[i]

The Library
of
Literary History

A LITERARY HISTORY OF INDIA. By R. W. Frazer, LL.B.

A LITERARY HISTORY OF IRELAND. By Douglas Hyde, LL.D.

A LITERARY HISTORY OF AMERICA. By Barrett Wendell.

A LITERARY HISTORY OF SCOTLAND. By J. H. Millar, LL.B.

A LITERARY HISTORY OF PERSIA. By Edward G. Browne, M.A. (In Two Volumes.)

A LITERARY HISTORY OF FRANCE. By Émile Faguet.

A LITERARY HISTORY OF THE ARABS. By Reynold A. Nicholson, M.A.

A LITERARY HISTORY OF ROME TO THE CLOSE OF THE GOLDEN AGE. By J. Wight Duff, M.A., D.Litt., LL.D.

A LITERARY HISTORY OF RUSSIA.

A LITERARY HISTORY OF ROME IN THE SILVER
AGE. By J. Wight Duff, M.A., D.Litt., LL.D.

Other Volumes in Preparation.

A LITERARY HISTORY OF THE JEWS. By Israel Abrahams, M.A.

A LITERARY HISTORY OF SPAIN. By James Fitzmaurice-Kelly.

ETC. ETC. ETC.

[ii]

[iii]

THE LIBRARY
OF
LITERARY HISTORY

A Literary History of Rome
in the Silver Age

A Literary History of Rome.
From the Origins to the Close of the Golden Age.

“Mr. Duff’s wide acquaintance with modern literature is not the least of his qualifications.... His treatise, full and erudite, yet everywhere human and interesting, cannot fail to deepen in his readers the sense of the continuity of literature and the relation of literature to life, and the debt of the modern world to Rome.”—The Times.

“Professor Wight Duff compels us to listen. To those who even dimly remember their Latin there is something irresistible in his style and arrangement, in his knowledge and in the temperate freshness of his criticism.”—The Nation.

“A work of rare scholarship condensed with consummate care and judgment.”—Scotsman.

“What particularly marks it out for suggestiveness and vigour is the broad human platform from which it surveys the progress of Latin poetry and prose.”—The Daily Telegraph.

“An author who can render so many diverse authors adequately appeals to us at once as an understanding critic at any rate.... There is labour and erudition and a keen sense of literary values.”—Saturday Review.

“The book is thoroughly up-to-date, and incorporates the results of recent philological and historical research. It is written in a style which commands admiration for its lucidity, terseness and vigour.”—The Classical Review.

“The taste and skill of his illustrative translations indicate a critic whose independent judgment of literary quality, and whose divination of the final and essential charm of a masterpiece are far better worth recording than is usually the case in works of this sort. As a matter of fact, however, we have had no works of this sort, at all events, in our own tongue.”—American Journal of Philology.

“L’ouvrage s’addresse donc à un large public cultivé, sans exclure les gens de métier.... Ses jugements sont ceux d’un homme de goût qui n’accepte pas sans examen les décisions d’autrui.... Il connaît bien ce dont il parle et il le fait connaître.”—Professor Lejay in Revue de philologie de littérature et d’histoire anciennes.

“Ein sympathetisches und wohl zu lesendes Buch, dessen Recht und Wert darin legt dass der Verfasser ein persönliches Verhältnis zu den Personen und Dingen hat über die er schreibt, seine Eindrücke in die Beleuchtung einer feinen und weiten Bildung rückt, stets das Ganze nicht trüben lässt, noch auch umgekehrt. Er hat auch Sinn für den Hintergrund und Zusammenhang der Dinge, wenigstens so weit beides römisch ist.”—Professor Friedrich Leo in Deutsche Literaturzeitung.

[v]

A Literary History
of Rome in the
Silver Age

From Tiberius to Hadrian

By
J. Wight Duff

M.A., D.Litt. (Oxon.), Hon. D.Litt. (Durham), LL.D. (Aberdeen);
Professor of Classics, Armstrong College (in the University
of Durham), Newcastle-upon-Tyne

Author of
“A Literary History of Rome to the Close of the Golden
Age” and “Writers of Rome”

T. Fisher Unwin Limited
Bouverie House, Fleet Street
1927

[vi]

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN

[vii]

LITTERARVM VETERVM
STVDIOSIS AMATORIBVS
HAS QVALESCVMQVE SVNT LVCVBRATIONES
DE AETATE ARGENTEA EXARATAS
LIBENTISSIMO ANIMO
IOANNES WIGHT DUFF
D. D. D.
ID. IVL. MCMXXVII

[viii]

The favourable reception accorded in several countries to my work on A Literary History of Rome from the Origins to the Close of the Golden Age, of which the first edition appeared in 1909, suggested the idea of continuing on similar principles the study of Latin literature into the first and second centuries, during which the Roman empire at its zenith in power and efficiency rendered its greatest services to human civilisation. The project was dropped throughout the period of the Great War, when, even if publication had been feasible, duties on a local Brigade Committee and for a time as Acting-Principal of my College effectually removed me from the atmosphere of literary criticism. Even after my publisher, Mr. Fisher Unwin, was good enough to revive the design, progress was extraordinarily slow, owing to the increasing demands made upon time by the recurrent problems of a modern university.

As in the former volume, emphasis has here been laid on the national character imprinted upon Latin literature despite all borrowings from Greek models; and attention has been carefully devoted to the evidence for the facts of an author’s life in an endeavour to recreate the environment amidst which he wrote. Nor have material sources, whether Greek or Latin, been overlooked: indispensable though some account of these must be for a true conception of a writer as at once inheritor and progenitor, it is surprising to note how little in this country scholarship has concerned itself with the origin of encyclopaedic learning like that of the elder Pliny. The arrangement adopted is different from that in Professor [x]Summers’s skilful handling of a slightly shorter period in his Silver Age of Latin Literature under headings of various kinds of literature rather than on chronological lines. In the present work, where historical background and literary evolution are alike regarded as of vital importance, the treatment has been not according to genre but mainly in the order of time. While the limits set for full discussion of authors are A.D. 14–A.D. 138, these dates are not rigidly observed respecting relevant topics, such as the survival of an author’s influence till modern times or the continuance of the Roman educational system; and an epilogue is added to give a brief conspectus of the literature which followed the Silver Age.

An attempt has been made to secure acquaintance with a reasonable proportion of the vast number of treatises and pamphlets written in Latin and in several modern languages upon matters related to the authors of the period. The obligations incurred to such works may be gauged from references in the footnotes. But it is obvious that no amount of reading in books upon books, however valuable in substance, can avail to produce either a vital chronicle of any age or serviceable estimates of its writers without first-hand study of the writers themselves and independent appreciation of their significance. I hope, therefore, for success in conveying to readers, by summary, by quotation, and by criticism, something of the impression made on myself during adventures among the literary products of the Silver Age. The illustrative translations from Latin into prose or verse are my own, and have been for the most part composed specially for this volume. Thanks are due to the Delegates of the Oxford University Press for permission to use a few verse renderings which I made for my book on The Writers of Rome. The general reader, whose Latin has perhaps grown rusty, may welcome these translations as supplementing the historical and critical portions, while he will doubtless realize that it is optional to consult or not to consult the footnotes.

[xi]

The bibliographical notes, it should be explained, are intended, not to be exhaustive, but to give by mention of selected editions some clue to the history of the printed text of an author and to include representative modern studies of his literary significance.

I wish to acknowledge kind assistance rendered by Mr. Basil Anderton, M.A., Public Librarian, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and by Miss Constance Shipley, M.A., Lecturer in Classics at Armstrong College, in reading and criticising some of the chapters of this book. My son, Mr. Arnold M. Duff, M.A., B.Litt.(Oxon.), Assistant Lecturer in Greek in the University of Aberdeen, has also perused several chapters and made useful suggestions, while my wife copied for the press either by hand or by typewriter almost the whole manuscript. Both have helped greatly in the checking of proofs and in the verification of references. To Professor Hermann Dessau of Berlin I owe several references to inscriptions which he sent me some years ago to amplify those in my article on “Roman Education” in The Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics. In the choice of a frontispiece, intended to illustrate the art of the period, I had the great benefit of advice from Mrs. Arthur Strong, Litt.D., LL.D., formerly Assistant-Director of the British School at Rome, in whose penetrating discernment of the true ethos of Roman sculpture I have found much to reinforce my argument that within the analogous domain of literature the Romans knew not only how to borrow from Greece but also how independently to create the beautiful.

It is a satisfaction to observe among scholars a growing insistence upon the independent vitality of Roman literature and a growing disinclination to regard it as a pale second-hand reflection of the splendour of Greek literature. My friend, the late Dr. Warde Fowler, appended to his Presidential Address on “The Imagination of the Romans,” read at the Newcastle-upon-Tyne Meeting of the central Classical Association of England and Wales in 1920, a note to the [xii]effect that he was in agreement with the contentions advocated on the subject in my Literary History of Rome; and only last year a German Professor, Herr Günther Jachmann, chose as the theme of an inaugural lecture at Köln “Die Originalität der römischen Literatur”. The value of Roman literature cannot be grasped without recognition of the extent to which Roman authors found fresh stimulus in surroundings widened far beyond those assigned by historical circumstance to the brilliant intellects of Greece.

J. W. D.

Newcastle-upon-Tyne
July 1927

In the literary history of Rome one of the most brilliant and attractive epochs is that part of the first and second centuries of the Christian era which critics have usually distinguished with the epithet of “Silver.” The Silver Age of Roman Literature is regarded in the present work as that immediately following the great times of Augustan poetry and prose. What has been traditionally reckoned the Golden Age coincided with the productive careers of Cicero and then Livy in prose, and lasted from Lucretius to Ovid in verse. While, soon after it began, Catullus wrote his anti-Caesarian lampoons, it reached its fullest glory when Virgil and Horace by their works threw lustre around the emergence of the imperial family—ecce Dionaei processit Caesaris astrum, in the language of the Eclogues. Politically, therefore, the Golden Age saw the final overthrow of the old senatorial republic and the inauguration of state-control by a single ruler for Rome and the Roman dominions. Such public oratory as Cicero’s, which adorned the earlier [2]phases of the age amidst the unfettered interplay of republican politics, had become an impossible anachronism before its close, when Augustus concentrated in his person all the significant powers of the ancient magistracies—munia senatus magistratuum legum in se trahere is the remark of Tacitus. In time, then, the Golden Age may be dated from 70 B.C. to A.D. 14, a stretch of eighty-four years.

The Silver Age is a longer period, even when restricted, as some prefer, to the years between A.D. 14 and 117, that is from the beginning of Tiberius’s reign to the end of Trajan’s. Here it has been extended to include the reign of Hadrian, A.D. 117-138, after which Latin literature is marked partly by sterility, partly by an artificial archaizing movement, partly by the entirely different train of thought expressed in Christian apologetics. Historically, this period of a century and a quarter coincides with the reigns of all but the first two of Suetonius’s twelve Caesars, and, in addition, the reigns of Nerva, Trajan and Hadrian, thirteen emperors altogether. If in the preceding age the empire was still young and so far, under Augustus, only partially tested, now during these succeeding generations, in spite of the enormities of individual emperors and in spite of the ghastly interval of bloodshed among successive candidates for the purple after Nero’s suicide, the hold of the system upon the world was firmly established, and its organization perfected, on the whole, for the benefit of mankind. With the Pax Romana came greater safety for life and limb both in Italy and in the provinces; governors abroad were more under the central control; roads were improved to meet the requirements of the imperial post-service for despatches; the water-supply of Rome and other cities was diligently cared for; new harbours were constructed; industry and trade increased, at any rate up to the point at which the policy of the bread-dole effected moral ruin for the population and in the end financial ruin for a state in which the value of free agriculture and free capital was misunderstood. Nihil est ab omni parte beatum; and so, upon examination, it is plain that amidst the material well-being and felicities of the second century, even in the prosperous Antonine age with which Gibbon began his history of The [3]Decline and Fall, there lurked elements of disintegration which would lead to the troubles of the third century.⁠[1]⁠

During the first century events had revealed the state-secret not only that emperors might be made by other electors than the Senate, but that they might be made even elsewhere than in Rome. The tendency, in fact, was towards a military monarchy, as the careers of Galba, Otho, Vitellius and Vespasian showed. When one considers, it seems well-nigh inevitable that an emperor’s absolute power abroad should ultimately expand his theoretically limited power in Italy and Rome towards absolutism. Between Augustus as first citizen at the opening of the century and Domitian claiming to be “Lord and God” towards its end vast changes had intervened. The dyarchy which Augustus was careful to respect had in time gone far on its way to monarchy; for the senate not infrequently acted under imperial coercion. More and more, too, it grew evident that the basis of the ruler’s power was the army—a conception abhorrent to Romans of the constitutional republic. In this connexion it is significant that the title imperator became commoner than princeps about Trajan’s time. Moreover, the worship of emperors during their lifetime in association with the cult of the goddess Roma, and the deification of certain emperors after death, outwardly exalted their office. It is, however, difficult to see how the notion of apotheosis could seriously survive among thinking readers of Seneca’s satire on the dead emperor Claudius; and it is a strange contradiction inherent in circumstances that, while the sacrifice in honour of a Caesar as the public test of loyalty involved the martyrdom of many Christians, yet the Caesar-worship from which their faith revolted did actually by its attainment of official universality prepare the way for the ultimate predominance of the Christian religion.

The crucial problem for the empire was, as Augustus foresaw, one of consolidation rather than aggrandisement; [4]and the only notable departures from this policy during the whole period were connected with the annexations in Britain begun by Claudius and those in Dacia and the East carried out by Trajan. Trajan’s Oriental conquests in the first quarter of the second century, though soon abandoned by his successor, brought the Roman Empire to its widest extent, and marked the extremity of contrast between the primitive pastoral settlement near the Tiber and the capital of world-wide dominions into which it had evolved. Rome had in the first century become more cosmopolitan than ever—a phenomenon sufficient to illustrate in the eyes of a Seneca the essential brotherhood of mankind, but in the eyes of a Juvenal the objectionable ubiquity of the alien interloper. It has been argued that, early in the second century, when Juvenal and Tacitus wrote, “a very small percentage of the free plebeians on the streets of Rome could prove unmixed Italian descent.”⁠[2] Here at once we meet a feature of importance for literature. Rome possessed a wonderful power of nationalizing the foreigner; but there was sure to be a reaction on her own life and thought. This large cosmopolitan and international element in the capital contributed towards a widening of their horizon for literary men, and to it the human note unquestionably observable in the Silver Age owed a great deal.

The whole period has been made very real to us by writers within recent times who have investigated its political, constitutional, social, religious and artistic history.⁠[3] Modern inquiry has combined with ancient documents to recreate the historical background requisite for appreciation of the literature, in such a way that few epochs of the past are so intimately [5]known. In some degree this clear view is due to the strikingly human note, the living interest in man and his concerns, which is characteristic of the ablest writers in the Silver Age. Much of its history and many of its personages have been made to live for us by Tacitus and Suetonius; its society by Petronius’s novel, the miscellaneous poems of Statius, the younger Pliny’s letters, Martial’s epigrams and Juvenal’s satires; its science by the elder Pliny; its rhetoric by the elder Seneca and Quintilian; its practical ethics by Seneca the younger. Inscriptions and coins tell their tale; the Colosseum remains the most imposing monument to the Flavian dynasty; Pompeii puts before us the dwellings, decorations and the very street-paving of the time; and Hadrian is brought nearer through his magnificent villa, a veritable urbis opus, close under Tivoli, his gateway at Athens, his wall in Britain, and his mausoleum familiar now as the Castel Sant’ Angelo at Rome.

Before passing from the historical aspects of the age, one may observe how the emperors comported themselves in relation to literature.⁠[4] They were well-educated men, and several of them showed literary talent. Tiberius in early life cultivated the acquaintance of M. Valerius Messala Corvinus, the friend of Horace and Tibullus, and modelled his oratorical style on Messala’s. It was said that he imitated the pathetic love-stories of Parthenios of Nicaea, who taught Virgil Greek. Tiberius’s successor Caligula was no author, but he had a turn for shrewd criticism, discernible in his sharp remark about Seneca’s style as “sand without lime;”⁠[5] and he recognized classic greatness in literature well enough to be insanely jealous of it. The next two emperors, Claudius and Nero, displayed ability as writers, the one in prose, the other in verse. If we then turn to the Flavian emperors, we find that, although none of the three felt so enthusiastic for literature as either Claudius or Nero had done, yet they all extended a certain limited patronage to authors. Vespasian, bourgeois man of business though he might be, was not unskilled in Greek eloquence, and composed memoirs. Titus, we know, wrote a poem on a [6]comet; while his brother Domitian was devoted to poetry in youth, and later fostered poetic rivalry by the Capitoline and Alban contests. That competition, when the right circumstances co-operate, can give health to literature is evident from the lasting greatness of Athenian drama: unfortunately, the spirit of Domitian’s reign was such as mainly to favour mediocrity or truckling in its poets. Trajan, without profound culture himself and no very active patron of letters, at least maintained friendly relations with such authors as the younger Pliny and the Greek Dion Chrysostom. His successor Hadrian, versatile and Hellenic in taste, dabbled in Latin poetry; but, to judge from the surviving fragments, never so successfully as at the last, when he composed his death-bed adieu in half a dozen lines to his soul.

Even such a cursory glance at rulers of the time indicates that the drawback for literature consisted not in their particular unfitness to play the literary patron but in a generally untoward environment. Artistic creation of the very freest and highest order was little likely to thrive in the atmosphere of the first century. The risk of danger always lay hidden in the unfathomable temperament of an emperor; and in the very essence of the new régime there wrought elements inimical to the safe production of literary work. The outspoken oratory of the past was unacceptable; history was capable of giving offence in high quarters; even drama could be frowned upon for a line misconstrued as a political allusion. At a time when Phaedrus’s beast-fables were denounced as libellous insults, it is not surprising that histories of human affairs should be adjudged to the flames. The prospects for literary men must often have appeared dark during the sway of the Julio-Claudian dynasty in situations such as were created by the espionage which Tiberius permitted in his later days, by the incalculable caprice of Caligula, the uncertainties of policy under the wives and freedmen of Claudius, and the egotistic vanity of Nero. The wonder is not that we have so small a yield from times so difficult, but that we have so much that has proved worth preserving. Fortunately, writers took risks. Under Nero, Petronius was safe, up to a point, in writing a novel of low [7]adventure, and Seneca was safe, again up to a point, in writing essays on high moral principles, though even these might be interpreted as implied reproofs. Lucan, on the other hand, was clearly on the thinnest ice in writing an epic about Pompey’s heroism in his warfare against Julius Caesar. This was doubly dangerous; because while the poem might very well be regarded as anti-imperial, it might also stir the jealousy of a poet-emperor. Later, under the Flavians, no one could be sure when the court might grow too suspicious to tolerate philosophers any longer in Rome, as happened in A.D. 75 and 90. Deep intellectual speculation has always been liable to enmity as unsettling: and so many members of noble houses had in troublous times found consolation in Stoicism that its teaching particularly tended to be associated with opposition to the imperial system. Apart from this aspect, it may be noted in passing how Stoic thought shows itself in such poets as Persius, Lucan and Juvenal, and in such prose writers as Seneca, the elder Pliny and Tacitus. The period of terror during the later part of Domitian’s reign, fifteen years of “silence” as Tacitus viewed it, pressed most severely upon history. But it was not impossible to write securely, if an author chose remote epic themes as Statius did, or composed scores of occasional epigrams as Martial did. Indeed, there never was a time when dilettanti recited more energetically their latest productions before a select circle of friends. After Domitian’s death, history and oratory recovered a modicum at least of their old freedom. Nerva’s principate was too brief to affect literature deeply, though it brought that welcome release from tyranny which bore fullest fruit in the historical labours of Tacitus under Trajan. This fresh impulse, however, seemed almost spent by the reign of Hadrian; for Suetonius and Florus were artistically but poor successors to Tacitus. Under Hadrian a revival of interest in Hellenism and the prominence of authors writing in Greek combined with the emperor’s example to act as positive setbacks to the fashion of writing in Latin.

In its literary aspects the whole age makes a fascinating study. Its appropriate epithet of “Silver” concedes the classic superiority of the Golden Age (aurea prima sata est aetas ... subiit [8]argentea proles); but silver, viewed as metal or as literature, retains a value of its own, and the metaphorical title, whether it calls to mind a glittering style or a literary convention already somewhat silvered with time, is both picturesque and instructive. No apology is needed for a survey of literary works created during the greatest period of the Roman Empire. Parallel with its administrative triumphs and its permanent services to civilization, we discover, in an adventure among its masterpieces, artistic production of high quality, thought commensurate with the achievement of the times, and engrossing portrayal of life. Convention has been alluded to, and we may trace much of it at work among authors; yet it is only fair to point out that the Silver Age had its unique geniuses. Nowhere else is a Tacitus or a Juvenal to be found, each uttering an individual note, and each among the greatest names in the domains of historical prose and poetic satire respectively. Phaedrus in fable, Petronius in the novel, Martial in epigram, Pliny in letter-writing were all fresh forces; nor is there any Seneca elsewhere in Latin, whether we like his style or not. Even the massive proportions of some works composed during this age are impressive though sometimes forbidding—it is so much easier, and commoner, to criticize than to read the thirty-seven books of Pliny’s Natural History or the seventeen of Silius’s epic. Before the incessant industry of the elder Pliny, less hard-working generations might, like his nephew, stand abashed. But such phenomenal diligence is not necessarily attractive; and probably what most draws readers to the Silver Age is that human note already mentioned which, in the midst of widespread artificiality elsewhere, makes many of the authors interesting to all periods. No one can take up Petronius, Juvenal, Martial or Tacitus without feeling that real life and real things are being described and without feeling absorbed by that reality.

The chief formative factors of this complex literature may be rapidly passed under review. Foremost of all the influences at work was the contemporary education in letters and rhetoric.⁠[6] While the general training in letters opened up the treasures [9]of Greek and Latin literature as sources of inspiration for prospective writers, the special training in the principles and practice of speaking profoundly affected style. The predominant study of poets in the rhetorical academies tended to obliterate the true demarcation between prose and poetry, leaving upon prose the indelible poetic tint which is characteristic of the Silver Age. The imitation of Virgil, traceable in Lucan, well-marked in Valerius Flaccus, and still more so in Silius and Statius, was by no means confined to these epic writers; it spread to occasional verse, epigram and satire; and it invaded prose, so that the style of Tacitus must be viewed in relation to Virgilian influence. Nor was this only a matter of poetic colour: the bones, as it were, of the language were affected in the altered grammar and syntax which have presently to be discussed and illustrated.

Manner of expression came to be deeply modified by the systematic instruction in rhetoric and by the declamatory exercises (especially the controuersia and suasoria) composed by the student practising the use of figures of speech, exclamations, apostrophes, interrogations, and innumerable other artifices, which he had been taught by a rhetor to consider effective for the purposes of argument or display. The declamation wore more than one aspect. A serious ingredient in the educational system, it was an exercise to be regularly practised by learners as a training in argument; and, whatever its futility under some instructors, sensible authorities like Quintilian had in view the solid kind of argument useful in a law-court.⁠[7] It combined certain of the functions of a modern essay with those of a debating society. It had even a romantic side; for not a few of its themes anticipated elements in medieval tales and modern novels. But it was open to attack from the first. The Romans indeed showed their common sense in calling the exercise declamatio—something of loud-voiced overstatement was implied in that half-derogatory term. Being a pillar of the educational fabric it was, like most things in education, pretty [10]sure to be criticized. However much pleasure it might give an admiring parent to hear his son exhibit his eloquence on speech day, this supreme test of the school career and reputed passport to success in life was subjected to incisive attacks, examples of which may be read in Petronius and Tacitus. No one could deny the readiness attainable by such practice in the rhetorical academy, any more than one could fairly overlook the metaphysical importance of some at least of the themes with which medieval Scholasticism was concerned; but in the one case, as in the other, a ceaseless immersion in verbiage caused stagnation of thought. Obscurantist professors of what was in itself an excellent art checked the progress of eloquence and robbed it eventually of life. Yet for generations it defied detraction, and in spite of defects, produced a long line of capable speakers. Unduly elaborated subtlety was at the worst wearisome: it was not destructive like the shameless perversion of the art practised by professional informers (delatores), who saw in the share of confiscated goods allowed to them by the Government a handsome reward for misapplying rhetoric towards compassing convictions on charges of treason.

Two sets of circumstances reinforced this rhetorical influence; one, the not uncommon habit of continuing exercise in declamations, either privately or under a master, long after college days; the other, an author’s custom, derived from Augustan times, of holding recitationes of his compositions in prose or verse before an invited gathering of friends, partly to elicit criticism, partly to advertise a forthcoming work, and also very largely to impress the audience. Under this last aim lay many pitfalls. Literature designed for a kind of parade tended to repeat the qualities of the academic show-piece. The ideal coveted was the production of telling effects. Hence ingenuity was expected in narrative, description and argument, with the result that a wide entrance stood open for the precious and far-fetched. A discourse, an oration, or a poem had to exhibit its author’s ability in elaborating academic commonplaces into surprisingly terse epigrams or sententiae; it had to wear the variegated adornments of rhetoric so that the style often became outrageously rococo in taste. Of the worst [11]excesses of the Silver Age one feels as did Alceste in Le Misanthrope, when he expressed his disdain for Oronte’s sonnet:

Artificiality driven to such extremes meant a divorce from plain common sense; for natural feeling met its death in the exuberant riot of epigram, word-play, antithesis, apostrophes and other devices. Similarly, when presenting a hypothetical case in a controuersia or suasoria, the speaker’s temptation was to cast about for novel arguments; and the quest after something novel was apt to lead far away from reality into unnatural extravagances of perverted ingenuity. Both defence and attack in the controuersiae reported by the elder Seneca give, we shall find, many examples of those incredibly smart inventions. Rhetorical gymnastics of this sort, while they had the merit of ensuring a high degree of readiness and finish in speech and in style as a whole, yet fostered in some speakers and authors an empty glibness from which no great literature could grow. The contemporary complaints about the decadence of oratory are significant. Despite all the attention lavished upon it, eloquence deteriorated. Over-cultivation would contribute to a measure of staleness, and political conditions had taken the heart out of the old type; but, beyond all that, the rhetoric of the schools was too remote from truth to produce good style.

It was well for literature, therefore, that actual life counteracted the cramping effects of rhetorical training. Many a promising academic speaker got his first salutary awakening when he had to plead a real case in a law-court. Furthermore, contact with the multiplicity of life in Rome, and with the various peoples included in the empire, was certain to stimulate and deepen an interest in man as such. It would be a profound mistake to overlook the complex nature of the Silver literature, or to imagine that we could sum up its qualities as if they were solely those of clever rhetoric, or to forget the realists of the time—Petronius, Juvenal, Martial. Of these three, while Petronius proves that he could compose in the conventional vein when he liked, it is Juvenal who makes the most interesting [12]blend, because he can be at once declamatory and realistic. If the worst manner of the declamations reappears in some of the rant which disfigures Seneca’s tragedies, Juvenal on the other hand is not mastered by but master of the declamatory element. This simply indicates that rhetorical artifice could be turned to different purposes by different hands: while it was used with mechanical precision by Valerius Maximus and with oppressive ingenuity by Lucan, it attained a miraculous brilliance under the pen of Tacitus. One feels with relief that Tacitus avoids Lucan’s besetting sin of overdoing the epigrammatic; for no Latin author is so absorbingly possessed by the passion for point as Lucan. Like Ovid in his quest after cleverness, Lucan casts about among several ways of saying the same thing, serves up obscure subtleties, and inserts digressions favourable to erudite description. As in his fellow epic-writers Valerius, Statius, Silius, this love of description again and again beguiles the author into subordinating the artistic unity of the whole to the elaboration of separate passages.

It has been pointed out that, alongside of this prevalence of the academic, there was the corrective element of genuine interest in man to give permanent value to much of the Silver Literature. While direct observation of life was the best antidote to unreal rhetoric, there were other factors which made for serious thought in preference to merely smart expression. One, already mentioned, was the Stoic philosophy, which offered to its followers an ordered view of the world as well as guidance in matters of conduct, especially at a crisis in life. Now grown more practical and therefore more Roman, since it had abandoned its extremest paradoxes, neo-Stoicism counted among the influences which encouraged a fellow-feeling amongst mankind. Between Stoicism and Cynicism, which the earlier Stoics had admitted to be a short cut to virtue,⁠[8] there was much in common. In agreement broadly, although not in detail, concerning virtue, reason (logos), cosmopolitanism and freedom of will, both disciplines reckoned numerous adherents in the early empire. They now definitely overshadowed the neo-Pythagoreans and neo-Sceptics. Other schools also had [13]lost ground. The prestige of Epicureanism was waning, while pure Platonism and pure Aristotelianism failed to attract the Roman mind. But Stoicism contained elements more commendably intelligible. Above all things, it emphasized conduct: it was an applied science of life, offering for troublesome enigmas a solution which, even if not finally satisfying, claimed a true accord with nature, and in the experience of many was found workable. With less demand upon intellectual subtlety than Platonism, practical Stoicism more adequately suited the Roman temperament as a preparation for facing the things that may happen.⁠[9] For many thinking Romans it must have been a consolation to realize that, though they might feel repelled from activity in the political sphere controlled by a Caesar, they yet remained citizens of a cosmopolis—a world-state, wherein they were fellow-citizens with God, participators in the divine essence and free by reason of a freedom divinely conferred. “God is near you,” writes Seneca, “with you, within you. This I say, Lucilius: a holy spirit abides within us, watcher of our deeds good or evil, and guardian over us.”⁠[10] In the spiritual realm, then, the Stoic was an intellectual aristocrat, conscious of an eternally virtuous power which enabled him to disdain misfortune and defy a Nero or a Domitian. Nor was this position the outcome of tumid rhetoric or ingenious theorizing: it was put to the proof: it was a faith in which men died and women faced exile.

Theoretically the Stoic creed did not prevent its followers from being loyal citizens of the empire; but in practice there was certain to be conflict. Their exaltation of virtue and their austere regimen in life were implicit rebukes to a luxurious emperor or court: the not uncommon actual abstention of Stoics from politics and their half-cynical attitude of independence gave further grounds for suspicion. Julius Kanus offended Caligula by uncompromising argument, and Thrasea under Nero was charged with disbelief in the deification of Poppaea and with contempt for state-religion. Besides, the historical [14]outlook of many Stoics as laudatores temporis acti tended to give umbrage in high imperial quarters. Revolutionary sympathies might not illogically be suspected in enthusiasts for “Romans of the olden times.” It had been dangerous to call Cassius “last of the Romans”: it was scarcely less dangerous to drink toasts to the memory of Brutus and Cassius on their birthdays.⁠[11] There lay significance in the fact that Helvidius Priscus, who had been banished by Nero, renewed under Vespasian his subversive propaganda in favour of what was termed democracy, but was really planned to be a government of Rome by the senatorial class in consonance with philosophical ideas.⁠[12] It is scarcely surprising then that Vespasian expelled all philosophers except Musonius.⁠[13] Only after Domitian did the imperial government become reconciled with Stoicism, which in the second century was the prevailing creed of educated Romans and found one of its classic exponents in the Greek reflections of an emperor.

The concept of a Stoic opposition under the empire must not call up the picture of a regularly organized party of disaffection. The Stoic might, like Seneca, take service with a Caesar. But among several features of the empire which provoked hostility two at any rate stand out. A Stoic could not avoid feeling repelled at once by Caesar-worship, and by the development of a largely mechanical bureaucracy in which the individual lacked scope for the competent performance of duty. Now Stoicism claimed to supply the very competence for which there was little or no safe outlet in imperial employment. The strong tendency among Roman Stoics of the first century to accentuate the individual came less from an aggressive Cynic standpoint than, as in Seneca, from a conception of the inward development of personality effected by rigorous self-examination. It did not amount to an assertion of the individual as an absolute [15]and independent entity; nevertheless, it encouraged that doctrine of self-sufficiency and that portion of disdain for others which can be illustrated from both Lucan and Persius.

Nor should the senatorial opposition under the Caesars be mistaken for lineal representatives of the nobles of the republic. The old families died out fast: some of their scions, as Tacitus and Juvenal show, lapsed into indigence and menial occupations. The patrician houses of the senate in Julius’s day are almost extinct by Hadrian’s time: Aemilii, Claudii, Fabii, Manlii and Valerii are gone: it is almost a surprise to find Cornelii. This disappearance of the ancient blood was due not so much to tyranny as to that voluntary childlessness which imperial legislation had attempted to discourage. A large proportion, then, of the new aristocracy was not of the old republican stock, but represented a fresh strain drawn from the industrial democracy of Caesar’s age: it was destined in turn to collapse through its own prosperity.

Both on contemporary and on subsequent thought neo-Stoicism exercised an almost incalculable influence. The insistence on a moral order in nature to which man must conform made for salutary discipline, and the doctrine of the immanence of the divine reason ennobled the conception of duty. The recognition of moral progress, in contrast to the uncompromising tenet of sudden perfection held by the early Stoics, was a more practical, a more encouraging, a more human view which possessed a tonic value beyond the reach of outworn paradoxes. Again, while the Stoic teaching on the brotherhood of man fostered kindliness, that on the equality of man fostered fairness of treatment.⁠[14] These and other doctrines of value colour the deep Stoic influence on Roman law. In the field of religion, Stoicism proved ultimately to be a solvent of polytheism; for though Stoics might profess belief in the divinities of traditional paganism, they yet turned to allegory as an explanation of the myths, and thus tended to undermine an unquestioning acceptance of the gods. Stoicism, [16]therefore, with its pantheistic trend contributed to the annihilation of traditional religion among the intellectuals without fully establishing monotheism to replace the polytheistic system.

Another of the more serious influences of the age, largely, though, as we shall find, not entirely independent of rhetorical artifice, was the practical interest in learning of an encyclopaedic sort, exemplified in Celsus, the elder Pliny and the lost works of Suetonius. The discontent repeatedly expressed over men’s waste of time is another reminder that the more serious thinkers were unlikely to reap permanent satisfaction either from social amenities or from vapid rhetoric. We have something like a gospel of work if we combine Phaedrus’s scoffing remarks on the fussy ardaliones, Seneca’s distaste for spending energy on trifles, the elder Pliny’s nervous husbandry of hours for study, his nephew’s grumblings about encroachments upon leisure, and even Martial’s regrets over procrastination and lost opportunities—soles ... nobis pereunt et imputantur, as he so humanly says.

Yet another influence which must not go unnoticed is that of the provinces, and especially the influence exercised by the old province of Spain. With some claim to have developed a partially independent culture of its own, it spoke a Latin which naturally retained certain idioms, words and sounds used by previous generations of soldiers and colonists. Latin which had grown old-fashioned at Rome might still in these days be heard in Spain. It is not altogether fanciful to detect a Spanish note in parts of the Silver Literature; for among Romano-Spaniards of the time were the Senecas and Lucan, Columella, Quintilian, Martial, besides several rhetors of standing. Trajan was a native of the Spanish Italica, where Hadrian’s ancestors had lived since the days of the Scipios. It is significant of the contribution being made by the provinces to Rome that the Spanish influence is observable in the first century, to be followed by the development of an African Latinity in the second, and the flourishing of Romano-Gallic rhetoric in the third. The contemporary influence of Greece also acted externally upon Rome in so far as it was exerted by Greeks who taught or wrote in the city. History has recorded how responsive to personal [17]contact with Greece itself were emperors like Nero and Hadrian; but the deeper Hellenic influence lay imbedded in the literature of the past, constantly lectured upon and assimilated generation after generation in Rome.

The wonderful variety of the Silver literature depends on the intermingling of such currents of influence, old and new. Tradition and inheritance, both Greek and Roman, operate side by side with fresh problems and interests. It was no age of stagnation. Distinctive, though conventional, voices are heard in the epics of Lucan and of his three successors, Valerius, Statius and Silius, whether, as in the case of the first and the last of these, they chose a historical theme, or, as in the case of the other two, they had recourse to mythology. Virgilianism acted there, as it also did in the eclogues by which Calpurnius Siculus transmitted pastoral poetry to Nemesianus. The drama of the day, never very great, has left, besides the Octauia, which is the single extant historical play in Latin, only Seneca’s mythological tragedies based on the Greek dramatists. Far more individual power is shown in satire. Persius, a convinced young Stoic student of Horace, fulminates in crabbedly compressed sermonettes against moral backsliding; and later, Juvenal, proclaiming himself to belong to the literary lineage of Lucilius and Horace, displays his unsurpassable strength of invective. Satire may be said to have taken a new turn early in the first century when Phaedrus used the iambics of his beast-fables to suggest with mischievous irony the foibles of mankind, and once more a new turn when, in the last quarter of the century, Martial perfected the epigram with the stinging close after the fashion which has ever since made him famous. In the revival of the Menippean satire, formerly associated with the name of Varro, we again encounter the medley of verse and prose. This type is represented in Seneca’s skit on the deification of Claudius and in Petronius’s picaresque novel.

As regards prose style, the names of Seneca and Petronius mark two different tendencies traceable throughout the period—Seneca, usually artificial, though less so in his satire; and Petronius, as becomes a portrayer of manners, more influenced by the spoken Latin of his day. It might have been expected [18]that encyclopaedic, scientific and technical learning should be uniformly conveyed in the simple style; but it is not always so. Straightforward expression, as a rule, characterized Celsus in the medical part of his encyclopaedia (and presumably also in the lost parts), besides Columella in his agricultural treatise, and Frontinus writing about aqueducts; whereas one detects, on the other hand, the lure of the purple patch when the elder Pliny pauses for intervals of reflection in his gigantic Natural History. So too Pomponius Mela’s geographical manual is needlessly decorated with flashes of intended eloquence; while Valerius Maximus’s handbook of stories for rhetoricians would have been more entertaining, had he told the stories in plainer style, leaving embellishment to the rhetoricians for whom he collected them. In history restraint of style is far to seek. Velleius Paterculus is convicted by his excessive superlatives alone, though one forgives him much for his surprisingly original interest in certain aspects of literary history. Curtius Rufus, handling the grand subject of Alexander’s campaigns, shows his ability in semi-romantic description rather than in historical inquiry. During the Neronian era, we meet the epigrammatic manner in Seneca’s philosophy. The brilliant neatness of his sentences lent them a quotability which essayists in later literatures have loved. But this is a manner whose qualities cloy; and a revulsion from his style soon took place, when in the Flavian era Quintilian’s lectures warned students against the seductions of Senecan prose and beckoned them back to Cicero’s rounded periods as the true models for composition. A modified Ciceronianism is, therefore, visible in Quintilian, and a still more modified Ciceronianism in his pupil, the younger Pliny. It also marks Tacitus’s early dialogue on oratory; but his characteristic style, that of his historical writing, is notoriously the triumph of an original genius in verbal parsimony. The closing phase of the Silver Age still exhibits the two tendencies side by side in Suetonius’s business-like sentences and in Florus’s feeble echoes of rhetorical utterance.

The language which was the medium for this literature may be briefly surveyed. Some aspects of Silver Latinity have been incidentally touched upon in connexion with the preponderating [19]amount of poetry read at school, which bore fruit not merely in poetic phraseology and Virgilian imitations, but in constructions (like the familiar dative of the agent with a passive verb) now transferred from poetry to prose. No doubt some of the typical usages and idioms which we shall find illustrated in Silver authors are due to the inevitable change which any living language must undergo. Old words gain a new meaning:⁠[15] new words are introduced. The Latin of Cicero could not have been, either in vocabulary or in sentence-structure or in grammar, the Latin of five generations later:⁠[16] hence we are prepared to observe in Tacitus and other writers of the Silver Age alterations in the employment of the subjunctive mood, fresh meanings of prepositions (like circa and citra), new usages of and new positions for connective particles.⁠[17]⁠

In tracing differences between Silver and earlier Latin, it is difficult to assess the relative importance of the universal tendency in language towards change and of such special influences as the systematic drill in rhetoric and poetry. Some apparent changes such as are noticeable in the position of igitur, in a seemingly strange word, or strange meaning, or in the use of a mood, are in reality inheritances from one or two prose writers of the Golden Age, especially Sallust and Livy: what had once been an exception has become, if not the rule, at least much commoner. Apart, however, from the inevitable laws of development, the Latin language of the first century and a half of the Christian era was most deeply affected by three fixed attitudes of mind—the rhetorical passion for terseness, the [20]rhetorical passion for novel modes of expression, and the rhetorical concentration of study upon poetic authors. Of these, compression was especially admired in the clause or phrase with epigrammatic point, but its pursuit was accountable not only for the shorter sentence in vogue, but for all sorts of ellipses⁠[18] in grammar and for a copious employment of asyndeton. The avoidance of the stereotyped made for the introduction of new words and meanings, greater freedom in the handling of moods, and a departure from the more regularly balanced clauses and phrases of Ciceronian Latin. Many of the changes in vocabulary are due to the individual genius of prose writers who invented words, or, by adopting them from the common speech, gave them a literary cachet. Under this head, Tacitus is an excellent example both as innovator and as lover of the rare word. Probably few who use the term “accumulator,” in speaking of modern apparatus, know that it was invented by Tacitus to describe one who heaps up wealth. The liking for the unusual which pervades his sentence-structure, his expression and his syntax descends into his selection of words. Thus, when there is a choice between noun-forms ending in -men and -mentum, he characteristically decides for the more uncommon form: he actually invents imitamentum, though imitamen had the poetic sanction of Ovid.

The wholesale invasion of prose by the poetic element already emphasized calls only for a few illustrations in a preliminary survey. It is poetic example that leads Seneca to write senium for senectus, Venus for amor, iuuenta for iuuentus, and leads Tacitus to use Lucretian words like insatiabiliter, Virgilian words like breuia (“shoals”), and adjectives like indefessus and intemeratus which both Virgil and Ovid had used before him. It is the poetic turn of expression also that fostered the increasing boldness of personification in prose, the use of abstract nouns in a concrete or personal sense,⁠[19] and the [21]substantival use of a neuter adjective.⁠[20] Poetry affected the grammar of cases and tenses as well. Thus the Latin perfect used in a general sense, like the gnomic “aorist of experience” in Greek, was in Augustan Latin still a poetic usage of which Virgil was fond in the Georgics; but by Seneca’s time it had passed into imperial prose.⁠[21] These and other instances, too many for citation here, make it evident that the language no less than the literature of the Silver Age has the interest of possessing distinctive features of its own.

A few reflections may fitly form a summary and conclusion to this introduction. When considering the Silver Age, in style so easily contrasted with its golden predecessor, one must beware of so isolating its artificialities as to produce an impression that it teems with faults. The truth rather is that the Silver Age does by a natural process of literary evolution continue tendencies already present in Augustan times. There is in Horace an artificiality which in some measure anticipates Persius and Statius; there are in Ovid ingenuities prophetic of Seneca and Lucan; and in Sallust and Livy aspects of prose which foreshadow Tacitus. There was no violent break; but in time, if only by reason of a gradual and apparently cyclic exhaustion of genius, the changes become too obvious to miss. It is perfectly reasonable, it is indeed incumbent, to state the differences; but they must be so stated as to include not merely signs of stylistic variation but fresh notes of wider outlook in certain later writers who come close to the general human heart, perhaps because less exclusively aristocratic than the elder Romans. A catholic criticism must do justice to their strength as well as to their weakness.

Such a caveat is needful, because the factors of national deterioration, even though they worked slowly, were unquestionably manifold. They were not merely political and economic: they were physiological and, what is of deep significance [22]for literature, they were psychological. Though it is easy to to take an exaggerated view of vice under the empire, there is nevertheless significance in the fact that the most powerful voices in the whole period are the voices of protest raised by Juvenal and Tacitus: satire and irony inevitably flourished in such an environment. There is a strong temptation to see little but proof of decadence in the conventional imitators among the poets of the age, its literary conceits, and unreal rhetoric, and even in its occasional recourse to the opposite tendency towards innovation, which French criticism has taught us to associate, as much as imitation, with decadent literature. Broadly the undeniable truth is that the Silver poets, whatever their literary skill, have fallen off in sheer artistic achievement. To turn from Lucretius and Virgil to Valerius Flaccus and Statius is to recognize an inferior quality of soul. The Silver poets have less whereon to feed man’s higher nature. Virgil’s profundity of feeling and reflection is something more enduring than refinements based on rhetorical commonplaces. Enough has, however, been said to lay stress upon the variety of the Silver Age, and upon the unfairness of estimating it solely as an age of decadence. One can no more affix a single label on a composite era than one can indict a nation. If the feeble echo or the falsetto note is often heard, it is not the only sound. The literature of the time must be judged positively by its own appeal to the world. Under this aspect, the Silver Age has its unique luminaries, the individuality of whose genius ensures them permanent fame. The mark of the true classic is the power of giving pleasure to the young and old of many generations through some fascinating and constantly renewed testimony to the indestructible continuity of human nature. Its interest is therefore universal, and its popularity unrestricted to an epoch. Readers of different countries at different epochs find in such work a source of eternal delight: it is not alien to them, nor they to it. In so far as authors of the Silver Age can address themselves successfully to mankind, and some of them beyond challenge retain this power, their place is secure among the immortals.

The main clue to the literary qualities of Silver Latin is to be found in education, and particularly in rhetorical education. No social or political factor exercised so determining an influence upon the literature of imperial Rome. It cannot be too clearly realized how potent must have been the effect of a training which was undergone by the writers, speakers and civil servants of each generation, and which had for its cardinal aims, first, to secure a thoroughly appreciative acquaintance with the best poetry in the literatures of Greece and Rome, and, next, to equip students with the power of effective and persuasive speech. A connected account of the education in vogue is, therefore, a fitting prelude to the evidence for the rhetorical system which may be drawn from such sources as the Controuersiae et Suasoriae collected by the elder Seneca, Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria, Tacitus’s Dialogus de Oratoribus and the notes by Suetonius De Grammaticis and De Rhetoribus.

Roman education, viewed in its continuity, underwent certain well-defined processes of evolution.⁠[22] Its history from first to last, from simple to complex, possesses the interest of [24]showing how the primitive domestic discipline made way for a cosmopolitan culture imparted in great measure by skilful foreigners, and how the ancient training of what we should call a primary type came to be amplified by a “secondary” curriculum, and still further by advanced courses of a “University” character. Interesting, however, as is the whole of this development, it is with definite phases and periods that we are here concerned. One may, in fact, conveniently think of Roman education as falling broadly into three ages, ending, each in its turn, with the Punic Wars, the reign of Hadrian (circ. A.D. 120), and the close of the Western Empire. Here we are mainly concentrating attention on the earlier generations of the Christian era; and what we find, as regards education, is that, before the opening of our period, scholastic training at Rome had gone through its most progressive stage, and, in range of subjects and interest, had left far behind the ancient parental instruction. That old type of instruction is best exemplified by the rigid, unromantic and severely practical method according to which the elder Cato brought up his son,⁠[23] and which, despite limitations, was well adapted to the mind, body and estate of the older Romans. It was a grounding in the elements of reading, writing and arithmetic, coupled with sound physical and moral instruction, and had been entrusted by custom largely to those agents of education in the home whom Seneca happily calls the “domestic magistrates.”⁠[24] In those early times which the younger Pliny⁠[25] recalls with admiring regret, it was possible that every parent should be an instructor and that the intimate companionship between father and son should be relied upon to guarantee not only proficiency [25]in the barest essentials of intellectual education, but also ability to serve in the army, knowledge of the laws and of religious rites, propriety of conduct and experience helpful in advising or controlling men.

As the ages passed, however, increased complexity of social conditions, together with the influx of Greeks whether bond or free, tended inevitably to relegate the work of equipping youthful minds to cultured slaves under parental supervision, and, at a later stage, very often to grammarians, rhetoricians and philosophers who settled in Rome eager to convey knowledge. Besides, the Romans, as conquest brought them nearer to world-dominion, were shrewd enough to recognize that a training which had suited the burgher of a city-state stood in need of generous extension, if it were to mould the citizens of a governing power charged with imperial responsibilities. The momentous agent of expansion in Roman education was the influence of Greece.⁠[26] The expansion itself may be fairly gauged from the acquaintance with the principles of Greek rhetoric common among the upper classes at Rome by the middle of the second century B.C., and from the establishment of three several grades of education controlled respectively by the litterator, the grammaticus and the rhetor. These correspond roughly to the elementary, secondary and University standards of modern days.⁠[27] While, however, literary and rhetorical education had reached a high pitch of proficiency long before our period opens and ceased to alter much in method, there are, on the other hand, before our period closes, signs of a changed attitude towards education on the part of the imperial authorities—signs, in fact, indicating some amount of endowment and control by municipalities and by the Emperor.

Allusion has been made to the emergence of three grades of education. Of these, the “secondary” and “University” grades possessed under the Empire the deepest significance for their effects upon literature because of the attention bestowed upon [26]the grammatical and aesthetic study of authors, upon rhetoric and upon philosophy. But while the bearing on literature is necessarily closer at these second and third stages in the educational fabric, still one cannot ignore the “primary” training, which contained features of fundamental importance for thought and literary production. It is not germane here to consider, as Quintilian does in the first book of his treatise, the methods of conveying to children the rudiments of reading, writing and arithmetic,⁠[28] or to comment on the awkwardness of the Roman numerals.⁠[29] Perhaps, in passing, it may be worth remark that the proportion of illiterates in ancient Rome was less than many might be disposed to guess; for elementary education must have been fairly extensive by the time of Polybius to admit of the circulation of military orders in writing; and the scribblings on walls in Pompeii argue a widespread ability to read and write in the first century A.D. But two problems in the most elementary education are not to be passed over, for they appeared to ancient thinkers to be vital in their influence upon character and taste. These were the choice of a nurse, and, at a subsequent stage, the choice of books from which reading should be taught. To Quintilian both were matters of serious consideration. Although primitive custom preferred, and learned authors⁠[30] argued, that mothers should suckle their own infants, and although the devoted care of a mother remained up to imperial times an appreciable and appreciated factor in shaping youthful lives,⁠[31] still there is evidence for the employment, at an early period in Rome, of both foster-mothers and dry nurses. At a later period the large number of household nurses [27]may be inferred from inscriptions.⁠[32] Their province, it was recognized, was not confined to sound alimentation; they helped to form character for better or worse, and to eliminate bad habits, mischievous notions and incorrect pronunciations. Hence the emphasis laid upon the selection of suitable nurses in Quintilian and in the treatise De Educatione ascribed to Plutarch.

The other matter in the elementary education which bears on literary equipment is the choice of reading-books. The scarcity of literary texts in Latin, which stimulated Livius Andronicus in the third century B.C. to translate the Odyssey, had long since ceased to trouble teachers; the difficulty came to lie rather in the embarrassing wealth of available material. Quintilian is emphatic in his counsel that for the earliest lessons good authors should be selected; and his preference is for Greek.⁠[33] He believed in the stimulus obtainable from great literature, even where the pupils are too young to appreciate its full meaning and beauty. In any case there were simple fables and extracts from standard authors in abundance to serve as convenient lesson-books.

The second and third stages of education were entrusted to a grammaticus and a rhetor respectively; here the methods and subjects produced manifest effects upon literary men in Rome. Age-limits for the different grades of study varied considerably owing to individual capabilities and the overlapping of which Quintilian complained; but commonly a pupil passed from elementary instruction to the “grammar school” at about twelve or thirteen, and then to the school of rhetoric at about sixteen. The function of “grammar” was to train pupils in the intelligent and effective reading of standard authors both Greek and Latin; and the teachers themselves were of diverse origin and rank. Most of the series of grammatici mentioned by Suetonius were Greeks, and many were freedmen;⁠[34] but there were native Romans quick enough to adopt the principles of criticism illustrated by Crates in his lectures upon Greek literature [28]about 165 B.C., and to transfer them to their own poets, with the result that Naevius, Ennius and Lucilius speedily became school authors.⁠[35] Though instances occurred of Roman knights taking up such work, still, as a rule, a profession of meagre returns and meagre repute attracted only a motley concourse of strange fellows—the retired apparitor, the unsuccessful pantomime-actor or the ex-boxer.⁠[36] But that the demand for instruction was considerable is plain from the mention by Suetonius of the time when there were twenty flourishing grammar schools in the capital.⁠[37] Many Greek grammatici in Rome towards the end of the Republic added to their duties the teaching of Latin; thus, the freedman Ateius Philologus, a native of Athens, was called by Asinius Pollio nobilis grammaticus Latinus,⁠[38] and Gnipho who taught Cicero was non minus Graece quam Latine doctus.⁠[39] Specialism, however, in the one or the other literature was usual in the schools of the Empire, and the testimony of inscriptions proves the existence of separate masters for Greek and for Latin.⁠[40]⁠

The implications and functions of ‘Grammar’ were wider than with us. Its two main concerns, as we shall find in Quintilian, were the correct employment of language (recte loquendi scientia) and the appreciative criticism of poetry (poetarum enarratio).⁠[41] The former comprised study of the parts of speech, accidence, metres, and faulty usages in word, idiom, pronunciation or spelling. The latter involved much more than knowledge of literature; for, since its aim was the elucidation of a poet’s complete value and meaning, it demanded acquaintance with subsidiary subjects like music, geometry, astronomy, physics and philosophy.⁠[42] One feature in the training which had lasting effects upon literature and which coloured diction under the Empire, is the signal preference for lecturing on poets rather than on prose-writers: this was an old tendency, for Cicero had raised his voice against the comparative neglect [29]of history.⁠[43] It is also of interest to recollect the attraction which even the drier and more detailed aspects of Grammar possessed for many great Romans, for scholars like Varro, leaders of men like Caesar, and emperors like Claudius. Keil’s Corpus Grammaticorum Latinorum may be said to establish the study as one of the monuments of the Roman genius; and such representative commentators upon Virgil as Macrobius and Servius are good examples of the mode in which capable grammarians were expected to annotate a classic.

The main exercises prove the attention given to composition. They included the re-telling of Aesop’s fables by word of mouth or in writing, paraphrases, training in moral maxims (sententiae), extracts of ethical import (chriae), sketches of character (ethologiae), brief stories (narratiunculae) of a poetic order where the momentous thing was information rather than style.⁠[44] The treatment of literature—on which ancient “grammar” laid very great stress—embraced expressive reading (lectio) free from sing-song and provincialisms;⁠[45] the elaborate explanation (enarratio) of subject-matter; textual criticism (emendatio); and literary criticism (iudicium).

The authors taught by the professor of grammar were largely the same as those taught subsequently by the professor of rhetoric. The tenth book of Quintilian, therefore, gives a representative list, subject to the qualification that rhetoric required more prose than grammar did. The difference lay not so much in the authors as in the mode of treatment: the grammaticus taught literature, the rhetor taught oratorical effect. In Greek it was traditional to start with Homer, as in Latin, under the Empire, with Virgil. Other usual Greek authors were Hesiod, who was valued for his practical maxims; the lyric poets, in excerpts “bowdlerised” to minimize the erotic element; the masters of Attic tragedy; and the comic writers, particularly Menander, in selections. Among Latin authors, Livius Andronicus’s translation of the Odyssey into saturnians still held its ground when Horace went to school; and generations of schoolboys were reared on the older epic poets Naevius [30]and Ennius, and on the dramatists Plautus, Caecilius, Terence, Pacuvius, Accius, Afranius. Virgil was introduced into the course by Caecilius Epirota, the freedman of Cicero’s friend Atticus, and soon took a premier position. Horace, too, speedily realized his own alarmed anticipation of becoming a text-book; and a passion for novelty, combined with a revulsion from the archaic, helped to bring about lectures on the works of Lucan, Statius and Nero himself, while the authors were still alive. Reaction was a recurrent feature in Roman literary taste as in education. It was a protest against the predominance of the moderns in the second century A.D. that actuated the revived enthusiasm for ante-Augustan poetry. The poets, then, on the whole, played rather too oppressive a part at this stage of education; and it was inevitable that the rhetorician should adjust the balance, for his pupils were to be concerned mainly with prose as their medium. Cicero had become a model in his own day, and Quintilian regards him as a fine exemplar from the outset (iucundus incipientibus quoque et apertus). Of the historians, Quintilian prefers Livy to Sallust because the latter, he considers, demands a more advanced intelligence. Here it is but right to say he has in view especially the needs of students of declamation.

If we class philosophy, especially when pursued by Romans abroad, as a kind of “post-graduate” study, we may regard the formal education in Rome as culminating in rhetoric. The training under the rhetor was designed to equip pupils for the vocations of public life—for deliberative and forensic oratory; and, despite obvious faults, it undoubtedly furnished in the best days of the Empire a constant supply of men of affairs, magistrates and lawyers, wielding speech with a standard of efficiency beyond the prevalent attainments of civil servants in modern times. The Roman, inheriting a native turn for oratory, had been easily drawn to the study of Greek rhetoric, which was based upon prolonged theorizing and practice in Sicily, Athens and Asia Minor. So insistent appeared to be the demands of rhetoric that teachers were constantly tempted to initiate their pupils into it too soon,⁠[46] when they ought to have been [31]continuing grammar; and this overlapping was the natural occurrence in the old days before any line of professional demarcation had been drawn between the provinces of grammar and rhetoric.⁠[47] But even much later, it often remained a point of honour with grammarians to give boys at the grammar school practice in rhetoric so that they might do themselves and their masters credit when they joined the rhetorical academy.⁠[48] The training in rhetoric at Rome had been in touch with Greek methods from the second century B.C.; but education was profoundly affected by the introduction early in the first century B.C.⁠[49] of the composition declaimed on a purely imaginary theme; and in time the Latin term declamatio, which had signified the forcible delivery of a speech, came to be applied to the academical exercise in rhetoric on an invented subject. Thenceforward declamation was the supreme test and crowning exercise in rhetoric, success in which was the ambition of pupils and the pride of parents.⁠[50] Practice in it spread from Italy to the schools of the west, in Gaul and Spain.

Before students were matured for declamation, they had to pass through a prescribed series of preliminary exercises.⁠[51] These included narratives less poetic in cast than those of the “grammar school,” investigation of debateable questions in history, panegyric and invective, examination of good and bad laws, comparison of character, moral studies or “common places,” (communes loci) serviceable for attacking vices, questions of a general type for debate (theses, e.g. “Is town life preferable to country life?” “Is forensic or military renown the greater?”), and questions involving reasons for particular facts (coniecturales causae, which Quintilian recollected from his student days as entertaining exercises, and which he illustrates by the example, “Why is Cupid winged and furnished with arrows and torch?”)⁠[52] [32]Lectures on great masters in oratory and history were also requisite; and here models like Cicero and Livy might be studied with the maximum of profit. Quintilian maintained that the student should memorize passages from the masterpieces of standard authors instead of wasting energy on “cold cabbage heated up”—the crambe repetita of the pupil’s own show-pieces.⁠[53]⁠

The two most advanced exercises were the suasoria and the harder controuersia—the former intended to prepare for deliberative oratory, the latter for pleading in the law-courts.⁠[54] Ample illustrations of their nature are furnished by the seven suasoriae and five books of controuersiae which have come down, along with excerpts from five lost books, out of the collection of the elder Seneca. Quintilian cites examples of stock themes, and there exist also the declamations of the pseudo-Quintilian and excerpts from Calpurnius Flaccus. The suasoria was an imagined consideration of the action suitable at a historical crisis: sometimes it was a supposed soliloquy, e.g. “Alexander deliberates whether he shall cross the ocean,” “Agamemnon deliberates if he should sacrifice Iphigeneia,” “Cicero deliberates whether he should burn his works to secure his safety from Antony”;⁠[55] sometimes it was a supposed joint deliberation, e.g. “The three hundred Spartans at Thermopylae consider whether they ought to retreat,” “The Conscript Fathers discuss the propriety of surrendering the Fabii to the Gauls”;⁠[56] at other times it was a supposed address conveying counsel of the kind which Juvenal remembered offering to the dictator Sulla by [33]way of exercise in the academy where he suffered the cane.⁠[57] Similarly, many a junior aspirant after eloquence composed an advisory speech to Hannibal urging him to advance straight upon Rome after Cannae.⁠[58] Seneca⁠[59] records some interesting facts concerning Ovid’s attitude to this exercise. After commenting on the influence of the schools upon Ovid’s poetry and on the young poet’s reputation as a declaimer, he tells us that Ovid rarely declaimed controuersiae, and in any case only those of a psychological nature (non nisi ethicas): his preference was for the suasoria, and he found arguing irksome.⁠[60] These illuminating remarks explain both the aspect of Ovid’s genius exhibited in the Heroides, and his failure to carry out his father’s wish that he should become a lawyer. For entire success, it should be noted, this hortatory declamation required historical knowledge, psychological insight, some dramatic power, and distinct gifts of imagination and style.

In the controuersia one has passed from monologue to a debate which professed to represent the pleadings in an imaginary suit or criminal trial, where, as Addison’s Sir Roger would have it, “much might be said on both sides.” The students virtually acted an invented case in a sham court. They argued for or against—sometimes, to gain additional readiness and thoroughness, they argued first on one side, then on the other. Though there was a semblance of observing legal forms, yet the circumstances, the laws assumed to be applicable, and the standing characters were largely drawn from a realm of imagination which undeniably evoked marvellous ingenuity in argument, but merited the strictures in Petronius and Quintilian because of its divorce from actual life. Magicians, pirate chiefs, and their susceptible daughters, preternaturally hard-hearted fathers, and unconscionably cruel tyrants appear and reappear. Suetonius⁠[61] cites two specimens of the less extravagant controuersiae. The first concerns the disputed ownership of a [34]treasure which happens to be dragged up in a fishing-net after certain youths have, by way of speculation, purchased in advance that particular cast from the fishermen—are the purchasers entitled to the fish plus the gold, or to the fish only? The other concerns the disputed freedom of a slave from the East so valuable that the dealer disguised him and falsely declared him as a free man at Brindisi to escape the duty exigible by the Customs officers—has the slave been legally emancipated in virtue of his owner’s declaration before witnesses?⁠[62] In Seneca the situations are often more unreal. Take his very first case:—One of two brothers who were at variance had a son; when his uncle fell into poverty, the kind-hearted nephew helped him, but was disinherited by his father for so doing: he was, however, adopted by his uncle, who luckily had a great estate left to him: meanwhile the young man’s father came to want, and though forbidden by his uncle, the lad now insisted on helping his father: in consequence, he is disinherited by his uncle—the question is, can he successfully impugn his uncle’s decision?⁠[63]⁠

Such exercises, incredible though the situations might be, imparted, through the mental gymnastics involved, a nimbleness of mind, a quickness in propounding or refuting arguments, a versatility in treatment, and a finish of speech which again and again fell little short of the amazing. The adept could equip himself with skilful mastery from the whole armoury of rhetoric. Yet, whatever merits may be claimed for rhetoric here or in the chapter on the elder Seneca, the training had obvious drawbacks. For its range was narrow and unreal: it handled things and persons such as never were on land or sea: and these same unreal cases were handled an infinite number of times, so that the depressing round of declamation, as pupil after pupil rose from the bench, was calculated, Juvenal says, to bore luckless professors to death!⁠[64] Any ambitious pupil had to take refuge in innovations upon the threadbare theme; and his most promising chance lay in suggesting some colour, some [35]ingenious line of defence undreamt of by any predecessor. Hence the far-fetched absurdities with which the pleadings teem. At any cost, old material had to receive a new dress, bedizened with all the frippery of rhetoric; and this compulsion produced an inordinate concentration upon tricks of expression to the detriment of matter and sense. A frequent result was an inartistic phantasmagoria of artificialities, conceits, antitheses and quibbles. Nor was the effect upon morals always better than upon aesthetics, for such a system was at times apt to engender a heedlessness of truth or falsity in fact, and callousness to the justice or injustice of a plea, provided only it could be made telling. Another dangerous fruit was pretentious glibness of speech of the kind which the staid author of the De Educatione Liberorum repeatedly denounced as obnoxious;⁠[65] and—most far-reaching of all the consequences—the rhetorical declamations were largely accountable for the unreal pose and mannerisms of the Latin literature of the Silver Age.

For such artificiality the best cure lay in extended knowledge. No sound critic ever based oratory on mere tricks of speech. Practised judges like Quintilian and Tacitus complained that true eloquence had deteriorated owing to the extravagance and ignorance of declaimers. Agreeing with Cicero, Quintilian views ideal oratory as founded upon a strong moral and intellectual basis; for to Quintilian, as to Cato generations earlier, the effective orator was the good man skilled in speaking (uir bonus dicendi peritus).⁠[66] Mere plausibility or claptrap is ruled out by his insistence upon the orator’s knowledge of the subject on which he is to speak. Put this way (mihi satis est eius esse oratorem rei de qua dicet non inscium), Quintilian’s requirements seem more moderate than Cicero’s sweeping demand for wide knowledge of all great subjects (omnium rerum magnarum atque artium scientiam),⁠[67] yet Quintilian too believes in [36]the study of subjects outside the professional training in rhetoric, especially ethics, physics and dialectic, law, and history.⁠[68]⁠

At a much earlier period, indeed, Romans of the better class had been expected to cover a wide field of knowledge. Cato, for instance, included in his scheme oratory, agriculture, law, war and medicine. A century later, Varro’s nine departments of education were grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, music, medicine and architecture. In the first three of these one recognizes the “trivium” and in the next four the “quadrivium” of the medieval education, while Cato’s subjects of agriculture, law and war have come to be regarded as professional. Medicine would tend to be more and more superficially studied, by reason of the number of Greek practitioners who came to Rome. The inclusion of architecture in the list is a testimony to the interest taken in the principles of a fine art which constituted an integral portion of Roman civilization, and reminds one of the broad education which Vitruvius believes should go to the training of an architect. But one may assume that architecture was in practice a special profession, and that an encyclopaedic education became less and less attainable, as knowledge deepened, although, under the Empire, writers like Celsus and Pliny still made an encyclopaedic appeal, at least to mature readers. It was, indeed, largely in philosophy that the abler youths followed “post-graduate” courses, either at Rome itself, where Epicurean, Academic and Stoic thought had long been represented, or abroad, especially at Athens, as the time-honoured fountain-head of the schools. Under the later Republic, the custom of seeking breadth in education is well exemplified by the studies which famous authors had pursued. Thus Virgil, besides his literary reading, worked at rhetoric, philosophy, mathematics, medicine and law; and study at a “foreign University,” which became common under the Empire, is illustrated in the careers of Caesar, Cicero and his son, Horace and Ovid.

Our present concern, however, is not with philosophy under the Empire but with grammar and rhetoric; and this for two [37]reasons—firstly, grammar and rhetoric affected literary style more than philosophy ever did, deep though the influence of Stoicism was in imperial days; secondly, it was the time-honoured curriculum in grammar and rhetoric which was most widely diffused in the Roman world, and which was, especially at many Western seats of learning, taught to the absolute exclusion of philosophy. In the Greek portions of the Empire, the so-called “Second Sophistic” was represented in the second century A.D. by itinerant rhetoricians presenting their displays of eloquence before audiences whose powers of criticism proved the continuance and diffusion of the ancient education.⁠[69] In the Western portions, it is interesting to note that the ancient system of grammar and rhetoric came to be preserved particularly at Carthage in Africa and in the academies of Gaul. Marseilles, Autun, Lyons, Bordeaux, and, later, Toulouse, Narbonne and Trèves were typical centres of instruction. The educational movement was of old standing in Gaul, where Marseilles had long exercised a magnetic attraction. Memories of the sound education which he had enjoyed at Marseilles doubtless weighed with Agricola when, about A.D. 80, he established schools in Britain for the sons of chieftains;⁠[70] and there was in Britain doubtless a serious enthusiasm for Roman culture, although Juvenal makes game of it by his jesting allusions to the influence of Gallic eloquence on British advocates and to the talk in the “Farthest North” about establishing a chair of rhetoric.⁠[71] Later in the second century, the regular three grades with some amplifications are illustrated in the studies of Marcus Aurelius; his early lessons from the litterator were varied by others from an actor and a tutor who taught both music and mathematics; next, he worked under professors of grammar, one of Greek and three of Latin; and at the later stage he had three Greek masters of rhetoric, among whom was Herodes Atticus, and one Latin master, who was Fronto. He studied philosophy under many teachers, and devoted much [38]attention to law. Public declamation also had an attraction for him.⁠[72] The firm hold obtained by such courses as we have described is plainly seen for many generations beyond our period. Alexander Severus early in the third century passed through just such a course as Marcus Aurelius had done.⁠[73] The instruction which many of the Christian Fathers underwent in youth was on the old pagan lines, and the Confessiones of St. Augustine are typical from this standpoint, because they are the vivid reminiscences of one who had been a student of rhetoric at Carthage and a professor at Milan. The conditions of education in Gaul in the fourth and fifth centuries are best known from the writings of Ausonius and Sidonius Apollinaris.⁠[74] Christians and non-Christians then found a bond of union in the literary studies familiar during their “college days”; so that some measure of vitality was left to the old training despite the degeneration consequent upon its bondage to unreal and conventional dexterities.

One life-giving element of our period, however, gradually vanished out of the Western schools. That was Greek. Whereas Seneca includes Greek arguments in his Controuersiae, and whereas, in the days of Apuleius and Tertullian, scholars knew Greek as well as Latin, yet by the fourth century both in Africa and in Gaul it was little taught. St. Augustine, for instance, had no liking for or proficiency in Greek, and read Plato mainly in Latin translations.⁠[75] This severance of the two literatures was prophetic of the approaching division of the Empire and of the usual Latin curriculum in the Middle Ages.

A highly interesting feature in education during imperial times is the closer rapprochement of the government therewith. This was a growing, though a slowly growing, tendency. The state had shown solicitude over morality by enacting sumptuary laws and encouraging marriage, but had been reluctant to patronize education directly. The Caesars had, however, foreshadowed a new policy. Julius paid respect to erudition by [39]granting citizenship to peregrini who settled in Rome as medical men or teachers of the liberal arts.⁠[76] Augustus exempted teachers from an edict banishing foreigners, and he transferred Verrius Flaccus with his school to the Palatium at a handsome salary, so that he might instruct the imperial grandchildren.⁠[77] Tiberius and Claudius were personally interested in grammatical studies; but the next practical step towards imperial patronage consisted in the fixing by Vespasian of an annual stipend of 100,000 sesterces for Greek and Latin rhetors. Whether Vespasian’s decree was intended to apply beyond the walls of the capital, and how soon it actually came into force inside the walls is not quite clear; at any rate, Jerome says Quintilian was the first professor at Rome to receive payment from the fiscus, and he sets this down to a year in Domitian’s reign.⁠[78] Trajan, recognizing the value of education as a means of training the future citizens of a state, decided to secure public instruction for five thousand poor boys.⁠[79]⁠

But it was left for Hadrian to take that new departure which constitutes his reign an epoch in educational history. Versed in literature, a skilled musician and painter, fond of declamation, the emperor had a taste for keeping learned men at Court, and fellow-feeling made him kind to them. Upon teachers who had grown too old for duty he conferred a retiring allowance.⁠[80] At Rome he housed rhetoric handsomely in his famous Athenaeum, and in the provinces he founded schools, awarded them subventions, and made appointments of teachers to them. It is worth while to trace the tendency beyond the limits of our period. Hadrian’s active policy of generous interest was continued by Antoninus Pius, who improved the status and income of professors of rhetoric and philosophy all over the Empire.⁠[81] Furthermore, he exempted from certain state-imposts rhetors, philosophers, grammarians and physicians, defining the number [40]of teachers entitled to such immunity in different towns—thus, the minimum personnel for the smallest place touched by his edict consisted of five physicians, three sophists and three grammarians.⁠[82] This imperial measure bears witness to the connexion of both central and municipal authorities with a local educational staff. In fact, the burden of maintaining local academies fell on the municipalities, and what an emperor did was by special benefits to stimulate local educational policy. It seems, therefore, natural that Marcus Aurelius in A.D. 176 should have devoted money towards the establishment of professorial chairs at Athens.⁠[83] Beyond his reign it must suffice to indicate only the most significant symptoms.⁠[84] Alexander Severus in the third century introduced a bursary system for deserving lads.⁠[85] In the next century, repeated edicts exhibit emperors in the light of protectors of underpaid or irregularly paid teachers against the penurious economies and dilatory finance of local bodies. Beneficence had established rights of control: hence, at the end of the third century, when Constantius Chlorus nominated Eumenius as principal of the reorganized school at Autun, the town accepted the emperor’s action as a matter of course. Julian in 362 explicitly claimed the prerogative of appointing professors to chairs, and, although he entrusted the sifting of candidates to the municipalities, he subjected them to the first definite restriction imposed by an emperor on local liberty of selection, when he forbade the teaching of literature by any Christian. Gratian’s edict—which is of interest as showing the hand of his adviser and old tutor, the poet Ausonius—fixed the emoluments for different grades of teachers; thus, a rhetor was to be paid twice as much as a grammarian. Virtually in this way, although the Government did not make direct grants, yet money for educational salaries was earmarked in the municipal budgets. So the chronicle of the imperial organization of public instruction proceeds; and, if it did little to affect the methods in vogue, still the patronage [41]was of value in keeping learning alive. The last great event in this connexion was the establishment by Theodosius II at Constantinople of a University staff consisting of thirty-one professors. Little over a century later came the dissolution by Justinian.

A study of the elder Seneca⁠[86] is invaluable, not merely for the light which he sheds upon the methods pursued by professional speakers, but also for his knowledge (illustrated by a wealth of [43]anecdote and reminiscence) concerning the individual literary qualities or even mannerisms of orators and rhetors both Augustan and Tiberian. Acquaintance with the system represented in his collection of Controuersiae and Suasoriae is indispensable for an appreciation of the position and prospects of oratory reflected in Quintilian’s treatise and Tacitus’s dialogue. But Seneca’s work is much more than an illuminating introduction to works about oratory: it constitutes the great exemplar of the Roman rhetorical education in operation, which must be grasped in order to estimate the stylistic merits or demerits of verse and prose in the Silver Age. Seneca is a gateway through which the history of Latin expression must pass towards Lucan as well as towards Tacitus, and to examine the academic exercises recorded by him is to go far on the path to understand the style of two centuries; for, like much subsequent prose and verse, they contain elements pointed to the degree of monotony, ingenious to the degree of unreality, and sometimes half-poetic in virtue of a spice of far-fetched romanticism.

L. Annaeus Seneca⁠[87] was born at Corduba, an ancient patrician colony of Rome in Spain—a town with literary traditions in Cicero’s time, and by Martial’s days able to boast of having produced three noted members of a single family, namely, the two Senecas and Lucan.⁠[88] This provincial family had attained equestrian rank, as we learn from words assigned to the younger Seneca.⁠[89] The elder Seneca was prevented by the civil wars from hearing Cicero⁠[90] declaim “with his great pupils in their praetextae,” i.e. during the consulate of Hirtius and Pausa in 43 B.C.; and, since the young Spaniard could not well have attended declamatory performances under the age of twelve, it is not likely that he was born later than 55 B.C. He was a boy (puer, Contr., I, praef. 3) when he first reached Rome, probably in 42 B.C., after the battle of Philippi. He may have come with his Spanish friend, Porcius Latro: in any case, they were classmates in the rhetorical school of Marullus,⁠[91] who was perhaps [44]recommended to them by his Spanish origin more than by outstanding merit. But Seneca did not restrict himself to one teacher. He had Arellius Fuscus for one of his early masters, and he evidently made a practice of listening to all available speakers, if we may judge from his wide acquaintance with their modes of argument and expression in the Controuersiae. This implies long residence in Rome, though there is no proof to support his frequent designation as a “rhetor.” Guess-work would assign to him the official duties of a procurator, and would by the call of such duties explain his return to Spain for a period. It was in Spain that he married Helvia, the mother of his three sons—M. Annaeus Novatus, who took the name of his adoptive father Gallio and, as pro-consul of Achaea, had the apostle Paul brought before him;⁠[92] L. Annaeus Seneca, the philosopher; and M. Annaeus Mela, Lucan’s father.

Clearly Seneca was in Rome at a date between 29 and 24 B.C., when he heard Ovid declaiming under Arellius Fuscus;⁠[93] and still later in 17 B.C., when he heard Latro’s embarrassing reference to the subject of adoption in the presence of Augustus and Agrippa.⁠[94] He was back in Rome before Asinius Pollio died, A.D. 5; for he mentions having heard Pollio’s youthful oratory and afterwards the oratory of his old age.⁠[95] The date of his death is to be inferred approximately. His allusion to the extinction of the Scaurus family (Suas. ii. 22) cannot be earlier than A.D. 34; and we can feel reasonably sure that he outlived Tiberius; for the account of that emperor’s death given by Suetonius⁠[96] on the authority of “Seneca” is plausibly referred to the lost historical work, which, as we know from a fragment of the younger Seneca, his father composed. The outspoken criticism on the policy of burning books (Contr. X. praef. 7) suggests that publication did not precede Tiberius’s death in 37. On the other hand, when the younger Seneca was banished in A.D. 41, his mother was a widow;⁠[97] so that the father can be presumed to have died at an age well over ninety, between A.D. 37 and 41.

[45]

A man of old-fashioned austerity,⁠[98] the elder Seneca recalls Cato the Censor, whom he admired. It is provincial virtue more than a love of rhetorical commonplace that speaks when he censures the moral decadence of the times; and one cannot but admire the straightforward sincerity in his manner of addressing his sons for whom he put together the Controuersiae. Even if public service interested him for part of his life, he can confidently be described as a scholar by preference. Not modern enough in his tastes to sympathize with the higher education of women, he discouraged Helvia from devoting herself to those philosophical studies in which their second son was destined to see a remedy for most of the ills of existence. Yet the attraction of the past did not render him hostile to the imperial system, which, under Augustus, he found compatible with reasonable liberty:⁠[99] and, while repressive book-burning stirred his anger, he declined to waste pity on speakers who would give utterance to treasonable words at the risk of their lives.⁠[100] His patriotism burned strongly enough to give him pleasure in pitting the epoch of his model Cicero against the oratorical claims of “arrogant Greece.”⁠[101] In general, he distrusted the smart levity of Greek rhetoricians,⁠[102] and his occasional compliments to them were oftener than not accompanied with a qualification.⁠[103]⁠

Of his ten books of Controuersiae, five (III, IV, V, VI and VIII) are represented only by the headings and excerpts of a fourth-century epitomator,⁠[104] with the fortunate addition, however, of prefaces to books III and IV. The other five [46]books (I, II, VII, IX, X) survived in spite of being summarized and give a reasonably full presentation of the arguments used in different declamations, though gaps are especially noticeable in the transcription of the debating points made in Greek. The prefaces to these five books have also survived, except that the preface to IX is incomplete. The survival of excerpts for the fuller books enables us to survey the method followed in epitomizing. The total number of subjects debated is seventy-four, of which thirty-nine are represented by excerpts only. The number of Controuersiae in a book varies from six to nine. There are seven suasoriae (perhaps part of a larger collection), of which the first has lost its beginning. These exercises have been defined and illustrated in the chapter on Roman education: it remains to examine Seneca’s subjects, method and judgements.

This elaborate collection of arguments on rhetorical themes was the compilation of his old age, and evidence has been cited to show that some parts were written after A.D. 37. It does not follow, however, that the whole was put together at the beginning of Caligula’s reign by a man over ninety:⁠[105] it is more likely that the author had begun his task years before when his sons would be practically interested in rhetorical exercises, and that he spread its composition over the later period of Tiberius’s reign without publishing until the emperor was dead. The Suasoriae were composed after the Controuersiae.⁠[106]⁠

Seneca’s purpose is stated in his first preface, which is addressed to all three sons, and yet meant for the public at large.⁠[107] It was to recall the manner and diction of declaimers of the older school, and to represent speakers whom his sons could not have heard. Impressing on these young men the wisdom of taking bygone rhetoric into account along with contemporary rhetoric, he is conscious of a decadence in oratory to be measured against the greatness of Cicero and his times. To the author the causes appear to be three: luxurious laziness; the fact that, since [47]oratory came to offer fewer rewards, men turned to pursuits less honourable but more profitable; and a natural law of reaction. Realizing the scarcity of works representative of the greatest declaimers and, still worse, the circulation of forgeries (quod peius est, falsi), he declares it his duty to rescue noble names from oblivion. Hence it is natural to respond with pleasure to his sons’ request that he should undertake so extensive a task.⁠[108] Only a marvellous memory could have achieved it; but Seneca possessed a Macaulay-like gift of remembrance, and, as he remarks with obvious truth, it was the distant past he recalled the more surely. There had been a time when he was capable of repeating a list of 2000 names read over once. This is partly the secret of his proficiency in citing arguments from about 120 different speakers, though one is not precluded from believing that he had preserved notes, and that he consulted published collections.

The seven prefaces possess great interest. One may weary of the seventy-four themes and the often scrappy arguments, even although they are genially diversified by criticism, digression and reminiscences; but the prefaces are eminently readable in respect of subject-matter and style. They are valuable for characterization of speakers, for critical judgements, and for their record of facts otherwise unknown to literary history: they are attractive for their entertaining stories. Besides, they give the best opportunity of weighing Seneca’s own literary qualities in contradistinction to the text of his themata, where he is for the most part professedly reporting the words of others. His Latinity, in its pleasant freedom from artifice, is worthy of an author who consistently revered Cicero and was aware that an inferior type of eloquence had emerged. This alone would constitute him an important link between the Golden and the Silver Age. Indeed, the first preface shows his realization of that change from oratory to declamation for which the principate was largely accountable. Commenting on the alteration of the Ciceronian causae into the later controuersiae, he proceeds to draw the distinction between the public speaking of an orator (uera actio) and the private exercise (domestica [48]exercitatio) of a declaimer. The new declamation, he notes, was a product of his own period.

Each preface, as a rule, treats one rhetor prominently, and in the succeeding book that rhetor’s arguments are reported with considerable fullness. Thus, the opening preface sketches a delightfully graphic picture of Seneca’s friend, Porcius Latro, his bodily strength and strong voice, his ineradicable Spanish ways, his passion for work in defiance of the laws of digestion, his memory for written notes, his mastery over historical detail, and his method of practising the artifices of his craft. Such realistic portrayal cannot but rivet our attention upon his advocacy in the controuersiae which follow; and Seneca explains that the first controversy in his collection was so placed because he remembered it to be the earliest of Latro’s declamations in the academy of Marullus. Similarly, the next preface describes Fabianus, the teacher of the younger Seneca, and in Book II a special effort is made to recall his arguments. The preface to III deals particularly with Cassius Severus; that to IV deals with a pair, Asinius Pollio and Q. Haterius; that to VII is mainly on Albucius; that to IX considers why Votienus Montanus did not practise declamation; and the last preface, when Seneca is tiring of his subject, gives rapid impressions of various speakers—Mamercus Scaurus (a great orator spoiled by laziness); Labienus, nicknamed “Rabienus,” a Pompeian in spirit who had his books publicly burned; Musa, objectionable for unnatural rhetoric; a group consisting of Moschus, Pacatus, Sparsus, Bassus, Capito; and finally the Spanish declaimers Gavius Silo and Turrinus Clodius.

Seneca’s admirable criticisms are well seen in his second preface which contrasts Fabianus with his master Arellius Fuscus. Here he commends the study of rhetoric as a fitting pursuit for his favourite son Mela, whose talents he rated more highly than those of his two brothers, then preparing for public life. Among instructive features in the preface to III are the demarcation of forensic from academic speaking, and the explanation offered by Cassius Severus of his relative inferiority as a declaimer. Severus, it may be noted, was a good extempore speaker, and anger improved his pleading. After arguing that [49]non omnia possumus omnes, that the individual’s gifts are often confined to a single field, that Cicero’s style was inferior in verse and Virgil’s in prose, he accounts for his success at the bar in words which implicitly censure the whole method of declamation:

“I have been accustomed to address not an audience, but a judge; I have been accustomed to answer not myself, but an opponent. I avoid superfluous words as much as inconsistent ones. In scholastic speaking what may not be considered superfluous, when the whole thing is a superfluous practice?... When I speak in court, I am doing something; when I declaim, I seem to be toiling in dreamland (in somniis laborare).... Declaimers are like hot-house plants that droop in the open (uelut adsueta clauso et delicatae umbrae corpora sub diuo stare non possunt).... There is nothing to be said for testing an orator in such a childish exercise. What would you think of judging a pilot on a fish-pond?”⁠[109] Seneca, then, is by no means blind to the unpractical nature of declamation. Elsewhere he records instances of the absurdity of some rhetorical figures in a law-court,⁠[110] and the inability of even a practised declaimer to plead in the forum under the open sky without the familiar associations of four enclosing walls.⁠[111]⁠

Part of the charm in the prefaces depends on random recollections. We grow familiar with Seneca’s Memini.⁠[112] It is not the least of their merits that some of the reminiscences are humorous and satiric. He takes care to chronicle Severus’s amusing attitude to the conceited Cestius, whose modern declamations students got up by heart, though in Cicero they studied only speeches to which Cestius had composed replies. “One day I remember entering his lecture-room when he was to deliver a speech against Milo (i.e. a rejoinder to Cicero’s Pro Milone). Self-satisfied as usual, Cestius was saying, ‘If I were a Thracian gladiator, I should be a Fusius; if I were a pantomime-actor, I should be a Bathyllus.’ Unable to check my [50]wrath I burst out, ‘Yes, and if you were a drain, you’d be the main drain!’—huge guffaws from everybody! The pupils gazed, curious to see what uncouth sort of creature I was. Cestius, ready to answer Cicero, had no answer for me!”⁠[113]⁠

Other interesting points occur in the preface to IV. They include a glance at the select audiences of Asinius Pollio, who was the first to give recitationes before invited guests; Seneca’s recollection of Pollio’s instructing his grandson how to look on both sides of a declamation; and references to the extempore declamations by Q. Haterius, “the one among all Romans known to me,” he says, “who transferred Greek facility to Latin.” His speed of utterance made Augustus remark, “Our friend Haterius needs a brake put on” (sufflaminandus est). The sketch of Albucius in the preface to VII is diverting. He was fearless in his employment of ordinary words: “sour wine” and “flea-bane,” “fallow deer” and “rhinoceros,” “latrines” and “sponges” came all alike to him in speaking. A chameleon orator, for ever adopting fresh styles, he sometimes proved unlucky in his figures, as when he asked rhetorically “Why is a cup smashed if it falls, and why is a sponge not?,” on which Cestius commented, “To-morrow he’ll give a declamation on why thrushes fly and gourds don’t!” It was Albucius who, in the debate about a parricide set adrift in a boat, invented the far-fetched joke of calling the boat “the wooden sack” (culleum ligneum) instead of the real sack used in the punishment of parricides.

The incomplete preface to IX resumes the criticism of declamation as unpractical. Seneca recognizes the defects afterwards emphasized by Petronius and Tacitus,⁠[114] when he points out that the dominant aim in declamation is to please, not to carry conviction (non ut uincat sed ut placeat). This is why it hunts for alluring ornaments (lenocinia conquirit) and avoids solid reasoning. Declamations composed on the assumption that one has only fools for opponents (aduersarios quamuis fatuos fingunt) must provide a poor training for a court of law. The conditions of practice are too easy in an academic exercise: [51]gladiators, it should be remembered, train with heavier weapons than those with which they fight in the arena.

The final preface is notable for the author’s frank confession that he had exhausted his recollections and they him (fatebor uobis: iam res taedio est). Indignant at the governmental revenge taken on the writings of Scaurus and of Labienus, he yet thanks heaven that these punishments of genius did not begin until genius itself was deteriorating. Musa’s extravagance of language is illustrated and condemned:

I remember his saying “Birds that fly, fish that swim, beasts that run, find graves in our insides. Ask now why we men die suddenly—we live by deaths!”

Freeman though he was, Musa, in Seneca’s view, richly deserved flogging like the veriest slave for such artificiality. “Much, I consider, must be allowed to talent,” he adds; “one must allow faults, but not monstrosities.”

The traditional title Oratorum et Rhetorum Sententiae Diuisiones Colores indicates the method. On a case propounded, the sentiments (sententiae) and contentions of a number of speakers for or against are given, often mere jottings; then a skeletonic mapping out (diuisiones) of quaestiones involved; and, finally, a selection of more or less plausible conceptions (colores) designed to put a special complexion on certain acts under review. Invention and ingenuity find their best opening in the third group, but the ingenuity often overleaps itself into absurdity. A few extracts from II. i. may serve by way of illustration. A rich man who has already disinherited no fewer than three sons, asks for a poor man’s only son in order to adopt him: the poor man says “yes;” but the son says “no,” and is thereupon disowned by his father. Arguments from eleven speakers in favour of the son are cited, among them those of Porcius Latro and Arellius Fuscus, whose arguments on the other side are afterwards given. Latro opens for the youth: “And this is my fate—disowned and adopted at the same moment! The home that sheltered my father up to old age cannot admit me!... (To the rich man) You suppose gold and silver to be riches, but they are the playthings of fortune. [52]I give you warning: even if I come to you, I shall take care—and it is a very easy thing in your house—to get disinherited! Strange things do happen, but I never dreamt that my father would hate children, or the rich man want them. I desire no patrimony: happiness is a frail fleeting thing”—and he cites examples. Vibius Rufus makes the young man argue: “The very father that does not like keeping his children, judges it necessary to have children! I invited his disinherited sons into our humble abode. Am I going to rob them of their home after promising them mine? What am I to do? If I obey, I shall get disinherited: if I don’t obey, I shall get disinherited. I love my father: and that is my offence.” Among Fuscus’s points are these: “(To the rich man) You ask for a son: well, there are crowds of youths without a father! (To his father) Lay on me any command you choose: I shall go to sea, go on war-service, provided that, wherever I am, I remain yours”; and much of his oration turns on the perils of wealth. Then Fabianus also declaims against the corrupting influence of riches, and uses his noted gift of description to contrast domestic decoration with natural landscape scenery, which is the possession of the poor. When Latro in turn argues for the father, he represents him as saying: “If I did not know what an evil poverty is, I should understand it now: my son does not dread being disowned. Adoption amalgamated the families of the Fabii, the Aemilii and the Scipios. From the foundation of Rome to our own days our famous patrician nobility has depended on it. Adoption cures the wounds of fortune (adoptio fortunae remedium est).” The marshalling of arguments under the diuisio follows: e.g. Pompeius Silo began, on behalf of the reluctant son, with the trite question, “Is a father to be obeyed in all things? And even if in all things, does this include an act that would make him no longer one’s father? Can a son be handed over for adoption against his will? If he cannot, can he be disowned for exercising his own will?” and so through logical alternatives on to his proof that the proposed adoption was, firstly, disgraceful; secondly, useless; thirdly, dangerous. When the colores are reported, Seneca comments on their risky allurements and adduces warning examples of silliness. He does [53]not mince words when he disapproves. This is a color from Latro in defence of the young man, who is supposed to say: “I was always friendly with the three disowned sons: I am their friend still. When they were disinherited, I advised them to keep quiet and by yielding soften their father. I told them, ‘As soon as you think it the right time, my father will entreat yours.’ Well, now they assure me that the most favourable moment is here. They are right: my father cannot find any more favourable moment for the reconciliation: the rich man is seeking sons.” And here is Latro’s color when he spoke on the other side: “This,” says the father to his son, “is my aim: I want to hand you over for adoption, so that the disowned sons may be by your means more readily reconciled to their father.”

While the exact point at issue varies greatly in the Controuersiae, the general question under debate falls into one of three types—criminal, civil, social. The fourth book may illustrate this division, as well as the unlikelihood of the themes. Of its eight cases, three are criminal, three civil, and two involve questions of public status. The criminal cases are: (IV. i.) A man is dragged from the grave of his three children by a wild young roysterer who plays upon him the prank of forcibly shaving him, dressing him in festal attire and compelling him to take part in a banquet; (iv.) During war-time a man who has lost his weapons in battle seizes weapons from a hero’s tomb, fights bravely and restores them: he is charged with sacrilegious violation of the monument; (vi.) A man’s wife dies in giving birth to a boy: the father marries soon after, and the boy borne by the second wife has a remarkable resemblance to his half-brother. Both are brought up in the country and become almost indistinguishable. After many years, on their reappearance in town, the father, who knows which is the elder, will not tell his wife which is her child: he is charged with cruelty. The civil cases are: (iii.) The ravisher of a girl secures from her exiled father a command that she shall elect to marry him, but her brother at home insists on her claiming the culprit’s death: the brother is disinherited for opposing his father’s will; (v.) A stepson, who is a doctor, declines to attend his stepmother, and his father disinherits him; (viii.) A proscribed master in time of [54]civil war is sheltered by a faithful freedman to whom he promises remission of all future claims on his service; when he is restored to his belongings, he makes demands on the freedman, which the latter resists. The two cases of status are: (ii.) Metellus, in rescuing the Palladium from the burning temple of Vesta, has lost his eye-sight: as a blind man, he is refused the right to exercise the priesthood; (vii.) A man taken in adultery by a tyrant wrests his sword from him, kills him, and claims a public prize as a tyrannicide.

In the whole collection the criminal charges predominate: of the 74, there are 30 criminal, 26 civil, while 18 affect status. But many side issues are involved. There are about a score of cases concerning immoral relations such as adultery, seduction, outrage and prostitution: almost as many turn on the disinheriting of children; seven on poisoning; seven on tyrants, a theme more at home in Greece. Pirates add a mild flavour of danger to some, but again and again the imagined circumstances are hopelessly unnatural and bizarre, and encourage extravagance of treatment and style. Certain controuersiae sound like sketchy novels with impossible plots, and must have been so handled in the narratio of a clever rhetor, who aimed at the diversion of a leisured and blasé audience. One instance⁠[115] combines the following episodes: a tyrant is slain; an illicit liaison results in homicide; a father’s intercessions are rejected by a son, who is afterwards captured by pirates; they demand a ransom, but the unforgiving father replies that, if they cut off their prisoner’s hands, he will pay twice the amount; the captive is eventually liberated by the gang; later the father falls into beggary; and finally his son refuses to help him. Anything may be expected in such a jumble—rhetorical outbursts, Homeric quotations, a plea of insanity, or the color devised by a professor with a voice like a hundred nutmeg-graters (centum raucorum uocem) that the father’s offer to the pirates “You will be paid double for cutting his hands off” was merely a regrettable secretarial error (librario una syllaba excidit ‘non’) for “You will be paid double for not cutting his hands off!”

[55]

The ultimate sources of most of the themes are undiscoverable. Many had become stereotyped in Greek rhetorical schools, and, with little or no modification, were transmitted through generations at Rome. Thus, actual Greek history supplied material for the suasoria on Alexander’s entry into Babylon, and Greek tragedy for Agamemnon’s deliberation whether he shall immolate his daughter. Sometimes the historical kernel was of the smallest. It is, for instance, an invention that the Athenians deliberated about removing their Persian trophies under Xerxes’s threat to return with his army. Sometimes the law invoked was a genuine one from the Attic code: often, however, it was a figment of the schools. An example is the debate on whether the priestess convicted of immorality who was thrown from a rock and survived might be subjected to punishment a second time: by Roman law a guilty priestess was buried alive. From Sulla’s time onwards there had been a growing accumulation of material for the free use of declaimers either to thrash out on Greek lines or to fuse with Roman elements. The treatise Ad Herennium and Cicero’s De Inuentione supply a long list of themes drawn from Roman as well as from Greek history; but details were liberally altered in declamations to secure rhetorical effect; for a good point counted more than historical accuracy. Mythology was also a source: and fertile imagination yet another.

Seneca’s ability as a writer is shown both in his suggestive comments and in a Boswellian aptitude for reproducing the words and style of others. In criticism nothing could be sounder than his grasp of that psychological endowment which made Ovid successful in a suasoria, of the wilfulness which made that poet love the bizarre lines which others censured, and the quality in his lost oratory which made it poetic prose (solutum carmen, Contr. II. ii. 8). Most illuminating are the remarks on Montanus’s passion for repetitions: he was “the Ovid of orators” because he could not let well alone (nescit quod bene cessit relinquere, Contr. IX. v. 17). It argues a genuine feeling for style that Seneca, besides characterizing good and bad speakers, can also represent their actual manner, such as Latro’s exclamatory qualities in Book I or his outburst on Popillius’s barbarity [56]in killing Cicero in Book VII. Similarly in the case of the Roman official who had a man beheaded at a banquet to satisfy the curiosity of a fille de joie, Seneca reproduces Murredius’s tetracolon which ended in nonsense “to complete the rhythm”—“Justice was subservient to the bed-chamber, a praetor to a harlot, prison to a banquet, day to night” (Seruiebat forum cubiculo, praetor meretrici, carcer conuiuio, dies nocti, IX. ii. 27). The heartlessness of the same scene is vividly brought home by Seneca’s illustration of Vibius Gallus’s realism, “A toast was drunk to the headsman for his deft stroke” (lictori quia bene percusserat propinatum est, IX. ii. 23).

The pernicious effect of some of the subjects upon the morality of pupils may easily be overstated. It is doubtful whether there was more of the violent and the illicit in them than is illustrated on a modern cinema film, which does not provide an equal stimulus towards thought and expression. Much, indeed, in ancient declamations was morally sound and bracing, even if rather commonplace: there was a healthy spirit in the denunciations of luxury and of tyranny, which might pass safely in an academic exercise, but might spell ruin in a historical work under the Empire. It is, besides, doubtful whether students altogether failed to realize the unreality of their controversial world; even the far-fetched elements may be said to have been attempts to satisfy the perennial human desire for romance. With so many stock subjects common to the successive periods represented by Seneca, Quintilian and the pseudo-Quintilian, by Calpurnius Flaccus,⁠[116] and later in Greek by Libanius, it was inevitable that sensible arguments should run dry, and relief from the hackneyed should be sought either in artificial embroidery or in capricious invention. The incentive to invent operated often without the check of common sense: so that one is reminded of nothing so much as of the pedantically ingenious questions which were devised by the fantastic imagination of the Troubadours to be pleaded and decided in a Court of Love.

Ingenuity is so characteristic of the Silver Age that it deserves to be noted in the making. It is most observable in the [57]cunningly contrived rebuttal of a charge. At first sight, one might condemn as beyond all excuse the scandalous practical joke already mentioned which was played upon a man at his children’s grave. Subjected forcibly to a fashionable toilette, the mourner had been presented by an unruly young reveller to his boon companions and coerced into attending their banquet in a neighbouring garden. What fair complexion shall an enterprising defence put upon such conduct? One answer to the prosecution follows these lines: Was it not reasonable to be touched by the old man’s mourning and loneliness? Was it not heart-breaking to notice that he had no kinsman to console him? Now when it is too late, the offenders, of course, can see that his friends must have deserted him, because they knew he was mad. In fact, “all was meant in kindness” is the explanation offered by this misunderstood young gentleman! “It was a festive occasion, and I was entertaining some of my good friends, when one of them said, ‘Why do we let that poor fellow in the cemetery kill himself with grief? Nobody can make up his mind spontaneously to abandon sorrow: people are bashful about it: they want compulsion....’” To prove the continuance of his friendly attitude, the defendant assures the complainant: “I’m perfectly ready to give you more consolation of the same sort—only, you’d just accuse me again!” The danger of such smartness in rhetoric and in literature is that it constantly tends to be overdone. Ingenuity of idea and phrase palls even in Ovid and in Lucan; but, indulged in by the smaller mind of a rhetorician in quest of specious argument or pointed epigram, it becomes grotesque, as Seneca shows by his censures.

The seven deliberative exercises, or Suasoriae, exhibit similar rhetorical qualities to those in the Controuersiae, and furnish continued proof of the attraction which digressive anecdotes, luckily for his readers, possessed for Seneca. At times he conscientiously pulls himself up (longius me fabellarum dulcedo produxit; itaque ad propositum reuertar, Suas. i. 7); but to his deviations from the strict lines of argument we owe interesting comments, e.g. on Virgil’s avoidance of bombast (i. 12); Pedo’s lines describing Germanicus’s voyage (i. 15); Arellius Fuscus’s description of the moon in contrast with Virgil’s [58]simpler and happier words (iii. 4); Gallio’s amusingly nonchalant attitude towards impassioned oratory at which he jested as “plena deo” (iii. 6-7); the records of Pollio’s hostility to Cicero’s reputation (vi. 14); an extract from Livy on the death of Cicero (vi. 17); Cornelius Severus’s hexameters on the same subject (vi. 26); and Cestius’s praise of Cicero’s services in exalting the Latin language over Greek (vii. 10).

Seneca had not spared foolish arguments in the Controuersiae. Murredius, quoted in the seventh book for a foolish point regarding Popillius, the ungrateful murderer of Cicero, and for another ineptitude on a poisoning charge, is declared to be “as silly as ever” in the ninth book.⁠[117] In the murder mystery, where a woman is found wounded, her husband killed, and a breach made in the wall between the house and the neighbouring one, Seneca justifiably stigmatized as fatuous the bit of description “My father had holes made in him as if he were the wall” (pater meus tamquam paries perfossus est).⁠[118] So it is with absurdities in the Suasoriae. The deliberations of the 300 Spartans in the pass whether to retreat or face the Persian are marked both by excellences and by inanities. “Whither will you, hoplites, flee, who are yourselves the walls of Sparta?”—that, in four neat words,⁠[119] is cited by Seneca as the best hit made by any Greek speaker in this suasoria. On the other hand, his strictures upon overstrained point are severe; for he says the prize-winner for puerility (inter has pueriles sententias uidetur palmam meruisse) was the speaker who played with the conceit that the inscription to the fallen Spartans was written in blood squeezed from their wounds—“ink,” he exclaimed, “worthy of a Spartan!” (where the Latin atramentum gives a more violent contrast to the red blood). The last suasoria concludes with two remarks from “that most likeable fool” Gargonius, “than which not even he had ever said anything sillier.” Turgid rhetoric receives corresponding castigation. The author, in making fun of his namesake Seneca “Grandio” (ii. 17), so called because he liked everything big from sandals to a sweetheart, recalls his handling of the 300 Spartans at bay. Lifting his arms and rising [59]on his toes (that was his way of making himself bigger!) he declaimed in swelling accents a Spartan’s imaginary soliloquy: “So all Greece has abandoned us. So much the better, I am glad, I am glad.” We wondered, remarks Seneca drily, what there was to be glad about. “Why? Because I shall now have the Persian to myself. That monarch, Xerxes, who has stolen seas with his armada, who has confined the earth but extended the deep, whose orders impose a new aspect upon universal nature, that monarch may doubtless encamp over against the heavens; but I shall have the gods for comrades!” If the elder Seneca’s good sense had been more widely shared, such bombast would have been frowned out of existence.

From these exercises, then, one may take an inventory, as it were, for the literary stock-in-trade of Silver Latin. There are exclamatory and high-flown outbursts typified in the apostrophe to the monster of cruelty who maimed foundlings to make money out of their begging;⁠[120] common-places on themes like the mutability of fortune,⁠[121] or the effect of calamity on the mind; sententiae, embodying ancient wisdom in proverbial form, such as “The cure may be worse than the disease” (quaedam remedia grauiora ipsis periculis sunt), “There are many paths to death,” “Innocence is a protection in danger,” “Nature has given none the breath of life for ever”;⁠[122] the purple patches in elaborate descriptions of ocean or tempest or natural scenery;⁠[123] the brief and pointed epigram designed to surprise by ingenuity or paradox, “Weeping is a modest curse directed against human calamity” (fletus humanarum necessitatum uerecunda exsecratio est);⁠[124] and the frequently allied antithesis, “the greatest runaways among the brave, the greatest laggards among runaways” (inter fortes fugacissimi, inter fugaces tardissimi).⁠[125] The indictment which lies against rhetoric for extravagance in the use of these and other artifices, and for its frequent self-divorce from real life, must not blind us to the good services which it rendered. Though but a simulacrum of the old free oratory, it was cherished by the Romans with almost pathetic assiduity, and from [60]their devotion to it as an end in itself they gained at least sharpened wits and facility of expression. The rhetorical training maintained in the Empire a high standard of ability in the use of language. This was not its sole advantage. Declaimers were not, as a rule, politicians, but the declamations afforded a safe outlet for a certain amount of social criticism and even a certain amount of republican feeling. Some of the themes, we have seen, gave the mind the satisfaction of entering upon mildly romantic adventures. The very fact that the law assumed in a case was not the actual law of Rome aided the growth of a new sentiment of equity. Further, there was ethical value in the moral and humane reflections of an experienced declaimer, while the attacks made upon luxury and riches were in keeping with a literary exaltation of the poor and the humble, which implied a broadening conception of the worth of the individual. To suppose that the declamations produced merely expert phraseology and did not stimulate thought is a profound mistake.

Seneca places before us the speakers of two generations in Rome, who by their various nationalities—Italian, Greek, Spanish and Gallic—indicate the cosmopolitan hold obtained by rhetoric. Most of the older generation, as Augustans, are outside our present limits; some speakers belong to both generations; and some definitely to the reign of Tiberius. Of the quartette (τετράδιον) placed by Seneca in the highest rank⁠[126]⁠—Porcius Latro, Arellius Fuscus, Albucius Silus and Junius Gallio—the first three had been recognized as eminent before the Christian era began. Ovid studied under Latro and Fuscus, and doubtless a subtle portion of their rhetorical influence descended through the poet to his imitators in the first century. Fuscus also had for a pupil Papirius Fabianus, a philosopher still more than a speaker, who taught the younger Seneca. Gallio, whose arguments are often exemplified in the Controuersiae, was noted for a jingle (tinnitus) of style in speaking. One of his writings was an answer composed to Labienus’s invective against Bathyllus, the favourite of Maecenas; and other [61]publications of his were declamations and a treatise on rhetoric. He was exiled in A.D. 32. Though Cestius Pius from Smyrna was pre-Tiberian, his pupils, Surdinus, Aietius Pastor, Quintilius Varus (son of the general crushed by the Germans in A.D. 9), formed a group towards the beginning of Tiberius’s reign; and Argentarius, his assiduous ape (Cestii simius), belonged clearly to the same time. Cestius had a swarm of followers who, we have seen, learned by heart his speeches in preference to Cicero’s.

In passing to speakers definitely under Tiberius, Caligula and Claudius, it is worth while to remember that the emperors themselves were by education products of the rhetorical system. Tiberius,⁠[127] as a student of rhetoric under Theodorus of Gadara, imbibed new principles—very different from those which his predecessor Augustus had learned from Apollodorus of Pergamum. The Apollodoreans, emphasizing narratio, stood for regularity in the division and structure of a speech, whereas the Theodoreans, eager for greater freedom, were content if the argumentatio alone was adequately handled. Tiberius’s years of retirement at Rhodes, before he was emperor, had perfected his acquaintance with Greek rhetoric; and his skill in the diplomatic and even cryptic use of language is apparent in the reports of his senatorial speeches given by Tacitus.⁠[128] In Latin, his tendency was to prefer archaic to foreign words and to base his oratory on the manner of Messalla Corvinus. Among his literary compositions were memoirs, while his verses showed the influence of Euphorion and other Greek poets. His successor, C. Caesar Caligula, from whose insane jealousy sprang his desire to annihilate the works of Homer, and his scathing attacks upon Virgil as well as Livy, did not publish works, though he was well trained in rhetoric, capable as a speaker especially when stimulated by anger, and critically contemptuous of the younger Seneca’s style as “sand minus mortar.”⁠[129] His uncle Claudius, the next emperor, was a voluminous writer in Greek and Latin. An early taste which he evinced for history [62]had been fostered by Livy; and his learning in other fields was extensive. Now a play, now a book on gambling, now an apology for Cicero against the strictures of Asinius Gallus, came from his pen. He even proposed three additional letters, the inverted digamma (Ⅎ) for consonantal u, antisigma (Ↄ) for ps, and the left half of H (Ⱶ) for the y sound between i and u.⁠[130] Part of the speech delivered by Claudius before the senate in A.D. 48, supporting the admission of Gallic nobles to Roman offices, was found recorded on a bronze tablet at Lyons in 1524, and forms an interesting subject of comparison with the version by Tacitus (Ann. XI. xxiv). Claudius’s consort, Agrippina, wrote memoirs, which the elder Pliny and Tacitus consulted.⁠[131]⁠

Of rhetoricians at least partly of the time of Tiberius, like Asprenas, Bruttedius, Turrinus and Capito, it is enough to distinguish the last for his declamation regarding Cicero’s murderer Popillius, which remained in circulation and was erroneously ascribed to Latro.⁠[132] Many speakers published collections of their speeches or manuals on speaking. Junius Otho, praetor in A.D. 22, was the author of four books on Colores;⁠[133] and Rutilius Lupus, towards the end of Seneca’s lifetime, brought out an abridged translation of a work on figures of speech by Gorgias, who taught at Athens in the first century B.C. Alfius Flavus, one of Cestius’s pupils, wrote also in verse. Senatorial eloquence under Tiberius was (in addition to Junius Otho) represented by Asinius Gallus, son of Asinius Pollio, and inheritor of his caustic style; Aeserninus, Pollio’s grandson; Valerius Messallinus Cotta, younger son of the Augustan Messalla Corvinus, and consul in A.D. 20, a pleasure-seeker with gifts in verse-making and in pleading (Ovid in exile had read a speech which he had delivered in court); Mamercus Scaurus, the easygoing aristocrat whose friendship with Sejanus and authorship of a tragedy, Atreus, proved his ruin; Q. Haterius, who died an old man in A.D. 26 and whose startlingly rapid delivery called forth Augustus’s remark already mentioned, that he needed a brake put on;⁠[134] L. Arruntius, [63]a man of ability at once academic and forensic; Votienus Montanus, from Narbo, who made his mark in an inheritance case for Galla Numisia, and was exiled for treason in A.D. 25; and L. Calpurnius Piso, one of the most dignified characters of the day, who alarmed Tiberius on one occasion by denouncing the infamy of informers and threatening to quit Rome in disgust.

To the time of Caligula and Claudius belongs Crispus Passienus, son of the Augustan Passienus. His published speeches were among those familiar to students in Quintilian’s boyhood.⁠[135] It is notable that Caligula allowed the condemned works of certain Augustan orators and historians, T. Labienus, Cremutius Cordus and Cassius Severus, to circulate again.⁠[136] Of these Cremutius belongs to the annals of history. Labienus, more noted as an orator than as a historian, was disliked for exceeding the due limits of free speech, and his enemies were pleased when his books were given to the flames by senatorial decree about A.D. 12.⁠[137] The blow was one which he refused to survive. Cassius Severus, another prominent orator in the Controuersiae, had offended Augustus by libels upon men and women of high station, and died in miserable poverty after twenty-five years of exile. There are reasons for believing that his death happened about A.D. 37, five years later than the date assigned by Jerome. Tacitus connects with his condemnation Augustus’s first attempt to repress literature.⁠[138]⁠

Many orators were occupied rather as political accusers than as literary creators, finding it lucrative to place delation at the service of any emperor whose aim was to ruin the potentially dangerous scions of aristocratic families, the so-called opposition under the Caesars. Some were unquestionably able persons, like Domitius Afer of Nemausus (Nîmes), who pleaded in the law-courts, occupied high positions in several reigns, and was known for legal writings De Testibus, and for published speeches mentioned by Quintilian. He had begun his career as an [64]accuser by A.D. 26, and lived into Nero’s times (A.D. 59).⁠[139] P. Suillius, one of the dreaded informers under Claudius, eventually fell himself under sentence of banishment. Vibius Crispus, already by Claudius’s time active in the nefarious intrigues of the delator, survived until about A.D. 90, one of many links between this period and the Flavian age.

Little can be surmised regarding the life of Valerius Maximus,⁠[140] the compiler of a significant repertory for rhetoricians; but that little is enough to settle his period. Vossius,⁠[141] rejecting the suggestion that he belonged to the third century A.D., proved that he must be referred to the age of Tiberius; and there is not much to add to his arguments. Aulus Gellius, in the second century, cites from the eighth book of Valerius.⁠[142] Further, what are almost the only explicit personal reminiscences in Valerius’s work afford evidence of date; for his great friend, the eloquent Sextus Pompeius, with whom he visited Asia and to whose kindly patronage he pays a tribute in his chapter on friendship, is identical with one of the consuls in the last year of Augustus’s and the first year of Tiberius’s reign, A.D. 14.⁠[143] [66]Pompeius was also a friend of Germanicus, and the patron to whom Ovid addressed certain epistles from Pontus:⁠[144] he became proconsul of Asia about A.D. 27. Besides, the tone in which Brutus and Cassius are charged with “parricide” for their share in the assassination of Julius Caesar savours of the repressive times of Tiberius.⁠[145] Confirmatory impressions may be derived from Valerius’s style; and, finally, if more precision in dates be desired for an author not so lavish in their use as Velleius Paterculus was, then two passages may be cited bearing on the time of composition. The prefatory remarks to his treatment of pudicitia must have been written before Livia’s death in A.D. 29; and the denunciation directed against Sejanus (though it does not name him) must have been written after his downfall in A.D. 31.⁠[146] Valerius’s work, then, appeared at latest within a few years after the publication of Paterculus’s history in A.D. 30; for its dedication to Tiberius, who is the Caesar addressed⁠[147] and often flattered, shows that it was not subsequent to the close of his reign in A.D. 37.

His work, Facta et Dicta Memorabilia, consists, as we have it, of nine books; and though his epitomator, Julius Paris, implies there were ten, this is most likely an error. The author’s aim will be best understood in the light of a summary of the contents:—

Book I. Religion, auspices, omens, prodigies and marvels ranging from more to less awe-inspiring instances—from a mysterious utterance or miraculous intervention of a god, to such merely curious cases as those of the man who forgot how to read, or the princess with a double row of teeth, or a heart stuffed with hairs!

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Book II. A pot-pourri of subjects, perhaps in this book more loosely interrelated than in any—marriage, magistracies, military regulations and discipline, public games, foreign customs, censorial strictness, and so on.

Book III. Mental and moral endowments, bravery, endurance, rise from humble origin to greatness, degeneracy, self-confidence, etc.

Book IV. Moderation, abstinence, conjugal love, friendship, generosity, etc.

Book V. Clemency, gratitude, ingratitude, filial duty, brotherly affection, patriotism, paternal love and severity.

Book VI. Chastity, outspoken retorts, strict punishments, weighty words and acts, justice, national honour, fidelity of wives and of slaves (where the comment quo minus exspectatam hoc laudabiliorem fidem speaks eloquently of the prevailing distrust felt by masters), and mutability of fortune.

Book VII. Good fortune, wise sayings or acts, smart sayings or acts, military ruses, defeat at elections, the straits of necessity, wills cancelled or ratified.

Book VIII. A book covering an extensive range, but furnishing only a few brief examples under some of its headings—Acquittals and convictions in public trials, famous private law-suits, women who pleaded cases, testimony borne in court, those who committed faults which they punished in others, industry, leisure, eloquence, expression and gesture, striking effects of the arts, memorable old age, desire of glory, magnificent honours conferred.

Book IX. Luxury and lust, cruelty, anger and hatred, avarice, arrogance, perfidy, temerity, mistakes, vengeance, wicked sayings and doings, deaths out of the common, desire of life, enrolment in families by fraud.

The utility of this fairly full, but not exhaustive, list rests on its indication of the author’s intention to illustrate subjects likely to be touched on by an orator. The design relates the [68]work to the rhetoric of the times. Here was ready for use a collection of noteworthy anecdotes constituting a serviceable Vade mecum for speakers or teachers. And this aim, easily discernible from a table of contents, is openly avowed by the compiler: his task, he tells us, was to make a handy digest of memorable deeds and sayings with a view to saving his readers the trouble of hunting among the scattered authorities whose writings he himself had to consult.⁠[148] It is a fair guess that he was a professor of rhetoric.

Dividing each book into chapters on separate topics, Valerius generally subdivides each chapter into Roman and foreign examples. The latter (externa) are fewer and are sometimes omitted.⁠[149] Occasionally he confesses to a sense of perplexity between the mass of available material (sermo infinitis personis rebusque circumfusus) and the claims of reasonable brevity:⁠[150] and so he feels bound under certain heads to reduce the number of examples (satietas modo uitanda est).⁠[151] Some parts of the work show little sign of systematic dovetailing: others exhibit closer interconnexion. From time to time he is at pains to indicate his method of grouping illustrations; thus, he exemplifies self-confidence, first in war, next in peace, then introduces the poet Accius avowedly as a link between Roman and foreign instances.⁠[152] Or, again, just as he is about to pass to foreign examples, some insistent Roman illustration may arrest his attention with a demand to be recorded (ad externa ... transire conanti M. Bibulus ... manus inicit);⁠[153] and equal emphasis marks his transition from Book IV to V—from generosity to its “fit companions, humanity and clemency.” These and other such instances prove that he had an artistic [69]regard for unity, and that it would be unfair to view him as an accumulator of higgledy-piggledy miscellanea.

In subject-matter, and in spirit no less, he is decidedly national. The predominance of examples from native life, custom and history makes this inevitable; yet it is, after all, but one aspect of the Roman in him. He is Roman in the practical aim wherewith he composed his digest for rhetoricians and their pupils; in the typical position assigned to religion at the forefront of the work; and in the conservative note upon which his text opens. This Roman conservatism animates his dignified pride in recording the ancestral habit of referring intricate ceremonial to pontifical wisdom, the sanction for action to augural observation, oracular responses to prophetic books, and the fit treatment for portents to the lore of Etruria. About illustrations from foreign history he is conscious that, if they do not make the same direct appeal as national examples, still they introduce a pleasant variety in the Latin subject-matter (attingam igitur externa; quae, Latinis inserta literis, ut auctoritatis minus habent, ita aliquid gratae uarietatis afferre possunt). No less patriotic is the enthusiasm with which, after mentioning the lays of ancient Rome once sung at banquets, he praises the old Roman training, and with a rhetorical climax turns his list of great families so educated into a compliment to the Caesars:

Maiores natu in conuiuiis ad tibias egregia superiorum opera carmine comprehensa pangebant, quo ad ea imitanda iuuentutem alacriorem redderent. Quid hoc splendidius, quid etiam utilius certamine?... Quas Athenas, quam scholam, quae alienigena studia huic domesticae disciplinae praetulerim? Inde oriebantur Camilli, Scipiones, Fabricii, Marcelli, Fabii: ac ne singula imperii nostri lumina simul percurrendo sim longior, inde, inquam, caeli clarissima pars diui fulserunt Caesares.

A similar spirit pervades his record of the honour secured for Latin as the official and imperial language everywhere;⁠[154] his apostrophe eulogizing Marius’s disdain for Greek eloquence;⁠[155] and his genuine admiration for the old national deliberative body:

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“The Senate-house was the trusty deep-set heart of the commonwealth, fortified, walled all round with the healthiness of silence. As men crossed its threshold, they cast aside personal and put on national affections.”⁠[156] So too one notes his pride in “the most tenacious bond of military discipline,” which he pronounces “the especial glory and mainstay of the Roman power, having been by salutary steadfastness kept untarnished and unscathed to the present time.”⁠[157] It is the same with his panegyrics upon Rome;⁠[158] his gratified consciousness of the progressive evolution from “Romulus’s small hut” (paruula Romuli casa) to “the pillar of the world” (terrarum orbis columen);⁠[159] his belief in the generosity of the Roman people;⁠[160] his rhapsodic outbursts like O munificentiam gentis Romanae, deorum benignitati aequandam!⁠[161] or his satisfaction in Roman justice.⁠[162]⁠

In the absence of systematic acknowledgment of his borrowings, it is impossible to give an exact account of the sources of Valerius. Any reader will observe that Livy has been largely drawn upon, even though he is mentioned but once.⁠[163] Cicero is mentioned oftener;⁠[164] but the mere occurrence of his name is no gauge of the extent to which he was used. Varro must have been an authority in many instances.⁠[165] We may also infer the consultation of Sallust and Asinius Pollio, and, for foreign examples, of Trogus.⁠[166] Besides mention of such poets as Livius Andronicus and Accius, there are references to the historian Caelius (Antipater), to the Collecta of Pomponius Rufus, and to [71]M. Scaurus’s autobiographic Memoirs.⁠[167] Cato’s work on Origines is cited definitely in one passage,⁠[168] and may elsewhere be reasonably thought to have supplied material. That work, as well as Cato’s Orations, must have been in Valerius’s mind when he wrote the words ornata sunt ab eo (sc. Catone) literarum Latinarum monimenta.⁠[169] About a score of Greek authors are cited. His treatment of sources varies. The original may be copied with fidelity, or paraphrased and rhetorically embellished, or condensed, or sometimes misrepresented thanks to bungling; for superficiality betrays him into many confusions.

Yet, blemishes notwithstanding, there are, as testimonies to a great measure of utility and vitality in his work, at least two well-known abridgements⁠[170] of it—one by Julius Paris, made about the fourth century, and intended, like the ampler original, for schools; the other by Januarius Nepotianus, the extant form of which breaks off in the third book (III. ii. 7), but which was evidently drawn from a manuscript of the original superior to any now extant, because it summarizes the gap in the first book (I. i. ext. 4–I. iv. ext. 1). Possibly the C. Titius Probus, to whom is ascribed in some MSS. the summary on Roman names at the end of Valerius, was an earlier epitomizer than Julius Paris and may have left an epitome afterwards combined with his; but, as the summary on names cannot by any stretch of imagination be called literature, there is scant profit in discussing the date of Titius Probus or his relationship to Julius Paris.⁠[171] Suffice it to add that the existence of late abridgements and the number of MSS. of the full text which have come down are indications of its hold upon medieval education. Niebuhr, indeed, declares that Valerius “was considered the most important book next to the Bible throughout the Middle Ages; it was the mirror of virtues and was translated into all the languages of Europe.”⁠[172] Teuffel⁠[173] more cautiously remarks that he was not rarely read (nicht selten [72]gelesen) in the Middle Ages; but even this modified statement is an illustration of the continued enthusiasm for Roman history.

His outlook on the world and his attitude towards historical questions do not argue a penetrating or independent genius. He relates omens and miracles in a spirit of unquestioning superstition; e.g. after his record of prodigies sent by Jupiter to dissuade Pompey from resistance to Caesar, Valerius asserts that “the overmastering principles of destiny prevented a heart not otherwise possessed by folly from weighing the prodigies aright.”⁠[174] He is also uncritical in his acceptance of traditional stories; if they are ancient, he argues that antiquity should secure credit for them, while it is his own function not to reject as idle such tales as gained the sanction of famous literary documents.⁠[175]⁠

On many historical matters his attitude is distorted by bias. He is an apologist for Caesarism, animated by an unconcealable dislike for inflammatory agitations conducted by the tribunes of the people in the days of the republic.⁠[176] Thus, although he admits the moderation of Tiberius Gracchus, he elsewhere brands him “an enemy of his fatherland.”⁠[177] Gaius Gracchus he regards as one who might have been a champion of the state, but who preferred to be its impious disturber.⁠[178] Consistently with this anti-democratic leaning, his attitude towards the imperial family is throughout one of such fulsome adulation that the author deteriorates into a toady; and this without, so far as we know, the excuse which may be offered for the flatteries of his contemporary Paterculus, on whose personal notice war had forced some of the admittedly able traits in Tiberius. Valerius’s invocation had described the reigning emperor as one “whose heavenly foresight guarantees a kindly fostering care for the virtues about which I am to speak”; and he delights to note that Tiberius has nobly united the blood of the Nerones with that of the Livii (in ortum salutaris principis [73]nostri conflueret).⁠[179] Again, he makes allusions to the blessings of contemporary life under an excellent emperor;⁠[180] but his enthusiasm embraces the whole kith and kin of the Caesars—they are heavenly luminaries risen from the time-honoured Roman training.⁠[181] So Julius Caesar is mentioned or addressed in terms of religious adoration, well seen in the apostrophe⁠[182] Tuas aras tuaque sanctissima templa, Diue Iuli, ueneratus oro, ending with an artificially balanced reference to the assassination: “Then burst forth the parricidal act of those whose design to subtract thee from the number of mankind involved thine addition to the conclave of the gods!” Elsewhere Caesar’s good qualities are declared to have given him the entrée into heaven, and his repurchase from pirate captors in earlier days is noted as a strange transaction on the part of Fortune; for then she ordained that a small ransom should buy back “the brightest star in the universe”: why, then, should ordinary men complain concerning Fortune, if she does not spare even the Caesars, “sharers in her own divinity”?⁠[183] This commendation of Caesarism lasts up to the end of the work:⁠[184] now the author couples Julius and Augustus as patrem et filium ... diuinitatis fastigio coniunctos;⁠[185] now it is on Augustus that he concentrates attention;⁠[186] now on the palace, as a hallowed abode—ad Augustam domum, beneficentissimum et honoratissimum templum.⁠[187] Sycophany reaches its acme of enormity in his shameless association of Chastity with the marriage-bed of the princess Julia.⁠[188]⁠

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In another way the narrowness of Valerius’s outlook is discernible. He is given to moralizing, a habit which in itself might afford a thinker opportunities for philosophic criticism of men, conduct and events. As it is, the actual pronouncements cannot hide the shallowness of the author’s intellect. His denunciations of luxury, partly perhaps sincere and usually justifiable, are also partly perhaps suggested by conventional sententiae within the cognizance of all educated Romans. These reflections, many of them second-hand or ready-made, constitute practically all his philosophy. He takes few steps towards scientific history. Eagerness to make a point renders him indifferent to healthy doubt; for his aim is to teach, if not history, at least rhetoric, by examples.⁠[189] With almost a fabulist’s fondness for pointing a moral, he enjoys conveying lessons on the degeneracy of his fatherland. He has praise for the old-fashioned probitas and continentia once under censorial scrutiny and by him regarded as the righteousness that strengthens a nation—quid enim prodest foris esse strenuum, si domi male uiuitur?⁠[190] Incidentally his protests afford glimpses of social history. He remarks on the advance in luxury at Rome since the days when Rufinus, an ex-consul, was struck off the senatorial roll for acquiring ten pounds’ weight of silver plate;⁠[191] and he glances at the contemporary craze for building-sites more extensive than the farm-lands of Cincinnatus.⁠[192] So, too, after dating the growth of Roman pleasure-seeking from the close of the Second Punic War and the conquest of Macedon, he contends that the abrogation of the Oppian law regulating the expenses of women was the thin end of the wedge which made an opening for greater extravagance in adornment.⁠[193] Another passage emphasizes the spread of luxurious customs within a single generation—cuius adulescentia priscos mores [75]uidet, senectus nouos orsa est.⁠[194] Occasions are fastened upon to inculcate venerable saws on the “riches of him who hath no desires” (omnia nimirum habet qui nihil concupiscit), or on the necessity of checking vice at the start (neque enim ullum finitur uitium ibi ubi oritur).⁠[195]⁠

His reflections, however, are not confined to the topic of effeminacy; for there is a wealth of general truths and half-proverbial sayings. They have the pointed expression suitable for clinching an argument or adorning a speech: e.g. “Necessity makes the most effectual hardening for human weakness” (humanae imbecillitatis efficacissimum duramentum est necessitas), or “There is a standing antipathy between valour and poltroonery” (sic enerues animos odisse uirtus solet).⁠[196] Similarly, of Theramenes’s bravado in toasting his enemy Critias out of the very poison he had been sentenced to drink, “To face punishment with such ease is assuredly to free oneself from punishment” (profecto est supplicio se liberare, tam facile supplicium perpeti);⁠[197] of the harm done to oneself by indulgence in angry passion (dolorem cum inferre uult, patitur);⁠[198] or of the altogether admirable bravery that comes from true philosophy (illa uehemens et constans animi militia);⁠[199] or yet again, of the vital interconnexion between home and country.⁠[200] Among more elaborate passages of this reflective cast is one (with a typical mixture of metaphors) upon the fleeting nature of human blessings:

Too perishable and frail, too much resembling the toy rattles of children, are your so-called human strength and human wealth. Their rising tide is as instantaneous as their ebb is sudden: at no place and in no person do they stand firmly fixed to steadfast roots; but, driven hither and thither by the wayward blast of fortune, they miserably plunge in an abyss of disaster those whom they have raised aloft and who are now deserted by an unforeseen retreat. And so things which by their loss double the [76]bitterness of the hardships inflicted ought to be neither considered nor called blessings.⁠[201]⁠

To sum up, although he is superstitious, uncritical, time-serving and in his moralizing somewhat hackneyed, yet Valerius is not to be denied credit for protesting against luxury, whether in an independent spirit or from sympathy with the emperor’s policy; and occasionally his genuine appreciation of the greatness of Rome may condone his rhetoric.

This leads to a consideration of his style. Wearing the characteristic guise of the period, it is rhetorical to the verge of bombast; it is metaphorical; it is, as we have seen, given to sententiae; and marked by artifice especially in its penchant for the balanced and epigrammatic. At his briefest he does not hold us—the curt paragraphs allotted to some illustrations are little better than a catalogue; and at times he is himself conscious of the defects attendant upon this mode of treatment.⁠[202] Many examples are incidents compressed from such authors as Livy and, it must generally be added, spoiled in the compressing. How much more effective, for instance, and dramatic is Livy’s handling of the trick whereby a Roman cheated a Sabine out of a cow intended for a sacrifice to bring good fortune!⁠[203] Still, justice compels the admission that sometimes Valerius relates a story both briefly and well—particularly where there is a neat dialogue to introduce. Such merits, however, as he has fail to raise his conglomerate of anecdotes into an aesthetic whole.

The influence of the rhetorical schools dominates his poetic and exclamatory vein, and not seldom beguiles him into turgidity. A piece representative of his occasional touch of poetic fancy follows his story about the symbolic wheat-grains [77]heaped by ants into the mouth of the sleeping infant, Midas:

To the ants of Midas I incline with justice and reason to prefer the bees of Plato; for the former proved harbingers of a prosperity perishable and frail; but the bees foretold prosperity solid and everlasting, when they placed the honey inside the lips of the little child asleep in his cradle. On hearing of what had befallen, the interpreters of prodigies declared that from his mouth should flow a dulcet eloquence unparalleled. Yet to my thinking it was not on Mount Hymettus, fragrant with thyme blossom, that these bees fed, but on the Heliconian mountain-slopes verdant with learning of every kind, and so by the inspiration of the goddesses they instilled into a noble genius the sweetest nourishment of the most exalted eloquence.⁠[204]⁠

Uncurbed by artistic repression, he indulges too freely in the exclamatory. This tends to inflation, and through over-employment becomes wearisome. Take the outburst (O spectaculum admirabile!) on the preparations for carrying out the sentence of scourging passed by the dictator Papirius upon his insubordinate master of the horse; or the apostrophe to the dictator Postumius, who adjudged his own son to death for disobedience to a military command.⁠[205] Touching the Macedonian envoys to Rome, who volunteered to carry the funeral bier of Aemilius Paullus, the author exclaims:

Twice did Macedonia show our city, Paullus, that you were an illustrious man; during your life, by its spoils; on your death, by its shoulders!⁠[206]⁠

It is a forced point made at the expense of simplicity. The section on the praises of poverty ends in characteristic tones:

Why then do we lacerate with daily invective a moderate fortune, as if that were an especial hardship for mankind?... Let us rather rise in spirit and with the memory of the olden times refresh our souls enfeebled by gazing upon money; for by the hut of Romulus, and by the modest dwellings of the ancient Capitol, and by the everlasting hearths of Vesta, content to this [78]day with earthen vessels, I swear that no riches can be preferred to the poverty of such men!⁠[207]⁠

If the passage were not so declamatory one might accept the suggested implication that the author’s means were moderate; as it stands, its autobiographic significance may be doubted.

Akin to the rhetorical element in Valerius are the copiousness and boldness of his metaphors. Their free introduction without a semi-apologetic uelut or quoddam or ut ita dicam, if un-Ciceronian, is in a stylistic sense more modern. The metaphors may be violent, or overdone, or actually mixed. One of many instances occurs in the contrast between Euripides and a self-confident contemporary proud of his powers in rapid composition:

The writings due to the fertile rush (fertilis cursus) of the one have collapsed without reaching the first turning-posts of memory (intra primas metas memoriae); the work of the other, a product of the lamp and of the hesitating pen, shall be borne with the full sails of fame along the passage of all time.⁠[208]⁠

Again, the degeneracy of Scipio’s son is “a birth of darkness from the lightning” (Di boni, quas tenebras ex quo fulmine nasci passi estis!);⁠[209] and the break in the even tenour of Polycrates’s happiness is thus expressed: “Once only did he change countenance, shaken with a very brief jolt of sadness” (semel dumtaxat uultum mutauit perquam breui tristitiae salebra succussum).⁠[210]⁠

The balance so representative of his time is a favourite device in summing up illustrations, as inimicorum existimatione punitus, suo iudicio finitus (of the death of Theramenes), or ita alteri tectum mendacium, alteri ueritas aperta finis uitae fuit,⁠[211] or in his prologue to Book I, “the other gods we have received, the Caesars we have given” (deos enim reliquos accepimus, [79]Caesares dedimus). In a later book he remarks that the difference between the poet Accius and Julius Caesar lay in books not busts (ibi uoluminum non imaginum certamina exercebantur), while of Virginius resolved to deliver his daughter from the designs of Appius Claudius he says: puellam occidit pudicaeque interemptor quam corruptae pater esse maluit.⁠[212]⁠

His artificiality is largely due to the inveterate habit of hunting for effective contrasts, and to a passion for the epigrammatic in expressing facts and reflections.⁠[213] Overreaching his aim, he constantly falls into far-fetched conceits. Some of these smart sayings are as heartless and tasteless as the headlines of certain modern newspapers. Take his comment on the intended result of the punishments inflicted upon Romans who had surrendered to a force of slaves: the object was, he says grimly,

that those who had been lured by the desire for life into permitting runaways richly deserving crucifixion to set up trophies over them, those who had not blushed to have the ignominious yoke imposed upon their own liberty by the hands of slaves, should now find that their share in the light of day could be embittered, and should now have a manly longing for that death of which they had felt a womanish dread.⁠[214]⁠

Here the final antithesis between effeminate timuerant and uiriliter optarent is singularly unnatural and strained. He is scarcely less artificial when he declares that “from the gallant wounds” of Cato of Utica “flowed more glory than blood,” and that by falling on his sword he taught mankind “how the upright should prefer honour without life to life without honour.”⁠[215] The tendency resembles Dryden at his earliest and worst, and the riot of conceit during one phase of English literature in the seventeenth century.

No less in the narrower aspect of vocabulary and constructions does the Latin of Valerius Maximus bear the stamp of [80]the Silver Age. His prose shares the fondness noticeable in Phaedrus’s verse for abstract turns of expression. As Phaedrus uses maiestas ducis for “the Emperor,” so Valerius uses mea paruitas for “my humble self.”⁠[216] This liking for the abstract, conjoined with abundance of metaphor, contributes to give his phraseology a more modern ring than the strictly classical Latin idiom has. When Marius is described as hostile to the upholders of ancient lineage, Valerius merges such persons in the abstract term uetustas, and the incompetent warriors who belittled successful men risen from lowly origins are grouped under the phrase militaris ignauia.⁠[217] He refers to Aemilius Lepidus despatched by the senate to be a guardian for a young Egyptian prince as amplissimique et integerrimi uiri sanctitatem.⁠[218] In similar fashion, he mentions “men who have slipped into this deviation (of luxury) unknown to old-world temperance,” where a simpler and earlier style of Latin might have said “unknown to our temperate ancestors.”⁠[219]⁠

As might be expected, new words rise into prominence and old words are used in changed senses. For example, he appears to favour sugillare, which, like sugillatio,⁠[220] is a Livian word—a significant point when it is remembered that Livy marks the transition between republican and Silver Latinity.⁠[221] Valerius gets the unusual and “post-classical” word uaframentum (“a trick”) into his head at VII. iii. ext. 2, and repeats it in the fourth and seventh paragraphs of the chapter. Indeed, he is given to this repetition of words and expressions which capture his fancy. Symptoms of the change coming over the language may be detected in his invention or acceptance of fresh meanings and fresh usages. Thus he widens the metaphorical use of words: e.g. Cimonis incunabula opinione stultitiae fuerunt referta (VI. ix. ext. 2) is a more artificial employment [81]of referta than in Cicero’s uita undique referta bonis (Tusc. Disp. V. xxxi. 86). The adjective numerosus, too, appears in its late Latin sense.⁠[222] Nor are his constructions those of stricter days. As in Phaedrus, persuadere is used personally in the passive;⁠[223] and infinitives are joined freely with verbs which in the Golden Age took a dependent ut and subjunctive.⁠[224] In all such linguistic matters Valerius is as symptomatic of his age as when he serves the needs of disputants and declaimers, or makes his verbal obeisances before imperial authority. So, while he is not a thinker even to the limited extent that Paterculus is, while he is casual in investigation, superficial in comment, and too often showy in style, yet, as a literary landmark, he possesses historical importance sufficient to justify an attentive examination of his work.

MINOR HISTORIANS

Under Tiberius, Caligula and Claudius history did not greatly flourish: under Nero, we shall find, it flourished still less. There are only two historians of note in the period—Velleius and Curtius. Before considering them, we may pause on a few minor names. Cremutius Cordus illustrates the danger of historical composition in the early Empire, especially if a writer gave offence to a powerful minister like Sejanus. Cremutius was charged with praising Brutus in his annals, and with calling Cassius “last of the Romans.” He starved himself to death, and the senate had his books burned in A.D. 25, though Tacitus says copies were hidden and published.⁠[225] Similarly, the downfall of the republic and the initial phases of the Empire occupied Aufidius Bassus in Tiberius’s reign. He gave attention to Rome’s wars with the Germans, and his work is cited and continued by the elder Pliny.⁠[226] The elder Seneca’s lost historical work has been recorded as containing an account of the end of [83]Tiberius. A later group includes Caligula’s victim Gaetulicus, who governed Germany for ten years, but whose writings on Germans and Britons may, like other works of his, have been in verse;⁠[227] then, in Claudius’s time, Servilius Nonianus who wrote on recent as well as contemporary history, and Bocchus who treated chronology and the marvels of Spain.

VELLEIUS PATERCULUS

The circumstance that C.⁠[228] Velleius Paterculus⁠[229] was quaestor elect in A.D. 6⁠[230] warrants the inference that his birth took place not later than 19 B.C. After A.D. 30, the year of the consulate of M. Vinicius, to whom he dedicated his history and whom he often addresses in its course, we know nothing of Velleius; and, indeed, he seems to have played no prominent part in the reign of Tiberius, for throughout the sixteen years which elapsed after his nomination as a candidatus Caesaris for the praetorship in the year of Augustus’s death⁠[231] we have no information about him. Then comes the fact that he published his book; and as to his biography the rest is silence. For us, therefore, his activity lies within narrow limits of time: its outstanding feature, that which determined his outlook on history, was his career in the public and especially the military service during the first fourteen years of the Christian era.

He came of a family which, as he is at pains to remind his readers, had been strenuous in civic life and in the profession of [84]arms. Dealing with the Italian franchise war, he declares that mistaken modesty (uerecundia) shall not deter him from doing justice to the part played by an ancestor (atauus), Minatius Magius, who in turn was the grandson of a notable Campanian, Decius Magius. This more distant forbear figures in Livy’s pages at Capua as a stubborn advocate of fidelity to Rome despite the threats of Hannibal.⁠[232] The author’s grandfather, C. Velleius, a praefectus fabrum, had been honoured by Pompey and remained so keen an anti-Caesarian that he ran himself through with his sword, when by reason of years he felt unable actively to support Tiberius Nero (the future emperor’s father) after his defeat by Octavian: “I shall not defraud my own grandfather,” says Velleius admiringly with a Johnsonian emphasis, “of a testimony which I should give to a stranger.”⁠[233] He notes elsewhere that his father, like himself, had been praefectus equitum.⁠[234] Again, he records the assistance given by Capito, his uncle (patruus meus), a man of senatorial rank, to Agrippa in prosecuting C. Cassius after the assassination of Caesar.⁠[235] To his brother, Magius Celer Velleianus, he makes several allusions, chronicling his recognized ability as lieutenant-general under Tiberius Caesar in Dalmatia and his association with the author both in attending Tiberius’s triumph, and later as one among “Caesar’s candidates” for the praetorship.⁠[236]⁠

Concerning his formal education we have scant knowledge; yet, considerable rhetorical training may be argued from his artifices of style; and he must have imbibed an interest in books and authors, to judge from his pronouncements on Homer, Hesiod and Cicero, and from excursuses on literary men of the Gracchan, Ciceronian and Augustan periods.⁠[237] About the beginning of our era he was a young officer (tribunus militum) who had gained preliminary insight into military life under Vinicius’s father in Thrace and Macedonia, and was next on service in the East.⁠[238] Such service doubtless provided a stimulus towards writing the now mutilated compendium upon Oriental and Greek affairs near the outset of his history. Elsewhere, [85]too, we meet transient suggestions of Oriental colour and memories—as when he recalls his good fortune in beholding a gorgeous Durbar held on an island in the Euphrates between C. Caesar and the Parthian monarch;⁠[239] or when there flashes on his inward eye the pleasant recollection of “so many events, places, nations and cities” of the East;⁠[240] or when he recounts Antony’s luxurious chariot-ride through the streets of Alexandria as the new Father Bacchus, “ivy-wreathed, clad in a golden robe, thyrsus in hand, and buskins on his legs;”⁠[241] or again when, con amore, he devotes picturesque touches to his description of the extravagant mummery of Antony’s quondam friend, Plancus, who acted Glaucus “naked and painted sea-green, wearing a chaplet of reeds on his head, dragging a tail after him and crawling upon his knees.”⁠[242]⁠

But no experience left upon his history so distinctive an imprint as his military service under Tiberius. This meant contact virtually for eight years on end with a powerful and able personality.⁠[243] For his commander’s greatness he conceived and expressed unbounded enthusiasm in an almost eighteenth-century sense of the term. It is an enthusiasm which amounts to a bias for Tiberius in particular and for the Caesars in general. The question of the character of Tiberius may be with greater appropriateness raised in considering Tacitus; but at least more light and shade might have been expected from Velleius, if, as an actual observer (spectator), he aimed at producing an impartial and realistic picture of the man. What one can say without prejudice is that he had abundant opportunity for estimating the merits of Tiberius as a general, and that both the author and [86]the subject of his eulogies were men of proved military experience. The future historian went out as a cavalry officer with Tiberius to Germany in A.D. 4; two years later, when quaestor-elect, he took charge of reinforcements despatched from Rome to Tiberius, who was then coping with the danger threatening Italy from Dalmatia and Pannonia; and after the quaestorship at Rome he acted as legatus under him.⁠[244] “What battalions of the enemy did we not behold in that first year!” exclaims Velleius proudly.⁠[245] The ultimate surrender of Pannonia confined war-like operations to Dalmatia, where Velleius and his brother were assisting Tiberius.⁠[246] Scarcely was Dalmatia pacified in A.D. 9 when the appalling disaster to the Roman arms under Varus in Germany summoned Tiberius thither to the rescue of imperial fortunes, or, to follow Velleius’s artificial expression, as the patronus who took up the case of his client, the state: “the never-failing champion of the Roman Empire undertakes the cause so familiar to him.”⁠[247] With Velleius’s attendance at Tiberius’s triumph in the winter of A.D. 12-13 the record of his career as a soldier fittingly closes.

It is natural that, like Livy on a larger scale, Velleius should treat with greater fulness events nearest to his own day; but his treatment of early history would look less disproportionate, if his compendium had come down in more perfect form. As it stands, Book I has lost its opening; and only eight chapters have survived to represent the affairs of the East and Greek and Tyrian enterprise before the foundation of Rome. An allusion to the rape of the Sabine maidens is interrupted by a gap of well-nigh six hundred years in the narrative, which is resumed in the second century B.C., at the period of the second Macedonian war. Then ten extant chapters of Book I include the fall of Carthage and Corinth, an account of Roman colonies, reflections on the multiplicity of geniuses at certain epochs and remarks on Roman literature and oratory. Book II, in 131 chapters, [87]ranges over more than a century and a half from Tiberius Gracchus to Tiberius Caesar. The last definite historical allusion is to the emperor’s bereavement by the death of the dowager-empress Livia, which happened in A.D. 29.⁠[248] The tone of encomium adopted towards Sejanus would prove, even if we did not know the date of Vinicius’s consulate, that the work ended before his fall in A.D. 31.⁠[249]⁠

In reviewing the literary and historical qualities of Velleius, one must keep before one the intentionally compendious nature of his work. Readers are indeed not likely to forget it; for he repeatedly pauses to explain that he is in haste, harping on the point till it sounds like a refrain among his themes. This brevity was a kind of literary fashion, comparable with that to which Phaedrus lays claim at the same period. Velleius seems desirous of illustrating the merits of his compendious system when applied to a serviceable digression upon Roman colonies (non inutili rerum notitia in artum contracta).⁠[250] At another time, he feels impelled to digress on the recurrence of periods distinguished for special talent, although he is sensible that the “headlong rapidity” of his composition, “like the revolution of a wheel, or the downrush of a torrent, admits of no halt, and involves rather the exclusion of necessary details than the acceptance of the superfluous.”⁠[251] Similarly he realizes the necessity laid upon him by his limits to deal succinctly with even such a subject as the greatness of Pompey (operis modus paucis eam narrari iubet);⁠[252] while the greatness of Caesar forces him to stop despite his urgency (quamlibet festinantem in se morari cogit.)⁠[253] Again, he offers a condensed account of the outbreak of the Civil War in contradistinction to the copious volumes of others;⁠[254] almost apologetically he regrets that his promise to be brief involves racing over details in Caesar’s campaigns against the Pompeians;⁠[255] with equal regret he exclaims that the boons [88]conferred upon the world by the victory at Actium could not have justice done them in so rapid a survey as his abridgement;⁠[256] and elsewhere he asserts the impossibility of describing adequately the magnificence of Octavian’s triumphant return to Rome “even in the compass of a regular history, let alone a work so abbreviated as this.”⁠[257] But it is in connexion with Tiberius that he becomes still more insistent upon his obligation to be concise; thus, he promises to discuss in a different work Pannonia, Dalmatia and other countries subdued by Tiberius;⁠[258] he reserves, presumably for the same intended work, the circumstances attending that prince’s withdrawal from Rome into temporary seclusion at Rhodes;⁠[259] he looks forward to conveying an impression of the popular joy over his adoption “in that regular history” (in illo iusto opere); so too with further Dalmatian and Pannonian victories and the Varian disaster which called Tiberius to Germany.⁠[260] The alarming effect of Augustus’s death he avers to be beyond description: “I have no leisure in so precipitate a narrative to portray it, and he who has leisure is unable to do it.”⁠[261] All this may savour of protesting too much on the part of one who would be brief; yet it has its importance as a proof that he had a conception of, and perhaps yearnings after, a different method of writing history; while, to some extent, his confessedly compendious aim disarms criticism or, at least, palliates certain blemishes and omissions. It is beside the point to reproach him with sketchiness when his plain object is to be sketchy; nor is it surprising that in his hurry he should be at times careless in composition, awkward in structure, conversational in tone, and given to tasteless repetition in word and phrase.⁠[262]⁠

In a work which makes no pretence to be exhaustive we [89]cannot expect an enumeration of authorities. Some sources he does, in fact, mention; others we are left to infer. Discussing the foundation of Capua and Nola (in a manner half suggesting that he belonged to the former town),⁠[263] he cites vaguely “some authors,” and then descends in particular upon Cato, whose Origines he is certain to have found useful, and from whom he dissents “with all due deference to his carefulness.”⁠[264] He alludes to the Annales of Hortensius as authoritative upon the Italian war of Sulla’s time; to an inscription, in proof of a religious ceremony performed by Sulla; to ampler details “in the larger volumes of others” who had treated the outbreak of the Civil War; and to the autobiographic memoirs of Augustus.⁠[265] The effect of the annalists’s method is observable in his inclusion of a survey of Greek colonization; and we may readily suppose, since the works of Atticus, Cornelius Nepos and Pompeius Trogus⁠[266] were available, that he made use of them. Livy, who was republican enough to be dubbed “Pompeian” by Augustus, would not possess the pro-Caesarian enthusiasm likely to commend him to Velleius.

The curtness of the specially compendious parts does not conduce to interest, and for this reason one welcomes occasions when summary gives place to slightly more spacious digressions such as those on colonies, on early Roman literature and the natural law regulating the emergence of genius, on literature and oratory at the Gracchan period, on great authors of the Augustan age, on Roman provinces, and on the boons of the Augustan régime.⁠[267] But it is only fair to say that the general effect compares favourably with that of most compendium-writers in Latin. For instance, his compendium is of much greater force and individuality than that of Florus. Velleius can at least be spirited and interesting (even if over-enthusiastic), when he relates his personal impressions of Tiberius. This may be due to an excess of that subjectivity which is a characteristic of the Silver Age; but it has the merit of winning attention. [90]He leaves us under no misapprehension as to his likes or dislikes. He is no democrat: he hates the ‘pernicious’ agitations of the Gracchi; he detests Marius and Cinna and the tribune of the people, Manilius (semper uenalis et alienae minister potentiae);⁠[268] on the other hand, he is full of admiration for Marcus Cato, while his affection for the Caesars emerges at every opportunity, continuously from the chapter recording Octavius’s birth, on through the appreciative comparison of Julius Caesar’s achievements in Gaul with the subsequent exploits of Tiberius, until he reaches those passages where he sounds the praises of the princeps or of his minister Sejanus.⁠[269] Now, while these antipathies and sympathies imply partiality, they by no means make the historian less entertaining. It is one thing to be trustworthy, and another to be readable. Besides, as we shall find, the very style, faults notwithstanding, has a good deal of colour and variety: it is no dead monotony in its choice of words and ideas.

Already in his prose there are evidences of the change which had set in towards Silver Latinity. Traces of such tendencies may be remarked in Livy,⁠[270] but in Velleius they are more prominent; for the old massive and, on the whole, straightforward periods are largely replaced by briefer sentences where pointed phrase and emphatic contrast argue a style at once disdainful of absolute simplicity and ambitious of attracting notice to the manner of expression. Where he attempts the long sentence, the inferiority of his literary architecture becomes patent: it is often an ill-built fabric of clumsy patchwork. Thus, the character of Julius Caesar is portrayed in a rambling sentence where the first word “hic” is separated from the closing verb “elapsus est,” to which it is nominative, by nearly 130 words forming an overcrowded series of subordinate clauses and phrases.⁠[271]⁠

[91]

The evolution of Latin prose during the first century A.D. is so closely wrapped up with the educational training undergone by writers, that one instinctively looks for traces left by the rhetorical school upon Velleius. They are not far to seek among his plentiful exclamations and interrogations: e.g. the apostrophe denouncing Antony for Cicero’s murder:

“You gained nothing, however, Mark Antony (for indignation bursting from heart and spirit compels me to depart from the regular form of my history), you gained nothing, I tell you, when you paid the hire for cutting off a divine gift of utterance and a most noble head, or when you procured for a ghastly wage the assassination of a man once the preserver of the commonwealth, once a consul so illustrious! You robbed Cicero on that day of a life of trouble, of an age in the yellow leaf, of an existence more pitiable under your domination than death could be under your triumvirate; but his reputation, the renown of his actions and words, these, instead of taking away, you enhanced. He lives and will live in the memory of all the ages; and as long as, whether framed by chance or providence or by what means soever, there shall endure unharmed this fabric of the universe, which he almost alone of Romans could see in the mind’s eye, could grasp with his genius, and could illustrate by his eloquence, so long shall it carry the praise of Cicero as the companion of its own continuance. All posterity will admire his writings against you, and will curse your conduct towards him!”⁠[272]⁠

The poetic element in his diction is an allied feature; and another kindred symptom is an inordinate fondness for superlatives.⁠[273]⁠

[92]

But it is his habitual quest after the striking and epigrammatic that classes Velleius’s Latin as definitely Silver.⁠[274] His antitheses—and some are excellent—would impress one more, if they were fewer; their frequency palls, and amid such an embarrassment of material, one need but select the examples first to hand. “Scipio, by the destruction of Carthage and Numantia, freed us from the dread of the one, and the insults of the other” (excisa Carthagine ac Numantia ab alterius nos metu, alterius uindicauit contumeliis).⁠[275] A little more elaborate is the studied contrast of nouns, adjectives and tenses observable in the following:

ne quid usquam malis publicis deesset, in qua ciuitate semper uirtutibus certatum erat, certabatur sceleribus, optimusque sibi uidebatur qui fuerat pessimus.⁠[276]⁠

Another chapter contains a balanced summary of the rivals’ position at the outbreak of the Civil War:

alterius ducis causa melior uidebatur, alterius erat firmior; hic omnia speciosa, illic ualentia: Pompeium senatus auctoritas, Caesarem militum armauit fiducia,⁠[277]⁠

in reading which one cannot help thinking of Lucan’s famous antithesis concerning the same struggle, Victrix causa deis placuit sed uicta Catoni, and the fuller comparison between the protagonists which follows that line.⁠[278] So one might quote the distinction drawn between Brutus and Cassius, or the portions of the chapter on Actium where he piles antithesis upon antithesis.⁠[279]⁠

Sometimes his artificiality lies in straining after an affectedly remote way of conveying a mental picture; and such literary conceits may or may not be combined with the trick of antithesis. He introduces a fanciful idea of the solace which the outcast Marius might derive from the ruins of Carthage, each contemplating, each comforting the other (cum Marius aspiciens [93]Carthaginem, illa intuens Marium, alter alteri possent esse solacio).⁠[280] When Catulus asphyxiated himself, he found a death rather after the wish than the design of his enemies (mortem magis uoto quam arbitrio inimicorum obiit).⁠[281] Similar anxiety to compass a smart saying animates the conceit implying that Catiline’s end had cheated the executioner: “gallantly fighting, he yielded up the breath of life already due to capital punishment” (fortissime dimicans quem debuerat supplicio spiritum reddidit).⁠[282] So of Sextus Pompey, the son of the pirate-crusher turned pirate, as Velleius must remind us: so, of the heroic lady, who “bringing about a premature death by swallowing live coals was compensated for death by deathless fame” (uiuo igni deuorato praematura morte inmortalem nominis sui pensauit memoriam).⁠[283]⁠

His prose style demands attention, both as a type of its period and as the subject of strictures which have sometimes been too unqualified. Although nowise comparable to the lactea ubertas of Livy, yet a careful examination will show that it cannot fairly be dismissed as absolutely meagre. There are qualities which recall Sallust: and that must be imputed to Velleius for literary virtue. His very artifices save him from baldness, while, as a military author, he displays, with all his faults and affectations, more sense of style than, for instance, the continuators of Caesar.⁠[284]⁠

His semi-proverbial sayings, which read like so many condensations of a reflective wisdom, rather heighten than otherwise one’s opinion of him as an author. Such pronouncements as the following imply, not absolute invention, but a faculty of insight and expression: “rivalry nurtures talent” (aluntur aemulatione ingenia); “continuance at the height of perfection is hard” (difficilis in perfecto mora est); “what one cannot overtake one ceases to follow” (quod assequi non potest sequi desinit); “precedents do not stop where they start” (non ibi consistunt exempla unde coeperunt); “men are indulgent critics of themselves” (familiare est hominibus omnia sibi ignoscere); “any port in a storm” (exitialem tempestatem fugientibus statio pro portu); [94]“ease is the deadliest foe to discipline” (res disciplinae inimicissima otium); “great tasks need great helpers” (magna negotia magnis adiutoribus egent).⁠[285] On at least two occasions he propounds the ancient notion that those predestined to calamity are forced upon foolishness by some higher power, be it “God” or “Destiny’s force that none may wrestle against.”⁠[286]⁠

For his historical method at large profundity cannot be claimed. He does not appreciate great movements in history; he does not exhibit the essential nexus or continuous evolution between periods; and though his eye to their relationship in time is noticeable in the frequent insertion of a date, even this laudable habit is discounted by inconsistencies in chronology. On the other hand, if he shows no keen discernment for the causal link conjoining ages, he can grasp and criticize certain political, social or economic developments which constitute differences between them: thus, he remarks forcibly upon the increase at Rome of civil broils (II. iii.), aestheticism (I. xiii.), luxury (I. xi., xv.),⁠[287] and house-rents (II. x.). And while the vital significance of great movements is not made luminous, he at least realizes the duty of assigning causes, as in his speculation upon the contemporary emergence of great geniuses (I. xvii.). It adds to his merits that he recognizes the play of human passions and in virtue thereof remains no mere chronicler, but becomes a discerner and recorder of motives—as in the case of the outbreak of the Civil War, where he accounts for Pompey’s attitude, or where he states the respective objects of Pompey, Caesar and Crassus in forming their triumvirate.⁠[288] If, then, it may be admitted that Velleius writes history without deep penetration into what Teuffel calls “the internal connexion of things”;⁠[289] yet it is going too far to say that “his interest [95]centres upon individuals only.” For, surely, his actual search for motives must relate the individual to his surroundings; and, as indicated, he is not entirely neglectful of the need for tracing causes. Besides, his serviceable digressions, already glanced at, arise expressly from his sense of the inferior force of isolated details in history as compared with their effect when grouped together.⁠[290]⁠

With these qualifications, however, the truth remains that his history is written mainly from a personal or subjective standpoint; and its cardinal method is the biographic, with some of the merits and most of the defects entailed. It is, then, not highly scientific or philosophic: on the other hand, though Velleius believes in the universal sway of fortune,⁠[291] there is in such a character-loving method little danger of representing historical figures as mere puppets controlled by some indefinable but apparently inexorable “Will of the Age.” With him prominent men are no tools of impersonal forces, but living actors who logically deserve moral blame or commendation when their qualities come to be weighed. So, through his own interest in character, he increases his readers’ interest in his personages and seldom leaves a doubt as to his opinion for or against a man. Strong sympathies, indeed, may be consistent with a claim to be candid and dispassionate.⁠[292] Velleius is, however, too enthusiastic to realize the extravagance of his praises. Bias has blinded the judge. Tiberius was doubtless an able soldier, but Velleius damages the emperor’s character by excessive eulogy. Perilously endowed with an inexhaustible capacity for laudation and an insatiable thirst for superlatives, he resembles a professional writer of testimonials in favour of the Caesars.⁠[293]⁠

The likes and dislikes are not confined to persons. He is almost Puritanic in his suspicion of art and wealth as detrimental to the community;⁠[294] and yet this distrust of aestheticism does not [96]conceal from him the crass ignorance (although he is too grave to see the humour) which Mummius showed in serving his celebrated notice upon the contractors for the removal of pictures and statues from Corinth to Rome, to the effect that any masterpiece lost must be replaced!⁠[295] He is scathing in his denunciation of proscription, and sarcastic on the tendency to minimize contemporary greatness and on homage rendered to high place.⁠[296] Still, it is upon his character-drawing that one should focus attention. His briefer character-pieces, containing many neat strokes, include, in the first book, that of Scipio (xii.-xiii.); in the second, Marius (xi.); Mithradates (xviii.); Cinna (xxiv.); Cato, finely called “the very likeness of Virtue” (homo uirtuti simillimus, xxxv.); Clodius (xlv.); Curio, “a most ingeniously good-for-nothing person” (homo ingeniosissime nequam, xlviii.); Caelius, who resembled Curio and was not minus ingeniosissime nequam (lxviii.); Brutus and Cassius (lxxii.); Lepidus (lxxx.), Shakespeare’s “slight unmeritable man,” called by Velleius “the biggest of fools without a single good quality to deserve the long indulgence of fortune”; Maecenas, whose voluptuous effeminacy during leisure-hours is noted in otio ac mollitiis paene ultra feminam fluens, and his sleepless vigilance at an emergency in the no less striking words ubi res uigiliam exigeret, sane exsomnis (lxxxviii.). The sketch of Drusus comes later (xcvii.). Fuller portrayals are given of Pompey (II. xxix.) and Caesar (xli.). Still more elaborate is the character of Tiberius conveyed in different chapters; and to this picture we now turn, remembering that a complete estimate of the real Tiberius involves the attitude of Tacitus. Tiberius is introduced in a comparison with Julius and Augustus;⁠[297] but we get our first historical glimpse of him when, a child of two, he lay in the arms of his mother Livia, then a fugitive from the troops of the man whose consort she was one day to be.⁠[298] Really, however, he enters on Velleius’ stage in his nineteenth year, announced with a fanfare of praise as a quaestor of promise:—

“Tiberius Claudius Nero ... brought up on a system of [97]the loftiest principles, a youth of high birth, good looks and imposing stature, thoroughly equipped with an excellent education and superior talents, who from the outset had awakened expectations equal to his present greatness, and even to the eye had proclaimed himself a prince.”⁠[299] For almost forty chapters Tiberius is the dominating figure; but it is mainly his career previous to his accession which Velleius describes; for it is only in five closing chapters that he touches briefly on his reign. This brevity is the more disappointing in view of the account which Tacitus gives in the Annals; and those at least who accept it must charge Velleius with suppressio ueri. About twenty chapters are occupied with Tiberius as a soldier.⁠[300] They contain material illustrative of his greatness, such as the indescribable enthusiasm for him as a general:—

The very sight of him drew tears of joy from the soldiers. They were all eagerness, with a sort of unexampled rapture in their salutation and a passion for touching his hand: they could not restrain themselves from immediately adding ‘Is it really you, General? Have we got you back in safety?’ and then, ‘I was with you in Armenia, General,’ ‘I was in Raetia,’ ‘I had a reward from you in Vindelicia,’ ‘I in Pannonia,’ ‘I in Germany’—a scene not to be expressed in words, and perhaps scarcely capable of winning belief.⁠[301]⁠

This forms an effective prelude to his military successes in Germany. Another impressive incident is that of the tall and aged German chieftain who in a native “dug-out” paddled half across the river between the enemy and the Roman camp to request the privilege of looking upon Tiberius.⁠[302] Tiberius’s solicitude for the health of subordinates (his provision of an [98]ambulance for sick officers is one illustration), and his self-discipline on active service, are among the admirable traits emphasized.⁠[303] Apart, however, from handling his prowess, Velleius has ways of elevating his hero. He touches on Tiberius’s dignified leisure at Rhodes, the disturbing effect exercised upon the peace of the world by this retirement, the widespread joy over his adoption by Augustus, and his modest reluctance to accept imperial sovereignty.⁠[304] Then, looking back from A.D. 30 over Tiberius’s years upon the throne, in a passage whose textual variations fortunately do not impair the sense, our author paints in couleur de rose his picture of the reign:

“Of the transactions of these last sixteen years, massed (ingerantur, Ellis; inhaereat, Kritz) as they are before the eyes and mind of everyone, who shall venture upon a detailed account? Our emperor secured the consecration of his sire not by authority, but by scrupulous reverence (non imperio sed religione); he did not simply give Augustus a divine title—he made him a god. Financial stability has been recalled to our public life and political disaffection cleared out of it (summota), as bribery has been from the elections, and strife from the senate-house. Justice, equity, industry, long buried and cumbered with mould (sepultaeque ac situ obsitae), have been restored to the state. There has been an enhancement of prestige for the authorities (magistratibus instead of militibus), of grandeur for the senate, and of dignity for the law-courts. Rioting in the theatre has been put down, and upright conduct has been either the aim inspired in all or a necessity imposed upon them: integrity is honoured and irregularities are punished. The humble man respects the powerful without fearing him, while the powerful takes precedence of a humbler man without despising him. When were provisions more moderate in price? When was peace richer in blessings? Spread over the regions of east and west and everywhere within the bounds of south or north, the Augustan Peace to the uttermost corner of the earth preserves men immune from the dread of brigandage. Accidental losses sustained not only by individuals but by cities are made [99]good through the generosity of our prince. Cities in Asia have been repaired; provinces have been secured against the wrong-doing of governors. Office is the ready reward of merit; crime is certain to meet with punishment, even if it comes late. Influence is surpassed by a fair claim, and intrigue by desert; for our best of princes by his own practice teaches his countrymen to act aright, and while he is greatest in power, he is even greater as an example.”⁠[305]⁠

Later we read his panegyric upon Tiberius composed in exclamatory fashion:

“With what precepts did he equip his dear Germanicus and imbue him with the principles of campaigning in his own company long before he welcomed him back as the conqueror of Germany! What were the honours which he heaped upon his young manhood, when the style of his triumph corresponded to the greatness of his exploits! How often has he honoured the people with donations, and how willingly, when he could do it with the approval of the senate, has he made good a deficiency in a senator’s income without either offering inducements to extravagance or allowing honourable poverty to be deprived of dignity!... What a formidable war, stirred up by the Gallic chieftain Sacrovir and Julius Florus, did he suppress with a rapidity and a gallantry so marvellous that the Roman people found itself a conqueror before it was conscious of being at war, and the messenger of victory outstripped the news of danger! The highly alarming conflict in Africa, too, despite its daily increase in seriousness, was, under his auspices and direction, speedily laid to rest. What public works has he erected of his own (sua rather than suo), or in the name of his family! With what dutiful generosity, surpassing human belief, is he rearing a temple to his sire!... Anything that has at any time enjoyed eminent renown, he considers to have the claim of kindred upon his protection. With what liberality on other occasions, but, especially at the recent conflagration on the Caelian Mount, has he out of his own patrimony come to the rescue of the losses of people in every rank! How little are [100]the public disturbed when, without the consternation involved in a levy, he organizes the raising of troops, a matter of prolonged and peculiar alarm!”⁠[306]⁠

Having thus belauded his talent for training youth in military science, his benefactions, energy, businesslike grasp, filial piety, and gift for organization, Velleius proceeds humbly to protest his wonderment that the gods should permit plots to be formed against so good a ruler, and to bemoan the sorrowful bereavements and shameful domestic trials which have befallen the emperor.

So the historian praises not wisely but too well. There is no whisper about unfair treatment of Germanicus to besmirch the spotlessness of the emperor: nor is there a suggestion of fault in Sejanus, for the powerful minister had not yet fallen. In the pages of Tacitus we look upon a different portrayal of the emperor and his times. But with Velleius all is right in the Roman world. As an old soldier he is unflinching in loyalty to his imperator. He could not belong to the political opposition. From the first warmly affected towards the Caesars, he shows his favourable attitude to the Empire in his sketch of the benefits conferred by the Augustan régime.⁠[307] Consistently with this feeling of approval a sense of the continuity of Rome animates and dignifies his closing prayer. This is an appeal for national preservation and defence addressed to Jupiter of the Capitol, to Mars as author of the Roman name and mainstay of its power, to Vesta as warden of the ever-burning fires, and finally to all those majestic divinities who had conferred imperial destiny upon Rome:

Voto finiendum uolumen est. Iuppiter Capitoline, et auctor ac stator Romani nominis, Gradiue Mars, perpetuorumque custos Vesta ignium, et quidquid numinum hanc Romani imperi molem in amplissimum terrarum orbis fastigium extulit, uos publica uoce obtestor atque precor: custodite, seruate, protegite hunc statum, hanc pacem, hunc principem.⁠[308]⁠

[101]

Q. CURTIUS

A story is told about Alfonso V of Aragon and I of Sicily and Sardinia that once, when ill, he had Quintus Curtius’s narrative of the exploits of Alexander the Great read to him, and that the result proved to be more than relaxation; for the King was cured. This anecdote of a ruler in the fifteenth century notable for kindness to scholars who fled from Constantinople to escape the Turks is one which indicates the right approach to Curtius. He is to be read rather for entertainment than for exact instruction; yet, after all, this is to certify his possession of a considerable literary gift. The manuscripts give his name as Q. Curtius Rufus;⁠[309] but details of his life are not forthcoming and his date is a matter of inference. There seems no way of settling his relationship to or identity with the Curtius Rufus⁠[310] in Tacitus who was son of a gladiator, gained a triumph for overworking his soldiers at silver mines in Germany, beheld an ominous midday vision recorded⁠[311] by both Tacitus and Pliny, and eventually became proconsul of Africa. It has been argued that, if he had been a writer, Tacitus would have mentioned the fact; that a proconsul might have been expected to be more proficient in military history than our Curtius is; and that an imperial official characterized by a “sullen sycophancy towards superiors” (aduersus superiores tristi adulatione) would not have been so independent in criticisms on Alexander’s arrogance, and on his courtiers’ subservience—“the perpetual curse of princes, whose power has been overthrown oftener by flattery than by foes.”⁠[312] Plausible answers can be framed to each of these arguments; for example, it is unfortunately too innocent (and [102]Sallust will serve as an instance) to assume that a writer’s morality is equal to his moralizing. But, all things considered, no absolute conclusion can be reached. Rather more satisfactory is the contention that he wrote under Claudius; for the two contemporary references⁠[313] traceable in his work best suit that period. One arises out of the siege of Tyre, “now that prolonged peace restores all things, Tyre, reborn after her destruction, finds repose beneath the protecting clemency of Rome”; and the other contrasts the dissolution of Alexander’s dominions after his death with the happier condition of the Roman Empire:

“Rightly does the Roman people acknowledge a debt of safety to a prince that shone forth like a new star of the night which wellnigh proved our last: most truly it was his rising, not the sun’s, that restored light to a world in gloom (caliganti) when, deprived of their head, its members were in conflict and panic.” The most satisfactory explanation of the second passage is that it refers to the night in January, A.D. 41, when Caligula was murdered and Claudius found himself suddenly elevated to the throne; and the suggestion has been made that caliganti is a play on the dead emperor’s name. The “prolonged peace” of the earlier passage applies appropriately to the period up to 41: and if the historian is the Curtius Rufus given between Porcius Latro and Valerius Primanus in Suetonius’s list in De Rhetoribus, then the order of names would suggest a similar date.⁠[314]⁠

Of the ten books which Curtius composed on Alexander’s exploits, the first two are lost. Other gaps occur at the end of Book V and beginning of VI, and there is a break in the last book. Freinsheim in the seventeenth century wrote Latin supplements for the missing parts, drawing his material from many authors including Plutarch and Arrian. The eight surviving books narrate Alexander’s career from 333 B.C., when [103]he was twenty-three and had reached Phrygia in his Asiatic expedition, up to his death at Babylon in 323 with the resultant confusion and rivalries. Falling short of first-rate history, the work is yet a wonderful and often enthralling pageant of adventure, diplomacy, barbarity, kindliness, privation, battle and sieges with “scapes i’the imminent deadly breach.” We need not read far in the existing Latin text before Alexander characteristically cuts the Gordian knot; and the will-power thereby displayed is soon triumphantly seizing the passes of Cilicia, winning the battle of Issus, and capturing the Persian queen and queen-mother (Book III.). Tyre falls after protracted siege-operations calling forth many inventions. In Egypt Alexander visits the oracle of Jupiter Hammon, is declared the god’s son, founds Alexandria, and on his return into Asia defeats King Darius at Arbela (IV.). The great cities of Babylon, Susa, Persepolis, fall into the victor’s hands, and Darius, to Alexander’s indignation, is murdered by two of his own commanders (V.). Oriental luxury increases its hold on the conqueror; and he has to face danger from conspirators (VI.). An emissary is despatched to kill Parmenio, his general in Media, whose son had been, on insufficient evidence, put to death for treason. Then Alexander carries his conquests into the heart of Asia (VII.). His murder of Clitus is the outcome of quarrelling over the wine-cups, and his domineering arrogance is depicted as on the increase. Besides, his espousal of an Oriental bride, Roxane, causes widespread disapproval. The next episode is the invasion of India, and a description of the country is attempted as a preliminary. The Indus is crossed and King Porus defeated (VIII.). After continued operations in the Punjaub, the army protests against proceeding further and Alexander reluctantly sanctions withdrawal. Nearchus is told off to investigate the Indian Ocean (IX.). Mutinous outbreaks hamper Alexander’s schemes of universal conquest and at Babylon he dies. After much scheming and counter-scheming Perdiccas divides the lands overrun by Alexander as provinces to be ruled by different generals, and Ptolemy transfers the embalmed body of the monarch to Alexandria (X.).

The barest summary of such achievements serves as a [104]reminder, though not as an explanation, of the greatness which the ages have conceded to Alexander. This unique personality remains an enigma: how much was due to personal ambition or actually to blood-lust, how much to thirst for adventure, how much to any definite or indefinite notion of disseminating Greek culture through the absorption of many ancient sovereignties into one far-extended empire, historians have found it hard conclusively to decide. But though the motives are beyond exact measurement, and though they palpably changed amidst the growing brilliance of repeated triumphs, the general results are unmistakable. Alexander’s was a career destined to alter the course of civilization, and open a new epoch for the world. Naturally, then, history has always felt the attraction of his name. Professional writers accompanied his expedition and, like modern war-correspondents, employed their eyes and ears to advantage; official records were kept of Macedonian affairs, of campaigns by land, of coasting voyages, and survived long enough to be documents for later research; so that, between authors with war experience and authors of the study, a gigantic literature was composed on the conqueror in the Alexandrian epoch. The theme in turn fascinated Rome. Livy, jealous of the Macedonian’s fame, makes a patriotic digression⁠[315] to argue that he would not have had the success against Rome that he had against Persia and India: and Livy’s contemporary, Pompeius Trogus, concerned himself with Macedon, as is plain from the epitome by Justinus. Some realization of the adventurous element in his career prompted the academic exercise recorded by the elder Seneca “Alexander deliberates whether he should cross the ocean.”⁠[316] Finally, the extent to which the glamour of his life fascinated the Middle Ages is shown in Chaucer’s words:

Curtius, therefore, entered upon a great inheritance. Yet he cannot be said to have made full use of his available sources. [105]Only in two passages⁠[317] does he name authorities: in both Clitarchus is mentioned, and in one of them Timagenes as well. It is possible indeed that he drew from Clitarchus (c. 300 B.C.) mainly through Timagenes (c. 55 B.C.). But, supposing he drew directly, Clitarchus was not a first-rate source; for it is an erroneous inference from Diodorus⁠[318] and Strabo that he actually served under Alexander. Further, he was turgid rather than veracious, and Cicero⁠[319] thinks poorly of him, counting it against Sisenna that he was content with imitating Clitarchus, an inferior model at the best. In many respects, Curtius seems to have less historical method than the two authors who not long after treated the same subject in Greek, namely, Plutarch and Arrian. Plutarch (born c. A.D. 40) at the outset of his Life of Alexander records his consciousness of the mass of material available, but is careful to add that he is writing “not histories but biographies.” All the same, he shows more critical acumen than Curtius, and does not necessarily accept, on a disputed point, the opinion of the majority. Arrian (c. A.D. 90-170), the latest classical historian of Alexander, possessed qualities which made him on the whole the best. His training in Stoic philosophy under Epictetus, his experiences as a soldier, his ability to write on Tactics, and the good sense with which he amply fulfils the promise of his proem to rely upon the evidence of Aristobulus and Ptolemy, both of whom served with Alexander—all contribute to the success of his story.⁠[320]⁠

Most of Curtius’s defects lie on the surface. His geography is not infrequently at fault, his accounts of military operations are [106]less than satisfying, his understanding of politics is far from profound, and his speeches are not individualized, but sound the same rhetorical note irrespective of variations in nationality and character. Virtually he renounces all claim to be critical when, relating the tenacity wherewith an Indian dog even with amputated limbs holds on to a lion, he declares,⁠[321] “Certainly I transcribe more than I believe; for I cannot bring myself to affirm what I doubt, nor to suppress what I have received.” In connection with the plain speaking of Scythian envoys⁠[322] who reproached Alexander for rapacity, Curtius professes to give it accurately (incorrupta), adding “though their speech be despised, our integrity ought not to be.” Laudable enough so far; but faithful reproduction of selected material (if indeed it was selected with discrimination) would for him preclude actual invention, and yet freely permit literary embellishment. Such negation of any high standard of critical inquiry is in keeping with his weakness of historical grasp. He takes no synoptic view of the meaning and results of Alexander’s career: thus, although he does contrast the posthumous dissolution of his power with the unity of the Roman Empire,⁠[323] he never attempts to estimate the debt of civilization to the wars of Alexander.

Notwithstanding such limitations, he displayed literary virtue. Above all, he can tell a story well. He had an inkling of the romance inherent in so intrepid an invasion of the gorgeous but perilous East, and his incidents are telling, sometimes positively exciting. Rhetorical erudition prompts him to over-indulge in descriptions: so that he enters with zest into details of difficulties overcome—a river reckoned impassable, a jungle wellnigh impenetrable, a rocky hill-fort to all appearance unscalable, the hazards of snowdrift and frostbite, or of sun-scorched wastes. He shows, however, to most advantage where he can best import dramatic movement; e.g. in V. xii., the treacherous conspiracy against Darius carried out at night when the monarch is deserted by his guards and a portentous silence broods over his tent; VI. vii.-xi., the plot against Alexander, [107]involving its thrill of intrigue and discovery, with the pleading for life before the army, the hideous tortures to extort confession, and a final spice of mystery concerning the guilt or innocence of Philotas; VII. ii., the camel-ride of Polydamas disguised as an Arab across the desert, and his fulfilment of Alexander’s crafty scheme of murdering Parmenio without trial as he reads a forged letter purporting to be from his son Philotas; VII. xi., the scaling of the rock-fastness in Sogdiana; VIII. i., the fatal quarrel at the banquet when Clitus, annoyed at Alexander’s boastfulness, quotes Euripides on Greek kings who monopolize the glory of others and then with drunken licence goes on openly to denounce Alexander’s murder of Parmenio and to mock at Alexander’s claim to be a son of Zeus; VIII. vi., the scheme of the pages of the bedchamber to assassinate the king after a carousal, the long wait for the expected chance, and the melodramatic interruption of their plan by a woman reputed to be a crazed prophetess; and, in IX. ix., the struggle against an unforeseen tide from the ocean.

Another element of interest is furnished by Curtius’s conception of his hero’s character. From one standpoint the work is a psychological study in progressive deterioration caused by prosperity. Here is a favourable sketch of Alexander which comes in the first of the surviving books:⁠[324]⁠

“It is not easy to describe, apart from their inborn reverence for their monarchs, how far the people surrendered themselves to an admiration for this monarch in particular, or, you might equally say, burned with affection for him. To begin with, it looked as if he could essay nothing without heaven lending assistance: as luck was everywhere at his side, his very rashness had turned to his glory. Then, even his years were scarcely ripe for achievements of such moment, and yet they were [108]more than enough, for they threw a halo round all his exploits; and things that are commonly thought insignificant not infrequently find their way to the common soldiers’ heart. He took his physical exercise among them; his dress and style were little different from the ordinary man’s; while he possessed true military energy. Such were the natural endowments or mental skill that had secured for him an equal share of affection and respect.”

Henceforward the author’s task is to display the effect of constantly triumphant warfare on such a character: and his method throughout is to record noble and chivalrous qualities in Alexander, but at the same time to produce the impression that gradually, under the influence of success, luxury and drink, the king yielded oftener to arrogant, arbitrary and cruel impulses, so that Jekyll-like he found it increasingly difficult to return from his inferior to his better nature. Hence a sort of alternation between good and bad strikes the reader as the tale is unfolded. The demoralization of the army at Babylon (V. i. 36-39) is a significant presage; still the conqueror feels qualms (V. ii. 13-15) about setting his feet on a table at which Darius used to dine, and he shows tactful respect for the feelings of the captive mother and queen of Darius (V. ii. 18-22) when he apologizes for his unfortunate, and to Persians impossible, suggestion that the royal ladies should work at woollen clothes like those from Macedonia. Similarly the moderation which marked one part of his career (V. iii. 15, moderationem clementiamque regis quae tunc fuit) becomes evident in his mercy to enemies at the intercession of Darius’s mother. Then falls a dark shadow: his fine traits of endurance, activity, honour and clemency are sullied by his insuperable passion for wine, and the drunken advice of the harlot Thaïs leads to the wanton burning of Persepolis, for the royal guests “rise from table intoxicated to fire a city which they had spared when they had arms in their hands” (V. vii. 5, surgunt temulenti ad incendendam urbem cui armati pepercerant). In the next book, Curtius pronounces Alexander a victim of luxury; “the man whom Persian arms had not broken was defeated by vice” (VI. ii. 1, quem arma Persarum non fregerant, uitia uicerunt); nevertheless [109]he is still considerate towards captives (ibid.), and, out of courtesy to Artabazus, an old Persian in his ninety-fifth year, orders a horse for both, forgoing his well-known preference for marching on foot (VI. v. 5). It is noted that his outward appearance disappointed the Amazonian queen (VI. v. 29), as it afterwards did the Scythian envoys (VII. viii. 9), being in both cases “not at all proportionate to his reputation.” Meanwhile, Oriental tastes and habits (VI. vi.) were driving him in the direction of ostentatious pomp. Luxury, however, did not prevent the king from sharing the privations of his men. The same chapter (VII. v.) which relates his merciless barbarity at Branchidae relates also his self-abnegation, despite the pangs of thirst, in declining water meant for some young men in the army. Yet this temperate warrior became an insufferable boaster in his cups, lauding his own exploits and belittling his royal sire Philip (VIII. i. 22). True, he undergoes agonies of remorse after his hasty murder of Clitus (VIII. ii.); but now that Clitus’s unbridled tongue has led to his doom, frankness in presence of the king becomes impossible (VIII. iv., sub fin., post Cliti caedem libertate sublata). Alexander succumbs to the charms of Roxane, because “amid fortune’s subservience to him, he could less control his desires now” (VIII. iv. 24, minus iam cupiditatibus suis imperantis inter obsequia fortunae). Scheming to be proclaimed a god, he resents Macedonian objections (VIII. v.). “His greed for glory and insatiate lust for fame grew intolerant of all obstacles” (IX. ii. 9, auaritia gloriae et insatiabilis cupido famae nihil inuium nihil remotum uideri sinebat). The chronicle reveals a grotesque chaos of pleasure and pain: immediately after the riotous Bacchanalian march of Alexander’s army in the East, Curtius remarks “This pomp had the executioner at its heels, for the satrap Aspastes already mentioned was ordered to be put to death: so cruelty is no bar to luxury, nor luxury to cruelty” (IX. x. sub fin.). A similar strain is heard in the last book: “He began to be impetuous in executing punishments, and likewise in believing ill of people. Prosperity, it is plain, has power to alter one’s nature, it being a rarity for anyone to be sufficiently guarded in respect of good fortune” (X. i. 39-40). In the final summary of his character (X. v. 26-37) we read “it [110]is plain to all fair judges of the king, that his merits were due to nature, and his faults to fortune or his time of life,” and later in his estimate Curtius elaborates this. For on the one hand he attributes to “fortune” failings such as Alexander’s claim to equal the gods or his exaction of divine honours—sins of pride, in fact, generated by his victories; and on the other hand he views his irascibility and intemperance as slips of youth which time would have abated. “It must, however, be allowed that while he owed a very great deal to merit, he owed more to fortune, whom he alone of mortal men held within his power.”

This raises a fundamental question touching the historian’s conception of Alexander’s whole career.⁠[325] The ascription of virtues to “nature” and faults to “fortune” takes us but a little way towards explaining a great man. The antithesis resembles Plutarch’s account of Alexander’s success as due to fortune (τύχη) combined with generalship (Alex. xx. 675), and it does not obviously fit into the Stoic view which Curtius elsewhere professes to be his solution for the enigma of life. “Fortune” indeed counts for much with Curtius. It was what we should call sheer luck that the enemy did not attack and crush Alexander’s troops while they revelled on Mount Meros. “It is incontestable that glory is oftener the gift of fortune than of merit” is the comment (VIII. x. 18, quis neget eximiam quoque gloriam saepius fortunae quam virtutis esse beneficium?). So, too, of a week’s Bacchanalian progress when the revelling host might have been an easy prey, “Fortune who ordains the credit and value of things here also turned a military scandal into glory” (IX. x. 28, fortuna quae rebus famam pretiumque constituit ...). Alexander’s aims against Spitamenes were secured without exertion on his part, because “fortune, never weary of favouring him, managed the matter without his presence” (VIII. iii. 1, fortuna indulgendo ei numquam fatigata ...)—a personification like that implied in the “homage paid by fortune” (obsequia fortunae, VIII. iv. 24) which, as already shown, rendered him less master of his passions when he met Roxane, the satrap’s daughter. The [111]king’s quick decision to segregate the Macedonian grumblers over Parmenio’s death proved, like everything else, fortunate for him, because they always afterwards fought gallantly to remove the stigma (VII. ii. 37, consilium temerarium forsitan ... sicut omnia alia felicitas regis excepit): and in his last adventure oceanwards “the one consolation of his rashness was his unfailing success” (unum erat temeritatis solacium perpetua felicitas). Little wonder, then, that Alexander should believe in his felicitas (VII. vii. 28) or his fortuna (fortunam cui confidat, VII. ix. 1, fortunae suae confisus, VII. xi. 27) like Julius Caesar after him.

In some of these instances Curtius may appear to imply little more than luck. But logically he is no believer in chance. He is a fatalist in his view of human life and is clearly influenced by Stoicism: so that his “fortune” in the last resort would be merged in “fate.” The inevitability of fate is a thought repeated in various contexts: of Alexander’s risk of a wound he says, “but to my mind, fate is unavoidable” (IV. vi. 17, sed, ut opinor, ineuitabile est fatum); of Darius’s incapacity to take advice that would rescue him, he says, “he is doomed to his own lot” (V. xii. 8, destinatus sorti suae), and of an intrigue to ruin an innocent man, “destiny, whose appointment is inevitable, was at hand” (X. i. 30., fatum cuius ineuitabilis sors est appetebat). His theory of history is made explicit apropos of the failure of Patron, the Greek, to save Darius by warning him against the treachery of Bessus:

This incident may afford amusement to those whose conviction it is that human affairs roll on driven by blind haphazard. I favour the belief that every series of events follows by immutable law its course as the result of eternal ordinance and the nexus of mysterious causes long since preordained.⁠[326]⁠

An aspect of Curtius’s thought commonly overlooked is a certain enlightenment of mind which argues his emancipation from some of the superstitious obsessions of antiquity. He condemns as unacceptable to the gods the ancient Tyrian [112]sacrifice of a freeborn boy (IV. iii. 23): he remarks, on the recourse to a soothsayer about an accident to a crow, that Alexander’s “mind was not without its touch of superstition” (IV. vi. 12, ut erat non intactae a superstitione mentis), and on the consultation of the oracle of Hammon that “the prophet had set himself to flatter” (IV. vii. 26, uates in adulationem compositus). He dubs the employment of diviners for a military problem as “the outcome of a superstitious mind” (V. iv. 1, a superstitione animi). A noticeable example occurs in the introductory description of the judicious Cobares who, after reminding the Persian satrap Bessus incidentally that a dog’s bark may be worse than its bite and that still waters run deep, advocates coming to terms with Alexander: “there was at the feast one Cobares, of Median nationality, more renowned for his profession of the magical art (if it really is an art and not a jest at the expense of the silliest) than for any knowledge thereof” (VII. iv. 8). Plainly Curtius would have one take note that such things mean weakness: it was when ill and confronted with serious menaces that Alexander, “who had, since Darius’s overthrow, given up the consultation of soothsayers and prophets, fell back on that superstition—the delusion of mankind” (VII. vii. 8, humanarum gentium ludibria). It must have given Curtius satisfaction to record later how Alexander dismissed the warnings of a fortune-teller as unseasonable hindrances (IX. iv. 27-30).

Speeches and descriptions yield Curtius his readiest outlet for rhetoric. Not offensively overdone, it is most patent in the sententious remarks introduced into narrative and speeches alike. Of gallant fighting in a tight corner he says “necessity, I hold, sharpens even cowardice, and despair is often the cause of hope” (V. iv. 31, ut opinor, ignauiam quoque necessitas acuit et saepe desperatio spei causa est). When Alexander tried to win indulgence for his Oriental luxury by generous gifts, the comment is, “but, I hold, to the free the price of slavery is unwelcome” (VI. vi. 11, sed opinor, liberis pretium seruitutis ingratum est). The story of a poor scion of a royal race brought from garden-work to a throne calls forth an almost Juvenalian cynicism: “the cause of his poverty was as usual—honesty” [113](IV. i. 20, causa ei paupertatis, sicut plerisque, probitas erat). Two instances may be given from a speech: “Those bear afflictions best who conceal them” (V. v. 11, optime miserias ferunt qui abscondunt) and “no man loyally loves one he disdains, for calamity is querulous and prosperity proud” (V. v. 12, nemo fideliter diligit quem fastidit, nam et calamitas querula est et superba felicitas). Some of the inserted epistles have a rhetorical ring, as in Alexander’s haughty words to Darius: “I know both how to conquer and how to consider the conquered ... when you write to me, remember that you are writing not only to a king, but to your king” (IV. i. 10-14).

As regards the technique of his prose, Curtius’s sentence-endings show a distinct preference for a cretic followed by spondee or trochee, a rhythm which perhaps no contemporary employs so often. An ending about half as often used—though still comparatively common—is the double cretic; next to that, the cretic followed by a tribrach, and then the double trochee.⁠[327]⁠

His style in general is influenced by Sallust, Virgil and, most of all, by Livy. But there is in him a sameness of expression for similar situations which becomes monotonous, and marks his inferiority in prose to Livy’s brilliant variety. One cannot read far without noticing his pluperfect indicatives, his employment of a future participle in Greek fashion to denote purpose, his loose ablatives absolute, his repetition of the connectives ceterum and quippe. Some rhetorical constituents of his style have already been illustrated. Yet it must be conceded that neither mannerisms, nor the poetic strain in him debar him from being generally clear: not seldom he is even vivacious.

CELSUS

The biography of A. Cornelius Celsus,⁠[328] the encyclopaedist, is a blank; and, in the absence of details, inquiry must rest satisfied with the guarantee of his gentile name through its occurrence in Columella and the elder Pliny.⁠[329] Celsus was a senior contemporary⁠[330] frequently mentioned by Columella, who belongs to the time of Claudius. Pliny’s statement that Julius Graecinus made use of the agricultural work of Celsus suggests that at least the books on farming were written before the close of Tiberius’s reign; for Graecinus was executed under Caligula about A.D. 39.⁠[331] The subsequent books on medicine may be presumed to precede A.D. 47, when Scribonius Largus published among his prescriptions a cure for quinsy which Celsus declares he has not found in medical treatises.⁠[332]⁠

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The encyclopaedic habit of Cato and Varro⁠[333] descended to Celsus. His labours included agriculture, medicine, military tactics, rhetoric, jurisprudence and philosophy—all subjects of traditional importance in the higher education of a Roman. To each he devoted several books;⁠[334] but the one surviving portion is the De Medicina in eight books. His military writings, whether in the encyclopaedia or in separate pamphlets composed as late as Nero’s reign, were consulted by Vegetius and Lydus.⁠[335] The books on philosophic systems, in which (Augustine informs us) the aim was rather exposition than refutation, may have been included in the encyclopaedia; but he evidently wrote other treatises on philosophy.⁠[336] Quintilian, who bestows modified praise upon Celsus’s style in discussing philosophy, cites his opinions on rhetoric, frequently to disagree with them.⁠[337] This is not unnatural when it is remembered that Celsus’s cursory treatment of rhetoric would not be calculated to satisfy a specialist like Quintilian; and it may be guessed that Celsus’s rhetorical portion was in fact eclipsed by the fuller treatment of the great professional authority and so sank into oblivion.

Regarding the order of parts in this encyclopaedia, we can be certain that the five books De Agricultura opened the work, and that the De Medicina followed, forming Books VI to XIII⁠[338] of the whole corpus. Detached from the encyclopaedia, they [116]possess the unique importance of representing the healing art in classical Rome. At the close of an introduction, which is an epitome and criticism of prevailing tendencies in medical science, Celsus summarizes his own position and announces his plan of handling first rules of health and next phenomena and cures of disease. To this end Book I is largely of diet; II of symptoms and therapeutics; III of fevers; IV of internal diseases, considered in order from the head to the joints of the feet; V and VI of drugs and ailments for which they are specifics (with numerous prescriptions); VII and VIII of surgical operations.

His sources are mainly, but not entirely, Greek; and among those the influence of Hippocrates and Asclepiades is pre-eminent. The authority of the former is recognized in the preface to Book II; his teaching on massage, Celsus notes, was in nowise superseded by the more diffuse Asclepiades; and again his magnanimous avowal of a professional mistake is admired, but without any such encomiastic fanfaronade as to justify the nickname “Hippocrates’s ape” sometimes given to Celsus.⁠[339] Asclepiades is also in high favour: his books on preservation of health and on general remedies are cited; his cure for a tertian fever is approved for its rejection of the faulty method of Cleophantus; he is quoted in contrast with Erasistratus to show that doctors differ about the treatment of hemorrhage or about the stress to be laid on diet.⁠[340] Erasistratus is another medical authority often mentioned.⁠[341] Prescriptions are ascribed to an imposing array of practitioners—especially in the pharmacy of the fifth book.⁠[342] Further, the punctiliousness with which Celsus introduces Greek synonyms indicates the origin of much of his reading.⁠[343] Yet it would be a mistake to suppose that he [117]confined himself to the older Hellenic sources. He had the work of recent practitioners, both native and foreign, like Cassius or Themison, to draw from; he had his own observation, though this plays no great part; so he introduces, sometimes with emphasis, his individual views and criticisms, and throughout displays a practical common sense which is typically Roman.

Some of these points demand attention, as illustrations of the author’s relation to his times. Indeed, it is not surprising that Celsus, who in another field incurred the disapproval of Quintilian because of an “excessive passion for novelty,”⁠[344] should have in medicine shown himself abreast of the latest tendencies and discoveries. Thus, though he does not always agree, he takes pains to record Themison’s advice as something modern;⁠[345] and in his preface remarks on the attitude of his followers (Themisonis aemuli) to the vexed question of theory versus practice. Cassius, again, is singled out for characterization as “the most talented leech of our age,” and is elsewhere mentioned as the proud discoverer of a remedy for disease of the larger intestine.⁠[346] The opening remarks by Celsus upon the diverse views of contemporary schools, and subsequent comparisons between medical practices of his own day and those of predecessors, prove that he was alive to advances or at least changes in the healing art.⁠[347] Sometimes he inserts original examples, such as the method of inducing perspiration pursued near Baiae.⁠[348] At other times his personal opinions or results of his observation are stated with a dogmatism that would do credit to wide practical experience.⁠[349] Scaliger, indeed, believed that [118]Celsus practised; but this has been stoutly denied, and one notices nothing in him that a vigilant eye and a perusal of medical books might not have yielded. It is difficult to credit that, if he had been a practising physician or surgeon, he would have refrained from quoting cases which he had attended. Undoubtedly, however, he gains in interest by combining an individual note with a continual suggestion of his environment. It is Celsus himself who speaks when the increased recourse to bleeding is noted as a novelty, and especially when he proceeds with his cautionary remarks on its unsuitability in certain cases and its murderous results in others.⁠[350] Like most contemporary writers, he feels impelled to stigmatize the two great moral and hygienic perils of the Empire—idleness and luxury.⁠[351] As a whole, his background forms for modern readers an attractive index to other days and other lands. The risks to health in autumn are naturally important to one writing in Rome: the mention of a siesta at midday comes from a southern clime: the careful description of the way to extract an arrow revives pictures of antiquated warfare: and the stress laid upon reading aloud as an exercise beneficial or injurious in certain bodily affections takes the reader back to the declamatory recitatio which once played its great part in the Roman social and educational system.⁠[352]⁠

The common sense noticeable in Celsus is in part an inheritance from earlier medical systems and ancient human experience; but in part an individual trait of tone and attitude. The wisdom evident in the preface must be credited to the author himself; for there, after an able statement of the issue between empirics and theorists in medicine, he holds the balance fairly, and votes for a combination of experience (usus, experimenta) [119]with science (rationalis ars). Proposing, therefore, a uia media as likeliest to lead to truth, he sagely argues that the great doctors of the past were not made doctors by scientific investigation independently of practice, but were by the fusion made greater doctors still.⁠[353] Among enlightened points in the same introduction are his freedom from the superstitious notion that diseases originate in divine wrath (a supposition logically denounced as a barrier to medical research and progress); his insistence upon the quest for true causes; and the emphasis laid upon anatomy and dissection. Celsus is indeed scientific enough to state principles which were ultimately to antiquate and supersede him: thus, under the head of dissection, he advocated the acquisition of a knowledge destined in due time to convict him of errors; for his anatomy, when he comes to it, is not beyond reproach. His remarks on vivisection are interesting. While he states the argument for experimenting upon condemned criminals, he also states with sympathy, and even some tenderness, the contrary argument on behalf of those surgeons who aim at “cure, not kill” (prudentem medicum non caedem sed sanitatem molientem), who recognize that the chances of the arena or war or an affray often provide a view of internal organs during life without dependence upon the scalpel of some “ruffian bandit of a doctor,”⁠[354] and who are content “to learn through pity what others have come to know by fiendish cruelty” (idque per misericordiam discere quod alii dira crudelitate cognouerint). His final verdict is that vivisection is superfluous, but dissection imperative.⁠[355] On many matters his counsels may involve no more than an ability to profit by ordinary human experience and medical tradition; yet, they are counsels which require continual restatement and are violated in all ages. Instances may be found in his rules for preservation of health, in [120]the limits assigned to bodily exercise, in the reduction of food after hard work, in the advantages of a rest cure,⁠[356] or in the physiological restrictions incumbent upon the scholar’s burning of the midnight oil—restrictions, more salutary,⁠[357] if less romantic, than the enthusiasm of the student in Bailey’s Festus,

With equal plausibility he advocates the benefits of change: it is good for a cough, while the climate that made one ill is the very worst for the invalid:⁠[358] similarly a voyage is recommended for consumption. Noteworthy acumen, too, marks his insistence on the fundamental position that strong probability is enough to justify a belief in the power of medicine.⁠[359] There is, however, no attempt to overestimate the value of drugs; for he bears in mind the curative efficacy of nature,⁠[360] and in another connexion declares the best medicine to be diet seasonably given.⁠[361] Other illustrations of sound sense are his reminder of the tact requisite in a physician about to take an invalid’s pulse, his admission that the confident quack may succeed with another’s patients better than with his own (quos ratio non restituit temeritas adiuuat), and his suspicion of too rigid a theory concerning “critical days” during an illness as being apparently due to the misleading influences of Pythagorean numbers upon medical calculations.⁠[362] Throughout his work he gives the impression that he set himself in a business-like manner to illustrate the aims which Asclepiades ascribed to a capable physician and which Celsus approves as an ideal uotum, namely, “to effect a cure with safety, despatch, and pleasantness” (ut tuto, ut celeriter, ut iucunde curet).⁠[363]⁠

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The person likely to reap the maximum of enjoyment from Celsus would be a medical man with historic instincts and a liking for straightforward Latin. A perusal will not recompense the seeker after either elaborate style or unquestionably sound advice; but to any reader passably acquainted with modern medical theory and practice his pages offer much in the way of interest, and occasionally of entertainment. Celsus represents the stage of medical knowledge attained in the early Empire, and the regimen and prescriptions found in his work indicate the method of treating or maltreating Roman citizens unlucky enough to need professional attendance. In a system so many centuries prior to the germ-theory of disease or to antiseptic and anaesthetic surgery, all sorts of quaint precautions and quaint remedies are advocated. There is a difference of atmosphere which, once felt, exerts a fascination, partly in spite of and partly in virtue of its errors. It is true that his teaching on anatomy leaves much to be desired; but the lay reader soon forgives mistakes such as those regarding the spleen.⁠[364] His surgery takes one back to a period ages before chloroform or ether, when one essential merit of the operator was intrepidity sufficient “to resist being influenced by the patient’s shrieks into hurrying more than the case demanded or cutting less than was needful,”⁠[365] and when, in an operation for cataract, the head had to be held fast to prevent a movement which might be permanently fatal to the eyesight.⁠[366] Among curiosities of Celsian medicine may be cited blood-letting for the spitting of blood,⁠[367] and a queer precaution against headache, to wit, the avoidance of moonlight particularly before the conjunction of sun and moon.⁠[368] Some pronouncements on diet are extraordinary—pork is the lightest and beef the heaviest of foods (leuissima suilla est, grauissima bubula).⁠[369] His recipe for quinsy is to eat a young swallow salted, burned, and administered as a powder in hydromel; and his comment here implies by contrast that, as a rule, book-knowledge rather than practice is the basis of his pharmacy—“although I have not read this in medical [122]treatises, still I believe it ought to be included in this work of mine.”⁠[370] The powdered liver of a fox⁠[371] for asthmatic troubles is comparable to the roast mouse still recommended in parts of Norfolk for whooping-cough. Not the least interesting are those prescriptions which, like so many survivals from primitive magic-healing, belong to what may be called excremental medicine. Prominent ingredients in his pharmacopoeia are not only such as deer’s marrow, bull’s suet, hog’s lard, but also the ordure of various animals. Lizard’s dung and pigeon’s blood are among the purgatives; and the dung of lizard, pigeon, ring-dove, swallow and sheep among caustics.⁠[372] As an encyclopaedic summarizer of previous and current medicine, Celsus could not be expected to go beyond his own age; but at least this may be urged that his emancipation from a number of earlier superstitions and his sensible attitude on the combined merits of theory and practice were far-off presages of a time when medicine should abandon the copious blood-letting and clysterizing of coprophagous patients. An illustration of the mark left by Celsus upon medicine was the implicit claim to have eclipsed him which was made in the name “Paracelsus” assumed some four centuries ago by the clever Swiss alchemist and quack Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim. If in the twentieth century Celsian medicine lies under a cloud, it is mainly because, notwithstanding his professed anxiety to give fair-play to both theory and experiment, he does not convince practising doctors that he founded his work sufficiently upon observation. Book-learning and the experience of others do not, from the standpoint of science, counterbalance this absence of a commanding personal authority.

We have seen that Quintilian, who would be most prone to appraise Celsus by his work on rhetoric, did not consider him an author of eminent genius. Without, however, exalted merit, Celsus had a sanity which is reflected in his style. One aspect of his good sense is that gift of straightforward expression which differentiates him from the artificiality of contemporary Latin. He states a plain fact or counsel or argument in a plain way. Some, indeed, of his readers, attracted by the elegance of his [123]brief sentences, have declared that more store should be set by his Latinity than by his medicine. It is an elegance which consists in no literary adornment beyond what comes of lucid, facile and neat exposition in sound Latin.⁠[373] There is almost nothing in the way of literary allusion. Quite exceptional in this respect is the passing reference to the poets’ accounts of Ajax or Orestes as illustrating the creations of a disordered imagination.⁠[374] Apropos of swallow’s blood prescribed for an injured eye he mentions the fabula which told how the old birds healed the eyes of their young with a herb, but fabula here may mean popular tradition rather than the literary fable. Signs of the usages of Silver Latin occur: igitur begins sentences in the manner of Sallust and Tacitus: frequens is used in its later sense: and occasionally he shows the tendency to use abstracts for concretes.⁠[375] But he keeps clear of contemporary mannerisms. When he uses balance, as in his opening words, it is not so much for ornament as for clearness;⁠[376] and herein he presents a strong contrast to such writers as Velleius Paterculus and Valerius Maximus. A well-sustained example of his style is his introduction, where he is free to discuss general subjects at some length and to state his views. In it, the sentences are short and direct—well adapted, without artifice, to the subject in hand. He is not concerned to avoid the repetition of a word or phrase by hunting after remote equivalents. Once, indeed, he seems to hesitate on a matter affecting his choice of words: it is, however, a hesitation animated not by rhetorical motives but by those qualms of modesty in expression which led many cultured Romans to avoid the Stoic outspokenness in “calling a spade a spade” and to reject even innocent collocations of sounds capable of conveying indecent suggestion. The question from this latter standpoint is discussed in the well-known letter by Cicero where he furnishes a salutary motto in the opening [124]phrase amo uerecundiam.⁠[377] It will be readily gathered that the difficulty for Celsus arises not in collocations of sounds, but in terms which he feels he must use in certain delicate parts of his subject.⁠[378] His quandary is to secure clearness with a due observance of the dictates of modesty and the requirements of medicine.⁠[379] Finally he decides in the interests of health that his treatment must be open and exhaustive; and it is noteworthy that, while he regards Greek terms in such connexions as more acceptable, he prefers in fact to use Latin words.

One may conclude with a passage on the duties of a physician, where the clausulae of two sentences recall the Ciceronian esse uideatur:

In the case of these (external injuries), it is beyond everything imperative upon a medical man to know which are incurable, which involve difficulty, which greater ease in treatment. For the wise doctor’s duty is, first, to decline handling a patient ill beyond the possibility of recovery, and so avoid the appearance of having killed one who was already cut off by his own fate; next, where there is serious apprehension—falling short, however, of absolute hopelessness—to inform the relatives of the person in danger that the case is risky, so that, if his skill is baffled by the malady, he may not produce the impression either of ignorance or of deception. But, just as this is the fitting attitude for a wise man, so on the other hand it is worthy of a charlatan to magnify a trivial case in order to produce the impression of a greater achievement.⁠[380]⁠

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POMPONIUS MELA

Pomponius Mela⁠[381] makes at least this claim on attention that his is the first Roman geography which has come down. A study holding a central position between natural sciences such as physics, astronomy, geology, zoology on the one hand and human sciences such as history, anthropology, ethnology, sociology on the other, might reasonably have been expected through its multifarious orientation to appeal to the didactic tendencies of Roman writers. One might have expected that upon the physical, mathematical and ethnographical foundations laid by the Greeks, imposing edifices would be raised by a people whose commercial and military interests opened the world to them, and that the continuous expansion of Rome beyond Italy would stimulate geographical inquiry. No doubt Varro did contribute to the subject, and Caesar, at any rate, incidentally. But for generations systematic investigation remained in the hands of Greeks and made little advance upon the knowledge attained in the times of Alexander and Alexandria. It is significant, then, that at a date when the Romans held the greater part of Britain, they had added scarcely anything to the facts learned by the voyage in northern waters made by Pytheas of Massilia about 330 B.C. Much later, indeed, when Pompey’s operations against Mithridates opened out the lands in Asia between the Black Sea and the Caspian, the opportunity for recording fresh geographical results had been seized not by any Roman but by the general’s Hellenic comrade Theophanes from Mytilene. Later still, the newly consolidated Roman Empire of the Augustan era received a systematic description from a Greek of Pontus, the renowned Strabo, who, friendly to Rome as he was, entertained but a poor opinion of Roman geographers, remarking that they imitated Greeks without much success, and without bringing to the subject much love of inquiry.⁠[382] These considerations render such Roman works on the [126]subject as exist the more noteworthy; and time has left to us only two, first, the Chorographia (or, as it is sometimes called, De Situ Orbis) by Pomponius Mela, largely an unoriginal compendium, and later, the portions in the Natural History of Pliny which handle geography in no very scientific manner, though their author has too high a regard for truth to acquit Roman writers of falsification or carelessness in their investigations.⁠[383]⁠

Pomponius Mela was, he tells us,⁠[384] a native of Tingentera in Spain, not far from Gibraltar. A slight balance of evidence⁠[385] suggests that he wrote his description of the world under Claudius and that he refers to that emperor and his triumph of A.D. 44, rather than to Caligula, when he says: “About the nature of Britain and the nature of her sons it will not be long before more definite and better ascertained details are given. Closed for ages, Britain is now being opened up by the greatest of emperors,⁠[386] victorious over tribes not only unconquered before his own day, but actually unknown. The evidence of its peculiarities which he aimed at in his campaign, he brings home to render clear by his triumph.”⁠[387]⁠

The method of Mela was prompted by the coasting survey of early travellers, and the tradition of such works as the partially genuine Periplus or “Cruise” of Scylax⁠[388] in the fourth century B.C. In the first two of his three books Mela follows the Mediterranean seaboard from west to east along the southern shores and then back from east to west along the northern shores: the third book is left for countries outside this scheme which, though it could not possibly be exhaustive, still with a certain appropriateness had for its hinge the Mediterranean, the ancestral home of geography. Thus, his brief introduction [127]over, Mela deals in Book I with the main divisions of the world, and, after a summary description of Asia, Europe and Africa, turns to a particular description, starting with Morocco, and from Egypt and Arabia proceeding by the coast of the Levant, Aegean, and Black Sea round Asia Minor until in Scythia he reaches Europe. In Book II the course is in the main westwards from European Scythia by Thrace, Greece, Italy, Southern Gaul to Spain with a digression on islands of the Mediterranean suggested by the “Gades insula.” Book III is concerned with coasts and countries outside the Mediterranean. The ocean brings him to the subject of tides, and he next follows the outer seaboard of Spain, proceeds by Gaul and the Baltic (his Codanian Gulf) to Germany, Sarmatia and Northern Scythia, then notices the islands of the ocean (including Britain and Thule), India, the Persian Gulf, and by a short circuit of Africa works his way back to the part of Mauretania bordering on the Atlantic, so that he ends where he began.

The Mediterranean (nostrum mare) is viewed as a continuous sea contracting at the Hellespont (Dardanelles), expanding in the Propontis (Sea of Marmora), narrowing again in the Bosporus, but once more widening into the Black Sea. The method of an imaginary voyage has the disadvantage of greatly neglecting interior countries (e.g. in Asia, Assyria); and Mela, in the later part of his work, feels compelled to leap eastwards to seas which shall secure him contact with India and Ethiopia. Being a Spaniard, he treats Spain with comparative fulness. In some other cases he holds that the reputation of a city or region dispenses him from elaborate description: Athens, for instance, is too famous to require notice (clariores quam ut indicari egeant Athenae), and Italy is handled in a matter-of-fact way without bursts of enthusiasm for the land of his adoption. He will be brief, he promises, concerning a country the treatment of which is demanded rather by the claims of system than by a need for exposition, since here “all is known” (nota sunt omnia).

He blunders in thinking that the Danube flows into the Adriatic and that the Alps bound Germany, and he is unscientific in blending mythology with geography; but he has the merit [128]of knowing about the north-western sweep of the Gallic coast and about northern seas and the Orkneys (Orcades).

Of Mela’s sources we have scanty information. He quotes Cornelius Nepos twice,⁠[389] and mentions a report by Hanno the Carthaginian after a voyage of discovery, for which Mela’s authority may be Nepos. The knowledge of Spain acquired by Varro, when a Pompeian officer in that country, may possibly have been accessible to the author,⁠[390] who in turn became a source for the elder Pliny. He is cited on Ireland by the scholiast on Juvenal and on the channels of the Ganges by Servius in opposition to Seneca.⁠[391]⁠

With something like a grudge the author in his proem declares that his task is of a sort which does not admit eloquent treatment; as it involves an array of names, its subject-matter is tedious rather than genial (longa est magis quam benigna materia). At the same time, it is well worth study (aspici cognoscique dignissimum) and calculated to recompense attention through the very thought put into it, if not through the talents of the author.⁠[392] Though the work be dry and little susceptible of ornament (facundiae minime capax), Mela does grasp opportunities of embellishing and enlivening his theme; and the alert reader may, among geographical details, discover and even welcome a rhetorical word-picture or record of wonders.

One of these purple patches is the description of the cavern of Corycus⁠[393] in Cilicia, environed by charming greenery and entered by a narrow and difficult footpath which descends among rustling trees and dancing rivulets to a grotto within a grotto, darker and more mysterious, filled with a sound as of crashing cymbals, where a great river seems to issue forth only to vanish again: and beyond are the depths of the cavern unmeasured and inexplorable. What otherwise would be a [129]catalogue is lighted up by passing allusions to famous battlefields, scenes with historical, poetic or legendary associations, birthplaces of celebrities, and monuments to the mighty dead; and no little entertainment may be got from his mention of customs⁠[394] and of marvels. It is not every geography that provides readable fare like the strange fountain of the Sun in Cyrenaica which boils at midnight and is icy cold at noon (I. viii.); queerly illogical African tribes who curse the Sun both at his rising and at his setting, and who have no individual names and are a dreamless people; or cave-dwellers feeding on serpents; or headless creatures with faces in their chests; the Pyramids (I. ix.), and the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus (I. xvi.)—representative wonders of the world; birds that shoot their wing-feathers like arrows (II. vii.); the land of the midnight Sun (III. v.); the rich pastures of Ireland on which flocks might feed till they burst (III. vi.); the island of “hairy women” (presumably some species of apes, III. ix.); and the well that brings on a fatal laugh (III. x.). One may read how to defy the serpents of Colubraria (II. vii., ad fin.); or may be half persuaded, apropos of the rocky district of the Lapideum (Le Crau) in Southern France, to believe the old fable that it once rained stones there (II. v.). The attraction of the marvellous is for Mela irresistible; Syracuse, for example, interests him not for its situation or history, but for the legend of Arethusa: and perhaps, if he could not be completely scientific, it was well that he should thus frankly display his not unengaging limitations.

Yet he can be serious and perspicacious. He notes the German love of war for little or no reason (ex libidine) except the desire of having a desolation round a country where might is right (ut circa ipsos quae iacent uasta sint; ius in uiribus habent); and he apologizes that he cannot give German geography exhaustively, because the names are too barbarous for Roman lips to pronounce (quorum nomina uix est eloqui ore Romano, III. iii.). His description of the Atlantic tides,⁠[395] with his alternative theories about their cause, may be translated:

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“A vast limitless sea, stirred by great tides (that is the term for its movements) at one time floods the plains, at another uncovers them widely and retreats. It does not work so on plain after plain in turn; it does not by alternate advances sweep round in full rush first on these and next on those; but after pouring out from its centre upon the shores of all countries and islands alike, however far apart, it quits them, and again massing towards its centre returns upon itself. Such is the regular force of the incoming tide that it drives back even mighty rivers, and either overtakes land animals or leaves sea-creatures high and dry. So far there is no definite decision whether this is the action of the universe through its own heaving breath, attracting and repelling the waters everywhere (on the assumption of savants that the world is a single animate being); or whether there exist some cavernous depressions for the ebb-tides to sink into, thence to well out and rise anew; or whether the moon is responsible for currents so extensive.”

The traces of rhetoric are visible not only in descriptions, but also in balanced clauses and exclamatory parentheses which recall Valerius Maximus. Of the bridging of the Hellespont by the Persians he exclaims “marvellous and mighty feat!” (mirum atque ingens facinus!), and of the devotion of the Carthaginian brothers buried alive to settle a boundary dispute in their country’s favour, “Marvellous feat most worthy of remembrance!” (mirum et memoria dignissimum facinus!).⁠[396] But he is not long-winded, and indeed has caught some of Sallust’s brevity, as where he remarks of the rivers Simois and Scamander near Troy that for them “fame has done more than nature” and so gives pithy expression to a feeling which many a traveller on the Trojan plain must have shared. Nor is Mela a mere echo of others: his prose has a rhythm of its own. Even without careful enumeration one is struck in reading his Latin by the frequency of double cretic and dactylic endings to his sentences. Closer investigation has shown that while he quite remarkably avoids the double trochee endings which are so much more common in Celsus, Curtius, the Senecas and Tacitus, he almost [131]as markedly exhibits a preference for closing on a cretic followed by an anapaest or tribrach (–⏑–⏑⏑⏓) or on one of the favourite types of Greek clausulae, the double dactyl (–⏑⏑–⏑⏑).⁠[397]⁠

MISCELLANEOUS LEARNING

In the miscellaneous learning of the age may be included its philosophy, criticism and grammar, jurisprudence and medicine. To take the last first, one recognizes in Scribonius Largus,⁠[398] court physician to Claudius, a sort of pendant to Celsus; for about A.D. 47 he made his collection of medical prescriptions. The jurists included Ateius Capito’s pupil, Masurius Sabinus, who gave his name to the “Sabinian” school, and influenced legal thought through his three books on the ius ciuile. In contrast with him M. Cocceius Nerva, the emperor’s grandfather, trained by Labeo, the great Augustan rival of Capito, was a forerunner of Proculus from whom the “Proculians” took their name.⁠[399] Among the grammarians were Julius Modestus, Hyginus’s freedman, who followed his master’s broad conception of grammar; the strict purist Pomponius Marcellus;⁠[400] and the successful but immoral teacher, Q. Remmius Palaemon (flor. A.D. 48), whose handbook (Ars) had a great vogue, and with whom Persius and Quintilian studied. Columella drew from Julius Atticus and Julius Graecinus, both writers on vine-culture in the time of Tiberius; and the botanists Caepio and Antonius Castor were used by the elder Pliny.

Apicius, pre-eminent as the ideal gourmet, belonged to the reign of Tiberius. His culinary lore was, as we know from Seneca and from a note on Juvenal,⁠[401] committed to writing. The work, however, on cookery in ten books which passes under [132]his name (Apicius de re coquinaria)⁠[402] is a compilation of some centuries later, poorly and even ungrammatically written, although entertaining for its astounding variety in ingredients and modes of dressing fish, flesh and fowl, as well as for such naïve receipts as that for improving honey: “mix two parts of good honey with the bad and put on the market.”

In philosophy the austere morality of the Sextii, father and son, in the Augustan age, had been transmitted through their adherent Papirius Fabianus to the youthful Seneca. Celsus, as we have seen, also wrote on philosophy. Theoretical speculation, however, might prove politically disastrous; for the uncompromising arguments of Julius Kanus, or Canus, led to his being sentenced to death by Caligula:⁠[403] it was a philosopher who attended him to the place of execution, Julius undertaking that, if he discovered the condition of souls in the other world, he would revisit his friends to inform them. But the Stoics in the time of Nero form a more powerful group of thinkers, and, as we shall see, left a permanent mark on literature.

PHAEDRUS: THE FABULIST OF ROME

Phaedrus,⁠[404] the fabulist of Roman literature, was an alien slave of Thracian, or, to use his own adjective, “Pierian” origin. The lines⁠[405] in which he laid claim to birth “almost in the very school of the Muses” are to be taken, according to the spirit of the context, in the strict geographical sense and not as a metaphorical anticipation of the Tennysonian conception that “the poet in a golden clime is born.” Perhaps the plain prose of the matter is that his birthplace was the Roman colony of [134]Philippi. Evidently he was brought to Italy when young; for he refers to studying Ennius in boyhood.⁠[406] His Latin and Greek education followed the customary routine, to judge from the fact that, although fables do not readily lend themselves to a display of erudition, yet his yield proof of acquaintance with such authors as Virgil, Euripides and Simonides.⁠[407] Hardly mentioned in classical literature, his name first appears as a nominative, “Phaedrus,” in a prefatory letter of Avianus;⁠[408] but some have argued that it is more in accord with linguistic usage and inscriptional evidence to call him “Phaeder.” Inasmuch, then, as he became a freedman in the household of Caesar Augustus, one may consider his full name C. Julius Phaeder or Phaedrus.⁠[409] Concerning the limits of his life, and its scanty details, we are dependent upon deductions from his writings. There is a prevalent consensus among critics that the first two of his five books were published during the reign of Tiberius,⁠[410] perhaps together, perhaps separately, as Professor Ellis supposed,⁠[411] and that the third book appeared under Caligula, some time between A.D. 37 and the beginning of 41. Now, since passages⁠[412] in that book suggest that the author was already conscious of approaching age, there is justification for guessing that he was born some fifteen years before the Christian era.⁠[413] Although in Book III he had decided to relinquish authorship, he explains his change of mind in the prologue to the next book,⁠[414] and even after that we possess a fifth, the product of his advanced years.⁠[415]⁠

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The two opening books, which explain in their prologues the relationship between the present fables and those of Aesop, may be regarded as dedicated to readers at large;⁠[416] but the rest were dedicated to individuals; namely, Book III to Eutychus, plausibly identified with the chariot-driver of the Greens prominent under Caligula;⁠[417] IV to one Particulo, for whom Phaedrus entertained a respect enhanced, doubtless, by gratification at being quoted in his compositions;⁠[418] and Book V to a certain Philetes, or Philetus, who is pointedly expected to see the applicability to the aged author of the tale about the old hunting-dog past its best:

In addition to these five books, for which (discounting the recorded readings of the lost Remensis and three imperfect codices) only a single manuscript⁠[420] is extant, there is an “Appendix” of about thirty fables. These, although they look tinctured with medieval colour and show signs of having been supplemented from the Greek collection of Babrios, are considered to have been drawn by Perotti in the fifteenth century from a subsequently lost abridgement of Phaedrus.⁠[421] Twenty so-called “New Fables” gained from the prose paraphrases associated with the name of the medieval Romulus, appeared in Nilant’s edition early in the eighteenth century. The traces discernible therein of their original verse-form led scholars like [136]Dressier and Lucian Müller to rewrite them in metre.⁠[422] Recently Zander in his Phaedrus Solutus has reclaimed thirty fables which he has re-written in senarii after a careful investigation of the three prose-collections—the Ademarian, the Wissemburgensis and “Romulus.” Zander has aimed at separating Phaedrian and non-Phaedrian elements in the prose paraphrases; he has isolated the traces of fifth-century or sixth-century Latin comparable with what is to be found in Salvianus or Gregory of Tours; and, following principles of Phaedrian metric expounded by Havet, he has made a rather more successful iambic reconstruction of missing fables than some of his predecessors in this field.

Much of Phaedrus, then, is lost. This is a safe conclusion, if only from gaps in our existing text and from the disproportionate length of the books—the total of 93 fables in the five books being made up of the constituent numbers 31, 8, 19, 25 and 10. Besides, an objection of the imaginary matter-of-fact critic forestalled by Phaedrus⁠[423] is that “not merely beasts but trees do speak” in his fables; yet, in such of the surviving tales as are incontestably by Phaedrus, trees nowhere appear among the interlocutors.⁠[424]⁠

If Phaedrus had been asked what was the origin of his material, he would have answered “Aesop” without hesitancy or qualification. Yet the true answer is not so simple. On the one hand, the well-springs lay far deeper in primeval Aryan tales than Phaedrus could have dreamed, and on the other hand the fables which he assumed to be by Aesop consisted largely of accretions subsequent to Aesop’s time. The primitive beast-story, so widespread an element in folklore, becomes literary when it is shaped either to satiric or to moral purpose. Some such shaping of the beast-fable lies at the root of the renown of the Samian slave, the actual “Aisopos,” who flourished in the middle of the sixth century B.C. From tradition and experience—that [137]great repository of practical morality—the Greek observer drew his store. But in the history of literature “Aesop” became gradually a vague name; for later tales were freely ascribed to him as a kind of father of fable, and such tales enjoyed wide popularity among Greek democracies both as a convenient cloak for social criticism and as a simple form of amusement. In this respect, then, there is an “Aesopic” just as there is a “Homeric” Question. The supposed Aesopic fables (λόγων Αἰσωπείων συναγωγαί) were gathered about 300 B.C. by Demetrius of Phaleron, once tyrant at Athens, and afterwards savant at Alexandria, where he did much to establish the great library. This Greek prose collection it was—altered and interpolated by Alexandrine scholars—which formed the basis of Phaedrus’s neat version in Latin iambics. The same collection, it may be inferred from the reappearance of several stories in Plutarch (or in writings attributed to him), was a source common to Phaedrus and Plutarch (or the pseudo-Plutarch).⁠[425] Further, there is ground for holding that the modern “Aesop” contains actually more of Phaedrus than of Aisopos, thanks to the influence exerted by Phaedrus in medieval times, mainly if not entirely through the prose-forms to which his verses had been reduced.

Phaedrus was not the first who used the fable in Roman literature. It had been employed incidentally by Ennius, Lucilius and Horace.⁠[426] Phaedrus, however, was the first to compose separate volumes of fables in Latin: this was the one Hellenic form not yet taken over. Drama, epic, didactic, elegy, lyric, history presented no fresh openings; but a limited claim to originality might be based on free poetic adaptations of Greek prose-fables current under the name of “Aesop.” The attitude of Phaedrus to “Aesop” was not one which paused critically to examine the implications of the name, but evidently accepted “Aesop” as the personality responsible for the fables ascribed to him. Phaedrus, therefore, felt that, however much [138]he might modify or add, he individually owed Aesop a debt for the substance at least of the fables; and this relationship to the Greek sage is proclaimed at the outset:

Indeed, throughout we are continually being reminded of his model. The epilogue to the second book—an envoi to the volume which began with the piece just cited—gives utterance to his admiration in the sentiment which possessed a strong attraction for De Quincey:

a proof, says Phaedrus, that the pathway of honour lies open to all and that glory depends on merit instead of birth. If he follows in Aesop’s steps, it is in no spirit of envy, but in one of fair emulation:

The prologue of the next book shows that this ambitious desire [139]of bringing honour to Roman literature harmonizes with his own patriotic appreciation of Hellenic traditions:

In a later poem, he pictures Aesop brought out in “the fresh buskins” of the tragic trimeter;⁠[431] elsewhere,⁠[432] he protests against carping detractors who set successes among the fables to Aesop’s account but failures to Phaedrus’s own account. The last prologue offers the explanation that he employs Aesop’s name to recommend his works, as great artists’ names might be inscribed on productions not by themselves: this is virtually to amplify his remark in another place that the fables are not “Aesop’s, but Aesopian.”⁠[433]⁠

It may well be, as Lucian Müller suggested,⁠[434] that Phaedrus used a more complete Aesop than is now available, and that we therefore cannot know how much he owed; but, however extensive his debt, it does not amount to servile borrowing. Independence is not surprising in an author who explicitly recognizes individuality in literature,⁠[435] and who, while he undertakes to imitate Aesop’s principle of instruction through examples, at the same time engages to introduce novel and diverting anecdotes:

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By such promised anecdotes, some from bygone Greek life, some from contemporary Rome, and by allusions to current events sufficiently caustic to bring trouble upon his head, Phaedrus added greatly to the living force of his work. Bent on his twofold purpose of amusement and counsel, he could not, without becoming a dull second-hand plagiarist, shut his eyes to his own times. Occasionally, indeed, the Roman setting is plainly revealed. It is so in the case of the too-credulous father who slew his son under a misapprehension, and then by his suicide left his suspected wife to be haled before the centumuiri: it is so in the tale of the conceited flute-player called “Princeps,”⁠[437] who used to play accompaniments to the pantomimus Bathyllus and who, with sublime assurance, mistook for plaudits in his own honour the acclamations of the theatre intended for the real princeps, the emperor. Equally Roman, or at least Italian, is the atmosphere in the entertaining tale about the peasant who competed in pig-squeaking on the stage against a professional ventriloquist, and, despite his ingenious precaution of keeping a live porker hidden beneath his clothes to be pinched surreptitiously, was howled down by the audience as defective in realism! The closing situation is one of delicious irony when he turns the laugh against his judges by openly displaying the authentic grunter:

Again, the painted “history” of the warfare between mice and weasels⁠[439] seems to allude to wall-paintings of a comic or burlesque nature such as can be illustrated from Pompeii. Another instance is a hit at the ardaliones,⁠[440] the fussy triflers and ineffectual meddlers of Roman society. They are derided under the semblance of an officious slave who, by forcing his gardening labours upon the attention of his imperial majesty, tried hard to curry favour and possibly win the ceremonial slap (alapa) that conferred liberty:

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But Phaedrus’s satire was not merely social: it invaded politics. In one passage he refers to fable as a literary invention which might be of service when one dare not be outspoken;⁠[442] and though it would be an exaggeration to consider him an organ of political opposition, he clearly did give umbrage in high quarters by criticisms. There are always people ready to fit the satiric cap on their heads; and much in Phaedrus could be deemed offensive by a bad conscience. Some doubtless [142]detected a political allusion where none was intended; yet there were lines which inevitably summoned up before the mind recent chapters in Roman history. No one, for instance, with republican sympathies in his heart could avoid putting his own interpretation and comment upon the lines:

Besides, certain fables definitely entered on dangerous ground. Thus, the familiar tale of the Wolf and the Lamb is explicitly levelled at false accusers, deriving special significance from the increase of informers (delatores), eager to secure convictions for treason, and encouraged by the authorities.⁠[444] Nor is hatred of delatores under Tiberius far to seek in the story of the evil end which befell the Wolf who bore false witness to support the Dog as plaintiff in his invented claim against the Sheep for a loan.⁠[445] Indeed, there is a good deal of fun in the fables at the expense of law-courts and judges. The problem whether the emperor liked the anecdote (previously translated) concerning his snub administered to the officious slave must remain undetermined; and equally insoluble is the question whether he recognized his portrait in the dread King Water-snake sent to succeed King Log, the roi fainéant against whom the Frogs had petitioned;⁠[446] but, at any rate, for the emperor’s minister Sejanus there was decidedly unpalatable reading in the first two books. Sejanus was very like the upstart Jackdaw in peacock’s feathers and his projected alliance with Livia, widow of the younger Drusus, possibly lent a sting to the protests of the Frogs against the marriage of the Sun who, even as things were, dried up the pools: “what will result if he have progeny?”⁠[447] Whichever may have been the offending fables in the volume of Bad Beasts, Sejanus assuredly did institute proceedings against the author, [143]who resented the indignity of suffering “calamity” at such hands.⁠[448] There is no evidence as to the punishment inflicted—whether it was banishment or imprisonment or even a return to slavery—but Phaedrus’s tone proves that it left him sore; and the incident is one among many illustrations of the repressive influence of the imperial entourage, a circle where few dared say the thing they felt.

It was not only through political strictures that Phaedrus made enemies. As we shall find, his very style, his love of brevity and pith, incurred hostile criticism, and, like Terence, he felt bound to devote portions of his prologues to answering detractors. Annoyance was also given by the manner in which his fables upheld honesty and justice:

Perhaps he is over-insistent on the didactic element in his work and on the lessons derivable from regarding him seriously:

It is an important aspect of his relation to his times, and a powerful factor in his social criticism, that he emphasizes the [144]ubiquitous presence and frequent triumph of injustice. It would be too much to call him gloomy or pessimistic; yet his figures move in a beast-world where, notwithstanding the moral sermonettes, much hardship and unfairness are perforce endured. The Wolf tyrannizes unmolested: the Lion insists that the whole spoil is his “share” and defies his allies to demur: the Ass, captured by robbers, feels no worse for the change of owner than, as a rule, Rome might when she gets a new emperor.⁠[451] When the great fall out, humble people have to suffer—so argue the Frogs about the battles of the Bulls.⁠[452] In a life so troublous, resignation is assumed to be a wise precaution—the Frogs, oppressed by their terrible King Water-snake, after lazy King Log, come to realize that it is best to let well alone, or even if things are not well, to bear the ills one has.⁠[453] Accordingly, there is much acceptance of fate. This is a wicked world, and must be recognized as such; for so far are rogues from infallibly getting their deserts that their success is often a good advertisement for villainy (successus improborum plures allicit, II. iii. 7).

Phaedrus, however, looked beyond the Rome of his day to that wider sphere of human nature which the best fables always illustrate and to which they owe much of their perennial attraction:

This relation to life at large comes to a great extent under the second of his professed objects—sound counsel. For example, it is with becoming seriousness that he treats the idea of the two wallets for human shortcomings familiar in Catullus’s allusion and forming the ancient analogue to Burns’ aspiration:

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In Phaedrus it takes this shape:

With similar seriousness of tone he uses the instance of the treasure-dragon to introduce his impressive apostrophe to the miser.⁠[456] In another poem we find the wise pilot’s advice for voyagers across the ocean of life:

There is also a note of pathetic truth to human experience and of wistful yearning in the little piece on the rarity of affection in ordinary life:

Yet it would be unfair to leave the impression that even in his satire on human nature Phaedrus constantly wears a sober face. He does not forget that one of his objects is amusement; and although there may be little enough of the “laughter” [146]which he promised, still many subjects are treated lightly and pleasantly. In such manner he handles the recurrent foibles of humanity exemplified in braggarts, in public gullibility, in interested advisers, in the old lady with a weakness for drink, and so forth.⁠[459] Here is his glance at good-looking and lucky fools:

Here again, a little more fully than in the Horatian parturiunt montes, nascetur ridiculus mus, we have a vivid illustration of “much cry and little wool”:

There is humour, too, as of some irresolute Sir Roger de Coverley, in Mr. Justice Ape’s summing up of a case where prosecutor and defendant are alike disreputable, and there has been unscrupulous cross-swearing. After hearing two clever but conflicting perorations, the Justice pronounces with Gilbertian comicality for both sides:

One must not overlook another source of charm. Good fables have a right to be read for the story alone. Now, as has been pointed out, much in Phaedrus comes down through Aesop from the primitive beast-story and folklore of the Aryans: much is but the residuum of what prehistoric fancy was capable of inventing and believing in far-off times when [147]quadruped, reptile and bird were supposed to talk. Phaedrus gave classic expression in verse to tales which have appealed to countless generations of children, and which hold their own in the modern nursery. For, as M. Reinach would like us to believe, our youngsters love such tales because they are unconscious totemists!⁠[463] To read Phaedrus, therefore, is like meeting friends that everyone must know, because the stories illustrate the common experience of mankind. So, granted a judicious ability to overlook the obtrusion of a moral first or last in a fable, one never tires of The Wolf and the Lamb, The Jackdaw in Peacock’s Feathers, The Lion’s Share, The Ambitious Frog and the Ox, The Sham Hospitality of Fox and Stork, The Mule with the Load of Gold and the Mule with the Load of Barley, The Wolf at Large and the Dog with a Collar,⁠[464] The Pearl in the Dung-heap, Aesop tossing Nuts or All Work and No Play, The Fox and the Sour Grapes, The Viper and the File, The Snake in the Bosom, The Forelock of Opportunity, and Old Bald-pate with the Fly or Adding Insult to Injury.⁠[465]⁠

Human realism, in fact, has been imparted to the beast-fable. Constantly forgetting that one is reading about animals, one does not care if the doings and sayings are inconsistent with the laws of physics or natural history. It matters little that a swimming dog is unlikely to see his reflexion in the water, and that cats do not habitually eat young pigs.⁠[466] The passions, wiles and talk of the animals are convincing because of the resemblance to mankind. In this sense, how natural it all is—how true to life! The cynical ingratitude of the bitch after borrowing shelter for herself and whelps; the mortally wounded pride of the old lion who endures a double death (bis uideor mori) when kicked by the ass; the much to be suspected outburst of sudden generosity on the part of designing persons in contrast [148]with the staid fidelity of a watchdog; the dignified contempt wherewith the boar declines to avenge a lewd insult (inquinari nolo)—these⁠[467] and many such have close parallels in actuality. Little wonder, then, that contemporaries not infrequently beheld themselves under the disguise. So entirely apposite were many stories that, as already seen, offence was sure to be taken where none was meant.

Without being among the great in achievement, Phaedrus yet exhibits the genuine attitude of a man of letters. He is intensely sensitive to unfriendly criticism; he repeatedly makes retorts on cavillers;⁠[468] he is proud of literary qualities like brevity;⁠[469] believes he has his place as the introducer of a new form in Roman literature;⁠[470] and has confidence in the survival of his writings.⁠[471] He takes pleasure in his vocation; for it is with obvious satisfaction that he recounts the value of literature to Simonides.⁠[472] Yet, equipped as he was with talent and self-reliance, and likely to secure an initial recommendation from his connexion with the imperial court, he admits that he made his way with difficulty. The admission occurs in the passage where, after mentioning his birth, he avows his disdain for wealth and his devotion to poetry:

In face of opposition, however, he feels the superiority of his [149]own unappreciated pearls: it is like throwing them on a dung-hill to offer fables to unresponsive readers:

The tardy acceptance of his writings during his lifetime seems in harmony with the silence regarding him in the classics at large. Seneca, writing about A.D. 43, pronounces the fable to be work “unattempted by the Roman genius.”⁠[475] Possibly in this remark he may definitely have the Greek Phaedrus in mind, though he does not name him. Quintilian, while he finds a place for fable in his scheme of education,⁠[476] does not mention Phaedrus. Before Avianus, who wrote in the fourth century, the single allusion generally cited as applicable to him, namely, Martial’s an aemulatur improbi iocos Phaedri? is not beyond dispute. While it is appropriate in Martial to call the fables ioci, as their author does, the epithet improbus, if it seriously means “shameless,” is remarkably inappropriate as a fair description of our moralist, even when we grant that he can be coarse. It is just possible that the coarsest in him has not survived; but unless one adopts a supposition of this sort, there is a temptation to fancy that the Phaedrus whom Martial meant may have been some obscure writer of mimes.⁠[477] More justice [150]was done to his reputation in later centuries when abridgements were in vogue; and in the Middle Ages he may said to have had his revenge.

This is a suitable point at which to note briefly the later fortunes of fable in the Roman world. It was not till after the time of Augustus that a group of Indian beast-stories with ethical applications was brought to Alexandria by a Cingalese embassy. Translated as the “Libyan Fables” of one “Kybises,” they had pithy conclusions pointing the moral to be deduced. In the days of Marcus Aurelius, a rhetor at his court, Nicostratus, formed a corpus out of the old Greek collection of Demetrius and the Libyan collection of “Kybises.” This body of fable from the nearer and the farther East was next turned into Greek choliambics by Valerius Babrius, about whose date there has been considerable dispute, but who was perhaps tutor to the young son of Alexander Severus. It is the Libyan element, rather than the Aesopic, which predominates among the forty-two fables done into Latin elegiacs by Flavius Avianus in the fourth century; and his uninspiring verses close the ancient records on this subject. With the later and more fascinating history of fable we are not concerned except to observe that in the Middle Ages it was Phaedrus who was especially read and paraphrased among fabulists. About eighty of his fables were collected in prose, perhaps in the ninth century,⁠[478] and went under the name of “Romulus.” The prose collection which once belonged to the monk Ademar of Chabannes or Chabanais,⁠[479] and was possibly written by himself early in the eleventh [151]century, possesses the historic interest of preserving some portions of Phaedrus otherwise lost; elsewhere among its contents are prose versions of existent verse fables in Phaedrus with but slight alterations.⁠[480]⁠

The outstanding qualities of the style and art of Phaedrus are his direct simplicity of language and unpretentious neatness of phrase and line. On brevity, as already indicated, he plumed himself, though on occasion he is half-apologetic over it. Brevity, we know, is not necessarily simple; but his brevity is. With him, condensation was not purchased at the expense of clearness; for his style is on the whole flowing and easy. Its natural turns, which seem to grow out of the nature of the subject, are at once appropriate to his animal speakers and a contrast to the artificial rhetoric beginning to inundate Latin literature. At the same time, he was aware of this increasing tendency towards the high-flown and the far-fetched; for in a passage⁠[481] where he makes telling retort on the hypercriticism launched at him, he composes a specimen of the tragic manner, and proclaims the impossibility of pleasing a fastidious Cato⁠[482] of a critic by means of either fabellae (fables) or fabulae (plays). It is, then, vastly to his credit that, while he thus affords proof of what he could do in aping tragic diction, he yet so avoids inflation and preciosity as to attain a strict and almost Attic sobriety of style comparable with the clear-cut and restrained work of Terence in the drama or of Caesar in prose. His use of antithesis, which is not tediously overdone, may be cited in illustration of his restraint; e.g.

or

[152]

In a certain fondness for abstract⁠[483] turns of expression one remarks a resemblance to the style of Valerius Maximus, and therefore a symptom of the movement in the language towards Silver Latinity. In general, despite his foreign origin, the Latin of Phaedrus obeys correct canons, though there are occasional vulgarisms and instances of loose grammatical usage.⁠[484]⁠

He does not possess in any remarkable degree the artist’s eye. The picturesque may be said to begin and end for him in a few vivid synonyms like “long-ears” (auritulus) for an ass, “the wizened one” (retorridus) for an old mouse, or in epithets like those in “branching antlers” (ramosa cornua) of a stag, or “lightning-flashing tusks” of the wild boar (fulmineis dentibus).⁠[485] He may pause to give a condensed description; but it is rare to find anything so full in this kind as Juno’s summary of the peacock’s advantages:

Nor does he trouble, we have seen, to keep true to nature; except in wonderland, cow, she-goat and sheep make a curious triple alliance for a lion on a carnivorous expedition. Really, Phaedrus is in Roman fashion bent upon moralizing so that his readers shall reap benefit (utilitatem);⁠[487] and this domination of the moral is one factor which prevents any free and accurate [153]study of animals. Not one of the world’s mighty sages, he has rather a thin philosophy to propound; and on his narrow stage the beasts sometimes display no more vitality than wooden marionettes. This renders his psychology too naïve—his animals reason in a manner patently subordinate to the intended lesson. The doves, for instance, harried by the kite, see at last the error of their ways and acknowledge the justice of their punishment:⁠[488] and the outcome has a smack suggestive of a death-bed repentance in accord with the distinctly self-regarding morality inculcated.

Although the parallel of La Fontaine’s fables must cross the mind insistently during a study of Phaedrus, yet any elaborate comparison between the two would be futile. There is so much that is incommensurate. The claim of Phaedrus had been to polish in iambic verse the prose of “Aesop”; and it may be granted that his fables have more picturesque turns than their Greek originals. But they pale before the masterpieces of the French writer. Phaedrus does not possess the knowledge, the penetration, the dramatic power, the sense of style—he has not, in short, the genius which makes La Fontaine a great poet at a great epoch, and par excellence the thinker and artist among fabulists. The Russian fabulist Kriloff, who is manifestly under obligations both to La Fontaine and to Aesop, may in one striking way be said to continue the Phaedrian tradition; for, whereas La Fontaine’s fables are impersonal, Kriloff’s had a frequent and pointed bearing on affairs and circumstances in the Russia of his time.

The metre of Phaedrus is the iambic senarius throughout. It is not the iambic line favoured by Catullus, Bibaculus or Horace, but broadly that employed by the ancient comic writers. He may have been influenced by Publilius Syrus, to whose sententious manner the moral of a fable often bears resemblance. We meet with a different type of iambic trimeter in Seneca, who, owing to Ovidian influence,⁠[489] composed lines unlike the early Roman tragic iambic; for neatness and monotony have in the Senecan iambic replaced the strong rough lines of Ennius, Pacuvius and Accius. But it is the ancient [154]iambic line, as used in comedy by Plautus and Terence, which descends lineally to Phaedrus. Only, while he may offend a fastidious ear by admitting spondees in the second and the fourth feet, he is generally careful to avoid overloading his verse with long syllables and to secure variety of sound by introducing other metrical feet⁠[490] and by attention to elision.

Regarding the fables as a whole, Dr. Mackail contends that “their chief interest is as the last survival of the urbanus sermo in Latin poetry”;⁠[491] but perhaps this view too exclusively estimates them from the linguistic and stylistic side. Slight from the standpoint of purely literary merit, the fables of Phaedrus do however possess considerable historical importance. They hold their place in the chronicle of European fable-literature; they form a chapter in the book of Rome’s debt to Greek models; they contain a significant amount of original material, with a virile bearing upon contemporary life; and, farther, it is not the least of their claims to attention that they wielded a potent influence in medieval times, and, if only as one of those lesson-books which sink deep into the memory, they have been beloved by many generations of readers.

POETRY OF THE TIME

To the exiguous body of minor poetry during his own times Tiberius contributed a lyric lament on the death of L. Caesar, and poems in the late Greek manner.⁠[492] It has already been observed that the emperor had profited by his studies in rhetoric, under Theodorus and others, enough to acquit himself proficiently in speaking and in writing, though he cultivated at times a halting and obscure manner. Towards the close of Augustus’s reign, Manilius⁠[493] had written his Astronomica, viewing the universe on Stoic principles and displaying a style not uninfluenced by Ovidian dexterity.

A famous but ill-starred prince has a niche in the history of [155]that particular type of didactic poetry which descended from Cicero and Manilius. The emperor’s nephew and adopted son, Germanicus⁠[494] (15 B.C.–A.D. 19), added to military ability a command of his own language as speaker and poet.⁠[495] He wrote Greek comedies which have perished, and in both languages elegiac epigrams, a few of which have been preserved, including a Latin one on a boy who met with a fatal accident on ice. To him are usually assigned the hexameter translations or adaptations of the Greek poems by Aratus of Soli in Cilicia on astronomy and weather-forecasts (Φαινόμενα and Διοσημεῖα) which have come down, some 700 and 200 lines respectively, under the name of “Claudius Caesar.” There is ancient authority for the ascription to Germanicus; Lactantius, for instance, quotes a line from “Germanicus Caesar in his Aratean poem.”⁠[496] An apostrophe to Augustus in the poem (l. 558) implies the death of that emperor, and genitor in l. 2 is applicable to his adoptive father Tiberius. Rutgers’s advocacy for the authorship of Domitian (who did not take the title “Germanicus” until after his campaign against the Chatti in A.D. 84) has found little acceptance.

Astronomy formed in antiquity an integral part of a liberal education: a cultured Roman in reading about the heavens was far from being so helpless as is the average reader of to-day, nor was the ancient so ignorant when he looked at the starry sky. The work translated and amplified by Germanicus is, in effect, an indication of a different type of knowledge, requirement and interest from that usual in modern times, and its compound of astronomy and mythology cannot retain the attraction which it once exercised. A heavenly body is not merely mentioned in its position or for its influence: it is [156]connected with the legend from which its name is derived, and so the didactic is lit up with faint gleams of poetry, in which perhaps Germanicus excels his original. Thus the deteriorating ages of the world appear as in Ovid, and the name of a constellation like Andromeda leads away from science into fancy:⁠[497]⁠

Long ago, Frey⁠[498] pointed out the prince’s free treatment of his Greek original, his correction of mistakes in the light of later knowledge, and his insertion of passages of his own composition, somewhat in the fashion observable in Coleridge’s rendering of Schiller’s Wallenstein. If time-honoured legends are not subjected to critical examination, they are at least sometimes introduced apologetically: “if an old tale may find favour,” “if in truth Juppiter was suckled as a child,” “if in truth Atlans upholds the realms of Jove.”⁠[499] This independence of method and spirit is one of the features which distinguishes Germanicus’s version of the Aratea from the preceding attempt by Cicero and the later one by Avienus in the fourth century.

A poem concerned with Germanicus may appropriately be mentioned here, because it connects the age of Augustus and that of Tiberius. It is a fragment in hexameters which stops short in the twenty-third line as quoted by the elder Seneca⁠[500] to illustrate Latin power in describing the ocean. The verses are by Albinovanus Pedo,⁠[501] a poet of Ovid’s set, who had written a Theseid and elegies, including a consolation to Livia on the death of Germanicus’s father, Drusus, some twenty-four years earlier than this poem on the expedition under Germanicus into the North Sea. Tacitus has described the storm which befell this same expedition in the Annals (II. xxiii.). In turgid [157]style Pedo aims at conveying the nervous alarm of adventurers braving the unknown hazards of high latitudes, with a sense of being exiled (extorres) beyond the known limits of the globe into sunless realms where Ocean “bears enormous monsters ’neath its sluggish tides”: They exclaim:

Though Pedo is mainly Augustan, his declamatory lines composed under Tiberius possess the interest of forming a link between the rhetorical qualities observable in Ovid and the epic poetry of the Silver Age.

The rarity of names of contemporary playwrights is a reminder that the drama, usually at Rome outrivalled by less intellectual entertainments, had fallen upon evil days. The popular dramatic performances, in favour of which comedy⁠[503] had virtually disappeared, were now the mime and the Atellan farce. The mime, realistic and often coarse though it was in its picture of life, yet, according to the opinion of so staid a philosopher as Seneca, shared with ancient classical tragedy and comedy the merit of conveying impressive lessons of practical wisdom;⁠[504] and there is a familiar anecdote told of the death-bed scene when Augustus asked those around him whether he had played the “mime” of life well, capping his query with Greek verses which solicited their applause.⁠[505] A writer of Caligula’s time named Catullus composed mimes, two of which were Phasma (“The Spectre”) and Laureolus, whose title-rôle of a bandit was on one occasion sustained by a wretched criminal who underwent a real crucifixion upon the stage.⁠[506] The Atellan [158]farce held its ground during several reigns,⁠[507] and was presumably all the more acceptable because some line or lines might strike the audience as covertly directed against an emperor.

Tragedy can scarcely be said to have had a real survival in the atrophied forms of fabulae salticae and dramatic recitations.⁠[508] The fabula saltica expressed action, feeling and character, sometimes no doubt with marvellous dexterity, through the dancing, gesture and garb of a pantomimus, while the words of the play were assigned to a chorus. Had the librettos come down, some might conceivably have entered into literary history: we know, for instance, that Lucan wrote fourteen such librettos; and, later, Statius wrote an Agaue for the dancer Paris. Many pieces, however, were based on the most unsavoury stories in mythology, and represented a Pasiphaë, a Myrrha, or a Leda. As regards the pathetic recitations extracted from plays or composed specially to recite, this mutilated or attenuated form of drama became one of the great amusements of Nero both as writer and performer.

Dramatic composition under the Empire was in reality no safer for authors than history was. If a mere line about a ruler’s folly in a tragedy apparently so remote from contemporary politics as his Atreus involved the downfall of Mamercus Scaurus,⁠[509] it is hardly matter for surprise that an equivocal jest in an Atellan farce should lead Caligula to have its luckless author burned in the amphitheatre.⁠[510] The friendship of P. Pomponius Secundus⁠[511] with a son of Sejanus had rendered him suspect under Tiberius, and for years he remained under surveillance with enforced leisure for literary creation. Outliving Tiberius, he again became a public figure. The elder Pliny speaks of him as of consular rank, served under him against the Germans, and wrote his biography. Why the mob in the [159]theatre attacked the dramatist in A.D. 47 is not clear. Quintilian, at any rate, considered him far the best tragic poet he had seen. A single title of his plays survives—the Aeneas, presumably a praetexta dramatizing portions of the legendary history of Rome.⁠[512]⁠

The De Re Rustica of L. Junius Moderatus Columella⁠[513] is our best witness to methods of husbandry in the earlier Empire. A Spaniard by birth—his native place was Gades⁠[514] (Cadiz)—he took both a family and a personal interest in farming. His uncle, “the most diligent husbandman in the province of Baetica,”⁠[515] whom he several times cites with respect, gained great experience in land-owning: and when Columella himself acquired estates in Italy,⁠[516] he added practical knowledge to his study of Greek, Carthaginian and Roman writers on the subject. [161]An inscription⁠[517] tells that he was of the Galerian tribe and served as an officer in the legio sexta ferrata; so it is a reasonable conjecture that, when that legion was stationed in Syria, he took the opportunity of observing agricultural operations which he recalled when he came to write.⁠[518] Besides his De Re Rustica in twelve books (originally designed to end with the tenth book which is in verse), he had previously written a manual on agriculture, of which the second book, De Arboribus, is left. A work now missing was his counterblast to fortune-telling, Adversus Astrologos (XI. i. 31); and he at least had it in mind to compose⁠[519] an account of rituals followed in farming, which would have been of great value for a student of Roman religion.

He wrote after Julius Graecinus and Cornelius Celsus (the agricultural part of whose encyclopaedia he often quotes), but before the elder Pliny, who in turn used Columella. One other chronological point can be determined, which shows he was writing in Nero’s reign. In the third book of the De Re Rustica he mentions Seneca, “a person of excellent genius and learning,” as holding a Nomentan estate⁠[520] not far from his own; and, as Seneca acquired this late in life but must have already held it long enough to make it known for its abundant vintage-yield, the inference is that this book was written not much before Seneca’s death in A.D. 65.

Briefly these are the subjects of the twelve books:

I, General rules for country life, e.g. on choosing land, securing water and staffing a farm; II, treatment of land, ploughing, manuring, various crops; III-IV, vineyards and vines; V, land dimensions, elms, olives, fruit-trees; VI, cattle, horses, mules; VII, sheep, goats, and (after a chapter on cheese-making) [162]swine and dogs; VIII, poultry and fish-ponds; IX, wild cattle and bees; X, gardens (in verse); XI, duties of a farm-bailiff, work for different months, and gardens (in prose); XII, duties of a bailiff’s wife—provisions, pickling, fruit-preserving; on mead, cheese, figs, raisins, making and treatment of wines, savoury olive marmalade, salting swine’s flesh.

From the mere headings one can see at once that such work is technical rather than literary; yet there is much in it to recreate important aspects of the environment of the Romans in the first century. Columella was conscious that agriculture, the traditional strength of Rome, was being sapped by the multiplication of parks and country-seats and by wasteful mismanagement of estates through incompetence. He is very insistent on the abuses due to absentee landlords, and equally insistent on the need for practical farming and personal control. The owner who manages for himself ought to secure better returns than he would by letting to tenant-farmers, though this latter method avoids some of the risks consequent on running the farm by slave-labour under a farm-bailiff.

A summary examination of his preface to the first book illustrates his general outlook and his advocacy of restored attention to agriculture, for which he has imbibed a traditional Roman veneration. The old Roman practice, he says, of land-tilling in which a consul or a dictator used to take personal delight, the pursuit which might be called “own sister to philosophy” (quasi consanguinea sapientiae), has fallen on evil days. There are teachers for all other sciences and arts, including trumpery, luxurious, and even disreputable ones; but, he adds, “of agriculture I have never known any to profess themselves either instructors or students.” Mother earth is foolishly alleged to have declined in fertility, whereas the true reason is that skilled labour is not being devoted to her. Feeble old town-slaves will be banished to do country work, although rural toil demands both knowledge and “green age” capable of standing fatigue. In contrast with olden times, we Romans “have crept (correpsimus) inside the city-wall and ply our hands rather in circuses and theatres than among crops and vineyards.” We misspend our days and nights and “consider ourselves [163]lucky because we never see a sunrise or a sunset.” Things are come to such a pass that “in this Latium and Saturnian land we let out by public auction the importation of corn from our provinces.” Agriculture is no easy thing to excel in; but the right attitude is not despair in face of its vast variety (tam variae tamque uastae scientiae), but determination to use the knowledge handed down by Greek and Roman writers (many of whom Columella names),⁠[521] and to make diligent practical experiment. As he remarks in his first chapter, “practice and experience are masters in the arts”: books and rules are only auxiliary: nothing benefits the farm so much as the master’s own presence.

Naturally the didactic value in such work outweighs the artistic; but there is a great deal of old-world information which can hardly fail to interest, though it may but concern the right contrivance of an old Italian hen-house, the food proper for poultry, recipes for preserving pears, the way to make mead of the very best honey, or the mode of reasonably encouraging treatment which Columella found efficacious with his slaves. It is something to have thus brought home to the mind what life meant on farms in the imperial period, to learn that a shepherd’s dog should be white so that it could be distinguished on dark mornings or at evening twilight from the dangerous wolf, to note the frugality and energy laid down as ideally requisite in a competent farm-bailiff, to admire the methodical regularity declared to be equally essential in the farm-bailiff’s wife as in a chorus of singers or (as the author says, no doubt with a touch of personal reminiscence) in the army. One of the truly Roman features in Columella is his maintenance of a standard of hard work, fortified by his citation from Cato, “by doing nothing men learn to do evil.” It is true his science is far from impeccable: some of his cures are appallingly foolish, and his astronomy little likely to produce a sound calendar. But then even blunders may have the merit of affording amusement; and, besides, there is in him a modesty which half disarms criticism. It appears very prettily in his final sentence, when, now an old man, and conscious [164]of the magnitude of his theme, he comes to say good-bye to it:

As a conclusion of my work now accomplished, I think it not improper, Publius Silvinus, to declare to my readers (if truly any be found who deign to take cognizance of such affairs) that I nowise doubted the existence of wellnigh an infinity of matters capable of being ingrafted upon this subject, but that I judged it right that only such as seemed most necessary should be handed down to remembrance. Nature has not, however, bestowed even on grey hairs insight into all things; for even whosoever have been esteemed the wisest of mortals are said to have known many things, but not all.⁠[522]⁠

Columella’s sources include, besides Greek authorities and Mago, the Carthaginian, whose work the senate of the republic had ordained to be translated into Latin, Cato,⁠[523] the Sasernae (father and son), Tremellius Scrofa, Varro, Virgil, Hyginus, and among later writers Graecinus, Julius Atticus and Cornelius Celsus. The two last he characterizes as “the most celebrated authors of our age.”⁠[524] He often adduces Celsus’s opinions, just as he often quotes Virgil’s Georgics. Columella is noticeably more specific, in fact more honest, touching his sources than many writers of antiquity were. Nothing could be more open than his introductory remarks on bees and beehives. It is solely for the sake of completeness, he explains, that he must include the theme: for on it “no precepts can be given more carefully than have been delivered by Hyginus, nor more gracefully than by Virgil, nor more elegantly than by Celsus.”⁠[525]⁠

Columella writes on a practical subject in a practical way. Of course there must be rare technical words drawn from operations that fall to be described, like abnodare (“cut off knots,” IV. xxii. 4, IV. xxiv. 10), decacuminare (“cut tops off,” IV. vii. 3, V. vi. 12), canteriatae (of vines supported by trellis-work, [165]V. iv. 1, cf. canterius, IV. xii. 1), impedatio (“propping,” IV. xiii. 1), scabrata (of a vine roughened by pruning, IV. xxiv. 22), glocire (of a hen’s clucking, VIII. v. 4).⁠[526] His sentences are clear and business-like, though without the archaic and bare jerkiness of Cato. Generally his most polished style appears in his prefaces; and, where he aims at finish, the influence of Cicero can be traced. Even without exact statistics, the ear detects the cadences of his clausulae—a liking for cretics (or resolved cretics) followed by trochee or double trochee, spondee or double spondee. One feature anyway is refreshing: he does not weary his reader with purple patches or with the artifices of his age. There are allusions to Spanish habits and Spanish names, but there is no Spanish rhetoric. When he is enthusiastic, his enthusiasm is natural, and that is why one can honestly welcome a certain poetic vein in him. Independently of his constant quotations from Virgil and his verse-book on gardens, an artistic sentiment stirs within the author, and his eye does not fail to mark nor his pen to convey the colours of an Italian vineyard in autumn:⁠[527]⁠

Even the greatest stranger to rural life, should he come into your grounds planted in due season, must with a transport of pleasure marvel at the kindliness of Nature, to see there the Bituric vines rich in fruitage, and here their rivals, the pale yellow vines, match each other.... Bounteous earth, rejoicing over the annual return of the season, as it were some eternal child-bearing, offers to mankind her breasts distended with new wine. Amidst all, while Bacchus favours the pregnant vine-branches whether of the white kind or golden and ruddy, or agleam with purple brightness, everywhere doth Autumn shine lustrous, laden with parti-coloured fruits.

This feeling for colour is met with again in his verses:

His treatment of horticulture in the tenth book, like his motive for writing it, was partly utilitarian, partly, but only partly, poetic. He was scarcely free enough in soul to take a garden, as Bacon did, for “the greatest refreshment to the spirits of man”; nor would Bacon’s threefold division of “a greene in the entrance, a heath or desart in the going forth, and the maine garden in the midst” ever have occurred to Columella. The luxury of contemporary banquets shocked him, he says in his preface; no poor man could afford such extravagance. Yet thrifty use might be made of a garden, and this would have been handled in prose but for Silvinus’s request that Columella should write in verse what Virgil expressly bequeathed in the fourth Georgic for literary posterity. Parts of the subject seemed so insignificant that the author feared its treatment might resemble “making ropes out of sand”; and thus throughout the 436 hexameters there may be traced a sort of conflict between the desire to give serviceable advice concerning a market-garden and an artistic yearning after beauty. Columella, indeed, succeeds, as Martial did after him, in making some at least of his vegetables poetic. Flowers are a godsend to him. Besides, there are Virgilian echoes from Eclogues, Georgics and Aeneid, but also occurrences of compound adjectives proportionately rather more frequent than in Virgil.⁠[529]⁠

The start is made on useful topics—soil proper to a garden, trees indicative of suitable ground, the wall or fence, the undesirability of statues save of the protective wooden Garden-God; then, after a pause to utter a conventional invocation, [167]the author advocates digging and ploughing regardless of mercy for “mother earth.” The season

calls for the employment of manure, hoe, rake and spade, and for the planting of gay flowers, as in the passage already translated. Herbs of various potency, different kinds of cabbage, watering of young plants and the management of a dry hill-plot lead to his insistence on work at the right moment:

Then follows a procession of vegetables—parsley, leeks, parsnips and lettuces, with a side-glance directed to the “thousand hues” secured by the skilled gardener, till the fertility of spring wakes a rhapsody on the dominion of Venus as reminiscent of Lucretius and of Virgil’s second Georgic, as it is anticipative of the Peruigilium Veneris:

Here, however, the poet checks himself: let such themes be reserved for a bard inspired to sing of nature’s mysteries: he must answer the call to humbler matters:

[168]

So we find ourselves among cresses, artichokes, pomegranates and beet; till again the brilliant array of spring-blossom fills the poet with glee over the flower-harvest:

So for the moment he is on the verge of fairyland invoking the nymphs.

Then comes the thought that in workaday Italy and in its market towns there is money to be made from the produce; so one must remember the tasks appropriate as the day lengthens and the southern heat increases: one must be on guard against inroads of insects and danger to ripe fruits from rain and hail, and must grow cucumbers and melons, plums, peaches and figs, not forgetting Vulcan’s feast in autumn. But, at this autumnal allusion, the vintage beckons us away from gardens to obey the summons of Bacchus, and with that Columella finishes his task self-imposed in pursuance of the behest of Virgil, the Roman Hesiod,

An intensely interesting, though fragmentary, work, now by common consent ascribed to Nero’s reign, is usually entitled the Satyricon or Satiricon (originally a Greek genitive plural), though the fragments are in the manuscripts also called satirae or satyri, and referred to Petronius Arbiter as author. Like the editio princeps of about 1482,⁠[536] several editions appeared without [170]the famous “Banquet of Trimalchio,” which was recovered at Trau in Dalmatia only in the middle of the seventeenth century. In that unique manuscript (Traguriensis) an entry had been made to the effect that the fragments belong to Books XV and XVI of Petronius’s “Satyri”; if this is trustworthy, then merely a fraction of a long work has come down to us. Since that thrilling discovery at Trau, all claims to have found additions have proved to be based on forgeries, like the passages published at Paris in 1693 by Nodot, who pretended they were contained in a manuscript from Belgrade.

Quotations from “Arbiter” or “Petronius” are made by several ancient scholars (e.g. Diomedes, Servius, Priscian); Fulgentius cites him as “Petronius Arbiter”; Terentianus Maurus calls him “Arbiter disertus,” and Sidonius Apollinaris classes him among renowned masters eloquii Latini; but the process of excerpting (like epitomizing, often fatal to an original) probably accounts for the disappearance of the complete work about the seventh century. The limited Petronius now extant was presumably the portion known to Eugenius Vulgarius in the tenth century, to John of Salisbury in the twelfth, and to Vincentius of Beauvais in the thirteenth.

Niebuhr’s opinion that the work was of the third century and Beck’s that it belonged to the time of Augustus or Tiberius have by general consent given place to the established belief that it was written in Nero’s age.⁠[537] Its social atmosphere, its style, its echoes of Seneca, Lucan and even of the emperor, all [171]point the argument in the same direction. Likewise it is in the highest degree probable that the author is the Petronius whose death is dramatically recorded by Tacitus and whose character is attractively idealized by Sienkiewicz in “Quo Vadis?” Gaius (or as Nipperdey⁠[538] preferred, Titus) Petronius was one of a series of Nero’s victims in A.D. 66, and Tacitus devotes two chapters⁠[539] to the career and end of a very remarkable man:

With him day passed in sleep, night in the duties and amusements of life. Energy makes some men’s reputation, but idling had made his: he was considered, not a debauchee and spendthrift like most squanderers of their wealth, but a man of polished luxury. The freer his sayings and doings and the more seeming carelessness they displayed, the more cordially were they construed as looking like straightforwardness. Yet when governor of Bithynia and afterwards when consul, he showed himself alert and a match for business. Then, falling back on vice or aping vice, he was selected by Nero to be one of his small inner circle, his judge of etiquette (elegantiae arbiter); for the emperor thought nothing charming and elegantly voluptuous, unless Petronius had given him approval of it.

As ill luck would have it, he roused the dangerous jealousy of Tigellinus, who proceeded to compass his ruin through a false charge. Nero was in Campania when Petronius received an ominous command to confine himself to Cumae. He was not the man to tolerate fluctuations of fear and hope: on the other hand he was little disposed to fling life away by precipitate suicide: so he alternately opened and bandaged his veins, exactly as he chose, held receptions for his friends and indulged in conversation neither serious nor suggestive of stoical virtue.

He listened as they repeated, not views on the immortality of the soul or on the theories of philosophers, but light poetry and sportive lines. To some of his slaves he gave generous gifts, to others a flogging. He went in to dinner, then indulged in sleep so that, though forced upon him, his death might appear the result of chance. Even in his will he did not, like most doomed men, flatter Nero or Tigellinus or any other powerful [172]personage; instead, he wrote a description of the prince’s scandalous excesses, prefixing the names of the profligates and the women concerned, and detailing every immoral novelty; then sealed the document and sent it to Nero.

This chronique scandaleuse written in Petronius’s last hours cannot, as some have hastily surmised, be the Satyricon, a far more elaborate production, which must have demanded prolonged leisure for its composition. But the Satyricon enables one to imagine the pith and realism of the terrible indictment hurled at the depraved despot by one who had been his minister of amusements. Certainly, in the qualities ascribed to Petronius by Tacitus, there is nothing to render it unlikely that the ascription of the fragments in the manuscripts to Petronius Arbiter refers to any other person than the Petronius who is called by the historian the emperor’s elegantiae arbiter. It is immaterial that Tacitus did not allude to any previous literary work by him: the historian’s grave judgement might not have considered its tone worth mention, and, in any case, it is not his way to record the writings of historical figures. We should never, for instance, have known about Seneca’s voluminous compositions from Tacitus. On the positive side it may be affirmed that the Tacitean portrait of Petronius wears the very features to be expected in the author of a novel depicting low and vicious life in tones which argue intimacy of knowledge and at the same time the almost cynically detached spirit of a spectator. This Mephistophelian insouciance of attitude has the artistic merit of leaving the wickedest and vulgarest characters of the story to act in an absolutely natural way, and exactly fits the brilliant courtier for whom, in spite of a spasmodic energy suggestive of higher capacities, the favourite business of life was the invention, organization and criticism of sensuous enjoyments. A psychology thus complex may well have baffled his closest friends. It might amuse so great a master of facile accomplishment to surprise Rome by an unsuspected talent for administration abroad. The controller of the revels may have been able at will to listen with assumed gravity to philosophical discussions and rhetorical performances, or even take part in what might one day furnish material for satire; in all probability he narrowly [173]observed Seneca and Lucan at court as potential “copy”; but his real affair was to be the ultimate authority on pleasures for exalted society, and, with a defiant unconcern, to live the life of an expert in everything that could contribute towards passing time gaily away.

What remains of the Satyricon is (like the contemporary Apocolocyntosis by Seneca) in the form of the Menippean satire taken over into Roman literature by Varro⁠[540] from the Cynic philosopher Menippus of Gadara, and therefore in prose interspersed with verses. Its story of adventures, many of them unutterably disreputable, is related by Encolpius, one of a trio on a round of escapades among the half-Greek cities of Southern Italy. His fellow-wanderers, rogues like himself, are Ascyltus, a young freedman, and Giton, a handsome serving-boy, who is a bone of contention between them. The narrative is diversified with a few entertaining tales—about a werewolf, about witches substituting a straw changeling for a boy, and the famous one of the widow of Ephesus⁠[541]⁠—digressive stories within a story, which long remained a convention of the novel, like the history of “the man of the hill” in Tom Jones.

Our present text opens somewhere on the coast of Campania—perhaps, if indeed it is necessary to locate the scene, at Cumae,⁠[542] though Naples, Puteoli and Misenum are among the rival suggestions. Encolpius, a student of rhetoric for the time being, is delivering a tirade against the unreality and futility of a rhetorical education totally divorced from the business of the actual world. Professor Agamemnon, who is in his company, argues in defence that teachers have to suit current taste or close their academies. The faulty training of the day he ascribes to parents’ insistence on an easy and quick road to proficiency; [174]and, breaking into verse, he recites choliambics on the simple life advisable for an orator, and hexameters on the needful study of Socratic philosophy and Demosthenes. Meanwhile Ascyltus had slipped off, and a crowd of students pour into the colonnade. Encolpius starts in pursuit of his comrade; asks his way of a greengrocer-woman, who guides him to a disorderly establishment, where he discovers his friend, and soon afterwards enters on one of a series of jealous wrangles with him over Giton. In the market-place the pair meet with exciting experiences, told in Latin so admirably natural as to place everything before our eyes. A brawl breaks out because the pair are taxed with being in possession of a stolen cloak (pallium), and because at the same time they challenge a countryman wearing a lost tunic of their own, threadbare indeed but very precious for the secret stock of gold coins sewed into it. Folk are much puzzled with the strangers’ willingness to renounce the cloak for the shabby tunic. They just escape arrest, and, when they have reached their inn, are visited by one Quartilla, who, preceded by her servant and attended by a little girl, has come to declare that they owe her penance for disturbing her ritual in the chapel of Priapus. Later, the scene changes to her house, where an orgy leads to general drowsiness, broken at length by the entry of two burglars. When their depredations are interrupted, the robbers pretend to snore, and the convivial licentiousness is renewed.

Then comes the morning of Trimalchio’s banquet (§§ 26-78)—a free repast secured for the adventurers through Agamemnon. Out of the existing total of 141 sections, over 50 are concerned with this episode, whose details vividly recreate an extravagantly vulgar dinner-party given by a wealthy parvenu of the freedman class to people of similar standing and to uninvited guests. It reads like an excursion into an ancient and not unreal land of Cockaigne. There is scarcely a dull piece among all the kaleidoscopic changes from incident to incident between the opening glimpse of the host,

a bald old man in a reddish shirt, playing at a game in which he never stooped to pick up a ball, if it touched the ground, but had a slave to supply fresh ones from a bag,

[175]

and the final scene during which, amidst the confusion caused by the irruption of the fire-brigade, Encolpius and his friends, surfeited and bored, made good their escape.

Four decorated lackeys precede the great man’s litter, which brings him home in a scarlet woollen wrap from the preliminary bath, while a musician plays small pipes close by, so that Trimalchio shall have music wherever he goes. The guests reach the entrance:

There stood a porter in green, with a cherry-coloured belt, shelling peas in a silver dish. Over the doorway hung a golden cage and a spotted magpie in it greeted arrivals.

These splashes of colour make a fitting prelude to the exuberant profusion throughout. Everywhere is a lavish parade of wealth and such an over-plentiful variety of viands that one feels of Trimalchio as of Chaucer’s frankeleyn:

Trimalchio is drawn as the representative of a new rich class whose social aspiration in any community must always be entrance at all costs into the envied circle of people of quality—that old caste which it must ape in default of manners and traditions of its own and whose culture it must affect with a nervous sense of inferiority imperfectly concealed under blatant self-assertion. A huge chained dog painted on the wall with large letters above, “CAVE CANEM,” played on guests the same mild joke as the familiar mosaic at one of the thresholds in Pompeii. This was, however, merely an introduction to other decorations, which represented Trimalchio in the slave-market, Trimalchio guided to Rome by Minerva, Trimalchio learning book-keeping, Trimalchio appointed steward, Trimalchio at various stages in his successful rise, “and just where the wall-space of the colonnade gave no more room, Mercury had lifted him by the chin and was hurrying him to his elevated official dais (as a sevir Augustalis).” No wonder that Fortune should be there with a horn of plenty and the three Fates spinning golden threads. Trimalchio was one of those who find in their own [176]career a substitute for ancestors. His name reappears incessantly inscribed on as many things as possible: one part of the dining-room door-posts ended in a sort of ship’s beak bearing the legend “presented by the steward Cinnamus to Gaius Pompeius Trimalchio, priest of the college of Augustus”; besides, silver dishes might be noted with the host’s name and their weight scrupulously engraved on the edges.

The diners take their places and have hors d’oeuvres served without Trimalchio, who arrives purposely late to the strains of music, his shaven head peeping out above a scarlet cloak and a fringed napkin round his neck—an irresistibly funny figure at which any guest off his guard was sure to laugh (expressit imprudentibus risum). His display of rings, bracelet and bangle indicated no better manners than his explanation to his guests that it was inconvenient for him to come so soon, but that he had sacrificed his own pleasure to avoid keeping them waiting. Even so, he means to finish his game with crystal pieces on a draughts-board of terebinth wood.

From this point the banquet proceeds through a whirl of surprise courses and surprise incidents. The pea-hen’s eggs distributed from under a wooden hen prove, though doubtful-looking at first, to contain a fat beccafico wrapped in spiced yolk of egg. A slave-boy is boxed for troubling to pick up a silver entree-dish that had fallen—by orders of the host it must be thrown down again and swept away. To ensure a fair field as in war, he has arranged that each guest shall have a separate table: “so the stinking slaves will make us less hot by crushing past us” (obiter et putidissimi serui minorem nobis aestum frequentia sua facient). When his fine old Falernian, labelled one hundred years in bottle, is produced, he indulges in one of his ill-bred remarks, “Yesterday I didn’t supply such a good brand, and there were far more genteel people at dinner” (heri non tam bonum posui, et multo honestiores cenabant). The old wine, like other incidents of the dinner, sets the host moralizing. “Ah me, so wine lives longer than poor mankind: so let’s have a good ‘wet’ (tengomenas). Wine is life”; but next moment a slave brings in another reminder of death, a mechanically jointed silver skeleton, on which Trimalchio reflects in verse:

[177]

One can but summarize, without entering into details, the fare provided. A Zodiac dish with symbolic dainties above for each of the twelve signs (on which the host insisted on giving a rambling astronomical lecture afterwards) has much finer delicacies concealed underneath. A wild boar on a tray is attended by huntsmen and hounds, and when the boar is opened, the birds begin to fly—thrushes, to wit, limed by fowlers in the dining-room for the astonished banqueters. Three white pigs are driven in, one of them to be turned into a dinner on the spot. Soon after, a pig is served up, to all appearance ungutted, and when by a prearranged jest, the seemingly negligent chef has been stripped for punishment, a stab at the animal releases a tumbling mass of cooked sausages! What promises to be a last course (epideipnis) consists of thrushes of fine meal stuffed with raisins and nuts, followed by quinces stuck all over with little spikes to resemble hedgehogs; but to their horror and loathing the sated guests are next confronted with a fat goose garnished ostensibly with fish and different birds, and yet all made, as Trimalchio boasts, by his expert cook Daedalus out of the same ingredient, namely, hog’s flesh! Suddenly two slaves fall a-fighting and smash the waterpots that hang round their necks, thus revealing oysters and mussels to be handed round presently in competition with the cook’s snails on a silver gridiron.

Still more entertainment is derivable from the conduct and talk of the diners than from the conglomerate menu. The host at one time inflicts on his guests a hideous tune from a mime; he must crack his joke in shouting “Carve ’er!” (Carpe) at his slave “Carver” (Carpus), he talks very plainly on subjects customarily thought delicate; he needs to be told by his wife to remember his dignity; and yet later in the meal lets a favourite slave mount on his back and slap him. Loving to create [178]astonishment, he has an enormous hoop let down from an opening in the ceiling to convey golden crowns and perfume-boxes as souvenirs; and he has cakes and fruits prepared to spurt out saffron. After acrobatic performances come Homeric reciters clashing spear and shield. Trimalchio tries to follow their Greek in some sort of Latin Iliad, until he thinks fit to explain the situation by his own fatuous version of the tale of Troy:

“You know the story they’re doing? Diomede and Ganymede were two brothers. Their sister was Helen. Agamemnon ran off with her and palmed off a hind on Diana in her place. So Homer is now telling of the fighting between Trojans and Parentines. Of course Agamemnon won, and married his daughter Iphigenia to Achilles. That’s what drove Ajax out of his mind, and he’ll make the sequel clear in a second.”⁠[544]⁠

And so a charger is carried in bearing a calf boiled whole and helmeted for a raving “Ajax” to slash at and divide on the point of his sword among the onlookers.

Another curious recitation is that by a young slave-boy of Habinnas’s, who, with his wife Scintilla, had arrived late in the evening, mellow from a wake. The boy starts with the opening line of Aeneid V., but, being a foreigner, soon makes blunders and actually sandwiches in between Virgilian pieces scraps from Atellane farces “so that for the first time in my life,” comments the smart Encolpius, “even Virgil hurt my finer feelings” (ut tunc primum me etiam Vergilius offenderit).⁠[545] This production is, however, in keeping with Trimalchio’s own standard of attainment; for it is one of the signs of his vulgarity that he pretends to a learning which he does not possess. He attempts literary talk with the professor present, claiming culture on the ground that he owns two collections of books—one Greek, one Latin.⁠[546] He used to read Homer when a boy, he adds; and with what effect is evident from the “howlers” in his story of the origin of Corinthian bronze, which bears some resemblance to that of Charles Lamb regarding roast-pig:

“When Troy fell, that charlatan and big rascal Hannibal heaped all the statues of bronze, gold and silver on to a single [179]funeral pile and set them on fire: they turned into one amalgam of bronze. From this mass artificers took pieces and made cups, dishes and statuettes.”⁠[547]⁠

Such mixed history prepares one for his mixed mythology when he boasts of his ownership of a round hundred beakers

“engraved with Cassandra killing her children—and the little boys are lying dead so naturally that you’d think they were alive.⁠[548] I have also a thousand cups, which Mummius left to my late master; and on them Daedalus is shutting Niobe into the Trojan Horse.”

The proud egotism of the self-made man who has risen in the social scale is admirably made to betray itself by such means as the engagement-book displayed prominently, the daily gazette of events on his estates read at dinner,⁠[549] his narrative of how he got on in business, or even his attempts at pathos by reading his will, the directions for his tombstone and his own epitaph:⁠[550]⁠

HERE RESTS
C. POMPEIVS TRIMALCHIO MAECENATIANVS:
NOMINATED TO THE AUGUSTAL PRIESTHOOD
IN ABSENCE, HE MIGHT HAVE BEEN MEMBER
OF ANY CIVIL GUILD IN ROME, BUT DECLINED.
DUTIFUL, BRAVE, FAITHFUL,
HE STARTED WITH LITTLE, BUT LEFT THIRTY MILLIONS:
YET HE NEVER HAD A COLLEGE EDUCATION.
FAREWELL BOTH HE AND THOU!

The talk of the guests makes a refreshing change from what would otherwise be intolerable gorging. Here the author proves his dramatic realism by drawing from the spoken Latin of the day, introducing its colloquialisms and faulty grammar. [180]A few translated extracts may suggest the off-hand character of the conversation:

“I couldn’t eat any more so I turned to my neighbour to get all the news I could, and started raking up stories and asking him who the woman was that was bustling up and down. ‘That’s Trimalchio’s wife,’ says he, ‘her name’s Fortunata, and she measures her shekels by the bushel. And what was she just a little while ago? Well, you must excuse my saying it, but you wouldn’t have taken a bit of bread from her hand. Now—I can’t say why or wherefore—she’s in the seventh heaven: she’s Trimalchio’s factotum (topanta). The truth is, she’s only got to tell him at high noon that it’s dark, and he’ll believe it. He hasn’t a notion of what he owns—he’s such a plutocrat; but this lynx of a woman keeps a look-out on everything, even where you wouldn’t think it.’”

And he proceeds to describe her as sober and thrifty, but a shrew and capable of inflicting, like Mrs. Caudle, curtain-lectures on her husband (est tamen malae linguae, pica puluinaris).⁠[551]⁠

Nowhere do we hear more of the true ring of chatter than when the host’s temporary retirement removes all restraint:⁠[552] Dama bawls for an extra tankard:

“Day doesn’t count: it’s night before you can turn about. So the best you can do is to go right from bed to dinner. And nice chilly weather we’ve had. Hot baths has scarcely warmed me up. (uix me balneus calfacit). After all, hot drinks is equal to an overcoat. I’ve had some good pulls, and am absolutely tight (plane matus). Wine’sh gone to my head” (uinus mihi in cerebrum abiit).

Seleucus breaks in—he has been at a funeral:

“Well, well, he’s joined the majority (abiit ad plures). The doctors did for him, or rather his evil stars has done it (immo magis malus fatus). A doctor’s only a comfort to the mind. Still he had a fine funeral ... and the mourning was jolly good—he left several slaves their freedom—even if the widow was stingy with her tears. What if he didn’t treat her over well? Woman taken all round is a bird of prey. One should never do a good turn: it’s just like chucking it down a well. But an old love nips like a crab.”⁠[553]⁠

[181]

One bore is interrupted by another; “Let’s remember the living,” shouts Phileros, but he too is soon talking about the dead man and his brother. Next Ganymedes insists on having his growl over profiteers and high prices until Echion, the rag-merchant, the optimist of the party, brings him to book:

“Do give up whining. Now it’s this way, now it’s that, as the countrymen said when he’d lost the spotted pig. What one doesn’t get to-day, one will to-morrow—that’s how life pushes on. S’help me, ye couldn’t mention a better country, if only it had the right people.... If you emigrate, you’ll be telling how pigs trot round at home ready-cooked. And, mark ye, we’re going to have a topping gladiatorial show (munus excellente) in three days more—the public holiday.”⁠[554]⁠

And, reckless of grammar, he rattles on about gladiatorial matches, till he takes to chaffing the professor:

“Now, Agamemnon, I fancy you’re saying ‘what’s this bore blethering about?’ Folks like you that’s able to speak doesn’t. You don’t belong to our sort, and so you jeer at the remarks of we ’umble people. We know as how much learning doth make you mad.”⁠[555]⁠

With their escape from this maelstrom of junketing, the youths recommence their adventures. It was no easy task after hard drinking to find the way back to their inn in the dark through a strange town. Luckily Giton had made chalk-marks on columns in the daytime, and the white could be seen.

Renewed quarrels between Encolpius and Ascyltus give place to a fresh set of incidents. Encolpius in a picture-gallery has met a shabbily dressed and unprincipled old poet Eumolpus. He can talk effectively on the decay of art⁠[556] owing to the disappearance of the ancient times of rivalry in hard work, when unselfish toil for posterity contrasted with the modern love of wine, women and wealth. Seeing Encolpius interested in a picture of the taking of Troy, he recites sixty-five iambics on this [182]Troiae Halosis, introducing the Trojan horse and Laocoon with the serpents as in Aeneid II, and thus briefly handling a theme which had interested Nero. His verses have a way of bringing a shower of stones about his head, but he remains an incorrigible versifier, even later when in imminent danger from shipwreck. Encolpius has deemed it wise to share Giton’s favour with Eumolpus, and the three have made their way aboard ship when Encolpius discovers to his alarm that the ship belongs to an old enemy, Lichas, and that he, with Tryphaena, another deadly enemy made in a lost part of the story, is actually on the vessel. To avoid detection, Encolpius and Giton agree to be shaven and branded to look like slaves; but a sea-sick passenger notices in the moonlight the shaving—an evil omen at sea—and discovery follows, with a free fight in which passengers and crew take part until a treaty of peace is made. Then there are rejoicings aboard, and Eumolpus indulges in elegiacs and hendecasyllabics on the tonsure of the youths, for whom wigs and false eyebrows have to be obtained. To illustrate fickleness, Eumolpus recounts the tale of the apparently inconsolable widow of Ephesus and the kindly soldier. In a storm Lichas is blown overboard and drowned, and the voyage ends in shipwreck.

The closing scenes are laid in Crotona, whither Encolpius and Giton accompany Eumolpus with much bravado and assurance to practise fraud and wilful imposition for their livelihood. Legacy-hunting is the great industry of the city (nam aut captantur aut captant, 116). The strangers have decided that Eumolpus shall act the part of a fabulously wealthy landed proprietor from Africa who has unfortunately been shipwrecked, but who can presumably more than repay in the long run any hospitality received at Crotona. Before the impostors set to work, a pause in the narrative permits Eumolpus to propound critical doctrines on historical poetry in his remarks introductory⁠[557] to nearly three hundred hexameters⁠[558] upon the Bellum Ciuile of 49 B.C. It is in the mouth of Eumolpus that the author places the famous phrase about the studied grace of Horace (Horatii curiosa felicitas).

[183]

Adventures are to the adventurous; and Encolpius, now called Polyaenus, is not long in Crotona before a serving-maid makes amorous overtures to him on behalf of her mistress, and his introduction⁠[559] to this fair Siren named Circe is related with a romantic beauty which deserves to be linked with a less unsavoury intrigue:

“It was not long before she ushered her mistress from her hiding-place and escorted to my side a lady perfect beyond all dreams. There is no language that can contain her charm: words of mine must fall short—her tresses all over her shoulders, a cascade of nature’s own curls; a low forehead with the hair turned back from it; eyebrows running on to the line of her cheeks and, between the eyes, almost united again; eyes brighter than the gleaming stars when there is no moon; just a curve on the nose; and sweet lips such as Praxiteles imagined Diana had. And then her chin, her neck, her hands, and the whiteness of those feet set in a tiny band of gold—she had eclipsed the marble of Paros. I had long loved Doris: I thought nothing of Doris now.”

The meetings with Circe end, however, disastrously for her lover, whom her servants finally expel with ignominy as an unsatisfying swain. Other troubles are in store when he has the misfortune to kill one of three sacred geese, but the imperfections of the text give a disjointed effect to the remaining episodes, which close with a very natural uneasiness on the part of the tricksters that they may be found out, and the grim jest which Eumolpus plays upon expectant beneficiaries under his will by making it a condition in one of the clauses that his heirs shall after his death slice him up and eat him!

While the period of composition may be taken as Neronian, the time of the events related is most likely not much earlier. Though Mommsen put the dramatic date under Augustus, Friedländer prefers the close of Claudius’s reign or beginning of Nero’s; and this proposition fits the case of Trimalchio “Maecenatianus,” freed in boyhood by his patron Maecenas, who died in 8 B.C. Petronius describes Trimalchio as old (senem caluum, [184]27) at the time of his entertainment; hence it may be imagined to have happened about the middle of the first century.

On possible literary sources of the Satyricon perhaps too much has been written in view of the fact that whatever the borrowing, suspected or unsuspected, the work remains a monument of originality for its realistic portrayal of certain grades of contemporary Italian life. The debt to that human fund of material and to the author’s unique genius for artistic handling eclipses any debt to literary sources. Of these sources the most obvious concerns his method of relieving prose with verse after Varro’s Menippean fashion: and to this particular medley (without any claim to the Varronian spirit) the title of saturae may allude. There are also a few burlesque echoes of epic,⁠[560] although, in the absence of the missing books, one cannot be justified in accepting the theory of “The Wrath of Priapus”⁠[561] as a motive comically analogous to a Homeric “Wrath of Poseidon,” and thereby imagined to link the escapades into a unity suggestive of an obscene Odyssey. Persecution by an offended deity of sex-lust may plausibly be considered to operate for part of the story in the spirit of the lines,

but it remains problematic whether it dominates the whole.

Other literary forms have been put forward as credible sources of influence on the Satyricon—the serious heroic romance, stories of adventure implied in certain rhetorical exercises among the elder Seneca’s collection, the prologue of comedy, and, with more plainly apposite bearing, the mime for its realism and the erotic Milesian tales⁠[563] in Greek, if not in Sisenna’s adaptations from Aristides. The hypothesis that [185]Petronius travestied such Greek love-romances as are represented by the Ninos story⁠[564] recovered on a first-century papyrus can scarcely hold good where we find no structure clearly suggesting parody to a reader: manifestly the tone of Petronius is far removed from that of the conventional courtships, piracies, voyages, shipwrecks, separations and reunions in the love-stories of later Greek literature.⁠[565] Time has even been spent on an endeavour to prove that picaresque Greek novels existed from which Petronius might have borrowed his rascally heroes. No doubt he owed much: there is equally no doubt that he created the realistic novel; for before him such prose fiction as had appeared in the form of fable, parable or anecdote fell far short of a sustained romance well filled with incident and characterization.

But just as the Satyricon as a whole, however original in spirit, owed something to literary convention, so the Cena repeats stock-features of Greek banquets like the performances by acrobats and reciters, the appearance of the uninvited guest (Habinnas), the quarrel, and the dog-fight.⁠[566] The Cena in Roman Satire had a tradition beginning perhaps in Ennius, but certainly established by Lucilius and developed by Horace; and between Nasidienus’s banquet in Horace and Trimalchio’s dinner-party there are points of resemblance⁠[567] enough to prove how fresh and independent Petronius could be even when he handled a tralatician idea like that of a rich and ill-bred parvenu, or reckless extravagance, or an accident at the feast, or the efforts of guests to smother laughter at their entertainer, or the obvious freedom from restraint among the guests during their host’s temporary withdrawal.⁠[568]⁠

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A sentence written in the eighteenth century makes a good introduction to much of the criticism passed on Petronius: “I told him that, in my opinion, he wrote with ease and vivacity, but was withal so lewd and indecent that he ought to find no quarter or protection among people of morals and taste.” So Smollett makes Roderick Random answer Earl Strutwell when he has raised the question of Petronius’s “taste in love” as “generally decried and indeed condemned by our laws.”⁠[569] The judgement has the interest of occurring in a novel which presents a parallel to the Satyricon in its spirit of adventure into more than questionable companies and in its background of rascality and immorality. Petronius’s own line,

may be taken as an anticipation of the attitude of many. In this faithful picture of seamy aspects of Italian life and manners there is much that is loathsome, but there is much that is merely vulgar, much that is innocuously humorous, while as a true presentment all of it retains its value in the history of society. It should be noted too that if Petronius does not condemn, neither does he commend. As a recording spectator with a patrician’s half-amused cynicism and a jaded voluptuary’s thrill from contemplating low life in contrast to court ceremonial and luxury, he was justifiably conscious that he had inaugurated something new in literature.

Any who may entertain misgivings about the title of Petronius’s work to rank as a realistic romance would do well to consider Guy de Maupassant’s preface to Pierre et Jean. There he states and defends the position of the realistic artist among novel writers. The realist, because misunderstood, is sometimes injudiciously condemned. No mere slavish copying of contemporary life will produce an adequate sense of simple reality; for an endeavour to incorporate within the limits of a book the whole truth and nothing but the truth would inevitably result in desperate entanglement among an endless [187]number of insignificant details. So the artistic realist, as surely as he values art and under pain of becoming a commonplace verbal photographer, must select characteristic details only, must communicate some meaning which underlies the bewildering miscellany of apparently incongruous incidents, and must, by his readjustment of actualities, compose a synthesis more intelligible and more cogent than life itself. This is a task which genius alone has power successfully to achieve; and, indeed, so subtle is the genius demanded that the higher order of realists must, as Maupassant suggested, prove themselves to be illusionists. In this connexion, one conceives that Petronius’s presentment of Trimalchio’s dinner-party is more effective and more memorable than the exact record of an actual dinner-party would have been. The quality of the host’s character and motives is grasped best from the artist’s manipulation of incidents; for without recourse had to elaborate psychological analysis there can be unmistakeably conveyed, by means of such conversation, behaviour and gestures as the author’s foresight has introduced, a convincing picture of the mental endowment of persons under observation. And, if this is the case with character, so too the events may be chosen and marshalled in such a way as to suggest their special significance in the narrative. These a realist like Petronius will choose and marshal with unabashed candour, disdaining nothing that is common to humanity, and unhindered by qualms of gingerly prudishness.

It is his mode of representing life that places Petronius in the company of Rabelais, Fielding and Smollett. His is a gay, outspoken, unashamed sensuality, flitting naturally from pleasure to pleasure and accepting for his characters without hesitancy the experiences of the world which come their way. This is the true spirit of the picaresque romance. Now one thinks of Gil Blas as a parallel, now of some of Dumas’s adventurers. An amour, a fight, a theft, a carousal, come all alike to Encolpius; and it is among the author’s distinctive merits that without pointless embroideries or reflective digressions he uses an accumulated experience of cities and men to fashion a straightforward and life-like story. It is briskly told, and because its characters seem flesh and blood it smacks of truth. Its living [188]people reveal themselves in part through their doings or misdoings, in part through natural talk; they are, in fact, the sport of their own weaknesses, whether they be the wandering rogues Encolpius and Ascyltus or the self-satisfied profiteer Trimalchio or some of his fellow-freedmen in affluent or in reduced circumstances. From the pen of an adept in sternly realistic treatment of figures and situations the reader must expect the shocking as well as the mirth-provoking; so that frank avowals and naked abandonment of reticence give to the Satyricon some of that kind of realism which is discoverable in certain French and Russian novels. The sensuality is, however, by no means sexual only. There is something Gargantuan, as there is certainly intended to be something satiric, in the overdone profusion which marks Trimalchio’s hospitality; and yet its variety and surprises imply that sort of sensual delight in good food which animates Anatole France’s description, in his Histoire Comique, of the Castelnaudary stew a-cooking twenty years till the added ingredients in the pan imparted a quality like that in the women’s amber-flesh of old Venetian masters. This Roman, this Gallic interest in food is not understood in England, where people do not talk about meals as they did at Rome and do in France; but then the renown of England does not lie in her cookery.

It is as a novelist that Petronius must be appreciated. A full judgement on his achievement is prevented by the loss of much the greater part of his work, though enough survives to prove his mastery of some qualities felt to be most enjoyable in the modern novel; such as his humour of situation and dialogue, often as pronounced as in Dickens; his restrained irony of attitude, not tragic as in Hardy, but verging towards Meredith’s comic spirit; his creation of incidents lively and varied, carrying the reader along as rapidly as in Dumas; and his management of pervading atmosphere in consonance with incidents and characters—a great secret in all the most effective tales. But in these light chapters of ancient life let no reader look for depth of thought or passion, or any of that pity and tenderness which make the strength of some of the greatest modern fiction.

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The Metamorphoses or Golden Ass of Apuleius in the second century is the only other fictitious narrative in Latin prose. One must place in a separate category The Marriage of Philology and Mercury written by Martianus Capella in the fifth century. That work was designed by Capella to precede his educational encyclopaedia on the triuium and quadriuium. It follows the Menippean form, as the Satyricon did, but is a pedantic allegorical fantasia. The Golden Ass and the Satyricon are alike of a higher imaginative order than the stereotyped romances of erotic adventure which subsequently became common in Greek; but, though they are both more readable than the loves of Theagenes and Chariclea in Heliodorus’s Aethiopica or of Daphnis and Chloe in Longus’s elegant prose pastoral, the Satyricon excels The Golden Ass because of its greater originality and its more typically Roman colour. The Golden Ass betrays more of the influence of Greek Milesian tales, notably in its long⁠[571] but charming episode of Cupid and Psyche; and, while it may be considered a satiric romance in its mockery of contemporary superstition, priestly imposture, and a weak police-system under which brigands enjoyed too much licence, still its atmosphere of the marvellous and the magical is widely dissimilar to the prevailing realism of the Satyricon, which, except in incidental tales concerning werewolf or witches, seldom departs from fidelity to actual life. Lucius, the hero of the later romance, whose lubricity and prying are responsible for his transformation into an ass, is, no doubt, as the victim of the mismanaged spell, brought into contact with different classes of individuals, different homes, and different religious rites including the mysteries of Isis so finely described towards the close; but the realism is less telling in Apuleius than in Petronius, because the incidents are related in a bizarre African style, whose colour and ring contrast markedly with the natural Latin of the Satyricon.

This Latin of the Satyricon has a natural ring, partly because, even where Petronius writes in literary Latin, he is, as a rule, simple, direct and non-rhetorical; partly because he constructs a life-like framework of easygoing remarks; partly because he [190]employs the actual words of everyday conversation. His style is not a unity. He is master of two styles—one educated, the other colloquial.⁠[572] Encolpius, like the rhetorical professor Agamemnon and the poet Eumolpus, expresses himself usually in the polished urbane Latin, which, without being over-formal, is still distinct from the vulgar Latin in which the freedmen speak. Even within this latter sphere, difficulties have been encountered in rigidly demarcating ordinary colloquial elements from plebeian and possibly dialectic elements. It is unlikely that Petronius took pains to manufacture an accurate mosaic of Campanian words: enough, that through broad strokes imitative of the locutions of humble folk he produced an effect like that of the “racy genuine language” which Borrow somewhere admires in criminals’ accounts of themselves; and, in fact, there are echoes as of an ancient Newgate Calendar. This dialogue is as true to life as the talk in Kipling’s “Soldiers Three” or in Conrad’s “Nigger of the Narcissus.” One of the great values, therefore, of Petronius is that his realistic novel, along with comedy, satire and the less formal letters of Cicero, affords examples of that popular Latin which is so important for understanding the genesis of the Romance languages. To take the most familiar instance, it is significant that caballus, which descends as the word for “horse” into Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French and Roumanian, should be found in writers like Lucilius, Horace and Juvenal as well as in Petronius.⁠[573]⁠

This sermo plebeius, then, Petronius causes to live again for his readers with just admixture enough of Greek⁠[574] to remind us that we are supposed to be in Campania. And so the freedmen, while they dine and revel, speak slangily and ungrammatically, uttering their thoughts in too casual and disconnected a manner to trouble about logical subordination of clauses or periodic form, and interspersing their talk quite appropriately with saws [191]or scraps of popular wisdom, rare compounds and diminutives,⁠[575] irregular inflectional endings and false genders. The sententious is rolled off by Trimalchio with a negligence of grammar which can be paralleled, if not exactly echoed, in English:

“My friends, even slaves are human beings, and they drinks the same milk as us, even if their evil stars has downed them.”⁠[576]⁠

Commending his wine, he declares “Fishes must swim” (pisces natare oportet). Ganymedes grumbles “This district’s going down as the calf’s tail grows” (haec colonia retrouersus crescit tanquam coda uituli). “One good turn deserves another” (manus manum lauat) says the next guest, who concludes in Latin less commendable than the sentiment, “Education’s a treasure and culture never dies” (litterae thesaurum est et artificium nunquam moritur, 46).

The spoken language, being conservative no less than innovating, retained, as it does in many countries, a proportion of archaisms, so that Petronian diminutives and other formations find parallels in early Latin writers. Gaudimonium, 61, and tristimonium, 63, remind one of words like mercimonium in Plautus; and there is an old-fashioned sound in sestertiarius, 45, dupunduarius, 58 and 74, linguosus, 43 and 63, dignitossus, 57, with adverbs like improbiter, 66, largiter, 71, and urceatim, 44. Similarly, several frequentative and intensive verbs are of the sort used by comic authors, and may be referred to the sermo cotidianus rather than to the sermo rusticus.⁠[577] Plebeian speech was also, like comedy, rich in transitives of the first conjugation (e.g. argutare, 46, 57; aginare, 61) and in compounds (recorrigere, 43, shared with Seneca and Tertullian; adcognoscere, 69; domusio, 46; caldicerebrius, 45, nesapius, 50). To the vulgar speech we may set down most of the departures from classic grammatical form, such as 3rd declension nouns transferred to 1st, e.g. the Greek words schemas, 44, stigmam, 45, 69; 2nd declension nouns transferred to 1st, triclinia, 71, [192]intestinas, 76; 1st to 2nd margaritum,⁠[578] 63; 3rd to 2nd uasus, 57, pauperorum, 46. Bouis, 62, and Iouis, 58 appear as nominatives: so too lacte, 38, which with the adjective in munus excellente, 45, is almost Italian. Changes of gender are seen in caelus, 39, 45; uinus, 41; balneus, 41; fatus, 42, 71, 77; fericulus, 39 (= ferculum with epenthetic vowel from vulgar pronunciation); lorus, 57. Notable verb-forms are uinciturum, 45, for uicturum; fefellitus sum, 61; faciatur, 71; mauoluit, 77. Alterations in voice occur; e.g. potes loquere, non loquis, 46; pudeatur, 47. As might be expected, old words are used in new senses; e.g. notaui, 6 (= “I noticed”),⁠[579] and departures are made from standard syntax; e.g. temptemus si adhuc sorbilia sunt, 33; persuadeo hospitem, 62.

True as he is to certain phases of life and speech, Petronius is yet a contrast to contemporary literary tendencies. In this very realism of his he is independent, and in large measure it must have rescued him from the risk of indulgence in the rhetorical artificialities of the period. He is, besides, a sort of flippant Epicurean counterfoil to the grave Stoic thought in Seneca’s treatises, and he is out of sympathy with Lucan’s manner in composing a historical poem.

Petronius is himself one of the figures in the poetry of the Neronian age. His own poetical attainments were considerable. The mere skill is evident from the varied verse-passages, long or short, in the Satyricon. Some of these have a literary bearing like Agamemnon’s didactic lines on the training of an orator, or Eumolpus’s iambics On the Sack of Troy—uninspired in face of the inevitable comparison with Virgil, but undeserving of that shower of stones which Petronius merrily makes the reciter earn. The longest piece consists of 295 hexameters to illustrate Eumolpus’s dogmas concerning the dangers which beset a poem on the Bellum Ciuile. Without naming Lucan, these pronouncements imply a criticism on his epic, especially in their objection to taking actual facts for poetic material and in their advocacy of divine interventions (deorum ministeria) [193]which the Pharsalia had eschewed. The poem itself cannot be read without thoughts of Lucan, particularly in its description of portents and panic. The alarm in Rome over Caesar’s approach is described in a passage characterized by rhetoric, artificialities and monotony in phrase and metre,⁠[580] while it contains pithy sentences recalling Lucan’s style: e.g. “as each man fears, so great his flight” (quantum quisque timet, tantum fugit), and “slays, if prayers could slay, his absent foe” (absentem uotis interficit hostem).

More poetic feeling is shown in some of the shorter pieces, such as the lines picturing the love of Circe and Encolpius in a flowery setting like that of Mother Earth in Jove’s embrace:

Apart from verses in the Satyricon, there are short poems which, with different degrees of authority and in different number, have been considered Petronian. Bährens gives 37.⁠[582] Sixteen pieces follow the epigrams assigned to Seneca in the Codex Vossianus Q. 86, and include two guaranteed as Petronian by Fulgentius, who quotes from them; eleven others were drawn by Binet from a now lost MS. which apparently ascribed them to Petronius, from whom Fulgentius in any case cites one; and they were followed by eight in regard to which at most a stylistic argument can be used; while four more (including, however, two from our mutilated Satyricon) are entitled as by Petronius in a different MS., Codex Vossianus F. 111. There is fair reason to believe that these, with a few [194]possible exceptions, are his work, and they may be excerpts from vanished portions of the Satyricon. Not unnaturally they vary in theme, metre and style, so that an appropriate motto is furnished by one of the couplets:

The fear that created gods, the emigrant with the world before him, the triumph of worthlessness, an old man’s torrent of tears, betrayal of secrets, perils of the sea, nature’s infinite variety, sympathy in suffering, a sweetheart’s gift of apples, a parrot from India, and a theory of dreams, are among the subjects. A few end in epigrammatic manner with a line which has some of the point though not all the sharpness of Martial. Nowhere, however, can we more readily believe that we have the genuine accents of Petronius than in poems which imply a cordial delight in natural beauty. It is more than a sated epicure’s itch for change from town, because in some a truer poet speaks than in the pastorals of his contemporary Calpurnius Siculus. Thus, Petronius leads his brief description of an autumn scene up to a neat final line:

Or he pictures his simple country house lovingly indeed, but with a sense of disillusion and an almost Senecan consciousness of wasted time:

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In another poem he hails the sea-side with rapture

But he has nothing finer than his sonnet-like poem in fourteen lines on the tyranny of love:

SENECA THE PHILOSOPHER

The jungle of literature which has grown up around Seneca⁠[588] [197]testifies to the manifold inquiries stimulated by his personality and works. The bare enumeration of representative treatises or essays on Senecan subjects becomes oppressive. In Latin and in many modern languages they have dealt with problems of his life—the cause of his exile, his moral character, his inconsistencies, his political significance and control or want of control over Nero; they have dealt with the chronology of his writings; with his theology, philosophy and cosmology, so that what he thought of God, man and the world has been scrutinized in relation to Stoicism as well as to those eclectic modifications which were always typical of the practical Roman; they have dealt, too, with his science, with aspects of his style, his characteristic prose, his gift of piquant satire, his poetic and tragic powers; with difficulties, still unsolved, in his text; with questions of his influence upon Christian literature, European drama and modern essay-writing. There is, then, no lack of Senecan themes, and his influence makes him one of the most prominent figures in the history of letters.

The Seneca family belonged to Corduba, the chief city of Baetica, which was the most civilized province of Spain. There, about 4 B.C.,⁠[589] L. Annaeus Seneca,⁠[590] second son of the so-called “rhetor,” was born. His mother Helvia, we learn in the Consolatio sent to her by her exiled son, had a philosophical bent—a contrast in this respect to her husband, whose interest lay in rhetoric. The family was well-to-do and talented. The elder Seneca and Helvia had three sons. The eldest was Novatus, to whom his brother dedicated his treatises On Anger and On A Happy Life: he became “Gallio” through adoption by L. Junius Gallio, the orator, and, when governor of Achaea in 51-52, happened to have the apostle Paul brought before his tribunal.⁠[591] The second son, called “Seneca” by his father, became, as a statesman and writer, the most famous bearer of [198]the name. The youngest son, Mela, of whose ability his father⁠[592] held a high opinion, was of a more retiring disposition, but, without courting senatorial honours, proved himself a successful money-maker, and possesses his best title to fame as father of Lucan.

Seneca was brought when a child, in the arms of an affectionate aunt,⁠[593] to Rome, whither his parents either preceded or followed him. His preliminary training under a grammaticus left him with a memory of much barren detail and a pronounced distaste for verbal criticism or the minutiae of book learning;⁠[594] his subsequent training in rhetoric by such masters as Mamercus Scaurus, Gallio, Musa, Julius Bassus,⁠[595] and under the auspices of his father, made an indelible impress upon his genius. No doubt his true intellectual love was reserved for philosophy, and he saw the weaknesses of declamation;⁠[596] but we have his father’s evidence that all three sons were captivated by rhetorical sententiae,⁠[597] and Seneca’s own style—disconnected, pointed, antithetic, metaphorical and piquant—is the best proof of its own origin. With his philosophical studies came a fuller satisfaction for intellect and spirit. Seneca was thoroughly Roman in emphasizing the practical aspect of philosophy. “Philosophy,” he says, “consists not in words but in realities. She sits at the helm and steers the voyage through the hazards of the waves.”⁠[598] More and more Seneca was drawn to it, not merely as a guide to conduct, but as something that filled a profound need of the soul. To him it signified the divine way, truth, and life: it made, especially through the Neo-Stoicism which he accepted and developed, a religious appeal. For the elect there was a turning away from the world,⁠[599] a disdain of earthly things,⁠[600] the duty of self-examination,⁠[601] the joys of conversion,⁠[602] the [199]apostolic call to enlighten others.⁠[603] There were ascetic privations,⁠[604] hard at first in their disciplinary stringency, although afterwards joyously welcomed: there were ecstatic possibilities of drawing close to God.⁠[605] The boy might not at once grasp all the implications of the higher teaching, and in life he may have practised very imperfectly the doctrines to which he gave eloquent and noble expression; yet it is certain that from the outset his philosophical masters exercised a deep influence upon him. They were three disciples of the Sextii—Sotion, Attalus and Fabianus. Sotion, arguing on Pythagorean principles, persuaded Seneca to become vegetarian; Attalus, the Stoic, with a contempt for luxury, induced him to renounce perfumes, wines, oysters, mushrooms and a soft bed; while Fabianus, who had given up a career as a speaker to devote himself to philosophical discussion, conveyed to him much of his own enthusiasm. Seneca was the first to arrive for a lecture, and last to leave: his abstinence and fasts were so rigorous that his health, never of the best,⁠[606] began to suffer, and his father intervened with the timely reminder that he might be mistaken for a devotee of the foreign superstitions which Tiberius had endeavoured to extirpate about A.D. 19. If Seneca sighed as a theorist, he obeyed as a son. Fits of melancholy drove him to thoughts of suicide, which Stoicism permitted in certain circumstances: only regard for his father prevented him from losing control over himself. The state of his health may have accounted for visits to Pompeii and to Egypt, where an aunt was wife of the Governor.⁠[607] One of his early works, a lost treatise on Egyptian religious practices (De Ritu et Sacris Aegyptiorum), must be put down to his stay in the country. His aunt was more than a good nurse; she could use her influence for her nephew, and on his return to Rome about A.D. 31 helped to secure the quaestorship for him. Then his career as a speaker at the bar began. Some years passed, and his oratorical [200]performances drew upon him the jealousy of Caligula, who, not content with sneering at them as “mere competitive exercises” and “sand without lime,”⁠[608] would have put Seneca to death but for the whisper from one of the emperor’s favourites that he was in any case doomed to die soon from consumption.⁠[609] Threatened men, however, live long, and Seneca’s future fame lay in other fields than the dangerous one of oratory.

By degrees his own preference turned him to literature and philosophy.⁠[610] Some of his lost works belong to this period—collections of discourses and poems, a physical treatise De Motu Terrarum, a biography of his father, who died about A.D. 39, and perhaps the Consolation to Marcia. Most likely, too, the material for the three books On Anger was collected about the same time, and published, with its bitter allusions to Caligula,⁠[611] soon after that emperor was safely dead. Seneca was not a recluse: a measure of self-effacement may have been judicious under Caligula, but Seneca’s own choice was to make the student’s loneliness alternate with social engagements. “There should be a blend, an alternation of solitude and society: the former will cause us to want human kind, the latter to want ourselves. And the one will be a cure for the other: solitude will heal dislike for a crowd, a crowd will heal the weariness of solitude.”⁠[612] The school of the world was essential to the thinker on wisdom. He was a good business man, able to advance his financial interests; and he had gifts of elegant expression which fitted him to mix with the highest circles in Rome. At court, after Caligula’s murder, Seneca occupied a prominent position as an asset in the party of the princesses, Julia Livilla and Agrippina, daughters of Germanicus and nieces of the emperor. His happiness was short-lived. A charge was brought against him of an immoral intrigue with Julia.⁠[613] Messalina, the [201]unscrupulous empress, is not unreasonably suspected of having for political reasons invented the accusation to weaken a rival faction. It involved Julia’s death ultimately, and Seneca’s trial before a subservient senate, where the death-sentence was at Claudius’s suggestion commuted to banishment. So for eight years, from 41 to 49, he underwent the punishment of “relegation” in Corsica.

In writing his Consolation to Helvia, probably a good many months later, he endeavours to cheer his mother by philosophical arguments that exile is quite tolerable, and very much what the exiled person makes it; but his real feelings of weary despondency are expressed in certain epigrams and in his Consolation to Polybius of A.D. 43, when his sympathy proffered to Claudius’s learned Secretary for Petitions (a libellis) and his cringing flattery of the emperor were designed, though in vain, to facilitate his recall. Certainly, he had books and literary pursuits to occupy his mind; slaves may have been in attendance; and his friend Caesonius Maximus seems to have stayed with him for a time; but there was much that was depressing. He had lost his father, his wife and a child: like other ancients, he could take little pleasure in rugged scenery: and there was a limit to his interest in the ethnology of the island. For a capitalist, diplomat and courtier, for a literary man with social instincts, banishment meant the same poignancy of suffering as Ovid knew on the shores of the Black Sea. But relief came for Seneca as it never came for Ovid. In 49 he was recalled and made praetor, through the influence of Agrippina, who realized that a man of his literary reputation would make a suitable tutor for her boy Nero.⁠[614] The young prince’s education consisted of all available subjects of culture, with two chief limitations according to Suetonius: Nero’s mother disapproved of philosophy for a future ruler, and Seneca jealously discouraged the study of the old orators, so that his own modern style might remain Nero’s ideal.⁠[615] When Claudius was done to death in 54, it fell to the imperial tutor to compose a suitable panegyric for his pupil, the new emperor, to deliver: and so began the period [202]of five years—the quinquennium⁠[616] praised long afterwards by Trajan—during which Seneca, aided by the good sense of Burrus, prefect of the guard, kept Nero on paths of comparative decency and moderation.⁠[617] Part of Seneca’s policy was directed towards keeping Nero free from undue interference on the part of his imperious mother,⁠[618] who hotly protested against “the claim of the cripple Burrus and the exile Seneca to govern mankind with a maimed hand and a scholar’s tongue.”⁠[619] At this period Seneca’s influence as a statesman reached its zenith; and it is a reasonable conjecture that for a time he contrived to mould governmental policy in the spirit of his own broadminded cosmopolitanism. It was of some service to the world that the author of the De Clementia, addressed to Nero when he was eighteen, should now be his chief adviser. Dio himself, who is usually a hostile witness where Seneca is concerned, gives to him and Burrus credit for able and fair administration.⁠[620] There were, however, black crimes which Seneca, whether privy to them or not, had to condone. Britannicus, the true heir to the purple, had been got rid of by poison at the emperor’s table in 55; and in 59 came Agrippina’s murder by her son’s command. State policy, the historical cloak for many infamies, might argue a case on behalf of both acts: the one removed a rival and secured the throne, the other ended a woman’s ascendancy and secured the emperor’s freedom.⁠[621] It was Seneca who composed for Nero the statement to be read in the Senate respecting his mother’s death. One can only guess what acquiescence meant for a man who could both think and feel. To his credit be it said that he seems at least to have pleaded with Nero to save his cruelly maligned empress Octavia in A.D. 62.

That was the year of Burrus’s death and of Tigellinus’s elevation, when Nero had begun to lean upon worse advisers, [203]who urged him to shake off his mentor.⁠[622] The mentor himself, recognizing that his influence was undermined, placed before Nero his request to retire.⁠[623] The wealth of a professing Stoic made an easy target for criticism,⁠[624] and a tempting lure for an avaricious emperor. Seneca’s speech, therefore, at his interview, as reported by Tacitus, took mainly the form of an apologia pro diuitiis suis. His wealth amassed in these years of service was an index surely of his Majesty’s bounty; and, now that he was old, it should return to his Majesty. Nero’s own ability to give a ready rejoinder he adroitly set to the credit of his excellent teacher, who was not nearly so old that his imperial pupil could think of dropping his pilotage and whose wealth he could not possibly accept—for what would people say?⁠[625] Fair dissembling words did not deceive Seneca. From that day he changed his mode of life: he no longer kept open house or made public appearances attended by troops of friends. He had some three years yet to devote to studious retirement: and to this period, A.D. 62-65, can be assigned with confidence his essay On Leisure (De Otio), his elaborate Moral Letters (Epistulae Morales), the seven books of the Quaestiones Naturales, and with less certainty some other works. Once again he made an offer of his substance to the emperor: it was in A.D. 64 when he proposed to help in repairing the devastation caused by the burning of Rome.⁠[626] He was not however destined to escape the despot. In 65, on an allegation of complicity in Piso’s conspiracy—and there were some who said that the next emperor was intended to be the philosopher⁠[627]⁠—the old man was ordered to put himself to death. What Tacitus records of the last hours of Seneca, his dignified calm, his reliance upon philosophy, his farewell advice to friends, his devoted wife’s desire to die with him, the too slow ebbing of life from the chill, attenuated frame, is an account few can read unmoved.⁠[628]⁠

The character of Seneca presents anomalies comparable to those which are notorious in Lord Bacon’s case. If Seneca [204]does not merit to the full the absolute superlatives which Pope applied to Bacon, “the wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind,” still the noble grandeur of his theoretical morality was deplorably sullied by lapses in actual life. Many of the charges date from his own time; and never was the calumny of enemies more rife, more gross, more readily believed than in the days when creatures like Suillius threw their slanderous mud. Among the historians, Dio is too biased to be trusted in his enumeration of the immoralities and inconsistencies laid to Seneca’s account. The story of improper relations with Julia so obviously served Messalina’s machinations that it cannot be accepted as incontrovertible fact, while the suggestion of an amour with Agrippina is even more incredible. That Seneca was privy to the deaths of Claudius, of Britannicus and of Agrippina was whispered and repeated, but the rumours can be neither proved nor disproved. His weak condonation of such deeds very naturally subjects him to suspicion. That he advocated the contempt of wealth and yet accumulated it, is not to be gainsaid; even so, and granted that he lent money on interest, we are not bound to believe Dio’s statement that Seneca caused an insurrection in Britain by suddenly calling in the huge sum of forty million sesterces. If he was a thrifty financier all his life, he at least thereby escapes the accusation of a vicious abuse of his money in an age of luxury.

While, however, some of the blackest charges may be parried as not proven, one count in the indictment is beyond denial, even if it be capable of extenuation. Outside the study, he lacked true moral bravery. Nothing could transcend the elevation of his ethical theory; but this emphatic assertor of moral principles tamely saw them trampled upon at court. Circumstances overbore his protests, perhaps even his qualms: his wisdom failed in courage and his prudence degenerated into pusillanimity. A voluptuous court, it must be allowed, had no atmosphere of bracing discipline in which an austere philosopher could practise virtue: its extravagant opulence and titanic depravity were better calculated to stifle the moral sense with a rankly perfumed sultriness. The danger was twofold: at one time, the aesthetic taste and social charm of Nero might lull the [205]conscience to rest; at another, his tigerish nature might unnerve any counsellor. Let it be admitted that Seneca was incapable of maintaining an impolitic opposition, and that he was, in Carlyle’s words, “so wistfully desirous to stand well with Truth and yet not ill with Nero” that he remains “our perhaps niceliest proportioned half-and-half, the plausiblest plausible on record.” Such scathing words may be glibly repeated by critics who are safe from Nero. But is no allowance to be made, if Seneca failed to transfer the dogmatism of the schools to an emperor’s acts? The philosopher’s heart at least was on the side of goodness. Nero’s court, life, policy must have often caused inexpressible pain to a believer in the Fatherhood and Providence of God, the brotherhood of man, the divine spark within all, the sovereign excellence of virtue, the vanity of worldly goods, the sin of luxury; and it must have been hard to adapt to Neronian orgies Seneca’s own ascetic preferences and practices. But a personality endowed with philosophic will, like Seneca’s, aimed sincerely at a higher life for himself and a better world for others: it could not choose but exert some influence. When one complains of Seneca’s inconsistencies, is one prepared to say that he would have served Rome better by avoiding court? To say this is to forget the good he did. To his credit stand Nero’s promising quinquennium, a policy of toleration in religion, and an endeavour to lessen cruelty in gladiatorial shows: besides, he preached clemency in life, as the author of the Octauia makes him do in the play. Nero’s deterioration after Seneca’s retirement is in itself a testimony to his previous authority.

Perhaps it is not merely fanciful to trace a dynamic evolution in Seneca’s character determined by his continuous struggle against hindrances and failures. If a worldling like Petronius came in time to feel out of touch with the vanity of court life, what of Seneca, who realized its vanity from the outset? In spite of much to disillusionize and to disgust, he persevered at court until his prospects of influencing Nero faded into nothingness, and his offered renunciation of riches had been hypocritically declined. His very faults made him in a sense a better man, and so acquired a spiritual value; for a recognition of his own backsliding and cowardice showed the force of temptation [206]and taught indulgence towards human frailty. This is why Seneca is less bigoted, less overbearing than most of his fellow-Stoics. His habit of self-examination must have often revealed his faults to him, so that one outcome was a tolerance which might well be imitated in judging him. “We have all done wrong,” he says in the De Clementia⁠[629]⁠—peccauimus omnes. It is then, more charitable, as well as more profitable, to forget his imperfections and omissions in favour of positive qualities like his humility⁠[630] and humanity—to forget his timidities in favour of his bravery at the end. In one of his later years he wrote to Lucilius: “Before old age my aim was a good life; in old age my aim is a good death.”⁠[631] And in another letter there is an utterance of dignified courage on which the hour of trial set the final seal of validity:

Without dread, then, I am composing myself for that day on which, laying aside shifts and subtleties, I shall have to judge respecting myself whether I merely speak or really feel as brave men should, whether all my insolent words hurled against fortune were mere pretence and mumming. Discount man’s opinion: it is uncertain and partial. Discount the philosophical pursuits of a lifetime: it is death that is to pass judgement on you. ’Tis true: discussions, literary conversations, words collected from the precepts of sages, and learned discourse do not exhibit the true strength of the mind. The greatest cowards can talk big. What you have achieved will then be made plain when you come to die. I accept the terms: I do not shrink from the decision.⁠[632]⁠

Besides his tragedies, short poems and the satire on Claudius, which are to be considered in another chapter, the following prose works by Seneca are extant—twelve so-called Dialogues, two books On Clemency, seven On Benefits, seven books of Natural Problems, and 124 Moral Epistles. His works that are lost, or survive only in fragments, trenched on the provinces of geography, physics, natural history, biography and ethics. [207]Among these were De Situ Indiae, De Ritu et Sacris Aegyptiorum, De Motu Terrarum, De Forma Mundi, De Piscium Natura, De Vita Patris, De Superstitione, De Immatura Morte, Moralis Philosophiae libri. Some of his Orationes and additional books of Letters also circulated. The twelve Dialogi collected in the Ambrosian MS. are given in the following order: De Prouidentia, De Constantia Sapientis, De Ira libri III, Ad Marciam de Consolatione, De Vita Beata, De Otio, De Tranquillitate Animi, De Breuitate Vitae, Ad Polybium de Consolatione, Ad Heluiam Matrem de Consolatione. Unfortunately, these are not in the sequence of composition; had they been so, fuller light would have been shed on the author’s intellectual development. Much labour has been spent on the chronology of the works, and respecting some of them at any rate the conclusions reached by inquirers are vain and conflicting. Several avenues of approach have been explored along the lines of internal evidence drawn from statement, expression or rhythm. But contemporary allusions (apart from those sometimes merely imagined in the searcher’s enthusiasm) are scarce in Seneca, as if to remind us that the treatises are concerned with themes which are independent of the years. Similarities of thought yield inconclusive criteria of contemporaneous composition in an author who, on some subjects, expressed himself in much the same manner from first to last throughout his career, but who conversely, on other subjects, contradicted himself within the range of the same treatise. Then, again, statistics, like M. Bourgery’s, showing relative frequency of definite metrical sentence-endings form an unsubstantial foundation on which to base theories of earliness or lateness in composition. M. Pichon⁠[633] in 1912 considered that, on the chronology of the works, Gercke in his Seneca-Studien of 1895 had to a great extent superseded Jonas’s dissertation of 1870; and now it is suggested⁠[634] that M. Albertini⁠[635] has made it almost unnecessary [208]to consult Gercke. If one constructs a table to exhibit the dates assigned by different critics to the works, the variation of opinion is at first sight bewildering. For instance, the Consolatio Ad Marciam, which Lipsius placed after the exile, was, according to others, written during it (41-49); and, according to Albertini, before it (A.D. 40). All three books of the De Ira were, according to Jonas, published in 41, but, according to Lehmann and Rossbach, in 49 after the recall; or—to take what marks perhaps the maximum of divergence—the De Prouidentia, in which Waltz sees a similarity of tone linking it with the De Constantia, is referred by him to the first months of exile, 41-42, while Albertini, agreeing with Gercke that it is “après la disgrâce,” gives A.D. 63. Respecting dates for the tragedies, opinions are equally at variance. The general proportion of uncertainty is so great that one is tempted to fall back upon Madvig’s dictum of 1873, librorum Senecae praeter paucos tempora incerta sunt.⁠[636] Yet, after all, there are points on which we can lay firm hold. Few of the extant prose works were written before Seneca’s exile in 41, and most of the best-known ones belong to the sixteen years which he had to live after his recall, when he was well over fifty years of age. There is much to say for believing that the Consolatio Ad Marciam is the oldest of the surviving treatises (A.D. 40), and that at least two books of the De Ira were composed in 41. We can be quite certain that the other two Consolations, namely Ad Heluiam and Ad Polybium, belong to the early part of the exile, the one to 41-42, the other to 43. No other work can be, without challenge, ascribed to this Corsican period, although some authorities think that to it belong the De Breuitate Vitae as well as the De Constantia and the De Prouidentia. As to the period after Seneca’s recall in 49, there is no doubt that the De Clementia was written early in Nero’s reign, probably in 55 (Albertini thinks 56). It is generally agreed that the De Otio, Epistulae Morales, and the Quaestiones Naturales follow the retirement of A.D. 62, the composition of the last two works spreading over more than one year.

Realizing, then, that a full and exact chronology is unattainable, [209]we proceed to a brief survey of the works.⁠[637] Of the twelve Dialogi⁠[638] it may be convenient to consider the three Consolations first, then the three books On Anger, and finally the remaining half-dozen treatises. The Consolations are not spontaneous expressions of sympathy, but literary efforts following broadly a scheme. It was a Greek invention thus to cure one of the maladies of the soul—grief; and the philosophers of different schools⁠[639] who composed such exercises were in time joined by the rhetoricians, so that two streams of influence converged in what was a kind of popular philosophy, with general features of similarity. Among these features were eclecticism in argument; insistence upon our inability to control external circumstances in contrast with the possession of our own reason and will; the employment of rhetorical loci communes and historical examples, as in a declamation; and a typical structure. Usually this structure consisted of an introduction, on the evil to be remedied; the main body of the consolation, on the cause of the affliction and the person afflicted; and a conclusion. It is evident that this species of moral pharmacy, based on an established science of consolation, possessed its time-honoured conventions alike in plan and thought. While, therefore, in Seneca the colour borrowed from Stoics and others is pronounced, it is fruitless to endeavour to trace his sources in detail. What gave a Consolation its distinctive value was very much what gives value to any work of art—the genius of its author and his power, within the limitations of an old form, to achieve a fresh result. The special circumstances deplored, the personality of the individual consoled, sometimes even digressions indulged in, and the signal mastery of style displayed, might all open up paths to an original effect.

The Ad Marciam is addressed to the brave daughter of Cremutius Cordus, who published some of the writings of her dead father, one of Sejanus’s victims. Its design is to console her in her continued mourning for her son, whom she had lost three years earlier. Between its exordium and its peroration [210]it contains a fairly systematic reasoning based on examples of other mothers in grief and on precepts for the control of grief. Seneca’s hand, however, is not so sure as it is in the Ad Heluiam, the most regularly arranged and, at the same time, the cleverest and most readable of the three Consolations. Once he has passed the exordium and a recapitulation of the troubles which have already taught his mother, Helvia, to be courageous, he addresses himself to the immediate task of consoling her under the loss of her exiled son—himself. The situation, it will be observed, was unique; for the person whose loss is mourned comforts the mourner. His ingenuity and prevailing Stoicism are apparent in the defence of the two main positions. On the one hand, the exile himself is not really unfortunate, because he has been trained not to mind the deprivation of external blessings; banishment is but a change of place which cannot affect virtue; enforced poverty does not hurt the sage (an argument which gives a handle for invectives against luxury); and the disgrace of exile lies only in man’s opinion. On the other hand, his mother is not really unfortunate; it cannot be that she laments her son’s support, since her affection has always been disinterested; her natural pangs over the separation give her an excellent chance of displaying fortitude after the manner of other courageous women whom Seneca proceeds to cite; her melancholy can be dispelled through her favourite studies in philosophy, and through the affection of the dear ones who are left. Seneca’s recognition here of ordinary human feelings outside the chill reason of the Stoics makes the one truly touching portion of his Consolation. For himself, he is happy to have leisure both for the study of the universe and for light literary work.

In the Ad Polybium, written about the middle of A.D. 43, he is far less cheerful. Here the object is to comfort Polybius, a learned and influential freedman at court, on the death of a brother. Apart from the reasoned consolation, two features stand out—the author’s acknowledgement of his misery in a remote corner (angulo) of the world, where his very Latin might suffer,⁠[640] and his flatteries of the emperor in the hope of securing [211]a remission of his sentence. The inconsistency with his previous fortitude and the undignified abasement in respect of Claudius have made all Seneca’s admirers wish that he had never written this treatise. Diderot’s denial of Seneca’s authorship in the eighteenth century has, however, received only slight support in modern times. The manner is Seneca’s, and there are not wanting memorable sayings; e.g. on the obligations of high rank, “great fortune is great servitude” (magna seruitus magna fortuna, vi. 5); on a dilemma for mourners, “to lament one in bliss is jealousy; to lament the non-existent, insanity” (beatum deflere inuidia est, nullum dementia, ix. 3); on life as a torture (omnis uita supplicium est, ix. 6), at the beginning of a fine passage on the troublous ocean of life whose one final haven is death; respecting the dead man, “he has not left us but gone before” (non reliquit ille nos sed antecessit, ix. 9); and on the grumbler under a reversal of fortune, “the man who gives to the close of a spell of pleasure the name of injustice has no gratitude” (ingratus est qui iniuriam uocat finem uoluptatis, x. 2).

The three books De Ira (which have certain gaps) were dedicated to Seneca’s brother, Novatus. They investigate the characteristics, uselessness and curability of anger. The plan, although the author several times indicates his line of treatment and his transitions, is not satisfactory.⁠[641] There are repetitions and contradictions,⁠[642] and the relation of Book III to the preceding couple presents difficulties. The work must be later than Caligulas’s reign; for it contains frank criticism on his mad anger, I. xx. 8-9, and on his barbarities, III. xviii. 3-4 and xix. 1-2. In the last passage Seneca indulges in the bitter climax: “Caligula tortured his victims by means of all the grimmest things in the world, with the cord, boot, rack, fire, and with that face of his (uultu suo).” Possibly the first two books were written, as Albertini suggests, in 41, just before the banishment; and Book III, which reads as if it came from Nero’s preceptor, may have been added in 49 to the work [212]interrupted eight years before. Seneca’s handling of so unfortunately common a human frailty could not fail to possess interest. He reminds us that ungovernable rage is the one passion that seizes a nation as a whole and so leads to war.⁠[643] The gift of apt illustration which marks the Letters to Lucilius is already noticeable. Irascible men, he suggests, ought not to meddle with the more exacting sorts of task, or, if they do, should stop short of weariness: their tempers need to be softened with milder pursuits; “for who does not know that clarions and trumpets are irritants, just as some airs are lullabies to soothe the mind? Green is good for wearied eyes (confusis oculis prosunt uirentia), and some colours are restful for weak sight, while the brilliancy of some is dazzling.”⁠[644] There is the gift too of graphic description and anecdote. A reader never forgets the opening chapter, where, after citing the sage who called anger “a brief insanity,” the author gives his tellingly repulsive portrayal of the outward symptoms of mad wrath leading up to his words of dismissal, “You could not tell whether the vice is more hateful or ugly.”⁠[645] Nor does one forget the idle Sybarite who was annoyed over seeing a labourer hard at work, and who complained about the discomfort caused him by the rumpling of some of the rose-leaves on which he lay.⁠[646]⁠

Years elapsed before Seneca indited to the same brother the now imperfect De Vita Beata. Novatus had become Gallio by adoption, as the superscription Ad Gallionem shows: most likely his governorship of Achaea was over. Two main questions are propounded—what makes life happy? and what is the way to the happy life? Happiness for Seneca consists not in what the many, but in what Stoic sages, think happy. It is “to live according to nature,”⁠[647] in possession of a sound mind, true courage, true patience, and a true estimate of things, so reaping “an immense joy, unshaken and equable, along with peace and harmony of spirit, greatness of mind and gentleness; [213]for all savagery is the outcome of weakness.”⁠[648] From another point of view, happiness is to practise virtue. Against pleasure a polemic is directed, although Seneca takes up a broadminded attitude towards the Epicurean system when properly interpreted (ch. xii). The mode of attainment to happiness is not clearly formulated, but the essay develops a spirited retort to those who yelp (conlatrant) at philosophy on the ground that philosophers do not perform what they preach.⁠[649] In particular a defence is needed for the ownership of wealth by the sage who affects to despise it. For himself Seneca can reply that he does not claim the virtuous perfection of the sage, but a wise use of wealth justifies its retention. Even in high estate a virtuous life may be led. Since the impression is given that the author is answering criticisms levelled at him as a rich man, a plausible date is 58 or 59, after Suillius’s attack upon Seneca.

The three treatises De Constantia Sapientis, De Tranquillitate Animi, and De Otio were addressed to a recipient, whose name, Serenus, fits the tenets conveyed. Annaeus Serenus died as prefect of Nero’s uigiles during one of Seneca’s later years: he had been accommodating enough to lend himself as a screen to prevent Agrippina from detecting Nero’s passion for the freedwoman Acte. Waltz,⁠[650] following Hense, has pointed out that the three treatises mark progressive stages of philosophical attitude in Seneca’s pupil. In the De Constantia Serenus is Epicurean; in the De Tranquillitate, he is already Stoic in sympathy, though restless; in the De Otio, he is a convinced disciple. The fuller title for the De Constantia, states its theme, “that the wise man can receive neither wrong nor insult” (nec iniuriam nec contumeliam accipere sapientem). Not unnaturally, considering its subject, some have referred it to the early months of exile; but a reference to a recent discussion [214]on Cato⁠[651] implies Rome rather than Corsica as the place of writing. As the purpose is to prove a paradox—admittedly a hard saying for Serenus—Seneca begins by explaining that Stoic doctrine is too manly to aim at attractiveness. The answers to the supposed adversary’s objections involve a good deal of hair-splitting; but there is a fine confidence in the emphasis laid upon the calm of the sage amidst the storm of war; “for no siege-engines can be invented to shake the well-established mind” (nulla machinamenta posse reperiri quae bene fundatum animum agitent), and he sums up:

See, then, Serenus, that the perfect man, full of virtues human and divine, can lose nothing: his goods are girt with solid and unscalable ramparts.... You cannot compare with them the walls of Babylon which Alexander entered, nor the battlements of Carthage or Numantia.... Those which protect the sage are safe from fire and invasion: they yield no passage: they tower impregnable, equalling gods. You have no ground for saying, as you are wont to do, that this sage of ours is nowhere found. We invent no such unreal glory of human genius (vi. 9-10).

At the opening of the De Tranquillitate, Serenus confesses his uneasy vacillation in the pursuit of peace of mind. What, for instance, should be the attitude of man amidst luxury? What are the claims of leisured retirement against the worries of public life? What satisfaction comes from literary fame? The answer gives Seneca’s views on the attainment and maintenance of such an unruffled course that the mind shall take pleasure in itself and in its surroundings. An extraordinary amount of human wisdom is contained in this treatise, which seeks to provide a cure for ennui and nerves. Among the interesting topics are failures in life; the restless traveller in quest of change; the teacher who performs genuine social service (in priuato publicum negotium agit); the value of friendship (nihil aeque oblectauerit animum quam amicitia fidelis et dulcis); property as a source of anxiety (a theme illustrated with characteristic fertility); foolishness in book-collecting (multoque satius est paucis te auctoribus tradere quam errare per multos); the [215]defiance of fortune; the vanity of human wishes; the interest in the condition of spirits beyond death; the proper estimate of human failings and sorrows; the torment of an artificial life; and the advisability of a little nonsense now and then to obviate the dullness produced by all work and no play (danda est animis remissio ... nascitur ex assiduitate laborum animorum hebetatio quaedam et languor).

The De Otio (mutilated at beginning and end) defends the moral value of leisure from affairs, in reply to Serenus’s statement of the strict Stoic position. Seneca’s plea is that at every age it is permissible to renounce action for philosophical meditation; but most of all is it permissible for those who have grown old in active service. Amid general corruption, such withdrawal is countenanced on both Stoic and Epicurean principles. We each belong to two commonwealths, and in retreat the sage may usefully serve the universal cosmopolis, the world at large, through his speculative life in accord with nature. Especially may he with profit devote himself to satisfying that inquiring disposition implanted in man by Nature herself. Nature has produced us to be spectators of her vast works: her beauty and complexity are not meant to pass unobserved. So by the right path of research, man must “discover something more ancient than the world itself” (aliquid ipso mundo inueniat antiquius); for “our thought bursts through the battlements of heaven, dissatisfied with knowing merely what is shown” (cogitatio nostra caeli munimenta perrumpit nec contenta est id quod ostenditur scire). The scientific impulse here is that which animates the Quaestiones Naturales, and the general tone befits the statesman who has resigned all responsibility for public policy.

There is a link between the De Otio and the much earlier De Breuitate Vitae; for its final advice to Paulinus, controller of the grain-supply for Rome, is that he would make the best use of life by retiring to cultivate philosophy. Such advice could hardly come with full effectiveness from an exile; while, on the other hand, a reference shows that the treatise must have been written before Claudius extended the pomerium of the city on January 24th, A.D. 50. Its date lies, therefore, [216]presumably somewhere in 49 between the author’s recall and his acceptance of a regular appointment.⁠[652] Paulinus perhaps was related to Seneca’s second wife.

The treatise is full of good things. Nowhere in literature are there to be read pithier remarks on the value of time. The first century of our era displayed a peculiarly keen sense of the way in which days are wasted. Under Tiberius, Phaedrus, we have seen, made fun of those fussy triflers, the ardaliones; and late in the century Pliny chafes against the petty but innumerable inroads made on leisure, while Martial betrays the same nervous spirit. Here Seneca speaks for the Neronian period. Life is short: yes, but it is we who make it so: life is long enough, if well employed. The general blindness to the worth of time is amazing: men will resist encroachments on land or money, but will let people trespass freely on their time, which is in reality their life. They are spendthrifts with the one thing in which greed is honourable (profusissimi in eo cuius unius honesta auaritia est). We live, in fact, as if we were to live for ever. You hear men coolly postponing leisurely reflection till after fifty or sixty: should they not blush to reserve for the sovereign duty of reflection the mere remnants of a life no longer fit for business? Drusus once declared that he was the only person who had never had holidays even when a boy: precocity like that must have an evil end. But the really great man will not let his hours be filched away from him; and his life will be long because devoted to self-improvement. Many a wrinkled grey-haired man has merely existed, not lived, a long time (non ille diu uixit, sed diu fuit). Yet for all men’s extravagance with this most precious of things, confront them with the peril of death, and how they plead for more time! For what purpose? To learn how to live and how to die demands a lifetime; but the paramount concern is laid aside in favour of toilsome exertions for a future on which no one can count. Thus the true life suffers from that procrastination which is the thief of our to-days (expectatio quae pendet ex crastino perdit hodiernum): so old age comes as a surprise, and [217]death as a terror, to those who have been busy (occupati) over the wrong things, and have squandered time on luxury, affectation or vice. That man has true leisure who has the sense of leisure: its secret lies with philosophy, through whose study one may master centuries that are past and commune with all the ages and all the sages. Those great thinkers—not the arrogant snobs whom some court in Rome—constitute the true society of the world; and yet, Seneca reminds us, as Ruskin did long afterwards in Sesame and Lilies, none of those great thinkers will refuse access to him. The communicable wisdom of the ages points the right path towards immortality, and what philosophy has hallowed is beyond the reach of injurious time.

The remaining dialogue is the De Prouidentia, given first in the Milan MS. It is addressed, like the Naturales Quaestiones and the Epistulae, to Seneca’s friend Lucilius, a man with literary tastes,⁠[653] who had held procuratorial offices in various parts of the Roman world, including Sicily, and in whom some have seen the author of the Aetna. The subject discussed is summarized in the fuller title—why any misfortunes befall good men, when a Providence exists (quare aliqua incommoda bonis uiris accidant, cum prouidentia sit). From the Stoic doctrine of a providential government of the universe, it follows that suffering must serve a good purpose. Discipline is one of the ends subserved: misfortune is a school for virtue, and a spectacle noble enough for the gods to witness is that of good men struggling with adversity—non miror si aliquando impetum capiunt spectandi magnos uiros conluctantis cum aliqua calamitate ... ecce par deo dignum, uir fortis cum fortuna mala, utique si et prouocauit. The last clause “especially if he has actually thrown out the challenge,” is an addition symptomatic of a rhetorical over-statement too common in this essay. The imperfect way in which some points in the argument are worked out has led certain critics to hold that a portion is lost at the end.⁠[654]⁠

Of the De Clementia, once in three books, we possess the first and a portion of the second. The idea of writing on [218]clemency was suggested to Seneca through recollecting Nero’s words, when he reluctantly signed a death-warrant, “Would that I had never learned to write!”⁠[655] If one is tempted to jeer at Seneca’s compliments to Nero and his expectations that a better era had dawned, one must in fairness remember the high hopes reposed and realized during the earlier years of the young prince’s reign. Book I discusses the need for clemency in a ruler. The emperor, as war-lord, is urged to recognize his responsibilities. He should follow the model of the gods: things a subject might do, a monarch cannot, in the full light that beats upon a throne (multa contra te lux est, omnium in istam conuersi oculi sunt). Cruelty makes a tyrant; but the affection of subjects is a stronger defence for a prince than their fear. Book II degenerates into tedious attempts at the definition of clementia in contrast with what the Stoic condemns as weaknesses—mercy (misericordia) and pardon (uenia).

The seven books De Beneficiis addressed to Aebutius Liberalis were not issued together. An allusion towards the close of Book I⁠[656] shows that Claudius was dead, and it is likely that the first four books had appeared some years after 54; being followed by the remaining books,⁠[657] perhaps by V and VI together, as Gercke thinks, before the retirement of 62, and by VII still later.⁠[658] The praise of Demetrius in VII. viii.-xii. best suits Seneca’s closing years. Based upon Hecaton, Panaetius and other Stoics, the treatment of Benefits is marked by insight into human nature and generosity of impulse rather than by strict method. It may be too much to say that the work is incapable of analysis,⁠[659] but it is safe to say that an attempted analysis shows the absence of exact system.

There are repetitions and anticipations, apparently because the author, instead of punctiliously exhausting a particular [219]aspect of his subject, preferred to record, as they came, in characteristically concise and striking language, his thoughts upon points which he left himself free to illuminate again as occasion might offer. He is not unaware of such repetitions.⁠[660] He is aware, too, of his digressions, on which he imposes a closure in such terms as, “Let us now return to the theme set before us,” or “My enthusiasm is carrying me away rather too far, for the subject is a tempting one.”⁠[661] Even his initial definition of a benefit is unduly deferred (I. vi. 1) until after five somewhat rambling chapters. Such traits, although they may be adjudged faults in logic, actually contribute to the easiness and readability of his work.⁠[662] Besides, some of his best thoughts are repeated in such varied form that they cannot fail to arrest the attention and impress themselves on the memory. Despite, then, a dearth of method, no man can rise from the most casual reading of a tractate by Seneca without having grasped its spirit. The redoubled beats, so keen and insistent in their staccato, ensure that effect.

The commonness of ingratitude is in Book I put down largely to the wrong mode of conferring benefits. The essence of a benefit lies in the attitude of the giver, and two points need consideration, the kind of benefits to be conferred and the mode of giving. The latter point is dealt with in Book II which turns to the mode of receiving, a topic involving that of the ungrateful disposition. Book III continues the subject of ingratitude, stating and answering problems: “Can ingratitude be prosecuted?” No. “Can a slave benefit a master?” Yes. “Can children confer on a parent more benefits than they have received?” Yes. Book IV, dealing with aspects of benefits and gratitude, puts the query, “Should one benefit the ungrateful?” The later books, from their investigation of quaestiones, are casuistic in character, but by no means uninteresting. Book V asks “Is it a shame to be surpassed in benefits?” then takes up the Stoic paradoxes “No one can be ungrateful,” “All are [220]ungrateful”; and proceeds to find fresh puzzles, “Must a son be grateful for benefits done to his father?” “Is that a benefit which was not intended?” Among the problems in Book VI are “Do we owe gratitude to one who has benefited us against his will?”, or “without knowing it?”, or “incidentally in furthering his own interests?,” and in the last book “Can one benefit the sage who possesses all?” and “What is the position where the giver has forgotten the benefit conferred?” Although many of the problems end in unfruitful refinements, there is much to treasure in Seneca’s permanently valuable and shrewd criticism of human conduct. He is genuinely anxious to correct by his counsels one of the most detrimental and heartbreaking mistakes made in life; for he well realises how much pain is caused by ignorance in conferring or in receiving a benefit. A few citations will illustrate some aspects of his attitude:

“I should find it hard to say whether it is meaner for the recipient to repudiate a benefit, or for the giver to press for its repayment, inasmuch as a benefit is a sort of loan whose return absolutely depends on the spontaneous action of the debtor.”

“We find many people ungrateful; yet we make more people so, because at one time we are insistent and harsh in our claims for return, at another time we are fickle enough to regret our generosity. By such conduct we spoil the whole favour.... A benefit is felt to be a debt in the same spirit as that in which it is bestowed.”

“If a man does not give because he does not receive, he must have given in order to receive, and that justifies ingratitude. How many there are who are unworthy of the light of day, and nevertheless the sun rises.”

“Persevere in your generosity. Assist one with your means, another with credit, another with your favour, or your advice, or a word in season. Is he ungrateful for one benefit? After receiving a second, perhaps he will not be so. Has he forgotten two? Perhaps the third kindness will bring back the recollection of those that slipped his mind.”

“The reality of a benefit lies not in gold, nor silver, but in the goodwill of the giver.”

“What is a benefit? It is the doing of a kindness which gives pleasure and in the giving gets pleasure.... The spirit [221]animating the act is what exalts trivial things, throws lustre on ordinary things, while it can discredit great and highly valued ones.”

The Naturales Quaestiones is in Seneca’s eyes an excursion into the highest speculation; for such physical inquiries concern God’s universe, whereas moral philosophy concerns man. The subject had occupied Seneca in Corsica,⁠[663] and for many years he must have collected material to be combined (not over methodically) in these seven books. At the opening of Book II he gives his threefold division of the knowledge of nature into astronomy, meteorology, and geography, according as the investigation is directed to phenomena in the heavens (caelestia), or between the heavens and earth (sublimia), or upon the earth (terrestria). He does not, however, treat these subjects equally or in order, as a glance at the contents of the different books will prove. Indeed, the order of these books is much disputed.⁠[664] It is possible that Seneca never finally settled their succession; for the work may have been ultimately issued by Lucilius, to whom it was dedicated. The time of composition can be determined within limits. Book III shows that it was the work of the author’s old age after his retirement in 62, and the opening of Book VI records the earthquake at Pompeii in February of 63.

The main themes are distributed among the books thus: I, Fire (meteors, rainbow, mock sun, etc.); II, Air (Thunder and Lightning); III, Water in various forms; IV, The rise of the Nile and (after a sudden break) snow, hail, and rain; V, Wind and atmospheric movement; VI, Earthquakes; VII, Comets.

The historical importance of the work is considerable. Here Seneca is in the succession to the Augustan Sextii, who had some reputation for scientific inquiry. Their influence and that of the “pneumatic” physicians, who took a Stoic view of the mechanism of physiology, contributed to keep physical [222]speculation alive in the first century. Science, however, was still too much a literary manipulation of material bequeathed by predecessors to facilitate real advance. This in the main applies to the compiler of the Naturales Quaestiones. Although he undoubtedly developed germs of independence (e.g. in ridiculing the divination with which he could not irrevocably break), he is not possessed by his subject, as the Epicurean poet Lucretius was. For Western Europe, in default of direct access to Aristotle, the work remained during the Middle Ages the prevalent authority on cosmology; but scientific, according to modern standards, it certainly is not. The absence of the exact equipment nowadays available rendered nice experiment impossible, and with the best will in the world the observer was exposed to all the risks attendant on the inaccuracy of sense-perception. To the utmost of his ability, nevertheless, Seneca sought to secure trustworthy data; e.g. with respect to a comet (VII. ii.); he was a searcher after causes, and stated fairly the points of conflicting theories; eclectic by preference, he even rejected the explanations of his own Stoic school when he deemed them incorrect; and he realized that generations of workers might be needed to reach truth in complex subjects (VII. xxv.). On the other hand, he never learned to divorce ethics from physics, and consequently some of the most interesting parts of the Naturales Quaestiones are his unscientific digressions. Thus, lightning suggests other presages and leads to discussions on fate and religion in Book II. Closing the same book, he recognizes that some would rather be delivered from the fear of lightning than know its origin, and, conceding that a moral should attach to every study, he proceeds to reason against the dread of death. Again, the chafing of the sea, he believes, indicates that Nature will ultimately inundate the world to make a new world. Lucilius is admonished at the beginning of Book IV that he must not be arrogant, although governor of Sicily; for the island is “a province, not an empire”; and the topic of snow occasions one of his tirades against the despicable luxury of effeminate Romans who would bathe in it or use ice to cool their thirst. In such passages the physicist has reverted to the moral philosopher.

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Much labour has been spent in arguing that the 124 Epistles to Lucilius were not real letters. In the last resort, the question is hardly a vital one; for supposing the form were proved to be fictitious, Seneca must at least have meant the collection to be taken for a budget of correspondence despatched by him to his friend, because he introduces references to letters received.⁠[665] Several scholars⁠[666] have followed Lipsius in his denial of the reality of the correspondence; but it is more satisfactory to accept the epistles as representing a real correspondence subjected to the author’s editorial suppression of the regular opening or closing phrases, of very intimate passages, and of certain personal names. They were written in A.D. 63 and 64, and sent, as written, to Lucilius. At different points in the collection a subject is often reopened, and there are inconsistencies in thought, so that no logical order is to be looked for, although it is possible to trace certain chronological groups⁠[667] according to Seneca’s change of reading or residence. Thus, the model of Epicurus’s letters to Idomeneus especially pervades the first twenty-nine letters, most of which close with an Epicurean maxim sent to Lucilius under some such jocular labels as “a little gift” (munusculum), “a windfall” (lucellum) or “toll” (portorium). Similarly, we note the effect of his concurrent study of Posidonius in many letters after No. 78. About forty letters (Nos. 49-87) seem to have been composed in Campania, and the subsequent letters in Rome or the neighbourhood. Some are brief notes: others treatises many pages long. Seneca remarks on the difference between Cicero’s epistolary notes⁠[668] about current politics and his own letters discussing moral and intellectual problems. Promising Lucilius a literary immortality⁠[669] through the publication of the correspondence, he keeps his eye fixed on posterity as firmly as ever the younger Pliny or Madame de Sévigné did.

The variety of interest is great, when it is remembered that [224]the prevailing object is the consideration of philosophical points, and that, therefore, many personal details were intentionally excluded. Nothing stands out more, throughout a perusal, than Seneca’s faith in the eternal and inestimable value of philosophy, for which everything should be sacrificed. Philosophy is the guide of life (xvi.) and its joy (xxiii.): more vital than any physical exercise, it promotes the health of the mind (xv.), guarantees a pleasant old age (xii.), and teaches how to face death (a recurrent topic): it offers the glory of literary immortality (xxi.), and deserves to be made a man’s life-work (lxxii.). Hunger and poverty must be endured cheerfully in the quest after wisdom (xvii.), and social pleasures rigidly renounced to win the needful seclusion (recede in te ipse quantum potes, vii. 8). Such seclusion involves hard mental toil, not for oneself but for posterity (viii.), to increase the store of human wisdom. Philosophy must be studied earnestly in Stoic writings as a whole, not in merely convenient anthologies (flosculi, xxxiii.); for Stoics decline to practise window-dressing (ocliferia: “We don’t trick a purchaser, so that, when he has entered the shop, he’ll find nothing beyond what was hung up in front,” xxxiii. 3). The time-honoured traditions of philosophy stamp it as a gradual achievement of civilization (xc.). It is no self-regarding morality, but has duties to discharge—the reclaiming of backsliders (xxv.) and help for the wretched (xlviii.). Genuine philosophy is in touch with human kind (v.), despite the risk of debasement from mixing with the mob (vii.): truly democratic, it is no respecter of pedigrees (stemma non inspicit, xliv. 1), and it is an occupation of the heart, not a pose marked by outward peculiarities (v.).

His counsels are couched in terms of winning modesty. He is not perfect, he confesses (xxvii.); if he ventures to prescribe remedies, he is in the same infirmary (ualitudinario, xxvii. 1) talking with other moral invalids about common ailments of the soul and their cure. This note of sympathy with frailty in utter forgetfulness of dogmatic Stoicism is one of the most likeable traits in Seneca: it increases his hold over us and his power of doing us good. So he preached abstinence (xviii.) more effectively than many a temperance bigot; recommended [225]the right behaviour for travel (i.e. learn to be at home everywhere as a citizen of the world, xxviii. 4); and pleaded the duty of kindness to slaves (“slaves?—nay, our humble friends: slaves?—nay, our fellow-slaves, for the real slavery is that of the mind, and no slavery is baser than self-imposed slavery in high rank,” xlvii. 1). He was too sensible to be misled by Stoic paradoxes about the self-sufficing sage who had no need of a friend (ix. and cix.): there had to be a uia media between contamination amidst the madding crowd (vii.) and deterioration in solitude: alone with oneself, he reminds us, one might be in bad company (x.). Thus he writes:

When friendship is made, one must trust; before it is made, one must judge. There is a topsy-turvy confusion in your folk who, in disobedience to the rule of Theophrastus, judge one after making a friend of him instead of making him their friend after judging him. Ponder long whether a given person is to be admitted to your friendship: when you have decided that he is to be so, welcome him with all your heart. Converse with him as boldly as with yourself (iii. 2).

The human appeal of the letters is intensified by the light thrown on contemporary life. They place before us the loathsome butchery at gladiatorial shows (vii.), the seductions of a seaside resort (li.), the arrival of mailboats from Alexandria (lxxvii.), the treatment of runaway slaves (cvii.), the pleasure of travelling light in contrast to the overpowering magnificence of some travellers (lxxxvii.). No less enlivening are personal details which bring the author nearer to us—even his asthma (liv.) and other ailments (lxxviii.), depressing attacks of fever, and his decision to be careful out of consideration for his wife’s solicitous feelings (civ.), sea-sickness on a trip in the Bay of Naples (liii.), an outing in a litter (lv.), trying experiences during a day of mud and dust in a tunnel near Naples (lvii.), lodgings over a noisy public bath (lvi.), feelings on the death of a friend (lxxvii. and lxiii., 1 and 4, “at a friend’s loss the eyes should be neither dry nor streaming ... let us see to it that the recollection of our lost ones is a pleasant one”), attendance at philosophy lectures when old (lxxvi.), thoughts suggested by a [226]wrestling-school or Scipio’s villa (lxxxvi.). Here the work on Italian fields is put before us (“It’s late June ... this very day I noticed peasants harvesting beans and sowing millet,” lxxxvi. 16); and another letter gives Seneca’s own experiences in vine-grafting (cxii.). Elsewhere we find reminiscences of his teachers with entertaining anecdotes (cviii.), or a hint to Lucilius that he must climb Aetna (lxxix.). His attitude to the government of the day appears in exhortations to practise circumspection and avoid offence (xiv.). It is noteworthy that he says nothing to indicate whether he looked back with satisfaction upon his public life. No doubt, his own tastes preferred the serene detachment of an onlooker portrayed in the following passage:

You dun me for more frequent letters: let’s compare accounts—you’ll not be solvent! The bargain, of course, was that you were to start—you were to write, I was to write back. But I’m not going to make difficulties: I know you’re safe for credit, and so I’ll pay in advance, and not do as that master of style, Cicero, tells Atticus to do—write anything that rises to his lips, even if he has got no news. I can never be at a loss for matter, though I skip all the details that fill Cicero’s letters—what candidate is in difficulties; who is fighting with other people’s backing, who with his own; who is standing for the consulship in reliance on Caesar or on Pompey or on a money-chest; what a skin-flint Caecilius is, out of whom his own relations can’t shift a coin under twelve per cent. No, it’s better to handle one’s own troubles than other folk’s, better to examine oneself to see in how many affairs one is a candidate, and yet decline to vote. This, my dear Lucilius, is the noble line—the line that means tranquillity and freedom—to compete for nothing, and entirely to give the elections of fortune the go-by. How great do you take the pleasure to be when the assembly of the tribes has been summoned, when the candidates are on tenterhooks within their respective quarters, when one is offering money, another acting through an agent, another smearing with kisses the hands of folk to whom he’ll refuse his handshake after election, when all are waiting in dumb amazement for the crier’s voice—how great the pleasure to stand at one’s ease, a spectator of that Vanity Fair without either buying or selling anything?⁠[670]⁠

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The discussions frequently bear, like St. Paul’s epistles, the mark of the Stoic diatribe. Objections are supposed to be raised (inquis) by Lucilius or by an imaginary opponent to be scrutinized and refuted. And there is something Bionean in sharp sarcasms recalling those of the Apocolocyntosis. The philosopher makes great game of the futile queries raised by pedantic teachers (lxxxviii. 7-8 and 37); of brainless pleasure-seekers in Rome, the human “antipodes” who turn night into day (cxxii.); of an outrageously vulgar parvenu freedman who purchased highly educated slaves to enable him to parade learning by proxy (xxvii.); of a philosophical lecturer’s rapid delivery, which was too like the glibness of a cheap-jack (xl. 3, istam uim dicendi rapidam atque abundantem aptiorem esse circulanti quam agenti rem magnam ac seriam docenti); or of luxurious baths hot enough to parboil a condemned criminal (lxxxvi. 10).

The remarks on style in various letters are instructive, as coming from one whose own style has provoked severe criticism in ancient and modern times. Letter 84 discusses the assimilation of reading, and states a theory of style in the making: bee-like we should gather widely, but the combined products must finally be made our own. In Letter 100, writing for the soul is contrasted with writing for the ear, and Seneca distinguishes the prose of Fabianus with the artificially inverted prose of the day. Letter 114 examines decadence in style, which is explicable on the hypothesis that it is a mirror of morals. Seneca’s citations here illustrate the loose and undisciplined compositions which, he argues, reflected the character of Maecenas. With the spread of luxury the affected manner in literature keeps pace, and eccentricity of expression captures the cultivated public as well as the common herd. There is no absolute standard: fashion sways style. While some ape the diction of earlier generations, others cannot abide the old-fashioned; and Seneca points the distinctions between the long rhythmic sentences of Cicero and the terse abruptness of Sallust. In the next letter, 115, he warns Lucilius not to be over-anxious to attain to a fine style: matter is more than manner—the question should be “what?” not “how?” Then, anticipating the famous Le style est de l’homme même, he declares [228]that style is the yield of a man’s mind (oratio cultus animi est).

This raises the question of Seneca’s own prose. The stress laid on the “what,” rather than the “how,” goes some way, though not all the way, towards explaining why he wrote, as many would have it, so badly. Quintilian, the champion of a phase of restored Ciceronianism in the next generation, may be taken to speak for the hostile critics. In a well-known passage⁠[671] he examines Seneca’s merits and demerits. In Quintilian’s eyes Seneca’s style was spoilt by all sorts of blemishes, and he felt it his duty to point his students to stricter standards of taste. Tacitus afterwards recorded Seneca’s power of appealing to his contemporaries.⁠[672] This very attractiveness Quintilian recognized, but feared: “he charmed because of his faults only” (placebat propter sola uitia). Conceding Seneca’s ready and rich intellect, his learning and versatility, brilliant sententiae and moral value, he at the same time indicates his weaknesses—liability to be misled by those who “devilled” for him in scientific inquiries (aliquando ab his quibus inquirenda quaedam mandabat deceptus est); want of strict accuracy in philosophy; and a style all the more pernicious because full of fascinating faults (eo perniciosissima, quod abundant dulcibus uitiis). Yet Quintilian considers that, in spite of wilful mannerisms, Seneca is safe reading for those of maturely trained judgement, for he allows there is much in him to approve and to admire. Next century, when an archaising movement had set in, Fronto condemns his style more sweepingly for its “fever-producing plums” (febriculosis prunuleis), while Gellius records some readers’ dislike for his glib vulgarity as well as other alleged defects, and censures Seneca for having, in the now lost twenty-second book of the Epistles, dared to pass unfavourable criticisms on Ennius, Cicero and Virgil.

It is clear that a lover of Cicero’s polished amplitude will not feel drawn to the Senecan sentence which, by comparison, must appear offhand, and, despite frequent use of pointed balance, to [229]a large extent formless. In order that a sententious thought might go home impressively and might be easily recalled and quoted, a premium was set upon its smart and brief formulation. The literary fashion was everything by fits and starts and nothing long; for the copious rounded periods of the older oratory had for the time lost their power of attraction. So eloquence no longer flowed in a full broad stream, but glittered iridescent like intermittent jets shot into sunlight from a cleverly contrived fountain. Seneca himself writes⁠[673] that he would like his Letters to Lucilius to be as natural in tone as if he were chatting with his friend seated or walking at his side; and so colloquial words and phrases do not surprise us. Indeed they fit the easygoing argument, as homeliness fits some sermons. But Seneca adheres to this simple model no more rigidly than Wordsworth to his theory of “a selection of the language really spoken by men.” Seneca is far from avoiding the artificial; and his style, like his character, has complexities and inconsistencies. It is intelligible, then, that critics should distinguish good and bad qualities in his composition, but perhaps it is more profitable to ask whether, with his style, he fulfilled his main object in writing. He had to face the fresh problem of composing readable tracts on ethical questions mainly Stoic: so, as an experimenter and innovator, he was sure to depart from traditional lines. Yet sometimes it looks as if he were censured for not being another Cicero. In literature, however, there are many mansions. The opening for Seneca was to create the Latin philosophical essay; and here he is, on the whole, a success.

To this success his power of awakening interest greatly contributed; for he is not a dull writer. He secures varied effects by neglecting logical method, so that he becomes pleasantly discursive; he diversifies his science with rhetorical descriptions; he illuminates a point with wonderful fertility in examples; and he holds the attention by his lively manner in arguing a question. Homeliness of expression alternates with elevation of thought. It is a personal and unmistakeable style, [230]crowded with those disconnected, jerky, antithetic and epigrammatic sentences which made Macaulay say: “to read him straightforward is like dining on nothing but anchovy sauce.” After all, those same forcible and quotable sentences have the merit of leaving Seneca’s position clear. Now, the virtue of an essay, in the true and original sense, lies largely in this, that, while it may not exhaust a subject, it must, if a good essay, convey a lucid impression. The qualities here noted are parallel to those in the writings of Montaigne and Bacon, and constitute Seneca one of the most admirable essayists in the world.

Everywhere we meet with such terse sayings as these:⁠[674] “A life is not incomplete, if it is honourable”; “it is not an important matter to live—it is important to die honourably, wisely, courageously”; “as a play, so is life—it matters not how long, but how good the acting is”; “success is a restless thing ... it intoxicates in more ways than one” (res est inquieta felicitas ... mouet cerebrum non uno genere); “a humiliating and grotesque sight is an old man at his A B C” (turpis et ridicula res est elementarius senex); “old age is an ailment for which there’s no cure” (senectus insanabilis morbus est). There are paradoxes like “some people have stopped living before they could start” (quidam ante uiuere desierunt quam inciperent); or balanced clauses, “in a multitude of books is distraction—so, as you can’t read all you’ve got, it’s enough to have as much as you can read”; or pieces of workaday wisdom, “what’s the good of meeting one’s trouble halfway? You’ll have the trouble fast enough when it comes” (quid iuuat dolori suo occurrere? satis cito dolebis cum uenerit), or “if you don’t want a man to lose his head in a crisis, you should give him practice beforehand.”⁠[675]⁠

Superabundant terseness of this sort leaves the reader dazzled and fatigued. Seneca’s is a prose which produces an effect analogous to that of his nephew Lucan’s hectic verse.

His language,⁠[676] as we might expect, is an amalgam of the literary and the vulgar. On the one hand, there is the [231]contribution of rhetoric and learning—poetic words, archaisms, philosophical terms, Hellenisms; on the other hand, the contribution of spoken Latin. A good deal of his vocabulary he shares, not with the more literary authors, but with Varro, Columella and the elder Pliny. From trade come such words as botularius (“sausage-maker”) and libitinarius (“undertaker”); and from agriculture, such as folliculus (“pod”) and retorridus (“parched up”). There are colloquial words like pilicrepus (“ball-player,” found in inscriptions), scordalus (“brawler,” in elder Seneca and Petronius), and diminutives like centunculus (“a little patch”). There are also rare words, not known before Seneca, like collatrare (“yelp at”) and perpessicius (“much enduring”). To other words he gives a new meaning.

Traces of Seneca’s influence are found in Juvenal and Tacitus; and early Christian writers⁠[677] like Tertullian, Lactantius and Jerome were attracted by the spirit and words of one who was for long believed to have corresponded with St. Paul. His prose style is definitely echoed in Tertullian’s Apologeticum; for its peroration, fiercely triumphant in its eulogy upon martyrdom, contains antitheses, exclamations, historical instances and short crisp utterances which ring as if they might have come from a converted Seneca.

If only as the exponent of Latin Stoicism, Seneca deserves lasting fame. The spirit of the later Stoicism can be gathered from his Latin essays and epistles, and in Greek from the Discourses of Epictetus recorded by Arrian and from the Meditations composed by the Emperor Marcus Aurelius. In the eyes of all three, the Stoic mode of thought guarantees healing for the wounds of life. But internal peace can be attained only by hard-won victories over self and over circumstance, by persevering progress towards virtue—a progress which, Seneca wisely insists, is in itself virtue—by trust in Providence, by acceptance of the Divine Will, by harmonizing oneself with Nature. The precept of Epictetus, “endure and abjure” (ἀνέχου καὶ ἀπέχου), expresses much of this ascetic faith. The tranquillity which the stricter Stoics of Greece would confine to the perfect sage is, [232]in the more sensible Roman spirit, claimed by Seneca for him also who is advancing and has made some headway. It is a hard fight to advance, he says, but “you are sworn to make yourself a good man”⁠[678] and the very striving is virtue.⁠[679] This is typical of the Roman rejection of the more pedantic early Stoicism. In Seneca the system has become an enlightened and broadened one, too practical to mistake paradoxes for genuine intellectual or moral sustenance. So too Seneca’s breadth of sympathy indicates the widening of the moral ideal; for cosmopolitanism has transcended the old opposition between Greek and barbarian. The claims of others are infinitely heightened, when in each fellow-man there is recognized, notwithstanding imperfections, some spark of an all-pervading divine essence. Forbearance, kindliness and true humanity are the fruits of such a creed: so out of a once rigid and unbending system disdainful of feeling, intolerant of human frailty, was evolved the Neo-Stoicism which could not but be moved by the sorrows and follies of the world, and could not look upon a distressed gladiator or a sick slave without seeing a kinsman deserving commiseration. It was a great gain for the world that at Rome the strength of Stoicism had grown less harsh, its exaltation less arrogant, its integrity less priggish, its calm less unfeeling.

At first it is not unnatural that in the restrained and self-confident Stoic philosophy a reader might seem to encounter a remote and even repellent quality as of a system too unreal to be literally practical. Yet in fact this is a mistake. The Roman Stoicism of the first century was no mere theoretic elaboration: it was a faith which offered genuine consolation amidst desperate afflictions. It could confer upon a believer the victory in defiance of the most malignant arrows of fortune. In such a faith some men could steel themselves, for the sake of the state, to help the work of government in trying times, and some could die triumphant over human injustice. History bears the clearest testimony to the inspiring vitality of the creed; and it is from this standpoint that one can best observe the human side of Seneca. Behind his preaching of Stoic doctrine there worked [233]a powerful earnestness which goes far to justify the iteration of counsels throughout the massive corpus of his treatises and letters.

The very seriousness of this philosophy, then, related it to life: it is in part the outcome of actual and often dangerous experience in dark times. It is a seriousness which makes the lighter human touches rarer and more precious. No doubt the sage cannot descend so easily to earth from an Olympian superiority as the ordinary littérateur who may be content to view mankind from the plain rather than from the heights; and one realizes that is was easier for Cicero and Pliny to unbend in their Letters than for Seneca in his. It is, then, all the more to the credit of Seneca’s good sense, as it certainly adds to his interest, that, though the Letters primarily subserve the purpose of permanent ethical instruction, he is by no means wanting in “small talk” and humour. The same breadth of mind that saved him from being a rigid dogmatist taught him to discover material for comment everywhere—vegetarianism, study in rowdy surroundings, slops for an invalid, the invasion of a dining-room by kitchen appliances to keep dainties hot.⁠[680] He can make fun of and, at the same time, defend the Stoic annihilation of emotion: with a touch of mischief he reports the young man’s question to Panaetius, “Should the good Stoic fall in love?”⁠[681] Never interested in logic, he jests at syllogisms more than once:⁠[682] they are not applicable, he insists, to the supreme question of human good and human conduct: “such subtleties make savants rather than saints” (non faciunt bonos sed doctos). A similarly jocular vein at the expense of pedants runs through his letter on virtues viewed as animalia,⁠[683] where he leads the Stoic argument by a reductio ad absurdum to the conclusion that to make a wise speech in the senate is an “animal.” Referring to his sea-sickness, he remarks facetiously that if he had regularly to be put ashore, as he was after one brief trip on the Bay of Naples, then a voyage anywhere would take him twice as long as Ulysses’s wanderings lasted, and with mock seriousness he affects to think that we owe the elaborate Odyssey ultimately [234]to the hero’s mal de mer.⁠[684] So, too, he drops the philosophic mantle to give us vivid pictures like that of his picnic with a friend,⁠[685] or a tissue of exaggerations in satirizing the luxury of the day: “We have reached such a pitch of luxury that we decline to tread on anything but precious stones” (eo deliciarum peruenimus ut nisi gemmas calcare nolimus, lxxxvi. 7).

Such ordinary human notes strengthen Seneca’s power over us when we turn to his grave and elevated thought. He does not work out systematically for us the whole body of the Stoic doctrines; but few can rise after reading in his books without feeling the better for it. A tonic bracing of the spirit comes from the serene forbearance advocated in the De Ira; the uncalculating generosity so estimably pervading the De Beneficiis; the princely, if Stoically guarded, clemency recommended in the De Clementia; the widely sympathetic understanding of human nature evident in the Letters; the virtuous conquest of desire proclaimed as the secret of bliss in The Happy Life; and the complete mastery of the soul indispensable for The Constancy of the Wise Man or for The Tranquillity of the Mind. The closing words of his last letter to Lucilius show the true Stoic independence of worldly standards:

I shall give you in brief a rule whereby to measure yourself, whereby to gauge your development: in that day you will come to your own, when you realize that the successful are of all men most miserable. Good-bye.

MISCELLANEOUS LEARNING

After the study of achievement so manysided as Seneca’s in philosophy, oratory and natural science (apart from his contribution to satire and drama), a brief sketch of contemporary learning is appropriate. In history the Neronian period did not shine. The impressions of Domitius Corbulo in Asia, of C. Suetonius Paulinus in Mauretania, of Ti. Claudius Balbillus in Egypt, and of L. Antistius Vetus in Germany made little mark. Agrippina, the emperor’s mother, composed memoirs which the elder Pliny and Tacitus quote. Works by jurists were not directly literary; but they were so frequently influential on Roman thought and its formulation that it is right to [235]record the names of the younger Nerva, father of the future emperor; Proculus from whom the “Proculians” took their name, and, among their “Sabinian” rivals, C. Cassius Longinus. Much philosophy continued to be written in Greek, as was done by Musonius Rufus and by Cornutus, who also was the author of works on grammar and rhetoric. But Latin was employed for philosophical purposes not only by Seneca but by Papirius Fabianus and Celsus. Stoicism, whether in formal exposition or in the actual lives of its professors, became one of the mighty intellectual and moral forces of the time. The independence of spirit, too, which the system fostered made its followers suspect: some of their tenets might readily be misconstrued as those of a political opposition, while a defiantly courageous manner of dying gave to many victims of an emperor’s cruelty a semi-religious halo of martyrdom. Among such victims were Barea Soranus, and Paetus Thrasea of Patavium, author of a panegyric upon the younger Cato which Plutarch used. Thrasea’s ruin in A.D. 66 involved his son-in-law Helvidius Priscus in banishment; but Helvidius returned when Galba had succeeded Nero, impeached twice unsuccessfully his father-in-law’s accuser, and brought upon himself a second exile under Vespasian.

It was to Nero that Caesius Bassus dedicated his metrical treatise: he may, as mentioned elsewhere, be identical with Persius’s poet-friend. Scholarship was also represented by Q. Asconius Pedianus (A.D. 3-88) and M. Valerius Probus of Berytus. The former proved himself a thorough investigator into the subject-matter and meaning of classical writers in his Liber contra obtrectatores Vergilii and his commentaries upon Cicero’s speeches. We possess, in impaired form, his commentaries on five speeches.⁠[686] One most valuable portion is his introduction to the Pro Milone. On Cicero’s Verrine orations notes of a very different character, as superficial as the genuine Asconius is satisfying and as grammatical as he is historical, have come down along with the other comments, but are usually referred to a “Pseudo-Asconius” of the fifth century. The [236]eminent grammarian Valerius Probus⁠[687] belongs to the Neronian period, though he outlived it by many years.⁠[688] His provincial education had brought him under the influence of older Latin books, and as a teacher in Rome he retained that interest in the style of the past which guaranteed linguistic equipment for his editions of Latin authors. He left a miscellany of notes upon archaic Latin;⁠[689] and Gellius, who often cites him, shows that he delivered lectures to his pupils on the subject. He elucidated, with critical notes, Terence, Lucretius, Virgil, Horace and Persius.

The oratory of the day recalls the names of the Stoic speakers in the Senate, Paetus Thrasea and Helvidius Priscus. Eprius Marcellus made himself notorious as a delator; the rhetorician Julius Africanus we shall find praised by Quintilian⁠[690] and coupled with Domitius Afer; Galerius Trachalus had his talents used by the Emperor Otho in the composition of speeches.⁠[691] Fabricius Veiento, who was accused in A.D. 62 for his satiric codicils directed against senators and priests, was banished by Nero, and had his books burned, but was in Rome again practising delation under Domitian. Among the professors of rhetoric were Clodius Quirinalis from Arelate (Arles); Antonius Liberalis who maintained a feud with Palaemon; and Verginius Flavus, the eminent teacher, who had Persius for a pupil.⁠[692]⁠

SENECAN SATIRE, POETRY AND DRAMA

The Apocolocyntosis,⁠[693] or “pumpkinification” of the Emperor Claudius, being, as a Menippean Satire, to some extent in verse, is a convenient link between Seneca the prose-writer and Seneca the poet. Many light and flippant touches in this skit, coupled with the metrical facility shown when prose is dropped, enable us to believe that he could have also written the verse-epigrams ascribed to him. A summary may convey some notion of its contents and spirit.

“I wish,” he begins, “to record the proceedings in heaven on October 13th in the new year which opens this fortunate era. No concession is to be made to malice or favour. It’s simple truth.” Then the author pokes fun at historians, philosophers and poets. One may inquire if this is to be a true story of Claudius’s translation? But who ever demanded [238]witnesses from a historian? The exact hour of day? Well, you may expect philosophers will say the same thing before clocks will! Was it afternoon? Oh, these poets! not content with raving about a sunrise or a sunset, they must interfere with our noontide:

That was the very time when Claudius lay dying, and he was an unconscionable time over it. Mercury had to remonstrate with one of the Fates: “Isn’t the poor wretch ever to have a rest? Why, it’s sixty-four years since he started gasping. What grudge have you got against him and the nation?” But Clotho remarked, “I wanted to give him a tiny bit of time longer, till he should confer Roman citizenship on the two or three left without it!...” However, she consents to leave a few foreigners in the world, just as a kernel (in semen):

Meanwhile Lachesis has a new golden thread to manipulate—Nero’s; and Apollo is there to chant approval:

“Nothing loth to look kindly on a handsome man, Lachesis went on spinning by the handful, and presented Nero with many extra years, on her own (annos de suo donat). Just then Claudius bubbled forth (ebulliit) the ghost, and consequently ceased to convey even the impression of being alive! He breathed his last as he was listening to a company of comedians, so there’s good reason for dreading them!”

(The scene shortly after changes.)

“Now listen to what took place in heaven. My informant will guarantee my accuracy (fides penes auctorem erit). Jupiter had got word that a person had arrived—a rather tall person and rather grey: he was threatening something or other, it was thought, for he was constantly shaking his head: he dragged the right foot. They’d asked what his country was, but couldn’t [239]make his answer out. He wasn’t a Greek; he wasn’t a Roman—didn’t belong to any known race, in fact.”

So, at Jupiter’s suggestion, Hercules, who had travelled the whole world over, was told off to interview this outlandish stranger. Greatly troubled, Hercules thought a thirteenth labour was upon him! Still, as the new arrival looked like some sort of human being (uisus est quasi homo), he tried him with Greek—a line from Homer. Claudius was delighted to find savants (philologos) in heaven; there would therefore be some room for his own works on history! So he answered in Greek, and, Roman-like, claimed Troy as his place of origin. Unluckily for this remark, the Goddess Malaria, who had attended him from Rome, interrupted with a flat contradiction, “It’s an absolute lie. He was born at Lyons: he’s a genuine Gaul: so, of course, he took Rome—the proper thing for a Gaul to do!” Thereat Claudius blazed out in anger and (like the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland) shouted, “Off with her head!” But you might have fancied the bystanders were his own freedmen for all the notice they took! Thereupon Hercules called him to order: “You just mark my words. Drop playing the silly ass. You’ve come where mice nibble iron. Make a clean breast of it—else I’ll bang the sottise (alogias) out of you.” And to look more awful, Hercules assumed the tragic rôle, and declaimed:

Claudius’s reply, as far as it could be understood, was an attempt to mollify Hercules, reminding him of days spent by the emperor on law-cases near his temple.

His success in this attempt must have been described in a passage now lost; for we are suddenly present at the debate in heaven concerning Claudius’s eligibility for deification. Some deity is quizzing Hercules on his proposal:

“Only do tell us what sort of a god you want that creature made. He can’t be an Epicurean god; for such a one ne dérange ni soi-même ni les autres (οὔτε αὐτὸς πρᾶγμα ἔχει [240]τι οὔτε ἄλλοις παρέχει). There’s a bit of the Stoic deity in him, I can see; for he’s got neither heart nor head.... Is this person to make our crooked ways straight? Why, he doesn’t know what to do in his own bedroom, and now he ‘scans the purlieus of the sky’—wants to be a god! He’s not content with having a temple in Britain and with savages for worshippers!”

At this point Jupiter “spies strangers” in the House, and in accordance with the rules Claudius has to retire. Janus, on being asked to express his views, makes a long speech too fast for the shorthand writer to keep up with (quae notarius persequi non potuit). Arguing that the honour of being a god must not be given to the canaille, he proposes a motion of exclusion in general terms. The next speaker, Diespiter, moves that Claudius be made a god in view of his relationship to Augustus and Augusta, and in view of Romulus’s need for a comrade in devouring boiled turnips! Many speeches are made and Hercules canvasses the gods in Claudius’s favour; but Augustus opposes in an oration of scathing irony:

“I call you to witness, Conscript Fathers, that since I was made a god, I have never uttered a word. I always mind my own business. But I can no longer disguise my feelings. Was it for this that I secured peace on land and sea?... Words fall short of my indignation.... This man, Conscript Fathers, who looks as though he couldn’t disturb a fly, used to kill folk as readily as a dog squats down.”

Claudius is then denounced as a murderer of Augustus’s descendants, and is apostrophized with the question why he passed death-sentences in cases that were untried:

“Where is this usual? It’s not done in heaven. Look at Jupiter. He’s been ruler for ever so many years, but Vulcan’s the only person whose leg he has broken. He lost his temper with his wife and hung her up, but he didn’t kill her, did he?... Who’s going to worship Claudius as a god? Who’s to believe in him? Make a god of such as he is, and nobody will believe you are gods yourselves!”

Augustus’s motion for deportation is carried, and Claudius is haled off to the lower regions by Mercury. As they pass down the Via Sacra, they can see Claudius’s funeral in progress—a [241]lovely (formosissimum) funeral and an extravagant one, obviously the obsequies of a god (plane ut scires deum efferri). And now Claudius realizes that he is dead, since there is din enough for him to hear the anapaestic dirge:

All this was most enjoyable. Claudius would have liked to watch his funeral longer, but he is hurried off below. Now, who should be in the lower world to meet him but his freedman Narcissus, spick and span, fresh from his bath? He had got ahead by a short cut (antecesserat compendiaria), and says he, “What have gods to do with mere mortals?” But Mercury breaks in: “Be sharp and tell them we’re coming.” Narcissus flies off faster than you could say the word. Everything slopes in hell, you must know: it’s easy going down. So Claudius, gouty though he was, arrived at Pluto’s door in a twinkle. Cerberus, “the hundred-headed brute” to use Horace’s phrase (ut ait Horatius, belua centiceps), was on the scene; and it was a little trying to face a shaggy black monster-dog after being used to a small whitish pet-bitch (subalbam canem in deliciis habere adsueuerat). But Narcissus shouted the announcement “Claudius is coming!” and immediately there was a throng of his victims to give him a reception! Then, as they crowd round, consuls, prefects, relatives and freedmen, the absent-minded emperor remarks, “Voici mes amis partout! How did you come here?” to which they answer, “Who but yourself sent us, you assassin of all your friends? To court with him!” So he is brought before Aeacus, and statistics are produced of those he had put to death: and Aeacus, being a person of perfect fairness, judges Claudius on Claudian principles; that is, he hears only the case for the prosecution! The verdict is “Guilty.” What should the sentence be? A new sort of penalty is wanted, and, after discussion, Aeacus decrees that [242]Claudius must rattle dice for ever in a box with no bottom. The convict had already begun this fruitless task, when all of a sudden Caligula appeared on the scene to claim him as a slave. Witnesses prove that they had seen Caligula thrashing him: so clearly he must have been in servitude, and is therefore assigned to Caligula, who gives him as a gift to that most righteous judge, Aeacus: and Aeacus hands him over to his Greek freedman Menander to be a law-clerk in attendance upon cases for evermore.

So the satire ends. Some critics will not allow the author to be funny in his own way, and they express dissatisfaction. They gravely point out that Claudius is not turned into a pumpkin, a metamorphosis which they understood was promised in the title: therefore they urge that perhaps the real conclusion is lost, or perhaps the real pumpkinification belonged to another pamphlet altogether.⁠[694] There is no need to be so literal: Claudius, an imperial applicant for divine honours, is sufficiently metamorphosed when he is degraded from heaven to a trumpery post in hell, and when throughout the satire he is treated as a silly pumpkin-head⁠[695] of a man. The title in the best MS. (Sangallensis) is Diui Claudii incipit Apotheosis (spelt Ἀποθήοσις) Annei Senece per satiram, which does not, at first sight, square with the title Apocolocyntosis recorded by Dio Cassius.⁠[696] Yet, on examination, the MS. title betrays a confirmatory corruption. It is tautological, as it stands, for one does not deify a deified emperor; all, however, is intelligible if it be, as Bücheler guessed, a contamination of an original superscription Diui Claudii Apocolocyntosis with a gloss, Apotheosis per satiram, to explain the parody implicit in the rare word.

[243]

The conclusion has been otherwise impeached.⁠[697] Some have thought the Caligula episode illogical after Claudius had been sentenced to perpetual dice-playing: others have thought the end too abrupt to be effective. Logic, however, is not to be demanded from a merry jest, and the fun lies exactly in its inconsequent suddenness. So far is the dénoûment from being pointless that in reality its point is double. Firstly, it represents a ruler who had yielded excessive power at his court to freedmen, as being now adjudged a slave, and transferred, like the veriest chattel, to be a freedman’s underling; secondly, it represents one who had a passion for acting the judge on earth as doomed to remain a mere law-clerk (a cognitionibus) in the infernal regions till the end of time. Several references to Claudius’s freedmen in the body of the satire are in keeping with this conclusion, especially the ironical gibe at their contemptuous disobedience;⁠[698] similarly, there are previous references to his performances in law which make the finale perfectly appropriate.⁠[699]⁠

The question of Seneca’s authorship involves different problems. Is the satire a likely product of his genius? How could he consistently write such an attack after his grovelling adulation of Claudius in the Consolatio ad Polybium,⁠[700] and after composing the funeral laudation for Nero to pronounce at the ceremonial sanctification of Claudius?⁠[701] The two questions of ability and consistency must be kept separate. About Seneca’s versatility and control of brilliant style there can be no doubt, while humorous and satiric qualities are not wanting in his Letters: about his consistency it must be allowed that this never was his strong point. Few philosophers are more vulnerable than the Stoic who amassed wealth and the moralist who drafted exculpatory orations to be delivered by a tyrant. Modern feeling cannot but see indecency in this bitter invective against [244]a deceased sovereign. Seneca laughs mercilessly at the dead emperor’s frailties, mental and physical—his pedantic stupidity, offensive absent-mindedness, capricious temper, unreasoning tyranny, shambling gait, and stammering utterance. The unprepossessing picture is painted with increasing bias until in Augustus’s denunciation of Claudius the author takes full opportunity for venting his spleen. There is no intention of being any fairer than Aristophanes was to Euripides or Socrates. One must expect nothing about the better aspects of Claudius’s policy or scholarship, or about the building schemes of his reign, nor any pity for the deep damnation of his taking off. Cunningly his contemptuous dismissal by the Fates is set in juxtaposition with Apollo’s praise of his young successor. A feeble dotard had gone: with the new princeps a golden era would return. Ignoble we may call it, but it can at any rate be explained. Years before, to suit his own longings for recall from exile, Seneca had resorted to gross flattery of Claudius in addressing Polybius; he had by request composed a formal speech on the dead emperor to suit the immediate state-occasion; but now, shortly after, he was quick enough to see that no reverence was shown to Claudius’s memory. His own oration, spoken by Nero, had been received with undisguised merriment when it mentioned “the foresight and sagacity”⁠[702] of the departed prince; and Nero’s conscience over the poisoning of Claudius troubled the emperor so little that he came to joke⁠[703] about mushrooms as food for the gods—had not Claudius gone by that means to heaven? On the whole, however, it suited the poisoners, Nero and Agrippina, that Seneca should take an opportunity of adopting their official version of the death and say nothing awkward about mushrooms. At the same time, if he depreciated Claudius and magnified Nero, so much the better: the predecessor would be the less missed, and the successor the more commended on the threshold of his reign. So at last Seneca’s chance came for unmasking his true attitude. He detested Claudius:⁠[704] he had an old score to wipe out: he probably felt [245]a sincere contempt for his pedantry: and thus a clever and venomous pasquinade was written by a man of flesh and blood, a Spaniard who could let his feelings—especially those of hatred—go. It rings as if it must have been written very soon after the official deification which it burlesques, i.e. soon after the middle of October, A.D. 54.⁠[705] The latest occurrence to which the author refers is the death of the imperial freedman Narcissus, whose removal followed hard upon that of his master.

The idea of a visit to the other world was familiar in ancient epic and drama, and could be made to serve either a serious or a comic purpose. The gods are treated by Seneca cavalierly; but Lucilius, Lucretius, even Cicero, had accustomed readers to such literary irreverence, and in Seneca no systematic attack on state religion was contemplated. Combined with the spirit and form of Menippean satire, such a framework and such an attitude gave excellent promise of burlesque effect; for the Menippean satire, thanks to Cynic traditions, encouraged the outspoken, the abrupt, the inconsequent, the startling in manner. Inherited from Menippus of Gadara and transmitted through Varro, it could be employed as an irresponsible and defiant medley. Seneca’s satire is less akin to the generally good-natured outlook of Varro⁠[706] than to that Cynicism in Menippus which is the secret of the Gadarene’s attraction for Lucian.⁠[707] But while Seneca shared in the spirit and conventions of the traditional Menippean, his place in this succession must not obscure his originality. The Apocolocyntosis is far too fresh and lively, too direct in its satiric bearing upon an actual personality, to be anything but work of an individual stamp. Obviously it is in many respects a contrast to the contemporary Menippean of Petronius. It had its own descendants, too: long after the classic age, two definite imitations of Seneca’s satire appeared; one, Lipsius’s Satura Menippea towards the end of the sixteenth century; the other Cunaeus’s Sardi Venales in 1612.

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Critics have differed about the style of the Apocolocyntosis in comparison with that of Seneca’s philosophical works. But two things have to be remembered: Menippean Satire does not claim the finish of style that suits philosophy; on the other hand, so expert a writer as Seneca had the ability to produce a fresh type of prose, if necessary, and to sprinkle it with homely proverbs, colloquialisms, slang plebeian grammar and a plebeian want of syntax.⁠[708] Adroitness in turning from higher to lower style is nowhere better seen than in his contemporary Petronius.

The versification is that of a skilled hand. The interspersed hexameters are comparable in quality with those of the epigrams and minor poems ascribed to Seneca. Behind the anapaestic dirge on Claudius lies the author’s facility gained in writing choral odes for his tragedies,⁠[709] and even the fourteen iambic senarii exhibit the same fondness for anapaests⁠[710] which marks his dramatic speeches and dialogues.

Seneca as poet must be judged not only by his dramas but by a collection of brief pieces⁠[711] in the Anthologia Latina compiled at Carthage in the sixth century. Of the opening seventy-three poems three are assigned by the MSS. to Seneca; but most, or indeed all, of the seventy-three may be his. Except a few in hendecasyllables, the poems are elegiac. They touch on miscellaneous themes—the mutability of things, a quiet life, the hardships of exile, republican heroes like Cato and Pompey, the true friendship of such as Crispus (presumably Passienus Crispus, the able orator who was consul a second time in A.D. 44), the false friendship of the great, imperial victories, luxury, riches, and the evils of civil warfare. While the reader is prepared for Stoic lines on simplicity of life and the dissolution of the universe, he is perhaps surprised to find erotic poems in the [247]collection, until he realizes that Seneca was no exception to the common practice whereby Romans amused themselves with composing verses inferior in morality to their authors’ actual behaviour.⁠[712] Even in the amorous pieces, however, it is a moralist that professes to speak—he sets limits to immodesty, and admires the fair one who relies on natural rather than artificial charms (naturae simplicitate ualet). There is, at the same time, in other poems much that fits the true Seneca—lines to his native Corduba (xix.), a reference to his two brothers (v. 14), and, elsewhere, to his little nephew, plausibly identified with Lucan:

He curses Corsica, the island

and can be yet crueller as the season advances. Amidst a plentiful lack of blessings, there are only two things to find there, “the place of exile and the exile’s self” (exul et exilium). He asks merely for an undisturbed existence: “Let the praetorship fall to those who wish it,” he says, and it is significant that Seneca had not risen higher than quaestor before his banishment. His fulsome and repeated eulogies on Claudius’s victories are partly redeemed by their romantic association with distant Britain “severed by the dreary sea” (uasto disiuncta Britannia ponto),

The nine plays⁠[716] ascribed to Seneca in the Codex Etruscus and other MSS. of the same family are given in the following [248]order: Hercules (Furens), Troades, Phoenissae, Medea, Phaedra, Oedipus, Agamemnon, Thyestes, Hercules (Oetaeus). Inferior MSS. give the alternative titles of Thebais for Phoenissae and Hippolytus for Phaedra. They add the Octauia, which cannot be by Seneca for reasons to be mentioned later.

The testimony to the manysidedness of Seneca⁠[717] is so strong that there is no need to pay attention to Sidonius Apollinaris’s blunder in separating Seneca the dramatist from Seneca the philosopher. It is true that Quintilian does not give Seneca’s name in his list of dramatists; but he certifies his interest in tragic diction (VIII. iii. 31), and quotes part of a line from the Medea as Seneca’s (IX. ii. 8). Six plays, Medea, Hercules Furens, Troades, Phaedra, Agamemnon and Thyestes, are cited by Latin authors or grammarians. The remaining three, Oedipus, Phoenissae and Hercules Oetaeus are, like the others, regarded in the MSS. as by Seneca. These three have had their authenticity attacked, but scholars generally accept all but portions of the Hercules Oetaeus. This last play extends, as we have it, to nearly 2000 lines, and its very length, along with echoes of previous plays, arouses suspicion: further investigation into such a feature as its double chorus (in which it resembles Seneca’s Agamemnon) or into its change of scene leads to the conclusion that it is a patchwork due, in part, to other hands than Seneca’s. The attribution of the plays as a whole to Seneca is confirmed by internal evidence. The short pointed sententiae both in form and in expression resemble his prose: and there are frequent parallels in thought, especially if, as often occurs, the thought assumes a Stoic cast.⁠[718]⁠

[249]

The question when Seneca wrote the tragedies is one which has received various and inconclusive answers. It has been dogmatically asserted⁠[719] that most of them were composed after 54 and none before 49. Recently,⁠[720] fresh emphasis has been laid on Quintilian’s recollection of hearing praefationes in which the propriety of a phrase for tragedy was discussed between Seneca and Pomponius Secundus. The plausible suggestion is made that these praefationes were spoken, not written, introductions to public readings of tragedies. Quintilian mentions the incident as a reminiscence from his youth, and, as he was born about A.D. 35, this implies a date in the early fifties of the first century. The point bears on the two problems whether Seneca’s dramas were meant for the stage and when they were composed. It may be that some of Seneca’s plays, like some by Secundus, were read, if they were not written, in the early fifties, and a desire to foster in his pupil Nero an interest in Greek adaptations might explain why Seneca should give tragic readings about that period; but it does not follow that all the plays are to be so dated. Pomponius Secundus had been in Germany in 50 and 51, and his debate with Seneca may therefore have followed his return. He had, however, produced plays or at least some kind of dramatic compositions before, as we know from the storm raised against him in the theatre in A.D. 47.⁠[721] So too Seneca, who returned from banishment in 49, may have written plays during his years of enforced leisure in Corsica. It is not surprising that this is the period of his life to which prevailing guess-work has ascribed the tragedies. But the problem appears insoluble: there was abundant time for Seneca to have written tragedies even before he was exiled, [250]a man of over forty, and there are elements in the tragedies more nearly akin to a clever student’s rhetoric than to philosophical maturity. Nor would it be easy to disprove a contention that some at least of the plays consisted of early material worked over and touched up at a later date.

That Seneca intended his dramas for the stage is incredible. No doubt there were still in the Neronian period tragic representations, but many of Seneca’s elaborate speeches would have been unsuitable in a theatre, and some scenes would not act as they stand. It was one thing for Seneca merely to imagine Medea slaying her children in public, but another thing to have this shown before actual Roman audiences, accustomed though they were to horrors. The author’s retention of three actors is not so much an attempt to meet theatrical conditions as an adherence to Greek convention. On the other hand, the rhetorical dexterity and descriptive power exhibited in the tragedies suited the taste of literary coteries before whom dramatic compositions could be read with effect.

As an adapter of Greek tragedy, Seneca was attracted most to the blend of realism and romance which characterises Euripides. Out of nine plays his model is definitely Euripides in four, Hercules Furens, Troades, Medea and Phaedra. Besides, in the imperfect and inconsistent remains of the Phoenissae, Euripidean material is drawn from the Greek play of that name, though there are also contributions from Aeschylus’s Seven Against Thebes and Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus. On Aeschylus was based the Agamemnon, and on Sophocles the Oedipus as well as the drearily long Hercules Oetaeus, whose authenticity has most been called in question. The Thyestes has no equivalent among extant Greek plays. These Latin plays are in no sense versions of the Greek: Seneca did not feel himself bound to adhere to the original plot in detail, but either introduced departures or followed Roman predecessors in their departures.⁠[722] The essential contrast, however, is one of spirit, which no reader can fail to realize, if he turns from Aeschylus’s [251]Agamemnon, Sophocles’s Oedipus Tyrannus and Euripides’s Medea to their Senecan descendants. In the Latin plays one has entered a new world, where genius has been replaced by cleverness, and an eminently classic directness of expression by rhetoric. Despite the recurrence of philosophical sentiments, there is no longer felt, like a pervasive force, the old Aeschylean preoccupation with fundamental themes of life and destiny, an atmosphere of altitude in thought and emotion whence a poet can survey the deepest problems concerning God and man, sin and suffering; there is no longer that combination of serenity and of tense drama which makes the Oedipus Tyrannus one of the greatest of plays; nor is there any longer the wide Euripidean humanity to win full sympathy for the outraged wifehood of Medea.

The most cursory comparison of Seneca’s plays with extant originals will indicate the nature and sometimes the object of his alterations. The Hercules Furens dramatises the hero’s madness which is with terrible irony turned upon his own wife and children after his triumphant return from the underworld in time to rescue them from the tyrant Lycus. For the sentence of death against the absent hero’s sons in Euripides the Roman dramatist has substituted a compulsory, and defiantly refused, offer of marriage from the tyrant to Hercules’s wife Megara; and he has introduced Theseus, not towards the close, as in the Greek play, but much earlier, so as to facilitate a long description of adventures shared by Theseus with Hercules during their raid upon the infernal regions. Another significant contrast is that Seneca treats Hercules’s slaying of wife and children as an exhibited part of the dramatic action, and not as material for narration in accord with Greek usage.

The Troades, on afflictions which befell the captive dames of Troy, combines material from the play of the same name by Euripides with parts of his Hecuba. In fact, Seneca’s play is cited under the title of Hecuba by Probus. The sacrifice of the princess Polyxena, which the ghost of Achilles demands shall be made at his tomb before the Greeks sail away, is based on the Hecuba. To it Seneca adds from the Troades the Greek precautionary execution of Astyanax, the little son of Hector and [252]Andromache. The extent of Seneca’s originality in what is one of his best plays could not be absolutely assessed without more knowledge than we are ever likely to obtain of two lost plays by Sophocles—the Polyxena and the Captive Women (Αἰχμαλωτίδες).

The presence among Accius’s plays of an Astyanax and a Troades raises the question of a possible influence of the older Roman tragic writers upon Seneca. It is certain that in his prose works Seneca occasionally cites them, either from direct knowledge or indirectly through Cicero. Some doubt may be felt whether earlier Roman tragedy retained all the prestige ascribed to it by Ribbeck; for, though it may not have entirely vanished from the stage, the taste of the Neronian age was even more pronounced than that of the Augustan in regarding it as old-fashioned and uncouth. If the fragments of Accius indicate departures from Euripides in which Seneca resembles him, this does not prove positively the influence of the earlier Latin poet: they may have used a common source in Sophocles. At best, however, all this is conjecture, though it has been gravely made material for learned tractates.⁠[723] There remains the obligation to remember that one need not find a source for every departure made by Seneca from extant Greek plays. He is entitled to credit for a measure of originality and a desire to entertain readers or hearers with inventive variations of his own on a familiar plot as well as with ingenious rhetorical points. This is his express theory of literary borrowing; for he advocates, it will be remembered, a bee-like diligence in blending borrowed materials into a new and distinctive flavour, so that even if the original source is manifest, the product shall be something different.⁠[724]⁠

The fragmentary Phoenissae presents puzzling features. The [253]title suggests that Seneca contemplated importing from the Greek a chorus of Phoenician damsels. Its 664 lines fall into two portions. The earlier portion presents, as in Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus, the self-blinded and self-exiled king wandering under the guidance of his daughter Antigone, who has vowed never to desert him. With a rhetorical echo of Roman Stoicism, he claims volubly the right of self-murder, a right which, during three years of misery, he has not exercised and which Antigone is at pains to refute by argument. A sudden break, where a choral ode might have been expected, leads to a brief episode in which Oedipus bitterly prays that his sons, Eteocles and Polynices, at war with each other, may act worthily of such a miserable father. From l. 363 a new episode, partly akin to the situation in Aeschylus’s Seven against Thebes, represents Antigone as now in Thebes, no longer with her father, but with her mother Jocasta, who has not committed suicide as in Sophocles’s Oedipus Tyrannus or in Seneca’s Oedipus, and whose feelings are torn between the two brothers at enmity:

The hopelessness of her attempt to conciliate the pair is seen in Eteocles’s theory of power which is propounded, and in Senecan manner expanded, towards the close of the fragment:

A reference to the literature⁠[727] on the Phoenissae shows how some have held these passages are excerpts from one or more completed dramas; others that they are fragments of one or more dramas never completed; others again that they are only dramatic studies or sketches not designed to be worked up into play-form.

The main differences of plot-construction which distinguish Seneca’s Medea from Euripides’s play are that, for the chance [254]visit of King Aegeus to Corinth when he promises to protect Medea during her imminent exile, Seneca substitutes a scene in which Medea’s wonder-working powers are described; and that, while in the Greek play the children of Jason and Medea are sentenced to exile along with their mother, in the Latin she begs in vain to be allowed to take them with her. Jason’s confession that he could not live without his children suggests to her the most terrible part of her revenge:

How far these and other changes either in plot-management or in expression are due to Seneca himself is past finding out. Medea’s story, dramatized half a dozen times in Greek, was a theme that attracted several Latin writers. Long after Ennius and Accius it had been handled by Ovid, both in the Heroides and in a play now lost; later, in Seneca’s time, it occupied the attention of his nephew, Lucan, and of Curiatius Maternus. Seneca’s admiring imitations of Ovid, demonstrable elsewhere in his writing, render it likely that here too he owed him much.

A subject not nearly so congenial to Roman tastes as Medea’s revenge was the guilty passion of Queen Phaedra for her stepson Hippolytus, an almost Puritanic devotee of the chase, for whom life in the open air meant everything and woman nothing. The extant version of this romantic theme by Euripides is his famous Hippolytus of 428 B.C., which has been designated Hippolytus Crowned (Ἱππόλυτος στεφανηφόρος or στεφανίας) to distinguish it from his previous and less successful drama Hippolytus Veiled (Ἱππόλυτος καλυπτόμενος). It is an interesting literary point that Seneca seems to have been attracted to the earlier version;⁠[729] for he restored in the plot of his Phaedra what Euripides apparently cancelled in deference to Athenian censure—the personal avowal of her love by Phaedra to her stepson. In the extant play by Euripides the nurse takes it upon herself to open Hippolytus’s eyes to the [255]Queen’s feelings; and, after his horrified recoil, the shame-stricken Phaedra strangles herself, leaving a note with false charges against the innocent youth. But in Seneca, as she has in person confessed her love, so in person does she malign him to her husband Theseus; and so again, when Hippolytus has met an undeserved death, it is Phaedra in person (not, as in Euripides, the goddess Artemis) who reveals her crime and clears Hippolytus.

In incidents, structure, and spirit, the Oedipus is a woeful falling off from Sophocles’s thrilling development of the steps in the revelation of the king as the unwitting murderer of his father. In Sophocles the seer Teiresias is sent for in time of crisis, and, when forced to speak, declares, though he is not believed, that Oedipus is the criminal sought for: in Seneca much space is laboriously wasted upon the description of gloomy sacrifices and necromancy. Instead of announcing, as in the Greek, the suicide of the queen, Seneca towards the close brings face to face the two chief victims of tragic circumstance, before Jocasta openly kills herself. But the very construction of the play is inferior. Devoting over 300 lines to lyric portions and over 200 to details of sacrifices and necromancy, the Roman writer has left himself only some 500 lines for the disentanglement of a complicated dramatic story.

Equally disappointing, when contrasted with its renowned Greek original by Aeschylus, is the Agamemnon. The disproportion of 1012 Latin lines to 1673 Greek could be compensated for by nothing short of vastly superior literary power; and of that there is no sign. The prevailing absence of genuine thought and feeling in choric songs and invocations based on a frigid mythology is in strong contrast to the profound reflections in the choruses of Aeschylus. It may be that, as Leo thinks,⁠[730] this was Seneca’s first essay in drama, and the Oedipus his second. In any case, the deviations from Aeschylus are noticeable. Instead of the watchman, who in the Greek announces the beacon-sent tidings of Troy’s capture, there is substituted a much more typically Senecan figure—the ghost of Thyestes, filled with the spirit of revenge against his hated brother Atreus, [256]father of Agamemnon, and therefore urging Aegisthus, the queen’s paramour, to perform his destined part in the hour of Agamemnon’s triumphant return from war. Clytemnestra, in the episode which follows, seems disposed to listen to the advice of her nurse—another typically Senecan figure—and abandon the design of murdering her husband. Less strong-willed than the Aeschylean Clytemnestra, she is confirmed in her purpose by Aegisthus. A further Senecan trait is the detailed description by the herald of the appalling storm which overtook the Greeks on their homeward voyage. Appearing late in the play (l. 782)—considerably after the band of captive Trojan women led by Cassandra—Agamemnon makes his exit less than 30 lines further on. One misses the famous and symbolic scene of the purple carpet in Aeschylus: it is replaced by brief and unheeded warnings of Agamemnon’s impending death from Cassandra. One misses too the single line of final anguish from the victim within. The Latin play represents Cassandra, not as murdered along with her captor, but as relating outside the palace the crime that is being perpetrated. An exciting moment occurs when Electra hurries from the palace and succeeds in sending her young brother Orestes, the future avenger, away into safety under the care of King Strophius, who has opportunely arrived in his chariot on his way home from an Olympic victory. Aeschylus represents the boy as already staying at the court of Strophius. His sister Electra, who at the close of Seneca’s play is sent to imprisonment while Cassandra is sent to her death, makes no appearance in the Agamemnon of Aeschylus. Some of these variations are foreshadowed in the fragments of Livius Andronicus’s Aegisthus, and Accius’s Clutemestra⁠[731]⁠—a coincidence which suggests either Seneca’s knowledge of the older Latin plays, or his use, in common with Andronicus, of a Greek play by a dramatist junior to Aeschylus.

There is no surviving Greek original with which to compare Seneca’s Thyestes, a gruesome play on the fiendish revenge wrought by Atreus upon his ambitious and adulterous brother Thyestes. But some parts at least of this dark story touching [257]the accursed house of Pelops, son of Tantalus, had been dramatized by Sophocles and Euripides in plays entitled Thyestes. It was a common theme for Roman writers. Three at least had handled it before Seneca: Ennius in his Thyestes; Accius in his Atreus, containing the cynical words oderint dum metuant; and, more famous still, Horace’s contemporary Varius in his Thyestes, which was praised by Quintilian as worthy to be set beside any of the Greek tragedies.⁠[732] Whether the earlier Latin plays influenced Seneca or not, it is barely conceivable that he should have missed reading Varius. But even after Seneca the subject continued to attract. Under Vespasian, Curiatius Maternus composed a Thyestes as he did a Medea, and in the Dialogus de Oratoribus is rallied by Aper for wasting his time on such material. Presumably the Ligurinus addressed in Martial III. 45, and certainly the Bassus twitted by him in V. 53, had handled the theme of Thyestes.

Occasional brilliance in expression and occasional loftiness in thought fail to outweigh those bombastic utterances and those innovations in incident or character-drawing which rob the Hercules Oetaeus of the delicacy exhibited by Sophocles in the Trachiniae. As we have it, patched by Seneca himself or another,⁠[733] it runs to a length of almost 2000 lines—over 700 more than there are in Sophocles’s play. In particular, the character of Deianira has suffered under Roman hands. From a heroine who was in the beginning tenderly attracted with Hellenic sweetness towards the captive Iole, and who was only by degrees tempted into jealousy, she is transformed by Seneca into one who hates at first sight—“like to one maddened and with lowering gaze,” in her uncontrollable anger “a tigress” or “a Maenad,”⁠[734] full of malevolence towards rival and husband. It is impossible to give to Seneca’s Deianira the sympathy felt for the broken-hearted wife in Sophocles when she realizes too late that the promised love-charm must mean death to Hercules. [258]Other additions are the introduction of the hero’s mother, Alcmena, to bewail his sufferings, and the incorporation into the play of his deification at the burning pyre on the summit of Oeta. There are, besides, signs that Seneca drew from Ovid’s Heroides and Metamorphoses.⁠[735]⁠

Even the brief glances here directed at Seneca’s deviations from well-known Greek originals serve to suggest many of his characteristics. His affinity with Euripides already indicated is significant. In truth, Seneca may be said to have, in great measure, although with inferior dramatic genius, pursued the path along which Euripides led. There was much to link together those two spirits, separated though they were by four centuries. There was above all a common interest in speculative philosophy and in live humanity. Already in Euripides there is the same craving after variety and effect, betrayed in situations intended to be telling, in pathetic or even harrowing detail, in picturesque descriptions, in smart argument, in sententious reflections. Here, if in any field, Seneca’s rhetorical training equipped him. Even when he breaks away from Euripides, he is but following his example in the quest of variety. The more he changes, the more he imitates. It would, therefore, be difficult to overrate the Euripidean influence upon him, and this should be remembered in any estimate of Senecan influence upon the literature of the Renaissance. On the other hand, while historically carrying on a late development in Greek drama, Seneca is the child of his own age, imbued with Latin rhetoric, and capable of using it alike with imposing and with futile effect. It cannot be contested that in his free treatment of borrowed material he leaves his individual impress for good or bad upon his plays. There is a Senecan ring, for which he must himself accept credit or discredit, in his curtailment or expansion of plots, his elaboration of descriptions, his choice of impressive dramatic moments, and in that aim at heightened colour which is betrayed by his fondness for the weird, for ghosts, for incantations, and by his introduction of death as an integral part of the action.

His faults lie on the surface. Mythological conventionality [259]in plots which were already, despite variations, fully exhausted in Greece; feebleness of moral significance; monotony of character; lack of nature’s infinite variety and lack of fidelity to much of the human nature selected for portrayal—such defects hinder the plays from powerfully enchaining the interest. The positive influence of rhetoric too is responsible for many far-fetched dialogues, high-flown declamations, and pedantic recitals. Seneca’s Medea may be regarded as an epitome of his method. Barbaric though she is by hypothesis, she is yet in Seneca too little a woman and too much a sorceress: we miss the more natural evolution of character given in Euripides: from the outset her fury is rhetoric, and, while we loathe the craven ingratitude of Jason, her wrongs fail to move us fully, because her transports of insane hatred are demonstrably manufactured. Medea can pause to weigh her anger mythologically:

Mythology is one of Seneca’s besetting perils. Jason is extravagantly praised as handsomer than Bacchus or Apollo;⁠[737] and the choric song praying that he may never be a victim of misfortune like his Argonautic comrades is too learnedly allusive,⁠[738] though not so irrelevant as the chorus upon the labours of Hercules which follows the tardy and brief appearance of Agamemnon in the play bearing his name. One mythological group of which Seneca never can have enough is that of the familiar sufferers of punishment in Hades—Ixion, Sisyphus, Tantalus and Tityos: mentioned in the Medea without Tityos, they recur in at least four other plays, and are taken over for literary ornament by the author of the Octauia.⁠[739] This may be a little tiresome, but nothing to the dreary boredom which reigns over long speeches like Medea’s catalogue of the charms needed for her murderous purposes, in which the author is [260]determined that his acquaintance with ancient geography and legend shall be unmistakable. Some such over-elaboration, some such inability to tell a plain and simple tale, explains the account, too ludicrous to be pathetic, of the piecing together of the mutilated remains of Hippolytus as if they were a jigsaw puzzle:

It is a dangerous realism which produces unintentional comicalities. What shall we say about the ghost of Thyestes who, because during his life he had been served with the hideous meal of his slaughtered children, could grotesquely claim to be “full of three sons buried in me?”⁠[741] No less peculiar is the chorus on the universal sway of love which reaches the climax of absurdity among enamoured whales and elephants:

A similar desire to be at once literal and smart leads to the silliness of Hercules’s words on recovering his wits after he has slain his family: “I have lost all,” he cries, “lost soul, arms, honour, wife, children—and madness too!”⁠[743] A deeper sense [261]of humour would have made Seneca more tragic. Further, more self-criticism in the light of common sense would have spared us much of what fatigues us in him—the pedantry, the senseless bombast,⁠[744] the epigrams which so inevitably come, no matter who is speaking; for a nurse will talk like a manual of rhetoric or like Seneca the moralist.⁠[745] When Phaedra’s nurse sagely reflects on love-madness and on inordinate desire as the companion of high estate, she adorns her remarks about luxury with semi-proverbial wisdom, and proceeds, through a contrasted picture

to her epigrammatic conclusion

As in set speech or soliloquy, so too in dialogue, there is displayed an allied and wonderful cleverness, but it is preternatural. The reader is not captured, as he should be, by the dramatic illusion: he never quite forgets that beings of real flesh and blood are not so ingenious in tragic situations. He is, besides, positively wearied with Ovidian elaboration of the same picture by fresh strokes, or choral platitudes ringing changes on the same idea.⁠[747]⁠

Yet all is not exaggeration in sentiment and style. When the worst has been urged against Seneca, there remain speeches that are spirited, descriptions that are effective, and thoughts that are memorable. The style is in general lucid, and, if epigrammatic, is founded on pure Latin and on harmonious versification. Perhaps no better example of the dramatic speech in Seneca can be given than that from the Troades in which Agamemnon pleads against the proposed sacrifice of the Trojan maiden Polyxena at Achilles’s tomb. The arguments, [262]put with clearness and vigour, are characteristically fortified by sententiae and antitheses:

[263]

A few other illustrations chosen from the same play are the more appropriate because nowhere so much as in the Troades does he hold his own in rivalry with his Greek sources. It is characteristic that the agonized mother, Andromache, concealing her boy in her husband’s sepulchre with the hope of eluding the murderous foe, should make the antithetic point:

There is plausible rhetoric in the alliterative excuse which Helen proffers for luring Polyxena into an expectation of marriage when she is really to be executed:

and Helen’s own plea for her guilty self is a clever appeal suggesting that she was more sinned against than sinning:

nor does one lightly forget the single utterance by the doomed boy—miserere, mater.⁠[752] One wonders, too, whether Seneca was [264]thinking of his own almost miraculous rescue from Caligula’s death-warrant when he declared:

Another dramatic feature often dexterously managed consists of the thrust-and-parry strokes in single lines—the Greek stichomythia. A suitable example comes from the passage where the nurse urges Medea to drop her daring resolution:

An allied neatness of expression, not uncommonly strengthened by antithesis, marks the sententious epigrams found in isolated verses throughout. The following are a few from three plays:⁠[755]⁠

Sometimes the whole of a character’s attitude in a given dramatic situation is summed up in a single line, as in Medea’s words,

or her appeal to Jason later in the play,

Compared with such a plethora of ingenious epigram, the flights into poetry are rare. Yet Seneca’s eye was not closed to nature. He paints daybreak in its colour and its human significance:

Some instinct, too, as of a seer, may have inspired his well-known prophecy:

In view of the doubt sometimes needlessly cast upon Seneca’s authorship of these dramas, it is of importance to note the [266]strong tincture of philosophic thought which colours many of the speeches and choral odes. The Troades presents us with a chant on the doctrine of utter annihilation:

A familiar Stoic dogma suggested the lines upon true kingship in the Thyestes:

and a little later the sage’s serenity is limned:

[267]

Similarly Stoic are the notions of freedom, of equality with monarch and with God, and of the right to abandon life at will, which are propounded in the Agamemnon:

It is this creed of the open door leading out of life on which Oedipus harps in the Phoenissae⁠[762] and which the guilty queen proclaims in the Phaedra,

As we should expect, it is stated in the prose works⁠[764] of Seneca, and so brings him into touch with contemporary history; for it is but the theoretical formulation of that right to suicide which many of the Roman Stoics in opposition during the darkest days of imperial tyranny not only claimed but exercised.

While, however, much of the philosophic colour in the plays reflects their author’s Stoicism, Seneca is dramatist enough to introduce non-Stoic views also. He allows, for instance, the chorus in the Phaedra to adopt an Epicurean and pessimistic attitude. It comes in an ode addressed to Nature and to “Olympus’s Lord,” beseeching a solution to one of the riddles of the universe—why it is that external nature is so regularly [268]controlled by law, whereas the Ruler of all things appears to be indifferent to man, and human affairs appear to be a chaotic realm of chance.⁠[765]⁠

Philosophy, whether Stoic or not, is, after all, one of the personal notes imported by Seneca into his adaptations from Greek drama. Like his yet more pervasive rhetoric, it is of Roman cast, and, if anachronistic in its Hellenic environment, it is but an additional sign of his independence of his originals. He is not at pains to avoid national colour: and thus, reckless of inconsistency, he puts into the mouth of Mycenaean elders certain terms redolent of Roman political history; turns the thought of a Theban chorus towards the clientes and patroni of Rome, and, later in the same play, towards a Roman rather than a Greek holiday; represents the ex-king of Thebes as quoting, like a paterfamilias, his power of life and death;⁠[766] and—more surprising still—not merely fuses into a Corinthian marriage-hymn elements in the bantering Fescennine spirit (“rarely against our lords is license legalised”), but actually, a few lines further on, where the metre has become hexameter, names that familiar feature of a wedding at Rome:

Another national trait lies in his debt to Latin predecessors. This is especially observable in his relation to Virgil and Ovid. To the former he owes much in language and in idea: one cannot, for example, read Theseus’s description in the Hercules Furens⁠[768] of his descent into the Lower World, nor Andromache’s account in the Troades⁠[769] of her vision of the dead Hector, without noticing reminiscences of Aeneid VI in the one case and of Aeneid II in the other. Ovid, to whose rhetorical abilities Seneca’s early attention must have been directed by his father, is the ultimate inspirer of many of his epigrams and mannerisms as well as of some of his metrical characteristics. Seneca, however, though a borrower in most fields, remained in part [269]original and inventive. This holds good of his choice of words. Such compounds as luctificus and fatidicus he would, like other poets of his century, inherit from Virgil; and similarly such words as securiger and multifidus from Ovid. But some compounds it would be hard to find in other authors, e.g. incestificus and superbificus, and nidificus too, although the verb nidificare rises to the mind in connexion with a famous tale of Virgil’s readiness in verse-making. Pacificus, apparently used by Cicero once, Seneca seems to have originated in verse and bequeathed through his nephew and Martial for its most familiar use in the Vulgate version of the Beatitudes.

The iambic trimeter used by Seneca for dramatic speeches and dialogue is in his hands a finished line more akin to that of Greek tragedy than to the rugged senarius of the oldest Latin dramas. Like the Augustans, and in all likelihood under the influence of Ovid’s lost Medea, he would regard the verses of Ennius, Pacuvius and Accius as uncouth. Seneca, for instance, does not imitate the heavy Ennian line with its spondees in second and fourth feet, and at least before a cretic ending shows a preference for elision. But the general effect is a polished monotony, towards which contributing factors are scarcity of the more subtle elisions, want of varied pauses, and a pronounced liking for either spondee or anapaest in the fifth foot. According to Lucian Müller, in all Seneca there are only six examples of a double iambic ending to a line;⁠[770] and statistics indicate that the anapaest in the fifth place, as a variant for the spondee, occurs rather oftener than once in every five lines. Seneca’s iambic trimeter is at its neatest, as it is at its sagest, in the stichomythia of the dialogue. When in long speeches the sense too often closes with the end of each line, the sharp ring which is suitable in stichomythia becomes mere jerkiness. His trimeters—indeed Latin trimeters as a whole—never attain the charm which can be illustrated from any Greek tragedy. Herein it contrasts with the Latin hexameter, which possesses a beauty and nobility rivalling any effect achieved in Greek. [270]Trochaic tetrameter is used in three passages,⁠[771] amounting to a total of 34 lines, based rather on the Greek model than on early Latin septenarii. But one departure is the admission of a dactyl in the sixth foot—a practice metrically analogous to the favour shown for an anapaest in the fifth foot of an iambic trimeter. Of choral measures he employs a considerable variety, some being feeble imitations of, others unfortunate departures from, Horace. The mixed metres in the Agamemnon and Oedipus⁠[772]⁠, are such failures that some, forgetting how much of an experimenter Seneca was in dramatic composition, have denied that he wrote those plays. The sum of the matter is that the choruses, lacking strophic arrangement and often dull in theme, suffer from the wearisome continuance of the same line without the break of a shorter closing one. Long passages in Sapphics without an Adonic, or in Asclepiadeans without a Glyconic, or in anapaestic dimeter without a monometer, almost madden the reader because of their sameness; and, unluckily, while Seneca declines to afford the relief of a Glyconic among longer Asclepiadeans, he has no qualms about perpetrating a run of Glyconics for seventy or eighty lines on end.

Time, however, has not judged Seneca by the monotony of his choral metres. In literature it is not too much to say that he has been a world-wide influence; for without him the history of the drama in most countries would have run an entirely altered course. By the fourteenth century his influence upon writers in Italy was evident—on Mussato, for example, whose iambic tragedy Ecerinis was a literary triumph in 1314 or 1315.⁠[773] Seneca’s historical function was to be a link between the incipient modern drama and Hellenism, which could not be directly accessible, or indeed intelligible, so long as Greek study was in its infancy. As a force at the birth of modern drama he completely eclipsed the other dramatists of antiquity: Sophocles counted for very little, Aeschylus for less, and Euripides mainly for as much of his spirit as operated through Seneca. When, therefore, Latin plays gave place to Italian tragedy in Cammelli’s [271]Filostrato e Panfila, Seneca was reckoned an appropriate personage to pronounce the prologue. At the period of the revival of learning, his plays had become renowned over Europe—Scaliger, it should be noted, rated him above Euripides—and his authority, except for Trissino’s preference in favour of Greek models, was riveted on Italy. In France it was the Latin plays which Buchanan and Muret wrote for their scholars to act that introduced the Senecan model and pointed the way towards the French tragedy of the Pléiade. In contrast to comedy, over which Terence’s influence did not retain its hold, French tragedy continued for three centuries to follow the foreign classical exemplar with the strictness observable in Corneille and Racine.

The immense popularity of Seneca in England during the sixteenth century is illustrated by the production of his Troades at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1551-52, as well as by frequent translation and frequent imitation. A reason is easily found. English playwrights, confronted with the task of shaping the amorphous native drama, saw in his plays orderly patterns to suit their purpose. Here was a type of drama which was a descendant of the ancient Greek, with still less action than in the Greek, with choruses even more divorced from the action, but conveniently demarcating the play into definite episodes or acts; while, in spirit, this type of drama exhibited what was for the Elizabethan playgoer an acceptable store of moral reflections and harrowing situations. One could accordingly combine the satisfaction of hearing good talk about rectitude one moment, and of revelling in horrors the next. Morality could be blended with melodrama. The leaven worked rapidly after Heywood began a series of translations of Seneca’s plays in 1559. Our first English tragedy, Gorboduc, 1561, is framed on the Senecan model, which had already captured the playwrights of Italy, France, and, in a measure, Germany. The division into five acts and the introduction of choruses (as lyric interludes rather than as integral parts in the drama) show Seneca’s influence upon the form of such plays as Gorboduc and The Misfortunes of Arthur. Dramas, however, that can be called fairly and fully Senecan are not numerous in English; for the drama in England [272]was turned into a freer course by Marlowe and Shakespeare, as it was in Spain by Lope de Vega and Calderon. The more lasting influence of Seneca on drama in France is largely attributable to the closer affinity between the Senecan and the French taste for rhetorical finish. But even where the model was not closely followed in England, the spirit of Seneca was operative; for it should be realized that it acted on the romantic drama no less than on the classical.

Thus, stock characters like the nurse, the ghost, the tyrant—each of them borrowed from Greek by Seneca, but each slightly modified—are handed on to the English drama. The nurse is a feature in five of the ten plays which Elizabethans ascribed to Seneca;⁠[774] in a sixth, Thyestes, there is an attendant on Atreus who hears his secrets and gives advice, while in a seventh, Oedipus, Manto, daughter of the blind Tiresias, fills the office of trusted attendant on her father, like Antigone in the Phoenissae. Such figures are prototypes of the nurse in Romeo and Juliet and the confidante of the French stage. Thyestes’s ghost designed in the Agamemnon to personify a Spirit of Revenge is the ancestor of the murdered Andrea’s ghost in Kyd’s Spanish Tragedie and the ghost of the hero’s father in Hamlet. The ruthless Lycus in Hercules Furens, Medea resolute in her contemplated barbarity, and Atreus openly avowing villainy, are types of character that descend to Elizabethan literature—to Barabas in Marlowe’s Jew of Malta, to Lorenzo in Kyd’s Spanish Tragedie, and to “Crookback the Tyrant” in Shakespeare’s Richard III. There is indeed much that is Senecan—as if we were to fancy that some old Spanish traits in Seneca were being revived—in The Spanish Tragedie, a ghastly medley of blood and thunder, ghosts and horrors. Its lurid description of the road to hell is after the manner of Seneca’s eeriest passages. This aspect is handed on to plays like Titus Andronicus, and persists in Webster’s Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil. Richard III, too, has many Senecan lineaments besides that already mentioned. One of the tragedies of blood, it has a multiplicity of ghosts: it has even a Senecan tendency to that rant from which Shakespeare did much to rescue drama; while [273]the old tones of repartee, subtly developed in Athenian tragedy and transmitted through Seneca to the moderns, ring out in the dialogue between Richard and the Queen Elizabeth in Act IV, Scene iv.

This stichomythia is the chief feature common to the popular playwrights of Shakespearean times and an author who represents a widely divergent line of Senecan tradition—namely, Sir William Alexander, Earl of Stirling. He followed the more classical Seneca, the Seneca of argument, description and apophthegm. Tyrannical wickedness and inflated bombast make room in his plays for discussions and reflections. When Ben Jonson’s Sejanus and Catiline had failed to keep Seneca on the boards of the playhouse, scholars turned to write dramas, as Seneca himself had done, for the study. Independent of popular taste, they were free to copy the quieter, the less wildly romantic, side of Seneca, to restore the chorus, to banish action, and create monuments of unreadable dullness. Works, however, like Alexander’s are interesting contrasts to such dramas of the theatre as displayed Seneca’s influence in almost hypertrophied vitality.

DRAMA OF THE AGE

The Octauia, in 983 lines, is the one surviving Roman historical drama. We have only more or less fragmentary traces of eleven other praetextae—Naevius’s Clastidium and Romulus, Ennius’s Ambracia and Sabinae (if we can be sure these two were plays), Pacuvius’s Paulus, Accius’s Brutus and Decius, Cornelius Balbus’s Iter, and, under the Empire, the Aeneas of Pomponius Secundus and the Domitius and Cato of Curiatius Maternus. It is difficult to see why the traditional ascription of the Octauia to Seneca ever deceived anyone. That Seneca should have introduced himself on the stage is barely credible; but that he, or anyone, should, during Nero’s lifetime, have ventured to portray the emperor as a heartless monster⁠[775] to mother and wife, as well as a vindictive tyrant to his people, is absolutely incredible. It has long been recognized, too, that the dramatic prophecy of Nero’s doom is too circumstantially accurate to have been composed till after the event [274]in A.D. 68; and Seneca had died three years before. The play no doubt recalls his manner. It has a ghost: it has a couple of nurses: it has, like the Agamemnon and Hercules Oetaeus, a couple of choruses: but its doleful repetitions are too many and its epigrams too few for Seneca. Also, the metre, in spite of certain similarities, such as the liking for an anapaest in the fifth foot, shows significant differences; for example, though Seneca was not so careful as the Greek dramatists in linking lines together, he did not allow hiatus and a syllaba anceps at the close of lines nearly so often as the author of the Octauia. This is a further reason, if further reason be needed, for repudiating Seneca’s authorship.⁠[776]⁠

Many conjectures have been made about the date of its composition, which has been put arbitrarily as late as the fourth century, not to speak of the absurd notion that the play was invented ten centuries later. The case for a date early in Domitian’s reign has been argued solemnly⁠[777] with little regard to the likelihood of such a publication under such an emperor. So too critics have cast around for an author and lighted upon Maternus, who, we know, wrote praetextae. These guesses take us nowhere. The most that can be said is that the author is unknown, but that he plainly studied Seneca; and that an extremely probable, because suitable, date is one of the years immediately succeeding Nero’s fall.⁠[778]⁠

The scene is laid in Nero’s palace, and the time is A.D. 62. The play opens with a lyric lament by Nero’s neglected empress, Octavia, who “outwails the sea-bred Halcyons” in her grief over the criminal follies of her dead mother Messalina, and over the wickedness shown by her stepmother Agrippina (now also dead) in poisoning her imperial husband, Claudius, Octavia’s father, and in taking Octavia from her betrothed, Silanus, to marry her to young Nero. To these enormities and to the poisoning of Octavia’s brother, Britannicus, rightful heir to [275]the throne, the melancholy heroine and her nurse repeat their sombre allusions until they cease to be artistically effective. Nero’s barbarity in murdering his mother, mentioned many times and once fully described,⁠[779] and his maltreatment of his wife, leave the unhappy Octavia nothing to hope for but death. On one occasion she is goaded into half a threat, which the nurse, however, unable to take it seriously, answers with scorn:

The nurse, like her mistress, is versed in mythology and endeavours to console Octavia for Nero’s infidelities by relating Jupiter’s misdemeanours as Swan or Bull or Golden Shower. The next choral chant recites a rumour that Nero has decided to espouse a new consort, and in the following episode Seneca enters soliloquizing on the dangers of prosperity, on his own greater safety as an exile “amid the cliffs of the Corsican sea,” and on the deterioration of mankind. Nero arrives blustering angrily and issuing orders to his prefect for two executions. Seneca’s vain appeal for clemency is succeeded by his equally vain expostulation against the projected marriage with the wanton Poppaea. Nero declares his resolution to make the morrow his wedding-day. On his departure, the ghost of his mother appears in order to symbolize the vengeance that must come, and her speech contains the prophecy of Nero’s doom (619-631), on which rests the conviction that the play is later than his death. Another choral ode precedes a scene between Poppaea, distraught by alarming dreams, and her nurse. Then to the chorus of Poppaea’s sympathizers enters a messenger reporting a revolt in favour of Octavia. The emperor reappears, breathing merciless fury and determined to revenge himself on Octavia, who in the final scene is exhibited under an armed [276]guard bound for exile and death. She came with a wail and she goes with a wail.

Although one cannot withhold sympathy from the victim of Nero’s heartlessness, the many feeble repetitions, the tiresome lamentations, and a minimum of incident, make the Octauia unforgivably dull. Even Agrippina’s ghost is unimpressive. If the reader wonders what business mythology has in this particular galley, he must remember the Senecan tradition. But, obviously, mythological lore removes all chance of making a historical drama realistic. It is grotesque when the nurse whitewashes Nero by giving a list of Jupiter’s lapses from connubial rectitude, or when Octavia herself, in railing against her wicked husband, opines that Mother Earth did not produce a worse monster in Typhon. Instead of all this, one would have liked a historical play to stir the feelings with abuse of Nero in good set terms and in plain Latin. And so with pity no less than indignation. If we are to sorrow with Octavia, she must first (as Horace would remind us) sorrow herself—naturally too, not uttering the artificial question, “What nightingale can match with plaints my tears?”⁠[781] But the incubus of learning is sometimes historical as well. The chorus take occasion to cite, as instances of the disastrous results of popular favour, the Gracchi and Livius Drusus, regretting that present grief prevents them from giving additional examples—presumably by ransacking historical or rhetorical manuals like the collection of exempla by Valerius Maximus. More perhaps than any other handicap, such misplaced erudition balks this tragic story in its intended emotional appeal.

The place occupied in the early Empire by fabulae salticae, mimi, pantomimi, and recitations excerpted from standard tragedies or composed for the occasion, has been already touched upon. Literary comedy fared no better than literary tragedy: mimes and Atellan farces had displaced it. The same thing holds good in the next period as in the Neronian age; such a comedy as the younger Pliny tells us⁠[782] he heard Vergilius [277]Romanus reading was modelled on classical lines and stood no chance of winning popularity. The mime, on the other hand, when it sketched ordinary life, had the spice of realism, united sometimes to that wisdom of experience which Seneca recognized as truly philosophic, and which, he suggests, it shared with writers of tragedy and togatae.⁠[783] It is interesting, in this connexion, to note that Afranius’s old togata of “The House on Fire” (Incendium) was played in Nero’s time, truth to life doubtless being enhanced by the permission granted to actors to keep any furniture which they saved from the flames.⁠[784] The Atellan farce had the additional and dangerous spice of veiled jests at exalted personages; but Suetonius gives us to understand that Nero showed surprising indulgence towards offending authors, so that joking allusions to the deaths of Claudius and Agrippina involved no more serious penalty than exile.⁠[785]⁠

The variety of public amusements with which serious drama had to compete may be estimated from several passages in Suetonius’s Life of Nero. It was at best but a spurious drama that found its way to the boards. Nero liked appearing on the stage as a tragic character.⁠[786] The matricide Orestes, the blinded Oedipus, the mad Hercules were parts that appealed to him;⁠[787] and it may be inferred that, like Lucan, he wrote the words to be recited or chanted. The quinquennial contests of the “Neronia,” even if established from vainglorious motives, proved his interest in poetry and music, and stimulated production of a kind. The emperor’s final performance on the stage was in an iambic chant from Oedipus in Exile, a theme similar to that of the opening part of Seneca’s Phoenissae; in this piece, however, Nero used Greek.⁠[788]⁠

Pomponius Secundus, who had made his début as author long before, as already recorded, lived far into Nero’s reign. Whether the riot in the theatre over his carmina⁠[789] in Claudius’s reign implies that he merely wrote verses for actors, or whether he put complete tragedies on the stage, one cannot say. Curiatius [278]Maternus,⁠[790] a famous orator who renounced public life for poetry and whose house is the scene of Tacitus’s Dialogus, had written his first play in Nero’s time. One of his two praetextae, entitled Domitius, was concerned with an ancestor of Nero’s who opposed Julius Caesar and died fighting at Pharsalia. His other historical play, Cato, had just made a great stir in Rome at the time of the Dialogus, A.D. 79-81. Like Seneca he wrote tragedies on the Greek subjects of Medea and Thyestes.

It is clear, then, that, whether or not complete tragedies continued to be represented on the stage, tragic poets at least continued to compose, if only in a dilettante manner. But no real survival of tragedy can be inferred from the shadowy list of names and titles yielded by allusions in Juvenal and Martial⁠[791]⁠—Alcithoe by Paccius, Thebae (or Thebais) and Tereus by Faustus, Atreus by Rubrenus Lappa, Hercules and Hecuba (or Troades) by Scaeva or Scaev(i)us Memor, who belongs to the reign of Domitian. It is one of literature’s little ironies that Memor should be addressed by Martial as “the glory of the Roman buskin” (Romani fama cothurni).

PERSIUS

The essential facts of the short life of Aulus⁠[792] Persius Flaccus are preserved in a biography taken from the commentary on the poet by Valerius Probus. Persius⁠[793] was born at Volaterrae in Etruria, and lived nearly twenty-eight years, from December, A.D. 34, to November, 62. Jerome, who felt attracted to his thought, corroborates both dates on the Abrahamic system of chronology. When about six years old, the boy lost his father, a man of equestrian rank; and his mother, who bore the Etruscan name Sisennia, remarried, but lost her second husband Fusius, a municipal knight, a few years later. It is recorded [280]of the youth that he was of gentle and modest character, good-looking, and affectionate to his female relatives, his mother, sister and aunt. Till he was twelve he was brought up in Etruria; his education at Rome began in A.D. 46. First he studied literature under the able but unprincipled Remmius Palaemon, and, even if temperamentally and morally antipathetic to this famous teacher, Persius would at any rate learn the technique of poetry in a school where the authors specially taught included Terence, Horace and Virgil. Later he worked at rhetoric under Verginius Flavus, whose renown for eloquence earned Nero’s hatred and who was banished at the same time as Musonius Rufus, the Stoic. There is little to support Lehmann’s hypothesis⁠[794] that republican tendencies were conveyed by Verginius to Persius; but at least the rhetorical method, practised though it apparently was by Verginius with some modifications, must have influenced Persius through such features as its search for striking phrases, and its introduction of communes loci. All the same, Persius had been schoolboy enough to play truant from rhetorical exercises, which he found unprofitable and distasteful: a touch of oil might produce an appearance of weak eyes and enable him to shirk the recitation lesson and so avoid declaiming some fine dying speech of Cato. Dice or a top might be preferable to the suasoria.⁠[795]⁠

Among his friends was the lyric poet Caesius Bassus, addressed in his sixth satire, who became his posthumous editor. He respected like a father Servilius Nonianus, ex-consul, orator and historian, who one day by the plaudits of his audience attracted the Emperor Claudius to a reading which he was giving near the Palatine Hill.⁠[796] Persius’s relationship to the younger Arria brought him into touch with the Stoic senator Thrasea, whose Life of Cato was a source for Plutarch, and who, though not in active opposition, wore a look of gravity equivalent to a permanent rebuke for Nero.⁠[797] Neither Thrasea nor Nonianus would necessarily have inculcated upon Persius hatred of the imperial system, and yet one may guess that Thrasea’s conservatism [281]had its influence on his sympathies and tastes. He had composed juvenile verses on the death of the elder Arria; and he mixed in Stoic circles. At sixteen he began a close and uninterrupted friendship with the Stoic teacher Cornutus, and through him became acquainted with two Greek philosophers of the day, Claudius Agathurnus (or Agathemerus) and Petronius Aristocrates, and with the young poet Lucan, like himself one of Cornutus’s pupils. Lucan’s admiration for his friend’s talent was enthusiastic: Persius’s writings, he declared, were genuine poetry, and his own mere sportive pieces (illa esse uera poemata, sua ludos). To Seneca, Lucan’s uncle, Persius was not drawn:⁠[798] the courtier’s pliant and adaptable Stoicism evidently did not commend itself to this young devotee. Literature apart, the most vital influence on Persius came from the intimacy and instruction of Cornutus,⁠[799] to whose philosophic power his pupil’s satires are the best surviving testimony. Cornutus was also a tragic poet, grammarian and author of a commentary on Virgil. Already, no doubt, suspect as a professor of Stoicism, he was banished for the suggestion that Nero’s projected epic on Roman history would be too long in 400 books.

Affectionate gratitude towards his master is one of the winning traits in Persius and adds greatly to the human interest of the fifth satire, which is addressed to him. On quitting boyhood, Persius relates he had been welcomed to “the Socratic bosom” of Cornutus, and had all moral twists straightened by a rule applied with subtle skill:

A few lines later he rejoices in their close union in relaxation and toil:

Persius died of an ailment of the stomach on his estate about eight miles out of Rome along the Appian Way. Possessed of considerable wealth (2,000,000 sesterces), he bequeathed a collection of books, including 700 volumes by the Stoic Chrysippus as well as money and silver plate to Cornutus, who accepted the library but renounced the other legacies in favour of his pupil’s relatives. Persius left only a small amount of literary work, for the Life remarks that he wrote seldom and slowly (scriptitauit et raro et tarde), as might be inferred from his style. His juvenile works included a praetexta, a book of travels⁠[802] (if Hodoeporicon is the true reading in the Vita), and his lines already mentioned on the heroic Arria. All these were, after his death, destroyed by the advice of Cornutus, who made slight corrections on the half-dozen satires before entrusting their publication to Caesius Bassus.

There is much to make Persius an interesting study. He was the first Stoic verse satirist of Rome; he was possessed by a moral earnestness almost preternaturally beyond his years, and died comparatively young; with his one book, as Quintilian [283]remarked,⁠[803] he earned genuine glory; he has throughout the ages attracted some and repelled others; he is undoubtedly difficult to understand, and yet has exerted a great influence on thinkers.

His six satires amount only to 650 hexameters: the shortest (iv.) being 52 lines long, and the longest (v.) 191. None but the first, for which it is said he received stimulus from reading Lucilius, can be strictly called a satire: the other five are “sermons,” rather in the modern than in the Horatian sense. Besides, there have come down fourteen choliambic lines appearing in some MSS. as a prologue, in others as an epilogue. They may well be neither, but the single piece saved from Persius’s other poems—a mock-modest disclaimer of inspiration which need not be taken literally as containing solemn misstatements by the poet about himself.⁠[804]⁠

Satire I, on the right and wrong spirit in current literature, is combined with the important secret (opertum) that everybody is an ass (auriculas asini quis non habet?)—a jocular offgrowth of the Stoic creed that all but the sage adept are fools. This initial attack on the corruption of literature furnished hints for the first satire of Juvenal. Persius in his imagined dialogue with a friend judges decadent literary taste to be a symptom of moral decay, and this stings him to pungent criticisms upon the foppery and ostentation of public recitations by authors who titillate the inward parts of a depraved audience with their licentious poetry. Private dinner-parties end in listening to insipid trash about a Phyllis or a Hypsipyle—but can a host get honest opinions on his poems from his guests? Heroics are attempted by writers who could not describe a simple rural scene, and there is a mania for archaisms and archaic poets, like Accius and Pacuvius.⁠[805] What is the good of artificial oratory and polished antitheses, if there is a plain charge of theft to meet? And surely [284]the manhood of the old Roman past has vanished when poetry apes nerveless stuff like,

The poet’s friend remonstrates: such unpopular truths may win a chilling reception for him in high society. By way of answer, Persius recalls the outspokenness of Lucilius and Horace’s winning pleasantries at the expense of human foibles.⁠[807] Is it sacrilege for Persius to mutter the truth and confide his little whispered secret, this joke of his own (hoc ridere meum), to the safe-keeping of a hole in the earth—“All the world’s got donkey’s ears?” He asks for readers who have drawn an inspiring breath from the masters of the old Greek comedy—Cratinus and Eupolis and the “Grand Old Man” (praegrandi sene) of comic drama, Aristophanes. This satire, then, is a manifesto of literary independence in contrast to the prevailing mode and of censorial independence after the example of Lucilius. The remaining five contain his Stoic message to his generation.

Satire II, on praying aright, is a brief disquisition addressed to a learned friend, Macrinus, on a similar theme to that in Juvenal’s tenth Satire. If Persius cannot rival Juvenal’s brilliant rhetorical skill and force, he at least surpasses him in the impression which he leaves of moral dignity and almost religious fervour. Condensed and scathing in its denunciation of the immorality and foolishness of petitions brazenly offered to the gods though unfit to be overheard by men, the poem rises to a noble elevation at its close upon the spiritual value of true worship:

Satire III, on right living and right thinking, expostulates with laziness which childishly fails to face the serious purposes of life. It opens with a concrete picture of lounging: “already bright morning enters the windows, widening the narrow chinks with light,” and yet we go on snoring off last night’s debauch. Is it not a scandal to pass an unworthy existence like a Natta?—Only, his vice is ingrained hopelessly:

May the Great Sire inflict on monsters of wickedness no other punishment than a revelation of virtue as she is:

Then the poet commends the wisdom derivable from true philosophy in spite of the guffaws of the unsympathetic soldier:

and from the same Stoic system one must learn the way at turning-points in one’s career, the limits of wealth and of desire, the claims of fatherland and kin, and the part God has ordained one to play.

Satire IV, on the right knowledge of oneself, opens with a brief Socratic examination of the claim made by “great Pericles’s ward” (Alcibiades) to guide the state. Of course, wisdom [286]comes before he has a beard! (ante pilos uenit). He ventures to advise the “Quirites” (a Roman touch in what is a Greek situation) on delicate problems of policy, while making mere enjoyment his chief good and having no higher conceptions than those of an old vegetable-woman of the streets (an allusion that recalls the crone in the Satyricon, who was Encolpius’s conductress to a haunt of vice).

and yet the popular estimate of your character is worthless; you must retire within yourself and examine the state of your soul:

Satire V, on the right freedom conferred by Stoic principles, has already been cited for its cordial acknowledgement of the poet’s debt to the guidance of Cornutus. The model on which the whole is based is the seventh satire of Horace’s second book. In contrast to the unity of feeling between himself and Cornutus, Persius notes the variety of aims in the world:

Men will not learn the one true lesson: they are in perpetual quest after a to-morrow which is never reached. What man needs is freedom—not the merely civic sort granted when a Roman praetor turned a slave into a freedman by formal stroke of the rod, but the true freedom guaranteed by moral reason:

Without reason, which enables a man to distinguish good from bad, his every act is sin (one of the hard sayings typical of orthodox Stoicism):

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And so, if you have passions within that master you, or if you feel the rival claims of avarice and luxury, then you are a slave. The two hooks pull opposite ways. If you escape once, you may still drag your chain. The truly free man is he who can inhibit himself from an evil impulse and disentangle himself from weaknesses like ambition or superstition.

Satire VI, on the right use of wealth, is not so decidedly a Stoic homily as its four predecessors. Wintering at Luna on the Ligurian coast by the Tuscan Sea (meum mare), Persius addresses to Caesius Bassus his claim to spend money on reasonable objects, supporting it by an argument with a supposed heir who desires to have the fortune saved intact. The statement by the biographer that some lines were removed from the last book (uersus aliqui dempti sunt ultimo libro) is best understood to imply that this final satire is incomplete.⁠[817]⁠

The subject of the sources of Persius is one of considerable complexity. His material was largely provided by his education, associates, and his own tastes. Stoic by training and conviction, he was more orthodox and more dogmatic than most Romans, and so took over and restated with scant argument some of the extreme paradoxes of the School. His studies under rhetoricians who preferred the classic Augustan models account for the opposition which he displays in his first satire to the revived Alexandrinism of Rome, and for his borrowings from Virgil, and beyond all others from Horace. Along with Horace he adopted for imitation Horace’s outspoken master in satire, Lucilius.⁠[818] His Horatian debts are visible everywhere, in [288]reminiscent word or phrase or idea, all retaining the mark of their origin despite Persius’s inveterate habit of contorted involution, which of set purpose departs from Horace’s clear straightforwardness. Thus, the simple rule of pathos in the Ars Poetica, “If you would have me weep, you must yourself grieve first,” is by Persius elaborated into

The reappearance of Horatian names gives an added effect of imitation, e.g. Pedius (i. 85), Nerius (ii. 14), Natta (iii. 31), Craterus (iii. 65), Bestius (vi. 37). Even a partial consideration of Persius’s sources shows that his aim was to express Stoic thought in language largely Horatian—a tour de force bound to fall short of perfect success; for no writer could hope to wed the suppleness of Horace to Stoic rigidity. Jahn emphasized the influence of the mime on Persius in addition to that of Horace; and there is a possibility that the dramatic realism of mime-writers like Sophron acted on the satires.⁠[820] To these must be added the influences of rhetoric and of the Cynico-stoical disputations. Rhetoric accounts for many of the diverse elements in his style, such as literary reminiscence, academic common-place, and argumentative artifice. Stoic preaching, which had for long been abandoned either to professional orators or to popular speakers, was now brought by Persius into literature. He might easily have imbibed the style of the Stoic diatribe (διατριβή), or polemic disputation, from Cornutus; and at Thrasea’s house he could have heard expositions by a Stoic like Musonius or by a Cynic like Demetrius.⁠[821] Cynic inspiration had already operated on Roman literature [289]through Varro’s Menippean satires, and Horace alludes to the bitter wit of Bion.⁠[822] The Bionean diatribe, given to blending learned argument with forceful words from popular speech, was likely to win attention from a writer fired, like Persius, almost to proselytizing ardour; and Greek Cynic literature had itself inherited and in turn bequeathed elements from Socratic dialogue and drama and rhetoric which contributed to the vigorous presentation of a philosophical argument. Just as the argumentative manner of certain of St. Paul’s epistles is affected by the Stoic diatribe, so Persius keeps up a similar tradition when he develops a theme by answering an objector implied or definitely introduced.⁠[823]⁠

Worked on by influences thus complex, enamoured of condensation, of allusiveness, of subtle borrowings, jerky in his management of dialogue so that a change of speaker is sometimes difficult to detect, Persius developed a crabbed manner of expression which makes him the hardest of Latin poets to read. Enjoyment is apt to vanish amidst the toil of disentanglement. Conscious as he was of the mission to proclaim salutary truths, he yet seems to have forgotten the effective force of clearness, and his curiously laboured style is certainly not that of the Cynico-stoic disquisition. The failure to support by connected argument dogmatic tenets, in themselves possibly intelligible enough, and the departure from a logical order of thought in the structure of some satires further contribute to his obscurity. Strictures upon him date from ancient times. Johannes Lydus, whose record of Persius’s imitation of Sophron, though challenged, has some facts in its favour, added that Persius surpassed the obscurity of Lycophron.⁠[824] In the time of Louis XIV Nicolas Chorier in his Aloisia imagined a letter apostrophizing Persius: “You wrapped yourself in blind night.... You did not want to be understood, perchance you too did not [290]understand!... You lurked inside yourself, lest the painstaking sagacity of learning might discover you. You were your own envelope.”⁠[825]⁠

The obscurity often lies in expression. A notoriously difficult line occurs at iv. 49.

which, even supposing it is to be translated “if craftily you scourge the exchange with many a lash,” still leaves the sense cryptic. Excessive compression may prove puzzling, as “While I pluck forth old grandams from your breast,”⁠[826] meaning “grandmotherly notions”; or, on testing the true meaning of applause, “Shake out thoroughly all this ‘bravo!’ (belle hoc excute totum); what does it not hold inside?” Another example turns on Janus’s luck in having two faces so that he cannot be mocked behind his back by imitation of a stork’s bill, or of the ears of an ass, or by shooting out the tongue:

where strangely enough the essential key-notions of mockery and of putting out the tongue are omitted. Occasionally an idiom may pull the reader up, for example his liking for infinitives in substantival meanings.⁠[828] Thus it is not at first obvious either to readers or commentators that iratus mammae lallare recusas is intended to signify “pettishly refuse your nurse’s lullaby.” Elsewhere the difficulty may lie in the disconnected course of his thought and the suddenness of his transitions; so that one is kept on the alert by what is no light reading for tired heads.

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There are, however, compensations. The test is whether under a cloud of difficulties there remains something real and sincere. Immediate delight is not obtainable from Persius: there are no flights of pleasant fancy, no ideal scenes, no passages of sheer beauty; and, if the reader is transported to no ideal world, he may be tempted to doubt—some critics have doubted—whether the world of the young satirist is a real world, whether his exposure of human weakness smacks more of Stoic books than of actual life. Persius did not write for the crowd: he in particular does not yield his secret except to the intimacy and sympathy of a thinking mind. His very obscurity is a fruit of a half-cloistered delicacy which shrank from revealing itself in ordinary modes of expression, and therefore adopted a composite style in which Lucilius and Horace, the mime and the argumentative Stoic diatribe are all ingredients. At the same time there has too often been a disposition to regard him mainly as a youthful zealot, fanatically fervent in his Stoicism, who had not mixed with his fellow-men. Sometimes it is forgotten that while he can be provokingly obscure, he can also be vivid, and, though his range is not wide, can show a power of observing life around him.

Among his sketches memorable for realism are those of the affected reciter;⁠[829] the laziness of the debauchee snoring as the sunshine pours through the shutter-chinks and the shadow touches the fifth line of the sun-dial;⁠[830] the fretful struggle to get to work with book and ink and pen;⁠[831] the truant’s games;⁠[832] the centurion’s idea of philosophers as

a national holiday on the occasion of a victory over the Germans;⁠[834] a shipwrecked friend who

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or the funeral of a Roman master by whose last will and testament his favourite slaves have been emancipated:

Vigour also characterizes his metaphors. A warning against offending high society by outspokenness is given thus:

A kindred vigour produces violent expressions like “purveying titbits for other people’s ears” (auriculis alienis colligis escas), or the forcible personification of money spent on costly sacrifices in an unrewarded pursuit after wealth:

A passage in the fifth satire⁠[839] is illuminating as to Persius’s own opinion of his style. There Cornutus is imagined to tell the poet that his forte lies not in mouthing high-flown tragedy, nor in foolish cawing (cornicaris) of mysterious nonsense, nor in straining his puffed cheeks with rhetoric till they go bang with a pop,⁠[840] but, as he declares in Latin words which intentionally echo Horace, “Nay, you follow the language of ordinary life, dexterous in the subtlety of your phrase-making” (iunctura callidus acri); or, in other terms, it was for Persius to cultivate plain satire instead of dramatizing any mythological supper of horrors. The words iunctura callidus acri provide a clue both to his merits and to his defects; for his phrase-making, at times strikingly successful, at other times overleaps itself and becomes one factor in his Browningesque obscurity.

The ring of Persius’s hexameters differs from that of Horace’s, which were constructed without regard to the high-sounding [293]epic tradition and designedly lowered in tone to suit the half-conversational character of his sermones. It is natural that Persius, who interpreted his Stoic message as lofty and severe, should not write with so easy a movement, but should adopt a more mechanical structure and more conventional cadence. There is in Persius a smaller number of spondaic words, a different management of caesurae, and a rarer use of monosyllabic endings; but, like Horace, he freely admits elision, and so presents a contrast with one of the features of the hexameters parodied in his first satire, as well as of the contemporary verse of Calpurnius Siculus, of the Einsiedeln eclogues and of the Laus Pisonis.

A hypothesis maintained with different degrees of detail by different commentators would make Persius not merely a mouthpiece of Stoicism but a political satirist who ventured to assail Nero. In the Vita a closing paragraph of unsettled authenticity affirms that in his fulminations against the modern school of literature he included an attack on the emperor.⁠[841] This contained the expression auriculas asini Mida rex habet, which Cornutus altered for safety to auriculas asini quis non habet? to prevent Nero from thinking he was aimed at. Then the scholia gave varying accounts of the source of the hexameters in the first satire at which Persius jests, but one view was that they were Nero’s; and so ancient commentators began to see throughout the satire a series of allusions to the emperor. Casaubon maintained that in Satire IV Alcibiades, the would-be statesman, stands for Nero, and though Jahn does not follow him here, as he does regarding Satire I, Casaubon has had supporters in Pretor and others.⁠[842] Lehmann has gone further. He has claimed to find covert but stinging allusions to Nero in Satire V, the very satire which to most readers must appear remarkable in that, while it handles freedom, it avoids all political aspects of the question. The more the hypothesis grows by accretion of hitherto unrecognized allusions, the weaker [294]it seems. Why should Nero alone be attacked? Why should the author have been so unphilosophical as to single out for constant censure an individual when all the world fell far short of Stoic perfection? Might not Persius well remember that Horace, his model, left politics on one side? And are we to be asked to believe that Cornutus took the trouble to alter the words “King Midas” to avoid giving possible offence to the emperor, and yet left in the text not merely copious hits at his Majesty more or less veiled, but actually lines of Nero’s own composition of which the satirist made fun?

Opinions have varied greatly concerning Persius. His fellow-student Lucan, as already mentioned, praised him whole-heartedly, and his satires on publication won immediate esteem.⁠[843] He was popular with the Fathers of the Church for his strong advocacy of virtue and his anima naturaliter Christiana, and he has attracted enthusiastic commentators since the days of Valerius Probus in his own century. Isaac Casaubon wrote of his own unsparing labours on him: in Persio omnem ingenii conatum effudimus. On the other hand, Joseph Scaliger remarked sarcastically about that same commentary: au Perse de Casaubon la saulce vaut mieux que le poisson. It is common literary knowledge that he left his mark on Rabelais and Montaigne, on Ben Jonson and Boileau, which argues in him something deeper than what Nisard saw—the knack of reproducing servilely in verse ready-made philosophical ideas. Simcox thinks he improves upon every reading, and a French editor⁠[844] declares je quitte Perse avec un sincère regret et comme on quitte un vieil ami; whereas a German scholar is delighted to lay him down: mit Freuden legen wir den Dichter aus der Händen,⁠[845] and another writer discovers in the satires a sea of darkness.⁠[846] It may be a half-cynical suggestion that editors come to love Persius in proportion to the toil which he has cost them, but one may fairly take leave to doubt whether an exponent of doctrines with which he hopes to better his fellowmen is [295]justified in being so far from plain. It is true that a recent editor sought to acquit him of obscurity, arguing that he is difficult but not obscure.⁠[847] Most students will hold that he is both, and that it must be largely a matter of disposition whether a reader will resent or not the trouble involved. Even that very earnestness in preaching morality which has gained him champions may appear to others the priggishness of a bookish young recluse. Still, in justice to Persius, it should be remembered that his lack of knowledge of the world may be easily overstated: his very education in rhetoric would open his eyes to evil; he had travelled; and many of his pictures show that he had observed life.

Persius set himself the task of presenting Stoic homilies in Horatian guise—a task perhaps harder, perhaps involving more incompatible elements even than that which Lucretius undertook when he wedded Epicureanism to the heroic hexameter. But whatever their obstacles, Lucretius attained his goal triumphantly, whereas Persius cannot be said to have won that perfect mastery over form and material which begets the greatest literature. Yet, obscurities notwithstanding, his voice has influenced the world and its thinkers; for it has at least been understood that there breathes through Persius no light-hearted complaisance with the frivolities of life, but a stern urgency always beckoning towards an austere ideal.

LUCAN

Precocity and enthusiasm were eminent characteristics of the young poet who first throve under Nero’s favour and finally succumbed to that emperor’s jealousy. Byron, dying at thirty-six, is reckoned a fertile genius; but when Lucan had to face death at an age earlier by more than ten years, there stood to his credit an almost equally wonderful mass of work—letters and speeches, epic and drama, miscellaneous verse, court-poetry, panegyrics and satires, as well as librettos for mimes. Of all these, however, time has spared only his Pharsalia, broken off in the tenth book. The determining factors in his career were his descent from two prominent Spanish families and his rhetorical education; for upon these depended the success and failure of his life, and the main qualities of his thought and style.

Lucan’s maternal grandfather was Acilius Lucanus, a Corduban speaker of note. His paternal grandfather was the elder Seneca, well known to Roman literary circles in the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius; his father was Annaeus Mela, an eques, apparently something of a philosophic recluse,⁠[848] while his uncles were M. Annaeus Novatus (the “Gallio” of the Acts of the Apostles) and the philosopher L. Annaeus Seneca. To the latter he owed his introduction to court-life, which [297]proved an incentive to brilliant achievement but ultimately compassed his ruin.

While the impersonality of epic precludes the Pharsalia from yielding details about Lucan’s life, yet from it alone sure influences could be drawn as to his training in literature, rhetoric and philosophy, his anti-Caesarism, his self-confident and impetuous spirit. We are not, however, without definite biographical sources. There are two lives of importance, one imperfect and inimical, manifestly the basis of Jerome’s entry⁠[849] regarding the death of Lucan, and, since the days of Joseph Scaliger, concluded with justice to come from Suetonius’s De uiris illustribus; and the other life a fuller and appreciative one, assigned to Vacca, a grammarian of the sixth century. Statius and Martial were admirers of Lucan and joined with his widow Polla in keeping his memory green; hence the Genethliacon Lucani of the former and several short pieces by the latter poet supply additional information.⁠[850] The record of Lucan’s connexion with the Pisonian conspiracy is in Tacitus, who also in the Dialogus ranks Lucan as already a classic alongside of Horace and Virgil.⁠[851]⁠

M. Annaeus Lucanus⁠[852] (A.D. 39-65) was born, about the [298]year of his grandfather Seneca’s death, at the “Patrician Colony” of Corduba, itself for generations a centre of intellectual importance in Spain. The infant, when eight months old, was brought to Rome; for it was natural that his father Mela should migrate in response to the lure of the great city, where already his own father and brother had made their mark. Later, there are interesting references by the philosopher Seneca to the child. In the Consolatio addressed to his mother Helvia he writes about a nephew, who must be Lucan, as a winning boy whose merry playfulness and talkativeness would keep anyone amused (ad cuius conspectum nulla potest durare tristitia ... cuius non lacrimas illius hilaritas supprimat?)⁠[853] and an epigram of his prays that one day this prattling child (dulci Marcus qui nunc sermone fritinnit) may rival his uncles in eloquence.⁠[854] His education under the best teachers was directed towards the realization of that very wish. Grounded in literature and in the traditionally wide range of learning subsidiary to “grammar,” he proceeded in due course to the study of rhetoric and philosophy. His declamations in Latin and Greek were of astonishing ability, eclipsing the efforts of his fellow-students, if not of his masters, and commanding the applause of his hearers. Such brilliance was at once a result and a cause of self-confidence: and the habitual desire to win attention confirmed him in many artificial conceits inseparable from the rhetorical system. Some philosophy he derived from his uncle; but he had at least one other famous Stoic teacher in Cornutus, at whose lectures, if we may trust Probus, he met Persius.⁠[855] For Persius’s poetry [299]Lucan expressed cordial admiration—a noticeable tribute from one whose precocious fertility had led him to compare himself favourably with Virgil.⁠[856]⁠

Quite early in his reign⁠[857] Nero had his attention drawn by Seneca to a nephew so talented. Little is known precisely regarding the development of his relations with the emperor; but we read of a visit paid to Athens from which Nero recalled him to join his entourage, and of honours conferred, such as the quaestorship before the regular age of twenty-five, and an augural priesthood. In A.D. 60, when twenty-one, he achieved his first public literary triumph in his Laudes Neronis at the quinquennial festival of the Neronia, then newly established, and at this date Nero and his youthful panegyrist were evidently on the best of terms. But Lucan’s position became insecure as Nero’s dislike for Seneca grew pronounced. It was perilous to vie with a clever and conceited imperial egotist prone to arrogate a principate in arts as well as in state, and an award of the prize to Lucan in a competition where he had the hardihood to enter against Nero rankled in the ruler’s heart. Suetonius implies that the final breach arose from Lucan’s sensitive fancy that Nero’s attitude towards his recitations was deliberately insulting, and from the poet’s unbecoming ridicule of the emperor’s verses. Vacca ascribes the quarrel to Nero’s jealousy of Lucan’s powers, and declares that he was forbidden further poetical production or forensic pleading. Thus silenced, except for covert satire, his passionate and wounded genius was driven into the bypaths of Piso’s conspiracy, in which he took a prominent part,⁠[858] indulging, according to Suetonius, in ferocious threats against the tyrant and in rapturous praises of tyrannicide. When, however, this over-ripened intrigue was unmasked, disaster revealed the weakness of his character; for, oblivious of his professed Stoicism, he descended to abject entreaties, and, in anxiety to save his life, made confessions involving among his accomplices his apparently innocent mother. That at least [300]is what Suetonius records.⁠[859] But pusillanimity did not capture Nero’s indulgence. Lucan was ordered to die; and after a sumptuous repast had his veins opened. Then he recollected, and recited as his last words, a piece of his own about a soldier similarly bleeding to death. This dying quotation, although Tacitus’s words⁠[860] might very well suggest that it belonged to a separate poem, has been sought for in three⁠[861] different places in the Pharsalia, and by some⁠[862] identified with a passage from the ninth book:

Thus, when “the mad despot’s crime” (rabidi nefas tyranni) cut short the poet’s career, his epic was incomplete and only in part published. “Why doth cruel allotment debar greatness from old age?” asks Statius in his tribute to Lucan’s memory.⁠[863]⁠

Thirteen of Lucan’s lost works were known to Vacca, and five of these are alluded to by Statius, who adds the Adlocutio ad Pollam.⁠[864] Suetonius, who confirms the other two authorities regarding the Laudes Neronis, mentions also a lampoon on Nero. The sagacious Vacca is clear that his thirteen are minor works compared with the epic on the civil war, but still “not all to be disdained”;⁠[865] and one might guess that the most important are those common to Vacca and Statius—the Iliacon from the Trojan cycle, the Catachthonion, a descent into the underworld, the Laudes Neronis, and the Orpheus. Naturally, although in all likelihood less important, the Adlocutio to Lucan’s wife Polla [301]is mentioned by Statius in his poem addressed to her in widowhood; but we do not know whether it was in prose or verse, unless its inclusion immediately after the De Incendio Vrbis, the one prose composition in Statius’s list, raises a presumption that it likewise was in prose. The remaining items in Vacca’s list are the Saturnalia, on the gaieties of December,⁠[866] ten books of miscellaneous Siluae, the unfinished tragedy of Medea, fourteen Salticae Fabulae,⁠[867] Epigrammata;⁠[868] and in prose (besides his account of the Great Fire at Rome) a series of Epistulae ex Campania (which, if they had survived, ought to have proved a fascinating addition to our specimens of ancient letter-writing) as well as a speech for and one against Octavius Sagitta. These orationes suggest that Lucan in A.D. 58, perhaps filled with the detective instinct characteristic of not a few literary men, seized upon one of the most exciting murder trials of the day⁠[869] as material for two clever rhetorical show-pieces in proof of what a versatile genius could say on both sides of a case complicated by cross-swearing and by an innocent freedman’s self-accusation.

The number of these works would be reduced by one on the suggestion which has been made⁠[870] that the Catachthonion and Orpheus may be identical. But this seems impossible. True, both concern the underworld and are in hexameters;⁠[871] but Statius makes separate allusions to them, and they are mentioned at different points in the Life by Vacca in the sixth century, when Lucan’s works were, as his words imply, still extant.

The ten books of the Pharsalia,⁠[872] on the war which broke out in 49 B.C. between Caesar and Pompey, amount to over 8000 hexameters, but do not complete the poet’s design; for the tenth [302]book, about 150 lines shorter than the next shortest, ends abruptly, leaving Caesar at war in Egypt.

Book I, though in many respects powerful, might have had more epic force, had it plunged at once into the narrative. As it is, the action is delayed by the announcement of the theme, a remonstrance on the iniquity of civil warfare, the comforting reflection that but for that warfare Rome would have had no Nero, the fantastic picture of the emperor as a god, and a fawning address to him as sufficient inspiration for the poet without need to invoke Apollo or Bacchus. The ensuing sketch of the causes of strife omits the burning question between the Senate and Caesar concerning Caesar’s command, but contains a vivid glance at the motives and characters of the two protagonists, spurred by rival claims (stimulos dedit aemula uirtus):

Referring to Pompey’s lack of recent campaigning, Lucan unduly stresses his advanced age.⁠[874] Now a man of 58, he was only six years older than his opponent, and, as Lucan more than once reminds us, had become Caesar’s son-in-law by marrying Julia, whose death rendered the breach between them more likely. In Pompey the poet, warmly though he espouses his cause, discerns a man over-confident in his previous record, who

The contrasting figure of Caesar is drawn with force, though not with sympathy:

[303]

Strict narrative begins with Caesar’s passage of the Alps (l. 183), bringing his big plans to the small river Rubicon—the antithesis in adjectives is Lucan’s—to be confronted with the majestic image of his native country protesting against further advance:

The Rubicon crossed, Ariminum is taken; Caesar is met by Curio and other tribunes expelled from Rome. A summons sent for troops from Gaul gives occasion for digressions on Gallic tribes, tides and Druids: then a description of panic in Rome at Caesar’s approach leads to the introduction of prodigies and expiatory rites. The book ends gloomily amidst presages of disaster. Lucan, it will be noted, while he removes from his historical poem the conventional gods of epic, supplies their place by the supernatural, as represented here by the symbolic figure of Roma, by portents, and by the prophetic second sight [304]of both an astrologer and a matron so weirdly possessed that she has power to behold Pompey already lying dead.

A hesitant note of philosophy opens Book II. Stoics were perpetually confronted with the problem of reconciling belief in fate with divination. Why, asks Lucan, is man allowed knowledge of future woes through omens? Then, with a transient departure from Stoic dogmatism, he speculates on the operation of cause in the world. Is it the outcome of law or chance? Yet he clinches this old debate with the Epicureans by uttering the prayer,

Mourning, as at a death, falls on Rome: men pray for the peril of foreign attack in preference to internecine strife. It is a passage typically rhetorical in the tumid declamation of its earlier portion and the argumentative point of its close:

The chief incidents of the book are the remarriage to Cato of his former wife, Marcia, widow of Hortensius; the resistance to Caesar offered by Domitius (pointedly introduced because an [305]ancestor of Nero) and the driving of Pompey southwards to Brundisium and thence overseas to Epirus. What Heitland frankly calls “padding” consists in digressions on the civil wars between Marius and Sulla and on the rivers of Italy. The figure of Cato is of significance in relation to Book IX, where he plays a commanding part. In Lucan’s eyes Cato is the incarnation of virtue, hitherto guiltless of his country’s blood, but now, as Brutus tells him, drawn perforce into the struggle:

Full of admiration for Cato’s ascetic ordering of his life, the poet proudly depicts his Stoic ability to combine a self-sufficing virtue with altruistic claims,

Book III, mainly concerned with Caesar’s doings on his return to Rome and during his siege of Massilia, is impoverished by a wearisome list of Pompey’s eastern allies and an incessant series of too ingeniously horrible deaths which befall the combatants. But among compensating passages are the descriptions of Pompey’s farewell to Italy and of the eerie forest near Massilia. The former opens the book with a note of poetry and pathos:

The second passage, a study in the sombre touched with the spirit of Celtic romance, describes the grove of the Druids. Here we are in a haunted twilight wood, polluted with inhuman rites, shunned by bird and beast as by sylvan deities, and though windless yet aquiver with a mysterious thrill in its leaves (arboribus suus horror inest)—a forest of black waters and misshapen images of eldritch gods, awesome through a wan aspect of decay and nameless terrors, where caverns resound with the rumble of the earthquake, where the hewn death-yew comes to life again, where flame plays among branches that do not burn and serpents hold the oak in their embrace.⁠[883]⁠

Three episodes constitute most of the action in Book IV—Caesar’s Spanish operations against Afranius and Petreius near Ilerda; the failure of one of three Caesarian rafts to escape the Pompeian blockade in Illyria; and the descent of Curio, in Caesar’s interest, upon Africa, when he is defeated by Juba and meets death. The pangs of thirst suffered by Pompeians in Spain prompt one of Lucan’s denunciations of luxury,⁠[884] while the counsel of Volteius to his men on the trapped raft that they must slay each other rather than surrender is argued in the overstrained manner of the schools, and is an ingenious combination of special pleading and boastfulness. When the crew carry out their dreadful compact of mutual slaughter, like the offspring of the teeth of mythical dragons, characteristic realism is indulged in to describe the crawling writhing bleeding agony of the lacerated men. But this virtual suicide closes in a reflection that consoled many of Nero’s subjects as well as Lucan—death is a ready way of eluding tyranny. Here it is still the Stoic who speaks; for Stoicism, while recognizing the [307]theoretical obliquity of suicide, admitted that it was in certain circumstances defensible:

The African expedition suggests the single long deviation of this book on the legend of the earth-born Antaeus strangled by Hercules. Curio’s soliloquy before battle reflects his not unnatural nervousness as commander of soldiers who had become Caesarians only by surrendering at Corfinium:

The apostrophe to Curio after his death leads up to the familiar line which implies that his desertion to Caesar’s side turned the scale of history:

Though Book V opens in Epirus with the assembly of the Senate friendly to Pompey and closes with his decision to send his wife Cornelia for safety to Lesbos, yet Caesar is the dominant figure, especially when he cows the mutineers (who express their grievances with pointed rhetoric), and recrosses the Adriatic [308]in a small boat on a tempestuous night to bring Antony to his aid. The action is delayed by a digression of about 150 lines on the Delphic Oracle consulted by Appius.

Caesar’s will-power is well brought out in his defiant braving of the storm despite the fisherman’s warning. He is content to have Fortune for his sole attendant (sola placet Fortuna comes) in crossing the sea to ensure the transport of his troops from Italy; for

But the storm proves an irresistible temptation to Lucan. Having exhausted his list of contending winds, he turns to hyperbole—mountains long buffeted in vain now at last succumb, and portentous waves new to those seas roll in from the encircling ocean. Next he elaborates the description by a resort to mythology. Much more human, however, is the concluding episode, in which Pompey, deeply affected, can scarcely bring himself to tell his wife that for her safety they must part:

Overloaded with digressions, besides detail of Caesar’s scheme to enclose his enemy at Dyrrachium, and hyperbolical praise of the centurion Scaeva’s repulse of Pompey’s attempt to break through, Book VI is not on the whole successful. The [309]plan to construct gigantic lines of investment is at first as little grasped by Pompey

In time, he is driven to counter-movements, and would have made a victorious sortie but for the prowess of one outstanding Caesarian, on whom, with incredible exaggeration, the whole fighting is made to concentrate. This champion is not to be dislodged save by a war-engine; he bristles with a thick forest of missiles in his chest; he offers the resistance of an African elephant; and, tearing out his eyeball along with the arrow which pierced it,

This and much more is neither poetry nor common sense. The rest mainly concerns the temporary discomfiture of Caesar, who retires upon Thessaly followed by Pompey. If only Pompey had been a Sulla, reflects Lucan, and had used his advantage for an immediate descent upon Rome, there would have been no Pharsalia. The mention of Thessaly is responsible for digressions on geography and magic; and, though the wizardry and witches of Thessaly appear more convincing in the pages of Apuleius, yet Lucan, when he leaves off cataloguing the astounding potency of Thessalian enchantments over love, weather, rivers, mountains and laws of the universe, does achieve an effect of gruesome diablerie through Sextus Pompey’s morbid longing to learn the future, not from oracles but, like Saul at Endor, from necromancy. After he and his attendants have made their way past ruined tombs towards the sunless and hell-like cavern when the sorceress Erichtho sits crooning her malignant spells, he holds a midnight séance with the hag. Conceding his request, she scares off birds and beasts of prey from the battle-field, and selects a fallen warrior to be revivified by loathsome ingredients and eerie incantations for the purpose of revealing prophetic messages from the other world. The revelation is that the shades await both Sextus’s father and his house; [310]Caesar’s daring, on the other hand, delights the spirits of dead Roman revolutionaries, but his triumph will be short. With such ominous responses Sextus returns to his father’s camp before daybreak.

Book VII is not free from turgidity and extravagance, but it is the greatest book of the poem, and describes the feelings of both rivals before Pharsalia as well as their fortunes in the culminating battle. With an outburst of enthusiasm, Lucan predicts the enduring power of his subject to engross readers:

In the famous passage on Pompey’s dream, he is fancied to be once more receiving the plaudits of the Roman people in his own theatre:

He awakes to realities. The Pompeians clamour for the fray and criticize their leader’s caution:

Unhistorically Cicero, who was not present, is introduced as urging him to give battle. He consents under protest and his men have their will; but

Amidst other presages of disaster, Lucan’s bias insinuates that Caesar sacrificed to the infernal powers. The harangue to his [311]followers is, some of it plausible argument, some of it rhodomontade, but, by reason of its vigour, all very readable. Observing the disposition of Pompey’s troops (Lucan’s account of which does not agree with that of other authorities), and seeing his wish fulfilled in the enemy’s descent upon the plain, Caesar confidently addresses his soldiers as the true arbiters of his destiny:

and continuing his alliterative rhetoric:

With corresponding alliteration, and not without bravado, Pompey’s speech to his army expresses his reasons for confidence:

But in vain. Tyranny, in Lucan’s view, was triumphant at Pharsalia. Why did Rome ever know freedom, if she was to lose it?⁠[898] Surely, the gods’ apathy had led through civil warfare to the creation of new deities and a new religion in emperor-worship!⁠[899] Refraining from details of individual horrors on the battle-field, Lucan contrasts the fugitive Pompey looking back upon lost greatness with Caesar, whose adversary is henceforward not Pompey but freedom,⁠[900] and who to discerning eyes might well be an object of pity—“’twas worse to win” (uincere peius erat). The picture of the conqueror is not flattering. According to Lucan, Caesar encouraged his men to plunder, was leader of the really guilty side, was hunted Orestes-like by avenging furies, callously surveyed the dead, and withheld from the rotting corpses that cremation which would not be refused (and here a piece of far-fetched Stoicism is dragged in) by the universal conflagration at the end of the world.

The main interest of Book VIII lies in Pompey’s flight to Egypt and his murder as he is about to land: it is broken by [312]reflections on and apostrophes to both Egypt and Pompey. A prey to nervous fears, alarmed at the rustle of woodland leaves in the wind,⁠[901] the defeated warrior escapes in a frail craft to Lesbos, where he endeavours to console his swooning wife:

He sets sail with her in anxiety great enough to make unnatural his converse with the pilot upon astronomy. By the Levant he reaches Cilicia, the scene of his old victories over piracy, and holds council with his remaining supporters on the policy, cunning but unprincipled, of playing East against West. Why not entangle and weaken Parthia by inducing her to fight in Rome’s civil wars? This proposal of Pompey’s is scouted as dishonourable by Lentulus—why not rather, he argues, keep the conflict within the Roman world, and try Egypt, whose King, Ptolemy, owed his throne indirectly to Pompey? So he sails to meet the death prepared for him by Ptolemy’s cynical adviser Pothinus, whose contention is that expediency must be preferred to right and that it is wisdom to side with the conqueror:

In the offing at Pelusium, overmastering fate secured that Pompey should be enticed from his high-sterned vessel into a small boat, where, within sight of wife and son, he was stabbed by the traitor Septimius. Achillas, that “Pharian satellite,” claimed the right to carry the victim’s head to the young king. Having noted the majesty of Pompey’s looks as preserved in death, Lucan yields to his besetting passion for realism and spoils the pathos of the scene. Instead of Virgil’s dignity of sorrow, or beauty of simile, we have the repulsive details of the still gasping mouth and the drooping neck laid cross-wise on a boat-thwart to be hacked through; there are sinews and veins [313]to cut; there are bones to break; it all takes time (diu); for the art of whirling off the head at a single blow, Lucan remarks (with his thoughts perhaps on Caligula), had yet to be developed—nondum artis erat caput ense rotare.⁠[904] Such realism is rendered superfluous by what follows:

The headless body is recovered from the sea in the moonlight by Cordus, one of Pompey’s Roman attendants, and, after an incomplete cremation, for which the material has to be supplied by the somewhat ludicrous device of theft from a conveniently deserted funeral pile, it is buried hastily; for the dawn has surprised Cordus at his ceremonial. But the lonely grave on the beach cannot confine one so illustrious:

Imprecations upon Egypt follow—futile, because Lucan’s curse of barrenness, if it could have been fulfilled, would have closed the chief granary of Rome. With further wild rhetoric on the burial-place the book ends.

Pompey’s apotheosis begins Book IX:

The lamentations of Cornelia, her announcement of her husband’s injunction that unceasing war must be waged for [314]liberty against Caesar, the vengeance on Egypt threatened by Pompey’s elder son when he learns of his father’s murder, and Cato’s dignified praise of the dead leader are preliminary to the chief theme of the book—the heroism of Cato. He will have none of the argument that continuance of war is criminal, now that Pompey is dead. Expostulating with reluctant Pompeians, he sarcastically declares that Caesar will believe they did him an intentional benefit by running before him at Pharsalia—here and in other passages erroneously called Philippi. As their next objective is Juba’s kingdom, Lucan is enabled to describe the treacherous quicksands of the Syrtes, a storm that imperils Cato’s fleet, and the swamps of Triton which most of the ships reach in safety. The resolution to march across the desert to Mauretania occasions a digression on Libya as well as passages recounting Cato’s marvellous endurance⁠[906] of thirst, and his refusal to consult the oracle of Hammon (whose misplacement is one of the not uncommon geographical blunders in Lucan). Labienus would have the will of Jupiter ascertained by this austere captain of men:

Cato, however, in tones worthy of the oracle itself, scouts the idea, criticizing it on Stoic principles:

[315]

Cato’s inspiring fortitude during the march with his soldiers is almost smothered beneath the mass of irrelevance expounding the origin of serpents in Africa, and catalogues enumerating not only various species of serpents but also various sorts of death from snake-bite. Late in the book Caesar reappears on a voyage which brings him to the ruins of Troy; and Lucan’s confidence in his own literary immortality prompts an apostrophe to poetry as conferring eternal renown:

Caesar’s veneration of his ancestral gods at Troy would have received more sympathetic treatment from Virgil. Lucan is content to record his coasting voyage along Asia Minor and his crossing by Rhodes to Egypt, where, amidst his hesitation whether to land, one of Ptolemy’s courtiers comes aboardship with the head of Pompey. To Lucan his grief over his rival’s murder is hypocrisy: now that he had ocular proof of the crime and thought it safe to be a good father-in-law (tutumque putauit iam bonus esse socer),

Book X, on Caesar in Egypt, would fit better into an epic on the mighty Julius himself than into the Pharsalia. Yet it has energy, in spite of a divagation on Alexander the Great, against whom Lucan inveighs as a “successful bandit” (felix praedo), and a longer excursus on the Nile. The principal incidents are Caesar’s visit to Alexander’s tomb, his amour with Cleopatra, her magnificent banquet after a reconciliation [316]with Ptolemy, the plot of Pothinus to kill Caesar, and the attack at dawn with Caesar at bay:

Before the book is broken short, his arch-enemies, Pothinus and Achillas, are dead; but the renewal of resistance by Ganymedes brings him again into imminent danger. There we leave the Caesar of Lucan. In the opinion of so Pompeian a poet, he cannot be fittingly punished by any blow from Egypt:

This reference to the postponement of a fated penalty has in some eyes lent colour to the view that the poem was designed to continue Caesar’s history up to his assassination in 44. The tenth book is on the face of it incomplete; even were that not obvious, we should detect an unfinished scheme from the assurance given to Sextus Pompey that his fate would be foretold by the shade of his dead father.⁠[912] That promised episode, a parallel to Anchises’s prophecy uttered to Aeneas, would have come into one of the unwritten books. A likely chronological limit would be Thapsus and the suicide of Cato in 46 B.C. That is M. Pichon’s view,⁠[913] which seems more commendable than his associated argument that, as the necromancy of Pharsalia VI corresponds in weirdness to the descent into the lower world in Aeneid VI, therefore twelve books must have been planned to answer to Virgil’s twelve. Much closer parallelism between the several books of Pharsalia and Aeneid would have to exist before this contention had validity. In the seventeenth century, the historian Thomas May, whose works in verse and prose are all forgotten save his translation of the Pharsalia, believed that Lucan meant to carry his epic as far as Caesar’s death. To [317]fill the gap. May composed a Supplementum, which Hallam ventured to call “the first Latin poetry which England can vaunt.” The whole matter is, however, conjectural; and the arguments for a contemplated prolongation to 44 B.C. are not of compelling cogency.

Another point on which there is divergence of opinion concerns the three books first composed according to Vacca’s Life. Ussani thinks they were I, VII, IX; Pichon thinks II, VII, VIII. One might defend I, II, VII as a more likely group than either, if one took certain mistakes in VII to prove its comparative earliness and were to offer a plausible explanation of its touching-up with anti-Caesarism. In all the suggestions, however, there are difficulties concerning Lucan’s attitude to Caesar and Nero; and waverers may do worse than fall back on the traditional view, which presents at least as few difficulties, and is the most natural interpretation of Vacca’s words, namely, that I, II, III constituted the tres libros quales uidemus.

The seven books not published till after Lucan’s death may have been already known to literary circles from the author’s readings; for the composition of the Pharsalia presumably extended over several years before A.D. 65. If one is satisfied that Lucan even in his first book,⁠[914] as well as in others, borrowed from Seneca’s Naturales Quaestiones belonging to A.D. 62 and 63, then that circumstance may be taken to limit the period; but Vitelli’s endeavour still further to narrow the time of writing seems unconvincing.⁠[915]⁠

Let us realize the audacity of this youthful author. Himself in touch with an imperial court, he dared write a long poem glorifying the opposition to the founder of the imperial principle at Rome. Possibly, in an age of ingenious and bizarre compositions under a clever sovereign, he imagined that his work might pass muster or evade censure as an artistic tour de force, and that a generous interpretation would be placed upon a historical thesis handled with epic talent and oiled with introductory adulation. But Lucan must have been sufficiently intimate with [318]the arbitrary despotism of Nero to recognize that in taking such a risk he played a game involving the highest of stakes. A consciousness of genius and an independence of spirit combined with the impetuosity of youth to drive him upon a hazard, in which perhaps he was keen to welcome the fascination of double danger. It was jeopardy enough to challenge the ruler of the world by rivalry in any field of literary eminence; but it was still more perilous to champion the defenders of the ancient republican system. Theirs had been a lost cause; and yet Lucan by setting himself to make idols of Pompey and Cato threw down the gauntlet to Caesarism again. Several factors contributed to this anti-Caesarism. Corduba, the Spanish home of his family, acknowledged a traditional allegiance to Pompey; Lucan’s own boyish imagination conjured up roseate visions of the republican past; his reading in the Pompeian books of Livy confirmed his attitude; and the sense of Nero’s intolerable unfairness in trying to silence him eventually turned intimacy into detestation.

This independence of spirit has its literary side, where Lucan proves himself an original genius. Apart from possession of a distinctive style, he refused to be encumbered by tradition. His originality lay not in the choice of a Roman historical theme—for there had been many epics, renowned and unrenowned, on national history—but in the decision to treat his theme without the conventional introduction of gods as controllers of the action. This novel method of treatment is, we know, criticized in Petronius.⁠[916] Well aware of the intrinsic greatness of the figures in a colossal struggle, Lucan relied for his effects more on history than on romance. In his theme he thus broke away from Virgilian precedent, and substituted for legendary glamour the interest of a fierce human conflict waged in comparatively recent times.

His equipment for his task may be indicated by a sketch of his sources—historical, philosophical and literary. As regards history, the theory which holds the field is that certain lost books of Livy are the well-springs of Lucan’s subject-matter.⁠[917] This thesis, the outcome of a hint given by Reifferscheid to [319]Baier, his pupil, was maintained by the latter in a work published in 1874. It has in recent years been reaffirmed by M. Pichon,⁠[918] whose skill, in what is the most complete study of Lucan’s sources, has addressed itself to the emancipation of Baier’s hypothesis from the exaggerations of Ziehen and Vitelli, and to its defence against the objections of Westerburg and Ussani. For the accessory material in his digressions Lucan no doubt went elsewhere: serpent-lore he could draw from Macer, who had copied Nicander; geography, in which he is inaccurate, from some general treatise; and data about Egypt in particular very likely from Seneca’s missing work on that country. Much of his merely allusive and decorative matter could be furnished from the standard academic learning, amplified by his own experience—he had been a quaestor, an augural priest, and he had travelled. But for details of his main theme there lay open at that time the complete decades of Livy, who had derived information from Caesar, Posidonius and others. Material contemporary with the civil war could thus be reached through Livy as an intermediary. By Livy it had been to a large extent already Pompeianized. Lucan was not temperamentally likely to follow Caesar’s own account; he would distrust Asinius Pollio, as one too active on Caesar’s side; and although he might well have found facts to recommend the writings of Cremutius Cordus, we do not know that Cordus related the struggle between Caesar and Pompey. On the other hand, Livy was an author for whose literary power the Senecas expressed warm admiration, and Lucan, while subscribing to the opinion entertained by his grandfather⁠[919] and his uncle,⁠[920] felt the special call of political sympathy.

Lucan’s historical value must remain a debatable question. It is comparatively easy, though it costs time, to construct a formidable list of his inexactitudes and deliberate departures from fact.⁠[921] It is also easy to illustrate his strong bias against Caesar. The bias may be readily explained; but it is not always so easy to be sure that the unhistorical in him is due either [320]to bias or to ignorance. When, for instance, he introduces Cicero, contrary to truth, in Pompey’s camp before Pharsalia, is he simply careless, or has he yielded to a half-poetic, half-rhetorical desire to insert a speech from the orator? The almost infectious enthusiasm of M. Pichon for Lucan, while it makes him too tolerant of his wearisome digressions, too laudatory of poetic merit in his rhetoric, too appreciative of the originality of his borrowings, at the same time makes him perhaps too ingenious in finding excuses for his misstatements. Yet the defence is at times justifiable. For example, as regards the frequently criticized epithets applied to Gallic tribes, their appropriateness is plausibly supported on historical, philological and archaeological grounds.⁠[922] Again, on the alleged confusion between Arverni and Aedui (I. 427), Lucan’s language need not involve the mistake commonly supposed, if proper stress be laid on both verbs in the line,

Certainly, to construct against Lucan a laborious indictment of error is quite misleading. It should, in any case, be noted that his additions are fewer than his omissions, and many alterations of historical fact charged against the Pharsalia may be due to Livy. One may surmise that Lucan himself is responsible for the silence about Caesar’s pacific overtures, for the sinister misconstruction laid upon Caesar’s clemency, and for the undervaluing of Caesarian bravery; because Livy, writing near the events, could hardly have risked such falsification of history. But, to hazard a guess—and here it is all guesswork—if Livy recorded generous acts by Caesar with some reserve as to their motives, then Lucan might conceivably drop them out because he did not think them sincere; and if characteristic episodes of bravery among the Caesarians were recorded, as we might expect, by Livy, then Lucan might with a kind of Stoic casuistry decline to take them over, because it would be evil to praise valour so ill employed. On the other hand, the elimination of Pompeian bloodthirstiness is presumably a feature already [321]occurring in Livy;⁠[923] and it is highly probable that incidents which put Pompey in an unfavourable light would be toned down by the historian who was twitted with having proved himself a good “Pompeian.” In short, Lucan’s suppressions and transpositions of fact are sometimes those of a partisan (and herein Livy preceded him), sometimes those of the artist who is interpreting history in a poet’s way.

One result of his choice of subject, it will thus be seen, is that some questions affecting Lucan are not literary questions at all, but concern historical value and misstatements intentional or unintentional. There is a risk of harbouring an exaggerated estimate of his historical acumen. Granted that he is at least scientific enough to note certain causes of the civil war, yet he betrays no conception of the vital constitutional principles involved, of the extent to which past abuses rendered the conflict inevitable, or of the real significance of the victory for the destinies of Rome and the world. Though in some aspects very Roman, Lucan is without Virgil’s profound insight into the mission of the Empire. Readers will concede that he is sensitive to the nefarious horror and enormity of civil strife, for he calls shame upon it in exclamatory outbursts repeated till we weary; but this fervour arises less from social or moral or even vaguely humanitarian considerations than from his ingrained rhetoric. One should not presume to blame him: we have little right to demand scientific history from a poet. Although he selected a historical subject and so must remain, faults notwithstanding, a source of history,⁠[924] yet it is not by historical standards that Lucan must be judged, nor, despite his Livian basis, could we unreservedly use his text to supply some of the missing matter of Livy. Frank allowance must be made for prejudices and inconsistencies, which are but natural to juvenile ardour and emotion. He had definitely taken his side, and it is absurd to [322]look for a dispassionate attitude to Caesarian or Pompeian. Interested in philosophy without being a philosopher, he was not concerned to reflect how un-Stoic it was, and in any case, how futile, to reproach Caesar, the man of destiny, for being also a man of blood. Here, as so often, he lets feeling speak.

What philosophy appears in the poem is Stoic. Remembering the poet’s family and his training alongside of Persius, we should expect nothing else; but it should also be remembered that the philosophical colour is incidental, and that the Pharsalia must, in the last resort, be judged less for its history or its philosophy than for its poetry. Critics like Heitland make as great a mistake in claiming a systematic character for Lucan’s Stoicism as Souriau does in over-emphasizing its contradictions. To demand rigid consistency in his thought is to end in the negative conclusion of Lejay—that Lucan had no philosophy. If a lapse into pessimism caused him to wonder whether the world is guided by the Stoic Providence or by blind chance, it was a very human aberration from his normal creed; and if, poet-like, he used the older mythological beliefs, such literary decoration must be no more pressed against him than against Lucretius.

Lucan’s literary training implied acquaintance with the classics of the past. It would be far too much to call him a disciple of Virgil: his spirit is alien to the Virgilian, and yet his debt to the great epic poet was inevitable owing to the education of the times. Here the truth lies between Merivale’s astonishing opinion that Lucan was in style practically independent of Virgil and Heitland’s that Lucan was “steeped” in Virgil’s language. The debt is seen in borrowed words and locutions (like felix qui potuit, IV. 393, and uenit summa dies, VII. 195), in a fresh use of Virgilian epithets and phrases, in a heightening of Virgilian simplicity to achieve strong effects, and in imitation of Virgilian episodes. Conscious and subconscious echoes are so plentiful and obvious that one cannot feel like Merivale “almost tempted to imagine that he had never read Virgil.” At the same time, there is no need to hunt for parallels where no parallels exist. Many of the alleged analogies in Heitland’s elaborate list are too vague and faint to be reckoned as definite borrowings; and even M. Pichon, who adopts a sounder attitude [323]regarding the Virgilian influence, scarcely convinces us in his claim that the vanishing of Julia’s ghost is modelled on that of Creusa, or that a father’s anguish over a dying son is modelled on Anna’s grief over Dido.⁠[925]⁠

Horace influenced Lucan slightly, Ovid very considerably. Sharing his uncle’s admiration for Ovid, he not only borrowed mythological material from him but also inherited much of his rhetorical dexterity. The Ovidian gift of repeating an idea in surprisingly new ways reappears in Lucan, and accounts for Fronto’s criticism that in his first seven lines he simply rang the changes on the one idea of “worse than civil wars.”⁠[926] He has not Ovid’s wonderful lightness and facility, but in the smoothness and monotony of his versification it can be seen that the rhythms of the Metamorphoses have told upon him. Resemblances to earlier poets like Ennius⁠[927] are not distinct enough to base conclusions upon; and a similarly negative result, many will agree, comes from the evidence adduced by Hosius⁠[928] to detect verbal influences exerted by Manilius, by the author of Aetna, by the earlier books of Livy and by Q. Curtius. This inquiry has considerable interest in its bearing on works so conjectural in date as the Astronomica, Aetna and the History of Alexander; but unfortunately the evidence rests upon slight similarities and amounts to little. Some of the not very impressive resemblances between Curtius and Lucan are due to analogy of facts (deserts, for example, are much alike the world over, and prompt similar terminology); other resemblances may be ascribed to community of source; and others are simply part of the common stock of Latin expression. One exceptional case is that of Seneca, some of whose works, particularly the tragedies, appear (after allowance has been made for the wide prevalence of the same mythology and the same rhetoric) to have affected Lucan. This hypothesis, if accepted, would prove the anteriority of the tragedies and support their attribution to Seneca.

Far more important, however, than the discovery of verbal [324]similarities is the consideration of the action of rhetoric on Lucan’s genius. When it is remembered that the essential aim in academic declamation was to appear clever and striking at all costs, the central characteristic of his epic is at once grasped. The dominant note is one of display. The object, not to be natural, but above everything to be piquant and impressive, is pursued with marvellous vigour and with mastery of all effective artifices. To his training, therefore, and to his aim we owe the parade of erudition which leads him into digressions⁠[929] and enumerations; the descent into realistic detail which is calculated to cause a shudder; the subtlety of argument which makes a debating speech cogent; the tendency to hyperbole which is bound to arrest attention; the love of point, epigram, antithesis which produces memorable phrases; and the recollection or invention of pithy maxims which embody human experience. His erudition is in part encyclopaedic, based on the science of the day, and in part mythological, based on the ancient literary education. The former accounts for excursuses on subjects like astronomy and geography,⁠[930] many of which are out of place; the latter appears in allusions or descriptions. The allusions may be straightforward, as when the preparations for Pharsalia are likened to those before the giants’ war, and when Caesar haunted by ghosts is likened to the matricide Orestes;⁠[931] or they may be slightly more recondite, as when the olive-branch is called “the leafage of Cecropian Minerva,” and when Marius is said to “gather Libyan wrath,” because, like the giant Antaeus, he drew fighting-force from the soil of Africa.⁠[932] Myth in Lucan’s eyes yields opportunities for exhibiting book-knowledge and so overpowers his philosophy upon occasion. Certainly in a critical mood he would, Stoic-like, reject the legends. It is the free-thinker that speaks through Cornelia’s guarded promise to follow her husband “through hell, if hell there be” (per Tartara, si sunt ulla, IX. 101-102). But [325]should the old traditional colour seem requisite, Lucan makes no scruple about its introduction: thus Julia’s ghost, expelled from Elysium (III. 12), knows that Tartarus is being enlarged to punish human misdeeds. His attitude is, in fact, not consistent: On the one hand, when Pompey reaches Cyprus, Lucan resists the attraction of the tale which long after inspired Botticelli’s “Nascita di Venere,” and so surrenders to rationalism with the unpoetic caveat “si numina nasci credimus”⁠[933]⁠: on the other hand, he is romantic enough to discern in the story of Antaeus or of the Golden Apples a chance for a telling description:⁠[934]⁠

Realism in Lucan is now natural, now morbid, now grotesque. Too often it is coupled with the desire to harrow by dwelling on the horrible. Hence he revels in describing tortures, the agonies of the wounded, the repulsive ghoulishness of a witch, the still twitching mouth of Pompey after his head has been hacked off, revolting aspects of cremation, and equally revolting aspects of putrefaction.⁠[935] So zealous is he in making a point that he again and again overshoots the mark, as in his account of a crowd of victims mutually smothering each other;⁠[936] or of an old man’s reminiscence of searching among the slain during the Sullan Terror for a body whose neck would fit his brother’s head, which he was carrying;⁠[937] or of Curio’s slaughtered men in Africa having no room to fall:

When the realism is strained to breaking-point, it becomes unreal, as in the carnage during the seafight at Massilia. There [326]the devilish ingenuity in inventing bizarre modes of death fails to make the struggle truly heroic, because the artificiality detracts from strong simplicity and pathos.⁠[938] The poet, having caused smiles by far-fetched conceits, only just succeeds towards the end in striking a note of human feeling when he relates the parting of the mortally wounded Argus from his father.⁠[939]⁠

Good examples of Lucan’s management of speeches are those of Caesar and Pompey in Book VII, where the two great opponents are made to express themselves in the author’s forceful, if rather bombastic, rhetoric. In Volteius’s speech in Book IV, encouraging his men to slay each other, we have virtually a thesis supported by the tricks of the schools and transferred to verse: the men by their death have to make a spectacle of themselves and the speech is correspondingly spectacular. The same rhetoric, often powerful and ingenious, invades parts of the epic where there is no set speech, but where the poet becomes declamatory, rendering his work, Quintilian thought, magis oratoribus quam poetis imitandus. Thus the reflections upon Pompey’s grave in Book VIII are composed after the fashion of a special pleader in a controuersia. The smartness in shifting positions and the disregard for consistency argue little solidity; and even where, as in this passage,⁠[940] the author’s favourite Pompey is concerned, the limited depth of feeling is comparable to nothing so much as that of a versatile advocate. One is naturally reminded of Lucan’s lost prose speeches for and against Sagitta.

Hyperbole is among his most noticeable rhetorical tendencies. He overstates and, in pursuit of overstatements, is drawn into the kind of elaboration which characterizes the storm in Book V.⁠[941] But the exaggeration is often confined to a single idea: so, to convey the notion of Caesar’s immense lines of circumvallation near Dyrrhachium, Lucan avers that, inside them, rivers run their whole length from source to mouth,

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and, of Thessaly polluted by the slain,

One of the great secrets of Lucan’s brilliant rhetoric is his subtle power of expressing thought in terse⁠[944] pointed form, often assisted by antithesis. When this subtlety is not carried to excess, the results are extraordinarily effective in producing memorable lines and phrases, epigrammatically summarizing a character or a situation or, in the older meaning of sententia, a general truth. Even his less natural conceits have a way of clinging to the memory, like his paradoxical manner of suggesting that when Caesar’s ships lie helpless on a still sea the crews would prefer a watery grave to being thus becalmed: “all hope of shipwreck vanishes” (naufragii spes omnis abit).⁠[945] Typical common-places admirably expressed in his neat Latin are those on the peril of success,

on the danger of delay,

on famine as a cause of revolt,

on the secret happiness of death,

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on condonation of a widely supported fault,

on death, as viewed in Pompey’s last words,

on the true attitude to death,

Alliteration is noticeable in some of the examples cited. Lucan does not use it so sparingly as Heitland suggests: on the contrary, much of his verse gains additional emphasis from being alliterative, as does his best known line,

or the simile descriptive of a storming charge by African horse,

A scrutiny of Lucan’s feverish mannerisms and wilful faults must not blind one to his merits. It is true that he is rhetorical and sensational; and that behind his clever artifices lies no mystery. He is able half to surprise, half to weary us with dazzling tricks of style; but he seldom enchants us with beauty. Yet, when all his inaccuracies, distortions, conceits, digressions and tediousness have been urged against him, his great passages prove that, in spite of artificiality, he can be fiery⁠[946] and well-nigh [329]irresistible. He would have gained extraordinarily by compression: that is to say, he shows to most advantage in extracts. His best rhetoric is something intensely stirring, though it is a style more appreciated in France than in England. Nor, even if he seldom is deeply poetic, should the vein of poetry that is in him be overlooked: it appears in passages such as that on Pompey’s last look at Italy, or on Cornelia in love with sorrow:

Some have submitted that the Pharsalia is an epic without a hero, or alternatively an epic with three. Perhaps it is truer to argue that Lucan in a real degree rose to the inherent greatness of his theme by so portraying Caesar that, while Pompey was his formal hero and Cato his spiritual hero, Caesar, however much disliked and maligned by the author, was and still is the practical hero of the poem in virtue of the defiant egoism and the untiring energy summarized in the line,

CALPURNIUS SICULUS

The importance of the eclogues of T. Calpurnius Siculus⁠[947] rests as much upon their testimony to the continuance of one aspect of Virgil’s influence as upon intrinsic poetic value. Eleven eclogues for long went under his name; but the edition by Angelus Ugoletus about 1500 cites the authority of a manuscript now lost for assigning the last four to Nemesianus, who wrote late in the third century. There is, in any case, good internal evidence for the separation; for, in the last four, elision is much commoner; more unclassical shortenings of final o appear; the parenthetic insertions of memini and fateor frequent in the first seven are absent; nor are there any of the allusions to the emperor which were familiar in the previous group. Besides, the ninth eclogue imitates parts of the third, though its taste is more questionable; and there are stylistic resemblances between the final eclogues and the undoubted work of Nemesianus on the chase—his Cynegetica.

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Whether the epithet “Siculus” means that he came from Sicily or that he was a follower of the Sicilian pastoral of Theocritus cannot be decided. His date too has been the subject of debate. The older theory of Wernsdorf, Gibbon and Bernhardy, that Calpurnius wrote under the Emperor Carus and his sons in the third century has been rejected by most modern authorities for cogent reasons which combine to fix the eclogues early in the reign of Nero. The ruler they mention is young (i. 44; iv. 85, 137; vii. 6),⁠[948] good-looking (vii. 83-84),⁠[949] divine (i. 84 ipse deus; vii. 6) and eloquent (i. 45; iv. 87). This applies to Nero satisfactorily.

The contemplation of a better time as in prospect (i. 42, 54),⁠[950] and of fairer treatment of the senate (i. 62) is in keeping with the actual relief and confidence felt in the opening reign of Nero, when contrasted with the closing years of Claudius. The comet described in the first eclogue is most plausibly identified with that which, according to the elder Pliny, Suetonius, and Dio Cassius, betokened the death of Claudius and lasted into Nero’s reign.⁠[951] The scene of the games described in the seventh eclogue is not the Colosseum (which was not begun till the reign of Vespasian), but the wooden amphitheatre of Nero’s time mentioned by Tacitus and Suetonius.⁠[952] No other epoch, then, suits all these references so well as the early Neronian.

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How far we can rely on Corydon’s mention of a brother or of poverty for autobiographic information about the poet is extremely doubtful. The reference to Meliboeus as a patron who saved him by assistance from the need of going to Spain⁠[953] may have a personal bearing and the question of identifying the patron has been much discussed. Granted that he is a historical figure, Sarpe’s⁠[954] contention that Meliboeus was Seneca is more satisfying than Haupt’s identification of him with Calpurnius Piso, who in the Laudatio Pisonis is spoken of as under the patronage of Apollo. The fourth eclogue⁠[955] describes Meliboeus as a poet under the auspices of Apollo and the Muses; and further it is suggested that he is an authority on winds and weather. Both references suit Seneca, who was a tragic poet and an observer of physical phenomena in his Quaestiones Naturales. Meliboeus is evidently a personage of exalted influence, and the idea of his acting as intermediary between the rustic singer and the emperor⁠[956] is consistent with Seneca’s high position at the imperial court.

The seven eclogues range in length from 84 lines (vii.) to 169 (iv.), and amount to 759 hexameters altogether. They are smoothly composed; and the echoes of Virgilian thought, expression, and poem-construction are obvious. Other Augustans are also laid under contribution. The whole effect, allowing for the artificiality and conventionality inseparable from the pastoral, is pleasing rather than forceful. The poet as “Corydon” is conscious that to seek to be a second Virgil (“Tityrus”) is an ambitious task, and so he represents Meliboeus as saying:

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Eclogue I is modelled loosely on the so-called Messianic eclogue of Virgil. Two rustics, Corydon and Ornytus, are sheltering from the scorching heat of the noontide,

when they find, carved on the bark of a tree, a prophecy by Faunus which heralds the dawn of a new golden age of peace and clemency associated with the accession of a young ruler, “a very god, who will take in his stout arms the weight of the Roman empire.” Eclogue II, after the manner of Virgil’s seventh eclogue, contains an amoebean contest in quatrains in which a shepherd and gardener praise Crotale, the object of their admiration, and make rival offers in this wise:

In III, Iollas searching for a lost heifer meets Lycidas, who tells how jealousy has driven him to lose his temper so far as to beat his sweetheart, Phyllis. Penitently he now would woo her love back in song, and the poem ends with lollas’s undertaking the part of peacemaker. “Out-and-out country, and clownish at that” (merum rus idque inficetum) was Scaliger’s sweeping judgement on the eclogue, which has however redeeming touches of delicacy and chivalry. Eclogue IV, entitled “Caesar,” and much the longest eclogue, is full of eulogy for the youthful emperor, whose services to the world are chanted in responsive verses by Corydon and Amyntas before their [334]patron Meliboeus, who is besought to bring the verses under the eye of his imperial majesty:

Eclogue V is more reminiscent of the Georgics than of the Eclogues, and therefore savours more of work than of the idealized recreation which is the feature of pastorals. It is extravagantly praised in the hexameter summaries of Brassicanus’s edition, to the effect that the agricultural writers Varro, Palladius, Columella, Cato and Virgil himself were all outdone here by the brief precepts enjoined by Mycon upon his young pupil Canthus. The precepts largely concern the management of sheep and goats.

The subject of VI is a not very entertaining wrangle between a pair of shepherds over a decision which one of them had pronounced in a musical contest between two other swains. The wrangle, it is proposed, might be settled by a poetic competition between the disputants; but their bad temper and abuse force the selected umpire to decline to act. The last poem, VII, with a similarity in scheme to Virgil’s first eclogue, possesses a special archaeological interest by reason of the description which the countryman Corydon, newly back from town, gives of the wooden amphitheatre in Rome, where a “young god” of an emperor exhibited thrilling and surprising contests. The variety of rare animals and quick scenic changes had filled the rustic eyewitness with wonderment; and at a distance he could see the emperor himself:

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It will be noted that these poems are not all strictly pastoral: under a bucolic guise the first, fourth, and seventh are essentially court-poetry with semi-political flavour and no little adulation. And in any case, whether they contained flatteries of the emperor or not, poems so artificial, as pastorals must be, were more likely to appeal to courtly readers than to any other audience of their day. The literary influence of Calpurnius Siculus was transmitted through Nemesianus to later centuries than the third, reappearing in the Renaissance pastorals of the Italians, Baptista Mantuanus, Sannazaro, Andrelinus and in the more prosaic French scholar Arnolletus (Arnoullet) of Nevers.⁠[962] The first among these, the “good old Mantuan” cited in Love’s Labour’s Lost, printed ten eclogues in 1498, and through them affected many authors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including Alexander Barclay’s “egloges” and, more memorable still, three “aeglogues” in the Shepheards Calender of Spenser.

A Panegyric on Piso⁠[963] (now generally taken to be C. Calpurnius Piso, the figurehead in the abortive plot against Nero in A.D. 65) has been claimed by some as the work of Calpurnius Siculus.⁠[964] The 261 hexameters De Laude Pisonis are carefully composed, and, like those of Calpurnius’s eclogues, contain few elisions.⁠[965] The passage where the panegyrist addresses Piso as his Maecenas and a passage in Calpurnius’s fourth eclogue addressed to Corydon’s patron Meliboeus resemble each other in the application of the epithet tereti (probably “slender”) to verse; but the coincidence does not make irrefragable proof of [336]unity of authorship.⁠[966] The utmost that can be said is that the identification is plausible. The ascription to Virgil, reported from a lost manuscript of the whole poem, is impossible; while the ascription to Lucan in a manuscript of extracts results from a copyist’s blunder; and such resemblances in diction to the Pharsalia of Lucan as can be traced⁠[967] in the panegyric are due to identity of period rather than of authorship. As conceivable authors of the poem three other names, Ovid, Saleius Bassus and Statius, have been put forward, of whom the first lived too early and the second and third too late to write it.

More certain ground is reached regarding the person eulogized. The poet, who declares himself under twenty summers old (261), poor, but ambitious for literary fame in preference to wealth (219-221), directs his praises to a youthful patron, eloquent, courteous, generous, musical, fond of games, and especially expert on the draught-board. Such characteristics accord with the description of C. Calpurnius Piso in Tacitus⁠[968] and with Juvenal’s “Piso bonus” of Satire V. 109, where the old scholium recounts Piso to have been such a celebrity for his playing with latrunculi that people flocked to watch him. The panegyric was most likely composed earlier than the eclogues of Calpurnius Siculus; and it does not follow, though the “Maecenas” of the one poem is C. Calpurnius Piso, that the “Meliboeus” in the other poems need be the same patron.

The laudation tends to monotony, though it never becomes absurdly fulsome. Piso, whom the poet more than once addresses as iuuenis facunde (32, 109), is honoured for having renounced the martial glory of his ancestors to

for ability to stir the emotions of the court,

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and for captivating clients by his courtesy,

Judged by the test of style alone, the piece has the ring of the first century, and the spirit of the references to oratory is unmistakably post-Augustan. It should be pointed out that the repeated use of chelys for the “lyre” suggests a similar period.⁠[972] But reliance on internal stylistic evidence is ancillary rather than essential, where the recipient of the panegyric has been definitely identified.

MINOR NERONIAN POETRY

Further examples of the bucolic verse of Nero’s age are furnished by the Einsiedeln Eclogues. These are two brief pieces contained in a tenth-century manuscript at Einsiedeln.⁠[973] The first, in 49 hexameters, is a contest of the conventional type between two shepherds who praise the emperor’s dexterity on the cithara, the one likening him to Apollo and the Thunderer, the other alluding to his poem on the burning of Troy. The umpire’s decision is wanting. The other piece, 38 lines long, rejoices over the return of the Golden Age,

in the spirit of Calpurnius Siculus’s

and must belong to the happier opening years of Nero’s reign. Beyond this there is no certainty about date or authorship, though considerable learned speculation⁠[974] has been expended on two rather inconsiderable eclogues. The frail argument, for instance, has been used that Seneca’s expression fas sit uidisse in Letter 115 (probably 64 B.C.) must refer to and so be later than fas mihi sit uidisse deos in the first poem. The higher literary quality of the second piece has appeared to some sufficient reason for assuming dual authorship: others have in both [338]seen lost eulogies by Lucan on the emperor: others still ascribe them to C. Calpurnius Piso,⁠[975] laying stress on the way in which the first words of the second poem Quid tacitus, Mystes? seem to be echoed in the first words of Calpurnius Siculus’s fourth eclogue, Quid tacitus, Corydon? Since the speaker there is Meliboeus (identified by some scholars, as we have seen, with Calpurnius Piso), the idea is that he may be quoting from a production of his own. One metrical feature may be pointed out: in the 49 lines of the first eclogue there are fully twice as many elisions as in the 261 lines of the De Laude Pisonis, and about as many as in the whole of Calpurnius Siculus.

According to the opinion of many, though the opinion is by no means unchallenged, this same Neronian period produced the Aetna,⁠[976] a didactic poem in 644 hexameters on the volcano. Traditionally, it came down among the minor works attributed to Virgil, although even by the time of Donatus doubt had been thrown on the attribution. While, then, it cannot be omitted in an account of the Appendix Vergiliana,⁠[977] it equally calls for mention in a review of the later age to which many prefer to assign it. There have not been wanting modern attempts to prove an early date: Kruczkiewicz⁠[978] has reasserted the Virgilian authorship, and Alzinger⁠[979] has argued for the earliest date of all, about half a dozen years after Lucretius’s death in 55 B.C. Independently of obvious imitations of Lucretius in the poem, its general style alone would point to some subsequent generation: technically and after a ponderous manner, the hexameters are Virgilian in cast, and Bücheler⁠[980] would put them at least later [339]than Ovid and Manilius. One cannot but be struck with the frequency of the elisions, if one turns to the Aetna straight from Calpurnius Siculus. The extreme inferior limit of time, on the other hand, is A.D. 79, the year of the eruption of Vesuvius, because in Aetna, 424-431, the fires of the sulphurous lands round Naples are regarded as extinct—a view impossible after the renewal of volcanic activity.⁠[981] Scaliger, accepting the authority of certain fifteenth-century MSS., believed that Cornelius Severus was the writer; but a common theory since Wernsdorf has been that the author was Lucilius Junior, the correspondent of the philosopher Seneca and imperial procurator in Sicily. To Lucilius Seneca addressed his moral epistles, the first book of his so-called dialogues, and his Quaestiones Naturales. We know from Seneca that he wrote verse and had literary tastes. We know too that Seneca wrote to Lucilius intimating that he expected from him a description of his tour round Sicily, and urging him to climb Aetna and send him information about the mountain:⁠[982]⁠

But you were sure to indulge your own weakness, without a suggestion from anybody. There’s no fear of your failing to describe Aetna in your poem (ne Aetnam describas in tuo carmine) and so touch on this commonplace of all the poets. Virgil’s previous treatment was no hindrance to Ovid’s handling the theme; and a pair of predecessors did not frighten Cornelius Severus off it.... Aetna is making your mouth water (Aetna tibi saliuam mouet), or I don’t know you! You’re bent on writing something fine (grande) to match former attempts.

The terms of the letter, it should be observed, suggest not so much a separate poem as the insertion of a description to form an episode in a poem on which Lucilius was at work; and the arguments advanced, taken as a whole, do not avail to place the problem completely outside the range of question.

Should the author ever be indisputably unearthed, his literary reputation will not be vastly enhanced by the discovery; for there is little in the poem to relieve its dullness; textual uncertainties [340]apart, it is not seldom obscure; and, despite the author’s professed search for causes, it makes but indifferent science. So one finds difficulty in understanding Teuffel’s apparently serious criticism of it as “very attractive”;⁠[983] but there is no accounting for taste. At the same time, the author must be credited with an earnest enthusiasm for the study of certain natural phenomena and a disdain for legendary subjects, which at the outset he dismisses as hackneyed, though he himself lapses inconsistently into mythology where he portrays Jupiter as amazed at Aetna’s fiery crashing menace and as alarmed lest the giants are once again to make war on heaven (ll. 202-203).

Men tour the world to see places celebrated in story, he points out, and then scornfully asks, “Do you think such things worth visiting? Study the mighty work of nature the artificer” (artificis naturae ingens opus aspice, l. 599). Far less extended, however, than this maxim should imply, his own theme is a single circumscribed corner of nature, almost trivial compared with the De Rerum Natura, just as his spirit is one of remarkably tempered seriousness compared with the passionate ardency of Lucretius. Unfortunately, the volcanic fire of which he wrote did not transmit itself to his style; and for his lack of interest in mankind he has paid the penalty of failing to engage a reader’s interest. Significantly, he is most impressive when he leaves off theorizing about the subterranean action of water, wind and fire, or describing ominous hidden rumblings and engulfing lava-streams, in order to show how the danger might affect human beings and elicit high moral qualities. This he does towards the close by introducing the episode of two brothers who rescue their father and mother during a volcanic eruption. The passage, though a little exclamatory and tautological, remains deservedly the best-known part of the poem. The following are excerpts translated from it (604 sqq.):

The title of The Latin Iliad (Ilias Latina),⁠[986] though it might well raise great expectations of literary achievement, is conferred upon 1070 hexameters of condensed paraphrase rather than of translation from the long Homeric epic. Judged solely as a summary, its representation of its original is most disproportionate; for over half the Latin total is given to the first five books of the Greek twenty-four. Whereas several of the [342]earlier books get over 100 Latin lines, several of the later get under 10; the fifth book, for instance, gets 149, the seventeenth only 3. The work must have been designed for an educational text-book, and to its employment in schools it doubtless owed its survival, and, what is notable in a production of no outstanding power, its happy chance of materially aiding the knowledge of letters in post-classical times; for in the dark medieval centuries, when Greek was forgotten in Western Europe, this “Latin Homer,” if only with faint and borrowed light, had the incontestable merit of reflecting some of the old radiancy of “the tale of Troy divine.”

Although by no means the sole attempt to give a Latin dress to the epics of the Trojan cycle, in which the Romans by virtue of their fabled descent always felt a national interest, the Ilias Latina is yet the only one which has come down. Other workers in the same field have left of their performance fragments only, or nothing. Roman literature indeed may be said to have dawned with the translation of the Odyssey into Saturnian verse by Andronicus.⁠[987] In Sulla’s time, Cn. Matius, and probably also in the first century B.C. Ninnius Crassus, had rendered the Iliad into hexameters⁠[988] without making any great mark. Then two attempts of imperial date may be mentioned besides the Ilias Latina. Attius Labeo, whom the scholiast on Persius declared “unscholarly” (indoctus)—exactly the opposite epithet, by the way, to that which Aulus Gellius applied to Matius—turned both Iliad and Odyssey into Latin hexameters. Persius calls his Iliad “drunk with hellebore” (ebria ueratro),⁠[989] and time has mercifully spared but one line of it. The other attempt was in prose and was the composition of the Emperor Claudius’s influential freedman Polybius. Seneca, in the Consolatio addressed to him, refers to this production twice⁠[990] in commendatory terms. Apparently Polybius had translated [343]Homer into Latin and Virgil into Greek; for Seneca says:

Homer and Virgil have been benefactors of mankind as much as you have been a benefactor of these poets and of everyone in deciding to make them known to a wider circle than that for which they wrote,

and, again,

Take in your hands the poems of either of the two authors (Homer and Virgil)—poems, the fame of which the abundant toil of your genius has enhanced, and which you have paraphrased (resoluisti) in such a way that, although their metrical form has gone (quamuis structura illorum recesserit), the charm is nevertheless preserved; for you have transferred them from one language to another so well as to secure that most difficult effect, the bringing of all the beauties of the original over into a foreign speech.

The Ilias Latina can with good reason be referred to some date earlier than Nero’s death, because its author has introduced into it a passage coloured with loyal Roman sentiment which could have been composed at no time except under the Julian dynasty of the Caesars:

Its hexameters are post-Ovidian, and Plessis⁠[992] ventures not over convincingly to fix its composition as early as in the era of Tiberius, in which case the author must have been contemporary not with Lucan, but with Phaedrus. This author he believes to have been Italicus—not Silius, but another of previous date; and in that belief is involved the question of alleged acrostics at the beginning and end of the poem, which has attracted the curiosity and ingenuity of certain commentators. [344]The initial letters of the first eight lines spell Italices and of the last eight lines scqipsit. A conjectural change in the seventh line gives Italicus and a mere transposition of words gives in the latter case scripsit. Some are content to leave the opening seven lines unaltered and read Italice, either as a vocative, or an adverb (“he wrote Italian-wise”). But the idea of the vocative has prompted tamperings with the next few lines to extract Sili, so that the poem would address Silius Italicus. To the acrostics⁠[993] is added the further elaboration of finding after the caesurae in the first six lines the letters of a mesostich, Pieris, to mean “The muse wrote it.” Such coincidences, however, in each case partly engineered, lead to no sure ground. Even if “Italicus” were accepted, the style of the Ilias Latina is so unlike⁠[994] that of Silius Italicus in the Punica that believers in the acrostic have had recourse to guessing it to be a work either of his youth or by some one else bearing the same name.

Another puzzle has arisen on the title “Pindarus” which MSS. of the Middle Ages imposed on the Latin Homer. Why should two very different Greek poets have been thus confused? Referring to Lucian Müller’s⁠[995] attempted explanation of this alternative title as based on the coupling of Homer with Pindar in Horace’s Odes,⁠[996] Tolkiehn has suggested that the intrusion of “Pindarus” may have been due to the presence in earlier MSS. of “Thebanus,” a possible epithet for Homer in respect of his legendary association with Thebes in Egypt.

As in the Aratea of Germanicus, new matter, though on a smaller scale, is sometimes introduced by the translator. An example of inserted Roman sentiment has been already cited. The last eight lines addressed to Calliope and other powers constitute the translator’s personal farewell to his task, and some [345]of his departures from events or details, as narrated in the Greek, may be caused by his reminiscences of Virgil and Ovid or by his trusting to memory. The modifying influence of Virgil is traceable in a simile here and there; in his making Aetna the forge of Vulcan (856-857), which is not Homeric; and in many turns of expression.⁠[997] There are, besides, positive inexactitudes, such as the assignment of some of Ulysses’s words to Nestor (ll. 151 sqq.), or the slaying of Democoon by Agamemnon (ll. 372-373) instead of by Ulysses as in Homer. These very additions and negligences acquit the author of having been a slavishly close translator. His Latin possesses the virtue of straightforward clearness, and his versification a considerable share of easy grace.

Nero⁠[998] also was among the poets, although he was one of the friends from whom literary men might reasonably pray to be saved. His education had been to some extent warped; for his mother Agrippina prevented the future emperor from studying philosophy deeply, and Seneca had in eloquence directed his pupil less to the old standard oratory than to the modern school in which the tutor himself cut a prominent figure.⁠[999] It was observable that, unlike previous emperors, he preferred to have his speeches composed for him,⁠[1000] and Seneca could at least check the tasteless bombast of which he sometimes betrayed signs. Towards poetry he had a bent, though he missed supreme success. One may conclude that caprice and mannerism outweighed Nero’s readiness and technique, without believing that the lines ascribed to him by the scholiast on the first satire of Persius are genuinely his. Seneca⁠[1001] commends for its elegance his line about the play of light on a dove’s neck as it moves (colla Cytheriacae splendent agitata columbae); and Nero certainly displayed versatility in sportive, satiric and erotic verses, in monologues of a tragic character suitable for his own recitation on the stage, and in his epic Troica, whence may have come the episode of “The Taking of Troy” which scandal [346]alleged he chanted to the cithara while Rome was in flames.⁠[1002] His establishment in A.D. 60 of the quinquennial competition of the Neronia arose fully as much from his own ambition to win the prize in public as from any desire to patronize music and poetry.

Caesius Bassus, one of Persius’s senior friends, was a lyric poet of whom Quintilian thought highly.⁠[1003] He may be the same as the author of a work on prosody dedicated to Nero.⁠[1004] Seneca’s friend Vagellius,⁠[1005] who had some reputation as a poet, the satirical versifiers Antistius (Sosianus) and Curtius Montanus mentioned in Tacitus,⁠[1006] and the Serranus included by Quintilian among epic authors may close the list of those who were lesser lights in Neronian poetry, unless the fact that Serranus is coupled by Juvenal with Saleius implies that he lived somewhat later.⁠[1007]⁠

THE ELDER PLINY

What everyone knows about an author is not necessarily of supreme importance; but the two most familiar facts about the elder Pliny—that he composed a massive Natural History and that he perished while investigating an eruption of Vesuvius—lie in their implications at the very roots of his title to fame. A meagre life by Suetonius has to be supplemented by information from the colossal work which is his imperishable monument and from his nephew’s admiring testimony in four of his letters.⁠[1008] C. Plinius Secundus⁠[1009] was born of an equestrian family at Novum [348]Comum in A.D. 23 or 24,⁠[1010] and his birth near Lake Como led him to claim Catullus as a fellow-Northerner (conterraneum meum).⁠[1011] He must have come early to Rome, because Nonianus, whom the boy saw in his consulate,⁠[1012] held the office in A.D. 35. If we know little about his education, we can see from his style that rhetoric was not omitted; and, while there is no proof that the poet Pomponius Secundus formally trained him in literature, we can at least be sure that he deeply influenced the younger man, who was destined to write his biography. Pliny’s allusions to Pomponius are full of respect, and he recalls how on one occasion he saw at Pomponius’s house specimens—then about two centuries old—of the handwriting of the Gracchi.⁠[1013] Similarity of disposition may have linked them together; for, like Pliny, Pomponius showed ability to combine literary with official duties. Pliny’s youthful pleading at the bar was followed by military service. When twenty-three or twenty-four he was a cavalry officer under Corbulo in Germania Inferior, and his first book was written on the use of the javelin by mounted troops. His comradeship (castrense contubernium) which he mentions⁠[1014] with the future Emperor Titus may have happened ten years later, about A.D. 57, when he was in the army of Pompeius Paulinus.⁠[1015] Several allusions attest experiences among peoples near the northern frontier of the Empire;⁠[1016] no doubt it [349]was personal knowledge that united with historical instinct to suggest his lost work on the wars of Germany.

Full detail, however, regarding his life before the accession of Vespasian is not available. It is true that he gives us a few interesting reminiscences: he saw for himself the harbour works in progress at Ostia about the beginning of Claudius’s reign; he could remember Claudius’s Empress Agrippina wearing a mantle of woven gold at a sham naval fight exhibited by the Emperor; and he witnessed the building of Nero’s “golden house” after the fire of 64.⁠[1017] On the other hand, we should like to be sure whether he had official connexion with the East. Was he ever procurator of Syria? Did he serve against the Jews as a staff officer under Titus? and was this the service which he calls castrense contubernium? Could he have been present at the siege of Jerusalem in 70? These questions might all be answered in the affirmative, if Mommsen’s hypothesis were accepted that Pliny is alluded to in a Greek inscription from Arados.⁠[1018] But the balance of authority prefers to hold that in 70 Pliny was in Gaul, and that this year began for him a series of procuratorships in Gallia Narbonensis, Africa, Gallia Belgica and Hispania Citerior.⁠[1019] Administered, according to Suetonius, with the highest integrity, these offices at the same time widened his horizon, even though they were all held within the western half of the Empire.

While at Rome, Pliny kept in close contact with the imperial house. A well-known letter by his nephew tells us that it was his custom to visit the palace before daylight to interview Vespasian and then return to his daily task.⁠[1020] He was on duty as admiral of the fleet at Misenum on that summer afternoon in 79 which the younger Pliny’s account of the catastrophe has made memorable. A pine-like cloud of smoky vapour [350]rising above the neighbouring mountains betrayed alarming volcanic activity, and the phenomena, pointed out to him by his sister, the younger Pliny’s mother, were too tempting for an ardent student of nature to miss, even though he was elderly, stout and busily engaged in reading after his midday siesta.

“He called for his shoes and climbed some high ground from which that uncommon sight could best be viewed. Looking at it from this distance, one felt uncertain from what mountain the cloud was rising, though later it was known to be Vesuvius.... It was white at one moment, at another grimy and spotted, as if it had carried up soil or cinders. A man of my uncle’s learning saw that the phenomenon was significant and deserving of closer survey. He ordered a light vessel to be got ready and gave me the chance of going with him, if I wished.”⁠[1021]⁠

Appeals for help reached him: large galleys had to be launched: and the scientific admiral made for the danger zone from which others were fleeing. His nephew’s letter pictures him dictating observations, braving the rain of stones upon the bay, and by his coolness heartening his friend Pomponianus, in whose house he supped and stayed overnight at Stabiae (Castellamare). The next day, one of preternatural darkness, amidst terrific concussions and sulphurous gas-fumes which put his friends to flight, he was left by the seashore and, troubled as he had been with his breathing, succumbed to asphyxiation. When, a day later, light was restored to the land, his body was found uninjured, wearing the appearance rather of sleep than of death (quiescenti quam defuncto similior).

An insatiable desire for knowledge and indefatigable industry in amassing it are the outstanding characteristics of Pliny. A hard-working official, he could never have completed so many volumes on intricate subjects without marvellous self-denial and an extraordinary faculty for dispensing with sleep. The small hours after midnight found him ready to begin study long before the time came for repairing to the Emperor Vespasian—another early riser. His very meals could be utilized for listening to a trained reader: during leisure hours, as he basked in summer sunlight, he would have a book read aloud, and take [351]notes or extracts. A favourite, but very risky, remark of his was that there was no book so bad as not to contain something profitable.⁠[1022] In the country only bathing-time was exempt from study, and immediately after a bath, while he was being rubbed down, he listened to a reader, or himself dictated. In winter the close attendance of a secretary, with hands gloved against the cold and equipped with books and tablets, ensured that nothing should impede the acquisition and distribution of knowledge. Once at dinner a book was being read aloud, when one of the guests stopped the reader for mispronouncing some words and made him repeat them: upon which Pliny said, “You understood him surely.” “Yes,” replied the friend. “Then why did you stop him? We have lost more than ten lines by this interruption of yours.” Such was his parsimony in time.⁠[1023]⁠

On another occasion he remonstrated with his nephew for taking a walk: “You might,” said he, “have avoided wasting those hours.” The nephew, in recalling the incident long afterwards, made the comment that his uncle thought all time lost that was not devoted to study.⁠[1024] By dint of this intense application he left to the younger Pliny no fewer than one hundred and sixty volumes of extracts written on both sides and in an extremely small hand, which, as the embarrassed legatee realized, “is tantamount to increasing their number.”⁠[1025] It is rare for so passionate a student to fill so many practical offices, and there is a legitimate force in the younger Pliny’s question, “Who among the lifelong devotees of letters must not, when compared with him, blush for yielding to slumber and sloth?”⁠[1026]⁠

Of the half-dozen lost works by Pliny, of which his nephew gives a chronological list,⁠[1027] one was a technical military manual, one a biography, two were on language under oratorical or grammatical aspects, and two were historical. They mark that all-roundness of interest which reappears in the Natural History. His literary career began when, as a young officer, he wrote his handbook on the use of javelins by cavalry, De iaculatione [352]equestri.⁠[1028] The two books De uita Pomponii Secundi were intended for a tribute of affection to the memory of one who was both a literary friend and Pliny’s commanding officer in Germany.⁠[1029] The Bellorum Germaniae XX Libri gave an account of the wars between Rome and the Germans. The idea came to the author on one of his German campaigns when he dreamt that the ghost of Drusus asked that his fame should be rescued from oblivion.⁠[1030] Tacitus quotes the work, which seems to have been in existence as late as the time of Symmachus in A.D. 396.⁠[1031] Studiosi III Libri, “The Student,” or, according to Gellius, “The Students,”⁠[1032] had each of its three long books divided into two volumes. Like Quintilian after him, Pliny treated the education of an orator from infancy (ab incunabulis). Choice specimens from controversial declamations were included. The work impressed Quintilian on the score of carefulness, and therefore surprised him all the more by incidentally introducing fantastic views upon the secret of the long gown which Cicero used to wear and on the advisability of tidy or untidy hair for a speaker.⁠[1033] It was in the latest years of Nero’s reign, when even learning had to walk warily, that Pliny turned to a grammatical subject⁠[1034] in Dubius Sermo, “doubtful forms in language.” He thus made his contribution, as Julius Caesar had done, to the conflict between anomaly and analogy in linguistic forms, though Pliny’s love of variety made him a less rigid stickler for analogy than Caesar had been. Its eight books carried weight with many grammarians including Charisius.⁠[1035] Next, in the thirty-one books A Fine Aufidi Bassi Pliny went back to history, continuing the work of Bassus. It is, however, not clear when that historian stopped: what we do know is that of three definite citations of Pliny’s history by Tacitus,⁠[1036] [353]the earliest refers to A.D. 55. The guess has been made—and opposed—that the thirty-one books treated annalistically the equal number of years from Caligula’s fall in 41 to the triumph of Vespasian and Titus in A.D. 71.⁠[1037] Fabia, who, like Nissen, sees in the lost work a principal source for the Histories of Tacitus, suggests that Pliny started from the later years of Claudius’s reign. Unfortunately, the surviving fragments⁠[1038] are too scanty to aid a decision; but, touching the terminus ad quem, it should be pointed out that Pliny’s words show that he certainly treated Nero’s last year, and suggest that he carried this history of his own times well into the reign of Vespasian.⁠[1039] Completed in A.D. 77, the work was left for publication by the younger Pliny, who notes in his uncle’s historical composition the same scrupulous exactitude⁠[1040] that struck Quintilian in his oratorical treatise. Care alone, however, does not create literature; and no one can now say how far Pliny’s methods in political and social history differed from his methods in natural history. That Tacitus by writing on the same period eclipsed and superseded him as artist and historian we may be quite sure. But it is likely enough that, even if he was no historical genius, we have lost much attractive material in the shape of Pliny’s first-hand impressions and experiences during a period with which he was contemporary.

The supreme memorial to his energy is his one extant production, the Naturalis Historia in thirty-seven books, admirably characterized by his nephew as “a diffuse work, learned, with a variety equal to nature’s own.”⁠[1041] The author found a patron, to whom he might address it, in the prince Titus—himself the composer of a poem on the appearance of a comet. Although dedicated to Titus in A.D. 77,⁠[1042] it was published, at least in the main, posthumously. Probably, either the first decade alone [354]was issued in 77,⁠[1043] or even it may have been subjected to alterations after being presented to Titus: there is general agreement that the author during the last two years of his life continued his task, but did not succeed in giving a final revision to the remaining books. The arrangement is as follows. Book I, which is preceded by an epistle dedicatory, forms an introduction consisting of an exhaustive table of contents book by book (expressly designed to save time and trouble for busy readers⁠[1044]⁠) with an imposing array of authorities employed in each: II, the single physical book, giving Pliny’s cosmography in relation to God, the universe and its elements: III-VI, on the geography and ethnography of Europe, Africa and Asia, starting in the west at the Pillars of Hercules and, after two books allotted to countries on the northern side of the Mediterranean, restarting eastwards from Mauretania for India and Mesopotamia: VII, his anthropological section, treating man and human physiology: VIII-XI, four books on zoology—land animals (with the elephant first, because biggest), sea creatures, birds, insects receiving each a book: XII-XIX, eight books on botany, under which come forest trees and fruit trees and (in XVIII) agriculture: XX-XXVII, eight books devoted to materia medica from botanical sources: XXVIII-XXXII, five books devoted to materia medica from zoological sources: XXXIII-XXXVII, mineralogy and metallurgy, embracing a survey of their application to medicine and the fine arts, so as to bring in the healing properties of metallic substances, artistic productions in gold, bronze or other metals, the manufacture of colours and achievements of great painters, stones and their employment by architects and sculptors, precious stones and their value.

The arrangement is not illogical in broad outline, though the treatment of medicaments got from the animal kingdom is, with a curious lack of symmetry, deferred until both the [355]vegetable kingdom and its medicaments have been treated at great length. That the plan of division was the author’s own is manifest from cross references within the text.⁠[1045] Even a brief summary of the scheme shows how much the subject is related to human concerns. In addition to thirteen predominantly medical books, the mineralogical portion contains a large amount bearing on the healing of man’s ailments: and it was the human factor that fortunately prompted—what would not have occurred to many writers on mineralogy—a valuable digression on the history of art.

Pliny calculated that his work was a repertory of twenty thousand facts, or what he took for facts, compiled from about two thousand volumes and one hundred selected authors.⁠[1046] This last number, however, does not cover his obligations to all sources, because the lists or indices of Roman and foreign authorities, which he appends to his table of contents for each book, yield totals of 146 Roman and 327 foreign authors, or something approaching 500 in all. The discrepancy between this total in the indices and the hundred exquisiti is more apparent than real. It was a professed point of honour with Pliny, though not with ancient writers as a rule, frankly to own obligation to all from whom literary material had been derived: “I hold it for courtesy and ample proof of an honourable modesty to acknowledge by whom one has profited.”⁠[1047] Therefore he feels gratitude not only to his hundred special authors, but to earlier writers whose knowledge they have enabled him to use. This avoidance, however, of any suspicion of plagiarism has been turned against him. Attempts have been made to charge him on this score with an empty parade of learning,⁠[1048] as if, even without his nephew’s explicit testimony, any reader should fail to see that the author had drawn upon multitudes [356]of books. He carries out his promise of acknowledgement to all authorities by recording their names (with subjects sometimes, but only sometimes, specified) in his indices for each book and to a less extent by mentioning authorities in the text. Here, however, he considers himself dispensed from systematic or exhaustive mention of the authors given in the lists: some are cited on incidental or isolated points, others can be inferred to be of more importance, and occasionally others are said to be followed for a considerable portion of the work.⁠[1049] Usually when an author is cited the information is indirectly reported in dependence upon such phrases as Fenestella tradit (IX. 123), scribit Annaeus Seneca (IX. 167), Varro auctor est (XVIII. 307), L. Piso prodidit (XXXIV. 30); but there are passages where authors are quoted verbatim for some lines on end, e.g., Trebius (IX. 93), Nepos (IX. 137) and Cato (XXIX. 14). One cardinal misfortune is that Pliny did not decide expressly to distinguish among principal, secondary, and still more remote authorities, such as those Greek writers who were known to him solely through intermediary writers, Greek or Roman. If he had even revealed the names of his hundred exquisiti, we should have possessed a canon for his main authorities, and thereby known which were subordinate, although the degree of their subordination might still have been perplexing to determine. Again, if we could have been certain of the principle underlying the order of names in each author-list, much would have been clearer about the origin and value of the material. Brunn’s well-known pamphlet of 1856,⁠[1050] which has had great influence in Plinian criticism, laid it down that the order of names in each list broadly corresponded with the order in which the authors were originally used in the particular book to which the list was applicable. Unluckily, this principle, as Brunn himself saw, is not so simple as it looks; and on examination it is burdened with so many exceptions due to Pliny’s [357]subsequent insertions and to disturbances in the text, intentional or accidental, that one must reluctantly doubt its validity.⁠[1051] Another puzzle lies in the figures given after most of the tables of contents to represent totals of “facts, stories, and observations” (res et historiae et obseruationes). The figures vary considerably (417 for Book II, 2214 for VI), while they are absent for III-V.⁠[1052] They may have been taken over from the excerpt-books containing Pliny’s raw material.

Such uncertainties engender speculation, and, since Montigny’s tractate of 1844 examined the relation of Pliny to Aristotle,⁠[1053] a formidable mass of books or brochures has appeared on the sources of the Natural History. This subject of Quellenkritik, though dry, is not barren, because it bears on the progress of human knowledge in antiquity and on Pliny’s mode of work. At the same time, a salutary reminder is given in Teuffel’s Geschichte der römischen Literatur that sure ground is likeliest where the inquiry deals with authors whose works still exist in whole or in part—Aristotle, Theophrastus, Cato, Varro, Virgil, Ovid, Vitruvius, Celsus, Mela and Columella—and that, where intermediary or original authorities are lost, modern research has had wide room—and used it freely—for the play of imagination.⁠[1054] This play of imagination accounts for some arbitrary and extreme positions. Rose, for example, declared Pliny to be an untrustworthy compiler who never handled Aristotle in Greek; Birt was confident that Pliny used Aristotle only through Pompeius Trogus (whereas others have laid much stress on King Juba, Nigidius Figulus, and Varro as intermediaries); Koebert uncompromisingly denied to Pliny the slightest intelligence in art criticism; Rabenhorst scrapped [358]Pliny’s author-lists along with Brunn’s attempted explanation of their order, to make way for his theory that Pliny did apparently little else than plunder the encyclopaedia of Verrius Flaccus.⁠[1055] Some proportion, however, ought to be observed in theorizing. Common sense refuses to believe that all Pliny’s authenticated toil could have been spent on summarizing and annotating scores of authors for his excerpt-rolls, if his Natural History were merely a compilation from Verrius Flaccus’s rerum dignarum memoria libri. Other reasons, if necessary, could be advanced to demolish such a contention; but we may rest content with the argument that the man who filled a series of distinguished offices with absolute integrity (procurationes splendidissimas et continuas summa integritate administrauit, Sueton.) would scarcely in his writing stoop, under an assumed cloak of gratitude, to a fraudulent invention of authorities to whom he in reality owed nothing.

In fact, throughout an investigation which has to a great extent become a controversy, three schools of criticism are discernible—one, radical in its attitude to Pliny, which, with Montigny, Rose, Rabenhorst and others, would dismiss his lists as totally untrustworthy; a second, conservative in attitude, which with Brunn, Urlichs, Gruppe and Detlefsen, would champion Pliny against a charge of pedantic or dishonest parade; and a third, probably now represented by the majority of scholars, moderate in attitude which would admit that Pliny’s lists of authorities cannot be taken at their face-value, but require minute sifting so as to discover, as far as is feasible, the relative importance of the authors named.

Yet amidst a welter of hypotheses, sometimes mutually destructive, real service has been rendered to learning. Brunn’s rule, already mentioned about the order in the author-lists, was [359]well worth formulating as an endeavour to disentangle Pliny’s system of quotation. Aly made temperately stated contributions to the subject of the zoological sources, and Münzer has illuminated in particular Pliny’s employment of Latin authorities like Cato and Varro, and their dependence in turn upon Greek originals. He has argued that Juba was for Pliny a channel for much of the older Greek learning, as Varro was for much of the older Latin learning.⁠[1056] In tracing sources for the fine arts treated in Pliny’s last books, progress has been made on the lines laid down by Otto Jahn,⁠[1057] who, after detecting the homogeneous nature of many of the art-criticisms, indicated their immediate Varronian authorship and ultimate Greek origin. Since Brieger⁠[1058] made the first attempt to determine the names of the Greek writers whose opinions Varro had latinized, a series of scholars have developed or modified the views of the pioneers in this subject.⁠[1059]⁠

Looking broadly at the whole vexed problem, one cannot find compelling reasons against believing that Pliny sometimes went back to the Greeks, and sometimes did not. In detail, if for a moment one considers zoology alone, there is ground for thinking that Pliny in certain parts of his work used the Greek Zoica⁠[1060] which passed for Aristotle, and in other parts used intermediary authors either Greek or Latin. It is a large assumption to make that a learned industrious Roman of the Flavian age never consulted the original Greek sources. Pliny probably obtained Aristotelian and Theophrastian material both indirectly through different intermediaries and directly [360]from the Greek. As regards Latin authors, we know that he used Cato both directly and indirectly; for we find that a quotation in Varro refers him to a passage in Cato, whom he then evidently consults by way of verification, because he quotes more of Cato’s passage than Varro did.⁠[1061] A presumption is thus raised in favour of believing that a parallel desire for verification would at times carry Pliny back from Roman authors to Greek authors whom they cited. An apposite instance occurs in a passage⁠[1062] where divergent views of Aristotle and Trogus are contrasted, suggesting the inference that Pliny had both the Greek and the Latin author in front of him. Elaborate as have been the pains devoted to the inquiry,⁠[1063] one cannot hope fully to recreate the working methods of an omnivorous excerptor and annotator like Pliny;⁠[1064] but one may picture his closely written notebooks packed with extracts, comments, and references, under appropriate headings or rubrics.⁠[1065] Beyond that, to descend into minutiae is guesswork. Pliny’s arrangement in those overflowing excerpt-rolls⁠[1066] and his way of serving up material for his magnum opus are alike matters of speculation, not of dogma. Much of his grouping came from predecessors—categories of animals, for example, classified, unscientifically enough, according to their environment as terrestrial, aquatic, aerial, were ready found for him; but how many tables of interesting points, more or less relevant, Pliny himself added as fruits of discursive reading can only be faintly conjectured. We can fancy his notebooks contained countless headings like “Earthquake, miraculous accidents due to,” “Fortune, examples of mutability in,” “The Sea, wonderful things observed in,” “Death, signs of,” “Elephants, remarkable traits in,” “Of Tritons and Nereids,” “Eagle, a strange case,” “Wood, valuable kinds of,” “Diet—for a man’s [361]health,” “Headache, remedies for,” “Crabs, what they cure,” “Mining, methods of,” “Gold, ancient uses of,” “Colours, natural and artificial,” “Precious stones, tests for”: many such are echoed in the Natural History. As to actual writing, his procedure was probably variable—involving now concentration upon one author or a very few authors, now dispersion among many authors or extracts from them. For larger and well-defined portions of his subject he would rely on one or more authors of highest importance—his authorities of first rank to be reinforced by others of inferior weight. Some such kind of hierarchy of sources has been sketched for the zoological books. Aly⁠[1067] has maintained that, whatever Pliny’s reliance upon Roman sources by preference, this reliance does not hold for Books VIII-XI. Here in zoology, according to his argument, the Aristotelian tradition reigned supreme, and no Latin author could compete; but Pliny liked patriotically to adduce the authority of his fellow-countrymen, and he therefore on special subjects turned from Aristotle—on domestic animals to Varro and Columella, on bees to Hyginus. Other authorities in this second rank were Nigidius, Trebius Niger, and Trogus, who themselves had drawn copiously from Aristotle. To ensure a spice of attractive variety, Pliny resorted to sources of a third rank, and thus imported anecdotes from the royal dilettante Juba,⁠[1068] or the travelled consular Licinius Mucianus. Enlivening items could also be hunted up in Roman annalists, antiquaries, poets, and jurists, or, if already entered in the notebooks, could be fitted into a suitable place in the big work. Besides, there was the added personal touch due to Pliny’s own recollections and comments.

For want, however, of any exact criterion, we are left with a double difficulty in absolutely pronouncing, firstly, which authorities are minor, and, secondly, what is the relative importance of different minor authorities. It is obvious that some writers must have been very seldom used: thus in the second book, on the universe, we should assume from the nature of its [362]contents that Livy, Nepos, Sebosus and Caelius Antipater, though named in the author-list, are not primary authorities on physics: very likely Nepos and Caelius are included solely in virtue of the incidental citations from them regarding the circumnavigation of Africa.⁠[1069] Again, how can we assess Pliny’s debt to Vitruvius and Valerius Maximus? Both names appear in a few of the author-registers, but they are never named in the text. Yet Pliny beyond a doubt used both, and, as they were post-Varronian, used them, not through Varro, but by direct consultation. In this connexion, it is judicious to observe that even as to pre-Varronian writers in Latin, though his debt to Varro is great, the exact amount of his independent research must remain undetermined. His reading in Roman literature earlier than Varro’s time may have been considerably wider than some critics of late have given him credit for. Pliny was not a lazy man.

From this preliminary consideration of problems involved in the study of Pliny’s sources we pass to a brief mention of his outstanding authorities for the principal branches of his work. In Physics he took over the inherited teaching of a large number of Greek thinkers, of whom he names, in his list for Book II, twenty-six as compared with seventeen Romans. He shows keen interest in such problems of Greek mathematicians as the size of the earth or distance of heavenly bodies. Enthusiasm evokes outbursts of praise for the wonderful scientific attainments of Greeks like Aristarchus and Hipparchus.⁠[1070] Matter is drawn from Posidonius; and Varro’s authority acts influentially here, as in most books—it is rare to find his name absent from the author-lists. One cannot but think it peculiar that neither the De Rerum Natura of Lucretius nor the Quaestiones Naturales of Seneca earned for their authors a mention in this list, though their names appear later in the work. In Geography⁠[1071] Varro was supplemented by Agrippa’s wall-chart of the known world [363]which Augustus had completed. Pomponius Mela and Juba were also used, but not Strabo. An important Greek source was Eratosthenes, who flourished early in the second century B.C. and drew from Pytheas, Hanno, and Nearchus. The book on mankind was specially indebted to Varro, Trogus and Verrius Flaccus. Coming to the twenty-five books (VIII-XXXII) assigned to Zoology and Botany under various aspects, one does well to remember, with regard to the Greek sources, that Alexandria had shown less interest in the “descriptive sciences” than in Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy. Zoology and Botany had been subordinated to the art of healing, and it is not without significance that Pliny devotes so large a space to their medicinal side. The development of technical applications appealed to the practical Roman temperament, which preferred empirical concentration upon externals to a Hellenic quest after universals. Doubtless Pliny often felt spiritually more at home with Roman writers—with Vitruvius’s applications of mathematics rather than with Euclid’s theorems, and with actual Roman achievements in engineering rather than with the problems of Archimedes. Thus in Zoology, while Aristotle’s influence remains paramount, it acts also through intermediaries like Nigidius Figulus, Trogus, and Juba. In Botany, material is borrowed from Theophrastus (who had given close attention to the healing properties of plants) but also from Varro, Juba, and Sextius Niger (whose Ὕλη—for he wrote in Greek—was a source common to Pliny and Dioscorides). Alongside of a clear respect for many Greek writers on botany, it is noticeable that Pliny shows fondness for Latin works with botanico-pharmacological contents: phrases like proximi herbarii nostri or quidam e nostris mark his national interest. On bees, Pliny, as we have noted, used Hyginus; on medicine, Celsus, Pompeius Lenaeus, Pompey’s freedman, who made available Mithradates’s lore on poisons, and Antony’s freedman, Antonius Castor, a man of high renown in botany;⁠[1072] on agriculture, Cato, [364]Varro and Columella. The Carthaginian Mago’s treatise on husbandry had long been accessible through the Latin translation authorized by the Senate. Mineralogical material was first collected in the fourth century by Theophrastus; but Pliny, who used his work on stones, is our principal surviving authority. In art, Pliny’s chief guide to Greek authorities was Varro, whom he often cites. Varro had taken occasion to sketch the history of art in connexion with architecture, an important branch in his scheme of education (disciplinae). The three ultimate Greek originals were Duris of Samos, born about 340 B.C., and his juniors Xenocrates⁠[1073] of Sicyon and Antigonus of Carystus. From the first of these came biographic and anecdotic matter concerning artists, from the second a sketch of developments in art with information about workers in bronze and colour, and from the third miscellaneous items of aesthetic interest. In more than one index appear the names of Pasiteles as a writer on wonderful works and of Heliodorus as a writer on monuments dedicated at Athens. Cornelius Nepos, Fenestella, Vitruvius, and Seneca are among Latin authors in the art-lists. The contemporary general and historian Licinius Mucianus supplied the author with facts bearing on art in Asia Minor.

Among questions affecting this elaborately stratified fabric of ancient knowledge, the temptation may arise to inquire what is its scientific worth to-day. Certain drawbacks lie on the surface. One sees that the author was too bookish to be original, too receptive to be experimental, too acquisitive to be discriminating. He tended rather to be overpowered by his enormous material than to marshal it with unerring critical control. We hear in him no Baconian trumpet-call towards research as a condition of intellectual advance; but, then, can experiment be demanded at a stage when, in spite of mechanical discoveries in Alexandria and Rome, scientific instruments and appliances were as yet imperfectly developed? It is, in truth, [365]easy, though not over-helpful towards a just estimate, to criticize Pliny for all his weakness in science when compared with standards of the present. Modern conceptions have, however, left much in the thought of less than a hundred years ago hopelessly antiquated—still more so an encyclopaedist of the first century. The gap between ancient Rome and ourselves is perceived the moment that we think of contemporary theories on the constitution of the universe, on astro-physics, on the properties of matter, on energy, on the meaning of life, on the origin of species, on disease, and on art. Such terms as electro-magnetics (electrum is only “amber” for Pliny), ether-waves, spectrum analysis, radio-activity, relativity, anthropology, evolution, bacteriology and aesthetics have no place in this old encyclopaedia. One has only to pick out a dozen names like Galileo, Newton, Laplace, Faraday, Huxley, Kelvin, Linnaeus, Lamarck, Lyell, Darwin, Mendel and Pasteur, and associate with them their teaching, to see at once how far Pliny has been outdistanced in Physics, Natural History and Medicine. To-day any visitor to Como, the birthplace of the Plinies, might readily fancy that the city itself bears witness to the advance in scientific achievement since the Natural History was written. In the façade of the cathedral are statues of both uncle and nephew, and a piazza not far away contains a statue in honour of another native of Como, the renowned Volta, who heralded an era of electricity. Along with electricity the sciences most conspicuously absent in the Natural History are Chemistry, Geology and Biology. All this is a reminder that, if defects are pointed out, many of them were inevitable in Pliny’s time, and to enter into minute detail would be implicitly to rehearse the history of scientific thought between then and now.

Pliny’s physics, being pre-Copernican, give, a geocentric plan of the universe; and no deeper explanation of the constitution of matter is vouchsafed than the doctrine of the four elements. His geography is unscientific, in some respects untrustworthy, and too much of a dry catalogue, in which many chances of winning interest are missed. In justice, it should be said, that he prepares us for this, and apologizes indeed [366]for his brevity.⁠[1074] How disappointingly unentertaining he can be is clear from the bald treatment of such an island as Sicily, or of such a country as Italy, which ends in his matter-of-fact dismissal of the subject, haec est Italia, diis sacra, hae gentes eius, haec oppida populorum.⁠[1075] Only at the outset does he let himself go regarding Italy; but a panegyrical excursus⁠[1076] does not atone for sins of omission. It is notorious that in his zoology there are many vulgar errors, and yet there is no dearth of the valuable and attractive. Here in the main the worth of what had been handed down from his master Aristotle ensured that much in Pliny must live; for Aristotle was a first-hand observer and exact recorder of the animal world, at any rate within the Aegean area which he knew: if he was overtaken by fable and fantasy, it was usually in the case of distant and semi-romantic regions. His fame as a naturalist has grown almost in inverse proportion to the decline of his fame as a physicist; for, whereas Copernicus and Galileo overturned his physics, the labours of men like Cuvier and Richard Owen have established his greatness in zoology. Of this Aristotelian tradition Pliny, though a less acute observer than his predecessor, inherited enough to win the grateful admiration of Buffon, just as his avowedly encyclopaedic aim won the sympathetic regard of von Humboldt. Neither in zoology nor in botany can his classifications be accepted to-day: nor yet are his descriptions, although many have merit, exhaustive or accurate. If we find cities confused in geography,⁠[1077] we are prepared for still worse confusion in the animal and vegetable kingdoms. To treat the elephant first of land animals or the whale first of sea creatures—at least after Tritons and Nereids!—is a negation of scientific order. Unfortunately, too, Pliny revived some of the fabulous element largely rejected by Aristotle. But here and there gleams betoken conceptions of the future. For example, had facts been more scientifically grasped, the assertion of sex in [367]plants and the account of artificial fertilization among date-palms might have carried the author far further. About his medicine what can be said? The quite imaginary healing powers ascribed to a vast assemblage of animals, plants and substances prove a great deal of his pharmacology to be a farrago of old-world and superstitious remedies. Still, here again the qualification of a critical sense is not entirely absent, inasmuch as Pliny realizes that the absurd claims of wonder-workers⁠[1078] tended to discredit the genuine virtues of herbs. His credulity has its limits. While Pliny, like many a Stoic, accepts portents, as is plain from his record of monstrous births in Book VII, he, on the other hand, rejects the werwolf fable (homines in lupos uerti rursusque restitui, VIII. 80) as only to be believed if all tales are true! Supposing, then, he ever read the excellently told story of the werwolf in Petronius, he read it in the same spirit as a modern reader would.

No number of shortcomings, however, can rob this encyclopaedia of its historical value. The most comprehensive document on the current science of imperial Rome, it is at the same time an index to the attainments of previous epochs in man’s pursuit after knowledge. Tested by its sources, it represents the intellectual stage reached through the manipulation and amplification of Greek—especially Aristotelian—knowledge by Alexandrian and Roman savants. Defects notwithstanding, it therefore abides an irremovable landmark. Admittedly a great deal of the Natural History is neither literature nor science: its style, which has yet to be considered, is often forbidding, and only under serious reservations can it be credited even with that informative quality which makes the literature of knowledge. Much of it, as we have seen, would be disowned by science. Yet its worst mistakes bear a significance in the chronicle of human thought. On the positive side, we owe an infinite amount of instruction to it and to it alone. Think as we choose of Pliny—picture him merely as an intelligent, painstaking, sincere official eager to know but limited in acumen, and dismiss, as we may by modern standards, his science as contemptible, we have still to place to his lasting [368]credit the merit of seeing that the world around teemed with curious things of fascinating interest which demanded record, though they might elude explanation. Besides, the human note (quite apart from the book devoted to man) rings out again and again. Whatever he might, during moments of despondency, write in disparagement of mankind, Pliny recorded enough by way of entertaining stories to place man in strange and sometimes romantic settings. Much that would otherwise have perished was rescued by him from oblivion. Some of the toilers for human progress in the distant past would be unknown but for his mention, and important details about Rome itself and Roman ways can be learned from no other ancient witness. Dreary tracts of second-hand matter redolent of the lamp rather than of nature are compensated for by information, often the fruit of Pliny’s personal experience, concerning such a miscellany of subjects as German forests and Spanish mining, animals imported for table-delicacies or public shows in the capital, harbour-works, roads, embankments, bridges, the sewage system, aqueducts with other great engineering feats of which he is justifiably proud, and (not always, it must be owned, without mistakes) the artistic treasures of the author’s day.

While there is a sense, then, in which Pliny remains in part true knowledge, he also remains literature in part, because a good deal of him can be read with pleasure. He is not, of course, to be continuously perused: his own recommendation, if needed, is against any such attempt, and Roman common sense would have prescribed for a work of reference exactly what a character in Ennius prescribed for philosophy—sips in preference to a sousing plunge.⁠[1079] For anyone not too rigidly concerned with Pliny’s Latin, an excellent way to enjoy him would be to prop Philemon Holland’s folio translation on a table, and browse, as one lists, among the big pages that give a feeling of spacious leisureliness by their size no less than by their generously expanded allowance of quaint English. An appropriate attitude finds a certain charm in anachronisms whereby the [369]ager Gallicus has become “the French pale about Ariminum,” or a Roman emperor in an inscription has been, as Pontifex Maximus, turned into an “Archbishop.” So Diuus Augustus is “Augustus Caesar of happie memorie” and Eratosthenes “a great clerke verily for all kind of literature.” But even in Pliny’s own Latin there is often the attractive feature of readability. He has a knack of recounting familiar things with freshness, and so one reads without boredom about the marvellously indiscriminate digestion of an ostrich (concoquendi sine delectu deuorata mira natura) and its foolish notion that, its head once hidden, its whole body is out of sight (cum colla frutice occultauerint latere sese existimantium, X. i.). His passage on the nightingale is, no doubt, in essence incommensurable with Keats’s Ode, but it will be felt that no one has ever described in prose with more enthusiasm than Pliny the musical variations in the bird’s minstrelsy, the marvel of sound so loud from so small a throat, the marvel of notes in rise and fall so true to perfect harmony.⁠[1080] Judged solely by its information, that is to say its facts and anecdotes, apart from manner of telling—which is variable—the Natural History is one of the half-dozen most interesting books in the world. To turn over its pages almost casually will prove this. Now we read about Nature’s wonderful equipment of the mosquito (XI. 2-3), now about products of civilization, whether, like paper,⁠[1081] essential in Pliny’s opinion, or less so, like citronwood tables (mensarum insania, XIII. 91-95), or oysters brought from Brindisi and refattened in the Lucrine lake (IX. 169). Again, we are told that soap or sapo—not, by the way, a Roman word or invention—was originally produced for reddening the hair in the form of a Gallic pomade, which was compounded of tallow and ashes, might be hard or soft, and gained more popularity [370]in Northern Europe with men than with women (XXVIII. 191). Here we chance upon an account of the ways to find gold (XXXIII. 66 sqq.), and there a case of a military officer being fool enough to take 12,000 lbs. weight of silver plate with him on a campaign against barbarians (ib. 143). One gets to know what the eyes of five emperors were like (XI. 143-144), how madly fond Tiberius was of Lysippus’s statue, the “Apoxyomenos,” and how Nero spoiled Lysippus’s “Alexander” by gilding it (XXXIV. 62-63). Or it may be only isolated scraps that we note—what ship brought the Egyptian obelisk to the Vatican, who first served a boar whole, who first served goose-liver at Rome, when bakers first came to the city, who was the earliest doctor. Or the subject may be, as it is in Book XIV, famous vineyards and vintages—what Augustus’s favourite brand was, what was a good invalid wine, what the wines at Julius Caesar’s banquets, what the evils of drunkenness or next morning’s feelings after a debauch—“a cask’s breath from the mouth, oblivion of almost everything, the death of memory.”⁠[1082] It is all the more entertaining that his individual impress is left on some at least of his catalogues. Thus his sketch of the imposing structures of Rome,⁠[1083] interspersed with outbursts of commendation as well as censures upon luxury, can hardly fail to amuse the modern reader by its picture of the supposedly dignified Roman people whirling through the air in two reversible theatres and actually cheering at the risk it ran (ad periculum suum plaudens, XXXVI. 118).

Pliny’s outlook on life was largely determined by his Stoic sympathies. Epicurean, Academic and Neo-Pythagorean grains had fallen upon his mind, but had not taken root there as did Stoicism. There was much to draw him to the system. He knew the most high-souled of its adherents, Paetus Thrasea, and he had studied Seneca.⁠[1084] A philosophy which pointed towards the study of nature, and was yet more engrossed in the attainment of virtue through wise conduct, could not but appeal [371]to a grave, diligent, self-sacrificing spirit like Pliny’s. It claimed to hold the solution for the riddle of Providence and the universe; and its ascetic position of disdain for pleasure so suited his own simple tastes and laborious days as to confirm him in a heart-felt dislike of luxury and of fools. His characteristic views, then, those to which he most regularly adheres, regarding God, the world and nature, man and society, are traceable to, or at least consistent with, Stoicism. Thus he is inclined to believe in a providential government of the world, whose soul is a divine power acting beneficently on earth as among the stars above.⁠[1085] Only human weakness could seek to associate God with an image made by human hands:⁠[1086] there is one God and, echoing Xenophanes’s conception that “He is all eye, all thought, all ear,” Pliny believes Him to be a mighty principle of Life and Soul, beside whom the manifold deities of Greece or Rome are simply a jest; for such diversity of gods makes “the population of heaven outstrip mankind!”⁠[1087] With this pantheistic creed Pliny sees around him a divine organism at work for human good; and something noble animates his perception of godhead in the service of humanity. For mortal to help mortal, he feels, is to rise to the rank of divinity and to glory everlasting.⁠[1088] A sense of piety, then, must have lightened his own toil upon the encyclopaedia, since his explicit aim therein was to help his fellows and posterity.⁠[1089]⁠

The same ultimate belief underlies his attitude to nature and to the earth, which are not always in his mind absolutely distinguished, and which logically indeed must be partially identified in respect of the divine element ascribed to both. Despite a few inconsistencies, there is no mistaking his general position; but the profundity of a philosopher is not to be expected from him. An honest simple-minded observer, Pliny did not arrogate to himself a power of penetration into the innermost recesses of nature. Perhaps he is chargeable with [372]having been over-readily content to contemplate merely the outward appearance of things—their phenomenal existence. Yet this was at least sincerer than bedimming nature under a misty cloud of unwarrantable hypotheses. On the whole, he saw life and the world with remarkable clearness: finding in it matter for wonder, indignation, and pity, he did not stay to analyse the momentous theories logically implicit in such sentiments. His criticism is at best on the surface: and he is more fully satisfied with a rapturous apostrophe or a puritanic tirade or a moralizing reflection than with any systematic pursuit of a vera causa or any attempt to read the enigma of the universe. So he is not strictly consistent even with regard to this mighty “Nature” whom he personifies as a Universal Mother. In one mood, thinking of man, poor wretch, whom she lays all naked upon the earth on his very birthday to wail in helplessness,⁠[1090] Pliny wonders whether after all she may be only a grim Stepdame (parens melior homini an tristior nouerca, VII. 1). But the mood does not last. As a rule, he is enamoured of Nature rather than of man: she does everything well, whereas man abuses and degrades her products. This spirit prompts Pliny’s repeated invectives against the refinements of pleasure. From his standpoint the herbal dyes of Gaul are more innocent than the purple got from the murex, because the former are ready to hand, while the latter must be sought in the unfathomed depths of the sea (intacta etiam ancoris, XXII. 3). So then man is at fault. Man’s pride is but folly after his lowly start at birth: man’s inhumanity to man makes most of the world’s mourning: man perverts the kindly boons of nature.⁠[1091] In contrast with his folly, his ingratitude, his extravagances, nature is the inspired artificer whose perfect workmanship ought never to be improved upon.⁠[1092] Virtues in herbs are so [373]many proofs that nature produces nothing without some secret reason—really for the sake of man.⁠[1093] Her simple remedies far excel his artificial drugs.⁠[1094] Her infinite and joyous variety is such that painting cannot do justice to her festive hues.⁠[1095] In keeping with such affectionate enthusiasm, the author has a characteristic retort for scoffers at his devoted toil upon the Natural History, when he claims the consolation of suffering neglect in company with Nature the beneficent (XXII. 15, plerisque ultro etiam inrisui sumus ista commentantes atque friuoli operis arguimur, magno quamquam immensi laboris solatio sperni cum rerum natura). Finally, if we can take the text as authentic, it is to her that he addressed a pious farewell as he laid down his pen: “Hail, Nature, parent of all things, vouchsafe thy blessing on the work of one who alone of Romans has celebrated thee in thine every phase” (XXXVII. 205).

A parallel attitude is adopted towards Earth, whom with some forgetfulness of nature’s beneficence he regards at once as part of nature, and yet as a mother enfolding man when finally cast off by the rest of nature. The typically Plinian eulogy translated below appears to ignore nature as parent of all:

“The Earth is the one portion of nature on whom for her singular services we have conferred a surname expressive of revered motherhood. She is to man as the heavens to God. She welcomes us at birth, feeds us when born, and once we have issued into this world supports us continually: at the last she folds us in her bosom when the rest of nature has abandoned us, then most our mother as she covers us: in none of her services more blessed than in that which makes us also blessed—even bearing our monuments and titles, prolonging our name, and extending our money in despite of quick-passing time. Her final power we men in our anger pray should lie heavy on an [374]enemy who is now no more,⁠[1096] as though we knew not that she is the only one never angry with mankind. The waters steal into rain-clouds, harden to hail, swell in waves, dash headlong in torrents: the air thickens in mist and raves in the storm-blast. But Earth is bountiful, tender, indulgent. Ever the handmaiden of mortal needs, what does she breed at our compelling, what yield at her own will—what scents and savours, what juices, what things to touch, what wealth of colour! How true her honesty to repay with interest a loan entrusted to her! What plenty she maintains for our sake!”⁠[1097]⁠

When at the beginning of his book on agriculture he renews his praises of Earth, it is to this passage that he refers, as one in which he has already championed her cause.⁠[1098] Yet man has repaid her bounty with gross maltreatment: “with iron, wood, fire, stone, and crops she is tortured every hour, and much more to serve our pleasures than our needs.... How many hands are worn to enable a finger-joint to glitter with a gem! If there were a hell, the excavations of greed and luxury would have dug it up by now!”⁠[1099]⁠

How empty, he reflects, is all man’s striving. This Earth, the theatre of our ambitions, is but a speck in the universe (mundi punctus). To those who are avaricious for land he preaches a sermonette on the vanity of human wishes, anticipates Juvenal’s sarcophago contentus erit on the close of Alexander’s career.⁠[1100] In a gayer mood, however, he overlooks the tortures of Mother-earth by crop-raising, and fancifully assigns as one explanation for the ancient fertility of the soil that it liked being ploughed by ex-generals of the Cincinnatus type, whereas in later days it underwent the ignominy of cultivation by slaves instead of retired dictators.⁠[1101]⁠

Pliny’s exaltation of nature proportionately depresses his views on man, society and progress. Good men, he thinks, are [375]due to nature’s kindness in providing the antidote with the poison:

“Some men too are born poisons. Like the black dart of the serpent’s tongue, their venomous souls blight what they touch. They denounce everything, and, comparable with unhallowed birds, begrudge their own darkness, and disturb the quiet of night itself with their howls—the only utterance they have—so that their mere encounter, as much as that of ill-omened creatures, paralyses action or kind-heartedness. Universal hatred is the one known gain from their loathsome breath. But in this sphere too the majesty of nature has produced good and honest men, just as she is more fertile in plants that heal and nourish. Rejoicing in the esteem of the good, we will abandon such human scum to the bitterness that burns within them, and proceed to make life fairer (excolere uitam): and this with firmer resolution, as our aim is the pleasure, not of reputation won, but of service rendered” (XVIII. 4-5).

As to the related subject of human society, Pliny is disappointed with the heedlessness of contemporary Romans, the lack of serious desire for knowledge, the flippant passion for luxury. This latter theme never tires him, though it tires his readers. Historically he connects the inroads of luxury with the conquest of Asia.⁠[1102] Widened maritime control had endangered the old Roman character: “we are not merely fed by risks at sea, we are clothed as well:” even shellfish had involved a devastation of morals (populatio morum), and, as regards the parade of wealth in pearls, “it is not enough to wear them—people must walk on them!”⁠[1103] Censuring the expenditure of fortunes upon costly incense for funeral pyres, Pliny claims that the old salted cake of simple worship used to win more divine grace, and complains that millions on millions of sesterces are drained out of the Roman Empire annually by China, India and Arabia in return for Oriental exports like silks, pearls and scents—“a dear price to pay for our extravagance and women” [376](tanti nobis deliciae et feminae constant).⁠[1104] Elsewhere, he ranks perfumes as the most superfluous of luxuries: “pearls pass to an heir: garments enjoy a respite: but perfumes breathe their last on the spot—they die in what may be called their own hour: their chief recommendation is that, as a lady passes by, the scent may draw the attention of those who have other business on hand.”⁠[1105] Forced fruits and vegetables share his condemnation with iced water for the full purse.⁠[1106] We have seen that he prefers natural dyes from Gallic plants to other sorts: Gaul therefore does not need to ransack the ocean for purples which the vicious use for seductive purposes. Gravely he adds that these more innocent vegetable dyes will not wash: and then, avoiding a detailed homily, pulls himself up with a rhythm that amusingly anticipates the mediaeval student’s song Mihi est propositum in taberna mori.⁠[1107] The same liking for simplicity comes out in his admiration for the ancient plainness of the oak wreath (ciuica corona) conferred for life-saving in war—a custom worthy of deathless memory, because rescue of a citizen must not be matter for gain.⁠[1108] Pliny’s own frugal habits of life and industrious husbandry of time give point to his protests against the shallowness of his day: he grieves in particular that the discoveries of the past are neglected and sound knowledge contemned owing to a pernicious worship of money (auaritiae tantum artes coluntur). In spite of free intercommunication throughout the Empire and the advantages of peace for quiet study, ground has been lost: preoccupation with the means of enrichment has engendered a lethargic attitude to antiquity as well as a brood of social evils.⁠[1109] Early in his work he had struck a similar note of regret over the unrewarded toil of ancient investigators (sine praemio alio quam posteros iuuandi), the contemporary failure to add to learning (nihil addisci noua inquisitione), and the cramping concentration on lucre (lucri non scientiae gratia).⁠[1110] The same revulsion against the carelessness of voluptuaries acts along with his ever-present desire for knowledge and his humanitarian regard for the thousand ills [377]that flesh is heir to (millia morborum singulis mortalium timenda) among the motives which underlie Pliny’s enthusiasm for the healing art.⁠[1111]⁠

Bias in favour of simplicity and belief in nature’s perfection combined to produce a curious anomaly in Pliny’s attitude towards life. This appears in a distrust of inventions which, if pressed logically, would argue actual hostility to human progress. One is prepared to find his discontent with contemporary society impelling him, like Rousseau, to conceive an ideal picture of primitive tribes: and so his raptures⁠[1112] on the charming innocence of unsophisticated man, supposing there were no mines in a wicked world, will not deceive a modern reader into fancying a dainty existence among Hottentots or Andaman islanders. When, however, he denounces the audacious manufacture of linum into sails (XIX. 4-6), and a Roman admiral has thus declared war on ships, one asks how far this is merely a conventional pose. It is at least infinitely ridiculous when contrasted with Sophocles’s famous ode on man as greatest of wonders, first and foremost because he “fares across the white sea before the stormy South.”⁠[1113] By degrees we realize that Pliny, in spite of his passion for knowledge, was not sympathetic towards daring exploration or scientific discovery. Well aware that nature has her secrets, he is yet chary about probing too deeply. We have seen that he has no inkling of the fundamental conceptions of pure science. Nor could applied science ever have obtained his benediction or thriven on his cautious methods. He would have been out of touch with an age of rapid industrial development and mechanical improvements. Upon his reflections about the evil uses of iron,⁠[1114] Philemon Holland appends a marginal note: “O Pliny, what wouldest thou say if thou diddest see and hear the pistols, muskets, culverines and cannons in these daies!” To transpose the Elizabethan apostrophe to more modern times, what would [378]he have said of inventions like gas, incandescent mantles, photography, telegraph, telephone, electric light, electric transmission of force, gramophone, cinematograph, anaesthetics, bacteriological tests, applications of Röntgen rays, wireless broadcasting, and, after his objections to navigation, what would he have said about aeronautics?

His political views may be in a measure divined from his close intimacy with the Flavian house, the tone of his preface to Titus, and allusions like that to the salutaris exortus Vespasiani (XXXIII. 41). Accepting the imperial system as indispensable to Rome, he is grateful for the security guaranteed by a world-wide order (immensa Romanae pacis maiestate, XXVII. 3). It is in virtue of this system that Italy holds the principate on earth and rules the nations aright (XXXVII. 201). Nevertheless his patriotism is wider than a single political system: he is intensely national and proud of Rome as Rome. He therefore feels himself free to praise the qualities which constituted the moral strength of the republic (XVI. 14); and, without Livy’s dominant bias for the aristocracy, he still venerates the renowned families who made history. Cincinnatus, Curius Dentatus and the elder Cato are among his heroes—men who could take a lead in defending the state and its land. The decline of agriculture was in his eyes the most painful symptom of the deterioration of Rome (XVIII. 21 and 35). Literary judgements are not germane to his subject, but his reverence for Homer, Cicero and Virgil can be observed.⁠[1115] It was part of his patriotism that, as already noted, he made the fullest possible use of Latin authorities in collecting the substance of his work. His preference for the writers of Rome is intensified because of his conviction that foreign influences had damaged the nation. Great as had been the intellectual services of Greece to the world, Pliny quotes with gusto the warning from Cato which ends like the jest about the Scots’ revenge for Flodden: “That country (Greece) will present us with her literature, and corrupt everything—even more so, if she sends [379]her physicians here. They have sworn to kill off every non-Greek with medicine!”⁠[1116]⁠

Pliny’s literary qualities form an extraordinary and somewhat irritant mixture. If one had to characterize his style, one might call it piebald; for there is an enormous difference between his lack-lustre catalogues and his intentional purple passages. Certain ingredients too are drawn from authors whose words have been worked into his text. In his preface he avows that he makes no claim to write an elevated style: his theme, he points out, is a dry one, calling for unadorned treatment, giving few opportunities for amusing a reader (neque admittunt ... iucunda dictu aut legentibus blanda), and necessitating in some portions the use of words from country life or from abroad (rusticis uocabulis aut externis, immo barbaris) to suit the subject-matter.⁠[1117] But, in general, his writing bears unmistakably the imprint of the Silver Age: alongside of the usual rhetorical paraphernalia such as antitheses, exclamations, questions and figures of speech, it exhibits the presence of poetic colouring and a particularly formless structure of sentence. At the same time there are elements of individuality. Though Pliny can be insufferably dull, he can also furnish a lively description and tell a good story. The former gift may be illustrated by his sketch of a struggle between an eagle and its prey, condensed in jerky jingling clauses,⁠[1118] or by the account in Book X of the bee-republic, the spider’s web, and organization among ants. Among many stories which Pliny, better than his promise in the preface, introduced to secure variety of interest, one may refer to Cleopatra’s boastful bet that she could spend ten million sesterces at a banquet and her way of doing it (IX. 119-121); the schoolboy of Baiae who used to bathe with a tame dolphin (IX. 25, followed by a similar tale which the younger Pliny seems to forget having found in his uncle’s work); the cobbler’s pet raven and why it got a public funeral (X. 121-122); the [380]freedman who raised far better crops than his neighbours and who, when arraigned for sorcery, exhibited in court his implements and workmen with the words, “These be my spells!” (XVIII. 41-43, ueneficia mea, Quirites, haec sunt.) One of the best Roman examples shows appreciation of the sardonic flavour in Tiberius’s joke about invalid wine from Sorrento: “doctors,” said the Emperor, “have laid their heads together to give Surrentine a testimonial—and I must say it’s excellent vinegar!” (XIV. 64). The anecdotes about Greek artists have the merit of retelling the competition of Zeuxis’s picture of grapes versus Parrhasios’s picture of a curtain (XXXV. 65), and the equally famous incident of the cobbler who, as a conceited art-critic, proved that he ought to have stuck to his last (ne supra crepidam sutor, XXXV. 85).

Seneca’s brevity, acting on a sarcastic vein in Pliny, sent him in expression half-way on to Tacitus. With less toilsome accumulation to face and more leisure for reflection, he might have developed a pretty wit: as things are, the mass of his work is so huge that he does not always get credit for his ingenuity. This pre-Tacitean irony colours his implication that some emperors had divinity thrust upon them, when in reference to “that god Augustus” he gravely adds the aside, “and I can’t say whether he simply got heavenly honours or deserved them” (VII. 150); and there must be a spice of mischievous raillery when in Book XXI he applies the phrase “God’s letters” to Augustus’s epistles complaining about his daughter Julia’s nocturnal revelries. Sometimes, the jest may be at the expense of idolatry: “once on a time wood served for images of the gods, for as yet nobody had discovered the value of beasts’ carcases, but nowadays by divine concession to luxury, the ivory (of elephants) makes gods’ heads and table-legs!” (XII. 5). Or it may be at the expense of civilization: he contrasts the honesty in Arabian forests—where the trees tapped for liquid incense need no watch set upon them; but in the perfume establishments of Alexandria “no supervision can sufficiently guard the workshop and the workman has his pants sealed up” (XII. 59). Much of his mockery, like Martial’s, is expended on medicine. “A tiny ulcer must have a drug from the [381]Persian Gulf” (ulcerique paruo medicina a Rubro Mari imputatur, XXIV. 5). “In matters affecting health, people are less trustful if they understand” (XXIX. 17: that is why a mysterious Greek practitioner is appreciated). “Physicians learn at our risk and conduct experiments through deaths” (ib. 18). “It’s not modesty but competition that brings medical fees down” (neque enim pudor sed aemuli pretia summittunt, ib. 21): “the hot baths prescribed for digestion so reduce the strength that the doctor’s most obedient patients are carried to their graves!” (ib. 26). Apropos of the wrangling among physicians over invalids and the epitaph on the man who “died of a crowd of doctors” (turba se medicorum perisse), Pliny remarks: “It’s an open secret that the most loquacious among these Greek doctors becomes straightaway the arbiter of a Roman life or death”: the fact is “Greek talent is the breeze that drives us Romans” (ingeniorum Graeciae flatu impellimur, XXIX. 11).

Some of the above are general enough in application to approach the semi-proverbial sententia, which gains in force if scathing and disdainful, like “When all hope is away, it is high time to pray” (tum praecipuus uotorum locus est cum spei nullus est, VIII. 57); “Absolutely nothing pleases man as it pleases nature” (nihil utique homini sic quomodo rerum naturae placet, XIX. 55); and “It is fitting that even luxury must be protected against faked gems” (quando etiam luxuriam aduersus fraudes muniri deceat, XXXVII. 198). Pliny displays aptness of personification in such conceptions as “nature at play” amidst the variety of her shells (magna ludentis Naturae uarietas, IX. 102), or the Nile-water “filling the rôle of farmer” (Nilus coloni uice fungens, XVIII. 167). He gives also many pithy summaries of a situation. Latifundia perdidere Italiam, on the ruin of agriculture, has been already quoted: by way of contrast, he lays it down that “cultivation consists in labour, not outlay” (if the reading is opera non impensa cultura constat)—that is why our ancestors said “The master’s eye is the most fertilizing thing” (XVIII. 43). Other epigrams touch neatly on the dangerous pursuit after riches, “We mine for wealth in the depths of hell” (in sede manium opes quaerimus, XXXIII. [382]2); on the deterioration caused by luxury, “The life of pleasure began, real life stopped” (uoluptas uiuere coepit, uita ipsa desiit, XIV. 6); and on the drawbacks entailed by the Empire on Rome in the loss of her ancient customs, “Our victory has meant moral defeat: we are dependents of the foreigner” (uincendo uicti sumus: paremus externis, XXIV. 5).

Certain longer passages, where he indulges in “fine writing,” exemplify his fanciful style and hankering after point. Here is an encomium upon Italy introduced with an apology for his brief treatment of Italian geography:

“Neither am I ignorant that it might be taken, and that justly, for a sign of an unthankful and a lazy mind, if one should speak merely in passing, after this cursory manner, of a land which is at once foster-child and parent of all lands. Divine grace has chosen Italy to make heaven itself more glorious, to unite scattered empires, to civilize manners, to draw together by interchange of speech the discordant and savage tongues of so many nations, to give to humanity humane culture, and in a word become for all peoples in the whole world their one and only country.... The city of Rome that stands alone therein—how worthy a face upon so charming a neck!—by what means ought she to be set forth?”

He proceeds to praise the climate, fertility and trade of the peninsula, “An open bosom for the commerce of the world from all parts, herself as it were eagerly running out into the sea to help mankind. The very Greeks—a stock most unrestrained in self-laudation—have delivered judgement on Italy by giving to what is but a small part of her the name of ‘Great Greece.’”⁠[1119]⁠

A parallel passage near the close of the work comes near to being a sort of peroration:

“Now that we have fully treated all the works of nature, it is fitting to draw some distinction among things themselves and among countries. Over all the globe, then, everywhere beneath the dome of heaven, the most beautiful land, the one that holds for products the highest rank in nature is Italy—queen and second mother for the world (rectrix parensque mundi altera),”⁠[1120] [383]and there follows a summary of her pre-eminence in men and women, soldiers and slaves, arts and talents, position and healthiness, water-supply and fertility.

His rhetoric may be elaborate, like his apostrophe to Cicero (VII. 116-117) and the passage on the question “What did Dame-Nature mean by making some honies poisonous?” (XXI. 78); or it may consist in short swallow-flights of sentiment like his regret over decay in bronze-work (XXXIV. 5-6), his pleasure over the power of art to draw the eyes of the Senate (XXXV. 28), and his allusion to the fall of the Carthaginian Hercules into dishonour (XXXVI. 39). All this betrays artifice designed to counterbalance the commonplace technicalities forced upon him by agriculture, medicine and mining. Another side of this desire to escape from his subject-matter appears in the poetic ingredients of his vocabulary—forms such as senecta and iuuenta shared with poets and the later prose-writers, or a word like gemmans employed in the Ovidian and Manilian sense of “sparkling.” When Pliny wrote sortis humanae uolumina (VII. 147), meaning “revolutions or reversals of human fortune,” he gave a metaphorical turn to the poetic use of uolumen in the sense of “whirl” or “eddy.” A Livian word like sugillatio (VII. 150; XXXII. 74) is also characteristic: it may have come direct from Livy, who in many respects is a forerunner of Silver Latin, or Pliny may have got it through Valerius Maximus. Further symptoms are noticeable in personifications and use of abstract nouns for concrete: leonum feritas inter se non dimicat (VII. 5, for leones feri), uniuersa mortalitas (VII. 147, for cuncti mortales, cf. mortalitati, XXXIV. 141), potestatum (IX. 29 “of men in power”), seruitus (XIV. 5, “slaves”), seruitia (XXXIII. 23, “slaves”), ministeriorum (XXXI. 7, for ministrorum).

Pliny’s frequent curtness does not make for limpidity. Too often he writes as one in a hurry, with the result that both expression and structure suffer. The ordinary Plinian sentence, in its badly fitted series of condensed clauses and phrases, forms a great contrast to the finished Ciceronian period; it loses proportionately in rhythm, logic and clearness. Any schoolboy will detect the inelegantly loose employment of the present [384]participle in writing inde eductum custodia bibere iussit illico exspirantem (XXI. 12) to convey the fact that “She (Cleopatra) had a prisoner brought from custody, whereupon she ordered him to drink, and he died on the spot.” Nowhere, however, is Pliny more exasperating than in his maltreatment of the ablative case. He uses ablatives in a slack sense, accumulates them cumbrously, introduces contiguous ablatives in confusingly different meanings, plasters a heap of ablatives absolute on to a sentence, or awkwardly suspends a gerund to the close (e.g. prodendo, XII. 17). Thus tenui gutta ploratu lanis (XII. 116) is intended to mean “after exuding in thin drops on to linen”; and the lumbering collocation adhibetur et ars iecori feminarum, sicut anserum, inuentum M. Apicii, fico arida saginatis a(c) satie(tate) necatis repente mulsi potu dato (VIII. 209) refers to the mode of securing sow-liver as well as goose-liver—“the sows being stuffed with dry figs, and then, when fattened, suddenly killed after having honied wine given to them to drink.” Fortunately the world has not judged Pliny by his style.

Himself a pre-eminent epitomator and excerptor, Pliny in turn fell into the hands of the epitomators and excerptors of the third and fourth centuries. Their interest lay chiefly in his geographical and medical portions.⁠[1121] The Collectanea rerum memorabilium by Solinus in the third century shows much of his influence acting either directly or indirectly;⁠[1122] and the so-called Medicina Plinii of the next century drew copiously on his medical books, as the third-century poem in 1115 hexameters by Serenus Sammonicus had also done. Abridgement brought upon many ancient originals the fate of disappearance; but this did not befall the Natural History. From Symmachus in the fourth century we learn that it was widely read; certainly it was used by Martianus Capella and Isidorus of Seville. In the surviving MSS. we have about a couple of hundred witnesses to its popularity in the Middle Ages. Bede in the eighth century possessed a copy,⁠[1123] and an astronomical work in an Anglo-Saxon [385]monastery drew material from at least two of the books.⁠[1124] In the next century Alcuin applied to Charlemagne for part of the text; a poem by Alcuin includes Pliny among the volumes of the library at York; and the Irish monk Dicuil made extracts from Pliny for his Mensura orbis terrae. In the twelfth century Robert of Cricklade (in North Wilts), Prior of St. Fridewide at Oxford, dedicated to Henry II of England his elaborate Defloratio in nine books excerpted from the Natural History.⁠[1125]⁠

Writers of every period, in fact, profited by the diligence of a compiler who took advantage of all moments to construct a main conduit whereby the science of the ancient world might pass on to later times. But it is natural that, while during less enlightened centuries he was accepted as an authority, the modern spirit of research should demand a fresh orientation towards his work judged as science. It is significant that “a large part of Pliny’s work has gradually passed into folk-keeping, so that through its agency the gipsy fortune-teller of to-day is still reciting garbled versions of the formulae of Aristotle and Hippocrates of two and a half millenia ago.”⁠[1126] That, however, is only one phase of his survival. On the permanence of his historical value stress has already been laid. It is under this aspect that the gigantic encyclopaedia best justifies the author’s unremitting pains and a reader’s interest to-day.

FLAVIAN HISTORY

As Pliny was a historian, it is in place to give here the brief chronicle of Flavian history. Primarily a business-like emperor, Vespasian himself wrote memoirs. Cluvius Rufus⁠[1127] connects the Claudian and Flavian epochs. Of consular rank when Caligula was assassinated in 41, he was governor of Spain in 69, and in his later years under Vespasian composed his work on Nero’s reign which Tacitus used. Another recent historian [386]used by Tacitus was Fabius Rusticus⁠[1128] who seems to have been alive as late as A.D. 108. Vipstanus Messalla, an orator like Quintilian with a preference for the old style, was a friend of Tacitus’s youth and author of historical studies.⁠[1129]⁠

Under Domitian, history could not but suffer blight. The only names that call for mention are those of Vibius Maximus, destined to become prefect of Egypt in A.D. 104, and author of a universal history in which Statius saw qualities recalling Sallust and Livy;⁠[1130] and the two Stoics Arulenus Rusticus and Herennius Senecio, composers of eulogies upon Paetus Thrasea and Priscus Helvidius respectively, which, with their philosophical independence, cost them their lives.⁠[1131] These were days when sentence of death was passed on Hermogenes of Tarsus because his history offended the Emperor, and on Mettius Pompusianus because he was interested enough in Livy to keep a volume of speeches by kings and generals extracted from his pages.⁠[1132]⁠

QUINTILIAN

In M. Fabius Quintilianus⁠[1133] we meet the premier teacher of imperial rhetoric and the greatest Latin authority upon education. The epigrammatist justifiably invoked him as

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Belonging to Calagurris in Spain,⁠[1135] he spent some part, perhaps a great part, of his early life in Rome, where his father may have been a rhetor.⁠[1136] Quintilian recalls the trial of Cossutianus Capito in A.D. 57 as an event of his youth (nobis adulescentibus): he mentions also his youthful attendance on the aged speaker Domitius Afer,⁠[1137] who died a year or more later. The conjectural date, then, for his birth would be about A.D. 35. If we accept the evidence of the scholiast on Juvenal,⁠[1138] the distinguished grammarian Palaemon was one of Quintilian’s teachers; and the common impression has been that his education was mainly in Rome. He had studied observantly the methods adopted by speakers of the previous generation, and his own criticisms indicate some of the qualities that acted upon him. Among these predecessors he ranks Julius Africanus high, no doubt for his force (uires Africani, XII. x. 11), alongside of his old master Domitius Afer, for whom, although a detestable informer under Tiberius, he entertained a deep respect. He liked Afer’s bon mots and his ripeness (maturitatem): he recalls his treatise On Witnesses and a speech that circulated in his boyhood.⁠[1139] Africanus, we learn independently, indulged in a metaphorical style of which it was remarked “Very fine, indeed; but what’s the point of it?”⁠[1140] Among others who exerted influence on Quintilian was Servilius Nonianus, to whose able though discursive histories he had listened.⁠[1141] Three recent orators he particularly mentions together.⁠[1142] They are Galerius Trachalus, whose lofty style and lucidity appeared to more advantage when heard than when read; for, says Quintilian, “he was blest with a voice such as I never heard in anyone else and a delivery that would have done credit to the stage” (pronuntiatio uel scenis suffectura);⁠[1143] Vibius Crispus, the notoriously successful informer whose pleasant style was apparently better suited to private than to [389]public cases;⁠[1144] and Julius Secundus, like Marcus Aper, one of the figures in Tacitus’s Dialogus, and prevented only by his premature demise from developing into a great orator.⁠[1145]⁠

While, however, rhetoric pervaded the atmosphere of Rome, we have no means of determining how much Quintilian owed in training to his own cultured home-province of Spain or whether he actually taught there. At some time or other he had gone back to Spain; for in 68 Galba brought him to Rome.⁠[1146] He then entered on his career of teaching as a professor, holding what may be termed an imperially subsidized chair of rhetoric.⁠[1147] His lectures earned him reputation, honours and wealth. Pupils surreptitiously pirated his discourses, and he himself was ultimately paid the compliment of elevation to the consulate.⁠[1148] After retirement from public teaching, he devoted the evening of life to his work on the principles of oratory, dedicated to Victorius, or Vitorius, Marcellus. Domitian entrusted to him the tutorship of his two grandnephews, as we learn from the proem to his fourth book, where he combines a perhaps diplomatically unavoidable flattery of the emperor with the explanation that this mark of confidence in his educational power had stimulated him to provide more than a manual on rhetoric for the son of Marcellus and his own son. Before he had gone quite half-way through his literary task the author suffered the pangs of severe bereavement.

Striking the most personal note in his work, the proem to the sixth book turns from technicalities to the broken hopes of a sorrowing father. Addressed to Marcellus as the real begetter of the treatise, it tells how the author had counted on bequeathing the work to be the richest of inheritances for his son, then a promising lad of nine, but death had intervened. In a fit of human petulance he upbraids the gods for causing him to outlive [390]all his dear ones. He had already lost his young wife in her nineteenth year, then one boy of five, and now the surviving boy—a clever child on whose accomplishments in Greek and Latin, and patience during illness he dwells tenderly, so that amidst his apostrophes of grief and Stoic reflections we are drawn nearer to him than anywhere else in his writings. In spite of a few epigrammatic antitheses, true to the rhetoric of the age, one cannot but be touched when he begs indulgence if mourning should make his energy flag, finds his best security in the thought that fortune has left herself no further chance of afflicting him, and bespeaks a kind attitude to labours that are not selfish but altruistic in aim. “This work, alas, like the acquisitions of my fortune, I shall leave for others than those for whom I designed it.”⁠[1149]⁠

The first ten chapters of the second book enable us to picture the sort of exercises prescribed by Quintilian in his apparently rather select academy. These were written themes to be criticized; reading lessons in historians and orators, with exposition and questioning; choice passages for committal to memory; courses on the theory of rhetoric—all leading to the supreme test of the declamation. A rhetorical instructor evidently led a busy life. Help had to be given to pupils in laying out a scheme of treatment, or marshalling arguments; the prepared speech had to be listened to and criticized; models for comparison had to be composed by the master. In addition, Quintilian took engagements outside school: he gave public exhibitions of his skill,⁠[1150] and he accepted briefs.⁠[1151] Many, therefore, who were not formally pupils came under his influence. The younger Pliny mentions him as his teacher.⁠[1152] On the other hand, there is no proof that Tacitus or Juvenal attended his school. It is not impossible that the former, who began his literary career with a flavour of Ciceronianism had, like his friend Pliny, studied under Quintilian; and passages in Juvenal,⁠[1153] which look [391]like reminiscences of Quintilian, may imply acquaintance with the Institutes of Oratory as a book or with its author as an instructor. But here positive statement is not defensible. Nor can a date be assigned for his death: it is usually placed before A.D. 100.

Of his lost works the most valuable would have been his investigation into decadence in oratory, De Causis Corruptae Eloquentiae.⁠[1154] This was a subject sure to engage the attention of criticism. Petronius, in his romance, had put his finger on the weak spots in declamations, and Tacitus handled the question in the Dialogus. Quintilian’s attitude, we can infer, was that of the expert who recognized the evil effects of unpractical exercises divorced from the concerns of ordinary life and marred by artificial figures of speech.⁠[1155] To Tacitus’s genius the same problem presented itself in its historical setting: political developments at Rome were no longer, he realized, such as to foster the ancient greatness in oratory. Among Quintilian’s orations there was only one which he published himself—an early effort defending Naevius Arpinianus and admittedly issued from ambitious motives.⁠[1156] But there were others which admirers had taken down imperfectly in shorthand and circulated under his name with a minimum of the real Quintilian in them (minimam partem mei habent). We cannot tell whether such collections included the two other cases which he definitely specifies—his speech for Queen Berenice and that for a widow alleged to have forged a will.⁠[1157] There was, besides, a pair of unauthorized publications of his lectures based on notes taken by enthusiastic students—the one on a two days’ discourse; the other on a longer course.⁠[1158] These appeared under Quintilian’s name, but, as they are stated to be libri artis rhetoricae, they can hardly be identified with either collection of Declamationes which used to be ascribed to Quintilian and which fall to be noticed later.

[392]

His single extant work, the Institutio Oratoria, in which he gathered up an educational experience of twenty years, was undertaken only after prolonged resistance to requests made to him in his newly won leisure: it took over two years to write, and even then, conscious of Horace’s precept against hurried workmanship, he delayed publication, as he explains to his publisher Trypho, from a sense that the two years had been given more to collection of material than to style.⁠[1159] If, as is usually thought, the twenty years of teaching mean years spent in Rome after his return in 68, then his retirement happened in 88, and the earliest date for the issue of the treatise would be four or five years afterwards, 92 or 93.⁠[1160] In the other direction, the latest date must fall before Domitian’s death in 96.

The author’s outline of his scheme in the twelve books is as follows.⁠[1161] Book I treats preliminary education from infancy; II, the initial training under a professor of rhetoric. This leads to a definition of rhetoric in which the essential divisions are inuentio (getting the right subject-matter) and elocutio (use of the right style). Five books (III-VII) are assigned to inuentio with the allied subject of dispositio (arrangement), and then four (VIII-XI) to elocutio with memoria (memorizing of a speech) and pronuntiatio (delivery). XII, as a culmination to the work, draws the picture of the finished orator.

The books that stand out distinctively are the first, in which Quintilian’s greatness as an educator is apparent—just where he would have wished it to appear—at the earlier stages of education; the second, in which he exhibits his method of teaching rhetoric; the tenth, in which his list of authors suitable for study is accompanied by brief literary judgements, many of them since grown familiar and famous; and the twelfth, which conveys his final conception of the trained speaker. But all possess value far beyond what might be looked for in a treatise on oratorical instruction. This is largely due to the width of the author’s purview. To educate a speaker was to educate a Roman gentleman; and capable speaking was expected of all [393]in public life. The training too was in much more than in speaking. It had to build up character, and to embrace the liberal arts.

Quintilian’s thoroughness impress one from the outset. This is what gives to the first book its permanent appeal. In education the initial steps are of vital importance; for early influences leave an indelible imprint.⁠[1162] No detail, therefore, is overlooked that might count—the speech of a child’s nurse, parental example, manners of slaves, ways of learning the letters, attention to syllables, or practice in saying hard words. The last contributes to clear enunciation—so much neglected in English education that we are fast becoming a nation of bad readers. The principle of the Kindergarten is foreshadowed in the dictum that mental work ought at the start to wear the shape of amusement. Quintilian offers sound reasons for preferring school to the home as an educational instrument: he believes in healthy emulation among boys and in the bond of initiation into common pursuits. “Ambition,” he remarks, “may be a vice, but it is often the root of virtues” (I. ii. 22). The best teacher must be secured even for the rudiments, but the standard should never be beyond the pupil’s capacity—the vessel must not be overfilled. One section is concerned with testing intelligence and temperament, to which instruction is to be adapted. Greek is prescribed from the beginning of the school-course, as well as the use of standard authors, even though the pupil may not appreciate them fully till later in life. Wider than in modern times, “Grammar,” we have seen,⁠[1163] embraces both the correct use of language and the study of literature. Linguistic foundations cannot be dispensed with: “without them the superstructure will collapse” (quidquid superstruxeris corruet, I. iv. 5). The warning about the danger of showy haste is as necessary now as in the first century. “This advice” (to study grammar), he says, “would be superfluous, were it not that most teachers, in their pretentious hurry (ambitiosa [394]festinatione), begin with what should come later, and, through a preference for parading their pupils’ attainments in regard to the more brilliant parts of their subject, actually hinder their progress by the short cut” (I. iv. 22).

When, after careful grounding in language, the young scholar reaches literature—where Homer and Virgil make the best reading-books—it will be found that, as honey is drawn from various blooms, so eloquence needs many arts for its support. There must be geometry and at least some philosophy; besides, ancient poetry could not be understood without some knowledge of music and astronomy. Before the book closes, a fine plea is made for breadth of training, and for the love of accomplishments for their own sake. Concurrent teaching of varied subjects is advocated, because change of study stimulates mental activity, and there is a tendency to underestimate the power of boys to bear the strain. For many studies there will never be more free time than in boyhood; we are apt to forget this and “shield laziness under the excuse of difficulty” (difficultatis patrocinia praeteximus segnitiae, I. xii. 16). Protesting against mercenary estimates of a subject, Quintilian says, “I don’t want to have a reader who is going to count up how his training is to pay him” (I. xii. 17).

The age for beginning the higher study of rhetoric, in contradistinction to grammar, must depend not on years but on attainment (II. i. 7). As the type of exercise in vogue has been indicated in the chapter on Roman education and in the sketch of Quintilian’s academy, it need not detain us. But attention may be drawn to the sanity of the pronouncements on the need for ability, character, good temper and patience in a teacher; on the mischief done to pupils by excessive applause or excessive severity; on the promise indicated by exuberance of style; on the correction of written work; on test-questions to make pupils think for themselves; on the discussion of blemishes and excellences in speeches chosen for study; on the deleterious influence of the proud parent; on the affection due by pupils to teachers who are “the parents of the mind” (parentes mentium, II. ix. 1). Regarding declamations it is worth observing that Quintilian, while he recognizes their weaknesses and suggests [395]improvements (II. x. 9), will not go the length of forbidding the imaginative type of theme.

There is a passage that implicitly states the case for such a work as the Institutio Oratoria, by answering the question why the untrained in speaking are sometimes thought more effective than the trained:

“An untrained speaker (ineruditus) employs abuse too openly and too often, even to the peril of the party whose case he has taken up, and to his own peril as well. At the same time, such a line gains a reputation, for people like very much to hear things said that they would never have consented to say themselves. A speaker of this sort still less escapes the other peril that lies in style: he makes frantic efforts (conatur perdite), with the occasional result that, while invariably casting about for the extravagant (nimium), he may chance on a fine effect (aliquid grande); but it is of rare occurrence and does not compensate for undoubted faults. For this reason, the uninstructed sometimes appear to have the fuller flow, because they say everything: trained speakers feel the need of both selection and restraint (et electio et modus). There is the further point that untrained speakers abandon the task of proving what they have asserted! By this means they avoid what our decadent law-courts (corrupta iudicia) consider dryness of question and argument; and they seek solely the kind of thing calculated to gratify the ear of the court with spurious delights. Besides, their very epigrams (sententiae), which they make their one great aim, are the more striking because the whole context is poor and mean—it is the case of flashes that show brighter not in shadow, as Cicero has it, but in downright darkness. So then one may call them geniuses to one’s heart’s content, provided it remains clear that such praise would be an insult to a really eloquent man.”⁠[1164]⁠

So much for the justification of his task. Full success, he is convinced, is the fruit of hard work devoted to a difficult subject of wide ramifications; and he can only congratulate, he remarks ironically, those persons who are eloquent without any trouble or system or study (sine labore, sine ratione, sine disciplina). [396]The leisure secured by his retirement from teaching and pleading while his services were still in demand (dum desideraremur) will enable him to formulate principles likely to help genuine students.⁠[1165] To be sure, an absolutely fixed system is impracticable: rhetoric would be a simple matter, if even a division of it were capable of being summarized in one brief instruction.⁠[1166] But, subject to certain rights of deviation, rules there must be:

It is upon great labour, continual study, varied practice, repeated experiments, profound sagacity and ready resource that the art of speaking depends. But it is also assisted by these rules, provided they point out the straight road instead of one fixed wheel-rut (orbitam); for if anyone believes it a sin to deviate from it, he needs must submit to the slow progress of a tight-rope walker! So we often quit the main military road, allured by a short cut.... The orator’s task is of wide extent and variety, fresh almost every day, and on it the last word will never have been said.⁠[1167]⁠

So Quintilian addresses himself to the details of his work with a dignified consciousness of its utility and indeed of its divine call—for speech, the God-given endowment which distinguishes man from other beings, undeniably deserves assiduous cultivation.⁠[1168] Defined as bene dicendi scientia, rhetoric, in addition to natural ability and expert training, demands a moral basis. A good character is insisted upon over and over again as an essential qualification of the orator, who is defined in Cato’s familiar words as uir bonus dicendi peritus.⁠[1169] Without sound morality the glib speaker endangers both the community and his own soul. Equally indispensable to a great orator is wide knowledge. As shown in the chapter on Roman education, Cicero actually recommended omnium rerum magnarum atque artium scientiam, while Quintilian’s requirements are more moderate—sed mihi satis est eius esse oratorem rei de qua dicet non inscium,⁠[1170] i.e. he must study the subject on which he is to speak. This explains why during schooldays, though the pupil’s [397]individual bent is to be taken into account, yet some breadth of training should be compulsory for all. It will be observed that this raises the question of the educational profit of training in subjects which a student may not like. We have seen that acquaintance with subjects like music, geometry, astronomy, outside the professional training was recommended at an earlier stage: and the importance of ethics, physics, dialectic, law and history could not be overlooked.⁠[1171] Purely vocational specialization for an orator would defeat itself.

At the outset of the five books allotted to matter and arrangement (III-VII), Quintilian, conscious that technicalities are unavoidable, gives warning that there will be much “wormwood and little honey” (parum mellis et absinthii multum). To his credit, he is not so dry as he promised to be. Certainly we are no longer interested in deciding into how many divisions the status of a case should fall. On the other hand, it would be too much to expect him entirely to renounce or even denounce the multa in nominibus differentia (III. vi. 47) as futile verbiage; for that would be opposed to the loyal spirit which led him to record, with merciful reductions, the terminological exactitudes used by generations of predecessors. We may, then, rest content in the confidence that he must have writhed under a boredom which he could not end. Technicalities notwithstanding, there is much of value. We would not be without his sketch of Greek and Roman writers on rhetoric,⁠[1172] which marks his interest in the past of his subject and constitutes an ancient bibliography on it as well as some indication of his sources. It is good to be told that of the two schools Apollodoreans and Theodoreans, the former represented an older type of oratory and were specially keen on narratio, the statement of a case; also, that Apollodorus taught Augustus, whereas Theodorus taught Tiberius. Again, when, after adopting the ancient tripartite division of oratory into laudatory, deliberative, and judicial, Quintilian adduces among deliberative exercises a technical term like prosopopoeia,⁠[1173] his remarks have the refreshing merit of showing his sound educational preference for a difficult thing. Prosopopoeia [398]was a dramatic exercise in character—a declamation where the speaker assumed the personality of the supposed deliberator; and Quintilian holds it to be the most useful of exercises for the excellent reason that it involves double the amount of work and develops the powers of future poets and historians.

Another testimony to his concern for the practical application of oratory is found in the predominance of its judicial aspects. In none of the parts of a speech, prooemium or exordium, narratio, probatio, refutatio, peroratio, do we ever seem far from the law-courts, so that interesting and sometimes entertaining light is thrown on criminal and civil procedure. Illustrations are drawn from the handling of arguments in Cicero’s speeches; and various problems are threshed out, such as the conciliation of a judge, the countering of an opponent’s pleas, or the admissibility of more than one answer to a charge. We are reminded of risks in a digression (egressio) which is sandwiched between the statement of a case and the enumeration of points to be dealt with (propositio). We recognize the virtues of a narratio when told that it must above all be understood, remembered, believed. Further, we learn the autobiographical fact that Quintilian was an adept at narratio, with the consequence that, in lawsuits where the pleading was shared among several advocates, he was usually asked to present the case—a circumstance which he mentions with a justifiable Apollodorean pride.

This legal atmosphere prevails throughout the fifth book in the treatment of proof, oaths, witnesses and rebutting arguments; and again through the sixth on perorations, sway of emotions, and the altercatio. Fortunately other matters are touched on. In one passage⁠[1174] he denounces the absence of solid reasoning—a want of virility to his mind—which weakened declamations composed merely to attract notice. They are like foils with the button on (praepilatis), and have no sinews (neruis carent). Among the emotions he examines laughter,—a perennial problem for the psychologist—and on it is prudent enough to confine himself to a single chapter, recognizing the merits of [399]the facetious and illustrating various types of pleasantry more or less funny. The attempted classification of jokes foreshadows no solution of the origin of laughter on the basis of psychoanalysis or otherwise: he is frankly puzzled: “a joke is appreciated not by the reason but by a mental impulse perhaps inexplicable.”⁠[1175] The seventh book—on arrangement—largely reflects the management of actual lawsuits. Here the process of thinking out points in a case recalls to the author several times his own practice. There is one most instructive example of the different lines on which the same academic case may be argued.⁠[1176]⁠

With four books to write on style (elocutio) and delivery (pronuntiatio), Quintilian declares that difficult portions of his work are still ahead. Good style is not compassed by taking thought: as he mischievously remarks, “it has happened that some most painstaking authors of manuals have themselves been very far away from eloquence.”⁠[1177] Mere attention to words (cura uerborum, VIII. pr. 18) is not enough, for real style is not a matter of showiness. Solicitude over verbal niceties quenches the ardour of imagination.⁠[1178] Yet the right sort of labour earns its reward: “no appropriate word will be lost by the man who first of all has learned the principles of eloquence, and by prolonged and judicious reading has acquired a plentiful stock of words, and applied thereto skill in arrangement; and who, besides, has strengthened all by abundant practice, so as to have it constantly at hand and before his eyes.... When our words are sound Latin, significant, elegant and appropriately arranged, why need we trouble further?”⁠[1179]⁠

One of the positive virtues in style is its due embellishment (ornatus); for the attainment of correctness and perspicuity is but to have avoided faults.⁠[1180] Such adornment should be virile, noble and chaste: it must not court an effeminate flightiness or artificial showiness: it ought to be radiant, as it were, with healthy blood and vigour. And so ornatus leads him to its mechanism in “tropes” (including metaphor, metonymy, irony, hyperbole) which he distinguishes from the “figures” [400]of Book IX. These figures depend either on the thought (like interrogation, personification, apostrophe) or on language (climax, paronomasia, antitheton or balance).

The chapter on the cultivation of style (de compositione, IX. iv.) is of vital importance for the student of Latin. It deals with charm in style, with the compact and the loose type of prose (uincta or contexta, and soluta),⁠[1181] order of words, jarring of consonants, final -m, jerkiness produced by a run of monosyllables, and prose-rhythm. It is an appropriate echo that the book should end with the Ciceronian clausula “esse uideatur.”

The long opening chapter of Book X contains Quintilian’s list of the best authors for study, first Greek and then Latin, in the provinces of poetry, drama, history, oratory and philosophy. When he comes to Roman writers, he adds satire, and makes the well-known claim, satura quidem tota nostra est, which, though fully defensible in one sense needs in another as much qualification as Horace’s statement that Lucilius depends entirely on old Attic comedy. In estimating Quintilian’s judgements, it should be remembered that they are primarily made from an oratorical standpoint. The chapter is not a piece of pure literary criticism. There is in it, as regards the Greeks, a good deal of traditional appreciation according to Alexandrian and Pergamene canons, and in many of the brief findings we feel that Quintilian has missed saying the right thing. Again, his attitude to history shows the limitations of his period. Here he is not advanced enough to conceive of history as a science as well as an art. Influenced by the prevailing tendency to compose history on rhetorical lines with purple patches and poetic descriptions, he holds it to be proxima poetis and in a sense “poetry free from the shackles of metre” (carmen solutum, X. i. 31). Nor is there any dream of a philosophy of history; there is no testimony to its power of guidance in the hands of the greatest masters; and when he avers that, in contrast with forensic oratory, it has nothing to do with proof, he ignores the part played in historical investigation by the weighing of documents [401]and evidence. All the same, on the purely stylistic aspect of history, he has said memorable things, like densus et breuis et semper instans sibi Thucydides, dulcis et candidus et fusus Herodotus, or his ascription of lactea ubertas to Livy and of breuitas as well as immortalis uelocitas to Sallust.⁠[1182]⁠

The traditional element in his criticisms, particularly on Greek literature, lessens his claim to originality. Broadly similar to Dionysius of Halicarnassus in order of treatment, he probably used both his work περὶ μιμήσεως and some of its sources.⁠[1183] Though he does not name him in Book X, he does so elsewhere more than once. But it should be remembered that he had open access to an extensive corpus of Greek criticism with its canonical lists of authors arranged in different branches of literature. Such literary canonization received the sanction of renowned authorities like Aristophanes of Byzantium and his follower Aristarchus; and similar lists issued from Pergamum. The stiffness of treatment and fixed habit of comparison which are the outcome of this inheritance leave their mark upon Quintilian: he is too starched in his grouping and too fond of finding for Greek writers a supposed analogue among the Romans. In respect of Latin literature, he is freer to employ his own reading and his own judgement. Though he had at least three well-known predecessors in the field of Latin criticism—Varro, Cicero and Horace—who were available, still here he speaks more clearly for himself.⁠[1184] There is no mistaking either his genuine predilection for Cicero,⁠[1185] whom he only occasionally criticises and then apologetically, or his almost consequential dislike of Seneca as master of a newfangled but unhealthily attractive style in prose.⁠[1186]⁠

Neat though many of the verdicts on Roman writers be, they [402]are, except in fuller critiques like those on Cicero and Seneca, too perilously adapted for unintelligent repetition by label-lovers. What purports to be criticism in a nutshell contains so small a fraction of the whole truth as to be virtually false or positively useless. It takes us, for instance, but a little way to find Lucretius put alongside of Macer for graceful handling of material, with the qualification that the latter is “tame” (humilis) while the former is “hard reading” (difficilis); and, while among elegiac poets Tibullus may properly be singled out for smooth finish, it is extraordinarily unsatisfying to read the added words “there are some who prefer Propertius.” Equal disappointment is felt on realizing that Catullus is regarded as a bitter lampoonist rather than a lyric poet. Yet within his limits Quintilian has given us much to be grateful for. It is illuminating to read the comparison of Ennius to the venerable oaks of the forest; or the opinions that Julius Caesar, granted more time for forensic oratory, would have rivalled Cicero; that Ovid was too much in love with his own genius; and that Lucan for all his fire, impetuosity and epigrams, must be frankly reckoned a model for orators instead of poets. It is of service also to have testimony to the excellence of lost plays like Varius’s Thyestes and Ovid’s Medea. Quintilian’s view was that Latin tragedies might rival Greek, but that in comedy Rome was crippled.⁠[1187]⁠

The treatment of memoria in Book XI gives an opportunity for the record of some wonderful powers of memory. Pronuntiatio (or delivery), which follows, is, we are told, termed “action” by most authorities, “but it appears to derive the one name from the voice, the other from gesture.” On this appeal to ear and eye, Quintilian lays great stress: “personally, I should be inclined to declare that language of but moderate quality, if recommended by forcible delivery, will produce a more powerful effect than the most excellent language, if deprived of that advantage.” He contemplates in language a standard of correct, clear, elegant Latin pronunciation free from anything rustic or foreign,⁠[1188] and in gesture a convincing fitness [403]to the thought. “If gestures and looks are at odds with our speech, if we utter melancholy words with a cheerful air, if we assert anything in a tone of denial, it is not merely impressiveness that is lacking to our words, but credibility as well.” Besides, there must be restraint: to prance about while speaking is to “overdo the business”—the bad habit of the professor who was jocularly asked how many miles he had declaimed!⁠[1189]⁠

It is in the last book that the moral dignity of Quintilian’s conception is best revealed. In the definition of an orator as “the good man skilled in speaking,” the indispensable requisite is put first: whatever academic labour may be involved in gaining the prescribed skill, he must before everything be good. “This is of moment,” he insists with a Roman grauitas, “because, should the oratorical power furnish the equipment of wickedness, then nothing would be more ruinous than eloquence alike to national and to private interests.” He might be expected to share Hecuba’s contempt for Odysseus as the glib orator, prepared to sacrifice every consideration to please the majority.⁠[1190] This stress on morality is so emphatic that his occasional concessions regarding a speaker’s avowal of the truth almost wear the guise of Macchiavellian lapses.⁠[1191]⁠

The tenth chapter of Book XII is full of value. Brief parallel surveys of Greek painting and sculpture faintly raise the hope that an attempt might be made, as in Lessing’s Laocoon, to demarcate the provinces of painting and literature. What in fact they lead up to is an instructive glance at dominant qualities in different Roman orators, and at the change in prevalent opinion about Cicero’s speeches. Once upon a time censured by hostile critics as florid and exuberant, they had come in Quintilian’s day to be thought meagre and dry. Thereupon we get the famous division of oratory into three traditional styles—the restrained Attic, the inflated Asian and the intermediate Rhodian. With the grammarian Santra’s explanation of Asianism, as due to the circumlocutions used by imperfect speakers of Greek on the Asiatic coast, he cannot agree. More [404]plausibly he refers differences in oratory to national and racial differences in speaker and hearer. “Attic” one may cheerfully pronounce the best style; but there is Attic and then again Attic. In an admirable passage he picks out types of Attic orators, among them Demosthenes and Pericles, to remind us how distinct in quality they were.

But now, as to what vitally concerns him, Latin eloquence (Latina facundia), he feels it cannot be properly discussed except from a comparative standpoint. How does the Latin language appear when placed side by side with Greek? Here two thoughts may present themselves to the reader, first, that Quintilian possessed the great advantage which Aristotle as a critic did not possess, and the later author of the Περὶ ὕψους did not use to any extent, of having the best of both Greek and Roman literature on which to form a judgement, and, second, that some authorities have tended to overstate Quintilian’s homage to Greek. On the latter point it may be said that this passage shows the Roman critic endeavouring to hold the balance evenly between a well-grounded traditional reverence for Greek and a patriotic confidence in the virility of Latin. No modern can hope to estimate either Greek or Latin sounds exactly with Roman ears, or to appreciate fully the counts on which he finds Greek more pleasant than Latin. He dislikes, for example, the letter f, particularly in the combination fr: he prefers the ringing final -ν of Greek to the “lowing sound” of the Latin -m. It is, however, easier to follow his complaint about the paupertas which involved Latin in repetitions unneeded by Greeks, and he is entitled to note the rich variety of Greek dialects. Yet he is not dismayed:

He who is to demand from the Latins the acknowledged grace of Attic speech must give me the same sweetness in utterance and equal supply of words.... The less help our language gives, the more we must battle in the production of thought. Sublime and varied conceptions must be brought forth. All the emotions should be stirred, and our speech illumined with the gleam of metaphor. We cannot be so graceful as the Greek: let us be more vigorous. We are defeated in subtlety: let us prevail in weight.⁠[1192]⁠

[405]

A curious anticipation of the Wordsworthian doctrine of poetic diction in the preface to the Lyrical Ballads appears in the contention next examined—that there is no natural eloquence except in the language of ordinary life.⁠[1193] Quintilian furnishes a sensible answer in his insistence on the fundamental difference between the common language and the speech of an eloquent man. If the theory were correct, then the orator’s sole task would be to apply plain words appropriately, whereas his duty is the wider one of delighting, touching, influencing hearers, and for such aims he must employ other aids—aids that are also granted to man by nature. Exercise is as needful and natural for the orator as for an athlete; and so in all nations one man is recognized as more eloquent than another.

Passing to the striking thoughts (sententiae) characteristic rather of Latin than of Greek oratory, Quintilian holds they are admittedly serviceable within limits—if they bear on the case, are not overdone, and contribute to a speaker’s success.⁠[1194] They have the merit of being impressive in a single hit (uno ictu), memorable for brevity, and effective by their charm (ipsa breuitate magis haerent et delectatione persuadent). Now are these ingenious flashes of epigram permissible in a spoken but not in a written oration? On this question, while he owns that the spoken speech may have to be somewhat cut to fit it for permanent book-form, Quintilian yet makes the significant declaration that ultimately an identical law of criticism must rule: “I consider it one and the same thing to speak well and to write well.”⁠[1195] The broad validity of this is not impaired by special circumstances like the necessity for addressing a popular jury or adapting one’s pronunciation to suit an illiterate witness.

Thereupon another threefold division of styles is given without any explicit attempt to relate it to the previous geographical triad. The three types are the plain (ἰσχνὸν), to instruct; the grand (ἁδρὸν), to move; and the intermediate or flowery (ἀνθηρὸν), to charm.⁠[1196] We are quickly assured that the three have many subdivisions and gradations of shade, [406]and that eloquence cannot be confined rigidly by classification. All varieties have their uses: besides, an orator is not always equal to himself. One thing is clear—it is a mistake to believe that a corrupt and flamboyant type is sure to be popular.⁠[1197] In any case, the true orator will achieve his supreme effects with the ease that comes to the successful climber above the zone of difficulty, and he will respect that sense of due restraint (modus) without which nothing is praiseworthy or beneficial.⁠[1198] Similar judgement (ratio) is applicable to all aspects of oratory, where, as in Aristotelian ethics, virtue lies in the mean (utriusque ultimum uitium est).⁠[1199]⁠

Towards the end, he not unnaturally thinks of the judgements which his work may encounter. To the best of his ability, he has put his knowledge at the service of those desirous to learn: “and it is enough for an honest man to have taught what he knew.”⁠[1200] But he anticipates criticism on his exacting demand that the same individual shall combine the highest ethical qualities with the highest intellectual proficiency based on extensive academic study—a sort of Admirable Crichton in oratory. If it be objected that his conception is too ideal, that it implies too much work, and that there is no time for a training so elaborate, then the answer to each count is ready: “let those who incline to despair reflect how great is the ability of the human mind, and how capable of realizing its aims....⁠[1201] Next let them think how noble is the object, and that no toil should be shirked with such a reward in view”; then in a Senecan tone he adds, “it is we ourselves that make our time short; for how little do we devote to study! The empty ceremonial call filches some hours, leisure squandered on gossip other hours, public shows and conviviality others still.”⁠[1202] He is conscious of an aim transcending all this as he continues: “let us pursue wholeheartedly the true majesty of eloquence, than which the immortal gods have granted nothing better to mankind, and deprived of which all things remain dumb, lacking illumination for the present as well as remembrance among posterity: let us [407]unceasingly strive after the highest, for so doing we shall either attain the summit or at the least behold many below ourselves.”⁠[1203]⁠

Quintilian’s eclectic erudition was drawn from wide reading in Greek and Latin. A full list of its sources would almost amount to a catalogue of rhetorical literature.⁠[1204] He was conversant with Greek theories, old and new, on his subject. Both Aristotelianism and Stoicism exerted influence upon him; Chrysippus⁠[1205] contributed important elements to his educational doctrine; and there is ground for believing that he studied the critical works of learned Greeks who had lived in Rome under Augustus, like Caecilius Calactinus (i.e. from Cale Acte in Sicily) and Dionysius of Halicarnassus. Among his Latin authorities on rhetoric Cornificius (usually identified with the Auctor ad Herennium), Cicero and Celsus were notable; while grammatical material was borrowed from Verrius Flaccus, Remmius Palaemon, and the elder Pliny. Quintilian possessed besides, as his quotations, allusions and criticisms show, an indispensable acquaintance with the best poetry and oratory composed in Latin.⁠[1206]⁠

Perhaps more than his learning, already glanced at, it is Quintilian’s prevailing sanity that impresses us. His common sense is apparent in his refusal to lose himself, despite an intricate subject, amidst a maze of rules, definitions or subdivisions; in his consequently drastic reduction of the technicalities infesting the ordinary artes or handbooks; in his repeated reminders that actual oratory gave birth to the rules, not the rules to oratory, and therefore that mere adherence to rules will never make a great speaker; in his admonition that rules cannot fit all occasions, but that circumstances alter cases; in the instructive citations of his own practical experience; in his recognition that weighty responsibility in a law-court is very different from the fictitious cases of the schools, with the corollary that practice [408]without learning is better than learning without practice;⁠[1207] and in the broadminded pronouncements that one’s chief model should not be one’s sole model,⁠[1208] and that the moderns are not entirely to be ignored.⁠[1209] With a similar eye for the practical, believer though he was in ideals, he condemns the foolishness of aiming at an unattainable perfection, and tells an illustrative anecdote. Julius Secundus, when a young student, was once found by his uncle in despair over the exordium of a speech on which he could not make a satisfactory start in spite of three days’ work: his uncle, an experienced speaker, rallied him smilingly into a sensible view by the pertinent question: “You don’t want, do you, to speak better than you can?”⁠[1210] Quintilian would not have progress in a great subject hindered by fantastic hypercriticism: dicendum pro facultate.

So much common sense and such preoccupation with the making of an orator may forbid us to expect anything startling in his criticisms. Practical in retrospect and outlook, he could not fail to value literature mainly by standards of utility. He does not turn his eye upon sheer beauty of words as the author of the Περὶ ὕψους does;⁠[1211] nor has he any flair for romance that might have made him appreciative of the tale of Cupid and Psyche or the Peruigilium Veneris, had they appeared in his day. It is not without significance that the grim wrestlings in Lucretius’s soul or in Catullus’s heart appear never to have affected him. The frenzy of despair and the fires of love are not such stuff as sound oratory is made of; and in any case it may be that he shares Horace’s antagonism to Catullus and Propertius, who had the temerity to exalt love into an absorbing passion and who could never have taken the Augustan official view of marriage as a civic duty. But Quintilian has admirable qualities which find parallels in our own Age of Reason during the eighteenth century. In contrast to the manifold affectations of his day, he shows a noticeable severity of taste. He seeks on [409]all occasions to discern clearly and think directly, because he has a zest for truth; he uses learning without flaunting it, while his maturity of judgement is saved from becoming oppressive by grace of expression and occasional gleams of humour. The kindliness of his heart, his sympathy with learners, and his steady resolve to help education forward are winning traits that make the Institutio something far higher than a manual of rhetoric.

It had been his ambition to produce an up-to-date handbook on an orator’s training that might be deemed equally classic with the rhetorical works of Cicero. To this object he devoted the fruits of his reading, teaching, and thinking, so that on the technique of the past conjoined with his personal experience he was enabled to rear with admirable discernment a coherent system from which the aspirant after oratorical triumphs might realize the extent and pertinacity of effort involved. Within the field of rhetoric, no ancient writer has rivalled him in varied fullness of achievement. He not merely gave us an excellent treatment of grammar in its literary aspects, of rhetorical technicalities, of idiomatic and euphonious prose, of the contrasted virtues and styles perennial in speaking and the avenues towards success; he not merely left us an incidental sketch of select Greek and Latin authors; but even outside the realm of composition and criticism he proved himself to be one of the great educators.⁠[1212] Though there may be no inkling of modern psychological paedagogy or of recently devised intelligence-tests, yet many of the eternal principles of a sound education are to be found in him stated for all time with convincing authority. The fact that many of his pronouncements retain their applicability amidst modern problems of teaching is, like the constant citation of his critical dicta, among the proofs of his permanent value.⁠[1213]⁠

Quintilian’s personal preferences in style can be gauged from [410]the two cautions prescribed for young students, the one against an uncouth archaism, the other against the allurements of modern affectation (ne recentis huius lasciuiae flosculis capti uoluptate praua deleniantur).⁠[1214] Admirer though he was of the Latinity of the Golden Age, and, in particular, a confessed follower of Cicero, abjuring all such artificial glitter as he associated with Seneca’s compositions, he was yet sufficiently a product of his own age to betray in his prose the new literary tendencies.⁠[1215] That was inevitable. The most potent will could not avail to reimpose on writers a Ciceronian Latin unchanged after a lapse of nearly a century and a half. Quintilian, then, while he soberly avoids meretricious tinsel, is himself a proof of the alteration in the language since the close of the republic. The examination of single words, idioms, sentence-structure, and of literary ornament half-shyly used, must definitely place him in the Silver Age. There are words like amaritudo, consummatus, formator, profectus, professor which he shares with several post-Augustan prose-writers; some like insenesco and secessus that have come from Augustan poets into subsequent prose; others of which we do not know in Latin before him, like adnotatio, circulatorius, destructio.⁠[1216] He has his own dash of the poetic tinge that now coloured prose—simple verbs for compounds (finire for definire, solari for consolari), abstracts for concretes, and adjectives employed as substantives.⁠[1217] Signs of Silver Latin are noticeable in the sense he gives to adverbs like alioqui and olim, or to prepositions like circa and citra. Equally symptomatic is the fondness for augmentatives in prae-, like praedurus, praedulcis, praetenuis, and the absence of the intensive per- compounds familiar in Cicero.⁠[1218] So, too, with syntax, in such constructions of the infinitive as opponere uerear or legi dignus. The change is, however, more than one in vocabulary and syntax. The usual ring of the sentence is [411]different from the Ciceronian.⁠[1219] The old amplitude of period is rarely present: it is replaced by a frequent looseness of structure whereby causal and adjectival clauses are tacked on to the sentence in a semi-detached fashion which operates against the harmony and euphony of the whole. Consequently, in spite of express preference for the ancient style of oratory,⁠[1220] there is no longer the same fullness or symmetry in Quintilian’s modified Ciceronianism. It was Filelfo, in the fifteenth century, who suggested that one might detect in Quintilian a smack of Spain (sapit Hispanitatem) and departure from good Latin (barbariem quandam); but it is as hard to isolate any characteristic Spanish colour or atmosphere or humour in him as it is to recognize the Patavinity of Livy. His style is, at least, free from that smart artificiality which offended him in the oratory of his day; for he stigmatizes it as a great contemporary fault to court praise by studied effects under which the artifice lay transparent. “People consider that the art is lost, unless it is obvious; whereas it ceases to be art, if it is obvious.”⁠[1221] This is in substance a return to the Horatian maxim of literary sobriety, ars est celare artem. A pervading restraint recommends him to the confidence of readers, and has contributed to form a prose which, without Aristotelian profundity or Ciceronian brilliance, is worthily adapted to the ripeness of experience that everywhere seems to speak through it. So it comes that after Seneca’s clever restlessness one has a sense of calm in Quintilian.

What were the vicissitudes of Quintilian’s reputation? Martial’s apostrophe, already cited, was a proclamation of his educational supremacy, as, in a left-handed way, was the fathering of spurious Declamations upon him. The Dialogus of Tacitus owed its inception probably to Quintilian’s inquiry into decadence in oratory. Published to meet an express demand, his Institutio must have enjoyed for a time a vogue [412]which is reflected in the attitude of Juvenal and Suetonius. From Suetonius descended the information entered in Jerome’s Chronicle of the fourth century: besides, Jerome’s letters imply acquaintance with Quintilian’s writings. But the Frontonian archaizers of the second century had checked the pro-Ciceronian authority of Quintilian, and in fact we have for 300 years no evidence proving direct knowledge of his work.⁠[1222] In the fourth century Quintilian appears to be known, except to Jerome and possibly Lactantius, solely through the Declamations. After Jerome, in spite of the fact that Cassiodorus and Isidorus recognize his rhetorical eminence, there are great intervals in time during which no mention of Quintilian can be traced. One of these long silences was broken in the ninth century when Servatus Lupus wrote to the Abbot of York asking for a copy of the twelve books of the Institutio—a request which he also preferred to the Pope with the explanation that he possessed only incomplete copies of Quintilian and of the De Oratore.⁠[1223] Silence falls again for a couple of centuries until, in the twelfth, the testimony of John of Salisbury proves that some of Quintilian’s methods were in use at the school of Chartres; nor is that the solitary evidence for monastic acquaintance with his work at this period.⁠[1224] Next century, the encyclopaedist Vincent of Beauvais knew his text at first hand; and then Petrarch’s enthusiastic handling of a manuscript of the Institutio, “discerptus et lacer” though it was,⁠[1225] brings us to the verge of the Renaissance.

A strong reinforcement in the posthumous influence of Quintilian came with the rediscovery of a complete text by Poggio at St. Gall in 1416. Five years earlier, in 1411, Guarino had translated into Latin the treatise of disputed authenticity Περὶ παίδων ἀγωγῆς which is included among Plutarch’s [413]writings and which is affected by a great deal of Quintilian’s educational theory.⁠[1226] The two events united to confirm the hold of Quintilian over humanism at the Revival of Learning.⁠[1227] In the general purpose of the humanist educator—the production not of a pedantic recluse but of an all-round man and fully equipped citizen—there was great similarity to the aims of the Institutio. For the attainment of Quintilian’s ideal no less than for that of the Renaissance, it was requisite to develop natural gifts by training, to form character by the lessons of standard literature, and to ensure an attractive dignity of bearing in social relations. The modern might be expected to find more ways of employing leisure nobly than a Roman gentleman of the Empire, to have more freedom of personal grace, and to show, if less oratorical cleverness, then perhaps more skill in conversation—but the fundamental basis for both systems was the same, and this explains why Quintilian was so warmly taken to the hearts of the humanists. His influence was enormous on educators like Vittorino da Feltre, Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (Pius II), Guarino, Agricola, Bebel, Vives and Melanchthon. Nowhere did it work more clearly than on Erasmus himself. In England Quintilian’s authority can be traced decidedly as far back as Elyot’s Governour of 1531. Ascham was much less impressed, whereas extensive borrowings from Quintilian went to the making of Ben Jonson’s Discoveries. Later, among great figures in our literature, Pope stands out as the one who had most understanding of “grave Quintilian’s copious works,” where “the justest rules and clearest methods” are “all ranged in order and disposed with grace.”⁠[1228] Apart from inevitable references in the comparatively modern treatises on rhetoric by Blair, Campbell and Whately, it must be recognized that Quintilian has scarcely attracted in Britain his due share of attention—but then we are not a rhetorical nation.

[414]

DECLAMATIONS AND ORATORS

Two sets of Declamationes⁠[1229] have come down under Quintilian’s name in separate MSS, the one consisting of nineteen fairly elaborate productions, the other of 145 shorter and sketchy ones from a collection originally numbering 388; for time has mercifully spared us the first 243. The ascription to Quintilian does not now convince many scholars of the authenticity of either collection. There has not, however, always been equal distrust. The Oxford editors of the longer declamations in the seventeenth century published them as specimens of his method, anticipating in the preface gratitude for omitting “the sorry remains and unsightly ruins” (miseras reliquias et informia rudera) of the 388 shorter ones. On the other hand, these same remnants were claimed for Quintilian by Aerodius in the sixteenth century and by Ritter in recent times.

In neither collection is the Latin notably irregular. There are in the nineteen longer declamations no very glaring deviations from classical diction to make belief in Quintilian’s authorship prima facie absurd on bare linguistic grounds. Yet features in the form of argument and the over-frequent recourse to sententiae of doubtful relevance point to a later date for some of them at least. Ritter thinks four authors⁠[1230] are represented; and Reitzenstein thinks even more, in which he is supported by Golz after an examination of the clausulae.⁠[1231] Few may accept in detail the groups arrived at by tests partly subjective and partly numerical; but it is likely enough that some are nearer in time to Quintilian than others and may actually [415]represent themes used in his school. A plausible guess is that we have here a collection made and perhaps amplified by a contemporary of Gellius or Apuleius.⁠[1232]⁠

As early as the third century A.D., there was current a collection of declamations referred to Quintilian but recognized as containing spurious specimens.⁠[1233] Jerome and Servius in the fourth century, and later Isidorus, quote from the longer declamations; Jerome, indeed, like Lactantius, quotes other declamations now lost. The belief of antiquity, therefore, that some of the declamations came down from Quintilian was unquestioning. But here, where there is so much triviality, so much of what he himself condemned in oratory, our hardest task is to believe either collection worthy of the great teacher. Ritter, however, has championed the authenticity of the shorter pieces, claiming that as legal speeches by Quintilian were brought out without his permission, so it is possible that these scholastic speeches were issued in an unauthorized way. Of two works in the province of rhetoric mentioned by Quintilian as having been published by enthusiastic pupils from notes, Ritter identifies the second with the shorter declamations; but, as this second work is stated to have been taken down in a comparatively few days, it is not easy to think it the same as the long series of what was once 388 school-themes, or to think it could be appropriately mentioned as an ars rhetorica.⁠[1234]⁠

It remains to glance at the collections themselves. The “learned and ingenious hand” who made the English version of the nineteen specimens in 1686 regarded them as an “exercitation or praxis upon Quintilian’s XII Books,” naïvely pronouncing them to be “the cream and product of the most promising wits (in the schools) culled out and polished by the second hand of the master.” Some turn upon immorality or crime: some have a public bearing: more often, with features akin to the Greek comedy of manners or a modern novel, their interest is social or domestic. A few could be served up as romances like [416]The Philtre of Loathing (XIV, XV), or as spiritualistic cases for investigation by the Psychical Research Society, like The Spell-bound Tomb (X), in which a mother, hitherto comforted by visions of her dead son, is aggrieved because a magician, at her husband’s instigation, has by enchantment cut off communication with the ghost. A detective story might be made out of The Wall with Handprints of Blood (I); and then we have the usual quota of pirates. A half-romantic theme like a wizard’s prophecy may be entangled with two imaginary laws which create a dilemma for debate. Thus, the fourth case concerns a brave young soldier whose horoscope, read by an astrologer long ago, had foretold that he would win distinction in battle but would one day kill his father. Now, there are supposed to be in this state two laws; (i) “A warrior who has served his country nobly may choose his reward;” (ii) “A citizen who meditates suicide must render satisfactory reasons for his resolve in open senate, under the penalty (so dreadful to the ancients) of having his body refused burial.” Here is the crux. The wizard’s prophecy about his valour has come true: he cannot face the likelihood of committing parricide which has by the power of suggestion become an obsession. The only way out, therefore, is to kill himself; but to secure burial he must gain the senate’s approval. This, then, is the reward which he will ask—leave to put himself to death:

“I, who am willing to die that I may not commit parricide, do not see but I must commit it, if I continue to live.... As for my father, who would keep me alive against my will, I do not wonder at him, because he is still overjoyed at the fresh acquist of my martial glory (adhuc recenti gloriae nostrae gaudio stupet).... He cannot see the parricide through the champion.”

The situation is not one which could ever trouble the student in actual life, but, like many other exercises, it served to evoke ingenuity in pleading. We seem to see literature in the making, when we chance upon a miniature study in the workings of fate that might form the basis of a Greek tragedy:

“My father was so far from being deterred by the prediction of his own danger that he himself, I say, (alack for the melancholy [417]force of fate—proh tristis necessitas!), girt on my arms and equipped me for battle with his own hands, as if assured of the astrologer’s veracity (tanquam mathematico iam credidisset).... And now he will not have me die, though there is nothing left for me to do but to murder him. O Death, who art commendable for the valiant, desirable for the wretched, and not to be rejected even by the happy! How much have I courted thee in war! (quanum te quaesiuimus in bello!)”

He relates how he bore a charmed life amidst the deadliest dangers: as no foe could slay him, he now must beg permission to kill himself:

“Titles, statues, dignities—reserve them for those who must live: guarantee me but my father’s safety, my own innocence, and the respect of history (temporum pudorem).... I trust the House will not consider that my father’s appearing against me (contradictione) debars me of my reward.”

The pleader contends that in any case it is better to die young in the midst of one’s fame than to endure the decrepitude of old age; but, in his special case, he is destined by his horoscope to die as a felon, if the fortune-teller spoke truth. Then comes a fresh turn. His valiancy in battle after all could only have been downright frenzy:

“I was not myself when I fought so gallantly; and I shall commit parricide too when I am not myself.... God forbid that I should tarry till the issue decide the conflict betwixt the wizard’s response and myself. I had rather defeat the astrologer than find fault with his predictions (mathematicum uincere malo quam reprehendere).”

This, then, is the paradoxical impasse: he can baulk his destiny only by death. If he is allowed to die now, his father, who admittedly loves him, will be able to shower affection upon his body, and (in the peroration)

“when you have had enough of farewell embraces, then and not till then is it right to lift up your hands towards heaven and cry out, ‘Wizard, thou art a liar!’ (mathematice, mentitus es).”

It is wonderful with what variety of argument or reflection [418]upon life and death, astrology and the power of prediction, such a theme can be elaborated. Similar dexterity, worthy of more solid cases, pervades most of the orations. It scarcely matters whether we have a lawsuit to compensate a poor man’s loss of bees through poison sprinkled on his rich neighbour’s flowers, or a strange malady of sleepy sickness attacking twins, of whom the doctor undertakes to cure one if he is allowed to put the other to death and hold a post-mortem!

The shorter declamations (and some are fortunately quite short) are more profitably represented in specimens than in their wearisome total. The problems are such as arise out of cases of outrage, divorce, adultery, murder of or by outlaws, tyrannicide, military desertion, shipwreck, prodigality of sons, harshness of fathers, or (like later Italian novelle) marriage between a son and a daughter of hostile families. Handling the type of theme already worn threadbare in Augustan days, they cannot be considered uniformly entertaining. Yet there are exceptions, and all is not monotony. One may even be grateful for absurd instances with outlines that might serve for wildly impossible tales; and, dipping further into the collection, one cannot deny that it has some variety. We may light upon the Gilbertian situation of a Cynic youth with a professed contempt for the good things of life objecting to disinheritance by his father; or a sober question of legacies to relatives or freedmen; or a semi-economic discussion on a proposed equalization of property, with such pertinent queries as whether it is to be for once and all, or whether the equalizing process is to be carried out as often as some one, for any reason whatever, is found to have less than his fellows. Favourite themes are dilemmas due to conflict between two laws: e.g. If a man exiled for treason has come so gallantly to the aid of his country in wartime that she gratefully recalls him, can he have his original conviction reviewed in spite of a law that the same case must not be heard twice? Or, again, if an exile has illegally come home before his time has expired, is he entitled to plead a law permitting an injured husband to inflict on his wife and her paramour the fate [419]that befell Paolo and Francesca? A common motif is that of an outraged woman. There is a refinement of this theme in the case where the unfortunate lady seems at various crises to jump out of the frying-pan into the fire. Against her father’s wish, she had exercised her option to marry the violator rather than have him put to death. For this compassion her father disowns her. When her father afterwards fell into poverty, filial affection impelled her to relieve his straits in spite of her husband’s objection; and for this he divorces her! Many cases, however, are of a stereotyped character, with little to differentiate them from the elder Seneca’s examples, except perhaps greater silliness.⁠[1235] In the case of the imported slave dressed by a dealer as a free citizen to cheat the Customs, one recognizes a parallel to that given by Suetonius as an illustration of the controuersia.⁠[1236]⁠

It is usual to find imaginary points of law freely and subtly raised, effective lines of argument being sketched in the sermo, and the rhetorical handling in the declamatio. Sometimes we get more than one sermo and declamatio: sometimes a section is devoted to the law of the case before it is examined in equity: sometimes the sermo is absent, leaving the declamatio, as in the dispute among three sons, an orator, a physician, and a philosopher, claiming the property of their deceased father, whose will constituted as his heir the son who should be proved to have best served the state. The general method may be exemplified in The Digging up of the Parricide’s Bones.⁠[1237] Two laws are here assumed that may conflict: (i) “Let a parricide’s body be cast out unburied”; (ii) “Let the violation of a grave be actionable.” The statement of the case is in brief as follows: a father on his death-bed, declaring that his two sons have poisoned him, enjoins on his daughter the duty of vengeance. She accuses them both. Before the trial one commits suicide and is buried in the family tomb. The other, when tried, is found guilty, [420]put to death, and his body left to rot. The daughter, presuming the guilt of the suicide, has his corpse exhumed and cast forth. She is charged with illegal violation of a grave. In the sermo, among questions suggested for discussion are these: is it illegal to disinter a buried person in any circumstances? More particularly, is it legal for one who could have prevented the burial in the first instance? Does the law, in forbidding burial of a parricide, forbid burial only of persons duly convicted? From the declamatio a few sentences may indicate the rhetorical line of defence:

“So then (had he not been exhumed) the dead parricide would have been buried and laid in lasting rest beside his father (his victim)!... Is such treatment to be conceded to one whom the law would cut off from the light of heaven when alive and from the earth when dead?... Must not a dutiful daughter listen to the troubled ghost of her father, unable to bear contact with a guilty son?”

Tediously unreal though the declamations are, they have a genuine importance in the history of ancient education and eloquence. They link the exercises of the Golden Age, as recorded by the elder Seneca, with those of several succeeding centuries. Deserving to die of their own dullness, they yet had surprising vitality, so that when we turn to the Greek declamations of the sophist Libanius, whose works help to make the century of Gregory Nazianzenus, Basil the Great and Julian the Apostate live again for us, we find the time-honoured themes still under treatment in the Eastern empire. The gibe of Gibbon that Libanius lived too much in the times of the Trojan War and in Athenian history might lead one to overlook other themes of his, of equal artificiality but of more social interest, in which preternaturally embittered fathers, unscrupulous stepmothers and disinherited sons play much the same part as they do in the Latin exercises that passed under Quintilian’s name.⁠[1238]⁠

Quintilian himself passed on what he found valuable in the rhetorical lore of writers like Rutilius Lupus and Celsus. He mentions [421]together⁠[1239] the senior rhetorical authors of his own day, Verginius Flavus, Pliny (the elder), and Tutilius, thus looking back in the case of the first-named to the Neronian age; for Verginius, as has been noted, taught Persius. Tutilius is named by Martial,⁠[1240] when he counsels a parent to avoid for his boy’s instructors all grammarians and rhetors, and so “leave Tutilius alone in his glory.” It is unfortunate for the completeness of our record that Quintilian expressly omits mention of authors alive when he wrote the Institutio.⁠[1241] Princeps was a rhetorician whom Suetonius could remember as giving on alternate days exhibitions of declamation and disputation. Julius Tiro is mentioned just after Quintilian himself in Suetonius’s list of rhetoricians, and Julius Gabinianus, who figures in the same list, won a great name as a teacher in Gaul during the Flavian period.⁠[1242] M. Aquilius Regulus, the younger Pliny’s bugbear, wrote books including a biographical lament on his dead son, but unscrupulously applied his oratorical gifts in delation, as did the hated Baebius Massa, Mettius Carus and Palfurius Sura. At the bar there were many able speakers less famous than Tacitus and Pliny themselves, such as Herennius Senecio, who was with Pliny in the impeachment of Baebius Massa; Vitorius Marcellus to whom Quintilian dedicated his Institutio; the African Septimius Severus, grandfather to the emperor of that name, and known to Statius and Martial; Satrius Rufus whom Pliny characterizes as content with contemporary style without seeking to rival Cicero (which Pliny himself tried to do); Valerius Licinianus, a native of Bilbilis, admired as a sort of Cicero by his fellow-Spaniard Martial, exiled under Domitian, but allowed by Nerva to settle as a professor of oratory in Sicily; and one of Martial’s patrons, the Spaniard Licinius Sura, who later composed speeches for Trajan.

FRONTINUS

The works of Sextus Julius Frontinus⁠[1243] originated largely in posts which he held during his public career. No one could have shown more of that thorough devotion to the details of official duty with which many of the best-born Romans ensured the greatness of the Empire. Frontinus was of good family, and his friend Martial alludes to a poetic vein discoverable in him during leisure hours at the coast.⁠[1244] Since, however, his books are practical rather than literary, it looks as if the energetic general and water-commissioner found scant time for any play of fancy. On New Year’s Day A.D. 70 we meet him⁠[1245] at a sitting of the senate, which he had summoned as city praetor, prepared presently to hand over his office to the young prince Domitian. His birth-date, then, may be guessed as about 40. [423]In Britain his name is of historic interest; for as governor (75-78) he proved a worthy successor to the vigorous Cerealis, whose successes against the Brigantes of the North he equalled by victories over the Silures in the difficult territories of South Wales.⁠[1246] It is likely that the Roman road from Bath and beyond the Bristol Channel westwards by Caerwent and Caerleon was engineered under his orders, even if it was not yet called the Via Julia. He was succeeded by Agricola in 78; but presumably saw further military service with Domitian in Germany against the Chatti in 83, since he makes specific allusions to the emperor’s tactics.⁠[1247] Some time afterwards, we know from internal evidence,⁠[1248] he was at work on a collection of stratagems in continuation of an earlier tactical manual, and at its outset he claims to be the solitary author to treat military science systematically.⁠[1249] It was in 97 that Nerva, aware of much slackness and corruption in the administration of the water-supply for Rome, showed confidence in the ability and integrity of Frontinus by appointing him superintendent of the aqueducts (curator aquarum).

To the new commissioner’s determination never to rely upon subordinates for advice but to learn for himself everything of moment affecting his task⁠[1250] we owe his immediate start upon the historical, topographical and statistical record which we possess in the De Aquis. Consul for a third time in the year 100, he held the position of augur until 103, the date of a letter by the younger Pliny⁠[1251] acknowledging a correspondent’s congratulations on his own nomination by the emperor to the college of augurs in succession to Frontinus. We may therefore infer that he died in that year.

If all his writings had survived, they would have added still more to the technical and professional effect of those we have. [424]He composed a work on land-surveying and land-laws, but of this gromatic treatise only excerpts have come down.⁠[1252] His theoretical treatise on military science (De re militari) is lost; but in the extant Strategematon Libri Tres we have a sequel for the use of officers,⁠[1253] illustrating principles of war by stratagems chosen from Greek and Roman history. They are grouped as those for use (Book I) before battle, (Book II) during battle and after; (Book III) at sieges; and are again subdivided into sections headed “on concealing one’s plans,” “on finding out the enemy’s plans,” “on escaping from difficult positions,” and so on.

A fourth book, containing anecdotes of another sort, has come down with The Stratagems and constitutes a problem. The preface acknowledges that the recorded instances illustrate military management rather than stratagems (exempla potius strategicon quam strategemata). They are treated in categories such as “discipline,” “restraint,” “justice,” “determination,” so that the ethical aspect forms a contrast to the three preceding books. The book has not lacked champions of its authenticity even in recent times.⁠[1254] Whereas, however, the three books on stratagems bear marks of common authorship with the De Aquis,⁠[1255] there are considerations that tend to isolate the fourth book. These include differences in thought between it and the undoubtedly genuine parts of the prefaces, and, throughout, differences in build of sentence, in turn of expression and use of words.⁠[1256] Equally tell-tale are traces of a change of tone in the latest preface; besides there is no clear explanation of the [425]departure from the author’s express resolve to write three books.

Yet the Latinity of Book IV does not appear to be demonstrably so much more post-Augustan than that in Books I-III that critics need put it as late as the fourth or the fifth century.⁠[1257] Expressions quoted against it like de uariis consiliis are not decisive. Gundermann⁠[1258] passed a more discriminating judgement upon its Latin by referring it to a date close to Frontinus’s own, early in the second century. Schanz’s hypothesis claims that the author was contemporary with Frontinus, and that he recorded an actual experience of his own in the surrender of the Lingones in A.D. 70 to himself.⁠[1259] It is difficult to believe in this unknown officer, who for this one occasion betrays his personal experience and in several other places relies upon Frontinus’s instances. The hypothesis in any case has to assume that a third person combined this book with the genuine three, and, to effect a plausible deception, not only wrote a fictitious preface for the later book, but also foisted a passage, ostensibly by Frontinus, into the original introduction to the earlier work.⁠[1260] But it is not an unnatural supposition that the fourth book was written by an imitator impressed with Frontinus’s example and responsive to Roman interest in military literature, and that he paid his model the compliment of incorporating material from him.⁠[1261] If this author pretended to write as Frontinus, the episode of the surrender of the Lingones may have been an insertion by him to lend verisimilitude to his forgery; if not, it was due to a subsequent interpolator, who, on all the theories, seems a necessary postulate to account for [426]certain intrusions and repetitions in the text. The borrowings are not all made by the author of Book IV, for some of his work is found interpolated in the earlier collection.⁠[1262] And what sort of interpolator or editor must we picture when we find instances repeated even within the space of the opening book?⁠[1263]⁠

Any collection of anecdotes pure and simple, even in the lightest vein, is apt to pall: so one tires of the concentrated essence of stratagem in campaign or siege administered in tabloid doses without comment. While Macaulay can thrill in relating “how well Horatius kept the bridge,” Frontinus’s bald account is Livy with all the lactea ubertas squeezed out.⁠[1264] Here and there, however, points of interest arise. Some of his examples of Machiavellian diplomacy or astute ruses de guerre prove that everything may be held fair in war. When we read about a screen of prisoners (captiuos lateri euntium praetexuit, I. iv, 1: cf. 2), or about poisoning an enemy’s water-supply (aquam hellebore corruptam, III. vii, 6), we recognize that unchivalrous devilry in military operations is not a peculiarity of any one period; while an instance of premeditated disregard of a covenant (III. iv. 6) anticipates the doctrine that treaty obligations must yield to military necessity. If such examples are abreast of modern ruthlessness, the author himself appears hopelessly antiquated in his naïve confession that he sees no prospect of improving engines of war.⁠[1265]⁠

Frontinus took the majority of his examples from Greek and Roman history before the Empire. Occasionally we find something later, like an allusion to the Variana clades of A.D. 9, or to Corbulo’s fighting in Armenia during Nero’s reign, or to Domitian’s campaigns; but his main sources are Caesar, Sallust and Livy. No stress need be laid on the two passages where Livy is cited by name (II. v. 31 and 34); for both are possibly interpolations. On the whole, Frontinus is free in his rehandling of originals, as may be seen if one compares passages [427]in Livy with his adaptations.⁠[1266] If, further, one compares passages in Livy with the adaptations by both Valerius Maximus and Frontinus,⁠[1267] one will find that the latter does not show the almost slavish dependence upon Valerius which characterizes the author of Book IV.⁠[1268] Sometimes indeed Frontinus is free to the extent of carelessness and inaccuracy. He is capable of confusing occasions and individuals. Thus he misrepresents Livy’s Diodorus as Diodotus (III. xvi. 5); turns a device used by Cincinnatus against the Volscians into one by Capitolinus against the Falisci (II. viii. 3); alters to Cimbrians Livy’s Celtiberians (II. v. 8), having in the preceding section (II. v. 7) called Viriathus “dux Celtiberorum,” though he is “dux Lusitanorum” elsewhere (II. xiii. 4). The trick ascribed to Manlius as a means of encouraging his men against the Etruscans (II. vii. 11) appears, on comparison with Livy and Dionysius, to involve a mistake between two colleagues. In such cases Frontinus’s memory may have played him false amidst the multitude of names with which he had to deal.

The Strategemata belongs to Domitian’s reign. The more famous treatise De Aquis Vrbis Romae, in two books, was begun under Nerva, but not finished until Trajan had succeeded him.⁠[1269] Only those without historical sense will dismiss as totally unreadable his description of aqueducts once vital in their utility and still in ruin imposingly picturesque. Undertaken in the conscientious spirit of mastering his business and instructing successors,⁠[1270] the author’s labour was lightened by belief in the value of his duties; for, in his eyes, the maintenance of the [428]aqueducts gave “a signal testimony to the greatness of the Roman Empire” (cum magnitudinis Romani imperii uel praecipuum sit indicium, 119). He had to contemplate a state of things very different from the old times when for 441 years Rome had been content with water from the Tiber, wells, or springs. Springs, he allows, may have healing virtues, and are still the objects of veneration (fontium memoria cum sanctitate adhuc exstat et colitur, 4); but his concern is now a practical one, directed upon nine or ten majestic conduits bringing water for miles over stone arches into the city.

His scheme embraced an account of the builders of the aqueducts, dates of construction, direction, length of channels, elevations, measurements of pipe-capacity and of volume at intake and delivery, as well as a list of curators up to his own day. Statistical details of wastage and of the amounts of water distributed by the several aqueducts in the several wards are certain—and the author knows it—to be complicated as well as dull (non ieiunam tantum sed etiam perplexam, 77); but he prescribes a cure in judicious skipping (licebit transire leuiora). We soon weary of the quinaria, the official unit of measurement, which Di Fenizio has recently calculated to have equalled 0.48 litre per second or 41.5 cubic metres per 24 hours. Yet even a cursory perusal yields instructive items. We read about the limpid drinking water that came from the Marcia; about unnecessary blending with turbid waters which spoiled the best; about fraudulent tapping of the supply; about the system of repairs; and topographical facts which illuminate features of the landscape near Rome to-day. A good deal is not literature but archaeology or engineering. All the same, it is a human document presenting an unvarnished picture of scrupulous and observant fidelity in the control of an essential public service, where there had been slackness and dishonesty. Through its unpretentious style shines a personality with a true conception of civic virtue, determined to aid Nerva and Trajan in undoing the abuses of the previous reign. For a man of culture it must have entailed some self-sacrifice to settle down upon the dry minutiae of the water-supply. Still, he was rewarded by a satisfaction in work well done which justified his proud [429]reflection that his reforms had, under imperial auspices, made Rome a salubrious city:

The Queen and Mistress of the globe realizes from day to day the care bestowed by our devoted emperor Nerva, her ruler; still more will the health of this same eternal city realize it in the increase of reservoirs, waterworks, fountains and tanks. No less benefit is distributed among individual consumers owing to the increase in the emperor’s private grants: those also who nervously used to draw an illegal water-supply are now relieved from anxiety and enjoy it by imperial bounty. Not even waste-water is lost: the look of the city is clean and improved: what we breathe is purer: and, as regards the unwholesome atmosphere, the causes which gave to the air of Rome its bad name have been removed.⁠[1271]⁠

The old-fashioned practical Roman of limited outlook speaks through the disdainful self-complacency of his exclamation:

With such a number of indispensable structures for all these waters you are welcome to compare the idle Pyramids or all the futile, though renowned, works by Greeks.⁠[1272]⁠

This, however, is a note of national hauteur. As an individual he was the reverse of boastful, and his modesty is illustrated in Pliny’s story about his forbidding any monument to be erected to himself, because, as he pithily put it, “Our memory will last if deserved by our life” (memoria nostra durabit si uita meruimus).⁠[1273]⁠

The composition of the De Aquis involved, besides personal observation and inquiries, research among records and business documents. Part of its material is based on reports from surveyors and engineers. Senatorial decrees affecting the aqueducts are recited.⁠[1274] Among Roman writers quoted are Fenestella, [430]Ateius Capito and Caelius Rufus.⁠[1275] It was characteristic of the man that his style should be straightforward in its freedom from artifice. He liked parade in composition as little as he did in the performance of duty. Dispensing with the attendants decreed to a water-commissioner on official business outside Rome, he declares: “for myself, when on my rounds inspecting the conduits, my own honesty and the authority given by his Majesty will serve for lictors” (101). So, too, he wisely refrained from pomp or epigram on such a subject as the water-supply. Very occasionally there is a sly hit, like that at the honesty required from masons on the wall “in accord with a law more honoured in the breach than in the observance” (secundum legem notam omnibus sed a paucis obseruatam, 123). But his belief, as we have learned from Pliny, that a man’s surest memorial is a worthy life makes a complete apologia for the absence of literary refinements.

His Latinity has been just glanced at in connexion with the problem of a pseudo-Frontinus. The “Silver” mark is unmistakeable in such usages as citra meaning “without,” circa meaning “about” or “over,” quamquam with subjunctive or participle, and future participles with a notion of purpose.⁠[1276] A reader can tell his whereabouts in the history of the language, when three lines in the preface to Book III give him hucusque, praelocutione and attentione (used absolutely, as in Quintilian). Many such typically post-Augustan words as sequelae (II. iv. 8) occur, or at least words, as we should expect remembering the main source of the Strategemata, that are Livian but otherwise mainly post-Augustan, like exasperatus (II. i. 11), praeualere (II. i. 8) and subinde (I. iii. 10, iv. 13; II. iii. 23, ix. 1; III. ix. 7). There are poetic epithets like inrequietum (II. ix. 1) which prose took over from Ovid, and there are phrases like bello adfusus (I. i. 8) and profunda siluarum (I. iii. 10) that have a Tacitean ring. Annuntiare (= nuntiare, I. ix. 2) is one of the words common to Frontinus with the elder Pliny and Apuleius which passed through the sermo cotidianus [431]and ecclesiastical Latin into the Italian annunziare and the French annoncer.

We have had occasion to point out resemblances between the Strategemata and the De Aquis in their Latin. The latter is nowhere more obviously post-Augustan, or non-Ciceronian, than in its employment of the superlative piissimus (De Aq. 88). Used by Mark Antony and condemned by Cicero as impossible,⁠[1277] it was accepted by Curtius, Seneca, Tacitus and Florus. Resemblances between Frontinus’s Latin and that of Book IV are explained away by Wölfflin as conscious imitation on the part of the spurious author. It is at least arguable that, since words of his like adiutorium, foret as a variant for esset, notabilis and subinde⁠[1278] belonged to the manner of the period, there was no need to steal them. Representative words in Book IV bear the same general post-Augustan stamp, usually with a Livian association, like praecessisse (IV. ii. 1, “be before others” in getting a bridge built), praeoptare (IV. ii. 2, v. 22, “prefer”), acclinauerat (IV. v. 5, “leaned against”), ampliaretur (IV. iii. 12, “be increased,” an extension from the legal sense of adjournment). As a significant parallel to inrequietum in the unchallenged part of Frontinus, we have an Ovidian word in obmurmurare (IV. vi. 2). The whole linguistic evidence runs counter to any violent separation of the books in time of composition.

TECHNICAL WRITERS

In the professional writing of the Flavian age, law and grammar may be included. Under Vespasian, the Sabinian school of jurists was represented by Caelius Sabinus, and the Proculian by Pegasus. Other legal writers were Urseius Ferox, Plautius, and Juventius Celsus the elder. The younger Juventius belongs, with Neratius Priscus, to later Flavian days and still more to Trajan’s reign. One of the juridical writers of Domitian’s time was Aufidius Chius, mentioned by Martial. Among refined literary critics of the day was Apollinaris, also [432]in Martial, whose Claranus, however, perhaps belonged to an earlier period. Possibly, but not certainly, we may place here Largius or Larcius Licinus, whose Ciceromastix is significant of a literary quarrel; and Aemilius Asper, the erudite grammarian, who left his mark on ancient scholarship by his commentaries upon Terence, Sallust and Virgil.

C. Valerius Flaccus⁠[1279] belongs, at least in part, to the time of Vespasian. If we accept “Balbus Setinus” or “Setinus Balbus,” the additions to his name in subscriptiones of the Vatican MS., then he may have been a native of Setia, but whether that was the Setia in Campania or one of two Setias in Spain it is impossible to determine. No special Spanish qualities are discoverable in him, and he was Roman enough to serve on the committee of fifteen for sacrifices.⁠[1280] Almost at the outset of his Argonautica, in invoking the emperor, he refers to Vespasian’s service in British seas, to the recent capture of Jerusalem by Titus in A.D. 70, and to the supposed likelihood that Vespasian’s younger “offspring” (proles), Domitian, might celebrate his brother’s exploits:

[434]

Beginning his epic, therefore, soon after 70, he made slow progress; for in the third and fourth books⁠[1282] he alludes to the eruption of Vesuvius in 79, and apparently he never completed the eighth book. Quintilian, writing in the early nineties of the century, is the only classical writer who mentions him. His words of regret over his recent death (multum in Valerio Flacco nuper amisimus, X. i. 90) suggest that Valerius died about A.D. 90.

In the Quest of the Golden Fleece Valerius had a subject which no one could make entirely dull. The tale of the earliest of ships,⁠[1283] the Argo, of its hazards by sea and land, of the love between Jason and the outlandish princess Medea, and of the perilous winning of the dragon-guarded treasure contains the same inherent romance as that which colours adventures upon the Spanish Main, so that Heredia’s line in Les Conquérants might equally well have been written of Jason’s crew,

Here too were voyagers for whom, under the perpetual imminence of the unknown, each night brought hopes and dreams of heroic morrows. This is the stuff of which epics can be made. Valerius, luckier in choosing such a theme than Lucan and Silius were in drawing upon history, could hardly fail, [435]notwithstanding the trammels of his episodes, to catch and convey some gleams of its pure roseate charm. The story of Statius’s Thebaid stirs in the bosom little perceptible emotion; but it is otherwise with the fortunes of the Argonauts. A primeval glamour plays round a legend which may be older than the tale of Troy: and we can be sure that it is older than the composition of one of the Homeric poems as we have it, for in the Odyssey Jason’s fabled ship is mentioned as in all men’s minds.⁠[1284]⁠

In a story so old, Valerius had many predecessors. He was not even the first Roman poet to handle it. Varro of Atax had based a work on the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes, and a reference in Probus⁠[1285] to Varro makes it likely that his poem was accompanied with a commentary whence Valerius might have derived material. Ancient Greek writers on the myth, Herodotus, the Attic tragedians, Apollodorus and Diodorus seem to have furnished Valerius with subject-matter, but whether directly, or indirectly through scholia on his chief source, Apollonius, it is hard to say.⁠[1286] Later Greek writers also contributed their portion; and his geographical learning, as in the catalogue of peoples in Book VI, came more probably from Eratosthenes than from the elder Pliny. To his material sources Valerius added inventions of his own, and treated the whole in a style upon which the influence of Virgil and of Ovid are unmistakeable.

The hexameters of the eight books reach a total of 5593, and Book I is the longest (851). Greek though the theme be, the poet’s aspiration is that his “utterances may fill the cities of Latium” (l. 21). The narrative opens with the jealousy felt by Pelias, king of Thessaly, towards Jason, the son of his brother Aeson, and his crafty plan to despatch his nephew on the dangerous Quest of the Golden Fleece under the pretext of revenge on Aeetes of Colchis for the murder of Phrixus. Jason feels the lure of glory, prays for the favour of Juno, and at Minerva’s command builds, decorates and solemnly launches [436]the Argo. Heroes flock to man her—Hercules brings the youth Hylas, and Chiron his ward Achilles. Sunset comes and

because there are no mariners! Orpheus whiles away the hours of night with a relevant ballad on the drowning of Helle by falling into the sea from the back of the golden ram, and on the escape of Phrixus, her brother. When the Dawn-goddess comes, “setting the sea a-shimmer with the morning sun,”⁠[1288] it is to display the adventurers in readiness for their start, which takes place after Jason’s parents, Aeson and Alcimede, have given utterance to their grief at the parting. A catalogue of the crew is added in about 130 lines (352-483). Their number is fifty, including Acastus, Pelias’s son, who joins stealthily at the moment of sailing. It is one of Valerius’s many departures from Apollonius that he more subtly represents Jason as inducing his cousin to share the dangerous voyage, whereas Apollonius makes him join voluntarily. Another difference is his introduction of the catalogue at a considerably later point than in Apollonius—an improvement, because he has first roused the human interest in the heroes. To the signal of three trumpet-blasts the galley sets forth, Telamon stroking on port-side and Hercules on starboard, with Orpheus to give time to the rowers, Argus in charge of ship-repairs, and Tiphys as pilot. The sailing has not passed unnoticed in heaven. The Sun-god, sire of Aeetes, whose domain is threatened, complains to Jove, Mars supporting the complaint, while Juno and Pallas oppose it. It is the old celestial machinery conventional in epic. As in Virgil, Jove replies, unfolding destiny with a Roman note prophetic of other empires,⁠[1289] and, again as in Virgil, the hero’s ship is menaced by a storm which Neptune calms. Meanwhile, Pelias’s impotent grief over the secret departure of his son in the Argo is vigorously described. He can strike at Jason [437]through his parents, as he declares in Latin reminiscent of Virgil:

But the old folk resolve to forestall the cruelty of the king, and drain a cup of bull’s blood. The death of Aeson and his consort is the occasion for a picture of the under-world strongly marked by Virgilian influence. Both in ideas and language the last twenty lines of the book recall Aeneid VI: e.g. the new adaptation of the Twin Gates; the joys of light, dance and song in the abodes of bliss; and the type of life on earth that is a passport to happiness.⁠[1291]⁠

The feeling that the Argonauts were “the first that ever burst” into a silent sea is skilfully suggested early in Book II by the description of sundown:

[438]

Guided by the stars, they make Lemnos; whereupon a digression relates how it came that Vulcan loved and Venus hated the island. Digression though it be, it is a well-told tale (which in turn influenced Statius) concerning the murder by the Lemnian women of their husbands returning from war, and Hypsipyle’s rescue of her royal father in an old ship. Her love for Jason is a copy in miniature of Dido’s for Aeneas. Jason, like the Trojan prince, has to be reminded of his mission; and there is grief in Lemnos when the Argonauts leave. The book contains a further incident—the rescue by Hercules and Telamon of the daughter of Laomedon from the sea-monster, and the scheming of the mean-souled Laomedon to avoid giving the rescuer the promised reward of white horses. Putting to sea again, they pass the narrows between Europe and Asia and are welcomed by King Cyzicus in his town.

Most of Book III is occupied with two incidents—the fight against Cyzicus and the capture of Hylas by a water-nymph. The former is a fatality due to a mistake pathetic in intention but in essence incredibly grotesque. The Argonauts have sailed away laden with farewell gifts from Cyzicus. Now, the goddess Cybele nurses a grudge against the royal house for the slaughter of one of her sacred lions during a hunt. It is, therefore, brought about that Tiphys, the steersman, is sunk in deep slumber and that the Argo drifts back to Cyzicus’s city, where in the dark enemies are fancied to be at hand. The battle thus begun in error lasts, we are expected to believe, through much of the night, and the Homeric slaughter wrought by the Argonauts is told with a realism considerably overdone: bones and jaws resound beneath the blows, and the land is white with scattered brains! (sparsusque cerebro albet ager, 166). The mighty boon (donum ingens) of being killed by Hercules leads one victim to the knowledge that a dreadful blunder has been made, and after the king has fallen by Jason’s spear, Jupiter intervenes. With the dawn Tiphys realizes that they have been fighting against a friendly state: it is a tragic recognition, like a frenzied Bacchanal’s return to her senses. Jason is filled with grief over his host of yesterday and arranges for elaborate funeral honours. This affords an opening for an exposition of the [439]philosophy of the soul and of conscience by the soothsayer Mopsus, who ordains ceremonies of expiation. Artificial scapegoats are employed, upon which, by a curious ritual magic, the anger of the hell-powers is to be diverted, and so the Argonauts row away light-hearted. The rebound from sorrow to happiness is reflected in the jocular rivalry among the oarsmen and by the humorous description of the “crab” caught by Hercules which smashes his oar and sends him floundering back on several others. Fresh trouble, however, comes with another landing: and some pretty description marks the story of how Hylas in hot pursuit of a stag stoops to drink at a brook and is drawn into it by a water-nymph. A series of similes illustrates the restless anxiety of Hercules as he calls in vain for the missing youth:

The Argonauts become impatient over the prolonged absence of Hercules, and debate (with traces of the rhetoric in a controuersia) whether they should sail without him. In the end, after Jason, with reluctance, has loosed the cable, his men grieve to miss the lion’s skin and see the empty bench:

In Book IV the chief incidents are the appearance of Hylas in a vision to announce his fate to Hercules; the arrival of the Argo at the land of the Bebryces, whose arrogant boxer-king, Amycus, is humbled by Pollux; Orpheus’s song of Io’s transformation into a heifer, in reference to the legendary name of the Bosphoros; the freeing of blind old Phineus from the torment of the Harpies, and his foretelling of the main stages of the Argonauts’ adventures; the narrow escape of the Argo from the Clashing Rocks (“how,” reflects Jason, “could they on their return [440]voyage ever thread their way through again?”—a hint of the poet’s intention to bring them back by a different route); and the attainment of the Euxine, where a dull and unpoetic description is inserted. Their welcome from the prince of the Mariandyni is all the warmer because, like them, he loathed King Amycus: as Valerius remarks in one of his comparatively few sententiae,

At the beginning of Book V death has thinned the number of the Argonauts, and fresh comrades join who relate their exploits in following the arms of Hercules against the Amazons. By night the noise of the Chalybes can be heard at work on implements of war—evil inventions which had brought into activity the Hates, the Angers and the avenging Fury. Caucasus is next sighted—the scene of Prometheus’s torment, and it so chances that Hercules has arrived to free the Titan that very day. Next comes the first sight of the Colchian land, with a fresh invocation to mark a new portion of the epic. Their hardest task is now before the Argonauts, and Jason reminds them that nothing must prevent their bringing back the Fleece:

Medea, King Aeetes’s daughter, after a night of ominous dreams, is early astir with her handmaidens. She is likened to Proserpine:

Valerius describes her, when she first sees the strangers, as a shy girl with nothing in her manner to suggest the sorceress. She depends for reassurance on her old nurse, who recognizes [441]the aliens as Greeks. The mutual impressions of hero and heroine follow: she, reduced to silence, draws back a few steps, but has eyes for him alone; he concentrates attention on her as a princess among the foreign women. Answering his courteous appeal, Medea declares herself daughter of Aeetes and instructs him about his way. So Jason proceeds shrouded in a mist of invisibility to the audience-chamber of the king in the Sun-god’s temple. In all this there is a contamination of epic sources, and a modelling of incidents upon earlier poems. The meeting of Jason and Medea is based partly on Odysseus’s meeting with Nausicaa in Homer, partly on Aeneas’s meeting with Venus under the guise of a huntress in the Aeneid. Jason, like Aeneas, proceeds in a miraculous cloud of concealment. The first interview with royalty in the Argonautica., as in the Aeneid, takes place in a temple. Just as there were tableaux on the walls from the Trojan war to interest the hero of the Aeneid, so for Jason there are provided, thanks to the prophetic skill of Vulcan, pictures of the Golden Fleece and the coming expedition of the Argonauts. This parallelism is one of the cramping conditions of ancient epic, and when it passes the bounds of the pleasantly reminiscential the reader feels that the poet has sacrificed his individuality to standard authority.

Jason’s claim to possess the Fleece angers Aeetes, but he dissembles and promises it as recompense if the Argonauts will help him against the menace of his brother Perses. It is a promise which causes commotion among the gods.

Much of the fighting against Perses and his catalogued allies in Book VI is wearisome. It is one of the innovations made on the story by Valerius, but we do not follow Jason on the battle-field with the love-lit gaze of Medea, when Juno, disguised as Medea’s sister, has led her to the town walls to watch the conflict. There is a note of pity for this girl ignorant of coming ill and the victim of a scheming goddess:

[442]

Jason performs deeds of prowess and Perses is defeated. With nightfall the din of battle dies away.

If Book VI has dull stretches, the last two books are the most attractive and possess great human interest. This is notably true of Book VII; for it traces the growth of Medea’s passion for Jason, the mental conflict between loyalty to her father and love for a stranger, and the avowal of their affection by the lovers in the temple of Diana. The speeches, though coloured inevitably with some rhetoric and some Virgilian echoes, show real emotion.

Aeetes disdainfully breaks his promise and makes a new proposal—the fire-breathing bulls must be yoked by Jason, and the crop of warriors from the dragon’s teeth must be sown. His perfidy meets with a spirited reply from Jason:

Alarmed for the hero, the lovesick princess wanders distraught in the palace; and still more passion is breathed into her soul by Venus under the form of Circe, daughter of the Sun. Her inward struggle is vividly represented—which shall she favour, father or alien? She is trapped (prensa). Would that earth could swallow her, and so she might escape accursed suggestions. Now she will, now she will not betray her father; but at last, [443]overcoming scruples, she turns to her most potent drugs to aid Jason. Possessed of these magical charms, she passes out into the night, and, after a final hesitation, through the city gates. Here Medea is a dual personality, now a timid maiden with a sense of modesty and a regard for duty, now an astonishingly powerful enchantress capable of controlling the passage of Night and the heavenly bodies. In Diana’s temple they confront each other. Jason breaks silence:

Protesting against the king’s ingratitude and perfidy, he declares his unalterable resolution:

Scarce lifting her eyes, the Colchian princess half resentfully, half scornfully, asks Jason why he ever came to her land; why he, a Thessalian foreigner, should look for aid from her. Her final entreaty is that, finding help elsewhere, he should let her go back to her father innocent as yet of treachery. But Jason snatches the proffered charms with avidity; henceforth irrevocably she is the guilty betrayer of her father. Round her lover she must put a sevenfold spell, and instruct him how to face the dread crop of warriors:

She calls him hospes and he calls her coniunx, a contrast designed to recall Dido and Aeneas;⁠[1302] and when Jason imprecates fire and destruction upon himself if he should forget Medea’s sacrifice of royalty and home, the tragedy of their broken love (though Valerius never completed the tale) is foreshadowed. The lists are made ready for his ordeal against the fire-breathing bulls and the furrow-sprung warriors; and Jason, with the aid of Medea’s magic and counsel, proves victorious.

[444]

Book VIII: Only one course is now open to Medea. In terror at her own acts and afraid of her father, she bids farewell to the palace and joins her lover in the forest. There is still the Fleece to win. To enable Jason to carry it off, she charms the guardian Dragon to sleep, though, as she bends over the prostrate beast which hitherto she has fed, she cannot but utter her sorrow for it when it wakes to realize the theft. But now there is need for despatch; and the supporting tree yields up the Fleece to the hero, while melancholy gloom gathers in the place; but elsewhere the land is lit up by the brilliant gold as he bears it away. Cheers rise from his men: the Argo draws near to meet him; and he hastens aboard with Medea.

Meanwhile dismay invades the palace on the discovery of her flight. Her mother, who has hitherto played no part, comes into the story with a rhetorical apostrophe to her fugitive daughter—she would fain scratch the face of the robber; she would have Fleece or any other sacred thing taken, if only Medea were given back; and details (singula) now too late recur to the queen’s mind that should have betrayed Medea’s love for the Thessalian; that was why she had no appetite (nullae dapes)! The scene changes: the lonely princess is at sea, the one woman among foreigners, uncertain whether the man for whom she has sacrificed so much will make her his bride. This anxiety ends, however, with their marriage in the island of Peuce. But the festivities are disturbed by the arrival of Medea’s brother Absyrtus with a fleet which Valerius wishes his readers to believe was very suddenly built. The Argonauts grumble over the prospect of attack from their Colchian pursuers, and would restore the girl if they might keep the Fleece. Jason does not hold out boldly against his men’s advice, but, with groans and qualms about his plighted troth, meditates treachery to his bride. So, within less than one hundred lines of the abrupt close, Valerius brings out the worst in Jason’s character. Divining his cowardice, Medea remonstrates with argument and question and irony. Is she a captive on the vessel? May she not hear the plans proposed?

Is he afraid, she asks, of her brother’s ships? Still even against a greater fleet she deserves to be defended.

A night of agony over Jason’s pusillanimous ingratitude has wrought a change on the beautiful girl:

Swayed two ways, Jason tries to say soothing words to Medea, and the epic breaks off leaving its hero discredited. The poet has, however, enlisted our sympathies for Medea, as Virgil has done for Dido.

Even the sketch just given serves to show that Valerius was not a slavish imitator of Apollonius of Rhodes. Certainly he owed him much in episodes, similes and ideas. But under each of these three heads he also shows independence. Episodes are amplified, abbreviated, or transferred, and original episodes are [446]introduced; if some similes are copied, fresh ones are invented; and, if there is a certain amount of close rendering of the Greek text, there is, besides, a great proportion of the poem which is due not merely to borrowings from Homer and the Latin of Virgil, Ovid, Lucan and Seneca’s tragedies, but to Valerius’s own genius. Thus, while it is instructive to estimate his debt to Apollonius, it is equally instructive to remember the contrasts between them, and competent critics have studied this question.⁠[1306] Broadly, in construction and probability of narrative he excels his Greek forerunner; but Valerius is most distinctively himself when he displays his gift of description, which is, on the whole, free from the flagrant vices of rhetoric and sometimes reaches a high level of beauty, and when he applies his psychological ability to the character of Medea. One cannot fail to see that in his unfolding of her love he is not tied to the Apollonian account: one notes the influence of Virgil’s Dido: one suspects Ovid’s influence as well; but there is no reason to deny to an artist like Valerius his own large share in elaborating his heroine’s passion.

It is, on several grounds, likely that the incompleteness of the epic was caused by the author’s death rather than by the ravages of time.⁠[1307] Some of the charges of inconsistency and disconnectedness brought against Valerius by critics might have been averted, it is contended, had he lived to revise his epic. All the same, it must be remembered that Valerius took years over his work and might never have removed such blemishes. As Professor Summers points out, Statius’s echoes of Valerius’s language suggest familiarity with his poem; but of about a score of allusions which Statius makes to the Argonautic legend none bears on the return voyage of the heroes, and this is just the portion which is missing in Valerius. An interesting problem turns on the author’s design for finishing his epic. One may conjecture that he contemplated four more books to equate the number with Virgil’s twelve; and it is a plausible guess that he would have, in his closing books, evinced still more independence [447]of his Greek model. Since he elects to place Jason’s marriage in Peuce, he presumably would have dropped the visit to Phaeacia. There is another feature which, while it illustrates his individuality, at the same time lends colour to the belief that he meant to bring his heroes into connexion with Italy.⁠[1308] This feature is the frequency of the allusions to Rome and her customs which the poet engrafts upon this epic of early Greek mariners. Surprise is scarcely felt that at the beginning we should find his autobiographic hint about the Sibyl’s tripod in his house, or his references to recent Roman history in his invocation to Vespasian, or his desire that his poem should be famed in Latin-speaking cities.⁠[1309] But the recurrent Roman note in the course of the narrative is more significant. Jove is made to foreshadow the coming of empires which must include Rome; Hypsipyle’s renown is to last as long as Roman chronicles; and allusions are made to Jupiter of the Alban mount and to the connexion of Rome with Troy.⁠[1310] In the sixth book there is an anticipation of the military emblems of Rome; a likening of the battle between Perses and Aeetes to internecine strife between Roman legions; and illustrations are drawn from shipwrecks on the Latian coast and from hunting in Umbria.⁠[1311] In the next book Jason is said to be as much dismayed by Aeetes’s refusal to keep his promise as a Tuscan pilot looking for the Tiber mouth but blown upon the quicksands off Africa; and Venus, disguised as daughter of the Sun, pretends to be consort of the Italian Picus and “queen of the Tuscan main.”⁠[1312] These and other instances incline one to believe that Valerius was leading up to a sort of Italianization of his Greek theme in its later phases, in which case he would have been at once more national and more Virgilian. For, just as the later half of the Aeneid has its scenes laid in Italy, so Valerius may have decided to imitate Virgil in bringing his Argonauts back by a route more familiar to a Roman reader than that by which they ventured out to Colchis. If the adventurers were to sail homewards by way of the North Sea past Britain and Gaul, this would have fittingly [448]accorded with the address to Vespasian in the opening book; and poetic justice might have been done by prolonging the epic to include the death of Jason’s enemy Pelias.

The fact that there is only one classical mention of Valerius (that by Quintilian recognizing his death as a loss to literature) does not suggest that he had a wide vogue. Yet his influence is traceable in Statius and Silius;⁠[1313] and Juvenal may be thinking of him in his gibe at the conveyance of “the gold of the stolen fleecelet.”⁠[1314] After age-long oblivion, attention was once more directed to his poem by Poggio’s discovery at St. Gall in 1417 of a manuscript containing Argonautica I-IV, 317. In spite of considerable poetic quality Valerius is not a readily quotable author. There is little criticism of life in him—little even in the way of the sententia: so readers have not found much to lay hold on, and his influence has been lessened. Thus, in estimating the classical sources of a work like William Morris’s Life and Death of Jason it is the relation to Apollonius rather than that to Valerius that one makes prominent.

The language⁠[1315] of Valerius is an interesting complex. As in the treatment of his epic theme he was both borrower and innovator, so with his style. Deeply influenced by Virgil and other predecessors, he yet strikes into fresh paths of expression: he even coins words. Among the compounds (many of them dactylic) which he loves, he revives old epithets like auriger, omnituens; uses rare ones, like astrifer, gemmifer, luctifer (in Seneca also); notably shares some with Ovid like piniger, reparabilis, turifer; and others, like monstrifer and monstrificus, with the elder Pliny. The adjectives astrifer, flammiger, undisonus recur in Statius; flammifer (which is Ennian, Lucretian and Ovidian), auricomus (Virgilian), securiger, and others, recur in Silius. But he has adjectives that are entirely his, aegisonus, arcipotens, implorabilis, intemerandus, soligena, just as he has ἅπαξ εἰρημένα among his verbs like protono, superincendo, and among his nouns like a(d)spiramen, lustramen, [449]ouatus (“rejoicing”), memoratrix, mugitor, the last term being used in one of his references to volcanic activity:

There are also forcible applications of words in new connexions, or extensions of meaning: e.g. Medea adnuitur thalamis (V. 258), “Medea is granted to the marriage-couch”; inuasit habenis murmur (VII. 605), “attacked the horse’s neighing with the reins,” i.e. “set bit and bridle to its mouth”; ueteris sub nocte cupressi (I. 774), “beneath the night-like shadow of an old cypress-tree,” resembling the phrase noctem implicat (VII. 598) of entangling a bull in a cloud of darkness, or Juvenal’s tenebrae for “a dingy hovel.” Fragor expresses vigorously news that comes in a crash:

The mixture of convention and boldness in Valerius makes him an intensely interesting linguistic study.

Despite his profound debt to Virgil, and traces of lines with a still more archaic flavour, the technique of Valerius’s verse is predominantly Ovidian. He recalls Ovid in dactylic movement, in lack of varied pauses, and in smooth versification. This smoothness of post-Ovidian poetry, which was based on a comparative avoidance of elision, missed that subtle entanglement of word with word which Virgil artistically employed to counteract some of the heaviness of the Latin language. Valerius has not the technical skill of Statius in hexameters: he is often monotonous in rhythm, in repetitions of words within a few lines, and in over-symmetric arrangement. Yet he is less monotonous than Lucan, although when the test is intellect, Valerius is unquestionably Lucan’s inferior. It is easy to illustrate some phases of his monotony: in Book VIII, a short one [450]of 466 lines, one can count at least 35 dactylic verbs (implicat, prosilit, etc.) forming the first foot of the line, without counting other dactylic words like uellera (at least four times), immemor (at least twice). Some of his endings too are monotonous: e.g. proles four times in less than ninety lines in Book IV,⁠[1317] although we may accept this as an echo of ancient epic phraseology. It is also convention which prompts his alliterative effects such as these in his later books:⁠[1318]⁠

or

or

More subtle is the onomatopoeic effect which he achieves in describing the gloomy sea-cave

To the credit of his common sense, he is less rhetorical than either Lucan or Statius. He rants less. He indulges in fewer epigrams. In eight books his sententiae do not exceed a dozen.⁠[1319] Doubtless, his similes are too numerous,⁠[1320] but they are, as a rule, brief. Unfortunately, though some have beauty, others are in bad taste, like the comparison of the love-sick Medea to a dog going mad; and others are far-fetched, like the comparison of the flight of the Harpies to the rain of ashes from Vesuvius in eruption.⁠[1321] He has his lapses into absurdities, hyperbole and artificiality. In the battle of Book VI there are extravagant details which recall Lucan; and the danger of mythology can [451]be seen when Jason, instead of the simple question, “Where is Hercules?” asks, “Where is he who was equal to the monsters sent by his stepmother?”⁠[1322] Such mythological allusions play their part along with inverted order of words and compact forms of expression in producing an effect sometimes far from clear: even though he is relatively free from laboured conceits, he falls far short of Virgil’s classic lucidity. There is undoubtedly in Valerius descriptive power, varied incident, vivid narrative, and the perennial attraction of the way of a man with a maid. Except for this last psychological interest his merits are mainly related to the objective and concrete with little to suggest that he had reflected profoundly on life or had any guidance or solace to offer to humanity.

Few literary figures of the first century are so well known biographically as Ti. Catius Silius Italicus.⁠[1323] The information comes mainly from a letter by the younger Pliny (III. vii), who, writing in A.D. 101 about the recent death of Silius, took the opportunity to sketch his career. Other facts of his life are learned from Martial and Tacitus.⁠[1324] He is called Silius Italicus in MSS., in Pliny and in Tacitus; Martial calls him either Silius or Italicus; his full name we know from inscriptions.⁠[1325] [453]It is argued that, if “Italicus” implied birth at Italica in Spain, Martial would have expressly claimed him for a countryman. Pliny’s evidence that he was over seventy-five when he died enables us to date his birth as A.D. 25 or 26. Under Nero he had got an evil name as an informer. He was the last Neronian consul (A.D. 68), and, in the struggle for the succession, a supporter of Vitellius, whom Cluvius Rufus and he attended at his interview with Flavius Sabinus in the Capitol. The reputation which he gained as proconsul of Asia in Vespasian’s time and his subsequent life of literary retirement did something to wipe out the stain of his ill-employed activity in Nero’s days. Leisure hours in intervals of writing were devoted to the reception of a circle of visitors and to learned discussions, presumably philosophical. His readings from his own works were planned to be practical tests of his friends’ critical judgement. In the later part of his life he left Rome for the quiet of Campania, from which not even the accession of the new emperor, Trajan, in A.D. 98, could lure him back. A connoisseur (φιλόκαλος, as Pliny says), he could not resist the temptation to buy fine country houses, in this respect becoming even more extravagant than his friend Pliny. He surrounded himself with books, statues and busts, above all venerating the portrait of Virgil, the anniversary of whose birth he observed more scrupulously than his own. Virgil’s tomb at Naples was to him a holy place (adire ut templum solebat). Before he attempted an epic, he had made some name in oratory, especially as a pleader in court.⁠[1326] His death on his Neapolitan estate was due to voluntary starvation. A tumour from which he was suffering was pronounced incurable, and he decided to refrain from food. It was a Stoical resolution; and he had, in fact, relations with the Stoic philosopher Epictetus.⁠[1327] Of two sons one predeceased him, the other reached the consulship and survived his father. Among additional facts derived from Martial we learn that one of his villas had been Cicero’s, that Virgil’s grave was on one of his properties, and that he began his Punica after his consulship. The ascription to him of the [454]epitome known as the Ilias Latina or Homerus Latinus is mentioned elsewhere.

A diligent but usually uninspired writer, fitly described by Pliny as having composed with more pains than genius (maiore cura quam ingenio), Silius must have resembled Southey in his methodically calculated production of verse; and his Punica may be said to occupy in Latin literature a position not unlike that of Madoc in English. By A.D. 88, the date of Martial’s fourth book, the plan of Silius’s epic was apparently known and friends were acquainted with parts of it.⁠[1328] By the end of 92⁠[1329] some at least of the Punica, wildly praised by Martial as immortal, was in book form; but the reference to Domitian’s war in Silius, Book III, 607, cannot have been written before that same year, as the Sarmatian campaign was fought in A.D. 92-93. Since XIV. 686 refers to Nerva (96-98), we may assign the latest books to the beginning of Trajan’s reign. It has been contended that so comparatively early a part of the work as Book VII must have followed the death of Domitian (96), on the ground that the introduction of Minerva there as hostile to Rome would have been unsuitable during the life of an emperor attached to the cult of that goddess.⁠[1330]⁠

Silius’s narrative of the Second Punic War is told in over 12,200 hexameters distributed among seventeen books. Of the three conflicts between Rome and Carthage the author realizes, at the outset of his task (I. 12-14), that this middle one demanded the greatest efforts from the combatants, and that the victors themselves were imperilled. Book I relates how in Dido’s city Juno pits against fate the war-loving and indomitable leader Hannibal, who resolves to strike a blow at Rome from Spain by besieging Saguntum. The Saguntine danger is laid before Rome; then in Book II Rome is embroiled with Carthage; and Saguntum, after a heroic defence, is taken by Hannibal. During the fighting, Queen Asbyte, the Camilla of the Carthaginian [455]side, falls, and the flight of the enemy before Hannibal as he seeks to avenge her is likened, in a typical simile, to the homeward flocking of birds or the swarming of bees to their hive:

Early in Book III there are digressions for the sake of descriptive writing. Neither the labours of Hercules on the portals of the temple where Hannibal seeks responses, nor the marvels (mira) of the inrushing tide are subjects possessing artistic necessity. The episode of the parting of Hannibal from his wife and child on the seashore is at once more natural and more relevant: it portrays her disappointment that she may not share his dangers; it also portrays his realization, as her ship waits, that the stirrings of ambition must tear him from her:

After such human motives it is weak to have intruded Jupiter’s designs for trying the Romans by peril and his despatch of Mercury to hasten Hannibal’s plans for the invasion of Italy. The catalogue of the Carthaginians and the crossing of Pyrenees, Rhone and Alps, with incidental episodes and risks, occupy the rest of the book. Opening with alarm in Italy, the next book narrates the fighting at the Ticinus and the Trebia. Warriors [456]on the field after epic fashion are invoked in the second person and perform prodigies of valour, while the unreality is increased by bringing Hannibal on the scene attended by Panic, Terror and Rage. The disaster caused by the Carthaginian elephants at the Trebia suggests the reflection:

Amidst the rigours of the Apennines Hannibal has lost an eye, when senators arrive from Carthage to claim in sacrifice his son. The demand had been debated at home, supported by Hanno because of an old grudge, but bitterly opposed by Hannibal’s wife Imilce, whose creed concerning sacrifice is thus avowed:

Book V is on Lake Trasimene, opening in legend and the mists of dawn, and then advancing, through Homeric armings and challenges, to the death of the consul Flaminius and to Hannibal’s chivalrous admiration for the bravery of his fallen enemies:

Book VI is largely devoted to the story of Regulus taken from the first Punic War. His son, Serranus, severely wounded, [457]reaches the door of Marus, one of his father’s old soldiers, who preaches endurance amidst the reverses of Rome:

The old man’s tale of Regulus is partly legendary, partly historical: it begins with dragon-fighting, and proceeds, not without rhetoric, to relate how Regulus kept his parole when the Carthaginian senate sent him to Rome in the vain hope that he would advocate an exchange of prisoners. There must always be a moral greatness in this story of self-abnegation and Stoic austerity:

And yet Silius’s long-drawn narrative has not the moving force of Horace’s brief treatment of the same episode in the third book of the Odes. The digression ends at line 552, where Silius returns to his true subject—panic in the city and Jupiter’s prompting of the Romans to entrust all to Fabius.

The saving of Rome by Fabius’s delaying tactics is the theme of Book VII. The digressions include the legend of the 300 Fabii told to Hannibal by a prisoner, a story of Bacchus occasioned by the Carthaginian inroad on the Falernian vineyards, and, at the approach of the Carthaginian fleet, the introduction of Nereids with the Virgilian cave of Proteus. The delays are not confined to the inaction of Fabius: Proteus is asked to prophesy, but first he must hark back to the Judgement of Paris. There is, however, a foil to Fabius’s caution in the impetuous Minucius, who is magnanimously rescued from the consequences of his foolhardiness by his colleague.

Book VIII forms a prelude to the battle of Cannae, as [458]related in the two following books. The unreal device of Juno’s despatch of the nymph Anna to encourage Hannibal leads us back to the Dido story for a time.⁠[1338] Then the narrative is resumed. The consuls have been changed, and Aemilius Paulus dreads the abyss to which the arrogance of his colleague Varro may lead. His arguments are stated in the debating manner of the schools,⁠[1339] making brief ironical points one after another—“the impetuous consul fears that he might leave Rome’s ruin for another man’s consulate; it might be well to summon a consul from Carthage, for even a Carthaginian would not be so dangerous!” The catalogue of Italian warriors, extending to over 260 lines, gives a chance of introducing famous names. There is, for example, a Tullius, descended from King Tullus, and destined, as ancestor of Cicero, to give in later days a noble citizen to Ausonia: next follows a eulogy on the orator:

So too there is a Scaevola, a Sulla, Nero the Sabine, a Piso, a Galba, a Brutus and others. Among the men of North Italy those are not forgotten who come from Virgil’s birthplace,

In the description of the battle of Cannae, Silius’s aim is not historical accuracy, but epic embellishment. His true model, therefore, is not such brief narratives as those in Polybius (III. 115-116) or Livy (XXII. 47-49), but the manner of the Iliad and the Aeneid, so that the account is expanded to fill nearly two books, IX and X; and is diversified by similes, divine interferences, Homeric slaughter, and episodes like the [459]unwitting slaying of a father by a son. Though it be mythological, there is a grim suggestiveness in Charon’s rejoicing in the expectation of receiving the dead:

and the poet has a conception of Roman greatness in adversity:

There is nobility in Hannibal’s character as drawn by Silius, when he decrees funeral honours to the fallen consul, Paulus, and muses over his body:

and, later, in his address of almost envious farewell:

The sorrow-stricken capital is again saved by Fabius, who wins a nation’s gratitude because he did not despair of the republic, though Silius unhappily uses the stilted expression, “he did not despair for the city of Laomedon’s descendants.”⁠[1346] Indeed some [460]twenty lines towards the close of the tenth book are full of indirect and far-fetched expressions.

Book XI brings Hannibal to Capua, where luxury begins its demoralizing work. The banquet has an obvious Virgilian basis. At Carthage the news of victory and the heap of rings from the fallen Romans fail to induce Hanno to join in the general plaudits for Hannibal. Instead, he advocates making terms with Rome, pleads war-weariness, and extols peace:

In Book XII, with the coming of spring, Hannibal stirs forth from Capua, like a serpent after hibernating. Henceforward his luck wanes, for the Romans win their first victory in the war. Among those celebrated for bravery is Ennius, whose poetry is eulogized. Hannibal appears outside Rome and rides round the walls to reconnoitre; but Jupiter checks his plans by raising storm after storm. It is a ludicrous see-saw of good and bad weather.

Book XIII, the longest book (895 lines), contains, besides digressions, the recapture of Capua, and its rescue by Pan from burning though not from pillage. Sent to inspire mercy, Pan is minutely described—horned and horny-hoofed, peak-eared, bearded and tailed, nimble and sportive, carrying a shepherd’s staff, altogether a strangely incongruous figure in the midst of historical events. In Spain, the two Scipios—father and uncle to the younger Scipio, afterwards Africanus—meet their death; and this leads to a long passage founded on Aeneas’s visit to the Underworld in Aeneid VI. Scipio, as the ultimate victor, is a kind of hero for Silius. As in the Odyssey, sacrifice and the blood-trench are indispensable preliminaries to holding converse with departed spirits; but the interview with the shade of Appius Claudius becomes ridiculous when Scipio lectures the ghost on different ways of disposing of the dead. The Sibyl is asked to unfold the mysteries of the Underworld and of the different souls admitted through the Ten Gates. The infernal [461]rivers, the personified evils of human life, and the monsters of mythology burden the description, and thereafter the wraiths of Scipio’s father and mother appear. Not only do the shades of Aemilius Paulus and of others killed at Cannae drink of the blood and speak, but Romans of ancient times appear as well as Hamilcar, Alexander the Great, and the god-like ghost of Homer. Among souls of the great fancied to be not yet incarnate are those of Pompey and Julius Caesar. When the Sibyl has foretold the eclipse of Hannibal’s career, Scipio returns to his men rejoicing.

In Book XIV the Muses are invoked to turn to Sicily, where Marcellus captures Syracuse after a defence prolonged by the mechanical ingenuity of the famous Greek mathematician Archimedes (who is referred to,⁠[1347] but, owing to hexametric exigencies, not named). In Book XV the Roman Senate anxiously consider the question of finding a general to succeed the two Scipios killed in Spain: and at this juncture Silius introduces the young Scipio confronted with the figures of Virtue and Pleasure after the model of the fabled Choice of Hercules. Gaily attired, Pleasure is one whose

Her alluring promises, coloured with an Epicurean idea of bliss,⁠[1349] contrast with the appeal directed by Virtue to the celestial element ennobling man. Virtue’s offer is “not purple or scents but victory over the enemy”; and, on Scipio’s acceptance, Pleasure retires displeased, but satirically prophesying that one day her hour will come in Rome. So Scipio mounts the rostra asking for control of the war. He afterwards justifies his selection by the capture of Nova Carthago in Spain. The book is crowded with other incidents such as the alliance of Philip of Macedon with Carthage, the funeral honours paid by Hannibal to Marcellus, and the defeat by Claudius Nero of [462]Hannibal’s brother Hasdrubal at the Metaurus on his way to join Hannibal. Book XVI recounts Scipio’s operations in Africa and Spain, and his games to honour the dead—chariot-race, foot-race, sword-fight, javelin competition, in which traditional epic elements are discernible. His request in Rome to be allowed to transfer the war to Africa, though hotly opposed by Fabius, is granted by the Senate: so in Book XVII he crosses to Africa and is thus the means of forcing Hannibal to quit Italy, to his poignant sorrow.⁠[1350] After a display of Homeric prowess by Scipio and deceits practised by Juno on Hannibal, the decisive victory of Zama is won. Hannibal may be overwhelmed, he reflects, but Jupiter himself can never blot out the memory of Cannae, nor will the nations pass over his deeds in silence. He will live still to be a menace to Rome.⁠[1351] Scipio recrosses the sea to hold his triumph, with Syphax and Hanno as notable captives, and the work closes with an apostrophe to him as the unvanquished sire, in merit comparable with Quirinus or Camillus, and truly claimed in Rome to be an offspring of the gods.

Even a summary betrays many of Silius’s weaknesses. His theme, the struggle of two peoples for world-supremacy, as derived from Livy, was a great one; and yet his quest after poetic embroidery divorced it from reality.⁠[1352] He makes gods interfere where a historian would investigate causes and motives: he relates battles, not as matters of strategy, but as conglomerates of individual combats. Military history is, therefore, not to be demanded from him; but a more penetrating genius, even though he might in epic spirit, like Silius, have concentrated largely on occurrences affecting the heroic figure of Hannibal, would still have placed in true perspective the evolution of the conflict. As it is, one would never grasp from Silius the significance of events like the siege of Syracuse and the younger Scipio’s Spanish campaign; nor would one [463]learn what the defeat of Carthage meant for the world. Traces there are, it is true, of the imperial note, but Silius does not convey through his poem a sense of the greatness of Rome as his master Virgil did. Author and reader are alike oppressed by the outworn conventions of invocations, apostrophes, similes,⁠[1353] lineages and colloquies of antagonists who fight in the Homeric fashion, intervention of mythological deities, unilluminating geography, and lack-lustre catalogues of names, in using which Silius has no Virgilian or Miltonic gift of making beautiful music.⁠[1354] All this goes to constitute the head and front of his offending—he is, taken altogether, dull and uninspiring. Hardly any of his characters live. Hannibal may be said to live at times, Scipio scarcely at any time: and interminable longueurs, verging on the dismal, force one in the end to wonder what imaginable constraint other than editorial necessity should ever drag one to a second perusal of these seventeen ponderous books.

Yet, even so, Silius has merit. He can be rhetorical, but he is not so insistently in search of striking points as the other epic-writers of his century. A curious nemesis overtakes him when he imitates; for some of his least natural effects arise from his enslavement to the example of Homer; Virgil and Lucan. It is particularly to the baleful influence of Lucan that one must ascribe his misdirected attempts at realism. One wishes that Silius, over his slain warriors, had felt a portion of the Virgilian pity; but instead he overdoes his descriptions. The last notes of a bugler, mortally hurt at the Ticinus, pass lingeringly through his instrument after his lips are already mute in death; the final breath of a gigantic soldier stirs the dust on the plain; a head is struck off, but the body runs on from its own impetus; or a victim’s murmured appeals continue after his head is severed.⁠[1355] [464]Lucanesque reminiscences overpaint the naval engagement off Syracuse in Book XIV—a man is cut in two by a prow; oars splash blood; hands grasping an enemy ship are hacked off and carried away still clinging; open wounds admit the sea.⁠[1356] In similarly exaggerative manner he makes corpses bridge a river,⁠[1357] and copies more than once Lucan’s idea of the wounded having no room to fall.⁠[1358] Yet there are not nearly so many of these excesses as in Lucan; and there are comparatively few strained conceits, like the topsy-turvy one, which he approves sufficiently to repeat, of fighters avenging their deaths in advance by abundant slaughter.⁠[1359] More often he is straightforward and non-rhetorical, with touches of natural description, as of the river Ticinus crystal-clear and gliding softly between shady banks to the notes of birds;⁠[1360] with an occasional eye for colour, as where he marks the rosy dawn over the blue waters, the glint of the Roman arms at Cannae, or the Carthaginian priest’s robe of blue on which precious stones glitter;⁠[1361] or, again, with a gleam of romance to light up the catalogue of Hannibal’s host, when from the far eastern gardens of the Hesperides came a leader,

Traces of Stoic thought in Silius may be in part prompted by the Stoicism recurrent in Lucan’s epic, but may conceivably be due to its contemporary prevalence. Among instances may be cited the unflinching constancy of the slave tortured by the Carthaginian whose “mind remains untouched, surmounting pain with smiles”; Decius’s claim that nature has granted no such boon to man as the open doorway out of life; the rivalry between Pleasure and Virtue for control over Scipio; and the fortitude with which Hannibal, when his brother’s head is exhibited on a spear,

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His sententiae, because not too numerous to be tedious, are the more effective. Some of the most telling are “The test of manhood is adversity” (IV. 603); “Banish delay: short-lived is fortune’s smile” (IV. 732); “War must have craft: a leader’s stout arm wins less fame” (V. 100); the cynical observation “in happy days the altars seldom reek” (VII. 89); “Anger against one’s country is sin” (VII. 555 succensere nefas patriae); “never doth love abandon hope” (VIII. 95 non unquam spem ponit amor); “valour is her own most fair reward” (XIII. 663); and Alexander’s counsel on celerity in fighting:

In spite of his debt to Virgil and Lucan, Silius gives signs of originality in his language. Occasionally he ventures on bold expressions: “a draught of Hannibal inflames” his soldiers (I. 345, haustusque medullis Hannibal exagitat); and, in reference to Capuan demoralization, “the yelps of vice (XI. 426 uitia adlatrantia)⁠[1365] shake a character so far unsmirched by prosperity.” He employs a large number of compound adjectives, especially in -fer and -ger. Some are Lucretian words transmitted through Virgil like aestifer, saetiger, horrificus. The adverb regifice he shares with Ennius. Many of his compounds had been used by Ovid and Lucan. Others cannot easily, if at all, be discovered elsewhere; uiticola, austrifer, nubiuagus, pharetriger, criniger (possibly in Lucan, unless he wrote cirrigeros in Phars. I. 463). Diffulminat seems to be Silius’s own invention. It is to be expected that he should share several compounds with his contemporaries, e.g. with Valerius Flaccus, luctificus (also in Cicero and Virgil), securiger (also in Ovid), gemmifer (in Propertius and Pliny), and with Statius uuifer, sceptriger and other words. Whether these last are instances of the influence of Silius on Statius cannot be [466]determined, but Statius certainly borrowed the gold-digger of Dalmatia from Silius’s “greedy Asturian.”⁠[1366] Silius’s use of sonipes, quadrupes and cornipes for equus (which he does not however entirely renounce) becomes wearisome.

Apart from Virgilian influence on incidents like the cave of Proteus (VII. 419 sqq.), tree-felling for funeral pyres (X. 527 sqq.), the banquet at Capua (XI. 267 sqq.), the Sibyl’s exposition of the lower world in Book XIII, and the funeral games of Book XVI (down to the detail of fouling transferred from the foot-race of the Aeneid to a chariot-race), there are frequent reminiscences of Virgil’s language in such phrases as quaerentia lumina caelum (VI. 11) or ille quidem cruda mente et uiridissimus irae (V. 569). Still more old-fashioned echoes are his ac tuba terrificis fregit stridoribus auras (V. 189);⁠[1367] ensis contunditur ense, pes pede uirque uiro teritur (IX. 325);⁠[1368] and the ancient legal form capital (XIII. 155). Silius did not write in a style so elaborate as that of Valerius Flaccus or Statius, and he did not try to be so clever as Lucan; but he is composite enough to be acquitted of bald simplicity. His hexameters are often highly alliterative, some lines having alliteration on three different consonants. There is much also which proves the metrical influence of Ovid, though Silius is less dactylic and moves less lightly than any of the epic poets of his time.

P. Papinius Statius,⁠[1369] a Neapolitan whose miscellaneous poems reflect many aspects of Rome in the Flavian age, is, even if judged solely by his posthumous influence, a considerable figure in the annals of epic. For his life our main source of information lies in his own Siluae. The date of his birth is a matter of inference, and the tendency is now to place it earlier than once was common. A passage formerly taken to mean that he was on the threshold of life at his father’s death does not really bear that sense,⁠[1370] and, while a reference to his own [468]old age (senium)⁠[1371] in the Siluae need not be literally pressed, it is most likely that these poems were written in mature years. For several reasons his birth-date cannot be put later than A.D. 45. His native town was Naples (mea Parthenope, Silv. I. ii. 260-261), a meeting-place of Greek and Roman culture, where his father, a man of good family, was a celebrated teacher. The lament (epicedion) on his death (Silv. V. iii.) tells how his father possessed poetic skill, had won victorious contests in poetry, kept a popular school, turned out pupils successful in after life, trained his son’s taste, and encouraged the epic on Thebes. The elder Statius’s affection for his wife, the poet’s mother, was only one of many endearing qualities which explain the depth of the younger man’s grief in bereavement. Before his father’s death Statius had begun to make a mark. He had won the prize for poetry at the Neapolitan Augustalia. At Rome he made money by such a libretto as that on Agaue supplied to the actor Paris,⁠[1372] and his recitationes from his works attracted good audiences.⁠[1373] Statius senior certainly did not die till after the eruption of Vesuvius in A.D. 79, because a passage in the Siluae (V. iii. 205) shows that he contemplated a poem on it, as he had already celebrated the destruction in 69 of the temples on the Capitol. The passage reads as if he did not long survive the eruption; and yet, since he encouraged his son’s work on the Thebaid (Silv. V. iii. 233), he must have lived an appreciable time beyond its inception in A.D. 80. However that may be, he was no longer alive at the time of Statius’s memorable triumph in the Alban competition instituted by Domitian, and the earliest date assignable to this success with a poem on the emperor’s exploits is 89.

Meanwhile (apart from recitations) none of Statius’s extant work had been published; but he had long been elaborating his epic on the seven champions against Thebes. That poem, the Thebaid, was issued in twelve books shortly before⁠[1374] the [469]publication of the first book of the Siluae, which can be dated A.D. 92. Certain passages,⁠[1375] it is true, in the Siluae refer to the author as still at work on the Thebaid; but they must be assumed to have been written, though not published, before 92. The poet’s farewell to a task of twelve years bears interesting testimony to his speculation on its claim to lasting renown, his complimentary attitude to Domitian, his knowledge that his own writings were being already studied, and above all his worshipful reverence for Virgil, the inspirer of his epic style:

Attracted from the subject of Thebes to “the tale of Troy divine,” he was yet to attempt another epic; but, for an interval, he was free to collect some of his miscellaneous poems, and the first book of the Siluae was issued in the same year, as is inferred from its prefatory reference to the death of Rutilius Gallicus, prefect of Rome, whose recovery from illness is the theme of the fourth poem. This book, dedicated to the poet Stella, whose marriage is celebrated in the second poem, was followed during the poet’s lifetime by II, III and IV, all addressed to different friends. Book IV can be definitely dated, as its opening piece celebrates Domitian’s seventeenth consulate: the book is assigned to the summer of A.D. 95. It is a fair surmise that Book II had been published in 93 and Book III in 94. Book V may have been posthumously issued; for its [470]preface to Abascantus bears solely on the first poem, and the fifth is incomplete.

Statius writes as if his attempted epic on Achilles had to yield place to the idea of an Italian subject—the wars of Domitian.⁠[1377] He had begun his Achilleid in 95,⁠[1378] and although it had not gone far beyond a single book, he gave public readings from it.⁠[1379] But the final interruption came with his death. The presumption is that Statius did not outlive Domitian, whose assassination occurred in 96.

The lost works of Statius are the pantomime Agaue from the tragic Theban story of Pentheus; the epic on the German campaign of Domitian, of which four hexameters survive;⁠[1380] and an epistle concerning the Thebaid sent to Vibius Maximus, the recipient of Statius’s Sapphics (Silv. IV. vii.), and an epitomator of Livy.⁠[1381] From the ode to him and the allusion in the preface of Siluae, Book IV, we realize that Statius admired his literary power and felt gratitude for his inspiring encouragement while the Thebaid was being written.

Statius’s love for his native Naples is obvious in his works. It was thither that he repaired towards the end of his life, mortified by his defeat in the Capitoline contest of 94, though sustained by the sympathy of his wife Claudia. But he had lived much in Rome and at the Alban villa which he owed to the emperor. His circle of friends was representative of the age. It included Domitian himself, whom he flattered far more than was justified by the grant of a special water-supply or by invitations to dinner. It included also men prominent in public life like the prefect Rutilius, imperial secretaries like Claudius Etruscus and Abascantus, or men who combined literary tastes with national service, like the poet Arruntius Stella who rose to the consulship, and the historian Vibius Maximus who under Trajan became governor of Egypt. It is plain that Statius and Martial belonged to the same social [471]grade; for Etruscus, Stella, and Lucan’s widow Polla appear in the works of both; and among other friends in common were Atedius Melior and Novius Vindex. But neither poet names the other, and the silence may be due to dislike.

The age was a tranquil one, favourable to aesthetic refinement rather than powerful creation; and Statius is its perfect counterpart in his quiet learning, power of polished expression, appreciation of beautiful scenes and beautiful works of art. We can discern his warmth of heart in the love he bears his father and his wife, and in his sorrow over the death of the little boy whom he adopted; for his marriage to Claudia, a widow with a daughter, proved childless. Very appropriately he contrasts a busy man of affairs with himself, a poet idly touching his lyre, but filled with a scholar’s veneration for Virgil:

We may rest assured that, while courtier-like he felt compelled to feign a celestial rapture in being a guest at Domitian’s table⁠[1383] and to suggest that it outshone the Homeric banquet of King Alcinous or the Virgilian banquet of Queen Dido, still his secret preference must have been for some such feast of reason and flow of soul as he was safe to find when he dined with his poet-friend Vindex.⁠[1384] At the board of that cultured connoisseur, gifted with unerring judgement of art-treasures, the menu—unlike that of Trimalchio in Petronius—did not consist of freakish whets to the appetite (ludibria uentris), but [472]was in keeping with the literary talk and cheery jests which made a midwinter night fly⁠[1385]⁠—a night to mark with pearls (nox et Erythraeae Thetidos signanda lapillis). In these social surroundings we can best understand the personality of Statius.

One might feel a temptation to dismiss the Thebaid with a summary as brief as the twelve bald hexameters in the Codex Toletanus; but that would convey a beggarly impression of a narrative nearly 10,000⁠[1386] lines long, in which, despite dull tracts, there are vigorous incidents and great moments. If Statius had studied the construction and proportions of his story more exactly, if he had condensed some and rigidly excised others of his episodes, the Thebaid would have gained in unity and attractiveness, while his readers and his reputation might have been increased by the reappearance as separate poems of the best among the banished portions. The following analysis may serve to confirm this.

Book I. Statius makes a dull start with frigid professions of ignorance as to where in the Theban story he should begin, and with equally frigid flattery of Domitian. The requisite note of gloom is struck in the fiendish prayer of the self-blinded Oedipus to the Fury Tisiphone that she should estrange his sons Eteocles and Polynices, and ensure discord through Eteocles’s refusal to keep his promise of letting his brother reign for a year in his stead at Thebes. Sharing none of Lucan’s objections to divine interference in epic action, the poet describes a council of Gods attended by Demigods, Rivers and Winds at which ruinous war between Thebes and Argos is ordained. Polynices, the prince exiled from Thebes, reaches Argos and during a terrific storm fights with another stranger to the land, Tydeus, for shelter by the palace door. The two combatants are received by King Adrastus, become fast friends, and are recognized by their host as the Lion (Polynices) and the Boar (Tydeus), destined to be his sons-in-law. At a royal banquet they see the two princesses, their future brides:

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The king’s tale of the dealings of Apollo with Argos owing to the death of the God’s child is a digression.

Book II. The woes of an accursed house work even beyond the grave. The ghost of Laius, father of Oedipus, escapes—to the envy of the other dead—from the lower world for the purpose of hardening Eteocles against his brother. Meanwhile at Argos there are wedding festivities, but also bad omens, when Argia is married to Polynices and Deipyle to Tydeus. The story of the fatal necklace of Harmonia worn by Argia is told incidentally. After twelve days of rejoicing, Polynices turns to his claims on Thebes:

Tydeus undertakes a mission to Thebes to require from Eteocles observance of his pact; but Eteocles refuses and plots to waylay the envoy on his way back by ordering an ambush of fifty men to await him. Tydeus’s fight against his foes in the pass is one of the most spirited and saga-like passages of the Thebaid. His challenge to the lurking assassins is given in ringing tones:

[474]

At the stone of the Sphinx he baffles their onset, slaying one after another:

One survivor is spared to take back the tidings to the treacherous king.

Book III. At the news there is sorrow in Thebes. To stir up Argos, Jupiter despatches Mars and overawes the gods into compliance with his will. The hush produced by his threats is likened to a windless calm in summer-time:

Exultant in his chariot, Mars is met and reproached by Venus in vain. Tydeus, battle-worn and wounded, presents himself at the council of King Adrastus in Argos and relates his adventure. The debate is “war or no war?” The seer Amphiaraus, when consulted, foresees disaster, and, though reluctant to reveal the worst, opposes the impetuosity of Capaneus. The seer’s speech when induced to break his silence is a forcible effort. Argia pleads for hostilities. Her speech has an effective close in human feeling: she would have her royal father consent to the war which is the heart’s desire of her husband; but she knows that, when the parting comes and the bugles sound for the men who march away, she would wish it otherwise.

Book IV. King Adrastus decides on war in the third spring after Polynices left Thebes. The leaders are Adrastus, Polynices, Tydeus, Hippomedon, Capaneus, Amphiaraus and Parthenopaeus. The description of the forces of these seven warriors against Thebes forms a dull catalogue of blended geography and mythology. At Thebes the dejected king [475]consults the prophet Teiresias, who advocates recourse to the oracles of the dead in a forest of gloom comparable to Lucan’s eerie forest near Massilia. Statius conveys an appropriate sense of weirdness in his description:

From the sadness of the Argolic ghosts whom he evokes Teiresias infers an ultimate Theban victory. Bacchus, aiding Thebes, hinders the Argives’ march by a miraculous drought:

And amidst this anguish of the solstice they are guided to the one spring remaining in the land by Hypsipyle, once of Lemnos and now a nurse to a king’s child Opheltes or Archemorus. Suspecting no danger, she leaves the child, in order to show them the water more quickly.

Book V. King Adrastus is desirous of knowing who this benefactress is, and nearly 500 lines are devoted to the fortunes, past and present, of Hypsipyle. She relates the crime of the Lemnian women in murdering their menfolk, the consequences to herself of having surreptitiously saved her father, and the visit of Jason in the Argo. Statius here trespasses on the subject of Valerius Flaccus’s Argonautica; and it may be noted that while in the Thebaid Hypsipyle states that she was forced into a union with Jason, Valerius represents her as attracted into an amour by Jason’s looks.

The child Archemorus has been all this time left unattended, and another digression describes the venomous serpent which attacks him. Cries “like half-completed words in dreams” (qualia non totas peragunt insomnia uoces) are heard, and on her [476]return the errant nurse finds the child dead. Against the furious anger of its father she is protected by the grateful Argives.

Book VI. The epic interest is considerably less in a book concerned first with the building of a funeral pyre and cremation of the child, and then with an elaborate account of the games in its honour—chariot-race, foot-race (“running,” remarks the poet, “is a useful accomplishment in war, if success fails one!”) quoits, boxing and wrestling.

Book VII. Jupiter is vexed that the Argives should delay the war by holding games—and readers may sympathize with Jupiter’s feeling in mid-epic. A further intervention is made by Mars and Bacchus. Eteocles hears of the Argive advance, and there follows a catalogue of the host, as pointed out by old Phorbas to Antigone, sister of the arch-opponents, while they look forth from a tower in Thebes. Jocasta, mother of Polynices, comes forth

to carry the olive branch (ramum oleae) into her son’s camp and make an appeal for peace. Polynices is touched; but, while he is wavering, Tydeus intervenes, bitterly recalling the treachery to which he had been subjected by Eteocles. The overtures fail: the Fury rouses the old passion for blood: fighting begins. A Theban warrior longs to slay Amphiaraus, counting other victims trivial in comparison. But another doom was appointed for him: Apollo diverts the fatal weapon to his charioteer, and takes the dead driver’s place, spreading death everywhere as the chariot careers on its dread path among bleeding corpses and dying men. Then by a solemn intuition Amphiaraus realizes the presence of Apollo and his own nearness to the brink of the other world:

Then came the mysterious passing, as the ground opened beneath the doomed man:

Book VIII. Excitement reigns in the lower world over the sudden descent of Amphiaraus; and the querulous utterances of Pluto, almost Lucianesque in their scoffing spirit, have a wholly different ring from the consistent solemnity of Virgil in Aeneid VI. The Argives are inwardly shaken and fall back: so there is joy in Thebes. Adrastus summons a council to choose a successor to the prophet. The battle is renewed on the Theban side by a sally, and a narrative of wounds and death ensues. The daughters of Oedipus, Antigone and Ismene, a pair of contrasting characters (par aliud morum), lament the sorrows of their house with divided sympathies in the conflict:

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Real pathos marks the end of Ismene’s lover, Atys, the warrior brought home dying, with her name the only word on his chill lips.⁠[1398] Tydeus works havoc among the enemy, and sends whirling through the air helmets with heads inside (galeasque rotat per nubila plenas, 699). He and Melanippus mortally wound each other, and the book closes with the horrible spectacle of Tydeus gnawing the head of his adversary.

Book IX is mainly concerned with the valiancy of two heroes, Hippomedon and the young Arcadian Parthenopaeus, whose parting from his mother Atalanta formed a brief episode in Book IV. Stoutly defending the dead Tydeus, Hippomedon is tempted away by Tisiphone’s lying message that Adrastus is taken prisoner, and on returning discovers that the foe have secured his friend’s body. During Hippomedon’s subsequent deeds of prowess, he is opposed by the River-god Ismenus and is saved from drowning only to succumb on the bank under a rain of darts. Parthenopaeus signalizes himself by feats of archery. He is in the end, at the instigation of Mars, slain by Dryas, who is in turn slain by an invisible hand, deemed to be that of Diana herself. The book concludes with the dying behests of Parthenopaeus.

Book X. Theban troops, inspirited by Eteocles’s harangue, plan to surround the Argives and prevent a retreat; but are themselves overcome by a divinely contrived sleep and surprised by the Argives, who break their lines and do much slaughter. At daybreak a fierce attack is delivered on Thebes, when Creon’s son Menoeceus devotes himself for his city, plunging to death from a rampart-tower. Capaneus, defiantly scaling the town walls, is struck dead by Jupiter’s thunderbolt.

Book XI. Goaded by Tisiphone, Polynices challenges Eteocles to single combat, and the latter, over-persuaded by Creon to face his brother, will not listen to the entreaties of his mother Jocasta. Polynices similarly rejects his sister Antigone’s appeals. Heaven, earth and hell are revolted by this detestably unnatural duel. The horrified Adrastus endeavours in vain to part the brothers and retires to Argos. The agonized intervention [479]of Pietas descending from the skies is foiled by the malignant Fury.

Thus, at last, half-way through the eleventh book, Statius makes the two protagonists meet, with the result that the compression of the last eleven hundred lines produces a much balder effect than that of the more spacious books which precede. Both combatants die, Polynices being mortally wounded, as he stoops to strip his rival. Creon, assuming the crown, decrees that no invader is to be buried. Led by Antigone, Oedipus laments over the bodies of his sons, and meditates suicide, which his daughter prevents. Jocasta stabs herself, and is tended by Ismene. Then Antigone’s intercession obtains a mitigation of Creon’s arrogant sentence of exile launched at Oedipus. The remnants of the invading army disperse to Adrastus’s dominions.

Book XII opens with funeral honours for the Theban dead. A report of Creon’s decree withholding burial from his fallen foes is brought to the wives of the six slain leaders on their way from Argos to recover the bodies of their dead. Except Argia, Polynices’s widow, all the women go to implore aid from Theseus, King of Athens. Argia, arriving outside Thebes, burns the body of her husband on Eteocles’s pyre, where there are signs to show that fratricidal hatred had survived death; she is met and helped by Antigone. The two are detected, haled before Creon, proudly own their act and are sentenced to death. Athens meanwhile consents to help the Argive war-widows. Very significantly the altar of mercy in Athens is described, as a symbolic contrast to the harshness of Creon at Thebes. The passage is remarkable for the colour it gave to the notion of after times that the poet was a Christian:

So the Athenians approach Thebes and win the victory, Creon dying at the hands of Theseus. The obsequies of the fallen and the envoi (already translated) complete the work.

To appreciate an allusive epic like the Thebaid the reader needs equipment in the myths of Thebes: he must know more than the story of Oedipus, the fated king, his house, and the “Seven Against Thebes”: he must remember the outlines of legends about Amphion, about Cadmus, son of Agenor, about Dirce, and he must be expert enough to grasp why Statius calls Thebes by varying epithets like “Aonian” (I. 34), “Echionian” (I. 169, II. 90), “Ogygian” (I. 173, 328, II. 85), or “Sidonian” (III. 656), and why Polynices is the “Ismenian hero” (I. 673), and why the Argives are Inacha pubes (I. 619). The well-springs of all such mythological lore lay far back in the ancient Greek Cyclic story of Thebes; in the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides;⁠[1400] and in Statius’s main source for material, Antimachus, who, before the days of the Alexandrian poets, but anticipating their erudition, composed a massive epic in his Thebais. He wrote rather for the leisured and the learned than for the ordinary reader. Alexandrian critics put him second among epic authors: and Hadrian is said to have preferred him to Homer. But he used his spacious limits unrestrained by any canons of unity. Not content to end the forbidding tale of fratricidal strife on the more human, more really tragic note of Antigone’s devotion to her slain brother, he involved himself in two additional sequels, the war with Athens and the revenge of Argos. Statius showed more wisdom in writing fewer books on the theme, in condensing the war with [481]Athens, and in omitting the triumphant return during the next generation of the Argive avengers, the Epigoni. When he is criticized, as he deserves to be, for his digressions, it is fair to remember the almost overpowering literary legacy which he inherited. There are signs that he also consulted Seneca’s Phoenissae and Oedipus; but in Latin his master was Virgil, although Ovid and Lucan⁠[1401] also went to his making. Nor was Horace forgotten.⁠[1402] The Virgilian influence is manifest both in his language and in the construction of his incidents. Sometimes actual phrases are copied as in magnanimosque duces (Th. III. 65); procumbunt piceae (Th. VI. 100, to remind readers, as if by a traditional phrase, that the whole passage is based on the felling of the wood in Aen. VI. 179 sqq.); pede pes (Th. VIII. 399, repeating the Ennian words borrowed by Furius of Antium as well as by Virgil, Aen. X. 361, and in structure going back to Homer himself). The Siluae present the same features in phrases like urbis opus (Silv. II. ii. 31) and qualis eras! (II. vi. 34). Or, again, a different turn may be given to the original expression, as Virgil’s Quis fallere possit amantem? becomes nil transit amantes (Th. II. 335), or his forsan et haec meminisse iuuabit is elaborated into

Elsewhere Statius gives us a blend of verbal and material reminiscence, as when he implores his father’s spirit to revisit and counsel him in dreams issuing from “the Gate of Horn” rather than from “The Ivory Gate” (Silv. V. iii. sub fin.; Aen. VI., sub fin.). His debt to Virgil for incident is also heavy—too heavy, in truth, for genuine originality. It was not merely that he took over through Virgil the convention of supernatural interferences, as also of copious decorative similes, and outdid all his predecessors in these: he went further and allowed his imitation to become too obsequious in a parallelism of incidents. Because Evander told the story of Hercules and Cacus in the [482]Aeneid, we must, before the first book of the Thebaid is completed, have Adrastus’s digressive tale about Coroebus’s resolve to rid his country of a punitive monster sent by Apollo; because there were funeral games in Virgil, we must have almost a whole book devoted to the rites and contests in memory of the child Archemorus; and because Aeneid IX celebrated the bold night-raid by Nisus and Euryalus, we must have a corresponding pair, Hopleus and Dymas, in the tenth book of the Thebaid, intercepted during their quest for the bodies of Tydeus and Parthenopaeus.

The other epic effort by Statius was his Achilleid, cut short by death when little over 1100 lines were written. What dimensions this tale of Troy might have reached we can only guess: it certainly was to cover a wider field than a “Wrath of Achilles”; for the author, immediately after his invocation, declares that his design is to relate more than the Iliad contains—not to end with the fate of Hector, as Homer did, but to escort the young hero throughout the Trojan war.⁠[1403] This then, is a second laurel wreath which he asks Apollo to plait for him, inasmuch as he announces himself no stranger to the Muses but known for his poem on Thebes.⁠[1404] True to his more extended view of Achilles’s life, Statius begins early in it with the fears of the hero’s mother Thetis that danger threatens her son from the elopement of Helen with Paris. So, with the purpose of transferring Achilles to a safe hiding-place, she visits the cave of the Centaur Chiron under Mount Pelion where the youth is being brought up. Her son is absent: Chiron tells his mother he has remarked a change in him:

Just at that moment, radiant after an adventure on which he has killed a lioness, he returns,

She decides that he must be concealed in the island of Scyros, and a pleasant picture of mingled nature and fancy is given us of his half-miraculous transference thither. Achilles, sunk in the profound sleep that falls on the young (qui pueris sopor), is borne by his goddess-mother down to the quiet seashore (iussa tacere litora). The way lies clear in a moonlit world. Their escort, the Centaur, seeks to hide his moist eyes (udaque celat lumina), when suddenly a dolphin team hurries mother and son off across the waters, and he can with effort (erecto prospectat equo!) just see them pass from sight where the white foam lingers behind their course. Then gloom descends on Thessaly; for the heights of Pholoë lament the youth that will never return, and cloud-capt Othrys sighs, and the river Spercheos wastes with pining—a frigid sort of “pathetic fallacy” like the legendary sorrow of nature for Balder dead. It is a more natural touch to say that the cave where the old Centaur taught Achilles music is now mute, or even to fancy that the woodland Fauns miss his boyish melodies, but the grotesque is reached in the mourning of the nymphs for the lost opportunity of marrying Achilles! This and the too matter-of-fact reference to the Centaur on his hind legs (erecto equo) are among the not infrequent instances where mythology betrayed Statius into absurdity. Nearly all the rest of the existing fragment, which might borrow Mr. Robert Bridges’ title “Achilles in Scyros,” relates his reception in women’s attire at court there, his passion for one of the princesses, the detection of his disguise by Ulysses, and his departure for Troy.

The Achilleid has much the same qualities as the Thebaid. There are still echoes of Virgil, mythological erudition, and ornamental similes. The subject, however, is a more attractive one than that of the Thebaid, and it is unfortunate that the incompleteness of the Achilleid makes elaborate comparison between them nugatory.

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Probably Statius and his contemporaries felt that his fame would be founded on his epic work, and it was for his Thebaid that he was valued in the Middle Ages. In Dante he plays an elevated part, and is often quoted. Chaucer, who mentions him with enthusiasm several times, calls him “Stace of Thebes” in The Knightes Tale, and in the Hous of Fame, repeating Dante’s confusion⁠[1405] of him with a rhetorician of Toulouse,

Here, then, as in Troilus and Criseyde, where he tells his “litel book” to go

it is among the great narrative poets that Chaucer places Statius. His hold upon the Middle Ages⁠[1406] is not altogether easy to explain. Was it the tradition that he became a Christian which threw a halo round him in the eyes of medieval Catholicism, and did that tradition in turn grow out of his worshipful attitude to Virgil and the tenderness of feeling which found one of its most remarkable expressions in his description of the Shrine of Mercy at Athens? Modern criticism, however, is not likely to forget that he was also the author of the miscellaneous Siluae, which after centuries of oblivion were restored to notice, when Poggio on his travels in 1417 or 1418 found them in a manuscript along with Manilius and Silius and had a copy made to be sent back to Italy.⁠[1407]⁠

The thirty-two poems in the five books of the miscellany entitled the Siluae are mostly in hexameter verse, though there are four in hendecasyllables⁠[1408] and one set each of Alcaics and Sapphics.⁠[1409] The number of lines in each book is between 700 [485]and 800. In the fifth book, the longest poem of all, 293 lines on the poet’s father, is in juxtaposition to the shortest, the 19 lines to Sleep. The variety of the poems is the outcome of their origin: they fit some passing event; pay a compliment to the emperor or a friend; describe a country house or work of art; frame an elegy on the poet’s father, a slave, a lion or a parrot; indite an invocation to Sleep; or celebrate the dead poet Lucan’s birthday. In other words, they are occasional verses, being, the author tells us in one of his five prefaces,⁠[1410] rapidly composed, so that they illustrate Quintilian’s description of what is meant by a silua in literature.⁠[1411] Statius had long hesitated about issuing in collected form poems which were composed separately, but considered that the author of the Thebaid might be pardoned for this venture, on the analogy of great poets who wrote light verses as Virgil did the Culex.⁠[1412] All students of the archaeology and social history of the Flavian age have reason to applaud the poet’s decision to give them to the world; and as literature there is nothing quite like them in Latin. They are not to be judged as claiming high inspiration, but as pieces in which the recurrent artificiality is time after time illuminated by the play of a pretty fancy and the grace of clever expression. Nor is the artificiality wholly inconsistent with sincerity of feeling. A survey of the poems may illustrate their qualities.

Book I. Statius is not at his best in the opening poem, on the equestrian statue of Domitian, where he strikes an exaggerated note in suggesting that the work has come down complete from heaven, that the rider is a greater than Julius, and that the burden of divinity makes Earth pant beneath the statue. The long epithalamium which follows, on Stella’s marriage to Violentilla, who was a Neapolitan like Statius, is pleasanter, though modern taste wearies of its Venus, Cupids, Apollo and Bacchus. More concrete and engaging is the third poem, on a visit to Vopiscus’s [486]cool retreat at Tivoli where the natural beauty of the scenery makes a genuine impression on the poet,⁠[1413] and compensates for the attendant artificialities. Then the recovery of Rutilius Gallicus is celebrated in polished lines, which, however they suited the first century, read rather frigidly when they introduce a rescue by Apollo and Aesculapius. Statius holds us more in describing his friend’s considerate conduct as a judge⁠[1414] and his premature breakdown owing to the strain of official duty. The lines appear to argue in their author maturity of years, and bear on the question of his birth-date: to him in this poem sixty is not old age:

In the fifth poem his sportive theme is the decoration of Claudius Etruscus’s baths and his task to celebrate not Greek springs but the Latin waters of the aqueducts Virgo and Marcia. Having struck this Roman note, however, he returns to Greek mythology: it is our Lady of Cythera, Venus and her husband, the Fire-God, who with the aid of the Loves’ torches are responsible for heating the bath furnaces! Everything there is costly (nil ibi plebeium); for Statius had aristocratic tastes: the water is fit to be Cytherea’s birthplace, Narcissus’s mirror, Diana’s bath! And after these mythological conceits comes the prosaic assurance that not even a visitor from the seaside would despise those bathing facilities.⁠[1416] The book closes with the praises of the emperor’s carnival, memorable for a fair-weather [487]rain of delicacies and fruits, a lavish bounty surpassing the Golden Age, Domitian’s condescension in sharing the feast, spectacular features like women combatants and dwarf warriors, and the cosmopolitan crowd at the theatre—buxom Lydian damsels clapping their hands, the jingling musicians of Cadiz, noisy Syrians, and those who barter common sulphur for broken glass.

The consolatory poem sent to Melior on the death of a slave-boy adopted by him has touches of real feeling, and is less overloaded with mythology. Closeness of blood, he argues in excuse for the adoptive father’s frantic grief, does not always make the strongest tie:

But there is comfort in regarding death as freedom from anxiety:

The poem on the mansion of Pollius and Polla at Sorrento shows how the effects of nature and of art compete in the poet’s mind. To adjudicate between the charms of a crescent bay outside and the architectural amenities of the villa itself is embarrassing.⁠[1419] Characteristically he divides his praises among aesthetic treasures and the view from different rooms, with his eye now on Naples in the distance, now on the variety of marbles around him. He draws from nature in his picture of the seaside villa in the gloaming,

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or he indulges in a purely fanciful picture:

Three short pieces follow, each touching on a possession of Atedius Melior—his plane-tree by the garden pool concerning which Statius daintily relates the legend of a nymph’s escape from Pan; his parrot for whose sudden death a train of mourning birds is invited to chaunt a dirge; and his tame lion slain in the amphitheatre to the just indignation of his fellow-lions, but with the consolation of having roused the emotion of people, senate and emperor! Of the dead slave of Flavius Ursus, commemorated in the next poem, he affirms that his fine qualities of soul justify the free display of grief which Statius in such consolations takes pains to emphasize. The book closes with the Genethliacon Lucani, whose neat hendecasyllabics congratulate Spain, land of the west, on its gift of Lucan to the world, and extravagantly claim that Homer and Virgil are outrivalled by him. But we are grateful for the light thrown by the Muse’s prophecy on the subjects of Lucan’s writings. Nor are the exclamatory lines on a young life cut short unnatural:

Book III opens with a record of the dedication of a temple to Hercules by Pollius Felix at Sorrento on a spot where the old narrow shrine once gave shelter to a picnic party surprised on a [489]hot summer day by tempest. The poet thinks the spacious building has improved what was

The second piece is a send-off (propempticon) to the author’s patron Maecius Celer about to sail for Egypt, where, the poem reminds us, the grain ships come from. Echoing Horace, Statius says his patron takes with him the better half of his soul (animae partem ... maiorem), and he dwells on the pain of parting. The gradually disappearing vessel is pictured:

His self-recrimination over failure to go abroad with his patron scarcely rings true, especially when supported with mythological instances; but the imagined reunion on the traveller’s return and the anticipation of the story of intervening years make a natural conclusion. The third poem is another consolation: it is addressed to Claudius Etruscus on his father’s death. The poet too, he says, had mourned a father.⁠[1425] The dead Etruscus, though of servile origin, was ennobled by service, and obedience is a law of nature. The sketch of his career is interesting. Freed by Tiberius, he attended Caligula as a keeper might a wild beast; he had high responsibilities under Claudius and Nero; and his preferment in the civil service to the treasury was a tribute to his ability in dealing with estimates. All this is cleverly told in well-turned verses; and a pleasant account is given of his married life. Unfortunately, artificiality is not absent. The conceit of fluttering Cupids dropping wing-feathers on a funeral pyre or supplying discarded arrow-cases [490]to make fuel for the cremation is supremely ridiculous; and when the grief of Etruscus for the loss of his father is compared with the grief of Theseus in like case, we feel the mythological parallel detracts from the simplicity befitting a deep sorrow. The fourth poem, one of the least pleasing, turns on the dedication to Aesculapius of the locks of Earinus, one of the emperor’s eunuchs. The fifth, on the other hand, has charm in its playful remonstrance with his wife on her alleged reluctance to accompany her husband when he has decided to quit Rome for the Bay of Naples. Could she refuse, after sharing loyally his hours of triumph and defeat, after full knowledge of his literary toil on the Thebaid, after nursing him back from the point of death? Facetiously he assures her that her daughter can find suitors elsewhere than in Rome: the district of his choice has not been completely devastated by the fires of Vesuvius! This home to which he invites her is “his own, his native land” (natale solum), blest with temperate climate and with peace. He ends this persiflage with a reminder of the legendary and literary associations of the Bay of Naples.

The first three poems of Book IV are overburdened with the praises of Domitian, and celebrate respectively his Majesty’s seventeenth consulship, his hospitality in the banqueting-hall, and his greatness as a road-maker. There follows a poetical epistle counselling a busy friend to take a holiday:

The one Alcaic lyric of the Siluae is a spring-ode to Septimius Severus, a native of North Africa. After it stands the hexametric poem which proves the value attached by Statius to the literary and artistic accompaniments of a dinner-party. Then Sapphics are addressed to Vibius Maximus abroad:

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But there is a child at home to greet Vibius: let the child learn from his father the historical skill wherewith he traces the antiquity of the world, recalling the style of terse Sallust and of “the nurseling of Timavus” (Livy). The eighth poem conveys congratulations to Julius Menecrates on the birth of a third child, so that, as the poet is quick to point out, the emperor’s previous concession of the ius trium liberorum had merely anticipated Lucina’s actual gift. The final piece, addressed in a bantering spirit to a friend on his return-present of a mouldy old book, submits a humorous list of possible cheap things to give away.

Book V begins with the commemorative poem consoling Abascantus in his continued grief over the loss of his wife Priscilla, a dear friend of Statius’s wife. Their loyal union is beautifully drawn and makes one of several engaging pictures in Statius of married happiness. Priscilla felt rapturous joy over her husband’s attainment to high office in the state, but the raptures did not turn her head:

She attended to her careworn husband’s wants with the regularity, solicitude, and simplicity to be found in a rural home:

The doom that assailed this favoured home is the prevailing theme in the second half of the poem. The succeeding piece is on a youth of sixteen, Crispinus, going out to face the work of [492]the world, with the inspiring memory of a father’s distinguished services. The next, a long “In Memoriam” on Statius’s own father, has been extensively drawn upon in connexion with his life. Like prose Consolationes, such an epicedion shows conventional features in structure and thought. It is followed by the briefest and most poetic of the Siluae. Dr. Mackail says, “one might almost call it a sonnet,”⁠[1430] and, if certain mythological lines are dropped, it can be reduced to the requisite proportions:

In the final poem of the miscellany is a lament on the death of the poet’s adopted son which marks the tenderness of his heart. “I,” he says, “who once could offer balm to the bereaved now crave the healing hand: and who art thou that censurest my lament?”

There are some books—and shall we not include the Siluae or still more the Thebaid?—of which the reader feels that it [493]were best not too earnestly to plod through them, but when one chances upon the wearisome to leave it as one found it, perhaps preferring my Lord of Montaigne’s method “of running over by divers glances, sodaine glimpses and reiterated reprisings.” To come from a simple and direct kind of poetry to Statius is like passing out of the open breeze into a conservatory of flowers, where many are beautiful but many raise the conviction that they are forced. He had inherited the Alexandrian and Catullian fondness for picture-drawing; and it is a natural result that descriptions emanating from an art-admirer like Statius should be influenced by his recollection of paintings and statues. At the same time this influence removed him one degree further from nature and led to that over-elaboration, which, by leaving little to the reader’s imagination, loses the charm of vague suggestiveness.⁠[1433] It is a learned and allusive style, apt to be far-fetched in fancy and excessive in eulogy. The Siluae, in particular, have the elegance of the eighteenth century. They imply a cultured leisure fertile in refined improvisations. The elegance bears a resemblance to that of Pope and Thomson, and the scenery to that of Watteau’s Fêtes Champêtres. Some of the missives have a tone that would have suited the boudoir of a French marquise or the library of a noble patron of letters in the time of Queen Anne or the early Georges. Nor is it surprising that the Thebaid should have made an appeal, if only a transient one, to Gray, whose works contain a fragment of his early translation into heroic couplets of part of its sixth book.

Statius’s artificiality is largely apparent in his enslavement to an unreal mythology, but partly also in his liking for literary conceits, which may or may not be mythological. Modern readers are mildly amused at the feather-dropping Cupids (Silv. III. iii.), or at Leander’s fire of love fit to warm the sea but not equal to Stella’s love for Violentilla (I. ii.), or at the descent from the sky of Domitian’s celestial kindred to embrace his equestrian statue:

In great part the artificiality was traditional. Thus, when [494]Statius addresses elegiac poets as “Ye who defraud the renowned verse of its final stride,” he is intentionally aping Ovid’s conceit of making Cupid responsible for the change of the heroic hexameter to the pentameter.⁠[1434] Often the attempt to make a myth realistic merely succeeds (as with Lucan) in achieving the grotesque: e.g. when the ghost of Laius mortally wounded years before is imagined to drop blood on the sleeping Eteocles in Thebaid II, or when the deaths of Niobe’s fourteen children is arithmetically related to the seven gates of Thebes:

Sometimes the artificiality lies more in the phrasing. It is fairly obvious that “the bridler of fiery footed steeds”⁠[1436] must be the Sun-god; that, if Hercules is “soaked plentifully with his brother,” the reference is to the grape juice of Bacchus;⁠[1437] and that, when in years a boy “equalled the sum of Hercules’s labours,” he ought to be twelve.⁠[1438] Rather more remote is the epithet “Ledaean” applied to a swan-plume because of Jove’s amour with Leda, or the author’s mode of suggesting that a cool mansion is free from the scorching summer sun of the Olympic games:

Again, the artificiality may depend on no allusion, but on a curiously strained form of expression. “He slants (obliquat) his entreaties” is used of entreaties addressed to bystanders; “they hold exchange of breasts” means embracing; “she reduced the glades to peace with her horn” means that Atalanta, when hunting, killed the wild beasts therein; and “the liquid fodder of eastern mid-winter” is a Statian expression for rains that feed the Nile.⁠[1440] It is easy to laugh at such lapses from the straightforward and to complain of Statius’s artificiality and [495]prolixity: it is easier still, and perhaps commoner, to decry him without reading him. But neither carping nor neglect is the right attitude towards a great influence in literature. More profit is derivable from remembering that he can show, as an epic writer, vigour in narrative and speech, and, as an occasional poet, a real taste for landscape and colour,⁠[1441] besides letting his fancy at times go free. Nor should strained compliments, strained consolations, strained mythology wholly obliterate that depth of affection which is nowhere more manifest than in the last book of the Siluae.

If he is more Virgilian than Lucan, Statius is less obtrusively rhetorical. There is less of the sententia, less epigram, less antithesis, and more of a quiet scholarly elaboration of the traditional epic manner. Thus it is rarer to find in him than in Lucan semi-proverbial phrases of a quotable cast, like “Panic believes everything” (nil falsum trepidis, Th. VII. 131), or “Hope deferred maketh the heart sick” (spes anxia mentem extrahit et longo consumit gaudia uoto, Th. I. 322: cf. II. 320-321). His elaboration tends to war against pithiness, but some phrases and lines are readily recalled: e.g. Cur oculis sordet uicina uoluptas? (Silv. I. iii. 98, virtually “why does distance lend enchantment to the view?”); calcabam necopinus opes (Silv. I. iii. 53, “I trod on wealth and knew it not”) of a rich mosaic floor; or, from the simile of Pluto’s entrance upon his sovereignty over the lower world, words that would fit Milton’s Satan, palluit amisso ueniens in Tartara caelo (Th. XI. 446, “blenched as he came to Hell when Heaven was lost.”).

What we must expect in a style so elaborate is an avoidance of the more simple and concrete modes of expressing ideas and a preference for abstractions, personifications, metaphors, as well as erudition. The lion that, even when mortally wounded, dies fighting to the last is referred to in these abstract terms: “as he fell, his valour returns from the midst of death and not at once did all his threats present their backs,” i.e. turn to flight.⁠[1442] [496]Statius makes great use of compound adjectives (e.g. uuifer, oliuifer, rorifer, laborifer, fumifer, flammiger, saetiger, noctiuagus, montiuagus, fluctiuagus, anguicomus), also of one of the traditional decorations in epic—the simile. There are well over thirty similes in Thebaid, Book VI, in connexion with the games, and well over twenty in many of the other books. They are elaborated often to the extent of six lines, sometimes to eight, and show considerable variety. Many that illustrate violent action introduce such animals as lions, tigresses, wolves, bears, boars, bulls; others picture birds in flight like cranes, or twittering like swallows: a snowstorm, a hunter, a passing ship, a ruined nest, a Spanish gold miner underground, an avalanche (which the old Delphin edition illustrates from Rhaetia), or a cow grieving for a lost calf (a passage that recalls a similar situation in Lucretius). King Adrastus is likened to a victorious bull, and Hippomedon to a Centaur; runners are compared cumulatively to race-horses, arrows, and stags escaping from a lion; and a falling quoit to the moon brought down from heaven by magic.

The hexameters of Statius exhibit less monotony than do those of Ovid, Lucan or Valerius Flaccus. He secures this greater variety by dexterity in the use of pauses. His metrical movements are composed with skill, and often are felicitously appropriate to the sense, as in the passage on Night and Sleep in Thebaid I, where he brings into juxtaposition a line with five spondees and one with five dactyls, then has a quick line of four dactyls, returns to a slow movement of five spondees, and closes on one where the feet are exactly balanced:

Computations⁠[1443] have been made which show that, while Statius is more dactylic than Virgil, he is less so than Ovid and Valerius. He has fewer elisions than Virgil. Altogether his line falls [497]short of supreme epic dignity. In the Siluae his hendecasyllabics, unlike Catullus’s but like Martial’s, regularly begin with a spondee. His two imitations of Horatian lyric metres display small inspiration. But in the Siluae his hexameters appear to most advantage, attaining a facility suitable to the lighter and more sportive subjects in the collection. Here, then, Statius is in matter and form most truly himself. He portrays in the main the surface of life, and is acquainted with its amenities and even its pathos; but he does not penetrate into its meaning.

MARTIAL

M. Valerius Martialis⁠[1444] was a native of Bilbilis in Spain. In his tenth book, which belongs to A.D. 95-98, he celebrates his [499]fifty-seventh anniversary,⁠[1445] so that his birth fell between 38 and 41. His cognomem was due to his having been born on the first of March.⁠[1446] While he claimed descent from Iberians and Celts,⁠[1447] his name indicates Roman citizenship. His parents, Fronto and Flaccilla,⁠[1448] secured for him a literary education to which he owed an incalculable debt, although in a fit of cynical depression in his fifties he says:

Already intellectually well-equipped when over twenty, he left Spain in A.D. 64 to find a wider scope for his abilities in Rome, which had grown so cosmopolitan that its population struck his fellow-Spaniard Seneca as made up more of foreigners than of citizens.⁠[1450] This first immigrant—a young “compatriot of the Tagus” with bristling Spanish hair, as he describes himself⁠[1451]⁠—had before him a reasonable prospect of success as a lawyer or a speaker; but he did not choose to employ his training in oratory. What attracted him was verse-writing, with the patronage which verse might win. The common link with Spain explains why Seneca and Lucan were his earliest patrons; but the introduction to society in the capital begun under such auspices was followed next year by the ruinous implication of both patrons in the Pisonian conspiracy against Nero. The career to which he had turned, or drifted, was sure to be one of vicissitude and disillusion; and Martial had frequent cause to recognize that only the few among clever poets or obsequious clients could scrape a living, while the rest starved (pallet cetera turba fame).⁠[1452]⁠

We read of juvenile productions which an enthusiastic bookseller would not let die;⁠[1453] but virtually Martial’s life is a [500]blank for the first sixteen years of his residence in Rome (A.D. 64-80). What his works make certain is that he gained an intimate acquaintance with all grades of society, the highest and the lowest. Some honours came his way, of a kind that indicate his possession of more influence than money. He became a tribunus, perhaps without having seen military service; he was confirmed in the resultant title of eques without possessing the means to support the position;⁠[1454] and he had obtained from two emperors the ius trium liberorum⁠[1455] without being a father—in fact, the tone of his work throughout argues the bachelor.⁠[1456] It is doubtful if his plot of farmland at Nomentum was in his hands early enough to have been a gift from Seneca, as has been guessed; but whether it came from him, or from Lucan’s widow Polla, or from some one else, it must have often afforded a welcome change after his three pair back-room in the sweltering city.⁠[1457] Later, he had a small house of his own on the Quirinal.⁠[1458] Neither from Caesar, however, nor from grandee did Martial ever obtain as much as he expected and craved. As it was, he survived by adroitness in courting the favour of well-to-do citizens so as to earn personal presents or the dole of the sportula. If he was temperamentally unfit to do anything but write verse, it is hard to see what other opening there was, apart from a way of life indistinguishable from sponging. For the surmise that he practised at the bar there is no justification either in the advice he quotes from a person whom he asked for a loan, “if you want to be rich, plead cases,” or in the similar counsel from Quintilian.⁠[1459] In spite of the fact that his verses had a sale, there was no such reading public as could ensure returns adequate for his maintenance: so pique at times made him argue that, if money-making is the supreme [501]object, parents ought not to spend on education: much better make a boy something practical, a musician, an auctioneer, or an architect.⁠[1460] For himself, he felt obliged to live, whatever scoffers might say about the necessity; and consequently had to capture patrons to be the props of his subsistence and, as he believed, the indispensable conditions of poetic production (sint Maecenates, non derunt, Flacce, Marones).

His first publication known to us was the Liber Spectaculorum of A.D. 80 which commemorated the opening by Titus of the Flavian Amphitheatre familiar now as the Colosseum. Though anything but inspired, the surviving thirty-three poems of this group throw interesting light on the contests of the arena. Some four years later appeared the collections, almost entirely of couplets, which are usually printed in defiance of chronology, as Books XIII and XIV of the Epigrams. They owed their occasion to the Saturnalia in December, when gifts might be sent to guests (Xenia) or taken home from the festive board (Apophoreta). The 127 pieces of the one, and 223 of the other were nearly all meant as suitable mottoes for such presents. Luckily Martial was capable of cleverer work. Epigrams of his had appeared before 86 when he published, perhaps together, the first two books of those which made his fame. Allusions enable us to date his volumes with fair closeness, and, while there are a few complications due to revised editions and collected issues, it is broadly true that from 86 until his return to Spain in 98 he brought out a new book about once a year. Taken together, his poems, few of them other than quite short, constitute one of the most extraordinary galleries of literary pictures, vignettes, miniatures, portraits, caricatures, sometimes almost thumbnail sketches that have ever made a past society live again in the mind’s eye. While grace in the sight of the emperor commended him to those in high places, including the worst creatures at court like the notorious Crispinus and Paris, there were many at the other end of the social scale, needy and seedy outcasts, to whom Martial’s Bohemian indigence introduced him. He observed all. He is one of the great spectators in literature. But the [502]vanity of the whole spectacle recurrently depressed him. Unremunerative attendance at the receptions of the great as well as disgust at loathsome vices which he exposes, contributed towards his tedium. Once weariness drove him to Cisalpine Gaul, whence he issued an edition of Book III.⁠[1461] In the very next book⁠[1462] he is hankering after Venetia as a retreat for his old age. Yet years passed before he could tear himself away from Rome, where, despite its drawbacks, he knew all the literary men of the day. At last in 98 the sense of monotony told. The ordinary expenses of life seemed as hard to meet as ever, and the old scenes in Spain, never wholly forgotten during more than the third of a century, came back now with alluring insistence to his mind:

Perhaps too some occult warfare in his soul between spirit and sense made him realize, as never before, the emptiness of the life around. At any rate the Flavian régime had suited him best; for under Nerva and Trajan a new age had dawned, when sycophantic blandishments were futile and rustica ueritas had been restored (X. lxxii). His well-to-do friend, the younger Pliny, found money for the impecunious poet’s journey to Spain. There, settled at Bilbilis on land granted to him by a patroness Marcella, he could indulge to the full that yearning for a quiet retreat which he revealed in lines addressed to the great satirist of the time:

Missing the stimulus of the capital, he let three years elapse before his twelfth and last book was sent out from Spain in 102. He did not long survive its publication; for Pliny in a letter belonging to A.D. 104 mentions his death, adding the criticism that he was a man of talent, subtlety and vigour, whose writing was characterized by abundance of wit and pungency, but no less good nature.⁠[1465]⁠

The form in which Martial’s works have come down calls for brief remark. Imperfect though the book of Spectacula is, the missing portions are perhaps a greater loss to archaeology than to literature. In the Xenia and Apophoreta, unlike the later books, short headings (lemmata) are given to which the reader is facetiously told he may, if he likes, confine himself; and the presents of the Apophoreta are arranged in pairs, expensive and less expensive. As regards the existing division into books, the numeration was Martial’s own,⁠[1466] though some books, as we have them, are not exactly as originally issued. For instance it is inconceivable that his first book was from the beginning entitled “Liber Primus,” with the implication that he was certain of success enough to justify future issues; still less is it conceivable that in the original issue of his first book he could have been described as toto notus in orbe Martialis. His preface to Book II, which defends the innovation of an introductory prose epistle, reads as if it were written before the preface to Book I; and this latter preface, by speaking of “little books” (libelli) in the plural, suggests that it could not have been added till more than one book of epigrams had appeared—probably when a collected edition of I-VII was issued. Among the later books, X and XI, originally belonging [504]to A.D. 95 and 96 respectively, had an Anthology made from them in 97; and a second edition of X came out in 98.⁠[1467] Interesting prose prefaces are given to Books I, II, VIII and XII, while a few lines of prose at the opening of IX introduce verses for the poet’s bust in Stertinius’s library. The preface to I offers an apology for the coarse outspokenness in the epigrams, with a significant list of literary predecessors; that to Book II is, as mentioned, an apology for an introductory epistle, in answer to the objection epigrammata curione non egent; that to VIII professes that there has been less indulgence here than elsewhere in the licence of the mime; and the last preface is an apology for slackness in publishing, since Martial’s retreat to Spain has deprived him of his stimulating Roman environment.

Martial, in his epigrams, reveals himself, and, even more, the company he kept. With him we enjoy the luxury of an intimacy unusual among writers of the Silver Age. Seneca, it may be said, opens his philosophic heart, yet he does not make—it is hardly imaginable that under Nero he should make—a complete self-revelation. Juvenal’s outspokenness is that of indignant censure rather than of personal confession. But Martial is naked and unashamed: he does not hide his thoughts, and even those quick flashes in which he divines the thoughts of others still further illuminate his own. Thus his personality is reflected in his themes, and is inseparable from the things he described and the men he loved or hated. A spectator of life, he was yet no detached spectator, but in a sense a part of his own observations, so that his resolve to reflect his surroundings leaves him at the same time essentially autobiographic. We become familiar, then, with his poverty, his mendicancy, his contempt for shams, his confidence in his literary powers, his pride in Spain, his determination to pander to readers by spicy attacks on the uncleanest vices. At times he seems a sort of Villon, never so much of a gallows-bird as the French poet, nor ever master of so deep a note of anguish, [505]but yet like him in Bohemian neediness and in direct vigour of style.

In the last resort, the key to his personality, to his style, to his reputation, to everything that matters respecting Martial, is to be found in this attitude towards life. Life afforded the inexhaustible material whence he recognized it was his special métier to draw. His brief poems—some of them butterfly flights as brief as Japanese tankas—might be trivialities, but they at least sprang from the actual. There is a sort of double antinomy in him. On the one hand, he often calls his verses nugae or ioci, as if he made no higher claim for them than the knack of amusing; yet he is insistent that they are not mere flippancies:

On the other hand, he explains elsewhere⁠[1469] that he could write seriously, but prefers to write entertainingly—the secret of his vogue. At the same time, he cannot make a living out of pleasantries: instead, he gets praise and starves:⁠[1470] so he jocularly even threatens to turn lawyer! In fact, however, though he said, and showed, that he could write seriously, he seldom chose to. The sportive, the flippant, the ludicrous, and often the indecent appealed to him irresistibly; for the truth is that he wrote, like all literary artists, because it was his pleasure:

But he would not have been human, he would certainly not have been Martial, if he had not expected an adequate return from verses that entertained or flattered; and occasionally his tone appears to meditate a sort of literary strike—pas d’argent, pas de poésie:

No writer ever more clearly recognized his field. In the third poem of Book VIII he pretends to hesitate over multiplying epigrams—five books, six, seven are already out and the whole collection is thumbed everywhere (teritur noster ubique liber), there should be some stint and limit (sit pudor et finis). Here the rebuke from the Comic Muse Thalia is significant: “Abandon your charming trifles! But what better thing is an idle singer (desidiosus) to do? Not tragic drama surely? Not epic? No, Martial’s function is to hold the mirror up to the manners of the day”:

The claim is also well illustrated in his objection to mythological twaddle—an objection sufficient to account for a radical lack of sympathy with Statius, the only prominent poet of the time whom he does not name:

This confident acceptance of life as his great exemplar explains the variety and truth of Martial’s pictures. He knew that he could portray his fellows with a sure hand; and his conviction that his forte lay in light verse reflecting manners and morals gave him an assurance that his work had force enough to last. It is essentially Flavian Rome that he drew; [507]for, though his writing continued under Nerva and the first few years of Trajan’s reign, nine books of epigrams had come out under Domitian. The repression of the Reign of Terror, which brought about the fifteen years of silence to which Tacitus alludes, did not affect the sort of verse which Martial composed. It was spicy, but not at the expense of the emperor or the imperial system. All contemporary types appear in Martial’s pages (hominem pagina nostra sapit). They range from Domitian himself, haloed beyond recognition, down to the vilest of characters to whom Martial owed no flattery and of whom to tell the truth was to produce a shudder. Since fun comes easiest at the expense of human weakness, there is a predominance of types in some way objectionable. Hence a multitudinous array of spongers, dinner-hunters, fortune-hunters, bores, coxcombs, charlatans, topers, freaks, stingy hosts, and incorrigible reprobates. But if there are false friends there are also firm ones, there are faithful slaves as well as faithless, moral wives as well as immoral, and genuine poets as well as poetasters. The eye for detail is remarkable: nothing is too slight for mention: the hawker of sulphur and the purchaser of broken glass are not overlooked any more than a wealthy connoisseur of artistic treasures. Such pieces as the neat summary of how the hours in a Roman day were spent convince one that Martial saw things as they were, whereas Juvenal, though possessed of an unchallenged sense of picturesque realism, tended to overlay his subject with violent exaggeration or with a thesis-like treatment in the manner of the rhetorical schools.

Thus to turn over Martial’s leaves in the most casual way transports one to ancient Rome. There we find the Stoic heroine and hero, Arria and Paetus, face to face with death; and intimates of the author who have to be admonished about using life aright, or welcomed home, or reminded of the enjoyable ideals of the unambitious, or urged, on the principle of Satan reproving sin, to decide on a profession (dum quid sis dubitas iam potes esse nihil). We can enter a private library; we can join in the despatch of marriage greetings, or condolences under bereavement, or congratulations to a lucky person on the [508]prospect of a long holiday which will send him back sun-burnt to the pale dwellers in town. We can see artistic triumphs in a handsomely enchased wine-bowl, or an antique bronze statuette. Again, we may listen to the author’s petition for the ius trium liberorum, his request for a supply of domestic water from the Aqua Marcia, or his many growls over the burdensome duty of calling on patrons, over paltry presents (some folk, he observes, send less and less each December!) and over the failure of patrons to maintain him fittingly; he is, he complains, not so well sheltered as his patron’s orchard-trees:

But it is not solely for town life that he has an eye. We note the almost Dutch detail in some of his sketches of rustic scenes. Especially out on Faustinus’s estate with its steading, the corn in heaps, the wine in casks, the barn-yard fowls, the labourers’ work, the rural fare, he appears to revel in “the genuine country, uncivilised” (rure uero barbaroque).⁠[1476] He envisages for us a real farm in Spain free from the formal dress of Rome, and provided with shade against the summer heat, and against the winter cold with a wood fire surrounded by grubby youngsters.⁠[1477]⁠

True to the author’s promise, there are many figures that amuse—the dry-as-dust antiquary spoiling his wine-parties by tedious rigmaroles about the pedigree of his silver goblets, the prosy pleader in court who needs hours to make a few legal points, the counsel who sagaciously blushes in preference to stating his client’s full case, the guest who arrives too late for breakfast but too early for lunch, and the too prolific poet who finds no time to revise his hasty compositions:

The element of humour in Martial was largely due to a keen [509]sense of the incongruous. He could not help chuckling at the notion of keeping about eight birthdays each year to secure presents, or at the huge Gaul who sprained his ankle and was glad to be carried home on a pauper’s bier, or at the nuisance who rummages a shop for objets d’art and gives endless trouble without buying enough to compensate for it.⁠[1479] Again there is the decidedly plain lady who takes care to frequent the company of ladies still plainer so as to appear a beauty by comparison:

Ailments and the medical profession are the subjects of many jests. There was the rebellious client who pretended to have gout in order to avoid calling on his patron, but who, after hobbling about swathed in wrappings, finally got the genuine disease; there was the patient who died because he dreamt of his medical man overnight; there was the ex-physician who turned undertaker and therefore had undertaken the same undertaking for the sick as before; and there was the doctor who on his clinical rounds gave a sufferer fever:

Such alert perception of the incongruous made him scoff at shams—the cupboard love that acts friendship with a view to hospitable invitations, the lady whose artificial aids to beauty [510]leave her with no face of her own, the hypocrisy of pretended philosophers who were at heart dissolute reprobates.⁠[1482]⁠

Ability to see the ludicrous side of things is always an entertaining social recommendation. With the literary circles of the day Martial was on familiar terms. He sends lines to Lucan’s widow on an anniversary of the poet’s birth, he records Caesonius’s fidelity to Seneca in exile, and shows patriotic pride in mentioning the Spanish birthplace of the Senecan family.⁠[1483] Quintilian, Arruntius Stella, a writer of polished verse, and Valerius Flaccus were among his friends. Despatching poetry to the younger Pliny, he good-humouredly quizzes him on his serious work at the bar: the judicious moment of festive relaxation “when rose-leaves reign, when locks are scent-bedew’d” must be chosen for the presentation of Martial’s trivialities.⁠[1484] With Silius Italicus he was well acquainted: would that Epic poet, “pride of the Castalian sisterhood,” he asks, deign to spare some leisure for the sportive trifles which he begs to forward? Just so, he suggests anachronistically, might Catullus have sent his Sparrow to Virgil!⁠[1485] He also shows interest in Silius’s activities and expresses sympathy for him in bereavement.⁠[1486] But no one, he felt, could embroil him with so true a friend as Juvenal, to whom he wrote after his retirement to Spain and whose distaste for long-winded epics he plainly shared.⁠[1487] As regards Statius, who often wrote about the same things and people as Martial did, their mutual silence must have been due to incompatibility of temperament. Martial’s circle included also the orator Aquilius Regulus, whom Pliny could not bear; Antonius Primus from Toulouse, who helped as a commander to secure the Empire for Vespasian; Julius Martialis, a close intimate; Q. Ovidius, a country neighbour at Nomentum; wealthy knights like Atedius Melior and Claudius Etruscus, but also many people less prominent like the centurions Varus and Pudens. While he gives the real names of friends, it is to his credit that he uses disguised [511]names for the victims of his satire. Disclaiming any intention of hurting (ludimus innocui), he declares that his concern is to attack not persons but vice (parcere personis, dicere de uitiis).⁠[1488] Consequently, resentful at having scurrilous verses fathered on him, he draws a lurid picture of the punishment which ought to befall a slanderous poet.⁠[1489] The systematic backbiter, he agrees, may be called malign; but, with a fine touch of human feeling, he adds:

The epigram in Martial is to be distinguished from, even if related to, the epigrammatic in contemporary rhetoric, whether prose or verse. In Martial it is a short independent verse composition, not one of a series of glittering ornaments in a continuous poem, history, or oration; that is, it constitutes a miniature unity; and there is a notable freedom from the forced conceit with which the epigrammatic is often allied in writers like Lucan. The epigram reached Rome from Greece in the form of a brief poem originally inscriptional in character, as its name implies. But the Greek ἐπίγραμμα itself had gone through a wide evolution since Simonides of Ceos employed it for the tomb of the Spartans who fell at Thermopylae. Beyond its use for epitaph, memorial, dedication, or gift, the elegiac metre in particular had been devoted, with its Greek quality of delicate and finished charm, to occasions which in modern times would be considered essentially lyrical. The impression made by a passing event or inward experience found utterance in a brief poem: the poem might convey the feeling produced by a landscape, a book, a storm, an artistic work, a misfortune, a mental disturbance, a friendship, an affair of the heart. In contrast therewith, the Roman tendency, on taking over from the Greeks this ill-defined branch of lyric, was to sacrifice the poetic flavour to point, and most of all to the point that stings. Hence, losing much of the lyric charm of the Greek, the epigram was largely transferred to the service of satiric purposes. Catullus, though certainly not wanting in [512]true lyric quality, gave to the elegiac that bent towards invective which was more definitely associated with the abusive iambic. In this latter field, it is noticeable that Diomedes,⁠[1491] describing the bitter iambic, names, along with the Greeks Archilochus and Hipponax, the Latin writers Lucilius, Catullus, Horace and Bibaculus. Now Martial owns his obligations and traces his freedom of speech (lasciuam uerborum ueritatem)⁠[1492] to Catullus, Domitius Marsus, Albinovanus Pedo, and Lentulus Gaetulicus of Caligula’s reign. Roman dilettanti of the Empire liked composing such verses, and it is among the freaks of time that, though many authors like Marsus, Pedo, Gaetulicus, Seneca and Petronius wrote epigrams, too little has survived in this genre, outside Martial’s collection, to afford a criterion of their individual contribution. Clearly, however, the march of literature had worked changes that could not fail to affect Martial. By his days, satire and rhetoric had both played a great part. He is but following the traditions of the epigram in maintaining its essential elements of concise expression and unity of idea; but he owes a debt to satire for his width of range (Juvenal’s farrago libelli), his dramatic vigour, his scraps of dialogue, his reflective pieces, his mordant wit and irony. So too, although he is not enslaved by rhetorical artifice, he knows how to make use of rhetorical point, as the culmination—usually a stinging culmination—up to which the rounded whole of a short poem should lead. His satiric epigrams, then, mark the close of the evolution of this partly lyric type.⁠[1493] Hence Martial’s individual impress on the epigram is permanent. With him it reached that fixity of form which it has retained up to modern times.

In a total of 1561 epigrams in the Spectacula and fourteen other books, 1235 are in elegiac metre, 238 in hendecasyllabic, and 77 in choliambic or scazon. There are, besides, a few in hexameter and iambic verse. The elegiac distich is common, and is almost the only form among the 350 pieces of the Xenia and Apophoreta. Often, however, his elegiac poems run to ten or a dozen lines, occasionally to twice that length. When [513]the delights of Faustinus’s farm tempt him to write 51 scazons, or when a dinner menu needs 32 hendecasyllabics, one hesitates whether to call these epigrams at all. Vigorous and correct in versification, his metres are in felicitous accord with the theme and spirit of his various pieces. With great skill he can employ the elegiac to express tender sentiment or weighty compliment, the hendecasyllabic for sportive and ironic occasions, and the scazon for trenchant invective. But, if the mood takes him, he can equally adapt the elegiac to satiric, and both hendecasyllabics and scazons to descriptive purposes. Martial’s favourite verse-form, the elegiac, is based, though not pedantically so, on Ovid: lines and phrases are occasionally taken from him, but Martial does not adhere to the Ovidian ending of the pentameter on a disyllable. Typical endings such as hospitibus, ingenio, undecies, amicitiae show that here, as elsewhere, he is under the influence of Catullus. It is upon Catullus principally that his hendecasyllabics and choliambics are founded, with the notable difference that Martial, departing from the Catullian freedom in the opening foot of the choliambic, restricts himself to a spondee. In style and metre we can trace some echoes of Virgil, Horace and the Priapea; and, to a less degree, of Tibullus and Propertius. Nor was the pointed manner of his early patrons Seneca and Lucan without effect on him.⁠[1494] Greek authors too have their share in his sources, but, on the whole, he is remarkably independent of models. Sometimes he appears to do little more than continue the kind of popular tradition found in the smarter graffiti at Pompeii. This, for example, is not unlike his manner:

Low life and the commonest objects came under his survey and saved him from bookish pedantry. The workaday spoken Latin of the caballus type, and words which many Romans would have shrunk from uttering (as we know from Cicero), [514]enter into his pages, alongside of language sanctioned by exalted literary usage. This range of vocabulary is proportionate to the width of his outlook, which contemplated, perhaps occasionally with too heartless an indifference, the ugly as well as the beautiful. His unabashed persistence in observation and his conscious power of natural portrayal left him free to use at will, or not to use, the literary predecessors whom he had studied. On subjects drawn direct from life he writes with a finished neatness of expression and a freshness that reads like improvisation. Over and over again, his natural themes appear to fall into natural phrases. It is a straightforwardness that gives him, for all his debt to patterns, the unmistakeable ring of originality. In literature there is only one Martial.

Rhetoric is in the main absent from one who, primarily interested in man, wrote as a realist. His most representative work is simple, with little of that Spanish note of excess which one detects or suspects in several of his compatriots, from the violent Porcius Latro onwards, not excepting Lucan and at times Seneca himself. Martial feels no attraction to mythology, though a court-poem might involve a few learned allusions. He is content that elevated epics should be praised, admired, even adored, so long as his verses are read. Hence the fundamental contrast, and therefore presumably the antipathy, to Statius⁠[1496] already mentioned. Hence too the justification for Martial’s pronouncement: “all turgid rhetoric (omnis uesica) is foreign to my writings: my muse swells not in wild tragic robe.”⁠[1497] Conformably thereto, he has a genial way of disarming criticism by making no high claims:

In another piece he admits that, while tossing off epigrams may appear simple, the crux lies in making a book; and, again, [515]the criticism that a book of his shows marked inequalities is answered by the contention that this is in its favour, because a bad book is of uniform quality!⁠[1499] No author ever passed a more honest criticism on his work. It is just this unevenness that makes Martial a successful surprise. Alongside of plain-speaking—the plainest of the plain—the reader may chance upon poems which prove in him an exquisite sense of beauty. If the seaside or a pretty name engages his fancy, he rises to a style in keeping with the subject. There are no finer scazons in Latin than those he wrote on “the sweet strand of genial Formiae” to rival the Catullian scazons on Sirmio:

So the liquid consonants of the admired “Springtide Lad” (Earinos) seem to run over into his enthusiastic hendecasyllabics on

[516]

So beauty of idea is combined with neatness when he sends a rose-wreath to a friend:

There the pedigree of the opening movement in Waller’s “Go, lovely rose” and Herrick’s “Go, happy rose” is evident. Much, indeed, that might be called Herrickian comes from brief pieces like

This neatness in expression underlies the characteristic suspense of point until the concluding line, phrase, or even word of an epigram—the typical manner of Martial familiar to us from imitations in neo-Latin writers, in writers of our own eighteenth century and in Byron, on the bee-like principle that

Very often, whether the piece is a brief couplet or a more extended set of elegiac, choliambic, or hendecasyllabic verses, the surprise and the bite come at the end. The epigram thus constitutes an artistic “period.” Such is the force of the sharp tussit of I. x.: “What is the inducement that lures Gemellus to propose marriage to Maronilla? Why does he long, plead, implore, send presents? Is she pretty? Nay, none so ugly! What is the bait and charm then? Why, her churchyard cough!”—an ugly but effective close on the attraction of a consumptive heiress for a fortune-hunter.⁠[1504] So he retorts on a [517]person whose absence would be a good riddance:

He makes fun of unwelcome kisses:

Again, less briefly than, but to the same effect as, Mr. Punch’s advice to those about to marry, he writes on a debtor’s going to law to dispute a claim:

From the idea of uniting in wedlock a much widowed widow with an equally bereaved widower he extracts grim fun:

He introduces us smilingly to a Roman hairdresser:

[518]

He jeers at the systematic diner-out:

This last is a frequently imitated form in which the apparent confirmation of the first statement leaves the final state of the victim worse than the first. A similar effect is got by an apparent contradiction of the original statement:

Just as elsewhere we trace the legacy of Martial in some of the gallantry of Cavalier poets, and as his “Non amo te, Sabidi” descends to “I do not like thee, Dr. Fell,” so this corrective form of epigram is the prototype of such quips as Samuel Rogers’s:

An engaging blend of modesty and confidence is an ingredient in the variety of Martial. At times, by way of pose, he may wish to give the impression that, like Byron, he “rattles on exactly as he’d talk” and that his verses are of little consequence:⁠[1512] at other times, he is both proud of his popularity and confident of his permanent place in literature. The emperor read him (II. xci.): so did ministers of state and men of letters (VI. lxiv. 8-10): everybody at Rome did, in fact (VI. lx.). He was pointed out (monstramur digito, IX. xcvii. 4), and people whispered “There he is!” (V. xiii. 3). Such a vogue had he that it was possible to find a nuisance of a person who could repeat Martial by heart and decline to stop! (VII. li.). In mock-heroic strain he declares:

His naughty jests (nequitiae, VI. lxxxii. 5) were known to [519]everyone who had not a Dutchman’s ear: no wonder, then, that his circle of readers should be as wide as the world (I. i. 2; V. xiii. 3; VIII. lxi. 3). He was flattered to realize that he was a favourite in Vienne (VII. lxxxviii.): his poems might be despatched to one person, but would be read by all (uni mitteris, omnibus legeris, VII. xcvii. 13). Away among the Goths a centurion thumbed his Martial (a rigido teritur centurione liber), and Britain learned to repeat his verses (XI. iii. 3-5). His books went through different editions; they were on sale by Secundus in parchment binding (I. ii. 3, 7-8), suitable for travellers; or at Atrectus’s shop, smart in purple (I. cxvii. 13-7); or at the establishment of Tryphon (IV. lxxii.), who was Quintilian’s publisher. Furthermore, his juvenile verses could be had in collected form (I. cxiii.), and plagiarists stole from his works. Yet even a “best seller” in ancient Rome could not ensure handsome returns: Martial significantly takes satisfaction in the thought that anyone can make money, but not everyone can be a poet (V. xiii. 9-10); for he has a fine consciousness that a book, to live, must possess an indwelling spirit (VI. lxi. 10). No doubt crosses his mind about his own literary survival (X. ii. 7-12), or about the immortality which mention by him can confer (V. xv. 3-4). Nobodies, therefore, must not expect to have their names perpetuated in his verse (V. lx. 6-7).

Alongside of this confidence, however, there rings out a note of impatient fretfulness. Weariness of the bustle in the Vanity Fair of Rome brought to this merry companion his intervals of heart-searching. Surrender day by day to the solicitations of purely trivial circumstance produced a natural revulsion against such waste of time. Led by a too facile compliance into insipid society, he awakes upon occasion to a sense of paltry achievement and lost opportunity. Etiquette, he felt, wars with poetry:

The same fretful malady of the age troubled him when he wrote to his namesake Julius Martialis on making the best of time:

The same friend is reminded that social duties may hamper one in living one’s own life:

Yet in spite of this discontent over a partially spoiled life, it may be doubted whether Martial was capable of more than he accomplished. He could only be himself. While he ought not to be called entirely shallow, he lacked the profundity which might have made him other than a laureate of the occasional.

The two glaring faults in Martial, servility and obscenity, brought each their own nemesis: where he is most flattering he is least simple, and where he is most indecent he is least witty. Both defects sprang from his circumstances. Never wealthy, he found in adroit dedications a more likely source of profit than in book-sales. Subservience towards patrons, on whose uncertain favours he had to rely, was inevitable. Hence adulation of the emperor, cringing to exalted personages, and continual clamour for bounty. He flattered Domitian because there was no choice. In touch with court, he could not logically keep out of his verse the official title of “Lord and God” assumed by the emperor: not belonging to the political opposition, he had no doubt a genuine belief in the imperial system; and, as the most fulsome compliments were acceptable, he resorted to mendacious homage. It is not merely that it appears historically ludicrous in Martial to apply to Domitian the epithet of chaste (pudicus) or to commend one of his own volumes as fit [522]to be read without a blush by that permanently red-faced prince; but it is also, as already suggested, noticeable that he pays a literary penalty for his moral weakness herein by deviating from his usual straightforwardness of style. In the midst of his extremest sycophancy, he becomes artificial owing to the intrusion of over-ingenious conceits. Thus, it is grotesque to assert⁠[1517] that Rome envies the barbarians with whom Domitian has been warring in person, because they were lucky enough to see the emperor’s face, whereas the poor capital had to be content with the laurel-wreathed despatch of victory. And no one can take seriously the far-fetched absurdity of his congratulations to the enemy on “seeing Domitian’s face at close quarters and in that countenance finding material for both terror and rejoicing.” Similar extravagance marks his welcome on his Majesty’s return from Dacia,

His argument, also, in favour of making requests to the divine emperor is far too clever; “it is not the sculptor of an image who makes a god; it is the man who prays.”⁠[1519]⁠

Martial’s indecency palls no less than his adulation. We are not amused. The foulest epigrams force on the reader a resilient disgust as if from some sickening contagion; and repeated shocks end in boredom. Conceivably it was a salutary instinct that prompted the quaint idea of a Delphin editor to remove from their original place in the text all the unsavoury epigrams into a musée secret at the end of the volume, in which might be taken one nauseating draught of concentrated impropriety. They number more than 150 or over ten per cent of the whole. Many open out vistas down by-lanes of hideous vice. It might be argued that even the foulest practices of sexual inverts had to be included in a complete picture of pagan Rome; and that there was much to which an avowed realist could not shut his eyes. Perhaps just because in their naked Romana simplicitas the worst epigrams are so repulsive, they might, though filthier, be considered less pernicious than Ovid, or than a sex-encumbered [523]modern novel, which often lacks Martial’s truth to life. Here we have a repellent rather than an erotic obscenity. The author realizes that some apology is needed for overstepping the limits of propriety. His poems are not for the prim and prudish, who are in set terms warned away with the mischievous suggestion that the warning will only whet their curiosity.⁠[1520] Certain of his books he can recommend as respectable:⁠[1521] in general, however, he does not address children but the seasoned onlookers at the Floralia and folk of easy morality.⁠[1522] So the freedom of Book XI is defended by the licence of the Saturnalia.⁠[1523] The fundamental excuse offered is one which not a few Roman writers were at pains to make by way of protest against any assumption that he who composes foul verses must himself be foul. Martial’s declaration “our page is wanton but our life is clean”⁠[1524] is couched in terms similar to those used by Catullus and Ovid, and practically repeated by Pliny, Apuleius and Ausonius.⁠[1525] The attitude suggests that the author had no objection to giving readers the particular spice they wanted: sometimes a fine poem is marred by a gross jest reserved as a surprise.⁠[1526] Beside so much nauseating coarseness, the claim of ludimus innocui (VII. xii. 9) may sound ironical; yet this can be said by way of comment, if not of palliation—he is not a slanderer, for in general real names are avoided. If victims were foully satirized, it was left to themselves or others to fit the cap. He resents the impudent dishonesty of a verse-writer who “vomits viperous venom” under Martial’s name.⁠[1527]⁠

His character is too complex to be satisfactorily analysed on psychological principles. Whether one thinks of a super-man as well as a subter-man within the same self, or thinks of the surprising contradictions in him as liberated at different crises from the oubliettes of a chequered experience, the diversity of his genius remains beyond full explanation. If one side [524]belonged to a realm where ethics and ideals seemed contraband, he presented another side in which sentiment under various aspects prevailed. Wrapped up with the sentiment on this more kindly and genial side there is admittedly some conventionality: the Greek tradition may act in one place, and the Latin tradition through poets like Catullus in another. A certain amount of sentiment may be due to the growth of more humane feelings in his age, as is traceable in Seneca. Yet a large portion must be ascribed to Martial’s own disposition. These phases of sentiment are most observable in his attitude to the dead, his genius for friendship, and his love of nature.

His best known epitaph, that on a little girl Erotion, bespeaks for her spirit in the land of shades the sheltering protection of Flaccilla and Fronto, his parents, who had gone before. It ends:

This conclusion, suggestive of the “sit terra tibi leuis” in sepulchral inscriptions, was twisted to malicious effect by Martial himself on a disreputable person:

Long afterwards it was parodied in reference to the massive buildings of the architect Vanbrugh:

A slave-boy is thus commemorated:

There is a manifest sense not merely of the poet’s personal loss but of the blow to the father of a youth from North Italy who has died in Asia Minor:

Kindly affection towards associates came easily to Martial. Q. Ovidius’s birthday and his own he considers

Enthusiasm animates his admiration for Decianus:

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Again, in a brief review of an intimacy of thirty-four years with Julius Martialis, he finds it has contributed on the whole to happiness, but pathetically fights against the notion of making friendship too warm, lest its loss prove overwhelming:

Martial’s appreciation of the country was inspired by something deeper than the relief felt by a jaded town-dweller. His ideals may not have been mightily exalted, but he had the poet’s eye for landscape and colour, and therewith a gift of fancy. Nowhere does he seem more poetic in his attitude towards external nature than in his lines on Vesuvius visited some years after the terrible eruption of A.D. 79. The poem has the interest of treating volcanic soil, which made both a practical and an imaginative appeal to the Romans.⁠[1535] The poet’s recollection of the old fertile greenery and cool shadows of the vines (hic est pampineis uiridis modo Vesbius umbris) contrasts with the bare desolation of the land now buried beneath the mournful ashes of the volcano (cuncta iacent flammis et tristi mersa fauilla). Then an exquisite touch of romantic imagination pictures the vine-slopes as once haunted by the Wine-god, near the dancing-places of the Satyrs (moderns might fancy them as gnomes and elves)—a region where Pompeii enjoyed the patronage of the Queen of Love and Herculaneum was called after the renowned demi-god:

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