CONCLUSION AN EPILOGUE—THE SECOND CENTURY AND AFTER

The passing of the Silver Age—Factors hampering literary creation—Elocutio nouella—Fronto, Gellius, Apuleius—Anarchy of third century—Energy diverted towards law, scholarship, epitomes—Vigour of Christian apologists—Prose of Minucius, Tertullian, Cyprian, Arnobius, Lactantius—Poetry of Commodianus, Ambrose, Prudentius—A Greek renascence—Echoes of Silver Age in Gallic Panegyrici, in Historia Augusta, and in Ammianus—Poetic revival in fourth century—Nemesianus, Ausonius, Claudian—End of national Roman literature—The European Latin of the Middle Ages—Vitality of literary influence of Rome at Renaissance and later periods.

Beyond the time of Suetonius the Silver Age does not extend.⁠[1866] We are not, therefore, strictly concerned with the Roman literature which followed, or with its phases of decadence, barrenness and revival. Yet it is instructive to consider what took the place of Silver Latin, and why changes set in. Obviously, Latin continued to be written, though for a time not in the same quantity; but such Latin as continued was written with a difference in quality. Several factors, indeed, during the immediately succeeding period militated against the production of what had been the prevalent type of literature. In the first place, there arose that natural desire for change which ensures periodic reaction in all literary history. What one might call the Silver spirit had spent itself. Pointed epigram palled: neither interest nor dexterity in it any longer existed. The chief sign of the altered tendency was the appearance of the archaizing school of Cornelius Fronto, which, by turning back to Ennius, Cato and the Gracchi as models of style, implicitly undervalued the Silver Age and revolted against its conventions. Born in Numidia about the beginning of the second century, Fronto had studied at Alexandria, had been a successful pleader at Rome in Hadrian’s time, and was, under Antoninus Pius, made tutor to the future emperor Marcus Aurelius, his correspondence with whom has in part survived. Fronto never was in any deep sense a thinker. His primary concern being eloquence, he manifestly did not sympathize with his imperial pupil’s devotion to philosophy. Touching canons of style, no less than the supremacy of wisdom, he was poles asunder from Seneca. A zealous champion of archaism in composition, Fronto maintained that old-fashioned Latin writers were preferable to the Greeks and to the later Romans, and that a virile elocutio nouella (the phrase is his own) would spring from a union between the ancient and the spoken Latin. The direct plainness of the older writers and speakers he felt, with some justice, to be more in touch with life; but his fundamental misconception lay in failing to realize that to copy them, as if Roman literature had not run a distinguished course during some centuries since their day, was to fly in the face of evolution, and that to reintroduce obsolete words, however natural they had been at one time, was merely to displace one system of artificiality in favour of another. Yet for a space the movement was novel enough to live. Fronto’s unbounded enthusiasm for the antiquated won the admiration of Aulus Gellius, who about the middle of the century began his miscellany of the Noctes Atticae during a winter spent at Athens. He used to buy old volumes in order to dig in them for contributions towards those brief essay-like studies of his which constitute an ancient museum of curiosities in literature, learning, language, philosophy and custom. As Gellius occupied himself particularly with the correct use of Latin words and idioms, his illustrations are often of great value. Not only did he transcribe passages from old authors like Ennius, Plautus, Caecilius or Afranius, and discuss points of Virgilian or Ciceronian expression and text, but he recorded critical views held by contemporary rhetoricians like Fronto, Herodes Atticus and Favorinus. In the Attic Nights one never knows on what odd piece of information one may chance. When, for instance, he writes about the perversity of Laberius in inventing bits of doubtful Latinity or in borrowing words from the common speech, Gellius tells us that botulus, a rare name for a sausage which we associate with the modern medical term botulism for certain sorts of food-poisoning, was a vulgar word used instead of the more proper farcimen in one of Laberius’s mimes. All such philological preoccupation was symptomatic of a period of literary decadence, when critics could not see what a miserable substitute for good Latin style was offered by the obscure, ill-sounding and strained language which they were now manufacturing.

The culmination of the elocutio nouella which marked the collapse of the Silver Latin is to be found in the work of the African Platonist and rhetorician Lucius Apuleius, and especially in his Metamorphoses, the fantastic tale relating, not without some prurience, the adventures of his namesake Lucius in Thessaly, the home of witchcraft and the supernatural. The main account of the consequences following the hero’s magical transformation into an ass came from a Greek source; and so did the incidental tales, such as the charming fairy-story of Cupid and Psyche, which the author dovetailed into his narrative. Based thus as its matter was on Greek, the romance is not unaffected by Hellenisms, but its prevailing exuberance follows the new Latin fashion. The short runs of words in a clause seem partly to recall a primitive, partly to anticipate a modern type of prose. The phrasing is unusual, often bizarre: it is a fantastic blend of elaborate archaism and bold innovation—now poetic, now colloquial. The diminutives of the vulgar tongue jostle far-fetched artifices. Such is the general effect that the reader accustomed to normal Latin feels as if he had adventured into a strange land with a strange speech.

There were other contemporary factors which tended to reduce the output of Latin literature. Tranquillity under the good government of the Antonines appeared to be as unpropitious for letters as was the anarchy of the third century. It is significant that there were no fewer than twenty-five Roman emperors between Commodus (180-192) and Diocletian (284-305). Besides, intellect was being diverted into other than purely literary channels. In law, the reigns of Septimius and Alexander Severus are famous for the eminent jurists Papinian and Ulpian. Attention was also devoted to scholarship and criticism. Authorities on metre like Terentianus Maurus, and grammarians or commentators of the third century, had in the fourth many renowned successors like Donatus, Charisius, Diomedes, Servius and Macrobius. Very symptomatic too was the demand in these centuries for epitomes of the more voluminous writers of the past. There is evidence of a definite distaste—from which emperors were not free—for the trouble of reading older and fuller authors; so that epitomators, on the principle that half a loaf is better than no bread, could at least claim to be ministering to culture by their condensed products. How much the epitomes contributed to the disappearance of their originals is a question easier to raise than to settle. Sometimes both original and epitome have come down together, as holds good of Vitruvius. Two abridgements did not kill Valerius Maximus, nor did epitomators and excerptors cause Pliny’s Natural History to be lost. Half of the elder Seneca’s Controuersiae and nearly three and a half decades of Livy survived in spite of being summarized, although sometimes, on the other hand, the abridgement alone has descended to posterity. Justinus, for example, remains, while his foundation Trogus has perished. Here, however, we may be content to conclude that the period was not only as a whole uncreative but that it felt itself unequal to the task of digesting the creations of more fertile times.

The truth is that the most virile thought which now found expression in Latin for some generations was the thought connected with the new faith in Christ, so that henceforth a history of Latin literature must take into account theological and patristic authors. Minucius Felix, a Roman lawyer, about the end of the second century, composed in his dialogue Octauius, which opens prettily on the sands at Ostia, a defence of certain aspects, though not the most significant aspects, of the Christian religion. This work was based on older models; but a new manner is coupled unmistakably with new matter in the works which the African Tertullian wrote after his conversion to Christianity. His previous training had been that of an advocate in the law-courts of Carthage; and he now consecrated a fiery eloquence to a fresh cause. The fervid indictment of paganism, in his Apologeticum especially, sounds like a break with classical tradition, because he unsparingly denounces the poetry and philosophy of the Greeks and Romans as a perversion of Holy Writ. His uncompromising Puritanism could spare no admiration for ancient culture. Yet, in spite of this, the break is not absolute. Even among Christian writers two lines of literary influence are discernible. On the one hand Tertullian’s Latin is akin to the African Latinity of Apuleius, and may, with some qualifications, be classed beside the better style of Cyprian, who was bishop of Carthage in the middle of the third century. On the other hand, a more classic tradition is seen not only in the above-mentioned Octauius by Minucius who continued the literary preference of Quintilian for Ciceronian standards, but also in The Institutes of Divinity (Diuinae Institutiones) by Lactantius, who, though a pupil of Arnobius, the author of Aduersus Nationes, departed from his master’s unpolished style in favour of that elegant diction which he cultivated as a professor of rhetoric at Nicomedia late in the third century, and which won him the title of “the Christian Cicero.” His Ciceronianism was merely one of many links between him and the past: he was in reality widely read in classical verse as well as prose, and a poem on the Phoenix in finished elegiacs may well be his. The poetry which Commodianus wrote after his conversion is a deviation from the classical manner, and in its mixture of quantitative with accentual principles marks a step towards medieval versification; but in general the attempts at Christian verse-writing bore little fruit until, about the end of the fourth century, St. Ambrose and Prudentius composed their hymns.

The contemporary prominence of Greek was another indication and contributory cause of the decadence of Latin. The fashion among Romans of composing in Greek and the genius of the actual Greek writers at this epoch, like Plutarch, Arrian and Lucian, helped to throw Latin into the shade as something outworn. Once more history tended to pass into Hellenic hands. Appian, in the time of Antoninus Pius, set himself to compose a Roman history, of which we possess a considerable portion; and later Dion Cassius, a grandson of the rhetorician Dion Chrysostom esteemed by Trajan, conceived the scheme of relating in eighty books the development of Rome from Aeneas’s time to A.D. 229, the year of the author’s return to his native Nicaea. The extant parts form an important, though not infallible, historical document. Greek writers in contact with Rome were never more admired than they were from Flavian to Antonine days. Hadrian’s reign, we have seen, inaugurated what may be fairly called a Hellenic revival; for little of the highest importance had appeared in secular Greek literature from Strabo and Diodorus in Augustan times to Dion Chrysostom and Plutarch. There was now, however, a sort of sophistic renascence of Greek prose, brilliant enough to dazzle contemporaries, which is transmitted from Dion Chrysostom, Lucian and Aristides, the rhetorician who studied under Herodes Atticus, down to Libanius who was Julian’s teacher in the fourth century. It is a movement which had points of contact with Latin writers such as Apuleius; but it laid no firm hold upon the world.

Latin, however, never so lost its vitality as to be wholly supplanted by Greek in the late Silver Age of Hellenism.⁠[1867] Though it may be argued that classical Latin in a sense ended with Suetonius, and though the literary ages which followed the Silver might be named after inferior metal, there were various resuscitations, if only spasmodic, of the classical manner. Mention has already been made of Ciceronian elements in Minucius and Lactantius. Although inferior in execution, some writers at least looked to the old exemplars. The rhetorical panegyrists of the Gallic school in the third century had Pliny’s Panegyricus in their eye; the six authors who composed, professedly under Diocletian and Constantine, the Historia Augusta⁠[1868] were, however feebly, continuing Suetonius’s studies of the Caesars; and the Asiatic Ammianus Marcellinus, though he never attained to mastery over Latin, intended his history of nearly three centuries from the beginning of Nerva’s reign until the death of Valens (96-378) to be a sequel to Tacitus. The last eighteen of his thirty-one books survive to enable us to judge of his obscurity and inflation in manner. Among poets under Diocletian and his successors, the revival of style became more evident; for the lethargy which had fallen on the third century was being thrown off. Even then the Virgilian tradition was plainly at work in the Cynegetica, a didactic poem on hunting by the Carthaginian Nemesianus, and in his bucolic pieces it combined pleasantly with the influence of Calpurnius Siculus. Still more varied classical influences unite in the works of Ausonius of Bordeaux. Whether one looks at his miscellaneous light verse, often amusingly egotistic, or at his renowned description of the river Mosella, written about 370, one finds a great deal that marks him as standing between the two worlds of classicism and romance. Towards the turn of the same century Claudian had come from Alexandria to the imperial court at Milan. In contrast to Ammianus, his use of Greek in early life did not prevent him from gaining wonderful control over the Latin manner. His historical epics revive the Virgilian tradition dear to the poets of the Silver Age; his Rape of Proserpine is reminiscent of Ovid; and his laudatory pieces are under obligations to Statius. Claudian’s patriotism, no less than his style, is only one among many recurrent illustrations of Rome’s power of attracting and remaking the alien. The beneficence of the Roman Empire is the idea underlying his lines:

With him or with the Gaul Rutilius Namatianus the national poetry might be said to close. Namatianus wrote in half-classical diction and half-classical metre at the time when the Empire was splitting up into new kingdoms; and there is a fitting note in his farewell apostrophe to Rome:

Yet, in another sense, Latin literature does not end either with Claudian or with Namatian: nor does it make much difference whether, with some authorities,⁠[1870] we take Boethius for the last of the ancients, or, with others,⁠[1871] take him for the first medieval Latin writer. Both positions are defensible and instructive. Two events, in particular, may serve to illustrate the continuity of influence, apart from questions of classic quality in style. First, Jerome’s translation into Latin of the Scriptures from Genesis to Acts, which came to be known as The Vulgate, was published in 405. Its Latinity, very different from the Ciceronian, must be recognized as one of the great formative influences on expression during medieval times. Secondly, the sack of Rome in 410 by a host of Goths and Huns under Alaric stimulated Augustine to undertake his work De Ciuitate Dei. No better link between antiquity and the Middle Ages could be discovered. The ideal claim to citizenship in a more abiding state than an earthly one had received a telling confirmation in the barbarians’ triumphant challenge to the power of Rome; and Rome herself was now to become “the Eternal City” rather through the greatness of the universal Church than through that of the Roman Empire.

Latin literature, then, did not close in the fourth or the fifth century; but thenceforward it was no longer national, no longer Roman. Latin became in the Middle Ages European, whether employed by the Venerable Bede, by Isidore of Seville, or by Carolingian scholars like Alcuin and Einhard. Even the birth of modern languages from their parent did not supplant Latin as an international medium for conveying ecclesiastical, legal, historical and philosophical learning: so, following Dante, it came that Petrarca and Boccaccio made use of Latin and Italian indifferently; and not till after the end of the seventeenth century was Latin really shaken in its supremacy as the general language for philosophy and science. That century had seen issued Bacon’s Nouum Organum and De Augmentis Scientiarum in its first quarter and Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica in its last quarter.

There can be no more interesting pendant to a literary history of Rome than a glance at later periods when the influence of the best writers acted strongly enough to inspire an artistic use of the Latin language. It must never be forgotten how much the humanism of the Renaissance, vitalized as it was by the rediscovery of Greek culture, included also a revival of Latin studies and of the power to write good Latin. In prose many names rise easily to the mind—among them, Valla and Ficino in Italy, Budaeus and Langolius in France, Erasmus and Grotius in the Low Countries, Sir Thomas More in England and George Buchanan in Scotland. In verse, the various collections of Deliciae drawn from the poets of Italy, France, Holland, Germany, England and Scotland, contain excellent examples of supreme ability to recapture, in fresh circumstances, the manner of the greatest authors of Rome. Other countries may not have had a galaxy of modern Latin poets to compare with the Italians Baptista Mantuan, Poliziano, Bembo, Pontano, Sannazaro, Vida, Fracastoro, Navagero and Flaminio, but there is no mistaking the literary merit of such Latin poems as were written by the Dutch scholars Grotius and Daniel Heinsius or by the Scottish scholars Buchanan and Arthur Johnston. Of England it may be said that, even if Latin poems like those of Milton and Cowley be taken into account, her finest work in Latin verse was yet to come from scholars of the nineteenth century, when in this field she had no equals abroad. While it is true that much of this modern skill consisted in translation or light jeux d’esprit, the elegance and taste shown in composition has borne eloquent testimony to the living literary influence of the best poets of the Gold and Silver Ages of Rome.