was, apart from the Christian writers, practically extinct. The authors
of the least importance, or whose names even are known to any but
professional scholars, may be counted on the fingers of one hand. The
stream of Roman law, the one guiding thread down those dark ages,
continued on its steady course. Papinian and Ulpian, the two foremost
jurists of the reigns of Septimius and Alexander Severus, bear a
reputation as high as that of any of their illustrious predecessors. Both
rose to what was in this century the highest administrative position in
the Empire, the prefecture of the praetorian guards. Papinian, a native
it seems of the Syrian town of Emesa, and a kinsman of the Syrian wife of
Septimius Severus, was the author of numerous legal works, both in Greek
and Latin. Under Severus he was not only commander of the household
troops, but discharged what we should now call the duties of Home
Secretary. His genius for law was united with an independence of judgment
and a sense of equity which rose beyond the limits of formal
jurisprudence, and made him one of the great humanising influences of his
profession. He was murdered, with circumstances of great brutality, by
the infamous Caracalla, almost immediately after his accession to sole
power. Domitius Ulpianus, Papinian's successor as the head of Latin
jurists, was also a Syrian by birth. Already an assessor to Papinian, and
a member of the imperial privy council, he was raised to the praetorian
prefecture and afterwards removed from it by his countryman, the Emperor
Heliogabalus, but reinstated by Alexander Severus, under whom he was
second ruler of the Empire till killed in a revolt of the praetorian
guards in the year 228. He was succeeded in the prefecture by Julius
Paulus, a jurist of almost equal eminence, though inferior to Ulpian in
style and literary grace. Roman law practically remained at the point
where these three eminent men left it, or only followed in their
footsteps, until its final systematisation under Justinian.
Beyond the field of law, such prose as was written in this century was
mainly Greek. The historical works of Herodian and Dio Cassius, poor in
quality as they are, seem to have excelled anything written at the same
time in Latin. Their contemporary, Marius Maximus, continued the series
of biographies of the Emperors begun by Suetonius, carrying it down from
Nerva to Heliogabalus; but the work, such as it was, is lost, and is only
known as the main source used by the earlier compilers of the _Augustan
History_. Verse-making had fallen into the hands of inferior grammarians.
Of their numerous productions enough survives to indicate that a certain
technical skill was not wholly lost. The metrical treatises of
Terentianus Maurus, a scholar of the later years of the second century,
show that the science of metre was studied with great care, not only in
its common forms, but in the less familiar lyric measures. The didactic
poem on the art of medicine by Quintus Sammonicus Serenus, the son of an
eminent bibliophile, and the friend of the Emperor Alexander Severus,
though of little poetical merit, is written in graceful and fluent verse.
If of little merit as poetry, it is of even less as science. Medicine had
sunk lower towards barbarism than versification, when a sovereign remedy
against fevers was described in these polished lines:--
_Inscribis chartae quod dicitur Abracadabra,
Saepius et subter repetis, sed detrahe summam
Et magis atque magis desint elemenfa figuris,
Singula quae semper rapies et cetera figes
Donec in augustum redigatur litera conum:
His lino nexis collum redimire memento_.
Nor is his alternative remedy of a piece of coral hung round the
patient's neck much more rational. The drop from the science of Celsus is
much more striking here than the drop from the art of Celsus'
contemporary Manilius. An intermittent imperial patronage of letters
lingered on. The elder and younger Gordian (the latter a pupil of
Sammonicus' father, who bequeathed his immense library to him) had some
reputation as writers. Clodius Albinus, the governor of Britain who
disputed the empire with Septimius Severus, was a devoted admirer of
Apuleius, and wrote romances in a similar manner, which, according to his
biographer, had no inconsiderable circulation.
Under Diocletian and his successors there was a slight and partial
revival of letters, which chiefly showed itself on the side of verse. The
_Cynegetica_, a didactic poem on hunting, by the Carthaginian poet Marcus
Aurelius Olympius Nemesianus, is, together with four bucolic pieces by
the same author, the chief surviving fragment of the main line of
Virgilian tradition. The _Cynegetica_, in spite of its good taste and its
excellent versification, is on the whole a dull performance; but in the
other pieces, the pastoral form gives the author now and then an
opportunity of introducing a little touch of the romantic tone which is
partly imitated from Virgil, but partly natural to the new Latin.
_Perdit spina rosas nec semper lilia candent
Nec longum tenet uva comas nec populus umbras,
Donum forma breve est, nec se quod commodet annis:--_
in these graceful lines the copied Virgilian cadence is united with the
directness and the real or assumed simplicity which belongs to the second
childhood of Latin literature, and which is so remarkable in the authors
who founded the new style. The new style itself was also largely
practised, but only a few scattered remnants survive. Tiberianus, Count
of Africa, Vicar of Spain, and praetorian prefect of Gaul (the whole
nomenclature of the Empire is now passing from the Roman to the mediaeval
type) under Constantine the Great, is usually identified with the author
of some of the most strikingly beautiful of these fragmentary pieces. A
descriptive passage, consisting of twenty lines of finely written
trochaics, reminds one of the _Pervigilium Veneris_ in the richness of
its language and the delicate simplicity of its style. The last lines may
be quoted for their singular likeness to one of the most elaborately
beautiful stanzas of the _Faerie Queene_, that which describes the sounds
"consorted in one harmony" which Guyon hears in the gardens of Acrasia:--
_Has per umbras omnis ales plus canora quam putes
Cantibus vernis strepebat et susurris dulcibus:
Hic loquentis murmur amnis concinebat frondibus
Quas melos vocalis aurae, musa Zephyri, moverat:
Sic euntem per virecta pulcra odora et musica
Ales amnis aura lucus flos et umbra iuverat._
The principal prose work, however, which has come down from this age,
shows a continued and even increased degradation of style. The so-called
_Historia Augusta_, a series of memoirs, in continuation of Suetonius'
_Lives of the Twelve Caesars_, of the Roman Emperors from Hadrian to
Numerian (A.D. 117-284), was begun under Diocletian and finished under
Constantine by six writers--Aelius Spartianus, Julius Capitolinus,
Vulcacius Gallicanus, Trebellius Pollio, Aelius Lampridius, and Flavius
Vopiscus. Most of them, if not all, were officials of the imperial court,
and had free access to the registers of the senate as well as to more
private sources of information. The extreme feebleness of the contents of
this curious work is only exceeded by the poverty and childishness of the
writing. History had sunk into a collection of trivial gossip and details
of court life, couched in a language worthy of a second-rate chronicler
of the Dark Ages. The mere outward circumstances of the men whose lives
they narrated--the _purpurati Augusti,_ as one of the authors calls them
in a romantically sonorous phrase--were indeed of world-wide importance,
and among the masses of rubbish of which the memoirs chiefly consist
there is included much curious information and striking incident. But
their main interest is in the light they throw on the gradual sinking of
the splendid administrative organisation of the second century towards
the sterile Chinese hierarchy of the Byzantine Empire, and the concurrent
degradation of paganism, both as a political and a religious system.
Vopiscus, the last of the six authors, apologises, in drawing the work to
a close, for his slender literary power, and expresses the hope that his
material at least may be found useful to some "eloquent man who may wish
to unlock the actions of princes." What he had in his mind was probably
not so much regular history as the panegyrical oratory which about this
same time became a prominent feature of the imperial courts, and gave
their name to a whole school of writers known as the Panegyrici. Gaul,
for a long time the rival of Africa as the nurse of judicial oratory, was
the part of the Empire where this new form of literature was most
assiduously cultivated. Up to the age of Constantine, it had enjoyed
practical immunity from barbarian invasion, and had only had a moderate
share of the civil wars which throughout the third century desolated all
parts of the Empire. In wealth and civilisation, and in the arts of
peace, it probably held the foremost place among the provinces.
Marseilles, Narbonne, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Autun, Rheims, and Trèves all
possessed famous and flourishing schools of oratory. The last-named town
was, after the supreme power had been divided among two or more Augusti,
a frequent seat of the imperial government of the Western provinces, and,
like Milan, became a more important centre of public life than Rome. Of
the extant collection of panegyrics, two were delivered there before
Diocletian's colleague, the Emperor Maximianus. A florid Ciceronianism
was the style most in vogue, and the phraseology, at least, of the old
State religion was, until the formal adoption of Christianity by the
government, not only retained, but put prominently forward. Eumenius of
Autun, the author of five or more pieces in the collection, delivered at
dates between the years 297 and 311, is the most distinguished figure of
the group. His fluent and ornate Latin may be read with some pleasure,
though the purpose of the orations leaves them little value as a record
of facts or a candid expression of opinions. Under the influence of these
nurseries of rhetoric a new Gallic school of Christian writers rose and
flourished during the fourth century. Hilarius of Poitiers, the most
eminent of the Gallic bishops of this period, wrote controversial and
expository works in the florid involved style of the neo-Ciceronian
orators, which had in their day a high reputation. As the first known
author of Latin hymns, he is the precursor of Ambrose and Prudentius.
Ambrose himself, though as Bishop of Milan he belongs properly to the
Italian school of theological writers, was born and probably educated at
Trèves. But the literature of the province reached its highest point
somewhat later, in one of the most important authors of the century,
Decimus Magnus Ausonius of Bordeaux.
Ausonius was of Gallic blood by both parents; he was educated in grammar
and rhetoric at the university of Bordeaux, and was afterwards for many
years professor of both subjects at that of Trèves. As tutor to Gratian,
son and successor of the Emperor Valentinian, he established himself in
court favour, and fulfilled many high State offices. After Gratian was
succeeded by Theodosius he retired to a lettered ease near his native
town, where he lived till nearly the end of the century. His numerous
poetical works are of the most miscellaneous kind, ranging from Christian
hymns and elegies on deceased relations to translations from the Greek
Anthology and centos from Virgil. Among them the volume of _Idyllia_
constitutes his chief claim to eminence, and gives him a high rank among
the later Latin poets. The gem of this collection is the famous
_Mosella,_ written at Trèves about the year 370. The most beautiful of
purely descriptive Latin poems, it is unique in the felicity with which
it unites Virgilian rhythm and diction with the new romantic sense of the
beauties of nature. The feeling for the charm of landscape which we had
occasion to note in the letters of the younger Pliny is here fully
developed, with a keener eye and an enlarged power of expression. Pliny's
description of the Clitumnus may be interestingly compared with the
passage of this poem in which Ausonius recounts, with fine and observant
touches, the beauties of his northern river--the liquid lapse of waters,
the green wavering reflections, the belt of crisp sand by the water's
edge and the long weeds swaying with the stream, the gleaming gravel-beds
under the water with their patches of moss and the quick fishes darting
hither and thither over them; or the oftener-quoted and not less
beautiful lines where he breaks into rapture over the sunset colouring of
stream and bank, and the glassy water where, at evening, all the hills
waver and the vine-tendril shakes and the grape-bunches swell in the
crystal mirror. In virtue of this poem Ausonius ranks not merely as the
last, or all but the last, of Latin, but as the first of French poets.
His feeling for the country of his birth has all the romantic patriotism
which we are accustomed to associate with a much earlier or a much later
age. The language of Du Bellay in the sixteenth century--
_Plus que le marbre dur me plaist l'ardoise fine,
Plus mon Loire Gaulois que le Tybre Latin--_
is anticipated here. The softer northern loveliness, _la douceur
Angevine_, appeals to Ausonius more than all the traditional beauties of
Arcadia or Sicily. It is with the Gallic rivers that he compares his
loved Moselle: _Non tibi se Liger anteferet, non Axona praeceps ... te
sparsis incerta Druentia ripis._
_O lordly flow the Loire and Seine
And loud the dark Durance!--_
we seem to hear the very words of the modern ballad: and at the end of
the poem his imagination returns, with the fondness of a lover, to the
green lakes and sounding streams of Aquitaine, and the broad sea-like
reaches of his native Garonne.
In this poem, alike by the classic beauty of his language and the
modernism of his feeling, Ausonius marks one of the great divisions in
the history of poetry. He is the last of the poets of the Empire which
was still nominally co-extensive with the world, which held in itself
East and West, the old and the new. The final division of the Roman
world, which took place in the year 395 between the two sons of
Theodosius, synchronises with a division as definite and as final between
classical and mediaeval poetry; and in the last years of the fourth
century the parting of the two streams, the separation of the dying from
the dawning light, is placed in sharp relief by the works of two
contemporary poets, Claudian and Prudentius. The singular and isolated
figure of Claudian, the posthumous child of the classical world, stands
alongside of that of the first great Christian poet like the figures
which were fabled to stand, regarding the rising and setting sun, by the
Atlantic gates where the Mediterranean opened into the unknown Western
seas.
Claudius Claudianus was of Asiatic origin, and lived at Alexandria until,
in the year of the death of Theodosius, he passed into Italy and became
the laureate of the court of Milan. Till then he had, according to his
own statement, written in Greek, his life having been passed wholly in
the Greek-speaking provinces. But immediately on his arrival at the seat
of the Western or Latin Empire he showed himself a master of the language
and forms of Latin poetry such as had not been known since the end of the
first century. His poems, so far as they can be dated, belong entirely to
the next ten years. He is conjectured not to have long survived the
downfall of his patron Stilicho, the great Vandal general who, as
guardian of the young Emperor Honorius, was practically ruler of the
Western Empire. He was the last eminent man of letters who was a
professed pagan.
The historical epics which Claudian produced in rapid succession during
the last five years of the fourth and the first five of the fifth century
are now little read, except by historians who refer to them for details
of the wars or court intrigues of the period. A hundred years ago, when
Statius and Silius Italicus formed part of the regular course of
classical study, he naturally and properly stood alongside of them. His
Latin is as pure as that of the best poets of the Silver Age; in wealth
of language and in fertility of imagination he is excelled, if at all, by
Statius alone. Alone in his age he inherits the scholarly tradition which
still lingered among the libraries of Alexandria. Nonnus, the last and
not one of the least learned and graceful of the later Greek epicists,
who probably lived not long after Claudian, was also of Egyptian birth
and training, and he and Claudian are really the last representatives of
that Alexandrian school which had from the first had so large and deep an
influence over the literature of Rome. The immense range of time covered
by Greek literature is brought more vividly to our imagination when we
consider that this single Alexandrian school, which began late in the
history of Greek writing and came to an end centuries before its
extinction, thus completely overlaps at both ends the whole life of the
literature of Rome, reaching as it does from before Ennius till after
Claudian.
These historical epics of Claudian's--_On the Consulate of Stilicho, On
the Gildonic War, On the Pollentine War, On the Third, Fourth, and Sixth
Consulates of Honorius_--are accompanied by other pieces, written in the
same stately and harmonious hexameter, of a more personal interest:
invectives against Rufinus and Eutropius, the rivals of his patron; a
panegyric on Stilicho's wife, Serena, the niece of Theodosius; a fine
epithalamium on the marriage of Honorius with Maria, the daughter of
Stilicho and Serena; and also by a number of poems in elegiac metre, in
which he wrote with equal grace and skill, though not with so singular a
mastery. Among the shorter elegiac pieces, which are collected under the
title of _Epigrams,_ one, a poem on an old man of Verona who had never
travelled beyond his own little suburban property, is among the jewels of
Latin poetry. The lines in which he describes this quiet garden life--
_Frugibus alternis, non consule computat annum;
Auctumnum pomis, ver sibi flore notat;
Idem condit ager soles idemque reducit,
Metiturque suo rusticus orbe diem,
Ingentem meminit parvo qui germine quercum
Aequaevumque videt consenuisse nemus--_
are in grace and feeling like the very finest work of Tibullus; and the
concluding couplet--
_Erret, et extremos alter scrutetur Hiberos,
Plus habet hic vitae, plus habet ille viae--_
though, in its dependence on a verbal point, it may not satisfy the
purest taste, is not without a dignity and pathos that are worthy of the
large manner of the classical period.
Claudian used the heroic hexameter for mythological as well as historical
epics. Of his _Gigantomachia_ we possess only an inconsiderable fragment;
but the three books of the unfinished _Rape of Proserpine_ are among the
finest examples of the purely literary epic. The description of the
flowery spring meadows where Proserpine and her companions gather
blossoms for garlands is a passage perpetually quoted. It is interesting
to note how the rising tide of romanticism has here, as elsewhere, left
Claudian wholly untouched. The passage, though elaborately ornate, is
executed in the clear hard manner of the Alexandrian school; it has not a
trace of that sensitiveness to nature which vibrates in the _Pervigilium
Veneris_. We have gone back for a moment to that poetical style which
perpetually reminds us of the sculptured friezes of Greek art, severe in
outline, immensely adroit and learned in execution, but a little chilly
and colourless except in the hands of its greatest masters. After paying
to the full the tribute of admiration which is due to Claudian's refined
and dignified workmanship, we are still left with the feeling that this
kind of poetry was already obsolete. It is not only that, as has been
remarked with truth of his historical epics, the elaboration of the
treatment is disproportionate to the importance or interest of the
subject. _Materiam superabat opus_ might be said with equal truth of much
of the work of his predecessors. But a new spirit had by this time
penetrated literature, and any poetry wholly divorced from it must be not
only artificial--for that alone would prove nothing against it--but
unnatural. Claudian is a precursor of the Renaissance in its narrower
aspect; the last of the classics, he is at the same time the earliest,
and one of the most distinguished, of the classicists. It might seem a
mere chance whether his poetry belonged to the fourth or to the sixteenth
century.
In Claudian's distinguished contemporary, the Spanish poet Aurelius
Prudentius Clemens, Christian Latin poetry reached complete maturity. His
collected poems were published at Rome in 404, the year celebrated by
Claudian as that of the sixth consulship of Honorius. Before Prudentius,
Christian poetry had been slight in amount and rude or tentative in
manner. We have already had occasion to notice its earliest efforts in
the rude verses of Commodianus. The revival of letters in the fourth
century, so far as it went, affected Christian as well as secular poetry.
Under Constantine, a Spanish deacon, one Gaius Vettius Aquilinus
Juvencus, put the Gospel narrative into respectable hexameters, which are
still extant. The poems and hymns which have come down under the name of
Bishop Hilary of Poitiers are probably spurious, and a similar doubt
attaches to those ascribed to the eminent grammarian and rhetorician,
Gaius Marius Victorinus, after his conversion. Before Prudentius
published his collection, the hymns of St. Ambrose had been written, and
were in use among the Western Churches. But these, though they formed the
type for all later hymn-writers, were few in number. Out of the so-called
Ambrosian hymns a rigorous criticism only allows five or six as
authentic. These, however, include two world-famed pieces, still in daily
use by the Church, the _Aeterne rerum Conditor_ and the _Deus Creator
omnium,_ and the equally famous _Veni Redemptor_.
To the form thus established by St. Ambrose, Prudentius, in his two books
of lyrical poems, gave a larger volume and a more sustained literary
power. The _Cathemerina,_ a series of poems on the Christian life, and
the _Peristephanon,_ a book of the praise of Christian martyrs--St.
Lawrence, St. Vincent, St. Agnes, among other less celebrated names--at
once represent the most substantial addition made to Latin lyrical poetry
since Horace, and the complete triumph of the new religion. They are not,
like the Ambrosian hymns, brief pieces meant for actual singing in
churches. Out of the twenty-six poems only three are under one hundred
lines in length, and that on the martyrdom of St. Romanus of Antioch runs
to no less than eleven hundred and forty, almost the proportions of a
small epic. But in the brilliance and vigour of their language, their
picturesque style, and the new joy that, in spite of their asceticism,
burns throughout them, they gave an impulse of immense force towards the
development of Christian literature. In merely technical quality they are
superior to any poetry of the time, Claudian alone excepted; in their
fullness of life, in the exultant tone which kindles and sustains them,
they make Claudian grow pale like a candle-flame at dawn.