And closed forever—
Then she and the women wrap the body “in linen white,” and it is borne off to be buried “in his low sepulchre.” The horrors of the death are not mentioned except for that brief speech of Hecuba’s.
Seneca’s messenger does not bring the dead body back, because as he explains in detail, the height from which the boy was thrown was so great, there was really nothing left except bits ground deep into the earth. However, he tells the mother she must be proud, for the boy endured to die with a great spirit. He walked to his place of death with steps that never faltered. When he reached the summit he looked upon the Greek host fearlessly and they all wept, Ulysses, too. Not an eye dry except the noble boy’s. Then pushing away the hands that held him he leaped of his own accord and died, dashed into pieces. “Just like his father,” says Andromache, and Hecuba ends the play with the conclusion that death alone is to be desired.
If literature is made up of the best, Seneca is unimportant for Latin literature, but the kind of drama he was the first to write has kept its popularity unimpaired down to today, and if great influence makes a great literary figure, he stands close to the first rank. In his plays the tendencies of Roman thought and feeling stand out in a form so heightened that they are unmistakable. He marks without the possibility of confusion the broad outlines of the Roman way as distinguished from the Greek way, and he is another proof that we are the inheritors not of Greece, but of Rome.
XII
Juvenal’s Rome and the Stoics
A strange page of history opens with the death of Augustus, strange and difficult to understand. In less than two centuries after he died Latin literature was practically over and the empire was beginning to fall. The Augustan age, when men of genius wrote books which nearly two thousand years of life assure us are immortal, was the prelude to a swift deterioration and the complete extinction of Roman letters. Four great and good emperors succeeded each other in the second century, giving Europe, the historians declare, a peace and prosperity she was not to see again, and yet during that century the mighty structure of the empire began to collapse. The last of the four, Marcus Aurelius, was a devoted follower of Rome’s noble philosophy, Stoicism. He raised it to the throne and through his virtues it acquired a new greatness and a fresh lustre, but with his death it ended. From then on, in the literature that has come down to us, Stoicism is never spoken of as an influence. The history of the first two centuries of the empire is a record of a great literature that ushers in its own destruction, great rulers that leave the Roman state tottering, a great spiritual movement that dies with its highest expression.
No one can doubt that the three are connected. The same causes must lie back of them all, and the final cause must be the weakening and the failure of what the whole world in the last analysis depends on: men’s energy and fortitude, their morality and vision. That was certainly taking place during these disastrous years, but the accounts given by contemporary writers show such an extraordinary divergence, it is impossible to bring what they say into a coherent whole or to see cause and effect in any clear detail.
During the two centuries when ancient Rome was dying and Latin literature almost dead, three names stand out: Tacitus the historian, a man of genius hardly surpassed by earlier writers; Juvenal the brilliant and bitter satirist; and Seneca of the sentimental plays, who has left us the best exposition there is in Latin of the Stoic doctrine. His two great successors, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, chose to express themselves in Greek and so are technically outside of Roman letters, but they are equally important with Seneca in showing what Stoicism became when it passed from Greece to Rome. The clear picture given by these three last and most famous Stoics of what resulted when a second-rate Greek philosophy had developed into a first-rate Roman religion, together with the history of Tacitus and the satires of Juvenal, are our best sources of knowledge for the momentous years that brought classical antiquity to an end.
But they are not sources consistent with each other. Juvenal’s and Tacitus’ Rome is so different from that of the Stoics, there is no way to make one city out of the two. Roman life as the historian and the satirist see it is evil without a single mitigating feature. As the Stoics show it, it is lived on loftiest heights with never a descent from them. To Juvenal, private life in Rome was given over to abominable vice; to Tacitus, public life was a mad reign of terror. In Seneca’s letters, in the discourses of Epictetus, in Marcus Aurelius’ diary, there is an atmosphere of purity, goodness, noble strength, such as pervades few books in all the literature of the world. In this last age of ancient Rome, extremes the most acute existed side by side. No reaction from the one ushered in the other: the spirit of black hopelessness for mankind as sunk irretrievably in the abyss of degradation, stood face to face with the spirit of unshakable confidence in man’s divinity.
The picture Tacitus and Juvenal drew is the one the world has accepted. It is so vividly and so powerfully done, the detail so convincing, the colors so sombre and yet so arresting, the impression it makes is overwhelming. All records of infamy seem to pale by comparison. And, at the same time, the sincerity of both writers is instantly apparent; monstrous as the deeds are they relate, the reader never doubts that they took place essentially as they are described. For truth, however, more is needed than sincerity joined to accuracy. Before either comes disinterestedness. The power to disengage oneself from one’s subject and put personal bias aside is the first requisite, and this neither the historian nor the satirist, great as they were, possessed. The tasks they set themselves, Juvenal to denounce the age he lived in, Tacitus to write the history of it, were those that need especially a balanced judgment, and both men had come too close personally to the evils of their times to be able to keep the balance. Each was unfortunate in his life, although for completely different reasons, and suffering had warped their point of view before ever they began to write.
Of Juvenal’s life nothing is directly known except that it fell during the last part of the first and the early part of the second century. He never writes about himself. Nevertheless no one who reads the satires can doubt that he was a very poor and a very proud man, wretched at living in a city where to be poor was to be perpetually affronted and treated with insolence, often by inferiors, even by slaves. Juvenal’s patron was no Maecenas. All he did for his dependents was to ask them occasionally to dinner where they were served different food from that placed before him. He feasted on lobster and asparagus, a mullet from Corsica, a lamprey from Sicily, a fattened goose’s liver, a huge capon, a boar with truffles, a peacock—“Gods! a whole boar! entire!—Go, gorged with peacock.” The hungry clients got a tiny crab, an eel caught in the sewers, a dubious kind of fungus. “Surely,” they whisper, “he will give us what is left of the hare—some scraps of the boar’s haunch.” But no. “If you can endure this,” Juvenal storms, “you deserve it. You will submit to being whipped.” And one sees the man of genius stalking home to his attic, his heart burning within him, to stay there until actual starvation drives him to the rich man’s door again.
In one passage he describes a school-master’s lot in such a way, one cannot but suspect that personal experience is behind the words. “Do you teach? Bowels of iron is what a teacher needs when each pupil stands up in turn and recites the self-same things in the self-same way. The same daily fare again and again—it’s death to the wretched master. ‘What would I not give,’ cries he, ‘that the boy’s father might listen to him as often as I do.’ And you live in a hole no blacksmith would put up with—and the lamps stink—and the boys thumb their begrimed Horace and their smoke-blackened Virgil—Be sure, O parents, to require the teacher to mould the young minds as a man moulds wax—and when the year ends reward him with a jockey’s wage.”
Such a man condemned to such a life, a genius, acutely sensitive, feeling his degradation at every turn, despising himself for accepting scraps flung him by men he despised, could hardly have failed to see life as a black and des
perate business. “If nature denies me talent,” he cries, “my indignation will write my verses for me.”
Taken by himself alone, if his authority were accepted without question, he would explain clearly, completely, and convincingly why Rome fell. His Rome is inhabited by a vile, degenerate people; it is a place where virtue has all but perished and what little is left exists only to suffer. It is a nightmare city where men must “dread poison when wine sparkles in a golden cup,” and wives “learned in the arch-poisoner’s arts carry to burial their husbands’ blackened corpses,” and every day in the year you meet a man who “has given aconite to a half-dozen relatives.” Where “no one can sleep for thinking of a money-loving daughter-in-law seduced, of brides that have lost their virtue, of adulterers not out of their ’teens”; where “every street is thronged with gloomy-faced debauchees,” and banquets celebrate unnatural and incestuous vice; where spies abound “whose gentle whisper cuts men’s throats”; where no woman is decent and no man to be trusted and all wealth dishonestly got and all position attained by abominable means: “The way to be somebody today is to dare some crime.”
This is a picture of a very different place from the one through which, a century before, Horace used to make his way to Maecenas. In a hundred years much, no doubt, may happen, and yet the change here is so great one must question if the difference lay wholly in the two Romes and not partly in the two reporters. When Horace wrote he did not have a case to make out—except, of course, on those occasions when his duty as a Roman patriot pressed upon him. But by nature he had no prepossessions which impelled him to emphasize either the bright or the dark, and he looked at human nature very tolerantly. He held up many a one to ridicule and even to scorn; he saw people very seldom as great and good and sometimes as intolerable; he was in no sense an optimist and he knew his Rome through and through. Nevertheless one never closes the book of his satires with a sense that the world of men is detestable. Horace did not find it so. His eyes were as keen to detect the good as the bad, and with all its follies and frailties he liked mankind.
This is the temper of mind which enables a man to estimate truthfully the world around him. It was not Juvenal’s. His satires leave one wondering if he ever liked anything, so black and evil as he saw it, was the world he lived in. Whenever he writes, a flood of hate and furious anger fills him and sweeps him away to include everything in his denunciations. He cannot discriminate; all everywhere are abominable and all equally abominable.
His attitude and his method may be seen excellently well in the same satire by which his trustworthiness as a reporter of his own times may be most easily judged, the famous sixth satire. It has been called his “Ballad of Bad Women,” but a juster title would be “The Way of All Women,” for all women are bad, hateful alike when they chatter Greek and insist on discussing the poets as when they poison their stepsons.
It is far too long an indictment to be given here, but the manner and matter is clear from a mere résumé of the main heads of the first half: What! You who once had your wits are taking a wife—a she-tyrant, when there is rope to be had for a noose? But, says he, he wants a son! And a virtuous woman! O doctors, come and bleed him. Think of that woman who left her husband for a gladiator—of the Empress Messalina’s vices. But there—women’s lust is the least of their sins. Here’s one who brought her husband a fortune—and bought her liberty with her dowry. She can write her love letters under his very nose. This man or that burns with love for his wife. Why? If you shake out the truth, it’s her face he loves, not her. Let three wrinkles appear and it’s ‘Be off. There’s another wife coming.’ But until then she rules the roost—and her extravagances! Still, suppose a woman could be found, charming, rich, virtuous—could anyone endure to be married to all the perfections? Any wench for my wife rather than you, O mother of the Gracchi. What man was ever so much in love with a woman as not to hate her seven hours out of twelve? Perhaps some faults are small, but they are intolerable to husbands—a woman forever showing off her Greek, for instance. Of course, if you really love your wife, you are lost beyond hope; no woman ever spares the man who loves her. She will arrange your friendships—turn your old friend from your door. ‘Crucify that slave,’ she cries. ‘Why? Give the man a hearing when his life is at stake.’ ‘Idiot—calling a slave a man. Why? It is my will.’ So she lords it—then gets tired of him and finds another husband—eight in five years. Give up all hope of peace, of course, as long as your mother-in-law lives. But in any trouble cherchez la femme. Never a case in court in which a woman was not at the bottom of the business. But what can you expect now they’ve taken to wrestling and fencing? Modesty in a woman like that? Actually panting as she goes through her exercises! Suppose you find her with a lover. Is she ashamed? Listen to the lady: ‘We agreed long ago that you were to go your way and I mine.’ Now-a-days a woman eats great oysters at midnight and drinks until the roof spins round. My old friends advise—keep your women at home, under lock and key. Yes—and who will guard the guards? So many varieties and all intolerable: the musical woman ever at an instrument; the one who talks to generals in uniform and can tell you what the Chinese are after; and, worst of all, she who will discuss Virgil and Homer. For heaven’s sake, get a wife who doesn’t understand all she reads. How I hate a woman who quotes ancient poets to me I never heard of. And all of them plaster their faces with dough and ointments. They will wash them off for company, but when do they want to look nice at home?
And so on and so on for some hundreds of lines more, which include a warning to stepsons in general that “those hot cakes are black with poison of a mother’s baking,” and end with the statement that you will meet every morning a woman who has murdered her husband—“no street but has its Clytemnestra.”
This is a fair sample of the way Juvenal looked at life. The trustworthiness of his entire picture of Rome can be estimated by the trustworthiness of this picture of the women. He hates them so intensely that he loses all sense of perspective, or, more truly, he never had any. Horrible crimes and silly habits are alike damned eternally and whatever happens is the woman’s fault. The lady divorced for three wrinkles is a villain, not a victim.
His honesty cannot be questioned. It comes through everything he writes. He is terrifically in earnest, desperately sincere. Certainly he saw all the abominations he says he did, but he was unable, both temperamentally and by reason of his misfortunes, to see anything that was not abominable. His rooted conviction was that the present was per se evil and the past good—and the farther off the better. In the last satires, written, he tells us, when that drastic teacher, old age, had taken him in hand, and when the fame of his writings must have softened life’s rigors for him, his indignation declines into a milder temper. “How can sad Poverty sing songs?” he wrote in an early satire. “Horace’s stomach was well-filled.” And certainly in considering the different accounts the two men give of their own times the explanation must have weight. Wrath against one’s own wrongs is so easily confused with wrath against the wrongs of the world.
Tacitus, Juvenal’s contemporary and a greater writer by far, one of Rome’s greatest, also suffered and also saw life as evil chiefly, almost unrelieved. He was not poor like Juvenal; he came of a rich and highly placed family, but the first part of his youth was passed during a time when the condition of the Roman state was as bad as it could well be. He was probably in his early ’teens when Nero was killed, and the atrocities of Nero’s last years must have been familiar topics of talk throughout his boyhood. He was grown to manhood when Domitian came to the throne and his best years were over when that monster died. They were years of silence for all except debased flatterers. “Ancient times,” wrote Tacitus, “saw the utmost of freedom, we of servitude. Robbed by an inquisition of the common use of speech and hearing, we should have lost our very memory with our voice, were it as much in our power to forget as to be dumb. Now at last [with Domitian’s death] our breath has come back, but genius and learning are more easi
ly extinguished than recalled. Fifteen years have been subtracted from our lives, and we are the wretched survivors not only of those taken from us, but of our own selves.” In the spirit of these sombre and moving words he writes his history.
The city he takes us into is essentially the same in its moral aspect as Juvenal’s city, but it is peopled by politicians and courtiers. Tacitus’ world is the great world of the court and the senate, the circles he himself moved in, remote from any Juvenal touched. It is the aristocratic Rome Cicero and Horace knew, but between them and Tacitus is a gulf so wide, it is astounding that they are separated by a mere century or less.
The history of the successors of Augustus, as related by Tacitus, is of men made mad by awful, limitless power. To be the absolute master of the civilized world, to be free in the complete sense of the word, able to indulge every wish the moment it entered the mind, to carry out each caprice no matter how extravagant, to have nothing stand in the way of any desire whatsoever, not a person in all the world, not law, not custom, not religion—the weight of that terrific responsibility was too much for the first men upon whom it fell. Indeed, the fact that during the following century rulers were found who were equal to it shows, better, perhaps, than anything else in Roman history, what the Roman character was capable of at its best. But during the earlier years Tacitus gives us an uninterrupted succession of abominable tyrants. “A black and shameful age,” is his summary. “If the narrative in which I am engaged was a record of wars and of men who died in the service of their country, even then the continued disasters would make the reader turn with abhorrence from so many tragic events. How much more from the present subject where we have nothing but base servility and a deluge of blood spilt by a despot in the hour of peace.” The base servility was most conspicuous in the case of members of the senate, who, Tacitus says, “tried to see which could be the most obsequious slave. The emperor [Tiberius, in this case, Augustus’ heir] was used to say as often as he went from the senate-house, “These men—how ready they are for slavery.’” They descended to incredible depths. At the end of an especially murderous outbreak on the part of Nero, in which Seneca and the poet Lucan lost their lives, when, writes Tacitus, “the city presented a scene of blood, and funerals darkened all the streets,” those who had lost their dearest “adorned the emperor’s house with laurel and printed kisses on his hand,” and a consul-elect moved that “A temple should be built to the Deified Nero, who had risen above the condition of human nature and was entitled to religious worship.”
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