Latin Literature Part 11

The author of the _Octavius_ was a lawyer, who practised in the Roman courts. The literary influence of Quintilian no doubt lasted longer among the legal profession, for whose guidance he primarily wrote, than among the grammarians and journalists, who represent in this age the general tendency of the world of letters. But even in the legal profession the new Latin had established itself, and, except in the capital, seems to have almost driven out the cla.s.sical manner. Its most remarkable exponent among Christian writers was, up to the time of his conversion, a pleader in the Carthaginian law-courts.

Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullia.n.u.s was born at Carthage towards the end of the reign of Antoninus Pius. When he was a young man, the fame of Apuleius as a writer and lecturer was at its height; and though Tertullian himself never mentions him (as Apuleius, on his side, never refers in specific terms to the Christian religion), they must have been well known to each other, and their antagonism is of the kind which grows out of strong similarities of nature. Apuleius pa.s.sed for a magician: Tertullian was a firm believer in magic, and his conversion to Christianity was, he himself tells us, very largely due to confessions of its truth extorted from demons, at the strange spiritualistic seances_ which were a feature of the time among all cla.s.ses. His conversion took place in the last year of Commodus. The tension between the two religions--for in Africa, at all events, the old and the new were followed with equally fiery enthusiasm--had already reached breaking point. A heathen mob, headed by the priestesses of the _Mater et Virgo Caelestis,_ the object of the ecstatic worship afterwards transferred to the mother of Christ, had two or three years before besieged the proconsul of Africa in his own house because he refused to order a general ma.s.sacre of the Christians. In the anarchy after the a.s.sa.s.sination of Commodus, the persecution broke out, and continued to rage throughout the reign of Septimius Severus. It was in these years that Tertullian poured forth the series of apologetic and controversial writings whose fierce enthusiasm and impetuous eloquence open the history of Latin Christianity. The _Apologetic.u.m,_ the greatest of his earlier works, and, upon the whole, his masterpiece, was composed towards the beginning of this persecution, in the last years of the second century.

The terms in which its purport is stated, _Quod religio Christiana d.a.m.nanda non sit, nisi qualis sit prius intelligatur,_ might lead one to expect a grave and reasoned defence of the new doctrine, like that of the _Octavius_. But Tertullian's strength is in attack, not in defence; and his apology pa.s.ses almost at once into a fierce indictment of paganism, painted in all the gaudiest colours of African rhetoric. Towards the end, he turns violently upon those who say that Christianity is merely a system of philosophy: and writers like Minucius are included with the eclectic pagan schoolmen in his condemnation. Here, for the first time, the position is definitely taken which has since then had so vast and varied an influence, that the Holy Scriptures are the source of all wisdom, and that the poetry and philosophy of the Graeco-Roman world were alike derived or perverted from the inspired writings of the Old Testament. Moses was five hundred years before Homer; and therefore, runs his grandiose and sweeping fallacy, Homer is derived from the books of Moses. The argument, strange to say, has lived almost into our own day.

In thus breaking with heathen philosophy and poetry, Tertullian necessarily broke with the literary traditions of Europe for a thousand years. The Holy Scriptures, as a canon of revealed truth, became incidentally but inevitably a canon of literary style likewise. Writings soaked in quotations from the Hebrew poets and prophets could not but be affected by their style through and through. A current Latin translation of the Old and New Testament--the so-called _Itala,_ which itself only survives as the ground-work of later versions--had already been made, and was in wide use. Its rude literal fidelity imported into Christian Latin an enormous ma.s.s of Grecisms and Hebraisms--the latter derived from the original writings, the former from the Septuagint version of the Old Testament--which combined with its free use of popular language and its relaxed grammar to force the new Latin further and further away from the cla.s.sical tradition. The new religion, though it met its educated opponents in argument and outshone them in rhetorical embellishment, still professed, after the example of its first founders, to appeal mainly to the simple and the poor. "Stand forth, O soul!" cries Tertullian in another treatise of the same period; "I appeal to thee, not as wise with a wisdom formed in the schools, trained in libraries, or nourished in Attic academy or portico, but as simple and rude, without polish or culture; such as thou art to those who have thee only, such as thou art in the crossroad, the highway, the dockyard."

In the ardour of its attacks upon the heathen civilisation, the rising Puritanism of the Church bore hard upon the whole of culture. As against the theatre and the gladiatorial games, indeed, it occupied an una.s.sailable position. There is a grim and characteristic humour in Tertullian's story of the Christian woman who went to the theatre and came back from it possessed with a devil, and the devil's crushing reply, _In meo eam inveni,_ to the expostulation of the exorcist; a n.o.bler pa.s.sion rings in his pleading against the butcheries of the amphitheatre, "Do you wish to see blood? Behold Christ's!" His declamations against worldly luxury and ornament in the sumptuous pages of the _De Cultu Feminarum_ are not more sweeping or less sincere than those of Horace or Juvenal; but the violent attack made on education and on literature itself in the _De Idololatria_ shows the growth of that persecuting spirit which, as it gathered material force, destroyed ancient art and literature wherever it found them, and which led Pope Gregory, four hundred years later, to burn the magnificent library founded by Augustus.

_Nos sumus in quos decucurrerunt fines seculorum,_ "upon us the ends of the world are come," is the burden of Tertullian's impa.s.sioned argument.

What were art and letters to those who waited, from moment to moment, for the glory of the Second Coming? Yet for ten years or more he continued to pour forth his own brilliant essays; and while the substance of his teaching becomes more and more harsh and vindictive, the force of his rhetoric, his command over irony and invective, the gorgeous richness of his vocabulary, remain as striking as ever. In the strange and often romantic psychology of the _De Anima,_ and in the singular clothes- philosophy of the _De Pallio,_ he appears as the precursor of Swedenborg and Teufelsdruckh. A remarkable pa.s.sage in the former treatise, in which he speaks of the growing pressure of over-population in the Empire, against which wars, famines, and pestilences had become necessary if unwelcome remedies, may lead us to reconsider the theory, now largely accepted, that the Roman Empire decayed and perished for want of men.

With the advance of years his growing antagonism to the Catholic Church is accompanied by a further hardening of his style. The savage Puritanism of the _De Monogamia_ and _De Ieiunio_ is couched in a scholastic diction where the tradition of culture is disappearing; and in the gloomy ferocity of the _De Pudicitia,_ probably the latest of his extant works, he comes to a final rupture alike with Catholicism and with humane letters.

The African school of patristic writers, of which Tertullian is at once the earliest and the most imposing figure, and of which he was indeed to a large degree the direct founder, continued for a century after his death to include the main literary production of Latin Christianity.

Thascius Caecilius Cypria.n.u.s, Bishop of Carthage from the year 248, though a pupil and an admirer of Tertullian, reverts in his own writings at once to orthodoxy and to an easy and copious diction. In earlier youth he had been a professor of rhetoric; after his conversion in mature life, he gave up all his wealth to the poor, and devoted his great literary gifts to apologetic and hortatory writings. He escaped the Decian persecution by retiring from Carthage; but a few years later he was executed in the renewed outbreak of judicial ma.s.sacres which sullied the short and disastrous reign of Valerian. Forty years after Cyprian's death the rhetorician Arn.o.bius of Sicca in Numidia renewed the attack on paganism, rather than the defence or exposition of Christianity, in the seven books _Adversus Nationes_, which he is said to have written as a proof of the sincerity of his conversion. "Uneven and ill-proportioned,"

in the phrase of Jerome, this work follows neither the elaborate rhetoric of the early African school, nor the chaster and more polished style of Cyprian, but rather renews the inferior and slovenly manner of the earlier antiquarians and encyclopedists. A free use of the rhetorical figures goes side by side with a general want of finish and occasional lapses into solecism. His literary gift is so small, and his knowledge of the religion he professes to defend so slight and so excessively inaccurate, that theologians and men of letters for once agree that his main value consists in the fragments of antiquarian information which he preserves. But he has a further claim to notice as the master of a celebrated pupil.

Lucius Caecilius Firmia.n.u.s Lactantius, a name eminent among patristic authors, and not inconsiderable in humane letters, had, like Cyprian, been a professor of rhetoric, and embraced Christianity in mature life.

That he was a pupil of Arn.o.bius is established by the testimony of Jerome; his African birth is only a doubtful inference from this fact.

Towards the end of the third century he established a school at Nicomedia, which had practically become the seat of empire under the rule of Diocletian; and from there he was summoned to the court of Gaul to superintend the education of Crispus, the ill-fated son of Constantine.

The new religion had pa.s.sed through its last and sharpest persecution under Diocletian; now, of the two joint Emperors Constantine openly favoured the Christians, and Licinius had been forced to relax the hostility towards them which he had at first shown. As it permeated the court and saw the reins of government almost within its grasp, the Church naturally dropped some of the anathematising spirit in which it had regarded art and literature in the days of its earlier struggles.

Lactantius brought to its service a taste trained in the best literary tradition; and while some doubt was cast on his dogmatic orthodoxy as regards the precise definition of the Persons of the Trinity, his pure and elegant diction was accepted as a model for later writers. His greatest work, the seven books of the _Inst.i.tutes of Divinity_, was published a few years before the victory of Constantine over Maxentius outside the walls of Rome, which was the turning-point in the contest between the two religions. It is an able exposition of Christian doctrine in a style which, for eloquence, copiousness, and refinement, is in the most striking contrast to the wretched prose produced by contemporary pagan writers. The influence of Cicero is obvious and avowed throughout; but the references in the work show the author to have been familiar with the whole range of the Latin cla.s.sics, poets as well as prose writers.

Ennius, the comedians and satirists, Virgil and Horace, are cited by him freely; he even dares to praise Ovid. In his treatise _On G.o.ds Workmanship_--_De Opificio Dei_--the arguments are often borrowed with the language from Cicero, but Lucretius is also quoted and combated. The more fanatical side of the new religion appears in the curious work, _De Mortibus Persecutorum_, written after Constantine had definitely thrown in his lot with Christianity. It is famous as containing the earliest record of the vision of Constantine before the battle of the Mulvian Bridge; and its highly coloured account of the tragical fates of the persecuting Emperors, from Nero to Diocletian, had a large effect in fixing the tradition of the later Empire as viewed throughout the Middle Ages. The long pa.s.sionate protest of the Church against heathen tyranny breaks out here into equally pa.s.sionate exultation; the Roman Empire is already seen, as it was later by St. Augustine, fading and crumbling away with the growth of the new and imperial City of G.o.d.

Besides the large and continuous volume of its prose production, the Latin Church of the third century also made its first essays in poetry.

They are both rude and scanty; it was not till late in the fourth century that Christian poetry reached its full development in the hymns of Ambrose and Prudentius, and the hexameter poems of Paulinus of Nola. The province of Africa, fertile as it was in prose writers, never produced a poet of any eminence. The pieces in verse--they can hardly be called poems--ascribed to Tertullian and Cyprian are forgeries of a late period.

But contemporary with them is an African verse-writer of curious linguistic interest, Commodia.n.u.s. A bishop of Ma.r.s.eilles, who wrote, late in the fifth century, a continuation of St. Jerome's catalogue of ecclesiastical writers, mentions his work in a very singular phrase: "After his conversion," he says, "Commodia.n.u.s wrote a treatise against the pagans in an intermediate language approximating to verse," _mediocri sermone quasi versu_. This treatise, the _Carmen Apologetic.u.m adversus Iudaeos et Gentes_, is extant, together with other pieces by the same author. It is a poem of over a thousand lines, which the allusions to the Gothic war and the Decian persecution fix as having been written in or very near the year 250. It is written in hexameters, composed on a system which wavers between the quant.i.tative and accentual treatment. These are almost evenly balanced. The poem is thus a doc.u.ment of great importance in the history of the development of mediaeval out of cla.s.sical poetry.

Though not, of course, without his barbarisms, Commodia.n.u.s was obviously neither ignorant nor careless of the rules of cla.s.sical versification, some of which--for instance, the strong caesura in the middle of the third foot--he retains with great strictness. His peculiar prosody is plainly deliberate. Only a very few lines are wholly quant.i.tative, and none are wholly accentual, except where accent and quant.i.ty happen to coincide. Much of the p.r.o.nunciation of modern Italian may be traced in his remarkable accentuation of some words; like Italian, he both throws back the accent off a long syllable and slides it forward upon a short one. a.s.sonance is used freely, but there is not more rhyming than is usual in the poetry of the late empire. Not only in p.r.o.nunciation, but in grammatical inflexion, the beginnings of Italian here and there appear.

The case-forms of the different declensions are beginning to run into one another: the plural, for example, of _insignis_ is no longer _insignes_, but, as in Italian, _insigni_; and the case-inflexions themselves are dwindling away before the free use of prepositions, which was already beginning to show itself in the _Pervigilium Veneris_.

Popular poetry was now definitely a.s.serting itself alongside of book- poetry formed on the cla.s.sical model. But authors who kept up a high literary standard in prose continued to do so in verse also. The poem _De Ave Phoenice_, found in early mediaeval collections under the name of Lactantius, and accepted as his by recent critics, is written in accurate and graceful elegiac couplets, which are quite in accordance with the admiration Lactantius, in his work _On the Wrath of G.o.d_, expresses for Ovid. It is perhaps the earliest instance outside the field of prose of the truce or coalition which was slowly forming itself between the new religion and the old culture. Beyond a certain faint and almost impalpable mysticism, which hints at the legend of the Phoenix as symbolical of the doctrine of the Resurrection, there is nothing in the poem which is distinctively Christian. Phoebus and the lyre of Cyllene are invoked, as they might be by a pagan poet. But the language is from beginning to end full of Christian or, at least, scriptural reminiscences, which could only be possible to a writer familiar with the Psalter. The description with which the poem opens of the Earthly Paradise, a "land east of the sun," where the bird has its home, has mingled touches of the Elysium of Homer and Virgil, and the New Jerusalem of the Revelation; as in the Psalms, the sun is a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, and night and day are full of a language that is not speech.

In the literary revival of the latter half of the fourth century these tendencies have developed themselves, and taken a more mature but a less interesting form. After Christianity had become formally and irrevocably the State religion, it took over what was left of Latin culture as part of the chaotic inheritance which it had to accept as the price for civil establishment. A heavy price was paid on both sides when Constantine, in Dante's luminous phrase, "turned the eagle." The Empire definitively parted with the splendid administrative and political tradition founded on the cla.s.sical training and the Stoic philosophy; though shattered as it had been in the anarchy of the third century, that was perhaps in any case irrecoverable. The Church, on its side, drew away in the persons of its leaders from its earlier tradition, with all that it involved in the growth of a wholly new thought and art, and armed or hampered itself with that cla.s.sicalism from which it never again got quite free. It is in the century before Constantine, therefore, when old and new were in the sharpest antagonism, and yet were both full of a strange ferment--the ferment of dissolution in the one case, in the other that of quickening-- that the end of the ancient world, and with it the end of Latin literature as such, might reasonably be placed. But the first result of the alliance between the Empire and the Church was to give added dignity to the latter and renewed energy to the former. The partial revival of letters in the fourth century may induce us to extend our survey so far as to include Ausonius and Claudian as legitimate, though remote, successors of the Augustan poets.

VII

THE FOURTH CENTURY: AUSONIUS AND CLAUDIAN.

For a full century after the death of Marcus Aurelius, Latin literature was, apart from the Christian writers, practically extinct. The authors of the least importance, or whose names even are known to any but professional scholars, may be counted on the fingers of one hand. The stream of Roman law, the one guiding thread down those dark ages, continued on its steady course. Papinian and Ulpian, the two foremost jurists of the reigns of Septimius and Alexander Severus, bear a reputation as high as that of any of their ill.u.s.trious predecessors. Both rose to what was in this century the highest administrative position in the Empire, the prefecture of the praetorian guards. Papinian, a native it seems of the Syrian town of Emesa, and a kinsman of the Syrian wife of Septimius Severus, was the author of numerous legal works, both in Greek and Latin. Under Severus he was not only commander of the household troops, but discharged what we should now call the duties of Home Secretary. His genius for law was united with an independence of judgment and a sense of equity which rose beyond the limits of formal jurisprudence, and made him one of the great humanising influences of his profession. He was murdered, with circ.u.mstances of great brutality, by the infamous Caracalla, almost immediately after his accession to sole power. Domitius Ulpia.n.u.s, Papinian's successor as the head of Latin jurists, was also a Syrian by birth. Already an a.s.sessor to Papinian, and a member of the imperial privy council, he was raised to the praetorian prefecture and afterwards removed from it by his countryman, the Emperor Heliogabalus, but reinstated by Alexander Severus, under whom he was second ruler of the Empire till killed in a revolt of the praetorian guards in the year 228. He was succeeded in the prefecture by Julius Paulus, a jurist of almost equal eminence, though inferior to Ulpian in style and literary grace. Roman law practically remained at the point where these three eminent men left it, or only followed in their footsteps, until its final systematisation under Justinian.

Beyond the field of law, such prose as was written in this century was mainly Greek. The historical works of Herodian and Dio Ca.s.sius, poor in quality as they are, seem to have excelled anything written at the same time in Latin. Their contemporary, Marius Maximus, continued the series of biographies of the Emperors begun by Suetonius, carrying it down from Nerva to Heliogabalus; but the work, such as it was, is lost, and is only known as the main source used by the earlier compilers of the _Augustan History_. Verse-making had fallen into the hands of inferior grammarians.

Of their numerous productions enough survives to indicate that a certain technical skill was not wholly lost. The metrical treatises of Terentia.n.u.s Maurus, a scholar of the later years of the second century, show that the science of metre was studied with great care, not only in its common forms, but in the less familiar lyric measures. The didactic poem on the art of medicine by Quintus Sammonicus Serenus, the son of an eminent bibliophile, and the friend of the Emperor Alexander Severus, though of little poetical merit, is written in graceful and fluent verse.

If of little merit as poetry, it is of even less as science. Medicine had sunk lower towards barbarism than versification, when a sovereign remedy against fevers was described in these polished lines:--

_Inscribis chartae quod dicitur Abracadabra, Saepius et subter repetis, sed detrahe summam Et magis atque magis desint elemenfa figuris, Singula quae semper rapies et cetera figes Donec in augustum redigatur litera conum: His lino nexis collum redimire memento_.

Nor is his alternative remedy of a piece of coral hung round the patient's neck much more rational. The drop from the science of Celsus is much more striking here than the drop from the art of Celsus'

contemporary Manilius. An intermittent imperial patronage of letters lingered on. The elder and younger Gordian (the latter a pupil of Sammonicus' father, who bequeathed his immense library to him) had some reputation as writers. Clodius Albinus, the governor of Britain who disputed the empire with Septimius Severus, was a devoted admirer of Apuleius, and wrote romances in a similar manner, which, according to his biographer, had no inconsiderable circulation.

Under Diocletian and his successors there was a slight and partial revival of letters, which chiefly showed itself on the side of verse. The _Cynegetica_, a didactic poem on hunting, by the Carthaginian poet Marcus Aurelius Olympius Nemesia.n.u.s, is, together with four bucolic pieces by the same author, the chief surviving fragment of the main line of Virgilian tradition. The _Cynegetica_, in spite of its good taste and its excellent versification, is on the whole a dull performance; but in the other pieces, the pastoral form gives the author now and then an opportunity of introducing a little touch of the romantic tone which is partly imitated from Virgil, but partly natural to the new Latin.

_Perdit spina rosas nec semper lilia candent Nec longum tenet uva comas nec populus umbras, Donum forma breve est, nec se quod commodet annis:--_

in these graceful lines the copied Virgilian cadence is united with the directness and the real or a.s.sumed simplicity which belongs to the second childhood of Latin literature, and which is so remarkable in the authors who founded the new style. The new style itself was also largely practised, but only a few scattered remnants survive. Tiberia.n.u.s, Count of Africa, Vicar of Spain, and praetorian prefect of Gaul (the whole nomenclature of the Empire is now pa.s.sing from the Roman to the mediaeval type) under Constantine the Great, is usually identified with the author of some of the most strikingly beautiful of these fragmentary pieces. A descriptive pa.s.sage, consisting of twenty lines of finely written trochaics, reminds one of the _Pervigilium Veneris_ in the richness of its language and the delicate simplicity of its style. The last lines may be quoted for their singular likeness to one of the most elaborately beautiful stanzas of the _Faerie Queene_, that which describes the sounds "consorted in one harmony" which Guyon hears in the gardens of Acrasia:--

_Has per umbras omnis ales plus canora quam putes Cantibus vernis strepebat et susurris dulcibus: Hic loquentis murmur amnis concinebat frondibus Quas melos vocalis aurae, musa Zephyri, moverat: Sic euntem per virecta pulcra odora et musica Ales amnis aura lucus flos et umbra iuverat._

The princ.i.p.al prose work, however, which has come down from this age, shows a continued and even increased degradation of style. The so-called _Historia Augusta_, a series of memoirs, in continuation of Suetonius'

_Lives of the Twelve Caesars_, of the Roman Emperors from Hadrian to Numerian (A.D. 117-284), was begun under Diocletian and finished under Constantine by six writers--Aelius Spartia.n.u.s, Julius Capitolinus, Vulcacius Gallica.n.u.s, Trebellius Pollio, Aelius Lampridius, and Flavius Vopiscus. Most of them, if not all, were officials of the imperial court, and had free access to the registers of the senate as well as to more private sources of information. The extreme feebleness of the contents of this curious work is only exceeded by the poverty and childishness of the writing. History had sunk into a collection of trivial gossip and details of court life, couched in a language worthy of a second-rate chronicler of the Dark Ages. The mere outward circ.u.mstances of the men whose lives they narrated--the _purpurati Augusti,_ as one of the authors calls them in a romantically sonorous phrase--were indeed of world-wide importance, and among the ma.s.ses of rubbish of which the memoirs chiefly consist there is included much curious information and striking incident. But their main interest is in the light they throw on the gradual sinking of the splendid administrative organisation of the second century towards the sterile Chinese hierarchy of the Byzantine Empire, and the concurrent degradation of paganism, both as a political and a religious system.

Vopiscus, the last of the six authors, apologises, in drawing the work to a close, for his slender literary power, and expresses the hope that his material at least may be found useful to some "eloquent man who may wish to unlock the actions of princes." What he had in his mind was probably not so much regular history as the panegyrical oratory which about this same time became a prominent feature of the imperial courts, and gave their name to a whole school of writers known as the Panegyrici. Gaul, for a long time the rival of Africa as the nurse of judicial oratory, was the part of the Empire where this new form of literature was most a.s.siduously cultivated. Up to the age of Constantine, it had enjoyed practical immunity from barbarian invasion, and had only had a moderate share of the civil wars which throughout the third century desolated all parts of the Empire. In wealth and civilisation, and in the arts of peace, it probably held the foremost place among the provinces.

Ma.r.s.eilles, Narbonne, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Autun, Rheims, and Treves all possessed famous and flourishing schools of oratory. The last-named town was, after the supreme power had been divided among two or more Augusti, a frequent seat of the imperial government of the Western provinces, and, like Milan, became a more important centre of public life than Rome. Of the extant collection of panegyrics, two were delivered there before Diocletian's colleague, the Emperor Maximia.n.u.s. A florid Ciceronianism was the style most in vogue, and the phraseology, at least, of the old State religion was, until the formal adoption of Christianity by the government, not only retained, but put prominently forward. Eumenius of Autun, the author of five or more pieces in the collection, delivered at dates between the years 297 and 311, is the most distinguished figure of the group. His fluent and ornate Latin may be read with some pleasure, though the purpose of the orations leaves them little value as a record of facts or a candid expression of opinions. Under the influence of these nurseries of rhetoric a new Gallic school of Christian writers rose and flourished during the fourth century. Hilarius of Poitiers, the most eminent of the Gallic bishops of this period, wrote controversial and expository works in the florid involved style of the neo-Ciceronian orators, which had in their day a high reputation. As the first known author of Latin hymns, he is the precursor of Ambrose and Prudentius.

Ambrose himself, though as Bishop of Milan he belongs properly to the Italian school of theological writers, was born and probably educated at Treves. But the literature of the province reached its highest point somewhat later, in one of the most important authors of the century, Decimus Magnus Ausonius of Bordeaux.

Ausonius was of Gallic blood by both parents; he was educated in grammar and rhetoric at the university of Bordeaux, and was afterwards for many years professor of both subjects at that of Treves. As tutor to Gratian, son and successor of the Emperor Valentinian, he established himself in court favour, and fulfilled many high State offices. After Gratian was succeeded by Theodosius he retired to a lettered ease near his native town, where he lived till nearly the end of the century. His numerous poetical works are of the most miscellaneous kind, ranging from Christian hymns and elegies on deceased relations to translations from the Greek Anthology and centos from Virgil. Among them the volume of _Idyllia_ const.i.tutes his chief claim to eminence, and gives him a high rank among the later Latin poets. The gem of this collection is the famous _Mosella,_ written at Treves about the year 370. The most beautiful of purely descriptive Latin poems, it is unique in the felicity with which it unites Virgilian rhythm and diction with the new romantic sense of the beauties of nature. The feeling for the charm of landscape which we had occasion to note in the letters of the younger Pliny is here fully developed, with a keener eye and an enlarged power of expression. Pliny's description of the c.l.i.tumnus may be interestingly compared with the pa.s.sage of this poem in which Ausonius recounts, with fine and observant touches, the beauties of his northern river--the liquid lapse of waters, the green wavering reflections, the belt of crisp sand by the water's edge and the long weeds swaying with the stream, the gleaming gravel-beds under the water with their patches of moss and the quick fishes darting hither and thither over them; or the oftener-quoted and not less beautiful lines where he breaks into rapture over the sunset colouring of stream and bank, and the gla.s.sy water where, at evening, all the hills waver and the vine-tendril shakes and the grape-bunches swell in the crystal mirror. In virtue of this poem Ausonius ranks not merely as the last, or all but the last, of Latin, but as the first of French poets.

His feeling for the country of his birth has all the romantic patriotism which we are accustomed to a.s.sociate with a much earlier or a much later age. The language of Du Bellay in the sixteenth century--

_Plus que le marbre dur me plaist l'ardoise fine, Plus mon Loire Gaulois que le Tybre Latin--_

is antic.i.p.ated here. The softer northern loveliness, _la douceur Angevine_, appeals to Ausonius more than all the traditional beauties of Arcadia or Sicily. It is with the Gallic rivers that he compares his loved Moselle: _Non tibi se Liger anteferet, non Axona praeceps ... te sparsis incerta Druentia ripis._

_O lordly flow the Loire and Seine And loud the dark Durance!--_

we seem to hear the very words of the modern ballad: and at the end of the poem his imagination returns, with the fondness of a lover, to the green lakes and sounding streams of Aquitaine, and the broad sea-like reaches of his native Garonne.

In this poem, alike by the cla.s.sic beauty of his language and the modernism of his feeling, Ausonius marks one of the great divisions in the history of poetry. He is the last of the poets of the Empire which was still nominally co-extensive with the world, which held in itself East and West, the old and the new. The final division of the Roman world, which took place in the year 395 between the two sons of Theodosius, synchronises with a division as definite and as final between cla.s.sical and mediaeval poetry; and in the last years of the fourth century the parting of the two streams, the separation of the dying from the dawning light, is placed in sharp relief by the works of two contemporary poets, Claudian and Prudentius. The singular and isolated figure of Claudian, the posthumous child of the cla.s.sical world, stands alongside of that of the first great Christian poet like the figures which were fabled to stand, regarding the rising and setting sun, by the Atlantic gates where the Mediterranean opened into the unknown Western seas.

Claudius Claudia.n.u.s was of Asiatic origin, and lived at Alexandria until, in the year of the death of Theodosius, he pa.s.sed into Italy and became the laureate of the court of Milan. Till then he had, according to his own statement, written in Greek, his life having been pa.s.sed wholly in the Greek-speaking provinces. But immediately on his arrival at the seat of the Western or Latin Empire he showed himself a master of the language and forms of Latin poetry such as had not been known since the end of the first century. His poems, so far as they can be dated, belong entirely to the next ten years. He is conjectured not to have long survived the downfall of his patron Stilicho, the great Vandal general who, as guardian of the young Emperor Honorius, was practically ruler of the Western Empire. He was the last eminent man of letters who was a professed pagan.

The historical epics which Claudian produced in rapid succession during the last five years of the fourth and the first five of the fifth century are now little read, except by historians who refer to them for details of the wars or court intrigues of the period. A hundred years ago, when Statius and Silius Italicus formed part of the regular course of cla.s.sical study, he naturally and properly stood alongside of them. His Latin is as pure as that of the best poets of the Silver Age; in wealth of language and in fertility of imagination he is excelled, if at all, by Statius alone. Alone in his age he inherits the scholarly tradition which still lingered among the libraries of Alexandria. Nonnus, the last and not one of the least learned and graceful of the later Greek epicists, who probably lived not long after Claudian, was also of Egyptian birth and training, and he and Claudian are really the last representatives of that Alexandrian school which had from the first had so large and deep an influence over the literature of Rome. The immense range of time covered by Greek literature is brought more vividly to our imagination when we consider that this single Alexandrian school, which began late in the history of Greek writing and came to an end centuries before its extinction, thus completely overlaps at both ends the whole life of the literature of Rome, reaching as it does from before Ennius till after Claudian.

These historical epics of Claudian's--_On the Consulate of Stilicho, On the Gildonic War, On the Pollentine War, On the Third, Fourth, and Sixth Consulates of Honorius_--are accompanied by other pieces, written in the same stately and harmonious hexameter, of a more personal interest: invectives against Rufinus and Eutropius, the rivals of his patron; a panegyric on Stilicho's wife, Serena, the niece of Theodosius; a fine epithalamium on the marriage of Honorius with Maria, the daughter of Stilicho and Serena; and also by a number of poems in elegiac metre, in which he wrote with equal grace and skill, though not with so singular a mastery. Among the shorter elegiac pieces, which are collected under the t.i.tle of _Epigrams,_ one, a poem on an old man of Verona who had never travelled beyond his own little suburban property, is among the jewels of Latin poetry. The lines in which he describes this quiet garden life--

_Frugibus alternis, non consule computat annum; Auctumnum pomis, ver sibi flore notat; Idem condit ager soles idemque reducit, Met.i.turque suo rusticus...o...b.. diem, Ingentem meminit parvo qui germine querc.u.m Aequaevumque videt consenuisse nemus--_

are in grace and feeling like the very finest work of Tibullus; and the concluding couplet--

_Erret, et extremos alter scrutetur Hiberos, Plus habet hic vitae, plus habet ille viae--_

though, in its dependence on a verbal point, it may not satisfy the purest taste, is not without a dignity and pathos that are worthy of the large manner of the cla.s.sical period.

Claudian used the heroic hexameter for mythological as well as historical epics. Of his _Gigantomachia_ we possess only an inconsiderable fragment; but the three books of the unfinished _Rape of Proserpine_ are among the finest examples of the purely literary epic. The description of the flowery spring meadows where Proserpine and her companions gather blossoms for garlands is a pa.s.sage perpetually quoted. It is interesting to note how the rising tide of romanticism has here, as elsewhere, left Claudian wholly untouched. The pa.s.sage, though elaborately ornate, is executed in the clear hard manner of the Alexandrian school; it has not a trace of that sensitiveness to nature which vibrates in the _Pervigilium Veneris_. We have gone back for a moment to that poetical style which perpetually reminds us of the sculptured friezes of Greek art, severe in outline, immensely adroit and learned in execution, but a little chilly and colourless except in the hands of its greatest masters. After paying to the full the tribute of admiration which is due to Claudian's refined and dignified workmanship, we are still left with the feeling that this kind of poetry was already obsolete. It is not only that, as has been remarked with truth of his historical epics, the elaboration of the treatment is disproportionate to the importance or interest of the subject. _Materiam superabat opus_ might be said with equal truth of much of the work of his predecessors. But a new spirit had by this time penetrated literature, and any poetry wholly divorced from it must be not only artificial--for that alone would prove nothing against it--but unnatural. Claudian is a precursor of the Renaissance in its narrower aspect; the last of the cla.s.sics, he is at the same time the earliest, and one of the most distinguished, of the cla.s.sicists. It might seem a mere chance whether his poetry belonged to the fourth or to the sixteenth century.

In Claudian's distinguished contemporary, the Spanish poet Aurelius Prudentius Clemens, Christian Latin poetry reached complete maturity. His collected poems were published at Rome in 404, the year celebrated by Claudian as that of the sixth consulship of Honorius. Before Prudentius, Christian poetry had been slight in amount and rude or tentative in manner. We have already had occasion to notice its earliest efforts in the rude verses of Commodia.n.u.s. The revival of letters in the fourth century, so far as it went, affected Christian as well as secular poetry.

Under Constantine, a Spanish deacon, one Gaius Vettius Aquilinus Juvencus, put the Gospel narrative into respectable hexameters, which are still extant. The poems and hymns which have come down under the name of Bishop Hilary of Poitiers are probably spurious, and a similar doubt attaches to those ascribed to the eminent grammarian and rhetorician, Gaius Marius Victorinus, after his conversion. Before Prudentius published his collection, the hymns of St. Ambrose had been written, and were in use among the Western Churches. But these, though they formed the type for all later hymn-writers, were few in number. Out of the so-called Ambrosian hymns a rigorous criticism only allows five or six as authentic. These, however, include two world-famed pieces, still in daily use by the Church, the _Aeterne rerum Conditor_ and the _Deus Creator omnium,_ and the equally famous _Veni Redemptor_.

To the form thus established by St. Ambrose, Prudentius, in his two books of lyrical poems, gave a larger volume and a more sustained literary power. The _Cathemerina,_ a series of poems on the Christian life, and the _Peristephanon,_ a book of the praise of Christian martyrs--St.