The Roman Poets of the Augustan Age: Virgil Part 2

The most enduring result of this munificence, more enduring even than the n.o.ble ruins of temples and theatres-the visible monuments preserved from that age-is the finished art of the verse of Virgil and Horace. By the liberality of the Emperor, Virgil was able to devote to the composition of his two great works nearly twenty years of 'unhasting and unresting'

labour in the beautiful scenery of Campania. The wealth and lands at the disposal of Maecenas enabled Horace to change the wearisome routine and enervating pleasures of Rome for hours of happy inspiration among the Sabine Hills or in the cool mountain air of Praeneste, amid the gardens and streams of Tibur or by the bright sh.o.r.es of Baiae(55). To the liberality of their patrons these poets owed not only the leisure and freedom from the ordinary cares of life(56), which allowed them to give all their thought and the unimpaired freshness of their genius to their art, but the opportunity of enjoying under the most favourable circ.u.mstances that source of happiness and inspiration which has given its most distinctive charm to their poetry-the beauty of Italian Nature. It is only in their appreciation of the living beauty of the world for its own sake (and apart from divine or human a.s.sociations) that the great Roman poets possess an interest beyond that of the poets of any other age or country, with the exception of the English poets of the present century.

Nowhere is the familiar charm of a well-loved spot suggested in truer and more graceful words than these:-

Te flagrantis atrox hora Caniculae Nescit tangere; tu frigus amabile Fessis vomere tauris Praebes, et pecori vago, etc.(57)

Nor can any lines express better a real love for the actual beauty of familiar scenes combined with an imaginative longing for the ideal beauty consecrated by old poetic a.s.sociations,-like to that which in modern times has often driven our Northern poets and artists across the Alps,-than the

Rura mihi et rigui placeant in vallibus amnes; Flumina amem silvasque inglorius. O ubi campi Spercheosque, et virginibus bacchata Lacaenis Taygeta, etc.(58)

of the Georgics.

The literature of the Augustan Age has often been compared with that of England in the first half of the eighteenth century. In so far as each literature is the literature of town life, in so far as it has a moral and didactic purpose, the comparison holds good. The Satires and Epistles of Horace present a parallel both to the poetical Satires of Pope, which in outward form are imitated from them, and still more to the prose Essays of the Spectator. They resemble those Essays in their union of humour and seriousness, in the use they make of character-painting, anecdote, and moral reflection, in the justice and at the same time the limitation of their criticism both on life and literature, in the colloquial ease combined with the studied propriety of their style. But while Horace, in addition to his powers as a moralist and painter of character, ranks high among those poets who enable us to feel the secret and the charm of Nature, latent in particular places, the only period of English literature from which this power is absent is that of which Addison and Pope are among the chief representatives. A similar superiority in this respect may be claimed for the Augustan poetry over that of the Age of Louis XIV. As was said before, French criticism points to Racine as a genius with a certain moral affinity to Virgil; but it equally acknowledges his inferiority as the interpreter of Nature. 'C'est cet amour,' says M.

Sainte-Beuve, 'cette pratique de la nature champetre qui a un peu manque a notre Racine, dont le gout et le talent de peindre ont ete presque uniquement tournes du cote de la nature morale.'

The ease of their circ.u.mstances and the fact that they owed this ease to others ('Deus n.o.bis haec otia fecit') have impressed themselves in other ways on the character of the Augustan poetry. The spirit of that poetry is certainly tamer than that of other great literary epochs. Even the enjoyment of Nature is a pa.s.sive rather than an active enjoyment derived from adventurous or contemplative energy. There is no suggestion, as there is in Homer and in many modern poets, of vivid contact with the sterner forces of Nature. The sense of discomfort as well as of danger was then, as it has been till the present century, sufficient to repress the imaginative love of the sea or of mountain scenery(59). Horace expresses a shrinking from the dangers of the sea, nor is there in Virgil any trace of that enjoyment of perilous adventure which is one of the great sources of delight in the Odyssey.

The profuse expenditure and luxury of the age called forth in its poets a spirit of reaction to a simpler and more primitive ideal, as they did in the French literature of the latter part of the eighteenth century. By contrast with the unreal enjoyment of luxury and the ennui occasioned by it, which Lucretius had satirised in the previous generation, a stronger sense of the purer sources of human enjoyment, of friendly and intellectual society, of family affection, of the beauty of Nature, of the simpler tastes of the country, was awakened even in those who in their actual lives did not realise all these sources of happiness. But in Horace this feeling of contrast does not express itself in the tones of vehement antagonism which appear a century later in Juvenal. Luxury and profuse expenditure are indeed repugnant to his taste, and they suggest to him, as they do to Virgil, the purer enjoyment of simple living. There is no doctrine which Horace preaches more constantly in all his works, or with more apparent sincerity, than that of being independent of fortune, and of the greater happiness enjoyed in the mean station in life between great wealth and poverty. Yet, while preaching the same doctrine, he does not express it in terms of such deep and earnest conviction as the

Divitiae grandes homini sunt vivere parce Aequo animo(60)

of Lucretius. In at least the earlier part of his poetic career he had had his share of the luxurious living and the other pleasures of Roman life.

Experience had satisfied him that the 'slight repast, and sleep on the gra.s.s by a river's side(61),' contributed more to his happiness in later life than drinking Falernian from midday; and as years went on, it gave him more pleasure to recall the memory of his old loves in song than to involve himself in new engagements. The Horatian maxims in favour of simplicity have this recommendation, that they are the result of experience in both ways of living. The luxurious life of the capital seems at no time to have possessed charms for Virgil or Tibullus. Though the latter was a man of refinement, and not averse to pleasure, yet he has a feeling similar to that of Rousseau in favour of an ideal of rudeness and simplicity as compared with the pomp and profusion of life in Rome. The more active and energetic temperament of Propertius and of Ovid induced them to partic.i.p.ate with less restraint in the pleasures of the city, and they appealed to congenial tastes among their contemporaries in the choice of the topics treated in their poems.

V.

The conditions. .h.i.therto considered enable us to appreciate the prominence given to national and imperial ideas in the literature of the Augustan Age, and also to understand the chief differences in tone and spirit between that literature and the literature of the Ciceronian Age. Along with these marked differences, obvious points of agreement are also observable. The cultivated men of each time had the same refined enjoyment in Nature, art, literature, and social life. And in turning to the intellectual conditions affecting literary form and style, the later period will be seen to be still more closely connected with the earlier.

The golden age of Latin poetry, commencing in the years preceding the overthrow of the Republic, reaches its maturity in the earlier part of the reign of Augustus, and then begins to decline, till under Tiberius the last poetic voice is silenced. Though Latin prose-literature had yet to be enriched by some of its greatest and most original works, yet neither the glory of the Empire, the charm of the Italian life, nor the vivifying ideas and creations of Greek genius were ever again able to revive the genuine poetical inspiration which ancient Italy once, and once only, enjoyed in abundant measure.

The half-century from about 60 B.C. to about 10 B.C. was, at once, one of those rare and germinative epochs in the history of the world, in which a powerful intellectual movement coincides with, influences, and is influenced by a great movement and change in human affairs; and it was at the same time a period of a rich and elaborate culture, in which the inheritance of Greek genius, art, and knowledge came for the first time into the full possession of the Romans. The earlier half of this period was more distinguished by original force of mind, the latter half by more complete and perfect culture. The age of Cicero was one of great energy in the chief provinces of human activity-in war and politics, in oratory, poetry, and philosophy. There is no intellectual quality so characteristic of his own oratory, of the poetry of Lucretius, of the military and political genius of Julius Caesar, as the 'vivida vis,'-the energy, at once rapid and enduring in its action, as of a great elemental force.

Among their contemporaries, though there was no man of high political capacity, yet there was a many-sided intellectual activity manifesting itself in the forum and senate-house, in social intercourse and correspondence, and in varied literary and philosophical discourse. As a result of this novel activity of mind, the Latin language developed then for the first time all its resources as a powerful organ of literature, inferior indeed to the language of Greece in the days of its purity, but much superior as the instrument of poetry and oratory, history and philosophy, to that language in its decay(62). The writers of the Augustan Age received this language from their predecessors, in its most sensitive period of growth, while able to present to the mind in unimpaired freshness the immediate impressions from outward things and from the inner world of consciousness, but still capable of more delicate and varied combinations to fit it to become the perfectly harmonious organ of sustained poetical emotion. This further development was given to it by the Augustan poets, but not without some loss of native force and purity of idiom. They too felt the influence of the strong intellectual movement of the preceding age. But it came upon their minds with a less novel and vehement impulse. They are greater in execution than in creative design.

They are more concerned with the results than with the processes of thought. Virgil may have been as a.s.siduous a student of philosophy as Lucretius, but he does not feel the same need of consistency of view and firmness of speculative conviction; he shares with Lucretius the strong pa.s.sion for poetry ('dulces ante omnia Musae'), but neither he nor Horace, though each recognises the supreme claims of philosophy, shows the pa.s.sion for enquiry which induced Lucretius

Noctes vigilare serenas, Quaerentem dictis quibus et quo carmine demum Clara tuae possim praepandere lumina menti, Res quibus occultas penitus convisere possis(63);

so that even in his dreams he describes himself as ever busy with the search after and exposition of truth,-

Nos agere hoc autem et naturam quaerere rerum Semper et inventam patriis exponere chartis(64).

The master-pieces of the Augustan literature were not the products of that vivid and rapidly-working creative energy which marked the Ciceronian Age.

There never was an age in which great writers trained themselves so carefully for their office, strove so much to conform to recognised principles of art, reflected so much on the plan and purpose of their compositions, or used more patient industry in bringing their conceptions to maturity. The maxim 'nonum prematur in annum' ill.u.s.trates the spirit in which the great artists of that age worked. The cultivated appreciation of Greek art and poetry-the essential condition of the creative impulse of Italy-then reached its highest point, produced its supreme effect in a national Roman literature of similar perfection of workmanship, and, after that, rapidly declined and pa.s.sed away from the Roman world as a source of literary inspiration, leaving however the educating influence of this new literature in its place. The Greek language had indeed been studied at Rome for nearly two centuries before the Ciceronian Age. The earliest Roman writers-Naevius, Ennius, Pacuvius, etc.-had used the epic and dramatic poetry of Greece as a kind of quarry for their own rude workmanship. The age of Laelius had imbibed much of the humanity and wisdom of Greek speculation. But it was not till the age of Cicero and Catullus that the long process of education and the largely increased intercourse between the two nations had raised the Roman mind to a full sense and enjoyment of artistic excellence, as revealed both to the eye and to the mind. The men of that age, in the midst of all their active pursuits, were moved by this foreign influence as the men of the Renaissance were moved by the recovery of cla.s.sical literature. In the case of some among them the pa.s.sion for acc.u.mulating books and works of art became the absorbing interest in their lives. Though in some of the orators and men of letters, e.g. Memmius, as we learn from Cicero, their Greek tastes fostered an affected indifference to their own nationality, yet on the best minds, such as those of Cicero himself, Lucretius, and Catullus, this intimate contact with Greek genius acted with a vivifying power by calling forth the native genius of Italy. It was the peculiarity of the Roman mind to be capable of receiving deep and lasting impressions from other nations with whom it came in contact, without sacrifice of the strong individuality of its own character. What Columella says of the Italian soil, 'that it is most responsive to the care bestowed on it, since, through the energy of its cultivators, it has learned to yield the products of nearly the whole world(65),' might be said with equal truth of the Italian mind. This adaptability to foreign influences, without loss of native genius and character, enabled Rome to exercise spiritual supremacy over the world for more than a thousand years after the loss of her temporal supremacy. In the age of Cicero and the following age this adaptability to another form of spiritual influence gave to Rome a great national literature.

Virgil, Horace, and their immediate contemporaries devoted themselves to Greek studies with even more ardour than their immediate predecessors.

Education and preparation for a career in literature was a more elaborate process than it had ever been before, perhaps we might add, than it has ever been since. Virgil was still an unknown student, carefully preparing himself for the labour of his life almost till he reached the age at which Catullus died. Horace at the age of twenty-three was, to use his own words, still 'seeking for the truth among the groves of Academus.' The taste for literary leisure was greatly developed among the educated cla.s.ses by the suppression of all active political life; while at the same time the establishment of public libraries made the access to books more easy and general. Women equally with men made themselves familiar with at least the lighter fancies of the learned Greeks. There are none of his Odes into which Horace is so fond of introducing his mythological allusions as those in which some real or fict.i.tious heroine, Galatea or Asterie, Lyde or Phyllis, is addressed. The poems of Propertius which celebrate his love for Cynthia could only be appreciated by the possessors of much recondite learning.

Though the greatest poets of the Augustan Age drew much of their inspiration from the purer sources of Greek genius, especially from Homer and the early lyric poets, yet the period of Greek literature which was most familiar to the Romans of the Augustan Age was the Alexandrian. It was nearest to them in point of time; it was most congenial to the taste of the learned Greeks who now gathered from the widely-scattered centres of Greek culture to Rome, as they had formerly done to Alexandria; it was of all the forms of Greek literature the most cosmopolitan, or rather the least national, in spirit, and thus most easily adopted by another race; it was moreover, like that of the Augustan Age, the literature of a courtly circle enjoying the favour and contributing to the glory of a royal patron. The earliest imitators of this poetry were Catullus and the other poets contemporary with him, such as Calvus, Caecilius, Cinna, and Varro Atacinus, the author of the epic poem of Jason. In the Augustan Age Gallus had not only obtained distinction as the author of original elegics in the style of the amatory poetry of Alexandria, but had translated a poem of Euphorion of Chalcis(66), whom Cicero holds up as the type of effeminacy in literature in contrast with the manliness of Ennius(67).

Tibullus to a certain extent, but still more Propertius and Ovid, followed in the same line. From the Alexandrine poets they derived the form and many of the materials of their art. Virgil, while familiar with the whole range of Greek poetry and pressing it all into his service, has used the Alexandrians more freely than any other Greek writers, with the exception of Homer. Horace is most independent of them; there are no direct traces of their works in any of his writings. The Greek authors to whom he acknowledges his debt are the early Lyrists and Iambic writers, the poets of the New Comedy, the philosophic writers of the later schools which arose out of the teaching of Socrates, and especially Aristippus. Yet even in him the influence of the Alexandrine tone is apparent, especially in his treatment of the subjects taken from the Greek mythology.

This poetry of Alexandria, or rather this poetry of the Greek race in its latter days, was, to a much greater extent, the artificial product of culture and knowledge than the manifestation of original feeling or intellectual power. The very language in which it was written was artificial, far removed, not only in phraseology but in dialectical forms, from the language of common life. Poetry was pursued as the recreation of scholars and men of science; its chief aim was to satisfy a dilettante curiosity:-

Cetera quae vacuas tenuissent carmine mentes, etc.(68)

The writers of this school whose names are most familiarly known are Callimachus, one of the Battiadae of Cyrene, Euphorion of Chalcis, Philetas of Cos, Aratus of Soli, Hermesianax and Nicander of Colophon, Apollonius of Rhodes(69), Lycophron of Chalcis, Eratosthenes of Cyrene, from whom Virgil takes a pa.s.sage about geographical science, Zenodotus of Ephesus, a grammarian,-names suggestive of the widely-diffused culture of the h.e.l.lenic race, and at the same time indicative of the absence of any great centre of national life such as Athens had been in former times. To these are sometimes added the more interesting names of Theocritus of Syracuse, and of the idyllic poets Moschus of Syracuse and Bion of Smyrna, although they are more a.s.sociated with the fresh woods and pastures of Sicily and Southern Italy. The chief materials used by the Alexandrine writers in their poetry were the tales and fancies of the old mythology and the results of natural science; the modes of human feeling to which they mainly gave expression were the pa.s.sion of love and the sensibility to the beauty of Nature.

Nothing attests more forcibly the original power and richness of faculty which shaped the primitive fancies of the Greek mythology into legend, poetry, and art, than the perennial vitality with which this mythology has reappeared under many forms, satisfying many different wants of the human mind, at various epochs, from the time of its birth even down to the present day. In the contrasts often drawn between the cla.s.sical and the romantic imagination, it is sometimes forgotten that this Greek mythology was richer in romantic personages, situations, and incidents, than the mythology or early legends of any other race. In the n.o.bler eras of Greek literature, after the creative impulse ceased out of which the mythology and its natural accompaniment epic poetry had arisen, the legends and personages of G.o.ds and heroes supplied to the lyrical poets an ideal background by connexion with which they glorified the pa.s.sions and interests of their own time: to the tragic poets of Athens they supplied beings of heroic stature, situations of transcendent import, by means of which they were enabled to give body and shape to the deepest thoughts on human destiny. The Alexandrians, and those Greek writers who came long after them, such as Quintus Calaber and Nonnus, did not seek to impart any recondite meaning to the legends which they revived, but rather to divest them of any sacred or ethical a.s.sociations, and to present them to their readers simply as bright and marvellous tales of pa.s.sion and adventure.

They endeavoured, either in the form of continuous epics or in the more appropriate form of 'epyllia' or epic idyls, to enable their readers to escape in fancy from the dull uniformity of their own time into a world of action in the bright morning of the national life. They sought especially to satisfy two impulses of the Greek nature which still survived out of the more powerful energies which had given birth to art and poetry,-the childlike curiosity (?????e? ?e? pa?de?) which delights in hearing a story told, and the artistic pa.s.sion to make present to the eye or the fancy distinct pictures and images of beauty and symmetry.

The later development of the Greek intellect was however more critical and scientific than creative. Science, learning, and criticism were especially encouraged and cultivated at Alexandria. The impulse given by Aristotle to natural observation and enquiry, and the large intercourse with the East which followed on the conquests of Alexander and the establishment of the kingdoms of his successors, led to a great increase of knowledge, or, in the absence of definite knowledge, of curiosity and speculation. The spirit of enquiry no longer, as in the days of the older philosophers, endeavoured to solve the whole problem of the universe, but to observe and systematise the phenomena of the special sciences. Natural history, botany, and medicine were studied zealously and successfully; the subjects of astronomy and meteorology excited equal interest, though the want of the appliances necessary for these studies made them more barren in results. A great advance was made in the knowledge of remote places of the earth and of their various products. The novelty of these enquiries, and of the knowledge resulting from them, stimulated curiosity and the imaginative emotion which accompanies it; and the enthusiasm of science combining with the enthusiasm of literary criticism gave birth to a new kind of didactic poetry, which aimed at expounding the phenomena of Nature in the epic diction of Homer. Among the best-known authors of this didactic poetry are Aratus, Callimachus, and Nicander,-the last described as being a poet, a grammarian, and a physician, a combination characteristic of the spirit in which both science and literature were cultivated. These writers supplied materials which Virgil used in the Georgics, and in the special examination of that poem it will be seen that he adopted other characteristics of the Alexandrine learning. The description by Ovid of the poem of Aemilius Macer in the lines

Saepe suas volucres legit mihi grandior aevo, Quaeque necet serpens, quae iuvet herba, Macer(70),

indicates the character not only of that poem, but also of the Alexandrine models on which it was founded.

The poetry of Alexandria touched most on the realities of human life in its treatment of the pa.s.sion of love and the enjoyment of the beauty of Nature. These are, in unadventurous times and in eras of advanced civilisation, the main motives of the imaginative literature which seeks its interest in the actual life of the present. Callimachus and Euphorion are mentioned as the models followed by Gallus, Propertius, and Tibullus(71). They, as well as their Roman followers, seem largely to have ill.u.s.trated their own feelings and experience by recondite allusions to the innumerable heroines of ancient mythology. The pa.s.sion of Medea for Jason is the motive which gives its chief human interest to the Argonautics of Apollonius, as the pa.s.sion of Dido for Aeneas, suggested by it, gives the chief purely human interest to the Aeneid. But the most powerful delineation of this kind in any writer of that period, recalling in its intensity the 'burning pa.s.sion set to the lyre by the Aeolian maiden,' is the monologue of Simaetha in the second Idyl of Theocritus, of which Virgil has produced but a faint echo in his

Ducite ab urbe domum, mea carmina, ducite Daphnim(72).

The love of Nature, though not then for the first time awakened,-for there are clear indications of the powerful influence of this sentiment, though in subordination to human interests, in the earlier epic, lyric, and dramatic poetry,-came then prominently forward as an element of refined pleasure in life, and as an inspiring influence both to poets and painters. The cause of the growth of this sentiment has been sought(73) partly in the rise of great cities, such as Antioch, Seleucia, Alexandria, which by debarring men from that free familiar contact with the forms, movement, and life of Nature enjoyed by the older Greeks, created an imaginative longing for a return to this communion as to a lost paradise.

The longing to escape from the heat and confinement of a great southern city to the fresh sights and free air of woods and mountains must have been often felt by poets and artists who had exchanged their homes on the sh.o.r.es and the islands of the Aegean for the dusty streets of Alexandria.

Probably the Metamorphoses of Ovid convey as good an idea as anything in Latin literature of the various influences active in the Alexandrine poetry; and the kind of scene which he takes most delight in painting in that poem is that of a cool and clear stream hidden in the thick shade of woods and haunted by the Nymphs. The taste for gardens within great cities, first developed at this time and afterwards carried to an extreme pitch of luxury in the early Roman Empire(74), further ill.u.s.trates the need felt for this kind of refreshment from objects of natural beauty.

Other causes have been suggested for the growth of this sentiment, as, for instance, the decay of the polytheistic fancies, which, by regarding each natural object as identified with some spiritual being, made it less an object of affection and curiosity for its own sake. The sudden growth of this sentiment in ancient times in an age of great luxury and culture is a.n.a.logous to the great development and expansion of the feeling under similar circ.u.mstances in the latter part of the eighteenth century. In both cases the sentiment arose from the desire to escape from the tedium of an artificial life. The love of Nature is not, as we might naturally expect it to be, a feeling much experienced by those who live in constant contact and conflict with its sterner forces, as by husbandmen, herdsmen, and hunters; nor is it developed consciously in primitive times or among unsophisticated races. It is the accompaniment of leisure, culture, and refinement of life. Some races are more susceptible of this feeling than others; and perhaps the Greek with his lively social temper, and the tendency of his imagination to reduce all beautiful objects to a human shape, was less capable of the disinterested delight in the sights and sounds of the outward world than the Italian. It was apparently among Siculians, the kindred of the people of Latium, and not among men living in the mountains of Arcadia or Thessaly, that Theocritus found the personages of his rustic idyl. Whether it was from the greater susceptibility of their national temperament, or from the fact that they lived in the later times of the world, to which the sentiment was more congenial, the Roman poets of the Augustan Age and of that immediately preceding it are the truest exponents of the love of Nature in ancient times; though it may be that, without the originating impulse given by the Greek mind in the Alexandrian period, and perpetuated by educated Greeks living in Southern Italy, this love of natural beauty might never have been consciously realised by them as a source of poetic inspiration.

The pursuit of literature in the Alexandrian Age was accompanied with great activity in the other arts, especially in sculpture and painting.

These last continued to be carried on by Greeks in Italy after Rome had succeeded to Alexandria as the centre of human culture. Sculpture and carving on wood, works of art in bronze, and the graving on gems continued to perpetuate an aesthetic half-belief in the Olympian deities and in the other creations of the Greek theology. Painting seems to have treated the same kind of subjects and to have aimed at satisfying the same cla.s.s of feelings as the poetry of the Alexandrian time. Many of its subjects it seems to have drawn directly from the works of poets(75). The paintings recovered from Pompeii, which may be presumed to have continued the traditions of a somewhat earlier art, ill.u.s.trate the same tastes which were gratified by the poetical treatment of mythological subjects, of landscape, and of the pa.s.sion of love. The knowledge acquired by science seems also to have been pressed into this service by the artist. The frequent representations of wild animals originated in the same kind of interest which animated Nicander to the composition of the T???a??(76).

Realistic reproductions from common life seem also to have been frequently executed by ancient, as by modern, painters. If, as is not improbable, the 'Moretum' and the 'Copa' are translations or imitations of Greek originals, they exemplify still further the close connexion between the art of the poet and of the painter among the Alexandrian dilettanti.

The various kinds of art which bring human forms and scenes from outward nature before the eye, and especially the art of the painter, must accordingly be taken into account as means of making the creations of Greek fancy and the objects of Greek sentiment vividly present to the Roman imagination. They not only acted immediately on the mind of the poet by suggesting to him directly subjects for his art and supplying frequent ill.u.s.trations for the treatment of native subjects, but they helped to interpret to cultivated minds his allusions to or reproductions from the poets of former times. The whole learning, fancy, and sentiment of the Alexandrians seem to have been absorbed and made their own by the Augustan poets. Virgil and Horace, indeed, formed their ideal of art from the works of a greater time. Their studies of Greek familiarised their minds with what was most perfect in form, n.o.blest in thought, feeling, and expression in the older poets. Yet in so far as Roman poetry is a reproduction of Greek poetry, it is the mind of the Alexandrian rather than of the old Ionian, Aeolian, or Athenian Greek that lives again in the Augustan literature. Probably this has been in favour of the Roman writers. With their highly susceptible and cultivated appreciation of excellence, their originality might have been altogether overpowered by an exclusive study of the n.o.bler and severer models. In receiving the instruction of contemporary Greeks, based to a great extent on the Alexandrine learning, and in reproducing the materials, manner, and diction of Alexandrine poets, they must have become conscious of the greater freshness and vigour of their own genius, of the more vital force of their own language, of their grander national life, of the privilege of being Romans, and of the blessing of breathing Italian air. Whatever was most worthy to survive in the spirit which animated the refined industry of the Alexandrian Age has been preserved in greater beauty and vitality in Virgil, Propertius, and Ovid, combined with the ideas, feelings, pa.s.sions, and experience of a new and more vigorous race.

One other circ.u.mstance has yet to be taken into account as affecting the culture and taste of the age, viz. the number of poets who lived at the time and the relations which subsisted between them. Those whose works have been preserved are only a few out of a larger circle who worked each in his own province of art, and listened to and criticised the works of their friends. Of the poets belonging to this circle whose works have not reached us, Varius, the older contemporary and life-long friend of Virgil, first acquired distinction as a writer of that kind of epic peculiar to Rome which treated of contemporary subjects and was dedicated to the personal glory of some great man. This kind of poem had probably originated with the 'Scipio' of Ennius, but it had been especially cultivated in the age of Cicero. Varius performed the office from which Virgil and Horace shrank, that, namely, of telling in verse the contemporary history of his own time, glorifying in one poem the memory of Julius Caesar, in another celebrating the wars of Augustus. Afterwards he resigned to Virgil the honours of epic poetry, and entered into rivalry with Pollio as the author of tragedy. His drama of Thyestes was represented at the Games celebrated after the battle of Actium, and for this drama he is said to have received a million sesterces(77). This play is praised both by Quintilian and Tacitus in the dialogue De Oratoribus.

Quintilian says of it, 'it may be compared with any work of the Greeks:'

but the drama is the branch of literature in which the judgment of a Latin critic is of least value. The Thyestes, like the Medea of Ovid, was probably a play of that rhetorical kind which was cultivated under the Empire, and which never got possession of the stage as the older tragedies of Attius and Pacuvius did. Cornelius Gallus has been already mentioned among the men of public eminence who cultivated poetry. He was a follower of the Alexandrians, and is mentioned by Propertius and Ovid as their own precursor in elegiac poetry. Aemilius Macer, a native of Verona, nearly of the same age as Virgil, and supposed to be shadowed forth as the Mopsus of the fifth Eclogue, was the author of a didactic poem called Ornithogonia, written in imitation of the Alexandrine Nicander. Valgius Rufus and Aristius Fuscus, mentioned by Horace as among the friendly critics by whom he wished his Satires to be approved, and to whom he addresses some of his Odes and Epistles, are also known as authors. In his later life Horace maintained friendly relations and correspondence with the younger men, such as Iulus Antonius, Florus, etc., who united a taste for poetry with the pursuits of young men of rank. And among the pleasures which Ovid recalls in the dreary days of his exile, none seem to have been more prized by him than the familiar relations in which he had lived with the older poets and with those of his own standing(78). The Alexandrine influence is visible in the kinds of poetry chiefly cultivated by these writers, especially in the didactic poem, the artificial epic, and the erotic elegy. We hear also of epic or narrative poems on contemporary subjects, of one or two dramatic writers, and also of writers in verse on grammatical and rhetorical subjects(79).

There is no feature in the social life of the Augustan Age so pleasant to contemplate as the brotherly friendship, free apparently from the jealousies of individuals and the petty pa.s.sions of literary coteries, in which the most eminent poets and men of letters lived with one another.

The only exception to the general state of good feeling of which there is any indication is an apparent coolness between Horace and Propertius. The latter poet neither mentions nor alludes to his ill.u.s.trious contemporary, though both were friends of Maecenas and of Virgil; and Horace, though he does not mention Propertius by name, as he does Tibullus and most of the other distinguished poets of the time, probably alludes to him in a pa.s.sage which was not intended to be complimentary(80). But in general what Plato says of the souls engaged in the pursuit and contemplation of intellectual beauty-'Envy stands aloof from the divine company'-was true of the 'divine company' of poets in the Age of Augustus. And the sincere and appreciative interest which they took in one another was not only a source of great happiness in their lives, but was able to fulfil the function of an enlightened and generous criticism. Poets were in the habit of reading their works to their friends before submitting them to the public. It is characteristic of the modesty of Virgil and of his unceasing aim at perfection that he was in the habit of reading to his friends chiefly those pa.s.sages in his works of which he was himself distrustful.

The fastidious taste of Horace sometimes rebelled against the importunity of those who desired to hear him read his own compositions. Yet the well-known testimony of Ovid proves that he was not averse to gratify an appreciative listener:-

Et tenuit nostras numerosus Horatius aures, Dum ferit Ausonia carmina culta lyra(81).

The appreciation and criticism of cultivated friends, themselves authors as well as critics, must have stimulated and corrected the taste of the poets of the age. The genius which is most purely original in its activity, and which communicates an altogether novel impulse to the world, relies absolutely on itself, and may be little stimulated by sympathy or affected by criticism. Of such a type Lucretius in ancient and Wordsworth in modern times are probably the best examples, though Dante and Milton seem to approach nearer to it than to the type of those whose genius is equally great in receiving from, as in giving to, the world-the type of genius of Homer, Sophocles, Shakspeare, and Goethe. The great qualities of writers of the first type are force, independence, boldness of invention and speculation, absolute sincerity. They are at the same time liable to the defects of incompleteness, one-sidedness, disregard of the true proportion of things. Their works do not produce the impression of that all-pervading, perfectly-balanced sanity of genius, which the Greeks meant when they applied the word s?f?? to their poets, and which makes the great men of the second type not only powerful movers but also the wisest teachers of the world. The best poetry of the Augustan Age, if wanting in the highest mode of creative energy, is eminently free from the defects which sometimes result from the intenser form of imagination; it is in a remarkable degree pervaded and controlled by this sanity of genius. This excellence of the Augustan literature may be partly, as was said before, attributed to the familiar intercourse which men of letters enjoyed with men of action and large social influence; partly, and probably to a greater degree, to the cultivated and generous criticism which men of genius and fine accomplishment imparted to and received from one another.

Outside of this friendly circle of men eminent in letters and social position there were other literary and critical coteries hostile to them, who seem to have chosen the merits of the old writers as the battle-ground on which they engaged the new school of poetry and criticism. These critical coteries Horace treats, as Catullus treats his 'vile poets, pests of the age,' and as Pope treated Dennis and the other poetasters of his time. He was evidently sensitive to the envy excited by his genius and by the favour of Maecenas, and in his later years it afforded him pleasure to be less exposed than he had been to carping criticism:-

Romae principis urbium Dignatur soboles inter amabiles Vatum ponere me choros, Et iam dente minus mordeor invido(82).