result was produced by the diffusion of that culture in the Latinized districts of Spain. The fervid temperament of a fresh and vigorous race, which received the Latin discipline just as Latium had two or three centuries previously received the Greek discipline, revealed itself in the writings of the Senecas, Lucan, Quintilian, Martial and others, who in their own time added literary distinction to the Spanish towns from which they came. The new extraneous element introduced into Roman literature draws into greater prominence the characteristics of the last great representatives of the genuine Roman and Italian spirit—the historian Tacitus and the satirist Juvenal.
On the whole this century shows, in form, language and substance, the signs of literary decay. But it is still capable of producing men of original force; it still maintains the traditions of a happier time; it is still alive to the value of literary culture, and endeavours by minute attention to style to produce new effects. Though it was not one of the great eras in the annals of literature, yet the century which produced Martial, Juvenal and Tacitus cannot be pronounced barren in literary originality, nor that which produced Seneca and Quintilian devoid of culture and literary taste.
This fourth period is itself subdivided into three divisions: (1) from the accession of Tiberius to the death of Nero, 68—the most important part of it being the Neronian age, 54 to 68; (2) the Flavian era, from the death of Nero to the death of Domitian, 96; (3) the reigns of Nerva and Trajan and part of the reign of Hadrian.
1. For a generation after the death of Augustus no new
original literary force appeared. The later poetry of the Augustan
age had ended in trifling dilettantism, for the
continuance of which the atmosphere of the court
Period from
Tiberius to Nero.
was no longer favourable. The class by which literature
was encouraged had become both enervated and
terrorized. The most remarkable poetical product of the time is
the long-neglected astrological poem of Manilius which was
written at the beginning of Tiberius’s reign. Its vigour and
originality have had scanty justice done to them owing to the
difficulty of the subject-matter and the style, and the corruptions
which still disfigure its text. Very different has been the fate
of the Fables of Phaedrus. This slight work of a Macedonian
freedman, destitute of national significance and representative
in its morality only of the spirit of cosmopolitan individualism,
owes its vogue to its easy Latinity and popular subject-matter.
Of the prose writers C. Velleius Paterculus, the historian, and
Valerius Maximus, the collector of anecdotes, are the most
important. A. Cornelius Celsus composed a series of technical
handbooks, one of which, upon medicine, has survived. Its
purity of style and the fact that it was long a standard work
entitle it to a mention here. The traditional culture was still,
however, maintained, and the age was rich in grammarians and
rhetoricians. The new profession of the delator must have given
a stimulus to oratory. A high ideal of culture, literary as well
as practical, was realized in Germanicus, which seems to have
been transmitted to his daughter Agrippina, whose patronage of
Seneca had important results in the next generation. The reign
of Claudius was a time in which antiquarian learning, grammatical
studies, and jurisprudence were cultivated, but no
important additions were made to literature. A fresh impulse
was given to letters on the accession of Nero, and this was partly
due to the theatrical and artistic tastes of the young emperor.
Four writers of the Neronian age still possess considerable
interest,—L. Annaeus Seneca, M. Annaeus Lucanus, A. Persius
Flaccus and Petronius Arbiter. The first three represent the
spirit of their age by exhibiting the power of the Stoic philosophy
as a moral, political and religious force; the last is the most
cynical exponent of the depravity of the time. Seneca (c. 5 B.C.–A.D.
65) is less than Persius a pure Stoic, and more of a
moralist and pathological observer of man’s inner life. He makes
the commonplaces of a cosmopolitan philosophy interesting
by his abundant illustration drawn from the private and social
life of his contemporaries. He has knowledge of the world,
the suppleness of a courtier, Spanish vivacity, and the ingenium
amoenum attributed to him by Tacitus, the fruit of which is
sometimes seen in the “honeyed phrases” mentioned by
Petronius—pure aspirations combined with inconsistency of
purpose—the inconsistency of one who tries to make the best
of two worlds, the ideal inner life and the successful real life
in the atmosphere of a most corrupt court. The Pharsalia of
Lucan (39–65), with Cato as its hero, is essentially a Stoic manifesto
of the opposition. It is written with the force and fervour
of extreme youth and with the literary ambition of a race as
yet new to the discipline of intellectual culture, and is characterized
by rhetorical rather than poetical imagination. The
six short Satires of Persius (34–62) are the purest product of
Stoicism—a Stoicism that had found in a contemporary, Thrasea,
a more rational and practical hero than Cato. But no important
writer of antiquity has less literary charm than Persius. In
avoiding the literary conceits and fopperies which he satirizes
he has recourse to the most unnatural contortions of expression.
Of hardly greater length are the seven eclogues of T. Calpurnius
Siculus, written at the beginning of the reign of Nero, which
are not without grace and facility of diction. Of the works
of the time that which from a human point of view is perhaps
the most detestable in ancient literature has the most genuine
literary quality, the fragment of a prose novel—the Satyricon—of
Petronius (d. 66). It is most sincere in its representation,
least artificial in diction, most penetrating in its satire, most
just in its criticism of art and style.
2. A greater sobriety of tone was introduced both into life and literature with the accession of Vespasian. The time was, however, characterized rather by good sense and industry than by original genius. Under Vespasian Age of Domitian. C. Plinius Secundus, or Pliny the elder (compiler of the Natural History, an encyclopaedic treatise, 23–79), is the most important prose writer, and C. Valerius Flaccus Setinus Balbus, author of the Argonautica (d. c. 90), the most important among the writers of poetry. The reign of Domitian, although it silenced the more independent spirits of the time, Tacitus and Juvenal, witnessed more important contributions to Roman literature than any age since the Augustan,—among them the Institutes of Quintilian, the Punic War of Silius Italicus, the epics and the Silvae of Statius, and the Epigrams of Martial. M. Fabius Quintilianus, or Quintilian (c. 35–95), is brought forward by Juvenal as a unique instance of a thoroughly successful man of letters, of one not belonging by birth to the rich or official class, who had risen to wealth and honours through literature. He was well adapted to his time by his good sense and sobriety of judgment. His criticism is just and true rather than subtle or ingenious, and has thus stood the test of the judgment of after-times. The poem of Ti. Catius Silius Italicus (25–101) is a proof of the industry and literary ambition of members of the rich official class. Of the epic poets of the Silver Age P. Papinius Statius (c. 45–96) shows the greatest technical skill and the richest pictorial fancy in the execution of detail; but his epics have no true inspiring motive, and, although the recitation of the Thebaid could attract and charm an audience in the days of Juvenal, it really belongs to the class of poems so unsparingly condemned both by him and Martial. In the Silvae, though many of them have little root in the deeper feelings of human nature, we find occasionally more than in any poetry after the Augustan age something of the purer charm and pathos of life. But it is not in the Silvae, nor in the epics and tragedies of the time, nor in the cultivated criticism of Quintilian that the age of Domitian lives for us. It is in the Epigrams of M. Valerius Martialis or Martial (c. 41–104) that we have a true image of the average sensual frivolous life of Rome at the end of the 1st century, seen through a medium of wit and humour, but undistorted by the exaggeration which moral indignation and the love of effect add to the representation of Juvenal. Martial represents his age in his Epigrams, as Horace does his in his Satires and Odes, with more variety and incisive force in his sketches, though with much less poetic charm and serious meaning. We know the daily life, the familiar personages, the outward aspect of Rome in the age of Domitian
