Chapter VII: Calpurnius Siculus and Minor Poetry of the Neronian Age

Calpurnius and Nemesianus—Calpurnius belongs to Neronian
period—Is “Meliboeus” Seneca?—The Seven Eclogues—_Panegyric_
on _Piso_ possibly by Calpurnius—Identification of the patron
eulogized—Some aspects of style.

The Einsiedeln Eclogues—Uncertain date and authorship of
_Aetna_—A blend of dullness and enthusiasm—The best passage—The
_Latin Iliad_—Latin translations from Homer—Suggested
acrostics bearing on authorship—Why was the Latin Homer called
“Pindar”?—Departures from the Greek original—Nero as poet—The
lesser lights.

CALPURNIUS SICULUS

The importance of the eclogues of T. Calpurnius Siculus[947] rests as much upon their testimony to the continuance of one aspect of Virgil’s influence as upon intrinsic poetic value. Eleven eclogues for long went under his name; but the edition by Angelus Ugoletus about 1500 cites the authority of a manuscript now lost for assigning the last four to Nemesianus, who wrote late in the third century. There is, in any case, good internal evidence for the separation; for, in the last four, elision is much commoner; more unclassical shortenings of final _o_ appear; the parenthetic insertions of _memini_ and _fateor_ frequent in the first seven are absent; nor are there any of the allusions to the emperor which were familiar in the previous group. Besides, the ninth eclogue imitates parts of the third, though its taste is more questionable; and there are stylistic resemblances between the final eclogues and the undoubted work of Nemesianus on the chase—his _Cynegetica_.

Whether the epithet “Siculus” means that he came from Sicily or that he was a follower of the Sicilian pastoral of Theocritus cannot be decided. His date too has been the subject of debate. The older theory of Wernsdorf, Gibbon and Bernhardy, that Calpurnius wrote under the Emperor Carus and his sons in the third century has been rejected by most modern authorities for cogent reasons which combine to fix the eclogues early in the reign of Nero. The ruler they mention is young (i. 44; iv. 85, 137; vii. 6),[948] good-looking (vii. 83-84),[949] divine (i. 84 _ipse deus_; vii. 6) and eloquent (i. 45; iv. 87). This applies to Nero satisfactorily.

The contemplation of a better time as in prospect (i. 42, 54),[950] and of fairer treatment of the senate (i. 62) is in keeping with the actual relief and confidence felt in the opening reign of Nero, when contrasted with the closing years of Claudius. The comet described in the first eclogue is most plausibly identified with that which, according to the elder Pliny, Suetonius, and Dio Cassius, betokened the death of Claudius and lasted into Nero’s reign.[951] The scene of the games described in the seventh eclogue is not the Colosseum (which was not begun till the reign of Vespasian), but the wooden amphitheatre of Nero’s time mentioned by Tacitus and Suetonius.[952] No other epoch, then, suits all these references so well as the early Neronian.

How far we can rely on Corydon’s mention of a brother or of poverty for autobiographic information about the poet is extremely doubtful. The reference to Meliboeus as a patron who saved him by assistance from the need of going to Spain[953] may have a personal bearing and the question of identifying the patron has been much discussed. Granted that he is a historical figure, Sarpe’s[954] contention that Meliboeus was Seneca is more satisfying than Haupt’s identification of him with Calpurnius Piso, who in the _Laudatio Pisonis_ is spoken of as under the patronage of Apollo. The fourth eclogue[955] describes Meliboeus as a poet under the auspices of Apollo and the Muses; and further it is suggested that he is an authority on winds and weather. Both references suit Seneca, who was a tragic poet and an observer of physical phenomena in his _Quaestiones Naturales_. Meliboeus is evidently a personage of exalted influence, and the idea of his acting as intermediary between the rustic singer and the emperor[956] is consistent with Seneca’s high position at the imperial court.

The seven eclogues range in length from 84 lines (vii.) to 169 (iv.), and amount to 759 hexameters altogether. They are smoothly composed; and the echoes of Virgilian thought, expression, and poem-construction are obvious. Other Augustans are also laid under contribution. The whole effect, allowing for the artificiality and conventionality inseparable from the pastoral, is pleasing rather than forceful. The poet as “Corydon” is conscious that to seek to be a second Virgil (“Tityrus”) is an ambitious task, and so he represents Meliboeus as saying:

High aim’st thou, Corydon, if Tityrus
Thou striv’st to be. He was a bard inspired
Who on the reed-pipe could outplay the lyre.[957]

Eclogue I is modelled loosely on the so-called Messianic eclogue of Virgil. Two rustics, Corydon and Ornytus, are sheltering from the scorching heat of the noontide,

Where ’neath its very root the beechtree keeps
Guard o’er the bubbling waters of the brook
And casts a tangled shade with swaying boughs,[958]

when they find, carved on the bark of a tree, a prophecy by Faunus which heralds the dawn of a new golden age of peace and clemency associated with the accession of a young ruler, “a very god, who will take in his stout arms the weight of the Roman empire.” Eclogue II, after the manner of Virgil’s seventh eclogue, contains an amoebean contest in quatrains in which a shepherd and gardener praise Crotale, the object of their admiration, and make rival offers in this wise:

_Idas._ Lambs countless bleating ’neath the teat I feed;
Countless Tarentine ewes yield wool for me,
And all the year my snow-white cheese is press’d.
Come, Crotale! This store shall all be thine.

_Astacus._ Who seeks to count the apples which I pick
Below my trees, will sooner count fine sand;
Winter nor summer checks my crop of herbs.
Come, Crotale! The garden all is thine.[959]

In III, Iollas searching for a lost heifer meets Lycidas, who tells how jealousy has driven him to lose his temper so far as to beat his sweetheart, Phyllis. Penitently he now would woo her love back in song, and the poem ends with lollas’s undertaking the part of peacemaker. “Out-and-out country, and clownish at that” (_merum rus idque inficetum_) was Scaliger’s sweeping judgement on the eclogue, which has however redeeming touches of delicacy and chivalry. Eclogue IV, entitled “Caesar,” and much the longest eclogue, is full of eulogy for the youthful emperor, whose services to the world are chanted in responsive verses by Corydon and Amyntas before their patron Meliboeus, who is besought to bring the verses under the eye of his imperial majesty:

_Corydon._ O how my lines that run in slender strain
Would, Meliboeus, then resound, if e’er
Men said I had a home among those hills,
If e’er I chanc’d to see a farm my own!
For oft unkindly poverty would pluck
My ear and say “The sheepfold is thy task.”
Yet, Meliboeus, should’st thou think my lays
Worth noticing, then bear them to our Lord;
For heaven grants thee right to pass within
The Palatine Apollo’s holy walls.[960]

Eclogue V is more reminiscent of the _Georgics_ than of the _Eclogues_, and therefore savours more of work than of the idealized recreation which is the feature of pastorals. It is extravagantly praised in the hexameter summaries of Brassicanus’s edition, to the effect that the agricultural writers Varro, Palladius, Columella, Cato and Virgil himself were all outdone here by the brief precepts enjoined by Mycon upon his young pupil Canthus. The precepts largely concern the management of sheep and goats.

The subject of VI is a not very entertaining wrangle between a pair of shepherds over a decision which one of them had pronounced in a musical contest between two other swains. The wrangle, it is proposed, might be settled by a poetic competition between the disputants; but their bad temper and abuse force the selected umpire to decline to act. The last poem, VII, with a similarity in scheme to Virgil’s first eclogue, possesses a special archaeological interest by reason of the description which the countryman Corydon, newly back from town, gives of the wooden amphitheatre in Rome, where a “young god” of an emperor exhibited thrilling and surprising contests. The variety of rare animals and quick scenic changes had filled the rustic eyewitness with wonderment; and at a distance he could see the emperor himself:

Unless my eyesight lied, one face methought
Combined Apollo’s look with that of Mars.[961]

It will be noted that these poems are not all strictly pastoral: under a bucolic guise the first, fourth, and seventh are essentially court-poetry with semi-political flavour and no little adulation. And in any case, whether they contained flatteries of the emperor or not, poems so artificial, as pastorals must be, were more likely to appeal to courtly readers than to any other audience of their day. The literary influence of Calpurnius Siculus was transmitted through Nemesianus to later centuries than the third, reappearing in the Renaissance pastorals of the Italians, Baptista Mantuanus, Sannazaro, Andrelinus and in the more prosaic French scholar Arnolletus (Arnoullet) of Nevers.[962] The first among these, the “good old Mantuan” cited in _Love’s Labour’s Lost_, printed ten eclogues in 1498, and through them affected many authors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including Alexander Barclay’s “egloges” and, more memorable still, three “aeglogues” in the _Shepheards Calender_ of Spenser.

* * * * *

_A Panegyric on Piso_[963] (now generally taken to be C. Calpurnius Piso, the figurehead in the abortive plot against Nero in A.D. 65) has been claimed by some as the work of Calpurnius Siculus.[964] The 261 hexameters _De Laude Pisonis_ are carefully composed, and, like those of Calpurnius’s eclogues, contain few elisions.[965] The passage where the panegyrist addresses Piso as his Maecenas and a passage in Calpurnius’s fourth eclogue addressed to Corydon’s patron Meliboeus resemble each other in the application of the epithet _tereti_ (probably “slender”) to verse; but the coincidence does not make irrefragable proof of unity of authorship.[966] The utmost that can be said is that the identification is plausible. The ascription to Virgil, reported from a lost manuscript of the whole poem, is impossible; while the ascription to Lucan in a manuscript of extracts results from a copyist’s blunder; and such resemblances in diction to the _Pharsalia_ of Lucan as can be traced[967] in the panegyric are due to identity of period rather than of authorship. As conceivable authors of the poem three other names, Ovid, Saleius Bassus and Statius, have been put forward, of whom the first lived too early and the second and third too late to write it.

More certain ground is reached regarding the person eulogized. The poet, who declares himself under twenty summers old (261), poor, but ambitious for literary fame in preference to wealth (219-221), directs his praises to a youthful patron, eloquent, courteous, generous, musical, fond of games, and especially expert on the draught-board. Such characteristics accord with the description of C. Calpurnius Piso in Tacitus[968] and with Juvenal’s “Piso bonus” of _Satire_ V. 109, where the old scholium recounts Piso to have been such a celebrity for his playing with _latrunculi_ that people flocked to watch him. The panegyric was most likely composed earlier than the eclogues of Calpurnius Siculus; and it does not follow, though the “Maecenas” of the one poem is C. Calpurnius Piso, that the “Meliboeus” in the other poems need be the same patron.

The laudation tends to monotony, though it never becomes absurdly fulsome. Piso, whom the poet more than once addresses as _iuuenis facunde_ (32, 109), is honoured for having renounced the martial glory of his ancestors to

Wage kindly war before a legal judge;[969]

for ability to stir the emotions of the court,

if thou sayest “weep,”
He weeps, then smiles if forced by thee to smile;[970]

and for captivating clients by his courtesy,

thou dost show the path
Of deference, and loving courtest love.[971]

Judged by the test of style alone, the piece has the ring of the first century, and the spirit of the references to oratory is unmistakably post-Augustan. It should be pointed out that the repeated use of _chelys_ for the “lyre” suggests a similar period.[972] But reliance on internal stylistic evidence is ancillary rather than essential, where the recipient of the panegyric has been definitely identified.

MINOR NERONIAN POETRY

Further examples of the bucolic verse of Nero’s age are furnished by the Einsiedeln Eclogues. These are two brief pieces contained in a tenth-century manuscript at Einsiedeln.[973] The first, in 49 hexameters, is a contest of the conventional type between two shepherds who praise the emperor’s dexterity on the _cithara_, the one likening him to Apollo and the Thunderer, the other alluding to his poem on the burning of Troy. The umpire’s decision is wanting. The other piece, 38 lines long, rejoices over the return of the Golden Age,

_Saturni rediere dies, Astraeaque uirgo_,

in the spirit of Calpurnius Siculus’s

_Aurea secura cum pace renascitur aetas_,

and must belong to the happier opening years of Nero’s reign. Beyond this there is no certainty about date or authorship, though considerable learned speculation[974] has been expended on two rather inconsiderable eclogues. The frail argument, for instance, has been used that Seneca’s expression _fas sit uidisse_ in Letter 115 (probably 64 B.C.) must refer to and so be later than _fas mihi sit uidisse deos_ in the first poem. The higher literary quality of the second piece has appeared to some sufficient reason for assuming dual authorship: others have in both seen lost eulogies by Lucan on the emperor: others still ascribe them to C. Calpurnius Piso,[975] laying stress on the way in which the first words of the second poem _Quid tacitus, Mystes?_ seem to be echoed in the first words of Calpurnius Siculus’s fourth eclogue, _Quid tacitus, Corydon?_ Since the speaker there is Meliboeus (identified by some scholars, as we have seen, with Calpurnius Piso), the idea is that he may be quoting from a production of his own. One metrical feature may be pointed out: in the 49 lines of the first eclogue there are fully twice as many elisions as in the 261 lines of the _De Laude Pisonis_, and about as many as in the whole of Calpurnius Siculus.

* * * * *

According to the opinion of many, though the opinion is by no means unchallenged, this same Neronian period produced the _Aetna_,[976] a didactic poem in 644 hexameters on the volcano. Traditionally, it came down among the minor works attributed to Virgil, although even by the time of Donatus doubt had been thrown on the attribution. While, then, it cannot be omitted in an account of the _Appendix Vergiliana_,[977] it equally calls for mention in a review of the later age to which many prefer to assign it. There have not been wanting modern attempts to prove an early date: Kruczkiewicz[978] has reasserted the Virgilian authorship, and Alzinger[979] has argued for the earliest date of all, about half a dozen years after Lucretius’s death in 55 B.C. Independently of obvious imitations of Lucretius in the poem, its general style alone would point to some subsequent generation: technically and after a ponderous manner, the hexameters are Virgilian in cast, and Bücheler[980] would put them at least later than Ovid and Manilius. One cannot but be struck with the frequency of the elisions, if one turns to the _Aetna_ straight from Calpurnius Siculus. The extreme inferior limit of time, on the other hand, is A.D. 79, the year of the eruption of Vesuvius, because in _Aetna_, 424-431, the fires of the sulphurous lands round Naples are regarded as extinct—a view impossible after the renewal of volcanic activity.[981] Scaliger, accepting the authority of certain fifteenth-century MSS., believed that Cornelius Severus was the writer; but a common theory since Wernsdorf has been that the author was Lucilius Junior, the correspondent of the philosopher Seneca and imperial procurator in Sicily. To Lucilius Seneca addressed his moral epistles, the first book of his so-called dialogues, and his _Quaestiones Naturales_. We know from Seneca that he wrote verse and had literary tastes. We know too that Seneca wrote to Lucilius intimating that he expected from him a description of his tour round Sicily, and urging him to climb Aetna and send him information about the mountain:[982]

But you were sure to indulge your own weakness, without a
suggestion from anybody. There’s no fear of your failing
to describe Aetna in your poem (_ne Aetnam describas in
tuo carmine_) and so touch on this commonplace of all the
poets. Virgil’s previous treatment was no hindrance to Ovid’s
handling the theme; and a pair of predecessors did not frighten
Cornelius Severus off it.... Aetna is making your mouth water
(_Aetna tibi saliuam mouet_), or I don’t know you! You’re bent
on writing something fine (_grande_) to match former attempts.

The terms of the letter, it should be observed, suggest not so much a separate poem as the insertion of a description to form an episode in a poem on which Lucilius was at work; and the arguments advanced, taken as a whole, do not avail to place the problem completely outside the range of question.

Should the author ever be indisputably unearthed, his literary reputation will not be vastly enhanced by the discovery; for there is little in the poem to relieve its dullness; textual uncertainties apart, it is not seldom obscure; and, despite the author’s professed search for causes, it makes but indifferent science. So one finds difficulty in understanding Teuffel’s apparently serious criticism of it as “very attractive”;[983] but there is no accounting for taste. At the same time, the author must be credited with an earnest enthusiasm for the study of certain natural phenomena and a disdain for legendary subjects, which at the outset he dismisses as hackneyed, though he himself lapses inconsistently into mythology where he portrays Jupiter as amazed at Aetna’s fiery crashing menace and as alarmed lest the giants are once again to make war on heaven (ll. 202-203).

Men tour the world to see places celebrated in story, he points out, and then scornfully asks, “Do you think such things worth visiting? Study the mighty work of nature the artificer” (_artificis naturae ingens opus aspice_, l. 599). Far less extended, however, than this maxim should imply, his own theme is a single circumscribed corner of nature, almost trivial compared with the _De Rerum Natura_, just as his spirit is one of remarkably tempered seriousness compared with the passionate ardency of Lucretius. Unfortunately, the volcanic fire of which he wrote did not transmit itself to his style; and for his lack of interest in mankind he has paid the penalty of failing to engage a reader’s interest. Significantly, he is most impressive when he leaves off theorizing about the subterranean action of water, wind and fire, or describing ominous hidden rumblings and engulfing lava-streams, in order to show how the danger might affect human beings and elicit high moral qualities. This he does towards the close by introducing the episode of two brothers who rescue their father and mother during a volcanic eruption. The passage, though a little exclamatory and tautological, remains deservedly the best-known part of the poem. The following are excerpts translated from it (604 _sqq._):

Once Aetna burst its caves and glow’d with fire;
As if its inmost furnaces were wreck’d,
One wave of sweeping heat poured forth afar....
Ablaze were crops in fields, and like their lords
Rich acres burn’d, and wood and hill gleam’d red....
Then each man, as his will or strength to snatch
Might prompt, essay’d to save his property.
One groans ’neath gold; another, gathering arms,
Puts them once more around his foolish neck.
One, faint with seizing things, is burdened by
His verses: lightly-laden run the poor!...[984]
All is the prey of fire that spareth none
Or spares the good alone. Yea, once a pair
Of noble sons, one named Amphinomus,
And both brave-hearted in the task they shar’d,
When fires roar’d close upon their homestead, saw
Their father and their mother, bent with eld,
Alas! sink on the threshold wearily.
Cease, men of greed, to lift your spoils belov’d!
Mother and father were _their_ only wealth:[985]
This spoil they’ll snatch, and through the midmost flames,
That gave them confidence, they haste to flee.
O sense of loving duty, best of goods,
Surest salvation for an upright man!
The fire-flames blush’d to touch the pious youths,
And wheresoe’er they turn’d their steps, retir’d.
Blest was that day: the ground they trod unscath’d:
Grim burning reign’d to right and blazed to left.

The title of _The Latin Iliad_ (_Ilias Latina_),[986] though it might well raise great expectations of literary achievement, is conferred upon 1070 hexameters of condensed paraphrase rather than of translation from the long Homeric epic. Judged solely as a summary, its representation of its original is most disproportionate; for over half the Latin total is given to the first five books of the Greek twenty-four. Whereas several of the earlier books get over 100 Latin lines, several of the later get under 10; the fifth book, for instance, gets 149, the seventeenth only 3. The work must have been designed for an educational text-book, and to its employment in schools it doubtless owed its survival, and, what is notable in a production of no outstanding power, its happy chance of materially aiding the knowledge of letters in post-classical times; for in the dark medieval centuries, when Greek was forgotten in Western Europe, this “Latin Homer,” if only with faint and borrowed light, had the incontestable merit of reflecting some of the old radiancy of “the tale of Troy divine.”

Although by no means the sole attempt to give a Latin dress to the epics of the Trojan cycle, in which the Romans by virtue of their fabled descent always felt a national interest, the _Ilias Latina_ is yet the only one which has come down. Other workers in the same field have left of their performance fragments only, or nothing. Roman literature indeed may be said to have dawned with the translation of the _Odyssey_ into Saturnian verse by Andronicus.[987] In Sulla’s time, Cn. Matius, and probably also in the first century B.C. Ninnius Crassus, had rendered the _Iliad_ into hexameters[988] without making any great mark. Then two attempts of imperial date may be mentioned besides the _Ilias Latina_. Attius Labeo, whom the scholiast on Persius declared “unscholarly” (_indoctus_)—exactly the opposite epithet, by the way, to that which Aulus Gellius applied to Matius—turned both _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ into Latin hexameters. Persius calls his _Iliad_ “drunk with hellebore” (_ebria ueratro_),[989] and time has mercifully spared but one line of it. The other attempt was in prose and was the composition of the Emperor Claudius’s influential freedman Polybius. Seneca, in the _Consolatio_ addressed to him, refers to this production twice[990] in commendatory terms. Apparently Polybius had translated Homer into Latin and Virgil into Greek; for Seneca says:

Homer and Virgil have been benefactors of mankind as much as
you have been a benefactor of these poets and of everyone in
deciding to make them known to a wider circle than that for
which they wrote,

and, again,

Take in your hands the poems of either of the two authors
(Homer and Virgil)—poems, the fame of which the abundant toil
of your genius has enhanced, and which you have paraphrased
(_resoluisti_) in such a way that, although their metrical form
has gone (_quamuis structura illorum recesserit_), the charm is
nevertheless preserved; for you have transferred them from one
language to another so well as to secure that most difficult
effect, the bringing of all the beauties of the original over
into a foreign speech.

The _Ilias Latina_ can with good reason be referred to some date earlier than Nero’s death, because its author has introduced into it a passage coloured with loyal Roman sentiment which could have been composed at no time except under the Julian dynasty of the Caesars:

Had not great Ocean’s ruler saved the prince (= Aeneas)
To flee and build New Troy in happier lands,
Raising a stock majestic to the stars,
The clan Rome loves would ne’er have come to stay.[991]

Its hexameters are post-Ovidian, and Plessis[992] ventures not over convincingly to fix its composition as early as in the era of Tiberius, in which case the author must have been contemporary not with Lucan, but with Phaedrus. This author he believes to have been Italicus—not Silius, but another of previous date; and in that belief is involved the question of alleged acrostics at the beginning and end of the poem, which has attracted the curiosity and ingenuity of certain commentators. The initial letters of the first eight lines spell _Italices_ and of the last eight lines _scqipsit_. A conjectural change in the seventh line gives _Italicus_ and a mere transposition of words gives in the latter case _scripsit_. Some are content to leave the opening seven lines unaltered and read _Italice_, either as a vocative, or an adverb (“he wrote Italian-wise”). But the idea of the vocative has prompted tamperings with the next few lines to extract _Sili_, so that the poem would address Silius Italicus. To the acrostics[993] is added the further elaboration of finding after the caesurae in the first six lines the letters of a mesostich, _Pieris_, to mean “The muse wrote it.” Such coincidences, however, in each case partly engineered, lead to no sure ground. Even if “Italicus” were accepted, the style of the _Ilias Latina_ is so unlike[994] that of Silius Italicus in the _Punica_ that believers in the acrostic have had recourse to guessing it to be a work either of his youth or by some one else bearing the same name.

Another puzzle has arisen on the title “Pindarus” which MSS. of the Middle Ages imposed on the Latin Homer. Why should two very different Greek poets have been thus confused? Referring to Lucian Müller’s[995] attempted explanation of this alternative title as based on the coupling of Homer with Pindar in Horace’s _Odes_,[996] Tolkiehn has suggested that the intrusion of “Pindarus” may have been due to the presence in earlier MSS. of “Thebanus,” a possible epithet for Homer in respect of his legendary association with Thebes in Egypt.

As in the _Aratea_ of Germanicus, new matter, though on a smaller scale, is sometimes introduced by the translator. An example of inserted Roman sentiment has been already cited. The last eight lines addressed to Calliope and other powers constitute the translator’s personal farewell to his task, and some of his departures from events or details, as narrated in the Greek, may be caused by his reminiscences of Virgil and Ovid or by his trusting to memory. The modifying influence of Virgil is traceable in a simile here and there; in his making Aetna the forge of Vulcan (856-857), which is not Homeric; and in many turns of expression.[997] There are, besides, positive inexactitudes, such as the assignment of some of Ulysses’s words to Nestor (ll. 151 _sqq._), or the slaying of Democoon by Agamemnon (ll. 372-373) instead of by Ulysses as in Homer. These very additions and negligences acquit the author of having been a slavishly close translator. His Latin possesses the virtue of straightforward clearness, and his versification a considerable share of easy grace.

* * * * *

Nero[998] also was among the poets, although he was one of the friends from whom literary men might reasonably pray to be saved. His education had been to some extent warped; for his mother Agrippina prevented the future emperor from studying philosophy deeply, and Seneca had in eloquence directed his pupil less to the old standard oratory than to the modern school in which the tutor himself cut a prominent figure.[999] It was observable that, unlike previous emperors, he preferred to have his speeches composed for him,[1000] and Seneca could at least check the tasteless bombast of which he sometimes betrayed signs. Towards poetry he had a bent, though he missed supreme success. One may conclude that caprice and mannerism outweighed Nero’s readiness and technique, without believing that the lines ascribed to him by the scholiast on the first satire of Persius are genuinely his. Seneca[1001] commends for its elegance his line about the play of light on a dove’s neck as it moves (_colla Cytheriacae splendent agitata columbae_); and Nero certainly displayed versatility in sportive, satiric and erotic verses, in monologues of a tragic character suitable for his own recitation on the stage, and in his epic _Troica_, whence may have come the episode of “The Taking of Troy” which scandal alleged he chanted to the cithara while Rome was in flames.[1002] His establishment in A.D. 60 of the quinquennial competition of the _Neronia_ arose fully as much from his own ambition to win the prize in public as from any desire to patronize music and poetry.

Caesius Bassus, one of Persius’s senior friends, was a lyric poet of whom Quintilian thought highly.[1003] He may be the same as the author of a work on prosody dedicated to Nero.[1004] Seneca’s friend Vagellius,[1005] who had some reputation as a poet, the satirical versifiers Antistius (Sosianus) and Curtius Montanus mentioned in Tacitus,[1006] and the Serranus included by Quintilian among epic authors may close the list of those who were lesser lights in Neronian poetry, unless the fact that Serranus is coupled by Juvenal with Saleius implies that he lived somewhat later.[1007]

LITERATURE OF THE FLAVIAN PERIOD

A.D. 69–A.D. 96