Cernere cum facili lucem ratione viderer."
Quod quaeris, Deus est. Coneris scandere caelum
Fataque fatali genitus cognoscere lege
Et transire tuum pectus, mundoque potiri:
Pro pretio labor est, nec sunt immunia tanta._
Wherever one found this language used, in prose or verse, it would be
memorable. The thought is not a mere text of the schools; it is strongly
and finely conceived, and put in a form that anticipates the ardent and
lofty manner of Lucan, without his perpetual overstrain of expression.
Other passages, showing the same mental force, occur in the
_Astronomica_; one might instance the fine passage on the power of the
human eye to take in, within its tiny compass, the whole immensity of the
heavens; or another, suggested by the mention of the constellation Argo,
on the influence of sea-power on history, where the inevitable and well-
worn instances of Salamis and Actium receive a fresh life from the
citation of the destruction of the Athenian fleet in the bay of Syracuse,
and the great naval battles of the first Punic war. Or again, the lines
with which he opens the fourth book, weakened as their effect is by what
follows them, a tedious enumeration of events showing the power of
destiny over human fortunes, are worthy of a great poet:--
_Quid tam sollicitis vitam consumimus annis,
Torquemurque metu caecaque cupidine rerum?
Acternisque senes curis, dum quaerimus aevum
Perdimus, et nullo votorum fine beati
Victuros agimus semper, nec vivimus unquam?_
These passages have been cited from the _Astronomica_ because, to all but
a few professional students of Latin, the poem is practically unknown.
The only other poet who survives from the reign of Tiberius is in a very
different position, being so well known and so slight in literary quality
as to make any quotations superfluous. Phaedrus, a Thracian freedman
belonging to the household of Augustus, published at this time the well-
known collection of _Fables_ which, like the lyrics of the pseudo-
Anacreon, have obtained from their use as a school-book a circulation
much out of proportion to their merit. Their chief interest is as the
last survival of the _urbanus sermo_ in Latin poetry. They are written in
iambic senarii, in the fluent and studiously simple Latin of an earlier
period, not without occasional vulgarisms, but with a total absence of
the turgid rhetoric which was coming into fashion. The _Fables_ are the
last utterance made by the speech of Terence: it is singular that this
intimately Roman style should have begun and ended with two authors of
servile birth and foreign blood. But the patronage of literature was now
passing out of the hands of statesmen. Terence had moved in the circle of
the younger Scipio; one book of the _Fables_ of Phaedrus is dedicated to
Eutychus, the famous chariot-driver of the Greens in the reign of
Caligula. It was not long before Phaedrus was in use as a school-book;
but his volume was apparently regarded as hardly coming within the
province of serious literature. It is ignored by Seneca and not mentioned
by Quintilian. But we must remind ourselves that the most celebrated
works, whether in prose or verse, do not of necessity have the widest
circulation or the largest influence. Among the poems produced in the
first ten years of this century the _Original Poems_ of Jane and Ann
Taylor are hardly if at all mentioned in handbooks of English literature;
but to thousands of readers they were more familiar than the contemporary
verse of Wordsworth or Coleridge or even of Scott. In their terse and
pure English, the language which is transmitted from one generation to
another through the continuous tradition of the nursery, they may remind
us of the _Fables_ of Phaedrus.
The collection, as it has reached us, consists of nearly a hundred
pieces. Of these three-fourths are fables proper; being not so much
translations from the Greek of Aesop as versions of the traditional
stories, written and unwritten, which were the common inheritance of the
Aryan peoples. Mixed up with these are a number of stories which are not
strictly fables; five of them are about Aesop himself, and there are also
stories told of Simonides, Socrates, and Menander. Two are from the
history of his own time, one relating a grim jest of the Emperor
Tiberius, and the other a domestic tragedy which had been for a while the
talk of the town in the previous reign. There are also, besides the
prologues and epilogues of the several books, a few pieces in which
Phaedrus speaks in his own person,[10] defending himself against
detractors with an acrid tone which recalls the Terentian prologues. The
body of fables current in the Middle Ages is considered by the most
recent investigators to descend from the collection of Phaedrus, though
probably supplemented from the Greek collection independently formed by
Babrius about the same period.
Though Livy is the single great historian of the Augustan age, there was
throughout this period a profuse production of memoirs and commentaries,
as well as of regular histories. Augustus wrote thirteen books of memoirs
of his own life down to the pacification of the Empire at the close of
the Cantabrian war. These are lost; but the _Index Rerum a se Gestarum,_
a brief epitome of his career, which he composed as a sort of epitaph on
himself, is extant. This document was engraved on plates of bronze
affixed to the imperial mausoleum by the Tiber, and copies of it were
inscribed on the various temples dedicated to him in many provincial
cities after his death. It is one of these copies, engraved on the
vestibule wall of the temple of Augustus and Rome at Ancyra in Galatia,
which still exists with inconsiderable gaps. His two principal ministers,
Maecenas and Agrippa, also composed memoirs. The most important work of
the latter hardly, however, falls within the province of literature; it
was a commentary on the great geographical survey of the Empire carried
out under his supervision.
Gaius Asinius Pollio, already mentioned as a critic and tragedian, was
also the author of the most important historical work of the Augustan age
after Livy's. This was a _History of the Civil Wars,_ in seventeen books,
from the formation of the first triumvirate in 60 B.C. to the battle of
Philippi. Though Pollio was a practised rhetorician, his narrative style
was simple and austere. The fine ode addressed to him by Horace during
the composition of this history seems to hint that in Horace's opinion--
or perhaps, rather, in that of Horace's masters--Pollio would find a
truer field for his great literary ability in tragedy. But apart from its
artistic quality, the work of Pollio was of the utmost value as giving
the view held of the Civil wars by a trained administrator of the highest
rank. It was one of the main sources used by Appian and Plutarch, and its
almost total loss is matter of deep regret.
An author of less eminence, and belonging rather to the class of
encyclopedists than of historians, is Pompeius Trogus, the descendant of
a family of Narbonese Gaul, which had for two generations enjoyed the
Roman citizenship. Besides works on zoology and botany, translated or
adapted from the Greek of Aristotle and Theophrastus, Trogus wrote an
important _History of the World_, exclusive of the Roman Empire, which
served as, and may have been designed to be, a complement to that of
Livy. The original work, which extended to forty-four books, is not
extant; but an abridgment, which was executed in the age of the Antonines
by one Marcus Junianus Justinus, and has fortunately escaped the fate
which overtook the abridgment of Livy made about the same time, preserves
the main outlines and much of the actual form of the original. Justin,
whose individual talent was but small, had the good sense to leave the
diction of his original as far as possible unaltered. The pure and
vivacious style, and the evident care and research which Trogus himself,
or the Greek historians whom he follows, had bestowed on the material,
make the work one of very considerable value. Its title, _Historiae
Philippicae_, is borrowed from that of a history conceived on a somewhat
similar plan by Theopompus, the pupil of Isocrates, in or after the reign
of Alexander the Great; and it followed Theopompus in making the
Macedonian Empire the core round which the history of the various
countries included in or bordering upon it was arranged.
Gaius Velleius Paterculus, a Roman officer, who after passing with credit
through high military appointments, entered the general administrative
service of the Empire, and rose to the praetorship, wrote, in the reign
of Tiberius, an abridgment of Roman history in two books, which hardly
rises beyond the mark of the military man who dabbles in letters. The
pretentiousness of his style is partly due to the declining taste of the
period, partly to an idea of his own that he could write in the manner of
Sallust. It alternates between a sort of laboured sprightliness and a
careless conversational manner full of endless parentheses. Yet Velleius
had two real merits; the eye of the trained soldier for character, and an
unaffected, if not a very intelligent, interest in literature. Where he
approaches his own times, his servile attitude towards all the members of
the imperial family, and towards Sejanus, who was still first minister to
Tiberius when the book was published, makes him almost valueless as a
historian; but in the earlier periods his observations are often just and
pointed; and he seems to have been almost the first historian who
included as an essential part of his work some account of the more
eminent writers of his country. A still lower level of aim and attainment
is shown in another work of the same date as that of Velleius, the nine
books of historical anecdotes, _Facta et Dicta Memorabilia,_ by Valerius
Maximus, whose turgid and involved style is not redeemed by any
originality of thought or treatment.
The study of archaeology, both on its linguistic and material sides, was
carried on in the Augustan age with great vigour, though no single name
is comparable to that of Varro for extent and variety of research. One of
the most eminent and copious writers on these subjects was Gaius Julius
Hyginus, a Spanish freed man of Augustus, who made him principal keeper
of the Palatine library. He was a pupil of the most learned Greek
grammarian of the age, Cornelius Alexander Polyhistor, and an intimate
acquaintance of Ovid. Of his voluminous works on geography, history,
astrology, agriculture, and poetry, all are lost but two treatises on
mythology, which in their present form are of a much later date, and are
at best only abridged and corrupted versions, if (as many modern critics
are inclined to think) they are not wholly the work of some author of the
second or third century. Hyginus was also one of the earliest
commentators on Virgil; he possessed among his treasures a manuscript of
the _Georgics,_ which came from Virgil's own house, though it was not
actually written by his hand; and many of his annotations and criticisms
on the _Aeneid_ are preserved by Aulus Gellius and later commentators. A
little later, in the reigns of Tiberius and Claudius, Virgilian criticism
was carried on by Quintus Remmius Palaemon of Vicenza, the most
fashionable teacher in the capital, and the author of a famous Latin
grammar on which all subsequent ones were more or less based. Perhaps the
most distinguished of Augustan scholars was another equally celebrated
teacher, Marcus Verrius Flaccus, who was chosen by Augustus as tutor for
his two grandsons, and thenceforward held his school in the imperial
residence on the Palatine. His lexicon, entitled _De Verborum
Significatu_, was a rich treasury of antiquarian research: such parts of
it as survive in the abridgments made from it in the second and eighth
centuries, by Sextus Pompeius Festus and Paulus Diaconus, are still among
our most valuable sources for the study of early Latin language and
institutions. The more practical side of science in the same period was
ably represented by Aulus Cornelius Celsus, the compiler of an
encyclopedia which included comprehensive treatises not only on oratory,
jurisprudence, and philosophy, but on the arts of war, agriculture, and
medicine. The eight books dealing with this last subject are the only
part of the work that has been preserved. This treatise, which is written
in a pure, simple, and elegant Latin, became a standard work. It was one
of the earliest books printed in the fifteenth century, and remained a
text-book for medical students till within living memory. Medical science
had then reached, in the hands of its leading professors, a greater
perfection than it regained till the eighteenth century. Celsus, though
not, so far as is known, the author of any important discovery or
improvement, had fully mastered a system which even then was highly
complicated, and takes rank by his extensive and accurate knowledge, as
well as by his rare literary skill, with the highest names in his
profession. That with his eminent medical acquirement he should have been
able to deal adequately with so many other subjects as well, has long
been a subject of perplexity. The cold censure of Quintilian, who refers
to him slightly as "a man of moderate ability," may be principally aimed
at the treatise on rhetoric, which formed a section of his encyclopedia.
Columella, writing in the next age, speaks of him as one of the two
leading authorities on agriculture; and he is also quoted as an authority
of some value on military tactics. Yet we cannot suppose that the
encyclopedist, however adequate his treatment of one or even more
subjects, would not lay himself open in others to the censure of the
specialist. It seems most reasonable to suppose that Celsus was one of a
class which is not, after all, very uncommon--doctors of eminent
knowledge and skill in their own art, who at the same time are men of
wide culture and far-ranging practical interests.
In striking contrast to Celsus as regards width of knowledge and literary
skill, though no less famous in the history of his own art, is his
contemporary, the celebrated architect Vitruvius Pollio. The ten books
_De Architectura,_ dedicated to Augustus about the year 14 B.C., are the
single important work on classical architecture which has come down from
the ancient world, and, as such, have been the object of continuous
professional study from the Renaissance down to the present day. But
their reputation is not due to any literary merit. Vitruvius, however
able as an architect, was a man of little general knowledge, and far from
handy with his pen. His style varies between immoderate diffuseness and
obscure brevity; sometimes he is barely intelligible, and he never writes
with grace. Where in his introductory chapters or elsewhere he ventures
beyond his strict province, his writing is that of a half-educated man
who has lost simplicity without acquiring skill.
Among the innumerable rhetoricians of this age one only requires formal
notice, Lucius Annaeus Seneca of Cordova, the father of the famous
philosopher, and the grandfather of the poet Lucan. His long life reached
from before the outbreak of war between Caesar and Pompeius till after
the death of Tiberius. His only extant work, a collection of themes
treated in the schools of rhetoric, was written in his old age, after the
fall of Sejanus, and bears witness to the amazing power of memory which
he tells us himself was, when in its prime, absolutely unique. How much
of his life was spent at Rome is uncertain. As a young man he had heard
all the greatest orators of the time except Cicero; and up to the end of
his life he could repeat word for word and without effort whole passages,
if not whole speeches, to which he had listened many years before. His
ten books of _Controversiae_ are only extant in a mutilated form, which
comprises thirty-five out of seventy-four themes; to these is prefixed a
single book of _Suasoriae_, which is also imperfect. The work is a mine
of information for the history of rhetoric under Augustus and Tiberius,
and incidentally includes many interesting quotations, anecdotes, and
criticisms. But we feel in reading it that we have passed definitely away
from the Golden Age. Yet once more "they have forgotten to speak the
Latin tongue at Rome." The Latinity of the later Empire is as distinct
from that of the Augustan age as this last is from the Latinity of the
Republic. Seneca, it is true, was not an Italian by birth; but it is just
this influx of the provinces into literature, which went on under the
early Empire with continually accelerating force, that determined what
type the new Latinity should take. Gaul, Spain, and Africa are henceforth
side by side with Italy, and Italy herself sinks towards the level of a
province. Within thirty years of the death of the elder Seneca "the fatal
secret of empire, that Emperors could be made elsewhere than at Rome,"
was discovered by the Spanish and German legions; of hardly less moment
was the other discovery, that Latin could be written in another than the
Roman manner. In literature no less than in politics the discovery meant
the final breaking up of the old world, and the slow birth of a new one
through alternate torpors and agonies. It might already have been said of
Rome, in the words of a poet of four hundred years later, that she had
made a city of what had been a world. But in this absorption of the world
into a single citizenship, the city itself was ceasing to be a world of
its own; and with the self-centred _urbs_ passed away the _urbanus
sermo,_ that austere and noble language which was the finest flower of
her civilisation.
III
THE EMPIRE.
I
THE ROME OF NERO: SENECA, LUCAN, PETRONIUS
The later years of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, while they brought about
the complete transformation of the government into an absolute monarchy,
also laid the foundations for that reign of the philosophers which had
been dreamed of by Plato, and which has never been so nearly realised as
it was in Rome during the second century after Christ. The Stoical
philosophy, passing beyond the limits of the schools to become at once a
religious creed and a practical code of morals for everyday use,
penetrated deeply into the life of Rome. At first associated with the
aristocratic opposition to the imperial government, it passed through a
period of persecution which only strengthened and consolidated its
growth. The final struggle took place under Domitian, whose edict of the
year 94, expelling all philosophers from Rome, was followed two years
afterwards by his assassination and the establishment, for upwards of
eighty years, of a government deeply imbued with the principles of
Stoicism.
Of the men who set this revolution in motion by their writings, the
earliest and the most distinguished was Lucius Annaeus Seneca, the son of
the rhetorician. Though only of the second rank as a classic, he is a
figure of very great importance in the history of human thought from the
work he did in the exposition of the new creed. As a practical exponent
of morals, he stands, with Plutarch, at the head of all Greek and Roman
writers.
The life of Seneca was one of singularly dramatic contrasts and
vicissitudes. He was born in the year 4 B.C., at Cordova, where, at a
somewhat advanced age, his father had married Helvia, a lady of high
birth, and brought up in the strictest family traditions. Through the
influence of his mother's family (her sister had married Vitrasius
Pollio, who for sixteen years was viceroy of Egypt), the way was easy to
him for advancement in the public service. But delicate health, which
continued throughout his life, kept him as a young man from taking more
than a nominal share in administrative work. He passed into the senate
through the quaestorship, and became a well-known figure at court during
the reign of Caligula. On the accession of Claudius, he was banished to
Corsica at the instance of the Empress Messalina, on the charge of being
the favoured lover of Julia Livilla, Caligula's youngest sister. Whether
the scandal which connected his name with hers, or with that of her
sister Agrippina, had any other foundation than the prurient gossip which
raged round all the members of the imperial family, may well be doubted;
but when Agrippina married Claudius, after the downfall and execution of
Messalina seven years later, she recalled him from exile, obtained his
nomination to the quaestorship, and appointed him tutor to her son
Domitius Nero, then a boy of ten. The influence gained by Seneca, an
accomplished courtier and a clever man of the world, as well as a
brilliant scholar, over his young pupil was for a long time almost
unbounded; and when Nero became Emperor at the age of seventeen, Seneca,
in conjunction with his close friend, Afranius Burrus, commander of the
imperial guards, became practically the administrator of the Empire. His
philosophy was not one which rejected wealth or power; a fortune of three
million pounds may have been amassed without absolute dishonesty, or even
forced upon him, as he pleads himself, by the lavish generosity of his
pupil; but there can be no doubt that in indulging the weaknesses and
passions of Nero, Seneca went far beyond the limits, not only of honour,
but of ordinary prudence. The mild and enlightened administration of the
earlier years of the new reign, the famous _quinquennium Neronis_, which
was looked back to afterwards as a sort of brief golden age, may indeed
be ascribed largely to Seneca's influence; but this influence was based
on an excessive indulgence of Nero's caprices, which soon worked out its
own punishment. His consent to the murder of Agrippina was the death-blow
to his influence for good, or to any self-respect that he may till then
have retained; the death of Burrus left him without support; and, by
retiring into private life and formally offering to make over his whole
fortune to the Emperor, he did not long delay his fate. In the year 65,
on the pretext of complicity in the conspiracy of Piso, he was commanded
to commit suicide, and obeyed with that strange mixture of helplessness
and heroism with which the orders of the master of the world were then
accepted as a sort of inevitable law of nature.
The philosophical writings of Seneca were extremely voluminous; and
though a large number of them are lost, he is still one of the bulkiest
of ancient authors. They fall into three main groups: formal treatises on
ethics; moral letters (_epistolae morales_), dealing in a less continuous
way with the same general range of subjects; and writings on natural
philosophy, from the point of view of the Stoical system. The whole of
these are, however, animated by the same spirit; to the Stoical
philosophy, physics were merely a branch of ethics, and a study to be
pursued for the sake of moral edification, not of reaching truth by
accurate observation or research. The discussions of natural phenomena
are mere texts for religious meditations; and though the eight books of
_Naturales Quaestiones_ were used as a text-book of physical science in
the Middle Ages, they are totally without any scientific value. So, too,
the twenty books of moral letters, nominally addressed to Lucilius, the
procurator of Sicily, merely represent a slight variation of method from
the more formal treatises, _On Anger, On Clemency, On Consolation, On
Peace of Mind, On the Shortness of Life, On Giving and Receiving
Favours_, which are the main substance of Seneca's writings.