Chapter XXXI: The Age of Augustus--Aspects of Its Civilisation (2)

An attempt which the emperor made to have the corn distributed every four months instead of every month met with scant approval and was soon abandoned. The Roman populace had grown thoroughly accustomed to the notion that its maintenance was the business of the state and would have liked nothing better than to have the emperor give them drink as well as food. Whenever wine grew dear they addressed complaints to him. But Augustus calmly replied that since the aqueducts of Agrippa had been completed no one in Rome need suffer thirst. Augustus had organised the maintenance of Rome on a large and liberal scale, but that which had formerly been a free-will offering became in his reign an eleemosynary institution.

Besides these regular monthly distributions there were special distributions in money and in kind on extraordinary occasions, which exhibit the emperor’s magnificent liberality. He has left the record of them in the _Monumentum Ancyranum_.[e] “To the Roman people, man by man, I caused three hundred sesterces to be paid in accordance with the testament of my father; in my own name I gave four hundred sesterces out of the spoils of war in my fifth consulate; and again in my tenth consulate I caused provisions to the value of four hundred sesterces per man to be distributed man by man out of my own means; and in my eleventh consulate I made twelve distributions of grain which I had purchased with my private means; and in my twelfth year of office as tribune I for the third time made a gift of four hundred sesterces man by man. These distributions were never made to less than 250,000 persons.

“In my eighteenth year of my office as tribune and my twelfth consulate I presented sixty denarii to 320,000 persons of the population of the capital man by man. In my thirteenth year of consular office I distributed sixty denarii apiece to the people who received the state corn, amounting to something over two hundred thousand persons.”

Taking these gifts in connection with similar expenses for lands and rewards for the veterans, for the imperial contributions to the state treasury and the provision of the military revenue, the colossal sum of six hundred million denarii mentioned in the appendix to the _Monumentum Ancyranum_ as given by Augustus to the Roman citizens does not seem at all exaggerated; and as these distributions were spread over a period of not quite sixty years, we must assign to each year a sum of not less than ten million denarii.

These sums, though dispensed of the imperial bounty, were taken by the people as their right in exchange for their lost liberty. Augustus was well aware that hunger is wont to be one of the mightiest, if not the mightiest, of revolutionary forces.

_Games; Gladiatorial Contests_

In the matter of subsistence the southerner is more modest in his demands than northern nations are; in the matter of excitement and amusement he makes greater claims. These Augustus also provided for liberally. The large scale and elaborate arrangement of the Roman games was in part the outcome of the simple idea of giving the people a compensation for their lack of influence in politics and of diverting their attention. In most cases where a nation is weary of politics it concentrates its attention upon private life, and the great ones of the theatre thrust statesmen and party leaders into the background. The emperor’s shows excelled everything that had ever been before in frequency, variety, and splendour; and so great was the interest taken in them by all classes that at great festivals and games the emperor was obliged to post sentinels to guard the vacant city from robbers and housebreakers.

The Actian games, celebrated at Rome every four years, were particularly magnificent. The first time (28) Augustus and Agrippa themselves managed the festivities and offered the populace spectacles of the most varied character. First a race ridden by boys and men of the highest families; then gymnastic contests in a wooden _stadium_ which the emperor had caused to be set up on the Field of Mars; while at the end prisoners of war were forced to exhibit to the people the spectacle of a mortal combat of gladiators. In later times the highest priestly colleges in Rome took charge of these games in rotation.

In his detailed narrative Augustus assigns the first place to the combats of gladiators, which he exhibited sometimes in his own name and sometimes in the names of his sons and grandsons; and in eight battles of this sort some ten thousand gladiators were engaged. Women were not absolutely excluded from among the spectators, but they were only allowed to watch the bloodshed from the topmost places. Augustus also abrogated the inhuman custom that none but the victors might leave the arena alive.

He endeavoured to check the excessive fondness for these cruel sports by forbidding officials to give gladiatorial shows instead of the usual theatrical or circus performances when they entered upon office, as had been done, for example, by the ædiles of the plebs in the year 42. Certain members of the aristocracy who were notorious for their bloodthirsty tastes, like Domitius Ahenobarbus, were first privately admonished, and, when that proved of no avail, their cruel gladiatorial fights were prohibited by an imperial edict.

Large troops of gladiators constituted a grave menace to the public peace, as had been proved, not only by the Gladiators’ War, but in the case of the gladiators of Decimus Brutus and M. Antonius. Accordingly in the year 22 an edict appeared to the effect that combats of gladiators were only to be arranged with the permission of the senate and not oftener than twice a year, and at the same time the number of contesting pairs was limited to sixty. Of course this did not diminish the popularity of these combats nor the interest of the populace in the combatants. It was an event when two veterans, each of whom had often conquered and slain his opponent, were at last pitted against each other for the decisive combat, or when a well-known gladiator had fought his way through and proceeded to hang up his victorious weapons in the temple of Hercules.

In later days the emperor Tiberius scorned to make himself popular by these means. But as the passion of the people for gladiatorial exhibitions did not wane they became a matter of private speculation. A freedman of small means erected a wooden amphitheatre for his shows at Fidenæ, but it was so badly built that it collapsed beneath the crowds of spectators who had flocked thither, most of them from Rome. After this accident the senate decreed that no one should give such performances unless he could prove that he was possessed of a certain fortune.

Wrestling matches of the sort so popular among the Greeks were not altogether unknown, but were only arranged three times by Augustus in the course of his long reign. Wooden stages were erected on the Field of Mars, and the most famous athletes were invited to Rome. Glycon of Pergamus, whose unconquered fist was celebrated not by his epitaph alone but also by Horace, was probably of the number.

The emperor followed these contests with peculiar interest. The Greeks had perfected boxing according to all the rules of the science; in Italy, on the other hand, it had retained more of its indigenous character. Augustus was in the habit of occasionally allowing the champions of the two nations to measure their strength against one another, but personally he was on the side of the Latin boxers, whether more or less schooled. When a harmless street fight broke out in any part of Rome, the emperor used to delight in the mighty blows which his countrymen dealt.

The emperor strove, though without lasting success, to keep women aloof from the brutal boxing matches. If the populace wanted to see boxers he yielded to their wishes, but he appointed the early morning hours for the contest and forbade women to go to the theatre before ten o’clock in the morning.

More popular still were the wild-beast hunts, of which Augustus arranged six-and-twenty, in which thirty-five hundred African lions and other wild animals were slain. Great was the difficulty of capturing and transporting these rare and dangerous animals; but greater still, it may be, the amount of care and money expended on the elaboration of the scenery. The Spaniards regard their bull-fights as a direct continuation of the wild-beast shows of antiquity; the splendour of the _mise en scène_ has survived to modern days, but the demands made by an ancient public in the matter of decoration and machinery were incomparably greater. In most cases gladiators were obliged to fight the dangerous animals, but occasionally criminals fell victims to them. Strabo, for example, saw the dreaded robber chieftain, Selurus, “the son of Etna,” hurled from a lofty scaffold that suddenly collapsed beneath him into the arena at Rome, where he fell straight into the lion’s cage that had been placed below.

The bloody battles of the gladiators on land found a counterpart in a tremendous sea fight which Augustus, following the example of the dictator, arranged quite close to Rome in the year 2. He caused a lake to be dug in the plain between the slopes of Janiculum and the bank of the Tiber, eighteen hundred feet long by twelve hundred wide, on which thirty large warships and many smaller ones, manned by three thousand (or possibly six thousand) gladiators, represented a sea fight of the time of the Persian wars. Ovid describes the gorgeous spectacle as an eye-witness:

“Then when Cæsar of late showed forth to the people
Ships of Persia and Athens, a type of the terrible sea fight,
Hither came youths from the two seas and hither came maidens,
And to the capital flocked all that dwelt in the earth.”

The lake was not supplied with water from the neighbouring Tiber, but Augustus built a special aqueduct (Aqua Augusta Alsietina) which brought water from the Alsietine and Sabatine lakes (Lago di Martignano and L. de Bracciano) to the Janiculum. The Romans were so spoiled by the beautiful spring-water of their aqueducts that Augustus never thought of carrying the water of these two lakes right across to the city on the other bank of the river, but the work was so substantial that it outlasted its original purpose. The emperor allowed the possessors of fields and gardens in the vicinity to make use of the water, which was not to be compared with that of the other aqueducts in the city.

The lake formed the centre of a little wood which the emperor presented to the Roman people in the name of his grandsons Lucius and Caius. Although he never arranged another sea fight on this lake, it was not filled up but was used by other emperors for maritime spectacles, in accordance with its original purpose.

_Races and Theatricals_

The ordinary performances in the theatre and circus, such as officials were required to arrange when they took office, were arranged by Augustus four times in his own name and twenty-three times in the names of other persons. Races in the circus, in particular, had been in vogue from very old times and enjoyed a high degree of popularity. It is true that the enthusiasm of the people did not reach the culminating point till the latter days of the empire, but the germ and rudiment was there even in republican times, and the age of Augustus did its fair share towards developing it. Epitaphs were not yet composed on the victors, like the τοὺς σοὺς ἀγῶνας αἰὼν λαλησει of subsequent centuries, but the interest and enthusiasm were spreading to wider circles. The prizes which rewarded the winners of the various races were valuable, and an exact record was kept of the first, second, and third prizes carried off by a famous charioteer in different years. There were originally only two parties in the circus, the whites and the reds, but the greens and the blues appear to have been added by the time of Augustus; or so it seems probable from inscriptions which, though they bear no date, yet form part of a large find of this period.

Even private individuals (_e.g._, a relative of the famous jurist Ateius Capito) were beginning to keep racing stables with a numerous staff. His slaves and freedmen formed a life-insurance association in which Vipsanius Agrippa also insured his servants of the same class. The Trojan riding matches which the sons of aristocratic families, including that of the emperor, repeatedly exhibited under Augustus have already been mentioned.

Theatrical performances are mentioned in the emperor’s enumeration, but recede very much into the background as being quite commonplace; they were mainly the affair of newly elected officials, but Augustus himself had plays acted in all sorts of places--the Forum, the Amphitheatre, and even on temporary stages in the streets and squares of the capital, in every language spoken in Rome, Latin and Greek being of course the chief. Every play-giver desired to offer the populace something quite unique. The dictator had even allowed a Roman knight to appear on the stage, and his son followed his example until it was interdicted by a decree of the senate.

Augustus purposely abstained from increasing the number of ordinary and regular festivals to any great extent. The _Secular_ games, of which we shall speak presently, naturally do not come under this head, as do the district games, associated with the new subdivision of the capital. We have already mentioned the games commemorative of the victory of Actium; the martial games were added later in commemoration of the solemn dedication of the magnificent temple of Mars in 2 B.C.

To the innovations of the empire also belong the votive games for the return of the emperor from Gaul and Spain in the years 13 B.C. and 7 B.C.; also votive games for the welfare of Augustus which were arranged every four years by the great colleges of priests in compliance with a decree of the senate.

The example of Rome soon found imitators in the capitals of the provinces; sometimes it was the emperor himself who instituted games there, sometimes prominent citizens who had received or hoped to receive some post of honour. The number of games held in honour of Augustus was very great, especially in the Greek cities. In Naples the imperial games were celebrated in the same fashion as the Olympic games, in commemoration of the visit of Augustus in the year 14 A.D.

NOVUM SECULUM--THE NEW BIRTH FOR ROME

Even as in the life of the individual there are often moments when he remembers with grief and yearning the golden days of childhood, so in the development of nations there are periods when the best minds of the nation dream of a past golden age, in which both the crime and the progress which have come to pass in the course of historical development were unknown. The farther the nation is from a primitive condition and the more strongly its members feel the drawbacks of civilisation, the brighter are the colours in which they paint the innocent joys of an earlier state of things to which violence and rapine were as yet strangers.

The generation which had grown to manhood during the civil wars had of necessity accustomed itself to horrors which are spared to those who grow up in times of order. All the more vividly did they dream of a happy and primitive age in the distant past; for none feels a greater enthusiasm for peace than those who have had to endure the evils of war.

Since the battle of Actium the civil wars were happily at an end; for nearly half a generation Rome had enjoyed the blessings of peace and the new constitution which Augustus had given her. The emperor had often announced his resolve to retire into private life, but had always allowed himself to be persuaded not to carry it out because the welfare of the state forbade it; he alone seemed to guarantee peace and safety, his rule seemed inseparable from domestic tranquillity, and the man who desired the one could not but desire the other. The emperor strove to keep this single idea in fresh variations constantly in mind among the Romans, and those honours pleased him best which gave public expression to this feeling. The senate, on the emperor’s return had dedicated the altar of the imperial peace. The poets, each after his fashion, sang the praises of peace and order:

“Fealty, peace itself, and honour, and the ancient
Moral awe, the long-forgotten virtue,
Now dares to return, it approaches, its horn
Full of blessing.”

There was, however, a danger that the rising generation might soon come to accept the benefits of peace as a matter of course, without definitely realising to whom they owed these blessings, and it was therefore desirable to keep in remembrance among the emperor’s contemporaries the difference between the unquiet past and the blissful present, and to give official recognition to the fact that the period of civil war was over and that a century of peace and prosperity had taken its place.

Such turning-points imply an invitation to take a backward glance and to reckon the sum of development up to this point. So had a poet done at the end of the previous century:

“How fair, O man, with thy palm-branches
Standest thou in the century’s decline,” etc.

The Rome of the period was also to take a backward glance.

As the senate had solemnly marked the end of the wars by closing the temple of Janus, so Augustus desired to mark the end of the period of reorganisation and reconstitution by an imposing symbolical act. Even the ordinary Roman census was not a mere counting up of the people; it was a reconstitution of the ranks of Roman citizenship, and if this tedious and toilsome preparatory labour were to attain legal validity, it must find its ratification and consummation in a final act in which the whole nation should be purified with the most solemn religious rites and commended to the propitious gods for the future. Similarly Augustus had been at work since the year 29 on a reorganisation of Rome, which was finally declared complete in the year 17 by a mighty lustrum, the Secular Festival.

The idea, and probably the name, of the _seculum_ is not Roman but Etruscan; at least, up to the present time no one has succeeded in discovering any plausible Roman etymology for the word. The seculum is probably of Etruscan origin, like the other elements of chronology among the Romans. This devout nation, which understood as no other did how to inquire into and interpret the will of the gods, fancied that it had learned that the deity did not merely declare to men the ordinary divisions of time into months and years by the path and the varying appearance of moon and sun, but that apart from these there were longer periods in the life of nations which the gods had appointed, and of which they revealed the beginning and the end to the generations of men by manifest tokens. Such a period is that in which one generation dies out and a new one arises, and it therefore extends from the birth to the death of a man who may be taken as the representative of his generation. When the last man died who was born at the beginning of the first seculum, then the second began; and, as the duration of human life seldom exceeds the hundredth year, a new seculum commonly commenced at the end of this period. It did not, however, of necessity last for exactly a hundred years; on the contrary, there had been one of 123 years in length, another of 118, etc.; but the Etruscans reckoned their seculum approximately at 100 years. When therefore the miraculous signs ensued, mortals realised that in the counsels of the gods the end was at hand, and hastened to propitiate the omens by sacrifices and games. In misfortune, men learned to take special heed of the omens of the gods, for they longed for the opportunity of concluding the unfavourable period and beginning a new one, free from ill-fortune and evil presage.

(In the Vatican)]

This grand wisdom of the Etruscans, which looked beyond the limits of human life, made a profound impression on their pupils, the Romans, and was transferred to Rome with the rest of the augural discipline. The family of the Valerii is said to have been the one to introduce this cult into Rome, for themselves alone in the first instance, and not as yet in the name of the state. One of the ancestors of this family, it was said, had come to Rome from his home in the land of the Sabines to propitiate the evil omens which disturbed him there. He came down the Tiber with his sick children till he reached the vicinity of Rome, and there, where the Field of Mars is narrowest, near the bank of the Tiber, was formerly a spot noted for volcanic phenomena, hot springs, and subterranean fire--the so-called Tarentum. The sick children were cured by the water of the neighbouring spring, and twenty feet below the surface of the ground the father found a primitive altar to the infernal gods, to whom he gave thanks for the miraculous cure by sacrifices, games, and _lectisternia_. A descendant of his is said to have been one P. Valerius Publicola, who, as consul in the first year of the republic (509) repeated these games of his family cult in the name and for the welfare of the state of Rome. It was essential to the secular theory of later generations that so important an epoch as the end of the monarchy and the beginning of the republic should have been marked by public secular games.

The next secular games were also said to have been celebrated by another Valerius, who was consul in the year 449, after the fall of the decemvirs; and about a hundred years later the third secular games had to be celebrated, which, according to the records of the quindecemviri, was again done by a consul of the house of the Valerii in the year 346, though no one else knows anything about such a celebration and it was not counted in the series of republican secular games. For according to Valerius Antias, the third secular games were celebrated in the year 249, at the time of the First Punic War; and the fourth--whether they were held in the year 149 or 146--mark the end of that memorable period. For a theory had taken shape among Roman antiquaries and historical students, of whose number was even a man of the erudition of Varro, that the seculum must always be a hundred years long, and for the sake of this theory the games, which on contemporary authority were held in the year 146, were put three years earlier. A hundred years later Varro’s authority on all such matters was at its zenith, and it sufficed to fix the next celebration for the year 49. “But instead of the celebration came the end; for this was the year at the beginning of which Cæsar crossed the Rubicon, and with that began the mortal agony of the republic. What commenced was not a new seculum for the republic, but a new order of things.” (Mommsen in _Die Nation_, 1891.)

The civil wars which ensued and seemed to develop one out of another in endless sequence, might, perhaps, have stifled the hope of peace in Italy, but not the longing for it. An iron age had dawned instead of the golden.

The dictator did in truth seem to succeed in exorcising the demons of discord and discontent. But this hope proved illusory on the ides of March. Soon afterwards the star of the Julii was seen at Rome, and seemed, as was at first hoped, to be the long-desired divine token that was to inaugurate a better time. An Etruscan _haruspex_ proclaimed to the assembled people that the ninth seculum (according to the Etruscans) was coming to an end and the tenth beginning.

But the augur died immediately after; a sign that his words were not indeed false but premature, according to the will of the gods. Nowhere did any likelihood of permanent amelioration present itself, but the yearning remained and hardly ever found stronger expression than in the wretched years that followed the murder of Cæsar. It was strengthened by Sibylline oracles, which were privately circulated and kept faith in the happy future alive. Since the oracle could not lie, it was, perhaps, nothing but miscalculations and vain hopes of men, in the year 49, which had anticipated too soon the dawn of a new age; and perhaps the seculum should be reckoned at 110 years and not 100--it takes but little to revive hope. In the year 43 no less a person than Varro announced to the anxious world of his day that this was the correct estimate; 440 years after the first celebration the fourth Roman seculum was declining to its close, and then a new birth would usher in the new age. But Rome still hoped in vain. Misery increased, and with it the excitement spread into the widest circles. In the year 40 Asinius Pollio was consul, a man of honourable character and highly educated, who endeavoured to avoid the arbitrary usurpations of other rulers. In the circumstances of the time, not the boldest imagination ventured to dream that he might bring back the golden age. But Asinius was at that time expecting the birth of a son; perhaps this son was destined by fate to do so; and a contemporary poet greets the coming deliverer with the most ardent longings. In later days Virgil, with better reasons, fixed his hopes and desires upon the emperor.

The opportunity of holding secular games in the latter half of the last century before Christ had thus passed by unused, and it was a very difficult matter to prove that Augustus was entitled to hold such a celebration. This hard and thankless task fell to the share of the famous jurist Ateius Capito, who acquitted himself skilfully enough to make the will of his master possible in theory. The chronology of Roman history has suffered violence at many hands before and after the time of Ateius Capito, but hardly ever more than at the time of the secular games of Augustus.

A comet, so readily connected by the popular imagination with the end of the world, appears to have decided the old question as to the turning-point of the longed-for cosmic period. It might indeed seem as though the gods themselves had declared their will; for at the beginning of the year 17 an extraordinarily bright comet was visible at Rome, with a long tail pointing from south to north. This was of course the star of the Julian gens, which Rome had not seen since the terrible year of 44. That which the youthful Cæsar had then undertaken with almost superhuman courage for the sake of avenging his father was now finished, and the age of strife was over. At that time the red glow of the comet had portended blood and civil wars; the second appearance of the Julian star, after the expiation of the crime, was a sign that the beginning of the new age was close at hand.

The memoirs of the emperor show what great stress he laid upon the appearance of the star of the year 44, and the coins of the empire struck soon after 17 testify to the impression made upon him and his contemporaries by the supposed return of the star of the Julian gens. It was greeted as the long-desired and manifest divine sign of the end of the iron age and the commencement of the golden.

Hence we see that the appearance of the star only gave the decision in the last resort. That which had long been in the air, that which was perhaps already beginning to evaporate, suddenly condensed into tangible shape under the influence of this divine manifestation; Augustus resolved not to let the moment pass unused, but to celebrate the long-expected fifth secular games, which were associated with the hope of a new birth for Rome.[b]

LITERATURE OF THE GOLDEN AGE

With the formation of the monarchy coincides a second revival of Roman literature, which can only be partly attributed to the new administration, as the leaders were born under the republic and grew up amidst the struggles for the monarchy. This period does not differ so much from the literature of the period of free government as might seem at first sight. For that peculiarly characteristic penetration by the Greek spirit which extended even to that manifestation of it which was least worthy of imitation, namely the Alexandrian, had been already in existence, and the refined elaboration of the language for poetical purposes, its charm and lightness, its beauty and merit, are already perceptible in the time of Terence, though in a very different fashion.

The great revolution which was taking place before their eyes had a far less disastrous effect on the poets of this time than might have been expected, and if the lamentations of the civil war are heard everywhere, it is, nevertheless, rather the ideas of universal peace and the greatness of the Roman power which determine the pervading key-note. It is true that if we look for the originality, power, and simplicity which are so irresistible in Greek literature, we shall be very much disappointed; for they are no more to be found in the literary creations than in the political. And for these defects the number of productions can offer no amends. The thought of writing for a large public, the entire Latin West, must have had an inspiring effect on an author, as it of course decided the whole conception and direction of literary compositions; the provinces took a more and more active share in them; on the other hand, in this field a kind of substitute was offered for the lack of political activity; it was a matter of course that authorship was harmless and accommodated itself to the ruling system, or else entered into a dangerous opposition to it. Partisan writing existed during the active political struggles of Rome even under the republic; but now sunshine and light were too unequally divided, and the frankness which was forbidden during the lifetime of the rulers indemnified itself after their death by bitterness and calumny.

The really higher styles of poetry, such as drama and epic, entirely died out. It was not as if this had been caused by the change in the government, for even in the time of the republic little originality or creative power had been shown in these directions. All that was now produced was borrowed entirely from the past. Rhetoric, metrics, and careful diction were all that could be added to it, and a beautiful, refined, and elegant form became the criterion according to which the age judged both literary and artistic productions. It was to such matters as these that the attention of the judges who decided concerning the admission of the poets into the national library was mainly directed.

We have no adequate information regarding the dramatic poetry of the Augustan period, for everything which won the applause of contemporaries has been lost. What has been preserved to us from this period, namely the tragedies handed down to us under the name of Seneca, has all the faults which a depraved taste brings with it; sensational plots and scenes based on sensual and sentimental emotions; figures without life, but of many words and speeches; a treatment without knowledge of dramatic technicalities; and yet withal a harmony of words and verses, highly polished versification and diction, and the whole magnificent apparatus belonging to the schools of rhetoric in periods, antitheses, similes, and plays upon words. It is decidedly to the credit of the lower classes if they turned away from these dramas, leaving them to the lifeless declamatory exercises of the so-called educated classes, and in so far as the taste for the drama still existed, preferred to amuse themselves with a simpler entertainment and the familiar pieces of the older poets, which had long ceased to be sufficiently refined and elegant for people of cultivation.

Nor did the epic produce anything really great. Virgil (P. Vergilius Maro, born on the 15th of October, 70 B.C., died the 22nd of September, 19 B.C.) did indeed make an attempt to create a national epic in the _Æneid_. But it is no more genuine than its fundamental idea of connecting the founder of the new empire with the father of Italian civilisation. Virgil studied under the Alexandrians and all that was to be learned he learned. He created the language and the verse structure which remained the standard for many centuries, so long as and wherever Latin poetry was cultivated. The form is throughout noble, and the poet was thoroughly acquainted with Homer and the Greek epic poets, nor is it without taste that he, as a man of learning, has drawn on this treasure; his ideas are pure and noble and he had learned to know his country and the legends of his forefathers better than many before or any after him, so that a certain national colouring is to be found in his work. But there was one thing which he did not possess; the creative genius which divines rightly in the choice of subject and arranges and treats its material with a light but master hand; as the subject was ill-chosen, so the poet never felt any hearty enthusiasm for it; everything has been thought out and very coldly and soberly thought out; beautiful pictures and striking comparisons are indeed presented; but they are sentimental and studied, and often look strange in their setting.

In the first place the hero is no hero, and the Roman patricians of even the time of the Scipios would have been revolted by this weakling who is feeble and sentimental like the poet himself, and not much more than a puppet in the hands of his divine mother. Such a weak figure gives no opportunity for strength in the treatment, which is accordingly languid, and the twelve cantos are spun out with monotonous tedium, so that to every one acquainted with Homer the reading of them is a mere task to be got through somehow. And if, from the standpoint of learning, the language and verses seem irreproachable, classical, and even worthy of imitation, all pleasure in them is lost by the fact that we are continually aware of the trouble and labour which they cost the poet.

It is characteristic of the times that Virgil possessed a canonical consideration with high and low, and poets and prose writers vied with one another to steal from him. From this fact we may guess the rest, and the loss in this field which has been recorded can have been no great one.

But how rapidly literature declined at the end of the period is clearly shown by the epic of M. Annæus Lucanus, the _Pharsalia_. This poem was produced in the reign of Nero, and it is difficult to decide whether the choice of subject or his treatment of it deserves the greater censure. The hero of the poem is Pompey, the Pompey of the civil wars, a figure so little poetical that a more unfortunate selection could scarcely have been made; with the utmost poetical license even without any anxiety to keep to the facts there was nothing to be made of the subject. That the civil wars in themselves might be capable of being made the subject of an epic is indisputable; it is equally indisputable that this could be done only by a poetic talent of the first order. But even Lucan could do it in his way, though he is no poet but a scholar of the school of the rhetoricians and the Stoa. As in the school of rhetorics the energy of the scholar signalised and exhausted itself in individual feats of ingenuity, so the poem is divided into a number of scenes without much connection, but distinguished by a soaring imagination, sounding verses, and pompous tirades, and of course with many learned accessories, without which neither a great nor a small poem was conceivable in that period. Besides this haste, uneasiness, and want of discretion are everywhere apparent, and these, too, belong to the time. On the whole it may be said that this poetry is a true reflection of the society in which it originated, and if we had epics by Seneca they might probably resemble those of his nephew. Of such models there could not fail to be imitations; the attempts even extended to the schools, and the editing of the _Iliad_ may well have been the work of industrious scholars, who knew something of Greek and had learned to imitate their _Virgil_.

Virgil had already directed his attention to the didactic poem, and the _Georgics_ are in their way his best creation. Didactic poetry is not approached with the same expectation as in the case of the higher kinds of poetry, and it is scarcely possible to draw the line between instruction and amusement. When the existence of this monstrosity has once been justified it must be allowed a certain amount of free play. Virgil had here the great advantage of dealing with a subject in which he was really interested and into whose treatment he put his whole heart. A deep feeling for nature and really genuine human sympathy with the subject, which are precisely what is nowhere to be perceived in the _Æneid_, occasionally break forth in the poem on agriculture. An artificial shepherd’s life, much like the idyls of the eighteenth century, is delineated in the _Eclogues_, and its unreality is only surpassed by Calpurnius, an imitator of the age of Nero.

Whilst the didactic poem proper received no further attention worth noting during this period, the elegy was successfully dealt with. In Albius Tibullus (54-19 B.C.) it even acquired a characteristic, one might almost say more national form than is the case with its other representatives.

In his elegies, Tibullus is as essentially free from the Greek influence as is conceivable in an age which was steeped in Hellenism; he treated the few themes, which are to be found in his poems, entirely from the human standpoint, and it is only by this means that he tries to affect the reader. The sameness which is easily produced in such works--love and sentimental sorrows are constantly recurring--he has successfully avoided by an extraordinary elegance and charm of treatment. The reader willingly follows the dreamy thought of the poet without blaming him for having led him rather into a world of dreams than into one of living and strong feeling.

The productions of S. Propertius (49-15 B.C.) are already much inferior. He also had true feeling, and the thoughts which it awakened in him are for the greater part not borrowed from his models. But it is overloaded with the learned accessories of Alexandrian learning, and the deep feelings of the poet are unduly thrust into the background by blatant mythological embellishments.

Far more splendid and brilliant is the talent of Ovid (P. Ovidius Naso, 43 B.C.-17 A.D.) who cultivated a wonderful borderland between didactic and elegiac poetry. But all his poems have one trait in common, although the _Metamorphoses_ and _Fasti_ may differ from the amatory poems, the _Tristia_ and the _Heroides_; they, for the first time, display in a more and more decided fashion the arts of the schools of the rhetoricians.

Ovid was a talented poet, to whom verses and thoughts came rapidly and without difficulty, but he was entirely wanting in depth of feeling. Even the poems, which came most from his heart, those laments which he sang in his banishment at inhospitable Tomi, scarcely arouse true sympathy, for the intrinsic unreality from which the poetry of Ovid suffers even here forces itself upon the reader. He recognised the conditions of the new monarchy unreservedly, and no poet is so well qualified as he to give us a picture of the views and manner of thought of the circle which surrounded the imperial house. Sensuality and pleasure are the scarlet threads which run through the Ovidian poems, and the pain which tortures him in banishment is entirely the effect of being shut out from the luxurious way of life which prevailed in those circles whose conversations and intrigues were the very life of his poetry.

The satire also, that most characteristic production of the national spirit of Rome, was now cultivated in a fashion partly original by Horace (Q. Horatius Flaccus, born on the 8th of December, 65 B.C., died on the 27th of November, 6 B.C.). Deep feeling or an effective comprehension of the times, its weaknesses and duties, would be sought for in vain, for the salons of the Augustan period no longer possessed these qualities, and it is a picture of the conversations of the salons that has been bequeathed to us in the Horatian satires. Some gossip of a higher or lower order, for the most part in a seemly though piquant form which seldom becomes real malice, forms the subject-matter of all the poems which have come down to us. The poet rises to a higher level in the didactic epistles, of which those of the second book, with their exhortations to the study of Greek models and their tasteful and striking æsthetic reflections, belong to the chief productions of the time; and in ripeness and clearness of judgment, careful polish and clear arrangement, they leave all others far behind them. Greatly inferior to the satires are the partly satirical _Epodes_, in which the personal element is too prominent, and in which the poet betrays great want of self-restraint and taste.

After Horace, the satire, such as he conceived it, found no imitator; the period which followed brought with it too many conflicts to allow mildness and tolerance to find a place. The preaching of morals is carried into the domain of poetry; A. Persius Flaccus, the only representative of this class of writing, gives us a very poor idea of the age if it really regarded him as a satirist; but we are scarcely justified in drawing this conclusion, since at the most he met with approbation only from the ranks of the opposition. It is the same taste, which Lucan represents, transferred to the satire; the arrogance and self-sufficiency of an adept belonging to a circle of noble stoics, who had scarcely got beyond the scholar’s bench, hollow pathos, rhetorical ornamentation, versified expoundings of the stoic popular morality. Persius lacked practically all the attributes of a poet. A mediocre performance which might be reckoned as a satire was the _Translation into the Society of Gourds of the deified Claudius_ (_Divi Claudius Apokolokyntosis_), a petty, revengeful pamphlet against the unfortunate prince, prepared moreover after his death. The dazzling wit with which the poet strikes at gods and men might have elicited approval in his own day; but the reader’s uppermost feeling will always be that this satire sprang from miserable cowardice and perfidious flattery.

The only really intellectual work of a satirical character that this period produced was the satires of Petronius, written in the reign of Nero. No other work so clearly bears the stamp of its time. At least the poor philosophy, which most of the poets have collected from their philosophical compendiums and their rhetorical exercises, has no part in this work, although the laboured and superficial culture of the time clings to its author throughout. The source of his wisdom is life. To him, man is the crown of creation, and he has studied him in all phases and degrees; what exists beside man has only interest for him inasmuch as it can serve to beautify human life and make it agreeable. Happiness and enjoyment are the watchword of the whole work, not in the coarsely material sense such as it is embodied in Trimalchio and his fellows, but a life which, while it is seasoned with all material joys, is also ennobled by all the contributions of art and cultivation. A rich and varied experience of life gives this work its great value; the age is reflected even to the most minute niceties of its language. Inventive power, description of detail, humour, and a fine irony, as well as an uncommonly skilful treatment, secure for some parts of these satires the praise of a master work; and if the frivolous and lascivious tone did not always bring us back to the court of Nero and the doings of the time, we might think that in this we had before us a model of the best age. Especially characteristic is the fine understanding of Greek art and culture, and the enthusiasm for Latin poetry, which expresses itself partly by means of a peculiar skill in versification and brilliancy of colouring, partly in bitter mockery of the affectations of contemporary poets and their dull, spiritless, and senseless exaggerations. The poet always preserves elegance and purity of language; when he goes out of his way to attain it, his good taste preserves him from errors, and that same taste also disclosed to him the cause and effect of the decline of rhetoric.

Only one quality is wanting in Petronius; like the Casanova literature of our own and the preceding century, his work has no moral purpose. Æsop’s fables were now also put into Latin, for Phædrus, often without a complete understanding of the original, in somewhat clumsy verses and with feeble wit, arranged the Greek fables for school and home use amongst the Romans. The satirical point of the different pieces is now almost entirely incomprehensible to us in our ignorance of conditions in the city of Rome.

The lyric proper was far the most popular form of poetry under the empire; for every one thought himself called upon to write songs and occasional verses. We gain some notion of this style of poetry from Horace. In his poems he chronicles the political measures of Augustus as well as the love affairs and social doings of himself and his friends. But whilst in the accounts of the latter it is frequently impossible to decide how much is fact, how much poetry, and, at times, imitation of his Greek models,--since so little true life beats through them,--in the former there is something at least which is in harmony with its subject. The poet has a firm and strong feeling for the greatness and honour of Rome, if perhaps he does not always see it in the true light; this gives some of his poems a colouring of truth and of a deep, sincere feeling.

Dependence on the Greeks of the best age could scarcely have been greater; in diction and versification he is most careful; but that subtle relation between the language and the sense, which was indispensable in the Greek models, has been abandoned; tricks of versification have determined the form and expression more frequently than poetic impulse and spontaneous feeling.

But that all poetic creation and feeling were not entirely wanting to the age is shown by the numerous small poetic productions found on tombstones. Here true human feeling still revealed itself, and found an expression which speaks to the heart and is often deeply affecting. It is the same with the smaller poems in the Latin anthology; of course the ideas are not great and imposing any more than were the occasions which gave rise to them. But this much may be gathered from them, that the language of poetry could still appeal to the heart, and purity and correctness were still adhered to. Of the spread of poetic activity we can scarcely form too vast an idea; the study of poetry was now an essential part of education, and since Asinius Pollio had introduced the custom of public readings, there was an audience for every individual aspirant. And if the decline of the art of poetry was to be brought about, this impulse would have effected it more surely than the principate whose influence on the decline of the art may be only too easily and willingly overestimated.

With the empire there came a change in the writing of history, inasmuch as freedom of thought and judgment was limited by the despotic rule, and the door was flung open to flattery and calumny; and in individual reigns it might have been dangerous to relate the history of the republic or of former emperors. But these circumstances alone cannot explain the insignificance of historical writing any more than the removal of the centre of politics to the imperial cabinet.

The Romans have really never possessed histories in the true sense of the term, and consequently there was at this period no room for any considerable damage to that species of composition. T. Livius (59 B.C.-17 A.D.) affords distinct evidence of this. In his own time he received unqualified admiration and in subsequent ages his name sheltered itself behind that of history; in the later days of the empire his prestige continually increased, and finally almost the only works in Latin dealing with the period of the republic and the triumvirate, and the beginnings of the Augustan era, are transcripts and excerpts from his writings. Augustus offered no exception to the opinion of the day; although he called him a Pompeian, he not only granted him all conceivable freedom, but on all occasions testified his personal esteem for him. And yet Livy is no historian. He undertook the formidable task of writing a complete history of the Roman state up to his time, but in consequence of its formidable compass the work was necessarily unsuccessful, as older works were often wanting, and Livy had not the ability to turn the existing material to account.

Every Roman historian had great difficulties to encounter with regard to the period of antiquity, and this extended more or less to the time of Sulla. Down to a certain period, patriotism required adherence to a traditional form which could not stand investigation; for other epochs the Greeks, especially Polybius, had formed a conception which had acquired a canonical value. Only critical judgment and a general scheme of treatment on a grand scale could have been effective; but Livy was not the man for this.

To him history was another name for the arranging of annalistic reports which he put together; the most obvious contradictions were rejected, and a certain system introduced into the chronology and adhered to as far as might be without too great scrupulousness; where he had older authors of merit, such as Polybius, to draw upon, his work was benefited; where this was not the case, he did not scruple to combine accounts essentially contradictory. He considered his principal office to be delineation, not arrangement, investigation, and criticism, and the rhetorical elaboration made up, in the eyes of the reader, for the want of exactness and a definite conception.[f]

MERIVALE’S ESTIMATE OF LIVY