Lucius Seneca - Yale Required Reading - Collected Works (Vol. 2)

Truth. Virgins, O Virgins, to sweet Hymen yield, For as a lone vine in a naked field Never extols her branches, never bears Ripe grapes, but with a headlong heaviness wears Her tender body, and her highest sprout Is quickly levell'd with her fading root; By whom no husbandmen, no youths will dwell; But if by fortune she be married well, To the elm her husband, many husbandmen And many youths inhabit by her then; So whilst a virgin doth untouch'd abide, All unmanur'd she grows old with her pride; But when to equal wedlock, in fit time, Her fortune and endeavour lets her climb, Dear to her love and parents she is held. Virgins, O Virgins, to sweet Hymen yield.

Ben Jonson, The Barriers .

LXIII.

In the metre of this poem Catullus observes the following general type—

Except in 18, Hilarate aere citatis erroribus animum , 53, Et earum omnia adirem furibunda latibula , where the Ionic a minore, which seems to have been the original basis of the rhythm, is preserved intact in the former half of the line. I have followed Catullus generally with exactness, but with an occasional resolution of one long into two short syllables, where it has not been introduced by the poet, e.g. in 31, 34, 49, 64, 65, 68, 79. In v. 10 I have ventured on a license which Catullus does not admit, but which is, I think, justified by other and earlier specimens of the metre, an anaclasis of the original Ionic a minore at the end of the line. In reading this poem it should never be forgotten that there is a pause in the middle of each line, which practically divides it into two halves. Tennyson, in his Boadicea , written on the model of the Attis , divides each verse similarly in the middle; but in the first half he has changed the rhythm of Catullus to a trochaic rhythm, in the second, while producing much of the effect of the Attis by the accumulation of short syllables at the end of the line, he has not bound himself to the same strictly defined feet as Catullus, and generally has preferred to take from the somewhat emasculate character of the verse by adding an unaccented syllable at the close.

LXIII.

8 Taborine

Beat loud the tabourines, let the trumpets blow.

Troilus and Cressida , Act iv. sc. 5.

16 Aby

abide; as, I think, in Spenser's Faerie Queene , vi. 2, 19.

But he was fierce and whot,

Ne time would give, nor any termes aby.

Below, lxiv. 297, I have used it in its more common meaning of atoning for, Faerie Queene , iv. 1, 53.

Yet thou, false Squire, his fault shalt deare aby,

And with thy punishment his penance shalt supply.

Midsummer Night's Dream , iii. 2.

Lest to thy peril thou aby it dear.

24 Ululation.

There sighs, complaints, and ululations loud

Resounded through the air without a star.

Longfellow's Dante Inf . iii. 22.

41 When he smote the shadowy twilight with his healthy team sublime.

Ere yet they blind the stars, and the wild team

Which love thee, yearning for thy yoke, arise,

And shake the darkness from their loosen'd manes,

And beat the twilight into flakes of fire.

Tennyson, Tithonus .

83 On a nervy neck.

Four maned lions hale

The sluggish wheels; solemn their toothed maws,

Their surly eyes brow-hidden, heavy paws

Uplifted drowsily, and nervy tails

Covering their tawny brushes.

Keats, Endymion , II. ad fin.

LXIV. 160.

Yet to your household thou, your kindred palaces olden.

I have combined thou with your purposely, to suggest the idea conveyed in uestras as opposed to potuisti , the family abode as opposed to the individual Theseus.

183 Flexibly fleeting

bent as they move rapidly through the water.

186 No glimmer of hope

from Heyse,

Keinerlei Flucht, kein Schimmer der Hoffnung, stumm liegt Alles.

258 Gordian.

She was a gordian shape of dazzling hue,

Vermilion-spotted, golden, green, and blue.

Keats, Lamia , Part I.

308 Wreaths sat on each hoar crown, whose snows flush' d rosy beneath them.

I have attempted here to give what I conceive Catullus may have meant to convey by the remarkable collocation At roseo niueae residebant uertice uittae . Properly, the wreaths are rosy, the locks snow-white; but the colour of the wreaths is so blent with the colour of the locks that each is lost in the other, and an inversion of epithets becomes possible.

So, in fury of heart, shall death's stern reaper, Achilles.

A verse seems to have been lost here, which I have thus supplied.

LXVIII. 149.

So, it is all I can, take, Allius, answer, a little Verse, to requite thy much friendship, a contrary boon .

These little rites, a stone, a verse, receive,

'Tis all a father, all a friend can give.

Pope, Epitaph on the children of Lord Digby.

LXIX. 4.

Clarity

clearness, transparency.

Here clarity of candour, history's soul,

The critical mind in short.

Browning, Ring and Book , i. 925.

LXX.

Sir Philip Sidney thus translates this poem:—

Unto no body my woman saith shee had rather a wife be,

Then to myself, not though Jove grew a suter of hers.

These be her words, but a woman's words to a love that is eager,

Midde [windes?] or waters stream do require to be writ.

XCIX. 10.

Fricatrice.

To a lewd harlot, a base fricatrice.

Ben Jonson, The Fox , iv. 2.

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***Of the life of Lucretius little is known. Jerome, under the year 95 B. C., says: “Titus Lucretius, the poet, was born, who afterwards was made insane by a love potion, and, when he had in the intervals of his madness written several books, which Cicero corrected, killed himself by his own hand in the forty-fourth year of his age.” 18Donatus, in his Life of Virgil , 19says that Lucretius died on the day when Virgil was fifteen years old, i. e., October 15, 55 B. C. This does not agree with the statement of Jerome. Cicero, in a letter written in February, 54 B. C., 20mentions the poems of Lucretius, but says nothing about correcting or editing them. This is the only contemporary reference to Lucretius or his work. Now the great poem of Lucretius was evidently never entirely finished by its author, who was therefore probably dead when Cicero wrote this letter. The date (55 B. C.) for his death is thus corroborated. The date of his birth must remain uncertain, but it was probably not far from 99 B. C. Jerome’s statement that Lucretius was insane and committed suicide is not in itself improbable. His work shows him to have been a man of passionate and intense feelings, and gives some ground for the belief that in the course of his life he was subjected to great emotional strain. Of his friends and his daily life we know nothing. His poem is dedicated to Memmius, who is generally supposed to be the Gaius Memmius who was proprætor in Bithynia in 57 B. C.

The only work of Lucretius is a didactic poem of six books, in hexameter verse, On the Nature of Things ( De Rerum Natura ), in which he expounds the doctrines of Epicurus. The Romans had been for many years acquainted with Greek philosophical teachings, especially with those of the Stoic and Epicurean schools. The Stoic doctrines had been taught by one of the most eminent philosophers of the second century B. C., Panætius, the friend of the younger Scipio Africanus, and were clearly congenial to the Roman temperament; for the Stoics taught that virtue is the highest good, that nothing else is worth striving for, and that the ordinary pleasures of life are mere interruptions of the philosopher’s peace. The Epicurean doctrine, that pleasure is the highest good, was popular only with those who wished to devote themselves to selfish and physical enjoyment, for the higher aspects of the doctrines of Epicurus were not understood. As early as 161 B. C. the senate had passed a vote banishing philosophers and rhetoricians from Rome, and six years later, when three famous philosophers—Diogenes the Stoic, Critolaus the Peripatetic, and Carneades of the Academic school—came to Rome, they aroused so much interest that the senate decided to remove them from the city as soon as possible. Greek philosophy was, then, not a new thing at Rome, but the poem of Lucretius is the first systematic presentation of the Epicurean doctrines.