“O that I had been unwedded and died without a child,”
and he spoke of his wicked daughter as the cancer of his life.
Plate LIX. RUINS OF PALMYRA: VIEW OF GREAT ARCH FROM THE EAST
Legislation was obviously futile, and example had broken down. It was only from within that Roman society could be reformed, only by supplying a spiritual influence which could counteract the materialism and immorality of the day. Augustus had tried in the provinces to raise up a new religion of loyalty and patriotism centred round the altar “to Rome and Augustus.” But that was obviously impossible in Rome itself. The only inspiring motive—in addition to Stoicism which could never be a popular creed—had been, for the last two or three centuries, patriotism, the worship of the sacred city and her glorious destinies. But even that had been shattered by the civil wars. Augustus now set himself deliberately to the task of creating a new Rome and a new Roman culture. He himself, like most of the nobles of his day, had received a Greek education. It was what we should call a good classical education in philosophy, literature, and rhetoric. Besides that he had been initiated into the Eleusinian mysteries at Athens, and they were probably the most powerful source of inspiration in the Mediterranean world, for even eclectics like Cicero admitted that they carried with them a hope of immortality. Augustus was himself deeply imbued with Greek culture and like most Roman nobles had dabbled in literature. Thus it is not surprising that the type of civilisation which he fostered in the new Rome was quite as much Greek as Italian. The age of Augustus was in fact the culmination of Græco-Roman culture alike in arts and letters because the fusion between the two races was now complete.
Elsewhere I have ventured to rebel against the current practice in history of subordinating the arts to politics and declaring that artistic production depends upon political facts. It is not so. Literary and artistic results are due to literary and artistic causes. The Roman literary language had only just attained perfection. Cicero had perfected it for prose, and it only remained for poetry to produce a Vergil. Everybody at Rome from Augustus downwards was busily writing hexameters in his spare time, and the recitals which were given at every dinner-party formed one of the social inflictions of the day. Just as Julius Cæsar and Cicero had thrown off their epics, so the great men of the succeeding age were poets—Augustus, Pollio, Mæcenas, Gallus, and all of them except Agrippa. But alongside of these distinguished amateurs, professional literary men of humble birth were now coming to the front. Vergil and Horace are not originally the products of the Augustan age, for they were both established poets before it began. But the conditions of art at Rome were such that a professional man of letters depended very closely upon a patron. That was the tradition handed on from the days of Plautus, when the writers had nearly always been foreign slaves or clients. Cicero, Cæsar, Lucretius, and Catullus had not been of the client class. They had flourished in that brief interval when it still seemed possible for Rome to develop a genuine free literature of her own. But that possibility had been killed like so many other hopes by the civil wars, and now the choice lay mainly between distinguished scribblers or obsequious literary craftsmen. Thus we get a second courtly period of literature like that of the Ptolemies at Alexandria, like that of Louis XIV. or of our own Stuart age when poets wrote to please individual patrons. The patron, if he be a man of taste, generally demands a very high degree of finish, and thus it is the courtly ages which produce the finished craftsmanship. It may be remarked that the ages of private patronage have given the world much of its greatest literature.
In the age of Augustus there was no censorship of letters such as generally prevailed under the stricter emperors of later days. Livy was permitted to publish his great history without curtailment of its strong republican tendency. When libels and pasquinades appeared against Cæsar he was content to contradict them in a proclamation. Nevertheless he made his influence weightily felt in the world of letters. He gave more than £10,000 to Varius for a tragedy which posterity has not thought worth while to preserve. He was himself a kindly and patient listener at the recitation of poems and history, speeches and dialogues, which formed the usual mode of first publication in those days. He only insisted that his own deeds should not form the subject of trivial composition by inferior authors. Horace appears at first to have been warned off from treatment of imperial politics. Vergil too in his early days received a hint not to sing of wars and kings. But later on both these writers were explicitly enlisted in the service of the state. In this part of the work Mæcenas was the emperor’s chief agent. Mæcenas, whose name has come to symbolise literary patronage, was a wealthy noble of an old Etruscan family who was content, like Cicero’s friend Atticus, to pull the wires of state largely by keeping generous hospitality and knowing all the important characters of his day. Luxurious and effeminate in his tastes, he gathered a group of talented authors round his table, and very distinctly suggested to them the lines upon which he desired them to work. Vergil, Varius, Horace, and Propertius were members of his salon. Another noble of high lineage, M. Valerius Messalla, maintained a rival coterie whose most prominent member was the elegiac poet Tibullus. Vergil, a half-Italian native of Mantua, who was not even a citizen by birth, had sprung into fame with his Bucolics, a series of pastoral idylls in the style of Theocritus. But though he was a provincial by birth, though he writes of shepherds and sings pathetically of his ancestral farm, nothing is more untrue than to regard him as a son of the soil, or an inspired ploughboy after the manner of Robert Burns. On the contrary he had received an elaborate education in the style of the day under Greek masters at Cremona, Milan, and Rome. He was steeped in Greek philosophy and letters. His shepherds are not the unsophisticated rustics of the Mantuan plain. They are shepherds “à la Watteau,” borrowed from the pages of Theocritus, and though many a brilliant epithet displays the Italian’s loving observation of nature, the background of the work is artificial and literary rather than rustic or natural. His shepherds, like Sidney’s, talk politics under a transparent disguise, which is often extremely incongruous.
