It was through patronage that literature became remunerative, and fortunately for the authors the patronage of literature became, under Octavius, fashionable. I have already referred to the familiar name of Mæcenas, whose influence in interesting his fellow-patricians and the young Emperor in the literary productions of the capital was most important. The fashion of patronage thus initiated continued to a greater or less extent until the days of Hadrian. As Simcox expresses it, the poets got into the habit of expecting to be treated “as semi-sacred pensioners, as they have been at the courts of the princes of the heroic age of Greece and Scandinavia—as they are still at the courts of certain princes in India who trace their descent up to the heroic age.”[223] In the age of Anne, English poets passed through a somewhat similar experience, and during the reigns of the first two Georges, they were not infrequently haunted by the same expectations. The bitter line, as paraphrased by Johnson, after his experience with Lord Chesterfield, commemorating the evil of the poet’s lot, has become proverbial
“Age, envy, want, the patron and the jail.”
In Rome when, in the decline of the literary interests of the Court, the hopes of patronage were finally abandoned, the profession of poetry seems for a time to have been practically given up.
Juvenal takes as the subject of his seventh satire the poverty of men of letters. He complains that the Emperor is their sole stay, and that authors can make no money and have as a dependence only the unprofitable patronage of the great. The poets who recite their verses, the historians, the lawyers, the rhetoricians who act as instructors for the young, are made to pass in turn before him, and of each the condition arouses the compassion of his irritable muse. In this satire we find references to the practice among poets of giving public readings of their productions. “Macalonus will lend you his palace and will provide some freedmen and some obliging friends to applaud. But among all these, you will find no one who will furnish you with means to pay either for seats in the parquet or orchestra, or even for places in the gallery.”[224]
Or again, it is Statius who gives a reading of his Thebaïd.
“All the city comes to hear the reading. The audience is enthusiastic and applauds vociferously. But Statius would have died of hunger if he had not been able to sell to the actor Paris his tragedy of Agave. Paris distributes military honors and puts on the fingers of poets the ring of knighthood. What the nobles do not give, an actor may bestow.”[225]
The author of the dialogue on the decadence of oratory (attributed to Tacitus) makes mention also of these public lectures or readings, and of what they cost to a certain Bassus, for hiring a hall, for programmes, and for outlays in getting an audience together.
Rogare ultro et ambire cogitur ut sint qui dignentur audire; et ne id quidem gratis. Nam et domum mutuatur, et auditorium exstruit, et subsellia conducit, et libellos dispergit.[226]
Apart from the use of authorship as a profession, it was of course pursued by many as an agreeable means of beguiling leisure, the results being harmless for posterity if not entirely so for the neighbors of the writer. In this respect, Rome, in the third century, was not very different from London or New York in the nineteenth. The dilettante tragedian frequently restricted his literary ambition to securing a hearing for his productions before an audience, whether public or private, and did not venture to plan for his works any wider publication.
There are not a few references to banquets at which the guests paid for their dinners by listening, with due appreciation, to the latest tragedy of their host.