history of subordinating the arts to politics and declaring that
artistic production depends upon political facts. It is not so.
Literary and artistic results are due to literary and artistic causes.
The Roman literary language had only just attained perfection. Cicero
had perfected it for prose, and it only remained for poetry to produce
a Vergil. Everybody at Rome from Augustus downwards was busily
writing hexameters in his spare time, and the recitals which were
given at every dinner-party formed one of the social inflictions of
the day. Just as Julius Cæsar and Cicero had thrown off their epics,
so the great men of the succeeding age were poets--Augustus, Pollio,
Mæcenas, Gallus, and all of them except Agrippa. But alongside of these
distinguished amateurs, professional literary men of humble birth were
now coming to the front. Vergil and Horace are not originally the
products of the Augustan age, for they were both established poets
before it began. But the conditions of art at Rome were such that
a professional man of letters depended very closely upon a patron.
That was the tradition handed on from the days of Plautus, when the
writers had nearly always been foreign slaves or clients. Cicero,
Cæsar, Lucretius, and Catullus had not been of the client class. They
had flourished in that brief interval when it still seemed possible
for Rome to develop a genuine free literature of her own. But that
possibility had been killed like so many other hopes by the civil wars,
and now the choice lay mainly between distinguished scribblers or
obsequious literary craftsmen. Thus we get a second courtly period of
literature like that of the Ptolemies at Alexandria, like that of Louis
XIV. or of our own Stuart age when poets wrote to please individual
patrons. The patron, if he be a man of taste, generally demands a very
high degree of finish, and thus it is the courtly ages which produce
the finished craftsmanship. It may be remarked that the ages of private
patronage have given the world much of its greatest literature.
In the age of Augustus there was no censorship of letters such as
generally prevailed under the stricter emperors of later days. Livy
was permitted to publish his great history without curtailment of
its strong republican tendency. When libels and pasquinades appeared
against Cæsar he was content to contradict them in a proclamation.
Nevertheless he made his influence weightily felt in the world of
letters. He gave more than £10,000 to Varius for a tragedy which
posterity has not thought worth while to preserve. He was himself a
kindly and patient listener at the recitation of poems and history,
speeches and dialogues, which formed the usual mode of first
publication in those days. He only insisted that his own deeds should
not form the subject of trivial composition by inferior authors.
Horace appears at first to have been warned off from treatment of
imperial politics. Vergil too in his early days received a hint not
to sing of wars and kings. But later on both these writers were
explicitly enlisted in the service of the state. In this part of
the work Mæcenas was the emperor’s chief agent. Mæcenas, whose name
has come to symbolise literary patronage, was a wealthy noble of an
old Etruscan family who was content, like Cicero’s friend Atticus,
to pull the wires of state largely by keeping generous hospitality
and knowing all the important characters of his day. Luxurious and
effeminate in his tastes, he gathered a group of talented authors
round his table, and very distinctly suggested to them the lines upon
which he desired them to work. Vergil, Varius, Horace, and Propertius
were members of his salon. Another noble of high lineage, M. Valerius
Messalla, maintained a rival coterie whose most prominent member was
the elegiac poet Tibullus. Vergil, a half-Italian native of Mantua,
who was not even a citizen by birth, had sprung into fame with his
_Bucolics_, a series of pastoral idylls in the style of Theocritus.
But though he was a provincial by birth, though he writes of shepherds
and sings pathetically of his ancestral farm, nothing is more untrue
than to regard him as a son of the soil, or an inspired ploughboy
after the manner of Robert Burns. On the contrary he had received
an elaborate education in the style of the day under Greek masters
at Cremona, Milan, and Rome. He was steeped in Greek philosophy and
letters. His shepherds are not the unsophisticated rustics of the
Mantuan plain. They are shepherds “à la Watteau,” borrowed from the
pages of Theocritus, and though many a brilliant epithet displays the
Italian’s loving observation of nature, the background of the work is
artificial and literary rather than rustic or natural. His shepherds,
like Sidney’s, talk politics under a transparent disguise, which is
often extremely incongruous. They are often engaged in praising Gallus
or Varus or Pollio, the young poet’s patrons. It was the success of
the _Bucolics_ which led Mæcenas to choose Vergil for carrying out an
important literary project. A poet was required to sing the praises of
country life in such a manner as to encourage the movement “back to the
land,” which Augustus was trying to foster. In his _Georgics_ Vergil
frankly admits that he is fulfilling the “hard commands” of Mæcenas.
The _Georgics_ are a treatise on husbandry, but here again it is not
first-hand work. We are informed that Vergil’s poetry had regained him
his paternal farm at Mantua. But the _Georgics_ were not written on
the farm. They were diligently composed in a library at Naples. They
arose from the study of Aratus and Hesiod, not from memory of Italian
life, and even in those gorgeous passages where Vergil is praising a
country life, it is not of the Italian farm that he is thinking but of
literary hills and dells in Greece. I think it is clear that the poet
took little pleasure in his task. He very gladly digresses from the
description of soils and mattocks to tell us a charming piece of Greek
mythology or to introduce a literary reference. Octavian had been a
“powerful god” already in the Eclogues before he became Augustus. Now
the only question is which of the stars shall receive him after death.
“Already the blazing Scorpion contracts his arms and leaves thee more
than a fair share of heaven.” Vergil pauses to depict the triumph of
Augustus--Nile flowing with blood, Asia tamed, the Niphates driven
back, the Parthian conquered. No literary catchword was ever more
absurd than the phrase “rustic of genius” applied to Vergil. As soon as
he had the means, he gladly turned his back upon his ancestral farm to
become a student and a courtier. Nevertheless Mæcenas was magnificently
served. Vergil had already forged a weapon of matchless music and
eloquence in his surging hexameters, and he used it to depict the
honest joys of rustic toil, the laborious tranquillity of the farm, the
beauty and interest of nature. He was instantly recognised by Augustus
as the destined laureate of the new Rome.
The _Æneid_ was solemnly devoted to the altar of Rome and Augustus.
Homer was the Greek model here, as Theocritus had been for the
_Bucolics_ and Hesiod for the _Georgics_. The origin of Rome was to be
linked on to the Trojan story as had already been done by the inventive
Greeks. Æneas had fled from Troy to Italy, and had left his son Julus
(the eponymous hero of the Julian house) to found an heroic kingdom
in Italy long before the genuine Roman heroes. Thus the humble native
story of Romulus was superseded. Piety was to be the great virtue
honoured by this poem, for piety towards the memory of Julius Cæsar was
the principal title upon which Augustus rested his claim to honour.
There were other analogies, perhaps. Dido most probably suggested
Cleopatra to the Roman reader. But it is to the praise of Rome, to the
glorification of that sense of filial duty which the Romans called
“piety” that the great epic is mainly devoted. Here again, though the
eloquence is so splendid and the versification so majestic, the _Æneid_
like its predecessors is a work of the study quite clearly written to
order. The plot is carelessly constructed. Æneas himself, with all his
piety, never for a moment lives. The religious motives which led to his
desertion of Dido barely satisfy us. Æneas makes the speeches, and the
gods continually intervene when danger threatens him. Our sympathies
are generally with the enemy, with Turnus or Camilla. Æneas is as
chilly and statuesque as Augustus himself.
It is in the famous Sixth Book, which tells of the descent to Hades,
that the praise of Rome is most elegant and most explicit. Here we are
shown the heroes of Roman history side by side with the heroes of the
Greeks, and here the young Marcellus, lately dead, is introduced in
those immortal and touching lines which caused Octavia his mother to
swoon when the poet recited them. Here too the poet pronounces in very
significant language the Roman idea of the destiny of his race.
excudent alii spirantia mollius æra,
credo equidem, uiuos ducent de marmore uoltus,
orabunt causas melius, cælique meatus
describent radio, et surgentia sidera dicent:
tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento;
hæ tibi erunt artes, pacisque imponere morem,
parcere subiectis, et debellare superbos.
“Others shall mould, I doubt not, the breathing bronze more delicately
and draw the living features out of marble, others shall plead causes
more eloquently, map out the wanderings of the sky with the rod, and
tell the risings of the stars. Thou, Roman, forget not to govern the
nations under thy sway. These shall be thy arts: to impose the rule of
peace, to spare the subject, and defeat the proud.” In these lines we
hear the proud Philistinism of an imperial people. This is the genuine
Roman (dare I add “British”?) attitude towards the arts and sciences.
They are for others to provide, for Greeks and Egyptians. Even oratory,
the highest achievement of the Roman genius in literature, is thus
scornfully thrown to the foreigner. The Romans knew that they could
buy or seize better statues than they could carve: their task was to
conquer and govern--not an ignoble art.
The _Æneid_ is explicitly a national laureate poem. The poet seeks to
enshrine all Roman life in his pages, to epitomise Roman history and
to introduce allusions to characteristic pieces of myth and ritual.
He inserts whole lines of Ennius or Lucretius when they please him.
They are superseded and replaced. Just like Dryden, he feels that he
is the heir of the ages. The extraordinary popularity which Vergil
attained even in his own lifetime grew in the course of a few centuries
almost into a cult. His tomb became an object of pilgrimage; in early
Christian times he became a prophet and in the Middle Ages a wizard.
The gentleness and purity of his personal life played their part in the
creation of this strange Vergilian legend.
Horace had less of the courtier’s suppleness and required winning to
the imperial cause. It took two efforts of Mæcenas to secure him
and we have letters preserved in which Augustus very good-humouredly
confesses his disappointment that Horace has refused a secretaryship.
Horace was the son of a freedman, as he was not in the least ashamed to
confess. But his father had managed to secure for Quintus the education
of a gentleman under Greek teachers in Rome, himself attending the
boy to school in place of the rascally pedagogue slaves who usually
undertook that office. Horace had further enjoyed a University
education at Athens, where he had fallen under the spell of Brutus,
for whom he fought at Philippi. He was, and remained, a Republican by
instinct, but Mæcenas won him over to the cause of Cæsarism. He made
his reputation with the _Satires_, a species of composition which may
be termed truly Italian. The satire is a conversational medley written
in the language of prose with the rhythm of poetry. In this Horace was
imitating the old Roman master Lucilius. It is much to the credit of
his critical discernment that Mæcenas was able to descry the brilliant
abilities of Horace in this very uninspiring medium. For though his
_Satires_ were sometimes bitterly satirical in the modern sense of the
word, Horace’s chief literary asset was the charm of a sunny, genial
character. He had in addition a gift for composition and an industry
which brought him almost but not quite to the level of original genius.
It seems to have been Mæcenas who set him to the writing of lyrical
odes. Biting satires might have been the most effective literary
weapon in republican days, but the glorification of the new regime
required something of a loftier strain. Vergil was engaged upon its
epic, Horace was instructed to write its occasional verse. The Greek
lyrists of the older period had as yet remained unimitated in Latin.
Accordingly just as when the young Vergil had wanted to sing of kings
and battles “Apollo had plucked his ear and admonished him that a
shepherd should feed fat sheep and sing a slender song,” so Horace was
deliberately set down to the task of celebrating the new Rome in the
style of Sappho and Alcæus and Anacreon. That he accomplished his task
so superbly is a proof of his energy and versatility. He himself, a
gentle valetudinarian whose idea of a banquet was a mess of cabbage
and pot-herbs, had to strike the lyre of revelry and sing of wine and
love. He sang without conviction, without a spark of Sapphic fire or
a note of natural music, but the noble rhetoric of the Roman schools
in the golden age supported him. He laboured for the right word never
in vain. No writer has ever equalled his matchless gift for making
truisms sound true. No other writer has been able to assert that “it is
sweet and comely to die for the fatherland,” or that “life is short”
with an equal air of genuine wisdom. Latin with its terse precision
is the ideal language for the expression of platitudes. His patriotic
eloquence is Roman rhetoric of the best kind. But perhaps his real
strength lies in drama. It is strange that Latin of the classical
period failed at producing a native drama so completely as it did.
Perhaps it was because the writers of that age were so completely under
Greek influences that their natural Italian genius for the theatre was
stifled under the load of a classical convention. Certainly Horace had
the gift, and in such passages as the dramatic duologue (Ode ix. of
Book III.) _Donec gratus eram tibi_, or the Epode of the witches (v.)
_At, o deorum_, or the still more famous Epistle about the bore, he
exhibits himself, like Browning, as a dramatist gone astray. Regarded
from the purely lyrical point of view, the Century Hymn, which he
wrote to order as Rome’s laureate in succession to Vergil, is perhaps
his greatest achievement. The Secular Games of 17 B.C. were intended
to bring visibly before men’s eyes the glories of the new monarchy
and incidentally to carry in their train the salutary but unpopular
measures of the Julian moral reform. So the choir of noble youths and
maidens were taught to sing in their prayer to Diana:
diua, producas subolem patrumque
prosperes decreta super iugandis
feminis prolisque nouæ feraci
lege marita,[48]
where the goddess is besought to increase the population of Rome and
favour the _senate’s_ decrees about marriage. The fourth book of
the _Odes_ was added after a long interval at the direct request of
Augustus. It is intended to bring the achievements of Augustus and
his family, particularly the triumphs of Tiberius and Drusus, into
favourable comparison with the heroic stories of republican history.
It is most melancholy to observe that Mæcenas, to whom Horace was
genuinely attached and whose name constantly occurs in his earlier
writings, here drops out of the poet’s verse because he had fallen out
of Cæsar’s favour.
Although Horace is in his _Odes_ as classical and conventional as all
the Roman writers of his age, his _Satires_ and _Epistles_ are more
intimate than any other Latin work of the great period. In them we get
real glimpses of life at Rome, or on a country estate. We cannot fail
to be struck with its idleness and emptiness. In the city he saunters
from the forum to the baths, from the baths to the dinner-table with
time and boredom for his only enemies. In the country he sometimes,
it is true, toys with husbandry, or shows a faint interest in
landscape-gardening or loiters among his books, but the life is to the
last degree super-civilised and unreal. The very ideas of hope and
progress were alien to the ancient world. The eyes of the Romans were
always turned behind them, so that they could not see the greatness of
the vista that was now opening for them in front.
The elegists--such as the graceful melancholy Tibullus, or Propertius,
the pedant who often stumbled into poetry, and a host of others who
are mere names to us--would hardly, but for their prominence in the
schoolroom, deserve serious attention. Callimachus the Alexandrian was
their model, himself scarcely a first-rate poet. The whole idea of
writing love poetry in an absolutely regular distich of hexameter and
pentameter was inartistic and unreal. Their fluent prolixity makes them
insufferably tedious out of school. It is difficult to sustain interest
in the relations between the bards and the married ladies with Greek
pseudonyms to whom their verses are addressed. From our point of view
the chief interest in these writers lies in the fact that nearly all
of them were at one time or another invited to praise the new regime.
Tibullus, indeed, who enjoyed a modest competence of his own, limits
his praises to his immediate patron Messalla, and frankly admits that
war and battles disgust him. But Propertius makes an attempt to carry
out his commission, and describes the battle of Actium fifteen years
after its occurrence. But though he invites Bacchus to assist his Muse,
it is wretched stuff and the poet himself turns from it with disgust.
The famous elegy upon Cornelia, daughter of the injured Scribonia,
beginning _desine, Paulle, meum lacrimis urgere sepulcrum_, is however
sufficient proof that it was only the want of a really inspiring theme
and a suitable medium which prevented Propertius from being in the
front rank of the world’s poets.
Ovid, “this incorrigibly immoral but inexpressibly graceful poet,”
as Mr. Cruttwell called him, is a far more interesting personality.
I think he may fairly be called the wickedest writer on the world’s
bookshelves. Others may be wicked through ignorance, or by accident,
or out of high animal spirits, but Ovid is immoral on principle, a
conscientious and industrious perverter. His greatest work, “The Art of
Loving,” is quite frankly a guide to adultery, the precepts it contains
being perfectly practical and evidently based on expert knowledge. In
his _Amores_, _Metamorphoses_, and _Fasti_ he took for his field the
domain of religion and exhibited celestial sin in the most captivating
light. We have already seen how the loves of the gods came to take
their place in the Olympian mythology, and how thinking pagans like
Plato regarded them. To such men they were already relics of barbarism,
but Ovid draws them out into the light again, gilds them with his wit
and makes them altogether charming for the Roman drawing-room. The
strange and uncouth old ritual of Italian nature-worship is piquantly
dressed out for the up-to-date blasphemer. Nobody who had read Ovid
could possibly worship Jupiter any
[Illustration:
FIG 1 THE CAPITOL
FIG 2 THE DECUMANUS MAXIMUS AND TRAJAN’S ARCH
PLATE LXIV TIMGAD]
more. It was all done with consummate art and unblushing impudence.
When the sad Niobe is bereft of her seven fair children by the arrows
of the jealous gods, our poet, ingeniously parodying Vergil, observes:
heu quantum hæc Niobe, Niobe distabat ab illa.
In telling the dreadful tragedy whereby the Greeks had explained the
sorrow of Philomela, the nightingale, our poet cheerfully describes the
slaughter of the children, adding:
pars inde cauis exultat aënis,
pars ueribus stridunt.
And so he moves from one lovely myth to another, preserving them indeed
for our archæologists, but delicately with the breath of his profanity
defiling them for ever.
Now Ovid is far more typical of the civilisation of his day than
either Vergil or Horace. For Ovid was a Roman noble, rich and gifted,
who in earlier days would have passed creditably from one high office
to another in the state, humorously plundering a province or two,
gracefully collecting objects of art in Asia and possibly losing a
battle or two through negligence. He actually started on a public
career as a brilliant barrister, and enjoyed the ancient office
of _decemvir_ stlitibus iudicandis, something like our Masters in
Chancery. But the Roman drawing-rooms soon swallowed him up in their
silken entanglements, and he spent the greater part of his life
whispering his poisonous little pentameters to ladies like Julia. Of
course a single poet with Ovid’s sinister gifts was doing far more
to corrupt Rome than all the Julian legislation could do to reform
it, and we may fairly conclude that Ovid with his attacks on the
traditional Roman morality and religion, together with effeminate
bards like Tibullus who sang of the horrors of war, were more than
undoing the patriotic work of Vergil and Horace. The plain fact is
that though you may hire writers you cannot purchase the spirit of a
people, and so Augustus and Mæcenas found, to the great misfortune of
the Roman Empire. They failed in their attempt to capture literature.
Oppression failed even more signally than corruption. Henceforth all
the literary talent of Rome is on the opposition side. Lucan extols
republicanism, Tacitus assails the emperors with satirical history,
Petronius pillories Nero with satirical romance, Juvenal with satirical
poetry. Only the younger Pliny is loyal, and to be praised by Pliny
is a very doubtful recommendation. Roman literature had imbibed the
republican ideals from its Greek foster-mother. The schoolmasters of
Rome continued to teach their pupils to declaim against tyrants.
But Ovid himself was not permitted to flourish in his wickedness. A
sudden decree from Cæsar Augustus fell upon him like a thunderbolt.
He was banished for ever and bidden to betake himself to Tomi, on the
Black Sea, near the mouth of the Danube. From that inhospitable region
he continued to pour forth elegiacs, _Epistles_ and _Tristia_, wherein
he protests his innocence, recants anything and everything he has ever
said, and bewails the horrors of arctic existence among the barbarians.
The actual cause of his banishment is one of the most piquant mysteries
in literary history. He has _seen_ something which he ought not to
have seen: his eyes have destroyed him. It is fairly clear that his
banishment synchronised with the banishment of the younger Julia, and
we may well believe that the old emperor, shocked and horrified by
this second scandal in his own house, attributed it to the corrupting
influence of that singer of gilded sins. The banishment was certainly
well merited and the only pity is that it came too late to effect its
purpose. The unmanly tone of the _Tristia_, the effeminate appeals to
everybody in Rome including a hitherto forgotten wife, reveal Ovid in
his true character. It is a little strange that generations of British
youth have been trained not only in the study but even in the imitation
of this author.
When we term the Golden Age of Roman literature “Augustan” we ought to
remember that it began long before Augustus and ended before his death.
Thus with all his patronage he may more justly be called the finisher
than the author of it. Of all the great writers, only Ovid, to whom
the simple life and bracing air of the Sarmatians afforded an unusual
longevity, outlived Augustus. Summing up the characteristics of the
literature of this day, we may say that courtliness and artificiality
were its most prominent characteristics. The freshness of Catullus,
the stern conviction of Lucretius, the fire of Cicero were extinct.
Nearly all that was native in Roman letters had perished; only the
crispness of epigram, the bite of satire and the dignified music of
the language itself remained as the Italian heritage. Greece had quite
definitely triumphed over Rome. Technical excellence continued, for
this has always been the mark of “Augustan” periods. But the well-meant
efforts of the state to capture literature for its own service had
failed. The horrors of the civil war outweighed the glories of the new
regime and with all his benevolence the emperor could never outlive the
memory of his proscriptions. Literature never forgave the murder of
Cicero though the author of _Thyestes_ might be loaded with treasure.
Indeed the widespread misery of those terrible days in 40 B.C. came
home personally to most of our middle-class writers. Vergil, Horace,
Tibullus, and Propertius had each and all received ineffaceable
memories in the loss of their patrimonies. It was little wonder that
even though they sang of wars and victories when “Cynthius plucked
their ear” their natural instinct was to compare Mars and Venus very
much to the disadvantage of the former.