The Story of Civilization

  Juvenal takes everything for his subject, and has no trouble in finding in everything some aspect that can bear condemning. “We are arrived at the zenith of vice,” he thinks, “and posterity will never be able to surpass us”;21 so far, so true. The root of the evil is the unscrupulous pursuit of wealth. He scorns the plebs that once ruled armies and unmade kings but can now be bought with panem et circenses, bread and circuses;23 this is one of a hundred phrases to which Juvenal’s vitality gave lasting life. He resents the influx of Oriental faces, dress, ways, smells, and gods; protests against the clannishness of the Jew, and likes least of all the “greedy little Greek” (Graeculus esuriens)—the degenerate descendant of a people once great but never honest. He loathes the informers who, like Pliny’s Regulus, get rich by reporting “unpatriotic” remarks; the legacy hunters who flutter around childless old men; the proconsul living in lifelong luxury on the profits of a term in the provinces; the clever lawyers who spin out lawsuits like an excreted web. He is disgusted above all by sexual excesses and perversions: by the roué who on marrying finds that his lechery has left him impotent; by the dandies whose manners, perfumes, and desires make them indistinguishable from women; and by the women who think that emancipation means that they should be indistinguishable from men.

  His sixth and bitterest satire is devoted to the gentler sex. Postumus is thinking 01 marriage; don’t do it, Juvenal warns him; and then the poet portrays the women of Rome as selfish, shrewish, superstitious, extravagant, quarrelsome, haughty, vain, litigious, adulterous, equaling every marriage with a divorce, substituting lapdogs for children,24 going in for athletics, worse yet for literature, quoting Virgil at you, spouting rhetoric and philosophy 25—“oh, may the gods save us from a learned wife!”26 He concludes that there is hardly a woman in the city worth marrying. A good wife is a rare bird (rara avis), stranger than a white crow. He marvels that Postumus should think of marriage when “there are so many halters to be had, so many high and dizzy windows are accessible, and the Aemilian Bridge is close at hand.” No; stay single. And get out of this nerve-wearying bedlam called Rome and live in some quiet Italian town where you will meet honest men and be safe from criminals, poets, collapsing tenements, and Greeks.27 Put ambition behind you; the goal is not worth the striving, so long is labor and so brief is fame. Live simply, cultivate your garden, desire only so much as hunger and thirst, cold and heat demand;28 learn pity, be kind to children, keep a sane mind in a healthy body (mens sana in corpore sano29). But only a fool will pray for a long life.

  We can understand such a mood; it is pleasant to contemplate the imperfections of our neighbors and the despicable inferiority of the world as compared with our dreams. Our enjoyment in this case is sharpened by Juvenal’s street-corner vocabulary, his easy-moving colloquial hexameters, his grim humor, and his lusty style. But we must not take him literally. He was angry; he had not made his way in Rome as rapidly as he had hoped; it was sweet revenge to lay about him with the bludgeon of a hatred that never feigned to be fair. His moral standard was high and sound, though tinged with conservative prejudices and delusions about the virtuous past; by those standards, used without mercy or modesty, we could indict any generation anywhere. Seneca knew how old a pastime this is. “Our forefathers,” he wrote, “complained, we complain, and our descendants will complain, that morals are corrupt, that wickedness holds sway, that men are sinking deeper and deeper into sinfulness, that the condition of mankind is going from bad to worse.”30 Around the immoral hub of any society is a spreading wheel of wholesome life, in which the threads of tradition, the moral imperatives of religion, the economic compulsions of the family, the instinctive love and care of children, the watchfulness of women and policemen, suffice to keep us publicly decent and moderately sane. Juvenal is the greatest of Roman satirists, as Tacitus is the greatest of Roman historians; but we should err as much in taking their picture as accurate as we should were we to accept without scrutiny the pleasant and civilized scene that rises before us as we read the letters of Pliny.

  III. A ROMAN GENTLEMAN

  When he was born at Como in 61 he was named Publius Caecilius Secundus. His father owned a farm and villa near the lake and held high office in the town. Orphaned early, Publius was adopted and educated first by Virginius Rufus, governor of Upper Germany, and then by his uncle Caius Plinius Secundus, author of the Natural History. This busy scholar made the boy his son and heir and died soon afterward. According to custom, the youth took his adoptive father’s name, causing confusion for 2000 years. At Rome he studied under Quintilian, who formed his taste on Cicero and must receive some of the credit for the Ciceronian fluency of Pliny’s style. At 18 he was admitted to the bar; at 39 he was chosen to deliver an address of welcome to Trajan. In the same year he was made consul; in 103, augur; in 105, “Curator of the Bed and Banks of the Tiber and the City Sewers.” He took no fees or gifts for his legal services, but he was a rich man and could afford to be magnanimous. He had properties in Etruria, at Beneventum, Como, and Laurentum, and offered 3,000,000 sesterces for another.31

  Like many aristocrats of his time, he amused himself by writing: at first a Greek tragedy, then some poems, lighthearted and occasionally obscene. Reproved by some, he confessed his fault impenitently, and proposed again “to indulge in mirth, wit, and gaiety, and enter into the spirit of the most wanton muse.”32 Hearing his letters praised, he composed some for publication and issued them at intervals from 97 to 109. Intended not only for the public but for the pleasure of the circles he described, they avoided the darker aspects of Roman life and passed by as too serious for his purpose the larger problems of philosophy and statesmanship. Their worth is in their graceful intimacy, and in the rosy light they shed upon Roman character and patrician ways.

  Pliny reveals himself with half the candor and all the felicity of Montaigne. He has an author’s inevitable vanity, but so openly that it hardly offends. “Nothing, I confess, so strongly affects me as the desire of a lasting name.”33 He speaks appreciatively of others as well as of himself, adding that “one may be sure a man has many virtues if he admires those of others”; 34 in any case it is a relief, coming from Juvenal and Tacitus, to hear an author speak well of his fellow men. He was as generous in act as in words, ever ready with favors, loans, or gifts, from finding a husband for a friend’s niece to enriching his native town. Finding that Quintilian could not give his daughter a dowry befitting the high station of the man she was marrying, he sent her 50,000 sesterces, excusing the smallness of the gift.35 He gave an old schoolmate 300,000 to make him eligible for the equestrian class; when the daughter of a friend inherited a legacy of debts he paid them off; and at some risk he lent a considerable sum to a philosopher banished by Domitian. To Como he gave a temple, a secondary school, an institute for poor children, a municipal bath, and 11,000,000 sesterces for a public library.

  What is especially pleasing in him is his love for his home, or his homes. He does not denounce Rome, but he is happier in Como or Laurentum, near the lake or the sea. There his chief enterprises are reading and doing nothing. He loves his gardens, and the mountain scenery behind them; he did not have to wait for Rousseau to make him enjoy nature. He speaks with the greatest tenderness of his third wife, Calpurnia, her sweet temper and pure mind, her fond delight in his success and his books. She read them all (he believed) and learned many of his pages by heart; she set his poems to music and sang them, and had a private corps of couriers to keep her informed of every development when he was trying an important case. She was but one of many good women in his circle. He tells of the modesty, patience, and courage of a fourteen-year-old girl who, just betrothed, learned that she had an incurable illness, and cheerfully awaited death;36 of Pompeius Saturninus’ wife, whose letters to her husband were lyrics of affection and fine Latin;37 of Thrasea’s daughter Fannia, who uncomplainingly bore exile for defending her husband Helvidius, nursed a relative through a dangerous illness, caught it, and died of it; “How complete,??
? he exclaims, “is her virtue, her sanctity, her sobriety, her courage!”38

  He had a hundred friends, some great, many good. He joined with Tacitus in prosecuting Marius Priscus for dishonesty and cruelty as proconsul in Africa; the two orators corrected each other’s speeches and invested in mutual compliments; Tacitus lifted Pliny to heaven by reporting that the literary world was pairing them as the leading writers of the age.39 He knew Martial, but from an aristocratic distance. He took Suetonius with him to Bithynia and helped him to get the “right of three children” without having any. His circle buzzed with literary and musical amateurs, with public recitals of poetry and speeches. “I do not believe,” says the learned Boissier, “that in any other period has literature been so greatly loved.”40 Homer and Virgil were being studied on the banks of the Danube and the Rhine, and the Thames was trembling with rhetoric.41 It was, in its upper half, an elegant and amiable society, rich in loving marriages, parental affection, humane masters, sincere friendships, and fine courtesies. “I accept your invitation to supper,” reads one letter, “but I must make this agreement beforehand, that you dismiss me soon, and treat me frugally. Let our table abound only in philosophical conversation, and let us enjoy even that within limits.”42

  Most of the men whom Pliny describes were members of the new aristocracy stemming from the provinces; they were not idlers, for nearly every one of them held public office and shared in the admirable administration of the Empire under Trajan. Pliny himself was sent as propraetor to Bithynia to restore the solvency of some cities there. His letters include some inquiries addressed to the Prince, and Trajan’s pithy replies; they show Pliny accomplishing his mission with ability and honor, though with a strangely detailed dependence upon the Emperor’s advice. His final letter begs forgiveness for sending his sick wife home by the coaches of the imperial post. Thereafter Pliny disappears from literature and history, leaving behind him a redeeming picture of a Roman gentleman, and of Italy in her happiest age.

  IV. THE CULTURAL DECLINE

  We should obscure these outstanding figures if we were to surround them with lesser lights. After them there were no giants in pagan Latin letters. Reason had made its great effort from Ennius to Tacitus and had spent itself. It is a shock to pass from the grandeur of the Histories and the Annals to the scandalous chronicle of Suetonius’ Lives of Illustrious Men (110); history is here degenerating into biography, and biography into anecdote; portents and miracles and superstitions crowd the pages, and only the Elizabethan English of Philemon Holland’s translation (1606) has raised the book to the level of literature. Less disturbing is the descent from Pliny to the letters of Fronto. Perhaps these were not meant for publication, and cannot be fairly compared with Pliny’s; some were spoiled by a search for archaic phraseology, but many are touched by real affection of the teacher for his pupil. Aulus Gellius supported the archaizing movement in his Attic Nights (169)—the largest collection of worthless trifles in ancient literature; and Apuleius brought it to a climax in The Golden Ass. Apuleius and Fronto came from Africa, and the fad may have had partial source in the fact that written Latin there had departed less than in Rome from the language of the people and the Republic. Fronto rightly believed in strengthening literature with popular speech, as one freshens a plant by turning over the earth at its roots. But youth does not come twice to a man, a nation, a literature, or a language. Orientalization had set in and could not be stopped. The common Greek tongue of the Hellenistic East and Oriental Rome was becoming the language of literature as well as of life; Fronto’s pupil chose it for his Meditations. Appian, an Alexandrian Greek living at Rome, chose Greek for his vivid Histories of Rome’s wars (ca. 160); so did Claudius Aelian, a Roman by birth and blood; a half century later Dio Cassius, a Roman senator, would write his history of Rome in Greek. Leadership in literature was passing back from Rome to the Greek East; not to the Greek spirit, but to the Oriental soul using Hellenic speech. There would be giants again in Latin; but they would be Christian saints.

  Roman art declined more slowly than Roman letters. Technical ability lingered on and produced good architecture, sculpture, painting, and mosaic. The head of Nerva, in the Vatican, carries on the vivid realism of Flavian portraits, and the Column of Trajan is an impressive relief despite much crudity. Hadrian labored to revive Hellenic classicism, but found no one to play Pheidias to his Pericles; the inspiration that had stirred Greece after Marathon, and Rome after Actium, was missing in an age of self-limitation, contentment, and peace. The busts of Hadrian lose character by their smooth Hellenistic lines; the heads of Plotina and Sabina are pretty; but the portraits of Antinoüs repel us by their sleek effeminate insipidity. Probably Hadrian’s classical reaction was a mistake: it ended the forceful naturalism and individuation of Flavian and Trajanic sculpture, which had had indigenous roots in Italian tradition and character. Nothing reaches maturity except through the fulfillment of its own nature.

  Under the Antonines Roman sculpture had its penultimate fling. Once at least it achieved perfection, in the figure of a young woman whose veiled head and modest robes are molded with a bewitching delicacy and firmness of line.43 Almost as good is the portrait of Marcus’ Faustina, aristocratically refined, and sensuous enough to accord with the innuendoes of history. Aurelius himself was carved or cast in a thousand forms, from the meditative and guileless yet eagerly sensitive youth of the Capitoline bust to the curly-headed professor in armor of that same collection. Every tourist knows the stately bronze of Aurelius Imperator on horseback, which, since Michelangelo restored it, has dominated the piazza of Rome’s Capitol.

  Relief remained to the end a favorite Roman art. The Etruscan and Hellenistic custom of carving mythological or historical scenes upon sarcophagi returned in Hadrian’s time as the hope of immortality took more personal and even physical form, and burial replaced cremation. Eleven panels surviving from triumphal arches erected to commemorate the campaigns of Aurelius II show the naturalistic style in perfection: no one is idealized, every participant is individualized; Marcus, receiving without pride the submission of a fallen enemy, is an appealingly human figure; and the defeated are shown not as barbarians but as men worthy of their long struggle for freedom. In 174 the Senate and people of Rome raised that Column of Aurelius which still adorns the Piazza Colonna; inspired by Trajan’s Column, it pictured the Marcomannic Wars with a sympathetic art that honored conquerors and conquered alike.

  The spirit of the Emperor had helped to form the art and morals of his time. The games were less cruel, the laws more considerate of the weak; marriage was apparently more lasting and content. Immorality continued, openly in a minority, clandestinely in the majority, as at all times; but it had passed its peak with Nero and had ceased to be fashionable. Men as well as women were returning to the old religion or devoting themselves to new ones; and the philosophers approved. Rome was now teeming with them, invited, welcomed, or tolerated by Aurelius; they took full advantage of his generosity and his power, crowded his court, received appointments and emoluments, delivered countless lectures, and opened many schools. In their imperial pupil they gave the world the culmination and disintegration of ancient philosophy.

  V. THE EMPEROR AS PHILOSOPHER

  Six years before his death Marcus Aurelius sat down in his tent to formulate his thoughts on human life and destiny. We cannot be sure that the Ta eis heauton—“to himself”—was intended for the public eye; probably so, for even saints are vain, and the greatest man of action has moments of weakness in which he aspires to write a book. Marcus was not an expert author; most of the training that Fronto had given him in Latin was wasted now, since he wrote in Greek; besides, these “Golden Thoughts” were penned in the intervals of travel, battles, revolts, and many tribulations; we must forgive them for being disconnected and formless, often repetitious, sometimes dull. The book is precious only for its contents—its tenderness and candor, its half-conscious revelations of a pagan-Christian, ancient-medieval soul.

/>   Like most thinkers of his time, Aurelius conceived philosophy not as a speculative description of infinity, but as a school of virtue and a way of life. He hardly bothers to make up his mind about God; sometimes he talks like an agnostic, acknowledging that he does not know; but having made that admission, he accepts the traditional faith with a simple piety. “Of what worth is it to me,” he asks, “to live in a universe without gods or Providence?”44 He speaks of deity now in the singular, now in the plural, with all the indifference of Genesis. He offers public prayer and sacrifice to the old divinities, but in his private thought he is a pantheist, deeply impressed with the order of the cosmos and the wisdom of God. He has a Hindu’s sense of the interdependence of the world and man. He marvels at the growth of the child out of a little seed, the miraculous formation of organs, strength, mind, and aspiration out of a little food.45 He believes that if we could understand we should find in the universe the same order and creative power as in man. “All things are implicated with one another, and the bond is holy. . . . There is a common reason in all intelligent beings; one god pervades all things, one substance, one law, one truth. . . . Can a clear order subsist in thee, and disorder in the All?”46