Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius. Dill Samuel

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СКАЧАТЬ of moralists that mothers did not guard with vigilant care the purity of their children. But there were women of the circle of Tacitus and Pliny as spotless as the half-legendary Lucretia, as they were far more accomplished, and probably far more charming. It is often said that women sink or rise according to the level of the men with whom they are linked. If that be true, there must have been many good men in the days of the Flavian dynasty.

      The younger Pliny, whose name, before his adoption, was Publius Caecilius Secundus,828 was descended from families which had been settled at Como since the time of the first Caesar.829 They belonged to the local aristocracy, and possessed estates and villas around the lake. Pliny’s father, who had held high municipal office, died early, but the boy had the great advantage of the guardianship of Verginius Rufus, for whose character and achievements his ward felt the profoundest reverence.830 That great soldier had been governor of Upper Germany at the close of Nero’s reign, and, with a deference to old constitutional principles, which Pliny must have admired, had twice, at the peril of his life, refused to receive the imperial place at the hands of his clamorous legions.831 Pliny was born in 61 or 62 A.D., the time which saw the death of Burrus, the retirement of Seneca from public life, and the marriage of Nero with Poppaea.832 His infancy therefore coincided with the last and wildest excesses of the Neronian tyranny. But country places like Como felt but little of the shock of these moral earthquakes. There was no school in Como till one was founded by Pliny’s own generosity.833 But the boy had probably, in his early years, the care of his uncle, the author of the Natural History, who, during the worst years of the Terror, was living, like many others, in studious retirement on his estates.834 The uncle and nephew were men [pg 146]of very different temperament, but there can be little doubt that the character and habits of the older man profoundly influenced the ideals of the younger. The elder Pliny would have been an extraordinary character even in a puritan age; he seems almost a miracle in the age of the Claudian Caesars. He was born in 23 A.D., in the reign of Tiberius; and his early youth and manhood cover the reigns of Caligula and Claudius. He was only 32 when Nero came to the throne. He returned to Rome in 71 to hold a high place in the councils of Vespasian.835 That more than monastic asceticism, that jealous hoarding of every moment,836 that complete indifference to ordinary pleasures, in comparison with the duty, or the ambition, of transmitting to future ages the accumulations of learned toil, is a curious contrast to the Gargantuan feasts or histrionic aestheticism which were the fashion in the circle of the Claudian Emperors. The younger Pliny has left us a minute account of his uncle’s routine of life, and justly adds that the most intense literary toil might seem mere idleness in comparison.837 His studies often began soon after midnight, broken by an official visit to the emperor before dawn. After administrative work was over, the remainder of the day was spent in reading or writing. Even in the bath or on a journey, this literary industry was never interrupted. A reader or amanuensis was always at hand to save the moments that generally are allowed to slip away to waste. He tells Titus in his preface that he had consulted 2000 volumes for his Natural History.838 The 160 volumes of closely written notes, which the austere enthusiast could have sold once for £3500, might have challenged the industry of a Casaubon or a Mommsen.

      The laborious intensity of the elder Pliny was probably unrivalled in his day. But the moral tone, the severe self-restraint, the contempt for the sensual, or even the comfortable, side of life, the plain unspeculative stoicism, was a tone which, from many indications in the younger Pliny and in the other [pg 147]literature of the time, appears to have been not so rare as the reader of Juvenal or Martial might suspect. A book like the Caesars of Suetonius, concentrating attention on the life of the emperor and his immediate circle, is apt to suggest misleading conclusions as to the condition of society at large. The old Roman character, perhaps the strongest and toughest national character ever developed, was an enduring type, and its true home was in the atmosphere of quiet country places in northern or central Italy, where the round of rural labour and simple pleasures reproduced the environment in which it first took form. We have glimpses of many of these nurseries or retreats of old-fashioned virtue in Pliny’s Letters. Brescia and Padua, in the valley of the Po, were especially noted for frugality and severity.839 And it was from among the youth of Brescia that Pliny suggested a husband for the daughter of the stoic champion, Arulenus Rusticus. There must have been many a home, like those of Spurinna, or Corellius Rufus, or Fabatus,840 or the poet Persius, where, far from the weary conventionality of the capital, the rage for wealth, the rush of vulgar self-assertion, there reigned the tranquil and austere ideal of a life dedicated to higher ends than the lusts of the flesh, or the ghoul-like avarice that haunted death-beds. There are youths and maidens in the portrait-gallery of Pliny whose innocence was guarded by good women as pure and strong as those matrons who nursed the stern, unbending soldiers of the Samnite and Punic wars.841

      The great struggle in which the legions of the East and West met again, and yet again, in the valley of the Po, probably did not much disturb the quiet homes on lake Como. The close of that awful conflict gave the world ten years of quiet and reformation, which were a genial atmosphere for the formation of many characters like Pliny’s. The reign of the Flavians was ushered in by the mystery and glamour of Eastern superstition, by oracles on Mount Carmel and miracles at Alexandria.842 But the plain Sabine soldier, who was the saviour of the Roman State, brought to his momentous task a clear unsophisticated good sense, with no trace of that [pg 148]crapulous excitement which had alternated between the heroics of spurious art and the lowest bohemianism. Vespasian, although he was not a figure to strike the imagination, was yet, if we think of the abyss from which, by his single strength, he rescued the Rome world,843 undoubtedly one of the greatest of the emperors. And his biographer, with an unusual tact, suggests what was probably one secret of his strength. Vespasian regularly visited the old farmhouse at Reate which was the cradle of his race. Nothing in the old place was ever changed. And, on holidays and anniversaries the emperor never failed to drink from the old silver goblet which his grandmother had used.844 The strength and virtue of the Latin race lay, not in religion or philosophy, but in the family pieties and devotion to the State. Vespasian found it urgent to bring order into the national finances, which had been reduced to chaos by the wild extravagance of his predecessors, and to recruit the Senate, which had been more than decimated by proscription, confiscation, and vicious self-abandonment.845 In performing his task, he did not shrink from the charge of cheese-paring, just as he did not dread the unpopularity of fresh taxation.846 But he could be liberal as well as parsimonious. He restored many of the ancient temples, even in country places.847 He made grants to senators whose fortunes had decayed or had been wasted.848 He spent great sums on colossal buildings and on amusements for the people.849 But the most singular and interesting trait in this remarkable man is that, with no pretensions to literary or artistic culture, he was the first Caesar who gave a fixed endowment to professors of the liberal arts, and that he was the founder of that public system of education850 which, for good or evil, produced profound effects on Roman character and intellect down to the end of the Western Empire. His motive was not, as some have suggested, to bring literature into thraldom to the State. He was really making himself the organ of a great intellectual [pg 149]movement. For, while the vast field of administration absorbed much of the energy of the cultivated class, the decay of free institutions had left a great number with only a shadow of political interest, and the mass of unoccupied talent had to find some other scope for its energies. It found it for ages, till the end of the Western Empire, in fugitive and ephemeral composition, or in the more ephemeral displays of the rhetorical class-room.851 Vespasian perhaps did a greater service in renovating the upper class of Rome by the introduction of many new men from the provinces, to fill the yawning gaps in senatorial and equestrian ranks. Spain contributed more than its fair share to the literature and statesmanship of this period.852 And one of the best and most distinguished sons of that province who found a career at Rome, was the rhetor Quintilian.

      The young Pliny, under his uncle’s care, probably came to Rome not long after Quintilian entered on his career of twenty years, as a teacher of rhetoric.853 While the elder Pliny was one of Vespasian’s trusted advisers, and regularly visited the emperor on official business before dawn, his nephew was forming his taste and character under the greatest and best of Roman teachers. Quintilian left a deep impression on the younger Pliny.854 He made him a Ciceronian, and he fortified his character. The master was one who believed that, in education, moral influence СКАЧАТЬ