A History of Roman Literature

by Harold North Fowler

It was not until the fourth century after Christ that a new capital of the Roman empire was founded at Constantinople; but long before that time the real centre of gravity of the empire was shifting toward the east. Latin literature after Trajan. In Asia, Egypt, and Africa, were the great sources of wealth and the great masses of population. While Rome was growing from the position of a small Italian town to that of the ruler of the world, and even for some time after the establishment of the empire, the Romans had possessed a strong national feeling, and Roman literature, although it began with imitation of the works of the Greeks, had been a national literature. But with the second century a change, which had been in preparation since the days of Augustus, became apparent. Rome was no longer the centre of the world in all things, though still the seat of government. Men of distinction spent at least a great part of their time in the smaller towns of Italy, and the leaders of thought and creators of literature no longer found it necessary to take up their residence at Rome. Then too, the progress of Christianity brought with it a new literature which was not national, but Christian. These causes, with others less obvious, but perhaps no less potent, led to the rapid decay of the national literature. It is our task from this point to trace the progress of this decay, and at the same time to record the rise of Christian literature in the Latin language. Works of great literary importance are few in this period, and the history of literature can be treated in less detail than heretofore.

The Emperor Hadrian (117-138 A. D.) was a man of singular versatility. Hadrian. He delivered and published speeches and wrote an autobiography, works on grammar, and even poems. He was equally familiar with Greek and Latin, and it is probably in part due to this fact that the literary revival during his rule was less Latin than Greek. He spent a great part of his time away from Rome, and wherever he went his path was marked by the erection of buildings for use and ornament. He lived for three years at Athens, where he added a new quarter to the ancient city. Greek, which had for centuries been familiar to the literary men of Rome, became now, more than ever before, the literary language of the empire. It is hardly to be wondered at that Latin literature has under Hadrian no greater representative than Suetonius.

Hadrian’s successor, Antoninus Pius (138-161 A. D.), was no writer, but showed his interest in literary and intellectual matters by granting salaries and privileges to philosophers and rhetors. Marcus Aurelius (161-180 A. D.) was carefully instructed by Greek and Roman teachers. The Antonines. While still a mere boy he was greatly interested in the Stoic philosophy; but the famous orator and teacher Fronto (see page [235]) obtained such great influence over him, that for a number of years he devoted himself to rhetoric. The correspondence of Fronto with Marcus Aurelius shows how great was the affection that existed between teacher and pupil, and also how petty were the rhetorical teachings and investigations in which Fronto passed his life and to which he hoped his pupil would devote his intellect. Fronto was, however, doomed to disappointment, for when Marcus Aurelius was in his twenty-fifth year he turned again to philosophy. The correspondence with Fronto is conducted in Latin similar to Fronto’s own, plentifully adorned with obsolete expressions taken from writers of the republican period. The Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius, those ethical maxims and moral reflections which make the Stoic doctrines seem so much like Christianity, are written in Greek. That Marcus Aurelius regarded Greek as the proper language of culture, or at least of philosophy, is shown by the fact that he established the schools of philosophy at Athens with regularly salaried professors. Lucius Verus, the colleague of Marcus Aurelius until 169 A. D., was also a pupil of Fronto, and in his letters to his teacher shows the same faults of style exhibited by Marcus Aurelius. He had no influence upon Latin literature, and Commodus (180-192 A. D.) had ho interest in literature of any sort.

Pertinax had literary tastes, but his brief reign gave him no opportunity to influence the course of the national literature, while his successor Didius Julianus, who bought the empire from the prætorian guards, found after sixty-six days of nominal power that his purchase brought him ruin and death. Later emperors. Septimius Severus (193-211 A. D.), although his native tongue was probably Punic, was well educated in Greek and Latin and wrote an autobiography, but there is no indication that he exercised any marked influence upon Roman literature. Among the later emperors were few whose literary interests were strong, and still fewer who appear as authors. In the third century Alexander Severus (222-235 A. D.) was seriously interested in Greek and Latin literature and encouraged literary production by all the means in his power; Gordian I (238 A. D.) wrote a metrical history of the Antonines in thirty books, besides various other works in prose and verse, but these are lost, and his brief reign did not enable him to give imperial encouragement to literature; the poems and speeches of Gallienus (260-268 A. D.) and the historical writings of Aurelian (270-275 A. D.) were of little importance. The Emperor Tacitus (275 A. D.) exerted himself to spread abroad the works of his ancestor the historian, and it may be due to him that those works are in part preserved. Those among the still later emperors who had literary interests made their influence felt rather upon Greek than Latin literature.

The most important writer in the reign of Hadrian is Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus. He was born apparently between 70 and 75 A. D. Suetonius. He was a friend of the younger Pliny, who mentions him in his letters. Pliny obtained for him a military tribuneship, which he passed on to a relative. Pliny also assisted him in the purchase of a small estate and encouraged him to publish some of his writings. Under Hadrian he held a position as secretary, from which he was dismissed in 121 A. D. Of his later life nothing is known, but he probably devoted himself to his literary labors, and as his works were numerous, we may assume that he lived to an advanced age.

Only two works of Suetonius are preserved, the first entire, but for a small part at the beginning, and of the second only a part, and that much mutilated. The Lives of the Cæsars. The Lives of the Twelve Cæsars (De Vita Cæsarum), in eight books, contains the lives of Julius Cæsar (Book I), Augustus (Book II), Tiberius (Book III), Caligula (Book IV), Claudius (Book V), Nero (Book VI), Galba, Otho, Vitellius (Book VII), Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian (Book VIII). The work is dedicated to Septicius Clarus, to whom Pliny the younger dedicated his letters, and was published between 119 and 121 A. D., for Clarus is addressed as præfectus prætorio, an office which he held only during those years. The beginning is lost, for the life of Cæsar begins at the point when Cæsar was sixteen years old. Suetonius is a careful and conscientious writer and makes use of various sources of information, not only published histories and biographies, but also public documents, autograph letters of the emperors, and apparently oral tradition. He lacks, however, the critical insight necessary for a good historian and the understanding of character needed by a good biographer. He collected his material with impartiality, avoiding neither what was friendly nor what was hostile to the emperors whose lives he records, and arranged this material as best he could, with no apparent endeavor to trace the development of character, or even to determine in all cases the chronological sequence of events. Dates are seldom given, and the work as a whole presents rather the material for history than real history. But this material is interesting, and the style is simple, straightforward, and clear. Although he wrote at a time when affectations of style were fashionable, Suetonius had the good taste to keep himself free from them.

The second work of Suetonius, entitled De Viris Illustribus (On Illustrious Men), was a series of philosophers, grammarians, and rhetoricians. De Viris Illustribus. The section on orators began with Cicero, that on historians with Sallust. The greater part of the section on grammarians and rhetoricians is extant, as are the lives of Terence, Horace, and Lucan from the section on poets, and that of Pliny the elder from the section on historians. Extracts from other parts of the work are preserved by Jerome and in the scholia on various writers. Each section contained a list of the authors discussed, a brief account of their branch of literature, and short lives of the authors arranged chronologically. In this work also the style is simple and clear, but brevity is sought at the expense of literary excellence.

Other works by Suetonius, some of which were much used by later writers as sources of information, were on Greek Games, Roman Games, the Roman Year, Critical Marks in Books, Cicero’s Republic, Dress, Imprecations, and Roman Laws and Customs. Other works. Some of theses were doubtless included in a work entitled Prata, a sort of encyclopædia in ten books, which dealt also with philology and natural science. The works on Greek Games and on Imprecations were apparently written in Greek, the rest in Latin. Suetonius was not a great writer, but was a diligent compiler of interesting information. His extant works are valuable as sources of information rather than as literary productions, though their freedom from the affectations of the age entitles their author to some praise even from a literary point of view.

To the time of Hadrian belongs a brief history of Rome by Annius or Annæus Florus. Florus. This is not a mere epitome of Livy, as it is entitled in one of the manuscripts, but rather a panegyric on the Roman people. Florus personifies the Roman people, speaks of its childhood under the rule of the kings, its youth while Rome was conquering Italy, its manhood from the conquest of Italy to the time of Augustus, and then instead of going on to tell of its old age, he says the emperor restored it to youth. Florus writes in a flowery, rhetorical style, and pays little attention to any part of history except wars and battles. For these reasons, and also because of its brevity, the work was a popular text-book in the Middle Ages. This Florus is probably identical with a poet who is reported to have joked with Hadrian, and who has left two rather attractive specimens of verse, one of five lines on spring, the other of twenty-six lines on the quality of life. A fragment of a discussion of the question whether Virgil was greater as a poet or as an orator is also preserved under the name of Florus. If this Florus is still the same person, we learn from the fragment that he was unsuccessful in competing for a prize in poetry at Rome, traveled about in many parts of the empire, and finally settled as a teacher in a provincial town, probably Tarraco (Tarragona), in the northeast part of Spain.