Latin Literature Part 7

The Ciceronian age represents on the whole the culmination of Latin prose, as the Augustan does the culmination of Latin poetry. In the former field, the purity of the language as it had been used by Caesar and Cicero could hardly be retained in a period of more diffused culture; and the influence of the schools of rhetoric, themselves based on inferior Greek models, became more and more marked. Poetry, too, was for the time more important than prose, and one result was that prose became infected with certain qualities of poetical style. The reign of Augustus includes only one prose writer of the first rank, the historian t.i.tus Livius.

Though not living like Virgil or Horace in the immediate circle of Augustus and under direct court patronage, Livy was in friendly relations with the Emperor and his family, and accepted the new rule with cordiality, if without much enthusiasm. Of his life, which seems to have been wholly spent in literary pursuits, little is known. He was born at Padua in the year of Julius Caesar's first consuls.h.i.+p, and had survived Augustus by three years when he died at the age of seventy-five. In earlier life he wrote some philosophical dialogues and treatises on rhetoric which have not been preserved. An allusion in the first book of his history shows that it was written, or at all events published, after the first and before the second closing of the temple of Ja.n.u.s by Augustus, in the years 29 and 25 B.C. For forty years thereafter he continued this colossal task, which, like the _Decline and Fall_, was published in parts from time to time. He lived to bring it down as far as the death of Drusus, the younger son of the Empress Livia, in the year 9 B.C. The division into books, of which there were one hundred and forty- two in the whole work, is his own; these again were arranged in _volumina_, or sections issued as separate volumes, and containing a varying number of books. The division of the work into decads was made by copyists at a much later period, and was no part of the author's own plan. Only one-fourth of the whole history has survived the Middle Ages.

This consists of the first, the third, the fourth, and half of the fifth decad, or books i.-x. and xxi.-xlv. of the work; of the rest we only possess brief tables of contents, drawn up in the fourth century, not from the original work but from an abridgment, itself now lost, which was then in use. The scale of the history is very different in the two surviving portions. The first decad carries it from the foundation of the city through the Regal and early Republican periods down to the third Samnite war, a period of four centuries and a half. The twenty-five extant books of the third, fourth, and fifth decads cover a period of fifty years, from the beginning of the second Punic to the conclusion of the third Macedonian war. This half century, it is true, was second in importance to none in Roman history. But the scale of the work had a constant tendency to expand as it approached more modern times, and more abundant doc.u.ments; and when he reached his own time, nearly a book was occupied with the events of each year.

Founded as it was, at least for the earlier periods, upon the works of preceding annalists, the history of Livy adopted from them the arrangement by years marked by successive consulates, which was familiar to all his readers. He even speaks of his own work as _annales_, though its formal t.i.tle seems to have been _Histori'_ (or _Libri Historiarum_) _ab Urbe Condita_. There is no reason to suppose that he intended to conclude it at any fixed point In a preface to one of the later volumes, he observed with justifiable pride that he had already satisfied the desire of fame, and only went on writing because the task of composition had become a fixed habit, which he could not discontinue without uneasiness. His fame even in his lifetime was unbounded. He seems to have made no enemies. The acrid criticism of Asinius Pollio, a purist by profession, on certain provincialities of his style, was an insignificant exception to the general chorus of praise. In treading the delicate ground of the Civil wars his att.i.tude towards the Republican party led Augustus to tax him half jestingly as a Pompeian; yet Livy lost no favour either with him or with his more jealous successor. The younger Pliny relates how a citizen of Cadiz was so fired by his fame that he travelled the whole way to Rome merely to see him, and as soon as he had seen him returned home, as though Rome had no other spectacles to offer.

Roman history had hitherto been divided between the annalists and the writers of personal and contemporary memoirs. Sall.u.s.t was almost the only example of the definite historical treatment of a single epoch or episode of the past. As a rule each annalist set himself the same task, of compiling, from the work of his predecessors, and such additional information as he found accessible to him, a general history of the Roman people from its beginnings, carried down as far towards his own day as he found time or patience to continue it. Each successive annalist tried to improve upon previous writers, either in elegance of style or in copiousness of matter, and so far as he succeeded in the double task his work replaced those already written. It was not considered unfair to transcribe whole pa.s.sages from former annalists, or even to copy their works with additions and improvements, and bring them out as new and original histories. The idea of literary property seems, in truth, to be very much a creation of positive law. When no copyright existed, and when the circulation of any book was confined within very small limits by the cost and labour of transcription, the vaguest ideas prevailed, not at Rome alone, on what we should now regard as the elementary morality of plagiarism. Virgil himself transferred whole lines and pa.s.sages, not merely from earlier, but even from contemporary poets; and in prose writing, one annalist cut up and reshaped the work of another with as little hesitation as a mediaeval romance-writer.

In this matter Livy allowed himself full liberty; and his work absorbed, and in a great measure blotted out, those of his predecessors. In his general preface he speaks of the two motives which animate new historians, as the hope that they will throw further light on events, or the belief that their own art will excel that of a ruder age. The former he hardly professes to do, at least as regards times anterior to his own; his hope is that by his pen the great story of the Republic will be told more impressively, more vividly, in a manner more stimulating to the reader and more worthy of the subject, than had hitherto been done. This purpose at least he amply and n.o.bly carried out; nor can it be said to be a low ideal of the function of history. So far, however, as the office of the historian is to investigate facts, to get at the exact truth of what physically happened, or to appreciate the varying degrees of probability with which that truth can be attained, Livy falls far short of any respectable ideal. His romantic temper and the ethical bent of his mind alike indisposed him to set any very great value on facts as such. His history bears little trace of any independent investigation. Sources for history lay round him in immense profusion. The enormous collections made by Varro in every field of antiquarian research were at his hand, but he does not seem to have used them, still less to have undertaken any similar labour on his own account. While he never wilfully distorts the truth, he takes comparatively little pains to disengage it from fables and inaccuracies. In his account of a battle in Greece he finds that Valerius Antias puts the number of the enemy killed as inside ten thousand, while Claudius Quadrigarius says forty thousand. The discrepancy does not ruffle him, nor even seem to him very important; he contents himself with an expression of mild surprise that Valerius for once allows himself to be outstripped in exaggerating numbers. Yet where Valerius is his only authority or is not contradicted by others, he accepts his statements, figures and all, without uneasiness. This instance is typical of his method as a critical--or rather an uncritical --historian. When his authorities do not disagree, he accepts what they say without much question. When they do disagree, he has several courses open to him, and takes one or another according to his fancy at the moment. Sometimes he counts heads and follows the majority of his authors; sometimes he adopts the account of the earliest; often he tries to combine or mediate between discordant stories; when this is not easy, he chooses the account which is most superficially probable or most dramatically impressive. He even bases a choice on the ground that the story he adopts shows Roman statesmans.h.i.+p or virtue in a more favourable light, though he finds some of the inventions of Roman vanity too much for him to swallow. Throughout he tends to let his own preferences decide whether or not a story is true. _In rebus tam antiquis si quae similia veri sint pro veris accipiantur_ is the easy canon which he lays down for early and uncertain events. Even when original doc.u.ments of great value were extant, he refrains from citing them if they do not satisfy his taste. During the second Punic war a hymn to Juno had been written by Livius Andronicus for a propitiatory festival. It was one of the most celebrated doc.u.ments of early Latin; but he refuses to insert it, on the ground that to the taste of his own day it seemed rude and harsh. Yet as a historian, and not a collector of materials for history, he may plead the privilege of the artist. The modern compromise by which doc.u.ments are cited in notes without being inserted in the text of histories had not then been invented; and notes, even when as in the case of Gibbon's they have a substantive value as literature, are an adjunct to the history itself, rather than any essential part of it. A more serious charge is, that when he had trustworthy authorities to follow, he did not appreciate their value. In his account of the Macedonian wars, he often follows Polybius all but word for word, but apparently without realising the Greek historian's admirable accuracy and judgment. Such appreciation only comes of knowledge; and Livy lacked the vast learning and the keen critical insight of Gibbon, to whom in many respects he has a strong affinity. His imperfect knowledge of the military art and of Roman law often confuses his narrative of campaigns and const.i.tutional struggles, and gives too much reason to the charge of negligence brought against him by that clever and impudent critic, the Emperor Caligula.

Yet, in spite of all his inaccuracies of detail, and in spite of the graver defect of insufficient historical perspective, which makes him colour the whole political development of the Roman state with the ideas of his own time, the history of Rome as narrated by Livy is essentially true and vital, because based on a large insight into the permanent qualities of human nature. The spirit in which he writes history is well ill.u.s.trated by the speeches. These, in a way, set the tone of the whole work. He does not affect in them to reproduce the substance of words actually spoken, or even to imitate the tone of the time in which the speech is laid. He uses them as a vivid and dramatic method of portraying character and motive. The method, in its brilliance and its truth to permanent facts, is like that of Shakespeare's _Coriola.n.u.s_. Such truth, according to the celebrated aphorism in Aristotle's _Poetics_, is the truth of poetry rather than of history: and the history of Livy, in this, as in his opulent and coloured diction, has some affinity to poetry. Yet, when such insight into motive and such vivid creative imagination are based on really large knowledge and perfect sincerity, a higher historical truth may be reached than by the most laborious acc.u.mulation of doc.u.ments and sifting of evidence.

Livy's humane and romantic temper prevented him from being a political partisan, even if political partisans.h.i.+p had been consistent with the view he took of his own art. In common with most educated Romans of his time, he idealised the earlier Republic, and spoke of his own age as fatally degenerate. But this is a tendency common to writers of all periods. He frequently pauses to deplore the loss of the ancient qualities by which Rome had grown great--simplicity, equity, piety, orderliness. In his remarkable preface he speaks of himself as turning to historical study in order to withdraw his mind from the evils of his own age, and the spectacle of an empire tottering to the fall under the weight of its own greatness and the vices of its citizens. "Into no State," he continues, "were greed and luxury so long in entering; in these late days avarice has grown with wealth, and the frantic pursuit of pleasure leads fast towards a collapse of the whole social fabric; in our ever-accelerating downward course we have already reached a point where our vices and their remedies are alike intolerable." But his idealisation of earlier ages was that of the romantic student rather than the reactionary politician. He is always on the side of order, moderation, conciliation; there was nothing politically dangerous to the imperial government in his mild republicanism. He shrinks instinctively from violence wherever he meets it, whether on the side of the populace or of the governing cla.s.s; he cannot conceive why people should not be reasonable, and live in peace under a moderate and settled government.

This was the temper which was welcome at court, even in men of Pompeian sympathies.

So, too, Livy's att.i.tude towards the established religion and towards the beliefs of former times has the same sentimental tinge. The moral reform attempted by Augustus had gone hand in hand with an elaborate revival and amplification of religious ceremony. Outward conformity at least was required of all citizens. _Expedit esse deos, et ut expedit esse putemus;_ "the existence of the G.o.ds is a matter of public policy, and we must believe it accordingly," Ovid had said, in the most daring and cynical of his poems. The old a.s.sociations, the antiquarian charm, that lingered round this faded ancestral belief, appealed strongly to the romantic patriotism of the historian. His own religion was a sort of mild fatalism; he pauses now and then to draw rather commonplace reflections on the blindness of men destined to misfortune, or the helplessness of human wisdom and foresight against destiny. But at the same time he gravely chronicles miracles and portents, not so much from any belief in their truth as because they are part of the story. The fact that they had ceased to be regarded seriously in his own time, and were accordingly in a great measure ceasing to happen, he laments as one among many declensions from older and purer fas.h.i.+ons.

As a master of style, Livy is in the first rank of historians. He marks the highest point which the enlarged and enriched prose of the Augustan age reached just before it began to fall into decadence. It is no longer the famous _urba.n.u.s sermo_ of the later Republic, the pure and somewhat austere language of a governing cla.s.s. The influence of Virgil is already traceable in Livy, in actual phrases whose use had hitherto been confined to poetry, and also in a certain warmth of colouring unknown to earlier prose. To Augustan purists this relaxation of the language seemed provincial and unworthy of the severe tradition of the best Latin; and it was this probably, rather than any definite novelties in grammar or vocabulary, that made Asinius Pollio accuse Livy of "Patavinity." But in the hands of Livy the new style, by its increased volume and flexibility, is as admirably suited to a work of great length and scope as the older had been for the purposes of Caesar or Sall.u.s.t. It is drawn, so to speak, with a larger pattern; and the added richness of tone enables him to advance without flagging through the long and intricate narrative where a simpler diction must necessarily have grown monotonous, as one more florid would be cloying. In the earlier books we seem to find the manner still a little uncertain and tentative, and a little trammelled by the traditional manner of the older annalists; as he proceeds in his work he falls into his stride, and advances with a movement as certain as that of Gibbon, and claimed by Roman critics as comparable in ease and grace to that of Herodotus. The periodic structure of Latin prose which had been developed by Cicero is carried by him to an even greater complexity, and used with a greater daring and freedom; a sort of fine carelessness in detail enhancing the large and continuous excellence of his broad effect.

Even where he copies Polybius most closely he invariably puts life and grace into his c.u.mbrous Greek. For the facts of the war with Hannibal we can rely more safely on the latter; but it is in the picture of Livy that we see it live before us. His imagination never fails to kindle at great actions; it is he, more than any other author, who has impressed the great soldiers and statesmen of the Republic on the imagination of the world.

_Quin Decios Drusosque procul, saevumque securi Aspice Torquatum, et referentem signa Camilium....

Quis te, magne Cato, tacitum, aut te, Cosse, relinquat?

Quis Gracchi genus, aut geminos, duo fulmina belli.

Scipiadas, cladem Libyae, parvoque potentem Fabricium, vel te sulco, Serrane, serentem?--

his whole work is a splendid expansion of that vision of Rome which pa.s.ses before the eyes of Aeneas in the Fortunate Fields of the underworld. In the description of great events, no less than of great characters and actions, he rises and kindles with his subject. His eye for dramatic effect is extraordinary. The picture of the siege and storming of Saguntum, with which he opens the stately narrative of the war between Rome and Hannibal, is an instance of his instinctive skill; together with the masterly sketch of the character of Hannibal and the description of the scene in the Carthaginian senate-house at the reception of the Roman amba.s.sadors, it forms a complete prelude to the whole drama of the war. His great battle-pieces, too, in spite of his imperfect grasp of military science, are admirable as works of art. Among others may be specially instanced, as masterpieces of execution, the account of the victory over Antiochus at Magnesia in the thirty-seventh book, and, still more, that in the forty-fourth of the fiercely contested battle of Pydna, the desperate heroism of the Pelignian cohort, and the final and terrible destruction of the Macedonian phalanx.

Yet, with all his admiration for great men and deeds, what most of all kindles Livy's imagination and sustains his enthusiasm is a subject larger, and to him hardly more abstract, the Roman Commonwealth itself, almost personified as a continuous living force. This is almost the only matter in which patriotism leads him to marked partiality. The epithet "Roman" signifies to him all that is high and n.o.ble. That Rome can do no wrong is a sort of article of faith with him, and he has always a tendency to do less than justice to her enemies. The two qualities of eloquence and candour are justly ascribed to him by Tacitus, but from the latter some deduction must be made when he is dealing with foreign relations and external diplomacy. Without any intention to falsify history, he is sometimes completely carried away by his romantic enthusiasm for Roman statesmans.h.i.+p.

This canonisation of Rome is Livy's largest and most abiding achievement.

The elder Seneca, one of his ablest literary contemporaries, observes, in a fine pa.s.sage, that when historians reach in their narrative the death of some great man, they give a summing-up of his whole life as though it were an eulogy p.r.o.nounced over his grave. Livy, he adds, the most candid of all historians in his appreciation of genius, does this with unusual grace and sympathy. The remark may bear a wider scope; for the whole of his work is animated by a similar spirit towards the idealised Commonwealth, to the story of whose life he devoted his splendid literary gifts. As the t.i.tle of _Gesta Populi Romani_ was given to the _Aeneid_ on its appearance, so the _Historiae ab Urbe Condita_ might be called, with no less truth, a funeral eulogy--_consummatio totius vitae et quasi funebris laudatio_--delivered, by the most loving and most eloquent of her children, over the grave of the great Republic.

VI.

THE LESSER AUGUSTANS.

The impulse given to Latin literature by the great poets and prose writers of the first century before Christ ebbed slowly away. The end of the so-called Golden Age may be conveniently fixed in the year which saw the death of Livy and Ovid; but the smaller literature of the period suffered no violent breach of continuity, and one can hardly name any definite date at which the Silver Age begins. Until the appearance of a new school of writers in the reign of Nero, the history of Roman literature is a continuation of the Augustan tradition. But it is continued by feeble hands, and dwindles away more and more under several unfavourable influences. Among these influences may be specially noted the growing despotism of the Empire, which had already become grave in the later years of Augustus, and under his successors reached a point which made free writing, like free speech, impossible; the perpetually increasing importance of the schools of declamation, which forced a fas.h.i.+on of overstrained and unnatural rhetoric on both prose and verse; and the paralysing effect of the great Augustan writers themselves, which led poetry at all events to lose itself in imitations of imitations within an arbitrary and rigid limit of subjects and methods.

In mere amount of production, however, literature remained active during the first half-century of the Christian era. That far the greater part of it has perished is probably a matter for congratulation rather than regret; even of what survives there is a good deal that we could well do without, and such of it as is valuable is so rather from incidental than essential reasons. _Scribimus indocti doctique poemata pa.s.sim_, Horace had written in half-humorous bitterness; the crowd of names that flit like autumn leaves through the pages of Ovid represent probably but a small part of the immense production. Among the works of Ovid himself were included at various times poems by other contemporary hands--some, like the _Consolatio ad Liviam_, and the elegy on the _Nut-tree_, without any author's name; others of known authors.h.i.+p, like the continuation by Sabinus of Ovid's _Heroides_, in the form of replies addressed to the heroines by their lovers. Heroic poetry, too, both on mythological and historical subjects, continued to be largely written; but few of the writers are more than names. Cornelius Severus, author of an epic on the civil wars, gave in his earlier work promise of great excellence, which was but imperfectly fulfilled. The fine and stately pa.s.sage on the death of Cicero, quoted by Seneca, fully reaches the higher level of post- Virgilian style. Two other poets of considerable note at the time, but soon forgotten after their death, were Albinova.n.u.s Pedo and Rabirius. The former, besides a _Theseid_, wrote a narrative and descriptive poem in the epic manner, on the northern campaigns of Germanicus, the latter was the author of an epic on the conflict with Antonius, which was kept alive for a short time by court favour; the stupid and amiable aide-de-camp of Tiberius, Velleius Paterculus, no doubt repeating what he heard in official circles, speaks of him and Virgil as the two most eminent poets of the age! Tiberius himself, though he chiefly wrote in Greek, occasionally turned off a copy of Latin verses; and his nephew Germanicus, a man of much learning and culture, composed a Latin version of the famous _Phaenomena_ of Aratus, which shows uncommon skill and talent. Another, and a more important work of the same type, but with more original power, and less a mere adaptation of Greek originals, is the _Astronomica,_ ascribed on doubtful ma.n.u.script evidence to an otherwise unknown Gaius or Marcus Manilius. This poem, from the allusions in it to the destruction of the three legions under Varus, and the retirement of Tiberius in Rhodes, must have been begun in the later years of Augustus, though probably not completed till after his death. As extant it consists of five books, the last being incomplete; the full plan seems to have included a sixth, and would have extended the work to about five thousand lines, or two-thirds of the length of the _De Rerum Natura_. Next to the poem of Lucretius it is, therefore, much the largest in bulk of extant Latin didactic poems. The oblivion into which it has fallen is, perhaps, a little hard if one considers how much Latin poetry of no greater merit continues to have a certain reputation, and even now and then to be read. The author is not a great poet; but he is a writer of real power both in thought and style. The versification of his _Astronomica_ shows a high mastery of technique. The matter is often prosaically handled, and often seeks relief from prosaic handling in ill- judged flights of rhetoric; but throughout we feel a strong and original mind, with a large power over lucid and forcible expression. In the prologue to the third book he rejects for himself the common material for hexameter poems, subjects from the Greek heroic cycle, or from Roman history. His total want of narrative gift, as shown by the languor and flatness of the elaborate episode in which he attempts to tell the story of Perseus and Andromeda, would have been sufficient reason for this decision; but he justifies it, in lines of much grace and feeling, as due to his desire to take a line of his own, and make a fresh if a small conquest for Latin poetry.

_Omnis ad accessus Heliconis semita trita est, Et iam confusi manant de fonitibus amnes Nec capiunt haustum, turbamque ad nota ruentem: Integra quaeramus rorantes prata per herbas Undamque occultis meditantem murmur in antris._

In a pa.s.sage of n.o.bler and more sincere feeling, he breaks off his catalogue of the signs of the Zodiac to vindicate the arduous study of abstract science--

_"Multum" inquis "tenuemque iubes me ferre laborem Cernere c.u.m facili lucem ratione viderer."

Quod quaeris, Deus est. Coneris scandere caelum Fataque fatali genitus cognoscere lege Et transire tuum pectus, mundoque potiri: Pro pretio labor est, nec sunt immunia tanta._

Wherever one found this language used, in prose or verse, it would be memorable. The thought is not a mere text of the schools; it is strongly and finely conceived, and put in a form that antic.i.p.ates the ardent and lofty manner of Lucan, without his perpetual overstrain of expression.

Other pa.s.sages, showing the same mental force, occur in the _Astronomica_; one might instance the fine pa.s.sage on the power of the human eye to take in, within its tiny compa.s.s, the whole immensity of the heavens; or another, suggested by the mention of the constellation Argo, on the influence of sea-power on history, where the inevitable and well- worn instances of Salamis and Actium receive a fresh life from the citation of the destruction of the Athenian fleet in the bay of Syracuse, and the great naval battles of the first Punic war. Or again, the lines with which he opens the fourth book, weakened as their effect is by what follows them, a tedious enumeration of events showing the power of destiny over human fortunes, are worthy of a great poet:--

_Quid tam sollicitis vitam consumimus annis, Torquemurque metu caecaque cupidine rerum?

Acternisque senes curis, dum quaerimus aevum Perdimus, et nullo votorum fine beati Victuros agimus semper, nec vivimus unquam?_

These pa.s.sages have been cited from the _Astronomica_ because, to all but a few professional students of Latin, the poem is practically unknown.

The only other poet who survives from the reign of Tiberius is in a very different position, being so well known and so slight in literary quality as to make any quotations superfluous. Phaedrus, a Thracian freedman belonging to the household of Augustus, published at this time the well- known collection of _Fables_ which, like the lyrics of the pseudo- Anacreon, have obtained from their use as a school-book a circulation much out of proportion to their merit. Their chief interest is as the last survival of the _urba.n.u.s sermo_ in Latin poetry. They are written in iambic senarii, in the fluent and studiously simple Latin of an earlier period, not without occasional vulgarisms, but with a total absence of the turgid rhetoric which was coming into fas.h.i.+on. The _Fables_ are the last utterance made by the speech of Terence: it is singular that this intimately Roman style should have begun and ended with two authors of servile birth and foreign blood. But the patronage of literature was now pa.s.sing out of the hands of statesmen. Terence had moved in the circle of the younger Scipio; one book of the _Fables_ of Phaedrus is dedicated to Eutychus, the famous chariot-driver of the Greens in the reign of Caligula. It was not long before Phaedrus was in use as a school-book; but his volume was apparently regarded as hardly coming within the province of serious literature. It is ignored by Seneca and not mentioned by Quintilian. But we must remind ourselves that the most celebrated works, whether in prose or verse, do not of necessity have the widest circulation or the largest influence. Among the poems produced in the first ten years of this century the _Original Poems_ of Jane and Ann Taylor are hardly if at all mentioned in handbooks of English literature; but to thousands of readers they were more familiar than the contemporary verse of Wordsworth or Coleridge or even of Scott. In their terse and pure English, the language which is transmitted from one generation to another through the continuous tradition of the nursery, they may remind us of the _Fables_ of Phaedrus.

The collection, as it has reached us, consists of nearly a hundred pieces. Of these three-fourths are fables proper; being not so much translations from the Greek of Aesop as versions of the traditional stories, written and unwritten, which were the common inheritance of the Aryan peoples. Mixed up with these are a number of stories which are not strictly fables; five of them are about Aesop himself, and there are also stories told of Simonides, Socrates, and Menander. Two are from the history of his own time, one relating a grim jest of the Emperor Tiberius, and the other a domestic tragedy which had been for a while the talk of the town in the previous reign. There are also, besides the prologues and epilogues of the several books, a few pieces in which Phaedrus speaks in his own person,[10] defending himself against detractors with an acrid tone which recalls the Terentian prologues. The body of fables current in the Middle Ages is considered by the most recent investigators to descend from the collection of Phaedrus, though probably supplemented from the Greek collection independently formed by Babrius about the same period.

Though Livy is the single great historian of the Augustan age, there was throughout this period a profuse production of memoirs and commentaries, as well as of regular histories. Augustus wrote thirteen books of memoirs of his own life down to the pacification of the Empire at the close of the Cantabrian war. These are lost; but the _Index Rerum a se Gestarum,_ a brief epitome of his career, which he composed as a sort of epitaph on himself, is extant. This doc.u.ment was engraved on plates of bronze affixed to the imperial mausoleum by the Tiber, and copies of it were inscribed on the various temples dedicated to him in many provincial cities after his death. It is one of these copies, engraved on the vestibule wall of the temple of Augustus and Rome at Ancyra in Galatia, which still exists with inconsiderable gaps. His two princ.i.p.al ministers, Maecenas and Agrippa, also composed memoirs. The most important work of the latter hardly, however, falls within the province of literature; it was a commentary on the great geographical survey of the Empire carried out under his supervision.

Gaius Asinius Pollio, already mentioned as a critic and tragedian, was also the author of the most important historical work of the Augustan age after Livy's. This was a _History of the Civil Wars,_ in seventeen books, from the formation of the first triumvirate in 60 B.C. to the battle of Philippi. Though Pollio was a practised rhetorician, his narrative style was simple and austere. The fine ode addressed to him by Horace during the composition of this history seems to hint that in Horace's opinion-- or perhaps, rather, in that of Horace's masters--Pollio would find a truer field for his great literary ability in tragedy. But apart from its artistic quality, the work of Pollio was of the utmost value as giving the view held of the Civil wars by a trained administrator of the highest rank. It was one of the main sources used by Appian and Plutarch, and its almost total loss is matter of deep regret.

An author of less eminence, and belonging rather to the cla.s.s of encyclopedists than of historians, is Pompeius Trogus, the descendant of a family of Narbonese Gaul, which had for two generations enjoyed the Roman citizens.h.i.+p. Besides works on zoology and botany, translated or adapted from the Greek of Aristotle and Theophrastus, Trogus wrote an important _History of the World_, exclusive of the Roman Empire, which served as, and may have been designed to be, a complement to that of Livy. The original work, which extended to forty-four books, is not extant; but an abridgment, which was executed in the age of the Antonines by one Marcus Junia.n.u.s Justinus, and has fortunately escaped the fate which overtook the abridgment of Livy made about the same time, preserves the main outlines and much of the actual form of the original. Justin, whose individual talent was but small, had the good sense to leave the diction of his original as far as possible unaltered. The pure and vivacious style, and the evident care and research which Trogus himself, or the Greek historians whom he follows, had bestowed on the material, make the work one of very considerable value. Its t.i.tle, _Historiae Philippicae_, is borrowed from that of a history conceived on a somewhat similar plan by Theopompus, the pupil of Isocrates, in or after the reign of Alexander the Great; and it followed Theopompus in making the Macedonian Empire the core round which the history of the various countries included in or bordering upon it was arranged.

Gaius Velleius Paterculus, a Roman officer, who after pa.s.sing with credit through high military appointments, entered the general administrative service of the Empire, and rose to the praetors.h.i.+p, wrote, in the reign of Tiberius, an abridgment of Roman history in two books, which hardly rises beyond the mark of the military man who dabbles in letters. The pretentiousness of his style is partly due to the declining taste of the period, partly to an idea of his own that he could write in the manner of Sall.u.s.t. It alternates between a sort of laboured sprightliness and a careless conversational manner full of endless parentheses. Yet Velleius had two real merits; the eye of the trained soldier for character, and an unaffected, if not a very intelligent, interest in literature. Where he approaches his own times, his servile att.i.tude towards all the members of the imperial family, and towards Seja.n.u.s, who was still first minister to Tiberius when the book was published, makes him almost valueless as a historian; but in the earlier periods his observations are often just and pointed; and he seems to have been almost the first historian who included as an essential part of his work some account of the more eminent writers of his country. A still lower level of aim and attainment is shown in another work of the same date as that of Velleius, the nine books of historical anecdotes, _Facta et Dicta Memorabilia,_ by Valerius Maximus, whose turgid and involved style is not redeemed by any originality of thought or treatment.

The study of archaeology, both on its linguistic and material sides, was carried on in the Augustan age with great vigour, though no single name is comparable to that of Varro for extent and variety of research. One of the most eminent and copious writers on these subjects was Gaius Julius Hyginus, a Spanish freed man of Augustus, who made him princ.i.p.al keeper of the Palatine library. He was a pupil of the most learned Greek grammarian of the age, Cornelius Alexander Polyhistor, and an intimate acquaintance of Ovid. Of his voluminous works on geography, history, astrology, agriculture, and poetry, all are lost but two treatises on mythology, which in their present form are of a much later date, and are at best only abridged and corrupted versions, if (as many modern critics are inclined to think) they are not wholly the work of some author of the second or third century. Hyginus was also one of the earliest commentators on Virgil; he possessed among his treasures a ma.n.u.script of the _Georgics,_ which came from Virgil's own house, though it was not actually written by his hand; and many of his annotations and criticisms on the _Aeneid_ are preserved by Aulus Gellius and later commentators. A little later, in the reigns of Tiberius and Claudius, Virgilian criticism was carried on by Quintus Remmius Palaemon of Vicenza, the most fas.h.i.+onable teacher in the capital, and the author of a famous Latin grammar on which all subsequent ones were more or less based. Perhaps the most distinguished of Augustan scholars was another equally celebrated teacher, Marcus Verrius Flaccus, who was chosen by Augustus as tutor for his two grandsons, and thenceforward held his school in the imperial residence on the Palatine. His lexicon, ent.i.tled _De Verborum Significatu_, was a rich treasury of antiquarian research: such parts of it as survive in the abridgments made from it in the second and eighth centuries, by s.e.xtus Pompeius Festus and Paulus Diaconus, are still among our most valuable sources for the study of early Latin language and inst.i.tutions. The more practical side of science in the same period was ably represented by Aulus Cornelius Celsus, the compiler of an encyclopedia which included comprehensive treatises not only on oratory, jurisprudence, and philosophy, but on the arts of war, agriculture, and medicine. The eight books dealing with this last subject are the only part of the work that has been preserved. This treatise, which is written in a pure, simple, and elegant Latin, became a standard work. It was one of the earliest books printed in the fifteenth century, and remained a text-book for medical students till within living memory. Medical science had then reached, in the hands of its leading professors, a greater perfection than it regained till the eighteenth century. Celsus, though not, so far as is known, the author of any important discovery or improvement, had fully mastered a system which even then was highly complicated, and takes rank by his extensive and accurate knowledge, as well as by his rare literary skill, with the highest names in his profession. That with his eminent medical acquirement he should have been able to deal adequately with so many other subjects as well, has long been a subject of perplexity. The cold censure of Quintilian, who refers to him slightly as "a man of moderate ability," may be princ.i.p.ally aimed at the treatise on rhetoric, which formed a section of his encyclopedia.

Columella, writing in the next age, speaks of him as one of the two leading authorities on agriculture; and he is also quoted as an authority of some value on military tactics. Yet we cannot suppose that the encyclopedist, however adequate his treatment of one or even more subjects, would not lay himself open in others to the censure of the specialist. It seems most reasonable to suppose that Celsus was one of a cla.s.s which is not, after all, very uncommon--doctors of eminent knowledge and skill in their own art, who at the same time are men of wide culture and far-ranging practical interests.

In striking contrast to Celsus as regards width of knowledge and literary skill, though no less famous in the history of his own art, is his contemporary, the celebrated architect Vitruvius Pollio. The ten books _De Architectura,_ dedicated to Augustus about the year 14 B.C., are the single important work on cla.s.sical architecture which has come down from the ancient world, and, as such, have been the object of continuous professional study from the Renaissance down to the present day. But their reputation is not due to any literary merit. Vitruvius, however able as an architect, was a man of little general knowledge, and far from handy with his pen. His style varies between immoderate diffuseness and obscure brevity; sometimes he is barely intelligible, and he never writes with grace. Where in his introductory chapters or elsewhere he ventures beyond his strict province, his writing is that of a half-educated man who has lost simplicity without acquiring skill.

Among the innumerable rhetoricians of this age one only requires formal notice, Lucius Annaeus Seneca of Cordova, the father of the famous philosopher, and the grandfather of the poet Lucan. His long life reached from before the outbreak of war between Caesar and Pompeius till after the death of Tiberius. His only extant work, a collection of themes treated in the schools of rhetoric, was written in his old age, after the fall of Seja.n.u.s, and bears witness to the amazing power of memory which he tells us himself was, when in its prime, absolutely unique. How much of his life was spent at Rome is uncertain. As a young man he had heard all the greatest orators of the time except Cicero; and up to the end of his life he could repeat word for word and without effort whole pa.s.sages, if not whole speeches, to which he had listened many years before. His ten books of _Controversiae_ are only extant in a mutilated form, which comprises thirty-five out of seventy-four themes; to these is prefixed a single book of _Suasoriae_, which is also imperfect. The work is a mine of information for the history of rhetoric under Augustus and Tiberius, and incidentally includes many interesting quotations, anecdotes, and criticisms. But we feel in reading it that we have pa.s.sed definitely away from the Golden Age. Yet once more "they have forgotten to speak the Latin tongue at Rome." The Latinity of the later Empire is as distinct from that of the Augustan age as this last is from the Latinity of the Republic. Seneca, it is true, was not an Italian by birth; but it is just this influx of the provinces into literature, which went on under the early Empire with continually accelerating force, that determined what type the new Latinity should take. Gaul, Spain, and Africa are henceforth side by side with Italy, and Italy herself sinks towards the level of a province. Within thirty years of the death of the elder Seneca "the fatal secret of empire, that Emperors could be made elsewhere than at Rome,"

was discovered by the Spanish and German legions; of hardly less moment was the other discovery, that Latin could be written in another than the Roman manner. In literature no less than in politics the discovery meant the final breaking up of the old world, and the slow birth of a new one through alternate torpors and agonies. It might already have been said of Rome, in the words of a poet of four hundred years later, that she had made a city of what had been a world. But in this absorption of the world into a single citizens.h.i.+p, the city itself was ceasing to be a world of its own; and with the self-centred _urbs_ pa.s.sed away the _urba.n.u.s sermo,_ that austere and n.o.ble language which was the finest flower of her civilisation.

III

THE EMPIRE.

I

THE ROME OF NERO: SENECA, LUCAN, PETRONIUS

The later years of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, while they brought about the complete transformation of the government into an absolute monarchy, also laid the foundations for that reign of the philosophers which had been dreamed of by Plato, and which has never been so nearly realised as it was in Rome during the second century after Christ. The Stoical philosophy, pa.s.sing beyond the limits of the schools to become at once a religious creed and a practical code of morals for everyday use, penetrated deeply into the life of Rome. At first a.s.sociated with the aristocratic opposition to the imperial government, it pa.s.sed through a period of persecution which only strengthened and consolidated its growth. The final struggle took place under Domitian, whose edict of the year 94, expelling all philosophers from Rome, was followed two years afterwards by his a.s.sa.s.sination and the establishment, for upwards of eighty years, of a government deeply imbued with the principles of Stoicism.

Of the men who set this revolution in motion by their writings, the earliest and the most distinguished was Lucius Annaeus Seneca, the son of the rhetorician. Though only of the second rank as a cla.s.sic, he is a figure of very great importance in the history of human thought from the work he did in the exposition of the new creed. As a practical exponent of morals, he stands, with Plutarch, at the head of all Greek and Roman writers.