and
“Deformem quidam te dicunt, Crispa”—
has, in his epigrams themselves, followed Martial in directions where he is a less blameless guide than in his literary criticism. |Ausonius.| But he has not followed him here; and though much of the collection is simply a translation of the Greek Anthology, I do not remember any literary following thereof. But the curious verse celebration of what we may call the University of Bordeaux, with its “commemoration,” in separate pieces of varying length and metre, of a couple of dozen of Professors; the Fourth Idyll, to his namesake and grandson on his studies; and the Epistles, especially those to Paullus the Rhetor and to Tetradius, all have more or less to do with the subject.
We find, and are not surprised to find, that of the Professors at Bordeaux the majority are Professors of Rhetoric. Compliment has naturally rather the better of criticism in the addresses to them, but certain things emerge. Tib. Victor Minervius is “another Quintilian,” especially for fluency and for the Demosthenicum (I suppose δεινότης); but it is a little suspicious that the fullest praise is given to his memory. Latinus Alcimus Alethius seems to have been himself a careful critic, and appears to have written specially on Sallust and on the Emperor Julian—perhaps the books are somewhere? Attius Patera was “a descendant of the Druids,” and we should have been glad to know whether he displayed that “Celtic spirit” in literature of which we have heard more than enough in these days. But Ausonius is vague as the Celtic vague itself. Attius Tiro Delphinius was a poet as well as an orator. Others—the dead Luciolus, Alethius Minervius the Younger, the Grammarian Lentulus, “cognomine Lascivus” (quite innocent, Ausonius tells us), his brother Jucundus, are more generally commended. Pieces, two grouped and some single, to the Greek and the Latin grammarians of Bordeaux—show that the languages, as well as the literatures, received plentiful attention. The compliment to Exuperius of Toulouse goes closer, and is decidedly double-edged.[[436]] Erudition is specially attributed to Staphylius, who knew not only Livy and Herodotus, but “all that is stored in the thousand volumes of Varro” (sexcentis, of course). It is observable that the grammarians[[437]] appear to have chiefly lectured on poetry, the Rhetors on prose, and the whole, with touches numerous, if not very definite, suggests to us a study liberal enough, but perhaps not very wide, rather undiscriminating. The Idyll to his nephew enters naturally into a few more particulars. A generous but general incitement to the study of the tongues is followed by detail. The, as it seems to us, very odd conjunction of Homer and Menander is an additional testimony to the popularity of the great New Comic. It can hardly be accidental, for it is separated by some lines from any other mention. In fact, Ausonius is not prodigal of names, only those of Horace, Virgil, and Terence being mentioned for Latin poetry, and the work, though not the name, of Sallust, with some other histories of the last Republican period. Lastly, the Epistles, besides supplying fresh instances of Ausonius’ rococo fancy for the cento—even the Macaronic cento—supply a perhaps humorous prose criticism in form of his own work, which is worth subjoining.[[438]]
The Anthologia Latina,[[439]] which a certain noble youth of the name of Octavian composed at the bidding of some Vandal |The Anthologia Latina.| chieftain, perhaps as late as 532, at the extreme verge of the twilight of the West, is not entirely deserving of the transferred sense attached to its patron’s nationality. It has preserved one or two pretty things for us, and more curious ones. And, in our particular relation, it shows that literary society and occupation had by no means gone wholly out of fashion. Both with individuals and coteries Virgil was a perversely favourite subject; and the deplorable persons who called themselves the Twelve Wise Men wrote distichs, and pentastichs, and polystichs, à dormir debout, on the contents of the books of the Æneid and other subjects. The epigrams attributed to Seneca are probably, whether they belong to any of the known Senecas or not, of an older and better time; and the pair (Nos. 27 and 28) on the theme of Ære perennius, though the sentiment is of course a commonplace, have a grip and ring of style which, at any rate after the flaccid barbarisms of the sixth century, shows well. But for the literary taste of this time itself, the works of a certain Luxorius (a contemporary it would seem, and, from the word spectabilis, probably of official rank) are most valuable. They are of some bulk, consisting of not much less than a hundred pieces, filling some forty pages in Baehrens’s edition. The body of the work, according to the usual prava docilitas of the epigrammatist, consists of things licentious or trivial enough; but Luxorius had read his Martial in this respect more closely than Ausonius, that he begins with three or four pieces of a critical or semi-critical kind. He is thoroughly convinced of the danger of writing after the ancients; but, as he says with some force to the Reader, “If you think them of better quality, why don’t you read them and not me?” He consoles his book, should it meet with contempt at Rome and Carthage, with the observation that things must be content with their proper places; and in a fourth piece pleads that if his epigrams are short, why, the reading will be the sooner finished. The tone, with a good deal less disguised conceit, is very much that of a literary abbé or President of the eighteenth century—a kind of person with whose general tastes, literary and other, Luxorius would probably have sympathised well enough.
We may now complete our survey of the actual documents by dealing with such remnants as we have of the technical |The Latin Rhetoricians.| treatises on Rhetoric in Latin. These are neither numerous nor bulky, nor, with one exception at the very end of the classical, and gate of the mediæval, period (to which latter some of them even belong), of much interest or importance. The fact may seem a little surprising, in face of the immense interest in the practice of the subject, which not merely Seneca, and Quintilian, and Pliny, but all others, show. But the surprise will vanish at a little consideration. Before the Romans attempted it, the technical part of Rhetoric had been reduced, as we saw, to a settled scheme of extreme intricacy by the Greeks, and these claimed to be as much the masters of the subject as Jews were of Medicine in the Middle Ages. Probably every Roman, though he might attend his own countrymen’s declamations, learnt the art of Rhetoric from a Greek professor at one time or another, and was familiar with the Greek technæ. It was only after the separation of the Empires, and not even immediately then, that Greek ceased to be the language of education. Moreover, the Romans, though of orderly and business-like habits of thought, had neither the liking nor the language suited for the intenser and minuter technicalities of the Art.
It may be almost sufficient justification of the last paragraph to mention that the whole body of Latin Rhetoricians, as given in the standard edition of Capperonnier,[[440]] fills but a volume of some 400 not very large quarto pages; and that this is made up by the insertion not merely of the Rhetorical part of Martianus Capella, but of such purely mediæval or “Dark Age” work as that of Bede, Isidore, and possibly Alcuin. These latter will find better place in the next Book. Martianus shall be noticed by himself presently; we may meanwhile run over the rest.
The first in order, and perhaps the oldest, is the Treatise on the Figures of P. Rutilius Lupus, a rhetorician often quoted |Rutilius Lupus, &c.| by Quintilian. It is in the dictionary form, but not alphabetically arranged. The definitions are technical, meagre, and chiefly limited to that jejune splitting of kinds which has been noticed under the head of Greek. The illustrative quotations, which are numerous and not useless, are wholly from Greek authors, many of them indicating by their time that the Gorgias, whose four books Quintilian tells us that Rutilius abstracted into one, was not the sophist of Leontini, but a later Athenian rhetorician. Except for the close connection which—until quite recently if not still—has existed between the Figures and criticism, this has little interest for us.
The next treatise, that of Aquila Romanus, is in the same way only a Latin accommodation of the work of Alexander (v. supra, p. [102]). It is of the same class, a non-alphabetical dictionary in miniature, and devoted to the same subject. Of the same class again, exactly, is the tractate of Julius Rufinianus, who, since he keeps, as Rutilius and Aquila had not done, the Greek words schema for figura, and lexis for elocutio, was probably a closer adapter, paraphrast, or translator of his original even than they. He has added a short parallel treatment of the other division of schemata, the intellectual or dianoetic.
Curius or Chirius Fortunatianus (a writer at any rate senior to Cassiodorus, who epitomised him) was more ambitious, |Curius Fortunatianus: his Catechism.| and instead of confining himself to the Figures, composed a regular art of the Rhetoric of the Schools in three books. It supplies an interesting and early example of the catechetical form which was so popular during the middle ages, which continued to flourish till within the memory of the present generation, and the disuse of which has certainly been accompanied by a loss in exactness of actual knowledge, compensated, or not, by a gain in the philosophical character of such as is acquired.