II The Augustan Age
Virgil
Publius Vergilius Maro was born at the village of Andes, near Mantua, on the 15th of October, 70 B.C. The province of Cisalpine Gaul, though not formally incorporated with Italy till twenty years later, had before this become thoroughly Romanised, and was one of the principal recruiting grounds for the legions. But the population was still, by blood and sympathy, very largely Celtic; and modern theorists are fond of tracing the new element of romance, which Virgil introduced with such momentous results into Latin poetry, to the same Celtic spirit which in later ages flowered out in the Arthurian legend, and inspired the whole creative literature of mediaeval Europe. To the countrymen of Shakespeare and Keats it will not seem necessary to assume a Celtic origin, on abstract grounds, for any new birth of this romantic element. The name Maro may or may not be Celtic; any argument founded on it is of little more relevance than the fancy which once interpreted the name of Virgil’s mother, Magia Polla, into a supernatural significance, and, connecting the name Virgilius itself with the word Virgo, metamorphosed the poet into an enchanter born of a maiden mother, the Merlin of the Roman Empire.
Virgil’s father was a small freeholder in Andes, who farmed his own land, practised forestry and bee-keeping, and gradually accumulated a sufficient competence to enable him to give his son—an only child, it would appear, of this marriage—the best education that the times could provide. He was sent to school at the neighbouring town of Cremona, and afterwards to Milan, the capital city of the province. At the age of seventeen he proceeded to Rome, where he studied oratory and philosophy under the best masters of the time. A tradition, which the dates make improbable, was that Gaius Octavius, afterwards the Emperor Augustus, was for a time his fellow-scholar under the rhetorician Epidius. In the classroom of the Epicurean Siro he may have made his first acquaintance with the poetry of Lucretius.
For the next ten years we know nothing of Virgil’s life, which no doubt was that of a profound student. His father had died, and his mother married again, and his patrimony was sufficient to support him until a turn of the wheel of public affairs for a moment lost, and then permanently secured his fortune. After the battle of Philippi, the first task of the victorious triumvirs was to provide for the disbanding and settlement of the immense armies which had been raised for the Civil war. The lands of cities which had taken the Republican side were confiscated right and left for this purpose; among the rest, Virgil’s farm, which was included in the territory of Cremona. But Virgil found in the administrator of the district, Gaius Asinius Pollio, himself a distinguished critic and man of letters, a powerful and active patron. By his influence and that of his friends, Cornelius Gallus and Alfenus Varus—the former a soldier and poet, the latter an eminent jurist, who both had been fellow-students of Virgil at Rome—Virgil was compensated by an estate in Campania, and introduced to the intimate circle of Octavianus, who, under the terms of the triumvirate, was already absolute ruler of Italy.
It was about this time that the Eclogues were published, whether separately or collectively is uncertain, though the final collection and arrangement, which is Virgil’s own, can hardly be later than 38 B.C. The impression they made on the world of letters was immediate and universal. To some degree no doubt a reception was secured to them by the influence of Maecenas, the Home Minister of Octavianus, who had already taken up the line which he so largely developed in later years, of a public patron of art and letters in the interest of the new government. But had Virgil made his first public appearance merely as a Court poet, it is probable that the Eclogues would have roused little enthusiasm and little serious criticism. Their true significance seems to have been at once realised as marking the beginning of a new era; and amid the storm of criticism, laudatory and adverse, which has raged round them for so many ages since, this cardinal fact has always remained prominent. Alike to the humanists of the earlier Renaissance, who found in them the sunrise of a golden age of poetry and the achievement of the Latin conquest over Greece, and to the more recent critics of this century, for whom they represented the echo of an already exhausted convention and the beginning of the decadence of Roman poetry, the Eclogues have been the real turning-point, not only between two periods of Latin literature, but between two worlds.
The poems destined to so remarkable a significance are, in their external form, close and careful imitations of Theocritus, and have all the vices and weaknesses of imitative poetry to a degree that could not well be exceeded. Nor are these failings redeemed (as is to a certain extent true of the purely imitative work of Catullus and other poets) by any brilliant jewel-finish of workmanship. The execution is uncertain, hesitating, sometimes extraordinarily feeble. One well-known line it is impossible to explain otherwise than as a mistranslation of a phrase in Theocritus such as one would hardly expect from a well-grounded schoolboy. When Virgil follows the convention of the Greek pastoral his copy is doubly removed from nature; where he ventures on fresh impersonation or allegory of his own, it is generally weak in itself and always hopelessly out of tone with the rest. Even the versification is curiously unequal and imperfect. There are lines in more than one Eclogue which remind one in everything but their languor of the flattest parts of Lucretius. Contemporary critics even went so far as to say that the language here and there was simply not Latin.
Yet granted that all this and more than all this were true, it does not touch that specific Virgilian charm of which these poems first disclosed the secret. Already through their immature and tremulous cadences there pierces, from time to time, that note of brooding pity which is unique in the poetry of the world. The fourth and tenth Eclogues may be singled out especially as showing the new method, which almost amounted to a new human language, as they are also those where Virgil breaks away most decidedly from imitation of the Greek idyllists. The fourth Eclogue unfortunately has been so long and so deeply associated with purely adventitious ideas that it requires a considerable effort to read it as it ought to be read. The curious misconception which turned it into a prophecy of the birth of Christ outlasted in its effects any serious belief in its historical truth: even modern critics cite Isaiah for parallels, and are apt to decry it as a childish attempt to draw a picture of some actual golden age. But the Sibylline verses which suggested its contents and imagery were really but the accidental grain of dust round which the crystallization of the poem began; and the enchanted light which lingers over it is hardly distinguishable from that which saturates the Georgics. Cedet et ipse mari vector, nec nautica pinus mutabit merces—the feeling here is the same as in his mere descriptions of daily weather, like the Omnia plenis rura natant fossis atque omnis navita ponto umida vela legit; not so much a vision of a golden age as Nature herself seen through a medium of strange gold. Or again, in the tenth Eclogue, where the masque of shepherds and gods passes before the sick lover, it is through the same strange and golden air that they seem to move, and the heavy lilies of Silvanus droop in the stillness of the same unearthly day.
Seven years following on the publication of the Eclogues were spent by Virgil on the composition of the Georgics. They were published two years after the battle of Actium, being thus the first, as they are the most splendid, literary production of the Empire. They represent the art of Virgil in its matured perfection. The subject was one in which he was thoroughly at home and completely happy. His own early years had been spent in the pastures of the Mincio, among his father’s cornfields and coppices and hives; and his newer residence, by the seashore near Naples in winter, and in summer at his villa in the lovely hill-country of Campania, surrounded him with all that was most beautiful in the most beautiful of lands. His delicate health made it easier for him to give his work the slow and arduous elaboration that makes the Georgics in mere technical finish the most perfect work of Latin, or perhaps of any literature. There is no trace of impatience in the work. It was in some sense a commission; but Augustus and Maecenas, if it be true that they suggested the subject, had, at all events, the sense not to hurry it. The result more than fulfilled the brilliant promise of the Eclogues. Virgil was now, without doubt or dispute, the first of contemporary poets.
But his responsibilities grew with his greatness. The scheme of a great Roman epic, which had always floated before his own mind, was now definitely and indeed urgently pressed upon him by authority which it was difficult to resist. And many elements in his own mind drew him in the same direction. Too much stress need not be laid on the passage in the sixth Eclogue—one of the rare autobiographic touches in his work—in which he alludes to his early experiments in “singing of kings and battles.” Such early exercises are the common field of young poets. But the maturing of his mind, which can be traced in the Georgics, was urging him towards certain methods of art for which the epic was the only literary form that gave sufficient scope. More and more he was turning from nature to man and human life, and to the contemplation of human destiny. The growth of the psychological instinct in the Georgics is curiously visible in the episode of Aristaeus, with which the poem now ends. According to a well-authenticated tradition, the last two hundred and fifty lines of the fourth Georgic were written several years after the rest of the poem, to replace the original conclusion, which had contained the praises of his early friend, Cornelius Gallus, now dead in disgrace and proscribed from court poetry. In the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, in the later version, Virgil shows a new method and a new power. It stands between the idyl and the epic, but it is the epic method towards which it tends. No return upon the earlier manner was thenceforth possible; with many searchings of heart, with much occasional despondency and dissatisfaction, he addressed himself to the composition of the Aeneid.
The earlier national epics of Naevius and Ennius had framed certain lines for Roman epic poetry, which it was almost bound to follow. They had established the mythical connection of Rome with Troy and with the great cycle of Greek legend, and had originated the idea of making Rome itself —that Fortuna Urbis which later stood in the form of a golden statue in the imperial bedchamber—the central interest, one might almost say the central figure, of the story. To adapt the Homeric methods to this new purpose, and at the same time to make his epic the vehicle for all his own inward broodings over life and fate, for his subtle and delicate psychology, and for that philosophic passion in which all the other motives and springs of life were becoming included, was a task incapable of perfect solution. On his death-bed Virgil made it his last desire that the Aeneid should be destroyed, nominally on the ground that it still wanted three years’ work to bring it to perfection, but one can hardly doubt from a deeper and less articulate feeling. The command of the Emperor alone prevented his wish from taking effect. With the unfinished Aeneid, as with the unfinished poem of Lucretius, it is easy to see within what limits any changes or improvements would have been made in it had the author lived longer: the work is, in both cases, substantially done.
The Aeneid was begun the year after the publication of the Georgics, when Virgil was forty years of age. During its progress he continued to live for the most part in his Campanian retirement. He had a house at Rome in the fashionable quarter of the Esquiline, but used it little. He was also much in Sicily, and the later books of the Aeneid seem to show personal observation of many parts of Central Italy. It is a debated question whether he visited Greece more than once. His last visit there was in 19 B.C. He had resolved to spend three years more on the completion of his poem, and then give himself up to philosophy for what might remain of his life. But the three years were not given him. A fever, caught while visiting Megara on a day of excessive heat, induced him to return hastily to Italy. He died a few days after landing at Brundusium, on the 26th of September. His ashes were, by his own request, buried near Naples, where his tomb was a century afterwards worshipped as a holy place. The Aeneid, carefully edited from the poet’s manuscript by two of his friends, was forthwith published, and had such a reception as perhaps no poem before or since has ever found. Already, while it was in progress, it had been rumoured as “something greater than the Iliad,” and now that it appeared, it at once became the canon of Roman poetry, and immediately began to exercise an overwhelming influence over Latin literature, prose as well as verse. Critics were not indeed wanting to point out its defects, and there was still a school (which attained greater importance a century later) that went back to Lucretius and the older poets, and refused to allow Virgil’s preeminence. But for the Roman world at large, as since for the world of the Latin races, Virgil became what Homer had been to Greece, “the poet.” The decay of art and letters in the third century only added a mystical and hieratic element to his fame. Even to the Christian Church he remained a poet sacred and apart: in his profound tenderness and his mystical “yearning after the further shore,” as much as in the supposed prophecy of the fourth Eclogue, they found and reverenced what seemed to them like an unconscious inspiration. The famous passage of St. Augustine, where he speaks of his own early love for Virgil, shows in its half-hysterical renunciation how great the charm of the Virgilian art had been, and still was, to him: Quid miserius misero, he cries, _non miserante se ipsum, et flente Didonis mortem quae fiebat amando Aeneam, non flente autem mortem meam quae flebat non amando te? Deus lumen cordis mei, non te amabam, et haec non flebam, sed flebam Didonem exstinctam, ferroque extrema secutam, sequens ipse extrema condita tua relicto te![6] To the graver and more matured mind of Dante, Virgil was the lord and master who, even though shut out from Paradise, was the chosen and honoured minister of God. Up to the beginning of the present century the supremacy of Virgil was hardly doubted. Since then the development of scientific criticism has passed him through all its searching processes, and in a fair judgment his greatness has rather gained than lost. The doubtful honour of indiscriminate praise was for a brief period succeeded by the attacks of an almost equally undiscriminating censure. An ill-judged partiality had once spoken of the Aeneid as something greater than a Roman Iliad: it was easy to show that in the most remarkable Homeric qualities the Aeneid fell far short, and that, so far as it was an imitation of Homer, it could no more stand beside Homer than the imitations of Theocritus in the Eclogues could stand beside Theocritus. The romantic movement, with its impatience of established fames, damned the Aeneid in one word as artificial; forgetting, or not seeing, that the Aeneid was itself the fountain-head of romanticism. Long after the theory of the noble savage had passed out of political and social philosophy it lingered in literary criticism; and the distinction between “natural” and “artificial” poetry was held to be like that between light and darkness. It was not till a comparatively recent time that the leisurely progress of criticism stumbled on the fact that all poetry is artificial, and that the Iliad itself is artificial in a very eminent and unusual degree.
No great work of art can be usefully judged by comparison with any other great work of art. It may, indeed, be interesting and fertile to compare one with another, in order to seize more sharply and appreciate more vividly the special beauty of each. But to press comparison further, and to depreciate one because it has not what is the special quality of the other, is to lose sight of the function of criticism. We shall not find in Virgil the bright speed, the unexhausted joyfulness, which, in spite of a view of life as grave as Virgil’s own, make the Iliad and Odyssey unique in poetry; nor, which is more to the point as regards the Aeneid, the narrative power, the genius for story-telling, which is one of the rarest of literary gifts, and which Ovid alone among the Latin poets possessed in any high perfection. We shall not find in him that high and concentrated passion which in Pindar (as afterwards in Dante) fuses the elements of thought and language into a single white heat. We shall not find in him the luminous and untroubled calm, as of a spirit in which all passion has been fused away, which makes the poetry of Sophocles so crystalline and irreproachable. Nor shall we find in him the peculiar beauties of his own Latin predecessors, Lucretius or Catullus. All this is merely saying in amplified words that Virgil was not Lucretius or Catullus, and that still less was he Homer, or Pindar, or Sophocles; and to this may be added, that he lived in the world which the great Greek and Latin poets had created, though he looked forward out of it into another.
Yet the positive excellences of the Aeneid are so numerous and so splendid that the claim of its author to be the Roman Homer is not unreasonable, if it be made clear that the two poems are fundamentally disparate, and that no more is meant than that the one poet is as eminent in his own form and method as the other in his. In our haste to rest Virgil’s claim to supremacy as a poet on the single quality in which he is unique and unapproachable we may seem tacitly to assent to the judgment of his detractors on other points. Yet the more one studies the Aeneid, the more profoundly is one impressed by its quality as a masterpiece of construction. The most adverse critic would not deny that portions of the poem are, both in dramatic and narrative quality, all but unsurpassed, and in a certain union of imaginative sympathy with their fine dramatic power and their stateliness of narration perhaps unequalled. The story of the last agony of Troy could not be told with more breadth, more richness, more brilliance than it is told in the second book: here, at least, the story neither flags nor hurries; from the moment when the Greek squadron sets sail from Tenedos and the signal-flame flashes from their flagship, the scenes of the fatal night pass before us in a smooth swift stream that gathers weight and volume as it goes, till it culminates in the vision of awful faces which rises before Aeneas when Venus lifts the cloud of mortality from his startled eyes. The episode of Nisus and Euryalus in the ninth book, and that of Camilla in the eleventh, are in their degree as admirably vivid and stately. The portraiture of Dido, again, in the fourth book, is in combined breadth and subtlety one of the dramatic masterpieces of human literature. It is idle to urge that this touch is borrowed from Euripides or that suggested by Sophocles, or to quote the Medea of Apollonius as the original of which Dido is an elaborate imitation. What Virgil borrowed he knew how to make his own; and the world which, while not denying the tenderness, the grace, the charm of the heroine of the Argonautica, leaves the Argonautica unread, has thrilled and grown pale from generation to generation over the passionate tragedy of the Carthaginian queen.
But before a deeper and more appreciative study of the Aeneid these great episodes cease to present themselves as detached eminences. That the Aeneid is unequal is true; that passages in it here and there are mannered, and even flat, is true also; but to one who has had the patience to know it thoroughly, it is in its total effect, and not in the great passages, or even the great books, that it seems the most consummate achievement. Virgil may seem to us to miss some of his opportunities, to labour others beyond their due proportion, to force himself (especially in the later books) into material not well adapted to the distinctive Virgilian treatment. The slight and vague portrait of the maiden princess of Latium, in which the one vivid touch of her “flower-like hair” is the only clear memory we carry away with us, might, in different hands—in those of Apollonius, for instance,—have given a new grace and charm to the scenes where she appears. The funeral games at the tomb of Anchises, no longer described, as they had been in early Greek poetry, from a real pleasure in dwelling upon their details, begin to become tedious before they are over. In the battle-pieces of the last three books we sometimes cannot help being reminded that Virgil is rather wearily following an obsolescent literary tradition. But when we have set such passages against others which, without being as widely celebrated as the episode of the sack of Troy or the death of Dido, are equally miraculous in their workmanship—the end of the fifth book, for instance, or the muster-roll of the armies of Italy in the seventh, or, above all, the last hundred and fifty lines of the twelfth, where Virgil rises perhaps to his very greatest manner—we shall not find that the splendour of the poem depends on detached passages, but far more on the great manner and movement which, interfused with the unique Virgilian tenderness, sustains the whole structure through and through.
In merely technical quality the supremacy of Virgil’s art has never been disputed. The Latin hexameter, “the stateliest measure ever moulded by the lips of man,” was brought by him to a perfection which made any further development impossible. Up to the last it kept taking in his hands new refinements of rhythm and movement which make the later books of the Aeneid (the least successful part of the poem in general estimation) an even more fascinating study to the lovers of language than the more formally perfect work of the Georgics, or the earlier books of the Aeneid itself. A brilliant modern critic has noted this in words which deserve careful study. “The innovations are individually hardly perceptible, but taken together they alter the character of the hexameter line in a way more easily felt than described. Among the more definite changes we may note that there are more full stops in the middle of lines, there are more elisions, there is a larger proportion of short words, there are more words repeated, more assonances, and a freer use of the emphasis gained by the recurrence of verbs in the same or cognate tenses. Where passages thus characterised have come down to us still in the making, the effect is forced and fragmentary; where they succeed, they combine in a novel manner the rushing freedom of the old trochaics with the majesty which is the distinguishing feature of Virgil’s style. The poet’s last words suggest to us possibilities in the Latin tongue which no successor has been able to realise.” In these later books likewise, the psychological interest and insight which keep perpetually growing throughout Virgil’s work result in an almost unequalled power of expressing in exquisite language the half-tones and delicate shades of mental processes. The famous simile in the twelfth Aeneid—
Ac velut in somnis oculos ubi languida pressit
Nocte quies, nequiquam avidos extendere cursus
Velle videmur, et in mediis conatibus aegri
Succidimus, nec lingua valet, nec corpore notae
Sufficiunt vires aut vox et verba sequuntur—
is an instance of the amazing mastery with which he makes language have the effect of music in expressing the subtlest processes of feeling. But the specific and central charm of Virgil lies deeper than in any merely technical quality. The word which expresses it most nearly is that of pity. In the most famous of his single lines he speaks of the “tears of things;” just this sense of tears, this voice that always, in its most sustained splendour and in its most ordinary cadences, vibrates with a strange pathos, is what finally places him alone among artists. This thrill in the voice, come colui che piange e dice, is never absent from his poetry. In the “lonely words,” in the “pathetic half-lines” spoken of by the two great modern masters of English prose and verse, he perpetually touches the deepest springs of feeling; in these it is that he sounds, as no other poet has done, the depths of beauty and sorrow, of patience and magnanimity, of honour in life and hope beyond death.
A certain number of minor poems have come down to us associated more or less doubtfully with Virgil’s name. Three of these are pieces in hexameter verse, belonging broadly to the class of the epyllion, or “little epic,” which was invented as a convenient term to include short poems in the epic metre that were not definitely pastorals either in subject or treatment, and which the Alexandrian poets, headed by Theocritus, had cultivated with much assiduity and considerable success. The most important of them, the Culex, or Gnat, is a poem of about four hundred lines, in which the incident of a gnat saving the life of a sleeping shepherd from a serpent, and being crushed to death in the act, is made the occasion for an elaborate description of the infernal regions, from which the ghost of the insect rises to reproach his unconscious murderer. That Virgil wrote a poem with this title is alluded to by Martial and Statius as matter of common undisputed knowledge; nor is there any certain argument against the Virgilian authorship of the extant poem, but various delicate metrical considerations incline recent critics to the belief that it is from the hand of an almost contemporary imitator who had caught the Virgilian manner with great accuracy. The Ciris, another piece of somewhat greater length, on the story of Scylla and Nisus, is more certainly the production of some forgotten poet belonging to the circle of Marcus Valerius Messalla, and is of interest as showing the immense pains taken in the later Augustan age to continue the Virgilian tradition. The third poem, the Moretum, is at once briefer and slighter in structure and more masterly in form. It is said to be a close copy of a Greek original by Parthenius of Nicaea, a distinguished man of letters of this period who taught Virgil Greek; nor is there any grave improbability in supposing that the Moretum is really one of the early exercises in verse over which Virgil must have spent years of his laborious apprenticeship, saved by some accident from the fate to which his own rigorous judgment condemned the rest.
So far the whole of the poetry attributed to Virgil is in the single form of hexameter verse, to the perfecting of which his whole life was devoted. The other little pieces in elegiac and lyric metres require but slight notice. Some are obviously spurious; others are so slight and juvenile that it matters little whether they are spurious or not. One elegiac piece, the Copa, is of admirable vivacity and grace, and the touch in it is so singularly unlike the Virgilian manner as to tempt one into the paradox of its authenticity. That Virgil wrote much which he deliberately destroyed is obviously certain; his fastidiousness and his melancholy alike drove him towards the search after perfection, and his mercilessness towards his own work may be measured by his intention to burn the Aeneid. Not less by this passionate desire of unattainable perfection than by the sustained glory of his actual achievement,—his haunting and liquid rhythms, his majestic sadness, his grace and pity,— he embodies for all ages that secret which makes art the life of life itself.
II
Horace
In that great turning-point of the world’s history marked by the establishment of the Roman Empire, the position of Virgil is so unique because he looks almost equally forwards and backwards. His attitude towards his own age is that of one who was in it rather than of it. On the one hand is his intense feeling for antiquity, based on and reinforced by that immense antiquarian knowledge which made him so dear to commentators, and which renders some of his work so difficult to appreciate from our mere want of information; on the other, is that perpetual brooding over futurity which made him, within a comparatively short time after his death, regarded as a prophet and his works as in some sense oracular. The Sortes Vergilianae, if we may believe the confused gossip of the Augustan History, were almost a State institution, while rationalism was still the State creed in ordinary matters. Thus, while, in a way, he represented and, as it were, gave voice to the Rome of Augustus, he did so in a transcendental manner; the Rome which he represents, whether as city or empire, being less a fact than an idea, and already strongly tinged with that mysticism which we regard as essentially mediaeval, and which culminated later without any violent breach of continuity in the conception of a spiritual Rome which was a kingdom of God on earth, and of which the Empire and the Papacy were only two imperfect and mutually complementary phases; quella Roma onde Cristo è Romano, as it was expressed by Dante with his characteristic width and precision.
To this mystical temper the whole mind and art of Virgil’s great contemporary stands in the most pointed contrast. More than almost any other poet of equal eminence, Horace lived in the present and actual world; it is only when he turns aside from it that he loses himself. Certain external similarities of method there are between them—above all, in that mastery of verbal technique which made the Latin language something new in the hands of both. Both were laborious and indefatigable artists, and in their earlier acquaintanceship, at all events, were close personal friends. But the five years’ difference in their ages represents a much more important interval in their poetical development. The earlier work of Horace, in the years when he was intimate with Virgil, is that which least shows the real man or the real poet; it was not till Virgil, sunk in his Aeneid, and living in a somewhat melancholy retirement far away from Rome, was within a few years of his death, that Horace, amid the gaiety and vivid life of the capital, found his true scope, and produced the work that has made him immortal.
Yet the earlier circumstances of the two poets’ lives had been not unlike. Like Virgil, Horace sprang from the ranks of the provincial lower middle class, in whom the virtues of industry, frugality, and sense were generally accompanied by little grace or geniality. But he was exceptionally fortunate in his father. This excellent man, who is always spoken of by his son with a deep respect and affection, was a freedman of Venusia in Southern Italy, who had acquired a small estate by his economies as a collector of taxes in the neighbourhood. Horace must have shown some unusual promise as a boy; yet, according to his own account, it was less from this motive than from a disinterested belief in the value of education that his father resolved to give him, at whatever personal sacrifice, every advantage that was enjoyed by the children of the highest social class. The boy was taken to Rome about the age of twelve—Virgil, a youth of seventeen, came there from Milan about the same time—and given the best education that the capital could provide. Nor did he stop there; at eighteen he proceeded to Athens, the most celebrated university then existing, to spend several years in completing his studies in literature and philosophy. While he was there the assassination of Caesar took place, and the Civil war broke out. Marcus Brutus occupied Macedonia, and swept Greece for recruits. The scarcity of Roman officers was so great in the newly levied legions that the young student, a boy of barely twenty-one, with no birth or connection, no experience, and no military or organising ability, was not only accepted with eagerness, but at once given a high commission. He served in the Republican army till Philippi, apparently without any flagrant discredit; after the defeat, like many of his companions, he gave up the idea of further resistance, and made the best of his way back to Italy. He found his little estate forfeited, but he was not so important a person that he had to fear proscription, and with the strong common sense which he had already developed, he bought or begged himself a small post in the civil service which just enabled him to live. Three years later he was introduced by Virgil to Maecenas, and his uninterrupted prosperity began.
Did we know more of the history of Horace’s life in the interval between his leaving the university and his becoming one of the circle of recognised Augustan poets, much in his poetical development might be less perplexing to us. The effect of these years was apparently to throw him back, to arrest or thwart what would have been his natural growth. No doubt he was one of the men who (like Caesar or Cromwell in other fields of action) develop late; but something more than this seems needed to account for the extraordinary weakness and badness of his first volume of lyrical pieces, published by him when he was thirty-five. In the first book of the Satires, produced about five years earlier, he had shown much of his admirable later qualities,—humour, sense, urbanity, perception,—but all strangely mingled with a vein of artistic vulgarity (the worst perhaps of all vulgarities) which is totally absent from his matured writing. It is not merely that in this earlier work he is often deliberately coarse—that was a literary tradition, from which it would require more than ordinary originality to break free,—but that he again and again allows himself to fall into such absolute flatness as can only be excused on the theory that his artistic sense had been checked or crippled in its growth, and here and there disappeared in his nature altogether. How elaborate and severe the self-education must have been which he undertook and carried through may be guessed from the vast interval that separates the spirit and workmanship of the Odes from that of the Epodes, and can partly be traced step by step in the autobiographic passages of the second book of Satires and the later Epistles. We are ignorant in what circumstances or under what pressure the Epodes were published; it is a plausible conjecture that their faults were just such as would meet the approbation of Maecenas, on whose favour Horace was at the time almost wholly dependent; and Horace may himself have been glad to get rid, as it were, of his own bad immature work by committing it to publicity. The celebrated passage in Keats’ preface to Endymion, where he gives his reasons for publishing a poem of whose weakness and faultiness he was himself acutely conscious, is of very wide application; and it is easy to believe that, after the publication of the Epodes, Horace could turn with an easier and less embarrassed mind to the composition of the Odes.
Meanwhile he was content to be known as a writer of satire, one whose wish it was to bring up to an Augustan polish the literary form already carried to a high degree of success by Lucilius. The second book of Satires was published not long after the Epodes. It shows in every way an enormous advance over the first. He has shaken himself free from the imitation of Lucilius, which alternates in the earliest satires with a rather bitter and self-conscious depreciation of the work of the older poet and his successors. The prosperous turn Horace’s own life had taken was ripening him fast, and undoing the bad effects of earlier years. We have passed for good out of the society of Rupilius Rex and Canidia. At one time Horace must have run the risk of turning out a sort of ineffectual François Villon; this, too, is over, and his earlier education bears fruit in a temper of remarkable and delicate gifts.
This second book of Satires marks in one way the culmination of Horace’s powers. The brilliance of the first years of the Empire stimulated the social aptitude and dramatic perception of a poet who lived in the heart of Rome, already free from fear or ambition, but as yet untouched by the melancholy temper which grew on him in later years. He employs the semi-dramatic form of easy dialogue throughout the book with extraordinary lightness and skill. The familiar hexameter, which Lucilius had left still cumbrous and verbose, is like wax in his hands; his perfection in this use of the metre is as complete as that of Virgil in the stately and serious manner. And behind this accomplished literary method lies an unequalled perception of common human nature, a rich vein of serious and quiet humour, and a power of language the more remarkable that it is so unassuming, and always seems as it were to say the right thing by accident. With the free growth of his natural humour he has attained a power of self-appreciation which is unerring. The Satires are full from end to end of himself and his own affairs; but the name of egoism cannot be applied to any self-revelation or self-criticism which is so just and so certain. From the opening lines of the first satire, where he notes the faults of his own earlier work, to the last line of the book, with its Parthian shot at Canidia and the jeunesse orageuse that he had so long left behind, there is not a page which is not full of that self-reference which, in its truth and tact, constantly passes beyond itself and holds up the mirror to universal human nature. In reading the Satires we all read our own minds and hearts.
Nearly ten years elapsed between the publication of the second book of the Satires and that of the first book of the Epistles. Horace had passed meanwhile into later middle life. He had in great measure retired from society, and lived more and more in the quietness of his little estate among the Sabine hills. Life was still full of vivid interest; but books were more than ever a second world to him, and, like Virgil, he was returning with a perpetually increasing absorption to the Greek philosophies, which had been the earliest passion of his youth. Years had brought the philosophic mind; the more so that these years had been filled with the labour of the Odes, a work of the highest and most intricate effort, and involving the constant study of the masterpieces of Greek thought and art. The “monument more imperishable than bronze” had now been completed; its results are marked in the Epistles by a new and admirable maturity and refinement. Good sense, good feeling, good taste, —these qualities, latent from the first in Horace, have obtained a final mastery over the coarser strain with which they had at first been mingled; and in their shadow now appear glimpses of an inner nature even more rare, from which only now and then he lifts the veil with a sort of delicate self-depreciation, in an occasional line of sonorous rhythm, or in some light touch by which he gives a glimpse into a more magical view of life and nature: the earliest swallow of spring on the coast, the mellow autumn sunshine on a Sabine coppice, the everlasting sound of a talking brook; or, again, the unforgettable phrases, the fallentis semita vitae, or quod petis hic est, or ire tamen restat, that have, to so many minds in so many ages, been key-words to the whole of life.
It is in the Epistles that Horace reveals himself most intimately, and perhaps with the most subtle charm. But the great work of his life, for posterity as well as for his own age, was the three books of Odes which were published by him in 23 B.C., at the age of forty-two, and represent the sustained effort of about ten years. This collection of eighty-eight lyrics was at once taken to the heart of the world. Before a volume of which every other line is as familiar as a proverb, which embodies in a quintessential form that imperishable delight of literature to which the great words of Cicero already quoted[7] give such beautiful expression, whose phrases are on all men’s lips as those of hardly any other ancient author have been, criticism is almost silenced. In the brief and graceful epilogue, Horace claims for himself, with no uncertainty and with no arrogance, such eternity as earth can give. The claim was completely just. The school-book of the European world, the Odes have been no less for nineteen centuries the companions of mature years and the delight of age—adolescentiam agunt, senectutem oblectant, may be said of them with as much truth as ever now. Yet no analysis will explain their indefinable charm. If the so-called “lyrical cry” be of the essence of a true lyric, they are not true lyrics at all. Few of them are free from a marked artificiality, an almost rigid adherence to canon. Their range of thought is not great; their range of feeling is studiously narrow. Beside the air and fire of a lyric of Catullus, an ode of Horace for the moment grows pale and heavy, cineris specie decoloratur. Beside one of the pathetic half-lines of Virgil, with their broken gleams and murmurs as of another world, a Horatian phrase loses lustre and sound. Yet Horace appeals to a tenfold larger audience than Catullus—to a larger audience, it may even be said, than Virgil. Nor is he a poets’ poet: the refined and exquisite technique of the Odes may be only appreciable by a trained artist in language; but it is the untrained mind, on whom other art falls flat, that the art of Horace, by some unique penetrative power, kindles and quickens. His own phrase of “golden mediocrity” expresses with some truth the paradox of his poetry; in no other poet, ancient or modern, has such studied and unintermitted mediocrity been wrought in pure gold. By some tact or instinct—the “felicity,” which is half of the famous phrase in which he is characterised by Petronius—he realised that, limited as his own range of emotion was, that of mankind at large was still more so, and that the cardinal matter was to strike in the centre. Wherever he finds himself on the edge of the range in which his touch is certain, he draws back with a smile; and so his concentrated effect, within his limited but central field, is unsurpassed, and perhaps unequalled.
This may partly explain how it was that with Horace the Latin lyric stops dead. His success was so immediate and so immense that it fixed the limit, so to speak, for future poets within the confined range which he had chosen to adopt; and that range he had filled so perfectly that no room was left for anything but imitation on the one hand, or, on the other, such a painful avoidance of imitation as would be equally disastrous in its results. With the principal lyric metres, too, the sapphic and alcaic, he had done what Virgil had done with the dactylic hexameter, carried them to the highest point of which the foreign Latin tongue was capable. They were naturalised, but remained sterile. When at last Latin lyric poetry took a new development, it was by starting afresh from a wholly different point, and by a reversion to types which, for the culture of the early imperial age, were obsolete and almost non-existent.
The phrase, verbis felicissime audax, used of Horace as a lyric poet by Quintilian, expresses, with something less than that fine critic’s usual accuracy, another quality which goes far to make the merit of the Odes. Horace’s use of words is, indeed, remarkably dexterous; but less so from happy daring than from the tact which perpetually poises and balances words, and counts no pains lost to find the word that is exactly right. His audacities—if one cares to call them so—in the use of epithet, in Greek constructions (which he uses rather more freely than any other Latin poet), and in allusive turns of phrase, are all carefully calculated and precisely measured. His unique power of compression is not that of the poet who suddenly flashes out in a golden phrase, but more akin to the art of the distiller who imprisons an essence, or the gem-engraver working by minute touches on a fragment of translucent stone. With very great resources of language at his disposal, he uses them with singular and scrupulous frugality; in his measured epithets, his curious fondness for a number of very simple and abstract words, and the studious simplicity of effect in his most elaborately designed lyrics, he reminds one of the method of Greek has-reliefs, or, still more (after allowing for all the difference made by religious feeling), of the sculptured work of Mino of Fiesole, with its pale colours and carefully ordered outlines. Phrases of ordinary prose, which he uses freely, do not, as in Virgil’s hands, turn into poetry by his mere use of them; they give rather than receive dignity in his verses, and only in a few rare instances, like the stately Motum ex Metello consule civicum, are they completely fused into the structure of the poem. So, too, his vivid and clearly-cut descriptions of nature in single lines and phrases stand out by themselves like golden tesserae in a mosaic, each distinct in a glittering atmosphere—qua tumidus rigat arva Nilus; opacam porticus excipiebat Arcton; nec prata canis albicant pruinis—a hundred phrases like these, all exquisitely turned, and all with the same effect of detachment, which makes them akin to sculpture, rather than painting or music. Virgil, as we learn from an interesting fragment of biography, wrote his first drafts swiftly and copiously, and wrought them down by long labour into their final structure; with Horace we may rather imagine that words came to the surface slowly and one by one, and that the Odes grew like the deposit, cell by cell, of the honeycomb to which, in a later poem, he compares his own work. In some passages where the Odes flag, it seems as though material had failed him before the poem was finished, and he had filled in the gaps, not as he wished, but as he could, yet always with the same deliberate gravity of workmanship.
Horatii curiosa felicitas—this, one of the earliest criticisms made on the Odes, remains the phrase which most completely describes their value. Such minute elaboration, on so narrow a range of subject, and within such confined limits of thought and feeling, could only be redeemed from dulness by the perpetual felicity—something between luck and skill—that was Horace’s secret. How far it was happy chance, how far deliberately aimed at and attained, is a question which brings us before one of the insoluble problems of art; we may remind ourselves that, in the words of the Greek dramatist Agathon, which Aristotle was so fond of quoting, skill and chance in all art cling close to one another. “Safe in his golden mediocrity,” to use the words of his own counsel to Licinius, Horace has somehow or another taken deep hold of the mind, and even the imagination, of mankind. This very mediocrity, so fine, so chastened, so certain, is in truth as inimitable as any other great artistic quality; we must fall back on the word genius, and remember that genius does not confine itself within the borders of any theory, but works its own will.
With the publication of the three books of the Odes, and the first book of the Epistles, Horace’s finest and maturest work was complete. In the twelve years of his life which were still to run he published but little, nor is there any reason to suppose that he wrote more than he published. In 17 B.C., he composed, by special command, an ode to be sung at the celebration of the Secular Games. The task was one in which he was much hampered by a stringent religious convention, and the result is interesting, but not very happy. We may admire the skill with which formularies of the national worship are moulded into the sapphic stanza, and prescribed language, hardly, if at all, removed from prose, is made to run in stately, though stiff and monotonous, verse; but our admiration is of the ingenuity, not of the poetry. The Jubilee Ode written by Lord Tennyson is curiously like the Carmen Seculare in its metrical ingenuities, and in the way in which the unmistakeable personal note of style sounds through its heavy and formal movement.
Four years later a fourth book of Odes was published, the greater part of which consists of poems less distinctly official than the Secular Hymn, but written with reference to public affairs by the direct command of the Emperor, some in celebration of the victories of Drusus and Tiberius on the north-eastern frontier, and others in more general praise of the peace and external prosperity established throughout Italy under the new government. Together with these official pieces he included some others: an early sketch for the Carmen Seculare, a curious fragment of literary criticism in the form of an ode addressed to one of the young aristocrats who followed the fashion of the Augustan age in studying and writing poetry, and eight pieces of the same kind as his earlier odes, written at various times within the ten years which had now passed since the publication of the first three books. An introductory poem, of graceful but half-ironical lamentation over the passing of youth, seems placed at the head of the little collection in studious depreciation of its importance. Had it not been for the necessity of publishing the official odes, it is probable enough that Horace would have left these few later lyrics ungathered. They show the same care and finish in workmanship as the rest, but there is a certain loss of brilliance; except one ode of mellow and refined beauty, the famous Diffugere nives, they hardly reach the old level. The creative impulse in Horace had never been very powerful or copious; with growing years he became less interested in the achievement of literary artifice, and turned more completely to his other great field, the criticism of life and literature. To the concluding years of his life belong the three delightful essays in verse which complete the list of his works. Two of these, which are placed together as a second book of Epistles, seem to have been published at about the same time as the fourth book of the Odes. The first, addressed to the Emperor, contains the most matured and complete expression of his views on Latin poetry, and is in great measure a vindication of the poetry of his own age against the school which, partly from literary and partly from political motives, persisted in giving a preference to that of the earlier Republic. In the second, inscribed to one of his younger friends belonging to the circle of Tiberius, he reviews his own life as one who was now done with literature and literary fame, and was giving himself up to the pursuit of wisdom. The melancholy of temperament and advancing age is subtly interwoven in his final words with the urbane humour and strong sense that had been his companions through life:—
Lusisti satis, edisti satis atque bibisti, Tempus abire tibi est, ne potum largius acquo Rideat et pulset lasciva decentius aetas.
A new generation, clever, audacious, and corrupt, had silently been growing up under the Empire. Ovid was thirty, and had published his Amores. The death of Virgil had left the field of serious poetry to little men. The younger race had learned only too well the lesson of minute care and formal polish so elaborately taught them by the earlier Augustan poets, and had caught the ear of the town with work of superficial but, for the time, captivating brilliance. Gloom was already beginning to gather round the Imperial household; the influence of Maecenas, the great support of letters for the last twenty years, was fast on the wane. In the words just quoted, with their half-sad and half-mocking echo of the famous passage of Lucretius,[8] Horace bids farewell to poetry.
But literary criticism, in which he had so fine a taste, and on which he was a recognised authority, continued to interest him; and the more seriously minded of the younger poets turned to him for advice, which he was always willing to give. The Epistle to the Pisos, known more generally under the name of the Art of Poetry, seems to have been composed at intervals during these later years, and was, perhaps, not published till after his death in the year 8 B.C. It is a discussion of dramatic poetry, largely based on Greek textbooks, but full of Horace’s own experience and of his own good sense. Young aspirants to poetical fame regularly began with tragedies; and Horace, accepting this as an actual fact, discusses the rules of tragedy with as much gravity as if he were dealing with some really living and national form of poetry. This discursive and fragmentary essay was taken in later ages as an authoritative treatise; and the views expressed by Horace on a form of poetical art with which he had little practical acquaintance had, at the revival of literature, and even down to last century, an immense influence over the structure and development of the drama. Just as modern comedy based itself on imitation of Plautus and Terence, and as the earliest attempts at tragedy followed haltingly in the steps of Seneca, so as regards the theory of both, Horace, and not the Greeks, was the guiding influence.
Among the many amazing achievements of the Greek genius in the field of human thought were a lyrical poetry of unexampled beauty, a refined critical faculty, and, later than the great thinkers and outside of the strict schools, a temperate philosophy of life such as we see afterwards in the beautiful personality of Plutarch. In all these three Horace interpreted Greece to the world, while adding that peculiarly Roman urbanity—the spirit at once of the grown man as distinguished from children, of the man of the world, and of the gentleman—which up till now has been a dominant ideal over the thought and life of Europe.
III
Propertius and the Elegists
Those years of the early Empire in which the names of Virgil and Horace stand out above all the rest were a period of large fertility in Latin poetry. Great poets naturally bring small poets after them; and there was no age at Rome in which the art was more assiduously practised or more fashionable in society. The Court set a tone which was followed in other circles, and more especially among the younger men of the old aristocracy, now largely excluded from the public life which had engrossed their parents under the Republic. The influence of the Alexandrian poets, so potent in the age of Catullus, was not yet exhausted; and a wider culture had now made the educated classes familiar with the whole range of earlier Greek poetry as well. Rome was full of highly educated Greek scholars, some of whom were themselves poets of considerable merit. It was the fashion to form libraries; the public collection formed by Augustus, and housed in a sumptuous building on the Palatine, was only the largest among many others in the great houses of Rome. The earlier Latin poets had known only a small part of Greek literature, and that very imperfectly; their successors had been trammelled by too exclusive an admiration of the Greek of the decadence. Virgil and Horace, though professed students of the Alexandrians, had gone back themselves, and had recalled the attention of the public, to the poets of free Greece, and had stimulated the widely felt longing to conquer the whole field of poetry for the Latin tongue.
For this attempt, tradition and circumstance finally proved too strong; and Augustan poetry, outside of a few definite forms, is largely a chronicle of failure. This was most eminently so in the drama. Augustan tragedy seems never to have risen for a moment beyond mere academic exercises. Of the many poets who attempted it, nothing survives beyond a string of names. Lucius Varius Rufus, the intimate friend of both Virgil and Horace, and one of the two joint-editors of the Aeneid after the death of the former, wrote one tragedy, on the story of Thyestes, which was acted with applause at the games held to celebrate the victory of Actium, and obtained high praise from later critics. But he does not appear to have repeated the experiment like so many other Latin poets, he turned to the common path of annalistic epic. Augustus himself began a tragedy of Ajax, but never finished it. Gaius Asinius Pollio, the first orator and critic of the period, and a magnificent patron of art and science, also composed tragedies more on the antique model of Accius and Pacuvius, in a dry and severe manner. But neither in these, nor in the work of the young men for whose benefit Horace wrote the Epistle to the Pisos, was there any real vitality; the precepts of Horace could no more create a school of tragedians than his example could create a school of lyric poets.
The poetic forms, on the other hand, used by Virgil were so much more on the main line of tendency that he stands among a large number of others, some of whom might have had a high reputation but for his overwhelming superiority. Of the other essays made in this period in bucolic poetry we know too little to speak with any confidence. But both didactic poetry and the little epic were largely cultivated, and the greater epic itself was not without followers. The extant poems of the Culex and Ciris have already been noted as showing with what skill and grace unknown poets, almost if not absolutely contemporary with Virgil, could use the slighter epic forms. Varius, when he abandoned tragedy, wrote epics on the death of Julius Caesar, and on the achievements of Agrippa. The few fragments of the former which survive show a remarkable power and refinement; Virgil paid them the sincerest of all compliments by conveying, not once only but again and again, whole lines of Varius into his own work. Another intimate friend of Virgil, Aemilius Macer of Verona, wrote didactic poems in the Alexandrian manner on several branches of natural history, which were soon eclipsed by the fame of the Georgics, but remained a model for later imitators of Nicander. One of these, a younger contemporary of Virgil called Gratius, or Grattius, was the author of a poem on hunting, still extant in an imperfect form. In its tame and laboured correctness it is only interesting as showing the early decay of the Virgilian manner in the hands of inferior men.
A more interesting figure, and one the loss of whose works leaves a real gap in Latin literature, is Gaius Cornelius Gallus, the earliest and one of the most brilliant of the Augustan poets. Like Varro Atacinus, he was born in Narbonese Gaul, and brought into Roman poetry a new touch of Gallic vivacity and sentiment. The year of his birth was the same as that of Virgil’s, but his genius matured much earlier, and before the composition of the Eclogues he was already a celebrated poet, as well as a distinguished man of action. The story of his life, with its swift rise from the lowest fortune to the splendid viceroyalty of Egypt, and his sudden disgrace and death at the age of forty-three, is one of the most dramatic in Roman history. The translations from Euphorion, by which he first made his reputation, followed the current fashion; but about the same time he introduced a new kind of poetry, the erotic elegy, which had a swift and far-reaching success. To Gallus, more than to any other single poet, is due the naturalisation in Latin of the elegiac couplet, which, together with the lyrics of Horace and the Virgilian hexameter, makes up the threefold poetical achievement of the Augustan period, and which, after the Latin lyric had died out with Horace himself, halved the field with the hexameter. For the remaining literature of the Empire, for that of the Middle Ages so far as it followed classical models, and even for that of the Renaissance, which carries us down to within a measurable distance of the present day, the hexameter as fixed by Virgil, and the elegiac as popularised by Gallus and rapidly brought to perfection by his immediate followers, are the only two poetical forms of real importance.
The elegiac couplet had, of course, been in use at Rome long before; Ennius himself had employed it, and in the Ciceronian age Catullus had written in it largely, and not without success. But its successful use had been hitherto mainly confined to short pieces, such as would fall within the definition of the Greek epigram. The four books of poems in which Gallus told the story of his passion for the courtesan Cytheris (the Lycoris of the tenth Eclogue) showed the capacities of the metre in a new light. The fashion they set was at once followed by a crowd of poets. The literary circles of Maecenas and Messalla had each their elegiac poet of the first eminence; and the early death of both Propertius and Tibullus was followed, amid the decline of the other forms of the earlier Augustan poetry, by the consummate brilliance of Ovid.
Of the Augustan elegiac poets, Sextus Propertius, a native of Assisi in Umbria, and introduced at a very early age to the circle of Maecenas, is much the most striking and interesting figure, not only from the formal merit of his poetry, but as representing a type till then almost unknown in ancient literature. Of his life little is known. Like Virgil, he lost his patrimonial property in the confiscations which followed the Civil war, but he was then a mere child. He seems to have been introduced to imperial patronage by the publication of the first book of his Elegies at the age of about twenty. He died young, before he was thirty-five, if we may draw an inference from the latest allusions in his extant poems; he had then written four other books of elegiac pieces, which were probably published separately at intervals of a few years. In the last book there is a noticeable widening of range of subject, which foreshadows the further development that elegiac verse took in the hands of Ovid soon after his death.
In striking contrast to Virgil or Horace, Propertius is a genius of great and, indeed, phenomenal precocity. His first book of Elegies, the Cynthia monobiblos of the grammarians, was a literary feat comparable to the early achievements of Keats or Byron. The boy of twenty had already mastered the secret of elegiac verse, which even Catullus had used stiffly and awkwardly, and writes it with an ease, a colour, a sumptuousness of rhythm which no later poet ever equalled. The splendid cadence of the opening couplet—
Cynthia prima suis miserum me cepit ocellis Contactum nullis ante cupidinibus—
must have come on its readers with the shock of a new revelation. Nothing like it had ever been written in Latin before: itself and alone it assures a great future to the Latin elegiac. His instinct for richness of sound is equally conspicuous where it is found in purely Latin phrases, as in the opening of the sixteenth elegy—
Quae fueram magnis olim patefacta triumphis
Ianua Tarpeiae nota pudicitiae
Cuius inaurati celebrarunt limina currus
Captorum lacrimis umida supplicibus,
and where it depends on a lavish use of Greek ornament, as in the opening of the third—
Qualis Thesea iacuit cedente carina
Languida desertis Gnosia litoribus,
Qualis et accubuit primo Cepheia somno
Libera iam duris cotibus Andromede,
Even when one comes to them fresh from Virgil, lines like these open a new world of sound. The Greek elegiac, as it is known to us by the finest work of the epigrammatists, had an almost unequalled flexibility and elasticity of rhythm; this quality Propertius from the first seized, and all but made his own. By what course of reasoning he was led in his later work to suppress this large and elastic treatment, and approximate more and more closely to the fine but somewhat limited and metallic rhythm which has been perpetuated by the usage of Ovid, we cannot guess. In this first book he ends the pentameter freely with words of three, four, and five syllables; the monotony of the perpetual disyllabic termination, which afterwards became the normal usage, is hardly compensated by the increased smoothness which it gives the verse.
But this new power of versification accompanied a new spirit even more remarkable, which is of profound import as the precursor of a whole school of modern European poetry. The Cynthia is the first appearance in literature of the neurotic young man, who reappeared last century in Rousseau’s Confessions and Goethe’s Werther, and who has dominated French literature so largely since Alfred de Musset. The way had been shown half a century before by that remarkable poet, Meleager of Gadara, whom Propertius had obviously studied with keen appreciation. Phrases in the Cynthia, like—
Tum mihi constantis deiecit lumina fastus Et caput impositis pressit Amor pedibus, or—
Qui non ante patet donec manus attigit ossa, are in the essential spirit of Meleager, and, though not verbally copied from him, have the precise quality of his rhythms and turns of phrase. But the abandonment to sensibility, the absorption in self-pity and the sentiment of passion, are carried by Propertius to a far greater length.
The abasement of a line like—
Sis quodcunque voles, non aliena tamen,_
is in the strongest possible contrast to that powerful passion which fills the poetry of Catullus, or to the romantic tenderness of the Eclogues; and in the extraordinary couplet—
Me sine, quem semper voluit fortuna iacere, Hanc animam extremae reddere nequitiae,
“the expense of spirit in a waste of shame” reaches its culminating point. This tremulous self-absorption, rather than any defect of eye or imagination, is the reason of the extraordinary lapses which now and then he makes both in description and in sentiment. The vivid and picturesque sketches he gives of fashionable life at watering-places and country-houses in the eleventh and fourteenth elegies, or single touches, like that in the remarkable couplet—
Me mediae noctes, me sidera prona iacentem, Frigidaque Eoo me dolet aura gelu, show that where he was interested neither his eye nor his language had any weakness; but, as a rule, he is not interested either in nature or, if the truth be told, in Cynthia, but wholly in himself. He ranks among the most learned of the Augustan poets; but, for want of the rigorous training and self-criticism in which Virgil and Horace spent their lives, he made on the whole but a weak and ineffective use of a natural gift perhaps equal to either of theirs. Thus it is that his earliest work is at the same time his most fascinating and brilliant. After the Cynthia he rapidly became, in the mordant phrase used by Heine of Musset, un jeune homme d’un bien beau passé. Some premonition of early death seems to have haunted him; and the want of self-control in his poetry may reflect actual physical weakness united with his vivid imagination.
The second and third books of the Elegies,[9] though they show some technical advance, and are without the puerilities which here and there occur in the Cynthia, are on the whole immensely inferior to it in interest and charm. There is still an occasional line of splendid beauty, like the wonderful—
Sunt apud infernos tot milia formosarum; an occasional passage of stately rhythm, like the lines beginning—
Quandocunque igitur nostros mors clausit ocellos; but the smooth versification has now few surprises; the learning is becoming more mechanical; there is a tendency to say over again what he had said before, and not to say it quite so well.
Through these two books Cynthia is still the main subject. But with the advance of years, and his own growing fame as a poet, his passion—if that can be called a passion which was so self-conscious and so sentimental—fell away from him, and left his desire for literary reputation the really controlling motive of his work. In the introductory poem to the fourth book there is a new and almost aggressive tone with regard to his own position among the Roman poets, which is in strong contrast to the modesty of the epilogue to the third book. The inflated invocation of the ghost of Callimachus laid him fatally open to the quietly disdainful reference by which, without even mentioning Propertius by name, Horace met it a year or two later in the second book of the Epistles. But even Horace is not infallible; and Propertius was, at all events, justified in regarding himself as the head of a new school of poetry, and one which struck its roots wide and deep.
In the fourth and fifth books of the Elegies there is a wide range of subject; the verse is being tested for various purposes, and its flexibility answers to almost every demand. But already we feel its fatal facility. The passage beginning Atque ubi iam Venerem, in the poem where he contrasts his own life with those of the followers of riches and ambition, is a dilution into twelve couplets of eight noble lines of the Georgics, with an effect almost as feeble, if not so grotesque, as that of the later metaphrasts, who occupied themselves in turning heroic into elegiac poems by inserting a pentameter between each two lines. The sixth elegy of the same book is nothing but a cento of translations from the Anthology, strung together and fastened up at the end by an original couplet in the worst and most puerile manner of his early writing. On the other hand, these books include fresh work of great merit, and some of great beauty. The use of the elegiac metre to tell stories from Graeco-Roman mythology and legendary Roman history is begun in several poems which, though Propertius has not the story-telling gift of Ovid, showed the way to the delightful narratives of the Fasti. A few of the more personal elegies have a new and not very agreeable kind of realism, as though Musset had been touched with the spirit of Flaubert. In one, the ninth of the fourth book, the realism is in a different and pleasanter vein; only Herrick among English poets has given such imaginative charm to straightforward descriptions of the ordinary private life of the middle classes. The fifth book ends with the noble elegy on Cornelia, the wife of Paulus Aemilius Lepidus, in which all that is best in Propertius’ nature at last finds splendid and memorable expression. It has some of his common failings,—passages of inappropriate learning, and a little falling off towards the end. But where it rises to its height, in the lines familiar to all who know Latin, it is unsurpassed in any poetry for grace and tenderness.
Nunc tibi commendo communia pignora natos;
Haec cura et cineri spirat inusta meo.
Fungere maternis vicibus pater: illa meorum
Omnis erit collo turba fovenda tuo.
Oscula cum dederis tua flentibus, adice matris;
Tota domus coepit nunc onus esse tuum.
Et siquid doliturus eris, sine testibus illis!
Cum venient, siccis oscula falle genis:
Sat tibi sint noctes quas de me, Paule, fatiges,
Somniaque in faciem reddita saepe meam.
In these lines, hardly to be read without tears, Propertius for once rises into that clear air in which art passes beyond the reach of criticism. What he might have done in this new manner had he lived longer can only be conjectured; at the same age neither Virgil nor Horace had developed their full genius. But the perpetual recurrence in the later poems of that brooding over death, which had already marked his juvenile work, indicates increasing exhaustion of power. Even the sparkling elegy on the perils of a lover’s rapid night journey from Rome to Tibur passes at the end into a sombre imagination of his own grave; and the fine and remarkable poem (beginning with the famous Sunt aliquid Manes) in which the ghost of Cynthia visits him, is full of the same morbid dwelling on the world of shadows, where the “golden girl” awaits her forgetful lover. Atque hoc sollicitum vince sopore caput had become the sum of his prayers. But a little while afterwards the restless brain of the poet found the sleep that it desired.
At a time when literary criticism was so powerful at Rome, and poetry was ruled by somewhat rigid canons of taste, it is not surprising that more stress was laid on the defects than on the merits of Propertius’ poetry. It evidently annoyed Horace; and in later times Propertius remained the favourite of a minority, while general taste preferred the more faultless, if less powerfully original, elegiacs of his contemporary, Albius Tibullus. This pleasing and graceful poet was a few years older than Propertius, and, like him, died at the age of about thirty-five. He did not belong to the group of court poets who formed the circle of Maecenas, but to a smaller school under the patronage of Marcus Valerius Messalla, a distinguished member of the old aristocracy, who, though accepting the new government and loyal in his service to the Emperor, held somewhat aloof from the court, and lived in a small literary world of his own. Tibullus published in his lifetime two books of elegiac poems; after his death a third volume was published, containing a few of his posthumous pieces, together with poems by other members of the same circle. Of these, six are elegies by a young poet of the upper class, writing under the name of Lygdamus, and plausibly conjectured to have been a near relative of Tibullus. One, a panegyric on Messalla, by an unknown author, is without any poetical merit, and only interesting as an average specimen of the amateur verse of the time when, in the phrase of Horace—
Populus calet uno Scribendi studio; pueri patresque severi Fronde comas vincti cenant et carmina dictant.
The curious set of little poems going under the name of Sulpicia, and included in the volume, will be noticed later.
Tibullus might be succinctly and perhaps not unjustly described as a Virgil without the genius. The two poets died in the same year, and a contemporary epigram speaks of them as the recognised masters of heroic and elegiac verse; while the well known tribute of Ovid, in the third book of the Amores, shows that the death of Tibullus was regarded as an overwhelming loss by the general world of letters. “Pure and fine,” the well-chosen epithets of Quintilian, are in themselves no slight praise; and the poems reveal a gentleness of nature and sincerity of feeling which make us think of their author less with admiration than with a sort of quiet affection. No two poets could be more strongly contrasted than Tibullus and Propertius, even when their subject and manner of treatment approximate most closely. In Tibullus the eagerness, the audacity, the irregular brilliance of Propertius are wholly absent; as are the feverish self-consciousness and the want of good taste and good sense which are equally characteristic of the latter. Poetry is with him, not the outburst of passion, or the fruit of high imagination, but the refined expression of sincere feeling in equable and melodious verse. The delightful epistle addressed to him by Horace shows how high he stood in the esteem and affection of a severe critic, and a man whose friendship was not lightly won or lavishly expressed. He stands easily at the head of Latin poets of the second order. In delicacy, in refinement, in grace of rhythm and diction, he cannot be easily surpassed; he only wants the final and incommunicable touch of genius which separates really great artists from the rest of the world.
IV
Ovid
The Peace of the Empire, secured by the victory of Actium, and fully established during the years which followed by Augustus and his lieutenants, inaugurated a new era of social life in the capital. The saying of Augustus, that he found Rome brick and left it marble, may be applied beyond the sphere of mere architectural decoration. A French critic has well observed that now, for the first time in European history, the Court and the City existed in their full meaning. Both had an organised life and a glittering external ease such as was hardly known again in Europe till the reign of the Grand Monarque. The enormous wealth of the aristocracy was in the mass hardly touched by all the waste and confiscations of the civil wars; and, in spite of a more rigorous administration, fresh accumulations were continually made by the new official hierarchy, and flowed in from all parts of the Empire to feed the luxury and splendour of the capital. Wealth and peace, the increasing influence of Greek culture, and the absence of political excitement, induced a period of brilliant laxity among the upper classes. The severe and frugal morals of the Republic still survived in great families, as well as among that middle class, from which the Empire drew its solid support; but in fashionable society there was a marked and rapid relaxation of morals which was vainly combated by stringent social and sumptuary legislation. The part taken by women in social and political life is among the most powerful factors in determining the general aspect of an age. This, which had already been great under the later Republic, was now greater than ever. The Empress Livia was throughout the reign of Augustus, and even after his death, one of the most important persons in Rome. Partly under her influence, partly from the temperament and policy of Augustus himself, a sort of court Puritanism grew up, like that of the later years of Louis Quatorze. The aristocracy on the whole disliked and despised it; but the monarchy was stronger than they. The same gloom overshadows the end of these two long reigns. Sentences of death or banishment fell thick among the leaders of that gay and profligate society; to later historians it seemed that all the result of the imperial policy had been to add hypocrisy to profligacy, and incidentally to cripple and silence literature.
Of this later Augustan period Ovid is the representative poet. The world in which he lived may be illustrated by a reference to two ladies of his acquaintance, both in different ways singularly typical of the time. Julia, the only daughter of Augustus, still a mere child when her father became master of the world, was brought up with a strictness which excited remark even among those who were familiar with the strict traditions of earlier times. Married, when a girl of fourteen, to her cousin, Marcus Claudius Marcellus; after his death, two years later, to the Emperor’s chief lieutenant, Marcus Agrippa; and a third time, when he also died, to the son of the Empress Livia, afterwards the Emperor Tiberius,—she was throughout treated as a part of the State machinery, and as something more or less than a woman. But she turned out to be, in fact, a woman whose beauty, wit, and recklessness were alike extraordinary, and who rose in disastrous revolt against the system in which she was forced to be a pivot. Alike by birth and genius she easily took the first place in Roman society; and under the very eyes of the Emperor she multiplied her lovers right and left, and launched out into a career that for years was the scandal of all Rome. When she had reached the age of thirty-seven, in the same year when Ovid’s Art of Love was published, the axe suddenly fell; she was banished, disinherited, and kept till her death in rigorous imprisonment, almost without the necessaries of life. Such were the first-fruits of the social reform inaugurated by Augustus and sung by Horace.
In the volume of poems which includes the posthumous elegies of Tibullus, there is also contained a group of short pieces by another lady of high birth and social standing, a niece of Messalla and a daughter of Servius Sulpicius, and so belonging by both parents to the inner circle of the aristocracy. Nothing is known of her life beyond what can be gathered from the poems. But that they should have been published at all, still more that they should have been published, as they almost certainly were, with the sanction of Messalla, is a striking instance of the unique freedom enjoyed by Roman women of the upper classes, and of their disregard of the ordinary moral conventions. The only ancient parallel is in the period of the Aeolic Greek civilisation which produced Sappho. The poems are addressed to her lover, who (according to the fashion of the time—like Catullus’ Lesbia or Propertius’ Cynthia) is spoken of by a Greek name, but was most probably a young Roman of her own circle. The writer, a young, and apparently an unmarried woman, addresses him with a frankness of passion that has no idea of concealment. She does not even take the pains to seal her letters to him, though they contain what most women would hesitate to put on paper. They have all the same directness, which sometimes becomes a splendid simplicity. One note, reproaching him for a supposed infidelity—
Si tibi cura togae potior pressumque quasillo Scortum quam Servi filia Sulpicia—
has all the noble pride of Shakespeare’s Imogen. Of the world and its ways she has no girlish ignorance; but the talk of the world, as a motive for reticence, simply does not exist for her.
Where young ladies of the upper classes had such freedom as is shown in these poems, and used it, the ordinary lines of demarcation between respectable women and women who are not respectable must have largely disappeared. It has been much and inconclusively debated whether the Hostia and Plania, to whom, under assumed names, the amatory poems of Propertius and Tibullus were addressed, were more or less married women (for at Rome there were degrees of marriage), or women for whom marriage was a remote and immaterial event. The same controversy has raged over Ovid’s Corinna, who is variously identified as Julia the daughter of the Emperor herself, as a figment of the imagination, or as an ordinary courtesan. The truth is, that in the society so brilliantly drawn in the Art of Love, such distinctions were for the time suspended, and we are in a world which, though for the time it was living and actual, is as unreal to us as that of the Restoration dramatists.
The young lawyer and man of fashion, Publius Ovidius Naso, who was the laureate of this gay society, was a few years younger than Propertius, with whom he was in close and friendly intimacy. The early death of both Propertius and Tibullus occurred before Ovid published his first volume; and Horace, the last survivor of the older Augustans, had died some years before that volume was followed by any important work. The period of Ovid’s greatest fertility was the decade immediately following the opening of the Christian era; he outlived Augustus by three years, and so laps over into the sombre period of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, which culminated in the reign of Nero.
As the eldest surviving son of an opulent equestrian family of Upper Italy, Ovid was trained for the usual career of civil and judicial office. He studied for the bar at Rome, and, though he never worked hard at law, filled several judicial offices of importance. But his interest was almost wholly in the rhetorical side of his profession; he “hated argument;” and from the rhetoric of the schools to the highly rhetorical poetry which was coming into fashion there was no violent transition. An easy fortune, a brilliant wit, an inexhaustible memory, and an unfailing social tact, soon made him a prominent figure in society; and his genuine love of literature and admiration for genius—unmingled in his case with the slightest trace of literary jealousy or self-consciousness—made him the friend of the whole contemporary world of letters. He did not begin to publish poetry very early; not because he had any delicacy about doing so, nor because his genius took long to ripen, but from the good-humoured laziness which never allowed him to take his own poetry too seriously. When he was about thirty he published, to be in the fashion, a volume of amatory elegiacs, which was afterwards re-edited and enlarged into the existing three books of Amores. Probably about the same time he formally graduated in serious poetry with his tragedy of Medea. For ten or twelve years afterwards he continued to throw off elegiac poems, some light, others serious, but all alike in their easy polish, and written from the very first with complete and effortless mastery of the metre. To this period belong the Heroides, the later pieces in the Amores, the elaborate poem on the feminine toilet called De Medicamine Faciei, and other poems now lost. Finally, in 2 or 1 B.C., he published what is perhaps on the whole his most remarkable work, the three books De Arte Amatoria.
Just about the time of the publication of the Art of Love, the exile of the elder Julia fell like a thunderbolt on Roman society. Staggered for a little under the sudden blow, it soon gathered itself together again, and a perpetual influx of younger men and women gathered round her daughter and namesake, the wife of Lucius Aemilius Paulus, into a circle as corrupt, if not so accomplished, as that of which Ovid had been a chief ornament. He was himself now forty; though singularly free from literary ambition, he could not but be conscious of his extraordinary powers, and willing to employ them on larger work. He had already incidentally proved that he possessed an instinct for narrative such as no Roman poet had hitherto had—such, indeed, as it would be difficult to match even in Greek poetry outside Homer. A born story-teller, and an accomplished master of easy and melodious verse, he naturally turned for subjects to the inexhaustible stores of the Graeco-Roman mythology, and formed the scheme of his Metamorphoses and Fasti. Both poems were all but complete, but only the first half of the latter had been published, when, at the end of the year 8, his life and work were suddenly shattered by a mysterious catastrophe. An imperial edict ordered him to leave Rome on a named day, and take up his residence at the small barbarous town of Tomi, on the Black Sea, at the extreme outposts of civilisation. No reason was assigned, and no appeal allowed. The cause of this sudden action on the part of the Emperor remains insoluble. The only reason ever officially given, that the publication of the Art of Love (which was already ten years old) was an offence against public morals, is too flimsy to have been ever meant seriously. The allusions Ovid himself makes to his own “error” or “crime” are not meant to be intelligible, and none of the many theories which have been advanced fully satisfies the facts. But, whatever may have been the cause—whether Ovid had become implicated in one of those aristocratic conspiracies against which Augustus had to exercise constant vigilance, or in the intrigues of the younger Julia, or in some domestic scandal that touched the Emperor even more personally— it brought his literary career irretrievably to the ground. The elegies which he continued to pour forth from his place of exile, though not without their grace and pathos, struggle almost from the first under the crowning unhappiness of unhappiness, that it ceases to be interesting. The five books of the Tristia, written during the earlier years of his banishment, still retain, through the monotony of their subject, and the abject humility of their attitude to Augustus, much of the old dexterity. In the four books of Epistles from Pontus, which continue the lamentation over his calamities, the failure of power is evident. He went on writing profusely, because there was nothing else to do; panegyrics on Augustus and Tiberius alternated with a natural history of fish—the Halieutica—and with abusive poems on his real or fancied enemies at Rome. While Augustus lived he did not give up hopes of a remission, or at least an alleviation, of his sentence; but the accession of Tiberius, who never forgot or forgave anything, must have extinguished them finally; and he died some three years later, still a heart-broken exile.
Apart from his single tragedy, from a few didactic or mock-didactic pieces, imitated from Alexandrian originals, and from his great poem of the Metamorphoses, the whole of Ovid’s work was executed in the elegiac couplet. His earliest poems closely approximate in their management of this metre to the later work of Propertius. The narrower range of cadence allowed by the rule which makes every couplet regularly end in a disyllable, involves a monotony which only Ovid’s immense dexterity enabled him to overcome. In the Fasti this dexterity becomes almost portentous: when his genius began to fail him, the essential vice of the metre is soon evident. But the usage was stereotyped by his example; all through the Empire and through the Middle Ages, and even down to the present day, the Ovidian metre has been the single dominant type: and though no one ever managed it with such ingenuity again, he taught enough of the secret to make its use possible for almost every kind of subject. His own elegiac poetry covers an ample range. In the impassioned rhetoric of the Heroides, the brilliant pictures of life and manners in the De Arte Amatoria, or the sparkling narratives of the Fasti, the same sure and swift touch is applied to widely diverse forms and moods. Ovid was a trained rhetorician and an accomplished man of the world before he began to write poetry; that, in spite of his worldliness and his glittering rhetoric, he has so much of feeling and charm, is the highest proof of his real greatness as a poet.
But this feeling and charm are the growth of more mature years. In his early poetry there is no passion and little sentiment. He writes of love, but never as a lover; nor, with all his quickness of insight and adroitness of impersonation, does he ever catch the lover’s tone. From the amatory poems written in his own person one might judge him to be quite heartless, the mere hard and polished mirror of a corrupt society; and in the Art of Love he is the keen observer of men and women whose wit and lucid common sense are the more insolently triumphant because untouched by any sentiment or sympathy. We know him from other sources to have been a man of really warm and tender feeling; in the poetry which he wrote as laureate of the world of fashion he keeps this out of sight, and outdoes them all in cynical worldliness. It is only when writing in the person of a woman—as in the Phyllis or Laodamia of the Heroides—that he allows himself any approach to tenderness. The Ars Amatoria, full as it is of a not unkindly humour, of worldly wisdom and fine insight, is perhaps the most immoral poem ever written. The most immoral, not the most demoralizing: he wrote for an audience for whom morality, apart from the code of good manners which society required, did not exist; and wholly free as it is from morbid sentiment, the one great demoralizing influence over men and women, it may be doubted whether the poem is one which ever did any reader serious harm, while few works are more intellectually stimulating within a certain limited range. To readers for whom its qualities have exhausted or have not acquired their stimulating force, it merely is tiresome; and this, indeed, is the fate which in the present age, when wit is not in vogue, has very largely overtaken it.
Interspersed in the Art of Love are a number of stories from the old mythology, introduced to illustrate the argument, but set out at greater length than was necessary for that purpose, from the active pleasure it always gives Ovid to tell a story. When he conceived the plan of his Metamorphoses, he had recognised this narrative instinct as his special gift. His tragedy of Medea had remained a single effort in dramatic form, unless the Heroides can be classed as dramatic monologues. The Medea, but for two fine single lines, is lost; but all the evidence is clear that Ovid had no natural turn for dramatic writing, and that it was merely a clever tour de force. In the idea of the Metamorphoses he found a subject, already treated in more than one Alexandrian poem, that gave full scope for his narrative gift and his fertile ingenuity. The result was a poem as long, and almost as unflagging, as the Odyssey. A vast mass of multifarious stories, whose only connection is the casual fact of their involving or alluding to some transformation of human beings into stones, trees, plants, beasts, birds, and the like, is cast into a continuous narrative. The adroitness with which this is done makes the poem rank as a masterpiece of construction. The atmosphere of romantic fable in which it is enveloped even gives it a certain plausibility of effect almost amounting to epic unity. In the fabulous superhuman element that appears in all the stories, and in their natural surroundings of wood, or mountain, or sea—always realised with fresh enjoyment and vivid form and colour—there is something which gives the same sort of unity of effect as we feel in reading the Arabian Nights. It is not a real world; it is hardly even a world conceived as real; but it is a world so plausible, so directly appealing to simple instincts and unclouded senses, above all so completely taken for granted, that the illusion is, for the time, all but complete. For later ages, the Metamorphoses became the great textbook of classical mythology; the legends were understood as Ovid had told them, and were reproduced (as, for instance, throughout the whole of the painting of the Renaissance) in the spirit and colour of this Italian story-teller.
For the metre of the Metamorphoses Ovid chose the heroic hexameter, but used it in a strikingly new and original way. He makes no attempt, as later poets unsuccessfully did, at reproducing the richness of tone and intricacy of modulation which it had in the hands of Virgil. Ovid’s hexameter is a thing of his own. It becomes with him almost a new metre— light, brilliant, and rapid, but with some monotony of cadence, and without the deep swell that it had, not in Virgil only, but in his predecessors. The swift, equable movement is admirably adapted to the matter of the poem, smoothing over the transitions from story to story, and never allowing a story to pause or flag halfway. Within its limits, the workmanship is faultless. The style neither rises nor sinks with the variation of subject. One might almost say that it was without moral quality. Ovid narrates the treachery of Scylla or the incestuous passion of Myrrha with the same light and secure touch as he applies to the charming idyl of Baucis and Philemon or the love-tale of Pyramus and Thisbe; his interest is in what happened, in the story for the story’s sake. So, likewise, in the rhetorical evolution of his thought, and the management of his metre, he writes simply as the artist, with the artistic conscience as his only rule. The rhetorician is as strong in him as it had been in the Amores; but it is under better control, and seldom leads him into excesses of bad taste, nor is it so overmastering as not to allow free play to his better qualities, his kindliness, his good-humour, his ungrudging appreciation of excellence, in his evolution of thought—or his play of fancy, if the expression be preferred—he has an alertness and precision akin to great intellectual qualities; and it is this, perhaps, which has made him a favourite with so many great men of letters. Shakespeare himself, in his earlier work, alike the plays and the poems, writes in the Ovidian manner, and often in what might be direct imitation of Ovid; the motto from the Amores prefixed to the Venus and Adonis is not idly chosen. Still more remarkable, because less superficially evident, is the affinity between Ovid and Milton. At first sight no two poets, perhaps, could seem less alike. But it is known that Ovid was one of Milton’s favourite poets; and if one reads the Metamorphoses with an eye kept on Paradise Lost, the intellectual resemblance, in the manner of treatment of thought and language, is abundantly evident, as well in the general structure of their rhetoric as in the lapses of taste and obstinate puerilities (non ignoravit vitia sua sed amavit might be said of Milton also), which come from time to time in their maturest work.
The Metamorphoses was regarded by Ovid himself as his masterpiece. In the first impulse of his despair at leaving Rome, he burned his own copy of the still incomplete poem. But other copies were in existence; and though he writes afterwards as though it had been published without his correction and without his consent, we may suspect that it was neither without his knowledge nor against his will; when he speaks of the manus ultima as wanting, it is probably a mere piece of harmless affectation to make himself seem liker the author of the Aeneid. The case was different with the Fasti, the other long poem which he worked at side by side with the Metamorphoses. The twelve books of this work, dealing with the calendar of the twelve months, were also all but complete when he was banished, and the first six, if not actually published, had, at all events, got into private circulation. At Tomi he began a revision of the poem which, apparently, he never completed. The first half of the poem, prefaced by a fresh dedication to Germanicus, was published, or republished, after the death of Augustus, to whom, in its earlier form, it had been inscribed; the second half never reached the public. It cannot be said that Latin poetry would be much poorer had the first six books been suppressed also. The student of metrical forms would, indeed, have lost what is metrically the most dexterous of all Latin poems, and the archaeologist some curious information as to Roman customs; but, for other readers, little would be missed but a few of the exquisitely told stories, like that of Tarquin and Lucretia, or of the Rape of Proserpine, which vary the somewhat tedious chronicle of astronomical changes and national festivals.
The poems of the years of Ovid’s exile, the Tristia and the Letters from Pontus, are a melancholy record of flagging vitality and failing powers. His adulation of the Emperor and the imperial family passes all bounds; it exhausts what would otherwise seem the inexhaustible copiousness of his vocabulary. The long supplication to Augustus, which stands by itself as book ii. of the Tristia, is the most elaborate and skilful of these pieces; but those which may be read with the most pleasure are the letters to his wife, for whom he had a deep affection, and whom he addresses with a pathos that is quite sincere. As hope of recall grew fainter, his work failed more and more; the incorrect language and slovenly versification of some of the Letters from Pontus are in sad contrast to the Ovid of ten years before, and if he went on writing till the end, it was only because writing had long been a second nature to him.
Of the extraordinary force and fineness of Ovid’s natural genius, there never have been two opinions; had he but been capable of controlling it, instead of indulging it, he might have, in Quintilian’s opinion, been second to no Roman poet. In his Medea, the critic adds, he did show some of this self-control; its loss is the more to be lamented. But the easy good-nature of his own disposition, no less than the whole impulse of the literary fashion then prevalent, was fatal to the continuous exercise of such severe self-education: and the man who was so keen and shrewd in his appreciation of the follies of lovers had all the weakness of a lover for the faults of his own poetry. The delightful story of the three lines which his critical friends urged him to erase proves, if proof were needed, that this weakness was not blindness, and that he was perfectly aware of the vices of his own work. The child of his time, he threw all his brilliant gifts unhesitatingly into the scale of new ideas and new fashions; his “modernity,” to use a current term of the present day, is greater than that of any other ancient author of anything like his eminence.
Prisca iuvent alios, ego me nunc denique natum Gratulor: haec aetas moribus apta meis—
this is his deliberate attitude throughout his life.
Such a spirit has more than once in the history of the arts marked the point from which their downward course began. I do not sing the old things, for the new are far better, the famous Greek musician Timotheus had said four centuries earlier, and the decay of Greek music was dated from that period. But to make any artist, however eminent, responsible for the decadence of art, is to confuse cause with effect; and the note of ignominy affixed by Augustus to the Art of Love was as futile as the action of the Spartan ephor when he cut the strings away from the cithara of Timotheus. The actual achievement of Ovid was to perfect and popularise a poetical form of unusual scope and flexibility; to throw a vivid and lasting life into the world of Graeco-Roman mythology; and, above all, to complete the work of Cicero and Horace in fixing a certain ideal of civilised manners for the Latin Empire and for modern Europe. He was not a poet of the first order; yet few poets of the first order have done a work of such wide importance.
V
Livy
The Ciceronian age represents on the whole the culmination of Latin prose, as the Augustan does the culmination of Latin poetry. In the former field, the purity of the language as it had been used by Caesar and Cicero could hardly be retained in a period of more diffused culture; and the influence of the schools of rhetoric, themselves based on inferior Greek models, became more and more marked. Poetry, too, was for the time more important than prose, and one result was that prose became infected with certain qualities of poetical style. The reign of Augustus includes only one prose writer of the first rank, the historian Titus Livius.
Though not living like Virgil or Horace in the immediate circle of Augustus and under direct court patronage, Livy was in friendly relations with the Emperor and his family, and accepted the new rule with cordiality, if without much enthusiasm. Of his life, which seems to have been wholly spent in literary pursuits, little is known. He was born at Padua in the year of Julius Caesar’s first consulship, and had survived Augustus by three years when he died at the age of seventy-five. In earlier life he wrote some philosophical dialogues and treatises on rhetoric which have not been preserved. An allusion in the first book of his history shows that it was written, or at all events published, after the first and before the second closing of the temple of Janus by Augustus, in the years 29 and 25 B.C. For forty years thereafter he continued this colossal task, which, like the Decline and Fall, was published in parts from time to time. He lived to bring it down as far as the death of Drusus, the younger son of the Empress Livia, in the year 9 B.C. The division into books, of which there were one hundred and forty-two in the whole work, is his own; these again were arranged in volumina, or sections issued as separate volumes, and containing a varying number of books. The division of the work into decads was made by copyists at a much later period, and was no part of the author’s own plan. Only one-fourth of the whole history has survived the Middle Ages. This consists of the first, the third, the fourth, and half of the fifth decad, or books i.-x. and xxi.-xlv. of the work; of the rest we only possess brief tables of contents, drawn up in the fourth century, not from the original work but from an abridgment, itself now lost, which was then in use. The scale of the history is very different in the two surviving portions. The first decad carries it from the foundation of the city through the Regal and early Republican periods down to the third Samnite war, a period of four centuries and a half. The twenty-five extant books of the third, fourth, and fifth decads cover a period of fifty years, from the beginning of the second Punic to the conclusion of the third Macedonian war. This half century, it is true, was second in importance to none in Roman history. But the scale of the work had a constant tendency to expand as it approached more modern times, and more abundant documents; and when he reached his own time, nearly a book was occupied with the events of each year.
Founded as it was, at least for the earlier periods, upon the works of preceding annalists, the history of Livy adopted from them the arrangement by years marked by successive consulates, which was familiar to all his readers. He even speaks of his own work as annales, though its formal title seems to have been Histori’ (or Libri Historiarum) ab Urbe Condita. There is no reason to suppose that he intended to conclude it at any fixed point In a preface to one of the later volumes, he observed with justifiable pride that he had already satisfied the desire of fame, and only went on writing because the task of composition had become a fixed habit, which he could not discontinue without uneasiness. His fame even in his lifetime was unbounded. He seems to have made no enemies. The acrid criticism of Asinius Pollio, a purist by profession, on certain provincialities of his style, was an insignificant exception to the general chorus of praise. In treading the delicate ground of the Civil wars his attitude towards the Republican party led Augustus to tax him half jestingly as a Pompeian; yet Livy lost no favour either with him or with his more jealous successor. The younger Pliny relates how a citizen of Cadiz was so fired by his fame that he travelled the whole way to Rome merely to see him, and as soon as he had seen him returned home, as though Rome had no other spectacles to offer.
Roman history had hitherto been divided between the annalists and the writers of personal and contemporary memoirs. Sallust was almost the only example of the definite historical treatment of a single epoch or episode of the past. As a rule each annalist set himself the same task, of compiling, from the work of his predecessors, and such additional information as he found accessible to him, a general history of the Roman people from its beginnings, carried down as far towards his own day as he found time or patience to continue it. Each successive annalist tried to improve upon previous writers, either in elegance of style or in copiousness of matter, and so far as he succeeded in the double task his work replaced those already written. It was not considered unfair to transcribe whole passages from former annalists, or even to copy their works with additions and improvements, and bring them out as new and original histories. The idea of literary property seems, in truth, to be very much a creation of positive law. When no copyright existed, and when the circulation of any book was confined within very small limits by the cost and labour of transcription, the vaguest ideas prevailed, not at Rome alone, on what we should now regard as the elementary morality of plagiarism. Virgil himself transferred whole lines and passages, not merely from earlier, but even from contemporary poets; and in prose writing, one annalist cut up and reshaped the work of another with as little hesitation as a mediaeval romance-writer.
In this matter Livy allowed himself full liberty; and his work absorbed, and in a great measure blotted out, those of his predecessors. In his general preface he speaks of the two motives which animate new historians, as the hope that they will throw further light on events, or the belief that their own art will excel that of a ruder age. The former he hardly professes to do, at least as regards times anterior to his own; his hope is that by his pen the great story of the Republic will be told more impressively, more vividly, in a manner more stimulating to the reader and more worthy of the subject, than had hitherto been done. This purpose at least he amply and nobly carried out; nor can it be said to be a low ideal of the function of history. So far, however, as the office of the historian is to investigate facts, to get at the exact truth of what physically happened, or to appreciate the varying degrees of probability with which that truth can be attained, Livy falls far short of any respectable ideal. His romantic temper and the ethical bent of his mind alike indisposed him to set any very great value on facts as such. His history bears little trace of any independent investigation. Sources for history lay round him in immense profusion. The enormous collections made by Varro in every field of antiquarian research were at his hand, but he does not seem to have used them, still less to have undertaken any similar labour on his own account. While he never wilfully distorts the truth, he takes comparatively little pains to disengage it from fables and inaccuracies. In his account of a battle in Greece he finds that Valerius Antias puts the number of the enemy killed as inside ten thousand, while Claudius Quadrigarius says forty thousand. The discrepancy does not ruffle him, nor even seem to him very important; he contents himself with an expression of mild surprise that Valerius for once allows himself to be outstripped in exaggerating numbers. Yet where Valerius is his only authority or is not contradicted by others, he accepts his statements, figures and all, without uneasiness. This instance is typical of his method as a critical—or rather an uncritical —historian. When his authorities do not disagree, he accepts what they say without much question. When they do disagree, he has several courses open to him, and takes one or another according to his fancy at the moment. Sometimes he counts heads and follows the majority of his authors; sometimes he adopts the account of the earliest; often he tries to combine or mediate between discordant stories; when this is not easy, he chooses the account which is most superficially probable or most dramatically impressive. He even bases a choice on the ground that the story he adopts shows Roman statesmanship or virtue in a more favourable light, though he finds some of the inventions of Roman vanity too much for him to swallow. Throughout he tends to let his own preferences decide whether or not a story is true. In rebus tam antiquis si quae similia veri sint pro veris accipiantur is the easy canon which he lays down for early and uncertain events. Even when original documents of great value were extant, he refrains from citing them if they do not satisfy his taste. During the second Punic war a hymn to Juno had been written by Livius Andronicus for a propitiatory festival. It was one of the most celebrated documents of early Latin; but he refuses to insert it, on the ground that to the taste of his own day it seemed rude and harsh. Yet as a historian, and not a collector of materials for history, he may plead the privilege of the artist. The modern compromise by which documents are cited in notes without being inserted in the text of histories had not then been invented; and notes, even when as in the case of Gibbon’s they have a substantive value as literature, are an adjunct to the history itself, rather than any essential part of it. A more serious charge is, that when he had trustworthy authorities to follow, he did not appreciate their value. In his account of the Macedonian wars, he often follows Polybius all but word for word, but apparently without realising the Greek historian’s admirable accuracy and judgment. Such appreciation only comes of knowledge; and Livy lacked the vast learning and the keen critical insight of Gibbon, to whom in many respects he has a strong affinity. His imperfect knowledge of the military art and of Roman law often confuses his narrative of campaigns and constitutional struggles, and gives too much reason to the charge of negligence brought against him by that clever and impudent critic, the Emperor Caligula.
Yet, in spite of all his inaccuracies of detail, and in spite of the graver defect of insufficient historical perspective, which makes him colour the whole political development of the Roman state with the ideas of his own time, the history of Rome as narrated by Livy is essentially true and vital, because based on a large insight into the permanent qualities of human nature. The spirit in which he writes history is well illustrated by the speeches. These, in a way, set the tone of the whole work. He does not affect in them to reproduce the substance of words actually spoken, or even to imitate the tone of the time in which the speech is laid. He uses them as a vivid and dramatic method of portraying character and motive. The method, in its brilliance and its truth to permanent facts, is like that of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. Such truth, according to the celebrated aphorism in Aristotle’s Poetics, is the truth of poetry rather than of history: and the history of Livy, in this, as in his opulent and coloured diction, has some affinity to poetry. Yet, when such insight into motive and such vivid creative imagination are based on really large knowledge and perfect sincerity, a higher historical truth may be reached than by the most laborious accumulation of documents and sifting of evidence.
Livy’s humane and romantic temper prevented him from being a political partisan, even if political partisanship had been consistent with the view he took of his own art. In common with most educated Romans of his time, he idealised the earlier Republic, and spoke of his own age as fatally degenerate. But this is a tendency common to writers of all periods. He frequently pauses to deplore the loss of the ancient qualities by which Rome had grown great—simplicity, equity, piety, orderliness. In his remarkable preface he speaks of himself as turning to historical study in order to withdraw his mind from the evils of his own age, and the spectacle of an empire tottering to the fall under the weight of its own greatness and the vices of its citizens. “Into no State,” he continues, “were greed and luxury so long in entering; in these late days avarice has grown with wealth, and the frantic pursuit of pleasure leads fast towards a collapse of the whole social fabric; in our ever-accelerating downward course we have already reached a point where our vices and their remedies are alike intolerable.” But his idealisation of earlier ages was that of the romantic student rather than the reactionary politician. He is always on the side of order, moderation, conciliation; there was nothing politically dangerous to the imperial government in his mild republicanism. He shrinks instinctively from violence wherever he meets it, whether on the side of the populace or of the governing class; he cannot conceive why people should not be reasonable, and live in peace under a moderate and settled government. This was the temper which was welcome at court, even in men of Pompeian sympathies.
So, too, Livy’s attitude towards the established religion and towards the beliefs of former times has the same sentimental tinge. The moral reform attempted by Augustus had gone hand in hand with an elaborate revival and amplification of religious ceremony. Outward conformity at least was required of all citizens. Expedit esse deos, et ut expedit esse putemus; “the existence of the gods is a matter of public policy, and we must believe it accordingly,” Ovid had said, in the most daring and cynical of his poems. The old associations, the antiquarian charm, that lingered round this faded ancestral belief, appealed strongly to the romantic patriotism of the historian. His own religion was a sort of mild fatalism; he pauses now and then to draw rather commonplace reflections on the blindness of men destined to misfortune, or the helplessness of human wisdom and foresight against destiny. But at the same time he gravely chronicles miracles and portents, not so much from any belief in their truth as because they are part of the story. The fact that they had ceased to be regarded seriously in his own time, and were accordingly in a great measure ceasing to happen, he laments as one among many declensions from older and purer fashions.
As a master of style, Livy is in the first rank of historians. He marks the highest point which the enlarged and enriched prose of the Augustan age reached just before it began to fall into decadence. It is no longer the famous urbanus sermo of the later Republic, the pure and somewhat austere language of a governing class. The influence of Virgil is already traceable in Livy, in actual phrases whose use had hitherto been confined to poetry, and also in a certain warmth of colouring unknown to earlier prose. To Augustan purists this relaxation of the language seemed provincial and unworthy of the severe tradition of the best Latin; and it was this probably, rather than any definite novelties in grammar or vocabulary, that made Asinius Pollio accuse Livy of “Patavinity.” But in the hands of Livy the new style, by its increased volume and flexibility, is as admirably suited to a work of great length and scope as the older had been for the purposes of Caesar or Sallust. It is drawn, so to speak, with a larger pattern; and the added richness of tone enables him to advance without flagging through the long and intricate narrative where a simpler diction must necessarily have grown monotonous, as one more florid would be cloying. In the earlier books we seem to find the manner still a little uncertain and tentative, and a little trammelled by the traditional manner of the older annalists; as he proceeds in his work he falls into his stride, and advances with a movement as certain as that of Gibbon, and claimed by Roman critics as comparable in ease and grace to that of Herodotus. The periodic structure of Latin prose which had been developed by Cicero is carried by him to an even greater complexity, and used with a greater daring and freedom; a sort of fine carelessness in detail enhancing the large and continuous excellence of his broad effect. Even where he copies Polybius most closely he invariably puts life and grace into his cumbrous Greek. For the facts of the war with Hannibal we can rely more safely on the latter; but it is in the picture of Livy that we see it live before us. His imagination never fails to kindle at great actions; it is he, more than any other author, who has impressed the great soldiers and statesmen of the Republic on the imagination of the world.
_Quin Decios Drusosque procul, saevumque securi
Aspice Torquatum, et referentem signa Camilium….
Quis te, magne Cato, tacitum, aut te, Cosse, relinquat?
Quis Gracchi genus, aut geminos, duo fulmina belli.
Scipiadas, cladem Libyae, parvoque potentem
Fabricium, vel te sulco, Serrane, serentem?—
his whole work is a splendid expansion of that vision of Rome which passes before the eyes of Aeneas in the Fortunate Fields of the underworld. In the description of great events, no less than of great characters and actions, he rises and kindles with his subject. His eye for dramatic effect is extraordinary. The picture of the siege and storming of Saguntum, with which he opens the stately narrative of the war between Rome and Hannibal, is an instance of his instinctive skill; together with the masterly sketch of the character of Hannibal and the description of the scene in the Carthaginian senate-house at the reception of the Roman ambassadors, it forms a complete prelude to the whole drama of the war. His great battle-pieces, too, in spite of his imperfect grasp of military science, are admirable as works of art. Among others may be specially instanced, as masterpieces of execution, the account of the victory over Antiochus at Magnesia in the thirty-seventh book, and, still more, that in the forty-fourth of the fiercely contested battle of Pydna, the desperate heroism of the Pelignian cohort, and the final and terrible destruction of the Macedonian phalanx.
Yet, with all his admiration for great men and deeds, what most of all kindles Livy’s imagination and sustains his enthusiasm is a subject larger, and to him hardly more abstract, the Roman Commonwealth itself, almost personified as a continuous living force. This is almost the only matter in which patriotism leads him to marked partiality. The epithet “Roman” signifies to him all that is high and noble. That Rome can do no wrong is a sort of article of faith with him, and he has always a tendency to do less than justice to her enemies. The two qualities of eloquence and candour are justly ascribed to him by Tacitus, but from the latter some deduction must be made when he is dealing with foreign relations and external diplomacy. Without any intention to falsify history, he is sometimes completely carried away by his romantic enthusiasm for Roman statesmanship.
This canonisation of Rome is Livy’s largest and most abiding achievement. The elder Seneca, one of his ablest literary contemporaries, observes, in a fine passage, that when historians reach in their narrative the death of some great man, they give a summing-up of his whole life as though it were an eulogy pronounced over his grave. Livy, he adds, the most candid of all historians in his appreciation of genius, does this with unusual grace and sympathy. The remark may bear a wider scope; for the whole of his work is animated by a similar spirit towards the idealised Commonwealth, to the story of whose life he devoted his splendid literary gifts. As the title of Gesta Populi Romani was given to the Aeneid on its appearance, so the Historiae ab Urbe Condita might be called, with no less truth, a funeral eulogy—consummatio totius vitae et quasi funebris laudatio—delivered, by the most loving and most eloquent of her children, over the grave of the great Republic.
VI
The Lesser Augustans
The impulse given to Latin literature by the great poets and prose writers of the first century before Christ ebbed slowly away. The end of the so-called Golden Age may be conveniently fixed in the year which saw the death of Livy and Ovid; but the smaller literature of the period suffered no violent breach of continuity, and one can hardly name any definite date at which the Silver Age begins. Until the appearance of a new school of writers in the reign of Nero, the history of Roman literature is a continuation of the Augustan tradition. But it is continued by feeble hands, and dwindles away more and more under several unfavourable influences. Among these influences may be specially noted the growing despotism of the Empire, which had already become grave in the later years of Augustus, and under his successors reached a point which made free writing, like free speech, impossible; the perpetually increasing importance of the schools of declamation, which forced a fashion of overstrained and unnatural rhetoric on both prose and verse; and the paralysing effect of the great Augustan writers themselves, which led poetry at all events to lose itself in imitations of imitations within an arbitrary and rigid limit of subjects and methods.
In mere amount of production, however, literature remained active during the first half-century of the Christian era. That far the greater part of it has perished is probably a matter for congratulation rather than regret; even of what survives there is a good deal that we could well do without, and such of it as is valuable is so rather from incidental than essential reasons. Scribimus indocti doctique poemata passim, Horace had written in half-humorous bitterness; the crowd of names that flit like autumn leaves through the pages of Ovid represent probably but a small part of the immense production. Among the works of Ovid himself were included at various times poems by other contemporary hands—some, like the Consolatio ad Liviam, and the elegy on the Nut-tree, without any author’s name; others of known authorship, like the continuation by Sabinus of Ovid’s Heroides, in the form of replies addressed to the heroines by their lovers. Heroic poetry, too, both on mythological and historical subjects, continued to be largely written; but few of the writers are more than names. Cornelius Severus, author of an epic on the civil wars, gave in his earlier work promise of great excellence, which was but imperfectly fulfilled. The fine and stately passage on the death of Cicero, quoted by Seneca, fully reaches the higher level of post-Virgilian style. Two other poets of considerable note at the time, but soon forgotten after their death, were Albinovanus Pedo and Rabirius. The former, besides a Theseid, wrote a narrative and descriptive poem in the epic manner, on the northern campaigns of Germanicus, the latter was the author of an epic on the conflict with Antonius, which was kept alive for a short time by court favour; the stupid and amiable aide-de-camp of Tiberius, Velleius Paterculus, no doubt repeating what he heard in official circles, speaks of him and Virgil as the two most eminent poets of the age! Tiberius himself, though he chiefly wrote in Greek, occasionally turned off a copy of Latin verses; and his nephew Germanicus, a man of much learning and culture, composed a Latin version of the famous Phaenomena of Aratus, which shows uncommon skill and talent. Another, and a more important work of the same type, but with more original power, and less a mere adaptation of Greek originals, is the Astronomica, ascribed on doubtful manuscript evidence to an otherwise unknown Gaius or Marcus Manilius. This poem, from the allusions in it to the destruction of the three legions under Varus, and the retirement of Tiberius in Rhodes, must have been begun in the later years of Augustus, though probably not completed till after his death. As extant it consists of five books, the last being incomplete; the full plan seems to have included a sixth, and would have extended the work to about five thousand lines, or two-thirds of the length of the De Rerum Natura. Next to the poem of Lucretius it is, therefore, much the largest in bulk of extant Latin didactic poems. The oblivion into which it has fallen is, perhaps, a little hard if one considers how much Latin poetry of no greater merit continues to have a certain reputation, and even now and then to be read. The author is not a great poet; but he is a writer of real power both in thought and style. The versification of his Astronomica shows a high mastery of technique. The matter is often prosaically handled, and often seeks relief from prosaic handling in ill-judged flights of rhetoric; but throughout we feel a strong and original mind, with a large power over lucid and forcible expression. In the prologue to the third book he rejects for himself the common material for hexameter poems, subjects from the Greek heroic cycle, or from Roman history. His total want of narrative gift, as shown by the languor and flatness of the elaborate episode in which he attempts to tell the story of Perseus and Andromeda, would have been sufficient reason for this decision; but he justifies it, in lines of much grace and feeling, as due to his desire to take a line of his own, and make a fresh if a small conquest for Latin poetry.
Omnis ad accessus Heliconis semita trita est,
Et iam confusi manant de fonitibus amnes
Nec capiunt haustum, turbamque ad nota ruentem:
Integra quaeramus rorantes prata per herbas
Undamque occultis meditantem murmur in antris.
In a passage of nobler and more sincere feeling, he breaks off his catalogue of the signs of the Zodiac to vindicate the arduous study of abstract science—
“Multum” inquis “tenuemque iubes me ferre laborem
Cernere cum facili lucem ratione viderer.”
Quod quaeris, Deus est. Coneris scandere caelum
Fataque fatali genitus cognoscere lege
Et transire tuum pectus, mundoque potiri:
Pro pretio labor est, nec sunt immunia tanta.
Wherever one found this language used, in prose or verse, it would be memorable. The thought is not a mere text of the schools; it is strongly and finely conceived, and put in a form that anticipates the ardent and lofty manner of Lucan, without his perpetual overstrain of expression. Other passages, showing the same mental force, occur in the Astronomica; one might instance the fine passage on the power of the human eye to take in, within its tiny compass, the whole immensity of the heavens; or another, suggested by the mention of the constellation Argo, on the influence of sea-power on history, where the inevitable and well-worn instances of Salamis and Actium receive a fresh life from the citation of the destruction of the Athenian fleet in the bay of Syracuse, and the great naval battles of the first Punic war. Or again, the lines with which he opens the fourth book, weakened as their effect is by what follows them, a tedious enumeration of events showing the power of destiny over human fortunes, are worthy of a great poet:—
Quid tam sollicitis vitam consumimus annis,
Torquemurque metu caecaque cupidine rerum?
Acternisque senes curis, dum quaerimus aevum
Perdimus, et nullo votorum fine beati
Victuros agimus semper, nec vivimus unquam?
These passages have been cited from the Astronomica because, to all but a few professional students of Latin, the poem is practically unknown. The only other poet who survives from the reign of Tiberius is in a very different position, being so well known and so slight in literary quality as to make any quotations superfluous. Phaedrus, a Thracian freedman belonging to the household of Augustus, published at this time the well-known collection of Fables which, like the lyrics of the pseudo-Anacreon, have obtained from their use as a school-book a circulation much out of proportion to their merit. Their chief interest is as the last survival of the urbanus sermo in Latin poetry. They are written in iambic senarii, in the fluent and studiously simple Latin of an earlier period, not without occasional vulgarisms, but with a total absence of the turgid rhetoric which was coming into fashion. The Fables are the last utterance made by the speech of Terence: it is singular that this intimately Roman style should have begun and ended with two authors of servile birth and foreign blood. But the patronage of literature was now passing out of the hands of statesmen. Terence had moved in the circle of the younger Scipio; one book of the Fables of Phaedrus is dedicated to Eutychus, the famous chariot-driver of the Greens in the reign of Caligula. It was not long before Phaedrus was in use as a school-book; but his volume was apparently regarded as hardly coming within the province of serious literature. It is ignored by Seneca and not mentioned by Quintilian. But we must remind ourselves that the most celebrated works, whether in prose or verse, do not of necessity have the widest circulation or the largest influence. Among the poems produced in the first ten years of this century the Original Poems of Jane and Ann Taylor are hardly if at all mentioned in handbooks of English literature; but to thousands of readers they were more familiar than the contemporary verse of Wordsworth or Coleridge or even of Scott. In their terse and pure English, the language which is transmitted from one generation to another through the continuous tradition of the nursery, they may remind us of the Fables of Phaedrus.
The collection, as it has reached us, consists of nearly a hundred pieces. Of these three-fourths are fables proper; being not so much translations from the Greek of Aesop as versions of the traditional stories, written and unwritten, which were the common inheritance of the Aryan peoples. Mixed up with these are a number of stories which are not strictly fables; five of them are about Aesop himself, and there are also stories told of Simonides, Socrates, and Menander. Two are from the history of his own time, one relating a grim jest of the Emperor Tiberius, and the other a domestic tragedy which had been for a while the talk of the town in the previous reign. There are also, besides the prologues and epilogues of the several books, a few pieces in which Phaedrus speaks in his own person,[10] defending himself against detractors with an acrid tone which recalls the Terentian prologues. The body of fables current in the Middle Ages is considered by the most recent investigators to descend from the collection of Phaedrus, though probably supplemented from the Greek collection independently formed by Babrius about the same period.
Though Livy is the single great historian of the Augustan age, there was throughout this period a profuse production of memoirs and commentaries, as well as of regular histories. Augustus wrote thirteen books of memoirs of his own life down to the pacification of the Empire at the close of the Cantabrian war. These are lost; but the Index Rerum a se Gestarum, a brief epitome of his career, which he composed as a sort of epitaph on himself, is extant. This document was engraved on plates of bronze affixed to the imperial mausoleum by the Tiber, and copies of it were inscribed on the various temples dedicated to him in many provincial cities after his death. It is one of these copies, engraved on the vestibule wall of the temple of Augustus and Rome at Ancyra in Galatia, which still exists with inconsiderable gaps. His two principal ministers, Maecenas and Agrippa, also composed memoirs. The most important work of the latter hardly, however, falls within the province of literature; it was a commentary on the great geographical survey of the Empire carried out under his supervision.
Gaius Asinius Pollio, already mentioned as a critic and tragedian, was also the author of the most important historical work of the Augustan age after Livy’s. This was a History of the Civil Wars, in seventeen books, from the formation of the first triumvirate in 60 B.C. to the battle of Philippi. Though Pollio was a practised rhetorician, his narrative style was simple and austere. The fine ode addressed to him by Horace during the composition of this history seems to hint that in Horace’s opinion— or perhaps, rather, in that of Horace’s masters—Pollio would find a truer field for his great literary ability in tragedy. But apart from its artistic quality, the work of Pollio was of the utmost value as giving the view held of the Civil wars by a trained administrator of the highest rank. It was one of the main sources used by Appian and Plutarch, and its almost total loss is matter of deep regret.
An author of less eminence, and belonging rather to the class of encyclopedists than of historians, is Pompeius Trogus, the descendant of a family of Narbonese Gaul, which had for two generations enjoyed the Roman citizenship. Besides works on zoology and botany, translated or adapted from the Greek of Aristotle and Theophrastus, Trogus wrote an important History of the World, exclusive of the Roman Empire, which served as, and may have been designed to be, a complement to that of Livy. The original work, which extended to forty-four books, is not extant; but an abridgment, which was executed in the age of the Antonines by one Marcus Junianus Justinus, and has fortunately escaped the fate which overtook the abridgment of Livy made about the same time, preserves the main outlines and much of the actual form of the original. Justin, whose individual talent was but small, had the good sense to leave the diction of his original as far as possible unaltered. The pure and vivacious style, and the evident care and research which Trogus himself, or the Greek historians whom he follows, had bestowed on the material, make the work one of very considerable value. Its title, Historiae Philippicae, is borrowed from that of a history conceived on a somewhat similar plan by Theopompus, the pupil of Isocrates, in or after the reign of Alexander the Great; and it followed Theopompus in making the Macedonian Empire the core round which the history of the various countries included in or bordering upon it was arranged.
Gaius Velleius Paterculus, a Roman officer, who after passing with credit through high military appointments, entered the general administrative service of the Empire, and rose to the praetorship, wrote, in the reign of Tiberius, an abridgment of Roman history in two books, which hardly rises beyond the mark of the military man who dabbles in letters. The pretentiousness of his style is partly due to the declining taste of the period, partly to an idea of his own that he could write in the manner of Sallust. It alternates between a sort of laboured sprightliness and a careless conversational manner full of endless parentheses. Yet Velleius had two real merits; the eye of the trained soldier for character, and an unaffected, if not a very intelligent, interest in literature. Where he approaches his own times, his servile attitude towards all the members of the imperial family, and towards Sejanus, who was still first minister to Tiberius when the book was published, makes him almost valueless as a historian; but in the earlier periods his observations are often just and pointed; and he seems to have been almost the first historian who included as an essential part of his work some account of the more eminent writers of his country. A still lower level of aim and attainment is shown in another work of the same date as that of Velleius, the nine books of historical anecdotes, Facta et Dicta Memorabilia, by Valerius Maximus, whose turgid and involved style is not redeemed by any originality of thought or treatment.
The study of archaeology, both on its linguistic and material sides, was carried on in the Augustan age with great vigour, though no single name is comparable to that of Varro for extent and variety of research. One of the most eminent and copious writers on these subjects was Gaius Julius Hyginus, a Spanish freed man of Augustus, who made him principal keeper of the Palatine library. He was a pupil of the most learned Greek grammarian of the age, Cornelius Alexander Polyhistor, and an intimate acquaintance of Ovid. Of his voluminous works on geography, history, astrology, agriculture, and poetry, all are lost but two treatises on mythology, which in their present form are of a much later date, and are at best only abridged and corrupted versions, if (as many modern critics are inclined to think) they are not wholly the work of some author of the second or third century. Hyginus was also one of the earliest commentators on Virgil; he possessed among his treasures a manuscript of the Georgics, which came from Virgil’s own house, though it was not actually written by his hand; and many of his annotations and criticisms on the Aeneid are preserved by Aulus Gellius and later commentators. A little later, in the reigns of Tiberius and Claudius, Virgilian criticism was carried on by Quintus Remmius Palaemon of Vicenza, the most fashionable teacher in the capital, and the author of a famous Latin grammar on which all subsequent ones were more or less based. Perhaps the most distinguished of Augustan scholars was another equally celebrated teacher, Marcus Verrius Flaccus, who was chosen by Augustus as tutor for his two grandsons, and thenceforward held his school in the imperial residence on the Palatine. His lexicon, entitled De Verborum Significatu, was a rich treasury of antiquarian research: such parts of it as survive in the abridgments made from it in the second and eighth centuries, by Sextus Pompeius Festus and Paulus Diaconus, are still among our most valuable sources for the study of early Latin language and institutions. The more practical side of science in the same period was ably represented by Aulus Cornelius Celsus, the compiler of an encyclopedia which included comprehensive treatises not only on oratory, jurisprudence, and philosophy, but on the arts of war, agriculture, and medicine. The eight books dealing with this last subject are the only part of the work that has been preserved. This treatise, which is written in a pure, simple, and elegant Latin, became a standard work. It was one of the earliest books printed in the fifteenth century, and remained a text-book for medical students till within living memory. Medical science had then reached, in the hands of its leading professors, a greater perfection than it regained till the eighteenth century. Celsus, though not, so far as is known, the author of any important discovery or improvement, had fully mastered a system which even then was highly complicated, and takes rank by his extensive and accurate knowledge, as well as by his rare literary skill, with the highest names in his profession. That with his eminent medical acquirement he should have been able to deal adequately with so many other subjects as well, has long been a subject of perplexity. The cold censure of Quintilian, who refers to him slightly as “a man of moderate ability,” may be principally aimed at the treatise on rhetoric, which formed a section of his encyclopedia. Columella, writing in the next age, speaks of him as one of the two leading authorities on agriculture; and he is also quoted as an authority of some value on military tactics. Yet we cannot suppose that the encyclopedist, however adequate his treatment of one or even more subjects, would not lay himself open in others to the censure of the specialist. It seems most reasonable to suppose that Celsus was one of a class which is not, after all, very uncommon—doctors of eminent knowledge and skill in their own art, who at the same time are men of wide culture and far-ranging practical interests.
In striking contrast to Celsus as regards width of knowledge and literary skill, though no less famous in the history of his own art, is his contemporary, the celebrated architect Vitruvius Pollio. The ten books De Architectura, dedicated to Augustus about the year 14 B.C., are the single important work on classical architecture which has come down from the ancient world, and, as such, have been the object of continuous professional study from the Renaissance down to the present day. But their reputation is not due to any literary merit. Vitruvius, however able as an architect, was a man of little general knowledge, and far from handy with his pen. His style varies between immoderate diffuseness and obscure brevity; sometimes he is barely intelligible, and he never writes with grace. Where in his introductory chapters or elsewhere he ventures beyond his strict province, his writing is that of a half-educated man who has lost simplicity without acquiring skill.
Among the innumerable rhetoricians of this age one only requires formal notice, Lucius Annaeus Seneca of Cordova, the father of the famous philosopher, and the grandfather of the poet Lucan. His long life reached from before the outbreak of war between Caesar and Pompeius till after the death of Tiberius. His only extant work, a collection of themes treated in the schools of rhetoric, was written in his old age, after the fall of Sejanus, and bears witness to the amazing power of memory which he tells us himself was, when in its prime, absolutely unique. How much of his life was spent at Rome is uncertain. As a young man he had heard all the greatest orators of the time except Cicero; and up to the end of his life he could repeat word for word and without effort whole passages, if not whole speeches, to which he had listened many years before. His ten books of Controversiae are only extant in a mutilated form, which comprises thirty-five out of seventy-four themes; to these is prefixed a single book of Suasoriae, which is also imperfect. The work is a mine of information for the history of rhetoric under Augustus and Tiberius, and incidentally includes many interesting quotations, anecdotes, and criticisms. But we feel in reading it that we have passed definitely away from the Golden Age. Yet once more “they have forgotten to speak the Latin tongue at Rome.” The Latinity of the later Empire is as distinct from that of the Augustan age as this last is from the Latinity of the Republic. Seneca, it is true, was not an Italian by birth; but it is just this influx of the provinces into literature, which went on under the early Empire with continually accelerating force, that determined what type the new Latinity should take. Gaul, Spain, and Africa are henceforth side by side with Italy, and Italy herself sinks towards the level of a province. Within thirty years of the death of the elder Seneca “the fatal secret of empire, that Emperors could be made elsewhere than at Rome,” was discovered by the Spanish and German legions; of hardly less moment was the other discovery, that Latin could be written in another than the Roman manner. In literature no less than in politics the discovery meant the final breaking up of the old world, and the slow birth of a new one through alternate torpors and agonies. It might already have been said of Rome, in the words of a poet of four hundred years later, that she had made a city of what had been a world. But in this absorption of the world into a single citizenship, the city itself was ceasing to be a world of its own; and with the self-centred urbs passed away the urbanus sermo, that austere and noble language which was the finest flower of her civilisation.