Beginnings

Roman literature began in 240 when Livius Andronicus, a Greek slave from southern Italy, turned a Greek play into Latin for the celebration of Rome’s victory over Carthage in the First Punic War.1 Among the many oddities of this story is the fact that we can put a date on the beginning of Roman literature. Other languages have their earliest poems; Roman literature has a beginning. And this beginning is precisely a multicultural moment of translation and transformation, one that believes in both the value of another national literature and the value of Roman participation in that cultural achievement. It was a transformation, however, that would change Roman festivals and the Latin language as well as the Greek traditions Livius translated.

Livius came to Rome as a prisoner of war. He was an actor who produced tragedies and comedies and wrote hymns; he was a tutor, who translated the Odyssey for his students. The fragments we have of this translation show that it was not merely a trot for reading Greek. The meter is the Saturnian - a name that suggests an Italic origin, although the current consensus is that even this meter is the result of the influence of Greek culture on Rome from the sixth century on. Whatever its origin, the adaptation of Greek epic meter into Latin Saturnian meter is an attempt to naturalize the cultural value of Homer. Similarly, the Greek ‘‘Muse’’ that Homer invokes in the first line of his poem becomes the Latin rustic deity, Camena, one of the Roman fountain goddesses. Perhaps an odd choice until one realizes that in the tradition of poets and fountains, poets drank from fountains that defined their inspiration; Livius drinks from Italian fountains. His line replaces the varied elegance of Homer’s diction with archaic Latin alliteration. The hero, Odysseus, who in Homer is polutropos, ‘‘a man of many turns,’’ is in Andronicus versutus, likewise ‘‘twisty,’’ but with two additional implications: one, moral, which is to say that the Roman translation imports a potentially pejorative perspective on the hero;2 and the other literary, that is, in Andronicus when Odysseus is ‘‘translated’’ as versutus, he is made into versus, and so becomes ‘‘well-versed or well-turned.’’ In Andronicus’ translation, ‘‘the well-versed Ulysses’’ traveling westward across the Mediterranean (a hero who in some legends traveled with Aeneas and helped to found Latin cities; see also Chapter 22) becomes (at least potentially) a trope for translation and cultural acquisition.

Livius Andronicus set in motion a process that was at once appropriative and transformative. He adds patronymics: Kalypso becomes ‘‘the nymph, Calypso, daughter of Atlas’’ and the Muse becomes ‘‘the divine daughter of Admonition.’’ ‘‘The baneful destiny of death’’ is reimagined within Roman divination and religion as ‘‘the day which Fatality foretold.’’ Andronicus does not just translate Homeric ideas; he Romanizes them. As the Greek slave made the Homeric achievement accessible in Latin and made Latin permeable to Greek ideas, he turned himself into a Roman and invented Roman literature.

Soon, Naevius, an Italian born near Capua, would rework and expand these techniques to create a cultural and literary idiom that was at once Greek and Roman: his Bellum Poenicum was both the historical account of the First Punic War and a literary epic with the machinery of Greek mythology. But what is most remarkable about Naevius’ world is that Naevius himself took part in this war: Naevius, then, tells a story of himself that takes place in a hybrid world that exists only in his literary imagination. It is rather like the shield he describes: ‘‘Upon it were engraved images, like the Titans, /the Giants with double bodies, the great Atlases, /Grubber and Purple, the sons of Earth’’ (Pun. 19) In this world, identity is the process of assimilation and appropriation. Naevius is not the man who fought the Carthaginians in the First Punic War, but the cultural assimilator who could see that war in terms of the Homer’s Iliad and Achilles’ shield.

But the assimilation of Greek culture that was taking place during the third and second centuries was not unproblematic.3 Roman grammarians adopted Greek terms to describe their language and their rhetoric. Roman aristocrats learned Greek and they called those who did not speak Greek or Latin ‘‘barbarians’’ (from barbaros, Greek for those who did not speak Greek). But they mocked Greek intellectualism, contemned Greek manners, plundered Greek cities, labeled political enemies ‘‘Little Greeks’’ (Graeculi), and felt that it was a political disadvantage even to appear to speak Greek. While they complained about the paucity of their vocabulary, they were consistently eliminating what was inelegant, superfluous, and inefficient from it.4 In a field of responses as charged and contradictory as this, it is clear that none of the positions taken says anything comprehensive about what was happening to Roman identity. The process was so highly charged precisely because Roman culture was defining itself in terms of Greek culture (see also Chapter 22).

Resistance to this Hellenization is exemplified by Cato, a wealthy farmer born in Tusculum in 234, 15 miles south of Rome, and a vocal anti-Hellene. In 204 as military tribune he met Ennius, an intellectual born in 239 in Calabria - a place where Oscan, Greek, and Latin culture intersected - and serving in the Roman army. He brought Ennius to Rome. Both men found themselves at the center of complex efforts to wrestle with (or deploy for political gain) what it meant to be Roman. Cato, a new man to the Roman political scene, staked his future on a conservative stand toward both politics and literature and became a vocal anti-Hellene. He wrote a prose history of Rome in which the actions of Roman generals were always cast as the actions of the state and its officers, not the achievements of individuals (see also Chapter 2). This emphasis on the Roman state and its offices, however, was not without its rhetorical and literary posturing: Cato called his history the Origines, or ‘‘The Origins,’’ a title that espoused on its surface a conservative stance, while it translated into Latin the title of one of the most influential of Greek poems, Callimachus’ Aetia, a clever, learned, and elitist poem on Greek mythology and human psychology. Thus, even Cato’s anti-Hellenic posturing was deployed in Hellenic terms. But if Cato was saying to the cultural elite that the true Roman response to the sophisticated learning of Callimachus’ Aetia was his Roman Origines, Ennius took up the challenge. He wrote an epic poem, one that began the long process of adapting the Greek hexameter to Latin norms. He borrowed heavily from both Homer, Callimachus, and the tragedians. Then he titled his Callimachean-Homeric epic Annales after the annual records of Roman history kept by priests.

Both the conservative and the innovator are engaged in a contest for what Rome will mean and how its history will be written by appropriating and deploying the cultural cache of both Rome and Greece: Cato writes a radically conservative, moralistic history and gives it a neo-Callimachean title, while Ennius writes a neo-Callimachean epic and gives it a conservative Roman title. Rome was defining itself with and against the cultural prestige of Greece to such an extent that neither Cato nor Ennius could position themselves in the Roman cultural debate without positioning themselves in terms of Greece. And it is, of course, no surprise that Cato himself, despite his staunch opposition to Hellenistic excesses, was well versed in Greek, employed Ennius as a Greek tutor for his children, studied Pythagorean philosophy and wrote on rhetoric.5

Ennius’ poem became the national epic of Rome, until it was supplanted by Virgil’s Aeneid. In addition to negotiating a Graeco-Roman identity and extending the tradition that began with Livius Andronicus and Naevius, it took an aggressive stance toward the literature it assimilated. Two examples will show the degree of appropriation and suggest the energies that it required. First, Ennius had to adapt the Greek hexameter to the Latin language. This was no easy task. On the one hand, the Greek language was qualitative, creating metrical effects out of the length (not the accent) of syllables; it had formulaic phrases that, among other things, could bring the hexameter to a close; and it was well furnished with short syllables which kept the verse light and swift. Latin, on the other hand, had (by comparison) too many long syllables, no tradition of formulaic epic verse, and a stress accent that could create tedious singsong effects when syllabic stress coincided with the long (qualitative) syllable of the verse. To make the Greek hexameter work in Latin, Ennius had to invent (or apply) new aesthetic principles: he changed the pause that divided the line; he created tensions between the pulse of the hexameter and the stress accents of prose pronunciation; he developed patterns of conflict and resolution that moved the verse forward while emphasizing its dactylic rhythm in every cadence.6 Line after line of Ennius is already applying the principles that will shape the stately measure of Virgil’s verse - a verse that is simultaneously Greek and indelibly Latin. After Ennius, the Latin hexameter was the established form, and no one again attempted to write a long poem in Saturnians.

Second, he undertook a work that was simultaneously historiographical and epic. Beginning with the fall of Troy and the regal period, he continued his epic down to his present. This is unique: we have poems that are foundation epics and chronicles of peoples, poems that sing the praises of kings, but we know of no prior poetic history of a nation from its origins to the present. The Iliad, by way of contrast, takes place over roughly a two-week period. Ennius’ expansion clearly reflects upon his own ambitions. But, when we recall that he was Messapian by birth, Oscan by family connection, Greek by education, and Roman by military service, one cannot ignore the extraordinary global ambitions of this epic and Roman project. Ennius, a Calabrian who became a Roman, continued the cultural acquisition of Greece by joining his ambitions to the aggrandizement of Rome as he turned national history into epic.

Ennius was proud of his assimilation of Greek culture. Near the beginning of his epic, he records that Homer came to him and told him that he was ‘‘Homer reborn.’’ The dream is itself an echo of a Hesiodic dream told in Callimachean fashion. And, for his position as poet, he rejected the Roman term, vates, and preferred the Greek term, poeta. But when he came to write his epitaph, it was resoundingly Roman: ‘‘Behold, my fellow-citizens, the image that recalls the old man Ennius; /He composed the greatest deeds of your fore-fathers’’ (Epig. 1). Here, a citizen addresses fellow-citizens while remaining fully conscious of his naturalized status (‘‘your forefathers’’). One might even say that his status as Roman depends as much upon his naturalization as it does upon his ability to represent for Romans their history as Romans (see also Chapter 28).

Shortly after Cato and Ennius had imagined Romanness as deeply engaged with the assimilation and appropriation of Greek values and culture, Mummius sacked and wasted Corinth, bringing to Rome what he could of those extravagant and luxurious Greek treasures (see also Chapter 24) - a reminder that appropriation is not always generous nor assimilation respectful.