Change and Decline: Roman Literature in the Early Empire PDF
Preview Change and Decline: Roman Literature in the Early Empire
SATHER CLASSICAL LECTURES Volume Forty-five CHANGE AND DECLINE CHANGE AND DECLINE ROMAN LITERATURE IN THE EARLY EMPIRE by GORDON WILLIAMS UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley • Los Angeles • London UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS BERKELEY AND LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS, LTD. LONDON, ENGLAND COPYRIGHT © 1978 BY THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA ISBN O-52O-O3333-7 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 76-24598 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 89 Contents Preface vii Introduction 1 Contemporary analyses of decline 6 1. The elder Seneca 7 2. Velleius Paterculus 9 3. Petronius 10 4. The younger Seneca 12 5. The elder Pliny »4 6. Longinus »7 7. The Dialogus de oratoribus of Tacitus 26 8. Conclusion 49 Ovid: The poet and politics 52 1. Ovid's isolation 53 2. Literature and politics 56 3. Ovid's earlier poetry and Augustus 61 4. Ovid's patron 65 5. The Ars A ma tor ia and Augustus 70 6. Fasti and Metamorphoses 83 7. The letters from exile 96 8. Ovid and the future 100 The dominance of Greek culture 102 1. The period before 100 B.C. 102 2. From 100 B.C. to the time of Augustus 108 vi Contents 3. Greek culture in the age of Augustus 118 4. Cultural fusion in the early Empire 138 5. The poetic fascination of Greek 145 IV Authoritarianism and irrationality 153 1. Imperial authoritarianism 154 2. Emperor-worship as a literary theme 15g 3. Some consequences of the terror 16g 4. Cruelty and the exploitation of weakness 184 V Thought and expression 193 1. imitatio and aemulatio 193 2. Brevity and expansiveness 213 3. Genre and personality 232 4. The cult of the episode 246 5. Ready-made poetic ideas 254 6. Rhetoric 266 VI Literature and society 272 1. The senate and the emperor 272 2. Literature and the senate 275 3. The differing characters of the different periods 280 4. Factors of success 286 5. Factors of decline 292 6. Patronage 297 7. Public recitation 303 8. The archaizing movement 306 Select bibliography 313 Index of passages discussed 32g General index 333 Preface ONE of the most pleasurably memorable experiences of my life was the delivery of the Sather Classical Lectures in April, May, and June of »973- Everything conspired to en- joyment: the physical surroundings, the climate, the friendly hospitality of colleagues, and—by no means least—the large, faithful audience that displayed its interest by many questions. Those questions were both critically helpful and of such a kind as to show that reflections on the problems I was discussing prompted my listeners to see analogies not only in other cul- tures and periods, but, very emphatically, also in their own. I very greatly profited from and enjoyed all such discussions; if I have been careful to avoid analogies (even the now very popular analogy with Mannerism) that is due to lack of knowledge and confidence, not to lack of interest and stimulus. I have taken the opportunity, in preparing the lectures for the printer, to make some changes in format; in particular, I have greatly extended the range of quotation, in the belief that most of these writers are more talked of than read. I have trans- lated all quotations into a prose that is designed to help with understanding the Latin or Greek rather than to be read for its own sake; this I did in the hope of making the subject as acces- sible as possible to students of other disciplines. Footnotes have been kept to a bare minimum: they are less designed to acknowl- edge debts than to give the reader information. Some debts are viii Preface acknowledged in the Select Bibliography; but that is inadequate for my constant indebtedness to great books, like those, for in- stance, of Friedlaender, Eduard Norden, Ronald Syme, A. D. Leeman, or George Kennedy. Those (and others) are works that pass into the bloodstream of anyone who studies this period. The main intention of the Select Bibliography is to make it easy to trace works mentioned briefly in the notes; but I have also added—in an admittedly random fashion—works that I am conscious helped me, in one way or another, to reach a point of view. Study of the period has been greatly helped by scholars who have published surveys of the scholarly work done in vari- ous fields; I have tried to include most of these also. However, I have only been able to notice work published later than 1972 in a very restricted and random way. My warm thanks must go to colleagues and friends in the Classics Department at Berkeley. Especially I thank Bill An- derson, who was chairman when I was there and who constantly helped me, with unfailing kindness. Those who have spent time at Berkeley will instantly understand the warmth of my grati- tude to Kendrick and Betty Pritchett for their generous hospi- tality and for their constant thoughtful anticipation of difficul- ties that strangers in Berkeley might encounter. I acknowledge, too, the skilled and experienced help which I was most gen- erously given by Bennett Price, who was my research assistant during my stay in Berkeley. His interest in, and knowledge of, rhetorical theory were invaluable to me. I am also greatly in- debted to my old friend and colleague John Simon, who helped me in many ways and not least in correcting the proofs. New Haven G. W. May 1976 Introduction THE so-called Silver Age of Roman literature compels a critic's attention, and judgements on it have been increasingly favourable of late. This is not surprising, since the tastes and standards of our own time seem to have been changing in a way that has made them coincide more and more with those implicit in much of the literature of the early Empire. But it is worrying, since it suggests a highly subjective approach to the literature of the past. Has literary history any value under such condi- tions? Is it even possible? Faced with the problem of characterizing and explaining the literary culture of a period, a critic may be tempted by two ex- treme positions: the one is permissive, in the sense that each writer is judged on his own terms and by reference to nothing outside his own work (it is almost a case of 'anything that is, is good'); the other is hierarchical, and clings to the ideal of ob- jective criteria to be applied rigorously and impartially to all writers, with the aim of arranging them, like candidates in an examination, in an order of merit. From the latter point of view, the literature of the early Empire is 'silver' to the 'gold' of the previous period, and decline is obvious. To the former type of critic no qualitative judgement is possible; all writers have their own peculiar virtues, and if literary history has any function, it is to record a process of change in which the ques- tion of decline is simply irrelevant. But this latter extreme in- 2 Introduction volves abdication of responsibility and leads to critical solipsism (which has almost become a characteristic of modern critical work on the period); the former is dictatorial and ultimately tends to reduce itself to meaningless labels. For in cultural his- tory change involves growth and decay, and it is the predomi- nance of particular types of growth or of decay that gives a pe- riod its cultural character. Neither critical procedure will serve to analyze that character. In what follows, I have not attempted an overall, unified portrait of the age. Instead, I have asked a series of questions which require different routes of approach into the literature of the period. Consequently, each of the six lectures is, to some extent, independent, and each approaches the problem of what happened to Roman literary culture in the early Empire from a different direction. The writers of the period themselves expressed pessimistic views of a decadent culture. From the vantage of hindsight, I think that their pessimism was justified, but I have been con- cerned to examine their causal explanations to see if they have anything to contribute to modern understanding of the period. In general, I find that they relied too much on outworn and conventional categories of explanation (particularly on the in- sidiously attractive and rhetorically useful category of moral decline). There was, however, the very important exception of Tacitus; and a large part of the first lecture is therefore devoted to a detailed analysis of the Dialogus de oratoribus. Tacitus was not prone to simple exposition of a point of view, and in this he was only doing justice to the extreme complexity of historical explanation; but this makes it very difficult for the reader to discern and order the views that Tacitus was expressing, and a work like the Dialogus is a particularly subtle web of nuance and suggestion. The results of such an analysis cannot be simply tabulated; and there is much to be said for allowing the ideas to emerge from the sheer process of dialectical engagement with the work (as if it were a poem). But a limited optimism is clear in Tacitus in favour of literature that has two characteristics. The first is negative: literature cannot be like oratory; that is,
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