Harold absolute in Norway. 143 So King Harold made them bring out a white kirtle, and hold it before Ulf's eyes, and he sang these verses: "Ken'st thou this kirtle? Kine are the king's due; And then the king added this tag, "Much guile is now mingled, The King claims thyself too." Then Harold went on in prose: "Take now this kirtle Ulf which thy friends owned before thee, and along with it such rights and names as they had." Ulf thought the King's fun most unfriendly, but could scarcely dare to say anything against it, and he hardly knew whether to take the kirtle or not, but his wife and his friends bade him never to accept such an insult whatever the King might say. Then the wife went up to the King with her kith and kin and asked for peace for Ulf, and that he might not be so shamefully mocked as looked likely, and at last the King listened to their prayer and did not force Ulf to become a thrall, and gave him back one farm out of the fifteen which he owned, but the rest the King confiscated, and all his goods and costly things, gold and silver and drinking cups and all. And so the end of the King's dealings with Ulf was just what Ulf's heart had told him would happen ere he bade the King to a feast. And after that the King fared back to Drontheim and took up his abode at Niđarós.” By this story, whether he invented it altogether or merely applied a well-known tale to the case of Ulf, Harold meant to show that though all men were equal before the Crown, the King's rights bore down all else. Against the King no lapse of time or right of property could avail anything. It was a sermon on the maxim of English law, nullum tempus occurrit regi, and nothing shows more how completely he had laid Norway under his feet than the way in which he now meddled with the freemen's rights and sought his victims among the vulgar herd, after having brought down so many mighty chiefs. So there he sat at Drontheim that winter of the year 1065 at peace with all the world, enjoying for once in his busy life a short breathing space, while those mighty events were preparing in the West so full of interest for England and the North, and in which Harold was so soon to play a chief part. ART. V.-Publius Papinius Statius. Recognovit GUSTAVUS QUECK. 2 voll. Leipzig, 1854. THIS is a new recension of the text of Statius' poems, forming part of Teubner's series of Greek and Roman authors. It has no notes; but a critical preface is prefixed to each volume. We do not pretend to give any estimate of its merits, on the only ground which it assumes to itself, that of a compendious critical edition; but we may safely recommend it to our readers as cheap, convenient, and scholarlike, before we pass, as we must now do, from the editor to the poet whose text he exhibits. There is no stronger attestation of the influence exercised by Virgil on his country's literature than the large space which the epic occupies in the poetry of post-Augustan Rome. In Greece, after the cessation of that creative activity which produced the poems of the Cycle and the legends of Heracles, the epic muse found scarcely any worshipper worthy of the name. For several centuries the hexameter had the whole field to itself; but when the territory was encroached upon by other settlers, the ancient form of composition dwindled away, like an aboriginal tribe in the presence of later civilisation. While the spirit of Grecian song was pouring itself forth in the lyric and the drama, the recollection of Homer was continued only by a few faint echoes, scarcely audible to contemporary ears, and wholly, or almost wholly, lost to modern times; and though Apollonius Rhodius is not, like Panyasis, Choerilus, and Antimachus, or his own Alexandrian brethren, Rhianus and Euphorion, a mere name to us, we feel as we read him that he would hardly have counted as an eminent poet, among a poetical nation like the Greeks, in an age where poetry was still fresh and vigorous. But in Rome the case is far otherwise. As we pass from the golden to the silver age, we are confronted by a body of epic poetry which contains more than four times the bulk of the Æneid. The Pharsalia of Lucan and the unfinished Argonautics of Valerius Flaccus are indeed shorter than Virgil's poem; but the Thebaid of Statius, taken together with the fragment of the Achilleid, is considerably longer, and the Punic War of Silius Italicus is nearly half as long again. These works, in fact, constitute about a third of the extant classical poetry since the Augustan era. Nor have we any reason to think that they have been preserved to us by mere accident, while others, more worthy of being kept alive, have been left to perish. We may not value these vast heroic efforts as we value some of the less ostentatious performances of the The Empire favourable to Epic, Poetry. 145 same period, the satires of Persius and Juvenal, or the epigrams of Martial. We may prefer, as we doubtless should prefer, the Silvæ of Statius to his Thebaid, and argue that the other three poets might have expended their powers more profitably in attempts of a less ambitious nature. But we cannot doubt that all four stood high in the estimation of their own period, the period immediately succeeding the acme of Roman culture; two of them conspicuously so; and there is certainly some significance in the fact that so much of the poetical power of a not ungifted generation should have been consumed upon a species of poetry which earlier and later ages, for very various reasons, have been equally forward to extol, and equally backward to cultivate. Doubtless there were other influences which tended to recommend the epic to the poets of Cæsarian Rome. In the days of the intellectual glory of Athens, the real successors of Homer were to be found in the great fathers of the drama. To the public, the pleasure of listening to a rhapsodist, however skilled, must have been tame when compared with the charm of a dialogue sustained by well-graced actors, relieved by orchestral music, and set off by the accessories of scenery; while the poet would naturally prefer a field of labour, which, independently of the confessed advantages of novelty and popularity, might appear less interminable and more diversified. But the drama, the tragic drama at any rate, had never taken a thoroughly firm hold on Roman soil; and it withered rather than flourished under the imperial sunshine. The degradation of the chorus stamped it from the first with the character of comparative insignificance; it was Greek tragedy shorn of one half of its glory. Already, in the time of Horace,1 the audience had begun to tire of the tragic dialogue, and to care only for the splendour of the spectacle; and it was not likely that under the successors of Augustus the drama should compete advantageously with the shows of the circus. The tragedy of Seneca was probably unacted tragedy; and unacted tragedy, as the public opinion of our own day tells us, is a plain confession of weakness. But there was still a field for heroic poetry; a wider one, it might seem, than it had enjoyed even in Virgil's time. The poet of the Æneid had read parts of his work in the presence of the imperial family; but, if we except a doubtful story of the recitation of his Eclogues, we do not know that he ever appeared before a more general audience. But the atmosphere of im 1 Horace, Epistles, Book 11. Ep. i. 187 foll. 2 The story is that the Bucolics were so popular as to be recited repeatedly on the stage, and that Cicero, being present on one of these occasions, pronounced the author Magnæ spes altera Romæ." Cicero was killed before Virgil lost his farm, so the whole may be a figment. 66 VOL. XL.-NO. LXXIX. K perial Rome was favourable to recitations; and it is evident from Juvenal's language1 that they formed a more prominent feature in his experience than they had done in that of Horace or Ovid. The same satire which complains that they did not bring money, admits that they brought fame. The poet might appear in his own person, and deliver his own verses, with no actor to intercept the rays of popular favour. The Thebaid, as we learn from the famous passage in Juvenal, was received with rapture by a crowded assembly. The author himself, in a poem to a friend, speaks of the day when the representatives of Rome's great founders will come to hear his Achilleid. We do not know what was the precise nature of the periodical contests for the crown of poetry, which formed so characteristic a feature of this, the silver age of Roman genius, and in which Statius was repeatedly successful; but we may well imagine that the poems submitted to competition would be of a more elaborate kind than the occasional pieces which make up the five books of the Silvæ. The Roman Clio had not yet abandoned faith in her origin; she still strove to execute feats which might be worthy of a goddess. In a later age, we find her contenting herself with minor epic excursions, like the Rape of Proserpine of Claudian, while she sometimes condescends, with Ausonius, to compose catalogues of words and names for grammar-schools, and celebrate the conflicting powers of Yes and No. But at present she is confident in her strength, and even fonder of exhibiting it than when that strength was really at its height. The epigram is the amusement of her leisure moments; she may give days or weeks to the composition of a satire: but it is to poems like the Thebaid, the product of the vigils of twelve long years, that she looks for enduring glory.2 The early Roman epic had been national in subject, if not in form. Nævius had sung of the great struggle against Carthage; Ennius had recounted the annals of the Roman people from the days of Romulus, if not earlier; Hostius had commemorated the war with Histria. The Eneid is the glorification of the forefathers of the imperial nation, who, though vanquished in Phrygia, had been victorious in Italy. But the Eneid, though national in one of its aspects, is exotic in another. It might be read by a Roman as a celebration of the antiquarian glories of his country; it might be read as a tale of the Homeric school, a sequel to the Iliad, a companion to the Odyssey. It would 1 Contrast the early part of the first and seventh satires of Juvenal with such passages as Hor. Sat. 1. iv. 23; Ep. 1. xix. 37 foll. 2 See the concluding lines of the Thebaid : O mihi bissenos multum vigilata per annos The Thebaid as a subject for Narrative Poetry. 147 naturally foster the love, not only of Greek mythology in relation to the history of Rome, but of Greek mythology as such; of that wonderful body of legendary lore, by turns terrible and pathetic, sublime and grotesque, which, even in our alien atmosphere, has such a charm for the imagination of the boy, and for the intellect of the grown man. These two aspects, combined in the Æneid, are found separately in the epics of the silver age. Silius and Lucan choose national subjects; the one going back on the traces of Nævius, and celebrating the Punic wars, the other treading on the scarcely extinguished embers of civil discord, and telling the story of Pharsalia. Flaccus and Statius resort to the storehouse of Grecian fable, which furnishes to the former the voyage of the Argonauts, the subject selected by the Alexandrian poet, to the latter the first siege of Thebes, the fertile theme of Athenian tragedy, and the life of Achilles, that grand whole, of which only a part had been appropriated by Homer. The choice of such a subject as the Thebaid is itself a significant one. It was indeed not new to epic poetry; it formed the subject of one of the poems of the Cycle, the substance of which modern critics have apparently been able to recover by the help of Pindar and Pausanias, though the extant fragments are but few; and it was revived some centuries later by Antimachus of Claros, whose enormous poem, twenty-four books of which were occupied in bringing the Seven Chiefs to Thebes, was listened to, Cicero tells us, by Plato, after all the other auditors had left the room, and is known to have been preferred by the imperial judgment of Hadrian to the works of Homer. Our associations with it are, of course, those of readers of Greek tragedy, in whose gallery of terrible imagery it forms so prominent a feature. There is reason to think, that as treated in the cyclic poem, it was without some of those revolting traits which now characterize it; but whatever may have been the condition in which the tragic poets received it, there can be no doubt about the horrors which invested it when it left their hands. As handled by Eschylus and Euripides, it pleases more than it shocks; but it is only because we have submitted ourselves to the laws of that species of art, the object of which is to purge the passions by pity and terror. Just before Statius' time, Seneca, if we are right, as we well may be, in ascribing the Theban tragedy to him, had shown what might be made of the subject by a practised rhetorician who should simply abandon himself to the task of drawing out its horrible and loathsome details. Possibly, by a recurrence to the ancient severity of treatment, it might have 1 See Mure, History of Greek Literature, vol. ii. pp. 269 foll. 2 Such as the self-inflicted blindness of Edipus. |