Post-Augustan Poetry From Seneca to Juvenal Part 6

nam monstra fato, moribus scelera imputes (_Phaedra_ 143).

[A] Cp. Theobald: None but himself can be his parallel.

[B] Cp. Sir W. Raleigh: Pa.s.sions are best compared with floods and streams, The shallow murmur but the deep are dumb.

[C] For dawning freedom makes the aged brave. MILLER.

[D] For thy impious love is worse Than her unnatural and impious love.

The first you would impute to character, The last to fate.

MILLER.

If nothing had survived of Seneca's plays but a collection of _sententiae_, we might have regretted his loss almost as we regret the loss of Menander.

Here his merits, such as they are, end: they fail to justify us in placing him high as a dramatist; and he has many faults over and above those incidental to his style and modes of thought. While freer than most of his contemporaries from the vain display of obscure erudition, he falls into the common vice of introducing 'catalogues'. They are dull in epic: in drama they are worse than dull. The _Hercules Furens_ is no place for a matter-of-fact catalogue of the hero's labours, set forth (210-248) in monotonous iambics from the mouth of Amphitryon. If they are to be described at all, they demand the decorative treatment of lyric verse,[200] nor is a catalogue of the herbs used by Medea to poison the robe destined for her rival any more excusable.[201] Again, like his contemporaries, he shows a lack of taste and humour which in its worst manifestations pa.s.ses belief. Not a few of the pa.s.sages already quoted serve to ill.u.s.trate the point. But for fatuity it would be hard to surpa.s.s the words with which Amphitryon interrupts Theseus'

account of the horrors of the underworld:

estne aliqua tellus Cereris aut Bacchi ferax? (_H.F._ 697.)

Scarcely less absurd is the chorus in the _Phaedra_, who, when hymning the power of love, give a long list of animals subject to such pa.s.sion: the catalogue culminates with the statement that even whales and elephants fall in love (351):

amat insani belua ponti Lucaeque boves.

But all such instances pale before the conclusion of the _Phaedra_. Not content with giving a ghastly and exaggerated account of the death of Hippolytus, Seneca must needs bring the fragments of his mutilated body upon the scene. Theseus, at the suggestion of the chorus, attempts to put them together again. The climax comes when, finding an unidentifiable portion, he cries (1267):

quae pars tui sit dubito, sed pars est tui!

The actual language of the plays is pure and cla.s.sical. There is no trace of provincialism, nothing to suggest that Seneca was a Spaniard.

Its vices proceed from the false mould in which it has been cast. There is a lack of connecting particles, and we proceed by a series of short rhetorical jerks.[202] It is the style that Seneca himself condemns in his letters (114. 1). Its faults are further aggravated by the metre: taken line by line, the iambics of Seneca are impressive: taken collectively they are monotonous in the extreme. The ear suffers a continual series of stabs, which are not the less unpleasant because none of them go deep. The verse seems formed, one might almost say punched out, by a relentless machine. It is never modified by circ.u.mstances; it is the same in narrative and dialogue, the same in pa.s.sion and in calm, if indeed Seneca can ever be said to be either pa.s.sionate or calm. Its pauses come with monotonous regularity at the end of the line, diversified only by an occasional break at the caesura in the third foot. Nor does the rule[203] observed by Seneca, that only a spondee or anapaest is permitted in the fifth foot, tend to relieve the monotony, though it does much to give the individual lines such weight as they possess. A more complete contrast with the iambics of the early Latin Tragedies cannot be imagined. What has been gained in polish has been lost in dignity. Whence the Senecan iambic is derived, is a question which cannot be answered with certainty. It is wholly unlike the early Roman tragic iambic. Elision is rare, and there is little variety. Instead of the ma.s.sive and rugged measure of Pacuvius or Accius, we have a finished and elegant monotony. In all likelihood it is the lineal descendant of the iambic of Ovid.[204] In view of Seneca's great admiration for Ovid--he quotes him continually in his prose works--of Ovid's mastery of rhetoric and epigram, and yet more of the distinct parallels traceable between the _Phaedra_ and _Medea_ of Seneca and the corresponding _Heroides_ of Ovid, it becomes a strong probability that the Senecan iambic was deeply influenced--if not actually created--by the iambic style of the earlier poet's lost drama, the famous _Medea_.[205]

As to the models to which he is indebted for his treatment of choric metres we know nothing. In spite of the fact that he employs a large variety of metres, and that his choruses at times stray from rhetoric into poetry of a high order, there is in them a still more deadly monotony than in his iambics. The chorus are devoid of life; they are there partly as a concession to convention, but mainly to supply incidental music. Their inherent dullness is not relieved by the metre.

Of strophic arrangement there is no clear trace; in a large proportion of cases the choruses are written in one fixed and rigid metre admitting of no variety: even where different metres alternate, the relaxation is but small, for the same monotony reigns unchecked within the limits of each section. The strange experiments in mixed metres in the _Agamemnon_ and _Oedipus_ show Seneca's technique at its worst: they are composed of fragments of Horatian metres, thinly disguised by inversions and resolutions of feet: they lack all governing principle and are an unqualified failure. Of the remaining metres the Anapaestic, Asclepiad, Sapphic, and Glyconic predominate. He is, perhaps, least unsuccessful in his treatment of the Anapaest: the lines do not lack melody, and the natural flexibility of the metre saves them from extreme monotony, though they would have been more successful had he employed the paroemiac line as a solemn and resonant close to the march of the dimeter. But one wearies soon of the eternal Asclepiads and Glyconics which he often allows to continue in unbroken and unvaried series for seventy or eighty lines together. He rarely allows any variation within the Glyconic and never makes use of it to break the monotony of the Asclepiad. Still worse are his Sapphics. Abandoning the usual arrangement in stanzas of three lesser Sapphics followed by an Adonic verse, his Sapphic choruses consist almost entirely of the lesser Sapphic varied by a very occasional Adonic. The continual succession of these lines without so much as an occasional change of caesura to diversify the rhythm is at times almost intolerable. At the close of such choruses we feel as though we had jogged at a rapid trot for long miles on a very hard and featureless road.

Language and metre work hand in hand with rhetoric to make these strange plays dramatically ineffective. So strange are they and in many ways so unlike anything else in Cla.s.sical literature, that the question as to the purpose with which they were written and the place they occupied in the literature of their day affords an interesting subject for speculation. Were they written for the stage? Decayed as was the taste for tragedy, tragedies may occasionally have been acted.[206] But there are considerations which suggest doubt as to whether the plays of Seneca were written with any such purpose. Even under Nero it is scarcely credible that the introduction of the mangled fragments of Hippolytus upon the stage would be possible or palatable.[207] Medea kills her children _coram populo_, and, not content with killing them, flings their bodies at Jason from her magic chariot high in air.

Hercules kills his children in full view of the audience, not within the house as in the corresponding drama of Euripides. Such scenes suggest that the plays were written not for the stage but for recitation with musical interludes from a trained choir. Indications that this was the case are to be found in the _Hercules Furens_. While the hero is engaged in slaying his children, Amphitryon, in a succession of short speeches, gives the details of the murder. This would be ridiculous and unnecessary were the scene actually presented on the stage, whereas they become absolutely necessary on the a.s.sumption that the play was written for recitation.[208] This a.s.sumption has the further merit of being charitable; skilful recitation would cover many defects that would be almost intolerable on the stage.

It is improbable, however, that the drama of Seneca occupied an important position in the literature of their day. The golden age of tragedy was past, and it is hard to believe that these plays are favourable specimens even of their own age. The authors of the Silver Age virtually ignore their existence, and, with the exception of two references in Tertullian and one in Apollinaris Sidonius, they are quoted only by scholars and grammarians.

They have small intrinsic value: but they afford interesting evidence for the taste[209] of their own day, and their influence on modern drama has been enormous. In the Renaissance at the dawn of the drama's revival, Seneca was regarded as a dramatist of the first order. Scaliger ranked him above Euripides: it was to him men turned to find models for tragedy. Everywhere we see traces of the Senecan drama.[210] It is a tribute to the dexterity of his rhetoric that his influence should have been so enormous, but it is to be regretted in the interests of the drama. For to Seneca more than to any other man is due the excessive prominence of declamatory rhetoric, which has characterized the drama throughout Western Europe from the Renaissance down to the latter half of the nineteenth century, and has proved a blemish to the work of all save a few great writers who recognized the value of rhetoric, but never mistook the shadow for the substance.

III

THE 'OCTAVIA'

A tragedy with this t.i.tle is included by the MSS. among the plays of Seneca. Its chief interest lies in the fact that it is the one surviving example of a _fabula praetexta_, or tragedy, drawn from Roman life. It deals with a tragic incident of Nero's reign, the final extinction of the Claudian house. Octavia, daughter of Claudius and Messalina, is the heroine. Her life was one long tragedy. Her childhood was darkened by the disaster that befell her unworthy mother, her maturer years by her marriage to Nero. She was a mere p.a.w.n in the game of politics. The marriage was brought about by the designs of Agrippina, to render Nero secure of the princ.i.p.ate. To effect this end her betrothed Sila.n.u.s was killed, Claudius, her father, and Britannicus, her brother, dispatched by poison. Soon her own wedded life turned to tragedy. Nero fell madly in love with Poppaea, and resolved to put away Octavia. At Poppaea's instigation she was accused of a base intrigue. The plot failed; the false charge could not be pressed home; she was divorced on the ground of sterility, and imprisoned in a town of Campania. A rumour arose that she was to be reinstated; the mob of Rome declared itself in her favour and gave wild expression to its joy. Poppaea's statues were cast down, Octavia's replaced. Poppaea was furious. She laid siege to Nero and won him to her will. The old false charge of adultery was trumped up; a complaisant freed man was found to confess himself Octavia's lover. She was banished to Pandataria and slain (June 9, 62 A.D.).

The play gives us a compressed version of the tragedy. It opens with a speech by Octavia's nurse, setting forth the sorrows of her young mistress. The speech over, she leaves the stage to be succeeded by Octavia, who, in a lament closely modelled on the lament of the Sophoclean Electra,[211] bewails the sorrows of her house, the deaths of Messalina, Claudius, and Britannicus. The nurse reappears, attempts to console her, and counsels submission to fate. Octavia changes her strain and prays for death. After a lament from the chorus, Nero and Seneca enter on the scene. Seneca urges moderation and sets forth his ideal of monarchy. Nero is quite his match in argument, rejects his advice, and, concluding with the words

desiste tandem, iam gravis nimium mihi, instare: liceat facere quod Seneca improbat (588).

Have done at last, For wearisome has thine insistence grown; One still may do what Seneca condemns ...

MILLER.

declares his intention of marrying Poppaea without delay. An interesting chorus follows, describing how Rome of old expelled the kings for their crimes. Nero has sinned even more than they. Has he not slain even his mother? There follows a long and interesting description of the murder,[212] which serves as an introduction to the entrance of the ghost of Agrippina in the guise of an avenging fury, prophesying the dethronement and death of her unnatural son. She is succeeded on the stage by Octavia, resigned to the surrender of her position and content to be no more than Nero's sister; once more the chorus bewail her fate.

At last her rival Poppaea appears in conversation with her nurse. The nurse congratulates her, but Poppaea has been terrified by visions of the night and is ill at ease. Her rival is not yet removed and her own place is still insecure. At this point comes the one ray of hope that illumines this sombre drama. A messenger arrives with the news that the people have risen in Octavia's favour. But the reader is not left in suspense for a moment. Nero appears and orders the suppression of the _emeute_ and the execution of Octavia. The chorus mourn the fate of the beloved of the Roman people. Their power and splendour is but brief: Octavia perishes untimely, like Gracchus and Livius Drusus. She herself appears in the hands of soldiers, being dragged off to execution and death. Like Ca.s.sandra,[213] she compares her fate with that of the nightingale, to whom the G.o.ds gave a new life of peace full of sweet lamentation as a close to her troubled human existence. One more song of condolence from the chorus, one more song of sorrow from Octavia, and she is taken from our sight, and the play closes with a denunciation by the chorus of the hardness of heart and the insatiate cruelty of Rome.

It is not hard to summarize the general effect of this curious drama.

Its author has read the Greek tragedians carefully and to some purpose; he has studied the characters of Electra, Ca.s.sandra, and Antigone with diligence, if without insight. He clearly feels deep sympathy for Octavia, and to some extent succeeds in communicating this sympathy to the audience. His heroine speaks in character: she is never a male Stoic, flaunting in female garb, she is a genuine woman, a gentle, lovable creature broken down by misfortune. The other characters are uninteresting. Nero is an academic tyrant, Seneca an academic adviser, Poppaea is little more than a lay figure. The most that can be said for them is that they do not rant. The chorus are on the whole a fairly satisfactory imitation of a chorus of sympathetic Greek women.[214]

There is nothing forced or unnatural about them; they are real human beings; their sympathy is genuine, and its expression appropriate. But they are dull; monotonous lamentation in monotonous anapaests is the height of their capacity. The play is a failure: the subject is not in itself dramatic; if it had been, it would have been spoiled by the treatment it receives. We are never in suspense; Octavia has never the remotest chance of escape; our pity for her is genuine enough, but her character lacks both grandeur and psychological interest: the pathos of her situation will not compensate us for the absence of a dramatic plot.

The fall of the house of Claudius compares ill with the tragedy of the Pelopidae. And the treatment of the story, from the dramatic standpoint, is childish. The play is scarcely more than a series of melancholy monologues interspersed with not less melancholy dirges from the chorus.

The most we can say of it is that it is simple and unaffected: if it lacks brilliance, it also lacks exaggeration. Thought and diction are commonplace and uninspired, but they are never absurd--an extraordinary merit in a poet of the Silver Age.

It will have been sufficiently evident from this brief sketch that the _Octavia_ is in all respects very different indeed from the other plays that claim Seneca for their author. It is free from their faults and their merits alike. It never sinks to their depths, but it never rises to their heights. Apart, however, from these general considerations,[215] there is evidence amounting almost to certainty that the _Octavia_ is not by Seneca. The tragedy takes place in the lifetime of Seneca. Seneca himself figures in the play. The story is of such a nature that it could hardly have been written, much less published, in the reign of Nero. Yet more conclusive is the fact that the ghost of Agrippina prophesies the fate of Nero in such a way as to make it certain that the author outlived the emperor and was acquainted with the facts of his death.[216]

Who then was the author? When did he write? Evidence is almost absolutely lacking. From its comparative sanity and simplicity and its intense hatred of Nero it may reasonably be conjectured that it is the work of the Flavian age; the age of the anti-Neronian reaction and of the return to saner models in life and literature. But there is no certainty; it may have been written under Nerva, Trajan, or Hadrian. It stands detached and aloof from the literature of its age.

CHAPTER III

PERSIUS

It is possible to form a clearer picture of the personality of Aulus Persius Flaccus, the satirist, than of any other poet of the Silver Age.

Not only are the essential facts of his brief career preserved for us in a concise, but extremely relevant biography taken from the commentary of the famous critic Valerius Probus, but there are few poets whose works so clearly reveal the character of their author.

Persius was born at the lofty hill-town of Volaterrae, in Tuscany, on the 4th of December, 34 A.D.[217] He was scarcely six years old when he lost his father, a wealthy Roman knight, named Flaccus. His mother, Fulvia Sisennia, married again, but her second husband, a knight named Fusius, died after a few years of wedded life. Persius was educated at home up to the age of twelve, when he was taken to Rome to be taught literature by Remmius Palaemon and rhetoric by Verginius Flavus. Of the latter nothing is known save that he wrote a much-approved textbook on rhetoric and was exiled by Nero;[218] the former was a freedman whose remarkable talents were only equalled by his gross vices; he had a prodigious memory, was a skilful _improvvisatore_, and the most distinguished teacher of the day.[219] At the age of sixteen, shortly after his a.s.sumption of the _toga virilis_, the young Persius made the friends.h.i.+p which was to be the ruling influence of his life. He learned to know and love the great Stoic teacher, Cornutus, with an attachment that was broken only by death. It was from Cornutus that he imbibed the principles of Stoicism, and at his house that he met the Greek philosophers, Petronius Aristocrates of Magnesia and the Lacedaemonian physician, Claudius Agathurnus, whose influence upon his character was only less than that of Cornutus. Among his intimates he counted Calpurnius Statura, who died in early youth, and the famous lyric poet, Caesius Ba.s.sus,[220] who was destined long to survive his friend and to do him the last service of editing the satires, which his premature death left unpublished and unfinished. Lucan also was one of his fellow students in the house of Cornutus,[221] while at a later date he made the acquaintance of Seneca, the leading writer of the day, although he never felt the seductive attractions of his fluent style and subtle intellect. More important influences were his almost filial respect and affection for the distinguished orator,[222] M. Servilius Nonia.n.u.s, and his close companions.h.i.+p with Thrasea Paetus, the leader of the Stoic opposition.[223] At one time Persius, if the scholiast may be believed,[224] contemplated a military career. The statement is scarcely probable in view of the contempt and dislike with which he invariably speaks of soldiers, nor is it easy to conceive a profession less suited to the temperament of the quiet and retiring poet. Whatever his original intentions may have been, he actually chose the secluded life of study, the _vita umbratilis_, as the Romans called it, remote from the dust and heat of the great world. That he was wise we cannot doubt. It was the only life possible in those days for a man of his character. 'Fuit morum lenissimorum, verecundiae virginalis, pietatis erga matrem et sororem et amitam exemplo sufficientis: fuit frugi, pudicus.' Even in a saner, purer, and less turbulent age, such a one would have been more fitted for the paths of study than for any branch of public life. He died of a disease of the stomach on the 24th of November, 62 A.D., in his villa on the Appian Way, some eight miles south of Rome,[225] leaving behind him a valuable library, a small amount of unpublished verse, and a considerable fortune, amounting to 2,000,000 sesterces. The whole of this fortune he bequeathed to his mother and sister, only begging them to give to his friend Cornutus a sum of 100,000 sesterces, twenty pounds weight of silver plate, and the whole of his library, containing no less than 700 volumes by the Stoic Chrysippus. Cornutus accepted the books, but refused the rest, showing that indifference to wealth that was to be looked for, though not always to be found, in professors of the Stoic philosophy. The literary work left by the dead poet was submitted by his mother to the judgement of Cornutus, himself a poet.[226] The bulk of the work was not great. Persius had in his boyhood written a _praetexta_ or tragedy with a Roman plot, a book of poems describing his journeys with Thrasea,[227] and a few verses on his kinswoman Arria, the wife of Caecina Paetus, immortalized by her devotion to her husband and her heroic death.[228] As the work of his maturer years he left his satires.

Cornutus recommended that all save the satires should be destroyed; they alone, unfinished though they might be, were worthy of the memory of his dead friend. He began the task of correcting them for publication, but transferred it to Caesius Ba.s.sus, at the latter's earnest entreaty. Of the nature of the correction and editing required we are ignorant, save for the statement of Probus that a few lines were removed from the end of the book to give it an appearance of completion.[229] The poems met with instant success;[230] they excited both wonder and criticism; that they continued to be read is shown by the existence of copious scholia, which must, indeed, have been almost necessary for such continuance of their popularity.[231]

The slender volume of Persius' works is composed of six satires in hexameter verse and a prologue written in choliambi. The first deals with the corruption of literature; the second, addressed to Macrinus on his birthday, treats of the right and wrong objects of prayer; the third is an appeal to an indolent young man for energy and earnestness; the fourth, almost a continuation of the third, attacks the lack of 'self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control', in public men; the fifth, addressed to his friend and teacher Cornutus, maintains the Stoic doctrine that all the world are slaves; only the righteous man attains to freedom; in the sixth, addressed to Caesius Ba.s.sus, the poet claims the right to spend his wealth in reasonable enjoyment, and denounces the grasping and unseemly selfishness of an imaginary heir to his fortune.

In the prologue--or epilogue as it is sometimes regarded[232]--he sarcastically disclaims any pretensions to poetic inspiration, and hints ironically that, in view of the number of poets who write merely to win their bread, inspiration may be regarded as unnecessary.

The ambition to win fame as a satirist was first fired in Persius by his reading the tenth book of the satires of Lucilius. If we may believe Probus, he imitated the opening of that book in his first satire, beginning like Lucilius by detracting from himself and proceeding to attack other authors indiscriminately.[233] Not enough of the tenth book of Lucilius has survived to enable us to check the accuracy of this statement, though it finds independent testimony in a remark of the scholiast on Horace, that the tenth book of Lucilius contained free criticisms of the early poets of Rome.[234] Further, the third satire is said by the scholiast to have been modelled on the fourth book of Lucilius, and there is a certain amount of evidence for supposing the choliambi of the epilogue to be an imitation of a Lucilian model.[235]

We have, however, no means of testing the truth of these a.s.sertions: the debt of Persius to Lucilius must be taken on trust. Of his enormous indebtedness to Horace we have, on the other hand, the clearest evidence. It is hard to conceive two poets with less in common as regards ideals, temperament, and technique; and yet throughout Persius we are startled by strange, though unmistakable, echoes of Horace.

He knows his Horace by heart, and Horace has become a veritable obsession. He is not content with giving his characters Horatian names.[236] That might be convention, not plagiarism. But phrase after phrase calls up the Horatian original. He runs through the whole gamut of plagiarism. There is plagiarism, simple and direct.

O si sub rastro crepet argenti mihi seria, dextro Hercule! (2. 10)

O that I could hear a crock of silver c.h.i.n.king under my harrow, by the blessing of Hercules. CONINGTON.

is undisguisedly copied from Horace (_Sat._ ii. 6. 10).

O si urnam argenti fors quae mihi monstret, ut illi, thesauro invento, qui mercennarius agrum ilium ipsum mercatus aravit, dives amico Hercule!

But as a rule, since he cannot keep Horace out, he strives to disguise him. The familiar

si vis me flere, dolendum est primum ipsi tibi