Chapter III: Prologue

“Silver” and “Gold” in Roman literature—The period
from Tiberius to Hadrian (A.D. 14–138)—Historical
aspects—Cosmopolitan Rome—Tangible remains—Emperors in relation
to literature—Risks in writing—Fresh individual forces in
Silver literature—The conventional in education—Declaiming and
reciting—Epigrammatic point and decorative tinsel—Corrective
factors in real life—Serious thought—Stoicism—The Stoic
opposition—Influence of Stoic doctrine—Influence of the
provinces—Variety in “Silver” themes and style—Changing
features in the language—Concentration on the terse, the
surprising, and the poetic—Grammar and vocabulary—A few summary
reflections.

In the literary history of Rome one of the most brilliant and attractive epochs is that part of the first and second centuries of the Christian era which critics have usually distinguished with the epithet of “Silver.” The Silver Age of Roman Literature is regarded in the present work as that immediately following the great times of Augustan poetry and prose. What has been traditionally reckoned the Golden Age coincided with the productive careers of Cicero and then Livy in prose, and lasted from Lucretius to Ovid in verse. While, soon after it began, Catullus wrote his anti-Caesarian lampoons, it reached its fullest glory when Virgil and Horace by their works threw lustre around the emergence of the imperial family—_ecce Dionaei processit Caesaris astrum_, in the language of the Eclogues. Politically, therefore, the Golden Age saw the final overthrow of the old senatorial republic and the inauguration of state-control by a single ruler for Rome and the Roman dominions. Such public oratory as Cicero’s, which adorned the earlier phases of the age amidst the unfettered interplay of republican politics, had become an impossible anachronism before its close, when Augustus concentrated in his person all the significant powers of the ancient magistracies—_munia senatus magistratuum legum in se trahere_ is the remark of Tacitus. In time, then, the Golden Age may be dated from 70 B.C. to A.D. 14, a stretch of eighty-four years.

The Silver Age is a longer period, even when restricted, as some prefer, to the years between A.D. 14 and 117, that is from the beginning of Tiberius’s reign to the end of Trajan’s. Here it has been extended to include the reign of Hadrian, A.D. 117-138, after which Latin literature is marked partly by sterility, partly by an artificial archaizing movement, partly by the entirely different train of thought expressed in Christian apologetics. Historically, this period of a century and a quarter coincides with the reigns of all but the first two of Suetonius’s twelve Caesars, and, in addition, the reigns of Nerva, Trajan and Hadrian, thirteen emperors altogether. If in the preceding age the empire was still young and so far, under Augustus, only partially tested, now during these succeeding generations, in spite of the enormities of individual emperors and in spite of the ghastly interval of bloodshed among successive candidates for the purple after Nero’s suicide, the hold of the system upon the world was firmly established, and its organization perfected, on the whole, for the benefit of mankind. With the _Pax Romana_ came greater safety for life and limb both in Italy and in the provinces; governors abroad were more under the central control; roads were improved to meet the requirements of the imperial post-service for despatches; the water-supply of Rome and other cities was diligently cared for; new harbours were constructed; industry and trade increased, at any rate up to the point at which the policy of the bread-dole effected moral ruin for the population and in the end financial ruin for a state in which the value of free agriculture and free capital was misunderstood. _Nihil est ab omni parte beatum_; and so, upon examination, it is plain that amidst the material well-being and felicities of the second century, even in the prosperous Antonine age with which Gibbon began his history of _The Decline and Fall_, there lurked elements of disintegration which would lead to the troubles of the third century.[1]

During the first century events had revealed the state-secret not only that emperors might be made by other electors than the Senate, but that they might be made even elsewhere than in Rome. The tendency, in fact, was towards a military monarchy, as the careers of Galba, Otho, Vitellius and Vespasian showed. When one considers, it seems well-nigh inevitable that an emperor’s absolute power abroad should ultimately expand his theoretically limited power in Italy and Rome towards absolutism. Between Augustus as first citizen at the opening of the century and Domitian claiming to be “Lord and God” towards its end vast changes had intervened. The dyarchy which Augustus was careful to respect had in time gone far on its way to monarchy; for the senate not infrequently acted under imperial coercion. More and more, too, it grew evident that the basis of the ruler’s power was the army—a conception abhorrent to Romans of the constitutional republic. In this connexion it is significant that the title _imperator_ became commoner than _princeps_ about Trajan’s time. Moreover, the worship of emperors during their lifetime in association with the cult of the goddess Roma, and the deification of certain emperors after death, outwardly exalted their office. It is, however, difficult to see how the notion of _apotheosis_ could seriously survive among thinking readers of Seneca’s satire on the dead emperor Claudius; and it is a strange contradiction inherent in circumstances that, while the sacrifice in honour of a Caesar as the public test of loyalty involved the martyrdom of many Christians, yet the Caesar-worship from which their faith revolted did actually by its attainment of official universality prepare the way for the ultimate predominance of the Christian religion.

The crucial problem for the empire was, as Augustus foresaw, one of consolidation rather than aggrandisement; and the only notable departures from this policy during the whole period were connected with the annexations in Britain begun by Claudius and those in Dacia and the East carried out by Trajan. Trajan’s Oriental conquests in the first quarter of the second century, though soon abandoned by his successor, brought the Roman Empire to its widest extent, and marked the extremity of contrast between the primitive pastoral settlement near the Tiber and the capital of world-wide dominions into which it had evolved. Rome had in the first century become more cosmopolitan than ever—a phenomenon sufficient to illustrate in the eyes of a Seneca the essential brotherhood of mankind, but in the eyes of a Juvenal the objectionable ubiquity of the alien interloper. It has been argued that, early in the second century, when Juvenal and Tacitus wrote, “a very small percentage of the free plebeians on the streets of Rome could prove unmixed Italian descent.”[2] Here at once we meet a feature of importance for literature. Rome possessed a wonderful power of nationalizing the foreigner; but there was sure to be a reaction on her own life and thought. This large cosmopolitan and international element in the capital contributed towards a widening of their horizon for literary men, and to it the human note unquestionably observable in the Silver Age owed a great deal.

The whole period has been made very real to us by writers within recent times who have investigated its political, constitutional, social, religious and artistic history.[3] Modern inquiry has combined with ancient documents to recreate the historical background requisite for appreciation of the literature, in such a way that few epochs of the past are so intimately known. In some degree this clear view is due to the strikingly human note, the living interest in man and his concerns, which is characteristic of the ablest writers in the Silver Age. Much of its history and many of its personages have been made to live for us by Tacitus and Suetonius; its society by Petronius’s novel, the miscellaneous poems of Statius, the younger Pliny’s letters, Martial’s epigrams and Juvenal’s satires; its science by the elder Pliny; its rhetoric by the elder Seneca and Quintilian; its practical ethics by Seneca the younger. Inscriptions and coins tell their tale; the Colosseum remains the most imposing monument to the Flavian dynasty; Pompeii puts before us the dwellings, decorations and the very street-paving of the time; and Hadrian is brought nearer through his magnificent villa, a veritable _urbis opus_, close under Tivoli, his gateway at Athens, his wall in Britain, and his mausoleum familiar now as the Castel Sant’ Angelo at Rome.

Before passing from the historical aspects of the age, one may observe how the emperors comported themselves in relation to literature.[4] They were well-educated men, and several of them showed literary talent. Tiberius in early life cultivated the acquaintance of M. Valerius Messala Corvinus, the friend of Horace and Tibullus, and modelled his oratorical style on Messala’s. It was said that he imitated the pathetic love-stories of Parthenios of Nicaea, who taught Virgil Greek. Tiberius’s successor Caligula was no author, but he had a turn for shrewd criticism, discernible in his sharp remark about Seneca’s style as “sand without lime;”[5] and he recognized classic greatness in literature well enough to be insanely jealous of it. The next two emperors, Claudius and Nero, displayed ability as writers, the one in prose, the other in verse. If we then turn to the Flavian emperors, we find that, although none of the three felt so enthusiastic for literature as either Claudius or Nero had done, yet they all extended a certain limited patronage to authors. Vespasian, _bourgeois_ man of business though he might be, was not unskilled in Greek eloquence, and composed memoirs. Titus, we know, wrote a poem on a comet; while his brother Domitian was devoted to poetry in youth, and later fostered poetic rivalry by the Capitoline and Alban contests. That competition, when the right circumstances co-operate, can give health to literature is evident from the lasting greatness of Athenian drama: unfortunately, the spirit of Domitian’s reign was such as mainly to favour mediocrity or truckling in its poets. Trajan, without profound culture himself and no very active patron of letters, at least maintained friendly relations with such authors as the younger Pliny and the Greek Dion Chrysostom. His successor Hadrian, versatile and Hellenic in taste, dabbled in Latin poetry; but, to judge from the surviving fragments, never so successfully as at the last, when he composed his death-bed adieu in half a dozen lines to his soul.

Even such a cursory glance at rulers of the time indicates that the drawback for literature consisted not in their particular unfitness to play the literary patron but in a generally untoward environment. Artistic creation of the very freest and highest order was little likely to thrive in the atmosphere of the first century. The risk of danger always lay hidden in the unfathomable temperament of an emperor; and in the very essence of the new _régime_ there wrought elements inimical to the safe production of literary work. The outspoken oratory of the past was unacceptable; history was capable of giving offence in high quarters; even drama could be frowned upon for a line misconstrued as a political allusion. At a time when Phaedrus’s beast-fables were denounced as libellous insults, it is not surprising that histories of human affairs should be adjudged to the flames. The prospects for literary men must often have appeared dark during the sway of the Julio-Claudian dynasty in situations such as were created by the espionage which Tiberius permitted in his later days, by the incalculable caprice of Caligula, the uncertainties of policy under the wives and freedmen of Claudius, and the egotistic vanity of Nero. The wonder is not that we have so small a yield from times so difficult, but that we have so much that has proved worth preserving. Fortunately, writers took risks. Under Nero, Petronius was safe, up to a point, in writing a novel of low adventure, and Seneca was safe, again up to a point, in writing essays on high moral principles, though even these might be interpreted as implied reproofs. Lucan, on the other hand, was clearly on the thinnest ice in writing an epic about Pompey’s heroism in his warfare against Julius Caesar. This was doubly dangerous; because while the poem might very well be regarded as anti-imperial, it might also stir the jealousy of a poet-emperor. Later, under the Flavians, no one could be sure when the court might grow too suspicious to tolerate philosophers any longer in Rome, as happened in A.D. 75 and 90. Deep intellectual speculation has always been liable to enmity as unsettling: and so many members of noble houses had in troublous times found consolation in Stoicism that its teaching particularly tended to be associated with opposition to the imperial system. Apart from this aspect, it may be noted in passing how Stoic thought shows itself in such poets as Persius, Lucan and Juvenal, and in such prose writers as Seneca, the elder Pliny and Tacitus. The period of terror during the later part of Domitian’s reign, fifteen years of “silence” as Tacitus viewed it, pressed most severely upon history. But it was not impossible to write securely, if an author chose remote epic themes as Statius did, or composed scores of occasional epigrams as Martial did. Indeed, there never was a time when dilettanti recited more energetically their latest productions before a select circle of friends. After Domitian’s death, history and oratory recovered a modicum at least of their old freedom. Nerva’s principate was too brief to affect literature deeply, though it brought that welcome release from tyranny which bore fullest fruit in the historical labours of Tacitus under Trajan. This fresh impulse, however, seemed almost spent by the reign of Hadrian; for Suetonius and Florus were artistically but poor successors to Tacitus. Under Hadrian a revival of interest in Hellenism and the prominence of authors writing in Greek combined with the emperor’s example to act as positive setbacks to the fashion of writing in Latin.

In its literary aspects the whole age makes a fascinating study. Its appropriate epithet of “Silver” concedes the classic superiority of the Golden Age (_aurea prima sata est aetas ... subiit argentea proles_); but silver, viewed as metal or as literature, retains a value of its own, and the metaphorical title, whether it calls to mind a glittering style or a literary convention already somewhat silvered with time, is both picturesque and instructive. No apology is needed for a survey of literary works created during the greatest period of the Roman Empire. Parallel with its administrative triumphs and its permanent services to civilization, we discover, in an adventure among its masterpieces, artistic production of high quality, thought commensurate with the achievement of the times, and engrossing portrayal of life. Convention has been alluded to, and we may trace much of it at work among authors; yet it is only fair to point out that the Silver Age had its unique geniuses. Nowhere else is a Tacitus or a Juvenal to be found, each uttering an individual note, and each among the greatest names in the domains of historical prose and poetic satire respectively. Phaedrus in fable, Petronius in the novel, Martial in epigram, Pliny in letter-writing were all fresh forces; nor is there any Seneca elsewhere in Latin, whether we like his style or not. Even the massive proportions of some works composed during this age are impressive though sometimes forbidding—it is so much easier, and commoner, to criticize than to read the thirty-seven books of Pliny’s _Natural History_ or the seventeen of Silius’s epic. Before the incessant industry of the elder Pliny, less hard-working generations might, like his nephew, stand abashed. But such phenomenal diligence is not necessarily attractive; and probably what most draws readers to the Silver Age is that human note already mentioned which, in the midst of widespread artificiality elsewhere, makes many of the authors interesting to all periods. No one can take up Petronius, Juvenal, Martial or Tacitus without feeling that real life and real things are being described and without feeling absorbed by that reality.

The chief formative factors of this complex literature may be rapidly passed under review. Foremost of all the influences at work was the contemporary education in letters and rhetoric.[6] While the general training in letters opened up the treasures of Greek and Latin literature as sources of inspiration for prospective writers, the special training in the principles and practice of speaking profoundly affected style. The predominant study of poets in the rhetorical academies tended to obliterate the true demarcation between prose and poetry, leaving upon prose the indelible poetic tint which is characteristic of the Silver Age. The imitation of Virgil, traceable in Lucan, well-marked in Valerius Flaccus, and still more so in Silius and Statius, was by no means confined to these epic writers; it spread to occasional verse, epigram and satire; and it invaded prose, so that the style of Tacitus must be viewed in relation to Virgilian influence. Nor was this only a matter of poetic colour: the bones, as it were, of the language were affected in the altered grammar and syntax which have presently to be discussed and illustrated.

Manner of expression came to be deeply modified by the systematic instruction in rhetoric and by the declamatory exercises (especially the _controuersia_ and _suasoria_) composed by the student practising the use of figures of speech, exclamations, apostrophes, interrogations, and innumerable other artifices, which he had been taught by a rhetor to consider effective for the purposes of argument or display. The declamation wore more than one aspect. A serious ingredient in the educational system, it was an exercise to be regularly practised by learners as a training in argument; and, whatever its futility under some instructors, sensible authorities like Quintilian had in view the solid kind of argument useful in a law-court.[7] It combined certain of the functions of a modern essay with those of a debating society. It had even a romantic side; for not a few of its themes anticipated elements in medieval tales and modern novels. But it was open to attack from the first. The Romans indeed showed their common sense in calling the exercise _declamatio_—something of loud-voiced overstatement was implied in that half-derogatory term. Being a pillar of the educational fabric it was, like most things in education, pretty sure to be criticized. However much pleasure it might give an admiring parent to hear his son exhibit his eloquence on speech day, this supreme test of the school career and reputed passport to success in life was subjected to incisive attacks, examples of which may be read in Petronius and Tacitus. No one could deny the readiness attainable by such practice in the rhetorical academy, any more than one could fairly overlook the metaphysical importance of some at least of the themes with which medieval Scholasticism was concerned; but in the one case, as in the other, a ceaseless immersion in verbiage caused stagnation of thought. Obscurantist professors of what was in itself an excellent art checked the progress of eloquence and robbed it eventually of life. Yet for generations it defied detraction, and in spite of defects, produced a long line of capable speakers. Unduly elaborated subtlety was at the worst wearisome: it was not destructive like the shameless perversion of the art practised by professional informers (_delatores_), who saw in the share of confiscated goods allowed to them by the Government a handsome reward for misapplying rhetoric towards compassing convictions on charges of treason.

Two sets of circumstances reinforced this rhetorical influence; one, the not uncommon habit of continuing exercise in declamations, either privately or under a master, long after college days; the other, an author’s custom, derived from Augustan times, of holding _recitationes_ of his compositions in prose or verse before an invited gathering of friends, partly to elicit criticism, partly to advertise a forthcoming work, and also very largely to impress the audience. Under this last aim lay many pitfalls. Literature designed for a kind of parade tended to repeat the qualities of the academic show-piece. The ideal coveted was the production of telling effects. Hence ingenuity was expected in narrative, description and argument, with the result that a wide entrance stood open for the precious and far-fetched. A discourse, an oration, or a poem had to exhibit its author’s ability in elaborating academic commonplaces into surprisingly terse epigrams or _sententiae_; it had to wear the variegated adornments of rhetoric so that the style often became outrageously rococo in taste. Of the worst excesses of the Silver Age one feels as did Alceste in _Le Misanthrope_, when he expressed his disdain for Oronte’s sonnet:

“Ce n’est que jeu de mots, qu’ affectation pure,
Et ce n’est point ainsi que parle la nature.”

Artificiality driven to such extremes meant a divorce from plain common sense; for natural feeling met its death in the exuberant riot of epigram, word-play, antithesis, apostrophes and other devices. Similarly, when presenting a hypothetical case in a _controuersia_ or _suasoria_, the speaker’s temptation was to cast about for novel arguments; and the quest after something novel was apt to lead far away from reality into unnatural extravagances of perverted ingenuity. Both defence and attack in the _controuersiae_ reported by the elder Seneca give, we shall find, many examples of those incredibly smart inventions. Rhetorical gymnastics of this sort, while they had the merit of ensuring a high degree of readiness and finish in speech and in style as a whole, yet fostered in some speakers and authors an empty glibness from which no great literature could grow. The contemporary complaints about the decadence of oratory are significant. Despite all the attention lavished upon it, eloquence deteriorated. Over-cultivation would contribute to a measure of staleness, and political conditions had taken the heart out of the old type; but, beyond all that, the rhetoric of the schools was too remote from truth to produce good style.

It was well for literature, therefore, that actual life counteracted the cramping effects of rhetorical training. Many a promising academic speaker got his first salutary awakening when he had to plead a real case in a law-court. Furthermore, contact with the multiplicity of life in Rome, and with the various peoples included in the empire, was certain to stimulate and deepen an interest in man as such. It would be a profound mistake to overlook the complex nature of the Silver literature, or to imagine that we could sum up its qualities as if they were solely those of clever rhetoric, or to forget the realists of the time—Petronius, Juvenal, Martial. Of these three, while Petronius proves that he could compose in the conventional vein when he liked, it is Juvenal who makes the most interesting blend, because he can be at once declamatory and realistic. If the worst manner of the declamations reappears in some of the rant which disfigures Seneca’s tragedies, Juvenal on the other hand is not mastered by but master of the declamatory element. This simply indicates that rhetorical artifice could be turned to different purposes by different hands: while it was used with mechanical precision by Valerius Maximus and with oppressive ingenuity by Lucan, it attained a miraculous brilliance under the pen of Tacitus. One feels with relief that Tacitus avoids Lucan’s besetting sin of overdoing the epigrammatic; for no Latin author is so absorbingly possessed by the passion for point as Lucan. Like Ovid in his quest after cleverness, Lucan casts about among several ways of saying the same thing, serves up obscure subtleties, and inserts digressions favourable to erudite description. As in his fellow epic-writers Valerius, Statius, Silius, this love of description again and again beguiles the author into subordinating the artistic unity of the whole to the elaboration of separate passages.

It has been pointed out that, alongside of this prevalence of the academic, there was the corrective element of genuine interest in man to give permanent value to much of the Silver Literature. While direct observation of life was the best antidote to unreal rhetoric, there were other factors which made for serious thought in preference to merely smart expression. One, already mentioned, was the Stoic philosophy, which offered to its followers an ordered view of the world as well as guidance in matters of conduct, especially at a crisis in life. Now grown more practical and therefore more Roman, since it had abandoned its extremest paradoxes, neo-Stoicism counted among the influences which encouraged a fellow-feeling amongst mankind. Between Stoicism and Cynicism, which the earlier Stoics had admitted to be a short cut to virtue,[8] there was much in common. In agreement broadly, although not in detail, concerning virtue, reason (_logos_), cosmopolitanism and freedom of will, both disciplines reckoned numerous adherents in the early empire. They now definitely overshadowed the neo-Pythagoreans and neo-Sceptics. Other schools also had lost ground. The prestige of Epicureanism was waning, while pure Platonism and pure Aristotelianism failed to attract the Roman mind. But Stoicism contained elements more commendably intelligible. Above all things, it emphasized conduct: it was an applied science of life, offering for troublesome enigmas a solution which, even if not finally satisfying, claimed a true accord with nature, and in the experience of many was found workable. With less demand upon intellectual subtlety than Platonism, practical Stoicism more adequately suited the Roman temperament as a preparation for facing the things that may happen.[9] For many thinking Romans it must have been a consolation to realize that, though they might feel repelled from activity in the political sphere controlled by a Caesar, they yet remained citizens of a cosmopolis—a world-state, wherein they were fellow-citizens with God, participators in the divine essence and free by reason of a freedom divinely conferred. “God is near you,” writes Seneca, “with you, within you. This I say, Lucilius: a holy spirit abides within us, watcher of our deeds good or evil, and guardian over us.”[10] In the spiritual realm, then, the Stoic was an intellectual aristocrat, conscious of an eternally virtuous power which enabled him to disdain misfortune and defy a Nero or a Domitian. Nor was this position the outcome of tumid rhetoric or ingenious theorizing: it was put to the proof: it was a faith in which men died and women faced exile.

Theoretically the Stoic creed did not prevent its followers from being loyal citizens of the empire; but in practice there was certain to be conflict. Their exaltation of virtue and their austere regimen in life were implicit rebukes to a luxurious emperor or court: the not uncommon actual abstention of Stoics from politics and their half-cynical attitude of independence gave further grounds for suspicion. Julius Kanus offended Caligula by uncompromising argument, and Thrasea under Nero was charged with disbelief in the deification of Poppaea and with contempt for state-religion. Besides, the historical outlook of many Stoics as _laudatores temporis acti_ tended to give umbrage in high imperial quarters. Revolutionary sympathies might not illogically be suspected in enthusiasts for “Romans of the olden times.” It had been dangerous to call Cassius “last of the Romans”: it was scarcely less dangerous to drink toasts to the memory of Brutus and Cassius on their birthdays.[11] There lay significance in the fact that Helvidius Priscus, who had been banished by Nero, renewed under Vespasian his subversive propaganda in favour of what was termed democracy, but was really planned to be a government of Rome by the senatorial class in consonance with philosophical ideas.[12] It is scarcely surprising then that Vespasian expelled all philosophers except Musonius.[13] Only after Domitian did the imperial government become reconciled with Stoicism, which in the second century was the prevailing creed of educated Romans and found one of its classic exponents in the Greek reflections of an emperor.

The concept of a Stoic opposition under the empire must not call up the picture of a regularly organized party of disaffection. The Stoic might, like Seneca, take service with a Caesar. But among several features of the empire which provoked hostility two at any rate stand out. A Stoic could not avoid feeling repelled at once by Caesar-worship, and by the development of a largely mechanical bureaucracy in which the individual lacked scope for the competent performance of duty. Now Stoicism claimed to supply the very competence for which there was little or no safe outlet in imperial employment. The strong tendency among Roman Stoics of the first century to accentuate the individual came less from an aggressive Cynic standpoint than, as in Seneca, from a conception of the inward development of personality effected by rigorous self-examination. It did not amount to an assertion of the individual as an absolute and independent entity; nevertheless, it encouraged that doctrine of self-sufficiency and that portion of disdain for others which can be illustrated from both Lucan and Persius.

Nor should the senatorial opposition under the Caesars be mistaken for lineal representatives of the nobles of the republic. The old families died out fast: some of their scions, as Tacitus and Juvenal show, lapsed into indigence and menial occupations. The patrician houses of the senate in Julius’s day are almost extinct by Hadrian’s time: Aemilii, Claudii, Fabii, Manlii and Valerii are gone: it is almost a surprise to find Cornelii. This disappearance of the ancient blood was due not so much to tyranny as to that voluntary childlessness which imperial legislation had attempted to discourage. A large proportion, then, of the new aristocracy was not of the old republican stock, but represented a fresh strain drawn from the industrial democracy of Caesar’s age: it was destined in turn to collapse through its own prosperity.

Both on contemporary and on subsequent thought neo-Stoicism exercised an almost incalculable influence. The insistence on a moral order in nature to which man must conform made for salutary discipline, and the doctrine of the immanence of the divine reason ennobled the conception of duty. The recognition of moral progress, in contrast to the uncompromising tenet of sudden perfection held by the early Stoics, was a more practical, a more encouraging, a more human view which possessed a tonic value beyond the reach of outworn paradoxes. Again, while the Stoic teaching on the brotherhood of man fostered kindliness, that on the equality of man fostered fairness of treatment.[14] These and other doctrines of value colour the deep Stoic influence on Roman law. In the field of religion, Stoicism proved ultimately to be a solvent of polytheism; for though Stoics might profess belief in the divinities of traditional paganism, they yet turned to allegory as an explanation of the myths, and thus tended to undermine an unquestioning acceptance of the gods. Stoicism, therefore, with its pantheistic trend contributed to the annihilation of traditional religion among the intellectuals without fully establishing monotheism to replace the polytheistic system.

Another of the more serious influences of the age, largely, though, as we shall find, not entirely independent of rhetorical artifice, was the practical interest in learning of an encyclopaedic sort, exemplified in Celsus, the elder Pliny and the lost works of Suetonius. The discontent repeatedly expressed over men’s waste of time is another reminder that the more serious thinkers were unlikely to reap permanent satisfaction either from social amenities or from vapid rhetoric. We have something like a gospel of work if we combine Phaedrus’s scoffing remarks on the fussy _ardaliones_, Seneca’s distaste for spending energy on trifles, the elder Pliny’s nervous husbandry of hours for study, his nephew’s grumblings about encroachments upon leisure, and even Martial’s regrets over procrastination and lost opportunities—_soles ... nobis pereunt et imputantur_, as he so humanly says.

Yet another influence which must not go unnoticed is that of the provinces, and especially the influence exercised by the old province of Spain. With some claim to have developed a partially independent culture of its own, it spoke a Latin which naturally retained certain idioms, words and sounds used by previous generations of soldiers and colonists. Latin which had grown old-fashioned at Rome might still in these days be heard in Spain. It is not altogether fanciful to detect a Spanish note in parts of the Silver Literature; for among Romano-Spaniards of the time were the Senecas and Lucan, Columella, Quintilian, Martial, besides several rhetors of standing. Trajan was a native of the Spanish Italica, where Hadrian’s ancestors had lived since the days of the Scipios. It is significant of the contribution being made by the provinces to Rome that the Spanish influence is observable in the first century, to be followed by the development of an African Latinity in the second, and the flourishing of Romano-Gallic rhetoric in the third. The contemporary influence of Greece also acted externally upon Rome in so far as it was exerted by Greeks who taught or wrote in the city. History has recorded how responsive to personal contact with Greece itself were emperors like Nero and Hadrian; but the deeper Hellenic influence lay imbedded in the literature of the past, constantly lectured upon and assimilated generation after generation in Rome.

The wonderful variety of the Silver literature depends on the intermingling of such currents of influence, old and new. Tradition and inheritance, both Greek and Roman, operate side by side with fresh problems and interests. It was no age of stagnation. Distinctive, though conventional, voices are heard in the epics of Lucan and of his three successors, Valerius, Statius and Silius, whether, as in the case of the first and the last of these, they chose a historical theme, or, as in the case of the other two, they had recourse to mythology. Virgilianism acted there, as it also did in the eclogues by which Calpurnius Siculus transmitted pastoral poetry to Nemesianus. The drama of the day, never very great, has left, besides the _Octauia_, which is the single extant historical play in Latin, only Seneca’s mythological tragedies based on the Greek dramatists. Far more individual power is shown in satire. Persius, a convinced young Stoic student of Horace, fulminates in crabbedly compressed sermonettes against moral backsliding; and later, Juvenal, proclaiming himself to belong to the literary lineage of Lucilius and Horace, displays his unsurpassable strength of invective. Satire may be said to have taken a new turn early in the first century when Phaedrus used the iambics of his beast-fables to suggest with mischievous irony the foibles of mankind, and once more a new turn when, in the last quarter of the century, Martial perfected the epigram with the stinging close after the fashion which has ever since made him famous. In the revival of the Menippean satire, formerly associated with the name of Varro, we again encounter the medley of verse and prose. This type is represented in Seneca’s skit on the deification of Claudius and in Petronius’s picaresque novel.

As regards prose style, the names of Seneca and Petronius mark two different tendencies traceable throughout the period—Seneca, usually artificial, though less so in his satire; and Petronius, as becomes a portrayer of manners, more influenced by the spoken Latin of his day. It might have been expected that encyclopaedic, scientific and technical learning should be uniformly conveyed in the simple style; but it is not always so. Straightforward expression, as a rule, characterized Celsus in the medical part of his encyclopaedia (and presumably also in the lost parts), besides Columella in his agricultural treatise, and Frontinus writing about aqueducts; whereas one detects, on the other hand, the lure of the purple patch when the elder Pliny pauses for intervals of reflection in his gigantic _Natural History_. So too Pomponius Mela’s geographical manual is needlessly decorated with flashes of intended eloquence; while Valerius Maximus’s handbook of stories for rhetoricians would have been more entertaining, had he told the stories in plainer style, leaving embellishment to the rhetoricians for whom he collected them. In history restraint of style is far to seek. Velleius Paterculus is convicted by his excessive superlatives alone, though one forgives him much for his surprisingly original interest in certain aspects of literary history. Curtius Rufus, handling the grand subject of Alexander’s campaigns, shows his ability in semi-romantic description rather than in historical inquiry. During the Neronian era, we meet the epigrammatic manner in Seneca’s philosophy. The brilliant neatness of his sentences lent them a quotability which essayists in later literatures have loved. But this is a manner whose qualities cloy; and a revulsion from his style soon took place, when in the Flavian era Quintilian’s lectures warned students against the seductions of Senecan prose and beckoned them back to Cicero’s rounded periods as the true models for composition. A modified Ciceronianism is, therefore, visible in Quintilian, and a still more modified Ciceronianism in his pupil, the younger Pliny. It also marks Tacitus’s early dialogue on oratory; but his characteristic style, that of his historical writing, is notoriously the triumph of an original genius in verbal parsimony. The closing phase of the Silver Age still exhibits the two tendencies side by side in Suetonius’s business-like sentences and in Florus’s feeble echoes of rhetorical utterance.

The language which was the medium for this literature may be briefly surveyed. Some aspects of Silver Latinity have been incidentally touched upon in connexion with the preponderating amount of poetry read at school, which bore fruit not merely in poetic phraseology and Virgilian imitations, but in constructions (like the familiar dative of the agent with a passive verb) now transferred from poetry to prose. No doubt some of the typical usages and idioms which we shall find illustrated in Silver authors are due to the inevitable change which any living language must undergo. Old words gain a new meaning:[15] new words are introduced. The Latin of Cicero could not have been, either in vocabulary or in sentence-structure or in grammar, the Latin of five generations later:[16] hence we are prepared to observe in Tacitus and other writers of the Silver Age alterations in the employment of the subjunctive mood, fresh meanings of prepositions (like _circa_ and _citra_), new usages of and new positions for connective particles.[17]

In tracing differences between Silver and earlier Latin, it is difficult to assess the relative importance of the universal tendency in language towards change and of such special influences as the systematic drill in rhetoric and poetry. Some apparent changes such as are noticeable in the position of _igitur_, in a seemingly strange word, or strange meaning, or in the use of a mood, are in reality inheritances from one or two prose writers of the Golden Age, especially Sallust and Livy: what had once been an exception has become, if not the rule, at least much commoner. Apart, however, from the inevitable laws of development, the Latin language of the first century and a half of the Christian era was most deeply affected by three fixed attitudes of mind—the rhetorical passion for terseness, the rhetorical passion for novel modes of expression, and the rhetorical concentration of study upon poetic authors. Of these, compression was especially admired in the clause or phrase with epigrammatic point, but its pursuit was accountable not only for the shorter sentence in vogue, but for all sorts of ellipses[18] in grammar and for a copious employment of asyndeton. The avoidance of the stereotyped made for the introduction of new words and meanings, greater freedom in the handling of moods, and a departure from the more regularly balanced clauses and phrases of Ciceronian Latin. Many of the changes in vocabulary are due to the individual genius of prose writers who invented words, or, by adopting them from the common speech, gave them a literary _cachet_. Under this head, Tacitus is an excellent example both as innovator and as lover of the rare word. Probably few who use the term “accumulator,” in speaking of modern apparatus, know that it was invented by Tacitus to describe one who heaps up wealth. The liking for the unusual which pervades his sentence-structure, his expression and his syntax descends into his selection of words. Thus, when there is a choice between noun-forms ending in _-men_ and _-mentum_, he characteristically decides for the more uncommon form: he actually invents _imitamentum_, though _imitamen_ had the poetic sanction of Ovid.

The wholesale invasion of prose by the poetic element already emphasized calls only for a few illustrations in a preliminary survey. It is poetic example that leads Seneca to write _senium_ for _senectus_, _Venus_ for _amor_, _iuuenta_ for _iuuentus_, and leads Tacitus to use Lucretian words like _insatiabiliter_, Virgilian words like _breuia_ (“shoals”), and adjectives like _indefessus_ and _intemeratus_ which both Virgil and Ovid had used before him. It is the poetic turn of expression also that fostered the increasing boldness of personification in prose, the use of abstract nouns in a concrete or personal sense,[19] and the substantival use of a neuter adjective.[20] Poetry affected the grammar of cases and tenses as well. Thus the Latin perfect used in a general sense, like the gnomic “aorist of experience” in Greek, was in Augustan Latin still a poetic usage of which Virgil was fond in the _Georgics_; but by Seneca’s time it had passed into imperial prose.[21] These and other instances, too many for citation here, make it evident that the language no less than the literature of the Silver Age has the interest of possessing distinctive features of its own.

A few reflections may fitly form a summary and conclusion to this introduction. When considering the Silver Age, in style so easily contrasted with its golden predecessor, one must beware of so isolating its artificialities as to produce an impression that it teems with faults. The truth rather is that the Silver Age does by a natural process of literary evolution continue tendencies already present in Augustan times. There is in Horace an artificiality which in some measure anticipates Persius and Statius; there are in Ovid ingenuities prophetic of Seneca and Lucan; and in Sallust and Livy aspects of prose which foreshadow Tacitus. There was no violent break; but in time, if only by reason of a gradual and apparently cyclic exhaustion of genius, the changes become too obvious to miss. It is perfectly reasonable, it is indeed incumbent, to state the differences; but they must be so stated as to include not merely signs of stylistic variation but fresh notes of wider outlook in certain later writers who come close to the general human heart, perhaps because less exclusively aristocratic than the elder Romans. A catholic criticism must do justice to their strength as well as to their weakness.

Such a caveat is needful, because the factors of national deterioration, even though they worked slowly, were unquestionably manifold. They were not merely political and economic: they were physiological and, what is of deep significance for literature, they were psychological. Though it is easy to to take an exaggerated view of vice under the empire, there is nevertheless significance in the fact that the most powerful voices in the whole period are the voices of protest raised by Juvenal and Tacitus: satire and irony inevitably flourished in such an environment. There is a strong temptation to see little but proof of decadence in the conventional imitators among the poets of the age, its literary conceits, and unreal rhetoric, and even in its occasional recourse to the opposite tendency towards innovation, which French criticism has taught us to associate, as much as imitation, with decadent literature. Broadly the undeniable truth is that the Silver poets, whatever their literary skill, have fallen off in sheer artistic achievement. To turn from Lucretius and Virgil to Valerius Flaccus and Statius is to recognize an inferior quality of soul. The Silver poets have less whereon to feed man’s higher nature. Virgil’s profundity of feeling and reflection is something more enduring than refinements based on rhetorical commonplaces. Enough has, however, been said to lay stress upon the variety of the Silver Age, and upon the unfairness of estimating it solely as an age of decadence. One can no more affix a single label on a composite era than one can indict a nation. If the feeble echo or the falsetto note is often heard, it is not the only sound. The literature of the time must be judged positively by its own appeal to the world. Under this aspect, the Silver Age has its unique luminaries, the individuality of whose genius ensures them permanent fame. The mark of the true classic is the power of giving pleasure to the young and old of many generations through some fascinating and constantly renewed testimony to the indestructible continuity of human nature. Its interest is therefore universal, and its popularity unrestricted to an epoch. Readers of different countries at different epochs find in such work a source of eternal delight: it is not alien to them, nor they to it. In so far as authors of the Silver Age can address themselves successfully to mankind, and some of them beyond challenge retain this power, their place is secure among the immortals.