CHAPTER I
THE CIRCLE OF THE YOUNGER PLINY
It is a great relief to turn from the picture of base and vulgar luxury in the novel of Petronius to the sobriety and refinement of a class which has been elaborately painted by a less skilful artist, but a better man. The contrast between the pictures of Petronius and those of Pliny, of course, raises no difficulty. The writers belonged indeed to the same order, but they were describing two different worlds. The difficulty arises when we compare the high tone of the world which Pliny has immortalised, with the hideous revelations of contemporary licence in the same class which meet us in Juvenal, Martial, and Tacitus. And historical charity or optimism has often turned the contrast to account. But there is no need to pit the quiet testimony of Pliny against the fierce invective of Juvenal. Indeed to do so would indicate an imperfect insight into the character of the men and the associations which moulded their views of the society which surrounded them. The friends of Pliny were for the most part contemporaries of the objects of Juvenal’s wrath and loathing.[814] But although the two men lived side by side during the same years, and probably began to write for the public about the same date,[815] there is no hint that they ever met. They were socially at opposite poles; they were also as widely separated by temperament. Pliny was a charitable, good-natured man, an aristocrat, living among the élite, with an [pg 142]assured position and easy fortune—a man who, as he admits himself, was inclined to idealise his friends.[816] He probably shut his eyes to their moral faults, just as he felt bound in honour to extol their third-rate literary efforts. Juvenal was, as in a former chapter we have seen reason to believe, a soured and embittered man, who viewed the society of the great world only from a distance, and caught up the gossip of the servants’ hall. With the heat of an excitable temperament, he probably magnified what he heard, and he made whole classes responsible for the folly and intemperance of a few. Martial, the friend of Juvenal, lived in the same atmosphere, but, while Juvenal was inspired by a moral purpose, Martial caters, unabashed, for a prurient taste.[817] Both the charitable optimist and the gloomy, determined pessimist, by limiting their view, can find ample materials for their respective estimates of pagan society towards the end of the first century. A judicial criticism will combine or balance the opposing evidence rather than select the witnesses.
The truth is that society in every age presents the most startling moral contrasts, and no single comprehensive description of its moral condition can ever be true. This has been too often forgotten by those who have passed judgment on the moral state of Roman society, both in the first age of the Empire and in the last. That there was stupendous corruption and abnormal depravity under princes like Caligula, Nero, and Domitian, we hardly need the testimony of the satirists to induce us to believe. That there were large classes among whom virtuous instinct, and all the sober strength and gravity of the old Roman character, were still vigorous and untainted, is equally attested and equally certain. Ingenious immorality and the extravagance of luxury were no doubt rampant in the last century of the Republic and in the first century of the Empire, and their enormity has been heightened by the perverted and often prurient literary skill with which the orgies of voluptuous caprice have been painted to the last loathsome details. Yet even Ovid has a lingering ideal of womanly dignity which may repel, by refined reserve, the audacity of libertinism.[818] He was forced, by old-fashioned scruple or imperial displeasure, to make an elaborate apology for the [pg 143]lubricities of the Ars Amandi.[819] The most wanton writer of the evil days shrinks from justifying adultery, and hardly ever fails to respect the unconscious innocence of girlhood. In the days when, according to Juvenal, Roman matrons were eloping with gladiators, and visiting the slums of Rome, Tacitus and Favorinus were preaching the duties of a pure motherhood.[820] In the days when crowds were gloating over the obscenities of pantomime, and aristocratic dinner-parties were applauding the ribaldry of Alexandrian songs, Quintilian was denouncing the corruption of youth by the sight of their fathers toying with mistresses and minions.[821] In an age when matrons of noble rank were exposing themselves at the pleasure of an emperor, the philosopher Musonius was teaching that all indulgence, outside the sober limits of wedlock, was a gross, animal degradation of human dignity.[822] And it is thus we may balance Juvenal and Martial on the one side and Pliny on the other. The gloomy or prurient satirist gives us a picture of ideal baseness; the gentle and charitable aristocrat opens before us a society in which people are charmingly refined, and perhaps a little too good. Yet it is said with truth that an age should be judged by its ideals of goodness rather than by its moral aberrations. And certain it is that the age of Pliny and Tacitus and Quintilian had a high moral ideal, even though it was also the age of Domitian. The old Roman character, whatever pessimists, ancient or modern, may say, was a stubborn type, which propagated itself over all the West, and survived the Western Empire. It is safe to believe that there was in Italy and Gaul and Spain many a grand seigneur of honest, regular life, virtuous according to his lights, like Pliny’s uncle, or his Spurinna, or Verginius Rufus, or Corellius. There were certainly many wedded lives as pure and self-sacrificing as those of the elder Arria and Caecina Paetus, or of Calpurnia and Pliny.[823] There were homes like those at Fréjus,[824] or Como, or Brescia,[825] in which boys and girls were reared in a refined and severe simplicity, which even improved upon the [pg 144]tradition of the golden age of Rome. And, as will be seen in a later chapter, many a brief stone record remains which shows that, even in the world of slaves and freedmen, there were always in the darkest days crowds of humble people, with honest, homely ideals, and virtuous family affection, proud of their industries, and sustaining one another by help and kindness.
In this sounder class of Roman society, it will be found that the saving or renovating power was, not so much any religious or philosophic impulse, as the wholesome influence, which never fails from age to age, of family duty and affection, reinforced, especially in the higher ranks, by a long tradition of Roman dignity and self-respect, and by the simple cleanness and the pieties of country life. The life of the blameless circle of aristocrats which Pliny determined to preserve for the eyes of posterity, seems to be sometimes regarded as the result of a sudden transformation, a rebound from the frantic excesses of the time of the Claudian Caesars to the simpler and severer mode of life of which Vespasian set a powerful example. That there was such a change of moral tone, especially in the class surrounding the court, partly caused by financial exhaustion, partly by the introduction of new men from the provinces into the ranks of the Senate, is certified by the supreme authority of Tacitus.[826] Yet we should remember that men like Agricola, the father-in-law of Tacitus, or Verginius Rufus, or Fabatus, the grandfather of Pliny’s wife, or the elder Pliny, and many another, were not converted prodigals. They knew how to reconcile, by quietude or politic deference, the dignity of Roman virtue with a discreet acquiescence even in the excesses of despotism. The fortunes of many of them remained unimpaired. The daily life of men like the elder Pliny and Spurinna, is distinguished by a virtuous calm, an almost painful monotony of habit, in which there seems to have been nothing to reform except, perhaps, a certain moral rigidity.[827] Above all, and surely it is the most certain proof and source of the moral soundness of any age, the ideal of [pg 145]womanhood was still high, and it was even then not seldom realised. There may have been many who justified the complaint of moralists that mothers did not guard with vigilant care the purity of their children. But there were women of the circle of Tacitus and Pliny as spotless as the half-legendary Lucretia, as they were far more accomplished, and probably far more charming. It is often said that women sink or rise according to the level of the men with whom they are linked. If that be true, there must have been many good men in the days of the Flavian dynasty.
The younger Pliny, whose name, before his adoption, was Publius Caecilius Secundus,[828] was descended from families which had been settled at Como since the time of the first Caesar.[829] They belonged to the local aristocracy, and possessed estates and villas around the lake. Pliny’s father, who had held high municipal office, died early, but the boy had the great advantage of the guardianship of Verginius Rufus, for whose character and achievements his ward felt the profoundest reverence.[830] That great soldier had been governor of Upper Germany at the close of Nero’s reign, and, with a deference to old constitutional principles, which Pliny must have admired, had twice, at the peril of his life, refused to receive the imperial place at the hands of his clamorous legions.[831] Pliny was born in 61 or 62 A.D., the time which saw the death of Burrus, the retirement of Seneca from public life, and the marriage of Nero with Poppaea.[832] His infancy therefore coincided with the last and wildest excesses of the Neronian tyranny. But country places like Como felt but little of the shock of these moral earthquakes. There was no school in Como till one was founded by Pliny’s own generosity.[833] But the boy had probably, in his early years, the care of his uncle, the author of the Natural History, who, during the worst years of the Terror, was living, like many others, in studious retirement on his estates.[834] The uncle and nephew were men [pg 146]of very different temperament, but there can be little doubt that the character and habits of the older man profoundly influenced the ideals of the younger. The elder Pliny would have been an extraordinary character even in a puritan age; he seems almost a miracle in the age of the Claudian Caesars. He was born in 23 A.D., in the reign of Tiberius; and his early youth and manhood cover the reigns of Caligula and Claudius. He was only 32 when Nero came to the throne. He returned to Rome in 71 to hold a high place in the councils of Vespasian.[835] That more than monastic asceticism, that jealous hoarding of every moment,[836] that complete indifference to ordinary pleasures, in comparison with the duty, or the ambition, of transmitting to future ages the accumulations of learned toil, is a curious contrast to the Gargantuan feasts or histrionic aestheticism which were the fashion in the circle of the Claudian Emperors. The younger Pliny has left us a minute account of his uncle’s routine of life, and justly adds that the most intense literary toil might seem mere idleness in comparison.[837] His studies often began soon after midnight, broken by an official visit to the emperor before dawn. After administrative work was over, the remainder of the day was spent in reading or writing. Even in the bath or on a journey, this literary industry was never interrupted. A reader or amanuensis was always at hand to save the moments that generally are allowed to slip away to waste. He tells Titus in his preface that he had consulted 2000 volumes for his Natural History.[838] The 160 volumes of closely written notes, which the austere enthusiast could have sold once for £3500, might have challenged the industry of a Casaubon or a Mommsen.
The laborious intensity of the elder Pliny was probably unrivalled in his day. But the moral tone, the severe self-restraint, the contempt for the sensual, or even the comfortable, side of life, the plain unspeculative stoicism, was a tone which, from many indications in the younger Pliny and in the other [pg 147]literature of the time, appears to have been not so rare as the reader of Juvenal or Martial might suspect. A book like the Caesars of Suetonius, concentrating attention on the life of the emperor and his immediate circle, is apt to suggest misleading conclusions as to the condition of society at large. The old Roman character, perhaps the strongest and toughest national character ever developed, was an enduring type, and its true home was in the atmosphere of quiet country places in northern or central Italy, where the round of rural labour and simple pleasures reproduced the environment in which it first took form. We have glimpses of many of these nurseries or retreats of old-fashioned virtue in Pliny’s Letters. Brescia and Padua, in the valley of the Po, were especially noted for frugality and severity.[839] And it was from among the youth of Brescia that Pliny suggested a husband for the daughter of the stoic champion, Arulenus Rusticus. There must have been many a home, like those of Spurinna, or Corellius Rufus, or Fabatus,[840] or the poet Persius, where, far from the weary conventionality of the capital, the rage for wealth, the rush of vulgar self-assertion, there reigned the tranquil and austere ideal of a life dedicated to higher ends than the lusts of the flesh, or the ghoul-like avarice that haunted death-beds. There are youths and maidens in the portrait-gallery of Pliny whose innocence was guarded by good women as pure and strong as those matrons who nursed the stern, unbending soldiers of the Samnite and Punic wars.[841]
The great struggle in which the legions of the East and West met again, and yet again, in the valley of the Po, probably did not much disturb the quiet homes on lake Como. The close of that awful conflict gave the world ten years of quiet and reformation, which were a genial atmosphere for the formation of many characters like Pliny’s. The reign of the Flavians was ushered in by the mystery and glamour of Eastern superstition, by oracles on Mount Carmel and miracles at Alexandria.[842] But the plain Sabine soldier, who was the saviour of the Roman State, brought to his momentous task a clear unsophisticated good sense, with no trace of that [pg 148]crapulous excitement which had alternated between the heroics of spurious art and the lowest bohemianism. Vespasian, although he was not a figure to strike the imagination, was yet, if we think of the abyss from which, by his single strength, he rescued the Rome world,[843] undoubtedly one of the greatest of the emperors. And his biographer, with an unusual tact, suggests what was probably one secret of his strength. Vespasian regularly visited the old farmhouse at Reate which was the cradle of his race. Nothing in the old place was ever changed. And, on holidays and anniversaries the emperor never failed to drink from the old silver goblet which his grandmother had used.[844] The strength and virtue of the Latin race lay, not in religion or philosophy, but in the family pieties and devotion to the State. Vespasian found it urgent to bring order into the national finances, which had been reduced to chaos by the wild extravagance of his predecessors, and to recruit the Senate, which had been more than decimated by proscription, confiscation, and vicious self-abandonment.[845] In performing his task, he did not shrink from the charge of cheese-paring, just as he did not dread the unpopularity of fresh taxation.[846] But he could be liberal as well as parsimonious. He restored many of the ancient temples, even in country places.[847] He made grants to senators whose fortunes had decayed or had been wasted.[848] He spent great sums on colossal buildings and on amusements for the people.[849] But the most singular and interesting trait in this remarkable man is that, with no pretensions to literary or artistic culture, he was the first Caesar who gave a fixed endowment to professors of the liberal arts, and that he was the founder of that public system of education[850] which, for good or evil, produced profound effects on Roman character and intellect down to the end of the Western Empire. His motive was not, as some have suggested, to bring literature into thraldom to the State. He was really making himself the organ of a great intellectual [pg 149]movement. For, while the vast field of administration absorbed much of the energy of the cultivated class, the decay of free institutions had left a great number with only a shadow of political interest, and the mass of unoccupied talent had to find some other scope for its energies. It found it for ages, till the end of the Western Empire, in fugitive and ephemeral composition, or in the more ephemeral displays of the rhetorical class-room.[851] Vespasian perhaps did a greater service in renovating the upper class of Rome by the introduction of many new men from the provinces, to fill the yawning gaps in senatorial and equestrian ranks. Spain contributed more than its fair share to the literature and statesmanship of this period.[852] And one of the best and most distinguished sons of that province who found a career at Rome, was the rhetor Quintilian.