Change and Decline: Roman Literature in the Early Empire

352 Pages·1978·16.179 MB·English

by  Gordon Willis Williams

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,