Chapter IV: Later Writers (1)

AULUS GELLIUS: THE ‘NOCTES ATTICÆ’—MACROBIUS: THE ‘SATURNALIA’—SERVIUS
ON VIRGIL—OTHER COMMENTATORS—AUSONIUS—THE ‘ANTHOLOGIA LATINA’—THE
LATIN RHETORICIANS—RUTILIUS LUPUS, ETC.—CURIUS FORTUNATIANUS, HIS
CATECHISM—MARIUS VICTORINUS ON CICERO—OTHERS—MARTIANUS CAPELLA.

The period from Nero to Hadrian is not merely the central and most important period of Latin criticism, but it contains a proportion altogether disproportionate of the bulk as of the value of Latin contributions to the subject. We must, however, complete our view of that subject, before summing up its general characteristics, with another chapter surveying the yield of the second, third, and fourth—perhaps, in view of the uncertainty of date of Martianus, we should add the fifth—centuries. The crop, if not very abundant, or of the very greatest value, is neither very scanty nor very uninteresting. It shall consist, in the specimens of it which we can afford to examine, first of the two famous and by no means unamusing miscellanists, the authors of the _Noctes Atticæ_ and the _Saturnalia_; then, by an easy transition, of the commentators and scholiasts represented by their prior Servius, himself an interlocutor in the Macrobian symposium; in the third place, of a poetical contingent, much less important indeed than that furnished by the satirists from Horace to Martial, but not quite insignificant; and lastly, of the technical rhetoricians, ending with one of their latest representatives, but perhaps the most interesting of all, Martianus Capella. The chapter will thus, at least, not lack variety.

It would be difficult to have a better example of the indisposition of the Latin mind towards literary criticism proper, [Sidenote: _Aulus Gellius: the_ Noctes Atticæ.] than that which is afforded by the famous _Noctes Atticæ_ of Aulus Gellius.[421] We know nothing of this good person except that he was probably of more or less pure Roman descent, that he probably lived for the most part of his life at Rome and at Athens in the early second century, that he was a friend of Herodes Atticus, probably knew Plutarch, and was extremely intimate with, and a great admirer of, the rhetorician Favorinus. The well-known miscellany which he has left us, and which, in purporting to give the results of study or conversation in an Attic country-house, has been for seventeen hundred years so fruitful in imitations—mother, indeed, of a family sometimes a great deal fairer than herself—is an amusing book and a valuable, because it preserves for us a great number of quotations from lost authors or books, because its farrago of matter is good pastime, and not least because of a certain Pepysian or Boswellian quality in its author. But though, amid its jumble of things ethical, physical, logical, legal, and, above all, philological, perhaps the larger part is occupied with literature or at least with books, it is quite astonishing how small is the proportion that can be called literary criticism, and how rudimentary and infantine even that small proportion is. Gellius had nearly all the qualities and acquirements of the dictionary-maker; he was interested in etymology, was a most exact and careful purist in the definition and usage of words, and evidently prided himself on his collections of illustrative phrases and passages.[422] But almost invariably it must be said of him that _hæret in litera_, or, if he escapes that adhesion, that he gives himself over to the substance and meaning, not to the literary form and art, of what he quotes and studies. In all the nineteen or twenty books of his work there are probably not nineteen or twenty pages of real literary criticism; and where he does give us any it is of the “strawiest” character. Take, for instance, his comparison (ii. 23) of the Greek and Latin comic writers, and especially of some passages of Cæcilius with their originals in Menander. In preferring the Greek he is, of course, quite right; but it is noteworthy that he can hardly render any specific reason for his preference. He says, vaguely if truly, that the Latins seem low and sordid beside the wit and brilliancy of the Greeks, that Cæcilius appears stupid and frigid by Menander. But as to detail he prudently adds, _nihil dicam ego quantum differat_; and, less prudently transgressing this rule later, confines himself wholly to the matter, accusing the Roman of leaving out a _simplex et verum et delectabile_ remark of the Greek. And if he comes a little nearer in praising (or making his favourite Favorinus praise) the _flavum marmor_ of Ennius, it is still pretty clear that he does this merely or mainly from the side of the dictionary-maker, pleased at getting a light on the exact meaning of _flavus_. Although to our ears his preference (vi. 20) of “Ora” to “Nola” (in the passage which Virgil is said to have altered from a rather petty spite to the Nolans), “because it makes a sweet hiatus” with _Vesevo_ at the end of the preceding line, may seem all wrong, the principle is æsthetic if the application is not. But, as a rule, we shall find that his critical opinions, where they are not concerned with purely verbal matters, are always decided by moral, philosophical, or in some other way extra-literary considerations. Even in an extremely interesting passage towards the end (xix. 9) where he makes _Græci plusculi_ attack the Spanish-Latin rhetor Antonius Julianus[423] on the score of the inferiority of Roman to Greek erotic poets, and gives the passages with which Julianus retorted, the chief interest for us is that even the Greeks except Catullus to some extent, and Calvus, from their censure. For there is little or nothing but logomachy to be got out of the condemnation of Hortensius as _invenustus_ and Cinna as _illepidus_.

Footnote 421:

Ed. Hertz, 2 vols., Leipsic, 1886.

Footnote 422:

Cf. the amusing chapter (vi. 17) in which he tells with innocent pride
how he overwhelmed _quempiam græculum_ with apt citations on the word
_obnoxius_. Gellius is not the only critic who has allowed parallel
passages to choke his critical faculties, or has endeavoured to make
up by the former for the absence of the latter.

Footnote 423:

This Antonius Julianus, from another notice (xx. 9), seems to have
been a person of slightly florid but by no means bad taste. For
Gellius tells us that he used to say his ears were delighted and
caressed by the coined words in the first mimiambic of C. Matius,[a]
such as _Columbulatim_, which is certainly not a little charming and
very Caroline. After all, the famous advice to regard and avoid an
unusual word, _tanquam scopulum_ (which, by the way, Gellius gives
us), is fatal to poetry.

Footnote a:

The fragments of this author may be found either in the sixth volume
of Baehrens’s _Poetæ Latini Minores_, or in the appendix to Otto
Crusius’s edition of Herondas (Leipsic, 1898). He has another word
which Herrick might have Englished, _albicascit_.

This same imputation of logomachy is hard to clear from the dispute in x. 3, whether, though Caius Gracchus is undoubtedly _fortis et vehemens_, it is or is not intolerable that he should be deemed _severior_, _amplior_, _acrior_, than Cicero. If Gellius had kept to the same words, and had said _fortior_ and _vehementior_, the observation just made might seem unkind; but as it is, one seems to be dropping into the well-known jargon of our own times, and of all times, to be hearing one reviewer asserting that Johnson is “alert” and another replying that Thompson is “nimble,” or opposing the “poignancy” of Smith to the “swiftness” of Brown. But the attention to words certainly comes in better when the critic objects to the use, in an otherwise _non sane incommode_ adapted version from Euripides by Ennius, of _ignobiles_ and _opulenti_ for ἀδοξοῦντες and δοκοῦντες. XII. 2, however, is a good _locus_ for us in more ways than one. It opens with a sketch of the difference of opinion about Seneca in the age succeeding his own, a difference of which Quintilian had, a little earlier, given us an inkling. “Some,” says Gellius, “think of him as of a most unprofitable writer, one not worth reading, because they hold his style vulgar and hackneyed, his matter and opinions distinguished either by inept and empty haste (_impetu_) or by frivolous and Old-Bailey (_causidicali_) wire-drawing, his erudition vernacular and plebeian, and possessing nothing either of the dignity or the grace of the classics. Others, while not denying that he has little grace of phrase, maintain that his matter lacks neither information nor teaching power, and that he has no unhappy gravity and severity in castigating vice.” He himself will give no general censure, but consider Seneca’s opinion of Cicero and Ennius and Virgil. This “consideration,” according to his wont, is rather a string of quotations with objurgatory epithets than a regular criticism. One may not agree with Seneca or one may (there are certainly some who would indorse his confession and avoidance of Cicero’s faults in the words _non ejus sed temporis vitium_). But the words which Gellius himself uses—_insulsissime, homo nugator, inepti et insubidi[424] hominis joca_—surely require some little argument to justify them, and this argument is what Gellius never gives. We may thank him, however, for the criticism as well as for the anecdote preserved (xiii. 2) in the story of the meeting of the tragic poets Pacuvius and Accius at Tarentum, in the extreme old age of the former. Pacuvius had asked his young guest and craftsfellow to read his tragedy of _Atreus_, and, after the reading, praised it as sonorous and grand, but perhaps a little harsh and austere. “It is so,” said the junior, “but I am not very sorry, for I hope to improve. It is the same in wits as in fruits: the hard and harsh mellow and sweeten, but those that are at first flabby, and soft, and moist, do not ripen but rot. I thought it best to have something in my genius for time and age to mitigate.” A sound principle, though not quite a universal one, as one may see in studying a certain life-work which ranges from “Claribel” to “Crossing the Bar.”

Footnote 424:

A Gellian synonym or variant for _ineptus_, not found in Augustan
Latin.

He is in his more meticulous moods when (xiii. 18) he accuses Plato of misquotation and Euripides of plagiarism; but a couple of chapters later a set discourse on euphony, starting from a saying of Valerius Probus, seems to promise well. Some one had asked Probus whether it was better to use the terminations _em_ or _im_, _es_ or _is_, for the accusative, where both occur. _Aurem tuam interroga_, said Probus, which is no doubt the conclusion of the whole matter. But his questioner, either foolish or dogged, asked how he was to do this, and Probus replied, “As Virgil did when he wrote _Urbisne invisere Cæsar_ but _Urbes habitant magnas_.” Nor are we sorry to hear that when the questioner still bored on, saying that he could not understand why one should be better in one place and another in another, Probus retorted, “_You_ need not trouble yourself; it will do _you_ no harm whatever you use.” _Prope inclementer_, says Gellius (“Served him right,” most of us will say). But he goes on to accumulate some other instances of this application of the rule of euphony, and perhaps here draws as near to true criticism as he ever does. Nor is he wrong, though he may be fanciful, in deciding in regard to certain almost literal Virgilian imitations of Homer, that the Greek is _simplicior et sincerior_, Virgil νεωτερικώτερος _et quodam quasi ferrumine immisso fucatior_.[425]

He may strain the word again too much, when he bestows a page on the difference of _multis hominibus_ and _multis mortalibus_ (xii. 28), but he recovers esteem when in xiv. 6 we find him rejecting, not without contumely, contributions to his _Noctes_ on the questions “Who was the first grammarian?” and “Why Telemachus did not nudge his bedfellow Pisistratus but kicked him?” &c., &c. _Properans reddidi_, says he, with the shudder one can fancy, though, to tell the truth, he does himself “something grow to” this kind of disease.

Footnote 425:

“Hobbledehoyish, and got up with inserted expletives.” _Ferrumen_, a
post-classical word, is almost exactly the French _cheville_.

We may close this anthology of the Gellian criticisms with some account of one of the most elaborate—a discourse of Favorinus on Pindar and Virgil.[426] After quoting the Roman poet’s traditional saying about himself—that he brought forth his verses as a bear does her cubs, licking them slowly and busily into shape—he points out that the facts exactly bear out the description, and that certain verses, not having undergone the process of licking, are very inferior to the others. Among these unlicked cubs, it seems, Favorinus would place the Etna passage. Even Pindar himself, whom Virgil followed, is, the critic thinks, _ipso insolentior tumidiorque_ in the place; but Virgil’s verse is such that Favorinus calls it “begun, not made.” And, the two passages having been cited in full, he indulges in the following drastic verbal censure: “At the very beginning, Pindar, paying more attention to the truth, said what was the fact, and a matter of ocular demonstration, that Etna smoked by day and flamed by night. But Virgil, laboriously seeking noisy-sounding words, confuses the two. The Greek says plainly that fountains of fire are belched forth, and rivers of smoke flow, and yellow, curling volumes of flame are borne down to the shores of the sea like fiery snakes; but this fellow of ours, choosing to interpret ῥόον καπνοῦ αἴθωνα by _atram nubem turbine piceo et favilla fumantem_, makes a crass and clumsy mixture, and translates the κρουνοὺς of flames, both harshly and inexactly, into ‘globes.’ Again, when he talks of ‘licking the stars,’ he makes an idle and empty exaggeration. Nay, the phrase, ‘emitting a black cloud of smoke full of pitchy whirlwinds and glowing ashes,’ is bad style and almost nonsense.[427] For glowing things, quoth he, neither smoke nor are black; unless by an improper vulgarism he applies _candente_, not to glowing but to merely ‘hot’ ash. But when he talks of ‘rocks and cliffs being belched and flung up,’ adding immediately that they are ‘melted, and groan, and are flung in handfuls into the air,’ neither did Pindar write this, nor would anybody else think of saying it, and the thing is the most monstrous of all monstrosities.”

Footnote 426:

xvii. 10.

Footnote 427:

_Inenarrabile et propemodum insensibile._

The classical hatred of bombast and the classical propensity to “stick at the word” in criticism are both very well illustrated here; but we should hardly guess, from the sample, that there existed in classical times much power of grasping the literary and poetical merit of a passage as a whole. Virgil, if he had cared to defend himself, would, no doubt, have called attention to the Pindaric words, τέρας and θαῦμα, as justifying even “monstrosity” in his own expanded description, and have urged that this description was at least partly intended to indicate the terror and confusion of mind caused by so portentous a phenomenon.

But this absence of the synoptic grasp of æsthetic means, as applied to produce literary effect, is precisely what we notice most in the ancient criticism which has come down to us. And it may be added that it is also precisely what we should expect to follow from the limitations of the ancient Rhetoric. Grammar provided rules for the arrangement of words, and lexicography provided lists of them, with their authority and their use carefully ticketed; so here criticism was at home. Rhetoric provided lists of Figures with which a man could compare the passage before him. But there was no training in the process of simply “submitting to” this passage, interrogating oneself whether it exercised a charm or not, and then interrogating oneself further whether that charm was genuine, and what was its cause. After all, Gellius has, as we have seen, sometimes come near to the discovery of the true method, and that he loved literature there can be no doubt.[428]

Footnote 428:

It may perhaps seem to those who know him well that he might have been
allowed more space here; and certainly he gives plentiful material.
But the individual importance of his items hardly requires more than
representative treatment.

Nor, much later, shall we find things different with that favourite of the Middle Ages and of Dr Johnson’s youth, [Sidenote: _Macrobius: The_ Saturnalia.] Macrobius,[429] who, about the beginning of the fifth century, undertook a pendant to the work of Gellius. It is not surprising that the author, _qui ot nom Macrobes_,[430] should have been a favourite (for his commentary on the _Somnium Scipionis_ principally, no doubt) with the period between Darkness and Renaissance. He has precisely the “fine confused feeding” in the way of matter and manner that these ages loved; and they would not be likely to quarrel with him for his lack of the criticism which, as we shall see, they themselves hardly, in more than a single instance, relished or understood. But he certainly illustrates, even in a greater degree than Gellius, the small propulsion of the Romans and their vassals towards the proper subjects of this book. Once more we find that etymology, mythology, grammar, the _farrago_ of the antiquary as distinguished from that of the literary enthusiast, of the philologist as opposed to the critic, receive ample attention. And, once more, what we are specially in quest of remains practically, if not entirely, unhandled.

Footnote 429:

Ed. Eyssenhardt, Leipsic, 1883.

Footnote 430:

_Roman de la Rose_, l. 7.

There are few more striking _loci_ in connection with this subject than the end of the first book of the _Saturnalia_. The guests have been talking mythology and etymology for some stricken hours, till at last a break occurs. Vettius Prætextatus, the host, has just ended a long mythological dissertation, to the admiration of everybody, when Euangelus (the irreverent humourist of the party) breaks in, with some amusement at the practice of citing Virgil as an authority. He supposes that the notion of making Latin poets into philosophers is an imitation of the Greeks, and hints that the process is dangerous, since even Tully himself, who was as formal a professor of philosophising as of oratory, so often as he talks of the nature of the gods, or of fate, or of divination, injures the glory which he has got together through his eloquence, by his desultory handling of things. Symmachus, the scholar-statesman, rebukes this blasphemer gravely, observing that, as for Cicero, he is _conviciis impenetrabilis_, and may be left aside for the moment, but that he fears Euangelus has learnt his Virgil only as boys do, and thinks him only good for boys, with nothing higher in him. Euangelus is by no means abashed, and takes the offensive. It was all very well, he says, for us as boys to take Virgil at our master’s valuation, but did not he himself pronounce himself far from faultless, inasmuch as he wished them to burn the _Æneid_? No doubt he was afraid, not merely of ethical blame for such scenes as the request of Venus to her lawful husband in favour of her illegitimate son, but of critical blame for his now Greek, now barbarous, diction, and for the awkward _ordonnance_ of his work. To this, _cum omnes exhorruissent_, Symmachus, still calm and sententious, makes answer by putting Virgil beside Cicero, and saying of his glory, that as it can grow by no one’s praise, so it is diminished by no one’s abuse. Any grammarian, he continues, can refute these calumnies; and it would be a shame to ask Servius (the famous Virgilian scholiast, who is present) to take the trouble. But he should like to know whether, as Euangelus is dissatisfied with Virgil’s Poetic, he likes his Rhetoric better. “Oh!” says Euangelus, “you have made him a philosopher, and now you are going to make him an orator, are you?”

A conversation of this kind gives us no bad reason to expect something like literary criticism proper, something such as Coleridge has given us in the _Biographia Literaria_ in reference to Wordsworth. But Symmachus for the time contents himself with undertaking to defend the Mantuan’s rhetoric, while the others overwhelm the impenitent Euangelus with a string of affirmations as to the poet’s proficiency in politics, law, augury, astrological and other philosophy, fidelity to the traditions of the Latin language, &c. But the justifications of these praises are deferred by the announcement of dinner, and for a time the conversation turns to lighter subjects—the famous string of stories for which Macrobius is most commonly quoted, including scandal about Princess Julia. Only in the third book, and then, it would seem, after a lacuna, is the detailed criticism of Virgil resumed.

There is no occasion to find fault with the quantity of it, for it fills, with a digression or two of the lighter kind, such as that on the dessert when it appears, four whole books, and some two hundred and forty pages in Eyssenhardt’s text. But the quality is, at any rate from our point of view, not quite so satisfactory. Much simply consists in citation of passages illustrating different “Figures.” A very large part, probably the largest, is mere and sheer quotation from Virgil himself, from Homer, and from other poets, Latin and Greek, with whom he is compared. And the comparison is carried on almost, if not quite entirely, on that most unsatisfying parallel-passage system which, in its abuse, has ever since been the delight of the pedantic criticaster—and the abomination of the true critic.

Of course the parallel passage, rightly handled, is invaluable—is practically indispensable to true literary criticism. The “Truth” passages of the _Areopagitica_ and Halifax’s _Character of a Trimmer_, the “Death” passages of Raleigh, Marston, and Lee, the different harmonies which the motive “Ask me no more” has suggested to Carew and Tennyson, the accounts of the passing of Arthur or the parting of Lancelot and Guinevere in Malory, and in his probable verse original, are the constant, the inexhaustible, texts and exercises of the critical faculty. But I do not think it unfair to Macrobius to say that hardly in a single occasion does he make any such use of his parallels. And in literary criticism, properly so called, such parallels as

οὐδέ τις ἄλλη
φαίνετο γαιάων ἀλλ’ οὐρανὸς ἠδε θάλασσα,

and

“Nec jam amplius ulla
apparet tellus, cælum undique et undique pontus,”

are all but valueless. They merely show what might be demonstrated once for all in a page—what does not need demonstrating to any intelligent person who has read fifty lines of the two poets—that Virgil was an excellent translator, and was, rather more frequently than becomes a great poet, content simply to translate.

The rest of the matter lies, for the most part if not wholly, as much as this or more in the uttermost precincts of literary criticism proper. The illustrations of Virgil’s attention to that religious ritual and liturgical language which was so important at Rome are very curious, very interesting, very valuable but they scarcely touch the fringe of literature: a Roman Blackmore could be as prolific of them as the Roman Dryden.

The contents of Book IV. may, perhaps, be urged against me; and I shall confess that they come nearer to a certain conception of literary criticism. But I should reply that this conception itself is an argument on the side I am taking. One of the gaps, common at the opening of the books of the _Saturnalia_, plunges us into the midst of a demonstration of Virgil’s pathos, that word being sometimes used in the Greek plural _pathe_, and referring to the Rhetorical “passions” appealed to. We find, however, almost directly, that the citations are only applied to illustrate and enforce Virgil’s technical command of rhetoric, as Symmachus had foreshadowed. The parts are accordingly dealt out in the orthodox way between accuser and defendant, and the passages quoted are distributed once more under figures—Irony, Hyperbole, and the rest. This, of course, is literary criticism after a fashion, though a fashion which Quintilian had already treated with some disdain (abandoning it almost entirely in the best parts of his own critical work), and which Longinus, though he too was not quite bold enough to discard it entirely, avoids, either cunningly or instinctively, in all his best passages. Macrobius and his distinguished company seem to wish for nothing better, and after they have complacently ticked off the sorts and sources of the pathos—time, place, circumstance, age, mood, manner, and so forth—they decide triumphantly, at the beginning of the Fifth Book, that Virgil must be held no less of an orator than of a poet. Indeed, Eusebius, who has conducted the rhetorical inquiry, draws a neat parallel between Virgil and Cicero himself. The eloquence, he says, of the Mantuan is multiplex and multiform, and comprehends every kind of speech. In your Cicero [Eusebius of course is a Greek] there is one tenor of eloquence, the abundant, and torrential, and copious. For the nature of orators is not uniform, but one flows and overflows, another affects a brief and concise manner. The thin and dry and sober speaker loves, as it were, a parsimony of words, his rival revels in full and florid and amply illustrated rhetoric. Virgil is the only man who, while others are so dissimilar, blends his own eloquence of every kind. And he subsequently distributes these kinds more specially to Cicero, Sallust, Fronto, and the younger Pliny. The passage which follows, for three or four pages, till the scoffer Euangelus brings on the Homeric parallels by asking whether they think a Venetian farmer’s boy is likely to have known Greek literature, is one of the most literary in the book. But it is (as a devil’s advocate must point out) curious and a little unfortunate that once more we find the subject drawn, as it were, irresistibly to the oratorical side. In no other branch of literature, it seems, could a Roman or a late Greek (which Macrobius probably was) taste the _minutiæ_ of difference, the savours and qualities which concern criticism proper. Elsewhere he “stuck in letters,” or in Figures, or in the merest schematic construction of prosody, or in the matter, as opposed to the form and spirit, of the literature.

Another piece of criticism, proper if not consummate, will be found in the seventeenth chapter of the Fifth Book, in the shape of a fresh comparison, to be itself compared with that cited above from Gellius, between Pindar’s Ætna, in the First Pythian and Virgil’s in the third _Æneid_. It is an even weaker piece. For the critic, a Greek, cavils at Virgil quite in the Rymer-and-Dennis style, not merely because he speaks of an _atram nubem_ as _fumantem candente favilla_, but (exactly as if he were an eighteenth-century French critic speaking of Shakespeare) because the poet actually indulges in such shocking words as _eructans_.

The Sixth Book deals with Virgil’s borrowing of diction and phrase from the older Latin poets, and has, of course, great linguistic, and a certain portion of literary, interest. But it is again remarkable how little this latter is improved or worked out. As in the Homeric case, the literary interest of the fact that Virgil was content simply to “lift” Ennian phrases, like _stellis fulgentibus_ or _tollitur in cælum clamor_, is limited to the demonstration that Virgil “stole his brooms ready made,” as the Berkshire broom-squire did. And no attempt is made (as might easily have been done, and in fairness to Virgil should have been done) to show the taste with which the poet selected beautiful words and happy phrases. Servius, later in the book, has some not uninteresting verbal criticism, but attempts nothing more. In fact, in all this bulk of work there is not as much literary criticism in the proper sense as Longinus has often given us in a paragraph, and hardly an attempt at even that general characterisation which we find sometimes in Gellius and still more in Quintilian. The place and power of Virgil remain untouched, or are referred to only in the vaguest conventionalisms.

[Sidenote: _Servius on Virgil._]

One of the contributors, as has been said, to the Macrobian symposium is no less a person than Maurus (or Marius) Servius Honoratus, the greatest commentator on the greatest Latin poet in general repute, and obviously, from the figure he makes in the _Saturnalia_, a man held in very high esteem for erudition and ability. We have his commentary,[431] together with those of other ancient commentators of less repute. They are extremely voluminous;[432] they are, and always have been, justly respected for their value in the interpretation of the poet. Servius had before him, and undoubtedly used, a very large bulk of precedent annotation, and represents, almost fully, the “Variorum” editor of modern times. We might therefore expect to find in him, if not something like the proceedings and results of Mr Furness in his _Shakespeare_, at any rate something like those of the Johnson-Malone time. Let us see what we actually do find. He gives us, at the very first, a definition of the duties of a critical editor, in which, on the face of it, there is very little to blame. The life of the poet; the titles of his work; the quality of the poem; the intention of the writer; the number of the books, the order of them, the explanation of them. Looking at this off-hand, one may wonder a little at the elevation to co-ordinate honours of the number and order of the books, and of course perceive that _qualitas carminis_, the critical point, is susceptible of rather widely differing interpretations as a promise. In the vague modern sense of “quality”—a sense, too, not absolutely unknown in ancient times—it covers by itself almost all that the most accomplished and wide-ranging criticism—the criticism of Coleridge or of Arnold, of Hazlitt or of Sainte-Beuve—can extend unto. In the narrow technical sense of the Greek ποιότης, it comes to very little more than the mere technical classification of the piece as epic or what not, and offers us food as little sappy with critical juice as the most arid distinctions of Rhetoric.

Footnote 431:

Ed. Lion, 2 vols., Göttingen, 1826.

Footnote 432:

The edition just quoted contains, without its indices, all but 1000
pages of very close and small print.

But we have barely turned a page when the sense in which Servius understands the comparative extent of the duties he has so lucidly mapped out breaks upon us. The “life,” brief and business-like, leaves no special room for complaint except to anecdote-mongers. But all the rest, except the “explanation,” is huddled up in less than a page, and in forms as succinct as the answers to a catechism. Title? “Æneis,” derived from Æneas, cf. Juvenal’s “Theseis.” Quality? Quite clear: the metre is heroic, the action “mixed” (_i.e._, the poet sometimes speaks himself, sometimes introduces others speaking). It is also Heroic, because it contains a mixture of divine and human things, of truth and fiction. For Æneas really did come to Italy, but clearly the poet made it up[433] when he represented Venus speaking to Jupiter, or the mission of Mercury. The style is grandiloquent—that is to say, the phrase is lofty and the sentiments noble. Besides, are there not three kinds of speaking, the low, the middle, the grand? This is the grand style. Virgil intended first to imitate Homer, then to magnify the ancestry of Augustus (proofs of this latter given). Here there is no dispute about the number of the author’s books, though in other cases (such as that of Plautus) there is. And there is not much doubt about the order, though a mere crotcheteer might put them in the order 2, 3, 1, in his ignorance that the art of the poet consists in beginning at the middle and anticipating the future (see Horace). This shows that Virgil was a skilful bard. That is all. _Sola superest explanatio quæ in sequenti expositione probabitur._

Footnote 433:

_Constat esse compositum._

_Sola superest explanatio!_ All, except the mere verbal part, is swept aside, as settled and done for, in these thirty or forty lines. Of the _quality_, in the fuller and higher sense, of the Virgilian art nothing; nothing of its comparative value even with that of Homer himself, still less of other Greeks, or with that of Ennius, of Lucretius, of Statius, of the scores of Roman epic or “heroic” poets whom and whose books Servius had before him, while their names only are before us. Nothing of his way of managing his metre, his diction, his prosopopœia, his scenery, his dialogue. And in the settlement of the questions that are attacked, the most schoolboy-like abstinence from anything but reference to stock authorities, stock classifications. Nothing, for instance, one would think, would be easier and more attractive, for a man who thinks that Virgil’s is the grand style, than to prove it to be so, nothing more curious and fascinating than to reply to the objections of those who think it is not, if there be such heretics (and, as we know from the Euangelus of the _Saturnalia_, there were such, even in those days). But no glimpse or glimmer of any such thing enters the mind of our scholiast. There are, everybody allows, three styles: Low, Middle, and Grand. Nobody calls Virgil low; you surely would not call him middle; therefore he must be grand. Q.E.D.; and demonstrated it is most mathematically. Then what kind of poem is it? You run your finger down the official list of kinds and find “Heroic; written in hexameters and dealing with mixed kinds.” Virgil is in hexameters, but _is_ he mixed? Let us run the careful finger down yet another table, “Mixed: that which is partly divine and partly human, partly false, partly true.” Let us see whether this will apply to Virgil. It does. Then Virgil is Heroic. Next, about order and so forth. Ought not Books II. and III., which tell the voyage of Æneas up to the events recorded in the opening of Book I., to come before it? This gives a moment’s pause, but let us look at our Horace—_Ut jam nunc dicat_, and so forth. Once more, we need not trouble ourselves: the order is all right.

To some readers this account may savour of flippancy; and to them it is impossible to offer any excuse. To others, who may not be likely to take the trouble to read Servius for themselves, it will be enough to say that practically nothing is put in his mouth which he does not say, that his method is hardly caricatured even in form. It is one of the best illustrations we have, or could reasonably expect to have, of the whole system of ancient criticism, save in its very greatest examples, and to some extent even in these. You construct, or accept from tradition as already constructed, a vast classification of terms and kinds, hierarchically arranged; and when a subject presents itself you simply refer it to the classification. Practically no intellectual labour is required, and still less—a mere minus quantity indeed—of cultivation of the æsthetic sentiment. The necessary cards, with the necessary descriptions on them, are in cell B or A, compartment _x_ or _y_, case 3 or 5, room I. or VI. You take them out and you tie them on, and there’s an end of the matter. Nay, some fifteen hundred years after Servius, there are other authorities who conduct criticism—and are indignant when it is not conducted—in the very self-same way.

But, it may be said, _superest explanatio_; the explanation does remain, and there may be much in that. In point of bulk there is very much; in point of value there is a great deal; but in point of strict criticism there is simply nothing, though the same reference to card, and cell, and compartment, and case abounds, as thus:—

_Arma virumque._ _Arma_ means “war”: it is the trope called Metonymy. So _toga_, for “peace,” see Cic. As for _Arma virumque_, it is another figure—that by which we change the order: some call it Hyperbaton. The whole phrase is a professive poetic beginning; _Musa_, &c., an invocative, and _urbs antiqua_ a narrative. As for _virum_, he does not mention the name, but indicates the person circumstantially. And now, as Thackeray says somewhere, “we know all about it, and can proceed” to write the exordium of an Æneid.

Far, very far, be it from me to speak with any ignorant or vulgar contempt of Servius. His erudition is very great; his verbal expositions are almost always very sound and grammatical; but for him we should lack a whole world of traditional information, without which the meaning of Virgil would either be entirely dark to us, or attainable only by the rashest of guesswork. And it must be admitted that according to the “figure” system of criticising he is, as the Roman orators say, _accuratissimus_. When Virgil, as he so often does, borrows a phrase from Ennius with a slight alteration, Servius points out that it is an _acyrologia_, and no doubt feels much comforted by the fact. Something else is an _amblysia_ (a “blunting,” lessening, _litotes_). There are derivations, anticipating the modern philologist, of the most scientific kind, as that of _consilia_ for _considia_, because people’s minds become quieter when they sit down. There is, indeed, a very great deal of miscellaneous information of all kinds.

But of criticism nothing, or less than nothing. Occasionally, at the beginning of the books, it does seem to occur to the excellent commentator that something more may be expected of him. Especially, and indeed most naturally, is this the case with the Fourth. He tells us, quite properly, that Apollonius had written an _Argonautica_, and that the whole book is borrowed from it.[434] It is; a fact of which those persons who (having better knowledge than Dante had) still take Virgil for a supreme poet might perhaps take more notice than they have usually taken. But to Servius, and persons of Servius’ way of thinking, there would not have been much in this. He goes on. It is almost entirely in affection, though it has pathos in the end, where the departure of Æneas begets sorrow. It consists entirely in counsels and subtleties. The style is very nearly comic—which is not surprising, considering that it treats of love. But there is a proper junction with the former book, which is a proof of art, as we have often said. An abrupt transition is a bad transition, though some people foolishly say that this junction is not well managed, &c., &c.

Footnote 434:

The enthusiastic Maronite usually

One may be, I hope without affectation, a little aghast at this. urges
that not the whole is conveyed, and that Virgil combines his
conveyances. Let it be so.

Grant that Virgil shows his want of originality by his relying on Apollonius. Grant that in the delineation of Dido’s tragic “All for Love and the World well Lost” for such a tame scoundrel as Æneas, he has none of the lightning strokes of Lucretius or Catullus. Yet most of us think that the Fourth book is a great thing, some that it is a much greater thing than the _Æneid_ of which it forms part. Servius might think, was entitled to think, and has the consent of many respectable moderns in thinking, differently. But it does not appear that he thought about it at all. He found in his books a distinction between “affection” and “pathos,” and applied it. He had learnt from the same books that Love was an inferior subject, Comedy an inferior style, and the former a proper theme of the latter. So the Fourth book, with its steady rise towards the hopeless, the hapless, the inevitable end, is _pæne comicus_. Certainly the criticism is, from our point of view.

But the very value of Servius, as of so many other writers, is precisely this, that he is _not_ writing from our point of view, that he is writing from a point of view entirely different. When he annotates _Est in secessu_ “_Topothesia_ est—_i.e._, fictus secundum poeticam licentiam locus.... Nam _topographia_ est rei veræ descriptio,” it may be difficult to repress a smile. So also when he points out, in respect to one of Anna’s speeches to Dido, not that it is touching, or eloquent, or indicative of a wonderful knowledge of the human heart, and an equally wonderful grasp of pathetic expression, but that it is regular Rhetoric—_suasione omni parte plena; nam purgat objecta, et ostendit utilitatem, et a timore persuadet_. But, after all, he is only playing his own game, not ours. It is impossible, or at any rate very difficult, to be sure whether it is in innocent unconsciousness or dry humour that he quotes, without comment, the objection to the phrase _nepos Veneris_ that it is unbecoming to represent Venus as a grandmother. Again, in one of his short prefaces to the Seventh book—at the point when, to modern readers, the interest of the _Æneid_ is all but over, and the romantic wanderings of Æneas, the passion of the Fourth book, the majesty and magnificence of the Sixth, are exchanged for the kite-and-crow battles of Trojans and Rutulians, the doll-like figure of Lavinia, and the unjust fate of the hero Turnus at the hands of a divinely helped invader—he tells us that the earlier books have been like the _Odyssey_ (as indeed they are), not because of the romantic interest, which of course he did not see, but as being _graviores varietate personarum et allocutionum_, while the last books are like the _Iliad_, as being _negotiis validiores_!

So, again, the relatively long preface to the _Bucolics_ tells us that the word comes from the Greek for oxen, which are the principal rustical animals; that these poems were invented in the time of Xerxes, when the Laconians (one does not quite see why, as Xerxes never landed in the Peloponnese) were kept to their walls or the mountains; that the _qualitas_ is a _humilis character_, thus, with the _medius_ of the _Georgics_, vindicating all the three styles for Virgil. For we must not require lofty speaking from humble rustics. He then gives us a curious specimen of the critical punctiliousness in matters of mint, anise, and cumin which accompanied blindness to weightier things. In bucolic verse there ought, it seems, to be a pause at the fourth foot; and if that foot is a dactyl so much the better; and it is better also that the first foot should be a dactyl and included in the word, and so forth.

For a final specimen he tells us, in the corresponding introduction to the _Georgics_ themselves, that as Virgil had followed Homer, and had not come near him in the _Æneid_, as he had followed Theocritus and run a good second in the _Eclogues_, so he followed Hesiod, and “simply left him” (_penitus reliquit_) in the _Georgics_. It required enormous skill to do what he has done. (So far so good, but before very long we come again to the parting of the ways.) The book is didactic, and therefore it should be written to somebody, for teaching presupposes two personages—the teacher and the taught. Again, one does not know whether to smile or not, to take the matter gravely and urge that any _lector benevolus_ will occupy quite sufficiently the _personam discipuli_, or to pass the matter, _olli subridens_, and reflecting that our legs also are not unexposed to the arrows.

It can scarcely be necessary to take special examples from the minor commentators on Virgil or on other Latin poets: for their characteristics are, so far as I know, exactly uniform with [Sidenote: _Other commentators._] those of Servius and with those of the Greek scholiasts. In explanation of words and things diligent to admiration, and extremely serviceable, if not always (according to modern standards, which are very likely temporary) scientific. In matters of prosody excellently minute and regular, though occasionally a little arbitrary. Not very seldom careful, to an almost touching extent, of referring phrases to the accepted categories of Figure, and applying the stock Rhetorical divisions and classifications. But not merely in the higher, but even in the middle regions of criticism proper, so meagre that they may almost be called entirely to seek. Quite rudimentary in Comparison; in indicating character, content to accept stock divisions, and not even attempting individual _signalement_. Abstaining with such uniformity that one can easily perceive the entire absence of any demand for it, from, any attempt to deal with the literary beauty of phrase or of passage, to bring out its effect on the reader, to estimate it as a work of art, like a picture or a statue. And now and then, as we have seen, not merely not applying the right, but applying totally wrong, tests to literature and especially to poetry, demanding from this latter compliance with the arbitrary requirements of traditional Rhetoric, and praising it for such compliance. Are they to be blamed for all this? Certainly not; no one is to be blamed for not doing what he never intended to do and what nobody wanted him to do, for doing what was his commission and his business. But they are to be cited, and examined, and recorded as witnesses to prove that, for the most part at any rate, criticism, in the best and highest sense, was what no critic thought of giving, and no reader thought of demanding, under the Latin dispensation.

It may not be uninteresting to accompany (as we did in the case of Greek) this view of the later criticism, more or less formal, with some account of the poets where they touch the subject. These touches are not frequent or important, but we find some in Ausonius for the end of the fourth century, and in the curious collection bearing (with what imparity of suggested contrast!) the title of the Latin Anthology, and supposed to have been put together at Carthage, at the end of the fifth, or a little later.

The unequal and decadent, but sometimes fascinating, author[435] of the _Mosella_ and the _Cupido cruci affixus_, of the two charming epigrams to wife and mistress—

“Uxor vivamus,”

and

“Deformem quidam te dicunt, Crispa”—

has, in his epigrams themselves, followed Martial in directions where he is a less blameless guide than in his literary criticism. [Sidenote: _Ausonius._] But he has not followed him here; and though much of the collection is simply a translation of the Greek Anthology, I do not remember any literary following thereof. But the curious verse celebration of what we may call the University of Bordeaux, with its “commemoration,” in separate pieces of varying length and metre, of a couple of dozen of Professors; the Fourth Idyll, to his namesake and grandson on his studies; and the Epistles, especially those to Paullus the Rhetor and to Tetradius, all have more or less to do with the subject.

Footnote 435:

Ausonius received little attention from scholars till very recently;
and I know him only, as I have long known him, in the Delphin edition
and the _Corpus Poetarum_. There are now, however, I believe, editions
by Peiper, Leipsic, 1886, and Schenkl, Berlin, 1883, besides
monographs.

We find, and are not surprised to find, that of the Professors at Bordeaux the majority are Professors of Rhetoric. Compliment has naturally rather the better of criticism in the addresses to them, but certain things emerge. Tib. Victor Minervius is “another Quintilian,” especially for fluency and for the _Demosthenicum_ (I suppose δεινότης); but it is a little suspicious that the fullest praise is given to his _memory_. Latinus Alcimus Alethius seems to have been himself a careful critic, and appears to have written specially on Sallust and on the Emperor Julian—perhaps the books are somewhere? Attius Patera was “a descendant of the Druids,” and we should have been glad to know whether he displayed that “Celtic spirit” in literature of which we have heard more than enough in these days. But Ausonius is vague as the Celtic vague itself. Attius Tiro Delphinius was a poet as well as an orator. Others—the dead Luciolus, Alethius Minervius the Younger, the Grammarian Lentulus, “_cognomine Lascivus_” (quite innocent, Ausonius tells us), his brother Jucundus, are more generally commended. Pieces, two grouped and some single, to the Greek and the Latin grammarians of Bordeaux—show that the languages, as well as the literatures, received plentiful attention. The compliment to Exuperius of Toulouse goes closer, and is decidedly double-edged.[436] Erudition is specially attributed to Staphylius, who knew not only Livy and Herodotus, but “all that is stored in the thousand volumes of Varro” (_sexcentis_, of course). It is observable that the grammarians[437] appear to have chiefly lectured on poetry, the Rhetors on prose, and the whole, with touches numerous, if not very definite, suggests to us a study liberal enough, but perhaps not very wide, rather undiscriminating. The Idyll to his nephew enters naturally into a few more particulars. A generous but general incitement to the study of the tongues is followed by detail. The, as it seems to us, very odd conjunction of Homer and Menander is an additional testimony to the popularity of the great New Comic. It can hardly be accidental, for it is separated by some lines from any other mention. In fact, Ausonius is not prodigal of names, only those of Horace, Virgil, and Terence being mentioned for Latin poetry, and the work, though not the name, of Sallust, with some other histories of the last Republican period. Lastly, the Epistles, besides supplying fresh instances of Ausonius’ _rococo_ fancy for the cento—even the Macaronic cento—supply a perhaps humorous prose criticism in form of his own work, which is worth subjoining.[438]

Footnote 436:

He has praised him (Prof. xvii.) his stately walk, his _verba
ingentia_, his handsome dress, and adds—

“Copia cui fandi longe pulcherrima: _quam si
Auditu tenus acciperes deflata placeret.
Discussam scires solidi nihil edere sensus_.”

Footnote 437:

It may be barely necessary to append the caution that _grammaticus_ is
a good deal more than “grammarian” in the most limited sense,
including “philologist,” “critic,” &c. Some preferred _literatus_, as
the Latin word.

Footnote 438:

_In verbis rudem; in eloquendo hiulcum; a propositis discrepantem; in
versibus concinnationis expertum, in cavillando natura invenustum nec
arte conditum; diluti salis et fellis ignavi; nec de mimo planipedem
nec de comœdis histrionem._.

The _Anthologia Latina_,[439] which a certain noble youth of the name of Octavian composed at the bidding of some Vandal [Sidenote: _The_ Anthologia Latina.] chieftain, perhaps as late as 532, at the extreme verge of the twilight of the West, is not entirely deserving of the transferred sense attached to its patron’s nationality. It has preserved one or two pretty things for us, and more curious ones. And, in our particular relation, it shows that literary society and occupation had by no means gone wholly out of fashion. Both with individuals and coteries Virgil was a perversely favourite subject; and the deplorable persons who called themselves the Twelve Wise Men wrote distichs, and pentastichs, and polystichs, _à dormir debout_, on the contents of the books of the _Æneid_ and other subjects. The epigrams attributed to Seneca are probably, whether they belong to any of the known Senecas or not, of an older and better time; and the pair (Nos. 27 and 28) on the theme of _Ære perennius_, though the sentiment is of course a commonplace, have a grip and ring of style which, at any rate after the flaccid barbarisms of the sixth century, shows well. But for the literary taste of this time itself, the works of a certain Luxorius (a contemporary it would seem, and, from the word _spectabilis_, probably of official rank) are most valuable. They are of some bulk, consisting of not much less than a hundred pieces, filling some forty pages in Baehrens’s edition. The body of the work, according to the usual _prava docilitas_ of the epigrammatist, consists of things licentious or trivial enough; but Luxorius had read his Martial in this respect more closely than Ausonius, that he begins with three or four pieces of a critical or semi-critical kind. He is thoroughly convinced of the danger of writing after the ancients; but, as he says with some force to the Reader, “If you think them of better quality, why don’t you read them and not me?” He consoles his book, should it meet with contempt at Rome and Carthage, with the observation that things must be content with their proper places; and in a fourth piece pleads that if his epigrams are short, why, the reading will be the sooner finished. The tone, with a good deal less disguised conceit, is very much that of a literary _abbé_ or President of the eighteenth century—a kind of person with whose general tastes, literary and other, Luxorius would probably have sympathised well enough.

Footnote 439:

_Poetæ Latini Minores_, ed. Baehrens, vol. iv. Sidonius Apollinaris,
who comes between Ausonius and the Anthology, and has much concern for
us, is deliberately postponed to the next Book.