IV. CELSUS: MELA: MISCELLANEOUS LEARNING
Cornelius Celsus—Contents of his encyclopaedia—The eight books, De Medicina—Sources—Relation to his times—Common Sense—Curiosities of Celsian medicine—Style.
The first Roman Geography—Pomponius Mela—The coasting method—Some aspects of his treatment—Faults and merits—Sources—Enlivening touches—Description of customs and marvels—Mela on tides—Rhetorical elements and his rhythm—Miscellaneous learning of the age.
CELSUS
The biography of A. Cornelius Celsus,[328] the encyclopaedist, is a blank; and, in the absence of details, inquiry must rest satisfied with the guarantee of his gentile name through its occurrence in Columella and the elder Pliny.[329] Celsus was a senior contemporary[330] frequently mentioned by Columella, who belongs to the time of Claudius. Pliny’s statement that Julius Graecinus made use of the agricultural work of Celsus suggests that at least the books on farming were written before the close of Tiberius’s reign; for Graecinus was executed under Caligula about A.D. 39.[331] The subsequent books on medicine may be presumed to precede A.D. 47, when Scribonius Largus published among his prescriptions a cure for quinsy which Celsus declares he has not found in medical treatises.[332]
The encyclopaedic habit of Cato and Varro[333] descended to Celsus. His labours included agriculture, medicine, military tactics, rhetoric, jurisprudence and philosophy—all subjects of traditional importance in the higher education of a Roman. To each he devoted several books;[334] but the one surviving portion is the De Medicina in eight books. His military writings, whether in the encyclopaedia or in separate pamphlets composed as late as Nero’s reign, were consulted by Vegetius and Lydus.[335] The books on philosophic systems, in which (Augustine informs us) the aim was rather exposition than refutation, may have been included in the encyclopaedia; but he evidently wrote other treatises on philosophy.[336] Quintilian, who bestows modified praise upon Celsus’s style in discussing philosophy, cites his opinions on rhetoric, frequently to disagree with them.[337] This is not unnatural when it is remembered that Celsus’s cursory treatment of rhetoric would not be calculated to satisfy a specialist like Quintilian; and it may be guessed that Celsus’s rhetorical portion was in fact eclipsed by the fuller treatment of the great professional authority and so sank into oblivion.
Regarding the order of parts in this encyclopaedia, we can be certain that the five books De Agricultura opened the work, and that the De Medicina followed, forming Books VI to XIII[338] of the whole corpus. Detached from the encyclopaedia, they possess the unique importance of representing the healing art in classical Rome. At the close of an introduction, which is an epitome and criticism of prevailing tendencies in medical science, Celsus summarizes his own position and announces his plan of handling first rules of health and next phenomena and cures of disease. To this end Book I is largely of diet; II of symptoms and therapeutics; III of fevers; IV of internal diseases, considered in order from the head to the joints of the feet; V and VI of drugs and ailments for which they are specifics (with numerous prescriptions); VII and VIII of surgical operations.
His sources are mainly, but not entirely, Greek; and among those the influence of Hippocrates and Asclepiades is pre-eminent. The authority of the former is recognized in the preface to Book II; his teaching on massage, Celsus notes, was in nowise superseded by the more diffuse Asclepiades; and again his magnanimous avowal of a professional mistake is admired, but without any such encomiastic fanfaronade as to justify the nickname “Hippocrates’s ape” sometimes given to Celsus.[339] Asclepiades is also in high favour: his books on preservation of health and on general remedies are cited; his cure for a tertian fever is approved for its rejection of the faulty method of Cleophantus; he is quoted in contrast with Erasistratus to show that doctors differ about the treatment of hemorrhage or about the stress to be laid on diet.[340] Erasistratus is another medical authority often mentioned.[341] Prescriptions are ascribed to an imposing array of practitioners—especially in the pharmacy of the fifth book.[342] Further, the punctiliousness with which Celsus introduces Greek synonyms indicates the origin of much of his reading.[343] Yet it would be a mistake to suppose that he confined himself to the older Hellenic sources. He had the work of recent practitioners, both native and foreign, like Cassius or Themison, to draw from; he had his own observation, though this plays no great part; so he introduces, sometimes with emphasis, his individual views and criticisms, and throughout displays a practical common sense which is typically Roman.
Some of these points demand attention, as illustrations of the author’s relation to his times. Indeed, it is not surprising that Celsus, who in another field incurred the disapproval of Quintilian because of an “excessive passion for novelty,”[344] should have in medicine shown himself abreast of the latest tendencies and discoveries. Thus, though he does not always agree, he takes pains to record Themison’s advice as something modern;[345] and in his preface remarks on the attitude of his followers (Themisonis aemuli) to the vexed question of theory versus practice. Cassius, again, is singled out for characterization as “the most talented leech of our age,” and is elsewhere mentioned as the proud discoverer of a remedy for disease of the larger intestine.[346] The opening remarks by Celsus upon the diverse views of contemporary schools, and subsequent comparisons between medical practices of his own day and those of predecessors, prove that he was alive to advances or at least changes in the healing art.[347] Sometimes he inserts original examples, such as the method of inducing perspiration pursued near Baiae.[348] At other times his personal opinions or results of his observation are stated with a dogmatism that would do credit to wide practical experience.[349] Scaliger, indeed, believed that Celsus practised; but this has been stoutly denied, and one notices nothing in him that a vigilant eye and a perusal of medical books might not have yielded. It is difficult to credit that, if he had been a practising physician or surgeon, he would have refrained from quoting cases which he had attended. Undoubtedly, however, he gains in interest by combining an individual note with a continual suggestion of his environment. It is Celsus himself who speaks when the increased recourse to bleeding is noted as a novelty, and especially when he proceeds with his cautionary remarks on its unsuitability in certain cases and its murderous results in others.[350] Like most contemporary writers, he feels impelled to stigmatize the two great moral and hygienic perils of the Empire—idleness and luxury.[351] As a whole, his background forms for modern readers an attractive index to other days and other lands. The risks to health in autumn are naturally important to one writing in Rome: the mention of a siesta at midday comes from a southern clime: the careful description of the way to extract an arrow revives pictures of antiquated warfare: and the stress laid upon reading aloud as an exercise beneficial or injurious in certain bodily affections takes the reader back to the declamatory recitatio which once played its great part in the Roman social and educational system.[352]
The common sense noticeable in Celsus is in part an inheritance from earlier medical systems and ancient human experience; but in part an individual trait of tone and attitude. The wisdom evident in the preface must be credited to the author himself; for there, after an able statement of the issue between empirics and theorists in medicine, he holds the balance fairly, and votes for a combination of experience (usus, experimenta) with science (rationalis ars). Proposing, therefore, a uia media as likeliest to lead to truth, he sagely argues that the great doctors of the past were not made doctors by scientific investigation independently of practice, but were by the fusion made greater doctors still.[353] Among enlightened points in the same introduction are his freedom from the superstitious notion that diseases originate in divine wrath (a supposition logically denounced as a barrier to medical research and progress); his insistence upon the quest for true causes; and the emphasis laid upon anatomy and dissection. Celsus is indeed scientific enough to state principles which were ultimately to antiquate and supersede him: thus, under the head of dissection, he advocated the acquisition of a knowledge destined in due time to convict him of errors; for his anatomy, when he comes to it, is not beyond reproach. His remarks on vivisection are interesting. While he states the argument for experimenting upon condemned criminals, he also states with sympathy, and even some tenderness, the contrary argument on behalf of those surgeons who aim at “cure, not kill” (prudentem medicum non caedem sed sanitatem molientem), who recognize that the chances of the arena or war or an affray often provide a view of internal organs during life without dependence upon the scalpel of some “ruffian bandit of a doctor,”[354] and who are content “to learn through pity what others have come to know by fiendish cruelty” (idque per misericordiam discere quod alii dira crudelitate cognouerint). His final verdict is that vivisection is superfluous, but dissection imperative.[355] On many matters his counsels may involve no more than an ability to profit by ordinary human experience and medical tradition; yet, they are counsels which require continual restatement and are violated in all ages. Instances may be found in his rules for preservation of health, in the limits assigned to bodily exercise, in the reduction of food after hard work, in the advantages of a rest cure,[356] or in the physiological restrictions incumbent upon the scholar’s burning of the midnight oil—restrictions, more salutary,[357] if less romantic, than the enthusiasm of the student in Bailey’s Festus,
When night hath set her silver lamp on high, Then is the time for study.
With equal plausibility he advocates the benefits of change: it is good for a cough, while the climate that made one ill is the very worst for the invalid:[358] similarly a voyage is recommended for consumption. Noteworthy acumen, too, marks his insistence on the fundamental position that strong probability is enough to justify a belief in the power of medicine.[359] There is, however, no attempt to overestimate the value of drugs; for he bears in mind the curative efficacy of nature,[360] and in another connexion declares the best medicine to be diet seasonably given.[361] Other illustrations of sound sense are his reminder of the tact requisite in a physician about to take an invalid’s pulse, his admission that the confident quack may succeed with another’s patients better than with his own (quos ratio non restituit temeritas adiuuat), and his suspicion of too rigid a theory concerning “critical days” during an illness as being apparently due to the misleading influences of Pythagorean numbers upon medical calculations.[362] Throughout his work he gives the impression that he set himself in a business-like manner to illustrate the aims which Asclepiades ascribed to a capable physician and which Celsus approves as an ideal uotum, namely, “to effect a cure with safety, despatch, and pleasantness” (ut tuto, ut celeriter, ut iucunde curet).[363]
The person likely to reap the maximum of enjoyment from Celsus would be a medical man with historic instincts and a liking for straightforward Latin. A perusal will not recompense the seeker after either elaborate style or unquestionably sound advice; but to any reader passably acquainted with modern medical theory and practice his pages offer much in the way of interest, and occasionally of entertainment. Celsus represents the stage of medical knowledge attained in the early Empire, and the regimen and prescriptions found in his work indicate the method of treating or maltreating Roman citizens unlucky enough to need professional attendance. In a system so many centuries prior to the germ-theory of disease or to antiseptic and anaesthetic surgery, all sorts of quaint precautions and quaint remedies are advocated. There is a difference of atmosphere which, once felt, exerts a fascination, partly in spite of and partly in virtue of its errors. It is true that his teaching on anatomy leaves much to be desired; but the lay reader soon forgives mistakes such as those regarding the spleen.[364] His surgery takes one back to a period ages before chloroform or ether, when one essential merit of the operator was intrepidity sufficient “to resist being influenced by the patient’s shrieks into hurrying more than the case demanded or cutting less than was needful,”[365] and when, in an operation for cataract, the head had to be held fast to prevent a movement which might be permanently fatal to the eyesight.[366] Among curiosities of Celsian medicine may be cited blood-letting for the spitting of blood,[367] and a queer precaution against headache, to wit, the avoidance of moonlight particularly before the conjunction of sun and moon.[368] Some pronouncements on diet are extraordinary—pork is the lightest and beef the heaviest of foods (leuissima suilla est, grauissima bubula).[369] His recipe for quinsy is to eat a young swallow salted, burned, and administered as a powder in hydromel; and his comment here implies by contrast that, as a rule, book-knowledge rather than practice is the basis of his pharmacy—“although I have not read this in medical treatises, still I believe it ought to be included in this work of mine.”[370] The powdered liver of a fox[371] for asthmatic troubles is comparable to the roast mouse still recommended in parts of Norfolk for whooping-cough. Not the least interesting are those prescriptions which, like so many survivals from primitive magic-healing, belong to what may be called excremental medicine. Prominent ingredients in his pharmacopoeia are not only such as deer’s marrow, bull’s suet, hog’s lard, but also the ordure of various animals. Lizard’s dung and pigeon’s blood are among the purgatives; and the dung of lizard, pigeon, ring-dove, swallow and sheep among caustics.[372] As an encyclopaedic summarizer of previous and current medicine, Celsus could not be expected to go beyond his own age; but at least this may be urged that his emancipation from a number of earlier superstitions and his sensible attitude on the combined merits of theory and practice were far-off presages of a time when medicine should abandon the copious blood-letting and clysterizing of coprophagous patients. An illustration of the mark left by Celsus upon medicine was the implicit claim to have eclipsed him which was made in the name “Paracelsus” assumed some four centuries ago by the clever Swiss alchemist and quack Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim. If in the twentieth century Celsian medicine lies under a cloud, it is mainly because, notwithstanding his professed anxiety to give fair-play to both theory and experiment, he does not convince practising doctors that he founded his work sufficiently upon observation. Book-learning and the experience of others do not, from the standpoint of science, counterbalance this absence of a commanding personal authority.
We have seen that Quintilian, who would be most prone to appraise Celsus by his work on rhetoric, did not consider him an author of eminent genius. Without, however, exalted merit, Celsus had a sanity which is reflected in his style. One aspect of his good sense is that gift of straightforward expression which differentiates him from the artificiality of contemporary Latin. He states a plain fact or counsel or argument in a plain way. Some, indeed, of his readers, attracted by the elegance of his brief sentences, have declared that more store should be set by his Latinity than by his medicine. It is an elegance which consists in no literary adornment beyond what comes of lucid, facile and neat exposition in sound Latin.[373] There is almost nothing in the way of literary allusion. Quite exceptional in this respect is the passing reference to the poets’ accounts of Ajax or Orestes as illustrating the creations of a disordered imagination.[374] Apropos of swallow’s blood prescribed for an injured eye he mentions the fabula which told how the old birds healed the eyes of their young with a herb, but fabula here may mean popular tradition rather than the literary fable. Signs of the usages of Silver Latin occur: igitur begins sentences in the manner of Sallust and Tacitus: frequens is used in its later sense: and occasionally he shows the tendency to use abstracts for concretes.[375] But he keeps clear of contemporary mannerisms. When he uses balance, as in his opening words, it is not so much for ornament as for clearness;[376] and herein he presents a strong contrast to such writers as Velleius Paterculus and Valerius Maximus. A well-sustained example of his style is his introduction, where he is free to discuss general subjects at some length and to state his views. In it, the sentences are short and direct—well adapted, without artifice, to the subject in hand. He is not concerned to avoid the repetition of a word or phrase by hunting after remote equivalents. Once, indeed, he seems to hesitate on a matter affecting his choice of words: it is, however, a hesitation animated not by rhetorical motives but by those qualms of modesty in expression which led many cultured Romans to avoid the Stoic outspokenness in “calling a spade a spade” and to reject even innocent collocations of sounds capable of conveying indecent suggestion. The question from this latter standpoint is discussed in the well-known letter by Cicero where he furnishes a salutary motto in the opening phrase amo uerecundiam.[377] It will be readily gathered that the difficulty for Celsus arises not in collocations of sounds, but in terms which he feels he must use in certain delicate parts of his subject.[378] His quandary is to secure clearness with a due observance of the dictates of modesty and the requirements of medicine.[379] Finally he decides in the interests of health that his treatment must be open and exhaustive; and it is noteworthy that, while he regards Greek terms in such connexions as more acceptable, he prefers in fact to use Latin words.
One may conclude with a passage on the duties of a physician, where the clausulae of two sentences recall the Ciceronian esse uideatur:
In the case of these (external injuries), it is beyond everything imperative upon a medical man to know which are incurable, which involve difficulty, which greater ease in treatment. For the wise doctor’s duty is, first, to decline handling a patient ill beyond the possibility of recovery, and so avoid the appearance of having killed one who was already cut off by his own fate; next, where there is serious apprehension—falling short, however, of absolute hopelessness—to inform the relatives of the person in danger that the case is risky, so that, if his skill is baffled by the malady, he may not produce the impression either of ignorance or of deception. But, just as this is the fitting attitude for a wise man, so on the other hand it is worthy of a charlatan to magnify a trivial case in order to produce the impression of a greater achievement.[380]
POMPONIUS MELA
Pomponius Mela[381] makes at least this claim on attention that his is the first Roman geography which has come down. A study holding a central position between natural sciences such as physics, astronomy, geology, zoology on the one hand and human sciences such as history, anthropology, ethnology, sociology on the other, might reasonably have been expected through its multifarious orientation to appeal to the didactic tendencies of Roman writers. One might have expected that upon the physical, mathematical and ethnographical foundations laid by the Greeks, imposing edifices would be raised by a people whose commercial and military interests opened the world to them, and that the continuous expansion of Rome beyond Italy would stimulate geographical inquiry. No doubt Varro did contribute to the subject, and Caesar, at any rate, incidentally. But for generations systematic investigation remained in the hands of Greeks and made little advance upon the knowledge attained in the times of Alexander and Alexandria. It is significant, then, that at a date when the Romans held the greater part of Britain, they had added scarcely anything to the facts learned by the voyage in northern waters made by Pytheas of Massilia about 330 B.C. Much later, indeed, when Pompey’s operations against Mithridates opened out the lands in Asia between the Black Sea and the Caspian, the opportunity for recording fresh geographical results had been seized not by any Roman but by the general’s Hellenic comrade Theophanes from Mytilene. Later still, the newly consolidated Roman Empire of the Augustan era received a systematic description from a Greek of Pontus, the renowned Strabo, who, friendly to Rome as he was, entertained but a poor opinion of Roman geographers, remarking that they imitated Greeks without much success, and without bringing to the subject much love of inquiry.[382] These considerations render such Roman works on the subject as exist the more noteworthy; and time has left to us only two, first, the Chorographia (or, as it is sometimes called, De Situ Orbis) by Pomponius Mela, largely an unoriginal compendium, and later, the portions in the Natural History of Pliny which handle geography in no very scientific manner, though their author has too high a regard for truth to acquit Roman writers of falsification or carelessness in their investigations.[383]
Pomponius Mela was, he tells us,[384] a native of Tingentera in Spain, not far from Gibraltar. A slight balance of evidence[385] suggests that he wrote his description of the world under Claudius and that he refers to that emperor and his triumph of A.D. 44, rather than to Caligula, when he says: “About the nature of Britain and the nature of her sons it will not be long before more definite and better ascertained details are given. Closed for ages, Britain is now being opened up by the greatest of emperors,[386] victorious over tribes not only unconquered before his own day, but actually unknown. The evidence of its peculiarities which he aimed at in his campaign, he brings home to render clear by his triumph.”[387]
The method of Mela was prompted by the coasting survey of early travellers, and the tradition of such works as the partially genuine Periplus or “Cruise” of Scylax[388] in the fourth century B.C. In the first two of his three books Mela follows the Mediterranean seaboard from west to east along the southern shores and then back from east to west along the northern shores: the third book is left for countries outside this scheme which, though it could not possibly be exhaustive, still with a certain appropriateness had for its hinge the Mediterranean, the ancestral home of geography. Thus, his brief introduction over, Mela deals in Book I with the main divisions of the world, and, after a summary description of Asia, Europe and Africa, turns to a particular description, starting with Morocco, and from Egypt and Arabia proceeding by the coast of the Levant, Aegean, and Black Sea round Asia Minor until in Scythia he reaches Europe. In Book II the course is in the main westwards from European Scythia by Thrace, Greece, Italy, Southern Gaul to Spain with a digression on islands of the Mediterranean suggested by the “Gades insula.” Book III is concerned with coasts and countries outside the Mediterranean. The ocean brings him to the subject of tides, and he next follows the outer seaboard of Spain, proceeds by Gaul and the Baltic (his Codanian Gulf) to Germany, Sarmatia and Northern Scythia, then notices the islands of the ocean (including Britain and Thule), India, the Persian Gulf, and by a short circuit of Africa works his way back to the part of Mauretania bordering on the Atlantic, so that he ends where he began.
The Mediterranean (nostrum mare) is viewed as a continuous sea contracting at the Hellespont (Dardanelles), expanding in the Propontis (Sea of Marmora), narrowing again in the Bosporus, but once more widening into the Black Sea. The method of an imaginary voyage has the disadvantage of greatly neglecting interior countries (e.g. in Asia, Assyria); and Mela, in the later part of his work, feels compelled to leap eastwards to seas which shall secure him contact with India and Ethiopia. Being a Spaniard, he treats Spain with comparative fulness. In some other cases he holds that the reputation of a city or region dispenses him from elaborate description: Athens, for instance, is too famous to require notice (clariores quam ut indicari egeant Athenae), and Italy is handled in a matter-of-fact way without bursts of enthusiasm for the land of his adoption. He will be brief, he promises, concerning a country the treatment of which is demanded rather by the claims of system than by a need for exposition, since here “all is known” (nota sunt omnia).
He blunders in thinking that the Danube flows into the Adriatic and that the Alps bound Germany, and he is unscientific in blending mythology with geography; but he has the merit of knowing about the north-western sweep of the Gallic coast and about northern seas and the Orkneys (Orcades).
Of Mela’s sources we have scanty information. He quotes Cornelius Nepos twice,[389] and mentions a report by Hanno the Carthaginian after a voyage of discovery, for which Mela’s authority may be Nepos. The knowledge of Spain acquired by Varro, when a Pompeian officer in that country, may possibly have been accessible to the author,[390] who in turn became a source for the elder Pliny. He is cited on Ireland by the scholiast on Juvenal and on the channels of the Ganges by Servius in opposition to Seneca.[391]
With something like a grudge the author in his proem declares that his task is of a sort which does not admit eloquent treatment; as it involves an array of names, its subject-matter is tedious rather than genial (longa est magis quam benigna materia). At the same time, it is well worth study (aspici cognoscique dignissimum) and calculated to recompense attention through the very thought put into it, if not through the talents of the author.[392] Though the work be dry and little susceptible of ornament (facundiae minime capax), Mela does grasp opportunities of embellishing and enlivening his theme; and the alert reader may, among geographical details, discover and even welcome a rhetorical word-picture or record of wonders.
One of these purple patches is the description of the cavern of Corycus[393] in Cilicia, environed by charming greenery and entered by a narrow and difficult footpath which descends among rustling trees and dancing rivulets to a grotto within a grotto, darker and more mysterious, filled with a sound as of crashing cymbals, where a great river seems to issue forth only to vanish again: and beyond are the depths of the cavern unmeasured and inexplorable. What otherwise would be a catalogue is lighted up by passing allusions to famous battlefields, scenes with historical, poetic or legendary associations, birthplaces of celebrities, and monuments to the mighty dead; and no little entertainment may be got from his mention of customs[394] and of marvels. It is not every geography that provides readable fare like the strange fountain of the Sun in Cyrenaica which boils at midnight and is icy cold at noon (I. viii.); queerly illogical African tribes who curse the Sun both at his rising and at his setting, and who have no individual names and are a dreamless people; or cave-dwellers feeding on serpents; or headless creatures with faces in their chests; the Pyramids (I. ix.), and the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus (I. xvi.)—representative wonders of the world; birds that shoot their wing-feathers like arrows (II. vii.); the land of the midnight Sun (III. v.); the rich pastures of Ireland on which flocks might feed till they burst (III. vi.); the island of “hairy women” (presumably some species of apes, III. ix.); and the well that brings on a fatal laugh (III. x.). One may read how to defy the serpents of Colubraria (II. vii., ad fin.); or may be half persuaded, apropos of the rocky district of the Lapideum (Le Crau) in Southern France, to believe the old fable that it once rained stones there (II. v.). The attraction of the marvellous is for Mela irresistible; Syracuse, for example, interests him not for its situation or history, but for the legend of Arethusa: and perhaps, if he could not be completely scientific, it was well that he should thus frankly display his not unengaging limitations.
Yet he can be serious and perspicacious. He notes the German love of war for little or no reason (ex libidine) except the desire of having a desolation round a country where might is right (ut circa ipsos quae iacent uasta sint; ius in uiribus habent); and he apologizes that he cannot give German geography exhaustively, because the names are too barbarous for Roman lips to pronounce (quorum nomina uix est eloqui ore Romano, III. iii.). His description of the Atlantic tides,[395] with his alternative theories about their cause, may be translated:
“A vast limitless sea, stirred by great tides (that is the term for its movements) at one time floods the plains, at another uncovers them widely and retreats. It does not work so on plain after plain in turn; it does not by alternate advances sweep round in full rush first on these and next on those; but after pouring out from its centre upon the shores of all countries and islands alike, however far apart, it quits them, and again massing towards its centre returns upon itself. Such is the regular force of the incoming tide that it drives back even mighty rivers, and either overtakes land animals or leaves sea-creatures high and dry. So far there is no definite decision whether this is the action of the universe through its own heaving breath, attracting and repelling the waters everywhere (on the assumption of savants that the world is a single animate being); or whether there exist some cavernous depressions for the ebb-tides to sink into, thence to well out and rise anew; or whether the moon is responsible for currents so extensive.”
The traces of rhetoric are visible not only in descriptions, but also in balanced clauses and exclamatory parentheses which recall Valerius Maximus. Of the bridging of the Hellespont by the Persians he exclaims “marvellous and mighty feat!” (mirum atque ingens facinus!), and of the devotion of the Carthaginian brothers buried alive to settle a boundary dispute in their country’s favour, “Marvellous feat most worthy of remembrance!” (mirum et memoria dignissimum facinus!).[396] But he is not long-winded, and indeed has caught some of Sallust’s brevity, as where he remarks of the rivers Simois and Scamander near Troy that for them “fame has done more than nature” and so gives pithy expression to a feeling which many a traveller on the Trojan plain must have shared. Nor is Mela a mere echo of others: his prose has a rhythm of its own. Even without careful enumeration one is struck in reading his Latin by the frequency of double cretic and dactylic endings to his sentences. Closer investigation has shown that while he quite remarkably avoids the double trochee endings which are so much more common in Celsus, Curtius, the Senecas and Tacitus, he almost as markedly exhibits a preference for closing on a cretic followed by an anapaest or tribrach (–⏑–⏑⏑⏓) or on one of the favourite types of Greek clausulae, the double dactyl (–⏑⏑–⏑⏑).[397]
MISCELLANEOUS LEARNING
In the miscellaneous learning of the age may be included its philosophy, criticism and grammar, jurisprudence and medicine. To take the last first, one recognizes in Scribonius Largus,[398] court physician to Claudius, a sort of pendant to Celsus; for about A.D. 47 he made his collection of medical prescriptions. The jurists included Ateius Capito’s pupil, Masurius Sabinus, who gave his name to the “Sabinian” school, and influenced legal thought through his three books on the ius ciuile. In contrast with him M. Cocceius Nerva, the emperor’s grandfather, trained by Labeo, the great Augustan rival of Capito, was a forerunner of Proculus from whom the “Proculians” took their name.[399] Among the grammarians were Julius Modestus, Hyginus’s freedman, who followed his master’s broad conception of grammar; the strict purist Pomponius Marcellus;[400] and the successful but immoral teacher, Q. Remmius Palaemon (flor. A.D. 48), whose handbook (Ars) had a great vogue, and with whom Persius and Quintilian studied. Columella drew from Julius Atticus and Julius Graecinus, both writers on vine-culture in the time of Tiberius; and the botanists Caepio and Antonius Castor were used by the elder Pliny.
Apicius, pre-eminent as the ideal gourmet, belonged to the reign of Tiberius. His culinary lore was, as we know from Seneca and from a note on Juvenal,[401] committed to writing. The work, however, on cookery in ten books which passes under his name (Apicius de re coquinaria)[402] is a compilation of some centuries later, poorly and even ungrammatically written, although entertaining for its astounding variety in ingredients and modes of dressing fish, flesh and fowl, as well as for such naïve receipts as that for improving honey: “mix two parts of good honey with the bad and put on the market.”
In philosophy the austere morality of the Sextii, father and son, in the Augustan age, had been transmitted through their adherent Papirius Fabianus to the youthful Seneca. Celsus, as we have seen, also wrote on philosophy. Theoretical speculation, however, might prove politically disastrous; for the uncompromising arguments of Julius Kanus, or Canus, led to his being sentenced to death by Caligula:[403] it was a philosopher who attended him to the place of execution, Julius undertaking that, if he discovered the condition of souls in the other world, he would revisit his friends to inform them. But the Stoics in the time of Nero form a more powerful group of thinkers, and, as we shall see, left a permanent mark on literature.
V. PHAEDRUS AND FABLE: POETRY OF THE TIME
Phaedrus—His Life—Books of Fables and “Appendix”—Text incomplete—His Greek exemplar—Relationship to Aesop—Novelties introduced by Phaedrus—Anecdotes based on Roman life—Political allusions and prosecution by Sejanus—The gentle art of making enemies—The injustices of life—Human weaknesses—The serious and the humorous—Perennial interest in fable—Realism—Phaedrus as man of letters—Fable in the later Roman world—Style—Art—Phaedrus and La Fontaine—Metre—A concluding view.
The poems of Tiberius—Germanicus Caesar’s Aratea—Mythological Astronomy—Albinovanus Pedo—Decadent forms of drama—Mime, Atellan farces and Fabulae Salticae—Pomponius Secundus.
PHAEDRUS: THE FABULIST OF ROME
Phaedrus,[404] the fabulist of Roman literature, was an alien slave of Thracian, or, to use his own adjective, “Pierian” origin. The lines[405] in which he laid claim to birth “almost in the very school of the Muses” are to be taken, according to the spirit of the context, in the strict geographical sense and not as a metaphorical anticipation of the Tennysonian conception that “the poet in a golden clime is born.” Perhaps the plain prose of the matter is that his birthplace was the Roman colony of Philippi. Evidently he was brought to Italy when young; for he refers to studying Ennius in boyhood.[406] His Latin and Greek education followed the customary routine, to judge from the fact that, although fables do not readily lend themselves to a display of erudition, yet his yield proof of acquaintance with such authors as Virgil, Euripides and Simonides.[407] Hardly mentioned in classical literature, his name first appears as a nominative, “Phaedrus,” in a prefatory letter of Avianus;[408] but some have argued that it is more in accord with linguistic usage and inscriptional evidence to call him “Phaeder.” Inasmuch, then, as he became a freedman in the household of Caesar Augustus, one may consider his full name C. Julius Phaeder or Phaedrus.[409] Concerning the limits of his life, and its scanty details, we are dependent upon deductions from his writings. There is a prevalent consensus among critics that the first two of his five books were published during the reign of Tiberius,[410] perhaps together, perhaps separately, as Professor Ellis supposed,[411] and that the third book appeared under Caligula, some time between A.D. 37 and the beginning of 41. Now, since passages[412] in that book suggest that the author was already conscious of approaching age, there is justification for guessing that he was born some fifteen years before the Christian era.[413] Although in Book III he had decided to relinquish authorship, he explains his change of mind in the prologue to the next book,[414] and even after that we possess a fifth, the product of his advanced years.[415]
The two opening books, which explain in their prologues the relationship between the present fables and those of Aesop, may be regarded as dedicated to readers at large;[416] but the rest were dedicated to individuals; namely, Book III to Eutychus, plausibly identified with the chariot-driver of the Greens prominent under Caligula;[417] IV to one Particulo, for whom Phaedrus entertained a respect enhanced, doubtless, by gratification at being quoted in his compositions;[418] and Book V to a certain Philetes, or Philetus, who is pointedly expected to see the applicability to the aged author of the tale about the old hunting-dog past its best:
Praise what we were, if what we are you blame: Nicely, Philetes, you can grasp my aim.[419]
In addition to these five books, for which (discounting the recorded readings of the lost Remensis and three imperfect codices) only a single manuscript[420] is extant, there is an “Appendix” of about thirty fables. These, although they look tinctured with medieval colour and show signs of having been supplemented from the Greek collection of Babrios, are considered to have been drawn by Perotti in the fifteenth century from a subsequently lost abridgement of Phaedrus.[421] Twenty so-called “New Fables” gained from the prose paraphrases associated with the name of the medieval Romulus, appeared in Nilant’s edition early in the eighteenth century. The traces discernible therein of their original verse-form led scholars like Dressier and Lucian Müller to rewrite them in metre.[422] Recently Zander in his Phaedrus Solutus has reclaimed thirty fables which he has re-written in senarii after a careful investigation of the three prose-collections—the Ademarian, the Wissemburgensis and “Romulus.” Zander has aimed at separating Phaedrian and non-Phaedrian elements in the prose paraphrases; he has isolated the traces of fifth-century or sixth-century Latin comparable with what is to be found in Salvianus or Gregory of Tours; and, following principles of Phaedrian metric expounded by Havet, he has made a rather more successful iambic reconstruction of missing fables than some of his predecessors in this field.
Much of Phaedrus, then, is lost. This is a safe conclusion, if only from gaps in our existing text and from the disproportionate length of the books—the total of 93 fables in the five books being made up of the constituent numbers 31, 8, 19, 25 and 10. Besides, an objection of the imaginary matter-of-fact critic forestalled by Phaedrus[423] is that “not merely beasts but trees do speak” in his fables; yet, in such of the surviving tales as are incontestably by Phaedrus, trees nowhere appear among the interlocutors.[424]
If Phaedrus had been asked what was the origin of his material, he would have answered “Aesop” without hesitancy or qualification. Yet the true answer is not so simple. On the one hand, the well-springs lay far deeper in primeval Aryan tales than Phaedrus could have dreamed, and on the other hand the fables which he assumed to be by Aesop consisted largely of accretions subsequent to Aesop’s time. The primitive beast-story, so widespread an element in folklore, becomes literary when it is shaped either to satiric or to moral purpose. Some such shaping of the beast-fable lies at the root of the renown of the Samian slave, the actual “Aisopos,” who flourished in the middle of the sixth century B.C. From tradition and experience—that great repository of practical morality—the Greek observer drew his store. But in the history of literature “Aesop” became gradually a vague name; for later tales were freely ascribed to him as a kind of father of fable, and such tales enjoyed wide popularity among Greek democracies both as a convenient cloak for social criticism and as a simple form of amusement. In this respect, then, there is an “Aesopic” just as there is a “Homeric” Question. The supposed Aesopic fables (λόγων Αἰσωπείων συναγωγαί) were gathered about 300 B.C. by Demetrius of Phaleron, once tyrant at Athens, and afterwards savant at Alexandria, where he did much to establish the great library. This Greek prose collection it was—altered and interpolated by Alexandrine scholars—which formed the basis of Phaedrus’s neat version in Latin iambics. The same collection, it may be inferred from the reappearance of several stories in Plutarch (or in writings attributed to him), was a source common to Phaedrus and Plutarch (or the pseudo-Plutarch).[425] Further, there is ground for holding that the modern “Aesop” contains actually more of Phaedrus than of Aisopos, thanks to the influence exerted by Phaedrus in medieval times, mainly if not entirely through the prose-forms to which his verses had been reduced.
Phaedrus was not the first who used the fable in Roman literature. It had been employed incidentally by Ennius, Lucilius and Horace.[426] Phaedrus, however, was the first to compose separate volumes of fables in Latin: this was the one Hellenic form not yet taken over. Drama, epic, didactic, elegy, lyric, history presented no fresh openings; but a limited claim to originality might be based on free poetic adaptations of Greek prose-fables current under the name of “Aesop.” The attitude of Phaedrus to “Aesop” was not one which paused critically to examine the implications of the name, but evidently accepted “Aesop” as the personality responsible for the fables ascribed to him. Phaedrus, therefore, felt that, however much he might modify or add, he individually owed Aesop a debt for the substance at least of the fables; and this relationship to the Greek sage is proclaimed at the outset:
Matter which first old Aesop did rehearse Hath Phaedrus polished in iambic verse. Two boons my book hath: it can laughter raise, And gives sage counsel in life’s wildering maze. Howbeit, should one think to criticize, Since beasts, nay even trees, here sermonize, Let him remember that in fables we Divert ourselves with unreality.[427]
Indeed, throughout we are continually being reminded of his model. The epilogue to the second book—an envoi to the volume which began with the piece just cited—gives utterance to his admiration in the sentiment which possessed a strong attraction for De Quincey:
To Aesop Athens reared a statue great, And set on lasting marble base a slave——[428]
a proof, says Phaedrus, that the pathway of honour lies open to all and that glory depends on merit instead of birth. If he follows in Aesop’s steps, it is in no spirit of envy, but in one of fair emulation:
If Latium shall countenance my task, More authors shall she have to match with Greece.[429]
The prologue of the next book shows that this ambitious desire of bringing honour to Roman literature harmonizes with his own patriotic appreciation of Hellenic traditions:
If Phrygian Aesop by his genius, If Scythian Anacharsis could by his Build deathless glory, why should I, who am Of nearer kin to literary Greece, Forsake in idle sleep my country’s fame?[430]
In a later poem, he pictures Aesop brought out in “the fresh buskins” of the tragic trimeter;[431] elsewhere,[432] he protests against carping detractors who set successes among the fables to Aesop’s account but failures to Phaedrus’s own account. The last prologue offers the explanation that he employs Aesop’s name to recommend his works, as great artists’ names might be inscribed on productions not by themselves: this is virtually to amplify his remark in another place that the fables are not “Aesop’s, but Aesopian.”[433]
It may well be, as Lucian Müller suggested,[434] that Phaedrus used a more complete Aesop than is now available, and that we therefore cannot know how much he owed; but, however extensive his debt, it does not amount to servile borrowing. Independence is not surprising in an author who explicitly recognizes individuality in literature,[435] and who, while he undertakes to imitate Aesop’s principle of instruction through examples, at the same time engages to introduce novel and diverting anecdotes:
The sage’s method I shall keep with care: Yet should it please me add some incidents Whereby variety may charm the taste, I pray thee, reader, take it courteously.[436]
By such promised anecdotes, some from bygone Greek life, some from contemporary Rome, and by allusions to current events sufficiently caustic to bring trouble upon his head, Phaedrus added greatly to the living force of his work. Bent on his twofold purpose of amusement and counsel, he could not, without becoming a dull second-hand plagiarist, shut his eyes to his own times. Occasionally, indeed, the Roman setting is plainly revealed. It is so in the case of the too-credulous father who slew his son under a misapprehension, and then by his suicide left his suspected wife to be haled before the centumuiri: it is so in the tale of the conceited flute-player called “Princeps,”[437] who used to play accompaniments to the pantomimus Bathyllus and who, with sublime assurance, mistook for plaudits in his own honour the acclamations of the theatre intended for the real princeps, the emperor. Equally Roman, or at least Italian, is the atmosphere in the entertaining tale about the peasant who competed in pig-squeaking on the stage against a professional ventriloquist, and, despite his ingenious precaution of keeping a live porker hidden beneath his clothes to be pinched surreptitiously, was howled down by the audience as defective in realism! The closing situation is one of delicious irony when he turns the laugh against his judges by openly displaying the authentic grunter:
Look ye, this shows what critics you must be.[438]
Again, the painted “history” of the warfare between mice and weasels[439] seems to allude to wall-paintings of a comic or burlesque nature such as can be illustrated from Pompeii. Another instance is a hit at the ardaliones,[440] the fussy triflers and ineffectual meddlers of Roman society. They are derided under the semblance of an officious slave who, by forcing his gardening labours upon the attention of his imperial majesty, tried hard to curry favour and possibly win the ceremonial slap (alapa) that conferred liberty:
A tribe of busy-bodies lives at Rome, Hot-headed bustlers, pressed mid idleness, Panting sans effort, and with much ado Effecting naught, a plague unto themselves And most detestable to other men. This tribe, if I but can, I would reform By this true tale, which will repay your care. Tiberius Caesar once, when Naples-bound, Had reached his villa at Misenum’s Cape, Which, by Lucullus on the headland built, Gazes far over the Sicilian main, And looks right down upon the Tuscan Sea. The Prince was strolling ’mid its pleasant glades, When one of his high-girt domestic slaves, Whose tunic of Egyptian linen fell Loose from his shoulders with its drooping fringe, Started with wooden watering-pot to spray The droughty ground, and for parade of work Got laughed at. Then by well-known cuts he gained Another terrace, quick to lay the dust. Caesar observed the man and grasped his game Of counting on some profit to be earned. “Come here!” the Emperor cried; the knave skipped up, Brisk with the joy of sure gratuity. Then his Imperial Highness had his jest: “You’ve not scored much, and all your fuss is lost: Far more with me the slaps of freedom cost!”[441]
But Phaedrus’s satire was not merely social: it invaded politics. In one passage he refers to fable as a literary invention which might be of service when one dare not be outspoken;[442] and though it would be an exaggeration to consider him an organ of political opposition, he clearly did give umbrage in high quarters by criticisms. There are always people ready to fit the satiric cap on their heads; and much in Phaedrus could be deemed offensive by a bad conscience. Some doubtless detected a political allusion where none was intended; yet there were lines which inevitably summoned up before the mind recent chapters in Roman history. No one, for instance, with republican sympathies in his heart could avoid putting his own interpretation and comment upon the lines:
Amid a change of government in states Poor folk change nothing but their master’s name.[443]
Besides, certain fables definitely entered on dangerous ground. Thus, the familiar tale of the Wolf and the Lamb is explicitly levelled at false accusers, deriving special significance from the increase of informers (delatores), eager to secure convictions for treason, and encouraged by the authorities.[444] Nor is hatred of delatores under Tiberius far to seek in the story of the evil end which befell the Wolf who bore false witness to support the Dog as plaintiff in his invented claim against the Sheep for a loan.[445] Indeed, there is a good deal of fun in the fables at the expense of law-courts and judges. The problem whether the emperor liked the anecdote (previously translated) concerning his snub administered to the officious slave must remain undetermined; and equally insoluble is the question whether he recognized his portrait in the dread King Water-snake sent to succeed King Log, the roi fainéant against whom the Frogs had petitioned;[446] but, at any rate, for the emperor’s minister Sejanus there was decidedly unpalatable reading in the first two books. Sejanus was very like the upstart Jackdaw in peacock’s feathers and his projected alliance with Livia, widow of the younger Drusus, possibly lent a sting to the protests of the Frogs against the marriage of the Sun who, even as things were, dried up the pools: “what will result if he have progeny?”[447] Whichever may have been the offending fables in the volume of Bad Beasts, Sejanus assuredly did institute proceedings against the author, who resented the indignity of suffering “calamity” at such hands.[448] There is no evidence as to the punishment inflicted—whether it was banishment or imprisonment or even a return to slavery—but Phaedrus’s tone proves that it left him sore; and the incident is one among many illustrations of the repressive influence of the imperial entourage, a circle where few dared say the thing they felt.
It was not only through political strictures that Phaedrus made enemies. As we shall find, his very style, his love of brevity and pith, incurred hostile criticism, and, like Terence, he felt bound to devote portions of his prologues to answering detractors. Annoyance was also given by the manner in which his fables upheld honesty and justice:
Hard task it is one’s feeling to restrain, When, conscious of sincere integrity, ’Tis badgered by the insolence of knaves. “Who are they?” you will ask: well, time will show. There is a motto which I learned at school: “An open growl from common folk is crime.” While I have wits, I shall remember well.[449]
Perhaps he is over-insistent on the didactic element in his work and on the lessons derivable from regarding him seriously:
You take my work for jest; with naught to do More grave, I wield an airy pen, ’tis true: Howbeit, scan my trivial lays with care, And how great profit shall you gather there![450]
It is an important aspect of his relation to his times, and a powerful factor in his social criticism, that he emphasizes the ubiquitous presence and frequent triumph of injustice. It would be too much to call him gloomy or pessimistic; yet his figures move in a beast-world where, notwithstanding the moral sermonettes, much hardship and unfairness are perforce endured. The Wolf tyrannizes unmolested: the Lion insists that the whole spoil is his “share” and defies his allies to demur: the Ass, captured by robbers, feels no worse for the change of owner than, as a rule, Rome might when she gets a new emperor.[451] When the great fall out, humble people have to suffer—so argue the Frogs about the battles of the Bulls.[452] In a life so troublous, resignation is assumed to be a wise precaution—the Frogs, oppressed by their terrible King Water-snake, after lazy King Log, come to realize that it is best to let well alone, or even if things are not well, to bear the ills one has.[453] Accordingly, there is much acceptance of fate. This is a wicked world, and must be recognized as such; for so far are rogues from infallibly getting their deserts that their success is often a good advertisement for villainy (successus improborum plures allicit, II. iii. 7).
Phaedrus, however, looked beyond the Rome of his day to that wider sphere of human nature which the best fables always illustrate and to which they owe much of their perennial attraction:
My scheme will brand no individual, But life itself and human ways describe —“A heavy task to promise,” one may say.[454]
This relation to life at large comes to a great extent under the second of his professed objects—sound counsel. For example, it is with becoming seriousness that he treats the idea of the two wallets for human shortcomings familiar in Catullus’s allusion and forming the ancient analogue to Burns’ aspiration:
Oh wad some power the giftie gie us To see oursels as others see us!
In Phaedrus it takes this shape:
Two wallets Jove on us hath slung— One stuffed with faults ourselves have made He set upon our back; and hung Before our breast the other, weighed Down with all other people’s vice. Hence our own frailty ’scapes our eyes: Let neighbours slip—we criticize![455]
With similar seriousness of tone he uses the instance of the treasure-dragon to introduce his impressive apostrophe to the miser.[456] In another poem we find the wise pilot’s advice for voyagers across the ocean of life:
Rejoice restrainedly and murmur slow; For life is one long blend of weal and woe.[457]
There is also a note of pathetic truth to human experience and of wistful yearning in the little piece on the rarity of affection in ordinary life:
The name of friend is common; friendship, rare. When a small home was built by Socrates (I would not shun his death to win his fame, I’d yield to odium, if but cleared when dust), One of the people—name unknown, of course— Asked “Why so small a house for one so great?” The answer came “’Twill hold my real friends.”[458]
Yet it would be unfair to leave the impression that even in his satire on human nature Phaedrus constantly wears a sober face. He does not forget that one of his objects is amusement; and although there may be little enough of the “laughter” which he promised, still many subjects are treated lightly and pleasantly. In such manner he handles the recurrent foibles of humanity exemplified in braggarts, in public gullibility, in interested advisers, in the old lady with a weakness for drink, and so forth.[459] Here is his glance at good-looking and lucky fools:
Sir Reynard once a tragic mask espied: “How fine a face to have no brain inside!” Said he. And so with those to whom their fate Gives rank and glory, but an empty pate.[460]
Here again, a little more fully than in the Horatian parturiunt montes, nascetur ridiculus mus, we have a vivid illustration of “much cry and little wool”:
A mountain once was brought to bed With frantic groans of labour torn. Earth in excitement lost its head— When lo! a tiny mouse was born! This story is designed for one Of mighty threats, fulfilment none.[461]
There is humour, too, as of some irresolute Sir Roger de Coverley, in Mr. Justice Ape’s summing up of a case where prosecutor and defendant are alike disreputable, and there has been unscrupulous cross-swearing. After hearing two clever but conflicting perorations, the Justice pronounces with Gilbertian comicality for both sides:
“You, Wolf, it seems, ne’er lost what now you claim: I find, glib Fox, you stole it all the same!”[462]
One must not overlook another source of charm. Good fables have a right to be read for the story alone. Now, as has been pointed out, much in Phaedrus comes down through Aesop from the primitive beast-story and folklore of the Aryans: much is but the residuum of what prehistoric fancy was capable of inventing and believing in far-off times when quadruped, reptile and bird were supposed to talk. Phaedrus gave classic expression in verse to tales which have appealed to countless generations of children, and which hold their own in the modern nursery. For, as M. Reinach would like us to believe, our youngsters love such tales because they are unconscious totemists![463] To read Phaedrus, therefore, is like meeting friends that everyone must know, because the stories illustrate the common experience of mankind. So, granted a judicious ability to overlook the obtrusion of a moral first or last in a fable, one never tires of The Wolf and the Lamb, The Jackdaw in Peacock’s Feathers, The Lion’s Share, The Ambitious Frog and the Ox, The Sham Hospitality of Fox and Stork, The Mule with the Load of Gold and the Mule with the Load of Barley, The Wolf at Large and the Dog with a Collar,[464] The Pearl in the Dung-heap, Aesop tossing Nuts or All Work and No Play, The Fox and the Sour Grapes, The Viper and the File, The Snake in the Bosom, The Forelock of Opportunity, and Old Bald-pate with the Fly or Adding Insult to Injury.[465]
Human realism, in fact, has been imparted to the beast-fable. Constantly forgetting that one is reading about animals, one does not care if the doings and sayings are inconsistent with the laws of physics or natural history. It matters little that a swimming dog is unlikely to see his reflexion in the water, and that cats do not habitually eat young pigs.[466] The passions, wiles and talk of the animals are convincing because of the resemblance to mankind. In this sense, how natural it all is—how true to life! The cynical ingratitude of the bitch after borrowing shelter for herself and whelps; the mortally wounded pride of the old lion who endures a double death (bis uideor mori) when kicked by the ass; the much to be suspected outburst of sudden generosity on the part of designing persons in contrast with the staid fidelity of a watchdog; the dignified contempt wherewith the boar declines to avenge a lewd insult (inquinari nolo)—these[467] and many such have close parallels in actuality. Little wonder, then, that contemporaries not infrequently beheld themselves under the disguise. So entirely apposite were many stories that, as already seen, offence was sure to be taken where none was meant.
Without being among the great in achievement, Phaedrus yet exhibits the genuine attitude of a man of letters. He is intensely sensitive to unfriendly criticism; he repeatedly makes retorts on cavillers;[468] he is proud of literary qualities like brevity;[469] believes he has his place as the introducer of a new form in Roman literature;[470] and has confidence in the survival of his writings.[471] He takes pleasure in his vocation; for it is with obvious satisfaction that he recounts the value of literature to Simonides.[472] Yet, equipped as he was with talent and self-reliance, and likely to secure an initial recommendation from his connexion with the imperial court, he admits that he made his way with difficulty. The admission occurs in the passage where, after mentioning his birth, he avows his disdain for wealth and his devotion to poetry:
I came to birth on that Pierian hill, Whereon the hallowed dame, Mnemosyne, Nine times a mother, bore to Thunderer Jove The Muses’ Choir. Though almost in that school I first saw light, though from my breast I have Erased all lust for gain, and with fair fame Undimmed, have set my heart on my career, Still ’tis but grudging welcome I receive.[473]
In face of opposition, however, he feels the superiority of his own unappreciated pearls: it is like throwing them on a dung-hill to offer fables to unresponsive readers:
Once in a dung-heap, as for food it sought, A barnyard fowl a pearl to light had brought: “Ah, what a gem to lie so low!” he cried; “If found by one for thy true worth keen-eyed, Long since thou hadst regained thy pristine pride. But I, thy finder, much prefer my food: Nor I to thee, nor thou to me dost good!” I mean the present fable to allude To those who Phaedrus have not understood![474]
The tardy acceptance of his writings during his lifetime seems in harmony with the silence regarding him in the classics at large. Seneca, writing about A.D. 43, pronounces the fable to be work “unattempted by the Roman genius.”[475] Possibly in this remark he may definitely have the Greek Phaedrus in mind, though he does not name him. Quintilian, while he finds a place for fable in his scheme of education,[476] does not mention Phaedrus. Before Avianus, who wrote in the fourth century, the single allusion generally cited as applicable to him, namely, Martial’s an aemulatur improbi iocos Phaedri? is not beyond dispute. While it is appropriate in Martial to call the fables ioci, as their author does, the epithet improbus, if it seriously means “shameless,” is remarkably inappropriate as a fair description of our moralist, even when we grant that he can be coarse. It is just possible that the coarsest in him has not survived; but unless one adopts a supposition of this sort, there is a temptation to fancy that the Phaedrus whom Martial meant may have been some obscure writer of mimes.[477] More justice was done to his reputation in later centuries when abridgements were in vogue; and in the Middle Ages he may said to have had his revenge.
This is a suitable point at which to note briefly the later fortunes of fable in the Roman world. It was not till after the time of Augustus that a group of Indian beast-stories with ethical applications was brought to Alexandria by a Cingalese embassy. Translated as the “Libyan Fables” of one “Kybises,” they had pithy conclusions pointing the moral to be deduced. In the days of Marcus Aurelius, a rhetor at his court, Nicostratus, formed a corpus out of the old Greek collection of Demetrius and the Libyan collection of “Kybises.” This body of fable from the nearer and the farther East was next turned into Greek choliambics by Valerius Babrius, about whose date there has been considerable dispute, but who was perhaps tutor to the young son of Alexander Severus. It is the Libyan element, rather than the Aesopic, which predominates among the forty-two fables done into Latin elegiacs by Flavius Avianus in the fourth century; and his uninspiring verses close the ancient records on this subject. With the later and more fascinating history of fable we are not concerned except to observe that in the Middle Ages it was Phaedrus who was especially read and paraphrased among fabulists. About eighty of his fables were collected in prose, perhaps in the ninth century,[478] and went under the name of “Romulus.” The prose collection which once belonged to the monk Ademar of Chabannes or Chabanais,[479] and was possibly written by himself early in the eleventh century, possesses the historic interest of preserving some portions of Phaedrus otherwise lost; elsewhere among its contents are prose versions of existent verse fables in Phaedrus with but slight alterations.[480]
The outstanding qualities of the style and art of Phaedrus are his direct simplicity of language and unpretentious neatness of phrase and line. On brevity, as already indicated, he plumed himself, though on occasion he is half-apologetic over it. Brevity, we know, is not necessarily simple; but his brevity is. With him, condensation was not purchased at the expense of clearness; for his style is on the whole flowing and easy. Its natural turns, which seem to grow out of the nature of the subject, are at once appropriate to his animal speakers and a contrast to the artificial rhetoric beginning to inundate Latin literature. At the same time, he was aware of this increasing tendency towards the high-flown and the far-fetched; for in a passage[481] where he makes telling retort on the hypercriticism launched at him, he composes a specimen of the tragic manner, and proclaims the impossibility of pleasing a fastidious Cato[482] of a critic by means of either fabellae (fables) or fabulae (plays). It is, then, vastly to his credit that, while he thus affords proof of what he could do in aping tragic diction, he yet so avoids inflation and preciosity as to attain a strict and almost Attic sobriety of style comparable with the clear-cut and restrained work of Terence in the drama or of Caesar in prose. His use of antithesis, which is not tediously overdone, may be cited in illustration of his restraint; e.g.
Strangers he gulls, but friends make fun of him (Ignotos fallit, notis est derisui, I. xi. 2)
or
Bores to themselves, to others caviare (Sibi molesta et aliis odiosissima, II. v. 4).
In a certain fondness for abstract[483] turns of expression one remarks a resemblance to the style of Valerius Maximus, and therefore a symptom of the movement in the language towards Silver Latinity. In general, despite his foreign origin, the Latin of Phaedrus obeys correct canons, though there are occasional vulgarisms and instances of loose grammatical usage.[484]
He does not possess in any remarkable degree the artist’s eye. The picturesque may be said to begin and end for him in a few vivid synonyms like “long-ears” (auritulus) for an ass, “the wizened one” (retorridus) for an old mouse, or in epithets like those in “branching antlers” (ramosa cornua) of a stag, or “lightning-flashing tusks” of the wild boar (fulmineis dentibus).[485] He may pause to give a condensed description; but it is rare to find anything so full in this kind as Juno’s summary of the peacock’s advantages:
Thou bear’st the palm for beauty as for size; The gleam of emerald illumes thy neck; A tail thou spread’st with brilliant plumes begemmed.[486]
Nor does he trouble, we have seen, to keep true to nature; except in wonderland, cow, she-goat and sheep make a curious triple alliance for a lion on a carnivorous expedition. Really, Phaedrus is in Roman fashion bent upon moralizing so that his readers shall reap benefit (utilitatem);[487] and this domination of the moral is one factor which prevents any free and accurate study of animals. Not one of the world’s mighty sages, he has rather a thin philosophy to propound; and on his narrow stage the beasts sometimes display no more vitality than wooden marionettes. This renders his psychology too naïve—his animals reason in a manner patently subordinate to the intended lesson. The doves, for instance, harried by the kite, see at last the error of their ways and acknowledge the justice of their punishment:[488] and the outcome has a smack suggestive of a death-bed repentance in accord with the distinctly self-regarding morality inculcated.
Although the parallel of La Fontaine’s fables must cross the mind insistently during a study of Phaedrus, yet any elaborate comparison between the two would be futile. There is so much that is incommensurate. The claim of Phaedrus had been to polish in iambic verse the prose of “Aesop”; and it may be granted that his fables have more picturesque turns than their Greek originals. But they pale before the masterpieces of the French writer. Phaedrus does not possess the knowledge, the penetration, the dramatic power, the sense of style—he has not, in short, the genius which makes La Fontaine a great poet at a great epoch, and par excellence the thinker and artist among fabulists. The Russian fabulist Kriloff, who is manifestly under obligations both to La Fontaine and to Aesop, may in one striking way be said to continue the Phaedrian tradition; for, whereas La Fontaine’s fables are impersonal, Kriloff’s had a frequent and pointed bearing on affairs and circumstances in the Russia of his time.
The metre of Phaedrus is the iambic senarius throughout. It is not the iambic line favoured by Catullus, Bibaculus or Horace, but broadly that employed by the ancient comic writers. He may have been influenced by Publilius Syrus, to whose sententious manner the moral of a fable often bears resemblance. We meet with a different type of iambic trimeter in Seneca, who, owing to Ovidian influence,[489] composed lines unlike the early Roman tragic iambic; for neatness and monotony have in the Senecan iambic replaced the strong rough lines of Ennius, Pacuvius and Accius. But it is the ancient iambic line, as used in comedy by Plautus and Terence, which descends lineally to Phaedrus. Only, while he may offend a fastidious ear by admitting spondees in the second and the fourth feet, he is generally careful to avoid overloading his verse with long syllables and to secure variety of sound by introducing other metrical feet[490] and by attention to elision.
Regarding the fables as a whole, Dr. Mackail contends that “their chief interest is as the last survival of the urbanus sermo in Latin poetry”;[491] but perhaps this view too exclusively estimates them from the linguistic and stylistic side. Slight from the standpoint of purely literary merit, the fables of Phaedrus do however possess considerable historical importance. They hold their place in the chronicle of European fable-literature; they form a chapter in the book of Rome’s debt to Greek models; they contain a significant amount of original material, with a virile bearing upon contemporary life; and, farther, it is not the least of their claims to attention that they wielded a potent influence in medieval times, and, if only as one of those lesson-books which sink deep into the memory, they have been beloved by many generations of readers.
POETRY OF THE TIME
To the exiguous body of minor poetry during his own times Tiberius contributed a lyric lament on the death of L. Caesar, and poems in the late Greek manner.[492] It has already been observed that the emperor had profited by his studies in rhetoric, under Theodorus and others, enough to acquit himself proficiently in speaking and in writing, though he cultivated at times a halting and obscure manner. Towards the close of Augustus’s reign, Manilius[493] had written his Astronomica, viewing the universe on Stoic principles and displaying a style not uninfluenced by Ovidian dexterity.
A famous but ill-starred prince has a niche in the history of that particular type of didactic poetry which descended from Cicero and Manilius. The emperor’s nephew and adopted son, Germanicus[494] (15 B.C.–A.D. 19), added to military ability a command of his own language as speaker and poet.[495] He wrote Greek comedies which have perished, and in both languages elegiac epigrams, a few of which have been preserved, including a Latin one on a boy who met with a fatal accident on ice. To him are usually assigned the hexameter translations or adaptations of the Greek poems by Aratus of Soli in Cilicia on astronomy and weather-forecasts (Φαινόμενα and Διοσημεῖα) which have come down, some 700 and 200 lines respectively, under the name of “Claudius Caesar.” There is ancient authority for the ascription to Germanicus; Lactantius, for instance, quotes a line from “Germanicus Caesar in his Aratean poem.”[496] An apostrophe to Augustus in the poem (l. 558) implies the death of that emperor, and genitor in l. 2 is applicable to his adoptive father Tiberius. Rutgers’s advocacy for the authorship of Domitian (who did not take the title “Germanicus” until after his campaign against the Chatti in A.D. 84) has found little acceptance.
Astronomy formed in antiquity an integral part of a liberal education: a cultured Roman in reading about the heavens was far from being so helpless as is the average reader of to-day, nor was the ancient so ignorant when he looked at the starry sky. The work translated and amplified by Germanicus is, in effect, an indication of a different type of knowledge, requirement and interest from that usual in modern times, and its compound of astronomy and mythology cannot retain the attraction which it once exercised. A heavenly body is not merely mentioned in its position or for its influence: it is connected with the legend from which its name is derived, and so the didactic is lit up with faint gleams of poetry, in which perhaps Germanicus excels his original. Thus the deteriorating ages of the world appear as in Ovid, and the name of a constellation like Andromeda leads away from science into fancy:[497]
The picture of her woe abides: she still extends Her arms as once when bound to cruel cliff.
Long ago, Frey[498] pointed out the prince’s free treatment of his Greek original, his correction of mistakes in the light of later knowledge, and his insertion of passages of his own composition, somewhat in the fashion observable in Coleridge’s rendering of Schiller’s Wallenstein. If time-honoured legends are not subjected to critical examination, they are at least sometimes introduced apologetically: “if an old tale may find favour,” “if in truth Juppiter was suckled as a child,” “if in truth Atlans upholds the realms of Jove.”[499] This independence of method and spirit is one of the features which distinguishes Germanicus’s version of the Aratea from the preceding attempt by Cicero and the later one by Avienus in the fourth century.
A poem concerned with Germanicus may appropriately be mentioned here, because it connects the age of Augustus and that of Tiberius. It is a fragment in hexameters which stops short in the twenty-third line as quoted by the elder Seneca[500] to illustrate Latin power in describing the ocean. The verses are by Albinovanus Pedo,[501] a poet of Ovid’s set, who had written a Theseid and elegies, including a consolation to Livia on the death of Germanicus’s father, Drusus, some twenty-four years earlier than this poem on the expedition under Germanicus into the North Sea. Tacitus has described the storm which befell this same expedition in the Annals (II. xxiii.). In turgid style Pedo aims at conveying the nervous alarm of adventurers braving the unknown hazards of high latitudes, with a sense of being exiled (extorres) beyond the known limits of the globe into sunless realms where Ocean “bears enormous monsters ’neath its sluggish tides”: They exclaim:
Heaven calls us back, forbidding mortal eyes To know the boundary of the world: why force With oars those alien seas and haunted waves?[502]
Though Pedo is mainly Augustan, his declamatory lines composed under Tiberius possess the interest of forming a link between the rhetorical qualities observable in Ovid and the epic poetry of the Silver Age.
The rarity of names of contemporary playwrights is a reminder that the drama, usually at Rome outrivalled by less intellectual entertainments, had fallen upon evil days. The popular dramatic performances, in favour of which comedy[503] had virtually disappeared, were now the mime and the Atellan farce. The mime, realistic and often coarse though it was in its picture of life, yet, according to the opinion of so staid a philosopher as Seneca, shared with ancient classical tragedy and comedy the merit of conveying impressive lessons of practical wisdom;[504] and there is a familiar anecdote told of the death-bed scene when Augustus asked those around him whether he had played the “mime” of life well, capping his query with Greek verses which solicited their applause.[505] A writer of Caligula’s time named Catullus composed mimes, two of which were Phasma (“The Spectre”) and Laureolus, whose title-rôle of a bandit was on one occasion sustained by a wretched criminal who underwent a real crucifixion upon the stage.[506] The Atellan farce held its ground during several reigns,[507] and was presumably all the more acceptable because some line or lines might strike the audience as covertly directed against an emperor.
Tragedy can scarcely be said to have had a real survival in the atrophied forms of fabulae salticae and dramatic recitations.[508] The fabula saltica expressed action, feeling and character, sometimes no doubt with marvellous dexterity, through the dancing, gesture and garb of a pantomimus, while the words of the play were assigned to a chorus. Had the librettos come down, some might conceivably have entered into literary history: we know, for instance, that Lucan wrote fourteen such librettos; and, later, Statius wrote an Agaue for the dancer Paris. Many pieces, however, were based on the most unsavoury stories in mythology, and represented a Pasiphaë, a Myrrha, or a Leda. As regards the pathetic recitations extracted from plays or composed specially to recite, this mutilated or attenuated form of drama became one of the great amusements of Nero both as writer and performer.
Dramatic composition under the Empire was in reality no safer for authors than history was. If a mere line about a ruler’s folly in a tragedy apparently so remote from contemporary politics as his Atreus involved the downfall of Mamercus Scaurus,[509] it is hardly matter for surprise that an equivocal jest in an Atellan farce should lead Caligula to have its luckless author burned in the amphitheatre.[510] The friendship of P. Pomponius Secundus[511] with a son of Sejanus had rendered him suspect under Tiberius, and for years he remained under surveillance with enforced leisure for literary creation. Outliving Tiberius, he again became a public figure. The elder Pliny speaks of him as of consular rank, served under him against the Germans, and wrote his biography. Why the mob in the theatre attacked the dramatist in A.D. 47 is not clear. Quintilian, at any rate, considered him far the best tragic poet he had seen. A single title of his plays survives—the Aeneas, presumably a praetexta dramatizing portions of the legendary history of Rome.[512]
LITERATURE OF THE NERONIAN PERIOD
A.D. 54–A.D. 68
I. COLUMELLA AND AGRICULTURE
Columella’s works—His date—Subjects treated in De Re Rustica—His outlook on agriculture—Vivid glimpses of farm-life—Attitude to sources—Prose style—Feeling for colour—His verse-book on gardens—Things useful and things beautiful.
The De Re Rustica of L. Junius Moderatus Columella[513] is our best witness to methods of husbandry in the earlier Empire. A Spaniard by birth—his native place was Gades[514] (Cadiz)—he took both a family and a personal interest in farming. His uncle, “the most diligent husbandman in the province of Baetica,”[515] whom he several times cites with respect, gained great experience in land-owning: and when Columella himself acquired estates in Italy,[516] he added practical knowledge to his study of Greek, Carthaginian and Roman writers on the subject. An inscription[517] tells that he was of the Galerian tribe and served as an officer in the legio sexta ferrata; so it is a reasonable conjecture that, when that legion was stationed in Syria, he took the opportunity of observing agricultural operations which he recalled when he came to write.[518] Besides his De Re Rustica in twelve books (originally designed to end with the tenth book which is in verse), he had previously written a manual on agriculture, of which the second book, De Arboribus, is left. A work now missing was his counterblast to fortune-telling, Adversus Astrologos (XI. i. 31); and he at least had it in mind to compose[519] an account of rituals followed in farming, which would have been of great value for a student of Roman religion.
He wrote after Julius Graecinus and Cornelius Celsus (the agricultural part of whose encyclopaedia he often quotes), but before the elder Pliny, who in turn used Columella. One other chronological point can be determined, which shows he was writing in Nero’s reign. In the third book of the De Re Rustica he mentions Seneca, “a person of excellent genius and learning,” as holding a Nomentan estate[520] not far from his own; and, as Seneca acquired this late in life but must have already held it long enough to make it known for its abundant vintage-yield, the inference is that this book was written not much before Seneca’s death in A.D. 65.
Briefly these are the subjects of the twelve books:
I, General rules for country life, e.g. on choosing land, securing water and staffing a farm; II, treatment of land, ploughing, manuring, various crops; III-IV, vineyards and vines; V, land dimensions, elms, olives, fruit-trees; VI, cattle, horses, mules; VII, sheep, goats, and (after a chapter on cheese-making) swine and dogs; VIII, poultry and fish-ponds; IX, wild cattle and bees; X, gardens (in verse); XI, duties of a farm-bailiff, work for different months, and gardens (in prose); XII, duties of a bailiff’s wife—provisions, pickling, fruit-preserving; on mead, cheese, figs, raisins, making and treatment of wines, savoury olive marmalade, salting swine’s flesh.
From the mere headings one can see at once that such work is technical rather than literary; yet there is much in it to recreate important aspects of the environment of the Romans in the first century. Columella was conscious that agriculture, the traditional strength of Rome, was being sapped by the multiplication of parks and country-seats and by wasteful mismanagement of estates through incompetence. He is very insistent on the abuses due to absentee landlords, and equally insistent on the need for practical farming and personal control. The owner who manages for himself ought to secure better returns than he would by letting to tenant-farmers, though this latter method avoids some of the risks consequent on running the farm by slave-labour under a farm-bailiff.
A summary examination of his preface to the first book illustrates his general outlook and his advocacy of restored attention to agriculture, for which he has imbibed a traditional Roman veneration. The old Roman practice, he says, of land-tilling in which a consul or a dictator used to take personal delight, the pursuit which might be called “own sister to philosophy” (quasi consanguinea sapientiae), has fallen on evil days. There are teachers for all other sciences and arts, including trumpery, luxurious, and even disreputable ones; but, he adds, “of agriculture I have never known any to profess themselves either instructors or students.” Mother earth is foolishly alleged to have declined in fertility, whereas the true reason is that skilled labour is not being devoted to her. Feeble old town-slaves will be banished to do country work, although rural toil demands both knowledge and “green age” capable of standing fatigue. In contrast with olden times, we Romans “have crept (correpsimus) inside the city-wall and ply our hands rather in circuses and theatres than among crops and vineyards.” We misspend our days and nights and “consider ourselves lucky because we never see a sunrise or a sunset.” Things are come to such a pass that “in this Latium and Saturnian land we let out by public auction the importation of corn from our provinces.” Agriculture is no easy thing to excel in; but the right attitude is not despair in face of its vast variety (tam variae tamque uastae scientiae), but determination to use the knowledge handed down by Greek and Roman writers (many of whom Columella names),[521] and to make diligent practical experiment. As he remarks in his first chapter, “practice and experience are masters in the arts”: books and rules are only auxiliary: nothing benefits the farm so much as the master’s own presence.
Naturally the didactic value in such work outweighs the artistic; but there is a great deal of old-world information which can hardly fail to interest, though it may but concern the right contrivance of an old Italian hen-house, the food proper for poultry, recipes for preserving pears, the way to make mead of the very best honey, or the mode of reasonably encouraging treatment which Columella found efficacious with his slaves. It is something to have thus brought home to the mind what life meant on farms in the imperial period, to learn that a shepherd’s dog should be white so that it could be distinguished on dark mornings or at evening twilight from the dangerous wolf, to note the frugality and energy laid down as ideally requisite in a competent farm-bailiff, to admire the methodical regularity declared to be equally essential in the farm-bailiff’s wife as in a chorus of singers or (as the author says, no doubt with a touch of personal reminiscence) in the army. One of the truly Roman features in Columella is his maintenance of a standard of hard work, fortified by his citation from Cato, “by doing nothing men learn to do evil.” It is true his science is far from impeccable: some of his cures are appallingly foolish, and his astronomy little likely to produce a sound calendar. But then even blunders may have the merit of affording amusement; and, besides, there is in him a modesty which half disarms criticism. It appears very prettily in his final sentence, when, now an old man, and conscious of the magnitude of his theme, he comes to say good-bye to it:
As a conclusion of my work now accomplished, I think it not improper, Publius Silvinus, to declare to my readers (if truly any be found who deign to take cognizance of such affairs) that I nowise doubted the existence of wellnigh an infinity of matters capable of being ingrafted upon this subject, but that I judged it right that only such as seemed most necessary should be handed down to remembrance. Nature has not, however, bestowed even on grey hairs insight into all things; for even whosoever have been esteemed the wisest of mortals are said to have known many things, but not all.[522]
Columella’s sources include, besides Greek authorities and Mago, the Carthaginian, whose work the senate of the republic had ordained to be translated into Latin, Cato,[523] the Sasernae (father and son), Tremellius Scrofa, Varro, Virgil, Hyginus, and among later writers Graecinus, Julius Atticus and Cornelius Celsus. The two last he characterizes as “the most celebrated authors of our age.”[524] He often adduces Celsus’s opinions, just as he often quotes Virgil’s Georgics. Columella is noticeably more specific, in fact more honest, touching his sources than many writers of antiquity were. Nothing could be more open than his introductory remarks on bees and beehives. It is solely for the sake of completeness, he explains, that he must include the theme: for on it “no precepts can be given more carefully than have been delivered by Hyginus, nor more gracefully than by Virgil, nor more elegantly than by Celsus.”[525]
Columella writes on a practical subject in a practical way. Of course there must be rare technical words drawn from operations that fall to be described, like abnodare (“cut off knots,” IV. xxii. 4, IV. xxiv. 10), decacuminare (“cut tops off,” IV. vii. 3, V. vi. 12), canteriatae (of vines supported by trellis-work, V. iv. 1, cf. canterius, IV. xii. 1), impedatio (“propping,” IV. xiii. 1), scabrata (of a vine roughened by pruning, IV. xxiv. 22), glocire (of a hen’s clucking, VIII. v. 4).[526] His sentences are clear and business-like, though without the archaic and bare jerkiness of Cato. Generally his most polished style appears in his prefaces; and, where he aims at finish, the influence of Cicero can be traced. Even without exact statistics, the ear detects the cadences of his clausulae—a liking for cretics (or resolved cretics) followed by trochee or double trochee, spondee or double spondee. One feature anyway is refreshing: he does not weary his reader with purple patches or with the artifices of his age. There are allusions to Spanish habits and Spanish names, but there is no Spanish rhetoric. When he is enthusiastic, his enthusiasm is natural, and that is why one can honestly welcome a certain poetic vein in him. Independently of his constant quotations from Virgil and his verse-book on gardens, an artistic sentiment stirs within the author, and his eye does not fail to mark nor his pen to convey the colours of an Italian vineyard in autumn:[527]
Even the greatest stranger to rural life, should he come into your grounds planted in due season, must with a transport of pleasure marvel at the kindliness of Nature, to see there the Bituric vines rich in fruitage, and here their rivals, the pale yellow vines, match each other.... Bounteous earth, rejoicing over the annual return of the season, as it were some eternal child-bearing, offers to mankind her breasts distended with new wine. Amidst all, while Bacchus favours the pregnant vine-branches whether of the white kind or golden and ruddy, or agleam with purple brightness, everywhere doth Autumn shine lustrous, laden with parti-coloured fruits.
This feeling for colour is met with again in his verses:
Plant many-colour’d blooms, those stars of earth— White gilly-flower and gold-eyed marigold, The fair-tress’d daffodil and “lion’s maw” Fierce gaping, lilies too that keep Their greenness in grey baskets, hyacinths Or snowy-white or blue. Add violets Pale-creeping or with gold and purple proud, And roses over-full of modest blush.[528]
His treatment of horticulture in the tenth book, like his motive for writing it, was partly utilitarian, partly, but only partly, poetic. He was scarcely free enough in soul to take a garden, as Bacon did, for “the greatest refreshment to the spirits of man”; nor would Bacon’s threefold division of “a greene in the entrance, a heath or desart in the going forth, and the maine garden in the midst” ever have occurred to Columella. The luxury of contemporary banquets shocked him, he says in his preface; no poor man could afford such extravagance. Yet thrifty use might be made of a garden, and this would have been handled in prose but for Silvinus’s request that Columella should write in verse what Virgil expressly bequeathed in the fourth Georgic for literary posterity. Parts of the subject seemed so insignificant that the author feared its treatment might resemble “making ropes out of sand”; and thus throughout the 436 hexameters there may be traced a sort of conflict between the desire to give serviceable advice concerning a market-garden and an artistic yearning after beauty. Columella, indeed, succeeds, as Martial did after him, in making some at least of his vegetables poetic. Flowers are a godsend to him. Besides, there are Virgilian echoes from Eclogues, Georgics and Aeneid, but also occurrences of compound adjectives proportionately rather more frequent than in Virgil.[529]
The start is made on useful topics—soil proper to a garden, trees indicative of suitable ground, the wall or fence, the undesirability of statues save of the protective wooden Garden-God; then, after a pause to utter a conventional invocation, the author advocates digging and ploughing regardless of mercy for “mother earth.” The season
When nesting swallows twitter “Spring is come”[530]
calls for the employment of manure, hoe, rake and spade, and for the planting of gay flowers, as in the passage already translated. Herbs of various potency, different kinds of cabbage, watering of young plants and the management of a dry hill-plot lead to his insistence on work at the right moment:
Be wakeful, men! noiseless the Seasons ply Their pace, and all the year turns round unheard.[531]
Then follows a procession of vegetables—parsley, leeks, parsnips and lettuces, with a side-glance directed to the “thousand hues” secured by the skilled gardener, till the fertility of spring wakes a rhapsody on the dominion of Venus as reminiscent of Lucretius and of Virgil’s second Georgic, as it is anticipative of the Peruigilium Veneris:
Hence ocean, hence the hills, hence all the world Do keep spring-time; hence lust in man and herd And fowl: the fire of love lit at the heart Rageth within the marrow, till o’ercloy’d Venus fulfils the fruitful frame and gets Manifold offspring, peopling still the world With young, lest in a barren age it faint.[532]
Here, however, the poet checks himself: let such themes be reserved for a bard inspired to sing of nature’s mysteries: he must answer the call to humbler matters:
Knit strains with slender thread such as ’mid toil The pruner, bending o’er his shrubs, may sing Attuned, or gardener in his pleasaunce green.[533]
So we find ourselves among cresses, artichokes, pomegranates and beet; till again the brilliant array of spring-blossom fills the poet with glee over the flower-harvest:
Yea, harvest presseth on the scented blooms: Now is spring gaudy, now the bounteous earth Is glad to deck her brows with coronal Of all the proud-pied increase of the year. Now Phrygian lotus shows its gem-like face, And violet-beds unclose their winking eyes. The “lion” yawns and, tinged with nature’s blush, The rose unveils her maiden cheek to pay The gods due worship and their sanctuaries Perfume with blended scents of Araby.[534]
So for the moment he is on the verge of fairyland invoking the nymphs.
Then comes the thought that in workaday Italy and in its market towns there is money to be made from the produce; so one must remember the tasks appropriate as the day lengthens and the southern heat increases: one must be on guard against inroads of insects and danger to ripe fruits from rain and hail, and must grow cucumbers and melons, plums, peaches and figs, not forgetting Vulcan’s feast in autumn. But, at this autumnal allusion, the vintage beckons us away from gardens to obey the summons of Bacchus, and with that Columella finishes his task self-imposed in pursuance of the behest of Virgil, the Roman Hesiod,
Who sang through Roman towns the Ascraean lay.[535]
II. PETRONIUS: NOVELIST AND POET
The remains of the Satyricon—The name Petronius Arbiter—The Petronius of Nero’s time—Identity of the author—Menippean form—Earlier adventures of three ne’er-do-wells in the extant text—The banquet of Trimalchio—Arrival of guests and host—Courses surprising and excessive—Conduct of the host—His blunders and egotism—Talk of the guests—Adventures resumed after the banquet—Sea-voyage and shipwreck—The impostors at Crotona—Love-episodes and closing scenes—The dramatic date—Sources and the author’s originality—Traces of literary convention even in first realistic romance—Morals and realism—Elements picaresque and sensual—Qualities anticipative of modern novels—Certain contrasts with Apuleius—Latin of the Satyricon—Plebeian speech—Examples in Petronius—Contrast with certain contemporary tendencies—His poetry—De Bello Ciuili—Short poems attributed to him—Nature and love.
An intensely interesting, though fragmentary, work, now by common consent ascribed to Nero’s reign, is usually entitled the Satyricon or Satiricon (originally a Greek genitive plural), though the fragments are in the manuscripts also called satirae or satyri, and referred to Petronius Arbiter as author. Like the editio princeps of about 1482,[536] several editions appeared without the famous “Banquet of Trimalchio,” which was recovered at Trau in Dalmatia only in the middle of the seventeenth century. In that unique manuscript (Traguriensis) an entry had been made to the effect that the fragments belong to Books XV and XVI of Petronius’s “Satyri”; if this is trustworthy, then merely a fraction of a long work has come down to us. Since that thrilling discovery at Trau, all claims to have found additions have proved to be based on forgeries, like the passages published at Paris in 1693 by Nodot, who pretended they were contained in a manuscript from Belgrade.
Quotations from “Arbiter” or “Petronius” are made by several ancient scholars (e.g. Diomedes, Servius, Priscian); Fulgentius cites him as “Petronius Arbiter”; Terentianus Maurus calls him “Arbiter disertus,” and Sidonius Apollinaris classes him among renowned masters eloquii Latini; but the process of excerpting (like epitomizing, often fatal to an original) probably accounts for the disappearance of the complete work about the seventh century. The limited Petronius now extant was presumably the portion known to Eugenius Vulgarius in the tenth century, to John of Salisbury in the twelfth, and to Vincentius of Beauvais in the thirteenth.
Niebuhr’s opinion that the work was of the third century and Beck’s that it belonged to the time of Augustus or Tiberius have by general consent given place to the established belief that it was written in Nero’s age.[537] Its social atmosphere, its style, its echoes of Seneca, Lucan and even of the emperor, all point the argument in the same direction. Likewise it is in the highest degree probable that the author is the Petronius whose death is dramatically recorded by Tacitus and whose character is attractively idealized by Sienkiewicz in “Quo Vadis?” Gaius (or as Nipperdey[538] preferred, Titus) Petronius was one of a series of Nero’s victims in A.D. 66, and Tacitus devotes two chapters[539] to the career and end of a very remarkable man:
With him day passed in sleep, night in the duties and amusements of life. Energy makes some men’s reputation, but idling had made his: he was considered, not a debauchee and spendthrift like most squanderers of their wealth, but a man of polished luxury. The freer his sayings and doings and the more seeming carelessness they displayed, the more cordially were they construed as looking like straightforwardness. Yet when governor of Bithynia and afterwards when consul, he showed himself alert and a match for business. Then, falling back on vice or aping vice, he was selected by Nero to be one of his small inner circle, his judge of etiquette (elegantiae arbiter); for the emperor thought nothing charming and elegantly voluptuous, unless Petronius had given him approval of it.
As ill luck would have it, he roused the dangerous jealousy of Tigellinus, who proceeded to compass his ruin through a false charge. Nero was in Campania when Petronius received an ominous command to confine himself to Cumae. He was not the man to tolerate fluctuations of fear and hope: on the other hand he was little disposed to fling life away by precipitate suicide: so he alternately opened and bandaged his veins, exactly as he chose, held receptions for his friends and indulged in conversation neither serious nor suggestive of stoical virtue.
He listened as they repeated, not views on the immortality of the soul or on the theories of philosophers, but light poetry and sportive lines. To some of his slaves he gave generous gifts, to others a flogging. He went in to dinner, then indulged in sleep so that, though forced upon him, his death might appear the result of chance. Even in his will he did not, like most doomed men, flatter Nero or Tigellinus or any other powerful personage; instead, he wrote a description of the prince’s scandalous excesses, prefixing the names of the profligates and the women concerned, and detailing every immoral novelty; then sealed the document and sent it to Nero.
This chronique scandaleuse written in Petronius’s last hours cannot, as some have hastily surmised, be the Satyricon, a far more elaborate production, which must have demanded prolonged leisure for its composition. But the Satyricon enables one to imagine the pith and realism of the terrible indictment hurled at the depraved despot by one who had been his minister of amusements. Certainly, in the qualities ascribed to Petronius by Tacitus, there is nothing to render it unlikely that the ascription of the fragments in the manuscripts to Petronius Arbiter refers to any other person than the Petronius who is called by the historian the emperor’s elegantiae arbiter. It is immaterial that Tacitus did not allude to any previous literary work by him: the historian’s grave judgement might not have considered its tone worth mention, and, in any case, it is not his way to record the writings of historical figures. We should never, for instance, have known about Seneca’s voluminous compositions from Tacitus. On the positive side it may be affirmed that the Tacitean portrait of Petronius wears the very features to be expected in the author of a novel depicting low and vicious life in tones which argue intimacy of knowledge and at the same time the almost cynically detached spirit of a spectator. This Mephistophelian insouciance of attitude has the artistic merit of leaving the wickedest and vulgarest characters of the story to act in an absolutely natural way, and exactly fits the brilliant courtier for whom, in spite of a spasmodic energy suggestive of higher capacities, the favourite business of life was the invention, organization and criticism of sensuous enjoyments. A psychology thus complex may well have baffled his closest friends. It might amuse so great a master of facile accomplishment to surprise Rome by an unsuspected talent for administration abroad. The controller of the revels may have been able at will to listen with assumed gravity to philosophical discussions and rhetorical performances, or even take part in what might one day furnish material for satire; in all probability he narrowly observed Seneca and Lucan at court as potential “copy”; but his real affair was to be the ultimate authority on pleasures for exalted society, and, with a defiant unconcern, to live the life of an expert in everything that could contribute towards passing time gaily away.
What remains of the Satyricon is (like the contemporary Apocolocyntosis by Seneca) in the form of the Menippean satire taken over into Roman literature by Varro[540] from the Cynic philosopher Menippus of Gadara, and therefore in prose interspersed with verses. Its story of adventures, many of them unutterably disreputable, is related by Encolpius, one of a trio on a round of escapades among the half-Greek cities of Southern Italy. His fellow-wanderers, rogues like himself, are Ascyltus, a young freedman, and Giton, a handsome serving-boy, who is a bone of contention between them. The narrative is diversified with a few entertaining tales—about a werewolf, about witches substituting a straw changeling for a boy, and the famous one of the widow of Ephesus[541]—digressive stories within a story, which long remained a convention of the novel, like the history of “the man of the hill” in Tom Jones.
Our present text opens somewhere on the coast of Campania—perhaps, if indeed it is necessary to locate the scene, at Cumae,[542] though Naples, Puteoli and Misenum are among the rival suggestions. Encolpius, a student of rhetoric for the time being, is delivering a tirade against the unreality and futility of a rhetorical education totally divorced from the business of the actual world. Professor Agamemnon, who is in his company, argues in defence that teachers have to suit current taste or close their academies. The faulty training of the day he ascribes to parents’ insistence on an easy and quick road to proficiency; and, breaking into verse, he recites choliambics on the simple life advisable for an orator, and hexameters on the needful study of Socratic philosophy and Demosthenes. Meanwhile Ascyltus had slipped off, and a crowd of students pour into the colonnade. Encolpius starts in pursuit of his comrade; asks his way of a greengrocer-woman, who guides him to a disorderly establishment, where he discovers his friend, and soon afterwards enters on one of a series of jealous wrangles with him over Giton. In the market-place the pair meet with exciting experiences, told in Latin so admirably natural as to place everything before our eyes. A brawl breaks out because the pair are taxed with being in possession of a stolen cloak (pallium), and because at the same time they challenge a countryman wearing a lost tunic of their own, threadbare indeed but very precious for the secret stock of gold coins sewed into it. Folk are much puzzled with the strangers’ willingness to renounce the cloak for the shabby tunic. They just escape arrest, and, when they have reached their inn, are visited by one Quartilla, who, preceded by her servant and attended by a little girl, has come to declare that they owe her penance for disturbing her ritual in the chapel of Priapus. Later, the scene changes to her house, where an orgy leads to general drowsiness, broken at length by the entry of two burglars. When their depredations are interrupted, the robbers pretend to snore, and the convivial licentiousness is renewed.
Then comes the morning of Trimalchio’s banquet (§§ 26-78)—a free repast secured for the adventurers through Agamemnon. Out of the existing total of 141 sections, over 50 are concerned with this episode, whose details vividly recreate an extravagantly vulgar dinner-party given by a wealthy parvenu of the freedman class to people of similar standing and to uninvited guests. It reads like an excursion into an ancient and not unreal land of Cockaigne. There is scarcely a dull piece among all the kaleidoscopic changes from incident to incident between the opening glimpse of the host,
a bald old man in a reddish shirt, playing at a game in which he never stooped to pick up a ball, if it touched the ground, but had a slave to supply fresh ones from a bag,
and the final scene during which, amidst the confusion caused by the irruption of the fire-brigade, Encolpius and his friends, surfeited and bored, made good their escape.
Four decorated lackeys precede the great man’s litter, which brings him home in a scarlet woollen wrap from the preliminary bath, while a musician plays small pipes close by, so that Trimalchio shall have music wherever he goes. The guests reach the entrance:
There stood a porter in green, with a cherry-coloured belt, shelling peas in a silver dish. Over the doorway hung a golden cage and a spotted magpie in it greeted arrivals.
These splashes of colour make a fitting prelude to the exuberant profusion throughout. Everywhere is a lavish parade of wealth and such an over-plentiful variety of viands that one feels of Trimalchio as of Chaucer’s frankeleyn:
It snewed in his hous of mete and drinke, Of alle deyntees that men coude thinke.
Trimalchio is drawn as the representative of a new rich class whose social aspiration in any community must always be entrance at all costs into the envied circle of people of quality—that old caste which it must ape in default of manners and traditions of its own and whose culture it must affect with a nervous sense of inferiority imperfectly concealed under blatant self-assertion. A huge chained dog painted on the wall with large letters above, “CAVE CANEM,” played on guests the same mild joke as the familiar mosaic at one of the thresholds in Pompeii. This was, however, merely an introduction to other decorations, which represented Trimalchio in the slave-market, Trimalchio guided to Rome by Minerva, Trimalchio learning book-keeping, Trimalchio appointed steward, Trimalchio at various stages in his successful rise, “and just where the wall-space of the colonnade gave no more room, Mercury had lifted him by the chin and was hurrying him to his elevated official dais (as a sevir Augustalis).” No wonder that Fortune should be there with a horn of plenty and the three Fates spinning golden threads. Trimalchio was one of those who find in their own career a substitute for ancestors. His name reappears incessantly inscribed on as many things as possible: one part of the dining-room door-posts ended in a sort of ship’s beak bearing the legend “presented by the steward Cinnamus to Gaius Pompeius Trimalchio, priest of the college of Augustus”; besides, silver dishes might be noted with the host’s name and their weight scrupulously engraved on the edges.
The diners take their places and have hors d’oeuvres served without Trimalchio, who arrives purposely late to the strains of music, his shaven head peeping out above a scarlet cloak and a fringed napkin round his neck—an irresistibly funny figure at which any guest off his guard was sure to laugh (expressit imprudentibus risum). His display of rings, bracelet and bangle indicated no better manners than his explanation to his guests that it was inconvenient for him to come so soon, but that he had sacrificed his own pleasure to avoid keeping them waiting. Even so, he means to finish his game with crystal pieces on a draughts-board of terebinth wood.
From this point the banquet proceeds through a whirl of surprise courses and surprise incidents. The pea-hen’s eggs distributed from under a wooden hen prove, though doubtful-looking at first, to contain a fat beccafico wrapped in spiced yolk of egg. A slave-boy is boxed for troubling to pick up a silver entree-dish that had fallen—by orders of the host it must be thrown down again and swept away. To ensure a fair field as in war, he has arranged that each guest shall have a separate table: “so the stinking slaves will make us less hot by crushing past us” (obiter et putidissimi serui minorem nobis aestum frequentia sua facient). When his fine old Falernian, labelled one hundred years in bottle, is produced, he indulges in one of his ill-bred remarks, “Yesterday I didn’t supply such a good brand, and there were far more genteel people at dinner” (heri non tam bonum posui, et multo honestiores cenabant). The old wine, like other incidents of the dinner, sets the host moralizing. “Ah me, so wine lives longer than poor mankind: so let’s have a good ‘wet’ (tengomenas). Wine is life”; but next moment a slave brings in another reminder of death, a mechanically jointed silver skeleton, on which Trimalchio reflects in verse:
Alack for us poor men! man’s little all Is naught: so shall we all be when we pass Below. Then let us live while luck allows.[543]
One can but summarize, without entering into details, the fare provided. A Zodiac dish with symbolic dainties above for each of the twelve signs (on which the host insisted on giving a rambling astronomical lecture afterwards) has much finer delicacies concealed underneath. A wild boar on a tray is attended by huntsmen and hounds, and when the boar is opened, the birds begin to fly—thrushes, to wit, limed by fowlers in the dining-room for the astonished banqueters. Three white pigs are driven in, one of them to be turned into a dinner on the spot. Soon after, a pig is served up, to all appearance ungutted, and when by a prearranged jest, the seemingly negligent chef has been stripped for punishment, a stab at the animal releases a tumbling mass of cooked sausages! What promises to be a last course (epideipnis) consists of thrushes of fine meal stuffed with raisins and nuts, followed by quinces stuck all over with little spikes to resemble hedgehogs; but to their horror and loathing the sated guests are next confronted with a fat goose garnished ostensibly with fish and different birds, and yet all made, as Trimalchio boasts, by his expert cook Daedalus out of the same ingredient, namely, hog’s flesh! Suddenly two slaves fall a-fighting and smash the waterpots that hang round their necks, thus revealing oysters and mussels to be handed round presently in competition with the cook’s snails on a silver gridiron.
Still more entertainment is derivable from the conduct and talk of the diners than from the conglomerate menu. The host at one time inflicts on his guests a hideous tune from a mime; he must crack his joke in shouting “Carve ’er!” (Carpe) at his slave “Carver” (Carpus), he talks very plainly on subjects customarily thought delicate; he needs to be told by his wife to remember his dignity; and yet later in the meal lets a favourite slave mount on his back and slap him. Loving to create astonishment, he has an enormous hoop let down from an opening in the ceiling to convey golden crowns and perfume-boxes as souvenirs; and he has cakes and fruits prepared to spurt out saffron. After acrobatic performances come Homeric reciters clashing spear and shield. Trimalchio tries to follow their Greek in some sort of Latin Iliad, until he thinks fit to explain the situation by his own fatuous version of the tale of Troy:
“You know the story they’re doing? Diomede and Ganymede were two brothers. Their sister was Helen. Agamemnon ran off with her and palmed off a hind on Diana in her place. So Homer is now telling of the fighting between Trojans and Parentines. Of course Agamemnon won, and married his daughter Iphigenia to Achilles. That’s what drove Ajax out of his mind, and he’ll make the sequel clear in a second.”[544]
And so a charger is carried in bearing a calf boiled whole and helmeted for a raving “Ajax” to slash at and divide on the point of his sword among the onlookers.
Another curious recitation is that by a young slave-boy of Habinnas’s, who, with his wife Scintilla, had arrived late in the evening, mellow from a wake. The boy starts with the opening line of Aeneid V., but, being a foreigner, soon makes blunders and actually sandwiches in between Virgilian pieces scraps from Atellane farces “so that for the first time in my life,” comments the smart Encolpius, “even Virgil hurt my finer feelings” (ut tunc primum me etiam Vergilius offenderit).[545] This production is, however, in keeping with Trimalchio’s own standard of attainment; for it is one of the signs of his vulgarity that he pretends to a learning which he does not possess. He attempts literary talk with the professor present, claiming culture on the ground that he owns two collections of books—one Greek, one Latin.[546] He used to read Homer when a boy, he adds; and with what effect is evident from the “howlers” in his story of the origin of Corinthian bronze, which bears some resemblance to that of Charles Lamb regarding roast-pig:
“When Troy fell, that charlatan and big rascal Hannibal heaped all the statues of bronze, gold and silver on to a single funeral pile and set them on fire: they turned into one amalgam of bronze. From this mass artificers took pieces and made cups, dishes and statuettes.”[547]
Such mixed history prepares one for his mixed mythology when he boasts of his ownership of a round hundred beakers
“engraved with Cassandra killing her children—and the little boys are lying dead so naturally that you’d think they were alive.[548] I have also a thousand cups, which Mummius left to my late master; and on them Daedalus is shutting Niobe into the Trojan Horse.”
The proud egotism of the self-made man who has risen in the social scale is admirably made to betray itself by such means as the engagement-book displayed prominently, the daily gazette of events on his estates read at dinner,[549] his narrative of how he got on in business, or even his attempts at pathos by reading his will, the directions for his tombstone and his own epitaph:[550]
HERE RESTS
C. POMPEIVS TRIMALCHIO MAECENATIANVS:
NOMINATED TO THE AUGUSTAL PRIESTHOOD IN ABSENCE, HE MIGHT HAVE BEEN MEMBER OF ANY CIVIL GUILD IN ROME, BUT DECLINED. DUTIFUL, BRAVE, FAITHFUL, HE STARTED WITH LITTLE, BUT LEFT THIRTY MILLIONS: YET HE NEVER HAD A COLLEGE EDUCATION. FAREWELL BOTH HE AND THOU!
The talk of the guests makes a refreshing change from what would otherwise be intolerable gorging. Here the author proves his dramatic realism by drawing from the spoken Latin of the day, introducing its colloquialisms and faulty grammar. A few translated extracts may suggest the off-hand character of the conversation:
“I couldn’t eat any more so I turned to my neighbour to get all the news I could, and started raking up stories and asking him who the woman was that was bustling up and down. ‘That’s Trimalchio’s wife,’ says he, ‘her name’s Fortunata, and she measures her shekels by the bushel. And what was she just a little while ago? Well, you must excuse my saying it, but you wouldn’t have taken a bit of bread from her hand. Now—I can’t say why or wherefore—she’s in the seventh heaven: she’s Trimalchio’s factotum (topanta). The truth is, she’s only got to tell him at high noon that it’s dark, and he’ll believe it. He hasn’t a notion of what he owns—he’s such a plutocrat; but this lynx of a woman keeps a look-out on everything, even where you wouldn’t think it.’”
And he proceeds to describe her as sober and thrifty, but a shrew and capable of inflicting, like Mrs. Caudle, curtain-lectures on her husband (est tamen malae linguae, pica puluinaris).[551]
Nowhere do we hear more of the true ring of chatter than when the host’s temporary retirement removes all restraint:[552] Dama bawls for an extra tankard:
“Day doesn’t count: it’s night before you can turn about. So the best you can do is to go right from bed to dinner. And nice chilly weather we’ve had. Hot baths has scarcely warmed me up. (uix me balneus calfacit). After all, hot drinks is equal to an overcoat. I’ve had some good pulls, and am absolutely tight (plane matus). Wine’sh gone to my head” (uinus mihi in cerebrum abiit).
Seleucus breaks in—he has been at a funeral:
“Well, well, he’s joined the majority (abiit ad plures). The doctors did for him, or rather his evil stars has done it (immo magis malus fatus). A doctor’s only a comfort to the mind. Still he had a fine funeral ... and the mourning was jolly good—he left several slaves their freedom—even if the widow was stingy with her tears. What if he didn’t treat her over well? Woman taken all round is a bird of prey. One should never do a good turn: it’s just like chucking it down a well. But an old love nips like a crab.”[553]
One bore is interrupted by another; “Let’s remember the living,” shouts Phileros, but he too is soon talking about the dead man and his brother. Next Ganymedes insists on having his growl over profiteers and high prices until Echion, the rag-merchant, the optimist of the party, brings him to book:
“Do give up whining. Now it’s this way, now it’s that, as the countrymen said when he’d lost the spotted pig. What one doesn’t get to-day, one will to-morrow—that’s how life pushes on. S’help me, ye couldn’t mention a better country, if only it had the right people.... If you emigrate, you’ll be telling how pigs trot round at home ready-cooked. And, mark ye, we’re going to have a topping gladiatorial show (munus excellente) in three days more—the public holiday.”[554]
And, reckless of grammar, he rattles on about gladiatorial matches, till he takes to chaffing the professor:
“Now, Agamemnon, I fancy you’re saying ‘what’s this bore blethering about?’ Folks like you that’s able to speak doesn’t. You don’t belong to our sort, and so you jeer at the remarks of we ’umble people. We know as how much learning doth make you mad.”[555]
With their escape from this maelstrom of junketing, the youths recommence their adventures. It was no easy task after hard drinking to find the way back to their inn in the dark through a strange town. Luckily Giton had made chalk-marks on columns in the daytime, and the white could be seen.
Renewed quarrels between Encolpius and Ascyltus give place to a fresh set of incidents. Encolpius in a picture-gallery has met a shabbily dressed and unprincipled old poet Eumolpus. He can talk effectively on the decay of art[556] owing to the disappearance of the ancient times of rivalry in hard work, when unselfish toil for posterity contrasted with the modern love of wine, women and wealth. Seeing Encolpius interested in a picture of the taking of Troy, he recites sixty-five iambics on this Troiae Halosis, introducing the Trojan horse and Laocoon with the serpents as in Aeneid II, and thus briefly handling a theme which had interested Nero. His verses have a way of bringing a shower of stones about his head, but he remains an incorrigible versifier, even later when in imminent danger from shipwreck. Encolpius has deemed it wise to share Giton’s favour with Eumolpus, and the three have made their way aboard ship when Encolpius discovers to his alarm that the ship belongs to an old enemy, Lichas, and that he, with Tryphaena, another deadly enemy made in a lost part of the story, is actually on the vessel. To avoid detection, Encolpius and Giton agree to be shaven and branded to look like slaves; but a sea-sick passenger notices in the moonlight the shaving—an evil omen at sea—and discovery follows, with a free fight in which passengers and crew take part until a treaty of peace is made. Then there are rejoicings aboard, and Eumolpus indulges in elegiacs and hendecasyllabics on the tonsure of the youths, for whom wigs and false eyebrows have to be obtained. To illustrate fickleness, Eumolpus recounts the tale of the apparently inconsolable widow of Ephesus and the kindly soldier. In a storm Lichas is blown overboard and drowned, and the voyage ends in shipwreck.
The closing scenes are laid in Crotona, whither Encolpius and Giton accompany Eumolpus with much bravado and assurance to practise fraud and wilful imposition for their livelihood. Legacy-hunting is the great industry of the city (nam aut captantur aut captant, 116). The strangers have decided that Eumolpus shall act the part of a fabulously wealthy landed proprietor from Africa who has unfortunately been shipwrecked, but who can presumably more than repay in the long run any hospitality received at Crotona. Before the impostors set to work, a pause in the narrative permits Eumolpus to propound critical doctrines on historical poetry in his remarks introductory[557] to nearly three hundred hexameters[558] upon the Bellum Ciuile of 49 B.C. It is in the mouth of Eumolpus that the author places the famous phrase about the studied grace of Horace (Horatii curiosa felicitas).
Adventures are to the adventurous; and Encolpius, now called Polyaenus, is not long in Crotona before a serving-maid makes amorous overtures to him on behalf of her mistress, and his introduction[559] to this fair Siren named Circe is related with a romantic beauty which deserves to be linked with a less unsavoury intrigue:
“It was not long before she ushered her mistress from her hiding-place and escorted to my side a lady perfect beyond all dreams. There is no language that can contain her charm: words of mine must fall short—her tresses all over her shoulders, a cascade of nature’s own curls; a low forehead with the hair turned back from it; eyebrows running on to the line of her cheeks and, between the eyes, almost united again; eyes brighter than the gleaming stars when there is no moon; just a curve on the nose; and sweet lips such as Praxiteles imagined Diana had. And then her chin, her neck, her hands, and the whiteness of those feet set in a tiny band of gold—she had eclipsed the marble of Paros. I had long loved Doris: I thought nothing of Doris now.”
The meetings with Circe end, however, disastrously for her lover, whom her servants finally expel with ignominy as an unsatisfying swain. Other troubles are in store when he has the misfortune to kill one of three sacred geese, but the imperfections of the text give a disjointed effect to the remaining episodes, which close with a very natural uneasiness on the part of the tricksters that they may be found out, and the grim jest which Eumolpus plays upon expectant beneficiaries under his will by making it a condition in one of the clauses that his heirs shall after his death slice him up and eat him!
* * * * *
While the period of composition may be taken as Neronian, the time of the events related is most likely not much earlier. Though Mommsen put the dramatic date under Augustus, Friedländer prefers the close of Claudius’s reign or beginning of Nero’s; and this proposition fits the case of Trimalchio “Maecenatianus,” freed in boyhood by his patron Maecenas, who died in 8 B.C. Petronius describes Trimalchio as old (senem caluum, 27) at the time of his entertainment; hence it may be imagined to have happened about the middle of the first century.
On possible literary sources of the Satyricon perhaps too much has been written in view of the fact that whatever the borrowing, suspected or unsuspected, the work remains a monument of originality for its realistic portrayal of certain grades of contemporary Italian life. The debt to that human fund of material and to the author’s unique genius for artistic handling eclipses any debt to literary sources. Of these sources the most obvious concerns his method of relieving prose with verse after Varro’s Menippean fashion: and to this particular medley (without any claim to the Varronian spirit) the title of saturae may allude. There are also a few burlesque echoes of epic,[560] although, in the absence of the missing books, one cannot be justified in accepting the theory of “The Wrath of Priapus”[561] as a motive comically analogous to a Homeric “Wrath of Poseidon,” and thereby imagined to link the escapades into a unity suggestive of an obscene Odyssey. Persecution by an offended deity of sex-lust may plausibly be considered to operate for part of the story in the spirit of the lines,
Angry Priapus of the Dardanelles Hunts me on earth and where grey Ocean swells;[562]
but it remains problematic whether it dominates the whole.
Other literary forms have been put forward as credible sources of influence on the Satyricon—the serious heroic romance, stories of adventure implied in certain rhetorical exercises among the elder Seneca’s collection, the prologue of comedy, and, with more plainly apposite bearing, the mime for its realism and the erotic Milesian tales[563] in Greek, if not in Sisenna’s adaptations from Aristides. The hypothesis that Petronius travestied such Greek love-romances as are represented by the Ninos story[564] recovered on a first-century papyrus can scarcely hold good where we find no structure clearly suggesting parody to a reader: manifestly the tone of Petronius is far removed from that of the conventional courtships, piracies, voyages, shipwrecks, separations and reunions in the love-stories of later Greek literature.[565] Time has even been spent on an endeavour to prove that picaresque Greek novels existed from which Petronius might have borrowed his rascally heroes. No doubt he owed much: there is equally no doubt that he created the realistic novel; for before him such prose fiction as had appeared in the form of fable, parable or anecdote fell far short of a sustained romance well filled with incident and characterization.
But just as the Satyricon as a whole, however original in spirit, owed something to literary convention, so the Cena repeats stock-features of Greek banquets like the performances by acrobats and reciters, the appearance of the uninvited guest (Habinnas), the quarrel, and the dog-fight.[566] The Cena in Roman Satire had a tradition beginning perhaps in Ennius, but certainly established by Lucilius and developed by Horace; and between Nasidienus’s banquet in Horace and Trimalchio’s dinner-party there are points of resemblance[567] enough to prove how fresh and independent Petronius could be even when he handled a tralatician idea like that of a rich and ill-bred parvenu, or reckless extravagance, or an accident at the feast, or the efforts of guests to smother laughter at their entertainer, or the obvious freedom from restraint among the guests during their host’s temporary withdrawal.[568]
A sentence written in the eighteenth century makes a good introduction to much of the criticism passed on Petronius: “I told him that, in my opinion, he wrote with ease and vivacity, but was withal so lewd and indecent that he ought to find no quarter or protection among people of morals and taste.” So Smollett makes Roderick Random answer Earl Strutwell when he has raised the question of Petronius’s “taste in love” as “generally decried and indeed condemned by our laws.”[569] The judgement has the interest of occurring in a novel which presents a parallel to the Satyricon in its spirit of adventure into more than questionable companies and in its background of rascality and immorality. Petronius’s own line,
You damn a work of fresh outspokenness[570]
may be taken as an anticipation of the attitude of many. In this faithful picture of seamy aspects of Italian life and manners there is much that is loathsome, but there is much that is merely vulgar, much that is innocuously humorous, while as a true presentment all of it retains its value in the history of society. It should be noted too that if Petronius does not condemn, neither does he commend. As a recording spectator with a patrician’s half-amused cynicism and a jaded voluptuary’s thrill from contemplating low life in contrast to court ceremonial and luxury, he was justifiably conscious that he had inaugurated something new in literature.
Any who may entertain misgivings about the title of Petronius’s work to rank as a realistic romance would do well to consider Guy de Maupassant’s preface to Pierre et Jean. There he states and defends the position of the realistic artist among novel writers. The realist, because misunderstood, is sometimes injudiciously condemned. No mere slavish copying of contemporary life will produce an adequate sense of simple reality; for an endeavour to incorporate within the limits of a book the whole truth and nothing but the truth would inevitably result in desperate entanglement among an endless number of insignificant details. So the artistic realist, as surely as he values art and under pain of becoming a commonplace verbal photographer, must select characteristic details only, must communicate some meaning which underlies the bewildering miscellany of apparently incongruous incidents, and must, by his readjustment of actualities, compose a synthesis more intelligible and more cogent than life itself. This is a task which genius alone has power successfully to achieve; and, indeed, so subtle is the genius demanded that the higher order of realists must, as Maupassant suggested, prove themselves to be illusionists. In this connexion, one conceives that Petronius’s presentment of Trimalchio’s dinner-party is more effective and more memorable than the exact record of an actual dinner-party would have been. The quality of the host’s character and motives is grasped best from the artist’s manipulation of incidents; for without recourse had to elaborate psychological analysis there can be unmistakeably conveyed, by means of such conversation, behaviour and gestures as the author’s foresight has introduced, a convincing picture of the mental endowment of persons under observation. And, if this is the case with character, so too the events may be chosen and marshalled in such a way as to suggest their special significance in the narrative. These a realist like Petronius will choose and marshal with unabashed candour, disdaining nothing that is common to humanity, and unhindered by qualms of gingerly prudishness.
It is his mode of representing life that places Petronius in the company of Rabelais, Fielding and Smollett. His is a gay, outspoken, unashamed sensuality, flitting naturally from pleasure to pleasure and accepting for his characters without hesitancy the experiences of the world which come their way. This is the true spirit of the picaresque romance. Now one thinks of Gil Blas as a parallel, now of some of Dumas’s adventurers. An amour, a fight, a theft, a carousal, come all alike to Encolpius; and it is among the author’s distinctive merits that without pointless embroideries or reflective digressions he uses an accumulated experience of cities and men to fashion a straightforward and life-like story. It is briskly told, and because its characters seem flesh and blood it smacks of truth. Its living people reveal themselves in part through their doings or misdoings, in part through natural talk; they are, in fact, the sport of their own weaknesses, whether they be the wandering rogues Encolpius and Ascyltus or the self-satisfied profiteer Trimalchio or some of his fellow-freedmen in affluent or in reduced circumstances. From the pen of an adept in sternly realistic treatment of figures and situations the reader must expect the shocking as well as the mirth-provoking; so that frank avowals and naked abandonment of reticence give to the Satyricon some of that kind of realism which is discoverable in certain French and Russian novels. The sensuality is, however, by no means sexual only. There is something Gargantuan, as there is certainly intended to be something satiric, in the overdone profusion which marks Trimalchio’s hospitality; and yet its variety and surprises imply that sort of sensual delight in good food which animates Anatole France’s description, in his Histoire Comique, of the Castelnaudary stew a-cooking twenty years till the added ingredients in the pan imparted a quality like that in the women’s amber-flesh of old Venetian masters. This Roman, this Gallic interest in food is not understood in England, where people do not talk about meals as they did at Rome and do in France; but then the renown of England does not lie in her cookery.
It is as a novelist that Petronius must be appreciated. A full judgement on his achievement is prevented by the loss of much the greater part of his work, though enough survives to prove his mastery of some qualities felt to be most enjoyable in the modern novel; such as his humour of situation and dialogue, often as pronounced as in Dickens; his restrained irony of attitude, not tragic as in Hardy, but verging towards Meredith’s comic spirit; his creation of incidents lively and varied, carrying the reader along as rapidly as in Dumas; and his management of pervading atmosphere in consonance with incidents and characters—a great secret in all the most effective tales. But in these light chapters of ancient life let no reader look for depth of thought or passion, or any of that pity and tenderness which make the strength of some of the greatest modern fiction.
The Metamorphoses or Golden Ass of Apuleius in the second century is the only other fictitious narrative in Latin prose. One must place in a separate category The Marriage of Philology and Mercury written by Martianus Capella in the fifth century. That work was designed by Capella to precede his educational encyclopaedia on the triuium and quadriuium. It follows the Menippean form, as the Satyricon did, but is a pedantic allegorical fantasia. The Golden Ass and the Satyricon are alike of a higher imaginative order than the stereotyped romances of erotic adventure which subsequently became common in Greek; but, though they are both more readable than the loves of Theagenes and Chariclea in Heliodorus’s Aethiopica or of Daphnis and Chloe in Longus’s elegant prose pastoral, the Satyricon excels The Golden Ass because of its greater originality and its more typically Roman colour. The Golden Ass betrays more of the influence of Greek Milesian tales, notably in its long[571] but charming episode of Cupid and Psyche; and, while it may be considered a satiric romance in its mockery of contemporary superstition, priestly imposture, and a weak police-system under which brigands enjoyed too much licence, still its atmosphere of the marvellous and the magical is widely dissimilar to the prevailing realism of the Satyricon, which, except in incidental tales concerning werewolf or witches, seldom departs from fidelity to actual life. Lucius, the hero of the later romance, whose lubricity and prying are responsible for his transformation into an ass, is, no doubt, as the victim of the mismanaged spell, brought into contact with different classes of individuals, different homes, and different religious rites including the mysteries of Isis so finely described towards the close; but the realism is less telling in Apuleius than in Petronius, because the incidents are related in a bizarre African style, whose colour and ring contrast markedly with the natural Latin of the Satyricon.
This Latin of the Satyricon has a natural ring, partly because, even where Petronius writes in literary Latin, he is, as a rule, simple, direct and non-rhetorical; partly because he constructs a life-like framework of easygoing remarks; partly because he employs the actual words of everyday conversation. His style is not a unity. He is master of two styles—one educated, the other colloquial.[572] Encolpius, like the rhetorical professor Agamemnon and the poet Eumolpus, expresses himself usually in the polished urbane Latin, which, without being over-formal, is still distinct from the vulgar Latin in which the freedmen speak. Even within this latter sphere, difficulties have been encountered in rigidly demarcating ordinary colloquial elements from plebeian and possibly dialectic elements. It is unlikely that Petronius took pains to manufacture an accurate mosaic of Campanian words: enough, that through broad strokes imitative of the locutions of humble folk he produced an effect like that of the “racy genuine language” which Borrow somewhere admires in criminals’ accounts of themselves; and, in fact, there are echoes as of an ancient Newgate Calendar. This dialogue is as true to life as the talk in Kipling’s “Soldiers Three” or in Conrad’s “Nigger of the Narcissus.” One of the great values, therefore, of Petronius is that his realistic novel, along with comedy, satire and the less formal letters of Cicero, affords examples of that popular Latin which is so important for understanding the genesis of the Romance languages. To take the most familiar instance, it is significant that caballus, which descends as the word for “horse” into Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French and Roumanian, should be found in writers like Lucilius, Horace and Juvenal as well as in Petronius.[573]
This sermo plebeius, then, Petronius causes to live again for his readers with just admixture enough of Greek[574] to remind us that we are supposed to be in Campania. And so the freedmen, while they dine and revel, speak slangily and ungrammatically, uttering their thoughts in too casual and disconnected a manner to trouble about logical subordination of clauses or periodic form, and interspersing their talk quite appropriately with saws or scraps of popular wisdom, rare compounds and diminutives,[575] irregular inflectional endings and false genders. The sententious is rolled off by Trimalchio with a negligence of grammar which can be paralleled, if not exactly echoed, in English:
“My friends, even slaves are human beings, and they drinks the same milk as us, even if their evil stars has downed them.”[576]
Commending his wine, he declares “Fishes must swim” (pisces natare oportet). Ganymedes grumbles “This district’s going down as the calf’s tail grows” (haec colonia retrouersus crescit tanquam coda uituli). “One good turn deserves another” (manus manum lauat) says the next guest, who concludes in Latin less commendable than the sentiment, “Education’s a treasure and culture never dies” (litterae thesaurum est et artificium nunquam moritur, 46).
The spoken language, being conservative no less than innovating, retained, as it does in many countries, a proportion of archaisms, so that Petronian diminutives and other formations find parallels in early Latin writers. Gaudimonium, 61, and tristimonium, 63, remind one of words like mercimonium in Plautus; and there is an old-fashioned sound in sestertiarius, 45, dupunduarius, 58 and 74, linguosus, 43 and 63, dignitossus, 57, with adverbs like improbiter, 66, largiter, 71, and urceatim, 44. Similarly, several frequentative and intensive verbs are of the sort used by comic authors, and may be referred to the sermo cotidianus rather than to the sermo rusticus.[577] Plebeian speech was also, like comedy, rich in transitives of the first conjugation (e.g. argutare, 46, 57; aginare, 61) and in compounds (recorrigere, 43, shared with Seneca and Tertullian; adcognoscere, 69; domusio, 46; caldicerebrius, 45, nesapius, 50). To the vulgar speech we may set down most of the departures from classic grammatical form, such as 3rd declension nouns transferred to 1st, e.g. the Greek words schemas, 44, stigmam, 45, 69; 2nd declension nouns transferred to 1st, triclinia, 71, intestinas, 76; 1st to 2nd margaritum,[578] 63; 3rd to 2nd uasus, 57, pauperorum, 46. Bouis, 62, and Iouis, 58 appear as nominatives: so too lacte, 38, which with the adjective in munus excellente, 45, is almost Italian. Changes of gender are seen in caelus, 39, 45; uinus, 41; balneus, 41; fatus, 42, 71, 77; fericulus, 39 (= ferculum with epenthetic vowel from vulgar pronunciation); lorus, 57. Notable verb-forms are uinciturum, 45, for uicturum; fefellitus sum, 61; faciatur, 71; mauoluit, 77. Alterations in voice occur; e.g. potes loquere, non loquis, 46; pudeatur, 47. As might be expected, old words are used in new senses; e.g. notaui, 6 (= “I noticed”),[579] and departures are made from standard syntax; e.g. temptemus si adhuc sorbilia sunt, 33; persuadeo hospitem, 62.
True as he is to certain phases of life and speech, Petronius is yet a contrast to contemporary literary tendencies. In this very realism of his he is independent, and in large measure it must have rescued him from the risk of indulgence in the rhetorical artificialities of the period. He is, besides, a sort of flippant Epicurean counterfoil to the grave Stoic thought in Seneca’s treatises, and he is out of sympathy with Lucan’s manner in composing a historical poem.
Petronius is himself one of the figures in the poetry of the Neronian age. His own poetical attainments were considerable. The mere skill is evident from the varied verse-passages, long or short, in the Satyricon. Some of these have a literary bearing like Agamemnon’s didactic lines on the training of an orator, or Eumolpus’s iambics On the Sack of Troy—uninspired in face of the inevitable comparison with Virgil, but undeserving of that shower of stones which Petronius merrily makes the reciter earn. The longest piece consists of 295 hexameters to illustrate Eumolpus’s dogmas concerning the dangers which beset a poem on the Bellum Ciuile. Without naming Lucan, these pronouncements imply a criticism on his epic, especially in their objection to taking actual facts for poetic material and in their advocacy of divine interventions (deorum ministeria) which the Pharsalia had eschewed. The poem itself cannot be read without thoughts of Lucan, particularly in its description of portents and panic. The alarm in Rome over Caesar’s approach is described in a passage characterized by rhetoric, artificialities and monotony in phrase and metre,[580] while it contains pithy sentences recalling Lucan’s style: e.g. “as each man fears, so great his flight” (quantum quisque timet, tantum fugit), and “slays, if prayers could slay, his absent foe” (absentem uotis interficit hostem).
More poetic feeling is shown in some of the shorter pieces, such as the lines picturing the love of Circe and Encolpius in a flowery setting like that of Mother Earth in Jove’s embrace:
Forth flashed rose, violet, and iris soft, And from the meadow green white lilies laughed: So bright the ground that to the lush grass called Our love: and day grew fairer to befriend Our hidden sighs.[581]
Apart from verses in the Satyricon, there are short poems which, with different degrees of authority and in different number, have been considered Petronian. Bährens gives 37.[582] Sixteen pieces follow the epigrams assigned to Seneca in the Codex Vossianus Q. 86, and include two guaranteed as Petronian by Fulgentius, who quotes from them; eleven others were drawn by Binet from a now lost MS. which apparently ascribed them to Petronius, from whom Fulgentius in any case cites one; and they were followed by eight in regard to which at most a stylistic argument can be used; while four more (including, however, two from our mutilated Satyricon) are entitled as by Petronius in a different MS., Codex Vossianus F. 111. There is fair reason to believe that these, with a few possible exceptions, are his work, and they may be excerpts from vanished portions of the Satyricon. Not unnaturally they vary in theme, metre and style, so that an appropriate motto is furnished by one of the couplets:
Find here what each desires: men’s pleasure goes Strange ways: one pulls a thorn and one a rose.[583]
The fear that created gods, the emigrant with the world before him, the triumph of worthlessness, an old man’s torrent of tears, betrayal of secrets, perils of the sea, nature’s infinite variety, sympathy in suffering, a sweetheart’s gift of apples, a parrot from India, and a theory of dreams, are among the subjects. A few end in epigrammatic manner with a line which has some of the point though not all the sharpness of Martial. Nowhere, however, can we more readily believe that we have the genuine accents of Petronius than in poems which imply a cordial delight in natural beauty. It is more than a sated epicure’s itch for change from town, because in some a truer poet speaks than in the pastorals of his contemporary Calpurnius Siculus. Thus, Petronius leads his brief description of an autumn scene up to a neat final line:
All the year’s promise stood before our eyes.[584]
Or he pictures his simple country house lovingly indeed, but with a sense of disillusion and an almost Senecan consciousness of wasted time:
Care-free the shelter of my cottage-roof; And wine-rich clusters hang from fertile elm. Red apples and ripe cherries load their boughs; Pallas’ own olive breaks with fruited branch.... Go to now: sell the fleeting hours of life For rich repasts! I pray my waiting end May find me here to answer for my hours.[585]
In another poem he hails the sea-side with rapture
O strand more sweet to me than life! O sea! Blest he who visits oft thy neighb’ring shores. O lovely day! Once in this scene I used To rouse the Naiads with alternate stroke. Here’s depth of pool, there’s seaweed from the bay, Here trusty haunt for passion unrevealed. My life is lived; for grudging fortune ne’er Shall filch from me what happier hours bestowed.[586]
But he has nothing finer than his sonnet-like poem in fourteen lines on the tyranny of love:
In night’s first silence couched, scarce had I found Repose and given to Sleep o’erwearied eyes, When cruel Love clutches my hair and cries: “Keep vigil thou, I say, for all thy wound. Canst thou, my slave, by thousand amours bound Alone, alone, thou block, lie sluggard-wise?” Thereat, barefoot, with tunic loose, I rise And try all paths, but follow no path round.
I run, I slacken speed, I half retrace My tracks, then in the highway blush to wait. Lo! hushed are human sounds and traffic’s roar, And note of bird and trusty pack that bays. Alone of all, both sleep and couch I hate, Heeding, great Cupid, thy imperial lore.[587]