THE ROMAN POETS
OF THE
AUGUSTAN AGE:
VIRGIL.
BY
W. Y. SELLAR, M.A., LL.D.
LATE PROFESSOR OF HUMANITY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH
AND FELLOW OF ORIEL COLLEGE, OXFORD
THIRD EDITION
OXFORD
AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
AMEN HOUSE, E.C. 4
London Edinburgh Glasgow New York
Toronto Melbourne Capetown Bombay
Calcutta Madras
HUMPHREY MILFORD
PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY
IMPRESSION OF 1941
FIRST EDITION, 1877
THIRD EDITION, 1897
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
TO
E. L. LUSHINGTON, ESQ., D.C.L., LL.D., ETC.
LATE PROFESSOR OF GREEK IN THE UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW.
MY DEAR LUSHINGTON,
Any old pupil of yours, in finishing a work either of classical
scholarship or illustrative of ancient literature, must feel that he owes
to you, probably more than to any one else, the impulse which directed him
to these studies. It is with this feeling that I should wish to associate
your name with this volume. Many of your former pupils can confirm my
recollection that one of the happiest influences of our youth was the
admiration excited by the union, in your teaching, of perfect scholarship
with a true and generous appreciation of all that is excellent in
literature. The intimate friendship of many subsequent years has afforded
me, along with much else of still higher value, ample opportunities for
verifying these early impressions.
Ever affectionately yours,
W. Y. SELLAR.
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION
This volume has been written in continuation of one which appeared some
years ago on the Roman Poets of the Republic. I hope in a short time to
bring out a new edition of that work, enlarged and corrected, and
afterwards to add another volume which will treat of Horace and the
Elegiac Poets. I have reserved for this later volume the examination of
the minor poems which have been attributed to Virgil, most of which belong
to the Augustan Age.
Besides the special acknowledgments of ideas or information derived from
various sources, which are made in notes at the foot of the page where an
occasion for them arises, I have to make a general acknowledgment of the
assistance I have received in my studies of the Augustan literature from
the earlier volumes of Dr. Merivale’s ‘History of the Romans under the
Empire,’ from the ‘History of Roman Literature’ by W. S. Teuffel, from M.
Sainte-Beuve’s ‘Étude sur Virgile,’ and from the Introductions and Notes
to Professor Conington’s edition of Virgil, and Mr. Munro’s edition of
Lucretius. In the account given of the Alexandrian literature in Chapter
I, I have availed myself of the chapters treating of that subject in
Helbig’s ‘Campanische Wandmalerei’; in treating of the estimation in which
Virgil was held under the Roman Empire, I have taken several references
from the work by Sr. Comparetti, ‘Virgilio nel Medio Evo’; and in
examining the order in which the Eclogues were composed, I have adopted
the opinions expressed in Ribbeck’s Prolegomena. I have also derived some
suggestions from the notes in the edition of Virgil by M. E. Benoist, and
from the work of M. G. Boissier, ‘La Religion Romaine d’Auguste aux
Antonins.’ As the greater part of this volume was written before the
appearance of Dr. Kennedy’s Virgil, I have not been able to make so much
use of his notes as I should have wished: I have, however, profited by
them to correct or to illustrate statements made before I had seen his
work, and, in revising the Virgilian quotations for the press, I have
followed his text.
I did not read Mr. Nettleship’s valuable and original ‘Suggestions
Introductory to the Study of the Aeneid’ until I had finished writing all
I had to say about that poem. I have drawn attention in the text or in
notes at the foot of the page to some places in which I modified what I
had originally written after reading his ‘Suggestions,’ to others in which
my own opinions are confirmed by his, and to one or two points of
divergence in our views.
Since the third chapter was printed off, I have received what seems a
confirmation of the opinion expressed there as to the probable situation
of Virgil’s early home, from a friend who recently visited the district,
where I suppose it to have been. He writes of the country which he passed
through—‘The result of my observations perfectly confirms what you had
already supposed. The country south of the Lago di Garda for a distance of
at least twenty miles is of a gently undulating character, and is
intersected by long ranges of hills which gradually sink down towards the
lake and the Mincio. The loftiest of these hills may perhaps reach a
height of 1000 feet above the lake-level, but that is a point on which I
cannot say anything certain.’
EDINBURGH, _Nov. 1876_.
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
The only material change which I have made in this edition is that I have
added translations of the passages quoted, for the convenience of any
readers, who, without much knowledge of Latin, may yet wish to learn
something about Latin literature. In the translations from Virgil, I have
sometimes made use of expressions which I found in Conington’s prose
Translation and in Mr. Papillon’s recently published edition of Virgil. I
have also availed myself of Sir Theodore Martin’s Translation of the Odes
of Horace. In correcting or supplementing some statements made in the
first edition, I have occasionally profited by remarks made in criticisms
on that edition which appeared shortly after its publication.
EDINBURGH, _March, 1883_.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I.
GENERAL INTRODUCTION.
PAGE
I. Relation of the Augustan Age to other Literary Epochs 1-8
Relation of the Augustan poetry to that of the 1
preceding Age
Parallel of the Augustan Age with other great literary 4
Epochs
---- especially with the Age of Louis XIV 5
Chief conditions modifying the poetry of the Augustan Age 7
II. Influence of the enthusiasm in favour of the Empire 8-21
General longing for peace 8
Revival of national sentiment and pride of Empire 10
Moral and religious reaction 13
Augustus the centre of the national enthusiasm 14
Deification of the Emperor in the poetry of the Age 15
---- illustrated by other extant works of art 19
Direction given to national sentiment by Augustus 20
III. Influence of Patronage on the Augustan Poetry 21-31
Poetry employed in the interest of the Government 21
Patrons of literature--Augustus 22
Personal influence of Maecenas 23
Pollio, Messala, Agrippa, Cornelius Gallus 26
Causes of the connexion between literature and social 28
eminence
Effects of this connexion on the tone of literature 29
IV. Influence of material conditions on Literature 31-37
Wealth and luxury of Rome in the Augustan Age 31
Liberality of Augustus and Maecenas to Virgil and Horace 33
Effects of this on the art of these poets 34
Reaction from the luxury of the Age apparent in literature 35
V. General condition of literary culture as affecting 37-54
the Augustan Poetry
Intellectual character of the last years of the 37
Republic and earlier years of the Empire
Distinction between the earlier and later periods 38
Appreciation of Greek art and literature in both 39
Alexandrine influences on the Augustan poetry 41
Characteristics of the Alexandrine poets 42
Their treatment of mythological subjects 43
Scientific and learned character of their poetry 44
Their treatment of the passion of love 45
Their treatment of external Nature 46
Pictorial art of the later Greeks 48
Superiority of the Augustan to the Alexandrine literature 49
Friendly relations among the poets of the Augustan Age 51
Influence of these relations on their art 52
Hostility of other literary coteries 53
VI. Causes of the special devotion to Poetry in the 54-58
Augustan Age
Effect of the Monarchy on the great forms of prose 55
literature
Poetry later in feeling the effects of Despotism 56
The Augustan literature the maturest development of 57
the national mind
CHAPTER II.
VIRGIL’S PLACE IN ROMAN LITERATURE.
Virgil’s pre-eminence acknowledged till recent times 59
Disparagement of his genius in the present century 60
I. Estimate of Virgil in former times 60-68
His former reputation as a great Epic Poet 61
Estimate of the Aeneid among the Romans 61
" " during the ‘Dark Ages’ 64
" " at the revival of letters 65
" " during the 17th and 18th centuries 67
II. Change in the estimate of Virgil in the present 68-77
century
Virgil’s alleged dissatisfaction with the Aeneid 69
Probable explanation of this 70
Adverse criticisms in the present century 71
Causes of these criticisms 74
Advance in Greek scholarship 74
Modern interest in remote antiquity 74
Literary reaction at the end of the 18th century 75
III. Virgil’s supreme importance as a representative 77-87
writer
Virgil a great representative of his country and age 78
" " of the idea of Rome 79
" " of the sentiment of Italy 80
" " of the political feeling of his age 81
" " of its ethical and religious
sensibility 83
" " of Roman culture and learning 84
" " of Roman art and style 85
The style of Virgil the maturity preceding decay 86
IV. Virgil’s claim to rank among the great Poets of 87-92
the World
Distinction between Greek, Latin, and modern imagination 87
Vividness and realism of feeling characteristic of the 89
Latin imagination
Modes in which this vividness and realism are 90
manifested by Virgil
CHAPTER III.
LIFE AND PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS OF VIRGIL.
I. Sources of our knowledge of Virgil’s Life 93-99
Various sources of ancient literary biography 93
Direct personal statements of the authors 93
Indirect self-revelations in their works 94
Evidence of contemporaries 94
Works of ancient Grammarians, etc. 95
Remains of ancient art 95
Knowledge of Virgil derived from his works 95
Testimony of Horace 95
Biographies of Probus and Donatus 98
Their value as evidence of facts and character 98
II. Life of Virgil 99-121
His name and the year of his birth 99
His birth-place as affecting his genius 101
His birth-place as affecting his culture 103
" " " his political feeling 104
Characteristics of the class from which he sprang 105
His early years 107
His studies at Rome 109
His later life in his native district 113
Loss of his farm 115
Publication of the Eclogues and preparation of the Georgics 116
Testimonies of Horace as to his life during this time 117
The Georgics composed at Naples 119
His death and wish to destroy the Aeneid 120
III. Personal Characteristics 121-129
His recluse and studious life 122
His personal appearance and habits 123
Impression of his character derived from Horace 124
" " " from his own works 125
His indifference to political freedom 127
His devotion to his art 127
CHAPTER IV.
THE ECLOGUES.
I. The Eclogues examined in the order of their 130-152
composition
Character of the Eclogues indicated by expressions 130
used in them
Order and time of their composition 131
Imitative character of the second and third 132
The fifth founded on the death and apotheosis of 137
Julius Caesar
Purely Theocritean character of the seventh 138
The first and ninth Eclogues 139
Elements of interest in the sixth 143
The ‘Pollio’ 144
Questions discussed in connexion with that poem 146
The eighth and tenth Eclogues 148
II. Relation of the Eclogues to the Greek Pastoral 152-160
Theocritean origin of Virgil’s Eclogues 152
Primitive pastoral poem among the Greeks 154
The ‘woes of Daphnis’ 155
The love of the Cyclops for Galatea 156
Origin of the pastoral dialogue 157
Artistic form given to these primitive elements by 157
Theocritus
Difference between the pastoral life of Sicily and 159
rural life of Italy
III. Truth of feeling in the Eclogues 161-173
Inferiority of the Eclogues in truth and vividness of 161
representation
Allusive personal references in the Eclogues 161
Mythological and geographical allusions 162
The sentiment of Nature in the Eclogues 164
The love of home and of the land 165
The passion of love 167
Style and rhythm of the Eclogues 168
Their Italian character 172
CHAPTER V.
MOTIVES, FORM, SUBSTANCE, AND SOURCES OF THE GEORGICS.
I. Original motives of the Poem 174-180
Desire to treat of rural life in the spirit of Hesiod 175
Influence of Maecenas on the choice of the subject 177
Virgil’s sympathy with the old class of husbandmen 178
II. Form of poetry adopted by Virgil 180-184
What forms of poetry available for Virgil’s purpose? 180
Character of didactic poetry among the Greeks 182
New type of didactic poetry introduced by Virgil 183
III. National interest and substance of the Poem 185-190
Italian character of the subject 185
Connexion of the subject with national history 187
Exceptional character of the concluding episode 189
IV. Sources of the Poem 190-198
Materials derived by Virgil from his own life 191
From Greek and Roman writers on agriculture 191
Relation of the Georgics to the ‘Works and Days’ 193
" " to the Alexandrine Metaphrastae 195
CHAPTER VI.
STRUCTURE AND COMPOSITION OF THE POEM IN RELATION TO
THE POEM OF LUCRETIUS.
I. Personal affinities and contrast between Lucretius 199-204
and Virgil
Influence of Lucretius on the ideas, method, and style 199
of the Georgics
Virgil’s recognition of his relation to Lucretius 200
Identity of feeling in the two poets 201
Difference in position and sympathies 202
Difference between the philosophic poet and poetic artist 203
II. The Lucretian idea of Nature in the Georgics 204-214
Nature more fully revealed in Lucretius than in 204
earlier poetry
Idea of the struggle of man with Nature in Lucretius 205
Lesson drawn by him from this idea 207
Presence of the same idea in other Roman writers 207
Virgil’s sense of the life of Nature derived from 208
Lucretius
Idea of the struggle with Nature as ordained by 209
Providence
Prominence thus given to the duty of labour 211
Lesson inculcated in the Georgics 212
Scientific beliefs of Lucretius as adopted or rejected 213
by Virgil
III. Dedications and Invocations in the two Poems 214-228
Lucretius Virgil’s chief model in technical execution 214
Address to Maecenas compared with address to Memmius 215
Eulogy of Caesar compared with eulogy of Epicurus 216
Meaning of their Invocation of Supernatural aid 217
Varieties of religious feeling and belief in the 218
Augustan Age
Rustic Paganism of Italy 218
Religious conceptions embodied in Greek art 219
Religious elements in Greek speculative philosophy 221
National religion of Rome 222
Meaning of the Invocation of Caesar 224
Union of various modes of religious belief in the 225
Invocation
Proems to the other Books of the Georgics 227
IV. Comparison of Virgil with Lucretius in didactic 229-244
exposition and illustration
Method of science in Lucretius, of art in Virgil 229
Greater selection and elimination of materials in Virgil 230
Illustration of Virgil’s subject from his sense of beauty 231
---- from his sense of the life of Nature 232
---- from his sympathy with the life of animals 233
---- from his conception of human energy in conflict 234
with Nature
---- from literary and mythological associations 235
---- from astronomy, antiquity, religious usages 239
Inferiority of Virgil to Lucretius in the use of 240
imaginative analogies
More uniform excellence in diction and rhythm 241
Virgil more of a conscious artist 242
V. The Episodes in the Georgics 244-260
Purpose of the episodes in Lucretius and in the Georgics 244
The minor episodes in the Georgics 245
Episodes at the end of Books iii. and iv. 248
Episode of the omens accompanying the death of Julius 252
Caesar
Episode of the Glory of Italy 255
Episode at the end of Book ii. 256
CHAPTER VII.
THE GEORGICS A POEM REPRESENTATIVE OF ITALY 261-279
The Georgics an original work of Latin genius 261
Technical value of the poem as an exposition of 263
Italian husbandry
Relation of the illustrative matter to the cultivated 266
Italian mind
Feeling of the dignity of labour an Italian sentiment 267
Italian feeling and representation of Nature 268
Italian character of the religious sentiment of the poem 272
" " of its ethical and political sentiment 273
" " of its artistic execution 276
CHAPTER VIII.
THE ROMAN EPIC BEFORE THE TIME OF VIRGIL 280-294
Distinction between primitive and literary epic 280
Absence of primitive epics from Roman literature 281
The Roman epic originates in the imitation of the 282
Greek epic
New character given to the Roman epic from the 283
national sentiment and commemorative instinct
---- from admiration of great men 284
---- from capacity for works of massive execution 285
National characteristics of the poem of Naevius 286
Historical substance of the early Roman epic 287
Representative character of the Annals of Ennius 288
Later annalistic and panegyrical poems 289
New type of Roman epic introduced by Varro Atacinus 291
Type of historical epic rejected in the maturity of 292
Roman art
CHAPTER IX.
FORM AND SUBJECT OF THE AENEID.
I. Purpose of the Aeneid and motives determining the 295-300
form of the Poem
Literary motives of the poem 295
Motive originating in the state of public feeling 296
" " in the position of Augustus 297
New problem in literary art presented to Virgil 298
The Aeneid the epic of the national fortunes 299
II. Adaptation of the legend of Aeneas to Virgil’s 300-310
purpose
Adaptation of the legend of Romulus to a poem founded 300
on national sentiment
Deficiency of the legend of Aeneas in national and 301
human interest
Greek origin of the legend 301
Its late reception among the Romans 303
Vague and composite character of the legend 304
Grounds on which Virgil’s choice was justified 305
Connexion of the legend with the Homeric cycle of events 305
Its recognition by the State for more than two centuries 306
Connexion with the glory of the Julian family 308
Largeness of scope afforded by the vagueness of the legend 309
Adaptation to a poem representative of Rome in the 309
Augustan Age
III. Composite character of the Aeneid illustrated by 310-324
an examination of the Poem
Twofold purpose of Virgil in composing the Aeneid 310
Native and Greek sources employed by him 310
Prominence given to his double purpose in the 311
statement of the subject of the poem
This double purpose traced in the details of the action 313
" " " in the ‘Inferno’ and in the ‘Shield
of Aeneas’ 323
The Aeneid a new type of epic poetry 324
CHAPTER X.
THE AENEID AS THE EPIC OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE.
I. Modes of national Sentiment expressed in the Aeneid 325-335
Pride of Empire 325
Sense of national continuity 328
Patriotic Italian sentiment 330
Antagonism to other races 333
II. Influence of the Religious Idea of Rome on the 336-347
action of the poem
Roman belief in the ‘Fortuna Urbis’ 336
Idea of ‘Fate’ in the Aeneid 337
Compared with the same idea in Tacitus 339
Origin and meaning of the Roman idea of Fate 340
Influence of this idea on the religious motives of the poem 341
Ethical aspect of religion in the Aeneid 344
III. Place assigned to Augustus in the Aeneid 347-354
Augustus the typical embodiment of Roman imperialism 347
Meaning given by Virgil to his relation to Aeneas 349
Imaginative and ethical value of the idea on which the 352
Aeneid is founded
CHAPTER XI.
THE AENEID AS AN EPIC POEM OF HUMAN LIFE.
I. General character of the action as affected by the 355-364
Age in which the poem was written, and by the author’s
genius
Dignity of the circumstances treated in the poem 355
Distinction of the actors 356
Interest to Roman readers of the revival of Homeric life 357
" " " of the new romance of Italy 358
Virgil’s narrative power 359
Inferiority to Homer in exhibiting a vivid image of life 360
" " from causes personal to Virgil 360
" " from the character of his Age 361
Virgil’s representation an artistic compromise 363
Sources of creative power in Virgil’s genius 364
II. Supernatural Agencies, Observances, and Beliefs 365-374
in the Aeneid
Part played by the Olympian Divinities in the Aeneid 365
" by the Powers of the Italian mythology 369
Survivals of primitive religious worship in the Aeneid 369
Belief in local deities 370
Worship of the dead 371
Virgil’s ‘Inferno’ 373
His exact acquaintance with religious ceremonial 374
III. Political and Social Life, etc. as represented 376-394
in the Aeneid
Idea of a Paternal Government in the Aeneid 376
Sense of majesty attaching to Government 378
Relation of States to one another 379
Material civilisation 381
Social manners 382
Sea-adventure 384
Battle-scenes 388
Appeal to local associations 392
IV. Conception and Delineation of Character in the 395-408
Aeneid
Weakness of dramatic imagination in Virgil 395
Conception and delineation of Aeneas 396
The minor characters of the poem 400
Turnus 402
Mezentius 404
Dido 405
V. On the Style, etc. of the Aeneid 408-423
Virgil’s imagination oratorical rather than dramatic 408
Characteristics of the speeches in the Aeneid 409
Descriptive faculty 410
Illustrative imagery 413
Rhythm and diction of the poem 418
Greatness of its style 421
THE ROMAN POETS OF THE AUGUSTAN AGE
CHAPTER I.
GENERAL INTRODUCTION.
I.
The Augustan Age, regarded as a critical epoch in the history of the
world, extends from the date of the battle of Actium, when Octavianus
became undisputed master of the world, to his death in the year 14 A.D.
But the age known by that name as a great epoch in the history of
literature begins some years earlier, and ends with the death of Livy and
Ovid in the third year of the following reign. Of the poets belonging to
that age whose writings have reached modern times—Virgil, Horace,
Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid—all were born, and some had reached
manhood, before the final overthrow of the Republic at the battle of
Philippi. The earlier poems of Virgil and Horace belong to the period
between that date and the establishment of the Empire. The age of the
Augustan poets may accordingly be regarded as extending from about the
death of Julius Caesar in 44 B.C. to the death of Ovid 17 A.D.
The whole of this period was one of great literary activity, especially in
the department of poetry. Besides the writers just mentioned, several
others were recognised by their contemporaries as poets of high
excellence, though there is no reason to doubt that the works which have
reached our time were the most distinguished by original genius and
finished execution. These works, though differing much in spirit and
character as well as in value, have some common characteristics which mark
them off from the literature of the Republic. It seems remarkable, if we
consider the short interval which divides the Ciceronian from the Augustan
Age, and the enthusiasm with which poetry was cultivated by the younger
generation in the years immediately preceding the battle of Pharsalia,
that so few of the poets eminent in that generation lived on into the new
era. The insignificant name of Helvius Cinna is almost the only poetic
link between the age of Catullus and the age of Virgil.(1) Perhaps, also,
the Quintilius whose death Horace laments in the twenty-fourth Ode of Book
I. may be the Varus of the tenth poem of Catullus. The more famous name of
Asinius Pollio also connects the two eras; but in Catullus he is spoken
of, not as a poet, but simply as ‘a youth of wit and graceful
accomplishments(2),’ and in his later career he was more distinguished as
a soldier, statesman, and orator than as a poet(3). It is remarked by Mr.
Munro that there are indications that the new generation of poets would
have come into painful collision with those of the preceding generation
had their lives been prolonged(4). This spirit of hostility appears in the
somewhat contemptuous notice of Calvus and Catullus in the Satires of
Horace:—
Quos neque pulcher
Hermogenes unquam legit, neque simius iste
Nil praeter Calvum et doctus cantare Catullum(5).
But it is rather in their political feelings and relations, and in the
views of life arising out of these, than in the principles and practice of
their art, that the new poets are separated from, and antagonistic to, the
old. Had Calvus and Catullus survived the extinction of liberty, it would
have been impossible for them to have adopted the tone of the poets of the
following age. By birth, position, and all their associations and
sympathies, they belonged to the Senatorian party. If they could have
yielded an outward submission to the ascendency of Julius Caesar and
Augustus, they never could have become sincerely reconciled to the new
order of things, nor could they have employed their art to promote the
ideas of the Empire. On the other hand, L. Varius, the oldest among the
poets of the new era, seems first to have become famous by a poem on the
death of Julius Caesar. Virgil, in the poem placed first in order among
his acknowledged works, speaks of Octavianus in language which no poet of
the preceding generation could have applied to a living contemporary: ‘O
Meliboeus, it was a God that gave to me this life of ease.’ In the
Georgics, planned, and, for the most part, composed before the
establishment of the monarchy, the person of Caesar is introduced, not
only as the centre of power in the world, but as an object of religious
veneration; and the national and ethical teaching of that poem is entirely
in harmony with the objects of his policy. And, although Horace in the
Satires and Epodes, composed between the years 40 and 30 B.C., is so far
true to the cause of his youth as to abstain from any direct declaration
of adherence to the winning side, yet he attributes to his adviser
Trebatius the counsel ‘to celebrate the exploits of the invincible
Caesar(6);’ and his whole relation to Maecenas is one of the most
characteristic marks of the position in which the new literature stood to
the State and to its leading men.
Yet, while separated from the literature of the Republic in many of its
ideas, and in the personal and political feelings on which it is founded,
the poetry of the Augustan Age is, in form and execution, the mature
development of the efforts of the previous centuries. Much of its literary
inspiration is derived from the age immediately preceding it, and from
still older native sources. The thought of Lucretius acted upon the mind
of Virgil through the force both of sympathy and antagonism, as a strong
original nature acts upon one which is at once receptive of influence and
possessed of firm convictions of its own. The national sentiment of Ennius
and the censorious spirit of Lucilius reappeared in new forms in the
Augustan poetry; while the more humane and social feelings, and the
enjoyment of beauty in Nature and art, fostered by Greek studies, as well
as the taste for less elevated pleasures, stimulated by the life of a
luxurious capital, are elements which the poetry of the early Empire has
in common with that of the last years of the Republic.
But the poetry of the new era has also certain marked characteristics, the
result not so much of antecedent as of concomitant circumstances, which
proclaim its affinity with great literary epochs of other nations rather
than with any period of the national literature. By Voltaire the Augustan
Age at Rome is ranked with the Age of Pericles at Athens, that of Lorenzo
de Medici at Florence, and that of Louis XIV. in France, as one of four
epochs in which arts and letters attained their highest perfection. The
affinity between the Augustan Age and those of Pericles and Lorenzo is
more superficial than real. They were all indeed periods in which the
cultivation of the arts to the highest degree of perfection was fostered
by the enlightened patronage of the eminent men who have given their name
to their eras. But the position of Augustus, as an absolute ruler, acted
more directly and potently, as a modifying and restraining power, on the
thoughts and feelings expressed in his age, than that of the leading men
of a republic; and the unique position of Rome as the mistress and
lawgiver of the civilised world gives to the literature of the Augustan
Age an imperial character and interest, which the national literature of
no other city or country, even though superior in other respects, can
possess. Those who regard all Latin poetry as exotic and imitative have,
with some plausibility, attempted to establish a parallel between the
Alexandrine poetry of the third century B.C. and that of the Augustan Age.
Nor can it be denied that the relation of the Augustan poets to the
Emperor was somewhat parallel to that of the scholars and poets of
Alexandria to the Ptolemies. The Alexandrine science and literature were
also important factors in Roman culture; and the most eminent poets both
of the Augustan Age and of that immediately preceding it, with the
exception of Horace and Lucretius, acknowledged, in the form as well as
the materials of their art, the influence of this latest development of
Greek poetry. The nature and amount of the debt incurred to the learned
school of Alexandria will be considered later, and it will be seen that it
does not seriously affect the originality of the best Roman writers. The
age of Queen Anne and of the first George, again, has been called the
Augustan Age of English literature. The parallel between the two eras
consists in the relation which poets and writers held to men eminent in
the State, and also in the finished execution and moderation of tone
common to both. The writers of England in our Augustan Age had the
advantage over those of Rome in the freedom with which they could express
their thoughts; but, even with this advantage, and with the still greater
advantage that the English race, in the long course of its literary
annals, has given proof of a richer poetical faculty than any other race
except the Hellenic, the blindest national partiality would scarcely claim
as general and as durable an interest for any poetical work of that era as
that claimed for the Georgics and Aeneid of Virgil and for the Odes and
Epistles of Horace.
On the whole the closest parallel, in respect not so much of the substance
and form of composition as of the circumstances and conditions affecting
the lives and tastes of poets and men of letters, is to be sought in the
age of Louis XIV. of France. The position and the policy of Augustus and
of Louis XIV. were alike in some important features. As absolute rulers,
the one over a great empire, the other over the most powerful and
enlightened nation then existing, they each played the most prominent part
in history during more than half a century. They were each animated by a
strong passion for national and personal glory, and encouraged art and
literature, not merely as a source of refined pleasure congenial to their
own tastes, but as the chief ornament of their reigns, and as important
instruments of their policy.
And not only the political but the purely literary conditions of the two
epochs were in some respects parallel. They were both times, not of
growth, but of maturity; not so much of the spontaneous inspiration of
genius, as of systematic effort directed in accordance with the principles
of art and the careful study of ancient models. In each time circumstances
and mutual sympathies brought men of letters into close and familiar
contact both with one another and with men of affairs and of social
eminence. And, while the relation of patronage to literature is not in any
circumstances favourable to original invention, and though, except under
most advantageous conditions, its tendency is to produce a tameness of
spirit, or even an insincerity of tone, yet it has its compensating
advantages. It imparts to literature the tone of the world—of the world
not only of social eminence, but of practical experience and conversance
with great affairs. The good taste, judgment, and moderation of tone which
have enabled the Augustan literature to stand successfully the criticism
of nineteen centuries, as well as its deficiency in the highest creative
power, when compared with such eras as the Homeric Age, the Age of
Pericles, and the Elizabethan Age in England, mark the limits of the good
influence which this relation between the great in worldly station and the
great in genius can exercise on literature.
A further parallel might be drawn between the material conditions of the
Augustan Age and those of the Age of Louis XIV. The aspect which the world
they lived in presented to the writers of the two eras was that of a rich,
luxurious, pleasure-loving city, the capital of a great empire or kingdom.
And this aspect of the world acts upon the susceptible nature of the poet
with both an attractive and a repellent force. He may feel the spell of
outward pomp and magnificence and the attractions of pleasure; or he may
be driven back on his own thought, and into communion with Nature, and to
an ideal longing for simpler and purer conditions.
But, instead of tracing these resemblances further, it is more important
to observe that, though the outward influences acting upon the poets of
the two eras were in many respects parallel, yet in form and substance the
poetry of the Augustan Age is quite different from that of the Age of
Louis XIV. However striking the parallel between any two periods of
history may at first sight appear, the points of difference between them
must be much more numerous than those of agreement: and, though outward
conditions have a modifying influence upon national temperament and
individual genius, yet these last are much the most important factors in
the creative literature of any age. The genius of ancient Italy was, in
point of imaginative susceptibility, very different from that of modern
France; and, though his countrymen recognise in Racine a moral affinity
with Virgil, yet the works these poets have left to the world are as
different as they well can be, in form, purpose, and character. The
conditions indicated in the comparison between the two periods are to be
studied as modifying, not as productive, influences. The forms which the
highest spiritual life in an age or an individual assumes, the power of
free and happy development which it obtains, or the limitations to which
it has to submit, can, to a very considerable extent, be explained by
reference, in the case of nations, to the political, social, and material
circumstances of the age, and, in the case of the individual, to his early
life and environment, his education and personal fortunes. But the quality
and intensity of that spiritual force which manifests itself from time to
time in the world, giving a new impulse to thought, a new direction to
feeling, and a new delight to life, are not to be explained by any
combination of circumstances. Yet, just as it is desirable to realise all
that can be known of the life and fortunes of an individual poet before
endeavouring to extract from his various works the secret of his power and
charm, so it is desirable, before entering on a separate study of the
various books which constitute the literature of any age, to take a
general survey of the most important conditions affecting the lives,
thoughts, and art of all who lived and wrote in that age. In the Augustan
Age these conditions may be classified under four heads: (1) the political
circumstances of the Empire and the state of moral and religious feeling
resulting from them; (2) the social relation of men of letters to men
eminent in the State; (3) the wealth, luxury, and outward splendour which
met the eye and gratified the senses, in the great city itself, and in the
villas scattered over the shores and inland scenes of central Italy; (4)
the intellectual culture inherited from the preceding age and modified by
the tastes and conditions of the new generation. These will be reviewed as
conditions acting on the imagination, and forming the intellectual
atmosphere in the midst of which the productions of poetical genius
expanded into various shapes and dimensions of beauty and stateliness.
II.
The battle of Actium marked the end of a century of revolution, civil
disturbances and wars, of confiscations of property, proscriptions and
massacres, such as no civilised state had ever witnessed before. The
triumph of Augustus secured internal peace and order for a century. The
whole world was, as Tacitus says(7), exhausted, and gladly consented to
the establishment of the Empire in the interests of peace. The generation
to which Virgil, Horace, Tibullus, and Propertius belonged had passed
through one of the worst crises of this long period of suffering. The
victors of Philippi, so far from following the example of clemency set to
them by the great victor of Pharsalia, had emulated the worst excesses of
the times of Marius and Sulla(8). The poets whose works record the various
phases of feeling through which that age passed had in their own person
experienced the consequences of the general insecurity. Virgil, in
addition to the loss of his paternal farm, had incurred imminent danger
from the violence of the soldier to whom his land had been allotted. The
language of Horace indicates that his life had been more than once in
jeopardy—at the rout of Philippi, and in his subsequent wanderings by land
and sea(9)—till he found himself a needy adventurer, ‘humilem decisis
pennis,’ again at Rome. Tibullus lost the greater part of the estates
which his ancestors had enjoyed for generations(10). A similar calamity
befell Propertius(11). Their own experience must thus have deepened the
horror of prolonged war and bloodshed natural to men of humane and
unwarlike temper, as they all were; for Horace, who alone among them took
part in the civil war, describes himself, a few years later, as ‘weak and
unfit for war(12),’ and Tibullus pleads his effeminacy and timidity as a
justification of a life devoted to indolent enjoyment(13). The works of
that age, composed between the dates of the battles of Philippi and
Actium, express the deep longing of the world for rest: those written
later express the deep thankfulness for its attainment. In Virgil the
recoil from the cruel and violent passions of the time in which his early
manhood was cast draws forth his tender compassion for all human
suffering, and creates in his imagination the ideal of a life of
peace—‘far from the clash of arms,’ the vision of a place of rest after
toil and danger—‘where the fates hold out to us peaceful dwelling-places;’
just as the recoil from the political anarchy of his own age and from the
cruel memories of the Marian times deepens the sense of human misery in
Lucretius, and forces on his mind the ideal refuge from the storms of life
in ‘the high and serene temples well bulwarked by the learning of the
wise.’ In Horace the feeling of insecurity arising out of his early
experience confirms the lessons of Epicurean wisdom, and teaches him not
to expect too much from life, but to enjoy thankfully whatever good the
passing hour brought to him. In all of them the sense of the real miseries
from which the world had escaped, and of the real blessings which it
enjoyed after the battle of Actium, induces an acquiescence in the
extinction of liberty and in the establishment of a form of government
which had been for centuries most repugnant to Roman sentiment.
Another influence reconciling men to the great political change which took
place in that era was the restored sense of national union. With whatever
feelings Octavianus may have been regarded in the early years of the
Triumvirate, after the final departure of Antony from Rome he was looked
upon both as the main pillar of order and as the champion of the national
cause, the true representative of Italy, of the ‘Senatus Populusque
Romanus’ against the motley hosts of the East, arrayed under the standards
of Antony and his Egyptian queen:—
Hinc Augustus agens Italos in proelia Caesar
Cum Patribus Populoque, Penatibus et magnis Dis.
* * * * * *
Hinc ope barbarica variisque Antonius armis,
Victor ab Aurorae populis et litore rubro,
Aegyptum viresque Orientis et ultima secum
Bactra vehit, sequiturque, nefas, Aegyptia coniunx(14).
With the Romans in the later age of the Republic the feeling of the glory
and greatness, the ancient and unbroken tradition, of their State was a
more active sentiment than the love of political liberty. The care for the
‘Respublica Romana’ as a free commonwealth was in the last century of its
existence confined to the leaders of the Senatorian aristocracy; the pride
in the ‘Imperium Romanum’ was a feeling in which all classes could share,
and which could especially unite to Rome the people of Italy, who had been
admitted too late into citizenship, and were separated by too great a
distance from the capital, to make the exercise of the political franchise
an object of value in their eyes. They probably felt themselves more truly
in the position of equal citizenship after the establishment of the
monarchy than before it. This feeling of the pride of empire asserts
itself much more strongly in the poets of the Augustan Age than in the
writers of the preceding generation. It is scarcely, if at all, apparent
in Lucretius and Catullus. It is only in the idealising oratory of Cicero,
who, with all his devoted attachment to the forms of the constitution and
the traditions of political freedom, still had a strong sympathy with the
imperial spirit of Rome, that we find the expression of the same kind of
sentiment which suggested to Virgil such lines as
Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento(15),
and inspired the national Odes of Horace.
The majesty of the State, moreover, impressed the imagination more
immediately and more deeply when it was visibly and permanently embodied
in a single person than when the administration of affairs and the
government of the Provinces were distributed for a brief tenure of office
among many competitors. By enabling them to realise the unity and vast
extent of their dominion, Augustus reconciled the prouder spirits of his
countrymen to his rule, as by restoring peace, order, and material
prosperity he enlisted their interests in his favour. At the same time the
success of his arms over the still unsubdued tribes of the West, and of
his diplomacy in wiping out the stain left on the Roman standards by the
disastrous campaign of Crassus, continued to gratify the passion for
military glory, without endangering the security and prosperity of Italy.
The national sentiment of Rome was further gratified by the maintenance of
the old forms of the constitution, by the revival of ancient usages and
ceremonies, and by the creation of a new interest in the early traditions
of the city, and in the ‘manners and men of the olden time(16).’ In his
brief summary of the glories of the Augustan Age, Horace specifies this
return to the ancient ways, ‘by which the Latin name and the might of
Italy grew great,’ as one of the best results of Caesar’s administration.
The revolution effected in the first century before our era, so far from
seeking, as other revolutions have done, abruptly to sever the connexion
between the old and the new, strove to re-establish the continuity of
national existence. The Augustan Age impressed itself on the minds of
those living under it as an era not of destruction but of restoration.
Though in the early part of his career Augustus availed himself of the
revolutionary passions of his time to overthrow the Senatorian oligarchy,
yet he sought to establish his own power on the conservative instincts of
society, and especially on the religious traditions intimately connected
with these instincts(17). The powerful hold which these instincts and the
feeling of the vital relation subsisting between the past and the present
had on the Roman nature was the secret of the great stability of the
Republic and Empire. We shall find how largely this sentiment enters into
the poetry of the age, how it is especially the animating principle of the
great national Epic, as it was of the national commemorative poem of
Ennius.
But the age witnessed a restoration of the past, not only in its action on
the imagination, but in a more direct influence on opinion and conduct.
Horace says of it, in the same passage as that referred to above,—‘It put
a curb on licence violating all the rules of order, and caused ancient
sins to disappear.’ The licence of the previous age in speculation, as in
life, had provoked a moral and religious reaction. The idea of a return to
a simpler and better life, and of a revived faith in the gods and in the
forms and ceremonies of religion, existed at least as an aspiration, if it
did not bear much fruit in action. This ideal aspiration finds its
expression not only in the two great poems of Virgil, whose whole nature
was in thorough harmony with it, who may be regarded almost as the prophet
of a new and purer religion, but in many of the Odes of the sceptical
disciple of Aristippus. It was part of the policy of Augustus, whether
from sincere conviction or as an instrument of social and political
regeneration, to revive religion and morality. Among the great acts of his
reign commemorated by himself he especially mentions the building and
restoration of the temples(18). The ‘Julian laws’ aimed also at a social
and moral restoration. There is no ground for attributing any hypocrisy to
Augustus, as a legislator, or to Horace, as his panegyrist, though neither
the life of the Emperor nor that of the poet showed a strict conformity
with the object of these laws. Yet, if it failed to re-establish the
ancient faith in the minds of the educated classes and to restore a
primitive austerity of life, this revival affected the best literature of
the time by the influence which it exercised on the deeper and more
serious feeling of Virgil and the manlier sympathies of Horace, and by
imposing at least some restraint on Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid in the
record of their pleasures(19).
The poets with whom our enquiry is concerned, and especially the two most
illustrious of their number, thoroughly represent, as they helped to call
forth, the spirit in which the Roman world passed through the great change
from the Republic to the Empire. They give expression to the weariness and
longing for rest, to the revival of Roman and Italian feeling, to the
pride of empire, the charm of ancient memories and associations, the
aspiration after a better life and a firmer faith. But, further, the
expression of these feelings is made subordinate to the personal glory of
Augustus, who stands out as the central and commanding figure in all their
representations. He is celebrated as the restorer of the golden Saturnian
age(20); the closer of the gateway of Janus(21); the leader of the men and
the gods of Italy against the swarms of the East and her monstrous
divinities(22); the ‘father of his country(23);’ the ruler destined to
extend the empire, on which ‘the sun never set,’ ‘beyond the Garamantians
and Indians(24);’ the descendant and true representative of the mythical
author of the Roman State(25); the man in whom the great destiny of Rome
and the great labours of all her sons were summed up and fulfilled(26);
the conqueror who raised three hundred shrines to the gods of Italy(27);
the legislator who by his life and his laws had reformed the corrupt
manners of the State(28). The sense of gratitude for the rest and
prosperity enjoyed under Augustus, the admiration for the real power of
intellect and character which made him the most successful ruler that the
world has ever seen, the confidence in the unbroken good fortune which
marked all his earlier career, may account, without the necessity of
attributing any unworthy motive, for the eulogies bestowed upon him as a
ruler and organiser of empire. But the language of admiration goes beyond
these into a region in which modern sympathies can with difficulty follow
it. Modern criticism may partially explain, but it cannot enable us to
enter with sympathy into that peculiar phase of the latter days of
Paganism which first appears in the literature and the historical
monuments of the Augustan Age as the Deification of the Emperors. In the
pages of Tacitus the worship of the Emperor appears as an established
‘cultus,’ as the symbol and the instrument of Roman domination over
foreign nations(29). The cities of Spain vie with the cities of the
Asiatic Greeks in their desire to raise temples in honour of the living
Emperor. Tacitus seems to regard it as even something discreditable in
Tiberius that he disclaims divine attributes(30). The origin of this
‘cultus,’ as it first established itself in the Greek cities of Asia, may
be referred to a survival of the old Greek hero-worship, which led even in
the Republican times to the offering of divine honours to Roman Proconsuls
and to the excess of the monarchical sentiment among Asiatics, which had
led to the worship of the successors of Alexander, and had prompted
Alexander himself to claim a divine origin. This foreign vein of feeling
united with a native vein,—the strong Roman faith in a secret invisible
power watching over the destiny of the State, and revered as ‘Fortuna
Urbis.’ This secret invisible divinity became as it were incarnate in the
person of the supreme ruler of the world, wielding the whole power,
representing the whole majesty of Rome.
The feeling with which the contemporary poets attribute to Augustus a
divine function in the world, and anticipate for him a place and high
office among the gods after death, is something different from this
literal adoration of a living man as invested with the full power and
attributes of Deity. But it is difficult to find any rational explanation
of the tone adopted by them in such passages as Georg. i. 24–42, or
Horace, Ode iii. 3. 11–12. There is, however, a striking coincidence in
the manner in which Virgil and Horace suggest the blending of the mortal
with the immortal, which seems to imply a common source of inspiration.
Horace asserts the divinity of Augustus by claiming for him qualities and
services equal to, or greater than, those which raised Castor, Pollux,
Hercules, Bacchus, and Romulus to the dwelling-place of the gods(31).
Virgil, in one of the cardinal passages of the Aeneid, in which the action
is projected into his own age, claims, for the restorer of order then, a
vaster range of beneficent influence than that over which the civilising
labours and conquests of Bacchus and Hercules had extended(32). In another
passage Horace speaks of the Roman as worshipping the ‘numen’ of Caesar
along with the Lares, ‘even as Greece keeps Castor and mighty Hercules in
memory(33).’ In all these passages the idea implied is that, as great
services to the human race have in other times raised mortals from earth
to heaven, so it shall be with Augustus after the beneficent labours of
his life are over(34). Probably the earliest suggestion of the idea in its
manifestation at Rome came from the consecration of Julius Caesar after
his death. The ‘Iulium Sidus’—‘the star beneath which the harvest-fields
should be glad with corn’—is appealed to both by Virgil and Horace as a
witness of the mortal become immortal. As the office of the deified Julius
is to answer the prayers of the husbandman, such too will be the office of
Augustus; and it is in this relation that he is invoked in the first
Georgic among the deities whose function it is to watch over the fields.
Both poets recall also the divine origin of the Emperor,—‘Augustus Caesar,
of the race of heaven,’—as the descendant of Venus. Both too dwell on the
especial protection of which he was the object. The divine care which had
watched over Rome from its origin was now centred on him as the supreme
head of the State, the heir and adopted son of the great Julius.
But, although we cannot ascribe to Virgil and Horace the ignorant
superstition which raised temples to the living Emperor in the cities of
Asia and in the various provinces of the Empire, it is difficult to
extract from their language any germ of sincere conviction. And yet to
condemn them of a base servility and hypocrisy would be to judge them
altogether from a modern point of view. At such a time as the Augustan Age
the minds of men were very variously affected by the different modes of
religious belief, national and foreign, philosophical and artistic, which
had been inherited from the past.(35) It must have been difficult for any
one to be altogether unmoved by the innumerable symbols of religion
visible around him, suggestive of a constant and immediate action of a
supernatural power on all human, and especially all national, concerns:
and it must have been equally difficult for any one trained in Greek
philosophy to accept literally the incongruous fables of mythology, or to
attach a definite personality to the imaginary beings of which it was
composed. Horace and Virgil appear to stand at opposite extremes of
incredulity and faith. Horace, in his Odes, accepts the beings of the
Greek mythology as materials for his art, while, by his silence on the
subject in his Satires and Epistles, he clearly implies that this
acceptance formed no part of his real convictions. To Virgil, on the other
hand, the gods of mythology appear to have a real existence, as
manifestations of the divine energy, revealed in the religious traditions
which connect the actual world of experience with a supernatural origin.
So too Horace, in his Odes, treats the blending of the divine with the
human elements in Augustus artistically or symbolically—represents him as
drinking nectar between Pollux and Hercules, or as inspired with wisdom by
the Muses in a Pierian cave—in much the same spirit as the great painters
of the Renaissance introduced in their pictures living popes or patrons of
art into the company of the most sacred personages. Virgil, to whose mind,
in all things affecting either the State or the individual, the invisible
world of faith appears very near the actual world of experience, seems
sincerely to believe in the delegation of supernatural power and authority
on the Emperor, and in the favour of Heaven watching over him. The divine
energy diffused through all living things might appear to be united with
the human elements in Augustus as it was in no other man, so that while
still on earth he might be thought of, if not as a ‘praesens divus,’ yet
as acting ‘praesenti numine,’ as the representative and vicegerent of
omnipotence(36).
Some further light is thrown on this subject by considering the
manifestation of this same spirit in other forms of the art of that age.
The famous statue of the Emperor, found recently in the ruins of a villa
of the Empress Livia, and at present seen among the statues of the
_Braccio Nuovo_ in the Vatican, has been critically examined by an eminent
German scholar, as furnishing the best commentary on the language of the
Augustan poets. In this statue the Emperor appears as blending the
attributes of a Roman imperator with those of a Greek hero or demigod.(37)
Beside him a Cupid, symbolical of the Julian descent from Venus, appears
riding on a dolphin. The breast-plate represents, among other protecting
deities, those whom Horace addresses in the Carmen Saeculare, Phoebus and
Diana, and the Sun and Earth-goddess. In the centre there is a figure of
Mars attended by the wolf, receiving back the standards from the Parthian;
on either side are seen two figures, representative of races recently
conquered, probably the Celtiberians and the tribes of the Alps. From the
coincidence of its symbolism it may be inferred that the statue was
produced at the same time as the Carmen Saeculare was composed. Its object
is to impress on the minds of men the image of Augustus as at once a great
earthly conqueror and a being of divine descent and possessed of more than
mortal attributes: the especial object of care to the supreme God of
Heaven; to Apollo, whom, since the victory of Actium, he claimed as his
tutelary divinity; to the Earth-goddess, the giver of fruitfulness and
prosperity; to Mars, the second divine ancestor of the Roman race, in
whose honour the famous temple, of which the ruins are yet visible, had
been raised after the battle of Philippi. The statue is of Greek
workmanship; the Greek divinities are presented in the forms familiar to
Greek art; but the idea is purely Roman, and born of the immediate
circumstances of the age.
Other extant works of art illustrate the divine functions and attributes
claimed for Augustus. In one cameo he is seen throned beside the goddess
Roma, with the sceptre and lituus, symbolical of his secular and spiritual
function, and the eagle of Jupiter at his side. In others both the Emperor
himself and various members of his family are represented under the form
of gods, goddesses, and demigods. Thus, in one in which the figure of
Aeneas is introduced, the young C. Caesar (Caligula) appears as Cupid, and
in another Germanicus and Agrippina are represented as Triptolemus and
Ceres.(38) But still more important, as attesting not the idealising
fancies of contemporary Greeks, but the native feeling with which the
house of Caesar came to be regarded even in the early years of the Empire,
is the one great extant monument of that age, a monument of Roman
inspiration and Roman workmanship, the Pantheon, raised by Agrippa in
honour of the deities connected with the Julian race.
The prominence given to this representation of Augustus in the poetry and
in the art of his age is probably to be explained by his own character and
policy. He was animated in no ordinary degree by that love of fame and
distinction which very powerfully influenced the greatest Roman conquerors
and statesmen, orators and poets. The disdain of such distinctions and the
dislike of public spectacles are mentioned, in contrast to the tastes of
his predecessor, among the causes of the unpopularity of Tiberius. The
enumeration in the Ancyraean inscription of the honours and titles
bestowed on him, recorded with ‘imperial brevity’ and dictated by a proud
self-esteem, attests the strength of this ruling passion in the latter
years of the life of Augustus. The direct pressure which he brought to
bear on the most eminent poets of the time to celebrate his wars is
sufficiently indicated in many passages in the Odes and familiar writings
of Horace. Belonging by descent to the comparatively obscure families of
the Octavii and Atii, Augustus attached peculiar importance to the glories
of the Julian line, which he inherited through his great-uncle and
adoptive father. Even Julius Caesar, notwithstanding his Epicurean
disregard of the religious ideas of his age, had encouraged the belief in
his divine descent, as marking him out for the special favours of fortune.
There was moreover in Augustus, in contradistinction to Julius Caesar, a
strong vein of religious or superstitious sentiment. His personal courage
has been questioned, probably with injustice, but he appears to have been
in a marked degree liable to supernatural terrors(39). As happens not
unfrequently with men who have been invariably successful in great and
hazardous enterprises, along with a strong reliance in the resources of
his own mind, he seems to have had faith in a supernatural guidance and
assistance attending him. His politic understanding appreciated the use of
such a belief to secure a divine sanction for his rule, which rested
substantially on military force. He availed himself of the enthusiasm and
willing services of the poets of the age, who regarded him as at once the
saviour of the State and their own benefactor, to impress this idea of
himself on the imagination of the cultivated classes, and at the same time
to glorify the actual successes of his reign, to further his policy of
national regeneration, and to make men feel the security of a
divinely-appointed government, along with the pride of belonging to a
powerful imperial State.
III.
The political revolution which transformed the Republic into the Empire,
and the state of public feeling, which, arising spontaneously, yet
received direction from the will and policy of Augustus, thus appear to be
the most important conditions determining the character of the Augustan
literature, and distinguishing it from that of the previous age. Poetic
art was employed as it had never been in any former time as an instrument
of government. If anything could have made the new order of things
acceptable to the best representatives of the old Republican traditions,
the purity and elevation imparted to the idea of the Empire in the verse
of Virgil must have had this effect. The poetical imagination, susceptible
as it is in the highest degree of emotions produced by the spectacle of
ancient or powerful government or of a people nobly asserting its freedom,
has little prophetic insight into the working of political causes. Nor
need it be regarded as a sign of weakness or time-serving in the poets of
the Augustan Age that they did not foresee the gloom and oppression which
were destined to follow so soon after the prosperous dawn of the Roman
Empire.
The establishment of the Empire affected the new poetry also by the
personal relations which it established between the leaders of society and
the leaders of literature. The early Republican poets were for the most
part strangers to Rome, men of comparatively humble position, who by their
merit gained the friendship of some of the great families, but who at the
same time depended for their success on popular favour. The poets of the
last days of the Republic were themselves members of the great families,
or men intimately associated with them; and they wrote to please
themselves and their equals. What remains of their poetry has thus all the
independence of the older Republican literature, with the refinement of a
literature addressed to a polished society. The poets of the Augustan Age
were men born in the country districts or provincial towns of Italy, and
the two most illustrious of their number were of humble origin: yet they
lived after their early youth in familiar intercourse with the foremost
men of their time; they owed their fortunes and position in life to the
favour of these men, and thus could not help sharing, and to some extent
reproducing, their tastes and tone in their writings.
Among the names of the patrons of literature that of Maecenas has become
proverbial, but perhaps even more important than his patronage was that
exercised by the Emperor himself. Not only was he a man of great natural
gifts, but he had received a most elaborate education. He was a powerful
and accomplished orator, and a practised writer(40). As was not unusual
with men who had received a thorough rhetorical training, he attempted the
composition of a tragedy, and had the sense to treat his failure with
good-natured humour(41). He made other attempts in verse, and composed
several works in prose, chiefly turning on the history of his own times.
He showed in his composition an especial regard for purity and correctness
of style. Suetonius tells us that he allowed no composition to be written
on himself ‘except in a serious spirit and by the best writers.’ Horace
testifies to this fastidiousness in the line,—
Cui male si palpere, recalcitret undique tutus(42).
Suetonius testifies further to his liberal patronage of genius; ‘ingenia
saeculi sui omnibus modis fovit;’ a statement confirmed by Horace’s
account of his liberality to Virgil and Varius,—
Dilecti tibi Vergilius Variusque poetae(43).
We are told also that in literary works he especially regarded ‘the
inculcation of precepts and the exhibition of examples of a useful
tendency for the state and for private life,’ which may partly account for
the didactic and practical aim which the higher poetry of the age set
before itself. He corresponded in terms of intimacy with Virgil, and made
repeated advances, which were at first somewhat coldly received, to
Horace, with the wish to number him among his familiar friends. But there
was another side to the temper of Augustus, which those admitted to his
favour did well not to forget. If he could be a liberal patron and genial
companion, he could also be a hard and pitiless master. Literature, like
everything else, had to be at his command, obedient to his will, and in
harmony with his policy. The fate of Gallus, that of Iulus Antonius, and
that of Ovid, prove that neither brilliant genius nor past favours and
familiarity could procure indulgence for whatever thwarted his purpose or
offended his dignity.
The relation between Maecenas and the members of his literary circle was
one of more intimacy and unreserve. This circle included among its members
Virgil and Varius, Horace and Propertius. The great works with which the
name of Maecenas is inseparably associated,—the Georgics of Virgil, the
first three books of the Odes of Horace, and the first book of his
Epistles,—entitle him to be honoured as among the most enlightened and
fortunate of all the patrons of literature. Virgil addresses him in
language not only of loyal admiration, but of acknowledgment for the
encouragement and guidance which he owed to him: and that such an
influence may have been really exercised by the inferior over the superior
mind is shown by the testimony given by Goethe of the stimulus which his
genius derived from the encouragement of the Duke of Weimar(44). Horace
writes of Maecenas in the language not only of admiration and gratitude,
but of warm and disinterested affection; and the favour shown to
Propertius, a poet of a very opposite type, shows that his appreciation of
genius was not limited by a narrow partisanship. His character seems to
have left very different impressions on the minds of his contemporaries,
according as they knew him intimately or merely from the outside. It is a
proof of his capacity and his loyalty(45) that he was the one man
thoroughly trusted by Augustus in all affairs of state, as Agrippa was in
war: and that his qualities of heart were no less admirable appears not
only from the poetical eulogies in the Georgics, the Elegies of
Propertius, and the Odes of Horace, but also from the more natural tribute
to his worth as a man and his sincerity as a friend contained in Horace’s
Satires and Epistles. On the world outside his own immediate circle he
produced the impression of an effeminate devotion to pleasure. His love of
pleasure and his shrinking from death seem to be confirmed by the
testimony of Horace:—
Cur me querelis, etc.
The sketch of him by Velleius Paterculus presents the view of his
character suggested by the contrast between his ability as a statesman and
the apparent indolence of his private life: ‘A man, who, while in all
critical emergencies displaying sleepless vigilance, foresight, and
capacity for action, yet, during intervals of relaxation, was in his
indolent self-indulgence almost more effeminate than a woman(46).’ It is
remarkable that Tacitus ascribes a similar character to the man in whom,
after the death of Maecenas, Augustus most confided—Sallustius
Crispus(47). Perhaps the position of Maecenas, as the trusted confidant of
a jealous and imperious master, required him to begin his career by
playing a part which afterwards became habitual to him. Among the traits
of his character indicated by Horace are knowledge of men, reticence, and
indifference to the outward distinctions of birth and rank. Whatever
ambition he had was to exercise real power as the minister of Augustus,
not to enjoy official titles. He certainly used his position to direct the
genius both of Virgil and Horace to public objects. There is no reason to
doubt the fact noticed in the Life of Virgil, that he influenced him in
the choice of the subject of the Georgics with the view to revive the
chief among the ancient arts, ‘by which the Latin name and the strength of
Italy had grown great.’ But it was with Horace that he shared all his
public interests and private feelings, and it is not a very hazardous
conjecture to presume that many of the Odes and familiar writings of the
latter poet reflect the tastes and sentiments of Maecenas, perhaps give
back the very style and manner of his conversation. The alternation
observable in the Odes of Horace between an apparent devotion to the
lighter themes of lyrical poetry and the serious interest in great
affairs, the irony disclaiming all lofty and austere pretension, the
Epicurean taste for simplicity combined with the Epicurean love of
pleasure, the indifference to outward state, and the urbanity and
knowledge of the world, more conspicuous in Horace than in any other
ancient poet, are suggestive of habitual contact with the worldly wisdom,
the real power disguised under an appearance of carelessness, the refined
enjoyment of life, the genial social nature, which were not only a great
power in the State, a great charm in the life of a by-gone age, but have
through their action on the literature of the time become a permanent and
beneficent influence on human culture.
Other names of men eminent among the ‘lights and leaders’ of the time are
also intimately connected with its literature. The earliest patron by whom
Virgil’s genius was recognised was not Maecenas but Asinius Pollio, who in
his early youth had lived in the gay circle of Catullus; who, as the
lieutenant of Antony, had governed the province of Cisalpine Gaul; who had
filled the office of Consul, commanded an army, and obtained a triumph;
who is mentioned by Horace in one of his early Satires as among the few
critics whose appreciation he valued; who in later life obtained great
distinction as an orator; to whose talent as a writer of tragedy both
Virgil and Horace bear witness; who undertook the composition of a work
the loss of which is one of the most irreparable gaps in historical
records—a contemporary History of the Civil Wars ‘ex Metello consule;’—and
who performed the important service to literature of being the first to
establish a public library at Rome, and the more questionable service of
instituting the practice of public recitations.
M. Valerius Messala, the next in importance among the patrons of letters,
unlike Maecenas and Pollio, who, though of old provincial families, were
‘novi homines’ at Rome, was a representative of one of the oldest and most
illustrious patrician houses. He had held high command in the Republican
army at Philippi, and was distinguished as an orator, an author, and
patron of literature. He became the centre of a literary circle the most
brilliant member of which was Tibullus; which, though living in friendly
relations with the circle of Maecenas, did not share with it the
enthusiasm for the new _régime_. Men like Pollio and Messala are important
as elements contributing to the general taste and culture of the age, but
not as determining the political or ethical character stamped upon the
literature.
No direct literary influence was exercised by Agrippa, who is described by
the elder Pliny as ‘A man, whose manners more nearly approached rustic
plainness than refinement of taste;’ but his military and naval successes,
and still more the great works of utility and beauty erected under his
superintendence, contributed to the same end as the poetry of Virgil and
Horace, that of perpetuating the spell of the name of Caesar upon the
imagination of the world.
Cornelius Gallus, like Pollio, was eminent both in action and in poetry,
but his brilliant and erratic career was cut short too soon to enable him
to obtain a foremost place either among poets or among literary patrons.
Yet an undying interest attaches to his name from the evidence afforded in
the Eclogues of his being the first and apparently the only one who
inspired in Virgil that affection, partly of the heart, partly of the
imagination, which fascinates and attaches the finer nature of the poet to
the stronger or bolder nature of one in whom it recognises some ideal of
heroism, combined with the qualities which unite men in friendship with
one another. It is of Gallus alone that Virgil writes in such a strain as
this:—
Gallo cuius amor tantum mihi crescit in horas
Quantum vere novo viridis se subicit alnus(48);
and it is to Gallus that he assigns the pre-eminence in his own especial
province of poetry,—as he represents the shepherd-poet Linus presenting
him with the reeds which the Muses had of old given to ‘the sage of
Ascra(49).’
The Odes of Horace, addressed to men of high official station and ancient
family, such as Sestius, Munatius Plancus, Sallustius Crispus, Aelius
Lamia, Manlius Torquatus, still further illustrate the close connexion
between the great world and the world of letters. His later Epistles, many
of which are addressed to young men of rank devoting themselves to
literary studies and pursuits, attest the continuance of the same tendency
as time went on. And in the following generation Ovid and his
contemporaries enjoyed the favour and friendship of the sons of these men
and of other illustrious patrons. Juvenal, in the Satire in which he
complains of the absence of a liberal patronage in his own age, unites the
names of Fabius and Cotta Messalinus (son of Messala), whose protection
and encouragement Ovid had enjoyed, with that of Maecenas(50). The chief
cause of this close bond of union between social rank and literary genius
was the fact that the men who in a former age would, from their birth and
education, have had a great political career before them, were now
debarred from the highest sphere of active life; while they were not yet,
what they became under the systematic corruption of the later Caesars, too
enervated and demoralised to continue susceptible of the nobler kinds of
intellectual pleasure.
Probably in no other aristocratic or courtly society has there been so
large a number of men possessing the ability and knowledge, the
accomplishments and leisure, required for the appreciative enjoyment of a
literature based on so fine and elaborate a culture. There are some
circumstances which made the patronage of the earlier half of the Augustan
Age more favourable to letters than that of other periods in which the
same influence has been exercised. The chief literary patrons then were
men who had played a prominent part in a revolutionary era,—men indeed of
ancient birth or hereditary distinction, yet owing their pre-eminence to
their talent, energy, and aptitude for the time, and thus open to new
influences, and free from the prejudices of an old-established nobility.
They had the culture and careful education of an aristocratic class,
combined with the liberal tendencies of revolutionary leaders. The
distance which in the preceding age would have kept apart men born into a
high social and political position from men of genius of humble origin was
easily passed in a time immediately succeeding that in which the great C.
Julius had practically proclaimed the doctrine of ‘an open career to every
kind of merit.’ Among the liberal traits in the character of Maecenas, as
painted by Horace, the indifference to distinctions of birth is specially
marked:—
Cum referre negas quali sit quisque parente
Natus, dum ingenuus(51).
The new men at the court of Augustus were naturally attracted to the new
men in literature, sprung from quite a different class from that to which
Lucretius, Catullus, or Calvus belonged, and yet, in respect of education,
refinement, and even early associations, in no respect their inferiors.
Another bond of union between them was that they were nearly all of the
same age, born with one or two exceptions between the years 70 B.C., and
60 B.C., and that several of them had studied under the same masters. The
distinguished men of the Ciceronian Age had passed away, with the
exception of one or two, such as Varro and Atticus, living in retirement,
and consoling themselves with their farms and libraries for the changes
they had witnessed. The leaders in action, as in literature, were all
young men, beginning their career together in an altered world, the
characters and destinies of which they were called upon to mould. One by
one they dropped away, most of them before passing the period of middle
life, leaving the Emperor almost the sole survivor among a younger
generation who had grown up under the new order of things, and, while
acquiescing in it as complacently, sharing neither in the energy nor in
the enthusiasm of the early years (from about 27 B.C. to about 10 B.C.)
during which the Empire left its greatest and happiest impression.
This relation of men of letters to the leaders of society under the Empire
could not but exercise a strong influence both for good and evil on the
literature of the age. Such a society,—able, versed in affairs,
accomplished, fond of pleasure,—whatever else it may be, is sure to be
characterised by good sense, a strong feeling of order and dignity, an
acute perception of propriety in conduct and manners, an urbanity of tone
restraining all arrogant self-assertion and violent animosity of feeling.
Such a society is the determined enemy of all pedantry, eccentricity, and
exaggeration, of all austerity or indecorum, of one-sided enthusiasm or
devotion to a single idea. The ‘aurea mediocritas’ in feeling, conduct,
thought, and enjoyment is the ideal which it sets before itself. Horace,
except in his highest and most thoughtful moods, is the true
representative of such a society; but its indirect influence may be noted
also in the moderation, the invariable propriety and dignity, both of
thought and language in Virgil, and in the tones of refinement with which
Propertius and Ovid record the experience and preach the philosophy of
pleasure. Yet literature probably lost as much from the limitation of
sympathy imposed upon it as it gained from this acquired dignity and
urbanity of tone. The Roman poets of this era, even while expressing
national sentiments and ideas, were not like Homer, Pindar, or Sophocles,
who, while putting a sufficiently high value on distinctions of birth and
fortune, and on the personal qualities accompanying these distinctions,
are yet, in a sense in which the poets of the Augustan Age are not, the
poets of a whole people. Horace introduces that series of his Odes which
most breathes a national spirit by disclaiming all sympathy with the
‘profanum vulgus.’ He looks upon it as one of the privileges of genius,
‘to scorn an ill-natured public.’ He did not wish his Satires to be
thumbed by the multitude or by men of the class of Hermogenes Tigellius.
He cared only for the appreciation of men belonging to the class in which
all culture and regard for the traditions of Rome were now centred. The
urban populace, as represented in literature, appears only as a
rabble,—and this is still more the case in the days of Juvenal,—which had
to be kept in order, fed, amused, and tended, like some dangerous wild
beast. The middle class, absorbed in money-making and commercial
adventure, supplies to Horace the representatives of the misers and
parvenus whom he painted in his Satires for the amusement of his
aristocratic readers. The tone of Virgil is equally anti-popular. The view
of society which he delights to present is that of a paternal ruler giving
laws to his people and caring for their welfare. His repugnance to the
influence of the ‘popularis aura’ on government is indicated in such
passages as the famous simile near the beginning of the Aeneid,
Ac veluti magno in populo cum saepe coorta est
Seditio, saevitque animis immobile vulgus(52),
and in his representation of ‘the good King Ancus’ as he is called by
Ennius and Lucretius, among the unborn descendants of Aeneas, as
iactantior Ancus
Nunc quoque iam nimium gaudens popularibus auris(53).
The encouragement and appreciation of the leaders of society involved on
the part of the poets a position of deference or dependence; the relation
between them had thus its limiting as well as its corrective effects; it
tended to make literature tamer in spirit and thought, perhaps also less
original in invention and more bounded in its range of human interest.
IV.
The great wealth and luxury of Rome, during the latter years of the
Republic and the early years of the Empire, exercised also an influence on
the life, the imagination, and the thoughts of the poets living in those
times. Through commerce and conquest Rome had entered into the possession
of the long accumulated wealth of the world, and, as generally happens in
eras of advanced civilisation, the enjoyment of these was very unequally
distributed. Nothing appears more remarkable in the social life of the
latter days of the Republic than the great riches possessed and expended
by a few individuals, such as Crassus, Hortensius, and the Luculli. One
proof of the immense accumulation of money at that time is the large price
which, as we learn from Cicero’s letters, was paid for the houses of the
leading men among the nobility. The number of villas possessed by Cicero
himself, the son of a provincial Eques, and debarred by stringent laws
(though probably they were evaded) from turning his pre-eminence as an
advocate to profit, and the sums spent by him in their adornment, suggest
to us to what an extent the soil of Italy, the works of Greek art, and the
natural and artificial products of the East, were at the disposal of the
ruling aristocracy of Rome. Still more is this thought forced on us when
we think of Proconsuls and Propraetors who came home glutted with the
spoils of their provinces, which they squandered in the coarsest luxury.
The change to the Empire, though it put a considerable check on this kind
of plunder, did little to distribute wealth more generally, or to limit
luxurious living. The appropriation during the Civil Wars of the sacred
treasures long accumulated in the temples of the gods(54), and the great
stimulus given to commerce by the establishment of peace, added largely to
the wealth available at Rome for purposes of munificence, of ostentation,
or indulgence. But the largest share in the disposal of the wealth of the
world had passed from the representatives of the old governing class to
the ruling powers of the new Empire, and this change was decidedly for the
public advantage. Augustus and his ministers possessed the old Greek
virtue of μεγαλοπρέπεια, and understood that immense wealth could be
better expended on great public objects than on beautifying their villas
and fish-ponds, or giving a more dangerous variety to their
entertainments. The policy of Augustus in restoring and building the
temples of the gods had an artistic as well as a religious purpose. He
wished to make his countrymen proud of the outward beauty of Rome, as
Pericles had made the Athenians proud of the beauty of Athens.
The most enduring result of this munificence, more enduring even than the
noble ruins of temples and theatres—the visible monuments preserved from
that age—is the finished art of the verse of Virgil and Horace. By the
liberality of the Emperor, Virgil was able to devote to the composition of
his two great works nearly twenty years of ‘unhasting and unresting’
labour in the beautiful scenery of Campania. The wealth and lands at the
disposal of Maecenas enabled Horace to change the wearisome routine and
enervating pleasures of Rome for hours of happy inspiration among the
Sabine Hills or in the cool mountain air of Praeneste, amid the gardens
and streams of Tibur or by the bright shores of Baiae(55). To the
liberality of their patrons these poets owed not only the leisure and
freedom from the ordinary cares of life(56), which allowed them to give
all their thought and the unimpaired freshness of their genius to their
art, but the opportunity of enjoying under the most favourable
circumstances that source of happiness and inspiration which has given its
most distinctive charm to their poetry—the beauty of Italian Nature. It is
only in their appreciation of the living beauty of the world for its own
sake (and apart from divine or human associations) that the great Roman
poets possess an interest beyond that of the poets of any other age or
country, with the exception of the English poets of the present century.
Nowhere is the familiar charm of a well-loved spot suggested in truer and
more graceful words than these:—
Te flagrantis atrox hora Caniculae
Nescit tangere; tu frigus amabile
Fessis vomere tauris
Praebes, et pecori vago, etc.(57)
Nor can any lines express better a real love for the actual beauty of
familiar scenes combined with an imaginative longing for the ideal beauty
consecrated by old poetic associations,—like to that which in modern times
has often driven our Northern poets and artists across the Alps,—than the
Rura mihi et rigui placeant in vallibus amnes;
Flumina amem silvasque inglorius. O ubi campi
Spercheosque, et virginibus bacchata Lacaenis
Taygeta, etc.(58)
of the Georgics.
The literature of the Augustan Age has often been compared with that of
England in the first half of the eighteenth century. In so far as each
literature is the literature of town life, in so far as it has a moral and
didactic purpose, the comparison holds good. The Satires and Epistles of
Horace present a parallel both to the poetical Satires of Pope, which in
outward form are imitated from them, and still more to the prose Essays of
the Spectator. They resemble those Essays in their union of humour and
seriousness, in the use they make of character-painting, anecdote, and
moral reflection, in the justice and at the same time the limitation of
their criticism both on life and literature, in the colloquial ease
combined with the studied propriety of their style. But while Horace, in
addition to his powers as a moralist and painter of character, ranks high
among those poets who enable us to feel the secret and the charm of
Nature, latent in particular places, the only period of English literature
from which this power is absent is that of which Addison and Pope are
among the chief representatives. A similar superiority in this respect may
be claimed for the Augustan poetry over that of the Age of Louis XIV. As
was said before, French criticism points to Racine as a genius with a
certain moral affinity to Virgil; but it equally acknowledges his
inferiority as the interpreter of Nature. ‘C’est cet amour,’ says M.
Sainte-Beuve, ‘cette pratique de la nature champêtre qui a un peu manqué à
notre Racine, dont le goût et le talent de peindre ont été presque
uniquement tournés du côté de la nature morale.’
The ease of their circumstances and the fact that they owed this ease to
others (‘Deus nobis haec otia fecit’) have impressed themselves in other
ways on the character of the Augustan poetry. The spirit of that poetry is
certainly tamer than that of other great literary epochs. Even the
enjoyment of Nature is a passive rather than an active enjoyment derived
from adventurous or contemplative energy. There is no suggestion, as there
is in Homer and in many modern poets, of vivid contact with the sterner
forces of Nature. The sense of discomfort as well as of danger was then,
as it has been till the present century, sufficient to repress the
imaginative love of the sea or of mountain scenery(59). Horace expresses a
shrinking from the dangers of the sea, nor is there in Virgil any trace of
that enjoyment of perilous adventure which is one of the great sources of
delight in the Odyssey.
The profuse expenditure and luxury of the age called forth in its poets a
spirit of reaction to a simpler and more primitive ideal, as they did in
the French literature of the latter part of the eighteenth century. By
contrast with the unreal enjoyment of luxury and the ennui occasioned by
it, which Lucretius had satirised in the previous generation, a stronger
sense of the purer sources of human enjoyment, of friendly and
intellectual society, of family affection, of the beauty of Nature, of the
simpler tastes of the country, was awakened even in those who in their
actual lives did not realise all these sources of happiness. But in Horace
this feeling of contrast does not express itself in the tones of vehement
antagonism which appear a century later in Juvenal. Luxury and profuse
expenditure are indeed repugnant to his taste, and they suggest to him, as
they do to Virgil, the purer enjoyment of simple living. There is no
doctrine which Horace preaches more constantly in all his works, or with
more apparent sincerity, than that of being independent of fortune, and of
the greater happiness enjoyed in the mean station in life between great
wealth and poverty. Yet, while preaching the same doctrine, he does not
express it in terms of such deep and earnest conviction as the
Divitiae grandes homini sunt vivere parce
Aequo animo(60)
of Lucretius. In at least the earlier part of his poetic career he had had
his share of the luxurious living and the other pleasures of Roman life.
Experience had satisfied him that the ‘slight repast, and sleep on the
grass by a river’s side(61),’ contributed more to his happiness in later
life than drinking Falernian from midday; and as years went on, it gave
him more pleasure to recall the memory of his old loves in song than to
involve himself in new engagements. The Horatian maxims in favour of
simplicity have this recommendation, that they are the result of
experience in both ways of living. The luxurious life of the capital seems
at no time to have possessed charms for Virgil or Tibullus. Though the
latter was a man of refinement, and not averse to pleasure, yet he has a
feeling similar to that of Rousseau in favour of an ideal of rudeness and
simplicity as compared with the pomp and profusion of life in Rome. The
more active and energetic temperament of Propertius and of Ovid induced
them to participate with less restraint in the pleasures of the city, and
they appealed to congenial tastes among their contemporaries in the choice
of the topics treated in their poems.
V.
The conditions hitherto considered enable us to appreciate the prominence
given to national and imperial ideas in the literature of the Augustan
Age, and also to understand the chief differences in tone and spirit
between that literature and the literature of the Ciceronian Age. Along
with these marked differences, obvious points of agreement are also
observable. The cultivated men of each time had the same refined enjoyment
in Nature, art, literature, and social life. And in turning to the
intellectual conditions affecting literary form and style, the later
period will be seen to be still more closely connected with the earlier.
The golden age of Latin poetry, commencing in the years preceding the
overthrow of the Republic, reaches its maturity in the earlier part of the
reign of Augustus, and then begins to decline, till under Tiberius the
last poetic voice is silenced. Though Latin prose-literature had yet to be
enriched by some of its greatest and most original works, yet neither the
glory of the Empire, the charm of the Italian life, nor the vivifying
ideas and creations of Greek genius were ever again able to revive the
genuine poetical inspiration which ancient Italy once, and once only,
enjoyed in abundant measure.
The half-century from about 60 B.C. to about 10 B.C. was, at once, one of
those rare and germinative epochs in the history of the world, in which a
powerful intellectual movement coincides with, influences, and is
influenced by a great movement and change in human affairs; and it was at
the same time a period of a rich and elaborate culture, in which the
inheritance of Greek genius, art, and knowledge came for the first time
into the full possession of the Romans. The earlier half of this period
was more distinguished by original force of mind, the latter half by more
complete and perfect culture. The age of Cicero was one of great energy in
the chief provinces of human activity—in war and politics, in oratory,
poetry, and philosophy. There is no intellectual quality so characteristic
of his own oratory, of the poetry of Lucretius, of the military and
political genius of Julius Caesar, as the ‘vivida vis,’—the energy, at
once rapid and enduring in its action, as of a great elemental force.
Among their contemporaries, though there was no man of high political
capacity, yet there was a many-sided intellectual activity manifesting
itself in the forum and senate-house, in social intercourse and
correspondence, and in varied literary and philosophical discourse. As a
result of this novel activity of mind, the Latin language developed then
for the first time all its resources as a powerful organ of literature,
inferior indeed to the language of Greece in the days of its purity, but
much superior as the instrument of poetry and oratory, history and
philosophy, to that language in its decay(62). The writers of the Augustan
Age received this language from their predecessors, in its most sensitive
period of growth, while able to present to the mind in unimpaired
freshness the immediate impressions from outward things and from the inner
world of consciousness, but still capable of more delicate and varied
combinations to fit it to become the perfectly harmonious organ of
sustained poetical emotion. This further development was given to it by
the Augustan poets, but not without some loss of native force and purity
of idiom. They too felt the influence of the strong intellectual movement
of the preceding age. But it came upon their minds with a less novel and
vehement impulse. They are greater in execution than in creative design.
They are more concerned with the results than with the processes of
thought. Virgil may have been as assiduous a student of philosophy as
Lucretius, but he does not feel the same need of consistency of view and
firmness of speculative conviction; he shares with Lucretius the strong
passion for poetry (‘dulces ante omnia Musae’), but neither he nor Horace,
though each recognises the supreme claims of philosophy, shows the passion
for enquiry which induced Lucretius
Noctes vigilare serenas,
Quaerentem dictis quibus et quo carmine demum
Clara tuae possim praepandere lumina menti,
Res quibus occultas penitus convisere possis(63);
so that even in his dreams he describes himself as ever busy with the
search after and exposition of truth,—
Nos agere hoc autem et naturam quaerere rerum
Semper et inventam patriis exponere chartis(64).
The master-pieces of the Augustan literature were not the products of that
vivid and rapidly-working creative energy which marked the Ciceronian Age.
There never was an age in which great writers trained themselves so
carefully for their office, strove so much to conform to recognised
principles of art, reflected so much on the plan and purpose of their
compositions, or used more patient industry in bringing their conceptions
to maturity. The maxim ‘nonum prematur in annum’ illustrates the spirit in
which the great artists of that age worked. The cultivated appreciation of
Greek art and poetry—the essential condition of the creative impulse of
Italy—then reached its highest point, produced its supreme effect in a
national Roman literature of similar perfection of workmanship, and, after
that, rapidly declined and passed away from the Roman world as a source of
literary inspiration, leaving however the educating influence of this new
literature in its place. The Greek language had indeed been studied at
Rome for nearly two centuries before the Ciceronian Age. The earliest
Roman writers—Naevius, Ennius, Pacuvius, etc.—had used the epic and
dramatic poetry of Greece as a kind of quarry for their own rude
workmanship. The age of Laelius had imbibed much of the humanity and
wisdom of Greek speculation. But it was not till the age of Cicero and
Catullus that the long process of education and the largely increased
intercourse between the two nations had raised the Roman mind to a full
sense and enjoyment of artistic excellence, as revealed both to the eye
and to the mind. The men of that age, in the midst of all their active
pursuits, were moved by this foreign influence as the men of the
Renaissance were moved by the recovery of classical literature. In the
case of some among them the passion for accumulating books and works of
art became the absorbing interest in their lives. Though in some of the
orators and men of letters, e.g. Memmius, as we learn from Cicero, their
Greek tastes fostered an affected indifference to their own nationality,
yet on the best minds, such as those of Cicero himself, Lucretius, and
Catullus, this intimate contact with Greek genius acted with a vivifying
power by calling forth the native genius of Italy. It was the peculiarity
of the Roman mind to be capable of receiving deep and lasting impressions
from other nations with whom it came in contact, without sacrifice of the
strong individuality of its own character. What Columella says of the
Italian soil, ‘that it is most responsive to the care bestowed on it,
since, through the energy of its cultivators, it has learned to yield the
products of nearly the whole world(65),’ might be said with equal truth of
the Italian mind. This adaptability to foreign influences, without loss of
native genius and character, enabled Rome to exercise spiritual supremacy
over the world for more than a thousand years after the loss of her
temporal supremacy. In the age of Cicero and the following age this
adaptability to another form of spiritual influence gave to Rome a great
national literature.
Virgil, Horace, and their immediate contemporaries devoted themselves to
Greek studies with even more ardour than their immediate predecessors.
Education and preparation for a career in literature was a more elaborate
process than it had ever been before, perhaps we might add, than it has
ever been since. Virgil was still an unknown student, carefully preparing
himself for the labour of his life almost till he reached the age at which
Catullus died. Horace at the age of twenty-three was, to use his own
words, still ‘seeking for the truth among the groves of Academus.’ The
taste for literary leisure was greatly developed among the educated
classes by the suppression of all active political life; while at the same
time the establishment of public libraries made the access to books more
easy and general. Women equally with men made themselves familiar with at
least the lighter fancies of the learned Greeks. There are none of his
Odes into which Horace is so fond of introducing his mythological
allusions as those in which some real or fictitious heroine, Galatea or
Asterie, Lyde or Phyllis, is addressed. The poems of Propertius which
celebrate his love for Cynthia could only be appreciated by the possessors
of much recondite learning.
Though the greatest poets of the Augustan Age drew much of their
inspiration from the purer sources of Greek genius, especially from Homer
and the early lyric poets, yet the period of Greek literature which was
most familiar to the Romans of the Augustan Age was the Alexandrian. It
was nearest to them in point of time; it was most congenial to the taste
of the learned Greeks who now gathered from the widely-scattered centres
of Greek culture to Rome, as they had formerly done to Alexandria; it was
of all the forms of Greek literature the most cosmopolitan, or rather the
least national, in spirit, and thus most easily adopted by another race;
it was moreover, like that of the Augustan Age, the literature of a
courtly circle enjoying the favour and contributing to the glory of a
royal patron. The earliest imitators of this poetry were Catullus and the
other poets contemporary with him, such as Calvus, Caecilius, Cinna, and
Varro Atacinus, the author of the epic poem of Jason. In the Augustan Age
Gallus had not only obtained distinction as the author of original elegics
in the style of the amatory poetry of Alexandria, but had translated a
poem of Euphorion of Chalcis(66), whom Cicero holds up as the type of
effeminacy in literature in contrast with the manliness of Ennius(67).
Tibullus to a certain extent, but still more Propertius and Ovid, followed
in the same line. From the Alexandrine poets they derived the form and
many of the materials of their art. Virgil, while familiar with the whole
range of Greek poetry and pressing it all into his service, has used the
Alexandrians more freely than any other Greek writers, with the exception
of Homer. Horace is most independent of them; there are no direct traces
of their works in any of his writings. The Greek authors to whom he
acknowledges his debt are the early Lyrists and Iambic writers, the poets
of the New Comedy, the philosophic writers of the later schools which
arose out of the teaching of Socrates, and especially Aristippus. Yet even
in him the influence of the Alexandrine tone is apparent, especially in
his treatment of the subjects taken from the Greek mythology.
This poetry of Alexandria, or rather this poetry of the Greek race in its
latter days, was, to a much greater extent, the artificial product of
culture and knowledge than the manifestation of original feeling or
intellectual power. The very language in which it was written was
artificial, far removed, not only in phraseology but in dialectical forms,
from the language of common life. Poetry was pursued as the recreation of
scholars and men of science; its chief aim was to satisfy a dilettante
curiosity:—
Cetera quae vacuas tenuissent carmine mentes, etc.(68)
The writers of this school whose names are most familiarly known are
Callimachus, one of the Battiadae of Cyrene, Euphorion of Chalcis,
Philetas of Cos, Aratus of Soli, Hermesianax and Nicander of Colophon,
Apollonius of Rhodes(69), Lycophron of Chalcis, Eratosthenes of Cyrene,
from whom Virgil takes a passage about geographical science, Zenodotus of
Ephesus, a grammarian,—names suggestive of the widely-diffused culture of
the Hellenic race, and at the same time indicative of the absence of any
great centre of national life such as Athens had been in former times. To
these are sometimes added the more interesting names of Theocritus of
Syracuse, and of the idyllic poets Moschus of Syracuse and Bion of Smyrna,
although they are more associated with the fresh woods and pastures of
Sicily and Southern Italy. The chief materials used by the Alexandrine
writers in their poetry were the tales and fancies of the old mythology
and the results of natural science; the modes of human feeling to which
they mainly gave expression were the passion of love and the sensibility
to the beauty of Nature.
Nothing attests more forcibly the original power and richness of faculty
which shaped the primitive fancies of the Greek mythology into legend,
poetry, and art, than the perennial vitality with which this mythology has
reappeared under many forms, satisfying many different wants of the human
mind, at various epochs, from the time of its birth even down to the
present day. In the contrasts often drawn between the classical and the
romantic imagination, it is sometimes forgotten that this Greek mythology
was richer in romantic personages, situations, and incidents, than the
mythology or early legends of any other race. In the nobler eras of Greek
literature, after the creative impulse ceased out of which the mythology
and its natural accompaniment epic poetry had arisen, the legends and
personages of gods and heroes supplied to the lyrical poets an ideal
background by connexion with which they glorified the passions and
interests of their own time: to the tragic poets of Athens they supplied
beings of heroic stature, situations of transcendent import, by means of
which they were enabled to give body and shape to the deepest thoughts on
human destiny. The Alexandrians, and those Greek writers who came long
after them, such as Quintus Calaber and Nonnus, did not seek to impart any
recondite meaning to the legends which they revived, but rather to divest
them of any sacred or ethical associations, and to present them to their
readers simply as bright and marvellous tales of passion and adventure.
They endeavoured, either in the form of continuous epics or in the more
appropriate form of ‘epyllia’ or epic idyls, to enable their readers to
escape in fancy from the dull uniformity of their own time into a world of
action in the bright morning of the national life. They sought especially
to satisfy two impulses of the Greek nature which still survived out of
the more powerful energies which had given birth to art and poetry,—the
childlike curiosity (Ἕλληνες ἀεὶ παῖδες) which delights in hearing a story
told, and the artistic passion to make present to the eye or the fancy
distinct pictures and images of beauty and symmetry.
The later development of the Greek intellect was however more critical and
scientific than creative. Science, learning, and criticism were especially
encouraged and cultivated at Alexandria. The impulse given by Aristotle to
natural observation and enquiry, and the large intercourse with the East
which followed on the conquests of Alexander and the establishment of the
kingdoms of his successors, led to a great increase of knowledge, or, in
the absence of definite knowledge, of curiosity and speculation. The
spirit of enquiry no longer, as in the days of the older philosophers,
endeavoured to solve the whole problem of the universe, but to observe and
systematise the phenomena of the special sciences. Natural history,
botany, and medicine were studied zealously and successfully; the subjects
of astronomy and meteorology excited equal interest, though the want of
the appliances necessary for these studies made them more barren in
results. A great advance was made in the knowledge of remote places of the
earth and of their various products. The novelty of these enquiries, and
of the knowledge resulting from them, stimulated curiosity and the
imaginative emotion which accompanies it; and the enthusiasm of science
combining with the enthusiasm of literary criticism gave birth to a new
kind of didactic poetry, which aimed at expounding the phenomena of Nature
in the epic diction of Homer. Among the best-known authors of this
didactic poetry are Aratus, Callimachus, and Nicander,—the last described
as being a poet, a grammarian, and a physician, a combination
characteristic of the spirit in which both science and literature were
cultivated. These writers supplied materials which Virgil used in the
Georgics, and in the special examination of that poem it will be seen that
he adopted other characteristics of the Alexandrine learning. The
description by Ovid of the poem of Aemilius Macer in the lines
Saepe suas volucres legit mihi grandior aevo,
Quaeque necet serpens, quae iuvet herba, Macer(70),
indicates the character not only of that poem, but also of the Alexandrine
models on which it was founded.
The poetry of Alexandria touched most on the realities of human life in
its treatment of the passion of love and the enjoyment of the beauty of
Nature. These are, in unadventurous times and in eras of advanced
civilisation, the main motives of the imaginative literature which seeks
its interest in the actual life of the present. Callimachus and Euphorion
are mentioned as the models followed by Gallus, Propertius, and
Tibullus(71). They, as well as their Roman followers, seem largely to have
illustrated their own feelings and experience by recondite allusions to
the innumerable heroines of ancient mythology. The passion of Medea for
Jason is the motive which gives its chief human interest to the
Argonautics of Apollonius, as the passion of Dido for Aeneas, suggested by
it, gives the chief purely human interest to the Aeneid. But the most
powerful delineation of this kind in any writer of that period, recalling
in its intensity the ‘burning passion set to the lyre by the Aeolian
maiden,’ is the monologue of Simaetha in the second Idyl of Theocritus, of
which Virgil has produced but a faint echo in his
Ducite ab urbe domum, mea carmina, ducite Daphnim(72).
The love of Nature, though not then for the first time awakened,—for there
are clear indications of the powerful influence of this sentiment, though
in subordination to human interests, in the earlier epic, lyric, and
dramatic poetry,—came then prominently forward as an element of refined
pleasure in life, and as an inspiring influence both to poets and
painters. The cause of the growth of this sentiment has been sought(73)
partly in the rise of great cities, such as Antioch, Seleucia, Alexandria,
which by debarring men from that free familiar contact with the forms,
movement, and life of Nature enjoyed by the older Greeks, created an
imaginative longing for a return to this communion as to a lost paradise.
The longing to escape from the heat and confinement of a great southern
city to the fresh sights and free air of woods and mountains must have
been often felt by poets and artists who had exchanged their homes on the
shores and the islands of the Aegean for the dusty streets of Alexandria.
Probably the Metamorphoses of Ovid convey as good an idea as anything in
Latin literature of the various influences active in the Alexandrine
poetry; and the kind of scene which he takes most delight in painting in
that poem is that of a cool and clear stream hidden in the thick shade of
woods and haunted by the Nymphs. The taste for gardens within great
cities, first developed at this time and afterwards carried to an extreme
pitch of luxury in the early Roman Empire(74), further illustrates the
need felt for this kind of refreshment from objects of natural beauty.
Other causes have been suggested for the growth of this sentiment, as, for
instance, the decay of the polytheistic fancies, which, by regarding each
natural object as identified with some spiritual being, made it less an
object of affection and curiosity for its own sake. The sudden growth of
this sentiment in ancient times in an age of great luxury and culture is
analogous to the great development and expansion of the feeling under
similar circumstances in the latter part of the eighteenth century. In
both cases the sentiment arose from the desire to escape from the tedium
of an artificial life. The love of Nature is not, as we might naturally
expect it to be, a feeling much experienced by those who live in constant
contact and conflict with its sterner forces, as by husbandmen, herdsmen,
and hunters; nor is it developed consciously in primitive times or among
unsophisticated races. It is the accompaniment of leisure, culture, and
refinement of life. Some races are more susceptible of this feeling than
others; and perhaps the Greek with his lively social temper, and the
tendency of his imagination to reduce all beautiful objects to a human
shape, was less capable of the disinterested delight in the sights and
sounds of the outward world than the Italian. It was apparently among
Siculians, the kindred of the people of Latium, and not among men living
in the mountains of Arcadia or Thessaly, that Theocritus found the
personages of his rustic idyl. Whether it was from the greater
susceptibility of their national temperament, or from the fact that they
lived in the later times of the world, to which the sentiment was more
congenial, the Roman poets of the Augustan Age and of that immediately
preceding it are the truest exponents of the love of Nature in ancient
times; though it may be that, without the originating impulse given by the
Greek mind in the Alexandrian period, and perpetuated by educated Greeks
living in Southern Italy, this love of natural beauty might never have
been consciously realised by them as a source of poetic inspiration.
The pursuit of literature in the Alexandrian Age was accompanied with
great activity in the other arts, especially in sculpture and painting.
These last continued to be carried on by Greeks in Italy after Rome had
succeeded to Alexandria as the centre of human culture. Sculpture and
carving on wood, works of art in bronze, and the graving on gems continued
to perpetuate an aesthetic half-belief in the Olympian deities and in the
other creations of the Greek theology. Painting seems to have treated the
same kind of subjects and to have aimed at satisfying the same class of
feelings as the poetry of the Alexandrian time. Many of its subjects it
seems to have drawn directly from the works of poets(75). The paintings
recovered from Pompeii, which may be presumed to have continued the
traditions of a somewhat earlier art, illustrate the same tastes which
were gratified by the poetical treatment of mythological subjects, of
landscape, and of the passion of love. The knowledge acquired by science
seems also to have been pressed into this service by the artist. The
frequent representations of wild animals originated in the same kind of
interest which animated Nicander to the composition of the Θηριακά(76).
Realistic reproductions from common life seem also to have been frequently
executed by ancient, as by modern, painters. If, as is not improbable, the
‘Moretum’ and the ‘Copa’ are translations or imitations of Greek
originals, they exemplify still further the close connexion between the
art of the poet and of the painter among the Alexandrian dilettanti.
The various kinds of art which bring human forms and scenes from outward
nature before the eye, and especially the art of the painter, must
accordingly be taken into account as means of making the creations of
Greek fancy and the objects of Greek sentiment vividly present to the
Roman imagination. They not only acted immediately on the mind of the poet
by suggesting to him directly subjects for his art and supplying frequent
illustrations for the treatment of native subjects, but they helped to
interpret to cultivated minds his allusions to or reproductions from the
poets of former times. The whole learning, fancy, and sentiment of the
Alexandrians seem to have been absorbed and made their own by the Augustan
poets. Virgil and Horace, indeed, formed their ideal of art from the works
of a greater time. Their studies of Greek familiarised their minds with
what was most perfect in form, noblest in thought, feeling, and expression
in the older poets. Yet in so far as Roman poetry is a reproduction of
Greek poetry, it is the mind of the Alexandrian rather than of the old
Ionian, Aeolian, or Athenian Greek that lives again in the Augustan
literature. Probably this has been in favour of the Roman writers. With
their highly susceptible and cultivated appreciation of excellence, their
originality might have been altogether overpowered by an exclusive study
of the nobler and severer models. In receiving the instruction of
contemporary Greeks, based to a great extent on the Alexandrine learning,
and in reproducing the materials, manner, and diction of Alexandrine
poets, they must have become conscious of the greater freshness and vigour
of their own genius, of the more vital force of their own language, of
their grander national life, of the privilege of being Romans, and of the
blessing of breathing Italian air. Whatever was most worthy to survive in
the spirit which animated the refined industry of the Alexandrian Age has
been preserved in greater beauty and vitality in Virgil, Propertius, and
Ovid, combined with the ideas, feelings, passions, and experience of a new
and more vigorous race.
One other circumstance has yet to be taken into account as affecting the
culture and taste of the age, viz. the number of poets who lived at the
time and the relations which subsisted between them. Those whose works
have been preserved are only a few out of a larger circle who worked each
in his own province of art, and listened to and criticised the works of
their friends. Of the poets belonging to this circle whose works have not
reached us, Varius, the older contemporary and life-long friend of Virgil,
first acquired distinction as a writer of that kind of epic peculiar to
Rome which treated of contemporary subjects and was dedicated to the
personal glory of some great man. This kind of poem had probably
originated with the ‘Scipio’ of Ennius, but it had been especially
cultivated in the age of Cicero. Varius performed the office from which
Virgil and Horace shrank, that, namely, of telling in verse the
contemporary history of his own time, glorifying in one poem the memory of
Julius Caesar, in another celebrating the wars of Augustus. Afterwards he
resigned to Virgil the honours of epic poetry, and entered into rivalry
with Pollio as the author of tragedy. His drama of Thyestes was
represented at the Games celebrated after the battle of Actium, and for
this drama he is said to have received a million sesterces(77). This play
is praised both by Quintilian and Tacitus in the dialogue De Oratoribus.
Quintilian says of it, ‘it may be compared with any work of the Greeks:’
but the drama is the branch of literature in which the judgment of a Latin
critic is of least value. The Thyestes, like the Medea of Ovid, was
probably a play of that rhetorical kind which was cultivated under the
Empire, and which never got possession of the stage as the older tragedies
of Attius and Pacuvius did. Cornelius Gallus has been already mentioned
among the men of public eminence who cultivated poetry. He was a follower
of the Alexandrians, and is mentioned by Propertius and Ovid as their own
precursor in elegiac poetry. Aemilius Macer, a native of Verona, nearly of
the same age as Virgil, and supposed to be shadowed forth as the Mopsus of
the fifth Eclogue, was the author of a didactic poem called Ornithogonia,
written in imitation of the Alexandrine Nicander. Valgius Rufus and
Aristius Fuscus, mentioned by Horace as among the friendly critics by whom
he wished his Satires to be approved, and to whom he addresses some of his
Odes and Epistles, are also known as authors. In his later life Horace
maintained friendly relations and correspondence with the younger men,
such as Iulus Antonius, Florus, etc., who united a taste for poetry with
the pursuits of young men of rank. And among the pleasures which Ovid
recalls in the dreary days of his exile, none seem to have been more
prized by him than the familiar relations in which he had lived with the
older poets and with those of his own standing(78). The Alexandrine
influence is visible in the kinds of poetry chiefly cultivated by these
writers, especially in the didactic poem, the artificial epic, and the
erotic elegy. We hear also of epic or narrative poems on contemporary
subjects, of one or two dramatic writers, and also of writers in verse on
grammatical and rhetorical subjects(79).
There is no feature in the social life of the Augustan Age so pleasant to
contemplate as the brotherly friendship, free apparently from the
jealousies of individuals and the petty passions of literary coteries, in
which the most eminent poets and men of letters lived with one another.
The only exception to the general state of good feeling of which there is
any indication is an apparent coolness between Horace and Propertius. The
latter poet neither mentions nor alludes to his illustrious contemporary,
though both were friends of Maecenas and of Virgil; and Horace, though he
does not mention Propertius by name, as he does Tibullus and most of the
other distinguished poets of the time, probably alludes to him in a
passage which was not intended to be complimentary(80). But in general
what Plato says of the souls engaged in the pursuit and contemplation of
intellectual beauty—‘Envy stands aloof from the divine company’—was true
of the ‘divine company’ of poets in the Age of Augustus. And the sincere
and appreciative interest which they took in one another was not only a
source of great happiness in their lives, but was able to fulfil the
function of an enlightened and generous criticism. Poets were in the habit
of reading their works to their friends before submitting them to the
public. It is characteristic of the modesty of Virgil and of his unceasing
aim at perfection that he was in the habit of reading to his friends
chiefly those passages in his works of which he was himself distrustful.
The fastidious taste of Horace sometimes rebelled against the importunity
of those who desired to hear him read his own compositions. Yet the
well-known testimony of Ovid proves that he was not averse to gratify an
appreciative listener:—
Et tenuit nostras numerosus Horatius aures,
Dum ferit Ausonia carmina culta lyra(81).
The appreciation and criticism of cultivated friends, themselves authors
as well as critics, must have stimulated and corrected the taste of the
poets of the age. The genius which is most purely original in its
activity, and which communicates an altogether novel impulse to the world,
relies absolutely on itself, and may be little stimulated by sympathy or
affected by criticism. Of such a type Lucretius in ancient and Wordsworth
in modern times are probably the best examples, though Dante and Milton
seem to approach nearer to it than to the type of those whose genius is
equally great in receiving from, as in giving to, the world—the type of
genius of Homer, Sophocles, Shakspeare, and Goethe. The great qualities of
writers of the first type are force, independence, boldness of invention
and speculation, absolute sincerity. They are at the same time liable to
the defects of incompleteness, one-sidedness, disregard of the true
proportion of things. Their works do not produce the impression of that
all-pervading, perfectly-balanced sanity of genius, which the Greeks meant
when they applied the word σοφοί to their poets, and which makes the great
men of the second type not only powerful movers but also the wisest
teachers of the world. The best poetry of the Augustan Age, if wanting in
the highest mode of creative energy, is eminently free from the defects
which sometimes result from the intenser form of imagination; it is in a
remarkable degree pervaded and controlled by this sanity of genius. This
excellence of the Augustan literature may be partly, as was said before,
attributed to the familiar intercourse which men of letters enjoyed with
men of action and large social influence; partly, and probably to a
greater degree, to the cultivated and generous criticism which men of
genius and fine accomplishment imparted to and received from one another.
Outside of this friendly circle of men eminent in letters and social
position there were other literary and critical coteries hostile to them,
who seem to have chosen the merits of the old writers as the battle-ground
on which they engaged the new school of poetry and criticism. These
critical coteries Horace treats, as Catullus treats his ‘vile poets, pests
of the age,’ and as Pope treated Dennis and the other poetasters of his
time. He was evidently sensitive to the envy excited by his genius and by
the favour of Maecenas, and in his later years it afforded him pleasure to
be less exposed than he had been to carping criticism:—
Romae principis urbium
Dignatur soboles inter amabiles
Vatum ponere me choros,
Et iam dente minus mordeor invido(82).
But with the final establishment of his reputation his fastidiousness
suffered more from the pedantry and importunities of admirers and
imitators:—
O imitatores, servum pecus, ut mihi saepe
Bilem, saepe iocum vestri movere tumultus(83).
Even the ‘mitis sapientia’ of Virgil has condescended to immortalise the
names of Bavius and Maevius, as Pope has immortalised the heroes of the
Dunciad. The often quoted line of Horace,—
Scribimus indocti doctique poemata passim(84),
marks the beginning of that ‘cacoethes scribendi’ which continued to
prevail till the days of Juvenal as a symptom of the ‘strenua inertia’ of
life under the Empire.
VI.
The almost exclusive devotion to poetry on the part of the meanest as well
as the greatest writers of the Augustan Age seems to demand some
explanation. The natural genius of Rome was more adapted to oratory,
history, and didactic exposition than to any of the great forms of poetry.
In the previous generation prose literature had reached the highest degree
of perfection. The style of Cicero is one of the most admirable and
effective vehicles for the varied purposes of passionate invective or
persuasive oratory, of familiar correspondence, and of popularising the
results of ethical, political, and religious reflection. In Caesar and
Sallust the record of great events in the national life had at last found
a power of clear, terse, and chastened diction, superior as a vehicle of
simple narrative to the style of the two great historians of later times,
if not so rich and varied in colouring and in poetical and reflective
suggestion. Of the prose literature of the Augustan Age we possess only
one great monument, the extant parts of ‘the colossal master-work of
Livy;’ and that was the product of the later and least brilliant period of
this epoch.
The cause of the sudden and permanent decline of Roman oratory was the
extinction of political life. Public speech could no longer be, as it had
been for nearly two centuries, a great power in the commonwealth. Under
the vigilant and judicious administration of Augustus there was not scope
even for that kind of oratory which flourished under his successors, and
became a very formidable weapon in the hands of the ‘delatores,’—that,
namely, which is employed in the prosecution and defence of men charged
with grave offences against the State. Neither was there scope or
inclination for philosophical or historical composition. Such freedom of
enquiry as Cicero allowed himself in his treatises De Legibus and De
Republica would scarcely have been tolerated under the monarchy; and the
world was in no mood for any severe strain of thought or any questioning
of the first principles of things. The new era desired ease, an escape
from care and the perplexities of thought, as well as peace and material
well-being. The spirit of the age was announced in the pastoral strain,
which celebrated its commencement in the apotheosis of Julius Caesar,
‘amat bonus otia Daphnis.’ Nor would it have been possible for any one to
have composed or at least to have published a candid history of the times;
and it may have been the discovery of this impossibility that induced
Asinius Pollio to leave his work unfinished. It would indeed have been a
gain for all time had a Roman Thucydides recorded the ‘movement in the
State’ from the Consulship of Metellus till the battle of Actium with the
accuracy and impartiality, the graphic condensation, the sober dignity,
the sensitive perception of the varying phases of passion and character in
states and individuals, the philosophical discernment of great political
principles destined to act in the same way ‘so long as the nature of man
remains the same,’ and the deep tragic pathos which make, even at the
present day, the record of ‘the twenty-seven years’ war of the
Peloponnesians and Athenians’ the most vividly interesting and permanently
instructive historical work which the world possesses. But even had the
genius of Rome been capable of producing a Thucydides, the circumstances
of the time would have reduced him to silence. Tacitus regards the
establishment of the Empire as equally fatal to the genius of the
historian, as it was to the genius of the orator:—‘Postquam bellatum apud
Actium atque omnem potentiam ad unum conferri pacis interfuit, magna illa
ingenia cessere. Simul veritas pluribus modis infracta, primum inscitia
rei publicae ut alienae, mox libidine assentandi(85).’
On the other hand, many circumstances contributed to give a great stimulus
to poetical literature in its most trivial and transitory as well as its
noblest and most enduring manifestations. It is remarked by a recent
French writer(86), that poetry is the last form of literature to wither
under a despotism. But it suffers from it most irretrievably in the end.
The poetic imagination is able to deceive itself by turning away from what
is painful and repulsive in the world, and by appearing to extract the
element of good, of vivid life, or impressive grandeur out of things evil
and fatal in their ultimate effects. Thus it is able to glorify the pomp
and state of imperialism, just as it is able to glorify the charm to the
senses or the attraction to the social nature afforded by the life of
passion and pleasure. But, in the long run, the decay in the higher
energies arising either from the loss of liberty or the loss of
self-control is more fatal to the nobler forms of art and poetry than to
any other products of intelligence.
Again, the mechanical difficulties of the art had been to a great extent
overcome, in the previous age. The discovery of the new and rich ore of
the Latin language, revealed and wrought into shapes of massive beauty and
delicate grace by Lucretius and Catullus, awakened and kept alive in the
great writers of this age the desire to perfect the work commenced by
their predecessors, and to develope all the majesty, beauty, and harmony
of which their native speech was capable. The education in grammar,
rhetoric, and Greek literature, which in the later years of the Republic
had trained men for the contests of public life, prepared them to
recognise and appreciate the perfection of style and of rhythm which was
now for the first time attained. But the attainment of this perfection was
a stumbling block to writers of an inferior order, and to all the poets
who came afterwards. The Augustan poets left to their successors, what
they had not themselves received, the fatal legacy of an established
poetical diction. The resources of the language for the highest purposes
of poetry seem to have been exhausted by the supreme effort of this epoch.
The golden perfection of the Augustan style gave place to the forced
rhetoric and the sensational extravagance of the Neronian age and to the
soberer but tamer imitations of the Flavian era.
In its inner inspiration, as well as its outward expression, the Augustan
poetry was the maturest development of the national mind. The inspiring
influences of Latin poetry were the idea of Rome, the appreciation of
Greek art, the genial Italian life. We have seen how the first
establishment of the Empire gave to the national idea a temporary
importance and prominence which it had not had since Ennius first awoke
his countrymen to the consciousness of their destiny. It was only in the
Augustan Age, or during the few years preceding it, that the taste of the
Romans was sufficiently educated to appreciate the perfect art of the
Greeks. The whole of Italy was now for the first time united in one
nation. A new generation had been born and grown to manhood since the
Social War. The pride in Rome and the love of the whole land might now be
felt by all men born between the Alps and the Straits of Sicily. The
districts far removed from the capital, ‘by the sounding Aufidus’ or ‘the
slow-winding Mincius,’ still kept alive the traditions of a severer
morality and the habits of a simpler and happier life(87). They were still
able to nourish the susceptible mind of childhood with poetic fancies(88).
In the following generation the idea of the empire was one no longer of
inspiring novelty, but rather of a dull oppression. The taste for Greek
literature had lost its freshness and quickening power. The natural
enjoyment of life, the susceptibility to beauty in art and nature, the
love of simplicity, were no longer possible to minds enervated and hearts
deadened by the unrelieved monotony of luxurious living.