There is no need to multiply instances; each play will supply many. Only in the Troades[184] and the Phaedra does this declamatory rhetoric rise to something higher than mere declamation and near akin to true poetry. In these plays there are two speeches standing on a different plane to anything else in Seneca's iambics. In the Troades Agamemnon is protesting against the proposed sacrifice of Polyxena to the spirit of the dead Achilles (255).

quid caede dira nobiles clari ducis aspergis umbras? noscere hoc primum decet, quid facere victor debeat, victus pati. violenta nemo imperia continuit diu, moderata durant; ... magna momento obrui vincendo didici. Troia nos tumidos facit nimium ac feroces? stamus hoc Danai loco, unde illa cecidit. fateor, aliquando impotens regno ac superbus altius memet tuli; sed fregit illos spiritus haec quae dare potuisset aliis causa, Fortunae favor. tu me superbum, Priame, tu timidum facis. ego esse quicquam sceptra nisi vano putem fulgore tectum nomen et falso comam vinclo decentem? casus haec rapiet brevis, nec mille forsan ratibus aut annis decem. ... fatebor ... affligi Phrygas vincique volui; ruere et aequari solo utinam arcuissem.

Why besmirch with murder foul the noble shade of that renowned chief? First must thou learn the bounds of a victor's power, of the vanquished's suffering. No man for long has held unbridled sway; only self-control may endure ... I myself have conquered and have learned thereby that man's mightiness may fall in the twinkling of an eye. Shall Troy o'erthrown exalt our pride and make us overbold? Here we the Danaans stand on the spot whence she has fallen. Of old, I own, I have borne myself too haughtily, self-willed and proud of my power. But Fortune's favour, which had made another proud, has broken my pride. Priam, thou makest me proud, thou makest me tremble. I count the sceptre naught save a glory bright with worthless tinsel that sets the vain splendour of a crown upon my brow. All this the chance of one short hour may take from me without the aid of a thousand ships and ten long years of siege ... I will own my fault ... I desired to crush and conquer Troy. Would I had forbidden to lay her low and raze her walls to the ground!

The thought is not deep: the speech might serve for a model for a suasoria in the schools of rhetoric. But there is a stateliness and dignity about it that is most rare in these plays. At last after dreary tracts of empty rant we meet Seneca, the spiritual guide of the epistles and the treatises.

Far more striking, however, from the dramatic standpoint, are the great speeches in the Phaedra, where the heroine makes known her passion for Hippolytus (600 sqq.). They are frankly rhetorical, but direct, passionate, and to the point. They contain few striking lines or sentiments, but they are clear and comparatively free from affectation. Theseus has maddened Phaedra by his infidelities, and has long been absent from her, imprisoned in the underworld. An uncontrollable passion for her stepson has come upon her. She appeals to the unsuspecting Hippolytus for pity and protection (619):

muliebre non est regna tutari urbium; tu qui iuventae flore primaevo viges cives paterno fortis imperio rege, sinu receptam supplicem ac servam tege. miserere viduae.

Hipp. Summus hoc omen deus avertat. aderit sospes actutum parens.

'Tis no woman's task to rule cities. Do thou, strong in the flower of thy first youth, flinch not, but govern the state by the power thy father held. Take me and shield me in thy bosom, thy suppliant and thy slave! Pity thy father's widow.

Hipp. Nay, high heaven avert the omen. Soon shall my father return unscathed.

Phaedra then begins to show her true colours. 'Nay!' she replies, 'he will not come. Pluto holds him fast, the would-be ravisher of his bride, unless indeed Pluto, like others I wot of, is indifferent to love.' Hippolytus attempts to console her: he will do all in his power to make life easy for her:

et te merebor esse ne viduam putes ac tibi parentis ipse supplebo locum.

I shall prove me worthy of thee: so thou shalt not deem thyself a widow. I will fill up my absent father's room.

These innocent words are as fuel to Phaedra's passion. She turns to him again appealing for pity, pity for an ill she dare not name—

quod in novercam cadere vix credas malum.

He bids her speak out. She replies, 'Love consumes me with an all-devouring flame. 'He still fails to catch her meaning, supposing that the passion of which she speaks is for the absent Theseus. She can restrain herself no longer: 'Aye, 'tis for Theseus!' she cries (646):

Hippolyte, sic est; Thesei vultus amo [185] illos priores quos tulit quondam puer, cum prima puras barba signaret genas monstrique caecam Cnosii vidit domum et longa curva fila collegit via. quis tum ille fulsit! presserant vittae comam et ora flavus tenera tinguebat pudor; inerant lacertis mollibus fortes tori; tuaeque Phoebes vultus aut Phoebi mei, tuusque potius—talis, en talis fuit cum placuit hosti, sic tulit celsum caput: in te magis refulget incomptus decor; est genitor in te totus et torvae tamen pars aliqua matris miscet ex aequo decus; in ore Graio Scythicus apparet rigor. si cum parente Creticum intrasses fretum, tibi fila potius nostra nevisset soror. te te, soror, quacumque siderei poli in parte fulges, invoco ad causam parem: domus sorores una corripuit duas, te genitor, at me natus. en supplex iacet adlapsa genibus regiae proles domus, respersa nulla labe et intacta, innocens tibi mutor uni. certa descendi ad preces: finem hic dolori faciet aut vitae dies, miserere amantis.[186]

Even so, Hippolytus; I love the face that Theseus wore, in the days of old while yet he was a boy, when the first down marked his bright cheeks and he looked on the dark home of the Cretan monster and gathered the long magic thread along the winding way. Ah! how then he shone upon my eyes. A wreath was about his hair and his delicate cheeks glowed with the golden bloom of modesty. Strong sinews stood out upon his shapely arms and his countenance was the countenance of the goddess that thou servest or of mine own bright sun-god; nay, rather 'twas as thine own. Even so, even so looked he when he won the heart of her that was his foe, and lofty was his carriage like to thine. But in thee still brighter shines an artless glory, and on thee is all thy father's beauty. Yet mingled therewith in equal portion is something of thy wild mother's fairness. On thy Greek face is seen the fierceness of the Scythian. Hadst thou sailed o'er the sea with thy sire to Crete, for thee rather had my sister spun the magic thread. On thee, on thee, my sister, I call where'er thou shinest in the starry heaven, on thee I call to aid my cause. Lo! sisters twain hath one house brought to naught—thee did the father ruin, me the son. Lo! suppliant at thy knees I fall, the daughter of a king, stainless and pure and innocent. For thee alone I swerve from my course. I have steeled my soul and stooped to beg of thee. Today shall end either my sorrow or my life. Pity, have pity, on her that loves thee.

Then the storm of Hippolytus' anger breaks. Here at least Seneca has used his great rhetorical gifts to good effect. The passion may be highly artificial when compared with the passion of the genuinely human Phaedra of Euripides, but it is nevertheless passion and not bombast: crudity there may be, but there is no real irrelevance.

There is less to praise and more to wonder at in Seneca's dialogue. Instead of rational conversation or controversy, he gives us a brilliant but meretricious display of epigram, the mechanical nature of which is often emphasized by a curious symmetry of structure. For line after line one character takes up the words of another and turns them against him with dexterity as extraordinary as it is monotonous. The resulting artificiality is almost incredible. It appears in its most extravagant form in the Thyestes.[187] Scarcely less strained, though from the nature of the subject the extravagance is less repellent, is a passage in the Troades. Achilles' ghost has demanded the sacrifice of Polyxena. Agamemnon hesitates to give orders for the sacrifice. Pyrrhus, Achilles' son, enumerates the great deeds of his father, and asks, indignantly, if such glory is to win naught save neglect after death. Agamemnon has sacrificed his own daughter, why should he not sacrifice Priam's? Agamemnon—in the speech quoted above—refuses indignantly. 'Sacrifice oxen if you will: no human blood shall be shed!' Pyrrhus replies (306):

hac dextra Achilli victimam reddam suam. quam si negas retinesque, maiorem dabo dignamque quam det Pyrrhus; et nimium diu a caede nostra regia cessat manus paremque poscit Priamus.

_Agam_. haud equidem nego hoc esse Pyrrhi maximum in bello decus, saevo peremptus ense quod Priamus iacet, _supplex paternus.

Pyrrh. supplices nostri patris hostesque eosdem novimus. Priamus tamen praesens rogavit; tu gravi pavidus metu, nec ad rogandum fortis Aiaci preces Ithacoque mandas clausus atque hostem tremens.

By this right hand he shall receive his own. And if thou dost refuse and keep the maid, A greater victim will I slay, and one More worthy Pyrrhus' gift: for all too long From royal slaughter hath my hand been free, And Priam asks an equal sacrifice.

Agam. Far be it from my wish to dim the praise That thou dost claim for this most glorious deed— Old Priam slain by thy barbaric sword, Thy father's suppliant.

Pyrrh. I know full well My father's suppliants—and well I know His enemies. Yet royal Priam came And made his plea before my father's face; But thou, o'ercome with fear, not brave enough Thyself to make request, within thy tent Did trembling hide, and thy desires consign To braver men, that they might plead for thee. MILLER.

Agamemnon retorts, 'What of your father, when he shirked the toils of war and lay idly in his tent?'—

levi canoram verberans plectro chelyn.

Pyrrh. tunc magnus Hector, arma contemnens tua, cantus Achillis timuit et tanto in metu navalibus pax alta Thessalicis fuit.

Agam. nempe isdem in istis Thessalis navalibus pax alta rursus Hectoris patri fuit.

Pyrrh. est regis alti spiritum regi dare.

Agam. cur dextra regi spiritum eripuit tua?

Pyrrh. mortem misericors saepe pro vita dabit.

Agam. et nunc misericors virginem busto petis?

Pyrrh. iamne immolari virgines credis nefas?

Agam. praeferre patriam liberis regem decet.

Pyrrh. lex nulla capto parcit aut poenam impedit.

Agam. quod non vetat lex, hoc vetat fieri pudor.

Pyrrh. quodcumque libuit facere victori licet.

Agam. minimum decet libere cui multum licet.

Idly strumming on his tuneful lyre.

Pyrrh. Then mighty Hector, scornful of thy arms, Yet felt such wholesome fear of that same lyre, That our Thessalian ships were left in peace.

Agam. An equal peace did Hector's father find, When he betook him to Achilles' ships.

Pyrrh. 'Tis regal thus to spare a kingly life.

Agam. Why then didst thou a kingly life despoil?

Pyrrh. But mercy oft doth offer death for life.

Agam. Doth mercy now demand a maiden's blood?

Pyrrh. Canst thou proclaim such sacrifice a sin?

Agam. A king must love his country more than child.

Pyrrh. No law the wretched captive's life doth spare.

Agam. What law forbids not, yet may shame forbid.

Pyrrh. 'Tis victor's right to do whate'er he will.

Agam. Then should he will the least, who most can do. MILLER.

The cleverness of this is undeniable: individual lines (e.g. the last) are striking. Taken collectively they are ineffective; we feel, moreover, that the cleverness is mere knack: the continued picking up of the adversary's words to be used as weapons against himself is wearisome. It would be nearly as great a strain to listen to such a dialogue as to take part in it: the atmosphere is that of the school of rhetoric, an atmosphere in which sensible and natural dialogue is impossible.[188]

The characters naturally suffer from this continued display of declamatory rhetoric. They have but one voice and language; they differ from one another only in their clothes and the situations in which they are placed. It is true that some of them are patterns of virtue and others monsters of iniquity. But strip off the coating of paint, and within the limits of these two types—for there are but two—the puppets are precisely the same. There is none of the play of light and shade so essential to drama: all is agonizingly crude and lurid. This is not due to the rhetoric alone, there is another influence at work. The plays are permeated by a strong vein of Stoicism. Carried to its logical conclusion Stoicism lays itself open to taunts such as Cicero levels at his friend Cato in the pro Murena,[189] where he delivers a humorous reductio ad absurdum of its tenets. Such a philosophy is fatal to the drama. It allows no room for human sentiment or human weakness; the most virtuous affections are chilled and robbed of their attractiveness: there are no gradations of temperament, intellect, or character: pathos disappears. The Stoic ideal was a being in whom the natural impulses and desires should be completely subjected to the laws of pure reason. It tends in its intensity to a narrowness, an abstract unreality which is unfavourable to the development of the more human virtues. What it gave with one hand the more rigid Stoic philosophy took away with the other. It preached the brotherhood of man and took away half the value of sympathy. And here in the plays there is nothing of the mitis sapientia, the concessions to mortal weakness, the humanity, which characterize the prose works of Seneca and have won the hearts of many generations of men. There the hardness of Stoicism is softened by ripe experience and a tendency to eclecticism, and the doctrinaire stands less sharply revealed. 'Sous l'austerite du philosophe, on trouve un homme.' The most noteworthy result of this hard Stoicism upon the plays is the almost complete absence of pathos springing from the tenderer human affections. Seneca's tragedy may sometimes succeed in horrifying us, as in the ghastly rhetoric of the Thyestes or the Medea. He moves us rarely.

But there are a few striking exceptions to the rule, notably the beautiful passage of the Troades, where Andromache bids her companions in misfortune cease from useless lamentation[190] (409):

quid, maesta Phrygiae turba, laceratis comas miserumque tunsae pectus effuso genas fletu rigatis? levia perpessae sumus, si flenda patimur. Ilium vobis modo, mihi cecidit olim, cum ferus curru incito mea membra raperet et gravi gemeret sono Peliacis axis pondere Hectoreo tremens. tunc obruta atque eversa quodcumque accidit torpens malis rigeusque sine sensu fero. iam erepta Danais coniugem sequerer meum, nisi hic teneret: hic meos animos domat morique prohibet; cogit hic aliquid deos adhuc rogare—tempus aerumnae addidit.

Why, ye sad Phrygian women, do ye rend your hair and beat your woeful breasts and bedew your cheeks with streaming tears? But light is our sorrow, if it lies not too deep for tears. For you Ilium but now has fallen, for me it fell long ago, when the cruel wheels of the swift ear of Peleus' son dragged in the dust the limbs of him I loved, and groaned loud as they quivered beneath the weight of Hector dead. Then was I overthrown, then cast to utter ruin, and since then I bear whatso falleth upon me, with a heart that is numb with grief, chilled and insensible, and long since had I snatched myself from the hands of the Greeks and followed my husband, did not my child keep me among the living: he checks my purpose and forbids me to die; he constrains me still to make supplication to heaven and prolongs my anguish.

Even here the pathos is the calm and reasoned pathos of hopelessness, the pathos of a Stoic who preaches endurance of evils against which his philosophy is not proof. Here, too, we find the Stoic attitude towards death. Death is the end of all; there is naught to dread; death puts an end to hope and fear: to die is to be as though we had never been (394):

post mortem nihil est, ipsaque mors nihil. velocis spatii meta novissima; spem ponant avidi, solliciti metum. tempus nos avidum devorat et chaos: mors individua est, noxia corpori nec parcens animae: Taenara et aspero regnum sub domino limen et obsidens custos non facili Cerberus ostio rumores vacui verbaque inania et par sollicito fabula somnio. quaeris quo iaceas post obitum loco? quo non nata iacent.

Since naught remains, and death is naught But life's last goal, so swiftly sought: Let those who cling to life abate Their fond desires, and yield to fate; Soon shall grim time and yawning night In their vast depths engulf us quite; Impartial death demands the whole— The body slays nor spares the soul. Dark Taenara and Pluto fell, And Cerberus, grim guard of hell— All these but empty rumours seem, The pictures of a troubled dream. Where then will the departed spirit dwell? Let those who never came to being tell. MILLER.

Death brings release from sorrow: the worst of torture is to be forced to live on in the midst of woe—

mors votum meum—cries Hecuba—(1171) infantibus violenta, virginibus venis, ubique properas, saeva: me solam times.

O death, my sole desire, for boys and maids Thou com'st with hurried step and savage mien: But me alone of mortals dost thou fear. MILLER.

So, too, Andromache, in the passage quoted above, almost apologizes for not having put an end to her existence. Polyxena meets death with exultation (Tro. 945, 1152-9): even the little Astyanax is infected with Stoic passion for suicide (1090):

nec gradu segni puer ad alta pergit moenia. ut summa stetit pro turre, vultus huc et huc acres tulit intrepidus animo.... non flet e turba omnium qui fletur; ac, dum verba fatidici et preces concipit Vlixes vatis et saevos ciet ad sacra superos, sponte desiluit sua in media Priami regna.

And with no lingering pace the boy climbed the lofty battlements, and all about him cast his keen gaze with dauntless soul.... But he alone of all the throng who wept for him wept not at all, and, while Ulysses 'uttered in priestly wise the words of fate and prayed' and called the cruel gods to the sacrifice, the boy of his own will cast himself down to death on the fields that Priam ruled.

The enthusiasm for death is carried too far.[191] Even the agony of the Troades fails really to stir us: it depresses us without wakening our sympathy. So, too, with other scenes: in the Hercules Furens we have the virtuous Stoic—in the persons of Megara and Amphitryon—confronting the instans tyrannus in the person of Lycus: it is the hackneyed theme of the schools of rhetoric,[192] but derives its inspiration from Stoicism (426):

Lyc. cogere. Meg. cogi qui potest nescit mori. Lyc. effare potius, quod novis thalamis parem regale munus. Meg. aut tuam mortem aut meam. Lyc. moriere demens. Meg. coniugi occurram meo. Lyc. sceptrone nostro famulus est potior tibi? Meg. quot iste famulus tradidit reges neci. Lyc. cur ergo regi servit et patitur iugum? Meg. imperia dura tolle: quid virtus erit?[193] Lyc. obici feris monstrisque virtutem putas? Meg. virtutis est domare quae cuncti pavent. Lyc. tenebrae loquentem magna Tartareae premunt. Meg. non est ad astra mollis e terris via.[194] Lyc. Thou shalt be forced. Meg. He can be forced, who knows not how to die. Lyc. Tell me what gift I could bestow more rich Than royal wedlock? Meg. Or thy death or mine. Lyc. Then die, thou fool. Meg. 'Tis thus I'll meet my lord. Lyc. Is that slave more to thee than I, a king? Meg. How many kings has that slave given to death! Lyc. Why does he serve a king and bear the yoke? Meg. Remove hard tasks, and where would valour be? Lyc. To conquer monsters call'st thou valour then? Meg. 'Tis valour to subdue what all men fear. Lyc. The shades of Hades hold that boaster fast. Meg. No easy way leads from the earth to heaven. MILLER

So, too, a little later (463) Amphitryon crushes Lycus with a true Stoic retort:—

Lyc. quemcumque miserum videris, hominem scias. Amph. quemcumque fortem videris, miserum neges.[195]

Lyc. Whoe'er is wretched, him mayst thou know for mortal. Amph. Whoe'er is brave, thou mayst not call him wretched.

Admirable as are the sentiments expressed by these virtuous and calamitous persons, they leave us cold: they are too self-sufficient to need our sympathy. Pain and death have no terrors for them; why should we pity them? But it would be unjust to lay the blame for this absence of pathetic power entirely on the influence of Stoicism. The scholastic rhetoric is not a good vehicle for pathos, and must bear a large portion of the blame, though even the rhetoric is due in no small degree to the Stoic type of dialectic. As Seneca himself says, speaking of others than himself, 'Philosophia quae fuit, facta philologia est.'[196] And it must further be remembered that of the few flights of real poetry in these plays some of the finest were inspired by Stoicism. The drama cannot nourish in the Stoic atmosphere, poetry can. Seneca was sometimes a poet. His best-known chorus, the famous regem non faciunt opes of the Thyestes (345), is directly inspired by Stoicism. The speeches of Agamemnon and Andromache, together with the chorus already quoted from the Troades, all bear the impress of the Stoic philosophy. The same is true of the scarcely inferior chorus on fate from the Oedipus (980).

But there are other passages of genuine poetry where the Stoic is silent. The chorus in the Hercules Furens (838), giving the conventional view of death, will stand comparison with the chorus of the Troades, giving the philosophic view. The chorus on the dawn (H.F. 125) brings the fresh sounds and breezes of early morning into the atmosphere of the rhetorician's lecture-room. The celebrated

venient annis saecula seris quibus Oceanus vincula rerum laxet et ingens pateat tellus Tethysque novos detegat orbes nec sit terris ultima Thule (Med. 375)

Late in time shall come an age, when Ocean shall unbar the world, and the whole wide earth be revealed, and Tethys shall show forth a new world, nor Thule be earth's limit any more.

has acquired a fictitious importance since the discovery of the new world, but shows a fine imagination, even if—as has been maintained—it is merely a courtly reference to the British expedition of Claudius. And the invocation to sleep in the Hercules Furens proved worthy to provide an inspiration for Shakespeare[197] (1063):

solvite tantis animum monstris solvite superi, caecam in melius flectite mentem. tuque, o domitor Somne malorum, requies animi, pars humanae melior vitae, volucre o matris genus Astracae, frater durae languide Mortis, veris miscens falsa, futuri certus et idem pessimus auctor, pax errorum, portus vitae, lucis requies noctisque comes, qui par regi famuloque venis, pavidum leti genus humanum cogis longam discere noctem: placidus fessum lenisque fove, preme devinctum torpore gravi.

Save him, ye gods, from monstrous madness, save him, restore his darkened mind to sanity. And thou, O sleep, subduer of ill, the spirit's repose, thou better part of human life, swift-winged child of Astraca, drowsy brother of cruel death, mixing false with true, prescient of what shall be, yet oftener prescient of sorrow, peace mid our wanderings, haven of man's life, day's respite, night's companion, that comest impartially to king and slave, thou that makest trembling mankind to gain a foretaste of the long night of death; do thou bring gentle rest to his weariness, and sweet balm to his anguish, and overwhelm him with heavy stupor.

But the poetry is confined mainly to the lyrics. In them, though the metre be monotonous and the thought rarely more than commonplace, the feeling rings true, the expression is brilliant, and the never absent rhetoric is sometimes transmuted to a more precious substance with a far-off resemblance to true lyrical passion. In the iambics, with the exception of the passages already quoted from the Troades and the Phaedra, touches of genuine poetry are most rare.[198] In certain of the long descriptive passages (H.F. 658 sqq., Oed. 530 sqq.) we get a stagey picturesqueness, but no more. It is for different qualities that we read the iambics of Seneca, if we read them at all.

Even in its worst moments the rhetoric is capable of extorting our unwilling admiration by its sheer cleverness and audacity. A good example is to be found in the passage of the Thyestes, where Atreus meditates whether he shall call upon his sons Menelaus and Agamemnon to aid him in his unnatural vengeance on Thyestes. He has doubts as to whether he is their father, for Thyestes had seduced their mother Aerope (327):—

prolis incertae fides ex hoc petatur scelere: si bella abnuunt et gerere nolunt odia, si patruum vocant, pater est. eatur.

And by this test of crime, Let their uncertain birth be put to proof: If they refuse to wage this war of death And will not serve my hatred; if they plead He is their uncle—then he is their sire. So to my work! MILLER'S translation slightly altered.

Equally ingenious is the closing scene between Atreus and Thyestes after the vengeance is accomplished and Thyestes has feasted on the flesh of his own sons (1100):

Thy. quid liberi meruere? Atr. quod fuerant tui. Thy. natos parenti— Atr. fateor et, quod me iuvat, certos. Thy. piorum praesides testor deos. Atr. quin coniugales? Thy. scelere quid pensas scelus? Atr. scio quid queraris: scelere praerepto doles, nec quod nefandas hauseris angit dapes; quod non pararis: fuerat hic animus tibi instruere similes inscio fratri cibos et adiuvante liberos matre aggredi similique leto sternere—hoc unum obstitit: tuos putasti. Thy. What was my children's sin? Atr. This, that they were thy children. Thy. But to think That children to the father— Atr. That indeed, I do confess it, gives me greatest joy, That thou art well assured they were thy sons. Thy. I call upon the gods of innocence— Atr. Why not upon the gods of marriage call? Thy. Why dost thou seek to punish crime with crime? Atr. Well do I know the cause of thy complaint: Because I have forestalled thee in the deed. Thou grievest, not because thou hast consumed This horrid feast, but that thou wast not first To set it forth. This was thy fell intent, To arrange a feast like this unknown to me, And with their mother's aid attack my sons, And with a like destruction lay them low. But this one thing opposed—thou thought'st them thine. MILLER.

These passages are as unreal as they are repulsive, but they are diabolically clever. Seneca's rhetoric is, however, as we have already seen, capable of rising to higher things, and even where he does not succeed, as in the passages quoted above from the Phaedra and Troades,[199] in introducing a genuine poetic element, he often produces striking declamatory effects. The exit of the blind Oedipus, as he goes forth into life-long banishment, bringing peace to Thebes at the last, is highly artificial in form, but, given the rhetorical drama, is not easily surpassed as a conclusion—

mortifera mecum vitia terrarum extraho. violenta Fata et horridus Morbi tremor, Maciesque et atra Pestis et rabidus Dolor, mecum ite, mecum. ducibus his uti libet (1058).

With me to exile lead I forth 'all pestilential humours of the land. Ye blasting fates', ye trembling agues, famine and deadly plague and maddened grief, go forth with me, with me! My heart rejoices to follow in your train.

So likewise the last despairing cry of Jason, as Medea sails victoriously away in her magic car—

per alta vade spatia sublimi aethere, testare nullos esse qua veheris deos

Sail on through the airy depths of highest heaven, and bear witness that, where thou soarest, no gods can be.

forms a magnificent ending to a play which, for all its unreality, succeeds for more than half its length (l 578) in arresting our attention by its ingenious rhetoric and its comparative freedom from mere bombast. Excellent, too, is the speech (Phoen. 193) in which Antigone dissuades her father from suicide. 'What ills can time have in store for him compared to those he has endured?'—

qui fata proculcavit ac vitae bona proiecit atque abscidit et casus suos oneravit ipse, cui deo nullo est opus, quare ille mortem cupiat aut quare petat? utrumque timidi est: nemo contempsit mori qui concupivit. cuius haut ultra mala exire possunt, in loco tuto est situs, quis iam deorum, velle fac, quicquam potest malis tuis adicere? iam nec tu potes nisi hoc, ut esse te putes dignum nece— non es nec ulla pectus hoc culpa attigit. et hoc magis te, genitor, insontem voca, quod innocens es dis quoque invitis.... ... ... quidquid potest auferre cuiquam mors, tibi hoc vita abstulit.

Who tramples under foot his destiny, Who disregards and scorns the goods of life, And aggravates the evils of his lot, Who has no further need of Providence: Wherefore should such a man desire to die, Or seek for death? Each is the coward's act. No one holds death in scorn who seeks to die. The man whose evils can no further go Is safely lodged. Who of the gods, think'st thou, Grant that he wills it so, can add one jot Unto thy sum of trouble? Nor canst thou, Save that thou deem'st thyself unfit to live. But thou art not unfit, for in thy breast No taint of sin has come. And all the more, My father, art thou free from taint of sin, Because, though heaven willed it otherwise, Thou still art innocent.... Whatever death From any man can take, thy life hath taken. MILLER

It is, however, in isolated lines and striking sententiae that Seneca's gift for rhetorical epigram is seen at its best. Nothing could be better turned than

quaeris Alcidae parem? nemo est nisi ipse: (H.F. 84).[A] curae leves loquuntur, ingentes stupent (Phaedra 607).[B] fortem facit vicina libertas senem (Phaedra 139).[C] qui genus iactat suum, aliena laudat (H.F. 340). fortuna fortes metuit, ignavos premit (Med. 159). fortuna opes auferre, non animum potest (Med. 176). maius est monstro nefas:[D] nam monstra fato, moribus scelera imputes (Phaedra 143).

[A] Cp. Theobald: None but himself can be his parallel.

[B] Cp. Sir W. Raleigh: Passions are best compared with floods and streams, The shallow murmur but the deep are dumb.

[C] For dawning freedom makes the aged brave. MILLER.

[D] For thy impious love is worse Than her unnatural and impious love. The first you would impute to character, The last to fate. MILLER.

If nothing had survived of Seneca's plays but a collection of sententiae, we might have regretted his loss almost as we regret the loss of Menander.

Here his merits, such as they are, end: they fail to justify us in placing him high as a dramatist; and he has many faults over and above those incidental to his style and modes of thought. While freer than most of his contemporaries from the vain display of obscure erudition, he falls into the common vice of introducing 'catalogues'. They are dull in epic: in drama they are worse than dull. The Hercules Furens is no place for a matter-of-fact catalogue of the hero's labours, set forth (210-248) in monotonous iambics from the mouth of Amphitryon. If they are to be described at all, they demand the decorative treatment of lyric verse,[200] nor is a catalogue of the herbs used by Medea to poison the robe destined for her rival any more excusable.[201] Again, like his contemporaries, he shows a lack of taste and humour which in its worst manifestations passes belief. Not a few of the passages already quoted serve to illustrate the point. But for fatuity it would be hard to surpass the words with which Amphitryon interrupts Theseus' account of the horrors of the underworld:

estne aliqua tellus Cereris aut Bacchi ferax? (H.F. 697.)

Scarcely less absurd is the chorus in the Phaedra, who, when hymning the power of love, give a long list of animals subject to such passion: the catalogue culminates with the statement that even whales and elephants fall in love (351):

amat insani belua ponti Lucaeque boves.

But all such instances pale before the conclusion of the Phaedra. Not content with giving a ghastly and exaggerated account of the death of Hippolytus, Seneca must needs bring the fragments of his mutilated body upon the scene. Theseus, at the suggestion of the chorus, attempts to put them together again. The climax comes when, finding an unidentifiable portion, he cries (1267):

quae pars tui sit dubito, sed pars est tui!

The actual language of the plays is pure and classical. There is no trace of provincialism, nothing to suggest that Seneca was a Spaniard. Its vices proceed from the false mould in which it has been cast. There is a lack of connecting particles, and we proceed by a series of short rhetorical jerks.[202] It is the style that Seneca himself condemns in his letters (114. 1). Its faults are further aggravated by the metre: taken line by line, the iambics of Seneca are impressive: taken collectively they are monotonous in the extreme. The ear suffers a continual series of stabs, which are not the less unpleasant because none of them go deep. The verse seems formed, one might almost say punched out, by a relentless machine. It is never modified by circumstances; it is the same in narrative and dialogue, the same in passion and in calm, if indeed Seneca can ever be said to be either passionate or calm. Its pauses come with monotonous regularity at the end of the line, diversified only by an occasional break at the caesura in the third foot. Nor does the rule[203] observed by Seneca, that only a spondee or anapaest is permitted in the fifth foot, tend to relieve the monotony, though it does much to give the individual lines such weight as they possess. A more complete contrast with the iambics of the early Latin Tragedies cannot be imagined. What has been gained in polish has been lost in dignity. Whence the Senecan iambic is derived, is a question which cannot be answered with certainty. It is wholly unlike the early Roman tragic iambic. Elision is rare, and there is little variety. Instead of the massive and rugged measure of Pacuvius or Accius, we have a finished and elegant monotony. In all likelihood it is the lineal descendant of the iambic of Ovid.[204] In view of Seneca's great admiration for Ovid—he quotes him continually in his prose works—of Ovid's mastery of rhetoric and epigram, and yet more of the distinct parallels traceable between the Phaedra and Medea of Seneca and the corresponding Heroides of Ovid, it becomes a strong probability that the Senecan iambic was deeply influenced—if not actually created—by the iambic style of the earlier poet's lost drama, the famous Medea.[205]

As to the models to which he is indebted for his treatment of choric metres we know nothing. In spite of the fact that he employs a large variety of metres, and that his choruses at times stray from rhetoric into poetry of a high order, there is in them a still more deadly monotony than in his iambics. The chorus are devoid of life; they are there partly as a concession to convention, but mainly to supply incidental music. Their inherent dullness is not relieved by the metre. Of strophic arrangement there is no clear trace; in a large proportion of cases the choruses are written in one fixed and rigid metre admitting of no variety: even where different metres alternate, the relaxation is but small, for the same monotony reigns unchecked within the limits of each section. The strange experiments in mixed metres in the Agamemnon and Oedipus show Seneca's technique at its worst: they are composed of fragments of Horatian metres, thinly disguised by inversions and resolutions of feet: they lack all governing principle and are an unqualified failure. Of the remaining metres the Anapaestic, Asclepiad, Sapphic, and Glyconic predominate. He is, perhaps, least unsuccessful in his treatment of the Anapaest: the lines do not lack melody, and the natural flexibility of the metre saves them from extreme monotony, though they would have been more successful had he employed the paroemiac line as a solemn and resonant close to the march of the dimeter. But one wearies soon of the eternal Asclepiads and Glyconics which he often allows to continue in unbroken and unvaried series for seventy or eighty lines together. He rarely allows any variation within the Glyconic and never makes use of it to break the monotony of the Asclepiad. Still worse are his Sapphics. Abandoning the usual arrangement in stanzas of three lesser Sapphics followed by an Adonic verse, his Sapphic choruses consist almost entirely of the lesser Sapphic varied by a very occasional Adonic. The continual succession of these lines without so much as an occasional change of caesura to diversify the rhythm is at times almost intolerable. At the close of such choruses we feel as though we had jogged at a rapid trot for long miles on a very hard and featureless road.

Language and metre work hand in hand with rhetoric to make these strange plays dramatically ineffective. So strange are they and in many ways so unlike anything else in Classical literature, that the question as to the purpose with which they were written and the place they occupied in the literature of their day affords an interesting subject for speculation. Were they written for the stage? Decayed as was the taste for tragedy, tragedies may occasionally have been acted.[206] But there are considerations which suggest doubt as to whether the plays of Seneca were written with any such purpose. Even under Nero it is scarcely credible that the introduction of the mangled fragments of Hippolytus upon the stage would be possible or palatable.[207] Medea kills her children coram populo, and, not content with killing them, flings their bodies at Jason from her magic chariot high in air. Hercules kills his children in full view of the audience, not within the house as in the corresponding drama of Euripides. Such scenes suggest that the plays were written not for the stage but for recitation with musical interludes from a trained choir. Indications that this was the case are to be found in the Hercules Furens. While the hero is engaged in slaying his children, Amphitryon, in a succession of short speeches, gives the details of the murder. This would be ridiculous and unnecessary were the scene actually presented on the stage, whereas they become absolutely necessary on the assumption that the play was written for recitation.[208] This assumption has the further merit of being charitable; skilful recitation would cover many defects that would be almost intolerable on the stage.

It is improbable, however, that the drama of Seneca occupied an important position in the literature of their day. The golden age of tragedy was past, and it is hard to believe that these plays are favourable specimens even of their own age. The authors of the Silver Age virtually ignore their existence, and, with the exception of two references in Tertullian and one in Apollinaris Sidonius, they are quoted only by scholars and grammarians.

They have small intrinsic value: but they afford interesting evidence for the taste[209] of their own day, and their influence on modern drama has been enormous. In the Renaissance at the dawn of the drama's revival, Seneca was regarded as a dramatist of the first order. Scaliger ranked him above Euripides: it was to him men turned to find models for tragedy. Everywhere we see traces of the Senecan drama.[210] It is a tribute to the dexterity of his rhetoric that his influence should have been so enormous, but it is to be regretted in the interests of the drama. For to Seneca more than to any other man is due the excessive prominence of declamatory rhetoric, which has characterized the drama throughout Western Europe from the Renaissance down to the latter half of the nineteenth century, and has proved a blemish to the work of all save a few great writers who recognized the value of rhetoric, but never mistook the shadow for the substance.

III

THE 'OCTAVIA'

A tragedy with this title is included by the MSS. among the plays of Seneca. Its chief interest lies in the fact that it is the one surviving example of a fabula praetexta, or tragedy, drawn from Roman life. It deals with a tragic incident of Nero's reign, the final extinction of the Claudian house. Octavia, daughter of Claudius and Messalina, is the heroine. Her life was one long tragedy. Her childhood was darkened by the disaster that befell her unworthy mother, her maturer years by her marriage to Nero. She was a mere pawn in the game of politics. The marriage was brought about by the designs of Agrippina, to render Nero secure of the principate. To effect this end her betrothed Silanus was killed, Claudius, her father, and Britannicus, her brother, dispatched by poison. Soon her own wedded life turned to tragedy. Nero fell madly in love with Poppaea, and resolved to put away Octavia. At Poppaea's instigation she was accused of a base intrigue. The plot failed; the false charge could not be pressed home; she was divorced on the ground of sterility, and imprisoned in a town of Campania. A rumour arose that she was to be reinstated; the mob of Rome declared itself in her favour and gave wild expression to its joy. Poppaea's statues were cast down, Octavia's replaced. Poppaea was furious. She laid siege to Nero and won him to her will. The old false charge of adultery was trumped up; a complaisant freed man was found to confess himself Octavia's lover. She was banished to Pandataria and slain (June 9, 62 A.D.).

The play gives us a compressed version of the tragedy. It opens with a speech by Octavia's nurse, setting forth the sorrows of her young mistress. The speech over, she leaves the stage to be succeeded by Octavia, who, in a lament closely modelled on the lament of the Sophoclean Electra,[211] bewails the sorrows of her house, the deaths of Messalina, Claudius, and Britannicus. The nurse reappears, attempts to console her, and counsels submission to fate. Octavia changes her strain and prays for death. After a lament from the chorus, Nero and Seneca enter on the scene. Seneca urges moderation and sets forth his ideal of monarchy. Nero is quite his match in argument, rejects his advice, and, concluding with the words

desiste tandem, iam gravis nimium mihi, instare: liceat facere quod Seneca improbat (588).

Have done at last, For wearisome has thine insistence grown; One still may do what Seneca condemns ... MILLER.

declares his intention of marrying Poppaea without delay. An interesting chorus follows, describing how Rome of old expelled the kings for their crimes. Nero has sinned even more than they. Has he not slain even his mother? There follows a long and interesting description of the murder,[212] which serves as an introduction to the entrance of the ghost of Agrippina in the guise of an avenging fury, prophesying the dethronement and death of her unnatural son. She is succeeded on the stage by Octavia, resigned to the surrender of her position and content to be no more than Nero's sister; once more the chorus bewail her fate. At last her rival Poppaea appears in conversation with her nurse. The nurse congratulates her, but Poppaea has been terrified by visions of the night and is ill at ease. Her rival is not yet removed and her own place is still insecure. At this point comes the one ray of hope that illumines this sombre drama. A messenger arrives with the news that the people have risen in Octavia's favour. But the reader is not left in suspense for a moment. Nero appears and orders the suppression of the emeute and the execution of Octavia. The chorus mourn the fate of the beloved of the Roman people. Their power and splendour is but brief: Octavia perishes untimely, like Gracchus and Livius Drusus. She herself appears in the hands of soldiers, being dragged off to execution and death. Like Cassandra,[213] she compares her fate with that of the nightingale, to whom the gods gave a new life of peace full of sweet lamentation as a close to her troubled human existence. One more song of condolence from the chorus, one more song of sorrow from Octavia, and she is taken from our sight, and the play closes with a denunciation by the chorus of the hardness of heart and the insatiate cruelty of Rome.

It is not hard to summarize the general effect of this curious drama. Its author has read the Greek tragedians carefully and to some purpose; he has studied the characters of Electra, Cassandra, and Antigone with diligence, if without insight. He clearly feels deep sympathy for Octavia, and to some extent succeeds in communicating this sympathy to the audience. His heroine speaks in character: she is never a male Stoic, flaunting in female garb, she is a genuine woman, a gentle, lovable creature broken down by misfortune. The other characters are uninteresting. Nero is an academic tyrant, Seneca an academic adviser, Poppaea is little more than a lay figure. The most that can be said for them is that they do not rant. The chorus are on the whole a fairly satisfactory imitation of a chorus of sympathetic Greek women.[214] There is nothing forced or unnatural about them; they are real human beings; their sympathy is genuine, and its expression appropriate. But they are dull; monotonous lamentation in monotonous anapaests is the height of their capacity. The play is a failure: the subject is not in itself dramatic; if it had been, it would have been spoiled by the treatment it receives. We are never in suspense; Octavia has never the remotest chance of escape; our pity for her is genuine enough, but her character lacks both grandeur and psychological interest: the pathos of her situation will not compensate us for the absence of a dramatic plot. The fall of the house of Claudius compares ill with the tragedy of the Pelopidae. And the treatment of the story, from the dramatic standpoint, is childish. The play is scarcely more than a series of melancholy monologues interspersed with not less melancholy dirges from the chorus. The most we can say of it is that it is simple and unaffected: if it lacks brilliance, it also lacks exaggeration. Thought and diction are commonplace and uninspired, but they are never absurd—an extraordinary merit in a poet of the Silver Age.

It will have been sufficiently evident from this brief sketch that the Octavia is in all respects very different indeed from the other plays that claim Seneca for their author. It is free from their faults and their merits alike. It never sinks to their depths, but it never rises to their heights. Apart, however, from these general considerations,[215] there is evidence amounting almost to certainty that the Octavia is not by Seneca. The tragedy takes place in the lifetime of Seneca. Seneca himself figures in the play. The story is of such a nature that it could hardly have been written, much less published, in the reign of Nero. Yet more conclusive is the fact that the ghost of Agrippina prophesies the fate of Nero in such a way as to make it certain that the author outlived the emperor and was acquainted with the facts of his death.[216]

Who then was the author? When did he write? Evidence is almost absolutely lacking. From its comparative sanity and simplicity and its intense hatred of Nero it may reasonably be conjectured that it is the work of the Flavian age; the age of the anti-Neronian reaction and of the return to saner models in life and literature. But there is no certainty; it may have been written under Nerva, Trajan, or Hadrian. It stands detached and aloof from the literature of its age.



CHAPTER III

PERSIUS

It is possible to form a clearer picture of the personality of Aulus Persius Flaccus, the satirist, than of any other poet of the Silver Age. Not only are the essential facts of his brief career preserved for us in a concise, but extremely relevant biography taken from the commentary of the famous critic Valerius Probus, but there are few poets whose works so clearly reveal the character of their author.

Persius was born at the lofty hill-town of Volaterrae, in Tuscany, on the 4th of December, 34 A.D.[217] He was scarcely six years old when he lost his father, a wealthy Roman knight, named Flaccus. His mother, Fulvia Sisennia, married again, but her second husband, a knight named Fusius, died after a few years of wedded life. Persius was educated at home up to the age of twelve, when he was taken to Rome to be taught literature by Remmius Palaemon and rhetoric by Verginius Flavus. Of the latter nothing is known save that he wrote a much-approved textbook on rhetoric and was exiled by Nero;[218] the former was a freedman whose remarkable talents were only equalled by his gross vices; he had a prodigious memory, was a skilful improvvisatore, and the most distinguished teacher of the day.[219] At the age of sixteen, shortly after his assumption of the toga virilis, the young Persius made the friendship which was to be the ruling influence of his life. He learned to know and love the great Stoic teacher, Cornutus, with an attachment that was broken only by death. It was from Cornutus that he imbibed the principles of Stoicism, and at his house that he met the Greek philosophers, Petronius Aristocrates of Magnesia and the Lacedaemonian physician, Claudius Agathurnus, whose influence upon his character was only less than that of Cornutus. Among his intimates he counted Calpurnius Statura, who died in early youth, and the famous lyric poet, Caesius Bassus,[220] who was destined long to survive his friend and to do him the last service of editing the satires, which his premature death left unpublished and unfinished. Lucan also was one of his fellow students in the house of Cornutus,[221] while at a later date he made the acquaintance of Seneca, the leading writer of the day, although he never felt the seductive attractions of his fluent style and subtle intellect. More important influences were his almost filial respect and affection for the distinguished orator,[222] M. Servilius Nonianus, and his close companionship with Thrasea Paetus, the leader of the Stoic opposition.[223] At one time Persius, if the scholiast may be believed,[224] contemplated a military career. The statement is scarcely probable in view of the contempt and dislike with which he invariably speaks of soldiers, nor is it easy to conceive a profession less suited to the temperament of the quiet and retiring poet. Whatever his original intentions may have been, he actually chose the secluded life of study, the vita umbratilis, as the Romans called it, remote from the dust and heat of the great world. That he was wise we cannot doubt. It was the only life possible in those days for a man of his character. 'Fuit morum lenissimorum, verecundiae virginalis, pietatis erga matrem et sororem et amitam exemplo sufficientis: fuit frugi, pudicus.' Even in a saner, purer, and less turbulent age, such a one would have been more fitted for the paths of study than for any branch of public life. He died of a disease of the stomach on the 24th of November, 62 A.D., in his villa on the Appian Way, some eight miles south of Rome,[225] leaving behind him a valuable library, a small amount of unpublished verse, and a considerable fortune, amounting to 2,000,000 sesterces. The whole of this fortune he bequeathed to his mother and sister, only begging them to give to his friend Cornutus a sum of 100,000 sesterces, twenty pounds weight of silver plate, and the whole of his library, containing no less than 700 volumes by the Stoic Chrysippus. Cornutus accepted the books, but refused the rest, showing that indifference to wealth that was to be looked for, though not always to be found, in professors of the Stoic philosophy. The literary work left by the dead poet was submitted by his mother to the judgement of Cornutus, himself a poet.[226] The bulk of the work was not great. Persius had in his boyhood written a praetexta or tragedy with a Roman plot, a book of poems describing his journeys with Thrasea,[227] and a few verses on his kinswoman Arria, the wife of Caecina Paetus, immortalized by her devotion to her husband and her heroic death.[228] As the work of his maturer years he left his satires. Cornutus recommended that all save the satires should be destroyed; they alone, unfinished though they might be, were worthy of the memory of his dead friend. He began the task of correcting them for publication, but transferred it to Caesius Bassus, at the latter's earnest entreaty. Of the nature of the correction and editing required we are ignorant, save for the statement of Probus that a few lines were removed from the end of the book to give it an appearance of completion.[229] The poems met with instant success;[230] they excited both wonder and criticism; that they continued to be read is shown by the existence of copious scholia, which must, indeed, have been almost necessary for such continuance of their popularity.[231]

The slender volume of Persius' works is composed of six satires in hexameter verse and a prologue written in choliambi. The first deals with the corruption of literature; the second, addressed to Macrinus on his birthday, treats of the right and wrong objects of prayer; the third is an appeal to an indolent young man for energy and earnestness; the fourth, almost a continuation of the third, attacks the lack of 'self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control', in public men; the fifth, addressed to his friend and teacher Cornutus, maintains the Stoic doctrine that all the world are slaves; only the righteous man attains to freedom; in the sixth, addressed to Caesius Bassus, the poet claims the right to spend his wealth in reasonable enjoyment, and denounces the grasping and unseemly selfishness of an imaginary heir to his fortune. In the prologue—or epilogue as it is sometimes regarded[232]—he sarcastically disclaims any pretensions to poetic inspiration, and hints ironically that, in view of the number of poets who write merely to win their bread, inspiration may be regarded as unnecessary.

The ambition to win fame as a satirist was first fired in Persius by his reading the tenth book of the satires of Lucilius. If we may believe Probus, he imitated the opening of that book in his first satire, beginning like Lucilius by detracting from himself and proceeding to attack other authors indiscriminately.[233] Not enough of the tenth book of Lucilius has survived to enable us to check the accuracy of this statement, though it finds independent testimony in a remark of the scholiast on Horace, that the tenth book of Lucilius contained free criticisms of the early poets of Rome.[234] Further, the third satire is said by the scholiast to have been modelled on the fourth book of Lucilius, and there is a certain amount of evidence for supposing the choliambi of the epilogue to be an imitation of a Lucilian model.[235] We have, however, no means of testing the truth of these assertions: the debt of Persius to Lucilius must be taken on trust. Of his enormous indebtedness to Horace we have, on the other hand, the clearest evidence. It is hard to conceive two poets with less in common as regards ideals, temperament, and technique; and yet throughout Persius we are startled by strange, though unmistakable, echoes of Horace.

He knows his Horace by heart, and Horace has become a veritable obsession. He is not content with giving his characters Horatian names.[236] That might be convention, not plagiarism. But phrase after phrase calls up the Horatian original. He runs through the whole gamut of plagiarism. There is plagiarism, simple and direct.

O si sub rastro crepet argenti mihi seria, dextro Hercule! (2. 10)

O that I could hear a crock of silver chinking under my harrow, by the blessing of Hercules. CONINGTON.

is undisguisedly copied from Horace (Sat. ii. 6. 10).

O si urnam argenti fors quae mihi monstret, ut illi, thesauro invento, qui mercennarius agrum ilium ipsum mercatus aravit, dives amico Hercule!

But as a rule, since he cannot keep Horace out, he strives to disguise him. The familiar

si vis me flere, dolendum est primum ipsi tibi

of the Ars Poetica (102) reappears in the far less natural

verum nec nocte paratum plorabit, qui me volet incurvasse querela (Pers. i. 91).

A man's tears must come from his heart at the moment, not from his brains overnight, if he would have me bowed down beneath his piteous tale. CONINGTON.

He speaks of his verses so finely turned and polished—

ut per leve severos effundat iunctura unguis (i. 64).

So that the critical nail runs glibly along even where the parts join. CONINGTON.

In this fantastically contorted and affected phrase we may espy an ingenious blending of two Horatian phrases,

totus teres atque rotundus, externi ne quid valeat per leve morari (Sat. ii. 7. 86),

and the simple

ad unguem factus

f Sat. i. 5. 32.[237]

There is no need to multiply instances. Horace appears everywhere, but quantum mutatus ab illo! As the result of this particular method of borrowing, assisted by affectations and obscurities which are all his own, Persius attains to a kind of spurious originality of diction, which often degenerates into sheer eccentricity. In spite of the fact that the original text can almost everywhere be reconstructed with certainty, he is almost the most obscure of Latin poets to the modern reader. A few instances will suffice. There were, it appears, three ways of mocking a person behind his back: one might tap the fingers against the lower portion of the hand in imitation of a stork's beak, one might imitate a donkey's ears, or one might put out one's tongue. When Persius wishes to say 'Janus, I envy you your luck, for no one can mock at you behind your back!' he writes (i. 58):

O Iane, a tergo quem nulla ciconia pinsit, nec manus auriculas imitari mobilis albas, nec linguae, quantum sitiat canis Apula, tantae.

Happy Janus, whom no stork's bill batters from behind, no nimble hand quick to imitate the ass's white ears, no long tongues thrust out like the tongue of a thirsty Apulian bitch.

The obscurity of the first line springs in part from the fact that the custom is not elsewhere spoken of. The second line may pass. The third defies literal translation. It means 'no long tongues thrust out like the tongue of a thirsty Apulian bitch'. But the omission of all mention both of 'protrusion' and of the 'dog days' makes the Latin almost without meaning. The epithet Apula becomes absurd. A 'thirsty Apulian dog' is barely sufficient to suggest the midsummer drought of Apulia. This is an extreme case; it is perhaps fairer to quote lines such as

si puteal multa cautus vibice flagellas (iv. 49),

'if in your zeal for the main chance you flog the exchange with many a stripe,' a mysterious passage generally supposed to mean 'if you exact exorbitant usury'. A little less enigmatic, but fully as forced and unnatural is

dum veteres avias tibi de pulmone revello (v. 92),

'while I pull your old grandmotherly views from your heart,' or the extraordinarily harsh metaphor of the first satire (24)—

quo didicisse, nisi hoc fermentum et quae semel intus innata est rupto iecore exierit caprificus?

What is the good of past study, unless this leaven—unless the wild fig-tree which has once struck its root into the breast, break through and come out? CONINGTON.

which means nothing more than 'What is the good of study unless a man brings out what he has in him?' A far more serious source of obscurity, however, is his obscurity of thought. Even when the sense of individual lines has been discovered, it is often difficult to see the drift of the passage as a whole. Logical development is perhaps not to be expected in the 'hotch-potch' of the 'satura'. But one has a right to demand that the transitions should be easy and the drift of the argument clear. This Persius refuses us. The difficulties which he presents are—as in the case of Robert Browning—in part due to his adoption of the traditional dramatic form in satire, a form in which clearness of expression is as difficult as it is desirable. But we cannot excuse his obscurity as we sometimes can in Browning—either as being to some extent a realistic representation of the discursiveness and lack of method that characterize the reasonings of the average intelligent man, or on the other hand as springing from the intensity of the poet's thought. It is not the case with Persius that his thoughts press so thick and quick upon him, or are of so deep and complicated a character, as to be incapable of simple and lucid expression. It is sheer waywardness and perversity springing from the absence of true artistic feeling to which we must attribute this cardinal defect. For his thought is commonplace, and his observation of the minds and ways of men is limited.

The qualities that go to the making of the true satirist are many. He must be dominated by a moral ideal, not necessarily of the highest kind, but sufficiently exalted to lend dignity to his work and sufficiently strongly realized to permeate it. He must have a wide and comprehensive knowledge of his fellow men. A knowledge of the broad outlines of the cardinal virtues and of the deadly sins is not sufficient. The satirist must know them in their countless manifestations in the life of man, as they move our awe or our contempt, our admiration or our terror, our love or our loathing, our laughter or our tears. He must be able to paint society in all its myriad hues. He must have a sense of humour, even if he lacks the sense of proportion; he must have the gift of laughter, even though his laughter ring harsh and painful. He must have the gift of mordant speech, of epigram, and of rhetoric. He must drive his points home with directness and lucidity. Mere denunciation of vice is not enough. Few prophets are satirists; few satirists are prophets.

Of these qualities Persius has all too few. The man who has become the pupil of a Cornutus at the age of sixteen, who has shunned a public career, and is characterized by a virginalis verecundia, is not likely, even in a long life, to acquire the knowledge of the world required for genuine satire. The satirist, it might almost be said, must not only have walked abroad in the great world, but must have passed through the fire himself, and in some sense experienced the vices he has set himself to lash. But Persius is young and, as far as might be in that age, innocent. His outlook is from the seclusion of literary and philosophic circles, and his satire lacks the peculiar vigour that can only be got from jostling one's way in the wider world. In consequence the picture of life which he presents lacks vividness. A few brilliant sketches there are; but they are drawn from but a narrow range of experience. There is nothing better of its kind than the description in the first satire of the omnipresent poetaster of the reign of Nero, with his affected recitations of tawdry, sensuous, and soulless verse (15):

Scilicet haec populo pexusque togaque recenti et natalicia tandem cum sardonyche albus sede leges celsa, liquido cum plasmate guttur mobile conlueris, patranti fractus ocello. tunc neque more probo videas nec voce serena ingentis trepidare Titos, cum carmina lumbum intrant et tremulo scalpuntur ubi intima versu.

Yes—you hope to read this out some day, got up sprucely with a new toga, all in white, with your birthday ring on at last, perched up on a high seat, after gargling your supple throat by a liquid process of tuning, with a languishing roll of your wanton eye. At this you may see great brawny sons of Rome all in a quiver, losing all decency of gesture and command of voice, as the strains glide into their very bones, and the marrow within is tickled by the ripple of the measure. CONINGTON.

A few lines later comes a similar and equally vivid picture (30):

ecce inter pocula quaerunt Romulidae saturi, quid dia poemata narrent. hic aliquis, cui circum umeros hyacinthina laena est, rancidulum quiddam balba de nare locutus, Phyllidas Hypsipylas, vatum et plorabile siquid, cliquat ac tenero subplantat verba palato.

Listen. The sons of Rome are sitting after a full meal, and inquiring in their cups, 'What news from the divine world of poesy?' Hereupon a personage with a hyacinth-coloured mantle over his shoulders brings out some mawkish trash or other, with a snuffle and a lisp, something about Phyllises or Hypsipyles, or any of the many heroines over whom poets have snivelled, filtering out his tones and tripping up the words against the roof of his delicate mouth. CONINGTON.

Here the poet is describing what he has seen; in the world of letters he is at home. He can laugh pungently enough at the style of oratory prevailing in the courts—

nilne pudet capiti non posse pericula cano pellere, quin tepidum hoc optes audire 'decenter'. 'fur es', ait Pedio. Pedius quid? crimina rasis librat in antithetis, doctas posuisse figuras laudatur, 'bellum hoc?' (i. 83).

Are you not ashamed not to be able to plead against perils threatening your grey hairs, but you must needs be ambitious of hearing mawkish compliments to your 'good taste'? The accuser tells Pedius point blank, 'You are a thief.' What does Pedius do? Oh, he balances the charges in polished antitheses— he is deservedly praised for the artfulness of his tropes. Monstrous fine that! CONINGTON.

He can parody the decadent poets with their effeminate rhythms and their absurdities of speech.[238] He can mock the archaizer who goes to Accius and Pacuvius for his inspiration.[239] He can give an admirable summary of the genius of Lucilius and Horace—

secuit Lucilius urbem, te Lupe, te Muci, et genuinum fregit in illis; omne vafer vitium ridenti Flaccus amico tangit et admissus circum praecordia ludit, callidus excusso populum suspendere naso (i. 114).

Lucilius bit deep into the town of his day, its Lupuses and Muciuses, and broke his jaw-tooth on them. Horace, the rogue, manages to probe every fault while making his friend laugh; he gains his entrance and plays about the heartstrings with a sly talent for tossing up his nose and catching the public on it. CONINGTON.

But the first satire stands alone qua satire. It is not, perhaps, the most interesting to the modern reader. It mocks at empty literary fashions, which have comparatively small human interest. But it is in this satire that Persius comes nearest the true satirist. The obscurity and affectation of its language is its one serious fault; otherwise it shows sound literary ideals, close observation, and a pretty vein of humour. Elsewhere there is small trace of keen observation[240] of actual life; he calls up before his reader no vision of the varied life of Rome, whether in the streets or in the houses of the rich. Instead, he laboriously tricks out some vice in human garb, converses with it in language such as none save Persius ever dreamed of using, or scourges it with all the heavy weapons of the Stoic armoury. There is at times a certain violence and even coarseness[241] of description which does duty for realism, but the words ring hollow and false. The picture described or suggested is got at second-hand. He lacks the vivacity, realism, and common sense of Horace, the cultured man of the world, the biting wit, the astonishing descriptive power, and the masterly rhetoric of Juvenal. We care little for the greater part of Persius' disquisition[242] on the trite theme of the schools, 'what should be the object of man's prayers to heaven?' when we have read the tenth satire of Juvenal. There is the same commonplace theme in both, and there is perhaps less originality to be found in the general treatment applied to it by Juvenal. But Juvenal makes us forget the triteness of the theme by his extraordinary gift of style. Like Victor Hugo, he has the gift of imparting richness and splendour to the obvious by the sheer force and glory of his declamatory power. Similarly the fifth satire, where Persius descants on the theme that only the good man is free, while all the rest are slaves, compares ill as a whole with the dialogue between Horace and Davus on the same subject (Sat. ii. 7). There is such a harshness, an angularity and bitterness about it, that he wholly fails of the effect produced by the easy dignity of the earlier poet. It is abrupt, violent, and obscure; and for this reason the austere Stoic makes less impression than his more engaging and easy-going predecessor. Horace knew how to press home his points, even while he played about the hearts of men. Persius has neither the persuasiveness of Horace nor the force of Juvenal.

But Persius, if he falls below his great rivals in point of art, is in one respect immeasurably their superior. He is a better and a nobler man. In his denunciations of vice his eyes are set on a more exalted ideal, an ideal from which he never wanders. There is a world of difference between the 'golden mean' of Horace, and the worship of virtue that redeems the obscurities of Persius. There is a still greater gulf between the high scorn manifested by Persius for all that is base and ignoble, and the fierce, almost petulant, indignation of Juvenal, that often seems to rend for the mere delight of rending, and is at times disfigured by such grossness of language that many an unsympathetic reader has wondered whether the indignation was genuine. Neither Horace nor Juvenal ever rose to the moral heights of the conclusion of the second satire (61):

O curvae in terris animae et caelestium inanes, quid iuvat hoc, templis nostros immittere mores et bona dis ex hac scelerata ducere pulpa? haec sibi corrupto casiam dissolvit olivo et Calabrum coxit vitiato murice vellus, haec bacam conchae rasisse et stringere venas ferventis massae crudo de pulvere iussit. peccat et haec, peccat, vitio tamen utitur. at vos dicite, pontifices, in sancto quid facit aurum? nempe hoc quod Veneri donatae a virgine pupae. quin damus id superis, de magna quod dare lance non possit magni Messalae lippa propago? compositum ius fasque animo sanctosque recessus mentis et incoctum generoso pectus honesto: haec cedo ut admoveam templis et farre litabo.

O ye souls that cleave to earth and have nothing heavenly in you! How can it answer to introduce the spirit of the age into the temple-service and infer what the gods like from this sinful pampered flesh of ours? The flesh it is that has got to spoil wholesome oil by mixing casia with it—to steep Calabrian wool in purple that was made for no such use; that has made us tear the pearl from the oyster, and separate the veins of the glowing ore from the primitive slag. It sins—yes, it sins; but it takes something by its sinning; but you, reverend pontiffs, tell us what good gold can do in a holy place. Just as much or as little as the dolls which a young girl offers to Venus. Give we rather to the gods such an offering as great Messala's blear-eyed representative has no means of giving, even out of his great dish—duty to God and man well blended in the mind—purity in the shrine of the heart, and a manly flavour of nobleness pervading the bosom. Let me have these to carry to the temple, and a handful of meal shall win me acceptance. CONINGTON.

This is real enthusiasm, though the theme be trite, and it is noteworthy that the enthusiasm has clarified the language, which goes straight to the point without obscurity or circumlocution. Here alone does the second satire of Persius surpass the more famous tenth satire of Juvenal. Yet even this fine outburst is surpassed by the deservedly well-known passage of the third satire, in which Persius appeals to a young man 'who has great possessions' to live earnestly and strenuously (23):

udum et molle lutum es, nunc nunc properandus et acri fingendus sine fine rota. sed rure paterno est tibi far modicum, purum et sine labe salinum (quid metuas?) cultrixque foci secura patella est. hoc satis? an deceat pulmonem rumpere ventis, stemmate quod Tusco ramum millesime ducis, censoremve tuum vel quod trabeate salutas? ad populum phaleras, ego te intus et in cute novi. non pudet ad morem discincti vivere Nattae. sed stupet hic vitio et fibris increvit opimum pingue, caret culpa, nescit quid perdat, et alto demersus summa rursus non bullit in unda. magne pater divum, saevos punire tyrannos haut alia ratione velis, cum dira libido moverit ingenium ferventi tincta veneno: virtutem videant intabescantque relicta. anne magis Siculi gemuerunt aera iuvenci, et magis auratis pendens laquearibus ensis purpureas subter cervices terruit, 'imus, imus praecipites' quam si sibi dicat et intus palleat infelix quod proxima nesciat uxor?

You are moist soft earth, you ought to be taken instantly, instantly, and fashioned without end by the rapid wheel. But you have a paternal estate with a fair crop of corn, a salt-cellar of unsullied brightness (no fear of ruin surely!), and a snug dish for fireside service. Are you to be satisfied with this? or would it be decent to puff yourself and vapour because your branch is connected with a Tuscan stem, and you are thousandth in the line, or because you wear purple on review days and salute your censor? Off with your trappings to the mob! I can look under them and see your skin. Are you not ashamed to live the loose life of Natta? But he is paralysed by vice; his heart is overgrown by thick collops of fat; he feels no reproach; he knows nothing of his loss; he is sunk in the depth and makes no more bubbles on the surface. Great Father of the Gods, be it thy pleasure to inflict no other punishment on the monsters of tyranny, after their nature has been stirred by fierce passion, that has the taint of fiery poison—let them look upon virtue and pine that they have lost her for ever! Were the groans from the brazen bull of Sicily more terrible, or did the sword that hung from the gilded cornice strike more dread into the princely neck beneath it, than the voice which whispers to the heart, 'We are going, going down a precipice,' and the ghastly inward paleness, which is a mystery, even to the wife of our heart? CONINGTON.

The man who wrote this has 'loved righteousness and hated iniquity'. In the work of Persius' rivals it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that it is the hatred of iniquity that is most prominent; the love of righteousness holds but a secondary place.

Persius is uncompromising; he is the true Stoic with the motto 'all or nothing'. But he has nothing of the stilted Stoicism that is such a painful feature of the plays of Seneca; nor, however perverse and affected he may be in diction, do we ever feel that his Stoicism is in some respects no better than a moral pose, a distressing feeling that sometimes afflicts as we read Seneca's letters or consolatory treatises. He speaks straight from the heart. His faults are more often the faults of the school of philosophy than of the schools of rhetoric. The young Lucan is said to have exclaimed, after hearing a recitation given by Persius:[243] 'That is real poetry, my verses are mere jeux d'esprit.'

If we take Persius at his noblest, Lucan's criticism is just. In these passages not only is the thought singularly pure and noble, and the expression felicitous, but the actual metre represents almost the high-water mark of the post-Vergilian hexameter. Here, as in other writers of the age, the influence of Ovid is traceable in the increase of dactyls and the avoidance of elision. But the verse has a swing and dignity, together with a variety, that can hardly be found in any other poetry of the Silver Age. It is the existence of passages such as these, and the high unswerving moral enthusiasm characterizing all his work, that have made Persius live through the centuries. It is fashionable for the critic to say, 'We lay down Persius with a sigh of relief.' That is true, but we feel the better for reading him. He is one of the few writers of Rome whose personality awakens a feeling of warm affection. He was a rigid Stoic, yet not proud or cold. In an age of almost universal corruption he kept himself unspotted from the world. He had a rare capacity for whole-hearted friendship. If his teacher Cornutus had never made another convert, and his preaching had been vain, it would have been ample reward to have won such a tribute of affection and gratitude as the lines in which Persius pours forth his soul to him (v. 21):

tibi nunc hortante Camena excutienda damus praecordia, quantaque nostrae pars tua sit, Cornute, animae, tibi, dulcis amice, ostendisse iuvat. pulsa dinoscere cautus quid solidum crepet et pictae tectoria linguae. hic ego centenas ausim deposcere fauces, ut quantum mihi te sinuoso in pectore fixi, voce traham pura, totumque hoc verba resignent, quod latet arcana non enarrabile fibra. cum primum pavido custos mihi purpura cessit bullaque subcinctis Laribus donata pependit, cum blandi comites totaque inpune Subura permisit sparsisse oculos iam candidus umbo, cumque iter ambiguum est et vitae nescius error deducit trepidas ramosa in compita mentes, me tibi supposui. teneros tu suscipis annos Socratico, Cornute, sinu. tune fallere sollers adposita intortos extendit regula mores, et premitur ratione animus vincique laborat artificemque tuo ducit sub pollice vultum. tecum etenim longos memini consumere soles, et tecum primas epulis decerpere noctes. unum opus et requiem pariter disponimus ambo, atque verecunda laxamus seria mensa. non equidem hoc dubites, amborum foedere certo consentire dies et ab uno sidere duci: nostra vel aequali suspendit tempora libra Parca tenax veri, seu nata fidelibus hora dividit in geminos concordia fata duorum, Saturnumque gravem nostro Iove frangimus una: nescio quod certe est quod me tibi temperat astrum.

It is to you, at the instance of the muse within me, that I would offer my heart to be sifted thoroughly; my passion is to show you, Cornutus, how large a share of my inmost being is yours, my beloved friend; strike it, use every test to tell what rings sound, and what is the mere plaster of a varnished tongue. An occasion indeed it is for which I may well venture to ask a hundred voices, that I may bring out in clear utterance how thoroughly I have lodged you in the very corners of my breast, and unfold in words all the unutterable feelings which lie entwined deep down among my heart-strings. When first the guardianship of the purple ceased to awe me and the band of boyhood was hung up as an offering to the quaint old household gods, when my companions made themselves pleasant, and the folds of my gown, now white, the stripe of purple gone, left me free to cast my eyes at will over the whole Subura—just when the way of life begins to be uncertain, and the bewildered mind finds that its ignorant ramblings have brought it to a point where roads branch off—then it was that I made myself your adopted child. You at once received the young foundling into the bosom of a second Socrates; and soon your rule, with artful surprise, straightens the moral twists that it detects, and my spirit becomes moulded by reason and struggles to be subdued, and assumes plastic features under your hand. Aye, I mind well how I used to wear away long summer suns with you, and with you pluck the early bloom of the night for feasting. We twain have one work and one set time for rest, and the enjoyment of a moderate table unbends our gravity. No, I would not have you doubt that there is a fixed law that brings our lives into one accord, and one star that guides them. Whether it be in the equal balance that truthful Destiny hangs our days, or whether the birth-hour sacred to faithful friends shares our united fates between the Heavenly Twins, and we break the shock of Saturn together by the common shield of Jupiter, some star, I am assured, there is which fuses me with you. CONINGTON.

There is a sincerity about these beautiful lines that is as rare as it is welcome in the poetry of this period. Much may be forgiven to the poet who could write thus, even though rarely. And it must be remembered that Persius is free from the worst of the besetting sins of his age, the love of rhetorical brilliance at the expense of sense, a failing that he criticizes with no little force in his opening satire. His harshness and obscurity are due in part to lack of sufficient literary skill, but still more to his attempt to assert his originality against the insistent obsession of the satires of Horace. As in the case of so many of his contemporaries, his literary fame must depend in the main on his 'purple patches'.

But he does what few of his fellow poets do; he leaves a vivid impression of his personality, and reveals a genuine moral ardour and nobility of character that refuse to be clouded or hidden by his dark sayings and his perverse obscurity.



CHAPTER IV

LUCAN

Marcus Annaeus Lucanus,[244] the poet who more than any other exhibits the typical excellences and defects of the Silver Age, was born at Cordova on November 3, in the year 39 A.D.[245] He came of a distinguished line. He was the son of M. Annaeus Mela, brother of Seneca the philosopher and dramatist, and son of Seneca the rhetorician. Mela was a wealthy man,[246] and in 40 A.D. removed with his family to Rome. His son (whose future as a great poet is said to have been portended by a swarm of bees that settled on the cradle and the lips of the bard that was to be[247]) received the best education that Rome could bestow. He showed extraordinary precocity in all the tricks of declamatory rhetoric, soon equalling his instructors in skill and far out-distancing his fellow pupils.[248] Among his preceptors was his kinsman, the famous Stoic, L. Annaeus Cornutus, well known as the friend and teacher of Persius.[249] His first appearance before the public was at the Neronia in 60 A.D., when he won the prize for Latin verse with a poem in praise of Nero.[250] Immediately afterwards he seems to have proceeded to Athens. But his talents had attracted the attention and patronage of Nero. He was recalled to Rome,[251] and at the nomination of the princeps became Quaestor, although he had not yet attained the requisite age of twenty-five.[252] He was also admitted to the College of Augurs, and for some time continued to enjoy Nero's friendship. But it was not to last. Lucan had been educated in Stoic surroundings. Though his own relatives managed to combine the service of the emperor with their Stoic principles, Lucan had not failed to imbibe the passionate regret for the lost liberty of the republic that was so prominent a feature in Stoic circles. It was not a mere pose that led him to select the civil war as the subject of his poem. His enthusiasm for liberty may have been literary rather than political in character. But when we are dealing with an artistic temperament we must bear in mind that the ideals which were primarily inspiration for art may on slight provocation become incentives to action. And in the case of Lucan that provocation was not lacking. As his fame increased, Nero's friendship was replaced by jealousy. The protege had become too serious a rival to the patron.[253] Lucan's vanity was injured by Nero's sudden withdrawal from a recitation.[254] From servile flattery he turned to violent criticism: he spared his former patron neither in word nor deed. He turned the sharp edge of his satire against him in various pungent epigrams, and was forbidden to recite poetry or to plead in the law courts.[255] But it would be unjust to Lucan to attribute his changed attitude purely to wounded vanity. Seneca was at this very moment attempting to retire from public life. The court of Nero had become no place for him. Lucan cannot have been unaffected by the action of his uncle, and it is only just to him to admit the possibility that the change in his attitude may have been due, at any rate in part, to a change in character, an awakening to the needs of the State and the needs of his own soul. There is no need to question the genuineness of his political enthusiasm, even though it tended to be theatrical and may have been largely kindled by motives not wholly disinterested. The Pisonian conspiracy found in him a ready coadjutor. He became one of the ringleaders of the plot ('paene signifer coniurationis'), and in a bombastic vein would promise Nero's head to his fellow-conspirators.[256] On the detection of the plot, in 65 A. D., he, with the other chiefs of the conspiracy, was arrested. For long he denied his complicity; at last, perhaps on the threat or application of torture, his nerve failed him; he descended to grovelling entreaties, and to win himself a reprieve accused his innocent mother, Acilia, of complicity in the plot.[257] His conduct does not admit of excuse. But it is not for the plain, matter-of-fact man to pass judgement lightly on the weakness of a highly-strung, nervous, artistic temperament; the artist's imagination may transmute pain such as others might hope to bear, to anguish such as they cannot even imagine. There lies the palliation, if palliation it be, of Lucan's crime. But it availed him nothing: the reprieve was never won; he was condemned to die, the manner of his death being left to his free choice. He wrote a few instructions for his father as to the editing of his poems, partook of a sumptuous dinner, and then, adopting the fashionable form of suicide, cut the arteries of his arms and bled to death. He died declaiming a passage from his own poetry in which he had described the death of a soldier from loss of blood.[258] It was a theatrical end, and not out of keeping with his life.

He lived but a little over twenty-five years and five months, but he left behind him a vast amount of poetry and an extraordinary reputation. His earliest work[259] seems to have been the Iliacon, describing the death of Hector, his ransom and burial. Next came the Catachthonion, a short work on the underworld. This was followed by the laudes Neronis, to which reference has already been made, and the Orpheus, which was extemporized in a competition with other poets.[260] If we follow the order given by Statius, his next work was the prose declamation on the burning of the city (64 A.D.) and a poem addressed to his wife Polla (adlocutio ad Pollam). Then comes his chef d'oeuvre, the Pharsalia, to which we shall return. Of the other works mentioned by Vacca, the Silvae must have been, like the Silvae of Statius, trifles thrown off hurriedly for the gratification of friends or for the celebration of some great occasion.[261] The salticae fabulae were libretti written for the pantomimus,[262] while the Saturnalia were light verse sent as presents to friends on the festival of Saturn.[263] Of these works nothing has come down to us save a few scanty fragments, not in any way calculated to make us regret their loss.[264] Even Vacca can find no very high praise for them. Judging alike from the probabilities of the case and from the Pharsalia itself, they must have suffered from Lucan's fatal gift of fluency.