Aim and Motive in Roman Writers Part I

Extract

What is it that prompts an author to write? Or, supposing some initial stimulus towards writing in general exists, what governs an author's choice of theme and his treatment of it? What does he try to do through his writing, and what does he find writing offers him? No doubt the final answers to these questions belong to psychology and metaphysics rather than literature, but at any rate various approaches can be made with firm and familiar ground still underfoot. One may say, for example, with Dr. Johnson that ‘no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money’ and there is no need to look far into the literary history of Rome to find men writing to earn their living or improve their circumstances in life. Livius Andronicus was a slave and taught and wrote his way to freedom; Plautus worked in a mill until he had bettered himself by his plays. The same is likely to have been true of Caecilius, another slave, and Terence, if manumitted early in life for personal reasons, would not have been enabled without his writing to maintain his closeness to wealthy and influential men—so much so that the Bacon-Shakespeare controversy has an earlier counterpart through his association with Scipio Africanus and Laelius. Ennius is another such, an obscure southern Italian whose qualities were recognized by M. Porcius Cato and got him an entry to Rome. True, Ennius did trace his descent from Messapus, the eponymous Boeotian king of Messapia, but as with Callimachus and Battus one does not know how serious the claim was: in hard cash at any rate it seems to have been worth little, for he lived in Rome simply enough writing and teaching until further patronage came.