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Preface

The favourable reception accorded in several countries to my work on A Literary History of Rome from the Origins to the Close of the Golden Age, of which the first edition appeared in 1909, suggested the idea of continuing on similar principles the study of Latin literature into the first and second centuries, during which the Roman empire at its zenith in power and efficiency rendered its greatest services to human civilisation. The project was dropped throughout the period of the Great War, when, even if publication had been feasible, duties on a local Brigade Committee and for a time as Acting-Principal of my College effectually removed me from the atmosphere of literary criticism. Even after my publisher, Mr. Fisher Unwin, was good enough to revive the design, progress was extraordinarily slow, owing to the increasing demands made upon time by the recurrent problems of a modern university.

As in the former volume, emphasis has here been laid on the national character imprinted upon Latin literature despite all borrowings from Greek models; and attention has been carefully devoted to the evidence for the facts of an author’s life in an endeavour to recreate the environment amidst which he wrote. Nor have material sources, whether Greek or Latin, been overlooked: indispensable though some account of these must be for a true conception of a writer as at once inheritor and progenitor, it is surprising to note how little in this country scholarship has concerned itself with the origin of encyclopaedic learning like that of the elder Pliny. The arrangement adopted is different from that in Professor Summers’s skilful handling of a slightly shorter period in his Silver Age of Latin Literature under headings of various kinds of literature rather than on chronological lines. In the present work, where historical background and literary evolution are alike regarded as of vital importance, the treatment has been not according to genre but mainly in the order of time. While the limits set for full discussion of authors are A.D. 14–A.D. 138, these dates are not rigidly observed respecting relevant topics, such as the survival of an author’s influence till modern times or the continuance of the Roman educational system; and an epilogue is added to give a brief conspectus of the literature which followed the Silver Age.

An attempt has been made to secure acquaintance with a reasonable proportion of the vast number of treatises and pamphlets written in Latin and in several modern languages upon matters related to the authors of the period. The obligations incurred to such works may be gauged from references in the footnotes. But it is obvious that no amount of reading in books upon books, however valuable in substance, can avail to produce either a vital chronicle of any age or serviceable estimates of its writers without first-hand study of the writers themselves and independent appreciation of their significance. I hope, therefore, for success in conveying to readers, by summary, by quotation, and by criticism, something of the impression made on myself during adventures among the literary products of the Silver Age. The illustrative translations from Latin into prose or verse are my own, and have been for the most part composed specially for this volume. Thanks are due to the Delegates of the Oxford University Press for permission to use a few verse renderings which I made for my book on The Writers of Rome. The general reader, whose Latin has perhaps grown rusty, may welcome these translations as supplementing the historical and critical portions, while he will doubtless realize that it is optional to consult or not to consult the footnotes.

The bibliographical notes, it should be explained, are intended, not to be exhaustive, but to give by mention of selected editions some clue to the history of the printed text of an author and to include representative modern studies of his literary significance.

I wish to acknowledge kind assistance rendered by Mr. Basil Anderton, M.A., Public Librarian, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and by Miss Constance Shipley, M.A., Lecturer in Classics at Armstrong College, in reading and criticising some of the chapters of this book. My son, Mr. Arnold M. Duff, M.A., B.Litt.(Oxon.), Assistant Lecturer in Greek in the University of Aberdeen, has also perused several chapters and made useful suggestions, while my wife copied for the press either by hand or by typewriter almost the whole manuscript. Both have helped greatly in the checking of proofs and in the verification of references. To Professor Hermann Dessau of Berlin I owe several references to inscriptions which he sent me some years ago to amplify those in my article on “Roman Education” in The Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics. In the choice of a frontispiece, intended to illustrate the art of the period, I had the great benefit of advice from Mrs. Arthur Strong, Litt.D., LL.D., formerly Assistant-Director of the British School at Rome, in whose penetrating discernment of the true ethos of Roman sculpture I have found much to reinforce my argument that within the analogous domain of literature the Romans knew not only how to borrow from Greece but also how independently to create the beautiful.

It is a satisfaction to observe among scholars a growing insistence upon the independent vitality of Roman literature and a growing disinclination to regard it as a pale second-hand reflection of the splendour of Greek literature. My friend, the late Dr. Warde Fowler, appended to his Presidential Address on “The Imagination of the Romans,” read at the Newcastle-upon-Tyne Meeting of the central Classical Association of England and Wales in 1920, a note to the effect that he was in agreement with the contentions advocated on the subject in my Literary History of Rome; and only last year a German Professor, Herr Günther Jachmann, chose as the theme of an inaugural lecture at Köln “Die Originalität der römischen Literatur”. The value of Roman literature cannot be grasped without recognition of the extent to which Roman authors found fresh stimulus in surroundings widened far beyond those assigned by historical circumstance to the brilliant intellects of Greece.

J. W. D.

NEWCASTLE-UPON-TYNE July 1927

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Prologue

“Silver” and “Gold” in Roman literature—The period from Tiberius to Hadrian (A.D. 14–138)—Historical aspects—Cosmopolitan Rome—Tangible remains—Emperors in relation to literature—Risks in writing—Fresh individual forces in Silver literature—The conventional in education—Declaiming and reciting—Epigrammatic point and decorative tinsel—Corrective factors in real life—Serious thought—Stoicism—The Stoic opposition—Influence of Stoic doctrine—Influence of the provinces—Variety in “Silver” themes and style—Changing features in the language—Concentration on the terse, the surprising, and the poetic—Grammar and vocabulary—A few summary reflections.

In the literary history of Rome one of the most brilliant and attractive epochs is that part of the first and second centuries of the Christian era which critics have usually distinguished with the epithet of “Silver.” The Silver Age of Roman Literature is regarded in the present work as that immediately following the great times of Augustan poetry and prose. What has been traditionally reckoned the Golden Age coincided with the productive careers of Cicero and then Livy in prose, and lasted from Lucretius to Ovid in verse. While, soon after it began, Catullus wrote his anti-Caesarian lampoons, it reached its fullest glory when Virgil and Horace by their works threw lustre around the emergence of the imperial family—ecce Dionaei processit Caesaris astrum, in the language of the Eclogues. Politically, therefore, the Golden Age saw the final overthrow of the old senatorial republic and the inauguration of state-control by a single ruler for Rome and the Roman dominions. Such public oratory as Cicero’s, which adorned the earlier phases of the age amidst the unfettered interplay of republican politics, had become an impossible anachronism before its close, when Augustus concentrated in his person all the significant powers of the ancient magistracies—munia senatus magistratuum legum in se trahere is the remark of Tacitus. In time, then, the Golden Age may be dated from 70 B.C. to A.D. 14, a stretch of eighty-four years.

The Silver Age is a longer period, even when restricted, as some prefer, to the years between A.D. 14 and 117, that is from the beginning of Tiberius’s reign to the end of Trajan’s. Here it has been extended to include the reign of Hadrian, A.D. 117-138, after which Latin literature is marked partly by sterility, partly by an artificial archaizing movement, partly by the entirely different train of thought expressed in Christian apologetics. Historically, this period of a century and a quarter coincides with the reigns of all but the first two of Suetonius’s twelve Caesars, and, in addition, the reigns of Nerva, Trajan and Hadrian, thirteen emperors altogether. If in the preceding age the empire was still young and so far, under Augustus, only partially tested, now during these succeeding generations, in spite of the enormities of individual emperors and in spite of the ghastly interval of bloodshed among successive candidates for the purple after Nero’s suicide, the hold of the system upon the world was firmly established, and its organization perfected, on the whole, for the benefit of mankind. With the Pax Romana came greater safety for life and limb both in Italy and in the provinces; governors abroad were more under the central control; roads were improved to meet the requirements of the imperial post-service for despatches; the water-supply of Rome and other cities was diligently cared for; new harbours were constructed; industry and trade increased, at any rate up to the point at which the policy of the bread-dole effected moral ruin for the population and in the end financial ruin for a state in which the value of free agriculture and free capital was misunderstood. Nihil est ab omni parte beatum; and so, upon examination, it is plain that amidst the material well-being and felicities of the second century, even in the prosperous Antonine age with which Gibbon began his history of The Decline and Fall, there lurked elements of disintegration which would lead to the troubles of the third century.[1]

During the first century events had revealed the state-secret not only that emperors might be made by other electors than the Senate, but that they might be made even elsewhere than in Rome. The tendency, in fact, was towards a military monarchy, as the careers of Galba, Otho, Vitellius and Vespasian showed. When one considers, it seems well-nigh inevitable that an emperor’s absolute power abroad should ultimately expand his theoretically limited power in Italy and Rome towards absolutism. Between Augustus as first citizen at the opening of the century and Domitian claiming to be “Lord and God” towards its end vast changes had intervened. The dyarchy which Augustus was careful to respect had in time gone far on its way to monarchy; for the senate not infrequently acted under imperial coercion. More and more, too, it grew evident that the basis of the ruler’s power was the army—a conception abhorrent to Romans of the constitutional republic. In this connexion it is significant that the title imperator became commoner than princeps about Trajan’s time. Moreover, the worship of emperors during their lifetime in association with the cult of the goddess Roma, and the deification of certain emperors after death, outwardly exalted their office. It is, however, difficult to see how the notion of apotheosis could seriously survive among thinking readers of Seneca’s satire on the dead emperor Claudius; and it is a strange contradiction inherent in circumstances that, while the sacrifice in honour of a Caesar as the public test of loyalty involved the martyrdom of many Christians, yet the Caesar-worship from which their faith revolted did actually by its attainment of official universality prepare the way for the ultimate predominance of the Christian religion.

The crucial problem for the empire was, as Augustus foresaw, one of consolidation rather than aggrandisement; and the only notable departures from this policy during the whole period were connected with the annexations in Britain begun by Claudius and those in Dacia and the East carried out by Trajan. Trajan’s Oriental conquests in the first quarter of the second century, though soon abandoned by his successor, brought the Roman Empire to its widest extent, and marked the extremity of contrast between the primitive pastoral settlement near the Tiber and the capital of world-wide dominions into which it had evolved. Rome had in the first century become more cosmopolitan than ever—a phenomenon sufficient to illustrate in the eyes of a Seneca the essential brotherhood of mankind, but in the eyes of a Juvenal the objectionable ubiquity of the alien interloper. It has been argued that, early in the second century, when Juvenal and Tacitus wrote, “a very small percentage of the free plebeians on the streets of Rome could prove unmixed Italian descent.”[2] Here at once we meet a feature of importance for literature. Rome possessed a wonderful power of nationalizing the foreigner; but there was sure to be a reaction on her own life and thought. This large cosmopolitan and international element in the capital contributed towards a widening of their horizon for literary men, and to it the human note unquestionably observable in the Silver Age owed a great deal.

The whole period has been made very real to us by writers within recent times who have investigated its political, constitutional, social, religious and artistic history.[3] Modern inquiry has combined with ancient documents to recreate the historical background requisite for appreciation of the literature, in such a way that few epochs of the past are so intimately known. In some degree this clear view is due to the strikingly human note, the living interest in man and his concerns, which is characteristic of the ablest writers in the Silver Age. Much of its history and many of its personages have been made to live for us by Tacitus and Suetonius; its society by Petronius’s novel, the miscellaneous poems of Statius, the younger Pliny’s letters, Martial’s epigrams and Juvenal’s satires; its science by the elder Pliny; its rhetoric by the elder Seneca and Quintilian; its practical ethics by Seneca the younger. Inscriptions and coins tell their tale; the Colosseum remains the most imposing monument to the Flavian dynasty; Pompeii puts before us the dwellings, decorations and the very street-paving of the time; and Hadrian is brought nearer through his magnificent villa, a veritable urbis opus, close under Tivoli, his gateway at Athens, his wall in Britain, and his mausoleum familiar now as the Castel Sant’ Angelo at Rome.

Before passing from the historical aspects of the age, one may observe how the emperors comported themselves in relation to literature.[4] They were well-educated men, and several of them showed literary talent. Tiberius in early life cultivated the acquaintance of M. Valerius Messala Corvinus, the friend of Horace and Tibullus, and modelled his oratorical style on Messala’s. It was said that he imitated the pathetic love-stories of Parthenios of Nicaea, who taught Virgil Greek. Tiberius’s successor Caligula was no author, but he had a turn for shrewd criticism, discernible in his sharp remark about Seneca’s style as “sand without lime;”[5] and he recognized classic greatness in literature well enough to be insanely jealous of it. The next two emperors, Claudius and Nero, displayed ability as writers, the one in prose, the other in verse. If we then turn to the Flavian emperors, we find that, although none of the three felt so enthusiastic for literature as either Claudius or Nero had done, yet they all extended a certain limited patronage to authors. Vespasian, bourgeois man of business though he might be, was not unskilled in Greek eloquence, and composed memoirs. Titus, we know, wrote a poem on a comet; while his brother Domitian was devoted to poetry in youth, and later fostered poetic rivalry by the Capitoline and Alban contests. That competition, when the right circumstances co-operate, can give health to literature is evident from the lasting greatness of Athenian drama: unfortunately, the spirit of Domitian’s reign was such as mainly to favour mediocrity or truckling in its poets. Trajan, without profound culture himself and no very active patron of letters, at least maintained friendly relations with such authors as the younger Pliny and the Greek Dion Chrysostom. His successor Hadrian, versatile and Hellenic in taste, dabbled in Latin poetry; but, to judge from the surviving fragments, never so successfully as at the last, when he composed his death-bed adieu in half a dozen lines to his soul.

Even such a cursory glance at rulers of the time indicates that the drawback for literature consisted not in their particular unfitness to play the literary patron but in a generally untoward environment. Artistic creation of the very freest and highest order was little likely to thrive in the atmosphere of the first century. The risk of danger always lay hidden in the unfathomable temperament of an emperor; and in the very essence of the new régime there wrought elements inimical to the safe production of literary work. The outspoken oratory of the past was unacceptable; history was capable of giving offence in high quarters; even drama could be frowned upon for a line misconstrued as a political allusion. At a time when Phaedrus’s beast-fables were denounced as libellous insults, it is not surprising that histories of human affairs should be adjudged to the flames. The prospects for literary men must often have appeared dark during the sway of the Julio-Claudian dynasty in situations such as were created by the espionage which Tiberius permitted in his later days, by the incalculable caprice of Caligula, the uncertainties of policy under the wives and freedmen of Claudius, and the egotistic vanity of Nero. The wonder is not that we have so small a yield from times so difficult, but that we have so much that has proved worth preserving. Fortunately, writers took risks. Under Nero, Petronius was safe, up to a point, in writing a novel of low adventure, and Seneca was safe, again up to a point, in writing essays on high moral principles, though even these might be interpreted as implied reproofs. Lucan, on the other hand, was clearly on the thinnest ice in writing an epic about Pompey’s heroism in his warfare against Julius Caesar. This was doubly dangerous; because while the poem might very well be regarded as anti-imperial, it might also stir the jealousy of a poet-emperor. Later, under the Flavians, no one could be sure when the court might grow too suspicious to tolerate philosophers any longer in Rome, as happened in A.D. 75 and 90. Deep intellectual speculation has always been liable to enmity as unsettling: and so many members of noble houses had in troublous times found consolation in Stoicism that its teaching particularly tended to be associated with opposition to the imperial system. Apart from this aspect, it may be noted in passing how Stoic thought shows itself in such poets as Persius, Lucan and Juvenal, and in such prose writers as Seneca, the elder Pliny and Tacitus. The period of terror during the later part of Domitian’s reign, fifteen years of “silence” as Tacitus viewed it, pressed most severely upon history. But it was not impossible to write securely, if an author chose remote epic themes as Statius did, or composed scores of occasional epigrams as Martial did. Indeed, there never was a time when dilettanti recited more energetically their latest productions before a select circle of friends. After Domitian’s death, history and oratory recovered a modicum at least of their old freedom. Nerva’s principate was too brief to affect literature deeply, though it brought that welcome release from tyranny which bore fullest fruit in the historical labours of Tacitus under Trajan. This fresh impulse, however, seemed almost spent by the reign of Hadrian; for Suetonius and Florus were artistically but poor successors to Tacitus. Under Hadrian a revival of interest in Hellenism and the prominence of authors writing in Greek combined with the emperor’s example to act as positive setbacks to the fashion of writing in Latin.

In its literary aspects the whole age makes a fascinating study. Its appropriate epithet of “Silver” concedes the classic superiority of the Golden Age (aurea prima sata est aetas ... subiit argentea proles); but silver, viewed as metal or as literature, retains a value of its own, and the metaphorical title, whether it calls to mind a glittering style or a literary convention already somewhat silvered with time, is both picturesque and instructive. No apology is needed for a survey of literary works created during the greatest period of the Roman Empire. Parallel with its administrative triumphs and its permanent services to civilization, we discover, in an adventure among its masterpieces, artistic production of high quality, thought commensurate with the achievement of the times, and engrossing portrayal of life. Convention has been alluded to, and we may trace much of it at work among authors; yet it is only fair to point out that the Silver Age had its unique geniuses. Nowhere else is a Tacitus or a Juvenal to be found, each uttering an individual note, and each among the greatest names in the domains of historical prose and poetic satire respectively. Phaedrus in fable, Petronius in the novel, Martial in epigram, Pliny in letter-writing were all fresh forces; nor is there any Seneca elsewhere in Latin, whether we like his style or not. Even the massive proportions of some works composed during this age are impressive though sometimes forbidding—it is so much easier, and commoner, to criticize than to read the thirty-seven books of Pliny’s Natural History or the seventeen of Silius’s epic. Before the incessant industry of the elder Pliny, less hard-working generations might, like his nephew, stand abashed. But such phenomenal diligence is not necessarily attractive; and probably what most draws readers to the Silver Age is that human note already mentioned which, in the midst of widespread artificiality elsewhere, makes many of the authors interesting to all periods. No one can take up Petronius, Juvenal, Martial or Tacitus without feeling that real life and real things are being described and without feeling absorbed by that reality.

The chief formative factors of this complex literature may be rapidly passed under review. Foremost of all the influences at work was the contemporary education in letters and rhetoric.[6] While the general training in letters opened up the treasures of Greek and Latin literature as sources of inspiration for prospective writers, the special training in the principles and practice of speaking profoundly affected style. The predominant study of poets in the rhetorical academies tended to obliterate the true demarcation between prose and poetry, leaving upon prose the indelible poetic tint which is characteristic of the Silver Age. The imitation of Virgil, traceable in Lucan, well-marked in Valerius Flaccus, and still more so in Silius and Statius, was by no means confined to these epic writers; it spread to occasional verse, epigram and satire; and it invaded prose, so that the style of Tacitus must be viewed in relation to Virgilian influence. Nor was this only a matter of poetic colour: the bones, as it were, of the language were affected in the altered grammar and syntax which have presently to be discussed and illustrated.

Manner of expression came to be deeply modified by the systematic instruction in rhetoric and by the declamatory exercises (especially the controuersia and suasoria) composed by the student practising the use of figures of speech, exclamations, apostrophes, interrogations, and innumerable other artifices, which he had been taught by a rhetor to consider effective for the purposes of argument or display. The declamation wore more than one aspect. A serious ingredient in the educational system, it was an exercise to be regularly practised by learners as a training in argument; and, whatever its futility under some instructors, sensible authorities like Quintilian had in view the solid kind of argument useful in a law-court.[7] It combined certain of the functions of a modern essay with those of a debating society. It had even a romantic side; for not a few of its themes anticipated elements in medieval tales and modern novels. But it was open to attack from the first. The Romans indeed showed their common sense in calling the exercise declamatio—something of loud-voiced overstatement was implied in that half-derogatory term. Being a pillar of the educational fabric it was, like most things in education, pretty sure to be criticized. However much pleasure it might give an admiring parent to hear his son exhibit his eloquence on speech day, this supreme test of the school career and reputed passport to success in life was subjected to incisive attacks, examples of which may be read in Petronius and Tacitus. No one could deny the readiness attainable by such practice in the rhetorical academy, any more than one could fairly overlook the metaphysical importance of some at least of the themes with which medieval Scholasticism was concerned; but in the one case, as in the other, a ceaseless immersion in verbiage caused stagnation of thought. Obscurantist professors of what was in itself an excellent art checked the progress of eloquence and robbed it eventually of life. Yet for generations it defied detraction, and in spite of defects, produced a long line of capable speakers. Unduly elaborated subtlety was at the worst wearisome: it was not destructive like the shameless perversion of the art practised by professional informers (delatores), who saw in the share of confiscated goods allowed to them by the Government a handsome reward for misapplying rhetoric towards compassing convictions on charges of treason.

Two sets of circumstances reinforced this rhetorical influence; one, the not uncommon habit of continuing exercise in declamations, either privately or under a master, long after college days; the other, an author’s custom, derived from Augustan times, of holding recitationes of his compositions in prose or verse before an invited gathering of friends, partly to elicit criticism, partly to advertise a forthcoming work, and also very largely to impress the audience. Under this last aim lay many pitfalls. Literature designed for a kind of parade tended to repeat the qualities of the academic show-piece. The ideal coveted was the production of telling effects. Hence ingenuity was expected in narrative, description and argument, with the result that a wide entrance stood open for the precious and far-fetched. A discourse, an oration, or a poem had to exhibit its author’s ability in elaborating academic commonplaces into surprisingly terse epigrams or sententiae; it had to wear the variegated adornments of rhetoric so that the style often became outrageously rococo in taste. Of the worst excesses of the Silver Age one feels as did Alceste in Le Misanthrope, when he expressed his disdain for Oronte’s sonnet:

“Ce n’est que jeu de mots, qu’ affectation pure, Et ce n’est point ainsi que parle la nature.”

Artificiality driven to such extremes meant a divorce from plain common sense; for natural feeling met its death in the exuberant riot of epigram, word-play, antithesis, apostrophes and other devices. Similarly, when presenting a hypothetical case in a controuersia or suasoria, the speaker’s temptation was to cast about for novel arguments; and the quest after something novel was apt to lead far away from reality into unnatural extravagances of perverted ingenuity. Both defence and attack in the controuersiae reported by the elder Seneca give, we shall find, many examples of those incredibly smart inventions. Rhetorical gymnastics of this sort, while they had the merit of ensuring a high degree of readiness and finish in speech and in style as a whole, yet fostered in some speakers and authors an empty glibness from which no great literature could grow. The contemporary complaints about the decadence of oratory are significant. Despite all the attention lavished upon it, eloquence deteriorated. Over-cultivation would contribute to a measure of staleness, and political conditions had taken the heart out of the old type; but, beyond all that, the rhetoric of the schools was too remote from truth to produce good style.

It was well for literature, therefore, that actual life counteracted the cramping effects of rhetorical training. Many a promising academic speaker got his first salutary awakening when he had to plead a real case in a law-court. Furthermore, contact with the multiplicity of life in Rome, and with the various peoples included in the empire, was certain to stimulate and deepen an interest in man as such. It would be a profound mistake to overlook the complex nature of the Silver literature, or to imagine that we could sum up its qualities as if they were solely those of clever rhetoric, or to forget the realists of the time—Petronius, Juvenal, Martial. Of these three, while Petronius proves that he could compose in the conventional vein when he liked, it is Juvenal who makes the most interesting blend, because he can be at once declamatory and realistic. If the worst manner of the declamations reappears in some of the rant which disfigures Seneca’s tragedies, Juvenal on the other hand is not mastered by but master of the declamatory element. This simply indicates that rhetorical artifice could be turned to different purposes by different hands: while it was used with mechanical precision by Valerius Maximus and with oppressive ingenuity by Lucan, it attained a miraculous brilliance under the pen of Tacitus. One feels with relief that Tacitus avoids Lucan’s besetting sin of overdoing the epigrammatic; for no Latin author is so absorbingly possessed by the passion for point as Lucan. Like Ovid in his quest after cleverness, Lucan casts about among several ways of saying the same thing, serves up obscure subtleties, and inserts digressions favourable to erudite description. As in his fellow epic-writers Valerius, Statius, Silius, this love of description again and again beguiles the author into subordinating the artistic unity of the whole to the elaboration of separate passages.

It has been pointed out that, alongside of this prevalence of the academic, there was the corrective element of genuine interest in man to give permanent value to much of the Silver Literature. While direct observation of life was the best antidote to unreal rhetoric, there were other factors which made for serious thought in preference to merely smart expression. One, already mentioned, was the Stoic philosophy, which offered to its followers an ordered view of the world as well as guidance in matters of conduct, especially at a crisis in life. Now grown more practical and therefore more Roman, since it had abandoned its extremest paradoxes, neo-Stoicism counted among the influences which encouraged a fellow-feeling amongst mankind. Between Stoicism and Cynicism, which the earlier Stoics had admitted to be a short cut to virtue,[8] there was much in common. In agreement broadly, although not in detail, concerning virtue, reason (logos), cosmopolitanism and freedom of will, both disciplines reckoned numerous adherents in the early empire. They now definitely overshadowed the neo-Pythagoreans and neo-Sceptics. Other schools also had lost ground. The prestige of Epicureanism was waning, while pure Platonism and pure Aristotelianism failed to attract the Roman mind. But Stoicism contained elements more commendably intelligible. Above all things, it emphasized conduct: it was an applied science of life, offering for troublesome enigmas a solution which, even if not finally satisfying, claimed a true accord with nature, and in the experience of many was found workable. With less demand upon intellectual subtlety than Platonism, practical Stoicism more adequately suited the Roman temperament as a preparation for facing the things that may happen.[9] For many thinking Romans it must have been a consolation to realize that, though they might feel repelled from activity in the political sphere controlled by a Caesar, they yet remained citizens of a cosmopolis—a world-state, wherein they were fellow-citizens with God, participators in the divine essence and free by reason of a freedom divinely conferred. “God is near you,” writes Seneca, “with you, within you. This I say, Lucilius: a holy spirit abides within us, watcher of our deeds good or evil, and guardian over us.”[10] In the spiritual realm, then, the Stoic was an intellectual aristocrat, conscious of an eternally virtuous power which enabled him to disdain misfortune and defy a Nero or a Domitian. Nor was this position the outcome of tumid rhetoric or ingenious theorizing: it was put to the proof: it was a faith in which men died and women faced exile.

Theoretically the Stoic creed did not prevent its followers from being loyal citizens of the empire; but in practice there was certain to be conflict. Their exaltation of virtue and their austere regimen in life were implicit rebukes to a luxurious emperor or court: the not uncommon actual abstention of Stoics from politics and their half-cynical attitude of independence gave further grounds for suspicion. Julius Kanus offended Caligula by uncompromising argument, and Thrasea under Nero was charged with disbelief in the deification of Poppaea and with contempt for state-religion. Besides, the historical outlook of many Stoics as laudatores temporis acti tended to give umbrage in high imperial quarters. Revolutionary sympathies might not illogically be suspected in enthusiasts for “Romans of the olden times.” It had been dangerous to call Cassius “last of the Romans”: it was scarcely less dangerous to drink toasts to the memory of Brutus and Cassius on their birthdays.[11] There lay significance in the fact that Helvidius Priscus, who had been banished by Nero, renewed under Vespasian his subversive propaganda in favour of what was termed democracy, but was really planned to be a government of Rome by the senatorial class in consonance with philosophical ideas.[12] It is scarcely surprising then that Vespasian expelled all philosophers except Musonius.[13] Only after Domitian did the imperial government become reconciled with Stoicism, which in the second century was the prevailing creed of educated Romans and found one of its classic exponents in the Greek reflections of an emperor.

The concept of a Stoic opposition under the empire must not call up the picture of a regularly organized party of disaffection. The Stoic might, like Seneca, take service with a Caesar. But among several features of the empire which provoked hostility two at any rate stand out. A Stoic could not avoid feeling repelled at once by Caesar-worship, and by the development of a largely mechanical bureaucracy in which the individual lacked scope for the competent performance of duty. Now Stoicism claimed to supply the very competence for which there was little or no safe outlet in imperial employment. The strong tendency among Roman Stoics of the first century to accentuate the individual came less from an aggressive Cynic standpoint than, as in Seneca, from a conception of the inward development of personality effected by rigorous self-examination. It did not amount to an assertion of the individual as an absolute and independent entity; nevertheless, it encouraged that doctrine of self-sufficiency and that portion of disdain for others which can be illustrated from both Lucan and Persius.

Nor should the senatorial opposition under the Caesars be mistaken for lineal representatives of the nobles of the republic. The old families died out fast: some of their scions, as Tacitus and Juvenal show, lapsed into indigence and menial occupations. The patrician houses of the senate in Julius’s day are almost extinct by Hadrian’s time: Aemilii, Claudii, Fabii, Manlii and Valerii are gone: it is almost a surprise to find Cornelii. This disappearance of the ancient blood was due not so much to tyranny as to that voluntary childlessness which imperial legislation had attempted to discourage. A large proportion, then, of the new aristocracy was not of the old republican stock, but represented a fresh strain drawn from the industrial democracy of Caesar’s age: it was destined in turn to collapse through its own prosperity.

Both on contemporary and on subsequent thought neo-Stoicism exercised an almost incalculable influence. The insistence on a moral order in nature to which man must conform made for salutary discipline, and the doctrine of the immanence of the divine reason ennobled the conception of duty. The recognition of moral progress, in contrast to the uncompromising tenet of sudden perfection held by the early Stoics, was a more practical, a more encouraging, a more human view which possessed a tonic value beyond the reach of outworn paradoxes. Again, while the Stoic teaching on the brotherhood of man fostered kindliness, that on the equality of man fostered fairness of treatment.[14] These and other doctrines of value colour the deep Stoic influence on Roman law. In the field of religion, Stoicism proved ultimately to be a solvent of polytheism; for though Stoics might profess belief in the divinities of traditional paganism, they yet turned to allegory as an explanation of the myths, and thus tended to undermine an unquestioning acceptance of the gods. Stoicism, therefore, with its pantheistic trend contributed to the annihilation of traditional religion among the intellectuals without fully establishing monotheism to replace the polytheistic system.

Another of the more serious influences of the age, largely, though, as we shall find, not entirely independent of rhetorical artifice, was the practical interest in learning of an encyclopaedic sort, exemplified in Celsus, the elder Pliny and the lost works of Suetonius. The discontent repeatedly expressed over men’s waste of time is another reminder that the more serious thinkers were unlikely to reap permanent satisfaction either from social amenities or from vapid rhetoric. We have something like a gospel of work if we combine Phaedrus’s scoffing remarks on the fussy ardaliones, Seneca’s distaste for spending energy on trifles, the elder Pliny’s nervous husbandry of hours for study, his nephew’s grumblings about encroachments upon leisure, and even Martial’s regrets over procrastination and lost opportunities—soles ... nobis pereunt et imputantur, as he so humanly says.

Yet another influence which must not go unnoticed is that of the provinces, and especially the influence exercised by the old province of Spain. With some claim to have developed a partially independent culture of its own, it spoke a Latin which naturally retained certain idioms, words and sounds used by previous generations of soldiers and colonists. Latin which had grown old-fashioned at Rome might still in these days be heard in Spain. It is not altogether fanciful to detect a Spanish note in parts of the Silver Literature; for among Romano-Spaniards of the time were the Senecas and Lucan, Columella, Quintilian, Martial, besides several rhetors of standing. Trajan was a native of the Spanish Italica, where Hadrian’s ancestors had lived since the days of the Scipios. It is significant of the contribution being made by the provinces to Rome that the Spanish influence is observable in the first century, to be followed by the development of an African Latinity in the second, and the flourishing of Romano-Gallic rhetoric in the third. The contemporary influence of Greece also acted externally upon Rome in so far as it was exerted by Greeks who taught or wrote in the city. History has recorded how responsive to personal contact with Greece itself were emperors like Nero and Hadrian; but the deeper Hellenic influence lay imbedded in the literature of the past, constantly lectured upon and assimilated generation after generation in Rome.

The wonderful variety of the Silver literature depends on the intermingling of such currents of influence, old and new. Tradition and inheritance, both Greek and Roman, operate side by side with fresh problems and interests. It was no age of stagnation. Distinctive, though conventional, voices are heard in the epics of Lucan and of his three successors, Valerius, Statius and Silius, whether, as in the case of the first and the last of these, they chose a historical theme, or, as in the case of the other two, they had recourse to mythology. Virgilianism acted there, as it also did in the eclogues by which Calpurnius Siculus transmitted pastoral poetry to Nemesianus. The drama of the day, never very great, has left, besides the Octauia, which is the single extant historical play in Latin, only Seneca’s mythological tragedies based on the Greek dramatists. Far more individual power is shown in satire. Persius, a convinced young Stoic student of Horace, fulminates in crabbedly compressed sermonettes against moral backsliding; and later, Juvenal, proclaiming himself to belong to the literary lineage of Lucilius and Horace, displays his unsurpassable strength of invective. Satire may be said to have taken a new turn early in the first century when Phaedrus used the iambics of his beast-fables to suggest with mischievous irony the foibles of mankind, and once more a new turn when, in the last quarter of the century, Martial perfected the epigram with the stinging close after the fashion which has ever since made him famous. In the revival of the Menippean satire, formerly associated with the name of Varro, we again encounter the medley of verse and prose. This type is represented in Seneca’s skit on the deification of Claudius and in Petronius’s picaresque novel.

As regards prose style, the names of Seneca and Petronius mark two different tendencies traceable throughout the period—Seneca, usually artificial, though less so in his satire; and Petronius, as becomes a portrayer of manners, more influenced by the spoken Latin of his day. It might have been expected that encyclopaedic, scientific and technical learning should be uniformly conveyed in the simple style; but it is not always so. Straightforward expression, as a rule, characterized Celsus in the medical part of his encyclopaedia (and presumably also in the lost parts), besides Columella in his agricultural treatise, and Frontinus writing about aqueducts; whereas one detects, on the other hand, the lure of the purple patch when the elder Pliny pauses for intervals of reflection in his gigantic Natural History. So too Pomponius Mela’s geographical manual is needlessly decorated with flashes of intended eloquence; while Valerius Maximus’s handbook of stories for rhetoricians would have been more entertaining, had he told the stories in plainer style, leaving embellishment to the rhetoricians for whom he collected them. In history restraint of style is far to seek. Velleius Paterculus is convicted by his excessive superlatives alone, though one forgives him much for his surprisingly original interest in certain aspects of literary history. Curtius Rufus, handling the grand subject of Alexander’s campaigns, shows his ability in semi-romantic description rather than in historical inquiry. During the Neronian era, we meet the epigrammatic manner in Seneca’s philosophy. The brilliant neatness of his sentences lent them a quotability which essayists in later literatures have loved. But this is a manner whose qualities cloy; and a revulsion from his style soon took place, when in the Flavian era Quintilian’s lectures warned students against the seductions of Senecan prose and beckoned them back to Cicero’s rounded periods as the true models for composition. A modified Ciceronianism is, therefore, visible in Quintilian, and a still more modified Ciceronianism in his pupil, the younger Pliny. It also marks Tacitus’s early dialogue on oratory; but his characteristic style, that of his historical writing, is notoriously the triumph of an original genius in verbal parsimony. The closing phase of the Silver Age still exhibits the two tendencies side by side in Suetonius’s business-like sentences and in Florus’s feeble echoes of rhetorical utterance.

The language which was the medium for this literature may be briefly surveyed. Some aspects of Silver Latinity have been incidentally touched upon in connexion with the preponderating amount of poetry read at school, which bore fruit not merely in poetic phraseology and Virgilian imitations, but in constructions (like the familiar dative of the agent with a passive verb) now transferred from poetry to prose. No doubt some of the typical usages and idioms which we shall find illustrated in Silver authors are due to the inevitable change which any living language must undergo. Old words gain a new meaning:[15] new words are introduced. The Latin of Cicero could not have been, either in vocabulary or in sentence-structure or in grammar, the Latin of five generations later:[16] hence we are prepared to observe in Tacitus and other writers of the Silver Age alterations in the employment of the subjunctive mood, fresh meanings of prepositions (like circa and citra), new usages of and new positions for connective particles.[17]

In tracing differences between Silver and earlier Latin, it is difficult to assess the relative importance of the universal tendency in language towards change and of such special influences as the systematic drill in rhetoric and poetry. Some apparent changes such as are noticeable in the position of igitur, in a seemingly strange word, or strange meaning, or in the use of a mood, are in reality inheritances from one or two prose writers of the Golden Age, especially Sallust and Livy: what had once been an exception has become, if not the rule, at least much commoner. Apart, however, from the inevitable laws of development, the Latin language of the first century and a half of the Christian era was most deeply affected by three fixed attitudes of mind—the rhetorical passion for terseness, the rhetorical passion for novel modes of expression, and the rhetorical concentration of study upon poetic authors. Of these, compression was especially admired in the clause or phrase with epigrammatic point, but its pursuit was accountable not only for the shorter sentence in vogue, but for all sorts of ellipses[18] in grammar and for a copious employment of asyndeton. The avoidance of the stereotyped made for the introduction of new words and meanings, greater freedom in the handling of moods, and a departure from the more regularly balanced clauses and phrases of Ciceronian Latin. Many of the changes in vocabulary are due to the individual genius of prose writers who invented words, or, by adopting them from the common speech, gave them a literary cachet. Under this head, Tacitus is an excellent example both as innovator and as lover of the rare word. Probably few who use the term “accumulator,” in speaking of modern apparatus, know that it was invented by Tacitus to describe one who heaps up wealth. The liking for the unusual which pervades his sentence-structure, his expression and his syntax descends into his selection of words. Thus, when there is a choice between noun-forms ending in -men and -mentum, he characteristically decides for the more uncommon form: he actually invents imitamentum, though imitamen had the poetic sanction of Ovid.

The wholesale invasion of prose by the poetic element already emphasized calls only for a few illustrations in a preliminary survey. It is poetic example that leads Seneca to write senium for senectus, Venus for amor, iuuenta for iuuentus, and leads Tacitus to use Lucretian words like insatiabiliter, Virgilian words like breuia (“shoals”), and adjectives like indefessus and intemeratus which both Virgil and Ovid had used before him. It is the poetic turn of expression also that fostered the increasing boldness of personification in prose, the use of abstract nouns in a concrete or personal sense,[19] and the substantival use of a neuter adjective.[20] Poetry affected the grammar of cases and tenses as well. Thus the Latin perfect used in a general sense, like the gnomic “aorist of experience” in Greek, was in Augustan Latin still a poetic usage of which Virgil was fond in the Georgics; but by Seneca’s time it had passed into imperial prose.[21] These and other instances, too many for citation here, make it evident that the language no less than the literature of the Silver Age has the interest of possessing distinctive features of its own.

A few reflections may fitly form a summary and conclusion to this introduction. When considering the Silver Age, in style so easily contrasted with its golden predecessor, one must beware of so isolating its artificialities as to produce an impression that it teems with faults. The truth rather is that the Silver Age does by a natural process of literary evolution continue tendencies already present in Augustan times. There is in Horace an artificiality which in some measure anticipates Persius and Statius; there are in Ovid ingenuities prophetic of Seneca and Lucan; and in Sallust and Livy aspects of prose which foreshadow Tacitus. There was no violent break; but in time, if only by reason of a gradual and apparently cyclic exhaustion of genius, the changes become too obvious to miss. It is perfectly reasonable, it is indeed incumbent, to state the differences; but they must be so stated as to include not merely signs of stylistic variation but fresh notes of wider outlook in certain later writers who come close to the general human heart, perhaps because less exclusively aristocratic than the elder Romans. A catholic criticism must do justice to their strength as well as to their weakness.

Such a caveat is needful, because the factors of national deterioration, even though they worked slowly, were unquestionably manifold. They were not merely political and economic: they were physiological and, what is of deep significance for literature, they were psychological. Though it is easy to to take an exaggerated view of vice under the empire, there is nevertheless significance in the fact that the most powerful voices in the whole period are the voices of protest raised by Juvenal and Tacitus: satire and irony inevitably flourished in such an environment. There is a strong temptation to see little but proof of decadence in the conventional imitators among the poets of the age, its literary conceits, and unreal rhetoric, and even in its occasional recourse to the opposite tendency towards innovation, which French criticism has taught us to associate, as much as imitation, with decadent literature. Broadly the undeniable truth is that the Silver poets, whatever their literary skill, have fallen off in sheer artistic achievement. To turn from Lucretius and Virgil to Valerius Flaccus and Statius is to recognize an inferior quality of soul. The Silver poets have less whereon to feed man’s higher nature. Virgil’s profundity of feeling and reflection is something more enduring than refinements based on rhetorical commonplaces. Enough has, however, been said to lay stress upon the variety of the Silver Age, and upon the unfairness of estimating it solely as an age of decadence. One can no more affix a single label on a composite era than one can indict a nation. If the feeble echo or the falsetto note is often heard, it is not the only sound. The literature of the time must be judged positively by its own appeal to the world. Under this aspect, the Silver Age has its unique luminaries, the individuality of whose genius ensures them permanent fame. The mark of the true classic is the power of giving pleasure to the young and old of many generations through some fascinating and constantly renewed testimony to the indestructible continuity of human nature. Its interest is therefore universal, and its popularity unrestricted to an epoch. Readers of different countries at different epochs find in such work a source of eternal delight: it is not alien to them, nor they to it. In so far as authors of the Silver Age can address themselves successfully to mankind, and some of them beyond challenge retain this power, their place is secure among the immortals.

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II. ROMAN EDUCATION UNDER THE EMPIRE

Connexion of Roman Education with Literature—Evolution through three periods—Emergence of three grades in education—Some problems of elementary education—Suitable nurses and reading-books—“Secondary” training under grammatici—Province of “grammar”—Exercises prescribed—Authors taught by grammatici—The higher training in rhetoric—Exercises preliminary to declamation—The suasoria—The controuersia—Ingenuity and unreality combined—The broad basis of sound oratory—Subjects included in Roman schemes of education—Spread of the traditional system in imperial times—Decay of Greek in the West—Growth of governmental interest in education—Attitude of emperors towards provincial academies and the later fortunes of the old education.

The main clue to the literary qualities of Silver Latin is to be found in education, and particularly in rhetorical education. No social or political factor exercised so determining an influence upon the literature of imperial Rome. It cannot be too clearly realized how potent must have been the effect of a training which was undergone by the writers, speakers and civil servants of each generation, and which had for its cardinal aims, first, to secure a thoroughly appreciative acquaintance with the best poetry in the literatures of Greece and Rome, and, next, to equip students with the power of effective and persuasive speech. A connected account of the education in vogue is, therefore, a fitting prelude to the evidence for the rhetorical system which may be drawn from such sources as the Controuersiae et Suasoriae collected by the elder Seneca, Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria, Tacitus’s Dialogus de Oratoribus and the notes by Suetonius De Grammaticis and De Rhetoribus.

* * * * *

Roman education, viewed in its continuity, underwent certain well-defined processes of evolution.[22] Its history from first to last, from simple to complex, possesses the interest of showing how the primitive domestic discipline made way for a cosmopolitan culture imparted in great measure by skilful foreigners, and how the ancient training of what we should call a primary type came to be amplified by a “secondary” curriculum, and still further by advanced courses of a “University” character. Interesting, however, as is the whole of this development, it is with definite phases and periods that we are here concerned. One may, in fact, conveniently think of Roman education as falling broadly into three ages, ending, each in its turn, with the Punic Wars, the reign of Hadrian (circ. A.D. 120), and the close of the Western Empire. Here we are mainly concentrating attention on the earlier generations of the Christian era; and what we find, as regards education, is that, before the opening of our period, scholastic training at Rome had gone through its most progressive stage, and, in range of subjects and interest, had left far behind the ancient parental instruction. That old type of instruction is best exemplified by the rigid, unromantic and severely practical method according to which the elder Cato brought up his son,[23] and which, despite limitations, was well adapted to the mind, body and estate of the older Romans. It was a grounding in the elements of reading, writing and arithmetic, coupled with sound physical and moral instruction, and had been entrusted by custom largely to those agents of education in the home whom Seneca happily calls the “domestic magistrates.”[24] In those early times which the younger Pliny[25] recalls with admiring regret, it was possible that every parent should be an instructor and that the intimate companionship between father and son should be relied upon to guarantee not only proficiency in the barest essentials of intellectual education, but also ability to serve in the army, knowledge of the laws and of religious rites, propriety of conduct and experience helpful in advising or controlling men.

As the ages passed, however, increased complexity of social conditions, together with the influx of Greeks whether bond or free, tended inevitably to relegate the work of equipping youthful minds to cultured slaves under parental supervision, and, at a later stage, very often to grammarians, rhetoricians and philosophers who settled in Rome eager to convey knowledge. Besides, the Romans, as conquest brought them nearer to world-dominion, were shrewd enough to recognize that a training which had suited the burgher of a city-state stood in need of generous extension, if it were to mould the citizens of a governing power charged with imperial responsibilities. The momentous agent of expansion in Roman education was the influence of Greece.[26] The expansion itself may be fairly gauged from the acquaintance with the principles of Greek rhetoric common among the upper classes at Rome by the middle of the second century B.C., and from the establishment of three several grades of education controlled respectively by the litterator, the grammaticus and the rhetor. These correspond roughly to the elementary, secondary and University standards of modern days.[27] While, however, literary and rhetorical education had reached a high pitch of proficiency long before our period opens and ceased to alter much in method, there are, on the other hand, before our period closes, signs of a changed attitude towards education on the part of the imperial authorities—signs, in fact, indicating some amount of endowment and control by municipalities and by the Emperor.

Allusion has been made to the emergence of three grades of education. Of these, the “secondary” and “University” grades possessed under the Empire the deepest significance for their effects upon literature because of the attention bestowed upon the grammatical and aesthetic study of authors, upon rhetoric and upon philosophy. But while the bearing on literature is necessarily closer at these second and third stages in the educational fabric, still one cannot ignore the “primary” training, which contained features of fundamental importance for thought and literary production. It is not germane here to consider, as Quintilian does in the first book of his treatise, the methods of conveying to children the rudiments of reading, writing and arithmetic,[28] or to comment on the awkwardness of the Roman numerals.[29] Perhaps, in passing, it may be worth remark that the proportion of illiterates in ancient Rome was less than many might be disposed to guess; for elementary education must have been fairly extensive by the time of Polybius to admit of the circulation of military orders in writing; and the scribblings on walls in Pompeii argue a widespread ability to read and write in the first century A.D. But two problems in the most elementary education are not to be passed over, for they appeared to ancient thinkers to be vital in their influence upon character and taste. These were the choice of a nurse, and, at a subsequent stage, the choice of books from which reading should be taught. To Quintilian both were matters of serious consideration. Although primitive custom preferred, and learned authors[30] argued, that mothers should suckle their own infants, and although the devoted care of a mother remained up to imperial times an appreciable and appreciated factor in shaping youthful lives,[31] still there is evidence for the employment, at an early period in Rome, of both foster-mothers and dry nurses. At a later period the large number of household nurses may be inferred from inscriptions.[32] Their province, it was recognized, was not confined to sound alimentation; they helped to form character for better or worse, and to eliminate bad habits, mischievous notions and incorrect pronunciations. Hence the emphasis laid upon the selection of suitable nurses in Quintilian and in the treatise De Educatione ascribed to Plutarch.

The other matter in the elementary education which bears on literary equipment is the choice of reading-books. The scarcity of literary texts in Latin, which stimulated Livius Andronicus in the third century B.C. to translate the Odyssey, had long since ceased to trouble teachers; the difficulty came to lie rather in the embarrassing wealth of available material. Quintilian is emphatic in his counsel that for the earliest lessons good authors should be selected; and his preference is for Greek.[33] He believed in the stimulus obtainable from great literature, even where the pupils are too young to appreciate its full meaning and beauty. In any case there were simple fables and extracts from standard authors in abundance to serve as convenient lesson-books.

The second and third stages of education were entrusted to a grammaticus and a rhetor respectively; here the methods and subjects produced manifest effects upon literary men in Rome. Age-limits for the different grades of study varied considerably owing to individual capabilities and the overlapping of which Quintilian complained; but commonly a pupil passed from elementary instruction to the “grammar school” at about twelve or thirteen, and then to the school of rhetoric at about sixteen. The function of “grammar” was to train pupils in the intelligent and effective reading of standard authors both Greek and Latin; and the teachers themselves were of diverse origin and rank. Most of the series of grammatici mentioned by Suetonius were Greeks, and many were freedmen;[34] but there were native Romans quick enough to adopt the principles of criticism illustrated by Crates in his lectures upon Greek literature about 165 B.C., and to transfer them to their own poets, with the result that Naevius, Ennius and Lucilius speedily became school authors.[35] Though instances occurred of Roman knights taking up such work, still, as a rule, a profession of meagre returns and meagre repute attracted only a motley concourse of strange fellows—the retired apparitor, the unsuccessful pantomime-actor or the ex-boxer.[36] But that the demand for instruction was considerable is plain from the mention by Suetonius of the time when there were twenty flourishing grammar schools in the capital.[37] Many Greek grammatici in Rome towards the end of the Republic added to their duties the teaching of Latin; thus, the freedman Ateius Philologus, a native of Athens, was called by Asinius Pollio nobilis grammaticus Latinus,[38] and Gnipho who taught Cicero was non minus Graece quam Latine doctus.[39] Specialism, however, in the one or the other literature was usual in the schools of the Empire, and the testimony of inscriptions proves the existence of separate masters for Greek and for Latin.[40]

The implications and functions of ‘Grammar’ were wider than with us. Its two main concerns, as we shall find in Quintilian, were the correct employment of language (recte loquendi scientia) and the appreciative criticism of poetry (poetarum enarratio).[41] The former comprised study of the parts of speech, accidence, metres, and faulty usages in word, idiom, pronunciation or spelling. The latter involved much more than knowledge of literature; for, since its aim was the elucidation of a poet’s complete value and meaning, it demanded acquaintance with subsidiary subjects like music, geometry, astronomy, physics and philosophy.[42] One feature in the training which had lasting effects upon literature and which coloured diction under the Empire, is the signal preference for lecturing on poets rather than on prose-writers: this was an old tendency, for Cicero had raised his voice against the comparative neglect of history.[43] It is also of interest to recollect the attraction which even the drier and more detailed aspects of Grammar possessed for many great Romans, for scholars like Varro, leaders of men like Caesar, and emperors like Claudius. Keil’s Corpus Grammaticorum Latinorum may be said to establish the study as one of the monuments of the Roman genius; and such representative commentators upon Virgil as Macrobius and Servius are good examples of the mode in which capable grammarians were expected to annotate a classic.

The main exercises prove the attention given to composition. They included the re-telling of Aesop’s fables by word of mouth or in writing, paraphrases, training in moral maxims (sententiae), extracts of ethical import (chriae), sketches of character (ethologiae), brief stories (narratiunculae) of a poetic order where the momentous thing was information rather than style.[44] The treatment of literature—on which ancient “grammar” laid very great stress—embraced expressive reading (lectio) free from sing-song and provincialisms;[45] the elaborate explanation (enarratio) of subject-matter; textual criticism (emendatio); and literary criticism (iudicium).

The authors taught by the professor of grammar were largely the same as those taught subsequently by the professor of rhetoric. The tenth book of Quintilian, therefore, gives a representative list, subject to the qualification that rhetoric required more prose than grammar did. The difference lay not so much in the authors as in the mode of treatment: the grammaticus taught literature, the rhetor taught oratorical effect. In Greek it was traditional to start with Homer, as in Latin, under the Empire, with Virgil. Other usual Greek authors were Hesiod, who was valued for his practical maxims; the lyric poets, in excerpts “bowdlerised” to minimize the erotic element; the masters of Attic tragedy; and the comic writers, particularly Menander, in selections. Among Latin authors, Livius Andronicus’s translation of the Odyssey into saturnians still held its ground when Horace went to school; and generations of schoolboys were reared on the older epic poets Naevius and Ennius, and on the dramatists Plautus, Caecilius, Terence, Pacuvius, Accius, Afranius. Virgil was introduced into the course by Caecilius Epirota, the freedman of Cicero’s friend Atticus, and soon took a premier position. Horace, too, speedily realized his own alarmed anticipation of becoming a text-book; and a passion for novelty, combined with a revulsion from the archaic, helped to bring about lectures on the works of Lucan, Statius and Nero himself, while the authors were still alive. Reaction was a recurrent feature in Roman literary taste as in education. It was a protest against the predominance of the moderns in the second century A.D. that actuated the revived enthusiasm for ante-Augustan poetry. The poets, then, on the whole, played rather too oppressive a part at this stage of education; and it was inevitable that the rhetorician should adjust the balance, for his pupils were to be concerned mainly with prose as their medium. Cicero had become a model in his own day, and Quintilian regards him as a fine exemplar from the outset (iucundus incipientibus quoque et apertus). Of the historians, Quintilian prefers Livy to Sallust because the latter, he considers, demands a more advanced intelligence. Here it is but right to say he has in view especially the needs of students of declamation.

If we class philosophy, especially when pursued by Romans abroad, as a kind of “post-graduate” study, we may regard the formal education in Rome as culminating in rhetoric. The training under the rhetor was designed to equip pupils for the vocations of public life—for deliberative and forensic oratory; and, despite obvious faults, it undoubtedly furnished in the best days of the Empire a constant supply of men of affairs, magistrates and lawyers, wielding speech with a standard of efficiency beyond the prevalent attainments of civil servants in modern times. The Roman, inheriting a native turn for oratory, had been easily drawn to the study of Greek rhetoric, which was based upon prolonged theorizing and practice in Sicily, Athens and Asia Minor. So insistent appeared to be the demands of rhetoric that teachers were constantly tempted to initiate their pupils into it too soon,[46] when they ought to have been continuing grammar; and this overlapping was the natural occurrence in the old days before any line of professional demarcation had been drawn between the provinces of grammar and rhetoric.[47] But even much later, it often remained a point of honour with grammarians to give boys at the grammar school practice in rhetoric so that they might do themselves and their masters credit when they joined the rhetorical academy.[48] The training in rhetoric at Rome had been in touch with Greek methods from the second century B.C.; but education was profoundly affected by the introduction early in the first century B.C.[49] of the composition declaimed on a purely imaginary theme; and in time the Latin term declamatio, which had signified the forcible delivery of a speech, came to be applied to the academical exercise in rhetoric on an invented subject. Thenceforward declamation was the supreme test and crowning exercise in rhetoric, success in which was the ambition of pupils and the pride of parents.[50] Practice in it spread from Italy to the schools of the west, in Gaul and Spain.

Before students were matured for declamation, they had to pass through a prescribed series of preliminary exercises.[51] These included narratives less poetic in cast than those of the “grammar school,” investigation of debateable questions in history, panegyric and invective, examination of good and bad laws, comparison of character, moral studies or “common places,” (communes loci) serviceable for attacking vices, questions of a general type for debate (theses, e.g. “Is town life preferable to country life?” “Is forensic or military renown the greater?”), and questions involving reasons for particular facts (coniecturales causae, which Quintilian recollected from his student days as entertaining exercises, and which he illustrates by the example, “Why is Cupid winged and furnished with arrows and torch?”)[52] Lectures on great masters in oratory and history were also requisite; and here models like Cicero and Livy might be studied with the maximum of profit. Quintilian maintained that the student should memorize passages from the masterpieces of standard authors instead of wasting energy on “cold cabbage heated up”—the crambe repetita of the pupil’s own show-pieces.[53]

The two most advanced exercises were the suasoria and the harder controuersia—the former intended to prepare for deliberative oratory, the latter for pleading in the law-courts.[54] Ample illustrations of their nature are furnished by the seven suasoriae and five books of controuersiae which have come down, along with excerpts from five lost books, out of the collection of the elder Seneca. Quintilian cites examples of stock themes, and there exist also the declamations of the pseudo-Quintilian and excerpts from Calpurnius Flaccus. The suasoria was an imagined consideration of the action suitable at a historical crisis: sometimes it was a supposed soliloquy, e.g. “Alexander deliberates whether he shall cross the ocean,” “Agamemnon deliberates if he should sacrifice Iphigeneia,” “Cicero deliberates whether he should burn his works to secure his safety from Antony”;[55] sometimes it was a supposed joint deliberation, e.g. “The three hundred Spartans at Thermopylae consider whether they ought to retreat,” “The Conscript Fathers discuss the propriety of surrendering the Fabii to the Gauls”;[56] at other times it was a supposed address conveying counsel of the kind which Juvenal remembered offering to the dictator Sulla by way of exercise in the academy where he suffered the cane.[57] Similarly, many a junior aspirant after eloquence composed an advisory speech to Hannibal urging him to advance straight upon Rome after Cannae.[58] Seneca[59] records some interesting facts concerning Ovid’s attitude to this exercise. After commenting on the influence of the schools upon Ovid’s poetry and on the young poet’s reputation as a declaimer, he tells us that Ovid rarely declaimed controuersiae, and in any case only those of a psychological nature (non nisi ethicas): his preference was for the suasoria, and he found arguing irksome.[60] These illuminating remarks explain both the aspect of Ovid’s genius exhibited in the Heroides, and his failure to carry out his father’s wish that he should become a lawyer. For entire success, it should be noted, this hortatory declamation required historical knowledge, psychological insight, some dramatic power, and distinct gifts of imagination and style.

In the controuersia one has passed from monologue to a debate which professed to represent the pleadings in an imaginary suit or criminal trial, where, as Addison’s Sir Roger would have it, “much might be said on both sides.” The students virtually acted an invented case in a sham court. They argued for or against—sometimes, to gain additional readiness and thoroughness, they argued first on one side, then on the other. Though there was a semblance of observing legal forms, yet the circumstances, the laws assumed to be applicable, and the standing characters were largely drawn from a realm of imagination which undeniably evoked marvellous ingenuity in argument, but merited the strictures in Petronius and Quintilian because of its divorce from actual life. Magicians, pirate chiefs, and their susceptible daughters, preternaturally hard-hearted fathers, and unconscionably cruel tyrants appear and reappear. Suetonius[61] cites two specimens of the less extravagant controuersiae. The first concerns the disputed ownership of a treasure which happens to be dragged up in a fishing-net after certain youths have, by way of speculation, purchased in advance that particular cast from the fishermen—are the purchasers entitled to the fish plus the gold, or to the fish only? The other concerns the disputed freedom of a slave from the East so valuable that the dealer disguised him and falsely declared him as a free man at Brindisi to escape the duty exigible by the Customs officers—has the slave been legally emancipated in virtue of his owner’s declaration before witnesses?[62] In Seneca the situations are often more unreal. Take his very first case:—One of two brothers who were at variance had a son; when his uncle fell into poverty, the kind-hearted nephew helped him, but was disinherited by his father for so doing: he was, however, adopted by his uncle, who luckily had a great estate left to him: meanwhile the young man’s father came to want, and though forbidden by his uncle, the lad now insisted on helping his father: in consequence, he is disinherited by his uncle—the question is, can he successfully impugn his uncle’s decision?[63]

Such exercises, incredible though the situations might be, imparted, through the mental gymnastics involved, a nimbleness of mind, a quickness in propounding or refuting arguments, a versatility in treatment, and a finish of speech which again and again fell little short of the amazing. The adept could equip himself with skilful mastery from the whole armoury of rhetoric. Yet, whatever merits may be claimed for rhetoric here or in the chapter on the elder Seneca, the training had obvious drawbacks. For its range was narrow and unreal: it handled things and persons such as never were on land or sea: and these same unreal cases were handled an infinite number of times, so that the depressing round of declamation, as pupil after pupil rose from the bench, was calculated, Juvenal says, to bore luckless professors to death![64] Any ambitious pupil had to take refuge in innovations upon the threadbare theme; and his most promising chance lay in suggesting some colour, some ingenious line of defence undreamt of by any predecessor. Hence the far-fetched absurdities with which the pleadings teem. At any cost, old material had to receive a new dress, bedizened with all the frippery of rhetoric; and this compulsion produced an inordinate concentration upon tricks of expression to the detriment of matter and sense. A frequent result was an inartistic phantasmagoria of artificialities, conceits, antitheses and quibbles. Nor was the effect upon morals always better than upon aesthetics, for such a system was at times apt to engender a heedlessness of truth or falsity in fact, and callousness to the justice or injustice of a plea, provided only it could be made telling. Another dangerous fruit was pretentious glibness of speech of the kind which the staid author of the De Educatione Liberorum repeatedly denounced as obnoxious;[65] and—most far-reaching of all the consequences—the rhetorical declamations were largely accountable for the unreal pose and mannerisms of the Latin literature of the Silver Age.

For such artificiality the best cure lay in extended knowledge. No sound critic ever based oratory on mere tricks of speech. Practised judges like Quintilian and Tacitus complained that true eloquence had deteriorated owing to the extravagance and ignorance of declaimers. Agreeing with Cicero, Quintilian views ideal oratory as founded upon a strong moral and intellectual basis; for to Quintilian, as to Cato generations earlier, the effective orator was the good man skilled in speaking (uir bonus dicendi peritus).[66] Mere plausibility or claptrap is ruled out by his insistence upon the orator’s knowledge of the subject on which he is to speak. Put this way (mihi satis est eius esse oratorem rei de qua dicet non inscium), Quintilian’s requirements seem more moderate than Cicero’s sweeping demand for wide knowledge of all great subjects (omnium rerum magnarum atque artium scientiam),[67] yet Quintilian too believes in the study of subjects outside the professional training in rhetoric, especially ethics, physics and dialectic, law, and history.[68]

At a much earlier period, indeed, Romans of the better class had been expected to cover a wide field of knowledge. Cato, for instance, included in his scheme oratory, agriculture, law, war and medicine. A century later, Varro’s nine departments of education were grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, music, medicine and architecture. In the first three of these one recognizes the “trivium” and in the next four the “quadrivium” of the medieval education, while Cato’s subjects of agriculture, law and war have come to be regarded as professional. Medicine would tend to be more and more superficially studied, by reason of the number of Greek practitioners who came to Rome. The inclusion of architecture in the list is a testimony to the interest taken in the principles of a fine art which constituted an integral portion of Roman civilization, and reminds one of the broad education which Vitruvius believes should go to the training of an architect. But one may assume that architecture was in practice a special profession, and that an encyclopaedic education became less and less attainable, as knowledge deepened, although, under the Empire, writers like Celsus and Pliny still made an encyclopaedic appeal, at least to mature readers. It was, indeed, largely in philosophy that the abler youths followed “post-graduate” courses, either at Rome itself, where Epicurean, Academic and Stoic thought had long been represented, or abroad, especially at Athens, as the time-honoured fountain-head of the schools. Under the later Republic, the custom of seeking breadth in education is well exemplified by the studies which famous authors had pursued. Thus Virgil, besides his literary reading, worked at rhetoric, philosophy, mathematics, medicine and law; and study at a “foreign University,” which became common under the Empire, is illustrated in the careers of Caesar, Cicero and his son, Horace and Ovid.

Our present concern, however, is not with philosophy under the Empire but with grammar and rhetoric; and this for two reasons—firstly, grammar and rhetoric affected literary style more than philosophy ever did, deep though the influence of Stoicism was in imperial days; secondly, it was the time-honoured curriculum in grammar and rhetoric which was most widely diffused in the Roman world, and which was, especially at many Western seats of learning, taught to the absolute exclusion of philosophy. In the Greek portions of the Empire, the so-called “Second Sophistic” was represented in the second century A.D. by itinerant rhetoricians presenting their displays of eloquence before audiences whose powers of criticism proved the continuance and diffusion of the ancient education.[69] In the Western portions, it is interesting to note that the ancient system of grammar and rhetoric came to be preserved particularly at Carthage in Africa and in the academies of Gaul. Marseilles, Autun, Lyons, Bordeaux, and, later, Toulouse, Narbonne and Trèves were typical centres of instruction. The educational movement was of old standing in Gaul, where Marseilles had long exercised a magnetic attraction. Memories of the sound education which he had enjoyed at Marseilles doubtless weighed with Agricola when, about A.D. 80, he established schools in Britain for the sons of chieftains;[70] and there was in Britain doubtless a serious enthusiasm for Roman culture, although Juvenal makes game of it by his jesting allusions to the influence of Gallic eloquence on British advocates and to the talk in the “Farthest North” about establishing a chair of rhetoric.[71] Later in the second century, the regular three grades with some amplifications are illustrated in the studies of Marcus Aurelius; his early lessons from the litterator were varied by others from an actor and a tutor who taught both music and mathematics; next, he worked under professors of grammar, one of Greek and three of Latin; and at the later stage he had three Greek masters of rhetoric, among whom was Herodes Atticus, and one Latin master, who was Fronto. He studied philosophy under many teachers, and devoted much attention to law. Public declamation also had an attraction for him.[72] The firm hold obtained by such courses as we have described is plainly seen for many generations beyond our period. Alexander Severus early in the third century passed through just such a course as Marcus Aurelius had done.[73] The instruction which many of the Christian Fathers underwent in youth was on the old pagan lines, and the Confessiones of St. Augustine are typical from this standpoint, because they are the vivid reminiscences of one who had been a student of rhetoric at Carthage and a professor at Milan. The conditions of education in Gaul in the fourth and fifth centuries are best known from the writings of Ausonius and Sidonius Apollinaris.[74] Christians and non-Christians then found a bond of union in the literary studies familiar during their “college days”; so that some measure of vitality was left to the old training despite the degeneration consequent upon its bondage to unreal and conventional dexterities.

One life-giving element of our period, however, gradually vanished out of the Western schools. That was Greek. Whereas Seneca includes Greek arguments in his Controuersiae, and whereas, in the days of Apuleius and Tertullian, scholars knew Greek as well as Latin, yet by the fourth century both in Africa and in Gaul it was little taught. St. Augustine, for instance, had no liking for or proficiency in Greek, and read Plato mainly in Latin translations.[75] This severance of the two literatures was prophetic of the approaching division of the Empire and of the usual Latin curriculum in the Middle Ages.

A highly interesting feature in education during imperial times is the closer rapprochement of the government therewith. This was a growing, though a slowly growing, tendency. The state had shown solicitude over morality by enacting sumptuary laws and encouraging marriage, but had been reluctant to patronize education directly. The Caesars had, however, foreshadowed a new policy. Julius paid respect to erudition by granting citizenship to peregrini who settled in Rome as medical men or teachers of the liberal arts.[76] Augustus exempted teachers from an edict banishing foreigners, and he transferred Verrius Flaccus with his school to the Palatium at a handsome salary, so that he might instruct the imperial grandchildren.[77] Tiberius and Claudius were personally interested in grammatical studies; but the next practical step towards imperial patronage consisted in the fixing by Vespasian of an annual stipend of 100,000 sesterces for Greek and Latin rhetors. Whether Vespasian’s decree was intended to apply beyond the walls of the capital, and how soon it actually came into force inside the walls is not quite clear; at any rate, Jerome says Quintilian was the first professor at Rome to receive payment from the fiscus, and he sets this down to a year in Domitian’s reign.[78] Trajan, recognizing the value of education as a means of training the future citizens of a state, decided to secure public instruction for five thousand poor boys.[79]

But it was left for Hadrian to take that new departure which constitutes his reign an epoch in educational history. Versed in literature, a skilled musician and painter, fond of declamation, the emperor had a taste for keeping learned men at Court, and fellow-feeling made him kind to them. Upon teachers who had grown too old for duty he conferred a retiring allowance.[80] At Rome he housed rhetoric handsomely in his famous Athenaeum, and in the provinces he founded schools, awarded them subventions, and made appointments of teachers to them. It is worth while to trace the tendency beyond the limits of our period. Hadrian’s active policy of generous interest was continued by Antoninus Pius, who improved the status and income of professors of rhetoric and philosophy all over the Empire.[81] Furthermore, he exempted from certain state-imposts rhetors, philosophers, grammarians and physicians, defining the number of teachers entitled to such immunity in different towns—thus, the minimum personnel for the smallest place touched by his edict consisted of five physicians, three sophists and three grammarians.[82] This imperial measure bears witness to the connexion of both central and municipal authorities with a local educational staff. In fact, the burden of maintaining local academies fell on the municipalities, and what an emperor did was by special benefits to stimulate local educational policy. It seems, therefore, natural that Marcus Aurelius in A.D. 176 should have devoted money towards the establishment of professorial chairs at Athens.[83] Beyond his reign it must suffice to indicate only the most significant symptoms.[84] Alexander Severus in the third century introduced a bursary system for deserving lads.[85] In the next century, repeated edicts exhibit emperors in the light of protectors of underpaid or irregularly paid teachers against the penurious economies and dilatory finance of local bodies. Beneficence had established rights of control: hence, at the end of the third century, when Constantius Chlorus nominated Eumenius as principal of the reorganized school at Autun, the town accepted the emperor’s action as a matter of course. Julian in 362 explicitly claimed the prerogative of appointing professors to chairs, and, although he entrusted the sifting of candidates to the municipalities, he subjected them to the first definite restriction imposed by an emperor on local liberty of selection, when he forbade the teaching of literature by any Christian. Gratian’s edict—which is of interest as showing the hand of his adviser and old tutor, the poet Ausonius—fixed the emoluments for different grades of teachers; thus, a rhetor was to be paid twice as much as a grammarian. Virtually in this way, although the Government did not make direct grants, yet money for educational salaries was earmarked in the municipal budgets. So the chronicle of the imperial organization of public instruction proceeds; and, if it did little to affect the methods in vogue, still the patronage was of value in keeping learning alive. The last great event in this connexion was the establishment by Theodosius II at Constantinople of a University staff consisting of thirty-one professors. Little over a century later came the dissolution by Justinian.

LITERATURE UNDER TIBERIUS, CALIGULA AND CLAUDIUS

A.D. 14–A.D. 54

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I. THE ELDER SENECA: ORATORS AND RHETORICIANS

Rhetoric in operation—The elder Seneca’s life—Character and tastes—His surviving Controuersiae and Suasoriae—His marvellous memory—Value of the prefaces—Their portrayal of rhetoricians—Critical views—Unpractical nature of declamations—Recollections—The academic and the forensic—Seneca’s method—Cases criminal, civil, social—Immoral, romantic, incredible elements—Sources—Literary ability—Effect of the exercises—Ingenuity—Interest of digressions—Silly arguments—Qualities of declamations in relation to Silver Literature.

Speakers of two generations—The emperors Tiberius, Caligula and Claudius—Some rhetoricians and orators of the time—Informers.

A study of the elder Seneca[86] is invaluable, not merely for the light which he sheds upon the methods pursued by professional speakers, but also for his knowledge (illustrated by a wealth of anecdote and reminiscence) concerning the individual literary qualities or even mannerisms of orators and rhetors both Augustan and Tiberian. Acquaintance with the system represented in his collection of Controuersiae and Suasoriae is indispensable for an appreciation of the position and prospects of oratory reflected in Quintilian’s treatise and Tacitus’s dialogue. But Seneca’s work is much more than an illuminating introduction to works about oratory: it constitutes the great exemplar of the Roman rhetorical education in operation, which must be grasped in order to estimate the stylistic merits or demerits of verse and prose in the Silver Age. Seneca is a gateway through which the history of Latin expression must pass towards Lucan as well as towards Tacitus, and to examine the academic exercises recorded by him is to go far on the path to understand the style of two centuries; for, like much subsequent prose and verse, they contain elements pointed to the degree of monotony, ingenious to the degree of unreality, and sometimes half-poetic in virtue of a spice of far-fetched romanticism.

L. Annaeus Seneca[87] was born at Corduba, an ancient patrician colony of Rome in Spain—a town with literary traditions in Cicero’s time, and by Martial’s days able to boast of having produced three noted members of a single family, namely, the two Senecas and Lucan.[88] This provincial family had attained equestrian rank, as we learn from words assigned to the younger Seneca.[89] The elder Seneca was prevented by the civil wars from hearing Cicero[90] declaim “with his great pupils in their praetextae,” i.e. during the consulate of Hirtius and Pausa in 43 B.C.; and, since the young Spaniard could not well have attended declamatory performances under the age of twelve, it is not likely that he was born later than 55 B.C. He was a boy (puer, Contr., I, praef. 3) when he first reached Rome, probably in 42 B.C., after the battle of Philippi. He may have come with his Spanish friend, Porcius Latro: in any case, they were classmates in the rhetorical school of Marullus,[91] who was perhaps recommended to them by his Spanish origin more than by outstanding merit. But Seneca did not restrict himself to one teacher. He had Arellius Fuscus for one of his early masters, and he evidently made a practice of listening to all available speakers, if we may judge from his wide acquaintance with their modes of argument and expression in the Controuersiae. This implies long residence in Rome, though there is no proof to support his frequent designation as a “rhetor.” Guess-work would assign to him the official duties of a procurator, and would by the call of such duties explain his return to Spain for a period. It was in Spain that he married Helvia, the mother of his three sons—M. Annaeus Novatus, who took the name of his adoptive father Gallio and, as pro-consul of Achaea, had the apostle Paul brought before him;[92] L. Annaeus Seneca, the philosopher; and M. Annaeus Mela, Lucan’s father.

Clearly Seneca was in Rome at a date between 29 and 24 B.C., when he heard Ovid declaiming under Arellius Fuscus;[93] and still later in 17 B.C., when he heard Latro’s embarrassing reference to the subject of adoption in the presence of Augustus and Agrippa.[94] He was back in Rome before Asinius Pollio died, A.D. 5; for he mentions having heard Pollio’s youthful oratory and afterwards the oratory of his old age.[95] The date of his death is to be inferred approximately. His allusion to the extinction of the Scaurus family (Suas. ii. 22) cannot be earlier than A.D. 34; and we can feel reasonably sure that he outlived Tiberius; for the account of that emperor’s death given by Suetonius[96] on the authority of “Seneca” is plausibly referred to the lost historical work, which, as we know from a fragment of the younger Seneca, his father composed. The outspoken criticism on the policy of burning books (Contr. X. praef. 7) suggests that publication did not precede Tiberius’s death in 37. On the other hand, when the younger Seneca was banished in A.D. 41, his mother was a widow;[97] so that the father can be presumed to have died at an age well over ninety, between A.D. 37 and 41.

A man of old-fashioned austerity,[98] the elder Seneca recalls Cato the Censor, whom he admired. It is provincial virtue more than a love of rhetorical commonplace that speaks when he censures the moral decadence of the times; and one cannot but admire the straightforward sincerity in his manner of addressing his sons for whom he put together the Controuersiae. Even if public service interested him for part of his life, he can confidently be described as a scholar by preference. Not modern enough in his tastes to sympathize with the higher education of women, he discouraged Helvia from devoting herself to those philosophical studies in which their second son was destined to see a remedy for most of the ills of existence. Yet the attraction of the past did not render him hostile to the imperial system, which, under Augustus, he found compatible with reasonable liberty:[99] and, while repressive book-burning stirred his anger, he declined to waste pity on speakers who would give utterance to treasonable words at the risk of their lives.[100] His patriotism burned strongly enough to give him pleasure in pitting the epoch of his model Cicero against the oratorical claims of “arrogant Greece.”[101] In general, he distrusted the smart levity of Greek rhetoricians,[102] and his occasional compliments to them were oftener than not accompanied with a qualification.[103]

Of his ten books of Controuersiae, five (III, IV, V, VI and VIII) are represented only by the headings and excerpts of a fourth-century epitomator,[104] with the fortunate addition, however, of prefaces to books III and IV. The other five books (I, II, VII, IX, X) survived in spite of being summarized and give a reasonably full presentation of the arguments used in different declamations, though gaps are especially noticeable in the transcription of the debating points made in Greek. The prefaces to these five books have also survived, except that the preface to IX is incomplete. The survival of excerpts for the fuller books enables us to survey the method followed in epitomizing. The total number of subjects debated is seventy-four, of which thirty-nine are represented by excerpts only. The number of Controuersiae in a book varies from six to nine. There are seven suasoriae (perhaps part of a larger collection), of which the first has lost its beginning. These exercises have been defined and illustrated in the chapter on Roman education: it remains to examine Seneca’s subjects, method and judgements.

This elaborate collection of arguments on rhetorical themes was the compilation of his old age, and evidence has been cited to show that some parts were written after A.D. 37. It does not follow, however, that the whole was put together at the beginning of Caligula’s reign by a man over ninety:[105] it is more likely that the author had begun his task years before when his sons would be practically interested in rhetorical exercises, and that he spread its composition over the later period of Tiberius’s reign without publishing until the emperor was dead. The Suasoriae were composed after the Controuersiae.[106]

Seneca’s purpose is stated in his first preface, which is addressed to all three sons, and yet meant for the public at large.[107] It was to recall the manner and diction of declaimers of the older school, and to represent speakers whom his sons could not have heard. Impressing on these young men the wisdom of taking bygone rhetoric into account along with contemporary rhetoric, he is conscious of a decadence in oratory to be measured against the greatness of Cicero and his times. To the author the causes appear to be three: luxurious laziness; the fact that, since oratory came to offer fewer rewards, men turned to pursuits less honourable but more profitable; and a natural law of reaction. Realizing the scarcity of works representative of the greatest declaimers and, still worse, the circulation of forgeries (quod peius est, falsi), he declares it his duty to rescue noble names from oblivion. Hence it is natural to respond with pleasure to his sons’ request that he should undertake so extensive a task.[108] Only a marvellous memory could have achieved it; but Seneca possessed a Macaulay-like gift of remembrance, and, as he remarks with obvious truth, it was the distant past he recalled the more surely. There had been a time when he was capable of repeating a list of 2000 names read over once. This is partly the secret of his proficiency in citing arguments from about 120 different speakers, though one is not precluded from believing that he had preserved notes, and that he consulted published collections.

The seven prefaces possess great interest. One may weary of the seventy-four themes and the often scrappy arguments, even although they are genially diversified by criticism, digression and reminiscences; but the prefaces are eminently readable in respect of subject-matter and style. They are valuable for characterization of speakers, for critical judgements, and for their record of facts otherwise unknown to literary history: they are attractive for their entertaining stories. Besides, they give the best opportunity of weighing Seneca’s own literary qualities in contradistinction to the text of his themata, where he is for the most part professedly reporting the words of others. His Latinity, in its pleasant freedom from artifice, is worthy of an author who consistently revered Cicero and was aware that an inferior type of eloquence had emerged. This alone would constitute him an important link between the Golden and the Silver Age. Indeed, the first preface shows his realization of that change from oratory to declamation for which the principate was largely accountable. Commenting on the alteration of the Ciceronian causae into the later controuersiae, he proceeds to draw the distinction between the public speaking of an orator (uera actio) and the private exercise (domestica exercitatio) of a declaimer. The new declamation, he notes, was a product of his own period.

Each preface, as a rule, treats one rhetor prominently, and in the succeeding book that rhetor’s arguments are reported with considerable fullness. Thus, the opening preface sketches a delightfully graphic picture of Seneca’s friend, Porcius Latro, his bodily strength and strong voice, his ineradicable Spanish ways, his passion for work in defiance of the laws of digestion, his memory for written notes, his mastery over historical detail, and his method of practising the artifices of his craft. Such realistic portrayal cannot but rivet our attention upon his advocacy in the controuersiae which follow; and Seneca explains that the first controversy in his collection was so placed because he remembered it to be the earliest of Latro’s declamations in the academy of Marullus. Similarly, the next preface describes Fabianus, the teacher of the younger Seneca, and in Book II a special effort is made to recall his arguments. The preface to III deals particularly with Cassius Severus; that to IV deals with a pair, Asinius Pollio and Q. Haterius; that to VII is mainly on Albucius; that to IX considers why Votienus Montanus did not practise declamation; and the last preface, when Seneca is tiring of his subject, gives rapid impressions of various speakers—Mamercus Scaurus (a great orator spoiled by laziness); Labienus, nicknamed “Rabienus,” a Pompeian in spirit who had his books publicly burned; Musa, objectionable for unnatural rhetoric; a group consisting of Moschus, Pacatus, Sparsus, Bassus, Capito; and finally the Spanish declaimers Gavius Silo and Turrinus Clodius.

Seneca’s admirable criticisms are well seen in his second preface which contrasts Fabianus with his master Arellius Fuscus. Here he commends the study of rhetoric as a fitting pursuit for his favourite son Mela, whose talents he rated more highly than those of his two brothers, then preparing for public life. Among instructive features in the preface to III are the demarcation of forensic from academic speaking, and the explanation offered by Cassius Severus of his relative inferiority as a declaimer. Severus, it may be noted, was a good extempore speaker, and anger improved his pleading. After arguing that non omnia possumus omnes, that the individual’s gifts are often confined to a single field, that Cicero’s style was inferior in verse and Virgil’s in prose, he accounts for his success at the bar in words which implicitly censure the whole method of declamation:

“I have been accustomed to address not an audience, but a judge; I have been accustomed to answer not myself, but an opponent. I avoid superfluous words as much as inconsistent ones. In scholastic speaking what may not be considered superfluous, when the whole thing is a superfluous practice?... When I speak in court, I am doing something; when I declaim, I seem to be toiling in dreamland (in somniis laborare).... Declaimers are like hot-house plants that droop in the open (uelut adsueta clauso et delicatae umbrae corpora sub diuo stare non possunt).... There is nothing to be said for testing an orator in such a childish exercise. What would you think of judging a pilot on a fish-pond?”[109] Seneca, then, is by no means blind to the unpractical nature of declamation. Elsewhere he records instances of the absurdity of some rhetorical figures in a law-court,[110] and the inability of even a practised declaimer to plead in the forum under the open sky without the familiar associations of four enclosing walls.[111]

Part of the charm in the prefaces depends on random recollections. We grow familiar with Seneca’s Memini.[112] It is not the least of their merits that some of the reminiscences are humorous and satiric. He takes care to chronicle Severus’s amusing attitude to the conceited Cestius, whose modern declamations students got up by heart, though in Cicero they studied only speeches to which Cestius had composed replies. “One day I remember entering his lecture-room when he was to deliver a speech against Milo (i.e. a rejoinder to Cicero’s Pro Milone). Self-satisfied as usual, Cestius was saying, ‘If I were a Thracian gladiator, I should be a Fusius; if I were a pantomime-actor, I should be a Bathyllus.’ Unable to check my wrath I burst out, ‘Yes, and if you were a drain, you’d be the main drain!’—huge guffaws from everybody! The pupils gazed, curious to see what uncouth sort of creature I was. Cestius, ready to answer Cicero, had no answer for me!”[113]

Other interesting points occur in the preface to IV. They include a glance at the select audiences of Asinius Pollio, who was the first to give recitationes before invited guests; Seneca’s recollection of Pollio’s instructing his grandson how to look on both sides of a declamation; and references to the extempore declamations by Q. Haterius, “the one among all Romans known to me,” he says, “who transferred Greek facility to Latin.” His speed of utterance made Augustus remark, “Our friend Haterius needs a brake put on” (sufflaminandus est). The sketch of Albucius in the preface to VII is diverting. He was fearless in his employment of ordinary words: “sour wine” and “flea-bane,” “fallow deer” and “rhinoceros,” “latrines” and “sponges” came all alike to him in speaking. A chameleon orator, for ever adopting fresh styles, he sometimes proved unlucky in his figures, as when he asked rhetorically “Why is a cup smashed if it falls, and why is a sponge not?,” on which Cestius commented, “To-morrow he’ll give a declamation on why thrushes fly and gourds don’t!” It was Albucius who, in the debate about a parricide set adrift in a boat, invented the far-fetched joke of calling the boat “the wooden sack” (culleum ligneum) instead of the real sack used in the punishment of parricides.

The incomplete preface to IX resumes the criticism of declamation as unpractical. Seneca recognizes the defects afterwards emphasized by Petronius and Tacitus,[114] when he points out that the dominant aim in declamation is to please, not to carry conviction (non ut uincat sed ut placeat). This is why it hunts for alluring ornaments (lenocinia conquirit) and avoids solid reasoning. Declamations composed on the assumption that one has only fools for opponents (aduersarios quamuis fatuos fingunt) must provide a poor training for a court of law. The conditions of practice are too easy in an academic exercise: gladiators, it should be remembered, train with heavier weapons than those with which they fight in the arena.

The final preface is notable for the author’s frank confession that he had exhausted his recollections and they him (fatebor uobis: iam res taedio est). Indignant at the governmental revenge taken on the writings of Scaurus and of Labienus, he yet thanks heaven that these punishments of genius did not begin until genius itself was deteriorating. Musa’s extravagance of language is illustrated and condemned:

I remember his saying “Birds that fly, fish that swim, beasts that run, find graves in our insides. Ask now why we men die suddenly—we live by deaths!”

Freeman though he was, Musa, in Seneca’s view, richly deserved flogging like the veriest slave for such artificiality. “Much, I consider, must be allowed to talent,” he adds; “one must allow faults, but not monstrosities.”

The traditional title Oratorum et Rhetorum Sententiae Diuisiones Colores indicates the method. On a case propounded, the sentiments (sententiae) and contentions of a number of speakers for or against are given, often mere jottings; then a skeletonic mapping out (diuisiones) of quaestiones involved; and, finally, a selection of more or less plausible conceptions (colores) designed to put a special complexion on certain acts under review. Invention and ingenuity find their best opening in the third group, but the ingenuity often overleaps itself into absurdity. A few extracts from II. i. may serve by way of illustration. A rich man who has already disinherited no fewer than three sons, asks for a poor man’s only son in order to adopt him: the poor man says “yes;” but the son says “no,” and is thereupon disowned by his father. Arguments from eleven speakers in favour of the son are cited, among them those of Porcius Latro and Arellius Fuscus, whose arguments on the other side are afterwards given. Latro opens for the youth: “And this is my fate—disowned and adopted at the same moment! The home that sheltered my father up to old age cannot admit me!... (To the rich man) You suppose gold and silver to be riches, but they are the playthings of fortune. I give you warning: even if I come to you, I shall take care—and it is a very easy thing in your house—to get disinherited! Strange things do happen, but I never dreamt that my father would hate children, or the rich man want them. I desire no patrimony: happiness is a frail fleeting thing”—and he cites examples. Vibius Rufus makes the young man argue: “The very father that does not like keeping his children, judges it necessary to have children! I invited his disinherited sons into our humble abode. Am I going to rob them of their home after promising them mine? What am I to do? If I obey, I shall get disinherited: if I don’t obey, I shall get disinherited. I love my father: and that is my offence.” Among Fuscus’s points are these: “(To the rich man) You ask for a son: well, there are crowds of youths without a father! (To his father) Lay on me any command you choose: I shall go to sea, go on war-service, provided that, wherever I am, I remain yours”; and much of his oration turns on the perils of wealth. Then Fabianus also declaims against the corrupting influence of riches, and uses his noted gift of description to contrast domestic decoration with natural landscape scenery, which is the possession of the poor. When Latro in turn argues for the father, he represents him as saying: “If I did not know what an evil poverty is, I should understand it now: my son does not dread being disowned. Adoption amalgamated the families of the Fabii, the Aemilii and the Scipios. From the foundation of Rome to our own days our famous patrician nobility has depended on it. Adoption cures the wounds of fortune (adoptio fortunae remedium est).” The marshalling of arguments under the diuisio follows: e.g. Pompeius Silo began, on behalf of the reluctant son, with the trite question, “Is a father to be obeyed in all things? And even if in all things, does this include an act that would make him no longer one’s father? Can a son be handed over for adoption against his will? If he cannot, can he be disowned for exercising his own will?” and so through logical alternatives on to his proof that the proposed adoption was, firstly, disgraceful; secondly, useless; thirdly, dangerous. When the colores are reported, Seneca comments on their risky allurements and adduces warning examples of silliness. He does not mince words when he disapproves. This is a color from Latro in defence of the young man, who is supposed to say: “I was always friendly with the three disowned sons: I am their friend still. When they were disinherited, I advised them to keep quiet and by yielding soften their father. I told them, ‘As soon as you think it the right time, my father will entreat yours.’ Well, now they assure me that the most favourable moment is here. They are right: my father cannot find any more favourable moment for the reconciliation: the rich man is seeking sons.” And here is Latro’s color when he spoke on the other side: “This,” says the father to his son, “is my aim: I want to hand you over for adoption, so that the disowned sons may be by your means more readily reconciled to their father.”

While the exact point at issue varies greatly in the Controuersiae, the general question under debate falls into one of three types—criminal, civil, social. The fourth book may illustrate this division, as well as the unlikelihood of the themes. Of its eight cases, three are criminal, three civil, and two involve questions of public status. The criminal cases are: (IV. i.) A man is dragged from the grave of his three children by a wild young roysterer who plays upon him the prank of forcibly shaving him, dressing him in festal attire and compelling him to take part in a banquet; (iv.) During war-time a man who has lost his weapons in battle seizes weapons from a hero’s tomb, fights bravely and restores them: he is charged with sacrilegious violation of the monument; (vi.) A man’s wife dies in giving birth to a boy: the father marries soon after, and the boy borne by the second wife has a remarkable resemblance to his half-brother. Both are brought up in the country and become almost indistinguishable. After many years, on their reappearance in town, the father, who knows which is the elder, will not tell his wife which is her child: he is charged with cruelty. The civil cases are: (iii.) The ravisher of a girl secures from her exiled father a command that she shall elect to marry him, but her brother at home insists on her claiming the culprit’s death: the brother is disinherited for opposing his father’s will; (v.) A stepson, who is a doctor, declines to attend his stepmother, and his father disinherits him; (viii.) A proscribed master in time of civil war is sheltered by a faithful freedman to whom he promises remission of all future claims on his service; when he is restored to his belongings, he makes demands on the freedman, which the latter resists. The two cases of status are: (ii.) Metellus, in rescuing the Palladium from the burning temple of Vesta, has lost his eye-sight: as a blind man, he is refused the right to exercise the priesthood; (vii.) A man taken in adultery by a tyrant wrests his sword from him, kills him, and claims a public prize as a tyrannicide.

In the whole collection the criminal charges predominate: of the 74, there are 30 criminal, 26 civil, while 18 affect status. But many side issues are involved. There are about a score of cases concerning immoral relations such as adultery, seduction, outrage and prostitution: almost as many turn on the disinheriting of children; seven on poisoning; seven on tyrants, a theme more at home in Greece. Pirates add a mild flavour of danger to some, but again and again the imagined circumstances are hopelessly unnatural and bizarre, and encourage extravagance of treatment and style. Certain controuersiae sound like sketchy novels with impossible plots, and must have been so handled in the narratio of a clever rhetor, who aimed at the diversion of a leisured and blasé audience. One instance[115] combines the following episodes: a tyrant is slain; an illicit liaison results in homicide; a father’s intercessions are rejected by a son, who is afterwards captured by pirates; they demand a ransom, but the unforgiving father replies that, if they cut off their prisoner’s hands, he will pay twice the amount; the captive is eventually liberated by the gang; later the father falls into beggary; and finally his son refuses to help him. Anything may be expected in such a jumble—rhetorical outbursts, Homeric quotations, a plea of insanity, or the color devised by a professor with a voice like a hundred nutmeg-graters (centum raucorum uocem) that the father’s offer to the pirates “You will be paid double for cutting his hands off” was merely a regrettable secretarial error (librario una syllaba excidit ‘non’) for “You will be paid double for not cutting his hands off!”

The ultimate sources of most of the themes are undiscoverable. Many had become stereotyped in Greek rhetorical schools, and, with little or no modification, were transmitted through generations at Rome. Thus, actual Greek history supplied material for the suasoria on Alexander’s entry into Babylon, and Greek tragedy for Agamemnon’s deliberation whether he shall immolate his daughter. Sometimes the historical kernel was of the smallest. It is, for instance, an invention that the Athenians deliberated about removing their Persian trophies under Xerxes’s threat to return with his army. Sometimes the law invoked was a genuine one from the Attic code: often, however, it was a figment of the schools. An example is the debate on whether the priestess convicted of immorality who was thrown from a rock and survived might be subjected to punishment a second time: by Roman law a guilty priestess was buried alive. From Sulla’s time onwards there had been a growing accumulation of material for the free use of declaimers either to thrash out on Greek lines or to fuse with Roman elements. The treatise Ad Herennium and Cicero’s De Inuentione supply a long list of themes drawn from Roman as well as from Greek history; but details were liberally altered in declamations to secure rhetorical effect; for a good point counted more than historical accuracy. Mythology was also a source: and fertile imagination yet another.

Seneca’s ability as a writer is shown both in his suggestive comments and in a Boswellian aptitude for reproducing the words and style of others. In criticism nothing could be sounder than his grasp of that psychological endowment which made Ovid successful in a suasoria, of the wilfulness which made that poet love the bizarre lines which others censured, and the quality in his lost oratory which made it poetic prose (solutum carmen, Contr. II. ii. 8). Most illuminating are the remarks on Montanus’s passion for repetitions: he was “the Ovid of orators” because he could not let well alone (nescit quod bene cessit relinquere, Contr. IX. v. 17). It argues a genuine feeling for style that Seneca, besides characterizing good and bad speakers, can also represent their actual manner, such as Latro’s exclamatory qualities in Book I or his outburst on Popillius’s barbarity in killing Cicero in Book VII. Similarly in the case of the Roman official who had a man beheaded at a banquet to satisfy the curiosity of a fille de joie, Seneca reproduces Murredius’s tetracolon which ended in nonsense “to complete the rhythm”—“Justice was subservient to the bed-chamber, a praetor to a harlot, prison to a banquet, day to night” (Seruiebat forum cubiculo, praetor meretrici, carcer conuiuio, dies nocti, IX. ii. 27). The heartlessness of the same scene is vividly brought home by Seneca’s illustration of Vibius Gallus’s realism, “A toast was drunk to the headsman for his deft stroke” (lictori quia bene percusserat propinatum est, IX. ii. 23).

The pernicious effect of some of the subjects upon the morality of pupils may easily be overstated. It is doubtful whether there was more of the violent and the illicit in them than is illustrated on a modern cinema film, which does not provide an equal stimulus towards thought and expression. Much, indeed, in ancient declamations was morally sound and bracing, even if rather commonplace: there was a healthy spirit in the denunciations of luxury and of tyranny, which might pass safely in an academic exercise, but might spell ruin in a historical work under the Empire. It is, besides, doubtful whether students altogether failed to realize the unreality of their controversial world; even the far-fetched elements may be said to have been attempts to satisfy the perennial human desire for romance. With so many stock subjects common to the successive periods represented by Seneca, Quintilian and the pseudo-Quintilian, by Calpurnius Flaccus,[116] and later in Greek by Libanius, it was inevitable that sensible arguments should run dry, and relief from the hackneyed should be sought either in artificial embroidery or in capricious invention. The incentive to invent operated often without the check of common sense: so that one is reminded of nothing so much as of the pedantically ingenious questions which were devised by the fantastic imagination of the Troubadours to be pleaded and decided in a Court of Love.

Ingenuity is so characteristic of the Silver Age that it deserves to be noted in the making. It is most observable in the cunningly contrived rebuttal of a charge. At first sight, one might condemn as beyond all excuse the scandalous practical joke already mentioned which was played upon a man at his children’s grave. Subjected forcibly to a fashionable toilette, the mourner had been presented by an unruly young reveller to his boon companions and coerced into attending their banquet in a neighbouring garden. What fair complexion shall an enterprising defence put upon such conduct? One answer to the prosecution follows these lines: Was it not reasonable to be touched by the old man’s mourning and loneliness? Was it not heart-breaking to notice that he had no kinsman to console him? Now when it is too late, the offenders, of course, can see that his friends must have deserted him, because they knew he was mad. In fact, “all was meant in kindness” is the explanation offered by this misunderstood young gentleman! “It was a festive occasion, and I was entertaining some of my good friends, when one of them said, ‘Why do we let that poor fellow in the cemetery kill himself with grief? Nobody can make up his mind spontaneously to abandon sorrow: people are bashful about it: they want compulsion....’” To prove the continuance of his friendly attitude, the defendant assures the complainant: “I’m perfectly ready to give you more consolation of the same sort—only, you’d just accuse me again!” The danger of such smartness in rhetoric and in literature is that it constantly tends to be overdone. Ingenuity of idea and phrase palls even in Ovid and in Lucan; but, indulged in by the smaller mind of a rhetorician in quest of specious argument or pointed epigram, it becomes grotesque, as Seneca shows by his censures.

The seven deliberative exercises, or Suasoriae, exhibit similar rhetorical qualities to those in the Controuersiae, and furnish continued proof of the attraction which digressive anecdotes, luckily for his readers, possessed for Seneca. At times he conscientiously pulls himself up (longius me fabellarum dulcedo produxit; itaque ad propositum reuertar, Suas. i. 7); but to his deviations from the strict lines of argument we owe interesting comments, e.g. on Virgil’s avoidance of bombast (i. 12); Pedo’s lines describing Germanicus’s voyage (i. 15); Arellius Fuscus’s description of the moon in contrast with Virgil’s simpler and happier words (iii. 4); Gallio’s amusingly nonchalant attitude towards impassioned oratory at which he jested as “plena deo” (iii. 6-7); the records of Pollio’s hostility to Cicero’s reputation (vi. 14); an extract from Livy on the death of Cicero (vi. 17); Cornelius Severus’s hexameters on the same subject (vi. 26); and Cestius’s praise of Cicero’s services in exalting the Latin language over Greek (vii. 10).

Seneca had not spared foolish arguments in the Controuersiae. Murredius, quoted in the seventh book for a foolish point regarding Popillius, the ungrateful murderer of Cicero, and for another ineptitude on a poisoning charge, is declared to be “as silly as ever” in the ninth book.[117] In the murder mystery, where a woman is found wounded, her husband killed, and a breach made in the wall between the house and the neighbouring one, Seneca justifiably stigmatized as fatuous the bit of description “My father had holes made in him as if he were the wall” (pater meus tamquam paries perfossus est).[118] So it is with absurdities in the Suasoriae. The deliberations of the 300 Spartans in the pass whether to retreat or face the Persian are marked both by excellences and by inanities. “Whither will you, hoplites, flee, who are yourselves the walls of Sparta?”—that, in four neat words,[119] is cited by Seneca as the best hit made by any Greek speaker in this suasoria. On the other hand, his strictures upon overstrained point are severe; for he says the prize-winner for puerility (inter has pueriles sententias uidetur palmam meruisse) was the speaker who played with the conceit that the inscription to the fallen Spartans was written in blood squeezed from their wounds—“ink,” he exclaimed, “worthy of a Spartan!” (where the Latin atramentum gives a more violent contrast to the red blood). The last suasoria concludes with two remarks from “that most likeable fool” Gargonius, “than which not even he had ever said anything sillier.” Turgid rhetoric receives corresponding castigation. The author, in making fun of his namesake Seneca “Grandio” (ii. 17), so called because he liked everything big from sandals to a sweetheart, recalls his handling of the 300 Spartans at bay. Lifting his arms and rising on his toes (that was his way of making himself bigger!) he declaimed in swelling accents a Spartan’s imaginary soliloquy: “So all Greece has abandoned us. So much the better, I am glad, I am glad.” We wondered, remarks Seneca drily, what there was to be glad about. “Why? Because I shall now have the Persian to myself. That monarch, Xerxes, who has stolen seas with his armada, who has confined the earth but extended the deep, whose orders impose a new aspect upon universal nature, that monarch may doubtless encamp over against the heavens; but I shall have the gods for comrades!” If the elder Seneca’s good sense had been more widely shared, such bombast would have been frowned out of existence.

From these exercises, then, one may take an inventory, as it were, for the literary stock-in-trade of Silver Latin. There are exclamatory and high-flown outbursts typified in the apostrophe to the monster of cruelty who maimed foundlings to make money out of their begging;[120] common-places on themes like the mutability of fortune,[121] or the effect of calamity on the mind; sententiae, embodying ancient wisdom in proverbial form, such as “The cure may be worse than the disease” (quaedam remedia grauiora ipsis periculis sunt), “There are many paths to death,” “Innocence is a protection in danger,” “Nature has given none the breath of life for ever”;[122] the purple patches in elaborate descriptions of ocean or tempest or natural scenery;[123] the brief and pointed epigram designed to surprise by ingenuity or paradox, “Weeping is a modest curse directed against human calamity” (fletus humanarum necessitatum uerecunda exsecratio est);[124] and the frequently allied antithesis, “the greatest runaways among the brave, the greatest laggards among runaways” (inter fortes fugacissimi, inter fugaces tardissimi).[125] The indictment which lies against rhetoric for extravagance in the use of these and other artifices, and for its frequent self-divorce from real life, must not blind us to the good services which it rendered. Though but a simulacrum of the old free oratory, it was cherished by the Romans with almost pathetic assiduity, and from their devotion to it as an end in itself they gained at least sharpened wits and facility of expression. The rhetorical training maintained in the Empire a high standard of ability in the use of language. This was not its sole advantage. Declaimers were not, as a rule, politicians, but the declamations afforded a safe outlet for a certain amount of social criticism and even a certain amount of republican feeling. Some of the themes, we have seen, gave the mind the satisfaction of entering upon mildly romantic adventures. The very fact that the law assumed in a case was not the actual law of Rome aided the growth of a new sentiment of equity. Further, there was ethical value in the moral and humane reflections of an experienced declaimer, while the attacks made upon luxury and riches were in keeping with a literary exaltation of the poor and the humble, which implied a broadening conception of the worth of the individual. To suppose that the declamations produced merely expert phraseology and did not stimulate thought is a profound mistake.

* * * * *

Seneca places before us the speakers of two generations in Rome, who by their various nationalities—Italian, Greek, Spanish and Gallic—indicate the cosmopolitan hold obtained by rhetoric. Most of the older generation, as Augustans, are outside our present limits; some speakers belong to both generations; and some definitely to the reign of Tiberius. Of the quartette (τετράδιον) placed by Seneca in the highest rank[126]—Porcius Latro, Arellius Fuscus, Albucius Silus and Junius Gallio—the first three had been recognized as eminent before the Christian era began. Ovid studied under Latro and Fuscus, and doubtless a subtle portion of their rhetorical influence descended through the poet to his imitators in the first century. Fuscus also had for a pupil Papirius Fabianus, a philosopher still more than a speaker, who taught the younger Seneca. Gallio, whose arguments are often exemplified in the Controuersiae, was noted for a jingle (tinnitus) of style in speaking. One of his writings was an answer composed to Labienus’s invective against Bathyllus, the favourite of Maecenas; and other publications of his were declamations and a treatise on rhetoric. He was exiled in A.D. 32. Though Cestius Pius from Smyrna was pre-Tiberian, his pupils, Surdinus, Aietius Pastor, Quintilius Varus (son of the general crushed by the Germans in A.D. 9), formed a group towards the beginning of Tiberius’s reign; and Argentarius, his assiduous ape (Cestii simius), belonged clearly to the same time. Cestius had a swarm of followers who, we have seen, learned by heart his speeches in preference to Cicero’s.

In passing to speakers definitely under Tiberius, Caligula and Claudius, it is worth while to remember that the emperors themselves were by education products of the rhetorical system. Tiberius,[127] as a student of rhetoric under Theodorus of Gadara, imbibed new principles—very different from those which his predecessor Augustus had learned from Apollodorus of Pergamum. The Apollodoreans, emphasizing narratio, stood for regularity in the division and structure of a speech, whereas the Theodoreans, eager for greater freedom, were content if the argumentatio alone was adequately handled. Tiberius’s years of retirement at Rhodes, before he was emperor, had perfected his acquaintance with Greek rhetoric; and his skill in the diplomatic and even cryptic use of language is apparent in the reports of his senatorial speeches given by Tacitus.[128] In Latin, his tendency was to prefer archaic to foreign words and to base his oratory on the manner of Messalla Corvinus. Among his literary compositions were memoirs, while his verses showed the influence of Euphorion and other Greek poets. His successor, C. Caesar Caligula, from whose insane jealousy sprang his desire to annihilate the works of Homer, and his scathing attacks upon Virgil as well as Livy, did not publish works, though he was well trained in rhetoric, capable as a speaker especially when stimulated by anger, and critically contemptuous of the younger Seneca’s style as “sand minus mortar.”[129] His uncle Claudius, the next emperor, was a voluminous writer in Greek and Latin. An early taste which he evinced for history had been fostered by Livy; and his learning in other fields was extensive. Now a play, now a book on gambling, now an apology for Cicero against the strictures of Asinius Gallus, came from his pen. He even proposed three additional letters, the inverted digamma (Ⅎ) for consonantal u, antisigma (Ↄ) for ps, and the left half of H (Ⱶ) for the y sound between i and u.[130] Part of the speech delivered by Claudius before the senate in A.D. 48, supporting the admission of Gallic nobles to Roman offices, was found recorded on a bronze tablet at Lyons in 1524, and forms an interesting subject of comparison with the version by Tacitus (Ann. XI. xxiv). Claudius’s consort, Agrippina, wrote memoirs, which the elder Pliny and Tacitus consulted.[131]

Of rhetoricians at least partly of the time of Tiberius, like Asprenas, Bruttedius, Turrinus and Capito, it is enough to distinguish the last for his declamation regarding Cicero’s murderer Popillius, which remained in circulation and was erroneously ascribed to Latro.[132] Many speakers published collections of their speeches or manuals on speaking. Junius Otho, praetor in A.D. 22, was the author of four books on Colores;[133] and Rutilius Lupus, towards the end of Seneca’s lifetime, brought out an abridged translation of a work on figures of speech by Gorgias, who taught at Athens in the first century B.C. Alfius Flavus, one of Cestius’s pupils, wrote also in verse. Senatorial eloquence under Tiberius was (in addition to Junius Otho) represented by Asinius Gallus, son of Asinius Pollio, and inheritor of his caustic style; Aeserninus, Pollio’s grandson; Valerius Messallinus Cotta, younger son of the Augustan Messalla Corvinus, and consul in A.D. 20, a pleasure-seeker with gifts in verse-making and in pleading (Ovid in exile had read a speech which he had delivered in court); Mamercus Scaurus, the easygoing aristocrat whose friendship with Sejanus and authorship of a tragedy, Atreus, proved his ruin; Q. Haterius, who died an old man in A.D. 26 and whose startlingly rapid delivery called forth Augustus’s remark already mentioned, that he needed a brake put on;[134] L. Arruntius, a man of ability at once academic and forensic; Votienus Montanus, from Narbo, who made his mark in an inheritance case for Galla Numisia, and was exiled for treason in A.D. 25; and L. Calpurnius Piso, one of the most dignified characters of the day, who alarmed Tiberius on one occasion by denouncing the infamy of informers and threatening to quit Rome in disgust.

To the time of Caligula and Claudius belongs Crispus Passienus, son of the Augustan Passienus. His published speeches were among those familiar to students in Quintilian’s boyhood.[135] It is notable that Caligula allowed the condemned works of certain Augustan orators and historians, T. Labienus, Cremutius Cordus and Cassius Severus, to circulate again.[136] Of these Cremutius belongs to the annals of history. Labienus, more noted as an orator than as a historian, was disliked for exceeding the due limits of free speech, and his enemies were pleased when his books were given to the flames by senatorial decree about A.D. 12.[137] The blow was one which he refused to survive. Cassius Severus, another prominent orator in the Controuersiae, had offended Augustus by libels upon men and women of high station, and died in miserable poverty after twenty-five years of exile. There are reasons for believing that his death happened about A.D. 37, five years later than the date assigned by Jerome. Tacitus connects with his condemnation Augustus’s first attempt to repress literature.[138]

Many orators were occupied rather as political accusers than as literary creators, finding it lucrative to place delation at the service of any emperor whose aim was to ruin the potentially dangerous scions of aristocratic families, the so-called opposition under the Caesars. Some were unquestionably able persons, like Domitius Afer of Nemausus (Nîmes), who pleaded in the law-courts, occupied high positions in several reigns, and was known for legal writings De Testibus, and for published speeches mentioned by Quintilian. He had begun his career as an accuser by A.D. 26, and lived into Nero’s times (A.D. 59).[139] P. Suillius, one of the dreaded informers under Claudius, eventually fell himself under sentence of banishment. Vibius Crispus, already by Claudius’s time active in the nefarious intrigues of the delator, survived until about A.D. 90, one of many links between this period and the Flavian age.

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II. VALERIUS MAXIMUS—A REPERTORY FOR SPEAKERS

Valerius Maximus—His date—His nine books and their aim—A collection for rhetoricians—Method and arrangement—National subject-matter and spirit—Sources—Survival of his influence through abridgements—Limitations in historical outlook—Adulation of the Caesars—Moralizing and sententious reflections—His style a mirror of the period—The poetic element—Rhetorical exclamations and declamations—Balanced structure—Artificial conceits—Language—Abstractions—Vocabulary and syntax.

Little can be surmised regarding the life of Valerius Maximus,[140] the compiler of a significant repertory for rhetoricians; but that little is enough to settle his period. Vossius,[141] rejecting the suggestion that he belonged to the third century A.D., proved that he must be referred to the age of Tiberius; and there is not much to add to his arguments. Aulus Gellius, in the second century, cites from the eighth book of Valerius.[142] Further, what are almost the only explicit personal reminiscences in Valerius’s work afford evidence of date; for his great friend, the eloquent Sextus Pompeius, with whom he visited Asia and to whose kindly patronage he pays a tribute in his chapter on friendship, is identical with one of the consuls in the last year of Augustus’s and the first year of Tiberius’s reign, A.D. 14.[143] Pompeius was also a friend of Germanicus, and the patron to whom Ovid addressed certain epistles from Pontus:[144] he became proconsul of Asia about A.D. 27. Besides, the tone in which Brutus and Cassius are charged with “parricide” for their share in the assassination of Julius Caesar savours of the repressive times of Tiberius.[145] Confirmatory impressions may be derived from Valerius’s style; and, finally, if more precision in dates be desired for an author not so lavish in their use as Velleius Paterculus was, then two passages may be cited bearing on the time of composition. The prefatory remarks to his treatment of pudicitia must have been written before Livia’s death in A.D. 29; and the denunciation directed against Sejanus (though it does not name him) must have been written after his downfall in A.D. 31.[146] Valerius’s work, then, appeared at latest within a few years after the publication of Paterculus’s history in A.D. 30; for its dedication to Tiberius, who is the Caesar addressed[147] and often flattered, shows that it was not subsequent to the close of his reign in A.D. 37.

His work, Facta et Dicta Memorabilia, consists, as we have it, of nine books; and though his epitomator, Julius Paris, implies there were ten, this is most likely an error. The author’s aim will be best understood in the light of a summary of the contents:—

Book I. Religion, auspices, omens, prodigies and marvels ranging from more to less awe-inspiring instances—from a mysterious utterance or miraculous intervention of a god, to such merely curious cases as those of the man who forgot how to read, or the princess with a double row of teeth, or a heart stuffed with hairs!

Book II. A pot-pourri of subjects, perhaps in this book more loosely interrelated than in any—marriage, magistracies, military regulations and discipline, public games, foreign customs, censorial strictness, and so on.

Book III. Mental and moral endowments, bravery, endurance, rise from humble origin to greatness, degeneracy, self-confidence, etc.

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IV. Moderation, abstinence, conjugal love, friendship, generosity, etc

Book V. Clemency, gratitude, ingratitude, filial duty, brotherly affection, patriotism, paternal love and severity.

Book VI. Chastity, outspoken retorts, strict punishments, weighty words and acts, justice, national honour, fidelity of wives and of slaves (where the comment quo minus exspectatam hoc laudabiliorem fidem speaks eloquently of the prevailing distrust felt by masters), and mutability of fortune.

Book VII. Good fortune, wise sayings or acts, smart sayings or acts, military ruses, defeat at elections, the straits of necessity, wills cancelled or ratified.

Book VIII. A book covering an extensive range, but furnishing only a few brief examples under some of its headings—Acquittals and convictions in public trials, famous private law-suits, women who pleaded cases, testimony borne in court, those who committed faults which they punished in others, industry, leisure, eloquence, expression and gesture, striking effects of the arts, memorable old age, desire of glory, magnificent honours conferred.

Book IX. Luxury and lust, cruelty, anger and hatred, avarice, arrogance, perfidy, temerity, mistakes, vengeance, wicked sayings and doings, deaths out of the common, desire of life, enrolment in families by fraud.

The utility of this fairly full, but not exhaustive, list rests on its indication of the author’s intention to illustrate subjects likely to be touched on by an orator. The design relates the work to the rhetoric of the times. Here was ready for use a collection of noteworthy anecdotes constituting a serviceable Vade mecum for speakers or teachers. And this aim, easily discernible from a table of contents, is openly avowed by the compiler: his task, he tells us, was to make a handy digest of memorable deeds and sayings with a view to saving his readers the trouble of hunting among the scattered authorities whose writings he himself had to consult.[148] It is a fair guess that he was a professor of rhetoric.

Dividing each book into chapters on separate topics, Valerius generally subdivides each chapter into Roman and foreign examples. The latter (externa) are fewer and are sometimes omitted.[149] Occasionally he confesses to a sense of perplexity between the mass of available material (sermo infinitis personis rebusque circumfusus) and the claims of reasonable brevity:[150] and so he feels bound under certain heads to reduce the number of examples (satietas modo uitanda est).[151] Some parts of the work show little sign of systematic dovetailing: others exhibit closer interconnexion. From time to time he is at pains to indicate his method of grouping illustrations; thus, he exemplifies self-confidence, first in war, next in peace, then introduces the poet Accius avowedly as a link between Roman and foreign instances.[152] Or, again, just as he is about to pass to foreign examples, some insistent Roman illustration may arrest his attention with a demand to be recorded (ad externa ... transire conanti M. Bibulus ... manus inicit);[153] and equal emphasis marks his transition from Book IV to V—from generosity to its “fit companions, humanity and clemency.” These and other such instances prove that he had an artistic regard for unity, and that it would be unfair to view him as an accumulator of higgledy-piggledy miscellanea.

In subject-matter, and in spirit no less, he is decidedly national. The predominance of examples from native life, custom and history makes this inevitable; yet it is, after all, but one aspect of the Roman in him. He is Roman in the practical aim wherewith he composed his digest for rhetoricians and their pupils; in the typical position assigned to religion at the forefront of the work; and in the conservative note upon which his text opens. This Roman conservatism animates his dignified pride in recording the ancestral habit of referring intricate ceremonial to pontifical wisdom, the sanction for action to augural observation, oracular responses to prophetic books, and the fit treatment for portents to the lore of Etruria. About illustrations from foreign history he is conscious that, if they do not make the same direct appeal as national examples, still they introduce a pleasant variety in the Latin subject-matter (attingam igitur externa; quae, Latinis inserta literis, ut auctoritatis minus habent, ita aliquid gratae uarietatis afferre possunt). No less patriotic is the enthusiasm with which, after mentioning the lays of ancient Rome once sung at banquets, he praises the old Roman training, and with a rhetorical climax turns his list of great families so educated into a compliment to the Caesars:

Maiores natu in conuiuiis ad tibias egregia superiorum opera carmine comprehensa pangebant, quo ad ea imitanda iuuentutem alacriorem redderent. Quid hoc splendidius, quid etiam utilius certamine?... Quas Athenas, quam scholam, quae alienigena studia huic domesticae disciplinae praetulerim? Inde oriebantur Camilli, Scipiones, Fabricii, Marcelli, Fabii: ac ne singula imperii nostri lumina simul percurrendo sim longior, inde, inquam, caeli clarissima pars diui fulserunt Caesares.

A similar spirit pervades his record of the honour secured for Latin as the official and imperial language everywhere;[154] his apostrophe eulogizing Marius’s disdain for Greek eloquence;[155] and his genuine admiration for the old national deliberative body:

“The Senate-house was the trusty deep-set heart of the commonwealth, fortified, walled all round with the healthiness of silence. As men crossed its threshold, they cast aside personal and put on national affections.”[156] So too one notes his pride in “the most tenacious bond of military discipline,” which he pronounces “the especial glory and mainstay of the Roman power, having been by salutary steadfastness kept untarnished and unscathed to the present time.”[157] It is the same with his panegyrics upon Rome;[158] his gratified consciousness of the progressive evolution from “Romulus’s small hut” (paruula Romuli casa) to “the pillar of the world” (terrarum orbis columen);[159] his belief in the generosity of the Roman people;[160] his rhapsodic outbursts like O munificentiam gentis Romanae, deorum benignitati aequandam![161] or his satisfaction in Roman justice.[162]

In the absence of systematic acknowledgment of his borrowings, it is impossible to give an exact account of the sources of Valerius. Any reader will observe that Livy has been largely drawn upon, even though he is mentioned but once.[163] Cicero is mentioned oftener;[164] but the mere occurrence of his name is no gauge of the extent to which he was used. Varro must have been an authority in many instances.[165] We may also infer the consultation of Sallust and Asinius Pollio, and, for foreign examples, of Trogus.[166] Besides mention of such poets as Livius Andronicus and Accius, there are references to the historian Caelius (Antipater), to the Collecta of Pomponius Rufus, and to M. Scaurus’s autobiographic Memoirs.[167] Cato’s work on Origines is cited definitely in one passage,[168] and may elsewhere be reasonably thought to have supplied material. That work, as well as Cato’s Orations, must have been in Valerius’s mind when he wrote the words ornata sunt ab eo (sc. Catone) literarum Latinarum monimenta.[169] About a score of Greek authors are cited. His treatment of sources varies. The original may be copied with fidelity, or paraphrased and rhetorically embellished, or condensed, or sometimes misrepresented thanks to bungling; for superficiality betrays him into many confusions.

Yet, blemishes notwithstanding, there are, as testimonies to a great measure of utility and vitality in his work, at least two well-known abridgements[170] of it—one by Julius Paris, made about the fourth century, and intended, like the ampler original, for schools; the other by Januarius Nepotianus, the extant form of which breaks off in the third book (III. ii. 7), but which was evidently drawn from a manuscript of the original superior to any now extant, because it summarizes the gap in the first book (I. i. ext. 4–I. iv. ext. 1). Possibly the C. Titius Probus, to whom is ascribed in some MSS. the summary on Roman names at the end of Valerius, was an earlier epitomizer than Julius Paris and may have left an epitome afterwards combined with his; but, as the summary on names cannot by any stretch of imagination be called literature, there is scant profit in discussing the date of Titius Probus or his relationship to Julius Paris.[171] Suffice it to add that the existence of late abridgements and the number of MSS. of the full text which have come down are indications of its hold upon medieval education. Niebuhr, indeed, declares that Valerius “was considered the most important book next to the Bible throughout the Middle Ages; it was the mirror of virtues and was translated into all the languages of Europe.”[172] Teuffel[173] more cautiously remarks that he was not rarely read (nicht selten gelesen) in the Middle Ages; but even this modified statement is an illustration of the continued enthusiasm for Roman history.

His outlook on the world and his attitude towards historical questions do not argue a penetrating or independent genius. He relates omens and miracles in a spirit of unquestioning superstition; e.g. after his record of prodigies sent by Jupiter to dissuade Pompey from resistance to Caesar, Valerius asserts that “the overmastering principles of destiny prevented a heart not otherwise possessed by folly from weighing the prodigies aright.”[174] He is also uncritical in his acceptance of traditional stories; if they are ancient, he argues that antiquity should secure credit for them, while it is his own function not to reject as idle such tales as gained the sanction of famous literary documents.[175]

On many historical matters his attitude is distorted by bias. He is an apologist for Caesarism, animated by an unconcealable dislike for inflammatory agitations conducted by the tribunes of the people in the days of the republic.[176] Thus, although he admits the moderation of Tiberius Gracchus, he elsewhere brands him “an enemy of his fatherland.”[177] Gaius Gracchus he regards as one who might have been a champion of the state, but who preferred to be its impious disturber.[178] Consistently with this anti-democratic leaning, his attitude towards the imperial family is throughout one of such fulsome adulation that the author deteriorates into a toady; and this without, so far as we know, the excuse which may be offered for the flatteries of his contemporary Paterculus, on whose personal notice war had forced some of the admittedly able traits in Tiberius. Valerius’s invocation had described the reigning emperor as one “whose heavenly foresight guarantees a kindly fostering care for the virtues about which I am to speak”; and he delights to note that Tiberius has nobly united the blood of the Nerones with that of the Livii (in ortum salutaris principis nostri conflueret).[179] Again, he makes allusions to the blessings of contemporary life under an excellent emperor;[180] but his enthusiasm embraces the whole kith and kin of the Caesars—they are heavenly luminaries risen from the time-honoured Roman training.[181] So Julius Caesar is mentioned or addressed in terms of religious adoration, well seen in the apostrophe[182] Tuas aras tuaque sanctissima templa, Diue Iuli, ueneratus oro, ending with an artificially balanced reference to the assassination: “Then burst forth the parricidal act of those whose design to subtract thee from the number of mankind involved thine addition to the conclave of the gods!” Elsewhere Caesar’s good qualities are declared to have given him the entrée into heaven, and his repurchase from pirate captors in earlier days is noted as a strange transaction on the part of Fortune; for then she ordained that a small ransom should buy back “the brightest star in the universe”: why, then, should ordinary men complain concerning Fortune, if she does not spare even the Caesars, “sharers in her own divinity”?[183] This commendation of Caesarism lasts up to the end of the work:[184] now the author couples Julius and Augustus as patrem et filium ... diuinitatis fastigio coniunctos;[185] now it is on Augustus that he concentrates attention;[186] now on the palace, as a hallowed abode—ad Augustam domum, beneficentissimum et honoratissimum templum.[187] Sycophany reaches its acme of enormity in his shameless association of Chastity with the marriage-bed of the princess Julia.[188]

In another way the narrowness of Valerius’s outlook is discernible. He is given to moralizing, a habit which in itself might afford a thinker opportunities for philosophic criticism of men, conduct and events. As it is, the actual pronouncements cannot hide the shallowness of the author’s intellect. His denunciations of luxury, partly perhaps sincere and usually justifiable, are also partly perhaps suggested by conventional sententiae within the cognizance of all educated Romans. These reflections, many of them second-hand or ready-made, constitute practically all his philosophy. He takes few steps towards scientific history. Eagerness to make a point renders him indifferent to healthy doubt; for his aim is to teach, if not history, at least rhetoric, by examples.[189] With almost a fabulist’s fondness for pointing a moral, he enjoys conveying lessons on the degeneracy of his fatherland. He has praise for the old-fashioned probitas and continentia once under censorial scrutiny and by him regarded as the righteousness that strengthens a nation—quid enim prodest foris esse strenuum, si domi male uiuitur?[190] Incidentally his protests afford glimpses of social history. He remarks on the advance in luxury at Rome since the days when Rufinus, an ex-consul, was struck off the senatorial roll for acquiring ten pounds’ weight of silver plate;[191] and he glances at the contemporary craze for building-sites more extensive than the farm-lands of Cincinnatus.[192] So, too, after dating the growth of Roman pleasure-seeking from the close of the Second Punic War and the conquest of Macedon, he contends that the abrogation of the Oppian law regulating the expenses of women was the thin end of the wedge which made an opening for greater extravagance in adornment.[193] Another passage emphasizes the spread of luxurious customs within a single generation—cuius adulescentia priscos mores uidet, senectus nouos orsa est.[194] Occasions are fastened upon to inculcate venerable saws on the “riches of him who hath no desires” (omnia nimirum habet qui nihil concupiscit), or on the necessity of checking vice at the start (neque enim ullum finitur uitium ibi ubi oritur).[195]

His reflections, however, are not confined to the topic of effeminacy; for there is a wealth of general truths and half-proverbial sayings. They have the pointed expression suitable for clinching an argument or adorning a speech: e.g. “Necessity makes the most effectual hardening for human weakness” (humanae imbecillitatis efficacissimum duramentum est necessitas), or “There is a standing antipathy between valour and poltroonery” (sic enerues animos odisse uirtus solet).[196] Similarly, of Theramenes’s bravado in toasting his enemy Critias out of the very poison he had been sentenced to drink, “To face punishment with such ease is assuredly to free oneself from punishment” (profecto est supplicio se liberare, tam facile supplicium perpeti);[197] of the harm done to oneself by indulgence in angry passion (dolorem cum inferre uult, patitur);[198] or of the altogether admirable bravery that comes from true philosophy (illa uehemens et constans animi militia);[199] or yet again, of the vital interconnexion between home and country.[200] Among more elaborate passages of this reflective cast is one (with a typical mixture of metaphors) upon the fleeting nature of human blessings:

Too perishable and frail, too much resembling the toy rattles of children, are your so-called human strength and human wealth. Their rising tide is as instantaneous as their ebb is sudden: at no place and in no person do they stand firmly fixed to steadfast roots; but, driven hither and thither by the wayward blast of fortune, they miserably plunge in an abyss of disaster those whom they have raised aloft and who are now deserted by an unforeseen retreat. And so things which by their loss double the bitterness of the hardships inflicted ought to be neither considered nor called blessings.[201]

To sum up, although he is superstitious, uncritical, time-serving and in his moralizing somewhat hackneyed, yet Valerius is not to be denied credit for protesting against luxury, whether in an independent spirit or from sympathy with the emperor’s policy; and occasionally his genuine appreciation of the greatness of Rome may condone his rhetoric.

This leads to a consideration of his style. Wearing the characteristic guise of the period, it is rhetorical to the verge of bombast; it is metaphorical; it is, as we have seen, given to sententiae; and marked by artifice especially in its penchant for the balanced and epigrammatic. At his briefest he does not hold us—the curt paragraphs allotted to some illustrations are little better than a catalogue; and at times he is himself conscious of the defects attendant upon this mode of treatment.[202] Many examples are incidents compressed from such authors as Livy and, it must generally be added, spoiled in the compressing. How much more effective, for instance, and dramatic is Livy’s handling of the trick whereby a Roman cheated a Sabine out of a cow intended for a sacrifice to bring good fortune![203] Still, justice compels the admission that sometimes Valerius relates a story both briefly and well—particularly where there is a neat dialogue to introduce. Such merits, however, as he has fail to raise his conglomerate of anecdotes into an aesthetic whole.

The influence of the rhetorical schools dominates his poetic and exclamatory vein, and not seldom beguiles him into turgidity. A piece representative of his occasional touch of poetic fancy follows his story about the symbolic wheat-grains heaped by ants into the mouth of the sleeping infant, Midas:

To the ants of Midas I incline with justice and reason to prefer the bees of Plato; for the former proved harbingers of a prosperity perishable and frail; but the bees foretold prosperity solid and everlasting, when they placed the honey inside the lips of the little child asleep in his cradle. On hearing of what had befallen, the interpreters of prodigies declared that from his mouth should flow a dulcet eloquence unparalleled. Yet to my thinking it was not on Mount Hymettus, fragrant with thyme blossom, that these bees fed, but on the Heliconian mountain-slopes verdant with learning of every kind, and so by the inspiration of the goddesses they instilled into a noble genius the sweetest nourishment of the most exalted eloquence.[204]

Uncurbed by artistic repression, he indulges too freely in the exclamatory. This tends to inflation, and through over-employment becomes wearisome. Take the outburst (O spectaculum admirabile!) on the preparations for carrying out the sentence of scourging passed by the dictator Papirius upon his insubordinate master of the horse; or the apostrophe to the dictator Postumius, who adjudged his own son to death for disobedience to a military command.[205] Touching the Macedonian envoys to Rome, who volunteered to carry the funeral bier of Aemilius Paullus, the author exclaims:

Twice did Macedonia show our city, Paullus, that you were an illustrious man; during your life, by its spoils; on your death, by its shoulders![206]

It is a forced point made at the expense of simplicity. The section on the praises of poverty ends in characteristic tones:

Why then do we lacerate with daily invective a moderate fortune, as if that were an especial hardship for mankind?... Let us rather rise in spirit and with the memory of the olden times refresh our souls enfeebled by gazing upon money; for by the hut of Romulus, and by the modest dwellings of the ancient Capitol, and by the everlasting hearths of Vesta, content to this day with earthen vessels, I swear that no riches can be preferred to the poverty of such men![207]

If the passage were not so declamatory one might accept the suggested implication that the author’s means were moderate; as it stands, its autobiographic significance may be doubted.

Akin to the rhetorical element in Valerius are the copiousness and boldness of his metaphors. Their free introduction without a semi-apologetic uelut or quoddam or ut ita dicam, if un-Ciceronian, is in a stylistic sense more modern. The metaphors may be violent, or overdone, or actually mixed. One of many instances occurs in the contrast between Euripides and a self-confident contemporary proud of his powers in rapid composition:

The writings due to the fertile rush (fertilis cursus) of the one have collapsed without reaching the first turning-posts of memory (intra primas metas memoriae); the work of the other, a product of the lamp and of the hesitating pen, shall be borne with the full sails of fame along the passage of all time.[208]

Again, the degeneracy of Scipio’s son is “a birth of darkness from the lightning” (Di boni, quas tenebras ex quo fulmine nasci passi estis!);[209] and the break in the even tenour of Polycrates’s happiness is thus expressed: “Once only did he change countenance, shaken with a very brief jolt of sadness” (semel dumtaxat uultum mutauit perquam breui tristitiae salebra succussum).[210]

The balance so representative of his time is a favourite device in summing up illustrations, as inimicorum existimatione punitus, suo iudicio finitus (of the death of Theramenes), or ita alteri tectum mendacium, alteri ueritas aperta finis uitae fuit,[211] or in his prologue to Book I, “the other gods we have received, the Caesars we have given” (deos enim reliquos accepimus, Caesares dedimus). In a later book he remarks that the difference between the poet Accius and Julius Caesar lay in books not busts (ibi uoluminum non imaginum certamina exercebantur), while of Virginius resolved to deliver his daughter from the designs of Appius Claudius he says: puellam occidit pudicaeque interemptor quam corruptae pater esse maluit.[212]

His artificiality is largely due to the inveterate habit of hunting for effective contrasts, and to a passion for the epigrammatic in expressing facts and reflections.[213] Overreaching his aim, he constantly falls into far-fetched conceits. Some of these smart sayings are as heartless and tasteless as the headlines of certain modern newspapers. Take his comment on the intended result of the punishments inflicted upon Romans who had surrendered to a force of slaves: the object was, he says grimly,

that those who had been lured by the desire for life into permitting runaways richly deserving crucifixion to set up trophies over them, those who had not blushed to have the ignominious yoke imposed upon their own liberty by the hands of slaves, should now find that their share in the light of day could be embittered, and should now have a manly longing for that death of which they had felt a womanish dread.[214]

Here the final antithesis between effeminate timuerant and uiriliter optarent is singularly unnatural and strained. He is scarcely less artificial when he declares that “from the gallant wounds” of Cato of Utica “flowed more glory than blood,” and that by falling on his sword he taught mankind “how the upright should prefer honour without life to life without honour.”[215] The tendency resembles Dryden at his earliest and worst, and the riot of conceit during one phase of English literature in the seventeenth century.

No less in the narrower aspect of vocabulary and constructions does the Latin of Valerius Maximus bear the stamp of the Silver Age. His prose shares the fondness noticeable in Phaedrus’s verse for abstract turns of expression. As Phaedrus uses maiestas ducis for “the Emperor,” so Valerius uses mea paruitas for “my humble self.”[216] This liking for the abstract, conjoined with abundance of metaphor, contributes to give his phraseology a more modern ring than the strictly classical Latin idiom has. When Marius is described as hostile to the upholders of ancient lineage, Valerius merges such persons in the abstract term uetustas, and the incompetent warriors who belittled successful men risen from lowly origins are grouped under the phrase militaris ignauia.[217] He refers to Aemilius Lepidus despatched by the senate to be a guardian for a young Egyptian prince as amplissimique et integerrimi uiri sanctitatem.[218] In similar fashion, he mentions “men who have slipped into this deviation (of luxury) unknown to old-world temperance,” where a simpler and earlier style of Latin might have said “unknown to our temperate ancestors.”[219]

As might be expected, new words rise into prominence and old words are used in changed senses. For example, he appears to favour sugillare, which, like sugillatio,[220] is a Livian word—a significant point when it is remembered that Livy marks the transition between republican and Silver Latinity.[221] Valerius gets the unusual and “post-classical” word uaframentum (“a trick”) into his head at VII. iii. ext. 2, and repeats it in the fourth and seventh paragraphs of the chapter. Indeed, he is given to this repetition of words and expressions which capture his fancy. Symptoms of the change coming over the language may be detected in his invention or acceptance of fresh meanings and fresh usages. Thus he widens the metaphorical use of words: e.g. Cimonis incunabula opinione stultitiae fuerunt referta (VI. ix. ext. 2) is a more artificial employment of referta than in Cicero’s uita undique referta bonis (Tusc. Disp. V. xxxi. 86). The adjective numerosus, too, appears in its late Latin sense.[222] Nor are his constructions those of stricter days. As in Phaedrus, persuadere is used personally in the passive;[223] and infinitives are joined freely with verbs which in the Golden Age took a dependent ut and subjunctive.[224] In all such linguistic matters Valerius is as symptomatic of his age as when he serves the needs of disputants and declaimers, or makes his verbal obeisances before imperial authority. So, while he is not a thinker even to the limited extent that Paterculus is, while he is casual in investigation, superficial in comment, and too often showy in style, yet, as a literary landmark, he possesses historical importance sufficient to justify an attentive examination of his work.

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III. VELLEIUS, CURTIUS AND HISTORY

Minor historians of the period—Cremutius Cordus, Aufidius Bassus and others.

Velleius Paterculus—Ancestry—Interest in literature and in the East—Military service under Tiberius—Scheme of the compendium—Obligation to be brief—Sources—Subjective factors of interest in Velleius—Symptoms of Silver Latin—The rhetorical element—Epigrammatic antitheses—Literary conceits—Merits of style—Sententious sayings—Defects and merits as historian—Subjective historical method—Character-pieces—His picture of Tiberius—The close on an imperial note.

Q. Curtius Rufus—The puzzle of his identity—Probable date under Claudius—Eight surviving books—The attractive theme of Alexander the Great—Curtius, Plutarch and Arrian in relation to sources—Want of critical method and historical grasp—Gift of narration—The hero’s character—A psychological study in deterioration—Fortune and Fate—Stoicism in Curtius—Freedom from superstition—Rhetorical element—Some features of style.

MINOR HISTORIANS

Under Tiberius, Caligula and Claudius history did not greatly flourish: under Nero, we shall find, it flourished still less. There are only two historians of note in the period—Velleius and Curtius. Before considering them, we may pause on a few minor names. Cremutius Cordus illustrates the danger of historical composition in the early Empire, especially if a writer gave offence to a powerful minister like Sejanus. Cremutius was charged with praising Brutus in his annals, and with calling Cassius “last of the Romans.” He starved himself to death, and the senate had his books burned in A.D. 25, though Tacitus says copies were hidden and published.[225] Similarly, the downfall of the republic and the initial phases of the Empire occupied Aufidius Bassus in Tiberius’s reign. He gave attention to Rome’s wars with the Germans, and his work is cited and continued by the elder Pliny.[226] The elder Seneca’s lost historical work has been recorded as containing an account of the end of Tiberius. A later group includes Caligula’s victim Gaetulicus, who governed Germany for ten years, but whose writings on Germans and Britons may, like other works of his, have been in verse;[227] then, in Claudius’s time, Servilius Nonianus who wrote on recent as well as contemporary history, and Bocchus who treated chronology and the marvels of Spain.

VELLEIUS PATERCULUS

The circumstance that C.[228] Velleius Paterculus[229] was quaestor elect in A.D. 6[230] warrants the inference that his birth took place not later than 19 B.C. After A.D. 30, the year of the consulate of M. Vinicius, to whom he dedicated his history and whom he often addresses in its course, we know nothing of Velleius; and, indeed, he seems to have played no prominent part in the reign of Tiberius, for throughout the sixteen years which elapsed after his nomination as a candidatus Caesaris for the praetorship in the year of Augustus’s death[231] we have no information about him. Then comes the fact that he published his book; and as to his biography the rest is silence. For us, therefore, his activity lies within narrow limits of time: its outstanding feature, that which determined his outlook on history, was his career in the public and especially the military service during the first fourteen years of the Christian era.

He came of a family which, as he is at pains to remind his readers, had been strenuous in civic life and in the profession of arms. Dealing with the Italian franchise war, he declares that mistaken modesty (uerecundia) shall not deter him from doing justice to the part played by an ancestor (atauus), Minatius Magius, who in turn was the grandson of a notable Campanian, Decius Magius. This more distant forbear figures in Livy’s pages at Capua as a stubborn advocate of fidelity to Rome despite the threats of Hannibal.[232] The author’s grandfather, C. Velleius, a praefectus fabrum, had been honoured by Pompey and remained so keen an anti-Caesarian that he ran himself through with his sword, when by reason of years he felt unable actively to support Tiberius Nero (the future emperor’s father) after his defeat by Octavian: “I shall not defraud my own grandfather,” says Velleius admiringly with a Johnsonian emphasis, “of a testimony which I should give to a stranger.”[233] He notes elsewhere that his father, like himself, had been praefectus equitum.[234] Again, he records the assistance given by Capito, his uncle (patruus meus), a man of senatorial rank, to Agrippa in prosecuting C. Cassius after the assassination of Caesar.[235] To his brother, Magius Celer Velleianus, he makes several allusions, chronicling his recognized ability as lieutenant-general under Tiberius Caesar in Dalmatia and his association with the author both in attending Tiberius’s triumph, and later as one among “Caesar’s candidates” for the praetorship.[236]

Concerning his formal education we have scant knowledge; yet, considerable rhetorical training may be argued from his artifices of style; and he must have imbibed an interest in books and authors, to judge from his pronouncements on Homer, Hesiod and Cicero, and from excursuses on literary men of the Gracchan, Ciceronian and Augustan periods.[237] About the beginning of our era he was a young officer (tribunus militum) who had gained preliminary insight into military life under Vinicius’s father in Thrace and Macedonia, and was next on service in the East.[238] Such service doubtless provided a stimulus towards writing the now mutilated compendium upon Oriental and Greek affairs near the outset of his history. Elsewhere, too, we meet transient suggestions of Oriental colour and memories—as when he recalls his good fortune in beholding a gorgeous Durbar held on an island in the Euphrates between C. Caesar and the Parthian monarch;[239] or when there flashes on his inward eye the pleasant recollection of “so many events, places, nations and cities” of the East;[240] or when he recounts Antony’s luxurious chariot-ride through the streets of Alexandria as the new Father Bacchus, “ivy-wreathed, clad in a golden robe, thyrsus in hand, and buskins on his legs;”[241] or again when, con amore, he devotes picturesque touches to his description of the extravagant mummery of Antony’s quondam friend, Plancus, who acted Glaucus “naked and painted sea-green, wearing a chaplet of reeds on his head, dragging a tail after him and crawling upon his knees.”[242]

But no experience left upon his history so distinctive an imprint as his military service under Tiberius. This meant contact virtually for eight years on end with a powerful and able personality.[243] For his commander’s greatness he conceived and expressed unbounded enthusiasm in an almost eighteenth-century sense of the term. It is an enthusiasm which amounts to a bias for Tiberius in particular and for the Caesars in general. The question of the character of Tiberius may be with greater appropriateness raised in considering Tacitus; but at least more light and shade might have been expected from Velleius, if, as an actual observer (spectator), he aimed at producing an impartial and realistic picture of the man. What one can say without prejudice is that he had abundant opportunity for estimating the merits of Tiberius as a general, and that both the author and the subject of his eulogies were men of proved military experience. The future historian went out as a cavalry officer with Tiberius to Germany in A.D. 4; two years later, when quaestor-elect, he took charge of reinforcements despatched from Rome to Tiberius, who was then coping with the danger threatening Italy from Dalmatia and Pannonia; and after the quaestorship at Rome he acted as legatus under him.[244] “What battalions of the enemy did we not behold in that first year!” exclaims Velleius proudly.[245] The ultimate surrender of Pannonia confined war-like operations to Dalmatia, where Velleius and his brother were assisting Tiberius.[246] Scarcely was Dalmatia pacified in A.D. 9 when the appalling disaster to the Roman arms under Varus in Germany summoned Tiberius thither to the rescue of imperial fortunes, or, to follow Velleius’s artificial expression, as the patronus who took up the case of his client, the state: “the never-failing champion of the Roman Empire undertakes the cause so familiar to him.”[247] With Velleius’s attendance at Tiberius’s triumph in the winter of A.D. 12-13 the record of his career as a soldier fittingly closes.

It is natural that, like Livy on a larger scale, Velleius should treat with greater fulness events nearest to his own day; but his treatment of early history would look less disproportionate, if his compendium had come down in more perfect form. As it stands, Book I has lost its opening; and only eight chapters have survived to represent the affairs of the East and Greek and Tyrian enterprise before the foundation of Rome. An allusion to the rape of the Sabine maidens is interrupted by a gap of well-nigh six hundred years in the narrative, which is resumed in the second century B.C., at the period of the second Macedonian war. Then ten extant chapters of Book I include the fall of Carthage and Corinth, an account of Roman colonies, reflections on the multiplicity of geniuses at certain epochs and remarks on Roman literature and oratory. Book II, in 131 chapters, ranges over more than a century and a half from Tiberius Gracchus to Tiberius Caesar. The last definite historical allusion is to the emperor’s bereavement by the death of the dowager-empress Livia, which happened in A.D. 29.[248] The tone of encomium adopted towards Sejanus would prove, even if we did not know the date of Vinicius’s consulate, that the work ended before his fall in A.D. 31.[249]

In reviewing the literary and historical qualities of Velleius, one must keep before one the intentionally compendious nature of his work. Readers are indeed not likely to forget it; for he repeatedly pauses to explain that he is in haste, harping on the point till it sounds like a refrain among his themes. This brevity was a kind of literary fashion, comparable with that to which Phaedrus lays claim at the same period. Velleius seems desirous of illustrating the merits of his compendious system when applied to a serviceable digression upon Roman colonies (non inutili rerum notitia in artum contracta).[250] At another time, he feels impelled to digress on the recurrence of periods distinguished for special talent, although he is sensible that the “headlong rapidity” of his composition, “like the revolution of a wheel, or the downrush of a torrent, admits of no halt, and involves rather the exclusion of necessary details than the acceptance of the superfluous.”[251] Similarly he realizes the necessity laid upon him by his limits to deal succinctly with even such a subject as the greatness of Pompey (operis modus paucis eam narrari iubet);[252] while the greatness of Caesar forces him to stop despite his urgency (quamlibet festinantem in se morari cogit.)[253] Again, he offers a condensed account of the outbreak of the Civil War in contradistinction to the copious volumes of others;[254] almost apologetically he regrets that his promise to be brief involves racing over details in Caesar’s campaigns against the Pompeians;[255] with equal regret he exclaims that the boons conferred upon the world by the victory at Actium could not have justice done them in so rapid a survey as his abridgement;[256] and elsewhere he asserts the impossibility of describing adequately the magnificence of Octavian’s triumphant return to Rome “even in the compass of a regular history, let alone a work so abbreviated as this.”[257] But it is in connexion with Tiberius that he becomes still more insistent upon his obligation to be concise; thus, he promises to discuss in a different work Pannonia, Dalmatia and other countries subdued by Tiberius;[258] he reserves, presumably for the same intended work, the circumstances attending that prince’s withdrawal from Rome into temporary seclusion at Rhodes;[259] he looks forward to conveying an impression of the popular joy over his adoption “in that regular history” (in illo iusto opere); so too with further Dalmatian and Pannonian victories and the Varian disaster which called Tiberius to Germany.[260] The alarming effect of Augustus’s death he avers to be beyond description: “I have no leisure in so precipitate a narrative to portray it, and he who has leisure is unable to do it.”[261] All this may savour of protesting too much on the part of one who would be brief; yet it has its importance as a proof that he had a conception of, and perhaps yearnings after, a different method of writing history; while, to some extent, his confessedly compendious aim disarms criticism or, at least, palliates certain blemishes and omissions. It is beside the point to reproach him with sketchiness when his plain object is to be sketchy; nor is it surprising that in his hurry he should be at times careless in composition, awkward in structure, conversational in tone, and given to tasteless repetition in word and phrase.[262]

In a work which makes no pretence to be exhaustive we cannot expect an enumeration of authorities. Some sources he does, in fact, mention; others we are left to infer. Discussing the foundation of Capua and Nola (in a manner half suggesting that he belonged to the former town),[263] he cites vaguely “some authors,” and then descends in particular upon Cato, whose Origines he is certain to have found useful, and from whom he dissents “with all due deference to his carefulness.”[264] He alludes to the Annales of Hortensius as authoritative upon the Italian war of Sulla’s time; to an inscription, in proof of a religious ceremony performed by Sulla; to ampler details “in the larger volumes of others” who had treated the outbreak of the Civil War; and to the autobiographic memoirs of Augustus.[265] The effect of the annalists’s method is observable in his inclusion of a survey of Greek colonization; and we may readily suppose, since the works of Atticus, Cornelius Nepos and Pompeius Trogus[266] were available, that he made use of them. Livy, who was republican enough to be dubbed “Pompeian” by Augustus, would not possess the pro-Caesarian enthusiasm likely to commend him to Velleius.

The curtness of the specially compendious parts does not conduce to interest, and for this reason one welcomes occasions when summary gives place to slightly more spacious digressions such as those on colonies, on early Roman literature and the natural law regulating the emergence of genius, on literature and oratory at the Gracchan period, on great authors of the Augustan age, on Roman provinces, and on the boons of the Augustan régime.[267] But it is only fair to say that the general effect compares favourably with that of most compendium-writers in Latin. For instance, his compendium is of much greater force and individuality than that of Florus. Velleius can at least be spirited and interesting (even if over-enthusiastic), when he relates his personal impressions of Tiberius. This may be due to an excess of that subjectivity which is a characteristic of the Silver Age; but it has the merit of winning attention. He leaves us under no misapprehension as to his likes or dislikes. He is no democrat: he hates the ‘pernicious’ agitations of the Gracchi; he detests Marius and Cinna and the tribune of the people, Manilius (semper uenalis et alienae minister potentiae);[268] on the other hand, he is full of admiration for Marcus Cato, while his affection for the Caesars emerges at every opportunity, continuously from the chapter recording Octavius’s birth, on through the appreciative comparison of Julius Caesar’s achievements in Gaul with the subsequent exploits of Tiberius, until he reaches those passages where he sounds the praises of the princeps or of his minister Sejanus.[269] Now, while these antipathies and sympathies imply partiality, they by no means make the historian less entertaining. It is one thing to be trustworthy, and another to be readable. Besides, as we shall find, the very style, faults notwithstanding, has a good deal of colour and variety: it is no dead monotony in its choice of words and ideas.

Already in his prose there are evidences of the change which had set in towards Silver Latinity. Traces of such tendencies may be remarked in Livy,[270] but in Velleius they are more prominent; for the old massive and, on the whole, straightforward periods are largely replaced by briefer sentences where pointed phrase and emphatic contrast argue a style at once disdainful of absolute simplicity and ambitious of attracting notice to the manner of expression. Where he attempts the long sentence, the inferiority of his literary architecture becomes patent: it is often an ill-built fabric of clumsy patchwork. Thus, the character of Julius Caesar is portrayed in a rambling sentence where the first word “hic” is separated from the closing verb “elapsus est,” to which it is nominative, by nearly 130 words forming an overcrowded series of subordinate clauses and phrases.[271]

The evolution of Latin prose during the first century A.D. is so closely wrapped up with the educational training undergone by writers, that one instinctively looks for traces left by the rhetorical school upon Velleius. They are not far to seek among his plentiful exclamations and interrogations: e.g. the apostrophe denouncing Antony for Cicero’s murder:

“You gained nothing, however, Mark Antony (for indignation bursting from heart and spirit compels me to depart from the regular form of my history), you gained nothing, I tell you, when you paid the hire for cutting off a divine gift of utterance and a most noble head, or when you procured for a ghastly wage the assassination of a man once the preserver of the commonwealth, once a consul so illustrious! You robbed Cicero on that day of a life of trouble, of an age in the yellow leaf, of an existence more pitiable under your domination than death could be under your triumvirate; but his reputation, the renown of his actions and words, these, instead of taking away, you enhanced. He lives and will live in the memory of all the ages; and as long as, whether framed by chance or providence or by what means soever, there shall endure unharmed this fabric of the universe, which he almost alone of Romans could see in the mind’s eye, could grasp with his genius, and could illustrate by his eloquence, so long shall it carry the praise of Cicero as the companion of its own continuance. All posterity will admire his writings against you, and will curse your conduct towards him!”[272]

The poetic element in his diction is an allied feature; and another kindred symptom is an inordinate fondness for superlatives.[273]

But it is his habitual quest after the striking and epigrammatic that classes Velleius’s Latin as definitely Silver.[274] His antitheses—and some are excellent—would impress one more, if they were fewer; their frequency palls, and amid such an embarrassment of material, one need but select the examples first to hand. “Scipio, by the destruction of Carthage and Numantia, freed us from the dread of the one, and the insults of the other” (excisa Carthagine ac Numantia ab alterius nos metu, alterius uindicauit contumeliis).[275] A little more elaborate is the studied contrast of nouns, adjectives and tenses observable in the following:

ne quid usquam malis publicis deesset, in qua ciuitate semper uirtutibus certatum erat, certabatur sceleribus, optimusque sibi uidebatur qui fuerat pessimus.[276]

Another chapter contains a balanced summary of the rivals’ position at the outbreak of the Civil War:

alterius ducis causa melior uidebatur, alterius erat firmior; hic omnia speciosa, illic ualentia: Pompeium senatus auctoritas, Caesarem militum armauit fiducia,[277]

in reading which one cannot help thinking of Lucan’s famous antithesis concerning the same struggle, Victrix causa deis placuit sed uicta Catoni, and the fuller comparison between the protagonists which follows that line.[278] So one might quote the distinction drawn between Brutus and Cassius, or the portions of the chapter on Actium where he piles antithesis upon antithesis.[279]

Sometimes his artificiality lies in straining after an affectedly remote way of conveying a mental picture; and such literary conceits may or may not be combined with the trick of antithesis. He introduces a fanciful idea of the solace which the outcast Marius might derive from the ruins of Carthage, each contemplating, each comforting the other (cum Marius aspiciens Carthaginem, illa intuens Marium, alter alteri possent esse solacio).[280] When Catulus asphyxiated himself, he found a death rather after the wish than the design of his enemies (mortem magis uoto quam arbitrio inimicorum obiit).[281] Similar anxiety to compass a smart saying animates the conceit implying that Catiline’s end had cheated the executioner: “gallantly fighting, he yielded up the breath of life already due to capital punishment” (fortissime dimicans quem debuerat supplicio spiritum reddidit).[282] So of Sextus Pompey, the son of the pirate-crusher turned pirate, as Velleius must remind us: so, of the heroic lady, who “bringing about a premature death by swallowing live coals was compensated for death by deathless fame” (uiuo igni deuorato praematura morte inmortalem nominis sui pensauit memoriam).[283]

His prose style demands attention, both as a type of its period and as the subject of strictures which have sometimes been too unqualified. Although nowise comparable to the lactea ubertas of Livy, yet a careful examination will show that it cannot fairly be dismissed as absolutely meagre. There are qualities which recall Sallust: and that must be imputed to Velleius for literary virtue. His very artifices save him from baldness, while, as a military author, he displays, with all his faults and affectations, more sense of style than, for instance, the continuators of Caesar.[284]

His semi-proverbial sayings, which read like so many condensations of a reflective wisdom, rather heighten than otherwise one’s opinion of him as an author. Such pronouncements as the following imply, not absolute invention, but a faculty of insight and expression: “rivalry nurtures talent” (aluntur aemulatione ingenia); “continuance at the height of perfection is hard” (difficilis in perfecto mora est); “what one cannot overtake one ceases to follow” (quod assequi non potest sequi desinit); “precedents do not stop where they start” (non ibi consistunt exempla unde coeperunt); “men are indulgent critics of themselves” (familiare est hominibus omnia sibi ignoscere); “any port in a storm” (exitialem tempestatem fugientibus statio pro portu); “ease is the deadliest foe to discipline” (res disciplinae inimicissima otium); “great tasks need great helpers” (magna negotia magnis adiutoribus egent).[285] On at least two occasions he propounds the ancient notion that those predestined to calamity are forced upon foolishness by some higher power, be it “God” or “Destiny’s force that none may wrestle against.”[286]

For his historical method at large profundity cannot be claimed. He does not appreciate great movements in history; he does not exhibit the essential nexus or continuous evolution between periods; and though his eye to their relationship in time is noticeable in the frequent insertion of a date, even this laudable habit is discounted by inconsistencies in chronology. On the other hand, if he shows no keen discernment for the causal link conjoining ages, he can grasp and criticize certain political, social or economic developments which constitute differences between them: thus, he remarks forcibly upon the increase at Rome of civil broils (II. iii.), aestheticism (I. xiii.), luxury (I. xi., xv.),[287] and house-rents (II. x.). And while the vital significance of great movements is not made luminous, he at least realizes the duty of assigning causes, as in his speculation upon the contemporary emergence of great geniuses (I. xvii.). It adds to his merits that he recognizes the play of human passions and in virtue thereof remains no mere chronicler, but becomes a discerner and recorder of motives—as in the case of the outbreak of the Civil War, where he accounts for Pompey’s attitude, or where he states the respective objects of Pompey, Caesar and Crassus in forming their triumvirate.[288] If, then, it may be admitted that Velleius writes history without deep penetration into what Teuffel calls “the internal connexion of things”;[289] yet it is going too far to say that “his interest centres upon individuals only.” For, surely, his actual search for motives must relate the individual to his surroundings; and, as indicated, he is not entirely neglectful of the need for tracing causes. Besides, his serviceable digressions, already glanced at, arise expressly from his sense of the inferior force of isolated details in history as compared with their effect when grouped together.[290]

With these qualifications, however, the truth remains that his history is written mainly from a personal or subjective standpoint; and its cardinal method is the biographic, with some of the merits and most of the defects entailed. It is, then, not highly scientific or philosophic: on the other hand, though Velleius believes in the universal sway of fortune,[291] there is in such a character-loving method little danger of representing historical figures as mere puppets controlled by some indefinable but apparently inexorable “Will of the Age.” With him prominent men are no tools of impersonal forces, but living actors who logically deserve moral blame or commendation when their qualities come to be weighed. So, through his own interest in character, he increases his readers’ interest in his personages and seldom leaves a doubt as to his opinion for or against a man. Strong sympathies, indeed, may be consistent with a claim to be candid and dispassionate.[292] Velleius is, however, too enthusiastic to realize the extravagance of his praises. Bias has blinded the judge. Tiberius was doubtless an able soldier, but Velleius damages the emperor’s character by excessive eulogy. Perilously endowed with an inexhaustible capacity for laudation and an insatiable thirst for superlatives, he resembles a professional writer of testimonials in favour of the Caesars.[293]

The likes and dislikes are not confined to persons. He is almost Puritanic in his suspicion of art and wealth as detrimental to the community;[294] and yet this distrust of aestheticism does not conceal from him the crass ignorance (although he is too grave to see the humour) which Mummius showed in serving his celebrated notice upon the contractors for the removal of pictures and statues from Corinth to Rome, to the effect that any masterpiece lost must be replaced![295] He is scathing in his denunciation of proscription, and sarcastic on the tendency to minimize contemporary greatness and on homage rendered to high place.[296] Still, it is upon his character-drawing that one should focus attention. His briefer character-pieces, containing many neat strokes, include, in the first book, that of Scipio (xii.-xiii.); in the second, Marius (xi.); Mithradates (xviii.); Cinna (xxiv.); Cato, finely called “the very likeness of Virtue” (homo uirtuti simillimus, xxxv.); Clodius (xlv.); Curio, “a most ingeniously good-for-nothing person” (homo ingeniosissime nequam, xlviii.); Caelius, who resembled Curio and was not minus ingeniosissime nequam (lxviii.); Brutus and Cassius (lxxii.); Lepidus (lxxx.), Shakespeare’s “slight unmeritable man,” called by Velleius “the biggest of fools without a single good quality to deserve the long indulgence of fortune”; Maecenas, whose voluptuous effeminacy during leisure-hours is noted in otio ac mollitiis paene ultra feminam fluens, and his sleepless vigilance at an emergency in the no less striking words ubi res uigiliam exigeret, sane exsomnis (lxxxviii.). The sketch of Drusus comes later (xcvii.). Fuller portrayals are given of Pompey (II. xxix.) and Caesar (xli.). Still more elaborate is the character of Tiberius conveyed in different chapters; and to this picture we now turn, remembering that a complete estimate of the real Tiberius involves the attitude of Tacitus. Tiberius is introduced in a comparison with Julius and Augustus;[297] but we get our first historical glimpse of him when, a child of two, he lay in the arms of his mother Livia, then a fugitive from the troops of the man whose consort she was one day to be.[298] Really, however, he enters on Velleius’ stage in his nineteenth year, announced with a fanfare of praise as a quaestor of promise:—

“Tiberius Claudius Nero ... brought up on a system of the loftiest principles, a youth of high birth, good looks and imposing stature, thoroughly equipped with an excellent education and superior talents, who from the outset had awakened expectations equal to his present greatness, and even to the eye had proclaimed himself a prince.”[299] For almost forty chapters Tiberius is the dominating figure; but it is mainly his career previous to his accession which Velleius describes; for it is only in five closing chapters that he touches briefly on his reign. This brevity is the more disappointing in view of the account which Tacitus gives in the Annals; and those at least who accept it must charge Velleius with suppressio ueri. About twenty chapters are occupied with Tiberius as a soldier.[300] They contain material illustrative of his greatness, such as the indescribable enthusiasm for him as a general:—

The very sight of him drew tears of joy from the soldiers. They were all eagerness, with a sort of unexampled rapture in their salutation and a passion for touching his hand: they could not restrain themselves from immediately adding ‘Is it really you, General? Have we got you back in safety?’ and then, ‘I was with you in Armenia, General,’ ‘I was in Raetia,’ ‘I had a reward from you in Vindelicia,’ ‘I in Pannonia,’ ‘I in Germany’—a scene not to be expressed in words, and perhaps scarcely capable of winning belief.[301]

This forms an effective prelude to his military successes in Germany. Another impressive incident is that of the tall and aged German chieftain who in a native “dug-out” paddled half across the river between the enemy and the Roman camp to request the privilege of looking upon Tiberius.[302] Tiberius’s solicitude for the health of subordinates (his provision of an ambulance for sick officers is one illustration), and his self-discipline on active service, are among the admirable traits emphasized.[303] Apart, however, from handling his prowess, Velleius has ways of elevating his hero. He touches on Tiberius’s dignified leisure at Rhodes, the disturbing effect exercised upon the peace of the world by this retirement, the widespread joy over his adoption by Augustus, and his modest reluctance to accept imperial sovereignty.[304] Then, looking back from A.D. 30 over Tiberius’s years upon the throne, in a passage whose textual variations fortunately do not impair the sense, our author paints in couleur de rose his picture of the reign:

“Of the transactions of these last sixteen years, massed (ingerantur, Ellis; inhaereat, Kritz) as they are before the eyes and mind of everyone, who shall venture upon a detailed account? Our emperor secured the consecration of his sire not by authority, but by scrupulous reverence (non imperio sed religione); he did not simply give Augustus a divine title—he made him a god. Financial stability has been recalled to our public life and political disaffection cleared out of it (summota), as bribery has been from the elections, and strife from the senate-house. Justice, equity, industry, long buried and cumbered with mould (sepultaeque ac situ obsitae), have been restored to the state. There has been an enhancement of prestige for the authorities (magistratibus instead of militibus), of grandeur for the senate, and of dignity for the law-courts. Rioting in the theatre has been put down, and upright conduct has been either the aim inspired in all or a necessity imposed upon them: integrity is honoured and irregularities are punished. The humble man respects the powerful without fearing him, while the powerful takes precedence of a humbler man without despising him. When were provisions more moderate in price? When was peace richer in blessings? Spread over the regions of east and west and everywhere within the bounds of south or north, the Augustan Peace to the uttermost corner of the earth preserves men immune from the dread of brigandage. Accidental losses sustained not only by individuals but by cities are made good through the generosity of our prince. Cities in Asia have been repaired; provinces have been secured against the wrong-doing of governors. Office is the ready reward of merit; crime is certain to meet with punishment, even if it comes late. Influence is surpassed by a fair claim, and intrigue by desert; for our best of princes by his own practice teaches his countrymen to act aright, and while he is greatest in power, he is even greater as an example.”[305]

Later we read his panegyric upon Tiberius composed in exclamatory fashion:

“With what precepts did he equip his dear Germanicus and imbue him with the principles of campaigning in his own company long before he welcomed him back as the conqueror of Germany! What were the honours which he heaped upon his young manhood, when the style of his triumph corresponded to the greatness of his exploits! How often has he honoured the people with donations, and how willingly, when he could do it with the approval of the senate, has he made good a deficiency in a senator’s income without either offering inducements to extravagance or allowing honourable poverty to be deprived of dignity!... What a formidable war, stirred up by the Gallic chieftain Sacrovir and Julius Florus, did he suppress with a rapidity and a gallantry so marvellous that the Roman people found itself a conqueror before it was conscious of being at war, and the messenger of victory outstripped the news of danger! The highly alarming conflict in Africa, too, despite its daily increase in seriousness, was, under his auspices and direction, speedily laid to rest. What public works has he erected of his own (sua rather than suo), or in the name of his family! With what dutiful generosity, surpassing human belief, is he rearing a temple to his sire!... Anything that has at any time enjoyed eminent renown, he considers to have the claim of kindred upon his protection. With what liberality on other occasions, but, especially at the recent conflagration on the Caelian Mount, has he out of his own patrimony come to the rescue of the losses of people in every rank! How little are the public disturbed when, without the consternation involved in a levy, he organizes the raising of troops, a matter of prolonged and peculiar alarm!”[306]

Having thus belauded his talent for training youth in military science, his benefactions, energy, businesslike grasp, filial piety, and gift for organization, Velleius proceeds humbly to protest his wonderment that the gods should permit plots to be formed against so good a ruler, and to bemoan the sorrowful bereavements and shameful domestic trials which have befallen the emperor.

So the historian praises not wisely but too well. There is no whisper about unfair treatment of Germanicus to besmirch the spotlessness of the emperor: nor is there a suggestion of fault in Sejanus, for the powerful minister had not yet fallen. In the pages of Tacitus we look upon a different portrayal of the emperor and his times. But with Velleius all is right in the Roman world. As an old soldier he is unflinching in loyalty to his imperator. He could not belong to the political opposition. From the first warmly affected towards the Caesars, he shows his favourable attitude to the Empire in his sketch of the benefits conferred by the Augustan régime.[307] Consistently with this feeling of approval a sense of the continuity of Rome animates and dignifies his closing prayer. This is an appeal for national preservation and defence addressed to Jupiter of the Capitol, to Mars as author of the Roman name and mainstay of its power, to Vesta as warden of the ever-burning fires, and finally to all those majestic divinities who had conferred imperial destiny upon Rome:

Voto finiendum uolumen est. Iuppiter Capitoline, et auctor ac stator Romani nominis, Gradiue Mars, perpetuorumque custos Vesta ignium, et quidquid numinum hanc Romani imperi molem in amplissimum terrarum orbis fastigium extulit, uos publica uoce obtestor atque precor: custodite, seruate, protegite hunc statum, hanc pacem, hunc principem.[308]

Q. CURTIUS

A story is told about Alfonso V of Aragon and I of Sicily and Sardinia that once, when ill, he had Quintus Curtius’s narrative of the exploits of Alexander the Great read to him, and that the result proved to be more than relaxation; for the King was cured. This anecdote of a ruler in the fifteenth century notable for kindness to scholars who fled from Constantinople to escape the Turks is one which indicates the right approach to Curtius. He is to be read rather for entertainment than for exact instruction; yet, after all, this is to certify his possession of a considerable literary gift. The manuscripts give his name as Q. Curtius Rufus;[309] but details of his life are not forthcoming and his date is a matter of inference. There seems no way of settling his relationship to or identity with the Curtius Rufus[310] in Tacitus who was son of a gladiator, gained a triumph for overworking his soldiers at silver mines in Germany, beheld an ominous midday vision recorded[311] by both Tacitus and Pliny, and eventually became proconsul of Africa. It has been argued that, if he had been a writer, Tacitus would have mentioned the fact; that a proconsul might have been expected to be more proficient in military history than our Curtius is; and that an imperial official characterized by a “sullen sycophancy towards superiors” (aduersus superiores tristi adulatione) would not have been so independent in criticisms on Alexander’s arrogance, and on his courtiers’ subservience—“the perpetual curse of princes, whose power has been overthrown oftener by flattery than by foes.”[312] Plausible answers can be framed to each of these arguments; for example, it is unfortunately too innocent (and Sallust will serve as an instance) to assume that a writer’s morality is equal to his moralizing. But, all things considered, no absolute conclusion can be reached. Rather more satisfactory is the contention that he wrote under Claudius; for the two contemporary references[313] traceable in his work best suit that period. One arises out of the siege of Tyre, “now that prolonged peace restores all things, Tyre, reborn after her destruction, finds repose beneath the protecting clemency of Rome”; and the other contrasts the dissolution of Alexander’s dominions after his death with the happier condition of the Roman Empire:

“Rightly does the Roman people acknowledge a debt of safety to a prince that shone forth like a new star of the night which wellnigh proved our last: most truly it was his rising, not the sun’s, that restored light to a world in gloom (caliganti) when, deprived of their head, its members were in conflict and panic.” The most satisfactory explanation of the second passage is that it refers to the night in January, A.D. 41, when Caligula was murdered and Claudius found himself suddenly elevated to the throne; and the suggestion has been made that caliganti is a play on the dead emperor’s name. The “prolonged peace” of the earlier passage applies appropriately to the period up to 41: and if the historian is the Curtius Rufus given between Porcius Latro and Valerius Primanus in Suetonius’s list in De Rhetoribus, then the order of names would suggest a similar date.[314]

Of the ten books which Curtius composed on Alexander’s exploits, the first two are lost. Other gaps occur at the end of Book V and beginning of VI, and there is a break in the last book. Freinsheim in the seventeenth century wrote Latin supplements for the missing parts, drawing his material from many authors including Plutarch and Arrian. The eight surviving books narrate Alexander’s career from 333 B.C., when he was twenty-three and had reached Phrygia in his Asiatic expedition, up to his death at Babylon in 323 with the resultant confusion and rivalries. Falling short of first-rate history, the work is yet a wonderful and often enthralling pageant of adventure, diplomacy, barbarity, kindliness, privation, battle and sieges with “scapes i’the imminent deadly breach.” We need not read far in the existing Latin text before Alexander characteristically cuts the Gordian knot; and the will-power thereby displayed is soon triumphantly seizing the passes of Cilicia, winning the battle of Issus, and capturing the Persian queen and queen-mother (Book III.). Tyre falls after protracted siege-operations calling forth many inventions. In Egypt Alexander visits the oracle of Jupiter Hammon, is declared the god’s son, founds Alexandria, and on his return into Asia defeats King Darius at Arbela (IV.). The great cities of Babylon, Susa, Persepolis, fall into the victor’s hands, and Darius, to Alexander’s indignation, is murdered by two of his own commanders (V.). Oriental luxury increases its hold on the conqueror; and he has to face danger from conspirators (VI.). An emissary is despatched to kill Parmenio, his general in Media, whose son had been, on insufficient evidence, put to death for treason. Then Alexander carries his conquests into the heart of Asia (VII.). His murder of Clitus is the outcome of quarrelling over the wine-cups, and his domineering arrogance is depicted as on the increase. Besides, his espousal of an Oriental bride, Roxane, causes widespread disapproval. The next episode is the invasion of India, and a description of the country is attempted as a preliminary. The Indus is crossed and King Porus defeated (VIII.). After continued operations in the Punjaub, the army protests against proceeding further and Alexander reluctantly sanctions withdrawal. Nearchus is told off to investigate the Indian Ocean (IX.). Mutinous outbreaks hamper Alexander’s schemes of universal conquest and at Babylon he dies. After much scheming and counter-scheming Perdiccas divides the lands overrun by Alexander as provinces to be ruled by different generals, and Ptolemy transfers the embalmed body of the monarch to Alexandria (X.).

The barest summary of such achievements serves as a reminder, though not as an explanation, of the greatness which the ages have conceded to Alexander. This unique personality remains an enigma: how much was due to personal ambition or actually to blood-lust, how much to thirst for adventure, how much to any definite or indefinite notion of disseminating Greek culture through the absorption of many ancient sovereignties into one far-extended empire, historians have found it hard conclusively to decide. But though the motives are beyond exact measurement, and though they palpably changed amidst the growing brilliance of repeated triumphs, the general results are unmistakable. Alexander’s was a career destined to alter the course of civilization, and open a new epoch for the world. Naturally, then, history has always felt the attraction of his name. Professional writers accompanied his expedition and, like modern war-correspondents, employed their eyes and ears to advantage; official records were kept of Macedonian affairs, of campaigns by land, of coasting voyages, and survived long enough to be documents for later research; so that, between authors with war experience and authors of the study, a gigantic literature was composed on the conqueror in the Alexandrian epoch. The theme in turn fascinated Rome. Livy, jealous of the Macedonian’s fame, makes a patriotic digression[315] to argue that he would not have had the success against Rome that he had against Persia and India: and Livy’s contemporary, Pompeius Trogus, concerned himself with Macedon, as is plain from the epitome by Justinus. Some realization of the adventurous element in his career prompted the academic exercise recorded by the elder Seneca “Alexander deliberates whether he should cross the ocean.”[316] Finally, the extent to which the glamour of his life fascinated the Middle Ages is shown in Chaucer’s words:

The storie of Alisaundre is so comune That everie wight that hath discrecioun Hath herd somewhat or al of his fortune.

Curtius, therefore, entered upon a great inheritance. Yet he cannot be said to have made full use of his available sources. Only in two passages[317] does he name authorities: in both Clitarchus is mentioned, and in one of them Timagenes as well. It is possible indeed that he drew from Clitarchus (c. 300 B.C.) mainly through Timagenes (c. 55 B.C.). But, supposing he drew directly, Clitarchus was not a first-rate source; for it is an erroneous inference from Diodorus[318] and Strabo that he actually served under Alexander. Further, he was turgid rather than veracious, and Cicero[319] thinks poorly of him, counting it against Sisenna that he was content with imitating Clitarchus, an inferior model at the best. In many respects, Curtius seems to have less historical method than the two authors who not long after treated the same subject in Greek, namely, Plutarch and Arrian. Plutarch (born c. A.D. 40) at the outset of his Life of Alexander records his consciousness of the mass of material available, but is careful to add that he is writing “not histories but biographies.” All the same, he shows more critical acumen than Curtius, and does not necessarily accept, on a disputed point, the opinion of the majority. Arrian (c. A.D. 90-170), the latest classical historian of Alexander, possessed qualities which made him on the whole the best. His training in Stoic philosophy under Epictetus, his experiences as a soldier, his ability to write on Tactics, and the good sense with which he amply fulfils the promise of his proem to rely upon the evidence of Aristobulus and Ptolemy, both of whom served with Alexander—all contribute to the success of his story.[320]

Most of Curtius’s defects lie on the surface. His geography is not infrequently at fault, his accounts of military operations are less than satisfying, his understanding of politics is far from profound, and his speeches are not individualized, but sound the same rhetorical note irrespective of variations in nationality and character. Virtually he renounces all claim to be critical when, relating the tenacity wherewith an Indian dog even with amputated limbs holds on to a lion, he declares,[321] “Certainly I transcribe more than I believe; for I cannot bring myself to affirm what I doubt, nor to suppress what I have received.” In connection with the plain speaking of Scythian envoys[322] who reproached Alexander for rapacity, Curtius professes to give it accurately (incorrupta), adding “though their speech be despised, our integrity ought not to be.” Laudable enough so far; but faithful reproduction of selected material (if indeed it was selected with discrimination) would for him preclude actual invention, and yet freely permit literary embellishment. Such negation of any high standard of critical inquiry is in keeping with his weakness of historical grasp. He takes no synoptic view of the meaning and results of Alexander’s career: thus, although he does contrast the posthumous dissolution of his power with the unity of the Roman Empire,[323] he never attempts to estimate the debt of civilization to the wars of Alexander.

Notwithstanding such limitations, he displayed literary virtue. Above all, he can tell a story well. He had an inkling of the romance inherent in so intrepid an invasion of the gorgeous but perilous East, and his incidents are telling, sometimes positively exciting. Rhetorical erudition prompts him to over-indulge in descriptions: so that he enters with zest into details of difficulties overcome—a river reckoned impassable, a jungle wellnigh impenetrable, a rocky hill-fort to all appearance unscalable, the hazards of snowdrift and frostbite, or of sun-scorched wastes. He shows, however, to most advantage where he can best import dramatic movement; e.g. in V. xii., the treacherous conspiracy against Darius carried out at night when the monarch is deserted by his guards and a portentous silence broods over his tent; VI. vii.-xi., the plot against Alexander, involving its thrill of intrigue and discovery, with the pleading for life before the army, the hideous tortures to extort confession, and a final spice of mystery concerning the guilt or innocence of Philotas; VII. ii., the camel-ride of Polydamas disguised as an Arab across the desert, and his fulfilment of Alexander’s crafty scheme of murdering Parmenio without trial as he reads a forged letter purporting to be from his son Philotas; VII. xi., the scaling of the rock-fastness in Sogdiana; VIII. i., the fatal quarrel at the banquet when Clitus, annoyed at Alexander’s boastfulness, quotes Euripides on Greek kings who monopolize the glory of others and then with drunken licence goes on openly to denounce Alexander’s murder of Parmenio and to mock at Alexander’s claim to be a son of Zeus; VIII. vi., the scheme of the pages of the bedchamber to assassinate the king after a carousal, the long wait for the expected chance, and the melodramatic interruption of their plan by a woman reputed to be a crazed prophetess; and, in IX. ix., the struggle against an unforeseen tide from the ocean.

Another element of interest is furnished by Curtius’s conception of his hero’s character. From one standpoint the work is a psychological study in progressive deterioration caused by prosperity. Here is a favourable sketch of Alexander which comes in the first of the surviving books:[324]

“It is not easy to describe, apart from their inborn reverence for their monarchs, how far the people surrendered themselves to an admiration for this monarch in particular, or, you might equally say, burned with affection for him. To begin with, it looked as if he could essay nothing without heaven lending assistance: as luck was everywhere at his side, his very rashness had turned to his glory. Then, even his years were scarcely ripe for achievements of such moment, and yet they were more than enough, for they threw a halo round all his exploits; and things that are commonly thought insignificant not infrequently find their way to the common soldiers’ heart. He took his physical exercise among them; his dress and style were little different from the ordinary man’s; while he possessed true military energy. Such were the natural endowments or mental skill that had secured for him an equal share of affection and respect.”

Henceforward the author’s task is to display the effect of constantly triumphant warfare on such a character: and his method throughout is to record noble and chivalrous qualities in Alexander, but at the same time to produce the impression that gradually, under the influence of success, luxury and drink, the king yielded oftener to arrogant, arbitrary and cruel impulses, so that Jekyll-like he found it increasingly difficult to return from his inferior to his better nature. Hence a sort of alternation between good and bad strikes the reader as the tale is unfolded. The demoralization of the army at Babylon (V. i. 36-39) is a significant presage; still the conqueror feels qualms (V. ii. 13-15) about setting his feet on a table at which Darius used to dine, and he shows tactful respect for the feelings of the captive mother and queen of Darius (V. ii. 18-22) when he apologizes for his unfortunate, and to Persians impossible, suggestion that the royal ladies should work at woollen clothes like those from Macedonia. Similarly the moderation which marked one part of his career (V. iii. 15, moderationem clementiamque regis quae tunc fuit) becomes evident in his mercy to enemies at the intercession of Darius’s mother. Then falls a dark shadow: his fine traits of endurance, activity, honour and clemency are sullied by his insuperable passion for wine, and the drunken advice of the harlot Thaïs leads to the wanton burning of Persepolis, for the royal guests “rise from table intoxicated to fire a city which they had spared when they had arms in their hands” (V. vii. 5, surgunt temulenti ad incendendam urbem cui armati pepercerant). In the next book, Curtius pronounces Alexander a victim of luxury; “the man whom Persian arms had not broken was defeated by vice” (VI. ii. 1, quem arma Persarum non fregerant, uitia uicerunt); nevertheless he is still considerate towards captives (ibid.), and, out of courtesy to Artabazus, an old Persian in his ninety-fifth year, orders a horse for both, forgoing his well-known preference for marching on foot (VI. v. 5). It is noted that his outward appearance disappointed the Amazonian queen (VI. v. 29), as it afterwards did the Scythian envoys (VII. viii. 9), being in both cases “not at all proportionate to his reputation.” Meanwhile, Oriental tastes and habits (VI. vi.) were driving him in the direction of ostentatious pomp. Luxury, however, did not prevent the king from sharing the privations of his men. The same chapter (VII. v.) which relates his merciless barbarity at Branchidae relates also his self-abnegation, despite the pangs of thirst, in declining water meant for some young men in the army. Yet this temperate warrior became an insufferable boaster in his cups, lauding his own exploits and belittling his royal sire Philip (VIII. i. 22). True, he undergoes agonies of remorse after his hasty murder of Clitus (VIII. ii.); but now that Clitus’s unbridled tongue has led to his doom, frankness in presence of the king becomes impossible (VIII. iv., sub fin., post Cliti caedem libertate sublata). Alexander succumbs to the charms of Roxane, because “amid fortune’s subservience to him, he could less control his desires now” (VIII. iv. 24, minus iam cupiditatibus suis imperantis inter obsequia fortunae). Scheming to be proclaimed a god, he resents Macedonian objections (VIII. v.). “His greed for glory and insatiate lust for fame grew intolerant of all obstacles” (IX. ii. 9, auaritia gloriae et insatiabilis cupido famae nihil inuium nihil remotum uideri sinebat). The chronicle reveals a grotesque chaos of pleasure and pain: immediately after the riotous Bacchanalian march of Alexander’s army in the East, Curtius remarks “This pomp had the executioner at its heels, for the satrap Aspastes already mentioned was ordered to be put to death: so cruelty is no bar to luxury, nor luxury to cruelty” (IX. x. sub fin.). A similar strain is heard in the last book: “He began to be impetuous in executing punishments, and likewise in believing ill of people. Prosperity, it is plain, has power to alter one’s nature, it being a rarity for anyone to be sufficiently guarded in respect of good fortune” (X. i. 39-40). In the final summary of his character (X. v. 26-37) we read “it is plain to all fair judges of the king, that his merits were due to nature, and his faults to fortune or his time of life,” and later in his estimate Curtius elaborates this. For on the one hand he attributes to “fortune” failings such as Alexander’s claim to equal the gods or his exaction of divine honours—sins of pride, in fact, generated by his victories; and on the other hand he views his irascibility and intemperance as slips of youth which time would have abated. “It must, however, be allowed that while he owed a very great deal to merit, he owed more to fortune, whom he alone of mortal men held within his power.”

This raises a fundamental question touching the historian’s conception of Alexander’s whole career.[325] The ascription of virtues to “nature” and faults to “fortune” takes us but a little way towards explaining a great man. The antithesis resembles Plutarch’s account of Alexander’s success as due to fortune (τύχη) combined with generalship (Alex. xx. 675), and it does not obviously fit into the Stoic view which Curtius elsewhere professes to be his solution for the enigma of life. “Fortune” indeed counts for much with Curtius. It was what we should call sheer luck that the enemy did not attack and crush Alexander’s troops while they revelled on Mount Meros. “It is incontestable that glory is oftener the gift of fortune than of merit” is the comment (VIII. x. 18, quis neget eximiam quoque gloriam saepius fortunae quam virtutis esse beneficium?). So, too, of a week’s Bacchanalian progress when the revelling host might have been an easy prey, “Fortune who ordains the credit and value of things here also turned a military scandal into glory” (IX. x. 28, fortuna quae rebus famam pretiumque constituit ...). Alexander’s aims against Spitamenes were secured without exertion on his part, because “fortune, never weary of favouring him, managed the matter without his presence” (VIII. iii. 1, fortuna indulgendo ei numquam fatigata ...)—a personification like that implied in the “homage paid by fortune” (obsequia fortunae, VIII. iv. 24) which, as already shown, rendered him less master of his passions when he met Roxane, the satrap’s daughter. The king’s quick decision to segregate the Macedonian grumblers over Parmenio’s death proved, like everything else, fortunate for him, because they always afterwards fought gallantly to remove the stigma (VII. ii. 37, consilium temerarium forsitan ... sicut omnia alia felicitas regis excepit): and in his last adventure oceanwards “the one consolation of his rashness was his unfailing success” (unum erat temeritatis solacium perpetua felicitas). Little wonder, then, that Alexander should believe in his felicitas (VII. vii. 28) or his fortuna (fortunam cui confidat, VII. ix. 1, fortunae suae confisus, VII. xi. 27) like Julius Caesar after him.

In some of these instances Curtius may appear to imply little more than luck. But logically he is no believer in chance. He is a fatalist in his view of human life and is clearly influenced by Stoicism: so that his “fortune” in the last resort would be merged in “fate.” The inevitability of fate is a thought repeated in various contexts: of Alexander’s risk of a wound he says, “but to my mind, fate is unavoidable” (IV. vi. 17, sed, ut opinor, ineuitabile est fatum); of Darius’s incapacity to take advice that would rescue him, he says, “he is doomed to his own lot” (V. xii. 8, destinatus sorti suae), and of an intrigue to ruin an innocent man, “destiny, whose appointment is inevitable, was at hand” (X. i. 30., fatum cuius ineuitabilis sors est appetebat). His theory of history is made explicit apropos of the failure of Patron, the Greek, to save Darius by warning him against the treachery of Bessus:

This incident may afford amusement to those whose conviction it is that human affairs roll on driven by blind haphazard. I favour the belief that every series of events follows by immutable law its course as the result of eternal ordinance and the nexus of mysterious causes long since preordained.[326]

An aspect of Curtius’s thought commonly overlooked is a certain enlightenment of mind which argues his emancipation from some of the superstitious obsessions of antiquity. He condemns as unacceptable to the gods the ancient Tyrian sacrifice of a freeborn boy (IV. iii. 23): he remarks, on the recourse to a soothsayer about an accident to a crow, that Alexander’s “mind was not without its touch of superstition” (IV. vi. 12, ut erat non intactae a superstitione mentis), and on the consultation of the oracle of Hammon that “the prophet had set himself to flatter” (IV. vii. 26, uates in adulationem compositus). He dubs the employment of diviners for a military problem as “the outcome of a superstitious mind” (V. iv. 1, a superstitione animi). A noticeable example occurs in the introductory description of the judicious Cobares who, after reminding the Persian satrap Bessus incidentally that a dog’s bark may be worse than its bite and that still waters run deep, advocates coming to terms with Alexander: “there was at the feast one Cobares, of Median nationality, more renowned for his profession of the magical art (if it really is an art and not a jest at the expense of the silliest) than for any knowledge thereof” (VII. iv. 8). Plainly Curtius would have one take note that such things mean weakness: it was when ill and confronted with serious menaces that Alexander, “who had, since Darius’s overthrow, given up the consultation of soothsayers and prophets, fell back on that superstition—the delusion of mankind” (VII. vii. 8, humanarum gentium ludibria). It must have given Curtius satisfaction to record later how Alexander dismissed the warnings of a fortune-teller as unseasonable hindrances (IX. iv. 27-30).

Speeches and descriptions yield Curtius his readiest outlet for rhetoric. Not offensively overdone, it is most patent in the sententious remarks introduced into narrative and speeches alike. Of gallant fighting in a tight corner he says “necessity, I hold, sharpens even cowardice, and despair is often the cause of hope” (V. iv. 31, ut opinor, ignauiam quoque necessitas acuit et saepe desperatio spei causa est). When Alexander tried to win indulgence for his Oriental luxury by generous gifts, the comment is, “but, I hold, to the free the price of slavery is unwelcome” (VI. vi. 11, sed opinor, liberis pretium seruitutis ingratum est). The story of a poor scion of a royal race brought from garden-work to a throne calls forth an almost Juvenalian cynicism: “the cause of his poverty was as usual—honesty” (IV. i. 20, causa ei paupertatis, sicut plerisque, probitas erat). Two instances may be given from a speech: “Those bear afflictions best who conceal them” (V. v. 11, optime miserias ferunt qui abscondunt) and “no man loyally loves one he disdains, for calamity is querulous and prosperity proud” (V. v. 12, nemo fideliter diligit quem fastidit, nam et calamitas querula est et superba felicitas). Some of the inserted epistles have a rhetorical ring, as in Alexander’s haughty words to Darius: “I know both how to conquer and how to consider the conquered ... when you write to me, remember that you are writing not only to a king, but to your king” (IV. i. 10-14).

As regards the technique of his prose, Curtius’s sentence-endings show a distinct preference for a cretic followed by spondee or trochee, a rhythm which perhaps no contemporary employs so often. An ending about half as often used—though still comparatively common—is the double cretic; next to that, the cretic followed by a tribrach, and then the double trochee.[327]

His style in general is influenced by Sallust, Virgil and, most of all, by Livy. But there is in him a sameness of expression for similar situations which becomes monotonous, and marks his inferiority in prose to Livy’s brilliant variety. One cannot read far without noticing his pluperfect indicatives, his employment of a future participle in Greek fashion to denote purpose, his loose ablatives absolute, his repetition of the connectives ceterum and quippe. Some rhetorical constituents of his style have already been illustrated. Yet it must be conceded that neither mannerisms, nor the poetic strain in him debar him from being generally clear: not seldom he is even vivacious.

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