CHAPTER I.

DECLINE OF ROMAN LITERATURE—IT BECAME DECLAMATORY—BIOGRAPHY OF PHÆDRUS—GENUINENESS OF HIS FABLES—MORAL AND POLITICAL LESSONS INCULCATED IN THEM—SPECIMENS OF FABLES—FABLES SUGGESTED BY HISTORICAL EVENTS—SEJANUS AND TIBERIUS—EPOCH UNFAVOURABLE TO LITERATURE—INGENUITY OF PHÆDRUS—SUPERIORITY OF ÆSOP—THE STYLE OF PHÆDRUS CLASSICAL.

With the death of Augustus[1011] commenced the decline of Roman literature, and only three illustrious names, Phædrus, Persius, and Lucan, rescue the first years of this period from the charge of a corrupt and vitiated taste. After awhile, indeed, political circumstances again became more favourable—the dangers which paralyzed genius and talent, and prevented their free exercise under Tiberius and his tyrannical successors, diminished, and a more liberal system of administration ensued under Vespasian and Titus. Juvenal and Tacitus then stood forth as the representatives of the old Roman independence; vigour of thought communicated itself to the language; a taste for the sublime and beautiful to a certain extent revived, although it did not attain to the perfection which shed a lustre over the Augustan age.

The characteristic of the first literature of this epoch was declamation and rhetoric. As liberty declined, true natural eloquence gradually decayed. When it is no longer necessary or even possible to persuade or convince the people, that eloquence which calms the passions, wins the affections, or appeals to common sense and the reasoning powers, has no opportunity for exercise. Its object is a new one—namely, to please and attract an audience who listen in a mere critical spirit: the weapons which it makes use of are novelty and ingenuity; novelty soon becomes strangeness, and strangeness exaggeration; whilst ingenuity implies unnatural study and a display of pedantic erudition—the aiming at startling and striking effects—and at length ends in affectation.

If this was the prevailing false taste under the immediate successors of Augustus, it is not surprising that it affected poetry as well as prose; and that the principal talent of the poet lay in florid and diffuse descriptions, whilst his chief fault was a style overladen with ornament. The tragedies ascribed to Seneca are theatrical declamations; the satires of Persius are philosophical declamations; whilst the poems of Lucan and Silius Italicus, though epic in form, are nothing more than descriptive poems, and their style is rather rhetorical than poetical.

PHÆDRUS.

Fable had been long known and popular amongst the Romans before the time of Phædrus. Livy could not have attributed the well-known one to Menenius Agrippa, unless it had been a familiar tradition of long standing. Fables amused the guests of Horace, and furnished subjects to those of Ovid. In this, as in other fields of literature, Rome was an imitator of Greece; but nevertheless the Roman fabulist struck out a new line for himself, and in his hands fable became, not only a moral instructor, but a severe political satirist. Phædrus, the originator and only author of Roman fable, flourished on the common confines of the golden and the silver age. His mode of thought, as well as the events which suggested both his original illustrations and his adaptations of the Æsopean stories, belong to that epoch of transition. His works are, as it were, isolated: he has no contemporaries. Although he was born in the reign of Augustus, he wrote when the Augustan age had passed away. Nevertheless his solitary voice was lifted up when those of the poet, the historian, and the philosopher were silenced.

Phædrus, like Horace, is his own biographer; and the only knowledge which we have respecting his life is furnished by his Fables. In the prologue to the third book he informs us that he was a native of Thrace: “I,” he says, “to whom my mother gave birth on the Pierian hill—

Ego quem Pierio mater enixa est jugo.”

And, again, he exclaims, “Why should I, who am nearer to lettered Greece, desert for slothful indolence the honour of my fatherland, when Thrace can reckon up her poets, and Apollo is the parent of Linus, the muse of Orpheus, who by his song endowed rocks with motion, tamed the wild beasts, and stopped the rapid Hebrus with welcome delay?—

Ego literatæ qui sum propior Græciæ, Cur somno inerti deseram patriæ decus; Threïssa cum gens numeret auctores suos, Linoque Apollo sit parens, Musa Orpheo Qui saxa cantu movit, et domuit feras, Hebrique tenuit impetus dulci morâ?”

From the title, “Augusti Libertus,” prefixed to his fables, it is clear that he adds one more distinguished name to that list of freedmen, who were celebrated in the annals of literature. Although, in the preface to his work, he modestly terms himself only a translator of Æsop,

Æsopus auctor quam materiam repperit Hanc ego polivi versibus senariis,[1012]

still, for many of his fables, he deserves the credit of originality. Probably he enlarged and extended his original plan; for he afterwards speaks of simply adopting the style and not the matter of the Æsopean fable.[1013]

He does not appear to have gained much fame or popularity; for he is only twice mentioned by ancient authorities, namely, by Martial[1014] and Seneca.[1015] The latter, writing to Polybius, a favourite freedman of Claudius, encourages him to enter upon the field which Phædrus already occupied, asserting that fables in the style of Æsop constituted a work hitherto unattempted by Roman genius (_intentatum Romanis ingeniis opus_.) Either, therefore, the fables of Phædrus were little known and appreciated, or Seneca purposely concealed from the Emperor’s favourite the fact of their existence, in order to flatter him with the hopes of his thus becoming the first Roman writer in his style. The persecution to which literary men were subject under the worst Emperors, of which Phædrus hints obscurely that he was a victim[1016]—the perils to which he would have been exposed by strictures upon persons in power, which, concealed under the veil of fiction, appear now dark and enigmatical, but which might have spoken plainly to the consciences of the actors themselves—probably rendered it a wise precaution to conceal his works during his lifetime; hence they would be little known, except to a chosen few, and the few copies made of them would account for the rarity of the extant manuscripts.

Owing to the deficiency of ancient testimony, the genuineness of the Fables has been disputed; but the purity of style, and the natural allusions to contemporary events render it almost certain that they belong to the age in which they were supposed to have been written. No one but a contemporary could have written the fable commencing—

Narrabo memoria quod factum est mea.[1017]

The prologue to the third book evidently speaks of the author’s own calamities; and the way in which the name of Sejanus is connected with the event, hints, although obscurely, that that prime minister of tyranny was the author of his sufferings. It is scarcely probable that he would have ventured to attack Sejanus during his lifetime. It may, therefore, be assumed that Phædrus lived beyond the eighteenth year of the reign of Tiberius, in which year Sejanus died.

The original manuscript followed in the early editions of Phædrus was discovered in the tenth century: it contained ninety-seven fables, divided into five books. But N. Perotto, an archbishop of Manfredonia, in the fifteenth century, published a miscellaneous collection of Latin fables, and amongst them were thirty-two new fables attributed to Phædrus, which were not found in the older editions. These were at first supposed to have been written by Perotto himself; but the manifest inferiority of some poems known to be the work of the archbishop, and the Augustan purity of style which marks the newly-discovered fables, leave little doubt of their genuineness. Consequently, they were published by Angelo Mai as supplementary to those which had already appeared.

The circumstances of the times in which he lived suggested the moral and prudential lessons which his fables inculcated. The bane of Rome, under the empire, was the public informer (_delator_,) as the sycophant had been the pest of Athens. Life and conduct, private as well as public, were exposed to a complete system of espionage: no one was safe from this formidable inquisition; a man’s familiar associate might be in secret his bitterest enemy. But the principal victims were the rich: they were marked out for destruction, in order that the confiscation of their property might glut the avarice of the Emperor and the informers. For this reason, Phædrus himself professes always to have seen the peril of acquiring wealth—

Periculosum semper reputavi lucrum.

And we cannot be surprised that the danger of riches, and the comparative safety of obscurity and poverty, should sometimes form the moral of his fables.

That of the Mules and the Thieves, which is entirely his own, teaches this lesson:—

Muli gravati sarcinis ibant duo; Unus ferebat fiscos cum pecuniâ, Alter tumentes multo saccos hordeo. Ille, onere dives, celsâ cervice eminet, Clarumque collo jactat tintinnabulum; Comes quieto sequitur et placido gradu. Subito latrones ex insidiis advolant, Interque cædem ferro mulum sauciant, Diripiunt nummos, negligunt vile hordeum. Spoliatus igitur cum casus fleret suos, Equidem, inquit alter, me contemptum gaudeo, Nam nihil amisi nec sum læsus vulnere. Hoc argumento tuta est hominum tenuitas; Magnæ periclo sunt opes obnoxiæ.[1018]

“Two mules, laden with heavy burdens, were journeying together: one carried bags of money; the other, sacks filled with barley. The former, proud of his rich load, carried his head high, and made the bell on his neck sound merrily; his companion followed with quiet and gentle paces. On a sudden, some thieves rush from an ambuscade, wound the treasure-mule, strip him of his money-bags, but leave untouched the worthless barley. When, therefore, the sufferer bewailed his sad case—‘For my part,’ replied his companion, ‘I rejoice that I was treated with contempt; for I have no wounds, and have lost nothing.’ The subject of this fable proves that poverty is safe, whilst great wealth is exposed to peril.”

The fable of the Man and the Ass teaches a salutary lesson to another class of wealthy men, namely, those favourites of the emperor and his creatures, who owed their wealth to plunder and confiscation. Every day’s experience proved that those who battened on the spoils of the oppressed one day, became themselves the victims of the same tyrannical system the next. Like that of the prime minister, Sejanus himself, the sun of their prosperity was destined to set, and their ill-gotten spoil to enrich others as unworthy as themselves. Those fortunes were indeed built upon a rotten foundation, which the same system had power to raise up and to overthrow:—

Quidam immolasset verrem quum sancto Herculi, Cui pro salute votum debebat sua, Asello jussit reliquias poni hordei. Quas aspernatus ille sic locutus est: Tuum libenter prorsus appeterem cibum Nisi, qui nutritus illo est, jugulatus foret.

* * * * *

Majorem turbam punitorum reperies; Paucis temeritas est bono, multis malo.[1019]

“A man who had sacrificed a boar to Hercules, which he had vowed as a thank-offering for his recovery from sickness, ordered the remains of the barley to be given to his ass. The ass rejected it with scorn, and said, ‘I would gladly eat of the food you give me, had not he who was fattened on it had his throat cut.’

“You will find that the majority of those who grow rich by violence and rapine are punished; audacity succeeds with few, but ruins many.”

The continued succession of tyrannical emperors must have taught their oppressed subjects that they had nothing to hope for from a change of those who wore the purple. This truth is imbodied in the fable of the old Peasant and his Ass:——

In principatu commutando civium Nil, præter domini nomen, mutant pauperes. Id esse verum parva hæc fabula indicat. Asellum in prato timidus pascebat senex. Is, hostium clamore subito territus, Suadebat asino fugere, ne possent capi. At ille lentus; quæso, num binas mihi Clitellas impositurum victorem putas? Senex negavit. Ergo quid refert mea Cui serviam, clitellas dum portem meas?[1020]

“In a change of princes the poor change nothing but the name of their master. The truth of this is shown by the following little fable. A timid old man was feeding his ass in a meadow. Alarmed by the shouts of an advancing enemy he urged the ass to fly for fear they should be taken prisoners. But the ass loitered, and said, ‘Pray, do you think that the conqueror will put two pack-saddles on my back?’ ‘No,’ replied the old man. ‘What, then, does it matter to me in whose service I am, so long as I have to carry my load?’”

The well known fable of the Wolf and the Lamb (i. 1) illustrates the unscrupulousness of the informers; and that of the Wolf and the House-dog (iii. 7) teaches how preferable is liberty, even under the greatest privations, to luxury and comfort purchased by submission to the caprices of a master.

Of such a kind were the moral and political lessons which Phædrus enforced in the attractive garb of fables. They were of a general character, suggested by the evils of the times in which he lived.

Another class were suggested by historical events: they were nevertheless severe satirical strictures on individuals. Two may be pointed out as examples which are evidently directed against Tiberius and Sejanus. These are—The Frogs demanding a King, (i. 2;) and the Frogs and the Sun, (i. 6.) Neither of the fables are original; they are apposite applications of two by Æsop.

The Romans,[1021] like the frogs in the first of these fables, had exchanged their liberty for the slavery of the empire. In Tiberius, now an imbecile dotard, wholly given up to sensual indulgence in his retreat at Capreæ, they had a perfect King Log. He was utterly careless of the sufferings of his subjects and the administration of his kingdom.

To his odious minister, Sejanus, he intrusted the toils of government, to which his own indolence indisposed him. All tyranny and cruelty were ascribed to the ministers; whilst the effeminate debauchery of the Emperor rendered him, even in that demoralized age, an object of contempt and insult rather than of abhorrence and fear. L. Sejanus, a kinsman of Ælius,[1022] employed bald-headed persons, and children with their heads shaved, in the procession of the Floral games, in order to hold up to scorn and derision the bald-headed Emperor, and he dared not take notice of the insult. The infamous Fulcinius Trio in his last will declared that Tiberius had become childish in his old age, and that his continued retirement was nothing else but exile.[1023] Pacuvianus was the author of pasquinades against the Emperor. In the same way Phædrus describes the frogs as treating “King Log” with scorn, and as defiling him in the most offensive manner.

But after the death of Sejanus a change took place in the Emperor’s conduct, though not in his character. He left Capreæ for a time, and took up his abode in the Vatican, close to the very walls of Rome. He now gave vent to his savage disposition, and displayed the temper of the water-snake in the fable. His natural cruelty was equalled by his activity. “His sharp tooth seized his unresisting victims one after the other: in vain they fly from death; fear prevents them from uttering a word in defence or expostulation.” No longer a vast expanse of sea and land intervened between the tyrant and his victims. There was nothing to delay the pompous and verbose missives of his bloody purposes: his rescripts could reach the consuls the same day, or at least after the interval of a night: he could behold, as it were, with his own eyes, the reeking hands of the executioners, and the waves of blood which deluged every dwelling.[1024] Vengeance not only fell on the guilty Sejanus and his unoffending family, the vilest and the noblest blood of Rome alike flowed at the tyrant’s command. The fable of the Frogs and the Sun was a covert attack upon the ambitious designs of Sejanus. It is sufficiently short to be quoted:

Uxorem quandam Sol quum vellet ducere, Clamorem Ranæ sustulere ad sidera. Convicio permotus, quærit Jupiter Causam querelæ. Quædam tum stagni incola, Nunc, inquit, omnes unus exurit lacus Cogitque miseras arida sede emori; Quidnam futurum est, si creârit liberos?[1025]

“Once upon a time the Sun determined to marry; and the Frogs raised a cry of alarm to Heaven. Jupiter, moved by their complaints, asked the cause of them. One of the denizens of the pond answered:—‘Now the Sun by himself dries up all the lakes, and causes us to die a miserable death in our parched-up dwellings. What then will become of us if he has children?’”

Now let us examine the application. The fawning yet ambitious Sejanus had always aspired to ally himself with the imperial family. The first attempt which he made to accomplish his design was procuring the betrothal of his daughter to Drusus, the son of Claudius, afterwards emperor. This prince died young, and consequently the marriage never took place;[1026] but this first opened the eyes of the Romans to the audacious projects of the favourite. Later in his career,[1027] he, by a similar step, endeavoured to pave his way to the imperial purple. He seduced Livilla, the sister of the amiable Germanicus, poisoned her husband, divorced his own wife, and asked the sanction of Tiberius to his marriage with the widow of the murdered man. The emperor, with his usual finesse and dissimulation, refused. The demand awoke the suspicions of the court, and was a commencement of that coolness between Sejanus and his patron which eventually ended in the fall of the latter. The influence of Sejanus alone was sufficiently baneful; what would it be if multiplied by a race of princes descended from him? The mere probability of such an event naturally filled Rome with alarm and consternation; and this Phædrus endeavoured to encourage by a fable, which, if it had not some such object as this, would scarcely be intelligible.

The quotations which have been given from the fables of Phædrus are sufficient, as examples of his ingenuity in imitation and adaptation, as well as of his original genius, whenever he trusts to his powers of invention. Some of his pieces, although, like the rest, they are entitled fables, are, in fact, narratives of real events, and show that he possessed a charming talent for telling anecdotes, besides skill as a fabulist in the proper sense of the term. His style has great merits: it combines the simple neatness and graceful elegance of the golden age with the vigour and terseness of the silver one. Phædrus has the facility of Ovid, and the brevity of Tacitus. Thus standing in the epoch between two literary periods, he, as far as the humble nature of his walk admits, unites the excellencies of both. Between the age of Horace and Juvenal, Cicero and Tacitus, there was a gap, and a long one, not less than half a century: it was a period in which Roman genius was slumbering. Phædrus proves that that sleep was not the sleep of death. Tacitus has partially accounted for this cold and dark interval. He tells us[1028]—“that although the affairs of the ancient Roman republic, whether in prosperity or in adversity, were related by illustrious writers—and even the times of Augustus were not deficient in historians of talent and genius—nevertheless the gradual growth of a spirit of adulation deterred all who were qualified for the task from attempting it. Fear, during the lifetime of Tiberius, Caius, Claudius, and Nero, and hatred, still fresh after their deaths, rendered all accounts of their reigns false.”

It was thus, according to him, fear and hatred, and a spirit of flattery, that silenced the voice of history. Doubtless what he says of history applies with equal force to poetry, and oratory likewise. The same cause which crushed political liberty rendered the truthfulness of the historian fraught with danger, and all poetry, except it spoke the language of adulation, treason; a crime which was no longer one against the majesty of the people, but was transferred to the person of the emperor. The very term παρρησια (boldness of speech) was a word, the utterance of which was as perilous as to speak of liberty.[1029] The danger had scarcely passed away when Juvenal, notwithstanding his fearless spirit, wrote:—

Unde illa priorum Scribendi quodcunque animo flagrante liberet, Simplicitas, cujus non audeo dicere nomen. _Juv._ i. 153.

Where the plain times, the simple, when our sires Enjoyed a freedom which I dare not name, And gave the public sin to public shame, Heedless who smiled or frowned. _Gifford._

But there was a negative as well as a positive cause, the withdrawal of patronage. Literature, in order to flourish, requires the genial sunshine of human sympathy: it needs either the patronage of the great or the favour of the people. In Greece it enjoyed the latter in the highest possible degree; in Rome, from the time of the Scipios to that of Augustus, it was fostered by the former. Immediately after his death patronage was withdrawn, and there was not public support to supply its place. Tiberius was first a soldier; then a dark and reserved politician; lastly, a blood-thirsty and superstitious sensualist. The enjoyments of Gaius Caligula were the extravagancies of a madman, although he was responsible for his moral insanity, because he had, by vicious indulgence, been the destroyer of his moral principle; and not only did he not encourage literature, but he even hated Homer and Virgil. Lastly, the stupid and dozing Claudius wrote books[1030] as stupid as himself, and was at once the butt and tool of his courtiers. It was not, therefore, until the reign of Nero that literature revived; for, though the bloodiest of tyrants, he had an ambition to excel in refinement, and had a taste for art and poetry.

In the construction of his fables, Phædrus displays observation and ingenuity. Nothing escapes his watchful eye which can be turned to account in his little poems. A rude sketch in charcoal on the wall of a low tavern[1031] suggested to him the idea of the Battle between the Rats and the Weasels. His animals are grouped, and put in attitudes, just as a painter would arrange them. His accurate eye has noted and registered the habits of the brute creation, and he has adapted them to the delivery of noble and wise sentiments with the utmost ingenuity. But there his genius stops. He is deficient in imagination. He makes his animals the vehicles of his wisdom; but he does not throw himself into them, or identify himself with them. The true poet is lost in his characters: carried away by the enthusiasm of an inspired imagination, his spirit is transfused into his heroes;—you forget his existence. The characters of Phædrus look and act like animals, but talk like human beings: the moralist and the philosopher can always be detected speaking under their mask and in their disguise.

In this consists the great superiority of Æsop to his Roman imitator. His brutes are a superior race, but they are still brutes. The reader could almost fancy that the fabulist had lived amongst them as one of themselves—had adopted their modes of life, and had conversed with them in their own language. In Phædrus we have human sentiments translated into the language of beasts—in Æsop we have beasts giving utterance to such sentiments as would be naturally theirs, if they were placed in the position of men. Skilful adaptation and happy delineation are the triumphs of ingenuity and observation: the creative power is that of the imagination.

The style of Phædrus, notwithstanding a few provincialisms,[1032] is pure and classical. He does not often indulge in the use of metaphors, but the few which are met with are striking and appropriate. He is not entirely free from some of that far-fetched affectation which characterizes the decline of Roman literature. But his fault is exaggerated conciseness, and the concentration of many ideas within a brief space, rather than the rhetorical ornament which now began to be admired and popular. His endeavour after brevity led him to use abstract substantives far more profusely than is consistent with the practice of the best classical writers. These faults, however, do not interfere with that clearness and simplicity, which, quite as much as the subjects, have rendered the fables of Phædrus a popular book for the young student, and please even those who have the opportunity of comparing his iambics with the liveliness of Gay, the politeness of Florian, the philosophy of Lessing, the sweetness of Cowper, and the unequalled versatility of La Fontaine.