Chapter 18

Such is one view now taken of the early Roman Empire. Its weakness is that it explains too much. How or why, if the matter was really as simple as this, did the traditional legend of the Empire grow up and extinguish the real facts? Is it possible that the malignant genius of a single historian should outweigh, not only perishable facts, but the large body of imperialist literature which extends from the great Augustans down to Statius and Quintilian? Even if we set aside Juvenal and Suetonius as a rhetorician and a gossipmonger, that only makes the weight Tacitus has to sustain more overwhelming. It is hardly possible to overrate the effect of a single work of great genius; but the more we study works of great genius the more certain does it appear that they are all founded on real, though it may be transcendental, truth. Systems, like persons, are to be known by their fruits. The Empire produced, as the flower of its culture and in the inner circle of its hierarchy, the type of men of whom Tacitus is the most eminent example; and the indignant hatred it kindled in its children leaves it condemned before the judgment of history.

The surviving fragments of the _Annals_ and _Histories_ leave three great pictures impressed upon the reader's mind: the personality of Tiberius, the court of Nero, and the whole fabric and machinery of empire in the year of the four Emperors. The lost history of the reigns of Caligula and Domitian would no doubt have added two other pictures as memorable and as dramatic, but could hardly make any serious change in the main structure of the imperial legend as it is successively presented in these three imposing scenes.

The character and statesmanship of Tiberius is one of the most vexed problems in Roman history; and it is significant to observe how, in all the discussions about it, the question perpetually reverts to another-- the view to be taken of the personality of the historian who wrote nearly a century after Tiberius' accession, and was not born till long after his death. In no part of his work does Tacitus use his great weapon, insinuation of motive, with such terrible effect. All the speeches or letters of the Emperor quoted by him, almost all the actions he records, are given with this malign sidelight upon them: that, in spite of it, we lose our respect for neither Emperor nor historian is strong evidence both of the genius of the latter and the real greatness of the former. The case of Germanicus Caesar is a cardinal instance. In the whole account of the relations of Tiberius to his nephew there is nothing in the mere facts as stated inconsistent with confidence and even with cordiality. Tiberius pronounces a long and stately eulogy on Germanicus in the senate for his suppression of the revolt of the German legions. He recalls him from the German frontier, where the Roman supremacy was now thoroughly re-established, and where the hot-headed young general was on the point of entangling himself in fresh and dangerous conquests, in order to place him in supreme command in the Eastern provinces; but first he allows him the splendid pageant of a Roman triumph, and gives an immense donative to the population of the capital in his nephew's name. Germanicus is sent to the East with _maius imperium_ over the whole of the transmarine provinces, a position more splendid than any that Tiberius himself had held during the lifetime of Augustus, and one that almost raised him to the rank of a colleague in the Empire. Then Germanicus embroils himself hopelessly with his principal subordinate, the imperial legate of Syria, and his illness and death at Antioch put an end to a situation which is rapidly becoming impossible. His remains are solemnly brought back to Rome, and honoured with a magnificent funeral; the proclamation of Tiberius fixing the termination of the public mourning is in its gravity and good sense one of the most striking documents in Roman history. But in Tacitus every word and action of Tiberius has its malignant interpretation or comment. He recalls Germanicus from the Rhine out of mingled jealousy and fear; he makes him viceroy of the East in order to carry out a diabolically elaborate scheme for bringing about his destruction. The vague rumours of poison or magic that ran during his last illness among the excitable and grossly superstitious populace of Antioch are gravely recorded as ground for the worst suspicions. That dreadful woman, the elder Agrippina, had, even in her husband's lifetime, made herself intolerable by her pride and jealousy after her husband's death she seems to have become quite insane, and the recklessness of her tongue knew no bounds. To Tacitus all her ravings, collected from hearsay or preserved in the memoirs of her equally appalling daughter, the mother of Nero, represent serious historical documents; and the portrait of Tiberius is from first to last deeply influenced by, and indeed largely founded on, the testimony of a madwoman.

The three books and a half of the _Annals_ which contain the principate of Nero are not occupied with the portraiture of a single great personality, nor are they full, like the earlier books, of scathing phrases and poisonous insinuations. The reign of Nero was, indeed, one which required little rhetorical artifice to present as something portentous. The external history of the Empire, till towards its close, was without remarkable incident. The wars on the Armenian frontier hardly affected the general quiet of the Empire; the revolt of Britain was an isolated occurrence, and soon put down. The German tribes, engaged in fierce internal conflicts, left the legions on the Rhine almost undisturbed. The provinces, though suffering under heavy taxation, were on the whole well ruled. Public interest was concentrated on the capital; and the startling events which took place there gave the fullest scope to the dramatic genius of the historian. The court of Nero lives before us in his masterly delineation. Nero himself, Seneca and Tigellinus, the Empress-mother, the conspirators of the year 65, form a portrait-gallery of sombre magnificence, which surpasses in vivid power the more elaborate and artificial picture of the reign of Tiberius. With all his immense ability and his deep psychological insight, Tacitus is not a profound political thinker; as he approaches the times which fell within his own personal knowledge he disentangles himself more and more from the preconceptions of narrow theory, and gives his dramatic gift fuller play.

It is for this reason that the _Histories_, dealing with a period which was wholly within his own lifetime, and many of the main actors in which he knew personally and intimately, are a greater historical work than even the _Annals_. He moves with a more certain step in an ampler field. The events of the year 69, which occupy almost the whole of the extant part of the _Histories_, offer the largest and most crowded canvas ever presented to a Roman historian. And Tacitus rises fully to the amplitude of his subject. It is in these books that the material greatness of the Empire has found its largest expression. In the _Annals_ Rome is the core of the world, and the provinces stretch dimly away from it, shaken from time to time by wars or military revolts that hardly touch the great central life of the capital. Here, though the action opens indeed in the capital in that wet stormy January, the main interest is soon transferred to distant fields; the life of the Empire still converges on Rome as a centre, but no longer issues from it as from a common heart and brain. The provinces had been the spoil of Rome; Rome herself is now becoming the spoil of the provinces. The most splendid piece of narration in the _Histories,_ and one of the finest in the work of any historian, is the story of the second battle of Bedriacum, and the storm and sack of Cremona by the Moesian and Pannonian legions. This is the central thought which makes it so tragical. The little vivid touches in which Tacitus excels are used towards this purpose with extraordinary effect; as in the incident of the third legion saluting the rising sun--_ita in Suria mos est_--which marks the new and fatal character of the great provincial armies, or the casual words of the Flavian general, _The bath will soon be heated,_ which were said to have given the signal for the burning of Cremona. In these scenes the whole tragedy of the Empire rises before us. The armies of the Danube and Rhine left the frontiers defenceless while they met in the shock of battle on Italian soil, still soaking with Roman blood and littered with unburied Roman corpses; behind them the whole armed strength of the Empire--_immensa belli moles_--was gathering out of Gaul, Spain, Syria, and Hungary; and before the year was out, the Roman Capitol itself, in a trifling struggle between small bodies of the opposing forces, went up in flame at the hands of the German troops of Vitellius.

This great pageant of history is presented by Tacitus in a style which, in its sombre yet gorgeous colouring, is unique in literature. In mere grammatical mechanism it bears close affinity to the other Latin writing of the period, but in all its more intimate qualities it is peculiar to Tacitus alone; he founded his own style, and did not transmit it to any successor. The influence of Virgil over prose reaches in him its most marked degree. Direct transferences of phrase are not infrequent; and throughout, as one reads the _Histories,_ one is reminded of the _Aeneid,_ not only by particular phrases, but by a more indefinable quality permeating the style. The narrative of the siege and firing of the Capitol, to take one striking instance, is plainly from the hand of a writer saturated with the movement and language of Virgil's _Sack of Troy_. A modern historian might have quoted Virgil in a note; with Tacitus the Virgilian reminiscences are interwoven with the whole structure of his narrative. The whole of the three fine chapters will repay minute comparison; but some of the more striking resemblances are worth noting as a study in language. _Erigunt aciem_, says the historian, _usque ad primas Capitolinae arcis fores ... in tectum egressi saxis tegulisque Vitellianos obruebant ... ni revolsas undique statuas, decora maiorum, in ipso aditu obiecissent ... vis propior atque acrior ingruebat ... quam non Porsena dedita urbe neque Galli temerare potuissent ... inrumpunt Vitelliani et cuncta sanguine ferro flammisque miscent_. We seem to be present once more at that terrible night in Troy--

_Vestibulum ante ipsum primoque in limine Pyrrhus ... Evado ad summi fastigia culminis ... ... turres ac tecta domorum Culmina convellunt ... ... veterum decora alia parentum Devolvunt ... nec saxa, nec ullum Telorum interea cessat genus ... ... armorumque ingruit horror ... ... et iam per moenia clarior ignis Auditur, propiusque aestus incendia volvunt ... Quos neque Tydides, nec Larissaeus Achilles, Non anni domuere decem, non mille carinae ... Fit via vi; rumpunt aditus primosque trucidant Inmissi Danai, et late loca milite complent._

These quotations indicate strikingly enough the way in which Tacitus is steeped in the Virgilian manner and diction. The whole passage must be read continuously to realise the immense skill with which he uses it, and the tragic height it adds to the narrative.

Nor is the deep gloom of his history, though adorned with the utmost brilliance of rhetoric, lightened by any belief in Providence or any distinct hope for the future. The artificial optimism of the Stoics is alien from his whole temper; and his practical acquiescence in the existing system under the reign of Domitian only added bitterness to his inward revolt from it. The phrases of religion are merely used by him to darken the shades of his narrative; _Deum ira in rem Romanam,_ one of the most striking of them, might almost be taken as a second title for his history. On the very last page of the _Annals_ he concludes a brief notice of the ruin and exile of Cassius Asclepiodotus, whose crime was that he had not deserted an unfortunate friend, with the striking words, "Such is the even-handedness of Heaven towards good and evil conduct." Even his praises of the government of Trajan are half-hearted and incredulous; "the rare happiness of a time when men may think what they will, and say what they think," is to his mind a mere interlude, a brief lightening of the darkness before it once more descends on a world where the ambiguous power of fate or chance is the only permanent ruler, and where the gods intervene, not to protect, but only to avenge.

IV.

JUVENAL, THE YOUNGER PLINY, SUETONIUS: DECAY OF CLASSICAL LATIN.

From the name of Tacitus that of Juvenal is inseparable. The pictures drawn of the Empire by the historian and the satirist are in such striking accordance that they create a greater plausibility for the common view they hold than could be given by any single representation; and while Juvenal lends additional weight and colour to the Tacitean presentment of the imperial legend, he acquires from it in return an importance which could hardly otherwise have been sustained by his exaggerated and glaring rhetoric.

As regards the life and personality of the last great Roman satirist we are in all but total ignorance. Several lives of him exist which are confused and contradictory in detail. He was born at Aquinum, probably in the reign of Nero; an inscription on a little temple of Ceres, dedicated by him there, indicates that he had served in the army as commander of a Dalmatian cohort, and was superintendent (as one of the chief men of the town) of the civic worship paid to Vespasian after his deification. The circumstance of his banishment for offence given to an actor who was high in favour with the reigning Emperor is well authenticated; but neither its place nor its time can be fixed. It appears from the _Satires_ themselves that they were written late in life; we are informed that he reached his eightieth year, and lived into the reign of Antoninus Pius. Martial, by whom he is repeatedly mentioned, alludes to him only as a rhetorician, not as a satirist. The sixteen satires (of which the last is, perhaps, not genuine) were published at intervals under Trajan and Hadrian. They fall into two groups; the first nine, which are at once the most powerful and the least agreeable, being separated by a considerable interval of years from the others, in which a certain softening of tone and a tendency to dwell on the praise of virtue more than on the ignoble details of vice is united with a failing power that marks the approach of senility.

Juvenal is the most savage--one might almost say the most brutal--of all the Roman satirists. Lucilius, when he "scourged the town," did so in the high spirits and voluble diction of a comparatively simple age. Horace soon learned to drop the bitterness which appears in his earlier satires, and to make them the vehicle for his gentle wisdom and urbane humour. The writing of Persius was that of a student who gathered the types he satirised from books rather than from life. Juvenal brought to his task not only a wide knowledge of the world--or, at least, of the world of the capital--but a singular power of mordant phrase, and a mastery over crude and vivid effect that keeps the reader suspended between disgust and admiration. In the commonplaces of morality, though often elevated and occasionally noble, he does not show any exceptional power or insight; but his graphic realism, combined (as realism often is) with a total absence of all but the grimmest forms of humour, makes his verses cut like a knife. _Facit indignatio versum_, he truly says of his own work; with far less flexibility, he has all the remorselessness of Swift. That singular product of the last days of paganism, the epigrammatist Palladas of Alexandria, is the only ancient author who shows the same spirit. Of his earlier work the second and ninth satires, and a great part of the sixth, have a cold prurience and disgustingness of detail, that even Swift only approaches at his worst moments. Yet the sixth satire, at all events, is an undeniable masterpiece; however raw the colour, however exaggerated the drawing, his pictures of Roman life have a force that stamps them permanently on the imagination; his _Legend of Bad Women,_ as this satire might be called, has gone far to make history.

It is in the third satire that his peculiar gift of vivid painting finds its best and easiest scope. In this elaborate indictment of the life of the capital, put into the mouth of a man who is leaving it for a little sleepy provincial town, he draws a picture of the Rome he knew, its social life and its physical features, its everyday sights and sounds, that brings it before us more clearly and sharply than even the Rome of Horace or Cicero. The drip of the water from the aqueduct that passed over the gate from which the dusty squalid Appian Way stretched through its long suburb; the garret under the tiles where, just as now, the pigeons sleeked themselves in the sun and the rain drummed on the roof; the narrow crowded streets, half choked with builders' carts, ankle-deep in mud, and the pavement ringing under the heavy military boots of guardsmen; the tavern waiters trotting along with a pyramid of hot dishes on their head; the flowerpots falling from high window ledges; night, with the shuttered shops, the silence broken by some sudden street brawl, the darkness shaken by a flare of torches as some great man, wrapped in his scarlet cloak, passes along from a dinner-party with his long train of clients and slaves: these scenes live for us in Juvenal, and are perhaps the picture of ancient Rome that is most abidingly impressed on our memory. The substance of the satire is familiar to English readers from the fine copy of Johnson, whose _London_ follows it closely, and is one of the ablest and most animated modern imitations of a classical original. The same author's noble poem on the _Vanity of Human Wishes_ is a more free, but equally spirited rendering of the tenth satire, which stands at the head of the later portion of Juvenal's work. In this, and in those of the subsequent satires which do not show traces of declining power, notably the eleventh and thirteenth, the rhetoric is less gaudy and the thought rises to a nobler tone. The fine passage at the end of the tenth satire, where he points out what it is permitted mankind to pray for, and that in the thirteenth, where he paints the torments of conscience in the unpunished sinner, have something in them which combines the lofty ardour of Lucretius with the subtle psychological insight of Horace, and to readers in all ages have been, as they still remain, a powerful influence over conduct. Equally elevated in tone, and with a temperate gravity peculiar to itself, is the part of the fourteenth satire which deals with the education of the young. We seem to hear once more in it the enlightened eloquence of Quintilian; in the famous _Maxima debetur puero reverentia_ he sums up in a single memorable phrase the whole spirit of the instructor and the moralist. The allusions to childhood here and elsewhere show Juvenal on his most pleasing side; his rhetorical vices had not infected the real simplicity of his nature, or his admiration for goodness and innocence. In his power over trenchant expression he rivals Tacitus himself. Some of his phrases, like the one just quoted, have obtained a world-wide currency, and even reached the crowning honour of habitual misquotation; his _Hoc volo sic iubeo_, his _Mens Sana in corpore sano_, his _Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?_ are more familiar than all but the best-known lines of Virgil and Horace. But perhaps his most characteristic lines are rather those where his moral indignation breaks forth in a sort of splendid violence quite peculiar to himself; lines like--

_Et propter vitam vivendi perdere causas,_

or--

_Magnaque numinibus vota exaudita malignis,_

in which the haughty Roman language is still used with unimpaired weight and magnificence.

To pass from Juvenal to the other distinguished contemporary of Tacitus, the younger Pliny, is like exchanging the steaming atmosphere and gorgeous colours of a hot-house for the commonplace trimness of a suburban garden. The nephew and adopted son of his celebrated uncle, Pliny had received from his earliest years the most elaborate training which ever fell to the lot of mediocrity. His uncle's death left him at the age of seventeen already a finished pedant. The story which he tells, with obvious self-satisfaction, of how he spent the awful night of the eruption of Vesuvius in making extracts from Livy for his commonplace book, sets the whole man before us. He became a successful pleader in the courts, and passed through the usual public offices up to the consulate. At the age of fifty he was imperial legate of Bithynia: the extant official correspondence between him and the Emperor during this governorship shows him still unchanged; upright and conscientious, but irresolute, pedantic, and totally unable to think and act for himself in any unusual circumstances. The contrast between Pliny's fidgety indecision and the quiet strength and inexhaustible patience of Trajan, though scarcely what Pliny meant to bring out, is the first and last impression conveyed to us by this curious correspondence. The nine books of his private letters, though prepared, and in many cases evidently written for publication, give a varied and interesting picture of the time. Here, too, the character of the writer in its virtues and its weakness is throughout unmistakable. Pliny, the patriotic citizen,-- Pliny, the munificent patron,--Pliny, the eminent man of letters,--Pliny, the affectionate husband and humane master,--Pliny, the man of principle, is in his various phases the real subject of the whole collection. His opinions are always just and elegant; few writers can express truisms with greater fervour. The letters to Tacitus with whom he was throughout life in close intimacy, are among the most interesting and the fullest of unintentional humour. Tacitus was the elder of the two; and Pliny, "when very young"--the words are his own,--had chosen him as his model and sought to follow his fame. "There were then many writers of brilliant genius; but you," he writes to Tacitus, "so strong was the affinity of our natures, seemed to me at once the easiest to imitate and the most worthy of imitation. Now we are named together; both of us have, I may say, some name in literature, for, as I include myself, I must be moderate in my praise of you." This to the author who had already published the _Histories!_ Before so exquisite a self-revelation criticism itself is silenced.