CHAPTER VIII - THE ROMAN EPIC BEFORE THE TIME OF VIRGIL

Summary

The distinction between what is called the primitive and the literary epic has become one of the commonplaces of criticism; and no distinction can well be more fundamental. The two kinds of epic poem belong to totally different epochs in civilisation; they are also the products of very different national temperaments and faculties. It is somewhat remarkable that those literatures which are richest in literary epics—the ancient Latin, the modern Italian, and the English—are those which possess few or no native poems of the type realised in the Iliad, the Niebelungen-Lied, and the Song of Roland; nor is there, in connexion with the earlier traditions of the Italian or the English race, that cycle of heroic adventure and personages in which such poems have their origin. The composition of the Aeneid and of the Paradise Lost implies powers of combination, of arranging great masses of materials, of concentration of the mind on a single object, more analogous to those which produced the vast historical work of Livy and ‘The Decline and Fall’ of Gibbon, than to the spontaneity, the naïveté, the rapidity of conception and utterance, and that immediate sympathy between poet and people, to which we owe the continuous poems developed out of some germ of popular ballad or national legend.