years of the first century after Christ. The "year of four Emperors"
which passed between the downfall of Nero and the accession of Vespasian
had shaken the whole Empire to its foundations. The recovery from that
shock left the Roman world established on a new footing. In literature,
no less than in government and finance, a feverish period of inflated
credit had brought it to the verge of ruin. At the beginning of his reign
Vespasian announced a deficit of four hundred million pounds (a sum the
like of which had never been heard of before) in the public exchequer;
some similar estimate might have been formed by a fanciful analogy of the
collapse that had to be made good in literature, when style could no
longer bear the tremendous overdrafts made on it by Seneca and Lucan. And
in the literary as in the political world there was no complete recovery:
throughout the second century we have to trace the gradual decline of
letters going on alongside of that mysterious decay of the Empire itself
before which a continuously admirable government was all but helpless.
Publius Papinius Statius, the most eminent of the poets of this age, was
born towards the end of the reign of Tiberius, and seems to have died
before the accession of Nerva. His poetry can all be assigned to the
reign of Domitian, or the few years immediately preceding it. As to his
life little is known, probably because it passed without much incident.
He was born at Naples, and returned to it in advanced age after the
completion of his _Thebaid_; but the greater part of his life was spent
at Rome, where his father was a grammarian of some distinction who had
acted for a time as tutor to Domitian. He had thus access to the court,
where he improved his opportunities by unstinted adulation of the Emperor
and his favourite eunuch Earinus. The curious mediaeval tradition of his
conversion to Christianity, which is so finely used by Dante in the
_Purgatorio_, cannot be traced to its origin, and does not appear to have
any historical foundation.
Twelve years were spent by Statius over his epic poem on the War of
Thebes, which was published about the year 92, with a florid dedication
to Domitian. After its completion he began another epic, on an even more
imposing scale, on the life of Achilles and the whole of the Trojan war.
Of this _Achilleid_ only the first and part of the second book were ever
completed; had it continued on the same scale it would have been the
longest of Greek or Latin epics. At various times after the publication
of the _Thebaid_ appeared the five books of _Silvae_, miscellaneous and
occasional poems on different subjects, often of a personal nature.
Another epic, on the campaign of Domitian in Germany, has not been
preserved.
The _Thebaid_ became very famous; later poets, like Ausonius or Claudian,
constantly imitate it. Its smooth versification, copious diction, and
sustained elegance made it a sort of canon of poetical technique. But,
itself, it rises beyond the merely mechanical level. Without any quality
that can quite be called genius, Statius had real poetical feeling. His
taste preserves him from any great extravagances; and among much tedious
rhetoric and cumbrous mythology, there is enough of imagination and
pathos to make the poem interesting and even charming. At a time when
Guercino and the Caracci were counted great masters in the sister art,
the _Thebaid_ was also held to be a masterpiece. Besides complete
versions by inferior hands, both Pope and Gray took the pains to
translate portions of it into English verse, and it is perpetually quoted
in the literature of the eighteenth century. It is, indeed, perhaps its
severest condemnation that it reads best in quotations. Not only the more
highly elaborated passages, but almost any passage taken at random, may
be read with pleasure and admiration; those who have had the patience to
read it through, however much they may respect the continuous excellence
of its workmanship, will (as with the _Gierusalemme Liberata_ of Tasso)
feel nearly as much respect for their own achievement as for that of the
poet.
The _Silvae_, consisting as they do of comparatively short pieces,
display the excellences of Statius to greater advantage. Of the thirty-
two poems, six are in lyric metres, the rest being all written in the
smooth graceful hexameters of which the author of the _Thebaid_ was so
accomplished a master. The subjects, for the most part of a familiar
nature, are very various. A touching and affectionate poem to his wife
Claudia is one of the best known. Several are on the death of friends;
one of very great beauty is on the marriage of his brother poet,
Arruntius Stella, to a lady with the charming name of Violantilla. The
descriptive pieces on the villas of acquaintances at Tivoli and Sorrento,
and on the garden of another in Rome, are full of a genuine feeling for
natural beauty. The poem on the death of his father, though it has
passages of romantic fancy, is deformed by an excess of literary
allusions; but that on the death of his adopted son (he had no children
of his own), which ends the collection, is very touching in the sincerity
of its grief and its reminiscences of the dead boy's infancy. Perhaps the
finest, certainly the most remarkable of all these pieces is the short
poem (one might almost call it a sonnet) addressed to Sleep. This, though
included in the last book of the _Silvae_, must have been written in
earlier life; it shows that had Statius not been entangled in the
composition of epics by the conventional taste of his age, he might have
struck out a new manner in ancient poetry. The poem is so brief that it
may be quoted in full:--
_Crimine quo merui iuvenis, placidissime divom,
Quove errore miser, donis ut solus egerem,
Somne, tuis? Tacet omne pecus, volueresque, feraeque,
Et simulant fessos curvata cacumina somnos;
Nec trucibus fluviis idem sonus; occidit horror
Aequoris, et terris maria inclinata quiescunt.
Septima iam rediens Phoebe mihi respicit aegras
Stare genas, totidem Oeteae Paphiaeque revisunt
Lampades, et toties nostros Tithonia questus
Praeterit et gelido spargit miserata flagello.
Unde ego sufficiam? Non si mihi lumina mille
Quae sacer alterna tantum statione tenebat
Argus, et haud unquam vigilabat corpore toto.
At nunc, heu, aliquis longa sub nocte puellae
Brachia nexa tenens, ultra te, Somne, repellit:
Inde veni: nec te totas infundere pennas
Luminibus compello meis: hoc turba precatur
Laetior; extremae me tange cacumine virgae,
Sufficit, aut leviter suspenso poplite transi._
Were the three lines beginning _Unde ego sufficiam_ struck out--and one
might almost fancy them to have been inserted later by an unhappy second
thought--the remainder of this poem would be as perfect as it is unique.
The famous sonnet of Wordsworth on the same subject must at once occur to
an English reader; but the poem in its manner, especially in the dying
cadence of the last two lines, recalls even more strongly some of the
finest sonnets of Keats. "Had Statius written often thus," in the words
Johnson uses of Gray, "it had been vain to blame, and useless to praise
him."
The two other epic poets contemporary with Statius whose works are
extant, Valerius Flaccus and Silius Italicus, belong generally to the
same school, but stand on a much lower level of excellence. The former is
only known as the author of the _Argonautica_. An allusion in the proem
of his epic to the recent destruction of Jerusalem by Titus in the year
70, and another in a later book to the great eruption of Vesuvius in 79,
fix the date of the poem; and Quintilian, writing in the later years of
Domitian, refers to the poet's recent death. From another passage in the
_Argonautica_ it has been inferred that Flaccus was one of the college of
quindecemvirs, and therefore of high family. The _Argonautica_ follows
the well-known poem of Apollonius Rhodius, but by his diffuse rhetorical
treatment the author expands the story to such a length that in between
five and six thousand lines he has only got as far as the escape of Jason
and Medea from Colchos. Here the poem breaks off abruptly in the eighth
book; it was probably meant to consist of twelve, and to end with the
return of the Argonauts to Greece. In all respects, except the choice of
subject, Valerius Flaccus is far inferior to Statius. He cannot indeed
wholly destroy the perennial charm of the story of the Golden Fleece, but
he comes as near doing so as is reasonably possible. His versification is
correct, but without freedom or variety; and incidents and persons are
alike presented through a cloud of monotonous and mechanical rhetoric.
If Valerius Flaccus to some degree redeemed his imaginative poverty by
the choice of his subject, the other epic poet of the Flavian era,
Tiberius Catius Silius Italicus, chose a subject which no ingenuity could
have adapted to epic treatment. His _Punic War_ may fairly contend for
the distinction of being the worst epic ever written; and its author is
the most striking example in Latin literature of the incorrigible
amateur. He had, in earlier life, passed through a distinguished official
career; he was consul the year before the fall of Nero, and in the
political revolutions which followed conducted himself with such prudence
that, though an intimate friend of Vitellius, he remained in favour under
Vespasian. After a term of further service as proconsul of Asia, he
retired to a dignified and easy leisure. His love of literature was
sincere; he prided himself on owning one of Cicero's villas, and the land
which held Virgil's grave, and he was a generous patron to men of
letters. The fulsome compliments paid to him by Martial (who has the
effrontery to speak of him as a combined Virgil and Cicero) are, no
doubt, only an average specimen of the atmosphere which surrounded so
munificent a patron; but the admiration which he openly expressed for the
slave Epictetus does him a truer honour. The _Bellum Punicum_, in
seventeen books, is longer than the _Odyssey_. It closely follows the
history as told by Livy; but the elements of almost epic grandeur in the
contest between Rome and Hannibal all disappear amid masses of tedious
machinery. Without any invention or constructive power of his own, Silius
copies with tasteless pedantry all the outworn traditions of the heroic
epic. What Homer or Virgil has done, he must needs do too. The Romans are
the Dardanians or the Aeneadae: Juno interferes in Hannibal's favour, and
Venus, hidden in a cloud, watches the battle of the Trebia from a hill.
Hannibal is urged to war by a dream like that of Agamemnon in the
_Iliad_; he is equipped with a spear "fatal to many thousands" of the
enemy, and a shield, like that of Aeneas, embossed with subjects from
Carthaginian history, and with the river Ebro flowing round the edge as
an ingenious variant of the Ocean-river on the shield of Achilles. A
Carthaginian fleet cruising off the coast of Italy falls in with Proteus,
who takes the opportunity of prophesying the course of the war. Hannibal
at Zama pursues a phantom of Scipio, which flies before him and
disappears like that of Aeneas before Turnus. Such was the degradation to
which the noble epic machinery had now sunk. Soon after the death of
Silius the poem seems to have fallen into merited oblivion; there is a
single reference to it in a poet of the fifth century, and thereafter it
remained unknown or unheard of until a manuscript discovered by Poggio
Bracciolini brought it to light again early in the fifteenth century.
The works of the other Flavian poets, Curiatius Maternus, Saleius Bassus,
Arruntius Stella, and the poetess Sulpicia, are lost; all else that
survives of the verse of the period is the work of a writer of a
different order, but of considerable importance and value, the
epigrammatist Martial. By no means a poet of the first rank, hardly
perhaps a poet at all according to any strict definition, he has yet a
genius of his own which for many ages made him the chief and almost the
sole model for a particular kind of literature.
Marcus Valerius Martialis was born at Augusta Bilbilis in Central Spain
towards the end of the reign of Tiberius. He came to Rome as a young man
during the reign of Nero, when his countrymen, Seneca and Lucan, were at
the height of their reputation. Through their patronage he obtained a
footing, if not at court, yet among the wealthy amateurs who extended a
less dangerous protection to men of letters. For some thirty-five years
he led the life of a dependant; under Domitian his assiduous flattery
gained for him the honorary tribunate which conferred equestrian rank,
though not the rewards of hard cash which he would probably have
appreciated more. The younger Pliny, who speaks of him with a slightly
supercilious approval, repaid with a more substantial gratification a
poem comparing him to Cicero. Martial's gift for occasional verse just
enabled him to live up three pair of stairs in the city; in later years,
when he had an income from booksellers as well as from private patrons,
he could afford a tiny country house among the Sabine hills. Early in the
reign of Domitian he began to publish regularly, bringing out a volume of
epigrams every year. After the accession of Trajan he returned to his
native town, from which, however, he sent a final volume three years
afterwards to his Roman publishers. There his talent for flattery at last
bore substantial fruit; a rich lady of the neighbourhood presented him
with a little estate, and though the longing for the country, which had
grown on him in Rome, was soon replaced by a stronger feeling of regret
for the excitement of the capital, he spent the remainder of his life in
material comfort.
The collected works of Martial, as published after his death, which
probably took place about the year 102, consist of twelve books of
miscellaneous _Epigrams,_ which are prefaced by a book of pieces called
_Liber Spectaculorum,_ upon the performances given by Titus and Domitian
in the capital, especially in the vast amphitheatre erected by the
former. At the end are added two books of _Xenia_ and _Apophoreta,_
distichs written to go with the Christmas presents of all sorts which
were interchanged at the festival of the Saturnalia. These last are, of
course, not "distinguished for a strong poetic feeling," any more than
the cracker mottoes of modern times. But the twelve books of _Epigrams_,
while they include work of all degrees of goodness and badness, are
invaluable from the vivid picture which they give of actual daily life at
Rome in the first century. Few writers of equal ability show in their
work such a total absence of character, such indifference to all ideas or
enthusiasms; yet this very quality makes the verse of Martial a more
perfect mirror of the external aspects of Roman life. A certain
intolerance of hypocrisy is the nearest approach Martial ever makes to
moral feeling. His perpetual flattery of Domitian, though gross as a
mountain--it generally takes the form of comparing him with the Supreme
Being, to the disadvantage of the latter--has no more serious political
import than there is serious moral import in the almost unexampled
indecency of a large proportion of the epigrams. The "candour" noted in
him by Pliny is simply that of a sheet of paper which is indifferent to
what is written upon it, fair or foul. He may claim the merit--nor is it
an inconsiderable one--of being totally free from pretence. In one of the
most graceful of his poems, he enumerates to a friend the things which
make up a happy life: "Be yourself, and do not wish to be something
else," is the line which sums up his counsel. To his own work he extends
the same easy tolerance with which he views the follies and vices of
society. "A few good, some indifferent, the greater number bad"--so he
describes his epigrams; what opening is left after this for hostile
criticism? If elsewhere he hints that only indolence prevented him from
producing more important work, so harmless an affectation may be passed
over in a writer whose clearness of observation and mastery of slight but
lifelike portraiture are really of a high order.
By one of the curious accidents of literary history Martial, as the only
Latin epigrammatist who left a large mass of work, gave a meaning to the
word epigram from which it is only now beginning to recover. The art,
practised with such infinite grace by Greek artists of almost every age
between Solon and Justinian, was just at this period sunk to a low ebb.
The contemporary Greek epigrammatists whose work is preserved in the
Palatine Anthology, from Nicarchus and Lucilius to Strato, all show the
same heaviness of handling and the same tiresome insistence on making a
point, which prevent Martial's epigrams from being placed in the first
rank. But while in any collection of Greek epigrammatic poetry these
authors naturally sink to their own place, Martial, as well by the mere
mass of his work--some twelve hundred pieces in all, exclusive of the
cracker mottoes--as by his animation and pungent wit, set a narrow and
rather disastrous type for later literature. He appealed strongly to all
that was worst in Roman taste--its heavy-handedness, its admiration of
verbal cleverness, its tendency towards brutality. Half a century later,
Verus Caesar, that wretched creature whom Hadrian had adopted as his
successor, and whose fortunate death left the Empire to the noble rule of
Antoninus Pius, called Martial "his Virgil:" the incident is highly
significant of the corruption of taste which in the course of the second
century concurred with other causes to bring Latin literature to decay
and almost to extinction.
Among the learned Romans of this age of great learning, the elder Pliny,
_aetatis suae doctissimus_, easily took the first place. Born in the
middle of the reign of Tiberius, Gaius Plinius Secundus of Comum passed
his life in high public employments, both military and civil, which took
him successively over nearly all the provinces of the Empire. He served
in Germany, in the Danubian provinces, in Spain, in Gaul, in Africa, and
probably also in Syria, on the staff of Titus, during the Jewish war. In
August of the year 79 he was in command of the fleet stationed at Misenum
when the memorable eruption of Vesuvius took place. In his zeal for
scientific investigation he set sail for the spot in a man-of-war, and,
lingering too near the zone of the eruption, was suffocated by the rain
of hot ashes. The account of his death, given by his nephew in a letter
to the historian Tacitus, is one of the best known passages in the
classics.
By amazing industry and a most rigid economy of time, Pliny combined with
his continuous official duties an immense reading and a literary
production of great scope and value. A hundred and sixty volumes of his
extracts from writers of all kinds, written, we are told, on both sides
of the paper in an extremely small hand, were bequeathed by him to his
nephew. Besides works on grammar, rhetoric, military tactics, and other
subjects, he wrote two important histories--one, in twenty books, on the
wars on the German frontier, the other a general history of Rome in
thirty-one books, from the accession of Nero to the joint triumph of
Vespasian and Titus after the subjugation of the Jewish revolt. Both
these valuable works are completely lost, nor is it possible to determine
how far their substance reappears in Tacitus and Suetonius; the former,
however, in both _Annals_ and _Histories_, repeatedly cites him as an
authority. But we fortunately possess the most important of his works,
the thirty-seven books of his _Natural History_. This is not, indeed, a
great work of literature, though its style, while sometimes heavy and
sometimes mannered, is on the whole plain, straightforward, and
unpretentious; but it is a priceless storehouse of information on every
branch of natural science as known to the ancient world. It was published
with a dedication to Titus two years before Pliny's death, but continued
during the rest of his life to receive his additions and corrections. It
was compiled from a vast reading. Nearly five hundred authors (about a
hundred and fifty Roman, the rest foreign) are cited in his catalogue of
authorities. The plan of this great encyclopedia was carefully thought
out before its composition was begun. It opens with a general system of
physiography, and then passes successively to geography, anthropology,
human physiology, zoology and comparative physiology, botany, including
agriculture and horticulture, medicine, mineralogy, and the fine arts.
After being long held as an almost infallible authority, Pliny, in more
recent times, fell under the reproach of credulity and want of sufficient
discrimination in the value of his sources. Further research has gone
some way to reinstate his reputation. Without having any profound
original knowledge of the particular sciences, he had a naturally
scientific mind. His tendency to give what is merely curious the same
attention as what is essentially important, has incidentally preserved
much valuable detail, especially as regards the arts; and modern research
often tends to confirm the anecdotes which were once condemned as plainly
erroneous and even absurd. Pliny has, further, the great advantage of
being shut up in no philosophical system. His philosophy of life, and his
religion so far as it appears, is that of his age, a moderate and
rational Stoicism. Like his contemporaries, he complains of the modern
falling away from nature and the decay of morals. But it is as the
conscientious student and the unbiassed observer that he habitually
appears. In diligence, accuracy, and freedom from preconception or
prejudice, he represents the highest level reached by ancient science
after Aristotle and his immediate successors.
Of the more specialised scientific treatises belonging to this period,
only two are extant, the three books on _Strategy_ by Sextus Julius
Frontinus, and a treatise by the same author on the public water-supply
of Rome; both belong to strict science, rather than to literature. The
schools of rhetoric and grammar continued to flourish: among many
unimportant names that of Quintilian stands eminent, as not only a
grammarian and rhetorician, but a fine critic and a writer of high
substantive value.
Marcus Fabius Quintilianus of Calagurris, a small town on the Upper Ebro,
is the last, and perhaps the most distinguished of that school of Spanish
writers which bulks so largely in the history of the first century. He
was educated at Rome, and afterwards returned to his native town as a
teacher of rhetoric. There he made, or improved, the acquaintance of
Servius Sulpicius Galba, proconsul of Tarraconensian Spain in the later
years of Nero. When Galba was declared Emperor by the senate, he took
Quintilian with him to Rome, where he was appointed a public teacher of
rhetoric, with a salary from the privy purse. He retained his fame and
his favour through the succeeding reigns. Domitian made him tutor to the
two grand-nephews whom he destined for his own successors, and raised him
to consular rank. For about twenty years he remained the most celebrated
teacher in the capital, combining his professorship with a large amount
of actual pleading in the law-courts. His published works belong to the
later years of his life, when he had retired from the bar and from public
teaching. His first important treatise, on the decay of oratory, _De
Causis Corruptae Eloquentiae_, is not extant. It was followed, a few
years later, in or about the year 93, by his great work, the _Institutio
Oratoria_, which sums up the teaching and criticism of his life.