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Is it Fair to Refer to a Decline and/or Fall in the Standard of Latin Literature between 80 BC and AD 180, and if not, Did one Occur at All?
By Henry Phillips
Published Online (2012)
Le style,c’est l’homme meme - Comte de Buffon
The historical consensus on the quality(1) of Roman oratory, the discipline considered the lynchpin of Roman literature from Cato the Elder onwards, has been clouded by Tacitus’ great work, the Dialogus de Oratoribus, and his notion that oratory appeared ‘like a conflagration [requiring] fuel and air, motion and excitement’ and that it ‘blazed out of the turmoil of the free state’.(2) To carry on the metaphor, Roman literature, was likewise seen as the embers that flew off the blazing trail of oratory, and thus shared in its fortunes and its failures. Just as when a historian creates a period he feels he is tearing F. W. Maitland’s ‘seamless web’, a literary critic cannot help but tear up the continuum in order to analyse it. Still it seems incredible that the term, the ‘Silver Age’, when applied to Latin literature, has carried so much weight when it only seems to have been introduced into the fabric of analysis as late as 1736. Successive authors seem to have hidden behind ‘sweeping generalisations and unexamined platitudes’.(3)
Firstly, I do not believe that there was a decline in Latin literature between 80 BC and 180 AD. The relationship between literature and freedom or even oratory and freedom, was never so simple as to be reducible to the equation that lots of freedom engendered masterpieces and minimal freedom produced none. It was a far more complex relationship in which some emperors such as Nero could patronise court ‘arbiters of elegance’ such as Petronius or superb thinkers such as Seneca but also sacrifice them on a whim of jealousy. Emperors such as Augustus needed literary men who could give the appearance ‘of solidity to pure wind’,(4) whilst exiling those who failed to ‘play the game’. Great literature burgeoned in periods of peace such as the Pax Augusta, however, it bloomed in harder times too, producing brilliant pièces de résistance from men such as Lucan. Censorship didn’t mute the empire; it forced it to think of other more subtle and cleverer methods to express itself. If the government was seen to be deteriorating, that only served to produce more satirists. Between Cicero and Aurelius there was never less than one truly great litterateur alive. Ironically, at the time Tacitus was writing his Dialogus there were five litterateurs: Pliny the Younger, Martial, Juvenal, Suetonius and himself all penning the most brilliant works. Quintilian’s opinion that those who would study Roman eloquence after him would discover a happy abundance of talent appears more prescient than the critics of later centuries.
Secondly, I would assert that the decline in the standard of Latin Literature began after Aurelius’ death in AD 180. The fate of Latin literature was ultimately tied to that of the state and the welfare of the Empire. When the state was in its prime, its poems and its philosophies, its myths and its epics, what might be called the ‘corpus of the golden age’ fortified the aura of invulnerability that reached its pitch in Hadrian. Rome was the urbs aeterna and the emperor a divi filius. But these edifying notions all collapsed in the sea of plagues, inflation, barbarians and usurpers that characterised the next century. Not only was the self-confidence of writers punctured (was Rome no longer what Virgil had built her up to be?) but Rome was forced to turn from the furtherance of civilisation to concentrating on its survival. Military efficiency, fiscal discipline, religion and a personal loyalty to the emperor, all of which would climax in Constantine, were hardly values compatible with great literature. The sons of Illyrium did not share the same priorities as the expanding civilising Rome had. A classical education, by the reign of Gordian I, no longer guaranteed a station of worth as the military did. A Classical education became useful only in Law – a discipline hardly renowned for its literature, and the Church. In the Church, the Classics, though sometimes resented, were nonetheless respected, as a foundation for theology if nothing else, with its centre of gravity in Greece, North Africa and the Levant. As the military situation deteriorated, multiple emperors moved more frequently from one temporary frontier capital to the next: Antioch, Nicomedia, Trier, Milan and Thessalonica all played host to the imperial households. Rome, the cultural anchor that had once drawn the most talented immigrant writers to the emperor like a magnet now lost its attraction. Besides, Money was no longer spent courting writers but on the limitanei and comitatenses defending the Empire. Hellenism’s beacon was passed back to its creators. It is no coincidence that the Second Sophistic comes into being as the Empire declines. The names that illuminate the Third Century are almost invariably Greek: Irenaeus and Origen the Christians; Plotinus, Porphyry and Iamblichus the neo-platonists; Favorinus, Atticus and Philostratus the sophists; Cassius Dio and Ammianus the historians.
That the cultural gravity would one day shift back to Greece again would probably not have come as a surprise to Cicero and his contemporaries. The vast majority of Latin authors had imitated Greek models of literature and tried to improve them with Roman examples. It would have been a revelation to most early Latin authors that the cultural pendulum would ever swing their way in the first place. Latin had been a mere peninsular patois when earnest Demosthenes had been stirring Greece with his Olynthiacs and Philippics. In fact, Naevius had even been able to claim, half-seriously, that if it hadn’t been for him ‘obliti sunt Romae loquies Latina lingua’.(5) All Rome could claim as its own were the Duodecum Tabulae, the Satura,(6) and, later, Pliny’s literary letter. The nearest Romans had come to establishing a literary tradition before Ennius was copying Etruscan religious texts. In a Roman world of utility, the poet was about as useful as a vagabond.(7) The traditionalist senators, led by Cato the Elder, criticised Greek cultural refinement and literary brilliance as vulgar, effeminate and thus immoral. As C. T. Cruttwell correctly pointed out, the Latin character was idealised as one that should be typically ‘natum rebus agendis’.(8) Sons of Roman citizens should accompany their fathers into field, forum and war, picking up a certain gravitas that valued action over verbal dexterity, and imbibe the values of the Greek historians given to them, scorning the East for its over-cleverness and luxury.
By 80 BC, however, Latin had transformed into the flexible lingua franca of Europe. Gone were the ‘Early Fathers’ whose Latin Ovid referred to, after reading Ennius, as ‘ingenio maximus, arte rudis’.(9) Cato the Elder had turned Latin’s naturally terse character into a positive aspect of the language, which, when coupled with his galling asperity, seemed capable of seeming proud with pregnant brevity (‘Delenda est Carthago’). Sallust’s concentration on the structe of his works, carefully setting up antitheses in both diction and syntax made Latin more capable of inferring emphasis and more flexible to wordplay. Cicero contributed many new terms so it could cope with complex Greek concepts and developed the idea of a period almost singlehandedly providing Latin with the grace and rhythm it had previously lacked.
Tacitus had been referring to oratory when he put the words ‘where change occurs, we are not to immediately conclude that it is a change for the worse: you must blame it on the carping spirit of mankind that what is old is always held in high esteem’(10) into Marcus Aper’s mouth. Though it might seem difficult to comprehend in a post-modern world where terms such as ‘progression’ and ‘development’ have virtually replaced words like ‘change’ in our vocabulary, one of the most popular forms of historiography has been that of ‘a fall’ in which we slowly regress from achieving a harmonious state to ‘the loss of human innocence, the dissolution of familial bonds, the accelerated technological abuse of nature, the onset of greed, war, moral decadence, and human suffering, the development of cities…’(11) detectable in the myths of Deucalion, Prometheus, the Old Testament and Flaccus, or more recently, Rousseau and Ruskin. Its lexicon has been dominated by value-laden words such as ‘rise’ and ‘fall’ and invariably accompanied by subjective, meaningless or misleading adjectives such as ‘inexorable’ or ‘historic’. Latin literature has not escaped such historiography but we must not allow these tired classifications go unscrutinised – they do not further our understanding. The only discernable effect dynastic change (a key element in the Tacitean model) had on Latin literature was on the type of output rather than the quality.
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Though speeches were very sensible and pragmatic affairs in the early Republic, there were notables such as Cato the Elder who could sway the mood of the senate with their peculiarly ‘Roman’ eloquence. As speeches became increasingly self-conscious affairs on which whole reputations hung in the balance, a proper classical education with oratory at its summit became a pre-requisite to any ambitious senator. The law became political: stakes were raised in family feuds; the prosecution of governors was a sure-fire way of gaining the attention of the elite with the prospect of becoming their rhetorical ‘sword and shield’ in the senate. In short, eloquence translated smoothly into power. The Gracchi had successfully agitated the plebs, Caesar had had the ear of his soldiers, and Cicero had been able to manipulate the mood of the senate (his Philippics being the outstanding example).(12) The senate was capable of retaining such freedom amongst its members because military, rhetorical, and financial power was never allowed to be concentrated in one man’s hands – until Caesar outmanoeuvred the senate with the formation of the Triumvirates and then outmanoeuvred the Triumvirate. The problem with this being the apparent beginning of a ‘golden age’ is that all the great literature produced was connected in some way to the state. Even Sallust had had to prescribe his historical works as ‘medicine’ for the state. Men were continually having to justify their task if it did not obviously benefit the state in some way. Varro and Catullus are conspicuous only as exceptions.(13) Later senators would see it as a literary golden age because it was their political golden age. The fact that literature was tied to the senate was both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness. As learning was steadily threaded to influence, literature was given great financial and human investment but was equally doomed to be restricted to tedious speeches and dreary history books.
Augustus, with the funds and apparatus of state concentrated solely in his hands, possessed both a formal and informal stranglehold on literature; he could exile men such as Ovid or merely trust the discernment of Maecenas. The Augustan Age has been a period traditionally perceived as one in which literature flourished to begin with because of lax censorship under a young confident emperor, before it decline under tougher censorship and an increasingly oppressive emperor – nicely fitting Tacitus’ model. In reality neither all modes of literature flourished nor were the worse poets situated at the backend of Augustus’ reign. As aforementioned, the senate had frozen literature into a pragmatic and political mould. Augustus, by taking senate politics out of the state, had effectively liberated literature from practical politics and thus utility, allowing her to flower by other means, but in the process reducing the more practical elements such as oratory, and its practitioners such as Pollio and Messalla, to recitation rooms.(14) Freed from the informal tyranny of the senate whose money and education had formed a stranglehold on literature in the Republic, the Muses were now subject to the concept of treason.
The poets who wrote in the Augustan Age can be roughly divided into to two categories: those who lived their youth before the civil war and those that lived the majority of their lives under the Principate. Under the former category fall Virgil and Horace, war-weary and ultimately sensible individuals who both seemed willing, if sometimes reluctant, to help prop up the Principate ideologically in the hope that they could mould it to a better end than Caesarism. Virgil was famously reluctant to write the Aeneid (15) (the declaration that one was too incompetent to execute such a mighty task was the preferred method of declining to write a Roman epic to rival Homer), to include references to Augustus, and for wanting the work burnt in his will. Equally, Horace’s Carmen Saeculare, his only openly pro-Augustus work is also suspiciously bad. Under the latter category fall Ovid and Propertius: the true ‘Augustan’ poets, and both rebels of Augustus’ new moral order. In this apparent ‘golden age’ the humorous, amorous and calculating Ovid was exiled for a ‘carmen et error’, but we shall never know whether the carmen was the real reason and the error a mere excuse to banish the irritant.(16) Passionate Propertius (17) was effectively exiled from the ‘Circle’ – the official litterateur’s clique, for telling it too true. Livy’s ambivalence presents us with a brilliant example of the mood of the times. He seems to grope in the darkness for an appropriate relationship with the state in which writers must ‘ignes suppositos cineri doloso’.(18) The relationship was a complex one: the state was by no means altruistic and yet the writers were by no means mere pawns. Tibullus is conspicuous as the exception only because he chose to write neutral elegy whose patronage flowed from Corvinus rather than Maecenas.
Gaius only reigned for four years before his murder in 41 BC. His retarded brother Claudius, an academic manqué, assumed the purple. He insisted on reading out his Etruscan and Carthaginian histories out to senators in sessions lasting several hours and wrote copious amounts on subjects as diverse as gambling and a Defence of Cicero Against the Charges of Gallus. Persius’ Satires were the only work of any consequence produced during the period and were certainly not related to any benefits bestowed by the emperor. A bookish boy of good stock, he wished to imitate Lucilius and yet retain a principled stoic dignity, his works showed promise, being both original and allusive but he died prematurely from a uitio stomachi. He is of note especially here because he is the first poet to realise that messages could still be expressed under harder times, they just had to be articulated in a more original and allusive manner so as to avoid offending the paranoid and often jealous palace. Claudius either patronised badly or did not patronise at all and in doing so suffered de facto damnatio memoriae as a ‘drooling clubfoot’ despite being an able administrator and ruler.
It was under the cultured Nero that patronage was given a new lease of life. The major figures: Seneca, Petronius, and Lucan are all notable for participating in Nero’s regime before discarded in (indulgent?) scenes of pro-Paetus-ism, anti-Caesarism and stoicism.(19) Seneca introduced declamation into literature with his Apocolocyntosis on Claudius, still bitter from his banishment to Corsica, before trying to show Nero the stoic light in tracts such as De Brevitate Vitae and his tragedies.(20) He died, losing blood and suffocating on the steam from his bath, according to Tacitus, after being implicated in the Piso conspiracy.(21) Petronius, famous as Nero’s arbiter elegantiae wrote the Satyricon, a longer, more novel-like satire – a satire that offended a rival at court (perhaps he identified himself with Trimalchio), Tigellinus – so much that he obtained Petronius’ death warrant by scheming. Petronius famously obliged after documenting all the luxurious outrages and sexual misdemeanours committed by the emperor. Lucan, a child prodigy and a friend of Nero’s before jealousy surpassed any previous affection, began to write the Pharsalia as an alternate epic to the Aeneid.(22) It ‘banishes the gods, sings of cultural disintegration and refuses to narrate’.(23) Virgil’s counsel to Caesarism, disguised as an obiter dictum of the Roman mission, had been ‘to spare the humbled foe’.(24) Something successive Caesars had conspicuously failed to do, and something Lucan certainly scolds. Lucan is also the foremost candidate as the author of the provocative Laus Pisonis – a panegyric of the conspirator’s family. Suicide followed. Nero’s literary resurgence was thus the product of an explosive mix of literary freedom and open rebellion, general licence and idealism, maverick spirits and generous patronage. A brilliant diversity in both talent and type makes it much more deserving of the label ‘golden age’ than the Augustan period. In fact, scholars such as G. A. S. Simcox have had to brand such a wealth of good quality literature a ‘perplexing phenomena’ because it does not fit the metallic model.(25) Tragedies, epics, eclogues, satires and panegyrics litter a reign of just fourteen years. The two exceptions to the ‘maverick rule’ are the independents Siculus and Italicus. Siculus wrote the fastidiously arranged Eclogues, an average work with only parts I and VII concerning Rome under Nero (and only possible under the independent patronage of Meliboeus). Italicus wrote Punica, an ideological synthesis of Virgil and Lucan’s epics, but also a superb work in its own right complete with its own unique theory on the demise of Rome (and only a feasible project after achieving the pro-consulship of Asia).
Though the theme of libertas was printed on all four emperor’s coins in 69, it no longer promised the restoration of the freedoms of the Republic, but at best meant that the senate would be given superficial deference as the patres of state to legitimise the de facto emperor, and at worse merely meant that freedom from Nero had been secured. Yet, under this stifling atmosphere in which successive Caesars tapped away at the rights and freedoms of state, three writers, Quintilian, Statius and Flaccus all thrived. Vespasian might have been a rather uncultured ‘plain’ man, but ‘he knew the virtues of educated men’ and government was still civil. The emperors of the Flavian dynasty all won glory by expanding and consolidating the empire (at its greatest extent under Trajan) and were confident and good charactered enough to see the necessity of educated men in government who either wrote themselves or patronised writers despite the fact that such writers were perceived to have the power to pose a threat to both the loyalty and unity of the empire and perhaps more significantly, puncture an emperor’s sense of self-esteem.
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Though no writer practiced sedition, the majority of writers did provide insightful and honest critiques of Flavian Rome. Statius’ rather gushing Silvae and Pliny’s equally slavish Epistulae (creating the genre) are exceptional for feeling such a need to provide such effusive illustrations of their loyalty. In the same way Martial and Juvenal went further than most with their damning judgments dressed in humour. Tacitus’ Annals, Flaccus’ Argonautica, and to a lesser extent, Suetonius’ Twelve Caesars are more typically balanced appraisals of the Roman mission, best summed up as ‘Tacitean realism’.(26) The majority of writers were conservative, or at least, illiberal, ‘middling men’, either senators themselves such as Tacitus and Pliny or patronised by them. Scholars such as Rostovtzeff have famously attempted to apply modern concepts such as class to the ancient world to no avail. Martial and Juvenal (neither of high social standing) are amusing in the conservative sense, in the Epigrams and Satires, you laugh at pretension, vulgarity, corruption, anything base or petty, corrupt or un-Roman.(27) These men, with the exception perhaps of Suetonius, are men that respected the Dominate that was slowly forming, men who looked back to the heady days of edifying defeats in Italicus’ Punica and the conservative values of Cato the Elder. The spirit of Lucan was dead; Caesarism was here to stay, and literature seemed all the better for it. Though controversial, I would perhaps put Statius’ Thebaid, above both Ovid’s illustrious Metamorphoses and Virgil’s benchmark Aeneid. Though not an original plot, Statius is second to none in execution, he masters every mood, from internecine strife at the highest levels of society in which Virgil was expert, to the description of a child’s innocence falling asleep amongst the disorder in the grass, in comparison to which Virgil’s accounts of intimacy pale, seeming at best, stolid if not flaccid.(28)
The period between Hadrian and Aurelius, all emperors of culture and learning, forms the Indian summer of Latin literature. Fronto plays Isocrates to Cicero’s Demosthenes(29) whilst teaching the emperor Aurelius oratory who meanwhile writes his stoical diary Meditations.(30) Apuleius writes his Metamorphoses charting the mishaps and misdeeds of Lucius in novel form before deteriorating into an apology for the sect of Isis to which Apuleius belonged.(31) Gellius inspects literary Latin though an Attic lens, purging it of the ‘corruptions’ it had acquired over approximately four hundred years, harking back to archaisms such as ‘edulcare, recentari, aeruscator, adulescentes frugris and elegans verborum’(32) as a regenerative exercise in his encyclopaedic Noctes Atticae.
There were no dragons teeth sown that condemned this period as the beginning of the decline of Latin and it would be simply childish to suppose that people simply ran out of ideas or got worse at writing. The reasons for decline after Aurelius are ones enshrined in the international affairs of the time rather than domestic politics. Peace, not freedom, was the indispensable ingredient to good literature and Aurelius was the first emperor to really suffer what would characterise the next century: plague, inflation and a prolonged war on the Rhine for which he could afford neither men nor supplies. Add to that wars on the Danube and Persian fronts, multiple usurpers and an army lacking discipline and it is not hard to see why priorities in the 3rd century were not more civil. This protracted decline of what might be termed ‘Gladstonian government’ or government on the cheap, in which client-kings or local elites basically ran the empire under amateur supervision had come to an end in a bureaucratic, salaried, militarised, professional elite that wished to both control and protect the empire.
The ramifications from this shift in government form were enormous. Firstly, Rome was of little significance militarily and as multiple rulers moved around the empire with their comitatenses nowhere really replaced Rome as a cultural capital and Latin literature lost its cultural gravity. Rome lost its ‘pulling-effect’ and in the process Latin was relegated from a world-class culture to a regional one. This meant that the Greek East that had lain relatively dormant over the past two centuries was able to accomplish a renaissance known as the Second Sophistic, propelled largely by the re-emergence of Platonic texts and their interpreters in the early 3rd Century. The cultural pendulum was swinging the other way. Secondly, the base of classical education, the essential to the production of any brilliant literature was drastically narrowed. Now that a soldierly career provided the main career ladder to politics, most rich families stayed out of politics altogether, as the senate’s actions after Aurelian’s death in 275 demonstrated, its priorities now lay in preserving their hereditary wealth rather than governing. A Latin education now only furthered a career in Law and the Church. In the long-term even law was being subsumed as sphere of government rather than private practice and the Church’s great thinkers mostly lay in the East preferred Greek to Latin – Tertullian, Cyprian and Jerome being exceptional cases.(33)
In conclusion, the grafting of Tacitus’ oratorical model onto literature as a ‘metallic standard’ has been a mistake. Literature began to flourish with the birth of Cicero but did not die with him and the Republic, in fact, for another two centuries the best writers in the world were Roman, I have listed only approximately thirty of them in this essay. When comparing the breadth and quality of Latin literature produced under Trajan’s reign to that of Severus less than eighty years later in AD 193, it is hard not to conclude that a definite decline has occurred. But the real problem was not with dynasties, it was the character of the empire itself, shaped by the sort of world it was in. It was the world adapting to the Roman empire that meant it was necessary for empire’s character to change. Defence, not literature, was now a priority. This re-evaluation after Aurelius could be interpreted as the start of what Gibbons famously described as the ‘triumph of superstition and barbarism’, not in the battles, sieges or diplomacy as popularly envisaged but in the arts that defined Rome as a civilisation.
End Notes
1 When referring to the arts it has always been difficult to obtain a consensus on what is good and what is bad, especially in this post-modern age when even the loosest representation of meaning can be labelled art. I, however, belong to an ever-dwindling and increasingly unfashionable minority that believes judgments can reach a reasonable amount of objectivity if the prejudices and discriminations that form society’s’ zeitgeists are understood and taken into account.
2 p.106 Tacitus R. Syme 1958
3 (xvi) Roman Poets of the Early Roman Empire A. J. Boyle & J. P. Sullivan 1991
4 Why I Write George Orwell 2004
5 Who would ever have predicted that Latin would one day produce an equal to Demosthenes? ‘ from Demosthenes nothing could be added, from Cicero nothing taken away’. p.61Book X Quintilian
6 The term originates from the word lanx satura which means medley or hodgepodge
7 Marcus Porcius Cato: ‘Poeticae artis honos non erat: si quis re studebat aut sese ad conuiuia adplicabat, grassator vocabator’. p.70 A Literary History of Rome J. W. Duff 1909
8 p.6 A History of Roman Literature C. T. Cruttwell 1877
9 p.21 History of Latin Literature Vol. I G. A. S. Simcox 1882
10 p.278 Dialogus de Oratoribus Tacitus Ed. C. P. Goold 1970
11 p.271 Roman Poets of the Early Roman Empire A. J. Boyle & J. P. Sullivan 1991
12 An example of his skills in persuasion: ‘At quam contumeluisus in edictusm quam barbarus, quam rudis!… quis enum hoc adulescente castior, quis modestior? Quod inventute habemus inlustrius exemplum veteris sanctatis? Quis autem illo, qui male dicit, impurior? Philippic II VI. 15 Cicero trans. P.205 W.C. A. Ker 1926
13 But even Catullus frowned upon the average ‘litterateur’: ‘pretentious litterateurs, degenerate twins/ Companions of one sofa-bed, they fuck/ The girls in friendly rivalry and share/ the same unholy itch. A pretty pair!’
14 Pollio’s famous reply to Octavian’s Fescennine attacks was ‘et ego taceo. non est enim facile in eum scriber qui potest proscribere’.
15 He even claimed to have taken up the enterprise in a ‘fit of madness’: ‘tanta incohata res est ut paene uitio mentis tantum opus ingressus mihi uidear’.
16 Ovid Tristia III v.49 ‘Inscia quod crimen viderunt lumina, plector,/ Peccatumque oculos est habuisse meum’. Ibid. 2.361 ‘denique composui teneros non solus amores/ composito poenas solus amore dedi’. Ibid. 237 He even suspected that Augustus had never even read the book and that some malicious courtier had just read out snippets he thought might anger the emperor.
17 He desired the same relations in Rome as the Spartans had shared with their women.
18 Odes Horace ii.i. 7
19 Men who drew on a ‘veneer of ethical ‘Stoic’ values. Upper class Romans were not true philosophers, but these principled ethics did at least suit the moral aspirations of new men, rising into the ruling class: they lacked the world-weary cynicism of the older intake…
p.509 The Classical World R. L. Fox
20 Pyrrhus: No law spares captives or checks their punishment
Agamemnon: If no law forbids it, shame forbids it
Trojan Women Act II Seneca [p.119 Roman Poets of the Early Roman Empire A. J. Boyle & J. P. Sullivan 199]
21 A characteristically clumsy senatorial conspiracy involving the Praetorian Guard but revealed to Nero by Epicharis after a number of aborted attempts.
22 ‘The Arabians, Medians and other Orientals who have lived continuously under tyrants are far more fortunate than we; they need not feel ashamed of being slaves, as we must. It is most false to say that gods rue this world… nothing but blind chance makes the world go round’. Lucan Pharsalia 7.432
23 p.154 Roman Poets of the Early Roman Empire A. J. Boyle & J. P. Sullivan 1991
24 ‘tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento, / Hae tibi erunt artes: pacisque imponere morem. / Parcere subjectis et debellare superbos’. Virgil Aeneid vi. 853 and directly referred to in Horace’s Carmen Saeculare when he writes ‘Long may Augustus conquer but spare the foe’.
25 p.32 History of Latin literature Vol. II G. A. S. Simcox 1882
26 ‘Tacitus peppers his pages with words suggesting pretence and masquerade (species, facies, imago, simulacrum), as if to imply he has disclosed and penetrated the façade which is the defining feature of the Roman Principate’. P.111 Latin Historians C. S. Kraus & A. J. Woodman 1997
27 Martial: ‘I asked for a small loan, from an old and well-to-do friend who has plenty in his coffers. His answer was “be a barrister and you’ll be rich”. Give me what I ask Gaius, I didn’t ask for advice’. p.229 Roman Literature and Society R. M. Oglive 1980 [continued next page]
Juvenal, never doffs the iron mask, the ‘rigidi censura cachinni’ (p.445 C. T. Cruttwell) his earnestness is best seen in the poem ‘The Vanity of Human Wishes’ or in turns of phrases like ‘Schoolmaster, rhetorician, surveyor, artist, masseur, diviner, tight-rope walker, magician or quack, your versatile hungry Greekling is all by turns’ especially when juxtaposed to Martial’s more tender 10, 47 that begins ‘Vitam quae faciunt beatiorem…’ or more witty teasing ‘You say that the rabbit isn’t cooked, and ask for the whip; Rufus, you prefer to carve up your cook than your rabbit.’ III, 94 It is ironic that the talented ‘Greekling’ Statius was a contemporary of Juvenal, who only mentions him once when giving an instance of fame not translating into riches.
28 But the boy, lying on the earth’s soft lap, / the long spring grass, began to craw away… And he picked the flowers in his path and drank/ The sunshine open-mouthed, all unaware/ Of evil ion the trees, and wandered on/ With no thought of his life… p.105 Thebaid Statius A. D. Melville & D. W. T. Vessey 1992
29 Fronto preferred a more Attic style of speech to Cicero, counselling the emperor Aurelius in AD 139 that ‘it frequently happens that words in a speech, by a change in their order, become essential or superfluous. I should be right in speaking of ship with three-decks. But ship would be a superfluous addition to a triple-decker’. P.11 Marcus Cornelius Fronto C. Haines 1919
30 An emperor whose who philosophy is perhaps summed up as ‘Nothing is more melancholy than to compass the whole creation’. P.47 Meditations M. Aurelius 1964
31 But not before a lengthy digression, to the joy of countless schoolboys, about a sexual peccadillo between Lucius [as a donkey] and an admirer that begins ‘Sed angebar plane non exili metu, reputans quemadmodum tantis tamque magnis cruribus possem delicatam matronam inscendere…’ Book X p.511 The Golden Ass Apuleius Ed. W. Addlington 1566
32 p.466 A History of Latin Literature C. T. Cruttwell 1877
33 In later centuries when the Empire became more culturally and politically bicameral it would be the translation of Greek to Latin that was the more lucrative business.
Is it Fair to Refer to a Decline and/or Fall in the Standard of Latin Literature between 80 BC and AD 180, and if not, Did one Occur at All?
Though no writer practiced sedition, the majority of writers did provide insightful and honest critiques of Flavian Rome. Statius’ rather gushing Silvae and Pliny’s equally slavish Epistulae (creating the genre) are exceptional for feeling such a need to provide such effusive illustrations of their loyalty. In the same way Martial and Juvenal went further than most with their damning judgments dressed in humour. Tacitus’ Annals, Flaccus’ Argonautica, and to a lesser extent, Suetonius’ Twelve Caesars are more typically balanced appraisals of the Roman mission, best summed up as ‘Tacitean realism’.(26) The majority of writers were conservative, or at least, illiberal, ‘middling men’, either senators themselves such as Tacitus and Pliny or patronised by them. Scholars such as Rostovtzeff have famously attempted to apply modern concepts such as class to the ancient world to no avail. Martial and Juvenal (neither of high social standing) are amusing in the conservative sense, in the Epigrams and Satires, you laugh at pretension, vulgarity, corruption, anything base or petty, corrupt or un-Roman.(27) These men, with the exception perhaps of Suetonius, are men that respected the Dominate that was slowly forming, men who looked back to the heady days of edifying defeats in Italicus’ Punica and the conservative values of Cato the Elder. The spirit of Lucan was dead; Caesarism was here to stay, and literature seemed all the better for it. Though controversial, I would perhaps put Statius’ Thebaid, above both Ovid’s illustrious Metamorphoses and Virgil’s benchmark Aeneid. Though not an original plot, Statius is second to none in execution, he masters every mood, from internecine strife at the highest levels of society in which Virgil was expert, to the description of a child’s innocence falling asleep amongst the disorder in the grass, in comparison to which Virgil’s accounts of intimacy pale, seeming at best, stolid if not flaccid.(28)
Andrew Brown wrote a piece for The Guardian
