Causam querelæ. Quædam tum stagni incola,
Nunc, inquit, omnes unus exurit lacus
Cogitque miseras arida sede emori;
Quidnam futurum est, si creârit liberos?[[1025]]
“Once upon a time the Sun determined to marry; and the Frogs raised a cry of alarm to Heaven. Jupiter, moved by their complaints, asked the cause of them. One of the denizens of the pond answered:—‘Now the Sun by himself dries up all the lakes, and causes us to die a miserable death in our parched-up dwellings. What then will become of us if he has children?’”
Now let us examine the application. The fawning yet ambitious Sejanus had always aspired to ally himself with the imperial family. The first attempt which he made to accomplish his design was procuring the betrothal of his daughter to Drusus, the son of Claudius, afterwards emperor. This prince died young, and consequently the marriage never took place;[[1026]] but this first opened the eyes of the Romans to the audacious projects of the favourite. Later in his career,[[1027]] he, by a similar step, endeavoured to pave his way to the imperial purple. He seduced Livilla, the sister of the amiable Germanicus, poisoned her husband, divorced his own wife, and asked the sanction of Tiberius to his marriage with the widow of the murdered man. The emperor, with his usual finesse and dissimulation, refused. The demand awoke the suspicions of the court, and was a commencement of that coolness between Sejanus and his patron which eventually ended in the fall of the latter. The influence of Sejanus alone was sufficiently baneful; what would it be if multiplied by a race of princes descended from him? The mere probability of such an event naturally filled Rome with alarm and consternation; and this Phædrus endeavoured to encourage by a fable, which, if it had not some such object as this, would scarcely be intelligible.
The quotations which have been given from the fables of Phædrus are sufficient, as examples of his ingenuity in imitation and adaptation, as well as of his original genius, whenever he trusts to his powers of invention. Some of his pieces, although, like the rest, they are entitled fables, are, in fact, narratives of real events, and show that he possessed a charming talent for telling anecdotes, besides skill as a fabulist in the proper sense of the term. His style has great merits: it combines the simple neatness and graceful elegance of the golden age with the vigour and terseness of the silver one. Phædrus has the facility of Ovid, and the brevity of Tacitus. Thus standing in the epoch between two literary periods, he, as far as the humble nature of his walk admits, unites the excellencies of both. Between the age of Horace and Juvenal, Cicero and Tacitus, there was a gap, and a long one, not less than half a century: it was a period in which Roman genius was slumbering. Phædrus proves that that sleep was not the sleep of death. Tacitus has partially accounted for this cold and dark interval. He tells us[[1028]]—“that although the affairs of the ancient Roman republic, whether in prosperity or in adversity, were related by illustrious writers—and even the times of Augustus were not deficient in historians of talent and genius—nevertheless the gradual growth of a spirit of adulation deterred all who were qualified for the task from attempting it. Fear, during the lifetime of Tiberius, Caius, Claudius, and Nero, and hatred, still fresh after their deaths, rendered all accounts of their reigns false.”
It was thus, according to him, fear and hatred, and a spirit of flattery, that silenced the voice of history. Doubtless what he says of history applies with equal force to poetry, and oratory likewise. The same cause which crushed political liberty rendered the truthfulness of the historian fraught with danger, and all poetry, except it spoke the language of adulation, treason; a crime which was no longer one against the majesty of the people, but was transferred to the person of the emperor. The very term παρρησια (boldness of speech) was a word, the utterance of which was as perilous as to speak of liberty.[[1029]] The danger had scarcely passed away when Juvenal, notwithstanding his fearless spirit, wrote:—
Unde illa priorum
Scribendi quodcunque animo flagrante liberet,