The Story of Civilization

by Will Durant

  VI Tacitus (xv, 38), Suetonius (“Nero,” 38), and Dio Cassius (LXII, 16) all agree in accusing Nero of starting and renewing the fire in order to rebuild Rome. There is no proof of his guilt or innocence.

  VII The figure given by Suetonius is often rejected as incredible; but probably it was reckoned in a depreciated currency.

  CHAPTER XIV

  The Silver Age

  A.D. 14-96

  I. THE DILETTANTES

  TRADITION has given to Latin letters from A.D. 14 to 117 the name of Silver Age, implying a fall from the cultural excellence of the Augustan Age. Tradition is the voice of time, and time is the medium of selection; a cautious mind will respect their verdict, for only youth knows better than twenty centuries. We may be permitted, however, to suspend judgment, to give Lucan, Petronius, Seneca, the elder Pliny, Celsus, Statius, Martial, Quintilian—and, in later chapters, Tacitus, Juvenal, Pliny the Younger, and Epictetus—an unbiased hearing, and enjoy them as if we had never heard that they belonged to a decadent period. In every epoch something is decaying and something is growing. In epigram, satire, the novel, history, and philosophy the Silver Age marks the zenith of Roman literature, as it represents in realistic sculpture and mass architecture the climax of Roman art.

  The speech of the common man re-entered literature, diminishing inflections, relaxing syntax, and dropping final consonants with Gallic impertinence. About the middle of the first century the Latin V (which had been pronounced like our W) and B (between vowels) were both softened into a sound like the English V; so habere, to have, became in sound havere, and prepared for Italian avere and French avoir; while vinum, wine, began to approximate, by lazy slurring of the changing final consonant, the Italian vino and the French vin. The Latin language was preparing to mother Italian, Spanish, and French.

  It must be admitted that rhetoric had now grown at the expense of eloquence, grammar at the expense of poetry. Able men devoted themselves beyond precedent to studying the form, evolution, and niceties of the language, editing already “classical” texts, formulating the august rules of literary composition, forensic oratory, poetic meter, and prose rhythm. Claudius tried to reform the alphabet; Nero made poetry fashionable by his almost Japanese example; and the elder Seneca wrote manuals of rhetoric on the ground that eloquence gives to every power a double power. Without eloquence only generals could rise in Rome; and even generals had to be orators. The mania for rhetoric seized all forms of literature: poetry became rhetorical, prose became poetical, and Pliny himself wrote an eloquent page in the six volumes of his Natural History. Men began to worry about the balance of their phrases and the melody of their clauses; historians wrote declamations, philosophers itched for epigrams, and every one wrote sententiae—concentrated pills of wisdom. All the polite world was writing poetry, and reading it to friends in hired halls or theaters, at table, even (Martial complained) in the bath. Poets engaged in public competitions, won prizes, were feted by municipalities and crowned by emperors; aristocrats and princes welcomed dedications or tributes and paid for them with dinners or denarii. The passion for poetry gave a pleasant aspect of amateur authorship to an age and city darkened with sexual license and periodic terror.

  Terror and poetry met in the life of Lucan. The older Seneca was his grandfather, the philosopher Seneca his uncle. Born in Corduba in 39, and named Marcus Annaeus Lucanus, he was brought in infancy to Rome and grew up in aristocratic circles where poetry and philosophy rivaled amorous and political intrigues as the foci of life. At twenty-one he competed in the Neronian Games with a poem “In Praise of Nero,” and won a prize. Seneca introduced him at court, and soon the poet and the Emperor were bandying epics. Lucan made the mistake of winning first prize in a poetic contest with the Prince; Nero ordered him to publish no more, and Lucan withdrew to avenge himself in private with a vigorous but rhetorical epic, Pharsalia, which viewed the Civil War from the standpoint of the Pompeian aristocracy. Lucan is fair to Caesar, and writes of him an illuminating phrase: nil actum credens cum quid superesset agendum—“thinking nothing done while anything remained to do.”1 But the real hero of the book is the younger Cato, whom Lucan equals with the gods in a famous line: victrix causa deis placuit, sed victa Catoni—“the winning cause pleased the gods, but the lost one pleased Cato.”2 Lucan too loved a lost cause and died for it. He joined in the conspiracy to replace Nero with Piso, was arrested, broke down (he was only twenty-six), and revealed the names of other conspirators, even, we are told, of his mother. When Nero confirmed his death sentence he recovered his courage, summoned his friends to a feast, ate with them heartily, opened his veins, and recited his lines against despotism as he bled to death (65).

  II. PETRONIUS

  We are not certain—it is only the general opinion—that the Petronius whose Satyricon still finds many readers was the Caius Petronius who died by Nero’s orders a year after Lucan. The book itself contains not a word to serve as a clue; and Tacitus, who describes the arbiter elegantiarum with pithy eloquence, makes no mention of the disreputable masterpiece. Some forty epigrams are ascribed to a Petronius, including a line that almost sums up Lucretius: primus in orbe deos fecit timor—“it was fear that first in the world made gods”;3 but these fragments too are silent about the author’s identity.

  The Satyricon was a collection of satires, probably in sixteen books, of which only the last two remain, themselves incomplete. They are saturae in the Latin sense of medleys—here of prose and verse, adventure and philosophy, gastronomy and venery. The form owes something to the satires of Menippus, a Syrian Cynic who wrote in Gadara about 60 B.C., and to the “Milesian Tales,” or love romances, that had become popular in the Hellenistic world. As all extant examples of these are later than Petronius, the Satyricon has the distinction of being the oldest known novel.

  It is hardly credible that an aristocratic lord of luxury, and master of fine taste, should have fathered a book so profusely vulgar as the Satyricon. All its active characters are plebeians, ex-slaves, or slaves, and all the scenes are of low life; here the Augustan preoccupation of literature with the upper classes is violently ended. Encolpius, who tells the tale, is an adulterer, a homosexual, a liar, and a thief, and takes it for granted that all sensible men are the same. “We had it understood between ourselves,” he says of himself and his friend, “that whenever opportunity came we would pilfer whatever we could lay our hands upon, for the improvement of our common treasury.”4 The story begins in a brothel, where Encolpius meets Ascyltos, who has taken refuge there from a lecture on philosophy. Their escapades among the towns and trolls of southern Italy form the thread of the wandering narrative; their rivalry for the handsome slave boy Giton unites and divides them in picaresque romance. At last they come to the house of the merchant Trimalchio; and the rest of the extant work is given over to describing the Cena Trimalchionis, the most astounding dinner in literature.

  Trimalchio is an ex-slave who has made a fortune, has bought enormous latifundia, and lives in parvenu luxury with the appointments of a palace and the atmosphere of a stew. His estates are so vast that a daily gazette must be written to keep him abreast of his earnings. He begs his guests to drink:

  If the wine don’t please you I’ll change it. I don’t have to buy it, thank the gods. Everything here that makes your mouth water was produced on one of my country places, which I’ve never yet seen; but they tell me it’s down Terracina and Tarentum way. I’ve got a notion to add Sicily to my other little holdings, so in case I want to go to Africa I’ll be able to sail along my own coasts. . . . When it comes to silver I’m a connoisseur; I have goblets as big as wine jars. ... I own a thousand bowls that Mummius left to my patron. . . . I buy cheap and sell dear; others may have different ideas.5

  He is a kindly fellow withal; he shouts at his slaves, but he pardons them readily. He has so many that only a tenth of them know him by sight. “Slaves are men,” he says, generously remembering his origin; “they sucked the same milk that we did . . . an
d mine will drink the water of freedom if they live.” To prove his intentions he has his will brought in and reads it to his guests. It includes specifications for his epitaph, which is to end with the proud claim that he “grew rich from little, left 30,000,000 sesterces, and never heard a philosopher.”6

  Forty pages describe the dinner; a few sentences will convey its aroma:

  There was a circular tray around which were displayed the signs of the zodiac, and upon each sign the caterer had placed the food best in keeping with it. Ram’s vetches on Aries, beef on Taurus . . . the womb of an unfarrowed sow on Virgo ... on Libra a balance holding a tart in one pan and a cake in the other. . . . Four dancers ran in to music, and removed the upper part of the tray. Beneath it . . . stuffed capons and sows’ bellies, and in the middle a hare. At the corners four figures of Marsyas spouted from their bladders a highly spiced sauce upon fish which were swimming about. ... A tray followed on which was served a wild boar; from its tusks hung baskets loaded with dates; around it were little suckling pigs made of pastry. . . . When the carver plunged his knife into the boar’s side, thrushes flew out, one for each guest.7

  Three white hogs walk into the room, and the guests choose which one they will have cooked for them; while they eat, the winning hog is roasted; soon it re-enters; when it is carved, sausages and meat puddings emerge from its belly. When the dessert arrives Encolpius has no stomach for it; but Trimalchio urges his guests onward by assuring them that the dessert has been made entirely out of a hog. A hoop is lowered from the ceiling, bringing to each diner an alabaster jar filled with perfume, while slaves replenish empty glasses with ancient wines. Trimalchio gets drunk and makes love to a boy; his fat wife protests, and he throws a cup at her head. “This Syrian dancing whore,” he says of her, “has a poor memory. I took her off the auction block and made her a woman, and now she puffs herself up like a frog. . . . But that’s the way it is: if you’re born in an attic you can’t sleep in a palace.”8 And he bids his major-domo keep her statue off his tomb, “else I’ll be nagged even after I’m dead.”

  It is a powerful and savage satire; realistic only in its details, and probably true of only a small segment of Roman life. If Nero’s Petronius wrote it we must count it the merciless caricature of the nouveau riche freedman by a patrician who had never earned his keep. There is no mercy in the book, no tenderness, no ideal; immorality and corruption are taken for granted, and the life of the underworld is presented with gusto, without indignation, and without comment. Here the gutter flows directly into classic literature, bringing its own judgments and taste, its own lusty vocabulary and hilarious vitality. Sometimes the story rises to those sublime heights of nonsense, obscenity, and vituperation which crown the epic of Gargantua and Pantagruel. Apuleius’ Golden Ass would follow in its steps; Gil Blas, seventeen centuries later, would rival it; Tristram Shandy and Tom Jones would continue its meandering tradition. It is the strangest book in the literature of Rome.

  III. THE PHILOSOPHERS

  In this loose and complex age, when freedom was so limited and life was so free, philosophy flourished alongside of sensuality, and the two were not above joining hands. The decay of the native religion had left a moral vacuum which philosophy sought to fill. Parents sent their sons, and themselves often went, to hear the lectures of men who offered to provide a rational code of civilized conduct, or a formal dress for naked desire. Those who could afford it paid philosophers to live with them, partly as educators, partly as spiritual counselors, partly as learned company; so Augustus had Areus, consulted him on almost everything, and for his sake (if we may believe a ruler) was lenient to Alexandria. When Drusus died Livia called in “her husband’s philosopher”—so Seneca phrases it—“to help her bear her grief.”9 Nero, Trajan, and of course Aurelius had philosophers residing with them at court, as kings have chaplains now. In their last moments men would summon philosophers to chart their passing, as centuries later they would ask for a priest.10

  The public never forgave these teachers of wisdom for taking salaries or fees. Philosophy was esteemed a sufficient substitute for food and drink, and philosophers who had a less exalted opinion of their profession were the butt of popular jokes, of Quintilian’s criticism, of Lucian’s satire, and of imperial hostility. Many of them deserved it, for they put on the philosopher’s coarse cloak, and grew a profound beard, to give a learned front to gluttony, avarice, and vanity. “A short survey of life,” says a character in Lucian,

  had convinced me of the absurdity and meanness . . . that pervade all worldly purposes. ... In this state of mind the best I could think of was to get at the truth of it all from the . . . philosophers. So I selected the best of them—if solemnity of visage, pallor of complexion, and length of beard are a criterion . . . I placed myself in their hands. For a considerable sum down, and more to be paid when they had perfected me in wisdom, I was to be . . . instructed in the order of the universe. Unfortunately, so far from dispelling my previous ignorance, they perplexed me more and more with their daily drenches of beginnings and ends, atoms and voids, matters and forms. My greatest difficulty was that, though they differed among themselves, and all they said was full of contradictions, they expected me to believe them, each pulling me in his own direction. . . . Often one of them could not tell you correctly the number of miles from Megara to Athens, but had no hesitation about the distance in feet from the sun to the moon.11

  Most of the Roman philosophers followed the Stoic creed. The epicureans were too busy pursuing wine, woman, and food to have much time for theory. Here and there in Rome were mendicant preachers of the Cynic philosophy, ignoring speculation, and calling men to a simple and soapless life; they acceded to the popular demand that philosophers should be poor, and were in consequence the least respected of the schools. Seneca, however, made one of them his intimate friend. “Why should I not hold Demetrius in high esteem?” he asked. “I have found that he lacks nothing;” and the millionaire sage marveled when the nearly naked Cynic refused a gift of 200,000 sesterces from Caligula.12

  Since the Roman Stoic was a man of action rather than of contemplation, he eschewed metaphysics as a hopeless quest, and sought in Stoicism a philosophy of conduct that would support human decency, family unity, and social order independently of supernatural surveillance and command. The essence of his code was self-control: he would subordinate passion to reason, and train his will to desire nothing that would make his peace of soul contingent upon external goods. In politics he would recognize the universal brotherhood of man under the fatherhood of God; at the same time he would love his country and hold himself ready to die at any time to avert its disgrace or his own. Life itself was always to remain within his choice; he was free to leave it whenever it should become an evil rather than a boon. A man’s conscience was to be higher than any law. Monarchy was a sad necessity for the rule of wide and diverse realms; but to kill a despot was an excellent thing.

  Roman Stoicism had at first profited from the Principate; the limitations on political freedom had driven men from the forum to the study, and had inclined the finest of them to a philosophy that made the self-controlled subject more sovereign than the impassioned king. The government did not check freedom of thought or speech so long as these made no public attack upon the emperor, his family, or the official gods. But when the professors and their Senatorial patrons began to denounce tyranny, there arose between philosophy and autocracy a war that lasted till the adoptive emperors united them on the throne. When Nero ordered Thrasea to die (65), he at the same time exiled Thrasea’s friend Musonius Rufus, the most sincere and consistent of the Stoic philosophers in first-century Rome. Rufus had defined philosophy as inquiry into right conduct, and had taken his quest seriously. He denounced concubinage despite its legality, and demanded of men the same standard of sexual morality that they required of women. Sexual relations, said this ancient Tolstoian, were permissible only in marriage and for procreation. He believed in equal educational opportunities f
or both sexes and welcomed women to his lectures; but he bade them seek from education and philosophy the means of perfecting themselves as women.13 Slaves, too, attended his classes; one of them—Epictetus—honored his teacher by surpassing him. When civil war flared in Rome after Nero’s death, Musonius went out to the attacking army and lectured it on the blessings of peace and the horrors of war. Antonius’ troops laughed at him and resumed the ultimate arbitrament. Vespasian, in expelling the philosophers from Rome, excepted Rufus; but he kept his concubines.

  IV. SENECA

  The Stoic philosophy found its most doubtful expression in the life, its most perfect expression in the writings, of Lucius Annaeus Seneca. Born at Corduba about 4 B.C., he was soon taken to Rome, and received all the education available there. He imbibed rhetoric from his father, Stoicism from Attalus, Pythagoreanism from Sotion, and practical politics from his aunt’s husband, the Roman governor of Egypt. He tried vegetarianism for a year, then gave it up, but remained always abstemious in food and drink; he was a millionaire in his surroundings rather than in his habits. He suffered so much from asthma and weak lungs that he often contemplated suicide. He practiced law, and was chosen quaestor about A.D. 33. Two years later he married Pompeia Paulina, with whom he lived in remarkable continuity until his death.

  On inheriting his father’s fortune he abandoned the law and indulged himself in writing. When Cremutius Cordus was forced by Caligula to kill himself (40), Seneca addressed to Cordus’ daughter Marcia a consolatio—an essay of condolence which was a regularly practiced form in the schools of rhetoric and philosophy. Caligula wished to have him executed for his impertinence, but Seneca’s friends saved his life by arguing that he would presently die of consumption in any case. Soon afterward Claudius accused him of improper relations with Julia, daughter of Germanicus; the Senate condemned him to death, but Claudius commuted this to exile in Corsica. On that rugged isle, amid a population as primitive as in Ovid’s Tomi, the philosopher spent eight lonely years (41-49). At first he took his misfortune with true stoic calm, and comforted his mother with a touching Consolatio ad Helviam; but as the bitter years crawled on, his spirit broke, and he addressed to Claudius’ secretary a Consolatio ad Polybium in a humble appeal for pardon. When this failed he tried to dull his sufferings by composing tragedies.