Pliny’s theory of life is clearly stated in the Letters, and it was evidently acted on by a great number of the class to which he belonged.937 The years of vigorous youth should be given to the service of the state, in pursuing the well-marked and carefully-graduated career of honours, or in the strenuous oratorical strife of the law courts. The leisure of later years might be portioned out between social duty, the pleasures or the cares of a rural estate, and the cultivation of literary taste by reading and imitation of the great masters. The last was the most imperious duty of all, for those with any literary gifts, because charm of style gives the one hope of surviving the wreck of time;938 for mere cultivated facility, as the most refined and creditable way of filling up the vacant spaces of life. Even if lasting fame was beyond one’s reach, it was something to be able to give pleasure to an audience of cultivated friends at a reading, and to enjoy the triumph of an hour. There must [pg 166]have been many a literary coterie who, if they fed one another’s vanity, also encouraged literary ideals, and hinted gentle criticism,939 in that polite delicacy of phrase in which the Roman was always an adept. One of these literary circles stands out in Pliny’s pages. At least two of its members had held great office. Arrius Antoninus, the maternal grandfather of the Emperor Antoninus Pius,940 had twice borne the consulship with antique dignity, and shown himself a model governor as proconsul of Asia.941 He was devoted to Greek literature, and seems to have preferred to compose in that language. We need not accept literally Pliny’s praises of his Atticism, and of the grace and sweetness of his Greek epigrams. But he seems to have had a facility which Pliny tortured his ingenuity in vain to imitate with the poorer resources of the Latin tongue.942 Among the friends of Antoninus was Vestricius Spurinna, who had defended Placentia for Otho, who was twice consul under Domitian, and was selected by Trajan to command the troops in a campaign in Germany.943 This dignified veteran, who had passed apparently untainted through the reigns of the worst emperors, varied and lightened the ordinary routine of his old age by the composition of lyrics, both in Greek and Latin, which seemed to his admirers to have a singular sweetness. Sentius Augurinus, a familiar friend of the two consulars, was also a brilliant verse writer,944 who could enthral Pliny by a recitation lasting for three days, although the fact that Pliny was the subject of one of the poems may account for the patience or the pleasure. One of Pliny’s dearest friends was Passennus Paullus, who claimed kindred with the poet Propertius, and, at any rate, came from the same town in Umbria. Passennus has been cruelly treated by Time, if his lyric efforts recalled, as we are asked to believe, the literary graces of his ancestor, and even those of Horace.945 Vergilius Romanus devoted himself to comedy, and was thought to have reproduced not unworthily the delicate charms of Menander and Terence, as well as the scathing invective of older [pg 167]Greek masters of the art.946 But there were others of Pliny’s circle who essayed a loftier and weightier style. Probably the foremost of these was Titinius Capito, who, as an inscription records,947 had held high civil office under Domitian, Nerva, and Trajan. He was an enthusiastic patron of letters, and readily offered his halls to literary friends for their recitations, which he attended with punctilious politeness. Cherishing the memory of the great men of the Republic, the Cassii, the Bruti, and the Catos, he composed a work on the death of the noble victims of the Terror.948 He tried in vain to draw Pliny into the field of historical composition.949 But the man who thought more of style and graceful charity than of truth, was not the man to write the history of such a time. He has done a much greater service in providing priceless materials for the reconstruction of its social history. Caninius Rufus was a neighbour of Pliny at Como.950 He was one of those for whom the charms of country life had a dangerous seduction. His villa, with its colonnades, “where it was always spring,” the shining levels of the lake beneath his verandah, the water course with its emerald banks, the baths and spacious halls, all these delights seem to have relaxed the literary energy and ambition of their master. Caninius meditated the composition of a Greek epic on the Dacian wars of Trajan.951 But he was probably one of those lingering, dilatory writers who meet us in Martial,952 waiting for the fire from heaven which never comes. The intractable roughness of barbarian names, which, as Pliny suggests, might have been eluded by a Homeric licence in quantity, was probably not the only difficulty of Caninius.
Among the literary friends of Pliny, a much more important person than Caninius was Suetonius, but Suetonius was apparently long paralysed by the same cautious hesitation to challenge the verdict of the public. A younger man than Pliny,953 Suetonius was one of his most intimate friends. They [pg 168]both belonged to that circle which nursed the senatorial tradition and the hatred of the imperial tyrants.954 The life of Suetonius was not very effectual or brilliant, from a worldly point of view. Although born within the rank to which every distinction was open,955 he was a man of modest and retiring tastes, devoted to quiet research, and destitute of the eager ambition and vigorous self-assertion which are necessary for splendid success. He was probably for some years a professor of grammar.956 He made a half-hearted attempt to gain a footing at the bar. In 101 A.D. he obtained a military tribunate, through Pliny’s influence, but speedily renounced his command.957 Henceforth he devoted himself entirely to that historical research, which, if it has not won for him any dazzling fame, has made historical students, in spite of some reservations as to his sources, his debtors for all time. Pliny had the greatest esteem for Suetonius, and was always ready to befriend him, whether it were in the purchase of a quiet little retreat near Rome,958 or in obtaining for the childless antiquary the Jus trium liberorum from Trajan.959 The two men were bound to one another by many tastes and sympathies, not the least strong being a curious superstition, which infected, as we shall see in a later chapter, even the most vigorous minds of that age. Suetonius had once a dream which seemed to portend failure in some legal cause in which he was engaged. He sought the aid of Pliny to obtain an adjournment. Pliny does not question the reality of such warnings, but merely suggests a more cheering interpretation of the vision.960 Although devoted to research, and a most laborious student, the biographer of the Caesars was strangely tardy in letting his productions see the light. In 106, he had been long engaged on a work, which was probably the De Viris Illustribus.961 Pliny assailed him with bantering reproaches on his endless use of the file, and begs him to publish without delay. From several indications, it appears that the lingering volume did not appear till 113.962 It was not till the year 118, when Hadrian arrived [pg 169]from the East after his accession, that Suetonius attained the rank of one of the imperial secretaryships.963 Pliny in all probability had died some years before the elevation of his friend.
But although the dawn of a new age of milder and less suspicious government had, for the first time since Augustus, left men free to compose a true record of the past, and even to vilify the early Caesars,964 the great mass of cultivated men in Pliny’s time, as in the days of Ausonius and Sidonius, were devoted to poetry. The chief cause in giving this direction to the Roman mind was undoubtedly the system pursued in the schools. In the first century, as in the fifth, the formative years of boyhood were devoted almost entirely to the study of the poets. The subject-matter of their masterpieces was not neglected by the accomplished grammarian, who was often a man of learning, and sometimes a man of taste; and the reading of poetry was made the text for disquisitions on geography and astronomy, on mythology or the antiquities of religious ritual and constitutional lore.965 But style and expression were always of foremost interest in these studies. The ear of the South has always felt the charm of rhythmical or melodious speech, with a keenness of pleasure generally denied to our colder temperament. And the Augustan age had, in a single generation, performed miracles, under Greek inspiration, in moulding the Latin tongue to be the apt vehicle of every mood of poetic feeling. That inspired band of writers, whose call it was to glorify the dawn of a world-wide empire and the ancient achievements of the Latin race,966 rose to the full height of their vocation. They were conscious that they were writing for distant provinces won from barbarism, and for a remote posterity.967 They discovered and revealed resources in the language, hitherto undreamt of. They wedded to its native dignity and strength a brilliancy, an easy grace and sprightliness, which positively ravished the ear of the street boys in Pompeii, or of the rude dweller on the Tanais or the Baetis.968 In his own lifetime Virgil became a popular hero. His Eclogues were chanted on the stage; [pg 170]verses of the Aeneid can still be seen, along with verses of Propertius, scrawled on the walls of Campanian towns. Virgil, when he visited Rome, was mobbed by admiring crowds. When his poetry was recited in the theatre, the whole audience rose to their feet as if to salute the emperor.969 He had the doubtful but significant honour of being recited by Alexandrian boys at the coarse orgies of a Trimalchio.970 Never was a worthy fame so rapidly and splendidly won: seldom has literary fame and influence been so lasting.
The Flavian age succeeded to this great heritage. Already there were ominous signs of a decay of originality and force, of decadence in the language itself.971 The controversy between the lovers of the new and the lovers of the archaic style was raging in the reign of Vespasian, and can be still followed in the De Oratoribus of Tacitus, or even in the verses of Martial.972 Already the taste for Ennius and the prae-Ciceronian oratory had set in, for the dialect of the heroes of the Punic Wars, even for “the Latin of the Twelve Tables,”973 a taste which was destined to produce its Dead Sea fruit in the age of the Antonines. But whoever might cavil at Cicero,974 no one ever questioned the pre-eminence of Virgil, and he and his contemporaries were still the models of a host of imitators. The mass of facile talent, thrown back on itself by the loss of free republican life and public interests, fascinated from earliest infancy by the haunting cadences of the grand style, rushed into verse-writing, to beguile long hours of idleness, or to woo a shadowy fame at an afternoon recital, with a more shadowy hope of future fame. The grand style was a charmer and deceiver. It was such a perfect instrument, it was so protean in its various power, it was so abundant in its resources, that a man of third-rate powers and thin commonplace imagination, who had been trained in skilful manipulation of consecrated phrase, might for the moment delude himself and his friends by faint echoes of the music of the golden age.
[pg 171]The brilliancy of inherited phrase concealed the poverty of the literary amateur’s fancy from himself. And, even if he were not deluded about his own powers, the practice in skilful handling of literary symbols, which was acquired in the schools, furnished a refined amusement for a too ample leisure. It is clear from the dialogue De Oratoribus, and from Pliny’s Letters, that the meditative life, surrounded by the quiet charm of stream and woodland, far from the din and strife and social routine of the great city,975 attracted many people much more than the greatest oratorical triumphs in the centumviral court, which, after all, were so pale and bourgeois beside the glories of the great ages of oratory. And although Aper, in the Dialogue of Tacitus, sneers at the solitary and unsocial toil of the poet, rewarded by a short-lived succès d’estime,976 there can be no doubt that the ambition to cut a figure, even for a day, was a powerful inspiration at a time when the ancient avenues to fame had been closed.
It was to satisfy such ambitions that Domitian founded the quinquennial competition on the Capitol, in the year 86 A.D.,977 as well as the annual festival in honour of Minerva on the Alban Mount. A similar festival, for the cultivation of Greek poetry, had been established at Naples in honour of Augustus, at which Statius had won the crown of corn-ears.978 And Nero had founded another, apparently only for his own glorification.979 The festival established by Domitian was more important and enduring. The judges were taken from the priestly colleges, and, amid a concourse of the highest functionaries of the state, the successful poet received his crown at the hands of the emperor. The prospect of such a distinction drew competitors from distant provincial parts. It is a curious illustration of the power and the skill of the literary discipline of the schools that, twice within a few years, the crown of oak leaves was won by boys under fourteen years of age. The verses of one of them may still be read upon his tomb.980
But these infrequent chances of distinction could not suffice [pg 172]for the crowd of eager composers. In those days, although the bookselling trade was extensive and vigorous, there was no organised publishing system by which a new work could be brought to the notice of the public.981 The author had to advertise himself by giving readings, to which he invited his friends, and by distributing copies of his book. The mania for recitation was the theme of satirists from the days of Horace to the days of Epictetus.982 Martial comically describes the frenzied poet torturing his friends day and night, pursuing them from the bath to the dining-room, and spreading a solitude around him.983 Juvenal congratulates his friend on escaping to the country from the hoarse reciter of a frigid Theseid.984 In the bohemian scenes of Petronius, the inveterate versifier, who will calmly finish a passage, after being cast ashore from a shipwreck, makes himself a nuisance by his recitations in the baths and porticoes of Croton, and is very properly stoned by a crowd of street boys.985 No aspect of social life is more prominent in the Letters of Pliny than the reading of new works, epics, or lyrics, histories, or speeches, before fashionable assemblies. A liberal patron like Titinius Capito would sometimes lend a hall for the purpose. But the reciter had many expenses, from the hire of chairs to the fees to freedmen and slaves, who acted as claqueurs. In the circle of a man like Pliny, to attend these gatherings was a sacred duty both to letters and to friendship. In a year when there was a more than usually abundant crop of poets, the eager advocate could boast that he had failed no one, even in the month when the courts were busiest.986 Doubtless, many of the fashionable idlers, who dawdled away their time in the many resorts devoted to gossip and scandal, were glad to show themselves in the crowd. Old friends would consider it a duty to support and encourage the budding literary ambition of a young aspirant of their set. Some sincere lovers of literary art would be drawn by a genuine interest and a wish to maintain the literary tradition, which was already betraying signs of weakness and decay. But, to a great many, this duty, [pg 173]added to the endless round of other social obligations, was evidently becoming repulsive and wearisome.987 Pliny could listen with delight and admiration to Sentius Augurinus reciting his poems for three long days.988 He would calmly expect his own friends to listen for as many days to a whole volume of his poems, or to his Panegyric on Trajan.989 Such was his high breeding, his kindliness, and such was his passion for literature in any form or of any quality, that he could hardly understand how what to him seemed at once a pleasure and duty should be regarded by others as an intolerable nuisance. The conduct of such people is treated with some disdain in one or two of the rare passages in which he writes of his circle with any severity. Some of these fashionable folk, after lingering in some place of gossip until the reading was well advanced, would enter the hall with ostentatious reluctance, and then leave before the end. Others, with an air of superiority, would sit in stolid silence and disguise the slightest expression of interest. This seemed to Pliny, not only grossly bad manners, but also neglect of a literary duty.990 The audience should not only encourage honest effort; they should contribute their judgment to the improvement of style. Pliny, like Aristotle, has an immense faith in the collective opinion of numbers, even in matters of artistic taste.991 He used to read his own pieces to successively wider circles, each time receiving suggestions for amendment. Many of Pliny’s Letters, like the dialogue De Oratoribus, reveal the keenness with which in those days questions of style were debated. But, as in the circle of Sidonius, this very energy of criticism was perhaps due to a dim consciousness of waning force.992 Pliny, with all his kindly optimism, lets fall a phrase here and there which betrays an uneasiness about the future of letters.993 Enthusiasm is failing. Nay, there is a hardly veiled contempt for that eager mediocrity which Pliny and Titinius Capito made it a point of honour to encourage. We feel that we are on the edge of that arid desert of cultivated [pg 174]impotence in which the freshness and vigour of Roman literature was soon mysteriously to disappear.
Great as were the attractions of the capital, its gay social circles with their multifarious engagements, its games and spectacles, and literary novelties, yet the most devoted “Ardelio,” in the end, felt the strain and the monotony to be oppressive.994 Seneca and Pliny, Martial and Juvenal,995 from various points of view, lament or ridicule the inanity and the slavery of city life. Roman etiquette was perhaps the most imperious and exacting that ever existed. Morning receptions, punctilious attendance at the assumption of the toga, at betrothals, or the sealing of wills, or the reading of some tedious epic, advice or support in the law courts, congratulations to friends on every official success, these duties, and many others, left men, who had a large circle of acquaintance, hardly a moment of repose. Hence the rapture with which Pliny escapes to the stillness of the Laurentine pine woods, or the pure cold breezes that blew from the Apennines over his Tuscan seat.996 In these calm solitudes the weary advocate and man of letters became for a little while his own master, and forgot the din and crush of the streets, the paltry ambitions, the malevolent gossip and silly rumours of the great world, in some long-suspended literary task. There can be no doubt that an intense enjoyment was becoming more and more felt in country life. Its unbought, home-grown luxuries, its common sights and sounds, its antique simplicity, have a strange charm even for a hardened bohemian like Martial.997 But Pliny, besides this commoner form of enjoyment, has a keen and exquisite feeling for beauty of scenery. He loves the amphitheatre of hills, crowned with immemorial forest that looks down on rich pastoral slope, or vineyard or meadow, bright with the flowers of spring, and watered by the winding Tiber; he loves the scenery of Como, where you watch the fishermen at his toils from some retreat on the terraced banks.998 Where in ancient literature can you find a more sharp and clear-cut picture of a romantic scene than [pg 175]in his description of the Clitumnus?999 The famous stream rises under a low hill, shaded by ancient cypresses, and broadens into a basin in whose glassy ice-cold waters you may count the pebbles. Soon the current grows broader and swifter, and the barges are swept along under groves of ash and poplar, which, so vivid is their reflection, seem to be growing in the river-bed. Hard by, is a temple of the river-god, with many other chapels, and a seat of ancient augury; the magic charm of antique religious awe blends with the witchery of nature, and many a villa is planted on fair spots along the banks. There was plenty of sport to be had in the Apennines or the Laurentine woods. But Pliny was plainly not a real sportsman. He once tells his friend Tacitus, who seems to have rallied him on this failing, that although he has killed three boars, he much prefers to sit, tablets in hand beside the nets, meditating in the silent glade.1000 The country is charming to Pliny, but its greatest charm lies in the long tranquil hours which can be given to literary musing. Part of the well-regulated day of Spurinna, a man who had commanded armies and governed provinces, and who had reached his seventy-seventh year, is devoted to lyric composition both in Greek and Latin.1001 Pliny once or twice laments the mass of literary talent which, from diffidence or love of ease, was buried in these rural retreats.1002 There must have been many a country squire, like that Terentius, who, apparently lost in bucolic pursuits, surprised his guest by the purity of his taste and his breadth of culture. We often meet the same buried talent after nearly four centuries in the pages of Sidonius.1003
The literature of the Flavian age has preserved for us many pictures of Roman villas. They occupied every variety of site. They were planted on rocks where the sea-foam flecked their walls,1004 or on inland lakes and rivers, embowered in woods, or on the spurs of the Apennines, between the ancient forest and the wealthy plain.1005 Some of these mansions were remote and secluded. But on the Bay of Naples, on the Laurentine shore or the banks of Lake Como,1006 they clustered thickly. [pg 176]Building in the days of Domitian was as much the rage as it was in the days of Horace, and, just as then, all natural obstacles were defied in preparing a site to the builder’s taste. In the grounds of Pollius Felix in the Silvae, whole hills had been levelled, and rocks had been cleared away to make a space for the house with its gardens and woodlands.1007 Manlius Vopiscus had built two luxurious seats on opposite banks of the Anio, where the stream glides silently under overarching boughs.1008 The villas pressed so close to the water that you could converse, and almost touch hands, across the interval between them. The love of variety, or the obligation imposed on senators to invest a third of their fortune in Italian land,1009 may account for the number of country seats possessed even by men who were not of the wealthiest class.1010 Pliny had villas at Laurentum, at Tifernum Tiberinum, at Beneventum, and more than two on Lake Como.1011 The orator Regulus had at least five country seats.1012 Silius Italicus had several stately abodes in the same district of Campania, and, with capricious facility, transferred his affections to each new acquisition.1013
It is by no means an easy task, and perhaps not a very profitable one, to trace minutely the arrangement of one of these great houses. Indeed there seems to have been a good deal of caprice and little care for symmetry in their architecture. The builder appears to have given no thought to external effect. To catch a romantic view from the windows, to escape the sultry heat of midsummer, or woo the brief sunshine of December, above all to obtain perfect stillness, were the objects which seem to have dictated the plans of the Roman architect.1014 The Laurentine villa of Pliny and the Surrentine of Pollius Felix from their windows or colonnades gave glimpses of forest or mountain, or sea, or fat herds browsing on the meadow grass, or a view seaward to the islands off the Cam[pg 177]panian shore.1015 One room admits the morning sun, another is brightened by the glow of evening. Here is a colonnade where in winter you can pace up and down with shutters closed on the weather side, or in spring-time enjoy the scent of violets and the temperate sunshine.1016 In the mansions on the Anio, there is, according to Statius, an air of everlasting quietness, never broken even by wandering wind, or ripple of the stream.1017 Pliny has a distant room at Laurentum, to which even the licensed din of the Saturnalia never penetrates.1018 Thus these villas threw out their chambers far and wide, meandering in all directions, according to the fancy of the master, or the charms of the neighbouring scenery.
The luxury of the Roman villa consisted rather in the spaciousness and variety of building, to suit the changing seasons, than in furniture for comfort or splendour. There were, indeed, in many houses some costly articles, tables of citrus and ivory, and antique vases, of priceless worth.1019 But the chambers of the most stately houses would probably, to modern taste, seem scantily furnished. It was on the walls and ceiling and columns that the Roman of taste lavished his wealth. The houses of Pliny, indeed, seem to have been little adorned by this sort of costly display.1020 But the villa of Pollius Felix, like the baths of Claudius Etruscus, shone with all the glory of variegated marbles on plaque and pillar, drawn from the quarries of Phrygia, Laconia, and Syene, Carystus and Numidia.1021 Pliny confesses that he is not a connoisseur in art. He speaks with hesitation of the merit of a Corinthian bronze which he has acquired.1022 But he was surrounded in his own class by artistic enthusiasm, much of it, it is to be feared, pretentious and ignorant. The dispersion of the artistic wealth of Greek lands had flooded Italy with the works of the great masters. Collectors of them, like Silius Italicus, abounded. The fashion became so general and so imperious, that it penetrated even into the vulgar circle of people like Trimalchio, who, in interpreting the subject of the chasing on a cup, could confuse the Punic and the Trojan wars. In the villas described [pg 178]by Statius, it would seem that the art of Apelles, Pheidias, Myron, and Polycletus adorned the saloons and colonnades.1023 It may be doubted, however, whether many of these works could claim such illustrious parentage. There was plenty of facile technique in those days which might easily deceive the vulgar collector by more or less successful reproduction.1024 The confident claim to artistic discrimination was not less common in the Flavian age than in later days, and it was probably as fallible. It is rather suspicious that, in the attempts at artistic appreciation in this period, attention seems to be concentrated on the supposed antiquity, rarity, or costliness of material. There is little in the glowing descriptions in the Silvae to indicate a genuine appreciation of real art.
It is possible that the great Roman country seat, in its vast extent, although not in the stateliness of its exterior, may have surpassed the corresponding mansions of our time. It was the expression in stone of the dominant passion of an enormously wealthy class, intoxicated with the splendour of imperial power, and ambitious to create monuments worthy of an imperial race. Moreover, the Roman’s energy always exulted in triumphing over natural difficulties. Just as he drove his roads unswerving over mountain and swamp, so he took a pride in rearing his piles of masonry on the most obstinate and defiant sites, or even in the middle of the waves. But, in the extent of their parks, and the variety of floral display, the Romans of the most luxurious age seldom reached the modern English standard. The grounds of the villas which, in thick succession, lined the Laurentine or Campanian shore, cannot have been very extensive. Pliny has splendid views from his windows of forest, mountain, and meadow, but the scene lies plainly beyond the bounds of his demesne.1025 The gardens and shrubberies are very artificial, arranged in terraces or labyrinths close to the house, or with hedges of box clipped into shapes of animals along an open colonnade. The hippodrome at his Tuscan seat, for riding exercise, is formed by lines of box and laurel and cypress and plane tree. The fig and mulberry form a garden at the Laurentine villa.1026 The cultivated [pg 179]flowers are few, only roses and violets. But the Romans made up for variety by lavish profusion. In the Neronian orgies a fortune was sometimes spent on Egyptian roses for a single banquet.1027
We might almost conjecture how the days passed amid such scenes, even without any formal diary. But Pliny has left us two descriptions of a gentleman’s day in the country.1028 Pliny himself, as we might expect, awoke early, about six o’clock, and in one of those sleeping-rooms, so carefully shut off from the voices of nature or from household noise, with shutters still closed, he meditated some literary piece. Then, calling for his amanuensis, he dictated what he had composed. About ten or eleven, he passed into a shady cloister, opening on a bed of violets, or a grove of plane trees, where he continued his literary work. Then followed a drive, during which, according to his uncle’s precept and example, his studies were still continued.1029 A short siesta, a walk, declamation in Greek and Latin, after the habit of Cicero, gymnastic exercise, and the bath, filled the space till dinner time arrived. During this meal, a book was read aloud, and the evening hours were enlivened by acting or music and the society of friends. Occasional hunting and the cares of a rural estate came in to vary this routine. The round of Spurinna’s day, which excited Pliny’s admiration by its rigid regularity, is pretty much the same as his own, except that Spurinna seems to have talked more and read less.1030
To the ordinary English squire Pliny’s studious life in the country would not seem very attractive. And his pretence of sport was probably ridiculed even in his own day.1031 But his Letters give glimpses of a rural society which, both in its pleasures and its cares, has probably been always much the same from one age to another in Europe. On his way to Como, Pliny once turned aside for a couple of days to his Tuscan estate, to join in the dedication of a temple which he had built for the people of Tifernum Tiberinum. The consecration was to be followed by a dinner to his good neighbours, who had elected him patron of their township, who were very proud of his career, and greeted him warmly whenever [pg 180]he came among them.1032 There is also the record of the restoration, in obedience to the warning of a diviner, of an ancient temple of Ceres on his lands, with colonnades to shelter the worshippers who frequented the shrine. And the venerable wooden statue of the goddess, which was much decayed, had to be replaced by a more artistic image. But the life of a Roman proprietor, of course, had its prosaic and troublesome side which Pliny does not conceal. There is an interesting letter in which he consults a friend on the question of the purchase of an estate.1033 It adjoined, or rather cut into his own lands. It could be managed by the same bailiff, and the same staff of labourers and artisans would serve for both estates. On the other hand, Pliny thinks, it is better not to put too many eggs into one basket. It is more prudent to have estates widely dispersed, and thus less exposed to a single stroke of calamity. Moreover this estate, however tempting, with its fertile, well-watered meadows, its vineyards and woods, is burdened by an insolvent tenantry, who, through faulty management, have been allowed to fall into arrear. Pliny, however, is tempted to buy at a greatly reduced price,1034 and, in order to meet the payment, although his wealth is nearly all in land, he can call in some loans at interest, and the balance can be borrowed from his father-in-law, whose purse is always at his disposal. Pliny was sometimes worried by the complaints of the people on his estates, and finds it very difficult to secure solvent tenants on a five years lease. He made liberal remissions of rent, but arrears went on accumulating, until the tenant in despair gave up any attempt to repay his debt. In this extremity, Pliny resolved to adopt a different system of letting. He substituted for a fixed rent a certain proportion of the produce,1035 in fact the métayer system, and employed some of his people to see that the returns were not fraudulently diminished. At another time he is embarrassed by finding that, owing to a bad vintage, [pg 181]the men who have bought his grapes in advance are going to be heavy losers. He makes a uniform remission to all of about twelve per cent. But he gives an additional advantage to the large buyers, and to those who had been prompt in their payments.1036 It is characteristic of the man that he says, quite naturally, that the landlord should share with his tenant such risks from the fickleness of nature.
So good a man was sure to be far more afflicted by the troubles of his dependents than by any pecuniary losses of his own. One year, there were many deaths among his slaves. Pliny feels this acutely, but he consoles himself by the reflection that he has been liberal in manumission, and still more liberal in allowing his slaves to make their wills, the validity of which he maintains as if they were legal instruments.1037 If Pliny shows a little too much self-complacency in this human sympathy, there can be no doubt that, like Seneca, he felt that slaves were humble friends, men of the same flesh and blood as the master, and that the master has a moral duty towards them, quite apart from the legal conventions of Rome.1038 When his wife’s grandfather proposed to make numerous manumissions, Pliny rejoiced greatly at the accession of so many new citizens to the municipality.1039 When his favourite reader, Encolpius, was seized with hemorrhage, Pliny displayed a genuine and most affectionate concern for the humble partner of his studies.1040 Another member of his household, a freedman named Zosimus, suffered from the same malady. Zosimus seems to have been a most excellent, loyal, and accomplished man. He was very versatile, a comedian, a musician, a tasteful reader of every kind of literature.1041 His patron sent him to Egypt to recruit his health. But, from putting too great a strain upon his voice, he had a return of his dangerous illness, and once more needed change of air. Pliny determined to send him to the Riviera, and begs a friend, Paulinus, to let Zosimus have the use of his villa and all necessary attention, for which Pliny will [pg 182]bear the cost.1042 In his social relations with his freedmen Pliny always shows himself the perfect, kindly gentleman. Juvenal and Martial poured their scorn on those unequal dinners, where the guests were graduated, and where poorer wine and coarser viands were served out to those of humble degree.1043 Pliny was present at one of these entertainments, and he expresses his contempt for the vulgar host in terms of unwonted energy.1044 His own freedmen, as he tells a fellow-guest, are entertained as equals at his table. If a man fears the expense, he can find a remedy by restraining his own luxury, and sharing the plain fare which he imposes on his company. Pliny’s relations with his slaves and freedmen were very like those which the kindly English squire cultivates towards his household and dependents. The affectionate regret for a good master or mistress, recorded on many an inscription of that age,1045 shows that Pliny’s household was by no means a rare exception.
Yet the Letters of Pliny, with all their charity and tranquil optimism, reveal now and then a darker side of household slavery. A man of praetorian rank named Largius Macedo, who forgot, or perhaps too vividly remembered, his own servile origin, was known as a cruel and haughty master. While he was enjoying the bath in his Formian villa, he was suddenly surrounded by a throng of angry slaves who, with every expression of hatred and loathing, inflicted on him such injuries that he was left for dead on the glowing pavement. He seemed, or pretended for a while, to be dead. A few who remained faithful took up the apparently lifeless corpse, amid the shrieks of his concubines, and bore him into the Frigidarium. The coolness and the clamour recalled him from his swoon. The would-be murderers meanwhile had fled, but many of them were caught in the end, and the outrage was sternly avenged.1046 In another letter, Pliny tells the tale of the mysterious disappearance of one Metilius Crispus, a citizen of Como, for whom Pliny had obtained equestrian rank, and made him a gift of the required HS.400,000. Metilius set out on a journey and was never heard of again.1047 It is [pg 183]significant that of the slaves who attended him no one ever reappeared. Amid such perils, says Pliny, do we masters live, and no kindness can relieve us from alarm. Seneca remarks that the master’s life is continually at the mercy of his slaves.1048 And the cruel stringency of legislation shows how real was the peril.
Pliny was only an infant in the evil days when suicide was the one refuge from tyranny, when the lancet so often opened the way to “eternal freedom.” Yet, even in his later years, men not unfrequently escaped from intolerable calamity or incurable disease by a voluntary death.1049 The morality of suicide was long a debated question. There were strict moralists who maintained that it was never lawful to quit one’s post before the final signal to retreat. Men like Seneca regarded it as a question to be determined by circumstances and motives.1050 He would not palliate wild, impetuous self-murder, without a justifying cause. On the other hand, there might be, especially under a monster like Nero, cases in which it were mere folly not to choose an easy emancipation rather than a certain death of torture and ignominy. Eternal law, which has assigned a single entrance to this life, has mercifully allowed us many exits. Any death is preferable to servitude.1051 So, in the case of disease and old age, it is merely a question whether the remainder of life is worth living. If the mental powers are falling into irreparable decay, if the malady is tormenting and incurable, Seneca would permit the rational soul to quit abruptly its crumbling tenement, not to escape pain or weakness, but to shake off the slavery of a worthless life.1052
Pliny was not a philosopher, and had no elaborate theory of suicide or of anything else. But his opinion on the question may be gathered from his remarks on the case of Titius Aristo, the learned jurist. To rush on death, he says, is a vulgar, [pg 184]commonplace act. But to balance the various motives, and make a deliberate and rational choice may, in certain circumstances, be the proof of a lofty mind.1053 The cases of suicide described in the Letters are nearly always cases of incurable or prolonged disease. The best known is that of the luxurious Silius Italicus, who starved himself to death in his seventy-fifth year.1054 He was afflicted with an incurable tumour, almost the only trouble in his long and happy life. Corellius Rufus, who had watched over Pliny’s career with almost parental care,1055 chose to end his life in a similar manner. Pliny was immensely saddened by the close of a life which seemed to enjoy so many blessings, high character, great reputation and influence, family love and friendship. Yet he does not question the last resolve of Corellius. In his thirty-third year he had been seized with hereditary gout. During the period of vigorous manhood, he had warded off its onsets by an extreme abstinence. But as old age crept on, its tortures, wracking every limb, became unendurable, and Corellius determined to put an end to the hopeless struggle. His obstinacy was proof against all the entreaties of his wife and friends, and Pliny, who was called in as a last resource, came only to hear the physician repelled for the last time with a single energetic word.1056 Sailing once on Lake Como, Pliny heard from an old friend the tragic tale of a double suicide from a verandah overhanging the lake. The husband had long suffered from a loathsome and hopeless malady. His wife insisted on knowing the truth, and, when it was revealed to her, she nerved him to end the cruel ordeal, and promised to bear him company. Bound together, the pair took the fatal leap.1057
In spite of his charity and optimism,1058 it would not be altogether true to say that Pliny was blind to the faults and vices of his time. He speaks, with almost Tacitean scorn, of the rewards which awaited a calculating childlessness, and of the [pg 185]eager servility of the will-hunter.1059 In recommending a tutor for the son of Corellia Hispulla, he regards the teacher’s stainless character as of paramount importance in an age of dangerous licence, when youth was beset with manifold seductions.1060 He blushes for the degradation of senatorial character displayed in the scurrilous or obscene entries which were sometimes found on the voting tablets of the august body.1061 The decline of modesty and courteous deference in the young towards their elders greatly afflicted so courteous a gentleman. There seemed to be no respect left for age or authority. With their fancied omniscience and intuitive wisdom, young men disdain to learn from any one or to imitate any example; they are their own models.1062 Among the many spotless and charming women of Pliny’s circle, there is one curious exception, one, we may venture to surmise, who had been formed in the Neronian age. Ummidia Quadratilla was a lady of the highest rank, who died at the age of eighty in the middle of the reign of Trajan.1063 She preserved to the end an extraordinary health and vigour, and evidently enjoyed the external side of life with all the zest of the old days of licence in her youth. Her grandson, who lived under her roof, was one of Pliny’s dearest friends, a spotless and almost puritanical character. Ummidia, even in her old age, kept a troop of pantomimic artistes, and continued to enjoy their doubtful exhibitions. But her grandson would never witness them, and, it must be said, Ummidia respected and even encouraged a virtue superior to her own.
It has been remarked that, in nearly all these cases, where Pliny has any fault to find with his generation, the evil seems to be only a foil for the virtue of some of his friends. Even in his own day, there were those who criticised him for his extravagant praise of the people he loved. He takes the censure as a compliment, preferring the kind-heartedness which is occasionally deceived, to the cold critical habit which has lost all illusions.1064 Pliny belonged to a caste who were linked [pg 186]to one another by the strongest ties of loyalty and tradition.1065 The members of it were bound to support one another by counsel, encouragement, and influence, they were expected to help a comrade’s advancement in the career of honours, to applaud and stimulate his literary ambition, to be prodigal of sympathy or congratulation or pecuniary help in all the vicissitudes of public or private life.1066 The older men, who had borne the weight of great affairs, recognised the duty of forming the character of their juniors by precept and criticism. In this fashion the old soldier Spurinna, on his morning drive, would pour forth to some young companion the wealth of his long experience. In this spirit Verginius Rufus and Corellius stood by Pliny throughout his official career, to guide and support him.1067 Pliny, in his turn, was always lavish of this kind of help, and deemed it a matter of pride and duty to afford it. Sometimes he solicits office for a friend’s son, or commends a man to the emperor for the Jus trium liberorum.1068 Sometimes he applauds the early efforts of a young pleader at the bar, or gives him counsel as to the causes which he should undertake, or the discipline necessary for oratorical success.1069 He was often consulted about the choice of a tutor for boys, and he responded with all the earnestness of a man who believed in the infinite importance of sound influence in the early years of life.1070 To his older friends he would address disquisitions on style, consolations in bereavement, congratulations on official preferment, descriptions of some fair scene or picturesque incident in rural life. He often wrote, like Symmachus, merely to maintain the connection of friendly sympathy by a chat on paper. His vanity is only too evident in some of these letters. But it is, after all, an innocent vanity and the consuming anxiety to cherish the warmth and solidarity of friendship, and a high tone in the great class to which he belonged, might well cover even graver faults. If there was too much self-indulgence in [pg 187]that class, if they often abandoned themselves to the seductions of ease and literary trifling in luxurious retreats, it is also to be remembered that a man of rank paid heavily for his place in Roman society, both in money and in the observance of a very exacting social code. And no one recognised the obligation with more cheerful alacrity than Pliny.
Pliny felt a genuine anxiety that young men of birth should aim at personal distinction. Any gleam of generous ambition, any sign of strenuous energy, which might save a young aristocrat from the temptations of ease and wealth, were hailed by him with unaffected delight. He was evidently very susceptible to the charm of manner which youths of this class often possess. When to that was added strength of character, his satisfaction was complete. Hence his delight when Fuscus Salinator and Ummidius Quadratus, of the very cream of the Roman nobility, entered on the conflicts of the Centumviral Court.1071 And indeed these young men appear to have had many graces and virtues. Salinator, in particular, with exquisite literary culture, had a mingled charm of boyish simplicity, gravity, and sweetness.1072 Asinius Bassus, the son of Asinius Rufus, was another of this promising band of youth, blameless, learned, and diligent, whom Pliny commends for the quaestorship to Fundanus, then apparently designated as consul.1073 There is no more genuine feeling in the Letters than the grief of Pliny for the early death of Junius Avitus, another youth of high promise. Pliny had formed his character, and supported him in his candidature for office. He had helped him with advice in his studies, or in his administrative duties. Avitus repaid all this paternal care by a docility and deference which were becoming rare among the young men of the day. Winning the affection and confidence of his elders in the service, Avitus was surely destined to develop into one of those just and strenuous imperial officers, like Corbulo or Verginius Rufus, many of whom have left only a name on a brief inscription, but who were the glory and strength of the Empire in the times of its deepest degradation. But all such hopes for Avitus were extinguished in a day.
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