BOOK III
THE EMPIRE AFTER AUGUSTUS
CHAPTER XIII
TIBERIUS TO VESPASIAN
The emperors (Tiberius, 14-37 A. D.; Caligula, 37-41 A. D.; Claudius, 41-54 A. D.; Nero, 54-68 A. D.)—Phædrus, about 40 A. D.—Germanicus, 15 B. C.-19 A. D.—Velleius Paterculus, 30 A. D.—Valerius Maximus, about 47 B. C. to about 30 A. D.—Celsus about 35 A. D.—Votienus Montanus, died 27 A. D.—Asinius Gallus, 40 B. C.-33 A. D.—Mamercus Scaurus, died 34 A. D.—Publius Vitellius, died 31 A. D.—Domitius Afer, 14 B. C.-59 A. D.—Cremutius Cordus, died 25 A. D.—Aufidius Bassus—Remmius Palæmon—Julius Atticus—Julius Gracchinus—Marcus Apicius—Philosophers—Lucius Annæus Seneca, about 1 A. D. to 65 A. D.—Persius, 34-62 A. D.—Lucan, 39-65 A. D.—Calpurnius, about 60 A. D.—Pomponius Secundus, about 50 A. D.—Petronius, died 66 A. D.—Quintus Curtius, about 50 (?) A. D.—Columella, about 40 A. D.—Mela, about 40 A. D.—Other writers.
With the death of Augustus the greatest period of Roman literature comes to an end. Literature after Augustus. From this time its history is a record of decay, not regularly progressive, to be sure, and not always manifested in the same way, but almost constant, and hardly interrupted even by the appearance of a few writers of genuine ability. With the establishment of peace throughout the Roman Empire, and with the ease and security of travel from province to province, men from all parts of the empire came to Rome for a time and returned to their homes, after, perhaps, imbibing something of the culture of the capital, while others took up their residence permanently in the imperial city. Some men of each class devoted themselves to literature. The elder Seneca belongs to one of these classes, the younger Seneca certainly to the latter. The influence of the provincials upon Roman literature could not fail to be great. In the hands of Spaniards like the Senecas, Latin could hardly remain the city speech, sermo urbanus, of the time of Cicero. The evil influence of even the best rhetorical teaching of the time of Augustus has already been mentioned, and as time went on the rhetorical teaching became constantly worse. Moreover, the circumstances of the empire, and especially of the city of Rome, were not favorable to the growth of literature. The peace that followed the unrest of the civil wars had led in the time of Augustus to great literary activity, but the continued peace in the subsequent years, when men’s minds were no longer moved by the remembrance of stirring events, tended to deaden the imagination and to dry up the springs of literary life. In the early part of the first century after Christ there are few important writers either in Greek or Latin. In the city itself the character of the emperor had a powerful effect upon literature.
Tiberius (14-37 A. D.) was a pupil of the Greek rhetorician, Theodorus of Gadara, and was familiar with Greek and Latin literature. The relations of the emperors to literature. He wrote Greek verses in the learned Alexandrian manner, a Latin poem on the death of Lucius Cæsar, and autobiographical memoirs in prose; but his own literary interest did not make him a patron of literature. His suspicious nature caused him to seek out and punish all real or imaginary allusions to himself in the works of contemporary authors, with the natural result that authorship became a pursuit too dangerous to be popular. Caligula (37-41 A. D.) had some ability as a speaker, and wished to be considered an orator, but his insanity led him to wish to destroy the works of Homer, and to remove the works and the busts of Virgil and Livy from the public libraries, on the ground that one of them was without genius or learning and the other was diffuse and careless. Although he did not systematically repress literature, his brief reign was certainly not favorable to its cultivation. Claudius (41-54 A. D.), who came to the throne at the age of fifty years, was a dull and learned pedant. He began to write a history from the death of Cæsar, but stopped at the end of the second book, owing to the objections of his mother and grandmother. He then wrote a history in forty-one books, probably beginning with the bestowal of the title of Augustus upon Octavian (27 B. C.), and continuing for forty-one years. He also wrote a history of the Etruscans in twenty books and a history of Carthage in eight books. Of all these works nothing remains. Some idea of his style may be derived from two inscriptions found at Lyons and Trent. The first is a speech delivered in the senate in 48 A. D., advocating the extension to the Gallic nobility of the ius honorum, or right to hold offices, the second a decree renewing the grant of citizenship to the inhabitants of the regions in the Rhætian Alps about Trent, and regulating their affairs. In both cases the style is confused and entirely without elegance or merit. Claudius also wrote a defense of Cicero against Asinius Gallus, the son of Asinius Pollio, who had maintained that Pollio was the greater orator. The addition by Claudius of three letters to the Latin alphabet shows his interest in linguistic matters, but was without permanent effect. Under this ruler literature revived somewhat after the persecutions under Tiberius. Nero (54-68 A. D.), the pupil of Seneca, wrote various short poems and an epic, entitled Troica, on the Trojan War. His jealousy caused him to be the enemy of other poets, but he paid little attention to literary attacks upon himself. On the whole, literature was not repressed during his reign, though after the discovery of the conspiracy of Piso, in 65 A. D., his wrath fell upon philosophers and men of letters.