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 in the sacred grove, the fight of the three Romans and the three Albans, the purchase of the Sibylline 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 Clœlia, 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 legend 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."(2) But this poetic cycle had ceased to exist in its original metrical form long before the days of Livy and of Horace. We read of the old arval songs, of the Salian verses, of songs sung at triumphs, or at feasts, by individual guests, in praise of illustrious men, and at funerals. But these were mostly brief, religious, or occasional. Of the panegyric, or family songs, Cicero deplores the total loss. The verses to which Ennius alludes, as sung by the Fauns and Bards, the ancient verses which existed before there was any real poetry, any general inspiration of the Muses (Ennius, no doubt, means poetry in Greek (26) Macaulay, Preface to "Lays of Rome." metres, and imitative of Greek poets), were from the Saturnian Poem of Nævius on the first Punic war. (27) Yet how did this old poetic cycle so utterly perish that no vestige should survive? (28) Much, no doubt, is to be attributed to the ordinary causes of decay,change of manners, of tastes, the complete dominion of the Grecian over the Roman mind, the misfortune that no patriotic or poetic antiquarian rose in time, no Percy or Walter Scott, to search out and to record the fragments of old song, which were dying out upon the lips of the peasantry and the people. There are, however, peculiar to Rome, some causes for the total oblivion of this kind of national record which may also seem worthy of consideration. The Grecian ballad poetry, the Homeric (distinguished, from all other ballads, and, indeed, from almost all other human compositions, by transcendent merit), had an inestimable advantage besides its other inimitable excellencies. At the time of its earliest, undoubtedly its most complete, development in the Iliad and Odyssey, the wonderfully and naturally musical ear of the Greeks had perfected that most exquisite Versibu', quos olim Fauni vatesque canebant, Cum neque Musarum scopulos quisquam superârat, Quoted in the Brutus of Cicero, which refers them to the verses of Nævius. (28) Mr. Macaulay has acutely observed that the words of Dionysius Halicar, ὡς ἐν τοῖς πατρίοις ὑμνοῖς ὑπὸ Ρωμαίων ἔτι νῦν adeтaι, are either translated, or at furthest paraphrased, from Fabius Pictor, one of the earliest of the Roman annalists. - some sturdy "laudator temporis acti," some rough Cato, who affected the old republican manners, they belonged to that class which had surrendered itselfwhich prided itself on its surrender to Greek influences. If family pride was still Roman in its reminiscences, if it delighted to recall its ancestral glories, it would disdain the rude old verse, and content itself with the chronicles which had now assumed the more authentic tone of history. It would appeal to more authoritative public records or private archives. The man of rank would be ashamed or afraid, in a more prosaic age, of resting the fame of his ancestors, or the truth of his genealogy, on such suspicious testimonies. Cicero might have taste and wisdom enough to regret the loss of these ancient songs, both as poetry and as trustworthy records of former times; but in his day they had entirely, and, it should seem, long, vanished from the more refined banquets of the higher classes: they found no place amid the gorgeous magnificence of the Luculli, or the more enervating luxuries of the Clodii. If, then, they lingered anywhere, they would be on the lips and in the hearts of the Roman people. But where were the Roman people? where was that stern, and frugal, and strongly national plebeian race, which so long maintained the Roman character for order, virtue, freedom; and which, if factious and unruly, was factious for noble ends, and unruly in defence or assertion of its rights? In the city there was, and there always had been, a populace, which from the first, to a great extent, was not of Roman |