Part 1 (2/2)

In view, then, of what is known of the att.i.tude of the four emperors of the period most critical for Silver Latin literature, the period of its birth, it may be said that, on the worst estimate, their direct influence is not an important factor in the decline.[49] On the other hand, the indirect influence of the princ.i.p.ate was beyond doubt evil.

Society was corrupt enough and public life sufficiently uninspiring under Augustus. After the first glow of enthusiasm over the restoration of peace and order, and over the vindication of the Roman power on the frontiers of empire had pa.s.sed away, men felt how thinly veiled was their slavery. Liberty was gradually restricted, autocracy cast off its mask: the sense of power that goes with freedom dwindled; little was left to waken man's enthusiasm, and the servility exacted by the emperors became more and more degrading. Unpleasing as are the flatteries addressed to Augustus by Vergil and Horace, they fade into insignificance compared with Lucan's apotheosis of Nero; or to take later and yet more revolting examples, the poems of the Silvae addressed by Statius to Domitian or his favourites. Further, these four emperors of the Julio-Claudian dynasty set a low standard of private life: they might command flattery, they could hardly exact respect. Two clever lunatics, a learned fool, and a morose cynic are not inspiring.

Nevertheless, however unhealthy its influence may have been--and there has been much exaggeration on this point--it must be remembered that the princ.i.p.ate found ready to its hand a society with all the seeds of decay implanted deep within it. Even a succession of sane and virtuous Caesars might well have failed, with the machinery and material at their disposal, to put new and vigorous life into the aristocracy and people of Rome. Even the encroachments of despotism on popular liberty must be attributed in no small degree to the incapacity of what should have been the ruling cla.s.s at Rome. Despotism was in a sense forced upon the emperors: they were not reluctant, but, had they been so, they would still have had little choice. The primary causes of the decline of literature, as of the decay of life and morals, lie much deeper. The influence of princeps and princ.i.p.ate, though not negligible, is _comparatively_ small.

The really important causes are to be found first in the general decay of Roman character--far-advanced before the coming of Caesarism, secondly in the peculiar nature of Roman literature, and thirdly in the vicious system of Roman education.

It was the first of these factors that produced the lubricity that defiles and the lack of moral earnestness that weakens such a large proportion of the literature of this age. It is not necessary to ill.u.s.trate this point in any detail.[50] The record of Rome, alike in home and foreign politics, during the hundred and twenty years preceding the foundation of the princ.i.p.ate forms one of the most fascinating, but in many respects one of the most profoundly melancholy pages in history.

The poems of Catullus and the speeches of Cicero serve equally to ill.u.s.trate the wholesale corruption alike of public and private morality. The Roman character had broken down before the gradual inroads of an alien luxury and the opening of wide fields of empire to plunder.

It is an age of incredible scandal, of mob law, of _coups d'etat_ and proscriptions, saved only from utter gloom by the illusory light shed from the figures of a few great men and by the never absent sense of freedom and expansion. There still remained a republican liberty of action, an inspiring possibility of reform, an outlet for personal ambition, which facilitated the rise of great leaders and writers. And Rome was now bringing to ripeness fruit sprung from the seed of h.e.l.lenism, a decadent and meretricious h.e.l.lenism, but even in its decay the greatest intellectual force of the world.

Wonderful as was the fruit produced by the graft of h.e.l.lenism, it too contained the seeds of decay. For Rome owed too little to early Greek epic and to the golden literature of Athens, too much to the later age when rhetoric had become a knack, and

the love of letters overdone Had swamped the sacred poets with themselves.[51]

Roman literature came too late: that it reached such heights is a remarkable tribute to the greatness of Roman genius, even in its decline. With the exception of the satires of Lucilius and Horace there was practically no branch of literature that did not owe its inspiration and form to Greek models. Even the primitive national metre had died out. Roman literature--more especially poetry--was therefore bound to be unduly self-conscious and was always in danger of a lack of spontaneity.

That Rome produced great prose writers is not surprising; they had copious and untouched material to deal with, and prose structure was naturally less rapidly and less radically affected by Greek influence.

That she should have produced a Catullus, a Lucretius, a Vergil, a Horace, and--most wonderful of all--an Ovid was an amazing achievement, rendered not the less astonis.h.i.+ng when it is remembered that the stern bent of the practical Roman mind did not in earlier days give high promise of poetry. The marvel is not wholly to be explained by the circ.u.mstances of the age. The new sense of power, the revival of the national spirit under the warming influence of peace and hope, that characterize the brilliant interval between the fall of the republic and the turbid stagnation of the empire, are not enough to account for it.

Their influence would have been in vain had they not found remarkable genius ready for the kindling.

The whole field of literature had been so thoroughly covered by the great writers of h.e.l.las, that it was hard for the imitative Roman to be original. As far as epic poetry was concerned, Rome had poor material with which to deal: neither her mythology--the most prosaic and business-like of all mythologies--nor her history seemed to give any real scope for the epic writer. The Greek mythology was ready to hand, but it was hard for a Roman to treat it with high enthusiasm, and still harder to handle it with freshness and individuality. The purely historical epic is from its very nature doomed to failure. Treated with accuracy it becomes prosy, treated with fancy it becomes ridiculous.

Vergil saw the one possible avenue to epic greatness. He went back into the legendary past where imagination could have free play, linked together the great heroic sagas of Greece with the scanty materials presented by the prehistoric legends of Rome, and kindled the whole work to life by his rich historical imagination and his sense of the grandeur of the Rome that was to be. His unerring choice of subject and his brilliant execution seemed to close to his successors all paths to epic fame. They had but well-worn and inferior themes wherefrom to choose, and the supremacy of Vergil's genius dominated their minds, becoming an obsession and a clog rather than an a.s.sistance to such poetic genius as they possessed. The same is true of Horace. As complete a master in lyric verse as Vergil in heroic, he left the after-comer no possibility of advance. As for Ovid, there could be only one Ovid: the cleverest and most heartless of poets, he at once challenged and defied imitation.

Satire alone was left with real chance of success: while the human race exists, there will always be fresh material for satire, and the imperial age was destined to give it peculiar force and scope. Further, satire and its nearest kin, the epigram, were the only forms of literature that were not seriously impaired by the artificial system of education that had struck root in Rome.

Otherwise the tendency to artificiality on the one hand and inadequacy of thought on the other, to which the conditions of its birth and growth exposed Roman literature, were aggravated to an almost incredible extent by the absurd system of education to which the unformed mind of the young Roman was subjected. It will be seen that what Greece gave with the right hand she took away with the left.

There were three stages in Roman education, the elementary, the literary, the rhetorical. The first, in which the _litterator_ taught the three R's, does not concern us here. In the second stage the _grammaticus_ gave instruction in Greek and Latin literature, together with the elements of grammar and style. The profound influence of Greece is shown by Quintilian's recommendation[52] that a boy should start on Greek literature, and by the fact that boys began with Homer.[53] Greek authors, particularly studied, were Aesop, Hesiod, the tragedians, and Menander.[54] Among Roman authors Naevius, Ennius, Pacuvius, Accius, Afranius, Plautus, Caecilius, and Terence were much read, though there was a reaction against these early authors under the empire, and they were partly replaced by Vergil, Horace, and Ovid.[55] These authors were made vehicles for the teaching of grammar and of style. The latter point alone concerns us here. The Roman boy was taught to read aloud intelligently and artistically with the proper modulation of the voice.

For this purpose he was carefully taught the laws of metre, with special reference to the peculiarities of particular poets. After the reading aloud (_lectio_) came the _enarratio_ or explanation of the text. The educational value of this was doubtless considerable, though it was impaired by the importance a.s.signed to obscure mythological knowledge and unscientific archaeology.[56] The pupil would be further instructed by exercises in paraphrase and by the treatment in simple essay form of themes (_sententiae_). 'Great store was set both in speaking and writing on a command of an abundance of general truths or commonplaces, and even at school boys were trained to commit them to memory, to expand them, and ill.u.s.trate them from history.'[57] Finally they were taught to write verse. Such at least is a legitimate inference from the extraordinary precocity shown by many Roman authors.[58] This literary training contained much that was of great value, but it also had grave disadvantages. There seems in the first place to have been too much 'spoon-feeding', and too little genuine brain exercise for the pupil.[59] Secondly, the fact that at this stage boys were nurtured almost entirely on poetry requires serious consideration. The quality of the food supplied to the mind, though pre-eminently palatable, must have tended to be somewhat thin. The elaborate instruction in mythological erudition was devoid of religious value; and indeed of any value, save the training of a purely mechanical memory. Attention was called too much to the form, too little to the substance. Style has its value, but it is after all only a secondary consideration in education. The effect upon literature of this poetical training was twofold. It caused an undue demand for poetical colour in prose, and produced a horrible precocity and _cacoethes scribendi_[60] in verse, together with an abnormal tendency to imitation of the great writers of previous generations.[61]

But the rhetorical training which succeeded was responsible for far worse evils. The importance of rhetoric in ancient education is easily explained. The Greek or Roman gentleman was destined to play a part in the public life of the city state. For this purpose the art of speaking was of enormous value alike in politics and in the law courts. Hence the universal predominance of rhetoric in higher education both in Rome and Greece.[62] The main instrument of instruction was the writing of themes for declamation. These exercises were divided into _suasoriae_-- deliberative speeches in which some course of action was discussed-- and _controversiae_--where some proposition was maintained or denied.

Pupils began with _suasoriae_ and went on to _controversiae_. Regarded as a mental gymnastic, these themes may have possessed some value. But they were hackneyed and absurdly remote from real life, as can be judged from the examples collected by the elder Seneca. Typical subjects of the _suasoria_ are--'Agamemnon deliberates whether to slay Iphigenia';[63]

'Cicero deliberates whether to burn his writings, Antony having promised to spare him on that condition';[64] 'Three hundred Spartans sent against Xerxes after the flight of troops sent from the rest of Greece deliberate whether to stand or fly.'[65]

The _controversia_ requires further explanation. A general law is stated, e.g. _incesta saxo deiciatur_. A special case follows, e.g.

_incesti d.a.m.nata antequam deiceretur invocavit Vestam: deiecta vixit_.

The special case had to be brought under the general rule; _repet.i.tur ad poenam_.[66] Other examples are equally absurd:[67] one and all are ridiculously remote from real life. It was bad enough that boys' time should be wasted thus, but the evil was further emphasized by the practice of recitation. These exercises, duly corrected and elaborated, were often recited by their youthful authors to an audience of complaisant friends and relations. Of such training there could be but one possible result. 'Less and less attention was paid to the substance of the speech, more and more to the language; justness and appropriateness of thought came to be less esteemed than brilliance and novelty of expression.'[68]

These formal defects of education were accompanied by a widespread neglect of the true educational spirit. The development on healthy lines of the _morale_, and intellect of the young became in too many instances a matter of indifference. Throughout the great work of Quintilian we have continued evidence of the lack of moral and intellectual enthusiasm that characterized the schools of his day. Even more pa.s.sionate are the denunciations levelled against contemporary education by Messala in the _Dialogus_ of Tacitus.[69] Parents neglect their children from their earliest years: they place them in the charge of foreign slaves, often of the most degraded character; or if they do pay any personal attention to their upbringing, it is to teach them not honesty, purity, and respect for themselves and their elders, but pertness, luxurious habits, and neglect alike of themselves and of others. The schools moreover, apart from their faulty methods and ideals of instruction, encourage other faults. The boys' interests lie not in their work, but in the theatres, the gladiatorial games, the races in the circus--those ancient equivalents of twentieth-century athleticism. Their minds are utterly absorbed by these pursuits, and there is little room left for n.o.bler studies. 'How few boys will talk of anything else at home? What topic of conversation is so frequent in the lecture-room; what other subject so frequently on the lips of the masters, who collect pupils not by the thoroughness of their teaching or by giving proof of their powers of instruction, but by interested visits and all the tricks of toadyism?'[70] Messala goes on[71] to denounce the unreality of the exercises in the schools, whose deleterious effect is aggravated by the low standard exacted. 'Boys and young men are the speakers, boys and young men the audience, and their efforts are received with undiscriminating praise.'

The same faults that were generated in the schools were intensified in after-life. In the law courts the same smart epigrams, the same meretricious style were required. No true method had been taught, with the result that 'frivolity of style, shallow thoughts, and disorderly structure' prevailed; orators imitated the rhythms of the stage and actually made it their boast that their speeches would form fitting accompaniments to song and dance. It became a common saying that 'our orators speak voluptuously, while our actors dance eloquently'.[72]

Poetical colour was demanded of the orator, rhetorical colour of the poet. The literary and rhetorical stages of education reacted on one another.[73]

Further, just as the young poet had to his great detriment been encouraged to recite at school, so he had to recite if he was to win fame for his verse in the larger world. Even in a saner society poetry written primarily for recitation must have run to rhetoric; in a rhetorical age the result was disastrous. In an enormous proportion of cases the poet of the Silver Age wrote literally for an audience. Great as were the facilities for publication the poet primarily made his name, not by the gradual distribution of his works among a reading public, but by declaiming before public or private audiences. The practice of gathering a circle of acquaintances together to listen to the recitations of a poet is said first to have been inst.i.tuted by Asinius Pollio, the patron of Vergil. There is evidence to show that all the poets of the Augustan age gave recitations.[74] But the practice gradually increased and became a nuisance to all save the few who had the courage to stand aloof from these mutual admiration societies.

Indiscriminate praise was lavished on good and bad work alike. Even Pliny the younger, whose cultivation and literary taste place him high above the average literary level of his day, approves of the increase of this melancholy harvest of minor poetry declaimed by uninspired bards.[75] The effect was lamentable. All the faults of the _suasoria_ and _controversia_ made their appearance in poetry.[76] The poet had continually to be performing acrobatic feats, now of rhetoric or epigram, now of learning, or again in the description of blood-curdling horrors, monstrous deaths and prodigious sorceries. Each work was overloaded with _sententiae_ and purple patches.[77] So only could the author keep the attention of his audience. The results were disastrous for literature and not too satisfactory[78] for the authors themselves, as the following curious pa.s.sage from Tacitus (_Dial._ 9) shows:

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