Nor can the whole story be told without some consideration of the vital forces at work in this period. If we think of the glories of the age of Augustus, literature under the Antonines and their successors seems plainly on the retrograde. It accompanies the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. No surging, national impulse prompts writers to their best, as in the days of Virgil. For all that, the conception of a world running down does inadequate justice to the age that led from Hadrian to Constantine. Historians give various reasons for the breaking up of Rome, but the summation of the factors that they discuss—political, military, economic (and epidemic)—leaves something unexplained. It is more profitable, while following these various changes or cata­strophes, to note the seeds of a new life that in spite of these, or along with these, was coming into being.

Here the fresh impulse comes from the East, and above all from Palestine. Greek and Roman religion had been hospitable long before to Oriental rites and ideas; under the Empire there came a second wave, spreading wider than the first. There was a conflict between the old and the new in pagan practice and there was a conflict between this modified paganism and Christianity. In the novelty of the Christian faith Celsus, Porphyry and Julian saw a menace to the Hellenistic civilization of their day and to the Empire of Rome. But the cleavage was not absolute. A reconciliation was in store, effected by the foundation of a new and Christian humanism in the fourth century. The period preceding, with which this chapter is concerned, was one of pregnant conflict.

Such is the background on which we may place the Latin literature of the second and third centuries of our era. Luckily no terms like ‘Golden Age’ or ‘Silver Latinity’ (or ‘Leaden Latinity’) have been applied to it by modern writers. We are free to identify its periods with the reigns of the different rulers or groups of these rulers. The Christian literature that demands our attention starts at the end of the second century. Though its founders are treated together in the account of the age of the Severi, Christians and pagans are not to be put in separate compartments. They were not in separate compartments when they wrote their works; they were citizens or subjects of the Roman Empire.

II.

THE AGE OF THE ANTONINES

 

The Latin literature of the Age of the Antonines is not lacking in interest, variety or novelty. Fronto, the arbiter litterarum of the day, was not aware that ancient culture was going into a decline. He well sustained the lineage of those critics who, from Cicero on, had laid down the law to their generations or their princes. Fronto’s theory of style, typified by the phrase elocutio novella, which is indeed his own, has been widely interpreted as an antiquarian attempt, something in the spirit of our Pre-Raphaelites, to go behind classic standards, to hunt out ancient words discarded by the purists, or popular words never accepted by them, and to make of those a quaint and novel style. A typical expression of this idea is given by Walter Pater in a passage of seductive beauty, though for just what elocutio novella means we go to Fronto.

Marcus Cornelius Fronto was born at Cirta in Numidia in the early years of the second century. He was presumably a Roman by descent, as his gentile name indicates, but his early training was in Greek literature rather than Roman. He probably studied at the famous schools of Alexandria, where rhetoric was the subject of his choice, and it remained the dominant influence in his career. He devoted himself, however, not to the profession of a rhetor, but, like Cicero, to a career in public life. He was a triumvir capitalisat Cirta, and always maintained an interest in the politics of his birthplace. Coming to Rome at the end of Hadrian’s reign he was made a senator. He went through the regular cursus honorum, with a quaestorship—like Cicero’s, again—in Sicily. Under Antoninus Pius he was consul suffectus in the same year, 143, that Herodes Atticus was consul ordinarius. If a philosopher was soon to become a king, Rhetoric at least controlled the consulate, as often in the past. Fronto was designated for a proconsulship in Asia, but the ailments from which he suffered prevented him from assuming that function. He remained in Rome, an ornament of the literary coteries of the day. His death occurred after 165 and probably before 169.

Such a career suggests in its outlines that of Cicero and prophesies that of Ausonius. Fronto’s speeches won him an immediate and, in antiquity, an enduring fame, not revived in modern times until Cardinal Angelo Mai brought to light the fragments of his works contained in a famous palimpsest of Bobbio. This was an unhappy discovery, think some, for Fronto’s reputation. Of late a more favourable view has rightly prevailed; for the Letters are among the treasures of Latin literature.

Shortly after Hadrian, in 138, had adopted Antoninus as his heir, with Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus to continue the line, Fronto was appointed tutor for the young princes. Most of the letters are written to Marcus, with some to Lucius, to the Emperor Antoninus and to other friends of high standing. Some few are in Greek. Such a correspondence lacks the scope of either that of Cicero or that of Pliny, but it contains what neither of these do, the outpouring of a singularly warm friendship, the love of a master for the pupil whose genius he was moulding, and the love of the pupil, aware of his destiny and grateful to his guide. The young prince does not hesitate to lavish on Fronto epithets of a most romantic sound, while Fronto can declare that nothing is sweeter to him than his pupil’s kiss. Such letters attest a high and noble element in the ancient affections of man for man; from its vice young Marcus, helped doubtless by his love of Fronto, had kept clear. He is spurred to his best because of him. ‘Amo vitam propter te, amo litteras tecum.’ He values him not so much for his mastery of rhetorical style as for his simplicity and his love of truth.

Thus the young philosopher cultivated rhetoric assiduously, for his master’s sake. There are touches of humour and banter in the talkings to and fro. The lad breaks out in joy at his master’s great consular speech and would give him a kiss for every section. He welcomes criticism and Fronto spares not the rhetorician’s rod. But he can mix praise with blame, encourage to further effort, worry all night about his pupil’s progress, and find at the last that in his twenty-second year Marcus has proved himself expert ‘in omni genere dicendi,’ conversant with all the liberal arts, and more important still, in the art of making friends. Rhetoric was not the whole of life for Fronto.

In his twenty-fifth year Marcus Aurelius declared open revolt against rhetoric. Fronto faced the situation bravely, and wrote for his pupil a little discourse de eloquently a rhetorical Mirror of the Prince—for a prince who had turned philosopher. Marcus, though fixed in his resolve, was touched by his tutor’s appeal and now worried about his health. He begged him to select for him the letters of Cicero that would best improve his style.

Fronto’s theory of style is not the construction of a mosaic from rare words quarried from the primitives. He studies the primi­tives—among others—not for the rare word, but for the right word, exact and striking and luminous. He spurns mere novelty for novelty’s sake, for he knows that like the sublime it may descend swiftly to the ridiculous. The orator must search and study. Not all the ancients have the clarion-note; some of them bellow or shriek, for the change of even a syllable or a letter may spoil the beauty of a phrase. Such principles of style are not preciously archaistic. There is no proclamation of a quaint new mode of writing. The term elocutio novella heralds no novel quaintness, but refers to that freshness of expression for which Fronto was always on the watch. Fronto’s interest in the early writers is as wholesome as that of Cicero, whose mind was steeped in the poetry of Ennius and the oratory of Gracchus, and who can admire verborum vetustas prisca, new turns of phrase and luminous expression. So Horace, though a modern of the moderns, bids the true poet hunt up in Cato or Cethegus words once bright but now caked with mould, and make them shine again. Fronto is not one of the archaizers, found in any age, of whom the younger Seneca said that they talk the Twelve Tables.

Against this sentimental cult of the antique, Fronto’s careful method seems like a deliberate protest. Hadrian, whom he could eulogize but not love, was guilty, as he puts it, of affecting a cloudy colouring of ancient eloquence. For Fronto, the count of mighty poets was not made up with those of the early Republic. He calls Lucretius sublime, and Horace a ‘memorable poet’ To Virgil he appeals as a master of nice distinctions in the use of words. The historians favoured by him are not merely those of the earliest period. Julius Caesar evokes his admiration for his imperial style. Sallust is quoted many times, and his rhetoric is minutely and admiringly analysed. In oratory, besides Sallust, Cato commands the enthusiasm of both master and pupil. But Cicero, too, the orator supreme, is an indispensable model in Fronto’s school. He may lack that patient search for the fitting word to which Fronto was devoted, but none excel him in the art of adorning his subject. Fronto declares in a phrase which the little Ciceronians of the Renaissance would have echoed with delight that Pompey deserved his title of ‘The Great’ not so much for his own achievements as for the speech on the Manilian Law. The orations of Cicero have the true clarion-call and nothing is more perfect than his letters.

But with Cicero Fronto’s training of the young orator stops. No use is made of the Augustan authors—despite Fronto’s reverence for Virgil—and those of the ‘Silver Age’ are mentioned only to be damned. Seneca, ironically called his master, is likened to a juggler, and Lucan is ridiculed for saying the same thing in seven different ways at the beginning of his poem on the Civil War. The rest with one exception are passed over in silence.

This means nothing less than a quiet Republican revolution in letters. One may naturally think of the Neo-Attic movement in Greek literature. Fronto’s first training was in Greek, and though the old Greek authors, with the exception of Homer, do not loom large in the Letters, he could not help knowing contemporary Greek writers associated with the court. Appian, the historian, was an intimate friend, to whom he writes in Greek, and Herodes Atticus, one of the leaders in the New Sophistic, was a fellow­tutor of young Marcus. But though his relations with Herodes were, on the whole, friendly, he would not have been disposed to adopt for the training of his imperial pupil in Latin style the method that his rival at court was exercising in Greek. In any case, his own doctrine reposed on a firmer basis than that of imitation. The influence of Neo-Atticism, which had started under Hadrian, may have affected him unawares, but Fronto’s own purpose was not to create a Roman Neo-Attic style to match that in vogue among the Greeks. He ridicules the ’quarrelsome’ style of Calvus, a professed Atticist, but calls that of Cicero ‘triumphant.’ Fronto’s aim is to return to the best standards of the Republic after the degeneracy of Imperial oratory, particularly in the age that had preceded his own. He does not, like certain authors of the Silver Age, shed tears over the decay of culture and on the connection of that decay with tyranny. His spirit is rather the confidence of a humanist in the forefront of a Renaissance than the wistfulness of a Pre-Raphaelite courting a primitive quaintness. With the ruler of the Empire as her pupil, Rhetoric will waken to a new life.

In Fronto’s own style there is nothing bizarre or recherche, and nothing especially distinguished, in the fragments of his speeches. They are in the ‘plain’ style according to Macrobius. In some of his rhetorical exercises, particularly in the Fable of Sleep, which Pater deemed worthy of translation in his exquisite style, there is curiously a breath of something new and romantic, a harbinger of Apuleius—but this is a passing mood. In his letters, though the model may not be directly his much-admired Cicero, he at least achieves, with differences from Cicero in phrasing and cadence, a plain and unaffected manner. He modestly declares that in his search for fresh and vivid language he achieves merely an obsolete or a vulgar diction. In other words, he deplores as a failing what some have described is the guiding principle of his style. There is no denying the presence of archaisms in his vocabulary and his grammar, but his purpose, whatever his success in achieving it, was to cultivate a living Latin, not to dig up dead Latin from its grave.

Fronto’s style befits his character—simple, kindly, conscient­ious, with touches of humour now and then. He speaks too profusely of his many ailments, but is just as solicitous about the health of his pupil. He is fond of his wife and of the ‘little chicks’ of Marcus; he is heartbroken when his own little grandson dies. He has a warm heart, possessing that virtue of philostorgia, the name and nature of which he had not found in Rome. He is devoted mind and soul to rhetoric and takes a natural pride in the training of his prince, but he has neither the little vanities of Pliny nor the large vanity of Cicero.

The age of the Antonines produced a number of learned men, some of them of the circle of Fronto. Among the grammarians were Aemilius Asper, a noted commentator on Virgil, Flavius Caper, and Statilius Maximus, who compared the rare expressions of Cato with those of Cicero—an undertaking quite in line with Fronto’s Republican interests. Helenius Aero annotated Terence and also that memorabilia poeta, Horace. Probably in this era Juba wrote on metrics, and a writer borrowing the name of Hyginus compiled his sorry book of fables. Julius Titianus, perhaps towards the end of this period, compiled a geographical work on the Roman provinces, and made a collection of rhetorical themes drawn from Virgil. The foremost scholars of the day were, of course, the jurists.

One man of miscellaneous learning, who deserves a modest place among the jurists, too, is Aulus Gellius, a younger contemporary of Fronto. Born we know not where or when, he studied at Rome under the grammarian Sulpicius Apollinaris, renowned in those days for his knowledge of Virgil and for his metrical periochae of Terence’s plays. Gellius’ teachers in rhetoric were Antonius Julianus and Titus Castricius. He writes pleasantly of the former master, who would sometimes hold his classes on the beach at Puteoli. Gellius would also call on Fronto, whose cultured conversations started him on the quest for the fitting word. He completed his studies by resorting to the philosophers of Athens. He also read widely in both the Greek and the Latin jurists, and held a minor judicial office. At Athens, he dined monthly with a little philosophical club and devoted his winter nights to making excerpts from a wide range of authors both Greek and Latin. In Fronto’s spirit he hunted words and he hunted, besides, anecdotes and marvels and maxims and customs and questions of law and any good subject for comment. These excerpts and comments he put together in a work called fittingly Attic Nights. After his return he worked in odd moments at his pleasant task. Twenty books were published and garnerings in plenty remained. His death occurred probably about the middle of the reign of Marcus Aurelius.

Gellius is of the tribe of the anecdotists, like Favorinus and Aelian and Athenaeus, though his work lacks both the richness and the system of the Deipnosophists. The anecdotes are jotted down with no attempt at orderly arrangement. He enlivens the treatment now and then with little dramatic dialogues, cast in some picturesque setting.

Gellius’ reading in both Latin and Greek is more catholic, or less discriminating, than Fronto’s. From Homer and Hesiod to Theocritus, from Parthenius to Plutarch and Appian, he sampled all that he could lay hands on. One might profitably arrange in chronological order the excerpts from the Latin authors; the value of his contribution to our knowledge of Latin literature would be set in striking relief. The quotations from Ennius alone make Gellius the rival of Cicero in preserving nearly all our significant fragments of the father of Latin poetry, and were it not for Gellius, our knowledge of the Romans’ love-poetry before Catullus would be well-nigh a blank. He rivals Cicero again in his citations of the laws of the Twelve Tables. He quotes plentifully from Cato and gives us valuable information about the works of Varro. He sketches the contemporaneous developments of Greek and Roman civilization through the Punic Wars, and he discourses on the meaning of humanitas in a passage with which all who write today on ancient humanism must reckon. Some of the anecdotes make the past suddenly alive with human interest.

Despite the breadth of Gellius’ reading, we find on examining his quotations, that his interests in Latin literature were virtually those of Fronto. Of the writers of the Silver Age there appears the same neglect. He finds Valerius Maximus, Pliny the Elder and Suetonius useful for anecdotes and marvels. He pays tribute to the greatest scholar of the Empire, Valerius Probus. As a Virgilian he cites Annaeus Cornutus, and as a more ardent student of philosophy than Fronto, he speaks highly of Musonius Rufus and Epictetus. He weighs the pros and cons for Seneca with a certain tolerance, but concludes that he is a bad model for the young. There is no word on Lucan or Persius, Juvenal or Tacitus: Gellius no less than Fronto champions a revival of Republican Rome in letters.

The prose of Gellius shows a quiet absence of style, as befits so learned a man. Like Fronto he is interested in ancient expressions and he consequently has certain seasonings of archaic phrases and constructions in his informal diction, but, like Fronto, he inveighs against those who either make a cult of antique usage or condescend to vulgarisms. The African quality in the style of either Fronto or Gellius is no longer the subject of ardent debate. Doubtless the early Republican Latinity introduced into Africa in 146 b.c. had developed certain local peculiarities in its subsequent history, but its literary centres were not shut off from Augustan and post-Augustan influences. The quest of ‘Africitas’ in the writers of the second century after Christ is as tempting, and as satisfying, as that of Livy’s ‘Patavinity’ or that of the spring of Bandusia on Horace’s farm. For the moment, at least, the matter rests with a non liquet. Fronto, born in Africa, had Rome as his social, and Republican Latin literature as his intellectual, milieu. Gellius, whom nothing whatsoever connects with Africa, was domiciled in Athens, Rome and Praeneste; spiritually he dwelt with a multitude of Greek writers, with those of Republican Rome—and with Virgil.

The simple character of the writer is stamped upon his work. He is a modest scholar, a bit pedantic, but by no means inhuman. He liked good dinners and pleasant talk. He was born to be a Fellow of an Academy—not its president, but its secretaire perpétuel.

The theories of Fronto in his search for a new and living Latin style found fruition in Apuleius. This writer stands on the same peak with Lucian and Marcus Aurelius. These three and these three alone among the writers of the Antonine Age have the spark of genius; these three alone have moulded the thought and inspired the literary art of subsequent centuries; and they alone are widely read today.

Apuleius was born of a well-to-do official at Madauros in Numidia about a.d. 124. He studied at Carthage and at Athens, quaffing the pleasant bowls, as he puts it, of the liberal arts, of poetry, of the natural sciences and of philosophy. He was initiated into various religious rites. His restless and curious temperament prompted him to wander far and wide in search of mystic cults and strange adventures. He would have consorted well with Germany’s Romantics, devoted to Sturm und Drang and Wanderlust. He could turn his ready wit to anything from a poem on tooth-powder to a scientific treatise on fishes or on magic. He came after his wanderings to the unescapable Rome and stayed there for a time. On his way back to his native region, he stopped at Oea in the Tripolitan district, where he married Aemilia Pudentilla the mother of his friend Pontianus, a lady of both more wealth and years than he. Jealous relatives brought suit against him for winning her affection by magical arts; and indeed he had a lively interest in magic,—damnabilis curiositas St Augustine calls it. He conducted his own defence—his speech bears the title Apologia—before the proconsul Claudius Maximus at Sabrata. He then returned to Madauros, spending the rest of his days there or at Carthage. He enjoyed the fame of many an oratorical triumph, commemorated by statues erected in his honour at Carthage and elsewhere. But he also devoted his best energies to the interpretation of Plato. The battle between Rhetoric and Philosophy, decided in different ways by Fronto and Marcus Aurelius, was for him but the stirring of a nature hospitable to both. A statue set up to him in his native place bore the title that he most prized, Philosophus Platonicus.

Were we not so uncertain as to the dates of the writings of Apuleius, both of those preserved and of the many that have not reached us—in Greek and in Latin, in poetry and in prose—it would be tempting to bisect his life, like that of Boccaccio and that of Marcus Aurelius, into a distraught, exuberant youth and a sober, philosophic maturity. The date of the trial at which his Apologia, full of autobiographical detail’s, was presented, falls between 155 and 158. He probably, though not surely, composed his great Romance, the Metamorphoses, in Rome. That work, too, reflects his own experience, seen as in a glass, im­pressionistically, much as personal allegory shines through the Eclogues of Virgil. It were rash to take any detail in it as biographical fact, but in essence it records the journeyings of a soul through carnal adventures into a mystic peace. It is Apuleius of Madauros who, in the person of his hero Lucius, becomes in the end a pastophoros of Osiris. He had lived on at least through part of the joint-reign of Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus. A century or two later he would possibly have atoned for poetry and other youthful sins by ending his days as a bishop, in the odour of sanctity and the arms of the Church.

The Apologia, besides showing the speaker’s mastery of law and his ability to conduct a defence, bespeaks his wide acquaintance with the writers, both Greek and Latin, of poetry and prose. His range is as wide as that of Aulus Gellius and, though his quotations may not number as many, his understanding, especially of poetry and philosophy, is deeper. He is moved to cite the ancients by the charges of his prosecutor Aemilianus, a man of little learning in Latin and none in Greek, whom he smothers under a blanket of urbane culture. His pungent wit recalls Cicero’s treatment of Caecilius, his dummy opponent in the trial of Verres. The cultivated Claudius Maximus must have enjoyed himself at this trial—and it was a warm day for Aemilianus.

The orator’s favourites among the Latin authors, not to mention his acquaintance with the whole stretch of Greek literature, are not only the primitives, but Caesar, Catullus, Calvus, Ticidas, Hortensius, Sallust, Varro, Nigidius Figulus, and Tibullus, Propertius, Virgil. The Silver Age passes unnoticed, but the verse of Hadrian and of his friend Vocontius appear. In short, this is the Republican programme of Fronto, which Apuleius encountered at Rome.

The style of the Apologia shows Cicero’s fluency as its argu­ments show his wit. Apuleius characterizes the different orators much in the manner of Fronto. The Apologia, as a specimen of the genus iudiciale, has fewer oratorical flights than appear in the Florida, a collection of extracts from epideictic speeches, which exhibit the manner of the wandering sophists of the period. Whatever of Africa they may contain, the breath of Asia is surely there.

In his last period may perhaps belong the works on Platonic philosophy. That entitled De Deo Socratis treats of the demon of , Socrates in connection with the whole world of daimones that appears in Plato’s Timaeus. The ambitious subject of the work De Flatone et eius dogmate, is Plato’s entire philosophy, considered under three heads—natural science, dialectics and ethics. The second part of these divisions is lost. What remains, taken with remarks on Plato elsewhere, is nearer to Plato than is sometimes asserted: it all depends on the proper interpretation of the Timaeus, which from the time of Cicero onwards was taken literally, with but small allowance for the divine playfulness of its author. But of the Neoplatonic hierarchies, ecstasies and necro­mancies which one might expect to find, there is little trace. Apuleius was also devoted to Aristotle. By him may be a translation of the treatise De Mundo ascribed to Aristotle, and a translation of the De Interpretatione. Among the writings that have not come down to us are works on the liberal arts, which then as to Boethius and to medieval thinkers were indissolubly connected with the crown of them all, philosophy. Other works, on philosophical, scientific and historical subjects, along with love-poems and another romance have likewise perished. The style of the philo­sophical works preserved is appropriately simpler than that of the orations. Besides, various works by other writers eventually were attributed to him—for his name had acquired authority.

The philosophical programme of Apuleius was apparently that of Cicero before him and that of Boethius after him, to make the best of Greek philosophy accessible to Roman readers. And, whatever his defects as an expounder of the philosophy of Plato, we may grant him his coveted title of Platonicus for his remark that ‘we of the household of Plato care for nothing that is not festal and joyous and solemn and high and celestial.’

The masterpiece of Apuleius, the Metamorphoses, is a composite of two literary forms. Into the frame of a romance, such as had been invented in Hellenistic times and popular under the Empire, he set a number of Milesian tales, spiced with ribaldry, sorceries, robberies and horrors. But the best of these stories, that of Cupid and Psyche, more of a medieval fairy tale than a Greek myth, is pure and sweet in tone. Its quality shines the brighter from the gruesome setting in which it is placed—an art that both Ovid and Boccaccio, an admirer of Apuleius, well understood. The story of a youth metamorphosed into an ass had been told by one Lucius of Patrae and perhaps by the great Lucian himself, of whose work a crude epitome still survives. Whatever the relation of Apuleius to his models, he has produced a structure of his own with touches of allegory and autobiography, as we have seen, that do not disturb the general design. Behind it is a mind not obsessed with romantic cravings, but master of itself, and of literary art, with careful planning, dramatic suspense, suasoriae, parody—even of Virgil— and delicate satire—even of the gods. Yet it is a kindly mind, with sympathy for men and beasts. It enjoys good fun and a laugh at its own expense. It is a religious mind, that cleanses off its own pollutions somewhat as Virgil’s shepherds cease their ribaldries when they begin their contest of song. The high mysticism, the high purity, and the gorgeous liturgy in which the progress of the soul culminates, sets forth in a sincere and alluring form the modes of cult and devotion against which the faith of Christians had to contend and over which it triumphed.

The style of this masterpiece is suited to the theme. The writer apologizes—-it is a mock apology—for the rude and exotic Latinity, which he, a poor Grecian, had picked up in Rome. No learned parade of his reading is made. No authors except great and typical figures, like Homer and Pythagoras, are mentioned. Words and sentences are humble, caught from the lips of the common people—of Africa, need we say? Diminutives abound, as in the low Latin whence Italian is derived. But the language is not really crude; it is fused with colour and with poetry. We may adapt a phrase of his own to describe it—‘picture Babylonica miris coloribus variegata.’ Some of the expressions, not found elsewhere, may well be the inventions of the author. Assonance and rhyme abound. Stretches of such prose, like the prose of George Meredith in his lyric moods, could be cut up into decent free verse; the flow of the sentence sets itself many a time to music. This is the manner that Fronto had imperfectly attempted in his Fable of Sleep. It is wholly different from its author’s oratorical and philosophical styles and leagues away from Cato or anything archaic. Nor is it a reflex of Neoatticism, though Apuleius in his literary feeling was half Greek. It is the proper diction for romance, and Apuleius is its great perfecter.

One element in the spiritual make-up of this curious and many-sided genius should not be forgotten. Apuleius was African by birth, Athenian by training, Oriental by his contact with the mystic cults, but also, by the magnetism of the City, an inhabitant of Rome. His mind dwelt reverently, as the Apologia shows, in various epochs of the Roman past. And the deity that comes to Lucius in a vision gives him a blessing of which the old formula ‘quod bonum felix faustumque sit’ is a part. But we are not listening to a magistrate opening an assembly. A priest is absolving a penitent’s soul—‘quod felix itaque ac faustum salutareque tibi sit.’ A new world has entered with the simple change of ‘bonum’ to ‘salutare.’

The interests of the circle of Fronto found expression in poetry as well as prose. The poets of the day, so far as the scanty frag­ments of their works permit a judgment, cultivated a simple vivid style and the shorter forms of verse, in which some novelties appear. As harbingers of the new movement we may regard the Emperor Hadrian and his friend Florus, who exchanged trifles of an Anacreontic nature that of a sudden could set forth true pathos, as in the Emperor’s address to his dying soul—‘pallidula, rigida, nudula.’

One of the Antonine poets is pleasantly pictured by Aulus Gellius—Annianus. This gentleman possessed an estate in the Faliscan territory in Etruria, where Gellius dined with him. The poet could talk learnedly of the effect of the waning moon on oysters, quoting Lucilius; he could cite Plautus and Terence on the proper accentuation of certain words, and he admired Virgil— here are traits that bespeak the age of Fronto. He also wrote Fescennine verse presumably of a salacious sort. It is cited by Ausonius in his apology for his own indecent Cento Nuptialis. Annianus also composed, apparently with his estate in mind, what he called a carmen Faliscum, modelled on the work of Septimius Serenus, the inventor of this form. Since Serenus was a recent writer for Terentianus Maurus, all three poets were contemporaries, or very nearly so, with Terentianus the last in the series.

Terentianus Maurus performed what at first would seem a highly unpoetical task in writing a metrical treatise on metre (de Litteris, Syllabis, Metris) with each metre described in specimens of itself. But the poet, a master of his subject, is amazingly skilful in turning technicalities into neat verse. He must have smiled frequently at his success. He pursues the theory that the dactylic hexameter and the iambic trimeter contain the other forms of verse in embryo, and he deftly assists at their delivery. His chief sources are Virgil, Horace, and Catullus, but he uses the primi­tives too, such as Livius Andronicus, and though generally eschewing the authors of the Silver Age, does not disdain examples from Pomponius Secundus, the tragedian of the time of Tiberius, and from Petronius. Interest in metre would lead Terentianus farther afield than Pronto, but the scope of his reading in poetry is virtually the same, and he seems to be speaking with Fronto’s voice in his encomiums of the ‘striking’—novitas inopina.

The verse of Septimius Serenus that Annianus renamed Faliscan consists of three dactyls followed by a pyrrhic or an iambus—more easily read as a half of a dactylic hexameter (up to the penthemimeral caesura) plus a proceleusmatic. The fragment describes the proper mode of mating the vine and the elm:

quando flagella iugas, ita iuga,

vitis et ulmus uti simul eant: n

am nisi sint paribus fruticibus,

umbra necat teneras Amineas.               

It looks as though Serenus had composed a new Georgies in a really rustic verse. In fact we are told by Marius Victorinus that this measure was called calabrion by the Greeks because it was used by Calabrian peasants in their country songs—all at once we have a glimpse of the folk-poetry of Magna Graecia. Another fragment in which the verse extends to the hephthemimeral caesura of the dactylic hexameter—

                   Inquit amicus ager domino—

is evidently from the same poem. For Maurus, who cites it as one of his exempla novella, calls the work plainly a didactic poem on the country. Elsewhere in his ‘dulcia opuscula’ he uses three choriambs plus a bacchius:

             Iane pater, Iane tuens, dive biceps, biformis.

Or the second choriamb in such a line may be replaced by two iambi:

              cui reserata mugiunt aurea claustra mundi—

a graceful line of rapid movement. It is not certain that all these bits and others in other metres amassed from other sources are from this new Georgies of Serenus, but it is clear that he experimented with novel and light-moving forms of verse, some of which were tried later by Boethius. In fact Jerome can rank Serenus with Pindar, Alcaeus, Horace and Catullus as the pagan lyric bards of whom King David the Psalmist is a Christian peer. If this utterance of Jerome, no mean connoisseur of ancient letters, be given full credit, we have lost in Septimius Serenus a lyric poet worthy to be named with Horace and Catullus.

One more member of this circle of the moderns may be mentioned—Alfius Avitus. He wrote not long before Maurus several books on Excellentes, ‘Heroes,’ in iambic dimeters. Priscian quotes from the second book of this work a fragment from the story of the faithless schoolmaster of Falerii who marched his pupils over to the Romans and whom, by order of Camillus, his pupils flogged back.

Turn literatos creditos

Ludo Faliscum liberos

Causatus in campi patens

Extraque muri ducere.

Spatiando paulatim trahit

Hostilis ad valli latus.

This poet, a modern with eyes on the past, seems to have anticipated Macaulay’s plan of celebrating the heroes of his country—here Camillus—not in an epic but in lays of ancient Rome.

We may turn from these tantalizing fragments to a poem complete, or nearly so, and one of the most remarkable in the whole range of Latin verse, the Pervigilium Veneris. Not all would agree that it is a product of the Antonine Age, where Walter Pater and others have put it; in fact there has been something of a drift since Pater’s time towards the assumption of a later date—but none of the later dates proposed has been definitely established. It may be said, with due caution, that nothing in the atmosphere, style or grammar of the poem jars with the age of Fronto and Apuleius or with the poetry just discussed.

But waiving all questions of date and authorship, we may centre our attention on the poem itself. It is included in an anthology of occasional verse contained in the famous Codex Salmasianus, which was put together at Carthage, about a.d. 532. That is not proof that the poem was written in Africa. In the Salmasianus the poem bears at the beginning the phrase ‘sunt vero versus xxii,’ which means not that the poem had twenty-two verses (it has ninety-three) or twenty-two strophes, but that there were twenty-two poems in the division of the anthology that it heads. The presence of the frequent refrain:

            cras amet qui numquam amavit quique amavit cras amet

would induce some omissions or transpositions, and a gap in the sense at line 58 makes some adjustment necessary. Some scholars assume that the original form presented a subtle series of strophes and antistrophes in the manner of a Greek ode, some would divide it into quatrains, a theory alluringly set forth by Dr Mackail, and some would note a series of irregular strophes which present an orderly succession of poetic ideas.

Assuming but a few changes in our present text, we have the following sequence: The poet announces the festival of Venus, which will take place on the morrow. He praises the spring, the season of love. Tomorrow is the bridal of the earth and sky, when the sea gave birth to Venus. She is the universal spirit of generation. She is also the mother of the Romans, whose royal race she has preserved from Romulus to the present Caesar. She brightens the spring with roses, sprinkling their virgin buds with dew. On the morrow the rose will reveal its own crimson, and become a bride in pure and single wedlock. The goddess orders the Nymphs into the groves and Cupid escorts them. They are afraid of his arrows, so he goes naked and unarmed. Beware of him, however! Cupid when naked is armed cap-à-pie. Venus now sends the virgins to implore the virgin Diana to refrain from the chase during the festival. The appeal succeeds. One may now see for three nights joyous troops in the woods, making merry in their myrtle-trimmed huts. The goddess has her throne adorned with the flowers and holds her Court of Love. The spirit of Venus now spreads throughout the countryside. In the country her boy Cupid was born. All the beasts of the field, all the birds of the air feel her presence. The raucous cry of the swans is heard in the ponds, the nightingale sings joyously in the poplar’s shade. But the poet has no joy, no love, no spring. He has only silence and the despite of the Muse. Amyclae was ruined for its silence, and silence has ruined the poet.

Loveless hearts shall love tomorrow, hearts that have loved shall love again?

The poem with its supple verse, gorgeous colouring and mystic over-tones is fittingly called by Dr Mackail ‘one of the finest flowers of Latin poetry.’ It accords with Hadrian’s interest in the cult of Venus; it is what a poet, growing old and sad, might well have written when Hadrian was about to pass off the scene, or a few years later. It is not liturgy, though there is perhaps a suggestion of liturgy mingled with reflection and seasoned with memories of Virgil, of Lucretius and possibly of Catullus. Its style in poetry suggests what Apuleius achieved in the prose of romance.

The Age of the Antonines, so far as Latin literature is concerned, means the reign of Antoninus Pius and the earlier part of that of Marcus Aurelius. They both were men of culture and patrons of learning, but Fronto’s pupil, ‘the only Emperor who had mastered the schemata, renounced the pomps and vanities of rhetoric and applied himself with equal zeal to the business of State and the perfection of a Stoic character. He rendered unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and unto the Infinite the things that are the Infinite’s, preparing his soul as conscientiously for its extinction as a Christian prepares his for its immortality. Had he lived a century or two later, he doubtless would have ended his days in a monastery; his spiritual experience was, unknown to himself, typical of the great revolution then slowly and surely at work in all society. The colleague and adoptive brother of Marcus Aurelius, Lucius Verus, had a good education and Fronto had made him, too, an orator, but his insignificant career ended in a.d. 169. Under Commodus there was little hope for the Muses. The descent from the philosopher-king to the king-gladiator, his son, one of the ‘little chicks’ of whom Fronto was fond, is one of the painful ironies of history.

III.

 THE AGE OF THE SEVERI AND THE RISE OF CHRISTIAN LATIN LITERATURE

The year before the accession of Septimius Severus saw the brief reigns of Pertinax and Didius Julianus. Had the former, a sturdy soldier and ex-schoolteacher—himself taught by Sulpicius Apollinaris—lived to establish the ancient discipline, as he desired, a revival of Roman integrity in literature as in the State might well have occurred, but his utter absence of tact led to his fall. Septimius Severus, a harsh, though firm and conscientious, ruler, was well- versed in both the Greek and the Latin authors, and in law. He had some interest in philosophy, which for him included astrology, and encouraged by his wife, the Syrian Julia Domna, displayed a strong and superstitious devotion to African and Oriental cult? He wrote an autobiography, now lost, which although he was born in Leptis Magna, and spoke Latin with an African accent, may not have been a monument of ‘Africitas’ in its style. For the Emperor felt himself most Roman. He condemns Clodius Albinus, another African and his rival for the throne, who had ‘ busied his senility with old-wives’ tales and literary nonsense like those Punic Milesian novels of his beloved Apuleius’. One may possibly detect in the animadversions of the Roman Septimius a note of revolt against the school of Fronto. At this time, or per­haps somewhat earlier, Julius Titianus wrote imaginary letters of illustrious women on the plan of Ovid’s Heroides, but in prose. His prose was so closely modelled on that of Cicero’s Letters that he gained from the Frontonians the title of the orator’s ape. Titianus may have belonged to a party of opposition—his return to Ovid is significant.

The poetry of this period has nothing to show but mimes and centos, nor did the reigns of terror under Caracalla and Elagabalus, separated by a brief respite under Macrinus, produce anything of note in letters.

In Severus Alexander a humanist, if not a philosopher, became king. This monarch was well trained in the liberal arts and created a literary circle about him—‘amavit litteratos homines vehementer’ observes his biographer. Among them was the Greek writer Cassius Dio, who was at once administrator and historian. Latin was the language of the eminent jurists, Aelius Gordianus, Paul and Ulpian, the orators Claudius Venacus and Catilius Severus, and the historian Encolpius. Severus himself was capable of metrical quips in Greek, recalling, but not equalling, the jeux d'esprit of Hadrian, and he wrote, we know not whether in Greek or in Latin, verses on the lives of good emperors. A quotation from Persius made by the Emperor may indicate that the tide was turning in the direction of the neglected ‘Silver Age,’ though there is little additional evidence of this sort. Sammonicus Serenus in his well-turned poem on medicine quotes Ennius, Plautus, Titinius, Varro, Lucretius, Horace and Livy and his verse is formed on that of Virgil. If this is a representative list, the favourites of this poet are still within the circle of Fronto’s authors. Such is the meagre crop from the plentiful seeds of liberal culture sown by Severus Alexander.

The Christian Church had no need of a literature for the first century or more of its existence. The new community pursued an underground existence until it came in conflict with the religion of the State. It throve in silence under persecution and at last found a voice to protest. The first apologies in the bilingual Roman world were in Greek. In the reigns of Hadrian and the Antonines at least a dozen of them appeared.

Africa is the cradle of Christian Latin literature and its father is Q. Septimius Florens Tertullianus. Born a pagan at. Carthage c. 150—160, trained in the same school of rhetoric as Apuleius, he was well-versed in Greek and Latin letters, in philosophy, and in law. A fiery, honest and original spirit, Tertullian reacted against ancient culture, married a Christian wife and is said to have become a priest of the Church. With Rome as his centre of authority he defended true doctrine against pagans, Jews and heretics. Disgusted at the laxness of Rome’s bishop he embraced the hyperascetic régime of the followers of Montanus and the revelations of the Paraclete vouchsafed to them alone. He broke with this heresy and founded one of his own. For all his divagations he was recognized as the founder of Occidental theology. Jerome includes him in his history of the Eminent Men of the Church, omitting mention of his works, ‘since everybody knows them.’ He flourished in the reigns of Septimius Severus and Caracalla, and lived to a decrepit old age. In contrast with the pagan writers of that period, Tertullian had something to say.

Among Tertullian’s earlier works there are defences of the faith against the pagans, consolations for martyrs, instructions on matters of Christian living, a general attack on heretics (De Praescriptione Haereticorum) and on Jews. Those that follow show his growing repugnance to the carnal-minded (psychici) and his hatred of heresy is directed against the sects of the day, save that into which he was drifting. The diverse errors of Hermogenes on the eternity of matter, of the gnostics (Adversus Valentinianos), of Marcion and of the Monarchianists (Adversus Praxeani) are all laid low. His De Anima, a startling defence of the corporeality of the soul, shows the lengths to which Tertullian’s contempt of the gnostics’ shadowy spirituality could go. Pendants to this scholarly treatise—of interest in the history of science as well as of religion—are the works De Carne Christi and the De Resurrectione Carnis. Some of the writings not extant were written in Greek, in which he might have written all his works, had he felt so inclined. Among these the loss of the seven books De Ecstasiis especially deplorable. They would have shown us how this foe of sentimentality had none the less an inner eye for visions, and why he could chide the Church for obtuseness when the Spirit would guide it into new truth.

Considered as literary products, the works of Tertullian suggest Cicero and Seneca as their chief models for both subject and form. De Patientia, like De Clementia or De Amicitia, is a philosophical essay, though the writer is a priest instructing catechumens, not a man of letters conducting a conversazione. The apologetic works are arguments for the defence, like those in Cicero’s orations. Ad Nationes, written to the pagans at large, refutes their slanders and attacks their superstitions. The Apologeticum written in the latter part of the year 197 to provincial magistrates who tried cases against Christians, is addressed to an imaginary court. The charge that Tertullian refutes is that the Christians are disloyal to the State and to the Emperor, its head. The answer is that they best render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s by invoking in his behalf the blessing of the one true God. The praise of the Emperor at the expense of the gods in this great and simple passage is suggestive of the tone in which Richelieu addressed his monarch. With the same learning and the same mastery of the law that Apuleius had shown in his own apologia, speaks outwith an intensity prompted by the graver danger and the nobler cause. At the same time he has by no means renounced Rhetoric with other pomps of the world. He is as honest as she allows him to be. The Christian arid the Sophist engage his spirit in a new suasoria and the Sophist too often wins the day.

The Apologeticum is of all Tertullian’s works the most carefully composed and the best mirror of his mind, with its weaknesses and its strength. Despite his legal and rhetorical quibblings there is enough sound sense in the work to convert an intelligent pagan to the reality of Christian life, although the attack here and elsewhere on the pagan culture in which Tertullian had been reared is bitter and persistent. It was not the moment for a Christian humanism when smouldering animosities broke forth into active persecution. He would not court the sympathy of pagans by attempting a harmony between their poets and philosophers and the writers of Sacred Scripture. Rather, in the words of St Paul, ‘the wisdom of this world is as foolishness with God,’ and a professor of the classics a near neighbour to idolatry. Yet once delivered of this epigram Tertullian draws the distinction between the teacher and the taught and wellnigh admits that the knowledge of literature is a necessary equipment for life. One bond there is between the ancient world and Christianity: it is that ‘testimony of the naturally Christian soul’ that common people, in calling on the name of God, have offered to His existence and His goodness. But Tertullian holds out no hand to the past. His final argument, addressed to the proconsul Scapula in 212-213 and repeated later by Lactantius in his De Mortibus Persecutorum, is that the persecuting magistrates have drawn upon themselves the wrath of God and perished violently.

The authors whom Tertullian had read in the schools of Carthage are not completely indicated in his writings, for he quotes mainly to refute them or to gather from them evidence of the superstitions and immoralities of paganism or to show how much better were the men of old than their gods. It is evident at least that he was versed in Greek as well as in Latin literature, though some, perhaps many, of his references are at second hand. The names of Ovid, Tacitus, Suetonius and Pliny the Younger among his authors suggest that Fronto’s boundary has been passed. The crucial instance is Seneca, who not only is quoted several times but called saepe noster.

The seekers of the tumor Africus have a happy hunting-ground in Tertullian. He is African by birth and temperament. He visited Rome, but eluded its attraction and broke with the Roman Church. His style should a priori reveal African traits. A plausible list of these has been assembled, yet the influence of his study of Greek and of the law and of the rhetorical tradition should not be forgotten. Despite his archaisms his oratorical model is not the simple Cato. His longer sentences are almost strophes with parallelisms, assonances, rhymes and metrical clausulae. We must reckon also with his fondness for Seneca, and a trace of the gorgeously romantic colouring of Apuleius may perhaps be detected here and there, particularly in the De Pallio. He has been called in a clever epigram ‘a barbarizing Tacitus,’ but the phrase, like some epigrams, is faulty in both its parts. Tertullian was not a barbarian, and he certainly did not model his style on that of Tacitus, whom he called, in an epigram of his own, no tacit person but a mendacious chatter-box. He started, like Tacitus, with the rhetoric of the schools, breaking through it, as Tacitus did in a different way, by the force of his native genius. At its best, his style is straightforward, strong and simple, the product of honest conviction and Christian humility. The Paraclete gave him at the right moment what he should say. He coins new words. His is a living and a growing language. It contains in the germ those two antithetic styles, the ornate and the plain, which are displayed in the history of Christian Latin literature, sometimes in the work of the same writer, for instance Fortunatus, down into and through the Middle Ages.

Judged solely as a man of letters, Tertullian, like Jerome, deserves a high rank among the writers of satire. If he is not a barbarizing Tacitus he may well be entitled a Christian Juvenal. Like Juvenal, he did not hesitate to call a spade a spade. His invective is no less tart, as when he describes the theatre as the Devil’s church, or the Bishop of Rome as pastor moechorum, or when he scolds the belles of Carthage—who, doubtless, loved to hear him scold—for dosing their hair with saffron like victims led to the altar, or when he ridicules the first families of Carthage for objecting to his use of the simple pallium—the national garb before their ancestors surrendered to Rome. Philosophers, professors and heretics all deal in shams, which Tertullian mercilessly blasts. Marcion, as a higher critic, ‘ emends Holy Scripture with the sword rather than the pen,’ and Praxeas, the Patripassionist, doubly distasteful to Tertullian on account of his opposition to Montanism, ‘exiled the Paraclete and crucified the Father.’ Such are the thrusts of sarcasm and wit that enliven many a page in Tertullian.

If, further, we take satire in the larger and ancient sense of the word, Tertullian presents little pictures of daily life both Christian and pagan that are of both human interest and historical importance. What to the pagan onlooker seemed, like Lucretius’ flock of sheep on the distant hill-side, a unified group—a group of subversive fanatics—becomes in the pages of Tertullian a little world of discords in faith and in practice no less pronounced than those that exist today. Yet the discords resolve in a harmony of assurance. ‘We are of yesterday, and yet we now fill the world.’ It is a new world in religion and in morality, with, for instance, a conception of the sacrament of marriage, only adumbrated before, that makes a conjoint pagan and Christian household unthinkable. Finally, though the satire of Tertullian, like the satire of Juvenal, is inspired by a saeva indignatio, it has its moments of tenderness and sympathy without which invective loses its force. For instance, he has nothing but praise for the real and simple Rome of old, or for the instinctively Christian soul that through the clouds of idolatry beheld a vision of God.

Tertullian is a character for tragedy. He, the scholarly defender of the Church against its enemies without and within, the founder of its theology and its language in the West, the apostle of a pure religion and undefiled, read himself out of the ranks by his very devotion to Christian revelation. With all his honesty, vigour and common sense, he could not escape the sophistic habit of mind. With all his devotion to tradition, his acceptance of the new prophecy transferred the seat of authority to the individual soul. The Church excluded Tertullian not for his Puritanism, but for his Protestantism. His confident reading of the Paraclete’s messages engendered that self-will or hybris that brings a high-minded hero to his fall.

The simple style appropriate for Christian humility, attained by Tertullian in some moments, appears in a rare monument of his times, an account of the martyrdom of two Roman maidens, Perpetua and Felicitas, who suffered death with several of their friends in the persecution of 202-3. Perpetua had recorded the events up to the moment of her death, and some writer of Montanistic leanings, possibly Tertullian himself, published the little work, happily leaving its plainness unadorned. Perpetua deserves a place with the heroines of tragedy. When her father, a Roman of high station, asked her to recant, she said, ‘Father, do you see that pitcher there?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Can it be called by any other name than that which it has?’ ‘No.’ ‘Then I cannot call myself other than what I am, a Christian.’ When the beasts attacked her in the amphitheatre, she pulled her torn garment about her, mindful of her modesty rather than her pain. When brought out again, she bound her scattered locks neatly, ‘for it was not proper for a martyr to loosen her hair, lest she seem to mourn at the moment of her glory.’ This is not the ‘theatrical’ death of Christians .that offended Marcus Aurelius.

This brief document, as sincere as a Gospel, is the first of its kind in Christian Latin literature. It is the sort of record that lay before Prudentius when he composed the simpler of his poems— like that on St Eulalia—in honour of the Martyrs' Crowns.

Minucius Felix, no less eminent than Tertullian in the history of Christian Latin literature, reflects a different social entourage and most probably a different imperial regime. Like Tertullian he was a pagan at the start and probably a native of Africa. After an excellent education, wherever received, he settled in Rome, perhaps early in the third century, and acquired fame in the law.

Minucius’ apology (the Octavius) takes the form of a dialogue, so artistically constructed that its apologetic contents seem incidental. The subject is the conversion, after the debate, of his friend Caecilius Natalis, who may be the M. Caecilius Natalis or his father Quintus who figure in an inscription of the early third century found at Cirta. Cirta was Fronto’s birthplace and Fronto’s attack on the Christians is answered in the dialogue. The work is named from the third speaker, Octavius Januarius. The debate, whether actual or imaginary, is placed in the past, as in some of the dialogues of Cicero. It is impossible, therefore, to find in the association with Fronto’s speech an argument for the date of the work itself.

The setting of the dialogue is presented with no little charm. The three friends are strolling on the shore at Ostia. A reverential kiss blown by Caecilius to a statue of Serapis starts the debate, in which, with an admixture of Epicurean science and Neo-academic scepticism, he assaults the immoralities and credulities of the Christian sect. He then defends the old religion—in the new form that had welcomed Serapis—with that tenderness for traditions to which a sceptical mind sometimes resorts. Octavius, in reply, asserts the eternal Providence, which even the humble can know and which pagan poets and philosophers no less than the Holy Scriptures have attested. The absurd superstitions attributed falsely to Christians are more than matched by the myths about the gods, who all, as Euhemerus showed, were nothing but men of renown deified by their admirers. The real life of Christians, their true and simple worship, their bravery in affliction, their sure hope of a resurrection are presented with a quiet fervour that wins Caecilius. Minucius finds it unnecessary to play his part of arbiter, and the three friends go on their way rejoicing. The controversy ends in a smile, like Horace’s satire and Cicero’s debate on the training of the orator—‘laeti hilaresque discessimus.’

With the art that conceals art, Minucius has covered in this dialogue the range of ancient history and Greek philosophy. He knows his authors, especially the Romans, intimately, though he mentions or cites but few. In the phrase: ‘sed quatenus indulgentes insano atque inepto labori ultra humilitatis nostrae terminos evagamur et in terram proiecti caelum ipsum et ipsa sidera audaci cupiditate transcendimus’, a familiar echo of Virgil and two echoes of Horace catch the ear. If the reader will turn to the edition of the learned Boenig, he will note reminiscences, or possible reminiscences, of virtually all the chief authors of Rome from Ennius to Tacitus and Juvenal. ‘Quid gentilium litterarum dimisit intactum?’ remarks Jerome. As in Tertullian, Fronto’s literary prescriptions have no more weight. Seneca, unnamed, is present. The epigram ‘Nobody can be as poor as when he was born’ comes from him and the chapter in which it occurs and that following are shot through with phrases of Seneca wisely conjoined with those of St Paul. The cultivated pagan reader who knew his Seneca might well be tempted to search the Christian scriptures.

Above all, the master of Minucius Felix is Cicero. The plan of the work is modelled on the De Natura Deorum, hardly a page fails to contain some glance at the arguments and the spirit of Cicero’s works. The omission of Cicero’s name, like that of Seneca’s, is not an attempt to conceal the writer’s borrowings, but an invitation to compare. With balanced periods and metrical clausulae his is a Ciceronian style, with some flavour of Seneca and Tertullian. If Tertullian is the founder of Christian Latinity, Minucius is the first in the line of Christian Ciceros.

Pleased by the style of the Octavius, a pagan reader would also admire its dramatic character. The surrender of Caecilius is no foregone conclusion. He is allowed to argue with learned acumen and with an almost blasphemous satire at the expense of the Christian’s transcendent God. Indeed, Minucius goes so far in his tolerance towards the adversary that he has been accused himself either of an ignorance of Christian dogma or of the delicate scepticism of a Renan. But Minucius is not telling his readers the whole story. He is tempting them to enquire further. As St Paul cites ‘certain of your own poets,’ so Minucius summons Virgil and the host of Greek philosophers to testify to the indwelling presence of  Christ nor any exposition of the inner articles of the Christian faith need surprise us no more than the failure to name Seneca or Cicero. He is not addressing some persecuting emperor or proconsul nor the anima naturaliter Christiana of humble folk, but presenting the new faith as worthy the attention of an anima naturaliter philosophica. There is finally, perhaps, an autobiographic element in the dialogue of Minucius. The debate between his two friends is one that at some time had gone on in his own mind.

The work of Minucius best suits the times and the entourage of the tolerant Severus Alexander. Though the writer is ap­parently unacquainted with Clement of Alexandria, who was evidently unacquainted with him, the two are peers in their courteous treatment of the pagan past. Minucius may have borrowed from Tertullian much of his information about pagan rites and superstitions, abstaining from giving his source as he abstained from citing Cicero, Seneca and numerous other pagans, but the supposition of an earlier source, and that a Latin source, used independently by Tertullian and Minucius has too quickly been ruled out of court.

The brief dialogue of Minucius was not awarded the influence that its merits deserved. It has come down to us in only one manuscript, in which it appears as a final book of the very different work of Arnobius—a torso, perhaps, of a collection of the Latin apologetes. Lactantius and Jerome recognized its importance, but with the works of these founders of Christian humanism on a grander scale at hand, the tiny masterpiece of Minucius passed from view. Boethius, too, in his Consolatio Philosophiae furnished the Middle Ages with a more sumptuous example of a philosophical approach to Christian revelation. For all that, the uniqueness of the Octavius remains.

IV.

FROM THE SEVERI TO VALERIAN

 

In the age of varied turmoil that succeeded the momentary calm of the reign of Severus Alexander, polite letters did not wholly disappear. The Historia Augusta states that the Younger Maximinus, a beautiful barbarian, was well trained in the arts by his teachers, and the three Gordians (238—244) are represented as cultivated noblemen. The eldest of them converted the poems of Cicero—Marius, Alcyonae, Uxorius, Nilus and the translation of Aratus—into modern style, and wrote a long epic with Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius for heroes. He also composed eulogies in prose on all the Antonine Emperors, thus making his own ‘mirror of the prince.’ The ancient authors—Plato and Aristotle, Cicero and Virgil—were the constant companions of his thought. His son Gordian II, a capable administrator of elegant tastes but loose living, wrote verse and prose that showed both talent and decadence—the work of one who was ‘abandoning his own genius.’ Gordian III, a merry and lovable youth, was also distinguished in letters, while the noble Balbinus was reputed eminent in oratory and the first poet of his time—an easy compliment.

This sketch of the literary achievements of the Roman emperors up to nearly the middle of the third century is taken from the much- questioned Historia Augusta—generally damned and generally used. It purports to be a collection of lives of the emperors from Hadrian to Carus and his sons written by six authors—Aelius Spartianus, Julius Capitolinus, Vulcacius Gallicanus, Aelius Lampridius, Trebellius Pollio and Flavius Vopiscus. In some of the lives Diocletian is addressed, in others Constantine. On the face of it these writers lived in the age between Diocletian and Constantine, or in some cases, perhaps, somewhat later. They wrote partly, as it seems to the present writer, with the object of constructing those ‘mirrors of the prince’ of which Roman emperors were obviously fond. ‘Te cupidum veterum imperatorum esse perspeximus,’ says Capitolinus to Diocletian, and Lampridius declares of Constantine that he adopted the virtues of his imperial ancestors for his own. A note of warning also appears, in the fashion of Tertullian and Lactantius. Whether each author treated all the emperors it is impossible to say. Some compiler, apparently, selected what he thought the best lives for his purpose and published a collection of them, presumably with additions, conflations and errors of his own. Various eminent scholars, however, favour the theory that the whole affair is a literary artifice used by a propagandist (whatever his propaganda may have been) who invented the high-sounding names of the putative authors and assigned them at random to the Lives. Even if this is so, the fiction is drawn, at least in part, from actual writings, both Greek and Latin, of the third century. We may be sure at least of an imperial chronicle from Augustus to Diocletian and of the biographical works of Marius Maximus and Aelius Junius Cordus.

Marius Maximus is mentioned by Ammianus Marcellinus and is, apparently, identical with that L. Marius Maximus Perpetuus Aurelianus who was consul under Severus Alexander. He wrote biographies of the emperors from Nerva to Elagabalus, thus bringing the work of Suetonius up to his own times. Suetonius was the natural model for the plan and style of his works, and for their uncritical information, plain and spicy, rumoured and true, in the manner of a modern journalist— ‘mytho-historical volumes’ is the apt designation in the Historia Augusta. At the same time he must have held up the moral mirror to history now and then, since Constantine had read in him that it was better for a State to have a bad ruler surrounded by good advisers than a good one surrounded by bad.

Aelius Junius Cordus is blamed for his excessive interest in scabrous tales, fabulous omens and petty statistics. But the startling anecdote may still have its value. Although we may not be sure that the elder Maximinus wore his wife’s bracelet for a ring, smashed horses’ teeth with his fist or their legs with his heel, and consumed a keg of wine and sixty pounds of meat a day, yet from these stories we may perhaps with some confidence infer that this giant barbarian set people’s tongues wagging.

In this third century Marius Maximus and Aelius Junius Cordus may not have stood alone; indeed if all the names cited in the Historia Augusta are those of genuine writers they lived in what was veritably an aetas Suetoniana. Gargilius Martialis is credited with biographies of Severus Alexander and other emperors. Cassiodorus included in his select monastic library his work on gardens and the medicinal properties of plants, which is also mentioned by Servius. It is possible that this writer is to be identified with the man whose military career is attested by a fine inscription of a.d. 260.

Among the important scholars of that period is Censorinus, who in a.d. 238, lacking the money for a birthday present for his friend A. Caerellius, sent him instead, a learned treatise on birthdays, with their religious, educational, physiological, astrological and chronological implications. Helenius Aero comments on Terence, Persius (?) and Horace. The work preserved under Aero’s name is spurious, but the helpful commentary of Porphyrio has come down in its genuine form. Grammarians of repute are G. Julius Romanus and Marius Plotius Sacerdos. C. Junius Solinus compiled, with large drafts on Suetonius and Pliny the Elder, an encyclopaedia of wondrous tales. Despite its second­hand character it became for the Middle Ages one of the great ancient books.

Another work profoundly esteemed in the Middle Ages is the Disticha Catons, four books of moral admonitions in couplets. The author, whose name, whether by accident or intention, suggests the elder Cato and his Carmen de Moribus, is a pagan, but sound sense and pithy phrase are mated with Christian humility in its utterances. No wonder that the little work became a text-book in medieval schools. The pagan is betrayed in the maxims on woman, but the age of Chaucer and Jean de Meun would hardly count them heresy. There are numerous manuscripts of these books from the ninth century on; the work was turned into Latin prose and into the vernacular of all the important countries in Europe. Excerpts were made and numerous commentators spun its epigrams into sermons. It captivated the medieval mind from the beginning of its history to the end, as no other pagan work could do, save only Virgil.

If we return to Christian literature, the first figure is Cyprian. The outer life of Cyprian was full of turmoil in the age of intensified persecution under Decius and Valerian—within was a more than Stoic placidissima pax. He was born in Africa a pagan, and was well trained in rhetoric and the kindred arts. After his conversion he became a priest and (c. 248-9) bishop of Carthage. When the persecution of Decius began in 249, he left his flock for their best interests. He was active in promoting the unity of the Church, and in opposing the schism of Novatian. He advocated firm yet lenient measures in the case of those who had fallen away from the faith and wished to be re-instated. Returning to his charge, he was sentenced and exiled during the new per­secution under Valerian in 257. Brought back to Carthage, he was tried again and suffered martyrdom in 258.

Cyprian’s writings are a mirror of the Church of his day. They all respond to the need of the moment. A work written to a friend before the persecution of Decius began (Ad Donatum) presents in a calm and pleasant tone, with many borrowings from Minucius Felix, the arguments that should turn a young man of good education to the new faith. When the storm breaks loose, we see in Cyprian’s Letters, his tractates and his sermons the record of the wise bishop’s concern for his churches and his ability to manage their affairs even when parted from them. He is also in touch with movements in Rome. His most characteristic work, De Catholicae Ecclesiae Unitate, whether or not he regards the Roman Pontiff as the head of Christendom, proclaims that principle of solidarity which has always been at the heart of the Catholic faith. In his apologetic works he answers the familiar charge that Christians were responsible for the calamities of the world. Highly characteristic are the three books of Testimonia, in which the Scriptures are searched for evidence bearing on Judaism, on the nature of Christ and on various points in Christian practice. He thus paves the way for Prosper of Aquitaine, Abelard, Peter Lombard and other medieval collectors of ‘sentences.’

The number of manuscripts of Cyprian and of works wrongly attributed to him presents a situation unique in Christian Latin literature. Some of the pseudepigrapha may be contemporary. Some are in vulgar Latin. Naturally this Corpus Cyprianum has proved a paradise for investigators of ‘Stylistik.'

The style of Cyprian shows his training in rhetoric. He has metrical clausulae as strict as Cicero’s. St Augustine, in his manual of a new Rhetoric, at once Christian and Ciceronian, cites only Cyprian and Ambrose for examples of the three styles—genus submissum, temperatum, grande. But Cyprian does not indulge in display. Ciceronian art and Christian straightforwardness have become one in his clear and simple style. Holy Writ furnishes the source of his thought and the spirit, if not the form, of his diction.

Cyprian’s two chief models in Christian literature are Minucius Felix and Tertullian. For the latter, despite his divagations, he had a hearty admiration. ‘Hand me the master’ he would daily say to his servant. Tertullian, shorn of his heresy, furnishes the substance of many of Cyprian’s observations and the plan of several of his discourses. The charge of plagiarism would be absurd—arguments once delivered to the saints become common property. Cyprian’s rewriting of Tertullian suggests the endeavours of Dryden and Pope to make Chaucer speak anew to their age. In both cases the tart vigour of the original is lost in the studied neatness of the reproduction. But there is more in Cyprian’s adaptation than this. Let us take an example.

In his treatise De cultu feminarum, Tertullian starts promptly with a slap on the face for his fair hearer, daughter of Eve, the devil’s gateway. Cyprian, imitating the work in his De habitu Virginum, praises the saintly maidens, who are the flower of the Church. But let them not dress too stylishly. For young men will gaze and sigh and conceive secret desires, so that even if you yourself are not ruined you will ruin others. After the exordium of Tertullian, a woman would feel indignant or amused, or both; after Cyprian’s she would reverently obey the call of noblesse oblige. Cyprian has translated his master not only into an urbane Ciceronian diction, but into a wise urbanity of soul. Here speaks a great Christian teacher and father of his flock. Tertullian’s disordered outbursts give place in Cyprian to a reasoned and effective art.

The Church did well in canonizing Cyprian, quite apart from his heroic death. He, like Tertullian, held open the Christian mind for revelations from the Paraclete, but the vision must come from within the united Church. Cyprian’s greatness was recognized at once by the deacon Pontius, the author of his biography, and many others pay in their turn a homage that some writers today seem reluctant to apply. Lactantius emphasizes his eloquence, the happy gift for explanation and his powers of persuasion. Jerome recommends the reading of Cyprian along with the Bible, and finds it unnecessary to speak of his works, ‘cum sole clariora sint.’ Prudentius finds the spirit of the prophets alive in him again and asserts that his fame shall endure as long as men and books survive. With a fine perception of the literary art of Cyprian, he weaves for his ‘martyr’s crown’ not, as were also fitting, a simple ballad, but a stately Horatian ode.

Novatian, the schismatic, a man of cultivation and the most celebrated of the Roman clergy of his day, wrote two letters to Cyprian, and also a discourse on the Trinity which has been preserved among the writings of Tertullian. In his work De cibis Iudaicis, which shows the symbolic character of the animals whose flesh the Jews refused to eat, Novatian paved the way for the wholesale allegorization of animals that prevailed in the Middle was the first Christian author who wrote exclusively in Latin.

Commodian, whose date seems now to have been definitely placed in the third century, though perhaps later than he is here treated, is the first to be recorded in the history of Christian poetry, although his poetry seems curiously and wonderfully made. The titles of his two works, Instructions and Carmen Apologeticum, bespeak that secondary inspiration of the Muse which consists of the metaphrase of subjects long popular in prose. The Instructiones consists of eighty short sections divided into two books. Acrostics indicate the subjects of the several sections, the last of which bears the mysterious title Nomen Gasei, which might mean, ‘The name of the inhabitant of Gaza.’ The acrostic, beginning at the last line and reading backwards, reveals the poet as Commodianus Mendicus Christi. The other poem, not known till its discovery by Cardinal Pitra in 1852, bears no ascription, but its style marks it as the product of the same author. The words in its subscription—Tractatus Sancti Episcopi—may indicate that the Beggar of Christ was also a Bishop.

Both poems are composed in what seems like rude hexameters of thirteen to seventeen syllables which may always be divided into six feet, but which ride rough-shod over quantity up to the last two feet. Since some sixty fairly decent hexameters are found in the course of the two poems, Commodian might possibly have employed throughout a more or less regular hexameter had he so chosen. Though he censures the study of the pagan authors, he himself had read some of them; Terence, Lucretius, Virgil, Horace, and perhaps also Sallust, Cicero, Tibullus and Ovid, may be traced in his verse. In the very passage that expresses his condemnation of the pagans, he finds a phrase of Virgil useful. His grammatical forms and syntax, however, are barbarous enough. On the whole it would appear that Commodian is not a person of cultivation who condescended to an ultra-humble style, but one who, after a certain schooling, adopted a diction that seemed natural to him. The same sort of limping hexameter is found in African inscriptions of the period.

Moreover, as has recently been pointed out, it is better not to calculate elaborately the relations of this verse of Commodian to the hexameter of Virgil, but while recognizing that relation in a general way, to see in his long line a combination of two short ones. The first has from five to seven syllables, the second from eight to ten, and their boundary line is in almost all cases what, if these were regular hexameters, would be the penthemimeral caesura. Elision is not observed, and word-accent, not metrical ictus, determines the rhythm. A line like Rex autem iniquus, qui obtinet ilium ut audit cannot be poured into the Virgilian mould. If one scans it with attention merely to word-accents, and scans the whole poem in the same way, the shackles fall from Commodian’s verse. It is read no longer with torture, but with pleasure. Our poet is continuing the efforts for simplicity introduced by Septimius Serenus and the other experimenters with such metres as the Faliscan. He is returning, via Virgil, to something like the bipartite Saturnian of ancient times.

In both contents and spirit, the Carmen Apologeticum is the more interesting of the two poems. It is courteous in tone, pre­senting not an attack, but an invitation to come and see. He therefore sketches the history of Israel down to the Incarnation, adds that of the early Church, and portrays the struggle of Christ and anti-Christ in the last days. In the Instructiones, he pictures the pagan gods in sarcastic terms, impaling them neatly on his acrostics—a good mnemonic device—which fixes the revolting image on the believer’s mind. The sections on the gods are followed by exhortations addressed to the unbelieving, and in the second book the varieties of Christians are described—the catechumen and priest, the true and the hypocrite, the sober and the drunken, the silent and the gossiping, martyrs divinely called and ill-advised aspirants for martyrdom.

Though our poet is heart and soul a believer, his theology falls into the Patripassionist heresy and revels in the fancies of the Chiliasts. In fact the theme that in both poems stirs his imagination is the end of the world, when the Thousand Years are over. He pictures the last days in words of fire that burn through the stubble of his verse. The length of the passage makes it a little poem by itself of an essentially epic character. Commodian, not Juvencus, is the first of the Christian Latin poets to write epic.

The poems of Commodian, despite their crudities, had a vogue of some two hundred years. Gennadius, though admiring the moral integrity of Commodian, found his perversion of Biblical prophecies a cause of amazement for those outside the fold and of despair for those within. And the author of the Decretum Gelasianum, by putting the works on his index, showed the Beggar of Christ to the door.

V.

 FROM VALERIAN TO DIOCLETIAN

 

In the period of unutterable confusion that follows Valerian, Gallienus (260—8) stands out as a lover of belles lettres and everything Greek. He is an orator, a poet, and, with the possible exception of Helius Verus, the most interesting cynic in Roman history since Petronius. He liked to make merry while the world was going to pieces. Yet, like Petronius, he could act with vigour on occasion, and his humbling of the Senate, which had become the chorus in the Roman tragedy, paved the way for Diocletian. The most enlightened act of Gallienus was his patronage of the philosopher Plotinus and his plans for founding a Platonic commonwealth in Campania.

A bit of the Emperor’s poetry is given in his Life, a brief, impromptu epithalamium delivered at the marriage of his nephew. The smooth hexameters have a touch of humour, with another in an additional couplet preserved in one of the manuscripts of our present Anthologia Latina. It may well be that many of the pieces preserved in the Codex Salmasianus go back to the third century. Here may belong the diverse rhetorical variations on themes from Virgil, the colourless Epistula of Dido to Aeneas, and the debate between cook and baker entitled Vespa; this piece, the product of some strolling mountebank, has touches of parody of the pastoral and anticipates the medieval conflictus with its diverse themes. Definitely of the third century are the pieces assigned, if they are rightly assigned, as seems likely, to Nemesian.

M. Aurelius Olympicus Nemesianus of Carthage flourished during the reign of the Emperor Carus and his sons Numerianus and Carinus (282—4). Numerian was an orator of renown and reputedly the best poet of the day. He is said to have competed in prize contests even against Nemesian, and when an iambic poet, Aurelius Apollinaris, presented a eulogy of his father, Numerian, we are told, totally eclipsed this performance with one of his own.

Nemesian perhaps aspired to be the Virgil of his day—at least we see signs of pastoral, didactic and epic poetry in his work. Epic exists as a mere promise. In his didactic poem on hunting dedicated to the sons of Carus after his death in 283, he vows that he will next sing their praises. But the panegyric designed never came to fruition. In 284 Numerianus was murdered by his father-in-law, and Carinus at war with Diocletian was killed by his own troops. The extant fragment of the Cynegetica is true to the technique of Virgil, and is at least as attractive as its Augustan precursor, the Cynegetica of Grattius.

The eclogues of Nemesian were long attributed to Calpurnius, whose poems they adjoin in our manuscript source, but evidence both external and internal attest their separateness. Nemesian has little of the inventiveness of Calpurnius, but in spite of his close imitations of both Calpurnius and Virgil—mere mosaics of their phrases—he has virtues of his own. The first eclogue, in honour of his patron, is a stately bit of liturgy. The second portrays an unseemly pastoral passion. Like the fourth, on two shepherds who sharing ‘equal frenzy for a different sex’ are tricked by their darlings, it betrays a sad lack of humour.

The best is the third. Nyctilus, Mycon and Amyntas steal up as Pan sleeps, and try to play his pipe. Pan, awakening, promises a song. His theme is the birth of Bacchus and the invention of wine. Old Silenus holds in his arms the restless infant, who plucks his bristles, pats his snub nose and tweaks his pointed ears. The scene changes to his manhood, when he bids the satyrs tread the grapes. They drink the new liquor and the fun begins. They frolic and dance and chase the airy nymphs. This poem is Nemesian’s one masterpiece. He has taken the framework of Virgil’s sixth eclogue, relieved it of its allegory and panegyric, and told a merry tale vividly. Fontenelle thought he had surpassed his model.

VI.

 FROM DIOCLETIAN TO CONSTANTINE

 

The great Diocletian, though at least learned enough to quote Virgil, was not distinguished by a love of literature. In his reign pagan Latin literature was at its last gasp. Typical of its condition are the effusions of the Panegyrists. We turn rather to Christian Latin literature. The Persecutions under Diocletian in 303 led to the martyrdom of a curious writer, Bishop Victorinus of Pettau in Illyria, whose Commentary on the Apocalypse was re-edited by Jerome, shorn of heresies in thought and style. He revels in the mystic properties of numbers, the number one thousand included. For like Commodian, he was a Chiliast.

Arnobius, the author of a novel apology, was born at Sicca Veneria in the province of Africa not far from the birthplace of Apuleius, Madauros, on the road to Carthage. He flourished under Diocletian and practised his profession of rhetorician illustriously in his native place. Until late in life a stalwart opponent of the new faith, he was suddenly converted by a dream, and like Saul of Tarsus, changed from an assailant to a champion. When his Bishop, suspicious of such an ally, demanded proof of his loyalty, he wrote his work Adversus Nationes.

Whether the Bishop was satisfied with the proof has been questioned more than once. Arnobius quotes the Scriptures rarely, proclaims that the soul must win its immortality by merit, and asserts that the pagan gods continue to exist though relegated to the rank of demons. He takes a sour view of human qualities, of the liberal arts and of the ability of the mind to arrive at truth. Morose, sceptical and ill-versed in Christian doctrine, he earned for his work a place among the Catholicis vitanda in the Gelasian list and an unenviable estimate among most modern historians of Christian Latin literature. And yet, Jerome, while aware of the vagaries of Arnobius, calls the books of this treatise most splendid and implies that these hostages of piety accomplished their purpose. It is time to return to this verdict.

The work of Arnobius was written during the Persecution of Diocletian in 303. The first of the seven books starts with a vigorous disclaimer of the pagan assertion that the Christian faith is the cause of the woes of the world. On the contrary it has brought joy and peace to all mankind. In an ornate Ciceronian style, with metrical clausulae and a plethora of rhetorical questions, the writer presents a simple idea deeply felt by him—the truth and purity of Christ’s life and works as seen on the background of pagan falsity.

But some pagans still hate the Christian faith, though men of intellect are coming over to it in droves. They have learned to put a more moderate estimate on the mind. For despite the great Plato, the soul is a humble organ. Its every passion is a door to death. It is of a medial and twofold substance—dwelling all too near the fangs of destruction.

Here obviously is a refutation in the spirit of Lucretius, and with a sprinkling of his phrases, of the Platonic proofs of the immortality of the soul put forth by Cicero in the first book of his Tusculan Disputations. But this is only half of the argument of Arnobius. The soul has enough divinity to win its immortality by the gift and grace of the Almighty Ruler. Arnobius has come into Christianity through the science of Lucretius, but his deliverer is not Epicurus, but. He proposes to the pagans a new reconciliation of science and religion. There are indeed gods, or angels, or demons, but they are the creations of the one true God; they are those mediae naturae whom Plato describes in his Timaeus. Thus Plato plays a part in this reconciliation, though there can be no truce with his idea of a divine soul in man; and Arnobius proceeds to depict the littleness of the human soul with a vigour that recalls Lucretius. His new solution, he says, does not pretend to explain all moral and metaphysical difficulties. But what philosopher has explained them? Yet one thing is certain, that a new fountain of life has been opened. Man has ever made progress in government and religion and the arts whereby life has been built up and given polish—the phrase is from Lucretius and the passage gives Lucretius’ fifth book in a nutshell. Thus has God prepared the world for the coming of Christ. With brave words on Christian martyrdom the book ends. This cursory summary gives no idea of its wealth of illustrations, its pungent sarcasm and its command of the science of the day.

The remaining books discuss the pagan cults with an assort­ment of spicy legends from which even Ovid had refrained and with a wealth of information that make Arnobius one of the happy hunting-grounds for investigators of Roman religion. The work ends with a question, Arnobius’ favourite form of expressing an idea. It contains a challenge to the imperialism of Rome.

These luculentissimi libri had no wide vogue. For the moment when they were written they filled a need. How much the author knew of the Christian scriptures or the doctrines of the Church is quite beside the point. He knows his ancient authors profoundly, Lucretius above all. He writes with a rich vocabulary partly classic, partly popular, completely African—for in Africa he lived—in a style as near to that of Cicero as he could come. His verbosities and interminable interrogations cannot spoil the brilliance of his performance. After the triumph of the Church under Constantine, the need of such an apology was no longer felt. Arnobius was superseded by his pupil Lactantius who, resuming the attitude of Minucius Felix towards pagan culture, laid the foundations of Christian humanism.

Lactantius, likewise a pagan at the start, was given by Diocletian the chair of rhetoric at Nicomedia in Bithynia. When he, and Rome, became Christian, Constantine appointed him tutor of his son Crispus. The Christian orator needed no more to appeal for the Emperor’s mercy, instead he became his spokesman in matters affecting the new culture, somewhat as Virgil and Horace proclaimed the higher policies of Augustus, which they themselves had taught him. His impetuous work de mortibus persecutorumis at once a kind of philosophy, or at least an apocalypse, of history, and like various works that we have discussed, a moral warning to the prince. If he wrote no epic on his master, he may somehow stand behind the famous Oratio ad Sanctos in which Constantine gave his imperial sanction to the Christian interpretation of Virgil’s Messianic eclogue.

Lactantius’ greatest work, the Divinae Institutiones is dedicated to Constantine, and intended by its author as a Christian counter­part of those ‘ Institutes ’ that lay down the principles of the Civil Law. In essence it is rather like Quintilian’s ‘Institution,’ or training, of the orator. While dealing only indirectly with the seven liberal arts, Lactantius assumes at every turn by the quotation or the adaptation of the ancient authors that the study of them is a necessary precursor to the education of a Christian. While criticizing them vigorously at various points he does not reject but absorbs them. His great model is Cicero, whose style he comes near to reproducing and whose thoughts he translates into Christian. The writer feels himself another Cicero as he addresses the new age, which in the West in many respects is an aetas Ciceroniana.

The work falls into seven books. The first, de Falsa Religione, is like the reconciliations of science and religion of our day, save that religion is the true worship of the soul that underlies the superstition of mythology, and science the new Christian truth that clears the ancient fables away. The second, de Origine Erroris, deals with that primitive idolatry which nevertheless showed flashes of the vision of the one, true God. The third, De Falsa Sapientia, would be called today ‘An Introduction to Philosophy’—written from a Catholic point of view. Master Cicero and the New Academy are much in evidence, yet Lucretius, whom he doubtless learned to admire from Arnobius, is treated, despite his patent falsities, with understanding and even courtesy. The fourth book, De Vera Sapientia et Religione, presents in an informal fashion the doctrines of the Christian faith. The fifth, De Iustitia, deals with personal ethics, and the principles of social justice. The sixth, De Vero Cultu, is not an exposition of liturgy (as one might hope) but a plea for the sincerity of worship. The seventh, De Vita Beata, is a new interpretation of Cicero’s arguments on immortality in the Tusculans, set forth in Christian terms.

Despite slight imperfections in its theology, this ‘Training of the Christian’ at once became a standard work and a monument of the reign of Constantine. Jerome, Augustine, Cassiodorus and Isidore acclaimed it. A steady stream of manuscript copies flowed down through the Middle Ages to the Renaissance; it was among the first books printed in Italy.

The period in which we have been following the course of Latin literature from the age of the Antonines to that of Constantine, while barren of works of the first order, is not in itself a barren epoch, but one alive with new impulses and achievements. It begins with a unified Roman world in which there is one literature, in either Greek or Latin. It witnesses the decay of pagan letters, which had lost their meaning, and the rise of a Christian literature, full of a new meaning yet mainly dependent for its art on ancient models. At the end of the period there is a weakening of the bonds that held together East and West and of those that in literature as in government connected the provinces with Rome. But amid such dissolutions the elements of a new Roman unity may be discerned, later apprehended by St Augustine in his vision of the City of God.