Post-Augustan Poetry From Seneca to Juvenal Part 8

anne magis Siculi gemuerunt aera iuvenci, et magis auratis pendens laquearibus ensis purpureas subter cervices terruit, 'imus, imus praecipites' quam si sibi dicat et intus palleat infelix quod proxima nesciat uxor?

You are moist soft earth, you ought to be taken instantly, instantly, and fashioned without end by the rapid wheel. But you have a paternal estate with a fair crop of corn, a salt-cellar of unsullied brightness (no fear of ruin surely!), and a snug dish for fireside service. Are you to be satisfied with this? or would it be decent to puff yourself and vapour because your branch is connected with a Tuscan stem, and you are thousandth in the line, or because you wear purple on review days and salute your censor?

Off with your trappings to the mob! I can look under them and see your skin. Are you not ashamed to live the loose life of Natta? But he is paralysed by vice; his heart is overgrown by thick collops of fat; he feels no reproach; he knows nothing of his loss; he is sunk in the depth and makes no more bubbles on the surface. Great Father of the G.o.ds, be it thy pleasure to inflict no other punishment on the monsters of tyranny, after their nature has been stirred by fierce pa.s.sion, that has the taint of fiery poison--let them look upon virtue and pine that they have lost her for ever! Were the groans from the brazen bull of Sicily more terrible, or did the sword that hung from the gilded cornice strike more dread into the princely neck beneath it, than the voice which whispers to the heart, 'We are going, going down a precipice,' and the ghastly inward paleness, which is a mystery, even to the wife of our heart? CONINGTON.

The man who wrote this has 'loved righteousness and hated iniquity'. In the work of Persius' rivals it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that it is the hatred of iniquity that is most prominent; the love of righteousness holds but a secondary place.

Persius is uncompromising; he is the true Stoic with the motto 'all or nothing'. But he has nothing of the stilted Stoicism that is such a painful feature of the plays of Seneca; nor, however perverse and affected he may be in diction, do we ever feel that his Stoicism is in some respects no better than a moral pose, a distressing feeling that sometimes afflicts as we read Seneca's letters or consolatory treatises.

He speaks straight from the heart. His faults are more often the faults of the school of philosophy than of the schools of rhetoric. The young Lucan is said to have exclaimed, after hearing a recitation given by Persius:[243] 'That is real poetry, my verses are mere _jeux d'esprit_.'

If we take Persius at his n.o.blest, Lucan's criticism is just. In these pa.s.sages not only is the thought singularly pure and n.o.ble, and the expression felicitous, but the actual metre represents almost the high-water mark of the post-Vergilian hexameter. Here, as in other writers of the age, the influence of Ovid is traceable in the increase of dactyls and the avoidance of elision. But the verse has a swing and dignity, together with a variety, that can hardly be found in any other poetry of the Silver Age. It is the existence of pa.s.sages such as these, and the high unswerving moral enthusiasm characterizing all his work, that have made Persius live through the centuries. It is fashionable for the critic to say, 'We lay down Persius with a sigh of relief.' That is true, but we feel the better for reading him. He is one of the few writers of Rome whose personality awakens a feeling of warm affection. He was a rigid Stoic, yet not proud or cold. In an age of almost universal corruption he kept himself unspotted from the world. He had a rare capacity for whole-hearted friendship. If his teacher Cornutus had never made another convert, and his preaching had been vain, it would have been ample reward to have won such a tribute of affection and grat.i.tude as the lines in which Persius pours forth his soul to him (v. 21):

tibi nunc hortante Camena excutienda damus praecordia, quantaque nostrae pars tua sit, Cornute, animae, tibi, dulcis amice, ostendisse iuvat. pulsa dinoscere cautus quid solidum crepet et pictae tectoria linguae.

hic ego centenas ausim deposcere fauces, ut quantum mihi te sinuoso in pectore fixi, voce traham pura, totumque hoc verba resignent, quod latet arcana non enarrabile fibra.

c.u.m primum pavido custos mihi purpura cessit bullaque subcinctis Laribus donata pependit, c.u.m blandi comites totaque inpune Subura permisit sparsisse oculos iam candidus umbo, c.u.mque iter ambiguum est et vitae nescius error deducit trepidas ramosa in compita mentes, me tibi supposui. teneros tu suscipis annos Socratico, Cornute, sinu. tune fallere sollers adposita intortos extendit regula mores, et premitur ratione animus vincique laborat artificemque tuo ducit sub pollice vultum.

tec.u.m etenim longos memini consumere soles, et tec.u.m primas epulis decerpere noctes.

unum opus et requiem pariter disponimus ambo, atque verecunda laxamus seria mensa.

non equidem hoc dubites, amborum foedere certo consentire dies et ab uno sidere duci: nostra vel aequali suspendit tempora libra Parca tenax veri, seu nata fidelibus hora dividit in geminos concordia fata duorum, Saturnumque gravem nostro Iove frangimus una: nescio quod certe est quod me tibi temperat astrum.

It is to you, at the instance of the muse within me, that I would offer my heart to be sifted thoroughly; my pa.s.sion is to show you, Cornutus, how large a share of my inmost being is yours, my beloved friend; strike it, use every test to tell what rings sound, and what is the mere plaster of a varnished tongue.

An occasion indeed it is for which I may well venture to ask a hundred voices, that I may bring out in clear utterance how thoroughly I have lodged you in the very corners of my breast, and unfold in words all the unutterable feelings which lie entwined deep down among my heart-strings. When first the guardianship of the purple ceased to awe me and the band of boyhood was hung up as an offering to the quaint old household G.o.ds, when my companions made themselves pleasant, and the folds of my gown, now white, the stripe of purple gone, left me free to cast my eyes at will over the whole Subura--just when the way of life begins to be uncertain, and the bewildered mind finds that its ignorant ramblings have brought it to a point where roads branch off--then it was that I made myself your adopted child. You at once received the young foundling into the bosom of a second Socrates; and soon your rule, with artful surprise, straightens the moral twists that it detects, and my spirit becomes moulded by reason and struggles to be subdued, and a.s.sumes plastic features under your hand. Aye, I mind well how I used to wear away long summer suns with you, and with you pluck the early bloom of the night for feasting. We twain have one work and one set time for rest, and the enjoyment of a moderate table unbends our gravity. No, I would not have you doubt that there is a fixed law that brings our lives into one accord, and one star that guides them. Whether it be in the equal balance that truthful Destiny hangs our days, or whether the birth-hour sacred to faithful friends shares our united fates between the Heavenly Twins, and we break the shock of Saturn together by the common shield of Jupiter, some star, I am a.s.sured, there is which fuses me with you. CONINGTON.

There is a sincerity about these beautiful lines that is as rare as it is welcome in the poetry of this period. Much may be forgiven to the poet who could write thus, even though rarely. And it must be remembered that Persius is free from the worst of the besetting sins of his age, the love of rhetorical brilliance at the expense of sense, a failing that he criticizes with no little force in his opening satire. His harshness and obscurity are due in part to lack of sufficient literary skill, but still more to his attempt to a.s.sert his originality against the insistent obsession of the satires of Horace. As in the case of so many of his contemporaries, his literary fame must depend in the main on his 'purple patches'.

But he does what few of his fellow poets do; he leaves a vivid impression of his personality, and reveals a genuine moral ardour and n.o.bility of character that refuse to be clouded or hidden by his dark sayings and his perverse obscurity.

CHAPTER IV

LUCAN

Marcus Annaeus Luca.n.u.s,[244] the poet who more than any other exhibits the typical excellences and defects of the Silver Age, was born at Cordova on November 3, in the year 39 A.D.[245] He came of a distinguished line. He was the son of M. Annaeus Mela, brother of Seneca the philosopher and dramatist, and son of Seneca the rhetorician. Mela was a wealthy man,[246] and in 40 A.D. removed with his family to Rome.

His son (whose future as a great poet is said to have been portended by a swarm of bees that settled on the cradle and the lips of the bard that was to be[247]) received the best education that Rome could bestow. He showed extraordinary precocity in all the tricks of declamatory rhetoric, soon equalling his instructors in skill and far out-distancing his fellow pupils.[248] Among his preceptors was his kinsman, the famous Stoic, L. Annaeus Cornutus, well known as the friend and teacher of Persius.[249] His first appearance before the public was at the Neronia in 60 A.D., when he won the prize for Latin verse with a poem in praise of Nero.[250] Immediately afterwards he seems to have proceeded to Athens. But his talents had attracted the attention and patronage of Nero. He was recalled to Rome,[251] and at the nomination of the princeps became Quaestor, although he had not yet attained the requisite age of twenty-five.[252] He was also admitted to the College of Augurs, and for some time continued to enjoy Nero's friendship. But it was not to last. Lucan had been educated in Stoic surroundings. Though his own relatives managed to combine the service of the emperor with their Stoic principles, Lucan had not failed to imbibe the pa.s.sionate regret for the lost liberty of the republic that was so prominent a feature in Stoic circles. It was not a mere pose that led him to select the civil war as the subject of his poem. His enthusiasm for liberty may have been literary rather than political in character. But when we are dealing with an artistic temperament we must bear in mind that the ideals which were primarily inspiration for art may on slight provocation become incentives to action. And in the case of Lucan that provocation was not lacking. As his fame increased, Nero's friendship was replaced by jealousy. The protege had become too serious a rival to the patron.[253]

Lucan's vanity was injured by Nero's sudden withdrawal from a recitation.[254] From servile flattery he turned to violent criticism: he spared his former patron neither in word nor deed. He turned the sharp edge of his satire against him in various pungent epigrams, and was forbidden to recite poetry or to plead in the law courts.[255] But it would be unjust to Lucan to attribute his changed att.i.tude purely to wounded vanity. Seneca was at this very moment attempting to retire from public life. The court of Nero had become no place for him. Lucan cannot have been unaffected by the action of his uncle, and it is only just to him to admit the possibility that the change in his att.i.tude may have been due, at any rate in part, to a change in character, an awakening to the needs of the State and the needs of his own soul. There is no need to question the genuineness of his political enthusiasm, even though it tended to be theatrical and may have been largely kindled by motives not wholly disinterested. The Pisonian conspiracy found in him a ready coadjutor. He became one of the ringleaders of the plot ('paene signifer coniurationis'), and in a bombastic vein would promise Nero's head to his fellow-conspirators.[256] On the detection of the plot, in 65 A. D., he, with the other chiefs of the conspiracy, was arrested. For long he denied his complicity; at last, perhaps on the threat or application of torture, his nerve failed him; he descended to grovelling entreaties, and to win himself a reprieve accused his innocent mother, Acilia, of complicity in the plot.[257] His conduct does not admit of excuse. But it is not for the plain, matter-of-fact man to pa.s.s judgement lightly on the weakness of a highly-strung, nervous, artistic temperament; the artist's imagination may trans.m.u.te pain such as others might hope to bear, to anguish such as they cannot even imagine. There lies the palliation, if palliation it be, of Lucan's crime. But it availed him nothing: the reprieve was never won; he was condemned to die, the manner of his death being left to his free choice. He wrote a few instructions for his father as to the editing of his poems, partook of a sumptuous dinner, and then, adopting the fashionable form of suicide, cut the arteries of his arms and bled to death. He died declaiming a pa.s.sage from his own poetry in which he had described the death of a soldier from loss of blood.[258] It was a theatrical end, and not out of keeping with his life.

He lived but a little over twenty-five years and five months, but he left behind him a vast amount of poetry and an extraordinary reputation.

His earliest work[259] seems to have been the _Iliacon_, describing the death of Hector, his ransom and burial. Next came the _Catachthonion_, a short work on the underworld. This was followed by the _laudes Neronis_, to which reference has already been made, and the _Orpheus_, which was extemporized in a compet.i.tion with other poets.[260] If we follow the order given by Statius, his next work was the prose declamation on the burning of the city (64 A.D.) and a poem addressed to his wife Polla (_adlocutio ad Pollam_). Then comes his _chef d'oeuvre_, the _Pharsalia_, to which we shall return. Of the other works mentioned by Vacca, the _Silvae_ must have been, like the _Silvae_ of Statius, trifles thrown off hurriedly for the gratification of friends or for the celebration of some great occasion.[261] The _salticae fabulae_ were _libretti_ written for the _pantomimus_,[262] while the _Saturnalia_ were light verse sent as presents to friends on the festival of Saturn.[263] Of these works nothing has come down to us save a few scanty fragments, not in any way calculated to make us regret their loss.[264] Even Vacca can find no very high praise for them. Judging alike from the probabilities of the case and from the _Pharsalia_ itself, they must have suffered from Lucan's fatal gift of fluency.

It was the _Pharsalia_ that won Lucan undying fame. Three books of this ambitious historical epic were finished and given to the world during the poet's lifetime.[265] These the poet had, at any rate in part, recited in public, calling attention, with a vanity worthy of himself and of the age, to his extreme youth; he was younger than Vergil when he composed the _Culex_![266] The remaining seven books never had the benefit of revision, owing to the poet's untimely end,[267] though curiously enough they show no special signs of lack of finish, and contain some of the finest pa.s.sages in the whole work. The composition of all ten books falls between 60 and 65 A.D. Lucan had chosen for his theme the death-struggle of the republic. It was a daring choice for more reasons than one. There were elements of danger in singing the praises of Pompey and Cato under the princ.i.p.ate. To that the fate of Cremutius Cordus bore eloquent testimony.[268] But Nero was less sensitive about the past than Tiberius. The republic had never become officially extinct. Tyrannicide was a licensed and hackneyed theme of the schools of rhetoric; in skilful hands it might be a subtle instrument of flattery. Moreover, Nero was descended in direct line from Domitius Ahen.o.barbus, who had fought and died for Pompey on the field of Pharsalus. In the books published during Lucan's lifetime there is not a line that could have given personal offence to the princeps, while the fulsome dedication would have covered a mult.i.tude of indiscretions.[269] Far more serious were the difficulties presented by the nature of the story itself. Historical epic rarely admits of artistic treatment, and the nearer the date of the events described, the more insoluble is the problem.

Two courses were open to Lucan: he might treat the story with comparative fidelity to truth, avoiding all supernatural machinery, save such as was justified by historical tradition; on the other hand he might adopt the course subsequently pursued by Silius Italicus in his poem on the Punic War, and introduce all the hackneyed interventions of Olympus, sanctioned by Vergil and followed by many a poet since. The latter method is obviously only suited for a purely legendary epic, though even the legendary epic can well dispense with it, and it might have been supposed that an age so sceptical and careless of the orthodox theology, as that into which Lucan was born, would have felt the full absurdity of applying such a device to historical epic. Lucan was wise in his choice, and left Olympus severely alone. But his choice roused contemporary criticism. In the _Satyricon_ of Petronius we find a defence of the old conventional mechanism placed in the mouth of a shabby and disreputable poet named Eumolpus (118). He complains 'that young men plunge headlong into epic verse thinking that it requires no more skill than a showy declamation at the school of rhetoric. They do not realize that to be a successful poet one must be steeped in the great ocean of literature. They do not recognize that there is such a thing as a special poetic vocabulary,[270] or that the commonplaces of rhetoric require to be interwoven with, not merely tacked on to, the fabric of their verse, and so it comes about that the writer who would turn the Civil War into an epic is apt to stumble beneath the burden he takes upon his shoulders, unless indeed he is permeated through and through with literature. You must not simply turn history into verse: historians do it better in prose. Rather the poet should sweep on his way borne by the breath of inspiration and untrammelled by hard fact, making use of cunning artifice and divine intervention, and interfusing his "commonplaces" with legendary lore; only so will his work seem to be the fine frenzy of an inspired bard rather than the exact.i.tude of one who is giving sworn evidence before a judge'. He then proceeds in 295 verses to deal, after the manner he has prescribed, with the events contained in the first three books of the _Pharsalia_, the only books that had been made public at the time when Petronius' romance was composed. Pluto inspires Caesar to the crime of civil war. Peace, Fidelity, and Concord fly from the earth at his approach. The G.o.ds range themselves on this side and on that. Discord perched high on Apennine incites the peoples of Italy to war. The verse is uninspired, the method is impossible, the remedy is worse than the disease. The last hope of our taking the poem seriously has departed. Yet this pa.s.sage of Petronius contains much sound criticism. Military and political history does _not_ admit of being turned into genuine poetry; an epic on an historic war must depend largely on its purple patches of description and rhetoric: it almost demands that prominence of epigram and 'commonplace' that Eumolpus condemns.[27l] Petronius sees the weakness of Lucan's epic; he fails because, like Silius Italicus, he thinks he has discovered a remedy. The faults of Lucan's poem are largely inherent in the subject chosen; they will stand out clearly as we review the structure and style of the work.

In taking the whole of the Civil War for his subject Lucan was confronted with a somewhat similar problem to that which faced Shakespeare in his _Julius Caesar_. The problem that Shakespeare had to meet was how to prolong and sustain the interest of the play after the death of Caesar and the events that centre immediately round it. The difficulty was surmounted triumphantly. The obstacles in Lucan's path were greater. The poem is incomplete, and there must be some uncertainty as to its intended scope. That it was planned to include the death of Cato is clear from the importance a.s.signed him in the existing books.

But could the work have concluded on such a note of gloom as the death of the staunchest champion of the republic? The whole tone of the poem is republican in the extreme. If the republic must perish, it should not perish unavenged. There are, moreover, many prophetic allusions to the death of Caesar,[272] which point conclusively to Lucan's intention to have made the vengeance of Brutus and Ca.s.sius the climax of his poem.

The problem which the poet had to resolve was how to prevent the interest from nagging, as his heroes were swept away before the triumphant advance of Caesar. He concentrates our attention at the outset on Pompey. Throughout the first eight books it is for him that he claims our sympathy. And then he is crushed by his rival and driven in flight to die an unheroic death. It is only at this point that Cato leaps into prominence. But though he has a firmness of purpose and a grandeur of character that Lucan could not give Pompey, he never has the chance to become the protagonist. Both Pompey and Cato, for all the fine rhetoric bestowed on them, fail to grip the reader, while from the very facts of history it is impossible for either of them to lend unity to the plot. Both are dwarfed by the character of Caesar. Caesar is the villain of the piece; he is a monster athirst for blood, he will not permit the corpses of his enemies (over which he is made to gloat) to be buried after the great battle, and when on his coming to Egypt the head of his rival is brought him, his grief and indignation are represented as being a mere blind to conceal his real joy. The successes are often merely the result of good fortune. Lucan is loth to admit even his greatness as a general. And yet, blacken his character as he may, he feels that greatness. From the moment of his brilliant characterization of Caesar in the first book[273] we feel we have a man who knows what he desires and will shrink from nothing to attain his ends; he 'thinks naught yet done while aught remains to do',[274] he 'strikes fear into men's hearts because he knows not the meaning of fear',[275] and through all the melodramatic rhetoric with which he addresses his soldiers, there shines clear the spirit of a great leader of men. Whoever was intended by the poet for his hero, the fact remains that Caesar dominates the poem as none save the hero should do. He is the hero of the _Pharsalia_ as Satan is the hero of _Paradise Lost_.[276] It is through him above all that Lucan retains our interest. The result is fatal for the proper proportion of the plot. Lucan does not actually alienate our sympathies from the republic, but, whatever our moral judgement on the conflict may be, our interest centres on Caesar, and it is hardly an exaggeration to say that the true tragedy of the epic would have come with his death. The _Pharsalia_ fails of its object as a republican epic; its success comes largely from an unintended quarter.

What the exact scale of the poem was meant to be it is hard to say.

Vergil had set the precedent for an epic of twelve books, and it is not improbable that Lucan would have followed his example. On the other hand, if Cato and Caesar had both to be killed in the last two books, great compression would have been necessary. In view of the diffuseness of Lucan's rhetoric, and the rambling nature of his narrative, it is more than probable that the epic would have exceeded the limit of twelve books and been a formidable rival in bulk to the _Punica_ of Silius Italicus. On the other hand, the last seven books of the existing poem are unrevised, and may have been destined for abridgement. There is so much that is irrelevant that the task would have been easy.

But it is not for the plot that Lucan's epic is read. It has won immortality by the brilliance of its rhetoric, its unsurpa.s.sed epigrams, its clear-cut summaries of character, its biting satire, and its outbursts of lofty political enthusiasm. These features stand out pre-eminent and atone for its astounding errors of taste, its strained hyperbole, its foolish digression. Lucan fails to make his actors live as they move through his pages; their actions and their speeches are alike theatrical; he has no dramatic power. But he can sum up their characters in burning lines that live through all time and have few parallels in literature. And these pictures are in all essentials surprisingly just and accurate. His affection for Pompey and the demands of his plot presented strong temptations to exalt his character at the expense of historical truth. Yet what can be more just than the famous lines of the first book, where his character is set against Caesar's? (129):

vergentibus annis in senium longoque togae tranquillior usu dedidicit iam pace ducem: famaeque pet.i.tor multa dare in volgus; totus popularibus auris inpelli plausuque sui gaudere theatri; nec reparare novas vires, multumque priori credere fortunae, stat magni nominis umbra: qualis frugifero querens sublimis in agro exuvias veteres populi sacrataque gestans dona duc.u.m: nec iam validis radicibus haerens pondere fixa suo est, nudosque per aera ramos effundens trunco non frondibus efficit umbram.

One aged grown Had long exchanged the corselet for the gown: In peace forgotten the commander's art, And learned to play the politician's part,-- To court the suffrage of the crowd, and hear In his own theatre the venal cheer; Idly he rested on his ancient fame, And was the shadow of a mighty name.

Like the huge oak which towers above the fields Decked with ancestral spoils and votive shields.

Its roots, once mighty, loosened by decay, Hold it no more: weight is its only stay; Its naked limbs bespeak its glories past, And by its trunk, not leaves, a shade is cast.

PROF. GOLDWIN SMITH.

Even the panegyric p.r.o.nounced on him by Cato on hearing the news of his death is as moderate as it is true and dignified (ix. 190):

civis obit, inquit, multum maioribus inpar nosse modum iuris, sed in hoc tamen en utilis aevo, cui non ulla fuit iusti reverentia; salva libertate potens, et solus plebe parata privatus servire sibi, rectorque senatus, sed regnantis, erat.

... invasit ferrum, sed ponere, norat; praetulit arma togae, sed pacem armatus amavit: iuvit sumpta ducem iuvit dimissa potestas.

A man, he said, is gone, unequal far To our good sires in reverence for the law, Yet useful in an age that knew not right, One who could power with liberty unite, Uncrowned 'mid willing subjects could remain, The Senate rule, yet let the Senate reign.

He drew the sword, but he could sheathe it too, War was his trade, yet he to peace inclined, Gladly command accepted-and resigned.--PROF. GOLDWIN SMITH.

Elsewhere he is as one of the 'strengthless dead', here he lives.

Elsewhere he may be invested with the pathos that must cling to the shadow of a mighty name, but he is too weak and ineffective to be interesting. His wavering policy in his last campaign is unduly emphasized.[277] When he is face to face with Caesar at Pharsalus and exhorts his men, he can but boast, he cannot inspire.[278] When the battle turns against him he bids his men cease from the fight, and himself flies, that he may not involve them in his own disaster.[279] No less convincing portrait could be drawn. The material was unpromising, but Lucan emphasizes all his weaknesses and wholly fails to bring out his n.o.bler elements. He is unworthy of the line

nec cinis exiguus tantam compescuit umbram.

So, too, in a lesser degree with Caesar. For a moment in the first book he flashes upon us in his full splendour (143):

sed non in Caesare tantum nomen erat nec fama ducis: sed nescia virtus stare loco, solusque pudor non vincere bello.

acer et indomitus, quo spes quoque ira voca.s.set.

ferre manum et numquam temerando parcere ferro, successus urgere suos, instare fauori numinis, inpellens quidquid sibi summa petenti obstaret, gaudensque viam fecisse ruina.

Not such the talisman of Caesar's name, But Caesar had, in place of empty fame.

The unresting soul, the resolution high That shuts out every thought but victory.

Whate'er his goal, nor mercy nor dismay He owned, but drew the sword and cleft his way: Pressed each advantage that his fortune gave; Constrained the stars to combat for the brave; Swept from his path whate'er his rise delayed, And marched triumphant through the wreck he made.

PROF. GOLDWIN SMITH.

Here at any rate is Caesar the general: in such a poem there is no room for Caesar the statesman. But from this point onward we see no true Caesar. Henceforward, save for a few brief moments, he is a figure for the melodramatic stage alone, a 'brigand chief', a master hypocrite, the favourite of fortune. And yet, for all his unreality, Lucan has endowed him with such impetuous vigour and such a plenitude of power that he dwarfs the other puppets that throng his pages even more, if possible, than in real life he overtopped his contemporaries.

Cato, the third great figure of the _Pharsalia_, was easier to draw.

Unconsciously stagey in life, he is little stagier in Lucan. And yet, in spite of his absurdity, he has a n.o.bility and a sincerity of purpose which is without parallel in that corrupt age. He was the hero of the Stoic republicans[280] of the early princ.i.p.ate, the man of principle, stern and unbending. He requires no fine touches of light and shade, for he is the perfect Stoic. But from the very rigidity of his principles he was no statesman and never played more than a secondary part in politics.

Lucan's task is to exalt him from the second rank to the first. But it is no easy undertaking, since it was not till after the disaster of Pharsalus that he played any conspicuous part in the Civil War. He first appears as warrant for the justice of the republican cause (i. 128). We next see him as the hope of all true patriots at Rome (ii. 238). Pompey has fled southward. Cato alone remains the representative of all that is n.o.blest and best in Rome. He has no illusions as to Pompey's character.

He is not the leader he would choose for so sacred a cause; but between Pompey and Caesar there can be no wavering. He follows Pompey. Not till the ninth book does he reappear in the action. Pompey is fallen, and all turn to Cato as their leader. The cause is lost, and Cato knows it well; but he obeys the call of duty and undertakes the hopeless enterprise undismayed. He is a stern leader, but he shares his men's hardships to the full, and fortifies them by his example. He is in every action what the real Cato only was at Utica. On him above all others Lucan has lavished all his powers; and he has succeeded in creating a character of such real moral grandeur that, in spite of its hardness and austerity, it almost succeeds in winning our affection (ii. 380):

hi mores, haec duri inmota Catonis secta fuit, servare modum finesque tenere naturamque sequi patriaeque inpendere vitam nec sibi sed toti genitum se credere mundo.

'Twas his rule Inflexible to keep the middle path Marked out and bounded; to observe the laws Of natural right; and for his country's sake To risk his life, his all, as not for self Brought into being, but for all the world.

SIR E. RIDLEY.

Here is a man indeed worthy to be the hero of a republican epic, did history permit it. Our chief reason--at moments there is a temptation to say 'our only reason'--for regretting the incompletion of the _Pharsalia_ is that Lucan did not live to describe Cato's death. _There_ was a subject which was worthy of his pen and would have been a labour of love. With what splendour of rhetoric he might have invested it can only be conjectured from the magnificent pa.s.sage where Cato refuses to inquire into his fate at Ammon's oracle (ix. 566):