Latin Literature Part 9

Beyond these incidental touches of wisdom and insight, which give an enduring value to the whole substance of the work, the chief interest for modern readers in the _Inst.i.tutio Oratoria_, lies in three portions which are, more or less, episodic to the strict purpose of the book, though they sum up the spirit in which it is written. These are the discussions on the education of children in the first, and on the larger education of mature life in the last book, and the critical sketch of ancient literature up to his own time, which occupies the first chapter of the tenth. Almost for the first time in history--for the ideal system of Plato, however brilliant and suggestive, stands on quite a different footing--the theory of education was, in this age, made a subject of profound thought and study. The precepts of Quintilian, if taken in detail, address themselves to the formation of a Roman of the Empire, and not a citizen of modern Europe. But their main spirit is independent of the accidents of any age or country. In the breadth of his ideas, and in the wisdom of much of his detailed advice, Quintilian takes a place in the foremost rank of educational writers. The dialogue on oratory written a few years earlier by Tacitus names, as the main cause of the decay of the liberal arts, not any lack of substantial encouragement, but the negligence of parents and the want of skill in teachers. To leave off vague and easy declamations against luxury and the decay of morals, and to fix on the great truth that bad education is responsible for bad life, was the first step towards a real reform. This Quintilian insists upon with admirable clearness. Nor has any writer on education grasped more firmly or expressed more lucidly the complementary truth that education, from the cradle upwards, is something which acts on the whole intellectual and moral nature, and whose object is the production of what the Romans called, in a simple form of words which was full of meaning, "the good man." It would pa.s.s beyond the province of literary criticism to discuss the reasons why that reform never took place, or, if it did, was confined to a circle too small to influence the downward movement of the Empire at large. They belong to a subject which is among the most interesting of all studies, and which has hardly yet been studied with adequate fulness or insight, the social history of the Roman world in the second century.

One necessary part of the education of the orator was a course of wide and careful reading in the best literature; and it is in this special connection that Quintilian devotes part of his elaborate discussion on style to a brief critical summary of the literature of Greece and that of his own country. The frequent citations which have already been made from this part of the work may indicate the very great ability with which it is executed. Though his special purpose as a professor of rhetoric is always kept in view, his criticism pa.s.ses beyond this formal limit. He expresses, no doubt, what was the general opinion of the educated world of his own time; but the form of his criticism is so careful and so choice, that many of his brief phrases have remained the final word on the authors, both in prose and verse, whom he mentions in his rapid survey. His catalogue is far from being, as it has been disparagingly called, a mere "list of the best hundred books." It is the deliberate judgment of the best Roman scholars.h.i.+p, in an age of wide reading and great learning, upon the masterpieces of their own literature. His own preference for certain periods and certain manners is well marked. But he never forgets that the object of criticism is to disengage excellences rather than to censure faults: even his p.r.o.nounced aversion from the style of Seneca and the authors of the Neronian age does not prevent him from seeing their merits, and giving these ungrudging praise.

It is, indeed, in Quintilian that the reaction from the early imperial manner comes to its climax. Statius had, to a certain degree, gone back to Virgil; Quintilian goes back to Cicero without hesitation or reserve.

He is the first of the Ciceronians; Lactantius in the fourth century, John of Salisbury in the twelfth, Petrarch in the fourteenth, Erasmus in the sixteenth, all in a way continue the tradition which he founded; nor is it surprising that the discovery of a complete ma.n.u.script of the _Inst.i.tutio Oratoria_, early in the fifteenth century was hailed by scholars as one of the most important events of the Renaissance. He is not, however, a mere imitator of his master's style; indeed, his style is, in some features and for some purposes, a better one than his master's. It is as clear and fluent, and not so verbose. He cannot rise to the great heights of Cicero; but for ordinary use it would be difficult to name a manner that combines so well the Ciceronian dignity with the rich colour and high finish added to Latin prose by the writers of the earlier empire.

The body of criticism left by Quintilian in this remarkable chapter is the more valuable because it includes nearly all the great Latin writers.

Cla.s.sical literature, little as it may have seemed so at the time, was already nearing its end. With the generation which immediately followed, that of his younger contemporaries, the Silver Age closes, and a new age begins, which, though full of interest in many ways, is no longer cla.s.sical. After Tacitus and the younger Pliny, the main stream dwindles and loses itself among quicksands. The writers who continue the pure cla.s.sical tradition are few, and of inferior power; and the chief interest of Latin literature becomes turned in other directions, to the Christian writers on the one hand, and on the other to those authors in whom we may trace the beginning of new styles and methods, some of which bore fruit at the time, while others remained undeveloped till the later Middle Ages. Why this final effort of purely Roman culture, made in the Flavian era with such sustained energy and ability, on the whole scarcely survived a single generation, is a question to which no simple answer can be given. It brings us once more face to face with the other question, which, indeed, haunts Latin literature from the outset, whether the conquest and absorption of Greece by Rome did not carry with it the seeds of a fatal weakness in the victorious literature. Up to the end of the Golden Age fresh waves of Greek influence had again and again given new vitality and enlarged power to the Latin language. That influence had now exhausted itself; for the Latin world Greece had no further message. That Latin literature began to decline so soon after the stimulating Greek influence ceased to operate, was partly due to external causes; the empire began to fight for its existence before the end of the second century, and never afterwards gained a pause in the continuous drain of its vital force. But there was another reason more intimate and inherent; a literature formed so completely on that of Greece paid the penalty in a certain loss of independent vitality. The gap between the literary Latin and the actual speech of the ma.s.s of Latin-speaking people became too great to bridge over. Cla.s.sical Latin poetry was, as we have seen, written throughout in alien metres, to which indeed the language was adapted with immense dexterity, but which still remained foreign to its natural structure. To a certain degree the same was even true of prose, at least of the more imaginative prose which was developed through a study of the great Greek masters of history, oratory, and philosophy. In the Silver Age Latin literature, feeling a great past behind it, definitely tried to cut itself away from Greece and stand on its own feet. Quintilian's criticism implies throughout that the two literatures were on a footing of substantial equality; Cicero is sufficient for him, as Virgil is for Statius. Even Martial, it has been noted, hardly ever alludes to Greek authors, while he is full of references to those of his own country. The eminent grammarians of the age, Aemilius Asper, Marcus Valerius Probus, Quintus Asconius Pedia.n.u.s, show the same tendency; their main work was in commenting on the great Latin writers. The elaborate editions of the Latin poets, from Lucretius to Persius, produced by Probus, and the commentaries on Terence, Cicero, Sall.u.s.t, and Virgil by Asconius and Asper, were the work of a generation to whom these authors had become in effect the cla.s.sics. But literature, as the event proved not for the first or the last time, cannot live long on the study of the cla.s.sics alone.

III.

TACITUS.

The end, however, was not yet; and in the generation which immediately followed, the single imposing figure of Cornelius Tacitus, the last of the great cla.s.sical writers, adds a final and, as it were, a sunset splendour to the literature of Rome. The reigns of Nerva and Trajan, however much they were hailed as the beginning of a golden age, were really far less fertile in literary works than those of the Flavian Emperors; and the boasted restoration of freedom of speech was almost immediately followed by an all but complete silence of the Latin tongue.

When to the name of Tacitus are added those of Juvenal and the younger Pliny, there is literally almost no other author--none certainly of the slightest literary importance--to be chronicled until the reign of Hadrian; and even then the princ.i.p.al authors are Greek, while mere compilers or grammarians like Gellius and Suetonius are all that Latin literature has to show. The beginnings of Christian literature in Minucius Felix, and of mediaeval literature in Apuleius and the author of the _Pervigilium Veneris,_ rise in an age scanty in the amount and below mediocrity in the substance of its production.

Little is known of the birth and parentage of Tacitus beyond the mere fact that he was a Roman of good family. Tradition places his birth at Interamna early in the reign of Nero; he pa.s.sed through the regular stages of an official career under the three Flavian Emperors. His marriage, towards the end of the reign of Vespasian, to the daughter and only surviving child of the eminent soldier and administrator, Gnaeus Julius Agricola, aided him in obtaining rapid promotion; he was praetor in the year in which Domitian celebrated the Secular Games, and rose to the dignity of the consuls.h.i.+p during the brief reign of Nerva. He was then a little over forty. When still quite a young man he had written the dialogue on oratory, which is one of the most interesting of Latin works on literary criticism; but throughout the reign of Domitian his pen was wholly laid aside. The celebrated pa.s.sage of the _Agricola_ in which he accounts for this silence may or may not give an adequate account of the facts, but at all events gives the keynote of the whole of his subsequent work, and of that view of the imperial government of the first century which his genius has fixed ineradicably in the imagination of the world.

Under Domitian a servile senate had ordered the works of the two most eminent martyrs of reactionary Stoicism, Arulenus Rusticus and Herennius Senecio, to be publicly burned in the forum; "thinking that in that fire they consumed the voice of the Roman people, their own freedom, and the conscience of mankind. Great indeed," he bitterly continues, "are the proofs we have given of what we can endure. The antique time saw to the utmost bounds of freedom, we of servitude; robbed by an inquisition of the common use of speech and hearing, we should have lost our very memory with our voice, were it as much in our power to forget as to be dumb. Now at last our breath has come back; yet in the nature of human frailty remedies are slower than their diseases, and genius and learning are more easily extinguished than recalled. Fifteen years have been taken out of our lives, while youth pa.s.sed silently into age; and we are the wretched survivors, not only of those who have been taken away from us, but of ourselves." Even a colourless translation may give some idea of the distilled bitterness of this tremendous indictment. We must remember that they are the words of a man in the prime of life and at the height of public distinction, under a prince of whose government he speaks in terms of almost extravagant hope and praise, to realise the spirit in which he addressed himself to paint his lurid portraits of Tiberius or Nero or Domitian.

The exquisitely beautiful memoir of his father-in-law, in the introduction to which this pa.s.sage occurs, was written by Tacitus in the year which succeeded his own consuls.h.i.+p, and which saw the accession of Trajan. He was then already meditating a large historical work on the events of his own lifetime, for which he had, by reading and reflection, as well as by his own administrative experience, acc.u.mulated large materials. The essay _De Origine Situ Moribus ac Populis Germaniae_ was published about the same time or a little later, and no doubt represents part of the material which he had collected for the chapters of his history dealing with the German wars, and which, as much of it fell outside the scope of a general history of Rome, he found it worth his while to publish as a separate treatise. The scheme of his work became larger in the course of its progress. As he originally planned it, it was to begin with the accession of Galba, thus dealing with a period which fell entirely within his own lifetime, and indeed within his own recollection. But after completing his account of the six reigns from Galba to Domitian, he did not, as he had at first proposed, go on to those of Nerva and Trajan, but resumed his task at an earlier period, and composed an equally elaborate history of the empire from the death of Augustus down to the point where his earlier work began. He still cherished the hope of resuming his history from the accession of Nerva, but it is doubtful whether he lived long enough to do so. Allusions to the Eastern conquests of Trajan in the _Annals_ show that the work cannot have been published till after the year 115, and it would seem--though nothing is known as to the events or employments of his later life--that he did not long survive that date. But the thirty books of his _Annals_ and _Histories,_ themselves splendid work for a lifetime, gave the continuous history of the empire in the most crucial and on the whole the most remarkable period of its existence, the eighty-two years which succeeded the death of its founder.

As in so many other cases, this memorable work has only escaped total loss by the slenderest of chances. As it is, only about one-half of the whole work is extant, consisting of four large fragments. The first of these, which begins at the beginning, breaks off abruptly in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius. A gap of two years follows, and the second fragment carries on the history to Tiberius' death. The story of the reign of Caligula is wholly lost; the third fragment begins in the seventh year of Claudius, and goes on as far as the thirteenth of Nero.

The fourth, consisting of the first four and part of the fifth book of the earlier part of the work, contains the events of little more than a year, but that the terrible "year of Emperors" which followed the overthrow of Nero and shook the Roman world to its foundations. A single ma.n.u.script has preserved the last two of these four fragments; to the hand of one nameless Italian monk of the eleventh century we owe our knowledge of one of the greatest masterpieces of the ancient world.

Not the least interesting point in the study of the writings of Tacitus is the way in which we can see his unique style gradually forming and changing from his earlier to his later manner. The dialogue _De Oratoribus_ is his earliest extant work. Its scene is laid in or about the year 75. But Tacitus was then little if at all over twenty, and it may have been written some five or six years later. In this book the influence of Quintilian and the Ciceronian school is strongly marked; there is so much of Ciceronianism in the style that many scholars have been inclined to a.s.sign it to some other author, or have even identified it with the lost treatise of Quintilian himself, on the _Causes of the Decay of Eloquence_. But its style, while it bears the general colour of the Silver Age, has also large traces of that compressed and allusive manner which Tacitus later carried to such an extreme degree of perfection. Full as it is of the _ardor iuvenilis,_ page after page recalling that Ciceronian manner with which we are familiar in the _Brutus_ or the _De Oratore_ by the balance of the periods, by the elaborate similes, and by a certain fluid and florid evolution of what is really commonplace thought, a touch here and there, like _contemnebat potius literas quam nesciebat_, or _vitio malignitatis humanae vetera semper in laude, praesentia in fastidio esse_, or the criticism on the poetry of Caesar and Brutus, _non melius quam Cicero, sed felicius, quia illos fecisse pauciores sciunt_, antic.i.p.ates the author of the _Annals,_ with his mastery of biting phrase and his unequalled power of innuendo.

The defence and attack of the older oratory are both dramatic, and to a certain extent unreal; it is probable that the dialogue does in fact represent the matter of actual discussions between the two princ.i.p.al interlocutors, celebrated orators of the Flavian period, to which as a young student Tacitus had himself listened. One phrase dropped by Aper, the apologist of the modern school, is of special interest as coming from the future historian; among the faults of the Ciceronian oratory is mentioned a languor and heaviness in narration--_tarda et iners structura in morem annalium_. It is just this quality in historical composition that Tacitus set himself sedulously to conquer. By every artifice of style, by daring use of vivid words and elliptical constructions, by studied avoidance of the old balance of the sentence, he established a new historical manner which, whatever may be its failings--and in the hands of any writer of less genius they become at once obvious and intolerable--never drops dead or says a thing in a certain way because it is the way in which the ordinary rules of style would prescribe that it should be said. A comparison has often been drawn between Tacitus and Carlyle in this matter. It may easily be pressed too far, as in some rather grotesque attempts made to translate portions of the Latin author into phrases chosen or copied from the modern. But there is this likeness: both authors began by writing in the rather mechanical and commonplace style which was the current fas.h.i.+on during their youth; and in both the evolution of the personal and inimitable manner from these earlier essays into the full perfection of the _Annals_ and the _French Revolution_ is a lesson in language of immense interest.

The fifteen silent years of Tacitus followed the publication of the dialogue on oratory. In the _Agricola_ and _Germania_ the distinctively Tacitean style is still immature, though it is well on the way towards maturity. The _Germania_ is less read for its literary merit than as the princ.i.p.al extant account, and the only one which professes to cover the ground at all systematically, of Central Europe under the early Roman Empire. It does not appear whether, in the course of his official employments, Tacitus had ever been stationed on the frontier either of the Rhine or of the Danube. The treatise bears little or no traces of first-hand knowledge; nor does he mention his authorities, with the single exception of a reference to Caesar's _Gallic War_. We can hardly doubt that he made free use of the material ama.s.sed by Pliny in his _Bella Germaniae,_ and it is quite possible that he really used few other sources. For the work, though full of information, is not critically written, and the historian constantly tends to pa.s.s into the moralist.

His Ciceronianism has now completely worn away, but his manner is still as deeply rhetorical as ever. What he has in view throughout is to bring the vices of civilised luxury into stronger relief by a contrast with the idealised simplicity of the German tribes; and though his knowledge and his candour alike make him stop short of falsifying facts, his selection and disposition of facts is guided less by a historical than by an ethical purpose. His lucid and accurate description of the amber of the Baltic seems merely introduced in order to point a sarcastic reference to Roman luxury; and the whole of the extremely valuable account of the social life of the Western German tribes is drawn in implicit or expressed contrast to the elaborate social conventions of what he considers a corrupt and degenerate civilisation. The exaggeration of the sentiment is more marked than in any of his other writings; thus the fine outburst, _Nemo illic vitia ridet, nec corrumpere et corrumpi seculum vocatur,_ concludes a pa.s.sage in which he gravely suggests that the invention of writing is fatal to moral innocence; and though he is candid enough to note the qualities of laziness and drunkenness which the Germans shared with other half-barbarous races, he glosses over the other quality common to savages, want of feeling, with the sounding and grandiose commonplace, expressed in a phrase of characteristic force and brevity, _feminis lugere honestum est, viris meminisse_.

The _Agricola,_ perhaps the most beautiful piece of biography in ancient literature, stands on a much higher level than the _Germania,_ because here his heart was in the work. The rhetorical bent is now fully under control, while his mastery over "disposition" (to use the term of the schools), or what one might call the architectural quality of the book, could only have been gained by such large and deep study of the art of rhetoric as is inculcated by Quintilian. The _Agricola_ has the stateliness, the ordered movement, of a funeral oration; the peroration, as it might not unfairly be called, of the two concluding chapters, reaches the highest level of the grave Roman eloquence, and its language vibrates with a depth of feeling to which Lucretius and Virgil alone in their greatest pa.s.sages offer a parallel in Latin. The sentence, with its subtle Virgilian echoes, in which he laments his own and his wife's absence from Agricola's death-bed--_omnia sine dubio, optime parentum, adsidente amantissima uxore superfuere honori tuo; paucioribus tamen lacrimis comploratus es, et novissima in luce desideraverunt aliquid oculi tui_--shows a new and strange power in Latin. It is still the ancient language, but it antic.i.p.ates in its cadences the language of the Vulgate and of the statelier mediaeval prose.

Together with this remarkable power over new prose rhythms, Tacitus shows in the _Agricola_ the complete mastery of mordant and unforgettable phrase which makes his mature writing so unique. Into three or four ordinary words he can put more concentrated meaning than any other author. The likeness and contrast between these brief phrases of his and the "half-lines" of Virgil might repay a long study. They are alike in their simple language, which somehow or other is charged with the whole personality of the author; but the personality itself is in the sharpest ant.i.thesis. The Virgilian phrases, with their grave pity, are steeped in a golden softness that is just touched with a far-off trouble, a pathetic waver in the voice as if tears were not far below it. Those of Tacitus are charged with indignation instead of pity; "like a jewel hung in ghastly night," to use Shakespeare's memorable simile, or like the red and angry autumnal star in the _Iliad_, they quiver and burn. Phrases like the famous _ubi solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant_, or the _felix opportunitate mortis_, are the concentrated utterance of a great but deeply embittered mind.

In this spirit Tacitus set himself to narrate the history of the first century of the Empire. Under the settled equable government of Trajan, the reigns of the Julio-Claudian house rapidly became a legendary epoch, a region of prodigies and nightmares and t.i.tanic crimes. Even at the time they happened many of the events of those years had thrown the imagination of their spectators into a fever. The strong taint of insanity in the Claudian blood seemed to have communicated itself to the world ruled over by that extraordinary series of men, about whom there was something inhuman and supernatural. Most of them were publicly deified before their death. The _Fortuna Urbis_ took in them successive and often monstrous incarnations. Augustus himself was supposed to have the gift of divination; his foreknowledge overleapt the extinction of his own house, and foresaw, across a gap of fifty years, the brief reign of Galba. Caligula threw an arch of prodigious span over the Roman Forum, above the roofs of the basilica of Julius Caesar, that from his house on the Palatine he might cross more easily to sup with his brother, Jupiter Capitolinus. Nero's death was for years regarded over half the Empire as incredible; men waited in a frenzy of excited terror for the reappearance of the vanished Antichrist. Even the Flavian house was surrounded by much of the same supernatural atmosphere. The accession of Vespasian was signalised by his performing public miracles in Egypt; Domitian, when he directed that he should be formally addressed as _Our Lord G.o.d_ by all who approached him, was merely settling rules for an established practice of court etiquette. In this thunderous unnatural air legends of all sorts sprung up right and left; foremost, and including nearly all the rest, the legend of the Empire itself, which (like that of the French Revolution) we are only now beginning to unravel. The modern school of historians find in authentic doc.u.ments, written and unwritten, the story of a continuous and able administration of the Empire through all those years by the permanent officials, and traces of a continuous personal policy of the Emperors themselves sustaining that administration against the reactionary tendencies of the Senate. Even the ma.s.sacres of Nero and Domitian are held to have been probably dictated by imperious public necessity. The confidential advisers of the Emperors acted as a sort of Committee of Public Safety, silent and active, while the credit or obloquy was all heaped on a single person. It took three generations to carry the imperial system finally out of danger; but when this end was at last attained, the era of the Good Emperors succeeded as a matter of course; much as in France, the success of the Revolution once fairly secured, the moderate government of the Directory and Consulate quietly succeeded to the Terror and the Revolutionary Tribunal.

Such is one view now taken of the early Roman Empire. Its weakness is that it explains too much. How or why, if the matter was really as simple as this, did the traditional legend of the Empire grow up and extinguish the real facts? Is it possible that the malignant genius of a single historian should outweigh, not only perishable facts, but the large body of imperialist literature which extends from the great Augustans down to Statius and Quintilian? Even if we set aside Juvenal and Suetonius as a rhetorician and a gossipmonger, that only makes the weight Tacitus has to sustain more overwhelming. It is hardly possible to overrate the effect of a single work of great genius; but the more we study works of great genius the more certain does it appear that they are all founded on real, though it may be transcendental, truth. Systems, like persons, are to be known by their fruits. The Empire produced, as the flower of its culture and in the inner circle of its hierarchy, the type of men of whom Tacitus is the most eminent example; and the indignant hatred it kindled in its children leaves it condemned before the judgment of history.

The surviving fragments of the _Annals_ and _Histories_ leave three great pictures impressed upon the reader's mind: the personality of Tiberius, the court of Nero, and the whole fabric and machinery of empire in the year of the four Emperors. The lost history of the reigns of Caligula and Domitian would no doubt have added two other pictures as memorable and as dramatic, but could hardly make any serious change in the main structure of the imperial legend as it is successively presented in these three imposing scenes.

The character and statesmans.h.i.+p of Tiberius is one of the most vexed problems in Roman history; and it is significant to observe how, in all the discussions about it, the question perpetually reverts to another-- the view to be taken of the personality of the historian who wrote nearly a century after Tiberius' accession, and was not born till long after his death. In no part of his work does Tacitus use his great weapon, insinuation of motive, with such terrible effect. All the speeches or letters of the Emperor quoted by him, almost all the actions he records, are given with this malign sidelight upon them: that, in spite of it, we lose our respect for neither Emperor nor historian is strong evidence both of the genius of the latter and the real greatness of the former.

The case of Germanicus Caesar is a cardinal instance. In the whole account of the relations of Tiberius to his nephew there is nothing in the mere facts as stated inconsistent with confidence and even with cordiality. Tiberius p.r.o.nounces a long and stately eulogy on Germanicus in the senate for his suppression of the revolt of the German legions. He recalls him from the German frontier, where the Roman supremacy was now thoroughly re-established, and where the hot-headed young general was on the point of entangling himself in fresh and dangerous conquests, in order to place him in supreme command in the Eastern provinces; but first he allows him the splendid pageant of a Roman triumph, and gives an immense donative to the population of the capital in his nephew's name.

Germanicus is sent to the East with _maius imperium_ over the whole of the transmarine provinces, a position more splendid than any that Tiberius himself had held during the lifetime of Augustus, and one that almost raised him to the rank of a colleague in the Empire. Then Germanicus embroils himself hopelessly with his princ.i.p.al subordinate, the imperial legate of Syria, and his illness and death at Antioch put an end to a situation which is rapidly becoming impossible. His remains are solemnly brought back to Rome, and honoured with a magnificent funeral; the proclamation of Tiberius fixing the termination of the public mourning is in its gravity and good sense one of the most striking doc.u.ments in Roman history. But in Tacitus every word and action of Tiberius has its malignant interpretation or comment. He recalls Germanicus from the Rhine out of mingled jealousy and fear; he makes him viceroy of the East in order to carry out a diabolically elaborate scheme for bringing about his destruction. The vague rumours of poison or magic that ran during his last illness among the excitable and grossly superst.i.tious populace of Antioch are gravely recorded as ground for the worst suspicions. That dreadful woman, the elder Agrippina, had, even in her husband's lifetime, made herself intolerable by her pride and jealousy after her husband's death she seems to have become quite insane, and the recklessness of her tongue knew no bounds. To Tacitus all her ravings, collected from hearsay or preserved in the memoirs of her equally appalling daughter, the mother of Nero, represent serious historical doc.u.ments; and the portrait of Tiberius is from first to last deeply influenced by, and indeed largely founded on, the testimony of a madwoman.

The three books and a half of the _Annals_ which contain the princ.i.p.ate of Nero are not occupied with the portraiture of a single great personality, nor are they full, like the earlier books, of scathing phrases and poisonous insinuations. The reign of Nero was, indeed, one which required little rhetorical artifice to present as something portentous. The external history of the Empire, till towards its close, was without remarkable incident. The wars on the Armenian frontier hardly affected the general quiet of the Empire; the revolt of Britain was an isolated occurrence, and soon put down. The German tribes, engaged in fierce internal conflicts, left the legions on the Rhine almost undisturbed. The provinces, though suffering under heavy taxation, were on the whole well ruled. Public interest was concentrated on the capital; and the startling events which took place there gave the fullest scope to the dramatic genius of the historian. The court of Nero lives before us in his masterly delineation. Nero himself, Seneca and Tigellinus, the Empress-mother, the conspirators of the year 65, form a portrait-gallery of sombre magnificence, which surpa.s.ses in vivid power the more elaborate and artificial picture of the reign of Tiberius. With all his immense ability and his deep psychological insight, Tacitus is not a profound political thinker; as he approaches the times which fell within his own personal knowledge he disentangles himself more and more from the preconceptions of narrow theory, and gives his dramatic gift fuller play.

It is for this reason that the _Histories_, dealing with a period which was wholly within his own lifetime, and many of the main actors in which he knew personally and intimately, are a greater historical work than even the _Annals_. He moves with a more certain step in an ampler field.

The events of the year 69, which occupy almost the whole of the extant part of the _Histories_, offer the largest and most crowded canvas ever presented to a Roman historian. And Tacitus rises fully to the amplitude of his subject. It is in these books that the material greatness of the Empire has found its largest expression. In the _Annals_ Rome is the core of the world, and the provinces stretch dimly away from it, shaken from time to time by wars or military revolts that hardly touch the great central life of the capital. Here, though the action opens indeed in the capital in that wet stormy January, the main interest is soon transferred to distant fields; the life of the Empire still converges on Rome as a centre, but no longer issues from it as from a common heart and brain.

The provinces had been the spoil of Rome; Rome herself is now becoming the spoil of the provinces. The most splendid piece of narration in the _Histories,_ and one of the finest in the work of any historian, is the story of the second battle of Bedriac.u.m, and the storm and sack of Cremona by the Moesian and Pannonian legions. This is the central thought which makes it so tragical. The little vivid touches in which Tacitus excels are used towards this purpose with extraordinary effect; as in the incident of the third legion saluting the rising sun--_ita in Suria mos est_--which marks the new and fatal character of the great provincial armies, or the casual words of the Flavian general, _The bath will soon be heated,_ which were said to have given the signal for the burning of Cremona. In these scenes the whole tragedy of the Empire rises before us.

The armies of the Danube and Rhine left the frontiers defenceless while they met in the shock of battle on Italian soil, still soaking with Roman blood and littered with unburied Roman corpses; behind them the whole armed strength of the Empire--_immensa belli moles_--was gathering out of Gaul, Spain, Syria, and Hungary; and before the year was out, the Roman Capitol itself, in a trifling struggle between small bodies of the opposing forces, went up in flame at the hands of the German troops of Vitellius.

This great pageant of history is presented by Tacitus in a style which, in its sombre yet gorgeous colouring, is unique in literature. In mere grammatical mechanism it bears close affinity to the other Latin writing of the period, but in all its more intimate qualities it is peculiar to Tacitus alone; he founded his own style, and did not transmit it to any successor. The influence of Virgil over prose reaches in him its most marked degree. Direct transferences of phrase are not infrequent; and throughout, as one reads the _Histories,_ one is reminded of the _Aeneid,_ not only by particular phrases, but by a more indefinable quality permeating the style. The narrative of the siege and firing of the Capitol, to take one striking instance, is plainly from the hand of a writer saturated with the movement and language of Virgil's _Sack of Troy_. A modern historian might have quoted Virgil in a note; with Tacitus the Virgilian reminiscences are interwoven with the whole structure of his narrative. The whole of the three fine chapters will repay minute comparison; but some of the more striking resemblances are worth noting as a study in language. _Erigunt aciem_, says the historian, _usque ad primas Capitolinae arcis fores ... in tectum egressi saxis tegulisque Vitellianos obruebant ... ni revolsas undique statuas, decora maiorum, in ipso aditu obiecissent ... vis propior atque acrior ingruebat ... quam non Porsena dedita urbe neque Galli temerare potuissent ...

inrumpunt Vitelliani et cuncta sanguine ferro flammisque miscent_. We seem to be present once more at that terrible night in Troy--

_Vestibulum ante ipsum primoque in limine Pyrrhus ...

Evado ad summi fastigia culminis ...

... turres ac tecta domorum Culmina convellunt ...

... veterum decora alia parentum Devolvunt ... nec saxa, nec ullum Telorum interea cessat genus ...

... armorumque ingruit horror ...

... et iam per moenia clarior ignis Auditur, propiusque aestus incendia volvunt ...

Quos neque Tydides, nec Larissaeus Achilles, Non anni domuere decem, non mille carinae ...

Fit via vi; rumpunt aditus primosque trucidant Inmissi Danai, et late loca milite complent._

These quotations indicate strikingly enough the way in which Tacitus is steeped in the Virgilian manner and diction. The whole pa.s.sage must be read continuously to realise the immense skill with which he uses it, and the tragic height it adds to the narrative.

Nor is the deep gloom of his history, though adorned with the utmost brilliance of rhetoric, lightened by any belief in Providence or any distinct hope for the future. The artificial optimism of the Stoics is alien from his whole temper; and his practical acquiescence in the existing system under the reign of Domitian only added bitterness to his inward revolt from it. The phrases of religion are merely used by him to darken the shades of his narrative; _Deum ira in rem Romanam,_ one of the most striking of them, might almost be taken as a second t.i.tle for his history. On the very last page of the _Annals_ he concludes a brief notice of the ruin and exile of Ca.s.sius Asclepiodotus, whose crime was that he had not deserted an unfortunate friend, with the striking words, "Such is the even-handedness of Heaven towards good and evil conduct."

Even his praises of the government of Trajan are half-hearted and incredulous; "the rare happiness of a time when men may think what they will, and say what they think," is to his mind a mere interlude, a brief lightening of the darkness before it once more descends on a world where the ambiguous power of fate or chance is the only permanent ruler, and where the G.o.ds intervene, not to protect, but only to avenge.

IV.

JUVENAL, THE YOUNGER PLINY, SUETONIUS: DECAY OF CLa.s.sICAL LATIN.

From the name of Tacitus that of Juvenal is inseparable. The pictures drawn of the Empire by the historian and the satirist are in such striking accordance that they create a greater plausibility for the common view they hold than could be given by any single representation; and while Juvenal lends additional weight and colour to the Tacitean presentment of the imperial legend, he acquires from it in return an importance which could hardly otherwise have been sustained by his exaggerated and glaring rhetoric.

As regards the life and personality of the last great Roman satirist we are in all but total ignorance. Several lives of him exist which are confused and contradictory in detail. He was born at Aquinum, probably in the reign of Nero; an inscription on a little temple of Ceres, dedicated by him there, indicates that he had served in the army as commander of a Dalmatian cohort, and was superintendent (as one of the chief men of the town) of the civic wors.h.i.+p paid to Vespasian after his deification. The circ.u.mstance of his banishment for offence given to an actor who was high in favour with the reigning Emperor is well authenticated; but neither its place nor its time can be fixed. It appears from the _Satires_ themselves that they were written late in life; we are informed that he reached his eightieth year, and lived into the reign of Antoninus Pius.

Martial, by whom he is repeatedly mentioned, alludes to him only as a rhetorician, not as a satirist. The sixteen satires (of which the last is, perhaps, not genuine) were published at intervals under Trajan and Hadrian. They fall into two groups; the first nine, which are at once the most powerful and the least agreeable, being separated by a considerable interval of years from the others, in which a certain softening of tone and a tendency to dwell on the praise of virtue more than on the ign.o.ble details of vice is united with a failing power that marks the approach of senility.

Juvenal is the most savage--one might almost say the most brutal--of all the Roman satirists. Lucilius, when he "scourged the town," did so in the high spirits and voluble diction of a comparatively simple age. Horace soon learned to drop the bitterness which appears in his earlier satires, and to make them the vehicle for his gentle wisdom and urbane humour. The writing of Persius was that of a student who gathered the types he satirised from books rather than from life. Juvenal brought to his task not only a wide knowledge of the world--or, at least, of the world of the capital--but a singular power of mordant phrase, and a mastery over crude and vivid effect that keeps the reader suspended between disgust and admiration. In the commonplaces of morality, though often elevated and occasionally n.o.ble, he does not show any exceptional power or insight; but his graphic realism, combined (as realism often is) with a total absence of all but the grimmest forms of humour, makes his verses cut like a knife. _Facit indignatio versum_, he truly says of his own work; with far less flexibility, he has all the remorselessness of Swift. That singular product of the last days of paganism, the epigrammatist Palladas of Alexandria, is the only ancient author who shows the same spirit. Of his earlier work the second and ninth satires, and a great part of the sixth, have a cold prurience and disgustingness of detail, that even Swift only approaches at his worst moments. Yet the sixth satire, at all events, is an undeniable masterpiece; however raw the colour, however exaggerated the drawing, his pictures of Roman life have a force that stamps them permanently on the imagination; his _Legend of Bad Women,_ as this satire might be called, has gone far to make history.

It is in the third satire that his peculiar gift of vivid painting finds its best and easiest scope. In this elaborate indictment of the life of the capital, put into the mouth of a man who is leaving it for a little sleepy provincial town, he draws a picture of the Rome he knew, its social life and its physical features, its everyday sights and sounds, that brings it before us more clearly and sharply than even the Rome of Horace or Cicero. The drip of the water from the aqueduct that pa.s.sed over the gate from which the dusty squalid Appian Way stretched through its long suburb; the garret under the tiles where, just as now, the pigeons sleeked themselves in the sun and the rain drummed on the roof; the narrow crowded streets, half choked with builders' carts, ankle-deep in mud, and the pavement ringing under the heavy military boots of guardsmen; the tavern waiters trotting along with a pyramid of hot dishes on their head; the flowerpots falling from high window ledges; night, with the shuttered shops, the silence broken by some sudden street brawl, the darkness shaken by a flare of torches as some great man, wrapped in his scarlet cloak, pa.s.ses along from a dinner-party with his long train of clients and slaves: these scenes live for us in Juvenal, and are perhaps the picture of ancient Rome that is most abidingly impressed on our memory. The substance of the satire is familiar to English readers from the fine copy of Johnson, whose _London_ follows it closely, and is one of the ablest and most animated modern imitations of a cla.s.sical original. The same author's n.o.ble poem on the _Vanity of Human Wishes_ is a more free, but equally spirited rendering of the tenth satire, which stands at the head of the later portion of Juvenal's work. In this, and in those of the subsequent satires which do not show traces of declining power, notably the eleventh and thirteenth, the rhetoric is less gaudy and the thought rises to a n.o.bler tone. The fine pa.s.sage at the end of the tenth satire, where he points out what it is permitted mankind to pray for, and that in the thirteenth, where he paints the torments of conscience in the unpunished sinner, have something in them which combines the lofty ardour of Lucretius with the subtle psychological insight of Horace, and to readers in all ages have been, as they still remain, a powerful influence over conduct. Equally elevated in tone, and with a temperate gravity peculiar to itself, is the part of the fourteenth satire which deals with the education of the young. We seem to hear once more in it the enlightened eloquence of Quintilian; in the famous _Maxima debetur puero reverentia_ he sums up in a single memorable phrase the whole spirit of the instructor and the moralist. The allusions to childhood here and elsewhere show Juvenal on his most pleasing side; his rhetorical vices had not infected the real simplicity of his nature, or his admiration for goodness and innocence. In his power over trenchant expression he rivals Tacitus himself. Some of his phrases, like the one just quoted, have obtained a world-wide currency, and even reached the crowning honour of habitual misquotation; his _Hoc volo sic iubeo_, his _Mens Sana in corpore sano_, his _Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?_ are more familiar than all but the best-known lines of Virgil and Horace. But perhaps his most characteristic lines are rather those where his moral indignation breaks forth in a sort of splendid violence quite peculiar to himself; lines like--

_Et propter vitam vivendi perdere causas,_

or--

_Magnaque numinibus vota exaudita malignis,_

in which the haughty Roman language is still used with unimpaired weight and magnificence.

To pa.s.s from Juvenal to the other distinguished contemporary of Tacitus, the younger Pliny, is like exchanging the steaming atmosphere and gorgeous colours of a hot-house for the commonplace trimness of a suburban garden. The nephew and adopted son of his celebrated uncle, Pliny had received from his earliest years the most elaborate training which ever fell to the lot of mediocrity. His uncle's death left him at the age of seventeen already a finished pedant. The story which he tells, with obvious self-satisfaction, of how he spent the awful night of the eruption of Vesuvius in making extracts from Livy for his commonplace book, sets the whole man before us. He became a successful pleader in the courts, and pa.s.sed through the usual public offices up to the consulate.