VII. MARTIAL AND MINOR FLAVIAN POETRY
Martial’s career—Poetry and patronage—Order of his books—Numeration and fresh editions by the author—His personality—Relation of literary trifles to real life—Distaste for epic—Varied assortment of Flavian types—Contemporary Rome envisaged—The humorous and incongruous—Martial’s friends—The epigram before him—His impress on it—Verse-forms and sources—Comparative absence of rhetoric—Simplicity, wit, polish combined—Pointed end in an epigram—Confidence in popularity and immortality—Sense of wasted time—Double nemesis of his two great faults—Adulation and coarseness—The sentimental side—Poems on the dead—On friendship—On natural scenery—Quotability—His influence.
Minor Flavian poetry—Maternus’s post-Neronian plays—Saleius Bassus—Poets under Domitian—Lyrics by Spurinna—Epics by Cerealis and Codrus—Erotic poems by Verginius Rufus, Arruntius Stella and Sulpicia—Satires by Turnus—Tragedies by Scaeva Memor and Canius Rufus.
MARTIAL
M. Valerius Martialis[1444] was a native of Bilbilis in Spain. In his tenth book, which belongs to A.D. 95-98, he celebrates his fifty-seventh anniversary,[1445] so that his birth fell between 38 and 41. His cognomem was due to his having been born on the first of March.[1446] While he claimed descent from Iberians and Celts,[1447] his name indicates Roman citizenship. His parents, Fronto and Flaccilla,[1448] secured for him a literary education to which he owed an incalculable debt, although in a fit of cynical depression in his fifties he says:
My foolish parents taught me poetry, But what were dominies and dons to me?[1449]
Already intellectually well-equipped when over twenty, he left Spain in A.D. 64 to find a wider scope for his abilities in Rome, which had grown so cosmopolitan that its population struck his fellow-Spaniard Seneca as made up more of foreigners than of citizens.[1450] This first immigrant—a young “compatriot of the Tagus” with bristling Spanish hair, as he describes himself[1451]—had before him a reasonable prospect of success as a lawyer or a speaker; but he did not choose to employ his training in oratory. What attracted him was verse-writing, with the patronage which verse might win. The common link with Spain explains why Seneca and Lucan were his earliest patrons; but the introduction to society in the capital begun under such auspices was followed next year by the ruinous implication of both patrons in the Pisonian conspiracy against Nero. The career to which he had turned, or drifted, was sure to be one of vicissitude and disillusion; and Martial had frequent cause to recognize that only the few among clever poets or obsequious clients could scrape a living, while the rest starved (pallet cetera turba fame).[1452]
We read of juvenile productions which an enthusiastic bookseller would not let die;[1453] but virtually Martial’s life is a blank for the first sixteen years of his residence in Rome (A.D. 64-80). What his works make certain is that he gained an intimate acquaintance with all grades of society, the highest and the lowest. Some honours came his way, of a kind that indicate his possession of more influence than money. He became a tribunus, perhaps without having seen military service; he was confirmed in the resultant title of eques without possessing the means to support the position;[1454] and he had obtained from two emperors the ius trium liberorum[1455] without being a father—in fact, the tone of his work throughout argues the bachelor.[1456] It is doubtful if his plot of farmland at Nomentum was in his hands early enough to have been a gift from Seneca, as has been guessed; but whether it came from him, or from Lucan’s widow Polla, or from some one else, it must have often afforded a welcome change after his three pair back-room in the sweltering city.[1457] Later, he had a small house of his own on the Quirinal.[1458] Neither from Caesar, however, nor from grandee did Martial ever obtain as much as he expected and craved. As it was, he survived by adroitness in courting the favour of well-to-do citizens so as to earn personal presents or the dole of the sportula. If he was temperamentally unfit to do anything but write verse, it is hard to see what other opening there was, apart from a way of life indistinguishable from sponging. For the surmise that he practised at the bar there is no justification either in the advice he quotes from a person whom he asked for a loan, “if you want to be rich, plead cases,” or in the similar counsel from Quintilian.[1459] In spite of the fact that his verses had a sale, there was no such reading public as could ensure returns adequate for his maintenance: so pique at times made him argue that, if money-making is the supreme object, parents ought not to spend on education: much better make a boy something practical, a musician, an auctioneer, or an architect.[1460] For himself, he felt obliged to live, whatever scoffers might say about the necessity; and consequently had to capture patrons to be the props of his subsistence and, as he believed, the indispensable conditions of poetic production (sint Maecenates, non derunt, Flacce, Marones).
His first publication known to us was the Liber Spectaculorum of A.D. 80 which commemorated the opening by Titus of the Flavian Amphitheatre familiar now as the Colosseum. Though anything but inspired, the surviving thirty-three poems of this group throw interesting light on the contests of the arena. Some four years later appeared the collections, almost entirely of couplets, which are usually printed in defiance of chronology, as Books XIII and XIV of the Epigrams. They owed their occasion to the Saturnalia in December, when gifts might be sent to guests (Xenia) or taken home from the festive board (Apophoreta). The 127 pieces of the one, and 223 of the other were nearly all meant as suitable mottoes for such presents. Luckily Martial was capable of cleverer work. Epigrams of his had appeared before 86 when he published, perhaps together, the first two books of those which made his fame. Allusions enable us to date his volumes with fair closeness, and, while there are a few complications due to revised editions and collected issues, it is broadly true that from 86 until his return to Spain in 98 he brought out a new book about once a year. Taken together, his poems, few of them other than quite short, constitute one of the most extraordinary galleries of literary pictures, vignettes, miniatures, portraits, caricatures, sometimes almost thumbnail sketches that have ever made a past society live again in the mind’s eye. While grace in the sight of the emperor commended him to those in high places, including the worst creatures at court like the notorious Crispinus and Paris, there were many at the other end of the social scale, needy and seedy outcasts, to whom Martial’s Bohemian indigence introduced him. He observed all. He is one of the great spectators in literature. But the vanity of the whole spectacle recurrently depressed him. Unremunerative attendance at the receptions of the great as well as disgust at loathsome vices which he exposes, contributed towards his tedium. Once weariness drove him to Cisalpine Gaul, whence he issued an edition of Book III.[1461] In the very next book[1462] he is hankering after Venetia as a retreat for his old age. Yet years passed before he could tear himself away from Rome, where, despite its drawbacks, he knew all the literary men of the day. At last in 98 the sense of monotony told. The ordinary expenses of life seemed as hard to meet as ever, and the old scenes in Spain, never wholly forgotten during more than the third of a century, came back now with alluring insistence to his mind:
While four-and-thirty harvests passed away, Others gave Ceres rustic cakes at home; But I, inhabiting fair sovran Rome, Have turned in Italy from dark to grey.[1463]
Perhaps too some occult warfare in his soul between spirit and sense made him realize, as never before, the emptiness of the life around. At any rate the Flavian régime had suited him best; for under Nerva and Trajan a new age had dawned, when sycophantic blandishments were futile and rustica ueritas had been restored (X. lxxii). His well-to-do friend, the younger Pliny, found money for the impecunious poet’s journey to Spain. There, settled at Bilbilis on land granted to him by a patroness Marcella, he could indulge to the full that yearning for a quiet retreat which he revealed in lines addressed to the great satirist of the time:
Mayhap, my Juvenal, your feet Stray down some noisy Roman street, While after many years of Rome I have regained my Spanish home. Bilbilis, rich in steel and gold, Makes me a rustic as of old.... Outrageous lengths of sleep I take And oft refuse at nine to wake. I pay myself nor more nor less For thirty years of wakefulness.[1464]
Missing the stimulus of the capital, he let three years elapse before his twelfth and last book was sent out from Spain in 102. He did not long survive its publication; for Pliny in a letter belonging to A.D. 104 mentions his death, adding the criticism that he was a man of talent, subtlety and vigour, whose writing was characterized by abundance of wit and pungency, but no less good nature.[1465]
The form in which Martial’s works have come down calls for brief remark. Imperfect though the book of Spectacula is, the missing portions are perhaps a greater loss to archaeology than to literature. In the Xenia and Apophoreta, unlike the later books, short headings (lemmata) are given to which the reader is facetiously told he may, if he likes, confine himself; and the presents of the Apophoreta are arranged in pairs, expensive and less expensive. As regards the existing division into books, the numeration was Martial’s own,[1466] though some books, as we have them, are not exactly as originally issued. For instance it is inconceivable that his first book was from the beginning entitled “Liber Primus,” with the implication that he was certain of success enough to justify future issues; still less is it conceivable that in the original issue of his first book he could have been described as toto notus in orbe Martialis. His preface to Book II, which defends the innovation of an introductory prose epistle, reads as if it were written before the preface to Book I; and this latter preface, by speaking of “little books” (libelli) in the plural, suggests that it could not have been added till more than one book of epigrams had appeared—probably when a collected edition of I-VII was issued. Among the later books, X and XI, originally belonging to A.D. 95 and 96 respectively, had an Anthology made from them in 97; and a second edition of X came out in 98.[1467] Interesting prose prefaces are given to Books I, II, VIII and XII, while a few lines of prose at the opening of IX introduce verses for the poet’s bust in Stertinius’s library. The preface to I offers an apology for the coarse outspokenness in the epigrams, with a significant list of literary predecessors; that to Book II is, as mentioned, an apology for an introductory epistle, in answer to the objection epigrammata curione non egent; that to VIII professes that there has been less indulgence here than elsewhere in the licence of the mime; and the last preface is an apology for slackness in publishing, since Martial’s retreat to Spain has deprived him of his stimulating Roman environment.
Martial, in his epigrams, reveals himself, and, even more, the company he kept. With him we enjoy the luxury of an intimacy unusual among writers of the Silver Age. Seneca, it may be said, opens his philosophic heart, yet he does not make—it is hardly imaginable that under Nero he should make—a complete self-revelation. Juvenal’s outspokenness is that of indignant censure rather than of personal confession. But Martial is naked and unashamed: he does not hide his thoughts, and even those quick flashes in which he divines the thoughts of others still further illuminate his own. Thus his personality is reflected in his themes, and is inseparable from the things he described and the men he loved or hated. A spectator of life, he was yet no detached spectator, but in a sense a part of his own observations, so that his resolve to reflect his surroundings leaves him at the same time essentially autobiographic. We become familiar, then, with his poverty, his mendicancy, his contempt for shams, his confidence in his literary powers, his pride in Spain, his determination to pander to readers by spicy attacks on the uncleanest vices. At times he seems a sort of Villon, never so much of a gallows-bird as the French poet, nor ever master of so deep a note of anguish, but yet like him in Bohemian neediness and in direct vigour of style.
In the last resort, the key to his personality, to his style, to his reputation, to everything that matters respecting Martial, is to be found in this attitude towards life. Life afforded the inexhaustible material whence he recognized it was his special métier to draw. His brief poems—some of them butterfly flights as brief as Japanese tankas—might be trivialities, but they at least sprang from the actual. There is a sort of double antinomy in him. On the one hand, he often calls his verses nugae or ioci, as if he made no higher claim for them than the knack of amusing; yet he is insistent that they are not mere flippancies:
He misses what is meant by epigram Who thinks it only frivolous flim-flam.[1468]
On the other hand, he explains elsewhere[1469] that he could write seriously, but prefers to write entertainingly—the secret of his vogue. At the same time, he cannot make a living out of pleasantries: instead, he gets praise and starves:[1470] so he jocularly even threatens to turn lawyer! In fact, however, though he said, and showed, that he could write seriously, he seldom chose to. The sportive, the flippant, the ludicrous, and often the indecent appealed to him irresistibly; for the truth is that he wrote, like all literary artists, because it was his pleasure:
For all their compliments, do verses pay? They mayn’t, yet these same poems make me gay.[1471]
But he would not have been human, he would certainly not have been Martial, if he had not expected an adequate return from verses that entertained or flattered; and occasionally his tone appears to meditate a sort of literary strike—pas d’argent, pas de poésie:
A man on whom my poetry Pronounced a handsome eulogy Pretends that he owes naught to me— I call this downright trickery![1472]
No writer ever more clearly recognized his field. In the third poem of Book VIII he pretends to hesitate over multiplying epigrams—five books, six, seven are already out and the whole collection is thumbed everywhere (teritur noster ubique liber), there should be some stint and limit (sit pudor et finis). Here the rebuke from the Comic Muse Thalia is significant: “Abandon your charming trifles! But what better thing is an idle singer (desidiosus) to do? Not tragic drama surely? Not epic? No, Martial’s function is to hold the mirror up to the manners of the day”:
Nay, dye your Roman booklets smart with wit That Life may read and know the portraits fit.[1473]
The claim is also well illustrated in his objection to mythological twaddle—an objection sufficient to account for a radical lack of sympathy with Statius, the only prominent poet of the time whom he does not name:
What profit empty myths in sorry lays? Read this of which Life says “It is my own.” No Centaurs here, Harpies, or Gorgon face You’ll find: my pages smack of man alone.[1474]
This confident acceptance of life as his great exemplar explains the variety and truth of Martial’s pictures. He knew that he could portray his fellows with a sure hand; and his conviction that his forte lay in light verse reflecting manners and morals gave him an assurance that his work had force enough to last. It is essentially Flavian Rome that he drew; for, though his writing continued under Nerva and the first few years of Trajan’s reign, nine books of epigrams had come out under Domitian. The repression of the Reign of Terror, which brought about the fifteen years of silence to which Tacitus alludes, did not affect the sort of verse which Martial composed. It was spicy, but not at the expense of the emperor or the imperial system. All contemporary types appear in Martial’s pages (hominem pagina nostra sapit). They range from Domitian himself, haloed beyond recognition, down to the vilest of characters to whom Martial owed no flattery and of whom to tell the truth was to produce a shudder. Since fun comes easiest at the expense of human weakness, there is a predominance of types in some way objectionable. Hence a multitudinous array of spongers, dinner-hunters, fortune-hunters, bores, coxcombs, charlatans, topers, freaks, stingy hosts, and incorrigible reprobates. But if there are false friends there are also firm ones, there are faithful slaves as well as faithless, moral wives as well as immoral, and genuine poets as well as poetasters. The eye for detail is remarkable: nothing is too slight for mention: the hawker of sulphur and the purchaser of broken glass are not overlooked any more than a wealthy connoisseur of artistic treasures. Such pieces as the neat summary of how the hours in a Roman day were spent convince one that Martial saw things as they were, whereas Juvenal, though possessed of an unchallenged sense of picturesque realism, tended to overlay his subject with violent exaggeration or with a thesis-like treatment in the manner of the rhetorical schools.
Thus to turn over Martial’s leaves in the most casual way transports one to ancient Rome. There we find the Stoic heroine and hero, Arria and Paetus, face to face with death; and intimates of the author who have to be admonished about using life aright, or welcomed home, or reminded of the enjoyable ideals of the unambitious, or urged, on the principle of Satan reproving sin, to decide on a profession (dum quid sis dubitas iam potes esse nihil). We can enter a private library; we can join in the despatch of marriage greetings, or condolences under bereavement, or congratulations to a lucky person on the prospect of a long holiday which will send him back sun-burnt to the pale dwellers in town. We can see artistic triumphs in a handsomely enchased wine-bowl, or an antique bronze statuette. Again, we may listen to the author’s petition for the ius trium liberorum, his request for a supply of domestic water from the Aqua Marcia, or his many growls over the burdensome duty of calling on patrons, over paltry presents (some folk, he observes, send less and less each December!) and over the failure of patrons to maintain him fittingly; he is, he complains, not so well sheltered as his patron’s orchard-trees:
I’ve got a room where window-draughts do play— One where the very North Wind wouldn’t stay![1475]
But it is not solely for town life that he has an eye. We note the almost Dutch detail in some of his sketches of rustic scenes. Especially out on Faustinus’s estate with its steading, the corn in heaps, the wine in casks, the barn-yard fowls, the labourers’ work, the rural fare, he appears to revel in “the genuine country, uncivilised” (rure uero barbaroque).[1476] He envisages for us a real farm in Spain free from the formal dress of Rome, and provided with shade against the summer heat, and against the winter cold with a wood fire surrounded by grubby youngsters.[1477]
True to the author’s promise, there are many figures that amuse—the dry-as-dust antiquary spoiling his wine-parties by tedious rigmaroles about the pedigree of his silver goblets, the prosy pleader in court who needs hours to make a few legal points, the counsel who sagaciously blushes in preference to stating his client’s full case, the guest who arrives too late for breakfast but too early for lunch, and the too prolific poet who finds no time to revise his hasty compositions:
You write two hundred lines ’twixt each sunrise, But never read them, silly!—yet how wise![1478]
The element of humour in Martial was largely due to a keen sense of the incongruous. He could not help chuckling at the notion of keeping about eight birthdays each year to secure presents, or at the huge Gaul who sprained his ankle and was glad to be carried home on a pauper’s bier, or at the nuisance who rummages a shop for objets d’art and gives endless trouble without buying enough to compensate for it.[1479] Again there is the decidedly plain lady who takes care to frequent the company of ladies still plainer so as to appear a beauty by comparison:
Your friends, Fabulla, either are Old crones or beldames uglier far: These frumps you trot around with you To parties, plays, and galleries too: And so, my dear, such hags among You look quite pretty and quite young![1480]
Ailments and the medical profession are the subjects of many jests. There was the rebellious client who pretended to have gout in order to avoid calling on his patron, but who, after hobbling about swathed in wrappings, finally got the genuine disease; there was the patient who died because he dreamt of his medical man overnight; there was the ex-physician who turned undertaker and therefore had undertaken the same undertaking for the sick as before; and there was the doctor who on his clinical rounds gave a sufferer fever:
When I was ill, you came to me, Doctor, and with great urgency A hundred students brought with you A most instructive case to view. The hundred finger’d me with hands Chill’d by the blasts of northern lands: Fever at outset had I none— I have it, Sir, now you have done.[1481]
Such alert perception of the incongruous made him scoff at shams—the cupboard love that acts friendship with a view to hospitable invitations, the lady whose artificial aids to beauty leave her with no face of her own, the hypocrisy of pretended philosophers who were at heart dissolute reprobates.[1482]
Ability to see the ludicrous side of things is always an entertaining social recommendation. With the literary circles of the day Martial was on familiar terms. He sends lines to Lucan’s widow on an anniversary of the poet’s birth, he records Caesonius’s fidelity to Seneca in exile, and shows patriotic pride in mentioning the Spanish birthplace of the Senecan family.[1483] Quintilian, Arruntius Stella, a writer of polished verse, and Valerius Flaccus were among his friends. Despatching poetry to the younger Pliny, he good-humouredly quizzes him on his serious work at the bar: the judicious moment of festive relaxation “when rose-leaves reign, when locks are scent-bedew’d” must be chosen for the presentation of Martial’s trivialities.[1484] With Silius Italicus he was well acquainted: would that Epic poet, “pride of the Castalian sisterhood,” he asks, deign to spare some leisure for the sportive trifles which he begs to forward? Just so, he suggests anachronistically, might Catullus have sent his Sparrow to Virgil![1485] He also shows interest in Silius’s activities and expresses sympathy for him in bereavement.[1486] But no one, he felt, could embroil him with so true a friend as Juvenal, to whom he wrote after his retirement to Spain and whose distaste for long-winded epics he plainly shared.[1487] As regards Statius, who often wrote about the same things and people as Martial did, their mutual silence must have been due to incompatibility of temperament. Martial’s circle included also the orator Aquilius Regulus, whom Pliny could not bear; Antonius Primus from Toulouse, who helped as a commander to secure the Empire for Vespasian; Julius Martialis, a close intimate; Q. Ovidius, a country neighbour at Nomentum; wealthy knights like Atedius Melior and Claudius Etruscus, but also many people less prominent like the centurions Varus and Pudens. While he gives the real names of friends, it is to his credit that he uses disguised names for the victims of his satire. Disclaiming any intention of hurting (ludimus innocui), he declares that his concern is to attack not persons but vice (parcere personis, dicere de uitiis).[1488] Consequently, resentful at having scurrilous verses fathered on him, he draws a lurid picture of the punishment which ought to befall a slanderous poet.[1489] The systematic backbiter, he agrees, may be called malign; but, with a fine touch of human feeling, he adds:
I think he needs our pity who likes none.[1490]
The epigram in Martial is to be distinguished from, even if related to, the epigrammatic in contemporary rhetoric, whether prose or verse. In Martial it is a short independent verse composition, not one of a series of glittering ornaments in a continuous poem, history, or oration; that is, it constitutes a miniature unity; and there is a notable freedom from the forced conceit with which the epigrammatic is often allied in writers like Lucan. The epigram reached Rome from Greece in the form of a brief poem originally inscriptional in character, as its name implies. But the Greek ἐπίγραμμα itself had gone through a wide evolution since Simonides of Ceos employed it for the tomb of the Spartans who fell at Thermopylae. Beyond its use for epitaph, memorial, dedication, or gift, the elegiac metre in particular had been devoted, with its Greek quality of delicate and finished charm, to occasions which in modern times would be considered essentially lyrical. The impression made by a passing event or inward experience found utterance in a brief poem: the poem might convey the feeling produced by a landscape, a book, a storm, an artistic work, a misfortune, a mental disturbance, a friendship, an affair of the heart. In contrast therewith, the Roman tendency, on taking over from the Greeks this ill-defined branch of lyric, was to sacrifice the poetic flavour to point, and most of all to the point that stings. Hence, losing much of the lyric charm of the Greek, the epigram was largely transferred to the service of satiric purposes. Catullus, though certainly not wanting in true lyric quality, gave to the elegiac that bent towards invective which was more definitely associated with the abusive iambic. In this latter field, it is noticeable that Diomedes,[1491] describing the bitter iambic, names, along with the Greeks Archilochus and Hipponax, the Latin writers Lucilius, Catullus, Horace and Bibaculus. Now Martial owns his obligations and traces his freedom of speech (lasciuam uerborum ueritatem)[1492] to Catullus, Domitius Marsus, Albinovanus Pedo, and Lentulus Gaetulicus of Caligula’s reign. Roman dilettanti of the Empire liked composing such verses, and it is among the freaks of time that, though many authors like Marsus, Pedo, Gaetulicus, Seneca and Petronius wrote epigrams, too little has survived in this genre, outside Martial’s collection, to afford a criterion of their individual contribution. Clearly, however, the march of literature had worked changes that could not fail to affect Martial. By his days, satire and rhetoric had both played a great part. He is but following the traditions of the epigram in maintaining its essential elements of concise expression and unity of idea; but he owes a debt to satire for his width of range (Juvenal’s farrago libelli), his dramatic vigour, his scraps of dialogue, his reflective pieces, his mordant wit and irony. So too, although he is not enslaved by rhetorical artifice, he knows how to make use of rhetorical point, as the culmination—usually a stinging culmination—up to which the rounded whole of a short poem should lead. His satiric epigrams, then, mark the close of the evolution of this partly lyric type.[1493] Hence Martial’s individual impress on the epigram is permanent. With him it reached that fixity of form which it has retained up to modern times.
In a total of 1561 epigrams in the Spectacula and fourteen other books, 1235 are in elegiac metre, 238 in hendecasyllabic, and 77 in choliambic or scazon. There are, besides, a few in hexameter and iambic verse. The elegiac distich is common, and is almost the only form among the 350 pieces of the Xenia and Apophoreta. Often, however, his elegiac poems run to ten or a dozen lines, occasionally to twice that length. When the delights of Faustinus’s farm tempt him to write 51 scazons, or when a dinner menu needs 32 hendecasyllabics, one hesitates whether to call these epigrams at all. Vigorous and correct in versification, his metres are in felicitous accord with the theme and spirit of his various pieces. With great skill he can employ the elegiac to express tender sentiment or weighty compliment, the hendecasyllabic for sportive and ironic occasions, and the scazon for trenchant invective. But, if the mood takes him, he can equally adapt the elegiac to satiric, and both hendecasyllabics and scazons to descriptive purposes. Martial’s favourite verse-form, the elegiac, is based, though not pedantically so, on Ovid: lines and phrases are occasionally taken from him, but Martial does not adhere to the Ovidian ending of the pentameter on a disyllable. Typical endings such as hospitibus, ingenio, undecies, amicitiae show that here, as elsewhere, he is under the influence of Catullus. It is upon Catullus principally that his hendecasyllabics and choliambics are founded, with the notable difference that Martial, departing from the Catullian freedom in the opening foot of the choliambic, restricts himself to a spondee. In style and metre we can trace some echoes of Virgil, Horace and the Priapea; and, to a less degree, of Tibullus and Propertius. Nor was the pointed manner of his early patrons Seneca and Lucan without effect on him.[1494] Greek authors too have their share in his sources, but, on the whole, he is remarkably independent of models. Sometimes he appears to do little more than continue the kind of popular tradition found in the smarter graffiti at Pompeii. This, for example, is not unlike his manner:
I wonder, wall, that you have not gone smash— You’ve had to bear so many scribblers’ trash.[1495]
Low life and the commonest objects came under his survey and saved him from bookish pedantry. The workaday spoken Latin of the caballus type, and words which many Romans would have shrunk from uttering (as we know from Cicero), enter into his pages, alongside of language sanctioned by exalted literary usage. This range of vocabulary is proportionate to the width of his outlook, which contemplated, perhaps occasionally with too heartless an indifference, the ugly as well as the beautiful. His unabashed persistence in observation and his conscious power of natural portrayal left him free to use at will, or not to use, the literary predecessors whom he had studied. On subjects drawn direct from life he writes with a finished neatness of expression and a freshness that reads like improvisation. Over and over again, his natural themes appear to fall into natural phrases. It is a straightforwardness that gives him, for all his debt to patterns, the unmistakeable ring of originality. In literature there is only one Martial.
Rhetoric is in the main absent from one who, primarily interested in man, wrote as a realist. His most representative work is simple, with little of that Spanish note of excess which one detects or suspects in several of his compatriots, from the violent Porcius Latro onwards, not excepting Lucan and at times Seneca himself. Martial feels no attraction to mythology, though a court-poem might involve a few learned allusions. He is content that elevated epics should be praised, admired, even adored, so long as his verses are read. Hence the fundamental contrast, and therefore presumably the antipathy, to Statius[1496] already mentioned. Hence too the justification for Martial’s pronouncement: “all turgid rhetoric (omnis uesica) is foreign to my writings: my muse swells not in wild tragic robe.”[1497] Conformably thereto, he has a genial way of disarming criticism by making no high claims:
There are excellent bits here, you’ll find, And bits of a so-and-so kind: Still more than the latter Are bad bits—no matter! A book is of all sorts combin’d.[1498]
In another piece he admits that, while tossing off epigrams may appear simple, the crux lies in making a book; and, again, the criticism that a book of his shows marked inequalities is answered by the contention that this is in its favour, because a bad book is of uniform quality![1499] No author ever passed a more honest criticism on his work. It is just this unevenness that makes Martial a successful surprise. Alongside of plain-speaking—the plainest of the plain—the reader may chance upon poems which prove in him an exquisite sense of beauty. If the seaside or a pretty name engages his fancy, he rises to a style in keeping with the subject. There are no finer scazons in Latin than those he wrote on “the sweet strand of genial Formiae” to rival the Catullian scazons on Sirmio:
Here Thetis’ face is ruffled by A gentle wind: the waters lie Not in dead calm, but o’er the main A peaceful liveliness doth reign, Bearing gay yachts before a breeze Cool as the air that floats with ease From purple fan of damozel Who would the summer heat dispel.[1500]
So the liquid consonants of the admired “Springtide Lad” (Earinos) seem to run over into his enthusiastic hendecasyllabics on
A name with violets and roses born, Name that the loveliest time of year hath worn, Fragrant of Hybla and of Attic thyme Or of the nest where dwells the bird sublime, A name sweet heavenly nectar to outvie, One that fair Attis would be calléd by, Or he that blends the cup for Jove on high, Which, uttered once in the Parrhasian Hall, Would make the Powers of Love sing madrigal.[1501]
So beauty of idea is combined with neatness when he sends a rose-wreath to a friend:
Go, happy rose, with thy soft chaplet bind My own Apollinaris’ locks; and see One far-off day, when they are white, thou wind Rose leaves around them: so may Love love thee![1502]
There the pedigree of the opening movement in Waller’s “Go, lovely rose” and Herrick’s “Go, happy rose” is evident. Much, indeed, that might be called Herrickian comes from brief pieces like
Polla, why send me wreaths of blooms new-born? I’d rather handle roses you had worn.[1503]
This neatness in expression underlies the characteristic suspense of point until the concluding line, phrase, or even word of an epigram—the typical manner of Martial familiar to us from imitations in neo-Latin writers, in writers of our own eighteenth century and in Byron, on the bee-like principle that
The body should always be little and sweet And the sting should be left to the tail.
Very often, whether the piece is a brief couplet or a more extended set of elegiac, choliambic, or hendecasyllabic verses, the surprise and the bite come at the end. The epigram thus constitutes an artistic “period.” Such is the force of the sharp tussit of I. x.: “What is the inducement that lures Gemellus to propose marriage to Maronilla? Why does he long, plead, implore, send presents? Is she pretty? Nay, none so ugly! What is the bait and charm then? Why, her churchyard cough!”—an ugly but effective close on the attraction of a consumptive heiress for a fortune-hunter.[1504] So he retorts on a person whose absence would be a good riddance:
You ask me, Linus, what my field Out at Nomentum is to yield: Well, this it yields to me: the view, My Linus, has no sign of you.[1505]
He makes fun of unwelcome kisses:
With half your lips, my Postumus, you kiss. Thanks: you may take a half away from this; But would you give me joy beyond compare? Then keep the other half of that half-share.[1506]
Again, less briefly than, but to the same effect as, Mr. Punch’s advice to those about to marry, he writes on a debtor’s going to law to dispute a claim:
The judge expects a fee from you, Your lawyer looks for payment too— Best pay your creditor his due![1507]
From the idea of uniting in wedlock a much widowed widow with an equally bereaved widower he extracts grim fun:
Fabius buries all his wives: Chrestilla ends her husbands’ lives. The torch, which from the marriage-bed They brandish, soon attends the dead. O Venus, link this conquering pair! Their match will meet with issue fair, Whereby for such a dangerous two A single funeral will do.[1508]
He introduces us smilingly to a Roman hairdresser:
There once was a barber called Smart Who plied his tonsorial art Over Wolfaway’s face; But in spite of his pace A new beard was ready to start.[1509]
He jeers at the systematic diner-out:
Philo declares he never dines at home, And that is no exaggeration: He has no place whereat to dine in Rome, Unless he hooks an invitation.[1510]
This last is a frequently imitated form in which the apparent confirmation of the first statement leaves the final state of the victim worse than the first. A similar effect is got by an apparent contradiction of the original statement:
’Tis said Acerra reeks of last night’s wine: ’Tis false: he always drinks till morning-shine.[1511]
Just as elsewhere we trace the legacy of Martial in some of the gallantry of Cavalier poets, and as his “Non amo te, Sabidi” descends to “I do not like thee, Dr. Fell,” so this corrective form of epigram is the prototype of such quips as Samuel Rogers’s:
Ward has no heart, they say; but I deny it: He has a heart—and gets his speeches by it.
An engaging blend of modesty and confidence is an ingredient in the variety of Martial. At times, by way of pose, he may wish to give the impression that, like Byron, he “rattles on exactly as he’d talk” and that his verses are of little consequence:[1512] at other times, he is both proud of his popularity and confident of his permanent place in literature. The emperor read him (II. xci.): so did ministers of state and men of letters (VI. lxiv. 8-10): everybody at Rome did, in fact (VI. lx.). He was pointed out (monstramur digito, IX. xcvii. 4), and people whispered “There he is!” (V. xiii. 3). Such a vogue had he that it was possible to find a nuisance of a person who could repeat Martial by heart and decline to stop! (VII. li.). In mock-heroic strain he declares:
Lo! I the man for trifles unsurpassed: You mayn’t admire me, but I hold you fast. Great themes are for great bards: enough to see You oft re-reading my light poetry.[1513]
His naughty jests (nequitiae, VI. lxxxii. 5) were known to everyone who had not a Dutchman’s ear: no wonder, then, that his circle of readers should be as wide as the world (I. i. 2; V. xiii. 3; VIII. lxi. 3). He was flattered to realize that he was a favourite in Vienne (VII. lxxxviii.): his poems might be despatched to one person, but would be read by all (uni mitteris, omnibus legeris, VII. xcvii. 13). Away among the Goths a centurion thumbed his Martial (a rigido teritur centurione liber), and Britain learned to repeat his verses (XI. iii. 3-5). His books went through different editions; they were on sale by Secundus in parchment binding (I. ii. 3, 7-8), suitable for travellers; or at Atrectus’s shop, smart in purple (I. cxvii. 13-7); or at the establishment of Tryphon (IV. lxxii.), who was Quintilian’s publisher. Furthermore, his juvenile verses could be had in collected form (I. cxiii.), and plagiarists stole from his works. Yet even a “best seller” in ancient Rome could not ensure handsome returns: Martial significantly takes satisfaction in the thought that anyone can make money, but not everyone can be a poet (V. xiii. 9-10); for he has a fine consciousness that a book, to live, must possess an indwelling spirit (VI. lxi. 10). No doubt crosses his mind about his own literary survival (X. ii. 7-12), or about the immortality which mention by him can confer (V. xv. 3-4). Nobodies, therefore, must not expect to have their names perpetuated in his verse (V. lx. 6-7).
Alongside of this confidence, however, there rings out a note of impatient fretfulness. Weariness of the bustle in the Vanity Fair of Rome brought to this merry companion his intervals of heart-searching. Surrender day by day to the solicitations of purely trivial circumstance produced a natural revulsion against such waste of time. Led by a too facile compliance into insipid society, he awakes upon occasion to a sense of paltry achievement and lost opportunity. Etiquette, he felt, wars with poetry:
I walk you out: I see you home: I listen, sir, to all your chatter. Your words and deeds I praise through Rome— D’you think it really doesn’t matter? Yet all this time I might instead Have fashioned poems in my head.... Tell me, Labullus, is this right? Can any call it honour bright That just to swell your client-crew The books I write should be too few? About a month has gone so fleet I’ve hardly filled a single sheet. In this the poet is the sinner If he won’t stay at home, to dinner.[1514]
The same fretful malady of the age troubled him when he wrote to his namesake Julius Martialis on making the best of time:
Defer not joys thou mayst not win from fate: Judge only what is past to be thine own. Cares with a linkéd chain of sorrow wait. Mirth tarries not; but soon on wing is flown. With both hands hold it—clasped in full embrace, Still from thy breast it oft will glide away! To say “I mean to live” is folly’s place: To-morrow’s life comes late; live, then, to-day.[1515]
The same friend is reminded that social duties may hamper one in living one’s own life:
If you and I, dear Martial, might Enjoy our days in Care’s despite, And could control each leisure hour, Both free to cull life’s real flower, Then we should never know the halls Of patrons, or law’s wearying calls, Or troublous court or family pride; But we should chat or read or ride, Play games or stroll in porch or shade, Visit the hot baths or “the Maid.” Such haunts should lure us constantly: Such should engage our energy. Now neither lives his life, but he Marks precious days that pass and flee. These days are lost, but their amount Is surely set to our account. Knowledge the clue to life can give: Then wherefore hesitate to live?[1516]
Yet in spite of this discontent over a partially spoiled life, it may be doubted whether Martial was capable of more than he accomplished. He could only be himself. While he ought not to be called entirely shallow, he lacked the profundity which might have made him other than a laureate of the occasional.
The two glaring faults in Martial, servility and obscenity, brought each their own nemesis: where he is most flattering he is least simple, and where he is most indecent he is least witty. Both defects sprang from his circumstances. Never wealthy, he found in adroit dedications a more likely source of profit than in book-sales. Subservience towards patrons, on whose uncertain favours he had to rely, was inevitable. Hence adulation of the emperor, cringing to exalted personages, and continual clamour for bounty. He flattered Domitian because there was no choice. In touch with court, he could not logically keep out of his verse the official title of “Lord and God” assumed by the emperor: not belonging to the political opposition, he had no doubt a genuine belief in the imperial system; and, as the most fulsome compliments were acceptable, he resorted to mendacious homage. It is not merely that it appears historically ludicrous in Martial to apply to Domitian the epithet of chaste (pudicus) or to commend one of his own volumes as fit to be read without a blush by that permanently red-faced prince; but it is also, as already suggested, noticeable that he pays a literary penalty for his moral weakness herein by deviating from his usual straightforwardness of style. In the midst of his extremest sycophancy, he becomes artificial owing to the intrusion of over-ingenious conceits. Thus, it is grotesque to assert[1517] that Rome envies the barbarians with whom Domitian has been warring in person, because they were lucky enough to see the emperor’s face, whereas the poor capital had to be content with the laurel-wreathed despatch of victory. And no one can take seriously the far-fetched absurdity of his congratulations to the enemy on “seeing Domitian’s face at close quarters and in that countenance finding material for both terror and rejoicing.” Similar extravagance marks his welcome on his Majesty’s return from Dacia,
Come, Caesar, e’en by night—let stars delay; If thou but come, thy folk will find it day.[1518]
His argument, also, in favour of making requests to the divine emperor is far too clever; “it is not the sculptor of an image who makes a god; it is the man who prays.”[1519]
Martial’s indecency palls no less than his adulation. We are not amused. The foulest epigrams force on the reader a resilient disgust as if from some sickening contagion; and repeated shocks end in boredom. Conceivably it was a salutary instinct that prompted the quaint idea of a Delphin editor to remove from their original place in the text all the unsavoury epigrams into a musée secret at the end of the volume, in which might be taken one nauseating draught of concentrated impropriety. They number more than 150 or over ten per cent of the whole. Many open out vistas down by-lanes of hideous vice. It might be argued that even the foulest practices of sexual inverts had to be included in a complete picture of pagan Rome; and that there was much to which an avowed realist could not shut his eyes. Perhaps just because in their naked Romana simplicitas the worst epigrams are so repulsive, they might, though filthier, be considered less pernicious than Ovid, or than a sex-encumbered modern novel, which often lacks Martial’s truth to life. Here we have a repellent rather than an erotic obscenity. The author realizes that some apology is needed for overstepping the limits of propriety. His poems are not for the prim and prudish, who are in set terms warned away with the mischievous suggestion that the warning will only whet their curiosity.[1520] Certain of his books he can recommend as respectable:[1521] in general, however, he does not address children but the seasoned onlookers at the Floralia and folk of easy morality.[1522] So the freedom of Book XI is defended by the licence of the Saturnalia.[1523] The fundamental excuse offered is one which not a few Roman writers were at pains to make by way of protest against any assumption that he who composes foul verses must himself be foul. Martial’s declaration “our page is wanton but our life is clean”[1524] is couched in terms similar to those used by Catullus and Ovid, and practically repeated by Pliny, Apuleius and Ausonius.[1525] The attitude suggests that the author had no objection to giving readers the particular spice they wanted: sometimes a fine poem is marred by a gross jest reserved as a surprise.[1526] Beside so much nauseating coarseness, the claim of ludimus innocui (VII. xii. 9) may sound ironical; yet this can be said by way of comment, if not of palliation—he is not a slanderer, for in general real names are avoided. If victims were foully satirized, it was left to themselves or others to fit the cap. He resents the impudent dishonesty of a verse-writer who “vomits viperous venom” under Martial’s name.[1527]
His character is too complex to be satisfactorily analysed on psychological principles. Whether one thinks of a super-man as well as a subter-man within the same self, or thinks of the surprising contradictions in him as liberated at different crises from the oubliettes of a chequered experience, the diversity of his genius remains beyond full explanation. If one side belonged to a realm where ethics and ideals seemed contraband, he presented another side in which sentiment under various aspects prevailed. Wrapped up with the sentiment on this more kindly and genial side there is admittedly some conventionality: the Greek tradition may act in one place, and the Latin tradition through poets like Catullus in another. A certain amount of sentiment may be due to the growth of more humane feelings in his age, as is traceable in Seneca. Yet a large portion must be ascribed to Martial’s own disposition. These phases of sentiment are most observable in his attitude to the dead, his genius for friendship, and his love of nature.
His best known epitaph, that on a little girl Erotion, bespeaks for her spirit in the land of shades the sheltering protection of Flaccilla and Fronto, his parents, who had gone before. It ends:
Soft be the turf that shrouds her! Tenderly Rest on her, earth; for she trod light on thee.[1528]
This conclusion, suggestive of the “sit terra tibi leuis” in sepulchral inscriptions, was twisted to malicious effect by Martial himself on a disreputable person:
Light may Earth’s crumbling sand be laid on thee That dogs may dig thy bones up easily![1529]
Long afterwards it was parodied in reference to the massive buildings of the architect Vanbrugh:
Lie heavy on him, earth! for he Laid many heavy loads on thee.
A slave-boy is thus commemorated:
Dear Alcimus, Death robbed thy lord of thee When young, and lightly now Labican soil Veils thee in turf: take for thy tomb to be No tottering mass of Parian stone which toil Vainly erects to moulder o’er the dead. Rather let pliant box thy grave entwine; Let the vine-tendril grateful shadow shed O’er the green grass bedew’d with tears of mine. Sweet youth, accept the tokens of my grief: Here doth my tribute last as long as Time. When Lachesis my final thread shall weave, I crave such plants above my bones may climb.[1530]
There is a manifest sense not merely of the poet’s personal loss but of the blow to the father of a youth from North Italy who has died in Asia Minor:
My Sixth Book, Rufus, thou canst never greet: It may not look, friend, to be read by thee. Thine ill-starred sojourn in the curséd East Restores but bones and ashes to thy sire. Widow’d of Rufus, come, Bologna, weep: Ring out lament thro’ all Aemilia! How great a love, how young a life is lost! (Heu qualis pietas, heu quam breuis occidit aetas!) He had but seen a fifth Olympiad. Ah, Rufus, wont with mindful heart to quote My trifles and recite my jests in full, Accept thy sorrowing friend’s brief tear-stained song And deem this incense offered from afar. (Accipe cum fletu maesti breue carmen amici Atque haec absentis thura fuisse puta.)[1531]
Kindly affection towards associates came easily to Martial. Q. Ovidius’s birthday and his own he considers
Days that all others in the year transcend: One gave me birth: the other, more—a friend.[1532]
Enthusiasm animates his admiration for Decianus:
If there be one to rank with those few friends Whom antique faith and age-long fame attends; If, steeped in Latin or Athenian lore, There be a good man truthful at the core; If one who guards the right and loves what’s fair, Who could not utter an unworthy prayer, If one whose prop is magnanimity, I swear, my Decianus, thou art he.[1533]
Again, in a brief review of an intimacy of thirty-four years with Julius Martialis, he finds it has contributed on the whole to happiness, but pathetically fights against the notion of making friendship too warm, lest its loss prove overwhelming:
Good comrades, Julius, have we been And four-and-thirty harvests seen: We have had sweetness mix’d with sour, Yet oftener came the happy hour. If for each day a pebble stood, And either black or white were hued, Then, ranged in masses separate, The brighter ones would dominate. If thou wouldst shun some heartaches sore And ward off gloom that gnaws thy core, Grapple none closely to thy heart— If less thy joy, then less thy smart.[1534]
Martial’s appreciation of the country was inspired by something deeper than the relief felt by a jaded town-dweller. His ideals may not have been mightily exalted, but he had the poet’s eye for landscape and colour, and therewith a gift of fancy. Nowhere does he seem more poetic in his attitude towards external nature than in his lines on Vesuvius visited some years after the terrible eruption of A.D. 79. The poem has the interest of treating volcanic soil, which made both a practical and an imaginative appeal to the Romans.[1535] The poet’s recollection of the old fertile greenery and cool shadows of the vines (hic est pampineis uiridis modo Vesbius umbris) contrasts with the bare desolation of the land now buried beneath the mournful ashes of the volcano (cuncta iacent flammis et tristi mersa fauilla). Then an exquisite touch of romantic imagination pictures the vine-slopes as once haunted by the Wine-god, near the dancing-places of the Satyrs (moderns might fancy them as gnomes and elves)—a region where Pompeii enjoyed the patronage of the Queen of Love and Herculaneum was called after the renowned demi-god:
This is Vesuvius where but late ’mid vines Green shadows played, and noble clusters filled The brimming vats. This is the very ridge More dear to Bacchus e’en than Nysa’s heights. On this same mount the Satyrs yesteryear Did foot their frolic dance: here Venus found A sweeter home than Lacedaemon gave. A city here bore Hercules’ great name: Now all lies whelm’d in fire and ashes dread, And Heaven might well repent such fatal power.[1536]
So the poem ends in a tone of heartfelt sorrow over beauty destroyed, while other pieces are full of a healthy delight in fresh air and country scenes. A plane-tree might set his fancy roaming into fairy-land:
Oft ’neath this tree the tipsy fauns have played, And the late pipe hath scared a silent home. Fleeing the midnight Pan o’er lonely mead Oft ’neath its leaves the woodland Dryad lurked.[1537]
Nature could bring him lively sensations of sight and smell, so that he scents the fragrance from the myrtle, from the vine flowering white in its first clusters, and from the grass newly nibbled by the sheep.[1538] Such images for the moment at least shut out the revolting vices of the city.
His own career in retrospect, when he left Rome for ever, contained much to dissatisfy him. But though he had fallen short of the noblest ideals, his experience enabled him to appraise aright the value of a good conscience in a review of bygone years. To this thought he has given admirable expression:
Good men make life a twofold span to last: Twice doth he live who can enjoy his past.[1539]
The pith of style which contributed to Martial’s vogue in his own day has always kept his poems alive; for quotability favours the preservation of literary work. Among his memorable sayings, in addition to the couplet quoted, are “To live is not a life—one must live well” (non est uiuere sed ualere uita, VI. lxx. 15); “To-morrow’s life comes late—live then to-day” (sera nimis uita est crastina, uiue hodie, I. xv. 12); “Accept the lot thou hast—prefer naught else” (quod sis esse uelis nihilque malis, X. xlvii. 12); “He hath no home whose home is everywhere” (quisquis ubique habitat, Maxime, nusquam habitat, VII. lxxiii. 6), which suggests his curt apostrophe to the owner of a spacious but comfortless mansion, “How well you are—not housed!” (quam bene non habitas! XII. l. 8.) His dislike of shams appears in “There is a gulf ’twixt goodness and pretence” (refert sis bonus an uelis uideri, VIII. xxxviii. 7). Many sundials have repeated his reflection on the flight of “sunny days that are lost but set to our account” (soles ... qui nobis pereunt et imputantur, V. xx. 12-13); and there is educational wisdom in the hint “Boys who keep fit in summer learn enough” (aestate pueri si ualent satis discunt, X. lxii. 12). For literary production he values patronage: “Give us but patrons—Virgils will not fail” (sint Maecenates, non derunt, Flacce, Marones, VIII. lvi. 5); but he goes deeper when he says “To live, a book must have a soul within” (uicturus genium debet habere liber, VI. lxi. 10), which is in keeping with “’Tis not a reader your books need but Apollo” (non lectore tuis opus est sed Apolline libris, X. xxi. 3). On the risk of publishing too many books he reminds himself “The rare delights: so early fruits please best” (rara iuuant: primis sic maior gratia pomis, IV. xxix. 3).
Martial’s influence began to act on Juvenal,[1540] and remained operative throughout antiquity. Fathers of the Church showed knowledge of him, and grammarians found illustrative material in his words and phrases. During the Renaissance he was much studied and edited. His hendecasyllabics were constantly imitated by the neo-Latin poets of Italy and France for satiric purposes. None followed more keenly in his steps than the Hungarian Janus Pannonius (1434-1472), who, besides modelling his epigrams in freedom of utterance upon Martial’s elegiacs and hendecasyllabics, enthusiastically praised him as a “father of wit” (ludorum pater et pater leporum)[1541] to be invoked in preference to Apollo and the Muses. Alongside there also flows (what is present in Martial himself) the stream of Catullian influence observable in the easy though occasionally solecistic Basia of the Pancharis by Jean Bonnefons (Bonefonius) printed at Paris in 1587.
Then the influence passed over from Latin into the epigrammatic writing of all modern literatures. Even the couplets of the Xenia bore fruit; for from them sprang the sarcastic Xenien in which Goethe and Schiller confronted dullness and satirized their literary enemies. Although in quite recent times the epigram may have been less cultivated, in his own field Martial remains, as a pattern, supreme.
MINOR FLAVIAN POETS
The minor and lost poetry of the Flavian era reaches a considerable amount. Vespasian, though an enemy to philosophers, gave financial encouragement to rhetors and poets. Both his sons, Titus and Domitian, wrote poems; but the latter, after his accession, did little for poetry, unless we put to his credit the continuance of Capitoline and Alban competitions which ministered to his pride by eliciting laudatory verse. Curiatius Maternus, best known from Tacitus’s Dialogus, has been included among poets of the Neronian age, when his career as dramatist began. His tragedy of Thyestes, however, and his praetextae entitled Domitius and Cato belong to Vespasian’s reign. The epic poetry of Saleius Bassus may have been, like that of Valerius Flaccus, based on mythology. Statius’s father was more attracted by current themes.
Under Domitian, dilettanti might keep the path of safety, if they confined themselves to such compositions as erotic poems, conventional epic, eulogies and colourless occasional verse for recitation before friends or for public competitions or for private exchange with other literary men. The authors were the kind of persons whom we meet in Statius, Martial or the younger Pliny. A considerable list could be drawn up from these three sources; but it may suffice to select, in lyric, Vestricius Spurinna,[1542] a military commander on Otho’s side; in epic, Julius Cerealis and the Codrus or Cordus whose Theseid is mentioned in Juvenal’s second line; in erotic verse, Verginius Rufus, an elderly friend of Pliny’s; Arruntius Stella, consul in 101, author of passionate poems on Violentilla, whom he afterwards married; and Calenus’s wife, Sulpicia, to whom the later so-called satire of Sulpicia in seventy hexameters should not be ascribed.[1543] Turnus succeeded in writing satire and yet surviving at the court of Domitian.[1544] His brother Scaeva or Scaev(i)us Memor, we have seen, wrote tragedies, as did Canius Rufus, along with others mentioned by Martial and Juvenal. There are also traces of lost palliatae and togatae. Neither these, however, nor productions like the Agaue by Statius prove that there was any real renascence of drama. It had fallen on evil days.
LITERATURE UNDER NERVA AND TRAJAN
A.D. 96–A.D. 117
I. PLINY THE YOUNGER AND MINOR CONTEMPORARIES
Early life—Problems in chronology—Later career—Poems—Orations—The Panegyricus—The amplified speech—Flattering picture of an ideal prince—Epistulae—Roman success in letter-writing—The essay-like epistle—Contrast with Cicero’s letters—Plinian parallels in eighteenth century—Correspondence with Trajan—Pliny’s gentlemanliness—Passion for literary pursuits—Naïve vanity—Religion and politics—Composite style—Neologisms—Influence.
Pliny’s literary circle and minor contemporaries—Verse—History and Oratory—Jurisprudence—Scholarship—Gromatics.
PLINY THE YOUNGER
The Latin name of the younger Pliny after his adoption under his maternal uncle’s will in A.D. 79 was C. Plinius Caelius Secundus.[1545] Previously he had been called P. Caecilius Secundus, and was one of the sons of L. Caecilius Cilo, a man of substance belonging to the old northern family of the Caecilii at Comum (Como). Pliny thus retained his gentile name instead of changing it to Caecilianus according to the republican mode. He was born at Comum,[1546] in either 61 or 62; for he says he was in his eighteenth year when his famous uncle lost his life in the eruption of Vesuvius, August 24th, A.D. 79.[1547] His father’s early death left him under the guardianship of the distinguished general Verginius Rufus, who twice refused the imperial purple: to him and to his uncle he owed guidance in his studies. There was no public teacher at Comum (a disadvantage which Pliny sought to remedy in later years), so that his education in the north must have been conducted either privately or at Milan. In time, however, he went to Rome and studied under Nicetes Sacerdos and Quintilian.[1548] The elder Pliny’s example and precepts kept his nephew assiduously employed: even a walk was frowned upon, and on the occasion of the fatal eruption the youth was engaged on a literary exercise set him by his uncle, and was also working on Livy.[1549] Such teaching and his own diligence led to his early appearance as a pleader; for he argued his first case in his nineteenth year.[1550] This was in Titus’s reign; thereafter, under Domitian, he filled a round of offices and built up a reputation by speaking, sometimes in the Senate, but mostly in what he calls his special “arena,” the centumviral court for the trial of lawsuits about disputed properties or successions.[1551] The literary works, however, by which he is known belong almost entirely to the time of Nerva and Trajan, and are therefore post-Flavian.
Except Cicero, no Latin author is so well-known to us. We have a full self-revelation in his letters, while a few inscriptions record his cursus honorum.[1552] Yet, clearly though his personality stands out, teasing puzzles remain, affecting his life and works. For these problems brief mention must suffice. Ever since Mommsen published his elaborate article Zur Lebensgeschichte der jüngeren Plinius in Hermes in 1869, discussion has continued on the dates when Pliny held certain of his offices and on the interconnected question of the dates when the different books of the epistles were written and issued. Though finality has not been reached, some of Mommsen’s pronouncements have been controverted, and doubts thrown upon his basic conception that Pliny is misleading his readers, with a view to produce a false impression of fine carelessness, when he declares that the letters are not in chronological order. Mommsen used his findings on the chronology of the letters as a foundation for his account of Pliny’s life. It is impossible here to enter into the arguments with which critics have assailed him or each other.[1553] After all, however important such details are in the interests of historical accuracy, it does, from the standpoint of pure literature, make little difference, if, for example, Mommsen was wrong (led wrong perhaps by implications in his own theory)[1554] as to Pliny’s tenure of office at the aerarium Saturni, or if he was right in assigning Pliny’s praetorship to 93.[1555]
Nor is there any stagnation in Plinian textual criticism, as the issue of recent editions proves;[1556] and, though a literary history is not directly concerned with an author’s MSS., it is difficult to forget that the sole written copy on which Pliny’s correspondence with Trajan rests has long since been lost, and that the establishment of the text in the other books of letters—not an easy matter—depends on a right assessment of three distinct families of MSS.[1557]
Fortunately, the essential facts of Pliny’s life are beyond dispute. He went through the two preliminary stages of a civil career by performing in the “vigintivirate” the duties of assisting the praetor as decemuir stlitibus iudicandis and by serving in garrison abroad as military tribune in Syria. After his return to Rome, he received the compliment of being appointed seuir of the equites; he held the quaestorship 89-90, tribunate of the people 91-92, and praetorship in 93. An imperial dispensation abolished for him the usual interval between tribunate and praetorship. He was, then, praetor in a year signalized by Domitian’s determined endeavour to quell what he considered a “Stoic Opposition.” How far Pliny did or could help his Stoic friends cannot be determined. He is at some pains at a later date to declare that he supported the philosopher Artemidorus with money and a personal call of sympathy outside Rome, and to indicate that he was himself the subject of a secret information;[1558] but Pliny had a hazardous position to fill, especially in 93, as a magistrate, as a recipient of the emperor’s favour, and as a temperamental objector to anything like martyrdom. Further confidence was shown in 94, when Domitian made him one of the three prefects of the military treasury. Discretion and the right sort of silence brought him safely to Nerva’s reign, when his business experience recommended him for nomination early in A.D. 98 to the prefecture of the military treasury. Nerva’s death before the end of January involved his induction into that office by Trajan, who, two years later, in September, 100, promoted Pliny to the suffect consulship. It was on assuming the chair in the Senate that Pliny pronounced before the emperor the Panegyric which was the spoken basis of the over-elaborated oration that survived. A break in magisterial duties ended a few years later, when Trajan granted him a seat in the college of augurs in succession to a revered friend, Julius Frontinus: next came his commission on the Tiber Conservancy Board, involving superintendence of the banks and channel of the river and the drainage of the city. When Trajan, therefore, had taken over from the Senate the badly managed province of Bithynia, he paid a well-deserved compliment to Pliny’s executive and financial ability by letting his choice fall upon him as his special and personal representative. The emperor knew him intimately, and on one occasion summoned him as an assessor in trials heard by his Majesty at Centum Cellae (Civita Vecchia), some forty-seven miles distant from Rome.[1559] The evidence on the whole points to A.D. 111-113 as the period of two years during which Pliny was governor in Bithynia.[1560] It may have been only in his second year of office that he found time to extend his movements beyond Bithynia proper, and to visit the eastern or Pontic part of his province.[1561] Presumably he died in harness: at least the correspondence comes to an abrupt close. In the last letter of his which we have, he mentions having sent his wife back to Italy post-haste on account of her grandfather’s death, and the emperor’s reply ends the collection.[1562] It is not wholly unfitting that this mainly official book should conclude with a domestic touch. Pliny was deeply attached to his third wife, Calpurnia: what he writes of her shows how much he appreciated her interest in his work: what he writes to her when they are separated shows that a love letter was within his capacity.[1563]
Pliny’s marriages brought him no children, but Trajan conferred upon him the ius trium liberorum in 98. Generous to friends, he showed munificence to his native town during his lifetime by presenting and endowing a library, devoting a sum to the support of freeborn boys and girls, and promising to pay one-third of the salary for a professor of rhetoric. The longest of the inscriptions[1564] concerning him prove his bequests for baths, for the maintenance of a hundred freedmen, and on their death for banqueting the townsfolk.
Of poetry we should scarcely have suspected him, but that he pleads guilty, and is manifestly anxious to be thought capable of composing the lightest of light verse. Pliny endeavouring to be naughty or even frivolous is difficult to conceive. However, he had tried his hand at a variety of forms; at a Greek tragedy, when he was fourteen, and later at Latin elegiac, epic and hendecasyllabic verse.[1565] An epigram by Cicero on Tiro tempted him once to use his midday siesta for poetic composition; and the thirteen hexameters which resulted show that he had much better have slept.[1566] The eight elegiacs of versified advice preserved elsewhere as one of his sportive trifles (lusus) are mediocre.[1567] Yet he is proud to have issued a volume of hendecasyllabic poems, which, he says, are read, sung to music, and actually lure Greeks to study Latin. “I simply pray,” is his complacent remark, “that future ages may endorse the mistake or the appreciation of my contemporaries.”[1568] But the ages have not spared the book.
Pliny felt still more pride in his oratory as a basis of fame. Much of his speaking must have been too strictly legal for preservation; but there were occasions in and outside Rome which made his eloquence in his own eyes worthy of permanent record. With some speeches he took enormous pains after delivery: they would be carefully revised, retried upon a small circle of friends, sent in whole or in part to correspondents for criticism, delivered afresh before a large invited audience, and, after final emendation, possibly published.[1569] “I reflect,” he remarks, “what a serious matter it is to put something into the hands of the public.”[1570] He was perfectly conscious of the risk that such a redelivered speech ran of losing its fire, and yet he wonders why he should be criticized for his practice of serving up speeches at a formal recitatio.[1571] We know of at least seven speeches of his that reached book-form, though they have not reached us. These include his address at the dedication of the library at Comum; pleadings in defence of Julius Bassus and Rufus Varenus on the two occasions when Pliny acted as counsel against the Bithynians, whom he was one day to govern; a speech for Attia Viriola to show cause why she should not be disinherited; and an attack in the Senate, after Domitian’s death, upon Publicius Certus as responsible for the conviction of the younger Helvidius. This last oration[1572] gave Pliny a safe opportunity of eulogizing a Stoic family, and brought him from a friend the compliment, joyfully accepted, of comparing it to Demosthenes’s speech Against Meidias. “In fact,” replies Pliny, “I had that speech in my hands when I composed mine—not to rival it (that would be outrageous or almost insane), but still to imitate and follow as far as difference of genius—a very great and a very small one—or the dissimilarity of the case would permit.”[1573] Among other speeches, which may or may not have circulated afterwards, were those he delivered on the two occasions when, as advocate for the Baetic provincials, he prosecuted ex-governors of theirs, Baebius Massa and Caecilius Classicus; his impeachment of the notorious Marius Priscus as counsel for the Africans along with Tacitus in A.D. 100; and the defence of a group of legatees charged in the criminal court with poisoning.
Nothing has, however, come down to represent his oratorical activity except the re-edited form of the Panegyricus on Trajan, pronounced in the Senate by Pliny on entering with Cornutus Tertullus upon the consulate in the later part of the year 100. One cannot hope to discern how much of the original speech is embedded in what we now have. Soon after its delivery, Pliny sent a copy to Voconius Romanus asking for criticisms, and his letter[1574] makes it clear that he was scrutinizing his own performance under various rhetorical heads. His contention is that the well-known nature of the material (that is, Trajan’s services and qualities) must concentrate the attention unduly on style (elocutio), whereas there are other points to consider like arrangement and transitions; also, just as in a picture, one demands high lights and shade. No more illuminating introduction, however, to the Panegyric can be found than in another letter mentioning an amplified form of the speech which Pliny has been reading to a gathering of friends on three successive days.[1575] As they had assembled in spite of bad weather, their interest was a compliment to literature, which, he says, was just reviving after being nearly extinguished: “it is not that there is more style than formerly, but people write with more liking because they have more liberty (liberius ideoque etiam libentius).” Exuberance, he submits, must be expected in such a composition: in fact, plain unadorned language might appear out of place in a eulogy, though he hints at hopes that literary taste will yet come to favour austere in preference to sugared writing.[1576] One most important point emerges bearing on the author’s design. Proper as it was that the fuller treatment in book-form (eadem illa spatiosius et uberius uolumine amplecti) should do justice to the excellence of the emperor, there was the further aim of drawing the picture of a perfect prince. This is an implicit appeal to posterity. Yet it only relatively makes the Panegyric more endurable: the praises remain excessive, the figures strained, the prolixity wearisome. For us its chief value lies in the historical light shed on the early part of a reign so scantily documented as Trajan’s is, apart from Pliny’s speech and his correspondence.[1577]
The complimentary expression of thanks to which senators had listened with secret chafing in Domitian’s day was expanded by Pliny into a laudatio in which he incorporated the two rhetorical prescriptions of detailed fact and psychological study. That is why the speech divides itself broadly between Trajan’s public acts and Trajan’s personal character. The exordium acknowledges a sense of the divine favour which has bestowed upon Rome such an emperor: it disclaims all intention of flattering; for abject obeisance, as if to a deity, is no longer necessary—Trajan is no tyrant, but a fellow-citizen. Then the keynote is struck. One reflects how highly endowed ought that person to be who controls the Empire by sea and land, in peace and war; but imagination can yield none worthier of such authority than the prince in whose presence the orator is speaking. Logically, then, he is the picture of an ideal for future ages. Trajan’s services before his recent arrival in Rome imply bravery, wide military experience, power of discipline and a loyal acceptance of his adoption by Nerva to be a colleague and successor. His triumphant entry into the city and at the same time his modest bearing form a fit prelude to a rehearsal of his public acts, such as liberality to the people, care of poor children, protection of commerce, solicitude for the corn supply that might well make Rome independent of “haughty Egypt,” exhibition of manly games, abolition of espionage, repression of informers, discountenancing of treason-trials, stabilization of finance, guaranteeing of wills, and a wise policy in building. The emperor devotes anxious thought to the provinces, and has a due regard for justice: in fine, he governs as the Creator does—a vicegerent on earth. His personal qualities are commended with allusions to the contrasted inhumanity of Domitian. So far is the emperor from self-assertion that he had long hesitated to accept a third consulship: so zealous is he that change of work is for him a form of relaxation. Unconscious humour lurks in the detailed picture of this indefatigable sportsman and handy seaman, unlike his predecessor (quantum dissimilis illi) whom sea-sickness reduced to the condition of a victim led to the slaughter (piaculum). Next, his private life in the palace with wife and sister is touched on; then his affability to friends, and, with a glance at Claudius’s court, his control over the freedmen of his household: “You know that greatness in freedmen is the chief mark of littleness in a prince.”[1578] Well does such an emperor deserve to be called optimus. After an apostrophe to his late Majesty, Nerva, the formal close comes in acknowledgements uttered to Trajan on behalf of Pliny himself and his colleague, and in deferential remarks to their fellow-senators.
Regarded under the aspect of an admonitory document for future princes, the Panegyric is less offensive to modern taste; because its words are not those of an obsequious toady but of a patriot insistent upon the services rendered by a wise emperor to his country. Its faults, too, such as affectation and long-windedness would certainly have been less present in the spoken form. As it now stands, it wearies the reader by its length, adulation and artifices. Trajan ceases to be interesting as a Sun-god or an earthly Jupiter: he is more effective as a hard-working ruler. The rhetorical element is also overdone: resort is too often had to antitheses,[1579] sententiae,[1580] and a subtlety that degenerates into bad taste.[1581] The specious “colores” of rhetoric betray themselves in over-ingenious turns: a mutiny, it is suggested, was the very thing wanted to prove Trajan a true corrector emendatorque; and his grey hairs were heaven-ordained to enhance his reverend appearance. What uncomplimentary rhetorical colour would have been given to grey hairs in Domitian’s case may be imagined. Perhaps Trajan felt such elaborate praises as trying as he must have found some of the questions on detail included a dozen years later in Pliny’s letters to him from Bithynia. Finally, the Panegyric contains much to illustrate the invasion of prose by the poetic: here the egressio on Egypt will provide apposite examples. As this epideictic performance, then, is our sole specimen of the author’s oratory, we must beware of judging the lost speeches by it. In other speeches Pliny, though never an austere orator, may have indulged less in the rhetorical faults of his time.
Pliny’s Letters, on which he prided himself less than on his poetry and speeches, constitute his real title to fame. The 247 letters of the nine books which precede the last book (containing 121 letters of official correspondence between Trajan and Pliny in A.D. 111-113) were written in the period from about A.D. 97 to about 109. Their chronology, it has been indicated, is a debated and still debateable matter; but there is a growing belief that the letters in the nine books were issued in groups, which one theory at least arranges symmetrically in triads.[1582] Pliny did not adhere to strict chronological order; and his own statement to that effect is confirmed by several instances.[1583] The collection in nine books may be assumed to have been complete before Pliny left Italy for his eastern province, and the so-called tenth book to have been published after Pliny’s death by some friend or possibly by his widow.
To understand Pliny’s significance as letter-writer it is necessary to observe what an epistula from his hand meant. We have nothing quite like it earlier: on the other hand, a long series of prose letters in later times and later literature bear a family resemblance to his. Classical Greece presents in this field relatively slight remains. There are no indisputably genuine Greek letters to represent the best period, partly because inside the small Hellenic communities it was pointless to write to a man whom one might see in an hour or so, and partly because external communication was hampered in many ways. As travel and separation greatly predispose to letter-writing, it is natural to think that the breadth of interest which furnishes the best epistolary equipment came more easily to a Roman in the days of a world-empire: it is therefore natural to feel less surprise that, as the dialogue had become classic in Greece, so the sort of halved dialogue which constitutes a good letter became classic at Rome. Something in the Roman genius favoured this literary form: it is not merely that there is no Greek analogy to the three kinds of epistles written by Cicero, Seneca and Pliny, but in later centuries Latin still holds the supremacy; for Julian the Apostate and Synesios, Bishop of Cyrene, are not in letter-writing the equals of the Gallic Bishop, Sidonius Apollinaris, or the statesman Cassiodor(i)us.
The letter, as published by Pliny, goes far beyond the scope of the simplest private form written to make a request or give information. This simplest form may be no more literature than an official letter is; yet many letters, in the original sense, intended only for an individual receiver may possess the charm of frankness and artlessness united with just as much design as is needed for clear conveyance of the writer’s thoughts. One of the fascinations in Cicero’s letters, especially those to Atticus, is that he speaks to his friend as if to himself, uttering the first thing that comes (quidquid in buccam, Ad Att., XII. i. 2); so that this immediate committal of thought or experience to paper involves a disregard of academic rules and often a free borrowing of tone and expression from the sermo cotidianus. Wherever, in parts of the Epistulae ad Familiares, there may cross Cicero’s mind the possibility of publication, he becomes at once less unconstrained and more formal. It makes all the difference whether our letters are to be read by one or by many. With the notion of a collective audience among contemporaries or posterity there begins the quest after artistry: then it is always possible that, on redressing the balance, one may be compensated for the lost spontaneity with new aesthetic effects. This more literary type is represented by Pliny. With him the epistle has overstepped the rigid bounds of a letter: it has become a causerie on paper, and the addressee is in a position comparable to that of the Pisones in Horace’s versified epistle on poetry, or Lucilius in Seneca’s Epistulae Morales, or Madame de Sévigné’s daughter in her correspondence. The recipient really represents the great public, while Pliny ranges at will anywhere through the width of human life among themes likely to provide interesting material—a senatorial debate, a trial, an illness, a death, a murder, a mysterious disappearance, floods on the Tiber, a volcanic disaster, ghost stories, a book, a speech, a literary celebrity, questions of style, principles of education, advice about a tutor, social claims, a day in town, a day in the country, scenery, a residence by the sea or in Tuscany or on the Lago di Garda, an offer of a loan, a purchase of property, a mean host, a Corinthian bronze, the duty of forgiveness, greetings to friends or relatives, congratulations, consolations. Elsewhere, in a light vein, he rallies a poor correspondent, or an acquaintance who has forgotten to come to dinner; regrets he has only got thanks to send for a present of thrushes; acknowledges another gift with the information that, though his eyes are troubling him, he can see it is a plump hen; tells another friend that he is busy with the vintage, but will “draw off” fresh verses for him;[1584] or again, much as Burns in one of his letters delightfully told three tales about Alloway Kirk, so Pliny tells three anecdotes about Regulus with the airy introduction: “down with your copper and get a story worth gold; no, three stories!”[1585]
Expression must be manifold to keep pace in pliancy with every swift turn of thought on such a variety of subjects. The general effect is that of a miscellany of miniature studies or feuilletons, in the sense that Pliny’s letters, essay-like, weigh some incident, experience, or idea in the scale of the author’s personal mood, or, if “weighing” be too precise a term, the author may be said to play lightly round his theme and put his own spirit into it. This personal impress makes the letters as readable as leaves from a well-written diary, so that they have, some of them, the incidental, intimate, and literary interest which marks a work like the Journal des Goncourt. Epistolary literature, even at its most artificial, possesses the attraction of affording a sure insight into the nature of the author. While it may be too much to declare, as Johnson did, that “in a man’s letters, you know, madam, his soul lies naked,” still there must always be in them a biography of the feelings: there will also often be—and perhaps more interesting if undesigned—illumination thrown upon the customs of the day. Since Pliny’s letters do not belong to the kind tossed off in fine careless freedom, one does not look to find in them the rapid conversational and staccato notes of some of Cicero’s, or the open impetuosities of Byron; for Pliny’s letters are more laboriously penned with the thought of eventual publication and the hope of posthumous fame: their sentiments and phrases are so cunningly disciplined and marshalled that what they lose in unsophisticated charm they gain in artistic grace. But with all this clever artificiality Pliny has much sound matter to convey. Studied elegance is not necessarily inimical to sincerity, and his letters remain a true index to his personality and to the life of his times. He realized the contrast between his own letters and Cicero’s. Their circumstances were different, and Cicero’s fertile genius could readily find abundance of material in the stirring times that witnessed the death-throes of the republic. Apologizing, therefore, to a friend who has demanded full letters, Pliny pleads lack of thrilling subjects and fears that his epistles may become too academic (scholasticae atque umbraticae).[1586] We may take it for certain that one reason why Cicero’s letters so far outnumber Pliny’s is that Pliny must have excluded from publication such of his letters as in substance could not lay claim to general interest or in form could not serve as patterns of style. It is noteworthy that there are no epistles of the literary type belonging to the period of his governorship, though it is conceivable that, but for his death, the world would have seen another issue of his open letters, adorned, as before, with that bel esprit which Europe has found so attractive.
This Plinian type of letter, where the underlying realities are retouched more or less lightly with literary refinements before publication, is one of the legacies of Rome to modern literature. Epistolography made no advance in the Middle Ages, but with the Renaissance the recovery was well marked among scholars. When we turn to the eighteenth century, the palmiest age for letter-writing in English literature, it is impossible to avoid being struck with a similarity of spirit between Pliny’s letters and those of Horace Walpole, Gray and Cowper. Despite Pliny’s complaints about inroads on his time, and harder worker though he was than our chief letter-writers, he yet enjoyed the comfort and the leisure which seem indispensable to the production of the best literary epistles. Thoughtful, kindly, communicative, he was the very man to give human interest to his writing. Neither in Walpole, that caustic and voluminous man of the world, nor in Gray, largely a recluse with a fund of somewhat baffling restraint, do we discover the amiability which makes this pagan gentleman so winning. Perhaps Cowper, if we neglect his shy melancholy and quiet humour, presents most parallels to Pliny. Scholarly, sensible, well-mannered, free from ill-nature, artistic in expression, he had a turn for reflection which make much in his letters read as if the English would go straight into Plinian Latin. Certainly it is not without significance that one of the best English renderings of Pliny was that composed by Melmoth in the eighteenth century: it is too verbose, but even its generous verbosity suggests the spacious leisure of a period before the rush of modern life mortally wounded the art of letter-writing.
In contrast to the literary epistles, the correspondence with Trajan concerns the business of a provincial governor, some of it urgently demanding for settlement all the haste that the Roman imperial post by road and sea would allow. Here we find petitions for privileges on behalf of Pliny himself and others, reports on his struggles with the impaired finances of municipalities, knotty questions in civil or religious or criminal law, local difficulties in building a theatre or temple or aqueduct or baths, and repeated requests for a trained surveyor or architect from Rome. Most famous of all is the pair consisting of the letter from Pliny on prosecuting Christians and Trajan’s answer. Historically the collection is most valuable, because it lifts the veil from the administration of a province in an abnormal condition; but much non-literary matter has, of necessity, to be introduced, and there is just that element of fussiness which good letters lack. One feels that the special commissioner refers too many minute points to Trajan, and deserves the reminder that some of his reported quandaries were exactly of the sort which he had been sent out to solve on the spot. Trajan’s replies are business-like and brief, the findings of a fair-minded man: though they are friendly to his “dear Secundus,” their very brevity sometimes implies that the governor is causing both the emperor and himself too much worry: once or twice, indeed, they verge on the snappy. That is one reason why it is incredible that they could have been the product of the imperial bureau in Rome—the personal touch is present. Reputations are not likely to be made by propounding theories that these replies came from an office instead of from the emperor, or by starting doubts about the authenticity of this correspondence in general or about the special letters touching the Christians whom Pliny had to judge in Bithynia.[1587]
A personality so manifold deserves fuller examination than has been incidentally possible in a survey of his life and letters. If dignity, self-possession, broad-mindedness, considerateness, courtesy and generosity are qualities that constitute a gentleman, then Pliny was one. He knew how to ensure respect for the high magistracies which he held; he could keep his head in court so as to make the requisite retort to an unfair opponent; his wide experience of life taught him fairness in dealing with others; he was considerate to tenants and servants; treated superiors and inferiors with politeness, and performed notable acts of munificence. Although he devoted much energy to the preparation of cases on the court-roll,[1588] his master-passion was literary study. Enthusiasm forces him to recommend it for others:
Let this be your business, this your idleness; this your toil, and this your rest; in these pursuits let your vigilance, in these let your repose too be found.[1589]
Amidst distracting avocations, he pined for retirement away from Rome where he could read and write:
Shall I never break, if I mayn’t untie, these cramping bonds? Never, I suppose—for the old tasks have new tasks growing on them before the earlier ones are finished.[1590]
So he writes from town:
What am I doing, you ask. What you wot of. I’m hard pressed with official duty; I’ve friends to attend to; sometimes I study, the thing to do which, not “sometimes” but solely and continually, would be, I don’t dare to say more virtuous, but surely more welcome.[1591]
Even if he did get away to the lake-country for fishing and hunting, he liked to combine literary composition with his sport; and a saving grace let him see the humour of the situation when he tells Tacitus about waiting for the wild boar with writing material at hand.[1592] What might easily have become mere bookishness was counteracted by duties, official and social, which involved intercourse with his fellow-men. As it happened, his career enabled him to discharge faithfully public and professional tasks, and yet in his leisure do good service to literature. Here his premier attention turned on oratory and poetry. While he knew and esteemed certain philosophers, he apparently shared some of Quintilian’s suspicions about others; and while he once penned a handsome tribute to the divine majesty of history, he disavowed any purpose of competing in that field.[1593] But, if he restricted his own output, he was catholic in his zeal for the production of all forms of literature. This appears in his enthusiasm for recitationes: it mattered little whether the reading were from history, comedy, poetry or oratory—Pliny was scrupulous in his attendance,[1594] believing that private perusal was not enough to test a work without the uiua uox,[1595] and offering sound reasons in defence of the practice as an aid to criticism.[1596]
Similar zeal stimulates vigorous correspondence about the emendation of his speeches and verses, and repeated exhortations urging others to produce literary work.[1597] His praises of contemporaries, though too lavish and partial, were in a measure due to the same genuine interest.[1598] He may be extravagant in declaring that nothing so perfect had appeared of recent years as Augurinus’s “Poems in Little” (Poematia): here he seems naïvely to disclose the reason for his bias as personal liking or the poet’s compliments to himself.[1599] He may also have overstated the case in saying that Fannius’s premature death robbed the world of an immortal work on Nero’s victims.[1600] Naturally some whisper reached him in time that exception had been taken to his excessive commendations: to which his answer, if not wholly valid, is at least candid:
You tell me that some people have condemned me in your hearing for praising my friends at every opportunity beyond what is due. I admit the impeachment (agnosco crimen)—welcome it, in fact. For what is nobler than the fault of kindliness? After all, who are they who know my friends better than I do? Yet suppose they do, why grudge me a most delightful deception? For, supposing my friends are not such as I declare they are, still I am happy in fancying them so. Well, then, they’d better turn this maladroit activity of theirs (sinistram diligentiam) upon others: there’s no lack of people who call it “critical judgement” to pull their friends to pieces: they’ll never persuade me into thinking that I love my friends too dearly.[1601]
It is futile to argue that he was not severe enough, and might have raised the literary standard by indulging, like Boileau, in outspoken attacks.[1602] What looks more likely is that the example and praise of a man of Pliny’s ability and reputation stirred contemporaries to do the utmost of which they were capable. However that may be, the freedom from envy implied in such praises must be set to his credit, and a good deal should be forgiven to a benevolence which showed itself in many other ways—in his charitable use of wealth, his willingness to help in misfortune, his ready emotion over the death of friend or slave.[1603] None but a considerate master would have chosen a room for study so as to avoid any temptation to interfere with the festive rowdiness of his slaves when celebrating the Saturnalia,[1604] or have taken pains to arrange that his freedman Zosimus, who had been spitting blood, should go to the Riviera and benefit by a prescription which medicine neglected for centuries in the treatment of consumption—excellent fresh air and properly handled milk.[1605] The tolerance which marked him as a governor made him companionable for very diverse types of men—a brooder like Tacitus or an airy mocker like Martial. It was rare for him to loathe anyone as he did Regulus; for he recognized the inhumanity of being too fierce a hater, and the virtue of forgiveness.[1606] Temperate though rich, Pliny followed a rule of life as commendable as the Stoic, yet without Stoic rigidity; and if at times he appeared a little prim and priggish, let it be remembered how anxious he was at other times to show that he could unbend into frivolities.[1607]
His greatest weakness lies so patently on the surface that it amuses more than it offends. The passion for fame turned into an amiable vanity when he was convinced that the coveted fame had been attained. With a perfectly naïve egoism that disarms severe censure, he chronicles his own good deeds or desires a place in Tacitus’s immortal works.[1608] Can one wonder that he liked to have his name coupled with that of the historian?[1609] He writes:
I never experienced greater pleasure than from a talk with Cornelius Tacitus recently. He told me that he had sitting next him at last circus-games a Roman knight. After conversation on a wide range of learning, the latter asked, “Are you from Italy or the provinces?” “You know me,” was the reply, “and from my literary works to be sure.” Whereupon the other asked, “Are you Tacitus or Pliny?”[1610]
The letter proceeds to recount another incident in which a stranger guessed Pliny’s identity, and concludes: “I’m not afraid to appear too boastful in quoting not my own but other people’s opinion about me.” Still, it is his own golden opinion that he quotes about his speech for Attia Viriola as an inspired performance.[1611] No wonder, then, that he should mention his delight when the judges in court could not help rising from their seats to show appreciation of his speaking,[1612] or that he thought it a “white pebble day” when he heard two young men (egregium par) pleading on opposite sides in the urban prefect’s council, both exhibiting an excellent style which they had based on Pliny as their pattern (exemplar),[1613] or that he should honestly confess that he enjoyed reading poetry which praised himself.[1614]
But he was not without traits of modesty: he owned there was something beyond him in the virtues of a good philosopher, in the eminence of Cicero, and in the genius of Tacitus.[1615] There is also something fine in his avowal that the attainment of glory is not all: it is the inner quality that counts, and to deserve success is no less honourable than to command it:
Besides I have in mind how much finer a spirit it shows to set the rewards of honour in one’s conscience rather than in men’s applause. Glory should follow, not be sought after; and if by some chance or other it does not follow, a deed is no less excellent for having failed to win glory.[1616]
A natural piety, flecked with superstition in the matter of omens and dreams, prompted him to build temples in Italy and to hesitate in the East over disturbing a consecrated site.[1617] However much he might feel officially opposed to the non-conformity of Christians in the observance of such public sacrifices as tested loyalty, against the principles of the Christian life he found nothing to say.[1618] As to his own religious beliefs, he accepted a Divine Power as having vouchsafed Trajan to Rome, and recognized the obligation of prayer to the Providence sustaining the emperor.[1619] On a bed of sickness, he knows the invalid discovers the vanity of worldly pursuits, and “in that hour remembers there are gods, in that hour remembers he is man.”[1620] Sincerity of feeling enabled him, like Persius, to penetrate the inmost meaning of worship in the doctrine that “the gods find pleasure not so much in exact petitions by their votaries as in innocency and holiness, and he who has brought to their shrines a clean and pure heart is found more acceptable than he who has brought a premeditated form of words.”[1621]
His views on the Empire were those of acquiescence in the system of control by one ruler working for the general weal.[1622] He had been able to keep to the path of prudence under a bad emperor, though even he claims to have been in danger from Domitian. After the dawn of better days, there came the raptures of the Panegyric, where the constitutional change is paradoxically summarized in his words to Trajan iubes esse liberos: erimus.[1623] Admirers of the great past of Rome might take comfort in the fancy that a good princeps was a restorer of the olden times. Broadly, Pliny’s political attitude is that difficulties in the state must be left to the higher powers to face: that is what an emperor is for.[1624] On this principle he certainly acted when Bithynia was under his charge.
Interrogated on his style, Pliny might have called himself Ciceronian. For his letters he employs a rhythmic prose of a a light type, decorating it with poetic quotations and allusions. If he cannot be said to be periodic in structure, he does largely follow the Ciceronian type of sentence-endings.[1625] Yet in reality his prose was the resultant of different forces. It is true that he went back in his orations to Cicero as a master; but, in addition, he acknowledges his debt to Demosthenes in Greek and to Calvus in Latin. It is also true that, like his master Quintilian, he decries the oratory of the day,[1626] and, like Quintilian again, holds that the best models (optima quaeque) should be imitated:[1627] at the same time, it does not follow that Pliny was unaffected by the rhetoric of his own era. On the contrary, the reader soon discovers in the letters that he was an offspring of the age in his studied use of the paraphernalia of rhetoric such as antithesis, oxymoron, the emphatic anaphora,[1628] and sententiae, like “many respect gossip, few conscience” (multi famam, conscientiam pauci uerentur), or “The favour of scoundrels is as untrustworthy as the scoundrels themselves” (gratia malorum tam infida est quam ipsi). The rhetorical ring due to artificial devices may be noted even in the English dress of a representative letter to an official friend:
Consider that you are sent to the province of Achaia, the true, the genuine Greece, where civilization, literature, and even agriculture are believed to have originated. Consider that you are sent to regulate the affairs of free states; that is to say, men in the highest degree men, free men in the highest sense free, who have maintained the right which nature granted them by courage, by services, by friendliness, finally by compact and the sanctions of religion. Let your feelings be those of reverence for their antiquity, their marvellous deeds, even for their myths.... Keep before your eyes that this is the land which sent us our legal code; the land which gave us laws, not after a victory, but at our own request. Remember it is Athens you approach, it is Lacedaemon you govern. To snatch from them the shadow that is left, the surviving name of freedom, would be harsh, cruel, barbarous.... Recollect the past greatness of each state, but not so as to despise her for having lost it. Let there be no arrogance, no harshness. You need not fear contempt: can contempt be shown for the magistrate invested with power and the insignia of office, unless he is a low, mean creature who has already a contempt for himself? Authority makes a poor test of its own force if it flouts others: it is a poor sort of homage that is won by terror: affection gives a far stronger guarantee for holding what you want than fear does. For fear vanishes, if one quits the scene, while affection remains; and just as the former turns into hatred, so does the latter turn into respect.[1629]
Yet Pliny was not a mere scholastic rhetorician: he was habitually versed in business affairs and actual lawsuits: he had, therefore, to be more practical in offence and defence than an academic professor had need to be. In fact, he realizes the weakness inherent in the rhetoric of the schools when he draws a picture of the rhetor Isaeus as a simple-minded teacher in contrast with the keen practised lawyer who necessarily learns guile from close contact with the real disputes of men.[1630] As to his Ciceronianism, it is so modified that his style could not be mistaken for Cicero’s. If he had been taught by Quintilian to eschew Seneca’s brevity, he did not keep the rotundity of the Ciceronian manner. Rather he is a compromise between the two styles. In one of his eleven surviving letters to Tacitus, he raises an interesting question on the relative merits of the terse and the profuse.[1631] True, at least, to theory, he favours the latter; and it may be imagined how illuminating it would have been to read the answer from the master of the condensed style. Pliny’s own illustration of brevity has a delightfully vague freedom about it: Homer, though like Virgil he takes many lines to describe the armour of his hero, is brief, he maintains, because he accomplishes his literary design (quia facit quod instituit), and so Pliny’s letter on his Tuscan villa must not be called big—it is the villa that is big! No single label indeed can fairly denote Pliny’s style: if he could be so labelled, he would not have made such attractive reading. The great variety of his subjects met with corresponding variety of treatment from him, so that he is justified when he claims that in literature, as in life, the ideal effect is produced by a blend of the grave and the gay.[1632]
In Pliny’s choice of words alone there are characteristics, such as his liking for frequentative verbs, that mark him off from the Golden Age.[1633] He is individual enough to invent words, e.g. the nouns abactus, praelusio, renutus, socialitas, sinisteritas, arcessitor, reformator, or to give fresh meanings to old words, e.g. descensio, dispensatio, egestio, nutatio, latitudo, gestator. Again, he typically shares words with writers of the Silver Age, e.g. cenatio, “dining-room” (Sen., Plin. Maj., Col., Petr., Mart., Suet.); computatio, “account” (Sen., Plin. Maj., Quint., Front.); captiuitas, “slavery” (Sen., Petr., Tac., Flor.); diuersitas, “difference” (Plin. Maj., Quint., Tac.); circulator, “hawker” (Cels., Sen., Petr.). His locutions and syntax also present noteworthy features. One may find a Livian and poetic turn in pietatis est totus or ne grauare or permitto facere, and a Virgilian base for constructions like certus fugae or liberum discriminis or securus magnitudinis. That Pliny based his Latin not strictly on Cicero but on the Latin of his own century is shown by much in the structure of the sentence, such as the general relinquishment of the period, and reduction of relative words; the new sense attached to conjunctions or adverbs like alioqui, quatenus, quoque; the use of participles in bold ways; much too in the use of moods,[1634] like quotiens intrasset or quocumque me contulissem or quamquam nouerim.
Fronto’s educational correspondence shows no knowledge of Pliny’s epistles; but Tertullian’s acquaintance with the two letters on the Christians is evident from his angry objections to them.[1635] Macrobius[1636] couples Pliny and Symmachus, the scholarly statesman of the late fourth century, as examples of the rich and luxuriant (pingue et floridum) style in oratory; but this does not convincingly prove that Symmachus’s Epistulae were inspired by the Plinian collection. Cassiodor(i)us mentions Plinius Secundus as orator et historicus cuius ingenii plurima opera exstant. It is natural to suppose that letter-writers in Latin should have used Pliny as a model, and that, as Pliny’s books were sold at Lyon during his lifetime, they would still be remembered when Roman studies flourished in Gaul during the fifth century A.D. But it is doubtful whether there is absolute proof of his influence between Sidonius Apollinaris,[1637] who was an admiring follower, and the tenth century.[1638] In the Middle Ages the Fathers and Seneca eclipsed Pliny in favour, but from the time of Politian and Erasmus his influence was re-established, and his literary heirs have been many, especially in England and France.
MINOR CONTEMPORARIES
Pliny was so completely in touch with the literary movements of his day that a survey of his circle gives not only a retrospect upon the Flavian age but an admirable introduction to literature under Trajan, and even, in the case of a slightly junior friend like Suetonius, carries us into Hadrian’s reign. Pliny, we have seen, was fond of writing poetry and fond of poets. It is therefore appropriate here to review his minor contemporaries in general, whether they wrote verse or prose. Some of the chief Flavian authors, such as Silius Italicus, Martial and Frontinus, he knew well; and among his elderly friends was Vestricius Spurinna, already classed among minor Flavian lyric poets. With him may be named, as typical of culture at the time, the grandfather of the Emperor Antoninus Pius, Arrius Antoninus, whose Greek epigrams and mimes caused Pliny to fancy he was reading Callimachus or Herodas.[1639] The information yielded by Pliny’s letters about elegiac and lyric writers indicates a widespread passion for composing short poems; so that the Rome of Trajan may be pictured as a nest of gentlemen singing or trying to sing, and what Pliny called “the crop of poets” accounts for his normally roseate view of the condition of literature. Two at least of his intimates, both of whom he pressed to publish, seem to have had an epic bent: these were Octavius Rufus[1640] and Caninius Rufus.[1641] Several significant letters were addressed to the latter on literary events, such as the death of Silius Italicus and the composition of a comedy by Vergilius Romanus. The story of a tame dolphin is communicated to him as material for a poetic narrative; and Pliny approves of his intention to write a poem in Greek on Trajan’s Dacian War. Calpurnius Piso took an old Greek title, καταστερισμοί,[1642] for his elegiac poem, which may have retold legends about the constellations in the spirit of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Like several contemporaries, Pompeius Saturninus[1643] was an orator and historian as well as a poet. His lyrics and epigrams after the manner of Catullus and Calvus evoke the utmost enthusiasm from Pliny; and to him Pliny’s speech at the inauguration of the Como library went to be revised with his customary acumen (qua soles lima). A very notable circumstance was that one day he read to Pliny certain epistles which he said were by his wife. Pliny’s comment is that he could have believed he was listening to Plautus or Terence in prose,[1644] though he is not equally sure that such polished letters could have been written by the lady. The importance of the incident lies in its testimony to the growing practice of writing literary epistles of what we may call a Plinian type. There seems to be here a hint, perhaps not sufficiently grasped, that such letters were considered to contain, as Pliny’s often do, a poetic element; and this is confirmed by the instance of Voconius Romanus, also an orator of ability, who was the author of letters that gave an impression as if “the Muses were speaking Latin.”[1645] Another imitator of Catullus and Calvus was Serius Augurinus, the youthful composer of Poematia, which were the best of their sort, we are told, for years. Pliny cites from him a hendecasyllabic piece, which, though it scarcely justifies the commendation in the letter, possessed for the critic the merit of containing the line “Pliny alone is as good as predecessors for me.”[1646] Passennus Paulus wrote Propertian elegies and Horatian odes: the latter, says the complimentary Pliny, might well suggest his descent from Horace, as in blood he was descended from Propertius.[1647] It was the opening of one of his lines, Prisce iubes, that gave Javolenus Priscus at a recitatio the chance of pouncing upon it disconcertingly with the rude interruption Ego uero non iubeo.[1648] A most fascinating survival from the period, had fate allowed, would have been the comic plays, some in Menander’s style and others based on the old Attic comedy, by Vergilius Romanus.[1649] The nature of the poems by Silius Proculus, which Pliny in one letter agrees to read, is unknown.[1650]
On turning from poetry to prose (though, it will be remembered, some of those already mentioned were prose-writers as well as poets), we are met on the threshold by Pliny’s most famous literary friend, Tacitus, the subject of a later chapter. The orator C. Fannius made some stir as a chronicler of Nero’s victims: before his death three books of his work had appeared and became popular.[1651] Titinius Capito chose for a historical theme “The Ends of Illustrious Men” (Exitus Inlustrium Virorum), occupying himself also with a poetic treatment of the lives of the renowned.[1652] He was a shining ornament of the age, a fosterer of learning, and restorer of what Pliny for the moment regards as a decadent literature.[1653] Always willing to lend his house for recitationes, he was a regular attender at Pliny’s readings, and a hero-worshipper who kept busts of the great republican champions at home. One of the three correspondents called Maximus in Pliny’s letters directed against a certain Planta a polemic work, which Pliny desired to see published.[1654] Writings by Sardus[1655] so delighted Pliny by praising him that he read and reread them; and Atrius[1656] is thanked for a book of his which he had not so far had time to read—the liber in question was possibly a speech. Julius Avitus is mentioned as having written much in a short life: since Pliny laments the loss of the whole by his premature death, the inference is that he never published his books.[1657] A large number of contemporary orators, besides those just mentioned, appear in Pliny’s pages; but they are too many to record here.[1658]
Jurisprudence under Trajan is represented by Neratius Priscus and Juventius Celsus on the Proculian side, and on the Sabinian side by Javolenus Priscus and probably Titius Aristo, one of Pliny’s friends.
Grammatical and linguistic learning had several representatives. Urbanus, who is plausibly referred to this period, has his comments on Virgil quoted by Servius. Velius Longus was likewise a Virgilian scholar. A student of Ennius, Lucilius, Accius and other early Latin authors, he wrote on archaisms and derivations: as was natural, he used and quoted Varro and Verrius Flaccus. The date of Flavius Caper is not certain, but he also combined an interest in Virgil with studies of old Latin: a good deal of his lore passed into the works of Charisius and Priscian. Caesellius Vindex, who is cited in Aulus Gellius, compiled an alphabetic dictionary of Antiquae Lectiones, which seems to have had the alternative title of Stromateus.
One of several authors named Hyginus in Latin literature appeared at this period as a gromatic writer in a treatise, now fragmentary, on legal boundaries, De Limitibus. It has been disputed whether another work De Limitibus Constituendis is his or not. The De Munitionibus Castrorum ascribed to him must, from internal evidence, be placed much later. A manual of geometry for land-surveyors, which drew upon Euclid among other sources, was composed by the Balbus whom subsequent gromatics often cite. This same department of field-measurement is represented slightly later by Siculus Flaccus and Junius Nipsus.
II. TACITUS
The spice of problems—Facts and inferences concerning Tacitus—His official career—Tacitus as a speaker—Memory of “The Terror”—The three minor works—Speculation on secondary motives—Aspects of the Dialogue on Oratory—Vexed questions—Agricola—Its form and purpose—Later style in the making—Germania—Points of interest—Matter and manner—Histories—Plan—Character-drawing—Other dramatic qualities—Annals—Great episodes—Sources—Outlook on human life, history and politics—Anti-imperial bias—Attitude to Tiberius—Language and style—Vicissitudes of his fame.
Concerning P. Cornelius Tacitus,[1659] the greatest historian of the Silver Age, there is no dearth of problems to awake interest, though they do not affect his unchallenged mastery of one of the most wonderful prose styles in literature. His very praenomen is uncertain.[1660] We do not know when or where he was born; we do not know when or where he died; and, while scholars are now nearly unanimous[1661] in ascribing the Dialogus de Oratoribus to him, they are not agreed on its date of composition or on the explanation of its contrast in style with the other works of Tacitus. Differences of opinion have arisen about the author’s real aim in his monographs on Agricola and on Germany; rival suggestions have been made about the number of books which the now mutilated Histories once contained; and more serious controversies have raged over the sources from which Tacitus drew, his method of using them, his credibility in general and his presentation of Tiberius in particular.
Approximately his birth-year may be given as A.D. 55. This is an inference from two facts: first, that, looking back on the year 75, the dramatic date of his Dialogus, Tacitus referred to himself as then “quite a young man” (iuuenis admodum, Dial. i.); and next, that, while the younger Pliny considered himself and Tacitus “nearly of an age” (propemodum aequales) he has mentioned efforts of his own as an adulescentulus to imitate Tacitus, who had already made a name.[1662] We can prove Pliny to have been born in 61 or 62, and from his words we may guess that Tacitus was some half-dozen years his senior. Possibly the historian’s father was the eques Cornelius Tacitus mentioned by the elder Pliny[1663] as a procurator in Belgic Gaul: the surmise at least would accord with Tacitus’s standing in public and private life. His official honours under the three Flavians are summarized by himself as “begun by Vespasian, increased by Titus, and further advanced by Domitian,”[1664] the interpretation being that under the first of these emperors he held one of the offices in the vigintivirate and had served in the army as tribunus militum laticlauius; that Titus nominated him to the quaestorship in 80, when twenty-five; and that under Domitian he was either edile or tribune, and afterwards, we know, praetor in 88.[1665] In A.D. 77, when still a iuuenis, he had been betrothed to the daughter of the Roman general Agricola, who was consul at the time, and married her next year shortly before his father-in-law’s appointment to Britain.[1666]
The keenness with which Tacitus studied rhetoric under eminent masters appears from his own statement.[1667] Following with closest attention the court-pleadings of M. Aper and Julius Secundus, he took lessons from them at their homes on the principles of argument and style. It is not impossible, although unproved, that he was one of Quintilian’s pupils: the Ciceronianism of his earliest work rather favours the idea. Certainly the Dialogus marks deep interest in the prospects of Roman oratory. A good rhetorical education, turned to practical account, earned him fame as a speaker; and among his noted appearances in public were, after being made consul suffectus in 97,[1668] his delivery of a funeral eulogy over Verginius Rufus, and in A.D. 100, when counsel with Pliny for the African provincials, his impeachment of Marius Priscus, their ex-proconsul. Pliny’s explicit compliment to his eloquence on both occasions was, we may take it, deserved; and it is significant that, in regard to the second occasion, he singles out as a quality of Tacitus’s oratory its impressive dignity.[1669]
Duties in an unknown province having kept Tacitus and his wife abroad for the four years from 90 to 93, they returned to Rome too late to attend the death-bed of his illustrious father-in-law.[1670] At once he found himself in the gloom of a reign of terror when senators were cowed by Domitian into conniving at the emperor’s judicial murders.[1671] The atmosphere of calculating espionage and of inexorable repression, now imposing silence, now inviting adulation, coloured all the after-life and after-writing of Tacitus. However gratefully he recognized that the dark clouds had lifted with the accession of Nerva in 96, and that at the dawn of “a most blessed age”[1672] he was at length free to express his views, we yet feel that the iron had entered into the soul of this man of over forty before he ever embarked on his career as historian, and that his outlook upon events must inevitably reflect the sombre hues of fifteen years of dumb helplessness which could not be forgotten.[1673] Though after Domitian’s death he accepted a consulship and though an inscription found in Caria shows he was proconsul of Asia about 112-116, still we may assume that henceforward his extensive plans for historical composition occupied most of his time. These plans proved in the event too extensive for the span of life allotted to him. After the Histories came the Annals, completed, as we shall see, between 115 and 117. But for his old age he had, he tells us, set aside the reigns of Nerva and Trajan; and he had also contemplated a work on the times of Augustus.[1674] These latter projects he never carried out, so that it looks as if he did not long survive the publication of the Annals about the end of Trajan’s reign.
The three minor works of Tacitus, the Dialogus, Agricola, and Germania, written before his prolonged historical labours, are linked together in several ways. The text of all three descends from the same lost archetype (Hersfeldensis), usually identified with a codex observed and recorded at Rome in 1455[1675] as containing the Germania, Agricola and Dialogus with the extant portions of Suetonius’s De Grammaticis and De Rhetoribus. All three works are of importance for the preliminary stages in the evolution of Tacitus’s style. Further, all three have been made the subjects of much theorizing about secondary purposes which, it has been alleged, they were written to subserve. Certain critics are not content with the motive professed in each case by the author, but have insisted on looking beneath the surface. Thus the Dialogus, ostensibly an inquiry into the decadence of oratory, has been declared, in keeping with the more than doubtful hypothesis that it was composed after Domitian’s reign, to be the author’s farewell to public speaking and an implicit apology for deserting the rhetorical art in favour of history.[1676] The Agricola has been asserted to be not only a memorial of piety to an honoured relative,[1677] but a semi-political monograph meant to explain to Trajan and others the conduct of both Agricola and Tacitus in the troublous times of Domitian; while the Germania, the contention runs, is no mere sketch of the homes and habits of northern tribes but a pamphlet with a definite tendency, either to hold up to luxurious Rome an accusing mirror which should reflect the healthier simplicity of the Germans, or, with far-sighted historic sense, to inculcate on the Romans the need for guarding against danger from the barbarian, or virtually to justify the prolonged absence of the new emperor Trajan on so vital a frontier as the Rhineland. The ingenuity, however, displayed in pressing such secondary motives has tended in some measure to push the real motive into the background and to distract attention from the literary value of the works.
The Dialogus de Oratoribus, in the form of a discussion among eminent men of the day, supplies an answer to a question put to Tacitus by Fabius Justus about the reasons for the decline in oratory. The participants are four—Curiatius Maternus, poet and dramatist, at whose house the scene is laid; Marcus Aper, an advocate of Gallic origin; Julius Secundus, a polished historian, and, like Aper, a native of Gaul; and Vipstanus Messalla, a Roman of high birth. It is part of the author’s dramatic skill to represent them in debate as speaking in character. Aper, utilitarian and practical, contrasts his own remunerative profession of pleader with the uselessness of poetry: Maternus, as poet and idealist, disdains wealth and influence, preferring the “privacy of woodland and grove” (nemora et luci secretum)[1678] and the “blest camaraderie” (felix contubernium) of the Muses. Secundus is a quiet and refined speaker, while the true Roman Messalla is the admiring champion of the past, with a dislike for the faults of contemporary oratory and education. The earlier part of the Dialogus consists of Aper’s eulogy on a lawyer’s calling and Maternus’s reply on behalf of poetry. On Messalla’s entrance, a preliminary exchange of views leads to Aper’s speech in praise of modern oratory at the expense of the “ancients”; whereupon he is, at Maternus’s request, followed by Messalla as a critic of defects in present-day eloquence. Maternus interrupts to recall Messalla to the real subject—the causes of deterioration in oratory—which is handled in the last part (xxviii-xli). A lacuna marked in the MS. has deprived us of the opening of Secundus’s historical review of factors in politics and in legal procedure which fostered the oratory of the republican era. In contrast therewith “the emperor’s discipline had tranquillized eloquence as it did everything else.”[1679] A second lacuna must be assumed, where we have lost the first part of Maternus’s closing speech, which proceeds in the extant portion to argue that unsettled political conditions and party spirit in ancient times had favoured the rise of great speakers. “Eloquence is the nurseling of licence” (eloquentia alumna licentiae), so that too well organized a government is fatal to first-rate speaking.
The Dialogus is a piquant combination of the fascinating and the provoking; for, while it handles an attractive theme with a charm that justifies its old description as an aureus libellus, it yet raises problems that remain unsolved and are, some of them, perhaps insoluble.[1680] The Tacitean authorship is now soundly upheld on the basis of manuscript authority, the general agreement of views with those in Tacitus’s unquestioned writings, and, despite obvious differences, the presence of significant similarities in style. With this prevalent acceptance, the claims made for Quintilian, the younger Pliny, Suetonius and others (including a hypothetical anonymous author) fall to the ground. The dramatic date of the conversation is widely accepted as A.D. 74-75, on the reasonable interpretation of the phrase sextam stationem as the sixth year of Vespasian’s reign.[1681] The actual time of composition by Tacitus is a much more vexed question; but Gudeman’s contention that it must have preceded the reign of Domitian appears still the most satisfactory. In opposition to this a theory[1682] is maintained that the Dialogus came after the other minor works in Trajan’s reign and that the divergence in literary manner presents little difficulty for the reason that in antiquity style was often not the man himself but a garb which a clever author could don or doff at will. Yet, when all is weighed, the Dialogus would have been a literary anachronism at the end of the first century. It is difficult to discern any occasion for Tacitus, so late as A.D. 98 or 99, when he ranked as one of the foremost speakers of the day, to write a dialogue on decay in oratory and to connect the subject with circumstances over twenty years earlier. Is it credible that a man of nearly forty-five, who was of recognized literary power and, according to hypothesis, already the author of both Agricola and Germania, would profess himself unable by his own effort to treat the causes of decadence directly and so feel obliged to employ the device of dialogue-form? And would a promise to repeat exactly a discussion almost a quarter of a century old strike readers as a plausible one? Another consideration is that the contrast between the sunny spirit of the Dialogus and the oppressive atmosphere of the Agricola makes it hard to assign them to the same period of their author’s life. Tacitus’s own reference to his silence under Domitian throws us back on an earlier date, and, if we fix that date before Domitian’s reign, as A.D. 81, it is not unnatural that Tacitus looking back from the age of twenty-six should have thought himself iuuenis admodum at the supposed period of the dialogue, A.D. 74-75.
For his Dialogus Tacitus drew considerable inspiration from works of Cicero like the Hortensius and the De Oratore. Quintilian’s known Ciceronianism is likely to have influenced Tacitus, whether he studied under the great professor or not; and those who place the composition of the Dialogus after Domitian’s time are entitled, without violating chronology, to believe that it was written with a bearing on the lost treatise by Quintilian De Causis Corruptae Eloquentiae. Tacitus mentions as available in libraries the acta and epistulae collected by Mucianus. He may have used Varro’s Catus de liberis educandis, and, like Quintilian in the Institutio and the pseudo-Plutarch in Περὶ παίδων ἀγωγῆς he probably went back to their common source, a Stoic work by Chrysippos, if we may judge by the array of resemblances set out by Gudeman.[1683]
In the Agricola Tacitus feels that he has a great man for the subject of his monograph: sincerity of admiration, therefore, lifts him above the rhetoric with which he was conversant. His epigrams here, as in his later works, are effective because they show grip of the eternal realities of human nature. So there is no small amount of the universal—of that which is true for all time—in the little book. It has besides the great interest of reflecting truthfully important aspects of the Roman imperial administration.
The introduction (i.-iii.) gives reasons for issuing a biography in an age when satire enjoyed more vogue. Personal memoirs—a class of writing with ancient traditions—must from their nature contend against prejudice, and in the recent reign of terror had been impossible; “for every good art had been exiled so that nothing honourable could cross one’s path anywhere.” But in the changed times of Nerva and Trajan[1684] an enforced silence may at length be broken, though, after past methods of repression, the harm still visible renders it hard to revive literature:
Nevertheless it will not be an uncongenial task to compose, even in a rugged and unpolished style, the record of previous servitude (under Domitian) and a testimony to present blessings. Meantime I issue this book designed to honour my father-in-law, Agricola, and in virtue of its expression of loyal affection it will be, if not commended, at least excused.[1685]
After this preface the author, turning to his theme, relates in six chapters (iv.-ix.) the life of Agricola up to his appointment as legate of Britain, describing his parentage, education, civil offices, and periods of service in Britain before his consulship. Into this earlier narrative Tacitus skilfully weaves characteristic qualities of a hero whose greatness is to culminate in his British victories. The all-important central portion of the work is therefore preceded by two excursuses, a brief description of Britain with its inhabitants (x.-xii.), and a sketch of the past conquests of Rome in the island (xiii.-xvii.). Twenty-one chapters (xviii.-xxxviii.) are then devoted to the main subject of Agricola’s British campaigns during the seven years of his command, from the defeat of the Ordovices and surrender of Mona to the victory over the Caledonians near Mons Graupius and the circumnavigation of the northern coast. Throughout he is depicted as not only a successful commander skilled in strategy but an able administrator, a discerner of men, and himself fair-minded, loyal and modest. The final portion (xxxix.-xlvi.), on Agricola’s recall and last years of retirement in Rome, begins with the ominous note of Domitian’s jealousy (fronte laetus, pectore anxius), and indicates that the ex-general by his unostentatious conduct was fulfilling the part of a good citizen in evil times. The shadow of an emperor’s enmity falls darkly over the later pages; and suspicions of poison are not absent from the fatal illness of A.D. 93. The work closes in a rhetorical apostrophe to the dead man and an epilogue on immortality:[1686]
“Thou wert blest indeed, Agricola, not only in the brilliance of thy life, but also in the timeliness of thy death! They who were present to hear thy last words recount thine unflinching and cheerful welcome of thy fate, as though thou wert doing a man’s best to make a gift of ‘not guilty’ to the emperor. But for me and for thy daughter, beyond the bitterness of having a parent torn away, there is an added sorrow. It was not ours to sit by thy sick-bed, to support thine ebbing strength, and take our fill of looks and embraces. Assuredly we should have received instructions and utterances to imprint in the depths of memory. Here lies our grief, our wound. By the circumstance of so long an absence abroad, he was lost to us four years before. Doubtless, best of parents, with a most loving wife sitting by thee, everything was done abundantly to show respect. Still it was with too few tears that thou wert lamented; in that last day of life there was something for which thine eyes yearned in vain.”
“If there is a land for the spirits of the just, if philosophers are right in holding that great souls are not extinguished with the body, then mayst thou rest in peace! Summon us, thy household, from a paralysing sense of loss and from womanish moanings to the contemplation of thy good qualities. To weep or beat the breast for such were sin. It is by admiration rather than by transient praise, it is by rivalling thine example if nature allows, that we must pay thee respect. That is genuine honour. That is the dutiful regard of one’s nearest kindred. This too I should enjoin on his daughter and his wife so to revere the memory of a father and husband, as to meditate inwardly on his every act and word, and cherish the mould and fashion of his soul rather than of his body. It is not that I think a veto should be set on images fashioned of marble or bronze; but, as with the face of man, so the likeness of the face is but frail and perishable, while the mould of the mind is everlasting—you can preserve and reproduce it, not through a foreign substance and by art, but in your very character. Whatever we loved, whatever we admired in Agricola, abides and will abide in the memories of men, in the eternity of the ages, through the reputation of his deeds. Many an ancient will oblivion overwhelm, as if inglorious and ignoble: Agricola, whose story is thus recorded for posterity, will survive.”
On the literary form and aim of the Agricola a surprising amount has been written.[1687] Biography, an established form of literature among the Romans, was akin to the laudationes funebres pronounced over the dead. Such encomia went back for their artistic pedigree to Greek models like the Agesilaos of Xenophon and the Evagoras of Isocrates, while formal rules for their construction were laid down in rhetorical handbooks. It does not, however, follow that Tacitus—though Gudeman[1688] would have it so—scrupulously conformed to these regulations; for his was not a genius to imprison itself within mechanical bounds. His growing interest in history was little likely to be content with laudation, but prompted him to introduce narrative freely, even to the extent of an enlivening digression such as the adventurous voyage of the Usipian cohort, or an excursus such as that on the geography and tribes of Britain, where the doubtful relevance from the standpoint of biography may be excused on the ground of irresistible didactic impulse. This very blend of narrative with eulogy has tempted some to regard the central portion of the Agricola as one of Tacitus’s preliminary studies destined for incorporation in his contemplated account of Domitian’s reign. But an examination of the sections dealing with Roman governors in Britain will show that in order to suit them for insertion in the Histories radical alterations in the scale of treatment would have been inevitable, especially in recording the services not only of Agricola but of Cerialis and Frontinus. Besides, certain domestic details appropriate in a biographical study would have been out of place in a chapter of imperial history. Both recasting and omissions therefore would have been necessitated. As it stands, the author’s illustration of his father-in-law’s eminence by the story of concrete achievement constitutes a more effective, if more subtle, form of praise than a direct panegyric like Pliny’s upon Trajan. The purely personal element was presumably strong in the lost Republican autobiographies of Scaurus, Rutilius Rufus, Catulus and Sulla, and under the Empire in the Lives of Pomponius Secundus by Pliny the Elder and of Julius Asiaticus by Julius Secundus, as well as in the kindred eulogies upon Paetus Thrasea and Helvidius Priscus. It was the example of Sallust’s Jugurtha and Catilina that served to recommend to Tacitus a more impersonal mode of treatment through an increased admixture of history; and the result is a composite work where both structure and style are, throughout the narrative, affected by Sallustian precedent. Livy’s influence also operates in the delivery of speeches by the Caledonian chief and by his Roman antagonist, while Cicero’s appears particularly in the apostrophe near the close.
As to the purpose of the Agricola, some scholars insist that it is no simple tribute of pietas, as Tacitus’s words suggest, but a political manifesto in favour of moderation under tyranny, and thus a reply to critics of Agricola’s and his own past subservience.[1689] Now, it is true that Tacitus dislikes extremists and commends moderate men, but he does so in all his writings; and no evidence exists to show that he, any more than contemporaries like Pliny, stood after Domitian’s death in special danger of virulent attack for years of non-resistance. The sorrowful admission which he makes[1690] of the shame incurred by forced acquiescence in Domitian’s outrages is very far from the tone, which Gantrelle professes to hear in the Agricola, of “an angry advocate defending a client.” Surely, after all, his attitude had not been different from that of Nerva and Trajan[1691] themselves or the majority of the senatorial class, so that hostility to Tacitus on the ground alleged would logically have been an unreasonable position for all but a few irreconcileables, and even in their case would have logically implied a censure upon two emperors as well.
The Agricola is a book to which one can always return with pleasure. In a venture through its pages one gets, within marvellously brief compass, a memorable revelation of a period in history and a noble personality. The rapid strokes of its prose, though not yet, as a rule, in Tacitus’s most condensed manner, are still sufficient to mark out the author as a great stylist and at the same time a student of humanity. No intelligent reader of the opening three chapters is likely to forget their lurid picture of the despotic villainy from which Rome was just recovering. In this setting begins a tale which holds a world of meaning in its pregnant statements. Take a few as one meets them. With a withering glance at Caligula, Tacitus says of Agricola’s father that “his very virtues won the resentment of Gaius Caesar.” A personal touch lends interest to the reminiscence concerning Agricola himself: “I recollect he used to say that in early youth he might have imbibed the tenets of philosophy too eagerly for a Roman and a senator (quam concessum Romano ac senatori), had not his wise mother curbed his burning and ardent enthusiasm.” Later, the first stirrings of military ambition felt by the young officer in Britain are ominously pronounced to be “unwelcome at an era when sinister misconstruction encountered eminence and a great name was as risky as a bad one” (nec minus periculum ex magna fama quam ex mala). Deep significance underlies the words “for his quaestorship the lot assigned him Asia as province and Salvius Titianus as chief: neither corrupted him” (neutro corruptus est.) Success as a subordinate could not be more pointedly summarized than in the balanced terms: “so by valour in obeying orders, and modesty in his reports, he avoided jealousy without avoiding distinction” (extra inuidiam nec extra gloriam erat). A pretty irony characterizes the reflection on the popular belief that one day Agricola would come back to Britain as governor: “rumour is not always astray: sometimes it actually picks the man” (haud semper errat fama, aliquando et elegit), and no less ironical is the comment on the British adoption of Roman dress, baths and banquets: “with the unsuspecting it all passed for civilization, though it was but a piece of their slavery” (humanitas uocabatur, cum pars seruitutis esset).
We may put his sententiae down to rhetoric, but it is a human rhetoric, based proverb-like on the experience of ages. “Successes everybody claims, failures are laid at one man’s door” (prospera omnes sibi uindicant, aduersa uni imputantur) is an adage that applies to more than soldiering. “Everything unknown passes for the marvellous” (omne ignotum pro magnifico) is a safe declaration for others than the Caledonian chief to make. “It is the way with human nature to hate the man you have wronged” (proprium humani ingenii est odisse quem laeseris) makes a cynical reminder of man’s unfairness to man. With the Agricola, in short, Tacitus has reached his Sallustian period, but already a greater than Sallust is here: in both Agricola and Germania the unique style of the later works can be seen, as it were, in the making.
The Germania, naturally of vital importance for early Teutonic history, belongs to the same year as the Agricola. The northern tribes of Europe had been powerful enemies of Rome for 210 years, Tacitus reckons, from the Cimbrian invasion of 113 B.C. to Trajan’s second consulate[1692] in A.D. 98; “so long has the conquest of Germany been going on” (tam diu Germania uincitur). The title, originally perhaps De Situ Germaniae, has received in the MSS. such expansions as De origine et situ Germanorum or De origine, situ, moribus ac populis Germanorum. There is no parallel in antiquity to this separate study of a people, viewed first generally (i.-xxvii.) in respect of geography, climate, warfare, government, religion, divination, meetings, punishments, chieftains, dwellings, dress, morality, food, drink, tillage, funeral as well as other customs; and then specially (xxviii.-xlvi.), in respect of the various tribes. In this second part Tacitus, starting with western and northern tribes, passes to the Suebi in central Germany and thereafter from the tribes along the Danube and on the east to island folk and folk near the Baltic, ending with Wends (Veneti) and Finns (Fenni) bordering on Sarmatia. One does not need to be an anthropologist to appreciate the attraction of a little treatise so neat in its description and sometimes so biting in its swift comments. All sorts of curiously instructive and diverting details are given about those tall men with fierce blue eyes and red hair (truces et caerulei oculi, rutilae comae). Was it, Tacitus asks, the kindness or anger of the gods that denied them silver and gold, so that, though frontier tribes adopted money, barter remained the trade-custom of the interior? We learn how German women were held in respect and how their near presence was felt to be a stimulus by warriors in battle. We read of the tribesmen’s fixed times for meetings at the new or the full moon, and we recognize the origin of our English “fortnight” and obsolete “sennight” in their non-Roman mode of computing time (nec dierum numerum, ut nos, sed noctium computant). Their observance of the marriage tie, their payment of blood-money to end a feud, their open hospitality, their primitive love of a gift, and reckless dicing up to the final stake of personal freedom, all go to fill the picture. Their liquor fermented from barley or other grain was evidently responsible for much insobriety. “To spend a whole day and night in drinking disgraces no one. Their quarrels, frequent as usual among the intoxicated, are seldom settled with abusive words, but commonly with wounds and bloodshed.”[1693] One of their curious habits was to take counsel at a feast, when the true feelings are disclosed amidst the freedom of the carousal, but to make a decision next day by a sort of appeal from Germans drunk to Germans sober: “they deliberate when they are unable to dissemble, they resolve when they cannot make a mistake” (deliberant dum fingere nesciunt, constituunt dum errare non possunt, xxii.).
Too much ink has been wasted on speculations whether the treatise is fundamentally an ethnographic essay, or a moral lesson for voluptuous Rome, or a political brochure to commend plans of aggression against the Germans.[1694] If we could be sure that the province which Tacitus once governed was in the north, we might then divine the origin of his interest in the tribes across the frontier. Though there is nothing in the treatise that proves personal contact, there is much that might very well have been conveyed by oral inquiry apart from reading. Supposing that his father was the procurator of Belgica named Cornelius Tacitus, the author clearly had opportunities for questioning a useful witness on many points. His own purpose of writing a history of Domitian’s reign during which there had been German campaigns, and Trajan’s absence for the first year of his reign on the German frontier, were enough to attract Tacitus to the subject. But it is most unlikely that these forty-six chapters were designed as part of his future Histories: it is a different thing, however, to view an independent monograph as a preliminary survey of ground some of which he would one day have to cover historically. The only previous authority whom he names is Caesar; but that he drew from more than one source is indicated by his vague plurals, quidam affirmant, quidam uocant. Fragments of Sallust prove that he dealt with German customs; Tacitus may or may not have used him; and the same possibility holds with regard to Livy (the periocha of whose hundred and fourth book gives part of its contents as situm Germaniae moresque), and with regard to Paterculus, Pomponius Mela, and the twenty books on German wars by the elder Pliny.
The best reason assignable for the genesis of the book is that Tacitus found the subject interesting. Had he intended to secure a political effect, such as the advocacy of a forward policy on the frontier, it is unimaginable that he should have left his object a secret to be penetrated by a very few critics with whom all others disagree. His one conceivable thought in representing the Germans as dangerous enemies from the days of the Cimbrian menace must have been approval for the policy of caution such as Trajan favoured.
And if he took up the subject because it interested him, he wrote about it in a way meant to interest the reader. Of course he points out differences between Germans and Romans, and of course he passes caustic remarks, because they are likely to capture the attention. People enjoy them, because they are excellent literature. Even Roman grauitas might permit a smile now and again over a clever gibe at obvious national failings. But this is not to say that Tacitus constructed his essay to be either a monitory or a minatory mirror for Rome. The Germans are not idealized in it. Though Tacitus admires their bravery, loyalty, purity, hospitality and simplicity of life, he does not overlook their faults like idleness, drunkenness, gaming, and unpunctuality in attending popular assemblies. He is entitled, then, with an investigator’s impartiality, to redress the balance by implied or express censure on blemishes in Roman civilization—its absurd deification of women belonging to the imperial family; its demoralizing spectacles; its over-costly banquets and funerals; its ineffectual enactments against exorbitant interest. The widespread laxity of social life at Rome is no doubt before his eyes when he writes “no one in Germany smiles at vice: to corrupt and to be corrupted is not styled up-to-date” (nec corrumpere et corrumpi saeculum uocatur). He has in mind Rome’s carelessness of her offspring when, after recording that infanticide is an infamy in Germany, he adds, “good morals have more force there than good laws elsewhere” (plusque ibi boni mores ualent quam alibi bonae leges, xix.). The social influence of the childless rich is what, like any satirist, he inwardly stigmatizes in the remark that among the Germans there are no advantages in childlessness (nec ulla orbitatis pretia); and it is of the notorious predominance of freedmen at certain epochs that he is thinking when he points out that they are of no importance in German states except in those ruled by kings: “elsewhere the inferiority of the freedman is the proof of freedom” (impares libertini libertatis argumentum sunt). Pronouncements so pithily sarcastic illustrate the same general characteristics of style in the Germania as those noticeable in its immediate predecessor.
In the Historiae Tacitus treated a period of some twenty-eight years (A.D. 69-96) which he had himself lived through.[1695] The work, when complete, embraced six principates, those of Galba, Otho, Vitellius, Vespasian, Titus and Domitian; in others words, its main theme was the Flavian imperial house with the preceding struggle during which three nominees of different sections of the army rose in turn and quickly fell. Beginning with 1st January, 69, it may have been originally meant to continue a history written by Fabius Rusticus. The title is guaranteed by Pliny’s prophecy “I augur (and in augury I am expert) that your Histories are to last,” and by Tertullian’s reference to the Jewish wars related in the fifth book.[1696] What we have left breaks off before the middle of Book V in the second Medicean MS., the sole authority for the text of the Histories, as it is also for that of Annals XI-XVI (a run of books which begin and end in a gap). Since that MS. numbers Histories, Book I as the seventeenth of the combined work from the death of Augustus, there is, prima facie, a presumption that the Annals ended with Book XVI, which, when unmutilated, must have treated about three years and a half (middle of A.D. 65 to end of 68). That, however, was about the length of time covered in Books III, and XIV, and XV. From Jerome we learn that Tacitus’s complete narrative of the Caesars, beginning with Tiberius and ending with Domitian, consisted of 30 volumes.[1697] If, then, the Annals were in 16 books, the Histories had 14. Some assign 18 to the former and 12 to the latter.[1698] This would imply a symmetrical hexadic division, so that six books of the Annals would in that case have treated Tiberius, six Caligula and Claudius, and six Nero.
The composition of the Histories preceded that of the Annals, where Tacitus alludes to having already dealt with Domitian’s times.[1699] Pliny had portions of the Histories sent to him for revision, and occasionally supplied Tacitus with material like the account of the eruption of Vesuvius. References in his letters—we have eleven addressed to Tacitus—enable us to fix the period of publication for the Histories as the years from A.D. 104 to 109.[1700]
One cannot read the first twenty chapters without recognizing that they come from a historian of grasp, who realizes the momentous issues involved in the troublous times which formed his theme. His plan is clearly stated, the dark character of the period foreshadowed, the state of the Empire and feeling in Rome sketched, before he brings on his stage most of the leading personages in the sanguinary contests which followed the death of Nero. Vitellius for the moment receives only passing mention; but one cannot fail, even within the earlier chapters, to be interested in the figures of Galba, Piso, Otho, and Mucianus, who is the champion of the two coming Flavians, already, says Tacitus, marked out for imperial power. Much of the interest, when one pauses to analyse it, is awaked by Tacitus’s never-failing psychological skill. We have almost at once brought home to us old Galba’s obstinate parsimony. “He was undone by his old-fashioned strictness and an excessive severity to which nowadays we are not equal” (I. xviii.). His murder is followed by a fuller estimate, in which his seventy-three years prompt the reflection that, having lived under five emperors, “he had been luckier in the reign of others than in his own.” The estimate then describes his character as one “rather free from vices than distinguished by virtues,” and ends in the well-known terms, “by general consent he would have been declared equal to empire, had he never been emperor” (I. xlix.). Piso’s behaviour at his adoption by Galba is excellently depicted: “not the least change did he show in look or manner: it was as if he had the power rather than the wish to rule” (I. xvii.). Of Otho we are told that “he had spent a slack boyhood and unruly youth; Nero liked him for rivalling his own profligacy” (I. xiii.). In Mucianus we see one better fitted for emperor-maker than for emperor: “he was a blend of dissipation and energy, courtesy and arrogance, good and bad qualities. His self-indulgence was excessive in leisure hours: whenever he was on service, he displayed great qualities.... He was a man who would find it easier to confer imperial power than to hold it” (I. x.).
The summary of the times is impressive in its melancholy force:
The period I am entering upon was rich in disasters, appalling in its battles, and rent asunder by mutinies—even in peace a cruel time. Four emperors were cut off by the sword. There were three civil wars, still more against the alien, and often wars with both characters combined.
After a review of troubles in the Roman world at large, he concentrates on Rome:
The city was wasted by conflagrations, its oldest sanctuaries consumed, and the Capitol itself fired by the hands of citizens. Holy rites were profaned; there was immorality in high places; the sea was full of exiles and its rocks dyed with butcheries. The savagery in the city was more outrageous. Nobility, possessions, magistracies declined or filled, invited accusation: merit meant surest destruction.... Slaves were bribed to betray masters, freedmen to betray patrons: those without enemies were ruined by friends. Yet the age was not so barren in good qualities as not to exhibit fine examples as well. Mothers accompanied sons in flight: wives followed husbands into exile: there were brave kinsfolk and faithful sons-in-law: the fidelity of slaves bade defiance even to torture: there were distinguished men driven to the last necessity, when compulsory death was faced with gallantry, and the last scenes of all rivalled the renowned deaths of antiquity. At no time did more terrible disasters to the Roman people or plainer evidence prove that what the gods care for is not our peace of mind but our chastisement (non esse curae deis securitatem nostram, esse ultionem, I. iii.).
Such was the far from roseate aspect which, on a general survey, the period wore in the eyes of its historian. One tragedy follows another in this historical drama with the inevitability of fate. The prominent characters being as Tacitus depicted them, no other dénouements seem possible. Galba’s meanness was sure to undo him with the praetorians; Otho’s faintheartedness to drive him on suicide; Vitellius’s gluttony to prevent a successful stand against the Flavianists. The secret of the imperial system had now, as Tacitus says, been revealed: emperors could be made elsewhere than in Rome, and the Empire, despite the veil drawn by the plausible fictions of Augustus and his successors, was demonstrated to be essentially a military, not a civil, institution. The pretence of hereditary right to the succession vanished before the decrees of contending armies. If only, then, as documentary evidence for a new epoch of vital significance the Histories must be of lasting value. Book I leaves Otho momentarily in power. Much skill is shown in the employment of speeches to serve historical purposes; for example, Galba’s address to Piso at his adoption is an essay on the duties of an emperor (xv.-xvi.), and the speech put into Otho’s mouth after praetorians and marines have sworn allegiance to him is intended, through an indictment of Galba’s rule, to explain the reasons for its collapse (xxxvii.-xxxviii.). Among many impressive moments in what makes a most readable book is that which immediately precedes the murder of Galba and Piso. Like dramatists ancient and modern, Tacitus divined the power of silence: in the third book it is through the deserted halls of the palace that the doomed Vitellius wanders alone (terret solitudo et tacentes loci, III. lxxxiv.), and in the fourth book there is a memorable picture of a disgraced legion on its gloomy march like a dumb funeral procession (silens agmen et uelut longae exsequiae, IV. lxii.). So here, in the opening book, as Galba with his adopted successor reach the forum, the stage is set for tragedy:
Not an accent came from people or crowd; but looks were those of dismay, and ears turned to meet any sound. There was no uproar, no repose: it was a hush like that of a mighty terror and mighty wrath (I. xl.).
Danger to the new ruler declares itself at once from the legionaries in Germany, who proclaim Vitellius emperor. Otho is therefore compelled to face hostile armies pouring into Italy from the north. This struggle is the main subject of Book II, which, owing to the historian’s constant dramatic sense, begins by directing attention to Vespasian and his son Titus, who are on the alert to challenge the victor in the latest duel. The description of the battle of Betriacum, which left the Vitellianists in possession of the field, is clearly not the work of an expert military historian; but Otho’s speech to his men choosing self-inflicted death as the only honourable course is a fine performance which throws into the light unsuspected traits of nobility in one who had misspent his life. Next comes the turn of the victorious gourmand. Vitellius, in betraying his indecent joy when nearly six weeks after the battle he rode over the field among heaps of putrefying dead, appears with unconscious dramatic irony to be provoking nemesis. Meanwhile that nemesis is drawing near in the shape of the generals who invade Italy on behalf of Vespasian, the nominee of the eastern troops. This fresh struggle for the throne is the subject of the third book—a powerful one, containing such thrilling episodes as the terrible sack of Cremona, the burning of the Capitol at Rome, and the last miserable hours of Vitellius. The fourth book brings the acknowledgement of Vespasian as emperor, and is largely concerned with the bold scheme of the Batavian Civilis to establish a northern empire free from the yoke of Rome. The narrative of his operations continued in part of the next book is, like most of the military history in Tacitus, hard to follow—“more remarkable,” says Gibbon, “for its elegance than perspicuity.”[1701] But the most interesting portions of the fifth book are those in which Tacitus turns to the war with the Jews at the outset of Vespasian’s reign. Unluckily, the account of the siege of Jerusalem is lost, but there is a curious fascination in the ludicrously distorted version of the Israelitish exodus from Egypt and of the mode whereby Moses put an end to the sufferings of his people in the wilderness. In many matters touching Jewish religion Tacitus betrays an amount of Roman prejudice and ignorance more tolerable in a satirist like Juvenal than in an investigator of history. One cannot but think it a pity that, if Josephus was not yet accessible, Tacitus failed to consult the Septuagint.[1702]
Concluding his Histories with the year A.D. 96, Tacitus turned back to deal with a period of over half a century from the death of Augustus in A.D. 14. The title of this narrative of the Julian dynasty through the reigns of Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero, is given in the sole MS. authority for Books I-VI (the first Medicean or Laurentian) as Ab excessu diui Augusti. Since Tacitus, however, several times[1703] refers to his work as Annales, we are justified in using the traditional title. It is at least appropriate to his plan of following the yearly succession of events, although Tacitus, being too great an artist to enslave himself to such bare monotony as is found in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, deviates from chronological order, should his subject appear to demand it.[1704] Thus he relates in sequence two summer campaigns as a relief from miseries in Rome, and elsewhere combines the inter-connected transactions of several years so that they may be more easily remembered.[1705]
A clue to the date of composition is got from a reference to the Persian Gulf as a contemporary limit of the Empire. This held good only between Trajan’s conquest of A.D. 115 and Hadrian’s order for withdrawal on his accession in 117.[1706] That the division into books was the author’s own is plain from allusions like “in prioribus libris.”[1707] The conclusion of a book was often arranged to synchronize effectively with some striking event: thus II ends with the death of Arminius, (liberator haud dubie Germaniae), XI with the fall of the empress Messalina, XII with the poisoning and deification of Claudius, XIV with the cruel fate of Octavia, XV with the crushing of the Pisonian conspiracy. We may guess that the now imperfect Book V culminated in the overthrow of Sejanus. Out of what once amounted to at least sixteen books, there have survived the first four, a fraction of the fifth with more of the sixth, and, although defective at beginning and end, the series from the eleventh to the sixteenth. Interpreted in terms of history, the losses are parts of Tiberius’s reign, the whole reign of the imperial madman Caligula, the reign of Claudius up to A.D. 47, and over two years at the close of Nero’s reign.
Regrettable though these losses are, we possess in the remainder one of the greatest monuments of historical genius—the ripest work of a penetrating critic of affairs who expressed his thoughts in accents that are absolutely unique. Whatever its gloom or its bias, lack of interest cannot be alleged against the broken story of fifty years. In Tiberius’s reign we have placed before us the enigmatic character of the emperor, his varying attitude to Senate and senators, his ultimate withdrawal from Rome, the sinister growth of sycophancy and delation, mutinies theatrically engineered and as theatrically suppressed, the exploits of Germanicus in the North and his untimely death in the East, the fortunes and misfortunes of the elder Agrippina and of the children whom she bore to Germanicus, the ambitious projects of the dangerous minister Sejanus, and the smothering of the third Caesar in his seventy-eighth year. Even so, the record cannot always be thrilling, and we find the historian regretting the necessity for inserting details which may look trivial in spite of their significance and for using matter that may appear monotonous. This is why he breaks off his depressing tale of judicial murders to relate the legendary account of the marvellous phoenix in view of the rumour that it had reappeared in Egypt, and why he suggests that even Eastern troubles with Parthia—not the most attractive theme in his narrative—might afford a welcome change from affairs in Rome. But in fact the variety of topics touched upon within the compass of this single reign is amazing, and much is due to social or economic bearing—extravagance in living, scarcity of corn, financial crises, fires in the city, inundations from the river, increase of slave establishments, Oriental worships, the seductions of astrology, relief from taxation for Asiatic cities ruined by earthquake, the questionable right of sanctuary for criminals and so forth.
A break of about a decade after Tiberius’s death takes us six years into the reign of Claudius, when Messalina was empress and Suillius conducted his dastardly prosecutions. Interested in completing a magnificent aqueduct from Subiaco to the capital, in adding new letters to the alphabet, and in supporting the claims of leading provincials for admission into the Senate, the emperor, himself a puppet in the hands of his freedmen officials, is the last to realize the public scandal caused by Messalina’s misbehaviour. When, thanks to energetic steps taken by the libertus Narcissus, she is despatched, the marriage of Claudius to his niece the younger Agrippina, Germanicus’s daughter, who had previously married Domitius, ushers in a period of intrigue which brings about the poisoning of Claudius and, with the elevation of Agrippina’s son Nero to the throne, the exclusion of Claudius’s own son Britannicus. Nero’s reign begins at Book XIII and is full of incident. His earlier years of high promise are followed by the growth in him of depravity, megalomania and cruelty. At times unpleasant, the chronicle is scarcely ever uninteresting and is often exciting. Among episodes which enchain the attention are Nero’s plots against his imperious mother, his callous repudiation of Octavia to marry his mistress Poppaea, heavy fighting in Armenia, a fresh revolt in Britain, the execution of a whole household of slaves for a murder committed by one, a treasure-hunt in North Africa on a false scent, the emperor’s roystering in the streets by night, his public display of his musical talents, his conduct after the great conflagration in Rome, the ramifications of the ill-starred Pisonian conspiracy, the dramatic deaths of men so different as Seneca and Petronius, and the fate of the daringly independent Stoic senator Paetus Thrasea. By a coincidence, time has cut short the Annals in the midst of the account of Thrasea’s enforced death just after he had severed his arteries and let the blood flow with words which virtually repeat those of the dying Seneca and which Tacitus in a freer reign must have rejoiced to write—“we pour out a libation to Jupiter the Deliverer” (libamus Ioui liberatori).[1708]
To do full justice to the debated subject of the historical sources of Tacitus would require a separate chapter, if not a book. Here it must be lightly touched upon. Let us first note what obligations he specifies, remembering that such acknowledgements were never de rigueur in antiquity. In the Histories he names three authors, Vipstanus Messalla (twice), C. Plinius and Sisenna.[1709] In the Annals he mentions more sources: C. Plinius three times, once as a writer on wars with the Germans, Fabius Rusticus also three times, Cluvius twice, Corbulo[1710] once, Tiberius’s orations, a letter from Tiberius to the Senate (quoted in part, perhaps from a previous historian rather than from the acta senatus), the commentarii Agrippinae filiae, acta diurna, and commentarii (or acta) senatus.[1711] But he is often content with vaguer references, implying a plurality, and sometimes a conflict, of authorities: e.g. inuenio apud quosdam auctores or celeberrimos auctores habeo or tradunt plerique.[1712] Clearly there was a large amount of potential material—literary works, public or private records, oral tradition, and, for the period of the Histories, the author’s own observation. It could not all, however, be either equally available or equally valuable for the historian. Among different sorts of records, the commentarii principales were probably not accessible to him, the acta senatus could not always be trusted, and the acta diurna contained too much petty detail. In one passage[1713] he mentions the circulation of fictitious speeches and decrees purporting to be genuine acta senatus; he was, then, on his guard against forgeries, and we may imagine that in some cases his account of proceedings in the Senate was a combination of the “Hansard” of the day with oral tradition.[1714] In another passage, relating to Nero’s amphitheatre, he disdainfully relegates to the “Daily Register,” or acta diurna, all details of foundations and timber-work as beneath the dignity of history.[1715] Fortunately, although here he seems to imply that the concern of history is with “illustrious events,” he at once proceeds to record the strengthening of two colonies by drafts of veterans, a money dole to the people, a payment into the exchequer, and the remission of a 4 per cent tax on slaves for sale—most of these being facts of social or economic import rather than res illustres.
Over and above authors whom he actually mentions, we know of several who might have provided material. For the period of the Histories there were Cluvius, Vespasian in his memoirs, and Antonius Julianus; and for the Annals the elder Seneca, Paterculus, Tiberius in his autobiography, Aufidius Bassus, Servilius Nonianus, Suetonius Paulinus, and Claudius. But in all this there are no more than possibilities. Indeed, throughout the whole question of Tacitus’s sources, one is always brought back to a baffling uncertainty due to the loss of even such sources as he specifies.[1716] One avenue which at first sight promised to lead to something definite was the investigation into the striking coincidences between Tacitus’s Latin and Plutarch’s Greek in their handling of Galba and Otho.[1717] There have been upholders of the theory that in this case Plutarch used Tacitus; but the general conviction is that both used the same authority, and apparently with considerable closeness.[1718] Beyond that, in spite of much ingenuity in argument, nothing tangible has been attained. A wide diversity of opinion prevails on the identification of this particular source. No less uncertainty has resulted from the attempts at assessing Tacitus’s debt to his authorities in general and his method of employing them. Nissen, and after him Fabia, would have us believe that Tacitus’s method was to follow closely the subject-matter of a single author for large tracts of his work, neglecting secondary sources (especially in composing the Histories), and devoting his attention to the embellishment of his borrowed material so as to produce a composition highly effective from the standpoint of style. It is as difficult now, as it was when Boissier first criticised Nissen’s hypothesis, to accept an attitude which would imply a slavish lack of independence in Tacitus, and a dishonest pretence of consulting several authors at a time. The idea does not agree with Tacitus’s known desire to get first-hand knowledge, as proved by the letters in which he secured from the younger Pliny information about the eruption of Vesuvius. In the entire absence of the original sources, there is the utmost difficulty in comprehending how one can comfortably assert that Tacitus drew from a single main source for large tracts of his work, or how one can claim to identify the source as the elder Pliny for the Histories, Aufidius Bassus for earlier parts of the Annals, and Cluvius Rufus for the reign of Nero.
Modern historical research demands methods of rigorous investigation which it is futile to expect in Tacitus. He will leave a matter of debate unsettled, and the uninitiated might wonder whether this is due to impartiality or natural hesitancy or an academic suspension of judgement. His criterion for decision in face of a conflict of evidence was usually what he deemed probable in the circumstances. The subjectivity of such a test, while it removes him from the category of strictly scientific historians, at the same time makes it important to note that personal outlook on the world, on politics and on history, which was certain to colour his interpretation of facts. Broadly his leanings are Stoic, though he wavers between freewill and predestination. At one time his language postulates an overmastering fate; at another it ascribes an event to the combined operation of a transcendental fate and human agency;[1719] at yet another it betrays a doubt whether “mortal affairs proceed by the unchangeable necessity of fate or by chance” (in incerto iudicium est fatone res mortalium et necessitate immutabili an forte uoluantur, Ann. VI. xxii.). If his views of the world are chaotic,[1720] he is not the only great writer who has found its mystery indefinable. He well realised how the adversity of the good and the prosperity of the wicked lent plausibility to the Epicurean creed that the gods take no interest in mankind (non denique homines dis curae, VI. xxii.); for himself, his melancholy observation of life made him not an atheist but a believer in the frequent wrath of heaven.[1721] Yet even this was a matter of the prevailing mood, for he was ready to think it a kindly intervention of providence that vouchsafed a brilliant starlit night with the calm of a tranquil sea, as it were to unmask the crime of Nero’s attempt to drown his mother.[1722] With all this is mixed up a share of superstitious credulity towards prodigies and divination; but the essential point for us is that Tacitus, on the whole, believed in some law or principle which holds good among historical occurrences and so gives meaning to the quest after a cause. Early in the Histories he says:
Before composing my purposed work, I intend to survey the condition of the capital, the temper of the armies, the attitude of the provinces, and what made for strength or weakness anywhere in the world, so that one may recognize not merely the incidents and issues of events, which are mainly affairs of chance, but also their meaning and causes.[1723]
With such expectations Tacitus could feel confidence in the dignity of history[1724] and in its power to instruct the future:
My design is not to set forth all motions made in the Senate, but only those which were remarkable for nobility or by reason of notorious infamy. This I consider the outstanding function of history to save excellence from oblivion and to confront evil words and evil deeds with the menace of reprobation from posterity (ne uirtutes sileantur utque prauis dictis factisque ex posteritate et infamia metus sit, Ann. III. lxv.).
Towards this aim at teaching by example, character is of vital importance; and among the causes of events which most engage Tacitus’s attention are human temperament and motives; so that, whatever the defects which made him in Mommsen’s eyes the most unmilitary of historians, he is at the same time one of the most psychological.
In theory Tacitus was republican, and in his writings a laudator temporis acti, whether he had to contemplate the pre-imperial state or its eloquence, its education, its historians. Yet he admitted that circumstances had rendered inevitable the concentration of power in the hands of a single individual.[1725] The old free republic, to him ideally preferable,[1726] could never come again.[1727] The duty of the citizen was therefore to pray for good emperors, but put up with such as one had,[1728] and to choose the safe path between brusque insolence and unseemly toadying (inter abruptam contumaciam et deforme obsequium, Ann. IV. xx.). We have noted in the Agricola his admiration for moderate aristocrats and his disapproval for intransigent members of the opposition who concluded a defiant parade of independence with a theatrically ostentatious death (ambitiosa morte, Agr. xlii.). Some consolation was obtainable from the fact that emperors like Nerva or Trajan could, he points out, square the principate with freedom. But, after all, the Empire remained for him a pis aller. With some emperors he could not but associate despotic cruelty, and with the period which he himself had to treat “barbarous edicts, perpetual prosecutions, treacherous friendships, the ruin of the innocent, the same causes producing the same consequences while one meets only a surfeit of sameness (obuia rerum similitudine et satietate).”[1729] It is nothing short of a triumph of intellect and art that, insisting as he does upon his depressingly sombre theme, Tacitus should still be able to captivate his reader. The reader must, however, be content to be thus held while he is subtly indoctrinated;[1730] for dispassionate history is not to be expected from a hostile judge.
The ineradicable prepossession in Tacitus is his conviction that Rome had fallen on evil days. No less than in the Histories, the opening chapters in the Annals have a sombre tone as of one looking back upon a long period of national woe. The rapid conspectus, in a sentence or two, of the evolution of Roman history towards one-man-rule closes in a glimpse at a world outworn with civil strife and subject to an emperor. Immediately one breathes an asphyxiating atmosphere of oppression and adulation which Tacitus feels must have impaired history. The deeds of the old Roman people, he remarks with pride, were recorded by famous historians, and even under the newly established Empire the Augustan age produced fine intellects capable of assessing and transmitting its achievements, had not court influence militated against the free utterance of opinion. But with later reigns came a blighting terrorism, so that, for the times of Tiberius, Gaius, Claudius and Nero, contemporary evidence was vitiated by dishonest flattery, and subsequent criticism vitiated by the reaction of loathing. From such extremes of feeling—from partiality as from bitterness—Tacitus at least claims to be exempt.[1731] He proceeds to note the concentration of supreme power in the person of Augustus and the acquiescence of the provinces in an imperial control which guaranteed them protection against the worst rapacity of arbitrary officialdom. If this latter fact be viewed as a bright spot in the new system, the dynastic plans of Augustus to support his disguised despotism by recognized heirs are described as clouded by a series of misfortunes. The death of the young Marcellus, the untimely ends of the “princes of the youth,” Gaius and Lucius Caesar, “cut off by destiny or by their stepmother Livia’s treachery,” and the unfair banishment of the aged emperor’s only grandson, Agrippa Postumus, served in turn, through a tragically entangled network of intrigue, to open for Livia’s son Tiberius the path to the succession.
Such is the way in which the stage is cleared for the entrance of the figure around which the battle concerning Tacitus’s credibility has been most fiercely fought.[1732] It is noticeable that in several points this introduction anticipates the summary in which he takes leave of the life and character of Tiberius at the close of the sixth book. That summary divides his life into phases, and implies that a signal deterioration took place in his final years of seclusion on the island of Capri, when, throwing off the habitual mask of hypocrisy, he came out in his true colours (remoto pudore et metu suo tantum ingenio utebatur). During a first perusal of the Annals one is so far overmastered by the accumulated effect attained by reprobation and innuendo as to take Tiberius for an execrable though accomplished tyrant. The author’s skill whereby he first disarms suspicion with a profession of impartiality, and thereafter loses few opportunities of imputing sinister motives to the emperor, bears its intended fruit in the reader’s willingness to accept the historian’s hostility for independence. By a train of devices one is almost unconsciously enrolled as a sympathizer with the aristocratic opposition to empire. But in time, upon reflection, there arise questionings. On a broad survey of facts, how came it that the Roman Empire of the first century was on the whole so well managed and so contented, if it was cursed with such monsters for its governors as Tiberius, Caligula, Nero and Domitian were traditionally represented to have been? And as to Tiberius in particular—whose portrayal is the great test for the veracity of Tacitus—how came it that his competence as ruler and his advanced years could stand the strain of the prolonged debauchery which is alleged to have disgraced his retirement at Capri?
The rehabilitation of an over-maligned Tiberius, however, runs a risk of going so far as to do injustice to Tacitus in turn. Tacitus can scarcely be charged with having invented libels upon the emperor: for everything he most likely had some authority, and he believed in his own impartiality. What can be pressed against him is the indictment that his own imperfectly realized prejudice debarred him from weighing judicially his information, drawn, as much of it was, from authorities with strong senatorial sympathies. Tacitus had no canon of the credible and incredible where his partisan passions were concerned. It is not, therefore, surprising that great inconsistencies can be pointed out in Books I-VI of the Annals. Reports of contemporary comments do not necessarily make historical evidence; and whether Tacitus did or did not set them down in malice, it was in malice that many of them were conceived. The suspicion is not an unreasonable one that he drew from tainted sources, like the memoirs of the younger Agrippina, which would be decidedly anti-Tiberian in tone. If we consider the alleged orgy of sensuality by Tiberius on Capri, the story may have originated in gossip provoked by the ruler’s impenetrable seclusion on the island, or, according to another guess, it may have been a legacy from scurrilous writings designed to damage his moral character during his previous retirement in Rhodes, and then, if submitted confidentially to Augustus, possibly retained among state-papers to which a century later both Tacitus and Suetonius had access. Whatever the genesis of such tales, Tacitus’s fault lay not in creating slanders but in failing to reject them critically. It is true that Suetonius, in ascribing loathsome profligacy to Tiberius, descends into details which Tacitus would pass over in lofty disdain;[1733] but Tacitus ought to have noted the inherent unlikelihood of this particular scandal, which is not substantiated by anything in writers like Philo and Josephus. The view that Tacitus of set purpose draws Tiberius with the conventional qualities of the tyrant in rhetoric (such as cruelty, injustice, suspicion, craft, lust, and anguish of soul) seems too mechanical a conception. What one can admit is that Tacitus is not above visiting upon Tiberius the faults of some of his worst successors, and that just as Velleius, an admiring rhapsodist, overstresses his hero’s merits, so Tacitus, although he records examples of the emperor’s ability, wisdom, fairness, and even generosity, allows prejudice so to blind him to many commendable traits in Tiberius that he paints him too black. Tacitus had no more unfortunate limitation than the inability to think imperially: he never grasped the stupendous achievement involved in Augustus’s reorganization of the Empire, and he betrays a cardinal weakness when he misjudges Tiberius for his statesman-like adherence to the Augustan policy of consolidation in preference to aggrandisement.
The Latin of Tacitus, considered from the standpoint of vocabulary, grammar and syntax, bears the impress of his age; but no mere analysis of language can estimate the qualities of his style.[1734] Words were for him instruments handled with an individual touch of genius which makes his Latin different from that of all other writers. Careful investigators have examined his language and recorded their results in books or pamphlets written in Latin and various modern languages: here a few leading aspects may be noted. It has become almost traditional, and it remains sensible, to approach the subject under Bötticher’s headings of brevity, variety, and poetic colour. Brevity is so inseparable from Tacitus that the schoolboy recognizes it as a difficulty to be overcome. Verbs and connectives are freely dropped, and puzzlingly elliptical bits of syntax occur.[1735] It was a condensation reached by a long process of experiment in thought and expression—an abrupt terseness pushed sometimes to the verge or over the verge of obscurity. The developed manner of the Annals, which is in strong contrast to what some might call the cloying amplitude of Ciceronian prose, indicates that Tacitus has travelled far from the comparative fullness of his own earliest work. Though he can at times employ the period with fine effect, his sentence-structure in general represents a reaction from the Ciceronian. In Tacitus, as in Virgil, thought or feeling is compressed into chosen expressions of a brevity so profoundly significant that they capture the imagination. The soul which he breathed into prose makes his words live: almost unbidden, they revisit the memory, haunting it with their ironic, melancholy, often tragic power. One does not easily forget sayings like “Heaven’s wrongs are heaven’s concern” (deorum iniurias dis curae, Ann. I. lxxiii.), or “shortlived and ill-starred are the darlings of the Roman people” (breues et infaustos populi Romani amores, II. xli.). His terseness is at its most effective pitch in his epigrams and summaries of character. Again and again the finished neatness of the Latin seems to elude rendering. Take the picture of the inscrutability of Tiberius:
His words were always halting and mysterious, but, now that his aim was the thorough concealment of his feelings, they became more than ever a tangled maze of uncertainty (suspensa semper et obscura uerba: tunc uero nitenti ut sensus suos penitus abderet, in incertum et ambiguum magis implicabantur, Ann. I. xi.).
A deep glance into a warped nature is conveyed in the thumbnail sketch of a martinet’s cruelty—“an old hand at hard military tasks and the crueller for having suffered” (uetus operis ac laboris et eo immitior quia tolerauerat, I. xx.). The policy of taking no notice of personal insults is inimitably expressed—“calumnies wither up, if ignored: resentment gives them seeming recognition” (spreta exolescunt: si irascare, agnita uidentur).
Variety is a phase of his independence. He gives changed meanings to words,[1736] indulges in novel extensions of idiom (e.g. pudet dictu, Agr. xxxii.); and, with a passion for the irregular, departs from the normal symmetry of expression where there is a balance in thought.[1737] It is not surprising that a long list is available of words which occur only, or for the first time, in Tacitus, such as adcumulator, adulatorius, concertator, eiectamentum, imitamentum, inlacessitus, instigator, instigatrix, peramoenus, regnatrix. In keeping with this goes a preference for the less usual form of a word, claritudo and firmitudo rather than claritas and firmitas;[1738] the form in -men like fragmen, medicamen, tegumen, where the commoner prose forms end in -mentum; and conversely, those in -mentum, like cognomentum and leuamentum rather than cognomen and leuamen. The so-called Graecisms are to be set down to the same pursuit of variety, although linguistically they are mainly not so much direct borrowings from the Greek as inheritances from native Latin idiom developed under Greek influence,[1739] or actual imitations of previous Roman writers: thus what is termed the Greek attracted dative (quibus bellum uolentibus erat, Agr. xviii.) had already appeared in Sallust and Livy, both of whom exerted influence upon Tacitus.
The poetic colouring is ubiquitous. It is noticeable in poetic, and especially Virgilian, words, which he often shares with prose-writers of the Silver Age as a result of the predominance of poetry in academic education. Examples are adolere (also in Columella), breuia (“shallows,” Virgil and Lucan), crebrescere (Quintil. and younger Pliny), densere (Lucret. and Virg.), exspes (Hor.), gestamen (elder Pliny), meatus (Lucr., Virg., younger Pliny), regnator (Plaut., Virg.). It is noticeable also in turns of phrase which recall Virgil, in frequent metaphors, and in personifications such as “the informers’ eloquence dripping with blood” (sanguinantis eloquentiae, Dial. xii.); “nowhere is the sea more widely a queen” (nusquam latius dominari mare, Agr. x.); “a night that threatens and will break forth into crime” (noctem minacem et in scelus erupturam, Ann. I. xxviii.).[1740]
Partly poetic association, partly a desire for variety sent Tacitus back sometimes to old-fashioned words, though, in spite of his liking for Sallust, he is more of an innovator than an archaizer. He occasionally employs Plautine words like mercimonium or truculentia, and by a kindred impulse substitutes the simple verb for the compound, e.g. cernere for decernere and firmare for affirmare. But he does not resort to the antique in the manner of Apuleius and Gellius later in his century. Like one of the interlocutors in his Dialogus, he recognized the current demand for novel smartness and poetic turns “unstained by the rust (ueterno) of Accius and Pacuvius, but taken from the sacred treasury of Horace, Virgil or Lucan.”[1741] It is an unwarrantable assumption to regard his hexametric opening in the Annals (urbem Romam a principio reges habuere) as a citation from Ennius.[1742]
Yet to scrutinize his language is only to note the mechanism of his style. What most matters is the use to which he could put his words, and his achievement of imperishable effects through his mastery over vividness, irony and an elevation of style too dignified to tolerate lapses into the petty or the repulsive. Many of his qualities, like his epigrams, sprang from rhetoric: it would be idle to pretend that he is free from affectation, but it is an affectation tempered with sound sense that never allows him to be carried into exuberance. Brilliant in his brevity, Tacitus does not depend for his fame solely on his bright flashes. His style is one of sustained power which does not admit triviality or dullness. “Le plus grand peintre de l’antiquité,” as Racine called him, showed himself a master of portraiture and description when his theme was a character, a conflict, a mutiny, a disaster, a plot, a trial, a debate. All is rapidity and the interest never flags. His originality is a phase of his intense subjectivity. He leaves his imprint on his writings because, as we have seen, he abandons the normal for a surprising terseness and for daring novelties, and because his vigour of expression reflects his realistic conception of the men and events which made his material.
Strange vicissitudes mark the history of Tacitus’s posthumous fame.[1743] Notwithstanding Pliny’s confidence in his friend’s literary immortality, the immediately succeeding generations showed faint interest in his writings. He was not spicy enough in detail for admirers of the Suetonian type of biography, not quaint enough in style for the archaizing school later in the century, not appreciative enough of either Christians or Jews to please the Fathers of the Church. Even his monograph on Agricola seems to have been little read, and grammarians do not quote him. In the final quarter of the third century, the emperor Tacitus claimed relationship with the historian, and, in alarm lest his works should be lost lectorum incuria, issued orders for the multiplication of copies, making it compulsory for libraries to possess them.[1744] In the fourth century it was the fond ambition of Ammianus Marcellinus, the last considerable historian in antiquity, to prove himself another Tacitus by continuing his works in thirty-one books (of which the last eighteen survive) on the Empire from the reign of Nerva to that of Valens. We can prove that Tacitus was known to the Aquitanian presbyter Sulpicius Severus, to Augustine’s Spanish friend Orosius, and to Sidonius Apollinaris; but when Cassiodorus in the sixth century, on the subject of amber, refers to “a certain Cornelius” as having mentioned it, we realize how misty his reputation had grown.[1745] That the Carolingian period had access to the Germania and the earlier books of the Annals can be demonstrated from the works of Robert of Fulda in the second half of the ninth century. Thereafter silence falls for some centuries until we find Boccaccio possessed of a manuscript, perhaps identical with our “Second Medicean,” containing the later books of the Annals with the Histories. The facts concerning the arrival at Rome from Germany in 1455 of the sole source for the minor works and the discovery at Corbey in 1509 of the “First Medicean,” the sole source for the earlier part of the Annals, are thrilling reminders how near the world came to losing Tacitus. All that we possess of him has been available in print since 1515, and has interested generations of politicians, historians, and essayists from Macchiavelli, Guicciardini and Montaigne onwards. When one reads of French revolutionaries relying upon Tacitean doctrine, one is amused to think that Milton had to rebut Salmasius’s misreading of him as an upholder of autocratic rule.
His influence upon early English drama should not be forgotten. It may be illustrated by Ben Jonson’s Sejanus His Fall, first acted in 1603 (when Shakespeare played a part), but not published till 1605. The playwright’s address “To the Readers” acknowledges his debt to Tacitus, Dio and Suetonius; and the same three sources were drawn upon some years later for the anonymous play of Nero. Abroad, Tacitus’s stimulus towards dramatic production is visible under Louis XIV in Corneille’s Otho and Racine’s Britannicus; towards the end of the eighteenth century in Alfieri’s Ottavia; and about the beginning of the nineteenth in Marie-Joseph Chénier’s Tibère and Arnault’s Germanicus.
His style militated against popularity with humanists so strictly trained on the norm of Ciceronianism as to be unable to see the merits of a different type of prose; but one most interesting phase of his influence is traceable in Justus Lipsius, whose edition of Tacitus in 1574 was a masterpiece of scholarship. Lipsius’s editorial labours transformed his Latin from Ciceronian into Tacitean and, in establishing his claim to breadth of literary taste, at the same time bore witness to the vital power transmitted by the great historian of the early empire.