Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, January 1885

by Various

Nor is it merely in regard to the political questions of the day that Isocrates performs the part of a journalist. He deals also with the social life of Athens. He expresses the feeling with which men of the old school observed a deterioration of manners connected, in their views, with the decay of Conservative elements in the democracy. He shows us the throngs of needy citizens, eagerly casting lots outside the law-courts for the privilege of employment as paid jurymen—while at the same time they are hiring mercenary troops to fight their battles abroad. He pictures the lavish display which characterized the festivals of the improvident city—where the amusement of the public had now become a primary art of statesmanship—when men might be seen blazing in gold spangled robes, who had been shivering through the winter in rags. He brings before us the young men of a degenerate Athens—no longer engaged in vigorous exercises of mind and body, in hunting or athletics; no longer crossing the market-place with downcast eyes, or showing marks of deference to their elders—but passing their hours in the society of gamesters and flute-players, or lazily cooling their wine in the fountain by the Ilissus. He is, in brief, a voice of public opinion on all the chief matters which come within the province of the publicist. In order that such a writer should have an influence similar to that of a newspaper, it was enough that copies of his writings should be sufficiently multiplied to leaven the conversation of the market-place and of private society. Every possessor of a copy was a centre from which the ideas would reach the members of his own circle. And there is good evidence that, in the fourth century b.c., the circulation of popular writings throughout the Hellenic world was both wide and rapid. The copying industry, in the Greece of that age, doubtless fell far short of the dimensions to which the labor of cultivated slaves (the literati) afterwards raised it at Rome—where we hear of Augustus, for instance, confiscating no fewer than two thousand copies of a single work—the psuedo-Sibylline books. But it was still amply sufficient to warrant a general comparison, in the sense just defined, between the influence of such a writer as Isocrates, and that of a modern journalist.

We have hitherto spoken only of the written rhetoric, in which the form of a speech was merely a literary fiction, like that adopted—in imitation of Isocrates—by Milton, when he chose to couch his Areopagitica in the form of a speech addressed to the Lords and Commons of England. But in passing, we should note that the actually spoken rhetoric of antiquity—especially of Greece—bore a certain analogy to the more elaborate efforts of journalism. This depends on the fact that ancient usage fully recognised, and generally expected, careful premeditation; while the speaker, conscious of the demand for excellence of form, usually aimed at investing his speech with permanent literary value. Demosthenes and Cicero are both witnesses to this: Cicero, doubtless, piqued himself on a faculty of extemporising at need, but probably trusted little to it on great occasions; while with Demosthenes it was the rule, we are told, never to speak without preparation. Take the oration delivered by Lysias at the Olympian festival, where he is exhorting the assembled Greeks to unite against the common foes of Hellas in Sicily and in Persia. Here the orator is essentially an organ of patriotic opinion, and his highly-wrought address is a finished leading-article, for which the author sought the largest publicity.

In turning from Greece to Rome, we are prepared to find literature holding a different relation towards public opinion. The Greek temperament with its quick play of thought and fancy, had an instinctive craving to make the sympathy of thoughts continually felt in words, and to accompany action with a running comment of speech. The Roman, as we find him during Rome’s earlier career of conquest, was usually content to feel that his action was in conformity with some principle which he had expressed once for all in an institution or a statute. His respect for authority, and his moral earnestness—in a word his political and social gravity—rendered him independent of the solace which the lively Greek derived from a demonstrated community of feeling. Rome, strong in arms, severe, persistent, offering to people after people the choice of submission or subjugation; Rome, the head of the Latin name, the capital of Italy, the queen of the Mediterranean, the empress of a pacified, because disarmed, world; Rome, who never deemed a war done until conquest had been riveted by law which should be the iron bond of peace,—this idea was the true inspiration of the Roman; and, as the literature was matured, it was this which added order to strength, and majesty to order, in the genius of the Roman tongue. It is especially curious to observe the fate which Comedy experienced when it first appeared at Rome, and endeavored to assume something of the political significance which its parent, Greek Comedy, had possessed at Athens. The poet Naevius appeared just after the first Punic War. He was a champion of popular liberties against the domination of the Senate; and, in his plays, he treated some of the Senatorian chiefs with satire of a quality which, to judge from the extant specimens, was exceedingly mild. “Who had so quickly ruined the commonwealth?” was a query put in one of his comedies; and the reply was, “New speakers came forward—foolish young men.” In another piece, he alluded to the applauses bestowed on him as proving that he was a true interpreter of the public mind, and deprecated any great man interfering with him. A very slave in one of his comedies, he added, was better off than a Roman citizen nowadays. Contrast these remarks with the indescribable insults which Aristophanes had boldly heaped on the Athenian demagogues. Mild as Naevius was, however, he was not mild enough for the “foolish young men.” Having ventured to observe that the accession of certain nobles of high office was due to a decree of fate, he was promptly imprisoned; he was afterwards banished; and he died in exile. This seems to have been the first and last attempt of Roman Comedy to serve as an organ of popular opinion. The Roman reverence for authority was outraged by the idea of a public man being presented in a comic light on the boards of a theatre. On the other hand, Roman feeling allowed a public man to be attacked, in speaking or in writing, with almost any degree of personal violence, provided that the purpose was seriously moral. Hence the personal criticism of statesmen, which at Athens had belonged to Comedy, passed at Rome into another kind of composition. It became an element of Satire.

The name of Satire comes, as is well known, from the lanx satura, the platter filled with first-fruits of various sorts, which was an annual thank-offering to Ceres and Bacchus. “Satire” meant a medley, or miscellany, and the first characteristic of Roman satire was that the author wrote in an easy, familiar way about any and every subject that was of interest to himself and his readers. As Juvenal says,—

“Men’s hopes, men’s fear—their fond, their fretful dream— Their joys, their fuss—that medley is my theme.”

Politics, literature, philosophy, society—every topic of public or private concern—belonged to the Satura, so long as the treatment was popular. Among all the forms of Roman literature, Satire stands out with a twofold distinction. First, it is genuinely national. Next, it is the only one which has a continuous development, extending from the vigorous age of the Commonwealth into the second century of the Empire. Satire is pre-eminently the Roman literary organ of public opinion. The tone of the Roman satirist is always that of an ordinary Roman citizen, who is frankly speaking his mind to his fellow-citizens. An easy, confidential manner in literature—as of one friend unbosoming himself to another—seems to have been peculiarly congenial to the ancient Italian taste. We may remember how the poet Ennius introduced into his epic a picture of the intimate converse between himself and the Roman general Servilius Geminus—a picture not unworthy of a special war-correspondent attached to head-quarters. Then Satire profited by the Italian gift for shrewd portraiture of manners. Take, for instance, the picture of a coquette, drawn some twenty centuries ago by Naevius:

“Like one playing at ball in a ring, she tosses about from one to another, and is at home with all. To one she nods, to another she winks; she makes love to one, clings to another.... To one she gives a ring to look at, to another blows a kiss; with one she sings, with another corresponds by signs.”[60]

The man who first established Satire as an outspoken review of Roman life was essentially a slashing journalist. This was Lucilius, who lived in the latter years of the second century b.c. He attacked the high-born statesmen, who, as he put it, “thought that they could blunder with impunity, and keep criticism at a distance by their rank.” On the other hand, he did not spare plebeian offenders. As one of his successors says, “he bit deep into the town of his day, and broke his jawtooth on them.” Literature and society also came under his censures. He lashes the new affectation of Greek manners and speech, the passion for quibbling rhetoric, the extravagance of the gluttons and the avarice of the misers. Even the Roman ladies of the time do not wholly escape. He criticises the variations of their toilettes. “When she is with you, anything is good enough; when visitors are expected, all the resources of the wardrobe are taxed,” The writings of this trenchant publicist formed the great standing example of free speech for later Roman times. Horace eschews politics; indeed, when he wrote, political criticism had become as futile as it was perilous; but he is evidently anxious to impress on the Roman public that he is true to the old tradition of satire by fearlessly lashing folly and vice. Persius, who died at the age of twenty-eight in the reign of Nero, made Roman Satire a voice of public opinion in a brave and a pure sense. Horace had been an accomplished Epicurean, who found his public among easy-going, cultivated men of the world. Persius spoke chiefly to minds of a graver cast: he summoned Roman citizens to possess themselves of a moral and intellectual freedom which no Cæsar could crush, the freedom given by the Stoic philosophy,—that philosophy which had moulded the jurisprudence of the Republic, and was now the refuge of thoughtful minds under the despotism of the Empire. Then we have once more a slashing publicist in Juvenal, who is national and popular in a broader sense than Horace or Persius. His fierce indignation is turned against the alien intruders, the scum of Greece and Asia, who are making Rome a foreign city, and robbing Roman citizens of their bread. He denounces the imported vices which are effacing the old Roman character. He is the last of the Roman satirists, and in much he resembles the first.

It may be noted that each of the three satirists of the Empire—Horace, Persius, Juvenal—gives us a dialogue between himself and an imaginary friend, who remonstrates with him for his rashness in imitating Lucilius, the outspoken satirist of the Republic. Horace, replies, in effect, “Never mind, I’m not afraid—Augustus will stand by me as Scipio and Laelius stood by Lucilius;” but, in fact, Horace never strikes like Lucilius; he keeps us smiling while he probes our faults; “he gains his entrance, and plays about the heart;” his censures even when keen, show cautious tact. Persius replies: “You need not read me if you do not like: but the joke is too good; I must tell some one that Midas has the ears of an ass.” When Juvenal is warned, we catch quite a different tone in the answer. After painting the Rome of his day, he says (I venture to give a version of my own):—

“Nought worse remains: the men of coming times Can but renew our lusts, repeat our crimes. Vice holds the dizzy summit: spread thy sail, Indignant Muse, and drive before the gale! But who shall find, or whence—I hear thee ask— An inspiration level with the task? Whence that frank courage of an elder Rome, When Satire, fearless, sent the arrow home? ‘Whom am I bound,’ she then could cry, ‘to spare? If high-placed guilt forgive not, do I care?’ Paint now the prompter of a Nero’s rage— The torments of a Christian were thy wage,— Pinned to the stake, in blazing pitch to stand, Or, on the hook that dragg’d thee, plough the sand....