At first sight we may find it strange that all this strenuous devotion to study produced so little in the way of first-rate original literature. It is of course customary to ascribe the decline—assuming that it was a decline—of the Golden Age of Augustan literature into the Silver Latin of Tacitus and Juvenal to the tyranny of emperors like Tiberius and Nero. It is perfectly true that Tiberius made it dangerous for senatorial historians to praise the murderers of a Cæsar. But that is a ludicrously inadequate explanation for the eclipse of literature. The experience of Vergil showed that it was possible for a great loyalist to win fortune and glory amounting to idolisation. The senators who wanted to continue their school declamations against tyranny were certainly discouraged, but there was still plenty of room for literary activity. The truth is, as we have seen, that Augustan literature was not the work of a young Rome, but of an old and perhaps already declining Græco-Roman culture. Again it was literary, not political, causes which led to literary decline. Tacitus, who had for his themes the conquest of Britain and the wars in Germany and the East, the Siege of Jerusalem, the burning of Rome, the tragic Year of the Four Emperors, the crimes and follies of Nero, and the development of the great imperial system, complains of the lack of interest in the history of his own times compared with those of the heroic past. The tyranny that depressed literature was of its own making, the tyranny of convention, classicism and erudition. To take poetry, though so many noble writers were toying with the epic, they only produced the pedantic Thebaid of Statius, the weary Argonauticon of Silius Italicus, an imitation of an imitation of Homer, and the Pharsalia of Lucan, which, though it contains many a brilliant epigram and memorable phrase, is to the majority of mankind almost unreadable. This is simply because Lucan was consciously pursuing the path which Vergil had pointed out and producing work which was the logical succession to the style of the Æneid. The Pharsalia is unmixed declamation, rhetoric shouting at top pitch on page after page. Vergil had accomplished the literary epic to perfection: to carry it any further in the same direction was to incur tediousness. Above all, both Lucan and Silius lacked the greatest of all Vergil’s gifts, his wonderful ear for verbal music. Vergil, like Milton, presented his epic diluted for mortal ears with music and human nature. It was not in the spirit that Lucan failed. He admired the republican cause and Pompeius, its champion, quite as sincerely as Vergil admired Augustus or Milton Cromwell. Thus it was not politics, but the literary gift which caused his failure, at least his failure to hold the ear of to-day. Past generations have esteemed him high among the world’s poets. Dante owed not a little to Lucan and Statius as well as to Vergil.
FIG. 1.—SACRIFICIAL RITES.
FIG. 2.—PREPARING FOR A SACRIFICE.
Plate LXXXIV.—TWO MOSAICS.
It was only in its lighter forms that poetry continued to make progress. The Silvæ of Statius, which were shorter occasional poems in elegiac or lyric measures thrown off at odd moments with ease and rapidity, are far more interesting than his frigid epic. Martial, the Spanish writer of vers de société, has a pretty wit that is often surprisingly modern in its tone. Certainly Juvenal towers over all others who have attempted satire. Horace had been content with an easy familiarity of tone which might wheedle a friend into the path of good sense by poking fun at his follies. Juvenal thunders his denunciations of wickedness with a moral heat which is surprising in an age often accused of feebleness. He does, however, resemble Lucan in spoiling some of his effects by want of light and shade, by a too-persistent flow of rhetoric. He seems unable to distinguish between harmless follies like playing the flute and real delinquencies like murdering one’s mother. He clearly draws far too black a picture of the men and morals of his day. But the pulpit from which he preaches is a high one.
If Juvenal is supreme over the poets of his time, Tacitus is as clearly monarch of the prose-writers. He was continuing the work of Livy and writing from the same republican standpoint. But for history-writing he had certainly discovered a finer style of rhetoric. Both are rhetoricians first and historians a long way after, but the packed epigrams of Tacitus say more in a line than Livy is capable of thinking in a chapter. In describing a battle, a riot, or a panic, or in painting some tragic scene, such as the death of Vitellius, Tacitus is unequalled. The freedom that was permitted to him and Suetonius in depicting the crimes and follies of the earlier Cæsars affords remarkable evidence of the freedom of letters under Nerva, Trajan, and Hadrian. Here, again, it is necessary, as in the case of Juvenal, to beware of accepting too literally the severity of his criticisms upon the preceding generation. To praise the past at the expense of the present was one of the traditions of Roman literature. But Tacitus was the last of Rome’s great historians and his loss was irreparable.
All the erudition of the age added little to the real advance of learning except in the domain of law. Industrious compilers like Pliny the elder have preserved a great deal of ancient lore for our study, but they are for the most part utterly uncritical and unscientific. There were no scientific thinkers like Aristotle in the Roman world. Still, some text-books which served the Middle Ages for instruction were produced under the principate, such as Vitruvius on architecture, Strabo and Pomponius Mela on geography, Columella on agriculture, Quintilian on rhetoric, and Galen on medicine. The latter was state-physician to Marcus Aurelius and was employed by him to study and combat the terrible plague which the Roman army brought back from the East. But for medical science he added little to his Greek master Hippocrates. In just the same way, the philosophers came no nearer to the core of reality than their masters of the fourth and third centuries before Christ, hard though they toiled and much as they spoke and wrote. They were indeed learning, what the old Greeks had failed or scorned to learn, how to apply doctrines to life, but in depth of thought they were so far behind that they ceased even to be able to comprehend Aristotle. Even Philo, the profound and learned Jewish philosopher, is doing little more than to attempt an application of Platonic and other Greek ideas to the teaching of Moses. Such originality as there was in the world of letters still proceeded mainly from the provinces. Greece was still putting forth original contributors to literature like the novelist Lucian, the biographer and moralist Plutarch, Pausanias the guide-book writer, Dio Chrysostom and Apollonius the preachers. Africa produced a novelist in the mysterious quack-magician Apuleius. Spain sent forth a whole galaxy of talent in the two Senecas, Martial, Lucan, and Quintilian. The younger Seneca, Nero’s complacent tutor, is