and Augustan poetry, outside of a few definite forms, is largely a
chronicle of failure. This was most eminently so in the drama. Augustan
tragedy seems never to have risen for a moment beyond mere academic
exercises. Of the many poets who attempted it, nothing survives beyond a
string of names. Lucius Varius Rufus, the intimate friend of both Virgil
and Horace, and one of the two joint-editors of the _Aeneid_ after the
death of the former, wrote one tragedy, on the story of Thyestes, which
was acted with applause at the games held to celebrate the victory of
Actium, and obtained high praise from later critics. But he does not
appear to have repeated the experiment like so many other Latin poets, he
turned to the common path of annalistic epic. Augustus himself began a
tragedy of _Ajax,_ but never finished it. Gaius Asinius Pollio, the first
orator and critic of the period, and a magnificent patron of art and
science, also composed tragedies more on the antique model of Accius and
Pacuvius, in a dry and severe manner. But neither in these, nor in the
work of the young men for whose benefit Horace wrote the _Epistle to the
Pisos,_ was there any real vitality; the precepts of Horace could no more
create a school of tragedians than his example could create a school of
lyric poets.
The poetic forms, on the other hand, used by Virgil were so much more on
the main line of tendency that he stands among a large number of others,
some of whom might have had a high reputation but for his overwhelming
superiority. Of the other essays made in this period in bucolic poetry we
know too little to speak with any confidence. But both didactic poetry
and the little epic were largely cultivated, and the greater epic itself
was not without followers. The extant poems of the _Culex_ and _Ciris_
have already been noted as showing with what skill and grace unknown
poets, almost if not absolutely contemporary with Virgil, could use the
slighter epic forms. Varius, when he abandoned tragedy, wrote epics on
the death of Julius Caesar, and on the achievements of Agrippa. The few
fragments of the former which survive show a remarkable power and
refinement; Virgil paid them the sincerest of all compliments by
conveying, not once only but again and again, whole lines of Varius into
his own work. Another intimate friend of Virgil, Aemilius Macer of
Verona, wrote didactic poems in the Alexandrian manner on several
branches of natural history, which were soon eclipsed by the fame of the
_Georgics_, but remained a model for later imitators of Nicander. One of
these, a younger contemporary of Virgil called Gratius, or Grattius, was
the author of a poem on hunting, still extant in an imperfect form. In
its tame and laboured correctness it is only interesting as showing the
early decay of the Virgilian manner in the hands of inferior men.
A more interesting figure, and one the loss of whose works leaves a real
gap in Latin literature, is Gaius Cornelius Gallus, the earliest and one
of the most brilliant of the Augustan poets. Like Varro Atacinus, he was
born in Narbonese Gaul, and brought into Roman poetry a new touch of
Gallic vivacity and sentiment. The year of his birth was the same as that
of Virgil's, but his genius matured much earlier, and before the
composition of the _Eclogues_ he was already a celebrated poet, as well
as a distinguished man of action. The story of his life, with its swift
rise from the lowest fortune to the splendid viceroyalty of Egypt, and
his sudden disgrace and death at the age of forty-three, is one of the
most dramatic in Roman history. The translations from Euphorion, by which
he first made his reputation, followed the current fashion; but about the
same time he introduced a new kind of poetry, the erotic elegy, which had
a swift and far-reaching success. To Gallus, more than to any other
single poet, is due the naturalisation in Latin of the elegiac couplet,
which, together with the lyrics of Horace and the Virgilian hexameter,
makes up the threefold poetical achievement of the Augustan period, and
which, after the Latin lyric had died out with Horace himself, halved the
field with the hexameter. For the remaining literature of the Empire, for
that of the Middle Ages so far as it followed classical models, and even
for that of the Renaissance, which carries us down to within a measurable
distance of the present day, the hexameter as fixed by Virgil, and the
elegiac as popularised by Gallus and rapidly brought to perfection by his
immediate followers, are the only two poetical forms of real importance.
The elegiac couplet had, of course, been in use at Rome long before;
Ennius himself had employed it, and in the Ciceronian age Catullus had
written in it largely, and not without success. But its successful use
had been hitherto mainly confined to short pieces, such as would fall
within the definition of the Greek epigram. The four books of poems in
which Gallus told the story of his passion for the courtesan Cytheris
(the Lycoris of the tenth Eclogue) showed the capacities of the metre in
a new light. The fashion they set was at once followed by a crowd of
poets. The literary circles of Maecenas and Messalla had each their
elegiac poet of the first eminence; and the early death of both
Propertius and Tibullus was followed, amid the decline of the other forms
of the earlier Augustan poetry, by the consummate brilliance of Ovid.
Of the Augustan elegiac poets, Sextus Propertius, a native of Assisi in
Umbria, and introduced at a very early age to the circle of Maecenas, is
much the most striking and interesting figure, not only from the formal
merit of his poetry, but as representing a type till then almost unknown
in ancient literature. Of his life little is known. Like Virgil, he lost
his patrimonial property in the confiscations which followed the Civil
war, but he was then a mere child. He seems to have been introduced to
imperial patronage by the publication of the first book of his _Elegies_
at the age of about twenty. He died young, before he was thirty-five, if
we may draw an inference from the latest allusions in his extant poems;
he had then written four other books of elegiac pieces, which were
probably published separately at intervals of a few years. In the last
book there is a noticeable widening of range of subject, which
foreshadows the further development that elegiac verse took in the hands
of Ovid soon after his death.
In striking contrast to Virgil or Horace, Propertius is a genius of great
and, indeed, phenomenal precocity. His first book of _Elegies,_ the
_Cynthia monobiblos_ of the grammarians, was a literary feat comparable
to the early achievements of Keats or Byron. The boy of twenty had
already mastered the secret of elegiac verse, which even Catullus had
used stiffly and awkwardly, and writes it with an ease, a colour, a
sumptuousness of rhythm which no later poet ever equalled. The splendid
cadence of the opening couplet--
_Cynthia prima suis miserum me cepit ocellis
Contactum nullis ante cupidinibus--_
must have come on its readers with the shock of a new revelation. Nothing
like it had ever been written in Latin before: itself and alone it
assures a great future to the Latin elegiac. His instinct for richness of
sound is equally conspicuous where it is found in purely Latin phrases,
as in the opening of the sixteenth elegy--
_Quae fueram magnis olim patefacta triumphis
Ianua Tarpeiae nota pudicitiae
Cuius inaurati celebrarunt limina currus
Captorum lacrimis umida supplicibus,_
and where it depends on a lavish use of Greek ornament, as in the opening
of the third--
_Qualis Thesea iacuit cedente carina
Languida desertis Gnosia litoribus,
Qualis et accubuit primo Cepheia somno
Libera iam duris cotibus Andromede,_
Even when one comes to them fresh from Virgil, lines like these open a
new world of sound. The Greek elegiac, as it is known to us by the finest
work of the epigrammatists, had an almost unequalled flexibility and
elasticity of rhythm; this quality Propertius from the first seized, and
all but made his own. By what course of reasoning he was led in his later
work to suppress this large and elastic treatment, and approximate more
and more closely to the fine but somewhat limited and metallic rhythm
which has been perpetuated by the usage of Ovid, we cannot guess. In this
first book he ends the pentameter freely with words of three, four, and
five syllables; the monotony of the perpetual disyllabic termination,
which afterwards became the normal usage, is hardly compensated by the
increased smoothness which it gives the verse.
But this new power of versification accompanied a new spirit even more
remarkable, which is of profound import as the precursor of a whole
school of modern European poetry. The _Cynthia_ is the first appearance
in literature of the neurotic young man, who reappeared last century in
Rousseau's _Confessions_ and Goethe's _Werther,_ and who has dominated
French literature so largely since Alfred de Musset. The way had been
shown half a century before by that remarkable poet, Meleager of Gadara,
whom Propertius had obviously studied with keen appreciation. Phrases in
the _Cynthia_, like--
_Tum mihi constantis deiecit lumina fastus
Et caput impositis pressit Amor pedibus,_
or--
_Qui non ante patet donec manus attigit ossa,_
are in the essential spirit of Meleager, and, though not verbally copied
from him, have the precise quality of his rhythms and turns of phrase.
But the abandonment to sensibility, the absorption in self-pity and the
sentiment of passion, are carried by Propertius to a far greater length.
The abasement of a line like--
Sis quodcunque voles, non aliena tamen,_
is in the strongest possible contrast to that powerful passion which
fills the poetry of Catullus, or to the romantic tenderness of the
_Eclogues_; and in the extraordinary couplet--
_Me sine, quem semper voluit fortuna iacere,
Hanc animam extremae reddere nequitiae,_
"the expense of spirit in a waste of shame" reaches its culminating
point. This tremulous self-absorption, rather than any defect of eye or
imagination, is the reason of the extraordinary lapses which now and then
he makes both in description and in sentiment. The vivid and picturesque
sketches he gives of fashionable life at watering-places and country-
houses in the eleventh and fourteenth elegies, or single touches, like
that in the remarkable couplet--
_Me mediae noctes, me sidera prona iacentem,
Frigidaque Eoo me dolet aura gelu,_
show that where he was interested neither his eye nor his language had
any weakness; but, as a rule, he is not interested either in nature or,
if the truth be told, in Cynthia, but wholly in himself. He ranks among
the most learned of the Augustan poets; but, for want of the rigorous
training and self-criticism in which Virgil and Horace spent their lives,
he made on the whole but a weak and ineffective use of a natural gift
perhaps equal to either of theirs. Thus it is that his earliest work is
at the same time his most fascinating and brilliant. After the _Cynthia_
he rapidly became, in the mordant phrase used by Heine of Musset, _un
jeune homme d'un bien beau passé_. Some premonition of early death seems
to have haunted him; and the want of self-control in his poetry may
reflect actual physical weakness united with his vivid imagination.
The second and third books of the _Elegies_,[9] though they show some
technical advance, and are without the puerilities which here and there
occur in the _Cynthia,_ are on the whole immensely inferior to it in
interest and charm. There is still an occasional line of splendid beauty,
like the wonderful--
_Sunt apud infernos tot milia formosarum;_
an occasional passage of stately rhythm, like the lines beginning--
_Quandocunque igitur nostros mors clausit ocellos;_
but the smooth versification has now few surprises; the learning is
becoming more mechanical; there is a tendency to say over again what he
had said before, and not to say it quite so well.
Through these two books Cynthia is still the main subject. But with the
advance of years, and his own growing fame as a poet, his passion--if
that can be called a passion which was so self-conscious and so
sentimental--fell away from him, and left his desire for literary
reputation the really controlling motive of his work. In the introductory
poem to the fourth book there is a new and almost aggressive tone with
regard to his own position among the Roman poets, which is in strong
contrast to the modesty of the epilogue to the third book. The inflated
invocation of the ghost of Callimachus laid him fatally open to the
quietly disdainful reference by which, without even mentioning Propertius
by name, Horace met it a year or two later in the second book of the
_Epistles_. But even Horace is not infallible; and Propertius was, at all
events, justified in regarding himself as the head of a new school of
poetry, and one which struck its roots wide and deep.
In the fourth and fifth books of the _Elegies_ there is a wide range of
subject; the verse is being tested for various purposes, and its
flexibility answers to almost every demand. But already we feel its fatal
facility. The passage beginning _Atque ubi iam Venerem,_ in the poem
where he contrasts his own life with those of the followers of riches and
ambition, is a dilution into twelve couplets of eight noble lines of the
_Georgics,_ with an effect almost as feeble, if not so grotesque, as that
of the later metaphrasts, who occupied themselves in turning heroic into
elegiac poems by inserting a pentameter between each two lines. The sixth
elegy of the same book is nothing but a cento of translations from the
_Anthology,_ strung together and fastened up at the end by an original
couplet in the worst and most puerile manner of his early writing. On the
other hand, these books include fresh work of great merit, and some of
great beauty. The use of the elegiac metre to tell stories from Graeco-
Roman mythology and legendary Roman history is begun in several poems
which, though Propertius has not the story-telling gift of Ovid, showed
the way to the delightful narratives of the _Fasti_. A few of the more
personal elegies have a new and not very agreeable kind of realism, as
though Musset had been touched with the spirit of Flaubert. In one, the
ninth of the fourth book, the realism is in a different and pleasanter
vein; only Herrick among English poets has given such imaginative charm
to straightforward descriptions of the ordinary private life of the
middle classes. The fifth book ends with the noble elegy on Cornelia, the
wife of Paulus Aemilius Lepidus, in which all that is best in Propertius'
nature at last finds splendid and memorable expression. It has some of
his common failings,--passages of inappropriate learning, and a little
falling off towards the end. But where it rises to its height, in the
lines familiar to all who know Latin, it is unsurpassed in any poetry for
grace and tenderness.
_Nunc tibi commendo communia pignora natos;
Haec cura et cineri spirat inusta meo.
Fungere maternis vicibus pater: illa meorum
Omnis erit collo turba fovenda tuo.
Oscula cum dederis tua flentibus, adice matris;
Tota domus coepit nunc onus esse tuum.
Et siquid doliturus eris, sine testibus illis!
Cum venient, siccis oscula falle genis:
Sat tibi sint noctes quas de me, Paule, fatiges,
Somniaque in faciem reddita saepe meam._
In these lines, hardly to be read without tears, Propertius for once
rises into that clear air in which art passes beyond the reach of
criticism. What he might have done in this new manner had he lived longer
can only be conjectured; at the same age neither Virgil nor Horace had
developed their full genius. But the perpetual recurrence in the later
poems of that brooding over death, which had already marked his juvenile
work, indicates increasing exhaustion of power. Even the sparkling elegy
on the perils of a lover's rapid night journey from Rome to Tibur passes
at the end into a sombre imagination of his own grave; and the fine and
remarkable poem (beginning with the famous _Sunt aliquid Manes_) in which
the ghost of Cynthia visits him, is full of the same morbid dwelling on
the world of shadows, where the "golden girl" awaits her forgetful lover.
_Atque hoc sollicitum vince sopore caput_ had become the sum of his
prayers. But a little while afterwards the restless brain of the poet
found the sleep that it desired.
At a time when literary criticism was so powerful at Rome, and poetry was
ruled by somewhat rigid canons of taste, it is not surprising that more
stress was laid on the defects than on the merits of Propertius' poetry.
It evidently annoyed Horace; and in later times Propertius remained the
favourite of a minority, while general taste preferred the more
faultless, if less powerfully original, elegiacs of his contemporary,
Albius Tibullus. This pleasing and graceful poet was a few years older
than Propertius, and, like him, died at the age of about thirty-five. He
did not belong to the group of court poets who formed the circle of
Maecenas, but to a smaller school under the patronage of Marcus Valerius
Messalla, a distinguished member of the old aristocracy, who, though
accepting the new government and loyal in his service to the Emperor,
held somewhat aloof from the court, and lived in a small literary world
of his own. Tibullus published in his lifetime two books of elegiac
poems; after his death a third volume was published, containing a few of
his posthumous pieces, together with poems by other members of the same
circle. Of these, six are elegies by a young poet of the upper class,
writing under the name of Lygdamus, and plausibly conjectured to have
been a near relative of Tibullus. One, a panegyric on Messalla, by an
unknown author, is without any poetical merit, and only interesting as an
average specimen of the amateur verse of the time when, in the phrase of
Horace--
_Populus calet uno
Scribendi studio; pueri patresque severi
Fronde comas vincti cenant et carmina dictant._
The curious set of little poems going under the name of Sulpicia, and
included in the volume, will be noticed later.
Tibullus might be succinctly and perhaps not unjustly described as a
Virgil without the genius. The two poets died in the same year, and a
contemporary epigram speaks of them as the recognised masters of heroic
and elegiac verse; while the well known tribute of Ovid, in the third
book of the _Amores,_ shows that the death of Tibullus was regarded as an
overwhelming loss by the general world of letters. "Pure and fine," the
well-chosen epithets of Quintilian, are in themselves no slight praise;
and the poems reveal a gentleness of nature and sincerity of feeling
which make us think of their author less with admiration than with a sort
of quiet affection. No two poets could be more strongly contrasted than
Tibullus and Propertius, even when their subject and manner of treatment
approximate most closely. In Tibullus the eagerness, the audacity, the
irregular brilliance of Propertius are wholly absent; as are the feverish
self-consciousness and the want of good taste and good sense which are
equally characteristic of the latter. Poetry is with him, not the
outburst of passion, or the fruit of high imagination, but the refined
expression of sincere feeling in equable and melodious verse. The
delightful epistle addressed to him by Horace shows how high he stood in
the esteem and affection of a severe critic, and a man whose friendship
was not lightly won or lavishly expressed. He stands easily at the head
of Latin poets of the second order. In delicacy, in refinement, in grace
of rhythm and diction, he cannot be easily surpassed; he only wants the
final and incommunicable touch of genius which separates really great
artists from the rest of the world.
IV.
OVID.
The Peace of the Empire, secured by the victory of Actium, and fully
established during the years which followed by Augustus and his
lieutenants, inaugurated a new era of social life in the capital. The
saying of Augustus, that he found Rome brick and left it marble, may be
applied beyond the sphere of mere architectural decoration. A French
critic has well observed that now, for the first time in European
history, the Court and the City existed in their full meaning. Both had
an organised life and a glittering external ease such as was hardly known
again in Europe till the reign of the Grand Monarque. The enormous wealth
of the aristocracy was in the mass hardly touched by all the waste and
confiscations of the civil wars; and, in spite of a more rigorous
administration, fresh accumulations were continually made by the new
official hierarchy, and flowed in from all parts of the Empire to feed
the luxury and splendour of the capital. Wealth and peace, the increasing
influence of Greek culture, and the absence of political excitement,
induced a period of brilliant laxity among the upper classes. The severe
and frugal morals of the Republic still survived in great families, as
well as among that middle class, from which the Empire drew its solid
support; but in fashionable society there was a marked and rapid
relaxation of morals which was vainly combated by stringent social and
sumptuary legislation. The part taken by women in social and political
life is among the most powerful factors in determining the general aspect
of an age. This, which had already been great under the later Republic,
was now greater than ever. The Empress Livia was throughout the reign of
Augustus, and even after his death, one of the most important persons in
Rome. Partly under her influence, partly from the temperament and policy
of Augustus himself, a sort of court Puritanism grew up, like that of the
later years of Louis Quatorze. The aristocracy on the whole disliked and
despised it; but the monarchy was stronger than they. The same gloom
overshadows the end of these two long reigns. Sentences of death or
banishment fell thick among the leaders of that gay and profligate
society; to later historians it seemed that all the result of the
imperial policy had been to add hypocrisy to profligacy, and incidentally
to cripple and silence literature.
Of this later Augustan period Ovid is the representative poet. The world
in which he lived may be illustrated by a reference to two ladies of his
acquaintance, both in different ways singularly typical of the time.
Julia, the only daughter of Augustus, still a mere child when her father
became master of the world, was brought up with a strictness which
excited remark even among those who were familiar with the strict
traditions of earlier times. Married, when a girl of fourteen, to her
cousin, Marcus Claudius Marcellus; after his death, two years later, to
the Emperor's chief lieutenant, Marcus Agrippa; and a third time, when he
also died, to the son of the Empress Livia, afterwards the Emperor
Tiberius,--she was throughout treated as a part of the State machinery,
and as something more or less than a woman. But she turned out to be, in
fact, a woman whose beauty, wit, and recklessness were alike
extraordinary, and who rose in disastrous revolt against the system in
which she was forced to be a pivot. Alike by birth and genius she easily
took the first place in Roman society; and under the very eyes of the
Emperor she multiplied her lovers right and left, and launched out into a
career that for years was the scandal of all Rome. When she had reached
the age of thirty-seven, in the same year when Ovid's _Art of Love_ was
published, the axe suddenly fell; she was banished, disinherited, and
kept till her death in rigorous imprisonment, almost without the
necessaries of life. Such were the first-fruits of the social reform
inaugurated by Augustus and sung by Horace.