Studies in the Poetry of Italy, Part I. Roman

John Stuart Mill · en

Several of the fragments show a certain measure of descriptive power and
poetic imagination in these early tragedians. The following passage from
the _Argonautæ_ of Accius shows this to a marked degree. It is a
description of the first ship, _Argo_, as she goes plowing through the
sea. It is supposed to be spoken by a rustic who from the shore is
watching the vessel's progress. It should be remembered that the great
boat is as strange a sight to him as were the ships of Columbus to the
natives of newly discovered America. Hence the strange and seemingly
strained metaphors.

                  The mighty mass glides on,
      Like some loud-panting monster of the deep;
      Back roll the waves, in eddying masses whirled.
      It rushes on, besprinkling all the sea
      With flying spray like backward streaming breath;
      As when one sees the cloud-rack whirled along,
      Or some huge mass of rock reft off and driven
      By furious winds, or seething whirlpools, high
      Upbeaten by the ever-rushing waves;
      Or else when Ocean crashes on the shore,
      Or Triton, from the caverns of the sea,
      Far down beneath the swelling waters' depths,
      A rocky mass to upper heaven uprears.

                                                Miller.

Sellar, in speaking of the feeling for natural beauty, says of Accius:
"The fragments of Accius afford the first hint of that enjoyment of
natural beauty which enters largely into a later age"; and quotes the
following passage from the _Oenomaus_ as "perhaps the first instance
in Latin poetry of a descriptive passage which gives any hint of the
pleasure derived from contemplating the common aspects of nature":

    By chance before the dawn, harbinger of burning rays, when the
    husbandmen bring forth the oxen from their rest into the fields,
    that they may break the red, dew-sprinkled soil with the plough,
    and turn up the clods from the soft soil.

When we read this delightful passage, and then turn to the exquisite and
fuller pictures of natural beauty which Lucretius and Vergil have left
us, we shall agree that Accius was himself indeed the "harbinger of
burning rays."


2. LATER ROMAN TRAGEDY AND SENECA