Twelve years were spent by Statius over his epic poem on the War of Thebes, which was published about the year 92, with a florid dedication to Domitian. After its completion he began another epic, on an even more imposing scale, on the life of Achilles and the whole of the Trojan war. Of this Achilleid only the first and part of the second book were ever completed; had it continued on the same scale it would have been the longest of Greek or Latin epics. At various times after the publication of the Thebaid appeared the five books of Silvae, miscellaneous and occasional poems on different subjects, often of a personal nature. Another epic, on the campaign of Domitian in Germany, has not been preserved.
The Thebaid became very famous; later poets, like Ausonius or Claudian, constantly imitate it. Its smooth versification, copious diction, and sustained elegance made it a sort of canon of poetical technique. But, itself, it rises beyond the merely mechanical level. Without any quality that can quite be called genius, Statius had real poetical feeling. His taste preserves him from any great extravagances; and among much tedious rhetoric and cumbrous mythology, there is enough of imagination and pathos to make the poem interesting and even charming. At a time when Guercino and the Caracci were counted great masters in the sister art, the Thebaid was also held to be a masterpiece. Besides complete versions by inferior hands, both Pope and Gray took the pains to translate portions of it into English verse, and it is perpetually quoted in the literature of the eighteenth century. It is, indeed, perhaps its severest condemnation that it reads best in quotations. Not only the more highly elaborated passages, but almost any passage taken at random, may be read with pleasure and admiration; those who have had the patience to read it through, however much they may respect the continuous excellence of its workmanship, will (as with the Gierusalemme Liberata of Tasso) feel nearly as much respect for their own achievement as for that of the poet.
The Silvae, consisting as they do of comparatively short pieces, display the excellences of Statius to greater advantage. Of the thirty- two poems, six are in lyric metres, the rest being all written in the smooth graceful hexameters of which the author of the Thebaid was so accomplished a master. The subjects, for the most part of a familiar nature, are very various. A touching and affectionate poem to his wife Claudia is one of the best known. Several are on the death of friends; one of very great beauty is on the marriage of his brother poet, Arruntius Stella, to a lady with the charming name of Violantilla. The descriptive pieces on the villas of acquaintances at Tivoli and Sorrento, and on the garden of another in Rome, are full of a genuine feeling for natural beauty. The poem on the death of his father, though it has passages of romantic fancy, is deformed by an excess of literary allusions; but that on the death of his adopted son (he had no children of his own), which ends the collection, is very touching in the sincerity of its grief and its reminiscences of the dead boy's infancy. Perhaps the finest, certainly the most remarkable of all these pieces is the short poem (one might almost call it a sonnet) addressed to Sleep. This, though included in the last book of the Silvae, must have been written in earlier life; it shows that had Statius not been entangled in the composition of epics by the conventional taste of his age, he might have struck out a new manner in ancient poetry. The poem is so brief that it may be quoted in full:—
Crimine quo merui iuvenis, placidissime divom,
Quove errore miser, donis ut solus egerem,
Somne, tuis? Tacet omne pecus, volueresque, feraeque,
Et simulant fessos curvata cacumina somnos;
Nec trucibus fluviis idem sonus; occidit horror
Aequoris, et terris maria inclinata quiescunt.
Septima iam rediens Phoebe mihi respicit aegras
Stare genas, totidem Oeteae Paphiaeque revisunt
Lampades, et toties nostros Tithonia questus
Praeterit et gelido spargit miserata flagello.
Unde ego sufficiam? Non si mihi lumina mille
Quae sacer alterna tantum statione tenebat
Argus, et haud unquam vigilabat corpore toto.
At nunc, heu, aliquis longa sub nocte puellae
Brachia nexa tenens, ultra te, Somne, repellit:
Inde veni: nec te totas infundere pennas
Luminibus compello meis: hoc turba precatur
Laetior; extremae me tange cacumine virgae,
Sufficit, aut leviter suspenso poplite transi.
Were the three lines beginning Unde ego sufficiam struck out—and one might almost fancy them to have been inserted later by an unhappy second thought—the remainder of this poem would be as perfect as it is unique. The famous sonnet of Wordsworth on the same subject must at once occur to an English reader; but the poem in its manner, especially in the dying cadence of the last two lines, recalls even more strongly some of the finest sonnets of Keats. "Had Statius written often thus," in the words Johnson uses of Gray, "it had been vain to blame, and useless to praise him."
The two other epic poets contemporary with Statius whose works are extant, Valerius Flaccus and Silius Italicus, belong generally to the same school, but stand on a much lower level of excellence. The former is only known as the author of the Argonautica. An allusion in the proem of his epic to the recent destruction of Jerusalem by Titus in the year 70, and another in a later book to the great eruption of Vesuvius in 79, fix the date of the poem; and Quintilian, writing in the later years of Domitian, refers to the poet's recent death. From another passage in the Argonautica it has been inferred that Flaccus was one of the college of quindecemvirs, and therefore of high family. The Argonautica follows the well-known poem of Apollonius Rhodius, but by his diffuse rhetorical treatment the author expands the story to such a length that in between five and six thousand lines he has only got as far as the escape of Jason and Medea from Colchos. Here the poem breaks off abruptly in the eighth book; it was probably meant to consist of twelve, and to end with the return of the Argonauts to Greece. In all respects, except the choice of subject, Valerius Flaccus is far inferior to Statius. He cannot indeed wholly destroy the perennial charm of the story of the Golden Fleece, but he comes as near doing so as is reasonably possible. His versification is correct, but without freedom or variety; and incidents and persons are alike presented through a cloud of monotonous and mechanical rhetoric.
If Valerius Flaccus to some degree redeemed his imaginative poverty by the choice of his subject, the other epic poet of the Flavian era, Tiberius Catius Silius Italicus, chose a subject which no ingenuity could have adapted to epic treatment. His Punic War may fairly contend for the distinction of being the worst epic ever written; and its author is the most striking example in Latin literature of the incorrigible amateur. He had, in earlier life, passed through a distinguished official career; he was consul the year before the fall of Nero, and in the political revolutions which followed conducted himself with such prudence that, though an intimate friend of Vitellius, he remained in favour under Vespasian. After a term of further service as proconsul of Asia, he retired to a dignified and easy leisure. His love of literature was sincere; he prided himself on owning one of Cicero's villas, and the land which held Virgil's grave, and he was a generous patron to men of letters. The fulsome compliments paid to him by Martial (who has the effrontery to speak of him as a combined Virgil and Cicero) are, no doubt, only an average specimen of the atmosphere which surrounded so munificent a patron; but the admiration which he openly expressed for the slave Epictetus does him a truer honour. The Bellum Punicum, in seventeen books, is longer than the Odyssey. It closely follows the history as told by Livy; but the elements of almost epic grandeur in the contest between Rome and Hannibal all disappear amid masses of tedious machinery. Without any invention or constructive power of his own, Silius copies with tasteless pedantry all the outworn traditions of the heroic epic. What Homer or Virgil has done, he must needs do too. The Romans are the Dardanians or the Aeneadae: Juno interferes in Hannibal's favour, and Venus, hidden in a cloud, watches the battle of the Trebia from a hill. Hannibal is urged to war by a dream like that of Agamemnon in the Iliad; he is equipped with a spear "fatal to many thousands" of the enemy, and a shield, like that of Aeneas, embossed with subjects from Carthaginian history, and with the river Ebro flowing round the edge as an ingenious variant of the Ocean-river on the shield of Achilles. A Carthaginian fleet cruising off the coast of Italy falls in with Proteus, who takes the opportunity of prophesying the course of the war. Hannibal at Zama pursues a phantom of Scipio, which flies before him and disappears like that of Aeneas before Turnus. Such was the degradation to which the noble epic machinery had now sunk. Soon after the death of Silius the poem seems to have fallen into merited oblivion; there is a single reference to it in a poet of the fifth century, and thereafter it remained unknown or unheard of until a manuscript discovered by Poggio Bracciolini brought it to light again early in the fifteenth century.
The works of the other Flavian poets, Curiatius Maternus, Saleius Bassus, Arruntius Stella, and the poetess Sulpicia, are lost; all else that survives of the verse of the period is the work of a writer of a different order, but of considerable importance and value, the epigrammatist Martial. By no means a poet of the first rank, hardly perhaps a poet at all according to any strict definition, he has yet a genius of his own which for many ages made him the chief and almost the sole model for a particular kind of literature.
Marcus Valerius Martialis was born at Augusta Bilbilis in Central Spain towards the end of the reign of Tiberius. He came to Rome as a young man during the reign of Nero, when his countrymen, Seneca and Lucan, were at the height of their reputation. Through their patronage he obtained a footing, if not at court, yet among the wealthy amateurs who extended a less dangerous protection to men of letters. For some thirty-five years he led the life of a dependant; under Domitian his assiduous flattery gained for him the honorary tribunate which conferred equestrian rank, though not the rewards of hard cash which he would probably have appreciated more. The younger Pliny, who speaks of him with a slightly supercilious approval, repaid with a more substantial gratification a poem comparing him to Cicero. Martial's gift for occasional verse just enabled him to live up three pair of stairs in the city; in later years, when he had an income from booksellers as well as from private patrons, he could afford a tiny country house among the Sabine hills. Early in the reign of Domitian he began to publish regularly, bringing out a volume of epigrams every year. After the accession of Trajan he returned to his native town, from which, however, he sent a final volume three years afterwards to his Roman publishers. There his talent for flattery at last bore substantial fruit; a rich lady of the neighbourhood presented him with a little estate, and though the longing for the country, which had grown on him in Rome, was soon replaced by a stronger feeling of regret for the excitement of the capital, he spent the remainder of his life in material comfort.
The collected works of Martial, as published after his death, which probably took place about the year 102, consist of twelve books of miscellaneous Epigrams, which are prefaced by a book of pieces called Liber Spectaculorum, upon the performances given by Titus and Domitian in the capital, especially in the vast amphitheatre erected by the former. At the end are added two books of Xenia and Apophoreta, distichs written to go with the Christmas presents of all sorts which were interchanged at the festival of the Saturnalia. These last are, of course, not "distinguished for a strong poetic feeling," any more than the cracker mottoes of modern times. But the twelve books of Epigrams, while they include work of all degrees of goodness and badness, are invaluable from the vivid picture which they give of actual daily life at Rome in the first century. Few writers of equal ability show in their work such a total absence of character, such indifference to all ideas or enthusiasms; yet this very quality makes the verse of Martial a more perfect mirror of the external aspects of Roman life. A certain intolerance of hypocrisy is the nearest approach Martial ever makes to moral feeling. His perpetual flattery of Domitian, though gross as a mountain—it generally takes the form of comparing him with the Supreme Being, to the disadvantage of the latter—has no more serious political import than there is serious moral import in the almost unexampled indecency of a large proportion of the epigrams. The "candour" noted in him by Pliny is simply that of a sheet of paper which is indifferent to what is written upon it, fair or foul. He may claim the merit—nor is it an inconsiderable one—of being totally free from pretence. In one of the most graceful of his poems, he enumerates to a friend the things which make up a happy life: "Be yourself, and do not wish to be something else," is the line which sums up his counsel. To his own work he extends the same easy tolerance with which he views the follies and vices of society. "A few good, some indifferent, the greater number bad"—so he describes his epigrams; what opening is left after this for hostile criticism? If elsewhere he hints that only indolence prevented him from producing more important work, so harmless an affectation may be passed over in a writer whose clearness of observation and mastery of slight but lifelike portraiture are really of a high order.