The Library of Literary History

A LITERARY HISTORY OF INDIA. By R. W. Frazer, LL.B.

A LITERARY HISTORY OF IRELAND. By Douglas Hyde, LL.D.

A LITERARY HISTORY OF AMERICA. By Barrett Wendell.

A LITERARY HISTORY OF SCOTLAND. By J. H. Millar, LL.B.

A LITERARY HISTORY OF PERSIA. By Edward G. Browne, M.A. (In Two Volumes.)

A LITERARY HISTORY OF FRANCE. By Émile Faguet.

A LITERARY HISTORY OF THE ARABS. By Reynold A. Nicholson, M.A.

A LITERARY HISTORY OF ROME TO THE CLOSE OF THE GOLDEN AGE. By J. Wight Duff, M.A., D.Litt., LL.D.

A LITERARY HISTORY OF RUSSIA.

A LITERARY HISTORY OF ROME IN THE SILVER AGE. By J. Wight Duff, M.A., D.Litt., LL.D.

Other Volumes in Preparation.

A LITERARY HISTORY OF THE JEWS. By Israel Abrahams, M.A.

A LITERARY HISTORY OF SPAIN. By James Fitzmaurice-Kelly.

ETC. ETC. ETC.

[ii]

[iii]

THE LIBRARY OF LITERARY HISTORY

A Literary History of Rome in the Silver Age

[iv]

By the same Author

A Literary History of Rome. From the Origins to the Close of the Golden Age.

“Mr. Duff’s wide acquaintance with modern literature is not the least of his qualifications.... His treatise, full and erudite, yet everywhere human and interesting, cannot fail to deepen in his readers the sense of the continuity of literature and the relation of literature to life, and the debt of the modern world to Rome.”—The Times.

“Professor Wight Duff compels us to listen. To those who even dimly remember their Latin there is something irresistible in his style and arrangement, in his knowledge and in the temperate freshness of his criticism.”—The Nation.

“A work of rare scholarship condensed with consummate care and judgment.”—Scotsman.

“What particularly marks it out for suggestiveness and vigour is the broad human platform from which it surveys the progress of Latin poetry and prose.”—The Daily Telegraph.

“An author who can render so many diverse authors adequately appeals to us at once as an understanding critic at any rate.... There is labour and erudition and a keen sense of literary values.”—Saturday Review.

“The book is thoroughly up-to-date, and incorporates the results of recent philological and historical research. It is written in a style which commands admiration for its lucidity, terseness and vigour.”—The Classical Review.

“The taste and skill of his illustrative translations indicate a critic whose independent judgment of literary quality, and whose divination of the final and essential charm of a masterpiece are far better worth recording than is usually the case in works of this sort. As a matter of fact, however, we have had no works of this sort, at all events, in our own tongue.”—American Journal of Philology.

“L’ouvrage s’addresse donc à un large public cultivé, sans exclure les gens de métier.... Ses jugements sont ceux d’un homme de goût qui n’accepte pas sans examen les décisions d’autrui.... Il connaît bien ce dont il parle et il le fait connaître.”—Professor Lejay in Revue de philologie de littérature et d’histoire anciennes.

“Ein sympathetisches und wohl zu lesendes Buch, dessen Recht und Wert darin legt dass der Verfasser ein persönliches Verhältnis zu den Personen und Dingen hat über die er schreibt, seine Eindrücke in die Beleuchtung einer feinen und weiten Bildung rückt, stets das Ganze nicht trüben lässt, noch auch umgekehrt. Er hat auch Sinn für den Hintergrund und Zusammenhang der Dinge, wenigstens so weit beides römisch ist.”—Professor Friedrich Leo in Deutsche Literaturzeitung.

ROMAN ART OF THE SILVER AGE.

Reliefs from frieze of temple of Minerva in Nerva’s Forum representing the goddess’s patronage of domestic arts.

From photograph by Alinari.

[v]

A Literary History of Rome in the Silver Age

From Tiberius to Hadrian

By J. Wight Duff

M.A., D.Litt. (Oxon.), Hon. D.Litt. (Durham), LL.D. (Aberdeen); Professor of Classics, Armstrong College (in the University of Durham), Newcastle-upon-Tyne

Author of “A Literary History of Rome to the Close of the Golden Age” and “Writers of Rome”

T. Fisher Unwin Limited Bouverie House, Fleet Street 1927

[vi]

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN

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LITTERARVM VETERVM STVDIOSIS AMATORIBVS HAS QVALESCVMQVE SVNT LVCVBRATIONES DE AETATE ARGENTEA EXARATAS LIBENTISSIMO ANIMO IOANNES WIGHT DUFF D. D. D. ID. IVL. MCMXXVII

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[ix]

Preface

The favourable reception accorded in several countries to my work on A Literary History of Rome from the Origins to the Close of the Golden Age, of which the first edition appeared in 1909, suggested the idea of continuing on similar principles the study of Latin literature into the first and second centuries, during which the Roman empire at its zenith in power and efficiency rendered its greatest services to human civilisation. The project was dropped throughout the period of the Great War, when, even if publication had been feasible, duties on a local Brigade Committee and for a time as Acting-Principal of my College effectually removed me from the atmosphere of literary criticism. Even after my publisher, Mr. Fisher Unwin, was good enough to revive the design, progress was extraordinarily slow, owing to the increasing demands made upon time by the recurrent problems of a modern university.

As in the former volume, emphasis has here been laid on the national character imprinted upon Latin literature despite all borrowings from Greek models; and attention has been carefully devoted to the evidence for the facts of an author’s life in an endeavour to recreate the environment amidst which he wrote. Nor have material sources, whether Greek or Latin, been overlooked: indispensable though some account of these must be for a true conception of a writer as at once inheritor and progenitor, it is surprising to note how little in this country scholarship has concerned itself with the origin of encyclopaedic learning like that of the elder Pliny. The arrangement adopted is different from that in Professor [x]Summers’s skilful handling of a slightly shorter period in his Silver Age of Latin Literature under headings of various kinds of literature rather than on chronological lines. In the present work, where historical background and literary evolution are alike regarded as of vital importance, the treatment has been not according to genre but mainly in the order of time. While

the limits set for full discussion of authors are A.D. 14–A.D. 138, these dates are not rigidly observed respecting relevant topics, such as the survival of an author’s influence till modern times or the continuance of the Roman educational system; and an epilogue is added to give a brief conspectus of the literature which followed the Silver Age.

An attempt has been made to secure acquaintance with a reasonable proportion of the vast number of treatises and pamphlets written in Latin and in several modern languages upon matters related to the authors of the period. The obligations incurred to such works may be gauged from references in the footnotes. But it is obvious that no amount of reading in books upon books, however valuable in substance, can avail to produce either a vital chronicle of any age or serviceable estimates of its writers without first-hand study of the writers themselves and independent appreciation of their significance. I hope, therefore, for success in conveying to readers, by summary, by quotation, and by criticism, something of the impression made on myself during adventures among the literary products of the Silver Age. The illustrative translations from Latin into prose or verse are my own, and have been for the most part composed specially for this volume. Thanks are due to the Delegates of the Oxford University Press for permission to use a few verse renderings which I

made for my book on The Writers of Rome. The general reader, whose Latin has perhaps grown rusty, may welcome these translations as supplementing the historical and critical portions, while he will doubtless realize that it is optional to consult or not to consult the footnotes.

[xi]

The bibliographical notes, it should be explained, are intended, not to be exhaustive, but to give by mention of selected editions some clue to the history of the printed text of an author and to include representative modern studies of his literary significance.

I wish to acknowledge kind assistance rendered by Mr. Basil Anderton, M.A., Public Librarian, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and by Miss Constance Shipley, M.A., Lecturer in Classics at Armstrong College, in reading and criticising some of the chapters of this book. My son, Mr. Arnold M. Duff, M.A., B.Litt.(Oxon.), Assistant Lecturer in Greek in the University of Aberdeen, has also perused several chapters and made useful suggestions, while my wife copied for the press either by hand or by typewriter almost the whole manuscript. Both have helped greatly in the checking of proofs and in the verification of references. To Professor Hermann Dessau of Berlin I owe several references to inscriptions which he sent me some years ago to amplify those in my article on “Roman Education” in The Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics. In the choice of a frontispiece, intended to illustrate the art of the period, I had the great benefit of advice from Mrs. Arthur Strong, Litt.D., LL.D., formerly Assistant-Director of the British School at Rome, in whose penetrating

discernment of the true ethos of Roman sculpture I have found much to reinforce my argument that within the analogous domain of literature the Romans knew not only how to borrow from Greece but also how independently to create the beautiful.

It is a satisfaction to observe among scholars a growing insistence upon the independent vitality of Roman literature and a growing disinclination to regard it as a pale second-hand reflection of the splendour of Greek literature. My friend, the late Dr. Warde Fowler, appended to his Presidential Address on “The Imagination of the Romans,” read at the Newcastle-upon-Tyne Meeting of the central Classical Association of England and Wales in 1920, a note to the [xii]effect that he was in agreement with the contentions advocated on the subject in my Literary History of Rome; and only last year a German Professor, Herr Günther Jachmann, chose as the theme of an inaugural lecture at Köln “Die Originalität der römischen Literatur”. The value of Roman literature cannot be grasped without recognition of the extent to which Roman authors found fresh stimulus in surroundings widened far beyond those assigned by historical circumstance to the brilliant intellects of Greece.

J. W. D.

Newcastle-upon-Tyne July 1927

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CHAPTER I PROLOGUE

“Silver” and “Gold” in Roman literature—The period from Tiberius to Hadrian (A.D. 14–138)—Historical aspects—Cosmopolitan Rome—Tangible remains—Emperors in relation to literature—Risks in writing—Fresh individual forces in Silver literature—The conventional in education—Declaiming and reciting—Epigrammatic point and decorative tinsel—Corrective factors in real life—Serious thought—Stoicism—The Stoic opposition—Influence of Stoic doctrine—Influence of the provinces—Variety in “Silver” themes and style—Changing features in the language—Concentration on the terse, the surprising, and the poetic—Grammar and vocabulary—A few summary reflections.

In the literary history of Rome one of the most brilliant and attractive epochs is that part of the first and second centuries of the Christian era which critics have usually distinguished with the epithet of “Silver.” The Silver Age of Roman Literature is regarded in the present work as that immediately following the great times of Augustan poetry and prose. What has been traditionally reckoned the Golden Age coincided with the productive careers of Cicero and then Livy in prose, and lasted from Lucretius to Ovid in verse. While, soon after it began, Catullus wrote his anti-Caesarian lampoons, it reached its fullest glory when Virgil and Horace by their works threw lustre around the emergence of the imperial family—ecce Dionaei processit Caesaris astrum, in the language of the Eclogues. Politically, therefore, the Golden Age saw the final overthrow of the old senatorial republic and the inauguration of state-control by a single ruler for Rome and the Roman dominions. Such public oratory as Cicero’s, which adorned the earlier

[2]phases of the age amidst the unfettered interplay of republican politics, had become an impossible anachronism before its close, when Augustus concentrated in his person all the significant powers of the ancient magistracies—munia senatus magistratuum legum in se trahere is the remark of Tacitus. In time, then, the Golden Age may be dated from 70 B.C. to A.D. 14, a stretch of eighty-four years.

The Silver Age is a longer period, even when restricted, as some prefer, to the years between A.D. 14 and 117, that is from the beginning of Tiberius’s reign to the end of Trajan’s. Here it has been extended to include the reign of Hadrian, A.D. 117-138, after which Latin literature is marked partly by sterility, partly by an artificial archaizing movement, partly by the entirely different train of thought expressed in Christian apologetics. Historically, this period of a century and a quarter coincides with the reigns of all but the first two of Suetonius’s twelve Caesars, and, in addition, the reigns of Nerva, Trajan and Hadrian, thirteen emperors altogether. If in the preceding age the empire was still young and so far, under Augustus, only partially tested, now during these succeeding generations, in spite of the enormities of individual emperors and in spite of the ghastly interval of bloodshed among successive candidates for the purple after Nero’s suicide, the hold of the system upon the world was firmly established, and its organization perfected,

on the whole, for the benefit of mankind. With the Pax Romana came greater safety for life and limb both in Italy and in the provinces; governors abroad were more under the central control; roads were improved to meet the requirements of the imperial post-service for despatches; the water-supply of Rome and other cities was diligently cared for; new harbours were constructed; industry and trade increased, at any rate up to the point at which the policy of the bread-dole effected moral ruin for the population and in the end financial ruin for a state in which the value of free agriculture and free capital was misunderstood. Nihil est ab omni parte beatum; and so, upon examination, it is plain that amidst the material well-being and felicities of the second century, even in the prosperous Antonine age with which Gibbon began his history of The [3]Decline and Fall, there lurked elements of disintegration which would lead to the troubles of the third century.⁠[1]⁠

During the first century events had revealed the state-secret not only that emperors might be made by other electors than the Senate, but that they might be made even elsewhere than in Rome. The tendency, in fact, was towards a military monarchy, as the careers of Galba, Otho, Vitellius and Vespasian showed. When one considers, it seems well-nigh inevitable that an emperor’s absolute power abroad should ultimately expand his theoretically limited power in Italy and Rome towards absolutism. Between Augustus as first citizen at the opening of the century and Domitian claiming to be “Lord and God” towards its end vast changes had intervened. The dyarchy which Augustus was careful to respect had in time gone far on its way to monarchy; for the senate not infrequently acted under imperial coercion. More and more, too, it grew evident that the basis of the ruler’s power was the army—a conception abhorrent to Romans of the constitutional republic. In this connexion it is significant that the title imperator became commoner than princeps about Trajan’s time. Moreover, the

worship of emperors during their lifetime in association with the cult of the goddess Roma, and the deification of certain emperors after death, outwardly exalted their office. It is, however, difficult to see how the notion of apotheosis could seriously survive among thinking readers of Seneca’s satire on the dead emperor Claudius; and it is a strange contradiction inherent in circumstances that, while the sacrifice in honour of a Caesar as the public test of loyalty involved the martyrdom of many Christians, yet the Caesar-worship from which their faith revolted did actually by its attainment of official universality prepare the way for the ultimate predominance of the Christian religion.

The crucial problem for the empire was, as Augustus foresaw, one of consolidation rather than aggrandisement; [4]and the only notable departures from this policy during the whole period were connected with the annexations in Britain begun by Claudius and those in Dacia and the East carried out by Trajan. Trajan’s Oriental conquests in the first quarter of the second century, though soon abandoned by his successor, brought the Roman Empire to its widest extent, and marked the extremity of contrast between the primitive pastoral settlement near the Tiber and the capital of world-wide dominions into which it had evolved. Rome had in the first century become more cosmopolitan than ever—a phenomenon sufficient to illustrate in the eyes of a Seneca the essential brotherhood of mankind, but in the eyes of a Juvenal the objectionable ubiquity of the alien interloper. It has been argued that, early in the second century, when Juvenal and Tacitus wrote, “a very small percentage of the free plebeians on the streets of Rome could prove unmixed Italian descent.”⁠[2] Here at once we meet

a feature of importance for literature. Rome possessed a wonderful power of nationalizing the foreigner; but there was sure to be a reaction on her own life and thought. This large cosmopolitan and international element in the capital contributed towards a widening of their horizon for literary men, and to it the human note unquestionably observable in the Silver Age owed a great deal.

The whole period has been made very real to us by writers within recent times who have investigated its political, constitutional, social, religious and artistic history.⁠[3] Modern inquiry has combined with ancient documents to recreate the historical background requisite for appreciation of the literature, in such a way that few epochs of the past are so intimately [5]known. In some degree this clear view is due to the strikingly human note, the living interest in man and his concerns, which is characteristic of the ablest writers in the Silver Age. Much of its history and many of its personages have been made to live for us by Tacitus and Suetonius; its society by Petronius’s novel, the miscellaneous poems of Statius, the younger Pliny’s letters, Martial’s epigrams and Juvenal’s satires; its science by the elder Pliny; its rhetoric by the elder Seneca and Quintilian; its practical ethics by Seneca the younger. Inscriptions and coins tell their tale; the Colosseum remains the most imposing monument to the Flavian dynasty; Pompeii puts before us the

dwellings, decorations and the very street-paving of the time; and Hadrian is brought nearer through his magnificent villa, a veritable urbis opus, close under Tivoli, his gateway at Athens, his wall in Britain, and his mausoleum familiar now as the Castel Sant’ Angelo at Rome.