PART III. ROMAN LITERATURE. CHAPTER I. LATIN AND ITS OLDEST MONUMENTS. Italy Peopled. While watching the rise, meridian splendors, and glowing sunset of Grecian letters, we have left unnoticed the dawn of literary taste in Italy, the sister of Hellas, peopled, as we have seen, by kindred Phrygian tribes who spoke dialects of the Phrygo-Hellenic tongue (p. 133). Whether they were the first of human kind to wake the echoes of the Italian solitudes, must ever remain a matter of doubt. Some believe that the Alps had proved an insuperable barrier to previous emigrants from the East; others, that the adventurous Pelasgians, on descending their slopes, found a Turanian population already in possession of the peninsula. If the latter theory be correct, the Turanian aborigines were speedily overpowered by the new-comers and became incorporated with their conquerors. When Rome was founded, 753 B.C., the predominant Italian races were distinguished as Latin and Umbrian (embracing the Oscans); their languages were closely related, and have been called Italic. The Etruscans, who lived west of the Tiber, though probably of Aryan origin, differed in many respects from the Umbrians and Latins. [See the above map for the various localities mentioned in connection with Roman Literature.] The Latin Language, in its most ancient form, was probably spoken by the people of Latium at least twelve hundred years before the Christian Era. For many centuries it remained harsh and unpolished, nor did its roughness materially wear away until it came in contact with the Greek, about 250 B.C. Then its vocabulary was enriched, and it gradually acquired elegance and beauty. A knowledge of Greek came to be regarded as indispensable to a polite education, and Roman children were taught this language before their own. A reaction, however, ultimately set in, and the foisting of foreign words and idioms on the native tongue was con THE LATIN LANGUAGE, 305 demned as strongly as it had once been favored; a strange expression was now compelled to run the gantlet of merciless criticism before it was admitted as part of the language. Cæsar advised to shun a new term as one would a reef; Augustus frankly acknowledged that, though he was emperor of the world, he could not make a Latin word; and Tiberius was thus pointedly rebuked by a Roman grammarian for a verbal error: "Thou, O Cæsar! canst confer Roman citizenship on men, but not on words.” When the rest of Italy submitted to the arms of Rome, it accepted the language of the conqueror. Latin also supplanted the Carthaginian tongue in Africa and Spain, Celtic in Gaul and Britain, and finally was spoken in greater or less purity throughout the empire. In its perfection, which it attained during the first century. B.C., Latin was characterized by energy, dignity, and precision, its power and gravity compensating for the lack of "Attic grace." According to its system of grammar, six cases and two numbers were distinguished; nouns, pronouns, and adjectives, were declined; and verbs were varied in form through the tenses and moods of two voices. Thus the Latin had one more case-form than the Greek, but lacked the dual number and middle voice of Greek and Sanscrit. The Latin alphabet, consisting originally of twenty-one letters, was borrowed from the Greeks through a Dorian colony at Cumæ. Its resemblance to the Greek may be seen by turning to page 87. The Roman system of notation was an Etruscan invention. Ancient Latin Relics.-During the five centuries that followed the founding of Rome, the literary history of the city is all but a blank. Curious specimens of its antique tongue are preserved in fragments of laws and a few inscriptions; but the songs of the first Latin bards are lost forever. The legends of Romulus, the seizure of the Sabine women, the stories of Lucretia and Virginia, of Coriolanus and Horatius, --these, with many similar traditions, were doubtless the subjects of irregular ballads and heroic poems. The rough simple verse in which they appeared was called Saturnian,* it is supposed to have been adopted from the Etruscan poets, and charmed the ears of the Romans until they listened to the more tuneful measures of the Greeks. The time-honored Saturnian verses were then thrust aside, with the old lays that told the proud conquerors of Italy of their humble origin and early struggles. This ballad-poetry may never have been written; sung from generation to generation, it was kept alive to grace in after-days the epic of Ennius and the pages of the historian Livy. The oldest existing Latin poetry is inscribed on a tablet exhumed at Rome in 1778. It is a chant of the Arval Brothers, an association of priests founded under the Roman kings, and consists of an invocation to Mars, the god of war, to avert pestilence. Almost as venerable is a fragment from a Salian Hymn, sung by the Salian (dancing) priests in honor of Ja'nus. Extracts from the Laws of the Twelve Tables (450 B.C.), which were destroyed in the early wars, have been collected from the works of later writers. The old Latin, however, is very obscure; so much did the language afterward change that in the golden age the Salian poems were enigmas to the Romans themselves. ין. There are also traces of an ancient Umbrian literature, which has perished. Age of native minstrelsy, 753–250 B.C.: early poetry composed of hymns, festal and religious, banquet songs and funeral odes in commemoration of heroes, * From Saturn, an ancient Italian god fabled to have instructed the people in agriculture. The metre was accommodated to the rapid beats of the foot in the country dances at harvest-time. THE DAWN PERIOD. 307 rude satiric verses, and, according to Niebuhr, epic poems surpassing the works of later times" in power and brilliance of imagination." No remnants of all this literature. In prose, a primitive oratory. CHAPTER II. DAWN OF ROMAN LITERATURE. As Italy received her first lessons in reading and writing. from the Greeks, in law - making from Solon, in art from Phidias and Praxiteles, so in polite literature she drew her inspiration from the same source. The early Roman writers not only took their cue from Greek authors, but were in some cases downright imitators and mere translators. A Greek slave, Livius Andronicus, who may be called the father of Roman classical literature, translating the Odyssey into Saturnian verse, introduced his captors to the literary treasures of his country. Enraptured Rome eagerly snatched the crown of letters as it fell from the head of her elder sister, and for a time the borrowed jewels sparkled on her brow. But she paid dearly for her brilliant ornaments; for, with Greek taste and culture, came also Greek effeminacy and vice. The aim of the first Latin writers was to give their tongue the same polish as the model from which they copied; but an excess of foreign graces was repugnant to the genius of their more stately language, and it was soon seen that the refinement of the Greek would prove fatal to the vigor of Latin. Accordingly the Roman orators set their faces against any further "Grecizing," and struggled as manfully to preserve the purity of their vernacular as they did to maintain the moral purity of the nation, fast drifting into the dangerous quicksands of sloth and self-indulgence. The sixth and seventh centuries of Rome, the period cov |