Chapter I: General Introduction (1)

I.

The Augustan Age, regarded as a critical epoch in the history of the world, extends from the date of the battle of Actium, when Octavianus became undisputed master of the world, to his death in the year 14 A.D. But the age known by that name as a great epoch in the history of literature begins some years earlier, and ends with the death of Livy and Ovid in the third year of the following reign. Of the poets belonging to that age whose writings have reached modern times—Virgil, Horace, Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid—all were born, and some had reached manhood, before the final overthrow of the Republic at the battle of Philippi. The earlier poems of Virgil and Horace belong to the period between that date and the establishment of the Empire. The age of the Augustan poets may accordingly be regarded as extending from about the death of Julius Caesar in 44 B.C. to the death of Ovid 17 A.D.

The whole of this period was one of great literary activity, especially in the department of poetry. Besides the writers just mentioned, several others were recognised by their contemporaries as poets of high excellence, though there is no reason to doubt that the works which have reached our time were the most distinguished by original genius and finished execution. These works, though differing much in spirit and character as well as in value, have some common characteristics which mark them off from the literature of the Republic. It seems remarkable, if we consider the short interval which divides the Ciceronian from the Augustan Age, and the enthusiasm with which poetry was cultivated by the younger generation in the years immediately preceding the battle of Pharsalia, that so few of the poets eminent in that generation lived on into the new era. The insignificant name of Helvius Cinna is almost the only poetic link between the age of Catullus and the age of Virgil.(1) Perhaps, also, the Quintilius whose death Horace laments in the twenty-fourth Ode of Book I. may be the Varus of the tenth poem of Catullus. The more famous name of Asinius Pollio also connects the two eras; but in Catullus he is spoken of, not as a poet, but simply as ‘a youth of wit and graceful accomplishments(2),’ and in his later career he was more distinguished as a soldier, statesman, and orator than as a poet(3). It is remarked by Mr. Munro that there are indications that the new generation of poets would have come into painful collision with those of the preceding generation had their lives been prolonged(4). This spirit of hostility appears in the somewhat contemptuous notice of Calvus and Catullus in the Satires of Horace:—

Quos neque pulcher
Hermogenes unquam legit, neque simius iste
Nil praeter Calvum et doctus cantare Catullum(5).

But it is rather in their political feelings and relations, and in the views of life arising out of these, than in the principles and practice of their art, that the new poets are separated from, and antagonistic to, the old. Had Calvus and Catullus survived the extinction of liberty, it would have been impossible for them to have adopted the tone of the poets of the following age. By birth, position, and all their associations and sympathies, they belonged to the Senatorian party. If they could have yielded an outward submission to the ascendency of Julius Caesar and Augustus, they never could have become sincerely reconciled to the new order of things, nor could they have employed their art to promote the ideas of the Empire. On the other hand, L. Varius, the oldest among the poets of the new era, seems first to have become famous by a poem on the death of Julius Caesar. Virgil, in the poem placed first in order among his acknowledged works, speaks of Octavianus in language which no poet of the preceding generation could have applied to a living contemporary: ‘O Meliboeus, it was a God that gave to me this life of ease.’ In the Georgics, planned, and, for the most part, composed before the establishment of the monarchy, the person of Caesar is introduced, not only as the centre of power in the world, but as an object of religious veneration; and the national and ethical teaching of that poem is entirely in harmony with the objects of his policy. And, although Horace in the Satires and Epodes, composed between the years 40 and 30 B.C., is so far true to the cause of his youth as to abstain from any direct declaration of adherence to the winning side, yet he attributes to his adviser Trebatius the counsel ‘to celebrate the exploits of the invincible Caesar(6);’ and his whole relation to Maecenas is one of the most characteristic marks of the position in which the new literature stood to the State and to its leading men.

Yet, while separated from the literature of the Republic in many of its ideas, and in the personal and political feelings on which it is founded, the poetry of the Augustan Age is, in form and execution, the mature development of the efforts of the previous centuries. Much of its literary inspiration is derived from the age immediately preceding it, and from still older native sources. The thought of Lucretius acted upon the mind of Virgil through the force both of sympathy and antagonism, as a strong original nature acts upon one which is at once receptive of influence and possessed of firm convictions of its own. The national sentiment of Ennius and the censorious spirit of Lucilius reappeared in new forms in the Augustan poetry; while the more humane and social feelings, and the enjoyment of beauty in Nature and art, fostered by Greek studies, as well as the taste for less elevated pleasures, stimulated by the life of a luxurious capital, are elements which the poetry of the early Empire has in common with that of the last years of the Republic.

But the poetry of the new era has also certain marked characteristics, the result not so much of antecedent as of concomitant circumstances, which proclaim its affinity with great literary epochs of other nations rather than with any period of the national literature. By Voltaire the Augustan Age at Rome is ranked with the Age of Pericles at Athens, that of Lorenzo de Medici at Florence, and that of Louis XIV. in France, as one of four epochs in which arts and letters attained their highest perfection. The affinity between the Augustan Age and those of Pericles and Lorenzo is more superficial than real. They were all indeed periods in which the cultivation of the arts to the highest degree of perfection was fostered by the enlightened patronage of the eminent men who have given their name to their eras. But the position of Augustus, as an absolute ruler, acted more directly and potently, as a modifying and restraining power, on the thoughts and feelings expressed in his age, than that of the leading men of a republic; and the unique position of Rome as the mistress and lawgiver of the civilised world gives to the literature of the Augustan Age an imperial character and interest, which the national literature of no other city or country, even though superior in other respects, can possess. Those who regard all Latin poetry as exotic and imitative have, with some plausibility, attempted to establish a parallel between the Alexandrine poetry of the third century B.C. and that of the Augustan Age. Nor can it be denied that the relation of the Augustan poets to the Emperor was somewhat parallel to that of the scholars and poets of Alexandria to the Ptolemies. The Alexandrine science and literature were also important factors in Roman culture; and the most eminent poets both of the Augustan Age and of that immediately preceding it, with the exception of Horace and Lucretius, acknowledged, in the form as well as the materials of their art, the influence of this latest development of Greek poetry. The nature and amount of the debt incurred to the learned school of Alexandria will be considered later, and it will be seen that it does not seriously affect the originality of the best Roman writers. The age of Queen Anne and of the first George, again, has been called the Augustan Age of English literature. The parallel between the two eras consists in the relation which poets and writers held to men eminent in the State, and also in the finished execution and moderation of tone common to both. The writers of England in our Augustan Age had the advantage over those of Rome in the freedom with which they could express their thoughts; but, even with this advantage, and with the still greater advantage that the English race, in the long course of its literary annals, has given proof of a richer poetical faculty than any other race except the Hellenic, the blindest national partiality would scarcely claim as general and as durable an interest for any poetical work of that era as that claimed for the Georgics and Aeneid of Virgil and for the Odes and Epistles of Horace.

On the whole the closest parallel, in respect not so much of the substance and form of composition as of the circumstances and conditions affecting the lives and tastes of poets and men of letters, is to be sought in the age of Louis XIV. of France. The position and the policy of Augustus and of Louis XIV. were alike in some important features. As absolute rulers, the one over a great empire, the other over the most powerful and enlightened nation then existing, they each played the most prominent part in history during more than half a century. They were each animated by a strong passion for national and personal glory, and encouraged art and literature, not merely as a source of refined pleasure congenial to their own tastes, but as the chief ornament of their reigns, and as important instruments of their policy.

And not only the political but the purely literary conditions of the two epochs were in some respects parallel. They were both times, not of growth, but of maturity; not so much of the spontaneous inspiration of genius, as of systematic effort directed in accordance with the principles of art and the careful study of ancient models. In each time circumstances and mutual sympathies brought men of letters into close and familiar contact both with one another and with men of affairs and of social eminence. And, while the relation of patronage to literature is not in any circumstances favourable to original invention, and though, except under most advantageous conditions, its tendency is to produce a tameness of spirit, or even an insincerity of tone, yet it has its compensating advantages. It imparts to literature the tone of the world—of the world not only of social eminence, but of practical experience and conversance with great affairs. The good taste, judgment, and moderation of tone which have enabled the Augustan literature to stand successfully the criticism of nineteen centuries, as well as its deficiency in the highest creative power, when compared with such eras as the Homeric Age, the Age of Pericles, and the Elizabethan Age in England, mark the limits of the good influence which this relation between the great in worldly station and the great in genius can exercise on literature.

A further parallel might be drawn between the material conditions of the Augustan Age and those of the Age of Louis XIV. The aspect which the world they lived in presented to the writers of the two eras was that of a rich, luxurious, pleasure-loving city, the capital of a great empire or kingdom. And this aspect of the world acts upon the susceptible nature of the poet with both an attractive and a repellent force. He may feel the spell of outward pomp and magnificence and the attractions of pleasure; or he may be driven back on his own thought, and into communion with Nature, and to an ideal longing for simpler and purer conditions.

But, instead of tracing these resemblances further, it is more important to observe that, though the outward influences acting upon the poets of the two eras were in many respects parallel, yet in form and substance the poetry of the Augustan Age is quite different from that of the Age of Louis XIV. However striking the parallel between any two periods of history may at first sight appear, the points of difference between them must be much more numerous than those of agreement: and, though outward conditions have a modifying influence upon national temperament and individual genius, yet these last are much the most important factors in the creative literature of any age. The genius of ancient Italy was, in point of imaginative susceptibility, very different from that of modern France; and, though his countrymen recognise in Racine a moral affinity with Virgil, yet the works these poets have left to the world are as different as they well can be, in form, purpose, and character. The conditions indicated in the comparison between the two periods are to be studied as modifying, not as productive, influences. The forms which the highest spiritual life in an age or an individual assumes, the power of free and happy development which it obtains, or the limitations to which it has to submit, can, to a very considerable extent, be explained by reference, in the case of nations, to the political, social, and material circumstances of the age, and, in the case of the individual, to his early life and environment, his education and personal fortunes. But the quality and intensity of that spiritual force which manifests itself from time to time in the world, giving a new impulse to thought, a new direction to feeling, and a new delight to life, are not to be explained by any combination of circumstances. Yet, just as it is desirable to realise all that can be known of the life and fortunes of an individual poet before endeavouring to extract from his various works the secret of his power and charm, so it is desirable, before entering on a separate study of the various books which constitute the literature of any age, to take a general survey of the most important conditions affecting the lives, thoughts, and art of all who lived and wrote in that age. In the Augustan Age these conditions may be classified under four heads: (1) the political circumstances of the Empire and the state of moral and religious feeling resulting from them; (2) the social relation of men of letters to men eminent in the State; (3) the wealth, luxury, and outward splendour which met the eye and gratified the senses, in the great city itself, and in the villas scattered over the shores and inland scenes of central Italy; (4) the intellectual culture inherited from the preceding age and modified by the tastes and conditions of the new generation. These will be reviewed as conditions acting on the imagination, and forming the intellectual atmosphere in the midst of which the productions of poetical genius expanded into various shapes and dimensions of beauty and stateliness.

II.

The battle of Actium marked the end of a century of revolution, civil disturbances and wars, of confiscations of property, proscriptions and massacres, such as no civilised state had ever witnessed before. The triumph of Augustus secured internal peace and order for a century. The whole world was, as Tacitus says(7), exhausted, and gladly consented to the establishment of the Empire in the interests of peace. The generation to which Virgil, Horace, Tibullus, and Propertius belonged had passed through one of the worst crises of this long period of suffering. The victors of Philippi, so far from following the example of clemency set to them by the great victor of Pharsalia, had emulated the worst excesses of the times of Marius and Sulla(8). The poets whose works record the various phases of feeling through which that age passed had in their own person experienced the consequences of the general insecurity. Virgil, in addition to the loss of his paternal farm, had incurred imminent danger from the violence of the soldier to whom his land had been allotted. The language of Horace indicates that his life had been more than once in jeopardy—at the rout of Philippi, and in his subsequent wanderings by land and sea(9)—till he found himself a needy adventurer, ‘humilem decisis pennis,’ again at Rome. Tibullus lost the greater part of the estates which his ancestors had enjoyed for generations(10). A similar calamity befell Propertius(11). Their own experience must thus have deepened the horror of prolonged war and bloodshed natural to men of humane and unwarlike temper, as they all were; for Horace, who alone among them took part in the civil war, describes himself, a few years later, as ‘weak and unfit for war(12),’ and Tibullus pleads his effeminacy and timidity as a justification of a life devoted to indolent enjoyment(13). The works of that age, composed between the dates of the battles of Philippi and Actium, express the deep longing of the world for rest: those written later express the deep thankfulness for its attainment. In Virgil the recoil from the cruel and violent passions of the time in which his early manhood was cast draws forth his tender compassion for all human suffering, and creates in his imagination the ideal of a life of peace—‘far from the clash of arms,’ the vision of a place of rest after toil and danger—‘where the fates hold out to us peaceful dwelling-places;’ just as the recoil from the political anarchy of his own age and from the cruel memories of the Marian times deepens the sense of human misery in Lucretius, and forces on his mind the ideal refuge from the storms of life in ‘the high and serene temples well bulwarked by the learning of the wise.’ In Horace the feeling of insecurity arising out of his early experience confirms the lessons of Epicurean wisdom, and teaches him not to expect too much from life, but to enjoy thankfully whatever good the passing hour brought to him. In all of them the sense of the real miseries from which the world had escaped, and of the real blessings which it enjoyed after the battle of Actium, induces an acquiescence in the extinction of liberty and in the establishment of a form of government which had been for centuries most repugnant to Roman sentiment.

Another influence reconciling men to the great political change which took place in that era was the restored sense of national union. With whatever feelings Octavianus may have been regarded in the early years of the Triumvirate, after the final departure of Antony from Rome he was looked upon both as the main pillar of order and as the champion of the national cause, the true representative of Italy, of the ‘Senatus Populusque Romanus’ against the motley hosts of the East, arrayed under the standards of Antony and his Egyptian queen:—

Hinc Augustus agens Italos in proelia Caesar
Cum Patribus Populoque, Penatibus et magnis Dis.
* * * * * *
Hinc ope barbarica variisque Antonius armis,
Victor ab Aurorae populis et litore rubro,
Aegyptum viresque Orientis et ultima secum
Bactra vehit, sequiturque, nefas, Aegyptia coniunx(14).

With the Romans in the later age of the Republic the feeling of the glory and greatness, the ancient and unbroken tradition, of their State was a more active sentiment than the love of political liberty. The care for the ‘Respublica Romana’ as a free commonwealth was in the last century of its existence confined to the leaders of the Senatorian aristocracy; the pride in the ‘Imperium Romanum’ was a feeling in which all classes could share, and which could especially unite to Rome the people of Italy, who had been admitted too late into citizenship, and were separated by too great a distance from the capital, to make the exercise of the political franchise an object of value in their eyes. They probably felt themselves more truly in the position of equal citizenship after the establishment of the monarchy than before it. This feeling of the pride of empire asserts itself much more strongly in the poets of the Augustan Age than in the writers of the preceding generation. It is scarcely, if at all, apparent in Lucretius and Catullus. It is only in the idealising oratory of Cicero, who, with all his devoted attachment to the forms of the constitution and the traditions of political freedom, still had a strong sympathy with the imperial spirit of Rome, that we find the expression of the same kind of sentiment which suggested to Virgil such lines as

Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento(15),

and inspired the national Odes of Horace.

The majesty of the State, moreover, impressed the imagination more immediately and more deeply when it was visibly and permanently embodied in a single person than when the administration of affairs and the government of the Provinces were distributed for a brief tenure of office among many competitors. By enabling them to realise the unity and vast extent of their dominion, Augustus reconciled the prouder spirits of his countrymen to his rule, as by restoring peace, order, and material prosperity he enlisted their interests in his favour. At the same time the success of his arms over the still unsubdued tribes of the West, and of his diplomacy in wiping out the stain left on the Roman standards by the disastrous campaign of Crassus, continued to gratify the passion for military glory, without endangering the security and prosperity of Italy. The national sentiment of Rome was further gratified by the maintenance of the old forms of the constitution, by the revival of ancient usages and ceremonies, and by the creation of a new interest in the early traditions of the city, and in the ‘manners and men of the olden time(16).’ In his brief summary of the glories of the Augustan Age, Horace specifies this return to the ancient ways, ‘by which the Latin name and the might of Italy grew great,’ as one of the best results of Caesar’s administration. The revolution effected in the first century before our era, so far from seeking, as other revolutions have done, abruptly to sever the connexion between the old and the new, strove to re-establish the continuity of national existence. The Augustan Age impressed itself on the minds of those living under it as an era not of destruction but of restoration. Though in the early part of his career Augustus availed himself of the revolutionary passions of his time to overthrow the Senatorian oligarchy, yet he sought to establish his own power on the conservative instincts of society, and especially on the religious traditions intimately connected with these instincts(17). The powerful hold which these instincts and the feeling of the vital relation subsisting between the past and the present had on the Roman nature was the secret of the great stability of the Republic and Empire. We shall find how largely this sentiment enters into the poetry of the age, how it is especially the animating principle of the great national Epic, as it was of the national commemorative poem of Ennius.

But the age witnessed a restoration of the past, not only in its action on the imagination, but in a more direct influence on opinion and conduct. Horace says of it, in the same passage as that referred to above,—‘It put a curb on licence violating all the rules of order, and caused ancient sins to disappear.’ The licence of the previous age in speculation, as in life, had provoked a moral and religious reaction. The idea of a return to a simpler and better life, and of a revived faith in the gods and in the forms and ceremonies of religion, existed at least as an aspiration, if it did not bear much fruit in action. This ideal aspiration finds its expression not only in the two great poems of Virgil, whose whole nature was in thorough harmony with it, who may be regarded almost as the prophet of a new and purer religion, but in many of the Odes of the sceptical disciple of Aristippus. It was part of the policy of Augustus, whether from sincere conviction or as an instrument of social and political regeneration, to revive religion and morality. Among the great acts of his reign commemorated by himself he especially mentions the building and restoration of the temples(18). The ‘Julian laws’ aimed also at a social and moral restoration. There is no ground for attributing any hypocrisy to Augustus, as a legislator, or to Horace, as his panegyrist, though neither the life of the Emperor nor that of the poet showed a strict conformity with the object of these laws. Yet, if it failed to re-establish the ancient faith in the minds of the educated classes and to restore a primitive austerity of life, this revival affected the best literature of the time by the influence which it exercised on the deeper and more serious feeling of Virgil and the manlier sympathies of Horace, and by imposing at least some restraint on Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid in the record of their pleasures(19).

The poets with whom our enquiry is concerned, and especially the two most illustrious of their number, thoroughly represent, as they helped to call forth, the spirit in which the Roman world passed through the great change from the Republic to the Empire. They give expression to the weariness and longing for rest, to the revival of Roman and Italian feeling, to the pride of empire, the charm of ancient memories and associations, the aspiration after a better life and a firmer faith. But, further, the expression of these feelings is made subordinate to the personal glory of Augustus, who stands out as the central and commanding figure in all their representations. He is celebrated as the restorer of the golden Saturnian age(20); the closer of the gateway of Janus(21); the leader of the men and the gods of Italy against the swarms of the East and her monstrous divinities(22); the ‘father of his country(23);’ the ruler destined to extend the empire, on which ‘the sun never set,’ ‘beyond the Garamantians and Indians(24);’ the descendant and true representative of the mythical author of the Roman State(25); the man in whom the great destiny of Rome and the great labours of all her sons were summed up and fulfilled(26); the conqueror who raised three hundred shrines to the gods of Italy(27); the legislator who by his life and his laws had reformed the corrupt manners of the State(28). The sense of gratitude for the rest and prosperity enjoyed under Augustus, the admiration for the real power of intellect and character which made him the most successful ruler that the world has ever seen, the confidence in the unbroken good fortune which marked all his earlier career, may account, without the necessity of attributing any unworthy motive, for the eulogies bestowed upon him as a ruler and organiser of empire. But the language of admiration goes beyond these into a region in which modern sympathies can with difficulty follow it. Modern criticism may partially explain, but it cannot enable us to enter with sympathy into that peculiar phase of the latter days of Paganism which first appears in the literature and the historical monuments of the Augustan Age as the Deification of the Emperors. In the pages of Tacitus the worship of the Emperor appears as an established ‘cultus,’ as the symbol and the instrument of Roman domination over foreign nations(29). The cities of Spain vie with the cities of the Asiatic Greeks in their desire to raise temples in honour of the living Emperor. Tacitus seems to regard it as even something discreditable in Tiberius that he disclaims divine attributes(30). The origin of this ‘cultus,’ as it first established itself in the Greek cities of Asia, may be referred to a survival of the old Greek hero-worship, which led even in the Republican times to the offering of divine honours to Roman Proconsuls and to the excess of the monarchical sentiment among Asiatics, which had led to the worship of the successors of Alexander, and had prompted Alexander himself to claim a divine origin. This foreign vein of feeling united with a native vein,—the strong Roman faith in a secret invisible power watching over the destiny of the State, and revered as ‘Fortuna Urbis.’ This secret invisible divinity became as it were incarnate in the person of the supreme ruler of the world, wielding the whole power, representing the whole majesty of Rome.

The feeling with which the contemporary poets attribute to Augustus a divine function in the world, and anticipate for him a place and high office among the gods after death, is something different from this literal adoration of a living man as invested with the full power and attributes of Deity. But it is difficult to find any rational explanation of the tone adopted by them in such passages as Georg. i. 24–42, or Horace, Ode iii. 3. 11–12. There is, however, a striking coincidence in the manner in which Virgil and Horace suggest the blending of the mortal with the immortal, which seems to imply a common source of inspiration. Horace asserts the divinity of Augustus by claiming for him qualities and services equal to, or greater than, those which raised Castor, Pollux, Hercules, Bacchus, and Romulus to the dwelling-place of the gods(31). Virgil, in one of the cardinal passages of the Aeneid, in which the action is projected into his own age, claims, for the restorer of order then, a vaster range of beneficent influence than that over which the civilising labours and conquests of Bacchus and Hercules had extended(32). In another passage Horace speaks of the Roman as worshipping the ‘numen’ of Caesar along with the Lares, ‘even as Greece keeps Castor and mighty Hercules in memory(33).’ In all these passages the idea implied is that, as great services to the human race have in other times raised mortals from earth to heaven, so it shall be with Augustus after the beneficent labours of his life are over(34). Probably the earliest suggestion of the idea in its manifestation at Rome came from the consecration of Julius Caesar after his death. The ‘Iulium Sidus’—‘the star beneath which the harvest-fields should be glad with corn’—is appealed to both by Virgil and Horace as a witness of the mortal become immortal. As the office of the deified Julius is to answer the prayers of the husbandman, such too will be the office of Augustus; and it is in this relation that he is invoked in the first Georgic among the deities whose function it is to watch over the fields. Both poets recall also the divine origin of the Emperor,—‘Augustus Caesar, of the race of heaven,’—as the descendant of Venus. Both too dwell on the especial protection of which he was the object. The divine care which had watched over Rome from its origin was now centred on him as the supreme head of the State, the heir and adopted son of the great Julius.

But, although we cannot ascribe to Virgil and Horace the ignorant superstition which raised temples to the living Emperor in the cities of Asia and in the various provinces of the Empire, it is difficult to extract from their language any germ of sincere conviction. And yet to condemn them of a base servility and hypocrisy would be to judge them altogether from a modern point of view. At such a time as the Augustan Age the minds of men were very variously affected by the different modes of religious belief, national and foreign, philosophical and artistic, which had been inherited from the past.(35) It must have been difficult for any one to be altogether unmoved by the innumerable symbols of religion visible around him, suggestive of a constant and immediate action of a supernatural power on all human, and especially all national, concerns: and it must have been equally difficult for any one trained in Greek philosophy to accept literally the incongruous fables of mythology, or to attach a definite personality to the imaginary beings of which it was composed. Horace and Virgil appear to stand at opposite extremes of incredulity and faith. Horace, in his Odes, accepts the beings of the Greek mythology as materials for his art, while, by his silence on the subject in his Satires and Epistles, he clearly implies that this acceptance formed no part of his real convictions. To Virgil, on the other hand, the gods of mythology appear to have a real existence, as manifestations of the divine energy, revealed in the religious traditions which connect the actual world of experience with a supernatural origin. So too Horace, in his Odes, treats the blending of the divine with the human elements in Augustus artistically or symbolically—represents him as drinking nectar between Pollux and Hercules, or as inspired with wisdom by the Muses in a Pierian cave—in much the same spirit as the great painters of the Renaissance introduced in their pictures living popes or patrons of art into the company of the most sacred personages. Virgil, to whose mind, in all things affecting either the State or the individual, the invisible world of faith appears very near the actual world of experience, seems sincerely to believe in the delegation of supernatural power and authority on the Emperor, and in the favour of Heaven watching over him. The divine energy diffused through all living things might appear to be united with the human elements in Augustus as it was in no other man, so that while still on earth he might be thought of, if not as a ‘praesens divus,’ yet as acting ‘praesenti numine,’ as the representative and vicegerent of omnipotence(36).

Some further light is thrown on this subject by considering the manifestation of this same spirit in other forms of the art of that age. The famous statue of the Emperor, found recently in the ruins of a villa of the Empress Livia, and at present seen among the statues of the _Braccio Nuovo_ in the Vatican, has been critically examined by an eminent German scholar, as furnishing the best commentary on the language of the Augustan poets. In this statue the Emperor appears as blending the attributes of a Roman imperator with those of a Greek hero or demigod.(37) Beside him a Cupid, symbolical of the Julian descent from Venus, appears riding on a dolphin. The breast-plate represents, among other protecting deities, those whom Horace addresses in the Carmen Saeculare, Phoebus and Diana, and the Sun and Earth-goddess. In the centre there is a figure of Mars attended by the wolf, receiving back the standards from the Parthian; on either side are seen two figures, representative of races recently conquered, probably the Celtiberians and the tribes of the Alps. From the coincidence of its symbolism it may be inferred that the statue was produced at the same time as the Carmen Saeculare was composed. Its object is to impress on the minds of men the image of Augustus as at once a great earthly conqueror and a being of divine descent and possessed of more than mortal attributes: the especial object of care to the supreme God of Heaven; to Apollo, whom, since the victory of Actium, he claimed as his tutelary divinity; to the Earth-goddess, the giver of fruitfulness and prosperity; to Mars, the second divine ancestor of the Roman race, in whose honour the famous temple, of which the ruins are yet visible, had been raised after the battle of Philippi. The statue is of Greek workmanship; the Greek divinities are presented in the forms familiar to Greek art; but the idea is purely Roman, and born of the immediate circumstances of the age.

Other extant works of art illustrate the divine functions and attributes claimed for Augustus. In one cameo he is seen throned beside the goddess Roma, with the sceptre and lituus, symbolical of his secular and spiritual function, and the eagle of Jupiter at his side. In others both the Emperor himself and various members of his family are represented under the form of gods, goddesses, and demigods. Thus, in one in which the figure of Aeneas is introduced, the young C. Caesar (Caligula) appears as Cupid, and in another Germanicus and Agrippina are represented as Triptolemus and Ceres.(38) But still more important, as attesting not the idealising fancies of contemporary Greeks, but the native feeling with which the house of Caesar came to be regarded even in the early years of the Empire, is the one great extant monument of that age, a monument of Roman inspiration and Roman workmanship, the Pantheon, raised by Agrippa in honour of the deities connected with the Julian race.

The prominence given to this representation of Augustus in the poetry and in the art of his age is probably to be explained by his own character and policy. He was animated in no ordinary degree by that love of fame and distinction which very powerfully influenced the greatest Roman conquerors and statesmen, orators and poets. The disdain of such distinctions and the dislike of public spectacles are mentioned, in contrast to the tastes of his predecessor, among the causes of the unpopularity of Tiberius. The enumeration in the Ancyraean inscription of the honours and titles bestowed on him, recorded with ‘imperial brevity’ and dictated by a proud self-esteem, attests the strength of this ruling passion in the latter years of the life of Augustus. The direct pressure which he brought to bear on the most eminent poets of the time to celebrate his wars is sufficiently indicated in many passages in the Odes and familiar writings of Horace. Belonging by descent to the comparatively obscure families of the Octavii and Atii, Augustus attached peculiar importance to the glories of the Julian line, which he inherited through his great-uncle and adoptive father. Even Julius Caesar, notwithstanding his Epicurean disregard of the religious ideas of his age, had encouraged the belief in his divine descent, as marking him out for the special favours of fortune. There was moreover in Augustus, in contradistinction to Julius Caesar, a strong vein of religious or superstitious sentiment. His personal courage has been questioned, probably with injustice, but he appears to have been in a marked degree liable to supernatural terrors(39). As happens not unfrequently with men who have been invariably successful in great and hazardous enterprises, along with a strong reliance in the resources of his own mind, he seems to have had faith in a supernatural guidance and assistance attending him. His politic understanding appreciated the use of such a belief to secure a divine sanction for his rule, which rested substantially on military force. He availed himself of the enthusiasm and willing services of the poets of the age, who regarded him as at once the saviour of the State and their own benefactor, to impress this idea of himself on the imagination of the cultivated classes, and at the same time to glorify the actual successes of his reign, to further his policy of national regeneration, and to make men feel the security of a divinely-appointed government, along with the pride of belonging to a powerful imperial State.

III.

The political revolution which transformed the Republic into the Empire, and the state of public feeling, which, arising spontaneously, yet received direction from the will and policy of Augustus, thus appear to be the most important conditions determining the character of the Augustan literature, and distinguishing it from that of the previous age. Poetic art was employed as it had never been in any former time as an instrument of government. If anything could have made the new order of things acceptable to the best representatives of the old Republican traditions, the purity and elevation imparted to the idea of the Empire in the verse of Virgil must have had this effect. The poetical imagination, susceptible as it is in the highest degree of emotions produced by the spectacle of ancient or powerful government or of a people nobly asserting its freedom, has little prophetic insight into the working of political causes. Nor need it be regarded as a sign of weakness or time-serving in the poets of the Augustan Age that they did not foresee the gloom and oppression which were destined to follow so soon after the prosperous dawn of the Roman Empire.

The establishment of the Empire affected the new poetry also by the personal relations which it established between the leaders of society and the leaders of literature. The early Republican poets were for the most part strangers to Rome, men of comparatively humble position, who by their merit gained the friendship of some of the great families, but who at the same time depended for their success on popular favour. The poets of the last days of the Republic were themselves members of the great families, or men intimately associated with them; and they wrote to please themselves and their equals. What remains of their poetry has thus all the independence of the older Republican literature, with the refinement of a literature addressed to a polished society. The poets of the Augustan Age were men born in the country districts or provincial towns of Italy, and the two most illustrious of their number were of humble origin: yet they lived after their early youth in familiar intercourse with the foremost men of their time; they owed their fortunes and position in life to the favour of these men, and thus could not help sharing, and to some extent reproducing, their tastes and tone in their writings.

Among the names of the patrons of literature that of Maecenas has become proverbial, but perhaps even more important than his patronage was that exercised by the Emperor himself. Not only was he a man of great natural gifts, but he had received a most elaborate education. He was a powerful and accomplished orator, and a practised writer(40). As was not unusual with men who had received a thorough rhetorical training, he attempted the composition of a tragedy, and had the sense to treat his failure with good-natured humour(41). He made other attempts in verse, and composed several works in prose, chiefly turning on the history of his own times. He showed in his composition an especial regard for purity and correctness of style. Suetonius tells us that he allowed no composition to be written on himself ‘except in a serious spirit and by the best writers.’ Horace testifies to this fastidiousness in the line,—

Cui male si palpere, recalcitret undique tutus(42).

Suetonius testifies further to his liberal patronage of genius; ‘ingenia saeculi sui omnibus modis fovit;’ a statement confirmed by Horace’s account of his liberality to Virgil and Varius,—

Dilecti tibi Vergilius Variusque poetae(43).

We are told also that in literary works he especially regarded ‘the inculcation of precepts and the exhibition of examples of a useful tendency for the state and for private life,’ which may partly account for the didactic and practical aim which the higher poetry of the age set before itself. He corresponded in terms of intimacy with Virgil, and made repeated advances, which were at first somewhat coldly received, to Horace, with the wish to number him among his familiar friends. But there was another side to the temper of Augustus, which those admitted to his favour did well not to forget. If he could be a liberal patron and genial companion, he could also be a hard and pitiless master. Literature, like everything else, had to be at his command, obedient to his will, and in harmony with his policy. The fate of Gallus, that of Iulus Antonius, and that of Ovid, prove that neither brilliant genius nor past favours and familiarity could procure indulgence for whatever thwarted his purpose or offended his dignity.

The relation between Maecenas and the members of his literary circle was one of more intimacy and unreserve. This circle included among its members Virgil and Varius, Horace and Propertius. The great works with which the name of Maecenas is inseparably associated,—the Georgics of Virgil, the first three books of the Odes of Horace, and the first book of his Epistles,—entitle him to be honoured as among the most enlightened and fortunate of all the patrons of literature. Virgil addresses him in language not only of loyal admiration, but of acknowledgment for the encouragement and guidance which he owed to him: and that such an influence may have been really exercised by the inferior over the superior mind is shown by the testimony given by Goethe of the stimulus which his genius derived from the encouragement of the Duke of Weimar(44). Horace writes of Maecenas in the language not only of admiration and gratitude, but of warm and disinterested affection; and the favour shown to Propertius, a poet of a very opposite type, shows that his appreciation of genius was not limited by a narrow partisanship. His character seems to have left very different impressions on the minds of his contemporaries, according as they knew him intimately or merely from the outside. It is a proof of his capacity and his loyalty(45) that he was the one man thoroughly trusted by Augustus in all affairs of state, as Agrippa was in war: and that his qualities of heart were no less admirable appears not only from the poetical eulogies in the Georgics, the Elegies of Propertius, and the Odes of Horace, but also from the more natural tribute to his worth as a man and his sincerity as a friend contained in Horace’s Satires and Epistles. On the world outside his own immediate circle he produced the impression of an effeminate devotion to pleasure. His love of pleasure and his shrinking from death seem to be confirmed by the testimony of Horace:—

Cur me querelis, etc.

The sketch of him by Velleius Paterculus presents the view of his character suggested by the contrast between his ability as a statesman and the apparent indolence of his private life: ‘A man, who, while in all critical emergencies displaying sleepless vigilance, foresight, and capacity for action, yet, during intervals of relaxation, was in his indolent self-indulgence almost more effeminate than a woman(46).’ It is remarkable that Tacitus ascribes a similar character to the man in whom, after the death of Maecenas, Augustus most confided—Sallustius Crispus(47). Perhaps the position of Maecenas, as the trusted confidant of a jealous and imperious master, required him to begin his career by playing a part which afterwards became habitual to him. Among the traits of his character indicated by Horace are knowledge of men, reticence, and indifference to the outward distinctions of birth and rank. Whatever ambition he had was to exercise real power as the minister of Augustus, not to enjoy official titles. He certainly used his position to direct the genius both of Virgil and Horace to public objects. There is no reason to doubt the fact noticed in the Life of Virgil, that he influenced him in the choice of the subject of the Georgics with the view to revive the chief among the ancient arts, ‘by which the Latin name and the strength of Italy had grown great.’ But it was with Horace that he shared all his public interests and private feelings, and it is not a very hazardous conjecture to presume that many of the Odes and familiar writings of the latter poet reflect the tastes and sentiments of Maecenas, perhaps give back the very style and manner of his conversation. The alternation observable in the Odes of Horace between an apparent devotion to the lighter themes of lyrical poetry and the serious interest in great affairs, the irony disclaiming all lofty and austere pretension, the Epicurean taste for simplicity combined with the Epicurean love of pleasure, the indifference to outward state, and the urbanity and knowledge of the world, more conspicuous in Horace than in any other ancient poet, are suggestive of habitual contact with the worldly wisdom, the real power disguised under an appearance of carelessness, the refined enjoyment of life, the genial social nature, which were not only a great power in the State, a great charm in the life of a by-gone age, but have through their action on the literature of the time become a permanent and beneficent influence on human culture.

Other names of men eminent among the ‘lights and leaders’ of the time are also intimately connected with its literature. The earliest patron by whom Virgil’s genius was recognised was not Maecenas but Asinius Pollio, who in his early youth had lived in the gay circle of Catullus; who, as the lieutenant of Antony, had governed the province of Cisalpine Gaul; who had filled the office of Consul, commanded an army, and obtained a triumph; who is mentioned by Horace in one of his early Satires as among the few critics whose appreciation he valued; who in later life obtained great distinction as an orator; to whose talent as a writer of tragedy both Virgil and Horace bear witness; who undertook the composition of a work the loss of which is one of the most irreparable gaps in historical records—a contemporary History of the Civil Wars ‘ex Metello consule;’—and who performed the important service to literature of being the first to establish a public library at Rome, and the more questionable service of instituting the practice of public recitations.

M. Valerius Messala, the next in importance among the patrons of letters, unlike Maecenas and Pollio, who, though of old provincial families, were ‘novi homines’ at Rome, was a representative of one of the oldest and most illustrious patrician houses. He had held high command in the Republican army at Philippi, and was distinguished as an orator, an author, and patron of literature. He became the centre of a literary circle the most brilliant member of which was Tibullus; which, though living in friendly relations with the circle of Maecenas, did not share with it the enthusiasm for the new _régime_. Men like Pollio and Messala are important as elements contributing to the general taste and culture of the age, but not as determining the political or ethical character stamped upon the literature.

No direct literary influence was exercised by Agrippa, who is described by the elder Pliny as ‘A man, whose manners more nearly approached rustic plainness than refinement of taste;’ but his military and naval successes, and still more the great works of utility and beauty erected under his superintendence, contributed to the same end as the poetry of Virgil and Horace, that of perpetuating the spell of the name of Caesar upon the imagination of the world.

Cornelius Gallus, like Pollio, was eminent both in action and in poetry, but his brilliant and erratic career was cut short too soon to enable him to obtain a foremost place either among poets or among literary patrons. Yet an undying interest attaches to his name from the evidence afforded in the Eclogues of his being the first and apparently the only one who inspired in Virgil that affection, partly of the heart, partly of the imagination, which fascinates and attaches the finer nature of the poet to the stronger or bolder nature of one in whom it recognises some ideal of heroism, combined with the qualities which unite men in friendship with one another. It is of Gallus alone that Virgil writes in such a strain as this:—

Gallo cuius amor tantum mihi crescit in horas
Quantum vere novo viridis se subicit alnus(48);

and it is to Gallus that he assigns the pre-eminence in his own especial province of poetry,—as he represents the shepherd-poet Linus presenting him with the reeds which the Muses had of old given to ‘the sage of Ascra(49).’

The Odes of Horace, addressed to men of high official station and ancient family, such as Sestius, Munatius Plancus, Sallustius Crispus, Aelius Lamia, Manlius Torquatus, still further illustrate the close connexion between the great world and the world of letters. His later Epistles, many of which are addressed to young men of rank devoting themselves to literary studies and pursuits, attest the continuance of the same tendency as time went on. And in the following generation Ovid and his contemporaries enjoyed the favour and friendship of the sons of these men and of other illustrious patrons. Juvenal, in the Satire in which he complains of the absence of a liberal patronage in his own age, unites the names of Fabius and Cotta Messalinus (son of Messala), whose protection and encouragement Ovid had enjoyed, with that of Maecenas(50). The chief cause of this close bond of union between social rank and literary genius was the fact that the men who in a former age would, from their birth and education, have had a great political career before them, were now debarred from the highest sphere of active life; while they were not yet, what they became under the systematic corruption of the later Caesars, too enervated and demoralised to continue susceptible of the nobler kinds of intellectual pleasure.