treatise on the theory and practice of Latin oratory, are very elaborate
and complete. In the first book, Quintilian discusses the preliminary
training required before the pupil is ready to enter on the study of his
art, beginning with a sketch of the elementary education of the child
from the time he leaves the nursery, which is even now of remarkable
interest. The second book deals with the general principles and scope of
the art of oratory, and continues the discussion of the aims and methods
of education in its later stages. The five books from the third to the
seventh are occupied with an exhaustive treatment of the matter of
oratory, under the heads of what were known to the Roman schools by the
names of _invention_ and _disposition_. The greater part of these books
is, of course, highly technical. The next four books, from the eighth to
the eleventh, treat of the manner of oratory, or all that is included in
the word _style_ in its widest signification. It is in this part of the
treatise that Quintilian, in relation to the course of general reading
both in Greek and Latin that should be pursued by the young orator, gives
the masterly sketch of Latin literature which is the most famous portion
of the whole work. The twelfth book, which concludes the work, reverts to
education in the highest and most extended sense, that of the moral
qualifications of the great orator, and the exhaustive discipline of the
whole nature throughout life which must be continued unfalteringly to the
end.
Now that the formal study of rhetoric has ceased to be a part of the
higher education, the more strictly technical parts of Quintilian's work,
like those of the _Rhetoric_ of Aristotle, have, in a great measure, lost
their relevance to actual life, and with it their general interest to the
world at large. Both the Greek and the Roman masterpiece are read now
rather for their incidental observations upon human nature and the
fundamental principles of art, than for instruction in a particular form
of art which, in the course of time, has become obsolete. These
observations, in Quintilian no less than in Aristotle, are often both
luminous and profound, A collection of the memorable sentences of
Quintilian, such as has been made by his modern editors, is full of
sayings of deep wisdom and enduring value. _Nulla mansit ars qualis
inventa est, nec intra initium stetit; Plerumque facilius est plus
facere, quam idem; Nihil in studiis parvum est; Cito scribendo non fit ut
bene scribatur, bene scribendo fit ut cito; Omnia nostra dum nascuntur
placent, alioqui nec scriberentur_;--such sayings as these, expressed
with admirable terseness and lucidity, are scattered all over the work,
and have a value far beyond the limits of any single study. If they do
not drop from Quintilian with the same curious negligence as they do from
Aristotle (whose best things are nearly always said in a parenthesis),
the advantage is not wholly with the Greek author; the more orderly and
finished method of the Roman teacher marks a higher constructive literary
power than that of Aristotle, whose singular genius made him indeed the
prince of lecturers, but did not place him in the first rank of writers.
Beyond these incidental touches of wisdom and insight, which give an
enduring value to the whole substance of the work, the chief interest for
modern readers in the _Institutio Oratoria_, lies in three portions which
are, more or less, episodic to the strict purpose of the book, though
they sum up the spirit in which it is written. These are the discussions
on the education of children in the first, and on the larger education of
mature life in the last book, and the critical sketch of ancient
literature up to his own time, which occupies the first chapter of the
tenth. Almost for the first time in history--for the ideal system of
Plato, however brilliant and suggestive, stands on quite a different
footing--the theory of education was, in this age, made a subject of
profound thought and study. The precepts of Quintilian, if taken in
detail, address themselves to the formation of a Roman of the Empire, and
not a citizen of modern Europe. But their main spirit is independent of
the accidents of any age or country. In the breadth of his ideas, and in
the wisdom of much of his detailed advice, Quintilian takes a place in
the foremost rank of educational writers. The dialogue on oratory written
a few years earlier by Tacitus names, as the main cause of the decay of
the liberal arts, not any lack of substantial encouragement, but the
negligence of parents and the want of skill in teachers. To leave off
vague and easy declamations against luxury and the decay of morals, and
to fix on the great truth that bad education is responsible for bad life,
was the first step towards a real reform. This Quintilian insists upon
with admirable clearness. Nor has any writer on education grasped more
firmly or expressed more lucidly the complementary truth that education,
from the cradle upwards, is something which acts on the whole
intellectual and moral nature, and whose object is the production of what
the Romans called, in a simple form of words which was full of meaning,
"the good man." It would pass beyond the province of literary criticism
to discuss the reasons why that reform never took place, or, if it did,
was confined to a circle too small to influence the downward movement of
the Empire at large. They belong to a subject which is among the most
interesting of all studies, and which has hardly yet been studied with
adequate fulness or insight, the social history of the Roman world in the
second century.
One necessary part of the education of the orator was a course of wide
and careful reading in the best literature; and it is in this special
connection that Quintilian devotes part of his elaborate discussion on
style to a brief critical summary of the literature of Greece and that of
his own country. The frequent citations which have already been made from
this part of the work may indicate the very great ability with which it
is executed. Though his special purpose as a professor of rhetoric is
always kept in view, his criticism passes beyond this formal limit. He
expresses, no doubt, what was the general opinion of the educated world
of his own time; but the form of his criticism is so careful and so
choice, that many of his brief phrases have remained the final word on
the authors, both in prose and verse, whom he mentions in his rapid
survey. His catalogue is far from being, as it has been disparagingly
called, a mere "list of the best hundred books." It is the deliberate
judgment of the best Roman scholarship, in an age of wide reading and
great learning, upon the masterpieces of their own literature. His own
preference for certain periods and certain manners is well marked. But he
never forgets that the object of criticism is to disengage excellences
rather than to censure faults: even his pronounced aversion from the
style of Seneca and the authors of the Neronian age does not prevent him
from seeing their merits, and giving these ungrudging praise.
It is, indeed, in Quintilian that the reaction from the early imperial
manner comes to its climax. Statius had, to a certain degree, gone back
to Virgil; Quintilian goes back to Cicero without hesitation or reserve.
He is the first of the Ciceronians; Lactantius in the fourth century,
John of Salisbury in the twelfth, Petrarch in the fourteenth, Erasmus in
the sixteenth, all in a way continue the tradition which he founded; nor
is it surprising that the discovery of a complete manuscript of the
_Institutio Oratoria_, early in the fifteenth century was hailed by
scholars as one of the most important events of the Renaissance. He is
not, however, a mere imitator of his master's style; indeed, his style
is, in some features and for some purposes, a better one than his
master's. It is as clear and fluent, and not so verbose. He cannot rise
to the great heights of Cicero; but for ordinary use it would be
difficult to name a manner that combines so well the Ciceronian dignity
with the rich colour and high finish added to Latin prose by the writers
of the earlier empire.
The body of criticism left by Quintilian in this remarkable chapter is
the more valuable because it includes nearly all the great Latin writers.
Classical literature, little as it may have seemed so at the time, was
already nearing its end. With the generation which immediately followed,
that of his younger contemporaries, the Silver Age closes, and a new age
begins, which, though full of interest in many ways, is no longer
classical. After Tacitus and the younger Pliny, the main stream dwindles
and loses itself among quicksands. The writers who continue the pure
classical tradition are few, and of inferior power; and the chief
interest of Latin literature becomes turned in other directions, to the
Christian writers on the one hand, and on the other to those authors in
whom we may trace the beginning of new styles and methods, some of which
bore fruit at the time, while others remained undeveloped till the later
Middle Ages. Why this final effort of purely Roman culture, made in the
Flavian era with such sustained energy and ability, on the whole scarcely
survived a single generation, is a question to which no simple answer can
be given. It brings us once more face to face with the other question,
which, indeed, haunts Latin literature from the outset, whether the
conquest and absorption of Greece by Rome did not carry with it the seeds
of a fatal weakness in the victorious literature. Up to the end of the
Golden Age fresh waves of Greek influence had again and again given new
vitality and enlarged power to the Latin language. That influence had now
exhausted itself; for the Latin world Greece had no further message. That
Latin literature began to decline so soon after the stimulating Greek
influence ceased to operate, was partly due to external causes; the
empire began to fight for its existence before the end of the second
century, and never afterwards gained a pause in the continuous drain of
its vital force. But there was another reason more intimate and inherent;
a literature formed so completely on that of Greece paid the penalty in a
certain loss of independent vitality. The gap between the literary Latin
and the actual speech of the mass of Latin-speaking people became too
great to bridge over. Classical Latin poetry was, as we have seen,
written throughout in alien metres, to which indeed the language was
adapted with immense dexterity, but which still remained foreign to its
natural structure. To a certain degree the same was even true of prose,
at least of the more imaginative prose which was developed through a
study of the great Greek masters of history, oratory, and philosophy. In
the Silver Age Latin literature, feeling a great past behind it,
definitely tried to cut itself away from Greece and stand on its own
feet. Quintilian's criticism implies throughout that the two literatures
were on a footing of substantial equality; Cicero is sufficient for him,
as Virgil is for Statius. Even Martial, it has been noted, hardly ever
alludes to Greek authors, while he is full of references to those of his
own country. The eminent grammarians of the age, Aemilius Asper, Marcus
Valerius Probus, Quintus Asconius Pedianus, show the same tendency; their
main work was in commenting on the great Latin writers. The elaborate
editions of the Latin poets, from Lucretius to Persius, produced by
Probus, and the commentaries on Terence, Cicero, Sallust, and Virgil by
Asconius and Asper, were the work of a generation to whom these authors
had become in effect the classics. But literature, as the event proved
not for the first or the last time, cannot live long on the study of the
classics alone.
III.
TACITUS.
The end, however, was not yet; and in the generation which immediately
followed, the single imposing figure of Cornelius Tacitus, the last of
the great classical writers, adds a final and, as it were, a sunset
splendour to the literature of Rome. The reigns of Nerva and Trajan,
however much they were hailed as the beginning of a golden age, were
really far less fertile in literary works than those of the Flavian
Emperors; and the boasted restoration of freedom of speech was almost
immediately followed by an all but complete silence of the Latin tongue.
When to the name of Tacitus are added those of Juvenal and the younger
Pliny, there is literally almost no other author--none certainly of the
slightest literary importance--to be chronicled until the reign of
Hadrian; and even then the principal authors are Greek, while mere
compilers or grammarians like Gellius and Suetonius are all that Latin
literature has to show. The beginnings of Christian literature in
Minucius Felix, and of mediaeval literature in Apuleius and the author of
the _Pervigilium Veneris,_ rise in an age scanty in the amount and below
mediocrity in the substance of its production.
Little is known of the birth and parentage of Tacitus beyond the mere
fact that he was a Roman of good family. Tradition places his birth at
Interamna early in the reign of Nero; he passed through the regular
stages of an official career under the three Flavian Emperors. His
marriage, towards the end of the reign of Vespasian, to the daughter and
only surviving child of the eminent soldier and administrator, Gnaeus
Julius Agricola, aided him in obtaining rapid promotion; he was praetor
in the year in which Domitian celebrated the Secular Games, and rose to
the dignity of the consulship during the brief reign of Nerva. He was
then a little over forty. When still quite a young man he had written the
dialogue on oratory, which is one of the most interesting of Latin works
on literary criticism; but throughout the reign of Domitian his pen was
wholly laid aside. The celebrated passage of the _Agricola_ in which he
accounts for this silence may or may not give an adequate account of the
facts, but at all events gives the keynote of the whole of his subsequent
work, and of that view of the imperial government of the first century
which his genius has fixed ineradicably in the imagination of the world.
Under Domitian a servile senate had ordered the works of the two most
eminent martyrs of reactionary Stoicism, Arulenus Rusticus and Herennius
Senecio, to be publicly burned in the forum; "thinking that in that fire
they consumed the voice of the Roman people, their own freedom, and the
conscience of mankind. Great indeed," he bitterly continues, "are the
proofs we have given of what we can endure. The antique time saw to the
utmost bounds of freedom, we of servitude; robbed by an inquisition of
the common use of speech and hearing, we should have lost our very memory
with our voice, were it as much in our power to forget as to be dumb. Now
at last our breath has come back; yet in the nature of human frailty
remedies are slower than their diseases, and genius and learning are more
easily extinguished than recalled. Fifteen years have been taken out of
our lives, while youth passed silently into age; and we are the wretched
survivors, not only of those who have been taken away from us, but of
ourselves." Even a colourless translation may give some idea of the
distilled bitterness of this tremendous indictment. We must remember that
they are the words of a man in the prime of life and at the height of
public distinction, under a prince of whose government he speaks in terms
of almost extravagant hope and praise, to realise the spirit in which he
addressed himself to paint his lurid portraits of Tiberius or Nero or
Domitian.
The exquisitely beautiful memoir of his father-in-law, in the
introduction to which this passage occurs, was written by Tacitus in the
year which succeeded his own consulship, and which saw the accession of
Trajan. He was then already meditating a large historical work on the
events of his own lifetime, for which he had, by reading and reflection,
as well as by his own administrative experience, accumulated large
materials. The essay _De Origine Situ Moribus ac Populis Germaniae_ was
published about the same time or a little later, and no doubt represents
part of the material which he had collected for the chapters of his
history dealing with the German wars, and which, as much of it fell
outside the scope of a general history of Rome, he found it worth his
while to publish as a separate treatise. The scheme of his work became
larger in the course of its progress. As he originally planned it, it was
to begin with the accession of Galba, thus dealing with a period which
fell entirely within his own lifetime, and indeed within his own
recollection. But after completing his account of the six reigns from
Galba to Domitian, he did not, as he had at first proposed, go on to
those of Nerva and Trajan, but resumed his task at an earlier period, and
composed an equally elaborate history of the empire from the death of
Augustus down to the point where his earlier work began. He still
cherished the hope of resuming his history from the accession of Nerva,
but it is doubtful whether he lived long enough to do so. Allusions to
the Eastern conquests of Trajan in the _Annals_ show that the work cannot
have been published till after the year 115, and it would seem--though
nothing is known as to the events or employments of his later life--that
he did not long survive that date. But the thirty books of his _Annals_
and _Histories,_ themselves splendid work for a lifetime, gave the
continuous history of the empire in the most crucial and on the whole the
most remarkable period of its existence, the eighty-two years which
succeeded the death of its founder.
As in so many other cases, this memorable work has only escaped total
loss by the slenderest of chances. As it is, only about one-half of the
whole work is extant, consisting of four large fragments. The first of
these, which begins at the beginning, breaks off abruptly in the
fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius. A gap of two years follows, and
the second fragment carries on the history to Tiberius' death. The story
of the reign of Caligula is wholly lost; the third fragment begins in the
seventh year of Claudius, and goes on as far as the thirteenth of Nero.
The fourth, consisting of the first four and part of the fifth book of
the earlier part of the work, contains the events of little more than a
year, but that the terrible "year of Emperors" which followed the
overthrow of Nero and shook the Roman world to its foundations. A single
manuscript has preserved the last two of these four fragments; to the
hand of one nameless Italian monk of the eleventh century we owe our
knowledge of one of the greatest masterpieces of the ancient world.
Not the least interesting point in the study of the writings of Tacitus
is the way in which we can see his unique style gradually forming and
changing from his earlier to his later manner. The dialogue _De
Oratoribus_ is his earliest extant work. Its scene is laid in or about
the year 75. But Tacitus was then little if at all over twenty, and it
may have been written some five or six years later. In this book the
influence of Quintilian and the Ciceronian school is strongly marked;
there is so much of Ciceronianism in the style that many scholars have
been inclined to assign it to some other author, or have even identified
it with the lost treatise of Quintilian himself, on the _Causes of the
Decay of Eloquence_. But its style, while it bears the general colour of
the Silver Age, has also large traces of that compressed and allusive
manner which Tacitus later carried to such an extreme degree of
perfection. Full as it is of the _ardor iuvenilis,_ page after page
recalling that Ciceronian manner with which we are familiar in the
_Brutus_ or the _De Oratore_ by the balance of the periods, by the
elaborate similes, and by a certain fluid and florid evolution of what is
really commonplace thought, a touch here and there, like _contemnebat
potius literas quam nesciebat_, or _vitio malignitatis humanae vetera
semper in laude, praesentia in fastidio esse_, or the criticism on the
poetry of Caesar and Brutus, _non melius quam Cicero, sed felicius, quia
illos fecisse pauciores sciunt_, anticipates the author of the _Annals,_
with his mastery of biting phrase and his unequalled power of innuendo.
The defence and attack of the older oratory are both dramatic, and to a
certain extent unreal; it is probable that the dialogue does in fact
represent the matter of actual discussions between the two principal
interlocutors, celebrated orators of the Flavian period, to which as a
young student Tacitus had himself listened. One phrase dropped by Aper,
the apologist of the modern school, is of special interest as coming from
the future historian; among the faults of the Ciceronian oratory is
mentioned a languor and heaviness in narration--_tarda et iners structura
in morem annalium_. It is just this quality in historical composition
that Tacitus set himself sedulously to conquer. By every artifice of
style, by daring use of vivid words and elliptical constructions, by
studied avoidance of the old balance of the sentence, he established a
new historical manner which, whatever may be its failings--and in the
hands of any writer of less genius they become at once obvious and
intolerable--never drops dead or says a thing in a certain way because it
is the way in which the ordinary rules of style would prescribe that it
should be said. A comparison has often been drawn between Tacitus and
Carlyle in this matter. It may easily be pressed too far, as in some
rather grotesque attempts made to translate portions of the Latin author
into phrases chosen or copied from the modern. But there is this
likeness: both authors began by writing in the rather mechanical and
commonplace style which was the current fashion during their youth; and
in both the evolution of the personal and inimitable manner from these
earlier essays into the full perfection of the _Annals_ and the _French
Revolution_ is a lesson in language of immense interest.