Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius

by Samuel Dill

It is by his letters that Pliny has lived, and will live on, so long as men care to know the inner life of the great ages that have gone before. The criticism, which is so quick to seize the obvious weaknesses of the author of a priceless picture of ancient society, seems to be a little ungrateful. We could forgive almost any failing or affectation in one who had left us a [pg 161]similar revelation of society when M. Aurelius was holding back the Germans on the Danube, or when Probus was shattering the invaders of the third century. The letters of Cicero offer an apparently obvious comparison, which may be used to the detriment of Pliny. Yet the comparison is rather inept. Cicero was a man of affairs in the thick of a great revolution, and his letters are invaluable to the student of politics at a great crisis in history. But in the calm of Trajan’s reign, a letter-writer had to seek other subjects of interest than the fortunes of the state. Literature, criticism, the beauties of nature, the simple charm of country life, the thousand trivial incidents and eccentricities of an over-ripe society in the capital of the world, furnished a ready pen and a genial imagination, which could idealise its surroundings, with ample materials. Pliny is by some treated as a mediocrity; but, like our own Horace Walpole, he had the keen sense to see that social routine could be made interesting, and that the man who had the skill to do so might make himself famous. He was genuinely interested in his social environment. And intense interest in one’s subject is one great secret of literary success. Pliny had also the instinct that, if a work is to live, it must have a select distinction of style, which may be criticised, but which cannot be ignored. He had the laudable ambition to put his thoughts in a form of artistic grace which may make even commonplace attractive. So good a judge as the late Mr. Paley did not hesitate to put the Latinity of Pliny on the level of that of Cicero. Pliny’s Letters, perhaps even more than the masterpieces of the Augustine age, fascinated the taste of the fourth and fifth centuries. They were the models of Symmachus and Sidonius, who tried, but in very different fashion, to do for their age what Pliny did for his.[919]

Like his imitators, Sidonius and Symmachus, Pliny intended his Letters to go down to the future as a masterpiece of style, and as a picture of his age. We know that the letters of Symmachus were carefully preserved in duplicate by his scribes, probably by his own instructions, although they were edited and published by his son only after his death.[920] Pliny, like [pg 162]Sidonius, gave his Letters to the public in successive portions during his life.[921] Like Sidonius too, he felt that he had not the sustained power to write a consecutive history of his time and the Letters of both are probably far more valuable. Pliny’s first book opens with a kind of dedication to Septicius Clarus, who was the patron of Suetonius, and who rose to be praetorian prefect under Hadrian.[922] Pliny appears to disclaim any order or principle of arrangement in these books, but this is the device of an artistic negligence. Yet it has been proved by the prince of European scholars in our day that both as to date and subject matter, Pliny’s Letters reveal signs of the most careful arrangement. The books were published separately, a common practice down to the end of Roman literary history. The same subject reappears in the same book or the next.[923] Groups of letters dealing with the same matter are found in their natural order in successive books. The proof is made even clearer by the silence or the express references to Pliny’s family relations. Finally, the older men, who fill the stage in the earlier Letters, disappear towards the end; while a younger generation, a Salinator or a Ummidius Quadratus, are only heard of in the later. Men of Pliny’s own age, like Tacitus or Cornutus Tertullus, meet us from first to last. The dates at which the various books were published have been fixed with tolerable certainty. It is enough for our present purpose to say that the earliest letter belongs to the reign of Nerva, and the ninth book was probably given to the world a year or two before the writer was appointed by Trajan to the office of imperial legate of Bithynia.[924]

It is easy, as we have said, and apparently congenial to some writers, to dwell on the vanity and self-complacency of the writer of these letters. By some he seems to be regarded chiefly as a poseur. To discover the weaknesses of Pliny is no great feat of criticism: they are on the surface. But “securus judicat orbis terrarum,” and Pliny has borne the scrutiny of the great judge. Men of his own race and age, who spoke and wrote the most finished Latin, awarded him the palm of exquisite style. But Pliny has many qualities of [pg 163]the heart, which should cover a multitude of sins, even more serious than any with which he is charged. He had the great gift of loyal friendship, and he had its usual reward in a multitude of friends. It has been regretted that Pliny does not deal with serious questions of politics and philosophy, that his Letters rather skim the surface of social life, and leave its deeper problems untouched. Pliny himself would probably have accepted this criticism as a compliment. The mass of men are little occupied with insoluble questions. And Pliny has probably deserved better of posterity by leaving us a vivid picture of the ordinary life of his time or of his class, rather than an analysis of its spiritual distresses and maladies. We have enough of that in Seneca, in M. Aurelius, and in Lucian. Of the variety and vividness of Pliny’s sketches of social life there can never be any question. But our gratitude will be increased if we compare his Letters with the collections of his imitators, Symmachus and Sidonius, whose arid pages are seldom turned by any but a few curious and weary students. Martial, in his way, is perhaps even more clear-cut and minute in his portraiture. But Martial is essentially a wit of the town, viewing its vices, follies, and fashions with the eye of a keen, but rather detached observer. In reading Pliny’s Letters, we feel ourselves introduced into the heart of that society in its better hours; and, above all, we seem to be transported to those quiet provincial towns and secluded country seats where, if life was duller and tamer than it was in the capital, the days passed in a quiet content, unsolicited by the stormier passions, in orderly refinement, in kindly relations with country neighbours, and amid the unfading charm of old-world pieties and the witchery of nature.

Pliny has also done a great service in preserving a memorial of the literary tone and habits of his time. Even in that age of fertile production and too enthusiastic appreciation, Pliny, like Seneca and Statius, has a feeling that the love for things of the mind was waning.[925] And he deemed it an almost religious duty, as Symmachus and Sidonius did more than three centuries after him, to arouse the flagging interest in letters, and to reward even third-rate literary [pg 164]effort with exuberant praise. He avows that it is a matter of duty to admire and venerate any performance in a field so difficult as that of letters.[926] Yet Pliny was not by any means devoid of critical honesty and acumen. He could be a severe judge of his own style. He expects candid criticism from his friends, and receives it with gratitude and good temper.[927] This is to him, indeed, the practical purpose of readings before final publication. He made emendations and excisions in the Histories of Tacitus, which the great author had submitted for his revision.[928] In his correspondence with Tacitus, there is a curious mixture of vanity along with a clear recognition of his friend’s immense superiority of genius, and a sure prescience of his immortal fame. He is proud to hear their names coupled as chiefs of contemporary literature,[929] and he cherishes the hope that, united by loyal friendship in life, they will go down together to a remote future. When, in the year 106, Tacitus had asked him for an account of the elder Pliny’s death, in the great eruption of Vesuvius, Pliny expressed a firm belief that the book on which Tacitus was then engaged was destined to an enduring fame.[930] He was not quite so confident as to the immortality of Martial’s work,[931] although he appreciates to the full Martial’s brilliant and pungent wit. On the other hand, writing to a friend about the death of Silius Italicus, he frankly recognises that the Epic of the Punic War is a work of industry rather than of genius.[932] Yet he cannot allow the author of this dull mechanical poem to pass away without some record of his career.[933] The death at seventy-five of the last surviving consular of the Neronian age, of the consul in whose year of office the tyranny of Nero closed, inspired a feeling of pathos which was probably genuine, in spite of the rather pompous and pedantic expression of it. And although he wrote the Punica, a work which was almost buried till the fifteenth century,[934] Silius was probably a not uninteresting person. He had been a delator under Nero, and [pg 165]had enjoyed the friendship of Vitellius, but he knew how to redeem his character under the Flavian dynasty, and he had filled the proconsulate of Asia with some credit.[935] Henceforth he enjoyed the lettered ease and social deference which were the privilege of his class for centuries. He retired finally to the shores of Campania, where, moving from one villa to another, and surrounding himself with books and gems of art, his life flowed away undisturbed by the agony of Rome in the last terror of the Caesars. Among his many estates he was the proud owner of one of Cicero’s villas, and of the ground where Virgil sleeps. He used to keep the great poet’s birthday with a scrupulous piety, and he always approached his tomb as a holy place. This apparently placid and fortunate life was, like so many in those days, ended by a voluntary death.[936] Silius Italicus, in his life and in his end, is a true type of a generation which could bend before the storm of despotism, and save itself often by ignominious arts, which could recover its dignity and self-respect in the pursuit of literary ideals, and, at the last, assert the right to shake off the burden of existence when it became too heavy.

Pliny’s theory of life is clearly stated in the Letters, and it was evidently acted on by a great number of the class to which he belonged.[937] The years of vigorous youth should be given to the service of the state, in pursuing the well-marked and carefully-graduated career of honours, or in the strenuous oratorical strife of the law courts. The leisure of later years might be portioned out between social duty, the pleasures or the cares of a rural estate, and the cultivation of literary taste by reading and imitation of the great masters. The last was the most imperious duty of all, for those with any literary gifts, because charm of style gives the one hope of surviving the wreck of time;[938] for mere cultivated facility, as the most refined and creditable way of filling up the vacant spaces of life. Even if lasting fame was beyond one’s reach, it was something to be able to give pleasure to an audience of cultivated friends at a reading, and to enjoy the triumph of an hour. There must [pg 166]have been many a literary coterie who, if they fed one another’s vanity, also encouraged literary ideals, and hinted gentle criticism,[939] in that polite delicacy of phrase in which the Roman was always an adept. One of these literary circles stands out in Pliny’s pages. At least two of its members had held great office. Arrius Antoninus, the maternal grandfather of the Emperor Antoninus Pius,[940] had twice borne the consulship with antique dignity, and shown himself a model governor as proconsul of Asia.[941] He was devoted to Greek literature, and seems to have preferred to compose in that language. We need not accept literally Pliny’s praises of his Atticism, and of the grace and sweetness of his Greek epigrams. But he seems to have had a facility which Pliny tortured his ingenuity in vain to imitate with the poorer resources of the Latin tongue.[942] Among the friends of Antoninus was Vestricius Spurinna, who had defended Placentia for Otho, who was twice consul under Domitian, and was selected by Trajan to command the troops in a campaign in Germany.[943] This dignified veteran, who had passed apparently untainted through the reigns of the worst emperors, varied and lightened the ordinary routine of his old age by the composition of lyrics, both in Greek and Latin, which seemed to his admirers to have a singular sweetness. Sentius Augurinus, a familiar friend of the two consulars, was also a brilliant verse writer,[944] who could enthral Pliny by a recitation lasting for three days, although the fact that Pliny was the subject of one of the poems may account for the patience or the pleasure. One of Pliny’s dearest friends was Passennus Paullus, who claimed kindred with the poet Propertius, and, at any rate, came from the same town in Umbria. Passennus has been cruelly treated by Time, if his lyric efforts recalled, as we are asked to believe, the literary graces of his ancestor, and even those of Horace.[945] Vergilius Romanus devoted himself to comedy, and was thought to have reproduced not unworthily the delicate charms of Menander and Terence, as well as the scathing invective of older [pg 167]Greek masters of the art.[946] But there were others of Pliny’s circle who essayed a loftier and weightier style. Probably the foremost of these was Titinius Capito, who, as an inscription records,[947] had held high civil office under Domitian, Nerva, and Trajan. He was an enthusiastic patron of letters, and readily offered his halls to literary friends for their recitations, which he attended with punctilious politeness. Cherishing the memory of the great men of the Republic, the Cassii, the Bruti, and the Catos, he composed a work on the death of the noble victims of the Terror.[948] He tried in vain to draw Pliny into the field of historical composition.[949] But the man who thought more of style and graceful charity than of truth, was not the man to write the history of such a time. He has done a much greater service in providing priceless materials for the reconstruction of its social history. Caninius Rufus was a neighbour of Pliny at Como.[950] He was one of those for whom the charms of country life had a dangerous seduction. His villa, with its colonnades, “where it was always spring,” the shining levels of the lake beneath his verandah, the water course with its emerald banks, the baths and spacious halls, all these delights seem to have relaxed the literary energy and ambition of their master. Caninius meditated the composition of a Greek epic on the Dacian wars of Trajan.[951] But he was probably one of those lingering, dilatory writers who meet us in Martial,[952] waiting for the fire from heaven which never comes. The intractable roughness of barbarian names, which, as Pliny suggests, might have been eluded by a Homeric licence in quantity, was probably not the only difficulty of Caninius.

Among the literary friends of Pliny, a much more important person than Caninius was Suetonius, but Suetonius was apparently long paralysed by the same cautious hesitation to challenge the verdict of the public. A younger man than Pliny,[953] Suetonius was one of his most intimate friends. They [pg 168]both belonged to that circle which nursed the senatorial tradition and the hatred of the imperial tyrants.[954] The life of Suetonius was not very effectual or brilliant, from a worldly point of view. Although born within the rank to which every distinction was open,[955] he was a man of modest and retiring tastes, devoted to quiet research, and destitute of the eager ambition and vigorous self-assertion which are necessary for splendid success. He was probably for some years a professor of grammar.[956] He made a half-hearted attempt to gain a footing at the bar. In 101 A.D. he obtained a military tribunate, through Pliny’s influence, but speedily renounced his command.[957] Henceforth he devoted himself entirely to that historical research, which, if it has not won for him any dazzling fame, has made historical students, in spite of some reservations as to his sources, his debtors for all time. Pliny had the greatest esteem for Suetonius, and was always ready to befriend him, whether it were in the purchase of a quiet little retreat near Rome,[958] or in obtaining for the childless antiquary the Jus trium liberorum from Trajan.[959] The two men were bound to one another by many tastes and sympathies, not the least strong being a curious superstition, which infected, as we shall see in a later chapter, even the most vigorous minds of that age. Suetonius had once a dream which seemed to portend failure in some legal cause in which he was engaged. He sought the aid of Pliny to obtain an adjournment. Pliny does not question the reality of such warnings, but merely suggests a more cheering interpretation of the vision.[960] Although devoted to research, and a most laborious student, the biographer of the Caesars was strangely tardy in letting his productions see the light. In 106, he had been long engaged on a work, which was probably the De Viris Illustribus.[961] Pliny assailed him with bantering reproaches on his endless use of the file, and begs him to publish without delay. From several indications, it appears that the lingering volume did not appear till 113.[962] It was not till the year 118, when Hadrian arrived [pg 169]from the East after his accession, that Suetonius attained the rank of one of the imperial secretaryships.[963] Pliny in all probability had died some years before the elevation of his friend.

But although the dawn of a new age of milder and less suspicious government had, for the first time since Augustus, left men free to compose a true record of the past, and even to vilify the early Caesars,[964] the great mass of cultivated men in Pliny’s time, as in the days of Ausonius and Sidonius, were devoted to poetry. The chief cause in giving this direction to the Roman mind was undoubtedly the system pursued in the schools. In the first century, as in the fifth, the formative years of boyhood were devoted almost entirely to the study of the poets. The subject-matter of their masterpieces was not neglected by the accomplished grammarian, who was often a man of learning, and sometimes a man of taste; and the reading of poetry was made the text for disquisitions on geography and astronomy, on mythology or the antiquities of religious ritual and constitutional lore.[965] But style and expression were always of foremost interest in these studies. The ear of the South has always felt the charm of rhythmical or melodious speech, with a keenness of pleasure generally denied to our colder temperament. And the Augustan age had, in a single generation, performed miracles, under Greek inspiration, in moulding the Latin tongue to be the apt vehicle of every mood of poetic feeling. That inspired band of writers, whose call it was to glorify the dawn of a world-wide empire and the ancient achievements of the Latin race,[966] rose to the full height of their vocation. They were conscious that they were writing for distant provinces won from barbarism, and for a remote posterity.[967] They discovered and revealed resources in the language, hitherto undreamt of. They wedded to its native dignity and strength a brilliancy, an easy grace and sprightliness, which positively ravished the ear of the street boys in Pompeii, or of the rude dweller on the Tanais or the Baetis.[968] In his own lifetime Virgil became a popular hero. His Eclogues were chanted on the stage; [pg 170]verses of the Aeneid can still be seen, along with verses of Propertius, scrawled on the walls of Campanian towns. Virgil, when he visited Rome, was mobbed by admiring crowds. When his poetry was recited in the theatre, the whole audience rose to their feet as if to salute the emperor.[969] He had the doubtful but significant honour of being recited by Alexandrian boys at the coarse orgies of a Trimalchio.[970] Never was a worthy fame so rapidly and splendidly won: seldom has literary fame and influence been so lasting.

The Flavian age succeeded to this great heritage. Already there were ominous signs of a decay of originality and force, of decadence in the language itself.[971] The controversy between the lovers of the new and the lovers of the archaic style was raging in the reign of Vespasian, and can be still followed in the De Oratoribus of Tacitus, or even in the verses of Martial.[972] Already the taste for Ennius and the prae-Ciceronian oratory had set in, for the dialect of the heroes of the Punic Wars, even for “the Latin of the Twelve Tables,”[973] a taste which was destined to produce its Dead Sea fruit in the age of the Antonines. But whoever might cavil at Cicero,[974] no one ever questioned the pre-eminence of Virgil, and he and his contemporaries were still the models of a host of imitators. The mass of facile talent, thrown back on itself by the loss of free republican life and public interests, fascinated from earliest infancy by the haunting cadences of the grand style, rushed into verse-writing, to beguile long hours of idleness, or to woo a shadowy fame at an afternoon recital, with a more shadowy hope of future fame. The grand style was a charmer and deceiver. It was such a perfect instrument, it was so protean in its various power, it was so abundant in its resources, that a man of third-rate powers and thin commonplace imagination, who had been trained in skilful manipulation of consecrated phrase, might for the moment delude himself and his friends by faint echoes of the music of the golden age.

The brilliancy of inherited phrase concealed the poverty of the literary amateur’s fancy from himself. And, even if he were not deluded about his own powers, the practice in skilful handling of literary symbols, which was acquired in the schools, furnished a refined amusement for a too ample leisure. It is clear from the dialogue De Oratoribus, and from Pliny’s Letters, that the meditative life, surrounded by the quiet charm of stream and woodland, far from the din and strife and social routine of the great city,[975] attracted many people much more than the greatest oratorical triumphs in the centumviral court, which, after all, were so pale and bourgeois beside the glories of the great ages of oratory. And although Aper, in the Dialogue of Tacitus, sneers at the solitary and unsocial toil of the poet, rewarded by a short-lived succès d’estime,[976] there can be no doubt that the ambition to cut a figure, even for a day, was a powerful inspiration at a time when the ancient avenues to fame had been closed.

It was to satisfy such ambitions that Domitian founded the quinquennial competition on the Capitol, in the year 86 A.D.,[977] as well as the annual festival in honour of Minerva on the Alban Mount. A similar festival, for the cultivation of Greek poetry, had been established at Naples in honour of Augustus, at which Statius had won the crown of corn-ears.[978] And Nero had founded another, apparently only for his own glorification.[979] The festival established by Domitian was more important and enduring. The judges were taken from the priestly colleges, and, amid a concourse of the highest functionaries of the state, the successful poet received his crown at the hands of the emperor. The prospect of such a distinction drew competitors from distant provincial parts. It is a curious illustration of the power and the skill of the literary discipline of the schools that, twice within a few years, the crown of oak leaves was won by boys under fourteen years of age. The verses of one of them may still be read upon his tomb.[980]