Trajan’s buildings are works, which are not only to be noticed in the
topography of Rome, but belong to history as great achievements.
Apollodorus of Damascus was his great architect, whose likeness I had
the pleasure of discovering: it is the figure of a man in a Greek dress,
presenting to the Emperor, who is seated, a drawing on a scroll; and it
is on the bas reliefs of the arch of Constantine, the upper part of
which is undoubtedly taken from the arch of Trajan. In the early times
of the republic, art had the finish of the Etruscan school, owing to
Etruscan artists; before the first Punic War, painting also flourished
in Rome. Then followed the imitation of the Greeks, of which we cannot
give a positive opinion. In the reign of Augustus, the material began to
be of paramount importance, notwithstanding which the style was still
grand: instead of the good freestone from the quarries of the
neighbourhood, people would have nothing but marble. In the temple of
Mars Ultor, all the columns are of marble. Otherwise Augustus, on the
whole, still built many great works of the stone of the country; and
this was yet done even as late as Claudius. But in the course of time,
the taste for foreign marbles became more and more decided: Phrygian,
Numidian, and other marbles were now used. In Nero’s days, Greek
architecture with marble pillars was in fashion; and the material was
looked upon as the chief thing, which in architecture is perfectly
absurd. With the exception of the Colosseum, all the buildings of Titus
and Domitian’s time are overdone; though highly finished, they want
distinctness of character: the impression of grandeur is quite lost.
Under Trajan, architecture acquires new splendour and dignity; which was
owing to that Greek whom we have named: in a new form, it went to work
with the treasures of the whole of the immense empire; so that it never
signified whether it cost some millions more or less. Trajan either made
or completed noble highways; he paved the Via Appia from Capua to
Brundusium with basalt; he drained the Pontine marshes as far as they
can be drained, and built the harbour of Centumcellæ (Civita Vecchia);
the conviction must even then have been come to, that the Tiber was
continually filling the harbours of Ostia and Portus with silt. He built
baths at the hot springs of Civita Vecchia, and made the mole and
harbour of Ancona: for the Tyrrhenian maritime towns were entirely
destroyed, though it is not known when. The greatest of his buildings
are at Rome, such as the _Forum Ulpium_ and therein the _Columna
Cochlis_. The slope of the Quirinal Hill, which reached almost as far as
the Capitol, was for a considerable length lowered upwards of a hundred
and forty feet (it may be that I do not quite remember the exact
measure[47]): this height is marked by the pillar. It was his object to
place the government offices in his Forum. The _Forum Ulpium_, like the
_Forum Augusti_ before it, was not, as formerly, an open space, which
now would no longer have had any meaning: we know for certain, that the
finance department, and all that belonged to it, had its offices there:
the whole was like a city of palaces. In the middle stood the column,
round which was twined a representation of the two Dacian wars of Trajan
in bas relief. Although these bas reliefs have suffered from fire and
lightning, they are still quite excellent, as this branch of the art was
then at its height: they are in exquisite taste. These figures are also
of value in an historical and antiquarian point of view, as they give us
representations of weapons, armour, dresses, and buildings of which
otherwise we should not have known anything. Within, there are steps
which lead to the top; and beneath, there is a vault in which the ashes
of Trajan were laid: of the latter nothing more is to be found. On the
top was the bronze statue of Trajan: this was taken down in the times of
barbarism, and Sixtus V. replaced it by a statue of St. Peter. In the
Forum round it, two gigantic buildings in the form of _basilicæ_ have
been brought to light by the clearings made by the French. The
magnificence of these, beggars all description: among other things,
there are floors in them of the most beautiful Numidian marble. At the
entrances of the Forum, there arose triumphal arches; which we only know
from coins: it may be that Constantine despoiled one of these, and had a
piece of it patched into his own triumphal arch.
Under Hadrian also, costly buildings were erected; as for instance, the
temple of Venus and Roma: but unluckily he had no taste, and following
his own whims, he exercised a baneful influence. Of the time of
Antoninus Pius, we have ruins which are much less beautiful; and under
M. Antoninus, there remains of sculpture only the art of casting in
bronze: his bronze statue is excellent; but the sculptures on the arch
of Antoninus are far inferior to those of Trajan’s reign. In the
triumphal arch of Severus, a most dreadful falling off is to be seen:
even the proportions are neglected, as people were no longer able to
draw. The spread of Christianity is unjustly reproached with having
driven out the fine arts: they had already died away before that.
But Trajan’s age was just as great in literature. Tacitus, it is true,
stands quite alone; he is one of those mighty minds which are no
creatures of any age. Yet even the mightiest souls feel the influence of
their age, which still gives them their tone and their impulses, though
it does not make them what they are. It is quite useless to ask Who was
Tacitus’ teacher?—he was taught by the sorrows of his times. His great
soul was deeply wounded by the horrors of Domitian’s reign, the distress
of which was followed under Nerva and Trajan by a refreshing period. The
first edition of the Agricola was written by him in the latter years of
Domitian, as he says in the wretchedly corrupted beginning of the second
chapter: (of the correctness of my emendation I have not the least
doubt.[48]) He afterwards revised the work. One may see here all the
greatness of the man, though it is struggling with the difficulty in
finding utterance, which arises from a decided aversion to
diffuseness,—from a striving after terseness without any affectation,
from a wish to express with the greatest conciseness nothing but the
thought itself, nor even to waste a word, notwithstanding a great
richness of ideas, This is most displayed in Tacitus’ earlier writings;
in the life of Agricola, and in his Germany. He did not want to write
large books, but only small treatises; and yet he wished to take in them
the complete description of his subject, all the fulness of his thoughts
was to be laid before his future reader. The real work of his life,
which he began later,—evidently later even than the _Germania_,—are the
_Historiæ_, the most finished performance of his that we know of: had we
them entire, we should see him passing through all the various styles of
history. There he did not condense; but he told his story at full
length, and with much detail: there is no reason to doubt that these
histories comprised the whole of the thirty books mentioned by St.
Jerome. After he had finished this work, he wrote the Annals besides, so
as to give a full account of the times of the Cæsars from the completion
and establishment of the _principatus_, after the farce of the
republican forms had been put an end to. These he wrote concisely,
throwing out some particular parts only in bold relief: the nearer he
approached the _Historiæ_, the more diffuse he must have become. At the
latter end of Nero, he certainly went as much into detail as in the
_Historiæ_. Tacitus is not difficult to understand when one has once
entered into his way of thinking: it is pitiful to hear people complain
of him and Sallust for affectation and mannerism. If we compare the
wonderful symmetry in Tacitus and Sallust with Livy, we see that they
for their times were far greater masters of style than the latter; for
whenever he takes upon himself to be argumentative, as in the preface
and in the passage on the triumph of Cornelius Cossus in the fourth
book, he becomes infinitely harder than any part of Tacitus. Livy wishes
there to be short and pithy, and he is unintelligible: the last named
passage is the most difficult which I know of in the good Latin prose.
Wherever he is not trying to be concise, he is very easy.
At the side of Tacitus, who stands quite alone,—as did Æschylus and
Sophocles, as did many a lyric poet, and as did Lessing, who among our
German prose writers has not found his equal,—but whose transcendent
merits were not acknowledged by his age, as men were glad to soothe
their feelings by placing a number of people on a par with him; Pliny
the Younger was mentioned in his day. Pliny’s letters are
psychologically most interesting; they give one much insight into the
human mind. He was one of the most good natured of men, but exceedingly
vain: before the eyes of the public, he had a strong feeling of his own
greatness and classicality. Although in conversation with his friends,
he certainly used to criticise Tacitus, and to deplore his defects; in
his letters to him, he is full of humility, and makes himself infinitely
small, just that Tacitus might be favourably disposed towards him, and
extol him highly: he would say that the public always named him and
Tacitus together; but that he himself was well aware how much indeed
Tacitus was his superior. His letters are most instructive, and give us
an invaluable picture of the times; and we recognise in Pliny himself a
benevolent and useful man, who makes a very good use of his large
fortune, one who was an excellent civil governor, but never free from
childish vanity: he always tells his friends the good which he does, of
course in the strictest confidence, and these letters are afterwards
published. Notwithstanding all this, he is a man of much understanding
and talent, being strikingly like the Parisian writers of the eighteenth
century: whole phrases in him are quite French, as the late Mr. Spalding
has rightly observed. He is therefore hardly to be translated into
German; but he may be rendered most beautifully into French. One may see
from these letters, that a sort of current coin of intellect had then
come into use; and this was indeed a matter of course in a time which
had been preceded by a host of eminent men: a great many thoughts had
become common property, so as to belong to the whole generation, and a
chord which had once been struck by a man like Tacitus, could not but
vibrate for a long time. Moreover, it was an age of comfort and of
cheerfulness after long depression. Every thing in it had thus been
brought to a level of mediocrity, and the self-same persons, under
different circumstances, would in all likelihood have been very little
indeed. We may judge of them in some measure from Florus, who lived in
the reign of Trajan. The earlier history was already so far behind them,
that people only wanted to have a general notion of it. The book is
quite a book of the time; insufferably frivolous, and displaying a
shocking want of taste, and an utter ignorance of the actual state of
things.
Before Trajan’s time, Greek literature had long been dead; in the reign
of Augustus, Dionysius of Halicarnassus was accomplished as a critic and
as an historian; in that of Tiberius, Strabo was eminent for his
practical turn for history. Yet these stand quite alone. Under Domitian,
Greek literature began to be restored by the schools of the
rhetoricians, who assume quite a different character. Dio Chrysostom of
Prusa is really an author of uncommon talent, whose speeches for the
most part painfully impress us by the triflingness of the matter of
which they treat: everywhere we find in him an excellence of language, a
pure, though acquired Atticism, over which he has a wonderful mastery.
There is not a more amiable mind than his: he is not vain, like a
rhetorician, and yet he is conscious of his powers. He was an unaffected
Platonist whose whole soul was in Athens: by-gone Athens was all the
world to him, and for it he forgets Rome and its rulers.
He is succeeded by Plutarch of Chæronea, whose amiability every one must
know and appreciate, although it is easy enough to see his defects as an
historian, and the weakness of his eclectic philosophy. Notwithstanding
this, there is no saying how much we owe him; and it is impossible to
read him but with the highest pleasure. His language is far less perfect
than that of Dio.
By these two men, Greek literature was raised again; and though they had
no successors to equal them, yet we may date from them a new era. The
real Alexandrine literature must be deemed to end with the death of
Eratosthenes in the reign of Ptolemy Evergetes: the period from
Aristarchus to Dio, is an intermediate one which has no distinct
character. In Rome under Augustus, a bad Greek literature became in
vogue, the Greek “_abbés_” (or language-masters) having corrupted every
body’s taste, as the French did ours in the last century: Livy stands
forth like a great man in that age. The fancy for what was Greek, even
though this had no longer a literature, spoiled Rome until the time of
Seneca: much mischief was also done by the fondness for sophistry. Then
follows Quintilian as the restorer of pure taste in Roman literature:
from him to Tacitus, there is a new classic era. Yet this epoch did not
last: the Greek school raises its head again, and fascinates the Romans
anew. Under Hadrian, the Greek language once more becomes prevalent, and
is generally written by all persons of education; under the Antonines,
all is hellenized.—The taste is changed; the antiquarian fondness for
the quaint and for Grecian phraseology, becomes the ruling fashion of
the day.