LATIN LITERATURE
BY
J. W. MACKAIL
III.
THE EMPIRE
IV.
JUVENAL, THE YOUNGER PLINY, SUETONIUS: DECAY OF CLASSICAL LATIN.
From the name of Tacitus that of Juvenal is inseparable. The pictures
drawn of the Empire by the historian and the satirist are in such
striking accordance that they create a greater plausibility for the
common view they hold than could be given by any single representation;
and while Juvenal lends additional weight and colour to the Tacitean
presentment of the imperial legend, he acquires from it in return an
importance which could hardly otherwise have been sustained by his
exaggerated and glaring rhetoric.
As regards the life and personality of the last great Roman satirist we
are in all but total ignorance. Several lives of him exist which are
confused and contradictory in detail. He was born at Aquinum, probably in
the reign of Nero; an inscription on a little temple of Ceres, dedicated
by him there, indicates that he had served in the army as commander of a
Dalmatian cohort, and was superintendent (as one of the chief men of the
town) of the civic worship paid to Vespasian after his deification. The
circumstance of his banishment for offence given to an actor who was high
in favour with the reigning Emperor is well authenticated; but neither
its place nor its time can be fixed. It appears from the "Satires"
themselves that they were written late in life; we are informed that he
reached his eightieth year, and lived into the reign of Antoninus Pius.
Martial, by whom he is repeatedly mentioned, alludes to him only as a
rhetorician, not as a satirist. The sixteen satires (of which the last
is, perhaps, not genuine) were published at intervals under Trajan and
Hadrian. They fall into two groups; the first nine, which are at once the
most powerful and the least agreeable, being separated by a considerable
interval of years from the others, in which a certain softening of tone
and a tendency to dwell on the praise of virtue more than on the ignoble
details of vice is united with a failing power that marks the approach of
senility.
Juvenal is the most savage -- one might almost say the most brutal -- of all
the Roman satirists. Lucilius, when he "scourged the town," did so in the
high spirits and voluble diction of a comparatively simple age. Horace
soon learned to drop the bitterness which appears in his earlier satires,
and to make them the vehicle for his gentle wisdom and urbane humour. The
writing of Persius was that of a student who gathered the types he
satirised from books rather than from life. Juvenal brought to his task
not only a wide knowledge of the world -- or, at least, of the world of the
capital -- but a singular power of mordant phrase, and a mastery over crude
and vivid effect that keeps the reader suspended between disgust and
admiration. In the commonplaces of morality, though often elevated and
occasionally noble, he does not show any exceptional power or insight;
but his graphic realism, combined (as realism often is) with a total
absence of all but the grimmest forms of humour, makes his verses cut
like a knife. "Facit indignatio versum", he truly says of his own work;
with far less flexibility, he has all the remorselessness of Swift. That
singular product of the last days of paganism, the epigrammatist Palladas
of Alexandria, is the only ancient author who shows the same spirit. Of
his earlier work the second and ninth satires, and a great part of the
sixth, have a cold prurience and disgustingness of detail, that even
Swift only approaches at his worst moments. Yet the sixth satire, at all
events, is an undeniable masterpiece; however raw the colour, however
exaggerated the drawing, his pictures of Roman life have a force that
stamps them permanently on the imagination; his "Legend of Bad Women," as
this satire might be called, has gone far to make history.
It is in the third satire that his peculiar gift of vivid painting finds
its best and easiest scope. In this elaborate indictment of the life of
the capital, put into the mouth of a man who is leaving it for a little
sleepy provincial town, he draws a picture of the Rome he knew, its
social life and its physical features, its everyday sights and sounds,
that brings it before us more clearly and sharply than even the Rome of
Horace or Cicero. The drip of the water from the aqueduct that passed
over the gate from which the dusty squalid Appian Way stretched through
its long suburb; the garret under the tiles where, just as now, the
pigeons sleeked themselves in the sun and the rain drummed on the roof;
the narrow crowded streets, half choked with builders' carts, ankle-deep
in mud, and the pavement ringing under the heavy military boots of
guardsmen; the tavern waiters trotting along with a pyramid of hot dishes
on their head; the flowerpots falling from high window ledges; night,
with the shuttered shops, the silence broken by some sudden street brawl,
the darkness shaken by a flare of torches as some great man, wrapped in
his scarlet cloak, passes along from a dinner-party with his long train
of clients and slaves: these scenes live for us in Juvenal, and are
perhaps the picture of ancient Rome that is most abidingly impressed on
our memory. The substance of the satire is familiar to English readers
from the fine copy of Johnson, whose "London" follows it closely, and is
one of the ablest and most animated modern imitations of a classical
original. The same author's noble poem on the "Vanity of Human Wishes" is
a more free, but equally spirited rendering of the tenth satire, which
stands at the head of the later portion of Juvenal's work. In this, and
in those of the subsequent satires which do not show traces of declining
power, notably the eleventh and thirteenth, the rhetoric is less gaudy
and the thought rises to a nobler tone. The fine passage at the end of
the tenth satire, where he points out what it is permitted mankind to
pray for, and that in the thirteenth, where he paints the torments of
conscience in the unpunished sinner, have something in them which
combines the lofty ardour of Lucretius with the subtle psychological
insight of Horace, and to readers in all ages have been, as they still
remain, a powerful influence over conduct. Equally elevated in tone, and
with a temperate gravity peculiar to itself, is the part of the
fourteenth satire which deals with the education of the young. We seem to
hear once more in it the enlightened eloquence of Quintilian; in the
famous "Maxima debetur puero reverentia" he sums up in a single memorable
phrase the whole spirit of the instructor and the moralist. The allusions
to childhood here and elsewhere show Juvenal on his most pleasing side;
his rhetorical vices had not infected the real simplicity of his nature,
or his admiration for goodness and innocence. In his power over trenchant
expression he rivals Tacitus himself. Some of his phrases, like the one
just quoted, have obtained a world-wide currency, and even reached the
crowning honour of habitual misquotation; his "Hoc volo sic iubeo", his
"Mens Sana in corpore sano", his "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" are
more familiar than all but the best-known lines of Virgil and Horace. But
perhaps his most characteristic lines are rather those where his moral
indignation breaks forth in a sort of splendid violence quite peculiar to
himself; lines like --
"Et propter vitam vivendi perdere causas,"
or --
"Magnaque numinibus vota exaudita malignis,"
in which the haughty Roman language is still used with unimpaired weight
and magnificence.
To pass from Juvenal to the other distinguished contemporary of Tacitus,
the younger Pliny, is like exchanging the steaming atmosphere and
gorgeous colours of a hot-house for the commonplace trimness of a
suburban garden. The nephew and adopted son of his celebrated uncle,
Pliny had received from his earliest years the most elaborate training
which ever fell to the lot of mediocrity. His uncle's death left him at
the age of seventeen already a finished pedant. The story which he tells,
with obvious self-satisfaction, of how he spent the awful night of the
eruption of Vesuvius in making extracts from Livy for his commonplace
book, sets the whole man before us. He became a successful pleader in the
courts, and passed through the usual public offices up to the consulate.
At the age of fifty he was imperial legate of Bithynia: the extant
official correspondence between him and the Emperor during this
governorship shows him still unchanged; upright and conscientious, but
irresolute, pedantic, and totally unable to think and act for himself in
any unusual circumstances. The contrast between Pliny's fidgety
indecision and the quiet strength and inexhaustible patience of Trajan,
though scarcely what Pliny meant to bring out, is the first and last
impression conveyed to us by this curious correspondence. The nine books
of his private letters, though prepared, and in many cases evidently
written for publication, give a varied and interesting picture of the
time. Here, too, the character of the writer in its virtues and its
weakness is throughout unmistakable. Pliny, the patriotic citizen, --
Pliny, the munificent patron, -- Pliny, the eminent man of letters, -- Pliny,
the affectionate husband and humane master, -- Pliny, the man of principle,
is in his various phases the real subject of the whole collection. His
opinions are always just and elegant; few writers can express truisms
with greater fervour. The letters to Tacitus with whom he was throughout
life in close intimacy, are among the most interesting and the fullest of
unintentional humour. Tacitus was the elder of the two; and Pliny, "when
very young" -- the words are his own, -- had chosen him as his model and
sought to follow his fame. "There were then many writers of brilliant
genius; but you," he writes to Tacitus, "so strong was the affinity of
our natures, seemed to me at once the easiest to imitate and the most
worthy of imitation. Now we are named together; both of us have, I may
say, some name in literature, for, as I include myself, I must be
moderate in my praise of you." This to the author who had already
published the "Histories!" Before so exquisite a self-revelation
criticism itself is silenced.
The cult of Ciceronianism established by Quintilian is the real origin of
the collection of Pliny's "Letters". Cicero and Pliny had many weaknesses
and some virtues in common, and the desire of emulating Cicero, which
Pliny openly and repeatedly expresses, had a considerable effect in
exaggerating his weaknesses. Cicero was vain, quick-tempered, excitable;
his sensibilities were easily moved, and found natural and copious
expression in the language of which he was a consummate master. Pliny,
the most steady-going of mankind, sets himself to imitate this excitable
temperament with the utmost seriousness; he cultivates sensibility, he
even cultivates vanity. His elaborate and graceful descriptions of
scenery -- the fountain of Clitumnus or the villa overlooking the Tiber
valley -- are no more consciously insincere than his tears over the death
of friends, or the urgency with which he begs his wife to write to him
from the country twice a day. But these fine feelings are meant primarily
to impress the public; and a public which could be impressed by the
spectacle of a man giving a dinner-party, and actually letting his
untitled guests drink the same wine that was being drunk at the head of
the table, put little check upon lapses of taste.
Yet with all his affectations and fatuities, Pliny compels respect, and
even a measure of admiration, by the real goodness of his character.
Where a good life is lived, it hardly becomes us to be too critical of
motives and springs of action; and in Pliny's case the practice of
domestic and civic virtue was accompanied by a considerable literary
gift. Had we a picture drawn with equal copiousness and grace of the Rome
of Marcus Aurelius half a century later, it would be a priceless addition
to history. Pliny's world -- partly because it is presented with such rich
detail -- reminds us, more than that of any other period of Roman history,
of the society of our own day. To pass from Cicero's letters to his is
curiously like passing from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century. In
other respects, indeed, they have what might be called an eighteenth
century flavour. Some of the more elaborate of them would fall quite
naturally into place among the essays of the "Spectator" or the
"Rambler;" in many others the combination of thin and lucid common-sense
with a vein of calculated sensibility can hardly be paralleled till we
reach the age of Rousseau.
Part of this real or assumed sensibility was the interest in scenery and
the beauties of nature, which in Pliny, as in the eighteenth century
authors, is cultivated for its own sake as an element in self-culture. In
the words with which he winds up one of the most elaborate of his
descriptive pieces, that on the lake of Vadimo in Tuscany -- "Me nihil
aeque ac naturae opera delectant" -- there is an accent which hardly recurs
till the age of the "Seasons" and of Gray's "Letters". Like Gray, Pliny
took a keen pleasure in exploring the more romantic districts of his
country; his description of the lake in the letter just mentioned is
curiously like passages from the journal in which Gray records his
discovery -- for it was little less -- of Thirlmere and Derwentwater. He
views the Clitumnus with the eye of an accomplished landscape-gardener;
he notes the cypresses on the hill, the ash and poplar groves by the
water's edge; he counts the shining pebbles under the clear ice-cold
water, and watches the green reflections of the overhanging trees; and
finally, as Thomson or Cowper might have done, mentions the abundance of
comfortable villas as the last charm of the landscape.
The munificent benefactions of Pliny to his native town of Comum, and his
anxiety that, instead of sending its most promising boys to study at
Milan -- only thirty miles off -- it should provide for them at home what
would now be called a university education, are among the many
indications which show us how Rome was diffusing itself over Italy, as
Italy was over the Latin-speaking provinces. Under Hadrian and the
Antonines this process went on with even growing force. Country life, or
that mixture of town and country life afforded by the small provincial
towns, came to be more and more of a fashion, and the depopulation of the
capital had made sensible progress long before the period of renewed
anarchy that followed the assassination of Commodus. Whether the rapid
decay of Latin literature which took place after the death of Pliny and
Tacitus was connected with this weakening of the central life of Rome, is
a question to which we hardly can hazard a definite answer. Under the
three reigns which succeeded that of Trajan, a period of sixty-four years
of internal peace, of beneficent rule, of enlightened and humane
legislation, the cultured society shown to us in Pliny's "Letters" as
diffused all over Italy remained strangely silent. Of all the streams of
tradition which descended on this age, the schools of law and grammar
alone kept their course; the rest dwindle away and disappear. Sixty years
pass without a single poet or historian, even of the second rate; one or
two eminent jurists share the field with one or two inconsiderable
extract-makers and epitomators, who barely rise out of the common herd of
undistinguished grammarians. Among the obscure poets mentioned by Pliny,
the name of Vergilius Romanus may excite a momentary curiosity; he was
the author of Terentian comedies, which probably did not long survive the
private recitations for which they were composed. The epitome of the
"History" of Pompeius Trogus, made by the otherwise unknown Marcus
Junianus Justinus, has been already mentioned; like the brief and poorly
executed abridgment of Livy by Julius or Lucius Annaeus Florus (one of
the common text-books of the Middle Ages), it is probably to be placed
under Hadrian. Javolenus Priscus, a copious and highly esteemed juridical
writer, and head of one of the two great schools of Roman jurisprudence,
is best remembered by the story of his witty interruption at a public
recitation, which Pliny (part of whose character it was to joke with
difficulty) tells with a scandalised gravity even more amusing than the
story itself. His successor as head of the school, Salvius Julianus, was
of equal juristic distinction; his codification of praetorian law
received imperial sanction from Hadrian, and became the authorised civil
code. He was one of the instructors of Marcus Aurelius. The wealth he
acquired by his profession was destined, in the strange revolutions of
human affairs, to be the purchase-money of the Empire for his great-
grandson, Didius Julianus, when it was set up at auction by the
praetorian guards. More eminent as a man of letters than either of these
is their contemporary Gaius, whose "Institutes of Civil Law", published
at the beginning of the reign of Marcus Aurelius, have ever since
remained one of the foremost manuals of Roman jurisprudence.
But the literary poverty of this age in Latin writing is most strikingly
indicated by merely naming its principal author. At any previous period
the name of Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus would have been low down in the
second rank: here it rises to the first; nor is there any other name
which fairly equals his, either in importance or in interest. The son of
an officer of the thirteenth legion, Suetonius practised in early life as
an advocate, subsequently became one of Hadrian's private secretaries,
and devoted his later years to literary research and compilation,
somewhat in the manner, though without the encyclopedic scope, of Varro.
In his youth he had been an intimate friend of the younger Pliny, who
speaks in high terms of his learning and integrity. The greater part of
his voluminous writings are lost; they included many works on grammar,
rhetoric, and archaeology, and several on natural history and physical
science. Fragments survive of his elaborate treatise "De Viris
Illustribus," an exhaustive history of Latin literature up to his own
day: excerpts made from it by St. Jerome in his "Chronicle" are the
source from which much of our information as to Latin authors is derived,
and several complete lives have been prefixed to manuscripts of the works
of the respective authors, and thus independently preserved. But his most
interesting, and probably his most valuable work, the "Lives of the
Twelve Caesars", has made him one of the most widely known of the later
classical writers. It was published under Hadrian in the year 120, and
dedicated to his praetorian prefect, Septicius Clarus. Tacitus (perhaps
because he was still alive) is never mentioned, and not certainly made
use of. Both authors had access, in the main, to the same materials; but
the confidential position of Suetonius as Hadrian's secretary no doubt
increased his natural tendency to collect stories and preserve all sorts
of trivial or scandalous gossip, rather than make any attempt to write
serious history. It is just this, however, which gives unique interest
and value to the "Lives of the Caesars". We can spare political insight
or consecutive arrangement in an author who is so lavish in the personal
detail that makes much of the life of history; who tells us the colour of
Caesar's eyes, who quotes from a dozen private letters of Augustus, who
shows us Caligula shouting to the moon from his palace roof, and Nero
lecturing on the construction of the organ. There perhaps never was a
series of biographies so crammed with anecdote. Nor is the style without
a certain sort of merit, from its entire and unaffected simplicity. After
all the fine writing of the previous century it is, for a little while,
almost a relief to come on an author who is frankly without style, and
says what he has to say straightforwardly. But it is only the absorbing
interest of the matter which makes this kind of writing long endurable.
It is, in truth, the beginning of barbarism; and Suetonius measures more
than half the distance from the fine familiar prose of the Golden Age to
the base jargon of the authors of the "Augustan History" a century and a
half later, under Diocletian.
Amid the decay of imagination and of the higher qualities of style, the
tradition of industry and accuracy to some degree survived. The
biographies of Suetonius show considerable research and complete honesty;
and the same qualities, though united with a feebler judgment, appear in
the interesting miscellanies of his younger contemporary, Aulus Gellius.
This work, published under the fanciful title of "Noctes Atticae", is
valuable at once as a collection of extracts from older writers and as a
source of information regarding the knowledge and studies of his own age.
Few authors are more scrupulously accurate in quotation; and by this
conscientiousness, as well as by his real admiration for the great
writers, he shows the pedantry of the time on its most pleasing side.
The twenty books of the "Noctes Atticae" were the compilation of many
years; but the title was chosen from the fact of the work having been
begun during a winter spent by the author at Athens, when about thirty
years of age. He was only one among a number of his countrymen, old as
well as young, who found the atmosphere of that university town more
congenial to study than the noisy, unhealthy, and crowded capital, or
than the quiet, but ill-equipped, provincial towns of Italy. Athens once
more became, for a short time, the chief centre of European culture.
Herodes Atticus, that remarkable figure who traced his descent to the
very beginnings of Athenian history and the semi-mythical Aeacidae of
Aegina, and who was consul of Rome under Antoninus Pius, had taken up his
permanent residence in his native town, and devoted his vast wealth to
the architectural embellishment of Athens, and to a munificent patronage
of letters. Plutarch and Arrian, the two most eminent authors of the age,
both spent much of their time there; and the Emperor Hadrian, by his
repeated and protracted visits -- he once lived at Athens for three years
together -- established the reputation of the city as a fashionable resort,
and superintended the building of an entirely new quarter to accommodate
the great influx of permanent residents. The accident of imperial
patronage doubtless added force to the other causes which made Greek take
fresh growth, and become for a time almost the dominant language of the
Empire. Though two centuries were still to pass before the foundation of
Constantinople, the centre of gravity of the huge fabric of government
was already passing from Italy to the Balkan peninsula, and Italy itself
was becoming slowly but surely one of the Western provinces. Nature
herself seemed to have fixed the Eastern limit of the Latin language at
the Adriatic, and even in Italy Greek was equally familiar with Latin to
the educated classes. Suetonius, Fronto, Hadrian himself, wrote in Latin
and Greek indifferently. Marcus Aurelius used Greek by preference, even
when writing of his predecessors and the events of Roman history. From
Plutarch to Lucian the Greek authors completely predominate over the
Latin. In the sombre century which followed, both Greek and Latin
literature were all but extinguished; the partial revival of the latter
in the fourth century was artificial and short-lived; and though the
tradition of the classical manner took long to die away, the classical
writers themselves completely cease with Suetonius. A new Latin, that of
the Middle Ages, was already rising to take the place of the speech
handed down by the Republic to the Empire.
Contents
Classical Literature and E-Texts
