_Quin Decios Drusosque procul, saevumque securi Aspice Torquatum, et referentem signa Camilium.... Quis te, magne Cato, tacitum, aut te, Cosse, relinquat? Quis Gracchi genus, aut geminos, duo fulmina belli. Scipiadas, cladem Libyae, parvoque potentem Fabricium, vel te sulco, Serrane, serentem?—

his whole work is a splendid expansion of that vision of Rome which passes before the eyes of Aeneas in the Fortunate Fields of the underworld. In the description of great events, no less than of great characters and actions, he rises and kindles with his subject. His eye for dramatic effect is extraordinary. The picture of the siege and storming of Saguntum, with which he opens the stately narrative of the war between Rome and Hannibal, is an instance of his instinctive skill; together with the masterly sketch of the character of Hannibal and the description of the scene in the Carthaginian senate-house at the reception of the Roman ambassadors, it forms a complete prelude to the whole drama of the war. His great battle-pieces, too, in spite of his imperfect grasp of military science, are admirable as works of art. Among others may be specially instanced, as masterpieces of execution, the account of the victory over Antiochus at Magnesia in the thirty-seventh book, and, still more, that in the forty-fourth of the fiercely contested battle of Pydna, the desperate heroism of the Pelignian cohort, and the final and terrible destruction of the Macedonian phalanx.

Yet, with all his admiration for great men and deeds, what most of all kindles Livy's imagination and sustains his enthusiasm is a subject larger, and to him hardly more abstract, the Roman Commonwealth itself, almost personified as a continuous living force. This is almost the only matter in which patriotism leads him to marked partiality. The epithet "Roman" signifies to him all that is high and noble. That Rome can do no wrong is a sort of article of faith with him, and he has always a tendency to do less than justice to her enemies. The two qualities of eloquence and candour are justly ascribed to him by Tacitus, but from the latter some deduction must be made when he is dealing with foreign relations and external diplomacy. Without any intention to falsify history, he is sometimes completely carried away by his romantic enthusiasm for Roman statesmanship.

This canonisation of Rome is Livy's largest and most abiding achievement. The elder Seneca, one of his ablest literary contemporaries, observes, in a fine passage, that when historians reach in their narrative the death of some great man, they give a summing-up of his whole life as though it were an eulogy pronounced over his grave. Livy, he adds, the most candid of all historians in his appreciation of genius, does this with unusual grace and sympathy. The remark may bear a wider scope; for the whole of his work is animated by a similar spirit towards the idealised Commonwealth, to the story of whose life he devoted his splendid literary gifts. As the title of Gesta Populi Romani was given to the Aeneid on its appearance, so the Historiae ab Urbe Condita might be called, with no less truth, a funeral eulogy—consummatio totius vitae et quasi funebris laudatio—delivered, by the most loving and most eloquent of her children, over the grave of the great Republic.



VI.

THE LESSER AUGUSTANS.

The impulse given to Latin literature by the great poets and prose writers of the first century before Christ ebbed slowly away. The end of the so-called Golden Age may be conveniently fixed in the year which saw the death of Livy and Ovid; but the smaller literature of the period suffered no violent breach of continuity, and one can hardly name any definite date at which the Silver Age begins. Until the appearance of a new school of writers in the reign of Nero, the history of Roman literature is a continuation of the Augustan tradition. But it is continued by feeble hands, and dwindles away more and more under several unfavourable influences. Among these influences may be specially noted the growing despotism of the Empire, which had already become grave in the later years of Augustus, and under his successors reached a point which made free writing, like free speech, impossible; the perpetually increasing importance of the schools of declamation, which forced a fashion of overstrained and unnatural rhetoric on both prose and verse; and the paralysing effect of the great Augustan writers themselves, which led poetry at all events to lose itself in imitations of imitations within an arbitrary and rigid limit of subjects and methods.

In mere amount of production, however, literature remained active during the first half-century of the Christian era. That far the greater part of it has perished is probably a matter for congratulation rather than regret; even of what survives there is a good deal that we could well do without, and such of it as is valuable is so rather from incidental than essential reasons. Scribimus indocti doctique poemata passim, Horace had written in half-humorous bitterness; the crowd of names that flit like autumn leaves through the pages of Ovid represent probably but a small part of the immense production. Among the works of Ovid himself were included at various times poems by other contemporary hands—some, like the Consolatio ad Liviam, and the elegy on the Nut-tree, without any author's name; others of known authorship, like the continuation by Sabinus of Ovid's Heroides, in the form of replies addressed to the heroines by their lovers. Heroic poetry, too, both on mythological and historical subjects, continued to be largely written; but few of the writers are more than names. Cornelius Severus, author of an epic on the civil wars, gave in his earlier work promise of great excellence, which was but imperfectly fulfilled. The fine and stately passage on the death of Cicero, quoted by Seneca, fully reaches the higher level of post- Virgilian style. Two other poets of considerable note at the time, but soon forgotten after their death, were Albinovanus Pedo and Rabirius. The former, besides a Theseid, wrote a narrative and descriptive poem in the epic manner, on the northern campaigns of Germanicus, the latter was the author of an epic on the conflict with Antonius, which was kept alive for a short time by court favour; the stupid and amiable aide-de-camp of Tiberius, Velleius Paterculus, no doubt repeating what he heard in official circles, speaks of him and Virgil as the two most eminent poets of the age! Tiberius himself, though he chiefly wrote in Greek, occasionally turned off a copy of Latin verses; and his nephew Germanicus, a man of much learning and culture, composed a Latin version of the famous Phaenomena of Aratus, which shows uncommon skill and talent. Another, and a more important work of the same type, but with more original power, and less a mere adaptation of Greek originals, is the Astronomica, ascribed on doubtful manuscript evidence to an otherwise unknown Gaius or Marcus Manilius. This poem, from the allusions in it to the destruction of the three legions under Varus, and the retirement of Tiberius in Rhodes, must have been begun in the later years of Augustus, though probably not completed till after his death. As extant it consists of five books, the last being incomplete; the full plan seems to have included a sixth, and would have extended the work to about five thousand lines, or two-thirds of the length of the De Rerum Natura. Next to the poem of Lucretius it is, therefore, much the largest in bulk of extant Latin didactic poems. The oblivion into which it has fallen is, perhaps, a little hard if one considers how much Latin poetry of no greater merit continues to have a certain reputation, and even now and then to be read. The author is not a great poet; but he is a writer of real power both in thought and style. The versification of his Astronomica shows a high mastery of technique. The matter is often prosaically handled, and often seeks relief from prosaic handling in ill- judged flights of rhetoric; but throughout we feel a strong and original mind, with a large power over lucid and forcible expression. In the prologue to the third book he rejects for himself the common material for hexameter poems, subjects from the Greek heroic cycle, or from Roman history. His total want of narrative gift, as shown by the languor and flatness of the elaborate episode in which he attempts to tell the story of Perseus and Andromeda, would have been sufficient reason for this decision; but he justifies it, in lines of much grace and feeling, as due to his desire to take a line of his own, and make a fresh if a small conquest for Latin poetry.

Omnis ad accessus Heliconis semita trita est, Et iam confusi manant de fonitibus amnes Nec capiunt haustum, turbamque ad nota ruentem: Integra quaeramus rorantes prata per herbas Undamque occultis meditantem murmur in antris.

In a passage of nobler and more sincere feeling, he breaks off his catalogue of the signs of the Zodiac to vindicate the arduous study of abstract science—

"Multum" inquis "tenuemque iubes me ferre laborem Cernere cum facili lucem ratione viderer." Quod quaeris, Deus est. Coneris scandere caelum Fataque fatali genitus cognoscere lege Et transire tuum pectus, mundoque potiri: Pro pretio labor est, nec sunt immunia tanta.

Wherever one found this language used, in prose or verse, it would be memorable. The thought is not a mere text of the schools; it is strongly and finely conceived, and put in a form that anticipates the ardent and lofty manner of Lucan, without his perpetual overstrain of expression. Other passages, showing the same mental force, occur in the Astronomica; one might instance the fine passage on the power of the human eye to take in, within its tiny compass, the whole immensity of the heavens; or another, suggested by the mention of the constellation Argo, on the influence of sea-power on history, where the inevitable and well- worn instances of Salamis and Actium receive a fresh life from the citation of the destruction of the Athenian fleet in the bay of Syracuse, and the great naval battles of the first Punic war. Or again, the lines with which he opens the fourth book, weakened as their effect is by what follows them, a tedious enumeration of events showing the power of destiny over human fortunes, are worthy of a great poet:—

Quid tam sollicitis vitam consumimus annis, Torquemurque metu caecaque cupidine rerum? Acternisque senes curis, dum quaerimus aevum Perdimus, et nullo votorum fine beati Victuros agimus semper, nec vivimus unquam?

These passages have been cited from the Astronomica because, to all but a few professional students of Latin, the poem is practically unknown. The only other poet who survives from the reign of Tiberius is in a very different position, being so well known and so slight in literary quality as to make any quotations superfluous. Phaedrus, a Thracian freedman belonging to the household of Augustus, published at this time the well- known collection of Fables which, like the lyrics of the pseudo- Anacreon, have obtained from their use as a school-book a circulation much out of proportion to their merit. Their chief interest is as the last survival of the urbanus sermo in Latin poetry. They are written in iambic senarii, in the fluent and studiously simple Latin of an earlier period, not without occasional vulgarisms, but with a total absence of the turgid rhetoric which was coming into fashion. The Fables are the last utterance made by the speech of Terence: it is singular that this intimately Roman style should have begun and ended with two authors of servile birth and foreign blood. But the patronage of literature was now passing out of the hands of statesmen. Terence had moved in the circle of the younger Scipio; one book of the Fables of Phaedrus is dedicated to Eutychus, the famous chariot-driver of the Greens in the reign of Caligula. It was not long before Phaedrus was in use as a school-book; but his volume was apparently regarded as hardly coming within the province of serious literature. It is ignored by Seneca and not mentioned by Quintilian. But we must remind ourselves that the most celebrated works, whether in prose or verse, do not of necessity have the widest circulation or the largest influence. Among the poems produced in the first ten years of this century the Original Poems of Jane and Ann Taylor are hardly if at all mentioned in handbooks of English literature; but to thousands of readers they were more familiar than the contemporary verse of Wordsworth or Coleridge or even of Scott. In their terse and pure English, the language which is transmitted from one generation to another through the continuous tradition of the nursery, they may remind us of the Fables of Phaedrus.

The collection, as it has reached us, consists of nearly a hundred pieces. Of these three-fourths are fables proper; being not so much translations from the Greek of Aesop as versions of the traditional stories, written and unwritten, which were the common inheritance of the Aryan peoples. Mixed up with these are a number of stories which are not strictly fables; five of them are about Aesop himself, and there are also stories told of Simonides, Socrates, and Menander. Two are from the history of his own time, one relating a grim jest of the Emperor Tiberius, and the other a domestic tragedy which had been for a while the talk of the town in the previous reign. There are also, besides the prologues and epilogues of the several books, a few pieces in which Phaedrus speaks in his own person,[10] defending himself against detractors with an acrid tone which recalls the Terentian prologues. The body of fables current in the Middle Ages is considered by the most recent investigators to descend from the collection of Phaedrus, though probably supplemented from the Greek collection independently formed by Babrius about the same period.

Though Livy is the single great historian of the Augustan age, there was throughout this period a profuse production of memoirs and commentaries, as well as of regular histories. Augustus wrote thirteen books of memoirs of his own life down to the pacification of the Empire at the close of the Cantabrian war. These are lost; but the Index Rerum a se Gestarum, a brief epitome of his career, which he composed as a sort of epitaph on himself, is extant. This document was engraved on plates of bronze affixed to the imperial mausoleum by the Tiber, and copies of it were inscribed on the various temples dedicated to him in many provincial cities after his death. It is one of these copies, engraved on the vestibule wall of the temple of Augustus and Rome at Ancyra in Galatia, which still exists with inconsiderable gaps. His two principal ministers, Maecenas and Agrippa, also composed memoirs. The most important work of the latter hardly, however, falls within the province of literature; it was a commentary on the great geographical survey of the Empire carried out under his supervision.

Gaius Asinius Pollio, already mentioned as a critic and tragedian, was also the author of the most important historical work of the Augustan age after Livy's. This was a History of the Civil Wars, in seventeen books, from the formation of the first triumvirate in 60 B.C. to the battle of Philippi. Though Pollio was a practised rhetorician, his narrative style was simple and austere. The fine ode addressed to him by Horace during the composition of this history seems to hint that in Horace's opinion— or perhaps, rather, in that of Horace's masters—Pollio would find a truer field for his great literary ability in tragedy. But apart from its artistic quality, the work of Pollio was of the utmost value as giving the view held of the Civil wars by a trained administrator of the highest rank. It was one of the main sources used by Appian and Plutarch, and its almost total loss is matter of deep regret.

An author of less eminence, and belonging rather to the class of encyclopedists than of historians, is Pompeius Trogus, the descendant of a family of Narbonese Gaul, which had for two generations enjoyed the Roman citizenship. Besides works on zoology and botany, translated or adapted from the Greek of Aristotle and Theophrastus, Trogus wrote an important History of the World, exclusive of the Roman Empire, which served as, and may have been designed to be, a complement to that of Livy. The original work, which extended to forty-four books, is not extant; but an abridgment, which was executed in the age of the Antonines by one Marcus Junianus Justinus, and has fortunately escaped the fate which overtook the abridgment of Livy made about the same time, preserves the main outlines and much of the actual form of the original. Justin, whose individual talent was but small, had the good sense to leave the diction of his original as far as possible unaltered. The pure and vivacious style, and the evident care and research which Trogus himself, or the Greek historians whom he follows, had bestowed on the material, make the work one of very considerable value. Its title, Historiae Philippicae, is borrowed from that of a history conceived on a somewhat similar plan by Theopompus, the pupil of Isocrates, in or after the reign of Alexander the Great; and it followed Theopompus in making the Macedonian Empire the core round which the history of the various countries included in or bordering upon it was arranged.

Gaius Velleius Paterculus, a Roman officer, who after passing with credit through high military appointments, entered the general administrative service of the Empire, and rose to the praetorship, wrote, in the reign of Tiberius, an abridgment of Roman history in two books, which hardly rises beyond the mark of the military man who dabbles in letters. The pretentiousness of his style is partly due to the declining taste of the period, partly to an idea of his own that he could write in the manner of Sallust. It alternates between a sort of laboured sprightliness and a careless conversational manner full of endless parentheses. Yet Velleius had two real merits; the eye of the trained soldier for character, and an unaffected, if not a very intelligent, interest in literature. Where he approaches his own times, his servile attitude towards all the members of the imperial family, and towards Sejanus, who was still first minister to Tiberius when the book was published, makes him almost valueless as a historian; but in the earlier periods his observations are often just and pointed; and he seems to have been almost the first historian who included as an essential part of his work some account of the more eminent writers of his country. A still lower level of aim and attainment is shown in another work of the same date as that of Velleius, the nine books of historical anecdotes, Facta et Dicta Memorabilia, by Valerius Maximus, whose turgid and involved style is not redeemed by any originality of thought or treatment.

The study of archaeology, both on its linguistic and material sides, was carried on in the Augustan age with great vigour, though no single name is comparable to that of Varro for extent and variety of research. One of the most eminent and copious writers on these subjects was Gaius Julius Hyginus, a Spanish freed man of Augustus, who made him principal keeper of the Palatine library. He was a pupil of the most learned Greek grammarian of the age, Cornelius Alexander Polyhistor, and an intimate acquaintance of Ovid. Of his voluminous works on geography, history, astrology, agriculture, and poetry, all are lost but two treatises on mythology, which in their present form are of a much later date, and are at best only abridged and corrupted versions, if (as many modern critics are inclined to think) they are not wholly the work of some author of the second or third century. Hyginus was also one of the earliest commentators on Virgil; he possessed among his treasures a manuscript of the Georgics, which came from Virgil's own house, though it was not actually written by his hand; and many of his annotations and criticisms on the Aeneid are preserved by Aulus Gellius and later commentators. A little later, in the reigns of Tiberius and Claudius, Virgilian criticism was carried on by Quintus Remmius Palaemon of Vicenza, the most fashionable teacher in the capital, and the author of a famous Latin grammar on which all subsequent ones were more or less based. Perhaps the most distinguished of Augustan scholars was another equally celebrated teacher, Marcus Verrius Flaccus, who was chosen by Augustus as tutor for his two grandsons, and thenceforward held his school in the imperial residence on the Palatine. His lexicon, entitled De Verborum Significatu, was a rich treasury of antiquarian research: such parts of it as survive in the abridgments made from it in the second and eighth centuries, by Sextus Pompeius Festus and Paulus Diaconus, are still among our most valuable sources for the study of early Latin language and institutions. The more practical side of science in the same period was ably represented by Aulus Cornelius Celsus, the compiler of an encyclopedia which included comprehensive treatises not only on oratory, jurisprudence, and philosophy, but on the arts of war, agriculture, and medicine. The eight books dealing with this last subject are the only part of the work that has been preserved. This treatise, which is written in a pure, simple, and elegant Latin, became a standard work. It was one of the earliest books printed in the fifteenth century, and remained a text-book for medical students till within living memory. Medical science had then reached, in the hands of its leading professors, a greater perfection than it regained till the eighteenth century. Celsus, though not, so far as is known, the author of any important discovery or improvement, had fully mastered a system which even then was highly complicated, and takes rank by his extensive and accurate knowledge, as well as by his rare literary skill, with the highest names in his profession. That with his eminent medical acquirement he should have been able to deal adequately with so many other subjects as well, has long been a subject of perplexity. The cold censure of Quintilian, who refers to him slightly as "a man of moderate ability," may be principally aimed at the treatise on rhetoric, which formed a section of his encyclopedia. Columella, writing in the next age, speaks of him as one of the two leading authorities on agriculture; and he is also quoted as an authority of some value on military tactics. Yet we cannot suppose that the encyclopedist, however adequate his treatment of one or even more subjects, would not lay himself open in others to the censure of the specialist. It seems most reasonable to suppose that Celsus was one of a class which is not, after all, very uncommon—doctors of eminent knowledge and skill in their own art, who at the same time are men of wide culture and far-ranging practical interests.

In striking contrast to Celsus as regards width of knowledge and literary skill, though no less famous in the history of his own art, is his contemporary, the celebrated architect Vitruvius Pollio. The ten books De Architectura, dedicated to Augustus about the year 14 B.C., are the single important work on classical architecture which has come down from the ancient world, and, as such, have been the object of continuous professional study from the Renaissance down to the present day. But their reputation is not due to any literary merit. Vitruvius, however able as an architect, was a man of little general knowledge, and far from handy with his pen. His style varies between immoderate diffuseness and obscure brevity; sometimes he is barely intelligible, and he never writes with grace. Where in his introductory chapters or elsewhere he ventures beyond his strict province, his writing is that of a half-educated man who has lost simplicity without acquiring skill.

Among the innumerable rhetoricians of this age one only requires formal notice, Lucius Annaeus Seneca of Cordova, the father of the famous philosopher, and the grandfather of the poet Lucan. His long life reached from before the outbreak of war between Caesar and Pompeius till after the death of Tiberius. His only extant work, a collection of themes treated in the schools of rhetoric, was written in his old age, after the fall of Sejanus, and bears witness to the amazing power of memory which he tells us himself was, when in its prime, absolutely unique. How much of his life was spent at Rome is uncertain. As a young man he had heard all the greatest orators of the time except Cicero; and up to the end of his life he could repeat word for word and without effort whole passages, if not whole speeches, to which he had listened many years before. His ten books of Controversiae are only extant in a mutilated form, which comprises thirty-five out of seventy-four themes; to these is prefixed a single book of Suasoriae, which is also imperfect. The work is a mine of information for the history of rhetoric under Augustus and Tiberius, and incidentally includes many interesting quotations, anecdotes, and criticisms. But we feel in reading it that we have passed definitely away from the Golden Age. Yet once more "they have forgotten to speak the Latin tongue at Rome." The Latinity of the later Empire is as distinct from that of the Augustan age as this last is from the Latinity of the Republic. Seneca, it is true, was not an Italian by birth; but it is just this influx of the provinces into literature, which went on under the early Empire with continually accelerating force, that determined what type the new Latinity should take. Gaul, Spain, and Africa are henceforth side by side with Italy, and Italy herself sinks towards the level of a province. Within thirty years of the death of the elder Seneca "the fatal secret of empire, that Emperors could be made elsewhere than at Rome," was discovered by the Spanish and German legions; of hardly less moment was the other discovery, that Latin could be written in another than the Roman manner. In literature no less than in politics the discovery meant the final breaking up of the old world, and the slow birth of a new one through alternate torpors and agonies. It might already have been said of Rome, in the words of a poet of four hundred years later, that she had made a city of what had been a world. But in this absorption of the world into a single citizenship, the city itself was ceasing to be a world of its own; and with the self-centred urbs passed away the urbanus sermo, that austere and noble language which was the finest flower of her civilisation.



III

THE EMPIRE.



I

THE ROME OF NERO: SENECA, LUCAN, PETRONIUS

The later years of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, while they brought about the complete transformation of the government into an absolute monarchy, also laid the foundations for that reign of the philosophers which had been dreamed of by Plato, and which has never been so nearly realised as it was in Rome during the second century after Christ. The Stoical philosophy, passing beyond the limits of the schools to become at once a religious creed and a practical code of morals for everyday use, penetrated deeply into the life of Rome. At first associated with the aristocratic opposition to the imperial government, it passed through a period of persecution which only strengthened and consolidated its growth. The final struggle took place under Domitian, whose edict of the year 94, expelling all philosophers from Rome, was followed two years afterwards by his assassination and the establishment, for upwards of eighty years, of a government deeply imbued with the principles of Stoicism.

Of the men who set this revolution in motion by their writings, the earliest and the most distinguished was Lucius Annaeus Seneca, the son of the rhetorician. Though only of the second rank as a classic, he is a figure of very great importance in the history of human thought from the work he did in the exposition of the new creed. As a practical exponent of morals, he stands, with Plutarch, at the head of all Greek and Roman writers.

The life of Seneca was one of singularly dramatic contrasts and vicissitudes. He was born in the year 4 B.C., at Cordova, where, at a somewhat advanced age, his father had married Helvia, a lady of high birth, and brought up in the strictest family traditions. Through the influence of his mother's family (her sister had married Vitrasius Pollio, who for sixteen years was viceroy of Egypt), the way was easy to him for advancement in the public service. But delicate health, which continued throughout his life, kept him as a young man from taking more than a nominal share in administrative work. He passed into the senate through the quaestorship, and became a well-known figure at court during the reign of Caligula. On the accession of Claudius, he was banished to Corsica at the instance of the Empress Messalina, on the charge of being the favoured lover of Julia Livilla, Caligula's youngest sister. Whether the scandal which connected his name with hers, or with that of her sister Agrippina, had any other foundation than the prurient gossip which raged round all the members of the imperial family, may well be doubted; but when Agrippina married Claudius, after the downfall and execution of Messalina seven years later, she recalled him from exile, obtained his nomination to the quaestorship, and appointed him tutor to her son Domitius Nero, then a boy of ten. The influence gained by Seneca, an accomplished courtier and a clever man of the world, as well as a brilliant scholar, over his young pupil was for a long time almost unbounded; and when Nero became Emperor at the age of seventeen, Seneca, in conjunction with his close friend, Afranius Burrus, commander of the imperial guards, became practically the administrator of the Empire. His philosophy was not one which rejected wealth or power; a fortune of three million pounds may have been amassed without absolute dishonesty, or even forced upon him, as he pleads himself, by the lavish generosity of his pupil; but there can be no doubt that in indulging the weaknesses and passions of Nero, Seneca went far beyond the limits, not only of honour, but of ordinary prudence. The mild and enlightened administration of the earlier years of the new reign, the famous quinquennium Neronis, which was looked back to afterwards as a sort of brief golden age, may indeed be ascribed largely to Seneca's influence; but this influence was based on an excessive indulgence of Nero's caprices, which soon worked out its own punishment. His consent to the murder of Agrippina was the death-blow to his influence for good, or to any self-respect that he may till then have retained; the death of Burrus left him without support; and, by retiring into private life and formally offering to make over his whole fortune to the Emperor, he did not long delay his fate. In the year 65, on the pretext of complicity in the conspiracy of Piso, he was commanded to commit suicide, and obeyed with that strange mixture of helplessness and heroism with which the orders of the master of the world were then accepted as a sort of inevitable law of nature.

The philosophical writings of Seneca were extremely voluminous; and though a large number of them are lost, he is still one of the bulkiest of ancient authors. They fall into three main groups: formal treatises on ethics; moral letters (epistolae morales), dealing in a less continuous way with the same general range of subjects; and writings on natural philosophy, from the point of view of the Stoical system. The whole of these are, however, animated by the same spirit; to the Stoical philosophy, physics were merely a branch of ethics, and a study to be pursued for the sake of moral edification, not of reaching truth by accurate observation or research. The discussions of natural phenomena are mere texts for religious meditations; and though the eight books of Naturales Quaestiones were used as a text-book of physical science in the Middle Ages, they are totally without any scientific value. So, too, the twenty books of moral letters, nominally addressed to Lucilius, the procurator of Sicily, merely represent a slight variation of method from the more formal treatises, On Anger, On Clemency, On Consolation, On Peace of Mind, On the Shortness of Life, On Giving and Receiving Favours, which are the main substance of Seneca's writings.

As a moral writer, Seneca stands deservedly high. Though infected with the rhetorical vices of the age, his treatises are full of striking and often gorgeous eloquence, and in their combination of high thought with deep feeling, have rarely, if at all, been surpassed. The rhetorical manner was so essentially part of Seneca's nature, that the warm colouring and perpetual mannerism of his language does not imply any insincerity or want of earnestness. In spite of the laboured style, there is no failure either in lucidity or in force, and even where the rhetoric is most profuse, it seldom is without a solid basis of thought. "It would not be easy," says a modern scholar, who was himself averse to all ornament of diction, and deeply penetrated with the spirit of Stoicism, "to name any modern writer who has treated on morality and has said so much that is practically good and true, or has treated the matter in so attractive a way."

In the moral writings we have the picture of Seneca the philosopher; Seneca the courtier is less attractively presented in the curious pamphlet called the Apocolocyntosis, a silly and spiteful attack on the memory of the Emperor Claudius, written to make the laughter of an afternoon at the court of Nero. The gross bad taste of this satire is hardly relieved by any great wit in the treatment, and the reputation of the author would stand higher if it had not survived the occasion for which it was written.

Among Seneca's extant works are also included nine tragedies, composed in imitation of the Greek, upon the well-worn subjects of the epic cycle. At what period of his life they were written cannot be ascertained. As a rule, only young authors had courage enough to attempt the discredited task of flogging this dead horse; but it is not improbable that these dramas were written by Seneca in mature life, in deference to his imperial pupil's craze for the stage. All the rhetorical vices of his prose are here exaggerated. The tragedies are totally without dramatic life, consisting merely of a series of declamatory speeches, in correct but monotonous versification, interspersed with choruses, which only differ from the speeches by being written in lyric metres instead of the iambic. To say that the tragedies are without merit would be an overstatement, for Seneca, though no poet, remained even in his poetry an extremely able man of letters and an accomplished rhetorician. His declamation comes in the same tones from all his puppets; but it is often grandiose, and sometimes really fine. The lines with which the curtain falls in his Medea remind one, by their startling audacity, of Victor Hugo in his most Titanic vein. As the only extant Latin tragedies, these pieces had a great effect upon the early drama of the sixteenth century in England and elsewhere. In the well-known verses prefixed to the first folio Shakespeare, Jonson calls on "him of Cordova dead," in the same breath with Aeschylus and Euripides; and long after the Jacobean period the false tradition remained which, by putting these lifeless copies on the same footing as their great originals, perplexed and stultified literary criticism, much as the criticism of classical art was confused by an age which drew no distinction between late Graeco-Roman sculpture and the finest work of Praxiteles or Pheidias.

By far the most brilliant poet of the Neronian age was Seneca's nephew, Marcus Annaeus Lucanus. His father, Annaeus Mela, the younger brother of the philosopher, is known chiefly through his more distinguished son; an interesting but puzzling notice in a life of Lucan speaks of him as famous at Rome "from his pursuit of the quiet life." This may imply refusal of some great office when his elder brother was practically ruler of the Empire; whatever stirrings of ambition he suppressed broke out with accumulated force in his son. Lucan's short life was one of feverish activity. At twenty-one he made his first public sensation by the recitation, in the theatre of Pompeius, of a panegyric on Nero, who had already murdered his own mother, but had not yet broken with the poet's uncle. Soon afterwards, he was advanced to the quaestorship, and a seat in the college of Augurs: but his brilliant poetical reputation seems to have excited the jealousy of the artist-emperor; a violent quarrel broke out between them, and Lucan, already in theory an ardent republican, became one of the principal movers in the conspiracy of Piso. The plan discussed among the conspirators of assassinating Nero while in the act of singing on the stage would, no doubt, commend itself specially to the young poet whom the Emperor had forbidden to recite in public. When the conspiracy was detected, Lucan's fortitude soon gave way; he betrayed one accomplice after another, one of the first names he surrendered being that of his mother, Acilia. The promise of pardon, under which his confessions were obtained, was not kept after they were completed; and the execution of Lucan, at the age of twenty-six, while it cut short a remarkable poetical career, rid the world of a very poor creature. Yet the final spasm of courage with which he died, declaiming a passage from his own epic, has gained him, in the noblest of English elegies, a place in the same verse with Sidney and Chatterton.

But the Pharsalia, the only large work which Lucan left complete, or all but complete, among a number of essays in different styles of poetry, and the only work of his which has been preserved, is a poem which, in spite of its immaturity and bad taste, compels admiration by its elevation of thought and sustained brilliance of execution. Pure rhetoric has, perhaps, never come quite so near being poetry; and if the perpetual overstraining of both thought and expression inevitably ends by fatiguing the reader, there are at least few instances of a large work throughout which so lofty and grandiose a style is carried with such elasticity and force. The Pharsalia is full of quotations, and this itself is no small praise. Lines like Nil actum credens dum quid superesset agendum, or Nec sibi, sed toti gentium se credere mundo, or Iupiter est quodcunque vides quocunque moveris, or the sad and noble

Victurosque dei celant, ut vivere durent, Felix esse mori—

are as well known and have sunk as deep as the great lines of Virgil himself; and not only in single lines, but in longer passages of lofty thought or sustained imagination, as in his description of the dream of Pompeius, at the beginning of the seventh book; or the passage on the extension of the Roman Empire, later in the same book; or the magnificent speech of Cato when he refuses to seek counsel of the oracle of Ammon, Lucan sometimes touches a point where he challenges comparison with his master. In these passages, without any delicacy of modulation, with a limited range of rhythm, his verse has a metallic clangour that stirs the blood like a trumpet-note. But his range of ideas is as limited as that of his rhythms; and the thought is not sustained by any basis of character. His fierce republicanism sits side by side with flattery of the reigning Emperor more gross and servile than had till then been known at Rome. He makes no attempt to realise his persons or to grasp the significance of events. Caesar, Pompeius, Cato himself—the hero of the epic—are not human beings, but mere lay-figures round which he drapes his gorgeous rhetoric. The Civil wars are alternately regarded as the death-agony of freedom and as the destined channel through which the world was led to the blessings of an uncontrolled despotism. His ideas are borrowed indifferently from the Epicurean and Stoical philosophies according to the convenience of the moment. Great events and actions do not kindle in him any imaginative sympathy; they are greedily seized as opportunities for more and more immoderate flights of extravagant embellishment. He "prates of mountains;" his "phrase conjures the wandering stars, and makes them stand like wonder-wounded hearers;" freedom, virtue, fate, the sea and the sun, gods and men before whom the gods themselves stand abased, hurtle through the poem in a confused thunder of sonorous phrase. Such brilliance, in the exact manner that was then most admired, dazzled his contemporaries and retained a permanent influence over later poets. Statius, himself an author of far higher poetical gifts, speaks of him in terms of almost extravagant admiration; with a more balanced judgment Quintilian sums him up in words which may be taken as on the whole the final criticism adopted by the world; ardens et concitatus et sententiis clarissimus, et, ut dicam quod sentio, magis oratoribus quam poetis imitandus.

One of Lucan's intimate friends was a young man of high family, Aulus Persius Flaccus of Volaterrae in Etruria, a near relation of the celebrated Arria, wife of Paetus. Through his kinswoman he was early introduced to the circle of earnest thinkers and moralists among whom the higher life was kept up at Rome amid the corruption of the Neronian age. The gentle and delicate boy won the hearts of all who knew him. When he died, at the age of twenty-eight, a little book of six satires, which he had written with much effort and at long intervals, was retouched by his master, the Stoic philosopher Cornutus, and published by another friend, Caesius Bassus, himself a poet of some reputation. Several other writings which Persius left were destroyed by the advice of Cornutus. The six pieces—only between six and seven hundred lines in all—were at once recognised as showing a refined and uncommon literary gift. Persius, we are informed, had no admiration for the genius of Seneca; and, indeed, no two styles, though both are deeply artificial, could be more unlike one another. With all his moral elevation, Seneca was a courtier, an opportunist, a man of the world: Stoicism took a very different colour in the boy "of maidenly modesty," as his biographer tells us, who lived in a household of devoted female relations, and only knew the world as a remote spectator. Though within the narrow field of his own experience he shows keen observation and delicate power of portraiture, the world that he knows is mainly one of books; his perpetual imitations of Horace are not so much plagiarisms as the unaffected outcome of the mind of a very young student, to whom the Satires of Horace were more familiar than the Rome of his own day. So, too, the involved and obscure style which has made him the paradise of commentators is less a deliberate literary artifice than the natural effect of looking at everything through a literary medium, and choosing phrases, not for their own fitness, but for the associations they recall. His deep moral earnestness, his gentleness of nature, and, it must be added, his want of humour, made him a favourite author beyond the circles which were merely attracted by his verbal obscurities and the way in which he locks up his meaning in hints and allusions. His unquestionable dramatic power might, in later life, have ripened into higher achievement; as it is, he lives to us chiefly in the few beautiful passages where he slips into being natural, and draws, with a grace and charm that are strikingly absent from the rest of his writing, the picture of his own quiet life as a student, and of the awakening of his moral and intellectual nature at the touch of philosophy.

Lucan and Persius represent the effect which Roman Stoicism had on two natures of equal sensibility but widely different quality and taste. Among the many other professors or adherents of the Stoic school in the age of Nero, a considerable number were also authors, but the habit of writing in Greek, which a hundred years later grew to such proportions as to threaten the continued existence of Latin literature, had already taken root. The three most distinguished representatives of the stricter Stoicism, Cornutus, Quintus Sextius, and Gaius Musonius Rufus (the first and last of whom were exiled by Nero), wrote on philosophy in Greek, though they seem to have written in Latin on other subjects. Musonius was, indeed, hardly more Roman than his own most illustrious pupil, the Phrygian Epictetus. Stoicism, as they understood it, left no room for nationality, and little for writing as a fine art.

This growing prevalence of Greek at Rome combined with political reasons to check the production of important prose works. History more especially languished under the jealous censorship of the government. The only important historical work of the period is one of which the subject could hardly excite suspicion, the Life of Alexander the Great, by Quintus Curtius Rufus. The precise date is uncertain, and different theories have assigned it to an earlier or later period in the reign of Augustus or of Vespasian. The subject is one which hardly any degree of dulness in the writer could make wholly uninteresting. But the clear and orderly narrative of Curtius, written in a style studied from that of Livy, but kept within simpler limits, has real merit of its own; and against his imperfect technical knowledge of strategy and tactics must be set the pains he took to consult the best Greek authorities.

Memoirs were written in the Neronian age by numbers both of men and women. Those of the Empress Agrippina were used by Tacitus; and we have references to others by the two great Roman generals of the period, Suetonius Paulinus and Domitius Corbulo. The production of scientific or technical treatises, which had been so profuse in the preceding generation, still went on. Only two of any importance are extant; one of these, the Chorographia of Pomponius Mela, a geographical manual based on the best authorities and embellished with descriptions of places, peoples, and customs, is valuable as the earliest and one of the most complete systems of ancient geography which we possess; but in literary merit it falls far short of the other, the elaborate work on agriculture by Lucius Junius Moderatus Columella. Both Mela and Columella were natives of Spain, and thus belong to the Spanish school of Latin authors, which begins with the Senecas and is continued later by Martial and Quintilian. But while Mela, in his style, followed the new fashion, Columella, an enthusiast for antiquity and a warm admirer of the Augustan writers, reverts to the more classical manner, which a little later became once more predominant in the writers of the Flavian period. His simple and dignified style is much above the level of a mere technical treatise. His prose, indeed, may be read with more pleasure than the verse in which, by a singular caprice, one of the twelve books is composed. In one of the most beautiful episodes of the Georgics, Virgil had briefly touched on the subject of gardening, and left it to be treated by others who might come after him: praetereo atque aliis post me memoranda relinquo. At the instance, he says, of friends, Columella attempts to fill up the gap by a fifth Georgic on horticulture. He approaches the task so modestly, and carries it out so simply, that critics are not inclined to be very severe; but he was no poet, and the book is little more than a cento from Virgil, carefully and smoothly written, and hardly if at all disfigured by pretentiousness or rhetorical conceits.

The same return upon the Virgilian manner is shown in the seven Eclogues, composed in the early years of Nero's reign, by Titus Calpurnius Siculus. These are remarkable rather as the only specimens for nearly three hundred years of a direct attempt to continue the manner of Virgil's Bucolics than for any substantive merit of their own. That manner, indeed, is so exceptionally unmanageable that it is hardly surprising that it should have been passed over by later poets of high original gift; but that even poets of the second and third rate should hardly ever have attempted to imitate poems which stood in the very first rank of fame bears striking testimony to Virgil's singular quality of unapproachableness. The Eclogues of Calpurnius (six of them are Eclogues within the ordinary meaning, the seventh rather a brief Georgic on the care of sheep and goats, made formally a pastoral by being put into the mouth of an old shepherd sitting in the shade at midday) are, notwithstanding their almost servile imitation of Virgil, written in such graceful verse, and with so few serious lapses of taste, that they may be read with considerable pleasure. The picture, in the sixth Eclogue, of the fawn lying among the white lilies, will recall to English readers one of the prettiest fancies of Marvell; that in the second, of Flora scattering her tresses over the spring meadow, and Pomona playing under the orchard boughs, is at least a vivid pictorial presentment of a sufficiently well-worn theme. A more normal specimen of Calpurnius's manner may be instanced in the lines (v. 52-62) where one of the most beautiful passages in the third Georgic, the description of a long summer day among the Italian hill-pastures, is simply copied in different words.

The didactic poem on volcanoes, called Aetna, probably written by the Lucilius to whom Seneca addressed his writings on natural philosophy, belongs to the same period and shows the same influences. Of the other minor poetical works of the time the only one which requires special mention is the tragedy of Octavia, which is written in the same style as those of Seneca, and was long included among his works. Its only interest is as the single extant specimen of the fabula praetexta, or drama with a Roman subject and characters. The characters here include Nero and Seneca himself. But the treatment is as conventional and declamatory as that of the mythological tragedies among which it has been preserved, and the result, if possible, even flatter and more tedious.

One other work of extreme and unique interest survives from the reign of Nero, the fragments of a novel by Petronius Arbiter, one of the Emperor's intimate circle in the excesses of his later years. In the year 66 he fell a victim to the jealousy of the infamous and all but omnipotent Tigellinus; and on this occasion Tacitus sketches his life and character in a few of his strong masterly touches. "His days were passed," says Tacitus, "in sleep, his nights in the duties or pleasures of life; where others toiled for fame he had lounged into it, and he had the reputation not, like most members of that profligate society, of a dissolute wanton, but of a trained master in luxury. A sort of careless ease, an entire absence of self-consciousness, added the charm of complete simplicity to all he said and did. Yet, as governor of Bithynia, and afterwards as consul, he showed himself a vigorous and capable administrator; then relapsing into the habit or assuming the mask of vice, he was adopted as Arbiter of Elegance into the small circle of Nero's intimate companions; no luxury was charming or refined till Petronius had given it his approval, and the jealousy of Tigellinus was roused against a rival and master in the science of debauchery."

The novel written by this remarkable man was in the form of an autobiography narrating the adventures, in various Italian towns, of a Greek freedman. The fragments hardly enable us to trace any regular plot; its interest probably lay chiefly in the series of vivid pictures which it presented of life among all orders of society from the highest to the lowest, and its accurate reproduction of popular language and manners. The hero of the story uses the ordinary Latin speech of educated persons, though, from the nature of the work, the style is much more colloquial than that of the formal prose used for serious writing. But the conversation of many of the characters is in the plebeius sermo, the actual speech of the lower orders, of which so little survives in literature. It is full of solecisms and popular slang; and where the scene lies, as it mostly does in the extant fragments, in the semi-Greek seaports of Southern Italy, it passes into what was almost a dialect of its own, the lingua franca of the Mediterranean under the Empire, a dialect of mixed Latin and Greek. The longest and most important fragment is the well-known Supper of Trimalchio. It is the description of a Christmas dinner-party given by a sort of Golden Dustman and his wife, people of low birth and little education, who had come into an enormous fortune. Trimalchio, a figure drawn with extraordinary life, is constantly making himself ridiculous by his blunders and affectations, while he almost wins our liking by his childlike simplicity and good nature. The dinner itself, and the conversation on literature and art that goes on at the dinner-table, are conceived in a spirit of the wildest humour. Trimalchio, who has two libraries, besides everything else handsome about him, is anxious to air his erudition. "Can you tell us a story," he asks a guest, "of the twelve sorrows of Hercules, or how the Cyclops pulled Ulysses' leg? I used to read them in Homer when I was a boy." After an interruption, caused by the entrance of a boar, roasted whole and stuffed with sausages, he goes on to talk of his collection of plate; his unique cups of Corinthian bronze (so called from a dealer named Corinthus; the metal was invented by Hannibal at the capture of Troy), and his huge silver vases, "a hundred of them, more or less," chased with the story of Daedalus shutting Niobe into the Trojan horse, and Cassandra killing her sons—"the dead children so good, you would think they were alive; for I sell my knowledge in matters of art for no money." Presently there follow the two wonderful ghost stories—that of the wer-wolf, told by one of the guests, and that of the witches by Trimalchio himself in return—both masterpieces of vivid realism. As the evening advances the fun becomes more fast and furious. The cook, who had excelled himself in the ingenuity of his dishes, is called up to take a seat at table, and after favouring the company with an imitation of a popular tragedian, begins to make a book with Trimalchio over the next chariot races. Fortunata, Trimalchio's wife, is a little in liquor, and gets up to dance. Just at this point Trimalchio suddenly turns sentimental, and, after giving elaborate directions for his own obsequies, begins to cry. The whole company are in tears round him when he suddenly rallies, and proposes that, as death is certain, they shall all go and have a hot bath. In the little confusion that follows, the narrator and his friend slip quietly away. This scene of exquisite fooling is quite unique in Greek or Latin literature: the breadth and sureness of touch are almost Shakespearian. Another fragment relates the famous story of the Matron of Ephesus, one of the popular tales which can be traced back to India, but which appears here for the first time in the Western world. Others deal with literary criticism, and include passages in verse; the longest of these, part of an epic on the civil wars in the manner of Lucan, is recited by one of the principal characters, the professional poet Eumolpus, to exemplify the rules he has laid down for epic poetry in a most curious discussion that precedes it. That so small a part of the novel has been preserved is most annoying; it must have been comparable, in dramatic power and (notwithstanding the gross indecency of many passages) in a certain large sanity, to the great work of Fielding. In all the refined writing of the next age we never again come on anything at once so masterly and so human.



II.

THE SILVER AGE: STATIUS, THE ELDER PLINY, MARTIAL, QUINTILIAN.

To the age of the rhetoricians succeeded the age of the scholars. Quintilian, Pliny, and Statius, the three foremost authors of the Flavian dynasty, have common qualities of great learning and sober judgment which give them a certain mutual affinity, and divide them sharply from their immediate predecessors. The effort to outdo the Augustan writers had exhausted itself; the new school rather aimed at reproducing their manner. In the hands of inferior writers this attempt only issued in tame imitations; but with those of really original power it carried the Latin of the Silver Age to a point higher in quality than it ever reached, except in the single case of Tacitus, a writer of unique genius who stands in a class of his own.

The reigns of the three Flavian emperors nearly occupy the last thirty years of the first century after Christ. The "year of four Emperors" which passed between the downfall of Nero and the accession of Vespasian had shaken the whole Empire to its foundations. The recovery from that shock left the Roman world established on a new footing. In literature, no less than in government and finance, a feverish period of inflated credit had brought it to the verge of ruin. At the beginning of his reign Vespasian announced a deficit of four hundred million pounds (a sum the like of which had never been heard of before) in the public exchequer; some similar estimate might have been formed by a fanciful analogy of the collapse that had to be made good in literature, when style could no longer bear the tremendous overdrafts made on it by Seneca and Lucan. And in the literary as in the political world there was no complete recovery: throughout the second century we have to trace the gradual decline of letters going on alongside of that mysterious decay of the Empire itself before which a continuously admirable government was all but helpless.

Publius Papinius Statius, the most eminent of the poets of this age, was born towards the end of the reign of Tiberius, and seems to have died before the accession of Nerva. His poetry can all be assigned to the reign of Domitian, or the few years immediately preceding it. As to his life little is known, probably because it passed without much incident. He was born at Naples, and returned to it in advanced age after the completion of his Thebaid; but the greater part of his life was spent at Rome, where his father was a grammarian of some distinction who had acted for a time as tutor to Domitian. He had thus access to the court, where he improved his opportunities by unstinted adulation of the Emperor and his favourite eunuch Earinus. The curious mediaeval tradition of his conversion to Christianity, which is so finely used by Dante in the Purgatorio, cannot be traced to its origin, and does not appear to have any historical foundation.

Twelve years were spent by Statius over his epic poem on the War of Thebes, which was published about the year 92, with a florid dedication to Domitian. After its completion he began another epic, on an even more imposing scale, on the life of Achilles and the whole of the Trojan war. Of this Achilleid only the first and part of the second book were ever completed; had it continued on the same scale it would have been the longest of Greek or Latin epics. At various times after the publication of the Thebaid appeared the five books of Silvae, miscellaneous and occasional poems on different subjects, often of a personal nature. Another epic, on the campaign of Domitian in Germany, has not been preserved.

The Thebaid became very famous; later poets, like Ausonius or Claudian, constantly imitate it. Its smooth versification, copious diction, and sustained elegance made it a sort of canon of poetical technique. But, itself, it rises beyond the merely mechanical level. Without any quality that can quite be called genius, Statius had real poetical feeling. His taste preserves him from any great extravagances; and among much tedious rhetoric and cumbrous mythology, there is enough of imagination and pathos to make the poem interesting and even charming. At a time when Guercino and the Caracci were counted great masters in the sister art, the Thebaid was also held to be a masterpiece. Besides complete versions by inferior hands, both Pope and Gray took the pains to translate portions of it into English verse, and it is perpetually quoted in the literature of the eighteenth century. It is, indeed, perhaps its severest condemnation that it reads best in quotations. Not only the more highly elaborated passages, but almost any passage taken at random, may be read with pleasure and admiration; those who have had the patience to read it through, however much they may respect the continuous excellence of its workmanship, will (as with the Gierusalemme Liberata of Tasso) feel nearly as much respect for their own achievement as for that of the poet.

The Silvae, consisting as they do of comparatively short pieces, display the excellences of Statius to greater advantage. Of the thirty- two poems, six are in lyric metres, the rest being all written in the smooth graceful hexameters of which the author of the Thebaid was so accomplished a master. The subjects, for the most part of a familiar nature, are very various. A touching and affectionate poem to his wife Claudia is one of the best known. Several are on the death of friends; one of very great beauty is on the marriage of his brother poet, Arruntius Stella, to a lady with the charming name of Violantilla. The descriptive pieces on the villas of acquaintances at Tivoli and Sorrento, and on the garden of another in Rome, are full of a genuine feeling for natural beauty. The poem on the death of his father, though it has passages of romantic fancy, is deformed by an excess of literary allusions; but that on the death of his adopted son (he had no children of his own), which ends the collection, is very touching in the sincerity of its grief and its reminiscences of the dead boy's infancy. Perhaps the finest, certainly the most remarkable of all these pieces is the short poem (one might almost call it a sonnet) addressed to Sleep. This, though included in the last book of the Silvae, must have been written in earlier life; it shows that had Statius not been entangled in the composition of epics by the conventional taste of his age, he might have struck out a new manner in ancient poetry. The poem is so brief that it may be quoted in full:—

Crimine quo merui iuvenis, placidissime divom, Quove errore miser, donis ut solus egerem, Somne, tuis? Tacet omne pecus, volueresque, feraeque, Et simulant fessos curvata cacumina somnos; Nec trucibus fluviis idem sonus; occidit horror Aequoris, et terris maria inclinata quiescunt. Septima iam rediens Phoebe mihi respicit aegras Stare genas, totidem Oeteae Paphiaeque revisunt Lampades, et toties 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 unquam vigilabat corpore toto. At nunc, heu, aliquis longa sub nocte puellae Brachia nexa tenens, ultra te, Somne, repellit: Inde veni: nec te totas infundere pennas Luminibus compello meis: hoc turba precatur Laetior; extremae me tange cacumine virgae, Sufficit, aut leviter suspenso poplite transi.

Were the three lines beginning Unde ego sufficiam struck out—and one might almost fancy them to have been inserted later by an unhappy second thought—the remainder of this poem would be as perfect as it is unique. The famous sonnet of Wordsworth on the same subject must at once occur to an English reader; but the poem in its manner, especially in the dying cadence of the last two lines, recalls even more strongly some of the finest sonnets of Keats. "Had Statius written often thus," in the words Johnson uses of Gray, "it had been vain to blame, and useless to praise him."

The two other epic poets contemporary with Statius whose works are extant, Valerius Flaccus and Silius Italicus, belong generally to the same school, but stand on a much lower level of excellence. The former is only known as the author of the Argonautica. An allusion in the proem of his epic to the recent destruction of Jerusalem by Titus in the year 70, and another in a later book to the great eruption of Vesuvius in 79, fix the date of the poem; and Quintilian, writing in the later years of Domitian, refers to the poet's recent death. From another passage in the Argonautica it has been inferred that Flaccus was one of the college of quindecemvirs, and therefore of high family. The Argonautica follows the well-known poem of Apollonius Rhodius, but by his diffuse rhetorical treatment the author expands the story to such a length that in between five and six thousand lines he has only got as far as the escape of Jason and Medea from Colchos. Here the poem breaks off abruptly in the eighth book; it was probably meant to consist of twelve, and to end with the return of the Argonauts to Greece. In all respects, except the choice of subject, Valerius Flaccus is far inferior to Statius. He cannot indeed wholly destroy the perennial charm of the story of the Golden Fleece, but he comes as near doing so as is reasonably possible. His versification is correct, but without freedom or variety; and incidents and persons are alike presented through a cloud of monotonous and mechanical rhetoric.

If Valerius Flaccus to some degree redeemed his imaginative poverty by the choice of his subject, the other epic poet of the Flavian era, Tiberius Catius Silius Italicus, chose a subject which no ingenuity could have adapted to epic treatment. His Punic War may fairly contend for the distinction of being the worst epic ever written; and its author is the most striking example in Latin literature of the incorrigible amateur. He had, in earlier life, passed through a distinguished official career; he was consul the year before the fall of Nero, and in the political revolutions which followed conducted himself with such prudence that, though an intimate friend of Vitellius, he remained in favour under Vespasian. After a term of further service as proconsul of Asia, he retired to a dignified and easy leisure. His love of literature was sincere; he prided himself on owning one of Cicero's villas, and the land which held Virgil's grave, and he was a generous patron to men of letters. The fulsome compliments paid to him by Martial (who has the effrontery to speak of him as a combined Virgil and Cicero) are, no doubt, only an average specimen of the atmosphere which surrounded so munificent a patron; but the admiration which he openly expressed for the slave Epictetus does him a truer honour. The Bellum Punicum, in seventeen books, is longer than the Odyssey. It closely follows the history as told by Livy; but the elements of almost epic grandeur in the contest between Rome and Hannibal all disappear amid masses of tedious machinery. Without any invention or constructive power of his own, Silius copies with tasteless pedantry all the outworn traditions of the heroic epic. What Homer or Virgil has done, he must needs do too. The Romans are the Dardanians or the Aeneadae: Juno interferes in Hannibal's favour, and Venus, hidden in a cloud, watches the battle of the Trebia from a hill. Hannibal is urged to war by a dream like that of Agamemnon in the Iliad; he is equipped with a spear "fatal to many thousands" of the enemy, and a shield, like that of Aeneas, embossed with subjects from Carthaginian history, and with the river Ebro flowing round the edge as an ingenious variant of the Ocean-river on the shield of Achilles. A Carthaginian fleet cruising off the coast of Italy falls in with Proteus, who takes the opportunity of prophesying the course of the war. Hannibal at Zama pursues a phantom of Scipio, which flies before him and disappears like that of Aeneas before Turnus. Such was the degradation to which the noble epic machinery had now sunk. Soon after the death of Silius the poem seems to have fallen into merited oblivion; there is a single reference to it in a poet of the fifth century, and thereafter it remained unknown or unheard of until a manuscript discovered by Poggio Bracciolini brought it to light again early in the fifteenth century.

The works of the other Flavian poets, Curiatius Maternus, Saleius Bassus, Arruntius Stella, and the poetess Sulpicia, are lost; all else that survives of the verse of the period is the work of a writer of a different order, but of considerable importance and value, the epigrammatist Martial. By no means a poet of the first rank, hardly perhaps a poet at all according to any strict definition, he has yet a genius of his own which for many ages made him the chief and almost the sole model for a particular kind of literature.

Marcus Valerius Martialis was born at Augusta Bilbilis in Central Spain towards the end of the reign of Tiberius. He came to Rome as a young man during the reign of Nero, when his countrymen, Seneca and Lucan, were at the height of their reputation. Through their patronage he obtained a footing, if not at court, yet among the wealthy amateurs who extended a less dangerous protection to men of letters. For some thirty-five years he led the life of a dependant; under Domitian his assiduous flattery gained for him the honorary tribunate which conferred equestrian rank, though not the rewards of hard cash which he would probably have appreciated more. The younger Pliny, who speaks of him with a slightly supercilious approval, repaid with a more substantial gratification a poem comparing him to Cicero. Martial's gift for occasional verse just enabled him to live up three pair of stairs in the city; in later years, when he had an income from booksellers as well as from private patrons, he could afford a tiny country house among the Sabine hills. Early in the reign of Domitian he began to publish regularly, bringing out a volume of epigrams every year. After the accession of Trajan he returned to his native town, from which, however, he sent a final volume three years afterwards to his Roman publishers. There his talent for flattery at last bore substantial fruit; a rich lady of the neighbourhood presented him with a little estate, and though the longing for the country, which had grown on him in Rome, was soon replaced by a stronger feeling of regret for the excitement of the capital, he spent the remainder of his life in material comfort.

The collected works of Martial, as published after his death, which probably took place about the year 102, consist of twelve books of miscellaneous Epigrams, which are prefaced by a book of pieces called Liber Spectaculorum, upon the performances given by Titus and Domitian in the capital, especially in the vast amphitheatre erected by the former. At the end are added two books of Xenia and Apophoreta, distichs written to go with the Christmas presents of all sorts which were interchanged at the festival of the Saturnalia. These last are, of course, not "distinguished for a strong poetic feeling," any more than the cracker mottoes of modern times. But the twelve books of Epigrams, while they include work of all degrees of goodness and badness, are invaluable from the vivid picture which they give of actual daily life at Rome in the first century. Few writers of equal ability show in their work such a total absence of character, such indifference to all ideas or enthusiasms; yet this very quality makes the verse of Martial a more perfect mirror of the external aspects of Roman life. A certain intolerance of hypocrisy is the nearest approach Martial ever makes to moral feeling. His perpetual flattery of Domitian, though gross as a mountain—it generally takes the form of comparing him with the Supreme Being, to the disadvantage of the latter—has no more serious political import than there is serious moral import in the almost unexampled indecency of a large proportion of the epigrams. The "candour" noted in him by Pliny is simply that of a sheet of paper which is indifferent to what is written upon it, fair or foul. He may claim the merit—nor is it an inconsiderable one—of being totally free from pretence. In one of the most graceful of his poems, he enumerates to a friend the things which make up a happy life: "Be yourself, and do not wish to be something else," is the line which sums up his counsel. To his own work he extends the same easy tolerance with which he views the follies and vices of society. "A few good, some indifferent, the greater number bad"—so he describes his epigrams; what opening is left after this for hostile criticism? If elsewhere he hints that only indolence prevented him from producing more important work, so harmless an affectation may be passed over in a writer whose clearness of observation and mastery of slight but lifelike portraiture are really of a high order.

By one of the curious accidents of literary history Martial, as the only Latin epigrammatist who left a large mass of work, gave a meaning to the word epigram from which it is only now beginning to recover. The art, practised with such infinite grace by Greek artists of almost every age between Solon and Justinian, was just at this period sunk to a low ebb. The contemporary Greek epigrammatists whose work is preserved in the Palatine Anthology, from Nicarchus and Lucilius to Strato, all show the same heaviness of handling and the same tiresome insistence on making a point, which prevent Martial's epigrams from being placed in the first rank. But while in any collection of Greek epigrammatic poetry these authors naturally sink to their own place, Martial, as well by the mere mass of his work—some twelve hundred pieces in all, exclusive of the cracker mottoes—as by his animation and pungent wit, set a narrow and rather disastrous type for later literature. He appealed strongly to all that was worst in Roman taste—its heavy-handedness, its admiration of verbal cleverness, its tendency towards brutality. Half a century later, Verus Caesar, that wretched creature whom Hadrian had adopted as his successor, and whose fortunate death left the Empire to the noble rule of Antoninus Pius, called Martial "his Virgil:" the incident is highly significant of the corruption of taste which in the course of the second century concurred with other causes to bring Latin literature to decay and almost to extinction.

Among the learned Romans of this age of great learning, the elder Pliny, aetatis suae doctissimus, easily took the first place. Born in the middle of the reign of Tiberius, Gaius Plinius Secundus of Comum passed his life in high public employments, both military and civil, which took him successively over nearly all the provinces of the Empire. He served in Germany, in the Danubian provinces, in Spain, in Gaul, in Africa, and probably also in Syria, on the staff of Titus, during the Jewish war. In August of the year 79 he was in command of the fleet stationed at Misenum when the memorable eruption of Vesuvius took place. In his zeal for scientific investigation he set sail for the spot in a man-of-war, and, lingering too near the zone of the eruption, was suffocated by the rain of hot ashes. The account of his death, given by his nephew in a letter to the historian Tacitus, is one of the best known passages in the classics.

By amazing industry and a most rigid economy of time, Pliny combined with his continuous official duties an immense reading and a literary production of great scope and value. A hundred and sixty volumes of his extracts from writers of all kinds, written, we are told, on both sides of the paper in an extremely small hand, were bequeathed by him to his nephew. Besides works on grammar, rhetoric, military tactics, and other subjects, he wrote two important histories—one, in twenty books, on the wars on the German frontier, the other a general history of Rome in thirty-one books, from the accession of Nero to the joint triumph of Vespasian and Titus after the subjugation of the Jewish revolt. Both these valuable works are completely lost, nor is it possible to determine how far their substance reappears in Tacitus and Suetonius; the former, however, in both Annals and Histories, repeatedly cites him as an authority. But we fortunately possess the most important of his works, the thirty-seven books of his Natural History. This is not, indeed, a great work of literature, though its style, while sometimes heavy and sometimes mannered, is on the whole plain, straightforward, and unpretentious; but it is a priceless storehouse of information on every branch of natural science as known to the ancient world. It was published with a dedication to Titus two years before Pliny's death, but continued during the rest of his life to receive his additions and corrections. It was compiled from a vast reading. Nearly five hundred authors (about a hundred and fifty Roman, the rest foreign) are cited in his catalogue of authorities. The plan of this great encyclopedia was carefully thought out before its composition was begun. It opens with a general system of physiography, and then passes successively to geography, anthropology, human physiology, zoology and comparative physiology, botany, including agriculture and horticulture, medicine, mineralogy, and the fine arts.

After being long held as an almost infallible authority, Pliny, in more recent times, fell under the reproach of credulity and want of sufficient discrimination in the value of his sources. Further research has gone some way to reinstate his reputation. Without having any profound original knowledge of the particular sciences, he had a naturally scientific mind. His tendency to give what is merely curious the same attention as what is essentially important, has incidentally preserved much valuable detail, especially as regards the arts; and modern research often tends to confirm the anecdotes which were once condemned as plainly erroneous and even absurd. Pliny has, further, the great advantage of being shut up in no philosophical system. His philosophy of life, and his religion so far as it appears, is that of his age, a moderate and rational Stoicism. Like his contemporaries, he complains of the modern falling away from nature and the decay of morals. But it is as the conscientious student and the unbiassed observer that he habitually appears. In diligence, accuracy, and freedom from preconception or prejudice, he represents the highest level reached by ancient science after Aristotle and his immediate successors.

Of the more specialised scientific treatises belonging to this period, only two are extant, the three books on Strategy by Sextus Julius Frontinus, and a treatise by the same author on the public water-supply of Rome; both belong to strict science, rather than to literature. The schools of rhetoric and grammar continued to flourish: among many unimportant names that of Quintilian stands eminent, as not only a grammarian and rhetorician, but a fine critic and a writer of high substantive value.

Marcus Fabius Quintilianus of Calagurris, a small town on the Upper Ebro, is the last, and perhaps the most distinguished of that school of Spanish writers which bulks so largely in the history of the first century. He was educated at Rome, and afterwards returned to his native town as a teacher of rhetoric. There he made, or improved, the acquaintance of Servius Sulpicius Galba, proconsul of Tarraconensian Spain in the later years of Nero. When Galba was declared Emperor by the senate, he took Quintilian with him to Rome, where he was appointed a public teacher of rhetoric, with a salary from the privy purse. He retained his fame and his favour through the succeeding reigns. Domitian made him tutor to the two grand-nephews whom he destined for his own successors, and raised him to consular rank. For about twenty years he remained the most celebrated teacher in the capital, combining his professorship with a large amount of actual pleading in the law-courts. His published works belong to the later years of his life, when he had retired from the bar and from public teaching. His first important treatise, on the decay of oratory, De Causis Corruptae Eloquentiae, is not extant. It was followed, a few years later, in or about the year 93, by his great work, the Institutio Oratoria, which sums up the teaching and criticism of his life.

The contents of this work, which at once became the final and standard treatise on the theory and practice of Latin oratory, are very elaborate and complete. In the first book, Quintilian discusses the preliminary training required before the pupil is ready to enter on the study of his art, beginning with a sketch of the elementary education of the child from the time he leaves the nursery, which is even now of remarkable interest. The second book deals with the general principles and scope of the art of oratory, and continues the discussion of the aims and methods of education in its later stages. The five books from the third to the seventh are occupied with an exhaustive treatment of the matter of oratory, under the heads of what were known to the Roman schools by the names of invention and disposition. The greater part of these books is, of course, highly technical. The next four books, from the eighth to the eleventh, treat of the manner of oratory, or all that is included in the word style in its widest signification. It is in this part of the treatise that Quintilian, in relation to the course of general reading both in Greek and Latin that should be pursued by the young orator, gives the masterly sketch of Latin literature which is the most famous portion of the whole work. The twelfth book, which concludes the work, reverts to education in the highest and most extended sense, that of the moral qualifications of the great orator, and the exhaustive discipline of the whole nature throughout life which must be continued unfalteringly to the end.

Now that the formal study of rhetoric has ceased to be a part of the higher education, the more strictly technical parts of Quintilian's work, like those of the Rhetoric of Aristotle, have, in a great measure, lost their relevance to actual life, and with it their general interest to the world at large. Both the Greek and the Roman masterpiece are read now rather for their incidental observations upon human nature and the fundamental principles of art, than for instruction in a particular form of art which, in the course of time, has become obsolete. These observations, in Quintilian no less than in Aristotle, are often both luminous and profound, A collection of the memorable sentences of Quintilian, such as has been made by his modern editors, is full of sayings of deep wisdom and enduring value. Nulla mansit ars qualis inventa est, nec intra initium stetit; Plerumque facilius est plus facere, quam idem; Nihil in studiis parvum est; Cito scribendo non fit ut bene scribatur, bene scribendo fit ut cito; Omnia nostra dum nascuntur placent, alioqui nec scriberentur;—such sayings as these, expressed with admirable terseness and lucidity, are scattered all over the work, and have a value far beyond the limits of any single study. If they do not drop from Quintilian with the same curious negligence as they do from Aristotle (whose best things are nearly always said in a parenthesis), the advantage is not wholly with the Greek author; the more orderly and finished method of the Roman teacher marks a higher constructive literary power than that of Aristotle, whose singular genius made him indeed the prince of lecturers, but did not place him in the first rank of writers.

Beyond these incidental touches of wisdom and insight, which give an enduring value to the whole substance of the work, the chief interest for modern readers in the Institutio Oratoria, lies in three portions which are, more or less, episodic to the strict purpose of the book, though they sum up the spirit in which it is written. These are the discussions on the education of children in the first, and on the larger education of mature life in the last book, and the critical sketch of ancient literature up to his own time, which occupies the first chapter of the tenth. Almost for the first time in history—for the ideal system of Plato, however brilliant and suggestive, stands on quite a different footing—the theory of education was, in this age, made a subject of profound thought and study. The precepts of Quintilian, if taken in detail, address themselves to the formation of a Roman of the Empire, and not a citizen of modern Europe. But their main spirit is independent of the accidents of any age or country. In the breadth of his ideas, and in the wisdom of much of his detailed advice, Quintilian takes a place in the foremost rank of educational writers. The dialogue on oratory written a few years earlier by Tacitus names, as the main cause of the decay of the liberal arts, not any lack of substantial encouragement, but the negligence of parents and the want of skill in teachers. To leave off vague and easy declamations against luxury and the decay of morals, and to fix on the great truth that bad education is responsible for bad life, was the first step towards a real reform. This Quintilian insists upon with admirable clearness. Nor has any writer on education grasped more firmly or expressed more lucidly the complementary truth that education, from the cradle upwards, is something which acts on the whole intellectual and moral nature, and whose object is the production of what the Romans called, in a simple form of words which was full of meaning, "the good man." It would pass beyond the province of literary criticism to discuss the reasons why that reform never took place, or, if it did, was confined to a circle too small to influence the downward movement of the Empire at large. They belong to a subject which is among the most interesting of all studies, and which has hardly yet been studied with adequate fulness or insight, the social history of the Roman world in the second century.

One necessary part of the education of the orator was a course of wide and careful reading in the best literature; and it is in this special connection that Quintilian devotes part of his elaborate discussion on style to a brief critical summary of the literature of Greece and that of his own country. The frequent citations which have already been made from this part of the work may indicate the very great ability with which it is executed. Though his special purpose as a professor of rhetoric is always kept in view, his criticism passes beyond this formal limit. He expresses, no doubt, what was the general opinion of the educated world of his own time; but the form of his criticism is so careful and so choice, that many of his brief phrases have remained the final word on the authors, both in prose and verse, whom he mentions in his rapid survey. His catalogue is far from being, as it has been disparagingly called, a mere "list of the best hundred books." It is the deliberate judgment of the best Roman scholarship, in an age of wide reading and great learning, upon the masterpieces of their own literature. His own preference for certain periods and certain manners is well marked. But he never forgets that the object of criticism is to disengage excellences rather than to censure faults: even his pronounced aversion from the style of Seneca and the authors of the Neronian age does not prevent him from seeing their merits, and giving these ungrudging praise.

It is, indeed, in Quintilian that the reaction from the early imperial manner comes to its climax. Statius had, to a certain degree, gone back to Virgil; Quintilian goes back to Cicero without hesitation or reserve. He is the first of the Ciceronians; Lactantius in the fourth century, John of Salisbury in the twelfth, Petrarch in the fourteenth, Erasmus in the sixteenth, all in a way continue the tradition which he founded; nor is it surprising that the discovery of a complete manuscript of the Institutio Oratoria, early in the fifteenth century was hailed by scholars as one of the most important events of the Renaissance. He is not, however, a mere imitator of his master's style; indeed, his style is, in some features and for some purposes, a better one than his master's. It is as clear and fluent, and not so verbose. He cannot rise to the great heights of Cicero; but for ordinary use it would be difficult to name a manner that combines so well the Ciceronian dignity with the rich colour and high finish added to Latin prose by the writers of the earlier empire.

The body of criticism left by Quintilian in this remarkable chapter is the more valuable because it includes nearly all the great Latin writers. Classical literature, little as it may have seemed so at the time, was already nearing its end. With the generation which immediately followed, that of his younger contemporaries, the Silver Age closes, and a new age begins, which, though full of interest in many ways, is no longer classical. After Tacitus and the younger Pliny, the main stream dwindles and loses itself among quicksands. The writers who continue the pure classical tradition are few, and of inferior power; and the chief interest of Latin literature becomes turned in other directions, to the Christian writers on the one hand, and on the other to those authors in whom we may trace the beginning of new styles and methods, some of which bore fruit at the time, while others remained undeveloped till the later Middle Ages. Why this final effort of purely Roman culture, made in the Flavian era with such sustained energy and ability, on the whole scarcely survived a single generation, is a question to which no simple answer can be given. It brings us once more face to face with the other question, which, indeed, haunts Latin literature from the outset, whether the conquest and absorption of Greece by Rome did not carry with it the seeds of a fatal weakness in the victorious literature. Up to the end of the Golden Age fresh waves of Greek influence had again and again given new vitality and enlarged power to the Latin language. That influence had now exhausted itself; for the Latin world Greece had no further message. That Latin literature began to decline so soon after the stimulating Greek influence ceased to operate, was partly due to external causes; the empire began to fight for its existence before the end of the second century, and never afterwards gained a pause in the continuous drain of its vital force. But there was another reason more intimate and inherent; a literature formed so completely on that of Greece paid the penalty in a certain loss of independent vitality. The gap between the literary Latin and the actual speech of the mass of Latin-speaking people became too great to bridge over. Classical Latin poetry was, as we have seen, written throughout in alien metres, to which indeed the language was adapted with immense dexterity, but which still remained foreign to its natural structure. To a certain degree the same was even true of prose, at least of the more imaginative prose which was developed through a study of the great Greek masters of history, oratory, and philosophy. In the Silver Age Latin literature, feeling a great past behind it, definitely tried to cut itself away from Greece and stand on its own feet. Quintilian's criticism implies throughout that the two literatures were on a footing of substantial equality; Cicero is sufficient for him, as Virgil is for Statius. Even Martial, it has been noted, hardly ever alludes to Greek authors, while he is full of references to those of his own country. The eminent grammarians of the age, Aemilius Asper, Marcus Valerius Probus, Quintus Asconius Pedianus, show the same tendency; their main work was in commenting on the great Latin writers. The elaborate editions of the Latin poets, from Lucretius to Persius, produced by Probus, and the commentaries on Terence, Cicero, Sallust, and Virgil by Asconius and Asper, were the work of a generation to whom these authors had become in effect the classics. But literature, as the event proved not for the first or the last time, cannot live long on the study of the classics alone.



III.

TACITUS.

The end, however, was not yet; and in the generation which immediately followed, the single imposing figure of Cornelius Tacitus, the last of the great classical writers, adds a final and, as it were, a sunset splendour to the literature of Rome. The reigns of Nerva and Trajan, however much they were hailed as the beginning of a golden age, were really far less fertile in literary works than those of the Flavian Emperors; and the boasted restoration of freedom of speech was almost immediately followed by an all but complete silence of the Latin tongue. When to the name of Tacitus are added those of Juvenal and the younger Pliny, there is literally almost no other author—none certainly of the slightest literary importance—to be chronicled until the reign of Hadrian; and even then the principal authors are Greek, while mere compilers or grammarians like Gellius and Suetonius are all that Latin literature has to show. The beginnings of Christian literature in Minucius Felix, and of mediaeval literature in Apuleius and the author of the Pervigilium Veneris, rise in an age scanty in the amount and below mediocrity in the substance of its production.

Little is known of the birth and parentage of Tacitus beyond the mere fact that he was a Roman of good family. Tradition places his birth at Interamna early in the reign of Nero; he passed through the regular stages of an official career under the three Flavian Emperors. His marriage, towards the end of the reign of Vespasian, to the daughter and only surviving child of the eminent soldier and administrator, Gnaeus Julius Agricola, aided him in obtaining rapid promotion; he was praetor in the year in which Domitian celebrated the Secular Games, and rose to the dignity of the consulship during the brief reign of Nerva. He was then a little over forty. When still quite a young man he had written the dialogue on oratory, which is one of the most interesting of Latin works on literary criticism; but throughout the reign of Domitian his pen was wholly laid aside. The celebrated passage of the Agricola in which he accounts for this silence may or may not give an adequate account of the facts, but at all events gives the keynote of the whole of his subsequent work, and of that view of the imperial government of the first century which his genius has fixed ineradicably in the imagination of the world. Under Domitian a servile senate had ordered the works of the two most eminent martyrs of reactionary Stoicism, Arulenus Rusticus and Herennius Senecio, to be publicly burned in the forum; "thinking that in that fire they consumed the voice of the Roman people, their own freedom, and the conscience of mankind. Great indeed," he bitterly continues, "are the proofs we have given of what we can endure. The antique time saw to the utmost bounds of freedom, we of servitude; robbed by an inquisition of the common use of speech and hearing, we should have lost our very memory with our voice, were it as much in our power to forget as to be dumb. Now at last our breath has come back; yet in the nature of human frailty remedies are slower than their diseases, and genius and learning are more easily extinguished than recalled. Fifteen years have been taken out of our lives, while youth passed silently into age; and we are the wretched survivors, not only of those who have been taken away from us, but of ourselves." Even a colourless translation may give some idea of the distilled bitterness of this tremendous indictment. We must remember that they are the words of a man in the prime of life and at the height of public distinction, under a prince of whose government he speaks in terms of almost extravagant hope and praise, to realise the spirit in which he addressed himself to paint his lurid portraits of Tiberius or Nero or Domitian.

The exquisitely beautiful memoir of his father-in-law, in the introduction to which this passage occurs, was written by Tacitus in the year which succeeded his own consulship, and which saw the accession of Trajan. He was then already meditating a large historical work on the events of his own lifetime, for which he had, by reading and reflection, as well as by his own administrative experience, accumulated large materials. The essay De Origine Situ Moribus ac Populis Germaniae was published about the same time or a little later, and no doubt represents part of the material which he had collected for the chapters of his history dealing with the German wars, and which, as much of it fell outside the scope of a general history of Rome, he found it worth his while to publish as a separate treatise. The scheme of his work became larger in the course of its progress. As he originally planned it, it was to begin with the accession of Galba, thus dealing with a period which fell entirely within his own lifetime, and indeed within his own recollection. But after completing his account of the six reigns from Galba to Domitian, he did not, as he had at first proposed, go on to those of Nerva and Trajan, but resumed his task at an earlier period, and composed an equally elaborate history of the empire from the death of Augustus down to the point where his earlier work began. He still cherished the hope of resuming his history from the accession of Nerva, but it is doubtful whether he lived long enough to do so. Allusions to the Eastern conquests of Trajan in the Annals show that the work cannot have been published till after the year 115, and it would seem—though nothing is known as to the events or employments of his later life—that he did not long survive that date. But the thirty books of his Annals and Histories, themselves splendid work for a lifetime, gave the continuous history of the empire in the most crucial and on the whole the most remarkable period of its existence, the eighty-two years which succeeded the death of its founder.