Chapter V: Phaedrus and Fable: Poetry of the Time

Phaedrus—His Life—Books of Fables and “Appendix”—Text
incomplete—His Greek exemplar—Relationship to Aesop—Novelties
introduced by Phaedrus—Anecdotes based on Roman
life—Political allusions and prosecution by Sejanus—The
gentle art of making enemies—The injustices of life—Human
weaknesses—The serious and the humorous—Perennial interest
in fable—Realism—Phaedrus as man of letters—Fable in the
later Roman world—Style—Art—Phaedrus and La Fontaine—Metre—A
concluding view.

The poems of Tiberius—Germanicus Caesar’s _Aratea_—Mythological
Astronomy—Albinovanus Pedo—Decadent forms of drama—Mime,
Atellan farces and _Fabulae Salticae_—Pomponius Secundus.

PHAEDRUS: THE FABULIST OF ROME

Phaedrus,[404] the fabulist of Roman literature, was an alien slave of Thracian, or, to use his own adjective, “Pierian” origin. The lines[405] in which he laid claim to birth “almost in the very school of the Muses” are to be taken, according to the spirit of the context, in the strict geographical sense and not as a metaphorical anticipation of the Tennysonian conception that “the poet in a golden clime is born.” Perhaps the plain prose of the matter is that his birthplace was the Roman colony of Philippi. Evidently he was brought to Italy when young; for he refers to studying Ennius in boyhood.[406] His Latin and Greek education followed the customary routine, to judge from the fact that, although fables do not readily lend themselves to a display of erudition, yet his yield proof of acquaintance with such authors as Virgil, Euripides and Simonides.[407] Hardly mentioned in classical literature, his name first appears as a nominative, “Phaedrus,” in a prefatory letter of Avianus;[408] but some have argued that it is more in accord with linguistic usage and inscriptional evidence to call him “Phaeder.” Inasmuch, then, as he became a freedman in the household of Caesar Augustus, one may consider his full name C. Julius Phaeder or Phaedrus.[409] Concerning the limits of his life, and its scanty details, we are dependent upon deductions from his writings. There is a prevalent consensus among critics that the first two of his five books were published during the reign of Tiberius,[410] perhaps together, perhaps separately, as Professor Ellis supposed,[411] and that the third book appeared under Caligula, some time between A.D. 37 and the beginning of 41. Now, since passages[412] in that book suggest that the author was already conscious of approaching age, there is justification for guessing that he was born some fifteen years before the Christian era.[413] Although in Book III he had decided to relinquish authorship, he explains his change of mind in the prologue to the next book,[414] and even after that we possess a fifth, the product of his advanced years.[415]

The two opening books, which explain in their prologues the relationship between the present fables and those of Aesop, may be regarded as dedicated to readers at large;[416] but the rest were dedicated to individuals; namely, Book III to Eutychus, plausibly identified with the chariot-driver of the Greens prominent under Caligula;[417] IV to one Particulo, for whom Phaedrus entertained a respect enhanced, doubtless, by gratification at being quoted in his compositions;[418] and Book V to a certain Philetes, or Philetus, who is pointedly expected to see the applicability to the aged author of the tale about the old hunting-dog past its best:

Praise what we _were_, if what we _are_ you blame:
Nicely, Philetes, you can grasp my aim.[419]

In addition to these five books, for which (discounting the recorded readings of the lost _Remensis_ and three imperfect codices) only a single manuscript[420] is extant, there is an “Appendix” of about thirty fables. These, although they look tinctured with medieval colour and show signs of having been supplemented from the Greek collection of Babrios, are considered to have been drawn by Perotti in the fifteenth century from a subsequently lost abridgement of Phaedrus.[421] Twenty so-called “New Fables” gained from the prose paraphrases associated with the name of the medieval Romulus, appeared in Nilant’s edition early in the eighteenth century. The traces discernible therein of their original verse-form led scholars like Dressier and Lucian Müller to rewrite them in metre.[422] Recently Zander in his _Phaedrus Solutus_ has reclaimed thirty fables which he has re-written in senarii after a careful investigation of the three prose-collections—the Ademarian, the Wissemburgensis and “Romulus.” Zander has aimed at separating Phaedrian and non-Phaedrian elements in the prose paraphrases; he has isolated the traces of fifth-century or sixth-century Latin comparable with what is to be found in Salvianus or Gregory of Tours; and, following principles of Phaedrian metric expounded by Havet, he has made a rather more successful iambic reconstruction of missing fables than some of his predecessors in this field.

Much of Phaedrus, then, is lost. This is a safe conclusion, if only from gaps in our existing text and from the disproportionate length of the books—the total of 93 fables in the five books being made up of the constituent numbers 31, 8, 19, 25 and 10. Besides, an objection of the imaginary matter-of-fact critic forestalled by Phaedrus[423] is that “not merely beasts but trees do speak” in his fables; yet, in such of the surviving tales as are incontestably by Phaedrus, trees nowhere appear among the interlocutors.[424]

If Phaedrus had been asked what was the origin of his material, he would have answered “Aesop” without hesitancy or qualification. Yet the true answer is not so simple. On the one hand, the well-springs lay far deeper in primeval Aryan tales than Phaedrus could have dreamed, and on the other hand the fables which he assumed to be by Aesop consisted largely of accretions subsequent to Aesop’s time. The primitive beast-story, so widespread an element in folklore, becomes literary when it is shaped either to satiric or to moral purpose. Some such shaping of the beast-fable lies at the root of the renown of the Samian slave, the actual “Aisopos,” who flourished in the middle of the sixth century B.C. From tradition and experience—that great repository of practical morality—the Greek observer drew his store. But in the history of literature “Aesop” became gradually a vague name; for later tales were freely ascribed to him as a kind of father of fable, and such tales enjoyed wide popularity among Greek democracies both as a convenient cloak for social criticism and as a simple form of amusement. In this respect, then, there is an “Aesopic” just as there is a “Homeric” Question. The supposed Aesopic fables (λόγων Αἰσωπείων συναγωγαί) were gathered about 300 B.C. by Demetrius of Phaleron, once tyrant at Athens, and afterwards _savant_ at Alexandria, where he did much to establish the great library. This Greek prose collection it was—altered and interpolated by Alexandrine scholars—which formed the basis of Phaedrus’s neat version in Latin iambics. The same collection, it may be inferred from the reappearance of several stories in Plutarch (or in writings attributed to him), was a source common to Phaedrus and Plutarch (or the pseudo-Plutarch).[425] Further, there is ground for holding that the modern “Aesop” contains actually more of Phaedrus than of Aisopos, thanks to the influence exerted by Phaedrus in medieval times, mainly if not entirely through the prose-forms to which his verses had been reduced.

Phaedrus was not the first who used the fable in Roman literature. It had been employed incidentally by Ennius, Lucilius and Horace.[426] Phaedrus, however, was the first to compose separate volumes of fables in Latin: this was the one Hellenic form not yet taken over. Drama, epic, didactic, elegy, lyric, history presented no fresh openings; but a limited claim to originality might be based on free poetic adaptations of Greek prose-fables current under the name of “Aesop.” The attitude of Phaedrus to “Aesop” was not one which paused critically to examine the implications of the name, but evidently accepted “Aesop” as the personality responsible for the fables ascribed to him. Phaedrus, therefore, felt that, however much he might modify or add, he individually owed Aesop a debt for the substance at least of the fables; and this relationship to the Greek sage is proclaimed at the outset:

Matter which first old Aesop did rehearse
Hath Phaedrus polished in iambic verse.
Two boons my book hath: it can laughter raise,
And gives sage counsel in life’s wildering maze.
Howbeit, should one think to criticize,
Since beasts, nay even trees, here sermonize,
Let him remember that in fables we
Divert ourselves with unreality.[427]

Indeed, throughout we are continually being reminded of his model. The epilogue to the second book—an _envoi_ to the volume which began with the piece just cited—gives utterance to his admiration in the sentiment which possessed a strong attraction for De Quincey:

To Aesop Athens reared a statue great,
And set on lasting marble base a slave——[428]

a proof, says Phaedrus, that the pathway of honour lies open to all and that glory depends on merit instead of birth. If he follows in Aesop’s steps, it is in no spirit of envy, but in one of fair emulation:

If Latium shall countenance my task,
More authors shall she have to match with Greece.[429]

The prologue of the next book shows that this ambitious desire of bringing honour to Roman literature harmonizes with his own patriotic appreciation of Hellenic traditions:

If Phrygian Aesop by his genius,
If Scythian Anacharsis could by his
Build deathless glory, why should I, who am
Of nearer kin to literary Greece,
Forsake in idle sleep my country’s fame?[430]

In a later poem, he pictures Aesop brought out in “the fresh buskins” of the tragic trimeter;[431] elsewhere,[432] he protests against carping detractors who set successes among the fables to Aesop’s account but failures to Phaedrus’s own account. The last prologue offers the explanation that he employs Aesop’s name to recommend his works, as great artists’ names might be inscribed on productions not by themselves: this is virtually to amplify his remark in another place that the fables are not “Aesop’s, but Aesopian.”[433]

It may well be, as Lucian Müller suggested,[434] that Phaedrus used a more complete Aesop than is now available, and that we therefore cannot know how much he owed; but, however extensive his debt, it does not amount to servile borrowing. Independence is not surprising in an author who explicitly recognizes individuality in literature,[435] and who, while he undertakes to imitate Aesop’s principle of instruction through examples, at the same time engages to introduce novel and diverting anecdotes:

The sage’s method I shall keep with care:
Yet should it please me add some incidents
Whereby variety may charm the taste,
I pray thee, reader, take it courteously.[436]

By such promised anecdotes, some from bygone Greek life, some from contemporary Rome, and by allusions to current events sufficiently caustic to bring trouble upon his head, Phaedrus added greatly to the living force of his work. Bent on his twofold purpose of amusement and counsel, he could not, without becoming a dull second-hand plagiarist, shut his eyes to his own times. Occasionally, indeed, the Roman setting is plainly revealed. It is so in the case of the too-credulous father who slew his son under a misapprehension, and then by his suicide left his suspected wife to be haled before the _centumuiri_: it is so in the tale of the conceited flute-player called “Princeps,”[437] who used to play accompaniments to the _pantomimus_ Bathyllus and who, with sublime assurance, mistook for plaudits in his own honour the acclamations of the theatre intended for the real _princeps_, the emperor. Equally Roman, or at least Italian, is the atmosphere in the entertaining tale about the peasant who competed in pig-squeaking on the stage against a professional ventriloquist, and, despite his ingenious precaution of keeping a live porker hidden beneath his clothes to be pinched surreptitiously, was howled down by the audience as defective in realism! The closing situation is one of delicious irony when he turns the laugh against his judges by openly displaying the authentic grunter:

Look ye, this shows what critics you must be.[438]

Again, the painted “history” of the warfare between mice and weasels[439] seems to allude to wall-paintings of a comic or burlesque nature such as can be illustrated from Pompeii. Another instance is a hit at the _ardaliones_,[440] the fussy triflers and ineffectual meddlers of Roman society. They are derided under the semblance of an officious slave who, by forcing his gardening labours upon the attention of his imperial majesty, tried hard to curry favour and possibly win the ceremonial slap (_alapa_) that conferred liberty:

A tribe of busy-bodies lives at Rome,
Hot-headed bustlers, pressed mid idleness,
Panting _sans_ effort, and with much ado
Effecting naught, a plague unto themselves
And most detestable to other men.
This tribe, if I but can, I would reform
By this true tale, which will repay your care.
Tiberius Caesar once, when Naples-bound,
Had reached his villa at Misenum’s Cape,
Which, by Lucullus on the headland built,
Gazes far over the Sicilian main,
And looks right down upon the Tuscan Sea.
The Prince was strolling ’mid its pleasant glades,
When one of his high-girt domestic slaves,
Whose tunic of Egyptian linen fell
Loose from his shoulders with its drooping fringe,
Started with wooden watering-pot to spray
The droughty ground, and for parade of work
Got laughed at. Then by well-known cuts he gained
Another terrace, quick to lay the dust.
Caesar observed the man and grasped his game
Of counting on some profit to be earned.
“Come here!” the Emperor cried; the knave skipped up,
Brisk with the joy of sure gratuity.
Then his Imperial Highness had his jest:
“You’ve not scored much, and all your fuss is lost:
Far more with me the slaps of freedom cost!”[441]

But Phaedrus’s satire was not merely social: it invaded politics. In one passage he refers to fable as a literary invention which might be of service when one dare not be outspoken;[442] and though it would be an exaggeration to consider him an organ of political opposition, he clearly did give umbrage in high quarters by criticisms. There are always people ready to fit the satiric cap on their heads; and much in Phaedrus could be deemed offensive by a bad conscience. Some doubtless detected a political allusion where none was intended; yet there were lines which inevitably summoned up before the mind recent chapters in Roman history. No one, for instance, with republican sympathies in his heart could avoid putting his own interpretation and comment upon the lines:

Amid a change of government in states
Poor folk change nothing but their master’s name.[443]

Besides, certain fables definitely entered on dangerous ground. Thus, the familiar tale of the Wolf and the Lamb is explicitly levelled at false accusers, deriving special significance from the increase of informers (_delatores_), eager to secure convictions for treason, and encouraged by the authorities.[444] Nor is hatred of _delatores_ under Tiberius far to seek in the story of the evil end which befell the Wolf who bore false witness to support the Dog as plaintiff in his invented claim against the Sheep for a loan.[445] Indeed, there is a good deal of fun in the fables at the expense of law-courts and judges. The problem whether the emperor liked the anecdote (previously translated) concerning his snub administered to the officious slave must remain undetermined; and equally insoluble is the question whether he recognized his portrait in the dread King Water-snake sent to succeed King Log, the _roi fainéant_ against whom the Frogs had petitioned;[446] but, at any rate, for the emperor’s minister Sejanus there was decidedly unpalatable reading in the first two books. Sejanus was very like the upstart Jackdaw in peacock’s feathers and his projected alliance with Livia, widow of the younger Drusus, possibly lent a sting to the protests of the Frogs against the marriage of the Sun who, even as things were, dried up the pools: “what will result if he have progeny?”[447] Whichever may have been the offending fables in the volume of Bad Beasts, Sejanus assuredly did institute proceedings against the author, who resented the indignity of suffering “calamity” at such hands.[448] There is no evidence as to the punishment inflicted—whether it was banishment or imprisonment or even a return to slavery—but Phaedrus’s tone proves that it left him sore; and the incident is one among many illustrations of the repressive influence of the imperial _entourage_, a circle where few dared say the thing they felt.

It was not only through political strictures that Phaedrus made enemies. As we shall find, his very style, his love of brevity and pith, incurred hostile criticism, and, like Terence, he felt bound to devote portions of his prologues to answering detractors. Annoyance was also given by the manner in which his fables upheld honesty and justice:

Hard task it is one’s feeling to restrain,
When, conscious of sincere integrity,
’Tis badgered by the insolence of knaves.
“Who are they?” you will ask: well, time will show.
There is a motto which I learned at school:
“An open growl from common folk is crime.”
While I have wits, I shall remember well.[449]

Perhaps he is over-insistent on the didactic element in his work and on the lessons derivable from regarding him seriously:

You take my work for jest; with naught to do
More grave, I wield an airy pen, ’tis true:
Howbeit, scan my trivial lays with care,
And how great profit shall you gather there![450]

It is an important aspect of his relation to his times, and a powerful factor in his social criticism, that he emphasizes the ubiquitous presence and frequent triumph of injustice. It would be too much to call him gloomy or pessimistic; yet his figures move in a beast-world where, notwithstanding the moral sermonettes, much hardship and unfairness are perforce endured. The Wolf tyrannizes unmolested: the Lion insists that the whole spoil is his “share” and defies his allies to demur: the Ass, captured by robbers, feels no worse for the change of owner than, as a rule, Rome might when she gets a new emperor.[451] When the great fall out, humble people have to suffer—so argue the Frogs about the battles of the Bulls.[452] In a life so troublous, resignation is assumed to be a wise precaution—the Frogs, oppressed by their terrible King Water-snake, after lazy King Log, come to realize that it is best to let well alone, or even if things are not well, to bear the ills one has.[453] Accordingly, there is much acceptance of fate. This is a wicked world, and must be recognized as such; for so far are rogues from infallibly getting their deserts that their success is often a good advertisement for villainy (_successus improborum plures allicit_, II. iii. 7).

Phaedrus, however, looked beyond the Rome of his day to that wider sphere of human nature which the best fables always illustrate and to which they owe much of their perennial attraction:

My scheme will brand no individual,
But life itself and human ways describe
—“A heavy task to promise,” one may say.[454]

This relation to life at large comes to a great extent under the second of his professed objects—sound counsel. For example, it is with becoming seriousness that he treats the idea of the two wallets for human shortcomings familiar in Catullus’s allusion and forming the ancient analogue to Burns’ aspiration:

Oh wad some power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as others see us!

In Phaedrus it takes this shape:

Two wallets Jove on us hath slung—
One stuffed with faults ourselves have made
He set upon our back; and hung
Before our breast the other, weighed
Down with all other people’s vice.
Hence our own frailty ’scapes our eyes:
Let neighbours slip—we criticize![455]

With similar seriousness of tone he uses the instance of the treasure-dragon to introduce his impressive apostrophe to the miser.[456] In another poem we find the wise pilot’s advice for voyagers across the ocean of life:

Rejoice restrainedly and murmur slow;
For life is one long blend of weal and woe.[457]

There is also a note of pathetic truth to human experience and of wistful yearning in the little piece on the rarity of affection in ordinary life:

The name of friend is common; friendship, rare.
When a small home was built by Socrates
(I would not shun his death to win his fame,
I’d yield to odium, if but cleared when dust),
One of the people—name unknown, of course—
Asked “Why so small a house for one so great?”
The answer came “’Twill hold my real friends.”[458]

Yet it would be unfair to leave the impression that even in his satire on human nature Phaedrus constantly wears a sober face. He does not forget that one of his objects is amusement; and although there may be little enough of the “laughter” which he promised, still many subjects are treated lightly and pleasantly. In such manner he handles the recurrent foibles of humanity exemplified in braggarts, in public gullibility, in interested advisers, in the old lady with a weakness for drink, and so forth.[459] Here is his glance at good-looking and lucky fools:

Sir Reynard once a tragic mask espied:
“How fine a face to have no brain inside!”
Said he. And so with those to whom their fate
Gives rank and glory, but an empty pate.[460]

Here again, a little more fully than in the Horatian _parturiunt montes, nascetur ridiculus mus_, we have a vivid illustration of “much cry and little wool”:

A mountain once was brought to bed
With frantic groans of labour torn.
Earth in excitement lost its head—
When lo! a tiny mouse was born!
This story is designed for one
Of mighty threats, fulfilment none.[461]

There is humour, too, as of some irresolute Sir Roger de Coverley, in Mr. Justice Ape’s summing up of a case where prosecutor and defendant are alike disreputable, and there has been unscrupulous cross-swearing. After hearing two clever but conflicting perorations, the Justice pronounces with Gilbertian comicality for both sides:

“You, Wolf, it seems, ne’er lost what now you claim:
I find, glib Fox, you stole it all the same!”[462]

One must not overlook another source of charm. Good fables have a right to be read for the story alone. Now, as has been pointed out, much in Phaedrus comes down through Aesop from the primitive beast-story and folklore of the Aryans: much is but the residuum of what prehistoric fancy was capable of inventing and believing in far-off times when quadruped, reptile and bird were supposed to talk. Phaedrus gave classic expression in verse to tales which have appealed to countless generations of children, and which hold their own in the modern nursery. For, as M. Reinach would like us to believe, our youngsters love such tales because they are unconscious totemists![463] To read Phaedrus, therefore, is like meeting friends that everyone must know, because the stories illustrate the common experience of mankind. So, granted a judicious ability to overlook the obtrusion of a moral first or last in a fable, one never tires of The Wolf and the Lamb, The Jackdaw in Peacock’s Feathers, The Lion’s Share, The Ambitious Frog and the Ox, The Sham Hospitality of Fox and Stork, The Mule with the Load of Gold and the Mule with the Load of Barley, The Wolf at Large and the Dog with a Collar,[464] The Pearl in the Dung-heap, Aesop tossing Nuts or All Work and No Play, The Fox and the Sour Grapes, The Viper and the File, The Snake in the Bosom, The Forelock of Opportunity, and Old Bald-pate with the Fly or Adding Insult to Injury.[465]

Human realism, in fact, has been imparted to the beast-fable. Constantly forgetting that one is reading about animals, one does not care if the doings and sayings are inconsistent with the laws of physics or natural history. It matters little that a swimming dog is unlikely to see his reflexion in the water, and that cats do not habitually eat young pigs.[466] The passions, wiles and talk of the animals are convincing because of the resemblance to mankind. In this sense, how natural it all is—how true to life! The cynical ingratitude of the bitch after borrowing shelter for herself and whelps; the mortally wounded pride of the old lion who endures a double death (_bis uideor mori_) when kicked by the ass; the much to be suspected outburst of sudden generosity on the part of designing persons in contrast with the staid fidelity of a watchdog; the dignified contempt wherewith the boar declines to avenge a lewd insult (_inquinari nolo_)—these[467] and many such have close parallels in actuality. Little wonder, then, that contemporaries not infrequently beheld themselves under the disguise. So entirely apposite were many stories that, as already seen, offence was sure to be taken where none was meant.

Without being among the great in achievement, Phaedrus yet exhibits the genuine attitude of a man of letters. He is intensely sensitive to unfriendly criticism; he repeatedly makes retorts on cavillers;[468] he is proud of literary qualities like brevity;[469] believes he has his place as the introducer of a new form in Roman literature;[470] and has confidence in the survival of his writings.[471] He takes pleasure in his vocation; for it is with obvious satisfaction that he recounts the value of literature to Simonides.[472] Yet, equipped as he was with talent and self-reliance, and likely to secure an initial recommendation from his connexion with the imperial court, he admits that he made his way with difficulty. The admission occurs in the passage where, after mentioning his birth, he avows his disdain for wealth and his devotion to poetry:

I came to birth on that Pierian hill,
Whereon the hallowed dame, Mnemosyne,
Nine times a mother, bore to Thunderer Jove
The Muses’ Choir. Though almost in that school
I first saw light, though from my breast I have
Erased all lust for gain, and with fair fame
Undimmed, have set my heart on my career,
Still ’tis but grudging welcome I receive.[473]

In face of opposition, however, he feels the superiority of his own unappreciated pearls: it is like throwing them on a dung-hill to offer fables to unresponsive readers:

Once in a dung-heap, as for food it sought,
A barnyard fowl a pearl to light had brought:
“Ah, what a gem to lie so low!” he cried;
“If found by one for thy true worth keen-eyed,
Long since thou hadst regained thy pristine pride.
But I, thy finder, much prefer my food:
Nor I to thee, nor thou to me dost good!”
I mean the present fable to allude
To those who Phaedrus have not understood![474]

The tardy acceptance of his writings during his lifetime seems in harmony with the silence regarding him in the classics at large. Seneca, writing about A.D. 43, pronounces the fable to be work “unattempted by the _Roman_ genius.”[475] Possibly in this remark he may definitely have the Greek Phaedrus in mind, though he does not name him. Quintilian, while he finds a place for fable in his scheme of education,[476] does not mention Phaedrus. Before Avianus, who wrote in the fourth century, the single allusion generally cited as applicable to him, namely, Martial’s _an aemulatur improbi iocos Phaedri?_ is not beyond dispute. While it is appropriate in Martial to call the fables _ioci_, as their author does, the epithet _improbus_, if it seriously means “shameless,” is remarkably inappropriate as a fair description of our moralist, even when we grant that he can be coarse. It is just possible that the coarsest in him has not survived; but unless one adopts a supposition of this sort, there is a temptation to fancy that the Phaedrus whom Martial meant may have been some obscure writer of mimes.[477] More justice was done to his reputation in later centuries when abridgements were in vogue; and in the Middle Ages he may said to have had his revenge.

This is a suitable point at which to note briefly the later fortunes of fable in the Roman world. It was not till after the time of Augustus that a group of Indian beast-stories with ethical applications was brought to Alexandria by a Cingalese embassy. Translated as the “Libyan Fables” of one “Kybises,” they had pithy conclusions pointing the moral to be deduced. In the days of Marcus Aurelius, a rhetor at his court, Nicostratus, formed a _corpus_ out of the old Greek collection of Demetrius and the Libyan collection of “Kybises.” This body of fable from the nearer and the farther East was next turned into Greek choliambics by Valerius Babrius, about whose date there has been considerable dispute, but who was perhaps tutor to the young son of Alexander Severus. It is the Libyan element, rather than the Aesopic, which predominates among the forty-two fables done into Latin elegiacs by Flavius Avianus in the fourth century; and his uninspiring verses close the ancient records on this subject. With the later and more fascinating history of fable we are not concerned except to observe that in the Middle Ages it was Phaedrus who was especially read and paraphrased among fabulists. About eighty of his fables were collected in prose, perhaps in the ninth century,[478] and went under the name of “Romulus.” The prose collection which once belonged to the monk Ademar of Chabannes or Chabanais,[479] and was possibly written by himself early in the eleventh century, possesses the historic interest of preserving some portions of Phaedrus otherwise lost; elsewhere among its contents are prose versions of existent verse fables in Phaedrus with but slight alterations.[480]

The outstanding qualities of the style and art of Phaedrus are his direct simplicity of language and unpretentious neatness of phrase and line. On brevity, as already indicated, he plumed himself, though on occasion he is half-apologetic over it. Brevity, we know, is not necessarily simple; but his brevity is. With him, condensation was not purchased at the expense of clearness; for his style is on the whole flowing and easy. Its natural turns, which seem to grow out of the nature of the subject, are at once appropriate to his animal speakers and a contrast to the artificial rhetoric beginning to inundate Latin literature. At the same time, he was aware of this increasing tendency towards the high-flown and the far-fetched; for in a passage[481] where he makes telling retort on the hypercriticism launched at him, he composes a specimen of the tragic manner, and proclaims the impossibility of pleasing a fastidious Cato[482] of a critic by means of either _fabellae_ (fables) or _fabulae_ (plays). It is, then, vastly to his credit that, while he thus affords proof of what he could do in aping tragic diction, he yet so avoids inflation and preciosity as to attain a strict and almost Attic sobriety of style comparable with the clear-cut and restrained work of Terence in the drama or of Caesar in prose. His use of antithesis, which is not tediously overdone, may be cited in illustration of his restraint; _e.g._

Strangers he gulls, but friends make fun of him
(_Ignotos fallit, notis est derisui_, I. xi. 2)

or

Bores to themselves, to others _caviare_
(_Sibi molesta et aliis odiosissima_, II. v. 4).

In a certain fondness for abstract[483] turns of expression one remarks a resemblance to the style of Valerius Maximus, and therefore a symptom of the movement in the language towards Silver Latinity. In general, despite his foreign origin, the Latin of Phaedrus obeys correct canons, though there are occasional vulgarisms and instances of loose grammatical usage.[484]

He does not possess in any remarkable degree the artist’s eye. The picturesque may be said to begin and end for him in a few vivid synonyms like “long-ears” (_auritulus_) for an ass, “the wizened one” (_retorridus_) for an old mouse, or in epithets like those in “branching antlers” (_ramosa cornua_) of a stag, or “lightning-flashing tusks” of the wild boar (_fulmineis dentibus_).[485] He may pause to give a condensed description; but it is rare to find anything so full in this kind as Juno’s summary of the peacock’s advantages:

Thou bear’st the palm for beauty as for size;
The gleam of emerald illumes thy neck;
A tail thou spread’st with brilliant plumes begemmed.[486]

Nor does he trouble, we have seen, to keep true to nature; except in wonderland, cow, she-goat and sheep make a curious triple alliance for a lion on a carnivorous expedition. Really, Phaedrus is in Roman fashion bent upon moralizing so that his readers shall reap benefit (_utilitatem_);[487] and this domination of the moral is one factor which prevents any free and accurate study of animals. Not one of the world’s mighty sages, he has rather a thin philosophy to propound; and on his narrow stage the beasts sometimes display no more vitality than wooden marionettes. This renders his psychology too naïve—his animals reason in a manner patently subordinate to the intended lesson. The doves, for instance, harried by the kite, see at last the error of their ways and acknowledge the justice of their punishment:[488] and the outcome has a smack suggestive of a death-bed repentance in accord with the distinctly self-regarding morality inculcated.

Although the parallel of La Fontaine’s fables must cross the mind insistently during a study of Phaedrus, yet any elaborate comparison between the two would be futile. There is so much that is incommensurate. The claim of Phaedrus had been to polish in iambic verse the prose of “Aesop”; and it may be granted that his fables have more picturesque turns than their Greek originals. But they pale before the masterpieces of the French writer. Phaedrus does not possess the knowledge, the penetration, the dramatic power, the sense of style—he has not, in short, the genius which makes La Fontaine a great poet at a great epoch, and _par excellence_ the thinker and artist among fabulists. The Russian fabulist Kriloff, who is manifestly under obligations both to La Fontaine and to Aesop, may in one striking way be said to continue the Phaedrian tradition; for, whereas La Fontaine’s fables are impersonal, Kriloff’s had a frequent and pointed bearing on affairs and circumstances in the Russia of his time.

The metre of Phaedrus is the iambic senarius throughout. It is not the iambic line favoured by Catullus, Bibaculus or Horace, but broadly that employed by the ancient comic writers. He may have been influenced by Publilius Syrus, to whose sententious manner the moral of a fable often bears resemblance. We meet with a different type of iambic trimeter in Seneca, who, owing to Ovidian influence,[489] composed lines unlike the early Roman tragic iambic; for neatness and monotony have in the Senecan iambic replaced the strong rough lines of Ennius, Pacuvius and Accius. But it is the ancient iambic line, as used in comedy by Plautus and Terence, which descends lineally to Phaedrus. Only, while he may offend a fastidious ear by admitting spondees in the second and the fourth feet, he is generally careful to avoid overloading his verse with long syllables and to secure variety of sound by introducing other metrical feet[490] and by attention to elision.

Regarding the fables as a whole, Dr. Mackail contends that “their chief interest is as the last survival of the _urbanus sermo_ in Latin poetry”;[491] but perhaps this view too exclusively estimates them from the linguistic and stylistic side. Slight from the standpoint of purely literary merit, the fables of Phaedrus do however possess considerable historical importance. They hold their place in the chronicle of European fable-literature; they form a chapter in the book of Rome’s debt to Greek models; they contain a significant amount of original material, with a virile bearing upon contemporary life; and, farther, it is not the least of their claims to attention that they wielded a potent influence in medieval times, and, if only as one of those lesson-books which sink deep into the memory, they have been beloved by many generations of readers.

POETRY OF THE TIME

To the exiguous body of minor poetry during his own times Tiberius contributed a lyric lament on the death of L. Caesar, and poems in the late Greek manner.[492] It has already been observed that the emperor had profited by his studies in rhetoric, under Theodorus and others, enough to acquit himself proficiently in speaking and in writing, though he cultivated at times a halting and obscure manner. Towards the close of Augustus’s reign, Manilius[493] had written his _Astronomica_, viewing the universe on Stoic principles and displaying a style not uninfluenced by Ovidian dexterity.

A famous but ill-starred prince has a niche in the history of that particular type of didactic poetry which descended from Cicero and Manilius. The emperor’s nephew and adopted son, Germanicus[494] (15 B.C.–A.D. 19), added to military ability a command of his own language as speaker and poet.[495] He wrote Greek comedies which have perished, and in both languages elegiac epigrams, a few of which have been preserved, including a Latin one on a boy who met with a fatal accident on ice. To him are usually assigned the hexameter translations or adaptations of the Greek poems by Aratus of Soli in Cilicia on astronomy and weather-forecasts (Φαινόμενα and Διοσημεῖα) which have come down, some 700 and 200 lines respectively, under the name of “Claudius Caesar.” There is ancient authority for the ascription to Germanicus; Lactantius, for instance, quotes a line from “Germanicus Caesar in his Aratean poem.”[496] An apostrophe to Augustus in the poem (l. 558) implies the death of that emperor, and _genitor_ in l. 2 is applicable to his adoptive father Tiberius. Rutgers’s advocacy for the authorship of Domitian (who did not take the title “Germanicus” until after his campaign against the Chatti in A.D. 84) has found little acceptance.

Astronomy formed in antiquity an integral part of a liberal education: a cultured Roman in reading about the heavens was far from being so helpless as is the average reader of to-day, nor was the ancient so ignorant when he looked at the starry sky. The work translated and amplified by Germanicus is, in effect, an indication of a different type of knowledge, requirement and interest from that usual in modern times, and its compound of astronomy and mythology cannot retain the attraction which it once exercised. A heavenly body is not merely mentioned in its position or for its influence: it is connected with the legend from which its name is derived, and so the didactic is lit up with faint gleams of poetry, in which perhaps Germanicus excels his original. Thus the deteriorating ages of the world appear as in Ovid, and the name of a constellation like Andromeda leads away from science into fancy:[497]

The picture of her woe abides: she still extends
Her arms as once when bound to cruel cliff.

Long ago, Frey[498] pointed out the prince’s free treatment of his Greek original, his correction of mistakes in the light of later knowledge, and his insertion of passages of his own composition, somewhat in the fashion observable in Coleridge’s rendering of Schiller’s _Wallenstein_. If time-honoured legends are not subjected to critical examination, they are at least sometimes introduced apologetically: “if an old tale may find favour,” “if in truth Juppiter was suckled as a child,” “if in truth Atlans upholds the realms of Jove.”[499] This independence of method and spirit is one of the features which distinguishes Germanicus’s version of the _Aratea_ from the preceding attempt by Cicero and the later one by Avienus in the fourth century.

A poem concerned with Germanicus may appropriately be mentioned here, because it connects the age of Augustus and that of Tiberius. It is a fragment in hexameters which stops short in the twenty-third line as quoted by the elder Seneca[500] to illustrate Latin power in describing the ocean. The verses are by Albinovanus Pedo,[501] a poet of Ovid’s set, who had written a _Theseid_ and elegies, including a consolation to Livia on the death of Germanicus’s father, Drusus, some twenty-four years earlier than this poem on the expedition under Germanicus into the North Sea. Tacitus has described the storm which befell this same expedition in the _Annals_ (II. xxiii.). In turgid style Pedo aims at conveying the nervous alarm of adventurers braving the unknown hazards of high latitudes, with a sense of being exiled (_extorres_) beyond the known limits of the globe into sunless realms where Ocean “bears enormous monsters ’neath its sluggish tides”: They exclaim:

Heaven calls us back, forbidding mortal eyes
To know the boundary of the world: why force
With oars those alien seas and haunted waves?[502]

Though Pedo is mainly Augustan, his declamatory lines composed under Tiberius possess the interest of forming a link between the rhetorical qualities observable in Ovid and the epic poetry of the Silver Age.

The rarity of names of contemporary playwrights is a reminder that the drama, usually at Rome outrivalled by less intellectual entertainments, had fallen upon evil days. The popular dramatic performances, in favour of which comedy[503] had virtually disappeared, were now the mime and the Atellan farce. The mime, realistic and often coarse though it was in its picture of life, yet, according to the opinion of so staid a philosopher as Seneca, shared with ancient classical tragedy and comedy the merit of conveying impressive lessons of practical wisdom;[504] and there is a familiar anecdote told of the death-bed scene when Augustus asked those around him whether he had played the “mime” of life well, capping his query with Greek verses which solicited their applause.[505] A writer of Caligula’s time named Catullus composed mimes, two of which were _Phasma_ (“The Spectre”) and _Laureolus_, whose title-rôle of a bandit was on one occasion sustained by a wretched criminal who underwent a real crucifixion upon the stage.[506] The Atellan farce held its ground during several reigns,[507] and was presumably all the more acceptable because some line or lines might strike the audience as covertly directed against an emperor.

Tragedy can scarcely be said to have had a real survival in the atrophied forms of _fabulae salticae_ and dramatic recitations.[508] The _fabula saltica_ expressed action, feeling and character, sometimes no doubt with marvellous dexterity, through the dancing, gesture and garb of a _pantomimus_, while the words of the play were assigned to a chorus. Had the librettos come down, some might conceivably have entered into literary history: we know, for instance, that Lucan wrote fourteen such librettos; and, later, Statius wrote an _Agaue_ for the dancer Paris. Many pieces, however, were based on the most unsavoury stories in mythology, and represented a Pasiphaë, a Myrrha, or a Leda. As regards the pathetic recitations extracted from plays or composed specially to recite, this mutilated or attenuated form of drama became one of the great amusements of Nero both as writer and performer.

Dramatic composition under the Empire was in reality no safer for authors than history was. If a mere line about a ruler’s folly in a tragedy apparently so remote from contemporary politics as his _Atreus_ involved the downfall of Mamercus Scaurus,[509] it is hardly matter for surprise that an equivocal jest in an Atellan farce should lead Caligula to have its luckless author burned in the amphitheatre.[510] The friendship of P. Pomponius Secundus[511] with a son of Sejanus had rendered him suspect under Tiberius, and for years he remained under surveillance with enforced leisure for literary creation. Outliving Tiberius, he again became a public figure. The elder Pliny speaks of him as of consular rank, served under him against the Germans, and wrote his biography. Why the mob in the theatre attacked the dramatist in A.D. 47 is not clear. Quintilian, at any rate, considered him far the best tragic poet he had seen. A single title of his plays survives—the _Aeneas_, presumably a _praetexta_ dramatizing portions of the legendary history of Rome.[512]

LITERATURE OF THE NERONIAN PERIOD

A.D. 54–A.D. 68