II Vogue of Epistolary Form of Literature
How Pliny was admired and copied in the Roman world of literature we learn from the subsequent story of Roman literature preserved to us.
With the exception of the writings of Suetonius, Pliny’s friend, for a lengthened period after the reign of Trajan, an age splendidly illustrated by the writings of Tacitus and Pliny, little literature has come down to us; very silent, indeed, after Trajan’s age seems to have been the highly cultured and literary society of Rome of which Pliny writes in such vivid and appreciative terms.
Thoughtful men seem to consider that in the Roman Empire, under Hadrian, under the noble Antonine princes and their successors, “the soil, the race, the language were alike exhausted.” Be that as it may, there is no doubt that from the time of Trajan until the latter days of the wondrous story of Rome, late in the fourth century, apart from a group of purely Christian writers, Latin literature was practically extinct; certainly it produced nothing worthy to be transmitted to later ages.
Perhaps a solitary but not a very notable exception might be made in the few fragments that have come down to us of Fronto, the tutor and dear friend of Marcus Aurelius. These fragments are chiefly pieces of his correspondence with his pupils Marcus and his shortlived colleague in the Empire, Lucius Verus. It is not, however, probable that these letters were ever intended for publication or for general reading. It has been said with some truth that the Emperor Marcus and his scholar friend and tutor wrote to each other with the effusiveness of two schoolgirls.24 In one particular these correspondents evidently agreed—they both disliked, and tried to despise, the fast growing Christian community.
Towards the close of the fourth century, however, when the great Emperor Theodosius was fast fading away, worn out with cares and anxieties for the future of an empire which even his splendid abilities were powerless to preserve even for a little season, in a period which has been graphically compared to the “wan lingering light of a late autumnal sunset,” arose a few, a very few distinguished writers, whose works posterity has judged worthy of preservation.25
With two of the best known of these, the pagan poet Claudian, whose splendid claims for posthumous fame are undoubted, and somewhat later the half-pagan, half-Christian poet Ausonius, we are not concerned in this study; they were purely poets. Two other authors, however, in this late evening of Roman story especially interest us, as they carry on the tradition on which we have been dwelling,—the love for and interest in “letters,” in carefully studied “correspondence,” which the Letters of Cicero and Pliny made the fashion in the literary society of imperial Rome.
Symmachus, in the last years of the fourth century, and Sidonius Apollinaris, some half-century later in the fifth century, were close imitators of Pliny. Their Letters have come down to us; and the popularity which they enjoyed in their own time, a popularity which has endured more or less in all succeeding ages, tells us what a powerful and enduring influence the correspondence of Pliny must have exercised over the old world of Rome.
Both these writers belonged to the highest class in the society of the dying Empire. Q. Aurelius Symmachus had held some of the highest offices open to the patrician order, he had been governor of several important provinces, prefect of the city, and consul; in his later years he was regarded and generally treated as the chief of the Senate, for whose privileges he was intensely jealous at a time when the despotic rule of the Emperor had reduced the once proud assembly to a group of shadowy names whose principal title to honour and respect was the splendid tradition of a great past.
This Symmachus, statesman and ardent politician, was a writer of no mean power. Like Pliny, whom in common with all the literary society of Rome he admired and longed to imitate, he determined to go down to posterity as a writer of Letters.
These Letters of his were read and re-read in his day and time; his contemporaries classed him as on a level with Cicero, and loved to compare him with the younger Pliny, whom Symmachus adopted as his model. Many copies were made of his correspondence; his letters were treasured up in precious caskets, and after he had passed away, his son, Memmius Symmachus, collected them all together, dividing them, as Pliny’s had been divided, into ten Books. Nine of them, like the compositions of the great writer whom he strove to imitate, are mainly concerned with private and domestic matters; the tenth, as in the case of Pliny, being made up of official communications which had passed between his father and the reigning Emperor.
It is somewhat dull reading this “Symmachus” correspondence, but it gives us a picture of the nobler and purer portion of Roman society in the closing years of the fourth century. He was too good a scholar, too able a man, not to see his inferiority to Pliny; and evidently he had his doubts respecting the claim of his correspondence to immortality, and he apologizes for their barrenness of interesting incident; but his contemporaries and his devoted son thought otherwise, and to their loyal admiration we owe the preservation of his carefully prepared and corrected, though somewhat tedious, imitation of the charming Letters of Pliny.
Sidonius Apollinaris, who flourished a little more than half a century later, belonged also to the great Roman world; he was born at Lyons about A.D. 430, and partly owing to the elevation of his father-in-law Avitus to the imperial throne, was rapidly preferred to several of the great offices of the Empire—amongst these to the prefecture of Rome. His undoubted ability, his high character, and great position and fortune led to his election by popular voice to the bishopric of Clermont (though not in Holy orders), the episcopal city of his native Auvergne in Gaul. In his new and to him strange position there is no doubt that he fulfilled the expectation of the people who chose him as bishop; and when, some fifteen or twenty years after his election, in the great Auvergne diocese, he passed away, he was deeply, even passionately, mourned by his flock. He had been their devoted pastor, their helper and defender in the troublous and anxious period of the Visigothic occupation of Southern Gaul.
Sidonius Apollinaris was a poet of some power, and a graceful and fluent writer of panegyrics of great personages which in that age were much in vogue. He was also deeply read in the literature to which so many of the leaders of Roman society in the late evening of the Empire were ardently devoted.
But it is from his “Correspondence” that this eminent representative of the patrician order in the last days of the Empire will ever be remembered. We possess some hundred and forty-seven of his letters. They were collected and revised by him after he became Bishop of Clermont. Their publication is usually dated between the years 477 and 488. The letters were divided according to ancient models, Pliny being the principal model, into nine Books. (There was no tenth Book of official correspondence in his case.)
In their present form, revised and redacted by the writer himself, very many of the letters read as though intended for a public far wider than the individuals to whom the communications were originally addressed; and it is more than probable that from a comparatively early period, Sidonius intended to follow a well-known practice, and wrote many of his letters with a view to their being preserved as pieces of literature. He even tells us he proposed to be an imitator of Symmachus, his predecessor in this special form of writing by some fifty or sixty years; and Symmachus, we know, was an ardent admirer and imitator of Pliny.
The Letters, however, of Sidonius possess a far wider interest for us than the correspondence of Symmachus. Symmachus is dull and even prosy, partly from his exaggerated attention to Pliny’s rule which he suggested to one of his correspondents on the subject of letter-writing. The letter-writer, said Pliny, must aim at a style at once compressed and accurate in its form of expression (pressus sermo purusque ex Epistolis petitur). Sidonius, on the other hand, is diffuse and often picturesque, and his language is enriched or disfigured by an ample and often a barbarous vocabulary, drawn from the popular dialect into which the Latin of Cicero and Pliny was fast declining when the Bishop of Clermont wrote. His correspondents were many and various, including, it appears, some seventeen contemporary bishops.
On the whole, the Letters of Sidonius give a vivid and even a brilliant picture of the highly cultivated life of the noble and upper classes of the fast fading Empire of the fifth century.
Briefly to sum up what we have said in this second study of Pliny’s Letters. We have dwelt on the great importance of Pliny’s picture of Christianity in the first years of the second century; for it was
1st. A picture painted by a great Roman (pagan) statesman; and
2nd. Though it appears in a letter, the letter was one of a collection of Letters intended for future generations. Pliny here copied Cicero, who really may be said to have “invented” this novel and peculiar form of literature, i.e. letters written not merely for private friends and officials, but for the public, and intended to be handed down, if they were found worthy, to after ages.
The “silence” of all Latin literature after the age of Pliny for some two hundred and seventy years, of course prevents citing any examples of such letters, written for public use and for posterity, during this “silent” period.
But after this “silence,” a brief renaissance of Latin literature took place.
In this renaissance the works of only two prose writers of great reputation have been preserved for us. Both these were most distinguished men in the political world and in the world of literature.
And these two chose to copy Pliny’s plan of letter-writing, i.e., letters composed for public use and intended for posterity.
The two were Symmachus and Sidonius Apollinaris.
After this brief renaissance of Letters a veil of darkness fell over the Roman world.