Change and Decline: Roman Literature in the Early Empire

By Gordon Williams

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1978.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Apr 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520336872

Gordon Williams

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Volume Forty-five

SATHER CLASSICAL LECTURES

CHANGE AND DECLINE

CHANGE AND DECLINE

ROMAN LITERATURE IN THE

EARLY EMPIRE by GORDON WILLIAMS

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley · Los Angeles ♦ London

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS BERKELEY AND LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS, LTD. LONDON, ENGLAND

COPYRIGHT © 1978 BY

THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

ISBN O-520-03333-7

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 76-24598 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

123456789

Contents 1

Contents 1

Preface

Introduction

Contemporary Analyses of Decline

1. The elder Seneca

2. Velleius Paterculus

3. Petronius

4. The younger Seneca

5. The elder Pliny

6. Longinus

7. The Dialogus de oratoribus of Tacitus

8. Conclusion

II Ovid: the Poet and Politics

1. Ovid’s isolation

2. Literature and politics

3. Ovid’s earlier poetry and Augustus

4. Ovid’s patron

5. The Ars Amatoria and August us

72 Ovid: The poet and politics

6. Fasti and Metamorphoses

7. The letters from exile

8. Ovid and the future

III The Dominance of Greek Culture

1. The period before 100 B.C.

2. From 100 B.C. to the time of Augustus

3. Greek culture in the age of Augustus

4. Cultural fusion in the early Empire

5. The poetic fascination of Greek

IV Authoritarianism and Irrationality

i. Imperial authoritarianism

2. Emperor worship as a literary theme

3. Some consequences of the terror

4. Cruelty and the exploitation of weakness

V Thought and Expression

1. imitatio and aemulatio

2. Brevity and expansiveness

3. Genre and personality

4. The cult of the episode

5. Ready-made poetic ideas

6. Rhetoric

VI Literature and Society

1. The senate and the emperor

1. Literature and the senate

3. The differing characters of the different periods

4. Factors of success

5. Factors of decline

6. Patronage

7. Public recitation

8. The archaizing movement

Select Bibliography

Index of Passages Discussed

General Index

Preface

ONE of the most pleasurably memorable experiences of my life was the delivery of the Sather Classical Lectures in April, May, and June of 1973. Everything conspired to enjoyment: the physical surroundings, the climate, the friendly hospitality of colleagues, and—by no means least—the large, faithful audience that displayed its interest by many questions. Those questions were both critically helpful and of such a kind as to show that reflections on the problems I was discussing prompted my listeners to see analogies not only in other cultures and periods, but, very emphatically, also in their own. I very greatly profited from and enjoyed all such discussions; if I have been careful to avoid analogies (even the now very popular analogy with Mannerism) that is due to lack of knowledge and confidence, not to lack of interest and stimulus.

I have taken the opportunity, in preparing the lectures for the printer, to make some changes in format; in particular, I have greatly extended the range of quotation, in the belief that most of these writers are more talked of than read. I have translated all quotations into a prose that is designed to help with understanding the Latin or Greek rather than to be read for its own sake; this I did in the hope of making the subject as accessible as possible to students of other disciplines. Footnotes have been kept to a bare minimum: they are less designed to acknowledge debts than to give the reader information. Some debts are acknowledged in the Select Bibliography; but that is inadequate for my constant indebtedness to great books, like those, for instance, of Friedlaender, Eduard Norden, Ronald Syme, A. D. Leeman, or George Kennedy. Those (and others) are works that pass into the bloodstream of anyone who studies this period. The main intention of the Select Bibliography is to make it easy to trace works mentioned briefly in the notes; but I have also added—in an admittedly random fashion—works that I am conscious helped me, in one way or another, to reach a point of view. Study of the period has been greatly helped by scholars who have published surveys of the scholarly work done in various fields; I have tried to include most of these also. However, I have only been able to notice work published later than 1972 in a very restricted and random way.

My warm thanks must go to colleagues and friends in the Classics Department at Berkeley. Especially I thank Bill Anderson, who was chairman when I was there and who constantly helped me, with unfailing kindness. Those who have spent time at Berkeley will instantly understand the warmth of my gratitude to Kendrick and Betty Pritchett for their generous hospitality and for their constant thoughtful anticipation of difficulties that strangers in Berkeley might encounter. I acknowledge, too, the skilled and experienced help which I was most generously given by Bennett Price, who was my research assistant during my stay in Berkeley. His interest in, and knowledge of, rhetorical theory were invaluable to me. I am also greatly indebted to my old friend and colleague John Simon, who helped me in many ways and not least in correcting the proofs.

New Haven G. W.

May 1976

Introduction

THE so-called Silver Age of Roman literature compels a critic’s attention, and judgements on it have been increasingly favourable of late. This is not surprising, since the tastes and standards of our own time seem to have been changing in a way that has made them coincide more and more with those implicit in much of the literature of the early Empire. But it is worrying, since it suggests a highly subjective approach to the literature of the past. Has literary history any value under such conditions? Is it even possible?

Faced with the problem of characterizing and explaining the literary culture of a period, a critic may be tempted by two extreme positions: the one is permissive, in the sense that each writer is judged on his own terms and by reference to nothing outside his own work (it is almost a case of ‘anything that is, is good’); the other is hierarchical, and clings to the ideal of objective criteria to be applied rigorously and impartially to all writers, with the aim of arranging them, like candidates in an examination, in an order of merit. From the latter point of view, the literature of the early Empire is ‘silver’ to the ‘gold’ of the previous period, and decline is obvious. To the former type of critic no qualitative judgement is possible; all writers have their own peculiar virtues, and if literary history has any function, it is to record a process of change in which the question of decline is simply irrelevant. But this latter extreme in volves abdication of responsibility and leads to critical solipsism (which has almost become a characteristic of modern critical work on the period); the former is dictatorial and ultimately tends to reduce itself to meaningless labels. For in cultural history change involves growth and decay, and it is the predominance of particular types of growth or of decay that gives a period its cultural character. Neither critical procedure will serve to analyze that character. In what follows, I have not attempted an overall, unified portrait of the age. Instead, I have asked a series of questions which require different routes of approach into the literature of the period. Consequently, each of the six lectures is, to some extent, independent, and each approaches the problem of what happened to Roman literary culture in the early Empire from a different direction.

The writers of the period themselves expressed pessimistic views of a decadent culture. From the vantage of hindsight, I think that their pessimism was justified, but I have been concerned to examine their causal explanations to see if they have anything to contribute to modern understanding of the period. In general, I find that they relied too much on outworn and conventional categories of explanation (particularly on the insidiously attractive and rhetorically useful category of moral decline). There was, however, the very important exception of Tacitus; and a large part of the first lecture is therefore devoted to a detailed analysis of the Dialogus de oratoribus. Tacitus was not prone to simple exposition of a point of view, and in this he was only doing justice to the extreme complexity of historical explanation; but this makes it very difficult for the reader to discern and order the views that Tacitus was expressing, and a work like the Dialogus is a particularly subtle web of nuance and suggestion. The results of such an analysis cannot be simply tabulated; and there is much to be said for allowing the ideas to emerge from the sheer process of dialectical engagement with the work (as if it were a poem). But a limited optimism is clear in Tacitus in favour of literature that has two characteristics. The first is negative: literature cannot be like oratory; that is, it cannot depend on the capacity to persuade an audience viva voce on vital issues of the moment. The second is that it must be related to the type of imaginative literature that maintains a close link with real events in contemporary society. The model is the outmoded dramatic work of Maternus; the unstated example is probably Tacitus’ own historiographical activity. What most strongly emerges from the Dialogus, however, is the vital nature of the link between literature and real life, a link that was missing in most of the literature of the early Empire.

Perhaps the most important new feature of the Augustan literary scene (and it is one which is implicitly represented in the Dialogus in the attractive figure of Curiatius Maternus) was the close integration of literature with society and politics, and the consequently inevitable confrontation with the personality of the emperor. This posed new and desperate problems for the writer, and these became acute in the early Empire. In the second lecture I have analyzed this increasingly tense dilemma of the literary artist in the paradigmatic figure of Ovid, who was not only a poet of enormous, even paramount, influence on the writers of the early Empire, but also one whose own career foreshadowed the perils of their situation. Essentially, all later writers up to the age of Trajan found themselves caught in Ovid’s dilemma and fell back on the solutions he had devised—though he had devised them too late to save himself. His solutions were basically three modes of escapism: into Greek mythology, into a safe antiquarianism, and into ingenious panegyric of the emperor. All involved, almost inevitably, a retreat from reality. Most succeeding writers chose one, or a combination, of these modes.

In the third lecture I examine the problem of the relationship between Greek and Roman culture. As I see it, Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit is true in a sense that Horace probably did not intend: Greek culture came, during the early Empire, to dominate Roman culture and to induce a paralyzing sense of inferiority in Roman writers—to such an extent that they ended by actually preferring Greek as the language of literary com position. My view is that this increasing dominance of Greek culture was a powerful—and largely unrecognized—factor in Roman literary decline. But it was just one factor among many.

The fourth lecture is concerned to analyze a peculiar phenomenon in the literature of the period which was manifested in a range of ways: from failure of intellectual nerve and a consequent reliance on various forms of irrationality on the one hand to a widespread obsession with the macabre and the sensational on the other. The common feature in all of these related manifestations was a readiness in writers to favour emotion and appeals to the emotions over reason and rationality. I have tried to analyze various ways in which the intellectual strength that characterized writers of the Augustan age collapsed under new strains imposed by the imperial system no less than under that itch for novelty which itself grew up in response to social and political changes. Here cause and effect are particularly difficult to separate.

In the fifth lecture I have attempted an analysis of the more directly stylistic changes that distinguish the literature of the early Empire from that of the Augustan age; and in doing this I have tried to relate such changes to general changes in what writers regarded as, or assumed to be, the function of literature. It is my view that the changed conception of the function of literature was bound, in the end, to be self-defeating and to lead to frustration, and even to hysteria, in the effort to satisfy the demands (often self-imposed) which increased at each new literary attempt.

The approach of the sixth lecture is to pose the general question of the ways in which literature fulfilled a social function in the period. It becomes clear in the course of this analysis that the period was not homogeneous, and that at least three periods, each with different characteristics, can be distinguished. But, by asking social questions about the literature, it has been possible, to some extent, to draw in points of view derived from the earlier lectures. This I have tried to do; but it must be said that any attempt at a tabulation of results would be facile and false.

Each of the approaches, while to some extent enmeshed with all the others, opens up a point of view that needs to be considered in its own terms and that resists easy assimilation to the others— and that is a large part of the difficulty (and the fascination) of this type of literary enquiry. In pursuing it, I have come increasingly to admire and understand the methods, and even the evasions (as some critics would see them), of Tacitus in his Dialogus de oratoribus.

Still, in the end, values need to be asserted explicitly. A work may be made to seem perfectly adequate, even meritorious, if one sympathetically takes into account the intentions of the author, the literary conditions of the time, the demands that were made on him, and so on. But the more these factors are required to appreciate the work, the surer is the decline from an age when writers either ignored these factors or adapted them to suit themselves. Yet values are not divinely revealed and immutable: they change. In my view, however, the changes in values in the period of the early Empire were largely imposed by factors extraneous to literature. Writers adapted themselves and their values not only to fear, but also to the desire to impress, to a sense of the superiority of Greeks no less than to that of great Roman predecessors, to irrationality and sensationalism, and to a wistful romantic escapism. Writers were certainly subjected to all the controls of terror, but it was not just for that reason that they showed more interest in confronting audiences than issues. Some made adaptations with success; but, in general, the proportion of decline involved in the adjustment of values steadily increased until the sense of belonging to a living tradition was completely lost, and Roman writers, vainly imitating Greek predecessors, groped back into the most remote past to find, at any price, some shred of novelty. That is not just change: that is decline.

Contemporary

Analyses

of Decline

THERE is a powerful unanimity among Roman writers of the early Empire: most of them (including some of the greatest Roman writers) express the feeling that they live in a period of cultural decadence.1 Theories of decline have a masochistic charm at most periods, but there are two special reasons —beyond the unanimity of their feelings—for taking these Roman writers seriously. The first lies in the curious fact that these diagnoses of decline began to be expressed very soon after the age of Augustus, which was a period of great cultural revival and optimism. It is surprising to find that confidence collapsing so soon. The second reason is that Roman literature did in fact run out into the sands of the so-called archaizing movement in the second century A.D.—this represented a relapse into admiration and imitation of the archaic period of Roman literature. Its beginnings can already be detected in the first century A.D., and it is a particularly peculiar phenomenon in that, unlike its contemporary Greek counterpart, it did not represent a return to the great age of Roman literature but to its rough and primitive origins. There was, therefore, a complete collapse of the ideals and confidence that marked the great Classical age of Roman literature in the late Republic and the age of Augustus.

The most important document of this decline (though it is no document at all, but a highly artistic and difficult work) is the Dialogus de oratoribus of Tacitus. But first it is worthwhile considering the views of some other writers. Broadly speaking, there were three explanations of decline: there was the explanation in terms of morals; there was the explanation in terms of political change; and there was the explanation that posited a fundamental law of growth followed by inevitable decline. These explanations were differently formulated and treated by different writers.

1 A good general introduction to the topic is H. Caplan (1944). A useful collection of texts in translation with helpful comment is D. A. Russell and M. Winterbottom (1972).

1. The elder Seneca

Lucius Annaeus Seneca had been born in Corduba in Spain about 55 B.C.; he died between A.D. 37 and 41. In his old age he dedicated a remarkable book, entitled Oratorum sententiae di- visiones colores,1 to his three sons, Annaeus Novatus (later governor of Achaea), L. Annaeus Seneca (the philosopher), and M. Annaeus Mela (the father of Lucan). In it he recalls verbatim speeches which he had heard up to forty and fifty years previously (his memory used to be good, he says, and ‘if two thousand names were read out I could repeat them in the exact order’).2 The tone of the book is nostalgic: ‘I must confess that it is a pleasure for me to return to my old studies and look back to better years, and, when the three of you complain that you were not able yourselves to hear the famous men of that period, for me to clear away the destruction done by time’.3 He goes on then to say:⁴ ‘Everything that Roman oratory has to match the arro gant Greeks (or even outdo them) reached its peak in Cicero’s day:⁵ all the geniuses who have brought distinction to our subject were born then. Since that time things have got worse daily. Perhaps this is due to the luxury of our age (nothing is so fatal to talent as luxury). Perhaps, as this great art became less highly valued, competitiveness was transferred to sordid business that brings great prestige and profit. Perhaps it is just Fate, whose grim law is universal: things that reach the top sink back again to the bottom even faster than they rose’.6 At this point the old man loses his temper and berates the younger generation for a page or so with sentiments like these:7 ‘Waving the hair, thinning the tone of the voice till it is as caressing as a woman’s, competing in bodily softness with women, beautifying themselves with indecent cosmetics. … Which of your contemporaries is enough of a man? Bom feeble and spineless, they stay like that all through their lives, destructive of others’ chastity, careless of their own… ’. He goes on to recall Cato’s definition of the orator as vir bonus dicendi peritus, ‘a man of high moral character who is a skilful speaker’, and therefore to deny the title of ‘orator’ to any of the present generation.

Clearly Seneca the elder has, without explicitly saying so, opted for the moral explanation of decline. He puts it in the form that character has been undermined by the luxury-loving habits of the age. It was a common theme in Augustan writers that greed for wealth had caused the downfall of the last generation of the Republic and that Rome’s hope of salvation lay in restraint and reform. But there had been no question of cultural decline, and, while the tone of these writers had indeed held warning, it had been optimistic. Yet here is Seneca the elder condemning the generation that had grown up in the last years of Augustus as decadent in character and deficient in literary culture. His view is of a steady decline beginning from Cicero’s death in 43 B.C., continuing through the age of Augustus, and reaching a nadir in the time of Tiberius.

He tacitly rejects two other explanations: the idea of a universal law of growth and decline, and a political explanation, which is only given a vague outline.⁸ Seneca says sive, cum pre· tium pulcherrimae rei cecidisset, translatum est omne certamen ad turpia multo honore quaestuque vigentia; literally "perhaps, after the value of the most beautiful thing had dropped, all effort was transferred to disgraceful things that yet are highly esteemed and profitable’. By ‘the most beautiful thing’ he means oratory; and when he speaks of its value dropping he must refer to the fact that the value of oratory fell when control of the state passed into the hands of one man (Augustus, and then Tiberius), with the result that occasions on which a gift for oratory could be publicly exercised and could really influence decisions were greatly restricted. Cicero’s whole career had been founded on his oratory. That could no longer happen. Both the vagueness of the language, however, and the brevity of treatment suggest that he attached as little importance to this explanation as to the concept of a universal law. It was, of course, a delicate subject, especially under Tiberius, and the very fact of his mentioning it at all suggests that bolder spirits had freely speculated that among disadvantages of the principate was an inevitable decline in oratory.⁹

1 References will be made to the Loeb edition by Michael Winterbottom (>974)·

2 controversies i pr. 2.

3 4. contr, 1 pr, 1,

4 contr, 1 pr 6-7,

5 This idea was already expressed by Cicero in Brutus 254

6 This idea too had already been expressed by Cicero, e.g., Tusc. Disp. 2.5·

7 contr. 1 pr. 8-10.

8 For a similar point (also vaguely expressed) in Longinus, see below

9 Seneca reports (suas. 7. 1) that Quintus Haterius (cos. 5 B.C.) advised Cicero in a suasoria: ‘My advice, Cicero, would have been to rate your life highly if freedom is to hold its place in the state, if eloquence is to hold its place in a free state [literally: in freedom]…*. But this was in a private and highly artificial exercise. Haterius was no bold spirit, as appears from Tacitus Annals 1. 13.

2. Velleius Paterculus

This ex-army officer turned historian was not among the bolder spirits. Adulation of Tiberius and of adherents such as Sejanus mark his work,¹ a historical compendium called His·

9.

toriae Romanae. Its style exhibits many of the faults condemned by the elder Seneca, and signs of hurried composition and triviality are everywhere. The work must have been published before the fall of Sejanus in A.D. 31 and belongs therefore more or less to the same period as that of the elder Seneca. Velleius had the novel idea of putting digressions on literary topics into his history: two deal with the early period of Roman literature (2. 9) and with the Ciceronian and Augustan periods (2. 36). He mentions Ovid, but the quality of his literary judgement is fairly indicated by his regarding Virgil and Rabirius as on the same literary level. In a third digression (1. 16-17) he ponders on the problem of decline. He has, it appears, constantly worried over the problem of why great geniuses come crowded together in brief periods. He decides that there is an inevitable law of decline in operation such that for each artistic form a brief period of greatness can be identified, associated with a galaxy of talent, and this is then followed by a period of decline. Velleius recognizes that he himself is living in a period of decline. This formulation of the problem, unlike that of the elder Seneca, who was thinking only of oratory, is applied by Velleius to all types of literature and indeed art—in fact to culture in general.

1 See especially Syme (1939) 488-89.

3. Petronius

Several passages in the novel of Petronius deal with the topic of cultural decline.1 At the opening of the fragmentary text (1-4), Encolpius, the narrator, is found wildly declaiming against deciaimers whose subject matter, he says, is sheer fantasy and whose style is windy, turgid, and loquacious. Agamemnon, a rhetor, agrees with him and makes more explicit the explanation underlying Encolpius’ wild language: it is that morals have declined—parents are to blame and educationists. A more interesting passage on the question of cultural decline in general occurs later in the novel, where Encolpius questions a very odd old poet, Eumolpus, about ‘the decadence of the age’ (88):

Stimulated by this conversation, I began to draw on his greater knowledge about the age of the paintings and some of the legends which were obscure to me and at the same time to examine the cause of the present decadence when the fine arts had died out al* together and painting had not left even the smallest trace of its existence. ‘Love of money’, he replied, ‘began this revolution. For in olden times, when Virtue was still loved for her own sake, the arts all flourished and men’s greatest efforts were spent on discovering anything that might be of benefit to future ages. So you find that Democritus extracted the juice of every plant and spent his whole life on experiments to reveal the special values of rocks and plant life. Eudoxus, again, grew old on the top of the highest mountain to find out the movements of the stars and the heavens, and Chrysippus three times purged his mind with doses of hellebore just to maintain his inventive powers. But, to turn to sculptors, Lysippus died of starvation as he brooded over the lines of a single statue; and Myron, who pretty well caught the souls of men and of animals in bronze, found no one to carry on his work. We, on the other hand, are submerged in wine and women; we do not deign to understand even the arts that have been discovered, but, slandering the past, ourselves learn and teach nothing but vice. Where do you find dialectic now? Astronomy? Where is that most civilized path of philosophy? Have you ever seen anyone going into a temple and pledging an offering if only he may attain to eloquence, or drink at the fountain of philosophy? They do not even pray for sanity and good health, but, before even reaching the Capitol’s entrance, one is promising an offering if he can bury a rich relative, another if he can dig up some treasure, another if he can make a few millions and live. You find even the senate, that exemplar of the Right and the Good, promising a thousand pounds in gold to the Capitol, fixing Juppiter himself up with some cash— an example designed to prevent anyone feeling shame at lusting for money. So do not be surprised at the extinction of the art of painting, when not only men but all the Gods too think an ingot of gold more beautiful than anything that Apelles or Pheidias, poor crazy Greeklings, produced’.

The poet’s view is that decadence has affected science and all the arts. His explanation is a version of the moral one: decad ence is due to greed for money and to excesses in wine and women. Since views expressed by characters in Petronius’ novel often seem to be parodies of contemporary ideas,2 it may be assumed that both the feeling of living in a decadent age and the moral explanation of its causation were hackneyed contemporary topics. In fact, the close coincidence of both passages in Petronius with the next couple of views to be examined underpins the case for detecting well-directed satire in Petronius.

1 For his identification and date, see chap. VI, sect. 4.

2 On this, see Index s.v. ‘Petronius*.

4. The younger Seneca

The date of Petronius’ novel is uncertain,1 but the likeliest view is that it was written about A.D. 60. He was forced to commit suicide in A.D. 66 as a result of the same conspiracy against Nero that forced the suicide of the younger Seneca. The topic of decadence was of great interest to Seneca, and he treated it in many passages and from several points of view. In his Natural Questions, written about A.D. 60, he laments the decline of scientific research in terms somewhat similar to those of the elder Pliny, but in a much more plangently moralizing tone.2 But his most important statement on the subject comes in the Moral Epistles, addressed to Lucilius and written probably in the years A.D. 62 to 65. In letter 114 he poses the problem in this form (1):

Quare quibusdam temporibus provenerit corrupt! generis oratio quaeris et quomodo in quaedam vitia inclinatio ingeniorum facta sit, ut aliquando inflata explicatio vigeret, aliquando infracta et in morem cantici ducta: quare alias sensus audaces et fidem egressi placuerint, alias abruptae sententiae et suspiciosae, in quibus plus intellegendum esset quam audiendum: quare aliqua aetas fuerit quae translationis iure uteretur inverecunde?

You question why at certain periods there has appeared a corrupt literary style and how certain vices have become fashionable with great writers—so that at one time expansive bombast has been the custom, at another an emasculated, song-like style. Why at one time have extravagantly incredible ideas found favour, at another abrupt allusive sayings in which one had to understand more than one heard? Why was there a time when there was a quite immoderate use of metaphor?

The very lengthy answer to this problem, supposed to have been posed by Lucilius, takes the form of a sermon on the text tails hominibus fuit oratio qualis vita ‘as a man’s life is, so is his style’—originally a Greek proverb. Seneca starts with an attack on Maecenas for effeminacy, for sloppiness in clothing, and for immorality in general. He uses very much the same terms that his father had used to attack the new generation.3 He then goes on very ingeniously to use the same terms that he had used to criticize Maecenas’ morals to criticize various quotations from Maecenas’ writings so that an almost exact correspondence is asserted linguistically between life and literary style.

From Maecenas, Seneca generalizes the analysis to the whole age (11):

itaque ubicumque videris orationem corruptam placere, ibi mores quoque a recto descivisse non erit dubium. quomodo con- viviorum luxuria, quomodo vestium aegrae civitatis indicia sunt, sic orationis licentia, si modo frequens est, ostendit animos quoque, a quibus verba exeunt, procidisse.

Accordingly wherever you find a corrupt literary style in favour, there you can be certain that morals too have deviated from the right path. Luxury in banqueting and in clothing is evidence of a sick society; so too a licentious literary style, once it is widespread, is evidence that the minds by which it is produced are decadent.

Seneca implies that there is a causal relationship between moral decline and corrupt writing such that moral decline is prior, but there is no real explanation either of the nature of the relationship or of the basic cause of decline in the first place —other than that felicitas produces luxuria and so the itch for novelty (9-10). What is particularly important about Seneca’s formulation is that he defines decadence in general terms of taste and style, so that his explanation, unlike his father’s, is not confined to oratory, but can be extended to cover all forms of literary activity. Only by implication does he attribute decadence to his own age, but then he was writing under Nero with whom this would have been a particularly delicate subject.4 Somewhat earlier (he died at the age of 28 in A.D. 62) Persius had given, in his first satire, a similar account of literary decadence in general, using the same basic connexion between morals and style; but Persius had quite explicitly identified the contemporary literary scene as decadent, and, like Petronius (in chapters 1 to 4), he had put much of the blame on the audience and on parents. But the two points of view are close enough to indicate dependence on a common pool of ideas. Seneca, following his father’s lead, worked out die idea of a relationship between morals and style in an original way by tracing detailed correspondences between style and moral behaviour—the fantastic lengths to which he goes illustrate some of the faults that he himself condemns and that are related to a basic technique, characteristic of the first century A.D., in the literary handling of an idea.5

1 See chap. VI, sect. 4.

2 Especially Nat. Quaest. 7. 31-32. The passage is close to Pliny in some respects, but it is much closer to what is parodied by Petronius (88). It is a much less sophisticated formulation than that in the Epistles to Lucilius and uses many of the details used by his father; in fact the passage is about halfway between Seneca the elder and Epistle 114.

3 See sect. 1 above.

4 For the literary renaissance under Nero, see Index s.v. ‘Nero*.

5 See chap. V, sect. 2.

5. The elder Pliny

The Natural History of the elder Pliny was dedicated to the emperor Titus in A.D. 77; he died two years later, taking too close a scientific interest in the great eruption of Vesuvius in A.D. 79.¹ In book 14, about to discourse on fruit-bearing trees, he pauses to complain (2-6) dertook to explain agricultural doctrine to farmers and many followed him in this task. This has increased my work for me, for I must now research not only into subsequent inventions, but also into the discoveries of the ancients since destruction of the records has been decreed by the laziness of men. One can find no causes for this failing other than those that are common to the whole world. The truth is that there are new ways now: men’s minds are totally occupied with other things, and only the arts of avarice are practised. Previously when races had to confine their empires within their own boundaries, and for that reason their talents, there was no scope for making fortunes, and they had to concentrate on things of the spirit; thus endless kings had homage paid to them in artistic tributes, and this was the wealth they put on display, thinking that thus they were assured of immortality. So life’s rewards and achievements were plentiful. To later generations the openness of the world and the abundance of physical possessions spelt ruin. Once you had senators being selected on income, judges being appointed on income, magistrates and army commanders finding honour in nothing so much as in income: once childlessness began to have the greatest influence and power, and willhunting was the richest source of profit, and the only pleasures were in possessions—then the real values of life were lost, and the arts called liberal from their greatest distinction (i.e., liberty) fell into its opposite, and slavery began to be the sole means of progress. This slavery took different forms of devotion and centred on different objects: what was common to all was the aim—the hope of gain. Everywhere you found even outstanding men preferring to practise foreign vices rather than native virtues. So, by heaven, pleasure began to live, life began to die.

Pliny is deadly serious, and it is this high moral seriousness that is parodied by Petronius. Pliny’s formulation of the moral explanation is one of higher generality than any yet. He sees it as a general disease over the whole world (this broadness of view derives from the unifying effect of the Roman empire): the widespread rise in the standard of living has not only made men lazy but has caused them to devote what energies they have to the avaricious acquisition of wealth. Wealth is now the index of goodness in every sphere, and men are slaves to it. This formulation goes further than any other yet in another way: it explains moral decline in terms of politics and economics, and supplies the causal chain of explanation that was missing in the younger Seneca.

1 Pliny Letters 6. 16.

6. Longinus

The author of On Sublimity, probably the best work of literary criticism that has come from the ancient world, labours under two disadvantages: he is generally called pseudo-Longinus, and the date of his book is unknown. Interest here will concentrate on the somewhat unexpected final chapter (44) of the work,1 in which Longinus discusses the causes of literary decline in the form of a dialogue between a philosopher and himself. The formulation of this discussion is of importance, and it would be very helpful in deciding the relationship between Longinus and Roman writers who dealt with this problem to have a reasonably firm date for the work. Unfortunately the evidence to decide the question does not exist. ‘The received opinion of today is that we have to do with a book of the 1st century A.D.’2 Some critics have dated the work to the time of Augustus and have identified the philosopher who appears in the last chapter with Philo of Alexandria (c. 30 B.C.-A.D. 45).3 Others have dated the