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The Arrotino which Smollett so greatly admired, and which the delusive Bianchi declared to be a representation of the Augur Attus Naevius, is now described as "A Scythian whetting his knife to flay Marsyas." Kinglake has an amusingly cynical passage on the impossibility of approaching the sacred shrines of the Holy Land in a fittingly reverential mood.
Early Literature of the Romans; the Fescennine Songs; the Fabulae Atellanae. 2. Early Latin Poets; Livius Andronicus, Naevius, and Ennius. 3. Roman Comedy. 4. Comic Poets; Plautus, Terence, and Statius. 5. Roman Tragedy. 6. Tragic Poets; Pacuvius and Attius. 7. Satire; Lucilius. 8. History and Oratory; Fabius Pictor; Cencius Alimentus; Cato; Varro; M. Antonius; Crassus; Hortensius. 9.
In the time of Horace Naevius was as well known as if he had been a modern; if, therefore, he was merely one, though, the most illustrious, of a long series of bards, it is inconceivable that his predecessors should have been absolutely unknown.
The hypothesis that he was not a Roman citizen, but possibly a burgess of Cales or of some other Latin town in Campania, renders the fact that the Roman police treated him so unscrupulously the more easy of explanation. At any rate he was not an actor, for he served in the army. Compare, e. g., with the verse of Livius the fragment from Naevius' tragedy of -Lycurgus- :
The object of the former was to connect Rome with Alba, that of the latter to connect Rome with Troy; in the former accordingly the city was built by Romulus son of the Alban king, in the latter by the Trojan prince Aeneas. To the present epoch, probably either to Naevius or to Pictor, belongs the amalgamation of the two stories.
For the golden cadence of poesy we have to wait till Virgil; but the strain that Lucretius breathes through bronze is statelier and more sonorous than any other in the stately and sonorous Roman speech. Like Naevius a century and a half before, he might have left the proud and pathetic saying on his tomb that, after he was dead, men forgot to speak Latin in Rome.
-Sed sumne ego stultus, qui rem curo publicam Ubi sunt magistratus, quos curare oporteat? and taken as a whole, we can hardly imagine a comedy politically more tame than was that of Rome in the sixth century. The oldest Roman comic writer of note, Gnaeus Naevius, alone forms a remarkable exception.
Among the old poets, or among those whom both the present age and posterity will disdainfully reject? He may fairly be placed among the ancients, who is younger either by a short month only, or even by a whole year. Is not Naevius in people's hands, and sticking almost fresh in their memory? So sacred is every ancient poem.
Naevius described the first, and Fabius the second, war with Carthage from their own knowledge; Ennius devoted at least thirteen out of the eighteen books of his Annals to the epoch from Pyrrhus down to the Istrian war; Cato narrated in the fourth and fifth books of his historical work the wars from the first Punic war down to that with Perseus, and in the two last books, which probably were planned on a different and ampler scale, he related the events of the last twenty years of his life.
Here too it was Naevius who gave poetic form to so much of the legendary as well as of the contemporary history as admitted of connected narrative; and who, more especially, recorded in the half-prosaic Saturnian national metre the story of the first Punic war simply and distinctly, with a straightforward adherence to fact, without disdaining anything at all as unpoetical, and without at all, especially in the description of historical times, going in pursuit of poetical flights or embellishments maintaining throughout his narrative the present tense.
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