A History of Roman Literature

by Harold North Fowler

Those men will know by my head’s price that they

Served no mean standard when they followed mine.

Then come, and by great slaughter gain deserts.

Mere flight is a base crime.[94]

Lucan is certainly the chief poet of the time of Nero. Less important is Titus Calpurnius Siculus, the author of seven Eclogues in imitation of Virgil and Theocritus. Calpurnius. Formerly eleven eclogues were attributed to him, but it is now evident that he was the author of only seven, the remainder being probably the work of Nemesianus, who lived in the first half of the third century. The Eclogues of Calpurnius are close imitations of those of Virgil, but are far inferior to their prototypes. They are attractive, but so much less attractive than Virgil’s Eclogues that they are little read. A poem In Praise of Piso (De Laude Pisonis) is attributed with great probability to Calpurnius. The Piso whose praise is sung is without doubt Calpurnius Piso, the rich and influential man who headed the conspiracy against Nero and committed suicide in 65 A. D. This poem is full of imitations of Virgil, Ovid, and Horace. Other poems. The poem entitled Ætna (see p. 141) and many of the anonymous poems preserved in manuscripts, some of which are not without merit, are to be ascribed to this period. The prætexta entitled Octavia, preserved among Seneca’s tragedies, undoubtedly belongs to a slightly later time, as Seneca and Nero appear in it. So far as its style is concerned, it might almost be by Seneca, though the rhetoric displayed is somewhat less effective than that of Seneca’s tragedies. The play is interesting, chiefly because it is the only extant play of its class. Only a few unimportant fragments remain of the tragedies by the distinguished general, Publius Pomponius Secundus.

A work of unique interest is the novel by Petronius. Petronius. This author is without much doubt identical with the Gaius Petronius, who was proconsul of Bithynia and afterwards consul, whom Nero admitted to his friendship and regarded as the arbiter elegantiæ or judge of good taste, but who was accused by Tigellinus in 66 A. D., and committed suicide to avoid execution. The novel, known as Satiræ, originally consisted of some twenty books, and contained an account of the adventures of a Greek freedman, Encolpius, as told by himself. The adventures were strung together with no plot, except as the wrath of the god Priapus (a parody of the wrath of Poseidon in Homer’s Odyssey) may have served as a plot to some extent. The extant parts are from the fifteenth and sixteenth books. The form is that of a Menippean Satire, prose and verse in combination, but the longer parts are exclusively in prose.

The chief of these is the Cena Trimalchionis (Trimalchio’s Banquet), the description of an elaborate entertainment given by a rich and purse-proud freedman, Trimalchio. Trimalchio’s banquet. The scene of the banquet is laid at Cumæ, or Puteoli. The house is large and full of costly things, but shows utter lack of taste. Trimalchio himself is a fat old fellow, who comes to the dinner after all the guests have been seated for some time. He informs them that it was inconvenient for him to come, but that he did not wish to disappoint them. At first he plays checkers with an attendant, but presently takes part in the feast and the conversation. The first course brought in is a wooden fowl sitting on eggs, which prove to be made of paste, and to contain finely seasoned birds. When a silver dish falls on the floor, Trimalchio orders it to be swept up with the rubbish. Another course consists of a great boar, out of which, when it is cut open by a slave in hunting costume, fly live thrushes. Again a roast pig is cut open, and sausages of all kinds fall out. The entertainment has other than gastronomical surprises, for a troupe of Homeric actors appear and perform scenes of the Trojan War, speaking in Greek. At the end of their performance a boiled calf is brought in, and the actor who takes the part of Ajax hacks it with his sword in imitation of the attack made by Ajax in his madness upon the cattle at Troy, and offers the astonished guests pieces of meat on his sword point. Acrobats also come in, and when one of them falls from a ladder upon Trimalchio, he is at once freed from slavery, lest it be said that so great a man as Trimalchio was injured by a slave. Presently the ceiling rolls apart, and a great hoop is let down, upon which are jars of perfumes as keepsakes for the guests. All these astonishing performances are made more amusing by the naive pride of Trimalchio, who prates much of his great wealth, and exhibits his ignorance by trying to make a show of learning. One of the guests tells a ghost story and another a tale of an adventure with a werewolf. Further excitement is caused by a fight between a fat little dog brought by Trimalchio’s friend, the stone-cutter Habinnas, and a large dog belonging to Trimalchio. The slaves then take part in the banquet, Trimalchio has his will read, and all weep. After a bath, the company passes to a second dining-room. Here Trimalchio has a furious quarrel with his wife, who is jealous of a favorite slave boy. Trimalchio finally has his grave-clothes brought in, and lies down as if dead, ordering his horn-blowers to play funereal music. The noise is so great that the police, thinking something is the matter, break into the house, whereupon the guests escape. All this, with many more details of the lavish and tasteless expenditure, the pride of the vulgar Trimalchio, and the absurd features of the banquet, is described with much satirical humor. The language of the narrative is refined, evidently that of a highly cultivated man. Trimalchio, however, and some of the other characters speak the popular dialect of southern Italy, which contains many words strange to literary Latin. Their speech is not without mistakes in grammar, and is full of proverbs, like the speech of Sancho Panza in Don Quixote.

Among the poems contained in the novel, the longest, entitled De Bello Civili (On the Civil War), consists of two hundred and ninety-five hexameters, in imitation of Lucan, with touches of parody; the next in length is the Troiæ Halosis (Capture of Troy), in sixty-five senarii, probably a parody of Nero’s poem of the same title. The novel of Petronius is, in some places, extremely indecent, but is interesting on account of the specimens of popular speech it contains, and still more, as the only known example of the satirical novel in Latin. It is, moreover, full of wit and humor, and shows keen observation and much knowledge of human nature as well as of literature. The loss of the greater part of the work is greatly to be regretted.

The only extant historical work of this period is the History of Alexander the Great (De Gestis Alexandri Magni), by Quintus Curtius Rufus, of whose personality nothing is known, but who seems to have written under Claudius. Quintus Curtius. The work originally consisted of ten books, the first two of which are lost. The style is modelled upon that of Livy, and is clear and simple for the most part, though not entirely free from the affectation of elegance customary at the time. Some of the descriptions and speeches are exceptionally fine. Curtius is not a critical historian, and follows Greek authorities selected without much attention to their accuracy. Of the other historical works of this period nothing remains. Memoirs. The memoirs composed by various more or less important persons are also lost. Among them may be mentioned those of the Empress Agrippina and of the generals Gnæus Domitius Corbulo, who was consul suffectus in 39 A. D., and was put to death by Nero in 86 A. D., and Suetonius Paulinus, who was twice consul, once soon after 42, and again in 66 A. D.

Many scientific treatises were written at this time, as in the previous period, but two only are extant: the treatise On Agriculture (De Re Rustica), by Lucius Junius Moderatus Columella, and the Geography (Chorographia), by Pomponius Mela. Columella. Columella was born at Gades (Cadiz), and served in the army in Syria. He possessed land in Italy, and in his work he has the agriculture of Italy chiefly in mind. The work is divided into twelve books, and is the most complete ancient treatise on agriculture extant—more complete than those of Cato and Varro. It is written in a simple and dignified style, more like the prose of the Augustan period than the artificial rhetoric of most contemporary writings. In this respect Columella is a precursor of the classical revival under the Flavian emperors. The tenth book, on gardening, is written in hexameters, to serve as a fifth book of Virgil’s Georgics, because Virgil had hardly touched upon this branch of his subject.[95] The entire work is dedicated to Publius Silvinus, and it was due to a suggestion from him and another friend that the tenth book was written in verse. Columella’s verse is simple and classical, but is greatly inferior to that of Virgil, and less admirable than his prose. Mela. Mela, like Columella, was a Spaniard. His native place was Tingentera. His three books on geography were written soon after 40 A. D., and form the earliest systematic treatise on the subject extant. The style is far inferior to that of Columella, for Mela writes in the affected manner of his times. The work is enlivened by descriptions of peoples, places, and customs, and is valuable as a source of information, since it is based upon good authorities.