The Portable Roman Reader (Portable Library)

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

Each volume in The Viking Portable Library either presents a representative selection from the works of a single outstanding writer or offers a comprehensive anthology on a special subject. Averaging 700 pages in length and designed for compactness and readability, these books fill a need not met by other compilations. All are edited by distinguished authorities, who have written introductory essays and included much other helpful material.

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First published in the United States of America
by Viking Penguin Inc. 1951
Paperbound edition published 1959
Reprinted 1961,1962,1963,1964, 1966 (twice),
1967, 1969,1970 ,1972, 1974, 1975
Published in Penguin Books 1977

 

 

Copyright 1951 by Viking Penguin Inc.

Copyright © renewed Viking Penguin Inc., 1979

All rights reserved

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Davenport, Basil, 1905—1966, ed.
The Portable Roman reader.
1. Latin literature—Translations into English.
2. English literature—Translations from Latin.
I. Title.
[PA6163.D38 1977] 870’.8 76-48083

eISBN : 978-1-101-17375-6

 

 

 

 

 

The editor wishes to thank the following for permission to use excerpts from English translations of Latin texts:

George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., London: Poems VIII and LVIII, Catullus,
Translations from Latin Poetry,
translated by R. C. Trevelyan.

Cambridge University Press, London: Poems IX and LXXXV, Catullus, translated by Hugh Macnaghten; and F. L. Lucas and the Cambridge University
Press: Pervigilium Veneris,
translated by F. L. Lucas.

Dodd, Mead & Company, New York: extracts from
Trimalchio’s Dinner
(Petronius) by Harry Thurston Peck, copyright 1898 by Dodd, Mead & Company (copyright renewed).

E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., New York, and J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., London: excerpt from
On the Nature of Things,
Lucretius, translated by William Ellery Leonard; and E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc.: Poem XLVI,
The Poems of Catullus
by William Appleton Aiken, copyright 1950 by William A. Aiken.

Harvard University Press, Cambridge: excerpts from volumes in the Loeb Classical Library:
Gallic War,
Caesar, translated by H. J. Edwards ;
De
Senectute, Cicero, translated by William A. Falconer; In
Catilinan,
Cicero, translated by Louis E. Lord;
Roman History, Livy,
translated by B. O. Foster;
Germania,
Tacitus, translated by William Peterson;
Annals,
Tacitus, translated by John Jackson.

Henry Holt and Company, Inc., New York, and The Society of Authors, London, as the Literary Representative of the Trustees of the Estate of the late A. E. Housman: Ode IV:7, Horace,
The Collected Poems of A. E. Housman,
copyright 1936 by Barclays Bank, Ltd., 1940 by Henry Holt and Company, Inc.

Longmans Green & Co., Limited, and the Representatives of the late Andrew Lang, London: Poems XXXI and CI, Catullus,
The Poetical Works of Andrew Lang.

Routledge and Kegan Paul, Ltd., London: epigrams, Martial,
The Twelve Books
of
Epigrams
by J. A. Pott and F. A. Wright.

Russell & Volkening, Inc., New York: Ode 1:7, Horace, translated by Lord Dunsany.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago: “Medea,”
Tragedies of Seneca
by Frank Justus Miller.

NOT long ago I was talking to a young friend of mine, a college graduate, intelligent, well read, and very fond of books. He happened to speak of
The Ides of March,
Thornton Wilder’s novel of Caesar and Cleopatra, and referred to it as illustrating conditions “toward the end of the Roman Empire.” I was more than startled. The idea that anybody at all could suppose that Julius Cæsar flourished toward the end of the Roman Empire filled me with the same sort of horror and pity that filled the elder Mrs. Day at the thought that in a Christian country anybody could miss being baptized. These emotions remained with me, and led me to reflect both on the probable number of men of my friend’s age who knew no more of Rome than he did, and on why it seemed to me such a loss for them.

A generation ago the answer to the latter question would have been prompt. One must know the history of Rome because one learned valuable lessons from it. Upon further inquiry as to what one learned, it appeared to be that from the rise of Rome one learned how to build a great state, and from the fall of Rome how to keep it from falling. Moreover, if the answer was given by an Englishman or an American, it was with a comfortable sense that the first of these lessons had been well learned, and there would be no need for the second just yet. We were still as confident as Gibbon, when, in finishing his
Decline and Fallofthe Roman Empire,
he congratulated himself that there were no powerful barbarians ready to overrun civilization; if he had dared, he might have added that the Christianity he saw around him did not seem sufficiently enthusiastic to be a menace to the state. Now, with the barbarians at the gate, when we inquire what did cause the fall of Rome, we are given a bewildering choice of answers. Rome fell because of persecuting the Christians, and of being converted by them; because of the invasions of the Goths, and of the Anopheles mosquito; because of bread and circuses, and of the natural aging of an organism. All of us who have old-fashioned church-going upbring ings can remember earnest preachers maintaining (like Thomas Wolfe’s schoolma‘am, who declared that the wages of Falstaff’s sin was death at a ripe old age) that the crimes of Nero led to the fall of Rome some four centuries later; and perhaps some of us have found Gibbon more brilliant, but no more convincing. What we can be sure of is, first, that Rome established what, considering the conditions of communication, can be called a world state, a society of many peoples and languages united in a common citizenship, and that for some hundreds of years she gave them peace and on the whole good government; and, second, that the Empire was established at the cost of a period of civil wars, political assassinations, secret denunciations, and party purges, and was later maintained by a bureaucracy so efficient that it kept the Empire alive when it is quite arguable that it would have been better dead. Compared with our grandfathers, we are nearer the world state as an ideal, and nearer the blood baths in reality.

The Rome that did this is one of the great formative facts of our world. Not to know Rome is not to know the character of one of one’s own immediate ancestors—an ancestor who has of late been less thought of than Athens and Jerusalem, and deservedly so, but an ancestor all the same, whose traits keep turning up in his descendants. And not to know Roman history is not to know one of the great historic dramas. The story of Rome is not indeed a tragedy in Aristotle’s sense. Greece of the Golden Age, and the Southern Confederacy, are examples among the nations of the Aristotelian tragic hero—the great man who by a certain flaw in his nature is brought to a downfall greater than he deserved. And, like classic heroes, both the Golden Age and the Confederacy fell with a crash. Rome is like George Eliot’s Tito Melema, the brilliant young man whose flaw grows and grows until his downfall is deserved; Rome is like Ethan Frome, the cripple who goes on living too long. It is a tragedy, perhaps, even more to the modem taste. And both the history and the mind of Rome are reflected, more, probably, than those of any other people, in its literature. Sherlock Holmes’ ideal reasoner, who from a single drop of water could deduce an Atlantic or a Niagara, could undoubtedly deduce the rise, greatness, and decline of Rome from reading, in order, Plautus, Virgil, and Juvenal; and without being an ideal reasoner one can still feel, in every work of Latin literature, the quality of Romanness.
Ex pede Herculem—
from the foot alone you may infer Hercules.

In the beginning, and for a long time thereafter, the Romans were a nation of soldiers. Throughout her history Rome was almost continuously at war somewhere along her lengthening or shrinking frontiers, and during the Republic every Roman was a soldier—potentially at least, and most often actually. That may be the reason for a certain hard-bitten realism and practicality in the Roman attitude toward life. Their plastic arts are for the most part imitated from the Greeks, and coarsened in the imitating; their great contributions are the arch, the aqueduct, the Roman road—and the portrait bust, which shows not an ideal athlete but an actual general or emperor, warts and all. One of the earliest pieces of Roman literature is a treatise on practical farming by the elder statesman Cato; one of the masterpieces of the Golden Age is the Georgics of Virgil, a solitary instance of a treatise on practical farming which is also fine poetry. The
Works andDays
of the Greek Hesiod is much less complete and more mythological; it opens with a myth of the Origin of Evil—which, as in Genesis, is why farming is necessary. In passing, it is significant that Hesiod is writing as a man who farms his own acres, Virgil as a gentleman farmer whose land is tilled by slaves; the Roman, at least the Roman who read and wrote, was far richer than the corresponding Greek. In this connection it is also significant that the practical Cato lays it down as a maxim that a slave should be either working or sleeping, and also recommends selling off old slaves for what they will fetch, to save their keep. Roman philosophy, in contrast to the metaphysical and aesthetic speculations of the Greeks, is almost entirely concerned with ethics. The exception, the great Roman philosopher Lucretius, is entirely concerned with two points: the Nature of Things—not the Nature of Reality but the way things actually are, as a matter of observation and deduction; and the eminently practical goal of Peace of Mind. And in both comedy and tragedy, the Romans delighted in
sententiæ,
short, pithy observations on the proper conduct of life.