In this sounder cla.s.s of Roman society, it will be found that the saving or renovating power was, not so much any religious or philosophic impulse, as the wholesome influence, which never fails from age to age, of family duty and affection, reinforced, especially in the higher ranks, by a long tradition of Roman dignity and self-respect, and by the simple cleanness and the pieties of country life. The life of the blameless circle of aristocrats which Pliny determined to preserve for the eyes of posterity, seems to be sometimes regarded as the result of a sudden transformation, a rebound from the frantic excesses of the time of the Claudian Caesars to the simpler and severer mode of life of which Vespasian set a powerful example. That there was such a change of moral tone, especially in the cla.s.s surrounding the court, partly caused by financial exhaustion, partly by the introduction of new men from the provinces into the ranks of the Senate, is certified by the supreme authority of Tacitus.(826) Yet we should remember that men like Agricola, the father-in-law of Tacitus, or Verginius Rufus, or Fabatus, the grandfather of Pliny"s wife, or the elder Pliny, and many another, were not converted prodigals. They knew how to reconcile, by quietude or politic deference, the dignity of Roman virtue with a discreet acquiescence even in the excesses of despotism. The fortunes of many of them remained unimpaired. The daily life of men like the elder Pliny and Spurinna, is distinguished by a virtuous calm, an almost painful monotony of habit, in which there seems to have been nothing to reform except, perhaps, a certain moral rigidity.(827) Above all, and surely it is the most certain proof and source of the moral soundness of any age, the ideal of womanhood was still high, and it was even then not seldom realised. There may have been many who justified the complaint of moralists that mothers did not guard with vigilant care the purity of their children. But there were women of the circle of Tacitus and Pliny as spotless as the half-legendary Lucretia, as they were far more accomplished, and probably far more charming. It is often said that women sink or rise according to the level of the men with whom they are linked. If that be true, there must have been many good men in the days of the Flavian dynasty.
The younger Pliny, whose name, before his adoption, was Publius Caecilius Secundus,(828) was descended from families which had been settled at Como since the time of the first Caesar.(829) They belonged to the local aristocracy, and possessed estates and villas around the lake. Pliny"s father, who had held high munic.i.p.al office, died early, but the boy had the great advantage of the guardianship of Verginius Rufus, for whose character and achievements his ward felt the profoundest reverence.(830) That great soldier had been governor of Upper Germany at the close of Nero"s reign, and, with a deference to old const.i.tutional principles, which Pliny must have admired, had twice, at the peril of his life, refused to receive the imperial place at the hands of his clamorous legions.(831) Pliny was born in 61 or 62 A.D., the time which saw the death of Burrus, the retirement of Seneca from public life, and the marriage of Nero with Poppaea.(832) His infancy therefore coincided with the last and wildest excesses of the Neronian tyranny. But country places like Como felt but little of the shock of these moral earthquakes. There was no school in Como till one was founded by Pliny"s own generosity.(833) But the boy had probably, in his early years, the care of his uncle, the author of the _Natural History_, who, during the worst years of the Terror, was living, like many others, in studious retirement on his estates.(834) The uncle and nephew were men of very different temperament, but there can be little doubt that the character and habits of the older man profoundly influenced the ideals of the younger. The elder Pliny would have been an extraordinary character even in a puritan age; he seems almost a miracle in the age of the Claudian Caesars. He was born in 23 A.D., in the reign of Tiberius; and his early youth and manhood cover the reigns of Caligula and Claudius. He was only 32 when Nero came to the throne. He returned to Rome in 71 to hold a high place in the councils of Vespasian.(835) That more than monastic asceticism, that jealous h.o.a.rding of every moment,(836) that complete indifference to ordinary pleasures, in comparison with the duty, or the ambition, of transmitting to future ages the acc.u.mulations of learned toil, is a curious contrast to the Gargantuan feasts or histrionic aestheticism which were the fashion in the circle of the Claudian Emperors. The younger Pliny has left us a minute account of his uncle"s routine of life, and justly adds that the most intense literary toil might seem mere idleness in comparison.(837) His studies often began soon after midnight, broken by an official visit to the emperor before dawn. After administrative work was over, the remainder of the day was spent in reading or writing. Even in the bath or on a journey, this literary industry was never interrupted. A reader or amanuensis was always at hand to save the moments that generally are allowed to slip away to waste. He tells t.i.tus in his preface that he had consulted 2000 volumes for his _Natural History_.(838) The 160 volumes of closely written notes, which the austere enthusiast could have sold once for 3500, might have challenged the industry of a Casaubon or a Mommsen.
The laborious intensity of the elder Pliny was probably unrivalled in his day. But the moral tone, the severe self-restraint, the contempt for the sensual, or even the comfortable, side of life, the plain unspeculative stoicism, was a tone which, from many indications in the younger Pliny and in the other literature of the time, appears to have been not so rare as the reader of Juvenal or Martial might suspect. A book like the Caesars of Suetonius, concentrating attention on the life of the emperor and his immediate circle, is apt to suggest misleading conclusions as to the condition of society at large. The old Roman character, perhaps the strongest and toughest national character ever developed, was an enduring type, and its true home was in the atmosphere of quiet country places in northern or central Italy, where the round of rural labour and simple pleasures reproduced the environment in which it first took form. We have glimpses of many of these nurseries or retreats of old-fashioned virtue in Pliny"s Letters. Brescia and Padua, in the valley of the Po, were especially noted for frugality and severity.(839) And it was from among the youth of Brescia that Pliny suggested a husband for the daughter of the stoic champion, Arulenus Rusticus. There must have been many a home, like those of Spurinna, or Corellius Rufus, or Fabatus,(840) or the poet Persius, where, far from the weary conventionality of the capital, the rage for wealth, the rush of vulgar self-a.s.sertion, there reigned the tranquil and austere ideal of a life dedicated to higher ends than the l.u.s.ts of the flesh, or the ghoul-like avarice that haunted death-beds.
There are youths and maidens in the portrait-gallery of Pliny whose innocence was guarded by good women as pure and strong as those matrons who nursed the stern, unbending soldiers of the Samnite and Punic wars.(841)
The great struggle in which the legions of the East and West met again, and yet again, in the valley of the Po, probably did not much disturb the quiet homes on lake Como. The close of that awful conflict gave the world ten years of quiet and reformation, which were a genial atmosphere for the formation of many characters like Pliny"s. The reign of the Flavians was ushered in by the mystery and glamour of Eastern superst.i.tion, by oracles on Mount Carmel and miracles at Alexandria.(842) But the plain Sabine soldier, who was the saviour of the Roman State, brought to his momentous task a clear unsophisticated good sense, with no trace of that c.r.a.pulous excitement which had alternated between the heroics of spurious art and the lowest bohemianism. Vespasian, although he was not a figure to strike the imagination, was yet, if we think of the abyss from which, by his single strength, he rescued the Rome world,(843) undoubtedly one of the greatest of the emperors. And his biographer, with an unusual tact, suggests what was probably one secret of his strength. Vespasian regularly visited the old farmhouse at Reate which was the cradle of his race.
Nothing in the old place was ever changed. And, on holidays and anniversaries the emperor never failed to drink from the old silver goblet which his grandmother had used.(844) The strength and virtue of the Latin race lay, not in religion or philosophy, but in the family pieties and devotion to the State. Vespasian found it urgent to bring order into the national finances, which had been reduced to chaos by the wild extravagance of his predecessors, and to recruit the Senate, which had been more than decimated by proscription, confiscation, and vicious self-abandonment.(845) In performing his task, he did not shrink from the charge of cheese-paring, just as he did not dread the unpopularity of fresh taxation.(846) But he could be liberal as well as parsimonious. He restored many of the ancient temples, even in country places.(847) He made grants to senators whose fortunes had decayed or had been wasted.(848) He spent great sums on colossal buildings and on amus.e.m.e.nts for the people.(849) But the most singular and interesting trait in this remarkable man is that, with no pretensions to literary or artistic culture, he was the first Caesar who gave a fixed endowment to professors of the liberal arts, and that he was the founder of that public system of education(850) which, for good or evil, produced profound effects on Roman character and intellect down to the end of the Western Empire. His motive was not, as some have suggested, to bring literature into thraldom to the State. He was really making himself the organ of a great intellectual movement. For, while the vast field of administration absorbed much of the energy of the cultivated cla.s.s, the decay of free inst.i.tutions had left a great number with only a shadow of political interest, and the ma.s.s of unoccupied talent had to find some other scope for its energies. It found it for ages, till the end of the Western Empire, in fugitive and ephemeral composition, or in the more ephemeral displays of the rhetorical cla.s.s-room.(851) Vespasian perhaps did a greater service in renovating the upper cla.s.s of Rome by the introduction of many new men from the provinces, to fill the yawning gaps in senatorial and equestrian ranks.
Spain contributed more than its fair share to the literature and statesmanship of this period.(852) And one of the best and most distinguished sons of that province who found a career at Rome, was the rhetor Quintilian.
The young Pliny, under his uncle"s care, probably came to Rome not long after Quintilian entered on his career of twenty years, as a teacher of rhetoric.(853) While the elder Pliny was one of Vespasian"s trusted advisers, and regularly visited the emperor on official business before dawn, his nephew was forming his taste and character under the greatest and best of Roman teachers. Quintilian left a deep impression on the younger Pliny.(854) He made him a Ciceronian, and he fortified his character. The master was one who believed that, in education, moral influence and environment are even more important than intellectual stimulus. He deplores the moral risks to which the careless, self-indulgent parent, or the corrupt tutor, may expose a boy in the years when the destiny of a life is decided for better or worse. Intellectual ambition is good. But no brilliancy of intellect will compensate for the loss of the pure ingenuous peace of boyhood. This is the faith of Quintilian, and it was also the faith of his pupil.(855) And it may be that the teaching of Quintilian had a larger share in forming the moral ideals of the Antonine age in the higher ranks than many more definitely philosophic guides, whose practice did not always conform to their doctrine.
Quintilian"s first principle is that the orator must be a good man in the highest and widest sense, and, although he will not refuse to borrow from the philosophical schools, he yet boldly a.s.serts the independence of the oratorical art in moulding the character of the man who, as statesman or advocate, will have constantly to appeal to moral principles.(856) This tone, combined with his own high example of seriousness, honour, and the purest domestic attachment,(857) must have had a powerful effect on the flower of the Roman youth, who were his pupils for nearly a generation.
There are none of his circle whose virtues Pliny extols more highly than the men who had sat with him on the same benches, and who accompanied or followed one another in the career of public office. One of the dearest of these youthful friends was Voconius Roma.n.u.s, who, besides being a learned pleader, with a keen and subtle intellect, was gifted with a singular social charm and sweetness of manner.(858) Another was Cornutus Tertullus, who was bound to Pliny by closer ties of sympathy than any of his friends, and for whose purity of character he had a boundless admiration. They were also united in the love and friendship of the best people of the time.(859) They were official colleagues in the consulship, and in the prefecture of the treasury of Saturn. For another academic friend, Julius Naso, who had been his loyal supporter in all his work and literary ambitions, he earnestly begs the aid of Funda.n.u.s, to secure him official advancement.(860) Calestrius Tiro, who rose to be proconsul of the province of Baetica, must be included in this select company. He had served with Pliny in the army of Syria, and had been his colleague in the quaestorship; they constantly visited one another at their country seats.(861) Such men, linked to one another by memories of boyhood and by the cares of the same official career, must have been a powerful and salutary element in social and political life at the opening of the Antonine age.
It is a curious thing that, while Pliny lived in the closest friendship with the Stoic opposition of Domitian"s reign, and has unbounded reverence for its canonised saints, as we may call them, he shows few traces of any real interest in speculative philosophy. Indeed, in one pa.s.sage he confesses that on such subjects he speaks as an amateur.(862) He probably thought, like his friend Tacitus, that philosophy was a thing to be taken in moderation by the true Roman. It was when he was serving on the staff in Asia that he formed a close friendship with Artemidorus, whom Musonius chose for his daughter"s hand.(863) Pliny has not a word to say of his opinions, but he extols his simplicity and genuineness-qualities, he adds, which you rarely find in the other philosophers of the day. It was at the same time that he formed a friendship with the Stoic Euphrates. That philosopher, who is so studiously maligned by Philostratus, was a heroic figure in Pliny"s eyes.(864) But what Pliny admires in him is not so much his philosophy, as his grave ornate style, his pure character, which showed none of that harsh and ostentatious severity which was then so common in his cla.s.s. Euphrates is a polished gentleman after Pliny"s own heart, tall and stately, with flowing hair and beard, a man who excites reverence but not fear, stern to vice, but gentle to the sinner. Pliny seems to have set little store by the formal preaching of philosophy. In a letter on the uses of sickness, he maintains that the moral lessons of the sick-bed are worth many formal disquisitions on virtue.(865)
Yet this man, apparently without the slightest taste for philosophic inquiry, or even for the homilies which, in his day, had taken the place of real speculation, had a profound veneration for the Stoic martyrs, and, true gentleman as he was, he risked his life in the times of the last Terror to befriend them. It needed both nerve and dexterity to be the friend of philosophers in those days. In that perilous year, 93 A.D., when Pliny was praetor,(866) the philosophers were banished from the city. Yet the praetor visited Artemidorus in his suburban retreat, and, with his wonted generosity, he helped the philosopher to wipe out a heavy debt which he had contracted. One of Pliny"s dearest friends was Junius Mauricus, the brother of Arulenus Rusticus, who had been put to death by Domitian for writing a eulogy on Thrasea the Stoic saint, the champion of the higher life in Nero"s reign.(867) Junius Mauricus afterwards suffered exile himself in the same cause. He had charged himself with the care of his martyred brother"s children, and Pliny helped him to find a worthy husband for the daughter of Rusticus.(868) With Fannia the widow of Helvidius, and the daughter of Thrasea, Pliny"s intimacy seems to have been of the closest kind. From her he heard the tales, now too well worn, of the fierce firmness of the elder Arria in nerving her husband Paetus for death, and of her own determined self-immolation.(869) The mother of Fannia, the younger Arria, when Thrasea her husband was condemned to die in the reign of Nero, was only prevented from sharing his fate by the most earnest entreaties of her friends.(870) Fannia had followed Helvidius into exile in Nero"s reign,(871) and again under Vespasian, when the philosopher, with a petulance very unlike the reserve of Thrasea, brought his fate upon himself by an insulting disregard of the emperor"s dignity as first magistrate of the State, if not by revolutionary tendencies.(872) Fannia seems to have inherited many of the great qualities of her father Thrasea, the n.o.blest and the wisest member of the Stoic opposition. He sprang from a district in Lombardy which was noted for its soundness and gravity of character. Unlike Paetus(873) and Helvidius, he never defied or intrigued against the emperor, even when the emperor was a Nero. And, though he belonged to the austere circle of Persius, he did not disdain to sing in tragic costume, at a festival of immemorial antiquity, in his native Patavium.(874) He performed his duties as senator with firm dignity, and yet with cautious tact. His worst political crime, and that which proved his ruin, was a severe reserve and a refusal to join in the shameful adulation of the matricide prince. He would not stoop to vote divine honours to the adulteress Poppaea, and for three years he absented himself from the Senate-house.(875) Yet, when the end came, he would not allow the fiery Arulenus Rusticus to imperil his future, by interposing his veto as tribune.(876) His daughter Fannia was worthy of her ill.u.s.trious descent. She showed all the fearless defiance of the elder Arria, when she boldly admitted that she had asked Senecio to write her husband"s life, and she uttered no word to deprecate her doom. When all her property was confiscated, she carried the dangerous volume with her to her place of exile.(877) Yet this stern heroine had also the tenderer virtues. She nursed her kinswoman Junia, one of the Vestals, through a dangerous fever, and caught the seeds of her own death from her charge.
With all her masculine firmness and courage, she had a sweetness and charm which made her not less loved than venerated. With her may be said to have expired the peculiar tradition of a circle which, for three generations, and during the reigns of eight emperors, guarded, sometimes with dangerous defiance, the old ideal of uncompromising virtue in the face of a brutal and vulgar materialism. It was the tradition which inspired the austere detachment of the poetry of Persius, with its dim solemnity and obscure depths, as of a sacred grove. These people were hard and stern to vicious power,(878) like our own Puritans of the seventeenth century. Like them too, they were exclusive and defiant, with the cold hauteur of a moral aristocracy, a company of the elect, who would not even parley with evil, for whom the issues of life and death were the only realities in a world hypnotised by the cult of the senses and the spell of tyranny. Their intense seriousness was a religion, although they had only the vaguest and most arid conception of G.o.d, and the dimmest and least comforting conception of any future life. They seemed to perish as a little sect of troublesome visionaries; and yet their spirit lived on, softened and sweetened, and pa.s.sed into the great rulers of the Antonine age.
Before his formal period of military service as tribune of the 3rd Gallic legion in Syria, Pliny had, in his nineteenth year, entered on that forensic career which was perhaps the greatest pride of his life.(879) He practised in the Centumviral court, which was chiefly occupied with questions of property and succession. Occasionally he speaks with a certain weariness of the trivial character of the cases in which he was engaged. But his general estimate is very different. The court is to him an arena worthy of the greatest talent and industry,(880) and the successful pleader may win a fame which may ent.i.tle him to take rank with the great orators of the past. Pliny, inspired by memories of Quintilian"s lectures, has always floating before him the glory of Cicero.(881) He will prepare for publication a speech delivered in an obscure case about a disputed will.(882) He is immensely proud of its subtlety and point, and the sweep of its indignant or pathetic declamation, and he is not unwilling to believe his legal friends who compared it with the _De Corona_! The suppression of free political life, the absence of public interests, and the extinction of the trade of the delator, left young men with a pa.s.sion for distinction few chances of gratifying it. The law courts at any rate provided an audience, and the chance of momentary prominence. In the Letters of Pliny, we can see the young advocate pushing his way through the dense ma.s.ses of the crowded court, arriving at his place with torn tunic, holding the attention of his audience for seven long hours, and sitting down amid the applause even of the judges themselves.(883) Calpurnia often arranged relays of messengers to bring her news of the success, from point to point, of one of her husband"s speeches.(884) Youths of the highest social rank-a Salinator, or a Ummidius Quadratus-threw themselves eagerly into the drudgery which might make an ephemeral name.(885) Ambitious pretenders, with no talent or learning, and arrayed perhaps in hired purple and jewels, like Juvenal"s needy lawyer, forced themselves on to the benches of the advocates, and engaged a body of claqueurs whose applause was purchased for a few denarii.(886) Pliny has such a pride in this profession, he so idealises what must have been often rather humdrum work, that he feels a personal pain at anything which seems to detract from the old-fashioned, leisurely dignity of the court. In his day the judges seem to have been becoming more rapid and business-like in their procedure, and less inclined to allow the many _clepsydrae_ which men of Pliny"s school demanded for the gradual development of all their rhetorical artifices. He regrets the good old times, when adjournments were freely granted,(887) and days would be spent on a case which was now despatched in as many hours. It is for this reason that he cannot conceal a certain admiration for Regulus, in other respects, "the most detestable of bipeds" but who redeemed his infamy by an enthusiasm and energy as an advocate which rivalled even that of Pliny.
M. Aquilius Regulus, the prince of delators, and one of the great glories of the Roman bar in Domitian"s reign, is a singular figure. His career and character are a curious ill.u.s.tration of the social history of the times.
Regulus was the son of a man who, in Nero"s reign, had been driven into exile and ruined.(888) Bold, able, recklessly eager for wealth and notoriety at any cost, as a mere youth he resolved to raise himself from obscure indigence, and soon became one of the most capable and dreaded agents of the tyranny. He gained an evil fame by the ruin of the great houses of the Cra.s.si and Orfiti. l.u.s.t of blood and greed of gain drove him on to the wholesale destruction of innocent boys, n.o.ble matrons, and men of the most ill.u.s.trious race. The cruelty of Nero was not swift enough to satisfy him, and he called for the annihilation of the Senate at a stroke.
He rose rapidly to great wealth, honours were showered upon him, and, after a prudent retirement in the reigns of Vespasian and t.i.tus, he reached the pinnacle of his depraved ambition under Vespasian"s cruel son.
He figures more than once in the poems of Martial, and always in the most favourable light. His talent and eloquence, according to the poet, were only equalled by his piety, and the special care of the G.o.ds had saved him from being buried under the ruins of a cloister which had suddenly fallen in.(889) He had estates at Tusculum, in Umbria and Etruria.(890) The courts were packed when he rose to plead.(891) Unfortunately, the needy poet furnishes a certain key to all this flattery, when he thanks Regulus for his presents, and then begs him to buy them back.(892) It is after Domitian"s death that we meet Regulus in Pliny"s pages. The times are changed, the delator"s day is over, and Regulus is a humbler man. But he is still rich, courted, and feared; he is still a great power in the law courts. With a weak voice, a bad memory, and hesitating utterance,(893) by sheer industry and determination he had made himself a powerful speaker, with a style of his own, sharp, pungent, brutally incisive, ruthlessly sacrificing elegance to point.(894) He belonged to the new school, and sometimes sneered at Pliny"s affectation of the grand Ciceronian manner.(895) Yet to Pliny"s eyes, his earnest strenuousness in his profession redeems some of his vices. He insists on having ample time to develop his case.(896) He appears in the morning pale with study, wearing a white patch on his forehead. He has consulted the diviners as to the success of his pleadings.(897) It is a curious sign of the times that this great advocate, who already possessed an enormous fortune, was a legacy-hunter of the meanest sort. He actually visited, on her death-bed, Verania, the widow of that Piso, the adopted son of Galba, over whose murder Regulus had savagely gloated, and by telling her that the stars promised a hope of recovery, he obtained a place in her will. His mourning for his son displayed all the feverish extravagance and grandiose eccentricity of a true child of the Neronian age.(898) The boy"s ponies and dogs and pet birds were slaughtered over his pyre. Countless pictures and statues of him were ordered. His memoir was read by the father to a crowded audience, and a thousand copies of it were sent broadcast over the provinces.(899) In Regulus we seem to see the type of character which, had fortune raised him to the throne, would have made perhaps a saner Caligula, and an even more eccentric Nero.
The struggles of the law courts were idealised by Pliny, and their transient triumphs seemed to him to match the glory of the Philippics or the Verrines. Yet, to do him justice, Pliny had sometimes a truer idea of the foundations of lasting fame. The secret of immortality, the one chance of escaping oblivion, is to leave your thought embalmed in choice and distinguished literary form, which coming ages will not willingly let die.(900) This, probably the only form of immortality in which Pliny believed, is the great motive for literary labour. The longing to be remembered was the most ardent pa.s.sion of the Roman mind in all ages and in all ranks, from the author of the _Agricola_ to the petty artisan, who commemorated the homely virtues of his wife for the eyes of a distant age, and made provision for the annual feast and the tribute of roses to the tomb. Of that immense literary ambition which Pliny represented, and which he considered it a duty to foster, only a small part has reached its goal.
The great ma.s.s of these eager litterateurs have altogether vanished, or remain as mere shadowy names in Martial or Statius or Pliny.
The poems of Martial and Statius leave the impression that, in the reign of Domitian, the interest in poetical literature was keen and widely diffused, and that, besides the poets by profession, there were crowds of amateurs who dabbled in verse. The _Silvae_ transport us into a charming, if rather luxurious world, where men like Atedius Melior or Pollius amuse themselves with dilettante composition among their gardens and marbles on the bays of Campania.(901) Martial has a host of friends similarly engaged, and the versatility of some of them is suspiciously wide. An old Ardelio is twitted by Martial with his showy and superficial displays in declamation and history, in plays and epigrams, in grammar and astronomy.(902) Canius Rufus, his countryman from Gades, Varro, Ba.s.sus, Brutia.n.u.s, Cirinius, have all an extraordinary dexterity in almost every branch of poetical composition. Martial is too keen a critic not to see the fugitive character of much of this amateur literature. Like Juvenal, he scoffs at the thin talent which concealed its feebleness behind the pomp and faded splendour of epic or tragic tradition.(903) He roughly tells the whole versifying crowd that genius alone will live in coming ages. The purchased applause of the recitation hall merely gratifies for an hour the vanity of the literary trifler. It is a pity for his fame that Martial did not always maintain this tone of sincerity. He can at times sell his flattery to the basest and most stupid. He is capable of implying a comparison of the frigid pedantry of Silius Italicus to the majesty of Virgil.(904)
Pliny was a friend and admirer of Martial, and, with his usual generous hand, he made the poet a present when he left Rome for ever to pa.s.s his last years at Bilbilis.(905) The needy epigrammatist was only a distant observer, or hanger-on of that world of wealth and refinement in which Pliny was a conspicuous figure. But from both Pliny and Martial we get very much the same impression of the literary movement in the reign of Domitian. Pliny himself is perhaps its best representative. He is a true son of the Roman schools, as they had been revived and strengthened by Vespasian, for a life of many generations. Pliny does not think slightly of the literary efforts of his own day: some of them he even overrates.
But already the Roman mind had bent its neck to that thraldom to the past, to that routine of rhetorical discipline, which, along with other causes, produced the combination of ambitious effort and mediocre performance that, for the last three centuries of the Empire, is the characteristic of all literary culture. From his great teacher Quintilian Pliny had imbibed a profound reverence for Cicero.(906) Alike in his career of honours and his literary pursuits, he loves to think that he is treading in the great orator"s footsteps. In answer to a taunt of Regulus, he once boldly avowed his preference for the Ciceronian oratory to that of his own day.
Demosthenes is also sometimes his model, though he feels keenly the difference that separates them.(907) Indeed his reverence for Greece as the mother of letters, art, and civic life was one of Pliny"s sincerest and most honourable feelings. To a man who had been appointed to high office in Greece he preaches, in earnest tones, the duty of reverence for that gifted race whose age was consecrated by the memories of its glorious prime.(908) Pliny"s Greek studies must have begun very early. At the age of fourteen he had written a Greek tragedy, for which, however, he modestly does not claim much merit.(909) He had always a certain taste for poetry, but it seems to have been merely the taste created or enforced by the constant study of the poets under the grammarian. Once, while detained by bad weather on his way back from military service in Asia, he amused himself with composing in elegiac and heroic verse.(910) Later in his career, he published a volume of poems in hendecasyllabic metre, written on various occasions. But there was no inspiration behind these conventional exercises. He was chiefly moved to write in verse, as he navely confesses, by the example of the great orators who beguiled their leisure in this way. Among his published poems there were some with a flavour of Catullan lubricity, which offended or astonished some of his severer friends, who thought such doubtful lightness unworthy of a grave character and a great position.(911) No better ill.u.s.tration could be found of Pliny"s incorrigible conventionality in such things than the defence which he makes of his suspected verses to t.i.tius Ariston.(912) It is to Pliny not a question of morals or propriety. The ancient models are to be followed, not only in their elevated, but in their looser moods. The case seems to be closed when Pliny can point to similar literary aberrations in a long line of great men from Varro and Virgil and Cicero to Verginius Rufus and the divine Nerva.(913)
Pliny, however, though vain of his dexterity in these trifles, probably did not rate them very highly. It was to oratorical fame that his ambition was directed. He was dissatisfied with the eloquence of his own day, which, to use the words of Regulus, sprang at the throat of its subject, and he avowed himself an imitator of Cicero. His speeches, even for the centumviral court, were worked up with infinite care, although with too self-conscious an aim to impress an audience. We can hardly imagine Cicero or Demosthenes coldly balancing their tropes and figures after the fashion of Pliny. When the great oratorical effort was over, the labour was renewed, in order to make the speech worthy of the eyes of posterity. It was revised and polished, and submitted to the scrutiny of critical readers for suggestions of emendation.(914) Pliny was probably the first to give readings of speeches to long-suffering friends. We hear with a shudder that the recital of the _Panegyric_ was spread over three days!(915) The other speeches on which Pliny lavished so much labour and thought, have perished, as they probably deserved to perish. The _Panegyric_ was preserved, and became the parent and model of the prost.i.tuted rhetoric of the Gallic renaissance in the fourth century.(916) Pliny was by no means a despicable literary critic, when he was not paying the tribute of friendly flattery which social tyranny then exacted. He could sometimes be honestly reserved in his appreciation of a friend"s dull literary efforts.(917) But in his ideals of oratory, he seems to be hopelessly wrong. There are some terse and epigrammatic sentences in the _Panegyric_, which redeem it by their strong sincerity. But Pliny"s canons of oratorical style would have excited the ridicule of his great models, who were thinking of their goal, and not measuring every pace as they strained towards it. Pliny"s theory that the mere length of a speech is a great element in its excellence, that swift directness is inartistic, that lingering diffuseness is an oratorical charm, that laboured manufacture of turgid phrases may produce the effect of the impetuous rush of Demosthenes and Cicero in their moments of inspiration, makes us rather glad, who love him, that we have not more of Pliny"s oratory.(918)
It is by his letters that Pliny has lived, and will live on, so long as men care to know the inner life of the great ages that have gone before.
The criticism, which is so quick to seize the obvious weaknesses of the author of a priceless picture of ancient society, seems to be a little ungrateful. We could forgive almost any failing or affectation in one who had left us a similar revelation of society when M. Aurelius was holding back the Germans on the Danube, or when Probus was shattering the invaders of the third century. The letters of Cicero offer an apparently obvious comparison, which may be used to the detriment of Pliny. Yet the comparison is rather inept. Cicero was a man of affairs in the thick of a great revolution, and his letters are invaluable to the student of politics at a great crisis in history. But in the calm of Trajan"s reign, a letter-writer had to seek other subjects of interest than the fortunes of the state. Literature, criticism, the beauties of nature, the simple charm of country life, the thousand trivial incidents and eccentricities of an over-ripe society in the capital of the world, furnished a ready pen and a genial imagination, which could idealise its surroundings, with ample materials. Pliny is by some treated as a mediocrity; but, like our own Horace Walpole, he had the keen sense to see that social routine could be made interesting, and that the man who had the skill to do so might make himself famous. He was genuinely interested in his social environment. And intense interest in one"s subject is one great secret of literary success. Pliny had also the instinct that, if a work is to live, it must have a select distinction of style, which may be criticised, but which cannot be ignored. He had the laudable ambition to put his thoughts in a form of artistic grace which may make even commonplace attractive. So good a judge as the late Mr. Paley did not hesitate to put the Latinity of Pliny on the level of that of Cicero. Pliny"s Letters, perhaps even more than the masterpieces of the Augustine age, fascinated the taste of the fourth and fifth centuries. They were the models of Symmachus and Sidonius, who tried, but in very different fashion, to do for their age what Pliny did for his.(919)
Like his imitators, Sidonius and Symmachus, Pliny intended his Letters to go down to the future as a masterpiece of style, and as a picture of his age. We know that the letters of Symmachus were carefully preserved in duplicate by his scribes, probably by his own instructions, although they were edited and published by his son only after his death.(920) Pliny, like Sidonius, gave his Letters to the public in successive portions during his life.(921) Like Sidonius too, he felt that he had not the sustained power to write a consecutive history of his time and the Letters of both are probably far more valuable. Pliny"s first book opens with a kind of dedication to Septicius Clarus, who was the patron of Suetonius, and who rose to be praetorian prefect under Hadrian.(922) Pliny appears to disclaim any order or principle of arrangement in these books, but this is the device of an artistic negligence. Yet it has been proved by the prince of European scholars in our day that both as to date and subject matter, Pliny"s Letters reveal signs of the most careful arrangement. The books were published separately, a common practice down to the end of Roman literary history. The same subject reappears in the same book or the next.(923) Groups of letters dealing with the same matter are found in their natural order in successive books. The proof is made even clearer by the silence or the express references to Pliny"s family relations.
Finally, the older men, who fill the stage in the earlier Letters, disappear towards the end; while a younger generation, a Salinator or a Ummidius Quadratus, are only heard of in the later. Men of Pliny"s own age, like Tacitus or Cornutus Tertullus, meet us from first to last. The dates at which the various books were published have been fixed with tolerable certainty. It is enough for our present purpose to say that the earliest letter belongs to the reign of Nerva, and the ninth book was probably given to the world a year or two before the writer was appointed by Trajan to the office of imperial legate of Bithynia.(924)
It is easy, as we have said, and apparently congenial to some writers, to dwell on the vanity and self-complacency of the writer of these letters.
By some he seems to be regarded chiefly as a _poseur_. To discover the weaknesses of Pliny is no great feat of criticism: they are on the surface. But "securus judicat orbis terrarum," and Pliny has borne the scrutiny of the great judge. Men of his own race and age, who spoke and wrote the most finished Latin, awarded him the palm of exquisite style.
But Pliny has many qualities of the heart, which should cover a mult.i.tude of sins, even more serious than any with which he is charged. He had the great gift of loyal friendship, and he had its usual reward in a mult.i.tude of friends. It has been regretted that Pliny does not deal with serious questions of politics and philosophy, that his Letters rather skim the surface of social life, and leave its deeper problems untouched. Pliny himself would probably have accepted this criticism as a compliment. The ma.s.s of men are little occupied with insoluble questions. And Pliny has probably deserved better of posterity by leaving us a vivid picture of the ordinary life of his time or of his cla.s.s, rather than an a.n.a.lysis of its spiritual distresses and maladies. We have enough of that in Seneca, in M.
Aurelius, and in Lucian. Of the variety and vividness of Pliny"s sketches of social life there can never be any question. But our grat.i.tude will be increased if we compare his Letters with the collections of his imitators, Symmachus and Sidonius, whose arid pages are seldom turned by any but a few curious and weary students. Martial, in his way, is perhaps even more clear-cut and minute in his portraiture. But Martial is essentially a wit of the town, viewing its vices, follies, and fashions with the eye of a keen, but rather detached observer. In reading Pliny"s Letters, we feel ourselves introduced into the heart of that society in its better hours; and, above all, we seem to be transported to those quiet provincial towns and secluded country seats where, if life was duller and tamer than it was in the capital, the days pa.s.sed in a quiet content, unsolicited by the stormier pa.s.sions, in orderly refinement, in kindly relations with country neighbours, and amid the unfading charm of old-world pieties and the witchery of nature.
Pliny has also done a great service in preserving a memorial of the literary tone and habits of his time. Even in that age of fertile production and too enthusiastic appreciation, Pliny, like Seneca and Statius, has a feeling that the love for things of the mind was waning.(925) And he deemed it an almost religious duty, as Symmachus and Sidonius did more than three centuries after him, to arouse the flagging interest in letters, and to reward even third-rate literary effort with exuberant praise. He avows that it is a matter of duty to admire and venerate any performance in a field so difficult as that of letters.(926) Yet Pliny was not by any means devoid of critical honesty and ac.u.men. He could be a severe judge of his own style. He expects candid criticism from his friends, and receives it with grat.i.tude and good temper.(927) This is to him, indeed, the practical purpose of readings before final publication. He made emendations and excisions in the Histories of Tacitus, which the great author had submitted for his revision.(928) In his correspondence with Tacitus, there is a curious mixture of vanity along with a clear recognition of his friend"s immense superiority of genius, and a sure prescience of his immortal fame. He is proud to hear their names coupled as chiefs of contemporary literature,(929) and he cherishes the hope that, united by loyal friendship in life, they will go down together to a remote future. When, in the year 106, Tacitus had asked him for an account of the elder Pliny"s death, in the great eruption of Vesuvius, Pliny expressed a firm belief that the book on which Tacitus was then engaged was destined to an enduring fame.(930) He was not quite so confident as to the immortality of Martial"s work,(931) although he appreciates to the full Martial"s brilliant and pungent wit. On the other hand, writing to a friend about the death of Silius Italicus, he frankly recognises that the Epic of the Punic War is a work of industry rather than of genius.(932) Yet he cannot allow the author of this dull mechanical poem to pa.s.s away without some record of his career.(933) The death at seventy-five of the last surviving consular of the Neronian age, of the consul in whose year of office the tyranny of Nero closed, inspired a feeling of pathos which was probably genuine, in spite of the rather pompous and pedantic expression of it. And although he wrote the _Punica_, a work which was almost buried till the fifteenth century,(934) Silius was probably a not uninteresting person. He had been a delator under Nero, and had enjoyed the friendship of Vitellius, but he knew how to redeem his character under the Flavian dynasty, and he had filled the proconsulate of Asia with some credit.(935) Henceforth he enjoyed the lettered ease and social deference which were the privilege of his cla.s.s for centuries. He retired finally to the sh.o.r.es of Campania, where, moving from one villa to another, and surrounding himself with books and gems of art, his life flowed away undisturbed by the agony of Rome in the last terror of the Caesars. Among his many estates he was the proud owner of one of Cicero"s villas, and of the ground where Virgil sleeps. He used to keep the great poet"s birthday with a scrupulous piety, and he always approached his tomb as a holy place. This apparently placid and fortunate life was, like so many in those days, ended by a voluntary death.(936) Silius Italicus, in his life and in his end, is a true type of a generation which could bend before the storm of despotism, and save itself often by ignominious arts, which could recover its dignity and self-respect in the pursuit of literary ideals, and, at the last, a.s.sert the right to shake off the burden of existence when it became too heavy.
Pliny"s theory of life is clearly stated in the Letters, and it was evidently acted on by a great number of the cla.s.s to which he belonged.(937) The years of vigorous youth should be given to the service of the state, in pursuing the well-marked and carefully-graduated career of honours, or in the strenuous oratorical strife of the law courts. The leisure of later years might be portioned out between social duty, the pleasures or the cares of a rural estate, and the cultivation of literary taste by reading and imitation of the great masters. The last was the most imperious duty of all, for those with any literary gifts, because charm of style gives the one hope of surviving the wreck of time;(938) for mere cultivated facility, as the most refined and creditable way of filling up the vacant s.p.a.ces of life. Even if lasting fame was beyond one"s reach, it was something to be able to give pleasure to an audience of cultivated friends at a reading, and to enjoy the triumph of an hour. There must have been many a literary coterie who, if they fed one another"s vanity, also encouraged literary ideals, and hinted gentle criticism,(939) in that polite delicacy of phrase in which the Roman was always an adept. One of these literary circles stands out in Pliny"s pages. At least two of its members had held great office. Arrius Antoninus, the maternal grandfather of the Emperor Antoninus Pius,(940) had twice borne the consulship with antique dignity, and shown himself a model governor as proconsul of Asia.(941) He was devoted to Greek literature, and seems to have preferred to compose in that language. We need not accept literally Pliny"s praises of his Atticism, and of the grace and sweetness of his Greek epigrams. But he seems to have had a facility which Pliny tortured his ingenuity in vain to imitate with the poorer resources of the Latin tongue.(942) Among the friends of Antoninus was Vestricius Spurinna, who had defended Placentia for Otho, who was twice consul under Domitian, and was selected by Trajan to command the troops in a campaign in Germany.(943) This dignified veteran, who had pa.s.sed apparently untainted through the reigns of the worst emperors, varied and lightened the ordinary routine of his old age by the composition of lyrics, both in Greek and Latin, which seemed to his admirers to have a singular sweetness. Sentius Augurinus, a familiar friend of the two consulars, was also a brilliant verse writer,(944) who could enthral Pliny by a recitation lasting for three days, although the fact that Pliny was the subject of one of the poems may account for the patience or the pleasure. One of Pliny"s dearest friends was Pa.s.sennus Paullus, who claimed kindred with the poet Propertius, and, at any rate, came from the same town in Umbria. Pa.s.sennus has been cruelly treated by Time, if his lyric efforts recalled, as we are asked to believe, the literary graces of his ancestor, and even those of Horace.(945) Vergilius Roma.n.u.s devoted himself to comedy, and was thought to have reproduced not unworthily the delicate charms of Menander and Terence, as well as the scathing invective of older Greek masters of the art.(946) But there were others of Pliny"s circle who essayed a loftier and weightier style.
Probably the foremost of these was t.i.tinius Capito, who, as an inscription records,(947) had held high civil office under Domitian, Nerva, and Trajan. He was an enthusiastic patron of letters, and readily offered his halls to literary friends for their recitations, which he attended with punctilious politeness. Cherishing the memory of the great men of the Republic, the Ca.s.sii, the Bruti, and the Catos, he composed a work on the death of the n.o.ble victims of the Terror.(948) He tried in vain to draw Pliny into the field of historical composition.(949) But the man who thought more of style and graceful charity than of truth, was not the man to write the history of such a time. He has done a much greater service in providing priceless materials for the reconstruction of its social history. Caninius Rufus was a neighbour of Pliny at Como.(950) He was one of those for whom the charms of country life had a dangerous seduction.
His villa, with its colonnades, "where it was always spring," the shining levels of the lake beneath his verandah, the water course with its emerald banks, the baths and s.p.a.cious halls, all these delights seem to have relaxed the literary energy and ambition of their master. Caninius meditated the composition of a Greek epic on the Dacian wars of Trajan.(951) But he was probably one of those lingering, dilatory writers who meet us in Martial,(952) waiting for the fire from heaven which never comes. The intractable roughness of barbarian names, which, as Pliny suggests, might have been eluded by a Homeric licence in quant.i.ty, was probably not the only difficulty of Caninius.
Among the literary friends of Pliny, a much more important person than Caninius was Suetonius, but Suetonius was apparently long paralysed by the same cautious hesitation to challenge the verdict of the public. A younger man than Pliny,(953) Suetonius was one of his most intimate friends. They both belonged to that circle which nursed the senatorial tradition and the hatred of the imperial tyrants.(954) The life of Suetonius was not very effectual or brilliant, from a worldly point of view. Although born within the rank to which every distinction was open,(955) he was a man of modest and retiring tastes, devoted to quiet research, and dest.i.tute of the eager ambition and vigorous self-a.s.sertion which are necessary for splendid success. He was probably for some years a professor of grammar.(956) He made a half-hearted attempt to gain a footing at the bar. In 101 A.D. he obtained a military tribunate, through Pliny"s influence, but speedily renounced his command.(957) Henceforth he devoted himself entirely to that historical research, which, if it has not won for him any dazzling fame, has made historical students, in spite of some reservations as to his sources, his debtors for all time. Pliny had the greatest esteem for Suetonius, and was always ready to befriend him, whether it were in the purchase of a quiet little retreat near Rome,(958) or in obtaining for the childless antiquary the _Jus trium liberorum_ from Trajan.(959) The two men were bound to one another by many tastes and sympathies, not the least strong being a curious superst.i.tion, which infected, as we shall see in a later chapter, even the most vigorous minds of that age. Suetonius had once a dream which seemed to portend failure in some legal cause in which he was engaged. He sought the aid of Pliny to obtain an adjournment. Pliny does not question the reality of such warnings, but merely suggests a more cheering interpretation of the vision.(960) Although devoted to research, and a most laborious student, the biographer of the Caesars was strangely tardy in letting his productions see the light. In 106, he had been long engaged on a work, which was probably the _De Viris Ill.u.s.tribus_.(961) Pliny a.s.sailed him with bantering reproaches on his endless use of the file, and begs him to publish without delay. From several indications, it appears that the lingering volume did not appear till 113.(962) It was not till the year 118, when Hadrian arrived from the East after his accession, that Suetonius attained the rank of one of the imperial secretaryships.(963) Pliny in all probability had died some years before the elevation of his friend.
But although the dawn of a new age of milder and less suspicious government had, for the first time since Augustus, left men free to compose a true record of the past, and even to vilify the early Caesars,(964) the great ma.s.s of cultivated men in Pliny"s time, as in the days of Ausonius and Sidonius, were devoted to poetry. The chief cause in giving this direction to the Roman mind was undoubtedly the system pursued in the schools. In the first century, as in the fifth, the formative years of boyhood were devoted almost entirely to the study of the poets. The subject-matter of their masterpieces was not neglected by the accomplished grammarian, who was often a man of learning, and sometimes a man of taste; and the reading of poetry was made the text for disquisitions on geography and astronomy, on mythology or the antiquities of religious ritual and const.i.tutional lore.(965) But style and expression were always of foremost interest in these studies. The ear of the South has always felt the charm of rhythmical or melodious speech, with a keenness of pleasure generally denied to our colder temperament. And the Augustan age had, in a single generation, performed miracles, under Greek inspiration, in moulding the Latin tongue to be the apt vehicle of every mood of poetic feeling. That inspired band of writers, whose call it was to glorify the dawn of a world-wide empire and the ancient achievements of the Latin race,(966) rose to the full height of their vocation. They were conscious that they were writing for distant provinces won from barbarism, and for a remote posterity.(967) They discovered and revealed resources in the language, hitherto undreamt of. They wedded to its native dignity and strength a brilliancy, an easy grace and sprightliness, which positively ravished the ear of the street boys in Pompeii, or of the rude dweller on the Tanais or the Baetis.(968) In his own lifetime Virgil became a popular hero. His Eclogues were chanted on the stage; verses of the Aeneid can still be seen, along with verses of Propertius, scrawled on the walls of Campanian towns. Virgil, when he visited Rome, was mobbed by admiring crowds. When his poetry was recited in the theatre, the whole audience rose to their feet as if to salute the emperor.(969) He had the doubtful but significant honour of being recited by Alexandrian boys at the coa.r.s.e orgies of a Trimalchio.(970) Never was a worthy fame so rapidly and splendidly won: seldom has literary fame and influence been so lasting.
The Flavian age succeeded to this great heritage. Already there were ominous signs of a decay of originality and force, of decadence in the language itself.(971) The controversy between the lovers of the new and the lovers of the archaic style was raging in the reign of Vespasian, and can be still followed in the _De Oratoribus_ of Tacitus, or even in the verses of Martial.(972) Already the taste for Ennius and the prae-Ciceronian oratory had set in, for the dialect of the heroes of the Punic Wars, even for "the Latin of the Twelve Tables,"(973) a taste which was destined to produce its Dead Sea fruit in the age of the Antonines.
But whoever might cavil at Cicero,(974) no one ever questioned the pre-eminence of Virgil, and he and his contemporaries were still the models of a host of imitators. The ma.s.s of facile talent, thrown back on itself by the loss of free republican life and public interests, fascinated from earliest infancy by the haunting cadences of the grand style, rushed into verse-writing, to beguile long hours of idleness, or to woo a shadowy fame at an afternoon recital, with a more shadowy hope of future fame. The grand style was a charmer and deceiver. It was such a perfect instrument, it was so protean in its various power, it was so abundant in its resources, that a man of third-rate powers and thin commonplace imagination, who had been trained in skilful manipulation of consecrated phrase, might for the moment delude himself and his friends by faint echoes of the music of the golden age.
The brilliancy of inherited phrase concealed the poverty of the literary amateur"s fancy from himself. And, even if he were not deluded about his own powers, the practice in skilful handling of literary symbols, which was acquired in the schools, furnished a refined amus.e.m.e.nt for a too ample leisure. It is clear from the dialogue _De Oratoribus_, and from Pliny"s Letters, that the meditative life, surrounded by the quiet charm of stream and woodland, far from the din and strife and social routine of the great city,(975) attracted many people much more than the greatest oratorical triumphs in the centumviral court, which, after all, were so pale and bourgeois beside the glories of the great ages of oratory. And although Aper, in the Dialogue of Tacitus, sneers at the solitary and unsocial toil of the poet, rewarded by a short-lived _succes d"estime_,(976) there can be no doubt that the ambition to cut a figure, even for a day, was a powerful inspiration at a time when the ancient avenues to fame had been closed.
It was to satisfy such ambitions that Domitian founded the quinquennial compet.i.tion on the Capitol, in the year 86 A.D.,(977) as well as the annual festival in honour of Minerva on the Alban Mount. A similar festival, for the cultivation of Greek poetry, had been established at Naples in honour of Augustus, at which Statius had won the crown of corn-ears.(978) And Nero had founded another, apparently only for his own glorification.(979) The festival established by Domitian was more important and enduring. The judges were taken from the priestly colleges, and, amid a concourse of the highest functionaries of the state, the successful poet received his crown at the hands of the emperor. The prospect of such a distinction drew compet.i.tors from distant provincial parts. It is a curious ill.u.s.tration of the power and the skill of the literary discipline of the schools that, twice within a few years, the crown of oak leaves was won by boys under fourteen years of age. The verses of one of them may still be read upon his tomb.(980)
But these infrequent chances of distinction could not suffice for the crowd of eager composers. In those days, although the bookselling trade was extensive and vigorous, there was no organised publishing system by which a new work could be brought to the notice of the public.(981) The author had to advertise himself by giving readings, to which he invited his friends, and by distributing copies of his book. The mania for recitation was the theme of satirists from the days of Horace to the days of Epictetus.(982) Martial comically describes the frenzied poet torturing his friends day and night, pursuing them from the bath to the dining-room, and spreading a solitude around him.(983) Juvenal congratulates his friend on escaping to the country from the hoa.r.s.e reciter of a frigid Theseid.(984) In the bohemian scenes of Petronius, the inveterate versifier, who will calmly finish a pa.s.sage, after being cast ash.o.r.e from a shipwreck, makes himself a nuisance by his recitations in the baths and porticoes of Croton, and is very properly stoned by a crowd of street boys.(985) No aspect of social life is more prominent in the Letters of Pliny than the reading of new works, epics, or lyrics, histories, or speeches, before fashionable a.s.semblies. A liberal patron like t.i.tinius Capito would sometimes lend a hall for the purpose. But the reciter had many expenses, from the hire of chairs to the fees to freedmen and slaves, who acted as _claqueurs_. In the circle of a man like Pliny, to attend these gatherings was a sacred duty both to letters and to friendship. In a year when there was a more than usually abundant crop of poets, the eager advocate could boast that he had failed no one, even in the month when the courts were busiest.(986) Doubtless, many of the fashionable idlers, who dawdled away their time in the many resorts devoted to gossip and scandal, were glad to show themselves in the crowd. Old friends would consider it a duty to support and encourage the budding literary ambition of a young aspirant of their set. Some sincere lovers of literary art would be drawn by a genuine interest and a wish to maintain the literary tradition, which was already betraying signs of weakness and decay. But, to a great many, this duty, added to the endless round of other social obligations, was evidently becoming repulsive and wearisome.(987) Pliny could listen with delight and admiration to Sentius Augurinus reciting his poems for three long days.(988) He would calmly expect his own friends to listen for as many days to a whole volume of his poems, or to his _Panegyric_ on Trajan.(989) Such was his high breeding, his kindliness, and such was his pa.s.sion for literature in any form or of any quality, that he could hardly understand how what to him seemed at once a pleasure and duty should be regarded by others as an intolerable nuisance. The conduct of such people is treated with some disdain in one or two of the rare pa.s.sages in which he writes of his circle with any severity. Some of these fashionable folk, after lingering in some place of gossip until the reading was well advanced, would enter the hall with ostentatious reluctance, and then leave before the end. Others, with an air of superiority, would sit in stolid silence and disguise the slightest expression of interest. This seemed to Pliny, not only grossly bad manners, but also neglect of a literary duty.(990) The audience should not only encourage honest effort; they should contribute their judgment to the improvement of style. Pliny, like Aristotle, has an immense faith in the collective opinion of numbers, even in matters of artistic taste.(991) He used to read his own pieces to successively wider circles, each time receiving suggestions for amendment.
Many of Pliny"s Letters, like the dialogue _De Oratoribus_, reveal the keenness with which in those days questions of style were debated. But, as in the circle of Sidonius, this very energy of criticism was perhaps due to a dim consciousness of waning force.(992) Pliny, with all his kindly optimism, lets fall a phrase here and there which betrays an uneasiness about the future of letters.(993) Enthusiasm is failing. Nay, there is a hardly veiled contempt for that eager mediocrity which Pliny and t.i.tinius Capito made it a point of honour to encourage. We feel that we are on the edge of that arid desert of cultivated impotence in which the freshness and vigour of Roman literature was soon mysteriously to disappear.
Great as were the attractions of the capital, its gay social circles with their multifarious engagements, its games and spectacles, and literary novelties, yet the most devoted "Ardelio," in the end, felt the strain and the monotony to be oppressive.(994) Seneca and Pliny, Martial and Juvenal,(995) from various points of view, lament or ridicule the inanity and the slavery of city life. Roman etiquette was perhaps the most imperious and exacting that ever existed. Morning receptions, punctilious attendance at the a.s.sumption of the toga, at betrothals, or the sealing of wills, or the reading of some tedious epic, advice or support in the law courts, congratulations to friends on every official success, these duties, and many others, left men, who had a large circle of acquaintance, hardly a moment of repose. Hence the rapture with which Pliny escapes to the stillness of the Laurentine pine woods, or the pure cold breezes that blew from the Apennines over his Tuscan seat.(996) In these calm so