We are not called upon to consider here the conditions out of which the earlier type of epic poetry is developed, or to enquire why the Latin race failed to create at least some inartistic legendary poem of sufficient length to be ranked in that form of literature. Perhaps no answer could be given to the question excepting that the Latin race had not sufficient creative force to produce such a work,--which is simply another way of stating the fact that it did not produce epic poems. The Romans were from a very early period interested in their past history and traditions. They seem to have shaped, either out of real incidents in their national and family history, or out of their chief national characteristics, stories of strong human interest(434), which only want the 'vates sacer' to be converted into poems. Every great family seems to have had its own traditions, glorifying the exploits and preserving the memory of illustrious ancestors; and whatever may have been the case in regard to the legendary stories connected with the fortunes of the State, some of these traditions were undoubtedly expressed in rude Saturnian verse, and chanted at family gatherings and at funeral banquets. The memory of these ancestral lays--if we may apply that word to them--survived till the time of Cicero, Horace, and apparently even of Tacitus(435), though no actual trace of them appears to have existed even in the age of the elder Cato. But the influence of these rude germs of poetry--if they exercised any influence on Latin literature at all--was confined to the structure of Roman history. An enquiry into the origin and growth of Roman epic poetry need not concern itself with them.
Neither is it necessary here to go back into the vexed and probably insoluble question of the genesis of the Homeric poems. That these stand in most intimate relation with the Virgilian epic is a patent fact; and the nature of this intimate relation will be examined in some of the subsequent chapters. But they first began to act on the Roman imagination and art many centuries after they assumed their present form. The Romans accepted them as they did the lyrical and dramatic poetry of Greece, and were absolutely unconcerned with the questions as to their origin which interest modern curiosity. For the adequate understanding of the form and substance of the Roman epic as it was shaped by its greatest master, a competent knowledge of the Iliad and Odyssey must be presupposed; but it is unnecessary in a work on Latin literature to discuss the origin and character of the epic poetry of the Greeks on the same scale on which their idyllic and didactic poetry has been discussed in previous chapters.