Book XII opens with funeral honours for the Theban dead. A report of

Creon’s decree withholding burial from his fallen foes is brought to the

wives of the six slain leaders on their way from Argos to recover the

bodies of their dead. Except Argia, Polynices’s widow, all the women go

to implore aid from Theseus, King of Athens. Argia, arriving outside

Thebes, burns the body of her husband on Eteocles’s pyre, where there are

signs to show that fratricidal hatred had survived death; she is met and

helped by Antigone. The two are detected, haled before Creon, proudly own

their act and are sentenced to death. Athens meanwhile consents to help

the Argive war-widows. Very significantly the altar of mercy in Athens is

described, as a symbolic contrast to the harshness of Creon at Thebes.

The passage is remarkable for the colour it gave to the notion of after

times that the poet was a Christian:

There stood an altar at the city’s heart

Reared to no God of Power: Mercy mild

Made it her shrine, and human misery

Had hallowed it. It never lacked for prayers

Renewed, nor e’er repelled a suppliant.

There whoso asks is heard, and day and night

The way is open, and the offering

The Holy One requireth is a cry.

The worship costs but little: incense-flame

And victim’s blood find no acceptance there.

That altar sweats with tears.[1399]

So the Athenians approach Thebes and win the victory, Creon dying at the

hands of Theseus. The obsequies of the fallen and the _envoi_ (already

translated) complete the work.

To appreciate an allusive epic like the _Thebaid_ the reader needs

equipment in the myths of Thebes: he must know more than the story of

Oedipus, the fated king, his house, and the “Seven Against Thebes”: he

must remember the outlines of legends about Amphion, about Cadmus, son of

Agenor, about Dirce, and he must be expert enough to grasp why Statius

calls Thebes by varying epithets like “Aonian” (I. 34), “Echionian” (I.

169, II. 90), “Ogygian” (I. 173, 328, II. 85), or “Sidonian” (III. 656),

and why Polynices is the “Ismenian hero” (I. 673), and why the Argives

are _Inacha pubes_ (I. 619). The well-springs of all such mythological

lore lay far back in the ancient Greek Cyclic story of Thebes; in the

tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides;[1400] and in Statius’s

main source for material, Antimachus, who, before the days of the

Alexandrian poets, but anticipating their erudition, composed a massive

epic in his _Thebais_. He wrote rather for the leisured and the learned

than for the ordinary reader. Alexandrian critics put him second among

epic authors: and Hadrian is said to have preferred him to Homer. But

he used his spacious limits unrestrained by any canons of unity. Not

content to end the forbidding tale of fratricidal strife on the more

human, more really tragic note of Antigone’s devotion to her slain

brother, he involved himself in two additional sequels, the war with

Athens and the revenge of Argos. Statius showed more wisdom in writing

fewer books on the theme, in condensing the war with Athens, and in

omitting the triumphant return during the next generation of the Argive

avengers, the Epigoni. When he is criticized, as he deserves to be, for

his digressions, it is fair to remember the almost overpowering literary

legacy which he inherited. There are signs that he also consulted

Seneca’s _Phoenissae_ and _Oedipus_; but in Latin his master was Virgil,

although Ovid and Lucan[1401] also went to his making. Nor was Horace

forgotten.[1402] The Virgilian influence is manifest both in his language

and in the construction of his incidents. Sometimes actual phrases are

copied as in _magnanimosque duces_ (_Th._ III. 65); _procumbunt piceae_

(_Th._ VI. 100, to remind readers, as if by a traditional phrase, that

the whole passage is based on the felling of the wood in _Aen._ VI.

179 _sqq._); _pede pes_ (_Th._ VIII. 399, repeating the Ennian words

borrowed by Furius of Antium as well as by Virgil, _Aen._ X. 361, and in

structure going back to Homer himself). The _Siluae_ present the same

features in phrases like _urbis opus_ (_Silv._ II. ii. 31) and _qualis

eras!_ (II. vi. 34). Or, again, a different turn may be given to the

original expression, as Virgil’s _Quis fallere possit amantem?_ becomes

_nil transit amantes_ (_Th._ II. 335), or his _forsan et haec meminisse

iuuabit_ is elaborated into

_forsan et has uenturus amor praemiserit iras_

_ut meminisse iuuet._ (_Th._ I. 472-473).

Elsewhere Statius gives us a blend of verbal and material reminiscence,

as when he implores his father’s spirit to revisit and counsel him in

dreams issuing from “the Gate of Horn” rather than from “The Ivory Gate”

(_Silv._ V. iii. _sub fin._; _Aen._ VI., _sub fin._). His debt to Virgil

for incident is also heavy—too heavy, in truth, for genuine originality.

It was not merely that he took over through Virgil the convention of

supernatural interferences, as also of copious decorative similes, and

outdid all his predecessors in these: he went further and allowed his

imitation to become too obsequious in a parallelism of incidents. Because

Evander told the story of Hercules and Cacus in the _Aeneid_, we must,

before the first book of the _Thebaid_ is completed, have Adrastus’s

digressive tale about Coroebus’s resolve to rid his country of a punitive

monster sent by Apollo; because there were funeral games in Virgil, we

must have almost a whole book devoted to the rites and contests in memory

of the child Archemorus; and because _Aeneid_ IX celebrated the bold

night-raid by Nisus and Euryalus, we must have a corresponding pair,

Hopleus and Dymas, in the tenth book of the _Thebaid_, intercepted during

their quest for the bodies of Tydeus and Parthenopaeus.

The other epic effort by Statius was his _Achilleid_, cut short by death

when little over 1100 lines were written. What dimensions this tale of

Troy might have reached we can only guess: it certainly was to cover

a wider field than a “Wrath of Achilles”; for the author, immediately

after his invocation, declares that his design is to relate more than the

_Iliad_ contains—not to end with the fate of Hector, as Homer did, but to

escort the young hero throughout the Trojan war.[1403] This then, is a

second laurel wreath which he asks Apollo to plait for him, inasmuch as

he announces himself no stranger to the Muses but known for his poem on

Thebes.[1404] True to his more extended view of Achilles’s life, Statius

begins early in it with the fears of the hero’s mother Thetis that danger

threatens her son from the elopement of Helen with Paris. So, with the

purpose of transferring Achilles to a safe hiding-place, she visits the

cave of the Centaur Chiron under Mount Pelion where the youth is being

brought up. Her son is absent: Chiron tells his mother he has remarked a

change in him:

Once he was wont to bear rebuke and hear

Commands with zeal, nor far desert the cave;

Now Ossa holds him not; nor Pelion’s

Towering mass, nor snows of Thessaly.

Just at that moment, radiant after an adventure on which he has killed a

lioness, he returns,

Yet, spite of war and toilsome energy,

Comely to look upon: there floated o’er

Fair lineaments a rosy fire: his hair

Outshone the gleam of yellow gold, and time

Had not yet changed his earliest youthful down.

Eyes with a quiet flash were his, and you

Could see his mother written on his face.

She decides that he must be concealed in the island of Scyros, and

a pleasant picture of mingled nature and fancy is given us of his

half-miraculous transference thither. Achilles, sunk in the profound

sleep that falls on the young (_qui pueris sopor_), is borne by his

goddess-mother down to the quiet seashore (_iussa tacere litora_). The

way lies clear in a moonlit world. Their escort, the Centaur, seeks to

hide his moist eyes (_udaque celat lumina_), when suddenly a dolphin team

hurries mother and son off across the waters, and he can with effort

(_erecto prospectat equo!_) just see them pass from sight where the

white foam lingers behind their course. Then gloom descends on Thessaly;

for the heights of Pholoë lament the youth that will never return, and

cloud-capt Othrys sighs, and the river Spercheos wastes with pining—a

frigid sort of “pathetic fallacy” like the legendary sorrow of nature for

Balder dead. It is a more natural touch to say that the cave where the

old Centaur taught Achilles music is now mute, or even to fancy that the

woodland Fauns miss his boyish melodies, but the grotesque is reached

in the mourning of the nymphs for the lost opportunity of marrying

Achilles! This and the too matter-of-fact reference to the Centaur on his

hind legs (_erecto equo_) are among the not infrequent instances where

mythology betrayed Statius into absurdity. Nearly all the rest of the

existing fragment, which might borrow Mr. Robert Bridges’ title “Achilles

in Scyros,” relates his reception in women’s attire at court there, his

passion for one of the princesses, the detection of his disguise by

Ulysses, and his departure for Troy.

The _Achilleid_ has much the same qualities as the _Thebaid_. There

are still echoes of Virgil, mythological erudition, and ornamental

similes. The subject, however, is a more attractive one than that of

the _Thebaid_, and it is unfortunate that the incompleteness of the

_Achilleid_ makes elaborate comparison between them nugatory.

Probably Statius and his contemporaries felt that his fame would be

founded on his epic work, and it was for his _Thebaid_ that he was valued

in the Middle Ages. In Dante he plays an elevated part, and is often

quoted. Chaucer, who mentions him with enthusiasm several times, calls

him “Stace of Thebes” in _The Knightes Tale_, and in the _Hous of Fame_,

repeating Dante’s confusion[1405] of him with a rhetorician of Toulouse,

The Tholosan that highte Stace,

That bar of Thebes up the fame

Upon his shuldres, and the name

Also of cruel Achilles.

Here, then, as in _Troilus and Criseyde_, where he tells his “litel book”

to go

And kis the steppes, whereas thou seest pace

Virgile, Ovyde, Omer, Lucan and Stace,

it is among the great narrative poets that Chaucer places Statius. His

hold upon the Middle Ages[1406] is not altogether easy to explain. Was it

the tradition that he became a Christian which threw a halo round him in

the eyes of medieval Catholicism, and did that tradition in turn grow out

of his worshipful attitude to Virgil and the tenderness of feeling which

found one of its most remarkable expressions in his description of the

Shrine of Mercy at Athens? Modern criticism, however, is not likely to

forget that he was also the author of the miscellaneous _Siluae_, which

after centuries of oblivion were restored to notice, when Poggio on his

travels in 1417 or 1418 found them in a manuscript along with Manilius

and Silius and had a copy made to be sent back to Italy.[1407]

The thirty-two poems in the five books of the miscellany entitled

the _Siluae_ are mostly in hexameter verse, though there are four in

hendecasyllables[1408] and one set each of Alcaics and Sapphics.[1409]

The number of lines in each book is between 700 and 800. In the fifth

book, the longest poem of all, 293 lines on the poet’s father, is in

juxtaposition to the shortest, the 19 lines to Sleep. The variety of the

poems is the outcome of their origin: they fit some passing event; pay

a compliment to the emperor or a friend; describe a country house or

work of art; frame an elegy on the poet’s father, a slave, a lion or a

parrot; indite an invocation to Sleep; or celebrate the dead poet Lucan’s

birthday. In other words, they are occasional verses, being, the author

tells us in one of his five prefaces,[1410] rapidly composed, so that

they illustrate Quintilian’s description of what is meant by a _silua_ in

literature.[1411] Statius had long hesitated about issuing in collected

form poems which were composed separately, but considered that the author

of the _Thebaid_ might be pardoned for this venture, on the analogy of

great poets who wrote light verses as Virgil did the _Culex_.[1412] All

students of the archaeology and social history of the Flavian age have

reason to applaud the poet’s decision to give them to the world; and

as literature there is nothing quite like them in Latin. They are not

to be judged as claiming high inspiration, but as pieces in which the

recurrent artificiality is time after time illuminated by the play of a

pretty fancy and the grace of clever expression. Nor is the artificiality

wholly inconsistent with sincerity of feeling. A survey of the poems may

illustrate their qualities.

Book I. Statius is not at his best in the opening poem, on the

equestrian statue of Domitian, where he strikes an exaggerated note in

suggesting that the work has come down complete from heaven, that the

rider is a greater than Julius, and that the burden of divinity makes

Earth pant beneath the statue. The long epithalamium which follows, on

Stella’s marriage to Violentilla, who was a Neapolitan like Statius, is

pleasanter, though modern taste wearies of its Venus, Cupids, Apollo

and Bacchus. More concrete and engaging is the third poem, on a visit

to Vopiscus’s cool retreat at Tivoli where the natural beauty of the

scenery makes a genuine impression on the poet,[1413] and compensates for

the attendant artificialities. Then the recovery of Rutilius Gallicus

is celebrated in polished lines, which, however they suited the first

century, read rather frigidly when they introduce a rescue by Apollo and

Aesculapius. Statius holds us more in describing his friend’s considerate

conduct as a judge[1414] and his premature breakdown owing to the strain

of official duty. The lines appear to argue in their author maturity of

years, and bear on the question of his birth-date: to him in this poem

sixty is not old age:

’Twas not the fault of years (for they had scarce

O’ertaken twice six lustres) but the toil

Incessant and the vigorous mind’s control

Over the body, all the watchful care

For his own emperor—a task beloved.

So stole upon the core of that tired frame

Ensnaring ease, slow disregard of life.[1415]

In the fifth poem his sportive theme is the decoration of Claudius

Etruscus’s baths and his task to celebrate not Greek springs but the

Latin waters of the aqueducts Virgo and Marcia. Having struck this Roman

note, however, he returns to Greek mythology: it is our Lady of Cythera,

Venus and her husband, the Fire-God, who with the aid of the Loves’

torches are responsible for heating the bath furnaces! Everything there

is costly (_nil ibi plebeium_); for Statius had aristocratic tastes: the

water is fit to be Cytherea’s birthplace, Narcissus’s mirror, Diana’s

bath! And after these mythological conceits comes the prosaic assurance

that not even a visitor from the seaside would despise those bathing

facilities.[1416] The book closes with the praises of the emperor’s

carnival, memorable for a fair-weather rain of delicacies and fruits,

a lavish bounty surpassing the Golden Age, Domitian’s condescension in

sharing the feast, spectacular features like women combatants and dwarf

warriors, and the cosmopolitan crowd at the theatre—buxom Lydian damsels

clapping their hands, the jingling musicians of Cadiz, noisy Syrians, and

those who barter common sulphur for broken glass.

The consolatory poem sent to Melior on the death of a slave-boy adopted

by him has touches of real feeling, and is less overloaded with

mythology. Closeness of blood, he argues in excuse for the adoptive

father’s frantic grief, does not always make the strongest tie:

Sons we beget perforce—adopt at will.[1417]

But there is comfort in regarding death as freedom from anxiety:

We all must go, must go; and Aeacus

Shaketh the urn amid the boundless shades (_umbris_, v. l. _ulnis_).

Yet he we mourn is happy in th’ escape

From men and gods and hazards unforeseen

And life’s dark instability; for him

Fate may not touch. He never asked nor feared

Nor yet deserved (_meruit_, v.l. _renuit_) to die; but we, a crowd

Distressed and wretched, know not whence may come

Our final day or what shall end our time.[1418]

The poem on the mansion of Pollius and Polla at Sorrento shows how the

effects of nature and of art compete in the poet’s mind. To adjudicate

between the charms of a crescent bay outside and the architectural

amenities of the villa itself is embarrassing.[1419] Characteristically

he divides his praises among aesthetic treasures and the view from

different rooms, with his eye now on Naples in the distance, now on the

variety of marbles around him. He draws from nature in his picture of the

seaside villa in the gloaming,

When day is wearied and the shadow falls

Upon the water from the hill at dusk,

And mirrored mansions float upon the bay;[1420]

or he indulges in a purely fanciful picture:

Oft when the grape is ripe with autumn-down,

A sea-nymph climbs the cliff, who, canopied

’Neath the dark night, with full-grown tendril clears

Of brine her dripping eyes, and from the slopes

Snatches the clusters sweet. The spindrift oft

Splashes the vintage from the neighbouring waves.

The Satyrs seaward dive and ’mid the surf

The Hill-gods long to seize the naked nymph.[1421]

Three short pieces follow, each touching on a possession of Atedius

Melior—his plane-tree by the garden pool concerning which Statius

daintily relates the legend of a nymph’s escape from Pan; his parrot

for whose sudden death a train of mourning birds is invited to chaunt

a dirge; and his tame lion slain in the amphitheatre to the just

indignation of his fellow-lions, but with the consolation of having

roused the emotion of people, senate and emperor! Of the dead slave of

Flavius Ursus, commemorated in the next poem, he affirms that his fine

qualities of soul justify the free display of grief which Statius in

such consolations takes pains to emphasize. The book closes with the

_Genethliacon Lucani_, whose neat hendecasyllabics congratulate Spain,

land of the west, on its gift of Lucan to the world, and extravagantly

claim that Homer and Virgil are outrivalled by him. But we are grateful

for the light thrown by the Muse’s prophecy on the subjects of Lucan’s

writings. Nor are the exclamatory lines on a young life cut short

unnatural:

Ah! Fates too cruel and severe!

Ah! Brief the span of high career!

Why round the peak must perils rage?

Why may not greatness reach old age?[1422]

Book III opens with a record of the dedication of a temple to Hercules by

Pollius Felix at Sorrento on a spot where the old narrow shrine once gave

shelter to a picnic party surprised on a hot summer day by tempest. The

poet thinks the spacious building has improved what was

A barren sandy shore but yesterday,

A hillside which the sea-foam splashed upon,

Cliffs rough with brier, ground that foothold grudged.[1423]

The second piece is a send-off (_propempticon_) to the author’s patron

Maecius Celer about to sail for Egypt, where, the poem reminds us, the

grain ships come from. Echoing Horace, Statius says his patron takes

with him the better half of his soul (_animae partem ... maiorem_), and

he dwells on the pain of parting. The gradually disappearing vessel is

pictured:

The barque speeds o’er the wandering tides in flight,

Faint by degrees, defeating eyes that strain

Afar, and clasps within its slender boards

Legions of fears.[1424]

His self-recrimination over failure to go abroad with his patron scarcely

rings true, especially when supported with mythological instances; but

the imagined reunion on the traveller’s return and the anticipation of

the story of intervening years make a natural conclusion. The third poem

is another consolation: it is addressed to Claudius Etruscus on his

father’s death. The poet too, he says, had mourned a father.[1425] The

dead Etruscus, though of servile origin, was ennobled by service, and

obedience is a law of nature. The sketch of his career is interesting.

Freed by Tiberius, he attended Caligula as a keeper might a wild beast;

he had high responsibilities under Claudius and Nero; and his preferment

in the civil service to the treasury was a tribute to his ability in

dealing with estimates. All this is cleverly told in well-turned verses;

and a pleasant account is given of his married life. Unfortunately,

artificiality is not absent. The conceit of fluttering Cupids dropping

wing-feathers on a funeral pyre or supplying discarded arrow-cases to

make fuel for the cremation is supremely ridiculous; and when the grief

of Etruscus for the loss of his father is compared with the grief of

Theseus in like case, we feel the mythological parallel detracts from the

simplicity befitting a deep sorrow. The fourth poem, one of the least

pleasing, turns on the dedication to Aesculapius of the locks of Earinus,

one of the emperor’s eunuchs. The fifth, on the other hand, has charm

in its playful remonstrance with his wife on her alleged reluctance to

accompany her husband when he has decided to quit Rome for the Bay of

Naples. Could she refuse, after sharing loyally his hours of triumph and

defeat, after full knowledge of his literary toil on the _Thebaid_, after

nursing him back from the point of death? Facetiously he assures her that

her daughter can find suitors elsewhere than in Rome: the district of

his choice has not been completely devastated by the fires of Vesuvius!

This home to which he invites her is “his own, his native land” (_natale

solum_), blest with temperate climate and with peace. He ends this

persiflage with a reminder of the legendary and literary associations of

the Bay of Naples.

The first three poems of Book IV are overburdened with the praises

of Domitian, and celebrate respectively his Majesty’s seventeenth

consulship, his hospitality in the banqueting-hall, and his greatness as

a road-maker. There follows a poetical epistle counselling a busy friend

to take a holiday:

Timely repose incites and nurtures strength,

And manhood after rest grows manlier.[1426]

The one Alcaic lyric of the _Siluae_ is a spring-ode to Septimius

Severus, a native of North Africa. After it stands the hexametric poem

which proves the value attached by Statius to the literary and artistic

accompaniments of a dinner-party. Then Sapphics are addressed to Vibius

Maximus abroad:

When will sweet Latium once more welcome you

From the Dalmatian hills, where, having sought

In hell, the miner comes back pale, in hue

Like gold up-brought.[1427]

But there is a child at home to greet Vibius: let the child learn from

his father the historical skill wherewith he traces the antiquity of

the world, recalling the style of terse Sallust and of “the nurseling

of Timavus” (Livy). The eighth poem conveys congratulations to Julius

Menecrates on the birth of a third child, so that, as the poet is quick

to point out, the emperor’s previous concession of the _ius trium

liberorum_ had merely anticipated Lucina’s actual gift. The final piece,

addressed in a bantering spirit to a friend on his return-present of a

mouldy old book, submits a humorous list of possible cheap things to give

away.

Book V begins with the commemorative poem consoling Abascantus in his

continued grief over the loss of his wife Priscilla, a dear friend of

Statius’s wife. Their loyal union is beautifully drawn and makes one of

several engaging pictures in Statius of married happiness. Priscilla felt

rapturous joy over her husband’s attainment to high office in the state,

but the raptures did not turn her head:

Luck never sapped thy calm: thine honest heart

Swelled not with bliss, but kept the even way.

High fortune left thee modest as before.[1428]

She attended to her careworn husband’s wants with the regularity,

solicitude, and simplicity to be found in a rural home:

As thrifty husbandman’s Apulian wife

Or house-dame sun-browned in the Sabine glare,

Knows, when the stars peep out, the hour has come

That ends his work, and plies her bustling toil

O’er bed and board, and hearkens for the sound

Of the returning plough.[1429]

The doom that assailed this favoured home is the prevailing theme in

the second half of the poem. The succeeding piece is on a youth of

sixteen, Crispinus, going out to face the work of the world, with the

inspiring memory of a father’s distinguished services. The next, a long

“In Memoriam” on Statius’s own father, has been extensively drawn upon in

connexion with his life. Like prose _Consolationes_, such an _epicedion_

shows conventional features in structure and thought. It is followed by

the briefest and most poetic of the _Siluae_. Dr. Mackail says, “one

might almost call it a sonnet,”[1430] and, if certain mythological lines

are dropped, it can be reduced to the requisite proportions:

What crime, O Sleep, thou God of calm confessed

Brings my young heart alone to lack thy boon?

Wild things of earth or air in slumber swoon:

The tree-tops droop the head in mimic rest:

Loud streams are hushed: the rough sea smooths his breast:

Fierce waves find peace upon the strand full soon.

But stars of eve and seventh returning moon

Behold me ever in pale woe depressed.

Dawn passing leaves me in her ruth bedewed:

E’en now some lover, clasping hand in hand

His love by night, repels thee, Sleep, with zeal.

Leave him—not on my eyes full-winged to brood,

As joy might crave. Nay, touch me with thy wand:

Enough if, o’er me poised, thou lightly steal.[1431]

In the final poem of the miscellany is a lament on the death of the

poet’s adopted son which marks the tenderness of his heart. “I,” he says,

“who once could offer balm to the bereaved now crave the healing hand:

and who art thou that censurest my lament?”

Better detain the flood that breaks its bank,

Or counter ravening flame than try to bar

A broken heart from grief.[1432]

There are some books—and shall we not include the _Siluae_ or still more

the _Thebaid_?—of which the reader feels that it were best not too

earnestly to plod through them, but when one chances upon the wearisome

to leave it as one found it, perhaps preferring my Lord of Montaigne’s

method “of running over by divers glances, sodaine glimpses and

reiterated reprisings.” To come from a simple and direct kind of poetry

to Statius is like passing out of the open breeze into a conservatory of

flowers, where many are beautiful but many raise the conviction that they

are forced. He had inherited the Alexandrian and Catullian fondness for

picture-drawing; and it is a natural result that descriptions emanating

from an art-admirer like Statius should be influenced by his recollection

of paintings and statues. At the same time this influence removed

him one degree further from nature and led to that over-elaboration,

which, by leaving little to the reader’s imagination, loses the charm

of vague suggestiveness.[1433] It is a learned and allusive style, apt

to be far-fetched in fancy and excessive in eulogy. The _Siluae_, in

particular, have the elegance of the eighteenth century. They imply a

cultured leisure fertile in refined improvisations. The elegance bears

a resemblance to that of Pope and Thomson, and the scenery to that of

Watteau’s _Fêtes Champêtres_. Some of the missives have a tone that would

have suited the boudoir of a French _marquise_ or the library of a noble

patron of letters in the time of Queen Anne or the early Georges. Nor

is it surprising that the _Thebaid_ should have made an appeal, if only

a transient one, to Gray, whose works contain a fragment of his early

translation into heroic couplets of part of its sixth book.

Statius’s artificiality is largely apparent in his enslavement to an

unreal mythology, but partly also in his liking for literary conceits,

which may or may not be mythological. Modern readers are mildly amused at

the feather-dropping Cupids (_Silv._ III. iii.), or at Leander’s fire of

love fit to warm the sea but not equal to Stella’s love for Violentilla

(I. ii.), or at the descent from the sky of Domitian’s celestial kindred

to embrace his equestrian statue:

Thus one neck shall find room for all the stars! (I. i. 98).

In great part the artificiality was traditional. Thus, when Statius

addresses elegiac poets as “Ye who defraud the renowned verse of its

final stride,” he is intentionally aping Ovid’s conceit of making

Cupid responsible for the change of the heroic hexameter to the

pentameter.[1434] Often the attempt to make a myth realistic merely

succeeds (as with Lucan) in achieving the grotesque: _e.g._ when the

ghost of Laius mortally wounded years before is imagined to drop blood

on the sleeping Eteocles in _Thebaid_ II, or when the deaths of Niobe’s

fourteen children is arithmetically related to the seven gates of Thebes:

Two funerals thronged each massive city-gate.[1435]

Sometimes the artificiality lies more in the phrasing. It is fairly

obvious that “the bridler of fiery footed steeds”[1436] must be the

Sun-god; that, if Hercules is “soaked plentifully with his brother,”

the reference is to the grape juice of Bacchus;[1437] and that, when in

years a boy “equalled the sum of Hercules’s labours,” he ought to be

twelve.[1438] Rather more remote is the epithet “Ledaean” applied to a

swan-plume because of Jove’s amour with Leda, or the author’s mode of

suggesting that a cool mansion is free from the scorching summer sun of

the Olympic games:

The house seethes not with heat of Pisa’s year.[1439]

Again, the artificiality may depend on no allusion, but on a curiously

strained form of expression. “He slants (_obliquat_) his entreaties”

is used of entreaties addressed to bystanders; “they hold exchange

of breasts” means embracing; “she reduced the glades to peace with

her horn” means that Atalanta, when hunting, killed the wild beasts

therein; and “the liquid fodder of eastern mid-winter” is a Statian

expression for rains that feed the Nile.[1440] It is easy to laugh

at such lapses from the straightforward and to complain of Statius’s

artificiality and prolixity: it is easier still, and perhaps commoner,

to decry him without reading him. But neither carping nor neglect is

the right attitude towards a great influence in literature. More profit

is derivable from remembering that he can show, as an epic writer,

vigour in narrative and speech, and, as an occasional poet, a real taste

for landscape and colour,[1441] besides letting his fancy at times go

free. Nor should strained compliments, strained consolations, strained

mythology wholly obliterate that depth of affection which is nowhere more

manifest than in the last book of the _Siluae_.

If he is more Virgilian than Lucan, Statius is less obtrusively

rhetorical. There is less of the _sententia_, less epigram, less

antithesis, and more of a quiet scholarly elaboration of the

traditional epic manner. Thus it is rarer to find in him than in Lucan

semi-proverbial phrases of a quotable cast, like “Panic believes

everything” (_nil falsum trepidis_, _Th._ VII. 131), or “Hope deferred

maketh the heart sick” (_spes anxia mentem extrahit et longo consumit

gaudia uoto_, _Th._ I. 322: _cf._ II. 320-321). His elaboration tends to

war against pithiness, but some phrases and lines are readily recalled:

_e.g._ _Cur oculis sordet uicina uoluptas?_ (_Silv._ I. iii. 98,

virtually “why does distance lend enchantment to the view?”); _calcabam

necopinus opes_ (_Silv._ I. iii. 53, “I trod on wealth and knew it not”)

of a rich mosaic floor; or, from the simile of Pluto’s entrance upon his

sovereignty over the lower world, words that would fit Milton’s Satan,

_palluit amisso ueniens in Tartara caelo_ (_Th._ XI. 446, “blenched as he

came to Hell when Heaven was lost.”).

What we must expect in a style so elaborate is an avoidance of the more

simple and concrete modes of expressing ideas and a preference for

abstractions, personifications, metaphors, as well as erudition. The

lion that, even when mortally wounded, dies fighting to the last is

referred to in these abstract terms: “as he fell, his valour returns

from the midst of death and not at once did all his threats present

their backs,” _i.e._ turn to flight.[1442] Statius makes great use of

compound adjectives (_e.g._ _uuifer_, _oliuifer_, _rorifer_, _laborifer_,

_fumifer_, _flammiger_, _saetiger_, _noctiuagus_, _montiuagus_,

_fluctiuagus_, _anguicomus_), also of one of the traditional decorations

in epic—the simile. There are well over thirty similes in _Thebaid_,

Book VI, in connexion with the games, and well over twenty in many of

the other books. They are elaborated often to the extent of six lines,

sometimes to eight, and show considerable variety. Many that illustrate

violent action introduce such animals as lions, tigresses, wolves, bears,

boars, bulls; others picture birds in flight like cranes, or twittering

like swallows: a snowstorm, a hunter, a passing ship, a ruined nest,

a Spanish gold miner underground, an avalanche (which the old Delphin

edition illustrates from Rhaetia), or a cow grieving for a lost calf (a

passage that recalls a similar situation in Lucretius). King Adrastus is

likened to a victorious bull, and Hippomedon to a Centaur; runners are

compared cumulatively to race-horses, arrows, and stags escaping from a

lion; and a falling quoit to the moon brought down from heaven by magic.

The hexameters of Statius exhibit less monotony than do those of Ovid,

Lucan or Valerius Flaccus. He secures this greater variety by dexterity

in the use of pauses. His metrical movements are composed with skill, and

often are felicitously appropriate to the sense, as in the passage on

Night and Sleep in _Thebaid_ I, where he brings into juxtaposition a line

with five spondees and one with five dactyls, then has a quick line of

four dactyls, returns to a slow movement of five spondees, and closes on

one where the feet are exactly balanced:

Titanis late, mundo subuecta silenti,

Rorifera gelidum tenuauerat aera biga;

Iam pecudes uolucresque tacent, iam Somnus amaris

Inrepsit curis pronusque ex aethere nutat

Grata laboratae referens obliuia uitae.

Computations[1443] have been made which show that, while Statius is

more dactylic than Virgil, he is less so than Ovid and Valerius. He has

fewer elisions than Virgil. Altogether his line falls short of supreme

epic dignity. In the _Siluae_ his hendecasyllabics, unlike Catullus’s

but like Martial’s, regularly begin with a spondee. His two imitations

of Horatian lyric metres display small inspiration. But in the _Siluae_

his hexameters appear to most advantage, attaining a facility suitable

to the lighter and more sportive subjects in the collection. Here, then,

Statius is in matter and form most truly himself. He portrays in the main

the surface of life, and is acquainted with its amenities and even its

pathos; but he does not penetrate into its meaning.

CHAPTER VII

MARTIAL AND MINOR FLAVIAN POETRY

Martial’s career—Poetry and patronage—Order of his

books—Numeration and fresh editions by the author—His

personality—Relation of literary trifles to real life—Distaste

for epic—Varied assortment of Flavian types—Contemporary

Rome envisaged—The humorous and incongruous—Martial’s

friends—The epigram before him—His impress on it—Verse-forms

and sources—Comparative absence of rhetoric—Simplicity,

wit, polish combined—Pointed end in an epigram—Confidence

in popularity and immortality—Sense of wasted time—Double

nemesis of his two great faults—Adulation and coarseness—The

sentimental side—Poems on the dead—On friendship—On natural

scenery—Quotability—His influence.

Minor Flavian poetry—Maternus’s post-Neronian plays—Saleius

Bassus—Poets under Domitian—Lyrics by Spurinna—Epics by

Cerealis and Codrus—Erotic poems by Verginius Rufus, Arruntius

Stella and Sulpicia—Satires by Turnus—Tragedies by Scaeva Memor

and Canius Rufus.

MARTIAL

M. Valerius Martialis[1444] was a native of Bilbilis in Spain. In his

tenth book, which belongs to A.D. 95-98, he celebrates his fifty-seventh

anniversary,[1445] so that his birth fell between 38 and 41. His cognomem

was due to his having been born on the first of March.[1446] While he

claimed descent from Iberians and Celts,[1447] his name indicates Roman

citizenship. His parents, Fronto and Flaccilla,[1448] secured for him a

literary education to which he owed an incalculable debt, although in a

fit of cynical depression in his fifties he says:

My foolish parents taught me poetry,

But what were dominies and dons to me?[1449]

Already intellectually well-equipped when over twenty, he left Spain in

_A.D._ 64 to find a wider scope for his abilities in Rome, which had

grown so cosmopolitan that its population struck his fellow-Spaniard

Seneca as made up more of foreigners than of citizens.[1450] This first

immigrant—a young “compatriot of the Tagus” with bristling Spanish hair,

as he describes himself[1451]—had before him a reasonable prospect of

success as a lawyer or a speaker; but he did not choose to employ his

training in oratory. What attracted him was verse-writing, with the

patronage which verse might win. The common link with Spain explains

why Seneca and Lucan were his earliest patrons; but the introduction to

society in the capital begun under such auspices was followed next year

by the ruinous implication of both patrons in the Pisonian conspiracy

against Nero. The career to which he had turned, or drifted, was sure to

be one of vicissitude and disillusion; and Martial had frequent cause

to recognize that only the few among clever poets or obsequious clients

could scrape a living, while the rest starved (_pallet cetera turba

fame_).[1452]

We read of juvenile productions which an enthusiastic bookseller would

not let die;[1453] but virtually Martial’s life is a blank for the first

sixteen years of his residence in Rome (A.D. 64-80). What his works

make certain is that he gained an intimate acquaintance with all grades

of society, the highest and the lowest. Some honours came his way, of

a kind that indicate his possession of more influence than money. He

became a _tribunus_, perhaps without having seen military service; he was

confirmed in the resultant title of _eques_ without possessing the means

to support the position;[1454] and he had obtained from two emperors the

_ius trium liberorum_[1455] without being a father—in fact, the tone of

his work throughout argues the bachelor.[1456] It is doubtful if his plot

of farmland at Nomentum was in his hands early enough to have been a gift

from Seneca, as has been guessed; but whether it came from him, or from

Lucan’s widow Polla, or from some one else, it must have often afforded

a welcome change after his three pair back-room in the sweltering

city.[1457] Later, he had a small house of his own on the Quirinal.[1458]

Neither from Caesar, however, nor from grandee did Martial ever obtain

as much as he expected and craved. As it was, he survived by adroitness

in courting the favour of well-to-do citizens so as to earn personal

presents or the dole of the _sportula_. If he was temperamentally unfit

to do anything but write verse, it is hard to see what other opening

there was, apart from a way of life indistinguishable from sponging.

For the surmise that he practised at the bar there is no justification

either in the advice he quotes from a person whom he asked for a loan,

“if you want to be rich, plead cases,” or in the similar counsel from

Quintilian.[1459] In spite of the fact that his verses had a sale,

there was no such reading public as could ensure returns adequate for

his maintenance: so pique at times made him argue that, if money-making

is the supreme object, parents ought not to spend on education: much

better make a boy something practical, a musician, an auctioneer, or an

architect.[1460] For himself, he felt obliged to live, whatever scoffers

might say about the necessity; and consequently had to capture patrons to

be the props of his subsistence and, as he believed, the indispensable

conditions of poetic production (_sint Maecenates, non derunt, Flacce,

Marones_).

His first publication known to us was the _Liber Spectaculorum_ of A.D.

80 which commemorated the opening by Titus of the Flavian Amphitheatre

familiar now as the Colosseum. Though anything but inspired, the

surviving thirty-three poems of this group throw interesting light on the

contests of the arena. Some four years later appeared the collections,

almost entirely of couplets, which are usually printed in defiance of

chronology, as Books XIII and XIV of the _Epigrams_. They owed their

occasion to the _Saturnalia_ in December, when gifts might be sent to

guests (_Xenia_) or taken home from the festive board (_Apophoreta_).

The 127 pieces of the one, and 223 of the other were nearly all meant

as suitable mottoes for such presents. Luckily Martial was capable of

cleverer work. Epigrams of his had appeared before 86 when he published,

perhaps together, the first two books of those which made his fame.

Allusions enable us to date his volumes with fair closeness, and, while

there are a few complications due to revised editions and collected

issues, it is broadly true that from 86 until his return to Spain in

98 he brought out a new book about once a year. Taken together, his

poems, few of them other than quite short, constitute one of the most

extraordinary galleries of literary pictures, vignettes, miniatures,

portraits, caricatures, sometimes almost thumbnail sketches that have

ever made a past society live again in the mind’s eye. While grace in the

sight of the emperor commended him to those in high places, including the

worst creatures at court like the notorious Crispinus and Paris, there

were many at the other end of the social scale, needy and seedy outcasts,

to whom Martial’s Bohemian indigence introduced him. He observed all.

He is one of the great spectators in literature. But the vanity of the

whole spectacle recurrently depressed him. Unremunerative attendance at

the receptions of the great as well as disgust at loathsome vices which

he exposes, contributed towards his tedium. Once weariness drove him to

Cisalpine Gaul, whence he issued an edition of Book III.[1461] In the

very next book[1462] he is hankering after Venetia as a retreat for his

old age. Yet years passed before he could tear himself away from Rome,

where, despite its drawbacks, he knew all the literary men of the day.

At last in 98 the sense of monotony told. The ordinary expenses of life

seemed as hard to meet as ever, and the old scenes in Spain, never wholly

forgotten during more than the third of a century, came back now with

alluring insistence to his mind:

While four-and-thirty harvests passed away,

Others gave Ceres rustic cakes at home;

But I, inhabiting fair sovran Rome,

Have turned in Italy from dark to grey.[1463]

Perhaps too some occult warfare in his soul between spirit and sense made

him realize, as never before, the emptiness of the life around. At any

rate the Flavian régime had suited him best; for under Nerva and Trajan

a new age had dawned, when sycophantic blandishments were futile and

_rustica ueritas_ had been restored (X. lxxii). His well-to-do friend,

the younger Pliny, found money for the impecunious poet’s journey to

Spain. There, settled at Bilbilis on land granted to him by a patroness

Marcella, he could indulge to the full that yearning for a quiet retreat

which he revealed in lines addressed to the great satirist of the time:

Mayhap, my Juvenal, your feet

Stray down some noisy Roman street,

While after many years of Rome

I have regained my Spanish home.

Bilbilis, rich in steel and gold,

Makes me a rustic as of old....

Outrageous lengths of sleep I take

And oft refuse at nine to wake.

I pay myself nor more nor less

For thirty years of wakefulness.[1464]

Missing the stimulus of the capital, he let three years elapse before his

twelfth and last book was sent out from Spain in 102. He did not long

survive its publication; for Pliny in a letter belonging to A.D. 104

mentions his death, adding the criticism that he was a man of talent,

subtlety and vigour, whose writing was characterized by abundance of wit

and pungency, but no less good nature.[1465]

The form in which Martial’s works have come down calls for brief remark.

Imperfect though the book of _Spectacula_ is, the missing portions are

perhaps a greater loss to archaeology than to literature. In the _Xenia_

and _Apophoreta_, unlike the later books, short headings (_lemmata_)

are given to which the reader is facetiously told he may, if he likes,

confine himself; and the presents of the _Apophoreta_ are arranged in

pairs, expensive and less expensive. As regards the existing division

into books, the numeration was Martial’s own,[1466] though some books, as

we have them, are not exactly as originally issued. For instance it is

inconceivable that his first book was from the beginning entitled “Liber

Primus,” with the implication that he was certain of success enough to

justify future issues; still less is it conceivable that in the original

issue of his first book he could have been described as _toto notus in

orbe Martialis_. His preface to Book II, which defends the innovation

of an introductory prose epistle, reads as if it were written before

the preface to Book I; and this latter preface, by speaking of “little

books” (_libelli_) in the plural, suggests that it could not have been

added till more than one book of epigrams had appeared—probably when a

collected edition of I-VII was issued. Among the later books, X and XI,

originally belonging to A.D. 95 and 96 respectively, had an Anthology

made from them in 97; and a second edition of X came out in 98.[1467]

Interesting prose prefaces are given to Books I, II, VIII and XII, while

a few lines of prose at the opening of IX introduce verses for the poet’s

bust in Stertinius’s library. The preface to I offers an apology for

the coarse outspokenness in the epigrams, with a significant list of

literary predecessors; that to Book II is, as mentioned, an apology for

an introductory epistle, in answer to the objection _epigrammata curione

non egent_; that to VIII professes that there has been less indulgence

here than elsewhere in the licence of the mime; and the last preface is

an apology for slackness in publishing, since Martial’s retreat to Spain

has deprived him of his stimulating Roman environment.

Martial, in his epigrams, reveals himself, and, even more, the company

he kept. With him we enjoy the luxury of an intimacy unusual among

writers of the Silver Age. Seneca, it may be said, opens his philosophic

heart, yet he does not make—it is hardly imaginable that under Nero he

should make—a complete self-revelation. Juvenal’s outspokenness is that

of indignant censure rather than of personal confession. But Martial

is naked and unashamed: he does not hide his thoughts, and even those

quick flashes in which he divines the thoughts of others still further

illuminate his own. Thus his personality is reflected in his themes,

and is inseparable from the things he described and the men he loved or

hated. A spectator of life, he was yet no detached spectator, but in a

sense a part of his own observations, so that his resolve to reflect his

surroundings leaves him at the same time essentially autobiographic.

We become familiar, then, with his poverty, his mendicancy, his

contempt for shams, his confidence in his literary powers, his pride in

Spain, his determination to pander to readers by spicy attacks on the

uncleanest vices. At times he seems a sort of Villon, never so much of

a gallows-bird as the French poet, nor ever master of so deep a note of

anguish, but yet like him in Bohemian neediness and in direct vigour of

style.

In the last resort, the key to his personality, to his style, to his

reputation, to everything that matters respecting Martial, is to be found

in this attitude towards life. Life afforded the inexhaustible material

whence he recognized it was his special _métier_ to draw. His brief

poems—some of them butterfly flights as brief as Japanese _tankas_—might

be trivialities, but they at least sprang from the actual. There is a

sort of double antinomy in him. On the one hand, he often calls his

verses _nugae_ or _ioci_, as if he made no higher claim for them than the

knack of amusing; yet he is insistent that they are not mere flippancies:

He misses what is meant by epigram

Who thinks it only frivolous flim-flam.[1468]

On the other hand, he explains elsewhere[1469] that he could write

seriously, but prefers to write entertainingly—the secret of his vogue.

At the same time, he cannot make a living out of pleasantries: instead,

he gets praise and starves:[1470] so he jocularly even threatens to turn

lawyer! In fact, however, though he said, and showed, that he could write

seriously, he seldom chose to. The sportive, the flippant, the ludicrous,

and often the indecent appealed to him irresistibly; for the truth is

that he wrote, like all literary artists, because it was his pleasure:

For all their compliments, do verses pay?

They mayn’t, yet these same poems make me gay.[1471]

But he would not have been human, he would certainly not have been

Martial, if he had not expected an adequate return from verses that

entertained or flattered; and occasionally his tone appears to meditate a

sort of literary strike—_pas d’argent, pas de poésie_:

A man on whom my poetry

Pronounced a handsome eulogy

Pretends that he owes naught to me—

I call this downright trickery![1472]

No writer ever more clearly recognized his field. In the third poem of

Book VIII he pretends to hesitate over multiplying epigrams—five books,

six, seven are already out and the whole collection is thumbed everywhere

(_teritur noster ubique liber_), there should be some stint and limit

(_sit pudor et finis_). Here the rebuke from the Comic Muse Thalia is

significant: “Abandon your charming trifles! But what better thing is an

idle singer (_desidiosus_) to do? Not tragic drama surely? Not epic? No,

Martial’s function is to hold the mirror up to the manners of the day”:

Nay, dye your Roman booklets smart with wit

That Life may read and know the portraits fit.[1473]

The claim is also well illustrated in his objection to mythological

twaddle—an objection sufficient to account for a radical lack of sympathy

with Statius, the only prominent poet of the time whom he does not name:

What profit empty myths in sorry lays?

Read this of which Life says “It is my own.”

No Centaurs here, Harpies, or Gorgon face

You’ll find: my pages smack of man alone.[1474]

This confident acceptance of life as his great exemplar explains the

variety and truth of Martial’s pictures. He knew that he could portray

his fellows with a sure hand; and his conviction that his forte lay in

light verse reflecting manners and morals gave him an assurance that

his work had force enough to last. It is essentially Flavian Rome that

he drew; for, though his writing continued under Nerva and the first

few years of Trajan’s reign, nine books of epigrams had come out under

Domitian. The repression of the Reign of Terror, which brought about

the fifteen years of silence to which Tacitus alludes, did not affect

the sort of verse which Martial composed. It was spicy, but not at the

expense of the emperor or the imperial system. All contemporary types

appear in Martial’s pages (_hominem pagina nostra sapit_). They range

from Domitian himself, haloed beyond recognition, down to the vilest of

characters to whom Martial owed no flattery and of whom to tell the truth

was to produce a shudder. Since fun comes easiest at the expense of human

weakness, there is a predominance of types in some way objectionable.

Hence a multitudinous array of spongers, dinner-hunters, fortune-hunters,

bores, coxcombs, charlatans, topers, freaks, stingy hosts, and

incorrigible reprobates. But if there are false friends there are also

firm ones, there are faithful slaves as well as faithless, moral wives

as well as immoral, and genuine poets as well as poetasters. The eye for

detail is remarkable: nothing is too slight for mention: the hawker of

sulphur and the purchaser of broken glass are not overlooked any more

than a wealthy _connoisseur_ of artistic treasures. Such pieces as the

neat summary of how the hours in a Roman day were spent convince one that

Martial saw things as they were, whereas Juvenal, though possessed of an

unchallenged sense of picturesque realism, tended to overlay his subject

with violent exaggeration or with a thesis-like treatment in the manner

of the rhetorical schools.

Thus to turn over Martial’s leaves in the most casual way transports one

to ancient Rome. There we find the Stoic heroine and hero, Arria and

Paetus, face to face with death; and intimates of the author who have to

be admonished about using life aright, or welcomed home, or reminded of

the enjoyable ideals of the unambitious, or urged, on the principle of

Satan reproving sin, to decide on a profession (_dum quid sis dubitas

iam potes esse nihil_). We can enter a private library; we can join in

the despatch of marriage greetings, or condolences under bereavement,

or congratulations to a lucky person on the prospect of a long holiday

which will send him back sun-burnt to the pale dwellers in town. We can

see artistic triumphs in a handsomely enchased wine-bowl, or an antique

bronze statuette. Again, we may listen to the author’s petition for the

_ius trium liberorum_, his request for a supply of domestic water from

the Aqua Marcia, or his many growls over the burdensome duty of calling

on patrons, over paltry presents (some folk, he observes, send less and

less each December!) and over the failure of patrons to maintain him

fittingly; he is, he complains, not so well sheltered as his patron’s

orchard-trees:

I’ve got a room where window-draughts do play—

One where the very North Wind wouldn’t stay![1475]

But it is not solely for town life that he has an eye. We note the almost

Dutch detail in some of his sketches of rustic scenes. Especially out

on Faustinus’s estate with its steading, the corn in heaps, the wine

in casks, the barn-yard fowls, the labourers’ work, the rural fare,

he appears to revel in “the genuine country, uncivilised” (_rure uero

barbaroque_).[1476] He envisages for us a real farm in Spain free from

the formal dress of Rome, and provided with shade against the summer

heat, and against the winter cold with a wood fire surrounded by grubby

youngsters.[1477]

True to the author’s promise, there are many figures that amuse—the

dry-as-dust antiquary spoiling his wine-parties by tedious rigmaroles

about the pedigree of his silver goblets, the prosy pleader in court

who needs hours to make a few legal points, the counsel who sagaciously

blushes in preference to stating his client’s full case, the guest who

arrives too late for breakfast but too early for lunch, and the too

prolific poet who finds no time to revise his hasty compositions:

You write two hundred lines ’twixt each sunrise,

But never read them, silly!—yet how wise![1478]

The element of humour in Martial was largely due to a keen sense of the

incongruous. He could not help chuckling at the notion of keeping about

eight birthdays each year to secure presents, or at the huge Gaul who

sprained his ankle and was glad to be carried home on a pauper’s bier, or

at the nuisance who rummages a shop for _objets d’art_ and gives endless

trouble without buying enough to compensate for it.[1479] Again there is

the decidedly plain lady who takes care to frequent the company of ladies

still plainer so as to appear a beauty by comparison:

Your friends, Fabulla, either are

Old crones or beldames uglier far:

These frumps you trot around with you

To parties, plays, and galleries too:

And so, my dear, such hags among

You look quite pretty and quite young![1480]

Ailments and the medical profession are the subjects of many jests.

There was the rebellious client who pretended to have gout in order

to avoid calling on his patron, but who, after hobbling about swathed

in wrappings, finally got the genuine disease; there was the patient

who died because he dreamt of his medical man overnight; there was the

ex-physician who turned undertaker and therefore had undertaken the same

undertaking for the sick as before; and there was the doctor who on his

clinical rounds gave a sufferer fever:

When I was ill, you came to me,

Doctor, and with great urgency

A hundred students brought with you

A most instructive case to view.

The hundred finger’d me with hands

Chill’d by the blasts of northern lands:

Fever at outset had I none—

I have it, Sir, now you have done.[1481]

Such alert perception of the incongruous made him scoff at shams—the

cupboard love that acts friendship with a view to hospitable invitations,

the lady whose artificial aids to beauty leave her with no face of her

own, the hypocrisy of pretended philosophers who were at heart dissolute

reprobates.[1482]

Ability to see the ludicrous side of things is always an entertaining

social recommendation. With the literary circles of the day Martial was

on familiar terms. He sends lines to Lucan’s widow on an anniversary of

the poet’s birth, he records Caesonius’s fidelity to Seneca in exile,

and shows patriotic pride in mentioning the Spanish birthplace of the

Senecan family.[1483] Quintilian, Arruntius Stella, a writer of polished

verse, and Valerius Flaccus were among his friends. Despatching poetry

to the younger Pliny, he good-humouredly quizzes him on his serious work

at the bar: the judicious moment of festive relaxation “when rose-leaves

reign, when locks are scent-bedew’d” must be chosen for the presentation

of Martial’s trivialities.[1484] With Silius Italicus he was well

acquainted: would that Epic poet, “pride of the Castalian sisterhood,” he

asks, deign to spare some leisure for the sportive trifles which he begs

to forward? Just so, he suggests anachronistically, might Catullus have

sent his _Sparrow_ to Virgil![1485] He also shows interest in Silius’s

activities and expresses sympathy for him in bereavement.[1486] But no

one, he felt, could embroil him with so true a friend as Juvenal, to whom

he wrote after his retirement to Spain and whose distaste for long-winded

epics he plainly shared.[1487] As regards Statius, who often wrote about

the same things and people as Martial did, their mutual silence must have

been due to incompatibility of temperament. Martial’s circle included

also the orator Aquilius Regulus, whom Pliny could not bear; Antonius

Primus from Toulouse, who helped as a commander to secure the Empire for

Vespasian; Julius Martialis, a close intimate; Q. Ovidius, a country

neighbour at Nomentum; wealthy knights like Atedius Melior and Claudius

Etruscus, but also many people less prominent like the centurions Varus

and Pudens. While he gives the real names of friends, it is to his credit

that he uses disguised names for the victims of his satire. Disclaiming

any intention of hurting (_ludimus innocui_), he declares that his

concern is to attack not persons but vice (_parcere personis, dicere

de uitiis_).[1488] Consequently, resentful at having scurrilous verses

fathered on him, he draws a lurid picture of the punishment which ought

to befall a slanderous poet.[1489] The systematic backbiter, he agrees,

may be called malign; but, with a fine touch of human feeling, he adds:

_I_ think he needs our pity who likes none.[1490]

The epigram in Martial is to be distinguished from, even if related to,

the epigrammatic in contemporary rhetoric, whether prose or verse. In

Martial it is a short independent verse composition, not one of a series

of glittering ornaments in a continuous poem, history, or oration; that

is, it constitutes a miniature unity; and there is a notable freedom

from the forced conceit with which the epigrammatic is often allied in

writers like Lucan. The epigram reached Rome from Greece in the form of

a brief poem originally inscriptional in character, as its name implies.

But the Greek ἐπίγραμμα itself had gone through a wide evolution since

Simonides of Ceos employed it for the tomb of the Spartans who fell

at Thermopylae. Beyond its use for epitaph, memorial, dedication, or

gift, the elegiac metre in particular had been devoted, with its Greek

quality of delicate and finished charm, to occasions which in modern

times would be considered essentially lyrical. The impression made by a

passing event or inward experience found utterance in a brief poem: the

poem might convey the feeling produced by a landscape, a book, a storm,

an artistic work, a misfortune, a mental disturbance, a friendship,

an affair of the heart. In contrast therewith, the Roman tendency, on

taking over from the Greeks this ill-defined branch of lyric, was to

sacrifice the poetic flavour to point, and most of all to the point that

stings. Hence, losing much of the lyric charm of the Greek, the epigram

was largely transferred to the service of satiric purposes. Catullus,

though certainly not wanting in true lyric quality, gave to the elegiac

that bent towards invective which was more definitely associated

with the abusive iambic. In this latter field, it is noticeable that

Diomedes,[1491] describing the bitter iambic, names, along with the

Greeks Archilochus and Hipponax, the Latin writers Lucilius, Catullus,

Horace and Bibaculus. Now Martial owns his obligations and traces his

freedom of speech (_lasciuam uerborum ueritatem_)[1492] to Catullus,

Domitius Marsus, Albinovanus Pedo, and Lentulus Gaetulicus of Caligula’s

reign. Roman _dilettanti_ of the Empire liked composing such verses, and

it is among the freaks of time that, though many authors like Marsus,

Pedo, Gaetulicus, Seneca and Petronius wrote epigrams, too little has

survived in this _genre_, outside Martial’s collection, to afford a

criterion of their individual contribution. Clearly, however, the march

of literature had worked changes that could not fail to affect Martial.

By his days, satire and rhetoric had both played a great part. He is but

following the traditions of the epigram in maintaining its essential

elements of concise expression and unity of idea; but he owes a debt to

satire for his width of range (Juvenal’s _farrago libelli_), his dramatic

vigour, his scraps of dialogue, his reflective pieces, his mordant wit

and irony. So too, although he is not enslaved by rhetorical artifice, he

knows how to make use of rhetorical point, as the culmination—usually a

stinging culmination—up to which the rounded whole of a short poem should

lead. His satiric epigrams, then, mark the close of the evolution of

this partly lyric type.[1493] Hence Martial’s individual impress on the

epigram is permanent. With him it reached that fixity of form which it

has retained up to modern times.

In a total of 1561 epigrams in the _Spectacula_ and fourteen other books,

1235 are in elegiac metre, 238 in hendecasyllabic, and 77 in choliambic

or scazon. There are, besides, a few in hexameter and iambic verse. The

elegiac distich is common, and is almost the only form among the 350

pieces of the _Xenia_ and _Apophoreta_. Often, however, his elegiac

poems run to ten or a dozen lines, occasionally to twice that length.

When the delights of Faustinus’s farm tempt him to write 51 scazons,

or when a dinner menu needs 32 hendecasyllabics, one hesitates whether

to call these epigrams at all. Vigorous and correct in versification,

his metres are in felicitous accord with the theme and spirit of his

various pieces. With great skill he can employ the elegiac to express

tender sentiment or weighty compliment, the hendecasyllabic for sportive

and ironic occasions, and the scazon for trenchant invective. But, if

the mood takes him, he can equally adapt the elegiac to satiric, and

both hendecasyllabics and scazons to descriptive purposes. Martial’s

favourite verse-form, the elegiac, is based, though not pedantically so,

on Ovid: lines and phrases are occasionally taken from him, but Martial

does not adhere to the Ovidian ending of the pentameter on a disyllable.

Typical endings such as _hospitibus_, _ingenio_, _undecies_, _amicitiae_

show that here, as elsewhere, he is under the influence of Catullus. It

is upon Catullus principally that his hendecasyllabics and choliambics

are founded, with the notable difference that Martial, departing from

the Catullian freedom in the opening foot of the choliambic, restricts

himself to a spondee. In style and metre we can trace some echoes of

Virgil, Horace and the _Priapea_; and, to a less degree, of Tibullus and

Propertius. Nor was the pointed manner of his early patrons Seneca and

Lucan without effect on him.[1494] Greek authors too have their share in

his sources, but, on the whole, he is remarkably independent of models.

Sometimes he appears to do little more than continue the kind of popular

tradition found in the smarter _graffiti_ at Pompeii. This, for example,

is not unlike his manner:

I wonder, wall, that you have not gone smash—

You’ve had to bear so many scribblers’ trash.[1495]

Low life and the commonest objects came under his survey and saved him

from bookish pedantry. The workaday spoken Latin of the _caballus_ type,

and words which many Romans would have shrunk from uttering (as we know

from Cicero), enter into his pages, alongside of language sanctioned

by exalted literary usage. This range of vocabulary is proportionate to

the width of his outlook, which contemplated, perhaps occasionally with

too heartless an indifference, the ugly as well as the beautiful. His

unabashed persistence in observation and his conscious power of natural

portrayal left him free to use at will, or not to use, the literary

predecessors whom he had studied. On subjects drawn direct from life he

writes with a finished neatness of expression and a freshness that reads

like improvisation. Over and over again, his natural themes appear to

fall into natural phrases. It is a straightforwardness that gives him,

for all his debt to patterns, the unmistakeable ring of originality. In

literature there is only one Martial.

Rhetoric is in the main absent from one who, primarily interested in man,

wrote as a realist. His most representative work is simple, with little

of that Spanish note of excess which one detects or suspects in several

of his compatriots, from the violent Porcius Latro onwards, not excepting

Lucan and at times Seneca himself. Martial feels no attraction to

mythology, though a court-poem might involve a few learned allusions. He

is content that elevated epics should be praised, admired, even adored,

so long as his verses are read. Hence the fundamental contrast, and

therefore presumably the antipathy, to Statius[1496] already mentioned.

Hence too the justification for Martial’s pronouncement: “all turgid

rhetoric (_omnis uesica_) is foreign to my writings: my muse swells not

in wild tragic robe.”[1497] Conformably thereto, he has a genial way of

disarming criticism by making no high claims:

There are excellent bits here, you’ll find,

And bits of a so-and-so kind:

Still more than the latter

Are bad bits—no matter!

A book is of all sorts combin’d.[1498]

In another piece he admits that, while tossing off epigrams may appear

simple, the crux lies in making a book; and, again, the criticism that a

book of his shows marked inequalities is answered by the contention that

this is in its favour, because a bad book is of uniform quality![1499]

No author ever passed a more honest criticism on his work. It is just

this unevenness that makes Martial a successful surprise. Alongside of

plain-speaking—the plainest of the plain—the reader may chance upon poems

which prove in him an exquisite sense of beauty. If the seaside or a

pretty name engages his fancy, he rises to a style in keeping with the

subject. There are no finer scazons in Latin than those he wrote on “the

sweet strand of genial Formiae” to rival the Catullian scazons on Sirmio:

Here Thetis’ face is ruffled by

A gentle wind: the waters lie

Not in dead calm, but o’er the main

A peaceful liveliness doth reign,

Bearing gay yachts before a breeze

Cool as the air that floats with ease

From purple fan of damozel

Who would the summer heat dispel.[1500]

So the liquid consonants of the admired “Springtide Lad” (_Earinos_) seem

to run over into his enthusiastic hendecasyllabics on

A name with violets and roses born,

Name that the loveliest time of year hath worn,

Fragrant of Hybla and of Attic thyme

Or of the nest where dwells the bird sublime,

A name sweet heavenly nectar to outvie,

One that fair Attis would be calléd by,

Or he that blends the cup for Jove on high,

Which, uttered once in the Parrhasian Hall,

Would make the Powers of Love sing madrigal.[1501]

So beauty of idea is combined with neatness when he sends a rose-wreath

to a friend:

Go, happy rose, with thy soft chaplet bind

My own Apollinaris’ locks; and see

One far-off day, when they are white, thou wind

Rose leaves around them: so may Love love thee![1502]

There the pedigree of the opening movement in Waller’s “Go, lovely rose”

and Herrick’s “Go, happy rose” is evident. Much, indeed, that might be

called Herrickian comes from brief pieces like

Polla, why send me wreaths of blooms new-born?

I’d rather handle roses _you_ had worn.[1503]

This neatness in expression underlies the characteristic suspense of

point until the concluding line, phrase, or even word of an epigram—the

typical manner of Martial familiar to us from imitations in neo-Latin

writers, in writers of our own eighteenth century and in Byron, on the

bee-like principle that

The body should always be little and sweet

And the sting should be left to the tail.

Very often, whether the piece is a brief couplet or a more extended

set of elegiac, choliambic, or hendecasyllabic verses, the surprise

and the bite come at the end. The epigram thus constitutes an artistic

“period.” Such is the force of the sharp _tussit_ of I. x.: “What is the

inducement that lures Gemellus to propose marriage to Maronilla? Why

does he long, plead, implore, send presents? Is she pretty? Nay, none so

ugly! What is the bait and charm then? Why, her churchyard cough!”—an

ugly but effective close on the attraction of a consumptive heiress for a

fortune-hunter.[1504] So he retorts on a person whose absence would be a

good riddance:

You ask me, Linus, what my field

Out at Nomentum is to yield:

Well, this it yields to me: the view,

My Linus, has no sign of _you_.[1505]

He makes fun of unwelcome kisses:

With half your lips, my Postumus, you kiss.

Thanks: you may take a half away from this;

But would you give me joy beyond compare?

Then keep the other half of that half-share.[1506]

Again, less briefly than, but to the same effect as, Mr. Punch’s advice

to those about to marry, he writes on a debtor’s going to law to dispute

a claim:

The judge expects a fee from you,

Your lawyer looks for payment too—

Best pay your creditor his due![1507]

From the idea of uniting in wedlock a much widowed widow with an equally

bereaved widower he extracts grim fun:

Fabius buries all his wives:

Chrestilla ends her husbands’ lives.

The torch, which from the marriage-bed

They brandish, soon attends the dead.

O Venus, link this conquering pair!

Their match will meet with issue fair,

Whereby for such a dangerous _two_

A single funeral will do.[1508]

He introduces us smilingly to a Roman hairdresser:

There once was a barber called Smart

Who plied his tonsorial art

Over Wolfaway’s face;

But in spite of his pace

A new beard was ready to start.[1509]

He jeers at the systematic diner-out:

Philo declares he never dines at home,

And that is no exaggeration:

He has no place whereat to dine in Rome,

Unless he hooks an invitation.[1510]

This last is a frequently imitated form in which the apparent

confirmation of the first statement leaves the final state of the

victim worse than the first. A similar effect is got by an apparent

contradiction of the original statement:

’Tis said Acerra reeks of last night’s wine:

’Tis false: he always drinks till morning-shine.[1511]

Just as elsewhere we trace the legacy of Martial in some of the gallantry

of Cavalier poets, and as his “Non amo te, Sabidi” descends to “I do not

like thee, Dr. Fell,” so this corrective form of epigram is the prototype

of such quips as Samuel Rogers’s:

Ward has no heart, they say; but I deny it:

He _has_ a heart—and gets his speeches by it.

An engaging blend of modesty and confidence is an ingredient in the

variety of Martial. At times, by way of pose, he may wish to give the

impression that, like Byron, he “rattles on exactly as he’d talk” and

that his verses are of little consequence:[1512] at other times, he is

both proud of his popularity and confident of his permanent place in

literature. The emperor read him (II. xci.): so did ministers of state

and men of letters (VI. lxiv. 8-10): everybody at Rome did, in fact (VI.

lx.). He was pointed out (_monstramur digito_, IX. xcvii. 4), and people

whispered “There he is!” (V. xiii. 3). Such a vogue had he that it was

possible to find a nuisance of a person who could repeat Martial by heart

and decline to stop! (VII. li.). In mock-heroic strain he declares:

Lo! I the man for trifles unsurpassed:

You mayn’t admire me, but I hold you fast.

Great themes are for great bards: enough to see

You oft re-reading my light poetry.[1513]

His naughty jests (_nequitiae_, VI. lxxxii. 5) were known to everyone

who had not a Dutchman’s ear: no wonder, then, that his circle of readers

should be as wide as the world (I. i. 2; V. xiii. 3; VIII. lxi. 3).

He was flattered to realize that he was a favourite in Vienne (VII.

lxxxviii.): his poems might be despatched to one person, but would be

read by all (_uni mitteris, omnibus legeris_, VII. xcvii. 13). Away

among the Goths a centurion thumbed his Martial (_a rigido teritur

centurione liber_), and Britain learned to repeat his verses (XI. iii.

3-5). His books went through different editions; they were on sale by

Secundus in parchment binding (I. ii. 3, 7-8), suitable for travellers;

or at Atrectus’s shop, smart in purple (I. cxvii. 13-7); or at the

establishment of Tryphon (IV. lxxii.), who was Quintilian’s publisher.

Furthermore, his juvenile verses could be had in collected form (I.

cxiii.), and plagiarists stole from his works. Yet even a “best seller”

in ancient Rome could not ensure handsome returns: Martial significantly

takes satisfaction in the thought that anyone can make money, but not

everyone can be a poet (V. xiii. 9-10); for he has a fine consciousness

that a book, to live, must possess an indwelling spirit (VI. lxi. 10).

No doubt crosses his mind about his own literary survival (X. ii. 7-12),

or about the immortality which mention by him can confer (V. xv. 3-4).

Nobodies, therefore, must not expect to have their names perpetuated in

his verse (V. lx. 6-7).

Alongside of this confidence, however, there rings out a note of

impatient fretfulness. Weariness of the bustle in the Vanity Fair of

Rome brought to this merry companion his intervals of heart-searching.

Surrender day by day to the solicitations of purely trivial circumstance

produced a natural revulsion against such waste of time. Led by a too

facile compliance into insipid society, he awakes upon occasion to a

sense of paltry achievement and lost opportunity. Etiquette, he felt,

wars with poetry:

I walk you out: I see you home:

I listen, sir, to all your chatter.

Your words and deeds I praise through Rome—

D’you think it really doesn’t matter?

Yet all this time I might instead

Have fashioned poems in my head....

Tell me, Labullus, is this right?

Can any call it honour bright

That just to swell _your_ client-crew

The books _I_ write should be too few?

About a month has gone so fleet

I’ve hardly filled a single sheet.

In this the poet is the sinner

If he won’t stay at home, to dinner.[1514]

The same fretful malady of the age troubled him when he wrote to his

namesake Julius Martialis on making the best of time:

Defer not joys thou mayst not win from fate:

Judge only what is past to be thine own.

Cares with a linkéd chain of sorrow wait.

Mirth tarries not; but soon on wing is flown.

With both hands hold it—clasped in full embrace,

Still from thy breast it oft will glide away!

To say “I mean to live” is folly’s place:

To-morrow’s life comes late; live, then, to-day.[1515]

The same friend is reminded that social duties may hamper one in living

one’s own life:

If you and I, dear Martial, might

Enjoy our days in Care’s despite,

And could control each leisure hour,

Both free to cull life’s real flower,

Then we should never know the halls

Of patrons, or law’s wearying calls,

Or troublous court or family pride;

But we should chat or read or ride,

Play games or stroll in porch or shade,

Visit the hot baths or “the Maid.”

Such haunts should lure us constantly:

Such should engage our energy.

_Now_ neither lives his life, but he

Marks precious days that pass and flee.

These days are lost, but their amount

Is surely set to our account.

Knowledge the clue to life can give:

Then wherefore hesitate to live?[1516]

Yet in spite of this discontent over a partially spoiled life, it may

be doubted whether Martial was capable of more than he accomplished. He

could only be himself. While he ought not to be called entirely shallow,

he lacked the profundity which might have made him other than a laureate

of the occasional.

The two glaring faults in Martial, servility and obscenity, brought

each their own nemesis: where he is most flattering he is least simple,

and where he is most indecent he is least witty. Both defects sprang

from his circumstances. Never wealthy, he found in adroit dedications a

more likely source of profit than in book-sales. Subservience towards

patrons, on whose uncertain favours he had to rely, was inevitable.

Hence adulation of the emperor, cringing to exalted personages, and

continual clamour for bounty. He flattered Domitian because there was

no choice. In touch with court, he could not logically keep out of his

verse the official title of “Lord and God” assumed by the emperor:

not belonging to the political opposition, he had no doubt a genuine

belief in the imperial system; and, as the most fulsome compliments were

acceptable, he resorted to mendacious homage. It is not merely that

it appears historically ludicrous in Martial to apply to Domitian the

epithet of chaste (_pudicus_) or to commend one of his own volumes as

fit to be read without a blush by that permanently red-faced prince;

but it is also, as already suggested, noticeable that he pays a literary

penalty for his moral weakness herein by deviating from his usual

straightforwardness of style. In the midst of his extremest sycophancy,

he becomes artificial owing to the intrusion of over-ingenious conceits.

Thus, it is grotesque to assert[1517] that Rome envies the barbarians

with whom Domitian has been warring in person, because they were lucky

enough to see the emperor’s face, whereas the poor capital had to be

content with the laurel-wreathed despatch of victory. And no one can take

seriously the far-fetched absurdity of his congratulations to the enemy

on “seeing Domitian’s face at close quarters and in that countenance

finding material for both terror and rejoicing.” Similar extravagance

marks his welcome on his Majesty’s return from Dacia,

Come, Caesar, e’en by night—let stars delay;

If thou but come, thy folk will find it day.[1518]

His argument, also, in favour of making requests to the divine emperor is

far too clever; “it is not the sculptor of an image who makes a god; it

is the man who prays.”[1519]

Martial’s indecency palls no less than his adulation. We are not amused.

The foulest epigrams force on the reader a resilient disgust as if

from some sickening contagion; and repeated shocks end in boredom.

Conceivably it was a salutary instinct that prompted the quaint idea

of a Delphin editor to remove from their original place in the text

all the unsavoury epigrams into a _musée secret_ at the end of the

volume, in which might be taken one nauseating draught of concentrated

impropriety. They number more than 150 or over ten per cent of the whole.

Many open out vistas down by-lanes of hideous vice. It might be argued

that even the foulest practices of sexual inverts had to be included in

a complete picture of pagan Rome; and that there was much to which an

avowed realist could not shut his eyes. Perhaps just because in their

naked _Romana simplicitas_ the worst epigrams are so repulsive, they

might, though filthier, be considered less pernicious than Ovid, or

than a sex-encumbered modern novel, which often lacks Martial’s truth

to life. Here we have a repellent rather than an erotic obscenity.

The author realizes that some apology is needed for overstepping the

limits of propriety. His poems are not for the prim and prudish, who

are in set terms warned away with the mischievous suggestion that the

warning will only whet their curiosity.[1520] Certain of his books he

can recommend as respectable:[1521] in general, however, he does not

address children but the seasoned onlookers at the Floralia and folk

of easy morality.[1522] So the freedom of Book XI is defended by the

licence of the Saturnalia.[1523] The fundamental excuse offered is one

which not a few Roman writers were at pains to make by way of protest

against any assumption that he who composes foul verses must himself

be foul. Martial’s declaration “our page is wanton but our life is

clean”[1524] is couched in terms similar to those used by Catullus and

Ovid, and practically repeated by Pliny, Apuleius and Ausonius.[1525] The

attitude suggests that the author had no objection to giving readers the

particular spice they wanted: sometimes a fine poem is marred by a gross

jest reserved as a surprise.[1526] Beside so much nauseating coarseness,

the claim of _ludimus innocui_ (VII. xii. 9) may sound ironical; yet

this can be said by way of comment, if not of palliation—he is not a

slanderer, for in general real names are avoided. If victims were foully

satirized, it was left to themselves or others to fit the cap. He resents

the impudent dishonesty of a verse-writer who “vomits viperous venom”

under Martial’s name.[1527]

His character is too complex to be satisfactorily analysed on

psychological principles. Whether one thinks of a super-man as well

as a subter-man within the same self, or thinks of the surprising

contradictions in him as liberated at different crises from the

oubliettes of a chequered experience, the diversity of his genius

remains beyond full explanation. If one side belonged to a realm where

ethics and ideals seemed contraband, he presented another side in

which sentiment under various aspects prevailed. Wrapped up with the

sentiment on this more kindly and genial side there is admittedly some

conventionality: the Greek tradition may act in one place, and the Latin

tradition through poets like Catullus in another. A certain amount of

sentiment may be due to the growth of more humane feelings in his age, as

is traceable in Seneca. Yet a large portion must be ascribed to Martial’s

own disposition. These phases of sentiment are most observable in his

attitude to the dead, his genius for friendship, and his love of nature.

His best known epitaph, that on a little girl Erotion, bespeaks for her

spirit in the land of shades the sheltering protection of Flaccilla and

Fronto, his parents, who had gone before. It ends:

Soft be the turf that shrouds her! Tenderly

Rest on her, earth; for she trod light on thee.[1528]

This conclusion, suggestive of the “sit terra tibi leuis” in sepulchral

inscriptions, was twisted to malicious effect by Martial himself on a

disreputable person:

Light may Earth’s crumbling sand be laid on thee

That dogs may dig thy bones up easily![1529]

Long afterwards it was parodied in reference to the massive buildings of

the architect Vanbrugh:

Lie heavy on him, earth! for he

Laid many heavy loads on thee.

A slave-boy is thus commemorated:

Dear Alcimus, Death robbed thy lord of thee

When young, and lightly now Labican soil

Veils thee in turf: take for thy tomb to be

No tottering mass of Parian stone which toil

Vainly erects to moulder o’er the dead.

Rather let pliant box thy grave entwine;

Let the vine-tendril grateful shadow shed

O’er the green grass bedew’d with tears of mine.

Sweet youth, accept the tokens of my grief:

Here doth my tribute last as long as Time.

When Lachesis _my_ final thread shall weave,

I crave such plants above my bones may climb.[1530]

There is a manifest sense not merely of the poet’s personal loss but of

the blow to the father of a youth from North Italy who has died in Asia

Minor:

My Sixth Book, Rufus, thou canst never greet:

It may not look, friend, to be read by thee.

Thine ill-starred sojourn in the curséd East

Restores but bones and ashes to thy sire.

Widow’d of Rufus, come, Bologna, weep:

Ring out lament thro’ all Aemilia!

How great a love, how young a life is lost!

(_Heu qualis pietas, heu quam breuis occidit aetas!_)

He had but seen a fifth Olympiad.

Ah, Rufus, wont with mindful heart to quote

My trifles and recite my jests in full,

Accept thy sorrowing friend’s brief tear-stained song

And deem this incense offered from afar.

(_Accipe cum fletu maesti breue carmen amici_

_Atque haec absentis thura fuisse puta._)[1531]

Kindly affection towards associates came easily to Martial. Q. Ovidius’s

birthday and his own he considers

Days that all others in the year transcend:

One gave me birth: the other, more—a friend.[1532]

Enthusiasm animates his admiration for Decianus:

If there be one to rank with those few friends

Whom antique faith and age-long fame attends;

If, steeped in Latin or Athenian lore,

There be a good man truthful at the core;

If one who guards the right and loves what’s fair,

Who could not utter an unworthy prayer,

If one whose prop is magnanimity,

I swear, my Decianus, thou art he.[1533]

Again, in a brief review of an intimacy of thirty-four years with Julius

Martialis, he finds it has contributed on the whole to happiness, but

pathetically fights against the notion of making friendship too warm,

lest its loss prove overwhelming:

Good comrades, Julius, have we been

And four-and-thirty harvests seen:

We have had sweetness mix’d with sour,

Yet oftener came the happy hour.

If for each day a pebble stood,

And either black or white were hued,

Then, ranged in masses separate,

The brighter ones would dominate.

If thou wouldst shun some heartaches sore

And ward off gloom that gnaws thy core,

Grapple none closely to thy heart—

If less thy joy, then less thy smart.[1534]

Martial’s appreciation of the country was inspired by something deeper

than the relief felt by a jaded town-dweller. His ideals may not have

been mightily exalted, but he had the poet’s eye for landscape and

colour, and therewith a gift of fancy. Nowhere does he seem more poetic

in his attitude towards external nature than in his lines on Vesuvius

visited some years after the terrible eruption of A.D. 79. The poem has

the interest of treating volcanic soil, which made both a practical and

an imaginative appeal to the Romans.[1535] The poet’s recollection of the

old fertile greenery and cool shadows of the vines (_hic est pampineis

uiridis modo Vesbius umbris_) contrasts with the bare desolation of the

land now buried beneath the mournful ashes of the volcano (_cuncta iacent

flammis et tristi mersa fauilla_). Then an exquisite touch of romantic

imagination pictures the vine-slopes as once haunted by the Wine-god,

near the dancing-places of the Satyrs (moderns might fancy them as gnomes

and elves)—a region where Pompeii enjoyed the patronage of the Queen of

Love and Herculaneum was called after the renowned demi-god:

This is Vesuvius where but late ’mid vines

Green shadows played, and noble clusters filled

The brimming vats. This is the very ridge

More dear to Bacchus e’en than Nysa’s heights.

On this same mount the Satyrs yesteryear

Did foot their frolic dance: here Venus found

A sweeter home than Lacedaemon gave.

A city here bore Hercules’ great name:

Now all lies whelm’d in fire and ashes dread,

And Heaven might well repent such fatal power.[1536]

So the poem ends in a tone of heartfelt sorrow over beauty destroyed,

while other pieces are full of a healthy delight in fresh air and country

scenes. A plane-tree might set his fancy roaming into fairy-land:

Oft ’neath this tree the tipsy fauns have played,

And the late pipe hath scared a silent home.

Fleeing the midnight Pan o’er lonely mead

Oft ’neath its leaves the woodland Dryad lurked.[1537]

Nature could bring him lively sensations of sight and smell, so that he

scents the fragrance from the myrtle, from the vine flowering white in

its first clusters, and from the grass newly nibbled by the sheep.[1538]

Such images for the moment at least shut out the revolting vices of the

city.

His own career in retrospect, when he left Rome for ever, contained

much to dissatisfy him. But though he had fallen short of the noblest

ideals, his experience enabled him to appraise aright the value of a good

conscience in a review of bygone years. To this thought he has given

admirable expression:

Good men make life a twofold span to last:

Twice doth he live who can enjoy his past.[1539]

The pith of style which contributed to Martial’s vogue in his own day has

always kept his poems alive; for quotability favours the preservation

of literary work. Among his memorable sayings, in addition to the

couplet quoted, are “To live is not a life—one must live well” (_non

est uiuere sed ualere uita_, VI. lxx. 15); “To-morrow’s life comes

late—live then to-day” (_sera nimis uita est crastina, uiue hodie_, I.

xv. 12); “Accept the lot thou hast—prefer naught else” (_quod sis esse

uelis nihilque malis_, X. xlvii. 12); “He hath no home whose home is

everywhere” (_quisquis ubique habitat, Maxime, nusquam habitat_, VII.

lxxiii. 6), which suggests his curt apostrophe to the owner of a spacious

but comfortless mansion, “How well you are—not housed!” (_quam bene non

habitas!_ XII. l. 8.) His dislike of shams appears in “There is a gulf

’twixt goodness and pretence” (_refert sis bonus an uelis uideri_, VIII.

xxxviii. 7). Many sundials have repeated his reflection on the flight of

“sunny days that are lost but set to our account” (_soles ... qui nobis

pereunt et imputantur_, V. xx. 12-13); and there is educational wisdom in

the hint “Boys who keep fit in summer learn enough” (_aestate pueri si

ualent satis discunt_, X. lxii. 12). For literary production he values

patronage: “Give us but patrons—Virgils will not fail” (_sint Maecenates,

non derunt, Flacce, Marones_, VIII. lvi. 5); but he goes deeper when he

says “To live, a book must have a soul within” (_uicturus genium debet

habere liber_, VI. lxi. 10), which is in keeping with “’Tis not a reader

your books need but Apollo” (_non lectore tuis opus est sed Apolline

libris_, X. xxi. 3). On the risk of publishing too many books he reminds

himself “The rare delights: so early fruits please best” (_rara iuuant:

primis sic maior gratia pomis_, IV. xxix. 3).

Martial’s influence began to act on Juvenal,[1540] and remained

operative throughout antiquity. Fathers of the Church showed knowledge

of him, and grammarians found illustrative material in his words and

phrases. During the Renaissance he was much studied and edited. His

hendecasyllabics were constantly imitated by the neo-Latin poets of

Italy and France for satiric purposes. None followed more keenly in his

steps than the Hungarian Janus Pannonius (1434-1472), who, besides

modelling his epigrams in freedom of utterance upon Martial’s elegiacs

and hendecasyllabics, enthusiastically praised him as a “father of wit”

(_ludorum pater et pater leporum_)[1541] to be invoked in preference to

Apollo and the Muses. Alongside there also flows (what is present in

Martial himself) the stream of Catullian influence observable in the

easy though occasionally solecistic _Basia_ of the _Pancharis_ by Jean

Bonnefons (Bonefonius) printed at Paris in 1587.

Then the influence passed over from Latin into the epigrammatic writing

of all modern literatures. Even the couplets of the _Xenia_ bore fruit;

for from them sprang the sarcastic _Xenien_ in which Goethe and Schiller

confronted dullness and satirized their literary enemies. Although in

quite recent times the epigram may have been less cultivated, in his own

field Martial remains, as a pattern, supreme.

MINOR FLAVIAN POETS

The minor and lost poetry of the Flavian era reaches a considerable

amount. Vespasian, though an enemy to philosophers, gave financial

encouragement to rhetors and poets. Both his sons, Titus and Domitian,

wrote poems; but the latter, after his accession, did little for poetry,

unless we put to his credit the continuance of Capitoline and Alban

competitions which ministered to his pride by eliciting laudatory verse.

Curiatius Maternus, best known from Tacitus’s _Dialogus_, has been

included among poets of the Neronian age, when his career as dramatist

began. His tragedy of _Thyestes_, however, and his _praetextae_ entitled

_Domitius_ and _Cato_ belong to Vespasian’s reign. The epic poetry of

Saleius Bassus may have been, like that of Valerius Flaccus, based on

mythology. Statius’s father was more attracted by current themes.

Under Domitian, dilettanti might keep the path of safety, if they

confined themselves to such compositions as erotic poems, conventional

epic, eulogies and colourless occasional verse for recitation before

friends or for public competitions or for private exchange with other

literary men. The authors were the kind of persons whom we meet in

Statius, Martial or the younger Pliny. A considerable list could be drawn

up from these three sources; but it may suffice to select, in lyric,

Vestricius Spurinna,[1542] a military commander on Otho’s side; in epic,

Julius Cerealis and the Codrus or Cordus whose _Theseid_ is mentioned

in Juvenal’s second line; in erotic verse, Verginius Rufus, an elderly

friend of Pliny’s; Arruntius Stella, consul in 101, author of passionate

poems on Violentilla, whom he afterwards married; and Calenus’s wife,

Sulpicia, to whom the later so-called satire of Sulpicia in seventy

hexameters should not be ascribed.[1543] Turnus succeeded in writing

satire and yet surviving at the court of Domitian.[1544] His brother

Scaeva or Scaev(i)us Memor, we have seen, wrote tragedies, as did Canius

Rufus, along with others mentioned by Martial and Juvenal. There are also

traces of lost _palliatae_ and _togatae_. Neither these, however, nor

productions like the _Agaue_ by Statius prove that there was any real

renascence of drama. It had fallen on evil days.

LITERATURE UNDER NERVA AND TRAJAN

A.D. 96–A.D. 117

CHAPTER I

PLINY THE YOUNGER AND MINOR CONTEMPORARIES

Early life—Problems in chronology—Later

career—Poems—Orations—The _Panegyricus_—The

amplified speech—Flattering picture of an ideal

prince—_Epistulae_—Roman success in letter-writing—The

essay-like epistle—Contrast with Cicero’s letters—Plinian

parallels in eighteenth century—Correspondence with

Trajan—Pliny’s gentlemanliness—Passion for literary

pursuits—Naïve vanity—Religion and politics—Composite

style—Neologisms—Influence.

Pliny’s literary circle and minor contemporaries—Verse—History

and Oratory—Jurisprudence—Scholarship—Gromatics.

PLINY THE YOUNGER

The Latin name of the younger Pliny after his adoption under his maternal

uncle’s will in A.D. 79 was C. Plinius Caelius Secundus.[1545] Previously

he had been called P. Caecilius Secundus, and was one of the sons of L.

Caecilius Cilo, a man of substance belonging to the old northern family

of the Caecilii at Comum (Como). Pliny thus retained his gentile name

instead of changing it to Caecilianus according to the republican mode.

He was born at Comum,[1546] in either 61 or 62; for he says he was in

his eighteenth year when his famous uncle lost his life in the eruption

of Vesuvius, August 24th, A.D. 79.[1547] His father’s early death left

him under the guardianship of the distinguished general Verginius

Rufus, who twice refused the imperial purple: to him and to his uncle

he owed guidance in his studies. There was no public teacher at Comum

(a disadvantage which Pliny sought to remedy in later years), so that

his education in the north must have been conducted either privately or

at Milan. In time, however, he went to Rome and studied under Nicetes

Sacerdos and Quintilian.[1548] The elder Pliny’s example and precepts

kept his nephew assiduously employed: even a walk was frowned upon, and

on the occasion of the fatal eruption the youth was engaged on a literary

exercise set him by his uncle, and was also working on Livy.[1549] Such

teaching and his own diligence led to his early appearance as a pleader;

for he argued his first case in his nineteenth year.[1550] This was in

Titus’s reign; thereafter, under Domitian, he filled a round of offices

and built up a reputation by speaking, sometimes in the Senate, but

mostly in what he calls his special “arena,” the centumviral court for

the trial of lawsuits about disputed properties or successions.[1551] The

literary works, however, by which he is known belong almost entirely to

the time of Nerva and Trajan, and are therefore post-Flavian.

Except Cicero, no Latin author is so well-known to us. We have a full

self-revelation in his letters, while a few inscriptions record his

_cursus honorum_.[1552] Yet, clearly though his personality stands out,

teasing puzzles remain, affecting his life and works. For these problems

brief mention must suffice. Ever since Mommsen published his elaborate

article _Zur Lebensgeschichte der jüngeren Plinius_ in _Hermes_ in

1869, discussion has continued on the dates when Pliny held certain

of his offices and on the interconnected question of the dates when

the different books of the epistles were written and issued. Though

finality has not been reached, some of Mommsen’s pronouncements have been

controverted, and doubts thrown upon his basic conception that Pliny

is misleading his readers, with a view to produce a false impression

of fine carelessness, when he declares that the letters are not in

chronological order. Mommsen used his findings on the chronology of the

letters as a foundation for his account of Pliny’s life. It is impossible

here to enter into the arguments with which critics have assailed him

or each other.[1553] After all, however important such details are in

the interests of historical accuracy, it does, from the standpoint of

pure literature, make little difference, if, for example, Mommsen was

wrong (led wrong perhaps by implications in his own theory)[1554] as to

Pliny’s tenure of office at the _aerarium Saturni_, or if he was right in

assigning Pliny’s praetorship to 93.[1555]

Nor is there any stagnation in Plinian textual criticism, as the issue

of recent editions proves;[1556] and, though a literary history is not

directly concerned with an author’s MSS., it is difficult to forget that

the sole written copy on which Pliny’s correspondence with Trajan rests

has long since been lost, and that the establishment of the text in the

other books of letters—not an easy matter—depends on a right assessment

of three distinct families of MSS.[1557]

Fortunately, the essential facts of Pliny’s life are beyond dispute. He

went through the two preliminary stages of a civil career by performing

in the “vigintivirate” the duties of assisting the praetor as _decemuir

stlitibus iudicandis_ and by serving in garrison abroad as military

tribune in Syria. After his return to Rome, he received the compliment

of being appointed _seuir_ of the _equites_; he held the quaestorship

89-90, tribunate of the people 91-92, and praetorship in 93. An imperial

dispensation abolished for him the usual interval between tribunate and

praetorship. He was, then, praetor in a year signalized by Domitian’s

determined endeavour to quell what he considered a “Stoic Opposition.”

How far Pliny did or could help his Stoic friends cannot be determined.

He is at some pains at a later date to declare that he supported the

philosopher Artemidorus with money and a personal call of sympathy

outside Rome, and to indicate that he was himself the subject of a secret

information;[1558] but Pliny had a hazardous position to fill, especially

in 93, as a magistrate, as a recipient of the emperor’s favour, and as

a temperamental objector to anything like martyrdom. Further confidence

was shown in 94, when Domitian made him one of the three prefects of the

military treasury. Discretion and the right sort of silence brought him

safely to Nerva’s reign, when his business experience recommended him for

nomination early in A.D. 98 to the prefecture of the military treasury.

Nerva’s death before the end of January involved his induction into that

office by Trajan, who, two years later, in September, 100, promoted Pliny

to the suffect consulship. It was on assuming the chair in the Senate

that Pliny pronounced before the emperor the _Panegyric_ which was the

spoken basis of the over-elaborated oration that survived. A break in

magisterial duties ended a few years later, when Trajan granted him a

seat in the college of augurs in succession to a revered friend, Julius

Frontinus: next came his commission on the Tiber Conservancy Board,

involving superintendence of the banks and channel of the river and the

drainage of the city. When Trajan, therefore, had taken over from the

Senate the badly managed province of Bithynia, he paid a well-deserved

compliment to Pliny’s executive and financial ability by letting his

choice fall upon him as his special and personal representative. The

emperor knew him intimately, and on one occasion summoned him as an

assessor in trials heard by his Majesty at Centum Cellae (Civita

Vecchia), some forty-seven miles distant from Rome.[1559] The evidence on

the whole points to A.D. 111-113 as the period of two years during which

Pliny was governor in Bithynia.[1560] It may have been only in his second

year of office that he found time to extend his movements beyond Bithynia

proper, and to visit the eastern or Pontic part of his province.[1561]

Presumably he died in harness: at least the correspondence comes to an

abrupt close. In the last letter of his which we have, he mentions having

sent his wife back to Italy post-haste on account of her grandfather’s

death, and the emperor’s reply ends the collection.[1562] It is not

wholly unfitting that this mainly official book should conclude with a

domestic touch. Pliny was deeply attached to his third wife, Calpurnia:

what he writes of her shows how much he appreciated her interest in his

work: what he writes to her when they are separated shows that a love

letter was within his capacity.[1563]

Pliny’s marriages brought him no children, but Trajan conferred upon

him the _ius trium liberorum_ in 98. Generous to friends, he showed

munificence to his native town during his lifetime by presenting and

endowing a library, devoting a sum to the support of freeborn boys and

girls, and promising to pay one-third of the salary for a professor of

rhetoric. The longest of the inscriptions[1564] concerning him prove his

bequests for baths, for the maintenance of a hundred freedmen, and on

their death for banqueting the townsfolk.

Of poetry we should scarcely have suspected him, but that he pleads

guilty, and is manifestly anxious to be thought capable of composing

the lightest of light verse. Pliny endeavouring to be naughty or even

frivolous is difficult to conceive. However, he had tried his hand at a

variety of forms; at a Greek tragedy, when he was fourteen, and later at

Latin elegiac, epic and hendecasyllabic verse.[1565] An epigram by Cicero

on Tiro tempted him once to use his midday siesta for poetic composition;

and the thirteen hexameters which resulted show that he had much better

have slept.[1566] The eight elegiacs of versified advice preserved

elsewhere as one of his sportive trifles (_lusus_) are mediocre.[1567]

Yet he is proud to have issued a volume of hendecasyllabic poems, which,

he says, are read, sung to music, and actually lure Greeks to study

Latin. “I simply pray,” is his complacent remark, “that future ages may

endorse the mistake or the appreciation of my contemporaries.”[1568] But

the ages have not spared the book.

Pliny felt still more pride in his oratory as a basis of fame. Much of

his speaking must have been too strictly legal for preservation; but

there were occasions in and outside Rome which made his eloquence in his

own eyes worthy of permanent record. With some speeches he took enormous

pains after delivery: they would be carefully revised, retried upon a

small circle of friends, sent in whole or in part to correspondents

for criticism, delivered afresh before a large invited audience, and,

after final emendation, possibly published.[1569] “I reflect,” he

remarks, “what a serious matter it is to put something into the hands

of the public.”[1570] He was perfectly conscious of the risk that such

a redelivered speech ran of losing its fire, and yet he wonders why he

should be criticized for his practice of serving up speeches at a formal

_recitatio_.[1571] We know of at least seven speeches of his that reached

book-form, though they have not reached us. These include his address

at the dedication of the library at Comum; pleadings in defence of

Julius Bassus and Rufus Varenus on the two occasions when Pliny acted as

counsel against the Bithynians, whom he was one day to govern; a speech

for Attia Viriola to show cause why she should not be disinherited;

and an attack in the Senate, after Domitian’s death, upon Publicius

Certus as responsible for the conviction of the younger Helvidius. This

last oration[1572] gave Pliny a safe opportunity of eulogizing a Stoic

family, and brought him from a friend the compliment, joyfully accepted,

of comparing it to Demosthenes’s speech _Against Meidias_. “In fact,”

replies Pliny, “I had that speech in my hands when I composed mine—not

to rival it (that would be outrageous or almost insane), but still to

imitate and follow as far as difference of genius—a very great and a very

small one—or the dissimilarity of the case would permit.”[1573] Among

other speeches, which may or may not have circulated afterwards, were

those he delivered on the two occasions when, as advocate for the Baetic

provincials, he prosecuted ex-governors of theirs, Baebius Massa and

Caecilius Classicus; his impeachment of the notorious Marius Priscus as

counsel for the Africans along with Tacitus in A.D. 100; and the defence

of a group of legatees charged in the criminal court with poisoning.

Nothing has, however, come down to represent his oratorical activity

except the re-edited form of the _Panegyricus_ on Trajan, pronounced

in the Senate by Pliny on entering with Cornutus Tertullus upon the

consulate in the later part of the year 100. One cannot hope to discern

how much of the original speech is embedded in what we now have. Soon

after its delivery, Pliny sent a copy to Voconius Romanus asking for

criticisms, and his letter[1574] makes it clear that he was scrutinizing

his own performance under various rhetorical heads. His contention

is that the well-known nature of the material (that is, Trajan’s

services and qualities) must concentrate the attention unduly on style

(_elocutio_), whereas there are other points to consider like arrangement

and transitions; also, just as in a picture, one demands high lights and

shade. No more illuminating introduction, however, to the _Panegyric_

can be found than in another letter mentioning an amplified form of the

speech which Pliny has been reading to a gathering of friends on three

successive days.[1575] As they had assembled in spite of bad weather,

their interest was a compliment to literature, which, he says, was just

reviving after being nearly extinguished: “it is not that there is more

style than formerly, but people write with more liking because they

have more liberty (_liberius ideoque etiam libentius_).” Exuberance, he

submits, must be expected in such a composition: in fact, plain unadorned

language might appear out of place in a eulogy, though he hints at hopes

that literary taste will yet come to favour austere in preference to

sugared writing.[1576] One most important point emerges bearing on the

author’s design. Proper as it was that the fuller treatment in book-form

(_eadem illa spatiosius et uberius uolumine amplecti_) should do justice

to the excellence of the emperor, there was the further aim of drawing

the picture of a perfect prince. This is an implicit appeal to posterity.

Yet it only relatively makes the _Panegyric_ more endurable: the praises

remain excessive, the figures strained, the prolixity wearisome. For us

its chief value lies in the historical light shed on the early part of a

reign so scantily documented as Trajan’s is, apart from Pliny’s speech

and his correspondence.[1577]

The complimentary expression of thanks to which senators had listened

with secret chafing in Domitian’s day was expanded by Pliny into a

_laudatio_ in which he incorporated the two rhetorical prescriptions of

detailed fact and psychological study. That is why the speech divides

itself broadly between Trajan’s public acts and Trajan’s personal

character. The exordium acknowledges a sense of the divine favour which

has bestowed upon Rome such an emperor: it disclaims all intention

of flattering; for abject obeisance, as if to a deity, is no longer

necessary—Trajan is no tyrant, but a fellow-citizen. Then the keynote

is struck. One reflects how highly endowed ought that person to be who

controls the Empire by sea and land, in peace and war; but imagination

can yield none worthier of such authority than the prince in whose

presence the orator is speaking. Logically, then, he is the picture of

an ideal for future ages. Trajan’s services before his recent arrival

in Rome imply bravery, wide military experience, power of discipline

and a loyal acceptance of his adoption by Nerva to be a colleague and

successor. His triumphant entry into the city and at the same time his

modest bearing form a fit prelude to a rehearsal of his public acts,

such as liberality to the people, care of poor children, protection

of commerce, solicitude for the corn supply that might well make Rome

independent of “haughty Egypt,” exhibition of manly games, abolition of

espionage, repression of informers, discountenancing of treason-trials,

stabilization of finance, guaranteeing of wills, and a wise policy in

building. The emperor devotes anxious thought to the provinces, and has

a due regard for justice: in fine, he governs as the Creator does—a

vicegerent on earth. His personal qualities are commended with allusions

to the contrasted inhumanity of Domitian. So far is the emperor from

self-assertion that he had long hesitated to accept a third consulship:

so zealous is he that change of work is for him a form of relaxation.

Unconscious humour lurks in the detailed picture of this indefatigable

sportsman and handy seaman, unlike his predecessor (_quantum dissimilis

illi_) whom sea-sickness reduced to the condition of a victim led to

the slaughter (_piaculum_). Next, his private life in the palace with

wife and sister is touched on; then his affability to friends, and,

with a glance at Claudius’s court, his control over the freedmen of

his household: “You know that greatness in freedmen is the chief mark

of littleness in a prince.”[1578] Well does such an emperor deserve to

be called _optimus_. After an apostrophe to his late Majesty, Nerva,

the formal close comes in acknowledgements uttered to Trajan on behalf

of Pliny himself and his colleague, and in deferential remarks to their

fellow-senators.

Regarded under the aspect of an admonitory document for future princes,

the _Panegyric_ is less offensive to modern taste; because its words are

not those of an obsequious toady but of a patriot insistent upon the

services rendered by a wise emperor to his country. Its faults, too,

such as affectation and long-windedness would certainly have been less

present in the spoken form. As it now stands, it wearies the reader by

its length, adulation and artifices. Trajan ceases to be interesting as

a Sun-god or an earthly Jupiter: he is more effective as a hard-working

ruler. The rhetorical element is also overdone: resort is too often had

to antitheses,[1579] _sententiae_,[1580] and a subtlety that degenerates

into bad taste.[1581] The specious “colores” of rhetoric betray

themselves in over-ingenious turns: a mutiny, it is suggested, was the

very thing wanted to prove Trajan a true _corrector emendatorque_; and

his grey hairs were heaven-ordained to enhance his reverend appearance.

What uncomplimentary rhetorical colour would have been given to grey

hairs in Domitian’s case may be imagined. Perhaps Trajan felt such

elaborate praises as trying as he must have found some of the questions

on detail included a dozen years later in Pliny’s letters to him from

Bithynia. Finally, the _Panegyric_ contains much to illustrate the

invasion of prose by the poetic: here the _egressio_ on Egypt will

provide apposite examples. As this epideictic performance, then, is our

sole specimen of the author’s oratory, we must beware of judging the lost

speeches by it. In other speeches Pliny, though never an austere orator,

may have indulged less in the rhetorical faults of his time.

Pliny’s _Letters_, on which he prided himself less than on his poetry and

speeches, constitute his real title to fame. The 247 letters of the nine

books which precede the last book (containing 121 letters of official

correspondence between Trajan and Pliny in A.D. 111-113) were written

in the period from about A.D. 97 to about 109. Their chronology, it has

been indicated, is a debated and still debateable matter; but there is a

growing belief that the letters in the nine books were issued in groups,

which one theory at least arranges symmetrically in triads.[1582] Pliny

did not adhere to strict chronological order; and his own statement to

that effect is confirmed by several instances.[1583] The collection in

nine books may be assumed to have been complete before Pliny left Italy

for his eastern province, and the so-called tenth book to have been

published after Pliny’s death by some friend or possibly by his widow.

To understand Pliny’s significance as letter-writer it is necessary to

observe what an _epistula_ from his hand meant. We have nothing quite

like it earlier: on the other hand, a long series of prose letters in

later times and later literature bear a family resemblance to his.

Classical Greece presents in this field relatively slight remains. There

are no indisputably genuine Greek letters to represent the best period,

partly because inside the small Hellenic communities it was pointless

to write to a man whom one might see in an hour or so, and partly

because external communication was hampered in many ways. As travel

and separation greatly predispose to letter-writing, it is natural to

think that the breadth of interest which furnishes the best epistolary

equipment came more easily to a Roman in the days of a world-empire:

it is therefore natural to feel less surprise that, as the dialogue

had become classic in Greece, so the sort of halved dialogue which

constitutes a good letter became classic at Rome. Something in the

Roman genius favoured this literary form: it is not merely that there

is no Greek analogy to the three kinds of epistles written by Cicero,

Seneca and Pliny, but in later centuries Latin still holds the supremacy;

for Julian the Apostate and Synesios, Bishop of Cyrene, are not in

letter-writing the equals of the Gallic Bishop, Sidonius Apollinaris, or

the statesman Cassiodor(i)us.

The letter, as published by Pliny, goes far beyond the scope of the

simplest private form written to make a request or give information.

This simplest form may be no more literature than an official letter is;

yet many letters, in the original sense, intended only for an individual

receiver may possess the charm of frankness and artlessness united with

just as much design as is needed for clear conveyance of the writer’s

thoughts. One of the fascinations in Cicero’s letters, especially those

to Atticus, is that he speaks to his friend as if to himself, uttering

the first thing that comes (_quidquid in buccam_, _Ad Att._, XII. i.

2); so that this immediate committal of thought or experience to paper

involves a disregard of academic rules and often a free borrowing of tone

and expression from the _sermo cotidianus_. Wherever, in parts of the

_Epistulae ad Familiares_, there may cross Cicero’s mind the possibility

of publication, he becomes at once less unconstrained and more formal.

It makes all the difference whether our letters are to be read by one or

by many. With the notion of a collective audience among contemporaries

or posterity there begins the quest after artistry: then it is always

possible that, on redressing the balance, one may be compensated for

the lost spontaneity with new aesthetic effects. This more literary

type is represented by Pliny. With him the epistle has overstepped the

rigid bounds of a letter: it has become a _causerie_ on paper, and

the addressee is in a position comparable to that of the Pisones in

Horace’s versified epistle on poetry, or Lucilius in Seneca’s _Epistulae

Morales_, or Madame de Sévigné’s daughter in her correspondence. The

recipient really represents the great public, while Pliny ranges at

will anywhere through the width of human life among themes likely to

provide interesting material—a senatorial debate, a trial, an illness,

a death, a murder, a mysterious disappearance, floods on the Tiber, a

volcanic disaster, ghost stories, a book, a speech, a literary celebrity,

questions of style, principles of education, advice about a tutor, social

claims, a day in town, a day in the country, scenery, a residence by the

sea or in Tuscany or on the Lago di Garda, an offer of a loan, a purchase

of property, a mean host, a Corinthian bronze, the duty of forgiveness,

greetings to friends or relatives, congratulations, consolations.

Elsewhere, in a light vein, he rallies a poor correspondent, or an

acquaintance who has forgotten to come to dinner; regrets he has only

got thanks to send for a present of thrushes; acknowledges another

gift with the information that, though his eyes are troubling him, he

can see it is a plump hen; tells another friend that he is busy with

the vintage, but will “draw off” fresh verses for him;[1584] or again,

much as Burns in one of his letters delightfully told three tales about

Alloway Kirk, so Pliny tells three anecdotes about Regulus with the airy

introduction: “down with your copper and get a story worth gold; no,

three stories!”[1585]

Expression must be manifold to keep pace in pliancy with every swift

turn of thought on such a variety of subjects. The general effect is

that of a miscellany of miniature studies or _feuilletons_, in the sense

that Pliny’s letters, essay-like, weigh some incident, experience, or

idea in the scale of the author’s personal mood, or, if “weighing” be

too precise a term, the author may be said to play lightly round his

theme and put his own spirit into it. This personal impress makes the

letters as readable as leaves from a well-written diary, so that they

have, some of them, the incidental, intimate, and literary interest which

marks a work like the _Journal des Goncourt_. Epistolary literature,

even at its most artificial, possesses the attraction of affording a

sure insight into the nature of the author. While it may be too much

to declare, as Johnson did, that “in a man’s letters, you know, madam,

his soul lies naked,” still there must always be in them a biography

of the feelings: there will also often be—and perhaps more interesting

if undesigned—illumination thrown upon the customs of the day. Since

Pliny’s letters do not belong to the kind tossed off in fine careless

freedom, one does not look to find in them the rapid conversational and

staccato notes of some of Cicero’s, or the open impetuosities of Byron;

for Pliny’s letters are more laboriously penned with the thought of

eventual publication and the hope of posthumous fame: their sentiments

and phrases are so cunningly disciplined and marshalled that what they

lose in unsophisticated charm they gain in artistic grace. But with all

this clever artificiality Pliny has much sound matter to convey. Studied

elegance is not necessarily inimical to sincerity, and his letters remain

a true index to his personality and to the life of his times. He realized

the contrast between his own letters and Cicero’s. Their circumstances

were different, and Cicero’s fertile genius could readily find abundance

of material in the stirring times that witnessed the death-throes of

the republic. Apologizing, therefore, to a friend who has demanded full

letters, Pliny pleads lack of thrilling subjects and fears that his

epistles may become too academic (_scholasticae atque umbraticae_).[1586]

We may take it for certain that one reason why Cicero’s letters so far

outnumber Pliny’s is that Pliny must have excluded from publication such

of his letters as in substance could not lay claim to general interest

or in form could not serve as patterns of style. It is noteworthy that

there are no epistles of the literary type belonging to the period of his

governorship, though it is conceivable that, but for his death, the world

would have seen another issue of his open letters, adorned, as before,

with that _bel esprit_ which Europe has found so attractive.

This Plinian type of letter, where the underlying realities are retouched

more or less lightly with literary refinements before publication, is

one of the legacies of Rome to modern literature. Epistolography made no

advance in the Middle Ages, but with the Renaissance the recovery was

well marked among scholars. When we turn to the eighteenth century, the

palmiest age for letter-writing in English literature, it is impossible

to avoid being struck with a similarity of spirit between Pliny’s letters

and those of Horace Walpole, Gray and Cowper. Despite Pliny’s complaints

about inroads on his time, and harder worker though he was than our

chief letter-writers, he yet enjoyed the comfort and the leisure which

seem indispensable to the production of the best literary epistles.

Thoughtful, kindly, communicative, he was the very man to give human

interest to his writing. Neither in Walpole, that caustic and voluminous

man of the world, nor in Gray, largely a recluse with a fund of somewhat

baffling restraint, do we discover the amiability which makes this pagan

gentleman so winning. Perhaps Cowper, if we neglect his shy melancholy

and quiet humour, presents most parallels to Pliny. Scholarly, sensible,

well-mannered, free from ill-nature, artistic in expression, he had

a turn for reflection which make much in his letters read as if the

English would go straight into Plinian Latin. Certainly it is not without

significance that one of the best English renderings of Pliny was that

composed by Melmoth in the eighteenth century: it is too verbose, but

even its generous verbosity suggests the spacious leisure of a period

before the rush of modern life mortally wounded the art of letter-writing.

In contrast to the literary epistles, the correspondence with Trajan

concerns the business of a provincial governor, some of it urgently

demanding for settlement all the haste that the Roman imperial post

by road and sea would allow. Here we find petitions for privileges

on behalf of Pliny himself and others, reports on his struggles with

the impaired finances of municipalities, knotty questions in civil or

religious or criminal law, local difficulties in building a theatre or

temple or aqueduct or baths, and repeated requests for a trained surveyor

or architect from Rome. Most famous of all is the pair consisting of

the letter from Pliny on prosecuting Christians and Trajan’s answer.

Historically the collection is most valuable, because it lifts the veil

from the administration of a province in an abnormal condition; but much

non-literary matter has, of necessity, to be introduced, and there is

just that element of fussiness which good letters lack. One feels that

the special commissioner refers too many minute points to Trajan, and

deserves the reminder that some of his reported quandaries were exactly

of the sort which he had been sent out to solve on the spot. Trajan’s

replies are business-like and brief, the findings of a fair-minded man:

though they are friendly to his “dear Secundus,” their very brevity

sometimes implies that the governor is causing both the emperor and

himself too much worry: once or twice, indeed, they verge on the snappy.

That is one reason why it is incredible that they could have been the

product of the imperial bureau in Rome—the personal touch is present.

Reputations are not likely to be made by propounding theories that these

replies came from an office instead of from the emperor, or by starting

doubts about the authenticity of this correspondence in general or about

the special letters touching the Christians whom Pliny had to judge in

Bithynia.[1587]

A personality so manifold deserves fuller examination than has been

incidentally possible in a survey of his life and letters. If dignity,

self-possession, broad-mindedness, considerateness, courtesy and

generosity are qualities that constitute a gentleman, then Pliny was

one. He knew how to ensure respect for the high magistracies which he

held; he could keep his head in court so as to make the requisite retort

to an unfair opponent; his wide experience of life taught him fairness

in dealing with others; he was considerate to tenants and servants;

treated superiors and inferiors with politeness, and performed notable

acts of munificence. Although he devoted much energy to the preparation

of cases on the court-roll,[1588] his master-passion was literary study.

Enthusiasm forces him to recommend it for others:

Let this be your business, this your idleness; this your toil,

and this your rest; in these pursuits let your vigilance, in

these let your repose too be found.[1589]

Amidst distracting avocations, he pined for retirement away from Rome

where he could read and write:

Shall I never break, if I mayn’t untie, these cramping bonds?

Never, I suppose—for the old tasks have new tasks growing on

them before the earlier ones are finished.[1590]

So he writes from town:

What am I doing, you ask. What you wot of. I’m hard pressed

with official duty; I’ve friends to attend to; sometimes I

study, the thing to do which, not “sometimes” but solely and

continually, would be, I don’t dare to say more virtuous, but

surely more welcome.[1591]

Even if he did get away to the lake-country for fishing and hunting, he

liked to combine literary composition with his sport; and a saving grace

let him see the humour of the situation when he tells Tacitus about

waiting for the wild boar with writing material at hand.[1592] What

might easily have become mere bookishness was counteracted by duties,

official and social, which involved intercourse with his fellow-men. As

it happened, his career enabled him to discharge faithfully public and

professional tasks, and yet in his leisure do good service to literature.

Here his premier attention turned on oratory and poetry. While he

knew and esteemed certain philosophers, he apparently shared some of

Quintilian’s suspicions about others; and while he once penned a handsome

tribute to the divine majesty of history, he disavowed any purpose of

competing in that field.[1593] But, if he restricted his own output, he

was catholic in his zeal for the production of all forms of literature.

This appears in his enthusiasm for _recitationes_: it mattered little

whether the reading were from history, comedy, poetry or oratory—Pliny

was scrupulous in his attendance,[1594] believing that private perusal

was not enough to test a work without the _uiua uox_,[1595] and offering

sound reasons in defence of the practice as an aid to criticism.[1596]

Similar zeal stimulates vigorous correspondence about the emendation

of his speeches and verses, and repeated exhortations urging others to

produce literary work.[1597] His praises of contemporaries, though

too lavish and partial, were in a measure due to the same genuine

interest.[1598] He may be extravagant in declaring that nothing so

perfect had appeared of recent years as Augurinus’s “Poems in Little”

(_Poematia_): here he seems naïvely to disclose the reason for his bias

as personal liking or the poet’s compliments to himself.[1599] He may

also have overstated the case in saying that Fannius’s premature death

robbed the world of an immortal work on Nero’s victims.[1600] Naturally

some whisper reached him in time that exception had been taken to his

excessive commendations: to which his answer, if not wholly valid, is at

least candid:

You tell me that some people have condemned me in your hearing

for praising my friends at every opportunity beyond what is

due. I admit the impeachment (_agnosco crimen_)—welcome it, in

fact. For what is nobler than the fault of kindliness? After

all, who are they who know my friends better than I do? Yet

suppose they do, why grudge me a most delightful deception?

For, supposing my friends are not such as I declare they are,

still I am happy in fancying them so. Well, then, they’d

better turn this maladroit activity of theirs (_sinistram

diligentiam_) upon others: there’s no lack of people who call

it “critical judgement” to pull their friends to pieces:

they’ll never persuade me into thinking that I love my friends

too dearly.[1601]

It is futile to argue that he was not severe enough, and might have

raised the literary standard by indulging, like Boileau, in outspoken

attacks.[1602] What looks more likely is that the example and praise of

a man of Pliny’s ability and reputation stirred contemporaries to do

the utmost of which they were capable. However that may be, the freedom

from envy implied in such praises must be set to his credit, and a good

deal should be forgiven to a benevolence which showed itself in many

other ways—in his charitable use of wealth, his willingness to help in

misfortune, his ready emotion over the death of friend or slave.[1603]

None but a considerate master would have chosen a room for study so as

to avoid any temptation to interfere with the festive rowdiness of his

slaves when celebrating the Saturnalia,[1604] or have taken pains to

arrange that his freedman Zosimus, who had been spitting blood, should

go to the Riviera and benefit by a prescription which medicine neglected

for centuries in the treatment of consumption—excellent fresh air and

properly handled milk.[1605] The tolerance which marked him as a governor

made him companionable for very diverse types of men—a brooder like

Tacitus or an airy mocker like Martial. It was rare for him to loathe

anyone as he did Regulus; for he recognized the inhumanity of being too

fierce a hater, and the virtue of forgiveness.[1606] Temperate though

rich, Pliny followed a rule of life as commendable as the Stoic, yet

without Stoic rigidity; and if at times he appeared a little prim and

priggish, let it be remembered how anxious he was at other times to show

that he could unbend into frivolities.[1607]

His greatest weakness lies so patently on the surface that it amuses

more than it offends. The passion for fame turned into an amiable vanity

when he was convinced that the coveted fame had been attained. With a

perfectly naïve egoism that disarms severe censure, he chronicles his

own good deeds or desires a place in Tacitus’s immortal works.[1608]

Can one wonder that he liked to have his name coupled with that of the

historian?[1609] He writes:

I never experienced greater pleasure than from a talk with

Cornelius Tacitus recently. He told me that he had sitting next

him at last circus-games a Roman knight. After conversation on

a wide range of learning, the latter asked, “Are you from Italy

or the provinces?” “You know me,” was the reply, “and from my

literary works to be sure.” Whereupon the other asked, “Are you

Tacitus or Pliny?”[1610]

The letter proceeds to recount another incident in which a stranger

guessed Pliny’s identity, and concludes: “I’m not afraid to appear too

boastful in quoting not my own but other people’s opinion about me.”

Still, it is his own golden opinion that he quotes about his speech for

Attia Viriola as an inspired performance.[1611] No wonder, then, that he

should mention his delight when the judges in court could not help rising

from their seats to show appreciation of his speaking,[1612] or that he

thought it a “white pebble day” when he heard two young men (_egregium

par_) pleading on opposite sides in the urban prefect’s council, both

exhibiting an excellent style which they had based on Pliny as their

pattern (_exemplar_),[1613] or that he should honestly confess that he

enjoyed reading poetry which praised himself.[1614]

But he was not without traits of modesty: he owned there was something

beyond him in the virtues of a good philosopher, in the eminence of

Cicero, and in the genius of Tacitus.[1615] There is also something fine

in his avowal that the attainment of glory is not all: it is the inner

quality that counts, and to deserve success is no less honourable than to

command it:

Besides I have in mind how much finer a spirit it shows to set

the rewards of honour in one’s conscience rather than in men’s

applause. Glory should follow, not be sought after; and if by

some chance or other it does not follow, a deed is no less

excellent for having failed to win glory.[1616]

A natural piety, flecked with superstition in the matter of omens and

dreams, prompted him to build temples in Italy and to hesitate in the

East over disturbing a consecrated site.[1617] However much he might feel

officially opposed to the non-conformity of Christians in the observance

of such public sacrifices as tested loyalty, against the principles of

the Christian life he found nothing to say.[1618] As to his own religious

beliefs, he accepted a Divine Power as having vouchsafed Trajan to Rome,

and recognized the obligation of prayer to the Providence sustaining the

emperor.[1619] On a bed of sickness, he knows the invalid discovers the

vanity of worldly pursuits, and “in that hour remembers there are gods,

in that hour remembers he is man.”[1620] Sincerity of feeling enabled

him, like Persius, to penetrate the inmost meaning of worship in the

doctrine that “the gods find pleasure not so much in exact petitions by

their votaries as in innocency and holiness, and he who has brought to

their shrines a clean and pure heart is found more acceptable than he who

has brought a premeditated form of words.”[1621]

His views on the Empire were those of acquiescence in the system of

control by one ruler working for the general weal.[1622] He had been

able to keep to the path of prudence under a bad emperor, though even

he claims to have been in danger from Domitian. After the dawn of

better days, there came the raptures of the _Panegyric_, where the

constitutional change is paradoxically summarized in his words to Trajan

_iubes esse liberos: erimus_.[1623] Admirers of the great past of Rome

might take comfort in the fancy that a good _princeps_ was a restorer of

the olden times. Broadly, Pliny’s political attitude is that difficulties

in the state must be left to the higher powers to face: that is what an

emperor is for.[1624] On this principle he certainly acted when Bithynia

was under his charge.

Interrogated on his style, Pliny might have called himself Ciceronian.

For his letters he employs a rhythmic prose of a a light type, decorating

it with poetic quotations and allusions. If he cannot be said to be

periodic in structure, he does largely follow the Ciceronian type of

sentence-endings.[1625] Yet in reality his prose was the resultant

of different forces. It is true that he went back in his orations to

Cicero as a master; but, in addition, he acknowledges his debt to

Demosthenes in Greek and to Calvus in Latin. It is also true that, like

his master Quintilian, he decries the oratory of the day,[1626] and,

like Quintilian again, holds that the best models (_optima quaeque_)

should be imitated:[1627] at the same time, it does not follow that

Pliny was unaffected by the rhetoric of his own era. On the contrary,

the reader soon discovers in the letters that he was an offspring of

the age in his studied use of the paraphernalia of rhetoric such as

antithesis, oxymoron, the emphatic anaphora,[1628] and _sententiae_,

like “many respect gossip, few conscience” (_multi famam, conscientiam

pauci uerentur_), or “The favour of scoundrels is as untrustworthy as

the scoundrels themselves” (_gratia malorum tam infida est quam ipsi_).

The rhetorical ring due to artificial devices may be noted even in the

English dress of a representative letter to an official friend:

Consider that you are sent to the province of Achaia, the true,

the genuine Greece, where civilization, literature, and even

agriculture are believed to have originated. Consider that you

are sent to regulate the affairs of free states; that is to

say, men in the highest degree men, free men in the highest

sense free, who have maintained the right which nature granted

them by courage, by services, by friendliness, finally by

compact and the sanctions of religion. Let your feelings be

those of reverence for their antiquity, their marvellous deeds,

even for their myths.... Keep before your eyes that this is

the land which sent us our legal code; the land which gave us

laws, not after a victory, but at our own request. Remember

it is Athens you approach, it is Lacedaemon you govern. To

snatch from them the shadow that is left, the surviving name

of freedom, would be harsh, cruel, barbarous.... Recollect the

past greatness of each state, but not so as to despise her

for having lost it. Let there be no arrogance, no harshness.

You need not fear contempt: can contempt be shown for the

magistrate invested with power and the insignia of office,

unless he is a low, mean creature who has already a contempt

for himself? Authority makes a poor test of its own force if

it flouts others: it is a poor sort of homage that is won by

terror: affection gives a far stronger guarantee for holding

what you want than fear does. For fear vanishes, if one quits

the scene, while affection remains; and just as the former

turns into hatred, so does the latter turn into respect.[1629]

Yet Pliny was not a mere scholastic rhetorician: he was habitually versed

in business affairs and actual lawsuits: he had, therefore, to be more

practical in offence and defence than an academic professor had need to

be. In fact, he realizes the weakness inherent in the rhetoric of the

schools when he draws a picture of the rhetor Isaeus as a simple-minded

teacher in contrast with the keen practised lawyer who necessarily learns

guile from close contact with the real disputes of men.[1630] As to his

Ciceronianism, it is so modified that his style could not be mistaken

for Cicero’s. If he had been taught by Quintilian to eschew Seneca’s

brevity, he did not keep the rotundity of the Ciceronian manner. Rather

he is a compromise between the two styles. In one of his eleven surviving

letters to Tacitus, he raises an interesting question on the relative

merits of the terse and the profuse.[1631] True, at least, to theory, he

favours the latter; and it may be imagined how illuminating it would have

been to read the answer from the master of the condensed style. Pliny’s

own illustration of brevity has a delightfully vague freedom about it:

Homer, though like Virgil he takes many lines to describe the armour of

his hero, is brief, he maintains, because he accomplishes his literary

design (_quia facit quod instituit_), and so Pliny’s letter on his Tuscan

villa must not be called big—it is the villa that is big! No single label

indeed can fairly denote Pliny’s style: if he could be so labelled, he

would not have made such attractive reading. The great variety of his

subjects met with corresponding variety of treatment from him, so that

he is justified when he claims that in literature, as in life, the ideal

effect is produced by a blend of the grave and the gay.[1632]

In Pliny’s choice of words alone there are characteristics, such as

his liking for frequentative verbs, that mark him off from the Golden

Age.[1633] He is individual enough to invent words, _e.g._ the nouns

_abactus_, _praelusio_, _renutus_, _socialitas_, _sinisteritas_,

_arcessitor_, _reformator_, or to give fresh meanings to old words,

_e.g._ _descensio_, _dispensatio_, _egestio_, _nutatio_, _latitudo_,

_gestator_. Again, he typically shares words with writers of the

Silver Age, _e.g._ _cenatio_, “dining-room” (Sen., Plin. Maj., Col.,

Petr., Mart., Suet.); _computatio_, “account” (Sen., Plin. Maj.,

Quint., Front.); _captiuitas_, “slavery” (Sen., Petr., Tac., Flor.);

_diuersitas_, “difference” (Plin. Maj., Quint., Tac.); _circulator_,

“hawker” (Cels., Sen., Petr.). His locutions and syntax also present

noteworthy features. One may find a Livian and poetic turn in _pietatis

est totus_ or _ne grauare_ or _permitto facere_, and a Virgilian base for

constructions like _certus fugae_ or _liberum discriminis_ or _securus

magnitudinis_. That Pliny based his Latin not strictly on Cicero but on

the Latin of his own century is shown by much in the structure of the

sentence, such as the general relinquishment of the period, and reduction

of relative words; the new sense attached to conjunctions or adverbs

like _alioqui_, _quatenus_, _quoque_; the use of participles in bold

ways; much too in the use of moods,[1634] like _quotiens intrasset_ or

_quocumque me contulissem_ or _quamquam nouerim_.

Fronto’s educational correspondence shows no knowledge of Pliny’s

epistles; but Tertullian’s acquaintance with the two letters on

the Christians is evident from his angry objections to them.[1635]

Macrobius[1636] couples Pliny and Symmachus, the scholarly statesman of

the late fourth century, as examples of the rich and luxuriant (_pingue

et floridum_) style in oratory; but this does not convincingly prove

that Symmachus’s _Epistulae_ were inspired by the Plinian collection.

Cassiodor(i)us mentions Plinius Secundus as _orator et historicus

cuius ingenii plurima opera exstant_. It is natural to suppose that

letter-writers in Latin should have used Pliny as a model, and that, as

Pliny’s books were sold at Lyon during his lifetime, they would still be

remembered when Roman studies flourished in Gaul during the fifth century

A.D. But it is doubtful whether there is absolute proof of his influence

between Sidonius Apollinaris,[1637] who was an admiring follower, and the

tenth century.[1638] In the Middle Ages the Fathers and Seneca eclipsed

Pliny in favour, but from the time of Politian and Erasmus his influence

was re-established, and his literary heirs have been many, especially in

England and France.

MINOR CONTEMPORARIES

Pliny was so completely in touch with the literary movements of his day

that a survey of his circle gives not only a retrospect upon the Flavian

age but an admirable introduction to literature under Trajan, and even,

in the case of a slightly junior friend like Suetonius, carries us into

Hadrian’s reign. Pliny, we have seen, was fond of writing poetry and

fond of poets. It is therefore appropriate here to review his minor

contemporaries in general, whether they wrote verse or prose. Some of the

chief Flavian authors, such as Silius Italicus, Martial and Frontinus, he

knew well; and among his elderly friends was Vestricius Spurinna, already

classed among minor Flavian lyric poets. With him may be named, as

typical of culture at the time, the grandfather of the Emperor Antoninus

Pius, Arrius Antoninus, whose Greek epigrams and mimes caused Pliny

to fancy he was reading Callimachus or Herodas.[1639] The information

yielded by Pliny’s letters about elegiac and lyric writers indicates a

widespread passion for composing short poems; so that the Rome of Trajan

may be pictured as a nest of gentlemen singing or trying to sing, and

what Pliny called “the crop of poets” accounts for his normally roseate

view of the condition of literature. Two at least of his intimates, both

of whom he pressed to publish, seem to have had an epic bent: these were

Octavius Rufus[1640] and Caninius Rufus.[1641] Several significant

letters were addressed to the latter on literary events, such as the

death of Silius Italicus and the composition of a comedy by Vergilius

Romanus. The story of a tame dolphin is communicated to him as material

for a poetic narrative; and Pliny approves of his intention to write a

poem in Greek on Trajan’s Dacian War. Calpurnius Piso took an old Greek

title, καταστερισμοί,[1642] for his elegiac poem, which may have retold

legends about the constellations in the spirit of Ovid’s _Metamorphoses_.

Like several contemporaries, Pompeius Saturninus[1643] was an orator and

historian as well as a poet. His lyrics and epigrams after the manner

of Catullus and Calvus evoke the utmost enthusiasm from Pliny; and to

him Pliny’s speech at the inauguration of the Como library went to be

revised with his customary acumen (_qua soles lima_). A very notable

circumstance was that one day he read to Pliny certain epistles which he

said were by his wife. Pliny’s comment is that he could have believed

he was listening to Plautus or Terence in prose,[1644] though he is not

equally sure that such polished letters could have been written by the

lady. The importance of the incident lies in its testimony to the growing

practice of writing literary epistles of what we may call a Plinian type.

There seems to be here a hint, perhaps not sufficiently grasped, that

such letters were considered to contain, as Pliny’s often do, a poetic

element; and this is confirmed by the instance of Voconius Romanus,

also an orator of ability, who was the author of letters that gave an

impression as if “the Muses were speaking Latin.”[1645] Another imitator

of Catullus and Calvus was Serius Augurinus, the youthful composer of

_Poematia_, which were the best of their sort, we are told, for years.

Pliny cites from him a hendecasyllabic piece, which, though it scarcely

justifies the commendation in the letter, possessed for the critic the

merit of containing the line “Pliny alone is as good as predecessors for

me.”[1646] Passennus Paulus wrote Propertian elegies and Horatian odes:

the latter, says the complimentary Pliny, might well suggest his descent

from Horace, as in blood he was descended from Propertius.[1647] It was

the opening of one of his lines, _Prisce iubes_, that gave Javolenus

Priscus at a _recitatio_ the chance of pouncing upon it disconcertingly

with the rude interruption _Ego uero non iubeo_.[1648] A most fascinating

survival from the period, had fate allowed, would have been the comic

plays, some in Menander’s style and others based on the old Attic comedy,

by Vergilius Romanus.[1649] The nature of the poems by Silius Proculus,

which Pliny in one letter agrees to read, is unknown.[1650]

On turning from poetry to prose (though, it will be remembered, some of

those already mentioned were prose-writers as well as poets), we are

met on the threshold by Pliny’s most famous literary friend, Tacitus,

the subject of a later chapter. The orator C. Fannius made some stir

as a chronicler of Nero’s victims: before his death three books of his

work had appeared and became popular.[1651] Titinius Capito chose for

a historical theme “The Ends of Illustrious Men” (_Exitus Inlustrium

Virorum_), occupying himself also with a poetic treatment of the

lives of the renowned.[1652] He was a shining ornament of the age, a

fosterer of learning, and restorer of what Pliny for the moment regards

as a decadent literature.[1653] Always willing to lend his house for

_recitationes_, he was a regular attender at Pliny’s readings, and a

hero-worshipper who kept busts of the great republican champions at

home. One of the three correspondents called Maximus in Pliny’s letters

directed against a certain Planta a polemic work, which Pliny desired

to see published.[1654] Writings by Sardus[1655] so delighted Pliny by

praising him that he read and reread them; and Atrius[1656] is thanked

for a book of his which he had not so far had time to read—the _liber_

in question was possibly a speech. Julius Avitus is mentioned as having

written much in a short life: since Pliny laments the loss of the whole

by his premature death, the inference is that he never published his

books.[1657] A large number of contemporary orators, besides those just

mentioned, appear in Pliny’s pages; but they are too many to record

here.[1658]

Jurisprudence under Trajan is represented by Neratius Priscus and

Juventius Celsus on the Proculian side, and on the Sabinian side by

Javolenus Priscus and probably Titius Aristo, one of Pliny’s friends.

Grammatical and linguistic learning had several representatives. Urbanus,

who is plausibly referred to this period, has his comments on Virgil

quoted by Servius. Velius Longus was likewise a Virgilian scholar. A

student of Ennius, Lucilius, Accius and other early Latin authors, he

wrote on archaisms and derivations: as was natural, he used and quoted

Varro and Verrius Flaccus. The date of Flavius Caper is not certain,

but he also combined an interest in Virgil with studies of old Latin: a

good deal of his lore passed into the works of Charisius and Priscian.

Caesellius Vindex, who is cited in Aulus Gellius, compiled an alphabetic

dictionary of _Antiquae Lectiones_, which seems to have had the

alternative title of _Stromateus_.

One of several authors named Hyginus in Latin literature appeared at this

period as a gromatic writer in a treatise, now fragmentary, on legal

boundaries, _De Limitibus_. It has been disputed whether another work _De

Limitibus Constituendis_ is his or not. The _De Munitionibus Castrorum_

ascribed to him must, from internal evidence, be placed much later. A

manual of geometry for land-surveyors, which drew upon Euclid among other

sources, was composed by the Balbus whom subsequent gromatics often cite.

This same department of field-measurement is represented slightly later

by Siculus Flaccus and Junius Nipsus.

CHAPTER II

TACITUS

The spice of problems—Facts and inferences concerning

Tacitus—His official career—Tacitus as a speaker—Memory

of “The Terror”—The three minor works—Speculation on

secondary motives—Aspects of the _Dialogue on Oratory_—Vexed

questions—_Agricola_—Its form and purpose—Later style

in the making—_Germania_—Points of interest—Matter and

manner—_Histories_—Plan—Character-drawing—Other dramatic

qualities—_Annals_—Great episodes—Sources—Outlook on human

life, history and politics—Anti-imperial bias—Attitude to

Tiberius—Language and style—Vicissitudes of his fame.

Concerning P. Cornelius Tacitus,[1659] the greatest historian of the

Silver Age, there is no dearth of problems to awake interest, though they

do not affect his unchallenged mastery of one of the most wonderful

prose styles in literature. His very praenomen is uncertain.[1660] We

do not know when or where he was born; we do not know when or where he

died; and, while scholars are now nearly unanimous[1661] in ascribing

the _Dialogus de Oratoribus_ to him, they are not agreed on its date of

composition or on the explanation of its contrast in style with the other

works of Tacitus. Differences of opinion have arisen about the author’s

real aim in his monographs on Agricola and on Germany; rival suggestions

have been made about the number of books which the now mutilated

_Histories_ once contained; and more serious controversies have raged

over the sources from which Tacitus drew, his method of using them, his

credibility in general and his presentation of Tiberius in particular.

Approximately his birth-year may be given as A.D. 55. This is an

inference from two facts: first, that, looking back on the year 75, the

dramatic date of his _Dialogus_, Tacitus referred to himself as then

“quite a young man” (_iuuenis admodum_, _Dial._ i.); and next, that,

while the younger Pliny considered himself and Tacitus “nearly of an

age” (_propemodum aequales_) he has mentioned efforts of his own as an

_adulescentulus_ to imitate Tacitus, who had already made a name.[1662]

We can prove Pliny to have been born in 61 or 62, and from his words we

may guess that Tacitus was some half-dozen years his senior. Possibly

the historian’s father was the _eques_ Cornelius Tacitus mentioned by

the elder Pliny[1663] as a procurator in Belgic Gaul: the surmise at

least would accord with Tacitus’s standing in public and private life.

His official honours under the three Flavians are summarized by himself

as “begun by Vespasian, increased by Titus, and further advanced by

Domitian,”[1664] the interpretation being that under the first of these

emperors he held one of the offices in the vigintivirate and had served

in the army as _tribunus militum laticlauius_; that Titus nominated him

to the quaestorship in 80, when twenty-five; and that under Domitian

he was either edile or tribune, and afterwards, we know, praetor in

88.[1665] In A.D. 77, when still a _iuuenis_, he had been betrothed to

the daughter of the Roman general Agricola, who was consul at the time,

and married her next year shortly before his father-in-law’s appointment

to Britain.[1666]

The keenness with which Tacitus studied rhetoric under eminent masters

appears from his own statement.[1667] Following with closest attention

the court-pleadings of M. Aper and Julius Secundus, he took lessons from

them at their homes on the principles of argument and style. It is not

impossible, although unproved, that he was one of Quintilian’s pupils:

the Ciceronianism of his earliest work rather favours the idea. Certainly

the _Dialogus_ marks deep interest in the prospects of Roman oratory.

A good rhetorical education, turned to practical account, earned him

fame as a speaker; and among his noted appearances in public were, after

being made _consul suffectus_ in 97,[1668] his delivery of a funeral

eulogy over Verginius Rufus, and in A.D. 100, when counsel with Pliny

for the African provincials, his impeachment of Marius Priscus, their

ex-proconsul. Pliny’s explicit compliment to his eloquence on both

occasions was, we may take it, deserved; and it is significant that, in

regard to the second occasion, he singles out as a quality of Tacitus’s

oratory its impressive dignity.[1669]

Duties in an unknown province having kept Tacitus and his wife abroad for

the four years from 90 to 93, they returned to Rome too late to attend

the death-bed of his illustrious father-in-law.[1670] At once he found

himself in the gloom of a reign of terror when senators were cowed by

Domitian into conniving at the emperor’s judicial murders.[1671] The

atmosphere of calculating espionage and of inexorable repression, now

imposing silence, now inviting adulation, coloured all the after-life and

after-writing of Tacitus. However gratefully he recognized that the dark

clouds had lifted with the accession of Nerva in 96, and that at the dawn

of “a most blessed age”[1672] he was at length free to express his views,

we yet feel that the iron had entered into the soul of this man of over

forty before he ever embarked on his career as historian, and that his

outlook upon events must inevitably reflect the sombre hues of fifteen

years of dumb helplessness which could not be forgotten.[1673] Though

after Domitian’s death he accepted a consulship and though an inscription

found in Caria shows he was proconsul of Asia about 112-116, still we may

assume that henceforward his extensive plans for historical composition

occupied most of his time. These plans proved in the event too extensive

for the span of life allotted to him. After the _Histories_ came the

_Annals_, completed, as we shall see, between 115 and 117. But for his

old age he had, he tells us, set aside the reigns of Nerva and Trajan;

and he had also contemplated a work on the times of Augustus.[1674]

These latter projects he never carried out, so that it looks as if he

did not long survive the publication of the _Annals_ about the end of

Trajan’s reign.

The three minor works of Tacitus, the _Dialogus_, _Agricola_, and

_Germania_, written before his prolonged historical labours, are linked

together in several ways. The text of all three descends from the same

lost archetype (_Hersfeldensis_), usually identified with a codex

observed and recorded at Rome in 1455[1675] as containing the _Germania_,

_Agricola_ and _Dialogus_ with the extant portions of Suetonius’s _De

Grammaticis_ and _De Rhetoribus_. All three works are of importance for

the preliminary stages in the evolution of Tacitus’s style. Further, all

three have been made the subjects of much theorizing about secondary

purposes which, it has been alleged, they were written to subserve.

Certain critics are not content with the motive professed in each case

by the author, but have insisted on looking beneath the surface. Thus

the _Dialogus_, ostensibly an inquiry into the decadence of oratory, has

been declared, in keeping with the more than doubtful hypothesis that

it was composed after Domitian’s reign, to be the author’s farewell to

public speaking and an implicit apology for deserting the rhetorical

art in favour of history.[1676] The _Agricola_ has been asserted to

be not only a memorial of piety to an honoured relative,[1677] but a

semi-political monograph meant to explain to Trajan and others the

conduct of both Agricola and Tacitus in the troublous times of Domitian;

while the _Germania_, the contention runs, is no mere sketch of the homes

and habits of northern tribes but a pamphlet with a definite tendency,

either to hold up to luxurious Rome an accusing mirror which should

reflect the healthier simplicity of the Germans, or, with far-sighted

historic sense, to inculcate on the Romans the need for guarding against

danger from the barbarian, or virtually to justify the prolonged absence

of the new emperor Trajan on so vital a frontier as the Rhineland. The

ingenuity, however, displayed in pressing such secondary motives has

tended in some measure to push the real motive into the background and to

distract attention from the literary value of the works.