V.

LYRIC POETRY: CATULLUS.

Contemporary with Lucretius, but, unlike him, living in the full whirl and glare of Roman life, was a group of young men who were professed followers of the Alexandrian school. In the thirty years which separate the Civil war and the Sullan restoration from the sombre period that opened with the outbreak of hostilities between Caesar and the senate, social life at Rome among the upper classes was unusually interesting and exciting. The outward polish of Greek civilisation was for the first time fully mastered, and an intelligent interest in art and literature was the fashion of good society. The "young man about town," whom we find later fully developed in the poetry of Ovid, sprang into existence, but as the government was still in the hands of the aristocracy, fashion and politics were intimately intermingled, and the lighter literature of the day touched grave issues on every side. The poems of Catullus are full of references to his friends and his enemies among this group of writers. Two of the former, Cinna and Calvus, were poets of considerable importance. Gaius Helvius Cinna—somewhat doubtfully identified with the "Cinna the poet" who met such a tragical end at the hands of the populace after Caesar's assassination—carried the Alexandrian movement to its most uncompromising conclusions. His fame (and that fame was very great) rested on a short poem called Zmyrna, over which he spent ten years' labour, and which, by subject and treatment alike, carried the method of that school to its furthest excess. In its recondite obscurity it outdid Lycophron himself. More than one grammarian of the time made a reputation solely by a commentary on it. It throws much light on the peculiar artistic position of Catullus, to bear in mind that this masterpiece of frigid pedantry obtained his warm and evidently sincere praise.

The other member of the triad, Gaius Licinius Macer Calvus, one of the most brilliant men of his time, was too deeply plunged in politics to be more than an accomplished amateur in poetry. Yet it must have been more than his intimate friendship with Catullus, and their common fate of too early a death, that made the two names so constantly coupled afterwards. By the critics of the Silver Age, no less than by Horace and Propertius, the same idea is frequently repeated, which has its best-known expression in Ovid's beautiful invocation in his elegy on Tibullus—

Obvius huic venias, hedera iuvenilia cinctus Tempora, cum Calvo, docte Catulle, tuo._

We must lament the total loss of a volume of lyrics which competent judges thought worthy to be set beside that of his wonderful friend.

Gaius Valerius Catullus of Verona, one of the greatest names of Latin poetry, belonged, like most of this group, to a wealthy and distinguished family, and was introduced at an early age to the most fashionable circles of the capital. He was just so much younger than Lucretius that the Marian terror and the Sullan proscriptions can hardly have left any strong traces on his memory. When he died, Caesar was still fighting in Gaul, and the downfall of the Republic could only be dimly foreseen. In time, no less than in genius, he represents the fine flower of the Ciceronian age. He was about five and twenty when the attachment began between him and the lady whom he has immortalised under the name of Lesbia. By birth a Claudia, and wife of her cousin, a Caecilius Metellus, she belonged by blood and marriage to the two proudest families of the inner circle of the aristocracy. Clodia was seven years older than Catullus; but that only made their mutual attraction more irresistible: and the death of her husband in the year after his consulship, whether or not there was foundation for the common rumour that she had poisoned him, was an incident that seems to have passed almost unnoticed in the first fervour of their passion. The story of infatuation, revolt, relapse, fresh revolt and fresh entanglement, lives and breathes in the verses of Catullus. It was after their final rupture that Catullus made that journey to Asia which gave occasion to his charming poems of travel. In the years which followed his return to Italy, he continued to produce with great versatility and force, making experiments in several new styles, and devoting great pains to an elaborate metrical technique. Feats of learning and skill alternate with political verses, into which he carries all his violence of love and hatred. But while these later poems compel our admiration, it is the earlier ones which win and keep our love. Though the old liquid note ever and again recurs, the freshness of these first lyrics, in which life and love and poetry are all alike in their morning glory, was never to be wholly recaptured. Nor did he live to settle down on any matured second manner. He was thirty-three at the utmost—perhaps not more than thirty—when he died, leaving behind him the volume of poems which sets him as the third beside Sappho and Shelley.

The order of the poems in this volume seems to be an artificial compromise between two systems—one an arrangement by metre, and the other by date of composition. In the former view the book falls into three sections—the pure lyrics, the idyllic pieces, and the poems in elegiac verse. The central place is occupied by the longest and most elaborate, if not the most successful, of his poems, the epic idyl on the marriage of Peleus and Thetis. Before this are the lyrics, chiefly in the phalaecian eleven-syllabled verse which Catullus made so peculiarly his own, but in iambic, sapphic, choriambic, and other metres also, winding up with the fine epithalamium written for the marriage of his friends, Mallius and Vinia. The transition from this group of lyrics to the Marriage of Peleus and Thetis is made with great skill through another wedding-chant, an idyl in form, but approaching to a lyric in tone, without any personal allusions, and not apparently written for any particular occasion. Finally comes a third group of poems, extending to the end of the volume, all written in elegiac verse, but otherwise extremely varied in date, subject, and manner. The only poem thus left unaccounted for, the Atys, is inserted in the centre of the volume, between the two hexameter poems, as though to make its wild metre and rapid movement the more striking by contrast with their smooth and languid rhythms. Whether the arrangement of the whole book comes from the poet's own hand is very doubtful. His dedicatory verses, which stand at the head of the volume, are more probably attached to the first part only, the book of lyrics. Catullus almost certainly died in 54 B.C.; the only positive dates assignable to particular poems, in either the lyric or the elegiac section, alike lie within the three or four years previous, and, while no strict chronological order is followed, the pieces at the beginning of the book are almost certainly the earliest, and those at the end among the latest.

Among the poems of Catullus, those connected with Lesbia hold the foremost place, and, as expressions of direct personal emotion, are unsurpassed, not merely in Latin, but in any literature. There are no poems of the growth of love among them; from the first, Lesbia appears as the absolute mistress of her lover's heart:

Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus, Rumoresque senum severiorum Omnes unius aestimemus assis. Soles occidere et redire possunt; Nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux Nox est perpetua una dormienda:—

thus he cries in the first intoxication of his happiness, as yet ignorant that the brief light of his love was to go out before noon. Clodia soon showed that the advice not to care for the opinion of the world was, in her case, infinitely superfluous. That intolerable pride which was the proverbial curse of the Claudian house took in her the form of a flagrant disregard of all conventions. In the early days of their love, Catullus only felt, or only expressed, the beautiful side of this recklessness. His affection for Clodia had in it, he says, something of the tenderness of parents for their children; and the poems themselves bear out the paradox. We do not need to read deeply in Catullus to be assured that merely animal passion ran as strong in him as it ever did in any man. But in the earlier poems to Lesbia all this turns to air and fire; the intensity of his love melts its grosser elements into one white flame. There is hardly even a word of Lesbia's bodily beauty; her great blazing eyes have only come down to us in the sarcastic allusions made to them by Cicero in his speeches and letters. As in a few of the finest lyrics of Burns, with whom Catullus, as a poet of love, has often been compared, the ardency of passion has effected for quintessential moments the work that long ages may work out on the whole fabric of a human soul— Concretam exemit labem purumque reliquit aetherium sensum atque aurai simplicis ignem.

But long after the rapture had passed away the enthralment remained. Lesbia's first infidelities only riveted her lover's chains—

Amantem iniuria talis Cogit amare magis;

then he hangs between love and hatred, in the poise of soul immortalised by him in the famous verse—

Odi et amo: quare id faciam fortasse requiris; Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

There were ruptures and reconciliations, and renewed ruptures and repeated returns, but through them all, while his love hardly lessens, his hatred continually grows, and the lyrical cry becomes one of the sharpest agony: through protestations of fidelity, through wails over ingratitude, he sinks at last into a stupor only broken by moans of pain. Then at last youth reasserts itself, and he is stung into new life by the knowledge that he has simply dropped out of Lesbia's existence. His final renunciation is no longer addressed to her deaf ears, but flung at her in studied insult through two of the associates of their old revels in Rome.

Cum suis vivat valeatque moechis Quos simul complexa tenet trecentos Nullum amans vere, sed identidem[2] omnium Ilia rumpens—

so the hard clear verse flashes out, to melt away in the dying fall, the long-drawn sweetness of the last words of all—

Nec meum respectet ut ante amorem Qui illius culpa cecidit, velut prati Ultimi flos, praetereunte postquam Tactus aratro est.

Foremost among the other lyrics of Catullus which have a personal reference are those concerned with his journey to Asia, and the death in the Troad of the deeply loved brother whose tomb he visited on that journey. The excitement of travel and the delight of return have never been more gracefully touched than in these little lyrics, of which every other line has become a household word, the Iam ver egelidos refert tepores, and the lovely Paene insularum Sirmio insularumque, whose cadences have gathered a fresh sweetness in the hands of Tennyson. But a higher note is reached in one or two of the short pieces on his brother's death, which are lyrics in all but technical name. The finest of these has all the delicate simplicity of an epitaph by the best Greek artists, Leonidas or Antipater or Simonides himself; and with this it combines the specific Latin dignity, and a range of tones, from the ocean-roll of its opening hexameter, Multas per gentes et multa per aequora vectus, to the sobbing wail of the Atque in perpehtum frater ave atque vale in which it dies away, that is hardly equalled except in some of Shakespeare's sonnets.

It is in these short lyrics of personal passion or emotion that the genius of Catullus is most eminent; but the same high qualities appear in the few specimens he has left of more elaborate lyrical architecture, the Ode to Diana, the marriage-song for Mallius and Vinia, and the Atys. The first of these, brief as it is, has a breadth and grandeur of manner which—as in the noble fragment of Keats' Ode to Maia—lift it into the rank of great masterpieces. The epithalamium, on the other hand, with which the book of lyrics ends, while very simple in structure, is large in scale. It is as much longer than the rest of the lyrics as the marriage-song which stands at the end of In Memoriam is than the other sections of that poem. In the charm of perfect simplicity it equals the finest of his lyrics; but besides this, it has in its clear ringing music what is for this period an almost unique premonition of the new world that rose out of the darkness of the Middle Ages, the world that had invented bells and church-organs, and had added a new romantic beauty to love and marriage. With a richness of phrase that recalls the Song of Solomon, the verses clash and swing: Open your bars, O gates! the bride is at hand! Lo, how the torches shake out their splendid tresses!... Even so in a rich lord's garden-close might stand a hyacinth-flower. Lo, the torches shake out their golden tresses; go forth, O bride! Day wanes; go forth, O bride! And the verse at the end, about the baby on its mother's lap—

Torqutatus volo parvulus Matris e gremio suae Porrigens teneras manus Dulce rideat ad patrem Semihiante labello—

is as incomparable; not again till the Florentine art of the fifteenth century was the picture drawn with so true and tender a hand.

Over the Atys modern criticism has exhausted itself without any definite result. The accident of its being the only Latin poem extant in the peculiar galliambic metre has combined with the nature of the subject[3] to induce a tradition about it as though it were the most daring and extraordinary of Catullus' poems. The truth is quite different. It stands midway between the lyrics and the idyls in being a poem of most studied and elaborate artifice, in which Catullus has chosen, not the statelier and more familiar rhythms of the hexameter or elegiac, but one of the Greek lyric metres, of which he had already introduced several others into Latin. As a tour de force in metrical form it is remarkable enough, and probably marks the highest point of Latin achievement in imitation of the more complex Greek metres. As a lyric poem it preserves, even in its highly artificial structure, much of the direct force and simplicity which mark all Catullus' best lyrics. That it goes beyond this, or that—as is often repeated—it transcends both the idyls and the briefer lyrics in sustained beauty and passion, cannot be held by any sane judgment.

How far elaboration could lead Catullus is shown in the long idyllic poem on the Marriage of Peleus and Thetis. Here he entirely abandons the lyric manner, and adventures on a new field, in which he does not prove very successful. The poem is full of great beauties of detail; but as a whole it is cloying and yet not satisfying. For a few lines together Catullus can write in hexameter more exquisitely than any other Latin poet. The description in this piece of the little breeze that rises at dawn, beginning Hic qualis flatu placidum mare matutino, like the more famous lines in his other idyllic poem—

Ut flos in septis secretum nascitur hortis, Ignotus pecori, nullo contusus aratro, Quem mulcent aurae, firmat sol, educat imber; Multi illum pueri, multae optavere puellae—

has an intangible and inexpressible beauty such as never recurs in the more mature art of greater masters. But Catullus has no narrative gift; his use of the hexameter is confined to a limited set of rhythms which in a poem about the length of a book of the Georgics become hopelessly monotonous; and it finally stops, rather than ends, when the writer (as is already the case with the reader) grows tired of it. It is remarkable that the poet who in the lightness and speed of his other metres is unrivalled in Latin, should, when he attempts the hexameter, be more languid and heavy, not only than his successors, but than his contemporaries. Here, as in the elaborate imitations of Callimachus with which he tested his command of the Latin elegiac, he is weak because he wanders off the true line, not from any failure in his own special gift, which was purely and simply lyrical. When he uses the elegiac verse to express his own feeling, as in the attacks on political or personal enemies, it has the same direct lucidity (as of an extraordinarily gifted child) which is the essential charm of his lyrics.

It is just this quality, this clear and almost terrible simplicity, that puts Catullus in a place by himself among the Latin poets. Where others labour in the ore of thought and gradually forge it out into sustained expression, he sees with a single glance, and does not strike a second time. His imperious lucidity is perfectly unhesitating in its action; whether he is using it for the daintiest flower of sentiment—fair passions and bountiful pities and loves without stain—or for the expression of his fiery passions and hatreds in some flagrant obscenity or venomous insult, it is alike straight and reckless, with no scruple and no mincing of words; in Mr. Swinburne's curiously true and vivid phrase, he "makes mouths at our speech" when we try to follow him.

With the death of Catullus and Calvus, an era in Latin poetry definitely ends. Only thirteen or fourteen years later a new era begins with the appearance of Virgil; but this small interval of time is sufficient to mark the passage from one age—we might almost say from one civilisation —to another. During these years poetry was almost silent, while the Roman world shook with continuous civil war and the thunder of prodigious armies. The school of minor Alexandrian poets still indeed continued; the "warblers of Euphorion" with their smooth rhythms and elaborate finesse of workmanship are spoken of by Cicero as still numerous and active ten years after Catullus' death. But their artifice had lost the gloss of novelty; and the enthusiasm which greeted the appearance of the Eclogues was due less perhaps to their intrinsic excellence than to the relief with which Roman poetry shook itself free from the fetters of so rigorous and exhausting a convention.



CICERO.

Meanwhile, in the last age of the Republic, Latin prose had reached its full splendour in the hands of the most copious and versatile master of style whom the Graeco-Roman world had yet produced. The claims of Cicero to a place among the first rank of Roman statesmen have been fiercely canvassed by modern critics; and both in oratory and philosophy some excess of veneration once paid to him has been replaced by an equally excessive depreciation. The fault in both estimates lay in the fact that they were alike based on secondary issues. Cicero's unique and imperishable glory is not, as he thought himself, that of having put down the revolutionary movement of Catiline, nor, as later ages thought, that of having rivalled Demosthenes in the Second Philippic, or confuted atheism in the De Natura Deorum. It is that he created a language which remained for sixteen centuries that of the civilised world, and used that language to create a style which nineteen centuries have not replaced, and in some respects have scarcely altered. He stands in prose, like Virgil in poetry, as the bridge between the ancient and modern world. Before his time, Latin prose was, from a wide point of view, but one among many local ancient dialects. As it left his hands, it had become a universal language, one which had definitely superseded all others, Greek included, as the type of civilised expression.

Thus the apparently obsolete criticism which ranked Cicero together with Plato and Demosthenes, if not above them, was based on real facts, though it may be now apparent that it gave them a wrong interpretation. Even Hellenists may admit with but slight reluctance that the prose of the great Attic writers is, like the sculpture of their contemporary artists, a thing remote from modern life, requiring much training and study for its appreciation, and confined at the best to a limited circle. But Ciceronian prose is practically the prose of the human race; not only of the Roman empire of the first and second centuries, but of Lactantius and Augustine, of the mediaeval Church, of the earlier and later Renaissance, and even now, when the Renaissance is a piece of past history, of the modern world to which the Renaissance was the prelude.

The life of Cicero as a man of letters may be divided into four periods, which, though not of course wholly distinct from one another, may be conveniently treated as separate for the purpose of criticism. The first is that of his immature early writings—poems, treatises on rhetoric, and forensic speeches—covering the period from his boyhood in the Civil wars, to the first consulship of Pompeius and Crassus, in 70 B.C. The second, covering his life as an active statesman of the first prominence, begins with the Verrine orations of that year, and goes down to the consulship of Julius Caesar, in 59 B.C. These ten years mark his culmination as an orator; and there is no trace in them of any large literary work except in the field of oratory. In the next year came his exile, from which indeed he returned within a twelvemonth, but as a broken statesman. From this point to the outbreak of the Civil war in 50 B.C., the third period continues the record of his great speeches; but they are no longer at the old height, nor do they occupy his full energy; and now he breaks new ground in two fields with works of extraordinary brilliance, the De Oratore and the De Republica. During the heat of the Civil war there follows a period of comparative silence, but for his private correspondence; then comes the fourth and final period, perhaps the most brilliant of all, the four years from 46 B.C. to his death in 43 B.C. The few speeches of the years 46 and 45 show but the ghost of former splendours; he was turning perforce to other subjects. The political philosophy of the De Republica is resumed in the De Legibus; the De Oratore is continued by the history of Roman oratory known as the Brutus. Then, as if realising that his true work in life was to mould his native language into a vehicle of abstract thought, he sets to work with amazing swiftness and copiousness to reproduce a whole series of Greek philosophical treatises, in a style which, for flexibility and grace, recalls the Greek of the best period—the De Finibus, the Academics, the Tusculans, the De Natura Deorum, the De Divinatione, the De Officiis. Concurrently with these, he continues to throw off further manuals of the theory and practice of oratory, intended in the first instance for the use of the son who proved so thankless a pupil, the Partitiones Oratoriae, the Topica, the De Optimo Genere Oratorum. Meanwhile, the Roman world had again been plunged into civil war by the assassination of Caesar. Cicero's political influence was no longer great, but it was still worth the while of younger and more unscrupulous statesmen to avail themselves of his eloquence by assumed deference and adroit flattery. The series of fourteen speeches delivered at Rome against Marcus Antonius, between September, 44, and April, 43 B.C., were the last outburst of free Roman oratory before the final extinction of the Republic. That even at the time there was a sense of their unreality—of their being rhetorical exercises to interest the capital while the real issues of the period were being fought out elsewhere—is indicated by the name that from the first they went under, the Philippics. In the epoch of the Verrines and the Catilinarians it had not been necessary to find titles for the weapons of political warfare out of old Greek history. Yet, in spite of this unreality, and of the decline they show in the highest oratorical qualities, the Philippics still remain a noble ruin of eloquence.

Oratory at Rome had, as we have already seen, attained a high degree of perfection when Cicero entered on public life. Its golden age was indeed, in the estimation of some critics, already over; old men spoke with admiring regret of the speeches of the younger Scipio and of Gaius Gracchus; and the death of the great pair of friendly rivals, Crassus and Antonius, left no one at the moment who could be called their equal. But admirable as these great orators had been, there was still room for a higher formal perfection, a more exhaustive and elaborate technique, without any loss of material qualities. Closer and more careful study led the orators of the next age into one of two opposed, or rather complementary styles, the Attic and Asiatic; the calculated simplicity of the one being no less artificial than the florid ornament of the other. At an early age Cicero, with the intuition of genius, realised that he must not attach himself to either school. A fortunate delicacy of health led him to withdraw for two years, at the age of seven and twenty, from the practice at the bar, in which he was already becoming famous; and in the schools of Athens and Rhodes he obtained a larger view of his art, both in theory and practice, and returned to Rome to form, not to follow, a style. Quintus Hortensius Hortalus, the foremost representative of the Asiatic school, was then at the height of his forensic reputation. Within a year or two Cicero was recognised as at least his equal: it is to the honour of both, that the eclipse of Hortensius by his younger rival brought no jealousy or alienation; up to the death of Hortensius, about the outbreak of the Civil war, they remained good friends. Years afterwards Cicero inscribed with his name the treatise, now lost, but made famous to later ages by having been one of the great turning-points in the life of St. Augustine[4], which he wrote in praise of philosophy as an introduction to the series of his philosophical works.

The years which followed Cicero's return from the East were occupied, with the single break of his quaestorship in Sicily, by hard and continuous work at the bar. His speeches of this date, being non- political, have for the most part not been preserved. The two still imperfectly extant, the Pro Roscio Comoedo of 76, and the Pro Tullio of 72 B.C., form, together with two other speeches dating from before his visit to the East, the Pro Quinctio and Pro Roscio Amerino, and, with his juvenile treatise on rhetoric known as the De Inventione, the body of prose composition which represents the first of his four periods. These early speeches are carefully composed according to the scholastic canons then in vogue, the hard legal style of the older courts alternating with passages of carefully executed artificial ornament. Their chief interest is one of contrast with his matured style; for they show, no doubt with much accuracy, what the general level of oratory was out of which the great Ciceronian eloquence sprang.

In 70 B.C., at the age of thirty-six, Cicero at last found his great chance, and seized it. The impeachment of Verres for maladministration in the government of Sicily was a political trial of great constitutional importance. It was undertaken at the direct encouragement of Pompeius, who had entered on his first or democratic consulate, and was indirectly a formidable attack both on the oligarchic administration of the provinces and on the senatorian jury-panels, in whose hands the Sullan constitution had placed the only check upon misgovernment. The defence of Verres was undertaken by Hortensius; the selection of Cicero as chief counsel for the prosecution by the democratic leaders was a public recognition of him as the foremost orator on the Pompeian side. He threw himself into the trial with all his energy. After his opening speech, and the evidence which followed, Verres threw up his defence and went into exile. This, of course, brought the case to an end; but the cause turned on larger issues than his particular guilt or innocence. The whole of the material prepared against him was swiftly elaborated by Cicero into five great orations, and published as a political document. These orations, the Second Action against Verres as they are called, were at once the most powerful attack yet made on the working of the Sullan constitution, and the high-water mark of the earlier period of Cicero's eloquence. It was not till some years later that his oratory culminated; but he never excelled these speeches in richness and copiousness of style, in ease and lucidity of exposition, and in power of dealing with large masses of material. He at once became an imposing political force; perhaps it was hardly realised till later how incapable that force was of going straight or of bearing down opposition. The series of political and semi-political speeches of the next ten years, down to his exile, represent for the time the history of Rome; and together with these we now begin the series of his private letters. The year of his praetorship, 66 B.C., is marked by the two orations which are on the whole his greatest, one public and the other private. The first, the speech known as the Pro Lege Manilia, which should really be described as the panegyric of Pompeius and of the Roman people, does not show any profound appreciation of the problems which then confronted the Republic; but the greatness of the Republic itself never found a more august interpreter. The stately passage in which Italy and the subject provinces are called on to bear witness to the deeds of Pompeius breathes the very spirit of an imperial race. Throughout this and the other great speeches of the period "the Roman People" is a phrase that keeps perpetually recurring with an effect like that of a bourdon stop. As the eye glances down the page, Consul Populi Romani, Imperium Populi Romani, Fortuna Populi Romani, glitter out of the voluminous periods with a splendour that hardly any other words could give.

The other great speech of this year, Cicero's defence of Aulus Cluentius Habitus of Larinum on a charge of poisoning, has in its own style an equal brilliance of language. The story it unfolds of the ugly tragedies of middle-class life in the capital and the provincial Italian towns is famous as one of the leading documents for the social life of Rome. According to Quintilian, Cicero confessed afterwards that his client was not innocent, and that the elaborate and impressive story which he unfolds with such vivid detail was in great part an invention of his own. This may be only bar gossip; true or false, his defence is an extraordinary masterpiece of oratorical skill.

The manner in which Cicero conducted a defence when the cause was not so grave or so desperate is well illustrated by a speech delivered four years later, the Pro Archia. The case here was one of contested citizenship. The defendant, one of the Greek men of letters who lived in great numbers at Rome, had been for years intimate with the literary circle among the Roman aristocracy. This intimacy gained him the privilege of being defended by the first of Roman orators, who would hardly, in any other circumstances, have troubled himself with so trivial a case. But the speech Cicero delivered is one of the permanent glories of Latin literature. The matter immediately at issue is summarily dealt with in a few pages of cursory and rather careless argument; then the scholar lets himself go. Among the many praises of literature which great men of letters have delivered, there is none, ancient or modern, more perfect than this; some of the sentences have remained ever since the abiding motto and blason of literature itself. Haec studia, adolescentiam agunt, senectutem oblectant, secundas res ornant, adversis perfugium ac solatium praebent, delectant domi, non impediunt foris, pernoctant nobiscum, peregrinantur, rusticantur; and again, Nullam enim virtus aliam mercedem laborum periculorumque desiderat, praeter hanc laudis et gloriae; qua quidem detracta, iudices, quid est quod in hoc tam exiguo vitae curriculo, et tam brevi, tantis nos in laboribus exerceamus? Certe, si nihil animus praesentiret in posterum, et si quibus regionibus vitae spatium circumscriptum est, eisdem omnes cogitationes terminaret suas, nec tantis se laboribus frangeret, neque tot curis vigiliisque angeretur, neque teties de vita ipsa dimicaret. Strange words these to fall from a pleader's lips in the dusty atmosphere of the praetor's court! non fori, neque iudiciali consuetudine, says Cicero himself, in the few words of graceful apology with which the speech ends. But, in truth, as he well knew, he was not speaking to the respectable gentlemen on the benches before him. He addressed a larger audience; posterity, and the civilised world.

The Pro Archia foreshadows already the change which was bound to take place in Cicero's life, and which was precipitated by his exile four years later. More and more he found himself forced away from the inner circle of politics, and turned to the larger field where he had an undisputed supremacy, of political and ethical philosophy clothed in the splendid prose of which he had now obtained the full mastery. The roll of his great speeches is indeed continued after his return from exile; but even in the greatest, the Pro Sestio, the Pro Caelio, the De Provinciis Consularibus of 56, or the In Pisonem and Pro Plancio of 55 B.C., something of the old tone is missing; it is as though the same voice spoke on a smaller range of notes and with less flexibility of cadence. And now alongside of the speeches begins the series of his works on oratory and philosophy, with the De Oratore of 55, and the De Republica of 54 B.C.

The three books De Oratore are perhaps the most finished examples of the Ciceronian style. The subject (which cannot be said of all the subjects he deals with) was one of which, over all its breadth and in all its details, he was completely master; and, thus left unhampered by any difficulties with his material, he could give full scope to his brilliant style and diction. The arrangement of the work follows the strict scholastic divisions; but the form of dialogue into which it is thrown, and which is managed with really great skill, avoids the tediousness incident to a systematic treatise. The principal persons of the dialogue are the two great orators of the preceding age, Lucius Crassus and Marcus Antonius; this is only one sign out of many that Cicero was more and more living in a sort of dream of the past, that past of his own youth which was still full of traditions of the earlier Republic.

The De Oratore was so complete a masterpiece that its author probably did not care to weaken its effect by continuing at the time to bring out any of the supplementary treatises on Roman oratory for which his library, and still more his memory, had accumulated immense quantities of material. In the treatise De Republica, which was begun in 54 B.C., though not published till three years later, he carried the achievement of Latin prose into a larger and less technical field—that of the philosophy of politics. Again the scene of the dialogue is laid in a past age; but now he goes further back than he had done in the De Oratore, to the circle of the younger Scipio. The work was received, when published, with immense applause; but its loss in the Middle Ages is hardly one of those which are most seriously to be deplored, except in so far as the second and fifth books may have preserved real information on the early history of the Roman State and the development of Roman jurisprudence. Large fragments were recovered early in the present century from a palimpsest, itself incomplete, on which the work of Cicero had been expunged to make room for the commentary of St. Augustine on the Psalms. The famous Somnium Scipionis, with which (in imitation of the vision of Er in Plato's Republic) the work ended, has been independently preserved. Though it flagrantly challenges comparison with the unequalled original, it has, nevertheless, especially in its opening and closing passages, a grave dignity which is purely Roman, and characteristically Ciceronian. Perhaps some of the elaborate fantasies of De Quincey (himself naturally a Ciceronian, and saturated in the rhythms and cadences of the finest Latin prose) are the nearest parallel to this piece in modern English. The opening words of Scipio's narrative, Cum in Africam venissem, Mania Manilio consuli ad quartam legionem tribunus, come on the ear like the throb of a great organ; and here and there through the piece come astonishing phrases of the same organ-music: Ostendebat autem Karthaginem de excelso et pleno stellarum inlustri et claro quodam loco.... Quis in reliquis orientis aut obeuntis solis, ultimis aut aquilonis austrive partibus, tuum nomen audiet?... Deum te igitur scito esse, siquidem deus est, qui viget, qui sentit, qui meminit, qui providet—hardly from the lips of Virgil himself does the noble Latin speech issue with a purer or a more majestic flow.

During the next few years the literary activity of Cicero suffered a check. The course of politics at Rome filled him with profound disappointment and disgust. Public issues, it became more and more plain, waited for their determination, not on the senate-house or the forum, but on the sword. The shameful collapse of his defence of Milo in 52 B.C. must have stung a vanity even as well-hardened as Cicero's to the quick; and his only important abstract work of this period, the De Legibus, seems to have been undertaken with little heart and carried out without either research or enthusiasm. His proconsulate in Cilicia in 51 and 50 B.C. was occupied with the tedious details of administration and petty warfare; six months after his return the Civil war broke out, and, until permitted to return to Rome by Caesar in the autumn of 47 B.C., he was practically an exile, away from his beloved Rome and his more beloved library, hating and despising the ignorant incompetence of his colleagues, and looking forward with almost equal terror to the conclusive triumph of his own or the opposite party. When at last he returned, his mind was still agitated and unsettled. The Pompeian party held Africa and Spain with large armies; their open threats that all who had come to terms with Caesar would be proscribed as public enemies were not calculated to restore Cicero's confidence. The decisive battle of Thapsus put an end to this uncertainty; and meanwhile Cicero had resumed work on his De Legibus, and had once more returned to the study of oratory in one of the most interesting of his writings, the Brutus de claris Oratoribus, in which he gives a vivid and masterly sketch of the history of Roman oratory down to his own time, filled with historical matter and admirable sketches of character.

The spring of 45 B.C. brought with it two events of momentous importance to Cicero: the final collapse of the armed opposition to Caesar at the battle of Munda, and the loss, by the death of his daughter Tullia, of the one deep affection of his inner life. Henceforth it seemed as if politics had ceased to exist, even had he the heart to interest himself in them. He fell back more completely than ever upon philosophy; and the year that followed (45-44 B.C.) is, in mere quantity of literary production, as well as in the abiding effect on the world of letters of the work he then produced, the annus mirabilis of his life. Two at least of the works of this year, the De Gloria and the De Virtutibus, have perished, though the former survived long enough to be read by Petrarch; but there remain extant (besides one or two other pieces of slighter importance) the De Finibus, the Academics, the Tusculans, the De Natura Deorum, the De Divinatione, the De Fato, the De Officiis, and the two exquisite essays De Senectute and De Amicitia.

It is the work of this astonishing year which, on the whole, represents Cicero's permanent contribution to letters and to human thought. If his philosophy seems now to have exhausted its influence, it is because it has in great measure been absorbed into the fabric of civilised society. Ciceronianism, at the period of the Renaissance, and even in the eighteenth century, meant more than the impulse towards florid and sumptuous style. It meant all that is conveyed by the Latin word humanitas; the title of "the humaner letters," by which Latin was long designated in European universities, indicated that in the great Latin writers—in Cicero and Virgil preeminently—a higher type of human life was to be found than existed in the literature of other countries: as though at Rome, and in the first century before Christ, the political and social environment had for the first time produced men such as men would wish to be, at all events for the ideals of Western Europe. To less informed or less critical ages than our own, the absolute contribution of Cicero to ethics and metaphysics seemed comparable to that of the great Greek thinkers; the De Natura Deorum was taken as a workable argument against atheism, and the thin and wire-drawn discussions of the Academics were studied with an attention hardly given to the founder of the Academy. When a sounder historical method brought these writings into their real proportion, it was inevitable that the scale should swing violently to the other side; and for a time no language was too strong in which to attack the reputation of the "phrase-maker," the "journalist," whose name had once dominated Europe. The violence of this attack has now exhausted itself; and we may be content, without any exaggerated praise or blame, to note the actual historical effect of these writings through many ages, and the actual impression made on the world by the type of character which they embodied and, in a sense, created. In this view, Cicero represents a force that no historian can neglect, and the importance of which it is not easy to overestimate. He did for the Empire and the Middle Ages what Lucretius, with his far greater philosophic genius, totally failed to do—created forms of thought in which the life of philosophy grew, and a body of expression which alone made its growth in the Latin-speaking world possible; and to that world he presented a political ideal which profoundly influenced the whole course of European history even up to the French Revolution. Without Cicero, the Middle Ages would not have had Augustine or Aquinas; but, without him, the movement which annulled the Middle Ages would have had neither Mirabeau nor Pitt.

The part of Cicero's work which the present age probably finds the most interesting, and the interest of which is, in the nature of things, perennial, has been as yet left unmentioned. It consists of the collections of his private letters from the year 68 B.C. to within a few months of his death. The first of these collections contains his letters to the friend and adviser, Titus Pomponius Atticus, with whom, when they were not both in Rome, he kept up a constant and an extremely intimate correspondence. Atticus, whose profession, as far as he had one, was that of a banker, was not only a man of wide knowledge and great political sagacity, but a refined critic and an author of considerable merit. The publishing business, which he conducted as an adjunct to his principal profession, made him of great use to Cicero by the rapid multiplication in his workshops of copies of the speeches or other writings for which there was an immediate public demand. But the intimacy was much more than that of the politician and his confidential adviser, or the author and his publisher. Cicero found in him a friend with whom he could on all occasions be perfectly frank and at his ease, and on whose sober judgment and undemonstrative, but perfectly sincere, attachment his own excitable and emotional nature could always throw itself without reserve. About four hundred of the letters were published by Atticus several years after Cicero's death. It must always be a source of regret that he could not, or, at all events, did not, publish the other half of the correspondence; many of the letters, especially the brief confidential notes, have the tantalising interest of a conversation where one of the speakers is inaudible. It is the letters to Atticus that place Cicero at the head of all epistolary stylists. We should hardly guess from the more formal and finished writings what the real man was, with his excitable Italian temperament, his swift power of phrase, his sensitive affections.

The other large collection of Cicero's letters, the Epistolae ad Familiares, was preserved and edited by his secretary, Tiro. They are, of course, of very unequal value and interest. Some are merely formal documents; others, like those to his wife and family in book xiv., are as intimate and as valuable as any we possess. The two smaller collections, the letters to his brother Quintus, and those to Marcus Brutus, of which a mere fragment is extant, are of little independent value. The Epistolae ad Familiares include, besides Cicero's own letters, a large number of letters addressed to him by various correspondents; a whole book, and that not the least interesting, consists of those sent to him during his Cilician proconsulate by the brilliant and erratic young aristocrat, Marcus Caelius Rufus, who was the temporary successor of Catullus as the favoured lover of Clodia. Full of the political and social gossip of the day, they are written in a curiously slipshod but energetic Latin, which brings before us even more vividly than Cicero's own the familiar language of the upper classes at Rome at the time. Another letter, which can hardly be passed over in silence in any history of Latin literature, is the noble message of condolence to Cicero on the death of his beloved Tullia, by the statesman and jurist, Servius Sulpicius Rufus, who carried on in this age the great tradition of the Scaevolae.

It is due to these priceless collections of letters, more than to any other single thing, that our knowledge of the Ciceronian age is so complete and so intimate. At every point they reinforce and vitalise the more elaborate literary productions of the period. The art of letter- writing suddenly rose in Cicero's hands to its full perfection. It fell to the lot of no later Roman to have at once such mastery over familiar style, and contemporary events of such engrossing and ever-changing interest on which to exercise it. All the great letter-writers of more modern ages have more or less, consciously or unconsciously, followed the Ciceronian model. England of the eighteenth century was peculiarly rich in them; but Horace Walpole, Cowper, Gray himself, would willingly have acknowledged Cicero as their master.

Caesar's assassination on the 15th of March, 44 B.C., plunged the political situation into a worse chaos than had ever been reached during the Civil wars. For several months it was not at all plain how things were tending, or what fresh combinations were to rise out of the welter in which a vacillating and incapable senate formed the only constitutional rallying-point. In spite of all his long-cherished delusions, Cicero must have known that this way no hope lay; when at last he flung himself into the conflict, and broke away from his literary seclusion to make the fierce series of attacks upon Antonius which fill the winter of 44-43 B.C., he may have had some vague hopes from the Asiatic legions which once before, in Sulla's hands, had checked the revolution, and some from the power of his own once unequalled eloquence; but on the whole he seems to have undertaken the contest chiefly from the instinct that had become a tradition, and from his deep personal repugnance to Antonius. The fourteen Philippics add little to his reputation as an orator, and still less to his credit as a statesman. The old watchwords are there, but their unreality is now more obvious; the old rhetorical skill, but more coarsely and less effectively used. The last Philippic was delivered to advocate a public thanksgiving for the victory gained over Antonius by the consuls, Hirtius and Pansa. A month later, the consuls were both dead, and their two armies had passed into the control of the young Octavianus. In autumn the triumvirate was constituted, with an armed force of forty legions behind it. The proscription lists were issued in November. On the 7th of December, after some aimless wandering that hardly was a serious effort to escape, Cicero was overtaken near Formiae by a small party of Antonian troops. He was killed, and his head sent to Rome and displayed in the senate-house. There was nothing left for which he could have wished to live. In the five centuries of the Republic there never had been a darker time for Rome. Cicero had outlived almost all the great men of his age. The newer generation, so far as they had revealed themselves, were of a type from which those who had inherited the great traditions of the Republic shrank with horror. Caesar Octavianus, the future master of the world, was a delicate boy of twenty, already an object of dislike and distrust to nearly all his allies. Virgil, a poet still voiceless, was twenty-seven.



VII.

PROSE OF THE CICERONIAN AGE: CAESAR AND SALLUST.

Fertile as the Ciceronian age was in authorship of many kinds, there was only one person in it whose claim to be placed in an equal rank with Cicero could ever be seriously entertained; and this was, strangely enough, one who was as it were only a man of letters by accident, and whose literary work is but among the least of his titles to fame—Julius Caesar himself. That anything written by that remarkable man must be interesting and valuable in a high degree is obvious; but the combination of literary power of the very first order with his unparallelled military and political genius is perhaps unique in history.

It is one of the most regrettable losses in Latin literature that Caesar's speeches and letters have almost completely perished. Of the latter several collections were made after his death, and were extant in the second century; but none are now preserved, except a few brief notes to Cicero, of which copies were sent by him at the time to Atticus. The fragments of his speeches are even less considerable; yet, according to the unanimous testimony both of contemporary and of later critics, they were unexcelled in that age of great oratory. He used the Latin language with a purity and distinction that no one else could equal. And along with this quality, the mira elegantia of Quintilian, his oratory had some kind of severe magnificence which we can partly guess at from his extant writings—magnifica et generosa, says Cicero; facultas dicendi imperatoria is the phrase of a later and able critic.

Of Caesar's other lost writings little need be said. In youth, like most of his contemporaries, he wrote poems, including a tragedy, of which Tacitus drily observes that they were not better than those of Cicero. A grammatical treatise, De Analogia, was composed by him during one of his long journeys between Northern Italy and the headquarters of his army in Gaul during his proconsulate. A work on astronomy, apparently written in connection with his reform of the calendar, two pamphlets attacking Cato, and a collection of apophthegms, have also disappeared. But we possess what were by far the most important of his writings, his famous memoirs of the Gallic and Civil Wars.

The seven books of Commentaries on the Gallic War were written in Caesar's winter quarters in Gaul, after the capture of Alesia and the final suppression of the Arvernian revolt. They were primarily intended to serve an immediate political purpose, and are indeed a defence, framed with the most consummate skill, of the author's whole Gallic policy and of his constitutional position. That Caesar was able to do this without, so far as can be judged, violating, or even to any large degree suppressing facts, does equal credit to the clear-sightedness of his policy and to his extraordinary literary power. From first to last there is not a word either of self-laudation or of innuendo; yet at the end we find that, by the use of the simplest and most lucid narration, in which hardly a fact or a detail can be controverted, Caesar has cleared his motives and justified his conduct with a success the more complete because his tone is so temperate and seemingly so impartial. An officer of his staff who was with him during that winter, and who afterwards added an eighth book to the Commentaries to complete the history of the Gallic proconsulate, has recorded the ease and swiftness with which the work was written. Caesar issued it under the unpretending name of Commentarii—"notes"—on the events of his campaigns, which might be useful as materials for history; but there was no exaggeration in the splendid compliment paid it a few years later by Cicero, that no one in his senses would think of recasting a work whose succinct, perspicuous, and brilliant style—pura et inlustris brevitas—has been the model and the despair of later historians.

The three books of Commentaries on the Civil War show the same merits in a much less marked degree. They were not published in Caesar's lifetime, and do not seem to have received from him any close or careful revision. The literary incompetence of the Caesarian officers into whose hands they fell after his death, and one or more of whom must be responsible for their publication, is sufficiently evident from their own awkward attempts at continuing them in narratives of the Alexandrine, African, and Spanish campaigns; and whether from the carelessness of the original editors or from other reasons, the text is in a most deplorable condition. Yet this is not in itself sufficient to account for many positive misstatements. Either the editors used a very free hand in altering the rough manuscript, or—which is not in itself unlikely, and is borne out by other facts—Caesar's own prodigious memory and incomparable perspicuity became impaired in those five years of all but superhuman achievement, when, with the whole weight of the civilised world on his shoulders, feebly served by second-rate lieutenants and hampered at every turn by the open or passive opposition of nearly the whole of the trained governing classes, he conquered four great Roman armies, secured Egypt and Upper Asia and annexed Numidia to the Republic, carried out the unification of Italy, reestablished public order and public credit, and left at his death the foundations of the Empire securely laid for his successor.

The loyal and capable officer, Aulus Hirtius (who afterwards became consul, and was killed in battle before Mutina a year after Caesar's murder), did his best to supplement his master's narrative. He seems to have been a well-educated man, but without any particular literary capacity. It was uncertain, even to the careful research of Suetonius, whether the narrative of the campaigns in Egypt and Pontus, known as the Bellum Alexandrinum, was written by him or by another officer of Caesar's, Gaius Oppius. The books on the campaigns of Africa and Spain which follow are by different hands: the former evidently by some subaltern officer who took part in the war, and very interesting as showing the average level of intelligence and culture among Roman officers of the period; the latter by another author and in very inferior Latin, full of grammatical solecisms and popular idioms oddly mixed up with epic phrases from Ennius, who was still, it must be remembered, the great Latin school-book. It is these curious fragments of history which more than anything else help us to understand the rapid decay of Latin prose after the golden period. Under the later Republic the educated class and the governing class had, broadly speaking, been the same. The Civil wars, in effect, took administration away from their hands, transferring it to the new official class, of which these subalterns of Caesar's represent the type; and this change was confirmed by the Empire. The result was a sudden and long-continued divorce between political activity on the one hand and the profession of letters on the other. For a century after the establishment of the Empire the aristocracy, which had produced the great literature of the Republic, remained forcibly or sullenly silent; and the new hierarchy was still at the best only half educated. The professional man of letters was at first fostered and subsidised; but even before the death of Augustus State patronage of literature had fallen into abeyance, while the cultured classes fell more and more back on the use of Greek. The varying fortunes of this struggle between Greek and literary Latin as it had been formed under the Republic, belong to a later period: at present we must return to complete a general survey of the prose of the Ciceronian age.

Historical writing at Rome, as we have seen, had hitherto been in the form either of annals or memoirs. The latter were, of course, rather materials for history than history itself, even when they were not excluded from Quintilian's famous definition of history[5] by being composed primarily as political pamphlets. The former had so far been attempted on too large a scale, and with insufficient equipment either of research or style, to attain any permanent merit. In the ten years after Caesar's death Latin history was raised to a higher level by the works of Sallust, the first scientific historian whom Italy had produced.

Gaius Sallustius Crispus of Amiternum in Central Italy belonged to that younger generation of which Marcus Antonius and Marcus Caelius Rufus were eminent examples. Clever and dissipated, they revolted alike from the severe traditions and the narrow class prejudices of the constitutional party, and Caesar found in them enthusiastic, if somewhat imprudent and untrustworthy, supporters. Sallust was expelled from the senate just before the outbreak of the Civil war; was reinstated by Caesar, and entrusted with high posts in Illyria and Italy; and was afterwards sent by him to administer Africa with the rank of proconsul. There he accumulated a large fortune, and, after Caesar's death, retired to private life in his beautiful gardens on the Quirinal, and devoted himself to historical study. The largest and most important of his works, the five books of Historiae, covering a period of about ten years from the death of Sulla, is only extant in inconsiderable fragments; but his two monographs on the Jugurthine war and the Catilinarian conspiracy, which have been preserved, place him beyond doubt in the first rank of Roman historians.

Sallust took Thucydides as his principal literary model. His reputation has no doubt suffered by the comparison which this choice makes inevitable; and though Quintilian did not hesitate to claim for him a substantial equality with the great Athenian, no one would now press the parallel, except in so far as Sallust's formal treatment of his subject affords interesting likenesses or contrasts with the Thucydidean manner. In his prefatory remarks, his elaborately conceived and executed speeches, his reflections on character, and his terse method of narration, Sallust closely follows the manner of his master. He even copies his faults in a sort of dryness of style and an excessive use of antithesis. But we cannot feel, in reading the Catiline or the Jugurtha, that it is the work of a writer of the very first intellectual power. Yet the two historians have this in common, which is not borrowed by the later from the earlier,—that they approach and handle their subject with the mature mind, the insight and common sense of the grown man, where their predecessors had been comparatively like children. Both are totally free from superstition; neither allows his own political views to obscure his vision of facts, of men as they were and events as they happened. The respect for truth, which is the first virtue of the historian, is stronger in Sallust than in any of his more brilliant successors. His ideal in the matter of research and documentary evidence was, for that age, singularly high. In the Catiline he writes very largely from direct personal knowledge of men and events; but the Jugurtha, which deals with a time two generations earlier than the date of its composition, involved wide inquiry and much preparation. He had translations made from original documents in the Carthaginian language; and a complete synopsis of Roman history, for reference during the progress of his work, was compiled for him by a Greek secretary. Such pains were seldom taken by a Latin historian.

The last of the Ciceronians, Sallust is also in a sense the first of the imperial prose-writers. His style, compressed, rhetorical, and very highly polished, is in strong contrast to the graceful and fluid periods which were then, and for some time later continued to be, the predominant fashion, and foreshadows the manner of Seneca or Tacitus. His archaism in the use of pure Latin, and, alongside of it, his free adoption of Grecisms, are the first open sign of two movements which profoundly affected the prose of the earlier and later empire. The acrid critic of the Augustan age, Asinius Pollio, accused him of having had collections of obsolete words and phrases made for his use out of Cato and the older Roman writers. For a short time he was eclipsed by the glowing and opulent style of Livy; but Livy formed no school, and Sallust on the whole remained in the first place. The line of Martial, primus Romana Crispus in historia, expresses the settled opinion held of him down to the final decay of letters; and even in the Middle Ages he remained widely read and highly esteemed.

Contemporary with Sallust in this period of transition between the Ciceronian and the Augustan age is Cornelius Nepos (circ. 99-24 B.C.). In earlier life he was one of the circle of Catullus, and after Cicero's death was one of the chief friends of Atticus, of whom a brief biography, which he wrote after Atticus' death, is still extant. Unlike Sallust, Nepos never took part in public affairs, but carried on throughout a long life the part of a man of letters, honest and kindly, but without any striking originality or ability. In him we are on the outer fringe of pure literature; and it is no doubt purposely that Quintilian wholly omits him from the list of Roman historians. Of his numerous writings on history, chronology, and grammar, we only possess a fragment of one, his collection of Roman and foreign biographies, entitled De Viris Illustribus. Of this work there is extant one complete section, De Excellentibus Ducibus Exterarum Gentium, and two lives from another section, those of Atticus and the younger Cato. The accident of their convenient length and the simplicity of their language has made them for generations a common school-book for beginners in Latin; were it not for this, there can be little doubt that Nepos, like the later epitomators, Eutropius or Aurelius Victor, would be hardly known except to professional scholars, and perhaps only to be read in the pages of some Corpus Sciptorum Romanorum. The style of these little biographies is unpretentious, and the language fairly pure, though without any great command of phrase. A theory was once held that what we possess is merely a later epitome from the lost original. But for this there is no rational support. The language and treatment, such as they are (and they do not sink to the level of the histories of the African and Spanish wars), are of this, and not of a later age, and quite consonant with the good- natured contempt which Nepos met at the hands of later Roman critics. The chief interest of the work is perhaps the clearness with which it enforces the truth we are too apt to forget, that the great writers were in their own age, as now, unique, and that there is no such thing as a widely diffused level of high literary excellence.

As remote from literature in the higher sense were the innumerable writings of the Ciceronian age on science, art, antiquities, grammar, rhetoric, and a hundred miscellaneous subjects, which are, for the most part, known only from notices in the writings of later commentators and encyclopedists. Foremost among the voluminous authors of this class was the celebrated antiquarian, Marcus Terentius Varro, whose long and laborious life, reaching from two years after the death of the elder Cato till the final establishment of the Empire, covers and overlaps the entire Ciceronian age. Of the six or seven hundred volumes which issued from his pen, and which formed an inexhaustible quarry for his successors, nearly all are lost. The most important of them were the one hundred and fifty books of Saturae Menippeae, miscellanies in prose and verse in the manner which had been originated by Menippus of Gadara, the master of the poet Meleager, and which had at once obtained an enormous popularity throughout the whole of the Greek-speaking world; the forty- one books of Antiquitates Rerum Humanarum et Divinarum, the standard work on the religious and secular antiquities of Rome down to the time of Augustine; the fifteen books of Imagines, biographical sketches, with portraits, of celebrated Greeks and Romans, the first certain instance in history of the publication of an illustrated book; the twenty-five books De Lingua Latina, of which six are extant in an imperfect condition; and the treatise De Re Rustica, which we possess in an almost complete state. This last work was written by him at the age of eighty. It is in the form of a dialogue, and is not without descriptive and dramatic power. The tediousness which characterised all Varro's writing is less felt where the subject is one of which he had a thorough practical knowledge, and which gave ample scope for the vein of rough but not ungenial humour which he inherited from Cato.

Other names of this epoch have left no permanent mark on literature. The precursors of Sallust in history seem, like the precursors of Cicero in philosophy, to have approached their task with little more equipment than that of the ordinary amateur. The great orator Hortensius wrote Annals (probably in the form of memoirs of his own time), which are only known from a reference to them in a later history written in the reign of Tiberius. Atticus, who had an interest in literature beyond that of the mere publisher, drew up a sort of handbook of Roman history, which is repeatedly mentioned by Cicero. Cicero's own brother Quintus, who passed for a man of letters, composed a work of the same kind; the tragedies with which he relieved the tedium of winter-quarters in Gaul were, however, translations from the Greek, not originals. Cicero's private secretary, Marcus Tullius Tiro, best known by the system of shorthand which he invented or improved, and which for long remained the basis of a standard code, is also mentioned as the author of works on grammar, and, as has already been noticed, edited a collection of his master's letters after his death. Decimus Laberius, a Roman of equestrian family, and Publilius Syrus, a naturalised native of Antioch, wrote mimes, which were performed with great applause, and gave a fugitive literary importance to this trivial form of dramatic entertainment. A collection of sentences which passes under the name of the latter was formed out of his works under the Empire, and enlarged from other sources in the Middle Ages. It supplies many admirable instances of the terse vigour of the Roman popular philosophy; some of these lines, like the famous—

Bene vixit is qui potuit cum voluit mori,

or—

Index damnatur ubi nocens absolvitur,

or—

O vitam misero longam, felici brevem!

or the perpetually misquoted—

Stultum facit fortuna, quem vult perdere,

have sunk deeper and been more widely known than almost anything else written in Latin. Among the few poets who succeeded the circle of Catullus, the only one of interest is Publius Terentius Varro, known as Varro Atacinus from his birthplace on the banks of the Aude in Provence, the first of the long list of Transalpine writers who filled Rome at a later period. Besides the usual translations and adaptations from Alexandrian originals, and an elaborate cosmography, he practised his considerable talent in hexameter verse both in epic and satiric poetry, and did something to clear the way in metrical technique for both Horace and Virgil. With these names, among a crowd of others even more vague and shadowy, the literature of the Roman Republic closes. A new generation was already at the doors.



II.

THE AUGUSTAN AGE.



VIRGIL.

Publius Vergilius Maro was born at the village of Andes, near Mantua, on the 15th of October, 70 B.C. The province of Cisalpine Gaul, though not formally incorporated with Italy till twenty years later, had before this become thoroughly Romanised, and was one of the principal recruiting grounds for the legions. But the population was still, by blood and sympathy, very largely Celtic; and modern theorists are fond of tracing the new element of romance, which Virgil introduced with such momentous results into Latin poetry, to the same Celtic spirit which in later ages flowered out in the Arthurian legend, and inspired the whole creative literature of mediaeval Europe. To the countrymen of Shakespeare and Keats it will not seem necessary to assume a Celtic origin, on abstract grounds, for any new birth of this romantic element. The name Maro may or may not be Celtic; any argument founded on it is of little more relevance than the fancy which once interpreted the name of Virgil's mother, Magia Polla, into a supernatural significance, and, connecting the name Virgilius itself with the word Virgo, metamorphosed the poet into an enchanter born of a maiden mother, the Merlin of the Roman Empire.

Virgil's father was a small freeholder in Andes, who farmed his own land, practised forestry and bee-keeping, and gradually accumulated a sufficient competence to enable him to give his son—an only child, it would appear, of this marriage—the best education that the times could provide. He was sent to school at the neighbouring town of Cremona, and afterwards to Milan, the capital city of the province. At the age of seventeen he proceeded to Rome, where he studied oratory and philosophy under the best masters of the time. A tradition, which the dates make improbable, was that Gaius Octavius, afterwards the Emperor Augustus, was for a time his fellow-scholar under the rhetorician Epidius. In the classroom of the Epicurean Siro he may have made his first acquaintance with the poetry of Lucretius.

For the next ten years we know nothing of Virgil's life, which no doubt was that of a profound student. His father had died, and his mother married again, and his patrimony was sufficient to support him until a turn of the wheel of public affairs for a moment lost, and then permanently secured his fortune. After the battle of Philippi, the first task of the victorious triumvirs was to provide for the disbanding and settlement of the immense armies which had been raised for the Civil war. The lands of cities which had taken the Republican side were confiscated right and left for this purpose; among the rest, Virgil's farm, which was included in the territory of Cremona. But Virgil found in the administrator of the district, Gaius Asinius Pollio, himself a distinguished critic and man of letters, a powerful and active patron. By his influence and that of his friends, Cornelius Gallus and Alfenus Varus—the former a soldier and poet, the latter an eminent jurist, who both had been fellow-students of Virgil at Rome—Virgil was compensated by an estate in Campania, and introduced to the intimate circle of Octavianus, who, under the terms of the triumvirate, was already absolute ruler of Italy.

It was about this time that the Eclogues were published, whether separately or collectively is uncertain, though the final collection and arrangement, which is Virgil's own, can hardly be later than 38 B.C. The impression they made on the world of letters was immediate and universal. To some degree no doubt a reception was secured to them by the influence of Maecenas, the Home Minister of Octavianus, who had already taken up the line which he so largely developed in later years, of a public patron of art and letters in the interest of the new government. But had Virgil made his first public appearance merely as a Court poet, it is probable that the Eclogues would have roused little enthusiasm and little serious criticism. Their true significance seems to have been at once realised as marking the beginning of a new era; and amid the storm of criticism, laudatory and adverse, which has raged round them for so many ages since, this cardinal fact has always remained prominent. Alike to the humanists of the earlier Renaissance, who found in them the sunrise of a golden age of poetry and the achievement of the Latin conquest over Greece, and to the more recent critics of this century, for whom they represented the echo of an already exhausted convention and the beginning of the decadence of Roman poetry, the Eclogues have been the real turning-point, not only between two periods of Latin literature, but between two worlds.

The poems destined to so remarkable a significance are, in their external form, close and careful imitations of Theocritus, and have all the vices and weaknesses of imitative poetry to a degree that could not well be exceeded. Nor are these failings redeemed (as is to a certain extent true of the purely imitative work of Catullus and other poets) by any brilliant jewel-finish of workmanship. The execution is uncertain, hesitating, sometimes extraordinarily feeble. One well-known line it is impossible to explain otherwise than as a mistranslation of a phrase in Theocritus such as one would hardly expect from a well-grounded schoolboy. When Virgil follows the convention of the Greek pastoral his copy is doubly removed from nature; where he ventures on fresh impersonation or allegory of his own, it is generally weak in itself and always hopelessly out of tone with the rest. Even the versification is curiously unequal and imperfect. There are lines in more than one Eclogue which remind one in everything but their languor of the flattest parts of Lucretius. Contemporary critics even went so far as to say that the language here and there was simply not Latin.

Yet granted that all this and more than all this were true, it does not touch that specific Virgilian charm of which these poems first disclosed the secret. Already through their immature and tremulous cadences there pierces, from time to time, that note of brooding pity which is unique in the poetry of the world. The fourth and tenth Eclogues may be singled out especially as showing the new method, which almost amounted to a new human language, as they are also those where Virgil breaks away most decidedly from imitation of the Greek idyllists. The fourth Eclogue unfortunately has been so long and so deeply associated with purely adventitious ideas that it requires a considerable effort to read it as it ought to be read. The curious misconception which turned it into a prophecy of the birth of Christ outlasted in its effects any serious belief in its historical truth: even modern critics cite Isaiah for parallels, and are apt to decry it as a childish attempt to draw a picture of some actual golden age. But the Sibylline verses which suggested its contents and imagery were really but the accidental grain of dust round which the crystallization of the poem began; and the enchanted light which lingers over it is hardly distinguishable from that which saturates the Georgics. Cedet et ipse mari vector, nec nautica pinus mutabit merces—the feeling here is the same as in his mere descriptions of daily weather, like the Omnia plenis rura natant fossis atque omnis navita ponto umida vela legit; not so much a vision of a golden age as Nature herself seen through a medium of strange gold. Or again, in the tenth Eclogue, where the masque of shepherds and gods passes before the sick lover, it is through the same strange and golden air that they seem to move, and the heavy lilies of Silvanus droop in the stillness of the same unearthly day.

Seven years following on the publication of the Eclogues were spent by Virgil on the composition of the Georgics. They were published two years after the battle of Actium, being thus the first, as they are the most splendid, literary production of the Empire. They represent the art of Virgil in its matured perfection. The subject was one in which he was thoroughly at home and completely happy. His own early years had been spent in the pastures of the Mincio, among his father's cornfields and coppices and hives; and his newer residence, by the seashore near Naples in winter, and in summer at his villa in the lovely hill-country of Campania, surrounded him with all that was most beautiful in the most beautiful of lands. His delicate health made it easier for him to give his work the slow and arduous elaboration that makes the Georgics in mere technical finish the most perfect work of Latin, or perhaps of any literature. There is no trace of impatience in the work. It was in some sense a commission; but Augustus and Maecenas, if it be true that they suggested the subject, had, at all events, the sense not to hurry it. The result more than fulfilled the brilliant promise of the Eclogues. Virgil was now, without doubt or dispute, the first of contemporary poets.

But his responsibilities grew with his greatness. The scheme of a great Roman epic, which had always floated before his own mind, was now definitely and indeed urgently pressed upon him by authority which it was difficult to resist. And many elements in his own mind drew him in the same direction. Too much stress need not be laid on the passage in the sixth Eclogue—one of the rare autobiographic touches in his work—in which he alludes to his early experiments in "singing of kings and battles." Such early exercises are the common field of young poets. But the maturing of his mind, which can be traced in the Georgics, was urging him towards certain methods of art for which the epic was the only literary form that gave sufficient scope. More and more he was turning from nature to man and human life, and to the contemplation of human destiny. The growth of the psychological instinct in the Georgics is curiously visible in the episode of Aristaeus, with which the poem now ends. According to a well-authenticated tradition, the last two hundred and fifty lines of the fourth Georgic were written several years after the rest of the poem, to replace the original conclusion, which had contained the praises of his early friend, Cornelius Gallus, now dead in disgrace and proscribed from court poetry. In the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, in the later version, Virgil shows a new method and a new power. It stands between the idyl and the epic, but it is the epic method towards which it tends. No return upon the earlier manner was thenceforth possible; with many searchings of heart, with much occasional despondency and dissatisfaction, he addressed himself to the composition of the Aeneid.

The earlier national epics of Naevius and Ennius had framed certain lines for Roman epic poetry, which it was almost bound to follow. They had established the mythical connection of Rome with Troy and with the great cycle of Greek legend, and had originated the idea of making Rome itself —that Fortuna Urbis which later stood in the form of a golden statue in the imperial bedchamber—the central interest, one might almost say the central figure, of the story. To adapt the Homeric methods to this new purpose, and at the same time to make his epic the vehicle for all his own inward broodings over life and fate, for his subtle and delicate psychology, and for that philosophic passion in which all the other motives and springs of life were becoming included, was a task incapable of perfect solution. On his death-bed Virgil made it his last desire that the Aeneid should be destroyed, nominally on the ground that it still wanted three years' work to bring it to perfection, but one can hardly doubt from a deeper and less articulate feeling. The command of the Emperor alone prevented his wish from taking effect. With the unfinished Aeneid, as with the unfinished poem of Lucretius, it is easy to see within what limits any changes or improvements would have been made in it had the author lived longer: the work is, in both cases, substantially done.

The _Aeneid_ was begun the year after the publication of the _Georgics,_ when Virgil was forty years of age. During its progress he continued to live for the most part in his Campanian retirement. He had a house at Rome in the fashionable quarter of the Esquiline, but used it little. He was also much in Sicily, and the later books of the _Aeneid_ seem to show personal observation of many parts of Central Italy. It is a debated question whether he visited Greece more than once. His last visit there was in 19 B.C. He had resolved to spend three years more on the completion of his poem, and then give himself up to philosophy for what might remain of his life. But the three years were not given him. A fever, caught while visiting Megara on a day of excessive heat, induced him to return hastily to Italy. He died a few days after landing at Brundusium, on the 26th of September. His ashes were, by his own request, buried near Naples, where his tomb was a century afterwards worshipped as a holy place. The _Aeneid,_ carefully edited from the poet's manuscript by two of his friends, was forthwith published, and had such a reception as perhaps no poem before or since has ever found. Already, while it was in progress, it had been rumoured as "something greater than the _Iliad,_" and now that it appeared, it at once became the canon of Roman poetry, and immediately began to exercise an overwhelming influence over Latin literature, prose as well as verse. Critics were not indeed wanting to point out its defects, and there was still a school (which attained greater importance a century later) that went back to Lucretius and the older poets, and refused to allow Virgil's preeminence. But for the Roman world at large, as since for the world of the Latin races, Virgil became what Homer had been to Greece, "the poet." The decay of art and letters in the third century only added a mystical and hieratic element to his fame. Even to the Christian Church he remained a poet sacred and apart: in his profound tenderness and his mystical "yearning after the further shore," as much as in the supposed prophecy of the fourth Eclogue, they found and reverenced what seemed to them like an unconscious inspiration. The famous passage of St. Augustine, where he speaks of his own early love for Virgil, shows in its half-hysterical renunciation how great the charm of the Virgilian art had been, and still was, to him: _Quid miserius misero,_ he cries, _non miserante se ipsum, et flente Didonis mortem quae fiebat amando Aeneam, non flente autem mortem meam quae flebat non amando te? Deus lumen cordis mei, non te amabam, et haec non flebam, sed flebam Didonem exstinctam, ferroque extrema secutam, sequens ipse extrema condita tua relicto te![6] To the graver and more matured mind of Dante, Virgil was the lord and master who, even though shut out from Paradise, was the chosen and honoured minister of God. Up to the beginning of the present century the supremacy of Virgil was hardly doubted. Since then the development of scientific criticism has passed him through all its searching processes, and in a fair judgment his greatness has rather gained than lost. The doubtful honour of indiscriminate praise was for a brief period succeeded by the attacks of an almost equally undiscriminating censure. An ill-judged partiality had once spoken of the _Aeneid_ as something greater than a Roman _Iliad:_ it was easy to show that in the most remarkable Homeric qualities the _Aeneid_ fell far short, and that, so far as it was an imitation of Homer, it could no more stand beside Homer than the imitations of Theocritus in the _Eclogues_ could stand beside Theocritus. The romantic movement, with its impatience of established fames, damned the _Aeneid_ in one word as artificial; forgetting, or not seeing, that the _Aeneid_ was itself the fountain-head of romanticism. Long after the theory of the noble savage had passed out of political and social philosophy it lingered in literary criticism; and the distinction between "natural" and "artificial" poetry was held to be like that between light and darkness. It was not till a comparatively recent time that the leisurely progress of criticism stumbled on the fact that all poetry is artificial, and that the _Iliad_ itself is artificial in a very eminent and unusual degree.

No great work of art can be usefully judged by comparison with any other great work of art. It may, indeed, be interesting and fertile to compare one with another, in order to seize more sharply and appreciate more vividly the special beauty of each. But to press comparison further, and to depreciate one because it has not what is the special quality of the other, is to lose sight of the function of criticism. We shall not find in Virgil the bright speed, the unexhausted joyfulness, which, in spite of a view of life as grave as Virgil's own, make the Iliad and Odyssey unique in poetry; nor, which is more to the point as regards the Aeneid, the narrative power, the genius for story-telling, which is one of the rarest of literary gifts, and which Ovid alone among the Latin poets possessed in any high perfection. We shall not find in him that high and concentrated passion which in Pindar (as afterwards in Dante) fuses the elements of thought and language into a single white heat. We shall not find in him the luminous and untroubled calm, as of a spirit in which all passion has been fused away, which makes the poetry of Sophocles so crystalline and irreproachable. Nor shall we find in him the peculiar beauties of his own Latin predecessors, Lucretius or Catullus. All this is merely saying in amplified words that Virgil was not Lucretius or Catullus, and that still less was he Homer, or Pindar, or Sophocles; and to this may be added, that he lived in the world which the great Greek and Latin poets had created, though he looked forward out of it into another.

Yet the positive excellences of the Aeneid are so numerous and so splendid that the claim of its author to be the Roman Homer is not unreasonable, if it be made clear that the two poems are fundamentally disparate, and that no more is meant than that the one poet is as eminent in his own form and method as the other in his. In our haste to rest Virgil's claim to supremacy as a poet on the single quality in which he is unique and unapproachable we may seem tacitly to assent to the judgment of his detractors on other points. Yet the more one studies the Aeneid, the more profoundly is one impressed by its quality as a masterpiece of construction. The most adverse critic would not deny that portions of the poem are, both in dramatic and narrative quality, all but unsurpassed, and in a certain union of imaginative sympathy with their fine dramatic power and their stateliness of narration perhaps unequalled. The story of the last agony of Troy could not be told with more breadth, more richness, more brilliance than it is told in the second book: here, at least, the story neither flags nor hurries; from the moment when the Greek squadron sets sail from Tenedos and the signal- flame flashes from their flagship, the scenes of the fatal night pass before us in a smooth swift stream that gathers weight and volume as it goes, till it culminates in the vision of awful faces which rises before Aeneas when Venus lifts the cloud of mortality from his startled eyes. The episode of Nisus and Euryalus in the ninth book, and that of Camilla in the eleventh, are in their degree as admirably vivid and stately. The portraiture of Dido, again, in the fourth book, is in combined breadth and subtlety one of the dramatic masterpieces of human literature. It is idle to urge that this touch is borrowed from Euripides or that suggested by Sophocles, or to quote the Medea of Apollonius as the original of which Dido is an elaborate imitation. What Virgil borrowed he knew how to make his own; and the world which, while not denying the tenderness, the grace, the charm of the heroine of the Argonautica, leaves the Argonautica unread, has thrilled and grown pale from generation to generation over the passionate tragedy of the Carthaginian queen.

But before a deeper and more appreciative study of the Aeneid these great episodes cease to present themselves as detached eminences. That the Aeneid is unequal is true; that passages in it here and there are mannered, and even flat, is true also; but to one who has had the patience to know it thoroughly, it is in its total effect, and not in the great passages, or even the great books, that it seems the most consummate achievement. Virgil may seem to us to miss some of his opportunities, to labour others beyond their due proportion, to force himself (especially in the later books) into material not well adapted to the distinctive Virgilian treatment. The slight and vague portrait of the maiden princess of Latium, in which the one vivid touch of her "flower- like hair" is the only clear memory we carry away with us, might, in different hands—in those of Apollonius, for instance,—have given a new grace and charm to the scenes where she appears. The funeral games at the tomb of Anchises, no longer described, as they had been in early Greek poetry, from a real pleasure in dwelling upon their details, begin to become tedious before they are over. In the battle-pieces of the last three books we sometimes cannot help being reminded that Virgil is rather wearily following an obsolescent literary tradition. But when we have set such passages against others which, without being as widely celebrated as the episode of the sack of Troy or the death of Dido, are equally miraculous in their workmanship—the end of the fifth book, for instance, or the muster-roll of the armies of Italy in the seventh, or, above all, the last hundred and fifty lines of the twelfth, where Virgil rises perhaps to his very greatest manner—we shall not find that the splendour of the poem depends on detached passages, but far more on the great manner and movement which, interfused with the unique Virgilian tenderness, sustains the whole structure through and through.