Post-Augustan Poetry | Page 6

off its mask: the sense of power that
goes with freedom dwindled; little was left to waken man's enthusiasm,
and the servility exacted by the emperors became more and more
degrading. Unpleasing as are the flatteries addressed to Augustus by
Vergil and Horace, they fade into insignificance compared with Lucan's
apotheosis of Nero; or to take later and yet more revolting examples,
the poems of the Silvae addressed by Statius to Domitian or his
favourites. Further, these four emperors of the Julio-Claudian dynasty
set a low standard of private life: they might command flattery, they
could hardly exact respect. Two clever lunatics, a learned fool, and a
morose cynic are not inspiring.
Nevertheless, however unhealthy its influence may have been--and
there has been much exaggeration on this point--it must be remembered
that the principate found ready to its hand a society with all the seeds of
decay implanted deep within it. Even a succession of sane and virtuous
Caesars might well have failed, with the machinery and material at
their disposal, to put new and vigorous life into the aristocracy and
people of Rome. Even the encroachments of despotism on popular
liberty must be attributed in no small degree to the incapacity of what
should have been the ruling class at Rome. Despotism was in a sense
forced upon the emperors: they were not reluctant, but, had they been
so, they would still have had little choice. The primary causes of the
decline of literature, as of the decay of life and morals, lie much deeper.
The influence of princeps and principate, though not negligible, is
comparatively small.
The really important causes are to be found first in the general decay of
Roman character--far-advanced before the coming of Caesarism,
secondly in the peculiar nature of Roman literature, and thirdly in the
vicious system of Roman education.

It was the first of these factors that produced the lubricity that defiles
and the lack of moral earnestness that weakens such a large proportion
of the literature of this age. It is not necessary to illustrate this point in
any detail.[50] The record of Rome, alike in home and foreign politics,
during the hundred and twenty years preceding the foundation of the
principate forms one of the most fascinating, but in many respects one
of the most profoundly melancholy pages in history. The poems of
Catullus and the speeches of Cicero serve equally to illustrate the
wholesale corruption alike of public and private morality. The Roman
character had broken down before the gradual inroads of an alien
luxury and the opening of wide fields of empire to plunder. It is an age
of incredible scandal, of mob law, of _coups d'état_ and proscriptions,
saved only from utter gloom by the illusory light shed from the figures
of a few great men and by the never absent sense of freedom and
expansion. There still remained a republican liberty of action, an
inspiring possibility of reform, an outlet for personal ambition, which
facilitated the rise of great leaders and writers. And Rome was now
bringing to ripeness fruit sprung from the seed of Hellenism, a decadent
and meretricious Hellenism, but even in its decay the greatest
intellectual force of the world.
Wonderful as was the fruit produced by the graft of Hellenism, it too
contained the seeds of decay. For Rome owed too little to early Greek
epic and to the golden literature of Athens, too much to the later age
when rhetoric had become a knack, and
the love of letters overdone
Had swamped the sacred poets with
themselves.[51]
Roman literature came too late: that it reached such heights is a
remarkable tribute to the greatness of Roman genius, even in its decline.
With the exception of the satires of Lucilius and Horace there was
practically no branch of literature that did not owe its inspiration and
form to Greek models. Even the primitive national metre had died out.
Roman literature--more especially poetry--was therefore bound to be
unduly self-conscious and was always in danger of a lack of
spontaneity. That Rome produced great prose writers is not surprising;

they had copious and untouched material to deal with, and prose
structure was naturally less rapidly and less radically affected by Greek
influence. That she should have produced a Catullus, a Lucretius, a
Vergil, a Horace, and--most wonderful of all--an Ovid was an amazing
achievement, rendered not the less astonishing when it is remembered
that the stern bent of the practical Roman mind did not in earlier days
give high promise of poetry. The marvel is not wholly to be explained
by the circumstances of the age. The new sense of power, the revival of
the national spirit under the warming influence of peace and hope, that
characterize the brilliant interval between the fall of the republic and
the