with the reign of Commodus. On the one hand, there is what may be called
the African school, writing in the new Latin; on the other, the Italian
school, which attempted to mould classical Latin to Christian use. The
former bears a close affinity in style to Apuleius, or, rather, to the
movement of which Apuleius was the most remarkable product; the latter
succeeds to Quintilian and his contemporaries as the second impulse of
Ciceronianism. The two opposing methods appear at their sharpest contrast
in the earliest authors of each, Tertullian and Minucius Felix. The vast
preponderance of the former, alike in volume of production and fire of
eloquence, offers a suggestive parallel to the comparative importance of
the two schools in the history of ecclesiastical Latin. Throughout the
third and fourth centuries the African school continues to predominate,
but it takes upon itself more of the classical finish, and tames the
first ferocity of its early manner. Cyprian inclines more to the style of
Tertullian; Lactantius, "the Christian Cicero," reverts strongly towards
the classical forms: and finally, towards the end of the fourth century,
the two languages are combined by Augustine, in proportions which,
throughout the Middle Ages, form the accepted type of the language of
Latin Christianity.
In a fine passage at the opening of the fifth book of his _Institutes of
Divinity,_ Lactantius regrets the imperfect literary support given to
Christianity by his two eminent predecessors. The obscurity and harshness
of Tertullian, he says (and to this may be added his Montanism, which
fluctuated on the edge of heresy), prevent him from being read or
esteemed as widely as his great literary power deserves; while Minucius,
in his single treatise, the _Octavius,_ gave a brilliant specimen of his
grace and power as a Christian apologist, but did not carry out the task
to its full scope. This last treatise is, indeed, of unique interest, not
only as a fine, if partial, vindication of the new religion, but as the
single writing of the age, Christian or pagan, which in style and diction
follows the classical tradition, and almost reaches the classical
standard. As to the life of its author, nothing is known beyond the
scanty indications given in the treatise itself. Even his date is not
wholly certain, and, while the reign of Commodus is his most probable
period, Jerome appears to allude to him as later than Tertullian, and
some modern critics incline to place the work in the reign of Alexander
Severus. The _Octavius_ is a dialogue in the Ciceronian manner, showing
especially a close study of the _De Natura Deorum_. A brief and graceful
introduction gives an account of the scene of the dialogue. The narrator,
with his two friends, Octavius and Caecilius, the former a Christian, the
latter a somewhat wavering adherent of the old faith, are taking a walk
on the beach near Ostia on a beautiful autumn morning, watching the
little waves lapping on the sand, and boys playing duck-and-drake with
pieces of tile, when Caecilius kisses his hand, in the ordinary pagan
usage, to an image of Serapis which they pass. The incident draws them on
to a theological discussion. Caecilius sets forth the argument against
Christianity in detail, and Octavius replies to him point by point; at
the end, Caecilius professes himself overcome, and declares his adhesion
to the faith of his friend. Both in the attack and in the defence it is
only the rational side of the new doctrine which is at issue. The unity
of God, the resurrection of the body, and retribution in a future state,
make up the sum of Christianity as it is presented. The name of Christ is
not once mentioned, nor is his divinity directly asserted. There is no
allusion to the sacraments, or to the doctrine of the Redemption; and
Octavius neither quotes from nor refers to the writings of either Old or
New Testament. Among early Christian writings, this method of treatment
is unexampled elsewhere. The work is an attempt to present the new
religion to educated opinion as a reasonable philosophic system; as we
read it, we might be in the middle of the eighteenth century. With this
temperate rationalism is combined a clearness and purity of diction,
founded on the Ciceronian style, but without Cicero's sumptuousness of
structure, that recalls the best prose of the Silver Age.
The author of the _Octavius_ was a lawyer, who practised in the Roman
courts. The literary influence of Quintilian no doubt lasted longer among
the legal profession, for whose guidance he primarily wrote, than among
the grammarians and journalists, who represent in this age the general
tendency of the world of letters. But even in the legal profession the
new Latin had established itself, and, except in the capital, seems to
have almost driven out the classical manner. Its most remarkable exponent
among Christian writers was, up to the time of his conversion, a pleader
in the Carthaginian law-courts.
Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus was born at Carthage towards the
end of the reign of Antoninus Pius. When he was a young man, the fame of
Apuleius as a writer and lecturer was at its height; and though
Tertullian himself never mentions him (as Apuleius, on his side, never
refers in specific terms to the Christian religion), they must have been
well known to each other, and their antagonism is of the kind which grows
out of strong similarities of nature. Apuleius passed for a magician:
Tertullian was a firm believer in magic, and his conversion to
Christianity was, he himself tells us, very largely due to confessions of
its truth extorted from demons, at the strange spiritualistic séances_
which were a feature of the time among all classes. His conversion took
place in the last year of Commodus. The tension between the two
religions--for in Africa, at all events, the old and the new were
followed with equally fiery enthusiasm--had already reached breaking
point. A heathen mob, headed by the priestesses of the _Mater et Virgo
Caelestis,_ the object of the ecstatic worship afterwards transferred to
the mother of Christ, had two or three years before besieged the
proconsul of Africa in his own house because he refused to order a
general massacre of the Christians. In the anarchy after the
assassination of Commodus, the persecution broke out, and continued to
rage throughout the reign of Septimius Severus. It was in these years
that Tertullian poured forth the series of apologetic and controversial
writings whose fierce enthusiasm and impetuous eloquence open the history
of Latin Christianity. The _Apologeticum,_ the greatest of his earlier
works, and, upon the whole, his masterpiece, was composed towards the
beginning of this persecution, in the last years of the second century.
The terms in which its purport is stated, _Quod religio Christiana
damnanda non sit, nisi qualis sit prius intelligatur,_ might lead one to
expect a grave and reasoned defence of the new doctrine, like that of the
_Octavius_. But Tertullian's strength is in attack, not in defence; and
his apology passes almost at once into a fierce indictment of paganism,
painted in all the gaudiest colours of African rhetoric. Towards the end,
he turns violently upon those who say that Christianity is merely a
system of philosophy: and writers like Minucius are included with the
eclectic pagan schoolmen in his condemnation. Here, for the first time,
the position is definitely taken which has since then had so vast and
varied an influence, that the Holy Scriptures are the source of all
wisdom, and that the poetry and philosophy of the Graeco-Roman world were
alike derived or perverted from the inspired writings of the Old
Testament. Moses was five hundred years before Homer; and therefore, runs
his grandiose and sweeping fallacy, Homer is derived from the books of
Moses. The argument, strange to say, has lived almost into our own day.
In thus breaking with heathen philosophy and poetry, Tertullian
necessarily broke with the literary traditions of Europe for a thousand
years. The Holy Scriptures, as a canon of revealed truth, became
incidentally but inevitably a canon of literary style likewise. Writings
soaked in quotations from the Hebrew poets and prophets could not but be
affected by their style through and through. A current Latin translation
of the Old and New Testament--the so-called _Itala,_ which itself only
survives as the ground-work of later versions--had already been made, and
was in wide use. Its rude literal fidelity imported into Christian Latin
an enormous mass of Grecisms and Hebraisms--the latter derived from the
original writings, the former from the Septuagint version of the Old
Testament--which combined with its free use of popular language and its
relaxed grammar to force the new Latin further and further away from the
classical tradition. The new religion, though it met its educated
opponents in argument and outshone them in rhetorical embellishment,
still professed, after the example of its first founders, to appeal
mainly to the simple and the poor. "Stand forth, O soul!" cries
Tertullian in another treatise of the same period; "I appeal to thee, not
as wise with a wisdom formed in the schools, trained in libraries, or
nourished in Attic academy or portico, but as simple and rude, without
polish or culture; such as thou art to those who have thee only, such as
thou art in the crossroad, the highway, the dockyard."
In the ardour of its attacks upon the heathen civilisation, the rising
Puritanism of the Church bore hard upon the whole of culture. As against
the theatre and the gladiatorial games, indeed, it occupied an
unassailable position. There is a grim and characteristic humour in
Tertullian's story of the Christian woman who went to the theatre and
came back from it possessed with a devil, and the devil's crushing reply,
_In meo eam inveni,_ to the expostulation of the exorcist; a nobler
passion rings in his pleading against the butcheries of the amphitheatre,
"Do you wish to see blood? Behold Christ's!" His declamations against
worldly luxury and ornament in the sumptuous pages of the _De Cultu
Feminarum_ are not more sweeping or less sincere than those of Horace or
Juvenal; but the violent attack made on education and on literature
itself in the _De Idololatria_ shows the growth of that persecuting
spirit which, as it gathered material force, destroyed ancient art and
literature wherever it found them, and which led Pope Gregory, four
hundred years later, to burn the magnificent library founded by Augustus.
_Nos sumus in quos decucurrerunt fines seculorum,_ "upon us the ends of
the world are come," is the burden of Tertullian's impassioned argument.
What were art and letters to those who waited, from moment to moment, for
the glory of the Second Coming? Yet for ten years or more he continued to
pour forth his own brilliant essays; and while the substance of his
teaching becomes more and more harsh and vindictive, the force of his
rhetoric, his command over irony and invective, the gorgeous richness of
his vocabulary, remain as striking as ever. In the strange and often
romantic psychology of the _De Anima,_ and in the singular clothes-
philosophy of the _De Pallio,_ he appears as the precursor of Swedenborg
and Teufelsdrückh. A remarkable passage in the former treatise, in which
he speaks of the growing pressure of over-population in the Empire,
against which wars, famines, and pestilences had become necessary if
unwelcome remedies, may lead us to reconsider the theory, now largely
accepted, that the Roman Empire decayed and perished for want of men.
With the advance of years his growing antagonism to the Catholic Church
is accompanied by a further hardening of his style. The savage Puritanism
of the _De Monogamia_ and _De Ieiunio_ is couched in a scholastic diction
where the tradition of culture is disappearing; and in the gloomy
ferocity of the _De Pudicitia,_ probably the latest of his extant works,
he comes to a final rupture alike with Catholicism and with humane
letters.
The African school of patristic writers, of which Tertullian is at once
the earliest and the most imposing figure, and of which he was indeed to
a large degree the direct founder, continued for a century after his
death to include the main literary production of Latin Christianity.
Thascius Caecilius Cyprianus, Bishop of Carthage from the year 248,
though a pupil and an admirer of Tertullian, reverts in his own writings
at once to orthodoxy and to an easy and copious diction. In earlier youth
he had been a professor of rhetoric; after his conversion in mature life,
he gave up all his wealth to the poor, and devoted his great literary
gifts to apologetic and hortatory writings. He escaped the Decian
persecution by retiring from Carthage; but a few years later he was
executed in the renewed outbreak of judicial massacres which sullied the
short and disastrous reign of Valerian. Forty years after Cyprian's death
the rhetorician Arnobius of Sicca in Numidia renewed the attack on
paganism, rather than the defence or exposition of Christianity, in the
seven books _Adversus Nationes_, which he is said to have written as a
proof of the sincerity of his conversion. "Uneven and ill-proportioned,"
in the phrase of Jerome, this work follows neither the elaborate rhetoric
of the early African school, nor the chaster and more polished style of
Cyprian, but rather renews the inferior and slovenly manner of the
earlier antiquarians and encyclopedists. A free use of the rhetorical
figures goes side by side with a general want of finish and occasional
lapses into solecism. His literary gift is so small, and his knowledge of
the religion he professes to defend so slight and so excessively
inaccurate, that theologians and men of letters for once agree that his
main value consists in the fragments of antiquarian information which he
preserves. But he has a further claim to notice as the master of a
celebrated pupil.
Lucius Caecilius Firmianus Lactantius, a name eminent among patristic
authors, and not inconsiderable in humane letters, had, like Cyprian,
been a professor of rhetoric, and embraced Christianity in mature life.
That he was a pupil of Arnobius is established by the testimony of
Jerome; his African birth is only a doubtful inference from this fact.
Towards the end of the third century he established a school at
Nicomedia, which had practically become the seat of empire under the rule
of Diocletian; and from there he was summoned to the court of Gaul to
superintend the education of Crispus, the ill-fated son of Constantine.
The new religion had passed through its last and sharpest persecution
under Diocletian; now, of the two joint Emperors Constantine openly
favoured the Christians, and Licinius had been forced to relax the
hostility towards them which he had at first shown. As it permeated the
court and saw the reins of government almost within its grasp, the Church
naturally dropped some of the anathematising spirit in which it had
regarded art and literature in the days of its earlier struggles.
Lactantius brought to its service a taste trained in the best literary
tradition; and while some doubt was cast on his dogmatic orthodoxy as
regards the precise definition of the Persons of the Trinity, his pure
and elegant diction was accepted as a model for later writers. His
greatest work, the seven books of the _Institutes of Divinity_, was
published a few years before the victory of Constantine over Maxentius
outside the walls of Rome, which was the turning-point in the contest
between the two religions. It is an able exposition of Christian doctrine
in a style which, for eloquence, copiousness, and refinement, is in the
most striking contrast to the wretched prose produced by contemporary
pagan writers. The influence of Cicero is obvious and avowed throughout;
but the references in the work show the author to have been familiar with
the whole range of the Latin classics, poets as well as prose writers.
Ennius, the comedians and satirists, Virgil and Horace, are cited by him
freely; he even dares to praise Ovid. In his treatise _On Gods
Workmanship_--_De Opificio Dei_--the arguments are often borrowed with
the language from Cicero, but Lucretius is also quoted and combated. The
more fanatical side of the new religion appears in the curious work, _De
Mortibus Persecutorum_, written after Constantine had definitely thrown
in his lot with Christianity. It is famous as containing the earliest
record of the vision of Constantine before the battle of the Mulvian
Bridge; and its highly coloured account of the tragical fates of the
persecuting Emperors, from Nero to Diocletian, had a large effect in
fixing the tradition of the later Empire as viewed throughout the Middle
Ages. The long passionate protest of the Church against heathen tyranny
breaks out here into equally passionate exultation; the Roman Empire is
already seen, as it was later by St. Augustine, fading and crumbling away
with the growth of the new and imperial City of God.
Besides the large and continuous volume of its prose production, the
Latin Church of the third century also made its first essays in poetry.
They are both rude and scanty; it was not till late in the fourth century
that Christian poetry reached its full development in the hymns of
Ambrose and Prudentius, and the hexameter poems of Paulinus of Nola. The
province of Africa, fertile as it was in prose writers, never produced a
poet of any eminence. The pieces in verse--they can hardly be called
poems--ascribed to Tertullian and Cyprian are forgeries of a late period.
But contemporary with them is an African verse-writer of curious
linguistic interest, Commodianus. A bishop of Marseilles, who wrote, late
in the fifth century, a continuation of St. Jerome's catalogue of
ecclesiastical writers, mentions his work in a very singular phrase:
"After his conversion," he says, "Commodianus wrote a treatise against
the pagans in an intermediate language approximating to verse," _mediocri
sermone quasi versu_. This treatise, the _Carmen Apologeticum adversus
Iudaeos et Gentes_, is extant, together with other pieces by the same
author. It is a poem of over a thousand lines, which the allusions to the
Gothic war and the Decian persecution fix as having been written in or
very near the year 250. It is written in hexameters, composed on a system
which wavers between the quantitative and accentual treatment. These are
almost evenly balanced. The poem is thus a document of great importance
in the history of the development of mediaeval out of classical poetry.
Though not, of course, without his barbarisms, Commodianus was obviously
neither ignorant nor careless of the rules of classical versification,
some of which--for instance, the strong caesura in the middle of the
third foot--he retains with great strictness. His peculiar prosody is
plainly deliberate. Only a very few lines are wholly quantitative, and
none are wholly accentual, except where accent and quantity happen to
coincide. Much of the pronunciation of modern Italian may be traced in
his remarkable accentuation of some words; like Italian, he both throws
back the accent off a long syllable and slides it forward upon a short
one. Assonance is used freely, but there is not more rhyming than is
usual in the poetry of the late empire. Not only in pronunciation, but in
grammatical inflexion, the beginnings of Italian here and there appear.
The case-forms of the different declensions are beginning to run into one
another: the plural, for example, of _insignis_ is no longer _insignes_,
but, as in Italian, _insigni_; and the case-inflexions themselves are
dwindling away before the free use of prepositions, which was already
beginning to show itself in the _Pervigilium Veneris_.
Popular poetry was now definitely asserting itself alongside of book-
poetry formed on the classical model. But authors who kept up a high
literary standard in prose continued to do so in verse also. The poem _De
Ave Phoenice_, found in early mediaeval collections under the name of
Lactantius, and accepted as his by recent critics, is written in accurate
and graceful elegiac couplets, which are quite in accordance with the
admiration Lactantius, in his work _On the Wrath of God_, expresses for
Ovid. It is perhaps the earliest instance outside the field of prose of
the truce or coalition which was slowly forming itself between the new
religion and the old culture. Beyond a certain faint and almost
impalpable mysticism, which hints at the legend of the Phoenix as
symbolical of the doctrine of the Resurrection, there is nothing in the
poem which is distinctively Christian. Phoebus and the lyre of Cyllene
are invoked, as they might be by a pagan poet. But the language is from
beginning to end full of Christian or, at least, scriptural
reminiscences, which could only be possible to a writer familiar with the
Psalter. The description with which the poem opens of the Earthly
Paradise, a "land east of the sun," where the bird has its home, has
mingled touches of the Elysium of Homer and Virgil, and the New Jerusalem
of the Revelation; as in the Psalms, the sun is a bridegroom coming out
of his chamber, and night and day are full of a language that is not
speech.
In the literary revival of the latter half of the fourth century these
tendencies have developed themselves, and taken a more mature but a less
interesting form. After Christianity had become formally and irrevocably
the State religion, it took over what was left of Latin culture as part
of the chaotic inheritance which it had to accept as the price for civil
establishment. A heavy price was paid on both sides when Constantine, in
Dante's luminous phrase, "turned the eagle." The Empire definitively
parted with the splendid administrative and political tradition founded
on the classical training and the Stoic philosophy; though shattered as
it had been in the anarchy of the third century, that was perhaps in any
case irrecoverable. The Church, on its side, drew away in the persons of
its leaders from its earlier tradition, with all that it involved in the
growth of a wholly new thought and art, and armed or hampered itself with
that classicalism from which it never again got quite free. It is in the
century before Constantine, therefore, when old and new were in the
sharpest antagonism, and yet were both full of a strange ferment--the
ferment of dissolution in the one case, in the other that of quickening--
that the end of the ancient world, and with it the end of Latin
literature as such, might reasonably be placed. But the first result of
the alliance between the Empire and the Church was to give added dignity
to the latter and renewed energy to the former. The partial revival of
letters in the fourth century may induce us to extend our survey so far
as to include Ausonius and Claudian as legitimate, though remote,
successors of the Augustan poets.
VII
THE FOURTH CENTURY: AUSONIUS AND CLAUDIAN.