LATIN LITERATURE
BY
J. W. MACKAIL
III
THE EMPIRE.
I
THE ROME OF NERO: SENECA, LUCAN, PETRONIUS
The later years of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, while they brought about
the complete transformation of the government into an absolute monarchy,
also laid the foundations for that reign of the philosophers which had
been dreamed of by Plato, and which has never been so nearly realised as
it was in Rome during the second century after Christ. The Stoical
philosophy, passing beyond the limits of the schools to become at once a
religious creed and a practical code of morals for everyday use,
penetrated deeply into the life of Rome. At first associated with the
aristocratic opposition to the imperial government, it passed through a
period of persecution which only strengthened and consolidated its
growth. The final struggle took place under Domitian, whose edict of the
year 94, expelling all philosophers from Rome, was followed two years
afterwards by his assassination and the establishment, for upwards of
eighty years, of a government deeply imbued with the principles of
Stoicism.
Of the men who set this revolution in motion by their writings, the
earliest and the most distinguished was Lucius Annaeus Seneca, the son of
the rhetorician. Though only of the second rank as a classic, he is a
figure of very great importance in the history of human thought from the
work he did in the exposition of the new creed. As a practical exponent
of morals, he stands, with Plutarch, at the head of all Greek and Roman
writers.
The life of Seneca was one of singularly dramatic contrasts and
vicissitudes. He was born in the year 4 B.C., at Cordova, where, at a
somewhat advanced age, his father had married Helvia, a lady of high
birth, and brought up in the strictest family traditions. Through the
influence of his mother's family (her sister had married Vitrasius
Pollio, who for sixteen years was viceroy of Egypt), the way was easy to
him for advancement in the public service. But delicate health, which
continued throughout his life, kept him as a young man from taking more
than a nominal share in administrative work. He passed into the senate
through the quaestorship, and became a well-known figure at court during
the reign of Caligula. On the accession of Claudius, he was banished to
Corsica at the instance of the Empress Messalina, on the charge of being
the favoured lover of Julia Livilla, Caligula's youngest sister. Whether
the scandal which connected his name with hers, or with that of her
sister Agrippina, had any other foundation than the prurient gossip which
raged round all the members of the imperial family, may well be doubted;
but when Agrippina married Claudius, after the downfall and execution of
Messalina seven years later, she recalled him from exile, obtained his
nomination to the quaestorship, and appointed him tutor to her son
Domitius Nero, then a boy of ten. The influence gained by Seneca, an
accomplished courtier and a clever man of the world, as well as a
brilliant scholar, over his young pupil was for a long time almost
unbounded; and when Nero became Emperor at the age of seventeen, Seneca,
in conjunction with his close friend, Afranius Burrus, commander of the
imperial guards, became practically the administrator of the Empire. His
philosophy was not one which rejected wealth or power; a fortune of three
million pounds may have been amassed without absolute dishonesty, or even
forced upon him, as he pleads himself, by the lavish generosity of his
pupil; but there can be no doubt that in indulging the weaknesses and
passions of Nero, Seneca went far beyond the limits, not only of honour,
but of ordinary prudence. The mild and enlightened administration of the
earlier years of the new reign, the famous "quinquennium Neronis", which
was looked back to afterwards as a sort of brief golden age, may indeed
be ascribed largely to Seneca's influence; but this influence was based
on an excessive indulgence of Nero's caprices, which soon worked out its
own punishment. His consent to the murder of Agrippina was the death-blow
to his influence for good, or to any self-respect that he may till then
have retained; the death of Burrus left him without support; and, by
retiring into private life and formally offering to make over his whole
fortune to the Emperor, he did not long delay his fate. In the year 65,
on the pretext of complicity in the conspiracy of Piso, he was commanded
to commit suicide, and obeyed with that strange mixture of helplessness
and heroism with which the orders of the master of the world were then
accepted as a sort of inevitable law of nature.
The philosophical writings of Seneca were extremely voluminous; and
though a large number of them are lost, he is still one of the bulkiest
of ancient authors. They fall into three main groups: formal treatises on
ethics; moral letters ( "epistolae morales "), dealing in a less continuous
way with the same general range of subjects; and writings on natural
philosophy, from the point of view of the Stoical system. The whole of
these are, however, animated by the same spirit; to the Stoical
philosophy, physics were merely a branch of ethics, and a study to be
pursued for the sake of moral edification, not of reaching truth by
accurate observation or research. The discussions of natural phenomena
are mere texts for religious meditations; and though the eight books of
"Naturales Quaestiones" were used as a text-book of physical science in
the Middle Ages, they are totally without any scientific value. So, too,
the twenty books of moral letters, nominally addressed to Lucilius, the
procurator of Sicily, merely represent a slight variation of method from
the more formal treatises, "On Anger, On Clemency, On Consolation, On
Peace of Mind, On the Shortness of Life, On Giving and Receiving
Favours", which are the main substance of Seneca's writings.
As a moral writer, Seneca stands deservedly high. Though infected with
the rhetorical vices of the age, his treatises are full of striking and
often gorgeous eloquence, and in their combination of high thought with
deep feeling, have rarely, if at all, been surpassed. The rhetorical
manner was so essentially part of Seneca's nature, that the warm
colouring and perpetual mannerism of his language does not imply any
insincerity or want of earnestness. In spite of the laboured style, there
is no failure either in lucidity or in force, and even where the rhetoric
is most profuse, it seldom is without a solid basis of thought. "It would
not be easy," says a modern scholar, who was himself averse to all
ornament of diction, and deeply penetrated with the spirit of Stoicism,
"to name any modern writer who has treated on morality and has said so
much that is practically good and true, or has treated the matter in so
attractive a way."
In the moral writings we have the picture of Seneca the philosopher;
Seneca the courtier is less attractively presented in the curious
pamphlet called the "Apocolocyntosis", a silly and spiteful attack on the
memory of the Emperor Claudius, written to make the laughter of an
afternoon at the court of Nero. The gross bad taste of this satire is
hardly relieved by any great wit in the treatment, and the reputation of
the author would stand higher if it had not survived the occasion for
which it was written.
Among Seneca's extant works are also included nine tragedies, composed in
imitation of the Greek, upon the well-worn subjects of the epic cycle. At
what period of his life they were written cannot be ascertained. As a
rule, only young authors had courage enough to attempt the discredited
task of flogging this dead horse; but it is not improbable that these
dramas were written by Seneca in mature life, in deference to his
imperial pupil's craze for the stage. All the rhetorical vices of his
prose are here exaggerated. The tragedies are totally without dramatic
life, consisting merely of a series of declamatory speeches, in correct
but monotonous versification, interspersed with choruses, which only
differ from the speeches by being written in lyric metres instead of the
iambic. To say that the tragedies are without merit would be an
overstatement, for Seneca, though no poet, remained even in his poetry an
extremely able man of letters and an accomplished rhetorician. His
declamation comes in the same tones from all his puppets; but it is often
grandiose, and sometimes really fine. The lines with which the curtain
falls in his "Medea" remind one, by their startling audacity, of Victor
Hugo in his most Titanic vein. As the only extant Latin tragedies, these
pieces had a great effect upon the early drama of the sixteenth century
in England and elsewhere. In the well-known verses prefixed to the first
folio Shakespeare, Jonson calls on "him of Cordova dead," in the same
breath with Aeschylus and Euripides; and long after the Jacobean period
the false tradition remained which, by putting these lifeless copies on
the same footing as their great originals, perplexed and stultified
literary criticism, much as the criticism of classical art was confused
by an age which drew no distinction between late Graeco-Roman sculpture
and the finest work of Praxiteles or Pheidias.
By far the most brilliant poet of the Neronian age was Seneca's nephew,
Marcus Annaeus Lucanus. His father, Annaeus Mela, the younger brother of
the philosopher, is known chiefly through his more distinguished son; an
interesting but puzzling notice in a life of Lucan speaks of him as
famous at Rome "from his pursuit of the quiet life." This may imply
refusal of some great office when his elder brother was practically ruler
of the Empire; whatever stirrings of ambition he suppressed broke out
with accumulated force in his son. Lucan's short life was one of feverish
activity. At twenty-one he made his first public sensation by the
recitation, in the theatre of Pompeius, of a panegyric on Nero, who had
already murdered his own mother, but had not yet broken with the poet's
uncle. Soon afterwards, he was advanced to the quaestorship, and a seat
in the college of Augurs: but his brilliant poetical reputation seems to
have excited the jealousy of the artist-emperor; a violent quarrel broke
out between them, and Lucan, already in theory an ardent republican,
became one of the principal movers in the conspiracy of Piso. The plan
discussed among the conspirators of assassinating Nero while in the act
of singing on the stage would, no doubt, commend itself specially to the
young poet whom the Emperor had forbidden to recite in public. When the
conspiracy was detected, Lucan's fortitude soon gave way; he betrayed one
accomplice after another, one of the first names he surrendered being
that of his mother, Acilia. The promise of pardon, under which his
confessions were obtained, was not kept after they were completed; and
the execution of Lucan, at the age of twenty-six, while it cut short a
remarkable poetical career, rid the world of a very poor creature. Yet
the final spasm of courage with which he died, declaiming a passage from
his own epic, has gained him, in the noblest of English elegies, a place
in the same verse with Sidney and Chatterton.
But the "Pharsalia", the only large work which Lucan left complete, or
all but complete, among a number of essays in different styles of poetry,
and the only work of his which has been preserved, is a poem which, in
spite of its immaturity and bad taste, compels admiration by its
elevation of thought and sustained brilliance of execution. Pure rhetoric
has, perhaps, never come quite so near being poetry; and if the perpetual
overstraining of both thought and expression inevitably ends by fatiguing
the reader, there are at least few instances of a large work throughout
which so lofty and grandiose a style is carried with such elasticity and
force. The "Pharsalia" is full of quotations, and this itself is no small
praise. Lines like "Nil actum credens dum quid superesset agendum," or
"Nec sibi, sed toti gentium se credere mundo", or "Iupiter est quodcunque
vides quocunque moveris," or the sad and noble
"Victurosque dei celant, ut vivere durent,
Felix esse mori -- "
are as well known and have sunk as deep as the great lines of Virgil
himself; and not only in single lines, but in longer passages of lofty
thought or sustained imagination, as in his description of the dream of
Pompeius, at the beginning of the seventh book; or the passage on the
extension of the Roman Empire, later in the same book; or the magnificent
speech of Cato when he refuses to seek counsel of the oracle of Ammon,
Lucan sometimes touches a point where he challenges comparison with his
master. In these passages, without any delicacy of modulation, with a
limited range of rhythm, his verse has a metallic clangour that stirs the
blood like a trumpet-note. But his range of ideas is as limited as that
of his rhythms; and the thought is not sustained by any basis of
character. His fierce republicanism sits side by side with flattery of
the reigning Emperor more gross and servile than had till then been known
at Rome. He makes no attempt to realise his persons or to grasp the
significance of events. Caesar, Pompeius, Cato himself -- the hero of the
epic -- are not human beings, but mere lay-figures round which he drapes
his gorgeous rhetoric. The Civil wars are alternately regarded as the
death-agony of freedom and as the destined channel through which the
world was led to the blessings of an uncontrolled despotism. His ideas
are borrowed indifferently from the Epicurean and Stoical philosophies
according to the convenience of the moment. Great events and actions do
not kindle in him any imaginative sympathy; they are greedily seized as
opportunities for more and more immoderate flights of extravagant
embellishment. He "prates of mountains;" his "phrase conjures the
wandering stars, and makes them stand like wonder-wounded hearers;"
freedom, virtue, fate, the sea and the sun, gods and men before whom the
gods themselves stand abased, hurtle through the poem in a confused
thunder of sonorous phrase. Such brilliance, in the exact manner that was
then most admired, dazzled his contemporaries and retained a permanent
influence over later poets. Statius, himself an author of far higher
poetical gifts, speaks of him in terms of almost extravagant admiration;
with a more balanced judgment Quintilian sums him up in words which may
be taken as on the whole the final criticism adopted by the world;
"ardens et concitatus et sententiis clarissimus, et, ut dicam quod
sentio, magis oratoribus quam poetis imitandus".
One of Lucan's intimate friends was a young man of high family, Aulus
Persius Flaccus of Volaterrae in Etruria, a near relation of the
celebrated Arria, wife of Paetus. Through his kinswoman he was early
introduced to the circle of earnest thinkers and moralists among whom the
higher life was kept up at Rome amid the corruption of the Neronian age.
The gentle and delicate boy won the hearts of all who knew him. When he
died, at the age of twenty-eight, a little book of six satires, which he
had written with much effort and at long intervals, was retouched by his
master, the Stoic philosopher Cornutus, and published by another friend,
Caesius Bassus, himself a poet of some reputation. Several other writings
which Persius left were destroyed by the advice of Cornutus. The six
pieces -- only between six and seven hundred lines in all -- were at once
recognised as showing a refined and uncommon literary gift. Persius, we
are informed, had no admiration for the genius of Seneca; and, indeed, no
two styles, though both are deeply artificial, could be more unlike one
another. With all his moral elevation, Seneca was a courtier, an
opportunist, a man of the world: Stoicism took a very different colour in
the boy "of maidenly modesty," as his biographer tells us, who lived in a
household of devoted female relations, and only knew the world as a
remote spectator. Though within the narrow field of his own experience he
shows keen observation and delicate power of portraiture, the world that
he knows is mainly one of books; his perpetual imitations of Horace are
not so much plagiarisms as the unaffected outcome of the mind of a very
young student, to whom the "Satires" of Horace were more familiar than
the Rome of his own day. So, too, the involved and obscure style which
has made him the paradise of commentators is less a deliberate literary
artifice than the natural effect of looking at everything through a
literary medium, and choosing phrases, not for their own fitness, but for
the associations they recall. His deep moral earnestness, his gentleness
of nature, and, it must be added, his want of humour, made him a
favourite author beyond the circles which were merely attracted by his
verbal obscurities and the way in which he locks up his meaning in hints
and allusions. His unquestionable dramatic power might, in later life,
have ripened into higher achievement; as it is, he lives to us chiefly in
the few beautiful passages where he slips into being natural, and draws,
with a grace and charm that are strikingly absent from the rest of his
writing, the picture of his own quiet life as a student, and of the
awakening of his moral and intellectual nature at the touch of
philosophy.
Lucan and Persius represent the effect which Roman Stoicism had on two
natures of equal sensibility but widely different quality and taste.
Among the many other professors or adherents of the Stoic school in the
age of Nero, a considerable number were also authors, but the habit of
writing in Greek, which a hundred years later grew to such proportions as
to threaten the continued existence of Latin literature, had already
taken root. The three most distinguished representatives of the stricter
Stoicism, Cornutus, Quintus Sextius, and Gaius Musonius Rufus (the first
and last of whom were exiled by Nero), wrote on philosophy in Greek,
though they seem to have written in Latin on other subjects. Musonius
was, indeed, hardly more Roman than his own most illustrious pupil, the
Phrygian Epictetus. Stoicism, as they understood it, left no room for
nationality, and little for writing as a fine art.
This growing prevalence of Greek at Rome combined with political reasons
to check the production of important prose works. History more especially
languished under the jealous censorship of the government. The only
important historical work of the period is one of which the subject could
hardly excite suspicion, the "Life of Alexander the Great", by Quintus
Curtius Rufus. The precise date is uncertain, and different theories have
assigned it to an earlier or later period in the reign of Augustus or of
Vespasian. The subject is one which hardly any degree of dulness in the
writer could make wholly uninteresting. But the clear and orderly
narrative of Curtius, written in a style studied from that of Livy, but
kept within simpler limits, has real merit of its own; and against his
imperfect technical knowledge of strategy and tactics must be set the
pains he took to consult the best Greek authorities.
Memoirs were written in the Neronian age by numbers both of men and
women. Those of the Empress Agrippina were used by Tacitus; and we have
references to others by the two great Roman generals of the period,
Suetonius Paulinus and Domitius Corbulo. The production of scientific or
technical treatises, which had been so profuse in the preceding
generation, still went on. Only two of any importance are extant; one of
these, the "Chorographia" of Pomponius Mela, a geographical manual based
on the best authorities and embellished with descriptions of places,
peoples, and customs, is valuable as the earliest and one of the most
complete systems of ancient geography which we possess; but in literary
merit it falls far short of the other, the elaborate work on agriculture
by Lucius Junius Moderatus Columella. Both Mela and Columella were
natives of Spain, and thus belong to the Spanish school of Latin authors,
which begins with the Senecas and is continued later by Martial and
Quintilian. But while Mela, in his style, followed the new fashion,
Columella, an enthusiast for antiquity and a warm admirer of the Augustan
writers, reverts to the more classical manner, which a little later
became once more predominant in the writers of the Flavian period. His
simple and dignified style is much above the level of a mere technical
treatise. His prose, indeed, may be read with more pleasure than the
verse in which, by a singular caprice, one of the twelve books is
composed. In one of the most beautiful episodes of the "Georgics", Virgil
had briefly touched on the subject of gardening, and left it to be
treated by others who might come after him: "praetereo atque aliis post
me memoranda relinquo". At the instance, he says, of friends, Columella
attempts to fill up the gap by a fifth Georgic on horticulture. He
approaches the task so modestly, and carries it out so simply, that
critics are not inclined to be very severe; but he was no poet, and the
book is little more than a cento from Virgil, carefully and smoothly
written, and hardly if at all disfigured by pretentiousness or rhetorical
conceits.
The same return upon the Virgilian manner is shown in the seven
"Eclogues," composed in the early years of Nero's reign, by Titus
Calpurnius Siculus. These are remarkable rather as the only specimens for
nearly three hundred years of a direct attempt to continue the manner of
Virgil's "Bucolics" than for any substantive merit of their own. That
manner, indeed, is so exceptionally unmanageable that it is hardly
surprising that it should have been passed over by later poets of high
original gift; but that even poets of the second and third rate should
hardly ever have attempted to imitate poems which stood in the very first
rank of fame bears striking testimony to Virgil's singular quality of
unapproachableness. The "Eclogues" of Calpurnius (six of them are
Eclogues within the ordinary meaning, the seventh rather a brief Georgic
on the care of sheep and goats, made formally a pastoral by being put
into the mouth of an old shepherd sitting in the shade at midday) are,
notwithstanding their almost servile imitation of Virgil, written in such
graceful verse, and with so few serious lapses of taste, that they may be
read with considerable pleasure. The picture, in the sixth Eclogue, of
the fawn lying among the white lilies, will recall to English readers one
of the prettiest fancies of Marvell; that in the second, of Flora
scattering her tresses over the spring meadow, and Pomona playing under
the orchard boughs, is at least a vivid pictorial presentment of a
sufficiently well-worn theme. A more normal specimen of Calpurnius's
manner may be instanced in the lines (v. 52-62) where one of the most
beautiful passages in the third "Georgic," the description of a long
summer day among the Italian hill-pastures, is simply copied in different
words.
The didactic poem on volcanoes, called "Aetna," probably written by the
Lucilius to whom Seneca addressed his writings on natural philosophy,
belongs to the same period and shows the same influences. Of the other
minor poetical works of the time the only one which requires special
mention is the tragedy of "Octavia," which is written in the same style
as those of Seneca, and was long included among his works. Its only
interest is as the single extant specimen of the "fabula praetexta," or
drama with a Roman subject and characters. The characters here include
Nero and Seneca himself. But the treatment is as conventional and
declamatory as that of the mythological tragedies among which it has been
preserved, and the result, if possible, even flatter and more tedious.
One other work of extreme and unique interest survives from the reign of
Nero, the fragments of a novel by Petronius Arbiter, one of the Emperor's
intimate circle in the excesses of his later years. In the year 66 he
fell a victim to the jealousy of the infamous and all but omnipotent
Tigellinus; and on this occasion Tacitus sketches his life and character
in a few of his strong masterly touches. "His days were passed," says
Tacitus, "in sleep, his nights in the duties or pleasures of life; where
others toiled for fame he had lounged into it, and he had the reputation
not, like most members of that profligate society, of a dissolute wanton,
but of a trained master in luxury. A sort of careless ease, an entire
absence of self-consciousness, added the charm of complete simplicity to
all he said and did. Yet, as governor of Bithynia, and afterwards as
consul, he showed himself a vigorous and capable administrator; then
relapsing into the habit or assuming the mask of vice, he was adopted as
Arbiter of Elegance into the small circle of Nero's intimate companions;
no luxury was charming or refined till Petronius had given it his
approval, and the jealousy of Tigellinus was roused against a rival and
master in the science of debauchery."
The novel written by this remarkable man was in the form of an
autobiography narrating the adventures, in various Italian towns, of a
Greek freedman. The fragments hardly enable us to trace any regular plot;
its interest probably lay chiefly in the series of vivid pictures which
it presented of life among all orders of society from the highest to the
lowest, and its accurate reproduction of popular language and manners.
The hero of the story uses the ordinary Latin speech of educated persons,
though, from the nature of the work, the style is much more colloquial
than that of the formal prose used for serious writing. But the
conversation of many of the characters is in the "plebeius sermo," the
actual speech of the lower orders, of which so little survives in
literature. It is full of solecisms and popular slang; and where the
scene lies, as it mostly does in the extant fragments, in the semi-Greek
seaports of Southern Italy, it passes into what was almost a dialect of
its own, the "lingua franca" of the Mediterranean under the Empire, a
dialect of mixed Latin and Greek. The longest and most important fragment
is the well-known "Supper of Trimalchio". It is the description of a
Christmas dinner-party given by a sort of Golden Dustman and his wife,
people of low birth and little education, who had come into an enormous
fortune. Trimalchio, a figure drawn with extraordinary life, is
constantly making himself ridiculous by his blunders and affectations,
while he almost wins our liking by his childlike simplicity and good
nature. The dinner itself, and the conversation on literature and art
that goes on at the dinner-table, are conceived in a spirit of the
wildest humour. Trimalchio, who has two libraries, besides everything
else handsome about him, is anxious to air his erudition. "Can you tell
us a story," he asks a guest, "of the twelve sorrows of Hercules, or how
the Cyclops pulled Ulysses' leg? I used to read them in Homer when I was
a boy." After an interruption, caused by the entrance of a boar, roasted
whole and stuffed with sausages, he goes on to talk of his collection of
plate; his unique cups of Corinthian bronze (so called from a dealer
named Corinthus; the metal was invented by Hannibal at the capture of
Troy), and his huge silver vases, "a hundred of them, more or less,"
chased with the story of Daedalus shutting Niobe into the Trojan horse,
and Cassandra killing her sons -- "the dead children so good, you would
think they were alive; for I sell my knowledge in matters of art for no
money." Presently there follow the two wonderful ghost stories -- that of
the wer-wolf, told by one of the guests, and that of the witches by
Trimalchio himself in return -- both masterpieces of vivid realism. As the
evening advances the fun becomes more fast and furious. The cook, who had
excelled himself in the ingenuity of his dishes, is called up to take a
seat at table, and after favouring the company with an imitation of a
popular tragedian, begins to make a book with Trimalchio over the next
chariot races. Fortunata, Trimalchio's wife, is a little in liquor, and
gets up to dance. Just at this point Trimalchio suddenly turns
sentimental, and, after giving elaborate directions for his own
obsequies, begins to cry. The whole company are in tears round him when
he suddenly rallies, and proposes that, as death is certain, they shall
all go and have a hot bath. In the little confusion that follows, the
narrator and his friend slip quietly away. This scene of exquisite
fooling is quite unique in Greek or Latin literature: the breadth and
sureness of touch are almost Shakespearian. Another fragment relates the
famous story of the "Matron of Ephesus", one of the popular tales which
can be traced back to India, but which appears here for the first time in
the Western world. Others deal with literary criticism, and include
passages in verse; the longest of these, part of an epic on the civil
wars in the manner of Lucan, is recited by one of the principal
characters, the professional poet Eumolpus, to exemplify the rules he has
laid down for epic poetry in a most curious discussion that precedes it.
That so small a part of the novel has been preserved is most annoying; it
must have been comparable, in dramatic power and (notwithstanding the
gross indecency of many passages) in a certain large sanity, to the great
work of Fielding. In all the refined writing of the next age we never
again come on anything at once so masterly and so human.
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