THE EMPERORS FROM VESPASIAN TO TRAJAN AND MINOR POETS
I
THE EMPERORS AND POETS WHOSE WORKS ARE LOST
After the death of Nero and the close of the Civil War a happier era,
both for literature and the world at large, was inaugurated by the
accession of Vespasian in 69 A.D. A man of low birth and of little
culture, he yet had a true appreciation of art and literature. Of his
own writing we know nothing save that he left behind him memoirs.[419]
But we have abundant evidence that he showed himself a liberal patron of
the arts. He gave rich rewards to poets and sculptors,[420] effected all
that was possible to repair the great loss of works of art occasioned by
the burning of the Capitol,[421] and did what he could for the stage,
perhaps even attempting to revive the legitimate drama.[422] Above all,
he set aside a large sum annually for the support of Greek and Latin
professors of rhetoric,[423] the first instance in the history of Rome
of State endowment of education. Against this we must set his expulsion
from Italy of philosophers and astrologers, an intemperate and
presumably ineffective act, prompted by reasons of State and probably
without any appreciable influence on literature.[424] His sons, however,
had received all the advantages of the highest education. Of Titus'
(79-81 A.D.) achievements in literature we have no information save that
he aspired to be both orator and poet. The language used in praise of
his efforts by Pliny the elder, our one authority on this point, is so
extravagant as to be virtually meaningless.[425] Of the literary
exploits of his brother Domitian (81-96 A.D.) there is more to be said.
It pleased him to lay claim to distinction both in prose and verse.[426]
His only prose work of which any record remains was a treatise on the
care of the hair;[427] his own baldness rankled in his mind and turned
the _calvus Nero_ of Juvenal into a hair specialist. As to his poems it
is almost doubtful if he ever wrote any. He professed an enthusiasm for
poetry, an art which, according to Suetonius, he had neglected in his
youth and despised when he came to the throne. But Quintilian, Valerius
Flaccus, and Martial[428] all load him with praise of various degrees of
fulsomeness, though, reading between the lines of Quintilian, it is easy
to see that Domitian's output must have been exceedingly small. The
evidence of these three authors goes to show that he had contemplated,
perhaps even begun, an epic on the achievements of his brother Titus in
the Judaic War. Whether these _caelestia carmina belli_, as Martial
calls them, ever existed, save in the imagination of courtiers and
servile poets, there is nothing to show. If they did exist there seems
no reason to regret their loss.
Domitian's chief service to literature, if indeed it was a true service,
was the establishment of the Agon Capitolinus in 86, a quinquennial
festival at which prizes were awarded not only for athletics and
chariot-racing, but for declamations in verse and prose,[429] and the
institution of a similar, though annual, contest at his own palace on
the Alban Mount, which took place as often as the great festival of
Minerva, known as the Quinquatria, came round.[430] But his interest in
literature was only superficial; he had no originality and read nothing
save the memoirs and edicts of Tiberius.[431] His capricious cruelty
extended itself to artists and authors;[432] twice (in 89 and 93 A.D.),
following his father's example, he banished philosophers and astrologers
from Rome;[433] the crime of having written laudatory biographies of the
Stoics Thrasea and Helvidius Priscus brought Arulenus Rusticus and
Herennius Senecio to their deaths.[434] But Domitian's tyranny had
little effect on _belles-lettres_, however adverse it may have been to
free-spoken philosophy, rhetoric, or history. Valerius Flaccus, Silius,
Statius, and Martial, all wrote during his reign, and the works of the
last-named poet and Quintilian give ample evidence of widespread
literary activity. The minor poet replenished the earth, and the prizes
for literature awarded at the Agon Capitolinus and the festival of the
Alban Mount must have been a real stimulus to writing, even though the
type of literature produced by such a stimulus may have been scarcely
worth producing. The worst feature of the poetry of the time is the
almost incredibly fulsome flattery to which the tyranny of Domitian gave
rise. As a compensation we have in the two succeeding reigns the biting
satire of Juvenal and Tacitus, rendered all the keener by its long
suppression under the last of the Flavian dynasty.
But, however impossible it may have been to write really effective
satire during the Flavian dynasty, of poets there was no lack. It was,
moreover, under the Flavians that there sprang up that reaction towards
a saner style to which we have already referred as finding its
expression in the Ciceronianism of Quintilian, and to a lesser degree in
the Vergilianism of Valerius, Statius, and Silius. Of lesser luminaries
there were enough and to spare. Serranus and Saleius Bassus are both
warmly commended by Quintilian for their achievements in Epic. The
former died young, before his powers had ripened to maturity, but showed
great soundness of style and high promise.[435] Of Saleius
Quintilian[436] says, 'He had a vigorous and poetic genius, but it was
not mellowed by age.' That is to say, he died young, like Serranus. In
the _Dialogus_ of Tacitus he is spoken of as the best of men and the
most finished of poets. He won Vespasian's favour and received a gift
from him of five hundred thousand sesterces. His poems brought him no
material profit; both Tacitus and Juvenal emphasize this point:
contentus fama iaceat Lucanus in hortis
marmoreis; at Serrano tenuique Saleio
gloria quantalibet quid erit, si gloria tantum est.[437]
Statius' father, a distinguished teacher of rhetoric at Naples, had
written a poem on the burning of the Capitol in 69 A.D., and was only
prevented by death[438] from singing the great eruption of Vesuvius.
Arruntius Stella of Patavium,[439] the friend of Statius and Martial,
wrote elegies to his wife Violentilla. Turnus,[440] like Juvenal the son
of a freedman, attained considerable success as a satirist, while the
two distinguished soldiers, Verginius Rufus[441] and Vestricius
Spurinna,[442] wrote light erotic verse and lyrics respectively. In
addition to these there are a whole host of minor poets mentioned by
Statius and Martial. In fact the writing of verse was the most
fashionable occupation for the leisure time of a cultivated gentleman.
With Nerva and Trajan the happiest epoch of the principate set in. Nerva
(96-98 A.D.) sprung from a line of distinguished jurists, was celebrated
by Martial as the Tibullus of his time,[443] and is praised by the
younger Pliny for the excellence of his light verses.[444] Trajan, his
successor (98-117 A.D.), though a man of war, rather than a man of
letters, wrote a history of the Dacian wars,[445] and possessed--as his
letters to Pliny testify--a remarkable power of expressing himself
tersely and clearly. He was, like Vespasian, a generous patron to
rhetoric and education,[446] and the founder of the important library
known as the _Bibliotheca Ulpia_.[447] But the great service which he
and his predecessor rendered to literature was, as Pliny and Tacitus
bear eloquent witness, the gift of freedom. This did more for prose than
for poetry, save for one important fact--it was the means of enriching
the world with the satires of Juvenal. If the quantity of the literature
surviving from the principates of Nerva and Trajan is small, its quality
is unmistakable. Pliny the younger, Tacitus, and Juvenal form a trio
whose equal is to be found at no other period of the post-Augustan
principate, while the letters of Pliny give proof of the existence of a
highly cultivated society devoted to literature of all kinds. Poets were
numerous even if they were not good. Few names, however, survive, and
those have but the slightest interest for us. It will suffice to mention
three of them: Passennus Paulus, Sentius Augurinus, and the younger
Pliny. With the dramatic poets, Pomponius Bassulus and Vergilius
Romanus, we have already dealt.[448] Pliny shall speak for himself and
his friends.
'Passennus Paulus,' he writes,[449] 'a distinguished Roman knight of
great learning, is a writer of elegies. This runs in the family; for he
is a fellow townsman of Propertius and indeed counts him among his
ancestors.' In a later letter[450] he speaks with solicitude of his
failing health, and goes on to describe the characteristics of his work.
'In his verse he imitates the ancients, paraphrases them, and reproduces
them, above all Propertius, from whom he traces his descent. He is a
worthy scion of the house, and closely resembles his great ancestor in
that sphere in which he of old excelled. If you read his elegies you
will find them highly polished, possessed of great sensuous charm, and
quite obviously written in the house of Propertius. He has lately
betaken himself to lyric verse, and imitates Horace with the same skill
with which he has imitated Propertius. Indeed, if kinship counts for
anything in the world of letters, you would deem him Horace's kinsman as
well.' Pliny concludes with a warm tribute to Passennus' character. The
picture is a pleasant one, but it is startling and significant to find
Pliny awarding such praise to one who was frankly imitative, if he was
not actually a plagiarist.[451]
Pliny is not less complimentary to Sentius Augurinus. 'I have been
listening,' he writes,[452] 'to a recitation given by Sentius Augurinus.
It gave me the greatest pleasure, and filled me with the utmost
admiration for his talent. He calls his verses "trifles" (_poematia_).
Much is written with great delicacy, much with great elevation of style;
many of the poems show great charm, many great tenderness; not a few are
honey-sweet, not a few bitter and mordant. It is some time since
anything so perfect has been produced.' The next clause, however,
betrays the reason, in part at any rate, for Pliny's admiration. In the
course of his recitation he had produced a small hendecasyllabic poem in
praise of Pliny's own verses. Pliny proceeds to quote it with every
expression of gratification and approval. It is certainly neatly turned
and well expressed, but it is such as any cultivated gentleman who had
read his Catullus and Martial might produce, and can hardly have been of
interest to any one save Augurinus and Pliny. Pliny was, in fact, with
all his admirable gifts, one of the principal and most amiable members
of a highly cultivated mutual admiration society. He was a poet himself,
though only a few lines of the poems praised by Augurinus have survived
to undergo the judgement of a more critical age. Pliny has, however,
given an interesting little sketch of his poetical career in the fourth
letter of the seventh book. 'I have always had a taste for poetry,' he
tells his friend Pontius; 'nay, I was only fourteen when I composed a
tragedy in Greek. What was it like? you ask. I know not; it was called a
tragedy. Later, when returning from my military service, I was
weather-bound in the island of Icaria, and wrote elegiac poems in Latin
about that island and the sea, which bears the same name. I have
occasionally attempted heroic hexameters, but it is only quite recently
that I have taken to writing hendecasyllables. You shall hear of their
origin and of the occasion which gave them birth. Some writings of
Asinius Gallus were being read aloud to me in my Laurentine villa; in
these works he was comparing his father with Cicero; we came upon an
epigram of Cicero dedicated to his freedman Tiro. Shortly after, about
noon--for it was summer--I retired to take my siesta, and finding that I
could not sleep, I began to reflect how the very greatest orators have
taken delight in composing this style of verse, and have hoped to win
fame thereby. I set my mind to it, and, quite contrary to my
expectations after so long desuetude, produced in an extremely short
space of time the following verses on that very subject which had
provoked me to write.'
Thirteen hexameter verses follow of a mildly erotic character. They are
not peculiarly edifying, and are certainly very far from being poetry.
He continues:
'I then turned my attention to expressing the same thoughts in elegiac
verse; I rattled these off at equal speed, and wrote some additional
lines, being beguiled into doing so by the fluency with which I wrote
the metre. On my return to Rome I read the verses to my friends. They
approved. Then in my leisure moments, especially when travelling, I
attempted other metres. Finally, I resolved to follow the example of
many other writers and compose a whole separate volume in the
hendecasyllabic metre; nor do I regret having done so. For the book is
read, copied, and even sung; even Greeks chant my verses to the sound of
the _cithara_ or the lyre; their passion for the book has taught them to
use the Latin tongue.' It was this volume of hendecasyllables about
which Pliny displays such naïve enthusiasm that led Augurinus to compare
Pliny to Calvus and Catullus. Pliny's success had come to him
comparatively late in life; but it emboldened him to the composition of
another volume of poems[453] in various metres, which he read to his
friends. He cites one specimen in elegiacs[454] which awakens no desire
for more, for it is fully as prosy as the hexameters to which we have
already referred. Of the hendecasyllables nothing survives, but Pliny
tells us something as to their themes and the manner of their
composition.[455] 'I amuse myself by writing them in my leisure moments
at the bath or in my carriage. I jest in them and make merry, I play the
lover, I weep, I make lamentation, I vent my anger, or describe
something or other now in a pedestrian, now in a loftier vein.' As this
little catalogue would suggest, these poems were not always too
respectable. The good Pliny, like Martial, thinks it necessary to
apologize[456] for his freedom in conforming to the fashionable licence
of his age by protesting that his muse may be wanton, but his life is
chaste. We can readily believe him, for he was a man of kindly heart and
high ideals, whose simple vanity cannot obscure his amiability. But it
is difficult to believe that the loss of his poetry is in any way a
serious loss to the world.[457] We have given Pliny the poet more space
than is his due; our excuse must be the interest of his engaging
self-revelations.
In spite of Pliny's enthusiasm for his poet friends, there is no reason
to suppose that the reign of Trajan saw the production of any poetry,
save that of Juvenal, which even approached the first rank. With the
accession of Hadrian we enter on a fresh era, characterized by the rise
of a new prose style and the almost entire disappearance of poetry. Rome
had produced her last great poet. The _Pervigilium Veneris_ and a few
slight but beautiful fragments of Tiberianus are all that illumine the
darkness till we come upon the interesting but uninspired elegiacs of
Rutilius Namatianus, the curiously uneven and slipshod poetry of
Ausonius, and the graceful, but cold and lifeless perfection of the
heroic hexameters of Claudian.
II
SULPICIA
Poetesses were not rare at Rome during the first century of our era; the
_scribendi cacoethes_ extended to the fair sex sufficiently, at any
rate, to evoke caustic comment both from Martial[458] and Juvenal.[459]
By a curious coincidence, the only poetesses of whose work we have any
record are both named Sulpicia. The elder Sulpicia belongs to an earlier
age; she formed one of the Augustan literary circle of which her uncle
Messala was the patron, and left a small collection of elegiac poems
addressed to her lover, and preserved in the same volume as the
posthumous poems of Tibullus, to whose authorship they were for long
attributed.[460]
The younger Sulpicia was a contemporary of the poet Martial, and, like
her predecessor, wrote erotic verse. Frank and outspoken as was the
earlier poetess, in this respect at least her namesake far surpassed
her. For the younger Sulpicia's plain-speaking, if we may judge from
the comments of ancient writers[461] and the one brief fragment of her
love-poems that has survived,[462] was of a very different character
and must at least have bordered on the obscene. But her work attracted
attention; her fame is associated with her love for Calenus, a love
that was long[463] and passionate. She continued to be read even in the
days of Ausonius and Sidonius Apollinaris. Martial compares her with
Sappho, and her songs of love seem to have rung true, even though their
frankness may have been of a kind generally associated with passions of
a looser character.[464] If, as a literal interpretation of
Martial[465] would lead us to infer, Calenus was her husband, the poems
of Sulpicia confront us with a spectacle unique in ancient
literature--a wife writing love-poems to her husband. Her language came
from the heart, not from book-learning; she was a poetess such as
Martial delighted to honour.
omnes Sulpiciam legant puellae,
uni quae cupiunt viro placere;
omnes Sulpiciam legant mariti,
uni qui cupiunt placere nuptae.
non haec Colchidos adserit furorem,
diri prandia nec refert Thyestae;
Scyllam, Byblida nec fuisse credit:
sed castos docet et probos amores,
lusus delicias facetiasque.
cuius carmina qui bene aestimarit,
nullam dixerit esse nequiorem,
nullam dixerit esse sanctiorem[466].
Read your Sulpicia, maidens all,
Whose husband shall your sole love be;
Read your Sulpicia, husbands all,
Whose wife shall reign, and none but she.
No theme for her Medea's fire,
Nor orgy of Thyestes dire;
Scylla and Byblis she'd deny,
Of love she sang and purity,
Of dalliance and frolic gay;
Who should have well appraised her lay
Had said none were more chaste than she,
Yet fuller none of amorous glee.
A. E. STREET.
Although the thought of what _procacitas_[467] may have meant in a lady
of Domitian's reign raises something of a shudder, and although it is to
be feared that Martial, when he goes on to say (loc. cit.)
tales Egeriae iocos fuisse
udo crediderim Numae sub antro,
Such sport I ween Egeria gave
To Numa in his spring-drenched cave.
A. E. STREET.
had that in his mind which would have scandalized the pious lawgiver of
Rome, we may yet regret the loss of poems which, if Martial's language
is not merely the language of flattery, may have breathed a fresher and
freer spirit than is often to be found in the poets of the age. Catullus
and Sappho would seem to have been Sulpicia's models, but her poems have
left so little trace behind them that it is impossible to speak with
certainty. As to their metre we are equally ill-informed. The fragment
of two lines quoted above is in iambic _senarii_. If we may believe the
evidence[468] of a satirical hexameter poem attributed to Sulpicia, she
also wrote in hendecasyllables and scazons. The genuineness of this poem
is, however, open to serious doubt. It consists of seventy hexameters
denouncing the expulsion of the philosophers by Domitian, and is known
by the title of _Sulpiciae satira_.[469] That it purports to be by the
poetess beloved of Calenus is clear from an allusion to their
passion.[470] Serious doubts have, however, been cast upon its
genuineness. It is urged that the work is ill-composed, insipid, and
tasteless, and that it contains not a few marked peculiarities in
diction and metre, together with more than one historical inaccuracy.
The inference suggested is that the poem is not by Sulpicia, but at
least two centuries later in date. It may readily be admitted that the
poem is almost entirely devoid of any real merit, that its diction is
obscure and slovenly, its metre lame and unimpressive. But the critics
of the poem are guilty of great exaggeration.[471] Many of its worst
defects are undoubtedly due to the exceedingly corrupt state of the
text; further, it is hard to see what interest a satire directed against
Domitian would possess centuries after his death, nor is it easy to
imagine what motive could have led the supposed forger to attribute his
work to Sulpicia. The balance of probability inclines, though very
slightly, in favour of the view that the work is genuine. This is
unfortunate; for the perusal of this curious satire on the hypothesis of
its genuineness appreciably lessens our regret for the loss of
Sulpicia's love poetry and arouses serious suspicion as to the veracity
of Martial. It must, however, in justice be remembered that it does not
follow that Sulpicia was necessarily a failure as a lyric writer because
she had not the peculiar gift necessary for satire. The absence of the
training of the rhetorical schools from a woman's education might well
account for such a failure. At the worst, Sulpicia stands as an
interesting example of the type of womanhood at which Juvenal levelled
some of his wildest and most ill-balanced invective.