men of the day, supplies an answer to a question put to Tacitus by Fabius
Justus about the reasons for the decline in oratory. The participants are
four—Curiatius Maternus, poet and dramatist, at whose house the scene
is laid; Marcus Aper, an advocate of Gallic origin; Julius Secundus,
a polished historian, and, like Aper, a native of Gaul; and Vipstanus
Messalla, a Roman of high birth. It is part of the author’s dramatic
skill to represent them in debate as speaking in character. Aper,
utilitarian and practical, contrasts his own remunerative profession of
pleader with the uselessness of poetry: Maternus, as poet and idealist,
disdains wealth and influence, preferring the “privacy of woodland and
grove” (_nemora et luci secretum_)[1678] and the “blest camaraderie”
(_felix contubernium_) of the Muses. Secundus is a quiet and refined
speaker, while the true Roman Messalla is the admiring champion of
the past, with a dislike for the faults of contemporary oratory and
education. The earlier part of the _Dialogus_ consists of Aper’s eulogy
on a lawyer’s calling and Maternus’s reply on behalf of poetry. On
Messalla’s entrance, a preliminary exchange of views leads to Aper’s
speech in praise of modern oratory at the expense of the “ancients”;
whereupon he is, at Maternus’s request, followed by Messalla as a critic
of defects in present-day eloquence. Maternus interrupts to recall
Messalla to the real subject—the causes of deterioration in oratory—which
is handled in the last part (xxviii-xli). A lacuna marked in the MS. has
deprived us of the opening of Secundus’s historical review of factors
in politics and in legal procedure which fostered the oratory of the
republican era. In contrast therewith “the emperor’s discipline had
tranquillized eloquence as it did everything else.”[1679] A second lacuna
must be assumed, where we have lost the first part of Maternus’s closing
speech, which proceeds in the extant portion to argue that unsettled
political conditions and party spirit in ancient times had favoured
the rise of great speakers. “Eloquence is the nurseling of licence”
(_eloquentia alumna licentiae_), so that too well organized a government
is fatal to first-rate speaking.
The _Dialogus_ is a piquant combination of the fascinating and the
provoking; for, while it handles an attractive theme with a charm
that justifies its old description as an _aureus libellus_, it yet
raises problems that remain unsolved and are, some of them, perhaps
insoluble.[1680] The Tacitean authorship is now soundly upheld on the
basis of manuscript authority, the general agreement of views with those
in Tacitus’s unquestioned writings, and, despite obvious differences,
the presence of significant similarities in style. With this prevalent
acceptance, the claims made for Quintilian, the younger Pliny, Suetonius
and others (including a hypothetical anonymous author) fall to the
ground. The dramatic date of the conversation is widely accepted as
A.D. 74-75, on the reasonable interpretation of the phrase _sextam
stationem_ as the sixth year of Vespasian’s reign.[1681] The actual time
of composition by Tacitus is a much more vexed question; but Gudeman’s
contention that it must have preceded the reign of Domitian appears still
the most satisfactory. In opposition to this a theory[1682] is maintained
that the _Dialogus_ came after the other minor works in Trajan’s reign
and that the divergence in literary manner presents little difficulty for
the reason that in antiquity style was often not the man himself but a
garb which a clever author could don or doff at will. Yet, when all is
weighed, the _Dialogus_ would have been a literary anachronism at the
end of the first century. It is difficult to discern any occasion for
Tacitus, so late as A.D. 98 or 99, when he ranked as one of the foremost
speakers of the day, to write a dialogue on decay in oratory and to
connect the subject with circumstances over twenty years earlier. Is it
credible that a man of nearly forty-five, who was of recognized literary
power and, according to hypothesis, already the author of both _Agricola_
and _Germania_, would profess himself unable by his own effort to treat
the causes of decadence directly and so feel obliged to employ the device
of dialogue-form? And would a promise to repeat exactly a discussion
almost a quarter of a century old strike readers as a plausible one?
Another consideration is that the contrast between the sunny spirit of
the _Dialogus_ and the oppressive atmosphere of the _Agricola_ makes it
hard to assign them to the same period of their author’s life. Tacitus’s
own reference to his silence under Domitian throws us back on an earlier
date, and, if we fix that date before Domitian’s reign, as A.D. 81, it is
not unnatural that Tacitus looking back from the age of twenty-six should
have thought himself _iuuenis admodum_ at the supposed period of the
dialogue, A.D. 74-75.
For his _Dialogus_ Tacitus drew considerable inspiration from works of
Cicero like the _Hortensius_ and the _De Oratore_. Quintilian’s known
Ciceronianism is likely to have influenced Tacitus, whether he studied
under the great professor or not; and those who place the composition
of the _Dialogus_ after Domitian’s time are entitled, without violating
chronology, to believe that it was written with a bearing on the lost
treatise by Quintilian _De Causis Corruptae Eloquentiae_. Tacitus
mentions as available in libraries the _acta_ and _epistulae_ collected
by Mucianus. He may have used Varro’s _Catus de liberis educandis_, and,
like Quintilian in the _Institutio_ and the pseudo-Plutarch in Περὶ
παίδων ἀγωγῆς he probably went back to their common source, a Stoic work
by Chrysippos, if we may judge by the array of resemblances set out by
Gudeman.[1683]
In the _Agricola_ Tacitus feels that he has a great man for the subject
of his monograph: sincerity of admiration, therefore, lifts him above the
rhetoric with which he was conversant. His epigrams here, as in his later
works, are effective because they show grip of the eternal realities
of human nature. So there is no small amount of the universal—of that
which is true for all time—in the little book. It has besides the great
interest of reflecting truthfully important aspects of the Roman imperial
administration.
The introduction (i.-iii.) gives reasons for issuing a biography in an
age when satire enjoyed more vogue. Personal memoirs—a class of writing
with ancient traditions—must from their nature contend against prejudice,
and in the recent reign of terror had been impossible; “for every
good art had been exiled so that nothing honourable could cross one’s
path anywhere.” But in the changed times of Nerva and Trajan[1684] an
enforced silence may at length be broken, though, after past methods of
repression, the harm still visible renders it hard to revive literature:
Nevertheless it will not be an uncongenial task to compose,
even in a rugged and unpolished style, the record of previous
servitude (under Domitian) and a testimony to present
blessings. Meantime I issue this book designed to honour my
father-in-law, Agricola, and in virtue of its expression
of loyal affection it will be, if not commended, at least
excused.[1685]
After this preface the author, turning to his theme, relates in six
chapters (iv.-ix.) the life of Agricola up to his appointment as
legate of Britain, describing his parentage, education, civil offices,
and periods of service in Britain before his consulship. Into this
earlier narrative Tacitus skilfully weaves characteristic qualities
of a hero whose greatness is to culminate in his British victories.
The all-important central portion of the work is therefore preceded by
two excursuses, a brief description of Britain with its inhabitants
(x.-xii.), and a sketch of the past conquests of Rome in the island
(xiii.-xvii.). Twenty-one chapters (xviii.-xxxviii.) are then devoted
to the main subject of Agricola’s British campaigns during the seven
years of his command, from the defeat of the Ordovices and surrender
of Mona to the victory over the Caledonians near Mons Graupius and
the circumnavigation of the northern coast. Throughout he is depicted
as not only a successful commander skilled in strategy but an able
administrator, a discerner of men, and himself fair-minded, loyal and
modest. The final portion (xxxix.-xlvi.), on Agricola’s recall and last
years of retirement in Rome, begins with the ominous note of Domitian’s
jealousy (_fronte laetus, pectore anxius_), and indicates that the
ex-general by his unostentatious conduct was fulfilling the part of a
good citizen in evil times. The shadow of an emperor’s enmity falls
darkly over the later pages; and suspicions of poison are not absent from
the fatal illness of A.D. 93. The work closes in a rhetorical apostrophe
to the dead man and an epilogue on immortality:[1686]
“Thou wert blest indeed, Agricola, not only in the brilliance of thy
life, but also in the timeliness of thy death! They who were present
to hear thy last words recount thine unflinching and cheerful welcome
of thy fate, as though thou wert doing a man’s best to make a gift of
‘not guilty’ to the emperor. But for me and for thy daughter, beyond the
bitterness of having a parent torn away, there is an added sorrow. It was
not ours to sit by thy sick-bed, to support thine ebbing strength, and
take our fill of looks and embraces. Assuredly we should have received
instructions and utterances to imprint in the depths of memory. Here lies
our grief, our wound. By the circumstance of so long an absence abroad,
he was lost to us four years before. Doubtless, best of parents, with a
most loving wife sitting by thee, everything was done abundantly to show
respect. Still it was with too few tears that thou wert lamented; in that
last day of life there was something for which thine eyes yearned in
vain.”
“If there is a land for the spirits of the just, if philosophers
are right in holding that great souls are not extinguished with the
body, then mayst thou rest in peace! Summon us, thy household, from a
paralysing sense of loss and from womanish moanings to the contemplation
of thy good qualities. To weep or beat the breast for such were sin. It
is by admiration rather than by transient praise, it is by rivalling
thine example if nature allows, that we must pay thee respect. That is
genuine honour. That is the dutiful regard of one’s nearest kindred. This
too I should enjoin on his daughter and his wife so to revere the memory
of a father and husband, as to meditate inwardly on his every act and
word, and cherish the mould and fashion of his soul rather than of his
body. It is not that I think a veto should be set on images fashioned
of marble or bronze; but, as with the face of man, so the likeness of
the face is but frail and perishable, while the mould of the mind is
everlasting—you can preserve and reproduce it, not through a foreign
substance and by art, but in your very character. Whatever we loved,
whatever we admired in Agricola, abides and will abide in the memories of
men, in the eternity of the ages, through the reputation of his deeds.
Many an ancient will oblivion overwhelm, as if inglorious and ignoble:
Agricola, whose story is thus recorded for posterity, will survive.”
On the literary form and aim of the _Agricola_ a surprising amount has
been written.[1687] Biography, an established form of literature among
the Romans, was akin to the _laudationes funebres_ pronounced over
the dead. Such encomia went back for their artistic pedigree to Greek
models like the _Agesilaos_ of Xenophon and the _Evagoras_ of Isocrates,
while formal rules for their construction were laid down in rhetorical
handbooks. It does not, however, follow that Tacitus—though Gudeman[1688]
would have it so—scrupulously conformed to these regulations; for
his was not a genius to imprison itself within mechanical bounds.
His growing interest in history was little likely to be content with
laudation, but prompted him to introduce narrative freely, even to the
extent of an enlivening digression such as the adventurous voyage of
the Usipian cohort, or an excursus such as that on the geography and
tribes of Britain, where the doubtful relevance from the standpoint of
biography may be excused on the ground of irresistible didactic impulse.
This very blend of narrative with eulogy has tempted some to regard
the central portion of the _Agricola_ as one of Tacitus’s preliminary
studies destined for incorporation in his contemplated account of
Domitian’s reign. But an examination of the sections dealing with Roman
governors in Britain will show that in order to suit them for insertion
in the _Histories_ radical alterations in the scale of treatment would
have been inevitable, especially in recording the services not only of
Agricola but of Cerialis and Frontinus. Besides, certain domestic details
appropriate in a biographical study would have been out of place in a
chapter of imperial history. Both recasting and omissions therefore would
have been necessitated. As it stands, the author’s illustration of his
father-in-law’s eminence by the story of concrete achievement constitutes
a more effective, if more subtle, form of praise than a direct panegyric
like Pliny’s upon Trajan. The purely personal element was presumably
strong in the lost Republican autobiographies of Scaurus, Rutilius Rufus,
Catulus and Sulla, and under the Empire in the _Lives_ of Pomponius
Secundus by Pliny the Elder and of Julius Asiaticus by Julius Secundus,
as well as in the kindred eulogies upon Paetus Thrasea and Helvidius
Priscus. It was the example of Sallust’s _Jugurtha_ and _Catilina_ that
served to recommend to Tacitus a more impersonal mode of treatment
through an increased admixture of history; and the result is a composite
work where both structure and style are, throughout the narrative,
affected by Sallustian precedent. Livy’s influence also operates in the
delivery of speeches by the Caledonian chief and by his Roman antagonist,
while Cicero’s appears particularly in the apostrophe near the close.
As to the purpose of the _Agricola_, some scholars insist that it is no
simple tribute of _pietas_, as Tacitus’s words suggest, but a political
manifesto in favour of moderation under tyranny, and thus a reply to
critics of Agricola’s and his own past subservience.[1689] Now, it is
true that Tacitus dislikes extremists and commends moderate men, but he
does so in all his writings; and no evidence exists to show that he,
any more than contemporaries like Pliny, stood after Domitian’s death
in special danger of virulent attack for years of non-resistance. The
sorrowful admission which he makes[1690] of the shame incurred by forced
acquiescence in Domitian’s outrages is very far from the tone, which
Gantrelle professes to hear in the _Agricola_, of “an angry advocate
defending a client.” Surely, after all, his attitude had not been
different from that of Nerva and Trajan[1691] themselves or the majority
of the senatorial class, so that hostility to Tacitus on the ground
alleged would logically have been an unreasonable position for all but a
few irreconcileables, and even in their case would have logically implied
a censure upon two emperors as well.
The _Agricola_ is a book to which one can always return with pleasure. In
a venture through its pages one gets, within marvellously brief compass,
a memorable revelation of a period in history and a noble personality.
The rapid strokes of its prose, though not yet, as a rule, in Tacitus’s
most condensed manner, are still sufficient to mark out the author as a
great stylist and at the same time a student of humanity. No intelligent
reader of the opening three chapters is likely to forget their lurid
picture of the despotic villainy from which Rome was just recovering. In
this setting begins a tale which holds a world of meaning in its pregnant
statements. Take a few as one meets them. With a withering glance at
Caligula, Tacitus says of Agricola’s father that “his very virtues won
the resentment of Gaius Caesar.” A personal touch lends interest to the
reminiscence concerning Agricola himself: “I recollect he used to say
that in early youth he might have imbibed the tenets of philosophy too
eagerly for a Roman and a senator (_quam concessum Romano ac senatori_),
had not his wise mother curbed his burning and ardent enthusiasm.” Later,
the first stirrings of military ambition felt by the young officer in
Britain are ominously pronounced to be “unwelcome at an era when sinister
misconstruction encountered eminence and a great name was as risky as
a bad one” (_nec minus periculum ex magna fama quam ex mala_). Deep
significance underlies the words “for his quaestorship the lot assigned
him Asia as province and Salvius Titianus as chief: neither corrupted
him” (_neutro corruptus est_.) Success as a subordinate could not be more
pointedly summarized than in the balanced terms: “so by valour in obeying
orders, and modesty in his reports, he avoided jealousy without avoiding
distinction” (_extra inuidiam nec extra gloriam erat_). A pretty irony
characterizes the reflection on the popular belief that one day Agricola
would come back to Britain as governor: “rumour is not always astray:
sometimes it actually picks the man” (_haud semper errat fama, aliquando
et elegit_), and no less ironical is the comment on the British adoption
of Roman dress, baths and banquets: “with the unsuspecting it all passed
for civilization, though it was but a piece of their slavery” (_humanitas
uocabatur, cum pars seruitutis esset_).
We may put his _sententiae_ down to rhetoric, but it is a human rhetoric,
based proverb-like on the experience of ages. “Successes everybody
claims, failures are laid at one man’s door” (_prospera omnes sibi
uindicant, aduersa uni imputantur_) is an adage that applies to more than
soldiering. “Everything unknown passes for the marvellous” (_omne ignotum
pro magnifico_) is a safe declaration for others than the Caledonian
chief to make. “It is the way with human nature to hate the man you have
wronged” (_proprium humani ingenii est odisse quem laeseris_) makes a
cynical reminder of man’s unfairness to man. With the _Agricola_, in
short, Tacitus has reached his Sallustian period, but already a greater
than Sallust is here: in both _Agricola_ and _Germania_ the unique style
of the later works can be seen, as it were, in the making.
The _Germania_, naturally of vital importance for early Teutonic history,
belongs to the same year as the _Agricola_. The northern tribes of Europe
had been powerful enemies of Rome for 210 years, Tacitus reckons, from
the Cimbrian invasion of 113 B.C. to Trajan’s second consulate[1692] in
A.D. 98; “so long has the conquest of Germany been going on” (_tam diu
Germania uincitur_). The title, originally perhaps _De Situ Germaniae_,
has received in the MSS. such expansions as _De origine et situ
Germanorum_ or _De origine, situ, moribus ac populis Germanorum_. There
is no parallel in antiquity to this separate study of a people, viewed
first generally (i.-xxvii.) in respect of geography, climate, warfare,
government, religion, divination, meetings, punishments, chieftains,
dwellings, dress, morality, food, drink, tillage, funeral as well as
other customs; and then specially (xxviii.-xlvi.), in respect of the
various tribes. In this second part Tacitus, starting with western and
northern tribes, passes to the Suebi in central Germany and thereafter
from the tribes along the Danube and on the east to island folk and folk
near the Baltic, ending with Wends (Veneti) and Finns (Fenni) bordering
on Sarmatia. One does not need to be an anthropologist to appreciate the
attraction of a little treatise so neat in its description and sometimes
so biting in its swift comments. All sorts of curiously instructive
and diverting details are given about those tall men with fierce blue
eyes and red hair (_truces et caerulei oculi, rutilae comae_). Was it,
Tacitus asks, the kindness or anger of the gods that denied them silver
and gold, so that, though frontier tribes adopted money, barter remained
the trade-custom of the interior? We learn how German women were held in
respect and how their near presence was felt to be a stimulus by warriors
in battle. We read of the tribesmen’s fixed times for meetings at the new
or the full moon, and we recognize the origin of our English “fortnight”
and obsolete “sennight” in their non-Roman mode of computing time (_nec
dierum numerum, ut nos, sed noctium computant_). Their observance of the
marriage tie, their payment of blood-money to end a feud, their open
hospitality, their primitive love of a gift, and reckless dicing up to
the final stake of personal freedom, all go to fill the picture. Their
liquor fermented from barley or other grain was evidently responsible for
much insobriety. “To spend a whole day and night in drinking disgraces
no one. Their quarrels, frequent as usual among the intoxicated,
are seldom settled with abusive words, but commonly with wounds and
bloodshed.”[1693] One of their curious habits was to take counsel at
a feast, when the true feelings are disclosed amidst the freedom of
the carousal, but to make a decision next day by a sort of appeal from
Germans drunk to Germans sober: “they deliberate when they are unable to
dissemble, they resolve when they cannot make a mistake” (_deliberant dum
fingere nesciunt, constituunt dum errare non possunt_, xxii.).
Too much ink has been wasted on speculations whether the treatise is
fundamentally an ethnographic essay, or a moral lesson for voluptuous
Rome, or a political brochure to commend plans of aggression against
the Germans.[1694] If we could be sure that the province which Tacitus
once governed was in the north, we might then divine the origin of his
interest in the tribes across the frontier. Though there is nothing in
the treatise that proves personal contact, there is much that might very
well have been conveyed by oral inquiry apart from reading. Supposing
that his father was the procurator of Belgica named Cornelius Tacitus,
the author clearly had opportunities for questioning a useful witness on
many points. His own purpose of writing a history of Domitian’s reign
during which there had been German campaigns, and Trajan’s absence
for the first year of his reign on the German frontier, were enough
to attract Tacitus to the subject. But it is most unlikely that these
forty-six chapters were designed as part of his future _Histories_: it
is a different thing, however, to view an independent monograph as a
preliminary survey of ground some of which he would one day have to cover
historically. The only previous authority whom he names is Caesar; but
that he drew from more than one source is indicated by his vague plurals,
_quidam affirmant, quidam uocant_. Fragments of Sallust prove that he
dealt with German customs; Tacitus may or may not have used him; and
the same possibility holds with regard to Livy (the _periocha_ of whose
hundred and fourth book gives part of its contents as _situm Germaniae
moresque_), and with regard to Paterculus, Pomponius Mela, and the twenty
books on German wars by the elder Pliny.
The best reason assignable for the genesis of the book is that Tacitus
found the subject interesting. Had he intended to secure a political
effect, such as the advocacy of a forward policy on the frontier, it
is unimaginable that he should have left his object a secret to be
penetrated by a very few critics with whom all others disagree. His one
conceivable thought in representing the Germans as dangerous enemies from
the days of the Cimbrian menace must have been approval for the policy of
caution such as Trajan favoured.
And if he took up the subject because it interested him, he wrote about
it in a way meant to interest the reader. Of course he points out
differences between Germans and Romans, and of course he passes caustic
remarks, because they are likely to capture the attention. People enjoy
them, because they are excellent literature. Even Roman _grauitas_ might
permit a smile now and again over a clever gibe at obvious national
failings. But this is not to say that Tacitus constructed his essay to
be either a monitory or a minatory mirror for Rome. The Germans are not
idealized in it. Though Tacitus admires their bravery, loyalty, purity,
hospitality and simplicity of life, he does not overlook their faults
like idleness, drunkenness, gaming, and unpunctuality in attending
popular assemblies. He is entitled, then, with an investigator’s
impartiality, to redress the balance by implied or express censure on
blemishes in Roman civilization—its absurd deification of women belonging
to the imperial family; its demoralizing spectacles; its over-costly
banquets and funerals; its ineffectual enactments against exorbitant
interest. The widespread laxity of social life at Rome is no doubt
before his eyes when he writes “no one in Germany smiles at vice: to
corrupt and to be corrupted is not styled up-to-date” (_nec corrumpere
et corrumpi saeculum uocatur_). He has in mind Rome’s carelessness of
her offspring when, after recording that infanticide is an infamy in
Germany, he adds, “good morals have more force there than good laws
elsewhere” (_plusque ibi boni mores ualent quam alibi bonae leges_,
xix.). The social influence of the childless rich is what, like any
satirist, he inwardly stigmatizes in the remark that among the Germans
there are no advantages in childlessness (_nec ulla orbitatis pretia_);
and it is of the notorious predominance of freedmen at certain epochs
that he is thinking when he points out that they are of no importance in
German states except in those ruled by kings: “elsewhere the inferiority
of the freedman is the proof of freedom” (_impares libertini libertatis
argumentum sunt_). Pronouncements so pithily sarcastic illustrate
the same general characteristics of style in the _Germania_ as those
noticeable in its immediate predecessor.
In the _Historiae_ Tacitus treated a period of some twenty-eight years
(A.D. 69-96) which he had himself lived through.[1695] The work, when
complete, embraced six principates, those of Galba, Otho, Vitellius,
Vespasian, Titus and Domitian; in others words, its main theme was the
Flavian imperial house with the preceding struggle during which three
nominees of different sections of the army rose in turn and quickly
fell. Beginning with 1st January, 69, it may have been originally
meant to continue a history written by Fabius Rusticus. The title is
guaranteed by Pliny’s prophecy “I augur (and in augury I am expert) that
your _Histories_ are to last,” and by Tertullian’s reference to the
Jewish wars related in the fifth book.[1696] What we have left breaks
off before the middle of Book V in the second Medicean MS., the sole
authority for the text of the _Histories_, as it is also for that of
_Annals_ XI-XVI (a run of books which begin and end in a gap). Since
that MS. numbers _Histories_, Book I as the seventeenth of the combined
work from the death of Augustus, there is, _prima facie_, a presumption
that the _Annals_ ended with Book XVI, which, when unmutilated, must
have treated about three years and a half (middle of A.D. 65 to end of
68). That, however, was about the length of time covered in Books III,
and XIV, and XV. From Jerome we learn that Tacitus’s complete narrative
of the Caesars, beginning with Tiberius and ending with Domitian,
consisted of 30 volumes.[1697] If, then, the _Annals_ were in 16 books,
the _Histories_ had 14. Some assign 18 to the former and 12 to the
latter.[1698] This would imply a symmetrical hexadic division, so that
six books of the _Annals_ would in that case have treated Tiberius, six
Caligula and Claudius, and six Nero.
The composition of the _Histories_ preceded that of the _Annals_, where
Tacitus alludes to having already dealt with Domitian’s times.[1699]
Pliny had portions of the _Histories_ sent to him for revision, and
occasionally supplied Tacitus with material like the account of the
eruption of Vesuvius. References in his letters—we have eleven addressed
to Tacitus—enable us to fix the period of publication for the _Histories_
as the years from A.D. 104 to 109.[1700]
One cannot read the first twenty chapters without recognizing that
they come from a historian of grasp, who realizes the momentous issues
involved in the troublous times which formed his theme. His plan is
clearly stated, the dark character of the period foreshadowed, the state
of the Empire and feeling in Rome sketched, before he brings on his
stage most of the leading personages in the sanguinary contests which
followed the death of Nero. Vitellius for the moment receives only
passing mention; but one cannot fail, even within the earlier chapters,
to be interested in the figures of Galba, Piso, Otho, and Mucianus, who
is the champion of the two coming Flavians, already, says Tacitus, marked
out for imperial power. Much of the interest, when one pauses to analyse
it, is awaked by Tacitus’s never-failing psychological skill. We have
almost at once brought home to us old Galba’s obstinate parsimony. “He
was undone by his old-fashioned strictness and an excessive severity to
which nowadays we are not equal” (I. xviii.). His murder is followed
by a fuller estimate, in which his seventy-three years prompt the
reflection that, having lived under five emperors, “he had been luckier
in the reign of others than in his own.” The estimate then describes his
character as one “rather free from vices than distinguished by virtues,”
and ends in the well-known terms, “by general consent he would have
been declared equal to empire, had he never been emperor” (I. xlix.).
Piso’s behaviour at his adoption by Galba is excellently depicted: “not
the least change did he show in look or manner: it was as if he had the
power rather than the wish to rule” (I. xvii.). Of Otho we are told
that “he had spent a slack boyhood and unruly youth; Nero liked him
for rivalling his own profligacy” (I. xiii.). In Mucianus we see one
better fitted for emperor-maker than for emperor: “he was a blend of
dissipation and energy, courtesy and arrogance, good and bad qualities.
His self-indulgence was excessive in leisure hours: whenever he was on
service, he displayed great qualities.... He was a man who would find it
easier to confer imperial power than to hold it” (I. x.).
The summary of the times is impressive in its melancholy force:
The period I am entering upon was rich in disasters, appalling
in its battles, and rent asunder by mutinies—even in peace a
cruel time. Four emperors were cut off by the sword. There were
three civil wars, still more against the alien, and often wars
with both characters combined.
After a review of troubles in the Roman world at large, he concentrates
on Rome:
The city was wasted by conflagrations, its oldest sanctuaries
consumed, and the Capitol itself fired by the hands of
citizens. Holy rites were profaned; there was immorality in
high places; the sea was full of exiles and its rocks dyed
with butcheries. The savagery in the city was more outrageous.
Nobility, possessions, magistracies declined or filled, invited
accusation: merit meant surest destruction.... Slaves were
bribed to betray masters, freedmen to betray patrons: those
without enemies were ruined by friends. Yet the age was not
so barren in good qualities as not to exhibit fine examples
as well. Mothers accompanied sons in flight: wives followed
husbands into exile: there were brave kinsfolk and faithful
sons-in-law: the fidelity of slaves bade defiance even to
torture: there were distinguished men driven to the last
necessity, when compulsory death was faced with gallantry,
and the last scenes of all rivalled the renowned deaths of
antiquity. At no time did more terrible disasters to the Roman
people or plainer evidence prove that what the gods care for
is not our peace of mind but our chastisement (_non esse curae
deis securitatem nostram, esse ultionem_, I. iii.).
Such was the far from roseate aspect which, on a general survey, the
period wore in the eyes of its historian. One tragedy follows another
in this historical drama with the inevitability of fate. The prominent
characters being as Tacitus depicted them, no other _dénouements_ seem
possible. Galba’s meanness was sure to undo him with the praetorians;
Otho’s faintheartedness to drive him on suicide; Vitellius’s gluttony
to prevent a successful stand against the Flavianists. The secret of
the imperial system had now, as Tacitus says, been revealed: emperors
could be made elsewhere than in Rome, and the Empire, despite the veil
drawn by the plausible fictions of Augustus and his successors, was
demonstrated to be essentially a military, not a civil, institution.
The pretence of hereditary right to the succession vanished before the
decrees of contending armies. If only, then, as documentary evidence for
a new epoch of vital significance the _Histories_ must be of lasting
value. Book I leaves Otho momentarily in power. Much skill is shown in
the employment of speeches to serve historical purposes; for example,
Galba’s address to Piso at his adoption is an essay on the duties of
an emperor (xv.-xvi.), and the speech put into Otho’s mouth after
praetorians and marines have sworn allegiance to him is intended, through
an indictment of Galba’s rule, to explain the reasons for its collapse
(xxxvii.-xxxviii.). Among many impressive moments in what makes a most
readable book is that which immediately precedes the murder of Galba and
Piso. Like dramatists ancient and modern, Tacitus divined the power of
silence: in the third book it is through the deserted halls of the palace
that the doomed Vitellius wanders alone (_terret solitudo et tacentes
loci_, III. lxxxiv.), and in the fourth book there is a memorable picture
of a disgraced legion on its gloomy march like a dumb funeral procession
(_silens agmen et uelut longae exsequiae_, IV. lxii.). So here, in the
opening book, as Galba with his adopted successor reach the forum, the
stage is set for tragedy:
Not an accent came from people or crowd; but looks were those
of dismay, and ears turned to meet any sound. There was no
uproar, no repose: it was a hush like that of a mighty terror
and mighty wrath (I. xl.).
Danger to the new ruler declares itself at once from the legionaries in
Germany, who proclaim Vitellius emperor. Otho is therefore compelled to
face hostile armies pouring into Italy from the north. This struggle is
the main subject of Book II, which, owing to the historian’s constant
dramatic sense, begins by directing attention to Vespasian and his son
Titus, who are on the alert to challenge the victor in the latest duel.
The description of the battle of Betriacum, which left the Vitellianists
in possession of the field, is clearly not the work of an expert military
historian; but Otho’s speech to his men choosing self-inflicted death as
the only honourable course is a fine performance which throws into the
light unsuspected traits of nobility in one who had misspent his life.
Next comes the turn of the victorious gourmand. Vitellius, in betraying
his indecent joy when nearly six weeks after the battle he rode over the
field among heaps of putrefying dead, appears with unconscious dramatic
irony to be provoking nemesis. Meanwhile that nemesis is drawing near
in the shape of the generals who invade Italy on behalf of Vespasian,
the nominee of the eastern troops. This fresh struggle for the throne is
the subject of the third book—a powerful one, containing such thrilling
episodes as the terrible sack of Cremona, the burning of the Capitol at
Rome, and the last miserable hours of Vitellius. The fourth book brings
the acknowledgement of Vespasian as emperor, and is largely concerned
with the bold scheme of the Batavian Civilis to establish a northern
empire free from the yoke of Rome. The narrative of his operations
continued in part of the next book is, like most of the military history
in Tacitus, hard to follow—“more remarkable,” says Gibbon, “for its
elegance than perspicuity.”[1701] But the most interesting portions of
the fifth book are those in which Tacitus turns to the war with the
Jews at the outset of Vespasian’s reign. Unluckily, the account of the
siege of Jerusalem is lost, but there is a curious fascination in the
ludicrously distorted version of the Israelitish exodus from Egypt and of
the mode whereby Moses put an end to the sufferings of his people in the
wilderness. In many matters touching Jewish religion Tacitus betrays an
amount of Roman prejudice and ignorance more tolerable in a satirist like
Juvenal than in an investigator of history. One cannot but think it a
pity that, if Josephus was not yet accessible, Tacitus failed to consult
the Septuagint.[1702]
Concluding his _Histories_ with the year A.D. 96, Tacitus turned back to
deal with a period of over half a century from the death of Augustus in
A.D. 14. The title of this narrative of the Julian dynasty through the
reigns of Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero, is given in the sole
MS. authority for Books I-VI (the first Medicean or Laurentian) as _Ab
excessu diui Augusti_. Since Tacitus, however, several times[1703] refers
to his work as _Annales_, we are justified in using the traditional
title. It is at least appropriate to his plan of following the yearly
succession of events, although Tacitus, being too great an artist to
enslave himself to such bare monotony as is found in the _Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle_, deviates from chronological order, should his subject
appear to demand it.[1704] Thus he relates in sequence two summer
campaigns as a relief from miseries in Rome, and elsewhere combines the
inter-connected transactions of several years so that they may be more
easily remembered.[1705]
A clue to the date of composition is got from a reference to the Persian
Gulf as a contemporary limit of the Empire. This held good only between
Trajan’s conquest of A.D. 115 and Hadrian’s order for withdrawal on his
accession in 117.[1706] That the division into books was the author’s
own is plain from allusions like “in prioribus libris.”[1707] The
conclusion of a book was often arranged to synchronize effectively with
some striking event: thus II ends with the death of Arminius, (_liberator
haud dubie Germaniae_), XI with the fall of the empress Messalina, XII
with the poisoning and deification of Claudius, XIV with the cruel fate
of Octavia, XV with the crushing of the Pisonian conspiracy. We may guess
that the now imperfect Book V culminated in the overthrow of Sejanus.
Out of what once amounted to at least sixteen books, there have survived
the first four, a fraction of the fifth with more of the sixth, and,
although defective at beginning and end, the series from the eleventh
to the sixteenth. Interpreted in terms of history, the losses are parts
of Tiberius’s reign, the whole reign of the imperial madman Caligula,
the reign of Claudius up to A.D. 47, and over two years at the close of
Nero’s reign.
Regrettable though these losses are, we possess in the remainder one
of the greatest monuments of historical genius—the ripest work of a
penetrating critic of affairs who expressed his thoughts in accents that
are absolutely unique. Whatever its gloom or its bias, lack of interest
cannot be alleged against the broken story of fifty years. In Tiberius’s
reign we have placed before us the enigmatic character of the emperor,
his varying attitude to Senate and senators, his ultimate withdrawal
from Rome, the sinister growth of sycophancy and delation, mutinies
theatrically engineered and as theatrically suppressed, the exploits of
Germanicus in the North and his untimely death in the East, the fortunes
and misfortunes of the elder Agrippina and of the children whom she
bore to Germanicus, the ambitious projects of the dangerous minister
Sejanus, and the smothering of the third Caesar in his seventy-eighth
year. Even so, the record cannot always be thrilling, and we find the
historian regretting the necessity for inserting details which may
look trivial in spite of their significance and for using matter that
may appear monotonous. This is why he breaks off his depressing tale
of judicial murders to relate the legendary account of the marvellous
phoenix in view of the rumour that it had reappeared in Egypt, and
why he suggests that even Eastern troubles with Parthia—not the most
attractive theme in his narrative—might afford a welcome change from
affairs in Rome. But in fact the variety of topics touched upon within
the compass of this single reign is amazing, and much is due to social
or economic bearing—extravagance in living, scarcity of corn, financial
crises, fires in the city, inundations from the river, increase of slave
establishments, Oriental worships, the seductions of astrology, relief
from taxation for Asiatic cities ruined by earthquake, the questionable
right of sanctuary for criminals and so forth.
A break of about a decade after Tiberius’s death takes us six years
into the reign of Claudius, when Messalina was empress and Suillius
conducted his dastardly prosecutions. Interested in completing a
magnificent aqueduct from Subiaco to the capital, in adding new letters
to the alphabet, and in supporting the claims of leading provincials for
admission into the Senate, the emperor, himself a puppet in the hands of
his freedmen officials, is the last to realize the public scandal caused
by Messalina’s misbehaviour. When, thanks to energetic steps taken by
the _libertus_ Narcissus, she is despatched, the marriage of Claudius
to his niece the younger Agrippina, Germanicus’s daughter, who had
previously married Domitius, ushers in a period of intrigue which brings
about the poisoning of Claudius and, with the elevation of Agrippina’s
son Nero to the throne, the exclusion of Claudius’s own son Britannicus.
Nero’s reign begins at Book XIII and is full of incident. His earlier
years of high promise are followed by the growth in him of depravity,
megalomania and cruelty. At times unpleasant, the chronicle is scarcely
ever uninteresting and is often exciting. Among episodes which enchain
the attention are Nero’s plots against his imperious mother, his callous
repudiation of Octavia to marry his mistress Poppaea, heavy fighting in
Armenia, a fresh revolt in Britain, the execution of a whole household
of slaves for a murder committed by one, a treasure-hunt in North Africa
on a false scent, the emperor’s roystering in the streets by night,
his public display of his musical talents, his conduct after the great
conflagration in Rome, the ramifications of the ill-starred Pisonian
conspiracy, the dramatic deaths of men so different as Seneca and
Petronius, and the fate of the daringly independent Stoic senator Paetus
Thrasea. By a coincidence, time has cut short the _Annals_ in the midst
of the account of Thrasea’s enforced death just after he had severed his
arteries and let the blood flow with words which virtually repeat those
of the dying Seneca and which Tacitus in a freer reign must have rejoiced
to write—“we pour out a libation to Jupiter the Deliverer” (_libamus Ioui
liberatori_).[1708]
To do full justice to the debated subject of the historical sources of
Tacitus would require a separate chapter, if not a book. Here it must be
lightly touched upon. Let us first note what obligations he specifies,
remembering that such acknowledgements were never _de rigueur_ in
antiquity. In the _Histories_ he names three authors, Vipstanus Messalla
(twice), C. Plinius and Sisenna.[1709] In the _Annals_ he mentions more
sources: C. Plinius three times, once as a writer on wars with the
Germans, Fabius Rusticus also three times, Cluvius twice, Corbulo[1710]
once, Tiberius’s orations, a letter from Tiberius to the Senate (quoted
in part, perhaps from a previous historian rather than from the _acta
senatus_), the _commentarii Agrippinae filiae_, _acta diurna_, and
_commentarii_ (or _acta_) _senatus_.[1711] But he is often content with
vaguer references, implying a plurality, and sometimes a conflict, of
authorities: _e.g._ _inuenio apud quosdam auctores_ or _celeberrimos
auctores habeo_ or _tradunt plerique_.[1712] Clearly there was a large
amount of potential material—literary works, public or private records,
oral tradition, and, for the period of the _Histories_, the author’s own
observation. It could not all, however, be either equally available or
equally valuable for the historian. Among different sorts of records, the
_commentarii principales_ were probably not accessible to him, the _acta
senatus_ could not always be trusted, and the _acta diurna_ contained too
much petty detail. In one passage[1713] he mentions the circulation of
fictitious speeches and decrees purporting to be genuine _acta senatus_;
he was, then, on his guard against forgeries, and we may imagine that in
some cases his account of proceedings in the Senate was a combination of
the “Hansard” of the day with oral tradition.[1714] In another passage,
relating to Nero’s amphitheatre, he disdainfully relegates to the “Daily
Register,” or _acta diurna_, all details of foundations and timber-work
as beneath the dignity of history.[1715] Fortunately, although here he
seems to imply that the concern of history is with “illustrious events,”
he at once proceeds to record the strengthening of two colonies by drafts
of veterans, a money dole to the people, a payment into the exchequer,
and the remission of a 4 per cent tax on slaves for sale—most of these
being facts of social or economic import rather than _res illustres_.
Over and above authors whom he actually mentions, we know of several who
might have provided material. For the period of the _Histories_ there
were Cluvius, Vespasian in his memoirs, and Antonius Julianus; and for
the _Annals_ the elder Seneca, Paterculus, Tiberius in his autobiography,
Aufidius Bassus, Servilius Nonianus, Suetonius Paulinus, and Claudius.
But in all this there are no more than possibilities. Indeed, throughout
the whole question of Tacitus’s sources, one is always brought back
to a baffling uncertainty due to the loss of even such sources as he
specifies.[1716] One avenue which at first sight promised to lead to
something definite was the investigation into the striking coincidences
between Tacitus’s Latin and Plutarch’s Greek in their handling of Galba
and Otho.[1717] There have been upholders of the theory that in this case
Plutarch used Tacitus; but the general conviction is that both used the
same authority, and apparently with considerable closeness.[1718] Beyond
that, in spite of much ingenuity in argument, nothing tangible has been
attained. A wide diversity of opinion prevails on the identification
of this particular source. No less uncertainty has resulted from the
attempts at assessing Tacitus’s debt to his authorities in general and
his method of employing them. Nissen, and after him Fabia, would have us
believe that Tacitus’s method was to follow closely the subject-matter
of a single author for large tracts of his work, neglecting secondary
sources (especially in composing the _Histories_), and devoting his
attention to the embellishment of his borrowed material so as to produce
a composition highly effective from the standpoint of style. It is
as difficult now, as it was when Boissier first criticised Nissen’s
hypothesis, to accept an attitude which would imply a slavish lack of
independence in Tacitus, and a dishonest pretence of consulting several
authors at a time. The idea does not agree with Tacitus’s known desire to
get first-hand knowledge, as proved by the letters in which he secured
from the younger Pliny information about the eruption of Vesuvius. In the
entire absence of the original sources, there is the utmost difficulty
in comprehending how one can comfortably assert that Tacitus drew from
a single main source for large tracts of his work, or how one can claim
to identify the source as the elder Pliny for the _Histories_, Aufidius
Bassus for earlier parts of the _Annals_, and Cluvius Rufus for the reign
of Nero.
Modern historical research demands methods of rigorous investigation
which it is futile to expect in Tacitus. He will leave a matter of
debate unsettled, and the uninitiated might wonder whether this is
due to impartiality or natural hesitancy or an academic suspension
of judgement. His criterion for decision in face of a conflict of
evidence was usually what he deemed probable in the circumstances. The
subjectivity of such a test, while it removes him from the category of
strictly scientific historians, at the same time makes it important to
note that personal outlook on the world, on politics and on history,
which was certain to colour his interpretation of facts. Broadly his
leanings are Stoic, though he wavers between freewill and predestination.
At one time his language postulates an overmastering fate; at another it
ascribes an event to the combined operation of a transcendental fate and
human agency;[1719] at yet another it betrays a doubt whether “mortal
affairs proceed by the unchangeable necessity of fate or by chance” (_in
incerto iudicium est fatone res mortalium et necessitate immutabili
an forte uoluantur_, _Ann._ VI. xxii.). If his views of the world are
chaotic,[1720] he is not the only great writer who has found its mystery
indefinable. He well realised how the adversity of the good and the
prosperity of the wicked lent plausibility to the Epicurean creed that
the gods take no interest in mankind (_non denique homines dis curae_,
VI. xxii.); for himself, his melancholy observation of life made him
not an atheist but a believer in the frequent wrath of heaven.[1721]
Yet even this was a matter of the prevailing mood, for he was ready to
think it a kindly intervention of providence that vouchsafed a brilliant
starlit night with the calm of a tranquil sea, as it were to unmask the
crime of Nero’s attempt to drown his mother.[1722] With all this is mixed
up a share of superstitious credulity towards prodigies and divination;
but the essential point for us is that Tacitus, on the whole, believed in
some law or principle which holds good among historical occurrences and
so gives meaning to the quest after a cause. Early in the _Histories_ he
says:
Before composing my purposed work, I intend to survey the
condition of the capital, the temper of the armies, the
attitude of the provinces, and what made for strength or
weakness anywhere in the world, so that one may recognize not
merely the incidents and issues of events, which are mainly
affairs of chance, but also their meaning and causes.[1723]
With such expectations Tacitus could feel confidence in the dignity of
history[1724] and in its power to instruct the future:
My design is not to set forth all motions made in the Senate,
but only those which were remarkable for nobility or by reason
of notorious infamy. This I consider the outstanding function
of history to save excellence from oblivion and to confront
evil words and evil deeds with the menace of reprobation from
posterity (_ne uirtutes sileantur utque prauis dictis factisque
ex posteritate et infamia metus sit_, _Ann._ III. lxv.).
Towards this aim at teaching by example, character is of vital
importance; and among the causes of events which most engage Tacitus’s
attention are human temperament and motives; so that, whatever the
defects which made him in Mommsen’s eyes the most unmilitary of
historians, he is at the same time one of the most psychological.
In theory Tacitus was republican, and in his writings a _laudator
temporis acti_, whether he had to contemplate the pre-imperial state
or its eloquence, its education, its historians. Yet he admitted that
circumstances had rendered inevitable the concentration of power in the
hands of a single individual.[1725] The old free republic, to him ideally
preferable,[1726] could never come again.[1727] The duty of the citizen
was therefore to pray for good emperors, but put up with such as one
had,[1728] and to choose the safe path between brusque insolence and
unseemly toadying (_inter abruptam contumaciam et deforme obsequium_,
_Ann._ IV. xx.). We have noted in the _Agricola_ his admiration for
moderate aristocrats and his disapproval for intransigent members of
the opposition who concluded a defiant parade of independence with a
theatrically ostentatious death (_ambitiosa morte_, _Agr._ xlii.). Some
consolation was obtainable from the fact that emperors like Nerva or
Trajan could, he points out, square the principate with freedom. But,
after all, the Empire remained for him a _pis aller_. With some emperors
he could not but associate despotic cruelty, and with the period which
he himself had to treat “barbarous edicts, perpetual prosecutions,
treacherous friendships, the ruin of the innocent, the same causes
producing the same consequences while one meets only a surfeit of
sameness (_obuia rerum similitudine et satietate_).”[1729] It is nothing
short of a triumph of intellect and art that, insisting as he does upon
his depressingly sombre theme, Tacitus should still be able to captivate
his reader. The reader must, however, be content to be thus held while
he is subtly indoctrinated;[1730] for dispassionate history is not to be
expected from a hostile judge.
The ineradicable prepossession in Tacitus is his conviction that Rome
had fallen on evil days. No less than in the _Histories_, the opening
chapters in the _Annals_ have a sombre tone as of one looking back upon
a long period of national woe. The rapid conspectus, in a sentence or
two, of the evolution of Roman history towards one-man-rule closes in a
glimpse at a world outworn with civil strife and subject to an emperor.
Immediately one breathes an asphyxiating atmosphere of oppression and
adulation which Tacitus feels must have impaired history. The deeds of
the old Roman people, he remarks with pride, were recorded by famous
historians, and even under the newly established Empire the Augustan
age produced fine intellects capable of assessing and transmitting
its achievements, had not court influence militated against the
free utterance of opinion. But with later reigns came a blighting
terrorism, so that, for the times of Tiberius, Gaius, Claudius and Nero,
contemporary evidence was vitiated by dishonest flattery, and subsequent
criticism vitiated by the reaction of loathing. From such extremes of
feeling—from partiality as from bitterness—Tacitus at least claims to
be exempt.[1731] He proceeds to note the concentration of supreme power
in the person of Augustus and the acquiescence of the provinces in an
imperial control which guaranteed them protection against the worst
rapacity of arbitrary officialdom. If this latter fact be viewed as a
bright spot in the new system, the dynastic plans of Augustus to support
his disguised despotism by recognized heirs are described as clouded by
a series of misfortunes. The death of the young Marcellus, the untimely
ends of the “princes of the youth,” Gaius and Lucius Caesar, “cut off
by destiny or by their stepmother Livia’s treachery,” and the unfair
banishment of the aged emperor’s only grandson, Agrippa Postumus, served
in turn, through a tragically entangled network of intrigue, to open for
Livia’s son Tiberius the path to the succession.
Such is the way in which the stage is cleared for the entrance of the
figure around which the battle concerning Tacitus’s credibility has been
most fiercely fought.[1732] It is noticeable that in several points this
introduction anticipates the summary in which he takes leave of the life
and character of Tiberius at the close of the sixth book. That summary
divides his life into phases, and implies that a signal deterioration
took place in his final years of seclusion on the island of Capri,
when, throwing off the habitual mask of hypocrisy, he came out in his
true colours (_remoto pudore et metu suo tantum ingenio utebatur_).
During a first perusal of the _Annals_ one is so far overmastered by
the accumulated effect attained by reprobation and innuendo as to take
Tiberius for an execrable though accomplished tyrant. The author’s skill
whereby he first disarms suspicion with a profession of impartiality,
and thereafter loses few opportunities of imputing sinister motives
to the emperor, bears its intended fruit in the reader’s willingness
to accept the historian’s hostility for independence. By a train of
devices one is almost unconsciously enrolled as a sympathizer with the
aristocratic opposition to empire. But in time, upon reflection, there
arise questionings. On a broad survey of facts, how came it that the
Roman Empire of the first century was on the whole so well managed and
so contented, if it was cursed with such monsters for its governors as
Tiberius, Caligula, Nero and Domitian were traditionally represented to
have been? And as to Tiberius in particular—whose portrayal is the great
test for the veracity of Tacitus—how came it that his competence as ruler
and his advanced years could stand the strain of the prolonged debauchery
which is alleged to have disgraced his retirement at Capri?
The rehabilitation of an over-maligned Tiberius, however, runs a risk
of going so far as to do injustice to Tacitus in turn. Tacitus can
scarcely be charged with having invented libels upon the emperor: for
everything he most likely had some authority, and he believed in his
own impartiality. What can be pressed against him is the indictment
that his own imperfectly realized prejudice debarred him from weighing
judicially his information, drawn, as much of it was, from authorities
with strong senatorial sympathies. Tacitus had no canon of the credible
and incredible where his partisan passions were concerned. It is not,
therefore, surprising that great inconsistencies can be pointed out in
Books I-VI of the _Annals_. Reports of contemporary comments do not
necessarily make historical evidence; and whether Tacitus did or did
not set them down in malice, it was in malice that many of them were
conceived. The suspicion is not an unreasonable one that he drew from
tainted sources, like the memoirs of the younger Agrippina, which would
be decidedly anti-Tiberian in tone. If we consider the alleged orgy
of sensuality by Tiberius on Capri, the story may have originated in
gossip provoked by the ruler’s impenetrable seclusion on the island, or,
according to another guess, it may have been a legacy from scurrilous
writings designed to damage his moral character during his previous
retirement in Rhodes, and then, if submitted confidentially to Augustus,
possibly retained among state-papers to which a century later both
Tacitus and Suetonius had access. Whatever the genesis of such tales,
Tacitus’s fault lay not in creating slanders but in failing to reject
them critically. It is true that Suetonius, in ascribing loathsome
profligacy to Tiberius, descends into details which Tacitus would pass
over in lofty disdain;[1733] but Tacitus ought to have noted the inherent
unlikelihood of this particular scandal, which is not substantiated
by anything in writers like Philo and Josephus. The view that Tacitus
of set purpose draws Tiberius with the conventional qualities of the
tyrant in rhetoric (such as cruelty, injustice, suspicion, craft, lust,
and anguish of soul) seems too mechanical a conception. What one can
admit is that Tacitus is not above visiting upon Tiberius the faults of
some of his worst successors, and that just as Velleius, an admiring
rhapsodist, overstresses his hero’s merits, so Tacitus, although he
records examples of the emperor’s ability, wisdom, fairness, and even
generosity, allows prejudice so to blind him to many commendable traits
in Tiberius that he paints him too black. Tacitus had no more unfortunate
limitation than the inability to think imperially: he never grasped the
stupendous achievement involved in Augustus’s reorganization of the
Empire, and he betrays a cardinal weakness when he misjudges Tiberius for
his statesman-like adherence to the Augustan policy of consolidation in
preference to aggrandisement.
The Latin of Tacitus, considered from the standpoint of vocabulary,
grammar and syntax, bears the impress of his age; but no mere analysis
of language can estimate the qualities of his style.[1734] Words were
for him instruments handled with an individual touch of genius which
makes his Latin different from that of all other writers. Careful
investigators have examined his language and recorded their results in
books or pamphlets written in Latin and various modern languages: here a
few leading aspects may be noted. It has become almost traditional, and
it remains sensible, to approach the subject under Bötticher’s headings
of brevity, variety, and poetic colour. Brevity is so inseparable from
Tacitus that the schoolboy recognizes it as a difficulty to be overcome.
Verbs and connectives are freely dropped, and puzzlingly elliptical bits
of syntax occur.[1735] It was a condensation reached by a long process of
experiment in thought and expression—an abrupt terseness pushed sometimes
to the verge or over the verge of obscurity. The developed manner of the
_Annals_, which is in strong contrast to what some might call the cloying
amplitude of Ciceronian prose, indicates that Tacitus has travelled far
from the comparative fullness of his own earliest work. Though he can
at times employ the period with fine effect, his sentence-structure in
general represents a reaction from the Ciceronian. In Tacitus, as in
Virgil, thought or feeling is compressed into chosen expressions of a
brevity so profoundly significant that they capture the imagination. The
soul which he breathed into prose makes his words live: almost unbidden,
they revisit the memory, haunting it with their ironic, melancholy, often
tragic power. One does not easily forget sayings like “Heaven’s wrongs
are heaven’s concern” (_deorum iniurias dis curae_, _Ann._ I. lxxiii.),
or “shortlived and ill-starred are the darlings of the Roman people”
(_breues et infaustos populi Romani amores_, II. xli.). His terseness is
at its most effective pitch in his epigrams and summaries of character.
Again and again the finished neatness of the Latin seems to elude
rendering. Take the picture of the inscrutability of Tiberius:
His words were always halting and mysterious, but, now that his
aim was the thorough concealment of his feelings, they became
more than ever a tangled maze of uncertainty (_suspensa semper
et obscura uerba: tunc uero nitenti ut sensus suos penitus
abderet, in incertum et ambiguum magis implicabantur_, _Ann._
I. xi.).
A deep glance into a warped nature is conveyed in the thumbnail sketch of
a martinet’s cruelty—“an old hand at hard military tasks and the crueller
for having suffered” (_uetus operis ac laboris et eo immitior quia
tolerauerat_, I. xx.). The policy of taking no notice of personal insults
is inimitably expressed—“calumnies wither up, if ignored: resentment
gives them seeming recognition” (_spreta exolescunt: si irascare, agnita
uidentur_).
Variety is a phase of his independence. He gives changed meanings to
words,[1736] indulges in novel extensions of idiom (_e.g._ _pudet dictu_,
_Agr._ xxxii.); and, with a passion for the irregular, departs from the
normal symmetry of expression where there is a balance in thought.[1737]
It is not surprising that a long list is available of words which
occur only, or for the first time, in Tacitus, such as _adcumulator_,
_adulatorius_, _concertator_, _eiectamentum_, _imitamentum_,
_inlacessitus_, _instigator_, _instigatrix_, _peramoenus, regnatrix_. In
keeping with this goes a preference for the less usual form of a word,
_claritudo_ and _firmitudo_ rather than _claritas_ and _firmitas_;[1738]
the form in _-men_ like _fragmen_, _medicamen_, _tegumen_, where
the commoner prose forms end in _-mentum_; and conversely, those in
_-mentum_, like _cognomentum_ and _leuamentum_ rather than _cognomen_
and _leuamen_. The so-called Graecisms are to be set down to the same
pursuit of variety, although linguistically they are mainly not so much
direct borrowings from the Greek as inheritances from native Latin idiom
developed under Greek influence,[1739] or actual imitations of previous
Roman writers: thus what is termed the Greek attracted dative (_quibus
bellum uolentibus erat_, _Agr._ xviii.) had already appeared in Sallust
and Livy, both of whom exerted influence upon Tacitus.
The poetic colouring is ubiquitous. It is noticeable in poetic, and
especially Virgilian, words, which he often shares with prose-writers
of the Silver Age as a result of the predominance of poetry in academic
education. Examples are _adolere_ (also in Columella), _breuia_
(“shallows,” Virgil and Lucan), _crebrescere_ (Quintil. and younger
Pliny), _densere_ (Lucret. and Virg.), _exspes_ (Hor.), _gestamen_ (elder
Pliny), _meatus_ (Lucr., Virg., younger Pliny), _regnator_ (Plaut.,
Virg.). It is noticeable also in turns of phrase which recall Virgil,
in frequent metaphors, and in personifications such as “the informers’
eloquence dripping with blood” (_sanguinantis eloquentiae_, _Dial._
xii.); “nowhere is the sea more widely a queen” (_nusquam latius dominari
mare_, _Agr._ x.); “a night that threatens and will break forth into
crime” (_noctem minacem et in scelus erupturam_, _Ann._ I. xxviii.).[1740]
Partly poetic association, partly a desire for variety sent Tacitus back
sometimes to old-fashioned words, though, in spite of his liking for
Sallust, he is more of an innovator than an archaizer. He occasionally
employs Plautine words like _mercimonium_ or _truculentia_, and by a
kindred impulse substitutes the simple verb for the compound, _e.g._
_cernere_ for _decernere_ and _firmare_ for _affirmare_. But he does not
resort to the antique in the manner of Apuleius and Gellius later in his
century. Like one of the interlocutors in his _Dialogus_, he recognized
the current demand for novel smartness and poetic turns “unstained by
the rust (_ueterno_) of Accius and Pacuvius, but taken from the sacred
treasury of Horace, Virgil or Lucan.”[1741] It is an unwarrantable
assumption to regard his hexametric opening in the _Annals_ (_urbem Romam
a principio reges habuere_) as a citation from Ennius.[1742]
Yet to scrutinize his language is only to note the mechanism of his
style. What most matters is the use to which he could put his words,
and his achievement of imperishable effects through his mastery over
vividness, irony and an elevation of style too dignified to tolerate
lapses into the petty or the repulsive. Many of his qualities, like his
epigrams, sprang from rhetoric: it would be idle to pretend that he is
free from affectation, but it is an affectation tempered with sound
sense that never allows him to be carried into exuberance. Brilliant
in his brevity, Tacitus does not depend for his fame solely on his
bright flashes. His style is one of sustained power which does not admit
triviality or dullness. “Le plus grand peintre de l’antiquité,” as Racine
called him, showed himself a master of portraiture and description when
his theme was a character, a conflict, a mutiny, a disaster, a plot,
a trial, a debate. All is rapidity and the interest never flags. His
originality is a phase of his intense subjectivity. He leaves his imprint
on his writings because, as we have seen, he abandons the normal for a
surprising terseness and for daring novelties, and because his vigour of
expression reflects his realistic conception of the men and events which
made his material.
Strange vicissitudes mark the history of Tacitus’s posthumous
fame.[1743] Notwithstanding Pliny’s confidence in his friend’s literary
immortality, the immediately succeeding generations showed faint interest
in his writings. He was not spicy enough in detail for admirers of
the Suetonian type of biography, not quaint enough in style for the
archaizing school later in the century, not appreciative enough of
either Christians or Jews to please the Fathers of the Church. Even his
monograph on Agricola seems to have been little read, and grammarians do
not quote him. In the final quarter of the third century, the emperor
Tacitus claimed relationship with the historian, and, in alarm lest
his works should be lost _lectorum incuria_, issued orders for the
multiplication of copies, making it compulsory for libraries to possess
them.[1744] In the fourth century it was the fond ambition of Ammianus
Marcellinus, the last considerable historian in antiquity, to prove
himself another Tacitus by continuing his works in thirty-one books (of
which the last eighteen survive) on the Empire from the reign of Nerva
to that of Valens. We can prove that Tacitus was known to the Aquitanian
presbyter Sulpicius Severus, to Augustine’s Spanish friend Orosius, and
to Sidonius Apollinaris; but when Cassiodorus in the sixth century,
on the subject of amber, refers to “a certain Cornelius” as having
mentioned it, we realize how misty his reputation had grown.[1745] That
the Carolingian period had access to the _Germania_ and the earlier
books of the _Annals_ can be demonstrated from the works of Robert of
Fulda in the second half of the ninth century. Thereafter silence falls
for some centuries until we find Boccaccio possessed of a manuscript,
perhaps identical with our “Second Medicean,” containing the later books
of the _Annals_ with the _Histories_. The facts concerning the arrival
at Rome from Germany in 1455 of the sole source for the minor works
and the discovery at Corbey in 1509 of the “First Medicean,” the sole
source for the earlier part of the _Annals_, are thrilling reminders how
near the world came to losing Tacitus. All that we possess of him has
been available in print since 1515, and has interested generations of
politicians, historians, and essayists from Macchiavelli, Guicciardini
and Montaigne onwards. When one reads of French revolutionaries relying
upon Tacitean doctrine, one is amused to think that Milton had to rebut
Salmasius’s misreading of him as an upholder of autocratic rule.
His influence upon early English drama should not be forgotten. It may be
illustrated by Ben Jonson’s _Sejanus His Fall_, first acted in 1603 (when
Shakespeare played a part), but not published till 1605. The playwright’s
address “To the Readers” acknowledges his debt to Tacitus, Dio and
Suetonius; and the same three sources were drawn upon some years later
for the anonymous play of _Nero_. Abroad, Tacitus’s stimulus towards
dramatic production is visible under Louis XIV in Corneille’s _Otho_
and Racine’s _Britannicus_; towards the end of the eighteenth century
in Alfieri’s _Ottavia_; and about the beginning of the nineteenth in
Marie-Joseph Chénier’s _Tibère_ and Arnault’s _Germanicus_.
His style militated against popularity with humanists so strictly trained
on the norm of Ciceronianism as to be unable to see the merits of a
different type of prose; but one most interesting phase of his influence
is traceable in Justus Lipsius, whose edition of Tacitus in 1574 was a
masterpiece of scholarship. Lipsius’s editorial labours transformed his
Latin from Ciceronian into Tacitean and, in establishing his claim to
breadth of literary taste, at the same time bore witness to the vital
power transmitted by the great historian of the early empire.
CHAPTER III
JUVENAL
Perplexities of biography—Medieval _uitae_—Contradictory
and incredible elements—Tradition of Juvenal’s exile—Was
he in Egypt?—Was he in Britain?—The lost inscription from
Aquinum—Martial and Juvenal—Publication of the Satires in
books—A few dates obtainable—Survey of the Satires—Motives
for writing—Pretence of satirizing a previous generation—Men
of evil life—A gallery of detestable women—An honest Roman’s
farewell to Rome—Dramatic elements—Hosts and clients—Prospects
of literature—Vanity of human wishes—Plain living and
extravagance—Legacy-hunters—Revenge a weakness—Parental
example—Egyptian villages at feud—A soldier’s advantages—Change
of spirit in later Satires—Lucilius, Horace, Juvenal—Power
of vivid delineation—Dark colours—Grimness of humour—Control
of rhetorical artifice—Familiar quotations—Debt to
predecessors—Juvenal’s hexameter—Words from the common
speech—Influence on later writers.
The life of D. Junius Juvenalis[1746] is full of perplexities which
investigation has not disentangled. Outside the scanty data obtainable
from his works and certain scholia, there is little on which to rely
with absolute security: yet there is a considerable amount of apparent
evidence consisting of some thirteen biographies, mostly medieval,
attached to many of the interpolated MSS., an inscription of possible
relevance from Aquinum, three poems addressed by Martial to a Juvenal
whom we can hardly suppose to have been other than the satirist, mention
by a few later authors,[1747] and an allusion in a hendecasyllabic poem
by Sidonius Apollinaris[1748] to one who had the misfortune, like Ovid,
to be banished and who was the “exiled victim of an actor’s wrath”
(_irati fuit histrionis exul_). Since the banishment of Juvenal is a
tradition among the _uitae_, though its alleged time and place vary,
this last allusion is not unnaturally taken to apply to him. Juvenal
was too much of a contemporary to figure in Suetonius’s book _De Viris
Illustribus_,[1749] so that even the best written of the _Lives_—namely,
that added to the Codex Montepessulanus or Pithoeanus in a later
hand—cannot be surmised to rest on so good a foundation as Suetonius, or
indeed to be of earlier date than the fourth century. Twelve _uitae_ seem
to be variations of the earliest one, independent variations being almost
certainly attempts to add conjectures based upon passages in the satires.
Thus, the prevailing tradition of a banishment to Egypt is varied in two
_uitae_ to “_contra Scotos_”—a change presumably suggested by Juvenal’s
references to Britain. How little intelligence might underlie a _uita_
can be gauged from the absurd explanation, given by one in a Harleian
MS., that Juvenal’s last satire, an attack on the unfair advantages
of soldiers, was meant to encourage recruiting. This looks as if the
innocent fabricator had confined himself to the opening sentence—_Quis
numerare queat felicis praemia, Galli, militiae?_
The chief statements in the most highly commended _uita_ are that Juvenal
was either a son or foster-son of a rich freedman (a closely allied
_uita_ adds Aquinum as his birthplace); that he practised declamation
until middle life more for the sake of amusement (_animi magis causa_)
than for academic or forensic use; that he composed lines directed
against Domitian’s pantomime-actor Paris; that later, when he had
become famous, he inserted those lines into what we know as the seventh
satire;[1750] that there happened then to be at court a favourite actor
who took the lines as directed against himself; that Juvenal’s supposed
allusion was resented in the highest quarters; and that, under pretext
of giving him a military command but in reality by way of punishment,
the authorities gazetted him at the age of eighty to the prefecture of a
cohort in a distant part of Egypt, where he very soon (_intra breuissimum
tempus_) died of grief and weariness.
Difficulties arise at once. If Juvenal was either son or foster-son of a
rich _libertinus_, how comes it that he is so obviously acquainted with
poverty at first hand, and why does he assail the class of freedmen, if
he owed it either birth or up-bringing? His tone convinces us that, for
at least one part of his life, far from being wealthy, he had experienced
the indignities put upon clients, hated the pampered lackeys of arrogant
patrons, and felt deep sympathy with the poor.[1751] Horace could attack
an individual freedman, as he did in the fourth epode, but Juvenal
detests the whole category: not only does he despise the purse-proud
upstart who had once been his barber, but he writes in general with so
Roman a prejudice against the foreigner that one cannot but distrust the
allegation of an alien strain in him.[1752] The more one examines the
_uitae_, the more do they appear to be manufactured: here the suspicion
arises that Juvenal, being a satirist, has been by some wrong-headed
parallel-hunter credited with a _libertinus_ for a father simply because
Horace had one before him. If it is just conceivable that the lines
cited as offensive enough to get him banished might have been twisted
against the author in the way alleged, at any rate the appointment of
an octogenarian to a military post in an important province appears too
incredible a prank for the Roman Empire: and, in any case, this statement
in three _Lives_ is contradicted by that in another group, which
indicates it was Domitian, not Trajan, who punished Juvenal. According to
that, the exile would have occurred earlier in Juvenal’s career.
Confusion increases as we look through the _uitae_. One declares
Juvenal to have come back to Rome from his command, and to have died
of melancholy because he did not see his friend Martial (who had left
the city for Spain in A.D. 98): another declares he died worn out with
old age as late as the reign of Antoninus Pius, having been exiled by
Domitian but not recalled by his immediate successors. In this latter
_uita_ he is said to have “amplified his satires in exile and made many
changes in them,” a statement which bore fruit in part of Ribbeck’s
theory about two Juvenals. An additional _uita_ found by Dürr in a MS.
in the Palazzo Barberini at Rome agrees with twelve of the _uitae_ that
Juvenal belonged to Aquinum: it also provides him with a mother and
sister named alike Septumuleia, which betrays medieval ignorance of
the classic usage whereby any daughter of Junius Juvenalis would have
been called Junia. The inconsistencies in these biographies cannot but
throw doubt even on any consistent residuum, unless it be independently
supported. Though a majority of the _uitae_ mention a military command
in Egypt, one has the uncomfortable suspicion that this may have come
from an impression that Juvenal’s treatment of an Egyptian subject in
Satire XV necessarily implied residence near its scene:[1753] and,
again, though in a majority of the _uitae_ he is said to have practised
declamation till middle life, this may have been an invention from the
rhetorical manner characteristically persisting in satires which were
manifestly composed long after he had been an academic pupil.[1754]
The all but unanimous record of a banishment appears to receive some
confirmation in the allusion already cited from Sidonius Apollinaris; but
one realizes that there is no certainty about the emperor who pronounced
the sentence, nor any means of deciding whether the command in Egypt is
or is not a confusion with previous military service in Britain. The
almost complete consensus about Aquinum as Juvenal’s birthplace agrees
with, and indeed may be ultimately due to, the passage in the third
satire where Umbricius, who is supposed to be saying good-bye to the
poet, employs the phrase “tuo Aquino.”[1755] That there was a Juvenal
at Aquinum is clear from the inscription discovered there and long
since lost.[1756] It recorded a dedication to Ceres (the very goddess
mentioned towards the close of the third satire) by Junius Juvenalis
(the _praenomen_ had disappeared), who was an officer in a cohort of
Dalmatians, and who, in respect of being a _duumuir quinquennalis_ and
_flamen_ of the deified Vespasian, was evidently the holder of two local
offices of importance. The reference to Vespasian-worship places the
inscription late in the first century, and, as more than one Dalmatian
cohort served, we know, in Britain about this period, it is tempting
to think that here we have an explanation of the satirist’s repeated
references to so far-off an island—his mention of the captured Orkneys
and the short night of the North, the chariot-fighting of Britons, the
oysters of Rutupiae (Richborough in Kent), the British whale, the forts
of the Brigantes in Yorkshire, the spread of Latin eloquence to Thule
(a designed exaggeration), and his use of the rather official form
_Brittones_.[1757] But here again questions arise. If Juvenal had seen
war-service, did it leave him inimical to a military life, as he appears
to be in his last satire? And, in addition to his undoubtedly close
acquaintance with Roman city life, was he long enough resident at Aquinum
to hold important magistracies there?
If Martial’s Juvenal is, as seems most likely, our Juvenal, then we
have the evidence of two epigrams in the seventh book belonging to A.D.
92, and one in the twelfth book issued in 101 or 102, after Martial had
returned to Spain.[1758] By 92 Juvenal is regarded by his friend as
_facundus_, which may refer either to style in writing or to eloquence
in speech. The eloquence has in this case generally been associated with
rhetorical powers, but it may have a forensic reference. Juvenal is
possibly speaking of his own practice at the bar when, after stigmatising
the high fee paid to a nobleman as advocate, he adds “and yet _we_
pleaded better.”[1759] Besides, it is worth noting that Martial applies
the epithet _facundus_ to his lawyer friend Pliny, and that Juvenal too
uses it of lawyers.[1760] Granted that banishment ever befell Juvenal,
there was time for it to have occurred between 92 and 101 or 102, when
Martial again addressed Juvenal; and whether Juvenal was an advocate or
not, he was then pictured as a struggling citizen wearing his sweaty gown
(_sudatrix toga_) at receptions in the mansions of the great. Between the
two poets a great sympathy of outlook is discernible[1761]. They not only
touch often upon the same subjects and persons, but adopt a very similar
attitude towards literature and patronage; they unveil alike the vices
of their day; and they exhibit considerable resemblance in words and
expressions.
Fortunately a few unquestioned dates can be extracted from his works.
The sixteen satires were issued in five sets or books at different
times.[1762] Internal evidence as to date discoverable from any one
satire has therefore significance for the whole volume to which it
belongs. The first book contained satires I-V, and the bitter tone
regarding Domitian in the second and fourth satires would alone prove
that their composition was later than his assassination in 96.[1763] But
we do not need to rely on inference; for a definite reference is made in
the fourth satire to his murder.[1764] The opening satire, which, being
prefatory, may have been written last, alludes to the sentence on Marius
Priscus for misgovernment in Africa;[1765] and, as we can date this
trial, in which Pliny held a prosecuting brief, at A.D. 100, we see that
Juvenal’s earliest published work belongs to the beginning of the second
century. It seems natural to think that Domitian’s reign was not yet
far in the past, and that Juvenal writes with a fierce, because recent,
recollection of the repression which had been removed to the equal relief
of writers like Pliny and Tacitus. This spirit makes it difficult to
believe that Friedländer is right in dating the first book so late as
the years between 112 and 116 in order to bring it nearer in time to the
succeeding book.
The long sixth satire formed the second book. The comet and the
earthquake[1766] there mentioned have been convincingly assigned to the
year 115, so that the volume can be dated about A.D. 116.
The third book consisted of satires VII, VIII and IX. The first of
these three opens with the declaration that the future of literature
depends on the emperor entirely—_et spes et ratio studiorum in Caesare
tantum_. Which Caesar? Some have said Trajan; Nettleship argued for
Domitian,[1767] without winning much support for a theory which would
badly break the chronological sequence of the volumes. A more fitting
emperor and period can be found in Hadrian, soon after his accession. He
had poetic tastes, and Juvenal’s words were a not unbecoming compliment
to the new ruler who reached Rome from the East in 118. Satire VIII was
probably written earlier: its allusion to Marius Priscus suggests a date
not long after A.D. 100.[1768]
The date of the fourth book, containing X, XI and XII, is undiscoverable.
The remaining four satires constituted the fifth book. Two passages in
it give clues to a date, and fix the thirteenth satire to 127 and the
fifteenth to 128 A.D.[1769]
This brief summary indicates a literary activity of some thirty years.
If, as we may infer, Juvenal had reached middle life when the first
volume was published, a date about A.D. 60 might be conjectured for his
birth. By the time of the eleventh satire he writes as an old man.[1770]
Unlike Lucilius and Horace, his acknowledged masters in satire, Juvenal
reveals little about himself. His rhetorical education was the one
customary for Romans of standing.[1771] For the philosophy professed
by exalted minds he felt a respect proportionate to his contempt for
philosophical hypocrites; but the philosophy which appealed to him was
not so much that of the Greek schools[1772] as that of life:
Great is Philosophy, whose holy writ
Ordains commandments and who conquers Chance.
We deem those happy too whom life hath taught
To bear life’s ills nor fret against the yoke.[1773]
He himself had been schooled by hardship, though later in his career we
know he owned a small farm at Tibur, and was able to offer hospitality to
friends in his own house at Rome.[1774]
The sixteen Satires consist of nearly 3900 hexameters, and range in
length from the 661 lines (or, including the Bodleian[1775] fragment,
695 lines) of the devastatingly horrible sixth satire to the 60 lines of
the incomplete sixteenth. In particular, the first, third and tenth—each
making a different appeal—can be read again and again without losing
their freshness: they stand the true test of the classical. It is
impossible to miss either the nobility of spirit pervading the thirteenth
or the terrific, if overdriven, power of the indictment against women in
the sixth.
The first satire is a characteristic prelude—the poet’s _apologia_,
to explain why he should write satire, and what his manner and matter
should be. A careful examination of it, therefore, reveals the underlying
aim. Deafened with recitations from authors, and, like Martial, sick of
hackneyed mythology, must not Juvenal too have his say?
Shall I just listen always? ne’er repay
Hoarse Cordus bawling his heroic lay?
Shall one recite his comedies at me,
Another elegiacs, and go free?...
I too learned rhetoric beneath the cane:
My essays counselled Sulla sleep to gain
In private life. ’Tis clemency misplaced,
When everywhere with swarms of bards you’re faced,
To spare the paper someone sure will waste.
So much to justify writing. But why satire? Why should Juvenal follow
the career of Lucilius? The answer comes pat: the difficulty is _not_
to write satire (_difficile est saturam non scribere_). The prominence
of offensive and vicious persons goads one into invective. One loathes
the spectacle of the impotent who dares to marry, or the masculine woman
aping a man, or the fabulously wealthy ex-slave and ex-barber flaunting
his riches. Annoying beyond endurance are the over-smart lawyers, the
treacherous informer and the unabashed will-hunter. How one’s anger
blazes to think of an innocent ward driven to evil courses by the knavery
of an unscrupulous guardian, or of a guilty proconsul receiving so
light a sentence that he can enjoy exile on his ill-gotten gains! Such
abuses need the Venusian lamp of Horace, and, somewhat in Martial’s
spirit, Juvenal claims that he has no taste for legendary themes, when,
from lust of filthy lucre, a cuckold encourages his wife’s lover, or
when horse-racing spendthrifts expect commissions in the army. In fact,
the temptation is rather to compose a whole volume in the open street,
when an imposing _lectica_ brings along a forger lolling at ease, or a
wealthy widow who poisoned her husband. If you would cut a figure, dare
some black deed that ought to earn transportation or jail: honesty gets
praise but is left in the cold (_probitas laudatur et alget_):
To crime men owe their table, park, estate,
Goblets in high relief or antique plate.
Say, who could find the calm repose they need
When a son’s wife is bribed to sin for greed,
When brides prove frail and boys turn paramours?
Though nature jibs, yet wrath my verse ensures.
(_si natura negat, facit indignatio uersum_).
So, like Martial again, but in an angrier tone, Juvenal proclaims his
subject to be human life—a gallimaufry of everything from the days of the
Flood:
Whate’er men do, their vows, fears, pleasure, rage,
Joys, hustle, make the hotchpotch of my page.[1776]
And when was there ever a heavier crop of villainy and avarice?
Picture the gamester attended by his steward, armed squire-like with
a money-chest for the battle of the gaming-table, ready to stake a
fortune but refusing raiment to a shivering slave. Think of the many
country-seats one rich individual may possess; think of his dining off
seven courses in solitary state; think of the miserable dole of the
_sportula_ given at his door to poor dependents, and the care taken to
confer this charity upon as few as possible. The scramble for the dole,
and the degrading tricks by which it is sought, are inimitably narrated
with all Juvenal’s power of realistic detail. “Wealth,” he remarks
bitingly, “is our most revered divinity: how singular that we Romans
have raised no temple to Money—no altars to the coinage to match our
worship of Pax, Fides, Victoria, Virtus and Concordia!” The gluttony
of the rich, however, brings its penalty in sudden death: and no one
feels sorry. Nowadays vice has reached its zenith—“so then, my satire,
hoist sail, crowd on full canvas!” (_utere uelis, totos pande sinus_).
Yet one caution must be observed. If, following Lucilius, you attack
those in high station, you may be sentenced to a cruel death. Therefore
count the cost before the trumpet sounds. It is safer to satirise a
past generation—those who lie buried beside the Great North Road (the
_Flaminia_), or the South-Eastern Road (the _Latina_). Dead men do not
retaliate.
Juvenal’s claim here to occupy himself with the past is noteworthy. The
profession is less an attempted blind for his own safety, than simply
another way of disavowing, as Martial explicitly did, the intention of
attacking individuals of his own times. Some critics have emphasised the
unreality of Juvenal’s working himself into a fury against dead men and
bygone abuses; but it may be urged that conceivably part of his material
was secretly written up (it was certainly noted in the mind) under
Domitian, and that anyhow, as society does not radically change within
a few years, there obviously remained, even under the better rule of
Trajan, abundance of human types inviting satiric attack. Contemporary
observation would then reinforce memory. The theory that represents
Juvenal’s eye as mainly upon the past fails to account for his vigour of
style, which is not adequately explained as artificial rhetoric.
Satires II, VI and IX may be considered together. Their plainspokenness
on sexual excess or perversion has excluded them from many editions.
Satire II denounces the atrocious profligacy of hypocritical philosophers
“who pose as Puritans, but live in vice” (_qui Curios simulant at
Bacchanalia uiuunt_). After a Zolaesque glance at diseases caused by evil
living, it is conceded that an open offender is less obnoxious than a
counterfeit moralist: “who’d stand a Gracchus railing at revolt?” (_quis
tulerit Gracchos de seditione querentes?_). In contrast with the sixth
satire, a woman is here introduced as a critic of the unnatural depravity
of some of the male sex. She protests that not women, but men deserve the
rigours of the law. Yet “censure acquits the crow but damns the dove”
(_dat ueniam coruis uexat censura columbas_). Men begin with effeminate
luxury and end as such monstrosities that the other world would have to
be disinfected after receiving them! One great lesson is driven home—the
steps in degradation must be jealously watched; “No man becomes a
blackguard in a trice” (_nemo repente fuit turpissimus_).
Satire VI is a long gallery of women to be avoided. Some are incurably
bad and deserve all they get: others, whom we might call merely
objectionable, like the loud-voiced virago or ostentatious she-pedant,
incur equal castigation from the angry author. About his brilliant
vehemence there can be no doubt. One must, however, not expect a strictly
logical summary; for careful planning is not Juvenal’s forte. He will
not limit his energy to a fixed programme. Thus in VI he harks back to
its opening jeremiad on the disappearance of primitive chastity from a
degenerate world; and more than once he introduces the capricious cruelty
of mistresses to slaves, or the passion for public spectacles. It is
inevitable, then, that, in satires like the first, critics should note
signs of imperfect construction. What, however, is lost in methodical
arrangement is often gained in free vigour.
His immediate keynote is the insanity of a man’s contemplating marriage
so long as ropes are available to hang himself with! With characteristic
exaggeration he declares there are few pure women left in Rome—few that
do not behave as dangerous temptresses. Can one imagine a woman content
with one husband? Scarcely could one discover an honest girl in the
country. Roman ladies are spectators of indecent pantomimes, they fall in
love with players or gladiators—they will desert home and children for a
pet “Sergy”—and they prove exacting in the costliest fancies.
Should you chance on that astounding rarity (_rara auis in terris
nigroque simillima cygno_)—a good woman—she is likely to exhibit
intolerable pride (_grande supercilium_): and the boastfulness that
ruined Niobe spoils all other feminine merits. Then there is the
annoying affectation of using Greek words (like the wanton ζωή and ψυχή)
which turned an Italian girl into “a maid of Athens” with Hellenic
blandishments. Even true love for your bride constitutes a danger;
you become her thrall and _Madame_ rules the house, prescribing your
affections, settling your will, sentencing a slave to death, and in the
end leaving you if it suits her. Figure to yourself the wife of eight
husbands in five autumns—an elegant epitaph! (here again Martial might
be speaking). Besides, there is your mother-in-law, schooling the young
mistress in rapacity and duplicity. If there is a law-suit, _cherchez la
femme_ (_nulla fere causa est in qua non femina litem mouerit_). Another
bugbear is the unsexed woman who takes up fencing, or the guilty consort
whose hypocritical tears conceal her offence, who brazens out the charge
if detected in an amour, and is eloquent where a trained rhetorician
would be hard put to it for an excuse. Riches, drunkenness, foreign ways,
strange rituals have all contributed to Rome’s deterioration. The advice
may be offered to set a guard on one’s wife—“but who shall guard the
guards themselves?” (_quis custodiet ipsos custodes?_)
The unpleasant series of portraits continues:—the housewife whose
ruinous extravagance knows no bounds and takes no lesson; she who dotes
on eunuchs or musicians; the gossip who retails the latest news with
additions; the bad-tempered woman, imperious in demands on her slaves and
coolly keeping guests waiting for dinner if she chooses to have a bath.
There is also the victim of disgusting intemperance; but Juvenal’s grim
humour represents as worse still[1777] the lady who will talk literature
at table—Madam Oracle, beside whom not even another woman (to say nothing
of an attorney or town-crier) could get a word in:[1778] and, with a
suggestive alliteration, he adds:
The wave of words, you’d swear, that from her wells
Sounds like so many basins banged with bells.[1779]
Therefore do not let the Roman matron go in too much for logic, history,
grammar, or rhetoric, for she will then quote verses you don’t know,
and pedantically correct her friend’s slip in grammar. He returns to
the maltreatment of slaves—a displaced curl may cost a lashing: he
then pillories the devotees of Eastern superstition, and those who
avoid motherhood, smuggle supposititious children into a home to delude
a husband, and resort to magic charms or philtres or even to poisons.
But—and here Juvenal anticipates the criticism that he paints too dark a
picture—you will say, this is all tragic rant.[1780] No, it is too true:
Roman women are guilty of the enormities described. Alcestis died for her
husband; the modern woman would have a husband die for a pet dog. There
are Clytemnestras everywhere.
It is a lurid ending, all the more effective after the clever protest
that he has only been telling the truth. In this satire we seem far away
from the respectable society of the satirist’s contemporary, Pliny the
younger. Yet if the picture is too much overdrawn to be sound history,
the genius of the author makes it great literature.
The ninth satire need not occupy us fully. In treating the unpleasant
theme of a reprobate’s sorrows, Juvenal introduces just enough of the
element of dialogue to remind one of the manner of Persius. Answering
the interlocutor’s request that he should withhold his revelation of
depravity in high circles, the poet asks in turn whether rich offenders
can ever successfully hide their infamy—the very talk of one’s slaves
should set a check on evil living. The other, mourning over years
misused, replies in one of the most notable passages in Juvenal:
What cure for my lost time and hopes deceived?
The little span of our poor narrow life
Hastes like a fading blossom to a close.
We drink; we call for garlands, perfumes, girls;
But Age creeps on us ere we understand.[1781]
Satire III, paraphrased by Johnson under the title of “London,” as he
paraphrased Satire X under the title of “The Vanity of Human Wishes,”
is deservedly among the most admired of Juvenal’s poems. The picture of
Rome as a good place to be out of lends itself to so much realistic and
even dramatic treatment that it forms an unforgettable social document.
The attack is put in the mouth of one of the poet’s friends, Umbricius,
who unburdens his mind just outside the Porta Capena, as he and a
cartful of household belongings are about to quit the city and take
the road for Cumae on the Bay of Naples. The capital is no place, he
asserts, for honourable men or honest work; he cannot be a useful
accomplice in crime; he cannot lie and flatter like smooth-tongued
versatile jacks-of-all-work from Greece or yet further East. Bitter
invective is directed against the _Graeculus esuriens_ who belongs to
a nation of consummate actors, cringing sycophants, and dangerous spies;
but there is also much stinging criticism upon the Rome and Romans of
the day. Where money, not worth, is the test of character, poverty
meets with the unkindest cut of all—it is jeered at.[1782] How hard
it is to rise in straitened circumstances! Rural simplicity is in sharp
contrast to the showiness of the town, where everything has its price,
where one must bribe a pampered valet for an interview with his master,
where life is threatened by tumble-down tenements or conflagrations or
street accidents.
The sudden collapse of a waggon loaded with marble is made the subject of
a miniature drama worthy of the ancient traditions of _satura_. Within
fourteen lines[1783] we have three vivid scenes:
I. A street in Rome; heavy traffic; cart upset; fatal accident
to a passer-by.
II. (The scene is changed, _domus interea_). The victim’s home;
busy slaves, in unconscious dramatic irony, preparing the bath
for their master who will never return alive.
III. (Another change of scene). Hades, whither master has
already gone (_at ille iam sedet in ripa_), a shuddering novice
waiting for the dread ferryman across the gloomy stream.
Nor are the perils less by night. Make your will before you venture to
sup from home! A strikingly picturesque sketch is given of the dark
streets where the drunken swashbuckler bullies those he can waylay. Here
again Juvenal shows mastery of his effective semi-dramatic method in a
series of brief scenes:
I. Night: restless _apache_ of ancient Rome tossing sleepless
on his couch; he has killed nobody that day; hence his
insomnia!—murdering is an indispensable soporific.
II. Dark street; _apache_ eluding the patrol.
III. Moonlight; lonely wayfarer returning from a supper-party;
enter _apache_ (_stat contra_):
He calls a halt: and you must needs obey:
What else? he’s wild, and brawn can force its way.
Swift angry dialogue follows, if dialogue it can be called, where the
surprised citizen scarcely gets time to reply. “And where may you come
from?” he bawls: “whose sour wine and beans have blown you out? Who’s the
cobbler you’ve been with gorging chopped leeks or boiled sheep’s head?
Eh? no answer? Speak or take a sound kicking! Out with it! Where do you
hold forth? In what praying-shanty am I to look for you?” It is the poor
man’s privilege to get mauled and implore leave to go home with just a
few teeth left! After a final complaint about shopbreakers, footpads
and highwaymen, Umbricius, in Juvenal’s hyperbolical manner, affects to
fear a shortage of iron owing to the quantity of chains needed for the
criminal population.
Satire IV is a half-playful account of an enormous turbot which a
fisherman decided must be presented to Domitian, who summons his privy
council to deliberate on the proper treatment of the fish. We are made
vividly to realize the perilous friendship of an imperial tyrant,
his distrust of his counsellors, and their pallid nervousness in his
proximity. The brief strokes of portraiture which recreate the figures at
court show great power.
The fifth satire is a scathing exposure of the shabby entertainment of
clients by mean hosts. “If,” says the poet to the client, “you can tamely
suffer the indignities put upon you at a rich patron’s table, you must be
absolutely worthless. Better be a beggar out and out. The height of your
aspiration (_uotorum summa_) is to get even the worst place at the great
man’s board, where one is not allowed to drink the same wine, or eat the
same bread or fish as he. A blackamoor rascal attends to you whom you
wouldn’t like to meet on a dark night (_cui per mediam nolis occurrere
noctem_) on the Latin Way, while a handsome slave stands by your patron,
who regales himself upon _foie gras_, capon and boar with truffles in
season. The best dainties you are permitted to watch without tasting.
Don’t suppose all this is entirely mean economy on your host’s part: he
does it maliciously to wound: it is such fun to watch a client’s angry
disappointment. To endure such insults proves you deserve them (_omnia
ferre si potes, et debes_).”
Satire VII anticipates the dawn of better days for literature and
learning under the patronage of a new ruler (_et spes et ratio studiorum
in Caesare tantum_). In contrast with these brighter prospects, the poem
is a growl of discontent over the present condition of literature, which
does not pay. Patrons are mean and poverty chills authorship. Only the
pantomime actor thrives and wields influence (_quod non dant proceres
dabit histrio_): so the most promising thing poets can do is to sell a
libretto for a _fabula saltica_ on the stage: otherwise a Statius might
starve in spite of popular readings from his _Thebaid_. Take the literary
professions: they are all miserably rewarded. The historian gets no
adequate return for his exacting toil: the advocate is not recompensed
in proportion to real skill—a jockey of the red colour can eclipse in
fortune a hundred lawyers. Nowadays a Cicero would not be prized unless
he wore a fine ring: a poor man has no chance, however eloquent (_rara in
tenui facundia panno_), and would do well to retire to Gaul or Africa—a
sagacious testimony by Juvenal to the intellectual force of these
provinces. The teachers of declamation are no better off: they are killed
by the deadly monotony of repeated exercises (_occidit miseros crambe
repetita magistros_). They are expected to post students up in useful
points without receiving proper fees (_scire uolunt omnes, mercedem
soluere nemo_), and they are blamed for a pupil’s want of proficiency.
Compute the fees earned by a teacher of singing and music, and you will
tear up your manual of rhetoric. If a great professor like Quintilian
made a good income, that was an exceptional freak of fortune. And,
with a touch of poetry, Juvenal calls for heaven’s blessing on former
generations who knew how to respect the instructor of the mind:
Grant that the earth, ye gods, above the shades
Of our forefathers may lie soft and light:
Sweet-breathing crocus, spring that never fades,
Grant to the tombs of those who held it right
To honour teachers as one would a sire.[1784]
In the eighth satire the uselessness of pedigrees is exposed (_stemmata
quid faciunt?_) as Juvenal laughs at the claims of long descent on the
part of those who live unworthy lives:
Though decked with olden busts great halls may be,
Virtue remains the sole nobility.[1785]
Good character is the true patent of high rank:[1786] there should be a
rapturous welcome for real goodness to match that of votaries greeting
Osiris. In breeds of dumb animals we expect the old qualities to be
maintained: otherwise, the degenerate is rejected: so a man must be
capable of winning distinction by his own conduct instead of relying on
his ancestors’ renown (_miserum est aliorum incumbere famae_). Juvenal
nowhere strikes a loftier ethical note than in his admonitions here that
the truth must be spoken were it even at the risk of torture, that a
governor of a province must rule his own desires, that the triumphs of
peace outnumber those of war (_plures de pace triumphos_), and—in two of
his most memorable lines—that death is preferable to disgrace.
Hold it black sin ’fore honour breath to choose—
For living’s sake the grounds of life to lose.[1787]
With the famous tenth satire we encounter Juvenal’s later and more
reflective manner. In length it comes next to the sixth, though about 300
lines shorter. The main thesis is that a survey of mankind over the globe
from the Pillars of Hercules to the Ganges, or, as Johnson has it, “from
China to Peru,” shows the blind foolishness of human desires. Ignorant
of what is really beneficial, man everywhere craves for what may prove
his ruin. Such a world of idiocy may move equally well a Democritus to
laughter or a Heraclitus to tears. The theme is vigorously illustrated
by instances exhibiting the perils of political ambition (Sejanus,
Crassus, Pompey, Caesar); eloquence (Demosthenes and Cicero); military
glory (Hannibal, Alexander the Great); long life (Nestor, Priam, Croesus,
Marius, and others who outlived their best days); beauty (Lucretia,
Virginia, Hippolytus, and Messalina’s ill-starred favourite Silius). More
abstract in subject, the satire retains much of Juvenal’s old vivid and
dramatic manner. In one compact line an admirably complete picture can
be conveyed: a traveller, nervous over the risk of robbery on a lonely
road (like the Appian), passes through a marshy district (such as the
Pomptine), and in the moonlight fancies each stirring of the bulrushes
may mean a lurking highwayman.[1788] Nothing could exceed the vigour
shown in describing the outburst of popular fury against the statues of
the fallen idol, Sejanus, and in the dramatic comments by those whom we
might introduce as “first citizen” and “second citizen.”[1789] Much else
remains familiar in the satire—the gibe at Cicero’s poetry, the nauseous
realism in recounting drawbacks of old age, and the sketch of Hannibal’s
career leading up to the contemptuous dismissal:
Go, madman, o’er the cruel Alps make speed
To please young spouters of a college screed![1790]
Juvenal’s cynicism is not entirely negative. After denouncing all
ordinary human aims, he still leaves something to pray for. The
concluding passage owes much of its nobility to the Stoicism which
inspires it; and though there is no need to question the author’s
sincerity, he comes in one flippant line very near spoiling the whole
effect. Half ashamed of his own seriousness, he seems unable to resist
the temptation to have his jest at one of the religious rituals of the
day (_exta et candiduli diuina tomacula porci_):
Shall men then pray for naught? If ’tis advice
You crave, then let the deities themselves
Apportion us our due and helpful lot.
The gods will grant not joys but all that’s meet.
They love man more than man loves self. Impelled
By yearning heart, by might of blind desire,
We seek a bride and offspring; but the gods
Alone know what the child or wife will be.
Still, that you may ask something, paying vows
At shrines with victims’ entrails, offering
Prophetic mincemeat of a piglet white,
Pray for a sound mind in a body sound.
Ask for the valiant soul that fears not death,
But counts the final lap of life a gift
From nature, and can suffer any toil,
Stranger to wrath and lust, preferring all
The cruel toils and woes of Hercules
To banquets, love, or cushions from the East.
Behold—I show what you may give yourself—
Through goodness lies the only path of peace.
O Chance, thy power is foiled if men be wise:
We men make thee a goddess in the skies.[1791]
The interest of the eleventh satire, which contrasts plain living with
sumptuous junketing, is in part autobiographic; for after its prelude
of 55 lines on the folly of extravagant gourmands who neglect the
heaven-sent and ever-valuable maxim “Know thyself,” it consists of an
invitation from the poet to a simple meal which shall draw produce from
his own Tiburtine farm. Only Homer and Virgil are to be read at table,
while the roar of the holiday-makers in the circus can be heard afar off.
The author’s old age is suggested in his declaration that it is for the
young to attend the games and shout and bet with a smart damsel seated
by their side: “but let my shrivelled skin bask in the spring sunshine
free from the formal gown.”[1792]
Though the twelfth is the shortest of the satires except the fragmentary
sixteenth, it hardly makes an artistic unity. The safe arrival of
Juvenal’s friend Catullus at Ostia after imminent danger of shipwreck
gives occasion for a pious sacrifice in token of thanksgiving by
the poet. His motives however must not be misconstrued. He is no
legacy-hunter seeking to curry favour. An awkward transition leads to
a gibe at such legacy-hunters as would purchase a place in a will by
offering the costliest victims, an elephant (and here the satire becomes
doubly elephantine), or a slave, or a child devoted like Iphigeneia. The
closing note is the forcible imprecation on a fortune-seeker:
Long may Pacuvius live, as Nestor old,
Possess as much, as Nero snatched, pile gold
In mountains, loving none, by none beloved.[1793]
The elevated moral teaching of Satire XIII must win our admiration.
Calvinus has been cheated of 10,000 sesterces by a fraudulent friend.
The solace which the poet has to offer is that genuine punishment is
inflicted by a guilty conscience: no wrong-doer can elude that court.
After all, we live no longer in the Golden Age, but in corrupt times,
when money exerts its lure and perjury is rampant. “The wrath of gods
is great, yet worketh slow” (_ut sit magna tamen certe lenta ira deorum
est_). The offender, then, must be left in the hands of heaven; and
Juvenal feels for vindictive passions only a biting, and, at the same
time, misogynistic contempt:
Vengeance is the delight of petty minds,
Paltry and weak. Infer this truth, because
None like a woman dotes upon revenge.[1794]
The influence of parental example is the theme of Satire XIV—the third
longest of the collection. There are many faults which children learn
from their parents, such as gambling, gluttony, cruelty, intrigue.
Therefore all that is unseemly to hear or see must be excluded from the
home: the utmost respect is due to the child (_maxima debetur puero
reuerentia_). You take pains to make your house clean to receive a guest:
should you not, for your son’s sake, keep it free from evil? The later
part of the poem deals with avarice, a fault which the young practise
reluctantly and which wears a spurious resemblance to virtue. Hence too
often a father inculcates the passion for gain upon a son by precept and
example; and hence the modern quest for wealth at the cost of crime and
risk of death. The final counsel is to get enough for the support of
life; and, with a glance at the Stoic ideal of living _secundum naturam_,
he declares:
Nature ne’er contradicts Philosophy.[1795]
If you need more, adopt the equestrian income as a standard, or even
twice that amount; beyond that, the treasures of Croesus are little
likely to satisfy your desires.
The fifteenth satire tells of a feud between two Egyptian townships,
Ombi and Tentyra. The Tentyrites having attacked their neighbours in the
midst of a festival were put to flight. In the retreat one fugitive who
slipped was hacked to pieces by the victors and devoured. This revolting
cannibalism gives Juvenal occasion for the reflection that tenderness of
heart as shown by tears is the noblest attribute of man.[1796]
Only partially finished, the last satire complains of unfair advantages
possessed by a soldier over a civilian. When it is cited as evidence
throwing doubt upon the records of Juvenal’s military service, one ought
in fairness to remember that not every soldier leaves the army as its
panegyrist.
In spirit there are signal differences between the earlier and the
later satires. If Satires X and XII-XV be compared with the rest, an
increase in prolix bookishness will be noted alongside of a decrease
in concrete force. Ribbeck’s theory of two Juvenals, a genuine satirist
and a spurious declaimer, is long since dead; but it possessed the merit
of resting upon a close examination into points of difference in the
satires. The hypothesis viewed the traditional Juvenal as a Janus-head
(_Janus-kopf_) looking on one side at the full fresh life of Rome and the
present, but on the other side at the dead past and the dusk of academic
tradition. The contrast was likened to passing from one of Schiller’s
dramas to a drowsy afternoon sermon (_eine sanft einschläfernde
Nachmittagspredigt_). Unfortunately the theory overestimated the
differences, failed to see that there was no fundamental incompatibility
in style, and interpreted the actual differences with a perverse
misconception of the true explanation. Above all its other absurdities,
the theory would ask us to believe that the tenth satire was the work of
some unknown forger and was merely one of the alleged “drowsy afternoon
sermons.” The solution lies not in positing a duality of authorship, but
in recognizing that the real Juvenal had grown older, and in his later
manner let his satire down from the old level of full-blooded vitality
and devil-may-care invective. The figment of the true and the false
Juvenal could be maintained only in cheerful oblivion of the evolution,
and sometimes deterioration, in style characteristic of many other
authors. There is no greater unlikeness between the early and the late
Juvenal than between the Horace of the earliest _Satires_ and the Horace
of the _Epistles_; or, to cite a prose-writer, between the first and
last works of Tacitus. In modern English, Carlyle and Browning are apt
parallels.
Juvenal, we have seen, proclaims his literary ancestry in his first
satire, legitimately affiliating his _genre_ to that of both Lucilius and
Horace. His insistence on indignation as the mainspring of his censorious
utterances definitely connects him with the fierce invective of the
former. Though the influence of Horace is manifest in his language, one
finds no imitation of Horatian geniality. To turn from Juvenal to the
fourth satire in Horace’s first book is to breathe an entirely different
atmosphere. We are there in the company of an apologist for the satiric
attitude who does not wish to be feared or hated or to write dangerously,
who guarantees that ill-natured rancour shall be absent from his
sketches, and who pleads for an indulgent attitude towards any outspoken
jest.[1797] Aware of his own faults, Horace can take himself, as well as
others, gently to task, with a sort of Chaucerian smile for pardonable
human weaknesses. His very habit of jotting things down on paper (_inludo
chartis_) is one of those venial peccadilloes (_mediocribus illis ex
uitiis unum_). This is the reason why his sportive verses win the
reader’s heart, as Persius felt—_circum praecordia ludit_. Juvenal’s
strength lies elsewhere: the genial smile has gone: he cannot laugh at
himself as Horace does. There is no self-revelation; for Juvenal takes
himself as seriously as he takes the world. If there is humour, it is
grim; since the times are out of joint, the lash must be plied to put
them right again. Some elements of Persius’s earnest spirit, especially
some Stoic traits, enter into him, though his method of censure is not
so much homily as fiery attack. Both alike, however, are fighters,
waging a warfare to improve the diseased society against which they find
themselves in reaction.
For Juvenal’s purpose he had at his command the gift of extraordinarily
vivid and succinct presentation of men and things. This gift renders
him the most powerful delineator of Roman society at the beginning of
the second century, so that he recreates for his readers the life that
was led then and the human figures who moved in the street, house, or
palace. This constitutes what, for want of a better term, we call his
realism. The secret of it he had learned, not in any rhetorical academy,
but in the severe school of life:[1798] he had undergone the privations
of poverty, and almost certainly of war and exile: he possessed the
observant eye, the retentive memory, the faculty of direct expression
needed to make an experience live again in literature. A few essential
and picturesque details, recorded with the utmost parsimony, place
a whole scene before us. Thus, we cannot fail to see the scramble
for the dole, with such subterfuges as the curtained, though empty,
_lectica_ supposed to contain a lady caller.[1799] Again, we seem to
be uncomfortably present among Domitian’s counsellors—one, an unwieldy
mountain of flesh (_uenter adest abdomine tardus_); another, an informer
whose gentle whisper could slit a victim’s throat (_tenui iugulos aperire
susurro_); yet another, a repulsive blind flatterer, pouring out words
of admiration for the emperor’s great turbot, and at the same time
“turning to the left, though in fact the fish was lying on his right!”
In the same passage[1800] the allusion to “the beggar at the carriage
wheels, who throws wheedling kisses as it drives down hill” is as true
to Italy to-day as it ever was. Certain dramatic aspects of this realism
have been illustrated in the survey of the Satires. Not unnaturally it
is a realism concentrated mainly on what will favour satiric treatment.
A satirist never achieves, or even aims at, a universal or impartial
view of life. Juvenal’s professed subject may be the _farrago_ of
all mankind’s doings during postdiluvian ages; but actually a great
proportion of human affairs can offer no challenge to a mordant critic.
Goodness, for instance, even at its most humdrum, is little likely to
stir the _indignatio_ which is Juvenal’s driving force. That he should
be darkly pessimistic is involved in the nature of the case and in his
temperament. He tends to look only at the gloomy side, and therefore to
obscure the fact that not everything around him was a cesspool of vice,
but that on the contrary much in contemporary Roman and Italian life was
sound, healthy, and beautiful. Undeniably, we could have spared some of
the coarseness with which he made wickedness revolting.
What humour exists in Juvenal is of a kind to match his serious
disposition. It tends to be grim and ironical: and the want of kindly
sunshine in it has led some to doubt its existence.[1801] His roundabout
allusive manner sometimes produces quaintly humorous effects through
its smack of flippancy: thus he substitutes “Ceres’ son-in-law” for
Pluto; and “the youth preferred to jealous Iarbas” for Aeneas. But his
grim irony is best seen in passages like those in which he treats the
unexpected fate of the citizen killed in the street accident of the third
satire, or when he sums up the aim of all ambition as nothing but the
laudatory inscription on a sepulchre which is itself so far from immortal
that even a tree may burst it asunder—“the very tombs have their allotted
span” (_data sunt ipsis quoque fata sepulcris_, X, 146). Here he has
taken one impressive step beyond the idea in Gray’s line, “The paths of
glory lead but to the grave.”
Occasionally there is a feeling for beauty, doubly welcome because
not much may be expected in a satirist. A transient gleam of romance
illumines the grotto of the inspired Egeria when he prefers nature’s
loveliness to artificial improvements:
Down to Egeria’s vale we fared, to caves
From Nature’s work transformed. How much more near
Would be the fountain nymph, if simple grass
Enclosed the waters with its margent green,
Nor marble kerb profaned the native stone.[1802]
Allusion has already been made to the beauty of idea and language in his
prayer that the last resting-place of those who revered the teachers of
the young shall be brightened by “fragrant crocus and unfailing spring”
(_spirantisque crocus et in urna perpetuum uer_, VII, 208).
It is not however in the realm of pure poetry but in his free mastery
of rhetoric and his skill in adapting it to his literary aims, that
Juvenal’s true eminence lies. This is not to suggest that he could ever
be dismissed as a rhetorician. He is not controlled by, but controls,
his instrument. It is very easy to accumulate copious examples of his
recourse to rhetorical artifices—interrogation, apostrophe, antithesis
and the rest. Scores of _sententiae_ could be reckoned up, like
Travellers with naught sing in the robber’s face.[1803]
or
“There’s many a thing which they
Whose coats are tattered never dare to say.”[1804]
Attention could also be called to his fondness for hyperbole, like “men
at sea outnumber those ashore!” or “pillars split by the everlasting
reciter,” or the jest that, if asked to enumerate the legion ailments
of old age, one could more readily tell “how many patients Dr. Themison
killed off in one autumn season.”[1805]
Akin to this penchant for overstatement is his diverting use of an
anticlimax where a series of objectionable things or persons ends
intentionally in a surprise. Thus, nothing worse, he says, could be
conceived than to stay in Rome dreading conflagrations, the constant fall
of houses, the thousand dangers of a cruel town, and—to cap all—poets
giving readings from their works in the hot August days![1806] But the
truth is that, tricks notwithstanding, his style in its complexity and
individuality is much more than merely rhetorical. The statement of the
_uitae_ that he practised declamation till middle life has produced a
misleading effect on some critics who have impeached his sincerity. His
place, however, in literary history is secure: he is one of the great
satirists—to some the greatest—and one refuses to believe that greatness
of style can be based on rhetorical knack alone. Admittedly declamatory,
he yet drew his real strength from a passion for serious morality,
which, without, perhaps, very deep religious feeling[1807] or convinced
attachment to philosophy,[1808] still gave him the right to cherish his
_saeua indignatio_ against abuses constituting social dangers.
Genuine feeling, then, forced him to raise an original voice in
utterances which the world has not allowed to die. Lines or phrases that
readily recur to the memory (some of them already quoted) are so many
reminders of his permanent contribution to literature: _e.g. probitas
laudatur et alget; quis tulerit Gracchos de seditione querentes? nemo
repente fuit turpissimus; omnia nouit Graeculus esuriens; haud facile
emergunt, quorum uirtutibus obstat res angusta domi; nemo malus felix;
rara auis in terris; hoc uolo, sic iubeo, sit pro ratione uoluntas; sed
quis custodiet ipsos custodes? soloecismum liceat fecisse marito; facies
dicetur an ulcus? occidit miseros crambe repetita magistros; stemmata
quid faciunt? propter uitam uiuendi perdere causas; panem et circenses;
mens sana in corpore sano; pictores quis nescit ab Iside pasci? prima est
haec ultio, quod se iudice nemo nocens absoluitur?; maxima debetur puero
reverentia; lucri bonus est odor ex re qualibet_.
Allusions and verbal reminiscences prove Juvenal’s memory for previous
literature. His reader is expected to understand an ordinary reference to
Greek poetry or history and to recognize now a Horatian, now a Virgilian
tag, as, for example, we find _rusticus expectas_ and _parcendum est
teneris_ in the same satire.[1809] As regards his versification, he makes
a noticeable departure from his fellow-satirists, Horace and Persius, in
favour of Virgil. His control, and it is masterly, over the hexameter
is in the main Virgilian rather than Ovidian, though it has some
Lucretian quality. One finds, then, in him an epic ring, which appears to
suggest that at least in his longer passages Juvenal may be represented
in English by the traditional blank verse of narrative poetry more
appropriately than by what too easily becomes the ding-dong of the rhymed
heroic couplet.
In those satires which Dryden selected for rendering, his neat distich is
at its best among the terse sententious parts; and the experiment whereby
the great English satirist set himself to translate his Roman prototype
must always remain of extraordinary interest, although one may feel that
Gifford’s heroic couplets achieve in some respects a more successful
version. Briefly, however, Juvenal’s variety of line-structure, his
freedom in pause and _enjambement_, cannot be conveyed within the
rigid limits of the couplet. This ease of movement accounts for his
range—occasional beauty, occasional harshness, but prevailing rapidity.
Cleverly interwined alliterations may be made not merely emphatic and
decorative as in _dat ueniam coruis, uexat censura columbas_, but
realistic in their unmistakable echo of the sense, as in the likening
of a woman’s torrential talk to the banging of tin basins and tinkling
bells—_tot pariter pelues et tintinnabula dicas pulsari_. Or, again, the
excited bustle of a house on fire is suggested by the final and initial
dentals which recur, like the rat-tat of a kettle-drum in
“iam poscit aquam, iam friuola transfert
Ucalegon, tabulata tibi iam tertia fumant.”
Totally different effects are produced by the slow melancholy movement at
the close of a line to express the fate of a poor wretch who has found
favour with the dangerous Messalina:
“rapitur miser extinguendus
Messalinae oculis.”
Like all the satirists, Juvenal draws a modicum of words from the common
speech of town and country—_caballus_, _olla_, _scrofa_, _potestas_ (like
the Italian _podestà_, a magistrate). He delights in such diminutives as
the _sermo cotidianus_ preserved all through the history of Latin and
handed down to modern Italian. One may specify as examples, _candidulus_,
_cuticula_, _flammeolum_, _foculus_, _fraterculus_, _Graeculus_,
_hortulus_, _igniculus_, _improbulus_, _liuidulus_, _nutricula_,
_ofella_, _pallidulus_, _palliolum_, _paruulus_, _pellicula_,
_rancidulus_, _sarcinula_, _seruulus_, _sordidulus_, _virguncula_.
The influence of the Satires is not traceable before the fourth century,
when Ammianus Marcellinus proves they had admirers. Both pagans and
Christians felt their spell: they were imitated by Ausonius, Claudian,
and Prudentius, and quoted by Lactantius and Servius. Medieval interest
in Juvenal’s ethical value was well marked—Chaucer apostrophizes him; and
from Elizabethan times onwards the satirists of England and France have
studied his poems. Readers of Boileau, Dryden, Pope, Johnson and Byron
know that they all in varying degrees were indebted to the works of the
Roman satirist.
LITERATURE IN THE REIGN OF HADRIAN
A.D. 117–A.D. 138
SUETONIUS AND FLORUS
Hadrian’s reign a literary diminuendo—The emperor himself—His
tastes—Archaism and Greek—Suetonius—An imperial secretary
in disgrace—Encyclopaedic fruits of his leisure—Works
extant and lost—Date of _De Viris Illustribus_ and _De Vita
Caesarum_—Sources—_De Grammaticis_—_De Rhetoribus_—_De
Poetis_—The doubtful _Life of Virgil_—Characteristics of
_Lives of the Caesars_—Suetonius and Tacitus—Suetonius
and Pepys—Portraits of emperors—Entertaining
realism—Style—Influence.
Three Flori in one—Florus the rhetor—Florus the poet—Doubtful
ascription of _Peruigilium Veneris_ to him—Florus the
historian—The Roman people his hero—Eulogy and rhetoric.
THE REIGN OF HADRIAN
Tempting though it is to make a study of the Silver Age culminate
crescendo-wise in the unique artistry of Tacitean prose, there are
difficulties in leaving out the diminuendo of Hadrian’s reign[1810]
(A.D. 117-138). One must acknowledge that literary history has but a
faint interest in the jurists of the period like Salvius Julianus and
Pomponius; or in the rhetoricians and philosophers, who mostly wrote
in Greek; or again in versifiers, skilful rather than inspired, like
Annianus, Septimius Serenus, Alfius Avitus, and the restless emperor
himself, although his dying farewell to his soul is at least a perpetual
bait for translators.[1811] One notes, too, little of significance among
the grammarians, except perhaps the commentaries, now in fragments,
written by Terentius Scaurus on Plautus, Virgil and Horace, and his
linguistically important _De Orthographia_, of which we possess two
abstracts. It is also true that the greatness of Tacitus eclipses the
work of Suetonius and Florus, the only two Hadrianic historians who are
noteworthy, if, as is most likely, the abridgement of Trogus’s Macedonian
history by Justinus is rather Antonine than contemporary.[1812] But
chronologically there is no natural break just before Suetonius, who was
one of Pliny’s junior friends; nor should the fall-off from Tacitean
brilliance blind one either to Suetonius’s merits in a different kind of
biography from the _Agricola_ or to the debt which literary history owes
him for preserving, with an almost Varronian interest in the past, much
that could not otherwise have been known about the poets and the teachers
of Rome.
Before studying Suetonius and Florus, a glance at the reign seems
appropriate. Its total literary achievement makes a somewhat ironic
comment on Juvenal’s hope _et spes et ratio studiorum in Caesare tantum_,
and shows that patronage does not of necessity beget literature.
Patronage, indeed, while clearly it never can create genius, is not
always even good for such genius as may emerge. The prince himself was
a lover of learning and architecture. He established a library at his
spacious villa whose ruins still impress us under the slopes of Tivoli:
he had another at Antium, and a third was attached to his famous academy
at Rome, the Athenaeum. “The little Greek” (_Graeculus_), as some dared
to call him, was a student of eloquence and drama. He published some of
his speeches: he patronized but also quizzed scholars and philosophers.
Pieces of mediocre verse by his Majesty have survived, and we know
the ugly title of his lost miscellany, _Catachannae_. Only once did
inspiration visit him: as he lay under the shadow of death, there came to
him a few simple lines immortal in their suggestion of the mysterious
parting between body and soul:
_Animula, uagula, blandula,_
_Hospes comesque corporis,_
_Quae nunc abibis in loca,_
_Pallidula, rigida, nudula,_
_Nec ut soles dabis iocos?_
The tender diminutives add to the difficulty of translation, but one more
attempt may be made:
Ah! little fondling soul and fleeting,
My body’s guest and travel-friend,
To what far land art thou retreating,
Poor little wan, stark, naked sweeting—
Thy wonted frolic at an end?[1813]
In several ways the example set by imperial taste contributed to give
to literature the particular turn which it now took. Hadrian had a
preference for the archaic—a feature of Roman criticism accentuated
later in the century. That he was a pronounced phil-Hellene and a great
traveller were both facts which influenced others. Suetonius, we shall
find, furnishes a good instance of the extent to which authors were now
composing in Greek as well as in Latin; and no long time elapses before a
Roman emperor, Marcus Aurelius, chooses Greek as the proper language for
his _Meditations_. Apollodorus composed his treatise on siege-operations
expressly for Hadrian, and military writing was continued by Aelian in
his work on Greek tactics. Many Greek volumes of the time on history
have perished; for example those of Crito, a Macedonian who accompanied
Hadrian on his journeys, and treated Syracuse, Macedonia, Persia in
addition to Trajan’s Dacian war. The best work of Arrian, from Bithynia,
belongs to Hadrian’s time. If he is chiefly remembered as a second
Xenophon who produced a new set of _Memorabilia_ in handling the Stoic
philosophy of his master Epictetus, and a new _Anabasis_ in narrating
the Asiatic expedition of Alexander, it should likewise be borne in mind
that he became a Roman citizen and a consul. Though he was still alive
in the days of Marcus Aurelius, it was for Hadrian that Arrian wrote
the _Periplus_ of the Black Sea. Geography, one feels, ought to have
flourished under so indefatigable a traveller: certainly mathematical
geography was, thanks to the genius of Ptolemaeus, to make a notable
advance under the Antonines.
SUETONIUS
No one in antiquity appears to have thought of writing the biography
of one of its most famous biographers, C. Suetonius Tranquillus.[1814]
For information about him, we are in consequence dependent upon a
few allusions of his own,[1815] sundry letters of the younger Pliny,
and a statement in the _Life of Hadrian_ which Spartianus wrote in
or after Diocletian’s reign. His father, Suetonius Laetus, fought at
Betriacum as a _tribunus angusticlauius_ of the thirteenth legion in
A.D. 69, and about that year Suetonius Tranquillus must have been
born.[1816] This conclusion hangs largely on the meaning attached
to the term _adulescentia_; for he looked back on himself as having
been _adulescens_ in A.D. 88 (when a pretended Nero appeared twenty
years after the real Nero’s death), and as still _adulescens_ late in
Domitian’s reign.[1817] He may have been born in Rome; but this is no
more certain of him than it is of Lucretius or Julius Caesar.
The external evidence about his life consists of references in Pliny’s
letters within the period from 96 to 112.[1818] These references show
that he practised in the law-courts; that he was allowed to transfer to
a kinsman a military tribunate for which he had himself been nominated;
that he was appreciated as a writer, but slow to issue works; and
that Pliny valued his advice on such a question as reading verse in
public. Pliny’s request submitted on Suetonius’s behalf to Trajan for
the concession of the _ius trium liberorum_ proves that, though he
was married, he had either no children or fewer than the statutory
requirement. The letter is a warm testimony to the integrity and learning
of a man who had been for a time an inmate of Pliny’s house, and for
whom, he assures the emperor, he felt a stronger affection the closer his
acquaintance became.[1819] In the next reign Suetonius held an imperial
secretaryship,[1820] when access to the archives gave him presumably the
first impulse, and certainly considerable material, towards his _Lives
of the Caesars_. Hadrian, however, in A.D. 121 dismissed him along with
others, including Septicius Clarus, prefect of the Praetorian guard,
for some offence against court-etiquette in relation to the empress
Sabina.[1821] Never a public man, Suetonius thenceforward devoted his
leisure to what most attracted him—historical, academic and antiquarian
studies. The list of his works proves that his productivity was great;
but we know from Pliny that he produced slowly.[1822] It may, therefore,
easily be credited that Suetonius lived till he was an old man under the
emperor Antoninus Pius.
Time has spared only the _Lives of the Caesars_, and from the _De Viris
Illustribus_, on men eminent in literature, the greater part of the
sections _De Grammaticis_ and _De Rhetoribus_, as well as the _Life_ of
the elder Pliny among the historians, that of Passienus Crispus among
the orators, and the _Lives_ of Terence, Horace and Lucan.[1823] These
last three are all (except such morsels as Jerome preserved in his
amplification of Eusebius’s chronicle) that can safely be counted genuine
portions of the _De Poetis_, the loss of which has left lamentable blanks
in our knowledge.
A catalogue given in Greek by Suidas under the heading Τράγκυλλος
includes the _De Vita Caesarum_ and _De Viris Illustribus_ and adds
nine titles: _On Games among the Greeks_ (in Greek); _On Spectacles and
Games among the Romans_; _On the Roman Year_; _On (critical) Signs in
Writings_; _On Cicero’s Republic_ (a book in answer to six books by the
grammarian Didymus against Cicero); _On Proper Names, Dress and Shoes_
(probably a history rather than a philosophy of clothes); _On Abusive
Terms and their Origin_ (in Greek, and grouped by their application
to the vicious, to busybodies, fools, slaves, etc.); _On the Manners
and Customs of Rome_ (two books which we can imagine to have been
full of interest); and the enigmatic Συγγενικόν.[1824] Some of these
are also vouched for by Latin writers like Aulus Gellius, Tertullian,
Censorinus, and Servius; while some may be not independent works but
sections of a larger treatise. Traces of yet other books are found in
Orosius, Servius, Lydus, Priscian and Isidore: namely, an account of
Julius Caesar’s campaigns in Gaul;[1825] _On Physical Blemishes_ (_De
Vitiis Corporalibus_, conceivably treated in connexion with his work
on dress); _On Eminent Courtesans_; _On Organization of Public Duties_
(_De Institutione Officiorum_); _On Kings_ (_De Regibus_); _On Various
Matters_ (_De Rebus Variis_), possibly identical with the miscellaneous
_Pratum_ or _Prata_, which, as can be inferred from later references, was
divided into books on different subjects, antiquarian and scientific
(_e.g._ Rome and Roman customs, the Roman year, the universe, nature of
animals, etc.), probably including some of those in Suidas’s list.[1826]
When it is remembered that Suetonius wrote both in Greek and in Latin,
and handled a vast range of themes, one can realize his long years
of laborious industry and understand his influence upon historians,
grammarians, antiquaries and encyclopaedists for several centuries.
If the work whose appearance in whole or part Pliny in one of his
letters expected from Suetonius was the _De Viris Illustribus_, then its
publication may be put about A.D. 113.[1827] One is on fairly sure ground
in dating the _De Vita Caesarum_ about 121, _i.e._ before the disgrace
of Septicius Clarus to whom the imperial biographies were dedicated.
There is, however, hardly justification for attempting to give, even
with reserve, as Macé does, an approximate date for the _De Institutione
Officiorum_ and the _De Rebus Variis_.
Much of his antiquarian lore Suetonius drew from Varro; for facts about
illustrious men he could lay under contribution Fenestella, Santra,
Nepos, Hyginus, Seneca the elder, and Asconius; and for poets the
commentators upon them. The citations and references to authorities in
the _Life of Terence_ indicate that he was well read. His main reliance
upon books and documents may be one reason (apart from an instinctively
historical interest in Julius and Augustus) why the _Lives_ grow shorter
as they approach his own period, when oral evidence was more abundant
than written histories. But he did not ignore verbal witnesses: on the
contrary, much in him was due to popular opinion and gossip. Thus,
stories about Claudius on the bench are recorded from the recollections
of elderly persons (_a maioribus natu audiebam_, _Cl._ xv.). The
painstaking inquiries (_quamuis satis curiose inquirerem_, _Vesp._ i.)
about Vespasian’s ancestors were presumably conducted in districts
likely to know the family. Quite definitely he made use of matters
which he heard mentioned by his grandfather (_auum meum narrantem puer
audiebam_, _Cal._ xix.), by his father (_Oth._ x.), or by others (_ex
nonnullis comperi_, _Ner._ xxix.). Similarly, he had several informants
(_e pluribus comperi_, _Tit._ iii.) to vouch for Titus’s expertness in
shorthand and that adroitness in imitating signatures which might in
other circumstances have turned the prince into an arch-forger. Yet the
bulk of Suetonius’s material came from his reading, which could be more
exactly estimated, had it been part of his method to name his sources
regularly instead of frequently contenting himself with a colourless
_quidam ... nonnulli tradunt_ (_Vesp._ i.). Though he may characterize
authorities as trustworthy (_nec incertis_, _Ner._ xxxiv.), this only
leaves one curious as to their identity. When Suetonius was in Hadrian’s
service _ab epistulis_, the archives under charge of the associated
department _a studiis_ were easily accessible to him; while his intimacy
with Pliny’s circle had not only given a patrician colour to his outlook,
but probably directed him by preference to writers of a corresponding
hue. At court he had opportunities for examining collections of
imperial letters and speeches, state-papers, edicts and ceremonial
eulogies, and, among public documents, the _acta diurna_, _senatus
consulta_ and _senatus acta_.[1828] It is interesting to remember that
Suetonius mentions his possession of verses by Nero in the emperor’s own
handwriting;[1829] nor is his reading without literary acumen when he
remarks of Claudius’s autobiography in eight books that it was lacking
not so much in style as in common sense (_composuit ... magis inepte quam
ineleganter_).[1830] Among historians whom he does name are well-known
figures like Nepos, Hirtius, Asinius Pollio, Cremutius Cordus and a few
others unfamiliar to us.[1831] Diligent though he was, he cannot be
called critical of his material: he was too well satisfied with amassing
it. A conflict of evidence he prefers to leave undecided (_quod discrepat
sit in medio_, _Vitell._ ii.). It is the more surprising that upon
occasion he can weigh his authorities. The most memorable instance is
the chapter discussing the birthplace of Caligula,[1832] where a brief
investigation into his sources decides him to follow the official _acta_
or _publici instrumenti auctoritas_ in preference to the authors Lentulus
Gaetulicus and the elder Pliny. In another passage he reasons critically
about the variation between complimentary and uncomplimentary accounts of
Vitellius’s ancestry: it was not, he observes, simply due to prejudice
for or against the emperor himself, since older accounts presented the
same conflict of evidence; and, in this connexion, he cites as one
of his first-hand authorities a memoir by Q. Elogius in the Augustan
period.[1833]
The _De Grammaticis_ contains in brief space much of interest in the
chronicle of literary teachers at Rome, throwing incidental light on
such points as the demarcation of grammar from rhetoric, the effect
of literary teaching on poetry, the fees earned, and the taste for
old-fashioned writers which lingered in the provinces after it had
vanished in Rome. Here and there we find amusing touches, like the
request made by a pleader for adjournment of a case to enable a litigant
to take lessons in grammar, or Asinius Gallus’s epigram on the ex-boxer
who had turned to teaching:
The Don who gives us glosses in a list
Once learned to dodge his head:
His mouth’s no good—but he has got a fist!
Why doesn’t he box instead?[1834]
In the still shorter _De Rhetoribus_ we are told incidentally about
enactments against professors of rhetoric, dangerous innovations in the
educational system, instances of long-continued practice of declamation
by famous men, varying methods and standard exercises. The work
unfortunately ends in an interrupted list of prominent teachers.
Among the _Lives of the Poets_ we face the double misfortune that few
have survived, and that the _Life of Virgil_ cannot with confidence
be pronounced Suetonian. It strikes in its very first chapter a note
different from the other literary biographies. There is something
appropriately mysterious in the record of Virgil’s lowly birth by the
wayside, the mild-eyed tearless babe, his mother’s symbolic dream, and
the poplar branch which was planted where he was born and which grew
with miraculous speed into a tree hallowed by prayers and veneration.
All this is indicative of a reverential attitude towards the personality
of Virgil already enshrined in educational tradition and honoured by
worshipping poets like Statius, in preparation, as it were, for the
medieval belief in his wizardry. The tone has led many critics to ascribe
it to Donatus; but it is only right to quote Nettleship’s defence of the
Suetonian authorship.[1835] “The style,” he says, “is in the main the
peculiar style of Suetonius; the Latin is the quiet, sober, terse and
yet distinguished Latin which characterizes him among other writers of
his period, and separates him from the later writers of the _Historia
Augusta_.” Of the accepted _Lives_ the _Terence_ has among its verse
quotations interesting criticisms by Cicero and Caesar (_o dimidiate
Menander!_) while the _Horace_ gives illuminating glimpses into Horace’s
affectionate intimacy with Maecenas and Augustus.
On the _Lives of the Caesars_ the reputation of Suetonius rests. Yet
it is easy to pick faults in the work. A great deal of it partakes of
the nature of a _chronique scandaleuse_ based upon tittle-tattle about
the emperors and compiled by a literary man with the muck-rake, too
keen upon petty and prurient detail to produce a scientific account
of his subjects. The author is neglectful of dates and over-rigid in
his scheme of biography. A measure of monotony is inevitable in his
typical arrangement of ancestry, birth, years before accession to power,
then public life and private life grouped under different aspects,
portents presaging death, personal appearance and so on.[1836] The
stiffness of plan is, however, considerably softened by a wealth of
illustrative anecdote. But there is no grasp like that of a Tacitus, no
deep penetration of motive, no appreciation of historical movements.
One reads the biographies of Galba, Otho and Vitellius without getting
any connected view of their struggle for sovereignty as presented in
the _Histories_ of Tacitus. On the other hand, the truth remains that
Suetonius is readable and continues to be read. In strong contrast to
Tacitus he hardly ever indulges in a general reflection; but he succeeds
in drawing attention to significant facts and outward characteristics.
The names of Suetonius and of Pepys have been mentioned together;[1837]
and some analogy indeed exists between their matter-of-fact, concrete,
gossiping styles, and their official relationship to the most elevated
personages of their day. There, however, the likeness, such as it is,
ends; for the English diarist is pre-eminent for naïve honesty in setting
down his own personality with his pen. The self-revelation made with his
intimacy of detail belongs to a different world from the record of the
Caesars which Suetonius compiled from documents and hearsay. Pepys is
internal, subjective and autobiographic: Suetonius is external, objective
and biographic.
If, again, one thinks of Tacitus’s vividness, Suetonius is vivid in a
different way. Compared with Tacitus, he is as a photograph to a picture
or a finished engraving. He is plain-spoken, and it may at least be
urged that, after the lunacy of certain high-flown writers, Suetonius
comes like a whiff of plebeian common sense. To him nothing is common
or unclean. He descends, if need be, into the coarse without qualms
or condemnation. He is a recorder, not a moralist: so, in regard to
Tiberius, as Heredia has it,
Égratignant la cire impitoyable, il a
Décrit les noirs loisirs du veillard de Caprée.[1838]
The great thing is that his personages live. His method is brevity of
fact, story and description. Attracted by details such as Tacitus would
have considered beneath the dignity of history, many may wish to know
what the early emperors looked like. Here are some vignettes with which
Suetonius can oblige them—Julius Caesar, a tall, clear-complexioned,
well-formed man with keen black eyes, close-shaven and rather sensitive
about his baldness; Augustus, handsome though not tall, with striking
eyes, curly yellowish locks, a nose prominent at the top, and complexion
between dark and fair; Tiberius, of robust build and stature above
the average, left-handed, wearing his hair pretty long at the back,
with particularly large eyes capable of seeing even in the dark, a
stern person with hardly anything to say; Caligula, pale-complexioned,
hollow-eyed and ugly; Claudius, not without dignity while he sat or
stood, but shaky on his legs when he walked, and ridiculous by reason
of his unseemly guffaw, his stammering utterance, and his perpetually
nodding head; Nero, of about medium height, with features handsome rather
than winning, light hair arranged in tiers of curls, weak bluish-grey
eyes, thick-set neck, projecting paunch and slender legs; Galba, bald
in front, blue-eyed, hook-nosed, his hands and feet twisted with
arthritis.[1839] We need not go through the whole realistic gallery,
which suggests the Dutch School of portraiture.
Similar vividness marks the facts and incidents with which Suetonius
entertains us. So full is he of his facts that as a rule he gives them in
the briefest possible compass. Just occasionally does he allow himself
to expand into longer passages which impress the memory. Among such
memorable ones is the narrative of Caesar’s arrival at the Rubicon after
missing his way in the darkness, the pause to weigh the question whether
to cross or not to cross, and the strangely gracious figure that appeared
to him piping by the river-side.[1840] Here a slight gleam of romance
has lit up a prevailingly matter-of-fact style. Other passages somewhat
more sustained than his customary terse strokes are the engrossing
description of Caesar’s murder, the account of Tiberius at Rhodes, the
graphic chapter on Caligula’s mad cruelty, where one almost seems to hear
the eerie laugh of the insane tyrant tickled at the thought that on a nod
from him his two unsuspecting consular guests could have their throats
cut; and the complete tale of the closing days in Nero’s life when he was
at bay, a series of ten chapters forming a unity unusually elaborate for
Suetonius and thrilling in its culminating three chapters.[1841]
Much, however, is on a smaller and less connected scale. As with a
diarist like Pepys, one can dip anywhere into Suetonius at haphazard
and chance upon incidents that may be isolated but are certainly
entertaining. It holds one to read about Caligula’s megalomaniac jealousy
of great writers like Homer, Virgil and Livy, whose works he wished
to destroy; his lunatic pranks in treating Castor and Pollux as his
_concierges_ so that from their temple Romans might enter the imperial
palace; his flirtations with the Moon-goddess and confidential talks with
brother Jove; his scathing disrespect for relatives in characterizing
his grandmother Livia as “a Ulysses in petticoats” and in regarding his
uncle Claudius as merely a butt. In the next _Life_, the ridiculous side
in Claudius is illustrated repeatedly from the emperor’s feeble jokes,
his silly remarks, and an absentmindedness so supreme as to sanction
the despatch of invitations to the dead. The reader is not expected to
honour an emperor who, while he could declaim marvellously, talked, as
Goldsmith did, like poor Poll.[1842] The _Life of Nero_ has many good
things. It tells of the way in which his ancestors the Aenobarbi got
their red beards; and of the young ruler’s exclamation over signing
his first death-warrant, “How I wish I did not know letters!” (_quam
uellem litteras nescire!_) It reveals the system of _claqueurs_ whom
Nero had trained in different sorts of applause (“bombi,” “rain-patter,”
“dish-clash”), and acquaints us with his touchy conceit, his hooliganism
in the streets at night, his ominous interest in fires, and his childish
conduct in exhibiting water-organs after the news of the revolt of Vindex
had reached him.
The sketches of the three Flavians contain metal just as attractive. The
_Life of Vespasian_ is masterly in its own way, from the entertainingly
superstitious portents heralding the great future of the destined prince
from the East (_e.g._ the sign of the three oak branches, the sign of
the street-mud, and the sign of the dog that brought in a man’s hand
one day when Vespasian was at lunch) up to the dying emperor’s grim jest
“Alack! I’m growing into a god, I suppose” (_Vae, puto, deus fio_).
The short _Life of Titus_ gives a mere glance at his notorious passion
(_insignem amorem_) for Queen Berenice; and a little later what might
have been handled as a romance closes in the curt statement about the
parted sweethearts; _Berenicem statim ab urbe dimisit inuitus inuitam_.
Like Gibbon, Titus presumably sighed as a lover but obeyed as a son.
To Suetonius we owe the record of the prince’s deservedly commended
utterance that a day in which he had done good to nobody was a lost
day—“_perdidi diem_,” _memorabilem illam meritoque laudatam uocem_. In
the _Life_ of his brother we are doubtless intended to catch the sinister
bearing of Domitian’s morbid pleasure in fly-catching at the beginning of
his reign, and his incessant reading of little beyond the memoirs written
at Capri by Tiberius—_son digne émule_, remarks Cucheval.[1843]
The free-and-easy style of Suetonius makes a sort of businesslike match
for his systematic marshalling of material. He is too much absorbed in
what he has drawn from his documents to trouble about rhetorical display.
His facts are left to speak for themselves, and sometimes they speak
badly. Inelegantly used participles or ablatives, jerky and unpolished
clauses, and an inartistic structure of sentence are frequent results
of this carelessness. One feels as if something has gone wrong with
sentences like _sed ea quoque paulatim repleta assidua equi uectatione
post cibum_ (_Cal._ iii.); or, again, one finds an important remark
tacked loosely on to a sentence, _e.g._ in telling how the doubtful
reputation of Titus as a possible second Nero “changed into rapturous
praise when no fault was discovered in him, but the noblest virtues
instead”—_at illi ea fama pro bono cessit conuersaque est in maximas
laudes neque uitio ullo reperto et contra uirtutibus summis_ (_Tit._
vii.). There is something modern in this escape from the conventional
order of words and this absence of decoration. Hence it comes that the
Elizabethan pomp and quaintness of Philemon Holland’s version are too
opulently distracting to convey the simple matter-of-fact tone of the
greater part of Suetonius, so that there is critical point in the old
epigram:
Philemon with’s Translations doeth so fille us,
He will not let Suetonius be Tranquillus.
Yet it has been noted that Suetonius is not without a rhythm in his
prose. De Groot’s statistics for the sentence-endings examined by him
suggest that the frequency of the double trochee in Suetonius is much
the same as in Quintilian, of cretic followed by trochee less than in
Quintilian, and of double cretic much the same as in Quintilian, though
less than in the younger Seneca.[1844] Macé has considered, on M. Havet’s
method, the rhythm of Suetonius’s _clausulae_ in relation to both
quantity and accent.[1845]
Preferring a neat simplicity[1846] in the statement of facts, Suetonius
has yet an individuality of style which, in spite of Silver Age
constructions and vocabulary, marks him off from writers like Velleius
and Florus as much as from Caesar and Cicero. We owe it to his dislike of
affectation that he often quotes documents verbatim without any attempt
at rewriting in his own manner. To the same dislike of affectation we
owe the comparative infrequency of archaisms and neologisms in his
works. It is noticeable that while Suetonius, as a scholar, had literary
and antiquarian interests in common with Hadrian, his critical tastes
were different. Unlike the emperor, he did not prefer Ennius to Virgil,
Cato to Cicero and Caelius to Sallust:[1847] on the contrary, he was an
admirer of Cicero, and,[1848] if he found blemishes in Sallust, must have
seen more in Caelius. In his vocabulary, as might be expected, there are
many words, or meanings of words, not to be found in Caesar or Cicero;
but, as in most other Silver Age writers, these are, to a large extent,
words taken over in first-century prose from the poetry of Virgil and
Horace, or words already occurring in the prose of Livy and post-Augustan
authors. Thus the Virgilian _austrinus_ (“southern”) had been used by
Columella and the elder Pliny before Suetonius; and _adapertus_ (“open”)
descended to him from Livy and Ovid through both prose and poetry of the
first century. Occasionally Suetonius harked back to the old-fashioned:
_cerritus_ (“crazed”) is a Plautine word transmitted through Horace,
and _aquilus_ (“swarthy”) is a rare adjective borrowed from Plautus.
Sometimes there are comparative novelties. _Extemporalis_ (“on the spur
of the moment”) represents the sort of term which Suetonius naturally
shares with writers like Quintilian, Tacitus, the younger Pliny and
Martial, who have occasion to mention rhetorical fluency. Much the same
holds of the non-Ciceronian, but ultimately most useful, words _prosa_
(sc. _oratio_) for “prose,” and _breuiarium_ for “an abstract.”
* * * * *
The Suetonian tradition is traceable in the biographical character of
histories for generations. It ousted the Tacitean type until Ammianus
Marcellinus (330-400) modelled his work on Tacitus. Suetonius’s formal
arrangement was imitated in the lost writings of Marius Maximus
(165-230), and it is evidently followed in the _Augustan History_, once
ascribed in part to Diocletian’s reign.[1849] Christian authors also
copied his structure, as did Paulinus in his biography of Ambrosius,
and after the same pattern Einhard, or Eginhard, composed his life of
Charlemagne. As regards language, writers like Eutropius, Aurelius
Victor, and Orosius show traces of having read Suetonius. The influence
of his _Lives_ of literary celebrities upon Jerome is a familiar fact.
His Greek writings appealed to some of the Byzantines, while his
miscellaneous range secured him notice from many different writers in
Latin. Thus, Tertullian used his work on games for the _De Spectaculis_;
Censorinus, Solinus and Macrobius found antiquarian lore in him; and
other borrowers were the Virgilian commentator Servius, the scholiasts
on Horace, on Germanicus, on Lucan and on Juvenal; as well as the
encyclopaedist Isidorus of Seville.
FLORUS
Great probability attaches to the arguments that Florus[1850] the
historian, Florus the rhetor, and Florus the poet, who all lived at this
period, were one and the same person. Accepting this identification, we
must take the correct name to have been P. Annius Florus, as the rhetor
was called, and explain as confusions the “Julius Florus” and “L. Annaeus
Florus” in MSS. of the historian. The academic dialogue by the rhetor on
the question whether Virgil was more of an orator or a poet (_Vergilius
Orator an Poeta_) is lost, but from a Brussels MS., containing an
introduction[1851] to this lost theme, important details about the
author’s life have been recovered. He was African. While at Rome in his
youth under Domitian, he took part in the Capitoline competition, but
was unfairly denied the prize and in chagrin took to wanderings which
eventually brought him to Tarraco. Settled in Spain, he was one day in
Trajan’s reign taxed by a friend with his long absence from the capital,
where his verses, the friend reminded him, found appreciative readers. By
Hadrian’s time he was in Rome again, and intimate enough with the emperor
to banter him in miserable trochaics upon his travelling propensities:
To be Caesar I’ve no notion,
Or to roam the British Ocean
Or in Scythian fog be frozen.
The imperial retort was:
To be Florus I’d be sorry,
Round the city inns to hurry,
Or thro’ every cookshop scurry,
Where the plump mosquitoes worry.[1852]
Better verses by Florus[1853] have come down in five hexameters on
spring-roses and twenty-six, on the whole pleasing, trochaic tetrameters
_De Qualitate Vitae_, which include reflections on womankind, bad
companionship, and foreign morality. In one quatrain a lover, who has cut
his sweetheart’s name on the bark of a tree, declares with an agreeable
assonance:
As the tree grows, so my zeal glows: passion fills the graven words.
(_Crescit arbor, gliscit ardor: animus implet literas._)
Another quatrain plays with a fancy concerning the Sun-god and the
Wine-god:
As Apollo, so is Bacchus, bearer of a fiery load:
Both the gods were flame-created: both the gods were born in fire:
Both have heat to give as guerdon in the sunlight or the vine:
One dispels the dark of night-time, one the darkness of the mind.
(_Sic Apollo deinde Liber sic uidetur ignifer:_
_Ambo sunt flammis creati prosatique ex ignibus:_
_Ambo de donis calorem, uite et radio, conferunt:_
_Noctis hic rumpit tenebras, hic tenebras pectoris._)
His work in trochaics gives colour to the guess that Florus composed the
_Peruigilium Veneris_,[1854] nearly one hundred trochaic tetrameters
celebrating the eve of a joyous festival devoted to the Lady of the
Springtime and of Love. Though now sadly disarranged, the poem was
originally perhaps in twenty-two quatrains,[1855] marked off by the
chanted refrain:
Let the lover love to-morrow; let the loveless learn to love.
(_Cras amet qui nunquam amauit, quique amauit cras amet._)
If one could be confident in the ascription to Florus, the reign of
Hadrian would be credited with one of the sweetest and most romantic
poems in all Latin literature, a hymn of ecstasy over the coming of a new
season of brightness and fertility upon the earth:
’Tis the fresh and tuneful Springtide—Spring first brought the world
to light,
In the Spring fond hearts draw closer: in the Springtime birds unite:
(_Ver nouum, uer iam canorum; uere natus orbis est;_
_Vere concordant amores; uere nubunt alites._)
In contrast to the prevailing glee comes the personal note of melancholy
at the end:
She is singing: we are silent: when doth Spring for me awake?
When shall I grow like the swallow? When may I my silence break?
I have lost the Muse by silence, and Apollo heeds me not.
(_Illa cantat, nos tacemus; quando uer uenit meum?_
_Quando fiam uti chelidon, ut tacere desinam?_
_Perdidi musam tacendo, nec me Apollo respicit._)
On the whole one must doubt whether the poem is not too good to be by
Florus. In style it might be called Apuleian, and if it is not Hadrianic
there is little to prevent one from believing that it at least belongs
to some part of the second century, unless its almost entire avoidance
of quadrisyllabic endings is considered too suggestive of the manner of
Tiberianus in the fourth century.[1856]
With Florus as historian, or rather epitomizer, we are on surer ground.
The best MS., the _Bambergensis_, gives the title of his work as _Epitoma
... de T. Liuio bellorum omnium annorum DCC_ and the correct number of
books as two. The _Nazarianus_ follows a division into four books. In
the title Florus’s dependence on Livy is recognized; but, besides this
main source, he used Sallust, Caesar, and possibly the elder Seneca’s
_Histories_. He is no geographer, but he alludes in his preface to
geographical charts, and may have consulted Mela and Pliny. The _Natural
History_ would give him authority for his reference to the richness of
Spain in gold, _chrysocolla_ and _minium_.[1857] Perhaps Lucan also
was a source.[1858] The work was probably written early in Hadrian’s
reign.[1859]
His preface shows his attitude. It is an attitude of praise rather than
of studied narration.[1860] The seven hundred years which he counts
from Romulus to Augustus had been, he feels, so full of the greatness
of the Roman people that one might suppose the history had been longer.
To study it is to study the destiny not of one people but of the human
race. Valour and Fortune had combined to establish a world-wide dominion.
On the analogy of geographers, Florus submits at the outset a kind of
plan (_breui quasi tabella_) to illustrate the evolution of the Roman
people. For him it was an organism, and had passed through four ages:
infancy, 250 years of regal government; youth, 250 years of warfare in
Italy; robust maturity, 200 years of world-conquest up to Augustus; old
age and decline, 200 years from Augustus until the writer’s own day—with,
however, he is careful to add, a renewal of youth under Trajan. His
figures, it should be noted, need correction; for chronology is not his
strong point. A recapitulation (_anacephalaeosis_) is given with each of
the first three ages; but the decadence is not treated. There is at the
end of Book I an anticipatory review of growing luxury in the third age
suggestive of the cause of the decline: the attack, as so often in the
Silver Era, is couched in rhetorical terms.[1861]
Genuine historical thought is impossible in an author whose criterion of
value was the extent to which events redounded to the glory of Rome, and
whose criterion of credibility was an entry in the annals (_quae nisi
in annalibus forent, hodie fabulae uiderentur_). His mode of treatment
scarcely admits a touch of romance. Egeria’s mysterious prompting of
Numa’s policy is merely a useful state-figment (_quo magis barbari
acciperent_). Occasionally we find a story, but it is in general told
with almost grudging curtness, like that of Navius and the whetstone.
Occasionally, too, a great exploit rouses Florus to something approaching
enthusiasm, like the recovery of Spain by Scipio; though it is a blemish
that the enthusiasm is not always worked into the narrative but confined
to parenthetic outbursts. Inevitably, however, much of the fascination
of Roman history vanishes in the dry condensation of a summary. Its very
neatness becomes tiresome, for the brevity tends to pass into abruptness.
But in fairness it must be judged with regard to the author’s intention
of writing a eulogistic sketch, where the Populus Romanus shall be the
single hero throughout.
Because the aim was eulogistic instead of unimpassioned history, there
is too frequent indulgence in exclamatory asides—“quae superbia!” “mira
res dictu!” “quis credat?” “immane dictu!” “mirum et incredibile dictu!”
“fidem numinum!” “o nefas!” Some of his comments have a naïve banality
in their search for antithetic point. Of Julius Caesar’s assassination
he says, “so he who had drenched the world with citizens’ blood at last
drenched the senate-house with his own” (_sic ille qui terrarum orbem
ciuili sanguine impleuerat tandem ipse sanguine suo curiam impleuit_);
and, when the murdered Cicero’s head was fixed on the _rostra_, he
states, “there was as great a rush to see him as there usually was
to hear” (_nec aliter ad uidendum eum quam solebat ad audiendum
concurreretur_). It is not surprising that the poetic element in him
overloads his expression with metaphor, while the rhetorical element
tempts him to exaggerate, as when Antony’s high turreted ships, “forts
and cities in appearance, sailed not without the groaning of the sea and
the toil of the winds” (_castellorum et urbium specie, non sine gemitu
maris, et labore uentorum ferebantur_). It is unsafe for a prose-writer
to expand the idea of Virgil’s _urbis opus_. On the other hand, he is
happy in certain of his comparisons: there is force in likening the
final resistance of Carthage to the dangerous bite of a dying beast; or
the diminution in the Gauls’ resistance, after a first effort, to the
melting of the snow upon their mountains. It may not be entirely fanciful
to impute to African Latinity the more bizarre and brusque turns in
him.[1862] In any case, though some of his rhetoric is absurd, it redeems
his work from being a totally dry abstract. His sentences are, as a rule,
well written, and not unpleasing in their _clausulae_. His language
is characteristic in the use of post-Augustan words like _captiuitas_
and _diuersitas_, and in the position of _igitur_ at the start of a
sentence.[1863] _Receptator_ seems to be a word of his own, outside
legal phraseology. The way in which he overworks _quasi_ and _quippe_ is
ludicrous.[1864]