Chapter III: Juvenal (2)

In those satires which Dryden selected for rendering, his neat distich is at its best among the terse sententious parts; and the experiment whereby the great English satirist set himself to translate his Roman prototype must always remain of extraordinary interest, although one may feel that Gifford’s heroic couplets achieve in some respects a more successful version. Briefly, however, Juvenal’s variety of line-structure, his freedom in pause and _enjambement_, cannot be conveyed within the rigid limits of the couplet. This ease of movement accounts for his range—occasional beauty, occasional harshness, but prevailing rapidity. Cleverly interwined alliterations may be made not merely emphatic and decorative as in _dat ueniam coruis, uexat censura columbas_, but realistic in their unmistakable echo of the sense, as in the likening of a woman’s torrential talk to the banging of tin basins and tinkling bells—_tot pariter pelues et tintinnabula dicas pulsari_. Or, again, the excited bustle of a house on fire is suggested by the final and initial dentals which recur, like the rat-tat of a kettle-drum in

“iam poscit aquam, iam friuola transfert
Ucalegon, tabulata tibi iam tertia fumant.”

Totally different effects are produced by the slow melancholy movement at the close of a line to express the fate of a poor wretch who has found favour with the dangerous Messalina:

“rapitur miser extinguendus
Messalinae oculis.”

Like all the satirists, Juvenal draws a modicum of words from the common speech of town and country—_caballus_, _olla_, _scrofa_, _potestas_ (like the Italian _podestà_, a magistrate). He delights in such diminutives as the _sermo cotidianus_ preserved all through the history of Latin and handed down to modern Italian. One may specify as examples, _candidulus_, _cuticula_, _flammeolum_, _foculus_, _fraterculus_, _Graeculus_, _hortulus_, _igniculus_, _improbulus_, _liuidulus_, _nutricula_, _ofella_, _pallidulus_, _palliolum_, _paruulus_, _pellicula_, _rancidulus_, _sarcinula_, _seruulus_, _sordidulus_, _virguncula_.

The influence of the Satires is not traceable before the fourth century, when Ammianus Marcellinus proves they had admirers. Both pagans and Christians felt their spell: they were imitated by Ausonius, Claudian, and Prudentius, and quoted by Lactantius and Servius. Medieval interest in Juvenal’s ethical value was well marked—Chaucer apostrophizes him; and from Elizabethan times onwards the satirists of England and France have studied his poems. Readers of Boileau, Dryden, Pope, Johnson and Byron know that they all in varying degrees were indebted to the works of the Roman satirist.

LITERATURE IN THE REIGN OF HADRIAN

A.D. 117–A.D. 138

SUETONIUS AND FLORUS

Hadrian’s reign a literary diminuendo—The emperor himself—His
tastes—Archaism and Greek—Suetonius—An imperial secretary
in disgrace—Encyclopaedic fruits of his leisure—Works
extant and lost—Date of _De Viris Illustribus_ and _De Vita
Caesarum_—Sources—_De Grammaticis_—_De Rhetoribus_—_De
Poetis_—The doubtful _Life of Virgil_—Characteristics of
_Lives of the Caesars_—Suetonius and Tacitus—Suetonius
and Pepys—Portraits of emperors—Entertaining
realism—Style—Influence.

Three Flori in one—Florus the rhetor—Florus the poet—Doubtful
ascription of _Peruigilium Veneris_ to him—Florus the
historian—The Roman people his hero—Eulogy and rhetoric.

THE REIGN OF HADRIAN

Tempting though it is to make a study of the Silver Age culminate crescendo-wise in the unique artistry of Tacitean prose, there are difficulties in leaving out the diminuendo of Hadrian’s reign[1810] (A.D. 117-138). One must acknowledge that literary history has but a faint interest in the jurists of the period like Salvius Julianus and Pomponius; or in the rhetoricians and philosophers, who mostly wrote in Greek; or again in versifiers, skilful rather than inspired, like Annianus, Septimius Serenus, Alfius Avitus, and the restless emperor himself, although his dying farewell to his soul is at least a perpetual bait for translators.[1811] One notes, too, little of significance among the grammarians, except perhaps the commentaries, now in fragments, written by Terentius Scaurus on Plautus, Virgil and Horace, and his linguistically important _De Orthographia_, of which we possess two abstracts. It is also true that the greatness of Tacitus eclipses the work of Suetonius and Florus, the only two Hadrianic historians who are noteworthy, if, as is most likely, the abridgement of Trogus’s Macedonian history by Justinus is rather Antonine than contemporary.[1812] But chronologically there is no natural break just before Suetonius, who was one of Pliny’s junior friends; nor should the fall-off from Tacitean brilliance blind one either to Suetonius’s merits in a different kind of biography from the _Agricola_ or to the debt which literary history owes him for preserving, with an almost Varronian interest in the past, much that could not otherwise have been known about the poets and the teachers of Rome.

Before studying Suetonius and Florus, a glance at the reign seems appropriate. Its total literary achievement makes a somewhat ironic comment on Juvenal’s hope _et spes et ratio studiorum in Caesare tantum_, and shows that patronage does not of necessity beget literature. Patronage, indeed, while clearly it never can create genius, is not always even good for such genius as may emerge. The prince himself was a lover of learning and architecture. He established a library at his spacious villa whose ruins still impress us under the slopes of Tivoli: he had another at Antium, and a third was attached to his famous academy at Rome, the Athenaeum. “The little Greek” (_Graeculus_), as some dared to call him, was a student of eloquence and drama. He published some of his speeches: he patronized but also quizzed scholars and philosophers. Pieces of mediocre verse by his Majesty have survived, and we know the ugly title of his lost miscellany, _Catachannae_. Only once did inspiration visit him: as he lay under the shadow of death, there came to him a few simple lines immortal in their suggestion of the mysterious parting between body and soul:

_Animula, uagula, blandula,_
_Hospes comesque corporis,_
_Quae nunc abibis in loca,_
_Pallidula, rigida, nudula,_
_Nec ut soles dabis iocos?_

The tender diminutives add to the difficulty of translation, but one more attempt may be made:

Ah! little fondling soul and fleeting,
My body’s guest and travel-friend,
To what far land art thou retreating,
Poor little wan, stark, naked sweeting—
Thy wonted frolic at an end?[1813]

In several ways the example set by imperial taste contributed to give to literature the particular turn which it now took. Hadrian had a preference for the archaic—a feature of Roman criticism accentuated later in the century. That he was a pronounced phil-Hellene and a great traveller were both facts which influenced others. Suetonius, we shall find, furnishes a good instance of the extent to which authors were now composing in Greek as well as in Latin; and no long time elapses before a Roman emperor, Marcus Aurelius, chooses Greek as the proper language for his _Meditations_. Apollodorus composed his treatise on siege-operations expressly for Hadrian, and military writing was continued by Aelian in his work on Greek tactics. Many Greek volumes of the time on history have perished; for example those of Crito, a Macedonian who accompanied Hadrian on his journeys, and treated Syracuse, Macedonia, Persia in addition to Trajan’s Dacian war. The best work of Arrian, from Bithynia, belongs to Hadrian’s time. If he is chiefly remembered as a second Xenophon who produced a new set of _Memorabilia_ in handling the Stoic philosophy of his master Epictetus, and a new _Anabasis_ in narrating the Asiatic expedition of Alexander, it should likewise be borne in mind that he became a Roman citizen and a consul. Though he was still alive in the days of Marcus Aurelius, it was for Hadrian that Arrian wrote the _Periplus_ of the Black Sea. Geography, one feels, ought to have flourished under so indefatigable a traveller: certainly mathematical geography was, thanks to the genius of Ptolemaeus, to make a notable advance under the Antonines.

SUETONIUS

No one in antiquity appears to have thought of writing the biography of one of its most famous biographers, C. Suetonius Tranquillus.[1814] For information about him, we are in consequence dependent upon a few allusions of his own,[1815] sundry letters of the younger Pliny, and a statement in the _Life of Hadrian_ which Spartianus wrote in or after Diocletian’s reign. His father, Suetonius Laetus, fought at Betriacum as a _tribunus angusticlauius_ of the thirteenth legion in A.D. 69, and about that year Suetonius Tranquillus must have been born.[1816] This conclusion hangs largely on the meaning attached to the term _adulescentia_; for he looked back on himself as having been _adulescens_ in A.D. 88 (when a pretended Nero appeared twenty years after the real Nero’s death), and as still _adulescens_ late in Domitian’s reign.[1817] He may have been born in Rome; but this is no more certain of him than it is of Lucretius or Julius Caesar.

The external evidence about his life consists of references in Pliny’s letters within the period from 96 to 112.[1818] These references show that he practised in the law-courts; that he was allowed to transfer to a kinsman a military tribunate for which he had himself been nominated; that he was appreciated as a writer, but slow to issue works; and that Pliny valued his advice on such a question as reading verse in public. Pliny’s request submitted on Suetonius’s behalf to Trajan for the concession of the _ius trium liberorum_ proves that, though he was married, he had either no children or fewer than the statutory requirement. The letter is a warm testimony to the integrity and learning of a man who had been for a time an inmate of Pliny’s house, and for whom, he assures the emperor, he felt a stronger affection the closer his acquaintance became.[1819] In the next reign Suetonius held an imperial secretaryship,[1820] when access to the archives gave him presumably the first impulse, and certainly considerable material, towards his _Lives of the Caesars_. Hadrian, however, in A.D. 121 dismissed him along with others, including Septicius Clarus, prefect of the Praetorian guard, for some offence against court-etiquette in relation to the empress Sabina.[1821] Never a public man, Suetonius thenceforward devoted his leisure to what most attracted him—historical, academic and antiquarian studies. The list of his works proves that his productivity was great; but we know from Pliny that he produced slowly.[1822] It may, therefore, easily be credited that Suetonius lived till he was an old man under the emperor Antoninus Pius.

Time has spared only the _Lives of the Caesars_, and from the _De Viris Illustribus_, on men eminent in literature, the greater part of the sections _De Grammaticis_ and _De Rhetoribus_, as well as the _Life_ of the elder Pliny among the historians, that of Passienus Crispus among the orators, and the _Lives_ of Terence, Horace and Lucan.[1823] These last three are all (except such morsels as Jerome preserved in his amplification of Eusebius’s chronicle) that can safely be counted genuine portions of the _De Poetis_, the loss of which has left lamentable blanks in our knowledge.

A catalogue given in Greek by Suidas under the heading Τράγκυλλος includes the _De Vita Caesarum_ and _De Viris Illustribus_ and adds nine titles: _On Games among the Greeks_ (in Greek); _On Spectacles and Games among the Romans_; _On the Roman Year_; _On (critical) Signs in Writings_; _On Cicero’s Republic_ (a book in answer to six books by the grammarian Didymus against Cicero); _On Proper Names, Dress and Shoes_ (probably a history rather than a philosophy of clothes); _On Abusive Terms and their Origin_ (in Greek, and grouped by their application to the vicious, to busybodies, fools, slaves, etc.); _On the Manners and Customs of Rome_ (two books which we can imagine to have been full of interest); and the enigmatic Συγγενικόν.[1824] Some of these are also vouched for by Latin writers like Aulus Gellius, Tertullian, Censorinus, and Servius; while some may be not independent works but sections of a larger treatise. Traces of yet other books are found in Orosius, Servius, Lydus, Priscian and Isidore: namely, an account of Julius Caesar’s campaigns in Gaul;[1825] _On Physical Blemishes_ (_De Vitiis Corporalibus_, conceivably treated in connexion with his work on dress); _On Eminent Courtesans_; _On Organization of Public Duties_ (_De Institutione Officiorum_); _On Kings_ (_De Regibus_); _On Various Matters_ (_De Rebus Variis_), possibly identical with the miscellaneous _Pratum_ or _Prata_, which, as can be inferred from later references, was divided into books on different subjects, antiquarian and scientific (_e.g._ Rome and Roman customs, the Roman year, the universe, nature of animals, etc.), probably including some of those in Suidas’s list.[1826] When it is remembered that Suetonius wrote both in Greek and in Latin, and handled a vast range of themes, one can realize his long years of laborious industry and understand his influence upon historians, grammarians, antiquaries and encyclopaedists for several centuries.

If the work whose appearance in whole or part Pliny in one of his letters expected from Suetonius was the _De Viris Illustribus_, then its publication may be put about A.D. 113.[1827] One is on fairly sure ground in dating the _De Vita Caesarum_ about 121, _i.e._ before the disgrace of Septicius Clarus to whom the imperial biographies were dedicated. There is, however, hardly justification for attempting to give, even with reserve, as Macé does, an approximate date for the _De Institutione Officiorum_ and the _De Rebus Variis_.

Much of his antiquarian lore Suetonius drew from Varro; for facts about illustrious men he could lay under contribution Fenestella, Santra, Nepos, Hyginus, Seneca the elder, and Asconius; and for poets the commentators upon them. The citations and references to authorities in the _Life of Terence_ indicate that he was well read. His main reliance upon books and documents may be one reason (apart from an instinctively historical interest in Julius and Augustus) why the _Lives_ grow shorter as they approach his own period, when oral evidence was more abundant than written histories. But he did not ignore verbal witnesses: on the contrary, much in him was due to popular opinion and gossip. Thus, stories about Claudius on the bench are recorded from the recollections of elderly persons (_a maioribus natu audiebam_, _Cl._ xv.). The painstaking inquiries (_quamuis satis curiose inquirerem_, _Vesp._ i.) about Vespasian’s ancestors were presumably conducted in districts likely to know the family. Quite definitely he made use of matters which he heard mentioned by his grandfather (_auum meum narrantem puer audiebam_, _Cal._ xix.), by his father (_Oth._ x.), or by others (_ex nonnullis comperi_, _Ner._ xxix.). Similarly, he had several informants (_e pluribus comperi_, _Tit._ iii.) to vouch for Titus’s expertness in shorthand and that adroitness in imitating signatures which might in other circumstances have turned the prince into an arch-forger. Yet the bulk of Suetonius’s material came from his reading, which could be more exactly estimated, had it been part of his method to name his sources regularly instead of frequently contenting himself with a colourless _quidam ... nonnulli tradunt_ (_Vesp._ i.). Though he may characterize authorities as trustworthy (_nec incertis_, _Ner._ xxxiv.), this only leaves one curious as to their identity. When Suetonius was in Hadrian’s service _ab epistulis_, the archives under charge of the associated department _a studiis_ were easily accessible to him; while his intimacy with Pliny’s circle had not only given a patrician colour to his outlook, but probably directed him by preference to writers of a corresponding hue. At court he had opportunities for examining collections of imperial letters and speeches, state-papers, edicts and ceremonial eulogies, and, among public documents, the _acta diurna_, _senatus consulta_ and _senatus acta_.[1828] It is interesting to remember that Suetonius mentions his possession of verses by Nero in the emperor’s own handwriting;[1829] nor is his reading without literary acumen when he remarks of Claudius’s autobiography in eight books that it was lacking not so much in style as in common sense (_composuit ... magis inepte quam ineleganter_).[1830] Among historians whom he does name are well-known figures like Nepos, Hirtius, Asinius Pollio, Cremutius Cordus and a few others unfamiliar to us.[1831] Diligent though he was, he cannot be called critical of his material: he was too well satisfied with amassing it. A conflict of evidence he prefers to leave undecided (_quod discrepat sit in medio_, _Vitell._ ii.). It is the more surprising that upon occasion he can weigh his authorities. The most memorable instance is the chapter discussing the birthplace of Caligula,[1832] where a brief investigation into his sources decides him to follow the official _acta_ or _publici instrumenti auctoritas_ in preference to the authors Lentulus Gaetulicus and the elder Pliny. In another passage he reasons critically about the variation between complimentary and uncomplimentary accounts of Vitellius’s ancestry: it was not, he observes, simply due to prejudice for or against the emperor himself, since older accounts presented the same conflict of evidence; and, in this connexion, he cites as one of his first-hand authorities a memoir by Q. Elogius in the Augustan period.[1833]

The _De Grammaticis_ contains in brief space much of interest in the chronicle of literary teachers at Rome, throwing incidental light on such points as the demarcation of grammar from rhetoric, the effect of literary teaching on poetry, the fees earned, and the taste for old-fashioned writers which lingered in the provinces after it had vanished in Rome. Here and there we find amusing touches, like the request made by a pleader for adjournment of a case to enable a litigant to take lessons in grammar, or Asinius Gallus’s epigram on the ex-boxer who had turned to teaching:

The Don who gives us glosses in a list
Once learned to dodge his head:
His mouth’s no good—but he has got a fist!
Why doesn’t he box instead?[1834]

In the still shorter _De Rhetoribus_ we are told incidentally about enactments against professors of rhetoric, dangerous innovations in the educational system, instances of long-continued practice of declamation by famous men, varying methods and standard exercises. The work unfortunately ends in an interrupted list of prominent teachers.

Among the _Lives of the Poets_ we face the double misfortune that few have survived, and that the _Life of Virgil_ cannot with confidence be pronounced Suetonian. It strikes in its very first chapter a note different from the other literary biographies. There is something appropriately mysterious in the record of Virgil’s lowly birth by the wayside, the mild-eyed tearless babe, his mother’s symbolic dream, and the poplar branch which was planted where he was born and which grew with miraculous speed into a tree hallowed by prayers and veneration. All this is indicative of a reverential attitude towards the personality of Virgil already enshrined in educational tradition and honoured by worshipping poets like Statius, in preparation, as it were, for the medieval belief in his wizardry. The tone has led many critics to ascribe it to Donatus; but it is only right to quote Nettleship’s defence of the Suetonian authorship.[1835] “The style,” he says, “is in the main the peculiar style of Suetonius; the Latin is the quiet, sober, terse and yet distinguished Latin which characterizes him among other writers of his period, and separates him from the later writers of the _Historia Augusta_.” Of the accepted _Lives_ the _Terence_ has among its verse quotations interesting criticisms by Cicero and Caesar (_o dimidiate Menander!_) while the _Horace_ gives illuminating glimpses into Horace’s affectionate intimacy with Maecenas and Augustus.

On the _Lives of the Caesars_ the reputation of Suetonius rests. Yet it is easy to pick faults in the work. A great deal of it partakes of the nature of a _chronique scandaleuse_ based upon tittle-tattle about the emperors and compiled by a literary man with the muck-rake, too keen upon petty and prurient detail to produce a scientific account of his subjects. The author is neglectful of dates and over-rigid in his scheme of biography. A measure of monotony is inevitable in his typical arrangement of ancestry, birth, years before accession to power, then public life and private life grouped under different aspects, portents presaging death, personal appearance and so on.[1836] The stiffness of plan is, however, considerably softened by a wealth of illustrative anecdote. But there is no grasp like that of a Tacitus, no deep penetration of motive, no appreciation of historical movements. One reads the biographies of Galba, Otho and Vitellius without getting any connected view of their struggle for sovereignty as presented in the _Histories_ of Tacitus. On the other hand, the truth remains that Suetonius is readable and continues to be read. In strong contrast to Tacitus he hardly ever indulges in a general reflection; but he succeeds in drawing attention to significant facts and outward characteristics. The names of Suetonius and of Pepys have been mentioned together;[1837] and some analogy indeed exists between their matter-of-fact, concrete, gossiping styles, and their official relationship to the most elevated personages of their day. There, however, the likeness, such as it is, ends; for the English diarist is pre-eminent for naïve honesty in setting down his own personality with his pen. The self-revelation made with his intimacy of detail belongs to a different world from the record of the Caesars which Suetonius compiled from documents and hearsay. Pepys is internal, subjective and autobiographic: Suetonius is external, objective and biographic.

If, again, one thinks of Tacitus’s vividness, Suetonius is vivid in a different way. Compared with Tacitus, he is as a photograph to a picture or a finished engraving. He is plain-spoken, and it may at least be urged that, after the lunacy of certain high-flown writers, Suetonius comes like a whiff of plebeian common sense. To him nothing is common or unclean. He descends, if need be, into the coarse without qualms or condemnation. He is a recorder, not a moralist: so, in regard to Tiberius, as Heredia has it,

Égratignant la cire impitoyable, il a
Décrit les noirs loisirs du veillard de Caprée.[1838]

The great thing is that his personages live. His method is brevity of fact, story and description. Attracted by details such as Tacitus would have considered beneath the dignity of history, many may wish to know what the early emperors looked like. Here are some vignettes with which Suetonius can oblige them—Julius Caesar, a tall, clear-complexioned, well-formed man with keen black eyes, close-shaven and rather sensitive about his baldness; Augustus, handsome though not tall, with striking eyes, curly yellowish locks, a nose prominent at the top, and complexion between dark and fair; Tiberius, of robust build and stature above the average, left-handed, wearing his hair pretty long at the back, with particularly large eyes capable of seeing even in the dark, a stern person with hardly anything to say; Caligula, pale-complexioned, hollow-eyed and ugly; Claudius, not without dignity while he sat or stood, but shaky on his legs when he walked, and ridiculous by reason of his unseemly guffaw, his stammering utterance, and his perpetually nodding head; Nero, of about medium height, with features handsome rather than winning, light hair arranged in tiers of curls, weak bluish-grey eyes, thick-set neck, projecting paunch and slender legs; Galba, bald in front, blue-eyed, hook-nosed, his hands and feet twisted with arthritis.[1839] We need not go through the whole realistic gallery, which suggests the Dutch School of portraiture.

Similar vividness marks the facts and incidents with which Suetonius entertains us. So full is he of his facts that as a rule he gives them in the briefest possible compass. Just occasionally does he allow himself to expand into longer passages which impress the memory. Among such memorable ones is the narrative of Caesar’s arrival at the Rubicon after missing his way in the darkness, the pause to weigh the question whether to cross or not to cross, and the strangely gracious figure that appeared to him piping by the river-side.[1840] Here a slight gleam of romance has lit up a prevailingly matter-of-fact style. Other passages somewhat more sustained than his customary terse strokes are the engrossing description of Caesar’s murder, the account of Tiberius at Rhodes, the graphic chapter on Caligula’s mad cruelty, where one almost seems to hear the eerie laugh of the insane tyrant tickled at the thought that on a nod from him his two unsuspecting consular guests could have their throats cut; and the complete tale of the closing days in Nero’s life when he was at bay, a series of ten chapters forming a unity unusually elaborate for Suetonius and thrilling in its culminating three chapters.[1841]

Much, however, is on a smaller and less connected scale. As with a diarist like Pepys, one can dip anywhere into Suetonius at haphazard and chance upon incidents that may be isolated but are certainly entertaining. It holds one to read about Caligula’s megalomaniac jealousy of great writers like Homer, Virgil and Livy, whose works he wished to destroy; his lunatic pranks in treating Castor and Pollux as his _concierges_ so that from their temple Romans might enter the imperial palace; his flirtations with the Moon-goddess and confidential talks with brother Jove; his scathing disrespect for relatives in characterizing his grandmother Livia as “a Ulysses in petticoats” and in regarding his uncle Claudius as merely a butt. In the next _Life_, the ridiculous side in Claudius is illustrated repeatedly from the emperor’s feeble jokes, his silly remarks, and an absentmindedness so supreme as to sanction the despatch of invitations to the dead. The reader is not expected to honour an emperor who, while he could declaim marvellously, talked, as Goldsmith did, like poor Poll.[1842] The _Life of Nero_ has many good things. It tells of the way in which his ancestors the Aenobarbi got their red beards; and of the young ruler’s exclamation over signing his first death-warrant, “How I wish I did not know letters!” (_quam uellem litteras nescire!_) It reveals the system of _claqueurs_ whom Nero had trained in different sorts of applause (“bombi,” “rain-patter,” “dish-clash”), and acquaints us with his touchy conceit, his hooliganism in the streets at night, his ominous interest in fires, and his childish conduct in exhibiting water-organs after the news of the revolt of Vindex had reached him.

The sketches of the three Flavians contain metal just as attractive. The _Life of Vespasian_ is masterly in its own way, from the entertainingly superstitious portents heralding the great future of the destined prince from the East (_e.g._ the sign of the three oak branches, the sign of the street-mud, and the sign of the dog that brought in a man’s hand one day when Vespasian was at lunch) up to the dying emperor’s grim jest “Alack! I’m growing into a god, I suppose” (_Vae, puto, deus fio_). The short _Life of Titus_ gives a mere glance at his notorious passion (_insignem amorem_) for Queen Berenice; and a little later what might have been handled as a romance closes in the curt statement about the parted sweethearts; _Berenicem statim ab urbe dimisit inuitus inuitam_. Like Gibbon, Titus presumably sighed as a lover but obeyed as a son. To Suetonius we owe the record of the prince’s deservedly commended utterance that a day in which he had done good to nobody was a lost day—“_perdidi diem_,” _memorabilem illam meritoque laudatam uocem_. In the _Life_ of his brother we are doubtless intended to catch the sinister bearing of Domitian’s morbid pleasure in fly-catching at the beginning of his reign, and his incessant reading of little beyond the memoirs written at Capri by Tiberius—_son digne émule_, remarks Cucheval.[1843]

The free-and-easy style of Suetonius makes a sort of businesslike match for his systematic marshalling of material. He is too much absorbed in what he has drawn from his documents to trouble about rhetorical display. His facts are left to speak for themselves, and sometimes they speak badly. Inelegantly used participles or ablatives, jerky and unpolished clauses, and an inartistic structure of sentence are frequent results of this carelessness. One feels as if something has gone wrong with sentences like _sed ea quoque paulatim repleta assidua equi uectatione post cibum_ (_Cal._ iii.); or, again, one finds an important remark tacked loosely on to a sentence, _e.g._ in telling how the doubtful reputation of Titus as a possible second Nero “changed into rapturous praise when no fault was discovered in him, but the noblest virtues instead”—_at illi ea fama pro bono cessit conuersaque est in maximas laudes neque uitio ullo reperto et contra uirtutibus summis_ (_Tit._ vii.). There is something modern in this escape from the conventional order of words and this absence of decoration. Hence it comes that the Elizabethan pomp and quaintness of Philemon Holland’s version are too opulently distracting to convey the simple matter-of-fact tone of the greater part of Suetonius, so that there is critical point in the old epigram:

Philemon with’s Translations doeth so fille us,
He will not let Suetonius be Tranquillus.

Yet it has been noted that Suetonius is not without a rhythm in his prose. De Groot’s statistics for the sentence-endings examined by him suggest that the frequency of the double trochee in Suetonius is much the same as in Quintilian, of cretic followed by trochee less than in Quintilian, and of double cretic much the same as in Quintilian, though less than in the younger Seneca.[1844] Macé has considered, on M. Havet’s method, the rhythm of Suetonius’s _clausulae_ in relation to both quantity and accent.[1845]

Preferring a neat simplicity[1846] in the statement of facts, Suetonius has yet an individuality of style which, in spite of Silver Age constructions and vocabulary, marks him off from writers like Velleius and Florus as much as from Caesar and Cicero. We owe it to his dislike of affectation that he often quotes documents verbatim without any attempt at rewriting in his own manner. To the same dislike of affectation we owe the comparative infrequency of archaisms and neologisms in his works. It is noticeable that while Suetonius, as a scholar, had literary and antiquarian interests in common with Hadrian, his critical tastes were different. Unlike the emperor, he did not prefer Ennius to Virgil, Cato to Cicero and Caelius to Sallust:[1847] on the contrary, he was an admirer of Cicero, and,[1848] if he found blemishes in Sallust, must have seen more in Caelius. In his vocabulary, as might be expected, there are many words, or meanings of words, not to be found in Caesar or Cicero; but, as in most other Silver Age writers, these are, to a large extent, words taken over in first-century prose from the poetry of Virgil and Horace, or words already occurring in the prose of Livy and post-Augustan authors. Thus the Virgilian _austrinus_ (“southern”) had been used by Columella and the elder Pliny before Suetonius; and _adapertus_ (“open”) descended to him from Livy and Ovid through both prose and poetry of the first century. Occasionally Suetonius harked back to the old-fashioned: _cerritus_ (“crazed”) is a Plautine word transmitted through Horace, and _aquilus_ (“swarthy”) is a rare adjective borrowed from Plautus. Sometimes there are comparative novelties. _Extemporalis_ (“on the spur of the moment”) represents the sort of term which Suetonius naturally shares with writers like Quintilian, Tacitus, the younger Pliny and Martial, who have occasion to mention rhetorical fluency. Much the same holds of the non-Ciceronian, but ultimately most useful, words _prosa_ (sc. _oratio_) for “prose,” and _breuiarium_ for “an abstract.”

* * * * *

The Suetonian tradition is traceable in the biographical character of histories for generations. It ousted the Tacitean type until Ammianus Marcellinus (330-400) modelled his work on Tacitus. Suetonius’s formal arrangement was imitated in the lost writings of Marius Maximus (165-230), and it is evidently followed in the _Augustan History_, once ascribed in part to Diocletian’s reign.[1849] Christian authors also copied his structure, as did Paulinus in his biography of Ambrosius, and after the same pattern Einhard, or Eginhard, composed his life of Charlemagne. As regards language, writers like Eutropius, Aurelius Victor, and Orosius show traces of having read Suetonius. The influence of his _Lives_ of literary celebrities upon Jerome is a familiar fact. His Greek writings appealed to some of the Byzantines, while his miscellaneous range secured him notice from many different writers in Latin. Thus, Tertullian used his work on games for the _De Spectaculis_; Censorinus, Solinus and Macrobius found antiquarian lore in him; and other borrowers were the Virgilian commentator Servius, the scholiasts on Horace, on Germanicus, on Lucan and on Juvenal; as well as the encyclopaedist Isidorus of Seville.

FLORUS

Great probability attaches to the arguments that Florus[1850] the historian, Florus the rhetor, and Florus the poet, who all lived at this period, were one and the same person. Accepting this identification, we must take the correct name to have been P. Annius Florus, as the rhetor was called, and explain as confusions the “Julius Florus” and “L. Annaeus Florus” in MSS. of the historian. The academic dialogue by the rhetor on the question whether Virgil was more of an orator or a poet (_Vergilius Orator an Poeta_) is lost, but from a Brussels MS., containing an introduction[1851] to this lost theme, important details about the author’s life have been recovered. He was African. While at Rome in his youth under Domitian, he took part in the Capitoline competition, but was unfairly denied the prize and in chagrin took to wanderings which eventually brought him to Tarraco. Settled in Spain, he was one day in Trajan’s reign taxed by a friend with his long absence from the capital, where his verses, the friend reminded him, found appreciative readers. By Hadrian’s time he was in Rome again, and intimate enough with the emperor to banter him in miserable trochaics upon his travelling propensities:

To be Caesar I’ve no notion,
Or to roam the British Ocean
Or in Scythian fog be frozen.

The imperial retort was:

To be Florus I’d be sorry,
Round the city inns to hurry,
Or thro’ every cookshop scurry,
Where the plump mosquitoes worry.[1852]

Better verses by Florus[1853] have come down in five hexameters on spring-roses and twenty-six, on the whole pleasing, trochaic tetrameters _De Qualitate Vitae_, which include reflections on womankind, bad companionship, and foreign morality. In one quatrain a lover, who has cut his sweetheart’s name on the bark of a tree, declares with an agreeable assonance:

As the tree grows, so my zeal glows: passion fills the graven words.
(_Crescit arbor, gliscit ardor: animus implet literas._)

Another quatrain plays with a fancy concerning the Sun-god and the Wine-god:

As Apollo, so is Bacchus, bearer of a fiery load:
Both the gods were flame-created: both the gods were born in fire:
Both have heat to give as guerdon in the sunlight or the vine:
One dispels the dark of night-time, one the darkness of the mind.

(_Sic Apollo deinde Liber sic uidetur ignifer:_
_Ambo sunt flammis creati prosatique ex ignibus:_
_Ambo de donis calorem, uite et radio, conferunt:_
_Noctis hic rumpit tenebras, hic tenebras pectoris._)

His work in trochaics gives colour to the guess that Florus composed the _Peruigilium Veneris_,[1854] nearly one hundred trochaic tetrameters celebrating the eve of a joyous festival devoted to the Lady of the Springtime and of Love. Though now sadly disarranged, the poem was originally perhaps in twenty-two quatrains,[1855] marked off by the chanted refrain:

Let the lover love to-morrow; let the loveless learn to love.
(_Cras amet qui nunquam amauit, quique amauit cras amet._)

If one could be confident in the ascription to Florus, the reign of Hadrian would be credited with one of the sweetest and most romantic poems in all Latin literature, a hymn of ecstasy over the coming of a new season of brightness and fertility upon the earth:

’Tis the fresh and tuneful Springtide—Spring first brought the world
to light,
In the Spring fond hearts draw closer: in the Springtime birds unite:
(_Ver nouum, uer iam canorum; uere natus orbis est;_
_Vere concordant amores; uere nubunt alites._)

In contrast to the prevailing glee comes the personal note of melancholy at the end:

She is singing: we are silent: when doth Spring for me awake?
When shall I grow like the swallow? When may I my silence break?
I have lost the Muse by silence, and Apollo heeds me not.
(_Illa cantat, nos tacemus; quando uer uenit meum?_
_Quando fiam uti chelidon, ut tacere desinam?_
_Perdidi musam tacendo, nec me Apollo respicit._)

On the whole one must doubt whether the poem is not too good to be by Florus. In style it might be called Apuleian, and if it is not Hadrianic there is little to prevent one from believing that it at least belongs to some part of the second century, unless its almost entire avoidance of quadrisyllabic endings is considered too suggestive of the manner of Tiberianus in the fourth century.[1856]

With Florus as historian, or rather epitomizer, we are on surer ground. The best MS., the _Bambergensis_, gives the title of his work as _Epitoma ... de T. Liuio bellorum omnium annorum DCC_ and the correct number of books as two. The _Nazarianus_ follows a division into four books. In the title Florus’s dependence on Livy is recognized; but, besides this main source, he used Sallust, Caesar, and possibly the elder Seneca’s _Histories_. He is no geographer, but he alludes in his preface to geographical charts, and may have consulted Mela and Pliny. The _Natural History_ would give him authority for his reference to the richness of Spain in gold, _chrysocolla_ and _minium_.[1857] Perhaps Lucan also was a source.[1858] The work was probably written early in Hadrian’s reign.[1859]

His preface shows his attitude. It is an attitude of praise rather than of studied narration.[1860] The seven hundred years which he counts from Romulus to Augustus had been, he feels, so full of the greatness of the Roman people that one might suppose the history had been longer. To study it is to study the destiny not of one people but of the human race. Valour and Fortune had combined to establish a world-wide dominion. On the analogy of geographers, Florus submits at the outset a kind of plan (_breui quasi tabella_) to illustrate the evolution of the Roman people. For him it was an organism, and had passed through four ages: infancy, 250 years of regal government; youth, 250 years of warfare in Italy; robust maturity, 200 years of world-conquest up to Augustus; old age and decline, 200 years from Augustus until the writer’s own day—with, however, he is careful to add, a renewal of youth under Trajan. His figures, it should be noted, need correction; for chronology is not his strong point. A recapitulation (_anacephalaeosis_) is given with each of the first three ages; but the decadence is not treated. There is at the end of Book I an anticipatory review of growing luxury in the third age suggestive of the cause of the decline: the attack, as so often in the Silver Era, is couched in rhetorical terms.[1861]

Genuine historical thought is impossible in an author whose criterion of value was the extent to which events redounded to the glory of Rome, and whose criterion of credibility was an entry in the annals (_quae nisi in annalibus forent, hodie fabulae uiderentur_). His mode of treatment scarcely admits a touch of romance. Egeria’s mysterious prompting of Numa’s policy is merely a useful state-figment (_quo magis barbari acciperent_). Occasionally we find a story, but it is in general told with almost grudging curtness, like that of Navius and the whetstone. Occasionally, too, a great exploit rouses Florus to something approaching enthusiasm, like the recovery of Spain by Scipio; though it is a blemish that the enthusiasm is not always worked into the narrative but confined to parenthetic outbursts. Inevitably, however, much of the fascination of Roman history vanishes in the dry condensation of a summary. Its very neatness becomes tiresome, for the brevity tends to pass into abruptness. But in fairness it must be judged with regard to the author’s intention of writing a eulogistic sketch, where the Populus Romanus shall be the single hero throughout.

Because the aim was eulogistic instead of unimpassioned history, there is too frequent indulgence in exclamatory asides—“quae superbia!” “mira res dictu!” “quis credat?” “immane dictu!” “mirum et incredibile dictu!” “fidem numinum!” “o nefas!” Some of his comments have a naïve banality in their search for antithetic point. Of Julius Caesar’s assassination he says, “so he who had drenched the world with citizens’ blood at last drenched the senate-house with his own” (_sic ille qui terrarum orbem ciuili sanguine impleuerat tandem ipse sanguine suo curiam impleuit_); and, when the murdered Cicero’s head was fixed on the _rostra_, he states, “there was as great a rush to see him as there usually was to hear” (_nec aliter ad uidendum eum quam solebat ad audiendum concurreretur_). It is not surprising that the poetic element in him overloads his expression with metaphor, while the rhetorical element tempts him to exaggerate, as when Antony’s high turreted ships, “forts and cities in appearance, sailed not without the groaning of the sea and the toil of the winds” (_castellorum et urbium specie, non sine gemitu maris, et labore uentorum ferebantur_). It is unsafe for a prose-writer to expand the idea of Virgil’s _urbis opus_. On the other hand, he is happy in certain of his comparisons: there is force in likening the final resistance of Carthage to the dangerous bite of a dying beast; or the diminution in the Gauls’ resistance, after a first effort, to the melting of the snow upon their mountains. It may not be entirely fanciful to impute to African Latinity the more bizarre and brusque turns in him.[1862] In any case, though some of his rhetoric is absurd, it redeems his work from being a totally dry abstract. His sentences are, as a rule, well written, and not unpleasing in their _clausulae_. His language is characteristic in the use of post-Augustan words like _captiuitas_ and _diuersitas_, and in the position of _igitur_ at the start of a sentence.[1863] _Receptator_ seems to be a word of his own, outside legal phraseology. The way in which he overworks _quasi_ and _quippe_ is ludicrous.[1864]

The popularity of Florus was assured in the third and fourth centuries, when the demand for epitomes rose to its height. It is no longer a current belief, as it once was, that the Livian _periochae_ (which should not be mistaken for epitomes) were the work of Florus. But Lucius Ampelius borrowed from him for his short manual of general knowledge, the _Liber Memorialis_, compiled perhaps early in the third century.[1865] Ammianus, Orosius, Festus and Jordanes used him, as did the Byzantine historian Malalas; and the multiplication of manuscripts of his text testifies to the favour in which he stood with the Middle Ages.