The Portable Roman Reader (Portable Library) (53 page)

 

T
HE argument has been put forward, I believe seriously, by Roman Catholic apologists, that the Papacy must be of divine institution or it could never have survived some of the popes. Dante, who believed that the Roman Empire was a similarly divine institution in the secular sphere, might have supported his view by saying that otherwise it could never have survived the emperors of the Julio-Claudian house. Among them, it has been said, “an arch-dissembler was succeeded by a madman, and a fool by a monster”—Tiberius, Augustus’s stepson, by Caligula, and Claudius by Nero. Most of them indulged in what old-fashioned historians liked to call Nameless Excesses (though Suetonius found names for them); and reign by reign they took away more power from the Senate and the other institutions surviving from the Republic. There was still a legal fiction that Rome was a republic, and that the head of the state merely held all the offices for the duration of the emergency, but the pretense was growing more and more threadbare. Everyone knew that at the death of an emperor the supreme power would go to whoever could seize it or persuade the dying emperor to give it to him. The dying emperors generally displayed a positive genius for passing over a promising and closely related kinsman in favor of the worst possible candidate, a genius that reached its peak when Claudius’s wife, Agrippina, persuaded him to set aside his own son Britannicus in favor of Nero, her son by a former marriage; after which she poisoned him. Augustus had had the sincere support of practically everyone, as the Savior of Society; but as reign succeeded reign and the emergency showed no signs of ending, the old Republicans tried to oppose the emperor, an opposition which of course provoked countermeasures. Tiberius made it a practice to seek out and punish all literary allusions to himself, real or supposed. It was not an encouraging time for writers. Nor was the succeeding reign, that of Caligula, who interested himself in literature to the extent of proposing to remove from the public libraries the works of Homer, Virgil, and Livy, on critical grounds.

The last of the Julio-Claudian emperors, Nero, fancied himself as a patron of the arts; unfortunately he also fancied himself as a poet, challenging Homer with an epic on the Trojan War, and it did not do to rival him too closely. But by now writers had had time to come to terms with the situation, and there emerged a group who formed the Silver Age, an age whose poetry is less concerned with what is said than with the way of saying it The Romans had always taken great pleasure in an art they called “rhetoric,” an art of pleading—much the same as oratory, except that the productions of the rhetoricians were designed to be read as well as heard. As the actual oratory of the Senate became of less and less importance, the art of the rhetoricians grew in favor and dealt with situations that were more and more farfetched. At this time there was also an increase in the always popular pastime of reading aloud. As good money is driven out by bad, the theater had been unable to withstand the competition of the arena with its actual deaths. Plays were no longer produced, but they were written to be read aloud.

In the plays of Seneca, who was the tutor of Nero, one can see the influence of the rhetoricians, with their verbal points and antitheses. I have seen an edition of Seneca, published in the seventeenth century, which admired him greatly and shared his taste for
sententiæ.
apothegms or epigrammatic sayings; the
sententiæ
in this text are marked in the margin, and there are sometimes a dozen to a page. Seneca’s characters converse in this fashion: “Whome‘er thou shalt see wretched, know him man.” “Whome’er thou shalt see brave, call him not wretched”; or this, between Theseus and his wife Phæ dra, struck with a guilty love she will not avow: “What is the crime that you would purge by death?” “I live.” This sort of thing, though it is not much to the taste of the present day, Seneca could do really well. He could also display, in the general conception of his tragedies, a positively monumental want of taste. One would say that he was trying to outdo the gladiatorial shows on their own ground. He selected for imitation those Greek tragedies which contained the most violent or unnatural situations and piled on the horrors by every possible means. Hippolytus, in Euripides, brought to his death by his father Theseus through a fatal misunderstanding, is brought on dying, and there is a truly beautiful scene of reconciliation. Hippolytus, in Seneca, is brought on not merely dead but in pieces in a basket, and Theseus, who has learned the truth too late, puts him together like a large jigsaw puzzle, saying at one point, “What is this ugly, shapeless piece all covered with wounds? I don’t know what part of thee it is, but it is part of thee. Put it down here, not where it belongs, but in an empty space.”

There is the same mixture of the old Roman self-reliance, epigrammatically expressed, and a positively Gothic romanticism and exaggeration, in the
Pharsalia,
an epic poem on the civil war between Julius Caesar and Pompey, by Seneca’s nephew Lucan. At a safe distance in history, it laments the beginning of the end of the Republic. It contains the great line
“Victrix causa diis placuit, sed victa Catoni”
(“The gods the victors, he the vanquished chose,” is Dryden’s rendering)—the great line for all lost causes; Kingsley applied it, with a satiric twist, to Charles I, Naomi Mitchison to the Gauls. But Lucan’s hyperbole knows neither measure nor restraint; and he also can fall into the unintentionally humorous, as in the catalogue of snakes that assail Cato’s army; each bites a soldier, causes death in its peculiar fashion, receives an appropriate epigram, and falls back for the next. Of the epic poets of the next reign, Statius, Silius Italicus, and Valerius Flaccus, it is enough to say that they are bankrupt through the inflation of the poetic currency by Lucan.

The Stoic ideals which inspire Lucan’s Cato and Seneca’s tragic heroes are better expressed in Seneca’s philosophical writing; and in his death, if not in his life, Seneca was himself their worthy exemplar. When Nero, whose favor he had lost some time before, accused him of conspiracy and ordered him to end his life, he called his wife and friends about him, opened his veins, and discoursed to them of virtue as his life ebbed, dying, like Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, “in the high Roman fashion” that was an example to so many centuries. Yet in reading his philosophy it is hard not to remember that this praise of manly independence comes from the man who flattered the Emperor Claudius while he lived, and as soon as he was dead lampooned him in the
Apocolocyntosis Claudii,
the
Pumpkinification of Claudius
(an allusion to Claudius’s official deification; the word is a paraprosdokian for Apotheosis). It is hard not to remember that this praise of poverty comes from the man who in five years of Nero’s favor became the richest subject in the Empire, with money at usury (that continuing curse of the Roman state) as far out as Britain.

The Julio-Claudian emperors, like all unconstitutional rulers, found their strongest opposition in the aristocracy of the old regime, the old senatorial families; and, like all unconstitutional rulers, they set themselves to create in opposition to it a class of novi
homines,
“new men” of wealth.
“Enrichissez-vous,”
Nero might have said to his favorites, as Louis-Philippe did to his
roturiers.
And there never has been a period when it was so possible to enrich oneself with such vast success. The sort of man who had grown rich appears in the episode of “Trimalchio’s Dinner,” from the
Satyricon
of Petronius. Petronius was also a favorite of Nero, his semi-official arbiter of elegancies—“vices, genuine or assumed,” says one historian, “gained him admission to the inner circle of Nero.” Like Seneca, he was accused of conspiracy, ordered to die, and did so, if not with Stoic elevation, at least with a cheerfulness which is perhaps more appealing. While his veins were draining “he listened to no disquisitions on the immortality of the soul or the dogmas of philosophy,” says Tacitus, “but to entertaining songs and humorous verses.” His
Satyricon
is an enormous, rambling novel, a sort of
Gil Blas
or
Peregrine Pickle,
much of which has been lost. The chief part that remains is “Trimalchio’s Dinner,” which displays the enormous, the inconceivable wealth, the extravagant luxury, and the universal sycophancy of Roman society. It might have borne the title of one of Trollope’s best and most neglected novels, written toward the end of his life, when he perceived how far English society was controlled and corrupted by wealth —
The Way We Live Now.

Tacitus, who wrote of the death of Petronius, also wrote, in his
Annals
and
History,
of the death of Republican freedom. At its beginning the Empire had promised in exchange the peace of Augustus—and, it must be emphasized, in most of the Roman world this promise had been kept. But to men highly placed in the city itself, it had meant conspiracies, assassinations, incrim inations under torture, and death at the suspicion of the emperor. It was a world in which a man became famous through his great age, his wealth, and “his wide avoidance of the malignity of so many emperors.” Tacitus has no hope of the return of the Republic; no hope, perhaps, for better things for the Roman world. It is this which gives interest to his
Germania,
an account of the Germans of his day. Tacitus has been accused of anticipating Rousseau in the invention of that fraud, the Noble Savage; but this is not fair. Tacitus is quite aware of the characteristic vices of the Germans, their fondness for gambling and drink, their dislike of discipline and hard work. But in Germany, he says, “no one laughs at vice, nor calls mutual corruption fashionable”; in Germany “it does not pay to be childless.”

Two other poets show “the way we live now,” Juvenal and Martial. Martial wrote twelve books of epigrams—short poems, each with a sting in the tail. The epigram in the Greek anthology had been the vehicle for love, humor, pathos, mourning; it had paid the last tribute to the men of Thermopylae or bidden the lady drink to the poet only with her eyes. In Martial, not exclusively but most commonly, it is the vehicle of brutal insult. There are some friendly invitations and a few tender epitaphs, but most of them hit off some weakness. And what weaknesses! About one in ten of them must be left, even in these liberal days, in “the decent obscurity of a learned tongue.” Among the remainder there are squibs against sycophants, bad poets, sponging guests and stingy hosts, husbands and wives who marry a rich partner for money, and sometimes hurry things when they get tired of waiting for it—all the crew whom we have met in Petronius and are to meet again in Juvenal. It is Juvenal who gives its real meaning to the word satire. The
satura,
a hodgepodge which would hold anything you liked to put into it, had always been used for making fun, as Horace made fun of the bore he met on the Appian Way. But when an eighteenth-century satirist is praised as one “Born to delight at once and lash the age,” that conception, that lashing the age was a task for a poet, comes from Juvenal’s view of Rome. Juvenal is the last Roman writer of great importance. He is followed by Suetonius, a minor historian, who wrote the lives of the first twelve Caesars. And though there are no sharp lines in history, though there are always precursors and epigoni, it may be said that, with Juvenal and Suetonius, Roman literature is at an end.

In reading Tacitus and Juvenal we feel that they must have exaggerated. Like the man who comforted himself after the sermon on hell fire with the reflection that “no constitution would stand it,” we feel that if half this were true the Roman state must have come to an end far sooner, long before this, whereas it not merely lasted but went on to achieve greater order and prosperity. Halfway through the Silver Age, Nero provoked a revolt, and there followed in rapid succession four emperors by the grace of the Army—Galba, Otho, Vitellius, and Vespasian, representing respectively the Army of Spain, the Household Troops, the Army of the Rhine, and a coalition of the Armies of the Danube and the Euphrates. Now there was no more make-believing in the Republic. For a number of reigns the throne was inherited by a real or adoptive heir (with one or two violent changes of dynasty; the Roman Empire from first to last resembled Gilbert’s “Utopia, Ltd.,” “a despotism tempered by dynamite,” or by the assassination which was its Roman equivalent). The change from pretended First Citizen to avowed Emperor had come about by Tacitus’s time; it was because the Republic was unquestionably, irretrievably gone that it was safe to regret it. The Emperor was deified in his lifetime, and the worship of the deified Emperor held together the Roman state. And for some two centuries that state had a succession of strong and able rulers. The period of the Antonine Emperors has been called, for its peace and prosperity, the Golden Age of the Roman Empire. But something had gone out of it, for it produced no more great works. Peace and prosperity are not enough.

(Lucius Annæus Seneca, 4? B.c—65 A.D.)