Part 15 (1/2)
contentus fama iaceat Luca.n.u.s in hortis marmoreis; at Serrano tenuique Saleio gloria quantalibet quid erit, si gloria tantum est.[437]
Statius' father, a distinguished teacher of rhetoric at Naples, had written a poem on the burning of the Capitol in 69 A.D., and was only prevented by death[438] from singing the great eruption of Vesuvius.
Arruntius Stella of Patavium,[439] the friend of Statius and Martial, wrote elegies to his wife Violentilla. Turnus,[440] like Juvenal the son of a freedman, attained considerable success as a satirist, while the two distinguished soldiers, Verginius Rufus[441] and Vestricius Spurinna,[442] wrote light erotic verse and lyrics respectively. In addition to these there are a whole host of minor poets mentioned by Statius and Martial. In fact the writing of verse was the most fas.h.i.+onable occupation for the leisure time of a cultivated gentleman.
With Nerva and Trajan the happiest epoch of the princ.i.p.ate set in. Nerva (96-98 A.D.) sprung from a line of distinguished jurists, was celebrated by Martial as the Tibullus of his time,[443] and is praised by the younger Pliny for the excellence of his light verses.[444] Trajan, his successor (98-117 A.D.), though a man of war, rather than a man of letters, wrote a history of the Dacian wars,[445] and possessed--as his letters to Pliny testify--a remarkable power of expressing himself tersely and clearly. He was, like Vespasian, a generous patron to rhetoric and education,[446] and the founder of the important library known as the _Bibliotheca Ulpia_.[447] But the great service which he and his predecessor rendered to literature was, as Pliny and Tacitus bear eloquent witness, the gift of freedom. This did more for prose than for poetry, save for one important fact--it was the means of enriching the world with the satires of Juvenal. If the quant.i.ty of the literature surviving from the princ.i.p.ates of Nerva and Trajan is small, its quality is unmistakable. Pliny the younger, Tacitus, and Juvenal form a trio whose equal is to be found at no other period of the post-Augustan princ.i.p.ate, while the letters of Pliny give proof of the existence of a highly cultivated society devoted to literature of all kinds. Poets were numerous even if they were not good. Few names, however, survive, and those have but the slightest interest for us. It will suffice to mention three of them: Pa.s.sennus Paulus, Sentius Augurinus, and the younger Pliny. With the dramatic poets, Pomponius Ba.s.sulus and Vergilius Roma.n.u.s, we have already dealt.[448] Pliny shall speak for himself and his friends.
'Pa.s.sennus Paulus,' he writes,[449] 'a distinguished Roman knight of great learning, is a writer of elegies. This runs in the family; for he is a fellow townsman of Propertius and indeed counts him among his ancestors.' In a later letter[450] he speaks with solicitude of his failing health, and goes on to describe the characteristics of his work.
'In his verse he imitates the ancients, paraphrases them, and reproduces them, above all Propertius, from whom he traces his descent. He is a worthy scion of the house, and closely resembles his great ancestor in that sphere in which he of old excelled. If you read his elegies you will find them highly polished, possessed of great sensuous charm, and quite obviously written in the house of Propertius. He has lately betaken himself to lyric verse, and imitates Horace with the same skill with which he has imitated Propertius. Indeed, if kins.h.i.+p counts for anything in the world of letters, you would deem him Horace's kinsman as well.' Pliny concludes with a warm tribute to Pa.s.sennus' character. The picture is a pleasant one, but it is startling and significant to find Pliny awarding such praise to one who was frankly imitative, if he was not actually a plagiarist.[451]
Pliny is not less complimentary to Sentius Augurinus. 'I have been listening,' he writes,[452] 'to a recitation given by Sentius Augurinus.
It gave me the greatest pleasure, and filled me with the utmost admiration for his talent. He calls his verses ”trifles” (_poematia_).
Much is written with great delicacy, much with great elevation of style; many of the poems show great charm, many great tenderness; not a few are honey-sweet, not a few bitter and mordant. It is some time since anything so perfect has been produced.' The next clause, however, betrays the reason, in part at any rate, for Pliny's admiration. In the course of his recitation he had produced a small hendecasyllabic poem in praise of Pliny's own verses. Pliny proceeds to quote it with every expression of gratification and approval. It is certainly neatly turned and well expressed, but it is such as any cultivated gentleman who had read his Catullus and Martial might produce, and can hardly have been of interest to any one save Augurinus and Pliny. Pliny was, in fact, with all his admirable gifts, one of the princ.i.p.al and most amiable members of a highly cultivated mutual admiration society. He was a poet himself, though only a few lines of the poems praised by Augurinus have survived to undergo the judgement of a more critical age. Pliny has, however, given an interesting little sketch of his poetical career in the fourth letter of the seventh book. 'I have always had a taste for poetry,' he tells his friend Pontius; 'nay, I was only fourteen when I composed a tragedy in Greek. What was it like? you ask. I know not; it was called a tragedy. Later, when returning from my military service, I was weather-bound in the island of Icaria, and wrote elegiac poems in Latin about that island and the sea, which bears the same name. I have occasionally attempted heroic hexameters, but it is only quite recently that I have taken to writing hendecasyllables. You shall hear of their origin and of the occasion which gave them birth. Some writings of Asinius Gallus were being read aloud to me in my Laurentine villa; in these works he was comparing his father with Cicero; we came upon an epigram of Cicero dedicated to his freedman Tiro. Shortly after, about noon--for it was summer--I retired to take my siesta, and finding that I could not sleep, I began to reflect how the very greatest orators have taken delight in composing this style of verse, and have hoped to win fame thereby. I set my mind to it, and, quite contrary to my expectations after so long desuetude, produced in an extremely short s.p.a.ce of time the following verses on that very subject which had provoked me to write.'
Thirteen hexameter verses follow of a mildly erotic character. They are not peculiarly edifying, and are certainly very far from being poetry.
He continues:
'I then turned my attention to expressing the same thoughts in elegiac verse; I rattled these off at equal speed, and wrote some additional lines, being beguiled into doing so by the fluency with which I wrote the metre. On my return to Rome I read the verses to my friends. They approved. Then in my leisure moments, especially when travelling, I attempted other metres. Finally, I resolved to follow the example of many other writers and compose a whole separate volume in the hendecasyllabic metre; nor do I regret having done so. For the book is read, copied, and even sung; even Greeks chant my verses to the sound of the _cithara_ or the lyre; their pa.s.sion for the book has taught them to use the Latin tongue.' It was this volume of hendecasyllables about which Pliny displays such nave enthusiasm that led Augurinus to compare Pliny to Calvus and Catullus. Pliny's success had come to him comparatively late in life; but it emboldened him to the composition of another volume of poems[453] in various metres, which he read to his friends. He cites one specimen in elegiacs[454] which awakens no desire for more, for it is fully as prosy as the hexameters to which we have already referred. Of the hendecasyllables nothing survives, but Pliny tells us something as to their themes and the manner of their composition.[455] 'I amuse myself by writing them in my leisure moments at the bath or in my carriage. I jest in them and make merry, I play the lover, I weep, I make lamentation, I vent my anger, or describe something or other now in a pedestrian, now in a loftier vein.' As this little catalogue would suggest, these poems were not always too respectable. The good Pliny, like Martial, thinks it necessary to apologize[456] for his freedom in conforming to the fas.h.i.+onable licence of his age by protesting that his muse may be wanton, but his life is chaste. We can readily believe him, for he was a man of kindly heart and high ideals, whose simple vanity cannot obscure his amiability. But it is difficult to believe that the loss of his poetry is in any way a serious loss to the world.[457] We have given Pliny the poet more s.p.a.ce than is his due; our excuse must be the interest of his engaging self-revelations.
In spite of Pliny's enthusiasm for his poet friends, there is no reason to suppose that the reign of Trajan saw the production of any poetry, save that of Juvenal, which even approached the first rank. With the accession of Hadrian we enter on a fresh era, characterized by the rise of a new prose style and the almost entire disappearance of poetry. Rome had produced her last great poet. The _Pervigilium Veneris_ and a few slight but beautiful fragments of Tiberia.n.u.s are all that illumine the darkness till we come upon the interesting but uninspired elegiacs of Rutilius Namatia.n.u.s, the curiously uneven and slipshod poetry of Ausonius, and the graceful, but cold and lifeless perfection of the heroic hexameters of Claudian.
II
SULPICIA
Poetesses were not rare at Rome during the first century of our era; the _scribendi cacoethes_ extended to the fair s.e.x sufficiently, at any rate, to evoke caustic comment both from Martial[458] and Juvenal.[459]
By a curious coincidence, the only poetesses of whose work we have any record are both named Sulpicia. The elder Sulpicia belongs to an earlier age; she formed one of the Augustan literary circle of which her uncle Messala was the patron, and left a small collection of elegiac poems addressed to her lover, and preserved in the same volume as the posthumous poems of Tibullus, to whose authors.h.i.+p they were for long attributed.[460]
The younger Sulpicia was a contemporary of the poet Martial, and, like her predecessor, wrote erotic verse. Frank and outspoken as was the earlier poetess, in this respect at least her namesake far surpa.s.sed her. For the younger Sulpicia's plain-speaking, if we may judge from the comments of ancient writers[461] and the one brief fragment of her love-poems that has survived,[462] was of a very different character and must at least have bordered on the obscene. But her work attracted attention; her fame is a.s.sociated with her love for Calenus, a love that was long[463] and pa.s.sionate. She continued to be read even in the days of Ausonius and Sidonius Apollinaris. Martial compares her with Sappho, and her songs of love seem to have rung true, even though their frankness may have been of a kind generally a.s.sociated with pa.s.sions of a looser character.[464] If, as a literal interpretation of Martial[465] would lead us to infer, Calenus was her husband, the poems of Sulpicia confront us with a spectacle unique in ancient literature--a wife writing love-poems to her husband. Her language came from the heart, not from book-learning; she was a poetess such as Martial delighted to honour.
omnes Sulpiciam legant puellae, uni quae cupiunt viro placere; omnes Sulpiciam legant mariti, uni qui cupiunt placere nuptae.
non haec Colchidos adserit furorem, diri prandia nec refert Thyestae; Scyllam, Byblida nec fuisse credit: sed castos docet et probos amores, lusus delicias facetiasque.
cuius carmina qui bene aestimarit, nullam dixerit esse nequiorem, nullam dixerit esse sanctiorem[466].
Read your Sulpicia, maidens all, Whose husband shall your sole love be; Read your Sulpicia, husbands all, Whose wife shall reign, and none but she.
No theme for her Medea's fire, Nor orgy of Thyestes dire; Scylla and Byblis she'd deny, Of love she sang and purity, Of dalliance and frolic gay; Who should have well appraised her lay Had said none were more chaste than she, Yet fuller none of amorous glee.
A. E. STREET.
Although the thought of what _procacitas_[467] may have meant in a lady of Domitian's reign raises something of a shudder, and although it is to be feared that Martial, when he goes on to say (loc. cit.)
tales Egeriae iocos fuisse udo crediderim Numae sub antro,
Such sport I ween Egeria gave To Numa in his spring-drenched cave.
A. E. STREET.
had that in his mind which would have scandalized the pious lawgiver of Rome, we may yet regret the loss of poems which, if Martial's language is not merely the language of flattery, may have breathed a fresher and freer spirit than is often to be found in the poets of the age. Catullus and Sappho would seem to have been Sulpicia's models, but her poems have left so little trace behind them that it is impossible to speak with certainty. As to their metre we are equally ill-informed. The fragment of two lines quoted above is in iambic _senarii_. If we may believe the evidence[468] of a satirical hexameter poem attributed to Sulpicia, she also wrote in hendecasyllables and scazons. The genuineness of this poem is, however, open to serious doubt. It consists of seventy hexameters denouncing the expulsion of the philosophers by Domitian, and is known by the t.i.tle of _Sulpiciae satira_.[469] That it purports to be by the poetess beloved of Calenus is clear from an allusion to their pa.s.sion.[470] Serious doubts have, however, been cast upon its genuineness. It is urged that the work is ill-composed, insipid, and tasteless, and that it contains not a few marked peculiarities in diction and metre, together with more than one historical inaccuracy.
The inference suggested is that the poem is not by Sulpicia, but at least two centuries later in date. It may readily be admitted that the poem is almost entirely devoid of any real merit, that its diction is obscure and slovenly, its metre lame and unimpressive. But the critics of the poem are guilty of great exaggeration.[471] Many of its worst defects are undoubtedly due to the exceedingly corrupt state of the text; further, it is hard to see what interest a satire directed against Domitian would possess centuries after his death, nor is it easy to imagine what motive could have led the supposed forger to attribute his work to Sulpicia. The balance of probability inclines, though very slightly, in favour of the view that the work is genuine. This is unfortunate; for the perusal of this curious satire on the hypothesis of its genuineness appreciably lessens our regret for the loss of Sulpicia's love poetry and arouses serious suspicion as to the veracity of Martial. It must, however, in justice be remembered that it does not follow that Sulpicia was necessarily a failure as a lyric writer because she had not the peculiar gift necessary for satire. The absence of the training of the rhetorical schools from a woman's education might well account for such a failure. At the worst, Sulpicia stands as an interesting example of the type of womanhood at which Juvenal levelled some of his wildest and most ill-balanced invective.