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HUMANITIES INSTITUTE

ROMAN LITERATURE Course description Roman Literature explores the major forms of ancient Roman literature: epic, history, drama, satire, lyric, philosophy. About the Professor. This course was developed by Frederic Will, Ph.D., School of Advanced Studies, University of Phoenix. Professor Will has written extensively on Greco-Roman cultures.

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Course Contents Week 1 Introduction UNIT 1 EPIC Week 2 Lucretius (98 B.C.-55 B.C.) Week 3 Virgil (70 B.C.-19 B.C.) UNIT 2 HISTORY Week 4 Livy (59 B.C.-17 A.D.) Week 5 Tacitus (56 A.D.-117 A.D.) UNIT 3 DRAMA Week 6 Plautus (254 B.C.-184 B.C.) Week 7 Seneca (4 B.C.-65 A.D.) UNIT 4 SATIRE Week 8 Petronius (?—65 A.D.) Week 9 Juvenal (55 A.D.--138 A.D.) UNIT 5 LYRIC Week 10 Catullus (84 B.C.—54 B.C.) Week 11 Horace (65 B.C. – 8 B.C.) Week 12 Propertius (60 B.C.—after 16 B.C.) Week 13 Ovid (43 B.C.—18 A.D.) UNIT 6 PHILOSOPHY Week 14 Marcus Aurelius (121 A.D.—180 A.D) . Week 15 Aurelius Augustinus (Saint Augustine) (354 A.D.--430 A.D.) CONCLUSION Week 16 A Review of Roman literature

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ASSIGNMENTS Unit Essays Unit 1: EPIC What Stoic and Epicurean ideas did Lucretius import into his epic, De Rerum Natura? Are those ideas incorporated in such a way as to constitute parts of a flowing narrative? Does Lucretius manage to avoid didacticism? Does Virgil avoid didacticism? His theme—or do you agree?—is arguably praise of Rome and Augustus. (There is much dispute about this.) If that is his theme, does he build it into a ‘good story’ while at the same time making his point? Unit 2: HISTORY Does Livy, as historian, at all carry out the same project as Virgil, in the Aeneid? Is Livy, too, concerned to ‘glorify’ the origins of his culture? Tacitus declares that he writes his history ‘objectively.’ Do you think he is correct about that? If not, what do you see as his ‘point of view’? Does he in any way write like what we today call an investigative reporter? Unit 3: DRAMA The comedies of Plautus are closely related to popular humor and daily entertainments. What larger points—views of life and mankind—do you see Plautus developing through his drama? How does Seneca’s drama reflect the tenor of the age it is written in? Is there melodrama and intensity in both the drama and the age? How do that age, and that melodrama, fit with the Stoic emphasis on calm in Seneca’s own world-view? Unit 4: SATIRE How do Petronius and Juvenal differ as satirists? Do they share a single opinion about the life of Rome, or are their targets totally different from each other? UNIT 5 LYRIC Catullus devotes much of his lyric power to love and sex. Is he ‘romantically’ in love with Lesbia? How does his ‘love’ change through the body of his poems? What kind of ‘love’ does he feel toward his departed brother? Unit 6 PHILOSOPHY What seem to you the deep points of difference between the writing of Saint Augustine, and that of the earlier Roman writers we have considered here? Does Marcus Aurelius seem to you a forebear of Saint Augustine, or are Marcus’ affiliations almost entirely to Stoic and Epicurean traditions?

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Final Essay How do you view the importance of actual chronological history to the literary creations of the Romans? Is their history important to many of these writers, as they go about their creation? Explain. In what literary genres do you think the Romans excelled? Where, in your opinion, were they relatively limited in their contribution to world culture? What (in your opinion) underlies the powerful satire in Roman literature? Has it something to do with the character of Roman life and society as they were experienced by Juvenal, Petronius, and—for instance—the brilliant epigrammatist, Martial? Livy and Virgil give different accounts of the origins of Roman culture. Or can you see their differing accounts fitting together with one another? What was the importance, for these two epic minded writers, of retelling the founding stories of Rome? How do you view the Roman theatrical tradition, from what we have read? Have Plautus (and Terence) anything in common with Seneca? Why—this might cost you some research time—do you think drama was the central literary experience for the Greeks, while for the Romans it was (arguably) a minor genre?

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Introduction Purpose of present syllabus. The present syllabus aims to provide a glimpse of some of the great landmarks of the ancient Roman literary achievement. The arrangement of study here is by genre of imagination: epic, history, satire, drama, lyric, philosophy. Each of these genres was the product of a distinctive kind of imagination. By adopting this perspective we single out determining facets of the Roman literary mind: the vastness of speculative and conceptual sweep (epic); the power of analytic self-awareness (philosophy); the ability to project human interactions onto the stage (comic drama); the inclusion of feeling in self-referential language (poetry); the organization of group memory (history); the power to reflect on the whole human condition (epic). We will make appropriate efforts, as we go along, to embed these generic discussions in their chronological setting, but we will not primarily be concerned with ‘filling in the time line.’ Roman and Greek literatures. In this course we are going to read and discuss selections in translation from fifteen different Ancient Roman authors. The life and work spans of those writers will be considerable, from the early third century B.C. (Plautus) to the early fifth century A.D. (Saint Augustine); 700 years, during which although some kinds of continuity persisted in the Roman world, political, social, and religious developments intruded to shape and change the world of the writer. In this blend of continuity with rapid change the development of Roman literature resembles that of the Greek literature which is the backdrop and generative source of the Roman literary achievement. We will try to highlight the salient changes in the longitudinal development of Roman literature, while at the same time looking at the collateral developments making themselves felt, in that literature, at any one time. Let me explain this latter point. Vertical and lateral literary histories. There is, in Roman (as in any) literature, a chronological development which can be read from beginning to end, and which sweeps up in its progress many and varied forms of expression—from delicate poetry to robust histories. There is also another kind of history, which we might call generic, which tracks the developments of literary expression through the different expressive forms which diversify that literary history. You will see from the table of course contents, above, that we are taking that second path, the history of literature in terms of the different forms or genres in which that literature unfolds. By the conclusion of our survey we should have focused on several expressive powers available to the makers of Ancient Roman literature. Readings and assignments. The readings for each week of the course will be in one of the most current of the many available English translations of the great texts noted below. (The readings will be listed with each week’s assignment. In many cases online versions will be available and acceptable.) The expectation, for student input, is suggested by the writing assignments:

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Unit Essays: 1,000-word essays at the end of each unit Final Essay: 5,000-word essay at the end of the course, which covers all units You should consult these topic suggestions at the outset of the class. The instructor will welcome imaginative ways to address the written assignments. A few collateral readings will be indicated along with the readings at the end of each week. No extensive bibliography is provided. This course promotes direct access to originals, for better or worse, endorsing Nietzsche’s notion that millions of words about the classics must not be permitted to obscure the classics. Reading For this first week we will read two books: Ancient Rome: a New History (New York, 2009), by David Potter, and Literature in the Roman World (Oxford, 2001) by Oliver Taplin. Both of these books will orient us, in our reading of the weekly texts, toward the larger network of developments in which those texts take place. This is the place to mention three valuable reference books, for the wider contexts of Roman literature: A History of Latin Literature, by Moses Hadas (New York, l952); A Literary History of Rome from the Origins to the Close of the Golden Age (London, 2013) and A Literary History of Rome in the Silver Age (London, l960), both of which latter books are by J. Wight Duff.

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Lucretius (98-55 B.C.) Roman epic and Greek culture. You will quickly see, from Potter’s Roman History, that Roman culture is from the start deeply indebted to Greek culture, and Lucretius’ epic, De Rerum Natura; On the Nature of Things, is just the proof we need. To write a long philosophical poem in Latin was to follow in the footsteps of early Greek literature, in which at least two major writers—Hesiod (in the Theogony, 8th century B.C.) and Parmenides (in On Nature, early fifth century B.C.)—developed their views of the world in formal epic poetry. (In so doing those Greek writers emulated the tradition, which goes far back into Middle Eastern and Indian philosophical and religious expression—Enuma Elish in Babylon, the Vedas in India—of consigning cosmological thought to poetry. To which we might add that the primal form of serious expression, throughout early cultures, is poetry, whilc prose is generally later to develop.) Epicurus. Not only is Greek poetry, but also Greek thought, the founding energy for Lucretius. The third century B.C. Greek philosopher, Epicurus, was the master thinker behind Lucretius’ view of the world. (Of him Lucretius writes: O glory of the Greeks, the first to raise The shining light out of tremendous dark Illumining the blessings of our life, You are the one I follow… As the founder of the Epicurean school, Epicurus exercised great influence on the thought of Hellenistic Greeks and of many Romans. His dominant principle was atomism; a belief that the world is composed of atoms collocated by chance, and responsible, in their infinitely subtle interweavings, for the entirety of existence, from the infinitesimal to the cosmically vast. Lucretius develops many riffs off of this basic perception. The best known of these concern his headlong assault on the fear of death, which he sees as the supreme disturber of mortal peace and happiness. Lucretius and the fear of death. Like Epicurus, and indeed like many Hellenistic thinkers, Lucretius thought the fear of death sufficient to destroy the pleasure of life, and overgrown with all kinds of misconceptions, principally the ignorant belief that we will have sensation, and be aware of our ‘dead condition’ after death. Lucretius takes special pains to argue away this ignorance, and to address also the subtler objections of those who see the world differently from him. One of those objections was that, even though we may be composed of atoms, and scatter to the winds at death, we may reassemble by accident and once again, at some time in the future, be conscious wholes again, essentially the persons we were before. To this Lucretius responds that even were this almost incalculably chance event to occur, we would be totally without memory, a new collocation entirely. So thorough does he believe the dispersal of the person at death, and the absurdity of fearing death as though it had any connection with our conscious presence?

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Venus and the swerve. The vast poem in which Lucretius embedded this argument—and which is carried out in splendid dactylic hexameters, just as did Homer in the past and as Virgil will soon do in his Aeneid—scrutinizes all that is, starting with the human person, with his/her weaknesses, hopes, and dreams, and then moves on to encase the human in its worldly and finally cosmic setting. After an initial exordium to the goddess of love, Venus, who brings all organic things to growth and life, Lucretius takes his reader farther out into the world of human senses and perceptions, then into the inorganic stages of development of the world around us, with a magnificent reach into the nature of human societies and their growth, and onward out into the cosmos so noble but so devoid of all those theistic god-presences on which we typically rely for comfort in our human world. At the most, we might say, the universe provides a staging ground for our human efforts at society, and in particular for our free will—which might seem to be precluded by the compulsive and random movement of atoms in the void. This free will element, which for Lucretius is the foundation of the peculiar dignity of the human, enters through a clinamen, or swerving, of the atoms in the void, a swerving which introduces chance into random necessity. Love and spring. Even the power of love, as we see in the opening of the poem (below) is to be understood in the terms of Epicurean physics, rather, say, than in the terms of Romance. The following passage may seem to boil down to a splendid praise of spring, and to the regeneration of nature through desire, and yet as the reader pursues the passage—reminiscent, say, of Chaucer’s wonderful prologue to spring, or Wordsworth’s loving poems about spring and daffodils—we find ourselves drifting powerfully into a universe where random movements of atoms, not any benevolence in things, is the driver. Mother of Rome, delight of Gods and men, Dear Venus that beneath the gliding stars Makest to teem the many-voyaged main And fruitful lands--for all of living things Through thee alone are evermore conceived, Through thee are risen to visit the great sun-- Before thee, Goddess, and thy coming on, Flee stormy wind and massy cloud away, For thee the daedal Earth bears scented flowers, For thee waters of the unvexed deep Smile, and the hollows of the serene sky Glow with diffused radiance for thee! For soon as comes the springtime face of day, And procreant gales blow from the West unbarred, First fowls of air, smit to the heart by thee, Foretoken thy approach, O thou Divine, And leap the wild herds round the happy fields \ Or swim the bounding torrents…

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Reading Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, translated by R.E. Latham (Harmondsworth, Penguin, l987). Godwin, John, Lucretius (Bristol, 2004.) Discussion Why do you suppose Lucretius wrote his epic vision in poetry? Would we write such a vision In poetry or prose today? What is the peculiar power of poetry, in rising to the height of such an argument about reality? How do you interpret Lucretius’ claim, that he composed De Rerum Natura in order to help free human beings from the fear of death? Does the argument he develops seem calculated to achieve that freeing? Are you afraid of death? What do you do about it? Does Lucretius integrate the idea of the swerve into his argument, or does it seem to be an artificial ingredient, introduced in order to preserve the possibility of free will?

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Virgil (70 B.C.-19 B.C.) The Roman historical setting. Thanks to the nature of his epic, Lucretius did not clamor for attention to the historical setting in which he was writing. Yet well he might have done. The first half of the first century B.C. was a time in which Rome, and the Italian cities which surrounded it, and which were coming increasingly under Roman domination, was being thrown into the whirlpool of intense political and cultural change. The early formative centuries—4th and 3rd B.C.—had seen the firming up of the independent free spirited senate of the still largely agricultural Roman society, the value formative struggles of a hardy people who had taken charge of the Italian peninsula, and who were building the muscle soon to be required for intense military effort, wars against the Gauls in the North, and then the three exhausting Punic Wars, fought against the Carthaginians from 264 B.C.-146 B.C. In the century following the conclusion of these Wars, in which Rome was ‘victorious’ and consolidated its control of Italia, tumultuous developments forced the older rural Rome into legislative reform—here and throughout the civic arena the brothers Gracchi were the powerful innovators—and generated private political forces with their own armies, like Marius (157-86 B.C.) and Sulla (138-78 B.C.) , which guaranteed a state of pressure cooker intensity to the whole peninsula. We are close to the period during which Julius Caesar and Pompey formed their first alliance—60 B.C. was the year—and with that we are stepping onto the rolling sidewalk of history along which the Roman Republic was careening toward Empire. No wonder, then, that we feel Lucretius’s epic might well have clamored for attention to its historical embedding. And indeed, if we look closely enough, at Lucretius’ stress on removing the fear of death, or on freeing mankind from superstition and anthropomorphic gods, we can see that in his work he was building himself a shelter from the chaos of his time. The Aeneid. The same can be said, more obviously, for the work of Virgil in creating his Aeneid, which was written between 29 B.C. and 19 B.C., and which thus coincided with the accession to imperial power of Augustus Caesar (Emperor from 27 B.C. to 14 A.D.). Not only was Virgil a close friend of the man who was to become the greatest power figure of his age, but Virgil witnessed/heard about up close those tumultuous events—Julius Caesar’s seizure of power and assassination in 44 B.C., the death of Pompey, the battle between Augustus and Antony/Cleopatra, which ended with the Battle of Actium in 34 B.C.—which were the transition of Rome into a world power, and one whose influence is profoundly culture shaping to our day. While Lucretius sought for personal quiet and speculative freedom, as a haven from the chaos of his world, Virgil took another path, letting his epic imagination expand onto a new vision of the new world Augustus was ushering in. Virgil and Homer. Virgil’s move was one of ultimate ambition, to write of world changing developments by following not only the dactylic hexameter epic tradition, inherited from the Greeks, but to create his epic directly out of the impulses of Homer’s two epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, which were probably composed around the beginning of the first millennium B.C., and which had served as a virtual

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Bible for the Greeks—underwriting their mythical imaginations, their sense of group pride, and providing an exemplar for aesthetic taste. The Iliad and the Odyssey. Put very roughly, the first half of Virgil’s epic follows the thematic developments of Homer’ Odyssey while the second half of the Aeneid—the ‘poem about Aeneas’—follows the thematic of the Iliad. This reversal of thematics, by which Virgil handles the sequence of events of Homer’s poems in reverse order, brings distinct attention to the second part of the Aeneid, which concerns the founding of the city of Rome by the hero, Aeneas, who has fled with his family and his family gods from the destruction of the citadel of Troy by the Greeks. While many moderns find the second half of the Aeneid less gripping than the first, in which Aeneas recounts the tales of his wandering after leaving Troy, and Virgil narrates Aeneas’ moving love affair with the Carthaginian Queen, Dido, there seems little doubt that for Virgil the true meaning of the epic lies in the second half of the Aeneid, in which Aeneas heroically defeats the regional Italic king, Turnus, and conquers Italy for Rome, the site of a new millennial world change. To call this monumental poem praise of Virgil’s friend Augustus, would be a huge understatement. The epic goes through and beyond flattery, to a level where the grandeur of the human enterprise is put out for viewing. Invocation. In the fashion of the classical epic, Virgil opens with an invocation to the Muse, in which he sums up his whole theme. It will be up to the reader to consider the daring of emulation, and firmness of purpose, which Virgil demonstrates in opening as follows: I sing of arms and the man, he who, exiled by fate, first came from the coast of Troy to Italy, and to Lavinian shores – hurled about endlessly by land and sea, by the will of the gods, by cruel Juno’s remorseless anger, long suffering also in war, until he founded a city and brought his gods to Latium: from that the Latin people came, the lords of Alba Longa, the walls of noble Rome. . Reading Virgil, Aeneid, translated by Robert Fitzgerald (New York, 1990.) Putnam, Michael, The Poetry of the Aeneid: Four Studies in Imaginative Unity and Design (Cambridge, l965). Ross, David O., Virgil’s Aeneid: A Reader’s Guide (Oxford, 2007.) Discussion It is customary to view the Aeneid as a panegyric of Augustus. Do you see another way of viewing the epic? What about the extreme brutality that

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marks the Romans’ accession to power on the Italic peninsula? Is that brutality being justified in the poem? Aeneas himself is called pius, in the Aeneid; a term suggesting devout, reliable, mature. Do you find Aeneas an engaging literary personality? Is he the stuff of a good novel? How do you read the ‘love affair’ with Dido? Is there a true love exchange, or is their relationship entirely between blocks of national/ethnic groups of power? Is it hard for Aeneas to leave Dido? What Stoic and Epicurean ideas did Lucretius import into his epic, De Rerum Natura? Are those ideas incorporated in such a way as to constitute parts of a flowing narrative? Does Lucretius manage to avoid didacticism? Does Virgil avoid didacticism? His theme—or do you agree?—is arguably praise of Rome and Augustus. (There is much dispute about this.) If that is his theme, does he build it into a ‘good story’ while at the same time making his point?

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Livy (59 B.C.-17 A.D.) Virgil and Livy. As we are working through Roman literature on the basis of types of imagination, we should note how ‘history’ differs from the historical epic of Virgil, which might at first glance seem also to be ‘history.’ In fact the Aeneid and the works of Livy might also seem to intersect as works of poetry, for we will find, on reading our Livy, that in his story telling mode of history writing he differs greatly from what an age like ours would consider ‘scientific writing of history.’ Apart from the formal matter of prosody itself—Livy in prose, Virgil in highly self conscious dactyls, which breathe a line by line dialogue with Homer’s own verses—Virgil may be said to thread his material with vision, a purposiveness centered on getting the founder of a new Rome to his destination, while Livy narrates historical material that is itself anecdotal and digressive, though like Virgil Livy too has an ultimate interest in praising aspects of his own culture, and promoting attention to them. When we come to Tacitus, the following week, we will find a more empirical historian than Livy, and have little trouble in distinguishing the historical from the epic view point. With Livy we need to make our distinctions carefully, between the two genres with which we are opening this syllabus. Livy and the world of Augustus. Like Lucretius and Virgil, though a generation or two later, Livy was born into the turbulent world we have already met, out of which Augustus, formerly Octavian, was to emerge the victor and the first Emperor; the world in which Caesar, Antony, and Pompey had gone down to defeat before the power of historical change. Livy’s popularity. Where Livy was born was relevant to his world view. He was born and raised in the north of Italy, near the present city of Padua, a region traditionally conservative, and accustomed to praise of Old Roman Values. To that viewpoint Livy remained faithful throughout his life, though by the 30’s B.C., when he moved semi-permanently to Rome, he was exposed to the intense new world forming around him, and was in fact a close friend, and distant relative, of the Emperor to be, Augustus. Though Livy’s one surviving work, a History of Rome From the Founding of the City (753 B.C.), became a popular text, and indeed a touchstone for his compatriots, as they formulated their own history for themselves, Livy remained in favor with the new imperial culture, the tendencies of which unmistakably moved away from the ‘old simplicity’ and ‘staunch rural values’ which Livy admired in the early centuries of his culture. Annals and Traditional History. The history Livy constructs was by his time part of ancient oral tradition, as well as of written histories by predecessors whose works are now lost. His history opens with the founding of the city of Rome by Aeneas—the same narrative as Virgil’s—and is left to

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us in three main sections, devoted, respectively, to the origins of Roman culture,various consulships in the sixth century B.C., and then incidents in the political history of Livy’s own time. We might say, today, that the way Livy’s historical mind works—a mixture of annals, which report the administrative leaders of the Republic for each year, with critical narration of traditional material—is cunning in its human perceptions but naive in its ‘notion of historical method.’ An example may help us nail down this point. Roman origin tales. Origin tales are central to Livy’s History, which begins credently with the tale of Aeneas’ founding, the same launch point Virgil employed. There follows a sequence of generations, several hundred years, in which peace dominates, the new nation flourishes; but then, as with the struggle of Cain and Abel, conflict comes in, needed to generate the birth pangs of the new world. The struggle pits two brothers, both candidates for the kingship, and turns violent when the younger flouts the rule of seniority, and sets off a train of consequences—it’s an intricate read, here—which eventuates in the rape of a Vestal Virgin, whose twin offspring barely escape the homicidal plans of the wronged king. At this point myth, rather than putative history, enters to divinize the lineages in store for Rome. The twin infants, as we all know, find themselves on the river bank ready to be washed away, when a she-wolf appears, on her way for a drink of the river, gives teat to the babes, saves their lives, and readies them, Romulus and Remus, for a role as the true legislative founders of the Roman State. The voice of Livy. What is the voice of Livy, as he tells this historical tale? In many ways he delights in the telling, and gratefully plugs these hallowed events into the ongoing tale. But Livy is, remember, living more than five centuries after the origin tale, and in a culture of world sophistication, in the milieu of speakers and creators like Virgil, Cicero, and Catullus. Unable even slightly to wink at us, as he maintains the old tradition, he feels obliged to comment as follows, on the reaction of the Emperor’s flock-master, to the advent of the twins in his hut: his (the flock master’s) name was Faustulus. He took the children to his hut and gave them to his wife Larentia to bring up. Some writers think that Larentia, from her unchaste life, had got the nickname of "She-wolf" amongst the shepherds, and that this was the origin of the marvellous story. As an historian, we have said, Livy accepts a mission not wholly different from that of the poet. But he does so with a clear acknowledgement, that he knows how to undercut his tale when he needs to. Reading Livy, The Early History of Rome, Books I-IV, translated by Ogilvie (London, Penguin, 2002.) Read entire text.

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Dorey, T.A., Livy (London, 1971.) Discussion To what extent are Livy and Virgil similar, in their efforts to reconstruct the origins of Rome through literature? Do they both ‘glorify’ those origins? What do you think of the ‘historical value’ of founding tales—Horace at the Bridge, Romulus and Remus—such as Livy uses to construct the early parts of his history? Does Livy write as a friend of the new Imperial world, or as an old Roman democrat, fundamentally opposed to the new?

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Tacitus (58 A.D.-117 A.D.) Livy and Tacitus. From our reading in Livy we note that the Romans were intensely interested in their own past, which, like all peoples, they manipulated in part for the sake of establishing their national image. This very motive, as we have seen, may parallel that of Virgil, in writing the Aeneid—for the Romans of the late first century B.C. were preoccupied with using the past to shape the present and gain power over the future. When we come to the historian Tacitus, however, our account must be different. Tacitus observes human affairs dispassionately, without projecting them into a future where they would acquire their meaning. Tacitus and the imperial world. Tacitus was born well into the imperial period of Rome—Augustus Caesar died in l7 A.D.—and in his most famous works, The Histories and The Annals he writes directly of his own time, specifically of the Imperial reigns of Tiberius (42 B.C.-37 A.D.), Claudius (10 B.C.-54 A.D.), and Nero (37 A.D.-68 A.D.). His own life brought him into contact with the major players on the political/imperial scene. Born in the provinces—probably in Gallia Narbonensis—Tacitus soon entered political life in Rome, where throughout his career life he was brilliantly active as a Senator/orator, a sought after lawyer in the increasingly litigious atmosphere of imperial Rome, and a provincial governor in the East, where he gained experience and great distinction. In other words, when it came to the dense historical material of the present, Tacitus had much personal awareness to bring to bear. While he proudly commented that he wrote his histories sine ira et studio, without anger or zeal, they nonetheless bear the marks of the hot fire of political action. There is no mistaking, in those works, a hatred of tyranny, and a surgical scorn for the kinds of voluptuous infighting which marked the struggles, among the successors of Augustus, to occupy the center of power in Rome. Tacitus’ style as historian. The unusual mixture of personal involvement with terse and observant style, a style both intense and withdrawn, forces our attention onto the way Tacitus went about informing himself, as an historian. (We have noted that Livy turned to earlier and anecdotal Roman historians, in constructing his history.) The answer is that Tacitus is both working from his personal experience, and from a consultation of contemporary documents, to which he devotes analytical attention (sine ira et studio.) Among his written sources were: the Acta, the official records, of the actions of the Roman senate; copies of official speeches; copies of personal letters to which he had access; the acta diurnala populi romani, the official news of daily developments in Rome. The Annals. In The Annals Tacitus plunges into the complexities of high level political struggle—for stakes richly involving love and power—the material of a sitcom like Dallas, but played out on the stage of Imperial rule.

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His presentation of the Death of Agrippina, the mother of Nero, shows his historical hand. The years following the death of Augustus presented a bewildering tangle of personal interrelations, among ambitious, lustful, perverse, greedy competitors for imperial power, or for the voluminous perks that spilled on all sides of the royal throne. The attempts of Agrippina, to raise her son Nero to imperial status, involve her in complex machinations which, because she is trying to manipulate a nest of vipers like Nero, Sejanus, and Britannicus, leads to her brutal and brilliantly described death. Cluvius relates that Agrippina in her eagerness to retain her influence went so far that more than once at midday, when Nero, even at that hour, was flushed with wine and feasting, she presented herself attractively attired to her half intoxicated son and offered him her person, and that when kinsfolk observed wanton kisses and caresses, portending infamy, it was Seneca who sought a female's aid against a woman's fascinations, and hurried in Acte, the freed-girl, who alarmed at her own peril and at Nero's disgrace, told him that the incest was notorious, as his mother boasted of it, and that the soldiers would never endure the rule of an impious sovereign. Fabius Rusticus tells us that it was not Agrippina, but Nero, who lusted for the crime, and that it was frustrated by the adroitness of that same freed-girl. Cluvius's account, however, is also that of all other authors, and popular belief inclines to it, whether it was that Agrippina really conceived such a monstrous wickedness in her heart, or perhaps because the thought of a strange passion seemed comparatively credible in a woman, who in her girlish years had allowed herself to be seduced by Lepidus in the hope of winning power, had stooped with a like ambition to the lust of Pallas, and had trained herself for every infamy by her marriage with her uncle. The mind of Tacitus. A close look at the present passage lets the reader into the labyrinthine complexity of Tacitus’ historical analysis. (You will want to read this historian with a fine toothed comb.) There are two interpretations of Agrippina’s behavior toward her son: one of which lays the stress on the mother’s lust, the other on that of the son. (The preference given to the second is backed up by other authorities, and given credence by further biographical evidence from Agrippina’s youth.) Tacitus manages, in this passage, to generate subtle psychology-- it was Seneca who sought a female's aid against a woman's fascinations-- and to introduce the subordinate motivations of two smaller players in the paragraph’s drama, Acte and Seneca. This rich crowding of perspectives is characteristic of the never simplistic texture of Tacitus’ history. Reading Tacitus, The Annals of Imperial Rome, translated by William Brodribb (Digireads.com, 2005.)

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Martin, Ronald, Tacitus (Berkeley, 1981). Discussion What is Tacitus’ personal attitude toward the intrigues and machinations at the imperial court? How does he view the death of Agrippina? How does Tacitus differ from Livy as an historian? Which of the two seems more to fit the ‘modern model’ of the critical historian? What evidence do you see, in Tacitus’ work, of his career as a politician and orator? Does Livy, as historian, at all carry out the same project as Virgil, in the Aeneid? Is Livy, too, concerned to ‘glorify’ the origins of his culture? Tacitus declares that he writes his history ‘objectively.’ Do you think he is correct about that? If not, what do you see as his ‘point of view’? Does he in any way write like what we today call an investigative reporter?

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Plautus (254 B.C.-184 B.C.) Differences among genres. We have looked at examples of epic and historical imagination in Roman literature, and found that in certain cases the two imaginations overlap, as between Virgil and Livy, both of whom are driven to sanctify the origins of the Roman State. When it comes to Roman drama, however, we tap another vein of literary expression, that of popular amusement. Origins of Roman drama. Early Roman drama acquired its impulse from the influence of the Greek dramatist Menander (341 B.C.-290 B.C.), who was the perfect expression of the urbane creations of the Hellenistic period; if it is true that the Greeks, in being conquered by the Romans in the second century B.C., at the same time conquered the Romans—through superior creativity—then the earliest expression of that reverse conquest might be the comedies of Plautus, which take off from the Greek. It should be added, though, that there is fragmentary evidence that Roman comedy existed long before Plautus—perhaps several centuries earlier—though all we have left is references to plays; also that the ludic/often raw/often phallic quality of the comedy of Plautus belongs to a long tradition of Roman popular culture, of jongleurs in the streets, nude public dancing, flute concerts in public. Roman drama as popular entertainment. Be that as it may, we inherit in Plautus a fully developed comic tradition which played an important role in the public entertainment of the Romans. This role unfolded regularly at the ludi, religious festivals honoring Jupiter, and held annually in September, starting in 366 B.C. At those ludi, where chariot races, boxing, and dancing were performed, plays of Plautus were regular centerpieces. Of that centrality it should be noted that these plays were performed without a theater until 55 B.C., so that the face to face quality of actors and spectators contributed directness. Plautus himself, born in the countryside (Umbria), and raised to a modest background, got his earliest job as a stage carpenter, which was not only the bridge to his exposure to Greek dramatic works, but his baptism of fire in the nitty gritty of stage presentation. Plautus’ opus. Of Plautus’ fifty two plays there remain twenty, all comedies, and all more or less cut from the same cloth; the same stock of characters; the same plot developments; the same license—a lot of joking about the gods, which aroused criticism in many quarters, and squared off against the ‘religious devotional’ purpose of the ludi; the same referential background of cultural anxiety—the 2nd Punic War (218-201 B.C.) sustained a high anxiety level in Rome. The stockpile of familiar character types—remarkably similar to those bursting forth in Italian commedia del’arte, already in the Renaissance heralding developments in seventeenth European theater—shares with the sharp dialogue the joyful energy of these plays. Stock characters in Plautus. A mild example of the repartee in these plays can be found in the brief excerpt below, from Plautus’ Captivi. (That mini excerpt will remind us already of the texture of those Shakespeare comedies, like Measure for Measure, which dazzle us still with their wordplay.) The stock characters who enact the

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formulae of these plays are numerous: the adulescens, a love struck young man; the senex, an old man, perhaps the father of the adulescens, often a competitor with his son for the love of a younger woman; the leno, or whorermaster, often in charge of a young lovely who is the interest of the adulescens; the miles gloriosus, or braggardly soldier, who totally lacks self-awareness; the parasitus, who sponges off the leading characters; and so on into minor characters like the whoremistress or the virgin, who is typically without personality, except beauty, and is the love object of the major male population. With this kind of cast—whose behavior, costuming, language are pretty consistent from one play to the next—Plautus constructs witty variations on themes of misunderstanding, happy endings for love, and cranky obstructionism—which will arouse the emotions we expect today from a good old sitcom. It will only add to the effect if we complete the description: each play has virtually the same setting, as well as characters; that setting is an urban street with an exit out onto a thoroughfare through which characters enter and depart; the trigger to action is usually an act of eavesdropping by which a generative rumor starts things going. SCENE II. Enter, from his house, HEGIO and a SLAVE.

HEG. Now, give attention you, if you please. Those two captives whom I purchased yesterday of the Quaestors out of the spoil, put upon them chains of light weight; take off those greater ones with which they are bound. Permit them to walk, if they wish, out of doors, or if indoors, but so that they are watched with the greatest care. A captive at liberty is like a bird that's wild; if opportunity is once given for escaping, 'tis enough; after that, you can never catch him. SLAVE. Doubtless we all are free men more willingly than we live the life of slaves. HEG. You, indeed, don't seem to think so. SLAVE. If I have nothing to give, should you like me to give myself to flight? HEG. If you do so give yourself, I shall at once have something to be giving to you. SLAVE. I'll make myself just like the wild bird you were telling of… History and the epic are hereby left behind as private acts, consummating private visions, while the dramatic imagination, in Rome as elsewhere, is eminently public, and in comedy especially absolutely requires giving public pleasure. Reading Plautus: The Comedies, Volume I, ed. Slavitt (Baltimore, l995). Sharrock, Alison, Reading Roman Comedy: Poetics and Playfulness in Plautus and Terence (Cambridge, 2009.)

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Discussion Why do Plautus’ plays thrive on stock characters? Would it have something to do with his historical moment? In what ways do stock characters serve as useful vehicles of comic art? Does Plautine comedy feature slapstick and burlesque elements? What kind of audience do you imagine for Plautus’s plays? What kind of use did Shakespeare make, of Plautus’ plays? Does the comedy of errors theme seem to you to be of lasting value as a theatrical recourse?

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Seneca (4 B.C.-65 A.D.) Seneca and Plautus. At the conclusion of this week’s syllabus you will find a translation of a passage from Seneca’s Oedipus—exact date unknown—which may at first glance make you doubt whether we are still dealing with Ancient Roman drama. We are. Though the passage yanks its original into strong contemporary diction it is nonetheless a vigorous and honest account of lines from the Roman dramatist and philosopher Seneca. We could hardly be farther in spirit from the comic world of Plautus, which we read in the previous week. We have moved two hundred years into the future, have entered the first half-century of Imperial Roman rule, and have changed genre from robust stock character drama to closet drama playing off against a sophisticated model, the Oedipus of the Greek dramatist Sophocles, written in the mid fifth century B.C. Oedipus the King. Sophocles’ play, as you know, concerns a proud, doomed, and irascible Ruler of Thebes, whose land has gone waste as a result—that is the rumor in the kingdom—of unholy actions somewhere in the community. The drive of the tightly compacted play is to find out the cause of the plague on the land, to track it to its individual source—the King himself—and to mete out a dreadful purging punishment to the King. The play is a perfect geometry of beginning, middle, end. Seneca’s Oedipus, on the other hand, is baroque, digressive, highly rhetorical. Whereas the king’s mother, Jocasta, is in Sophocles a cog in the wheels of destiny, who limits her commentaries, on the dreadful fate of her son, to various ways of deploring the savage ironies of life, in Seneca’s play, as you see above, Jocasta deplores, in the fate of her son, the whole rotten fallenness of the human condition, and does so in extravagantly bitter and melodramatic terms. In the hands of her brilliant British adapter, Ted Hughes, her speech acquires a texture of its own, which brings to the front of the play the hyperbolic intensity of a character who, in Sophocles, is simply a stage in the development of the plot. The tenor of Seneca’s work. The tenor of Seneca’s work as a dramatist is epitomized in this example: intense, hyperbolic, rhetorical, and, as we refreshingly begin to think, valuable in its own right and deeply expressive of its own age. (Think of the example of the murder of Agrippina, in Tacitus; think of the fierce personal struggles, and emotional depths, of the main figures in the fight for the succession to Augustus, at just the time of Seneca’s life: doesn’t the speech of Iocasta belong to the rhetorical modes of the time?) Seneca and Nero. The dramatist behind Oedipus, and eight other tragedies on ancient Greek mythical themes, played a prominent role in the first half of the first century A.D. From Cordoba in Spain, Seneca went as a young man to Rome, to study Rhetoric and Philosophy—in the latter field especially to deepen his understanding of the principles of Stoicism, to which he adhered throughout his life. That Greek philosophy, with its emphasis on control of the passions, but also on the power of the emotions, lay behind the philosophical developments of Seneca’s thought. His view was that the misuse of the passions is a sure key to downfall, and that man needs

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calm and willed self-discipline in order to lead a satisfactory life. This larger perspective, which is deeply embedded in the values of Seneca’s literary work, was hard won, for in ‘real life’ Seneca himself was exposed to the baroque energies of a cultural moment which would not spare the individual. As tutor and advisor to the Emperor Nero—again recall the treatment of Nero in Tacitus—Seneca tried to convince his boss of the importance of self-control, and for a time, but only for a time, succeeded. Seneca as moralist. In the year 41 A.D. Seneca was accused of complicity in a plot to kill the Emperor, and was sent into exile. It was while in exile on the island of Corsica that Seneca turned inward and began to write seriously, leaving us in the end a remarkably rich collage of texts—one hundred twenty four letters—many of them highly refined philosophical reflection, nine tragedies, and twelve substantial philosophical essays, in which he discusses, with great finesse, issues bearing on desire, anger, and the potentials for global oneness in humanity. It is cruelly ironic that this brilliantly outreaching creator was in the end forced to commit suicide, a dreadful one as the historian Tacitus again tells us, in which repeated vein cuttings and ultimately suffocation by steam were required to do the deed. when I carried my sons I carried them for death I carried them for the Throne I carried them for final disaster when I carried my First son Did I know what was coming did I know What ropes of blood were twisting together what Bloody footprints Were hurrying together in my body Did I know what past and unfinished reckonings Were getting flesh again inside me Did I think that the debts of the past Were settled before I conceived I knew the thing in my womb was going to have to Pay for the whole past I knew the future was waiting for him like a greedy God a maneater in a cave Was going to ask for everything happiness strength And finally life As if no other man existed I carried him for this For pain and for fear For hard sharp metal for the cruelty of other men And his own cruelty I carried him for disease For rottenness and dropping to pieces I carried him for death bones dust I knew

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Reading Seneca, Three Tragedies (Trojan Women; Medea; Phaedra), translated and with an introduction by Frederick Ahl (Ithaca, 1986). Pratt, Norman, Seneca’s Drama (Chapel Hill, 1983). Discussion How does Seneca’s Oedipus differ from the Oedipus of Sophocles, in Oedipus The King? What do you see as the connection between Seneca’s ethical theory, his Stoicism, and what you are coming to know as his dramatic practice? Seneca’s drama was performed in private readings, rather than on public stages. Can you see why that was an appropriate way to showplace Seneca’s work? The comedies of Plautus are closely related to popular humor and daily entertainments. What larger points—views of life and mankind—do you see Plautus developing through his drama? How does Seneca’s drama reflect the tenor of the age it is written in? Is there melodrama and intensity in both the drama and the age? How do that age, and that melodrama, fit with the Stoic emphasis on calm in Seneca’s own world-view?

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Petronius History of Roman Literature. Though our emphasis is falling on the development of genres, of or diverse forms of imagination, in Roman literature, we are inevitably constructing an image of the chronological flow of Roman literature and culture. It will have become clear, from what we have been reading to date, that the half century following the death of Augustus was fraught with social conflicts and vivid human passions. Tacitus and Seneca have made the point for us, and we will soon have lyric poetry, like that of Catullus, to amplify the point from another direction. Our attention this week will fall on a brilliant satirist of just the period we are considering. Life of Petronius. Little is known of the life of Petronius. Like Seneca, who had only contempt for the hedonistic life-style of the first century A.D., Petronius too was implicated in the goings on of imperial society ‘at the highest level.’ He himself came, apparently, of a wealthy family, and moved naturally into the intense life of metropolitan Rome. We may know him best for a raucous pre novel, the Satyricon, but must realize that he also did responsible work as a citizen, serving as Governor of the Province of Bithynia in 62 A.D., and after that as Consul, or First Magistrate, of Rome. These posts, however, led ‘yet higher’ in to the inner circle of Nero’s court—remember the machinations of Nero, in the account given by Tacitus—and from there to appointment as Nero’s arbiter elegantiae, or court judge of fashion. That this post was official and recognized is a measure of the high-life level that dominated the Imperial Court. Petronius’ fate. We do know that, after having achieved significant influence over the Emperor Petronius inevitably found himself the object of jealousy. Tigellinus, commander of Nero’s public guard, accused Petronius—wrongly, as we know—of conspiring to kill the Emperor, whereupon Petronius was arrested, in 65 A.D. Before the Emperor had returned from campaign, Petronius, who was to the max a hedonist and not a masochist, proceeded to commit suicide. The way he did so was as distinctive as the way he lived his life. He cut his veins, which bled only feebly, so that he temporarily postponed his death, while chatting with his friends, listening to pop music, and reclining. Only after it had become evident that he needed help, in dispatching himself, did his companions essentially suffocate him with steam from his bath. (Remember Seneca?) Ancient satire. The Satyricon, the only text Petronius left us, has been a smash hit with readers from the beginning. On the surface, the explanation might seem to be the over the top luxury and eroticism climate of the text—the anal, the urinary, and the phallic competing for top role. The fact is, though, that the Satyricon is an exceptionally innovative form of that satirical genre which is occasionally a byproduct of conspicuously over-sophisticated societies. (We will turn, next week, to another brilliant Roman satirist, Juvenal, whose chief target, like that of Petronius, was the decadence of first century A. D. Rome. We will be asking ourselves, as we advance, why Greek society generated almost no satire—except for aspects of Aristophanes’

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comic drama—while Roman was rich in the genre.) The narrator of the tale, Encolpius, recounts events as do the narrators of early English novels, like Fielding’s Tom Jones, where the tale teller is also immersed in the events being told about. Formally, therefore, Petronius’ tale makes moves toward the novel, in its earliest western form. And there is much more to say about those moves, for the world Encolpius tells us about smacks of that ‘real world’ so forcefully brought to the literary text by the novels of Renaissance Europe—cf. Gil Blas or Don Quixote—in which literary convention often steps aside to let the rawness of ordinary life assert itself. The Satyricon. It might well be added that the narrator of the Satyricon travels dark paths of irony, which complement his broadly satirical view of the society he portrays. The passage below both caricatures the indifference of the ‘elite’ to the trashed people of their society, and leaves us gasping, as we absorb the bitter subtext of the narrator’s words. We had had enough of these novelties and started to enter the dining-room when a slave, detailed to this duty, cried out, "Right foot first." Naturally, we were afraid that some of us might break some rule of conduct and cross the threshold the wrong way; nevertheless, we started out, stepping off together with the right foot, when all of a sudden, a slave who had been stripped, threw himself at our feet, and commenced begging us to save him from punishment, as it was no serious offense for which he was in jeopardy; the steward's clothing had been stolen from him in the baths, and the whole value could scarcely amount to ten sesterces. So we drew back our right feet and intervened with the steward, who was counting gold pieces in the hall, begging him to remit the slave's punishment. Putting a haughty face on the matter, "It's not the loss I mind so much," he said, "as it is the carelessness of this worthless rascal. He lost my dinner clothes, given me on my birthday they were, by a certain client, Tyrian purple too, but it had been washed once already. But what does it amount to? I make you a present of the scoundrel!" Reading Petronius, Satyricon, trans. Arrowsmith (New York, 1983). Courtney, Edward, A Companion to Petronius (Oxford, 2001.) Sullivan, J.P., The Satyricon of Petronius: A Literary Study (London, l968). Discussion The life Petronius pillories is that of the Roman nouveaux riches of Nero’s moment. What does Petronius think of the ‘little guy’? What is his attitude toward the slaves in Trimalchio’s house?

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Does the Satyricon read like a novel to you? Do you see a plot developing, and a ‘growth’ in the central characters? Do you leave Petronius’ satire with the sense that he has scourged evil, or does he himself seem to delight in the fallen world he describes.

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Juvenal (55 A. D. -138 A.D.) Life of Juvenal. As with many of the authors we have met in Ancient Rome, little is known about Juvenal. Born in the second half of the first century A.D., he lives out his life in a settling, and gradually less turbulent, phase of the imperial experience. He was born in Aquinum, scion of a wealthy freedman, studied in Rome as a pupil of the eminent orator Quintilian, and left us sixteen substantial dactylic hexameter satires. Satire. Satire, said the Roman orator Quintilian, is the one genre the Romans can claim as their own. He had something there. We have remarked that for the Greeks—with the exception of the comic dramatic genius Aristophanes, a mime writer like Herondas, and perhaps in places a Hellenistic playwright like Menander—tragedy, riotous comedy, epic all came naturally, but, perhaps for some distinctive twist to Greek culture, the satire-breeding urban culture was not present. To the Romans, on the other hand, satire came naturally. Already in the second century B.C. Roman society had been suitably mocked by Lucilius, a model for Juvenal, while Horace (65 B.C.-8 B.C.), a close contemporary of Livy, had provided a more recent model, as had Petronius’ Stoic contemporary, Persius (34 A.D.-62 A.D.). Types of Satire. It should be said from the start that these Roman satirists are all different from one another, and that the genre in which they write is looser than it might seem. Lucilius, for instance, was a dark Stoic, imbued with severe moral precepts, and brought a heavy hammer to bear on the foibles of his society, while Horace, his contemporary, was far mellower, though at all times a criticus, and made sure that his ire was foremost art. The cases of Petronius and Juvenal are even harder to distinguish. There is no doubt that, plain on the face of their texts, both writers deal with life as it is, the common people, even the bas fonds and gross levels of social existence. This latter proclivity is especially marked in Petronius, who, while shocked at the wretched treatment of such menials as slaves and domestic servants, is in his camp, Fellini mode totally intrigued by the outrageous goings on in ‘high society.’ (It is as though Trimalcho is a slightly concealed portrait of Nero, though even Trimalchio is not worse than good naturedly degenerate; concerned, after all, with the will in which he is going to decree the freedom of all his slaves.) Juvenal, by contrast with Petronius, is much less the caricaturist. While Petronius carries out a proto novel narrative in prose, Juvenal adopts the dactylic hexameter verse form, which links him to the grand tradition in poetry—though in a manner ever so slightly tongue in cheek. Juvenal is more the sociologist/satirist, with a sharp eye, as in Satire Three, for the self-inflicted plight of his beloved Rome. How does he handle this critique of his city? The voice of satire, and society. He talks his satire to a friend who is moving out of the city to a removed and quiet spot along the coast south of Rome. And why is the friend making this move? He is sick of Rome. Juvenal embraces the chance to criticize the metropolis, in characterizing his friend’s view. Rome is overcrowded and

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noisy, the aristocrats are fake and pretentious, the streets are full of the seriously poor. Morals are shot and piety to family or gods is weak. He takes pleasure in detailing each of these weaknesses. He dwells, for example, on the shoddy construction of buildings, which are doomed to rapid collapse, on the bribes that are required In order to get contracts, on the sloppy indifference of the legal system. The passage below suggests the subtlety of the author’s insight into the corruption that has befallen the city. In this passage the narrator’s friend speaks, throwing up his hands before the embedded corruption of his world. In order to succeed, in the literary world, one has to kiss ass, lie about the merits of so and so’s work. One must entice others with prophecies of the impending death—of those whose wills will devolve on them. One must collude in fraudulent schemes, in order to get on the governor’s staff: What can I do at Rome? I cannot lie; if a book is bad, I cannot praise it, and beg for a copy; I am ignorant of the movements of the stars; I cannot, and will not, promise to a man his father's death; I have never examined the entrails of a frog; I must leave it to others to carry to a bride the presents and messages of a paramour. No man will get my help in robbery, and therefore no governor will take me on his staff: I am treated as a maimed and useless trunk that has lost the power of its hands. What man wins favour nowadays unless he be an accomplice--one whose soul seethes and burns with secrets that must never be disclosed? Reading Juvenal, Sixteen Satires, trans. Peter Green (New York, Penguin, 2004.) Jones, Frederick, Juvenal and the Satiric Genre (London, 2007). Discussion What seem to you the chief differences between the satire of Petronius and that of Juvenal? Are the authors pillorying the same faults and/or the same level of social behavior? What seems to you to generate the satirical spirit in the first century A.D.? Is it the decline in morals? Or is it the particularly rich target that sophisticated urban enclaves offer to the literary eye? Does Juvenal offer us a true to life picture of the problems facing the city of Rome? Or does he, in the mouths of his ‘characters,’ work for literary effect? How would you know how to answer this question?

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Catullus (84 B.C.-54 B.C.) Fine tuning the generic issue. Our rapid movement among the literary genres of ancient Rome has taken us through samples of epic, history, satire and drama. Would it be fair to say that the emphasis, throughout that sequence, is on public expression—that is on expressing the nature of society, social relations, large historical purviews? Of course this is a simplified view, and we have already fine tuned our response and qualifications in earlier weeks, but I think our generalization holds, and especially when we put the earlier texts of our course side by side with those that constitute the lyric, which we turn to this Week. How is lyric expression different from that of these other genres? Lyric and personal expression. One wants to respond that the lyric is an expression of personal feeling, as distinct from critical understanding. I think this distinction will survive our encounters with four lyric poets in the present section—though Ovid will be the hardest to ‘fit in’—for indeed Catullus, Horace (Week 11) and Propertius (Week 12) surely speak to some degree from the heart. The way Catullus does this is far from an emotional spilling of his guts, which he is much too witty/urbane/blasé to indulge—although in one of his most moving poems, #101, he unfolds a moving elegy to his departed brother, in which there is nothing but metrical savvy to stand between him and raw emotion. Who was this Catullus, famed especially for the passion and occasional viciousness of his love poetry? How does he fit into the historical framework of our course? Life and work of Catullus. Catullus was born in 84 B.C., and lived for only some thirty years. He was born and raised in Gaul, in a prosperous equestrian family—the equestrian class was the second level of the aristocracy. (His father was sufficiently prominent that he had twice hosted Julius Caesar, during Caesar’s campaigns in the West.) Catullus was sent to Rome for his young adult years, and there, as he began making waves with his red hot poetry, he was lucky enough to spend time with Cicero, Caesar, and Pompey, all of whom appear in his poems; he was, in other words, very much a part of the high stakes socio/political world of the first century B.C., although for Catullus and his own friends poetry was always far more important than politics. That Catullus was not only admired but liked in high circles follows from an episode involving Julius Caesar himself. Catullus and Lesbia. Catullus insulted Caesar in a poem—Catullus was a master at pretty gross invective—but though Caesar was piqued, and agreed that Catullus had a bite, Caesar turned around the next day and invited Catullus to dinner. The poetry Catullus created, in this hot cultural climate he lived, was in large part amatory, and reflected his up and down passion for the woman he called Lesbia. (This woman, we think, was the sister of a notorious urban gangster, Publius Clodius Pulcher). Their relationship, to judge from Catullus’ poems, and from nothing else, was a battleground of on and off, climax, departure, despair, return to one another; the

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brilliant formulation Catullus gave, to this exhausting passion, has made him one of the most influential and frequently copied writers of antiquity. Catullus and his Circle. The poetry of Catullus reflects a deep influence from fellow Roman poets like Ovid, Horace, and Virgil, who were all part of the milieu with which, even if briefly, Catullus intersected. But Catullus cast a wide net of reading and response. He is known, for instance, for a superb translation of Sappho’s (6th century Lesbos Greek lyricist) poem to the woman she loves. This translation (poem 51) is such a perfected rendition of Greek language and metric into polished Latin, that it constitutes a truly original poem of Catullus himself. Here, as at all points, Catullus is a master of form and style, openly preferring venustas (beauty) to virtus (which we could translate either as manliness or virtue.) Though Catullus and his group of writers were referred to by Cicero as neoteroi, youngsters, they included among them some of the world’s most achieved lyric poets. The small sample below is here for a reason. It is easy for us to identify with exquisitely passionate love poetry—rare though it is—but the invective, the grossness, which Catullus can blend with lust and love, is as scarce as hen’s teeth in modern poetry. Check out the following and delight! Lecherous tavern, and you its regulars, nine pillars along from the Twins’ pillars, do you think you’re the only ones with cocks, the only ones who’re allowed to trouble young girls, and consider the rest of us goats? Or, because a hundred or two of you sit in a row, you, dullards, that I daren’t bugger two hundred together? Think on: I’ll draw all over the front of the tavern with your leavings. Because my girl, who’s left my arms, whom I loved as no other girl’s ever been loved, for whom so many great battles were fought, is there. You, all the rich and the fortunate, love her, and, what’s so shameful, it’s true, all the lesser ones, all the adulterous frequenters of by-ways: you, above all, one of the hairy ones, rabbit-faced offspring of Spain, Egnatius. Whom a shadowy beard improves, and teeth scrubbed with Iberian piss. Reading The Poems of Catullus: A Bilingual Edition, trans. Peter Green (Berkeley, 2005.) Havelock, E.A., The Lyric Genius of Catullus (New York, 1967).

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Martin, Charles, Catullus (New Haven, 1992). Quinn, Kenneth, The Catullan Revolution (Melbourne, l959). Discussion Does Lesbia come across as a ‘real person’ or as a fiction of Catullus’ imagination. Support your contention. Does Catullus address the political turmoil of his time? Or does he sidestep it, in order to concentrate on ‘pure poetry.’ How do you explain the blend of gross invective with erotic passion in Catullus’ work? Do these two emotive states have a natural affiliation with one another? Catullus devotes much of his lyric power to love and sex. Is he ‘romantically’ in love with Lesbia? How does his ‘love’ change through the body of his poems? What kind of ‘love’ does he feel toward his departed brother? How do Petronius and Juvenal differ as satirists? Do they share a single opinion about the life of Rome, or are their targets totally different from each other?

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Horace (65 B.C.-8 B.C.)

Lyric poetry and convention. In introducing Catullus we were naturally drawn to the issue of self-expression, and, because that is the convenient pathway, we moved into the themes of that lusty and brilliant opus. We paid little attention to the finesse of prosody, through which Catullus, obviously, filtered his strong feelings. We did, though, remind ourselves that, though the lyric genre introduces expressive modes rare in the genres studied earlier here, the expression of self is always, especially in developed literary milieux, carried out under the banner of prevailing and available literary conventions. Horace, even more than Catullus, would enable us to value this point—which runs so sharply counter of the romantic ideas of poetic expression buoyed up bourgeois interpretations of European poetries of the early l9th centiury. Horace as craftsman. To appreciate the complex relation Horace occupies, to the inheritance of Greek lyric, we need only look at the array of odes, epodes, satires, and sermones (stories) he draws on to develop his verbally, but not philosophically, complex response to life through poetry. This great poet, in craftsman and world view terms perhaps the greatest Rome created, was deeply immersed in the technical skills the Greek lyric poets—Sappho, Archilochos, Alcaeus—established as early as the seventh century B.C. The views of life Horace expresses through these forms—hearty patriotism, delight in rural life, sexual passion for women and young boys, despair at the loss of the old Roman virtues—these are views of far less conceptual interest than the procedure by which he thinks and sings, complexly, through these views. To the Roman orator Quintilian, these products were the finest verbal achievements of the Romans. But where did Horace come onto the cultural background which made him privy to the artistic resources he utilizes.? Horace and the turmoil of the times. Horace was born into the tempestuous first century B.C., which, unlike the tangled and internecine struggles of the first century A.D.—the world of Petronius, Tacitus, Juvenal—was all intra-armies struggle, factional violence, and the overwhelming need for some kind of political resolution, which, as it was, proved to be Augustus. Horace’s birthplace. Horace was born in the Samnite south of Italy, in the town of Venusia. (He was not a Roman, nor properly speaking an Italian, but a Samnite; his dialect of Latin may well have been tinged with the Samnite dialect, and even with some words of the Oscan tongue, a totally non-Italic speech form. This linguistic diversity may have played into Horace’s unusual sensitivity to language tone, and, not much later, to his

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skill in mastering Greek.) In school he was forced to learn ‘standard Latin,’ which as lifelessly taught induced in him a contempt for forced learning. Horace’s education. By great fortune, Horace was born to a father determined to provide his son with the best possible education. (Horace’s father was a slave, but through hard work and superior intelligence gained his freedom in mid life, and ever after remained a beloved model for his son.) As part of that commitment, Horace’s dad made it possible for his son to study in Athens, where he went at age nineteen. This was to be a decisive move for the young man. He enrolled in the Academy—the West’s first University, founded by Plato in the fourth century B.C.—and began an intensive study of Greek and Greek authors. It was at this time that he read and grasped the great lyric poets of the seventh and sixth centuries B.C., Sappho, Archilochus, and Simonides—and found his way into the secret of their intricate meters. Horace in Athens. While Horace was in Athens, the political drama of Rome itself reached and surrounded Horace. Rome was at this time in turmoil between followers of old Republican ideals, like Brutus, and new social shapers, far more autocratic in temper, who after the death of Julius Caesar were competing to dominate Rome. Brutus, eager to create a strong Republican contingent around himself, came to Greece to recruit appropriate support, and there came into contact with promising young Roman/Italic scions, among whom was Horace. Horace and Brutus. Brutus approached Horace carefully. and with care recruited him into his republican army. The relationship started well for the non-military, art-loving, Horace. The twists of fate for Horace began when the army of Brutus, which Horace was fighting with, was crushed by Octavian at the Battle of Philippi in 42 B.C. Treated not as an enemy, but as a promising fellow Roman, Brutus was quickly befriended by Octavian’s friend and super wealthy Roman political advisor, Maecenas. Under the umbrella of Maecenas’ protection Horace was enabled to move back into distinguished society in Rome itself, and to serve as a spokesperson for the new regime. Horace made friends of the highest quality, like Virgil, who were to introduce him into Octavian/Augustus’ circle, and from that arrived position, during a moderately long but highly creative life, Horace remained a fixture of Roman poetry and culture.

What slender boy, Pyrrha, drowned in liquid perfume, urges you on, there, among showers of roses, deep down in some pleasant cave? For whom did you tie up your hair, with simple elegance? How often he’ll cry at

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the changes of faith and of gods, ah, he’ll wonder, surprised by roughening water, surprised by the darkening storms, who enjoys you now and believes you’re golden, who thinks you’ll always be single and lovely, ignoring the treacherous breeze. Wretched are those you dazzle while still untried. As for me the votive tablet that hangs on the temple wall reveals, suspended, my dripping clothes, for the god, who holds power over the sea. Reading Horace, The Odes: New Translations by Contemporary Poets (Princeton, 2002.) Maclennan, Keith, Horace: A Poet for a New Age (Cambridge, 2010). Reckford, Kenneth, Horace (New York, l969). Discussion Does Horace’s ‘love poetry’ display what we might call romantic passion, and if not, what is the drive of his love poetry. Is it purely erotic? What role did Athens play in Horace’s creative development? What did the Greek literary example mean to him? You will note that Horace, like most of the authors we have studied, was not from Rome. What do you think was the significance of Horace’s birth in a region where languages other than Latin were spoken?

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Propertius (60 B.C.- after 16 B.C.) Propertius and his moment. The poem you find at the end of this week’s syllabus is from the first of four books of elegies, by the Roman poet Propertius. We are in the year 25 B.C., and once again, as with Virgil, Livy, and Horace we are in that zone of tremendously powerful political change which surrounded the civil struggles of the Roman Republic, in its last decades, and the accession of Octavian to the role of Caesar Augustus in 38 B.C. As you can see, Propertius—like Catullus and Horace—tended to prefer love to politics, though none of these men shunned the perks that could devolve on them from healthy relations with power. The prosody of Propertius. Since, however, Propertius was first and foremost a lyric poet, we should pause a minute to consider his product—the brilliantly hewn elegy form, which is the mould of the Latin behind the above translation. Look at the first two lines of the English, then at the far more compact Latin of those lines: Cy’nthia pri’ma suis’ miserum’ me ce’pit oce’llis Con/tactum/ nullis/ ante cu’pidini’bus. The elegy form. The interplay of these two kinds of line was from the time of the early Greek poets considered the gold standard for one kind of poetic construction. The first of the two lines of the elegiac couplet contains six stressed syllabic units, arranged (this is an average) on the basis of six succeeding dactyls—sound units consisting of a stressed followed by two unstressed syllables. The second of the two lines of the couplet consists of five stressed syllables, arranged in a such a sound pattern that the relatively brevity of the second line answers, closes off, and completes the proposition of the first line, so that the couplet is a perfect unit. Reader, forgive this foreshortened, simplistic account of a splendid, long trained verse form, and, taking the most you can get from this account, return to the first two shaggy and limping lines of our English translation. See the difference in concision? Form and content in Propertius. The form of such poetry is not a hollow shell surrounding its content, but the content itself in action, and Propertius, on a par with the Horace who was master of Greek prosodic modes, is one of splendors of Roman literature. In a famous poem, #6 from Book I, Propertius writes to his friend Tullus that he is glad to be known as one who sang from the turmoils of love, rather than giving himself up to warfare, fighting with the Emperor. Propertius proudly proclaims, in many of his poems, that the warfare he values is with the obduracy of language. Propertius: the biography. Which brings us to the issue of Propertius’ distinctive life situation and value system. He was born in mid-first century in Assisi, in the province of Umbria. We know that Propertius’ father died when his son was a young boy, and that Propertius was raised by his Mother—whose efforts had to have been huge; the family’s land had been confiscated by Augustus, as part of a large offering

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to Octavian’s veterans after the Battle of Actium, and Propertius’s mother herself paid the indirect costs of war. Somehow, fortunately, Propertius made his way to Rome, where—untouched by any direct contact with the military conflicts seething around him—he settled on the Esquiline Hill, an upscale section of Rome, and entered slowly into the circle of the powers, a circle which, as we know from the intimacy of Augustus with Virgil and Horace, was open to the arts. Of supreme importance then was Propertius’ meeting with Cynthia, the woman who was to dominate his first three Books, though in the fourth Book he records their bitter break up, and at the same time announces new themes he intends to pursue in his writing. The first Book of Elegies attracted cutting edge admiration in Rome, and fortunately for Propertius Maecenas—the benefactor of Horace and Virgil—was taken with this new work, and invited Propertius into his circle of literary discussants and fellow spirits. The financial support of Maecenas, for which this benefactor wanted nothing in return except praise, bailed out a whole generation of brilliant poets at a time of struggle, conflict, and danger in Rome. Propertius and romantic poetry. It is fascinating to observe the power of love to generate poetry, in both Greek and Roman literatures. We have mentioned the peculiarity of the lyric genre in Ancient Rome, that it is a vehicle for self-expression, but that the vehicle in question is highly disciplined and prosodically wrought. Self-expression, in ancient Roman poetry, does not mean anything like free-verse, or even like the flowing personal line of a Whitman, who sings of his own soul. Ancient prosody precluded any such ‘naturalism,’ and in fact the reader of Propertius will find an abundance of scholarly myth references—all impeccably integrated—which betray the almost universal stress, in ancient poetry, on the same kind of erudition we know from the epic and satiric genres. As for Propertius who can ever have exceeded him in the exquisite formulation of the wonder of spending all night touching all the parts of another person’s body. Cynthia was the first. She caught me with her eyes, a fool who had never before been touched by desires. Love cast down my look of constant pride, and he pressed on my head with his feet, until he taught me to despise chaste girls, perversely, and to live without plan. Already, it's been a whole year that the frenzy hasn't stopped, when, for all that, the gods are against me. Reading Propertius, Poems, translated Lee and Lyne (Oxford, 1994.) Hubbard, Margaret, Propertius (Bristol, 1974). Sullivan, J.P., Propertius: a critical introduction (Cambridge, l976).

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Ovid (43 B.C.- 18 A.D.) Distinctions within genres. We have made many distinctions within the lyric genre of Roman literature. We have found that Catullus, Horace, Propertius all ‘deal with’ love, but that only says so much. There are great differences among those ‘dealings.’ Catullus is robust and sensual, and at his most enamored ready to kiss Lesbia for an eternity. Propertius is as passionate as Catullus, but far more self-conscious about the kinds of language he is using to create himself a lover in poetry. (He is more philosophical than Catullus.) Horace is more multi-themed than Catullus or Propertius—more discursive about morals, life styles, the political world, the social world—and, especially in the material we have discussed, less furiously passionate and love conscious than the other two. (Horace is also the author of sensuous homoerotic poetry which has proven unpalatably direct to Western tastes, and which far exceeds the boldness of the other two lyricists.) It is finally worth noting, once again, the difference between the love poetries of these three men and the Romantic lyric, by which we mean the Wordsworthian tradition in post 1800 poetry, which privileges the whole hearted and innocent love of man and maid, against a background (frequently sketched, as in the poetry of Browning) against the sense of a cruel and fated world, in which the ultimate outcome of human emotions is dubious. The works of Ovid. When we come to Ovid, a born poet, one ‘born speaking in hexameters,’ as he says of himself, we reach, if possible, a new level of sophistication. (When it comes to love poetry the Romans lead the pack in finesse and inventiveness.) Ovid wrote many literary works, all in highly disciplined, Greek inspired, meters, and many of those works concerned love. We will address these promptly. But who was this Ovid? Ovid’s life. Publius Ovidius Naso was born in Sulmo to an important equestrian family—equestrian, as you recall, meaning just below the highest patrician rank. He was sent to Rome for his education—as were all his peers—and studied Rhetoric, as a prelude to the study and practice of law. (This educational pathway, leading toward Law, and beyond that toward politics, was generally expected of the aspiring young gentleman learning in Rome.) For some reason, perhaps the shocking death of his brother at age twenty, Ovid decided to stick with his initial instinct, and to give himself unreservedly to poetry. At this point—and here too you see a familiar pattern—Ovid went to Athens to study, and while studying there traveled to Asia Minor and Sicily. (Are you noticing, as we move through Roman history, that privileged Roman youth traveled widely, in the eastern Mediterranean?) From 29 B.C.-25 B.C. Ovid returned to Rome to devote himself to poetry. It was at this period that he too found his patron. This time it was not Maecenas, who was to become the central figure of Augustus’ literary circle, but Marcus Corvinus, who was long a defender of the Roman Republic against Augustus, but who moved toward Augustus, as the tide of history swept in that direction, and whose daughter, Julia, became a keystone of the Augustan circle. Thus Ovid too came ultimately under the supportive

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umbrella of the Emperor’s largesse, and left us one more instance of the way money and connections pave the way to literary success. Ovid’s exile. From this point on Ovid not only determined, but had the means to, give his life to poetry. He was in the midst of a highly popular series of works—the Heroides, the Amores, the Ars Amatoria, the Metamorphoses—when a devastating blow of fate assaulted him. In the year 8 A.D. Ovid was banished by the Emperor Augustus, and exiled to the distant city of Tomi, on the Black Sea. This was a serious exile for any Roman, let alone an urban sophisticate accustomed to the cultural interactions of the metropolis. The world at large has never known the true cause of this exile, which Ovid attributes to carmem et error, a song and an error, terms which have resisted any clear interpretation though Ovid’s contemporaries, and later scholars, have generated theories galore about what these words mean. One major trend of explanation is that Ovid had inside information about scandalous behaviors in Augustus’ court. Whatever the case there, precisely, we are sure that Augustus was outraged by the ‘open immorality’ Ovid had foregrounded in his long poem, the Ars Amatoria (21A.D.), which promoted exactly the adultery that the new Emperor, Augustus, was making an intense effort to criminalize. The fury of Augustus. The panoply of poems Ovid created, in a fertile life, included a wide variety of tones. The early Amores (16/15 B.C.) include some of the world’s wittiest couplets on the war (and truce) between the sexes; funny, bitter, urbane to the max. The Ars Amatoria (2 A.D.) is equally witty—a handbook first for guys, then for gals, on the most effective ways of seducing a married woman or man, depending; and with tons of collateral tips on, for example, detours like the lady’s maid you use to get at the married lady, but who turns out to want a seduction of her own en route. (This kind of game playing was particularly odious to the Emperor Augustus.) In his last poems, written from Black Sea exile, Ovid writes The Tristia (9 A.D.-12 A.D.), elegant but deeply sad poems from exile, in which he laments everything lost—his beloved Rome, his beloved third wife. Reading Ovid, Ars Amatoria, Book One, trans. Hollis (Oxford , l992). Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Raeburn (New York, 2004.) Ovid’s Poetry of Exile (translated into verse by David Slavitt) (Baltimore, l990). Liveley, Genevieve, Ovid: Love Songs (Bristol, 2005.)

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Marcus Aurelius (121 A.D- 180 A.D.; Emperor 161 A.D. -180 A.D.) Stoics and Epicureans. We have been advancing through Roman literature by way of genres, and come at the end to philosophy, which requires a special prologue. At its peak, Greek philosophy, especially in Plato and Aristotle, had tried out systematic speculation, and established a power of rigorous dialectic with imagination which has left its mark on the formal study of philosophy to this day. But there were other themes in Greek philosophy, most influentially the schools of Stoicism and Epicureanism which came to flower in the third century B.C. These two branches of thought devoted their attention to the moral life, though not without concern for the ontological background of the universe in which human behavior is framed. Both the Stoics and the Epicureans, with their emphases on self-discipline, moderation, and toleration, exercised huge influence on Roman society and culture. The Meditations. All this by way of direct approach to Marcus Aurelius, for whom Stoicism was an inspiration and staff of support throughout a hectically busy life at the top of the social/administrative ladder. Marcus’ philosophy is embedded in a single book, which he called To Himself, and which we call the Meditations, and which is a living masterpiece of Stoic—and broadly human—wisdom. We will return to the book. Who was the man? The Life of Marcus Aurelius. Marcus Aurelius was born in Ucubi, south east of Cordoba, Spain, to a family of wealth and distinction. His great grandfather had been a Senator, while Marcus’ mother had inherited great wealth from her own father. This was already the formula for success, and Marcus, following the expectations of his class and educational aspirations, moved to Rome, where he spent his formative youth years in a upscale neighborhood, the Caelian Hill. (It will have struck us all, in this class, that Rome served as the magnet for all its future luminaries, though the leaders of Roman literary culture hailed widely from distant parts of the Empire.) Education. In Rome Marcus was home-schooled, as were all young men of his class and expectation, Attracted by the ideal of the ‘philosopher,’ he went through a stage of dressing in dark rough cloaks, and sleeping on the ground—occupational traits of one kind of ‘ancient philosopher’—until falling under the influence of Fronto, whom the Emperor Hadrian appointed tutor to Marcus Aurelius, and who—himself a wealthy and independent scholar---remained a prudent and affectionate guide to Marcus Aurelius throughout his life. Marcus was studious as well as active, and seemed destined for a superior role in practical political administration. Imperial succession. In 138 B.C. the Emperor Hadrian chose Antoninus Pius to succeed him—Hadrian morbidly concerned with the decline in his health. As part of the succession deal, Hadrian stipulated that Antoninus should adopt Marcus Aurelius as his son. Pursuant to that deal Antoninus, taken as all were by the abilities of Marcus Aurelius, passed a law permitting his ‘son’ to assume the (very important) role of quaestor, before the age of twenty-four; and from there on the Emperor made all the necessary maneuvers required to prep Marcus as his successor. In 161

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the death of Antoninus Pius opened the way for (a thoroughly reluctant) Marcus Aurelius, to become the last of the Antonine Emperors. The worries of ruling. We are making our way back to a book, The Meditations, which Marcus Aurelius jotted down ‘to himself’ in intervals of camp and court life between 170 A.D. and 180 A.D. By the time Marcus was pushed to that brilliant literary survival tactic, his reign had become more than difficult, and more than a challenge to a man who, though a quick learner and a brilliant ‘ruler,’ had a strong withdrawal streak of the private intellectual in him. (Marcus’ reign had started well, but already in 162 A.D. Rome had been hit by devastating floods which had killed most of the livestock in the city, destroying whole settled areas, and setting off a long lasting famine which had to be countered by opening emergency grain supplies. Not much later the frontiers of the Empire fell under attack from a wide variety of Marcomanni, Quadi, Sarmatians, and Germanic tribes avid to get their pillaged share of the Imperial fruits. The worries of ruling soon beset Marcus Aurelius, who was above all conscientious, and the literary result is a world classic of Stoic wisdom and good sense. The end of his life was essentially the conclusion of this book, which, as you will see, was essentially his life turned inside out. Supreme self-help book. You will have little trouble following the themes of this work, which highlight the importance of self-control, self-examination, indifference to petty behaviors, a sense of our cosmic setting, a refusal to be bullied by the seeming urgency of the moment. No self-help book, on the shelves at Barnes and Noble, can light a candle to the wisdom of the Meditations. Here is a passage from Book One, in which Marcus is praising his father, for the virtues he learned from him: whensoever any business upon some necessary occasion was to be put off and omitted before it could be ended, he was ever found, when he went back to the matter again, the same man that he was before. He was accurate in examination of things and in consultations, and patient in the hearing of others. He would not hastily give over a search into any matter, as one easy to be satisfied with sudden notions and apprehensions. He was careful to preserve his friends; nor at any time would he carry himself towards them with disdainful neglect, and grow weary of them; nor yet at any time would he be madly fond of them. He had a contented mind in all things, a cheerful countenance, care to foresee things afar off, and to take order for the least, without any noise or clamour. Reading Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, trans. Hammond (New York, 2006.) A Companion to Marcus Aurelius, ed. Van Ackeren (New York, 2012.)

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Discussion What explains the great attraction of Marcus Aurelius to Stoicism and Epicureanism? Do those philosophies contain the potential for the kinds of insight Saint Augustine (as a Christian) will instinctively work from? Does the Stoicism of Seneca—you may want to research this—resemble that of Marcus Aurelius? In what ways is Marcus Aurelius’ To Himself a response to the immediate pressures of his own life? What were those pressures? What finally was his attitude toward them? Would you call Marcus Aurelius a philosopher, or a practical man of considerable wisdom? To answer this you would need to establish a working definition of ‘philosopher,’ which is not so easy. In Greco Roman times the philosopher was sometimes the sage, sometimes—as in Plato—the brilliant dialectician. What does ‘philosopher’ mean to us today?

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(Aurelius Augustinus) Saint Augustine (354 A.D.-430 A.D.) The world of Saint Augustine. Born a century and a half after the death of Marcus Aurelius, Augustine Aurelius, later to be called Saint Augustine, represents a new world of thought and commitment, and takes us fittingly to the point where Latin literature merges into the literature and thought of the Middle Ages. Life of Saint Augustine. Raised in Thagaste, in present day Algeria, Augustine was born of a Berber Christian mother (Monica), and a pagan father, thus grew up knowing both of these conflicting world views, which were to fight many battles inside him, up to the time of his conversion to Christianity, and his baptism in 387 A.D.. He was a speaker of Latin, and a lover of that language, which first met him in mature form in Cicero’s Hortensius. Such details of his biography are known to us largely through his Confessions (A.D. 397/398), which form his autobiography and tell us of his path to Christian conviction and baptism. We search with difficulty, in earlier Latin literature, for anything like an autobiography, and will hardly get farther than to a ‘confessional’ poet like Propertius, who traces many dramas of his emotional life but barely gives us a sense of his stage by stage growth. The Confessions in its historical setting. The life that Augustine traces for us in his Confessions is full of profound self-criticism, from his analysis of his bad character as an infant—fundamentally greedy—to his contempt for his wasted years of sensuality and vanity, to his final decision to turn to the Christian revelation, for which he is profoundly grateful, but which swamps him with a sense of wasted time. In the course of presenting this self-account, Augustine spins a development yarn of astonishing interest, full of psychological insights, portraits of daily life in the family, the street, the academy, and finally the church, which greatly enrich our understanding of a considerable area of late fourth century Roman culture. Marcus Aurelius—though he wrote in Greek—was a profoundly acculturated part of the Roman governmental machinery—a warrior/Emperor. When we come to Augustine, almost two centuries later, the high period of Roman literature as well as administrative power, is sharply waning. There are strangers at the gate; the many tribes who beset the Eastern frontiers of Marcus Aurelius’ empire have now greatly increased in number and strength, reducing the old confidence and authority of Rome. The era of the autocratic, and often depraved, Roman Emperor has had its say in various iterations, and the dignity of the old Roman world—the world Livy harked back to, and Horace and Virgil admire—is in various kinds of shambles. All of which is not to say that Augustine works outside the Roman tradition. His Latin, by general consent, is on the highest level of the language’s prose. He was well trained in Latin language and literature—note his complaints about the study of Virgil, in elementary school—went off to Carthage to teach Latin, then later, when he had moved to Italy, he competed for and won a significant academic post in Milan, as a teacher of Latin literature. Augustine, even more than Marcus Aurelius, lives inside the traditions of Latin culture. But the powerful additional factor, in the making of

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Augustine, is the incorporation of Christianity, which already, by Augustine’s time, had become a determinant shaping force in Roman and Latin life. Augustine’s Christianity. Augustine’s Christianity, which is the subject of his voluminous literary output—well over a hundred separate titles, on topics of Biblical exegesis, every aspect of theology, problems of knowing and will—is the turning move in his personal achievement, and sharply marks his literary creation off from that of any other major writer before him in Latin. We should therefore underline the cultural landmarking that Augustine carries out. Development within Christianity. By the time of the Confessions, Christianity was a seasoned component of the Roman/Latinate cultural world. In the second decade of the 4th Century A.D. the Roman Emperor Constantine had privileged Christianity as the state religion, and Church councils were busy formulating basic doctrine for the remainder of the fourth century. (The Nicene Creed, which has remained a liturgical centerpiece to our day, in Western Christianity, was formulated in 325 A.D.) Paganism was still enrooted and influential—Julian the Apostate, the last pagan Emperor of Rome ruled from 361 A.D.-363 AD—but both the common people, and select wealthy Romans, were turning their influence and convictions in the direction of the new religion. Augustine, who was to go on to be elected Bishop of Hippo, in North Africa, played a persuasive role in the reshaping of Latin culture, and the new spirit he brought to that driving intention is evident in The Confessions. Is Saint Augustine a philosopher? We have been concerned with the fine tuning of genre. Is Augustine a ‘philosopher’? Was Marcus Aurelius a ‘philosopher’? We have commented on the emphasis, within Marcus Aurelius’ Stoicism, on procedures of discipline, honor, firmness in personal relations. Augustine too might be considered an ethical philosopher. As we see from the Confessions, he is interested in the truly good in behavior, and not in the ‘socially proper.’ In his larger works, like The City of God, written in the first decade of the fifth century A.D., Augustine presses ethical concerns onto an unusually broad tapestry. The City of God, the far or in side of the world we customarily inhabit, is the world where God and the divine dwell. If we add that it is our sole goal to reach that world, won’t we be saying that Augustine is an exhorter as well as a describer of the ethical life? Reading Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. R.S. Pine-Coffin (New York, l961). C.N. Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture: A Study of Thought and Action from Augustus to Augustine (New York, 2003.) Discussion

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Does Saint Augustine seem to you still to belong to the Roman world? Do his views of life appear to you to be embedded in the Roman styles and values that you have become acquainted with in this course? What do you see as the chief turning points for Augustine, on his path to conversion? What were the trigger experiences that drove him upward into his decision? Was Augustine a philosopher, a theologian, or a practical ethical person? Or do you see all these traits in him? In considering him as a ‘theologian’ you might want to review a few of the hundreds of sermons he left for us.

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A Review of Roman Literature Timespan of Roman History. We have completed a brisk survey of Roman literature, taken up in terms of genres (small samples of genres.) It is to be hoped that you got some insight into the chronological development of Roman literature (even of Roman culture.) Although Roman culture has virtually a millennium long timespan, we restricted ourselves on the whole (Plautus was the big exception) to material composed between the beginning of the first century B.C., and the second century A.D., a period of three centuries. Concluding with Augustine meant adding two centuries to that timeline. Our heavy emphasis lay on the centuries before and just after the birth of Christ, for that was a period of huge literary activity in Rome, as well as of monumental and dramatic political change. Greatnesses of Roman Literature. We found, as we had to expect from the literary culture of one of the world’s most influential empires, a wide palette of generic achievements, a palette from which we might draw certain conclusions, about what the Romans did best, and not so well. (After all, we are trying to get our minds critically about a vast achievement.) Among the astounding riches of Roman literature is the burst of disciplined but passionate poetries that spring forth from the literary groups that gathered around the world of Augustus, if we may so call the thrilling crystallization of power under this in many ways benign and forward thinking First Emperor. The phenomenon of the Maecenas comes to full flowering among these creators—Juvenal, Horace, Virgil, Propertius, Ovid. Maecenas’ closeness to Augustus, his love of patronizing the arts, his generosity to his favorites, were traits that marked the spirit of the period and materially facilitated a great literary growth-spurt. Maecenas’ generosity fell on a rich soil, too, for the personal lyric or epigram- we omitted mention of other geniuses like Martial and Tibullus—was of peculiar vigor in Augustan Rome. Roman Epic. The Roman epic was of decisive cultural influence. (We cannot speak of an epic tradition in Rome, the way we speak of the dominant Homeric tradition in Greece, a tradition which pervaded culture, law, folk tradition, principles of behavior throughout subsequent centuries; but we could align various Roman epic poets, like Ennius and Statius, who reached back into Greco Roman mythical tradition.) Virgil, though writing long after the formation of Roman culture, reached back to reconstruct an account, of the origins of that culture, which not only dignified the Augustan moment, but concentrated the account of founding into a compelling narrative lodged in Greco-Roman ‘mythology.’ While Virgil did not exercise the kind of Biblical force over the Romans, that Homer did over the Greeks, he continued to attract the literati throughout Roman culture, as well as to become a staple of school studies—as we saw last week with Augustine. Roman Historians. We can safely say that the historical perspective was well developed in Roman literature. Just as Virgil constructed a past for the Romans, Livy went in search of one, uncovering and piecing together the early tales Roman—not

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Greco-Roman—history was made from. (Livy played for the Romans the crucial role Herodotus did for the Greeks, legitimizing them in their own eyes.) Tacitus, from the objective standpoint which contained a critical/urbane eye, scrutinized Roman political culture of the first part of the first century, and served as one kind of conscience of the moment. Many more Roman historians could have been included in our discussion—Julius Caesar, Sallust, Josephus, Ammianus Marcellinus—which will hardly surprise us, coming as they do from a culture in which historical self-awareness played a constitutive role in every act of governing. Roman Satire and Drama. When it comes to satire, the natural Roman fascination with character types—recall the stock characters of Plautus—and with intra-societal intrigues (Ovid’s Amores), plays out into a fascination with the foibles, indeed with the vices, of big city politics, whether on a grand or a commoner level. Juvenal and Petronius both revel in the viciousness of Augustan Rome, but not without a reserve of severity, which gives their special stamp of attention to the notion that the satirist and the moralist are twins under the surface. It would be pointless to note that Roman drama, even at its best, most amusing (Plautus, his contemporary Terence) and most powerful (Seneca), is far below the dramatic achievement of the Greeks, for whom both tragic and comic drama served, at least in the fifth century, as the supreme vehicle of cultural energy and daring. Plautus and Seneca were popular and influential in their time, and give delight today, but they hardly seem to push the boundaries of art, or to find new territory for the human spirit. Romans as practical people. Have we earned the right to any general comment on the character of Roman literature? It is a cliché to say that the Romans were a preeminently practical people. They were obviously brilliant in skills required to make a coherent and liveable society. They could—depending of course on the time, and with particular stress on the high pax Augusta epoch, the first two or three centuries of our era—they could build roads, aqueducts, public and private buildings, sewers and toilets; they could build systems of law as reference points for civil order. None of these skills is less than hugely important, none of them is represented with equal perfection among the Greeks—unless it be in temple architecture or, in the Hellenistic period, city management. Conclusion, with Saint Augustine. All that having been said, Roman literature at its finest—in Virgil, the poets, in Ovid; in the deathless dignity of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, in the spectacular satire of Petronius—is hard to beat. What we have seen, in our sixteen lessons, should give at least an initial impulse toward admiration. And with all of that, and of course depending on how you feel about confessing, Saint Augustine takes us through Roman culture over a high wall into new territory, new insights into the human self which no other Romans had tackled. Discussion

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Have you become aware, in this course, of the pervasive influence of Greek culture throughout Roman culture and literature? What seem to be the points of sharpest influence? Drama? History? Epic? Do you see a conflict between ‘being a practical people’ and ‘being a creative people’? Are these distinctions meaningful, when it comes to the Greeks and Romans? How do you explain the relatively empty spaces in the history of Roman literature? What kind of literature was being written prior to the plays of Plautus? Was there significant Roman literature in the third and fourth centuries A.D.—that is, outside of the work of Saint Augustine? How do you view the importance of actual chronological history to the literary creations of the Romans? Is their history important to many of these writers, as they go about their creation? Explain. In what literary genres do you think the Romans excelled? Where, in your opinion, were they relatively limited in their contribution to world culture? What seem to you the deep points of difference between the writing of Saint Augustine, and that of the earlier Roman writers we have considered here? Does Marcus Aurelius seem to you a forebear of Saint Augustine, or are Marcus’ affiliations almost entirely to Stoic and Epicurean traditions? What (in your opinion) underlies the powerful satire in Roman literature? Has it something to do with the character of Roman life and society as they were experienced by Juvenal, Petronius, and—for instance—the brilliant epigrammatist, Martial? Livy and Virgil give different accounts of the origins of Roman culture. Or can you see their differing accounts fitting together with one another? What was the importance, for these two epic minded writers, of retelling the founding stories of Rome? How do you view the Roman theatrical tradition, from what we have read? Have Plautus (and Terence) anything in common with Seneca? Why—this might cost you some research time—do you think drama was the central literary experience for the Greeks, while for the Romans it was (arguably) a minor genre?

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HUMANITIES INSTITUTE ROMAN LITERATURE An Online Guide to French Literature Guide Description Designed for English-speaking students, the online guide will cover the literary history of Ancient Greece. The topics reflect and mirror general aesthetic trends, including Romanticism, Nationalism, and Postmodernism, and the narratives themselves explore various modes of self-expression. Instructor This guide was prepared by Frederick Will, Ph.D., professor emeritus of the University of Iowa.

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Introduction to Online Guide The purpose of this guide is to provide a concise sequence of entries, for the major figures, and in some cases, for lesser authors or game changing themes, in Roman literary history. Some effort will be made to bridge among the different entries, lest we create more nearly an encylopedia than an instructive chronology. We will divide the whole ebook into three parts, the Early and Republican Period, the Pax Romana—the first two centuries of the Christian era—and the remaining developments which were initiated by the Imperial reign of Marcus Aurelius, and carry through into the full early development of Christianity in the 5th and 6th centuries A.D. Those three divisions will in themselves be steps toward an interpretation of the entries we offer; it being already interpretive to claim that here, not there, ends or begins an era or period. But that is not the end of the shaping we will be applying to the data of Roman literary history. For within each of the three time periods, into which we divide this history, we will make subdivisions by genre; a section for epic, drama, poetry, history, and so on, as appropriate to that time period. This further subdivision will interfere with the untainted chronology of the history, but will give us a way of measuring the salience of different forms of expression, during the period in question. Our occasional critical interventions will give us a further way of delegating emphasis within each historical era. The guide will be divided into the following three periods: Period One: The Early Italic period (776 B.C.-509 B.C.) The Republican Period (509 B.C..-27 B.C.) Period Two: The Pax Romana (1st and 2d centuries A.D.) Period Three The Age of Marcus Aurelius (3rd Century A. D.) and The Age of Saint Augustine (4th century A.D. and later.) Under each period we will subdivide our topics by the broad type of writing (genre) for which the Roman writer in question is known. We will profile some of the key issues and authors of each period, characterize each period as a whole, and sprinkle quotes through a number of the entries.

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Contents Period 1 The Early Period (776 B.C.-27 B.C.) EPIC 1 The centrality of the epic in ancient cultures 2 Livius Andronicus 3 Naevius 4 Virgil DRAMA 5 Greek and Roman drama: a comparison 6 Plautus 7 Terence 8 Accius 9 Caecilius Statius 10 Seneca CRITICISM 11 Valerius Cato POETRY AND SATIRE 12 The great period of Roman Poetry 13 Ennius 14 Lucilius 15 Catullus 16 Propertius 17 Ovid 18 Horace 19 Tibullus PHILOSOPHY 20 Lucretius SPEECHES AND TRACTS 21 Cato the Elder 22 Cicero HISTORY 23 Cornelius Nepos 24 Varro 25 Julius Caesar 26 Sallust 27 Livy ARCHITECTURE 28 Vitruvius

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Period 2 The Period of the Pax Romana (1st and 2d centuries A.D.) EPIC 29 Statius 30 Gaius Flaccus 31 Silius Italicus POETRY AND SATIRE 32 The importance of satire in Roman literature 33 Persius 34 Martial 35 Juvenal 36 Lucan 37 Petronius 38 Apuleius NATURAL HISTORY, ARCHITECTURE AND AGRICULTURE 39 Pomponius Mela 40 Columella 41 Pliny the Elder 42 Pliny the Younger 43 Frontinus PHILOSOPHY 44 Marcus Aurelius, Emperor 45 Aulus Gellius ORATORY 46 Quintilian 47 Marcus Fronto HISTORY 48 Florus 49 Tacitus 50 Suetonius Period 3 The Age of Christianity and Pagan Nostalgia (3rd-6th centuries A.D.) THEOLOGY 51 The clash of religious cultures and the Christian turn 52 Tertullian 53 Macrobius 54 Lactantius 55 Ambrose 56 Orosius

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57 Jerome 58 Augustine 59 Cassiodorus 60 Boethius POETRY 61 Pervigilium veneris 62 Sidonius Apollinaris 63 Paulinus of Nola 64 Ausonius 65 Claudian 66 Prudentius JURISPRUDENCE 67 Ulpian ORATORY 68 Symmachus HISTORY 69 Solinus 70 Ammianus Marcellinus 71 Gregory of Tours SCHOLARSHIP 72 Isidore of Seville

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Period One: The Early Period 776 B.C.-509 B.C.; The Republic 776 B.C.—27 B.C. The Roman Republic, as we confidently label this under- documented period of many changes and much obscurity, came into existence in 509 B.C., after the effective defeat of the then essentially Etruscan monarchy, which for almost three centuries had been the dominant force on the Italic peninsula. That Etruscan monarchic period is obscure as was everything associated with the Etruscans, of whose origins there are many competing theories, and whom we know for their splendid tombs and a language undecipherable—though putatively descended from Greek. Into that early period—from 776 B.C. when the Romans viewed their state as having been founded, by Romulus and Remus—the Romans retrofitted many tales, like those of the royal family of the Tarquins, which were to serve as the Romans’ cultural backstory. (The historian Livy, and the epic poet Virgil, were to be among the formative narrators, or fabulators of this early pre-Roman Roman cultural development.) Slightly less legendary are the reports that this early pre-Republican ‘Rome’ was truncated by the expulsion of the last of the Italian kings in the year 509 B.C., from which date we can properly speak of that Republic which Rome will be until the accession of Augustus to the role of Imperator, in 27 B.C.; that is almost five hundred years later. What transpires in the intervening time is a complex history of growth and development, to which we will have occasion to refer periodically in the following entries. Through these centuries the genuinely Republican traits of the government of Rome—a system of consuls, quaestors, praetors, and tribunes of the people, representing an increasingly large but basically peasant plebs, or common folks; a upper level of very rich landowners; a growing and powerful military—give way to growingly clear signs of the imperial future ahead. Major wars are fought—notably the three Punic Wars in the third and second centuries, which greatly increase the territorial extent of Rome, and the conquests of Hellenistic Greece in the East, with the consequent influx of Greek culture into Rome. By the first century B.C. there are deadly Civil Wars in Rome itself, involving power players like Julius Caesar, Pompey, Antony, and Brutus. These civil wars spread turbulence in a first century B.C. Rome which by tbe first century is in the way of becoming a settled cultural matrix; until the acceptance of imperial status, by Augustus Caesar in 23 B.C., is met by a general feeling of relief.

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EPIC Topic 1 The centrality of the epic in ancient cultures In classical Greece and Rome the Epic was the standard bearer of cultural values and self-awareness. We have already mentioned Virgil, the epic master—the Latin Homer—who was responsible for much of the formulation of the Romans’ origins and founding narratives. Virgil’s epic work the Aeneid, like that of Homer in Greece almost a millennium earlier, had the effect of unifying a nation—so far as that was possible in an extensive, fast-growing, and largely illiterate populace. And Virgil was not the first Roman epic poet of whom we have significant knowledge. As we will see, in the immediately following entries, we have fragments of the epics of two third- century B.C. writers, Naevius and Livius Andronicus. At the end of the first century A.D. we will come on another major epic writer, Statius. The Romans were fond publicists of their own past, and found no better way to exercise that skill than through epics which reviewed and extolled the national background. It will be well to point out that the material of Latin epic attempted to bring together the Italic narrative past—the Romulus and Remus, Tarquinius themes—with the Greek myth figures from the early Republic part of the belief system of the Romans—this material tended to translate the Greek gods into Romanized deities with Roman names. The Latin epic thus served the function of drawing together the double strands of cultural history that lay behind the Roman state to be. This point deserves emphasis, for the Roman Empire was to require a unified autobiography in order to become the world shaping institution it was. The ancient Greeks, on the other hand, were at their highest period in the fifth century B.C., as a congeries of one thousand different city-states, with little binding them together. Homer was there, to be sure, and dominant as a teacher and narrator to the ages, but himself the reflector of pre city-state tribalism, and no Messiah predicting the unity of the Greek people—a unity they didn’t acquire until modern times.

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Topic 2 Livius Andronicus Livius Andronicus (280-200 B.C.) was a dramatist, epic poet, translator, and educator, from whom we have almost no remaining texts, only comments in other authors. He was apparently captured in war and enslaved, and then introduced into a well to do Roman family, where he was employed as a tutor, presumably with the special task of helping youngsters learn Greek. (During this period, when Roman forces were in the process of subduing the remaining Hellenic states in Greece, the power of Greek literature was returning to Rome itself, thus enabling Greece, as it was said at the time, to capture its conquerors.) Probably as a byproduct of this home teaching, Livius went on to translate Homer’s Odyssey, and in so doing to create one of history’s first serious translations, an effort –from what we can gather, from the remaining forty-six scattered lines of this translation—both to respect the flavor of the Greek, through ‘archaizing’ of Latin, and to remain within the limits of the Latin of his day. (A precise example survives here, and we embrace it, for we have little to go on: where Homer refers to a hero as ‘equal to the gods,’ Livius, considering this equation improper, impious, refers to the same hero as ‘summus adprimus,’ that is of supreme importance. Translation, as the art of adjusting culture and fine tuning differences, already announces itself here. We cannot overstress the importance of this text’s contribution to Roman literary self-awareness. Livius was also known as the first significant Roman dramatist and poet, though we have almost no lines of his work to go by, and must rely on the references of those later writers—Cicero, Varro, and Horace—who refer to Livius as the father of their national literature. It was said that Livius produced his first play in 240 B.C., and went on to write profusely for the stage, themes based on Greek literature. We begin our author register, therefore, with a writer whose importance is surpassed only by his obscurity.

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Topic 3 Naevius (270 B.C.-221 B.C.) Like Livius, Naevius has come down to us as a major voice for poetry and epic in early Rome. (Where Livius was predominately a teacher and translator, though he was much more than that, Naevius was a more daring innovator, and better placed to shape the development of Roman literature—which was still in its infancy. Naevius was a dramatist and epic poet, who was born in Campania, an Italian from the region of Naples. Of his life we know little, and what we know seems to involve his taste for satire. (His dramas work off Aristophanic themes, and he seems to have imported Aristophanes’ taste for raucous dramatic caricature; a taste easy to purvey in the Rome of the period before us.) That bite brought him into conflict with the wealthy Metelli clan, whose ire led to the banishment of Naevius to Tunisia, and to his (not much later) suicide. Prior to these events, it seems, he fought with the Roman army in the Punic Wars, a topic which entered his writings. Naevius’ thirty year writing career began in 270 B.C., and among his earliest known work were two plays written in prison—in Tunisia—and known to have been performed at Pompey’s Theater in Rome in 55 B.C. One of these plays was named the Equus Trojanus (Trojan Horse), while another was devoted to the tale of Romulus and Remus. In other words, to draw a conclusion which is further supported by the titles of other of Naevius’ plays, he was concerned to use both Greco/Roman themes and native Italic themes in his drama. We will see that in his most innovative creative mood he anticipated the epoch making creativity of Virgil, whose Aeneid was later to formulate for the new Empire of Rome the twinned heritage of Latin and Greek origins. Naevius showed his Romanitas in an aesthetic manner than marked his fidelity to his native traditions—a fidelity which was to prove stubborn and formative throughout the Republican period of Rome. Instead of confining himself to the dactylic hexameter, the classic and complex meter of Greek epic and of Virgil’s epic, Naevius chose to use the ‘saturnalian’ meter, which was ‘obvious,’ strongly marked out, and easy to follow. It was this meter that he chose for his epic, the Bellum Punicum, of which we still retain a few scattered lines.

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Topic 4 Virgil (70 B.C.-19 B.C.) With Virgil we advance a century and a half. Between the time of Naevius and that of the epic Aeneid, of Virgil, events have transpired which make it essential for us to fill in some blanks. By the time of the Roman Empire Rome has tested itself with internal conflicts that left none of the old Republican values untouched. The Punic Wars, with which Naevius’ epic poem dealt in the third century B.C., were a major wake up call for the Italic society that was developing around the city of Rome in the first three centuries of the Roman Republic. The Carthaginians, just across the Mediterranean from Rome, staged a series of prolonged attacks on the Romans, concluding with a dramatic push from Carthaginian Spain, across the Pyrenees into North Italy—under the brilliant and intrepid leader Hannibal—with the aspiration of conquering Rome itself. These incursions, which intersected with the careers of Naevius and Livius, were destined to open Rome to a wider world than that of the plains of Latium in Italia. And that was only a beginning of what would have to transpire, before the world of Naevius became that of Virgil. The reliable representative government structure of the early Republic—with its tribunes of the people, its quaestors and praetors rotating office annually, and tied to democratic representation, and its two consuls, each serving for a year, and sharing the administrative business of the state—this structure came under pressure from the development of rivals for state control. With this development, the conflict of the Civil Wars for power, grew conflicts of a deeper nature, which take us far into the formation of the cultural environment in which Virgil creates his Aeneid. The well known and dramatic events of the first century B.C. bring to the fore ambitious and often reckless political opponents—Julius Caesar, Pompey, Crassus, Brutus, Antony—whose struggles for power came to a head when Julius Caesar crosses the Rubicon in 44 B.C., and moves to take Rome itself. These struggles are the staging ground for what will be, from 27 B.C. on, an assumption of Imperial power by Caesar Augustus. Although this assumption of imperium flies against all the sturdy values long imputed to the Republic, it brought a degree of peace and order which many in Rome treasured. Aeneid (29 B.C.-19 B.C.) Whatever peace the Augustan imperium introduced, it was nowhere more deeply celebrated than in Virgil’s Aeneid. (We will stick to that great achievement, at the cost of discussing the splendid formal poetry Virgil has left us in his Georgics and Eclogues, which celebrate peace in their own way, finding rare ways to praise the land and farmscape of Italy, and to establish that poetic love of the countryside which will be imprinted on later Latin lyric poetry—especially in Horace and Tibullus.) In the Aeneid, the poem about Aeneas, the ‘founder of Rome,’ Virgil works at two immense challenges: to harmonize the founding narratives of the Romans into one—where the Greek tales of the Trojan War, its gods and heroes, will be integrated into narratives of the early Italic peoples, thus bringing to fruit the synthesizing drive we saw already in the work of Naevius; to ground the grandeur of Rome in a narrative of the noble origins and daring conquests of the founders of that society. In addressing these challenges Virgil manages, with amazing success and daring, to rival the epics of Homer, whose genius was inimitable, but whose themes were less ‘concentrated’ than Virgil’s.

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The story Virgil unfolds derives from Homer’s Iliad, and from the Fall of Troy, which the best of the Greek warriors had besieged and conquered, leaving its streets plundered and its walls in flames. From the holocaust emerge Aeneas—ever after called pius, for the care and piety with which on his back he carried his father to safety—and survivor Trojans, who take to the ships in flight. The Aeneid revolves about the perilous sea voyage which takes Aeneas and his men through versions of the terrors of the sea, and the dalliances of love, which exactly model the scenarios through which Homer had led his epic hero, Odysseus. The second half of Virgil’s epic is set on Italian soil, and highlights the struggles of Aeneas to defeat the indigenous Italian opposition, powerfully represented by Turnus, and to establish the noble foundations of the City of Rome, of which Augustus is now—and the point of the tale digs in here—the supreme representative, replete with a pedigree in verse so powerful it will in fact long outlive Augustus himself

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DRAMA Topic 5 Greek and Roman drama: a comparison We suggest the following ‘difference’ simply because many of us are used to thinking of Greek drama as the norm of ancient dramatic performance. That classical Greek drama, of the fifth century B.C., had long roots in ritual and rustic ceremony, traditionally devoted to celebrating the power of harvest and renewal. From those rural roots emerged the splendidly sophisticated examinations of human nature and destiny which we know from creators like Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. The Roman theatrical experience also grows from rustic origins, and in fact preserves those origins—raw humor, phallic energy, popular horseplay—throughout its expression as comedy. However another central element, of the Greek theatrical experience, has intervened between the great period of classical Greek tragedy and the Roman theater of which we have already made mention in talking of Livius and of Naevius, in the third century B.C. That intervening stage is the Greek drama of the Hellenistic period, late fourth century B.C. and later, and specifically the dramas of Menander, whose turn to a new version of comedy cohered with the relative sentimentality and social fascination of the fourth century in Athens. The plays of Menander, comedies we would call them, concerned sentimental themes like love gone wrong, star crossed lovers, conflict in what was then middle class society; all of which was a far cry from that Greek tragic tradition that explored the ultimate limits of human experience. It was from this relatively bourgeois theatrical tradition that Roman comedy, in Plautus and Terence, took its impulse. We can recall, from our comments on Livius and Naevius, that Latin epic and dramatic work was deferential toward the classical Greek tradition, and toward Homer. However the Romans went on to make a huge popular entertainment out of their own distinctive drama: a popularity so marked that still in the 4th century A.D. theatrical entertainment—the television of its day—preoccupied a lot of the average Roman’s time: 102 out of 176 annual state holidays being given over to the presentation of popular drama.

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Topic 6 Plautus (254 B.C.- 184 B.C.) The Roman dramatist Plautus was born in the countryside (Umbria), raised against a modest background, and got his earliest job as a stage carpenter, which was his baptism of fire in the nitty gritty of stage presentation. From there he made his way into writing and producing plays. Of Plautus’ fifty two plays there remain twenty, all comedies, and all more or less cut from the same cloth; the same stock of characters; the same plot developments; the same license—a lot of joking about the gods, which aroused criticism in many quarters, and squared off against the ‘religious devotional’ purpose of the ludi or popular feast days; the same referential background of cultural anxiety—the 2nd Punic War (218-201 B.C.) which sustained a high anxiety level in Rome. Each play of Plautus has virtually the same setting, as well as characters; that setting is an urban street with an exit out onto a thoroughfare through which characters enter and depart; the trigger to action is usually an act of eavesdropping by which a generative rumor starts things going. The Plautine comedy is as close to daily public life on the street as are the themes it develops. The dialogue, however, is a highly stylized version of the speech of the street. From The Captives. SCENE II. Enter, from his house, HEGIO and a SLAVE.

HEG. Now, give attention you, if you please. Those two captives whom I purchased yesterday of the Quaestors out of the spoil, put upon them chains of light weight; take off those greater ones with which they are bound. Permit them to walk, if they wish, out of doors, or if indoors, but so that they are watched with the greatest care. A captive at liberty is like a bird that's wild; if opportunity is once given for escaping, 'tis enough; after that, you can never catch him. SLAVE. Doubtless we all are free men more willingly than we live the life of slaves. HEG. You, indeed, don't seem to think so. SLAVE. If I have nothing to give, should you like me to give myself to flight? HEG. If you do so give yourself, I shall at once have something to be giving to you. SLAVE. I'll make myself just like the wild bird you were telling of…

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Topic 7 Terence (185 B.C.-159 B.C.) Terence was born in or near Carthage, and appears to have been of Libyan-Berber descent. Much more than we don’t know about his youth except that he was handsome and sociable and was valued by his master—he was a slave—who took him to Rome. In Rome Terence was given an education—it will have been basic education in Greek and Greek literature—and freed, becoming one of the many freedmen who benefitted from either the generosity or self-interest of their masters—one more financial burden off the master’s shoulders. Freed, he pushed rapidly into a life of dramatic writing and production. (What learning stages led to this, what contacts he made, we don’t know; just brilliance erupting onto the scene.) The first of his plays to be produced was the Andria (166 B.C.), and from then on, for the next six or seven years, he wrote and presented six popular plays, the most appreciated of which, at the time, were Phormio and The Eunuch, both produced in l61 B.C. After this burst of splendid achievement, the still very young Terence took to sea—perhaps to go to Greece, to deepen his knowledge of that language and culture—and was not heard of again; perhaps a victim of shipwreck. His fame, young though he was, was already firmly established in Rome, and he would go on to be one of the most cited and popular Roman authors for the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. GNA. (to himself.) Immortal Gods! how much does one man excel another! What a difference there is between a wise person and a fool! This strongly came into my mind from the following circumstance. As I was coming along to-day, I met a certain person of this place, of my own rank and station, no mean fellow, one who, like myself, had gutted away his paternal estate; I saw him, shabby, dirty, sickly, beset with rags and years;—“What’s the meaning of this garb?” said I; he answered, “Because, wretch that I am, I’ve lost what I possessed: see to what I am reduced,—all my acquaintances and friends forsake me.” On this I felt contempt for him in comparison with myself. “What!” said I, “you pitiful sluggard, have you so managed matters as to have no hope left?”

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Topic 8 Accius (170 B.C.-86 B.C.?). Lucius Accius was born in Pisanum in Umbria, the son of a freedman. We know that he lived to a ripe old age, for Cicero—sixty four years younger than Accius—writes of having conversed with Accius, on literary matters. Otherwise we know little about his life, though his literary reputation was vast, and many praised him for the sublimity of his dramatic thoughts. Our interest in him is great, because he was a writer of tragedies—though Pliny the Younger ranks him as among the erotic poets--and though we have little left from his extensive work, we treasure the fragments we have. These amount to some seven hundred lines, from at least fifty plays, most of which apparently were tragedies. (His work itself would seem to have been either imitations or free translations of the Greek originals, especially of Aeschylus.) His favorite themes, to judge from the fragments we have, and from the titles of his lost work, seem to have been The Trojan War and the narratives of the House of Pelops.) Nor were his tragedies his only work, for he also (among other things) wrote a verse history of Greek and Roman poetry, and a kind of Annales, in the fashion of Ennius, on the History of Rome. Throughout this oeuvre we come to see this writer as essentially conservative, and we are not surprised to find, among his relicta, a line like the following, describing the view point of a dictatorial leader—a line picked up later by the emperor Caligula: Oderint dum metuant… Let them hate (me) as long as long as they fear (me.) Though Accius remains a fleeting profile for us, we learn through him—as we had to expect would be the case—that tragedy too was a vigorous form in Rome, and that its models were essentially Greek.

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Topic 9 Caecilius Statius (220 B.C.-166 B.C.) Caecilius Statius was born in Gaul, in the city of Medidanum, in 220 B.C. We know that he was born a slave, but that he was taken to Rome as a prisoner, in 200 B.C., and received his present name from his patron. We can assume that he was well educated, for he earned his living by adapting Greek New Comedy, especially Menander, for the Roman stage. Like Plautus, therefore, Caecilius got his gift for dramaturgy, and his living, from a hands on relation to the Roman theater. So highly valued was his skill at theatrical judgment, that Caecilius was called on to evaluate, as a resident critic, the plays of such masters as Terence. Caecilius himself was the author of at least 42 comedies—for that number of titles is known—all presumably comedies, comoedia palliata—based on Greek New Comedy themes. The fact is that Caecilius was viewed, in his heyday, as the equal of both Plautus and Terence—less dramatic than the former, less polished than the latter, but on a level with both, and greatly praised for his work by such a judge as Horace. It is interesting to note that the little we still have of Caecilius’ work, some 280 lines, comes down to us, by pure luck, in another Roman author, the Aulus Gellius whose Attic Nights we review elsewhere. The fact that we have a great deal of Plautus, a handful of Terence, and tiny fragments of Caecilius cannot be taken as a measure of the relative value of the works of these three writers. We will have seen, throughout this collection of e book entries, that the luck of text transmission is just that, luck, except in the case of such ubiquitously cited classic writers as Virgil or Horace, to whose works references are scattered throughout Roman literature. Grant us a brief delay; impulse is but a worthless servant. Fear created the first gods in the world.

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Topic 10 Seneca (4 B.C.-65 A.D.) From Cordoba in Spain, Seneca went as a young man to Rome, to study Rhetoric and Philosophy. Greek philosophy, with its emphasis on control of the passions, but also on the power of the emotions, lay behind the philosophical developments of Seneca’s thought. His view was that the misuse of the passions is a sure key to downfall, and that man needs calm and willed self-discipline in order to lead a satisfactory life. As tutor and advisor to the Emperor Nero, Seneca tried to convince his boss of the importance of self-control, and for a time, but only for a time, succeeded. Seneca was a Stoic philosopher—though an independent one—and knew his roots back into the thinking of Greeks like Zeno, Cleanthes, Chrysippos, whose work took wing already in the 4th century B.C. As a Stoic, Seneca occupied a full spectrum of philosophical concerns—epistemology, ontology, political philosophy, and especially ethics. The key tenet of Seneca’s Stoicism was the central conviction that all these behaviors are material, and that thought process and belief systems are best explained as products of exclusively material creatures. His own moral positions may have owed a lot to his personal life—which found him intensely involved with the key players of his time in Rome--Nero, Caligula--figures association with whom eventually led him to a forced suicide. Seneca was also a dramatist, in his whose seven extant plays he explores the passions and downfalls which are the reigning subjects of his philosophy. He was a master of comments: ‘What progress have I made? I am beginning to be my own friend.’ That is progress indeed. Such a person will never be alone and you may be sure he is a friend to all. Nothing, to my way of thinking, is a better proof of a well ordered mind than a man’s ability to stop just where he is and pass some time in his own company.

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CRITICISM Topic 11 Valerius Cato 1st century B.C. Valerius Cato was a Roman poet, grammarian, and above all critic, who deserves mention here especially for his role as a literary arbiter. We know little about his life; he was a native of Gaul, he lost his inherited property in the Sullan disturbances and civil strife of the mid first century, and he spent the last years of his life in poverty. He is also noteworthy, though, for his own poetry, which was part of a standard setting work within a new school of Roman mythological poets. In this role Cato was on the side of the Alexandrian epic tradition—that of Callimachos—with its complex digressions into mythical tales, and its highly aesthetic sense of verbal structure, with rigorous insistence on metrical elegance and regularity. (Cato famously preferred the epic poet Euphorion, now lost to us, to the nativist Ennius.) Cato was also the author of lyrics, like the ‘Lydia,’ and the ‘Diana,’ which carry a strange delicacy. In his ‘Indignatio,’ lost but probably poetry, he defended himself against the charge that he was of low birth. Most remarkable, for us, is the role Valerius Cato played as a professor/critic. As a lecturer on literature and taste he had a vast following; the biographer Suetonius wrote that Cato ‘had many important students and seemed a talent of unusual ability.’ A famous line of the time, that became enshrined in popular fascination, held that ‘Cato is a grammarian—grammaticus/ scholar of literary taste--brilliant in Latin, and one who chooses and establishes poets.’ This tribute to the style setting poet plunges us back into the contentious world of Roman literary politics. In this regard, we can add that Cato appears to have edited a version of the poetry of Lucilius, a kind of scholarly literary feat which illustrates the fullness of the role of the critic/writer in first century B.C. Rome.

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POETRY AND SATIRE Topic 12 The great period of Roman Poetry We are dividing the period of Republican Rome into achievements by genre, and have opened with entries on epic and dramatic poetry. It is worth highlighting one aspect of the work in those two genres. The presence of Greek literary achievement hangs over these early Roman works. We have seen that, although we have only fragments of their actual texts, Naevius and Livius come down to us known for works—of both drama and epic—with titles linking them to Greek literature. Virgil takes as his grand challenge to meet headlong the epic work of the greatest Greek, and arguably Greco-Roman, poet, Homer. As for Roman drama, we have seen both from play titles, and evident closeness to plot and staging procedures of Hellenistic drama, that Plautus and Terence worked in terms of Greek models. We needn’t consider this Roman work derivative—for it has its own style and vigor-- but we can observe that it remains under the spell of the very Greeks whom the Romans were submitting to political conquest from the late third century B.C. on. When we come to the more intimate genre of the lyric, as distinct from the public/nationalist tendencies of epic poetry, we will find the same tug of war between Greek culture and the Roman search for its own pathways in literary expression—as well as in architecture and sculpture. The greatest lyric poets of Rome remain haunted (and inspired) by the work of Archilochos, Sappho, Anacreon and other sixth century B.C. Greek lyricists. To what do we attribute what seems to be this long shadow of the Hellenic, onto Roman culture in its early period? Two answers. The Greeks were the first western creators of a vigorous system of literary genres, apportioning their native genius into the development of these distinctively different patterns of literary creation. The Romans clearly followed this inspiration in formality. The second point is counter to expectation. The classical tradition, which formed in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, was conscious of its proximity to the Romans—in fact many Greek texts were still unknown in the Renaissance—but by the l8th and l9th centuries the tide had turned, the Latin tradition had come to seem derivative, and geniuses of philosophy and poetry affirmed their identity with the ancient Greek spirit.

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Topic 13 Ennius (239 B.C.-169 B.C.) Ennius, often considered the ‘father of Roman poetry,’ was born in Calabria, south of Naples, near the toe of Italy. There he was fortunate to be brought up in a region where several language groups intersected: Greek, Latin, and Oscan. (Oscan, a language kin to Latin, had a different phonology and partially different writing system from Latin, and was spoken in Italia until the first century A.D.) We can only assume that this multilinguistic environment promoted young Ennius’ sense of language—just as the constant contact with Greek lay behind the verbal creativity of many of the finest Latin authors. Ennius was a prolific author—although of his work, as of that of Livius and Naevius--we have only scattered remaining lines, which is itself remarkable, considering that Ennius’ major work, The Annales, was the chief Latin school boy text up to the time of Virgil, two hundred years after Ennius’ birth. (It is for such a reason, doubtless, that Ennius got the sobriquet, father of Latin poetry.) The Annales was a history of Rome in fifteen books, covering the period from 1184 B.C. to the time of Cato the Elder (d. 149 B.C.) . The whole work was composed in dactylic hexameters—like the epics of Homer. Ennius was in addition the author of popular plays—like the Euhemerus, based on the theory of a Greek thinker, that gods were the divinized forms of early heroes and statesmen, and like six Books of Satires, of which we know virtually nothing. We may reflect, in Ennius’ case, on the accidentality of text preservation from antiquity. We have all (virtually) of Homer’s two great epics, all of Virgil, but of a monumental and much studied Greek dramatist like Aeschylus we have only six plays left, while of Ennius we have virtually nothing. Text histories of ancient authors are often fascinating detective stories, and the works of major authors can frequently be found to have hung by a single thread at some point in the High Middle Ages.

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Topic 14 Lucilius (160 B.C.-103 B.C.) Lucilius was born in Campania, and served under the general Scipio in the Battle of Numantia in 134. (We should note that most Roman men served in the army for several years; Numantia was in Spain, and the successful Roman assault on it was a masterwork of the Roman general Scipio Africanus, who had saved Rome militarily in the Punic Wars against Carthage.) It was during that War that Luciius formed his lasting acquaintance with Scipio, who was to remain one of his two dear lifetime friends, and the recipient of many of his Epistulae, which were renowned in his time—but are now all gone except for the odd line. (The whole remainder of Lucilius comes down to about 11,000 lines, mostly unmatched and difficult to place in any context. Many of those lines, as happened in the haphazard accretion of Roman literary history, were embedded in comments made on Lucilius, or on ‘unrelated topics,’ found in ancient grammarians and commentators.) The works of Lucilius are especially noteworthy for his experiments in satire. Prior to his time Roman writers had exercised their satirical bent, but typically (and this is our best guess, from fragments) in a rough and often vulgar style, with no fear of the obscene. We have at least alluded to the roughness of tone in Plautus; and he, after all, was already a subtle craftsperson. The genre of ‘fescennine verses,’ which were rampant in the last centuries of the Republic, were often performed at marriage ceremonies, by dancing men wearing bark masks--until these dances came under legal sanction, as offensive to public morals. The saturae of Lucilius, from what we gather, were part of a genuine and honest social critique, aimed at vices and corruption, and unsparing of name or dignity. The brutal directness of this work was possible to a person of Lucilius’ temper, but chiefly because he was born into the equestrian order, next in level to the aristocrats, and because he had cultivated valuable and protective friends within the power structure.

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Topic 15 Catullus (84 B.C.-54 B. C.) Catullus was born in 84 B.C., and lived for only some thirty years. He was born and raised in Gaul, in a prosperous equestrian family—the equestrian class was the second level of the aristocracy. (His father was sufficiently prominent that he had twice hosted Julius Caesar, during Caesar’s campaigns in the West.) Catullus was sent to Rome for his young adult years, and there, as he began making waves with his red hot poetry, he was lucky enough to spend time with Cicero, Caesar, and Pompey, all of whom appear in his poems; he was, in other words, very much a part of the high stakes socio/political world of the first century B.C., although for Catullus and his own friends poetry was always far more important than politics. That Catullus was not only admired but liked in high circles follows from an episode involving Julius Caesar himself. Catullus insulted Caesar in a poem—Catullus was a master at gross invective—but though Caesar was piqued, and agreed that Catullus had a bite, Caesar turned around the next day and invited Catullus to dinner. The poetry Catullus created, in this hot cultural climate he lived, was in large part amatory, and reflected his up and down passion for the woman he called Lesbia. Their relationship, to judge from Catullus’ poems, was a battleground of on and off; climax, departure, despair, return to one another. The poetry of Catullus reflects a deep influence from fellow Roman poets like Ovid, Horace, and Virgil, who were all part of the milieu with which, even if briefly, Catullus intersected. Catullus is a master of form and style, openly preferring venustas (beauty) to virtus (which we could translate either as manliness or virtue.) Though Catullus and his group of writers were referred to by Cicero as neoteroi, youngsters, they included among them the world’s greatest lyric poets. Lecherous tavern, and you its regulars, nine pillars along from the Twins’ pillars, do you think you’re the only ones with cocks, the only ones who’re allowed to trouble young girls, and consider the rest of us goats? Or, because a hundred or two of you sit in a row, you, dullards, that I daren’t bugger two hundred together? Think on: I’ll draw all over the front of the tavern with your leavings.

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Topic 16 Propertius (50 B.C.-15 B.C.) Propertius was born in mid-first century in Assisi, in the province of Umbria. We know that Propertius’ father died when his son was a young boy, and that Propertius was raised by his mother—whose efforts had to have been huge; the family’s land had been confiscated by Augustus, as part of a large offering to Octavian’s veterans after the Battle of Actium, and Propertius’s mother herself paid the indirect costs of war. Somehow, fortunately, Propertius made his way to Rome, where—untouched by any direct contact with the military conflicts seething around him—he settled on the Esquiline Hill, an upscale section of Rome, and entered slowly into the circle of the powerful, a circle which, as we know from the intimacy of Augustus with Virgil and Horace, was open to the arts. Of supreme importance then was Propertius’ meeting with Cynthia, the woman who was to dominate his first three Books, though in the fourth Book he records their bitter break up, and at the same time announces new themes he intends to pursue in his writing. The first Book attracted cutting edge admiration in Rome, and, fortunately for Propertius, Maecenas—the benefactor of Horace and Virgil—was taken with this new work, and invited Propertius into his circle of literary discussants and fellow spirits. The financial support of Maecenas, for which this benefactor wanted nothing in return except praise, bailed out a whole generation of brilliant poets at a time of struggle, conflict, and danger in Rome. Cynthia was the first. She caught me with her eyes, a fool who had never before been touched by desires. Love cast down my look of constant pride, and he pressed on my head with his feet, until he taught me to despise chaste girls, perversely, and to live without plan. Already, it's been a whole year that the frenzy hasn't stopped, when, for all that, the gods are against me.

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Topic 17 Ovid (43.B.C.- A.D. 17) Publius Ovidius Naso was born in Sulmo to an important equestrian family—equestrian, as you recall, meaning just below the highest patrician rank. He was sent to Rome for his education—as were all his peers—and studied Rhetoric, as a prelude to the study and practice of law. For some reason, perhaps the shocking death of his brother at age twenty, Ovid decided to stick with his initial instinct, and to give himself unreservedly to poetry. At this point Ovid went to Athens to study, and while studying there traveled to Asia Minor and Sicily. From 29 B.C.-25 B.C. Ovid returned to Rome to devote himself to poetry. Ovid’s exile. From this point on Ovid not only determined, but had the means, to give his life to poetry. He was in the midst of a highly popular series of works—the Heroides, the Amores, the Ars Amatoria, the Metamorphoses—when a devastating blow of fate assaulted him. In the year 8 A.D. Ovid was banished by the Emperor Augustus, and exiled to the distant city of Tomi, on the Black Sea. The world at large has never known the true cause of this exile, which Ovid attributes to carmen et error, a song and an error. One major explanation is that Ovid had inside information about scandalous behaviors in Augustus’ court. Whatever the case there, precisely, we are sure that Augustus was outraged by the ‘open immorality’ Ovid had foregrounded in his long poem, the Ars Amatoria (21A.D.), which promoted exactly the adultery that the new Emperor, Augustus, was making an intense effort to criminalize. The panoply of poems Ovid created, in a fertile life, included a wide variety of tones. The early Amores (16/15 B.C.) include some of the world’s wittiest couplets on the war (and truce) between the sexes. The Ars Amatoria (2 A.D.) is equally witty—a handbook on the most effective ways of seducing a married woman or man, depending; with detours like the lady’s maid you use to get at the married lady, but who turns out to want a seduction of her own en route. In his last poems, written from Black Sea exile, Ovid writes The Tristia (9 A.D.-12 A.D.), elegant but deeply sad poems from exile, in which he laments everything lost—his beloved Rome, his beloved third wife.

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Topic 18 Horace (65 B.C.-8 B.C.) Horace’s birthplace. Horace was born in the Samnite south of Italy, in the town of Venusia. He was not a Roman, nor properly speaking an Italian, but a Samnite; his dialect of Latin may well have been tinged with the Samnite dialect, and even with some words of the Oscan tongue, a totally non-Italic speech form. This linguistic diversity may have played into Horace’s unusual sensitivity to language tone, and, not much later, to his skill in mastering Greek. In school he was forced to learn ‘standard Latin,’ which, lifelessly taught, induced in him a contempt for forced learning. By great fortune, Horace was born to a father determined to provide his son with the best possible education. (Horace’s father was a slave, but through hard work and superior intelligence gained his freedom in mid life, and ever after remained a beloved model for his son.) As part of that commitment, Horace’s dad made it possible for his son to study in Athens, where he went at age nineteen. This was to be a decisive move for the young man. He enrolled in the Academy—the West’s first University, founded by Plato in the fourth century B.C.—and began an intensive study of Greek and Greek authors. It was at this time that he read and grasped the great lyric poets of the seventh and sixth centuries B.C., Sappho, Archilochus, and Simonides—and found his way into the secret of their intricate meters. Venus, again thou mov'st a war Long intermitted, pray thee, pray thee spare! I am not such, as in the reign Of the good Cynara I was; refrain Sour mother of sweet Loves, forbear To bend a man, now at his fiftieth year Too stubborn for commands so slack: Go where youth's soft entreaties call thee back. More timely hie thee to the house (With thy bright swans) of Paulus Maximus: There jest and feast, make him thine host If a fit liver thou dost seek to toast. For he's both noble, lovely, young, And for the troubled client fills his tongue: Child of a hundred arts, and far Will he display the ensigns of thy war.

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Topic 19 Tibullus (55 B.C.-19 B.C.) We know little about Tibullus, and that little is largely a conjecture from his poems. We gather that he was probably from the equestrian class, came into the world with some money, but was later a victim of the turbulent historical setting his short life was placed in. In the period of Civil Wars, in which Julius Caesar was to lose his life and Augustus Caesar to be uplifted to Emperor, there were large private armies in Italy, competing for power and representing one or another of the major power players of the day. Among the power players were Marc Antony, and Octavian, who was to become Augustus Caesar; and it was their practice to appropriate available lands in order to settle and pacify the mercenary troops who had fought for them. In 41 B.C. this fate befell Tibullus—as it was to befall Horace and Catullus—and his funds and living space were curtailed thereby, to the end of his short life. Never in great want, though, Tibullus found himself living out his life on a modest dwelling in Rome, and a similar one in the country, which, in the fashion of Roman poets, he greatly preferred. It was in the country and in the life of poetry that he was most comfortable, and the latter pleasure was beautifully supported by Tibullus’ patron, Messalia Corvinus, So befriended was Tibullus with this patron, that he followed him to Aquitania, to aid in the quelling of an uprising, and yet this poet was no friend of war. It needs to be added, therefore, that not only the country but passionately loved women was what sustained him. In the passage below we have a taste of the pain Tibullus felt when briefly separated by a bolted door from his beloved Delia. A Plea to Delia

More wine: and let new pain be lessened by the grape, so that sleep might quell my weary eyes: and let no one stir my mind numbed with drink while wretched love is fast asleep. For a savage guard’s been set upon my girl and the harsh door shut fast with a solid bolt. Door, of a surly master, may the rain beat on you, and lightning hurled on Jupiter’s orders find you out. Door, open now, conquered by my complaints alone, and no sound as you open, turned on a stealthy hinge.

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PHILOSOPHY Topic 20 Lucretius (99 B.C.-55 B.C.) Roman culture is from the start deeply indebted to Greek culture, and Lucretius’ epic, De Rerum Natura; On the Nature of Things, is just the proof we need. To write a long philosophical poem in Latin was to follow in the footsteps of early Greek literature, in which at least two major writers—Hesiod (in the Theogony, 8th century B.C.) and Parmenides (in On Nature, early fifth century B.C.)—developed their views of the world in formal epic poetry. Not only is Greek poetry, but also Greek thought, the founding energy for Lucretius. The third century B.C. Greek philosopher, Epicurus, was the master thinker behind Lucretius’ view of the world. His dominant principle was atomism; a belief that the world is composed of atoms collocated by chance, and responsible, in their infinitely subtle interweavings, for the entirety of existence, from the infinitesimal to the cosmically vast. Lucretius develops many riffs off of this basic perception. The best known of these concern his headlong assault on the fear of death, which he sees as the supreme disturber of mortal peace and happiness. After an initial exordium to the goddess of love, Venus, who brings all organic things to growth and life, On the Nature of Things takes its reader farther out into the world of human senses and perceptions, then into the inorganic stages of development of the world around us, with a magnificent reach into the nature of human societies and their growth, and onward out into a cosmos noble but devoid of all those theistic god-presences on which we typically rely for comfort in our human world. The free will element, which for Lucretius is the foundation of the peculiar dignity of the human, enters through a clinamen, or swerving, of the atoms in the void, a swerving which introduces chance into random necessity. Mother of Rome, delight of Gods and men, Dear Venus that beneath the gliding stars Makest to teem the many-voyaged main And fruitful lands--for all of living things Through thee alone are evermore conceived, Through thee are risen to visit the great sun-- Before thee, Goddess, and thy coming on, Flee stormy wind and massy cloud away, For thee the daedal Earth bears scented flowers, For thee waters of the unvexed deep Smile, and the hollows of the serene sky Glow with diffused radiance for thee!

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SPEECHES AND TRACTS Topic 21 Cato the Elder (234 B.C.-149 B.C.) Cato the Elder is so called to distinguish him from his equally renowned great grandson, Cato the Younger. Actually the older man was known by a variety of monikers—Cato the Censor (the Judge), Cato Priscus (Cato the Ancient, from his predllection for the good old days), and Cato Maior (the Elder): all of which terms rightly suggest the view of himself Cato valued and promoted, and the symbolic status he came to occupy for Romans of later days. Was the making of an old rugged Republican noticeable from the start in Cato’s life? He was born in Tusculum, of a well known but modest plebeian family, whose earlier representatives had distinguished themselves in military affairs. He had inherited a small country property on which he was brought up, close to the land and to rural values; and to a neighbor of old Roman tastes, with a military record and a powerful modest demeanor that went with his respect for the Old Roman style. Cato’s tastes formed in conservative and rural values, and it was only because of his energy and natural talent that a patrician called him to Rome. In Rome, and throughout the rest of his life, he remained a staunch public figure, passing through the cursus honorum—tribune, praetor, aedile, quaestor—and serving his country honorably in more than one of the military conflicts which were raging across the Italic peninsula during the Punic Wars against Carthage. (It was in reference to these conflicts that Cato pronounced in the Senate his renowned statement that ‘Carthago delenda est,’ ‘Carthage must be destroyed.” His behavior in public office, both in Rome and in the provinces, was legendary for strictness, self-denial, absolute hostility to corruption—and a particularly strong hatred of gambling. While we have only one remaining book from Cato—he was prolific—we see in him a great practical sense of life on the land. (The book is De Agri Cultura, and not surprisingly aims to serve as a kind of farmer’s manual. The kind of wisdom we might expect there is encapsulated below: Wise men profit more from fools than fools from wise men; for the wise men shun the mistakes of fools, but fools do not imitate the successes of the wise.

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Topic 22 Cicero (106 B.C.-43 B.C.) Marcus Tullius Cicero was born into a wealthy equestrian family, and though not of the highest wealth found himself, thanks to his natural talent, early in life drawn into the vivid circles of Roman political life. At the youngest possible ages he was elected to all of the stages of the cursus honorum—the sequence of public posts through which Roman political figures needed to pass—serving as praetor , questor, aedile, and tribune of the people, and achieving a growing reputation, throughout the process, for oratorical skill, courage and honesty, and ability to win difficult cases. Those cases, of course, were taken on by Cicero as he grew into his double talent as politician and lawyer both. At the apex of his public career he brought his legal talents to an articulate law court eloquence which has made him, as for example in the famous prosecution of the Catilinarian Conspiracy, a model of public eloquence for western culture to our day. Cicero was actively involved in the turmoil of Civil conflict which was tearing Rome apart through the struggles of Caesar, Augustus, Antony, and Pompey—the bruising strife from which Augustus was to emerge Emperor. Cicero first took the stage in opposition to Mark Antony, but not long after won the hostility of Julius Caesar, and was in the end murdered (43 B.C.). But in the course of his intense absorption in the public life of his time, he made himself one of the most influential cultural figures in all of Roman history. He introduced Greek philosophy to the Romans, he set the highest standards of oratorical skill, and he left us, in his vast body of letters—as to his friend, Atticus—a vivid, humane, intense picture of Roman life at its intelligent and creative and dangerous best. When, O Catiline, do you mean to cease abusing our patience? How long is that madness of yours still to mock us? When is there to be an end of that unbridled audacity of yours, swaggering about as it does now? Do not the nightly guards placed on the Palatine Hill—do not the watches posted throughout the city—does not the alarm of the people, and the union of all good men—does not the precaution taken of assembling the senate in this most defensible place—do not the looks and countenances of this venerable body here present, have any effect upon you? Do you not feel that your plans are detected?

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HISTORY Topic 23 Cornelius Nepos (110 B.C.-25 B.C.) Cornelius Nepos was a Roman biographer/historian—the blend of two genres we are familiar with, later, in the work of Suetonius. He was born in Hostilia, in Gaul, not far from Verona. (The poet Ausonius and Pliny the Elder refer to him as ‘a dweller on the river Po.’) Nepos was a friend of Catullus, who dedicated certain poems to him, as well as of Cicero and Atticus, the wealthy friend and intimate of Cicero. Nepos was known for his simple writing style, in a clear and direct Latin—for which reason he has regularly been chosen as the ‘unseen translation’ text set for examination in the U.K. school system. We have lost most of the work of Cornelius Nepos, and retain today only the text of his Lives of Outstanding Rulers, which first came to light in the reign of the Emperor Theodosius. Below is an excerpt from the study of Hannibal, the Carthaginian general: Hannibal was the son of Hamilcar, and a native of Carthage. If it be true, as no one doubts, that the Roman people excelled all other nations in warlike merit, it is not to be disputed that Hannibal surpassed other commanders in ability as much as the Romans surpassed all other people in valour; for as often as he engaged with the Romans in Italy, he always came off with the advantage; and, had not his efforts been paralyzed by the envy of his countrymen at home, he would appear to have been capable of getting the mastery over the Romans. But the jealous opposition of many prevailed against the ability of one. He, however, so cherished in his mind the hatred which his father had borne the Romans, and which was left him, as it were, by bequest, that he laid down his life before he would abate it; for even when he was exiled from his country, and stood in need of support from others, he never ceased in thought to make war with the Romans

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Topic 24 Varro (116 B.C.-27 B.C.) Varro is the first scholar to make our list of literary figures, and one of the most influential intellectuals of his time, that same tumultuous first century B.C. which was bringing a new Rome to birth, and a new artistic culture—but at a price. For Varro himself, however, the price was not great. He was born near Reate, probably of equestrian stock, which denoted a certain comfort in society. His upbringing was rustic, and throughout his life he remained close to his country and to the large acreage he inherited from his father. He made one bad choice, by supporting Pompey (the losing side) in the Civil Wars which were tearing Italy apart, then by collaborating closely with Julius Caesar, at whose death Varro was briefly without protector; but he was nonetheless active publically, and went on to serve in important civic roles, as praetor and as one of the tribunes of the people. With the accession to power of Augustus Caesar, Varro became the beneficiary of great privilege, was made Director of the Public Library of Rome, a role in which he found time to pursue his immensely productive writing life. He is said to have written more than 800 books, dealing with virtually everything pertaining to the history of Rome and to the natural history with which he was fascinated and deeply informed. Of particular influence, among Varro’s works, were a year by year chronology of the history of Rome since its founding, and an Encyclopedia of the knowledge base of his time, with a most influential section on the division of the Liberal Arts—a catalogue which was to exercise great influence over Mediaeval pedagogy, and on into the Renaissance, and a text, De Re Rustica, On Agriculture, which provides up to the minute advice on farming practice. Had I possessed the leisure, Fundania I should write in a more serviceable form what now I must set forth as I can, reflecting that I must hasten; for if man is a bubble, as the proverb has it, all the more so is an old man. For my eightieth year admonishes me to gather up my pack before I set forth from life.

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Topic 25 Julius Caesar (100 B.C.-44 B.C.) Julius Caesar has become one of the most celebrated figures from Roman culture. Shakespeare’s play is one reason, but to scholars of the first century B.C. in Rome it will seem evident why Caesar figures so importantly. We have noted that the Roman Republic was fraught with serious conflicts, from the third century on (Punic Wars), and that those external wars—eventually successful for Rome—were followed by serious civil conflict in the second century (the private armies of Marius and Sulla), which led, circuitously, into the civil powers struggles of the first century. Those power struggles were not just random conflicts, from within Roman society, but were fights to the death for power which promised to lead control of the entire developing ‘nation.’ It is into this setting that Julius Caesar moved, exercised extraordinary decision, and bad fair to conquer. This still young military political power figure came into national prominence with his conquest of Gaul in 51 B.C., then his invasion of Britain, and then his decision, against all the threats of the power structure in Rome, to cross the Rubicon River and to enter Rome as a conqueror. All these threatening and daring moves, however, had been preceded by a significant political decision, to join (60 B.C.) with Pompey and Crassus in the First Triumvirate, a political alliance intended to stabilize and share power in Rome. (This alliance was opposed, from the start, by Cicero and Cato the Younger.) It was clearly Caesar’s intention to take complete control of the Roman political apparatus, but as we know he was faced with heavy opposition. A powerful coalition, led by Caesar’s supposed friend Brutus, arranged the murder of Julius Caesar on the Ides of March in 44. B.C. What we have from Julius Caesar is a memory of grand undertakings, and texts, like that in which he records the daily events of his early campaign of victory in Gaul, his bellum gallicum. The dry lively detail lives: All Gaul is divided into three parts, one of which the Belgae inhabit, the Aquitani another, those who in their own language are called Celts, in our Gauls, the third. All these differ from each other in language, customs and laws.

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Topic 26 Sallust (86 B.C.-34 B.C.) Sallust, the first fully stylish and individual historian of ancient Rome, was, as would be expected, also both a politician—in his time serving both as quaestor and as tribune of the people—and a man of wealth, of indeed vast wealth, which grew incrementally after he had abused the treasury assigned him during his lucrative governorship of Africa. Sallust was born in Samnite country, the provinces, in the town of Amiternum. His family was of rural stock, and Sallust himself was throughout his life a foe of the old aristocracy. Well educated, comfortable in his inheritance, he soon found himself caught up in the civil struggles of mid-first century Rome, and attached himself closely to Julius Caesar, who favored Sallust with important political appointments. The life experiences Sallust underwent, in the Civil Wars of his time and then in the chaos that followed on Caesar’s death, qualified him for the sharp eyed writing of history which he began to take seriously in the last two decades of his life. (A wastrel in his youth, he sobered up with age, and in his writings displays a thorough contempt for the moral corruption of his time.) He has left us fragments of his Histories, but quite full texts of his specific history of the Catilinarian Conspiracy and of the Jugurthine Wars, respectively. In those works he writes not only with critical hindsight but in a kind of Latin we now wonder at, for its rare constructions and equally rare word choices. We touch the fastidious Sallust whose considerable wealth was largely disbursed in the building of superb gardens, which he filled with unfamiliar African flora. Sallust opens his history, The Conspiracy of Catiline, with the following thoughts: It becomes all men, who desire to excel other animals, to strive, to the utmost of their power, not to pass through life in obscurity, like the beasts of the field, which nature has formed groveling and subservient to appetite. All our power is situate in the mind and in the body. Of the mind we rather employ the government; of the body, the service. The one is common to us with the gods; the other with the brutes.

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Topic 27 Livy (59 B.C.-18 A.D.) Livy was born and raised in the north of Italy, near the city of Padua, a region traditionally conservative, and accustomed to praise of Old Roman Values. To that viewpoint Livy remained faithful throughout his life, though by the 30’s B.C., when he moved semi-permanently to Rome, he was exposed to the intense new world forming around him, and was in fact a close friend, and distant relative, of the Emperor to be, Augustus. Though Livy’s one surviving work, a History of Rome From the Founding of the City (753 B.C.), became a popular text, and indeed a touchstone for his compatriots, as they formulated their own history for themselves, Livy remained in favor with the new imperial culture, the tendencies of which unmistakably moved away from the ‘old simplicity’ and ‘staunch rural values’ which Livy admired in the early centuries of his culture. The history Livy constructs was by his time part of ancient oral tradition, as well as of written histories by predecessors whose works are now lost. His history opens with the founding of the city of Rome by Aeneas—the same narrative as Virgil’s—and is left to us in three main sections, devoted, respectively, to the origins of Roman culture, various consulships in the sixth century B.C., and then incidents in the political history of Livy’s own time. Origin tales are central to Livy’s History, which begins credently with the tale of Aeneas’ founding, the same launch point Virgil employed. There follows a sequence of generations, several hundred years, in which peace dominates, the new nation flourishes; but then, as with the struggle of Cain and Abel, conflict comes in, needed to generate the birth pangs of the new world. The struggle pits two brothers, both candidates for the kingship, and turns violent when the younger flouts the rule of seniority, and sets off a train of consequences—it’s an intricate read, here—which eventuates in the rape of a Vestal Virgin, whose twin offspring barely escape the homicidal plans of the wronged king. The twin infants, as we all know, find themselves on the river bank ready to be washed away, when a she-wolf appears, on her way for a drink of the river, gives teat to the babes, saves their lives, and readies Romulus and Remus to be the legislative founders of the Roman State.

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ARCHITECTURE Topic 28 Vitruvius (80 B.C.-15 B.C.) Vitruvius was a Roman author, architect, engineer, and mechanical inventor, whose influence on the technical achievements of the Roman Empire was considerable; not precisely because of his own inventions—though he participated in many—but because he compiled, in his ten book volume De Architectura, a record of the state of technical knowledge at his time in Rome. In doing so he built from his own extensive experience as a practitioner, for he had gotten on the job training in the service of Julius Caesar, as a ballista, the third class of armed praefectus fabrum—master of military equipment—and had seen action on the front in Hispania, which iprepared him for advanced skill in making siege machineries, an important element in the Roman warfare of the time. Vitruvius, famed for us as architect, in fact exercised many related skills, that the Romans considered essential to the architect’s craft: the making of hoists, cranes, water clocks, water mills, pulleys, hypocausts, sundials, aqueducts. The philosophical viewpoint of De Architectura was that there are three essential components to a properly constructed building: firmitas (solidity), utilitas (functionality), and venustas (beauty). (These are, by the way, traits we find in the vast panoply of Roman architectural structures.) Underneath this prescription lay the belief that art imitates nature, and that the chief traits of achieved architecture depend on their closeness to nature. Leonardo da Vinci helps us to understand what Vitruvius meant by his doctrine, for Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man, drawn around 1490, depicts a standing nude man—in two superimposed stances—inscribed in both a circle and a sphere, indicators of Vitruvius’ profound insight into the depth of relation between geometrical and natural form. It follows, therefore, that architects who have aimed at acquiring manual skill without scholarship have never been able to reach a position of authority to correspond to their pains, while those who relied only upon theories and scholarship were obviously hunting the shadow, not the substance. But those who have a thorough knowledge of both, like men armed at all points, have the sooner attained their object and carried authority with them.

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Period Two: The Period of the Pax Romana (1st and 2d centuries A.D.) EPIC Topic 29 Statius (45 A.D.-96 A.D.) We enter the second section of our entries, beginning with epic, as though that genre was still the beacon founder of a culture. However with Statius, as was not the case with Virgil, we have moved (and quite quickly) into a cultural climate where artifice rather than historical imperatives has come to empower the epic. Statius is a poet’s poet, writing in a variety of learned meters, including the dactylic hexameter and the meters of the Greek lyric, and from early on in life an addict of high culture. Statius was born into a poetry-creating family, in which, although they were not wealthy, emphasis was laid on the availability of otium, leisure, for the creation of a good life. Statius’ father was an ambitious and well known reciter of his poetry, at the annual poetry festivals around Naples, and Statius took the same direction. Doubtless taking pages from the family’s literary ambitions, Statius moved to Rome in 90 A.D., and busied himself acquiring the good graces of the Emperor Domitian. To the Emperor, and his circle, Statius dedicated many of the complimentary poems that appear in Statius’ Silvae, his lyrics of celebration—from which we excerpt below. Statius was best known, both in his own time and during the Middle Ages, for his Thebaid, a lengthy dactylic epic in which he narrates the multiple (often obscurely erudite) tales concerning the struggles of Eteocles and Polyneices, the two sons of Oedipus. The Emperor Domitian’s Seventeenth Consulship Caesar’s purple adds one, joyously, to those sixteen entries In the calendar: Germanicus sees in a memorable new-year, Rising with the new day, and with the stars in their grandeur, Shining more brightly than they, and greater than the dawn. Judges of Latium exult; rejoice you magistrates; let Rome Sweep the sky more proudly with her seven hills; above all Let the Palatine, let Evander’s summit triumph over the rest. The lictors newly-appointed enter the Palace, that twelve-fold Honour of the Consulship returns. The Senate, their prayers Heard, delight in having overcome Caesar’s modest reluctance.

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Topic 30 Gaius Flaccus (?- d. 90A.D.) Gaius Flaccus is thought to have been born in Setia, in Latium, though he is barely mentioned by his contemporaries; the only direct reference is from the orator Quintilian, who writes with sadness of the death of this epic poet. We know that Flaccus was of prominent family, and presumably well to do, because he was a member of the Fifteen who were in charge of the Sibylline Books in Rome—a position of distinction. Flaccus is known to us at all for an epic length poem, in eight books and in dactylic hexameters. This poem, the Argonatica, appears to have been based on, and in places directly copied from, the famous Greek epic of Apollonius Rhodios, which is an account of Jason’s journey to Colchis, to recover the Golden Fleece, and to bring it, and incidentally his bride Medea, back to Greece. Flaccus’ poem, which has come down to us in a badly damaged manuscript, and is generally thought derivative on Apollonios, was dedicated to the Emperor Vespasian, as he set off on an expedition of conquest to Britain. Like Jason, the parallel ran, Vespasian was opening the seas to new victory and new discoveries. My song is of the straits first navigated by the mighty sons of gods, of the prophetic ship that dared to seek the shores of Scythian Phasis, that burst unswerving through the clashing rocks, to slink at length to rest in the starry firmament. Phoebus, be thou my guide, if there stands in a pure home the tripod that shares the secrets of the Cymaean prophetess, if the green laurel lies on a worthy brow. And thou too, that didst win still greater glory for opening up the sea, after the Caledonian ocean had borne thy sails,1the ocean that of yore would not brook the Phrygian Iuli, do thou, holy sire, raise me above the nations and the cloud-wrapped earth, and be favourable unto me as I hymn the wondrous deeds of old time heroes.

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Topic 31 Silius Italicus (28 A.D.-103 A.D.) Silius Italicus was born near Padua, we believe, and must have been of a noteworthy family, for his future life was to make him a regular acquaintance of Emperors and the imperial court. By the end of his long life Silius had been an effective forensic orator—a formidable figure in the courts of law—a Roman consul, and a prolific epic poet, author of the longest known work of Latin poetry, the Punica. In that epic poem, which is based on the Second Punic War between Rome and Carthage, Silius is working out his intense devotion to his two models of Roman culture, Virgil and Cicero. (He writes in Virgilian hexameters, and interweaves his narrative at many points with that of the Aeneid, as well as with Homer’s epics.) The tale takes off from the anger of Juno against Aeneas, who in Virgil’s poem abandoned Juno’s favorite, Dido, in her homeland of Carthage. That infidelity, as Juno saw it, the justified revenge Carthage would wish to take, through Hannibal, on the faithless Romans! The huge work that Silius wove around this theme was, it appears, the fruit of his retirement, during the last ten years of his life. His previous existence, as active public figure, supporter of Nero, close friend of the Emperor Vitellius, proconsul of Asia, whetted his typically Roman appetite for a peaceful retirement in the country. He brought that retirement to a self-willed end, with a peaceful and uncomplaining suicide—no unusual move for a stalwart Roman eager to control the last stages of his life. When Dido long ago fled across the sea from the land of Pygmalion, leaving behind her the realm polluted by her brother's guilt, she landed on the destined shore of Libya. There she bought land for a price and founded a new city, where she was permitted to lay strips of a bull's hide round the strand. Here — so remote antiquity believed — Juno elected to found for the exiles a nation to last for ever, preferring it to Argos, and to Mycenae, the city of Agamemnon and her chosen dwelling-place.

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POETRY AND SATIRE Topic 32 The importance of satire in Roman literature Satire, said the Roman orator Quintilian, is the one genre the Romans can claim as their own. He had something there. For the Greeks—with the exception of the comic genius Aristophanes, a mime writer like Herondas, and perhaps in places a Hellenistic playwright like Menander—tragedy, riotous comedy, epic all came naturally, but, perhaps for some distinctive twist to Greek culture, the satire-breeding urban culture was not present. To the Romans, on the other hand, satire came naturally. Already in the second century B.C. Roman society had been suitably mocked by Lucilius, a model for Juvenal, while Horace (65 B.C.-8 B.C.), a close contemporary of Livy, had provided a more recent model, as had Petronius’ Stoic contemporary, Persius (34 A.D.-62 A.D.). Whether this state of affairs had to do with the nature of Roman society is open to discussion. Certainly from the first century B.C. Roman society was tense with interactions, some political and some social, which brought intellectuals, writers, and the politically ambitious all together in the same cauldron of human energies. That is the kind of high voltage social environment in which the satirist, observing and scourging at the same time, can often find a place for his craft. It should be said from the start that these Roman satirists are all different from one another, and that the genre in which they write is looser than it might seem. Lucilius, for instance, was a dark Stoic, imbued with severe moral precepts, and brought a heavy hammer to bear on the foibles of his society, while Horace, his contemporary, was far mellower, though at all times a criticus, and made sure that his ire was foremost art. The cases of Petronius and Juvenal are even harder to distinguish. There is no doubt that, plain on the face of their texts, both writers deal with life as it is, the common people, even the bas fonds and gross levels of social existence. This latter proclivity is especially marked in Petronius, who, while shocked at the wretched treatment of such menials as slaves and domestic servants, is in his camp, Fellini mode totally intrigued by the outrageous goings on in ‘high society.’ (It is as though Trimalcho is a slightly concealed portrait of Nero, though even Trimalchio is not worse than good naturedly degenerate; concerned, after all, with the will in which he is going to decree the freedom of all his slaves.)

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Topic 33 Persius (34 A.D.-62 A.D.) Persius, like many of the finest Roman satirists, was born into a period of history which seems to beg for the satiric and comic/ tragic assaults it received. To be Persius was to live at the time of Nero, Caligula, and courts of equally depraved and profligate on hangers; corruption and bestiality make good reading today, but cannot have inspired much social confidence in their time. In his own way Persius, who remains to us in a slim volume of only seven hundred lines, took many subtle bites out of the flesh of his corrupt time. In the passage at the end of this entry, he flays an ill prepared candidate for high political power. Persius was born in the Etruscan community of Volterra of an equestrian family. Having lost both his father and stepfather, at an early age, he moved to Rome at the age of 12, with few credentials except for a tragedy which he had written in his childhood. There he came to know a number of up and coming poets, of whom Lucan is best known to us today, and in reading to discover his affiliation and admiration for Lucilius, whom we presented above. Persius was a subtle poet (see below) and person—known for ‘girlish modesty and personal beauty’; and for great and lasting affection for his mother and aunt, to whom he left his considerable fortune. He died too young for us to see to what margins he would drive his sharp witted Muse. From Satire 4 ‘You’re handling affairs of state!’ (Imagine Socrates, the bearded Master, speaking, the one done in by that fatal gulp of hemlock) ‘On what basis, then? Tell me that, O ward of great Pericles! Wisdom, I suppose, and knowledge of the world, have come To you before your need to shave, and you know what ought To be said or not said. So when the rabble seethes with anger, It’s your spirit will be roused, to still the fevered crowd with An imperious hand. And what will you say to them? ‘Citizens,’ I’d imagine, ‘this is not right, that’s wrong, something else is Yet more correct.’

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Topic 34 Martial (40 A.D.-102 A.D.) Martial was born in Hispania, the westernmost Roman province, a region from which a number of distinguished Roman writers—Seneca, Quintilian, Lucan—hailed, and a region which, in his own extensive writing life in the city of Rome, Martial often praised for its simplicity and honesty. (The present literary trope, romantic longing for the more rural life outside, even far from, Rome, runs throughout Latin literature. In Horace the trope becomes an organizing theme for a whole body of poetry. But the fact is that Roman writers—like New Yorkers--characteristically pine for the capital when they are removed from it. Ovid, as we will see soon, almost died. Martial made several sallies away from Rome, before leaving it permanently, and each time was firmly pulled back toward the City.) He prided himself on his masculine hair—‘stiff Hispanian hair’ which he traced to his Spanish origins, and contrasted to the effeminate locks of the Greeks—and referred often to the pleasures of hunting and fishing, which he had enjoyed in his youth, and took to represent a masculine and simple life. But Martial remained an urban epigrammatist for most of his life—perhaps, we have to guess, until the money he got from patrons (both genders) began to dry up. (It was not that he was a leech, but that for much of his writing life he was an honest beneficiary of the regularly accepted patron-artist relationship, which produced so much valuable support for the arts in Rome. Martial left a huge volume of epigrams, 1561 in mumber, of which 125 are elegiac couplets. Three examples follow:

Fabullus' wife Bassa frequently totes A friend's baby, on which she loudly dotes. Why does she take on this childcare duty? It explains farts that are somewhat fruity. "Tongilianus, you paid two hundred for your house; An accident much common in this city destroyed it. You collected ten times more. Doesn't it seem, I pray, That you set fire to your own house, Tongilianus?"

With your giant nose and cock I bet you can with ease When you get excited check the end for cheese.

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Topic 35 Juvenal (55 A. D. -138 A.D.) As with many of the authors we have met in Ancient Rome, little is known about Juvenal. Born in the second half of the first century A.D., he lives out his life in a settling, and gradually less turbulent, phase of the imperial experience. He was born in Aquinum, scion of a wealthy freedman, studied in Rome as a pupil of the eminent orator Quintilian, and left us sixteen substantial dactylic hexameter satires. In a typical satire Juvenal talks to a friend who is moving out of the city to a removed and quiet spot along the coast south of Rome. And why is the friend making this move? He is sick of Rome. Juvenal embraces the chance to criticize the metropolis, in characterizing his friend’s view. Rome is overcrowded and noisy, the aristocrats are fake and pretentious, the streets are full of the seriously poor. Morals are shot and piety to family or gods is weak. Juvenal takes pleasure in detailing each of these weaknesses. He dwells, for example, on the shoddy construction of buildings, which are doomed to rapid collapse, on the bribes that are required in order to get contracts, on the sloppy indifference of the legal system. The passage that follows suggests the subtlety of the author’s insight into the corruption that has befallen the city. In this passage the narrator’s friend speaks, throwing up his hands before the embedded corruption of his world. In order to succeed, in the literary world, one has to kiss ass, lie about the merits of so and so’s work. One must entice others with prophecies of the impending death—of those whose wills will devolve on them. One must collude in fraudulent schemes, in order to get on the governor’s staff: What can I do at Rome? I cannot lie; if a book is bad, I cannot praise it, and beg for a copy; I am ignorant of the movements of the stars; I cannot, and will not, promise to a man his father's death; I have never examined the entrails of a frog; I must leave it to others to carry to a bride the presents and messages of a paramour. No man will get my help in robbery, and therefore no governor will take me on his staff: I am treated as a maimed and useless trunk that has lost the power of its hands. What man wins favour nowadays unless he be an accomplice--one whose soul seethes and burns with secrets that must never be disclosed? The popularity of these works of Juvenal is easy to understand. We ar all willing to be found simply venial, to be exposed to critical view in those habits that make us part of the picture of humanity; we all love to be teased for our humanity, but we all hate to be scorned. That is the rough and tumble distinction Juvenal maintains with genius.

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Topic 36 Lucan (39 A.D.-65 A.D.) Young and still brilliant, Lucan died at the age of twenty five. He had been born in Cordova, Spain, of a distinguished and wealthy family. He was the grandson of the Elder Seneca, and grew up under the tutelage of Seneca the Younger. Lucan’s family saw to a good education for him, which enabled him to put in a traditional period of study in Athens, where he became immersed in Greek and in Stoic philosophy. Lucan’s own advancement on the Roman scene derived especially from his friendship with the Emperor Nero. That friendship, which was not to last that long, was close enough to gain Lucan a position as quaestor, and an appointment to the augurate—one of the high religious roles in the city. The friendship however shattered, for reasons we don’t fully understand—possibly for an offensive poem Lucan wrote about the Emperor—and was to spoil even further, when Lucan was caught in what was considered treasonous behavior toward the Emperor, in the so-called conspiracy of Piso. Lucan was at the time only twenty five, but he was condemned to commit suicide, which he did by slitting the veins of his arm. He is known to us today chiefly for his remarkable epic poem, The Pharsalia, in which he chronicled the Civil War as it played out between Julius Caesar and Pompey. Of war I sing, war worse than civil, waged over the plains of Emathia, and of legality conferred on crime ; I tell how an imperial people turned their victorious right hands against their own vitals ; how kindred fought against kindred ; how, when the compact of tyranny was shattered, all the forces of the shaken world contended to make mankind guilty; how standards confronted hostile standards, eagles were matched against each other, and pilum threatened pilum. What madness was this, my countrymen, what fierce orgy of slaughter ? While the ghost of Crassus still wandered unavenged, and it was your duty to rob proud Babylon of her trophies over Italy, did you choose to give to hated nations the spectacle of Roman bloodshed, and to wage wars that could win no triumphs ? Ah ! with that blood shed by Roman hands how much of earth and sea might have been bought — where the sun rises and where night hides.

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Topic 37 Petronius (27 A.D.-65 A.D.) Little is known of the life of Petronius. He came, apparently, of a wealthy family, and moved naturally into the intense life of metropolitan Rome. We may know him best for a raucous pre-novel, the Satyricon, but must realize that he also did responsible work as a citizen, serving as Governor of the Province of Bithynia in 62 A.D., and after that as Consul, or First Magistrate, of Rome. These posts, however, led ‘yet higher’ to the inner circle of Nero’s court, and from there to appointment as Nero’s arbiter elegantiae, or court judge of fashion. After having achieved significant influence over the Emperor, Petronius inevitably found himself the object of jealousy. Tigellinus, commander of Nero’s public guard, accused Petronius of conspiring to kill the Emperor, whereupon Petronius was arrested, in 65 A.D. Before the Emperor had returned from campaign, Petronius, who was to the max a hedonist and not a masochist, proceeded to commit suicide. He cut his veins, which bled only feebly, so that he temporarily postponed his death, while chatting with his friends, listening to pop music, and reclining. Only after it had become evident that he needed help in dispatching himself, did his companions essentially suffocate him with steam from his bath. We had had enough of these novelties and started to enter the dining-room when a slave, detailed to this duty, cried out, "Right foot first." Naturally, we were afraid that some of us might break some rule of conduct and cross the threshold the wrong way; nevertheless, we started out, stepping off together with the right foot, when all of a sudden, a slave who had been stripped, threw himself at our feet, and commenced begging us to save him from punishment, as it was no serious offense for which he was in jeopardy; the steward's clothing had been stolen from him in the baths, and the whole value could scarcely amount to ten sesterces. So we drew back our right feet and intervened with the steward, who was counting gold pieces in the hall, begging him to remit the slave's punishment. Putting a haughty face on the matter, "It's not the loss I mind so much," he said, "as it is the carelessness of this worthless rascal. He lost my dinner clothes…”

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Topic 38 Apuleius (125 A.D. -180 A.D.) Apuleius was a Numidian Berber born and raised close to Carthage in North Africa. Born into a wealthy family, he received a substantial inheritance—which he was to squander while still young—which enabled him to spend the customary period in Athens, studying Greek philosophy (Platonism) and from there to undertake extensive travels, in Italy, Asia Minor and Egypt. It is known that in the course of these travels he investigated and joined certain mystery cults. (He was eventually to become a priest of the cult of Aesculapius, the patron deity of healing, and the practice of magic, as we know from his surviving work, became a central experience for his adult life.) Before returning to his North African home environment he practiced law in Rome, where he proved brilliant and effective—shall we say a witty and inventive defence lawyer? He was popular for his public speeches. The text of Apuleius, for which he is best known, is the Metamorphoses (or The Golden Ass), which is considered the first true novel of ancient literature. This novel is more like a picaresque tale, as we might put it today, but it has a prose narrative verve, and a complex sardonic plot, which distinguish it even from works like Petronius’. (The excerpt below will indicate a farcical detail which is told in the fashion we might expect from Renaissance popular street fiction.) This Hippias, of whom I speak, once came to Pisa during the Olympian games arrayed in raiment that was as remarkable to the eye as it was wonderful in its workmanship. For he had purchased nothing of what he wore: it was all the work of his own hands, the clothes in which he was clad, the shoes wherewith he was shod, and the jewels that made him conspicuous. Next his skin he wore an undershirt of triple weft and the finest texture, double dyed with purple. He had woven it for himself in his own house with his own hands. He had for girdle a belt, broidered in Babylonian fashion with many varied colours. In this also no man else had helped him. For outer garment he had a white cloak cast about his shoulders; this cloak also is known to have been the work of his own hands.

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NATURAL HISTORY, ARCHITECTURE AND AGRICULTURE Topic 39 Pomponius Mela (?-d. 45 A.D.) We know very little about the life of Pomponius, except that he was (probably) born in what is today Algeciras, in Spain. There remains from this influential author only one work, De situ orbii, On the situation of the earth, a text of barely one hundred pages, divided into three separate books. This work is the earliest formal treatise of geography known to us from Roman literature, and is noteworthy chiefly for that reason; yet it needs to be stated, because our survey here is of works of Roman literature, that the prose of Pomponius sets a rare standard for artistic concision; and so we include this man’s contribution, here, as we did that of Gaius Solinus, also a fine imaginative mind, and one that composed his history of Roman curiosities in hexameter verse. The text itself refers to an expedition of the Emperor Claudius to Britain, in 43 A.D.—our only marker for dating the work of Pomponius—and includes both a map of the known world, as Pomponius imagined it from nautical tales, and a description of what for him was the known world. His map is surprisingly accurate, when it comes to the Mediterranean world, and yet his account of Asia or the Baltic regions reflects how little evidence he had to go by. His account divides the world into five zones, of which only two are habitable. He is convinced, as were many in his time, that there was another breed of humans dwelling farther south on our planet, cut off from the Mediterranean world by the savage heat that divided the globe. But, beyond the early philosophers and Homer, who said that the the whole world was surrounded by ocean, there is the testimony of Cornelius Nepos, who, as a more recent witness, is thus more reliable. On this subject, Nepos furnishes the account of Q. Metellus Celer, attributing to the latter the following report: when Celer was proconsul in Gaul, he was given by the king of the Boii some Indians as a gift. And upon trying to establish whence they had arrived in those parts, they answered that they had been driven by the force of tempests from Indian waters, and having crossed the intervening districts they had finally come to the shores of Germany…

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Topic 40 Columella (4 A.D.-70 A.D.) Columella was born in Cadiz, Spain, and went into a career in the army. (We know virtually nothing about his early life.) He served as a tribune in Syria (35 A.D.) and then, after retiring from that role and from his army career, he began to devote himself to farming and to extensive writing about farming. (That writing, enshrined in De Re Rustica, consists of twelve books on diverse agricultural topics, and is almost completely preserved, due to a lucky Renaissance monastery find.) Columella himself had several of his own extensive farms in Italy, on which he taught and observed the best agricultural practices of his time. Nor was he without predecessors or teachers in this agricultural endeavor. He has many sources, both Latin and Greek, though none of them are preserved except in his references to them. His most influential personal teacher was a distinguished agriculturalist, what Columella calls ‘a clever man and an exceptional farmer.’ This influential relative it was who taught Columella the arts of cross breeding. Columella’s uncle performed such experiments as crossing sheep with wild African rams brought into Italy to perform in the gladiatorial games. Columella’s extensive study is intended to be of practical value to the Roman farmer, and accordingly deals with all the relevant topics: soils, viticulture, fruits, olive trees, varieties of animals and fish, agricultural calendars, and household management issues. The following excerpt suggests the tone: If no cereal is sown amongst the dwarf trees, spaces of twenty feet are left on either side ; but if one indulges in crops, forty feet are left on one side and twenty on the other. In all other respects operations are carried out on the same principle as in an Italian plantation, namely, that the vines are planted in long holes, that they may be looked after with the same care, and trained along the boughs of the trees, and the young cross-branches joined together every year from the nearest trees and the old ones cut off. If one cross-branch does not reach to another, it should be connected by a rod running between them. When later the fruit bows the vine down with its weight, it should be supported by props put underneath it.

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Topic 41 Pliny the Elder (23 A.D.-79 A.D.) Pliny the Elder was born in Como, in the north of Italy, of a prosperous equestrian family, and led a busy life of military duties, law court work in Rome, and, at the more peaceful later stages of his life, immense encyclopedic effort—the text of his Natural History, from which we draw an excerpt at the end of this entry. It appears that this immense work, which was far the most compendious encyclopedia of classical learning, and which remained the standard reference throughout the Middle Ages, comprised 160 volumes (that is, papyrus scroll volumes); we have to be astounded by the breadth of topics taken up there—all forms of plant and animal life known to the Romans, military and social history, astronomy and astrology, religious protocol, analyses of ancient philosophers and their schools. It can hardly surprise us, as we enter this forest of knowledge, to learn that Pliny was unmarried and without children. Or, on the other side of the coin, that he was also a public spirited man, a patriotic Roman known for founding a school and a library—out of his own very considerable wealth. This spirit of generosity, in fact, led to Pliny’s death. He died while attempting to make a sea rescue of a friend who had been trapped in the burning ash from the eruption of Vesuvius that obliterated Pompeii and Herculaneum. I have included in thirty-six books 20,000 topics, all worthy of attention, (for, as Domitius Piso says, we ought to make not merely books, but valuable collections,) gained by the perusal of about 2000 volumes, of which a few only are in the hands of the studious, on account of the obscurity of the subjects, procured by the careful perusal of 100 select authors; and to these I have made considerable additions of things, which were either not known to my predecessors, or which have been lately discovered. Nor can I doubt but that there still remain many things which I have omitted; for I am a mere mortal, and one that has many occupations.

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Topic 42 Pliny the Younger (61 A.D.-112 A.D.) Pliny the Younger was the nephew of Pliny the Elder, so called, and was essentially raised by his uncle, from whom the younger Pliny inherited his major estate. Pliny the Younger was himself the son of a member of the equites class, and born into privileged circumstances in Como, in North Italy. He was tutored at home, before being sent to Rome for his formal education. In Rome he learned Rhetoric at Quintilian’s school, and from that base moved on into legal practice and the continuation of his progress through the cursus homorum. (He commenced that canonical upward progression, through public offices, at an exceptionally early age, eighteen, when he was appointed to the rank of praetor and then of quaestor.) It should be noted that Pliny maintained both his public offices, and his legal career, and survived a number of volatile imperial changes, without being drawn into the rough and tumble of politics. At the summit of his political role he was appointed both the pre praetor of the province of Bithynia, and the chief Augur of Rome, the highest public religious position in the City. Pliny was a voluminous letter writer, and from the huge trove of his epistles we know much about the daily life of first century Rome, as well as about Emperors—especially Trajan--and matters of state, like the prosecution of the Christians during Pliny’s governorship in the province of Bithynia. (Noteworthy, too, that he was active in the prosecution of other governors, caught in corruption.) The following excerpt is from a letter on the Christians, to the Emperor: In the meanwhile, the method I have observed towards those who have been denounced to me as Christians is this: I interrogated them whether they were Christians; if they confessed it I repeated the question twice again, adding the threat of capital punishment; if they still persevered, I ordered them to be executed. For whatever the nature of their creed might be, I could at least feel no doubt that contumacy and inflexible obstinacy deserved chastisement. There were others possessed of the same folly; but because they were Roman citizens, I signed an order for them to be transferred to Rome.

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Topic 43 Frontinus (40 A.D.-103 A.D.) Frontinus was one of the most distinguished aristocrats of first century Rome. He occupied, as did most of the intellectuals we profile in these entries, a variety of public offices in Rome. He was made praetor in 70, then governor of Britain—a significant appointment for it was not only the scene of major military conquests but it was there that Frontinus became aware of the intricacies of military fortification, and water supply management, until finally, at the apex of his career, he was made the Water Commissioner of Rome (96 A.D.). In that position he confirmed his growing reputation as engineer, architect, city planner, and high level administrator. (He was also, at the same time, appointed head of the College of Augurs. As water commissioner Frontinus set about writing his seminal study De Aqueductu, to which we are indebted for the much that we know about the outstandingly well developed water system of Rome. We know that Frontinus was not only a consummate architect, of the water system that supplied Rome, but that he was a master of mapping the city’s pipelines, of foolproofing the Roman water supply so that it couldn’t easily be pirated, and of dividing the waters that entered Rome, via aqueducts, into drinking quality water, baths and fountain level purity, and finally into conduits leading to irrigation services for the city. Much of the famed high quality of urban living, in Rome, can be attributed to the genius of Frontinus. It has seemed to me not inappropriate to include also a statement of the lengths of the channels of the several aqueducts, according to the kinds of construction. For since the chief function of this office of water-commissioner lies in their upkeep, the man in charge of them ought to know which of them demand the heavier outlay. My zeal was not satisfied with submitting details to examination; I also had plans made of the aqueducts, on which it is shown where there are valleys and how great these are; where rivers are crossed; and where conduits laid on hillsides demand more particular constant care for their maintenance and repair. By this provision, one reaps the advantage of being able to have the works before one's eyes, so to speak, at a moment's notice, and to consider them as though standing by their side.

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PHILOSOPHY Topic 44 Marcus Aurelius (121 A.D- 180 A.D.; Emperor 161 A.D. -180 A.D.) Marcus Aurelius was born in Ucubi, south east of Cordoba, Spain, to a family of wealth. His great grandfather had been a Senator, while Marcus’ mother had inherited wealth from her father. Following the expectations of his class and educational aspirations, Marcus moved to Rome, where he spent his formative youth years in a upscale neighborhood, the Caelian Hill. In Rome Marcus was home-schooled, as were all young men of his class and expectation. Attracted by the ideal of the ‘philosopher,’ he went through a stage of dressing in dark rough cloaks, and sleeping on the ground—occupational traits of one kind of ‘ancient philosopher’—until falling under the influence of Fronto, whom the Emperor Hadrian appointed tutor to Marcus Aurelius, and who—himself a wealthy and independent scholar---remained a prudent and affectionate guide to Marcus Aurelius throughout his life. Marcus was studious as well as active, and seemed destined for a superior role in practical political administration. In 138 A.D. the Emperor Hadrian chose Antoninus Pius to succeed him—Hadrian being morbidly concerned with the decline in his health. As part of the succession deal, Hadrian stipulated that Antoninus should adopt Marcus Aurelius as his son. Pursuant to that deal Antoninus, taken as all were by the abilities of Marcus Aurelius, passed a law permitting his ‘son’ to assume the (very important) role of quaestor, before the age of twenty-four; and from there on the Emperor made all the necessary maneuvers required to prep Marcus as his successor. In 161 the death of Antoninus Pius opened the way for (a thoroughly reluctant) Marcus Aurelius, to become the last of the Antonine Emperors. Marcus’ philosophy is embedded in a single book, which we call The Meditations, and which is a living masterpiece of Stoic—and broadly human—wisdom. In the follow praise of his father, Marcus describes himself: …whensoever any business upon some necessary occasion was to be put off and omitted before it could be ended, he was ever found, when he went back to the matter again, the same man that he was before. He was accurate in examination of things and in consultations, and patient in the hearing of others. He would not hastily give over a search into any matter, as one easy to be satisfied with sudden notions and apprehensions.

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Topic 45 Aulus Gellius (125 A.D.-180 A.D. Aulus Gellius was born into the midst of the Pax Romana, well after the explosive civil conflicts of the first century B.C., when discord finally forced imperial autocracy on Rome, and after the first century A.D., during which enormous civic energy went into imperial excesses and extravagance, and the greatest creative period of classical Roman arts and letters reached and passed its peak. Which is to say that the time for collectors of knowledge and reflection onto the past was approaching the still active but no longer peaking culture of Rome. Enter Aulus Gellius. Very little is known about the life of Aulus Gellius, the author, grammarian, and philosopher. He was evidently born in Rome, of a good family—quite possibly of African origin—and sent to Athens where he studied rhetoric and philosophy. At the time he seems to have traveled considerably through Greece, before returning to Rome. From his writings, which were essentially jottings, or a commonplace book in which he remarked on the events of the day and the curiosities of Roman culture, we have today some twenty books gathered under the title of the Attic Nights—so called, apparently, from their origin in a chilly Athenian winter, when Aulus Gellius began his lifetime practice of jotting down his world. The ancients were remarkably superstitious with respect to their mode of building cities, and had a number of preposterous ceremonies. This of the pomarium may be reckoned among them. When a city was built, a certain space of ground was left both within and without the walls, upon which it was deemed impious to erect any edifices ; indeed it was considered as holy ground. The pomarium of Rome was increased with the city and the empire, and it seems a little singular, that Julius Caesar alone should not avail himself of the privilege which his conquests gave him ef contributing to its enlargement.

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ORATORY Topic 46 Quintilian (35 A.D.-100 A.D.) About Quintilian’s life we know little. He was born in Calagurris, Hispania, into a prosperous provincial family. His father, who was highly educated, sent his son to Rome for his education. There Quintilian learned Greek and improved his Latin, and fell under the spell of an influential mentor, Domitius Afer, who led him in the direction of Rhetoric, the art of oratory—and the natural bridge into both politics and the law. Domitius, an ardent advocate of Cicero’s rhetoric, impressed Quintilian with a taste for chaste and honed prose—in contrast with the flamboyant rhetorical style of Seneca—whom we have also met in these entries as a dramatist and a philosopher. For a while Quintilian remained in Rome, practicing law, then returned to Spain, then returned to Rome, where he continued to maintain a useful—if always dangerous—relationship with the Emperor of the day, Nero, Domitian, Galba. While in Rome Quintilian benefitted from considerable imperial financial support, sufficient to enable him to open a school. (Among his pupils were Pliny the Younger and, probably, the historian Tacitus.) Then, when the Emperor Galba was overthrown, and in the midst of the brief dangerous period of chaos which marked the imperial transition moment, Quintilian opened yet another School of Rhetoric, where he was able to exercise his now widespread renown in Rome. It was in his School teachings, and in the famed Institutes of Oratory, which he wrote in the last years of his life, that Quintilian developed his view of rhetoric in its richest form. He emphasized that the rhetorician or orator should be a vir bonus, dicendi peritus—a good man, skilled at speaking—and that this skilled man should be capable of both invention and imagination. Throughout the Institutes the stress is on the education of the rhetorician to be, who will be a public servant, and a man of good will, as well as a talented user of language. For I cannot admit that the principles of moral and honorable conduct are, as some have thought, to be left to the philosophers; since the man who can duly sustain his character as a citizen, who is qualified for the management of public and private affairs, and who can govern communities by his counsels, settle them by means of laws, and improve them by judicial enactments, can certainly be nothing else but an orator.

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Topic 47 Marcus Fronto (100 A.D.-170 A.D.) Fronto was a Roman born in Cirta in Numidia, ‘a Libyan of the Libyan Nomads,’ as he calls himself. He was educated first in Carthage, then in Rome, under the rulership of the Emperor Hadrian. His life reads like a contemporary success-story, for he was from early on popular as a distinguished lawyer, grammarian, and rhetorician. (Though his speeches have been totally lost he was in his time considered as skilled as Cicero and Cato the Elder, as a public speaker.) He had some exposure to the political arena, having been appointed consul in 142, but having had to resign after two months, due to poor health. In the course of his career he was a voluminous letter writer—an excerpt appears below—and orator, as well as grammarian with a vocation, to take Latin style back to the Ciceronian and pre-Ciceronian stage, getting away from the baroque expressiveness of a dramatist/philosopher like Seneca; and back to a purer Latin, studded with rare and unexpected words drawn from the earlier stages of the language. In the course of his public life Fronto amassed a huge fortune, which he spent on the construction of new buildings throughout the city of Rome, and on projects like purchasing and restoring the Gardens of the renowned Augustan literary patron Maecenas. I say nothing of Gaius Caesar, Cleopatra's keenest foe and afterwards paramour, nothing of Augustus, the husband of Livia. As regards Romulus himself the founder of this city, when he slew the leader of the enemy in a hand-to-hand combat and brought the Spolia Opima to Jupiter Feretrius, do you think he was content with half rations? Verily no hungry or ascetic man could have conceived the idea of carrying off grown-up maidens from a public festival. What? did not the aged Numa, most holy of men, pass his life putting sacred offerings and tithes to secular uses, and sacrificing bulls, sheep, and swine, he the dictator of festivals, the inaugurator of banquets, the promulgator of holidays.

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HISTORY Topic 48 Florus (74 A.D.-130 A.D.) Florus was a Roman historian, born in Africa. He lived in the time of Trajan and Hadrian—that little is known of his actual upbringing. He is known to us for having compiled a brief history of Rome, largely drawn from the texts of the historian Livy, which he entitled An Epitome of Roman History. This history covers the period from the foundation of the Roman Republic to the closing of the Temple of Janus by Augustus in 25 B.C. It is customary to describe this historical work as bombastic and superficial, but in fact the work is one of a genus of formulaic types of history which flourished in the Roman Empire. The work itself, which is a panegyric of the greatness of Rome, is divided into three parts, as though the history of Rome were a developing person: infancy, youth, manhood. Florus’s Epitome, interestingly enough, became a much used textbook in the Middle Ages, and was in use even into the nineteenth century. It is worth adding that Florus was also the author of a dialogue on the issue of whether Virgil was a poet or an orator. The founder of the city and empire was Romulus, the son of Mars and Rhea Sylvia. The priestess, when pregnant, confessed this fact of herself, nor did report, soon afterwards, testify a doubt of it, as, being thrown, with his brother Remus, into the river by order of Amulius, he could not be destroyed; for not only did the Tiber repress its stream, but a she-wolf, leaving her young, and following the children's cries, offered her teats to the infants, and acted towards them the part of a mother. Being found, in these circumstances, under a tree, the king's shepherd carried them into a cottage, and brought them up.

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Topic 49 Tacitus (56 A.D.-117 A.D.) Tacitus was born well into the imperial period of Rome—Augustus Caesar died in l7 A.D.—and in his most famous works, The Histories and The Annals he writes directly of his own time, specifically of the Imperial reigns of Tiberius (42 B.C.-37 A.D.), Claudius (10 B.C.-54 A.D.), and Nero (37 A.D.-68 A.D.). His own life brought him into contact with the major players on the political/imperial scene. Born in the provinces—probably in Gallia Narbonensis—Tacitus soon entered political life in Rome, where throughout his career life he was brilliantly active as a Senator/orator, a sought after lawyer in the increasingly litigious atmosphere of imperial Rome, and a provincial governor in the East, where he gained experience and great distinction. In other words, when it came to the dense historical material of the present, Tacitus had much personal awareness to bring to bear. While he proudly commented that he wrote his histories sine ira et studio, without anger or zeal, they nonetheless bear the marks of the hot fire of political action. There is no mistaking, in those works, a hatred of tyranny, and a surgical scorn for the kinds of voluptuous infighting which marked the struggles, among the successors of Augustus, to occupy the center of power in Rome. The unusual mixture of personal involvement with terse and observant style, a style both intense and withdrawn, forces our attention onto the way Tacitus went about informing himself, as an historian. (We have noted that Livy turned to earlier and anecdotal Roman historians, in constructing his history.) The answer is that Tacitus is both working from his personal experience, and from a consultation of contemporary documents, to which he devotes analytical attention (sine ira et studio.) Among his written sources were: the Acta, the official records of the actions of the Roman senate; copies of official speeches; copies of personal letters to which he had access; the acta diurnala populi romani, the official news of daily developments in Rome. In The Annals Tacitus plunges into the complexities of high level political struggle-- stakes involving love and power. The years following the death of Augustus presented a bewildering tangle of personal interrelations among ambitious, lustful, perverse, greedy competitors for imperial power, or for the voluminous perks that spilled on all sides of the royal throne. Tacitus is at his best describing such events.

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Topic 50 Suetonius (69 A.D.—122 A.D.) Suetonius was born in Italy into a well to do family of equestrian rank. He was educated in the newly formed schools of Rhetoric, in Rome, and through such training became a close friend of Pliny the Younger, and of other urban Roman intellectuals, as well as members of the Imperial court. He served on Pliny’s staff in Bithynia, and became acquainted with both the Emperors Trajan and Hadrian. It was in fact the Emperor Trajan who dismissed Suetonius from his staff, on the grounds of an alleged affair with a high court lady. Suetonius wrote extensively, but is now known to us chiefly for his Lives of the Caesars, a series of twelve biographies of the dictators or Emperors of Rome from Julius Caesar to Domitian. In each of those historical biographies he follows a set protocol of topics: physical appearance, omens, family history, quotes, and general background history to the life of the person. We are lucky to have these incisive portraits of the main governing figures of the early Empire. It should be added that, in his Life of Claudius, Suetonius writes of the Christiani, and of Chrestus, an apparent reference to the new religious movement that was just beginning to make itself noticeable in Roman culture. When quaestor, he pronounced the customary orations from the rostra in praise of his aunt Julia and his wife Cornelia, who had both died. And in the eulogy of his aunt he spoke in the following terms of her paternal and maternal ancestry and that of his own father: "The family of my aunt Julia is descended by her mother from the kings, and on her father's side is akin to the immortal Gods; for the Marcii Reges (her mother's family name) go back to Ancus Marcius, and the Julii, the family of which ours is a branch, to Venus. Our stock therefore has at once the sanctity of kings, whose power is supreme among mortal men, and the claim to reverence which attaches to the Gods, who hold sway over kings themselves."

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Period 3 The Age of Christianity and Pagan Nostalgia (3rd-6th centuries A.D.) THEOLOGY Topic 51 The clash of religious cultures and the Christian turn We are moving abruptly from the pagan to the Christian world view, and that within a short span of time. Not long before our present juncture, we were comfortably ensconced in the text worlds of such as Tacitus, Quintilian, or Aulus Gellius, who were—to pick typical and perfectly random examples—firmly settled in the pagan value world, and the assumptions of classical Roman political/cultural life. Those assumptions, and the power of the pagan perspective—pagan meaning ‘of the countryside,’ where change comes relatively slowly—were only slowly to fade, and in fact we will come upon more than a few powerful and influential pagan intellects even in the centuries following the Christianization of the Roman Empire by Constantine in 313 A.D. To mention a few, there are Julian the Apostate, the Emperor (361-363 A.D) who attempted to reinstate paganism as the Roman state religion, and the poets Ausonius and Claudian, who are for all intents and purposes pagan sensibilities. There are many others, though, like the philosopher Boethius in the late fifth century A.D., who though nominally Christian, and writing a great text of consolation against death—The Consolation of Philosophy—offer fundamentally pagan sentiments and refer not at all to the Christian view of death. We should thus be on notice that the age of Constantine—a century after the death of Marcus Aurelius—did not usher in a new world, but simply enforced developments already insisting on themselves long before the Church was firmly established in the Western Roman Empire. Marcus Aurelius himself, to sharpen the point, was if not ‘Christian’ part of a ripening, of the classical tradition of humane living—the tradition of the Stoics and Epicureans—which belongs to the growth of the finer virtues Christianity too will highlight: patience, attention to others, self-discipline, fidelity. And yet, because Christianity was for long a persecuted movement, and because affirming it required reinventions of the language of human description, it took guts to go into the lines with the new religion; it took men of the severe stamp of Tertullian and Lactantius.

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Topic 52 Tertullian (160 A.D.—225 A.D.) Tertullian was one of the first and most prolific Latin fathers of the Christian Church, often called ‘the founder of Western theology.’ He was a controversial and combative force within the Church, and exercised influence for centuries after his time. Tertullian was born in Carthage, son (probably) of a Roman centurion, and himself (probably) a priest. He was a skilled orator, a learned linguist—able to write three books in Greek, in addition to the very curried and dramatic Latin he was master of. In l97-8 A.D. he was converted to Christianity, an experience he felt needed to be intense and overwhelming—as his own conversion was; ‘Christians are made, not born,’ as Tertullian put it. . As a theologian Tertullian was noted for his polemics against heresy, for his spirit of paradox—which put him in touch with the essential Christian mystery, death is life—and above all for his formulation of the doctrine of the trinity, of which he was the first serious Christian theologian. For some time, it seems, he adhered to the powerful Montanist Christian sect—compared to Pentecostals in later Christian tradition—which emphasized its special role of prophesying in the Holy Spirit. Tertullian paid temporary homage to this group, then returned, in his vast opus, to what was becoming a far more orthodox Christianity. Tertullian’s opus was extensive; in addition to the three books in Greek he has left us thirty one works of Latin theology. Among those works certain trends stand out: an abiding respect for prophetic Christianity, a realist theology—God is understood almost as a ‘physical’ being--and a scorn for the traditions of Platonism and Aristotelianism, which were on the whole leading edges of early Christian thought. One might add that, for Tertullian and fellow Montanists past and present, a strict ascetic discipline was congenial, and a very severe social/moral code. The Son of God was crucified: I am not ashamed--because it is shameful. The Son of God died: it is immediately credible--because it is silly. He was buried, and rose again: it is certain--because it is impossible.

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Topic 53 Macrobius (early fifth century A.D.) We know almost nothing about the life of Macrobius, starting with his place of birth. He himself tells us that he was ‘born under foreign skies,’ which some have thought, because he seems to have been deeply versed in Greek, suggests Greece itself, or at least the still Greek speaking parts of the Eastern Roman Empire. (Others have postulated the sophisticated environment of North Africa.) We also know that he was thought a vir clarissimus, a most distinguished man. But that is it. What remains of this man is a curious work, The Saturnalia, which assumes the form of an ongoing dialogues among upscale intellectuals, who regale one another extensively with miscellaneous information about ancient Roman religious festivals, calendar systems, dress and dining practices, tastes in luxury at the dinner table or in the boudoir, and extensive discussions of literature. Among the discussions of literature we note that Books 3 through 6 are devoted to Virgil’s Aeneid—interpretation, grammatical observations, speculations on the historical setting of the poem. The most influential sections of The Saturnalia—for the considerable impact of this text on the Middle Ages—deals with the religious-ritual settings of Roman culture, and especially with such practices as sun worship and the formation of the calendar. It should be mentioned that a second remaining work of Macrobius, the Dream of Scipio, was one of the major sources, for the Middle Ages, of knowledge of Platonism and Neo Platonism. It was during their reign that Saturn suddenly disappeared, and Janus then devised means to add to his honors. First he gave the name Saturnia to all the land which acknowledged his rule; and then he built an altar, instituting rites as to a god and calling these rites the Saturnalia-a fact which goes to show how very much older the festival is than the city of Rome. And it was because Saturn had improved the conditions of life that, by order of Janus, religious honors were paid to him, as his effigy indicates, which received the additional attribute of a sickle, the symbol of harvest.

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Topic 54 Lactantius (240 A.D.-320 A.D.) Lactantius was born in Cirta, in Numidia, a Latin speaking part of North Africa. Of his early life we know practically nothing, but first meet him teaching Rhetoric, which at the end of his life he was again teaching, in Constantinople. He began his career under the protection of the Emperor Constantine, in Rome, which was suitable because Constantine was not a Christian, nor was Lactantius born a Christian. In sequence with this relation to Constantine, Lactantius went on, at the request of the succeeding Emperor, Diocletian, to become a Professor of Philosophy at the University in Nicomedia. It was at this point, however, that Lactantius converted to Christianity, and had to resign from the post given him by the strongly pagan Emperor, Diocletian. Reduced for years to poverty, without a regular source of employment, Lactantius initiated that writing career that was to lead to his major work, the Divinae Institutiones, in which he expounds his elaborate, and to many too radical, system of Christian doctrine; one of the first systematic theologians of the Church. This career direction was abetted by the replacement of Diocletian by the first Christian Emperor, Constantine I, who made Christianity the official religion of the Roman state. From that point on Lactantius was fully protected, in his faith and in his voluble writings, and flourished as the tutor to the son of Constantine I! For before anything is done or arranged, there is need of counsel that it may be determined how it should be done; nor can anything be done without the foresight of a settled plan. Therefore the plan precedes every work. Therefore that which has not been made has no plan. But the world has a plan by which it both exists and is governed; therefore also it was made: if it was made, it will also be destroyed. Let them therefore assign a reason, if they can, why it was either made in the beginning or will hereafter be destroyed.

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Topic 55 Ambrose (340 A.D.-397 A.D.) Saint Ambrose was born in Trier, the Roman imperial city, into a Christian family. He was destined to become one of the four Doctors of the Church—along with Jerome, Gregory, and Saint Augustine—but he had a long path ahead of him, when he was born into a world which was not viewing him as a candidate for the religious life. His father was a praetorian prefect of Gaul, thus a high functionary of the Roman Empire, and Ambrose himself, after a fine Roman education in law, literature and rhetoric, was appointed to be Governor of the Province of Liguria. (His promise for a literary career was regularly noted; legend claimed that, as an infant, his face had been covered by bees, in his crib; and that the creatures had left him unharmed, with a tiny drop of honey on his face, as an indicator of the sweetness of tongue which was to characterize him.) Fate was to direct him toward high Church office simply because of his popularity, for when the Arian Bishop of Milan was deposed, popular sentiment in that city clamored for Ambrose to be chosen as his replacement. So strong was this sentiment that Ambrose was rapidly promoted to the new role—after quickly being baptized and ordained. As Archbishop of Milan Ambrose led a morally and theologically vigorous life. He was a splendid preacher, whose sermons were inspirational to Saint Augustine, and remain to us in large number. He was an unremitting and successful foe of the Arians. He led a chaste life of strict discipline, and above all gave all that he had to the poor. He remains one of the adored saints of the Catholic Church. What then? Ought we to be dumb? Certainly not. For: "there is a time to keep silence and a time to speak." If, then, we are to give account for an idle word, let us take care that we do not have to give it also for an idle silence. For there is also an active silence, such as Susanna's was, who did more by keeping silence than if she had spoken. For in keeping silence before men she spoke to God, and found no greater proof of her chastity than silence.

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Topic 56 Orosius (375 A. D.-418 A.D.) Orosius was a priest, theologian, and historian born in Gallicia in Hispania. He was a widely traveled scholar, who came in contact with many of the outstanding intellectuals of his day: Jerome, and Augustine, with whom Orosius collaborated in the writing of The City of God. In the year 415, at the behest of Augustine, Orosius traveled to Palestine, carrying the relics of Saint Stephen of Jerusalem, and destined for work with a particularly influential Church Council. Orosius wrote three books, the most influential of which was his Seven Books of History Against the Pagans, which had a great impact on historiography throughout the Middle Ages. In supporting Augustine on the issues of the Pelagians, in participating actively in the Priscillianist controversy, in defending Christianity against the charge it had been responsible for the downfall of Rome, Orosius wrote what has properly been called ‘a universal history with an apologetic and providentialist character,’ which can make the modern think of the Histoire universelle of Bossuet in the l7th century. The history of Orosius tracks from the creation of the world through the great empires—Babylonia, Rome, Macedonia, Carthage—to the doorstep of Christian Rome, the inheritor and harvester of all these foregoers. From Adam, the first man, to Ninus, whom they call "The Great" and in whose time Abraham was born, 3,184 years elapsed, a period that all historians have either disregarded or have not known. But from Ninus, or from Abraham, to Caesar Augustus, that is, to the birth of Christ, which took place in the forty-second year of Caesar's rule, when, on the conclusion of peace with the Parthians, the gates of Janus were closed and wars ceased over all the world, there were 2,015 years. During this later period, whether one considers the men of action or the historians, the labors of all of them, both literary and active, were lavishly expended. My subject, therefore, requires a brief mention of at least a few facts from those books which, in their account of the origin of the world, have gained credence by the accuracy with which their prophecies were later fulfilled. I used these books not because I purpose to press their authority upon anyone, but because it is worth while to repeat the common opinions that we ourselves all share.

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Topic 57 Jerome (347 A.D.-420 A.D.) Jerome, later Saint Jerome, was born in Stridon, of well to do parents, and was in his youth sent to Rome for philosophical studies. There he mastered Latin, and learned some Greek—which was by this time not widely known in the Roman Empire. He spent a ‘typical youth’ with much time wasting, in an atmosphere which was partly pagan and partly Christian. His secular passions drew him, though they were a source of remorse. He offers us a dramatic confession, of the powerful effect on him of visits to the Catacombs, in which he felt, among the burial places of the Christians, the closeness and terror of death. Not long after this late teens experience, which alarmed the young Jerome, he set out on a learning trip to Antioch and the East. He was immersed in these Wanderjahre studies of theology when he was hit by a powerful dream, the effect of which to lead him to abandon his theological studies. In subsequent years, haunted by a new sense of the shortness of life and the Christian proposition, Jerome betook himself to the Syrian Thebaid, and was drawn toward the self denying practices of the monks there. Shortly afterwards he began the study of Hebrew, which was to be a central factor in his translation of the Vulgate into Latin; in 378 A.D. he was ordained, and went to Constantinople for the first of a series of influential ecclesiastical posts. In 388, Jerome took an offer of support from a wealthy Roman lady convert, and set himself up in a desert cell in Israel, where he spent the last thirty years of his life reading and writing his hugely influential translation of the Vulgate into Latin, and a wide diversity of theological tracts and personal letters. Show me, O Lord, Your mercy, and delight my heart with it. Let me find You whom I so longingly seek. Behold, here is the man whom the robbers seized, manhandled, and left half dead on the road to Jericho. Kind-hearted Samaritan, come to my aid! I am the sheep who wandered into the wilderness. Seek after me and bring me home again to Your fold. Do with me according to Your Will, that I may abide with You all the days of my life, and praise You with all those who are with You in heaven for all eternity. Amen.

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Topic 58 Aurelius Augustinus (Saint Augustine) (354 A.D.-430 A.D.) Raised in Thagaste, in present day Algeria, Augustine was born of a Berber Christian mother (Monica), and a pagan father, and thus grew up knowing both of these conflicting world views. Such details as we have of his biography are known to us largely through his Confessions (A.D. 397/398), which form his autobiography and tell us of his path to Christian conviction and baptism. The life that Augustine traces for us in his Confessions is full of profound self-criticism, from his analysis of his bad character as an infant—fundamentally greedy—to his contempt for his wasted years of sensuality and vanity, to his final decision to turn to the Christian revelation. Augustine spins a development yarn of astonishing interest, full of psychological insights, portraits of daily life in the family, the street, the academy, and finally the church, which greatly enrich our understanding of late fourth century Roman culture. Augustine’s Christianity, which is the subject of his voluminous literary output—well over a hundred separate titles, on topics of Biblical exegesis, every aspect of theology, problems of knowing and will—is the turning move in his personal achievement, and sharply marks his literary creation off from that of any other major writer before him in Latin. We should therefore underline the cultural landmarking that Augustine carries out. By the time of the Confessions, Christianity was a seasoned component of the Roman/Latinate cultural world. In the second decade of the 4th Century A.D. the Roman Emperor Constantine had privileged Christianity as the state religion, and Church councils were busy formulating basic doctrine for the remainder of the fourth century. (The Nicene Creed, which has remained a liturgical centerpiece to our day, in Western Christianity, was formulated in 325 A.D.) Paganism was still enrooted and influential—Julian the Apostate, the last pagan Emperor of Rome, ruled from 361 A.D.-363 AD—but both the common people, and select wealthy Romans, were turning their influence and convictions in the direction of the new religion. Augustine, who was to go on to be elected Bishop of Hippo, in North Africa, played a persuasive role in the reshaping of Latin culture, and the new spirit he brought to that driving intention is evident in The Confessions.

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Topic 59 Cassiodorus (485 A.D.-585 A.D.) Cassiodorus was born near Catanzaro in southern Italy, where his father was Governor of Sicily. The young man began his political career early, serving his way through the cursus honorum—quaestor, consul, magister officiorum—under Theoderic, the Ostrogoth King who had succeeded to the supreme power in Italy, and the power figure under whom Cassiodorus would through much of his life serve as virtually Prime Minister. (In that capacity, Cassiodorus served as Pretorian Prefect of Italy, a role in which he also worked with Pope Agapetus 1, to set up a Papal Library of Greek and Latin texts, and to set up a school in Rome.) As an official high-ranking administrator, of the Kingdom of Italy, Cassiodorus was noted for a tireless taking of official notes and records, and for collecting these documents for royal business and for posterity. In the last thirty years of his long life, Cassiodorus established a monastery on his private property, and wrote a long text—the Institutiones Divinae—as an educational and life-values text for his monks. This document, and the educational philosophy contained in it, remained influential throughout the Middle Ages, and did much to underpin the trivium/quadrivium of High Mediaeval educational practice. It was in fact Cassiodorus, as well as his predecessor in papal service, Boethius, who did most, in his time, for both preserving the learning of the classical Roman past, and advancing educational practice. Be cheerful and of good courage, therefore, with reference to the new administration. No soldier or civil servant shall harass you for his own pleasure. No tax-collector shall load you with burdens of his own imposition. We are determined to keep not only our own hands clean, but also those of our officials. Otherwise, vainly does a good Judge guard himself from receiving money, if he leaves to the many under him licence to receive it on their own account. But we, both by precept and example, show that we aim at the public good, not at private and fraudulent gains.

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Topic 60 Boethius (480 A.D.-524 A.D.) Boethius was born in Rome of a distinguished family of late Roman Emperors and consuls, and though we are in a Roman Empire customarily viewed as ‘fallen,’ we see through Boethius and his family the energy still clinging to the frame of the old city. Boethius’ father was a consul in 487 A.D., after the non Roman Odoacer had deposed the last Roman Emperor. Boethius himself was a senator by the age of 25, and elected consul in 510. From his final and best known work, The Consolation of Philosophy, we know that Boethius was during these same years making himself formidably erudite—in the Greek language, no less, which was by this time become a relatively rarity in the Empire—but where he studied—Athens, Egypt, or possibly at home—we are not sure. We do know that he found his way into an influential post in the administration of the new post-imperial Rome, as a high level functionary working for the Ostrogothic king, Theoderic. It was in that position that he got into serious trouble, in the course (apparently) of trying to bring about a reconciliation between the Western and Eastern branches of the Catholic Church. Having insulted Theoderic, in the course of these deliberations, Boethius found himself condemned to death by torture, a bitter fate for a man of political power, deep learning, and a family setting that was precious to him. It was while in prison, awaiting his execution, that Boethius wrote his Consolation of Philosophy, from which he was trying to draw solace in his suffering. It was this work which survived from his active writing life—he wrote extensively on logical issues emerging from the philosophy of Aristotle—and became a central text for the Middle Ages and Renaissance. It opens thus: While I was thus mutely pondering within myself, and recording my sorrowful complainings with my pen, it seemed to me that there appeared above my head a woman of a countenance exceeding venerable. Her eyes were bright as fire, and of a more than human keenness; her complexion was lively, her vigour showed no trace of enfeeblement; and yet her years were right full, and she plainly seemed not of our age and time.

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POETRY Topic 61 Pervigilium Veneris (4th Century A.D.) This ninety three line poem was written in Latin in the fourth century A.D., but more than that we can hardly say about it. Scholarly speculation suggests the name of Tiberianus—as this work resembles his Amnis ibat poem—but that is a guess. There are also guesses about the setting of this poem, whose title means ‘the vigil of Venus,’ and whose substance concerns the spring outburst of life in nature—animals and plants—and contrasts that outburst to the isolation of the human narrator figure in the poem. It has been thought that the occasion of this poem was a three day festival of Venus—the hypothesis is the festival in Sicily which lasted from April 1-3. It is also likely that this poem had roots in Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things, which opens on a sumptuous verbal celebration of the power of love in nature, and the way that power opens out into fresh generation in the spring. The poem resonates especially for its opening refrain, a simple ritual celebration of the power of pagan love—for there is no trace of a call to ‘spiritual love’ in this brief poem, though we are already in a period of Roman creativity when Christian poetry was proliferating. He that never loved before, Let him love to-morrow! He that hath loved o'er and o'er, Let him love to-morrow! But it is not only the opening which haunts us here. The poem concluded on a note which springs forth a new richness. Spring, young Spring, with song and mirth, Spring is on the newborn earth. Spring is here, the time of love — The merry birds pair in the grove, And the green trees hang their tresses, Loosen'd by the rain's caresses. Tomorrow sees the dawn of May, When Venus will her sceptre sway, Glorious, in her justice-hall: There where woodland shadows fall, On bowers of myrtle intertwined, Many a band of love she'll bind. Then, at the end, the poet tells us that while spring is singing, he is silent, and he asks, poignantly, when his own spring will come. We find ourselves, here, in a new world of closeness to nature, and of gloomy individual self-inspection, which pushes us forward toward sensibilities which are mediaeval rather than pagan naturalist. A new world is forming.

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Topic 62 Sidonius Apollinaris (430 A.D.-489 A.D.) Sidonius was a bishop, diplomat, and poet, who has been called the most important surviving author of fifth century Gaul, a province of the Roman Empire, and a region in which a distinctive and flourishing Latin culture lasted longer than anywhere else, as the Empire fell. Sidonius was born at Lyons, into a family noted for distinguished service in the Roman administration. Sidonius became Prefect of Gaul under the emperor Valentinian III—at a time, be it noted, when the formal fall of the Empire was not more than a half century away—and, in addition, when the replacement of the pagan world by the Christian had at least in name been accomplished on the governmental level. He moved in high governing circles, and married the daughter of the Emperor Avitus, with whom he had one son and two daughters. Prosperous and prominent, with several estates in Italy, he was elected to be the Urban Prefect of Rome. To all of this was added that he was chosen, against his will, to be the Bishop of Lyons. In this set of high roles Sidonius managed a voluminous literary career—poems and many volumes of letters—and survived the often life-threatening ins and outs of imperial politics. You have often begged a description of Theodoric the Gothic king…Well, he is a man worth knowing, even by those who cannot enjoy his close acquaintance… And first as to his person. He is well set up, in height above the average man, but below the giant. His head is round, with curled hair retreating somewhat from brow to crown. His nervous neck is free from disfiguring knots. The eyebrows are bushy and arched; when the lids droop, the lashes reach almost half-way down the cheeks. The upper ears are buried under overlying locks, after the fashion of his race. The nose is finely aquiline; the lips are thin and not enlarged by undue distension of the mouth. Every day the hair springing from his nostrils is cut back; that on the face springs thick from the hollow of the temples, but the razor has not yet come upon his cheek, and his barber is assiduous in eradicating the rich growth on the lower part of the face.

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Topic 63 Paulinus of Nola (354 A.D.-431 A.D) Paulinus was born into a wealthy family in Nola. His family, then he by inheritance, owned many estates in Aquitaine, and he himself was well educated, in particular by the poet Ausonius. He was especially drawn to the history of Latin poetry. Paulinus was appointed consul, and appeared destined for a high level political career, but the call of the new Christian religion was strong enough to change his direction. Paulinus was converted to Christianity, and baptized in 389. He had before that married a Spanish lady of high birth, with whom he had one child, dead at birth. It seems that both he and his wife were exceptionally touched by this death, and that the event led, in Paulinus, to increase his desire for asceticism and philanthropy. He and his wife moved to Spain, where she herself had extensive estates, and the two of them began a life of prayer and giving. Paulinus was particularly devoted to the memory of Saint Felix, in whose honor he wrote one festive poem each year, and to whom he and his wife constructed a Basilica near his wife’s home. In 391 Paulinus was ordained, and from that time on—in between his constant writing of letters to well known churchmen—Paulinus adopted an increasingly saintly life, of sharing, providing shelter and food for the needy, and praising his beloved St. Felix. The following excerpt is from a letter of Paulinus to his teacher Ausonius. Why, father, do you bid the deposed Muses return to my charge? Hearts dedicated to Christ reject the Latin Muses and exclude Apollo. Of old you and I shared common cause . . . in summoning deaf Apollo from his cave at Delphi, invoking the Muses as deities, seeking from groves or mountain ridges that gift of utterance bestowed by divine gift. But now another power, a greater God, inspires my mind and demands another way of life. He asks back from man His own gift, so that we may live for the Father of life.

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Topic 64 Ausonius (310 A.D.-395 A.D.) Ausonius was born in today’s Bordeaux, the son of a physician of Greek origin. The family was prosperous and of settled urban habit, of old Romano-Gallic stock on both sides. (By this historical moment the Roman stock had moved far toward blending with that of the Frankish invaders.) Ausonius’ uncle was a professor at Toulouse—the young man studied both at Bordeaux and Toulouse—and Ausonius not only studied with the man, but, when his uncle was sent on mission to Constantiniople, Ausonius accompanied him, enriching his Greek knowledge and experience of the world. He considered moving into active life in the world, Then he was granted a consulship by the Emperor Gratian, to whose son Ausonius had served as a tutor in the past. But by 333 Ausonius had decided to take another career path, and to become a professor of Grammar, always a needed and essential subject of study in classical Roman culture. In 334 Ausonius was summoned by the Emperor Valentinian I to tutor his son, a position in which the poet enjoyed both the pleasure of courtly life and the opportunity to begin a serious writing career—which he was to pursue until the end of his life. The fact is that he wrote voluminously—below you see a tiny excerpt from his well known poem to the River Moselle—and with great eloquence, both about the beautiies of nature and about daily life around him. And without greatly seeking it, he was later in life drawn back into the public sphere, and appointed to the influential post of Praetorian Prefect of Gaul. It is said that at the end of his life he became a (lukewarm) convert to Christianity.

What colour are they now, thy quiet waters? The evening star has brought the evening light, And filled the river with the green hillside; The hill-tops waver in the rippling water, Trembles the absent vine and swells the grape In thy clear crystal.

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Topic 65 Claudian (370 A.D.-404 A.D.) Claudian was born in Alexandria in 370, and was taken to Rome sometime before 395 A.D. He was already at that time an educated and versatile young poet, and he busied himself, shortly after arrival in Rome, with writing eulogies to his two patrons. This practice, common enough in Roman culture as we remember from the circle around Maecenas in Augustus’ time, was often a portal into court support, and that was the luck that befell Claudian. The Emperor Honorius, who was in Milan, conferred on Claudian the title of vir illustris, and employed him as court poet. In that position Claudian busied himself writing three kinds of poetry—all either in dactyls or elegiac couplets: poems in praise of Honorius; poems in praise of Stilicho—the half-Vandal, half Roman military man who served as the regent for the young Honorius; and epic poems, of which we know especially The Rape of Persephone. Not only did his position pay off in comforts, but Stilicho’s wife found Claudian his own rich wife…and what more could you want than that? Blest who beyond his fathers' fields Through life has never cared to roam, To whom the self-same roof still yields From infancy to age a home. Whose steps, upon that very spot Where once he crawled, a staff now bears, Fond to retrace of that one cot The annals through a hundred years. In varied quest of distant schemes Him fortune never forced to stray, He never drank of unknown streams, A restless wanderer far away. No merchant, whom each swelling sea, No soldier, whom each blast of war Fills with alarm, no lawyer he Vexed with the hoarse and wrangling bar. In state affairs he boasts no skill, What cities are he never knew; Enough, that Heaven's blue concave still Is free and open to his view.

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Topic 66 Prudentius (348 A.D.-405 A.D.) Prudentius was born in Northern Spain, probably in the Roman Province of Tarraconensis. We know little about his youth, and first meet him practicing law. He served twice as provincial governor—note how all Roman callings pass at some stage through law and official positions—before the Emperor Theodosius called him to the court. It seems that Prudentius was no great friend of court life, and in 392 A.D. he retired from public life entirely. He had long been a Christian, but at this point, in his retirement, he gravitated into a sharply ascetic life, fasting til evening every day, and eating no meat or animal food. Toward the end of his life he gathered together the many poems and hymns he had written during this time. Some of those hymns are still in use in the Christian Church: especially his ‘Of the Father’s Love Begotten’ and ‘Earth has many a noble city.’ His most widely known work was an allegory, the Psychomachia, in which Christian faith and paganism struggle for man’s soul; the first in a series of mediaeval allegories which will lead later to such great work as the Romance of the Rose. …sleep that is given us for a time is an image of ever- lasting death. Our sins, like foul night, make us lie snoring ; but the voice of Christ from the height of heaven teaches and forewarns us that daylight is near, lest our soul be in bondage to slumber, and to the very end of a slothful life sleep lie heavily on a heart that is buried in sin and has forgotten its natural light. They say that evil spirits which roam happily in the darkness of night are terrified when the cock crows, and scatter and flee in fear ; for the hated approach of light, salvation, Godhead, bursts through the foul darkness and routs the ministers of night. They have foreknowledge that this is a sign of our promised hope, whereby being freed from slumber we hope for the coming of God. What this bird signifies the Saviour showed to Peter, when He declared that ere the cock crew He should be thrice denied. For sin is committed before the herald of coming day sheds light on the race of men and brings an end of sinning.

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JURISPRUDENCE Topic 67 Ulpian (170 A.D -228 A.D.) Ulpian was a Roman jurist of Tyrian ancestry who was born in l70 A.D. and was active as a writer and practicing jurist at least from 211-222 A.D. The Roman system of laws was widely admired in the ancient world, served as a foundation—to this date—of the Napoleonic code which defines French law, and passed over largely into the Law Code of Justinian, which was in effect from the early fifth century A.D. on. Of Ulpian’s work we know that some one third of it passed over into the Digest, or central part, of the Justinian law code. Below we offer a brief excerpt from Ulpian’s notoriously carefully worded and thought-through legal propositions. While thinking meticulously, he wrote voluminously. His documents published as Ad Sabinum are a commentary in fifty books on the Roman civil code. Ad edictum deals with the legal edicts of the Roman Emperors, in 83 books. He also wrote on every aspect of testamentary and criminal law. Among his other achievements was the creation of the first life table, a chart for measuring life expectancy. All this assiduous work was carried on throughout a life of considerable turmoil, during which the fate of Ulpian was closely tied up with his relations to this or that Roman Emperor. Ulpian’s first known public role was as assessor of the auditorium of Papinian, and from that position on he was Master of the Requests under the Emperor Caracalla--by whom he was banished from Rome, then advisor to the Emperor Alexander, during whose reign Ulpian was murdered in a palace riot. A law is perfect, which forbids something to be done, and if it has been done rescinds it, such as the Lex ....A law is imperfect, which forbids something to be done, and if it has been done does not rescind it, and imposes no penalty upon him who breaks the law; such as the Lex Cincia, which prohibits more than two thousand asses to be donated, except to certain relatives, and if more than that is given does not rescind the donation.

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ORATORY Topic 68 Symmachus (345 A.D.-402 A.D.) We are now in a period of late Roman culture when the official Christianization of Rome, authorized by Constantine I in 313, is giving strength to what is in any case the rapidly growing power of the new religion. Julian the Apostate, Emperor from 361-363 A.D., had attempted to restore the official role of pagan religion in Rome, but the attempt had soon failed. There was widespread feeling, though, that the advent of Christianity was weakening the State. Symmachus, who was born in 345 in Gaul (Bordeaux), was a vigorous sympathizer of the old gods and in mid career found himself protesting that the removal of the Altar of Victory from the Capitol, by the Emperor Gratian, was an open insult to the old gods, whose revenge was spearheading the calamitous events then striking the Roman Empire. Symmachus pursued the same defense, of the old pagan system, by struggling to retain the dignity and support of the Vestal Virgins in Rome. The career life of Symmachus was closely involved with these ideological struggles of his time. He was active in politics, a statesman, an orator, a man of letters. He was governor of proconsular Africa in 373, urban prefect of Rome in 384-5, consul in 391, and Corrector of Lucania and Bruttii. In the course of his public life he accumulated enormous wealth, and had villas throughout Italy, not least because of a new found friendship with the Emperor Theodosius, in the last years of Symmachus’ life. In those last years Symmachus went into the retirement of a gentleman of leisure, writing voluminously—letters, Relationes (official dispatches), orations—and maintaining close relations with the intelligentsia of the Empire. Symmachus appears as the main character in the table conversation of Macrobius’ Saturnalia. We gaze up at the same stars; the sky covers us all; the same universe encompasses us. Does it matter what practical system we adopt in our search for the Truth? The heart of so great a mystery cannot be reached by following one road only.

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HISTORY Topic 69 Julius Solinus (3rd century A.D.) The lines between history writing, geography, astronomy, and agricultural wisdom were much less sharply drawn in Ancient Greece and Rome than they are today, in our age of relative specialization. In fact the writings of ancient historians and natural historians were often created in hexameter (or other) verse. Solinus, a third century A.D. grammarian, and historian/compiler, was one of the these cross boundary historians—and thanks to his wide range of knowledge he became known to the Middle Ages as Polyhistor, the multiply learned one. We know him best for a huge compendium of curiosities, in chronological order, which was dedicated to a certain Adventus, who we know to have been a Roman consul in 218 A.D. The work offered to Adventus was essentially a history of the ancient world as Solinus knew it, heavily stressing what he had gathered about the British Isles, and with a great deal of borrowing from Pliny’s Natural History and from the geography of Pomponius Mela. (There was no copyright in antiquity, but Solinus was regularly attacked for the liberality with which he borrowed from his predecessors.)The following passage will give an idea of the kind of ‘curiosity’ dear to Solinus, and, incidentally, fertile for the imaginative work of Roman creative writers, whose work is full of such materials as this. This folk dwells in remote and secret places, and celebrates foul mysteries on savage hills. Nothing have they in common with men save the face, and the customs of humanity are wholly strange to them; and they hate the sun. They hiss rather than speak; their voices are harsh, and not to be heard without fear. They boast of a certain stone, which they call Sixtystone; for they say that it displays sixty characters. And this stone has a secret unspeakable name; which is Ixaxar.

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Topic 70 Ammianus Marcellinus (320 A.D.-390 A.D) Ammianus was born in or near Antioch, in the Greek speaking East of the Roman Empire, and was active for most of us life as both a soldier/administrator and a voluminous writer. (He refers to himself as miles quondam et graecus.) As a young man he enlisted as a soldier in the army of the Emperor Constantius II, with whom he served in the elite corps of protectores domestici, essentially royal body guards. Under directive of the Emperor he then served in the army of the East, from where he returned to Rome, only to depart for further combat in the company of Ursicinus, Governor of Nissibis in Mesopotamia. Subsequently he was invited back to his imperial post in Rome, from where he traveled on occasion, accompanying the Emperor on campaigns against the Sassanids and Alamanni. The History which Ammianus wrote takes up the account of Roman history at the point where Tacitus left off; Ammianus’ work covers from 96 A.D.—378 A.D. Unfortunately for us, however, all that is left of his work are the eighteen books which cover the years 353 A.D.—378 A.D. Even so this work is an invaluable source for our knowledge of the nearly final years of the Roman Empire. Having narrated with exceeding care the series of transactions in my own immediate recollection, it is necessary now to quit the track of notorious events, in order to avoid the dangers often found in connection with truth; and also to avoid exposing ourselves to unreasonable critics of our work, who would make an outcry as if they had been personally injured, if anything should be passed over which the emperor has said at dinner, if any cause should be overlooked for which the common soldiers were assembled round their standards, or if there were not inserted a mention of every insignificant fort, however little such things ought to have room in a varied description of different districts. Or if the name of every one who filled the office of urban praetor be not given, and many other things quite impertinent to the proper idea of a history, which duly touches on prominent occurrences, and does not stoop to investigate petty details or secret motives, which any one who wishes to know may as well hope to be able to count those little indivisible bodies flying through space, which we call atoms.

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Topic 71 Gregory of Tours (538 A.D.-594 A.D.) Gregory of Tours was born in Clermont, in Gallo-Roman territory and of a distinguished senatorial father. He was related to most of the previous Bishops of Tours, as well as to most of the leading prelates of the region. He was, in addition, well placed in Tours to keep abreast of developments in the Western Church. Five Roman roads radiated out from Tours, providing an easy means of communication and information both in and out of the city. Furthermore the Loire River was a source of ready transport and news of the world. There was an additional reason for the central importance of Tours. The city was the resting place of St. Martin of Tours, one of the most revered Catholic saints, and the figure whose shrine brought hordes of pilgrims to Tours. For all these reasons, Gregory found himself near one of the centers of the civilized world, for all that the Roman Empire was slipping from any recognizable relation to its earlier forms. Gregory of Tours has left us a compendious History of the Franks in fifteen books, the most substantial document we have of Merovingian history; to which the bulk of the book is devoted. We note with interest that we opens with the origins of the world, but then skips very rapidly to his own time; and that he refers to the pagans as incestuous and weak. I believe, then, in God the Father omnipotent. I believe in Jesus Christ his only Son, our Lord God, born of the Father, not created. [I believe] that he has always been with the Father, not only since time began but before all time. For the Father could not have been so named unless he had a son; and there could be no son without a father. But as for those who say: "There was a time when he was not, I reject them with curses, and call men to witness that they are separated from the church. I believe that the word of the Father by which all things were made was Christ. I believe that this word was made flesh and by its suffering the world was redeemed, and I believe that humanity, not deity, was subject to the suffering.

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SCHOLARSHIP Topic 72 Isidore of Seville (560 A.D.-636 A.D) Isidore of Seville, as he was later called, was born in Cartagena, Hispania, of an Hispano-Roman family of high rank. He was educated at the Cathedral School of Seville, where he learned from an early version of the Mediaeval trivium/quadrivium system, and where he gathered his Latin, some Greek, and some Hebrew. (All of these achievements were essential to making what a distinguished French historian would call ‘the last scholar of the ancient world.’) As a Bishop, Isidore was particularly concerned to combat Arianism, which was widespread and popular among the Arians. (He remains famous for the success he eventually had, in defending the Catholic faith against this heresy.) He was also greatly respected for the skill with which he inter-related with the Visigothic community—his mother was a Visigoth—and through which he worked toward the establishment, in Seville, of an early form of representative government. In the course of these cultural and political efforts, he worked to bring Aristotle back to popular attention, and to sensitize his people to the richness of the classical tradition behind them. It also characterizes Isidore’s thought that, while he was working heroically to bring together the Visigothic community with that of the Catholics in Spain, he developed strong tracts against the Jews, and activated many of the traditional hatreds of the ‘killers of our Savior.’ The chief work Isidore left behind, his Etymologies, was an encyclopedia of the knowledge current in Isidore’s time, which means in effect a pastiche of comments on classical history and culture from other authors. The influence of this huge work—20 volumes, 448 chapters-- was immeasurable: between 1470 A.D-1530 A.D. this text went through ten editions, while in its own time it was viewed as the last word in encyclopedic knowledge. It might be added that in 2002 Isidore was declared the patron saint of the internet, of computers, and of computer technicians.