Post-Augustan Poetry From Seneca to Juvenal

by Harold Edgeworth Butler

crimine quo merui iuvenis,[589] placidissime divum, quove errore miser, donis ut solus egerem, Somne, tuis? tacet omne pecus volucresque feraeque et simulant fessos curvata cacumina somnos, nec trucibus fluviis idem sonus; occidit horror aequoris, et terris maria acclinata quiescunt. septima iam rediens Phoebe mihi respicit aegras stare genas; totidem Oetaeae Paphiaeque revisunt lampades et totiens nostros Tithonia questus praeterit et gelido spargit miserata flagello. unde ego sufficiam? non si mihi lumina mille quae sacer alterna tantum statione tenebat Argus et haud umquam vigilabat corpore toto. at nunc heus! aliquis longa sub nocte puellae bracchia nexa tenens ultro te, Somne, repellit: inde veni! nec te totas infundere pennas luminibus compello meis (hoc turba precetur laetior): extremo me tange cacumine virgae (sufficit) aut leviter suspenso poplite transi.

By what crime, O Sleep, most gentle of gods, or by what error, have I, that am young, deserved—woe's me!—that I alone should lack thy blessing? All cattle and birds and beasts of the wild lie silent; the curved mountain ridges seem as though they slept the sleep of weariness, and wild torrents have hushed their roaring. The waves of the deep have fallen and the seas, reclined on earth's bosom, take their rest. Yet now Phoebe returning gazes for the seventh time on my sleepless weary eyes. For the seventh time the lamps of Oeta and Paphos (i.e. Hesperus and Venus) revisit me, for the seventh time Tithonus' bride sweeps over my complaint and all her pity is to touch me with her frosty scourge. How may I find strength to endure? I needs must faint, even had I the thousand eyes which divine Argos kept fixed upon his prey in shifting relays (so only could he wake, nor watched he ever with all his body). But now—woe's me!—another, his arms locked about his love, spurneth thee from him all the long night. Leave him, O Sleep, for me. I bid thee not sweep upon my eyes with all the force of thy fanning pinions. That is the prayer of happier souls than I. Touch me only with the tip of thy wand—that shall suffice—or lightly pass over my head with hovering feet.

Here Statius far surpasses himself. Had all else that he wrote been merely mediocre, this one short poem would have given him a claim on the grateful memory of posterity. The note it strikes is one that has never been heard before in Latin poetry and is never heard again. We have wavered before as to Statius' title to the name of true poet; this should turn the balance in his favour. Great he is not for a moment to be called; Lucan, with all his faults, stands high above him; Valerius Flaccus, aided largely by his happier choice of subject, is in some respects his superior; but for finish, dexterity, and fluency, Statius is unique among the post-Augustans. Just as an actor who has acquired a perfect mastery of all the tricks and technique of the stage may sometimes cheat us into believing him to be a great actor, though in reality neither intellect, presence, nor voice qualify him for such high praise, so it is with Statius. His facility and cunning workmanship hold us amazed, and at times the reader is on the verge of yielding up his saner judgement before such charm. But the revulsion of feeling comes inevitably. Statius had not learned the art of concealing his art. The unreality of his work soon makes itself felt, and his skill becomes in time little better than a weariness and a mockery.

CHAPTER X

SILIUS ITALICUS

Titus Catius Silius Italicus[590] is best known to us as the author of the longest and worst of surviving Roman epics. But by a strange irony of fate we have a fuller knowledge of his life and character than is granted us in the case of any other poet of the Silver Age, with the exception of Seneca and Persius. His social position, his personal character, his cultured and artistic tastes, rather than any merit possessed by his verse, have won him a place in the picture-gallery of Pliny the younger.[591] We would gladly sacrifice the whole of the 'obituary notice' transmitted to us by the kindly garrulity of Pliny, for a few more glimpses into the life of Juvenal, or even of Valerius Flaccus, but the picture is interesting and even attractive, and awakens feelings of a less unfriendly nature than are usually entertained for the plodding poetaster who had the misfortune to write the seventeen books of Punica.

Silius was born in the year 25 or 26 A.D.[592]; of his family and place of birth we know nothing.[593] He first appears in the unpleasing guise of a 'delator' in the reign of Nero, in the last year of whose principate he filled the position of consul (68 A.D.).

In the 'year of the four emperors' (69 A.D.) he is found as the friend and counsellor of Vitellius;[594] his conduct, we are told, was wise and courteous. He subsequently won renown by his admirable administration of the province of Asia, and then retired from the public gaze to the seclusion of a life of study.[595] The amiability and virtue which marked the leisure of his later years wiped out the dark stain that had besmirched his youth. 'Men hastened to salute him and to do him honour. When not engaged in writing, he would pass the day in learned converse with the friends and acquaintances—no mere fortune-hunters—who continually thronged the chambers where he would lie for long hours upon his couch. His verses, which he would sometimes submit to the judgement of the critics by giving recitations, show diligence rather than genius. The increasing infirmities of age led him to forsake Rome for Campania; not even the accession of a new princeps induced him to quit his retirement. It is not less creditable to Caesar to have permitted than to Silius to have ventured on such a freedom. He was a connoisseur even to the verge of extravagance. He had several country houses in the same district, and often abandoned those which he already possessed, if some new house chanced to catch his fancy. He had a large library, and a fine collection of portraits and statues, and was an enthusiastic admirer of works of art which he was not fortunate enough to possess. He kept Vergil's birthday with greater care than his own, especially when he was at Naples, where he would visit the poet's tomb with all the veneration due to the temple of a god.' He died[596] in his Neapolitan villa of self-chosen starvation. His health had failed him. He was afflicted by an incurable tumour, and ran to meet death with a fortitude that nothing could shake. 'His life was happy and prosperous to his last hour; his one sorrow was the death of his younger son; the elder (and better) of his sons, who survives him, has had a distinguished career, and has even reached the consulate.' From Epictetus[597] we gather, what we might infer from the manner of his death, that he was a Stoic. From Martial,[598] who addresses him in the interested language of flattery as the leading orator of his day, and as the maker of immortal verse, we learn that he was the proud possessor of the Tusculan villa of Cicero, and that he actually owned the tomb of the poet whom he loved so well.

Silius' life is more interesting than his verse. Like Lucan, he elected to write historical epic, and in his choice of a subject was undoubtedly wiser than his younger contemporary. For instead of selecting a period so dangerously recent as the civil strife in which the republic perished, he went back to the Second Punic War, to a time sufficiently remote to permit of greater freedom of treatment and to enable him to avoid the peril of unduly republican ecstasies. In making this choice he was in all probability influenced by his reverence for Vergil. He, too, would sing of Rome's rise to greatness, would write a truly national epic on the great theme which Vergil so inimitably foreshadowed in the dying words of the Carthaginian queen, would link the most stirring years of Rome's history with the past, just as Vergil had linked the epic of Rome's founder to the greatness of the years that were to come. Ennius had been before him, but he might well aspire to remodel and develop the rude annalistic work of the earlier poet.[599] The brilliant history of Livy, with its vivid battle-scenes and its sonorous speeches, was a quarry that might provide him with the richest material. Unhappily, less wise than Lucan, he made the fatal mistake of adopting the principles set forth by Eumolpus, the dissolute poet in the novel of Petronius.[600]

The intrusion of the mythological method into historical epic is disastrous. It is barely tolerable in the pseudo-historical epic of Tasso. In the military narrative of Silius it is monstrous and insufferable. His reverence for Vergil led him to control, or attempt to control, every action of the war by divine intervention.