Latin Literature – A History
The Early Roman Theater
The Stage
From the first stage performance of Livius Andronicus to the Gracchi, Roman
culture flourished on stage. All the Roman poets in this period wrote for the stage,
and there were professional guilds of author and actors, even literary discussion
groups.
All principle Roman dramatic genres are imported. From Greece came the palliata,
or comedy (Plautus, Terence) and the tragic genre, the cothurna. Authors of these
often acknowledge their Greek models and set their plays in Greece. When these
forms were set in Rome, they were called trabeata or praetexta.
The earliest theatrical event in Rome is connected with the Ludi Romani, where in
240 Livius presented his tragedy. By the time of Plautus, four occassions are
available for ludi scaenici. The ludi were always organized by Roman magistrates
and had other entertainment, such as gladiators, as well. These same magistrates
commissioned the works, so praetexta pieces would likely refer to them in some
way. We don’t see that with comedy at all though. There was also a producer
(dominus gregis). The works were performed on temporary wooden stages, probably
replicating a Greek theater.
Masks were used, at least in from the middle of the second century on. They
enabled to audience to identify the type of character, and prologues refer to
character types, not names. Masks enabled complicated plays to be performed by at
most 5 actors.
The Forms
We know most about Palliatae, since we have Plautus. His comedies are not
divided into acts and are both recited and sung. There were three different modes –
the recited parts, in iambic senarii (Roman version of trimeter), recitatives with
accompaniment in trochaic septenarii, and the sung parts in a wide array of meters.
This gave the playwright wide leeway, and there were great differences between
palliatae and Greek new comedy. A play by Menander was divided into acts and
composed almost exclusively of recited parts or recitatives, in iambic trimeter or
trochaic tetrameters. This metrical restriction helped give new comedy its
“bourgeois realism.” By restoring sung parts, the palliata gained a great deal in
dramatic presentation, and also had new possibilities for expression.
We know less about Roman tragedy. Attic tragedy had recited passages alternating
with lyric, usually strophic style. It also had the chorus. Latin drama lacked this.
Latin tragedians instead raised the entire stylistic level of their plays, to a very
lofty level. They used every trick they could and gave tragedy its own language, to
the point where it was parodied by the comic poets. Instead of being dominated by
the iambic senarius (= trimeter) Roman tragedy used a wide variety of other meters.
Roman tragedy had more pathos, but less rationality, less analysis. Ultimately,
Roman drama did not have the literary past to permit deep distinctions between
different genres and styles
A Dramatic Subgenre: The Atellan
This was a popular comic genre. They had rudimentary plots, farcical language,
plays on words, no professional structure. Lots of improvisation, with very fixed
masks.
Livius Andronicus
Wrote the first Roman tragedy in 240, and a parthenion in 207. Otherwise his
dates are unknown. He was the first to translate Greek Literary works into Latin,
and showed that that itself was an artform. His Odusia became a school text for a
while. But it was written to be both an autonomous work and a work which
preserved as much as possible the artistic quality of the original. He used a
somewhat artificial archaic Latin to replicate Homer. He also increases the pathos
and dramatizes things a bit. The same thing applies to his tragedies, all translated
from Greek (including an Ajax).
Naevius
Fought at the end of the first punic war. Of plebeian birth. Died around 204.
Wrote many tragedies and comedies, for which we have titles and a scattering of
verses. Also wrote an epic, Bellum Poenicum, in Saturnians. Was about both
Aeneas and the first Punic War. The first Latin author from Rome. Besides Bellum
Poenicum, other works seem distinctly designed to praise Rome – a Romulus
Tragedy, and a tragedy Clastidium about a Claudius who only died around 208.
Near contemporary subjects was a decided novelty. Although Roman through and
through, the Poenicum shows deep influence of Homer, blending Iliad and Odyssey,
and Hellenistic works. The poem was apparently quite bold, but declined along
with the Saturnian. His other tragedies include Trojan plays, and he was the most
important predecessor of Plautus. His drama also included attacks on
contemporary figures.
Plautus
T. Maccius Plautus, from Umbria. Born 255-250, died 184. His works were edited
in the mid-second century, and it was later Varro who picked out the 21 extant
comedies as authentic.
Typical Features of Plots and Characters
All plots are predictable, and have standardized characters. Plautus doesn’t want
problems of character or psychology, or any of that nonsense. Nearly all his plots
can be reuced to a contest between two antagonists over the possession of property,
generally a woman and/or the money needed to secure her. One part wins, the
other loses. Normally the young man wins and the old man or pimp loses. This fits
the cultural norms of the audience.
Having adopted these typical forms, Plautus can direct his interest to particular
forms of plot. The form most preferred is the ‘slave’s comedy’ Usually the young
man enlists a clever slave. As time passes the slaves get more clever, and even
theorize about their deceptions. Pseudolus even engages in discourse with the
audience. There are numerous variants possible, but they don’t effect the basic
formula – slave plans a trick, he acts, he triumphs. One other element is always
present – Fortune or Tyche. Another element that is almost always present is the
discovery of identity. Slave girl becomes free, etc. The slave, who is acting
immorally, winds up, thanks to Fortune, to be working in a moral reality after all.
The Greek Models
Plautus prefers sung forms, in contrast to Menander. So there is substantial
rewriting. Plautus rarely reveals the Greek originals, and his titles usually are no
help. But some can be identified. Plautus’s style is so consistent that it is clear he
was not much influenced by the differing styles of different new comedies. He was
on his own a very original author.
Plautus was happy to stick to the plot, but his plays are full of puns, metaphors,
similes, riddles, double entendres, neologisms, jests at Roman military. The system
of names is completely changed – Plautus wanted his own way, with Greek names,
but not the same as the models, and new names, not those already common in Italic
farce. Plautus worked hard to assimilate Attic conventions, modes of though,
typical characters. But he destroys many qualities of the models – dramatic
consistency, psychological development, characterization, etc.
Comic Lyricism
Trying to strip out the Plautine elements of a play and then work backwards to a
Greek model was done by the Germans. The Italians tried to seek out everything
original in Plautus. Both can be fruitful, but have been taken too far. Plautus gives
up certain aspects of the Greek, like dramatic consistency and character nuance, to
shift the emphasis to other concerns.
Character construction is usually cited as a defect. Plautus clearly has a favorite –
the clever slave and he plays an exceptional role, often directing the plot and
commenting on it. The position of the slave is often equivalent to the dramatic poet.
It is the slave who makes the greatest word-plays. Other characters are drawn into
the slaves comic sphere.
At best, Plautus uses the plots of the originals, but develops things in new ways.
Lovers take on the normal role, but they sing and hear themselves sing, they use
verbal variations, and can be both ironic and self-ironic. Plautus develops this
dramatic action smoothly. The plot becomes open for free creative play, for comic
lyricism.
The Structures of the Plot and the Reception of Plautine Drama
One important plot device is the reversal of values. The need for property, whether
woman or money, tends to turn things upside down. Free persons are treated like
slaves, fathers eye the women loved by their sons, married men instead of bachelors
court women. The play threatens to subvert everything the audience finds normal.
In Roman society the son is subordinate to the father, and conflicts arise here too.
Sometimes even identities are called into question, even between gods and men.
Typically, comedy returns things to the way the were supposed to be. The audience
expects this. The plot also touches real problems, like the availibilty of women and
the use of money in the family. The characters are Greek, and so are many details,
but the audience feels right at home. But there is no moralizing, as the primacy of
the clever slave shows. He is the most fun and the most incompatible with a serious
message. But even so the plays reinforce social norms. The slave pursues a
legitimate aim, even if he does so immorally. There is a discord between the ends
and the means. Plautus’s characters are so into their roles that the audience really
can’t identify them. And so with Plautus the Romans first learn of all the
ambiguities inherent in poetic fiction.
Caecilius Statius
Was originally Gaulish. Probably came to rome after 222, died 168. All of his works
are palliatae. He was regarded as the equal of Plautus and Terence, and fell
roughly between the two. As befitted a more Hellenized Rome, he adhered more
closely to the Greek models. A passage in Gellius compares the Plocium of Caecilius
and its original, the Plokion of Menander. calm dialogue is converted to farcical
song and the jokes are somewhat cruder.
Oratory and Historiography of the Archaic Period
Oratory
The earliest orators of note seem to have been late third century, but we know
nothing of them beyond names. Cato the Elder was the great orator of the second
century
Annals of Fabius Pictor
Pictor introduced the use of Greek, chiefly to counteract the favorable Greek
writings about Carthage. His work covered the foundations down to the second
punic war. It may have included accounts of his own activities in that war. It had
an antiquarian bent for researching the origins of institions and ceremonies.
Fabius saw the preservation of sentatorial power as the pillar on which Rome’s
success depended. Polybius criticized his lack of objectivity towards Carthage.
Cincius Alimentus and the other annalists
Cincius was another senator, of plebeian origins, who fought in the second punic
war and may have known hannibal. Polybius praised his work. Other annalists
writing in Greek include Gaius Acilius and Aulus Postumius Albinus. Cato criticize
the latter for using Greek.
Literature and Culture in the Period of Conquests
After the second Punic war Rome had nothing to stand in the way of conquering
everything. After 146, Rome fell away from the austere noble morality, described
by ancient historians as a perversion of ancient virtues. The chief economic
problem was that the upper and middle classes grew wealthy from all the wars
while the yeoman farmers lost their land, leading to the famous agarian difficulties.
Meanwhile the conqust of Greece opened new cultural and literary doors.
This in turn set off conflict between the Hellenophobes and Philhellenes in the
upper class, the former represtented by Cato the Censor. Cato didn’t want to reject
all Greek culture, just the parts that undermined traditional morality. A debate
can be seen in the drama of Terence, whose patron was Scipio Aemilianus. Scholars
used to speek of a Scipionic circle, but this is false. Scipio was certainly well
nourished on the classics and did patronize important writers like Polybius. Scipio
saw adapting Hellenic culture as a way of making Rome less provincial and more
worthy of ruling the world. Many of the writers took lengths to justify Rome’s
position and opposed measures such as land reform.
Ennius
Born 239, south of Tarentum. Died 169. Was Italian, but thoroughly acquainted
with Greek culture. Cato brought him to Rome in 204. By 190 he was writing
tragedies, of which we have numerous quotations. Besides comedies and some
minor works, he is most famous for his hexameter Annales.
The Drama
Was the last poet to do both tragedy and comedy, but wasn’t a good comic poet.
Preferred tragedy, with its pathos, and especially Euripides. Wrote many plays on
Trojan themes, working from all three Attic playwrights.
Annals: Structure and Composition
This was a celebratory work, influenced by Alexandrian poetry and Homer, but
focusing on all of Roman history. Its closest prcedent is Naevius’s Bellum
Poenicum, but Ennius used an unbroken narrative, starting with Aeneas, although
some periods were less fully treated than others. The title refers to the Annales
Maximi. Ennius seems concerned almost entirely with military events. Ennius had
read Pictor and set out to equal Homer.
Ennius and the Muse: His Poetics
Originally planned for 15 books, up to the victory of his patron Fulvius Nobilior in
187, but 3 more books added. There were two proems, in 1 and 7. In the first
proem, Homer appeared in a dream and promised to be reincarnated in Ennius.
The second proem invokes the Greek muses, and puts Ennius on level with the
Alexandrian poets and critics. And Ennius may have mentioned his adoption of
dactylic hexameter.
Experimentation – Language, Style, Meter
Ennius was a very bold poet, using numerous Grecism and even inventing Latin
endings to parallel Greek. He wrote in very varied hexameters, sometimes using
nothing but either dactyls or spondees. He used wicked alliteration. He loved
sound effects. He adapted Latin to the hexameter, working out rules for vowel
placement, word placement, and caesura. Later authors refined this, and in
particular moved away from the alliteration. Virgil often alliterates to make his
poetry sound more archaic.
Ennius and the Period of Conquests
The Annals sets out values, examples of behavior, and cultural models. Homer
trained Greeks, Ennius tried to do something similar. His poem represents a
triumph of aristocratic ideology. It emphasis the virtues of individual commanders
(as compared to say cato). It is a poem for the aristocracy. But Ennius also praises
peacetime virtues like literacy and oratory.
Cato
Born 234 at Tusculum to a plebeian family. His censorship in 184 was legendary.
Arch-conservative, especially on values. Wrote numerous speeches, a treatise on
Agriculture, the Origines, and some minor stuff.
The Beginnings of Senatorial Historiography
He wrote the Origines in old age, the first work of history in Latin. Much space is
given over to his concern about rampant moral corruption, waged against his
contemporaries such as the elder Africanus. Cato reported his own speeches, and
the work was probably in part a self-celebration. Cato attempted to kill the cult of
great personalities by making his work a celebration of the Roman people and
leaving out all famous names, even of enemies. This ran counter to the annalists,
who recorded the deeds of particular families. In their place, he brought in lesser
heroes who were more deserving to be symbols of the Roman people. Cato did
broaden the reaches of history, discussing the Italian peoples outside of Rome, and
even Africans and Spaniards
The Treatise on Agriculture
The work consists mainly of precepts laid down in a dry, schematic fashion. It
makes it clear that agriculture is an acquisitive activity, better than loaning money
at interest, which is immoral, or trading at sea, which is risky. The type of farm
described is probably at a transition between the small family farm and the large
slave estate. By remaining attached to the land, the rural aristocracy remained
attached to its values. It emphasizes the paterfamilias and is brutal towards
slaves.
Cato’s Political-Cultural Battle
Cato’s oratory was lively and full of movement. It tends to reject Greek practices,
part of Cato’s war against Greek culture. But Cato did use Greek agricultural
science and the Origines may have been influenced by Timaeus. Cato fought the
enlightened aspects of Greek culture, like its criticism of traditional social values
and relations, more than the whole culture. He was probably behind the expulsion
of Greek philosophers from Rome. He also supported laws that limited wealth and
its display and tightly controlled women.
Terence
Born in Carthage around 195, and came to Rome as a slave. Scipio Aemilianus was
his patron. Died in 159, on his to Greece for a tour. Six comedies are extant.
Historical Background
Debuted in 166, two years after Pydna. This was a time of hellenizing. Plautus had
been the most successful author ever. Terence accepted the basic framework, but
his primary interest is in human material, and he tries to convey the new
sensibilities and interests that are emerging among the elite. Terence encountered
grave difficulties while doing this, and is part of a split between the taste of the elite
and the masses. He rejects the comic exuberance of Plautus to achieve greater
psychological understanding of his characters. The plots are typical – young lovers,
fathers who oppose them, slaves working to resolve things, and a recognition at the
end. Terence’s innovation lies trying to get at the psychology of a character. Often
he worked against type – the non-shrewish mother-in-law, the morally superior
prostitute.
Style and Language
Terence does not make a display of language in contrast to Plautus. Language is
almost censored – in six comedies centered on love affairs the word kiss appears
twice, and there is little talk about eating and drinking, or sex. This censorship
ensures the prominence of certain of the plays’ characteristics. But Terence’s
smooth style is much more ordinary, with a concern for verisimilitude, something of
great importance in the Hellenistic period. His speech, while ordinary, reproduces
the speech of the upper class, giving a rather idealized effect.
The Prologues: Terence’s Poetics and his relation to his models
Terence is very much aware of the technical aspects of his work. He is very close to
Menander In this respect. Terence case more for consistency and seamlessness
than dramatic illusion. No meta-theatrics for him. No self-concisousness.
Terence’s principle technical innovation is in the importance of the prologue.
Normally, the prologue was used for laying out the plot. Terence rejected this and
instead use the prologue to discuss his own stances – his relation to the Greek
originals, responses to critics on poetics. It presupposes a more advanced and select
audience than does Plautus. This brings him closer to the Alexandrian ideal of the
poet-philologist, in the spirit of Ennius and Lucilius. And it emphasizes his
distance from the older generation of Plautus. One thing in particular he rebuts is
the charge of contaminatio. Terence took a single Greek play as a source, but often
mixed in a scene from another play. It was not a mechanical transposition and
Plautus did it too. Terence does seem to have stuck quite faithfully to the
Menandrian plots.
Themes and Literary Success of Terence’s Comedies
Terence sacrifices the verbal wit of palliata for deeper characters. In Terence family
relations become human relations, viewed in full complexity and taken seriously.
Humanitas is the key here, as it was the key during the Scipionic period. Still, the
most successful of his plays was the most Plautine, the Eunuch. Hecyra (Mother-in-
Law) flopped twice. However his humanism and lucid latin made him an extremely
popular author for schools, and he was being performed at least as late as the late
Republic. His urbane, cultured style was much admired by Cicero. Caesar admired
his style too, but criticized his lack of comic vitality. Terence remained a popular
school text right through the middle ages, and was very popular in the renaissance.
The Development of Tragedy
Pacuvius
Born roughly 220, died 130. He wrote exclusively tragedy, and not much of it
either. We have 12 titles of cothurnatae.
Accius
Born 170, died around 85. He was an emminent figure in the collegium poetarum
and was viciously attacked by Lucilius. He was the most prolific writer of tragedies,
with 40+ titles attested. Most were cothurnatae, one was Praetexta, on Brutus,
written for Decimus Junius Brutus around 136. Also wrote a number of philological
works.
The Development of Tragedy
Both Pacuvius and Accius were working in the tradition of Ennius as tragedian.
Their works were performed into the Augustan age. Roman tragedy still has Greek
models behind it, but they are reworked with complete independence. They touch
on themes and problems felt in contemporary Roman society. For instane, the
theme of tyrannicide was related to the political strife in Republican politics.
Tragedies increasingly dealt with the novelistic – ghosts, shipwrecks, prodigies,
betrayls, cruelty. Our fragments show a taste for the picturesque and the horrible.
In this sense, Roman tragedy was anti-classical. Second century tragedy also shows
the increasing importance of rhetoric. Pacuvius and Accius both experimented in
Latin, in the tradition of Ennius. Tragedy also became more high-brow. But after
Accius tragedy became increasingly a private occupation for illustrious men, often
famous politicians. Avant-garde poets abandoned the genre and it was not until
Ovid’s Medea that it will bloom again.
The Development of Epic Poetry from Ennius to Virgil
Ennius dominated Latin epic. After him, the Saturnian was out of date and
someone even rewrote Andronicus’s Odyssey in hexameters. Accius wrote an
obscure poem called Annales, and Catullus attacked the Annales of a certain
Volusius. The genre seems to have been reduced to celebrating particular military
campaigns. The style evolved a bit, and epic poetry remained the strongest link
between literature and propaganda.
Lucilius
Died 102, born between 180 and 148, with no real agreement. Probably belonged to
the Scipionic circle. He wrote 30 books of satires, mostly in hexameters. We have
lots of fragments, mostly short.
Lucilius and Satire
A rich provincial eques, he could launch attacks against some of the most
distinguished men in Rome. The word satire is of unknown derivation, it has
nothing to do with Gree satyr. It perhaps means “mixture and variety” Quintilian
calls it a wholly Roman genre. It perhaps comes from the search for a genre that
could convey an author’s personal voice, something that was lacking in epic,
tragedy, and comedy. But the Hellenistic poets, especially Callimachus, showed it
could be done. Ennius wrote a satire of which we have a few fragments.
But it is Lucilius who really developed the genre. It shows the development of an
audience eager for a literature close to contemporary reality. The thirty books dealt
with a variety of subjects. The first book had a council of the gods that decided one
Lentulus Lupus would die of indigestion. The gods acted like the Roman senate.
This satirized both epic and a contemporary. In book 30 there is a decadent
banquet. Book 16 seems to have been dedicated to his beloved, thus foreshadowing
personal love poetry. There is also criticism of other literary genres. His poetry
rejects a single stylistic level, and amalgamates the language of epic and the
specialized vocabularies that had hitherto been excluded from Latin poetry – those
of science, medicine, sex, etc. Plus lots of Grecisms. Lucilius is perhaps as close to
modern realism as Latin gets. His style is disharmonius, a blend of life and art.
His criticism and humor hit the most diverse aspects of daily life.
Politics and Culture Between the Era of the Gracchi and the Sullan
Restoration
Oratory and Political Tensions
Cicero’s oratory caused little that came before to survive. But in his Brutus Cicero
sketches out a history of eloquence. Aemilianus was famous for gravitas, Laelius
for lenitas. Gaius was famous for a florid style, and a forceful delivery in the style
of Demosthenes. The next great orators were Marcus Antonius and Lucius Licinius
Crassus, whom Cicero made the protagonists of the De Oratore. Both were
optimates, and Crassus had a part in closing a popular school of rhetoric, which had
produced the Rhetorica ad Herennium. There were two styles of oratory, Asianism
and Atticism. Asianism aimed for pathos and a musical sound. Hortensius was the
greatest practicer of this. Atticism came in later, as a reaction to Cicero, and prized
the bare style of Lysias. C. Licinius Calvus and Marcus Brutus were the best
practioners of this.
The Development of Historiography
History is, after oratory, the chief genre in which the crisis of the Gracchan period
finds expression. Contemporary events are the subject and the dry manner of the
annalists is dropped for an attempt at a rational understanding of events.
Sempronius Asellio wrote a history about only the events of his time in a very
unardorned way. Coelius Antipater wrote a monograph on the second punic war
with lots fantastic elements and pathos. Other historians in the Gracchan period
stuck to the annalistic tradition – Lucius Cassius Hemina, Lucius Calpurnius Piso
Frugi, et al. Annalistic writing continues in the Sullan period with Licinius Macer
and Valerias Antias. Claudius Quadrigarius also wrote in this period.
The most notable historian of this period was Lucius Cornelius Sisenna. He wrote a
history that dealt entirely with contemporary events and heroized Sulla. It was a
very dramatic, tragic history, with a theatrical narrative, reversals of fortune, etc.
A new genre arose, the comentarii, sort of autobiographies of politicians. Often
little more than notes to provide fodder for historians. Sulla himself wrote one in
Greek. This interest in autobiography may be connected with the rise of Roman
portraiture. Some autobiographies were a kind of political-self-defense, while
others, espcially Sulla’s, glorifed the author as having divine favor.
Antiquarian, Linguistic, and Philological Studies
Antiquarianism is the tracing of remote origins of usages, customs, and social
institutions. It is naturally linked with history, but avails itself of other sciences
too. IN the Sullan period the two branches split. We have only names, no
fragments. At the same time, Latin philology was born. Aelius Stilo began the task
of making critical editions of literary texts. He taught both Varro and Cicero.
Comedy after Terence – the Fabula Palliata and the Fabula Togata
Comedy continued to be performed. We have a number of names, but very few
fragments from Turpilius only. The fragments we have show an archaizing
tendency in language, which may be indicative of the fact that Palliata was
increasingly felt to be an old-fashioned genre. New genres sprang up. Similar
things happened with the togata, which continued to draw heavily on Greek
influences. But the comic tone seems to have dampened – Seneca tells us that the
togata fell between tragedy and comedy.
The Atellan at Rome in the Late Republic
In the Sullan period, the subliterary genre of farce or Atellan, returned to favor.
However, it became increasingly elaborate, with scripts and more complicated plots,
while keeping its broad humor. Two authors stand out – Lucius Pomponius and
Novius, of whom we have titles and fragments. Some titles suggest parodies of
Greek tragedies.
The Mime: Laberius and Syrus
The Greek term indicates imitation of real life, but that could apply to many genres.
For the Romans, mimes were like variety acts, with music and parodies. The
growth of Mimes is part of a growing taste for realism that can be seen in the
Caesarean period even in Catullus. Actors did not use masks.
We know of two important authors of Mimes, Decimus Laberius and Publilius
Syrus. Not all figures of mime were literary figures, and much of it continued to be
based on schematic plots, improvisation, songs, capers, risque love scenes, with a
surprise ending and a comic free-for all.
Laberius was on a higher level. An exact contemporary of Cicero his works show
the influence of Greek comedy and had both literary and theatrical success. He
seems to have introduced contemporary political allusions, and attacked Julius
Caesar. Syrus was his younger rival and was especially famous for the sententiae
in his works, which survive as a collection.
The preference for mimes and Atellan shows how much comedy and tragedy had
declined. It is a sign of a split in literary consumption – the cultivated elite
demanded a more refined and cultivated literature, one for private consumption,
while the urban masses had degraded culturally which left it open almost
exclusively to baser forms of spectacle. They wanted spectacles that could
reproduce directly the simple manifestations of daily life and of primitive, easily
satisfied emotions. There would never again be a truly popular theater in Rome.
The Late Republic (78-44)
The normal historical division of death of Sulla/death of Caesar also works for
Literature, since Cicero started writing shortly before Sulla’s death and died soon
after Caesar. The period also includes the entire development of neoteric poetry.
Just in the period 44-43 lie the debuts of the founders of the new school, Cornelius
Gallus and Virgil. The flourishing of Lucretius also falls neatly into this period.
This period witnesses the greatest flowering of judicial and political oratory, the
impetus of Roman philosophical thought, and the growth of Antiquarianism (Varro
et al). The most striking phenemenon is the importance acquired by
philosophical=political thought. Rome develops a true modern philosophy, with
Greek influence, but one which can stand on its own and work for Roman interests.
The great thinkers are no longer those writing in Greek. The role of religion is
discussed and the behavior of man analyzed. The ideas of intellectuals shed light
on the struggle for power.
There is no particular consistency between political action and ideological
inspiration. The real characteristic is the intense circulation of ideals and ideas and
the independence intellectuals begin to claim (think Sallust). The poets finally
depart from dependence on Greek sources, even if there are still Greek models.
They are also independent in their social lives. In contrast, the Augustan Age will
make the poet central at the expense of the individual. Cicero’s ambiton for an
independent role for intellectuals would find no one to continue it.
Neoteric Poetry and Catullus
Cicero referred to Poetae Novi scornfully. The reforming of literary taste these
poets promoted is one aspect of the Hellenization taking place due to the second
century conquests. This had been going on for a while, in the Scipionic circle and in
the development of new forms by Lucilius. A more conspicuous manifestation of
Greek culture is the development of a new type of poetry, small in scale, light in
tone, devoted to expressing personal sentiments. These were called nugae. They
arose in the last part of the second century in an intellectual circle that formed
around Q. Lutatius Catulus, and were the product of otium. They reveal a taste
educated by contact with Alexandria.
These poems gradually gave way to poetry that placed otium and pleasure at the
very center. Neoteric poetry marks a trend – decreasing time spent in service to the
state, more time spent in service to otium, for literature and pleasure. This is also
reflected in Epicureanism, which renounces politics and soldiering for a quiet life.
But the Epicureans hated love as a disease, but for the neoteric poets love is the
center of life.
The neoteric poets don’t constitute a circle or school. They are unified by their
taste, and a concern for form. Much like Callimachus, they paid great attention to
polished form, to ars, to brevitas, and as Callimachus attacked the successors of
Homer, the neoterics attacked the bloated traditional latin epics. Neoterics valued
the epigram and the epyllion, a mythical poem in miniature. Neoterics would
become a boundary of modernity.
The Pre-Neoteric Poets
Q, Lutatius Catulus was a man of wide culture, who introduced the epigram to
Latin. A circle formed around him. For two poets, Valerius Aedituus and Porcius
Licinus, we actually have some poems. Their taste for light peotry was carried on
by Laevius, who lived at the beginning of the first century and wrote six books of
“love jests” based on myths but with a very playful character. Two of his
contemporaries were Matius and Sueius.
The Neoteric Poets
Laevius marks progress from nugatory poems, which were closely dependent on
Hellenistic models. A prominent figure in the founding of the new school is Valerius
Cato who came from gaul and worked as a teacher and poet in Rome. He was in the
great tradition of the Hellenistic poet-philologist. Close to him was Furius
Bibaculus, who lived long enough to write harsh epigrams against Augustus. He
also wrote an historical epic on the gallic wars. Publius Terentius Varro Atacinus
also wrote an historical poem, but followed the new taste with a poem called
Leucadia, which was one of the earliest instances of Latin erotic poetry, and wrote
satires. At the same time, he continued the Latin tradition of poet-translators by
translating the Argonatuica, an epic that had much of the eros and psychological
complications that the neoterists liked.
Cinna and Calvus were friends of Catullus. G. Helvius Cinna was famous for his
devotion to the new school and was perhaps the most abstruse and precocious.
Licinius Calvus was a famous orator who attacked Vatinius, and an Atticist. But he
was above all a poet and wrote political invective and poems on love themes.
Catullus
C. Valerius Catullus was born in Verona of a well-to-do family. Born about 84, died
about 54. We have 116 poems, of which three were added by later scholars against
evidence, and deleted later. The numbering is still the same. They are traditionally
divided into three sections based on meter. 1-60 are commonly called the
polymetric poems, known also as nugae ‘diversions.’ They are in a wide variety of
meters, especially hendecasyllabics, but also iambic trimeters and Sapphics. No
elegaic couplets. The second group, 61-68 are more heterongenous and include
poems of greater extent and stylistic effort. They are the ‘learned poems’ The third
group, 69-116, consists mainly of short poems in elegiac couplets, the so-called
epigrams. Some attribute the ordering of the collection to Catullus himself, others,
noting the arrangement by meter, suggest it was done by a later philologist. There
are fragments of some poems not in the standard collection.
Catullus is synonymous with the neoteric revolution. In a time of acute crisis for
the old Republic, personal otium became an alternative to communal life. Literary
activity is no longer turned to the state and its values, but towards personal poetry
suitable for expressing the small events of a private life. This aim of recovering
intimate space is met most clearly in the shorter poems. These works favor the
events of daily life, like affections, friendships, hatreds, passions, while striving for
perfection of form. The poems present an impression of immediacy, but that is what
Catullus is attempting through his learning, and the majority of his poems have
literary antecedents in Greek models. The recipient of the poem would expect a
certain level stylistically. Behind their simplicity is a careful construction and
balance.
The background to his poetry is the fashionable milieu around the capital and by
his circle of like-minded friends. Against this the figure of Lesbia stands out, the
incarnation of the power of eros. She has beauty and intelligence, cultivation to
enrapture Catullus. In his poetry, love moves from being on the margin of life,
where morality placed, to being at the very center. Catullus transfers everything to
love, shunning politics and public life. The violation of the love pact by Lesbia
figures prominently. He refers to it using values such as fides and pietas, and shows
a strong concern with marriage. But is also produces a strong conflict within him
(odi et amo). His one consolation is that he kept his faith with her, even if she did
not with him.
By defining his poetry as lepidus, novus, expolitus, Catullus reveals its
Callimachean ancestry. He opposes the verbose superficiality of Ennius. He tries
out new things, especially in the learned poems. Catullus ventures into a new epic
genre, the epyllion. 64 became a model for Latin culture, and recounts, in
hexameter, the marriage of Peleus and Thetis, but has another story embedded by
means of the Alexandrian ekphrsis, the story of Theseus’s abandonment of Ariadne.
The intertwining of the happy relationship and the unhappy establishes the
importanace of fides. The myth is a symbolic projection of Catullus’s desire for a
lasting foedus. 63 is another epyllion, about Attis and his self-castration for Cybele
and his later regret. Instead of being written in hexameters, the normal meter of
epyllion, it is in galliambics, an Alexandrian meter used for cult songs to Cybele.
61 & 62 are nuptial songs. Both show the influence of Sappho, 66 is a translation
on the Lock of Berenice from the Aetia of Callimachus. It is particularly insistent
on the themes of fides and pietas and the celebration of traditional values. 65 is a
letter in elegiac couplets dedicating 66 to Hortensius Hortalus. 68 is difficult to
interpret because it may be two poems combined in the manuscripts. It is
important because of the large space given to recollection and a mythically projected
real life in a large poem, and is the ancestor of Latin subjective elegy.
Besides the enormous influence of Alexandrian literature, there was also extensive
influece of Sappho and Archilochus. Catullus is a novel combination of literary
language and everyday speech. But it still allows for rather vulgar expressions.
Diminutives are frequent and the softness of there form add to the charm (lepos). It
is in short, composite and lively, with a wide range of expression, from mocking and
invective to tender love. The learned poems are perhaps less intense and vital, but
this befits their more formal, mythological nature.
Catullus was a major influence on the Augustan poets (except for Horace). The
elegists in particular regard Catullus as the ancestor, but also the Virgil of the
Eclogues and the Dido scene. In the later empire he is still be referred to, and
Martial shows major influence.
Lucretius
Born mid-90s, died mid-50s. Cicero refers to him in a letter of 54. His work is the
De Rerum Natura, in 6 books of hexameter verses. It may have been lacking in its
final revision and it is possible that Cicero edited it and published it.
Lucretius and Roman Epicureanism
Rome was generally open to Greek learning, filtering out what seemed to threaten
the institutional order of the Repubklic. Epicureanism was seen as a dissolver of
moral tradition because of its emphasis on pleasure and its denial that the gods
intervened in human affairs. But by the first century Epicureanism had spread
discreetly throughout the higher levels of Roman society. Atticus and Caesar both
had some Epicurean leanings, and Virgil may have been taught by an Epicurean in
Naples. We are less well informed about the lower classes, by Epicureanim
genereally addressed itself to all classes, men and women.
Lucretius choose a very odd genre – the epic didactic poem – to popularize
Epicureanism. This is strange because Epicurus condemed poetry, espcially
Homeric poetry. Later Epicureans held to the master’s intentions, limiting
themselves to playful poems. Lucretius may have choosen the form to help
penetrate the Roman upper classes and to better compete with other philosophies,
which were often clothed in literature. Besides Homer, he also shows admiration
for Empedocles, at least as literature, and for his zeal.
The Didactic Poem
De Rerum Natura translates Epicurus’s major (lost) work, Peri Physeos. It is
divided into three groups of two books. After the proem, which is formed by a hymn
to Venus, book 1 sets forth the basics of Epicurean physics: the atoms and the
infinite void. It ends with a critical review of the other natural philosophers. Book
2 develops atoms further, and postulates an infinite number of worlds, all subject to
birth and death. 3 & 4 deal with anthropology, explaining the workings of the body
and soul, and the mind. 5 & 6 cover cosmology. 5 details the mortality of the
world, 6 covers natural phenomena, eliminating divine will as a cause, and ends
with the plague in Athens. It may be unfinished.
This is the first serious piece of Latin didactic poetry. Hellenistic literature,
following the examples of Hesiod, Parmenides, and Empedocles, used hexameters.
Aratus of Soli wrote Phenomena and Weather-signs, and Nicander wrote further
works. All were apparently translated into Latin. Lucretius differs from these
hellenistic works in that he tries to explain every aspect of life and the world,
whereas Hellenistic pieces favored technical subjects and idealized them. The main
influence is really Empedocles’s Peri Physeos and Lucretius pays homage to him.
Unlike Hellenistic poetry, which is mainly limited to describing phenomena,
Lucretius investigates causes and lays before his reader a truth. Hellenistic
didactic praised things and suggested that the object of description was marvelous,
while Lucretius finds nothing to marvel at, since everything is connected to the
rules. The recipient is supposed to react to this instruction to become more aware of
his own intellect. This is the root of the sublime, and for Lucretius sublime is a way
of interpreting the world and setting forth the explanation for the reader to see. It
invites the reader to broaden his horizons. The texts expects an engaged reader
who is able to take in this overwhelming experience. There is a tension between the
poem and the reader because of this, with the poem constantly inviting the reader
to challenge himself.
There are frequent asides to the reader and rigourous argument. Lucretius likes to
use the reductio ad absurdum against other theories Analogy is also used. Book 3
is perhaps the best example of everything. It opens with a hymn to Epicurus, and
then follows a lengthy section on the mortality of the soul, with 29 different proofs.
The book ends with Nature herself speaking directly to mankind.
The Study of Nature and the Serenity of Man
Lucretius devotes the opening of the first book to refuting traditional religion as
cruel and impious. He cites Iphigenia at Aulis. Religion crushes human life under
its weight, and the only way around it is for man to realize there is nothing after
death. And for this they need the sure knowledge provided by the poem. Lucretius
describes a nexus of religious superstition, fear of death, and the need for scientific
explanation. He warms against the terrifying utterances of soothsayers.
Otherwise, he follows Epicurus closely, who is modeled as a homeric hero in a great
duel. Epicurus, because he frees men from mortal sufferings, becomes a sort of god
himself. Epicurus believed in the eternal gods, but denied that man was subject to
them in any way. Book 5 discusses the origins of religion as to unexplained natural
phenomena, that now can be explained thanks to Epicurus.
The Course of History
Lucretius devotes a considerable part to the history of the world. Mortal beings
formed through moist soil and heat, the gods were not involved. Lucretius refutes
the idea of mythical beings once inhabiting the earth. HE goes on to chart human
progress, alternating positive ones like language, fire, agriculture, with negative
ones like war and religion. Accident and material are the factors responsible for the
advance of civilization. Progress does bring on negative factors like war, personal
ambition, covetousness. Epicurus taught to avoid what was unnatural and
unnecessary and to focus on what was natural and necessary. Those who regarded
this as pure hedonism failed to grasp its precepts, of limiting needs and focusing on
simple pleasures.
The Interpretation of the Work
The narrative voice of the poem must not be conflated with the historical figure.
The author’s effort is always aimed at rationnally convincing his reader and
transmitting a doctrine of moral liberation. There are dark dramatic pictures,
usually connected with the context. The rejection of a stoic beneficial nature
explains the section on nature as unconcerned with mans needs. Book 4 has a
harsh attack on the passion of love, trying to clinch the model of the rational
Epicurean sage. These powerful excessive elements are part of the poem’s attempt
to seek out an elevated register which fuses the grandeur of the sublime with
elements of diatribe and satire.
Lucretius does seem more pessimistic than one would expect from an Epicurean.
His rationalism has limits – that there is nothing beyond death does nothing to
remove the concern of dying. This is where Lucretius becomes especially firm. His
constant precepts about siezing the day for a contrast to the description of man as
prey to irrationality which Lucretius himself presents us with near the end of the
book.
Language and Style
The style is shaped to persuede the reader. This includes the frequent repetitions.
Some concepts were summed up and repeated often. Also, there are frequent bids
for the readers attention. Latin lacked the technical terms for philosophy, so
Lucretius had to invent them himself. He also uses a wide variety of archaic,
Ennian, words, and creates many words himself, especially novel adverbs. He
draws on Ennius more than Alexandria in this sense. He uses passiave infinitives
in ier instead of I and likes to open his lines with a dactyl, but his verses tend to be
calmer and more linear than Virgil or Ovid. He shows wide familiarity with Greek
literature, from Homer to Callimachus.
In some ways the lack of technical vocabulary was a blessing for Lucretius since it
forced him to use a vast range of images and examples. These images themselves
have poetic and emotional potency. There is a lot of contrast, between small and
great, static and dynamic, and this is mirrored in the contrasting colloquial style
and the sublime style.
Lucretius had little and sporadic influence on later works. Many authors have
clearly read him, but show few signs. Virgil does make a point of surpassing him in
the Georgics. Lucretius became more popular in the 2
nd
century for his archaic
style, but fell off again in the Christian era.
Cicero
Born in 106 at Arpinum. Educated under Licinius Crassus and the two Scaevolas.
Fought under Pompeius Strabo in the social war, and made his debut as a pleader
in 81. Defended Sextus Roscius in 80 against Sullans, and went to Greece to study.
Was quaestor to Sicily in 75, and prosecuted Verres in 70 to great acclaim. Aedile
69, praetor 66. Supported giving Pompey exceptional powers. Consul 63,
suppressed Catiline. Waned and went into exile under the triumvirate, but
returned in triump in 57. Tried to collaborate with the triumvirs until 51, and
continued forensic activity, Worked on philosophical treatises. In 51 was governor
of Cilicia, and sided with Pompey in the civil war. Was pardoned by Caesar, and
after Caesar’s murder attacked Antony in the Philippics, for which he was put to
death in 43.
Tradition and Innovation in Roman Culture
Cicero is perhaps the best known person of the ancient world and one of the most
interesting. He attempted to develop a politico-ethical program to save the republic.
His own view was tied to the landowning aristocracy, and his oratory a powerful
advocate. As the years passed though, he became increasingly dismayed and looked
more and more on the basics of politics and morality. His philosophical works aim,
like his speeches, to give a solid intellectual, ethical, political base for a dominant
class, that would observe order and tradition, but still absorb Greek culture, that
would perform its duties to the state but not neglect the joys of otium. Behind it all
one perceives a society of contrasts – the huge wealth of empire was making the
traditional morality obsolete, but the abandoment of the virtues that made Rome
great were calling the very survival of the Republic into question.
The Supremacy of the Word: Political Careera and Political Oratory
The Pro Roscio had to defend Roscius against the powerful Sullan Chrysogonus
without involving Sulla. So Sulla is praised to the moon. The style is Asianism –
swift phrases, lots of metaphors. It would develop later. Already fully developed is
portraiture, at depicting persons in colorful and satiric ways. Chrysogonus is the
first in a long line down to Antony to suffer this.
In 70 the Sicilians asked Cicero to prosecute the ex-governor Verres. Cicero swiftly
gathered evidence and delivered a single oration, after which Verres fled and was
convicted by default. Cicero subsequently published, in the form of a speech, a book
against Verres, which is an important document for understanding Roman
provincial administration. The victory over Hortensius, Verres’s defender, was a
literary one as well. Hortensius was the prime exponent of Asianism. Cicero has
moved beyond it, without the dryness of the atticists, and achieved a mastery of the
Latin period. Potraiture is again especially prominent.
In 66 Cicero, as praetor, spoke in favor of the law of Manilius granting Pompey an
extraordinary commission. In it he insisted on the importance of taxes from the
east and the threat Mithradates posed to that. He was really defending the
interests of the publicans, attempting to cement their concord with the senate. He
was also ingratiating himself with Pompey, who tended to favor tribunes, But
Cicero was not becoming a populares by any means.
This succeeded in getting him elected consul for 63, in which he put down the
famous Catilinarian conspiracy and helped defeat the agrarian law of Rullus.
During the time of the Catilinarian speeches, he also delivered the Pro Murena.
Murena had been accused of electoral corruption by a defeated canddiate, Sulpicius
Rufus, and by Cato. In a very ironic and witty speech, Cicero mocked the strictness
of Cato and began to sketch the lines of a new ethical model.
After his return from exile, he defended Sestius against Clodius in 56. In this
speech he abandons the idea of concordia ordinum, and tries instead for a consensus
ordinum bonorum, that is active agreement among all well-to-do landholders. The
boni would henceforth be the principal audience for Cicero’s politic-ethical
preaching. They were not supposed to selfishly pursue their own interests, but to
actively support those who represented their cause. Cicero argued in the Republic
that sometimes the boni and senate had to entrust themselves to the guidance of
eminent people. In this light he tried to influence the triumvirs, but many of his
speeches show vacillation. He continues to attack Clodius and the populares, but
fights for Caesar too.
Prominent among the anti-Clodian speeches is the Pro Caelio. Cicero attacked
Clodia to get at her brother, in one of his most brilliant speeches. Satire and
potraiture are prominent, but it also gives a cross section of Roman society of the
time. Cicero attempts to persuade that the newer customs of the youth can only
give scandal to moralists attached to the past. If the youth were restrained too
closely they might try overthrowing traditional values, but given free reign they
would return to the mos maiorum. Traditional values still dominate, but are less
rigid and more responsive.
After being pardoned by Caesar in 46, Cicero made a number of speeches defending
former Pompeians. They don’t come across as all that sincere, although the Pro
Marcello tries to expound Caesar’s program of reforming government.
After Caesar’s murder, Cicero tried to play Octavian off of Antony. Beginning in the
summer of 44 he delivered the Philippics, trying to get the senate to declare Antony
a public enemy. The second Philippic especially stands out. It failed, and Cicero
was executed as a result.
Cicero’s career followed a consistent path. He always supported the nobilitas and
remained faithful to the idea of concord among orders. This was an attempt to
overcome the factions that dominated politics. It failed because Cicero
underestimated the importance of private armies and had much too high
expectations of the boni. During the civil war, many landholders found Caesar
preferrable to Pompey, and Augustus exploited this still further.
The Rhetorical Works
Nearly all written after 55, in response to the growing crisis of the Republic. One
early, unfinished piece, De Inventione, declares that an orator must be well versed
in both eloquence and philsophical wisdom, since the latter is necessary for the
formation of a moral conscience. The De Oratore returns to the same themes in 55.
It is in the form of a dialogue, set in 91, between Marcus Antonius, and Lucius
Licinius Crassus. Crassus is in effect Cicero. Caesar Strabo also appears to give
advice on witticism. The work is set shortly before the Social War and the crisis of
the state is a concern for all involved.
Cicero’s model is the Platonic dialogue. The streets of Athens are replaced by a
country villa. This was a major departure from the dry handbooks. Cicero
produced a lively piece on Greek theories nourished by Roman examples. It
demands a broad cultural education for an orator, since the abililty to do both pro
and contra on any argument would be dangerous in the hands of someone without
virtues and values. The training of the orator coincides with the training of a
member of the ruling class. No specialized education, but a man of broad culture
able to persuade his listeners. He is to harness the power of the boni with his
rhetoric.
Cicero was criticized by Atticists for not distancing himself enough from Asianism.
He defended himself in the Brutus, a dialogue between himself, Atticus, and Brutus
that sketches a history of oratory, culminating in the stages of his own career. It
reflects a break with strict stylistic schools such as Asianism and Atticism, and calls
for oratory without systems, a la Demosthenes.
A Project of State
Cicero’s De Republica does not set out to sketch an ideal state as does Plato.
Instead, he projects himself into the past, to the time of the Scipio’s as the best form
of state. The dialogue takes place in 129 at a villa of Scipio Aemilianus. In the first
part, Scipio distinguishes the three forms of government and how the Romans
successfully used all three. Book 2 dealt with the development of the Roman
Constitution. The following books are highly fragmentary, but it concludes in 6
with the dream of Scipio, in which Africanus appears to show how insignificant
mortal life is, but how wonderful the afterlife would be for a good statesman.
The theory of government goes back, through Polybius, to Aristotle. Cicero adds the
first citizen, the princeps, which he seems to think of in the role Scipio Aemilianus
played, a first citizen working in the bounds of the Republic. The princeps would
have to steel himself against all selfish passions. The dream of Scipio enjoins
disdain for all human things. It was a difficult task, as the events of the 50s showed
with Pompey and Caesar.
The De Republica was followed by De Legibus, begun in 52. It has a contemporary
setting with Cicero, Quintus, and Atticus as speakers. In book 1 Cicero expounds
the stoic theory that law is based on what is innate in men and therefore derives
from god. In book 2 he expounds on the best laws, based on the Roman constitution.
In 3 he gives the texts of laws concerning magistrates and their competence.
Morality for Roman Society
Cicero didn’t start writing philosophy until 46, and picked up the pace in 45 after
his daughter Tullia died. Perhaps his masterpiece is De Finibus Bonorum et
Malorum, dedicated to Brutus. It deals with ethical questions, the highest good and
evil, in three dialogues. The first dialogue (books 1-2) refutes Epicureanims, the
second compares Stoicism with the Academic and Peripatetic theories, and the last
(book 5) expounds the eclectic theory of Cicero’s teacher Antiochus. The Tusculan
Disputations deals with themes of death, grief, sadness, spiritual disturbance, and
virtue as a guaruntee of happiness and is the closest Cicero gets to Stoicism. Other
works include those on divinities, and the De Officiis, which is his last philosophical
work.
Cicero is trying to rethink the whole system of philosophy that grew up in
Hellenistic times, and to knit together an ideal structure for the Roman state. For
knowledge, Cicero rejects that it can be known for sure, and holds to the skepticims
of the Academics, that the truth must be apprached in terms of appearances and
probability. This is how Cicero approaches most problems.
This leads to a philosophical eclecticism, of humanitas that urged the adoption of
open tolerance. This is manifested even in the dialogues, which show good Roman
society, with a softened polemic and a rejection of harsh contradiciton, and general
politeness. The only case were this doesn’t really apply is Epicureanism, which is
refuted in De Finibus, because it doesn’t emphisize activity in the state and because
it excludes divinity’s providential function. The De Finibus develops the
comparison of different philosophical systems most fully. Ethical rigidity, such as
the stoicism of Cato, is rejected, and Cicero is even willing to consider philosophies
like the Paripatetics that were moderately open to pleasure.
In the Cato Maior de Senectute, Cicero projects himself onto the figure of Cato in
the last year of his life, and makes Cato into a refined cultivator of humanitas and
sociability. Otium is perfectly harmonized with the tenacity of political
engagement, two demands that Cicero tried to reconcile throughout his life. In the
Laelius de Amicitia Cicero tries to enlarge the social basis of friendship beyond the
circle of the nobilitas, not just for political relations, but for true, sincere friendship.
The De Officiis was written alongside the Philippics. It is a treatise dedicated to
Marcus Cicero. It seeks to formulate a morality that will allow the Roman
aristocracy to regain control over society. The philosophy is provided by the modern
Stoicism of Panaetius, which was less rigid and hard-edged. This gave Cicero a
model for moving between theoretical thought and practical application.
Panaetius theorized about beneficence, which fitted well with the lives of Roman
aristocrats and how they used officia and donations to attract a following. This was
problematic too, for Cicero, because it could lead to corruption and demagoguery.
Panaetius replaced the idea of virtue with magnitudo animi, a sort of gentlemanly
virtue and a natural desire to dmoniate or outdo others, even though it disdains
worldy wealth. Checking personal desire was a strong part of this. Cicero links this
all to reason and says the task is to get rid of egoitism and vice, or transform to
virtue and work for the state.
The final virtue is moderation. It is manifested in a suitable decorum of words and
actions and shows firm self-control, to be admired by others. He gives a long list of
advice on etiquette and ends with a description of the aristocrats ideal house – large
and elegant, but not luxurious and pretentious.
This concept of decorum permits individual variation. Each man must play the part
as best suited to his talent. One can undertake a non-public career as long as he
remembers his duties to the community. This obviously includes all those boni to
whom Cicero had been speaking since the Pro Sestio, both those involved in politics,
and those supporting the right politicians.
Cicero as Prose Writer: Language and Style
Like Lucretius, Cicero had a hard time finding the right sort of terminology for his
philosophy. He experimented a lot, and avoided Grecisms. He ended up
introducing many abstract words into Latin as a result. But his main contribution
is the creation of a complex and harmonious period, with perfect balance between
its parts, modeled on Isocrates and Demosthenes. It was very logical and
eliminated many of the incogruities Latin had. Phrases were orgranized into units
with accurate and explicit subordination instead of coordination. Cicero also has a
huge variety of tones and registers, and great ease of movement among different
stylistic effects. The disposition of words must follow the numerus, a sort of
metrical rule system for prose, which located rythmical effects in the final part of
the period.
The Poetic Works
Cicero wrote poetry all his life, and it was not well received. At first he wrote short
mythologizing poems in the Alexandrian style, and an epic on Marius. These works
are in some ways precursors to neoterics. Around 60 he composed a three book
poem on his consulship. It was heavily criticized, then and now, for being
overloaded with praise for Cicero. By this time, Cicero was working in the Ennian
tradition and was hostile to the neoterics. Technically though he contributed to the
regularizing of Latin hexameter, and gave it more elegance and flexibility. This
was very important for Ovid and Virgil. Cicero also translated, with somewhat
more success, Greek works.
Correspondence
We have 16 Books Ad Familiares, 16 books Ad Atticum, 3 books Ad Quintum, and 2
books Ad Brutum, about 900 letters in all, from 68-43. It is a rich and varied
collection, to a wide variety of correspondents, showing every side of Cicero. The
style is different from the other works, slangy, elliptical, full of allusions and
Grecisms. It reflects faithfully the language of the Roman upper class.
Cicero’s Literary Success
Cicero and his contemporaries saw him primarily as a statesmen, and his prose was
widely criticized by various schools at the time. Sallust rejected him completely.
But the elder Seneca ranks him with the Greek orators. Seneca the Younger
perfected an ani-Ciceronian style, but by then he was being canonized as the main
prose author in schools. Asconius wrote his commentary around this time and
Quintilian named Cicero as the master of rhetoric.
Philology, Biography, and Antiquarianims at the End of the Republic
Studies of Antiquity and Nostalgia for the Roman Past
Research into etymology was also research into the origins of customs and
institutions. But these philological=antiquarian studies reached their full flowering
at the end of the Republic. Doubtlessly the crises of the time led to a nostalgic
desire to know about ancient things. Veneration of the national past was a bit of a
roadblock to true philology, but Varro at least does not ignore foreing contributions,
and Nepos mixes traditional values with moderate cultural relavitism.
Varro
Born 116, was a partisan of Pompey, but pardoned by Caesar and entrusted in 46
with the task of creating a large library. Died in 27. His extant works include 6
damaged books of De Lingua Latina (out of 25) and a De Re Rustica. But he wrote
many many many other things.
Varro more or less overlaps with Cicero for most of his works, and he too was trying
to give an intelligent response to the crisis of the Republic. He saw Rome as
declining and the problem as the growth of consumption. But unlike Cicero, Varro
was good about admiting the importance of foreign culture to Rome. He seems to
have allied himself with Posidonius in saying that Rome’s success was due to its
willingness to learn from everybody.
In his work, the Antiquitates, nearly all of Latin civilization was illustrated and
given order. It was divided into sections on Res Humanae and Res Divinae. The
Res Humanae were very successful and established much of the basic chronology of
Rome. Virgil made use of it in creating the legend of the Aeneid. The Res Divinae
was taken by Christian fathers as being the basic pagan text. History in these
works was above all of customs, institutions. It is a collective history of the Roman
people. The Roman people over the ages ultimately created the Roman state.
Major heroes are only seen in this context.
Varro was also a devoted philologist. He did extensive work on the text of Plautus,
establishing as authentic the 21 plays that have survived. He also wrote
extensively on the latin language, discussing things such as foreign elements and
etymologies. The etymologies in particular are quite bizarre.
He also wrote the Menippean satires, in a mixture of prose and verse, in 150 books,
over an extended period. We have about 90 titles and 600 short fragments. A
common them through them is the decline of Roman morals and the vices of current
politicians. Much is based on Lucilius, and there is a strong Plautine influence as
well. The language was rich and colorful, and the Menippeans were forerunners to
the Satyricon and the Apocolocyntosis. There was a strong Greek influence as well,
odd for Roman satire. The most important identifying factor was the irregular
mixture of prose and verse.
Written in 37, the De Rustica is the work of his old age. In three books, arranged as
a dialogue. There is a strong relationship to Cato’s work. The main purpose of the
work is glorify the country gentleman. It has little instruction on the stuff one
actually does in agriculture, but merely fosters the ideal of the rich landowner.
We have so little of Varro’s output that it is easy to forget that he was once
numbered among Cicero, Caesar, Virgil, and Horace. He enjoyed great popularity
throughout antiquity. Virgil based the Georgics in large part on De Re Rustica.
Varro was the model for all later Latin scholars. But like all ancient scholars, fewer
and fewer read him.
Cornelius Nepos
Born around 100, and had connections to Cicero and Atticus. Part of his De Viris
Illustribus had been presrved, the part on foreign military leaders, the rest is lost
aside from Atticus and Cato. Died around 27. His first work was a systematic
universal chronology, the Chronica.
The biographies were evidently a means for comparing civilizations, and were
grouped by profession. Each category had two books, one Roman, one foreign
(especially Greek). The comparisons do not necessarily seem to have been pro-
Roman, even Hannibal comes across in a good light. This sort of thing was
symptomatic of an era when the Romans were wondering what was distinctive
about their civilization. One can see some cultural relativism in Nepos, since he
warns not to judge the customs of another people by one’s own.
All in all, Nepos was a mediocre writer. He influenced Plutarch’s parallel lives. His
works, written in a very simple style, were aimed at the less culturally elite. The
one really interesting life is that of Atticus, who was a contemporary figure and was
shown to be an example of how old ashioned virtues and modern values could be
reconciled.
Caesar
Born July 13 100. Had to leave Rome on account of his relationship to Marius,
served in Asia, returned 78. Quaestor 68, aedile 65, PM 63, praetor 62, propraetor
in Spain 61, consul 59, etc. His conquest of Gaul 58-51 gave him vast personal
power. Invaded Italy after his opponents refused to compromise, etc. Works
included the commentaries, various speeches, verse compositions, and an Anticato.
The Commentarius as Historical Genre
An intermediate form between notes and reports and true history, Earlier
politician like Sulla had written them on their own careers and Caesar was
doubtlessly in this tradition. Cicero speaks of Caesar’s commentaries as the raw
material for historians to use. But Caesar’s commentaries come awfully close to full
history, using drama and direct discourse, in the third person.
The Gallic Campaigns in Caesar’s Narration
The seven books cover the period from 58-52 when Caesar subjugated Gaul. Starts
with the migration of the Helvetii and ends with the capture of Vercingetorix. It is
not clear if it was written in one go in 52/51, or year by year. Stylistic indications
point towards the latter.
The Narration of the Civil War
Three books, the first two narrate 49, the third 48 without quite covering the whole
year. The work appears to be unfinished, and may have been published after
Caesar’s death, although most go for a date of 46. Caesar does not miss a chance to
take a swipe at the old ruling order, dominated by a corrupt clique. It becomes
quite satirical in places. This culminates in the picture of the Pompeian camp
before the battle of Pharsalus, where his opponents fight to divide up the spoils.
However, the Civil War does not put forth a clear program of reform. Rather,
Caesar works to destroy the image of himself as a revolutionary and reassure the
traditionalists. Thus Caesar emphasizes his oppostion to more radical measures
like land reform, and his support for the limits of law. Above all the Civil Wars are
a glorification of his own soldiers.
Caesar’s Truthfulness and the Problem of Historical Distortion
The unadorned style, the rejection of rhetorical embellishments contribute to the
objective impassive tone of the works. However, modern criticism has found
distortions and interpretations of events for political propaganda. This is more
apparent in the Civil Wars. On the other hand, The Gallic Wars present a
defensive war, in keeping with the traditions of Roman imperialism. And in both
works he does not create a halo of charisma around himself and puts a great deal of
emphasis on luck, the impoderable factor that effects both sides.
The Continuators of Caesar
Hirtius wrote Book 8 of the Gallic War to link up the narrative to Book 1 of the Civil
War. The Bellum Alexandrium probably also belongs to him. His style is plainer
and closer to the traditional commentary than Caesar. The Bellum Africum is
horribly archaizing, while the Bellum Hispaniense was clearly written by a soldier
with little rhetorical skill.
Linguistic Theories
Caesar was one of the greatest of all orators, but we don’t have any of his speeches.
Cicero recognizes him as a purifier of the Latin language. Caesar wrote 3 books De
Analogia in which he encouraged the use of regular words and the avoidance of
strnage words. Simplicty, order, and clarity were praised. Cicero recognized the
greatness of the Comentarii, but disapproved of Caesar’s rhetorical views.
Literary Success
In the modern period most of Caesar’s success has been political and military. But
Caesar’s contemporaries took him seriously as a writer. Both opponents and
proponents praise the style of the Comentarii. Later his clarity made him a dull
author for grammarians and his real followers were the historians. Livy gradually
supplanted him as the most read source for the period.
Sallust
Born 86 in Sabine country. Moved to Rome for training and entered politics as a
populares. He led a fierce campaign against Milo and cicero in 52, and was expelled
from the Senate. Fought with Caesar and reentered the Senate in 46. After a
really bad governorship he withdrew again from the Senate and devoted himself to
writing, probably dying in 34 with the Histories unfinished.
The Historical Monograph as a Literary Genre
Both monographs have lengthy proems in which Sallust tries to justify his
withdrawal from public life to write history. For him, history is important for
training the politician. He denounces the greed and corruption that brought
himself down. But most important is that his work takes the form of an
investigation into the crisis. This accounts for the monographs, almost unique in
Roman history. They allowed him to focus upon a single historical problem against
the background of an organic view of Roman history. The Bellum Catinlinae
illuminates the most acute point of the crisis, while the Bellum Iugurthae directly
confronts through a paradigmatic episode the incapacity of a corrupt nobility and
the first successful resisitance by the populares.
Catiline’s Conspiracy and the Fear of the Lower Classes
Catiline had perceived that an opposition to the senatorial government could be
made up of the urban plebs, the poorer classes of Italy, and the debt laden part of
the aristocarcy, and even slaves. Sallust saw Catiline as one of the symptoms of the
Roman decline, and goes on to trace the decline or morality from the fall of
Carthage. He pins much of the blame on Sulla, who inspired Catiline. A second
excursus denounces the decay of Roman political life between Sulla and the civil
war of Caesar and Pompey. Government by faction is condemned. Sallust probably
hoped that Caesar would reestablish the power and order of the ruling class by
expanding the senate with the elites of Italy. Sallust partially distorts Caesar, in
that he cleanses him of any link with the Catilinarians and does not condemn him
as the chief populares. There is also the famous comparison of Caesar and Cato, in
which both men are shown to be essential types for the state. Cicero comes off less
prominently than might be expected, not as a hero, but as the official doing his
duty. Catiline on the other hand emerges as a mighty evil. Sallust locates the
moral degeneration of Catiline in many other of the Roman ruling class, but does
not push too far, lest he seem to support the rebellion.
The Bellum Iugurthae: Sallust and the Oppostion to the Nobility
Sallust explains that the war with Jugurtha was the first occasion when men dared
to oppose the insolence of the nobility. The purpose of the monograph is to make
clear the responsibilities of those governing the state. The war against Jugurtha is
important against the backdrop of the degenerating politcal life. The opposition to
the nobility wants an expansionist policy. As in the Catiline, there is an excursus
midway through on the perils of faction. But now the principle target is the
nobility, and Sallust, while condemning the excesses of the Gracchi, does not
condemn them altogether.
The main lines of populares policy are put into speeches by the tribune Memmius
and of Marius when he encourages the plebs to enroll in the army en masse.
Marius in particular emphasizes the need for a new aristocracy based on virtue and
appeals to the original values that made Rome great. In spite of this (which Sallust
approves) Marius is an ambiguous character. Sallust does not approve of his
expansion of the army, which led to the professional armies of a few decades later.
Jugurtha on the other hand is much like Catiline – admirable traits corrupted,
leaving a petty treacherous tyrant.
The Histories and the Crisis of the Republic
The Histories begin in 78, and the last fragment goes to 67. The work was
apparently left unfinished at Sallust’s death, we do not know how far he planned to
go. It was a much more ambituous piece than the monographs and returned to
annalistic form. Four large speeches and several letters survive, along with several
fragments of a geographic or ethnographic character. The Histories paints a very
dark picture as immorality spreads inexorably, with a few exceptions. It is a very
pessimistic work.
Style
It was Sallust who determined, to a large extent, the future stylistic evolution of
Latin historiography. He was nourished on Cato and Thucydides, and developed a
style of inconcinnitas, rejecting long balanced periods in favor of variety and
irregularity. He made frequent use of antithesis, asymetry, and variation. This
restless dynamism and the moves to keep it in check produce a majestic gravitas.
There is a strong archaizing trend to this, with obsolete words and strings of
paratactic phrases. Balance and subordination are avoided. The expression is very
economic. In short, an archaic style, but innovative, with broken movement and
strange vocabulary running contrary to the trends in literary language at the time.
The Epistulae and the Invective
Sallust was immediately very popular, as is shown by the Invective against Cicero
preserved under his name, which is probably an Augustan school exercise. The
letters to Caesar are also probably forgeries.
Literary Success
Among Latin authors, only Virgil and Cicero were more widely read. He was highly
regarded as a prose stylist and considered both a model for historians and for
speech and letter writers. His linguistic oddities made him a favorite of
grammarians. Tacitus adopted his style, and he appealed to Ammianus much later.
43 BC – AD 17: Characteristics of a Period
Introduction
After the death of Cicero, all the dominant figures of new poetry have connections
with Augustus. Virgil starts writing in 42, and Ovid and Livy both die in 17. For
petry, the “Augustan Age” is not a misnomer, although the name is less useful for
other genres like history. Even the earliest works of Virgil and Horace show the
influence of the general crisis, not that of Octavian. Works composed before Actium
have the dominant theme of fear. Even in the Georgics, composed in 30, the theme
of Civil war is still there, and it falls on the Odes and the Aeneid too. Both Virgil
and Horace suffered losses in the wars, and both were eventually attached to
Augustus, in hopes that he could somehow bring peace. Maecenas, as their
immediate patron, did not exercise control over literature, but since Virgil and
Horace were small landowners anyway, the prime beneficiaries of peace. The
paradox of Augustus is that he was both destroyer and renewer, and this would be
reflected above all in the conflicted character of Aeneas.
This was the time period of literary masterpieces. Only oratory did not flourish,
understandably. The most evident feature of these masterpieces was the desire to
compete with classical Greece. The Augustan poets re-do much of the Greek
masterpieces, not in the sense of translating but in the sense of creating texts that
have the same cultural importance to Rome as Homer did to Greece. For the
Augustans all of Greek literature is alive and present all at once.
The Augustans would bring the artistic unity of works to full maturity, with poets
showing they had complete mastery of the literary form they adopted. The
Hellenistic poets had a clearly defined system of genres, ordered by internal
differences. By mixing these forms they achieved new possibilities. The neoterics,
while freely contaminiating forms, had worked in single modes of composition
rather than experimenting. Unlike the Alexandrians, they didn’t have a vast body
of literature from Homer onwards as references.
After the neoterics, the poets of Virgil and Gallus’s generation embarked on vaster
things. They worked in the opposite way from the Alexandrians, restricting the
fields of subjects and delimiting their languages as they constructed genres. While
Theocritus included all sorts of Idylls, the Evlogues were a consistent pastoral world
, in which bucolic poetry is a genre with its own meaning and form. Elegy functions
on a similar level, selecting only those features that allow it to talk of tortured love.
Only those elements that can be turned toward this function are allowed.
Within 40 years, these writers succeeded in producing a body of works comparable
to Greek literature. The poets knew what they were doing and were proud of it – no
longer just artists, but vates.
Thus several texts come into existence related to the Augustan ideology. The
subjects and experiences of poetry broadened greatly and was no longer an effort of
form and expression as with the neoterics. Virgil gives the myth of the Italian
countryside, while Horace speaks of Great civic subjects. How sincere they were is
a matter of debate, since Augustus held these same values, recalling the old yeoman
farmers of the Republic.
The outstanding feature of Roman society is the development of the private
dimension. This explains the explosion of elegy, which speaks of a withdrawal from
the public arena. However, the life of love is not officially favored by Augustus and
Maecenas. The poets reject any exaltation of the national polity, and excuse
themselves for it. Only the least politically engaged would actually collide with
Augustus – Ovid.
The later phase of Augustus’s reign was stormy, even in literature. After Virgil,
poetry splits and is either celebratory or apolitical. Efforts to restore Roman drama
fail. After the deaths of Horace and Maecenas there is no longer a direct connection
between literary circiles and Augustus. The final flowering is Ovid, who gives
literary dignity to a modernist culture. He glorifies the princeps, but sings of free
love! Unintentionally, he touched on the split between the traditional values
Augustus promoted and the actual values, and for it he was exiled to the black sea,
a foreshadowing of the difficult relationship between literature and absolute power.
Literature, the political background, and the poetic circles
Cornelius Gallus was undoubtedly a major poet from the death of Caesar to Actium,
and perhaps the most importatnt link between the neoterics and Augustan love
poetry. Varius Rufus was an important poet who published the Aeneid, but we
don’t know much about him. He was probably an Epicureanism, which is not
surprising given how Epicureanism pervades the Maecenean circle.
Maecenas was the center of the Augustan poets, and overlapped with most of them
in age. An Etruscan by birth, he never rose to public office in Rome, but was an
important advisor to Augustus. He was a kind of living symbol of the new times, in
that he had great power, but no public office. He too was a poet, but was more
concerned with fostering others. Even Augustus wrote poetry, an Ajax, but said it
died by the sponge instead of the sword. He did write a biography, but his true self
portrait is in the Res Gestae, finished soon before his death in 14.
The cultural richness of the period is not confined to Augustus and Maecenas.
Asinius Pollio testifies to the culture that flourished outside the new regime. A
supporter of Antony, he founded the first public library in Rome (at the temple of
Libertas) and encouraged public readings of literary works. He was praised by both
Virgil and Horace for his tragedies, but his main work was a history from 60 to 42
which does not survive, but which was written from the point of view of the losers.
Virgil
P. Vergilius Maro was bron in 70 near Mantua. Details of his early life are very
obscure. His first published work was the Bucolics/Eclogues, around 41, which
predate his involvement with Maecenas. In the following years he worked on the
didactic Georgics, which seems to have been finished around 29, and then the
Aeneid, which was left unfinished at his death in 19.
The Bucolics
Theocritus was the least successful Hellenistic author in Rome before the Bucolics.
His simple, delicate, artificial world had no appeal to the neoterics and did not lend
itself to innovation. The urban Romans preferred other forms. Ironically, the
pastoral world of Theocritus was intended for an urban, cosmopolitan society.
Virgil read in Theocritus the rural world in which he had grown up. Virgil
completely absorbed the whole pastoral ethos, and yet remained original – not one
Eclogue stands one-to-one with a Theocrtiean Idyll, The Bucolics, which are
netoeric for the learning, stylization, and devotion to poetry, also mark the
beginning of Augustan literature for their reworking of Greek texts while treating
them as classics. The originally of Virgil is shown by his devoting an entire book
the the genre, held together by a thoughtful structure. This was itself completely
new.
Theocritus had a wide variety of themes. Virgil therefore could abandon the
pastoral world occassionally. The eclogues are largely set in the countryside of
Italy, but there are references, esp. 10, to Arcadia, which Virgil turned into a sort of
ideal pastoral land. There is autobiography in 1 & 9, with the drama of exiled
shepherds. Octavian is in the first, and there is the famous fourth, but beyond that
all is unconvincing conjecture.
In eclogue 4, Virgil aims for a higher level, to sing of the birth of a boy who will
bring a golden age. The identity of the boy is the big questions, or even if Virgil had
one particular in mind, or if he was just writing in the general spirit of hope and
rebirth after Philippi. The eclogue dates to 40. One theory is that the child was
hoped for but never born, since even the ancients didn’t seem to know what was
going on.
6 & 9 allow Virgil to broaden the bucolic horizon. 6 is the most Alexandrian of them
– Silenus sings of myths and cosmologies, and at the center is a tribute to Cornelius
Gallus. Gallus is mentioned as a poet of love in 10 as well, where he seeks refuge in
Virgil’s pastoral world.
All in all, the Bucolics show poetry as a refuage. Passions are fierce, but poetry is a
means of overcoming them through harmony. In bucolic, as opposed to elegy, love is
consolation and reconciliation.
From the Bucolics to the Georgics
By 38 Virgil had Maecenas for a patron. Virgil spent the next 10 years working on
the Georgics, working over every detail. The Georgics also presuppose deep
knowledge of Greek and Roman poetry, and also technical and philosophical
treatises. The end of the first book pre-supposes an Italy still sore from Civil Wars
when Octavian was not secure, the other books show him as a bringer of peace. So
the poem not only includes the peace, but the wounds that led up to it.
The date of the poem’s publication was about 28, but according to Servius Virgil
suppressed one part of the poem and replaced it with the Aristaeus story. This
seems to have had something to do with the death of Gallus in 26. But this is very
problematic, given the balance of the Georgics, and the fact that they must have
already been in circulation.
The Georgics
Virgil starts out from Greek didactic poets like Aratus, Eratosthenes, and Nicander,
who wrote very limited didactic treatises in verse based on prose treatises. The
Alexandrians were more interested in describing, and the works are overbalanced
for form over science. The Georgics is very different from a technical treatise in
verse.
In Rome, Lucretius had revived the didactic genre by going back to Hesiod,
Parmenides, and Empedocles. All wrote for a large community and had well
defined goals of life and wisdom. Lucretius used poetry as honey for severe
philosophy. Descriptions, digressions, and similes are all meant to be functional for
the work and its ideology.
Virgil’s great achievement was in reconciling the two schools of didactic poetry.
Technical poems and prose treatises like that of Varro are ransacked, but the focus
on minor details, like the crust on an oil lamp, and other negligible things, are
exploited fully in the strain of Lucretius. The Georgics have a message of salvation
and wisom in the train of Lucretius. While Lucretius looked to natural causes,
Virgil looks to all that civilizes and humanizes nature.
In the first book Ocatavian is portrayed as the only man who can save Rome, in the
latter books he is a triumphant bringer of peace. He ensures conditions of security
and prosperity, in which farmers can again find continuity. The poem does not
however correspond with any agrarian program, and is rather an idealized
representation of the past, of the small landowner. Scant reference is made to the
great latifundia, and none at all to slave labor, that dominated Roman agriculture
by this time. The glorification of the traditional Italian peasant calls to mind the
conflict between east and west going on.
The themes of the four books are tilling the fields, aboriculture, livestock, and bee-
keeping. This are four of the fundamental jobs of the farmer, but not the only four.
The ordering marks human toil becoming less, and nature becoming more active.
The laboring plowman in book 1 and the laboring bees in book 4 go together. Each
book has a proem and includes digressions. Discourse flows naturally either by
association or antithesis. The books themselves are fairly symetrical and each
conclude with a digression of roughly equal length. The proems act as hinges, with
long ones in 1 & 3, short in 2 & 4. 1 & 3 are paired, and have darker digressions
(civil war and plague). The work is also full of contrasts and uncertainties. The
simple life of the Italian farmer has led to the greatness of Rome, but Rome is a
degenerate place, oppiste the georgic ideal.
The concluding digression of 4 is a narrative on nature. It mixes the stories of
Aristaeus, a great civilizer, and Orpheus. The two myths are reworked and
interlock. This is in the best Alexandrian and Neoteric tradition (Catullus 64).
Both Aristaeus and Orpheus meet many difficulties and both struggle against
death. But both also work within the didactic genre. Orpheus fuses the great
possibilities of man together, while Aristaeus shows that the struggle against
nature is maintained by obediance to divine guidance, and leads to the rebirth of his
bees.
From the Georgics to the Aeneid
The Georgics allowed Virgil to think big and to immerse himself more in the
narrative. A new epic was needed in Augustan culture, and Virgil undertook to
write it. Something in the tradition of Ennius was expected, a Caesarid. But Virgil
produced something completely different.
The Aeneid
The Aeneid is conceived as a response to the Homeric poems. The first six books are
the Odyssean half, the last six the Iliadic half. Virgil reverses the sequence of
Homer, and transforms many things. War is waged not to destroy a city but to
create a new one, and there is no homecoming, only a venture into the unknown.
This complex transformation of Homer was something new. But the Aeneid doesn’t
just contaminuate the Homeric poems, it also continues them. And it repeats them
as well. Only now, instead of death and destruction, the poem will lead to a new
unity.
The poem is also meant to praise Augustus. The events of the Aeneid are treated as
historical but it is not a Roman world, but a heroic one. This displacement allows
Virgil to regard the Augustan world from a distance. There are prophetic passages
relating to Augustus with clear examples in Homer, like the descent to the
underworld and the shield of Aeneas.
Ancient Italy had a series of foundation legends tied to the Trojan War. Aeneas had
a hero cult in Lavinium, but was originally not associated with Rome. However, the
Romans connected their founder Romulus to him, and helped to legitimize the
domination of the world with a deep historical background. Plus, the Julian clan
claimed Aeneas for an ancestor.
Virgil extensively reworked the antiquarian studies about Aeneas’s arrival in Italy.
He sets in forth all the modern peoples of Italy, and all get to contribute to the
Roman cuase. Even the Greeks have a role to play in Evanduer and Pallas. The
poem has immense politcal and historical significance, but it is not itself historical.
It doesn’t even get to the end of Aeneas’s life.
The greatest quality of Virgil’s style is his ability to get the most amount of freedom
from the most amount of order. He brought the hexameter to a peak of regularity
and flexibility. The neoterics had established tight rules about this, in reaction to
the anarchy of archaic poetry. The Alexandrians had influence here too. The
resultant lines were horribly rigid. Virgil opens up the meter, with several places
for the principle caesura, giving regularity but more flexibility. Combined with
secondary caesuras, there are a large variety of sequences possible. Alliteration
becomes controlled and is used mainly for patheitc moments or to link key words.
The language is rich in poetic and archaic words, but also in ‘ordinary’ words.
Grecisms and weird literary formations are avoided. Virgil’s novelty is in his new
junctures among words – recentem locum caede for instance. This is more a
development of everyday language.
The Aeneid is much more formulaic, in the tradition of Homer than the other works.
But Virgil charges the forms – epithets tend to be used to suggest the psychology of
the person or the action. Greater initiative is given to the reader to make
judgements.
The Aeneid is a mission ordered by fate. The poet is the spokesman for the project
and he focuses on Aeneas. Virgil fully assumes the role of a national epic. But
below the fate motif, there is extensive conflict and deep feelings, and not just in
positive characters like Aeneas. For instance, Dido. Traditionally, the
Carthaginians were treacherous, cruel, and overly fond of luxury. Virgil, going back
to the origins of the Punic Wars, makes them arise from excessive and tragic love
between similar parties. Then there is the war with Turnus, which is portrayed as
unnecessary and even a civil war. It is tragic and willed by demonic powers. The
salying of Turnus appears necessary, but when he appears he is begging for mercy.
Yet Aeneas kills him anyway, in sharp contrast to the Achilles/Priam scene at the
close of the Iliad. Virgil expected a lot from his readers – they had to appreciate the
necessity of the victory and remember the motives of the defeated, look at the world
from a high perspective, and share the sufferings of individuals. And the poem also
shows a marked influence from Greek Tragedy, in the openness to the problematic
aspects of life, which makes it very different from the traditional national epic. No
wonder that it immediately became a classic and has remained so for more than
2000 years.
Horace
Born 65 to a freedman. Received excellent education and studied philosophy in
Greece. Was a military tribune under Brutus, but ran away at Philippi. Received
pardon and came to Rome to work as a scribe. Admitted to Maecenas’s circle
around 37, and given a farm in Sabine country in 33. His works include 17 epodes
(41-30), two books of Satires (1: 35, 2: 30, along with Epodes), 4 books of Odes(1-3:
23, 4: 13), and the Carmen Saeculare The odes are organized artistically, in the
Alexandrian style. 1 book of Epistles in 20, with 20 poems, and a second book,
perhaps posthumous (19-13) with two long epistles on literary subjects and the Ars
Poetica.
The Epodes as Poetry of Excess
Mostly iambics alternating with another meter. These are early and their harsh
polemics may be linked to Horace’s own hardship after Philippi. Some of this may
be due to the genre he was working in, the forms of Archilochus. Horace was very
proud of bringing this poet’s influence to bear, but he was careful to say that he
borrowed meters and inspiration, but not the actual contents. He means that he
was drawing on the problems of Rome in the 30s, not seventh century Greece.
The tenth epode is a good example. In it, Horace wishes for Maevius to be
shipwrecked. There is a model from Archilochus (or perhaps Hipponax), the
Strasburg epode. A fragment of this shows that Horace has somewhat toned down
the personal invective for more playful curses and threats. But the Archilochean
spirit must have seemed quite suitable for Horace to express the anxieties of his
times, as epode 4 seems to show. The Iambs of Callimachus are also an influence in
their variety. The erotic epodes develop hellenistic themes, and behind all the
excess there is some moderation.
The Satires
Horace points to Lucilius as the founder of Satire. Lucilius choose hexameter as the
meter and used the form for personal aggression. For this, Horace linked Lucilius
to the Old Comedy poets. There were a great variety of themes in satire, and an
autobiographic element too. Horace was well aware of this.
Horace inherited aggressiveness and autobiography, he emphasized the
carelessness of Lucilius in style. While Lucilius had diatribe and aggresiveness, but
did not clearly link the two, Horace always has a stable connection. The gratuitness
aggressiveness of Lucilius is replaced by an analysis of of vices by observation and
comic characters. It does not seek to proselytize, but only to show the way for a
choosen few. Unlike Lucilius, Horace can’t attacked the high-born, instead he goes
after the irregulat types like courtesans, parasites, profiteers, etc.
Horace’s morality is rooted in Italian good sense, but is constructed with materials
developed by the Hellenistic philosophies. His basic inquiries were in autarkeia
(self-sufficiency) and metriotes (moderation). Neither belonged to a specific school,
but epicureanism has the greatest influence. The satires are stamped with good-
natured reasonableness and emphasize friendship. Moral inquiry is a theme in
many satires, sometimes via a discussion or diatribe, sometimes through examples.
The fundamental comparison is between the poet and his friends and a host of
negative models.
This stance is shown to be precarious in the second book. Autobiographical
elements are almost non-existent and six of the eight satires are in a dialogue form.
The poet is no longer the main speaker. It is no longer possible to extract a truth
from the poet, since all the interlocutors have their own truths and realities. The
poet no longer finds satire to be a way of identifying good behavior.
Satire, according to Horace, is closer to prose than any other poetry. Horace aims
for an elegant educated conversation, with disciplined simple language. This is
quite different from Lucilius, who included lofty literary parody and vulgar speech.
Horace shows he has knows his Callimachus, with concentration and suppleness.
The Odes
Horatian Lyric has an organic relationship with the Greek tradition. This is true of
most Latin poetry. Horace, having proclaimed his debt to Archilochus in the
Epodes, declares his debt to Alcaeus in the Odes. Horace as a lyric poet has always
been linked to the question of the originality of Latin literature compared with
Greek. Horace was concious of his literary antecendents, but jealous of his own
originality.
Horace was the first to emply the measures of Alcaeus, and boasts of it. However,
themes and settings are usually Roman and the language is Horatian. The model of
Alcaeus also allowed Horace to join poems dealing with communal issues with the
private sphere. Many of Horace’s poems begin with an opening borrowed from a
Greek model, a ‘motto’ but the poem develops in a completely different way from the
Greek.
There are important differences between Horace and Alcaeus. Alcaeus is closely
tied to the political conflicts on Lesbos. Horace has an intellectual interest in the
Republic, and uses poetry as a relief from toil or battle only as an image. Horace’s
poems, written for reading, frequently describe imaginary or highly stylized
situations and aim for an elevated level of refinement and sophistication.
Horace seems to have been less influenced by Sappho, who was more important for
elegy. Anacreon was a more significant element. Bacchylides gave the impetus for
ode 1.15, which also shows a debt to the neoteric epyllion. But Pindar is the most
important choral poet to impact Horace. From Pindar Horace learns of the high
function of poetry and the poet.
This echoing of early Greek was doubtlessly Horace’s way of distancing himself from
the Alexandrian/neoteric school. But the Alexandrians still provided a wealth of
themes, and in the form of the Hellenic metropolis and its cares.
Horace is the poet of balance and moderation. There is a strong undercurrent of
philosophical contemplation in the Odes, Epicurean in particular. So clearly put are
some of the basic notions that the Odes became an important source for Epicureans.
The cardinal point is an awareness in the brevity of life. Carpe diem and all that.
Pleasure too is fleeting, and so one must erect a wall of happiness already
experienced that can be looked back on.
This sometimes translates into autarkeia, the condition of the vates, freed from
human folly and blessed by the gods. This is connected to his destiny as a poet –
the Muses save Horace for that. But the middle way is not always stable and
Horace is well aware of the passions that can overturn it. Wisdom can never
completely counterbalance the knowledge of time, old age, and death. Many odes
deal with death.
On the other end are the civic odes. These are oncerned with celebrating people and
events of the Augustan period and are little concerned with private affairs. Onto
the trunk of Hellenistic and early lyric Horace has been able to tack national
themes. This met the needs of a society that looked, with hope and enthusiasm, on
the princeps as the guarantor of peace. But Horace is not a mere propagandist in
verse. He is able to take advantage of the flexibility of the principate to reflect on it,
and to glorify the sublime quality of magnanimity, such as loyalty to the Republic,
and virtus, such as that displayed by Cleopatra. Even in praising Augustus, Horace
gives sincere, anxious gratitude toward the man who brought peace.
Horace shares with Augustus a moral structure, that the decline in values caused
the Republic to fall. This sometimes overlaps with Horace’s criticism of luxury and
praise for virtus. Personal and private can overlap – a public festivity is an occasion
for private joy. This became important in Propertius and Ovid.
This polarity should not obscure the incredible variety of the odes. We have
convivial poems and erotics ones as well. Horace’s love poetry is fostered by an
ironic detachment from passion. Love is analyzed as a ritual in a conventional
setting. Another common form is the hymn, although it has no formal occasion
unlike the majority of Greek hymns. There is a lot of genre-crossing too.
Some recurrent themes include the countryside as a locus amoenus, but also as a
place untamed by man. The most distinctive Horatian place is the small farm. It is
a symbol of the poet’s existence. Friendship is another important theme, as is the
vocation of poetry (the whole vates stuff).
Horace owes a lot to Callimachus in terms of style. He uses a very simple diction,
with moderate use of sound figures and few metaphors or similes. Diction is free
from redundancy and polished. There is a wonderful skill with exploiting meters.
Words are placed with utmost care in a line, binding some close together and
separating others. This can emphasize some words that might otherwise be
insignificant. Juxtaposition is used often. Horace is stingy with novel expression
and prefers neat analogies and contextual correspondance – parallelism, antithesis.
The ultimate effect is a very sobre and classical poem
The Epistles Culture Project and Philosophical Withdrawal
After the Odes Horace returned to hexameter with the Epistles, which are very
similar to the satires. The key difference is that the Epistles address people who
are absent, while the satires address people who are pressent. Of course, the
Epistles are structured like letters, and are more personal than satires. This form
was almost certainly novel. While the satire belonged to an urban setting, the
epistles presuppose a rural setting (the angulus). Exhortation is the true aim of
every poem, and of the first book. The angulus is a road that symbolizes an entire
mental iter, similar to the temple of wisdom that Lucretius proposed.
The collection develops a didactic discourse, much like Lucretius. The relation
between author and reader her is imposed by constant injunctions and exhortations,
that teaches pupils the joy of a withdrawn life. But there is a melancholy perplexity
that the reader will not always prove receptive.
There are other differences with satire. The comic aggression is now gone. Moral
inquiry is animated by the need for wisdom. The passage of time means that
wisdom cannot be postponed. But Horace no longer seems willing to construct a
satisfying model of life. He wavers between a moral vigor and hedonism. His
morality is uncertain. He is dissatisfied with himself. This weakness in Horace’s
own ethics/philosophy is accompanied by an increasing didactic discourse. The
letter corresponds in some way to the eminent and respected individual giving
advice to the younger man.
This didactic nature is heightened in the second book and in the ars poetica.
Literary criticism and poetics were among the hot topics in Horace’s day. Augustus
wanted a national literature, which the Aeneid partially fulfilled. The question of
drama remained open. In the Epistle to Augustus Horace attacks favoring archaic
poets of Roman theater, and takes the side of the refined, cultivated Callimachean
art. Furthermore, a audience less refined than the writer won’t get a quality
dramatic production and prefers things like Mimes.
The Ars Poetica orients its analysis of art and poetry by questions of dramatic
literature – tragedy, comedy, and satyr play. The Ars offers Horace’s contribution
to theater theory. It reiterates his belief that art should be refined, cultivated, and
attentive. He also gives a valuable sketch of Greek and Roman literature and
culture.
Literary Success
Horace quickly became a sort of poet-laureate. He was widely read in schools, and
his satires had a major impact on Persius and Juvenal, although as a lyric poet the
impact was less.
Elegy: Tibullus and Propertius
The Greeks invented elegy, but the Romans elevated it to a high genre. For the
Romans elegy chiefly meant love poetry. In Greek elegy was used for a wide variety
of genres from war to funerary rites. The work of Antimachus of colophon is an
important step in the development. The death of his beloved became an excuse to
narrate various myths. He established the connection between autobiography and
elegy. Several Hellenistic poets did collections under a female name too.
The origins of Latin elegy are hotly disputed. The strong autobiographic nature of
Latin has no predecessor in Greek, not even Callimachus’s Aetia. Jacoby regarded
elegy as an outgrowth of the Greek epigram, but this doesn’t explain the functions
of myth. The subjective nature of Latin elegy contrasts with the objective, non-
autobiographical nature of Greek, but this should not be taken to far, and many of
the Greek elegies like that of Antimachus must have had at least a very slight
autobiographical element. Latin elegy developed this strongly.
Elegy tends to frame individual experiences in typical forms and situations. There
is an elegiac world with conventional roles and behaviors. Above all it is love
poetry. For the elegist, love is the sole and absolute experience, filling existence
and giving it meaning. The poet’s life is figured as servtium to the domina of love,
who is capricious and unfaithful. His relationship to her is made up of a little joy
and a lot of suffering. She gives herself to him only with difficulty, hences the
famous scene of the lover wailing before her closed door. Only occassionally can he
actually rebel against love. All these bitter experiences cause him to project himself
into myth, into a golden age, while he leads a life of degradation and repudiates his
role of citizen.
Elegy avowedly rebels against established values, but also reclaims them by
transferring them into its own world. As with Catullus, these relations tend to be
seen as bound by fides and pudicitia, and suspicious of luxury and urban
sophistication. The elegist leads a sort of bohemian life. The poetry also serves as a
form of courtship and tries to seduce the beloved with the mirage of fame and glory.
Elegy has an enormous debt to Catullus and the neoterics. It share with them a
taste for Callimachean poetics, refinement and elegance. And it inherits from
Catullus a sense of moral rebellion and a taste for otium. Elegy pays homage to
Catullus several times.
Cornelius Gallus
Born in Narbonese Gaul about 69. A follower of Augustus, he was made prefect of
Egypt in 29, but spoke against the emperor and committed suicide in 26. Was a
friend of Virgil (who dedicated the thenth eclogue to him), and also the Greek
Parthenius (who influenced the neoterics) He wrote four books of Elegies called
Amores, which had a strong erotic element but must have had some myth too. They
also showed influence of Euphorion of Chalcis. A papyrus preserves ten verses
which show many themes of elegy in embryonic form – beloved as a source of
inspiration, the servitium amoris, the poet’s guilty conscience for his life outside of
traditional values. Gallus was thus the mediator between the neoterics and the full
Augustan elegy.
Tibullus
We don’t know much about him, he died after Virgil in 19. His patron was Messalla
Corvinus. Three books of poetry have come down under his name, only the first two
and a few poems from the end of the third are considered authentic. The elegies of
the first book describe Delia, the inconstand and capricious woman who is fond of
luxury, the relationship is tormented. There are several elegies on a young man,
Marathus, written in a more playful and less tormented tone. Three of the six
elegies in the second book are about Nemesis, a greedy and unscrupulous courtesan.
Tibullus is regularly set in the city, which serves as the backdrop for everything
amorous. The world of myth is absent, and instead its idealizing function is
performed by the countryside. The Tibullan countryside is an idyllic world, full of
nature and ancestral rustic religion. There is a strong need for a peaceful refuge
where he can cultivate his feelings. He has an ideal world to counter that of civil
war, a bucolic one.
Tibullus wrote with extreme care and extraordinary regularity. Expression is
smooth and limpid, and restrained. Words are distributed evenly and the sound of
the second half of a verse echoes the first. Very terse and elegant. He was very
popular among his contemporaries, and Quintilian thought highly of him. Many
preferred his elegant balance to the rough frenetic Propertius. But Ovid
overshadowed him later.
Corpus Tibullianum
This is the third book of Tibullus, actually it was divided into two books itself. Six
poems are the work of one Lygdamus, which is clearly a pseudonym. The real name
is disputed. His poems center on his painful separation from his beloved and are
obsessed with death. Next comes a long Panygyric of Messalla, which praises the
patron. The thirteen poems of 4 include some of Tibullus himself concerning the
love for Sulpicia, while the rest are by Sulpicia herself.
Propertius
Born around 48. His family suffered in the civil war, but by 29 he was part of a
fashionable literary circle and having an affair with an unscrupulous woman he
called Cynthia. Came into contact with Maecenas as a result of his first book of
elegies. Probably died shortly after 16. We have four books of elegies, published
separately beginning in 28. The elegies are probably in the order written, not some
other order as in Horace. Book 1 is concerned almost entirely with Cynthia, while
starting in Book 2 we see the influence of Maecenas, a rejection of epic poetry, and
some homage to the princeps. Book 3 is still dominated by Cynthia, but there are
signs of a break. Book 4 has only two poems for Cynthia, in another she appears as
an aggressive ghost.
The Alexandrian poets gave collections of poems the name of the woman celebrated
within. And so the first book was published as Cynthia. Propertius is presented as
a prisoner of his passion and being doomed on her account. Cynthia was a highly
refined courtesan and for Propertius to take up with her compromised his social
status. But he glories in this degradation and takes pleasure in the suffering. He
makes love the absolute center of his life and Cynthia becomes the only reason for
his existence. This rejection of the mos maiorum, begun in Catullus, is carried to an
extreme here.
An existence devoted to otium and servitium becomes one with the poet’s existence,
since he makes his life the material of poetry and uses poetry to court the woman.
Poetry is the only tool the poor elegist has in comparison to wealthier suitors. The
slender Callimachean poetry is preferred as more suitable for courtship. For
himself and Cynthia, Propertius dreams of the great loves of myth, and imagines
traditional models for her, with a traditional foedus and castitast and pudor and
fides. Of course, reality is different and the poet is attracted to a fashionably
elegant woman. From this tension is born the escape into pure myth, with pure
love.
The first book was immediately successful and caused Maecenas to court
Propertius. The second book opens with an elegant recusatio to doing epic poetry.
But his attitude in 2 is more complex than in one, as his relationship grows more
painful, and his existence seems more incomplete. By book 3 he is embracing
themes less closely associated with Cynthia. Love elegy is less frequent and the
poems are wittier and more detached. The book ends with a final break with
Cynthia.
In the fourth book, Propertius uncouples elegy from eros and makes it independent.
He wants to be the Roman Callimachus, a master of style, who will carefully
investigate causes in the manner of the Aetia, the very origins of the names, myths
and cults of Rome. This foreshadows the Fasti of Ovid. But in contrast to other
poetry, Propertius’s is still light and elegant, in the style of Callimachus. And there
are still elegies with noteworthy pathos and romantic themes. There is even a move
towards chastity, domestic virtues, and family life.
In constrat to the crystalline elegance of Tibullus, Propertius is concentrated, dense,
metaphor-laden. He is constantly experimenting. The Callimachean influence is
clear, with sophisticated myths and complex syntax. This has left a very poor
manuscript tradition. Its elegance is harsh, and its psychology complex. He
remained quite popular in antiquity.
Ovid
Born in 43. Studied in Rome and Greece. Joined the literary circle of Messalla
Corvinus, but was exiled to the Black Sea in AD 8. Died late 17 or early 18. His
earliest work seems to have been the Amores, around 15, in five books – we have a
revised edition in 3 books from AD 1 or so. The first 15 Heroides also date to
around 15, while the second set (16-21) date to 4-8 AD. The Medea was written
between 12-8 BC. The Ars Amatoria and the Remedia date to about 1 AD. The
Metamophoses, in 15 books, were written from 2-8 AD, as were the six books (out of
12 projected) of Fasti. From the exile period we have the five books of Tristia from
9, and four books of Epistulae ex Ponto. The first three date to 13, the last was
probably posthumous.
A Modern Poetry
In writing elegy, Ovid did not adhere to a life centered on love. For Ovid, the
practice of poetry itself was the center of his life, and it made extensive
experimentation possible. Because of this literary self-consciousness, Ovid was able
to analyze reality while excluding nothing. Ovid opposed absolute choices, and can
follow what seems more in accord with his taste or what is more accord with the
tendencies of his age. This explains the most significant feature of his poetry, his
acceptance of the new forms of life in Rome, but also an open attitude to the values
of tradition. By the time he comes onto the scene the Civil Wars were fading into
the past and people in general were full of growing aspirations of ease and
refinement, and less severe morality. Ovid became the interpreter of these
aspirations. This is equally true with regard to content and form. Ovid is strongly
innovative compared to the classical line represented by Horace. He has a terse,
elegant style, with a rich, bold expression and a finely musical verse. Literature
was for him an ornament of life.
The Amores
While these are traditional love elegies in many ways, and owe much to Propertius,
the features of Ovidian elegy are already visible. The poetry lacks a central female
figure around whom the poet’s life revolves. The only woman evoked, Corinna, is
tenuous and may never have existed. Ovid even declares that he cannot be satisfied
with one love. The heavy pathos and drama of Catullus and Propertius is gone too,
for Ovid it is lusus. Love is examined with irony and detachment. Servitium
Amoris is almost totally absent. And the poet shows a high literary consciousness.
Ovidian elegy is not subordinate to life, but central to it.
The Didactic Love Poetry
There are several didactic Amores, which help pave the way for the Ars and
Remedia. Amores 1.8 had a lena (procuress) giving advice, it was a short step from
there to the poet. In the Ars, the poet is no longer himself a protaganist. Once love
lost its devastating passion, the love relation is an intellectual game with its own
rules. The roles, situations, and behaviors are already codified in literature, all that
remained was for Ovid to draw up a textbook.
The Ars is in three books, in elegies. The first two tell men how to conquer a
women, the third, added later, provides women with instruction on conquering men.
It describes the fashionable meeting places and haunts, pastimes, urban life, and
everything the lover is to do in the campaign of seduction. Ovid wittily draws on
the Georgics and Lucretius, and there are occassional historic or mythic narratives
inserted for illustrative purposes. The pefect lover for Ovid is devoid of scruples and
impatient with traditional morality. This was a delicate sphere as Augustus made
it a center of reform. But Ovid doesn’t advocate love as a complete life choice like
earlier elegy. Rather he just wants a certain degree of tolerance for it. By
decentralizing love, Ovid attempts to reconcile elegy with the society it sprang from.
Ovid borrows from the values of modernity, from the lifestyle of Augustan Rome.
Finally, there is the Remedia. Earlier elegists had asserted there was no cure from
love, but now Ovid, in the best Stoic and Epicurean traditions, attacks that and
says it is obligatory to free oneself from love if it brings suffering. And with that,
the brief period of Latin elegy ends.
The Heroides
Love and myth are the great sources of Ovid’s early poetry. Before the
Metamorphoses, the most mythological work is the Heroides, a collection of verse
letters. 1-15 are letters written by famous women of myth (mostly Greek, though
Dido and the historic Sappho are present) to their distant lovers or husbands. 16-21
consists of three letters from the lovers and the replies from their respective women.
The two groups were composed separately, and 15 (to Sappho) actually has its own
tradition. Substantial doubts have been raised about the authenticity of many
letters, including 15, but these are probably too much.
Ovid proclaims this to be a new genre, and he seems to be right. A single poem of
Propertius has a love letter. The literary tradition is drawn mainly from Greek
tragedy and epic. but Callimachus, Catullus, and Virgil are present too. The
characters and situations may belong to myth, but they are characterized with
common elements of elegy. For example, in the letter of Phaedra to Hippolytus,
Phaedra comes across as an unscrupulous woman of amorous society rather than a
tragic heroine.
Elegy is thus a filter for the narrative material of myth. It acts as a perspective
that reduces every possible theme to its own language. Ovid’s heroines, in imposing
an elegiac shape on epic narrative, distory and reinterpret. In letter 7 Dido selects
from Virgil the contents useful for persuading Aeneas not to go, while Deianira
contradicts everything in Sophocles in her letter to Heracles. Ovid manages to
introduce a new literary universe, neither ancient nor modern, but based on their
coexistence.
The letters are presented as monologues, and are mostly based on the abandoned
woman theme (Catullus 64). The structure of the letter form did not allow for much
variety and the heroines monologue is only occassionally broken by a flashback.
Each letter is set at a very specific point. The heroine is aware of the past, but not
the future, and Ovid exploits this irony. The reader is of course required to have
full knowledge of the myth to understant the letter fully. The double epistle opens
more possibilities. There can be a clash of different points of view and a wider
narrative field. The letter form becomes a critical part of the narration.
The Heroides are poems of lament. Usually this is for abandonment, but there are
other causes as well. In the Heroides, elegy returns to its origins as poetry of grief
and lament. More space is given over to Pathos and there is less playfulness. Most
notable is a Euripidean exploration of female psychology.
The Metamorphoses
The outer form was epic, but the model was Hesiod, a collective poem of
independent stories linked by a single theme. The Aetia of Callimachus is the
major Hellenistic model, as well as a lost work by Nicander. But Ovid makes it
clear that he is writing an epic poem, something Callimachus disposed of. Ovid
wants a universal work that goes beyond the limits of various types of poetry. It
would start with creation. Even the new regime could get a brief moment in the
poem.
Between these two ends about 250 different myths are told. They are arranged
chronologically near the beginning and end, but in the middle it is the timeless
period of myth. The stories can be linked any number of ways – geography,
thematic parallels, or the type of metamorphosis.
The dimensions of the stories vary widely, from simple allusion to several hundred
lines in the style of an epyllion. Ovid is careful to pace everything and to juxtapose
different types of stories. He does not strive for homogeneity so much as variety.
The chronological order is contiually disturbed by the insertion of prior narratives,
via the embedded tale, an Alexandrian technique. Different characters themselves
become narrators, allowing the poet to adapt characteristics to them and giving the
whole work the quality of an endless fugue.
Metamorphosis was a favorite theme of Hellenistic poets, which satisfied a taste for
aetiology, the origin of causes. Metamorphosis gives unity to Ovid’s work, and he
attempts to give it philosophical dignity as well by inserting a speech of Pythagoras
near the end, but this does not bear the stamp of conviction. The central subject is
love, no longer in contemporary Rome but now in the world of myth. But Ovid does
not have the heroic aspect of Virgil, rather, like the Hellenistic poets, he uses myth
is a decorative backdrop. The poem is above all a world of poetic fictions, and a
concise summary of a vast literary inheritance from Homer to the Latin tragedians
and the vast literature of the Hellenistic period. It is proud of its intertextual
nature and is often self-content or self-ironic with its material.
The fundamental characteristic of the world of the Metamorphosis is its ambiguous
and deceptive nature. The boundary between reality and appearance is a foggy one.
Disguises, shadows, reflections, echoes and other things give the poem an insidious
nature, where humans are the playthings of gods. The characters act as thought
they had grasped reality, and the poet, who has the true point of view, follows them
down their path to change and often comments on the course of the events,
involving the reader still more. The narrative is especially noteworthy for its strong
visual qualities. Ovid dwells on the boundaries between old and new. With its
visual nature and its fondness for the paradoxes of reality and a love of spectacle, it
anticipates the poetry of the Empire.
The Fasti
Like Propertius, Ovid devotes himself to writing “Roman Elegies” The Fasti,
illustrating the myths of the Roman Calendar, only go as far as June. The work
owes much to the Aitia of Callimachus. Ovid wanted to be the Roman Callimachus,
a poet who created a whole new genre. He undertook a careful study of antiquarian
sources to illustrate the beliefs, rites, usages, and place names – all part of the
rediscovery of ancient origins that took place under Augustus. Into this background
he inserts Greek myth, or anecdotal references to contemporary events. This allows
him to overcome the limits imposed by a calendar form and makes room for all his
playfulness.
This interpretation tends to free the Fasti from Augustan ideology. Frazer looked to
Ovid as a transmitter of traditional stories and ignored the poet’s stance towards
that tradition. But caution is in order. Ovid plays with his duty as an antiquarian,
just as Callimachus had. When he puts in doubt the relationship between past and
present, the game of Augustan ideology becomes serious. The gap in the poem is
not that Ovid doesn’t take Augustus seriously, but that he doesn’t take Romulus
seriously.
The Works of Exile
Ovid’s first work composed from exile and sent to Rome with hesitation was five
books of Tristia. The common theme is lament over the exiled poet’s condition. He
appeals to his wife and friends to get him moved someplace else and laments the
primitive conditions he is in. The first book recounts his long journey, while the
second is a gigantic plea towards Augustus.
The other colletion of exile poems is in epistolary form, called the Epistulae ex
Ponto. These use regular formulae from letters and all their addressees are named.
Themes common to letters are mentioned frequently, such as the distance between
friends, etc. There is an interesting parallel with the Heroides, letters of abandoned
women, and the Epistulae, letters of the abandoned poet. But the Epistulae mark a
return to elegy as the form of lament. He defends himself as a poet and calls on
mythological parallels to show how strange his own exile was. Ovid puts all his
remaining hope into his poetry.
One other poem came from exile, the Ibis, which consists of a long series of
invectives against a detractor of Ovid’s. The scheme is borrowed from an Ibis of
Callimachus, directed against Apollonius (or so they say).
Livy
Born in 59 at Padua, and died 17. Spent much of his life composing the 142 book Ab
Urbe Condita, of which 1-10 and 21-45 survive, along with some fragments and
summaries
The Plan of Livy’s Work and Historiograhic Method
Livy returned to an annalistic structure, rejecting the monography of Sallust. He
began with Aeneas’s flight from Rome, and reached the death of Drusus in 9 BC in
Book 142. He may have planned to reach book 150 with the death of Augustus.
Books 1-10 go down to 289, while 21-45 cover 218-167. The whole thing was divided
into decades from at least the fifth century, and the division may go back to Livy
himself. Like most Latin historians, the narrative scale increased as he approached
his own time More than half of his history dealt with the age of the Gracchi on.
Livy relied on many sources. For the first decade he used almost exclusively
annalists, particularly the more recent ones such as Antias, Macer, and Claudius
Quadrigarius. For Roman expansion into the east Polybius came into play and gave
Livy a unified vision of the Mediterranean world. Neither Fabius Pictor nor Cato
seems to have had much impact. Livy relied almost solely on literary sources, and
does not seem to have made any effort to use documentation or inscriptions that
might have been available. Some have criticized him as a mere exornator rerum,
who dramatized what he found in the literature. Some scholars would leave Livy
out of the development of Latin historiography from Sallust to Tacitus, that is,
outside of senatorial historiography. This contains some elements of truth, but
there isn’t a direct opposition between senatorial history (written to educate
politicians) and literary history with lots of moralizing. Livy is less aggressive than
Tacitus, and lacks the skepticism and rationalism of Sallust and Tacitus, but he is
still a fundamentally honest historian.
The New Regime and the Tendencies of Livy’s Historiography
The Augustan regime did not seek to dominate history as it did poetry. Livy was
not part of the opposition, but he was not an uncritical supporter either. Tacitus
said that Livy was a Pompeian, but we can’t evaluate this without the books that
dealt with the civil wars. He praised Brutus and Cassius too. This didn’t bother
Augustus, who was more eager to show himself as restorer of the Republic than the
heir of Caesar. Given Livy’s hatred of demagoguery and praise of values, it seems
that he and the new regime found lots to agree on.
But this did not translate into total celebration. Lacking the narrative of the Civil
Wars, we can’t understand this for sure. But in the preface Livy does not seem to
regard the Augustan settlement as wholly satisfactory. He probably failed to see
Augustus as the destroyer of all the seeds that caused civil war. Livy refers to
Rome’s past as a refuge from the distress he feels when narrating more recent
events, an implicit criticism of Sallust, who placed contemporary crisis at the center
of history. Livy tries to view the crisis in the general context of Roman history.
Justification of the Roman Empire emerges very forcefully from Livy. It is due to
the strong bond of fortuna and virtus in the Roman people. No other people could
stand up to the moral force of the Romans. This may be due to Livy’s tendency to
idolize the past – more contemporary periods may have been far darker. For Livy,
images of the past are models of social and individual behavior, both positive and
negative.
Narrative Style
Livy is sharply opposed to the style of Sallust, and comes much closer to the
Ciceronian ideal for history Where Sallust is brief and condensed, Livy is ample,
flowing, and luminous, without artifice or harshness. Livy gave much more space to
the dramatic presentation of a story than Sallust, but didn’t allow it to overwhelm
the historical framework – the rape of Lucretia is a good example.
Livy’s history is not a political study, but a narrative of human personalities and
representative individuals. There is a moral passion, inherited from the Hellenistic
schools. Livy wants to show that moral and intellectual qualities have a decisive
influence on events. He immerses himself in the affairs he describes and brings to
life his characters and scenes. Indirect discourse is skillfully used to suggest the
hidden minds of crowds and people. Speeches delineate the thoughts of individuals
and show impedutous ardor that the listeners feel.
But Livy’s pathetic qualities in no way approach those of Sallust. Livy prefers and
airy, sentimental manner, with more ethos than pathos, which lends an epic,
monumental manner to the text. This rivaled the Sallustian school in antiquity.
Livy was clearly a follower of Cicero’s precepts on history, although while Cicero’s
periods are intended for speaking, Livy’s, with an overload of detail, are for reading.
Livy was wildly popular in his lifetime and had great influence on historians like
Tacitus and poets like Lucan and Silius Italicus. Seneca, Tacitus, and Quintilian all
praise his literary qualities. But the great mass of his work made preservation
difficult. Large numbers of summaries were made. The last record of a complete
Livy is from 401.
Directions in Historiography
Asinius Pollio and the History of the Civil Wars
Asinius Pollio continued the tradition of senatorial history. A follower of Antony, he
maintained his independence under Augustus and pursued a wide array of literary
interests. He was a noted orator of the Atticist school, and an implacable foe of
Cicero. His Histories, written starting in 35, covered the years 60-42. Pollio was
apparently unafraid to tackle controversial matters, but he does not seem to have
displayed open opposition to Augustus.
As an Atticist, Pollio favored a very spare, primitive Thucydidean style, and did not
hesitate to attack other historians like Caesar and Sallust. Not enough remains of
his own writings to judge how well he did, but he seems to have been spare to the
point of obscurity.
Autobiography and Propaganda: Augustus
Both Agrippa and Augustus wrote comentarii on their own lives. Augustus seems
to have followed Sulla in trying to put a halo around his own life with lots of
references to prodigies and prophecies.
Pompeius Trogus and Reflections of Anti-Roman Opposition
Trogus came from Gaul Narbonensis and wrote a Historiae Philppicae in 44 books.
This is lost, but an abridgement by Justin survives from the second or third
centuries AD The title recalls the Philippicae of Theopompus, but Pompeius wrote
a universal history, even if the greater part of the narrative was concerned with
Macedonian history. Rome is only treated in the last two books, which seems to
show that Pompeius considered Macedonia the greatest empire, or at least that
Roman hegemony is only the most recent of many.
Pompeius Trogus relied heavily on the Greek historian Timagenes, who was very
anti-Roman. However, this does not seem to have been true of Pompeius’s work. As
far as we can tell, Pompeius was an imitator of Sallust in terms of style. He
preferred indirect discourse to direct.
The Historiography of Consensus: Velleuis Paterculus and Valerius Maximus
Tiberius lacked ability as a literary organizer. But he did find an impassioned fan
in Velleius, who served under Tiberius in Germany. His history in two books (with
large gaps) covering Rome from the remote past down to the present. When it gets
to Tiberius, it becomes a virtual panegyric, in contrast to the senatorial traditions.
Velleius is also interested in cultural history and talks about the emergence of
Greek culture in Rome and the evolution of public tastes.
Valerius Maximus also expressed warm support for Tiberius in nine books of
Memorable Deeds and Sayings, published around 31-32 after the fall of Sejanus.
His collection is technichally a book of exempla, of models of vices and virtues for
use in rhetorical schools. It looks on the Romans as superior to other peoples, and
celebrates the mos maiorum.
The Historiography of the Senatorial Opposition
The strongest trends in history under Tiberius were those in opposition., and
expressed itself in the worship of republican models like Cato as in history. At least
one historian, Labienus, had to suffer his works being burnt and committed suicide.
Cremutius Cordus’s work almost suffered a similar fate, but survived, he did not.
Other noted opposition historians include Servilius Nonianus, a major source for
Tacitus, and Aufidius Bassus.
Historiography as Literary Entertainment: Curtius Rufus
Quintus Curtius Rufus is a mysterious figure who wrote a history of Alexander in
10 books. The first two are lost and there are major gaps elsewhere. His dating is
terribly unclear, with suggestions ranging from Augustus to Theodosius, but
perhaps he belongs to immediately after the reign of Caligula.
Alexander the great was always a popular figure for the Romans, and had acquired
an important place in a sort of romantic literature in fabulous places. Curtius’s
work derives from this train, and is written in an intense, colorful style, reminiscent
of Livy. But he is more narrator than historian, and he employs sources quite
casually, sometimes contradicting himself. Clitarchus and Timagenes are the two
most important sources. Curtius is more interested in a romantic narrative.
Scholarship and Technical Disciplines
Scholarship and Grammatical Studies in the Augustan Age
The greatest grammarian of the time was Verrius Flaccus, whose works on
grammar and scholarship are all lost. His Fasti were used extensively by Ovid. His
name is principally linked to the De Verborum Significatu, a glossary of rare words.
It does not survive, but a partial abridgement does by Festus, which was in turn
abridged by Paul the Deacon.
The Technical Disciplines in the Age of Augustus and the Julio-Claudians
Architecture is represented by Vitruvius Pollio, who published De Architectura in
10 books between 27 and 23 BC. For Vitruvius, architecture is an imitation of the
providential order of nature. Thus, the architect needs a rich and varied education,
especially in philosophy.
Medicine is represented by Celsus, who wrote a vast encyclopedia on the six arts –
agriculture, military, medicine, oratory, philsophy, and law. He tries to maintain a
position between rationalism and empiricism, and is a very elegant writer.
Agriculture is represented by Columella. De Re Rustica came out in two editions,
we have one book on trees from the first, and the whole of the second edition. The
tenth book is in hexameters and attempts to fill a gap on gardens in the Georgics.
Columella is a much more exacting writer than Varro and Cato, and he criticizes
the lack of schooling in agriculture. He writes with the big latifundia in mind,
although he criticizes it frequently.
Geography is represented by Agrippa and Pomponius Mela. Marcus Agrippa drew
up a gigantic map of the whole world, with commentary, which was set up in the
Campus Martius after his death. Pomponius Mela lived under Claudius and left a
Chorographia in three books, which describes the world starting at the straits of
Gibralter and going counter-clockwise. He is mostly interested in ethnography.
Culture and Spectacle: The Literature of the Early Empire
The End of Patronage
The second generation under Augustus had been little touched by the civil wars,
and so felt less grateful towards him. The death of Maecenas created a gap between
political powers and the intellectual elite that would only occassionally be bridged.
Tiberius did nothing about this, except inspire nasty senatorial histories. Even the
learned Claudius did nothing.
Nero tried to reestablish patronage, and there was a brief upswing in literature.
Nero was especially interested in performance and established a poetry competition.
His histrionic spirit and drive towards hellenisation sparked a backlash in the
conservative senatorial tradition. The Flavians continued public competitions, but
pulled back from Nero’s Greek leanings. Vespasian in particular renewed rhetorical
training for the ruling class.
Literature and Theater
Pantomime was introduced under Augustus and rapidly became popular. It was a
theatrical representation with an intense dramatic action. One actor sang to
musical accompanient, another masked actor mimed the events. We have no music
or libretti, but Seneca and Juvenal give evidence for its extreme popularity. The
only thing that rivaled it were Circus games, which became increasingly
spectacular. This love of spectacle is reflected in much of the poetry from this time
Seneca the Elder and Declamation
Public declmation was spreading also. Seneca the Elder gives a good picture of the
rhetorical activity of his day. Seneca was born in Spain around 50 BC, and died
before 41 AD. His work testifies to the loss of public and judicial oratory under the
regime. Rhetoric sinks to pointless excercises, declamationes, which center on
themes and subjects that are chosen for their unusual or odd character.
Declamation has now become a public spectacle.
Seneca illustrates two types of exercises most in vogue, the controversia, which was
of a judicial nature, and the suasoria, which was of the deliberative or political type
and aimed to guide the action of a famous mythical or historical person. But the
orator’s aim is not so much to persuade but to astonish the audience, and therefore
the language can be quite contrived and colorful. Very Asianism.
Recitation or Literature as Spectacle
Another form of cultural entertainment is the recitatio, the recitation of literary
passages to an invited audience. Many authors, such as Juvenal, Persius, and
Tacitus, viewed this as corrupting literature. Literature becomes more spectacular,
more theatrical, intended to get as much response from the audience as possible.
This is seen in the tragedies of Seneca and the Thebaid of Statius.
Overall, the “Silver Age” is characterized by an invasion of rhetorical devices, but
also a reaction against classicism. Exotic forms are preferred, and society can no
longer find satisfactory expression in the classical forms of art.
Seneca
Born about 4 BC in Spain. Went through the usual education, and began a political
career in 31 AD. Caligula was jealous of his fame and wanted to execute him, and
Claudius had him exiled for being involved with Julia Livilla, Caligula’s sister.
Agrippina got him recalled in 49 and made a tutor for Nero, and guided him when
he became emperor. He gradually lost influence and comitted suicide in 65, as
described by Tacitus.
We have a series of treatises, or dialogues, on ethical and psychological questions,
the works De Beneficiis and De Clementia, twenty books of Epistulae Morales ad
Lucilium, the Naturales Quaestiones, and nine cothurnatae tragedies. The Ludus
de Morte Claudii (Apocolocyntosis) is generally regarded as authentic too.
The Dialogi and Stoic Wisdom
Very few Senecan works can be dated, so it is difficult to trace his development.
The individual works of the Dialogi are independent treatises on particular aspects
of stoic ethics Seneca’s stoicism is of a moderate sort that eschews dogmatic
conclusions. The three books of De Ira are a study of the origins of human passions
and the ways of checking and mastering them. De Vita Beata addresses the
problem of happiness and the role wealth plays in creating it. It may have been
written in response to charges that Seneca didn’t practice what he preached.
Seneca justifies that even if the essence of happiness lies in virtue, wealth can still
help if it works in the pursuit of virtue.
Seneca shows a detachment from earthly contigencies in De Constantia Sapientis,
De Otio, and De Tranquillitate Animi. Seneca seeks a middle path between the
extremes of contemplative leisure, and the engagement proper to a Roman citizen.
In generally, the withdrawn life seems to be better if a choice has to be made. De
Brevitate Vitae deals with the problem of time and the brevity of life, which is due
to our inability to grasp its essence. De Providentia deals with the contradiction
with providence, which the Stoics say governs human affairs, but which often seems
to reward the wicked and punish the good.
Philosophy and Power
The Naturales Quaestiones deal with various atmospheric and celestial phenomena,
and is an immense labor of compilation. Posidonius seems to have been a major
source. The De Beneficiis treats nature and the various types of beneficence. It
analyzes beneficence as a cohesive element in social relations, and appeals to
philanthropy and liberality.
De Clementia is dedicated to the young Nero and sketches an ideal political
program based on fairness and moderation. For Seneca, the problem was to have a
good sovereign. Clemency is the virtue that should shape the sovereigns dealings
with his subjects. Seneca seemed to be aiming for a Platonic ideal of rule by
philosophers. He cherished the idea of a balanced, harmonius rule by a restrained
sovereing and a secure Senate, with everyone trained in philosophy.
The Day to Day Practice of Philosophy: The Epistulae Ad Lucilium
There are two drives in Seneca’s philosophy – one towards civic engagement and
one towards meditative otium. But in his late writings he is mainly concerned with
the individual conscience. The letters to Lucilius deal with this most of all, and
date to after 62. It isn’t clear if they were all real letters, or if some were added
later.
Philosophical letters date back to Plato and Epicurus, but Seneca introduced them
into Latin. He works hard to distinguish it from the letters of Cicero. His letters
are an instrument of moral growth, a diary of the road to wisdom. Seneca
emphasizes that the letter form allows for an intimacy that a treatise lacks. It is
close to ordinary life. The letters allow different stages to be articulated, and allows
Seneca to conform to different stages in the process of education.
Letters are also very suitable for Seneca’s philosophy, which is not systematic but
deal with particular aspects or themes in ethics. They show affinities with
Horatian satire and center on the principles around which the sage shapes his life.
They have the tone of one who is himself still seeking wisdom. Seneca proposes an
ideal life directed towards concentration, meditationm, and reflections on the
weaknesses and vices both of oneself and others. It is still profoundly aristocratic
and Seneca has disdain for the common mass in the circus. For the Stoic sage,
inner freedom is the ultimate objective, along with meditation on death which he
looks on with serenity.
“Dramatic Style”
Seneca rejects the Ciceronian hypotaxis in favor of a paratactic structure, which
aims at reproducing the spoken language and breaks up the series of thoughts into
pointed sententiae. The prose has its roots in Asiatic rhetoric,. nad has lots of
parallelism, antitheses, repetitions, and moves in staccato phrases. This pointed
style is used by Seneca to probe the secrets of the human soul, alternating the quiet
tones of meditation with the resonant tones of preaching.
The Tragedies
We know virtually nothing about when they were written or how they were
performed. They are the only extant Latin tragedies and all come from Greek
models. They are also important as witnesses to the revival of Latin tragic drama
under the Julio-Claudians. The intellectual Senatorial elite seems to have turned
to tragedy as the form most suitable to opposing tyranny. All the tragedians we
know about were important public figures.
Seneca’s tragedies lack notices and many have believed they were chiefly for
reading. The elaborate stage effects and bloodiness in places seem to support that
thesis, since many were beyond the capacity of the Roman theater.
The various tragic stories are figured as conflicts of contrasting forces, especially
within the human soul. Philosophical themes and morals occur frequently, and the
tragedies are to a certain extent expressions of Stoic doctrine. This should not be
pressed, since a fundamental part of tragedy is the imability of logos to restrain
passions and check evil. This occurs against a backdrop of horror, a struggle of
malign forces. Evil is manifested especially as the tyrant.
For almost all the tragedies we have the Greek original for comparison. Seneca
contaminates, restructures, and rationalizes them. The poetic language has its
roots in Augustan poetry, especially Ovid, and borrows a type of strict iambic from
Augustan tragedy. The heavy pathos common to Latin drama is still there, as the
sententious phrase. Dialogue strives for Asiatic brevity. The dramatic tension is
heightened by long digressions (ekphraseis) which are excessive even compared to
epic. They belong to the tendency of Seneca’s play to have isolated scenes outside
the dramatic dynamic.
There is also the Octavia, a tragedy on the death of Nero’s first wife. It is the only
praetexta tragedy extant, although it is not by Seneca. It is stylistically close, and
probably comes from the early Flavian period.
The Apocolocyntosis
The Ludus de Morte Claudii, better known as the Apocolocyntosis after Dio Cassius,
which seems to imply a pumpkinhead. Because of the different titles, it has
sometimes not been attributed to Seneca, but currently it is strongly believed to be
authentic. The work narrates Claudius’s death and ascent to heaven, where the
gods reject him and condemn him to the underworld. There he becomes a slave of
Caligular and a freedman. Scorn for the dead emperor is offset with praise for
Nero. It belongs to the genre of Menippean satire, and has some things in common
with the dialogues of Lucian. It alternates prose and different kinds of verse and
quotes freely and farcically, and mocks more fashionable genres like epic and
tragedy.
The Poetic Genres in the Julio-Claudian Period
This period is one of the most difficult to sum up. There was the overwhelming
influence of Virgil, Ovid, and Horace. But we lack impressive new writers to serve
as points of reference. The literature of this period has a rage for minor poetic
genres.
The Minor Poetry of Ovid’s Generation
We have a few fragments of Valgius Rufus and Domitius Marsus. Aemilius Macer
was more closely connected with Ovid and wrote hexameter didactic poetry on
natural and scientific poetry. Grattius was another author of a didactic hexameter
poem. These poems were more descriptive than anything else.
Astronomical Poetry Germanicus and Manilius
This tendency for didactic poetry is call neo-Alexandrian. Both Manilius and
Germanicus are linked to this since they model their works on Aratus. There was a
widespread interest in Astronomy and astroolgy in Rome from the time of Caesar
on. This was due to some philosophies and also to influence from the east.
Augustus and other emperors made use of the propagandistic value of this.
Germanicus, the adopted son of Tiberius, left us two incomplete poems – an Aratea
based on the Phaenomena of Aratus, and a Prognostica, based on the Prognostica of
Aratus. The former was on celestial bodies, the latter on weather signs.
Manilius is one of the most obscure figures in Latin. All we know comes from the
five books of the Astronomica. The first book covers astronomy, the second the
zodiac, the third the horoscope, the fourth the decans of the zodiac, the fifth the
extra-zodiacal signs that accompany the zodiac.
Star lore had become quite fashionable in the first century and Manilius attempts
to confer poetic dignity on it. The structure of the poem is shaped by the search of a
univeral order, a cosmic ratio. He is clearly a stoic and in one passage compares the
intricate workings of the nature to the heirarchical structure of Roman society. His
poetry has a much greater instructive function than Grattius and his ilk. Manilius,
in spite of his opposition to Lucretius’s philosophy, nevertheless sees in him the only
possible model for high didactic poetry.
Manilius is perhaps the first real exponent of “silver” latin poetry. His fluid
hexameters show the dominant influence of Ovid, which continued to dominate
Lucan and Statius. Ovid’s presence is also felt in mythological digressions. The
work must have been written towards the end of Augustus’s reign, and may have
overlapped with Tiberius a little bit.
Developments in Historical Epic
Epic poetry on historical subjects was always popular in Rome, even if we have only
fragments. Catullus, Horace, Propertius all attacked a sort of panegyric epic. The
most significant poet of the later Augustan age was Albinovanus Pedo, who wrote a
very forceful, rhetorical poem on Germanicus with lots of colors and pathos
Rabirius in some ways anticicpated Lucan, choosing the Civil war between Antony
and Octavian as his subject. He seems to have had naturalistic interests, again
foreshadowing Lucan. Cornelius Severus wrote a less modern and more achaizing
epic. He was perhaps closer to prose than poetry.
The Appendix Vergiliana
This is a diverse collection of poems from the first century AD. None of the works
are likely to be by Virgil, except for one or two short pieces. Most probably date
from later in the first century. The poems include the Dirae, an invective like the
Ibis of Ovid; the Catalepton, a group of 15 short poems; the Culex, an epyllion,
about a shepherd saved by a mosquito; the Ciris, another epyllion, tells how Scylla
was turned into a heron; the Aetna, a scientific poem on the causes and phenomena
of volcanoes.
Phaedrus: The Fable Tradition
Phaedrus is in some respects a minor voice in a minor genre. But he is the first poet
in the Greco-Roman world to give us a collection of fables meant for reading. Fables
were a universal and popular genre, and many earlier authors included fables in
their works. Phaedrus invents very little, and cannot rival fables from great poets
such as Hesiod and Horace. What Phaedrus does is to give the fable a standard
voice.
The Aesopic tradition was fixed in greece in the fourth century BC in prose literary
collections. Phaedrus regularized the genre. Where he is original is in his morals,
which comment on the ‘law of the stronger” and seem to refer to the point of view of
the lower classes in Rome. There are even references to contemporary events and
polemics.
The manuscripts give us some 90 fables in 5 books, all in iambic senarii. No one
actually seems to have read Phaedrus in antiquity.
The Poetic Genres in the Neronian Age
Of all the Julio-Claudians, Nero left the biggest mark on literature. The bucolic
genre in particular flourished. The influence of Virgil dominated. Calpurnius
Siculus left seven eclogues in the manner of Virgil. His poems are noteworthy
because some of the shepherds are allegories of historical figures. He reinforces
some references from Virgil too – the golden age of Eclogue 4 becomes the age of
Nero. Two fragmentary poems have also been found, the Carmina Einsidlensia,
which also date to Nero.
Nero himself wrote much, but we have only titles. They seem to indicate a return to
Alexandrian models, including a Troica. Nero encouraged poets with a luxurious,
baroque style with lots of unusual images, bold metaphors, etc. Persius and Martial
parody them. The display of Greek culture becomes increasinly vital. An
abridgement of the Iliad dates to this time.
Lucan
Born in Spain in 39 AD, nephew of Seneca. Was favored by Nero for a while, but
the relationship ended and Lucan committed suicide when he was discovered in a
plot against the emperor in 65. His chief work is called either the Bellum Civile or
the Pharsalia, and is in 10 books. The last is unfinished. We have some titles and a
few fragments of some earlier works.
Versified History?
What we know of Lucan’s early works seems to have conformed to Nero’s taste. The
Pharsalia represents a different kettle of fish, taking the Civil War of Caesar and
Pompey and turning it into a glorification of Republican liberty.
The ancients criticized Lucan for using elaborate sentitiae (like oratory), rejecting
divine intervention, and the almost annalistic narrative. These were major
innovations in the epic genre. Lucan probably followed the account of Livy, but
inserted scenes like the necromancy and generally colored the work for ideological
purposes. It was immediately a great success.
Lucan and Virgil: The Destruction of the Augustan Myths
The criticisms above assume a comparison with the Aeneid The Pharsalia is the
anti-Aeneid and Lucan the anti-Virgil. Epic is transformed from a monument to the
state to a denunciation of civil war, the subversion of values, and the arrival of
injustice. Lucan does not so much draw on the epic tradition as he projects himself
onto it. Lucan has set himself the task of unmasking the deception Virgil put over
the destruction of the Republic with the Aeneid, writing a poem to show how the
principate was born from the ashes of liberty. There is more to it than this, of
course, since Virgil presented ambiguous and contrary aspects in the Aeneid.
Doubts appear in Virgil, but that isn’t enough for Lucan, who has to shatter
everything.
The Praise of Nero and the Evolution of Lucan’s Poetics
This pessimism probably grew as Lucan wrote the poem, and Lucan may have at
first had some hopes from Nero. But the polemic against Virgil begins almost
immediately. Virgil put civil war far in the past. Lucan puts it forth in all its
inescapable historical reality. Nero is praised in the poem, in an echo of Jupiter’s
prophesies in the Aeneid. It was common at the time to attribute Augustan
features to Nero, saying that Nero is the true Augustus.
It is not clear that the praise of Nero is sincere, but Conte thinks it must be. Lucan
is fairly consistent with how he portrays Pompey and Caesar. Pompey moves closer
to wisdom, while Caesar is a black character throughout. As the work goes on, and
it becomes apparent that Nero is not the new Augustus, the work becomes more
pessimistic. Nero is not named after the proem.
Lucan and the anti-myth of Rome
As the poem goes forward Lucan becomes darker and darker. The story is of Rome’s
inevitable decline, of its collapse. Lucan inverts Virgil’s paradigm of the growth of
Rome, and even his language. Like the Aeneid, the Pharsalia is structured around
prophecies – not of the growth of Rome, but of its end. Even the necromancy in 6 is
a counterpart to the katabasis of Aeneas, and Sextus Pompeius a kind of anti-
Aeneas. Instead of a parade of future Romans we get a list of past heroes weeping
and past enemies exulting.
The Characters of the Poem
The Pharsalia has no main character like Aeneas. It turns on the personalities of
Caesar, Pompey, and Cato. Caesar domintes the early books, and becomes the
incarnation of furor unleashed against Rome. Lucan deprives Caesar of his
clementia and makes him a dark, sinister character. Caesar’s relentless energy is
contrasted with Pompey, a character entering political and military senility.
Pompey is an Aeneas, but one whom the gods do not favor. Abandoned by Fortune,
Pompey moves to a sort of purification by death, and realizes that death in a just
cause is the only path to redemption. Cato is already aware of this fact. The poem
is stoic in its background, but traditional stoicism comes to an end in Cato. Once
Cato realizes the gods are willing the destruction of Rome, he cannot give his
allegiance to that will as stoicism demanded. Instead, he renounces the gods and
declares that he is just as capable of them at separating the just and unjust. There
are a number of minor figures, including Domitius Ahenobarbus, who comes across
as heroic. Caesar’s army is portrayed as particularly bloodthirsty. Pompey’s loyal
wife Cornelia stands out.
Style
The narrative is very urgent – the periods follow one another, overflowing the
hexameter and giving a strong sense of haste. Emjambment is almost continual
There is much in common with Seneca’s tragedies, and it is aften called baroque or
mannerist. Elision is avoided. The poet himself is almost constantly present
condemning and judging.
This style does not merely reflect the literary fashions of the day. The tension of the
epic is created by the passion and enthusiasm of the young poet. Since the entire
world had changed, could epic still hold its traditional forms of heroism and values?
Epic was the highest form of expression for a people. But now the course of events
had betrayed the ideal world, epic was no longer up to the task of narrating it.
Lucan can’t break away from epic, but he compensates with the ardor in which he
denounces everything. Rhetoric is used extensively, to make sure this
condemnationa can’t be missed in the epic form.
Petronius
Left behind a long narrative fragment in prose, with some verse parts, probably
titled Satyrica (pl. Satyricon). We have all of book 15 and parts of 14 and 16. It is
not clear if he wrote other works. The text itself was badly mutilated. The Cena
Trimalchionis only reappeared in the seventeenth century.
Author and Dating
The work is very shadowy and the author is only identified as Petronius Arbiter.
He is very likely to be equated with Petronius Niger, consul of 62, whom Tacitus
describes in great detail in Annals 16. Parts of Tacitus’s narrative of his death in
66 seem to echo the Satyricon in atmosphere, and the Petronius of Tacitus clearly
has many of the qualities the author of the Satyricon would have needed. All
internal indications fit with a date in Nero’s reign too, and no later. The language
is unlike any other literary Latin, with frequent use of vulgarisms for some minor
characters, contrasted with higher expressions of others. The novel gives us a
valuable insight into a lower stratum of Latin.
The Literary Genre: Menippean and Novel
Modern critics generally use the term “novel” for only two latin texts, the Satyricon
and the Metamorphoses of Apuleius, and a handful of Greek texts. The origin of
this literary genre is inconclusive and the ancient critics don’t talk about it.
The Greek novel has a fairly standard plot. There are two young lovers, male and
female, who are separated and endure lots of troubles before they are reunited and
and can live happily ever after. The plot consists entirely of incidents that delay
this outcome. Much of the story’s suspense resides in how the heroine preserves her
chastity and escapes various traps. In some ways it is a narrative version of a new
comedy, but the setting is now the whole Mediterrenean world.
Things work differently in Petronius. There is no room for chastity and no
character has any morals. The protaganist is tossed around sexual mishaps of
every sort, and his lover is male. The Satyricon might even be a parody of the
Greek love romance. There is some truth in this, but the lovers in the Satyricon are
not apart much, and their love is not the focus of the whole story.
There are other genres Petronius is working in. There was a genre of short, racy
stories that was popular at the time. This non-idealized writing was lost due to its
low form and its amorality, and it may be that there were longer narratives besides
the short story.
No Classical narrative is as remotely complex as the Satyricon, with its loose
succession of scenes linked by complex narrative echoes. Characters who appear,
and then reappear much later. Typical situations are repeated, even if the settings
and minor characters change. But Encolpius the hero is always entrapped and
driven on to even worse situations.
The prose narrative is often interrupted by poetry. Eumolpus spews forth torrents
of bad poetry, including the sack of Troy and the Civil Wars. But many other poetic
passages are the narrator speaking. These comments are often ironic. This use of
free poetic inserts is unique to Petronius.
The closest reference for the free alternation of prose and verse was Menippean
satire such as the Apocolocyntosis of Seneca. The history of this form is
complicated. The form seems to have been an open vessel, varying greatly in both
themes and form. However, the satire was a narrative of very brief compass, and it
was a personal attack. No such intent is seen in Petronius. And the alternationg of
prose and verse becomes for Petronius a novel way of construing the account.
Realism and Parody
The novel has a strong sense of realism – not ideal settings as in Greek novel, but
the actual settings, characteristic places of the Roman world – the school of rhetoric,
the banquet, the brother, etc. The author has a strong interest in the mentality of
different social classes and in mimcing their language. Satire provides a helpful
contrast, as it oftens looks at quite precise social types, like the parasite and shows
them through a moralizing lens. There is continuous moral comment. Petronius
never gives his readers a tool to judge by. He gives us a vision of reality without the
illusion of an ideal. He does not preach or protest as satire does.
The novel is completely dominated by a drive for parody. The use of verse helps
drive the irony towards literature. But the parody is charged with ambiguity, as in
the Bellum Civile poem that is presented, with allusions to both Virgil and Lucan,
but criticisms of the latter too. Literary models are used ironically – a maid quotes
Virgil to convince her mistress to yield to a suitor. Echoes of grand epic, especially
the Odyssey, are numerous. The whole story of Encolpius is in a way a parody of
the Odyssey. Probably a parody of Homer was part of the overall game of parody.
The appearance of Priapus, the god of sex, as a vindictive deity works. Petronius
may have collected and reinterpreted and parodied all the literary genres and
cultural myths of his day, forming a kind of literary encyclopedia of Imperial Rome.
Satire under the Principate: Persius and Juvenal
Both Persius and Juvenal declare their connection to Horace and Lucilius, but the
genre is greatly transformed in their hands. While Horace and Lucilius addressed
an audience of friends, Persius and Juvenal have a general audience in mind. The
purpose of satire is no longer to arouse laughter while examining human weakness.
For this the poet himself collaborated with the listener. Now the listener is denied
any closeness with the poet. The courteous, confidential manner of Horace is
replaced by invective. The poets take up the stern moralism that Horace rejected.
In Persius and Juvenal, an anti-classicism arise against the Augustan poets. But
the greatest difference is that satire is no longer aimed at a circle of friends, but at a
large audience, and that it must effect the audience. So showy rhetoric is in order.
Persius
Bron AD 34 at Volterra. Was educated by the Stoic Annaeus Cornutus, who
introduced him to the senatorial opposition circles. He led an austere life and died
in 62. His Satires were published posthumously by Cornutus.
Persius, animated by Stoicism, found in sature the ideal form for expressing
sarcasm and invective, as well as moral exhortation. Persius repeatedly says his
poetry was inspired by an ethical need to combat corruption and vice.
Contemporary poetry was ruined by bad taste that was a sign of bad morals.
Therefore Persius attacked it for all it was worth, as well as the inane myths that
went with it.
In describing the various forms in which vice and corruption are manifest, Persius
extensively uses words and metaphors relating to the body and sex. In this area his
gives us some of his most famous pictures, distorting the reality that is typical of
moralists. In denouncing vice and describing its manifestations, Persius heightens
the tones of satire, moving them towards a macabre baroqueness that would peak in
Juvenal. Describing vice is the major aspect of Persius’s work, but there are few
indications of how to live rightly. The precepts set forth originate in Stoic doctrine
and its theory of virtue.
It is necessary to recognize behind the satires the intertextual echoes. Notes that
were prominent in the Augustan program can still be heard. The first presence is
the Horatian sermo. But much of Augustan poetry had a didactic nature, drawing
on Lucretius. Persius takes this model and goes the other way. The use of poetry
as didactic is beaten down in Persius. Horace in particular had seen literary texts
as a means of involving the reader with the poet teacher.
Persius meditates on this function, but also breaks away from it. The didactic
function in Persius denies itself the possibility of success. The good humor of
Horace is replaced by a harsh and aggressive attitude towards the readers. This
does give the work an advantage – space is avaliable for the confessional
monologue, for interior reflection. This gives a glimpse of a personal itinerary
towards philosophy.
The aim of assaulting the reader gives Persius his extremely obscure and difficult
style. It is very harsh, with frequent oxymorons. The style distorts ordinary
language to shed new light on reality. Metaphor is used to expose new relations. It
is from this esthetic and ethical drive that gives Persius his obscurity.
Juvenal
Born between 50 and 60. The last reference in his poems is to 127, so he died after
that. A friend of Martial. He left sixteen satires divided into five books. They seem
to lie between 100 and 127.
Juvenal claims that the silly literature of his day was far removed from deep
degradation of Roman society, years that to others seemed to inaugure a new time
of peace and prosperity. While even Persius seemed to find a remedy in stern
philosophy, Juvenal just attacks everything, with no hope of redemption. In other
words, he refuses to conform to the earlier traditions of Satire. In doing this, he
attacks the very forms of moral reasoning and judgement that shaped Roman moral
thought. He rejects philosophies that attempt to teach man to remain indifferent to
the physical world.
Rancor towards society, and hidden resentment at not belonging to it, is an
important aspect of Juvenal, who represents the middle class that witnessed daily
corruption. In his distorted view, Roman society is perverted, with its classes
overturned. He hates the old aristocracy, which has abdicated its role. He hates
the nouveux riche, the freedmen, the Orientals. Most of all he hates women and
devotes the entire sixth satire to denounce them, with Messalina, the imperial
prostitute, standing out.
Although Juvenal has an occassional moment of solidarity with the crowd, his view
towards the masses is equally hateful. He has nationalistic pride, hence he hates
Greeks and Orientals. He idealizes the achaic Roman past with its yeoman
farmers, and impliciitly admits his own powerlessness. In the last two books he
does ease up and become more detached, more stoic. It is a resigned view in the
face of corruption, and still the old anger breaks out.
Early satire had a familiar, unpretentious tone. Now that reality is so distorted,
satire must match it with grandiosity. It no longer adopts a lowly style, but the
high language of epic and tragedy. But this high language is employed with the
basest of content, giving a powerful contrast. His expression is visual and pregnant,
dense and sententious, with a tendency to explode into hyperbole.
Epic in The Flavian Period
Statius
Born between 40 and 50 in Naples, died 96. A protégé of Domitian. Left the Silvae,
five books of poems in assorted meters, and two epic poems, the Thebaid in 12
books, and the Achilleid, which is unfinished and breaks off in the second book.
Silvae
Statius was a professional author. The Silvae is a collection of varied and misc.
things, and a valuable document on the society of the day. They were commissioned
by different people who represent a cross sectional of the society of the time and
reveal two trends – withdrawal into private life and the ideology of a public service
under the emperor. A number of poems are addressed to Domitian and give a sense
for the emperor’s position at the time.
The 32 poems are very carefully organized with complex effects of balance and
variation. Individual poems are shaped by traditional schemes (wedding, birthday,
etc). The poet shows himself to be at home in a heirarchical society, with the deified
princeps at the center.
The poet of the Silvae acts as a part of his community. He arouses pathetic
emotions, but only to calm them. Poetry has become an ornamentation, the face of
luxury, and intellectual futility is turned into a precious wit. This is still the heir to
Virgil and company, and inherits expressions and phrases, but exploits this for
everyday things. It is carefree and a bit superficial, trying to make everyday men
and objects agreeable. Even his ecphrases are less descriptions and more encomia.
It is a rhetoric of sweetness.
However, the poems are still refined, traditional, and reflective. It aspires to
present itself as an authorized portrait of good Roman imperial society. They are
part of a Flavian policy to control culture, to promote traditional values and literary
forms. Literature was becoming more theatrical, with public festivals. This is fully
congruent with the success which mime was having. But the Silvae were on a
higher level.
Thebaid
Statius claims to follow the Aeneid at a distance. Like the Aeneid, in 12 books. The
first hexad has lots of travel, like the Odyssey, but other variations including
ghosts, while the second hexad has the Iliadic portion. There are a huge number of
models besides Virgil, including Seneca. And there is a tension between the world
of Virgil and modern anxieties located at the center of it all.
Certain themes recur constantly. The whole story is governed by divine presages,
and the inability of men to interpret them. The house of Oedipus isn’t crushed so
much by family curses as by a universal necessity. This very negative theme brings
Statius very close to Lucan. So we have something of a compromise. The
traditional deities appear flat and the active divine forces are abstract ideas. The
human figures are cardboard cutouts. Despite the diffuse nature and large number
of characters, Statius tries had to keep the poem together, with lots of thematic
references and similes. The similes tend to show how nature reflects the course of
human events, a very stoic idea..
The Achilleid
The only part we have deals with the young Achilles on Scyros. The tone seems
more relaxed than the Thebaid. The plan of narrating the whole of Achilles’s life
would have brought Statius up against Homer himself. The title is very suggestive
of Virgil too.
Valerius Flaccus
He left behind a single work, the Argonautica in 8 books. It was dedicated to
Vespasion, but contains references to Titus, and was probably left unfinished by the
authors death. The poem recounts about ¾ of the story in the Argonautica of
Apollonius.
Although largely based on Apollonius, Valerius does more than Romanize it. He
makes important changes in the psychology of characters, and strives for effect with
pathos, dramatization, visualization. Valerius has a lively awareness of literature,
and has a staggering number of different models, which make the text somewhat
diffuse at times. There is a lot of attention to detal, but the narrative lacks
movement and gives the impression of having been written scene by scene rather
than as a whole.
Valeruis tends to exaggerate’s Virgil subjective narrative, that is rendering events
and situations from the point of view of different characters. What the characters
are feeling sometimes overwhelms the events they are describing. Pathos is sought
on every possible occasion. The result is a narrative that is often obscure. Because
of this, the work presupposes an audience already learned in the mythology. One
almost has to have a text of Apollonius handy.
There are a few hints of contemporary reality. One charcter commits suicide when
persecuted by a tyrannt in the manner of the stoics. The kingdom of Colchis has
civil war emphasized, which allows Valerius to work in a battle scene. There is also
a strong ethnographic interest, typical of the Flavian period.
Silius Italicus
Born AD 26, politically connected to Nero, and served under Vespasian. Died 101.
His Punica is in seventeen books, and may be incomplete. Pliny tells us that Silius
worshipped Virgil and even purchased his tomb. He had very museum-like
interests, and the Punica is a frigid gallery of historical busts and antiquarian
curiosities. It is the longest epic poem in Latin, and probably the worst.
His primary source is Livy. His framework closely follows Livy, especially in the
first 10 books. From 11 on the author seems to be trying to bestow more epic
dignity. Some episodes and scenes not found in Livy may be drawn from other
annalists.
The most obvious parallel for the Punica is the Annals of Ennius, which show how
to compose an annalistic epic. Another model is Naevius, who wrote an epic poem
on the first punic war.
The basic inspiration comes from the Aeneid. The war with Hannibal is shown as a
direct continuation of the curse of Dido. Going against Lucan, Silius restores the
function of divine appearances. Juno continues to oppose the Romans and support
the Carthaginians. Jupiter forces her to stand down. Jupiter puts the punic was as
a sort of gigantic test for the Romans to prove themselves.
There is no protagonist, but Hannibal is the only character in the poem from
beginning to end, showing the influence of Turnus and Lucan’s Caesar. There is a
sizable group of Roman heroes with good old fashioned virtues. Scipio Africanus
and Fabius Maximus stand out. Scipio even gets to make a journey to the
underworld. Fabius represents the Roman senatorial tradition. Overall, the works
joins the tradition of Roman patriotic literature while adding nothing new.
Pliny the Elder and Specialist Knowledge
Born AD 23, served in Germany 46-58. He wrote a Bella Germaniae that was a
source for Taitus, and was fiercely hostile to Nero. Under Vespasian he became a
procurator. During the seventies he wrote a major history and the Naturalis
Historia, which he presented to Titus. Died in the eruption of Vesuvius in 79. The
Natural History is divided into 37 books and intended to index all knowledge. 1 is a
general table of contents, 2 cosmology and physical geography, 3-6 geography, 7
anthoropolgy, 8-11 zoology, 12-19 botany, 20-32 medicine, 33-37 metallurgy and
mineralogy (with an excursus on the history of art)
Pliny the Elder and Encyclopedism
There were many handbooks, largely adopted from Greek, on various aspects of
learning in the early empire. Imperial Rome saw a great expansion of technical and
professional classes like doctors and architects. There was a growing bureaucracy
as well. Scientific curiosity was also a form of entertainment. Works of
paradoxagraphers, cataloging oddities, became popular. The paradoxpgraphers
show the limit of Roman scientific culture – genuine curiosity, but no systematic
principle. There is a lack of connection between practical experience and tradition.
New data is catalogued and placed side by side with the old. Pliny the Elder’s work
is the fullest realization of these tendencies. No other Roman author conceived of
such a massive project.
Pliny was close to certain stoic positions, and the idea of the universe as a cosmic
machine was well suited to him. There is some adherence to stoicism in the work,
but overall Pliny was an eclectic. Stoicism gave him a sense of the sage’s mission.
Stylistically, he is one of the worst Latin writers. A scattered, muddled style
contrast with true rhetorical tirades. His rejection of the Ciceronian period, while
typical of the time, dissolves into impersonal confusion. Still, his work was one of
the best organized and easily consultable ancient texts. A number of abridgements
and epitomes were made.
A Technical Writer: Frontinus
Consul 74, died under Trajan. Wrote a wide range of technical works. De Aquis
Urbis Romae is a good concrete treatment of the problems of Rome’s water supply.
Frontinus was actually in charge of aqueducts for a while. The Strategemata is
more problematic, basically a work of military anecdotes.
Martial and the Epigram
Born in Spain between 38 and 41. Began to publish in the 80s but apparently had
trouble making a living. Disappointed, he returned to Spain in 98, where he died in
104. We have twelve books of epigrams written and published 86-102. There are
three books of independent epigrams as well. The meters vary, but the most
common is the elegiac couplet, and the lengths vary from a single verse to 40 verses.
There are about 1500 epigrams total, carefully arranged for balance and variety
The Epigram as Realistic Poetry
The Flavian period was noteworthy for its move back to high poetic art, ie epic. But
it also witnessed the popularity of the humble epigram. The epigram originated in
archaic Greece and was a commemorative inscription. In the Hellenistic era it freed
itself from the epigraphic form, and became a type of occassional poetry, suitable for
fixing in a few verses some small moment. The subjects are often light, but heavier
ones such as laments are found. It was not very popular in Latin, and except for
Catullus we know nothing about the poets Martial names as his predecessors. Only
with Martial’s work does epigram find artistic recognition, and becomes an element
of social etiquette. But the Greek epigram also flourished in Rome.
Catullus valued the brief from, in the style of Callimachus, for expressing feelings,
tastes, and passions. Martial makes the epigram his exclusive genre because he
values its flexibility. It is very close to everyday life and contrasts with the higher
genres like epic. Martial claims his realism as the cause of his success. The
epigram gave the public a concise evocation of a spectacular event, or the
commemroation of events such as births, weddings, etc. In short, it combined
practical usefulness with literary amusement.
Martial distorts the spectable of reality. He heightens the grotesque features of
people and reduces them the recurrent types like the parasite. But he rarely
engages in moral judgement and prefers social satire without harshness. He wants
laughter, not indignation. Many of his poems evoke a simple, idyllic life.
The Mechanism of Wit
Martial’s subjects are varied, and embrace all of human experience. Some are
traditional, like funerary epigram, and others are close to the poet’s own
experiences. Some are literary polemics. In general, his epigrams develop the
comic-satiric aspect move than was traditional. This was begun by Lucillius, a
Greek poet under Nero. Martial perfected the use of a closing quip. A typical
epigram first describes the situation or person, creating tension of expectation for
the reader and the second aprt releases the tension in a surprise paradox.
This is accompanied by a lively colloquial langugae, with lots of very obscene words.
But Martial can vary his tones, and his language often reflects that of the imperial
court as well. His variety mirros the variety of the world he represents.
Quintilian
Born in Spain around AD 35. Became a teacher of rhetoric at Rome, where he
taught the younger Pliny and possibly Tacitus. He retired from teaching in 88, and
died in 95. His principle work, the Institutio Oratoria, in 12 books, survives. Two
books of declamations are probably spurious.
Remedies for the Corruption of Eloquence
The corruption of eloquence involved both morality and taste. The first aspect was
evident in informing. The second aspect had to do with literary choices and there
was a debate between various schools of oratory going on in the Flavian period.
Quintilian was the standard bearer of the classicist reaction to the corrupt style
whose chief exponent was Seneca. Like other authors, Quintilian saw the
degeneration of eloquence in moral terms. But he, as a teacher, also see the
technical causes and trusts to a renewed serious in oratory to solve them. The
Institutio Oratoria sketches out a comprehensive program of cultural and moral
training, from infancy to the start of public life.
Quintilian’s stated goal is to take up Cicero and adapt him to modern times. This
fit in well with the goals of the Flavians in restoring old values. By 90 the new style
of Seneca was on the decline, thanks to Quintilian. But Quintilians still devotes
space to refuting Seneca, and his use of sententia as a way of making a speech
lively. Basically, it was a clash of how to deal with the audience. Quintilian
believed they needed to be taught (docere) while Seneca wanted to move them
(movere) by placing the burden of the meaning on the audience.
Quintilian’s Educational Program
Quintilian describes a type of orator close to the Ciceronian ideal by virtue of the
cultural training. But in this training philosophy has dropped out in favor of
rhetoric and literary culture. Quintilian gives a sketch of appropriate Greek and
Latin authors to read. The chief purpose of all these authors is to shape the orator’s
style. The Ciceronian model is seens as the ideal balance between bombast and
terseness.
The Orator and the Princeps
In the last book, Quintilian defends the orator as a profession of great dignity,
important as much for society as for the princeps. However, his ideal of an orator
who guides the senate is groundless in the reality of the empire, and the opposite of
the view of Tacitus.
The Age of Adoptive Emperors
A Period of Peace and Stability
The period from 96-192, excepting the last 12 years, was one of tranquillity, with
Emperors ruling uniformly and a Senate that finally adopted itself to a limited role
under the Emperor. The problem of imperial succession found a solution in
adoption, which achieved stability and allowed the emperors to make new
institutional and social reforms. The prevailing clomate was one of harmony and
cooperation. The period was dominated by a pursuit of grace and courtesy. Pliny
the younger symbolizes this age, and even Tacitus’s bitterness is aimed at the past.
Cultural Refinement and Erudite Philology
Culture tends towards showy refinement. Literature and culture enjoy widespread
patronage, and many libraries sprang up. Greek literature in particular flowered
now that the eastern Mediterranean was peaceful. The second sophistic movement
sprang up, largely rhetorical. They were readily accepted into Roman society, and
Greek intellectuals everywhere, including Appian, Arrian, Plutach, Lucian, and
Galen, were drawn into the orbit of Roman power. Hadrian best exemplifies this
renaissance of Greek culture. He preferred the archaic to the more modern – Cato
over Cicero, Ennius over Virgil. But he was a major promoter of culture and
established an academy at Rome, and collected countless works of ancient masters
at his villa.
The Signs of the Future: Religious Syncretism and the Revival of Beliefs in an
Afterlife
Also during this period a climate of religious syncretism began to arise when
various faiths were mised. Two basic tendencies were converging. First, various
pagan cults belonging to different parts of the Empire were being absorbed by the
official cults of Rome. Second, among many people, we find a renewed belief in the
hereafter and a growth in beliefs tied to magical practices, oracles, etc.
Philosophical sects, especially stoicism, were running out of steam. New faiths were
offering, not the model of the wise man, but of altruism and religious reformers.
The last triumph of Stoicism would be in the strictness of Marcus Aurelius.
New beliefs offered hope of higher rewards. The cult of Isis and Serapis pentrated
into Britain and Germany, before giving way to another eastern cult, that of
Mithras. Originally a divinity of ligh and truth, and an agend of Ahura-Mazda,
Mithras was transformed into the central divinity of a Roman mystery cult. It was
more popular than the cult of Isis because it promised future immortality and
imposed a practical code of morality. In some respects it wasn’t that different from
Christianity – one even had to be baptised, albeit in the blood of a bull (a nod to
Cybele). It placed great importance on the zodiac and on the planets. It was
especially aimed at wealthy businessmen and army officials, and not to the lower
classes. Only men were allowed.
This was in contrast to early Christianity, which allowed both men and women of
all classes. Christianity had simpler rituals too, more attractive to the lower
classes. And Christianity was soon to establish a solid, articulated organization.
By the beginning of the second century a hierarchical structure was in place, and
clergy had wide powers over their flocks. Christianity also quickly developed its
own literature, which contributed greatly to this consolidation. By 130 the four
gospels and the epistles of Paul were accepted as the New Testament. Individual
communties produced their own testimonies of acts of faith. The extensive written
tradition also made it possible for Christianty to assert itself clearly in a time of
syncretism.
Pliny the Younger
Born 61 or 62. Studied under Quintilian, was consul suffectus in 100, and governor
of Bithynia in 111, where he died in 113. We have his Panegyricus, a speech of
thanks to Trajan, and ten books of Letters. The first 9 have the letters from 98-107
and were probably published by Pliny himself, the tenth as letters to Trajan, mostly
from Bithynia, and may have been published after his death.
Pliny and Trajan
The Panegyricus has come down as the first in a collection of them. Pliny
enumerates the virtues of Trajan and describes a model of concord between the
emperor and the aristocracy, and the close cooperation of the aristocracy with the
equites. There is a little fear of another wicked emperor like Domitian. It has a
certain pedagogic stance to it. On the other hand, in the letters from Bithynia Pliny
behaves like scrupulous and loyal, but indecisive public official, informing Trajan of
every conceivable problem and waiting for advice. Trajan’s message of tolerance for
the Christians
Pliny and the Society of His Day
The first nine books of letters may have been published in groups. The letters seem
to be arranged for variety, and are mainly about single themes, as opposed to the
letters of Cicero. Pliny’s style aims for grace and elegance, modeled in Cicero.
Essentially, the letters are brief essay chronicling the fashionable, intellectual, and
civic life of his day. He addresses his correspondants in a very ceremonious way,
and tells them about his activities and concerns as a large landowner. He praises
various people, and can usually find something nice to say about anyone he
mentions. Unlike Quintilian and Tacitus, Pliny is not concerned with social crisis.
He seems to detect a certain decline in taste, since people are less keen on literary
events than they used to be. In general, Pliny seems to prefer trivial literature, and
the portrayl of social relations show they were increasinly marked by an empty and
ceremonious formalism, as the Roman ruling class became more and more banal.
But it is Pliny’s correspondence alone which preserves the names of many authors
and gives us an overall view of literature under the Flavians and Trajan.
Tacitus
Born in Narbonese Gaul, married the daughter of Julius Agricola, and began a
political career under Vespasian. Praetor 88, Consul Suffectus 97. Pro-consul of
Asia 112 or 113. Died around 117. Left De Vita Julii Agricolae, published 88, De
Origine et Situ Germanorum, probably 98, Dialogus de Oratoribus, soon after 100,
Histories, written between 100 and 110, and Annals, written afterwards, possibly
left incomplete by his death.
The Causes of Decline in Oratory
Some have suspected it is not Tacitean because of its very Ciceronian style. But it
seems likely that it is, and the style is a reflection of the contents on rhetoric. One
speaker, Maternus, seems to represent Tacitus’s thought, that the empire Is the
sole force that can save the state from civil war, but that the principate hinders
oratory.
Agricola and the Futility of Opposition
Tacitus took advantage of the return of freedom under Trajan to publish his first
historical work, a biography of his father in law Agricola. Occassionally
encomiastic, it summarizes Agricola’s career before Britain and focuses chiefly on
his conquest of the island. These allow for geographic and ethnographic
digressions. Britain is the principal field in which Agricola’s virtus is shown and
where he commits great deeds. Tacitus emphasizes how Agricola was able to serve
the state faithfully and honorably, even under a tyrant like Domitian. When
Agricola finally comes into conflict with Domitian, he demonstrate how useful a
man can be until such a conflict. Nor does Agricola die as a Stoic martyr. He is a
model for the middle path a man can live under a tyrant. The Agricola is a
composite work, panegyric and biography, but also a funeral speech, enlarged with
historical and ethnographic details. It frequently shows the influence of Cicero, but
in the historical parts Livy and Sallust predominate.
Barbarian Virtue and Roman Corruption
The Germania is the only extant example of specific ethnographic literature that
was apparently popular in Rome. They may go back to Caesar’s Gallic war, and
Sallust and Livy probably used them in their works. Tacitus used almost
exclusively written sources, probably Pliny’s Bella Germaniae chief among them.
So the Germania describes the Germans before the Flavians crossed the Rhine and
the Danube.
Tacitus’s intentions in the Germania are unclear. One hypothesis sees the
glorification of a primitive civilization, not yet corrupted by the refined vices of a
decadent civilization. There is an implicit contrast between the vigorous Germans
and the Romans. But Tacitus is probably also trying to show what a threat they
were to the frivolous Roman society. This doesn’t stop Tacitus from including a long
list of weaknesses. It is probably connected with the presence of Trajan along the
Rhine.
The Parallelisms of History
Histories originally covered 69-96, only 69 and part of 70 (1-4, part of 5) remain.
Tacitus likely had contemporary events in mind when he wrote it. Galba attempted
to secure himself by adopting Piso, a puppet, while in 97 Nerva adopted Trajan, a
strong leader. In Galba’s speech to the senate on adoption, the historian makes
clear his own positions. Galba is split between a model of behavior based on the
mos maiorum, a model now based on forms and out of touch with reality, and a real
ability to dominate. Thus, Galba could not choose a course that would secure the
state. In contrast, when Nerva adopted Trajan, he choose an old fashioned
commander able to dominate the armies while remaining popular. Tacitus was
convinced only a stronge princeps with respect for the senate could rule.
The Histories have a very swift narrative, as befits the rapidly changing events.
Tacitus breaks things up into individual scenes in which he employs all his powers
of color and suggestions. He is especially good a depicting the mob, but he is almost
as disdainful of the senate, which has a façade of praise overlaying their hatred.
Human nature is almost always painted darkly in the Histories. But Tacitus has
brilliant portraits of some of the main protagonists. Otho in particular is
interesting. Tacitus shows how servile he has to be to the mob to gain power, and
how this is part of his demagogic energy. He is dominated by a relentless virtus,
and has a monologue where he contemplates stopping at no crime to gain power.
But he manages to change when defeated and dies a glorious death to spare further
bloodshed.
Tacitus shows great affinities with Sallust. He relies on inconcinnitas, dislocated
syntax, and disjointed structures. But Tacitus improves on Sallust by accentuating
the tension between gravitas and pathos, by using more poetic coloring, and with
frequent ellipsis and irregular constructions. He often extends a phrase with
surprising finish, modifying by allusion what has just been stated.
The Roots of the Principate
Tacitus turned next to examining the principate from Tiberius to Nero. His view of
the principate is much darker now. The history of the principate is the history of
the decline of political freedom, with the senate eager for servile assent to the
wishes of the princeps. But he has no sympathy for the martyrdom some senators
sought. It is a very desolate and hopeless work.
Tacitus has an excellent grasp of tragic historiography. His tragedies are fostered
by the pessimism of Sallustian historiography, and Tacitus uses them to explore the
deepest depths of individual characters. The passions, except partially for Nero, are
political. But he also brings out the tensions involved in social climbing, and the
defects from which no person is exempt. Other passions are secondary, but Tacitus
brings out plenty of sex and jealousy.
The art of portraiture reaches its peak in Tiberius. The portrait is built up through
stages and painted with a whole range of gradations. Paradoxical portraits are
used as well. Petronius is a degenerate person, yet shows great character and
energy in public office. His death is in complete contrast to the Stoic ideal, and yet
Tacitus almost seems to favor him.
The style is different in some ways from the histories. The Annals are more concise
and austere, and use a more solemn and archaic diction. Variatio is heavy. Violent
metaphors and strange verb uses are common, and there is a heavy trace of Virgil.
Starting in Book 13 Tacitus seems to get a little less tight, more elevated, more
classical. Perhaps this was because the time of Nero was much closer than that of
Tiberius.
Sources
The Sources for the annals and the histories are not entirely clear. But Tacitus
certainly had access to extensive offical documents and perhaps collections of
speeches. Tacitus was very careful in how he used documentation. He certainly
used multiple sources for different sections. He mentions the Bella Germania of
Pliny the Elder, and a history that continues that of Bassus’s, and anoither of
Vipstanus Messalla. Fabius Rusticus was apparently a source for the Nero books.
He may also have had corresponence and memoirs. And there was a pamphlet
genre, the exitus illustrium virorum, which dealt with the deaths of “freedom-
fighters” like Thrasea, which Tacitus drew on for extra color.
Suetonius and Minor Historians
His birth and death are highly uncertain. Maybe just after 70 to around 130. He
wrote many learned works. Of De Viris Illustribus, we have only part of the section
on grammarians and rhetors. Some of the other lives were passed on in part
through other traditions. We have the Lives of the Caesar’s complete except for the
preface and the introductory chapters.
Biography in Suetonius
Biography was a genre of the Greeks that Varro and Nepos had both practiced.
Varro established the form – brief information on origins, education, principal
interests and works, features of character. Suetonius followed this model for his De
Viris Illustribus. The Caesars have a different format in the different activities
engaged in and the much greater scale. They follow a chronolgical account through
the accension to the principate, and then focus on various aspects of the emperor’s
personality presented under different headings, before returning to chronolgical
order with the death and funerary honors.
The most significant aspect of this form is the rejection of chronological order. The
biographer prefers to compose in episodic fragments and give an analysis that is
centered on the person, his life and character. This was very different from the
model Plutarch used for his Parallel Lives, which followed chronological order. But
Suetonius’s form is best suited for showing the new form that power has assumed,
the personal form of the principate, and an awarness that the old annalistic form,
based on consuls, is no longer tenable. In some way the Res Gestae of Augustus,
which is organized per species like Suetonius, is an important predecessor.
Suetonius has a tendency to emphasize the private lives of the emperors, describing
their excesses and dwelling on petty or scandalous details, making his work seem
like a handbook of royal perversions. He seems to want to demystify the emperors,
without falling into encomium or rejecting the information of the imperial archives.
The result is a minor historiography that draws on the most varied sources. It also
depicts in some ways the features of its audience, the equestrian order, from whose
point of view it is written. Such an audience would have appreciated Suetonius’s
sober laconic language. It is a very smooth and nimble style of writing, which helps
make up for the superificiality of his historical and psychological analysis.
Florus and the Biography of Rome
The need to reform traditional historiographic models is shown not only by
Suetonius, but by also by the author of an epitome of Roman history, Lucius
Annaeus Florus. He may be identified with a minor poet under Hadrian. The
epitome is not made soley from Livy, and probably includes material from Sallust
and Caesar, and maybe the poets. It is essentially a reconstruction of Roman
military history, showing the small city become an empire. Florus treats the
Roman empire almost like a biographer, charting birth, adolescence. But he has a
very sunny outlook about how things are going to do under Trajan. The public
seems to have had a growing taste for these quick concise narratives.
Apuleius
We know very little about his life. He was born in Africa around 125, and educated
in Carthage and Athens. On a journey to Alexandria he stopped at Oea (Tripoli)
around 155-6, where he married the widow mother of a schoolmate, Pudentilla. In
158, the wife’s parents charged him with using marriage. He was acquitted and
spent the remainder of life at Carthage as a successful orator, dying sometime after
170.
His works include the Metamorphoses, or Golden Ass, in 11 books, his Apology or
defense speech, the Florida, and philosophical treatises on Plato, Socrates, and De
Mundo. A few other works are sometimes attributed to him, and still more are lost.
A Complex Figure: Orator, Scientist, Philosopher
He is a representative of the Second Sophistic, and shares much with it – curiosity
about nature, anxiety and tension over the occult, initiation into mystery cults, and
the career of a brilliant itinerant lecturer, master of both Greek and Latin. He is so
imbued with popular culture that it is possible to hear echoes of Platonic, Periptetic,
and other Greek philosophers, along with Isiac, gnostic, and Jewish religious
conceptions. Platonism seems strongest, with Peripatetic and Socratic influences.
The De Mundo, a reworking of pseudo-Aristotle’s Peri-Kosmou. The basic
philosophy is explained by the middle Platonist tendency to accept Aristotelian
ideas that conciliate nature and the metaphysical-theological side, with a strong
spirit as its basis (which comes from Stoicism). If this doesn’t all belong to
Apuleius, then certainly the coloring of the Latin does. The effort to bring into
Latin the specialist language of the natural sciences is particularly in evidence
here.
The De Deo Socratis is the most systematic extant treatment on the doctrine of
demons. It is in three parts. The first section examines the separate worlds of Gods
and Men, the second the position of demons and their function as intermediaries,
and the third concentrates on the daimon of Socrates.
The Florida is a collection of 23 oratorical passages on various themes, extracted
from lectures and public readings. From these pieces a lecturer emerges who was
prepared to deal with anything. They are exceptional displays of rhetorical
virtuosity and show that a talented orator could earn quite a good living.
The long speech that makes up the Apology is a judicial speech, the only one from
the Imperial period. It was apparently a revision of the actual defense speech, and
is first and foremost a sophisticated literary product. The speech rebuts the charge
of using magic to seduce his wife Pudentilla. It is often compared with the Pro
Caelio for its similar playfulness. He often borrows from Cicero. The color of the
speech is far removed from Cicero, full of vulgarism, neologisms, archaims, and
poeticisms. There are frequent allusions aimed at the judge. Apuleius clearly has
encyclopedic knowledge. Literary examples are quoted for the author’s defense.
Apuleius clearly does have extensive knowledge of magic. He draws a distinction
between magic and philosophy. But the ability of the scientist to dominate natural
forces is ambiguous, and he claims to have that power. There is much that is
unclear about his portrayl of magic. Even his picture of a philosopher is strangely
eclectic. Still, Apuleius’s fame as a magician lasted for centuries. He was
apparently acquited.
Apuleius and the Novel
The Metamorphosies or Golden Ass, is the only complete extant Latin novel. It tells
the story of young Lucius, who get sucked into a world of magic, and get
transformed into an ass. He learns he must eat roses to be changed back. He has a
series of adventures, and at one point the principle narrative becomes a frame for
the story of Cupid and Psyche. Finally, Lucius eats the roses of the priest of Isis
and becomes human to be initiated into the cult.
Like Petronius, it is difficult to classify the novel of Apuleius. But in addition to all
the other influences (ante) there is the fabulae Milesiae. But this genre is almost
completely lost. The basic story of ass-man seems to have been one of these fabulae.
But the magical element is probably Apuleius. He is quite conscious of the
innovation in adding a series of magical tales to the first two books. There are
several young students, much like Encolpius, who are having lots of misfortunes.
But their misfortunes are due to magic. The ordinary logic of a story is defeated by
magic.
Then there are the sources. There was a novel in Greek among the writings of
Lucian, certainly spurious, called Lucius or the Ass, with the same basic plot. Then
there are references to works of a Lucius of Patrae. So how much did Apuleius
invent himself. The Cupid and Psyche episode, and the cult of Isis, probably, but a
lot is in dispute. Between the Lucius of Lucian and the Golden Ass there is also a
strong narrative difference in tone. The Lucius is purely pleasurable, with no moral
purpose. The Metamorphoses, as much fun as it is, takes on the quality of an
exemplary tale. As a result of this, at least one particular course episdoe, the
spurcum additamentum, is usually deleted as a later addition.
The tale of Cupid and Psyche occupies a center space in the text and is a
prefiguration of Lucius’s destiny. The interpretation of the novel hinges on it. The
oldest interpretation is as a polemic against pagans, a Christian myuth of the
meeting between Soul and Desire. A religious interpretation sees it as a doublet for
Lucius’s redemption. Others tried to see it as Platonic. None of this really works,
and it is better to look at the literary value of the story. It is the task of the
secondary tale to complicate the first reading with the theme of religion. This
prefigures the epiphany of Isis at the very end, and overlaps with the first theme to
give it meaning as an initiation.
The tale of Cupid and Psyche itself if probably influenced by popular fable, with
suggestions of Virgil and elegy thrown in for good measure. Everything is told with
levity, much as Ovid might have.
The whole novel is contructed as a journey through a world of literary signs towards
a liberation into light and morality. The mixture of religious elements with the
Milesian tale is the most original aspect of the novel. The salvation of Lucius is the
necessary culmination of this.
Language and Style
Apuleius’s language is a highly orignal mixture of different features. He loves
archaic words, and combined with his oratory, makes him a master of different
registers. So we have all sorts of things mixed together. He gives words a magical
meaning. He knows how words are used in literature for differetn situations, and
so he can recombine them in a new, personal way. Apuleius carries Latin rhetoric
to its limits of expression.