Post-Augustan Poetry | Page 9

to recite at school, so he had to recite if he was to win fame for his verse in the larger world. Even in a saner society poetry written primarily for recitation must have run to rhetoric; in a rhetorical age the result was disastrous. In an enormous proportion of cases the poet of the Silver Age wrote literally for an audience. Great as were the facilities for publication the poet primarily made his name, not by the gradual distribution of his works among a reading public, but by declaiming before public or private audiences. The practice of gathering a circle of acquaintances together to listen to the recitations of a poet is said first to have been instituted by Asinius Pollio, the patron of Vergil. There is evidence to show that all the poets of the Augustan age gave recitations.[74] But the practice gradually increased and became a nuisance to all save the few who had the courage to stand aloof from these mutual admiration societies. Indiscriminate praise was lavished on good and bad work alike. Even Pliny the younger, whose cultivation and literary taste place him high above the average literary level of his day, approves of the increase of this melancholy harvest of minor poetry declaimed by uninspired bards.[75] The effect was lamentable. All the faults of the suasoria and controversia made their appearance in poetry.[76] The poet had continually to be performing acrobatic feats, now of rhetoric or epigram, now of learning, or again in the description of blood-curdling horrors, monstrous deaths and prodigious sorceries. Each work was overloaded with sententiae and purple patches.[77] So only could the author keep the attention of his audience. The results were disastrous for literature and not too satisfactory[78] for the authors themselves, as the following curious passage from Tacitus (Dial. 9) shows:
Bassus is a genuine poet, and his verse possesses both beauty and charm: but the only result is that, when after a whole year, working every day and often well into the night, he has hammered out one book of poems, he must needs go about requesting people to be good enough to give him a hearing: and what is more he has to pay for it: for he borrows a house, constructs an auditorium, hires benches and distributes programmes. And then--admitting his recitations to be highly successful--yet all that honour and glory falls within one or two days, prematurely gathered like grass in the blade or flowers in their earliest bloom: it has no sure or solid reward, wins no friendship or following or lasting gratitude, naught save a transient applause, empty words of praise and a fleeting enthusiasm.
The less fortunate poet had to betake himself to the forum or the public baths or some temple, there to inflict his tawdry wares upon the ears of a chance audience.[79] Others more fortunate would be lent a room by some rich patron.[80] Under Nero and Domitian we get the apotheosis of recitation. Nero, we have seen, established the Neronia in 60 and himself competed. Domitian established a quinquennial competition in honour of Jupiter Capitolinus in 86 and an annual competition held every Quinquatria Minervae at his palace on the Alban mount.[81] From that time forward it became the ambition of every poet to be crowned at these grotesque competitions.
The result of all these co-operating influences will be evident as we deal with the individual poets. Here we can only give a brief summary of the general characteristics of this fantastic literature. We have a striving after originality that ends in eccentricity: writers were steeped in the great poets of the Augustan age: men of comparatively small creative imagination, but, thanks to their education, possessed of great technical skill, they ran into violent extremes to avoid the charge of imitating the great predecessors whom they could not help but imitate; hence the obscurity of Persius--the disciple of Horace--and of Statins and Valerius Flaccus--the followers of Vergil. Hence Lucan's bold attempt to strike out a new type of epic, an attempt that ended in a wild orgy of brilliant yet turbid rhetoric. The simple and natural was at a discount: brilliance of point, bombastic description, gorgeous colour were preferred to quiet power. Alexandrian learning, already too much in evidence in the Augustan age, becomes more prominent and more oppressive. For men of second-rate talent it served to give their work a spurious air of depth and originality to which it was not entitled. The necessity of patronage engendered a fulsome flattery, while the false tone of the schools of rhetoric,[82] aided perhaps by the influence of the Stoical training so fashionable at Rome, led to a marvellous conceit and self-complacency, of which a lack of humour was a necessary corollary. These symptoms are seen at their worst during the extravagant