Post-Augustan Poetry From Seneca to Juvenal

by Harold Edgeworth Butler

After the death of Nero and the close of the Civil War a happier era, both for literature and the world at large, was inaugurated by the accession of Vespasian in 69 A.D. A man of low birth and of little culture, he yet had a true appreciation of art and literature. Of his own writing we know nothing save that he left behind him memoirs.[419] But we have abundant evidence that he showed himself a liberal patron of the arts. He gave rich rewards to poets and sculptors,[420] effected all that was possible to repair the great loss of works of art occasioned by the burning of the Capitol,[421] and did what he could for the stage, perhaps even attempting to revive the legitimate drama.[422] Above all, he set aside a large sum annually for the support of Greek and Latin professors of rhetoric,[423] the first instance in the history of Rome of State endowment of education. Against this we must set his expulsion from Italy of philosophers and astrologers, an intemperate and presumably ineffective act, prompted by reasons of State and probably without any appreciable influence on literature.[424] His sons, however, had received all the advantages of the highest education. Of Titus' (79-81 A.D.) achievements in literature we have no information save that he aspired to be both orator and poet. The language used in praise of his efforts by Pliny the elder, our one authority on this point, is so extravagant as to be virtually meaningless.[425] Of the literary exploits of his brother Domitian (81-96 A.D.) there is more to be said. It pleased him to lay claim to distinction both in prose and verse.[426] His only prose work of which any record remains was a treatise on the care of the hair;[427] his own baldness rankled in his mind and turned the calvus Nero of Juvenal into a hair specialist. As to his poems it is almost doubtful if he ever wrote any. He professed an enthusiasm for poetry, an art which, according to Suetonius, he had neglected in his youth and despised when he came to the throne. But Quintilian, Valerius Flaccus, and Martial[428] all load him with praise of various degrees of fulsomeness, though, reading between the lines of Quintilian, it is easy to see that Domitian's output must have been exceedingly small. The evidence of these three authors goes to show that he had contemplated, perhaps even begun, an epic on the achievements of his brother Titus in the Judaic War. Whether these caelestia carmina belli, as Martial calls them, ever existed, save in the imagination of courtiers and servile poets, there is nothing to show. If they did exist there seems no reason to regret their loss.

Domitian's chief service to literature, if indeed it was a true service, was the establishment of the Agon Capitolinus in 86, a quinquennial festival at which prizes were awarded not only for athletics and chariot-racing, but for declamations in verse and prose,[429] and the institution of a similar, though annual, contest at his own palace on the Alban Mount, which took place as often as the great festival of Minerva, known as the Quinquatria, came round.[430] But his interest in literature was only superficial; he had no originality and read nothing save the memoirs and edicts of Tiberius.[431] His capricious cruelty extended itself to artists and authors;[432] twice (in 89 and 93 A.D.), following his father's example, he banished philosophers and astrologers from Rome;[433] the crime of having written laudatory biographies of the Stoics Thrasea and Helvidius Priscus brought Arulenus Rusticus and Herennius Senecio to their deaths.[434] But Domitian's tyranny had little effect on belles-lettres, however adverse it may have been to free-spoken philosophy, rhetoric, or history. Valerius Flaccus, Silius, Statius, and Martial, all wrote during his reign, and the works of the last-named poet and Quintilian give ample evidence of widespread literary activity. The minor poet replenished the earth, and the prizes for literature awarded at the Agon Capitolinus and the festival of the Alban Mount must have been a real stimulus to writing, even though the type of literature produced by such a stimulus may have been scarcely worth producing. The worst feature of the poetry of the time is the almost incredibly fulsome flattery to which the tyranny of Domitian gave rise. As a compensation we have in the two succeeding reigns the biting satire of Juvenal and Tacitus, rendered all the keener by its long suppression under the last of the Flavian dynasty.

But, however impossible it may have been to write really effective satire during the Flavian dynasty, of poets there was no lack. It was, moreover, under the Flavians that there sprang up that reaction towards a saner style to which we have already referred as finding its expression in the Ciceronianism of Quintilian, and to a lesser degree in the Vergilianism of Valerius, Statius, and Silius. Of lesser luminaries there were enough and to spare. Serranus and Saleius Bassus are both warmly commended by Quintilian for their achievements in Epic. The former died young, before his powers had ripened to maturity, but showed great soundness of style and high promise.[435] Of Saleius Quintilian[436] says, 'He had a vigorous and poetic genius, but it was not mellowed by age.' That is to say, he died young, like Serranus. In the Dialogus of Tacitus he is spoken of as the best of men and the most finished of poets. He won Vespasian's favour and received a gift from him of five hundred thousand sesterces. His poems brought him no material profit; both Tacitus and Juvenal emphasize this point:

contentus fama iaceat Lucanus in hortis marmoreis; at Serrano tenuique Saleio gloria quantalibet quid erit, si gloria tantum est.[437]

Statius' father, a distinguished teacher of rhetoric at Naples, had written a poem on the burning of the Capitol in 69 A.D., and was only prevented by death[438] from singing the great eruption of Vesuvius. Arruntius Stella of Patavium,[439] the friend of Statius and Martial, wrote elegies to his wife Violentilla. Turnus,[440] like Juvenal the son of a freedman, attained considerable success as a satirist, while the two distinguished soldiers, Verginius Rufus[441] and Vestricius Spurinna,[442] wrote light erotic verse and lyrics respectively. In addition to these there are a whole host of minor poets mentioned by Statius and Martial. In fact the writing of verse was the most fashionable occupation for the leisure time of a cultivated gentleman.

With Nerva and Trajan the happiest epoch of the principate set in. Nerva (96-98 A.D.) sprung from a line of distinguished jurists, was celebrated by Martial as the Tibullus of his time,[443] and is praised by the younger Pliny for the excellence of his light verses.[444] Trajan, his successor (98-117 A.D.), though a man of war, rather than a man of letters, wrote a history of the Dacian wars,[445] and possessed—as his letters to Pliny testify—a remarkable power of expressing himself tersely and clearly. He was, like Vespasian, a generous patron to rhetoric and education,[446] and the founder of the important library known as the Bibliotheca Ulpia.[447] But the great service which he and his predecessor rendered to literature was, as Pliny and Tacitus bear eloquent witness, the gift of freedom. This did more for prose than for poetry, save for one important fact—it was the means of enriching the world with the satires of Juvenal. If the quantity of the literature surviving from the principates of Nerva and Trajan is small, its quality is unmistakable. Pliny the younger, Tacitus, and Juvenal form a trio whose equal is to be found at no other period of the post-Augustan principate, while the letters of Pliny give proof of the existence of a highly cultivated society devoted to literature of all kinds. Poets were numerous even if they were not good. Few names, however, survive, and those have but the slightest interest for us. It will suffice to mention three of them: Passennus Paulus, Sentius Augurinus, and the younger Pliny. With the dramatic poets, Pomponius Bassulus and Vergilius Romanus, we have already dealt.[448] Pliny shall speak for himself and his friends.

'Passennus Paulus,' he writes,[449] 'a distinguished Roman knight of great learning, is a writer of elegies. This runs in the family; for he is a fellow townsman of Propertius and indeed counts him among his ancestors.' In a later letter[450] he speaks with solicitude of his failing health, and goes on to describe the characteristics of his work. 'In his verse he imitates the ancients, paraphrases them, and reproduces them, above all Propertius, from whom he traces his descent. He is a worthy scion of the house, and closely resembles his great ancestor in that sphere in which he of old excelled. If you read his elegies you will find them highly polished, possessed of great sensuous charm, and quite obviously written in the house of Propertius. He has lately betaken himself to lyric verse, and imitates Horace with the same skill with which he has imitated Propertius. Indeed, if kinship counts for anything in the world of letters, you would deem him Horace's kinsman as well.' Pliny concludes with a warm tribute to Passennus' character. The picture is a pleasant one, but it is startling and significant to find Pliny awarding such praise to one who was frankly imitative, if he was not actually a plagiarist.[451]

Pliny is not less complimentary to Sentius Augurinus. 'I have been listening,' he writes,[452] 'to a recitation given by Sentius Augurinus. It gave me the greatest pleasure, and filled me with the utmost admiration for his talent. He calls his verses "trifles" (poematia). Much is written with great delicacy, much with great elevation of style; many of the poems show great charm, many great tenderness; not a few are honey-sweet, not a few bitter and mordant. It is some time since anything so perfect has been produced.' The next clause, however, betrays the reason, in part at any rate, for Pliny's admiration. In the course of his recitation he had produced a small hendecasyllabic poem in praise of Pliny's own verses. Pliny proceeds to quote it with every expression of gratification and approval. It is certainly neatly turned and well expressed, but it is such as any cultivated gentleman who had read his Catullus and Martial might produce, and can hardly have been of interest to any one save Augurinus and Pliny. Pliny was, in fact, with all his admirable gifts, one of the principal and most amiable members of a highly cultivated mutual admiration society. He was a poet himself, though only a few lines of the poems praised by Augurinus have survived to undergo the judgement of a more critical age. Pliny has, however, given an interesting little sketch of his poetical career in the fourth letter of the seventh book. 'I have always had a taste for poetry,' he tells his friend Pontius; 'nay, I was only fourteen when I composed a tragedy in Greek. What was it like? you ask. I know not; it was called a tragedy. Later, when returning from my military service, I was weather-bound in the island of Icaria, and wrote elegiac poems in Latin about that island and the sea, which bears the same name. I have occasionally attempted heroic hexameters, but it is only quite recently that I have taken to writing hendecasyllables. You shall hear of their origin and of the occasion which gave them birth. Some writings of Asinius Gallus were being read aloud to me in my Laurentine villa; in these works he was comparing his father with Cicero; we came upon an epigram of Cicero dedicated to his freedman Tiro. Shortly after, about noon—for it was summer—I retired to take my siesta, and finding that I could not sleep, I began to reflect how the very greatest orators have taken delight in composing this style of verse, and have hoped to win fame thereby. I set my mind to it, and, quite contrary to my expectations after so long desuetude, produced in an extremely short space of time the following verses on that very subject which had provoked me to write.'

Thirteen hexameter verses follow of a mildly erotic character. They are not peculiarly edifying, and are certainly very far from being poetry. He continues:

'I then turned my attention to expressing the same thoughts in elegiac verse; I rattled these off at equal speed, and wrote some additional lines, being beguiled into doing so by the fluency with which I wrote the metre. On my return to Rome I read the verses to my friends. They approved. Then in my leisure moments, especially when travelling, I attempted other metres. Finally, I resolved to follow the example of many other writers and compose a whole separate volume in the hendecasyllabic metre; nor do I regret having done so. For the book is read, copied, and even sung; even Greeks chant my verses to the sound of the cithara or the lyre; their passion for the book has taught them to use the Latin tongue.' It was this volume of hendecasyllables about which Pliny displays such naïve enthusiasm that led Augurinus to compare Pliny to Calvus and Catullus. Pliny's success had come to him comparatively late in life; but it emboldened him to the composition of another volume of poems[453] in various metres, which he read to his friends. He cites one specimen in elegiacs[454] which awakens no desire for more, for it is fully as prosy as the hexameters to which we have already referred. Of the hendecasyllables nothing survives, but Pliny tells us something as to their themes and the manner of their composition.[455] 'I amuse myself by writing them in my leisure moments at the bath or in my carriage. I jest in them and make merry, I play the lover, I weep, I make lamentation, I vent my anger, or describe something or other now in a pedestrian, now in a loftier vein.' As this little catalogue would suggest, these poems were not always too respectable. The good Pliny, like Martial, thinks it necessary to apologize[456] for his freedom in conforming to the fashionable licence of his age by protesting that his muse may be wanton, but his life is chaste. We can readily believe him, for he was a man of kindly heart and high ideals, whose simple vanity cannot obscure his amiability. But it is difficult to believe that the loss of his poetry is in any way a serious loss to the world.[457] We have given Pliny the poet more space than is his due; our excuse must be the interest of his engaging self-revelations.