nec trucibus fluviis idem sonus; occidit horror aequoris, et terris maria acclinata quiescunt. septima iam rediens Phoebe mihi respicit aegras stare genas; totidem Oetaeae Paphiaeque revisunt lampades et totiens nostros Tithonia questus praeterit et gelido spargit miserata flagello. unde ego sufficiam? non si mihi lumina mille quae sacer alterna tantum statione tenebat Argus et haud umquam vigilabat corpore toto. at nunc heus! aliquis longa sub nocte puellae bracchia nexa tenens ultro te, Somne, repellit: inde veni! nec te totas infundere pennas luminibus compello meis (hoc turba precetur laetior): extremo me tange cacumine virgae (sufficit) aut leviter suspenso poplite transi.
By what crime, O Sleep, most gentle of gods, or by what error, have I, that am young, deserved–woe’s me!–that I alone should lack thy blessing? All cattle and birds and beasts of the wild lie silent; the curved mountain ridges seem as though they slept the sleep of weariness, and wild torrents have hushed their roaring. The waves of the deep have fallen and the seas, reclined on earth’s bosom, take their rest. Yet now Phoebe returning gazes for the seventh time on my sleepless weary eyes. For the seventh time the lamps of Oeta and Paphos (i.e. Hesperus and Venus) revisit me, for the seventh time Tithonus’ bride sweeps over my complaint and all her pity is to touch me with her frosty scourge. How may I find strength to endure? I needs must faint, even had I the thousand eyes which divine Argos kept fixed upon his prey in shifting relays (so only could he wake, nor watched he ever with all his body). But now–woe’s me!–another, his arms locked about his love, spurneth thee from him all the long night. Leave him, O Sleep, for me. I bid thee not sweep upon my eyes with all the force of thy fanning pinions. That is the prayer of happier souls than I. Touch me only with the tip of thy wand–that shall suffice–or lightly pass over my head with hovering feet.
Here Statius far surpasses himself. Had all else that he wrote been merely mediocre, this one short poem would have given him a claim on the grateful memory of posterity. The note it strikes is one that has never been heard before in Latin poetry and is never heard again. We have wavered before as to Statius’ title to the name of true poet; this should turn the balance in his favour. Great he is not for a moment to be called; Lucan, with all his faults, stands high above him; Valerius Flaccus, aided largely by his happier choice of subject, is in some respects his superior; but for finish, dexterity, and fluency, Statius is unique among the post-Augustans. Just as an actor who has acquired a perfect mastery of all the tricks and technique of the stage may sometimes cheat us into believing him to be a great actor, though in reality neither intellect, presence, nor voice qualify him for such high praise, so it is with Statius. His facility and cunning workmanship hold us amazed, and at times the reader is on the verge of yielding up his saner judgement before such charm. But the revulsion of feeling comes inevitably. Statius had not learned the art of concealing his art. The unreality of his work soon makes itself felt, and his skill becomes in time little better than a weariness and a mockery.
CHAPTER X
SILIUS ITALICUS
Titus Catius Silius Italicus[590] is best known to us as the author of the longest and worst of surviving Roman epics. But by a strange irony of fate we have a fuller knowledge of his life and character than is granted us in the case of any other poet of the Silver Age, with the exception of Seneca and Persius. His social position, his personal character, his cultured and artistic tastes, rather than any merit possessed by his verse, have won him a place in the picture-gallery of Pliny the younger.[591] We would gladly sacrifice the whole of the ‘obituary notice’ transmitted to us by the kindly garrulity of Pliny, for a few more glimpses into the life of Juvenal, or even of Valerius Flaccus, but the picture is interesting and even attractive, and awakens feelings of a less unfriendly nature than are usually entertained for the plodding poetaster who had the misfortune to write the seventeen books of _Punica_.
Silius was born in the year 25 or 26 A.D.[592]; of his family and place of birth we know nothing.[593] He first appears in the unpleasing guise of a ‘delator’ in the reign of Nero, in the last year of whose principate he filled the position of consul (68 A.D.).
In the ‘year of the four emperors’ (69 A.D.) he is found as the friend and counsellor of Vitellius;[594] his conduct, we are told, was wise and courteous. He subsequently won renown by his admirable administration of the province of Asia, and then retired from the public gaze to the seclusion of a life of study.[595] The amiability and virtue which marked the leisure of his later years wiped out the dark stain that had besmirched his youth. ‘Men hastened to salute him and to do him honour. When not engaged in writing, he would pass the day in learned converse with the friends and acquaintances–no mere fortune-hunters–who continually thronged the chambers where he would lie for long hours upon his couch. His verses, which he would sometimes submit to the judgement of the critics by giving recitations, show diligence rather than genius. The increasing infirmities of age led him to forsake Rome for Campania; not even the accession of a new princeps induced him to quit his retirement. It is not less creditable to Caesar to have permitted than to Silius to have ventured on such a freedom. He was a connoisseur even to the verge of extravagance. He had several country houses in the same district, and often abandoned those which he already possessed, if some new house chanced to catch his fancy. He had a large library, and a fine collection of portraits and statues, and was an enthusiastic admirer of works of art which he was not fortunate enough to possess. He kept Vergil’s birthday with greater care than his own, especially when he was at Naples, where he would visit the poet’s tomb with all the veneration due to the temple of a god.’ He died[596] in his Neapolitan villa of self-chosen starvation. His health had failed him. He was afflicted by an incurable tumour, and ran to meet death with a fortitude that nothing could shake. ‘His life was happy and prosperous to his last hour; his one sorrow was the death of his younger son; the elder (and better) of his sons, who survives him, has had a distinguished career, and has even reached the consulate.’ From Epictetus[597] we gather, what we might infer from the manner of his death, that he was a Stoic. From Martial,[598] who addresses him in the interested language of flattery as the leading orator of his day, and as the maker of immortal verse, we learn that he was the proud possessor of the Tusculan villa of Cicero, and that he actually owned the tomb of the poet whom he loved so well.
Silius’ life is more interesting than his verse. Like Lucan, he elected to write historical epic, and in his choice of a subject was undoubtedly wiser than his younger contemporary. For instead of selecting a period so dangerously recent as the civil strife in which the republic perished, he went back to the Second Punic War, to a time sufficiently remote to permit of greater freedom of treatment and to enable him to avoid the peril of unduly republican ecstasies. In making this choice he was in all probability influenced by his reverence for Vergil. He, too, would sing of Rome’s rise to greatness, would write a truly national epic on the great theme which Vergil so inimitably foreshadowed in the dying words of the Carthaginian queen, would link the most stirring years of Rome’s history with the past, just as Vergil had linked the epic of Rome’s founder to the greatness of the years that were to come. Ennius had been before him, but he might well aspire to remodel and develop the rude annalistic work of the earlier poet.[599] The brilliant history of Livy, with its vivid battle-scenes and its sonorous speeches, was a quarry that might provide him with the richest material. Unhappily, less wise than Lucan, he made the fatal mistake of adopting the principles set forth by Eumolpus, the dissolute poet in the novel of Petronius.[600]
The intrusion of the mythological method into historical epic is disastrous. It is barely tolerable in the pseudo-historical epic of Tasso. In the military narrative of Silius it is monstrous and insufferable. His reverence for Vergil led him to control, or attempt to control, every action of the war by divine intervention.
Juno reappears in her old role as the implacable enemy of Rome. It is she that kindles Hannibal’s hatred for Rome, causes the outbreak of the war,[601] and, disguised as the lake-god Trasimenus, spurs him on to Rome.[602] It is at her instigation that Anna Perenna kindles him to fresh effort by the news that Fabius Cunctator is no longer in command against him,[603] that Somnus moderates his designs after Cannae.[604] It is Juno that conceals the Carthaginian forces in a cloud at Cannae,[605] and that rescues Hannibal from the fury of Scipio at Zama.[606] Against Juno is arrayed Venus, the protector of the sons of Aeneas. She persuades her husband Vulcan to dry up the Trebia, whose flood threatens the Romans with yet greater disaster than they have already suffered,[607] she unnerves and demoralizes the Punic army by the luxury of Capua.[608] Minerva and Mars play minor parts, the former favouring Carthage, the latter Rome.[609] Nothing is gained by this dreary and superannuated mechanism, while the poem is yet further hampered by the other encumbrances of epic commonplace.
The _Thebais_ of Statius is full of episodes that only find a place because Vergil had borrowed similar episodes from Homer. But the _Thebais_ is a professedly mythological epic, and Statius commands a light touch and brilliant colours. The reader merely groans when the heavy-handed Silius introduces his wondrously engraven shield,[610] his funeral games,[611] his Amazon,[612] his dismal catalogues,[613] his Nekuia.[614] In the latter episode, he even introduces the Vergilian Sibyl of Cumae; it is a redeeming feature that Scipio does not make a ‘personally conducted tour’ through the nether world; such a direct challenge to the Sixth Aeneid was perhaps impossible for so true a lover of Vergil as Silius. The Homeric method of necromancy is wisely preferred, and the Sibyl reveals the past and future of Rome as the spirits pass before them. But there are no illuminating flashes of imagination; the best feature of the episode is an uninspired and frigid appropriateness. Nothing serves better than the failure of Silius to show at once the daring and the genius of Vergil, when he ransacked the wealth of Homer and
from a greater Greek
Borrowed as beautifully as the moon The fire o’ the sun.
Apart from these unintelligent plagiarisms and vexatious absurdities, the actual form and composition of the work show some skill. The poet passes from scene to scene, from battle to battle, with ease and assurance in the earlier books. It is only with the widening of the area of conflict that the work loses its connexion. The earlier and less important exploits of the elder Scipios were wisely dismissed in a few words.[615] The poet avoided the mistake of undue scrupulosity in respect of chronology and makes no attempt to pose as a scientific military historian. But it is a serious defect that he should fail to show the significance of the successful ‘peninsular campaign’ of the younger Scipio. Here, as in the descriptions of the siege of Syracuse, the reader is haunted by the feeling that these great events are regarded as merely episodic. Even the thrilling march of Hasdrubal, ending in the dramatic catastrophe of the Metaurus, is hardly given its full weight. There is more true historical and dramatic appreciation in Horace’s
Karthagini iam non ego nuntios
mittam superbos: occidit, occidit spes omnis et fortuna nostri
nominis Hasdrubale interempto
than in all the ill-proportioned verbiage of Silius. The task of setting forth the course of a conflict that flamed all over the Western Mediterranean world was not easy, and Silius’ failure was proportionately great. Nay–if it be not merely the hallucination of a weary reader–he seems to have tired of his task. The first twelve books take us no further than Hannibal’s appearance before the walls of Rome, and the war is summarily brought to a close in the last five books, although these, it should be noted, are by no means free from irrelevant matter. The last three books above all are jejune and perfunctory, and it has been suggested that they lack the final revision that the rest of the work had received. Be this as it may, the result of the inadequate treatment of the close of the war is that the reader lays down the poem with no feeling of the greatness of Rome’s triumph.
Yet even with these faults of composition, a genuine poet might have wrought a great work from the rough ore of history. The scene is thronged with figures as remarkable and inspiring as history affords. There is the fierce irresistible Hannibal, the sagacious Fabius, the elder Scipios, tragic victims of disaster, the younger Scipio, glorious with the light of victory as the clouds of defeat are rolled away, Hasdrubal hurled to ruin at the supreme crisis of the war, Marcellus the victorious, beleaguered[616] and beleaguerer, the ill-starred Paulus, the Senate of Rome that thanked the fugitive Varro because he had not despaired of the republic,[617] and above all the gigantic figure of Rome herself, unshaken, indomitable, triumphant. These are no dry bones that the breath of the poet alone should make them live. They breathe immortal in the prose of Livy, in the verse of Silius they are vain ‘shadows of men foredone’. The Hannibal of Silius is not the dazzling villain of Livy, the incarnation of military daring and ‘Punic faith’. Mistaken patriotism does not lead Silius to blacken the character of Rome’s great antagonist; he strives to do him justice; he is as true a patriot, as chivalrous[618] a warrior, as any of the Roman leaders. But he does not live; he is merely the stock warrior of epic, and his exploits fail to compel belief.
Fabius, the least romantic, though not the least interesting figure in the war, stands forth more clearly. The prosaic Silius is naturally most successful with his most prosaic hero. The younger Scipio is the embodiment of _pietas_, an historical Aeneas, without his prototype’s most distressing weaknesses, but with all his dullness, and lacking the halo of legend and the splendour of the founder of the race to glorify him. Paulus has the merit of true courage, and his consciousness of his colleague’s folly invests him with a certain pathos. He makes the best death of any Silian warrior, and deserves the eulogy passed on him by Hannibal. The rest are lay-figures, with even less individuality and life. Silius failed to depict character. He fails, too, to show any true sense of the political greatness of Rome. The genius of Rome and the genius of Carthage are never confronted or contrasted; the greatness of Rome in defeat, the scenes of Rome agonizing in the grip of unexpected disaster, are never brought home to the reader with the least degree of vividness. The great battles are described at tedious length[619] and rendered ridiculous by the lavish introduction of Homeric single combats. If Silius is rarely bombastic or rendered absurd by the grossness of his exaggeration, he yet fails to see what Lucan saw plainly–that for the author of a military historical epic, it is the issues of the war, big with the fate of generations to come, the temper of the combatants, the character of the chief actors, that are the really interesting elements. Almost alone of Silver Latin poets he shows no real gifts of rhetoric and epigram, no virtuosity of diction, no brilliance of description. We lack the declamation of Lucan, the apostrophes on the issues of the war, the vivid character-sketches of the generals, the political enthusiasm, the thunder of the oratory of general and statesman. The battle-speeches of Livy, whose glow and vigour half atone for their theatricality, have been made use of by Silius, but find only a feeble echo in his lifeless verse. Nothing stands out sharply defined; the epic lacks impetus and has no salient points; outlines are blurred in an unpoetic haze. The history of Tacitus has been described as history ‘seen by lightning flashes’. Such should be the history of historical epic. In its stead Silius presents us with a confused welter of archaistic battle, learned allusion, and epic commonplace.
‘Aequalis liber est, Cretice, qui malus est,’ cries Martial[620] to a friend. The epigram would apply to the __Punica_. There is scarcely a passage in the whole work that reveals genuine poetic imagination. Silius is free from many of the faults of his contemporaries, the faults that spring from aspirations towards originality. He is content to be an imitator. In his style, as in his composition, Vergil is an obsession. But the echoes are muffled or unmusical. Gifted with ease and fluency and–for his age–comparative lucidity of diction, Silius has no true ear for music, nor true eye for beauty. His verse moves naturally but heavily. He is the most spondaic poet[621] of his age, and the spondaic rhythm is not alleviated by artistic variety of pause or judicious use of elision. Lucan is heavy, but he hits hard and is weighty in the best sense. Silius rolls on lumbering and unperturbed, never rising or falling. He has all the faults of Ovid, and, in spite of his laboured imitation, none of the merits of Vergil. Nothing can kindle him. The most heroic and the most tragic of all the stories of the struggle for the empire of the western world is that of Regulus, the famous captive of Carthage in the first Punic War.[622] The episode is skilfully and naturally introduced. The story is told by an aged veteran of the first Punic War to a descendant of Regulus, who has fled wounded from the rout of Trasimene. Silius succeeds in making one of the noblest stories in history lifeless and dull. The narration opens with the description of a melodramatic struggle between Regulus and a monstrous serpent in Africa, scarcely an harmonious prelude for the simple and solemn climax of the hero’s life, his return to his home to fix ‘the Senate’s wavering will’, his departure unmoved to Carthaginian captivity, with the certainty of death and torture before him. Silius treats this tragic episode simply and severely; there is nothing to offend the taste, but there is equally nothing to move the heart; the description is merely dull; it lacks the fire of life and the finer imagination. Here, again, we turn for relief to Horace with his brief but incomparable
atqui sciebat quae sibi barbarus
tortor pararet, non aliter tamen
dimovit obstantes propinquos
et populum reditus morantem
quam si clientum longa negotia
diiudicata lite relinqueret,
tendens Venefranos in agros
aut Lacedaemonium Tarentum (iii. 5. 49).
Take the corresponding passage in Silius. Regulus concludes his speech to the Senate as follows (vi. 485):
exposcunt Libyes nobisque dedere haec referenda, pari libeat si pendere bellum foedere et ex aequo geminas conscribere leges. sed mihi sit Stygios ante intravisse penates talia quam videam ferientes pacta Latinos, haec fatus Tyriae sese iam reddidit irae, nec monitus spernente graves fidosque senatu Poenorum dimissa cohors. quae maesta repulsa ac minitans capto patrias properabat ad oras. prosequitur volgus, patres, ac planctibus ingens personat et luctu campus. revocare libebat interdum et iusto raptum retinere dolore.
‘The Libyans ask whether you will cease from war on equal terms and draw up a treaty wherein each side keeps its own. They bid me bring back your reply. But may I sooner enter the gates of hell than see the Latins make such a compact!’ He spake, and yielded himself back once more to the mercies of the Tyrian’s hate: the Senate spurned not his words of weight, his loyal warning. The Punic embassy was dismissed. Cast down at their rebuff, and threatening their captive, they hastened homeward to their native shores. The people, the fathers, follow them: the whole vast plain resounds with weeping and beating of breasts, and ever and again they strove to recall the hero and with just grief to retain him as he was snatched away from them.
Criticism is needless. One passage is in the grand style, the other is not; one is mere verse-making, the other the purest poetry. Silius has nothing of _curiosa felicitas_ or even of the more common gift of vague sensuous charm. Even on such hackneyed themes as the choice of Hercules, with Scipio playing the part of Hercules, he fails to rise to the conventional prettiness of which even a Calpurnius Siculus would have been capable. Virtue and pleasure are rendered equally unattractive, and we pity Scipio for having to make the choice. With the other poets of the age it is easy to select passages to illustrate their characteristic merits and defects. But from the dull monotony of Silius it is hard to choose. He does not read well even in selections. Apart from the general absurdity of the conception of the poem he is rarely grotesque. His taste is chastened by his love of Vergil, and the absence of genuine rhetorical power saves him from dangerous exuberance. The tricks of rhetoric are there, but the edge of his wit is dull, and he has no speed nor energy. For similar reasons he never attains sublimity. There are faint traces of the _Romana gravitas_ in lines such as
iamque tibi veniet tempus quo maxima rerum nobilior sit Roma mails (iii. 584).
And the time shall come when Rome, the greatest thing in all the world, shall be yet more ennobled by her woes.
The idea that the trials of Rome shall be as a ‘refiner’s fire’ has a certain grandeur, but the expression of the idea is commonplace. The same is true of the elaboration of the Vergilian _parcere subiectis_, where the poet describes Marcellus’ clemency to the vanquished Syracusans, and makes brief allusion to the unhappy death of Archimedes (xiv. 673):
sic parcere victis
pro praeda fuit et sese contenta nec ullo sanguine pollutis plausit Victoria pennis. tu quoque ductoris lacrimas, memorande, tulisti, defensor patriae, meditantem in pulvere formas nec turbatum animi tanta feriente ruina.
So mercy toward the conquered took the place of rapine, and Victory was content with herself and clapped her wings unstained by any blood. Thou, too, immortal sage, defender of thy country, didst win the meed of the conqueror’s tears, thou whom ruin smote down, all unmoved, as thou broodedst o’er figures traced in the dust.
To find Silius at his best–not a very exalted best–we must turn to the passage where he depicts the feelings of Hannibal on finding the body of Paulus on the field of Cannae (x. 513):
quae postquam aspexit, geminatus gaudia ductor Sidonius ‘Fuge, Varro,’ inquit ‘fuge, Varro, superstes, dum iaceat Paulus. patribus Fabioque sedenti et populo consul totas edissere Cannas. concedam hanc iterum, si lucis tanta cupido est, concedam tibi, Varro, fugam. at, cui fortia et hoste me digna haud parvo caluerunt corda vigore, funere supremo et tumuli decoretur honore. quantus, Paule, iaces! qui tot mihi milibus unus maior laetitiae causa est. cum fata vocabunt, tale precor nobis salva Karthagine letum.’ * * * * *
‘i decus Ausoniae, quo fas est ire superbas (572) virtute et factis animas. tibi gloria leto iam parta insigni. nostros Fortuna labores versat adhuc casusque iubet nescire futuros.’ haec Libys, atque repens crepitantibus undique flammis aetherias anima exultans evasit in auras.
When this he saw, the Sidonian chief was filled with double joy and cried, ‘Fly, Varro, fly and survive defeat; enough that Paulus lieth low! Go, consul, tell all the tale of Cannae to the fathers, to laggard Fabius, to the people. If so thou long’st to live, I will grant thee, Varro, to flee once more as thou fleest to-day. But let him, whose heart was bold and worthy to be my foe, and all aflame with mighty valour, be honoured with the last rites of burial and all the honour of the tomb. How great, Paulus, art thou in the death! Thy fall alone gives greater cause for joy than the fall of so many thousands. Such, when the fates shall summon me, such I pray be my fate, so Carthage stand unshaken.’ … ‘Go, Ausonia’s glory, where the souls of those whom valour and noble deeds make proud may go. _Thou_ hast won great glory by thy death. For _us_, Fortune still tosses us to and fro in weltering labour and forbids us to see what chance the future hath in store.’ So spake the Libyan, and straightway from the crackling flame the exulting spirit soared skyward through the air.
The picture of the soul of Paulus soaring heavenward from the funeral pyre, exultant at the honour paid him by his great foe, is the nearest approach to pure poetic imagination in the whole weary length of the _Punica_.[623] But the pedestrian muse of Silius is more at home in the ingenious description of the manoeuvres and counter-manoeuvres of Fabius and Hannibal in the seventh book; the similes with which the passage closes are hackneyed, but their application is both new and clever:
(vii. 91)
iam Fabius tacito procedens agmine et arte bellandi lento similis, praecluserat omnes fortunaeque hostique vias. discedere signis haud licitum summumquc decus, quo tollis ad astra imperil, Romane, caput, parere docebat * * * * *
(123)
cassarum sedet irarum spectator et alti celsus colle iugi domat exultantia corda infractasque minas dilato Marte fatigat sollers cunctandi Fabius, ceu nocte sub atra munitis pastor stabulis per ovilia clausum impavidus somni servat pecus: effera saevit atque impasta truces ululatus turba luporum exercet morsuque quatit restantia claustra. inritus incepti movet inde atque Apula tardo arva Libys passu legit ac nunc valle residit conditus occulta, si praecipitare sequentem atque inopinata detur circumdare fraude; nunc nocturna parat caecae celantibus umbris furta viae retroque abitum fictosque timores adsimulat, tum castra citus deserta relicta ostentat praeda atque invitat prodigus hostem: qualis Maeonia passim Maeandrus in ora, cum sibi gurgitibus flexis revolutus oberrat. nulla vacant incepta dolis: simul omnia versat miscetque exacuens varia ad conamina mentem, sicut aquae splendor radiatus lampade solis dissultat per tecta vaga sub imagine vibrans luminis et tremula laquearia verberat umbra.
Now Fabius advanced, leading his host in silence and–such was his cunning–like to a laggard in war; so closed he all the paths whereby fortune or the foe might fall on him. No soldier might quit the standards, and he taught that the height of glory, even that glory, Roman, that raises thine imperial head to the stars, was obedience…. Fabius sits high on the mountain slopes watching the foeman’s rage and tames his impetuous ardour, humbles his threats, and, with skilful delay, postpones the day of battle and wears out his patience: as when through the darkness of the night a shepherd, fearless and sleepless in his well-guarded byre, keeps his flock penned within the fold: without, the wolf-pack, fierce and famished, howls fiercely, and with its teeth shakes the gates that bar its entrance. Baffled in his enterprise, the Libyan departs thence and slowly marches across the Apulian fields and pitches his camp deep in a hidden vale, if perchance he may hurl the Roman to ruin as he follows in his track and surround him by hidden guile. Now he prepares a midnight ambush in some dark pass beneath the shelter of the gloom, and falsely feigns retreat and fear; then, swiftly leaving his camp and booty, he displays them to the foe, and lavishly invites a raid. Even as on Maeonian shores Maeander with winding channel turns upon himself and wanders far and wide, now here, now there. Naught he attempts, but has some guile in it. He weighs every scheme, sharpens his mind for divers exploits, and blends contrivance with contrivance, even as the gleam of water lit by the sun’s torch dances through a house quivering, and the reflected beam goes wandering and lashes the roof with tremulous reflection.
There is in this passage nothing approaching real excellence, but its dexterity may reasonably command some respect. It is dexterity of which Silius has little to show. He is well-read in history and its bastard sister mythology. At his best he can string together his incidents with some skill, and he makes use of his learning in the accepted fashion of his day.[624] The poem is deluged with proper names and learned aetiology, though he has no conception of that magical use of proper names and legendary allusions which is the secret of the masters of literary epic.[625]
But the absence of any true poetic genius makes him the most tedious of Latin authors, and his unenviable reputation is well deserved. For the poetry of the struggle with Carthage for the
plumed troops and the big wars
That make ambition virtue,
for ‘all quality, pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war’, we must go to the inspired prose of Livy.
And yet it is well that the _Punica_ should have been preserved. It is well to know that as France has its _Henriade_ and England its _Madoc_, so Rome had its _Punica_. It is our one direct glimpse into the work of that cultured society, devastated by the ‘scribendi caccethes’, as Juvenal puts it, or, from the point of view of the facile Pliny, adorned by the number of its poets.[626] The _Punica_ have won an immortality far other than that prophesied for them by Martial,[627] but they show us the work of a cultured Roman gentleman of his day, who, if he had small capacity, had a high enthusiasm for letters, who had diligence if he had not genius, and was possessed by a love for the supreme poet in whose steps he followed, a passion so sincere that it may win from his scanty readers at least a partial forgiveness for the inadequacy of his imitation and for the suffering inflicted on all those who have essayed the dreary adventure of reading the seventeen books that bear his name.
CHAPTER XI
MARTIAL
Marcus Valerius Martialis, like Quintilian, Seneca, and Lucan, was a Spaniard by birth, and, unlike those writers, never became thoroughly reconciled to life at Rome. He was born at Bilbilis,[628] a small town of Hispania Tarraconensis. The exact year of his birth is uncertain; but as the tenth book of his epigrams, written between 95 and 98 A. D., contains a reference (24) to his fifty-seventh birthday, he must have been born between 38 and 41 A. D. His birthday was the 1st of March, a fact to which he owes his name Martialis.[629] Of the position of his parents, Valerius Fronto and Flaccilla,[630] we have no evidence. That they were not wealthy is clear from the circumstances of their son. But they were able to give him a regular literary education,[631] although, unlike his fellow-countrymen whom we have mentioned above, he was educated in his native province. But the life of a provincial did not satisfy him. Conscious, perhaps, of his literary gifts, he went, in 64 A.D.,[632] like so many a young provincial, to make his fortune at Rome. There he attached himself as client to the powerful Spanish family of the Senecas, and found a friendly reception also in the house of Calpurnius Piso.[633] But fortune was against him; as he was congratulating himself on his good luck in starting life at Rome under such favourable auspices, the Pisonian conspiracy (65 A.D.) failed, and his patrons fell before the wrath of Nero.[634] His career must be commenced anew. Of his life from this point to the reign of Domitian we know little. But this much is certain, that he endured all the indignities and hardships of a client’s life,[635] and that he chose this degrading career in preference to the active career of the Roman bar. He had no taste for oratory, and rejected the advice of his friend Gaius[636] and his distinguished compatriot Quintilian to seek a livelihood as an advocate or as a politician. ‘That is not life!’ he replies to Quintilian:
vivere quod propero pauper nec inutilis annis, da veniam: properat vivere nemo satis. differat hoc patrios optat qui vincere census atriaque immodicis artat imaginibus (ii. 90. 3).
His ideals and ambitions were low, and his choice had, as we shall see, a degrading effect upon his poetry. He chose rather to live on such modest fortune as he may have possessed, on the client’s dole, and such gifts as his complimentary epigrams may have won from his patrons. These gifts must have been in many cases of a trifling description,[637] but they may occasionally have been on a more generous scale. At any rate, by the year 94 A. D., we find him the possessor of a little farm at Nomentum,[638] and a house on the Quirinal.[639] Although he must presumably have written a considerable quantity of verse in his earlier years, it is not till 80 A. D. that he makes an appearance on the stage of literature. In that year the Flavian amphitheatre was consecrated by the Emperor Titus, and Martial celebrated the fact by the publication of his first book, the _Spectaculorum Liber_. It is of small literary value, but it was his first step on the ladder of fame. Titus conferred on him the _ius trium liberorum_, although he seems not to have entered on the enjoyment of this privilege till the reign of Domitian.[640] He thus first came in touch with the imperial circle. From this time forward we get a continual stream of verse in fulsome praise of Domitian and his freedman. But his flattery met with small reward. There are many poems belauding the princeps, but few that thank him. The most that he acquired by his flattery was the honorary military tribunate and his elevation to the equestrian order.[641] Of material profit he got little,[642] save such as his improved social position may have conferred on him indirectly.
Four years after the publication of the _Spectaculorum Liber_ (i.e. later in 84 and 85)[643] he published two books, the thirteenth and fourteenth, composed of neat but trifling poems on the presents (Xenia and Apophoreta) which it was customary to give at the feast of the Saturnalia. From this point his output was continuous and steady, as the following table will show:[644]
I, II. 85 or early in 86.
III. 87 or early in 88.
IV. December (Saturnalia) 88.
V. Autumn, 89.
VI. Summer or Autumn, 90.
VII. December, 92.
VIII. 93.
IX. Summer, 94.
X. 1. December, 95.
X. 2. 98.
XI. 97.
XII. Late in 101.
His life during this period was uneventful. He lived expensively and continually complains of lack of funds and of the miseries of a client’s life. Once only (about 88) the discomfort of his existence seems to have induced him to abandon Rome. He took up his residence at Forum Cornelii, the modern Imola, but soon returned to Rome.[645] It was not till 98 that he decided to leave the capital for good and to return to his Spanish home. A new princeps was on the throne. Martial had associated his work too closely with Domitian and his court to feel at his ease with Nerva. He sent the new emperor a selection from his tenth and eleventh books, which we may, perhaps, conjecture to have been expurgated. He denounced the dead Domitian in a brilliant epigram which may have formed part of that selection, but which has only been preserved to us by the scholiast on Juvenal (iv. 38):
Flavia gens, quantum tibi tertius abstulit heres! paene fuit tanti non habuisse duos.
How much thy third has wronged thee, Flavian race! ‘Twere better ne’er to have bred the other brace. ANON.
But he felt that times were changed and that there was no place now for his peculiar talent for flattery (x. 72. 8):
non est hic dominus sed imperator,
sed iustissimus omnium senator,
per quem de Stygia domo reducta est siccis rustica Veritas capillis.
hoc sub principe, si sapis, caveto verbis, Roma, prioribus loquaris.
an emperor
Is ours, no master as of yore,
Himself the Senate’s very crown
Of justice, who has called from down In her deep Stygian duress
The hoyden Truth, with tangled tress. Be wise, Rome, see you shape anew
Your tongue; your prince would have it true. A. E. STREET.
Let flattery fly to Parthia. Rome is no place for her (ib. 4). Martial had made his name: he was read far and wide throughout the Empire.[646] He could afford to retire from the city that had given him much fame and much pleasure, but had balanced its gifts by a thousand vexations and indignities. Pliny assisted him with journey-money, and after a thirty-four years’ sojourn in Italy he returned to Bilbilis to live a life of _dolce far niente_. The kindness of a wealthy friend, a Spanish lady named Marcella,[647] gave him an estate on which he lived in comfort, if not in affluence. He published but one book in Spain, the twelfth, written, he says in the preface, in a very few days. He lived in peace and happiness, though at times he sighed for the welcome of the public for whom he had catered so long,[648] and chafed under the lack of sympathy and culture among his Spanish neighbours.[649] He died in 104. ‘Martial is dead,’ says Pliny, ‘and I am grieved to hear it. He was a man of genius, with a shrewd and vigorous wit. His verses are full of point and sting, and as frank as they are witty. I provided him with money for his journey when he left Rome; I owed it to my friendship for him, and to the verses which he wrote in my honour’–then follows Mart. x. 20–‘Was I not right to speed him on his way, and am I not justified in mourning his death, seeing that he wrote thus concerning me? He gave me what he could, he would have given more had he been able. And yet what greater gift can one man give another than by handing down his name and fame to all eternity. I hear you say that Martial’s verses will not live to all eternity? You may be right; at any rate, he hoped for their immortality when he wrote them’ (Plin. _Ep._ iii. 21).
Of Martial’s character we shall have occasion to speak later. There is nothing in the slight, but generous, tribute of Pliny that has to be unsaid.
Of the circles in which he moved his epigrams give us a brilliant picture; of his exact relations with the persons whom he addresses it is hard to speak with certainty. Many distinguished figures of the day appear as the objects of his flattery. There are Spaniards, Quintilian, Lucinianus Maternus and Canius Rufus, all distinguished men of letters, the poets Silius Italicus, Stertinius Avitus, Arruntius Stella, the younger Pliny, the orator Aquilius Regulus, Lentulus Sura, the friend of Trajan, the rich knights, Atedius Melior, and Claudius Etruscus, the soldier Norbanus, and many others. With Juvenal also he seems to have enjoyed a certain intimacy. Statius he never mentions, although he must have moved in the same circles.[650] His intimates–as might be expected–are for the most part, as far as we can guess, of lower rank. There are the centurions Varus and Pudens, Terentius Priscus his compatriot, Decianus the Stoic from the Spanish town of Emerita, the self-sacrificing Quintus Ovidius, Martial’s neighbour at Nomentum and a fellow-client of Seneca, and, above all, Julius Martialis. His enemies and envious rivals are attacked and bespattered with filth in many an epigram, but Martial, true to his promise in the preface to his first book, conceals their true names from us.
Of his _vie intime_ he tells us little. As far as we may judge, he was unmarried. It is true that several of his epigrams purport to be addressed to his wife. But two facts show clearly that this lady is wholly imaginary. Even Martial could not have spoken of his wife in such disgusting language as, for instance, he uses in xi. 104, while in another poem (ii. 92) he clearly expresses his intention not to marry:
natorum mihi ius trium roganti
Musarum pretium dedit mearum
solus qui poterat. valebis, uxor, non debet domini perire munus.
The honorary _ius trium liberorum_ had given him, he says, all that marriage could have brought him. He has no intention of making the emperor’s generosity superfluous by taking a wife. He preferred the untrammelled life of a bachelor. So only could he enjoy the pleasures which for him meant ‘life ‘. He is neither an impressive nor a very interesting figure. He has many qualities that repel, even if we do not take him too seriously; and though he may have been a pleasant and in many respects most amiable companion, he has few characteristics that arrest our attention or compel our respect. More will be said of his virtues and his vices in the pages that follow. It is the artist rather than the man that wakens our interest.
In Martial we have a poet who devoted himself to the one class of poetry which, apart from satire, the conditions of the Silver Age were qualified to produce in any real excellence–the epigram. In a period when rhetorical smartness and point were the predominant features of literature, the epigram was almost certain to flourish. But Roman poets in general, and Martial in particular, gave a character to the epigram which has clung to it ever since, and has actually changed the significance of the word itself.
In the best days of the Greek epigram the prime consideration was not that a poem should be pointed, but that it should be what is summed up in the untranslatable French epithet _lapidaire_; that is to say, it should possess the conciseness, finish, and relevance required for an inscription on a monument. Its range was wide; it might express the lover’s passion, the mourner’s grief, the artist’s skill, the cynic’s laughter, the satirist’s scorn. It was all poetry in miniature. Point is not wanting, but its chief characteristics are delicacy and charm. ‘No good epigram sacrifices its finer poetical substance to the desire of making a point, and none of the best depend on having a point at all.'[651] Transplanted to the soil of Italy the epigram changes. The less poetic Roman, with his coarse tastes, his brutality, his tendency to satire, his appreciation of the incisive, wrought it to his own use. In his hands it loses most of its sensuous and lyrical elements and makes up for the loss by the cultivation of point. Above all, it becomes the instrument of satire, stinging like a wasp where the satirist pure and simple uses the deadlier weapons of the bludgeon and the rapier.
The epigram must have been exceedingly plentiful from the very dawn of the movement which was to make Rome a city of _belles-lettres_. It is the plaything of the dilettante _litterateur_, so plentiful under the empire.[652] Apart from the work of Martial, curiously few epigrams have come down to us; nevertheless, in the vast majority of the very limited number we possess the same Roman characteristics may be traced. In the non-lyrical epigrams of Catullus, in the shorter poems of the _Appendix Vergiliana_, there is the same vigour, the same coarse humour, the same pungency that find their best expression in Martial. Even in the epigrams attributed to Seneca in the _Anthologia Latina_ [653] something of this may be observed, though for the most part they lack the personal note and leave the impression of mere juggling with words. It is in this last respect, the attention to point, that they show most affinity with Martial. Only the epigrams in the same collection attributed to Petronius[654] seem to preserve something of the Greek spirit of beauty untainted by the hard, unlovely, incisive spirit of Rome.
Martial was destined to fix the type of the epigram for the future. For pure poetry he had small gifts. He was endowed with a warm heart, a real love for simplicity of life and for the beauties of nature. But he had no lyrical enthusiasm, and was incapable of genuine passion. He entered heartwhole on all his amatory adventures, and left them with indifference. Even the cynical profligacy of Ovid shows more capacity for true love. At their best Martial’s erotic epigrams attain to a certain shallow prettiness,[655] for the most part they do not rise above the pornographic. And even though he shows a real capacity for friendship, he also reveals an infinite capacity for cringing or impudent vulgarity in his relations with those who were merely patrons or acquaintances. His needy circumstances led him, as we shall see, to continual expressions of a peevish mendicancy, while the artificiality and pettiness of the life in which he moved induced an excessive triviality and narrowness of outlook.
He makes no great struggle after originality. The slightness of his themes and of his _genre_ relieved him of that necessity. Some of his prettiest poems are mere variations on some of the most famous lyrics of Catullus.[656] He pilfers whole lines from Ovid.[657] Phrase after phrase suggests something that has gone before. But his plagiarism is effected with such perfect frankness and such perfect art, that it might well be pardoned, even if Martial had greater claims to be taken seriously. As it is, his freedom in borrowing need scarcely be taken into account in the consideration of our verdict. At the worst his crime is no more than petty larceny. With all his faults, he has gifts such as few poets have possessed, a perfect facility and a perfect finish. Alone of poets of the period he rarely gives the impression of labouring a point. Compared with Martial, Seneca and Lucan, Statius and Juvenal are, at their worst, stylistic acrobats. But Martial, however silly or offensive, however complicated or prosaic his theme, handles his material with supreme ease. His points may often not be worth making; they could not be better made. Moreover, he has a perfect ear; his music may be trivial, but within its narrow limits it is faultless.[658] He knows what is required of him and he knows his own powers. He knows that his range is limited, that his sphere is comparatively humble, but he is proud to excel in it. He has the artist’s self-respect without his vanity.
His themes are manifold. He might have said, with even greater truth than Juvenal, ‘quidquid agunt homines, nostri est farrago libelli.’ He does not go beneath the surface, but almost every aspect of the kaleidoscopic world of Rome receives his attention at one time or another. His attitude is, on the whole, satirical, though his satire is not inspired by deep or sincere indignation. He is too easy in his morals and too good-humoured by temperament. He is often insulting, but there is scarcely a line that breathes fierce resentment, while his almost unparalleled obscenity precludes the intrusion of any genuine earnestness of moral scorn in a very large number of his satiric epigrams. On these points he shall speak for himself; he makes no exacting claims.
‘I hope,’ he says in the preface to his first book, ‘that I have exercised such restraint in my writings that no one who is possessed of the least self-respect may have cause to complain of them. My jests are never outrageous, even when directed against persons of the meanest consideration. My practice in this respect is very different from that of early writers, who abused persons without veiling their invective under a pseudonym. Nay more, their victims were men of the highest renown. My _jeux d’esprit_ have no _arrieres-pensees_, and I hope that no one will put an evil interpretation on them, nor rewrite my epigrams by infusing his own malignance into his reading of them. It is a scandalous injustice to exercise such ingenuity on what another has written. I would offer some excuse for the freedom and frankness of my language–which is, after all, the language of epigram–if I were setting any new precedent. But all epigrammatists, Catullus, Marsus, Pedo, Gaetulicus, have availed themselves of this licence of speech. But if any one wishes to acquire notoriety by prudish severity, and refuses to permit me to write after the good Roman fashion in so much as a single page of my work, he may stop short at the preface, or even at the title. Epigrams are written for such persons as derive pleasure from the games at the Feast of Flowers. Cato should not enter my theatre, but if he does enter it, let him be content to look on at the sport which I provide. I think I shall be justified in closing my preface with an epigram
TO CATO
Once more the merry feast of Flora’s come, With wanton jest to split the sides of Rome; Yet come you, prince of prudes, to view the show. Why come you? merely to be shocked and go?’
He reasserts the kindliness of his heart and the excellence of his intentions elsewhere:
hunc servare modum nostri novere libelli; parcere personis, dicere de vitiis (x. 33).
For in my verses ’tis my constant care To lash the vices, but the persons spare. HAY.
Malignant critics _had_ exercised their ingenuity in the manner which he deprecated.[659] Worse still, libellous verse had been falsely circulated as his:
quid prodest, cupiant cum quidam nostra videri si qua Lycambeo sanguine tela madent, vipereumque vomant nostro sub nomine virus qui Phoebi radios ferre diemque negant? (vii. 12. 5).
But what does’t avail,
If in bloodfetching lines others do rail, And vomit viperous poison in my name,
Such as the sun themselves to own do shame? ANON., 1695.
In this respect his defence of himself is just. When he writes in a vein of invective his victim is never mentioned by name. And we cannot assert in any given case that his pseudonyms mask a real person. He may do no more than satirize a vice embodied and typified in an imaginary personality.
He is equally concerned to defend himself against the obvious charges of prurience and immorality:
innocuos censura potest permittere lusus: lasciva eat nobis pagina, vita proba[660] (i. 4. 7).
Let not these harmless sports your censure taste! My lines are wanton, but my life is chaste. ANON., seventeenth century.
This is no real defence, and even though we need not take Martial at his word, when he accuses himself of the foulest vices, there is not the slightest reason to suppose that chastity was one of his virtues. In Juvenal’s case we have reason to believe that, whatever his weaknesses, he was a man of genuinely high ideals. Martial at his best shows himself a man capable of fine feeling, but he gives no evidence of moral earnestness or strength of character. On the other hand, to give him his due, we must remember the standard of his age. Although he is lavish with the vilest obscenities, and has no scruples about accusing acquaintances of every variety of unnatural vice, it must be pointed out that such accusations were regarded at Rome as mere matter for laughter. The traditions of the old _Fescennina locutio_ survived, and with the decay of private morality its obscenity increased. Caesar’s veterans could sing ribald verses unrebuked at their general’s triumph, verses unquotably obscene and casting the foulest aspersions on the character of one whom they worshipped almost as a god. Caesar could invite Catullus to dine in spite of the fact that such accusations formed the matter of his lampoons. Catullus could insert similar charges against the bridegroom for whom he was writing an _epithalamium_. The writing of Priapeia was regarded as a reputable diversion. Martial’s defence of his obscenities is therefore in all probability sincere, and may have approved itself to many reputable persons of his day. It was a defence that had already been made in very similar language by Ovid and Catullus,[661] and Martial was not the last to make it. But the fact that Martial felt it necessary to defend himself shows that a body of public opinion–even if not large or representative–did exist which refused to condone this fashionable lubricity. Extenuating circumstances may be urged in Martial’s defence, but even to have conformed to the standard of his day is sufficient condemnation; and it is hard to resist the suspicion that he fell below it. His obscenities, though couched in the most easy and pointed language, have rarely even the grace–if grace it be–of wit; they are puerile in conception and infinitely disgusting.
It is pleasant to turn to the better side of Martial’s character. No writer has ever given more charming expression to his affection for his friends. It is for Decianus and Julius Martialis that he keeps the warmest place in his heart. In poems like the following there is no doubting the sincerity of his feeling or questioning the perfection of its expression:
si quis erit raros inter numerandus amicos, quales prisca fides famaque novit anus, si quis Cecropiae madidus Latiaeque Minervae artibus et vera simplicitate bonus,
si quis erit recti custos, mirator honesti, et nihil arcano qui roget ore deos,
si quis erit magnae subnixus robore mentis: dispeream si non hic Decianus erit (i. 39).
Is there a man whose friendship rare With antique friendship may compare;
In learning steeped, both old and new, Yet unpedantic, simple, true;
Whose soul, ingenuous and upright, Ne’er formed a wish that shunned the light, Whose sense is sound? If such there be, My Decianus, thou art he.
PROFESSOR GOLDWIN SMITH
Even more charming, if less intense, is the exhortation to Julius Martialis to live while he may, ere the long night come that knows no waking:
o mihi post nullos, Iuli, memorande sodales, si quid longa fides canaque iura valent, bis iam paene tibi consul tricensimus instat, et numerat paucos vix tua vita dies.
non bene distuleris videas quae posse negari, et solum hoc ducas, quod fuit, esse tuum. exspectant curaeque catenatique labores: gaudia non remanent, sed fugitiva volant. haec utraque manu complexuque adsere toto: saepe fluunt imo sic quoque lapsa sinu. non est, crede mihi, sapientis dicere ‘vivam ‘. sera nimis vita est crastina: vive hodie (i. 15).
Friend of my heart–and none of all the band Has to that name older or better right: Julius, thy sixtieth winter is at hand, Far-spent is now life’s day and near the night. Delay not what thou would’st recall too late; That which is past, that only call thine own: Cares without end and tribulations wait, Joy tarrieth not, but scarcely come, is flown. Then grasp it quickly firmly to thy heart,– Though firmly grasped, too oft it slips away;– To talk of living is not wisdom’s part: To-morrow is too late: live thou to-day! PROFESSOR GOLDWIN SMITH
Best of all is the retrospect of the long friendship which has united him to Julius. It is as frank as it is touching:
triginta mihi quattuorque messes
tecum, si memini, fuere, Iuli.
quarum dulcia mixta sunt amaris
sed iucunda tamen fuere plura;
et si calculus omnis huc et illuc diversus bicolorque digeratur,
vincet candida turba nigriorem.
si vitare voles acerba quaedam
et tristes animi cavere morsus,
nulli te facias nimis sodalem:
gaudebis minus et minus dolebis (xii. 34).[662]
My friend, since thou and I first met, This is the thirty-fourth December;
Some things there are we’d fain forget, More that ’tis pleasant to remember.
Let for each pain a black ball stand, For every pleasure past a white one,
And thou wilt find, when all are scanned, The major part will be the bright one. He who would heartache never know,
He who serene composure treasures, Must friendship’s chequered bliss forego; Who has no pain hath fewer pleasures. PROFESSOR GOLDWIN SMITH
He does not pour the treasure of his heart at his friend’s feet, as Persius does in his burning tribute to Cornutus. He has no treasure of great price to pour. But it is only natural that in the poems addressed to his friends we should find the statement of his ideals of life:
vitam quae faciunt beatiorem,
iucundissime Martialis, haec sunt: res non parta labore sed relicta;
non ingratus ager, focus perennis; lis numquam, toga rara, mens quieta;
vires ingenuae, salubre corpus;
prudens simplicitas, pares amici, convictus facilis, sine arte mensa;
nox non ebria sed soluta curis.
non tristis torus et tamen pudicus; somnus qui faciat breves tenebras:
quod sis esse velis nihilque malis; summum nec metuas diem nee optes (x. 47).
What makes a happy life, dear friend, If thou would’st briefly learn, attend– An income left, not earned by toil;
Some acres of a kindly soil;
The pot unfailing on the fire;
No lawsuits; seldom town attire;
Health; strength with grace; a peaceful mind; Shrewdness with honesty combined;
Plain living; equal friends and free; Evenings of temperate gaiety:
A wife discreet, yet blythe and bright; Sound slumber, that lends wings to night. With all thy heart embrace thy lot,
Wish not for death and fear it not. PROFESSOR GOLDWIN SMITH.
This exquisite echo of the Horatian ‘beatus ille qui procul negotiis’ sets forth no very lofty ideal. It is frankly, though restrainedly, hedonistic. But it depicts a life that is full of charm and free from evil. Martial, in his heart of hearts, hates the Rome that he depicts so vividly. Rome with its noise, its expense, its bustling snobbery, its triviality, and its vice, where he and his friend Julius waste their days:
nunc vivit necuter sibi, bonosque
soles effugere atque abire sentit, qui nobis pereunt et imputantur (v. 20. 11).
Dead to our better selves we see
The golden hours take flight,
Still scored against us as they flee. Then haste to live aright.
PROFESSOR GOLDWIN SMITH
He longs to escape from the world of the professional lounger and the parasite to an ampler air, where he can breathe freely and find rest. He is no philosopher, but it is at times a relief to get away from the rarified atmosphere and the sense of strain that permeates so much of the aspirations towards virtue in this strange age of contradictions.
Martial at last found the ease and quiet that his soul desired in his Spanish home:
hic pigri colimus labore dulci
Boterdum Plateamque (Celtiberis
haec sunt nomina crassiora terris): ingenti fruor inproboque somno
quem nec tertia saepe rumpit hora, et totum mihi nunc repono quidquid
ter denos vigilaveram per annos.
ignota est toga, sed datur petenti rupta proxima vestis a cathedra.
surgentem focus excipit superba
vicini strue cultus iliceti,
* * * * *
sic me vivere, sic iuvat perire. (xii. 18. 10).
Busy but pleas’d and idly taking pains, Here Lewes Downs I till and Ringmer plains, Names that to each South Saxon well are known, Though they sound harsh to powdered beaux in town. None can enjoy a sounder sleep than mine; I often do not wake till after nine;
And midnight hours with interest repay For years in town diversions thrown away. Stranger to finery, myself I dress
In the first coat from an old broken press. My fire, as soon as I am up, I see
Bright with the ruins of some neighbouring tree. * * * * *
Such is my life, a life of liberty; So would I wish to live and so to die. HAY.
Martial has a genuine love for the country. Born at a time when detailed descriptions of the charms of scenery had become fashionable, and the cultivated landscape at least found many painters, he succeeds far better than any of his contemporaries in conveying to the reader his sense of the beauties which his eyes beheld. That sense is limited, but exquisite. It does not go deep; there is nothing of the almost mystical background that Vergil at times suggests; there is nothing of the feeling of the open air and the wild life that is sometimes wafted to us in the sensuous verse of Theocritus. But Martial sees what he sees clearly, and he describes it perfectly. Compare his work with the affected prettiness of Pliny’s description of the source of the Clitumnus or with the more sensuous, but over-elaborate, craftsmanship of Statius in the _Silvae_. Martial is incomparably their superior. He speaks a more human language, and has a far clearer vision. Both Statius and Martial described villas by the sea. We have already mentioned Statius’ description of the villa of Pollius at Sorrento; Martial shall speak in his turn:
o temperatae dulce Formiae litus,
vos, cum severi fugit oppidum Martis et inquietas fessus exuit curas,
Apollinaris omnibus locis praefert. * * * * *
hic summa leni stringitur Thetis vento: nec languet aequor, viva sed quies ponti pictam phaselon adiuvante fert aura,
sicut puellae lion amantis aestatem mota salubre purpura venit frigus.
nec saeta longo quaerit in mari praedam, sed a cubili lectuloque iactatam
spectatus alte lineam trahit piscis. * * * * *
frui sed istis quando, Roma, permittis? quot Formianos imputat dies annus
negotiosis rebus urbis haerenti?
o ianitores vilicique felices!
dominis parantur ista, serviunt vobis[663] (x. 30).
O strand of Formiae, sweet with genial air, Who art Apollinaris’ chosen home
When, taking flight from his task-mistress Rome, The tired man doffs his load of troubling care. * * * * *
Here the sea’s bosom quivers in the wind; ‘Tis no dead calm, but sweet serenity, Which bears the painted boat before the breeze, As though some maid at pains the heat to ban, Should waft a genial zephyr with her fan. No fisher needs to buffet the high seas, But whiles from bed or couch his line he casts, May see his captive in the toils below. * * * * *
But, niggard Rome, thou giv’st how grudgingly! What the year’s tale of days at Formiae For him who tied by work in town must stay? Stewards and lacqueys, happy your employ, Your lords prepare enjoyment, you enjoy. A. E. STREET.
These are surely the most beautiful _scazons_[664] in the Latin tongue; the metre limps no more; a master-hand has wrought it to exquisite melody; the quiet undulation of the sea, the yacht’s easy gliding over its surface, live before us in its music. Even more delicate is the homelier description of the gardens of Julius Martialis on the slopes of the Janiculum. It is animated by the sincerity that never fails Martial when he writes to his friend:
Iuli iugera pauca Martialis
hortis Hesperidum beatiora
longo Ianiculi iugo recumbunt:
lati collibus imminent recessus
et planus modico tumore vertex
caelo perfruitur sereniore
et curvas nebula tegente valles
solus luce nitet peculiari:
puris leniter admoventur astris
celsae culmina delicata villae.
hinc septem dominos videre montes et totam licet aestimare Romam,
Albanos quoque Tusculosque colles et quodcumque iacet sub urbe frigus (iv. 64).
Martial’s few acres, e’en more blest Than those famed gardens of the West,
Lie on Janiculum’s long crest;
Above the slopes wide reaches hang recessed. The level, gently swelling crown
Breathes air from purer heavens blown; When mists the hollow valleys drown
‘Tis radiant with a light that’s all its own. The clear stars almost seem to lie
On the wrought roof that’s built so high; The seven hills stand in majesty,
And Rome is summed in one wide sweep of eye. Tusculan, Alban hills unfold,
Each nook which holds its store of cold. A. E. STREET.
Such a picture is unsurpassed in any language.[665] Statius, with all his brilliance, never came near such perfect success; he lacks sincerity; he can juggle with words against any one, but he never learned their truest and noblest use.
There are many other themes beside landscape painting in which the _Silvae_ of Statius challenge comparison with the epigrams of Martial. Both use the same servile flattery to the emperor, both celebrate the same patrons,[666] both console their noble friends for the loss of relatives, or favourite slaves; both write _propemptica_. Even in the most trivial of these poems, those addressed to the emperor, Statius is easily surpassed by his humbler rival. His inferiority lies largely in the fact that he is more ambitious. He wrote on a larger scale. When the infinitely trivial is a theme for verse, the epigrammatist has the advantage of the author of the more lengthy _Silvae_. Perfect neatness vanquishes dexterous elaboration. Moreover, if taste can be said to enter into such poems at all, Martial errs less grossly. Even Domitian–one might conjecture–may have felt that Statius’ flattery was ‘laid on with a trowel’. Martial may have used the same instrument, but had the art to conceal it.[667] There are even occasions where his flattery ceases to revolt the reader, and where we forget the object of the flattery. In a poem describing the suicide of a certain Festus he succeeds in combining the dignity of a funeral _laudatio_ with the subtlest and most graceful flattery of the princeps:
indignas premeret pestis cum tabida fauces, inque suos voltus serperet atra lues, siccis ipse genis flentes hortatus amicos decrevit Stygios Festus adire lacus.
nec tamen obscuro pia polluit ora veneno aut torsit lenta tristia fata fame,
sanctam Romana vitam sed morte peregit dimisitque animam nobiliore via.
hanc mortem fatis magni praeferre Catonis fama potest; huius Caesar amicus erat (i. 78).
When the dire quinsy choked his guiltless breath, And o’er his face the blackening venom stole, Festus disdained to wait a lingering death, Cheered his sad friends and freed his dauntless soul. No meagre famine’s slowly-wasting force, Nor hemlock’s gradual chillness he endured, But like a Roman chose the nobler course, And by one blow his liberty secured.
His death was nobler far than Cato’s end, For Caesar to the last was Festus’ friend. HODGSON (slightly altered).
The unctuous dexterity of Statius never achieved such a master-stroke.
So, too, in laments for the dead, the superior brevity and simplicity of Martial bear the palm away. Both poets bewailed the death of Glaucias, the child favourite of Atedius Melior. Statius has already been quoted in this connexion; Martial’s poems on the subject,[668] though not quite among his best, yet ring truer than the verse of Statius. And Martial’s epitaphs and epicedia at their best have in their slight way an almost unique charm. We must go to the best work of the Greek Anthology to surpass the epitaph on Erotion (v. 34):
hanc tibi, Fronto pater, genetrix Flaccilla, puellam oscula commendo deliciasque meas,
parvola ne nigras horrescat Erotion umbras oraque Tartarei prodigiosa canis.
inpletura fuit sextae modo frigora brumae, vixisset totidem ni minus illa dies.
inter tam veteres ludat lasciva patronos et nomen blaeso garriat ore meum.
mollia non rigidus caespes tegat ossa nec illi, terra, gravis fueris: non fuit illa tibi.
Fronto, and you, Flaccilla, to you, my father and mother, Here I commend this child, once my delight and my pet, So may the darkling shades and deep-mouthed baying of hellhound Touch not with horror of dread little Erotion dear. Now was her sixth year ending, and melting the snows of the winter, Only a brief six days lacked to the tale of the years. Young, amid dull old age, let her wanton and frolic and gambol, Babble of me that was, tenderly lisping my name. Soft were her tiny bones, then soft be the sod that enshrouds her, Gentle thy touch, mother Earth, gently she rested on thee! A. E. STREET.
Another poem on a like theme shows a different and more fantastic, but scarcely less pleasing vein (v. 37):
puella senibus dulcior mihi cycnis, agna Galaesi mollior Phalantini,
concha Lucrini delicatior stagni, cui nec lapillos praeferas Erythraeos
nec modo politum pecudis Indicae dentem nivesque primas liliumque non tactum;
quae crine vicit Baetici gregis vellus Rhenique nodos aureamque nitellam;
fragravit ore quod rosarium Paesti, quod Atticarum prima mella cerarum,
quod sucinorum rapta de manu gleba; cui conparatus indecens erat pavo,
inamabilis sciurus et frequens phoenix, adhuc recenti tepet Erotion busto,
quam pessimorum lex amara fatorum sexta peregit hieme, nec tamen tota,
nostros amores gaudiumque lususque.
Little maiden sweeter far to me
Than the swans are with their vaunted snows, Maid more tender than the lambkins be
Where Galaesus by Phalantus flows; Daintier than the daintiest shells that lie By the ripples of the Lucrine wave;
Choicer than new-polished ivory
That the herds in Indian jungles gave; Choicer than Erythrae’s marbles white, Snows new-fallen, lilies yet unsoiled: Softer were your tresses and more bright Than the locks by German maidens coiled: Than the finest fleeces Baetis shows,
Than the dormouse with her golden hue: Lips more fragrant than the Paestan rose, Than the Attic bees’ first honey-dew, Or an amber ball, new-pressed and warm; Paled the peacock’s sheen in your compare; E’en the winsome squirrel lost his charm, And the Phoenix seemed no longer rare. Scarce Erotion’s ashes yet are cold;
Greedily grim fate ordained to smite E’er her sixth brief winter had grown old– Little love, my bliss, my heart’s delight. A.D. INNES.
Through all the playful affectations of the lines we get the portrait of a fairy-like child, light-footed as the squirrel, golden-haired and fair as ivory or lilies.[669] Martial was a child-lover before he was a man of letters.
Beautiful as these little poems are, there is in Martial little trace of feeling for the sorrows of humanity in general. He can feel for his intimate friends, and his tears are ready to flow for his patron’s sorrows. But the general impression given by his poetry is that of a certain hardness and lack of feeling, of a limited sympathy, and an unemotional temperament. It is a relief to come upon a poem such as that in which he describes a father’s poignant anguish for the loss of his son (ix. 74):
effigiem tantum pueri pictura Camoni servat, et infantis parva figura manet. florentes nulla signavit imagine voltus, dum timet ora pius muta videre pater.
Here as in happy infancy he smiled
Behold Camonus–painted as a child; For on his face as seen in manhood’s days His sorrowing father would not dare to gaze. W. S. B.
or to find a sudden outbreak of sympathy with the sorrows of the slave (iii. 21):
proscriptum famulus servavit fronte notata, non fuit haec domini vita sed invidia.[670]
When scarred with cruel brand, the slave Snatched from the murderer’s hand
His proscript lord, not life he gave His tyrant, but the brand.
PROFESSOR GOLDWIN SMITH.
Of the _gravitas_ or dignity of character specially associated with Rome he shows equally few traces. His outlook on life is not sufficiently serious, he shows little interest in Rome of the past, and has nothing of the retrospective note so prominent in Lucan, Juvenal, or Tacitus; he lives in and for the present. He writes, it is true, of the famous suicide of Arria and Caecina Paetus,[671] of the death of Portia the wife of Brutus,[672] of the bravery of Mucius Scaevola.[673] But in none of these poems does he give us of his best. They lack, if not sincerity, at least enthusiasm; emotion is sacrificed to point. He is out of sympathy with Stoicism, and the suicide doctrinaire does not interest him. ‘Live while you may’ is his motto, ‘and make the best of circumstances.’ It is possible to live a reasonably virtuous life without going to the lengths of Thrasea:
quod magni Thraseae consummatique Catonis dogmata sic sequeris salvus ut esse velis, pectore nec nudo strictos incurris in enses, quod fecisse velim te, Deciane, facis. nolo virum facili redimit qui sanguine famam; hunc volo, laudari qui sine morte potest (i. 8).
That you, like Thrasea or Cato, great, Pursue their maxims, but decline their fate; Nor rashly point the dagger to your heart; More to my wish you act a Roman’s part. I like not him who fame by death retrieves, Give me the man who merits praise and lives. HAY.
The sentiment is full of common sense, but it is undeniably unheroic. Martial is not quixotic, and refuses to treat life more seriously than is necessary. Our complaint against him is that he scarcely takes it seriously enough. It would be unjust to demand a deep fund of earnestness from a professed epigrammatist dowered with a gift of humour and a turn for satire. But it is doing Martial no injustice to style him the laureate of triviality. For his satire is neither genial nor earnest. His kindly temper led him to avoid direct personalities, but his invective is directed against vice, not primarily because it is wicked, but rather because it is grotesque or not _comme il faut_. His humour, too, though often sparkling enough, is more often strained and most often filthy. Many of his epigrams were not worth writing, by whatever standard they be judged.[674] The point is hard to illustrate, since a large proportion of his inferior work is fatuously obscene. But the following may be taken at random from two books:
Eutrapelus tonsor dum circuit ora Luperci expingitque genas, altera barba subit (vii. 83).
Eutrapelus the barber works so slow, That while he shaves, the beard anew does grow. ANON., 1695.
invitas ad aprum, ponis mihi, Gallice, porcum. hybrida sum, si das, Gallice, verba mihi (viii. 22).
You invite me to partake of a wild boar, you set before me a home-grown pig. I’m half-boar, half-pig, if you can cheat me thus.
pars maxillarum tonsa est tibi, pars tibi rasa est, pars volsa est. unum quis putet esse caput? (viii. 47).
Part of your jaws is shaven, part clipped, part has the hair pulled out. Who’d think you’d only one head?
tres habuit dentes, pariter quos expuit omnes, ad tumulum Picens dum sedet ipse suum; collegitque sinu fragmenta novissima laxi oris et adgesta contumulavit humo.
ossa licet quondam defuncti non legat heres: hoc sibi iam Picens praestitit officium (viii. 57).
Picens had three teeth, which he spat out altogether while he was sitting at the spot he had chosen for his tomb. He gathered in his robe the last fragments of his loose jaw and interred them in a heap of earth. His heir need not gather his bones when he is dead, Picens has performed that office for himself.
summa Palatini poteras aequare Colossi, si fieres brevior, Claudia, sesquipede (viii. 60).
Had you been eighteen inches shorter, Claudia, you would have been as tall as the Colossus on the Palatine.
Without wishing to break a butterfly on the wheel, we may well quote against Martial the remark made in a different context to a worthless poet:
tanti non erat esse te disertum (xii. 43).
‘Twas scarce worth while to be thus eloquent.
There is much also which, without being precisely pointless or silly, is too petty and mean to be tolerable to modern taste. Most noticeable in this respect are the epigrams in which Martial solicits the liberality of his patrons. The amazing relations existing at this period between patron and client had worked a painful revolution in the manners and tone of society, a revolution which meant scarcely less than the pauperization of the middle class. The old sacred and almost feudal tie uniting client and patron had long since disappeared, and had been replaced by relations of a professional and commercial character. Wealth was concentrated in comparatively few hands, and with the decrease of the number of the patrons the throng of clients proportionately increased. The crowd of clients bustling to the early morning _salutatio_ of the patronus, and struggling with one another for the _sportula_ is familiar to us in the pages of Juvenal and receives fresh and equally vivid illustration from Martial. The worst results of these unnatural relations were a general loss of independence of character and a lamentable growth of bad manners and cynical snobbery. The patron, owing to the increasingly heavy demands upon his purse, naturally tended to become close-fisted and stingy, the needy client too often was grasping and discontented. The patron, if he asked his client to dine, would regale him with food and drink of a coarser and inferior quality to that with which he himself was served.[675] The client, on the other hand, could not be trusted to behave himself; he would steal the table fittings, make outrageous demands on his patron, and employ every act of servile and cringing flattery to improve his position.[676] The poor poet was in a sense doubly dependent. He would stand in the ordinary relation of _cliens_ to a _patronus_, and would be dependent also for his livelihood on the generosity of his literary patrons. For, in spite of the comparative facilities for the publication and circulation of books, he could make little by the public sale of his works, and living at Rome was abnormally expensive. The worst feature of all was that such a life of servile dependence was not clearly felt to be degrading. It was disliked for its hardship, annoyance, and monotony, but the client too often seems to have regarded it as beneath his dignity to attempt to escape from it by industry and manly independence.
As a result of these conditions, we find the pages of Martial full of allusions to the miserable life of the client. His skill does not fail him, but the theme is ugly and the historical interest necessarily predominates over the literary, though the reader’s patience is at times rewarded with shrewd observations on human nature, as, for instance, the bitter expression of the truth that ‘To him that hath shall be given’–
semper pauper eris, si pauper es, Aemiliane; dantur opes nullis nunc nisi divitibus (v. 81);
Poor once and poor for ever, Nat, I fear, None but the rich get place and pension here. N.B. HALHEAD.
or the even more incisive
pauper videri Cinna vult: et est pauper (viii. 19).
But we soon weary of the continual reference to dinners and parasites, to the snobbery and indifference of the rich, to the tricks of toadyism on the part of needy client or legacy hunter. It is a mean world, and the wit and raillery of Martial cannot make it palatable. Without a moral background, such as is provided by the indignation of Juvenal, the picture soon palls, and the reader sickens. Most unpleasing of all are the epigrams where Martial himself speaks as client in a language of mingled impertinence and servility. His flattery of the emperor we may pass by. It was no doubt interested, but it was universal, and Martial’s flattery is more dexterous without being either more or less offensive than that of his contemporaries. His relations towards less exalted patrons cannot be thus easily condoned. He feels no shame in begging, nor in abusing those who will not give or whose gifts are not sufficient for his needs. His purse is empty; he must sell the gifts that Regulus has given him. Will Regulus buy?
aera domi non sunt, superest hoc, Regule, solum ut tua vendamus munera: numquid emis? (vii. 16).
I have no money, Regulus, at home. Only one thing is left to do–sell the gifts you gave me. Will you buy?
Stella has given him some tiles to roof his house; he would like a cloak as well:
cum pluvias madidumque Iovem perferre negaret et rudis hibernis villa nataret aquis, plurima, quae posset subitos effundere nimbos, muneribus venit tegula missa tuis.
horridus ecce sonat Boreae stridore December: Stella, tegis villam, non tegis agricolam (vii. 36).[677]
When my crased house heaven’s showers could not sustain, But flooded with vast deluges of rain, Thou shingles, Stella, seasonably didst send, Which from the impetuous storms did me defend: Now fierce loud-sounding Boreas rocks doth cleave, Dost clothe the farm, and farmer naked leave? ANON., 1695.
This is not the way a gentleman thanks a friend, nor can modern taste appreciate at its antique value abuse such as–
primum est ut praestes, si quid te, Cinna, rogabo; illud deinde sequens ut cito, Cinna, neges. diligo praestantem; non odi, Cinna, negantem: sed tu nec praestas nec cito, Cinna, negas (vii. 43).
The kindest thing of all is to comply: The next kind thing is quickly to deny. I love performance nor denial hate:
Your ‘Shall I, shall I?’ is the cursed state.
The poet’s poverty is no real excuse for this petulant mendicancy.[678] He had refused to adopt a profession,[679] though professional employment would assuredly have left him time for writing, and no one would have complained if his output had been somewhat smaller. Instead, he chose a life which involved moving in society, and was necessarily expensive. We can hardly attribute his choice merely to the love of his art. If he must beg, he might have done so with better taste and some show of finer feeling. Macaulay’s criticism is just: ‘I can make large allowance for the difference of manners; but it can never have been _comme il faut_ in any age or nation for a man of note–an accomplished man–a man living with the great–to be constantly asking for money, clothes, and dainties, and to pursue with volleys of abuse those who would give him nothing.’
In spite, however, of the obscenity, meanness, and exaggerated triviality of much of his work, there have been few poets who could turn a prettier compliment, make a neater jest, or enshrine the trivial in a more exquisite setting. Take the beautifully finished poem to Flaccus in the eighth book (56), wherein Martial complains that times have altered since Vergil’s day. ‘Now there are no patrons and consequently no poets’–
ergo ego Vergilius, si munera Maecenatis des mihi? Vergilius non ero, Marsus ero.
Shall I then be a Vergil, if you give me such gifts as Maecenas gave? No, I shall not be a Vergil, but a Marsus.
Here, at least, Martial shows that he could complain of his poverty with decency, and speak of himself and his work with becoming modesty. Or take a poem of a different type, an indirect plea for the recall of an exile (viii. 32):
aera per tacitum delapsa sedentis in ipsos fluxit Aratullae blanda columba sinus, luserat hoc casus, nisi inobservata maneret permissaque sibi nollet abire fuga.
si meliora piae fas est sperare sorori et dominum mundi flectere vota valent, haec a Sardois tibi forsitan exulis oris, fratre reversuro, nuntia venit avis.
A gentle dove glided down through the silent air and settled even in Aratulla’s bosom as she was sitting. This might have seemed but the sport of chance had it not rested there, though undetained, and refused to part even when flight was free. If it is granted to the loving sister to hope for better things, and if prayers can move the lord of the world, this bird perchance has come to thee from Sardinia’s shore of exile to announce the speedy return of thy brother.
Nothing could be more conventional, nothing more perfect in form, more full of music, more delicate in expression. The same felicity is shown in his epigrams on curiosities of art or nature, a fashionable and, it must be confessed, an easy theme.[680] Fish carved by Phidias’ hand, a lizard cast by Mentor, a fly enclosed in amber, are all given immortality:
artis Phidiacae toreuma clarum
pisces aspicis: adde aquam, natabunt (iii. 35).
These fishes Phidias wrought: with life by him They are endowed: add water and they swim. PROFESSOR GOLDWIN SMITH.
inserta phialae Mentoris manu ducta lacerta vivit et timetur argentum (iii. 41).
That lizard on the goblet makes thee start. Fear not: it lives only by Mentor’s art. PROFESSOR GOLDWIN SMITH.
et latet et lucet Phaethontide condita gutta, ut videatur apis nectare clusa suo.
dignum tantorum pretium tulit illa laborum: credibile est ipsam sic voluisse mori (iv. 32).
Here shines a bee closed in an amber tomb, As if interred in her own honey-comb.
A fit reward fate to her labours gave; No other death would she have wished to have. MAY.
Always at home in describing the trifling amenities of life, he is at his best equally successful in dealing with its trifling follies. An acquaintance has given his cook the absurd name of Mistyllos in allusion to the Homeric phrase [Greek: mistyllon t’ ora talla]. Martial’s comment is inimitable:
si tibi Mistyllos cocus, Aemiliane, vocatur, dicatur quare non Taratalla mihi? (i. 50).
He complains of the wine given him at a dinner-party with a finished whimsicality:
potavi modo consulare vinum.
quaeris quam vetus atque liberale? Prisco consule conditum: sed ipse
qui ponebat erat, Severe, consul (vii. 79).
I have just drunk some consular wine. How old, you ask, and how generous? It was bottled in Priscus’ consulship: and he who set it before me was the consul himself.
Polycharmus has returned Caietanus his IOU’s. ‘Little good will that do you, and Caietanus will not even be grateful’:
quod Caietano reddis, Polycharme, tabellas, milia te centum num tribuisse putas?
‘debuit haec’ inquis. tibi habe, Polycharme, tabellas et Caietano milia crede duo (viii. 37).
In giving back Caietanus his IOU’s, Polycharmus, do you think you are giving him 100,000 sesterces? ‘He owed me that sum,’ you say. Keep the IOU’s and lend him two thousand more!
Chloe, the murderess of her seven husbands, erects monuments to their memory, and inscribes _fecit Chloe_ on the tombstones:
inscripsit tumulis septem scelerata virorum ‘se fecisse’ Chloe. quid pote simplicius? (ix. 15).
On her seven husbands’ tombs she doth impress ‘This Chloe did.’ What more can she confess? WRIGHT.
Vacerra admires the old poets only. What shall Martial do?
miraris veteres, Vacerra, solos
nec laudas nisi mortuos poetas.
ignoscas petimus, Vacerra: tanti
non est, ut placeam tibi, perire (viii. 69).
Vacerra lauds no living poet’s lays, But for departed genius keeps his praise. I, alas, live, nor deem it worth my while To die that I may win Vacerra’s smile. PROFESSOR GOLDWIN SMITH.
All this is very slight, _merae nugae_; but even if the humour be not of the first water, it will compare well with the humour of epigrams of any age. Martial knows he is not a great poet.[681] He knows, too, that his work is uneven:
iactat inaequalem Matho me fecisse libellum: si verum est, laudat carmina nostra Matho. aequales scribit libros Calvinus et Vmber: aequalis liber est, Cretice, qui malus est (vii. 90).
Matho makes game of my unequal verse; If it’s unequal it might well be worse. Calvinus, Umber, write on one dead level, The book that’s got no up and down’s the devil!
If there are thirty good epigrams in a book, he is satisfied (vii. 81). His defence hardly answers the question, ‘Why publish so many?’ but should at least mollify our judgement. Few poets read better in selections than Martial, and of few poets does selection give so inadequate an idea. For few poets of his undoubted genius have left such a large bulk of work which, in spite of its formal perfection, is morally repulsive or, from the purely literary standpoint, uninteresting. But he is an important figure in the history of literature, for he is the father of the modern epigram. Alone of Silver Latin poets is he a perfect stylist. He has the gift of _felicitas_ to the full, but it is not _curiosa_. Inferior to Horace in all other points, he has greater spontaneity. And he is free from the faults of his age. He is no _virtuoso_, eaten up with self-conscious vanity; he attempts no impossible feats of language; he is clear, and uses his mythological and geographical knowledge neatly and picturesquely; but he makes no display of obscure learning. ‘I would please schoolmasters,’ he says, ‘but not _qua_ schoolmasters’ (x. 21. 5). So, too, he complains of his own education:
at me litterulas stulti docuere parentes: quid cum grammaticis rhetoribusque mihi? (ix. 73. 7).
My learning only proves my father fool! Why would he send me to a grammar school? HAY.
As a result, perhaps, of this lack of sympathy with the education of his day, we find that, while he knows and admires the great poets of the past, and can flatter the rich poetasters of the present, his bent is curiously unliterary. He gives us practically no literary criticism. It is with the surface qualities of life that he is concerned, with its pleasures and its follies, guilty or innocent. He has a marvellously quick and clear power of observation, and of vivid presentation. He is in this sense above all others the poet of his age. He either does not see or chooses to ignore many of the best and most interesting features of his time, but the picture which he presents, for all its incompleteness, is wider and more varied than any other. We both hate him and read him for the sake of the world he depicts. ‘Ugliness is always bad art, and Martial often failed as a poet from his choice of subject.'[682] There are comparatively few of his poems which we read for their own sake. Remarkable as these few poems are, the main attraction of Martial is to be found not in his wit or finish, so much as in the vividness with which he has portrayed the life of the brilliant yet corrupt society in which his lot was cast. It lives before us in all its splendour and in all its squalor. The court, with its atmosphere of grovelling flattery, its gross vices veiled and tricked out in the garb of respectability; the wealthy official class, with their villas, their favourites, their circle of dependants, men of culture, wit, and urbanity, through all which runs, strangely intermingled, a vein of extreme coarseness, vulgarity, and meanness; the lounger and the reciter, the diner-out and the legacy-hunter; the clients struggling to win their patrons’ favour and to rise in the social scale, enduring the hardships and discomfort of a sordid life unillumined by lofty ideals or strength of will, a life that under cold northern skies would have been intolerable; the freedman and the slave, with all the riff-raff that support a parasitic existence on the vices of the upper classes; the noise and bustle of Rome, its sleepless nights, its cheerless tenements, its noisy streets, loud with the sound of traffic or of revelry; the shows in the theatre, the races in the circus, the interchange of presents at the Saturnalia; the pleasant life in the country villa, the simplicity of rural Italy, the sights and sounds of the park and the farm-yard; and dimly seen beyond all, the provinces, a great ocean which absorbs from time to time the rulers of Rome and the leaders of society, and from which come faint and confused echoes of frontier wars; all are there. It is a great pageant lacking order and coherence, a scene that shifts continually, but never lacks brilliance of detail and sharply defined presentment. Martial was the child of the age; it gave him his strength and his weakness. If we hate him or despise him, it is because he is the faithful representative of the life of his times; his gifts we cannot question. He practised a form of poetry that at its best is not exalted, and must, even more than other branches of art, be conditioned by social circumstance. Within its limited sphere Martial stands, not faultless, but yet supreme.
CHAPTER XII
JUVENAL
Our knowledge of the life of the most famous of Roman satirists is strangely unsatisfactory. Many so-called lives of Juvenal have come down to us, but they are confused, contradictory, inadequate, and unreliable.[683] His own work and allusions in other writers help us but little in our attempt to reconstruct the story of the poet’s life.
Only by investigating the dates within which the satires seem to fall is it possible to arrive at some idea of the dates within which falls the life of their author. The satires were published in five books at different times. The first book (1-5), which is full of allusions to the tyranny of Domitian, cannot have been published before 100 A.D., since the first satire contains an allusion to the condemnation of Marius Priscus,[684] which took place in that year. The fifth book (13-16) must, from references in the thirteenth and fifteenth[685] satires to the year 127, have been published not much later than that date. The publication of the satires falls, therefore, between 100 and 130.
With these data it is possible to approach the question of the dates of Juvenal’s birth and death. The main facts to guide us are the statements of the best of the biographies that he did not begin to write satire till on the confines of middle age, that even then he delayed to publish, and that he died at the age of eighty.[686] The inference is that he was born between 50 and 60 A. D., and died between 130 and 140 A. D.[687]
As to the facts of his life we are on little firmer ground. But concerning his name and birthplace there is practical certainty. Decimus Junius Juvenalis[688] was born at Aquinum,[689] a town of Latium, and is said to have been the son or adopted son of a rich freedman. His education was of the usual character, literary and rhetorical, and was presumably carried out at Rome.[690] He acquired thus early in youth a taste for rhetoric that never left him. For he is said to have practised declamation up till middle age, not with a view to obtaining a position as professor of rhetoric or as advocate, but from sheer love of the art.[691] It is probable that he combined his passion for rhetoric with service as an officer in the army. Not only does he show considerable intimacy in his satires with a soldier’s life,[692] but interesting external evidence is afforded by an inscription discovered near Aquinum. It runs:
C_ERE_RI. SACRVM
D. _IV_NIVS. IVVENALIS
_TRIB_. COH. _I_. DELMATARVM
II. _VIR_. QVINQ. FLAMEN
DIVI. VESPASIANI
VOVIT. DEDICAV_ITQ_VE
SVA PEC.[693]
If this inscription refers, as well it may, to the poet, it will follow that he served as tribune of the first Dalmatian cohort, probably in Britain,[694] held high municipal office in his native town, and was priest of the deified Vespasian. But the _praenomen_ is wanting in the original, and the inscription may have been erected not by the satirist but by one of his kinsfolk. That he spent the greater portion of his life at Rome is evident from his satires. Of his friends we know little. Umbricius, Persicus, Catullus, and Calvinus[695] are mere names. Of Quintilian[696] he speaks with great respect, and may perhaps have studied under him; of Statius he writes with enthusiasm, but there is no evidence that he had done more than be present at that poet’s recitations.[697] Martial, however, was a personal friend, and writes affectionately of him and to him in three of his epigrams.[698] Unlike Martial, whose life was a continual struggle against poverty, Juvenal, though he had clearly endured some of the discomforts and degradations involved by a client’s attendance on his rich _patronus_, was a man of some means, possessing an estate at Aquinum,[699] a country house at Tibur,[700] and a house at Rome.[701] At what date precisely he began to write is uncertain. We are told that his first effort was a brief poem attacking the actor Paris, which he afterwards embodied in the seventh satire. But it was long before he ventured to read his satires even to his intimate friends.[702] This suggests that portions, at any rate, of the satires of the first book were composed during the reign of Domitian.[703] Juvenal had certainly every reason for concealing their existence till after the tyrant’s death. The first satire was probably written later to form a preface to the other four, and the whole book may have been published in 101. It is noteworthy, however, that Martial, writing to him in that year, mentions merely his gifts as a declaimer, and seems not to know him as a satirist. The second book, containing only the sixth satire, was probably published about 116, since it contains allusions to earthquakes in Asia and to a comet boding ill to Parthia and Armenia (l. 407-12). Such a comet was visible in Rome in the autumn of 115, on the eve of Trajan’s campaign against Parthia, while in December an earthquake did great damage to the town of Antioch. The third book (7-9) opens with an elaborate compliment to Hadrian as the patron of literature at Rome. As Hadrian succeeded to the principate in 117 and left Rome for a tour of the provinces in 121, this book must fall somewhere between our dates. The fourth book (10-12) contains no indication as to its date, but must lie between the publication of the third book and of the fifth (after 127). Beyond these facts it is hardly possible to go in our reconstruction of the poet’s life. As far as may be judged it was an uneventful career save for one great calamity. The ancient biographies assert that Juvenal’s denunciation of actors embodied in the seventh satire offended an actor who was the favourite of the princeps. They are supported by Apollinaris Sidonius,[704] who speaks of Juvenal as the ‘exile-victim of an actor’s anger’, and by Johannes Malala.[705] The latter writer, with certain of the ancient biographies, identifies the actor with Paris, the favourite of Domitian; others, again, say that the poet was banished by Nero[706]–a manifestly absurd statement–others by Trajan,[707] while our best authority asserts that he was eighty years old when banished, and that he died of grief and mortification.[708] The place of exile is variously given. Most of the biographies place it in Egypt, the best of them asserting that he was given a military command in that province.[709] Others mention Britain,[710] others the Pentapolis of Libya.[711] Amid such discrepancies it is impossible to give any certain answer. But it is certain that the actor who caused Juvenal’s banishment was not Paris, who was put to death by Domitian as early as 83, and almost equally certain that Domitian is guiltless of the poet’s exile. It is, however, possible that he was banished by Trajan or Hadrian, though it would surprise us to find Trajan, for all the debauchery of his private life, so far under the influence of an actor[712] as to sacrifice a Roman citizen to his displeasure; while as regards Hadrian it is noteworthy that the very satire said to have offended the _pantomimus_ contains an eloquent panegyric of that emperor. Further, it is hard to believe the story that Juvenal was banished to Egypt at the advanced age of eighty under the pretext of a military command. The problem is insoluble.[713] The most that can be said is that the persistence of the tradition gives it some claim to credibility, though the details handed down to us are wholly untrustworthy, and probably little better than clumsy inferences from passages in the satires.
The scope of Juvenal’s work and the motives that spur him are set forth in the first satire. He is weary of the deluge of trivial and mechanical verse poured out by the myriad poetasters of the day:
Still shall I hear and never quit the score, Stunned with hoarse Codrus’ Theseid, o’er and o’er? Shall this man’s elegies and t’other’s play Unpunished murder a long summer’s day? … since the world with writing is possest, I’ll versify in spite; and do my best
To make as much waste-paper as the rest.[714]
He will write in a different vein from his rivals. Satire shall be his theme. In such an age, when virtue is praised and vice practised, the age of the libertine, the _parvenu_, the forger, the murderer, it is hard not to write satire. ‘Facit indignatio versum!'[715] he cries. ‘All the daily life of Rome shall be my theme’:
quidquid agunt homines votum timor ira voluptas gaudia discursus nostri est farrago libelli.[716]
What human kind desires and what they shun, Rage, passion, pleasure, impotence of will, Shall this satirical collection fill.
DRYDEN.
Never was vice so rampant; luxury has become monstrous; the rich lord lives in pampered and selfish ease, while those poor mortals, his clients, jostle together to receive the paltry dole of the _sportula_; that is all the help they will get from their patron:
No age can go beyond us; future times Can add no further to the present crimes. Our sons but the same things can wish and do; Vice is at stand and at the highest flow. Thou, Satire, spread thy sails, take all the winds that blow.[717]
And yet the satirist must be cautious; the days are past when a Lucilius could lash Rome at his will:
When Lucilius brandishes his pen
And flashes in the face of guilty men, A cold sweat stands in drops on every part, And rage succeeds to tears, revenge to smart. Muse, be advised; ’tis past considering time, When entered once the dangerous lists of rhyme; Since none the living villains dare implead, Arraign them in the persons of the dead.[718]
No better preface has ever been written; it gives a perfect summary of the motives, the objects, and the methods of the poet’s work in language which for vigour and brilliance he never surpassed. The closing lines show us his literary parentage. It is Lucilius who inspires him; it is the fierce invective of the father of Roman satire that appeals to him. Lucilius had scourged Rome, when the inroads of Hellenism and oriental luxury, the fruits of foreign conquest, were beginning to make themselves felt. To Juvenal it falls to denounce the triumph of these corroding influences. He has nothing of the almost pathetic philosophic detachment of Persius, nor of the easy-going compromise of Horace. He does not palter with problems of right and wrong, nor hesitate over his