THE AUGUSTEAN EMPIRE (44 B.C.—A.D. 70)

CHAPTER XVI.

THE LITERATURE OF THE AUGUSTAN AGE

I.

THE AGE OF AUGUSTUS

 

THE Augustan age has become a type and a proverb for a period when letters flourish and men of letters prosper, when, in Aristotle’s phrase, life is complete or perfect—the national life happy in great achievement and in great hope. A galaxy of talent or even of genius is thought of, and, commonly, a monarchical society. The periods have been few in human story when great poets have abounded; yet at times national character and circumstance have brought to full ripeness the creative power of a people; ‘all at once and all in tune’ a nation hears its poets speaking. There is no clear explanation why one generation should concentrate in itself the gifts that make a nation great in the creative arts. It seems that behind or underneath literature there must be some national consciousness; the men of letters may not speak of it; they may even revolt against national ideals; but there must be the atmosphere, the nidus, the ‘leaf-mould,’ that only a nation, race and a history can give. Yet national achievement by itself seems not enough. Sometimes, as in the decade of Napoleon, we find a common floruit for the literature of a number of nations together, a profound stirring of all that goes to make literature— sorrow, triumph, doubt, pain, obstinate questionings, endeavour, experience, hope, personality. Beranger, Wordsworth and Goethe are sufficiently unlike, but they all in their several ways interpret Europe. Our common talk labels these great creative ages not so much by the name of poet or thinker as by that of some other figure, it may be Pericles or Elizabeth. Yet in so saying we give more than date; we stumble into a half-explanation of what interests us. Augustus has more to do with the Augustan age than we should deduce from his historians. It is Virgil who gives the true picture, the true significance of Augustus, who ‘created’ him and made him a figure and a legend; and Augustus in turn did more for Virgil than perhaps Emperor or even poet recognized. In spite of such critics as Martial, the financial is the least causal of all links between Augustus and Aeneid; let it be struck out at once. It is the age of Augustus, it is unthinkable without him.

Elsewhere in this volume will be read the Emperor’s history; here we are not so greatly concerned with fact as with imagination. It is not so much what the Emperor did or even was, but what men divined in him, or through him. Here the haunting picture of Pliny the naturalist serves us best—the collector of facts, curious of phrase, illuminative in his spasms of insight and epigram. ‘The unthinkable majesty of Roman peace’ (immensa Romanae paits maiestas)—word by word it has its value, its suggestion; the four words sum up the burden of the Aeneid, the real meaning of the work of Augustus.

To be able to judge aright of literature, Longinus tells us, is the last fruit of long experience. Harder still is it to trace influences, thoughts hardly to be packed into the narrow compass of word or even poem, the impulses of deeper birth which make poets; with long acquaintance the task grows not easier but harder. The great poets do not unlock their hearts in sonnets; the original impulse may be transformed more than once before it yields the poem that is to be immortal. When criticism is in its autocratic youth, with principles few and fixed, many things are possible, which to the old lover of Virgil seem rough and improbable. To assess the influence of his age upon the poet, of all people, is difficult; the touch of time is perhaps always unimaginable; the poet consciously or unconsciously reacts to it and against it. Sometimes it chiefly wakes the desire to escape to some other world of old romance, to some deeper world where he can handle the eternal, as readers of Virgil know. The poets tell us explicitly that they look before and after, that Memory is the mother of the Muses, that poetry is ‘emotion re-collected in tranquillity’; no wonder then, a feeling for the past—the past of the man, the land, the human kind —tells in the shaping of a poet. But if he has no faith in the future, no reasonable hope, he will lose heart, and do nothing. Perhaps some ease of mind in the present must contribute to the needed tranquillity.

All these requirements are met in the age of Augustus. The collapse of the Republic witnessed, if it did not stimulate, a great antiquarian movement. Augustus gave the world new hopes. It was, men said, in the interests of all that the whole world should be ruled, and ruled by one man; it was the only remedy for a land divided against itself. The hope was in the main justified; for two centuries mankind had peace. With all his sensitiveness to pain, his indelible memories, Virgil shows the effect of this new hope. Yet in the marshalling of events, and their disentangling, we may be so absorbed by movement, or by personality, as to forget the slow influence of years too full of the dramatic and catastrophic, the ceaseless play of thought upon problems unsolved, the sheer pain that the disorder means for the sensitive nature.

There was immense literary activity, the poets especially being innumerable; they always are. Velleius Paterculus, a minor historian, but possessor of a pleasant style, the sole surviving admirer of Sejanus, runs rapidly over a series of great names. He links Virgil ‘prince of poets’ (princeps carminum) with Rabirius; with them he groups Livy, Tibullus and Naso; all of them ‘superlatively perfect ’ is his almost illogical verdict (perfectissimi). He omits Horace. Ovid, in passing, pronounces Rabirius to have been ‘mighty-mouthed’ (magni oris). These compliments serve merely to remind us of men long forgotten, interesting only to those who find history in lists. But, above these, there are in penumbra round the great poets their friends whose genius they, more sympathetic than posterity, recognized as equal to their own. Yet, as Plato suggests, the greatest poets are not always the best critics. The minor poets of an age have what Matthew Arnold called a historical value; they reveal the common impulses and endeavours, the atmosphere of their day, sometimes more clearly than the greater men; for they are more obviously under its in­fluence. They may even be more popular for the time. But the significant thing in History is constantly less obtrusive; it is creative, the seed of something to come, the force that is slowly making a new age, and contemporaries often miss it. Not always;

nescio quid maius nascitur Iliade

though one wonders how often Propertius and his friends ac­claimed epoch-making works.

The outstanding men of letters of the age of Augustus were born in Republican times. Virgil was nearly forty when Actium was fought. How the troubles of his country affected him, we read in the first Georgic; twice over Emathia’s plains are drenched with Roman blood, shed in civil strife; right and wrong are confounded; the fields are left untilled, the ploughman is a soldier; Euphrates and Germany threaten war; neighbour cities draw the sword, each on the other; life and work have lost their appeal. In prose, it is Catiline, the disorders of Pompeian Rome, the Civil War, the strange promise of Caesar’s rule, the Murder, Antony, Brutus, the whole chaos of factions and incapables; and then Actium. Posterity knows that Actium meant final peace; contemporaries did not. There were still conspirators; the Emperor’s health was uncertain; the succession to the throne was a problem. Augustus maintained that his rule was a temporary expedient; a policy that may have kept men conscious that he was needed, but left the strain of uncertainty not wholly relieved.

Thus for decades change had been menaced, such change as left men unable to forecast national or personal life. Custom was the very basis of life and of national character, and it was to be swept away. If freedom and self-government were to be lost, what were the alternatives? The Roman looked out on degenerate Macedonian despotisms, on old Greek cities garrisoned by conquerors, on citizen life reduced to nullity and all the chances of battle, murder and sudden death. It takes thought to realize the full effect of this upon sentient natures. A highly developed society, it has suffered much, and it is uneasy and restless.

The Roman world was repeating the experience of the Hellenistic age, when many elements of modern feeling, largely absent in the great classical art of Athens, begin to appear—a new delight in family life, a new interest in man as man, a new way of looking at love, a new sensitiveness to the beauty of external nature (as Virgil’s old Corycian pirate among his flowers and fruits will remind us), a new interest in science; and, we may add, a new self­consciousness in the use of language and a highly developed antiquarianism. The human mind must have compensations, and the new interests replace in some measure the lost political life, and bring out new values in human experience. It is an endeavour to find as much to believe in, and to enjoy, as a changed world will allow. Something to believe in is sought by the greater minds; something to rub along on, by Horace and his school, something to forget with, by Ovid and his kind. The idealist looks back and looks within; but there is also the forward look. The Aeneid shows a happier and braver prospect than the Georgics, the promise of the new age is sustained through the opening years of imperial rule and the outlook brightens.

 

II.

THE MOVEMENT AWAY FROM ALEXANDRINISM

 

Every kind of literature is attempted; the old Greek masterpieces, and the less masterly models of the Hellenistic period, where design is lost in workmanship, are studied and copied. The Emperor himself wrote a tragedy, or part of a tragedy, starting on it with great enthusiasm; but when his friends asked him what had become of Ajax, “he has fallen upon his—sponge”, he said. Augustus had the gift denied to some great men, as Tacitus says; he might write poetry but he did not publish it. The age saw the gradual decline of ‘the singers of Euphorion’ as Cicero called them, the addicts of Alexandrinism.

Propertius indeed glorifies the land of his nativity on account of his own likeness to the chief of the Alexandrines—

Umbria Romani patria Callimachi,

though Assisi prefers to remember a very different son. He, like others, loved to reproduce the tricks of the Hellenistic poetry, to shine as ‘learned’. The whole of Greek mythology was absorbed; and an extreme allusiveness imbedded in Latin verse (without too much other distinction) Greek names, often long names and patronymics, as if large part of the charm of verse lay in the riddles that only a very full dictionary could explain. Of course its emotional value was slight, it could only live where useless learning was the ideal.

Iam Pandioniae cessit genus Orithyiae,

a dolor ibat Hylas ibat Hamadryasin.

Hic erat Arganthi Pege sub vertice montis

              grata domus Nympnis umida Thyniasin.                (1,20,31—4)

 The appalling difficulty found by the medieval copyists in reproducing these long words proves the point; it was not the language actually employed by men. The writer was not perhaps thinking of readers, vain as he was; he loved perhaps the long words so full of vowels, so free from consonants, the peregrinate movement of his lines, their freedom from elision, their unexpected structure. Catullus had done the same thing in monotonous hexameters, following closely the ingenuities and perversions of Callimachus; but much is forgiven to bright experimentalists of his sort. They may explore blind alleys, but they know enough to come out of them.

Something was gained by this variety of experiment. Ennius and Lucretius wrote ruggedly enough. Whatever their gifts of mind, and poetic feeling, few will feel that they had mastered their medium. Latin was not Greek; no language but has its own movements and music, and naturalization is a slow business. Homer’s hexameter was Greek; and to do the same thing in Latin was to do something different; the poet must know his own language and prefer it. Spenser’s letter to Gabriel Harvey about the hexameters is relevant here. Spenser was quite clear that English is not Latin, and he listened till he caught the native island accents, and wrote his Faerie Queene with that music in his heart. It is the same record that we read in Latin. Homer is splendid, but not Latin; the Alexandrines were ingenious and ‘writ no language.’ The men who will write Latin hexameters could learn from both, but they had to write by ear (digits callemus et aure). Two men above all others trained the Latin ear. Cicero, whose poems Tacitus and Juvenal ridiculed, and whose verse Virgil studied, was one; and the other was Virgil himself.

But the other poets show the same movement. Horace is the least Alexandrine of them all. With a scorn for the affectations, the vocabulary and the tricks of the school, and a strong preference for older models, he always knew what he was doing; he wrote his odes with a miraculous instinct for what was possible and triumphed in sheer sound. His hexameters were deliberately moulded on an old Roman pattern, but, with time and self-criticism, he gradually responded there also to his own sense for pause and movement. Ovid shows the same response. The years reveal little change in his technique; the only difference is made by the solitary and frost-bitten spirit. If elegiacs are to be written in Latin at all, they must be written as Ovid wrote them. He too has learnt from the modes of his predecessors. He can match learning and polysyllables with Propertius; but he wears his wealth of learning much lightlier, it never gets between his feet; he does not go to Alexandria to learn how to turn a Latin sentence; let the singers of Euphorion invert, contort and obscure any meaning they labour with, Ovid writes to be understood at once. He is quick where others lumber, gets three sentences into his couplet, where they may take three couplets to a sentence—and Heaven may know what it means then; Ovid’s meaning leaps at the most indolent reader. His verse is lighter in movement and texture than could before him have been believed possible. He plays with his learning and his mythology; no nymph among his hundreds has the self-conscious solemnity of Pandionian Orithyia. His hexameters, too, are of the newer period, but they show a falling away from the great standards of Virgil; they are monotonous; perhaps because in his heart he preferred writing elegiacs. At times his hexameters sound much more like elegiacs.

When it comes to hexameters, it was Virgil alone who wrote Virgilian hexameters; there is a subtler art about them, beyond imitation. There have been many studies of Virgilian verse, as to sense-pause, caesura strong or weak, the interweaving of dactyl and spondee, the strong control of elision (the most difficult of details); and the conclusion of the whole matter is a new consciousness of the master-hand, and a despairing realization that the rules of genius are very few or infinite. Virgil has assimilated Homer and Apollonius—"it was easier”, he said, “to wrench his club from Hercules than to steal a line from Homer”; yes it would still be Homer’s, conspicuously stolen property. He has assimilated Lucretius, Cicero, Catullus; and, unlike the Greek poet, who did the right thing without knowing why, Virgil does know why and writes with the infinite variety and the supreme fitness of Nature herself. Charles Lamb did not wish to see the corrected manuscript of Milton; Virgil’s premature death left passages unrevised in the Aeneid, or we should have said his verse was as ‘inevitable’ as the printed lines of Milton.

The story of Virgil shows his early interest in Alexandrinism. The Eclogues are obviously inspired by Theocritus; and the long passage in the fourth Georgic, telling the tale of Aristaeus and his bees, shows the influence of other Alexandrine models. The use of lovely proper names, which could indeed be omitted, the movements of the verse, the insertion of the beautiful story of Orpheus, and the handling of its central emotion, reveal the story of his mind. It is pleasant to think of the young Virgil enjoying the art of Catullus and imitating it, turning his lines with the happy and self-conscious cleverness of youth—a young poet among young poets, mannered with the studied graces of his day. But it means more to realize that, even in his cleverest and most youthful work, there were ‘certain vital signs’ of something far greater yet to develop.

Drymoque Xanthoque Ligeaque Phyllodoceque...

Cydippeque et flava Lycorias, altera virgo...

Clioque et Beroe soror, Oceanitides ambae...

Atque Ephyre atque Opis et Asia Deiopea....

                                               (Georg. IV, 336-44)

The names, the metrical structure of the second line, the open vowel and pentasyllabic ending of the last, are unmistakable. Spondaic endings Virgil never used with the lavish freedom of Catullus. It is remarked that Lucretius has none of them in his last book; his spondaic endings had been more apt to suggest Ennius than Alexandria, and there is perhaps something in the guess that he renounced them consciously, a contemptuous revolt from the fashion that captured Catullus. Virgil at all events uses both types of spondaic ending, the Ennian type in his later work; the lines of the mature man neither smell of the museum nor have a self-conscious air. The Epithalamium of Catullus is frankly imitative throughout, but Virgil never surrenders so completely. When Ovid uses a spondaic ending, it has a look of being dragged in; like an irrelevant quotation, it is foreign to the movement of his thought and his lines.

But, in another way, the passage shows the Alexandrine influence, and comparison with others reveals how Virgil outgrew it; and both stages are in measure illustrative of the age. The Hades which Orpheus visits is picturesque, and amenable to song, not quite so deliberately charming as Horace’s genial infernos the pleasant limbo of poets and myths, to which the branch of the guilty tree so nearly sent him, and the other, where the daughters of Danaus rest to hear music, and Ixion and Tityos smile reluctantly—but it is a literary hell, not too unlike that one of fair women, at which Propertius hints, in a beautiful line, with a good double spondee to restrain excessive sorrow:

                                 Sunt apud infernos tot milia formosarum. (n, 28, 49)

 It has all the right things in it; Orpheus sings, and the shades gather about him to listen, and we grow conscious, as the poet speaks, of deeper thoughts, which we are to think again:

At cantu commotae Erebi de sedibus imis

Umbrae ibant tenues simulacraque luce carentum,

Quam multa in foliis avium se milia condunt,

Vesper ubi aut hibernus agit de montibus imber,

Matres atque viri defunctaque corpora vita

Magnanimum heroum, pueri innuptaeque puellae,

Impositique rogis iuvenes ante ora parentum. (Georg, iv, 471—7)

When Virgil drew Hades in real earnest, the Hades that Aeneas visited, he used this passage again but with two changes. It is no casual storm or cold evening that drives the birds from the hills; it is the great migration of the birds to another shore altogether. The difference is profound. No Orpheus fetches up the idle companies of the dead to listen genially to his chance music; there is a new earnestness; the throngs are urging forward on an inevitable journey and in dire need. The lines, but for the change noted, and some slight re-arrangement, are the same; but they have become a new thing, and give the reader for ever one of the most moving pictures that the ancient world has to offer. It is a miracle of change, and it too speaks of movements of thought, intensified, and to become more and more urgent in the centuries of Roman life that follow.

A last point on the passage. Orpheus leads away his half­regained Eurydice, but he looks back, and loses her; and her last cry is in five lovely lines, too exquisite to be a transcript of the deepest emotion; too structured and intricate for translation without changes, the art is conscious with the double quis and the rare and beautiful movement of the middle line:

Illa ‘quis et me’ inquit ‘miseram et te perdidit, Orpheu,

Quis tantus furor? en iterum crudelia retro

Fata vocant, conditque natantia lumina somnus.

Iamque vale: feror ingenti circumdata nocte

Invalidasque tibi tendens—heu, non tua—palmas.’ (Georg, IV, 494-8)

Emotion uses other tones, as Virgil came to see, directer language.

Do you see this? Look on her, look, her lips,

Look there, look there!

So Lear; and it is with new directness, not unlike it, that Virgil in later years tells of death and loss. Simpler structures serve for the end of Palinurus, Mimas, Mezentius; and human sorrow under the passionless stars has its quietest telling toward the end of the Aeneid, and there significantly it is to Ennius and not Euphorion that Virgil turns:

                                                      Turn litore toto

Ardentes spectant socios semiustaque servant

Busta, neque avelli possunt nox umida donee

Invertit caelum stellis ardentibus aptum. (Am. xi, 199—202)

 

III.

DIDACTIC POETRY

 

It was a persistent idea among ancient critics, professed experts or ordinary persons usurping the r61e in the light of nature, that the poet is essentially a teacher. To draw the inference that the object of poetry is information might be too abrupt; but some of the poets evidently thought so. It was the Muses, who can speak feigned things like to the true but can speak truth on occasion, who first gave this idea to Hesiod. Aristophanes chooses to suppose for the moment that Homer’s glory lies in the value of the Iliad as a military handbook; Aeschines that Homer meant to warn Greeks against bad demagogues; but orators are often more naive than humourists. But even Plato calls for valuable poets, who can put into suitable verse the doctrines which the state would have instilled into childhood; he saw, with some regret it would seem, that poetry, in general, was a divine madness, carrying on an ancient quarrel with philosophy, and that, very oddly, the madman wrote verse which men sang with more abandon, and read with more love and reverence, than the lines which the sober-minded achieved; it was very strange.

But the sober poets took their function very seriously, and put all sorts of useful information into conscientious verse, taking care to slip in gay snatches of what they meant for real poetry, in the hope of coaxing the reader along. They had never read, nor imagined on their own account, that instructions may be conveyed too directly, too like a lecture, but that they should rather “slide into the mind of the reader while he is imagining no such matter”. When Nicander of Colophon indites his Theriaca, all about serpents and antidotes, the reader is left in no doubt as to what is intended, and if he cares for snakes or is nervous about them, he is the man who must hear Nicander; but the snake might be preferable. The modern reader may feel some surprise that a second copy of Nicander was ever made. Aratus wrote of astronomy, and found two men to translate him into Latin verse; Cicero was one of them, and it seems that Virgil read the translation as Milton read Sylvester’s version of Du Bartas. The patience of great poets almost seems a phase of their divine madness.

The Roman character took instinctively to the idea of putting information into verse; Ennius perhaps started the mode with his Annals. Lucretius lifted the tradition of didactic poetry to a new level altogether, and as poet and thinker gave it a new life and a new warrant. Among his imitators, men of less genius, Manilius, Stoic, poet, exponent of astronomy, perhaps has the first place.

It is remarkable how at this time astrology captured the minds of men, coming reinforced from the nearer East, and taught by ‘Chaldaeans.’ Horace warned Leuconoe to avoid ‘Babylonian numbers’ and take the days as they came, his own philosophy of life. But the Roman world was not to be put off by such genial sceptics. The sudden and widespread acceptance of the planet week in this period is significant; and the Northern names of the days prove how the new week overleapt the Imperial frontiers while paganism still prevailed. It is a very curious phenomenon. Posidonius, the fashionable philosopher, came to Rome in 51 BC; and today every kind of intellectual activity is traced to his inspiration, where it is not direct translation of his own books. He was, so St Augustine tells us (de Civ. Dei, V, 2), ‘a champion of the fateful stars’ (fatalium siderum assertor). Horace himself plays with these stars as he does with Hades and other things; his horoscope coincides with that of Maecenas. But astrologers in Rome were condemned by an edict of Tiberius in AD 16, and Manilius saved his poem from suspicion by leaving out the promised planets; a horoscope without planets is unthinkable.

Manilius then wrote of the stars, a poem less interesting to modern astronomers, who find it incoherent, obscure and below  Greek standards, than to classical scholars. Today he is perhaps more read for his editors than for himself. A poet who will grapple with ‘dodecatemories’ takes his life in his hands, even with the precedent of Lucretius and homoeomereia. Yet he has learnt in the same school as Ovid; which is to say that he can write good Latin gracefully, and will not spurn a quip. Bentley would have it that Manilius and Ovid alone among the ancients had wit.

Ornari res ipsa negat contenta doceri. (hi, 39)

                                                    Victorque Medusae

Victus in Andromeda est. Iam cautibus invidet ipsis

Felicesque vocat teneant quae membra catenas. (v, 572)

That the Stoic can affect the stylist, every reader of Seneca knows. Manilius can turn off a Stoic dogma as neatly:

Fata regunt orbem, certa stant omnia lege. (iv, 14)

Quis caelum poterit nisi caeli munere nosse

Et reperire deum nisi qui pars ipse deorum est? (n, 115)

 But good lines and sound doctrine do not make a great poet, and mankind turns away from the unequal yoking of dubious science and respectable verse. Oddly enough Manilius has supplied Benjamin Franklin with an epitaph, or the best part of it. Reason, wrote Manilius,

                 solvitque animis miracula rerum

Eripuitque lovi fulmen viresque Tonanti.                      (1,103)

Turgot took the last line, eliminated Jove, slipped in George III and the British, and there was the epitaph, Latin, concise, epigrammatic, and rhetorical:

             Eripuit caelo fulmen sceptrumque tyrannis.

But it is a dubious interpretation of literature, which includes in it everything written.

Another piece of the kind is the didactic poem Aetna which, as its name implies, deals with volcanoes, and explains that the cause is physical not divine, the gods have better things to do (32); the earth is hollow, full of chasms and wind-channels; wind and spirit jostle within Etna, they are blocked and explode. This also is a poem, whose author’s only care is for the fact—omnis in vero mihi cura (92)—with digressions, though it maybe relevant to urge that possessions can be an encumbrance when you are running away from an eruption (617-9). One line describing how two bold sons risked death to save their parents,

                     Erubuere pios iuvenes attingere flammae             (633)

absurd as it is, may be the inspiration of the most famous line of Crashaw. The main interest, however, of the poem is that in ancient times it was attributed with some doubt (de qua ambigitur) to Virgil. It is not today, but Virgil’s fame is not injured by the transfer.

Virgil wrote his own didactic poem, as all the world rejoices to remember— a song of Ascra for the towns of Rome. The epithet Ascraeum proclaims allegiance to Hesiod; but the poem is not in the least in Hesiod’s vein; and it is read not so much for instruction as delight. No Roman had ever written anything like it, not Virgil himself in his Eclogues. In the Aeneid he does not mention Homer, nor the Meles, nor Chios’ rocky isle, and he transcends the Georgies as in them he eclipsed his Bucolics. Horace also wrote a didactic poem, de Arte Poetica, derived it is said (by the commentator Porphyrion) from a Greek, Neoptolemus2. But, for all its sense and wit, it never made a reader a poet yet.

The didactic poem which has had most influence, the only one that has really taught men and women what it set out to teach them, is a very different work from any yet noticed; not one of the true didactic poets (for Virgil and Horace are not really of the order) could have tolerated the idea of such an outrageous parody, but none of them was ever so effective, so witty, or so readable as the infamous Ovid with his Ars Amatoria, The whole thing was a defiance, an outrage—and a revelation of life in Rome. It is not great poetry; but assume there is no such thing as morality, and nothing could be better done than the three books of the poem; though it would in reality lose a great deal by such an assumption, and Ovid knows it. He is too clever to use the ugly language of Juvenal or Martial; it is a graceful corruption; there never was such cleverness nor such wit so used. Ovid has to be at his worst to be at his best. The book deserves its bad name; yet, strange paradox, there is something likeable about the man himself. But that is the way with human beings.

IV.

ANTIQUITIES AND ANTIQUARIANS

 

With the new interest in antiquity, that rose in the Republic’s last years, came something akin to a national reaction. From the earliest days of civilization in Italy commodities and fashions had come from the South and the Sea; the North and the mountains had nothing to send but men—the last being the great naked magnificent Gauls, tallest and most beautiful of races, Polybius says, but not civilized. The Greek alphabet, the Greek arts, the Greek mason, Greek literature, Greek slaves, Greek wines, Greek fashions had followed one another. From the time of Cato there is a reverse movement—a growing interest in what is Italian, Latin, Roman, in ancient usage, custom, ceremony, in native legends and old Latin literature. Origines is the title of Cato’s book, a significant name; and the form and texture of the book were significant, even ominous. The antiquary and the historian approach the past in different ways, because in fact they come to it in a different spirit. It is not what happened that is interesting, Polybius urges; it is why it happened. The antiquary is not greatly interested in ‘causes of things,’ in evolution; he loves the picture of the past because it is past, the old tools, the old furniture, the old usage; and his interests exclude order and encourage digression. The mode is set of a rambling sort of book with no more thread than the drifting mind of the antiquary; a gossip on old grammar may come before or after a discussion of the honours of old age, or ancient courtesy, or old farming ways. Those curious in such things will recall all sorts of books comfortably packed together on this scheme or absence of scheme—the works of Gellius, Aelian, Plutarch, and Clement-encyclopaedias with the loose-hung habits of a penny newspaper, but generally with an antiquarian flavour. The fashion spread widely and deserves notice; for the antiquary started it, and the all too easy structure fitted well with declining energy of mind.

Horace bears witness to the zeal for obsolete words, used by Catos and Cethegi in days of old, but long lost in the dust of antiquity, to the passion for old authors—no other merits beyond age were needed to make them literature. Horace himself is no archaizer, no collector of verbal curiosities. That role he left to such people as Verrius Flaccus whose assemblage of words, grammar and antiquities known as de Verborum Significatu survives only ‘ in ruins,’ of interest now, as in his own day, only to the learned. The practical Augustus despised what he called ‘the odour of far-fetched words’; he pursued a middle path of lucidity with equal contempt for innovators and archaizers (cacozelos et antiquaries), parodying the ‘scented permanent wave’ of Maecenas’ style, and laughing at his stepson’s quest for the obsolete; why should you want, he asked, to use the words that Sallust borrowed from Cato’s Origines? Gellius, a century later, takes substantially the Emperor’s position, when he bids cultivate the character of the past and use the language of the present. Vive ergo moribus praeteritis, loquere verbis praesentibus. But the mode interested Virgil, who loved old words, old lines, old poets, and used the archaisms, but in his own way, pudenter et raro.

A great mass of writing, not all of it literature, grew up about old Roman usage. Varro is in the centre of it, a curious figure, dreaded a little by Cicero, denounced by Virgil’s great comme­tator, Servius, as ‘everywhere the enemy of religion,’ yet claiming himself to be a sort of second Aeneas rescuing the gods and their rituals from sheer oblivion, as the first Aeneas saved them from burning Troy[LX]. His work was a godsend to St Augustine and the Christians long after, and in the age of Augustus to poets and historians. When the poetic value of Cynthia was exhausted—it was never so high or of such universal significance as her poet supposed—Propertius announced a new departure. He would sing of sacred rites and sacred days, of the ancient names of famous places; and he wrote one or two elegies on these lines. But we need only contrast the grave and splendid scene of Evander and Aeneas in the Forum with the kind of cleverness that antiquity inspired in Propertius, to see that he was wise to give it up.

Fictilibus crevere deis haec aurea templa. (v, 1,5)

He is more conscious of the clay than of the god; but it is the god that impresses Evander, and through him the reader of Virgil— quit deus incertum est, habitat deus, and the great conclusion follows et te quoque dignum finge deo, a note beyond Propertius, whose gift for bad taste, where no irreverence can give it a flavour, is still with him:

Optima nutricum nostris lupa Martia rebus

Qualia creverunt moenia lacte tuo. (v, 1, 55)

Ovid took up the task, and wrote twelve books of Fasti, of which he destroyed six. The literary critic scarcely deplores the loss, but the archaeologist well may, and the humanist. That Ovid of all people should play the antiquary, is all the evidence we need for the popularity of the hobby. It takes him from his proper field; no one can entirely trust his data or his interpretations; and no doubt he was bored with it all at times. But the kindliness of the man, his humour, his humanity, are not excluded by his subject; and he can tell a story as charmingly as anybody. Yet the spiritual value of the past, for Virgil its very essence, was not to be expected to touch Ovid. He belonged to his own age:

Prisca iuvent alios; ego me nunc denique natum

               Gratulor; haec aetas moribus apta meis.            (Ars Am. in, 121)

Nothing could be truer; his day and his character were admirably matched; antiquity—well, Virgil was made for antiquity.

Horace wrote no Antiquities. No poet, once the crude days of Epode and Satire were over, ever made fewer mistakes. Metiri se quemque suo modulo ac pede verum est—he certainly observed his own rule and took his own measure. Antiquarian poetry, even if such a thing is actually possible, is inevitably a branch of didactic poetry; and, while Horace is as apt to preach as Coleridge, he knew better than to meddle with this form of double desiccation. Virgil, like Milton playing with the notion of King Arthur, had his dream of writing of Alban kings and their battles, but Apollo (as also in the case of Horace) happily intervened with an oracular reference to sheep. His biographer more bluntly says that he was displeased with his material and turned to the Bucolics. Later on his studies of old Rome and ancient Italy served a more glorious end in the Aeneid. Point by point Virgil absorbs, reflects and transcends his age.

Romulus and Remus are part of a normal English education, and have been for centuries; and so they are likely to be as long as Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome are available for children’s recitation. But few realize how much was written by classical authors about the most ancient days of Rome. Dionysius of Halicarnassus is little read, seriously as he took his antiquarian work, and admirably as Edward Spelman translated (and printed) him. He is oftener cited as a critic—not one of the great epoch-making critics, but as an Augustan of great scholarship, highly trained, and possessed of a real sympathy for literature. On Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides, he writes what is still interesting. Of his history he tells us that he came into Italy, at the end of the Civil War; and spent twenty-two years at Rome, preparing materials for his work; scholars helped him and he drew upon such authors as Cato, Fabius Maximus, Valerius Antias, Licinius Macer, the Aelii, the Gellii and Calpurnii. Greeks are in general unacquainted with Roman history, though Greeks were Rome’s first founders; so, ‘as the most grateful return’ for all Rome has done for him, he writes of ‘that most beautiful part of the Roman history,’ a story of brave men, who fulfilled their destiny and deserve immortal glory; of foreign wars and seditions; he will give an account of all the forms of government that Rome has used, and show the whole manner of living of the ancient Romans. “I look upon that country as the best”, he says, “which is the most self-sufficient and generally stands least in need of foreign commodities. Now I am persuaded that Italy enjoys this universal fertility beyond any other country”. So he too writes his Salve magna parens. A succession of beautifully designed speeches may accomplish his intent ‘to afford satisfaction to those persons who desire to qualify themselves for political debates,’ but no more than Livy’s similar productions does it convince the modern historian. Yet he is a pleasant writer, not infallible, but possessed of abundance of matter—legend and usage, myth and religion, and boundless learning—eminently useful to the careful student of Livy and Plutarch, and for himself good to read, with the grave qualification applied to others by Quintilian (x, 1, 90)—si vacet.

A shorter space must suffice for Diodorus of Agyrrhium, better known as Diodorus Siculus, who compiled a universal history from the best available writers and preserved much that might otherwise have been lost, though E. A. Freeman, a severe judge, found his work often inaccurate and himself invincibly stupid.

The past and its achievements were bound to have a part in other literature than the antiquary’s. Vitruvius must know the great traditions of the Greek architects before he could write the famous book on Architecture that has meant so much in the history of that art and is still full of human interest even for others than architects. Strabo, chief of geographers, abounds in ancient learning; his book is full of legend and literature. Geography is not for him all latitude and equator. Incidentally perhaps the great map of the Empire, set up in a colonnade by Vipsanius Agrippa, may be mentioned here, the first parent of many. That the great lawyers Antistius Labeo and Ateius Capito (to be treated of in the next volume) should draw upon antiquity, was inevitable; precedents imply the past.

But, of course, for the antiquities of Rome no author takes precedence of Livy and Virgil. In this interest also, they represent their contemporaries. “A mere antiquarian”, said Dr Johnson, “is a rugged being”, and so some of them were, Cato and Varro particularly; while Ovid shows that even a frivolous world could find the austere study, if handled aright, quite bright and amusing. In Livy and Virgil Roman antiquarianism falls into the hands of genius, and is transformed, and becomes the interest of the world for ever.

We hear from time to time—Cicero’s letters and Horace’s odes reveal it—of historians and poets who conceive that the history of their own times is full enough of vivid episode to yield theme for great writing, who would handle the Civil War, its causes, sins, alliances, and so forth, a task full of hazard, indeed to tread the lava with the volcanic fire below. It was no new idea; Thucydides had written of his own time; but it needs peculiar gifts; the struggle for life is perhaps as hard among historians as among poets, and the Romans who wrote contemporary history and survived are few. It is better for the historian to write of the past ‘unmoved, and without reason to be moved, by anger or by party spirit.’ The past is always apt to be better known than the present and more intelligible. As for the poets who would make epics of contemporary events, Plato’s canon that madness is essential to poetry obviously excludes history. Virgil and Horace gave to posterity, each of them, a great deal of his age, and a great interpretation of it; and one has only to read Lucan to realize how much more wisely they conceived of poetry.

V. 

PERSONAL POETRY: ELEGY; PROPERTIUS

 

Homer, as Aristotle remarked, ‘said as little as possible on his own account’; he kept himself out of his poetry. The next age of Greek poetry sees poets, men and women, who tell their own tales; rage, says Horace, armed Archilochus with the iambus that he made his own; Sappho has her complaints and writes her Ille mi par; Alcaeus resounds the stern sorrows of strife, of flight, of war. To these and to other poets Romans turned in this age of many interests, forgetful of what Horace notes, in the ode we are citing, that the mass of men prefer as themes of song battle and the tyrant driven forth; and Aristotle says the mass of mankind is apt to be right. Securus iudicat orbit terrarum.

All that Gallus wrote for Cytheris is gone with Cinna’s Smyrna and other immortal works. Propertius survives in virtue of great promise in youth. He had an instinct for Latin and its rhythms and cadences, a love of phrase and of beautiful words, an ear for movement and variety—gifts that enabled him to reveal a new province for Roman poetry. His concentration on his own passion was not so new, and there are those who feel he was at heart less interested in Cynthia than in Propertius. But Cynthia filled his first volume of verse, and he tells us:

Non haec Calliope non haec mihi cantat Apollo:

Ingenium nobis ipsa puella facit. (11,1,3-4)

A few lines lower, as so often, the case is given away by a line fatally susceptive of an unintended meaning:

              Maxima de nihilo nascitur historia. (ib. 16)

Questions are asked about the transmission of his poems—is their order all wrong, are their pages shuffled, or is he beyond other poets inconsequent? It is conceded by his admirers that he lacks self-criticism, that he over-estimates the appeal of allusive learning, that Cynthia was after all only Cynthia, a monotonous type, abruptly as her moods vary. Those moods her poet records; and patient commentators try to make a story of them; she blazes out at Propertius and bids him be gone for a year; so a vacant year is marked in the annals. He tried other themes—the antiquities of Rome, as we saw. He writes an elegy for a friend lost at sea, strikes out a great line:

Nunc tibi pro tumulo Carpathium omne mare est (iu, 7, 12)

 and matches it with a clever conceit, which shows how little feeling there was in it all:

Et nova longinquis piscibus esca natat. (ib. 8)

Not so the greater poets:

Nudus in ignota, Palinure, iacebis arena. (Aen. v, 871)

Tibullus followed with elegies to Delia, a slighter force in the history of verse and perhaps of poetry, but a pleasanter and more congenial nature, with affinities to Virgil, and the friend of Horace, a poet graceful, delicate, refined, who loved the country. After them comes Ovid, the greatest of elegiac poets. His Corinna had the advantage of being perhaps an abstraction; so, safe from passion, Ovid can be safe from absurdity, the type that Horace drew (with no thought of him):

                       urbani parcentis viribus atque

Extenuantis eas.

He lived longer than the other elegiac writers; he had more range, more variety and more wit—humour, too, which the others lack.

 

VI. 

LIVY

 

So many interests, so many lines of original experience and deliberate imitation, meet in Augustan literature, and throughout it all is a strong consciousness of Rome. Rome maxima rerum, Rome pulcerrima rerum, Rome populum late rege-—the beauty and the wonder and the power of this city on the seven hills, of this marvellous citizenship, of this world-wide empire—they never lose the sense of it, the passion for it. Rome is in all their thoughts, consciously or unconsciously. As the Englishman of the Victorian period moved about the continent, not saying that he was English, perhaps not thinking it, but being it, distilling it, announcing it, the Roman of this period, as we see him in his writing, is a citizen of no mean city, a fellow-citizen of Augustus. The doors of Janus were at last shut, and mankind had entered upon the unthinkable majesty of Roman peace. The world was one, united as it had hardly been under Alexander; Rome had achieved this, she was giving order and law, life and hope, to the world and she was its centre; and every man who thought knew it, and the greater men felt it.

“Whether I am likely to accomplish anything worth the labour, if I record the achievements of the Roman People from the foundation of the city, I do not exactly know, nor if I knew would I venture to affirm it; perceiving as I do that it is an old practice and hackneyed; all new historians believe either that they can produce higher certitude as to matter, or that by grace of style they will eclipse a rude antiquity”. So Livy begins the preface to his History—a work of infinite labour covering seven hundred years. His readers will wish to reach the account of their own day, when the might of a great people is its undoing; for himself, there are things he is glad to forget. To the earliest legends he will attribute neither truth nor falsehood; for the rest, he would have the reader consider as he goes, what life and character were age by age, by what men, by what policy or arts, in peace and in war, Rome’s power was developed—and then the reader must reflect upon the decay of discipline and character; though Livy believes that there never was a State where poverty and thrift were so long honoured, and where luxury and avarice arrived so late with their fatal consequences.

The historian came from Patavium (Padua); twice over Quintilian tells us how Asinius Pollio (the friend of Virgil and the critic of Cicero) detected a certain ‘Patavinity’ in the historian’s Latin. He was born in Caesar’s first consulship (59 BC) and survived Augustus by three years; and full forty years of this long life he gave to his history, an accepted figure at the court of Augustus, for it was with his encouragement that the young prince Claudius embarked on History. It is something to have made an Emperor an historian. He lived to be famous, and his fame survived him. But in process of time his hundred and forty-two books seemed long, and fell into the hands of men who abridged them and finally were content with epitome; and then for centuries little is heard of him, till fame begins to return to him with John of Salisbury. Three-quarters of his work remains lost. Still an author who survives in thirty-five books has an immortality beyond most of his profession.

A higher certitude or a superior grace was Livy’s antithesis. As we have not (with one signal exception) the work of the men from whom he drew, and do not in all cases know who they were, it is perhaps idle to dispute about the higher certitude. The one exception is Polybius, an author (Livy concedes) ‘not to be despised’, ‘a reliable authority in all Roman history and especially where Greece is concerned’.  Pleasant words and patronizing, but from them few would guess the amount of Livy’s debt to Polybius or how closely he follows him. The students of history must be few who would not surrender a good many books of Livy for as many of Polybius; for no man who has spent his years with Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon and Polybius, can think of Livy as an historian in the same sense of the word. The speeches in Livy, particularly in the early period, ‘the neat and eloquent harangues—pure inventions—lend an air of unreality to the whole narrative. But fashion rules and history had to be written thus.’ So judges a great English historian of Rome, and most honest readers will have felt the same.

Matthew Arnold once spoke of a history of English literature being written to the tune of Rule Britannia. No one can follow Hannibal through Polybius and Livy and fail to make a similar judgment on the Roman. Polybius judges more dispassionately, and as a man who has actually taken a hand in politics, who has seen war in many lands, who has travelled and explored the world and lived in intimacy with statesmen and generals. Livy, like Timaeus (in Polybius’ caustic criticism), had lived and worked in a study. His battle-pieces, written with gusto, are pronounced magnificent but not war. He is criticized for a similarly defective knowledge of Roman law, and for confusion in his account of constitutional struggles. The Emperor Gaius came near having the busts and writings of Livy removed from all public libraries, complaining that he was ‘verbose and careless.’ To be sure, Gaius was for doing the same by Virgil as ‘a man of no genius and very little learning,’ and asked why he might not, like Plato, turn Homer too out of his Republic. But critics of more admitted sanity make the same complaint of Livy’s neglect of documents and monuments. He will not quote the hymn to Juno written by Livius Andronicus in the Second Punic War—‘praiseworthy enough for the rude talent of those times, but today if quoted it would seem lacking in taste and finish.’ He used Valerius Antias freely in his first decade, to decide later on that he was not very reliable. He is believed not to have troubled to use the great antiquarian accumulations of Varro. In judging evidence, or statements that must pass for evidence, his canons of criticism are various; he will go by the majority, or the earliest, or he will harmonize, or he will choose the story that looks probable or tells best or fits best with Roman glory or statesmanship. ‘In matters so ancient, if a story looks like truth, let it be taken as true.’

Traditur—there is something to be said for tradition, for folk­memory, as it is now called; and Livy would not have made much of a Record Office, if he had had it; nor did his public want a Latin Polybius—we have to remember that. For Livy knew the taste and temper of his day, and he gave his fellow-citizens quite evidently what they wanted. He too is a sign of the times; History is an art akin to Rhetoric, and more and more it will be written on Livy’s lines, from Quintus Curtius and his Alexander on into the Middle Ages. Curtius may have belonged to this very age of Augustus—it is not certain; but he writes well in the Livian way, and posterity kept his book and did right to do so. Even the solider and sounder historians show the heritage of rhetoric— Eusebius and Ammianus Marcellinus are invaluable, but their style is incredible to those who only read in the great periods of literature. But who would care for a Thucydidean precision; does the stuff go well, does it carry you along, does the story march?

The answer is that Livy’s story does carry you along. ‘It is hardly too much,’ wrote Macaulay’s nephew, ‘to assert that the demand for Macaulay varies with the demand for coal. The astonishing success of this celebrated book must be regarded as something of far higher consequence than a mere literary or commercial triumph. It is no insignificant feat to have awakened in hundreds of thousands of minds the taste for letters and the yearning for knowledge.’ Something of the same kind may be claimed for Livy. Livy and Macaulay did what they intended; they carried History into the business and bosom of their nations. They taught men to find the past interesting, to believe in their people; they helped to mould their languages. It is something to consort with a man of genius, who so writes as to be always clear, always interesting, always illuminative. Il parle d'or, said Paul-Louis Courier of Livy.

Hannibal may be drawn amiss in Livy’s pages; Romulus may lack a little of being historical; Valerius Antias may—but enough of this. Rome is the hero of Livy’s book. Rome may not have been so uniformly wise and right—though few but Polybius and the author of Revelation said so with much emphasis. But Livy chose well, and he did his work. He made the history of Rome. Sainte- Beuve comments on some ancient work in the telling phrase that ‘it made no heart beat.’ Livy’s work did make the heart beat; it helped to give men the sense of their country; it forced them to realize the grandeur of that old type which ‘did not despair of the Republic.’ Whatever our view of his limitations, it was of Livy’s Rome and Virgil’s that men thought, it was she that they loved, to her that they rallied, through the great centuries of the Empire and in the dark times that followed. Is this picture of Rome true? That after all is the final question. There is no doubt about the art with which it is drawn; it has fascinated mankind as well as the Romans; it lives; but is it true? Is it relevant to ask, does his picture agree with Virgil’s?

VII. 

OVID

 

“In elegy”, wrote Quintilian, “we can challenge the Greeks. In this Tibullus seems to me a writer in the highest degree terse and graceful, though there are those who prefer Propertius. Ovidius utroque lascivior”. Time developes some meanings in words and atrophies others; and the criticism may sound ambiguous, till the sentence is finished: ‘sicut durior Gallus.' Quintilian feels a certain stiffness in Gallus; no one has made this complaint of Ovid, either as regards style or matter; he is the gayest and most playful of Latin writers. Perhaps he has not more humour than Apuleius, but he did not feel it necessary to invent a new language; he was content to write Latin. No one wrote it with more grace; no one can be read with more ease; not Cicero himself is more definitely master of the art of saying precisely what he means and being entirely as lucid as he intends. The complaint is the other way; the writing is too easy, the meaning too quickly exhausted. “A line of Wordsworth,”  wrote Charles Lamb (and it is as true of Virgil”) is a lever to raise the immortal spirit”. There are no undertones, no harmonics, about Ovid’s work; it is all on the surface. Probably no writer, who refused depth, has ever had so wide a range of influence; and if complete mastery of his art entitles him to it, Ovid deserves it.

 Sulmo mihi patria est gelidis uberrimus undis. (Trist. iv, IO, 3)

Ovid (43 BC-AD 18) was born at Sulmo, ninety miles from Rome, in the Paelignian country, of a family whose equestrian rank was inherited, he says in this short account of himself, from ancestors of old (usque a proavis vetus ordinis heres), it was not the chance gift of Fortune in modern times. His elder brother’s bent was oratory; he preferred the Muses, in spite of his father’s frequent reminder that Homer left no estate. He dutifully tried to write prose, but in vain; verse came of its own accord,

Et quod temptabam scribere versus erat.

He took the first steps in a legal career, but he gave up the hope of attaining the Senate; neither body nor mind inclined to energy; he lacked ambition—at least of that sort. So he lived a life of ease—without scandal, he points out; he wrote verse, associated with poets, heard Propertius recite, listened to numerosus Horatius; but Vergilium vid itantum. He visited the East and Sicily. He was early famous, and everybody wondered who Corinna might be; it was a feigned name, he tells us. Amores, The Letters of the Heroines, the Art of Love, the Remedy of Love, the Metamorphoses in fifteen books, the Fasti originally in twelve, suggest that his life was not all idle, in spite of the evidence that his works offer so abundantly of the frivolity and worthlessness of the company he kept or pretended to keep. Suddenly in AD 8 Augustus ordered him to remove to Tomi on the Black Sea—Costanza today, where his statue stands. The cause for this removal was twofold—a book and a blunder. The book was the Art of Love; but that had been already published for ten years; then what was the blunder? All sorts of guesses have been made, with little agreement. Augustus never forgave him; and Tiberius, whose domestic happiness had been wrecked by compulsory marriage with Julia, was not likely to take a genial view of the poet of her school. So he had ten years of Tomi, writing letters and Tristia, with a heavy heart, to no purpose at all. His descriptions of barbarian life away on the Euxine are interesting; but the repeated picture of a broken spirit does not add to his fame.

To some of his books reference has already been made, his Art and his Fasti. His Heroines are graceful enough, and (he says) a novelty; no one would look for history or character in them—it would be as wise to grumble at the Iliad for failing of the brevity of an epigram; but a certain tenderness is sometimes felt in them not revealed in his other work. The Heroines show a wide reading in Greek literature, as does everything he wrote. The Metamorphoses make a book which one might call portentous, but that mankind owes so much happiness to it. Others had collected stories, and love tales in particular, like the solid Parthenius, who is supposed to have taught Virgil, and the dateless Apollodorus, both Greeks. Ovid has a sort of string for his series of tales, but the reader soon forgets it. At one point a group of sisters tell stories to one another, to while away the time, with a faint sug­gestion of Boccaccio1, but the grand merit of the book is that it is a huge assemblage of stories, in Latin that will perplex nobody, told with such vigour and brightness—and such utter absence of any kind of reverence—that the reader is never taxed wherever he picks it up. The only difficulty is to read it as a whole. It has many famous lines:

Fas est et ab hoste doceri (iv, 428)

Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor (vn, 20—1

Os homini sublime dedit caelumque videre: (1, 85)

and thousands more ranging from bathos to wit as unexpected—

Et quia nuda fui, sum visa paratior illi: (v, 603)

Hoc certe furtum coniunx mea nesciet, inquit,

Aut si rescierit,—sunt o sunt iurgia tanti. (11, 423—4)

This couplet is Juppiter’s, who is here the Jove of the Pompeian wall-pictures, which might have been designed to illustrate the book. There are rhetorical passages of course, and proper names in gratuitous heaps. Thirty-two of Actaeon’s dogs are named be­fore we reach the brute that bit him; in the Phaethon story twenty- three mountains are listed and twenty-seven rivers. The poet plays at his work, and a great deal of it is trifling. But when all this is said, the main thing remains to be said.

The Middle Ages adopted the Metamorphoses; men had through that great period ‘a passion for monotony’, we are told; and the book was read and re-read, probably by others, certainly by poets who drew matter and inspiration from it. Few books can have given so much pleasure to mankind directly or indirectly. We read of Ovid as the favourite poet of Chaucer and Boccaccio—

As saith Ovid and Titus Livius—

but Chaucer knew little of Livy beyond the tales of Lucretia and Virginia. Throughout a long poetical activity Chaucer is con­stantly borrowing from Ovid, and on all sorts of subjects, especially from the Metamorphoses. The Wife of Bath tells of her husband Jankin and his comprehensive volume:

He hadde a book that gladly, night and day,

For his desport he wolde rede al way. ...

In whiche book eek ther was Tertulan,

Crisippus, Trotula and Helowys,

That was abbesse nat fer fro Parys;

And eek the Parables of Salomon,

Ovydes Art, and bokes many on,

Ana alle thise wer bounden in o volume.

 

‘Ovydes Art’ is one of the strongest influences in Provencal poetry and his other books contribute significantly to medieval romance. The Heroines are a sort of ‘Saints’ Legend of Cupid.’ Stranger still, we read of Ovid being ‘moralized’ by Chrétien Légouais, a Franciscan, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, who allegorized the Metamorphoses in 70,000 lines; this or another effort of the kind was twice printed by Badius in the early days of printing. The Art itself was allegorized and lies behind the Roman de la Rose. As for ‘wandering scholars’ and the Goliardic tribe, Ovid was their obvious canon, and we are told of one Doctor of Divinity in Paris, who held that God hath spoken in Ovid even as in Augustine. But here we seem leaving literature for theology, and Phoebus may twitch our ears.

 

VIII. 

HORACE

 

It seems established, though it remains strange, that Chaucer had no knowledge of Horace, much as they have in common. In general it appears that Horace did not appeal to the Middle Ages as did Ovid, Statius, Lucan, and above all Virgil—a fact not altogether idle. Some great writers will stand translation, and even in very bad renderings will capture and influence readers: the Odyssey and Don Quixote are outstanding books of this kind. But others insist upon having readers of their own class and antecedents, and on being read in the original. Horace almost requires an Augustan age. Ben Jonson translated some of him into English. Burton found him congenial and constantly quotes him in The Anatomy of Melancholy. Herrick read him and copied him. Indeed it is well said that Horace is the patron saint, the ancestor and exemplar of all light verse in English from Prior to Praed. Perhaps we might count the essayists too from Addison to Thackeray among his descendants. The eighteenth century is his true floruit. It gave him a constituency with the same sort of culture, the same preference for taste, finish and sanity, and a strong sympathy for his nil admirari. Horace took clear precedence of Virgil throughout the century in England, and lived in ceaseless quotation. Steele and Fielding show his spirit; Lord Chesterfield and Horace Walpole have him at their fingers’ ends; Burke, Pitt, Fox and Sheridan quote him, with consummate address. Indeed it might be said that Horace only lost his seat in Parliament when Gladstone retired from politics and solaced himself by translating the Odes. It was not a supreme version, but to be translated by a Prime Minister—

Principibus placuisse viris non ultima laus est,

 is Horace’s own comment.

In his interesting essay on Béranger, Walter Bagehot compares him with Horace, but finds marked differences, which go far to explain Horace’s eighteenth-century popularity. Sceptical and indifferent as both poets are, Beranger differs from Horace in having a real faith in liberty and belief in it. Horace was the friend of Maecenas, and was offered very high, if untitled, office by Augustus. Bagehot finds it hard to imagine why precisely Horace, the student at Athens, should have thought it worth while to serve with Brutus. Perhaps he was not yet the Horace we know. An American scholar has recently brought out the length of his service, the range of territory covered, and the rank attained with the inference, supported by the proposal of Augustus, that Horace was a far more capable and forceful person than some suppose. But it is Horace’s care to obscure all this. It is characteristic of him that he can write with humour of his wars against Augustus, of his military tribune days and his rout at Philippi. And there, says Bagehot, he touches Beranger closely; the most essential character of each is geniality. Pope endeavours to copy Horace, but there is always a bitter ingredient in the copy which the original lacks; for it is not commonly given to the children of men to be philosophers without envy, while Horace either never had it, or outgrew it. He has a genius for friendship—though not necessarily with pushing people like Propertius, he seems to say, who must in any case have been thoroughly distaste­ful to him, an extravagant, unbalanced person. Horace is the poet of the quiet mind, who gives the world in exquisite form its own view of itself, “its self-satisfaction, its conviction that you must bear what comes, not hope for much, think some evil, never be excited, admire little, and then you will be at peace”. But Horace, aloof from crusades and passions, is genially aloof, and very human and lovable in his Epicureanism.

His story is familiar; he tells it himself. The freedman father, the sound education, Athens, the war, Philippi, the ‘clipped wings,’ and then friendship with Virgil and Varius, with Maecenas and Augustus. It is curious how often he speaks of the sea. To Maecenas his tone is, to a surprising degree, that of a friend on equal terms, in a genuine friendship. For Virgil he has an obvious reverence; Virgil is among the ‘white souls,’ none whiter. But, after all, perhaps the man who stands highest with him is the freedman father, so described. There is an ode in the Fourth Book that has perplexed critics; it must be to another, an unknown, Virgil, iuvenum nobilium cliens? Could anyone so name the Virgil? Could anyone chaff Virgil about bartering nard for wine of Cales? Could the famous dulce est desipere in loco be addressed to the author of the Aeneid? Charles Lamb at any rate so addressed the author of the Excursion. ‘Now, I think, in buffoonery I have a wider range than you.’ It may well be an early ode, written when the words iuvenum nobilium cliens would not be shocking. But they never did shock Horace, nor did the freedman stigma of his father. Proud as he is of exalted patronage, he can write his cuncta resigno and libertine patre natum. That is the man; for genius is a strange com­pound, and Horace well illustrates what strange traits it can have, and how much it can lack.

The survival of his earlier works, Epodes and Satires, makes his greatness still stranger. If nothing else survived, few would wish to read him. Even among the Odes there are verses which could be spared; they are too like the Epodes, they may be old work, but there they are. Literary mode may, of course, be the explanation; even the admirable Pliny the Younger felt it fitting to endeavour on one occasion to write obscene verse, and no doubt wrote it conscientiously as he wrote everything. The Epodes are unpleasant, with a harshness, a coarseness of fibre, that surprises; but the more surprising thing is that Horace outgrew it all. His sense of humour suffers change into something rich and strange. The coarseness is gone; there is instead geniality, good taste, a delightful playfulness, a charm that is not artifice or mode, but comes from within, as Longinus says all greatness does, an echo of the nature. The development is in its way as wonderful as the result.

The Satires were imitations of Lucilius, in matter and metre, and the model was ill chosen; for in his Epistles it is his own genius that is seen, and it is incomparably pleasanter and wiser. The changes in metre we have noted. The matter is dictated by friendship instead of satire; and we have a mellowing poet’s judgments upon books, and Homer, the schools of the philosophers, the ways of men; tale and fable and country scene vary the impression; and all is lit up by Horace’s own philosophy of life. The book, indeed his whole work, gives a remarkably living picture of the times; he might be called the Boswell of his age, but that he has no Johnson, not even Maecenas, and that such parallels can only be partial and the wrong part would be emphasized. Still more the appeal lies in his having the late Elia’s fondness for the first person; he reveals himself and we like him.

As for the Odes they form, it has been said, ‘a secular Psalter for daily and yearly and age-long use.’ The art of them for ever taxes the critics; the workmanship suggests the Matine bee, mosaic, painting in monochrome, jewel-work and so forth. His own ‘golden mediocrity,’ the shrewd word ‘economy’ and the like help us perhaps a little. No one quotes Plato about him; he is of all great poets least like an ‘inspired idiot.’ It has been sometimes said that Horace is the favourite poet of men who do not care for poetry; what women think of him is not so clear—probably, like Boswell, he is a man’s author. But it takes a lifetime of acquain­tance with Horace himself and the classical poets to realize how great an achievement is his handling of verse. The old technical term ‘inevitable’ recurs to the mind. His ear is quick, and he has trained it, and in lyrics he is as infallible as Virgil in hexameters. Perhaps the achievement would not be possible in any language but Latin. The modern tongues have to make shift with characterless monosyllables, where Horace had to his hand case-endings, a conjugated verb and the mysteries of the subjunctive. But even in Latin he has no real imitator; Prudentius has real lyric gifts, and writes Sapphics, but he has other aims, another feeling for life. No one really gets very far beyond the two famous criticisms of Petronius and Quintilian—Horatii curiosa felicitas and plenus iucunditatis et gratiae et varius figuris et verbis felicissime audax. There we may leave it; there is consolation in St Augustine’s phrase, if we may detach it, alii disputent, ego mirabor.

 

IX. 

VIRGIL

 

In our survey of the main factors and interests in Augustan literature, we have found at every point that Virgil is master of all that lives, that he touches every phase of national life and movement. Elegy excepted, it may be said; but the ancients judged otherwise, for where love is concerned they set Dido before Corinna; the one represents merely an amused animalism, the other is tragedy, and her story raises every question that pain and happiness can bring home to the human heart. St Augustine was assuredly not alone in shedding tears for Didonem extinctam ferroque extrema secutam. If the modern reader makes the confession mens immota manebat, it merely means the triumph of scholarship over humanism and helps to explain the decline of classical studies. For in judging Virgil the reader judges himself; his comments merely tell a sentient world what he himself is fit for; what follows is written in that consciousness.

Virgil was born on 15 October 70 BC—Octobres Maro consecravit Idus. He was born by the roadside, we are told; he grew up on a farm at or near Andes, a village not very far from Mantua. His father was a man of energy, among other things a lumberman, and his son vividly pictures the felling of the forest and the flight of the birds.

Antiquasque domos avium cum stirpibus imis

Eruit; illae altum nidis petiere relictis. (Georg. 11, 209)

Deforestation had its usual effects, and today men miss the birds that Virgil knew in his country. Virgil’s intimate knowledge of woodcraft is remarked, not by the ancients who loved to augment his omniscience, but by the modern expert; and he is always very near the farm and the farm-people; the wars of Antony and Turnus wreck the settled low content and all that it means of work and happiness. To the end, we are told by Melissus, a professional humourist, Virgil looked like a rustic and would be taken for one. He remained shy and uneasy; and, when he was suddenly recognized and applauded in the theatre, he left Rome for the neighbourhood of Naples. There his character won him the nickname Parthenias, which suggests that the Neapolitans may have pronounced his name, as it afterwards became current, and as it passed into the languages and literature of Europe.

Nos patriae fines et dulcia linquimus arva stands in the forefront of his work, an experience indelible for such a nature; for, quickly as Pollio, Maecenas, and Octavian in turn come to the poet’s aid, he has shared the common lot. So in his way had Horace; but Horace, unlike the greater poets, had ways of protecting himself, et mea virtute me involve, and lived free from the past and careful to avoid fresh trouble. The greater poet discards no experience; and a tenderness for human suffering, little familiar in Roman literature, is always to be felt in his work by those who have known suffering. Some imagination is needed for the interpretation of a poet, and it may not be mere fancy to believe that this painful contact with the common problem reacted upon Virgil’s attitude to letters and to thought. A poet does not read as ordinary men do, witness Keats reading Chapman’s Homer, Virgil was never done with his poets, their text was written over again within him. But life gave fresh clues. He had his clever period, like an undergraduate, and clearly loved the sheer cleverness of the Alexandrines. And he meant to be an Epicurean, to gather the learned lore of Siro and free his life from all care in the havens of the blest. Martial implies in his senseless way that Virgil found those havens; Tennyson thought not—‘the doubtful doom of human kind’ is never absent from him. Neither Hellenistic poetry nor philosophy was deep enough to explain his experience, and he went back to the greater poets and thinkers of an earlier day—to Euripides and Pythagoras, and, of course, to Hesiod and Homer. Plato, in one of his greatest sentences, speaks of ‘the ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy [LXV].’ It is a useful thought for the student of poets; for the greatest poets all know that quarrel between intuition and reason, as well as Plato knew it; it is fought out within them; and if it be not, there is no great poetry. ‘Prolong that battle while his life shall last,’ or you will hardly have a Virgil, a Dante, a Shakespeare. There are other views of poetry, but probably to the extremest champion of pure poetry, of sheer music (if he can feel Latin), Virgil will speak as securely.

Without stopping to analyse poems so familiar as the acknowledged writings of Virgil, or to guess (fond amusement) about the disputed works, let us sum up in outline what Virgil has meant to his friends, ancient and modern, remembering that no great poet can be explained by any such process. An index never gives the living spirit of a book, nor will it here; but it may tell a reader what to look for. To begin, then, Horace affixes to Virgil two epithets, which mean little to the casual reader unless it be a question.

                                             Molle atque facetum

Vergilio adnuerunt gaudentes rure Camenae. (Sat. 1, 10, 44)

The Muses of the country-side, all would admit at once; the adjectives need closer care. Exquisite tenderness and playfulness is what they seem to connote; the one is soon obvious, the other is still subtler. It nigrum campis agmen—Ennius would have stared; it is ants that march in file in Virgil, but the line was Ennius’ own, and he wrote it of elephants; how came Virgil to borrow it? The reader must answer that, not forgetting the dulce est desipere in loco discussed above. No lover of Virgil but recalls the antithesis:

Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas....

Fortunatus et ille deos qui novit agrestes.

The lines are poetry; they chronicle opinion—fact, too, perhaps—but far more an attitude to life, a spirit in which life is handled, for which fresh discoveries mean much, but a tireless expectancy much more. Virgil is never done with life, with human experience and history; they are as fertile as Nature of surprises and revelations; and he pursues life both ways. To these add the untranslated

                       Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.

Here many comments recur to the mind—the higher truth and the higher seriousness of poetry, which Aristotle and Arnold emphasize; the conception of poetry as the echo of a great soul, which Longinus gave; the common man’s realization that a man cannot be human who has ‘no capacity for tragedy.’ But Virgil only speaks to those who know him in his fulness and are long intimate with him.

Our index would seem to require some listing of what Virgil did for his Roman readers and has ever done. He gave, then, be­yond all other poets, a new revelation of the beauty of Latin; and here Longinus’ ‘old experience’ is needed. There is so much in his Latin—all the values of sound—consonant, vowel and syllable, none astray—word with word, line with line, the paragraph and the page. Other men are best quoted in lines; Virgil’s page, better still the book or the whole epic, are needed to give his music. It is like Don Quixote, so little quotable, everything in the spirit and the fabric. ‘The rich Virgilian rustic measure of Lari maxim’; all the suggestions of word and sound, the harmonics that echo from the great phrase—all these have to be reckoned. For some unaccount­able reason, says his friend, R. L. Stevenson’s favourite line of Virgil from boyhood was

Iam medio apparet fluctu nemorosa Zacynthos.

Was it unaccountable? Look at the last words; think of the sea and sea-faring; and there is Homer behind and Samoa to come; from Sertorius to Sancho it is in the Isle that men look for happiness. The great poets are frank enough in linking their music to those who went before them, and Ennius is best known in Virgil; his verse serves to patch the sense out for those who do not know; but for those who do know there is a depth of feeling unspeakable—music, reminder, old story, reconciliation—

                                     nox umida donec

Invertit caelum stellis ardentibus aptum.

But once again it is the passage that gives the interpretation. ‘Virgil,’ writes J. W. Mackail, ‘stands out as having achieved the utmost beauty, melody and significance, of which human words seem to be capable[LXVI].’

Virgil goes farther. Romance in his day pointed to Greece, to Troy, to the Orient; Italy was a land of prose. Virgil revealed its beauty for ever, and taught other men beside the Italians to see their own lands. Sed neque Medorum silvae—no, there is no land to match Italy:

                                   praeruptis oppida saxis,

Fiuminaque antiquos subterlabentia muros...

                                    te, Lari maxime, teque,

Fluctibus et fremitu assurgens Benace marino.

                                                               (Georg. 11, 156-7, 159-60)

Whatever Homer’s catalogues meant to the Greek, they were Virgil’s warrant for showing Italy to his people. The Italians, too,

                                   quibus Itala iam turn

Floruerit terra alma viris—                              (den. vii, 643—4)

Marsian, Sabellian, Ligurian, the heroes, Decii, Marii and all, the settler from overseas, the old Corycian, and the great figure of Evander:

Me pulsum patria pelagique extrema petentem

Fortuna omnipotens et ineluctabile Fatum

His posuere locis—                                    (Aen. vm, 333-5)

he thinks of them all and interprets them, and all that they have done in the beauty of the land, the growth of civilization, the development of character, the turning to account of work and pain and happiness. It is long since Matthew Arnold pronounced literature to be an interpretation of life—the noble and profound application of ideas to life; and other things are said. But Virgil’s work at least warrants Arnold’s view, and will never be quite understood without it.

The Aeneid some have reckoned a mistake, and cited the dying poet’s sense of incompleteness to support a shallow judgment. Here again the criticism chiefly reveals the critic—has he known an empire, a national history? Does he look only to youth, or are middle age and old age also part of life? Aeneas is no young Achilles; he has his barbarus has segetes written on his heart—et campos ubi Troia fuit—and Augustine’s line

                       Infelix simulacrum atque ipsius umbra Creusae;

he lives for no purpose of his own, Italiam non sponte sequor, ego poscor Qlympo; and he is tenderer than the old type of hero, witness the killing of Lausus, and pacem me exanimis. He becomes an interpretation of all Roman history. Into the story are woven— and they belong there, are an integral part of it—the great names of Rome, heroes and statesmen, the house of Julius with its great service of mankind, the Roman Empire (‘the best thing that Fortune ever did for the world,’ says Polybius), and the ‘unspeakable majesty of Roman peace.’ If Virgil’s interpretation of these things is true, the poem must have meaning for others than Romans; it must interpret the world, life, the human heart; it must be more philosophic, more in earnest, than any history. All this men through the centuries have found in the Aeneid, and it is still to be found there; but not by casual readers, nor in fragments. Poetry and Nature are not so read to any purpose; they ask for devotion and they repay it.