Latin Literature

by J. W. Mackail

"Multum" inquis "tenuemque iubes me ferre laborem
Cernere cum facili lucem ratione viderer."
Quod quaeris, Deus est. Coneris scandere caelum
Fataque fatali genitus cognoscere lege
Et transire tuum pectus, mundoque potiri:
Pro pretio labor est, nec sunt immunia tanta.

Wherever one found this language used, in prose or verse, it would be memorable. The thought is not a mere text of the schools; it is strongly and finely conceived, and put in a form that anticipates the ardent and lofty manner of Lucan, without his perpetual overstrain of expression. Other passages, showing the same mental force, occur in the Astronomica; one might instance the fine passage on the power of the human eye to take in, within its tiny compass, the whole immensity of the heavens; or another, suggested by the mention of the constellation Argo, on the influence of sea-power on history, where the inevitable and well- worn instances of Salamis and Actium receive a fresh life from the citation of the destruction of the Athenian fleet in the bay of Syracuse, and the great naval battles of the first Punic war. Or again, the lines with which he opens the fourth book, weakened as their effect is by what follows them, a tedious enumeration of events showing the power of destiny over human fortunes, are worthy of a great poet:—

Quid tam sollicitis vitam consumimus annis,
Torquemurque metu caecaque cupidine rerum?
Acternisque senes curis, dum quaerimus aevum
Perdimus, et nullo votorum fine beati
Victuros agimus semper, nec vivimus unquam?

These passages have been cited from the Astronomica because, to all but a few professional students of Latin, the poem is practically unknown. The only other poet who survives from the reign of Tiberius is in a very different position, being so well known and so slight in literary quality as to make any quotations superfluous. Phaedrus, a Thracian freedman belonging to the household of Augustus, published at this time the well- known collection of Fables which, like the lyrics of the pseudo- Anacreon, have obtained from their use as a school-book a circulation much out of proportion to their merit. Their chief interest is as the last survival of the urbanus sermo in Latin poetry. They are written in iambic senarii, in the fluent and studiously simple Latin of an earlier period, not without occasional vulgarisms, but with a total absence of the turgid rhetoric which was coming into fashion. The Fables are the last utterance made by the speech of Terence: it is singular that this intimately Roman style should have begun and ended with two authors of servile birth and foreign blood. But the patronage of literature was now passing out of the hands of statesmen. Terence had moved in the circle of the younger Scipio; one book of the Fables of Phaedrus is dedicated to Eutychus, the famous chariot-driver of the Greens in the reign of Caligula. It was not long before Phaedrus was in use as a school-book; but his volume was apparently regarded as hardly coming within the province of serious literature. It is ignored by Seneca and not mentioned by Quintilian. But we must remind ourselves that the most celebrated works, whether in prose or verse, do not of necessity have the widest circulation or the largest influence. Among the poems produced in the first ten years of this century the Original Poems of Jane and Ann Taylor are hardly if at all mentioned in handbooks of English literature; but to thousands of readers they were more familiar than the contemporary verse of Wordsworth or Coleridge or even of Scott. In their terse and pure English, the language which is transmitted from one generation to another through the continuous tradition of the nursery, they may remind us of the Fables of Phaedrus.

The collection, as it has reached us, consists of nearly a hundred pieces. Of these three-fourths are fables proper; being not so much translations from the Greek of Aesop as versions of the traditional stories, written and unwritten, which were the common inheritance of the Aryan peoples. Mixed up with these are a number of stories which are not strictly fables; five of them are about Aesop himself, and there are also stories told of Simonides, Socrates, and Menander. Two are from the history of his own time, one relating a grim jest of the Emperor Tiberius, and the other a domestic tragedy which had been for a while the talk of the town in the previous reign. There are also, besides the prologues and epilogues of the several books, a few pieces in which Phaedrus speaks in his own person,[10] defending himself against detractors with an acrid tone which recalls the Terentian prologues. The body of fables current in the Middle Ages is considered by the most recent investigators to descend from the collection of Phaedrus, though probably supplemented from the Greek collection independently formed by Babrius about the same period.

Though Livy is the single great historian of the Augustan age, there was throughout this period a profuse production of memoirs and commentaries, as well as of regular histories. Augustus wrote thirteen books of memoirs of his own life down to the pacification of the Empire at the close of the Cantabrian war. These are lost; but the Index Rerum a se Gestarum, a brief epitome of his career, which he composed as a sort of epitaph on himself, is extant. This document was engraved on plates of bronze affixed to the imperial mausoleum by the Tiber, and copies of it were inscribed on the various temples dedicated to him in many provincial cities after his death. It is one of these copies, engraved on the vestibule wall of the temple of Augustus and Rome at Ancyra in Galatia, which still exists with inconsiderable gaps. His two principal ministers, Maecenas and Agrippa, also composed memoirs. The most important work of the latter hardly, however, falls within the province of literature; it was a commentary on the great geographical survey of the Empire carried out under his supervision.

Gaius Asinius Pollio, already mentioned as a critic and tragedian, was also the author of the most important historical work of the Augustan age after Livy's. This was a History of the Civil Wars, in seventeen books, from the formation of the first triumvirate in 60 B.C. to the battle of Philippi. Though Pollio was a practised rhetorician, his narrative style was simple and austere. The fine ode addressed to him by Horace during the composition of this history seems to hint that in Horace's opinion— or perhaps, rather, in that of Horace's masters—Pollio would find a truer field for his great literary ability in tragedy. But apart from its artistic quality, the work of Pollio was of the utmost value as giving the view held of the Civil wars by a trained administrator of the highest rank. It was one of the main sources used by Appian and Plutarch, and its almost total loss is matter of deep regret.

An author of less eminence, and belonging rather to the class of encyclopedists than of historians, is Pompeius Trogus, the descendant of a family of Narbonese Gaul, which had for two generations enjoyed the Roman citizenship. Besides works on zoology and botany, translated or adapted from the Greek of Aristotle and Theophrastus, Trogus wrote an important History of the World, exclusive of the Roman Empire, which served as, and may have been designed to be, a complement to that of Livy. The original work, which extended to forty-four books, is not extant; but an abridgment, which was executed in the age of the Antonines by one Marcus Junianus Justinus, and has fortunately escaped the fate which overtook the abridgment of Livy made about the same time, preserves the main outlines and much of the actual form of the original. Justin, whose individual talent was but small, had the good sense to leave the diction of his original as far as possible unaltered. The pure and vivacious style, and the evident care and research which Trogus himself, or the Greek historians whom he follows, had bestowed on the material, make the work one of very considerable value. Its title, Historiae Philippicae, is borrowed from that of a history conceived on a somewhat similar plan by Theopompus, the pupil of Isocrates, in or after the reign of Alexander the Great; and it followed Theopompus in making the Macedonian Empire the core round which the history of the various countries included in or bordering upon it was arranged.

Gaius Velleius Paterculus, a Roman officer, who after passing with credit through high military appointments, entered the general administrative service of the Empire, and rose to the praetorship, wrote, in the reign of Tiberius, an abridgment of Roman history in two books, which hardly rises beyond the mark of the military man who dabbles in letters. The pretentiousness of his style is partly due to the declining taste of the period, partly to an idea of his own that he could write in the manner of Sallust. It alternates between a sort of laboured sprightliness and a careless conversational manner full of endless parentheses. Yet Velleius had two real merits; the eye of the trained soldier for character, and an unaffected, if not a very intelligent, interest in literature. Where he approaches his own times, his servile attitude towards all the members of the imperial family, and towards Sejanus, who was still first minister to Tiberius when the book was published, makes him almost valueless as a historian; but in the earlier periods his observations are often just and pointed; and he seems to have been almost the first historian who included as an essential part of his work some account of the more eminent writers of his country. A still lower level of aim and attainment is shown in another work of the same date as that of Velleius, the nine books of historical anecdotes, Facta et Dicta Memorabilia, by Valerius Maximus, whose turgid and involved style is not redeemed by any originality of thought or treatment.

The study of archaeology, both on its linguistic and material sides, was carried on in the Augustan age with great vigour, though no single name is comparable to that of Varro for extent and variety of research. One of the most eminent and copious writers on these subjects was Gaius Julius Hyginus, a Spanish freed man of Augustus, who made him principal keeper of the Palatine library. He was a pupil of the most learned Greek grammarian of the age, Cornelius Alexander Polyhistor, and an intimate acquaintance of Ovid. Of his voluminous works on geography, history, astrology, agriculture, and poetry, all are lost but two treatises on mythology, which in their present form are of a much later date, and are at best only abridged and corrupted versions, if (as many modern critics are inclined to think) they are not wholly the work of some author of the second or third century. Hyginus was also one of the earliest commentators on Virgil; he possessed among his treasures a manuscript of the Georgics, which came from Virgil's own house, though it was not actually written by his hand; and many of his annotations and criticisms on the Aeneid are preserved by Aulus Gellius and later commentators. A little later, in the reigns of Tiberius and Claudius, Virgilian criticism was carried on by Quintus Remmius Palaemon of Vicenza, the most fashionable teacher in the capital, and the author of a famous Latin grammar on which all subsequent ones were more or less based. Perhaps the most distinguished of Augustan scholars was another equally celebrated teacher, Marcus Verrius Flaccus, who was chosen by Augustus as tutor for his two grandsons, and thenceforward held his school in the imperial residence on the Palatine. His lexicon, entitled De Verborum Significatu, was a rich treasury of antiquarian research: such parts of it as survive in the abridgments made from it in the second and eighth centuries, by Sextus Pompeius Festus and Paulus Diaconus, are still among our most valuable sources for the study of early Latin language and institutions. The more practical side of science in the same period was ably represented by Aulus Cornelius Celsus, the compiler of an encyclopedia which included comprehensive treatises not only on oratory, jurisprudence, and philosophy, but on the arts of war, agriculture, and medicine. The eight books dealing with this last subject are the only part of the work that has been preserved. This treatise, which is written in a pure, simple, and elegant Latin, became a standard work. It was one of the earliest books printed in the fifteenth century, and remained a text-book for medical students till within living memory. Medical science had then reached, in the hands of its leading professors, a greater perfection than it regained till the eighteenth century. Celsus, though not, so far as is known, the author of any important discovery or improvement, had fully mastered a system which even then was highly complicated, and takes rank by his extensive and accurate knowledge, as well as by his rare literary skill, with the highest names in his profession. That with his eminent medical acquirement he should have been able to deal adequately with so many other subjects as well, has long been a subject of perplexity. The cold censure of Quintilian, who refers to him slightly as "a man of moderate ability," may be principally aimed at the treatise on rhetoric, which formed a section of his encyclopedia. Columella, writing in the next age, speaks of him as one of the two leading authorities on agriculture; and he is also quoted as an authority of some value on military tactics. Yet we cannot suppose that the encyclopedist, however adequate his treatment of one or even more subjects, would not lay himself open in others to the censure of the specialist. It seems most reasonable to suppose that Celsus was one of a class which is not, after all, very uncommon—doctors of eminent knowledge and skill in their own art, who at the same time are men of wide culture and far-ranging practical interests.