Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius. Dill Samuel

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ greatest talent and industry,880 and the successful pleader may win a fame which may entitle him to take rank with the great orators of the past. Pliny, inspired by memories of Quintilian’s lectures, has always floating before him the glory of Cicero.881 He will prepare for publication a speech delivered in an obscure case about a disputed will.882 He is immensely proud of its subtlety and point, and the sweep of its indignant or pathetic declamation, and he is not unwilling to believe his legal friends who compared it with the De Corona! The suppression of free political life, the absence of public interests, and the extinction of the trade of the delator, left young men with a passion for distinction few chances of gratifying it. The law courts at any rate provided an audience, and the chance of momentary prominence. In the Letters of Pliny, we can see the young advocate pushing his way through the dense masses of the crowded court, arriving at his place with torn tunic, holding the attention of his audience for seven long hours, and sitting down amid the applause even of the judges themselves.883 Calpurnia often arranged relays of messengers to bring her news of the success, from point to point, of one of her husband’s speeches.884 Youths of the highest social rank—a Salinator, or a Ummidius Quadratus—threw themselves eagerly into the drudgery which might make an ephemeral name.885 Ambitious pretenders, with no talent or learning, and arrayed perhaps in hired purple and jewels, like Juvenal’s needy lawyer, forced themselves on to the benches of the advocates, and engaged a body of claqueurs whose applause was purchased for a few denarii.886 Pliny has such a pride in this profession, he so idealises what must have been often rather humdrum work, that he feels a personal pain at anything which seems to detract from the [pg 155]old-fashioned, leisurely dignity of the court. In his day the judges seem to have been becoming more rapid and business-like in their procedure, and less inclined to allow the many clepsydrae which men of Pliny’s school demanded for the gradual development of all their rhetorical artifices. He regrets the good old times, when adjournments were freely granted,887 and days would be spent on a case which was now despatched in as many hours. It is for this reason that he cannot conceal a certain admiration for Regulus, in other respects, “the most detestable of bipeds” but who redeemed his infamy by an enthusiasm and energy as an advocate which rivalled even that of Pliny.

      M. Aquilius Regulus, the prince of delators, and one of the great glories of the Roman bar in Domitian’s reign, is a singular figure. His career and character are a curious illustration of the social history of the times. Regulus was the son of a man who, in Nero’s reign, had been driven into exile and ruined.888 Bold, able, recklessly eager for wealth and notoriety at any cost, as a mere youth he resolved to raise himself from obscure indigence, and soon became one of the most capable and dreaded agents of the tyranny. He gained an evil fame by the ruin of the great houses of the Crassi and Orfiti. Lust of blood and greed of gain drove him on to the wholesale destruction of innocent boys, noble matrons, and men of the most illustrious race. The cruelty of Nero was not swift enough to satisfy him, and he called for the annihilation of the Senate at a stroke. He rose rapidly to great wealth, honours were showered upon him, and, after a prudent retirement in the reigns of Vespasian and Titus, he reached the pinnacle of his depraved ambition under Vespasian’s cruel son. He figures more than once in the poems of Martial, and always in the most favourable light. His talent and eloquence, according to the poet, were only equalled by his piety, and the special care of the gods had saved him from being buried under the ruins of a cloister which had suddenly fallen in.889 He had estates at Tusculum, in Umbria and [pg 156]Etruria.890 The courts were packed when he rose to plead.891 Unfortunately, the needy poet furnishes a certain key to all this flattery, when he thanks Regulus for his presents, and then begs him to buy them back.892 It is after Domitian’s death that we meet Regulus in Pliny’s pages. The times are changed, the delator’s day is over, and Regulus is a humbler man. But he is still rich, courted, and feared; he is still a great power in the law courts. With a weak voice, a bad memory, and hesitating utterance,893 by sheer industry and determination he had made himself a powerful speaker, with a style of his own, sharp, pungent, brutally incisive, ruthlessly sacrificing elegance to point.894 He belonged to the new school, and sometimes sneered at Pliny’s affectation of the grand Ciceronian manner.895 Yet to Pliny’s eyes, his earnest strenuousness in his profession redeems some of his vices. He insists on having ample time to develop his case.896 He appears in the morning pale with study, wearing a white patch on his forehead. He has consulted the diviners as to the success of his pleadings.897 It is a curious sign of the times that this great advocate, who already possessed an enormous fortune, was a legacy-hunter of the meanest sort. He actually visited, on her death-bed, Verania, the widow of that Piso, the adopted son of Galba, over whose murder Regulus had savagely gloated, and by telling her that the stars promised a hope of recovery, he obtained a place in her will. His mourning for his son displayed all the feverish extravagance and grandiose eccentricity of a true child of the Neronian age.898 The boy’s ponies and dogs and pet birds were slaughtered over his pyre. Countless pictures and statues of him were ordered. His memoir was read by the father to a crowded audience, and a thousand copies of it were sent broadcast over the provinces.899 In Regulus we seem to see the type of character which, had fortune raised him to the throne, would have made perhaps a saner Caligula, and an even more eccentric Nero.

      [pg 157]

      The struggles of the law courts were idealised by Pliny, and their transient triumphs seemed to him to match the glory of the Philippics or the Verrines. Yet, to do him justice, Pliny had sometimes a truer idea of the foundations of lasting fame. The secret of immortality, the one chance of escaping oblivion, is to leave your thought embalmed in choice and distinguished literary form, which coming ages will not willingly let die.900 This, probably the only form of immortality in which Pliny believed, is the great motive for literary labour. The longing to be remembered was the most ardent passion of the Roman mind in all ages and in all ranks, from the author of the Agricola to the petty artisan, who commemorated the homely virtues of his wife for the eyes of a distant age, and made provision for the annual feast and the tribute of roses to the tomb. Of that immense literary ambition which Pliny represented, and which he considered it a duty to foster, only a small part has reached its goal. The great mass of these eager litterateurs have altogether vanished, or remain as mere shadowy names in Martial or Statius or Pliny.

      The poems of Martial and Statius leave the impression that, in the reign of Domitian, the interest in poetical literature was keen and widely diffused, and that, besides the poets by profession, there were crowds of amateurs who dabbled in verse. The Silvae transport us into a charming, if rather luxurious world, where men like Atedius Melior or Pollius amuse themselves with dilettante composition among their gardens and marbles on the bays of Campania.901 Martial has a host of friends similarly engaged, and the versatility of some of them is suspiciously wide. An old Ardelio is twitted by Martial with his showy and superficial displays in declamation and history, in plays and epigrams, in grammar and astronomy.902 Canius Rufus, his countryman from Gades, Varro, Bassus, Brutianus, Cirinius, have all an extraordinary dexterity in almost every branch of poetical composition. Martial is too keen a critic not to see the fugitive character of much of this amateur literature. Like [pg 158]Juvenal, he scoffs at the thin talent which concealed its feebleness behind the pomp and faded splendour of epic or tragic tradition.903 He roughly tells the whole versifying crowd that genius alone will live in coming ages. The purchased applause of the recitation hall merely gratifies for an hour the vanity of the literary trifler. It is a pity for his fame that Martial did not always maintain this tone of sincerity. He can at times sell his flattery to the basest and most stupid. He is capable of implying a comparison of the frigid pedantry of Silius Italicus to the majesty of Virgil.904

      Pliny was a friend and admirer of Martial, and, with his usual generous hand, he made the poet a present when he left Rome for ever to pass his last years at Bilbilis.905 The needy epigrammatist was only a distant observer, or hanger-on of that world of wealth and refinement in which Pliny was a conspicuous figure. But from both Pliny and Martial we get very much the same impression of the literary movement in the reign of Domitian. Pliny himself is perhaps its best representative. He is a true son of the Roman schools, as they had been revived and strengthened by Vespasian, for a life of many generations. Pliny does not think slightly of the literary efforts of his own day: some of them he even overrates. But already the Roman mind had bent its neck to that thraldom to the past, to that routine СКАЧАТЬ