we call Jove, whom Grecians call

The atmosphere: who in one person is the wind and clouds, then rain,

And after, freezing hail; and once again, thin air.

For this, those things are Jove considered which I name to you,

Since by these elements do men and cities, beasts.

And all things else exist.

There was a satire by Ennius, as Quintilian tells us, containing a dialogue between Life and Death; but of this we have not a remnant. He also introduced the fables of ?sop into his writings. The following is the moral which he deduces from the story of the lark and the farmers-a moral which Aulus Gellius assures us that it would be worth our while to take well to heart. It may be freely translated as follows:

Now list to this warning, give diligent heed,

Whether seeking for pleasure or pelf:

Don't wait for your neighbors to help in your need,

But just go and do it yourself!

Surely Miles Standish might have gained from his Ennius, as well as from his C?sar, that famous motto:

If you wish a thing well done,

You must do it yourself, you must not leave it to others!

We may leave our present notice of Ennius with a glance at the epitaph which he wrote for himself. It is classed with his epigrams, but it may properly be considered in connection with the medley of his satires. In it he claims that unsubstantial immortality of remembrance and of mention among men which is even now, as we write and read, being vouchsafed to him.

Behold, O friends, old Ennius' carvéd stone,

Who wrote your father's deeds with lambent pen;

Let no tears deck my funeral, for lo,

My soul immortal lives on lips of men.

We have seen that the spirit of invective in Lucilius, which became in his hands the spirit of satire, is traceable to the old Greek comedy. The poetic form (the dactylic hexameter in which he wrote twenty of the thirty books of his satire) had already been naturalized in Roman literature by Ennius in his great epic poem. But to Lucilius is due the credit of being the first to incarnate this spirit in this form, and thus to establish an entirely new type in literature.

His satires contain invectives against luxury, avarice, and kindred vices, and prevalent superstitions; an attack upon the rich; ridicule of certain rhetorical affectations; grammatical remarks, and criticisms on art; observations upon the Stoic philosophy; the poet's own political experiences and expectations, also other anecdotes and incidents gathered from his own experience; an interesting account of a journey to Sicily, from which Horace probably obtained the model for his famous journey to Brundisium. These and many other subjects filled his pages, and suggest by their wide range the old-time medley-satire.

The poet lived in stirring times. Born in 180 B. C., eleven years before the death of Ennius, he died about 103 B. C., three years after Cicero's birth and the year before the birth of C?sar. He was thus contemporary with some of the most important and striking events in Roman history-the third Macedonian War; the Third Punic War; the Numantian War, in which he himself served as a knight under Scipio Africanus in 133 B. C.; the troubled times of the two Gracchi; the Jugurthine War, and the rise of Caius Marius. He was of equestrian rank, and lived on terms of intimacy with some of the best men at Rome, notably the younger Scipio and L?lius. With such backing as this, of family and friends, he was in good position to direct his satire against the wicked and unscrupulous men of his time, regardless of their rank, without fear or favor.

What did the Romans themselves think of Lucilius? To judge from the frequency and character of their references to him, the poet must have made a profound impression upon his countrymen. A study of these references shows that in the main this impression was favorable. He is doctus, that is, profoundly learned in the wisdom of the Greeks; and, according to Aulus Gellius, he was equally well versed in the language and literature of his own land. He is to Juvenal the magnus, the "father of satire," who has well-nigh preempted the field, to follow whom requires elaborate explanation and apology on the part of the would-be satirist. He is to Cicero perurbanus, pre?minently endowed with that subtle something in spirit and expression which marks at once the polished man of the world. He is to Fronto remarkable for his gracilitas, that plainness, directness, and simplicity of style which, joined with the "harshness" and "roughness" of his "eager" spirit and of his righteous indignation, made his satire such a formidable weapon against the vices of his day. Persius says of him that he "slashed the citizens of his time and broke his jaw-teeth on them." And the testimony of Juvenal is still more striking: "But whenever Lucilius with drawn sword fiercely rages, his hearer, whose soul is cold within him because of his crimes, blushes with shame, and his heart quakes in silent fear because of his guilty secrets."

Like those of so many of his predecessors in literature, the works of Lucilius remain to us only in the merest fragments. For these we are indebted largely to the Latin grammarians, who quote freely from him, usually in illustration of the meaning of some word which they may be discussing. A comparatively small number of the fragments have come down to us through quotations on account of their sentiment, as when Cicero says: "Lucilius used to say that he did not write to be read by either of the extremes of society, because one would not understand him, and the other knew more than he did."

We shall now examine a few of the more important of the fragments which have been preserved to us. The following has been thought to be a vivid picture of the unworthy struggle of life as he saw it in the Rome of his own time. Lactantius, however, whose quotation of the fragment has saved it, thinks that the poet is portraying in a more general way the unhappy, unrestful life of mankind, unrelieved, as Lucretius would say, by the comforting reflections of philosophy.

But now, from morning to night, on holidays and work days, in the same place, the whole day long, high and low, all busy themselves in the forum and never depart. To one and the same pursuit and practice have they all devoted themselves: to cheat as guardedly as possible, to strive craftily, to vie in flattery, to make a pretense of being good men, to lay snares just as if they were all the foes of all.

There was a certain Titus Albucius, who, it seems, was so enamored with everything Greek that he was continually affecting the manners and language of that country. Such running after foreign customs and speech has not yet wholly disappeared. This weakness is the object of the poet's wit in the following passage, in which he tells how Sc?vola, the propr?tor of Asia, once "took down" the silly Albucius in Athens:

A Greek, Albucius, you would be called, and not a Roman and a Sabine, a fellow-townsman of Pontius and Tritanius, though they are both illustrious men, and first-rate standard-bearers. And so, as pr?tor at Athens, when I meet you, I salute you in the foreign style which you are so fond of: "χ?ιρε!"[A] I say; and my lictors and all my retinue inquire: "χ?ιρε?" Fie, Albucius! for this thou art my country's foe, and my own enemy!

[A] Hail.

The fourth satire, says an ancient scholiast, was an attack upon luxury and the vices of the rich. The following passage might well have been the opening lines of this satire, representing L?lius as exclaiming in praise of a vegetable diet and against gluttony:

"O sorrel, how praiseworthy art thou,

And yet how little art thou really known!"

over his mess of sorrel L?lius the wise used to cry out, chiding one by one the gluttons of our day.

And that he did not hesitate to call the glutton and spendthrift by name is shown by this fragment, which is evidently a continuation of the same diatribe:

"O Publius Gallonius, thou spendthrift," said he, "thou art a wretched fellow. Never in all thy life hast thou dined well, though all thy wealth on that lobster and that sturgeon thou consumest."

The last selection which we shall present from Lucilius is the longest extant fragment. The passage is a somewhat elaborate definition of virtue as the old Roman understood it. We use the translation of Sellar.

Virtue, Albinus, consists in being able to give their true worth to the things on which we are engaged, among which we live. The virtue of a man is to understand the real meaning of each thing: to understand what is right, useful, honorable for him; what things are good, what bad, what is unprofitable, base, dishonorable; to know the due limit and measure in making money; to give its proper worth to wealth; to assign what is really due to office; to be a foe and enemy of bad men and bad principles; to extol the good, to wish them well, to be their friend through life. Lastly, it is true worth to look on our country's weal as the chief good; next to that the weal of our parents; third and last, our own weal.