Part 14

Horace, as a poet, was once admired beyond all bounds; but for the last thirty years or more, he has not had justice done to him. His imitations from the Greeks are of wonderful beauty, and they have also much in them which is his own. Yet for all that he has many faults. When searching for an original expression, he sometimes contents himself with another which is none of the most appropriate or the most terse: if one keeps this remark well in mind, many of Bentley’s emendations fall to the ground. Moreover he has two great failings. One is quite annoyed at his misappreciation of the earlier writers; the times had quite changed, and hence he took a dislike to many things because they were strange in his day, more especially to archaisms. How he could have been blind to the merits of Plautus, is quite inconceivable: the age to which he belonged had wrought on him the same effects which difference of nationality has on other men; many an expression may have quite gone down to the common people, and thus have become vulgar, so that Horace was shocked by it. This feeling may have been much increased by his disgust at those who made a ridiculous parade of quaintness, playing the same farce as the exaggerated admirers of the middle ages among us. And besides this, painful is the impression which is made upon us by the irony of Horace’s Epicurean philosophy, owing to which he, in fact, looks upon everything as a folly, and tries to sneer at everything, treating what is most venerable with irreverence: this becomes at last a bad habit with him. Yet there is excuse for this in the age in which he lived; in better times, it would not have been thus. One sees in him a mild and quiet man, who in truth was always constrained and reserved; the wild, reckless Catullus, with his loud laugh, and his loud wailings, comes more home to our hearts: the same tone which there is in Horace may also have been that of Menander, and the latest Athenian comedy. Horace did not choose to let his heart bleed, and thus he puts us indeed into a sadder frame of mind. When a real good is lost for the people, one should not deaden the feelings to it, and try to make the world thoughtless; but one should carry the grief for it within one’s breast, and let it have free course, yet without cherishing or artificially fostering it. “He who has lost a real good,” says Friederick Leopold Von Stolberg, “has often much left to him, if he retains the consciousness of what he has lost.” Horace with all this is still ever noble and amiable: he has only misunderstood an unhappy age. He lived nearly to his fifty-seventh year.

Of the same standing as Horace was Tibullus an _Eques Romanus_: he was one of those whose fortune had somewhat suffered in those stormy times. The year of his birth is unknown to us: from an epigram which is ascribed to Domitius Marsus (_Te quoque Virgilio comitem non æqua, Tibulle_, &c.), we merely gather that he died soon after Virgil. Yet there is some doubt about that epigram: the way in which Horace addresses Tibullus, seems to bespeak a contemporary. Of Tibullus, the first two books are not to be doubted; but the third cannot possibly be his, although the name of the author can hardly be Lygdamus: for it may only be substituted for the right one, as being of the same quantity. Thus it is also with the names of women: that of the mistress of Propertius, whom he calls Cynthia, was Hostia; that of Tibullus’ Delia, was Plania. Owing to party spirit, people will not admit the truth of Voss’s remark, that in the third book there is quite a different metrical character, and also quite another turn of expression: he who does not see this, is in my opinion no judge of questions either of grammar or of metre. A distich has been rejected as spurious because it clashes with the chronology of Tibullus: the poet of the third book was born, like Ovid, in 709, under the consulship of Hirtius and Pansa, as he says himself:—

Natalem primo nostrum videre parentes, Cum cecidit fato consul uterque pari.

These verses cannot be struck out. The fourth book is just as little Tibullus’ own: the panegyric on Messalla is the production of some poor fellow who was in want of a patron, and certainly not that of a knight. Both books, the third and the fourth, are by authors who are inferior to Tibullus. The smaller poems which bear the names of Sulpicia and Cerinthus, may be Tibullus’ own; but they are almost too good to be his: there is too much strength and boldness in them. To me, Tibullus is an unpleasing poet: this womanish and maudlin grief, this unantique sentimentality, are mistaken tones of Mimnermus, which to me are unbearable; and above all, in a Roman.

Somewhat older perhaps than Horace was Cornelius Gallus, a man of rank who had also tried his fortune in war, and whom Augustus had appointed governor of Egypt, in which post indeed he behaved shamefully. He must, however, have had his amiable qualities, as Virgil was so fond of him, and introduced his praise in the fourth book of the Georgics: it was to replace it, that the poet had afterwards to put in the episode of Aristæus. Having been convicted of very disgraceful things, Gallus put an end to his own life. He had translated Euphorion, and written elegies, of which, however, one line only remains. He must have been a distinguished poet, though what goes under his name, all but a few fragments, is not genuine. If he is called _durior_, this perhaps implies that he had the old language and versification of Catullus and Lucretius, which Quinctilian might indeed have found harsh.

One who also lived at the same time as these men, was Varius. Of him we have unfortunately but a few verses; the ancients, however, ranked him with Virgil and Horace among the great poets of that age; he was especially renowned for his tragedy of Thyestes. This is a very unhappy subject; and I am afraid that there was a good deal of rant in that piece, and that it stood in the same relation to Greek tragedy as the Æneid to the Iliad. The tragic poets of that age in all likelihood no longer had before them the old Athenian tragedy, like Pacuvius and Attius, but the Alexandrian; for what was called the Pleias, was certainly something quite different from the old tragic poets. One may get an idea of it from Seneca, whose pieces are certainly not of Roman home-growth, but evidently formed after foreign models: his lyrical part is limited to anapæsts, and very rarely contains quite simple strophes of four lines. If I had the choice, I would rather have Varius’ poem _De Morte_ than his tragedy.

This was the noble group of the poets of that age, such as seldom have met together in this world. These poets Augustus found living when he made himself master of the state; they have passed the shortest part of their lives under his rule. But now a second generation arose, which is really to be called the Augustan. It begins with Propertius, whose poems are evidently imitations from the Alexandrian school; whereas Horace kept to the older lyric style, although Virgil already begins to follow somewhat in the track of the poets of Alexandria and Pergamus. Propertius must have been born about 700. He was a native of Umbria, and his youth was about the time of the assignments of land: it was his ambition to be the Roman Callimachus or Philetas.

Much greater than he,—in fact, of all the Roman poets whose works have come down to us, by far the most poetical after Catullus,—was Ovid, born in 709. Virgil is evidently disheartened by his lot; Horace’s mind was painfully distracted in another way, as he fondly loved Brutus; Tibullus, with his feeling heart, was weighed down by evil times; Propertius was so affected by the early loss of his property, that free enjoyment of life and perfect ease never returned to him: but as for Catullus, on the other hand, the unbounded freedom of his humour sprang from the independence of his fortune. His father must have been one of the most eminent men in his province; he was a guest-friend of Cæsar. Ovid was born with one of the most happy dispositions that heaven can give, at a time when the troubles of the Perusian war could only reach him in his cradle; he was in his thirteenth year when Cæsar Octavianus conquered at Actium: thus his lightheartedness and cheerfulness arose from the circumstances of the age in which he lived. On this we are all of us dependent: my own tone of mind is quite different from what it would have been had I been born thirty years sooner or later. Ovid was a young man of rank and wealth at Sulmo, who began the world adorned with every gift of mind and body: a greater facility no man could have, and in this respect, he is among the very first poets. In Schiller’s poems, one may every where remark his struggle with the forms of verse, and the toil with which he worked; whilst in Goethe’s early productions, everything is as if written off-hand. The Greek lyric poets also are never far-fetched; it is as if they could express themselves only in the way in which they did, and in none other: Horace, unlike them, is plodding, and it is but seldom that anything, as it were, bubbles out of him. In Ovid, all comes fresh from the heart: his faults, which also run through his poetry, are well known. The cause of his misfortune is a riddle which no human sagacity will ever be able to make out; and the endless stories which have been spread about it are but so many absurdities. The utter depression of his mind during his abode in Tomi has been turned into a reproach against him; but I am rather struck with admiration, that in this dreadful exile among barbarians, his freshness and liveliness forsook him so little.

One of his contemporaries was Cornelius Severus, of whom we have a fragment which strengthens the opinion that had he lived longer, he would have become an eminent epic poet, infinitely superior to Lucan.

Pedo Albinovanus must also have been distinguished. Whether he is the author of the poem to Livia on the death of her son Drusus, seems not to be so certain as is generally believed.

Livy was born in the consulship of Cæsar, 693, and lived to his seventy-fifth, or seventy-seventh year;[35] he thus reached far into Tiberius’ reign. I have already spoken of him before. History was the only thing that one could then write in prose; eloquence had sunk into wretched declamation, or mere lawyer’s pleading. He was fifty years of age, or somewhat older, when he began to write his history. The unfavourable opinion which Asinius Pollio gave of him, certainly arose from party spirit, as the latter could not abide anything that was Pompeian. Livy’s great fame, in which no one of his day has equalled him, is all built upon his historical work; and this is the reason why he is not once mentioned in Horace: very likely, he lived at first as a teacher of rhetoric in complete retirement. A man came all the way from Cadiz to Rome to see him.

In the literature of the Cæsarian period, I forgot to mention Dec. Laberius, who was very distinguished and original as a writer of mimes. If men like Laberius and P. Syrus acted their mimes themselves, these were evidently a kind of improvisation, a description of poetry which was akin to the _sermones_ of Horace, and partook very little of the peculiarities of dramatic verse. P. Syrus also ranked very high. Comedy had at that time quite gone off; we do not even meet with mediocrities. Of tragedies, the Thyestes of Varius only is mentioned.—Valgius also belongs still to the time of Virgil.

The political weakness of Greece in those days, before the might of Rome, is not greater than the absolute nullity of Greek literature as compared with the richness of the Roman one. The Greeks were then nothing but rhetoricians and grammarians, though these certainly deserve an honourable mention: of poems, there are none worth speaking of; even of epigrammatic talent there never yet was such a dearth: only a few wretched epigrams date from that age. Dionysius of Halicarnassus stands alone as a man distinguished for sense and judgment: it is therefore not to be wondered at, that the Romans in this respect also felt superior to the Greeks; and they did not perhaps feel it as much as they should have done. In the latter days of Augustus, literature again went down hill most rapidly; and under Tiberius it had completely run itself out. Those who were the leaders of taste, and brought on the silver era, were Greek rhetoricians, mostly from the Levant. From old Greece, as far as I know, Plutarch is for many centuries after Polybius the only writer of eminence.

PRIVATE LIFE OF AUGUSTUS. AGRIPPA. MÆCENAS. FAMILY CONNEXIONS. BUILDINGS.

The very many statues and busts which yet remain of Augustus, bear out the statement of Suetonius, that he was an uncommonly fine man. His _decora facies_ he still had even in his old age; we may trace the likeness in his busts throughout the different periods of his life. He is so beautiful that I very nearly got his bust; but his personal character deterred me. He was however a remarkable man in every respect. What he was reproached with by the ancients, was want of courage; but this is an imputation which is easily made, especially if there is some foundation for it after all; yet there were, on the other hand, instances also in which he undeniably showed courage. In the war of Philippi, there is indeed some ground for such a charge: at Mutina, he perhaps was guilty of treachery; but in the Pompeian war, no reproach of the kind attaches to him. He was a bad general, and had no more luck in the field than he had in his domestic relations. His falseness and cruelty, I have before described; yet he had also his good qualities: he was a friend to his friends, and put up with many things from them; which considering his pride, is very surprising: towards Agrippa and Mæcenas, he was neither faithless nor unthankful. In his domestic relations, he was regardless of character. He had at first been betrothed to Antony’s stepdaughter Clodia, but the match was broken off; then he married Scribonia, who bore him Julia of unhappy notoriety; and then he put her away, and compelled Tib. Claudius Nero, who had once been proscribed as a partisan of Brutus, and who was also one of the best of the family of the Claudii, to give up to him Livia. Livia, whose ambition and thirst of power for her own family knew no bounds, and who shrank from no crime, had gradually gotten the most absolute sway over Augustus. However much he sought to bring back purity of morals, he himself was a thorough profligate; and this Livia winked at. They were married to each other nearly fifty years; and the longer they lived together, the greater became her power. She must have been wondrously beautiful in her youth, and amazingly clever: for a long course of years, she strove with quiet patience to get the dominion for her race; and for this purpose she estranged Augustus from the whole of his family. The only child she had borne him was still-born. So long as Octavia, the half-sister of Augustus, and one of the most respectable of the later Roman matrons, was alive and had prospects for her son Marcellus, who was married to Julia, she herself seemed to have been altogether set aside. But after the death of Marcellus, Agrippa became more powerful than ever, though he had already gained such an ascendancy, that Augustus, had he not loved him much, must have been afraid of him; and now the emperor bound him to him by the marriage with Julia, because he really feared him: Julia had by Marcellus one daughter only. Agrippa was much older than Augustus, with whom he had been as a sort of tutor in Apollonia; it is not unlikely that Cæsar had meant him to accompany his nephew as _custos_ to the Parthian war, as was generally done when the youthful Roman at seventeen first joined the army: thus Lollius went with C. Cæsar. Before that time, nothing is mentioned about him, nor can any one tell where he came from; in Cæsar’s campaigns, he is not once named: he is said to have been _ignobili_, even _humili loco natus_. He afterwards shows himself to have been an experienced general. Augustus’ best time was that during which Agrippa’s influence was paramount with him; that is to say, almost the whole unbroken period from the battle of Actium to the death of Agrippa, whom no one accuses of having had any share in the earlier crimes of his pupil. It is he, above all men, who gave the state its form; he is, more than Augustus, the author of the most useful institutions,—perhaps also of some artful ones, but certainly of all that had any good in them. Besides which, there was something grand about him. We have but one building left of his, the Pantheon, which indeed is the finest relic of ancient Rome. He had a genius for vast and magnificent works, for roads, canals, aqueducts, baths: he so laid out the whole of the Campus Martius, that Strabo is quite in ecstacies whilst describing it. In the war against Pompey, he displayed tried ability: moreover, he then built a fleet and the _portus Julius_. He was thrice consul, and openly laid claim to the highest honours: for he looked upon them as his due, being anything but cowed and daunted before Augustus. He died, I believe, in 740; Mæcenas in 744, in the same year as Horace.

The friendship of Augustus was shared with Agrippa by C. Cilnius Mæcenas, of the illustrious Etruscan house of the Cilnii (_Etrusci reges, reges atavi_):—it must have been a δυναστεία; the name is also met with innumerable times on monuments at Arretium. This clan must have had the Roman franchise even before the _lex Julia_; for as early as Livius Drusus, a Mæcenas, as we are told by Cicero,[36] was already among the _equites splendidissimi_. Horace seems to hint that the forefathers of Mæcenas’ line, both on the father and mother’s side, had been raised to the highest magistracy in the days of Etruscan freedom:—

“—_quod avus tibi maternus fuit atque paternus, Olim qui magnis legionibus imperitarent_:”

in all likelihood, both of these branches belonged to Arretium: Mæcenas himself was merely a Roman knight. With posterity, he has earned the honour of having been a patron of the poets: we may rejoice that he showed kindness to Horace and Virgil, without indeed troubling ourselves about his motives for it, which we have no means of finding out. He was a strange man, an epicurean in the very worst sense; and he unblushingly avowed it, as he set up ease and comfort as the highest good in life. He displayed a more than womanish love of life; for though in a wretchedly broken state of health, he was glad to live, even in torture, if only live he could (_vita dum superest, bene est_). There was also something childish and trifling about him: he had a foppish delight in trinkets and jewels, for which Augustus often laughed at him. To the latter, he was a convenient friend and a most agreeable companion; and for all honours he expressed an epicurean contempt, looking upon Agrippa’s love of distinction as folly. Yet for all that, he may have cared not a little for having influence; whenever Augustus consulted him, he got very sensible advice. Once only he behaved in a manly way. When Augustus, in the time of the triumvirate, or in that of the Perusian war, was seated on his tribunal, and was pronouncing one sentence of death after another, Mæcenas sent him a note with the words “Get up then, you executioner!” This looks like a man whose heart is much better than his philosophy.