Bassus is a genuine poet, and his verse possesses both beauty and charm: but the only result is that, when after a whole year, working every day and often well into the night, he has hammered out one book of poems, he must needs go about requesting people to be good enough to give him a hearing: and what is more he has to pay for it: for he borrows a house, constructs an auditorium, hires benches and distributes programmes. And then—admitting his recitations to be highly successful—yet all that honour and glory falls within one or two days, prematurely gathered like grass in the blade or flowers in their earliest bloom: it has no sure or solid reward, wins no friendship or following or lasting gratitude, naught save a transient applause, empty words of praise and a fleeting enthusiasm.
The less fortunate poet had to betake himself to the forum or the public baths or some temple, there to inflict his tawdry wares upon the ears of a chance audience.[79] Others more fortunate would be lent a room by some rich patron.[80] Under Nero and Domitian we get the apotheosis of recitation. Nero, we have seen, established the Neronia in 60 and himself competed. Domitian established a quinquennial competition in honour of Jupiter Capitolinus in 86 and an annual competition held every Quinquatria Minervae at his palace on the Alban mount.[81] From that time forward it became the ambition of every poet to be crowned at these grotesque competitions.
The result of all these co-operating influences will be evident as we deal with the individual poets. Here we can only give a brief summary of the general characteristics of this fantastic literature. We have a striving after originality that ends in eccentricity: writers were steeped in the great poets of the Augustan age: men of comparatively small creative imagination, but, thanks to their education, possessed of great technical skill, they ran into violent extremes to avoid the charge of imitating the great predecessors whom they could not help but imitate; hence the obscurity of Persius—the disciple of Horace—and of Statins and Valerius Flaccus—the followers of Vergil. Hence Lucan's bold attempt to strike out a new type of epic, an attempt that ended in a wild orgy of brilliant yet turbid rhetoric. The simple and natural was at a discount: brilliance of point, bombastic description, gorgeous colour were preferred to quiet power. Alexandrian learning, already too much in evidence in the Augustan age, becomes more prominent and more oppressive. For men of second-rate talent it served to give their work a spurious air of depth and originality to which it was not entitled. The necessity of patronage engendered a fulsome flattery, while the false tone of the schools of rhetoric,[82] aided perhaps by the influence of the Stoical training so fashionable at Rome, led to a marvellous conceit and self-complacency, of which a lack of humour was a necessary corollary. These symptoms are seen at their worst during the extravagant reign of Nero, though the blame attaches as much to Seneca as to his pupil and emperor. Traces of a reaction against this wild unreality are perhaps to be found in the literary criticism scattered tip and down the pages of Petronius,[83] but it was not till the extinction of Nero and Seneca that any strong revolt in the direction of sanity can be traced. Even then it is rather in the sphere of prose than of poetry that it is manifest. Quintilian headed a Ciceronian reaction and was followed by Pliny the younger and for a time by Tacitus. But we may perhaps trace a similar Vergilian reaction in the verse of Silius, Statius, and Valerius.[84] Their faults do not nauseate to the same extent of those of their predecessors. But the mischief was done, and in point of extravagance and meretricious taste the differense is only one of degree.
Satire alone attains to real eminence: rhetoric and epigram are its most mordant weapons, and the schools of rhetoric, if they did nothing else, kept those weapons well sharpened: the gross evils of the age opened an ample field for the satirist. Hence it is that all or almost all that is best in the literature of the Silver Age is satirical or strongly tinged with satire. Tacitus, who had many of the noblest qualifications of a poet, almost deserves the title of Rome's greatest satirist; the works of Persius and Juvenal speak openly for themselves while many of the finest passages in Lucans are most near akin to satire. It is true that under the principate satire had to be employed with caution; under the first two dynasties it was compelled to be general in tone: it was not until after the fall of Domitian, under the enlightened rule of Nerva and Trajan, that it found a freer scope and was at least allowed to lash the vices of the present under the names of the past.
It is in satire alone that we find any trace of genuine moral earnestness and enthusiasm; and the reason for this is primarily that the satirists wrote under the influence of the one force that definitely and steadily made for righteousness. It is the Stoic philosophy that kindles Persius and Lucan, while Tacitus and Juvenal, even if they make no profession of Stoicism, have yet been profoundly influenced by its teaching. Their morality takes its colour, if not its form, from the philosophy oh the 'Porch'. The only non-satirical poetry primarily inspired by Stoicism is the dramatic verse of Seneca. That its influence here is not wholly for the best is due only in part to the intrinsic qualities of its teaching. It is rather in its application that the fault lies; it dominates and crushes the drama instead of suffusing it and lending it wings; it insists on preaching instead of suggesting. It is too insistent and aggressive a creed to harmonize with poetry, unless that poetry be definitely didactic in type and aim. But it is admirably suited to be the inspiration of satire, and it is therefore that the satire makes a far stronger moral appeal than any other form of post-Augustan literature.
Satire apart, the period is in the main an age of belles lettres, of 'the literary gourmet, the connoisseur, the blasé and disillusioned man of society, passionately appreciative of detail, difficulties overcome, and petty felicities of expression.'[85] It is the fashion to despise its works, and the fashion cannot be described as unhealthy or unjust. Yet it produced a few men of genius, while even in the works of those who were far removed from genius, the very fact that there is much refinement of wit, much triumphing over technical difficulties, much elaborate felicity of expression, makes them always a curious and at times a remunerative study. But perhaps its greatest claim upon us lies in the unexpected service that it rendered to the cause of culture. In the darkness of the Middle Ages when Greek was a hidden mystery to the western world, Lucan and Statius, Juvenal and Persius, and even the humble and unknown author of the Ilias Latina, did their part in keeping the lamp alive and illumining the midnight in which lay hidden the 'budding morrow' of the Renaissance.