Latin Literature Part 10

At the age of fifty he was imperial legate of Bithynia: the extant official correspondence between him and the Emperor during this governorship shows him still unchanged; upright and conscientious, but irresolute, pedantic, and totally unable to think and act for himself in any unusual circ.u.mstances. The contrast between Pliny's fidgety indecision and the quiet strength and inexhaustible patience of Trajan, though scarcely what Pliny meant to bring out, is the first and last impression conveyed to us by this curious correspondence. The nine books of his private letters, though prepared, and in many cases evidently written for publication, give a varied and interesting picture of the time. Here, too, the character of the writer in its virtues and its weakness is throughout unmistakable. Pliny, the patriotic citizen,-- Pliny, the munificent patron,--Pliny, the eminent man of letters,--Pliny, the affectionate husband and humane master,--Pliny, the man of principle, is in his various phases the real subject of the whole collection. His opinions are always just and elegant; few writers can express truisms with greater fervour. The letters to Tacitus with whom he was throughout life in close intimacy, are among the most interesting and the fullest of unintentional humour. Tacitus was the elder of the two; and Pliny, "when very young"--the words are his own,--had chosen him as his model and sought to follow his fame. "There were then many writers of brilliant genius; but you," he writes to Tacitus, "so strong was the affinity of our natures, seemed to me at once the easiest to imitate and the most worthy of imitation. Now we are named together; both of us have, I may say, some name in literature, for, as I include myself, I must be moderate in my praise of you." This to the author who had already published the _Histories!_ Before so exquisite a self-revelation criticism itself is silenced.

The cult of Ciceronianism established by Quintilian is the real origin of the collection of Pliny's _Letters_. Cicero and Pliny had many weaknesses and some virtues in common, and the desire of emulating Cicero, which Pliny openly and repeatedly expresses, had a considerable effect in exaggerating his weaknesses. Cicero was vain, quick-tempered, excitable; his sensibilities were easily moved, and found natural and copious expression in the language of which he was a consummate master. Pliny, the most steady-going of mankind, sets himself to imitate this excitable temperament with the utmost seriousness; he cultivates sensibility, he even cultivates vanity. His elaborate and graceful descriptions of scenery--the fountain of c.l.i.tumnus or the villa overlooking the Tiber valley--are no more consciously insincere than his tears over the death of friends, or the urgency with which he begs his wife to write to him from the country twice a day. But these fine feelings are meant primarily to impress the public; and a public which could be impressed by the spectacle of a man giving a dinner-party, and actually letting his unt.i.tled guests drink the same wine that was being drunk at the head of the table, put little check upon lapses of taste.

Yet with all his affectations and fatuities, Pliny compels respect, and even a measure of admiration, by the real goodness of his character.

Where a good life is lived, it hardly becomes us to be too critical of motives and springs of action; and in Pliny's case the practice of domestic and civic virtue was accompanied by a considerable literary gift. Had we a picture drawn with equal copiousness and grace of the Rome of Marcus Aurelius half a century later, it would be a priceless addition to history. Pliny's world--partly because it is presented with such rich detail--reminds us, more than that of any other period of Roman history, of the society of our own day. To pa.s.s from Cicero's letters to his is curiously like pa.s.sing from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century. In other respects, indeed, they have what might be called an eighteenth century flavour. Some of the more elaborate of them would fall quite naturally into place among the essays of the _Spectator_ or the _Rambler;_ in many others the combination of thin and lucid common-sense with a vein of calculated sensibility can hardly be paralleled till we reach the age of Rousseau.

Part of this real or a.s.sumed sensibility was the interest in scenery and the beauties of nature, which in Pliny, as in the eighteenth century authors, is cultivated for its own sake as an element in self-culture. In the words with which he winds up one of the most elaborate of his descriptive pieces, that on the lake of Vadimo in Tuscany--_Me nihil aeque ac naturae opera delectant_--there is an accent which hardly recurs till the age of the _Seasons_ and of Gray's _Letters_. Like Gray, Pliny took a keen pleasure in exploring the more romantic districts of his country; his description of the lake in the letter just mentioned is curiously like pa.s.sages from the journal in which Gray records his discovery--for it was little less--of Thirlmere and Derwent.w.a.ter. He views the c.l.i.tumnus with the eye of an accomplished landscape-gardener; he notes the cypresses on the hill, the ash and poplar groves by the water's edge; he counts the shining pebbles under the clear ice-cold water, and watches the green reflections of the overhanging trees; and finally, as Thomson or Cowper might have done, mentions the abundance of comfortable villas as the last charm of the landscape.

The munificent benefactions of Pliny to his native town of Comum, and his anxiety that, instead of sending its most promising boys to study at Milan--only thirty miles off--it should provide for them at home what would now be called a university education, are among the many indications which show us how Rome was diffusing itself over Italy, as Italy was over the Latin-speaking provinces. Under Hadrian and the Antonines this process went on with even growing force. Country life, or that mixture of town and country life afforded by the small provincial towns, came to be more and more of a fashion, and the depopulation of the capital had made sensible progress long before the period of renewed anarchy that followed the a.s.sa.s.sination of Commodus. Whether the rapid decay of Latin literature which took place after the death of Pliny and Tacitus was connected with this weakening of the central life of Rome, is a question to which we hardly can hazard a definite answer. Under the three reigns which succeeded that of Trajan, a period of sixty-four years of internal peace, of beneficent rule, of enlightened and humane legislation, the cultured society shown to us in Pliny's _Letters_ as diffused all over Italy remained strangely silent. Of all the streams of tradition which descended on this age, the schools of law and grammar alone kept their course; the rest dwindle away and disappear. Sixty years pa.s.s without a single poet or historian, even of the second rate; one or two eminent jurists share the field with one or two inconsiderable extract-makers and epitomators, who barely rise out of the common herd of undistinguished grammarians. Among the obscure poets mentioned by Pliny, the name of Vergilius Roma.n.u.s may excite a momentary curiosity; he was the author of Terentian comedies, which probably did not long survive the private recitations for which they were composed. The epitome of the _History_ of Pompeius Trogus, made by the otherwise unknown Marcus Junia.n.u.s Justinus, has been already mentioned; like the brief and poorly executed abridgment of Livy by Julius or Lucius Annaeus Florus (one of the common text-books of the Middle Ages), it is probably to be placed under Hadrian. Javolenus Priscus, a copious and highly esteemed juridical writer, and head of one of the two great schools of Roman jurisprudence, is best remembered by the story of his witty interruption at a public recitation, which Pliny (part of whose character it was to joke with difficulty) tells with a scandalised gravity even more amusing than the story itself. His successor as head of the school, Salvius Julia.n.u.s, was of equal juristic distinction; his codification of praetorian law received imperial sanction from Hadrian, and became the authorised civil code. He was one of the instructors of Marcus Aurelius. The wealth he acquired by his profession was destined, in the strange revolutions of human affairs, to be the purchase-money of the Empire for his great- grandson, Didius Julia.n.u.s, when it was set up at auction by the praetorian guards. More eminent as a man of letters than either of these is their contemporary Gaius, whose _Inst.i.tutes of Civil Law_, published at the beginning of the reign of Marcus Aurelius, have ever since remained one of the foremost manuals of Roman jurisprudence.

But the literary poverty of this age in Latin writing is most strikingly indicated by merely naming its princ.i.p.al author. At any previous period the name of Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus would have been low down in the second rank: here it rises to the first; nor is there any other name which fairly equals his, either in importance or in interest. The son of an officer of the thirteenth legion, Suetonius practised in early life as an advocate, subsequently became one of Hadrian's private secretaries, and devoted his later years to literary research and compilation, somewhat in the manner, though without the encyclopedic scope, of Varro.

In his youth he had been an intimate friend of the younger Pliny, who speaks in high terms of his learning and integrity. The greater part of his voluminous writings are lost; they included many works on grammar, rhetoric, and archaeology, and several on natural history and physical science. Fragments survive of his elaborate treatise _De Viris Ill.u.s.tribus,_ an exhaustive history of Latin literature up to his own day: excerpts made from it by St. Jerome in his _Chronicle_ are the source from which much of our information as to Latin authors is derived, and several complete lives have been prefixed to ma.n.u.scripts of the works of the respective authors, and thus independently preserved. But his most interesting, and probably his most valuable work, the _Lives of the Twelve Caesars_, has made him one of the most widely known of the later cla.s.sical writers. It was published under Hadrian in the year 120, and dedicated to his praetorian prefect, Septicius Clarus. Tacitus (perhaps because he was still alive) is never mentioned, and not certainly made use of. Both authors had access, in the main, to the same materials; but the confidential position of Suetonius as Hadrian's secretary no doubt increased his natural tendency to collect stories and preserve all sorts of trivial or scandalous gossip, rather than make any attempt to write serious history. It is just this, however, which gives unique interest and value to the _Lives of the Caesars_. We can spare political insight or consecutive arrangement in an author who is so lavish in the personal detail that makes much of the life of history; who tells us the colour of Caesar's eyes, who quotes from a dozen private letters of Augustus, who shows us Caligula shouting to the moon from his palace roof, and Nero lecturing on the construction of the organ. There perhaps never was a series of biographies so crammed with anecdote. Nor is the style without a certain sort of merit, from its entire and unaffected simplicity. After all the fine writing of the previous century it is, for a little while, almost a relief to come on an author who is frankly without style, and says what he has to say straightforwardly. But it is only the absorbing interest of the matter which makes this kind of writing long endurable.

It is, in truth, the beginning of barbarism; and Suetonius measures more than half the distance from the fine familiar prose of the Golden Age to the base jargon of the authors of the _Augustan History_ a century and a half later, under Diocletian.

Amid the decay of imagination and of the higher qualities of style, the tradition of industry and accuracy to some degree survived. The biographies of Suetonius show considerable research and complete honesty; and the same qualities, though united with a feebler judgment, appear in the interesting miscellanies of his younger contemporary, Aulus Gellius.

This work, published under the fanciful t.i.tle of _Noctes Atticae_, is valuable at once as a collection of extracts from older writers and as a source of information regarding the knowledge and studies of his own age.

Few authors are more scrupulously accurate in quotation; and by this conscientiousness, as well as by his real admiration for the great writers, he shows the pedantry of the time on its most pleasing side.

The twenty books of the _Noctes Atticae_ were the compilation of many years; but the t.i.tle was chosen from the fact of the work having been begun during a winter spent by the author at Athens, when about thirty years of age. He was only one among a number of his countrymen, old as well as young, who found the atmosphere of that university town more congenial to study than the noisy, unhealthy, and crowded capital, or than the quiet, but ill-equipped, provincial towns of Italy. Athens once more became, for a short time, the chief centre of European culture.

Herodes Atticus, that remarkable figure who traced his descent to the very beginnings of Athenian history and the semi-mythical Aeacidae of Aegina, and who was consul of Rome under Antoninus Pius, had taken up his permanent residence in his native town, and devoted his vast wealth to the architectural embellishment of Athens, and to a munificent patronage of letters. Plutarch and Arrian, the two most eminent authors of the age, both spent much of their time there; and the Emperor Hadrian, by his repeated and protracted visits--he once lived at Athens for three years together--established the reputation of the city as a fashionable resort, and superintended the building of an entirely new quarter to accommodate the great influx of permanent residents. The accident of imperial patronage doubtless added force to the other causes which made Greek take fresh growth, and become for a time almost the dominant language of the Empire. Though two centuries were still to pa.s.s before the foundation of Constantinople, the centre of gravity of the huge fabric of government was already pa.s.sing from Italy to the Balkan peninsula, and Italy itself was becoming slowly but surely one of the Western provinces. Nature herself seemed to have fixed the Eastern limit of the Latin language at the Adriatic, and even in Italy Greek was equally familiar with Latin to the educated cla.s.ses. Suetonius, Fronto, Hadrian himself, wrote in Latin and Greek indifferently. Marcus Aurelius used Greek by preference, even when writing of his predecessors and the events of Roman history. From Plutarch to Lucian the Greek authors completely predominate over the Latin. In the sombre century which followed, both Greek and Latin literature were all but extinguished; the partial revival of the latter in the fourth century was artificial and short-lived; and though the tradition of the cla.s.sical manner took long to die away, the cla.s.sical writers themselves completely cease with Suetonius. A new Latin, that of the Middle Ages, was already rising to take the place of the speech handed down by the Republic to the Empire.

V.

THE _ELOCUTIO NOVELLA_.

Though the partial renascence in art and letters which took place in the long peaceful reign of Hadrian was on the whole a Greek, or, at all events, a Graeco-Roman movement, an attempt at least towards a corresponding movement in purely Latin literature, both in prose and verse, was made about the same time, and might have had important results had outward circ.u.mstances allowed it a reasonable chance of development.

As it is, Apuleius and Fronto in prose, and the new school of poets, of whom the unknown author of the _Pervigilium Veneris_ is the most striking and typical, represent not merely a fresh refinement in the artificial management of thought and language, but the appearance on the surface of certain native qualities in Latin, long suppressed by the decisive supremacy of the manner established as cla.s.sical under the Republic, but throughout latent in the structure and temperament of the language. Just when Latin seemed to be giving way on all hands to Greek, the signs are first seen of a much more momentous change, the rise of a new Latin, which not only became a common speech for all Europe, but was the groundwork of the Romance languages and of half a dozen important national literatures. The decay of education, the growth of vulgarisms, and the degradation of the fine, but extremely artificial, literary language of the cla.s.sical period, went hand in hand towards this change with the extreme subtleties and refinements introduced by the ablest of the new writers, who were no longer content, like Quintilian and Pliny, to rest satisfied with the manner and diction of the Golden Age. The work of this school of authors is therefore of unusual interest; for they may not unreasonably be called a school, as working, though unconsciously, from different directions towards the same common end.

The theory of this new manner has had considerable light thrown upon it by the fragments of the works of Marcus Cornelius Fronto, recovered early in the present century by Angelo Mai from palimpsests in the Vatican and Ambrosian libraries at Rome and Milan. Fronto was the most celebrated rhetorician of his time, and exercised a commanding influence on literary criticism. The reign of the Spanish school was now over; Fronto was of African origin; and though it does not follow that he was not of pure Roman blood, the influence of a semi-tropical atmosphere and African surroundings altered the type, and produced a new strain, which we can trace later under different forms in the great African school of ecclesiastical writers headed by Tertullian and Cyprian, and even to a modified degree in Augustine himself. He was born in the Roman colony of Cirta, probably a few years after the death of Quintilian. He rose to a conspicuous position at Rome under Hadrian, and was highly esteemed by Marcus Antoninus, who not only elevated him to the consulship, but made him one of the princ.i.p.al tutors of the joint-heirs to the Empire, Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus. He died a few years before Marcus Aurelius.

The recovered fragments of his writings, which are lamentably scanty and interrupted, are chiefly from his correspondence with his two imperial pupils. With both of them, and Marcus Aurelius especially, he continued in later years to be on the most intimate and affectionate relations. The elderly rhetorician, a martyr, as he keeps complaining, to gout, and the philosophic Emperor write to each other with the effusiveness of two school-girls. It is impossible to suspect Marcus Aurelius of insincerity, and it is easy to understand what a real fervour of admiration his saintly character might awaken in any one who had the privilege of watching and aiding its development; but the endearments exchanged in the letters that pa.s.s between "my dearest master" and "my life and lord" are such as modern taste finds it hard to sympathise with, or even to understand.

The single cause for complaint that Fronto had against his pupil was that, as he advanced in life, he gradually withdrew from the study of literature to that of philosophy. To Fronto, literature was the one really important thing in the world; and in his perpetual recurrence to this theme, he finds occasion to lay down in much detail his own literary theories and his canons of style. The _Elocutio Novella_, which he considered it his great work in life to expound and to practise, was partly a return upon the style of the older Latin authors, partly a new growth based, as theirs had been, on the actual language of common life.

The prose of Cato and the Gracchi had been, in vocabulary and structure, the living spoken language of the streets and farms, wrought into shape in the hands of men of powerful genius. To give fresh vitality to Latin, Fronto saw, and saw rightly, that the same process of literary genius working on living material must once more take place. His mistake was in fancying it possible to go back again to the second century before Christ, and make a fresh start from that point as though nothing had happened in the meantime. In our own age we have seen a somewhat similar fallacy committed by writers who, in their admiration of the richness and flexibility of Elizabethan English, have tried to write with the same copiousness of vocabulary and the same freedom of structure as the Elizabethans. Between these and their object lies an insuperable barrier, the formed and finished prose of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; between Fronto and his lay the whole ma.s.s of what, in the sustained and secure judgment of mankind, is the cla.s.sical prose of the Latin language, from Cicero to Tacitus. In the simplicity which he pursued there was something ineradicably artificial, and even unnatural, and the fresh resources from which he attempted to enrich the literary language and to form his new Latin resembled, to use his own striking simile, the exhausted and unwilling population from which the legions could only now be recruited by the most drastic conscription.

Yet if Fronto hardly succeeded in founding a new Latin, he was a powerful influence in the final collapse and disappearance of the old. His reversion to the style and language of pre-Ciceronian times was only a temporary fashion; but in the general decay of taste and learning it was sufficient to break the continuity of Latin literature. The bronze age of Ennius and Cato had been succeeded, in a broad and stately development, by the Golden and Silver periods. Under this fresh attack the Latin of the Silver Age breaks up and goes to pieces, and the failure of Fronto and his contemporaries to create a new language opens the age of the base metals. The collapse of the imperial system after the death of Marcus Aurelius is not more striking or more complete than the collapse of literature after that of his tutor.

Of the actual literary achievement of this remarkable critic, when he turned from criticism and took to construction, the surviving fragments give but an imperfect idea. Most of the fragments are from private letters; the rest are from rhetorical exercises, including those of the so-called _Principia Historiae_, a panegyric upon the campaigns and administration of Verus in the Asiatic provinces. But among the letters there are some of a more studied eloquence, which show pretty clearly the merits and defects of their author as a writer. In narrative he is below mediocrity: his attempt, for instance, to tell the story of the ring of Polycrates is incredibly languid and tedious. Where his style reaches its highest level of force and refinement is in the more imaginative pa.s.sages, and in the occasional general reflections where he makes the thought remarkable by an unexpected cadence of language. A single characteristic pa.s.sage may be quoted, the allegory of the Creation of Sleep. It occurs in a letter urging the Emperor to take a brief rest from the cares of government during a few days that he was spending at a little seaside town in Etruria. The admirably sympathetic rendering given by the late Mr. Pater in _Marius the Epicurean_ will show more clearly than abstract criticism the distinctively romantic or mediaeval note which, except in so far as it had been antic.i.p.ated by the genius of Plato and Virgil, appears now in literature almost for the first time.

"They say that our father Jupiter, when he ordered the world at the beginning, divided time into two parts exactly equal; the one part he clothed with light, the other with darkness; he called them Day and Night; and he a.s.signed rest to the night and to the day the work of life.

At that time Sleep was not yet born, and men pa.s.sed the whole of their lives awake: only, the quiet of the night was ordained for them, instead of sleep. But it came to pa.s.s, little by little, being that the minds of men are restless, that they carried on their business alike by night as by day, and gave no part at all to repose. And Jupiter, when he perceived that even in the night-time they ceased not from trouble and disputation, and that even the courts of law remained open, resolved to appoint one of his brothers to be the overseer of the night and have authority over man's rest. But Neptune pleaded in excuse the gravity of his constant charge of the seas, and Father Dis the difficulty of keeping in subjection the spirits below: and Jupiter, having taken counsel with the other G.o.ds, perceived that the practice of nightly vigils was somewhat in favour. It was by night, for the most part, that Juno gave birth to her children; Minerva, the mistress of all art and craft, loved the midnight lamp; Mars delighted in the night for his plots and sallies; and the favour of Venus and Bacchus was with those who roused by night. Then it was that Jupiter formed the design of creating Sleep; and he added him to the number of the G.o.ds, and gave him the charge over night and rest, putting into his hands the keys of human eyes. With his own hands he mingled the juices wherewith Sleep should soothe the hearts of mortals-- herb of Enjoyment and herb of Safety, gathered from a grove in Heaven; and, from the meadows of Acheron, the herb of Death; expressing from it one single drop only, no bigger than a tear that one might hide. 'With this juice,' he said, 'pour slumber upon the eyelids of mortals. So soon as it hath touched them they will lay themselves down motionless, under thy power. But be not afraid: they will revive, and in a while stand up again upon their feet.' After that, Jupiter gave wings to Sleep, attached, not to his heels like Mercury's, but to his shoulders like the wings of Love. For he said, 'It becomes thee not to approach men's eyes as with the noise of a chariot and the rushing of a swift courser, but with placid and merciful flight, as upon the wings of a swallow--nay! not so much as with the fluttering of a dove.'"

Alike in the nave and almost childlike simplicity of its general structure, and in its minute and intricate ornament, like that of a diapered wall or a figured tapestry, where hardly an inch of s.p.a.ce is ever left blank--this new style is much more akin to the manner of the thirteenth or fourteenth century than to that of the cla.s.sical period. A similar quality is shown, not more strikingly, but on a larger scale and with a more certain touch, in the celebrated prose romance of Fronto's contemporary, Lucius Apuleius.

Like Fronto, Apuleius was of African origin. He was born at the Roman colony of Madaura in Numidia, and educated at Carthage, from which he proceeded afterwards to the university of Athens. The epithets of _semi- Numida_ and _semi-Gaetulus_, which he applies to himself, indicate that he fully felt himself to belong to a civilisation which was not purely European. Together with the Graeco-Syrian Lucian, this Romano-African represents the last extension which ancient culture took before finally fading away or becoming absorbed in new forms. Both were by profession travelling lecturers; they were the nearest approach which the ancient world made to what we should now call the higher cla.s.s of journalist.

Lucian, in his later life--like a journalist nowadays who should enter Parliament--combined his profession with high public employment; but Apuleius, so far as is known, spent all his life in writing and lecturing. Though he was not strictly either an orator or a philosopher, his works include both speeches and philosophical treatises; but his chief distinction and his permanent interest are as a novelist both in the literal and in the accepted sense of the word--a writer of prose romances in which he carried the _novella elocutio_ to the highest point it reached. He was born about the year 125; the _Metamorphoses_, his most famous and his only extant romance, was written at Rome before he was thirty, soon after he had completed his course of study at Athens. The philosophical or mystical treatises of his later life, _On the Universe, On the G.o.d of Socrates, On Plato and his Doctrine_, do not rise above the ordinary level of the Neo-Platonist school, Platonism half understood, mixed with fanciful Orientalism, and enveloped in a maze of verbiage.

That known as the _Apologia_, an elaborate literary amplification of the defence which he had to make before the proconsul of Africa against an accusation of dealing in magic, is the only one which survives of his oratorical works; and his miscellaneous writings on many branches of science and natural history, which are conjectured to have formed a sort of encyclopedia like those of Celsus and Pliny, are all but completely lost: but the _Florida_, a collection, probably made by himself, of twenty-four selected pa.s.sages from the public lectures which he delivered at Carthage, give an idea of his style as a lecturer, and of the scope and variety of his talent. The Ciceronian manner of Quintilian and his school has now completely disappeared. The new style may remind one here and there of Seneca, but the resemblance does not go far. Fronto, who speaks of Cicero with grudging and lukewarm praise, regards Seneca as on the whole the most corrupt among Roman writers, and Apuleius probably held the same view. He produces his rhetorical effects, not by daring tropes or acc.u.mulations of sonorous phrases, but by a perpetual refinement of diction which keeps curiously weighing and rejecting words, and giving every other word an altered value or an unaccustomed setting.

The effect is like that of strange and rather barbarous jewellery. A remarkable pa.s.sage, on the power of sight possessed by the eagle, may be cited as a characteristic specimen of his more elaborate manner. _Quum se nubium tenus altissime sublimavit_, he writes, _evecta alis totum istud spatium, qua pluitur et ningitur, ultra quod cac.u.men nec fulmini nec fulguri locus est, in ipso, ut ita dixerim, solo aetheris et fastigio hiemis ... nutu clementi laevorsum vel dextrorsum tota mole corporis labitur ... inde cuncta despiciens, ibidem pinnarum eminus indefesso remigio, ac paulisper cunctabundo volatu paene eodem loco pendula circ.u.mtuetur et quaerit quorsus potissimum in praedam superne se proruat fulminis vice, de caelo improvisa simul campis pecua, simul montibus feras, simul urbibus homines, uno obtutu sub eodem impetu cernens_. The first thing that strikes a reader accustomed to cla.s.sical Latin in a pa.s.sage like this is the short broken rhythms, the simple organism of archaic prose being artificially imitated by carefully and deliberately breaking up all the structure which the language had been wrought into through the handling of centuries. The next thing is that half the phrases are, in the ordinary sense of the word, barely Latin. Apuleius has all the daring, though not the genius, of Virgil himself in inventing new Latin or using old Latin in new senses. But Virgil is old Latin to him no less than Ennius or Pacuvius; in this very pa.s.sage, with its elaborate archaisms, there are three phrases taken directly from the first book of the _Aeneid_.

In the _Metamorphoses_ the elaboration of the new style culminates. In its main substance this curious and fantastic romance is a translation from a Greek original. Its precise relation to the version of the same story, extant in Greek under the name of Lucian, has given rise to much argument, and the question cannot be held to be conclusively settled; but the theory which seems to have most in its favour is that both are versions of a lost Greek original. Lucian applied his limpid style and his uncommon power of narration to rewrite what was no doubt a ruder and more confused story. Apuleius evidently took the story as a mere groundwork which he might overlay with his own fantastic embroidery. He was probably attracted to it by the supernatural element, which would appeal strongly to him, not merely as a professed mystic and a dabbler in magic, but as a _decadent_ whose art sought out strange experiences and romantic pa.s.sions no less than novel rhythms and exotic diction. Under the light touch of Lucian the supernaturalism of the story is merely that of a fairy-tale, not believed in or meant to be believed; in the _Metamorphoses_ a brooding sense of magic is over the whole narrative. In this spirit he entirely remodels the conclusion of the story. The whole of the eleventh book, from the vision of the G.o.ddess, with which it opens, to the reception of the hero at the conclusion into the fellowship of her holy servants, is conceived at the utmost tension of mystical feeling. "With stars and sea-winds in her raiment," flower-crowned, shod with victorious palm, clad, under the dark splendours of her heavy pall, in shimmering white silk shot with saffron and rose like flame, an awful figure rises out of the moonlit sea: _En adsum_, comes her voice, _rerum natura parens, elementorum omnium domina, seculorum progenies initialis, summa numinum, regina manium, prima caelitum, deorum dearumque facies uniformis, quae caeli luminosa culmina, maris salubria flamina, inferorum deplorata silentia nutibus meis dispenso_. It was in virtue of such pa.s.sages as that from which these words are quoted that Apuleius came to be regarded soon after his death as an incarnation of Antichrist, sent to perplex the worshippers of the true G.o.d. Already to Lactantius he is not a curious artist in language, but a magician inspired by diabolical agency; St. Augustine tells us that, like Apollonius of Tyana, he was set up by religious paganism as a rival to Jesus Christ.

Of the new elements interwoven by Apuleius in the story of the transformations and adventures of Lucius of Patrae (Lucius of Madaura, he calls him, thus hinting, to the mingled awe and confusion of his readers, that the events had happened to himself), the fervid religious enthusiasm of the conclusion is no doubt historically the most important; but what has made it immortal is the famous story of Cupid and Psyche, which fills nearly two books of the _Metamorphoses_. With the strangeness characteristic of the whole work, this wonderful and exquisitely told story is put in the mouth of a half crazy and drunken old woman, in the robbers' cave where part of the action pa.s.ses. But her first half-dozen words, the _Erant in quadam civitate rex et regina_, lift it in a moment into the fairy world of pure romance. The story itself is in its const.i.tuent elements a well-known specimen of the _marchen,_ or popular tale, which is not only current throughout the Aryan peoples, but may be traced in the popular mythology of all primitive races. It is beyond doubt in its essential features of immemorial antiquity; but what is unique about it is its sudden appearance in literature in the full flower of its most elaborate perfection. Before Apuleius there is no trace of the story in Greek or Roman writing; he tells it with a daintiness of touch and a wealth of fanciful ornament that have left later story- tellers little or nothing to add. The version by which it is best known to modern readers, that in the _Earthly Paradise_, while, after the modern poet's manner, expanding the descriptions for their own sake, follows Apuleius otherwise with exact fidelity.

In the more highly wrought episodes, like the _Cupid and Psyche_, the new Latin of Apuleius often approximates nearly to a.s.sonant or rhymed verse.

Both rhyme and a.s.sonance were to be found in the early Latin which he had studied deeply, and may be judged from incidental fragments of the popular language never to have wholly disappeared from common use during the cla.s.sical period. Virgil, in his latest work, as has been noticed, shows a tendency to experiment in combining their use with that of the Graeco-Latin rhythms. The combination, in the writing of the new school, of a sort of inchoate verse with an elaborate and even pedantic prose was too artificial to be permanent; but about the same time attempts were made at a corresponding new style in regular poetry. Rhymed verse as such does not appear till later; the work of the _novelli poetae_, as they were called by the grammarians, partly took the form of reversion to the trochaic metres which were the natural cadence of the Latin language, partly of fresh experiments in hitherto untried metres, in both cases with a large employment of a.s.sonance, and the beginnings of an accentual as opposed to a quant.i.tative treatment. Of these experiments few have survived; the most interesting is a poem of remarkable beauty preserved in the Latin Anthology under the name of the _Pervigilium Veneris_. Its author is unknown, nor can its date be determined with certainty. The worship of Venus Genetrix, for whose spring festival the poem is written, had been revived on a magnificent scale by Hadrian; and this fact, together with the internal evidence of the language, make it a.s.signable with high probability to the age of the Antonines. The use of the preposition _de_, almost as in the Romance languages, where case- inflexions would be employed in cla.s.sical Latin, has been held to argue an African origin; while its remarkable mediaevalisms have led some critics, against all the other indications, to place its date as low as the fourth or even the fifth century.

The _Pervigilium Veneris_ is written in the trochaic septenarian verse which had been freely used by the earliest Roman poets, but had since almost dropped out of literary use. With the revival of the trochaic movement the long divorce between metrical stress and spoken accent begins to break down. The metre is indeed accurate, and even rigorous, in its quant.i.tative structure; but instead of the prose and verse stresses regularly clashing as they do in the hexameter or elegiac, they tend broadly towards coinciding, and do entirely coincide in one-third of the lines of the poem. We are on the very verge of the accentual Latin poetry of the Middle Ages, and the affinity is made closer by the free use of initial and terminal a.s.sonances, and even of occasional rhyme. The use of stanzas with a recurring refrain was not unexampled; Virgil, following Theocritus and Catullus, had employed the device with singular beauty in the eighth _Eclogue_; but this is the first known instance of the refrain being added to a poem in stanzas of a fixed and equal length;[11] it is more than halfway towards the structure of an eleventh-century Provencal _alba_. The keen additional pleasure given by rhyme was easily felt in a language where accidental rhymes come so often as they do in Latin, but the rhyme here, so far as there is any, is rather incidental to the way in which the language is used, with its silvery chimes and recurrences, than sought out for its own sake; there is more of actual rhyming in some of the prose of Apuleius. The refrain itself-

_Cras amet qui nunquam amavit, quique amavit cras amet--_

has its internal recurrence, the folding back of the musical phrase upon itself; and as it comes over and over again it seems to set the whole poem swaying to its own music. In one of the most remarkable of his lyrics (like this poem, a song of spring), Tennyson has come very near, as near perhaps as it is possible to do in words, towards explaining the actual process through which poetry comes into existence: _The fairy fancies range, and lightly stirr'd, Ring little bells of change from word to word_. In the _Pervigilium Veneris_ with its elaborate simplicity-- partly a conscious literary artifice, partly a real reversion to the childhood of poetical form--this process is, as it were, laid bare before our eyes; the ringing phrases turn and return, and expand and interlace and fold in, as though set in motion by a strain of music.

_Cras amet qui nunquam amavit, quique amavit cras amet; Ver novum, ver iam canorum, ver renatus...o...b..s est; Vere concordant amores, vere nubunt alites Et nemus comam resolvit de maritis imbribus: Cras amet qui nunquam amavit, quique amavit cras amet--_

in these lines of clear melody the poem opens, and the rest is all a series of graceful and florid variations or embroideries upon them; the first line perpetually repeating itself through the poem like a thread of gold in the pattern or a phrase in the music. In the soft April night the tapering flame-shaped rosebud, soaked in warm dew, swells out and breaks into a fire of crimson at dawn.

_Facta Cypridis de cruore deque Amoris osculo Deque gemmis deque flammis deque solis purpuris Cras ruborem qui latebat veste tectus ignea Unico marita nodo non pudebit solvere.

Cras amet qui nunquam amavit, quique amavit cras amet._

Flower-garlanded and myrtle-shrouded, the Spring worshippers go dancing through the fields that break before them into a sheet of flowers; among them the boy Love goes, without his torch and his arrows; amid gold- flowered broom, under trees unloosening their tresses, in myrtle-thicket and poplar shade, the whole land sings with the voices of innumerable birds. Then with a sudden sob the pageant ceases:--

_Ilia cantat, nos tacemus: quando ver venit meum?

Quando fiam uti chelidon ut tacere desinam?_

A second spring, in effect, was not to come for poetry till a thousand years later; once more then we hear the music of this strange poem, not now in the bronze utterance of a mature and magnificent language, but faintly and haltingly, in immature forms that yet have notes of new and piercing sweetness.

_Bels dous amicx, fa.s.sam un joc novel Ins el jardi on chanton li auzel--_

so it rings out in Southern France, "in an orchard under the whitethorn leaf;" and in England, later, but yet a century before Chaucer, the same clear note is echoed, _bytuene Mershe ant Averil, whan spray bigineth to spring._

But in the Roman Empire under the Antonines the soil, the race, the language, were alike exhausted. The anarchy of the third century brought with it the wreck of the whole fabric of civilisation; and the new religion, already widely diffused and powerful, was beginning to absorb into itself on all sides the elements of thought and emotion which tended towards a new joy and a living art.

VI.

EARLY LATIN CHRISTIANITY: MINUCIUS FELIX, TERTULLIAN, LACTANTIUS.

The new religion was long in adapting itself to literary form; and if, between the era of the Antonines and that of Diocletian, a century pa.s.ses in which all the important literature is Christian, this is rather due to the general decay of art and letters, than to any high literary quality in the earlier patristic writing. Christianity began among the lower cla.s.ses, and in the Greek-speaking provinces of the Empire; after it reached Rome, and was diffused through the Western provinces, it remained for a long time a somewhat obscure sect, confined, in the first instance, to the small Jewish or Graeco-Asiatic colonies which were to be found in all centres of commerce, and spreading from them among the uneducated urban populations. The persecution of Nero was directed against obscure people, vaguely known as a sort of Jews, and the martyrdom of the two great apostles was an incident that pa.s.sed without remark and almost without notice. Tacitus dismisses the Christians in a few careless words, and evidently cla.s.ses the new religion with other base Oriental superst.i.tions as hardly worth serious mention. The well-known correspondence between Pliny and Trajan, on the subject of the repressive measures to be taken against the Christians of Bithynia, indicates that Christianity had, by the beginning of the second century, taken a large and firm footing in the Eastern provinces; but it is not till a good many years later that we have any certain indication of its obtaining a hold on the educated cla.s.ses. The legend of the conversion of Statius seems to be of purely mediaeval origin. Flavius Clemens, the cousin of the Emperor Domitian, executed on the ground of "atheism" during the year of his consulship, is claimed, though without certainty, as the earliest Christian martyr of high rank. Even in the middle of the second century, the Church of Rome mainly consisted of people who could barely speak or write Latin. The Muratorian fragment, the earliest Latin Christian doc.u.ment, which general opinion dates within a few years of the death of Marcus Aurelius, and which is part of an extremely important official list of canonical writings issued by the authority of the Roman Church, is barbarous in construction and diction. It is in the reign of Commodus, amid the wreck of all other literature, that we come on the first Christian authors. Victor, Bishop of Rome from the year 186, is mentioned by Jerome as the first author of theological treatises in Latin; taken together with his attempt to excommunicate the Asiatic Churches on the question, already a burning one, of the proper date of keeping Easter, this shows that the Latin Church was now gaining independent force and vitality.

Two main streams may be traced in the Christian literature which begins with the reign of Commodus. On the one hand, there is what may be called the African school, writing in the new Latin; on the other, the Italian school, which attempted to mould cla.s.sical Latin to Christian use. The former bears a close affinity in style to Apuleius, or, rather, to the movement of which Apuleius was the most remarkable product; the latter succeeds to Quintilian and his contemporaries as the second impulse of Ciceronianism. The two opposing methods appear at their sharpest contrast in the earliest authors of each, Tertullian and Minucius Felix. The vast preponderance of the former, alike in volume of production and fire of eloquence, offers a suggestive parallel to the comparative importance of the two schools in the history of ecclesiastical Latin. Throughout the third and fourth centuries the African school continues to predominate, but it takes upon itself more of the cla.s.sical finish, and tames the first ferocity of its early manner. Cyprian inclines more to the style of Tertullian; Lactantius, "the Christian Cicero," reverts strongly towards the cla.s.sical forms: and finally, towards the end of the fourth century, the two languages are combined by Augustine, in proportions which, throughout the Middle Ages, form the accepted type of the language of Latin Christianity.

In a fine pa.s.sage at the opening of the fifth book of his _Inst.i.tutes of Divinity,_ Lactantius regrets the imperfect literary support given to Christianity by his two eminent predecessors. The obscurity and harshness of Tertullian, he says (and to this may be added his Montanism, which fluctuated on the edge of heresy), prevent him from being read or esteemed as widely as his great literary power deserves; while Minucius, in his single treatise, the _Octavius,_ gave a brilliant specimen of his grace and power as a Christian apologist, but did not carry out the task to its full scope. This last treatise is, indeed, of unique interest, not only as a fine, if partial, vindication of the new religion, but as the single writing of the age, Christian or pagan, which in style and diction follows the cla.s.sical tradition, and almost reaches the cla.s.sical standard. As to the life of its author, nothing is known beyond the scanty indications given in the treatise itself. Even his date is not wholly certain, and, while the reign of Commodus is his most probable period, Jerome appears to allude to him as later than Tertullian, and some modern critics incline to place the work in the reign of Alexander Severus. The _Octavius_ is a dialogue in the Ciceronian manner, showing especially a close study of the _De Natura Deorum_. A brief and graceful introduction gives an account of the scene of the dialogue. The narrator, with his two friends, Octavius and Caecilius, the former a Christian, the latter a somewhat wavering adherent of the old faith, are taking a walk on the beach near Ostia on a beautiful autumn morning, watching the little waves lapping on the sand, and boys playing duck-and-drake with pieces of tile, when Caecilius kisses his hand, in the ordinary pagan usage, to an image of Serapis which they pa.s.s. The incident draws them on to a theological discussion. Caecilius sets forth the argument against Christianity in detail, and Octavius replies to him point by point; at the end, Caecilius professes himself overcome, and declares his adhesion to the faith of his friend. Both in the attack and in the defence it is only the rational side of the new doctrine which is at issue. The unity of G.o.d, the resurrection of the body, and retribution in a future state, make up the sum of Christianity as it is presented. The name of Christ is not once mentioned, nor is his divinity directly a.s.serted. There is no allusion to the sacraments, or to the doctrine of the Redemption; and Octavius neither quotes from nor refers to the writings of either Old or New Testament. Among early Christian writings, this method of treatment is unexampled elsewhere. The work is an attempt to present the new religion to educated opinion as a reasonable philosophic system; as we read it, we might be in the middle of the eighteenth century. With this temperate rationalism is combined a clearness and purity of diction, founded on the Ciceronian style, but without Cicero's sumptuousness of structure, that recalls the best prose of the Silver Age.