LATIN LITERATURE
BY
J. W. MACKAIL
I.
THE REPUBLIC.
VII.
PROSE OF THE CICERONIAN AGE: CAESAR AND SALLUST.
Fertile as the Ciceronian age was in authorship of many kinds, there was
only one person in it whose claim to be placed in an equal rank with
Cicero could ever be seriously entertained; and this was, strangely
enough, one who was as it were only a man of letters by accident, and
whose literary work is but among the least of his titles to fame -- Julius
Caesar himself. That anything written by that remarkable man must be
interesting and valuable in a high degree is obvious; but the combination
of literary power of the very first order with his unparallelled military
and political genius is perhaps unique in history.
It is one of the most regrettable losses in Latin literature that
Caesar's speeches and letters have almost completely perished. Of the
latter several collections were made after his death, and were extant in
the second century; but none are now preserved, except a few brief notes
to Cicero, of which copies were sent by him at the time to Atticus. The
fragments of his speeches are even less considerable; yet, according to
the unanimous testimony both of contemporary and of later critics, they
were unexcelled in that age of great oratory. He used the Latin language
with a purity and distinction that no one else could equal. And along
with this quality, the "mira elegantia " of Quintilian, his oratory had
some kind of severe magnificence which we can partly guess at from his
extant writings -- "magnifica et generosa ", says Cicero; "facultas dicendi
imperatoria " is the phrase of a later and able critic.
Of Caesar's other lost writings little need be said. In youth, like most
of his contemporaries, he wrote poems, including a tragedy, of which
Tacitus drily observes that they were not better than those of Cicero. A
grammatical treatise, "De Analogia ", was composed by him during one of
his long journeys between Northern Italy and the headquarters of his army
in Gaul during his proconsulate. A work on astronomy, apparently written
in connection with his reform of the calendar, two pamphlets attacking
Cato, and a collection of apophthegms, have also disappeared. But we
possess what were by far the most important of his writings, his famous
memoirs of the Gallic and Civil Wars.
The seven books of "Commentaries on the Gallic War " were written in
Caesar's winter quarters in Gaul, after the capture of Alesia and the
final suppression of the Arvernian revolt. They were primarily intended
to serve an immediate political purpose, and are indeed a defence, framed
with the most consummate skill, of the author's whole Gallic policy and
of his constitutional position. That Caesar was able to do this without,
so far as can be judged, violating, or even to any large degree
suppressing facts, does equal credit to the clear-sightedness of his
policy and to his extraordinary literary power. From first to last there
is not a word either of self-laudation or of innuendo; yet at the end we
find that, by the use of the simplest and most lucid narration, in which
hardly a fact or a detail can be controverted, Caesar has cleared his
motives and justified his conduct with a success the more complete
because his tone is so temperate and seemingly so impartial. An officer
of his staff who was with him during that winter, and who afterwards
added an eighth book to the "Commentaries " to complete the history of the
Gallic proconsulate, has recorded the ease and swiftness with which the
work was written. Caesar issued it under the unpretending name of
"Commentarii " -- "notes" -- on the events of his campaigns, which might be
useful as materials for history; but there was no exaggeration in the
splendid compliment paid it a few years later by Cicero, that no one in
his senses would think of recasting a work whose succinct, perspicuous,
and brilliant style -- "pura et inlustris brevitas " -- has been the model and
the despair of later historians.
The three books of "Commentaries on the Civil War " show the same merits
in a much less marked degree. They were not published in Caesar's
lifetime, and do not seem to have received from him any close or careful
revision. The literary incompetence of the Caesarian officers into whose
hands they fell after his death, and one or more of whom must be
responsible for their publication, is sufficiently evident from their own
awkward attempts at continuing them in narratives of the Alexandrine,
African, and Spanish campaigns; and whether from the carelessness of the
original editors or from other reasons, the text is in a most deplorable
condition. Yet this is not in itself sufficient to account for many
positive misstatements. Either the editors used a very free hand in
altering the rough manuscript, or -- which is not in itself unlikely, and
is borne out by other facts -- Caesar's own prodigious memory and
incomparable perspicuity became impaired in those five years of all but
superhuman achievement, when, with the whole weight of the civilised
world on his shoulders, feebly served by second-rate lieutenants and
hampered at every turn by the open or passive opposition of nearly the
whole of the trained governing classes, he conquered four great Roman
armies, secured Egypt and Upper Asia and annexed Numidia to the Republic,
carried out the unification of Italy, reestablished public order and
public credit, and left at his death the foundations of the Empire
securely laid for his successor.
The loyal and capable officer, Aulus Hirtius (who afterwards became
consul, and was killed in battle before Mutina a year after Caesar's
murder), did his best to supplement his master's narrative. He seems to
have been a well-educated man, but without any particular literary
capacity. It was uncertain, even to the careful research of Suetonius,
whether the narrative of the campaigns in Egypt and Pontus, known as the
"Bellum Alexandrinum ", was written by him or by another officer of
Caesar's, Gaius Oppius. The books on the campaigns of Africa and Spain
which follow are by different hands: the former evidently by some
subaltern officer who took part in the war, and very interesting as
showing the average level of intelligence and culture among Roman
officers of the period; the latter by another author and in very inferior
Latin, full of grammatical solecisms and popular idioms oddly mixed up
with epic phrases from Ennius, who was still, it must be remembered, the
great Latin school-book. It is these curious fragments of history which
more than anything else help us to understand the rapid decay of Latin
prose after the golden period. Under the later Republic the educated
class and the governing class had, broadly speaking, been the same. The
Civil wars, in effect, took administration away from their hands,
transferring it to the new official class, of which these subalterns of
Caesar's represent the type; and this change was confirmed by the Empire.
The result was a sudden and long-continued divorce between political
activity on the one hand and the profession of letters on the other. For
a century after the establishment of the Empire the aristocracy, which
had produced the great literature of the Republic, remained forcibly or
sullenly silent; and the new hierarchy was still at the best only half
educated. The professional man of letters was at first fostered and
subsidised; but even before the death of Augustus State patronage of
literature had fallen into abeyance, while the cultured classes fell more
and more back on the use of Greek. The varying fortunes of this struggle
between Greek and literary Latin as it had been formed under the
Republic, belong to a later period: at present we must return to complete
a general survey of the prose of the Ciceronian age.
Historical writing at Rome, as we have seen, had hitherto been in the
form either of annals or memoirs. The latter were, of course, rather
materials for history than history itself, even when they were not
excluded from Quintilian's famous definition of history[5] by being
composed primarily as political pamphlets. The former had so far been
attempted on too large a scale, and with insufficient equipment either of
research or style, to attain any permanent merit. In the ten years after
Caesar's death Latin history was raised to a higher level by the works of
Sallust, the first scientific historian whom Italy had produced.
Gaius Sallustius Crispus of Amiternum in Central Italy belonged to that
younger generation of which Marcus Antonius and Marcus Caelius Rufus were
eminent examples. Clever and dissipated, they revolted alike from the
severe traditions and the narrow class prejudices of the constitutional
party, and Caesar found in them enthusiastic, if somewhat imprudent and
untrustworthy, supporters. Sallust was expelled from the senate just
before the outbreak of the Civil war; was reinstated by Caesar, and
entrusted with high posts in Illyria and Italy; and was afterwards sent
by him to administer Africa with the rank of proconsul. There he
accumulated a large fortune, and, after Caesar's death, retired to
private life in his beautiful gardens on the Quirinal, and devoted
himself to historical study. The largest and most important of his works,
the five books of "Historiae ", covering a period of about ten years from
the death of Sulla, is only extant in inconsiderable fragments; but his
two monographs on the Jugurthine war and the Catilinarian conspiracy,
which have been preserved, place him beyond doubt in the first rank of
Roman historians.
Sallust took Thucydides as his principal literary model. His reputation
has no doubt suffered by the comparison which this choice makes
inevitable; and though Quintilian did not hesitate to claim for him a
substantial equality with the great Athenian, no one would now press the
parallel, except in so far as Sallust's formal treatment of his subject
affords interesting likenesses or contrasts with the Thucydidean manner.
In his prefatory remarks, his elaborately conceived and executed
speeches, his reflections on character, and his terse method of
narration, Sallust closely follows the manner of his master. He even
copies his faults in a sort of dryness of style and an excessive use of
antithesis. But we cannot feel, in reading the "Catiline " or the
"Jugurtha ", that it is the work of a writer of the very first
intellectual power. Yet the two historians have this in common, which is
not borrowed by the later from the earlier, -- that they approach and
handle their subject with the mature mind, the insight and common sense
of the grown man, where their predecessors had been comparatively like
children. Both are totally free from superstition; neither allows his own
political views to obscure his vision of facts, of men as they were and
events as they happened. The respect for truth, which is the first virtue
of the historian, is stronger in Sallust than in any of his more
brilliant successors. His ideal in the matter of research and documentary
evidence was, for that age, singularly high. In the "Catiline " he writes
very largely from direct personal knowledge of men and events; but the
"Jugurtha ", which deals with a time two generations earlier than the date
of its composition, involved wide inquiry and much preparation. He had
translations made from original documents in the Carthaginian language;
and a complete synopsis of Roman history, for reference during the
progress of his work, was compiled for him by a Greek secretary. Such
pains were seldom taken by a Latin historian.
The last of the Ciceronians, Sallust is also in a sense the first of the
imperial prose-writers. His style, compressed, rhetorical, and very
highly polished, is in strong contrast to the graceful and fluid periods
which were then, and for some time later continued to be, the predominant
fashion, and foreshadows the manner of Seneca or Tacitus. His archaism in
the use of pure Latin, and, alongside of it, his free adoption of
Grecisms, are the first open sign of two movements which profoundly
affected the prose of the earlier and later empire. The acrid critic of
the Augustan age, Asinius Pollio, accused him of having had collections
of obsolete words and phrases made for his use out of Cato and the older
Roman writers. For a short time he was eclipsed by the glowing and
opulent style of Livy; but Livy formed no school, and Sallust on the
whole remained in the first place. The line of Martial, "primus Romana
Crispus in historia ", expresses the settled opinion held of him down to
the final decay of letters; and even in the Middle Ages he remained
widely read and highly esteemed.
Contemporary with Sallust in this period of transition between the
Ciceronian and the Augustan age is Cornelius Nepos ( "circ ". 99-24 B.C.).
In earlier life he was one of the circle of Catullus, and after Cicero's
death was one of the chief friends of Atticus, of whom a brief biography,
which he wrote after Atticus' death, is still extant. Unlike Sallust,
Nepos never took part in public affairs, but carried on throughout a long
life the part of a man of letters, honest and kindly, but without any
striking originality or ability. In him we are on the outer fringe of
pure literature; and it is no doubt purposely that Quintilian wholly
omits him from the list of Roman historians. Of his numerous writings on
history, chronology, and grammar, we only possess a fragment of one, his
collection of Roman and foreign biographies, entitled "De Viris
Illustribus ". Of this work there is extant one complete section, "De
Excellentibus Ducibus Exterarum Gentium ", and two lives from another
section, those of Atticus and the younger Cato. The accident of their
convenient length and the simplicity of their language has made them for
generations a common school-book for beginners in Latin; were it not for
this, there can be little doubt that Nepos, like the later epitomators,
Eutropius or Aurelius Victor, would be hardly known except to
professional scholars, and perhaps only to be read in the pages of some
"Corpus Sciptorum Romanorum ". The style of these little biographies is
unpretentious, and the language fairly pure, though without any great
command of phrase. A theory was once held that what we possess is merely
a later epitome from the lost original. But for this there is no rational
support. The language and treatment, such as they are (and they do not
sink to the level of the histories of the African and Spanish wars), are
of this, and not of a later age, and quite consonant with the good-
natured contempt which Nepos met at the hands of later Roman critics.
The chief interest of the work is perhaps the clearness with which it
enforces the truth we are too apt to forget, that the great writers were
in their own age, as now, unique, and that there is no such thing as a
widely diffused level of high literary excellence.
As remote from literature in the higher sense were the innumerable
writings of the Ciceronian age on science, art, antiquities, grammar,
rhetoric, and a hundred miscellaneous subjects, which are, for the most
part, known only from notices in the writings of later commentators and
encyclopedists. Foremost among the voluminous authors of this class was
the celebrated antiquarian, Marcus Terentius Varro, whose long and
laborious life, reaching from two years after the death of the elder Cato
till the final establishment of the Empire, covers and overlaps the
entire Ciceronian age. Of the six or seven hundred volumes which issued
from his pen, and which formed an inexhaustible quarry for his
successors, nearly all are lost. The most important of them were the one
hundred and fifty books of "Saturae Menippeae ", miscellanies in prose and
verse in the manner which had been originated by Menippus of Gadara, the
master of the poet Meleager, and which had at once obtained an enormous
popularity throughout the whole of the Greek-speaking world; the forty-
one books of "Antiquitates Rerum Humanarum et Divinarum ", the standard
work on the religious and secular antiquities of Rome down to the time of
Augustine; the fifteen books of "Imagines ", biographical sketches, with
portraits, of celebrated Greeks and Romans, the first certain instance in
history of the publication of an illustrated book; the twenty-five books
"De Lingua Latina ", of which six are extant in an imperfect condition;
and the treatise "De Re Rustica ", which we possess in an almost complete
state. This last work was written by him at the age of eighty. It is in
the form of a dialogue, and is not without descriptive and dramatic
power. The tediousness which characterised all Varro's writing is less
felt where the subject is one of which he had a thorough practical
knowledge, and which gave ample scope for the vein of rough but not
ungenial humour which he inherited from Cato.
Other names of this epoch have left no permanent mark on literature. The
precursors of Sallust in history seem, like the precursors of Cicero in
philosophy, to have approached their task with little more equipment than
that of the ordinary amateur. The great orator Hortensius wrote "Annals "
(probably in the form of memoirs of his own time), which are only known
from a reference to them in a later history written in the reign of
Tiberius. Atticus, who had an interest in literature beyond that of the
mere publisher, drew up a sort of handbook of Roman history, which is
repeatedly mentioned by Cicero. Cicero's own brother Quintus, who passed
for a man of letters, composed a work of the same kind; the tragedies
with which he relieved the tedium of winter-quarters in Gaul were,
however, translations from the Greek, not originals. Cicero's private
secretary, Marcus Tullius Tiro, best known by the system of shorthand
which he invented or improved, and which for long remained the basis of a
standard code, is also mentioned as the author of works on grammar, and,
as has already been noticed, edited a collection of his master's letters
after his death. Decimus Laberius, a Roman of equestrian family, and
Publilius Syrus, a naturalised native of Antioch, wrote mimes, which
were performed with great applause, and gave a fugitive literary
importance to this trivial form of dramatic entertainment. A collection
of sentences which passes under the name of the latter was formed out of
his works under the Empire, and enlarged from other sources in the Middle
Ages. It supplies many admirable instances of the terse vigour of the
Roman popular philosophy; some of these lines, like the famous --
"Bene vixit is qui potuit cum voluit mori ",
or --
"Index damnatur ubi nocens absolvitur ",
or --
"O vitam misero longam, felici brevem! "
or the perpetually misquoted --
"Stultum facit fortuna, quem vult perdere ",
have sunk deeper and been more widely known than almost anything else
written in Latin. Among the few poets who succeeded the circle of
Catullus, the only one of interest is Publius Terentius Varro, known as
Varro Atacinus from his birthplace on the banks of the Aude in Provence,
the first of the long list of Transalpine writers who filled Rome at a
later period. Besides the usual translations and adaptations from
Alexandrian originals, and an elaborate cosmography, he practised his
considerable talent in hexameter verse both in epic and satiric poetry,
and did something to clear the way in metrical technique for both Horace
and Virgil. With these names, among a crowd of others even more vague and
shadowy, the literature of the Roman Republic closes. A new generation
was already at the doors.
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