Latin Literature Part 8

The life of Seneca was one of singularly dramatic contrasts and vicissitudes. He was born in the year 4 B.C., at Cordova, where, at a somewhat advanced age, his father had married Helvia, a lady of high birth, and brought up in the strictest family traditions. Through the influence of his mother's family (her sister had married Vitrasius Pollio, who for sixteen years was viceroy of Egypt), the way was easy to him for advancement in the public service. But delicate health, which continued throughout his life, kept him as a young man from taking more than a nominal share in administrative work. He pa.s.sed into the senate through the quaestors.h.i.+p, and became a well-known figure at court during the reign of Caligula. On the accession of Claudius, he was banished to Corsica at the instance of the Empress Messalina, on the charge of being the favoured lover of Julia Livilla, Caligula's youngest sister. Whether the scandal which connected his name with hers, or with that of her sister Agrippina, had any other foundation than the prurient gossip which raged round all the members of the imperial family, may well be doubted; but when Agrippina married Claudius, after the downfall and execution of Messalina seven years later, she recalled him from exile, obtained his nomination to the quaestors.h.i.+p, and appointed him tutor to her son Domitius Nero, then a boy of ten. The influence gained by Seneca, an accomplished courtier and a clever man of the world, as well as a brilliant scholar, over his young pupil was for a long time almost unbounded; and when Nero became Emperor at the age of seventeen, Seneca, in conjunction with his close friend, Afranius Burrus, commander of the imperial guards, became practically the administrator of the Empire. His philosophy was not one which rejected wealth or power; a fortune of three million pounds may have been ama.s.sed without absolute dishonesty, or even forced upon him, as he pleads himself, by the lavish generosity of his pupil; but there can be no doubt that in indulging the weaknesses and pa.s.sions of Nero, Seneca went far beyond the limits, not only of honour, but of ordinary prudence. The mild and enlightened administration of the earlier years of the new reign, the famous _quinquennium Neronis_, which was looked back to afterwards as a sort of brief golden age, may indeed be ascribed largely to Seneca's influence; but this influence was based on an excessive indulgence of Nero's caprices, which soon worked out its own punishment. His consent to the murder of Agrippina was the death-blow to his influence for good, or to any self-respect that he may till then have retained; the death of Burrus left him without support; and, by retiring into private life and formally offering to make over his whole fortune to the Emperor, he did not long delay his fate. In the year 65, on the pretext of complicity in the conspiracy of Piso, he was commanded to commit suicide, and obeyed with that strange mixture of helplessness and heroism with which the orders of the master of the world were then accepted as a sort of inevitable law of nature.

The philosophical writings of Seneca were extremely voluminous; and though a large number of them are lost, he is still one of the bulkiest of ancient authors. They fall into three main groups: formal treatises on ethics; moral letters (_epistolae morales_), dealing in a less continuous way with the same general range of subjects; and writings on natural philosophy, from the point of view of the Stoical system. The whole of these are, however, animated by the same spirit; to the Stoical philosophy, physics were merely a branch of ethics, and a study to be pursued for the sake of moral edification, not of reaching truth by accurate observation or research. The discussions of natural phenomena are mere texts for religious meditations; and though the eight books of _Naturales Quaestiones_ were used as a text-book of physical science in the Middle Ages, they are totally without any scientific value. So, too, the twenty books of moral letters, nominally addressed to Lucilius, the procurator of Sicily, merely represent a slight variation of method from the more formal treatises, _On Anger, On Clemency, On Consolation, On Peace of Mind, On the Shortness of Life, On Giving and Receiving Favours_, which are the main substance of Seneca's writings.

As a moral writer, Seneca stands deservedly high. Though infected with the rhetorical vices of the age, his treatises are full of striking and often gorgeous eloquence, and in their combination of high thought with deep feeling, have rarely, if at all, been surpa.s.sed. The rhetorical manner was so essentially part of Seneca's nature, that the warm colouring and perpetual mannerism of his language does not imply any insincerity or want of earnestness. In spite of the laboured style, there is no failure either in lucidity or in force, and even where the rhetoric is most profuse, it seldom is without a solid basis of thought. "It would not be easy," says a modern scholar, who was himself averse to all ornament of diction, and deeply penetrated with the spirit of Stoicism, "to name any modern writer who has treated on morality and has said so much that is practically good and true, or has treated the matter in so attractive a way."

In the moral writings we have the picture of Seneca the philosopher; Seneca the courtier is less attractively presented in the curious pamphlet called the _Apocolocyntosis_, a silly and spiteful attack on the memory of the Emperor Claudius, written to make the laughter of an afternoon at the court of Nero. The gross bad taste of this satire is hardly relieved by any great wit in the treatment, and the reputation of the author would stand higher if it had not survived the occasion for which it was written.

Among Seneca's extant works are also included nine tragedies, composed in imitation of the Greek, upon the well-worn subjects of the epic cycle. At what period of his life they were written cannot be ascertained. As a rule, only young authors had courage enough to attempt the discredited task of flogging this dead horse; but it is not improbable that these dramas were written by Seneca in mature life, in deference to his imperial pupil's craze for the stage. All the rhetorical vices of his prose are here exaggerated. The tragedies are totally without dramatic life, consisting merely of a series of declamatory speeches, in correct but monotonous versification, interspersed with choruses, which only differ from the speeches by being written in lyric metres instead of the iambic. To say that the tragedies are without merit would be an overstatement, for Seneca, though no poet, remained even in his poetry an extremely able man of letters and an accomplished rhetorician. His declamation comes in the same tones from all his puppets; but it is often grandiose, and sometimes really fine. The lines with which the curtain falls in his _Medea_ remind one, by their startling audacity, of Victor Hugo in his most t.i.tanic vein. As the only extant Latin tragedies, these pieces had a great effect upon the early drama of the sixteenth century in England and elsewhere. In the well-known verses prefixed to the first folio Shakespeare, Jonson calls on "him of Cordova dead," in the same breath with Aeschylus and Euripides; and long after the Jacobean period the false tradition remained which, by putting these lifeless copies on the same footing as their great originals, perplexed and stultified literary criticism, much as the criticism of cla.s.sical art was confused by an age which drew no distinction between late Graeco-Roman sculpture and the finest work of Praxiteles or Pheidias.

By far the most brilliant poet of the Neronian age was Seneca's nephew, Marcus Annaeus Luca.n.u.s. His father, Annaeus Mela, the younger brother of the philosopher, is known chiefly through his more distinguished son; an interesting but puzzling notice in a life of Lucan speaks of him as famous at Rome "from his pursuit of the quiet life." This may imply refusal of some great office when his elder brother was practically ruler of the Empire; whatever stirrings of ambition he suppressed broke out with acc.u.mulated force in his son. Lucan's short life was one of feverish activity. At twenty-one he made his first public sensation by the recitation, in the theatre of Pompeius, of a panegyric on Nero, who had already murdered his own mother, but had not yet broken with the poet's uncle. Soon afterwards, he was advanced to the quaestors.h.i.+p, and a seat in the college of Augurs: but his brilliant poetical reputation seems to have excited the jealousy of the artist-emperor; a violent quarrel broke out between them, and Lucan, already in theory an ardent republican, became one of the princ.i.p.al movers in the conspiracy of Piso. The plan discussed among the conspirators of a.s.sa.s.sinating Nero while in the act of singing on the stage would, no doubt, commend itself specially to the young poet whom the Emperor had forbidden to recite in public. When the conspiracy was detected, Lucan's fort.i.tude soon gave way; he betrayed one accomplice after another, one of the first names he surrendered being that of his mother, Acilia. The promise of pardon, under which his confessions were obtained, was not kept after they were completed; and the execution of Lucan, at the age of twenty-six, while it cut short a remarkable poetical career, rid the world of a very poor creature. Yet the final spasm of courage with which he died, declaiming a pa.s.sage from his own epic, has gained him, in the n.o.blest of English elegies, a place in the same verse with Sidney and Chatterton.

But the _Pharsalia_, the only large work which Lucan left complete, or all but complete, among a number of essays in different styles of poetry, and the only work of his which has been preserved, is a poem which, in spite of its immaturity and bad taste, compels admiration by its elevation of thought and sustained brilliance of execution. Pure rhetoric has, perhaps, never come quite so near being poetry; and if the perpetual overstraining of both thought and expression inevitably ends by fatiguing the reader, there are at least few instances of a large work throughout which so lofty and grandiose a style is carried with such elasticity and force. The _Pharsalia_ is full of quotations, and this itself is no small praise. Lines like _Nil actum credens dum quid superesset agendum,_ or _Nec sibi, sed toti gentium se credere mundo_, or _Iupiter est quodcunque vides quocunque moveris,_ or the sad and n.o.ble

_Victurosque dei celant, ut vivere durent, Felix esse mori--_

are as well known and have sunk as deep as the great lines of Virgil himself; and not only in single lines, but in longer pa.s.sages of lofty thought or sustained imagination, as in his description of the dream of Pompeius, at the beginning of the seventh book; or the pa.s.sage on the extension of the Roman Empire, later in the same book; or the magnificent speech of Cato when he refuses to seek counsel of the oracle of Ammon, Lucan sometimes touches a point where he challenges comparison with his master. In these pa.s.sages, without any delicacy of modulation, with a limited range of rhythm, his verse has a metallic clangour that stirs the blood like a trumpet-note. But his range of ideas is as limited as that of his rhythms; and the thought is not sustained by any basis of character. His fierce republicanism sits side by side with flattery of the reigning Emperor more gross and servile than had till then been known at Rome. He makes no attempt to realise his persons or to grasp the significance of events. Caesar, Pompeius, Cato himself--the hero of the epic--are not human beings, but mere lay-figures round which he drapes his gorgeous rhetoric. The Civil wars are alternately regarded as the death-agony of freedom and as the destined channel through which the world was led to the blessings of an uncontrolled despotism. His ideas are borrowed indifferently from the Epicurean and Stoical philosophies according to the convenience of the moment. Great events and actions do not kindle in him any imaginative sympathy; they are greedily seized as opportunities for more and more immoderate flights of extravagant embellishment. He "prates of mountains;" his "phrase conjures the wandering stars, and makes them stand like wonder-wounded hearers;"

freedom, virtue, fate, the sea and the sun, G.o.ds and men before whom the G.o.ds themselves stand abased, hurtle through the poem in a confused thunder of sonorous phrase. Such brilliance, in the exact manner that was then most admired, dazzled his contemporaries and retained a permanent influence over later poets. Statius, himself an author of far higher poetical gifts, speaks of him in terms of almost extravagant admiration; with a more balanced judgment Quintilian sums him up in words which may be taken as on the whole the final criticism adopted by the world; _ardens et concitatus et sententiis clarissimus, et, ut dicam quod sentio, magis oratoribus quam poetis imitandus_.

One of Lucan's intimate friends was a young man of high family, Aulus Persius Flaccus of Volaterrae in Etruria, a near relation of the celebrated Arria, wife of Paetus. Through his kinswoman he was early introduced to the circle of earnest thinkers and moralists among whom the higher life was kept up at Rome amid the corruption of the Neronian age.

The gentle and delicate boy won the hearts of all who knew him. When he died, at the age of twenty-eight, a little book of six satires, which he had written with much effort and at long intervals, was retouched by his master, the Stoic philosopher Cornutus, and published by another friend, Caesius Ba.s.sus, himself a poet of some reputation. Several other writings which Persius left were destroyed by the advice of Cornutus. The six pieces--only between six and seven hundred lines in all--were at once recognised as showing a refined and uncommon literary gift. Persius, we are informed, had no admiration for the genius of Seneca; and, indeed, no two styles, though both are deeply artificial, could be more unlike one another. With all his moral elevation, Seneca was a courtier, an opportunist, a man of the world: Stoicism took a very different colour in the boy "of maidenly modesty," as his biographer tells us, who lived in a household of devoted female relations, and only knew the world as a remote spectator. Though within the narrow field of his own experience he shows keen observation and delicate power of portraiture, the world that he knows is mainly one of books; his perpetual imitations of Horace are not so much plagiarisms as the unaffected outcome of the mind of a very young student, to whom the _Satires_ of Horace were more familiar than the Rome of his own day. So, too, the involved and obscure style which has made him the paradise of commentators is less a deliberate literary artifice than the natural effect of looking at everything through a literary medium, and choosing phrases, not for their own fitness, but for the a.s.sociations they recall. His deep moral earnestness, his gentleness of nature, and, it must be added, his want of humour, made him a favourite author beyond the circles which were merely attracted by his verbal obscurities and the way in which he locks up his meaning in hints and allusions. His unquestionable dramatic power might, in later life, have ripened into higher achievement; as it is, he lives to us chiefly in the few beautiful pa.s.sages where he slips into being natural, and draws, with a grace and charm that are strikingly absent from the rest of his writing, the picture of his own quiet life as a student, and of the awakening of his moral and intellectual nature at the touch of philosophy.

Lucan and Persius represent the effect which Roman Stoicism had on two natures of equal sensibility but widely different quality and taste.

Among the many other professors or adherents of the Stoic school in the age of Nero, a considerable number were also authors, but the habit of writing in Greek, which a hundred years later grew to such proportions as to threaten the continued existence of Latin literature, had already taken root. The three most distinguished representatives of the stricter Stoicism, Cornutus, Quintus s.e.xtius, and Gaius Musonius Rufus (the first and last of whom were exiled by Nero), wrote on philosophy in Greek, though they seem to have written in Latin on other subjects. Musonius was, indeed, hardly more Roman than his own most ill.u.s.trious pupil, the Phrygian Epictetus. Stoicism, as they understood it, left no room for nationality, and little for writing as a fine art.

This growing prevalence of Greek at Rome combined with political reasons to check the production of important prose works. History more especially languished under the jealous censors.h.i.+p of the government. The only important historical work of the period is one of which the subject could hardly excite suspicion, the _Life of Alexander the Great_, by Quintus Curtius Rufus. The precise date is uncertain, and different theories have a.s.signed it to an earlier or later period in the reign of Augustus or of Vespasian. The subject is one which hardly any degree of dulness in the writer could make wholly uninteresting. But the clear and orderly narrative of Curtius, written in a style studied from that of Livy, but kept within simpler limits, has real merit of its own; and against his imperfect technical knowledge of strategy and tactics must be set the pains he took to consult the best Greek authorities.

Memoirs were written in the Neronian age by numbers both of men and women. Those of the Empress Agrippina were used by Tacitus; and we have references to others by the two great Roman generals of the period, Suetonius Paulinus and Domitius Corbulo. The production of scientific or technical treatises, which had been so profuse in the preceding generation, still went on. Only two of any importance are extant; one of these, the _Chorographia_ of Pomponius Mela, a geographical manual based on the best authorities and embellished with descriptions of places, peoples, and customs, is valuable as the earliest and one of the most complete systems of ancient geography which we possess; but in literary merit it falls far short of the other, the elaborate work on agriculture by Lucius Junius Moderatus Columella. Both Mela and Columella were natives of Spain, and thus belong to the Spanish school of Latin authors, which begins with the Senecas and is continued later by Martial and Quintilian. But while Mela, in his style, followed the new fas.h.i.+on, Columella, an enthusiast for antiquity and a warm admirer of the Augustan writers, reverts to the more cla.s.sical manner, which a little later became once more predominant in the writers of the Flavian period. His simple and dignified style is much above the level of a mere technical treatise. His prose, indeed, may be read with more pleasure than the verse in which, by a singular caprice, one of the twelve books is composed. In one of the most beautiful episodes of the _Georgics_, Virgil had briefly touched on the subject of gardening, and left it to be treated by others who might come after him: _praetereo atque aliis post me memoranda relinquo_. At the instance, he says, of friends, Columella attempts to fill up the gap by a fifth Georgic on horticulture. He approaches the task so modestly, and carries it out so simply, that critics are not inclined to be very severe; but he was no poet, and the book is little more than a cento from Virgil, carefully and smoothly written, and hardly if at all disfigured by pretentiousness or rhetorical conceits.

The same return upon the Virgilian manner is shown in the seven _Eclogues,_ composed in the early years of Nero's reign, by t.i.tus Calpurnius Siculus. These are remarkable rather as the only specimens for nearly three hundred years of a direct attempt to continue the manner of Virgil's _Bucolics_ than for any substantive merit of their own. That manner, indeed, is so exceptionally unmanageable that it is hardly surprising that it should have been pa.s.sed over by later poets of high original gift; but that even poets of the second and third rate should hardly ever have attempted to imitate poems which stood in the very first rank of fame bears striking testimony to Virgil's singular quality of unapproachableness. The _Eclogues_ of Calpurnius (six of them are Eclogues within the ordinary meaning, the seventh rather a brief Georgic on the care of sheep and goats, made formally a pastoral by being put into the mouth of an old shepherd sitting in the shade at midday) are, notwithstanding their almost servile imitation of Virgil, written in such graceful verse, and with so few serious lapses of taste, that they may be read with considerable pleasure. The picture, in the sixth Eclogue, of the fawn lying among the white lilies, will recall to English readers one of the prettiest fancies of Marvell; that in the second, of Flora scattering her tresses over the spring meadow, and Pomona playing under the orchard boughs, is at least a vivid pictorial presentment of a sufficiently well-worn theme. A more normal specimen of Calpurnius's manner may be instanced in the lines (v. 52-62) where one of the most beautiful pa.s.sages in the third _Georgic,_ the description of a long summer day among the Italian hill-pastures, is simply copied in different words.

The didactic poem on volcanoes, called _Aetna,_ probably written by the Lucilius to whom Seneca addressed his writings on natural philosophy, belongs to the same period and shows the same influences. Of the other minor poetical works of the time the only one which requires special mention is the tragedy of _Octavia,_ which is written in the same style as those of Seneca, and was long included among his works. Its only interest is as the single extant specimen of the _fabula praetexta,_ or drama with a Roman subject and characters. The characters here include Nero and Seneca himself. But the treatment is as conventional and declamatory as that of the mythological tragedies among which it has been preserved, and the result, if possible, even flatter and more tedious.

One other work of extreme and unique interest survives from the reign of Nero, the fragments of a novel by Petronius Arbiter, one of the Emperor's intimate circle in the excesses of his later years. In the year 66 he fell a victim to the jealousy of the infamous and all but omnipotent Tigellinus; and on this occasion Tacitus sketches his life and character in a few of his strong masterly touches. "His days were pa.s.sed," says Tacitus, "in sleep, his nights in the duties or pleasures of life; where others toiled for fame he had lounged into it, and he had the reputation not, like most members of that profligate society, of a dissolute wanton, but of a trained master in luxury. A sort of careless ease, an entire absence of self-consciousness, added the charm of complete simplicity to all he said and did. Yet, as governor of Bithynia, and afterwards as consul, he showed himself a vigorous and capable administrator; then relapsing into the habit or a.s.suming the mask of vice, he was adopted as Arbiter of Elegance into the small circle of Nero's intimate companions; no luxury was charming or refined till Petronius had given it his approval, and the jealousy of Tigellinus was roused against a rival and master in the science of debauchery."

The novel written by this remarkable man was in the form of an autobiography narrating the adventures, in various Italian towns, of a Greek freedman. The fragments hardly enable us to trace any regular plot; its interest probably lay chiefly in the series of vivid pictures which it presented of life among all orders of society from the highest to the lowest, and its accurate reproduction of popular language and manners.

The hero of the story uses the ordinary Latin speech of educated persons, though, from the nature of the work, the style is much more colloquial than that of the formal prose used for serious writing. But the conversation of many of the characters is in the _plebeius sermo,_ the actual speech of the lower orders, of which so little survives in literature. It is full of solecisms and popular slang; and where the scene lies, as it mostly does in the extant fragments, in the semi-Greek seaports of Southern Italy, it pa.s.ses into what was almost a dialect of its own, the _lingua franca_ of the Mediterranean under the Empire, a dialect of mixed Latin and Greek. The longest and most important fragment is the well-known _Supper of Trimalchio_. It is the description of a Christmas dinner-party given by a sort of Golden Dustman and his wife, people of low birth and little education, who had come into an enormous fortune. Trimalchio, a figure drawn with extraordinary life, is constantly making himself ridiculous by his blunders and affectations, while he almost wins our liking by his childlike simplicity and good nature. The dinner itself, and the conversation on literature and art that goes on at the dinner-table, are conceived in a spirit of the wildest humour. Trimalchio, who has two libraries, besides everything else handsome about him, is anxious to air his erudition. "Can you tell us a story," he asks a guest, "of the twelve sorrows of Hercules, or how the Cyclops pulled Ulysses' leg? I used to read them in Homer when I was a boy." After an interruption, caused by the entrance of a boar, roasted whole and stuffed with sausages, he goes on to talk of his collection of plate; his unique cups of Corinthian bronze (so called from a dealer named Corinthus; the metal was invented by Hannibal at the capture of Troy), and his huge silver vases, "a hundred of them, more or less,"

chased with the story of Daedalus shutting Niobe into the Trojan horse, and Ca.s.sandra killing her sons--"the dead children so good, you would think they were alive; for I sell my knowledge in matters of art for no money." Presently there follow the two wonderful ghost stories--that of the wer-wolf, told by one of the guests, and that of the witches by Trimalchio himself in return--both masterpieces of vivid realism. As the evening advances the fun becomes more fast and furious. The cook, who had excelled himself in the ingenuity of his dishes, is called up to take a seat at table, and after favouring the company with an imitation of a popular tragedian, begins to make a book with Trimalchio over the next chariot races. Fortunata, Trimalchio's wife, is a little in liquor, and gets up to dance. Just at this point Trimalchio suddenly turns sentimental, and, after giving elaborate directions for his own obsequies, begins to cry. The whole company are in tears round him when he suddenly rallies, and proposes that, as death is certain, they shall all go and have a hot bath. In the little confusion that follows, the narrator and his friend slip quietly away. This scene of exquisite fooling is quite unique in Greek or Latin literature: the breadth and sureness of touch are almost Shakespearian. Another fragment relates the famous story of the _Matron of Ephesus_, one of the popular tales which can be traced back to India, but which appears here for the first time in the Western world. Others deal with literary criticism, and include pa.s.sages in verse; the longest of these, part of an epic on the civil wars in the manner of Lucan, is recited by one of the princ.i.p.al characters, the professional poet Eumolpus, to exemplify the rules he has laid down for epic poetry in a most curious discussion that precedes it.

That so small a part of the novel has been preserved is most annoying; it must have been comparable, in dramatic power and (notwithstanding the gross indecency of many pa.s.sages) in a certain large sanity, to the great work of Fielding. In all the refined writing of the next age we never again come on anything at once so masterly and so human.

II.

THE SILVER AGE: STATIUS, THE ELDER PLINY, MARTIAL, QUINTILIAN.

To the age of the rhetoricians succeeded the age of the scholars.

Quintilian, Pliny, and Statius, the three foremost authors of the Flavian dynasty, have common qualities of great learning and sober judgment which give them a certain mutual affinity, and divide them sharply from their immediate predecessors. The effort to outdo the Augustan writers had exhausted itself; the new school rather aimed at reproducing their manner. In the hands of inferior writers this attempt only issued in tame imitations; but with those of really original power it carried the Latin of the Silver Age to a point higher in quality than it ever reached, except in the single case of Tacitus, a writer of unique genius who stands in a cla.s.s of his own.

The reigns of the three Flavian emperors nearly occupy the last thirty years of the first century after Christ. The "year of four Emperors"

which pa.s.sed between the downfall of Nero and the accession of Vespasian had shaken the whole Empire to its foundations. The recovery from that shock left the Roman world established on a new footing. In literature, no less than in government and finance, a feverish period of inflated credit had brought it to the verge of ruin. At the beginning of his reign Vespasian announced a deficit of four hundred million pounds (a sum the like of which had never been heard of before) in the public exchequer; some similar estimate might have been formed by a fanciful a.n.a.logy of the collapse that had to be made good in literature, when style could no longer bear the tremendous overdrafts made on it by Seneca and Lucan. And in the literary as in the political world there was no complete recovery: throughout the second century we have to trace the gradual decline of letters going on alongside of that mysterious decay of the Empire itself before which a continuously admirable government was all but helpless.

Publius Papinius Statius, the most eminent of the poets of this age, was born towards the end of the reign of Tiberius, and seems to have died before the accession of Nerva. His poetry can all be a.s.signed to the reign of Domitian, or the few years immediately preceding it. As to his life little is known, probably because it pa.s.sed without much incident.

He was born at Naples, and returned to it in advanced age after the completion of his _Thebaid_; but the greater part of his life was spent at Rome, where his father was a grammarian of some distinction who had acted for a time as tutor to Domitian. He had thus access to the court, where he improved his opportunities by unstinted adulation of the Emperor and his favourite eunuch Earinus. The curious mediaeval tradition of his conversion to Christianity, which is so finely used by Dante in the _Purgatorio_, cannot be traced to its origin, and does not appear to have any historical foundation.

Twelve years were spent by Statius over his epic poem on the War of Thebes, which was published about the year 92, with a florid dedication to Domitian. After its completion he began another epic, on an even more imposing scale, on the life of Achilles and the whole of the Trojan war.

Of this _Achilleid_ only the first and part of the second book were ever completed; had it continued on the same scale it would have been the longest of Greek or Latin epics. At various times after the publication of the _Thebaid_ appeared the five books of _Silvae_, miscellaneous and occasional poems on different subjects, often of a personal nature.

Another epic, on the campaign of Domitian in Germany, has not been preserved.

The _Thebaid_ became very famous; later poets, like Ausonius or Claudian, constantly imitate it. Its smooth versification, copious diction, and sustained elegance made it a sort of canon of poetical technique. But, itself, it rises beyond the merely mechanical level. Without any quality that can quite be called genius, Statius had real poetical feeling. His taste preserves him from any great extravagances; and among much tedious rhetoric and c.u.mbrous mythology, there is enough of imagination and pathos to make the poem interesting and even charming. At a time when Guercino and the Caracci were counted great masters in the sister art, the _Thebaid_ was also held to be a masterpiece. Besides complete versions by inferior hands, both Pope and Gray took the pains to translate portions of it into English verse, and it is perpetually quoted in the literature of the eighteenth century. It is, indeed, perhaps its severest condemnation that it reads best in quotations. Not only the more highly elaborated pa.s.sages, but almost any pa.s.sage taken at random, may be read with pleasure and admiration; those who have had the patience to read it through, however much they may respect the continuous excellence of its workmans.h.i.+p, will (as with the _Gierusalemme Liberata_ of Ta.s.so) feel nearly as much respect for their own achievement as for that of the poet.

The _Silvae_, consisting as they do of comparatively short pieces, display the excellences of Statius to greater advantage. Of the thirty- two poems, six are in lyric metres, the rest being all written in the smooth graceful hexameters of which the author of the _Thebaid_ was so accomplished a master. The subjects, for the most part of a familiar nature, are very various. A touching and affectionate poem to his wife Claudia is one of the best known. Several are on the death of friends; one of very great beauty is on the marriage of his brother poet, Arruntius Stella, to a lady with the charming name of Violantilla. The descriptive pieces on the villas of acquaintances at Tivoli and Sorrento, and on the garden of another in Rome, are full of a genuine feeling for natural beauty. The poem on the death of his father, though it has pa.s.sages of romantic fancy, is deformed by an excess of literary allusions; but that on the death of his adopted son (he had no children of his own), which ends the collection, is very touching in the sincerity of its grief and its reminiscences of the dead boy's infancy. Perhaps the finest, certainly the most remarkable of all these pieces is the short poem (one might almost call it a sonnet) addressed to Sleep. This, though included in the last book of the _Silvae_, must have been written in earlier life; it shows that had Statius not been entangled in the composition of epics by the conventional taste of his age, he might have struck out a new manner in ancient poetry. The poem is so brief that it may be quoted in full:--

_Crimine quo merui iuvenis, placidissime divom, Quove errore miser, donis ut solus egerem, Somne, tuis? Tacet omne pecus, volueresque, feraeque, Et simulant fessos curvata cac.u.mina somnos; Nec trucibus fluviis idem sonus; occidit horror Aequoris, et terris maria inclinata quiesc.u.n.t.

Septima iam rediens Phoebe mihi respicit aegras Stare genas, totidem Oeteae Paphiaeque revisunt Lampades, et toties nostros t.i.thonia questus Praeterit et gelido spargit miserata flagello.

Unde ego sufficiam? Non si mihi lumina mille Quae sacer alterna tantum statione tenebat Argus, et haud unquam vigilabat corpore toto.

At nunc, heu, aliquis longa sub nocte puellae Brachia nexa tenens, ultra te, Somne, repellit: Inde veni: nec te totas infundere pennas Luminibus compello meis: hoc turba precatur Laetior; extremae me tange cac.u.mine virgae, Sufficit, aut leviter suspenso poplite transi._

Were the three lines beginning _Unde ego sufficiam_ struck out--and one might almost fancy them to have been inserted later by an unhappy second thought--the remainder of this poem would be as perfect as it is unique.

The famous sonnet of Wordsworth on the same subject must at once occur to an English reader; but the poem in its manner, especially in the dying cadence of the last two lines, recalls even more strongly some of the finest sonnets of Keats. "Had Statius written often thus," in the words Johnson uses of Gray, "it had been vain to blame, and useless to praise him."

The two other epic poets contemporary with Statius whose works are extant, Valerius Flaccus and Silius Italicus, belong generally to the same school, but stand on a much lower level of excellence. The former is only known as the author of the _Argonautica_. An allusion in the proem of his epic to the recent destruction of Jerusalem by t.i.tus in the year 70, and another in a later book to the great eruption of Vesuvius in 79, fix the date of the poem; and Quintilian, writing in the later years of Domitian, refers to the poet's recent death. From another pa.s.sage in the _Argonautica_ it has been inferred that Flaccus was one of the college of quindecemvirs, and therefore of high family. The _Argonautica_ follows the well-known poem of Apollonius Rhodius, but by his diffuse rhetorical treatment the author expands the story to such a length that in between five and six thousand lines he has only got as far as the escape of Jason and Medea from Colchos. Here the poem breaks off abruptly in the eighth book; it was probably meant to consist of twelve, and to end with the return of the Argonauts to Greece. In all respects, except the choice of subject, Valerius Flaccus is far inferior to Statius. He cannot indeed wholly destroy the perennial charm of the story of the Golden Fleece, but he comes as near doing so as is reasonably possible. His versification is correct, but without freedom or variety; and incidents and persons are alike presented through a cloud of monotonous and mechanical rhetoric.

If Valerius Flaccus to some degree redeemed his imaginative poverty by the choice of his subject, the other epic poet of the Flavian era, Tiberius Catius Silius Italicus, chose a subject which no ingenuity could have adapted to epic treatment. His _Punic War_ may fairly contend for the distinction of being the worst epic ever written; and its author is the most striking example in Latin literature of the incorrigible amateur. He had, in earlier life, pa.s.sed through a distinguished official career; he was consul the year before the fall of Nero, and in the political revolutions which followed conducted himself with such prudence that, though an intimate friend of Vitellius, he remained in favour under Vespasian. After a term of further service as proconsul of Asia, he retired to a dignified and easy leisure. His love of literature was sincere; he prided himself on owning one of Cicero's villas, and the land which held Virgil's grave, and he was a generous patron to men of letters. The fulsome compliments paid to him by Martial (who has the effrontery to speak of him as a combined Virgil and Cicero) are, no doubt, only an average specimen of the atmosphere which surrounded so munificent a patron; but the admiration which he openly expressed for the slave Epictetus does him a truer honour. The _Bellum Punic.u.m_, in seventeen books, is longer than the _Odyssey_. It closely follows the history as told by Livy; but the elements of almost epic grandeur in the contest between Rome and Hannibal all disappear amid ma.s.ses of tedious machinery. Without any invention or constructive power of his own, Silius copies with tasteless pedantry all the outworn traditions of the heroic epic. What Homer or Virgil has done, he must needs do too. The Romans are the Dardanians or the Aeneadae: Juno interferes in Hannibal's favour, and Venus, hidden in a cloud, watches the battle of the Trebia from a hill.

Hannibal is urged to war by a dream like that of Agamemnon in the _Iliad_; he is equipped with a spear "fatal to many thousands" of the enemy, and a s.h.i.+eld, like that of Aeneas, embossed with subjects from Carthaginian history, and with the river Ebro flowing round the edge as an ingenious variant of the Ocean-river on the s.h.i.+eld of Achilles. A Carthaginian fleet cruising off the coast of Italy falls in with Proteus, who takes the opportunity of prophesying the course of the war. Hannibal at Zama pursues a phantom of Scipio, which flies before him and disappears like that of Aeneas before Turnus. Such was the degradation to which the n.o.ble epic machinery had now sunk. Soon after the death of Silius the poem seems to have fallen into merited oblivion; there is a single reference to it in a poet of the fifth century, and thereafter it remained unknown or unheard of until a ma.n.u.script discovered by Poggio Bracciolini brought it to light again early in the fifteenth century.

The works of the other Flavian poets, Curiatius Maternus, Saleius Ba.s.sus, Arruntius Stella, and the poetess Sulpicia, are lost; all else that survives of the verse of the period is the work of a writer of a different order, but of considerable importance and value, the epigrammatist Martial. By no means a poet of the first rank, hardly perhaps a poet at all according to any strict definition, he has yet a genius of his own which for many ages made him the chief and almost the sole model for a particular kind of literature.

Marcus Valerius Martialis was born at Augusta Bilbilis in Central Spain towards the end of the reign of Tiberius. He came to Rome as a young man during the reign of Nero, when his countrymen, Seneca and Lucan, were at the height of their reputation. Through their patronage he obtained a footing, if not at court, yet among the wealthy amateurs who extended a less dangerous protection to men of letters. For some thirty-five years he led the life of a dependant; under Domitian his a.s.siduous flattery gained for him the honorary tribunate which conferred equestrian rank, though not the rewards of hard cash which he would probably have appreciated more. The younger Pliny, who speaks of him with a slightly supercilious approval, repaid with a more substantial gratification a poem comparing him to Cicero. Martial's gift for occasional verse just enabled him to live up three pair of stairs in the city; in later years, when he had an income from booksellers as well as from private patrons, he could afford a tiny country house among the Sabine hills. Early in the reign of Domitian he began to publish regularly, bringing out a volume of epigrams every year. After the accession of Trajan he returned to his native town, from which, however, he sent a final volume three years afterwards to his Roman publishers. There his talent for flattery at last bore substantial fruit; a rich lady of the neighbourhood presented him with a little estate, and though the longing for the country, which had grown on him in Rome, was soon replaced by a stronger feeling of regret for the excitement of the capital, he spent the remainder of his life in material comfort.

The collected works of Martial, as published after his death, which probably took place about the year 102, consist of twelve books of miscellaneous _Epigrams,_ which are prefaced by a book of pieces called _Liber Spectaculorum,_ upon the performances given by t.i.tus and Domitian in the capital, especially in the vast amphitheatre erected by the former. At the end are added two books of _Xenia_ and _Apoph.o.r.eta,_ distichs written to go with the Christmas presents of all sorts which were interchanged at the festival of the Saturnalia. These last are, of course, not "distinguished for a strong poetic feeling," any more than the cracker mottoes of modern times. But the twelve books of _Epigrams_, while they include work of all degrees of goodness and badness, are invaluable from the vivid picture which they give of actual daily life at Rome in the first century. Few writers of equal ability show in their work such a total absence of character, such indifference to all ideas or enthusiasms; yet this very quality makes the verse of Martial a more perfect mirror of the external aspects of Roman life. A certain intolerance of hypocrisy is the nearest approach Martial ever makes to moral feeling. His perpetual flattery of Domitian, though gross as a mountain--it generally takes the form of comparing him with the Supreme Being, to the disadvantage of the latter--has no more serious political import than there is serious moral import in the almost unexampled indecency of a large proportion of the epigrams. The "candour" noted in him by Pliny is simply that of a sheet of paper which is indifferent to what is written upon it, fair or foul. He may claim the merit--nor is it an inconsiderable one--of being totally free from pretence. In one of the most graceful of his poems, he enumerates to a friend the things which make up a happy life: "Be yourself, and do not wish to be something else," is the line which sums up his counsel. To his own work he extends the same easy tolerance with which he views the follies and vices of society. "A few good, some indifferent, the greater number bad"--so he describes his epigrams; what opening is left after this for hostile criticism? If elsewhere he hints that only indolence prevented him from producing more important work, so harmless an affectation may be pa.s.sed over in a writer whose clearness of observation and mastery of slight but lifelike portraiture are really of a high order.

By one of the curious accidents of literary history Martial, as the only Latin epigrammatist who left a large ma.s.s of work, gave a meaning to the word epigram from which it is only now beginning to recover. The art, practised with such infinite grace by Greek artists of almost every age between Solon and Justinian, was just at this period sunk to a low ebb.

The contemporary Greek epigrammatists whose work is preserved in the Palatine Anthology, from Nicarchus and Lucilius to Strato, all show the same heaviness of handling and the same tiresome insistence on making a point, which prevent Martial's epigrams from being placed in the first rank. But while in any collection of Greek epigrammatic poetry these authors naturally sink to their own place, Martial, as well by the mere ma.s.s of his work--some twelve hundred pieces in all, exclusive of the cracker mottoes--as by his animation and pungent wit, set a narrow and rather disastrous type for later literature. He appealed strongly to all that was worst in Roman taste--its heavy-handedness, its admiration of verbal cleverness, its tendency towards brutality. Half a century later, Verus Caesar, that wretched creature whom Hadrian had adopted as his successor, and whose fortunate death left the Empire to the n.o.ble rule of Antoninus Pius, called Martial "his Virgil:" the incident is highly significant of the corruption of taste which in the course of the second century concurred with other causes to bring Latin literature to decay and almost to extinction.

Among the learned Romans of this age of great learning, the elder Pliny, _aetatis suae doctissimus_, easily took the first place. Born in the middle of the reign of Tiberius, Gaius Plinius Secundus of Comum pa.s.sed his life in high public employments, both military and civil, which took him successively over nearly all the provinces of the Empire. He served in Germany, in the Danubian provinces, in Spain, in Gaul, in Africa, and probably also in Syria, on the staff of t.i.tus, during the Jewish war. In August of the year 79 he was in command of the fleet stationed at Misenum when the memorable eruption of Vesuvius took place. In his zeal for scientific investigation he set sail for the spot in a man-of-war, and, lingering too near the zone of the eruption, was suffocated by the rain of hot ashes. The account of his death, given by his nephew in a letter to the historian Tacitus, is one of the best known pa.s.sages in the cla.s.sics.

By amazing industry and a most rigid economy of time, Pliny combined with his continuous official duties an immense reading and a literary production of great scope and value. A hundred and sixty volumes of his extracts from writers of all kinds, written, we are told, on both sides of the paper in an extremely small hand, were bequeathed by him to his nephew. Besides works on grammar, rhetoric, military tactics, and other subjects, he wrote two important histories--one, in twenty books, on the wars on the German frontier, the other a general history of Rome in thirty-one books, from the accession of Nero to the joint triumph of Vespasian and t.i.tus after the subjugation of the Jewish revolt. Both these valuable works are completely lost, nor is it possible to determine how far their substance reappears in Tacitus and Suetonius; the former, however, in both _Annals_ and _Histories_, repeatedly cites him as an authority. But we fortunately possess the most important of his works, the thirty-seven books of his _Natural History_. This is not, indeed, a great work of literature, though its style, while sometimes heavy and sometimes mannered, is on the whole plain, straightforward, and unpretentious; but it is a priceless storehouse of information on every branch of natural science as known to the ancient world. It was published with a dedication to t.i.tus two years before Pliny's death, but continued during the rest of his life to receive his additions and corrections. It was compiled from a vast reading. Nearly five hundred authors (about a hundred and fifty Roman, the rest foreign) are cited in his catalogue of authorities. The plan of this great encyclopedia was carefully thought out before its composition was begun. It opens with a general system of physiography, and then pa.s.ses successively to geography, anthropology, human physiology, zoology and comparative physiology, botany, including agriculture and horticulture, medicine, mineralogy, and the fine arts.

After being long held as an almost infallible authority, Pliny, in more recent times, fell under the reproach of credulity and want of sufficient discrimination in the value of his sources. Further research has gone some way to reinstate his reputation. Without having any profound original knowledge of the particular sciences, he had a naturally scientific mind. His tendency to give what is merely curious the same attention as what is essentially important, has incidentally preserved much valuable detail, especially as regards the arts; and modern research often tends to confirm the anecdotes which were once condemned as plainly erroneous and even absurd. Pliny has, further, the great advantage of being shut up in no philosophical system. His philosophy of life, and his religion so far as it appears, is that of his age, a moderate and rational Stoicism. Like his contemporaries, he complains of the modern falling away from nature and the decay of morals. But it is as the conscientious student and the unbia.s.sed observer that he habitually appears. In diligence, accuracy, and freedom from preconception or prejudice, he represents the highest level reached by ancient science after Aristotle and his immediate successors.

Of the more specialised scientific treatises belonging to this period, only two are extant, the three books on _Strategy_ by s.e.xtus Julius Frontinus, and a treatise by the same author on the public water-supply of Rome; both belong to strict science, rather than to literature. The schools of rhetoric and grammar continued to flourish: among many unimportant names that of Quintilian stands eminent, as not only a grammarian and rhetorician, but a fine critic and a writer of high substantive value.

Marcus Fabius Quintilia.n.u.s of Calagurris, a small town on the Upper Ebro, is the last, and perhaps the most distinguished of that school of Spanish writers which bulks so largely in the history of the first century. He was educated at Rome, and afterwards returned to his native town as a teacher of rhetoric. There he made, or improved, the acquaintance of Servius Sulpicius Galba, proconsul of Tarraconensian Spain in the later years of Nero. When Galba was declared Emperor by the senate, he took Quintilian with him to Rome, where he was appointed a public teacher of rhetoric, with a salary from the privy purse. He retained his fame and his favour through the succeeding reigns. Domitian made him tutor to the two grand-nephews whom he destined for his own successors, and raised him to consular rank. For about twenty years he remained the most celebrated teacher in the capital, combining his professors.h.i.+p with a large amount of actual pleading in the law-courts. His published works belong to the later years of his life, when he had retired from the bar and from public teaching. His first important treatise, on the decay of oratory, _De Causis Corruptae Eloquentiae_, is not extant. It was followed, a few years later, in or about the year 93, by his great work, the _Inst.i.tutio Oratoria_, which sums up the teaching and criticism of his life.

The contents of this work, which at once became the final and standard treatise on the theory and practice of Latin oratory, are very elaborate and complete. In the first book, Quintilian discusses the preliminary training required before the pupil is ready to enter on the study of his art, beginning with a sketch of the elementary education of the child from the time he leaves the nursery, which is even now of remarkable interest. The second book deals with the general principles and scope of the art of oratory, and continues the discussion of the aims and methods of education in its later stages. The five books from the third to the seventh are occupied with an exhaustive treatment of the matter of oratory, under the heads of what were known to the Roman schools by the names of _invention_ and _disposition_. The greater part of these books is, of course, highly technical. The next four books, from the eighth to the eleventh, treat of the manner of oratory, or all that is included in the word _style_ in its widest signification. It is in this part of the treatise that Quintilian, in relation to the course of general reading both in Greek and Latin that should be pursued by the young orator, gives the masterly sketch of Latin literature which is the most famous portion of the whole work. The twelfth book, which concludes the work, reverts to education in the highest and most extended sense, that of the moral qualifications of the great orator, and the exhaustive discipline of the whole nature throughout life which must be continued unfalteringly to the end.

Now that the formal study of rhetoric has ceased to be a part of the higher education, the more strictly technical parts of Quintilian's work, like those of the _Rhetoric_ of Aristotle, have, in a great measure, lost their relevance to actual life, and with it their general interest to the world at large. Both the Greek and the Roman masterpiece are read now rather for their incidental observations upon human nature and the fundamental principles of art, than for instruction in a particular form of art which, in the course of time, has become obsolete. These observations, in Quintilian no less than in Aristotle, are often both luminous and profound, A collection of the memorable sentences of Quintilian, such as has been made by his modern editors, is full of sayings of deep wisdom and enduring value. _Nulla mansit ars qualis inventa est, nec intra initium stet.i.t; Plerumque facilius est plus facere, quam idem; Nihil in studiis parvum est; Cito scribendo non fit ut bene scribatur, bene scribendo fit ut cito; Omnia nostra dum nasc.u.n.tur placent, alioqui nec scriberentur_;--such sayings as these, expressed with admirable terseness and lucidity, are scattered all over the work, and have a value far beyond the limits of any single study. If they do not drop from Quintilian with the same curious negligence as they do from Aristotle (whose best things are nearly always said in a parenthesis), the advantage is not wholly with the Greek author; the more orderly and finished method of the Roman teacher marks a higher constructive literary power than that of Aristotle, whose singular genius made him indeed the prince of lecturers, but did not place him in the first rank of writers.