Plate LXXXV.—MURAL PAINTING: FLUTE-PLAYER
perhaps the most typical figure in the literature of the principate. Trained as a rhetorician, like all the men of his day, his literary work consists of rhetorical drama and rhetorical philosophy, including some rhetorical science. No writer has ever attained to such a position of wealth and honour by the exercise of his pen. It cannot be said that Seneca’s position was gained without defilement, or that it brought him happiness. He was largely responsible by his weak compliance for the deterioration of character in his imperial pupil. If so, it brought its own retribution, for Nero drove him to suicide. Though Seneca’s tragedies are neglected to-day, they formed the connecting-link between Euripides and the stage of the Renaissance.
It will be seen that the principal defect of thought and literature under the Empire was its lack of originality. But, after all, that had always been the deficiency of Roman writers. It was due very largely to the overwhelming incubus of Greek civilisation, from whose leading-strings the Romans, to the end of time, never escaped. That in its turn arose chiefly through the nature of their education which turned all their attention to style as the end of literary endeavour. Any one who would argue against a classical education could find no better argument than the relations between the two “classical” peoples.
Art
With art it is much the same story; for the decoration of their villas and colonnades the Romans of the Empire continued to prefer their statues imported from Greece. Pausanias shows us that Greece, even in the second century A.D., was still teeming with works of art of every kind. Impoverished and shrunken as the old Greek cities were at this period, it shows some high-mindedness that they still retained treasures which would have fetched millions in the Trans-Adriatic markets. There was, however, a brisk trade in copies and imitations of the masterpieces. For statues, then, the Greek work of the fifth and fourth centuries almost destroyed any attempt at originality by the Romans. Only in portraiture was there much progress, and here work of great power and vigour was produced. It reaches the zenith perhaps under the Flavian emperors, but their successors of the Antonine period and later are often depicted on their busts with triumphant but unsparing realism. The bust of Philip the Arabian in the Vatican is one of the most striking. Sometimes it almost seems as if there was a malicious spirit of caricature in these too faithful portraits. Can Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher prince, have presented to the world a visage so weak and so tonsorially perfect?[71] Can Caracalla have borne his bloody mind so visibly written on his face?[72] In portraiture, there is certainly progress and not decay.
Otherwise, to judge by the remains, sculptors were almost confined to bas-relief. This was the medium chosen by emperor after emperor for the narration of his exploits, and advances were unquestionably made in the art of pictorial or narrative sculpture. That this is a high art in itself may, I think, be contested. One cannot escape from a sense of the practical futility of telling the history of the Dacian Wars on a serpentine band of ornament which soared away out of sight. It is rather characteristic of the plodding Roman, who so often lost sight of the wood in his faithful contemplation of the trees. If we look for the end to which this art of narrative relief was tending, we shall find it on the basis of the column of Antoninus Pius preserved in the Vatican garden.[73] These cavalrymen placidly gyrating round the group of standard-bearers, each on his own little shelf, are so extremely life-like as to recall nothing in the world so much as pieces of gingerbreads. We begin to perceive that Madame Tussaud would have been hailed as a great creative artist in Imperial Rome. Nevertheless, without subscribing to all the superlatives of Mrs. Strong, we may admit that Art was still alive and vigorous and still scoring fresh technical triumphs in the Antonine period and even later.
