Part 34 (1/2)
Historical research flagged; epitomizers had possession of the field. We have the names of L. AMPELIUS, the author of an abridged ”book of useful information on various subjects,” history predominating, called _Liber Memorialis_, which still remains; and of GRANIUS LICINIa.n.u.s, short fragments of whose Roman history in forty books are left to us.
Poetry was even more meagrely represented. Aulus Gellius [44] has preserved a translation of one of Plato's epigrams, which he calls _ouk amousos_, by a contemporary author, whose name he does not give. It is written in dimeter iambics, an easier measure than the hexameter, and therefore more within the reduced capacity of the time. The loose metrical treatment proceeds not so much from ignorance of the laws of quant.i.ty as from imitation of Hadrian's lax style, [45] and perhaps from a tendency, now no longer possible to resist, to adopt the plebeian methods of speech and rhythm into the domain of recognised literature. As the fragment may interest our readers, we quote it:
”Dum semibiulco savio Meum puellum savior, Dulcemque florem spiritus Duco ex aperto tramite; Animula aegra et saucia Cucurrit ad l.a.b.i.as mihi, Rictumque in oris pervium Et labra pueri mollia, Rimata itineri transitus Ut transiliret, nit.i.tur.
Tum si morae quid plusculae Fuisset in coetu osculi Amoris igni percita Transisset, et me linqueret: Et mira prorsum res foret, Ut ad me fierem mortuus, Ad puerum intus viverem.”
In the fifth and last lines we see a reversion to the ante-cla.s.sical irregularities of scansion. The reader should refer to the remarks on this subject on page 20.
Perhaps the much-disputed poem called _Pervigilium Veneris_ belongs to this epoch. [46] It is printed in Weber's _Corpus Poetarum_, [47] and is well worth reading from the melancholy despondency that breathes through its quiet inspiration. The metre is the trochaic tetrameter, which is always well suited to the Latin language, and which here appears treated with Greek strictness, except that in lines 55, 62, 91, a spondee is used in the fifth foot instead of a trochee. The refrain--
”Cras amet qui nunquam amavit, quique amavit, eras amet,”
may be called the ”last word” of expiring epicureanism.
The last writer that comes before us is the rhetorician and pseudo- philosopher, L. APULEIUS. He was born at Madaura, in Africa, 114 A.D. [48]
and calls himself Seminumida et Semigaetula. [49] His parents were in easy circ.u.mstances, and sent him to school at Carthage, which was fast rising to the highest place among the seminaries of rhetoric. By his father's death he came into a considerable fortune, and in order to finish his education spent some time at Athens, and travelled through many parts of the East hunting up all the information he could find on magic and necromancy, and getting himself initiated into all the different mysteries. About 136 he came to Rome, where he practised at the bar for about two years. He then returned to Madaura; but soon growing discontented determined to indulge his restless craving for travel and acquiring knowledge. He therefore set out for Egypt, the nurse of all occult wisdom, and the centre of attraction for all curious spirits. On his way he fell ill and was detained at Oea, where he met a rich widow named Pudentilla, whom in course of time he married. Her two sons had not been averse to the match, indeed Apuleius says they strongly urged it forward. But very soon they found their step-father an inconvenience, and through their uncle Aemilia.n.u.s inst.i.tuted a suit against him on the ground of his having bewitched their mother into marrying him. This serious charge, which was based princ.i.p.ally on the disparity of years, Pudentilla being sixty (though her husband maintains she is only forty), Apuleius refutes in his _Apologia_, [50] a valuable relic of the time, which well deserves to be read. The accusation had been divided into three parts, to each of which the orator replies. The first part or preamble had tried to excite odium against him by alleging his effeminacy in using dentifrice, in possessing a mirror, and in writing lascivious poems, and also by alluding to his former poverty. His reply to this is ready enough; he admits that nature has favoured him with a handsome person of which he is not ashamed of trying to make the best; besides, how do they know his mirror is not used for optical experiments? As to poverty, if he _had_ been poor, he gloried in the fact; [51] many great and virtuous men had been so too, and some thought poverty an essential part of virtue. The preamble disposed of, he proceeds to the more serious charge of magic. He has, so the indictment says, fascinated a child; he has bought poisons; he keeps something uncanny in his handkerchief, probably some token of sorcery: he offers nocturnal sacrifices, vestiges of which of a suspicious character have been found; and he wors.h.i.+ps a little skeleton he has made and which he always carries about with him. His answer to these charges is as follows:--the child was epileptic and died without his aid; the poisons he has bought for purposes of natural science; the image he carries in his handkerchief is that of Plato's _monarch_ (_vous Basileus_), devotion to which is only natural in a professed Platonist; and as for the sacrifices, they are pious prayers, offered outside the town solely in order to profit by the peaceful inspirations which the country awakens. The third part of the indictment concerned his marriage. He has forced the lady's affections; he has used occult arts as her own letters show, to gain an influence over her; love-letters have pa.s.sed between them, which is a suspicious thing when the lady is sixty years of age; the marriage was celebrated out of Oea; and last but not least, he has got possession of her very considerable fortune. His answers are equally to the point here.
So far from being unwilling to espouse him or needing any compulsion, the good lady with difficulty waited till her sons came of age, and then brooked no further delay; moreover he had not pressed his suit, though her sons themselves had strongly wished him to do so; as regards the correspondence, a son who reads his mother's private letters is hardly a witness to command confidence; as regards her age she is forty, not sixty; as regards the place of her marriage both of them preferred the country to the town; and as regards the fortune, which he denies to be a rich one, the will provides that on her death it shall revert to her sons. Having now completed his argument he lets loose the flood-gates of his satire; and with a violence, an indecency, and a dragging to light of home secrets, scarcely to be paralleled except in some recent trials, he flays the reputation of uncle and nephews, and triumphantly appeals to the judge to give a verdict in his favour. [52]
We next find him at Carthage where he gave public lectures on rhetoric. He had enough real ability joined with his affectation of wisdom to ensure his success in this sphere. Accordingly we find that he attained not only all the civil honours that the city had to bestow, but also the pontificate of Aesculapius, a position even more gratifying to his tastes.
During his career as a rhetorician he wrote the _Florida_, which consists for the most part of selected pa.s.sages from his public discourses. It is now divided into four books, but apparently at first had no such division.
It embraces specimens of eloquence on all kinds of subjects, in a middle style between the comparatively natural one of his _Apologia_ and the congeries of styles of all periods which his latest works present. In these _morceaux_, some of which are designed as themes for improvisation, he pretends to an acquaintance with the whole field of knowledge. As a consequence, it is obvious that his knowledge is nowhere very deep. He was equally fluent in Greek and Latin, and frequently pa.s.sed from one language to the other at a moment's notice.
He now cultivated that peculiar style which we see fully matured in his _Metamorphoses_. It is a mixture of poetical and prose diction, of archaisms and modernisms, of rare native and foreign terms, of solecisms, conceits, and quotations, which render it repulsive to the reader and betray the chaotic state of its creator's canons of taste. The story is copied from Lucian's _Aoukios ae Onos_, but it is on a larger scale, and many insertions occur, such as adventures with bandits or magicians; accounts of jugglers, priests of Cybele, and other vagrants; details on the arts; a description of an opera; licentious stories; and, above all, the pretty tale of Cupid and Psyche, [53] which came originally from the East, but in its present form seems rather to be modelled on a Greek redaction. ”The golden a.s.s of Apuleius,” as the eleven books of Metamorphoses are called by their admirers, was by no means thought so well of in antiquity as it is now. Macrobius expresses his wonder that a serious philosopher should have spent time on such trifles. St Augustine seems to think it possible the story may be a true one: ”aut indicavit aut finxit.” It is a fict.i.tious autobiography, narrating the adventures of the author's youth; how he was tried for the murder of three leather-bottles and condemned; how he was vivified by an enchantress with whom he was in love; how he wished to follow her through the air as a bird, but owing to a mistake of her maids was transformed into an a.s.s; how he met many strange adventures in his search for the rose-leaves which alone could restore his lost human form. The change of shape gave him many chances of observing men and women: among other incidents he is treated with disdain by his own horse and mule, and severely beaten by his groom. He hears his character openly defamed; his resentment at this, and the frequent attempts he makes to a.s.sert his rationality, are among the most ludicrous parts of the book; finally, after many adventures, he is restored to human shape by some priests of Isis or Osiris, to whose service he devotes himself for the rest of his life.
Some have considered this extravagant story to be an allegory, [54]
others, again, a covert satire on the vices of his countrymen. This latter supposition we may at once discard. The former is not unlikely, though the exact explanation of it will be a matter of uncertainty. Perhaps the a.s.s symbolizes sensuality; the rose-leaves, science; the priests of Isis, either the Platonic philosophy, or the Mysteries; the return to human shape, holiness or virtue. It is also possible that it may be a plea for paganism against the new religious elements that were gathering strength at Carthage; but if so, it is hard to see why he should have chosen as his model the atheistic story of Lucian. In a similar manner the story of Cupid and Psyche has been made a type of the progress of the soul.
Apuleius was one of those minds not uncommon in a decaying civilization, in which extreme quasi-religious exaltation alternates with impure hilarity. He is a licentious mystic; a would-be magician; [55] a hierophant of pretentious sanct.i.ty, something between a Cagliostro and a Swedenborg; a type altogether new in Roman literature, and a gloomy index of its speedy fall.
Besides these works of Apuleius, we possess some short philosophical tracts, embodying some of his Platonist and Pythagorean doctrines. They are _De deo Socratis_, _De Dogmate Platonis_ in three books, and the _De Mundo_, a popular theologico-scientific exposition, drawn from Aristotle.
The general tenor of these works will be considered in the next chapter, as their bearing on the thought of the times gives them considerable importance.
CHAPTER IX.
STATE OF PHILOSOPHICAL AND RELIGIOUS THOUGHT DURING THE PERIOD OF THE ANTONINES--CONCLUSION.
During the second century after Christ we have the remarkable spectacle of the renaissance of Greek literature. The eloquence which had so long been silent now was heard again in Dio Chrysostom, the delicate artillery of Attic wit was revived by Lucian, the dignity of sublime thought was upheld by Arrian and Marcus Aurelius. It should be remarked that the Greeks had never quite discontinued the art of eloquence. When their own political independence ended, they carried their talents into other lands, into Egypt, India, Asia Minor, sowing colonies of intelligence wherever they went; but the chief place to which they flocked was Rome. At Rome the hold they gained was such that even tyranny itself could not loosen it. Their light spirits and plastic nature made them adapt themselves to every fas.h.i.+on without difficulty and without regret; even under Tiberius or Domitian there was always something for a cultured Greek to do. [1]
Rhetoric was the inheritance of the dethroned Greek nation, and they clung to it with all the fondness of grat.i.tude. Long after the pacification of the world had destroyed all the subject-matter of oratory, they cherished the form of it, and practised it with a zeal proportioned to its worthlessness. Even in her best days, as we know from Thucydides, Greece had been a victim to fine talking; the words of her delicious language seemed by their mere sound to have power over those that used them; and now that patriotism had ceased to inspire her orators, they naturally sought in the splendour of the Asiatic style an equivalent for the chaste beauties of ancient national eloquence. There were two cla.s.ses of Greeks at this period who effected in no small degree the general spread of culture. These were the rhetors and the sophists; properly speaking distinct, but often confounded under the general name of sophist.
The rhetors proper have been already described. We need only notice here the gradually increasing insignificance of the themes they chose. In the Claudian era the points discussed were either historical, mythical, or legal. All had some reference, however distant, to actual pleading before a court of law. But now even this element of reality has disappeared. The poetical readings which had been the fas.h.i.+on under Domitian gave place to rhetorical _ostentations_ which were popular in proportion to their frivolity or misplaced ingenuity. The heroes of Marathon, [2] the sages of ancient Greece, had once been the objects of praise. They were now made the objects of derision and invective. [3] Speeches against Socrates, Achilles, or Homer, and in favour of Busiris, were commonly delivered, in which every argument was acutely misapplied, and every established belief acutely combated. Panegyrics of cities, G.o.ds, or heroes, had been a favourite exercise of the orator's art. Now these panegyrics were expended upon the most contemptible themes, _infames materiae_ as they were called.
Fronto sang the praises of idleness, of fever, of the vomit, of gout, of smoke, of dust; Lucian, in a speech still extant, of the fly; others of the a.s.s, the mouse, the flea! Such were the detestable travesties into which Greek eloquence had sunk. Roman statesmen frequently displayed their talents in this way; but as a rule they declaimed in Greek. These orations were delivered in a basilica or theatre, and for two days previously criers ranged through the city, advertising the inhabitants of the lecturer's name and subject.
Other aspirants to fame, gifted with less refinement, paraded the streets in rags and filth, and railed sardonically at all the world, mingling flattery of the crowd with abuse of the great, and of all the restrictions of society. These were the street preachers of cynicism, who found their trade by no means an unprofitable one. Often, after a few years of squalid abstinence and quack philosophy, they had picked up enough to enable them to shave their beards, don the robes of good society, and end their days in the vicious self-indulgence which was the original inspirer of their tirades.
Every great city was full of these caterers for itching ears, the one sort fas.h.i.+onable, the other vulgar, but both equally acceptable to their audience. Some more ambitious spirits, of whom Apuleius is the type, not content with success in a single town, moved from place to place, challenging the chief sophist in each city to enter the lists against them. If he declined the contest, his popularity was at an end for ever.
If he accepted it, the risk was enormous, lest a people tired of his eloquence might prefer the sound of a new voice, and thus force on him the humiliation of surrendering his crown and his t.i.tles to another. For in their delirious enthusiasm the cities of Greece and Asia lavished money, honours, immunities, and statues, upon the mountebank orators who pleased them. Emperors saluted them as equals; the people chose them for amba.s.sadors; until their conceit rose to such a height as almost to pa.s.s the bounds of belief. [4] And their morals, it will readily be guessed, did not rise above their intellectual capacities. Instead of setting an example of virtue, they were below the average in licentiousness, avarice, and envy. Effeminate in mind, extravagant in purse, they are perhaps the most contemptible of all those who have set themselves up as the instructors of mankind.
But all were not equally debased. Side by side with this truckling to popular favour was a genuine attempt to preach the simple truths of morality and religion. For near a century it had been recognised that certain elements of philosophy should be given forth to the world. Even the Stoics, according to Lactantius, [5] had declared that women and slaves were capable of philosophical pursuits. Apuleius, conspicuous in this department also, was a distinguished itinerant teacher of wisdom.
Lucian at one time lectured in this way. But the most eloquent and natural of all was Dio Chrysostom, who, though a Greek, is so pleasing a type of the best popular morals of the time, that we may, perhaps, be excused for referring to him. He was a native of Bithynia, but in consequence of some disagreement with his countrymen, he came to Rome during the reign of Domitian. Having offended the tyrant by his freedom of speech, he was compelled to flee for his life. For years he wandered through Greece and Macedonia in the guise of a beggar, doing menial work for his bread, but often asked to display his eloquence for the benefit of those with whom he came in contact. Once while present at the Olympic festival and silently standing among the throng, he was recognised as one who could speak well, and compelled to harangue the a.s.sembled mult.i.tudes. He chose for his subject the praises of Jupiter Olympius, which he set forth with such majestic eloquence that all who heard him were deeply moved, and a profound silence, broken only by sobs of emotion, reigned throughout the vast crowd. Other stories are told showing the effect of his words. On one occasion he recalled a body of soldiers to their allegiance; on another he quelled a sedition; on a third he rebuked the mob of Alexandria for its immoral conduct, and, strange as it may seem, was listened to without interruption. When Domitian's death allowed him to return to Rome, he maintained the same courageous att.i.tude. Trajan often asked his advice, and he discoursed to him freely on the greatness of royalty and its duties. He seems to have held a lofty view of his mission; he calls it a _proppaesis iera_, [6] or holy proclamation, and he speaks of himself as a _prophaetaes alaethestatos taes athanatou physeus_. [7]