VI. LUCAN: HISTORICAL EPIC
The author of the Pharsalia—Authorities for his life—His career—Relations with Nero—Lost works—The Pharsalia—Summary of the ten books—What was its contemplated length?—The three books first composed—Daring in choice of subject—Originality in epic treatment—Lucan’s sources, historical, philosophical and literary—Historical value—Misstatements and anti-Caesarian bias—Stoicism—Influence of previous poets—How rhetoric affected him—Erudition—Realism—Speeches—Pointed style in sententiae—A vein of poetry—His hero.
LUCAN
Precocity and enthusiasm were eminent characteristics of the young poet who first throve under Nero’s favour and finally succumbed to that emperor’s jealousy. Byron, dying at thirty-six, is reckoned a fertile genius; but when Lucan had to face death at an age earlier by more than ten years, there stood to his credit an almost equally wonderful mass of work—letters and speeches, epic and drama, miscellaneous verse, court-poetry, panegyrics and satires, as well as librettos for mimes. Of all these, however, time has spared only his Pharsalia, broken off in the tenth book. The determining factors in his career were his descent from two prominent Spanish families and his rhetorical education; for upon these depended the success and failure of his life, and the main qualities of his thought and style.
Lucan’s maternal grandfather was Acilius Lucanus, a Corduban speaker of note. His paternal grandfather was the elder Seneca, well known to Roman literary circles in the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius; his father was Annaeus Mela, an eques, apparently something of a philosophic recluse,[848] while his uncles were M. Annaeus Novatus (the “Gallio” of the Acts of the Apostles) and the philosopher L. Annaeus Seneca. To the latter he owed his introduction to court-life, which proved an incentive to brilliant achievement but ultimately compassed his ruin.
While the impersonality of epic precludes the Pharsalia from yielding details about Lucan’s life, yet from it alone sure influences could be drawn as to his training in literature, rhetoric and philosophy, his anti-Caesarism, his self-confident and impetuous spirit. We are not, however, without definite biographical sources. There are two lives of importance, one imperfect and inimical, manifestly the basis of Jerome’s entry[849] regarding the death of Lucan, and, since the days of Joseph Scaliger, concluded with justice to come from Suetonius’s De uiris illustribus; and the other life a fuller and appreciative one, assigned to Vacca, a grammarian of the sixth century. Statius and Martial were admirers of Lucan and joined with his widow Polla in keeping his memory green; hence the Genethliacon Lucani of the former and several short pieces by the latter poet supply additional information.[850] The record of Lucan’s connexion with the Pisonian conspiracy is in Tacitus, who also in the Dialogus ranks Lucan as already a classic alongside of Horace and Virgil.[851]
M. Annaeus Lucanus[852] (A.D. 39-65) was born, about the year of his grandfather Seneca’s death, at the “Patrician Colony” of Corduba, itself for generations a centre of intellectual importance in Spain. The infant, when eight months old, was brought to Rome; for it was natural that his father Mela should migrate in response to the lure of the great city, where already his own father and brother had made their mark. Later, there are interesting references by the philosopher Seneca to the child. In the Consolatio addressed to his mother Helvia he writes about a nephew, who must be Lucan, as a winning boy whose merry playfulness and talkativeness would keep anyone amused (ad cuius conspectum nulla potest durare tristitia ... cuius non lacrimas illius hilaritas supprimat?)[853] and an epigram of his prays that one day this prattling child (dulci Marcus qui nunc sermone fritinnit) may rival his uncles in eloquence.[854] His education under the best teachers was directed towards the realization of that very wish. Grounded in literature and in the traditionally wide range of learning subsidiary to “grammar,” he proceeded in due course to the study of rhetoric and philosophy. His declamations in Latin and Greek were of astonishing ability, eclipsing the efforts of his fellow-students, if not of his masters, and commanding the applause of his hearers. Such brilliance was at once a result and a cause of self-confidence: and the habitual desire to win attention confirmed him in many artificial conceits inseparable from the rhetorical system. Some philosophy he derived from his uncle; but he had at least one other famous Stoic teacher in Cornutus, at whose lectures, if we may trust Probus, he met Persius.[855] For Persius’s poetry Lucan expressed cordial admiration—a noticeable tribute from one whose precocious fertility had led him to compare himself favourably with Virgil.[856]
Quite early in his reign[857] Nero had his attention drawn by Seneca to a nephew so talented. Little is known precisely regarding the development of his relations with the emperor; but we read of a visit paid to Athens from which Nero recalled him to join his entourage, and of honours conferred, such as the quaestorship before the regular age of twenty-five, and an augural priesthood. In A.D. 60, when twenty-one, he achieved his first public literary triumph in his Laudes Neronis at the quinquennial festival of the Neronia, then newly established, and at this date Nero and his youthful panegyrist were evidently on the best of terms. But Lucan’s position became insecure as Nero’s dislike for Seneca grew pronounced. It was perilous to vie with a clever and conceited imperial egotist prone to arrogate a principate in arts as well as in state, and an award of the prize to Lucan in a competition where he had the hardihood to enter against Nero rankled in the ruler’s heart. Suetonius implies that the final breach arose from Lucan’s sensitive fancy that Nero’s attitude towards his recitations was deliberately insulting, and from the poet’s unbecoming ridicule of the emperor’s verses. Vacca ascribes the quarrel to Nero’s jealousy of Lucan’s powers, and declares that he was forbidden further poetical production or forensic pleading. Thus silenced, except for covert satire, his passionate and wounded genius was driven into the bypaths of Piso’s conspiracy, in which he took a prominent part,[858] indulging, according to Suetonius, in ferocious threats against the tyrant and in rapturous praises of tyrannicide. When, however, this over-ripened intrigue was unmasked, disaster revealed the weakness of his character; for, oblivious of his professed Stoicism, he descended to abject entreaties, and, in anxiety to save his life, made confessions involving among his accomplices his apparently innocent mother. That at least is what Suetonius records.[859] But pusillanimity did not capture Nero’s indulgence. Lucan was ordered to die; and after a sumptuous repast had his veins opened. Then he recollected, and recited as his last words, a piece of his own about a soldier similarly bleeding to death. This dying quotation, although Tacitus’s words[860] might very well suggest that it belonged to a separate poem, has been sought for in three[861] different places in the Pharsalia, and by some[862] identified with a passage from the ninth book:
His tears were blood; and, where the ooze can find An outlet, wells abundant gore; the mouth And open nostrils stream: his sweat comes red: And every limb is drenched from teeming veins. So the whole body is a single wound.
Thus, when “the mad despot’s crime” (rabidi nefas tyranni) cut short the poet’s career, his epic was incomplete and only in part published. “Why doth cruel allotment debar greatness from old age?” asks Statius in his tribute to Lucan’s memory.[863]
Thirteen of Lucan’s lost works were known to Vacca, and five of these are alluded to by Statius, who adds the Adlocutio ad Pollam.[864] Suetonius, who confirms the other two authorities regarding the Laudes Neronis, mentions also a lampoon on Nero. The sagacious Vacca is clear that his thirteen are minor works compared with the epic on the civil war, but still “not all to be disdained”;[865] and one might guess that the most important are those common to Vacca and Statius—the Iliacon from the Trojan cycle, the Catachthonion, a descent into the underworld, the Laudes Neronis, and the Orpheus. Naturally, although in all likelihood less important, the Adlocutio to Lucan’s wife Polla is mentioned by Statius in his poem addressed to her in widowhood; but we do not know whether it was in prose or verse, unless its inclusion immediately after the De Incendio Vrbis, the one prose composition in Statius’s list, raises a presumption that it likewise was in prose. The remaining items in Vacca’s list are the Saturnalia, on the gaieties of December,[866] ten books of miscellaneous Siluae, the unfinished tragedy of Medea, fourteen Salticae Fabulae,[867] Epigrammata;[868] and in prose (besides his account of the Great Fire at Rome) a series of Epistulae ex Campania (which, if they had survived, ought to have proved a fascinating addition to our specimens of ancient letter-writing) as well as a speech for and one against Octavius Sagitta. These orationes suggest that Lucan in A.D. 58, perhaps filled with the detective instinct characteristic of not a few literary men, seized upon one of the most exciting murder trials of the day[869] as material for two clever rhetorical show-pieces in proof of what a versatile genius could say on both sides of a case complicated by cross-swearing and by an innocent freedman’s self-accusation.
The number of these works would be reduced by one on the suggestion which has been made[870] that the Catachthonion and Orpheus may be identical. But this seems impossible. True, both concern the underworld and are in hexameters;[871] but Statius makes separate allusions to them, and they are mentioned at different points in the Life by Vacca in the sixth century, when Lucan’s works were, as his words imply, still extant.
The ten books of the Pharsalia,[872] on the war which broke out in 49 B.C. between Caesar and Pompey, amount to over 8000 hexameters, but do not complete the poet’s design; for the tenth book, about 150 lines shorter than the next shortest, ends abruptly, leaving Caesar at war in Egypt.
Book I, though in many respects powerful, might have had more epic force, had it plunged at once into the narrative. As it is, the action is delayed by the announcement of the theme, a remonstrance on the iniquity of civil warfare, the comforting reflection that but for that warfare Rome would have had no Nero, the fantastic picture of the emperor as a god, and a fawning address to him as sufficient inspiration for the poet without need to invoke Apollo or Bacchus. The ensuing sketch of the causes of strife omits the burning question between the Senate and Caesar concerning Caesar’s command, but contains a vivid glance at the motives and characters of the two protagonists, spurred by rival claims (stimulos dedit aemula uirtus):
Caesar could brook no man in front of him, Pompey none by his side.[873]
Referring to Pompey’s lack of recent campaigning, Lucan unduly stresses his advanced age.[874] Now a man of 58, he was only six years older than his opponent, and, as Lucan more than once reminds us, had become Caesar’s son-in-law by marrying Julia, whose death rendered the breach between them more likely. In Pompey the poet, warmly though he espouses his cause, discerns a man over-confident in his previous record, who
Finds not new strength, but trusting much past luck Stands there the shadow of a mighty name.[875]
The contrasting figure of Caesar is drawn with force, though not with sympathy:
His manhood knew No rest—his only shame to lose a fight. Keen and untamed, where hope or anger called, He turned his hand, nor quailed to stain his sword ... To make a path by havoc was his joy.[876]
Strict narrative begins with Caesar’s passage of the Alps (l. 183), bringing his big plans to the small river Rubicon—the antithesis in adjectives is Lucan’s—to be confronted with the majestic image of his native country protesting against further advance:
The waters of the little Rubicon Were won, when, in the general’s sight, arose The mighty Phantom of his land, dismayed, Clear through the darkling night, most sad of look, Letting her grey locks stream from head that wore A crown of towers: so, with her tresses torn, Bare-armed she took her stand hard by and spoke Words blent with groans: “Men, whither press ye on? Where bear my standards? If with right ye come, Or if as citizens, thus far ye may.”
Then thrilled a shudder through the general’s frame, Stiffening his hair, and on the river’s brim Curbing his march a languor held his steps. Forthwith he prayed: “O Thou, that lookest forth From the Tarpeian Rock down on the walls Of our great city, O Thou Thunderer, And Phrygian Home-Gods, ... Vestal Fires, and peer Of highest Godhead, Rome, bless my design! Not thee do I pursue in frenzied arms. Lo! I am Caesar, lord on land and sea O’er all the world, and with thy leave e’en now Thy champion.”[877]
The Rubicon crossed, Ariminum is taken; Caesar is met by Curio and other tribunes expelled from Rome. A summons sent for troops from Gaul gives occasion for digressions on Gallic tribes, tides and Druids: then a description of panic in Rome at Caesar’s approach leads to the introduction of prodigies and expiatory rites. The book ends gloomily amidst presages of disaster. Lucan, it will be noted, while he removes from his historical poem the conventional gods of epic, supplies their place by the supernatural, as represented here by the symbolic figure of Roma, by portents, and by the prophetic second sight of both an astrologer and a matron so weirdly possessed that she has power to behold Pompey already lying dead.
A hesitant note of philosophy opens Book II. Stoics were perpetually confronted with the problem of reconciling belief in fate with divination. Why, asks Lucan, is man allowed knowledge of future woes through omens? Then, with a transient departure from Stoic dogmatism, he speculates on the operation of cause in the world. Is it the outcome of law or chance? Yet he clinches this old debate with the Epicureans by uttering the prayer,
Thy will be done forthwith: let human thought Be blind to coming doom: grant hope mid fear![878]
Mourning, as at a death, falls on Rome: men pray for the peril of foreign attack in preference to internecine strife. It is a passage typically rhetorical in the tumid declamation of its earlier portion and the argumentative point of its close:
Make Rome the foe of all the nations, but Spare us a civil war! Let Dacians hem Us here and Getae there: one rival should Meet Spain, the other turn his standard ’gainst The quivers of the East. And let thy hand, O Rome, have no relief from toil! Or, if, Ye Gods, ye will to blast th’ Italian name, Then let all ether, fallen into fire, Crash manifold in lightning on the earth! O wrathful Father, in one instant smite Both sides, both leaders, ere they yet have earned Their doom! From such a crop of novel crime Seek they to prove which shall be lord at Rome? Scarce had it been worth while to stimulate A civil war, if neither were to rule.[879]
The chief incidents of the book are the remarriage to Cato of his former wife, Marcia, widow of Hortensius; the resistance to Caesar offered by Domitius (pointedly introduced because an ancestor of Nero) and the driving of Pompey southwards to Brundisium and thence overseas to Epirus. What Heitland frankly calls “padding” consists in digressions on the civil wars between Marius and Sulla and on the rivers of Italy. The figure of Cato is of significance in relation to Book IX, where he plays a commanding part. In Lucan’s eyes Cato is the incarnation of virtue, hitherto guiltless of his country’s blood, but now, as Brutus tells him, drawn perforce into the struggle:
Thy virtuous past shall have this one reward— War makes thee guilty as it finds the rest: (Accipient alios, facient te bella nocentem.)[880]
Full of admiration for Cato’s ascetic ordering of his life, the poet proudly depicts his Stoic ability to combine a self-sufficing virtue with altruistic claims,
To keep the Mean and hold due boundary, To follow Nature, spend a life for Rome, Deeming his birth was for the world, not self: His feast to stifle hunger, and his Gods To ward the storm from roof-tree: richest garb For him to draw i’ the old way round his limbs The Roman burgher’s shaggy gown.... But ne’er Did selfish joy creep in to steal a part In Cato’s deeds.[881]
Book III, mainly concerned with Caesar’s doings on his return to Rome and during his siege of Massilia, is impoverished by a wearisome list of Pompey’s eastern allies and an incessant series of too ingeniously horrible deaths which befall the combatants. But among compensating passages are the descriptions of Pompey’s farewell to Italy and of the eerie forest near Massilia. The former opens the book with a note of poetry and pathos:
The South Wind fell upon the yielding sails And sped the Armada till its argosies Ploughed through the midmost deep: each mariner Kept steadfast outlook for the Ionian Main. Pompey alone ne’er turned his eyes aside From Italy, but all the while he watched The homeland havens fade away and shores That ne’er would meet his sight again, and peaks Cloud-wrapt, and scarce distinguishable hills.[882]
The second passage, a study in the sombre touched with the spirit of Celtic romance, describes the grove of the Druids. Here we are in a haunted twilight wood, polluted with inhuman rites, shunned by bird and beast as by sylvan deities, and though windless yet aquiver with a mysterious thrill in its leaves (arboribus suus horror inest)—a forest of black waters and misshapen images of eldritch gods, awesome through a wan aspect of decay and nameless terrors, where caverns resound with the rumble of the earthquake, where the hewn death-yew comes to life again, where flame plays among branches that do not burn and serpents hold the oak in their embrace.[883]
Three episodes constitute most of the action in Book IV—Caesar’s Spanish operations against Afranius and Petreius near Ilerda; the failure of one of three Caesarian rafts to escape the Pompeian blockade in Illyria; and the descent of Curio, in Caesar’s interest, upon Africa, when he is defeated by Juba and meets death. The pangs of thirst suffered by Pompeians in Spain prompt one of Lucan’s denunciations of luxury,[884] while the counsel of Volteius to his men on the trapped raft that they must slay each other rather than surrender is argued in the overstrained manner of the schools, and is an ingenious combination of special pleading and boastfulness. When the crew carry out their dreadful compact of mutual slaughter, like the offspring of the teeth of mythical dragons, characteristic realism is indulged in to describe the crawling writhing bleeding agony of the lacerated men. But this virtual suicide closes in a reflection that consoled many of Nero’s subjects as well as Lucan—death is a ready way of eluding tyranny. Here it is still the Stoic who speaks; for Stoicism, while recognizing the theoretical obliquity of suicide, admitted that it was in certain circumstances defensible:
Despite such, lessons shown of manliness, Yet craven peoples will refuse to learn How smooth the path of valour which the hand Can make to ’scape from bondage; but a King Is dreaded for the steel; and liberty Is galled with cruel arms, in ignorance That swords were given that none might be a slave. Ah Death! That thou mightst scorn to take from life Cowards, and none but brave be free to die![885]
The African expedition suggests the single long deviation of this book on the legend of the earth-born Antaeus strangled by Hercules. Curio’s soliloquy before battle reflects his not unnatural nervousness as commander of soldiers who had become Caesarians only by surrendering at Corfinium:
’Tis daring cloaks great fear: myself shall first Seize arms, and let my men, while yet mine own, March down to level ground; for idleness Aye bringeth changeful mind. End plots by fight! When blood-lust prompts and sword is firmly gripped, The helmet covers qualms. Who minds to weigh Opposéd leaders then or balance claims? Each backs the side he stands on; as at shows Within the fateful amphitheatre, No ancient grudge makes combatants engage— Pairs hate at sight.[886]
The apostrophe to Curio after his death leads up to the familiar line which implies that his desertion to Caesar’s side turned the scale of history:
Momentumque fuit mutatus Curio rerum.
Though Book V opens in Epirus with the assembly of the Senate friendly to Pompey and closes with his decision to send his wife Cornelia for safety to Lesbos, yet Caesar is the dominant figure, especially when he cows the mutineers (who express their grievances with pointed rhetoric), and recrosses the Adriatic in a small boat on a tempestuous night to bring Antony to his aid. The action is delayed by a digression of about 150 lines on the Delphic Oracle consulted by Appius.
Caesar’s will-power is well brought out in his defiant braving of the storm despite the fisherman’s warning. He is content to have Fortune for his sole attendant (sola placet Fortuna comes) in crossing the sea to ensure the transport of his troops from Italy; for
Mad-set on battle-mellay was his heart.[887]
But the storm proves an irresistible temptation to Lucan. Having exhausted his list of contending winds, he turns to hyperbole—mountains long buffeted in vain now at last succumb, and portentous waves new to those seas roll in from the encircling ocean. Next he elaborates the description by a resort to mythology. Much more human, however, is the concluding episode, in which Pompey, deeply affected, can scarcely bring himself to tell his wife that for her safety they must part:
Words fail him, though his purpose be resolved; And so he fain would clog what is to come, Indulge delay and moments steal from doom. All slumber banished and the night far gone, Cornelia clasps his breast that teems with care, And seeks fond kisses from her lord now turned Away. She marvels that his cheeks are wet, And, smitten with a wound mysterious, She dare not find great Pompey shedding tears. He sighing said: “My own, more dear than life— I mean the life of happier times, not this That burdens me—the woeful day hath come, Which we postponed too little, yet too much: Caesar is nigh, all eagerness for fight!”[888]
Overloaded with digressions, besides detail of Caesar’s scheme to enclose his enemy at Dyrrachium, and hyperbolical praise of the centurion Scaeva’s repulse of Pompey’s attempt to break through, Book VI is not on the whole successful. The plan to construct gigantic lines of investment is at first as little grasped by Pompey
As wild waves boiling on the Kentish shore Rave all unfelt by Caledonians.[889]
In time, he is driven to counter-movements, and would have made a victorious sortie but for the prowess of one outstanding Caesarian, on whom, with incredible exaggeration, the whole fighting is made to concentrate. This champion is not to be dislodged save by a war-engine; he bristles with a thick forest of missiles in his chest; he offers the resistance of an African elephant; and, tearing out his eyeball along with the arrow which pierced it,
Stamps on the weapon and his eye as well![890]
This and much more is neither poetry nor common sense. The rest mainly concerns the temporary discomfiture of Caesar, who retires upon Thessaly followed by Pompey. If only Pompey had been a Sulla, reflects Lucan, and had used his advantage for an immediate descent upon Rome, there would have been no Pharsalia. The mention of Thessaly is responsible for digressions on geography and magic; and, though the wizardry and witches of Thessaly appear more convincing in the pages of Apuleius, yet Lucan, when he leaves off cataloguing the astounding potency of Thessalian enchantments over love, weather, rivers, mountains and laws of the universe, does achieve an effect of gruesome diablerie through Sextus Pompey’s morbid longing to learn the future, not from oracles but, like Saul at Endor, from necromancy. After he and his attendants have made their way past ruined tombs towards the sunless and hell-like cavern when the sorceress Erichtho sits crooning her malignant spells, he holds a midnight séance with the hag. Conceding his request, she scares off birds and beasts of prey from the battle-field, and selects a fallen warrior to be revivified by loathsome ingredients and eerie incantations for the purpose of revealing prophetic messages from the other world. The revelation is that the shades await both Sextus’s father and his house; Caesar’s daring, on the other hand, delights the spirits of dead Roman revolutionaries, but his triumph will be short. With such ominous responses Sextus returns to his father’s camp before daybreak.
Book VII is not free from turgidity and extravagance, but it is the greatest book of the poem, and describes the feelings of both rivals before Pharsalia as well as their fortunes in the culminating battle. With an outburst of enthusiasm, Lucan predicts the enduring power of his subject to engross readers:
’Mid tribes in far-off years, ’mid folks unborn, Haply by fame alone to time bequeathed, Or haply profited by such renown As e’en my toiling pen can lend the great, When men shall read of war, this tale shall still Move hope and fear alike, or futile wish. Spellbound each reader still shall fancy doom Is yet to come, not past and gone, and so Will favour thee, great Pompey, to the end.[891]
In the famous passage on Pompey’s dream, he is fancied to be once more receiving the plaudits of the Roman people in his own theatre:
In dreamland Rome seemed his. Break not that sleep, O camp-watch! Ne’er let bugle strike his ears! To-morrow’s ghastly night, sad to recall The day, brings naught but deadly battle-lines.[892]
He awakes to realities. The Pompeians clamour for the fray and criticize their leader’s caution:
In Pompey’s camp “Pharsalia!” was the prayer.[893]
Unhistorically Cicero, who was not present, is introduced as urging him to give battle. He consents under protest and his men have their will; but
On many a face was paleness as of death To come—a look most eloquent of doom.[894]
Amidst other presages of disaster, Lucan’s bias insinuates that Caesar sacrificed to the infernal powers. The harangue to his followers is, some of it plausible argument, some of it rhodomontade, but, by reason of its vigour, all very readable. Observing the disposition of Pompey’s troops (Lucan’s account of which does not agree with that of other authorities), and seeing his wish fulfilled in the enemy’s descent upon the plain, Caesar confidently addresses his soldiers as the true arbiters of his destiny:
No need for prayer: woo fortune now by fight,[895]
and continuing his alliterative rhetoric:
Wave but the blade and bring the whole world low.[896]
With corresponding alliteration, and not without bravado, Pompey’s speech to his army expresses his reasons for confidence:
Our better cause bids hope for help from Heaven.[897]
But in vain. Tyranny, in Lucan’s view, was triumphant at Pharsalia. Why did Rome ever know freedom, if she was to lose it?[898] Surely, the gods’ apathy had led through civil warfare to the creation of new deities and a new religion in emperor-worship![899] Refraining from details of individual horrors on the battle-field, Lucan contrasts the fugitive Pompey looking back upon lost greatness with Caesar, whose adversary is henceforward not Pompey but freedom,[900] and who to discerning eyes might well be an object of pity—“’twas worse to win” (uincere peius erat). The picture of the conqueror is not flattering. According to Lucan, Caesar encouraged his men to plunder, was leader of the really guilty side, was hunted Orestes-like by avenging furies, callously surveyed the dead, and withheld from the rotting corpses that cremation which would not be refused (and here a piece of far-fetched Stoicism is dragged in) by the universal conflagration at the end of the world.
The main interest of Book VIII lies in Pompey’s flight to Egypt and his murder as he is about to land: it is broken by reflections on and apostrophes to both Egypt and Pompey. A prey to nervous fears, alarmed at the rustle of woodland leaves in the wind,[901] the defeated warrior escapes in a frail craft to Lesbos, where he endeavours to console his swooning wife:
Thy husband’s woe alone may win thee praise. Take heart: let thine affection strive with fate And love me for myself, a vanquished man.[902]
He sets sail with her in anxiety great enough to make unnatural his converse with the pilot upon astronomy. By the Levant he reaches Cilicia, the scene of his old victories over piracy, and holds council with his remaining supporters on the policy, cunning but unprincipled, of playing East against West. Why not entangle and weaken Parthia by inducing her to fight in Rome’s civil wars? This proposal of Pompey’s is scouted as dishonourable by Lentulus—why not rather, he argues, keep the conflict within the Roman world, and try Egypt, whose King, Ptolemy, owed his throne indirectly to Pompey? So he sails to meet the death prepared for him by Ptolemy’s cynical adviser Pothinus, whose contention is that expediency must be preferred to right and that it is wisdom to side with the conqueror:
Freedom in crime protects a hated sway.... Who would be good must quit a royal court: Virtue and sovereign power do not accord. Blush to be cruel and you’ll always fear![903]
In the offing at Pelusium, overmastering fate secured that Pompey should be enticed from his high-sterned vessel into a small boat, where, within sight of wife and son, he was stabbed by the traitor Septimius. Achillas, that “Pharian satellite,” claimed the right to carry the victim’s head to the young king. Having noted the majesty of Pompey’s looks as preserved in death, Lucan yields to his besetting passion for realism and spoils the pathos of the scene. Instead of Virgil’s dignity of sorrow, or beauty of simile, we have the repulsive details of the still gasping mouth and the drooping neck laid cross-wise on a boat-thwart to be hacked through; there are sinews and veins to cut; there are bones to break; it all takes time (diu); for the art of whirling off the head at a single blow, Lucan remarks (with his thoughts perhaps on Caligula), had yet to be developed—nondum artis erat caput ense rotare.[904] Such realism is rendered superfluous by what follows:
To let the curséd boy prince know the dead, Yon manly wealth of hair by kings admired, The locks which graced that noble brow, were seized, And, while the features lived and sobbing breath Yet moved the lips to murmur, while the eyes Unclosed were glazing, on a Pharian spear Was fixed that head whose word for war had rung The knell of peace, the head that swayed our laws In campus or from rostra eloquent. This face, O Roman Fortune, pleased thee once!
The headless body is recovered from the sea in the moonlight by Cordus, one of Pompey’s Roman attendants, and, after an incomplete cremation, for which the material has to be supplied by the somewhat ludicrous device of theft from a conveniently deserted funeral pile, it is buried hastily; for the dawn has surprised Cordus at his ceremonial. But the lonely grave on the beach cannot confine one so illustrious:
The Roman name and the wide realms of Rome Mark the true boundary of great Pompey’s tomb.[905]
Imprecations upon Egypt follow—futile, because Lucan’s curse of barrenness, if it could have been fulfilled, would have closed the chief granary of Rome. With further wild rhetoric on the burial-place the book ends.
Pompey’s apotheosis begins Book IX:
Not in Egyptian ashes lay his soul: A little dust held not so great a shade. Spurning the tomb and quitting limbs half-burned And the unworthy pyre, it makes for Heaven.
The lamentations of Cornelia, her announcement of her husband’s injunction that unceasing war must be waged for liberty against Caesar, the vengeance on Egypt threatened by Pompey’s elder son when he learns of his father’s murder, and Cato’s dignified praise of the dead leader are preliminary to the chief theme of the book—the heroism of Cato. He will have none of the argument that continuance of war is criminal, now that Pompey is dead. Expostulating with reluctant Pompeians, he sarcastically declares that Caesar will believe they did him an intentional benefit by running before him at Pharsalia—here and in other passages erroneously called Philippi. As their next objective is Juba’s kingdom, Lucan is enabled to describe the treacherous quicksands of the Syrtes, a storm that imperils Cato’s fleet, and the swamps of Triton which most of the ships reach in safety. The resolution to march across the desert to Mauretania occasions a digression on Libya as well as passages recounting Cato’s marvellous endurance[906] of thirst, and his refusal to consult the oracle of Hammon (whose misplacement is one of the not uncommon geographical blunders in Lucan). Labienus would have the will of Jupiter ascertained by this austere captain of men:
The laws above have ever ruled thy life, And thou dost follow God. Lo! now the leave Is thine to speak with Jove. Ask of the doom That waits accursed Caesar, and hold search Into thy country’s future character.[907]
Cato, however, in tones worthy of the oracle itself, scouts the idea, criticizing it on Stoic principles:
What should be asked? Whether I’d rather die Free, arms in hand, or look on tyranny? Whether a life is naught, e’en when prolonged? Or if years make a difference? Or if A good man can be hurt by any blow? Does Fortune drop her threats when Virtue fights? Is it enough to wish what merits praise? Does right ne’er grow by gain? All this we know: Jove cannot plant it deeper in our heart.[908]
Cato’s inspiring fortitude during the march with his soldiers is almost smothered beneath the mass of irrelevance expounding the origin of serpents in Africa, and catalogues enumerating not only various species of serpents but also various sorts of death from snake-bite. Late in the book Caesar reappears on a voyage which brings him to the ruins of Troy; and Lucan’s confidence in his own literary immortality prompts an apostrophe to poetry as conferring eternal renown:
Hallowed and mighty toil of bards empowered To rescue all from fate and grant the gift To mortal nations of eternity! Grudge not, O Caesar, fame to heroes old— If Latin poësy may promise aught, Then, long as Homer’s honours shall endure, Peoples to come will read both thee and me; For my Pharsalia will live, and time Shall ne’er damn Lucan to obscurity.[909]
Caesar’s veneration of his ancestral gods at Troy would have received more sympathetic treatment from Virgil. Lucan is content to record his coasting voyage along Asia Minor and his crossing by Rhodes to Egypt, where, amidst his hesitation whether to land, one of Ptolemy’s courtiers comes aboardship with the head of Pompey. To Lucan his grief over his rival’s murder is hypocrisy: now that he had ocular proof of the crime and thought it safe to be a good father-in-law (tutumque putauit iam bonus esse socer),
Some tears he shed that fell not of freewill, And forced his moanings from a mirthful heart.
Book X, on Caesar in Egypt, would fit better into an epic on the mighty Julius himself than into the Pharsalia. Yet it has energy, in spite of a divagation on Alexander the Great, against whom Lucan inveighs as a “successful bandit” (felix praedo), and a longer excursus on the Nile. The principal incidents are Caesar’s visit to Alexander’s tomb, his amour with Cleopatra, her magnificent banquet after a reconciliation with Ptolemy, the plot of Pothinus to kill Caesar, and the attack at dawn with Caesar at bay:
He dreads the onset, yet disdains to dread: So roars some noble brute in cage confined And gnaws his prison till he breaks his teeth.[910]
Before the book is broken short, his arch-enemies, Pothinus and Achillas, are dead; but the renewal of resistance by Ganymedes brings him again into imminent danger. There we leave the Caesar of Lucan. In the opinion of so Pompeian a poet, he cannot be fittingly punished by any blow from Egypt:
Not till his country’s swords transfix the heart Of Caesar, shall great Pompey be avenged.[911]
This reference to the postponement of a fated penalty has in some eyes lent colour to the view that the poem was designed to continue Caesar’s history up to his assassination in 44. The tenth book is on the face of it incomplete; even were that not obvious, we should detect an unfinished scheme from the assurance given to Sextus Pompey that his fate would be foretold by the shade of his dead father.[912] That promised episode, a parallel to Anchises’s prophecy uttered to Aeneas, would have come into one of the unwritten books. A likely chronological limit would be Thapsus and the suicide of Cato in 46 B.C. That is M. Pichon’s view,[913] which seems more commendable than his associated argument that, as the necromancy of Pharsalia VI corresponds in weirdness to the descent into the lower world in Aeneid VI, therefore twelve books must have been planned to answer to Virgil’s twelve. Much closer parallelism between the several books of Pharsalia and Aeneid would have to exist before this contention had validity. In the seventeenth century, the historian Thomas May, whose works in verse and prose are all forgotten save his translation of the Pharsalia, believed that Lucan meant to carry his epic as far as Caesar’s death. To fill the gap. May composed a Supplementum, which Hallam ventured to call “the first Latin poetry which England can vaunt.” The whole matter is, however, conjectural; and the arguments for a contemplated prolongation to 44 B.C. are not of compelling cogency.
Another point on which there is divergence of opinion concerns the three books first composed according to Vacca’s Life. Ussani thinks they were I, VII, IX; Pichon thinks II, VII, VIII. One might defend I, II, VII as a more likely group than either, if one took certain mistakes in VII to prove its comparative earliness and were to offer a plausible explanation of its touching-up with anti-Caesarism. In all the suggestions, however, there are difficulties concerning Lucan’s attitude to Caesar and Nero; and waverers may do worse than fall back on the traditional view, which presents at least as few difficulties, and is the most natural interpretation of Vacca’s words, namely, that I, II, III constituted the tres libros quales uidemus.
The seven books not published till after Lucan’s death may have been already known to literary circles from the author’s readings; for the composition of the Pharsalia presumably extended over several years before A.D. 65. If one is satisfied that Lucan even in his first book,[914] as well as in others, borrowed from Seneca’s Naturales Quaestiones belonging to A.D. 62 and 63, then that circumstance may be taken to limit the period; but Vitelli’s endeavour still further to narrow the time of writing seems unconvincing.[915]
Let us realize the audacity of this youthful author. Himself in touch with an imperial court, he dared write a long poem glorifying the opposition to the founder of the imperial principle at Rome. Possibly, in an age of ingenious and bizarre compositions under a clever sovereign, he imagined that his work might pass muster or evade censure as an artistic tour de force, and that a generous interpretation would be placed upon a historical thesis handled with epic talent and oiled with introductory adulation. But Lucan must have been sufficiently intimate with the arbitrary despotism of Nero to recognize that in taking such a risk he played a game involving the highest of stakes. A consciousness of genius and an independence of spirit combined with the impetuosity of youth to drive him upon a hazard, in which perhaps he was keen to welcome the fascination of double danger. It was jeopardy enough to challenge the ruler of the world by rivalry in any field of literary eminence; but it was still more perilous to champion the defenders of the ancient republican system. Theirs had been a lost cause; and yet Lucan by setting himself to make idols of Pompey and Cato threw down the gauntlet to Caesarism again. Several factors contributed to this anti-Caesarism. Corduba, the Spanish home of his family, acknowledged a traditional allegiance to Pompey; Lucan’s own boyish imagination conjured up roseate visions of the republican past; his reading in the Pompeian books of Livy confirmed his attitude; and the sense of Nero’s intolerable unfairness in trying to silence him eventually turned intimacy into detestation.
This independence of spirit has its literary side, where Lucan proves himself an original genius. Apart from possession of a distinctive style, he refused to be encumbered by tradition. His originality lay not in the choice of a Roman historical theme—for there had been many epics, renowned and unrenowned, on national history—but in the decision to treat his theme without the conventional introduction of gods as controllers of the action. This novel method of treatment is, we know, criticized in Petronius.[916] Well aware of the intrinsic greatness of the figures in a colossal struggle, Lucan relied for his effects more on history than on romance. In his theme he thus broke away from Virgilian precedent, and substituted for legendary glamour the interest of a fierce human conflict waged in comparatively recent times.
His equipment for his task may be indicated by a sketch of his sources—historical, philosophical and literary. As regards history, the theory which holds the field is that certain lost books of Livy are the well-springs of Lucan’s subject-matter.[917] This thesis, the outcome of a hint given by Reifferscheid to Baier, his pupil, was maintained by the latter in a work published in 1874. It has in recent years been reaffirmed by M. Pichon,[918] whose skill, in what is the most complete study of Lucan’s sources, has addressed itself to the emancipation of Baier’s hypothesis from the exaggerations of Ziehen and Vitelli, and to its defence against the objections of Westerburg and Ussani. For the accessory material in his digressions Lucan no doubt went elsewhere: serpent-lore he could draw from Macer, who had copied Nicander; geography, in which he is inaccurate, from some general treatise; and data about Egypt in particular very likely from Seneca’s missing work on that country. Much of his merely allusive and decorative matter could be furnished from the standard academic learning, amplified by his own experience—he had been a quaestor, an augural priest, and he had travelled. But for details of his main theme there lay open at that time the complete decades of Livy, who had derived information from Caesar, Posidonius and others. Material contemporary with the civil war could thus be reached through Livy as an intermediary. By Livy it had been to a large extent already Pompeianized. Lucan was not temperamentally likely to follow Caesar’s own account; he would distrust Asinius Pollio, as one too active on Caesar’s side; and although he might well have found facts to recommend the writings of Cremutius Cordus, we do not know that Cordus related the struggle between Caesar and Pompey. On the other hand, Livy was an author for whose literary power the Senecas expressed warm admiration, and Lucan, while subscribing to the opinion entertained by his grandfather[919] and his uncle,[920] felt the special call of political sympathy.
Lucan’s historical value must remain a debatable question. It is comparatively easy, though it costs time, to construct a formidable list of his inexactitudes and deliberate departures from fact.[921] It is also easy to illustrate his strong bias against Caesar. The bias may be readily explained; but it is not always so easy to be sure that the unhistorical in him is due either to bias or to ignorance. When, for instance, he introduces Cicero, contrary to truth, in Pompey’s camp before Pharsalia, is he simply careless, or has he yielded to a half-poetic, half-rhetorical desire to insert a speech from the orator? The almost infectious enthusiasm of M. Pichon for Lucan, while it makes him too tolerant of his wearisome digressions, too laudatory of poetic merit in his rhetoric, too appreciative of the originality of his borrowings, at the same time makes him perhaps too ingenious in finding excuses for his misstatements. Yet the defence is at times justifiable. For example, as regards the frequently criticized epithets applied to Gallic tribes, their appropriateness is plausibly supported on historical, philological and archaeological grounds.[922] Again, on the alleged confusion between Arverni and Aedui (I. 427), Lucan’s language need not involve the mistake commonly supposed, if proper stress be laid on both verbs in the line,
Aruernique ausi Latios se fingere fratres.
Certainly, to construct against Lucan a laborious indictment of error is quite misleading. It should, in any case, be noted that his additions are fewer than his omissions, and many alterations of historical fact charged against the Pharsalia may be due to Livy. One may surmise that Lucan himself is responsible for the silence about Caesar’s pacific overtures, for the sinister misconstruction laid upon Caesar’s clemency, and for the undervaluing of Caesarian bravery; because Livy, writing near the events, could hardly have risked such falsification of history. But, to hazard a guess—and here it is all guesswork—if Livy recorded generous acts by Caesar with some reserve as to their motives, then Lucan might conceivably drop them out because he did not think them sincere; and if characteristic episodes of bravery among the Caesarians were recorded, as we might expect, by Livy, then Lucan might with a kind of Stoic casuistry decline to take them over, because it would be evil to praise valour so ill employed. On the other hand, the elimination of Pompeian bloodthirstiness is presumably a feature already occurring in Livy;[923] and it is highly probable that incidents which put Pompey in an unfavourable light would be toned down by the historian who was twitted with having proved himself a good “Pompeian.” In short, Lucan’s suppressions and transpositions of fact are sometimes those of a partisan (and herein Livy preceded him), sometimes those of the artist who is interpreting history in a poet’s way.
One result of his choice of subject, it will thus be seen, is that some questions affecting Lucan are not literary questions at all, but concern historical value and misstatements intentional or unintentional. There is a risk of harbouring an exaggerated estimate of his historical acumen. Granted that he is at least scientific enough to note certain causes of the civil war, yet he betrays no conception of the vital constitutional principles involved, of the extent to which past abuses rendered the conflict inevitable, or of the real significance of the victory for the destinies of Rome and the world. Though in some aspects very Roman, Lucan is without Virgil’s profound insight into the mission of the Empire. Readers will concede that he is sensitive to the nefarious horror and enormity of civil strife, for he calls shame upon it in exclamatory outbursts repeated till we weary; but this fervour arises less from social or moral or even vaguely humanitarian considerations than from his ingrained rhetoric. One should not presume to blame him: we have little right to demand scientific history from a poet. Although he selected a historical subject and so must remain, faults notwithstanding, a source of history,[924] yet it is not by historical standards that Lucan must be judged, nor, despite his Livian basis, could we unreservedly use his text to supply some of the missing matter of Livy. Frank allowance must be made for prejudices and inconsistencies, which are but natural to juvenile ardour and emotion. He had definitely taken his side, and it is absurd to look for a dispassionate attitude to Caesarian or Pompeian. Interested in philosophy without being a philosopher, he was not concerned to reflect how un-Stoic it was, and in any case, how futile, to reproach Caesar, the man of destiny, for being also a man of blood. Here, as so often, he lets feeling speak.
What philosophy appears in the poem is Stoic. Remembering the poet’s family and his training alongside of Persius, we should expect nothing else; but it should also be remembered that the philosophical colour is incidental, and that the Pharsalia must, in the last resort, be judged less for its history or its philosophy than for its poetry. Critics like Heitland make as great a mistake in claiming a systematic character for Lucan’s Stoicism as Souriau does in over-emphasizing its contradictions. To demand rigid consistency in his thought is to end in the negative conclusion of Lejay—that Lucan had no philosophy. If a lapse into pessimism caused him to wonder whether the world is guided by the Stoic Providence or by blind chance, it was a very human aberration from his normal creed; and if, poet-like, he used the older mythological beliefs, such literary decoration must be no more pressed against him than against Lucretius.
Lucan’s literary training implied acquaintance with the classics of the past. It would be far too much to call him a disciple of Virgil: his spirit is alien to the Virgilian, and yet his debt to the great epic poet was inevitable owing to the education of the times. Here the truth lies between Merivale’s astonishing opinion that Lucan was in style practically independent of Virgil and Heitland’s that Lucan was “steeped” in Virgil’s language. The debt is seen in borrowed words and locutions (like felix qui potuit, IV. 393, and uenit summa dies, VII. 195), in a fresh use of Virgilian epithets and phrases, in a heightening of Virgilian simplicity to achieve strong effects, and in imitation of Virgilian episodes. Conscious and subconscious echoes are so plentiful and obvious that one cannot feel like Merivale “almost tempted to imagine that he had never read Virgil.” At the same time, there is no need to hunt for parallels where no parallels exist. Many of the alleged analogies in Heitland’s elaborate list are too vague and faint to be reckoned as definite borrowings; and even M. Pichon, who adopts a sounder attitude regarding the Virgilian influence, scarcely convinces us in his claim that the vanishing of Julia’s ghost is modelled on that of Creusa, or that a father’s anguish over a dying son is modelled on Anna’s grief over Dido.[925]
Horace influenced Lucan slightly, Ovid very considerably. Sharing his uncle’s admiration for Ovid, he not only borrowed mythological material from him but also inherited much of his rhetorical dexterity. The Ovidian gift of repeating an idea in surprisingly new ways reappears in Lucan, and accounts for Fronto’s criticism that in his first seven lines he simply rang the changes on the one idea of “worse than civil wars.”[926] He has not Ovid’s wonderful lightness and facility, but in the smoothness and monotony of his versification it can be seen that the rhythms of the Metamorphoses have told upon him. Resemblances to earlier poets like Ennius[927] are not distinct enough to base conclusions upon; and a similarly negative result, many will agree, comes from the evidence adduced by Hosius[928] to detect verbal influences exerted by Manilius, by the author of Aetna, by the earlier books of Livy and by Q. Curtius. This inquiry has considerable interest in its bearing on works so conjectural in date as the Astronomica, Aetna and the History of Alexander; but unfortunately the evidence rests upon slight similarities and amounts to little. Some of the not very impressive resemblances between Curtius and Lucan are due to analogy of facts (deserts, for example, are much alike the world over, and prompt similar terminology); other resemblances may be ascribed to community of source; and others are simply part of the common stock of Latin expression. One exceptional case is that of Seneca, some of whose works, particularly the tragedies, appear (after allowance has been made for the wide prevalence of the same mythology and the same rhetoric) to have affected Lucan. This hypothesis, if accepted, would prove the anteriority of the tragedies and support their attribution to Seneca.
Far more important, however, than the discovery of verbal similarities is the consideration of the action of rhetoric on Lucan’s genius. When it is remembered that the essential aim in academic declamation was to appear clever and striking at all costs, the central characteristic of his epic is at once grasped. The dominant note is one of display. The object, not to be natural, but above everything to be piquant and impressive, is pursued with marvellous vigour and with mastery of all effective artifices. To his training, therefore, and to his aim we owe the parade of erudition which leads him into digressions[929] and enumerations; the descent into realistic detail which is calculated to cause a shudder; the subtlety of argument which makes a debating speech cogent; the tendency to hyperbole which is bound to arrest attention; the love of point, epigram, antithesis which produces memorable phrases; and the recollection or invention of pithy maxims which embody human experience. His erudition is in part encyclopaedic, based on the science of the day, and in part mythological, based on the ancient literary education. The former accounts for excursuses on subjects like astronomy and geography,[930] many of which are out of place; the latter appears in allusions or descriptions. The allusions may be straightforward, as when the preparations for Pharsalia are likened to those before the giants’ war, and when Caesar haunted by ghosts is likened to the matricide Orestes;[931] or they may be slightly more recondite, as when the olive-branch is called “the leafage of Cecropian Minerva,” and when Marius is said to “gather Libyan wrath,” because, like the giant Antaeus, he drew fighting-force from the soil of Africa.[932] Myth in Lucan’s eyes yields opportunities for exhibiting book-knowledge and so overpowers his philosophy upon occasion. Certainly in a critical mood he would, Stoic-like, reject the legends. It is the free-thinker that speaks through Cornelia’s guarded promise to follow her husband “through hell, if hell there be” (per Tartara, si sunt ulla, IX. 101-102). But should the old traditional colour seem requisite, Lucan makes no scruple about its introduction: thus Julia’s ghost, expelled from Elysium (III. 12), knows that Tartarus is being enlarged to punish human misdeeds. His attitude is, in fact, not consistent: On the one hand, when Pompey reaches Cyprus, Lucan resists the attraction of the tale which long after inspired Botticelli’s “Nascita di Venere,” and so surrenders to rationalism with the unpoetic caveat “si numina nasci credimus”[933]: on the other hand, he is romantic enough to discern in the story of Antaeus or of the Golden Apples a chance for a telling description:[934]
None but a churl insults time-hallowed eld And summons bards to tell plain truth. There was Once on a time a forest all of gold Whose wealth weighed down its boughs with yellow fruit. A troop of maidens watched that radiant grove: And round the trees, ’neath ruddy metal bowed, A serpent never doomed to slumber coiled.
Realism in Lucan is now natural, now morbid, now grotesque. Too often it is coupled with the desire to harrow by dwelling on the horrible. Hence he revels in describing tortures, the agonies of the wounded, the repulsive ghoulishness of a witch, the still twitching mouth of Pompey after his head has been hacked off, revolting aspects of cremation, and equally revolting aspects of putrefaction.[935] So zealous is he in making a point that he again and again overshoots the mark, as in his account of a crowd of victims mutually smothering each other;[936] or of an old man’s reminiscence of searching among the slain during the Sullan Terror for a body whose neck would fit his brother’s head, which he was carrying;[937] or of Curio’s slaughtered men in Africa having no room to fall:
Hemmed by the throng each corpse still kept its feet (Compressum turba stetit omne cadauer, IV. 787).
When the realism is strained to breaking-point, it becomes unreal, as in the carnage during the seafight at Massilia. There the devilish ingenuity in inventing bizarre modes of death fails to make the struggle truly heroic, because the artificiality detracts from strong simplicity and pathos.[938] The poet, having caused smiles by far-fetched conceits, only just succeeds towards the end in striking a note of human feeling when he relates the parting of the mortally wounded Argus from his father.[939]
Good examples of Lucan’s management of speeches are those of Caesar and Pompey in Book VII, where the two great opponents are made to express themselves in the author’s forceful, if rather bombastic, rhetoric. In Volteius’s speech in Book IV, encouraging his men to slay each other, we have virtually a thesis supported by the tricks of the schools and transferred to verse: the men by their death have to make a spectacle of themselves and the speech is correspondingly spectacular. The same rhetoric, often powerful and ingenious, invades parts of the epic where there is no set speech, but where the poet becomes declamatory, rendering his work, Quintilian thought, magis oratoribus quam poetis imitandus. Thus the reflections upon Pompey’s grave in Book VIII are composed after the fashion of a special pleader in a controuersia. The smartness in shifting positions and the disregard for consistency argue little solidity; and even where, as in this passage,[940] the author’s favourite Pompey is concerned, the limited depth of feeling is comparable to nothing so much as that of a versatile advocate. One is naturally reminded of Lucan’s lost prose speeches for and against Sagitta.
Hyperbole is among his most noticeable rhetorical tendencies. He overstates and, in pursuit of overstatements, is drawn into the kind of elaboration which characterizes the storm in Book V.[941] But the exaggeration is often confined to a single idea: so, to convey the notion of Caesar’s immense lines of circumvallation near Dyrrhachium, Lucan avers that, inside them, rivers run their whole length from source to mouth,
There many rivers rise and speed their course Till yet within the lines they join the sea;[942]
and, of Thessaly polluted by the slain,
What crop shall rise unstained with tainted blade? Thy plough shall ever wound a Roman ghost![943]
One of the great secrets of Lucan’s brilliant rhetoric is his subtle power of expressing thought in terse[944] pointed form, often assisted by antithesis. When this subtlety is not carried to excess, the results are extraordinarily effective in producing memorable lines and phrases, epigrammatically summarizing a character or a situation or, in the older meaning of sententia, a general truth. Even his less natural conceits have a way of clinging to the memory, like his paradoxical manner of suggesting that when Caesar’s ships lie helpless on a still sea the crews would prefer a watery grave to being thus becalmed: “all hope of shipwreck vanishes” (naufragii spes omnis abit).[945] Typical common-places admirably expressed in his neat Latin are those on the peril of success,
Greatness is wrecked upon itself: the gods Have set that limit on prosperity (In se magna ruunt: laetis hunc numina rebus Crescendi posuere modum, I. 81-82);
on the danger of delay,
Postponement ever hurts the well-prepared (Semper nocuit differre paratis, I. 281);
on famine as a cause of revolt,
A starving people knows not fear (Nescit plebes ieiuna timere, III. 58);
on the secret happiness of death,
From those who are to live the gods conceal The bliss of death; so they endure their life (Victurosque dei celant ut uiuere durent Felix esse mori, IV. 519-520);
on condonation of a widely supported fault,
The sin that many share goes unavenged (Quidquid multis peccatur inultum est, V. 260);
on death, as viewed in Pompey’s last words,
In life success is mutable: in death Man meets not misery. (Mutantur prospera uitae, Non fit morte miser, VIII. 631-632);
on the true attitude to death,
The brave man’s finest lot Is knowledge how to die; next, death enforced (Scire mori sors prima uiris, sed proxima cogi, IX. 211).
Alliteration is noticeable in some of the examples cited. Lucan does not use it so sparingly as Heitland suggests: on the contrary, much of his verse gains additional emphasis from being alliterative, as does his best known line,
Heaven loved the winning cause, Cato the lost (Victrix causa deis placuit sed uicta Catoni, I. 128);
or the simile descriptive of a storming charge by African horse,
The loud sound shook the land: from shattered earth, High as the dust the Thracian whirlwind drives, A cloud dimmed heaven and drew the darkness down (Tum campi tremuere sono: terraque soluta Quantus Bistonio torquetur turbine puluis, Aëra nube sua texit traxitque tenebras, IV. 766-768).
A scrutiny of Lucan’s feverish mannerisms and wilful faults must not blind one to his merits. It is true that he is rhetorical and sensational; and that behind his clever artifices lies no mystery. He is able half to surprise, half to weary us with dazzling tricks of style; but he seldom enchants us with beauty. Yet, when all his inaccuracies, distortions, conceits, digressions and tediousness have been urged against him, his great passages prove that, in spite of artificiality, he can be fiery[946] and well-nigh irresistible. He would have gained extraordinarily by compression: that is to say, he shows to most advantage in extracts. His best rhetoric is something intensely stirring, though it is a style more appreciated in France than in England. Nor, even if he seldom is deeply poetic, should the vein of poetry that is in him be overlooked: it appears in passages such as that on Pompey’s last look at Italy, or on Cornelia in love with sorrow:
Locking in fast embrace her cruel grief, She hath her joy in tears, enamouréd Of woe that henceforth is her lord, (Saeuomque arte complexa dolorem Perfruitur lacrimis et amat pro coniuge luctum, IX. 111-112).
Some have submitted that the Pharsalia is an epic without a hero, or alternatively an epic with three. Perhaps it is truer to argue that Lucan in a real degree rose to the inherent greatness of his theme by so portraying Caesar that, while Pompey was his formal hero and Cato his spiritual hero, Caesar, however much disliked and maligned by the author, was and still is the practical hero of the poem in virtue of the defiant egoism and the untiring energy summarized in the line,
Thinking naught done while aught remained to do, (Nil actum credens cum quid superesset agendum, II. 657).
VII. CALPURNIUS SICULUS AND MINOR POETRY OF THE NERONIAN AGE
Calpurnius and Nemesianus—Calpurnius belongs to Neronian period—Is “Meliboeus” Seneca?—The Seven Eclogues—Panegyric on Piso possibly by Calpurnius—Identification of the patron eulogized—Some aspects of style.
The Einsiedeln Eclogues—Uncertain date and authorship of Aetna—A blend of dullness and enthusiasm—The best passage—The Latin Iliad—Latin translations from Homer—Suggested acrostics bearing on authorship—Why was the Latin Homer called “Pindar”?—Departures from the Greek original—Nero as poet—The lesser lights.
CALPURNIUS SICULUS
The importance of the eclogues of T. Calpurnius Siculus[947] rests as much upon their testimony to the continuance of one aspect of Virgil’s influence as upon intrinsic poetic value. Eleven eclogues for long went under his name; but the edition by Angelus Ugoletus about 1500 cites the authority of a manuscript now lost for assigning the last four to Nemesianus, who wrote late in the third century. There is, in any case, good internal evidence for the separation; for, in the last four, elision is much commoner; more unclassical shortenings of final o appear; the parenthetic insertions of memini and fateor frequent in the first seven are absent; nor are there any of the allusions to the emperor which were familiar in the previous group. Besides, the ninth eclogue imitates parts of the third, though its taste is more questionable; and there are stylistic resemblances between the final eclogues and the undoubted work of Nemesianus on the chase—his Cynegetica.
Whether the epithet “Siculus” means that he came from Sicily or that he was a follower of the Sicilian pastoral of Theocritus cannot be decided. His date too has been the subject of debate. The older theory of Wernsdorf, Gibbon and Bernhardy, that Calpurnius wrote under the Emperor Carus and his sons in the third century has been rejected by most modern authorities for cogent reasons which combine to fix the eclogues early in the reign of Nero. The ruler they mention is young (i. 44; iv. 85, 137; vii. 6),[948] good-looking (vii. 83-84),[949] divine (i. 84 ipse deus; vii. 6) and eloquent (i. 45; iv. 87). This applies to Nero satisfactorily.
The contemplation of a better time as in prospect (i. 42, 54),[950] and of fairer treatment of the senate (i. 62) is in keeping with the actual relief and confidence felt in the opening reign of Nero, when contrasted with the closing years of Claudius. The comet described in the first eclogue is most plausibly identified with that which, according to the elder Pliny, Suetonius, and Dio Cassius, betokened the death of Claudius and lasted into Nero’s reign.[951] The scene of the games described in the seventh eclogue is not the Colosseum (which was not begun till the reign of Vespasian), but the wooden amphitheatre of Nero’s time mentioned by Tacitus and Suetonius.[952] No other epoch, then, suits all these references so well as the early Neronian.
How far we can rely on Corydon’s mention of a brother or of poverty for autobiographic information about the poet is extremely doubtful. The reference to Meliboeus as a patron who saved him by assistance from the need of going to Spain[953] may have a personal bearing and the question of identifying the patron has been much discussed. Granted that he is a historical figure, Sarpe’s[954] contention that Meliboeus was Seneca is more satisfying than Haupt’s identification of him with Calpurnius Piso, who in the Laudatio Pisonis is spoken of as under the patronage of Apollo. The fourth eclogue[955] describes Meliboeus as a poet under the auspices of Apollo and the Muses; and further it is suggested that he is an authority on winds and weather. Both references suit Seneca, who was a tragic poet and an observer of physical phenomena in his Quaestiones Naturales. Meliboeus is evidently a personage of exalted influence, and the idea of his acting as intermediary between the rustic singer and the emperor[956] is consistent with Seneca’s high position at the imperial court.
The seven eclogues range in length from 84 lines (vii.) to 169 (iv.), and amount to 759 hexameters altogether. They are smoothly composed; and the echoes of Virgilian thought, expression, and poem-construction are obvious. Other Augustans are also laid under contribution. The whole effect, allowing for the artificiality and conventionality inseparable from the pastoral, is pleasing rather than forceful. The poet as “Corydon” is conscious that to seek to be a second Virgil (“Tityrus”) is an ambitious task, and so he represents Meliboeus as saying:
High aim’st thou, Corydon, if Tityrus Thou striv’st to be. He was a bard inspired Who on the reed-pipe could outplay the lyre.[957]
Eclogue I is modelled loosely on the so-called Messianic eclogue of Virgil. Two rustics, Corydon and Ornytus, are sheltering from the scorching heat of the noontide,
Where ’neath its very root the beechtree keeps Guard o’er the bubbling waters of the brook And casts a tangled shade with swaying boughs,[958]
when they find, carved on the bark of a tree, a prophecy by Faunus which heralds the dawn of a new golden age of peace and clemency associated with the accession of a young ruler, “a very god, who will take in his stout arms the weight of the Roman empire.” Eclogue II, after the manner of Virgil’s seventh eclogue, contains an amoebean contest in quatrains in which a shepherd and gardener praise Crotale, the object of their admiration, and make rival offers in this wise:
Idas. Lambs countless bleating ’neath the teat I feed; Countless Tarentine ewes yield wool for me, And all the year my snow-white cheese is press’d. Come, Crotale! This store shall all be thine.
Astacus. Who seeks to count the apples which I pick Below my trees, will sooner count fine sand; Winter nor summer checks my crop of herbs. Come, Crotale! The garden all is thine.[959]
In III, Iollas searching for a lost heifer meets Lycidas, who tells how jealousy has driven him to lose his temper so far as to beat his sweetheart, Phyllis. Penitently he now would woo her love back in song, and the poem ends with lollas’s undertaking the part of peacemaker. “Out-and-out country, and clownish at that” (merum rus idque inficetum) was Scaliger’s sweeping judgement on the eclogue, which has however redeeming touches of delicacy and chivalry. Eclogue IV, entitled “Caesar,” and much the longest eclogue, is full of eulogy for the youthful emperor, whose services to the world are chanted in responsive verses by Corydon and Amyntas before their patron Meliboeus, who is besought to bring the verses under the eye of his imperial majesty:
Corydon. O how my lines that run in slender strain Would, Meliboeus, then resound, if e’er Men said I had a home among those hills, If e’er I chanc’d to see a farm my own! For oft unkindly poverty would pluck My ear and say “The sheepfold is thy task.” Yet, Meliboeus, should’st thou think my lays Worth noticing, then bear them to our Lord; For heaven grants thee right to pass within The Palatine Apollo’s holy walls.[960]
Eclogue V is more reminiscent of the Georgics than of the Eclogues, and therefore savours more of work than of the idealized recreation which is the feature of pastorals. It is extravagantly praised in the hexameter summaries of Brassicanus’s edition, to the effect that the agricultural writers Varro, Palladius, Columella, Cato and Virgil himself were all outdone here by the brief precepts enjoined by Mycon upon his young pupil Canthus. The precepts largely concern the management of sheep and goats.
The subject of VI is a not very entertaining wrangle between a pair of shepherds over a decision which one of them had pronounced in a musical contest between two other swains. The wrangle, it is proposed, might be settled by a poetic competition between the disputants; but their bad temper and abuse force the selected umpire to decline to act. The last poem, VII, with a similarity in scheme to Virgil’s first eclogue, possesses a special archaeological interest by reason of the description which the countryman Corydon, newly back from town, gives of the wooden amphitheatre in Rome, where a “young god” of an emperor exhibited thrilling and surprising contests. The variety of rare animals and quick scenic changes had filled the rustic eyewitness with wonderment; and at a distance he could see the emperor himself:
Unless my eyesight lied, one face methought Combined Apollo’s look with that of Mars.[961]
It will be noted that these poems are not all strictly pastoral: under a bucolic guise the first, fourth, and seventh are essentially court-poetry with semi-political flavour and no little adulation. And in any case, whether they contained flatteries of the emperor or not, poems so artificial, as pastorals must be, were more likely to appeal to courtly readers than to any other audience of their day. The literary influence of Calpurnius Siculus was transmitted through Nemesianus to later centuries than the third, reappearing in the Renaissance pastorals of the Italians, Baptista Mantuanus, Sannazaro, Andrelinus and in the more prosaic French scholar Arnolletus (Arnoullet) of Nevers.[962] The first among these, the “good old Mantuan” cited in Love’s Labour’s Lost, printed ten eclogues in 1498, and through them affected many authors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including Alexander Barclay’s “egloges” and, more memorable still, three “aeglogues” in the Shepheards Calender of Spenser.
* * * * *
A Panegyric on Piso[963] (now generally taken to be C. Calpurnius Piso, the figurehead in the abortive plot against Nero in A.D. 65) has been claimed by some as the work of Calpurnius Siculus.[964] The 261 hexameters De Laude Pisonis are carefully composed, and, like those of Calpurnius’s eclogues, contain few elisions.[965] The passage where the panegyrist addresses Piso as his Maecenas and a passage in Calpurnius’s fourth eclogue addressed to Corydon’s patron Meliboeus resemble each other in the application of the epithet tereti (probably “slender”) to verse; but the coincidence does not make irrefragable proof of unity of authorship.[966] The utmost that can be said is that the identification is plausible. The ascription to Virgil, reported from a lost manuscript of the whole poem, is impossible; while the ascription to Lucan in a manuscript of extracts results from a copyist’s blunder; and such resemblances in diction to the Pharsalia of Lucan as can be traced[967] in the panegyric are due to identity of period rather than of authorship. As conceivable authors of the poem three other names, Ovid, Saleius Bassus and Statius, have been put forward, of whom the first lived too early and the second and third too late to write it.
More certain ground is reached regarding the person eulogized. The poet, who declares himself under twenty summers old (261), poor, but ambitious for literary fame in preference to wealth (219-221), directs his praises to a youthful patron, eloquent, courteous, generous, musical, fond of games, and especially expert on the draught-board. Such characteristics accord with the description of C. Calpurnius Piso in Tacitus[968] and with Juvenal’s “Piso bonus” of Satire V. 109, where the old scholium recounts Piso to have been such a celebrity for his playing with latrunculi that people flocked to watch him. The panegyric was most likely composed earlier than the eclogues of Calpurnius Siculus; and it does not follow, though the “Maecenas” of the one poem is C. Calpurnius Piso, that the “Meliboeus” in the other poems need be the same patron.
The laudation tends to monotony, though it never becomes absurdly fulsome. Piso, whom the poet more than once addresses as iuuenis facunde (32, 109), is honoured for having renounced the martial glory of his ancestors to
Wage kindly war before a legal judge;[969]
for ability to stir the emotions of the court,
if thou sayest “weep,” He weeps, then smiles if forced by thee to smile;[970]
and for captivating clients by his courtesy,
thou dost show the path Of deference, and loving courtest love.[971]
Judged by the test of style alone, the piece has the ring of the first century, and the spirit of the references to oratory is unmistakably post-Augustan. It should be pointed out that the repeated use of chelys for the “lyre” suggests a similar period.[972] But reliance on internal stylistic evidence is ancillary rather than essential, where the recipient of the panegyric has been definitely identified.
MINOR NERONIAN POETRY
Further examples of the bucolic verse of Nero’s age are furnished by the Einsiedeln Eclogues. These are two brief pieces contained in a tenth-century manuscript at Einsiedeln.[973] The first, in 49 hexameters, is a contest of the conventional type between two shepherds who praise the emperor’s dexterity on the cithara, the one likening him to Apollo and the Thunderer, the other alluding to his poem on the burning of Troy. The umpire’s decision is wanting. The other piece, 38 lines long, rejoices over the return of the Golden Age,
Saturni rediere dies, Astraeaque uirgo,
in the spirit of Calpurnius Siculus’s
Aurea secura cum pace renascitur aetas,
and must belong to the happier opening years of Nero’s reign. Beyond this there is no certainty about date or authorship, though considerable learned speculation[974] has been expended on two rather inconsiderable eclogues. The frail argument, for instance, has been used that Seneca’s expression fas sit uidisse in Letter 115 (probably 64 B.C.) must refer to and so be later than fas mihi sit uidisse deos in the first poem. The higher literary quality of the second piece has appeared to some sufficient reason for assuming dual authorship: others have in both seen lost eulogies by Lucan on the emperor: others still ascribe them to C. Calpurnius Piso,[975] laying stress on the way in which the first words of the second poem Quid tacitus, Mystes? seem to be echoed in the first words of Calpurnius Siculus’s fourth eclogue, Quid tacitus, Corydon? Since the speaker there is Meliboeus (identified by some scholars, as we have seen, with Calpurnius Piso), the idea is that he may be quoting from a production of his own. One metrical feature may be pointed out: in the 49 lines of the first eclogue there are fully twice as many elisions as in the 261 lines of the De Laude Pisonis, and about as many as in the whole of Calpurnius Siculus.
* * * * *
According to the opinion of many, though the opinion is by no means unchallenged, this same Neronian period produced the Aetna,[976] a didactic poem in 644 hexameters on the volcano. Traditionally, it came down among the minor works attributed to Virgil, although even by the time of Donatus doubt had been thrown on the attribution. While, then, it cannot be omitted in an account of the Appendix Vergiliana,[977] it equally calls for mention in a review of the later age to which many prefer to assign it. There have not been wanting modern attempts to prove an early date: Kruczkiewicz[978] has reasserted the Virgilian authorship, and Alzinger[979] has argued for the earliest date of all, about half a dozen years after Lucretius’s death in 55 B.C. Independently of obvious imitations of Lucretius in the poem, its general style alone would point to some subsequent generation: technically and after a ponderous manner, the hexameters are Virgilian in cast, and Bücheler[980] would put them at least later than Ovid and Manilius. One cannot but be struck with the frequency of the elisions, if one turns to the Aetna straight from Calpurnius Siculus. The extreme inferior limit of time, on the other hand, is A.D. 79, the year of the eruption of Vesuvius, because in Aetna, 424-431, the fires of the sulphurous lands round Naples are regarded as extinct—a view impossible after the renewal of volcanic activity.[981] Scaliger, accepting the authority of certain fifteenth-century MSS., believed that Cornelius Severus was the writer; but a common theory since Wernsdorf has been that the author was Lucilius Junior, the correspondent of the philosopher Seneca and imperial procurator in Sicily. To Lucilius Seneca addressed his moral epistles, the first book of his so-called dialogues, and his Quaestiones Naturales. We know from Seneca that he wrote verse and had literary tastes. We know too that Seneca wrote to Lucilius intimating that he expected from him a description of his tour round Sicily, and urging him to climb Aetna and send him information about the mountain:[982]
But you were sure to indulge your own weakness, without a suggestion from anybody. There’s no fear of your failing to describe Aetna in your poem (ne Aetnam describas in tuo carmine) and so touch on this commonplace of all the poets. Virgil’s previous treatment was no hindrance to Ovid’s handling the theme; and a pair of predecessors did not frighten Cornelius Severus off it.... Aetna is making your mouth water (Aetna tibi saliuam mouet), or I don’t know you! You’re bent on writing something fine (grande) to match former attempts.
The terms of the letter, it should be observed, suggest not so much a separate poem as the insertion of a description to form an episode in a poem on which Lucilius was at work; and the arguments advanced, taken as a whole, do not avail to place the problem completely outside the range of question.
Should the author ever be indisputably unearthed, his literary reputation will not be vastly enhanced by the discovery; for there is little in the poem to relieve its dullness; textual uncertainties apart, it is not seldom obscure; and, despite the author’s professed search for causes, it makes but indifferent science. So one finds difficulty in understanding Teuffel’s apparently serious criticism of it as “very attractive”;[983] but there is no accounting for taste. At the same time, the author must be credited with an earnest enthusiasm for the study of certain natural phenomena and a disdain for legendary subjects, which at the outset he dismisses as hackneyed, though he himself lapses inconsistently into mythology where he portrays Jupiter as amazed at Aetna’s fiery crashing menace and as alarmed lest the giants are once again to make war on heaven (ll. 202-203).
Men tour the world to see places celebrated in story, he points out, and then scornfully asks, “Do you think such things worth visiting? Study the mighty work of nature the artificer” (artificis naturae ingens opus aspice, l. 599). Far less extended, however, than this maxim should imply, his own theme is a single circumscribed corner of nature, almost trivial compared with the De Rerum Natura, just as his spirit is one of remarkably tempered seriousness compared with the passionate ardency of Lucretius. Unfortunately, the volcanic fire of which he wrote did not transmit itself to his style; and for his lack of interest in mankind he has paid the penalty of failing to engage a reader’s interest. Significantly, he is most impressive when he leaves off theorizing about the subterranean action of water, wind and fire, or describing ominous hidden rumblings and engulfing lava-streams, in order to show how the danger might affect human beings and elicit high moral qualities. This he does towards the close by introducing the episode of two brothers who rescue their father and mother during a volcanic eruption. The passage, though a little exclamatory and tautological, remains deservedly the best-known part of the poem. The following are excerpts translated from it (604 sqq.):
Once Aetna burst its caves and glow’d with fire; As if its inmost furnaces were wreck’d, One wave of sweeping heat poured forth afar.... Ablaze were crops in fields, and like their lords Rich acres burn’d, and wood and hill gleam’d red.... Then each man, as his will or strength to snatch Might prompt, essay’d to save his property. One groans ’neath gold; another, gathering arms, Puts them once more around his foolish neck. One, faint with seizing things, is burdened by His verses: lightly-laden run the poor!...[984] All is the prey of fire that spareth none Or spares the good alone. Yea, once a pair Of noble sons, one named Amphinomus, And both brave-hearted in the task they shar’d, When fires roar’d close upon their homestead, saw Their father and their mother, bent with eld, Alas! sink on the threshold wearily. Cease, men of greed, to lift your spoils belov’d! Mother and father were their only wealth:[985] This spoil they’ll snatch, and through the midmost flames, That gave them confidence, they haste to flee. O sense of loving duty, best of goods, Surest salvation for an upright man! The fire-flames blush’d to touch the pious youths, And wheresoe’er they turn’d their steps, retir’d. Blest was that day: the ground they trod unscath’d: Grim burning reign’d to right and blazed to left.
The title of The Latin Iliad (Ilias Latina),[986] though it might well raise great expectations of literary achievement, is conferred upon 1070 hexameters of condensed paraphrase rather than of translation from the long Homeric epic. Judged solely as a summary, its representation of its original is most disproportionate; for over half the Latin total is given to the first five books of the Greek twenty-four. Whereas several of the earlier books get over 100 Latin lines, several of the later get under 10; the fifth book, for instance, gets 149, the seventeenth only 3. The work must have been designed for an educational text-book, and to its employment in schools it doubtless owed its survival, and, what is notable in a production of no outstanding power, its happy chance of materially aiding the knowledge of letters in post-classical times; for in the dark medieval centuries, when Greek was forgotten in Western Europe, this “Latin Homer,” if only with faint and borrowed light, had the incontestable merit of reflecting some of the old radiancy of “the tale of Troy divine.”
Although by no means the sole attempt to give a Latin dress to the epics of the Trojan cycle, in which the Romans by virtue of their fabled descent always felt a national interest, the Ilias Latina is yet the only one which has come down. Other workers in the same field have left of their performance fragments only, or nothing. Roman literature indeed may be said to have dawned with the translation of the Odyssey into Saturnian verse by Andronicus.[987] In Sulla’s time, Cn. Matius, and probably also in the first century B.C. Ninnius Crassus, had rendered the Iliad into hexameters[988] without making any great mark. Then two attempts of imperial date may be mentioned besides the Ilias Latina. Attius Labeo, whom the scholiast on Persius declared “unscholarly” (indoctus)—exactly the opposite epithet, by the way, to that which Aulus Gellius applied to Matius—turned both Iliad and Odyssey into Latin hexameters. Persius calls his Iliad “drunk with hellebore” (ebria ueratro),[989] and time has mercifully spared but one line of it. The other attempt was in prose and was the composition of the Emperor Claudius’s influential freedman Polybius. Seneca, in the Consolatio addressed to him, refers to this production twice[990] in commendatory terms. Apparently Polybius had translated Homer into Latin and Virgil into Greek; for Seneca says:
Homer and Virgil have been benefactors of mankind as much as you have been a benefactor of these poets and of everyone in deciding to make them known to a wider circle than that for which they wrote,
and, again,
Take in your hands the poems of either of the two authors (Homer and Virgil)—poems, the fame of which the abundant toil of your genius has enhanced, and which you have paraphrased (resoluisti) in such a way that, although their metrical form has gone (quamuis structura illorum recesserit), the charm is nevertheless preserved; for you have transferred them from one language to another so well as to secure that most difficult effect, the bringing of all the beauties of the original over into a foreign speech.
The Ilias Latina can with good reason be referred to some date earlier than Nero’s death, because its author has introduced into it a passage coloured with loyal Roman sentiment which could have been composed at no time except under the Julian dynasty of the Caesars:
Had not great Ocean’s ruler saved the prince (= Aeneas) To flee and build New Troy in happier lands, Raising a stock majestic to the stars, The clan Rome loves would ne’er have come to stay.[991]
Its hexameters are post-Ovidian, and Plessis[992] ventures not over convincingly to fix its composition as early as in the era of Tiberius, in which case the author must have been contemporary not with Lucan, but with Phaedrus. This author he believes to have been Italicus—not Silius, but another of previous date; and in that belief is involved the question of alleged acrostics at the beginning and end of the poem, which has attracted the curiosity and ingenuity of certain commentators. The initial letters of the first eight lines spell Italices and of the last eight lines scqipsit. A conjectural change in the seventh line gives Italicus and a mere transposition of words gives in the latter case scripsit. Some are content to leave the opening seven lines unaltered and read Italice, either as a vocative, or an adverb (“he wrote Italian-wise”). But the idea of the vocative has prompted tamperings with the next few lines to extract Sili, so that the poem would address Silius Italicus. To the acrostics[993] is added the further elaboration of finding after the caesurae in the first six lines the letters of a mesostich, Pieris, to mean “The muse wrote it.” Such coincidences, however, in each case partly engineered, lead to no sure ground. Even if “Italicus” were accepted, the style of the Ilias Latina is so unlike[994] that of Silius Italicus in the Punica that believers in the acrostic have had recourse to guessing it to be a work either of his youth or by some one else bearing the same name.
Another puzzle has arisen on the title “Pindarus” which MSS. of the Middle Ages imposed on the Latin Homer. Why should two very different Greek poets have been thus confused? Referring to Lucian Müller’s[995] attempted explanation of this alternative title as based on the coupling of Homer with Pindar in Horace’s Odes,[996] Tolkiehn has suggested that the intrusion of “Pindarus” may have been due to the presence in earlier MSS. of “Thebanus,” a possible epithet for Homer in respect of his legendary association with Thebes in Egypt.
As in the Aratea of Germanicus, new matter, though on a smaller scale, is sometimes introduced by the translator. An example of inserted Roman sentiment has been already cited. The last eight lines addressed to Calliope and other powers constitute the translator’s personal farewell to his task, and some of his departures from events or details, as narrated in the Greek, may be caused by his reminiscences of Virgil and Ovid or by his trusting to memory. The modifying influence of Virgil is traceable in a simile here and there; in his making Aetna the forge of Vulcan (856-857), which is not Homeric; and in many turns of expression.[997] There are, besides, positive inexactitudes, such as the assignment of some of Ulysses’s words to Nestor (ll. 151 sqq.), or the slaying of Democoon by Agamemnon (ll. 372-373) instead of by Ulysses as in Homer. These very additions and negligences acquit the author of having been a slavishly close translator. His Latin possesses the virtue of straightforward clearness, and his versification a considerable share of easy grace.
* * * * *
Nero[998] also was among the poets, although he was one of the friends from whom literary men might reasonably pray to be saved. His education had been to some extent warped; for his mother Agrippina prevented the future emperor from studying philosophy deeply, and Seneca had in eloquence directed his pupil less to the old standard oratory than to the modern school in which the tutor himself cut a prominent figure.[999] It was observable that, unlike previous emperors, he preferred to have his speeches composed for him,[1000] and Seneca could at least check the tasteless bombast of which he sometimes betrayed signs. Towards poetry he had a bent, though he missed supreme success. One may conclude that caprice and mannerism outweighed Nero’s readiness and technique, without believing that the lines ascribed to him by the scholiast on the first satire of Persius are genuinely his. Seneca[1001] commends for its elegance his line about the play of light on a dove’s neck as it moves (colla Cytheriacae splendent agitata columbae); and Nero certainly displayed versatility in sportive, satiric and erotic verses, in monologues of a tragic character suitable for his own recitation on the stage, and in his epic Troica, whence may have come the episode of “The Taking of Troy” which scandal alleged he chanted to the cithara while Rome was in flames.[1002] His establishment in A.D. 60 of the quinquennial competition of the Neronia arose fully as much from his own ambition to win the prize in public as from any desire to patronize music and poetry.
Caesius Bassus, one of Persius’s senior friends, was a lyric poet of whom Quintilian thought highly.[1003] He may be the same as the author of a work on prosody dedicated to Nero.[1004] Seneca’s friend Vagellius,[1005] who had some reputation as a poet, the satirical versifiers Antistius (Sosianus) and Curtius Montanus mentioned in Tacitus,[1006] and the Serranus included by Quintilian among epic authors may close the list of those who were lesser lights in Neronian poetry, unless the fact that Serranus is coupled by Juvenal with Saleius implies that he lived somewhat later.[1007]
LITERATURE OF THE FLAVIAN PERIOD
A.D. 69–A.D. 96
I. THE ELDER PLINY: FLAVIAN SCIENCE AND HISTORY
Life—His public appointments—Eruption of Vesuvius—Avidity for knowledge—Six lost works—Contents and arrangement of the Natural History—Sources and method—Pliny’s lists of authorities—Quellenkritik—Some of its services—Variations in use of Greek and Latin sources—Difficulties as to minor authorities—Pre-eminent authorities—A few contrasts with modern science—Obvious weaknesses—Historical value of the encyclopaedia—Attractive features—Information pleasantly conveyed—Stoic outlook—Nature and man—Mother-earth—Human society—Human progress—Political views—Literary qualities—Rhetoric, sarcasm, epigram—Pith of expression—Purple passages—The common-place and the poetic—Sentence-structure—Survival of influence.
Flavian historians (a) under Vespasian, (b) under Domitian.
THE ELDER PLINY
What everyone knows about an author is not necessarily of supreme importance; but the two most familiar facts about the elder Pliny—that he composed a massive Natural History and that he perished while investigating an eruption of Vesuvius—lie in their implications at the very roots of his title to fame. A meagre life by Suetonius has to be supplemented by information from the colossal work which is his imperishable monument and from his nephew’s admiring testimony in four of his letters.[1008] C. Plinius Secundus[1009] was born of an equestrian family at Novum Comum in A.D. 23 or 24,[1010] and his birth near Lake Como led him to claim Catullus as a fellow-Northerner (conterraneum meum).[1011] He must have come early to Rome, because Nonianus, whom the boy saw in his consulate,[1012] held the office in A.D. 35. If we know little about his education, we can see from his style that rhetoric was not omitted; and, while there is no proof that the poet Pomponius Secundus formally trained him in literature, we can at least be sure that he deeply influenced the younger man, who was destined to write his biography. Pliny’s allusions to Pomponius are full of respect, and he recalls how on one occasion he saw at Pomponius’s house specimens—then about two centuries old—of the handwriting of the Gracchi.[1013] Similarity of disposition may have linked them together; for, like Pliny, Pomponius showed ability to combine literary with official duties. Pliny’s youthful pleading at the bar was followed by military service. When twenty-three or twenty-four he was a cavalry officer under Corbulo in Germania Inferior, and his first book was written on the use of the javelin by mounted troops. His comradeship (castrense contubernium) which he mentions[1014] with the future Emperor Titus may have happened ten years later, about A.D. 57, when he was in the army of Pompeius Paulinus.[1015] Several allusions attest experiences among peoples near the northern frontier of the Empire;[1016] no doubt it was personal knowledge that united with historical instinct to suggest his lost work on the wars of Germany.
Full detail, however, regarding his life before the accession of Vespasian is not available. It is true that he gives us a few interesting reminiscences: he saw for himself the harbour works in progress at Ostia about the beginning of Claudius’s reign; he could remember Claudius’s Empress Agrippina wearing a mantle of woven gold at a sham naval fight exhibited by the Emperor; and he witnessed the building of Nero’s “golden house” after the fire of 64.[1017] On the other hand, we should like to be sure whether he had official connexion with the East. Was he ever procurator of Syria? Did he serve against the Jews as a staff officer under Titus? and was this the service which he calls castrense contubernium? Could he have been present at the siege of Jerusalem in 70? These questions might all be answered in the affirmative, if Mommsen’s hypothesis were accepted that Pliny is alluded to in a Greek inscription from Arados.[1018] But the balance of authority prefers to hold that in 70 Pliny was in Gaul, and that this year began for him a series of procuratorships in Gallia Narbonensis, Africa, Gallia Belgica and Hispania Citerior.[1019] Administered, according to Suetonius, with the highest integrity, these offices at the same time widened his horizon, even though they were all held within the western half of the Empire.
While at Rome, Pliny kept in close contact with the imperial house. A well-known letter by his nephew tells us that it was his custom to visit the palace before daylight to interview Vespasian and then return to his daily task.[1020] He was on duty as admiral of the fleet at Misenum on that summer afternoon in 79 which the younger Pliny’s account of the catastrophe has made memorable. A pine-like cloud of smoky vapour rising above the neighbouring mountains betrayed alarming volcanic activity, and the phenomena, pointed out to him by his sister, the younger Pliny’s mother, were too tempting for an ardent student of nature to miss, even though he was elderly, stout and busily engaged in reading after his midday siesta.
“He called for his shoes and climbed some high ground from which that uncommon sight could best be viewed. Looking at it from this distance, one felt uncertain from what mountain the cloud was rising, though later it was known to be Vesuvius.... It was white at one moment, at another grimy and spotted, as if it had carried up soil or cinders. A man of my uncle’s learning saw that the phenomenon was significant and deserving of closer survey. He ordered a light vessel to be got ready and gave me the chance of going with him, if I wished.”[1021]
Appeals for help reached him: large galleys had to be launched: and the scientific admiral made for the danger zone from which others were fleeing. His nephew’s letter pictures him dictating observations, braving the rain of stones upon the bay, and by his coolness heartening his friend Pomponianus, in whose house he supped and stayed overnight at Stabiae (Castellamare). The next day, one of preternatural darkness, amidst terrific concussions and sulphurous gas-fumes which put his friends to flight, he was left by the seashore and, troubled as he had been with his breathing, succumbed to asphyxiation. When, a day later, light was restored to the land, his body was found uninjured, wearing the appearance rather of sleep than of death (quiescenti quam defuncto similior).
An insatiable desire for knowledge and indefatigable industry in amassing it are the outstanding characteristics of Pliny. A hard-working official, he could never have completed so many volumes on intricate subjects without marvellous self-denial and an extraordinary faculty for dispensing with sleep. The small hours after midnight found him ready to begin study long before the time came for repairing to the Emperor Vespasian—another early riser. His very meals could be utilized for listening to a trained reader: during leisure hours, as he basked in summer sunlight, he would have a book read aloud, and take notes or extracts. A favourite, but very risky, remark of his was that there was no book so bad as not to contain something profitable.[1022] In the country only bathing-time was exempt from study, and immediately after a bath, while he was being rubbed down, he listened to a reader, or himself dictated. In winter the close attendance of a secretary, with hands gloved against the cold and equipped with books and tablets, ensured that nothing should impede the acquisition and distribution of knowledge. Once at dinner a book was being read aloud, when one of the guests stopped the reader for mispronouncing some words and made him repeat them: upon which Pliny said, “You understood him surely.” “Yes,” replied the friend. “Then why did you stop him? We have lost more than ten lines by this interruption of yours.” Such was his parsimony in time.[1023]
On another occasion he remonstrated with his nephew for taking a walk: “You might,” said he, “have avoided wasting those hours.” The nephew, in recalling the incident long afterwards, made the comment that his uncle thought all time lost that was not devoted to study.[1024] By dint of this intense application he left to the younger Pliny no fewer than one hundred and sixty volumes of extracts written on both sides and in an extremely small hand, which, as the embarrassed legatee realized, “is tantamount to increasing their number.”[1025] It is rare for so passionate a student to fill so many practical offices, and there is a legitimate force in the younger Pliny’s question, “Who among the lifelong devotees of letters must not, when compared with him, blush for yielding to slumber and sloth?”[1026]
Of the half-dozen lost works by Pliny, of which his nephew gives a chronological list,[1027] one was a technical military manual, one a biography, two were on language under oratorical or grammatical aspects, and two were historical. They mark that all-roundness of interest which reappears in the Natural History. His literary career began when, as a young officer, he wrote his handbook on the use of javelins by cavalry, De iaculatione equestri.[1028] The two books De uita Pomponii Secundi were intended for a tribute of affection to the memory of one who was both a literary friend and Pliny’s commanding officer in Germany.[1029] The Bellorum Germaniae XX Libri gave an account of the wars between Rome and the Germans. The idea came to the author on one of his German campaigns when he dreamt that the ghost of Drusus asked that his fame should be rescued from oblivion.[1030] Tacitus quotes the work, which seems to have been in existence as late as the time of Symmachus in A.D. 396.[1031] Studiosi III Libri, “The Student,” or, according to Gellius, “The Students,”[1032] had each of its three long books divided into two volumes. Like Quintilian after him, Pliny treated the education of an orator from infancy (ab incunabulis). Choice specimens from controversial declamations were included. The work impressed Quintilian on the score of carefulness, and therefore surprised him all the more by incidentally introducing fantastic views upon the secret of the long gown which Cicero used to wear and on the advisability of tidy or untidy hair for a speaker.[1033] It was in the latest years of Nero’s reign, when even learning had to walk warily, that Pliny turned to a grammatical subject[1034] in Dubius Sermo, “doubtful forms in language.” He thus made his contribution, as Julius Caesar had done, to the conflict between anomaly and analogy in linguistic forms, though Pliny’s love of variety made him a less rigid stickler for analogy than Caesar had been. Its eight books carried weight with many grammarians including Charisius.[1035] Next, in the thirty-one books A Fine Aufidi Bassi Pliny went back to history, continuing the work of Bassus. It is, however, not clear when that historian stopped: what we do know is that of three definite citations of Pliny’s history by Tacitus,[1036] the earliest refers to A.D. 55. The guess has been made—and opposed—that the thirty-one books treated annalistically the equal number of years from Caligula’s fall in 41 to the triumph of Vespasian and Titus in A.D. 71.[1037] Fabia, who, like Nissen, sees in the lost work a principal source for the Histories of Tacitus, suggests that Pliny started from the later years of Claudius’s reign. Unfortunately, the surviving fragments[1038] are too scanty to aid a decision; but, touching the terminus ad quem, it should be pointed out that Pliny’s words show that he certainly treated Nero’s last year, and suggest that he carried this history of his own times well into the reign of Vespasian.[1039] Completed in A.D. 77, the work was left for publication by the younger Pliny, who notes in his uncle’s historical composition the same scrupulous exactitude[1040] that struck Quintilian in his oratorical treatise. Care alone, however, does not create literature; and no one can now say how far Pliny’s methods in political and social history differed from his methods in natural history. That Tacitus by writing on the same period eclipsed and superseded him as artist and historian we may be quite sure. But it is likely enough that, even if he was no historical genius, we have lost much attractive material in the shape of Pliny’s first-hand impressions and experiences during a period with which he was contemporary.
The supreme memorial to his energy is his one extant production, the Naturalis Historia in thirty-seven books, admirably characterized by his nephew as “a diffuse work, learned, with a variety equal to nature’s own.”[1041] The author found a patron, to whom he might address it, in the prince Titus—himself the composer of a poem on the appearance of a comet. Although dedicated to Titus in A.D. 77,[1042] it was published, at least in the main, posthumously. Probably, either the first decade alone was issued in 77,[1043] or even it may have been subjected to alterations after being presented to Titus: there is general agreement that the author during the last two years of his life continued his task, but did not succeed in giving a final revision to the remaining books. The arrangement is as follows. Book I, which is preceded by an epistle dedicatory, forms an introduction consisting of an exhaustive table of contents book by book (expressly designed to save time and trouble for busy readers[1044]) with an imposing array of authorities employed in each: II, the single physical book, giving Pliny’s cosmography in relation to God, the universe and its elements: III-VI, on the geography and ethnography of Europe, Africa and Asia, starting in the west at the Pillars of Hercules and, after two books allotted to countries on the northern side of the Mediterranean, restarting eastwards from Mauretania for India and Mesopotamia: VII, his anthropological section, treating man and human physiology: VIII-XI, four books on zoology—land animals (with the elephant first, because biggest), sea creatures, birds, insects receiving each a book: XII-XIX, eight books on botany, under which come forest trees and fruit trees and (in XVIII) agriculture: XX-XXVII, eight books devoted to materia medica from botanical sources: XXVIII-XXXII, five books devoted to materia medica from zoological sources: XXXIII-XXXVII, mineralogy and metallurgy, embracing a survey of their application to medicine and the fine arts, so as to bring in the healing properties of metallic substances, artistic productions in gold, bronze or other metals, the manufacture of colours and achievements of great painters, stones and their employment by architects and sculptors, precious stones and their value.
The arrangement is not illogical in broad outline, though the treatment of medicaments got from the animal kingdom is, with a curious lack of symmetry, deferred until both the vegetable kingdom and its medicaments have been treated at great length. That the plan of division was the author’s own is manifest from cross references within the text.[1045] Even a brief summary of the scheme shows how much the subject is related to human concerns. In addition to thirteen predominantly medical books, the mineralogical portion contains a large amount bearing on the healing of man’s ailments: and it was the human factor that fortunately prompted—what would not have occurred to many writers on mineralogy—a valuable digression on the history of art.
Pliny calculated that his work was a repertory of twenty thousand facts, or what he took for facts, compiled from about two thousand volumes and one hundred selected authors.[1046] This last number, however, does not cover his obligations to all sources, because the lists or indices of Roman and foreign authorities, which he appends to his table of contents for each book, yield totals of 146 Roman and 327 foreign authors, or something approaching 500 in all. The discrepancy between this total in the indices and the hundred exquisiti is more apparent than real. It was a professed point of honour with Pliny, though not with ancient writers as a rule, frankly to own obligation to all from whom literary material had been derived: “I hold it for courtesy and ample proof of an honourable modesty to acknowledge by whom one has profited.”[1047] Therefore he feels gratitude not only to his hundred special authors, but to earlier writers whose knowledge they have enabled him to use. This avoidance, however, of any suspicion of plagiarism has been turned against him. Attempts have been made to charge him on this score with an empty parade of learning,[1048] as if, even without his nephew’s explicit testimony, any reader should fail to see that the author had drawn upon multitudes of books. He carries out his promise of acknowledgement to all authorities by recording their names (with subjects sometimes, but only sometimes, specified) in his indices for each book and to a less extent by mentioning authorities in the text. Here, however, he considers himself dispensed from systematic or exhaustive mention of the authors given in the lists: some are cited on incidental or isolated points, others can be inferred to be of more importance, and occasionally others are said to be followed for a considerable portion of the work.[1049] Usually when an author is cited the information is indirectly reported in dependence upon such phrases as Fenestella tradit (IX. 123), scribit Annaeus Seneca (IX. 167), Varro auctor est (XVIII. 307), L. Piso prodidit (XXXIV. 30); but there are passages where authors are quoted verbatim for some lines on end, e.g., Trebius (IX. 93), Nepos (IX. 137) and Cato (XXIX. 14). One cardinal misfortune is that Pliny did not decide expressly to distinguish among principal, secondary, and still more remote authorities, such as those Greek writers who were known to him solely through intermediary writers, Greek or Roman. If he had even revealed the names of his hundred exquisiti, we should have possessed a canon for his main authorities, and thereby known which were subordinate, although the degree of their subordination might still have been perplexing to determine. Again, if we could have been certain of the principle underlying the order of names in each author-list, much would have been clearer about the origin and value of the material. Brunn’s well-known pamphlet of 1856,[1050] which has had great influence in Plinian criticism, laid it down that the order of names in each list broadly corresponded with the order in which the authors were originally used in the particular book to which the list was applicable. Unluckily, this principle, as Brunn himself saw, is not so simple as it looks; and on examination it is burdened with so many exceptions due to Pliny’s subsequent insertions and to disturbances in the text, intentional or accidental, that one must reluctantly doubt its validity.[1051] Another puzzle lies in the figures given after most of the tables of contents to represent totals of “facts, stories, and observations” (res et historiae et obseruationes). The figures vary considerably (417 for Book II, 2214 for VI), while they are absent for III-V.[1052] They may have been taken over from the excerpt-books containing Pliny’s raw material.
Such uncertainties engender speculation, and, since Montigny’s tractate of 1844 examined the relation of Pliny to Aristotle,[1053] a formidable mass of books or brochures has appeared on the sources of the Natural History. This subject of Quellenkritik, though dry, is not barren, because it bears on the progress of human knowledge in antiquity and on Pliny’s mode of work. At the same time, a salutary reminder is given in Teuffel’s Geschichte der römischen Literatur that sure ground is likeliest where the inquiry deals with authors whose works still exist in whole or in part—Aristotle, Theophrastus, Cato, Varro, Virgil, Ovid, Vitruvius, Celsus, Mela and Columella—and that, where intermediary or original authorities are lost, modern research has had wide room—and used it freely—for the play of imagination.[1054] This play of imagination accounts for some arbitrary and extreme positions. Rose, for example, declared Pliny to be an untrustworthy compiler who never handled Aristotle in Greek; Birt was confident that Pliny used Aristotle only through Pompeius Trogus (whereas others have laid much stress on King Juba, Nigidius Figulus, and Varro as intermediaries); Koebert uncompromisingly denied to Pliny the slightest intelligence in art criticism; Rabenhorst scrapped Pliny’s author-lists along with Brunn’s attempted explanation of their order, to make way for his theory that Pliny did apparently little else than plunder the encyclopaedia of Verrius Flaccus.[1055] Some proportion, however, ought to be observed in theorizing. Common sense refuses to believe that all Pliny’s authenticated toil could have been spent on summarizing and annotating scores of authors for his excerpt-rolls, if his Natural History were merely a compilation from Verrius Flaccus’s rerum dignarum memoria libri. Other reasons, if necessary, could be advanced to demolish such a contention; but we may rest content with the argument that the man who filled a series of distinguished offices with absolute integrity (procurationes splendidissimas et continuas summa integritate administrauit, Sueton.) would scarcely in his writing stoop, under an assumed cloak of gratitude, to a fraudulent invention of authorities to whom he in reality owed nothing.
In fact, throughout an investigation which has to a great extent become a controversy, three schools of criticism are discernible—one, radical in its attitude to Pliny, which, with Montigny, Rose, Rabenhorst and others, would dismiss his lists as totally untrustworthy; a second, conservative in attitude, which with Brunn, Urlichs, Gruppe and Detlefsen, would champion Pliny against a charge of pedantic or dishonest parade; and a third, probably now represented by the majority of scholars, moderate in attitude which would admit that Pliny’s lists of authorities cannot be taken at their face-value, but require minute sifting so as to discover, as far as is feasible, the relative importance of the authors named.
Yet amidst a welter of hypotheses, sometimes mutually destructive, real service has been rendered to learning. Brunn’s rule, already mentioned about the order in the author-lists, was well worth formulating as an endeavour to disentangle Pliny’s system of quotation. Aly made temperately stated contributions to the subject of the zoological sources, and Münzer has illuminated in particular Pliny’s employment of Latin authorities like Cato and Varro, and their dependence in turn upon Greek originals. He has argued that Juba was for Pliny a channel for much of the older Greek learning, as Varro was for much of the older Latin learning.[1056] In tracing sources for the fine arts treated in Pliny’s last books, progress has been made on the lines laid down by Otto Jahn,[1057] who, after detecting the homogeneous nature of many of the art-criticisms, indicated their immediate Varronian authorship and ultimate Greek origin. Since Brieger[1058] made the first attempt to determine the names of the Greek writers whose opinions Varro had latinized, a series of scholars have developed or modified the views of the pioneers in this subject.[1059]
Looking broadly at the whole vexed problem, one cannot find compelling reasons against believing that Pliny sometimes went back to the Greeks, and sometimes did not. In detail, if for a moment one considers zoology alone, there is ground for thinking that Pliny in certain parts of his work used the Greek Zoica[1060] which passed for Aristotle, and in other parts used intermediary authors either Greek or Latin. It is a large assumption to make that a learned industrious Roman of the Flavian age never consulted the original Greek sources. Pliny probably obtained Aristotelian and Theophrastian material both indirectly through different intermediaries and directly from the Greek. As regards Latin authors, we know that he used Cato both directly and indirectly; for we find that a quotation in Varro refers him to a passage in Cato, whom he then evidently consults by way of verification, because he quotes more of Cato’s passage than Varro did.[1061] A presumption is thus raised in favour of believing that a parallel desire for verification would at times carry Pliny back from Roman authors to Greek authors whom they cited. An apposite instance occurs in a passage[1062] where divergent views of Aristotle and Trogus are contrasted, suggesting the inference that Pliny had both the Greek and the Latin author in front of him. Elaborate as have been the pains devoted to the inquiry,[1063] one cannot hope fully to recreate the working methods of an omnivorous excerptor and annotator like Pliny;[1064] but one may picture his closely written notebooks packed with extracts, comments, and references, under appropriate headings or rubrics.[1065] Beyond that, to descend into minutiae is guesswork. Pliny’s arrangement in those overflowing excerpt-rolls[1066] and his way of serving up material for his magnum opus are alike matters of speculation, not of dogma. Much of his grouping came from predecessors—categories of animals, for example, classified, unscientifically enough, according to their environment as terrestrial, aquatic, aerial, were ready found for him; but how many tables of interesting points, more or less relevant, Pliny himself added as fruits of discursive reading can only be faintly conjectured. We can fancy his notebooks contained countless headings like “Earthquake, miraculous accidents due to,” “Fortune, examples of mutability in,” “The Sea, wonderful things observed in,” “Death, signs of,” “Elephants, remarkable traits in,” “Of Tritons and Nereids,” “Eagle, a strange case,” “Wood, valuable kinds of,” “Diet—for a man’s health,” “Headache, remedies for,” “Crabs, what they cure,” “Mining, methods of,” “Gold, ancient uses of,” “Colours, natural and artificial,” “Precious stones, tests for”: many such are echoed in the Natural History. As to actual writing, his procedure was probably variable—involving now concentration upon one author or a very few authors, now dispersion among many authors or extracts from them. For larger and well-defined portions of his subject he would rely on one or more authors of highest importance—his authorities of first rank to be reinforced by others of inferior weight. Some such kind of hierarchy of sources has been sketched for the zoological books. Aly[1067] has maintained that, whatever Pliny’s reliance upon Roman sources by preference, this reliance does not hold for Books VIII-XI. Here in zoology, according to his argument, the Aristotelian tradition reigned supreme, and no Latin author could compete; but Pliny liked patriotically to adduce the authority of his fellow-countrymen, and he therefore on special subjects turned from Aristotle—on domestic animals to Varro and Columella, on bees to Hyginus. Other authorities in this second rank were Nigidius, Trebius Niger, and Trogus, who themselves had drawn copiously from Aristotle. To ensure a spice of attractive variety, Pliny resorted to sources of a third rank, and thus imported anecdotes from the royal dilettante Juba,[1068] or the travelled consular Licinius Mucianus. Enlivening items could also be hunted up in Roman annalists, antiquaries, poets, and jurists, or, if already entered in the notebooks, could be fitted into a suitable place in the big work. Besides, there was the added personal touch due to Pliny’s own recollections and comments.
For want, however, of any exact criterion, we are left with a double difficulty in absolutely pronouncing, firstly, which authorities are minor, and, secondly, what is the relative importance of different minor authorities. It is obvious that some writers must have been very seldom used: thus in the second book, on the universe, we should assume from the nature of its contents that Livy, Nepos, Sebosus and Caelius Antipater, though named in the author-list, are not primary authorities on physics: very likely Nepos and Caelius are included solely in virtue of the incidental citations from them regarding the circumnavigation of Africa.[1069] Again, how can we assess Pliny’s debt to Vitruvius and Valerius Maximus? Both names appear in a few of the author-registers, but they are never named in the text. Yet Pliny beyond a doubt used both, and, as they were post-Varronian, used them, not through Varro, but by direct consultation. In this connexion, it is judicious to observe that even as to pre-Varronian writers in Latin, though his debt to Varro is great, the exact amount of his independent research must remain undetermined. His reading in Roman literature earlier than Varro’s time may have been considerably wider than some critics of late have given him credit for. Pliny was not a lazy man.
From this preliminary consideration of problems involved in the study of Pliny’s sources we pass to a brief mention of his outstanding authorities for the principal branches of his work. In Physics he took over the inherited teaching of a large number of Greek thinkers, of whom he names, in his list for Book II, twenty-six as compared with seventeen Romans. He shows keen interest in such problems of Greek mathematicians as the size of the earth or distance of heavenly bodies. Enthusiasm evokes outbursts of praise for the wonderful scientific attainments of Greeks like Aristarchus and Hipparchus.[1070] Matter is drawn from Posidonius; and Varro’s authority acts influentially here, as in most books—it is rare to find his name absent from the author-lists. One cannot but think it peculiar that neither the De Rerum Natura of Lucretius nor the Quaestiones Naturales of Seneca earned for their authors a mention in this list, though their names appear later in the work. In Geography[1071] Varro was supplemented by Agrippa’s wall-chart of the known world which Augustus had completed. Pomponius Mela and Juba were also used, but not Strabo. An important Greek source was Eratosthenes, who flourished early in the second century B.C. and drew from Pytheas, Hanno, and Nearchus. The book on mankind was specially indebted to Varro, Trogus and Verrius Flaccus. Coming to the twenty-five books (VIII-XXXII) assigned to Zoology and Botany under various aspects, one does well to remember, with regard to the Greek sources, that Alexandria had shown less interest in the “descriptive sciences” than in Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy. Zoology and Botany had been subordinated to the art of healing, and it is not without significance that Pliny devotes so large a space to their medicinal side. The development of technical applications appealed to the practical Roman temperament, which preferred empirical concentration upon externals to a Hellenic quest after universals. Doubtless Pliny often felt spiritually more at home with Roman writers—with Vitruvius’s applications of mathematics rather than with Euclid’s theorems, and with actual Roman achievements in engineering rather than with the problems of Archimedes. Thus in Zoology, while Aristotle’s influence remains paramount, it acts also through intermediaries like Nigidius Figulus, Trogus, and Juba. In Botany, material is borrowed from Theophrastus (who had given close attention to the healing properties of plants) but also from Varro, Juba, and Sextius Niger (whose Ὕλη—for he wrote in Greek—was a source common to Pliny and Dioscorides). Alongside of a clear respect for many Greek writers on botany, it is noticeable that Pliny shows fondness for Latin works with botanico-pharmacological contents: phrases like proximi herbarii nostri or quidam e nostris mark his national interest. On bees, Pliny, as we have noted, used Hyginus; on medicine, Celsus, Pompeius Lenaeus, Pompey’s freedman, who made available Mithradates’s lore on poisons, and Antony’s freedman, Antonius Castor, a man of high renown in botany;[1072] on agriculture, Cato, Varro and Columella. The Carthaginian Mago’s treatise on husbandry had long been accessible through the Latin translation authorized by the Senate. Mineralogical material was first collected in the fourth century by Theophrastus; but Pliny, who used his work on stones, is our principal surviving authority. In art, Pliny’s chief guide to Greek authorities was Varro, whom he often cites. Varro had taken occasion to sketch the history of art in connexion with architecture, an important branch in his scheme of education (disciplinae). The three ultimate Greek originals were Duris of Samos, born about 340 B.C., and his juniors Xenocrates[1073] of Sicyon and Antigonus of Carystus. From the first of these came biographic and anecdotic matter concerning artists, from the second a sketch of developments in art with information about workers in bronze and colour, and from the third miscellaneous items of aesthetic interest. In more than one index appear the names of Pasiteles as a writer on wonderful works and of Heliodorus as a writer on monuments dedicated at Athens. Cornelius Nepos, Fenestella, Vitruvius, and Seneca are among Latin authors in the art-lists. The contemporary general and historian Licinius Mucianus supplied the author with facts bearing on art in Asia Minor.
Among questions affecting this elaborately stratified fabric of ancient knowledge, the temptation may arise to inquire what is its scientific worth to-day. Certain drawbacks lie on the surface. One sees that the author was too bookish to be original, too receptive to be experimental, too acquisitive to be discriminating. He tended rather to be overpowered by his enormous material than to marshal it with unerring critical control. We hear in him no Baconian trumpet-call towards research as a condition of intellectual advance; but, then, can experiment be demanded at a stage when, in spite of mechanical discoveries in Alexandria and Rome, scientific instruments and appliances were as yet imperfectly developed? It is, in truth, easy, though not over-helpful towards a just estimate, to criticize Pliny for all his weakness in science when compared with standards of the present. Modern conceptions have, however, left much in the thought of less than a hundred years ago hopelessly antiquated—still more so an encyclopaedist of the first century. The gap between ancient Rome and ourselves is perceived the moment that we think of contemporary theories on the constitution of the universe, on astro-physics, on the properties of matter, on energy, on the meaning of life, on the origin of species, on disease, and on art. Such terms as electro-magnetics (electrum is only “amber” for Pliny), ether-waves, spectrum analysis, radio-activity, relativity, anthropology, evolution, bacteriology and aesthetics have no place in this old encyclopaedia. One has only to pick out a dozen names like Galileo, Newton, Laplace, Faraday, Huxley, Kelvin, Linnaeus, Lamarck, Lyell, Darwin, Mendel and Pasteur, and associate with them their teaching, to see at once how far Pliny has been outdistanced in Physics, Natural History and Medicine. To-day any visitor to Como, the birthplace of the Plinies, might readily fancy that the city itself bears witness to the advance in scientific achievement since the Natural History was written. In the façade of the cathedral are statues of both uncle and nephew, and a piazza not far away contains a statue in honour of another native of Como, the renowned Volta, who heralded an era of electricity. Along with electricity the sciences most conspicuously absent in the Natural History are Chemistry, Geology and Biology. All this is a reminder that, if defects are pointed out, many of them were inevitable in Pliny’s time, and to enter into minute detail would be implicitly to rehearse the history of scientific thought between then and now.
Pliny’s physics, being pre-Copernican, give, a geocentric plan of the universe; and no deeper explanation of the constitution of matter is vouchsafed than the doctrine of the four elements. His geography is unscientific, in some respects untrustworthy, and too much of a dry catalogue, in which many chances of winning interest are missed. In justice, it should be said, that he prepares us for this, and apologizes indeed for his brevity.[1074] How disappointingly unentertaining he can be is clear from the bald treatment of such an island as Sicily, or of such a country as Italy, which ends in his matter-of-fact dismissal of the subject, haec est Italia, diis sacra, hae gentes eius, haec oppida populorum.[1075] Only at the outset does he let himself go regarding Italy; but a panegyrical excursus[1076] does not atone for sins of omission. It is notorious that in his zoology there are many vulgar errors, and yet there is no dearth of the valuable and attractive. Here in the main the worth of what had been handed down from his master Aristotle ensured that much in Pliny must live; for Aristotle was a first-hand observer and exact recorder of the animal world, at any rate within the Aegean area which he knew: if he was overtaken by fable and fantasy, it was usually in the case of distant and semi-romantic regions. His fame as a naturalist has grown almost in inverse proportion to the decline of his fame as a physicist; for, whereas Copernicus and Galileo overturned his physics, the labours of men like Cuvier and Richard Owen have established his greatness in zoology. Of this Aristotelian tradition Pliny, though a less acute observer than his predecessor, inherited enough to win the grateful admiration of Buffon, just as his avowedly encyclopaedic aim won the sympathetic regard of von Humboldt. Neither in zoology nor in botany can his classifications be accepted to-day: nor yet are his descriptions, although many have merit, exhaustive or accurate. If we find cities confused in geography,[1077] we are prepared for still worse confusion in the animal and vegetable kingdoms. To treat the elephant first of land animals or the whale first of sea creatures—at least after Tritons and Nereids!—is a negation of scientific order. Unfortunately, too, Pliny revived some of the fabulous element largely rejected by Aristotle. But here and there gleams betoken conceptions of the future. For example, had facts been more scientifically grasped, the assertion of sex in plants and the account of artificial fertilization among date-palms might have carried the author far further. About his medicine what can be said? The quite imaginary healing powers ascribed to a vast assemblage of animals, plants and substances prove a great deal of his pharmacology to be a farrago of old-world and superstitious remedies. Still, here again the qualification of a critical sense is not entirely absent, inasmuch as Pliny realizes that the absurd claims of wonder-workers[1078] tended to discredit the genuine virtues of herbs. His credulity has its limits. While Pliny, like many a Stoic, accepts portents, as is plain from his record of monstrous births in Book VII, he, on the other hand, rejects the werwolf fable (homines in lupos uerti rursusque restitui, VIII. 80) as only to be believed if all tales are true! Supposing, then, he ever read the excellently told story of the werwolf in Petronius, he read it in the same spirit as a modern reader would.
No number of shortcomings, however, can rob this encyclopaedia of its historical value. The most comprehensive document on the current science of imperial Rome, it is at the same time an index to the attainments of previous epochs in man’s pursuit after knowledge. Tested by its sources, it represents the intellectual stage reached through the manipulation and amplification of Greek—especially Aristotelian—knowledge by Alexandrian and Roman savants. Defects notwithstanding, it therefore abides an irremovable landmark. Admittedly a great deal of the Natural History is neither literature nor science: its style, which has yet to be considered, is often forbidding, and only under serious reservations can it be credited even with that informative quality which makes the literature of knowledge. Much of it, as we have seen, would be disowned by science. Yet its worst mistakes bear a significance in the chronicle of human thought. On the positive side, we owe an infinite amount of instruction to it and to it alone. Think as we choose of Pliny—picture him merely as an intelligent, painstaking, sincere official eager to know but limited in acumen, and dismiss, as we may by modern standards, his science as contemptible, we have still to place to his lasting credit the merit of seeing that the world around teemed with curious things of fascinating interest which demanded record, though they might elude explanation. Besides, the human note (quite apart from the book devoted to man) rings out again and again. Whatever he might, during moments of despondency, write in disparagement of mankind, Pliny recorded enough by way of entertaining stories to place man in strange and sometimes romantic settings. Much that would otherwise have perished was rescued by him from oblivion. Some of the toilers for human progress in the distant past would be unknown but for his mention, and important details about Rome itself and Roman ways can be learned from no other ancient witness. Dreary tracts of second-hand matter redolent of the lamp rather than of nature are compensated for by information, often the fruit of Pliny’s personal experience, concerning such a miscellany of subjects as German forests and Spanish mining, animals imported for table-delicacies or public shows in the capital, harbour-works, roads, embankments, bridges, the sewage system, aqueducts with other great engineering feats of which he is justifiably proud, and (not always, it must be owned, without mistakes) the artistic treasures of the author’s day.
While there is a sense, then, in which Pliny remains in part true knowledge, he also remains literature in part, because a good deal of him can be read with pleasure. He is not, of course, to be continuously perused: his own recommendation, if needed, is against any such attempt, and Roman common sense would have prescribed for a work of reference exactly what a character in Ennius prescribed for philosophy—sips in preference to a sousing plunge.[1079] For anyone not too rigidly concerned with Pliny’s Latin, an excellent way to enjoy him would be to prop Philemon Holland’s folio translation on a table, and browse, as one lists, among the big pages that give a feeling of spacious leisureliness by their size no less than by their generously expanded allowance of quaint English. An appropriate attitude finds a certain charm in anachronisms whereby the ager Gallicus has become “the French pale about Ariminum,” or a Roman emperor in an inscription has been, as Pontifex Maximus, turned into an “Archbishop.” So Diuus Augustus is “Augustus Caesar of happie memorie” and Eratosthenes “a great clerke verily for all kind of literature.” But even in Pliny’s own Latin there is often the attractive feature of readability. He has a knack of recounting familiar things with freshness, and so one reads without boredom about the marvellously indiscriminate digestion of an ostrich (concoquendi sine delectu deuorata mira natura) and its foolish notion that, its head once hidden, its whole body is out of sight (cum colla frutice occultauerint latere sese existimantium, X. i.). His passage on the nightingale is, no doubt, in essence incommensurable with Keats’s Ode, but it will be felt that no one has ever described in prose with more enthusiasm than Pliny the musical variations in the bird’s minstrelsy, the marvel of sound so loud from so small a throat, the marvel of notes in rise and fall so true to perfect harmony.[1080] Judged solely by its information, that is to say its facts and anecdotes, apart from manner of telling—which is variable—the Natural History is one of the half-dozen most interesting books in the world. To turn over its pages almost casually will prove this. Now we read about Nature’s wonderful equipment of the mosquito (XI. 2-3), now about products of civilization, whether, like paper,[1081] essential in Pliny’s opinion, or less so, like citronwood tables (mensarum insania, XIII. 91-95), or oysters brought from Brindisi and refattened in the Lucrine lake (IX. 169). Again, we are told that soap or sapo—not, by the way, a Roman word or invention—was originally produced for reddening the hair in the form of a Gallic pomade, which was compounded of tallow and ashes, might be hard or soft, and gained more popularity in Northern Europe with men than with women (XXVIII. 191). Here we chance upon an account of the ways to find gold (XXXIII. 66 sqq.), and there a case of a military officer being fool enough to take 12,000 lbs. weight of silver plate with him on a campaign against barbarians (ib. 143). One gets to know what the eyes of five emperors were like (XI. 143-144), how madly fond Tiberius was of Lysippus’s statue, the “Apoxyomenos,” and how Nero spoiled Lysippus’s “Alexander” by gilding it (XXXIV. 62-63). Or it may be only isolated scraps that we note—what ship brought the Egyptian obelisk to the Vatican, who first served a boar whole, who first served goose-liver at Rome, when bakers first came to the city, who was the earliest doctor. Or the subject may be, as it is in Book XIV, famous vineyards and vintages—what Augustus’s favourite brand was, what was a good invalid wine, what the wines at Julius Caesar’s banquets, what the evils of drunkenness or next morning’s feelings after a debauch—“a cask’s breath from the mouth, oblivion of almost everything, the death of memory.”[1082] It is all the more entertaining that his individual impress is left on some at least of his catalogues. Thus his sketch of the imposing structures of Rome,[1083] interspersed with outbursts of commendation as well as censures upon luxury, can hardly fail to amuse the modern reader by its picture of the supposedly dignified Roman people whirling through the air in two reversible theatres and actually cheering at the risk it ran (ad periculum suum plaudens, XXXVI. 118).
Pliny’s outlook on life was largely determined by his Stoic sympathies. Epicurean, Academic and Neo-Pythagorean grains had fallen upon his mind, but had not taken root there as did Stoicism. There was much to draw him to the system. He knew the most high-souled of its adherents, Paetus Thrasea, and he had studied Seneca.[1084] A philosophy which pointed towards the study of nature, and was yet more engrossed in the attainment of virtue through wise conduct, could not but appeal to a grave, diligent, self-sacrificing spirit like Pliny’s. It claimed to hold the solution for the riddle of Providence and the universe; and its ascetic position of disdain for pleasure so suited his own simple tastes and laborious days as to confirm him in a heart-felt dislike of luxury and of fools. His characteristic views, then, those to which he most regularly adheres, regarding God, the world and nature, man and society, are traceable to, or at least consistent with, Stoicism. Thus he is inclined to believe in a providential government of the world, whose soul is a divine power acting beneficently on earth as among the stars above.[1085] Only human weakness could seek to associate God with an image made by human hands:[1086] there is one God and, echoing Xenophanes’s conception that “He is all eye, all thought, all ear,” Pliny believes Him to be a mighty principle of Life and Soul, beside whom the manifold deities of Greece or Rome are simply a jest; for such diversity of gods makes “the population of heaven outstrip mankind!”[1087] With this pantheistic creed Pliny sees around him a divine organism at work for human good; and something noble animates his perception of godhead in the service of humanity. For mortal to help mortal, he feels, is to rise to the rank of divinity and to glory everlasting.[1088] A sense of piety, then, must have lightened his own toil upon the encyclopaedia, since his explicit aim therein was to help his fellows and posterity.[1089]
The same ultimate belief underlies his attitude to nature and to the earth, which are not always in his mind absolutely distinguished, and which logically indeed must be partially identified in respect of the divine element ascribed to both. Despite a few inconsistencies, there is no mistaking his general position; but the profundity of a philosopher is not to be expected from him. An honest simple-minded observer, Pliny did not arrogate to himself a power of penetration into the innermost recesses of nature. Perhaps he is chargeable with having been over-readily content to contemplate merely the outward appearance of things—their phenomenal existence. Yet this was at least sincerer than bedimming nature under a misty cloud of unwarrantable hypotheses. On the whole, he saw life and the world with remarkable clearness: finding in it matter for wonder, indignation, and pity, he did not stay to analyse the momentous theories logically implicit in such sentiments. His criticism is at best on the surface: and he is more fully satisfied with a rapturous apostrophe or a puritanic tirade or a moralizing reflection than with any systematic pursuit of a vera causa or any attempt to read the enigma of the universe. So he is not strictly consistent even with regard to this mighty “Nature” whom he personifies as a Universal Mother. In one mood, thinking of man, poor wretch, whom she lays all naked upon the earth on his very birthday to wail in helplessness,[1090] Pliny wonders whether after all she may be only a grim Stepdame (parens melior homini an tristior nouerca, VII. 1). But the mood does not last. As a rule, he is enamoured of Nature rather than of man: she does everything well, whereas man abuses and degrades her products. This spirit prompts Pliny’s repeated invectives against the refinements of pleasure. From his standpoint the herbal dyes of Gaul are more innocent than the purple got from the murex, because the former are ready to hand, while the latter must be sought in the unfathomed depths of the sea (intacta etiam ancoris, XXII. 3). So then man is at fault. Man’s pride is but folly after his lowly start at birth: man’s inhumanity to man makes most of the world’s mourning: man perverts the kindly boons of nature.[1091] In contrast with his folly, his ingratitude, his extravagances, nature is the inspired artificer whose perfect workmanship ought never to be improved upon.[1092] Virtues in herbs are so many proofs that nature produces nothing without some secret reason—really for the sake of man.[1093] Her simple remedies far excel his artificial drugs.[1094] Her infinite and joyous variety is such that painting cannot do justice to her festive hues.[1095] In keeping with such affectionate enthusiasm, the author has a characteristic retort for scoffers at his devoted toil upon the Natural History, when he claims the consolation of suffering neglect in company with Nature the beneficent (XXII. 15, plerisque ultro etiam inrisui sumus ista commentantes atque friuoli operis arguimur, magno quamquam immensi laboris solatio sperni cum rerum natura). Finally, if we can take the text as authentic, it is to her that he addressed a pious farewell as he laid down his pen: “Hail, Nature, parent of all things, vouchsafe thy blessing on the work of one who alone of Romans has celebrated thee in thine every phase” (XXXVII. 205).
A parallel attitude is adopted towards Earth, whom with some forgetfulness of nature’s beneficence he regards at once as part of nature, and yet as a mother enfolding man when finally cast off by the rest of nature. The typically Plinian eulogy translated below appears to ignore nature as parent of all:
“The Earth is the one portion of nature on whom for her singular services we have conferred a surname expressive of revered motherhood. She is to man as the heavens to God. She welcomes us at birth, feeds us when born, and once we have issued into this world supports us continually: at the last she folds us in her bosom when the rest of nature has abandoned us, then most our mother as she covers us: in none of her services more blessed than in that which makes us also blessed—even bearing our monuments and titles, prolonging our name, and extending our money in despite of quick-passing time. Her final power we men in our anger pray should lie heavy on an enemy who is now no more,[1096] as though we knew not that she is the only one never angry with mankind. The waters steal into rain-clouds, harden to hail, swell in waves, dash headlong in torrents: the air thickens in mist and raves in the storm-blast. But Earth is bountiful, tender, indulgent. Ever the handmaiden of mortal needs, what does she breed at our compelling, what yield at her own will—what scents and savours, what juices, what things to touch, what wealth of colour! How true her honesty to repay with interest a loan entrusted to her! What plenty she maintains for our sake!”[1097]
When at the beginning of his book on agriculture he renews his praises of Earth, it is to this passage that he refers, as one in which he has already championed her cause.[1098] Yet man has repaid her bounty with gross maltreatment: “with iron, wood, fire, stone, and crops she is tortured every hour, and much more to serve our pleasures than our needs.... How many hands are worn to enable a finger-joint to glitter with a gem! If there were a hell, the excavations of greed and luxury would have dug it up by now!”[1099]
How empty, he reflects, is all man’s striving. This Earth, the theatre of our ambitions, is but a speck in the universe (mundi punctus). To those who are avaricious for land he preaches a sermonette on the vanity of human wishes, anticipates Juvenal’s sarcophago contentus erit on the close of Alexander’s career.[1100] In a gayer mood, however, he overlooks the tortures of Mother-earth by crop-raising, and fancifully assigns as one explanation for the ancient fertility of the soil that it liked being ploughed by ex-generals of the Cincinnatus type, whereas in later days it underwent the ignominy of cultivation by slaves instead of retired dictators.[1101]
Pliny’s exaltation of nature proportionately depresses his views on man, society and progress. Good men, he thinks, are due to nature’s kindness in providing the antidote with the poison:
“Some men too are born poisons. Like the black dart of the serpent’s tongue, their venomous souls blight what they touch. They denounce everything, and, comparable with unhallowed birds, begrudge their own darkness, and disturb the quiet of night itself with their howls—the only utterance they have—so that their mere encounter, as much as that of ill-omened creatures, paralyses action or kind-heartedness. Universal hatred is the one known gain from their loathsome breath. But in this sphere too the majesty of nature has produced good and honest men, just as she is more fertile in plants that heal and nourish. Rejoicing in the esteem of the good, we will abandon such human scum to the bitterness that burns within them, and proceed to make life fairer (excolere uitam): and this with firmer resolution, as our aim is the pleasure, not of reputation won, but of service rendered” (XVIII. 4-5).
As to the related subject of human society, Pliny is disappointed with the heedlessness of contemporary Romans, the lack of serious desire for knowledge, the flippant passion for luxury. This latter theme never tires him, though it tires his readers. Historically he connects the inroads of luxury with the conquest of Asia.[1102] Widened maritime control had endangered the old Roman character: “we are not merely fed by risks at sea, we are clothed as well:” even shellfish had involved a devastation of morals (populatio morum), and, as regards the parade of wealth in pearls, “it is not enough to wear them—people must walk on them!”[1103] Censuring the expenditure of fortunes upon costly incense for funeral pyres, Pliny claims that the old salted cake of simple worship used to win more divine grace, and complains that millions on millions of sesterces are drained out of the Roman Empire annually by China, India and Arabia in return for Oriental exports like silks, pearls and scents—“a dear price to pay for our extravagance and women” (tanti nobis deliciae et feminae constant).[1104] Elsewhere, he ranks perfumes as the most superfluous of luxuries: “pearls pass to an heir: garments enjoy a respite: but perfumes breathe their last on the spot—they die in what may be called their own hour: their chief recommendation is that, as a lady passes by, the scent may draw the attention of those who have other business on hand.”[1105] Forced fruits and vegetables share his condemnation with iced water for the full purse.[1106] We have seen that he prefers natural dyes from Gallic plants to other sorts: Gaul therefore does not need to ransack the ocean for purples which the vicious use for seductive purposes. Gravely he adds that these more innocent vegetable dyes will not wash: and then, avoiding a detailed homily, pulls himself up with a rhythm that amusingly anticipates the mediaeval student’s song Mihi est propositum in taberna mori.[1107] The same liking for simplicity comes out in his admiration for the ancient plainness of the oak wreath (ciuica corona) conferred for life-saving in war—a custom worthy of deathless memory, because rescue of a citizen must not be matter for gain.[1108] Pliny’s own frugal habits of life and industrious husbandry of time give point to his protests against the shallowness of his day: he grieves in particular that the discoveries of the past are neglected and sound knowledge contemned owing to a pernicious worship of money (auaritiae tantum artes coluntur). In spite of free intercommunication throughout the Empire and the advantages of peace for quiet study, ground has been lost: preoccupation with the means of enrichment has engendered a lethargic attitude to antiquity as well as a brood of social evils.[1109] Early in his work he had struck a similar note of regret over the unrewarded toil of ancient investigators (sine praemio alio quam posteros iuuandi), the contemporary failure to add to learning (nihil addisci noua inquisitione), and the cramping concentration on lucre (lucri non scientiae gratia).[1110] The same revulsion against the carelessness of voluptuaries acts along with his ever-present desire for knowledge and his humanitarian regard for the thousand ills that flesh is heir to (millia morborum singulis mortalium timenda) among the motives which underlie Pliny’s enthusiasm for the healing art.[1111]
Bias in favour of simplicity and belief in nature’s perfection combined to produce a curious anomaly in Pliny’s attitude towards life. This appears in a distrust of inventions which, if pressed logically, would argue actual hostility to human progress. One is prepared to find his discontent with contemporary society impelling him, like Rousseau, to conceive an ideal picture of primitive tribes: and so his raptures[1112] on the charming innocence of unsophisticated man, supposing there were no mines in a wicked world, will not deceive a modern reader into fancying a dainty existence among Hottentots or Andaman islanders. When, however, he denounces the audacious manufacture of linum into sails (XIX. 4-6), and a Roman admiral has thus declared war on ships, one asks how far this is merely a conventional pose. It is at least infinitely ridiculous when contrasted with Sophocles’s famous ode on man as greatest of wonders, first and foremost because he “fares across the white sea before the stormy South.”[1113] By degrees we realize that Pliny, in spite of his passion for knowledge, was not sympathetic towards daring exploration or scientific discovery. Well aware that nature has her secrets, he is yet chary about probing too deeply. We have seen that he has no inkling of the fundamental conceptions of pure science. Nor could applied science ever have obtained his benediction or thriven on his cautious methods. He would have been out of touch with an age of rapid industrial development and mechanical improvements. Upon his reflections about the evil uses of iron,[1114] Philemon Holland appends a marginal note: “O Pliny, what wouldest thou say if thou diddest see and hear the pistols, muskets, culverines and cannons in these daies!” To transpose the Elizabethan apostrophe to more modern times, what would he have said of inventions like gas, incandescent mantles, photography, telegraph, telephone, electric light, electric transmission of force, gramophone, cinematograph, anaesthetics, bacteriological tests, applications of Röntgen rays, wireless broadcasting, and, after his objections to navigation, what would he have said about aeronautics?
His political views may be in a measure divined from his close intimacy with the Flavian house, the tone of his preface to Titus, and allusions like that to the salutaris exortus Vespasiani (XXXIII. 41). Accepting the imperial system as indispensable to Rome, he is grateful for the security guaranteed by a world-wide order (immensa Romanae pacis maiestate, XXVII. 3). It is in virtue of this system that Italy holds the principate on earth and rules the nations aright (XXXVII. 201). Nevertheless his patriotism is wider than a single political system: he is intensely national and proud of Rome as Rome. He therefore feels himself free to praise the qualities which constituted the moral strength of the republic (XVI. 14); and, without Livy’s dominant bias for the aristocracy, he still venerates the renowned families who made history. Cincinnatus, Curius Dentatus and the elder Cato are among his heroes—men who could take a lead in defending the state and its land. The decline of agriculture was in his eyes the most painful symptom of the deterioration of Rome (XVIII. 21 and 35). Literary judgements are not germane to his subject, but his reverence for Homer, Cicero and Virgil can be observed.[1115] It was part of his patriotism that, as already noted, he made the fullest possible use of Latin authorities in collecting the substance of his work. His preference for the writers of Rome is intensified because of his conviction that foreign influences had damaged the nation. Great as had been the intellectual services of Greece to the world, Pliny quotes with gusto the warning from Cato which ends like the jest about the Scots’ revenge for Flodden: “That country (Greece) will present us with her literature, and corrupt everything—even more so, if she sends her physicians here. They have sworn to kill off every non-Greek with medicine!”[1116]
Pliny’s literary qualities form an extraordinary and somewhat irritant mixture. If one had to characterize his style, one might call it piebald; for there is an enormous difference between his lack-lustre catalogues and his intentional purple passages. Certain ingredients too are drawn from authors whose words have been worked into his text. In his preface he avows that he makes no claim to write an elevated style: his theme, he points out, is a dry one, calling for unadorned treatment, giving few opportunities for amusing a reader (neque admittunt ... iucunda dictu aut legentibus blanda), and necessitating in some portions the use of words from country life or from abroad (rusticis uocabulis aut externis, immo barbaris) to suit the subject-matter.[1117] But, in general, his writing bears unmistakably the imprint of the Silver Age: alongside of the usual rhetorical paraphernalia such as antitheses, exclamations, questions and figures of speech, it exhibits the presence of poetic colouring and a particularly formless structure of sentence. At the same time there are elements of individuality. Though Pliny can be insufferably dull, he can also furnish a lively description and tell a good story. The former gift may be illustrated by his sketch of a struggle between an eagle and its prey, condensed in jerky jingling clauses,[1118] or by the account in Book X of the bee-republic, the spider’s web, and organization among ants. Among many stories which Pliny, better than his promise in the preface, introduced to secure variety of interest, one may refer to Cleopatra’s boastful bet that she could spend ten million sesterces at a banquet and her way of doing it (IX. 119-121); the schoolboy of Baiae who used to bathe with a tame dolphin (IX. 25, followed by a similar tale which the younger Pliny seems to forget having found in his uncle’s work); the cobbler’s pet raven and why it got a public funeral (X. 121-122); the freedman who raised far better crops than his neighbours and who, when arraigned for sorcery, exhibited in court his implements and workmen with the words, “These be my spells!” (XVIII. 41-43, ueneficia mea, Quirites, haec sunt.) One of the best Roman examples shows appreciation of the sardonic flavour in Tiberius’s joke about invalid wine from Sorrento: “doctors,” said the Emperor, “have laid their heads together to give Surrentine a testimonial—and I must say it’s excellent vinegar!” (XIV. 64). The anecdotes about Greek artists have the merit of retelling the competition of Zeuxis’s picture of grapes versus Parrhasios’s picture of a curtain (XXXV. 65), and the equally famous incident of the cobbler who, as a conceited art-critic, proved that he ought to have stuck to his last (ne supra crepidam sutor, XXXV. 85).
Seneca’s brevity, acting on a sarcastic vein in Pliny, sent him in expression half-way on to Tacitus. With less toilsome accumulation to face and more leisure for reflection, he might have developed a pretty wit: as things are, the mass of his work is so huge that he does not always get credit for his ingenuity. This pre-Tacitean irony colours his implication that some emperors had divinity thrust upon them, when in reference to “that god Augustus” he gravely adds the aside, “and I can’t say whether he simply got heavenly honours or deserved them” (VII. 150); and there must be a spice of mischievous raillery when in Book XXI he applies the phrase “God’s letters” to Augustus’s epistles complaining about his daughter Julia’s nocturnal revelries. Sometimes, the jest may be at the expense of idolatry: “once on a time wood served for images of the gods, for as yet nobody had discovered the value of beasts’ carcases, but nowadays by divine concession to luxury, the ivory (of elephants) makes gods’ heads and table-legs!” (XII. 5). Or it may be at the expense of civilization: he contrasts the honesty in Arabian forests—where the trees tapped for liquid incense need no watch set upon them; but in the perfume establishments of Alexandria “no supervision can sufficiently guard the workshop and the workman has his pants sealed up” (XII. 59). Much of his mockery, like Martial’s, is expended on medicine. “A tiny ulcer must have a drug from the Persian Gulf” (ulcerique paruo medicina a Rubro Mari imputatur, XXIV. 5). “In matters affecting health, people are less trustful if they understand” (XXIX. 17: that is why a mysterious Greek practitioner is appreciated). “Physicians learn at our risk and conduct experiments through deaths” (ib. 18). “It’s not modesty but competition that brings medical fees down” (neque enim pudor sed aemuli pretia summittunt, ib. 21): “the hot baths prescribed for digestion so reduce the strength that the doctor’s most obedient patients are carried to their graves!” (ib. 26). Apropos of the wrangling among physicians over invalids and the epitaph on the man who “died of a crowd of doctors” (turba se medicorum perisse), Pliny remarks: “It’s an open secret that the most loquacious among these Greek doctors becomes straightaway the arbiter of a Roman life or death”: the fact is “Greek talent is the breeze that drives us Romans” (ingeniorum Graeciae flatu impellimur, XXIX. 11).
Some of the above are general enough in application to approach the semi-proverbial sententia, which gains in force if scathing and disdainful, like “When all hope is away, it is high time to pray” (tum praecipuus uotorum locus est cum spei nullus est, VIII. 57); “Absolutely nothing pleases man as it pleases nature” (nihil utique homini sic quomodo rerum naturae placet, XIX. 55); and “It is fitting that even luxury must be protected against faked gems” (quando etiam luxuriam aduersus fraudes muniri deceat, XXXVII. 198). Pliny displays aptness of personification in such conceptions as “nature at play” amidst the variety of her shells (magna ludentis Naturae uarietas, IX. 102), or the Nile-water “filling the rôle of farmer” (Nilus coloni uice fungens, XVIII. 167). He gives also many pithy summaries of a situation. Latifundia perdidere Italiam, on the ruin of agriculture, has been already quoted: by way of contrast, he lays it down that “cultivation consists in labour, not outlay” (if the reading is opera non impensa cultura constat)—that is why our ancestors said “The master’s eye is the most fertilizing thing” (XVIII. 43). Other epigrams touch neatly on the dangerous pursuit after riches, “We mine for wealth in the depths of hell” (in sede manium opes quaerimus, XXXIII. 2); on the deterioration caused by luxury, “The life of pleasure began, real life stopped” (uoluptas uiuere coepit, uita ipsa desiit, XIV. 6); and on the drawbacks entailed by the Empire on Rome in the loss of her ancient customs, “Our victory has meant moral defeat: we are dependents of the foreigner” (uincendo uicti sumus: paremus externis, XXIV. 5).
Certain longer passages, where he indulges in “fine writing,” exemplify his fanciful style and hankering after point. Here is an encomium upon Italy introduced with an apology for his brief treatment of Italian geography:
“Neither am I ignorant that it might be taken, and that justly, for a sign of an unthankful and a lazy mind, if one should speak merely in passing, after this cursory manner, of a land which is at once foster-child and parent of all lands. Divine grace has chosen Italy to make heaven itself more glorious, to unite scattered empires, to civilize manners, to draw together by interchange of speech the discordant and savage tongues of so many nations, to give to humanity humane culture, and in a word become for all peoples in the whole world their one and only country.... The city of Rome that stands alone therein—how worthy a face upon so charming a neck!—by what means ought she to be set forth?”
He proceeds to praise the climate, fertility and trade of the peninsula, “An open bosom for the commerce of the world from all parts, herself as it were eagerly running out into the sea to help mankind. The very Greeks—a stock most unrestrained in self-laudation—have delivered judgement on Italy by giving to what is but a small part of her the name of ‘Great Greece.’”[1119]
A parallel passage near the close of the work comes near to being a sort of peroration:
“Now that we have fully treated all the works of nature, it is fitting to draw some distinction among things themselves and among countries. Over all the globe, then, everywhere beneath the dome of heaven, the most beautiful land, the one that holds for products the highest rank in nature is Italy—queen and second mother for the world (rectrix parensque mundi altera),”[1120] and there follows a summary of her pre-eminence in men and women, soldiers and slaves, arts and talents, position and healthiness, water-supply and fertility.
His rhetoric may be elaborate, like his apostrophe to Cicero (VII. 116-117) and the passage on the question “What did Dame-Nature mean by making some honies poisonous?” (XXI. 78); or it may consist in short swallow-flights of sentiment like his regret over decay in bronze-work (XXXIV. 5-6), his pleasure over the power of art to draw the eyes of the Senate (XXXV. 28), and his allusion to the fall of the Carthaginian Hercules into dishonour (XXXVI. 39). All this betrays artifice designed to counterbalance the commonplace technicalities forced upon him by agriculture, medicine and mining. Another side of this desire to escape from his subject-matter appears in the poetic ingredients of his vocabulary—forms such as senecta and iuuenta shared with poets and the later prose-writers, or a word like gemmans employed in the Ovidian and Manilian sense of “sparkling.” When Pliny wrote sortis humanae uolumina (VII. 147), meaning “revolutions or reversals of human fortune,” he gave a metaphorical turn to the poetic use of uolumen in the sense of “whirl” or “eddy.” A Livian word like sugillatio (VII. 150; XXXII. 74) is also characteristic: it may have come direct from Livy, who in many respects is a forerunner of Silver Latin, or Pliny may have got it through Valerius Maximus. Further symptoms are noticeable in personifications and use of abstract nouns for concrete: leonum feritas inter se non dimicat (VII. 5, for leones feri), uniuersa mortalitas (VII. 147, for cuncti mortales, cf. mortalitati, XXXIV. 141), potestatum (IX. 29 “of men in power”), seruitus (XIV. 5, “slaves”), seruitia (XXXIII. 23, “slaves”), ministeriorum (XXXI. 7, for ministrorum).
Pliny’s frequent curtness does not make for limpidity. Too often he writes as one in a hurry, with the result that both expression and structure suffer. The ordinary Plinian sentence, in its badly fitted series of condensed clauses and phrases, forms a great contrast to the finished Ciceronian period; it loses proportionately in rhythm, logic and clearness. Any schoolboy will detect the inelegantly loose employment of the present participle in writing inde eductum custodia bibere iussit illico exspirantem (XXI. 12) to convey the fact that “She (Cleopatra) had a prisoner brought from custody, whereupon she ordered him to drink, and he died on the spot.” Nowhere, however, is Pliny more exasperating than in his maltreatment of the ablative case. He uses ablatives in a slack sense, accumulates them cumbrously, introduces contiguous ablatives in confusingly different meanings, plasters a heap of ablatives absolute on to a sentence, or awkwardly suspends a gerund to the close (e.g. prodendo, XII. 17). Thus tenui gutta ploratu lanis (XII. 116) is intended to mean “after exuding in thin drops on to linen”; and the lumbering collocation adhibetur et ars iecori feminarum, sicut anserum, inuentum M. Apicii, fico arida saginatis a(c) satie(tate) necatis repente mulsi potu dato (VIII. 209) refers to the mode of securing sow-liver as well as goose-liver—“the sows being stuffed with dry figs, and then, when fattened, suddenly killed after having honied wine given to them to drink.” Fortunately the world has not judged Pliny by his style.
Himself a pre-eminent epitomator and excerptor, Pliny in turn fell into the hands of the epitomators and excerptors of the third and fourth centuries. Their interest lay chiefly in his geographical and medical portions.[1121] The Collectanea rerum memorabilium by Solinus in the third century shows much of his influence acting either directly or indirectly;[1122] and the so-called Medicina Plinii of the next century drew copiously on his medical books, as the third-century poem in 1115 hexameters by Serenus Sammonicus had also done. Abridgement brought upon many ancient originals the fate of disappearance; but this did not befall the Natural History. From Symmachus in the fourth century we learn that it was widely read; certainly it was used by Martianus Capella and Isidorus of Seville. In the surviving MSS. we have about a couple of hundred witnesses to its popularity in the Middle Ages. Bede in the eighth century possessed a copy,[1123] and an astronomical work in an Anglo-Saxon monastery drew material from at least two of the books.[1124] In the next century Alcuin applied to Charlemagne for part of the text; a poem by Alcuin includes Pliny among the volumes of the library at York; and the Irish monk Dicuil made extracts from Pliny for his Mensura orbis terrae. In the twelfth century Robert of Cricklade (in North Wilts), Prior of St. Fridewide at Oxford, dedicated to Henry II of England his elaborate Defloratio in nine books excerpted from the Natural History.[1125]
Writers of every period, in fact, profited by the diligence of a compiler who took advantage of all moments to construct a main conduit whereby the science of the ancient world might pass on to later times. But it is natural that, while during less enlightened centuries he was accepted as an authority, the modern spirit of research should demand a fresh orientation towards his work judged as science. It is significant that “a large part of Pliny’s work has gradually passed into folk-keeping, so that through its agency the gipsy fortune-teller of to-day is still reciting garbled versions of the formulae of Aristotle and Hippocrates of two and a half millenia ago.”[1126] That, however, is only one phase of his survival. On the permanence of his historical value stress has already been laid. It is under this aspect that the gigantic encyclopaedia best justifies the author’s unremitting pains and a reader’s interest to-day.
FLAVIAN HISTORY
As Pliny was a historian, it is in place to give here the brief chronicle of Flavian history. Primarily a business-like emperor, Vespasian himself wrote memoirs. Cluvius Rufus[1127] connects the Claudian and Flavian epochs. Of consular rank when Caligula was assassinated in 41, he was governor of Spain in 69, and in his later years under Vespasian composed his work on Nero’s reign which Tacitus used. Another recent historian used by Tacitus was Fabius Rusticus[1128] who seems to have been alive as late as A.D. 108. Vipstanus Messalla, an orator like Quintilian with a preference for the old style, was a friend of Tacitus’s youth and author of historical studies.[1129]
Under Domitian, history could not but suffer blight. The only names that call for mention are those of Vibius Maximus, destined to become prefect of Egypt in A.D. 104, and author of a universal history in which Statius saw qualities recalling Sallust and Livy;[1130] and the two Stoics Arulenus Rusticus and Herennius Senecio, composers of eulogies upon Paetus Thrasea and Priscus Helvidius respectively, which, with their philosophical independence, cost them their lives.[1131] These were days when sentence of death was passed on Hermogenes of Tarsus because his history offended the Emperor, and on Mettius Pompusianus because he was interested enough in Livy to keep a volume of speeches by kings and generals extracted from his pages.[1132]