Roman literature is all the more attractive for challenging the prevailing ethos of a military and, to a large extent, a philistine society. The Roman literati obviously had their clientele, especially among the leisured aristocracy of late Republican and early imperial Rome. But somehow they did not blend into the landscape so naturally as their Greek counterparts. There was always tension between the sophisticated world of letters and the stern Roman world at large. This tension may well explain why Latin literature developed so late, and why it received such a hostile reception from those who, like Cato, saw it as a mere aping of decadent Greek habits. It may also explain why dramatic comedy was the first genre to be imported, and why satire was the only medium which the Romans could honestly call their own. Of the thirty or so masters of the Latin repertoire, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and Cicero have gained universal recognition. But anyone who recoils from the luxury, gluttony, and cruelty of Roman living must surely feel an affinity for the sensitive souls who reacted most strongly against their milieu— for the exquisite lyrics of Catullus, the biting wit of Juvenal, the epigrams of Martial.
EPIGRAPH
E
PIGRAPHY,
the study of inscriptions, is one of the important auxiliary sciences in exploring the classical world. Since so much material and cultural evidence has perished, the inscriptions which have survived on stone or on metal provide an invaluable source of information. The careful study of tombstones, dedicatory tablets, statues, public monuments, and the like yields a rich harvest of intimate details about the people whom the inscriptions commemorate—their family life, their names and titles, their writing, their careers, their regiments, their laws, their gods, their morality. The great epigraphic collections, such as the
Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum
(CIL) and the
Corpus Inscriptionum Graecarum
(CIG), both produced in nineteenth-century Berlin, are as solid and as durable as the monuments which they record.
The most famous of Roman epigraphs—the Twelve Tables of the Law, which stood for centuries in the Forum—did not survive; but the variety of the extant material is extraordinary.
Roman tombstones frequently bore a poetic description of the dead person’s life and career. A stone from Moguntium (Mainz) carried a protest over the manner of the dedicatee’s death:
Jucundus M Terenti l(ibertus) pecuarius
Praeteriens quicumque legis consiste viator
Et vide quam indigne raptus inane queror.
Vivere non potui plures XXX per annos
Nam erupuit servus mihi vitam et ipse
Praecipitem sese dejecit in amnem:
Apstulit huic Moenus quod domino eripuit.
Patronus de suo posuit.
1
(Jucundus, shepherd, a free slave of Marcus Terentius. Traveller, whoever you are, stop and peruse these lines. Learn how my life was wrongly taken from me, and listen to my vain laments. I was not able to live for more than 30 years. A slave took my life, then threw himself in the river. The Man took his life, of which his master was deprived. (My) patron has raised (this stone) at his own expense.)
Dedications to the gods were a usual feature of public monuments. An inscription discovered in the Circus Maximus, and now placed on an obelisk in the Piazza del Popolo, was originally erected in 10–9 BC by the Emperor Augustus in honour of the conquest of Egypt:
IMP . CAESAR . DIVI. F
AUGUSTUS
PONTIFEX . MAXIMUS
IMP XII. COS XI. TRIB POT XIV
AEGYPTO. IN POTESTATEM
POPULI ROMANI REDACTA
SOLI . DONUM . DEDIT.
2
(The Emperor Caesar Augustus, son of the divine (Julius), Supreme Priest, twelve times Commander, eleven times Consul, fourteen times Tribune, Egypt having passed to the control of the Roman people, has offered this gift to the Sun.)
Objects of a much more humble nature often bear interesting inscriptions. Vases and pottery carried marks of manufacture. Metal stamps, for imprinting a name or advertisement onto clay, were in common use. A whole series of such stamps, from the bottles of an optician, were found at Reims:
D CALLISEST FRAGIS ADASPRITVDI
D(ecimi) Gall Sest(i) [s] frag(is) ad aspritudi(nem)
(Decimus Gallius Sestus’ Eye-Wash for Granulous Pupils)
3
The first Roman writers wrote in Greek. Livius Andronicus (c.284–204), who translated Homer into Latin verse, was an educated Greek slave brought to Rome after the sack of Tarentum in 272
BC.
Serious Latin literature appeared in the second half of the third century
BC,
with the plays of Cn. Naevius (d. c.200
BC),
T. Maccius Plautus (c.254–184
BC),
and P. Terentius Afer, ‘Terence’ (b. 185
BC).
All three made brilliant adaptations of the Greek comedies; with them, the theatre became a central institution of Roman culture. Native Latin poetry begins with Q. Ennius (239–169
BC),
a prime literary innovator. He introduced tragedy, launched the art of satire, and fashioned the Latin hexameter which provided the basic metre of many later poets.
Oratory held a prominent place in Roman life, as it did in Greece. Its greatest practitioner, M. Tullius Cicero (106–43
BC),
spoke and wrote in a polished style which has been taken ever since as the model for Latin prose. A ‘new man’, Cicero rose to the highest office of consul in 63, only to be banished and, after a second spell of political activity, to be proscribed and beheaded. His writings, which included moral philosophy and political theory as well as the orations, had an immense influence both on Christian and on rationalist thinking. He was a champion of the rule of law, and of republican government. His successor, the elder Seneca (c.55
BC–CAD
37), a rhetorician from Cordoba, compiled a great anthology of oratory.
History writing had much to feed on. Titus Livius, ‘Livy’ (59
BC-AD
17), wrote a history of Rome in 142 books, 35 of which are extant. He idealized the Roman Republic, and impresses more by style than by analysis. ‘I shall find satisfaction, not I trust ignobly,’ Livy began, ‘by labouring to record the story of the greatest nation in the world.’ C. Iulius Caesar (100–44
BC)
was both the supreme maker and recorder of Roman history. His accounts of the Gallic War and of the civil war against Pompey are masterpieces of simplicity, once known to every European schoolboy. C. Sallustius Crispus or ‘Sallust’ (86–34
BC)
followed Caesar both in his political and his literary interests. Cornelius Tacitus
(AD
55–120) continued the annals of Livy through the first century of the Empire, and not with any great enthusiasm for the emperors. His inimitably astringent style can also be seen in monographs such as the
Germania
. ‘The revolution of the ages may bring round the same calamities,’ wrote Gibbon in a footnote, ‘but the ages may revolve without a Tacitus to describe them.’
9
The art of biography also flourished. The supreme exponent was C. Suetonius Tranquillus
(AD
c.69–140), sometime secretary of the Emperor Hadrian. His racy
Lives of the Twelve Caesars
is a mine of information and entertainment, outshone only by Tacitus’ study of his father-in-law Agricola, Governor of Britain.
Latin literature undoubtedly reached its heights with the poets of the Augustan Age—Virgil, Horace, and Ovid, the lyricist C. Valerius Catullus (c.84–54), the elegiac poet Albius Tibullus (c.55–19
BC),
and the aptly named Sextus Propertius (c.50–15
BC),
whose love poems to the exasperating Cynthia match those of Catullus to his Lesbia. ‘Cupid is naked’, wrote Propertius, ‘and does not like artifice contrived by beauty.’
P. Vergilius Maro, ‘Virgil’ (70–19
BC),
created language that rarely palls, even with the most mundane of subject-matter. His
Eclogues
or ‘Selections’ are pastoral poems; his
Georgics
eulogize farming. The
Aeneid
, or ‘Voyage of Aeneas’, is an extended allegorical epic which celebrates the Roman debt to Homer and to Greece. Recounting the adventures of Aeneas, a survivor of Troy and ancestor both of Romulus and of the
gens Iulia
, Virgil provided the mythical pedigree with which educated Romans wished to identify. His infinitely precise hexameters are not really translatable. They were written at the rate of one line a day for ten years, and sing in inimitable tone—serene, sustained, subtle, sad:
FELIX QUI POTUIT RERUM COGNOSCERE CAUSAS,
(Happy is he who could learn the causes of things.)
SED FUGIT INTEREA, FUGIT IRREPARABILE TEMPUS.
(But meanwhile time is flying, flying beyond recall.)
OMNIA VINCIT AMOR; ET NOS CEDAMUS AMORI.
(Love conquers all, so let us yield to Love.)
ET PENITUS TOTO DIVISOS ORBE BRITANNOS
(And Britons wholly separated from all the world.)
SUNT LACRIMAB RERUM ET MENTEM MORTALIA TANGUNT.
(There are tears shed for things, and mortality touches the mind.)
10
For Dante, Virgil was
il maestro di lor che sanno
(the master of those who know), and ‘the fount which spilt such a broad river of words’. For the early Christians he was the pagan poet who, in the fourth Eclogue, was thought to have forecast the birth of Christ. For the moderns he was ‘lord of language… poet of the poet-satyr … wielder of the stateliest measure ever moulded by the lips of man’. He probably composed his own epitaph, seen at Pozzuoli by Petrarch:
MANTUA ME GENUIT CALABRI RAPUERE: TENET NUNC
PARTHENOPE. CECINI PASCUA, RURA, DUCES.
(Mantua bore me; Calabria carried me away; Naples now holds me. I sang of pastures, fields, and lords.)
11
Q. Horatius Flaccus, ‘Horace’ (65–8
BC),
Virgil’s friend and contemporary, was the author of
Odes
and
Satires, Epodes
and
Epistles
. He had studied in Athens, commanded a legion, and fought at Philippi before retiring to his Sabine farm under the protection of his patron Maecenas. He was a gentle, tolerant soul. His Epistle to the Pisos, otherwise the
Ars Poetica
, was much admired by later poets. His Satires were directed at human folly, not evil. His Odes shine with translucent clarity, and with
curiosa felicitas
, a ‘marvellous felicity of expression’:
DULCE ET DECORUM EST PRO PATRIA MORI.
(It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.)
PARTURIENT MONTES, NASCETUR RIDICULUS MUS.
(The mountains will give birth, and a silly mouse will be born.)
ATQUE INTER SILVAS ACADEMI QUAERERE VERUM.
(And seek for truth even in the groves of Academe.)
EXEGI MONUMBNTUM AERE PERENNIUS … NON OMNIS MORIAR.
(I have created a monument more lasting than bronze… I shall not die completely.)
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Horace is the most imitated, and the most translated of poets.
P. Ovidius Naso, ‘Ovid’ (43 BC–17
AD),
was a leading figure of Roman society until banished to the Black Sea coast by the Emperor Augustus. The causes of his exile, he says, were ‘a poem and an error’. The poem was undoubtedly his
Ars amatoria
, ‘The Art of Love’; the error probably involved the Emperor’s daughter Julia, who was also banished. Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
or ‘Transformations’, which rework over two hundred Greek and Roman myths and legends, has been rated the most influential book of the ancient world. It has provided the favourite reading not only of the Romans but of people as different as Chaucer, Montaigne, and Goethe. It has inspired a torrent of creative works from Petrarch to Picasso.
Si vis amari
, wrote Ovid,
ama
(If you wish to be loved, you, too, must love).
13
The Silver Age of Latin literature, which lasted from the death of Augustus to perhaps the middle of the second century, contained fewer giants. Apart from
Tacitus and Suetonius, there gleamed the talent of the Stoic philosopher Seneca II, of the two Plinys, of the poet Lucan, the rhetorician Quintilian, the novelist Petronius, and, above all, of the satirist D. Iunius Iuvenalis, ‘Juvenal’ (c.47–130).
Difficile est saturam non scribere
, wrote Juvenal (it is difficult
not
to write satire).
The calculated violence of Roman life was proverbial. The butcheries of the foreign wars were repeated in the civil strife of the city. Livy’s catch-phrase,
Vae vic-tis!
(Woe to the vanquished) was no empty slogan. In 88
BC,
when the so-called ‘Vespers of Ephesus’ saw perhaps 100,000 Romans massacred in one day on the orders of King Mithridates, Sulla, leader of the aristocratic ‘Optimates’, marched on Rome and proscribed the rival followers of Marius. The head of the Tribune, P. Sulpicius Rufus, was exhibited in the Forum. The urban Praetor, preparing to conduct a sacrifice before the Temple of Concord, was sacrificed himself. In 87
BC,
when Rome opened its gates to Marius, it was the turn of the Optimates to be slaughtered. Marius’ legions of slaves and his Dalmatian Guard struck down every senator whom the general did not salute. Among his victims were names of later importance—Gn. Octavius, the reigning consul, M. Crassus, M. Antonius, L. Caesar, all ex-consuls. In 86, after the sudden death of Marius, the general’s associate, Q. Sertorius, summoned the executioners on the pretext of distributing their pay, then cut them down
en masse
to the number of some 4,000. In 82, when the Optimates finally triumphed, they too massacred their prisoners: ‘the clatter of arms and the groans of the dying were distinctly heard in the Temple of Bellona, where Sulla was just holding a meeting of the Senate’.
14
Thereafter, to avoid such scenes, the procedure of proscription was formalized. Victorious factions would post a list of names in the Forum to summon the leaders of the defeated faction to stand trial or risk confiscation. Men on the list who killed themselves in time, usually by opening their veins in a warm bath, could save their families from ruin. Those who failed to do so found their names on a new list, carved in marble, declaring their lives and the property of their kin to be forfeit. In 43, for example, the proscription of the second triumvirate caused the deaths of at least 300 senators and 2,000 knights. Among them was Cicero, whose head and hands, severed from the corpse, were exhibited on the rostra of the Forum. Where the ruling class of Rome set an example, the populace followed.
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