LUCILIUS,
A Roman knight, who was born in the year 605, at Suessa, a town in the Auruncian territory. He was descended of a good family, and was the maternal granduncle of Pompey the Great. In early youth he served at the siege of Numantia, in the same camp with Marius and Jugurtha, under the younger Scipio Africanus[397], whose friendship and protection he had the good fortune to acquire. On his return to Rome from his Spanish campaign, he dwelt in a house which had been built at the public expense, and had been inhabited by Seleucus Philopater, Prince of Syria, whilst he resided in his youth as an hostage at Rome[398]. Lucilius continued to live on terms of the closest intimacy with the brave Scipio and wise Lælius,
“Quin ubi se a vulgo et scenâ in secreta remôrant
Virtus Scipiadæ et mitis sapientia Lælî,
Nugari cum illo et discincti ludere, donec
Decoqueretur olus, soliti[399].” ——
These powerful protectors enabled him to satirize the vicious without restraint or fear of punishment. In his writings he drew a genuine picture of himself, acknowledged his faults, made a frank confession of his inclinations, gave an account of his adventures, and, in short, exhibited a true and spirited representation of his whole life. Fresh from business or pleasure, he seized his pen while his fancy was yet warm, and his passions still awake,—while elated with success or depressed by disappointment. All these feelings, and the incidents which occasioned them, he faithfully related, and made his remarks on them with the utmost freedom:—
“Ille velut fidis arcana sodalibus olim
Credebat libris; neque si male gesserat, usquam
Decurrens aliô, neque si bene: quo fit ut omnis
Votivâ pateat veluti descripta tabellâ
Vita senis[400].” ——
Unfortunately, however, the writings of Lucilius are so mutilated, that few particulars of his life and manners can be gleaned from them. Little farther is known concerning him, than that he died at Naples, but at what age has been much disputed. Eusebius and most other writers have fixed it at 45, [pg 239]which, as he was born in 605, would be in the 651st year of the city. But M. Dacier and Bayle[401] assert that he must have been much older, at the time of his death, as he speaks in his satires of the Licinian law against exorbitant expenditure at entertainments, which was not promulgated till 657, or 658.
Satire, more than any other species of poetry, is the offspring of the time in which it has its birth, and which furnishes it with the aliment whereon it feeds. The period at which Lucilius appeared was favourable to satiric composition. There was a struggle existing between the old and new manners, and the freedom of speaking and writing, though restrained, had not yet been totally checked by law. Lucilius lived amidst a people on whom luxury and corruption were advancing with fearful rapidity, but among whom some virtuous citizens were still anxious to stem the tide which threatened to overwhelm their countrymen. The satires of Lucilius were adapted to please these staunch “laudatores temporis acti,” who stood up for ancient manners and discipline. The freedom with which he attacked the vices of his contemporaries, without sparing individuals,—the strength of colouring with which his pictures were charged,—the weight and asperity of the reproaches with which he loaded those who had exposed themselves to his ridicule or indignation,—had nothing revolting in an age when no consideration compelled to those forbearances necessary under different forms of society or government[402]. By the time, too, in which Lucilius began to write, the Romans, though yet far from the polish of the Augustan age, had become familiar with the delicate and cutting irony of the Greek comedies of which the more ancient Roman satirists had no conception. Lucilius chiefly applied himself to the imitation of these dramatic productions, and caught, it is said, much of their fire and spirit:
“Eupolis, atque Cratinus, Aristophanesque, pöetæ,
Atque alii, quorum comœdia prisca virorum est,
Si quis erat dignus describi, quod malus, aut fur,
Quod mœchus foret, aut sicarius, aut alioqui
Famosus, multa cum libertate notabant.
Hinc omnis pendet Lucilius, hosce secutus,
Mutatis tantum pedibus numerisque[403].” ——
The Roman language, likewise, had grown more refined in the age of Lucilius, and was thus more capable of receiving the Grecian beauties of style. Nor did Lucilius, like his prede[pg 240]cessors, mix iambic with trochaic verses. Twenty books of his satires, from the commencement, were in hexameter verse, and the rest, with exception of the thirtieth, in iambics or trochaics. His object, too, seems to have been bolder and more extensive than that of his precursors, and was not so much to excite laughter or ridicule, as to correct and chastise vice. Lucilius thus bestowed on satiric composition such additional grace and regularity, that he is declared by Horace to have been the first among the Romans who wrote satire in verse:—
“Primus in hunc operis componere carmina morem.”
But although Lucilius may have greatly improved this sort of writing, it does not follow that his satires are to be considered as altogether of a different species from those of Ennius—a light in which they have been regarded by Casaubon and Ruperti; “for,” as Dryden has remarked, “it would thence follow, that the satires of Horace are wholly different from those of Lucilius, because Horace has no less surpassed Lucilius in the elegance of his writing, than Lucilius surpassed Ennius in the turn and ornament of his.”
The satires of Lucilius extended to not fewer than thirty books; but whether they were so divided by the poet himself, or by some grammarian who lived shortly after him, seems uncertain: He was a voluminous author, and has been satirized by Horace for his hurried copiousness and facility:—
“Nam fuit hoc vitiosus: In horâ sæpe ducentos,
Ut magnum, versus dictabat, stans pede in uno:
Garrulus, atque piger scribendi ferre laborem;
Scribendi recte: nam ut multum, nil moror[404].”
Of the thirty books there are only fragments extant; but these are so numerous, that though they do not capacitate us to catch the full spirit of the poet, we perceive something of his manner. His merits, too, have been so much canvassed by ancient writers, who judged of them while his works were yet entire, that their discussions in some measure enable us to appreciate his poetical claims. It would appear that he had great vivacity and humour, uncommon command of language, intimate knowledge of life and manners, and considerable acquaintance with the Grecian masters. Virtue appeared in his draughts in native dignity, and he exhibited his distinguished friends, Scipio and Lælius, in the most amiable light. At the same time it was impossible to portray [pg 241]anything more powerful than the sketches of his vicious characters. His rogue, glutton, and courtezan, are drawn in strong, not to say coarse colours. He had, however, much of the old Roman humour, that celebrated but undefined urbanitas, which indeed he possessed in so eminent a degree, that Pliny says it began with Lucilius in composition[405], while Cicero declares that he carried it to the highest perfection[406], and that it almost expired with him[407]. But the chief characteristic of Lucilius was his vehement and cutting satire. Macrobius calls him “Acer et violentus poeta[408];” and the well-known lines of Juvenal, who relates how he made the guilty tremble by his pen, as much as if he had pursued them sword in hand, have fixed his character as a determined and inexorable persecutor of vice. His Latin is admitted on all hands to have been sufficiently pure[409]; but his versification was rugged and prosaic. Horace, while he allows that he was more polished that his predecessors, calls his muse “pedestris,” talks repeatedly of the looseness of his measure, “Incomposito pede currere versus,” and compares his whole poetry to a muddy and troubled stream:—
“Cum flueret lutulentus erat quod tollere velles.”
Quintilian does not entirely coincide with this opinion of Horace; for, while blaming those who considered him as the greatest of poets, which some persons still did in the age of Domitian, he says, “Ego quantum ab illis, tantum ab Horatio dissentio, qui Lucilium fluere lutulentum, et esse aliquid quod tollere possis, putat[410].” The author of the books Rhetoricorum, addressed to Herennius, and which were at one time attributed to Cicero, mentions, as a singular awkwardness in the construction of his lines, the disjunction of words, which, according to proper and natural arrangement, ought to have been placed together, as—
“Has res ad te scriptas Luci misimus Æli.”
Nay, what is still worse, it would appear from Ausonius, that [pg 242]he had sometimes barbarously separated the syllables of a word—
“Villa Lucani—mox potieris aco.
Rescisso discas componere nomine versum;
Lucilî vatis sic imitator eris[411].”
As to the learning of Lucilius, the opinions of antiquity were different; and even those of the same author appear somewhat contradictory on this point. Quintilian says, that there is “Eruditio in eo mira.” Cicero, in his treatise De Finibus, calls his learning mediocris; though, afterwards, in the person of Crassus, in his treatise De Oratore, he twice terms him Doctus[412]. Dacier suspects that Quintilian was led to consider Lucilius as learned, from the pedantic intermixture of Greek words in his compositions—a practice which seems to have excited the applause of his contemporaries, and also of his numerous admirers in the Augustan age, for which they have been severely ridiculed by Horace, who always warmly opposed himself to the excessive partiality entertained for Lucilius during that golden period of literature—
“At magnum fecit, quod verbis Græca Latinis
Miscuit:—O seri studiorum!”
It is not unlikely that there may have been something of political spleen in the admiration expressed for Lucilius during the age of Augustus, and something of courtly complaisance in the attempts of Horace to counteract it. Augustus had extended the law of the 12 tables respecting libels; and the people, who found themselves thus abridged of the liberty of satirizing the Great by name, might not improbably seek to avenge themselves by an overstrained attachment to the works of a poet, who, living as they would insinuate, in better times, practised, without fear, what he enjoyed without restraint[413].
Some motive of this sort doubtless weighed with the Romans in the age of Augustus, since much of the satire of Lucilius must have been unintelligible, or at least uninteresting to them. Great part of his compositions appears to have been rather a series of libels than legitimate satire, being occupied with virulent attacks on contemporary citizens of Rome—
—— “Secuit Lucilius urbem,
Te Mute, te Lupe, et genuinum fregit in illos[414].”
Douza, who has collected and edited all that remains of the satires of Lucilius, mentions the names of not fewer than sixteen individuals, who are attacked by name in the course even of these fragments, among whom are Quintus Opimius, the conqueror of Liguria, Cæcilius Metellus, whose victories acquired him the sirname of Macedonianus, and Cornelius Lupus, at that time Princeps Senatus. Lucilius was equally severe on contemporary and preceding authors; Ennius, Pacuvius, and Attius, having been alternately satirized by him[415]. In all this he indulged with impunity[416]; but he did not escape so well from a player, whom he had ventured to censure, and who took his revenge by exposing Lucilius on the stage. The poet prosecuted the actor, and the cause was carried on with much warmth on both sides before the Prætor, who finally acquitted the player[417].
The confidence of Lucilius in his powerful patrons, Scipio and Lælius, inspired this freedom; and it appears, in fact, to have so completely relieved him from all fear or restraint, that he boldly exclaims—
—— “Cujus non audeo dicere nomen?
Quid refert dictis ignoscat Mutius, an non?”
It is chiefly to such support that the unbridled license of the old Roman satirists may be ascribed—
—— “Unde illa priorum
Scribendi quodcunque animo flagrante liberet
Simplicitas[418].” ——
The harsh and uncultivated spirit of the ancient Romans also naturally led to this species of severe and personal castigation; and it was not to be expected that in that age they should have drawn their pictures with the delicacy and generality which Horace has given to Offellus.
Lucilius, however, did not confine himself to invectives on vicious mortals. In the first book of his satires, he appears to have declared war on the false gods of Olympus, whose plurality he denied, and ridiculed the simplicity of the people, who bestowed on an infinity of gods the venerable name of father, which should be reserved for one. Near the com[pg 244]mencement of this book he represents an assembly of the gods deliberating on human affairs:
“Consilium summis hominum de rebus habebant.”
And, in particular, discussing what punishment ought to be inflicted on Rutilius Lupus, a considerable man in the Roman state, but noted for his wickedness and impiety, and so powerful that it is declared—
“Si conjuret, populus vix totus satis est.”
Jupiter expresses his regret that he had not been present at a former council of the gods, called to deliberate on this topic—
“Vellem concilio vestrûm, quod dicitis, olim,
Cælicolæ; vellem, inquam, adfuissem priore
Concilio.” ——
Jupiter having concluded, the subject is taken up by another of the gods, who, as Lactantius informs us, was Neptune[419]; but being puzzled with its intricacy, this divinity declares it could not be explained, were Carneades himself (the most clear and eloquent of philosophers) to be sent up to them from Orcus:
“Nec si Carneadem ipsum ad nos Orcus remittat.”
The only result of the solemn deliberations of this assembly is a decree, that each god should receive from mortals the title of father—
“Ut nemo sit nostrûm, quin pater optumus divûm;
Ut Neptunus pater, Liber, Saturnu’ pater, Mars,
Janu’ Quirinu’ pater, nomen dicatur ad unum.”
The third book contains an account of the inconveniences and amusements of a journey, performed by Lucilius, along the rich coast of Campania, to Capua and Naples, and thence all the way to Rhegium and the Straits of Messina. He appears particularly to have described a combat of gladiators, and the manifold distresses he experienced from the badness of the roads—
“Præterea omne iter hoc est labosum atque lutosum.”
Horace, in the fifth satire of his first book, has, in imitation of Lucilius, comically described a journey from Rome to Brundusium, and like him has introduced a gladiatorial combat. The fourth satire of Lucilius stigmatizes the luxury and vices of the rich, and has been imitated by Persius in his third book. Aulus Gellius informs us, that in part of his fifth satire he exposed, with great wit and power of ridicule, those literary affectations of using such words in one sentence as terminate with a similar jingle, or consist of an equal number of syllables. He has shown how childish such affectations are, in that passage wherein he complains to a friend that he had neglected to visit him while sick. In the ninth satire he ridicules the blunders in orthography, committed by the transcribers of MSS., and gives rules for greater accuracy. Of the tenth book little remains; but it is said to have been the perusal of it which first inflamed Persius with the rage of writing satires. The eleventh seems to have consisted chiefly of personal invectives against Quintus Opimius, Lucius Cotta, and others of his contemporaries, whose vices, or rivalship with his patron Scipio, exposed them to his enmity and vengeance. The sixteenth was entitled Collyra, having been chiefly devoted to the celebration of the praises of Collyra, the poet’s mistress[420]. Of many of the other books, as the 12th, 13th, 18th, 21st, and four following, so small fragments remain, that it is impossible to conjecture the subject; for although we may see the scope of insulated lines, their matter may have been some incidental illustration, and not the principal subject of the satire. Even in those books, of which there are a greater number of fragments extant, they are so disjoined that it is as difficult to put them legibly together as the scattered leaves of the Sibyl; and the labour of Douza, who has been the most successful in arranging the broken lines, so as to make a connected sense, is by many considered as but a conjectural and philological sport. Those few passages, however, which are in any degree entire, show great force of satire; as for example, the following account of the life led by the Romans:—
“Nunc vero a mane ad noctem, festo atque profesto,
Totus item pariterque dies, populusque patresque
Jactare indu foro se omnes, decedere nusquam,
Uni se atque eidem studio omnes dedere et arti;
Verba dare ut caute possint, pugnare dolose,
Blanditia certare, bonum simulare virum se,
Insidias facere, ut si hostes sint omnibus omnes.”
The verses in which our poet bitterly ridicules the superstition of those who adored idols, and mistook them for true gods, are written in something of the same spirit—
“Terricolas Lamias, Fauni quas, Pompiliique
Instituere Numæ, tremit has, his omnia ponit:
Ut pueri infantes credunt signa omnia ahena
Vivere, et esse homines; et sic isti omnia ficta
Vera putant: credunt signis cor inesse ahenis—
Pergula pictorum, veri nihil, omnia ficta[421].”
On this passage Lactantius remarks, that such superstitious fools are much more absurd than the children to whom the satirist compares them, as the latter only mistake statues for men, the former for gods. There are two lines in the 26th book, which every nation should remember in the hour of disaster—
“Ut populus Romanus victus vi, et superatus præliis
Sæpe est multis; bello vero nunquam, in quo sunt omnia[422].”
But the most celebrated and longest passage we now have from Lucilius, is his definition of Virtus—
“Virtus, Albine, est, pretium persolvere verum,
Queis in versamur, queis vivimus rebus, potesse:
Virtus est homini, scire id quod quæque habeat res;
Virtus, scire homini rectum, utile, quid sit honestum,
Quæ bona, quæ mala item, quid inutile, turpe, inhonestum;
Virtus, quærendæ rei finem scire modumque:
Virtus, divitiis precium persolvere posse:
Virtus, id dare quod re ipsa debetur honori;
Hostem esse atque inimicum hominum morumque malorum,
Contra, defensorem hominum morumque bonorum,
Magnificare hos, his bene velle, his vivere amicum:
Commoda præterea patriæ sibi prima putare,
Deinde parentûm, tertia jam postremaque nostra[423].”
Lactantius has cavilled at the different heads of this definition[424], and perhaps some of them are more applicable to what we call wisdom, than to our term virtue, which, as is well known, does not precisely correspond to the Latin Virtus.
If we possessed a larger portion of the writings of Lucilius, I have no doubt it would be found that subsequent Latin poets, particularly the satirists, have not only copied various passages, but adopted the plan and subjects of many of his satires. It has already been mentioned, that Horace’s journey to Brundusium is imitated from that of Lucilius to Capua. His severity recommended him to Persius and Juvenal, who both mention him with respect. Persius, indeed, professes to follow him, but Juvenal seems a closer imitator of his manner. The jingle in the two following lines, from an uncertain book of Lucilius—
“Ut me scire volo mihi conscius sum, ne
Damnum faciam. Scire hoc se nescit, nisi alios id scire scierit,”
seems to have suggested Persius’ line—
“Scire tuum nihil, nisi te scire hoc sciat alter.”
The verses, “Cujus non audeo dicere nomen,” &c. quoted above, are copied by Juvenal in his first satire, but with evident allusion to the works of his predecessor. A line in the first book—
“Quis leget hæc? mîn’ tu istud ais? nemo, Hercule, nemo,”
has been imitated by Persius in the very commencement of his satires—
“O curas hominum! O quantum est in rebus inane!
Quis leget hæc? mîn’ tu istud ais? nemo, Hercule, nemo.”
Virgil’s phrase, so often quoted, “Non omnia possumus omnes,” is in the fifth book of Lucilius—
“Major erat natu; non omnia possumus omnes.”
Were the whole works of Lucilius extant, many more such imitations might be discovered and pointed out. It is not on [pg 248]this account, however, that their loss is chiefly to be deplored. Had they remained entire, they would have been highly serviceable to philological learning. They would have informed us also of many incidents of Roman history, and would have presented us with the most complete draught of ancient Roman manners, and genuine Roman originals, which were painted from life, and at length became the model of the inimitable satires of imperial Rome.
Besides satirizing the wicked, under which category he probably classed all his enemies, Lucilius also employed his pen in praise of the brave and virtuous. He wrote, as we learn from Horace, a panegyric on Scipio Africanus, but whether the elder or younger is not certain:—
“Attamen et justum poteras et scribere fortem
Scipiadam, ut sapiens Lucilius[425].”
Lucilius was also author of a comedy entitled Nummularia, of which only one line remains; but we are informed by Porphyrion, the scholiast on Horace, that the plot turned on Pythias, a female slave, tricking her master, Simo, out of a sum of money, with which to portion his daughter.
Lucilius was followed in his satiric career by Sævius Nicanor, the grammarian, who was the freedman of one Marcius, as we learn from the only line of his poetry which is extant, and which has been preserved by Suetonius, or whoever was the author of the work De Illustribus Grammaticis:—
“Sævius Nicanor Marci libertus negabit.”
Publius Terentius Varro, sirnamed Atacinus, from the place of his birth, also attempted the Lucilian satire, but with no great success as we learn from Horace:—
“Hoc erat, experto frustra Varrone Atacino.”
He was more fortunate, it is said, in his geographical poems, and in that De Bello Sequanico[426].
We may range among the satires of this period, the Diræ of the grammarian, Valerius Cato, who, being despoiled of his patrimony, especially his favourite villa at Tusculum, during the civil wars of Marius and Sylla, in order to make way for the soldiery, avenged himself, by writing poetical imprecations on his lost property. This poem is sometimes inscribed [pg 249]Diræ in Battarum, which is inaccurate, as it gives an idea that Battarus is the name of the person who had got possession of the villa, and on whom the imprecations were uttered. There is not, however, a word of execration against any of those who had obtained his lands, except in so far as he curses the lands themselves, praying that they may become barren—that they may be inundated with rain—blasted with pestiferous breezes, and, in short, laid waste by every species of agricultural calamity. Joseph Scaliger thinks that Battarus was a river, and Nic. Heinsius that it was a hill. It seems evident enough from the poem itself, that Battarus was some well known satiric or invective bard, whom the author invokes, in order to excite himself to reiterated imprecations[427]:—
“Rursus et hoc iterum repetamus, Battare, carmen.”
The concluding part of the Diræ, as edited by Wernsdorff[428], is a lamentation for the loss of a mistress, called Lydia, of whom the unfortunate poet had likewise been deprived. This, however, has been regarded by others as a separate poem from the Diræ. Cato was also author of a poem called Diana, and a prose work entitled Indignatio, in which he related the history of his misfortunes. He lived to an advanced age, but was oppressed by extreme poverty, and afflicted with a painful disease, as seems to be implied in the lines of his friend Furius Bibaculus, preserved in the treatise De Illustribus Grammaticis:—
“Quem tres calculi, et selibra farris,
Racemi duo, tegula sub unâ,
Ad summam prope nutriunt senectam[429].”
The stream of Roman poetry appears to have suffered a temporary stagnation during the period that elapsed from the destruction of Carthage, which fell in 607, till the death of Sylla, in 674. Lucilius, with whose writings we have been engaged, was the only poet who flourished in this long interval. The satirical compositions which he introduced were not very generally nor successfully imitated. The race of dramatists had become almost extinct, and even the fondness for regular comedy and tragedy had greatly diminished. This [pg 250]was a pause, (though for a shorter period,) like that which was made in modern Italy, from the death of Petrarch till the rise of its bright constellation of poets, at the end of the 15th century. But the taste for literature which had been excited, and the luminous events which occurred, prevented either nation from being again enveloped in darkness. The ancient Romans could not be electrified by the fall of Carthage as their descendants were by the capture of Constantinople. But even the total subjugation of Greece, and extended dominion in Asia, were slower, at least in their influence on the efforts of poetry, than might have been anticipated from what was experienced immediately after the conquest of Magna Græcia. Any retrograde movement, however, was prevented by the more close and frequent intercourse which was opened with Greece. There, Athens and Rhodes were the chief allies of the Roman republic. These states had renounced their freedom, for the security which flattery and subservience obtained for them; but while they ceased to be considerable in power, they still continued pre eminent in learning. A number of military officers and civil functionaries, whom their respective employments carried to Greece—a number of citizens, whom commercial speculations attracted to its towns, became acquainted with and cherished Grecian literature. That contempt which the ancient and severe republicans had affected for its charms, gave place to the warmest enthusiasm. The Roman youth were instructed by Greeks, or by Romans who had studied in Greece. A literary tour in that country was regarded as forming an essential part in the education of a young patrician. Rhodes, Mitylene, and Athens, were chiefly resorted to, as the purest fountains from which the inspiring draughts of literature could be imbibed. This constant intercourse led to a knowledge of the philosophy and finest classical productions of Greece. It was thus that Lucretius was enabled to embody in Roman verse the whole Epicurean system, and Catullus to imitate or translate the lighter amatory and epigrammatic compositions of the Greeks. Both these poets flourished during the period on which we are now entering, and which extended from the death of Sylla to the accession of Augustus. The former of them,