II. The Intellectual World
Literature. The principate had two literatures; one Greek, the other Roman. But the forms of literary production were the same in each, and the Roman authors took rank with those of Greece in their respective fields. For the Romans could boast that they had adapted the Latin tongue to the literary types of the older culture world, while preserving in their work a spirit genuinely Roman.
The Augustan age. The feeling of relief produced by the cessation of the civil wars, and the hopes engendered by the policy of Augustus inspired a group of writers whose genius made the age of Augustus the culminating point in the development of Roman poetry, like the age of Cicero in Roman prose. Foremost among the poets of the new era was Virgil (70–19 B. C.), the son of a small landholder of Mantua, whose Aeneid, a national epic, the glorification [pg 299]alike of Rome and of the Julian house, placed him with Homer in the front rank of epic poets for all time. His greatest contemporary was Horace (65–8 B. C.), the son of a freedman from South Italy. It was Horace who first wrote Latin lyrics in the complicated meters of Greece, and whose genial satire and insight into human nature have combined with his remarkable happiness of phrase to make him the delight of cultivated society both in antiquity and modern times. The leading elegiac poets were Propertius, Tibullus and Ovid (43 B. C.–17 A. D.). In his Fasti and Metamorphoses the latter recounted with masterly narrative skill the legends of Greek and Roman mythology. His elegies reveal the spirit of the pleasure-seeking society of new Rome and show the ineffectiveness of the attempt of Augustus to bring about a moral regeneration of the Roman people. This, probably, was the true ground for his banishment from Rome. Livy (59 B. C.–17 A. D.) was the one prose writer of note in the Augustan age. His history of Rome is a great work of art, an Aeneid in prose, which celebrated the past greatness of Rome and the virtues whereby this had been attained—those virtues which Augustus aimed to revive.
The age of Nero. From Augustus to Nero there are no names of note in Roman literature, but under the latter came a slight reawakening of literary productivity. Seneca (4 B. C.–65 A. D.), a Spaniard from Corduba, Nero’s tutor, minister and victim, is best known as the exponent of the practical Stoic religion and the only Roman tragedian whose works have survived. His nephew Lucan (39–65 A. D.) portrayed in his epic, the Pharsalia, the struggle of the republicans against Julius Caesar. His work shows a reawakening of a vain republican idealism and is the counterpart to the Stoic opposition in the senate. Petronius (d. 66 A. D.), the arbiter of the refinements of luxury at Nero’s court, displayed his originality by giving, in the form of a novel, a skilful and lively picture of the society of the freedmen in the Greek municipalities of South Italy.
The Flavian era. Under the Flavians, Pliny the Elder (23–79 A. D.), a native of Cisalpine Gaul, compiled his Natural History, which he aimed to make an encyclopaedia of information on the whole world of nature. It is a work of monumental industry but displays a lack of critical acumen and scientific training. At about the same time there taught in Rome the Spaniard Quintilian (d. 95 A. D.), who wrote on the theory and practice of rhetoric, expressing in charming [pg 300]prose the Ciceronian ideal of life and education. His countryman Martial (d. 102 A. D.) gave in satiric epigrams glimpses of the meaner aspects of contemporary life.
Tacitus and his contemporaries. The freer atmosphere of the government of Nerva and Trajan allowed the senatorial aristocracy to voice feelings carefully suppressed under the terror of Domitian. Their spokesman was Tacitus (55–116 A. D.), a man of true genius, who ranks next to Thucydides as the representative of artistic historical writing in ancient times. His Treatise on the Orators, his Life of Agricola, and his descriptive account of the German peoples (Germania) were preludes to two great historical works, the Annals and the Histories, which together covered the period from 14–96 A. D. His attitude is strongly influenced by the persecutions of senators under Domitian, and is the expression of his personal animosity and that of the descendants of the older republican nobility towards the principate in general. A friend of Tacitus, the younger Pliny (62–113 A. D.), imitated Cicero in collecting and publishing his letters. This correspondence is valuable as an illustration of the life and literary diletantism of educated circles of the day, as also for the light it throws upon the administrative policies of Trajan. An embittered critic of the age was the satirist Juvenal (d. about 130 A. D.), from Aquinum in Italy, who wrote from a stoical standpoint but with little learning and narrow vision. Somewhat later the first literary history of Rome was written by Suetonius (75–150 A. D.), who is better known as the author of the Lives of the Caesars (from Julius to Domitian), a series of gossipy narratives which set the style for future historical writing in Rome.
With Hadrian begins the period of archaism in Roman literature, that is, an artificial return to the Latin of Cato, Ennius and Plautus, an unmistakable symptom of intellectual sterility.
Provincial literature. The progress of Romanization in the provinces is clearly marked by the participation of provincials in the literary life of Rome. From the Cisalpine, from Narbonese Gaul, and from Spain, men with literary instincts and ability had been drawn to the capital as the sole place where their talents would find recognition. But gradually some of the provinces developed a Latin culture of their own. The first evidences of this change came from the age of the Antonines, when a Latin literature made its appearance in the province of Africa. Its earliest representative was the sophist Apuleius, the author of the romance entitled The Golden Ass.
Christian literature. It was in Africa also that a Latin Christian literature first arose, and it was the African Christian writers who made Latin the language of the church in Italy and the West. Of these Christian apologists the earliest and most influential was Tertullian of Carthage, whose literary activity falls in the time of the Severi. Cyprian and Arnobius continued his task in the third century. In Minucius Felix, a contemporary of Tertullian, the Christian community at Rome found an able defender of the faith.
Jurisprudence. In all other sciences the Romans sat at the feet of the Greeks, but in that of jurisprudence they displayed both independence and originality. The growth of Roman jurisprudence was not hampered but furthered by the establishment of the principate, for the development of a uniform administrative system for the whole empire called for the corresponding development of a uniform system of law. The study of law was stimulated by the practice of Augustus and his successors who gave to prominent jurists the right of publicly giving opinions (jus publice respondendi) by his authority on the legal merits of cases under trial. A further encouragement was given by Hadrian’s organization of his judicial council. The great service of the jurists of the principate was the introduction into Roman law of the principles of equity founded on a philosophic conception of natural law and the systematic organization and interpretation of the body of the civil law. Roman jurisprudence reached its height between the accession of Hadrian and the death of Severus Alexander. The chief legal writers of this period were Julian in the time of Hadrian, Gaius in the age of the Antonines, his contemporary Scaevola, the three celebrated jurists of the time of the Severi—Papinian, Paul and Ulpian, all pretorian prefects,—and lastly Modestine, who closes the long line of classic juris-consults.