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Updated: May 11, 2025
It is true that the endeavour to replace the gods and heroes of legend by the kings and consuls of Rome resembles the attempt of the giants to storm heaven by means of mountains piled one above another: without a world of gods there is no ancient epos and no ancient drama, and poetry knows no substitutes.
The republican movements, which deprived these families of their privileges, were favorable to the stronger development of each man's individuality, and the poet, who in the most perfect form of the epos was completely lost in his subject, now came before the people as a man with thoughts and objects of his own, and gave free vent to the emotions of his soul in elegiac and iambic strains.
But those who walk in epos, drama, or romance, see through the labouring months the young moons wax and wane, and watch the night from evening unto morning star, and from sunrise unto sunsetting can note the shifting day with all its gold and shadow.
With the origin and the occult meaning of the folklore of Poictesme this book at least is in no wise concerned: its unambitious aim has been merely to familiarize English readers with the Jurgen epos for the tale's sake. Since this volume is presented simply as a story to be read for pastime, neither morality nor symbolism is hereinafter educed, and no "parallels" and "authorities" are quoted.
The time did come at length when the full epos of a remarkable prosperity was closed up and sealed for De Quincey. But that was in the unseen future. To the child it was not permitted to look beyond the hazy lines that bounded his oasis of flowers into the fruitless waste abroad.
Ennius proposed to himself the very same task as Naevius; but the similarity of the subject only brings out into stronger relief the political and poetical contrast between the national and the anti- national poet. Naevius sought out for the new subject a new form; Ennius fitted or forced it into the forms of the Hellenic epos.
In lyric poetry there are only intervals and gradations between the song, the ode, and the elegy, but no proper contrast. The spirit of epic poetry, as we recognise it in its father, Homer, is clear self-possession. The epos is the calm quiet representation of an action in progress.
Owing to the interest of the subject especially for aristocratic circles, and the great plastic talent of the poet, the Annals remained the oldest Roman original poem which appeared to the culture of later generations readable or worth reading; and thus, singularly enough, posterity came to honour this thoroughly anti- national epos of a half-Greek -litterateur- as the true model poem of Rome.
Manius Valerius caused the victory which he obtained over the Carthaginians and Hiero in 491 off Messana to be depicted on the side wall of the senate- house the first historical frescoes in Rome, which were followed by many of similar character, and which were in the domain of the arts of design what the national epos and the national drama became not much later in the domain of poetry.
He was a younger contemporary of Andronicus his poetical activity began considerably before, and probably did not end till after, the Hannibalic war and felt in a general sense his influence; he was, as is usually the case in artificial literatures, a worker in all the forms of art produced by his predecessor, in epos, tragedy, and comedy, and closely adhered to him in the matter of metres.
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