The habit of scientific veracity is unknown to the Roman historians; any fact is good enough for them, provided it makes good copy, and can be dealt with in a picturesque sentence or neat epigram. They pay little attention to the consecutive order of events, are not always careful to distinguish between persons of the same name, and are rather attracted than otherwise by an opportunity of attributing contradictory qualities to the same person; the time at which a thing was done is of little importance to them, the person by whom it was done of equally little; a good story is to them a good story, and nothing more; if its effect is increased by hanging it on the name of a well known man, they seldom stop to inquire whether he can be justly implicated in the events narrated; consequently it is always agreeable to find their statements corroborated by undesigned coincidences. Paterculus and Suetonius agree in telling us that the last two years of the life of Tiberius at Rhodes were made a burden to him by the sinister influence of Marcus Lollius, but they leave us in some doubt as to who this Marcus Lollius really was, whether he was the same man who was Consul in B.C. 21, and Commander-in-chief in Northern Gaul in B.C. 16, whether the Consul and the General were two different persons, and whether the adviser of Caius Cæsar was not the Consul but his son.
The poet Horace addressed one of his odes and two of his epistles to a Lollius. It has been generally assumed, on the ground of a misunderstood allusion, that the ode was written for the father, and the two letters for the son; comparison of the three shows that they must have been written to the same person, and that that person could not have been Consul in B.C. 21. Letters and ode alike contain advice which Horace could not have addressed even to a man his equal in rank and of his own age without a risk of putting a summary end to any friendship that might have existed between them, still less to a Consular, and possibly a senior. Horace tells us definitely that he was forty-four years of age in the year when Lollius and Lepidus were consuls; the family of Lollius had been hitherto undistinguished; the name appears on no previous occasion in the consular lists, nor had the man himself done anything to suggest him as a fit recipient of premature honours. The legal age for admission to the Consulship was forty-three, and though the law was frequently broken in times of revolution, or in favour of candidates of the Imperial House, Augustus, whose policy was to restore the old as far as it was not incompatible with the new, was not likely to break the law in favour of a man who was not inevitable. It is not likely that Lollius the Consul was one of those young men who were rapidly pushed through the routine of office, because they had claims which could not be disregarded, or because it was necessary to conciliate their families. Horace could not have written, as he did write, to the man who was Consul in B.C. 21.
The second of the two letters included in the collection was certainly written in B.C. 21; the date is fixed by an allusion to the fact that Augustus was at the time away demanding the restoration of the Eagles from the Parthians. The person to whom it was addressed was about to become the companion of some young man of distinction, probably Drusus, for Tiberius was at this time absent with Augustus, and on his return passed under the tutelage of Agrippa, so far as he was not in the hands of Augustus himself. The advice which Horace gives could not be applicable to a man old enough to be Consul, and therefore not in a subordinate position to his charge; but it is strictly applicable to a young man who was to be the companion of another young man, his superior in rank or position. Everything in the letter indicates the youth of Lollius; he was to share in the athletic amusements of his friend; the temptations, which he is to resist, are the temptations of a young man. The advice given is excellent, and might be profitably studied by any young man of the present day, who happens to find himself in a similar situation; some of it is distinctly personal, and tells us what kind of a young man this Lollius was. Horace begins by addressing him as “liberrime Lolli,” “most independent Lollius,” and indicates that one of his dangers is undue sensitiveness to the imputation of servility. He concludes with some general advice not specially applicable to the particular occasion: “In the midst of all you will read the works of learned men, and strictly enquire of them how you may be able to live your life in comfort, whether you are always to be harassed and excited by a sense of poverty, excessive anxiety, and the expectation of but moderate affluence, whether virtue is acquired by learning or given by nature, what dispels care, what puts you on good terms with yourself, what calms and purifies, honour or the pleasures of gain, or the side road, and the path of the unobserved.” We should be at liberty to infer from this that the good qualities of Lollius were balanced by an irritable ambition and a love of money.
The other epistle to Lollius, though he is addressed with mock solemnity in the first line as “most mighty Lollius,” is clearly written to a boy: “while you are spouting Homer at Rome I have read him over again at Præneste.” The recitation of the Homeric poems was an early step in the educational course of the Romans, and preceded the technical course in rhetoric. At the end of the letter Horace says: “Now is the time, boy, to drink in the words of wisdom with a clean heart; present yourself now to the higher influences.” Horace begins with drawing moral lessons from the Homer which he has been reading, and then passes on to general advice: “Don’t wait to enter on the path of virtue, don’t put off your moral discipline, or the time will go by,” “The man who is a slave to cupidity or anxiety cannot enjoy anything,” “Despise sensual pleasures; sensual pleasure is bought with pain and carries a curse,” “The greedy man is always a poor man; fix a limit to your desires,” “The Sicilian tyrants never discovered a worse torture than envy,” “Anger is a short fit of madness; control your temper, it must be slave or despot; bridle it, bind it with chains.”
These might seem to be mere general moralizings, applicable to anybody, but we have already had some of them in the previous letter, and they occur again in the ode addressed to Lollius.
“Lest you should happen to think that the words which I fit to music will perish, I would have you to remember that though Homer stands first, other poets are not unknown. Many heroes have lived and died besides those commemorated by Homer, but their names are lost and their deeds forgotten, because they never found their inspired bard; therefore I will not permit your many virtues, Lollius, to pass unmentioned in my pages. You have an acute intellect, which preserves its balance whether things go well or ill. The man who punishes dishonest avarice, abstaining from money the universal tempter, and is Consul not for one year only, but whenever the good and honest prefer honour to bribes, flings away the gifts of corruption with lofty countenance, and victoriously carries his arms through opposing squadrons. It is not the man with large possessions that you will rightly call happy; he more correctly claims the name who knows how to use the gifts of the gods wisely, and can bear the hardships of poverty and dreads wickedness worse than death; such an one has no fear of dying for the friends he loves or his fatherland.” Even if we admit that the rendering of the tenth and eleventh stanzas of this ode is beset with difficulties, there is no question about the last two with their praise of poverty.
The allusion to the Consulship has tempted commentators to infer that the ode was addressed to Lollius, the father, but it is just as likely, and on other accounts more likely, that the complimentary allusion was made to the son. “Your father is Consul this year; you will be Consul for many years if you abstain from certain temptations.”
In fact, all three poems seem to have been written at about the same time, viz., in the Consulship of the elder Lollius, B.C. 21, whose son was still a boy when he served under Augustus in Spain, his service simply amounting to being present in his father’s company during the campaign.
The situation, in short, seems to have been that Horace was attracted, as other middle-aged men have been attracted, by a spirited, clever, and athletic lad, who seemed to have a great future before him, but whose character was spoiled by three serious defects—a violent temper, restless ambition, cupidity. The attraction was sufficiently mutual to allow Horace to give good advice, which he was careful to present in a complimentary form, but without success, for Paterculus, speaking of the Lollius who was general in Northern Gaul in B.C. 16, and suffered a severe defeat, losing the Eagle of the Fifth Legion, describes him as having been “on all occasions more greedy of money than of acting properly, steeped in vice though a consummate dissembler.” A page or two later he speaks of the misdeeds and death of Marcus Lollius, when acting as adviser of Caius Cæsar in the East.
Lollius may have had an old grudge against Tiberius; he was still a boy when Tiberius, then at the age of seventeen, accompanied Augustus to the Cantabrian War, at which Lollius was also present, and he may already have shown indications of the ungovernable temper which drew forth the monitions of Horace. Then in B.C. 21 he was appointed companion to Drusus, the brother of Tiberius. His abilities rapidly attracted attention; he won the favour of Augustus, and was given a command on the German frontier. He was unsuccessful and was superseded; the war was entrusted to Drusus and Tiberius. After this we do not hear of Lollius in any public capacity till he was made the adviser of Caius Cæsar. It is again not improbable that he attributed his disgrace to the representations of the two Neros, of whom Tiberius was now the sole survivor. The retirement of Tiberius again gave him an opportunity; he again won the favour of Augustus, and went out to the East with Caius, prepared to indulge his grudge against Tiberius. Suetonius definitely tells us that when Caius arrived in the East Tiberius went to visit him at Samos, and found him ill disposed to himself, owing to the representations of his companion and adviser, Marcus Lollius; that this situation lasted for two years; that representations were even made to Augustus to the effect that Tiberius was tampering with the fidelity of the centurions in the army of Caius; that Tiberius, on being informed of this, wrote and begged that a guard might be sent to observe his actions; that he gave up his customary military exercises, and adopted the dress of a Greek civilian; that he became day by day increasingly an object of contempt and hatred, so that the people of Nîmes threw down his statues, and a man ventured to say at a banquet, in the presence of Caius, that he would undertake to start for Rhodes at once and bring back the exile’s head. Tiberius found his position one of actual peril, and again wrote begging to be allowed to return to Rome. He did not obtain this permission till Caius had been consulted on the subject, as Augustus had undertaken to take no step without his consent. Happily Lollius had by this time lost his influence, and Caius raised no objection. Paterculus supplies a link in the chain of events. Lollius, either seeing an opportunity for getting rid of both Caius and Tiberius, and making himself master in the East, or simply in the endeavour to raise suspicions against the latter, had opened a correspondence with the young King of the Parthians, who betrayed it to Caius, with whom he had celebrated a series of entertainments on the river Euphrates, closely resembling those held by Napoleon and the Czar Alexander on the Vistula many centuries later. Lollius died a few days after the disclosure. Paterculus, who was at that time a tribune of soldiers in the army of Caius, did not know whether his death was accidental or self inflicted; he only knew that everybody was delighted, as they were no less grieved by the death of another of the friends of Horace, Censorinus, “a man,” says Paterculus, “born to win the favour of mankind.”