They are often engaged in praising Gallus or Varus or Pollio, the young poet’s patrons. It was the success of the Bucolics which led Mæcenas to choose Vergil for carrying out an important literary project. A poet was required to sing the praises of country life in such a manner as to encourage the movement “back to the land,” which Augustus was trying to foster. In his Georgics Vergil frankly admits that he is fulfilling the “hard commands” of Mæcenas. The Georgics are a treatise on husbandry, but here again it is not first-hand work. We are informed that Vergil’s poetry had regained him his paternal farm at Mantua. But the Georgics were not written on the farm. They were diligently composed in a library at Naples. They arose from the study of Aratus and Hesiod, not from memory of Italian life, and even in those gorgeous passages where Vergil is praising a country life, it is not of the Italian farm that he is thinking but of literary hills and dells in Greece. I think it is clear that the poet took little pleasure in his task. He very gladly digresses from the description of soils and mattocks to tell us a charming piece of Greek mythology or to introduce a literary reference. Octavian had been a “powerful god” already in the Eclogues before he became Augustus. Now the only question is which of the stars shall receive him after death. “Already the blazing Scorpion contracts his arms and leaves thee more than a fair share of heaven.” Vergil pauses to depict the triumph of Augustus—Nile flowing with blood, Asia tamed, the Niphates driven back, the Parthian conquered. No literary catchword was ever more absurd than the phrase “rustic of genius” applied to Vergil. As soon as he had the means, he gladly turned his back upon his ancestral farm to become a student and a courtier. Nevertheless Mæcenas was magnificently served. Vergil had already forged a weapon of matchless music and eloquence in his surging hexameters, and he used it to depict the honest joys of rustic toil, the laborious tranquillity of the farm, the beauty and interest of nature. He was instantly recognised by Augustus as the destined laureate of the new Rome.

The Æneid was solemnly devoted to the altar of Rome and Augustus. Homer was the Greek model here, as Theocritus had been for the Bucolics and Hesiod for the Georgics. The origin of Rome was to be linked on to the Trojan story as had already been done by the inventive Greeks. Æneas had fled from Troy to Italy, and had left his son Julus (the eponymous hero of the Julian house) to found an heroic kingdom in Italy long before the genuine Roman heroes. Thus the humble native story of Romulus was superseded. Piety was to be the great virtue honoured by this poem, for piety towards the memory of Julius Cæsar was the principal title upon which Augustus rested his claim to honour. There were other analogies, perhaps. Dido most probably suggested Cleopatra to the Roman reader. But it is to the praise of Rome, to the glorification of that sense of filial duty which the Romans called “piety” that the great epic is mainly devoted. Here again, though the eloquence is so splendid and the versification so majestic, the Æneid like its predecessors is a work of the study quite clearly written to order. The plot is carelessly constructed. Æneas himself, with all his piety, never for a moment lives. The religious motives which led to his desertion of Dido barely satisfy us. Æneas makes the speeches, and the gods continually intervene when danger threatens him. Our sympathies are generally with the enemy, with Turnus or Camilla. Æneas is as chilly and statuesque as Augustus himself.

It is in the famous Sixth Book, which tells of the descent to Hades, that the praise of Rome is most elegant and most explicit. Here we are shown the heroes of Roman history side by side with the heroes of the Greeks, and here the young Marcellus, lately dead, is introduced in those immortal and touching lines which caused Octavia his mother to swoon when the poet recited them. Here too the poet pronounces in very significant language the Roman idea of the destiny of his race.

“Others shall mould, I doubt not, the breathing bronze more delicately and draw the living features out of marble, others shall plead causes more eloquently, map out the wanderings of the sky with the rod, and tell the risings of the stars. Thou, Roman, forget not to govern the nations under thy sway. These shall be thy arts: to impose the rule of peace, to spare the subject, and defeat the proud.” In these lines we hear the proud Philistinism of an imperial people. This is the genuine Roman (dare I add “British”?) attitude towards the arts and sciences. They are for others to provide, for Greeks and Egyptians. Even oratory, the highest achievement of the Roman genius in literature, is thus scornfully thrown to the foreigner. The Romans knew that they could buy or seize better statues than they could carve: their task was to conquer and govern—not an ignoble art.

The Æneid is explicitly a national laureate poem. The poet seeks to enshrine all Roman life in his pages, to epitomise Roman history and to introduce allusions to characteristic pieces of myth and ritual. He inserts whole lines of Ennius or Lucretius when they please him. They are superseded and replaced. Just like Dryden, he feels that he is the heir of the ages. The extraordinary popularity which Vergil attained even in his own lifetime grew in the course of a few centuries almost into a cult. His tomb became an object of pilgrimage; in early Christian times he became a prophet and in the Middle Ages a wizard. The gentleness and purity of his personal life played their part in the creation of this strange Vergilian legend.

Horace had less of the courtier’s suppleness and required winning to the imperial cause. It took two efforts of Mæcenas to secure him and we have letters preserved in which Augustus very good-humouredly confesses his disappointment that Horace has refused a secretaryship. Horace was the son of a freedman, as he was not in the least ashamed to confess. But his father had managed to secure for Quintus the education of a gentleman under Greek teachers in Rome, himself attending the boy to school in place of the rascally pedagogue slaves who usually undertook that office. Horace had further enjoyed a University education at Athens, where he had fallen under the spell of Brutus, for whom he fought at Philippi. He was, and remained, a Republican by instinct, but Mæcenas won him over to the cause of Cæsarism. He made his reputation with the Satires, a species of composition which may be termed truly Italian. The satire is a conversational medley written in the language of prose with the rhythm of poetry. In this Horace was imitating the old Roman master Lucilius. It is much to the credit of his critical discernment that Mæcenas was able to descry the brilliant abilities of Horace in this very uninspiring medium. For though his Satires were sometimes bitterly satirical in the modern sense of the word, Horace’s chief literary asset was the charm of a sunny, genial character. He had in addition a gift for composition and an industry which brought him almost but not quite to the level of original genius. It seems to have been Mæcenas who set him to the writing of lyrical odes. Biting satires might have been the most effective literary weapon in republican days, but the glorification of the new regime required something of a loftier strain. Vergil was engaged upon its epic, Horace was instructed to write its occasional verse. The Greek lyrists of the older period had as yet remained unimitated in Latin. Accordingly just as when the young Vergil had wanted to sing of kings and battles “Apollo had plucked his ear and admonished him that a shepherd should feed fat sheep and sing a slender song,” so Horace was deliberately set down to the task of celebrating the new Rome in the style of Sappho and Alcæus and Anacreon. That he accomplished his task so superbly is a proof of his energy and versatility. He himself, a gentle valetudinarian whose idea of a banquet was a mess of cabbage and pot-herbs, had to strike the lyre of revelry and sing of wine and love. He sang without conviction, without a spark of Sapphic fire or a note of natural music, but the noble rhetoric of the Roman schools in the golden age supported him. He laboured for the right word never in vain. No writer has ever equalled his matchless gift for making truisms sound true. No other writer has been able to assert that “it is sweet and comely to die for the fatherland,” or that “life is short” with an equal air of genuine wisdom. Latin with its terse precision is the ideal language for the expression of platitudes. His patriotic eloquence is Roman rhetoric of the best kind. But perhaps his real strength lies in drama. It is strange that Latin of the classical period failed at producing a native drama so completely as it did. Perhaps it was because the writers of that age were so completely under Greek influences that their natural Italian genius for the theatre was stifled under the load of a classical convention. Certainly Horace had the gift, and in such passages as the dramatic duologue (Ode ix. of Book III.) Donec gratus eram tibi, or the Epode of the witches (v.) At, o deorum, or the still more famous Epistle about the bore, he exhibits himself, like Browning, as a dramatist gone astray. Regarded from the purely lyrical point of view, the Century Hymn, which he wrote to order as Rome’s laureate in succession to Vergil, is perhaps his greatest achievement. The Secular Games of 17 B.C. were intended to bring visibly before men’s eyes the glories of the new monarchy and incidentally to carry in their train the salutary but unpopular measures of the Julian moral reform. So the choir of noble youths and maidens were taught to sing in their prayer to Diana:

where the goddess is besought to increase the population of Rome and favour the senate’s decrees about marriage. The fourth book of the Odes was added after a long interval at the direct request of Augustus. It is intended to bring the achievements of Augustus and his family, particularly the triumphs of Tiberius and Drusus, into favourable comparison with the heroic stories of republican history. It is most melancholy to observe that Mæcenas, to whom Horace was genuinely attached and whose name constantly occurs in his earlier writings, here drops out of the poet’s verse because he had fallen out of Cæsar’s favour.

Although Horace is in his Odes as classical and conventional as all the Roman writers of his age, his Satires and Epistles are more intimate than any other Latin work of the great period. In them we get real glimpses of life at Rome, or on a country estate. We cannot fail to be struck with its idleness and emptiness. In the city he saunters from the forum to the baths, from the baths to the dinner-table with time and boredom for his only enemies. In the country he sometimes, it is true, toys with husbandry, or shows a faint interest in landscape-gardening or loiters among his books, but the life is to the last degree super-civilised and unreal. The very ideas of hope and progress were alien to the ancient world. The eyes of the Romans were always turned behind them, so that they could not see the greatness of the vista that was now opening for them in front.

The elegists—such as the graceful melancholy Tibullus, or Propertius, the pedant who often stumbled into poetry, and a host of others who are mere names to us—would hardly, but for their prominence in the schoolroom, deserve serious attention. Callimachus the Alexandrian was their model, himself scarcely a first-rate poet. The whole idea of writing love poetry in an absolutely regular distich of hexameter and pentameter was inartistic and unreal. Their fluent prolixity makes them insufferably tedious out of school. It is difficult to sustain interest in the relations between the bards and the married ladies with Greek pseudonyms to whom their verses are addressed. From our point of view the chief interest in these writers lies in the fact that nearly all of them were at one time or another invited to praise the new regime. Tibullus, indeed, who enjoyed a modest competence of his own, limits his praises to his immediate patron Messalla, and frankly admits that war and battles disgust him. But Propertius makes an attempt to carry out his commission, and describes the battle of Actium fifteen years after its occurrence. But though he invites Bacchus to assist his Muse, it is wretched stuff and the poet himself turns from it with disgust. The famous elegy upon Cornelia, daughter of the injured Scribonia, beginning desine, Paulle, meum lacrimis urgere sepulcrum, is however sufficient proof that it was only the want of a really inspiring theme and a suitable medium which prevented Propertius from being in the front rank of the world’s poets.

Ovid, “this incorrigibly immoral but inexpressibly graceful poet,” as Mr. Cruttwell called him, is a far more interesting personality. I think he may fairly be called the wickedest writer on the world’s bookshelves. Others may be wicked through ignorance, or by accident, or out of high animal spirits, but Ovid is immoral on principle, a conscientious and industrious perverter. His greatest work, “The Art of Loving,” is quite frankly a guide to adultery, the precepts it contains being perfectly practical and evidently based on expert knowledge. In his Amores, Metamorphoses, and Fasti he took for his field the domain of religion and exhibited celestial sin in the most captivating light. We have already seen how the loves of the gods came to take their place in the Olympian mythology, and how thinking pagans like Plato regarded them. To such men they were already relics of barbarism, but Ovid draws them out into the light again, gilds them with his wit and makes them altogether charming for the Roman drawing-room. The strange and uncouth old ritual of Italian nature-worship is piquantly dressed out for the up-to-date blasphemer. Nobody who had read Ovid could possibly worship Jupiter any

more. It was all done with consummate art and unblushing impudence. When the sad Niobe is bereft of her seven fair children by the arrows of the jealous gods, our poet, ingeniously parodying Vergil, observes:

In telling the dreadful tragedy whereby the Greeks had explained the sorrow of Philomela, the nightingale, our poet cheerfully describes the slaughter of the children, adding:

And so he moves from one lovely myth to another, preserving them indeed for our archæologists, but delicately with the breath of his profanity defiling them for ever.

Now Ovid is far more typical of the civilisation of his day than either Vergil or Horace. For Ovid was a Roman noble, rich and gifted, who in earlier days would have passed creditably from one high office to another in the state, humorously plundering a province or two, gracefully collecting objects of art in Asia and possibly losing a battle or two through negligence. He actually started on a public career as a brilliant barrister, and enjoyed the ancient office of decemvir stlitibus iudicandis, something like our Masters in Chancery. But the Roman drawing-rooms soon swallowed him up in their silken entanglements, and he spent the greater part of his life whispering his poisonous little pentameters to ladies like Julia. Of course a single poet with Ovid’s sinister gifts was doing far more to corrupt Rome than all the Julian legislation could do to reform it, and we may fairly conclude that Ovid with his attacks on the traditional Roman morality and religion, together with effeminate bards like Tibullus who sang of the horrors of war, were more than undoing the patriotic work of Vergil and Horace. The plain fact is that though you may hire writers you cannot purchase the spirit of a people, and so Augustus and Mæcenas found, to the great misfortune of the Roman Empire. They failed in their attempt to capture literature. Oppression failed even more signally than corruption. Henceforth all the literary talent of Rome is on the opposition side. Lucan extols republicanism, Tacitus assails the emperors with satirical history, Petronius pillories Nero with satirical romance, Juvenal with satirical poetry. Only the younger Pliny is loyal, and to be praised by Pliny is a very doubtful recommendation. Roman literature had imbibed the republican ideals from its Greek foster-mother. The schoolmasters of Rome continued to teach their pupils to declaim against tyrants.

But Ovid himself was not permitted to flourish in his wickedness. A sudden decree from Cæsar Augustus fell upon him like a thunderbolt. He was banished for ever and bidden to betake himself to Tomi, on the Black Sea, near the mouth of the Danube. From that inhospitable region he continued to pour forth elegiacs, Epistles and Tristia, wherein he protests his innocence, recants anything and everything he has ever said, and bewails the horrors of arctic existence among the barbarians. The actual cause of his banishment is one of the most piquant mysteries in literary history. He has seen something which he ought not to have seen: his eyes have destroyed him. It is fairly clear that his banishment synchronised with the banishment of the younger Julia, and we may well believe that the old emperor, shocked and horrified by this second scandal in his own house, attributed it to the corrupting influence of that singer of gilded sins. The banishment was certainly well merited and the only pity is that it came too late to effect its purpose. The unmanly tone of the Tristia, the effeminate appeals to everybody in Rome including a hitherto forgotten wife, reveal Ovid in his true character. It is a little strange that generations of British youth have been trained not only in the study but even in the imitation of this author.

When we term the Golden Age of Roman literature “Augustan” we ought to remember that it began long before Augustus and ended before his death. Thus with all his patronage he may more justly be called the finisher than the author of it. Of all the great writers, only Ovid, to whom the simple life and bracing air of the Sarmatians afforded an unusual longevity, outlived Augustus. Summing up the characteristics of the literature of this day, we may say that courtliness and artificiality were its most prominent characteristics. The freshness of Catullus, the stern conviction of Lucretius, the fire of Cicero were extinct. Nearly all that was native in Roman letters had perished; only the crispness of epigram, the bite of satire and the dignified music of the language itself remained as the Italian heritage. Greece had quite definitely triumphed over Rome. Technical excellence continued, for this has always been the mark of “Augustan” periods. But the well-meant efforts of the state to capture literature for its own service had failed. The horrors of the civil war outweighed the glories of the new regime and with all his benevolence the emperor could never outlive the memory of his proscriptions. Literature never forgave the murder of Cicero though the author of Thyestes might be loaded with treasure. Indeed the widespread misery of those terrible days in 40 B.C. came home personally to most of our middle-class writers. Vergil, Horace, Tibullus, and Propertius had each and all received ineffaceable memories in the loss of their patrimonies. It was little wonder that even though they sang of wars and victories when “Cynthius plucked their ear” their natural instinct was to compare Mars and Venus very much to the disadvantage of the former.

When we turn to consider the Art of the period, we must not forget to carry with us the light that we have obtained from the study of its literature. For Augustus and his assistants were attempting precisely similar ends in both regions. With temples, baths, circuses, amphitheatres, colonnades, libraries, and statues the new regime was to flourish its magnificence in the eyes of the world and, above all, to dazzle the citizens of Rome, fill up the emptiness of their lives, and make them forget, if it were possible, the magnitude of their loss. Money was lavished upon this object by the emperor and all his friends, and the building activity which transformed Rome from a city of brick into a city of marble must have given work and pay to vast numbers of the poor. But the magnificence has all perished, as all magnificence must, and it is left for us by the study of a few ruined monuments, a few statues and busts, an altar here, a cornice there, to estimate the spirit of Rome in conformity with its literature.

Roman art supplied much of their inspiration to the artists of the Renaissance. Michael Angelo and Raphael learnt their art by copying the antiquities, and much of the Renaissance architecture was direct imitation of the Augustan age. But with the birth of archæology as a science in the nineteenth century, scholars became accustomed to leap straight over the Roman era, or to regard it merely as a phase of the Hellenistic decline. From that view, undoubtedly erroneous and unjust, there has latterly been an attempt to escape. Wickhoff and Riegl, whose foremost interpreter in this country is Mrs. Strong, have argued that Roman art has an existence per se, not only possessing characteristic excellences of its own, but in many points transcending the limits of Greek art. To such pioneers we owe a deep debt of gratitude. They have undoubtedly drawn our attention to real merits and real steps of progress in the art of the Romans. But on the whole they have failed, as it seems to an onlooker, to prove their case. Partly it is in the long run a question of taste. A convinced Romanist like Mrs. Strong displays for our admiration many works of art which trained eyes, accustomed to Greek and modern art, often refuse to admire. I would take as an instance the well-known “Tellus Group,” a slab from the Augustan Altar of Peace,[49] preserved in the Uffizi Gallery at Florence. To me it seems a laborious composition, executed with care and skill, but wholly without inspiration or imagination. It is purely conventional allegory. How would the designer of an illuminated ticket for an agricultural exhibition depict Mother Earth? He would design a group (would he not?) with a tall and richly bosomed lady for his central figure, he would put

two naked babes upon her lap, at her feet would be a cow and a sheep, while the background would be filled with flowers and trees. The cornucopia would occupy a prominent position. If he were asked to fill his space with additional figures, he would throw in Air and Water, one on each side, designed on the same plan. There would be little motive in the group, little connection between the figures. The designer’s aim would be that the spectator in a casual glance might observe the fitness of it all—Earth sitting between Air and Water—note it, and pass on. This is just what the Roman artist has done. He has earned his money. He has carved most skilfully and diligently, he has introduced all the conventional emblems. He has drawn his metaphor from stock. I cannot see that he has put any love or religion or indeed faith of any kind into his work. The only thing my eye cares to dwell upon is the absurdity of Air, who is riding (backwards) on a wholly inadequate swan, pretending to form one of a group with the immovably seated Earth. This then is the first point of criticism against the Romanists. I have put it as a mere subjective impression, which involves simply a question of taste. But in reality it is more. They are failing or have failed to make out their case, chiefly because the critical world of art-lovers declines to follow their expressions of enthusiasm, and can give reasons for its refusal.

Secondly, we have a right to ask the apostles of Roman art what they mean by their claims. How justly may we call works like the Altar of Peace,[50] or even the Column of Trajan, “Roman Art”? Was any of it executed by Roman artists? We have just read the true Roman attitude towards art in Vergil’s scornful excudent alii. We may be sure that the Altar of Peace was executed by Greeks. The only named sculptors of the period are Greeks. This is indeed admitted, but then the Roman claim takes one of two forms, (1) that work executed in the Roman Empire may be called Roman, which is absurd, or (2) that apart from mere execution there are in the work certain characteristic innovations which are due to Roman inspiration. The latter claim is true, to some extent, and important.

Just as Mæcenas “plucked the ear” of the poets, and instructed them when to sing or when to refrain from singing of kings and battles, so the patron of art gave instructions to the Greek artists. It is clear enough what instructions he gave. Like Cromwell he cried “Paint me as I am, warts and all. Leave your idealism, your perfect profiles, your serene gods in the tranquillity of Olympus, and depict men with the living emotions displayed in frown and wrinkle.” That was excellent advice, no doubt, but he seems to have gone further. He seems, like the good Dr. Primrose, to have demanded value for his money by insisting upon so many portraits to the square yard of surface to be decorated. Is not this the explanation of the crowded figures in the new style of relief work, as exhibited at Rome from the Altar of Peace to the Column of Trajan? In the friezes of the Mausoleum, the fourth-century Greek sculptors had discovered the advantage of free spacing so that each figure has a value of its own. The florid taste of the millionaire Attalids of Pergamum had made a reactionary movement in the direction of crowded and tangled forms. Now these Roman friezes carry the demand a stage further. In these processions we have a compact mass of faces, each admirably and no doubt faithfully portrayed, but ruining by their very numbers the artistic success of the whole. The spectator is not to admire a composition. As in Frith’s “Derby Day” he is to pick out a face here and there and cry “That is Agrippa: that is Messalla: that is Germanicus.” In its essence such a demand is not the mark of a people with any sense of art. On the contrary it is the measure of their crudity and Philistinism. Nevertheless this new demand enabled the versatile Greek genius to win for itself fresh triumphs, especially in realistic portraiture and narrative relief-work.

Part of the claim which Wickhoff and his followers make for the originality of Roman art is based upon the belief that the limitations of Greek art are not self-imposed; for example, that the Greeks did not know how to express emotion in the plastic arts, that they could not make realistic portraits, that through ignorance they never perceived the beauty of a stark corpse, that Pheidias lacked the intelligence to find a dramatic centre for the Parthenon frieze, and so forth. Such assumptions as these are easily disproved. Greeks were capable of realism (witness the Ludovisi reliefs[51]) but they preferred to idealise. In portraying giants, barbarians, or slaves they could express transient emotions, but for Greeks and gods in statuary they deliberately preferred serenity. The Greeks sought to conceal their art rather than to display it, as we have learnt from the discovery of the subtle secrets of their architecture, and it is rash to assert of any principle of craftsmanship that the Greeks did not know it. Many of the claims of Rome to originality may be refuted by this consideration.

What I believe to be the true statement of the case is this: Greek art did not come to an end with the death of Praxiteles or the Roman conquest. Its central impulse passed over from the impoverished mainland to the still flourishing communities of the East, to Antioch on the Mæander where the Aphrodite of Melos was produced, to Rhodes where the Laocoön was carved, to Ephesus, and farther east still, even into Parthia and possibly India. It was by no means stereotyped but still producing new forms to meet fresh demands, as for sarcophagi in Sidon, or for paintings and mosaics in Egypt. In the course of this period the art of the Greeks was much influenced by the East. The Romans at first were content to take Greek art as they found it. In the days of Mummius they were merely like rich transatlantic collectors in search of beautiful, still more of precious and unique, commodities. They had no doubt some slaves of their own working in Rome at the arts and crafts. Some of these would be Greeks of inferior birth and capacity reproducing old Greek work for the Roman market. But some of them may well have been Italians, some Etruscans preserving the old artistic traditions of their race. This “collecting” era lasted down to the time of Augustus. We have seen it as late as Cicero and Atticus. There was little demand for new creations in those days. Few temples were being built. The artists were still scattered about the Levant. There was little to attract them to Rome.

But when Augustus decided to build a new Rome of marble, founding or restoring his eighty temples, with arches and theatres innumerable all over the Empire, there must have been a great influx of artists from Greece and Asia Minor. Now begins an art to which we may fairly apply the term Græco-Roman in the sense that it was the work of Greek artists under oriental influences supplying Roman demands. The new demands entailed still further artistic developments; some of them, but not all, to be regarded by those who view the history of art as a whole, as improvements. One main effect of Roman conditions was that art largely ceased its service of religion and became devoted to secular purposes. Thus the limitations of the best Greek art, self-imposed as they were, now broke down. The effect is seen especially in portraiture, where the Romans had a tradition of realism resulting from the use of the death-mask in making wax images of the illustrious deceased. Hence in the decoration of the great Altar of Peace at Rome, the Greek artists, who would naturally have produced a frieze of gods or idealised worshippers, were asked for portraits of the men of the day. I think it is clear that enormous skill was devoted to the likenesses of men and very little care to the gods. The composition of the whole was of little account. A little later the demand for historical reliefs on arches and columns was met by the development of quite new features in the art of sculpture, namely, those spatial or tridimensional effects of perspective which are so remarkable on the Trajan column.[52] This art seems to have begun in Alexandrian times but Rome may claim the credit for its development. It was necessary, if sculpture was to do that for

which it was surely never intended—to tell a story. The Parthenon frieze was religious ornament, the Trajan column is secular history. When the Romans required ornament they were content with decoration merely and the artists complied with the wonderful skill which they had probably learnt in Asia. Never have there been such exquisite natural designs in wreaths and festoons of flowers and fruit as in the sculpture of the Augustan age.[53] It is the same with the art of the goldsmith, as we see in the wonderful discoveries of silver made at Hildesheim and Bosco Reale[54] or in the great imperial cameos wrought in sardonyx.[55] There was money and skill in plenty. But what was lacking was a spirit to animate it.

If we could be sure of our ground in setting down realism as the Roman contribution to the history of Art, it would be a great achievement for Rome. Realism is undoubtedly a fine thing though idealism is a finer. Unfortunately it seems that Hellenic art in the eastern centres was developing realism, or at least illusionism, for itself on its own soil. On the whole, in the controversy between the archæologists, Strzygowski, who claims the East as the inspiring force in Roman days, seems to have the best of it. The coins of Asia Minor present realistic portraiture quite distinct from that which was native on Roman soil. Thus the exquisite festoons of flowers, fruit, and birds, all botanically and anatomically correct to the last feather or stamen, are probably the product of Greece and the East. But we may well believe that the nature of the Roman patron’s demands assisted this movement. The Roman, if we may judge by Pliny the Roman art-critic, was just the man to insist that an apple should not resemble a pear or to count the petals of a poppy. This sort of criticism affords excellent discipline for the artist. The statues of the period, such as the Venus Genetrix by Arcesilaus in the Louvre[56] and the Orestes and Electra group by Stephanus at Naples, are not very interesting works. They are plainly late-born issues of Greek sculpture, though in the latter there is an attempt at expression which seems to be derived from the influence of portraiture. The “Electra,” for example, has the same look in her eyes, a frowning look as of one standing in strong sunlight, that we see in the portrait of Agrippa. Portraiture had taught the sculptor of this day new secrets about the setting of the human eye. They had learnt the effect produced by deepening the hollow under the brow and by making the direction of the glance diverge from that of the head and body. But much of this was a legacy from Scopas. In little things like the hang of Electra’s robe there is visible degeneration. Here, as in the Tellus Group, the contour of the bosom is made to support the falling drapery, an unnatural and very unpleasing effect.

The architecture of the period is distinguished by similar characteristics. It is distinctly Græco-Roman with much of the subtle harmony of fine Greek work lost. The temples are, on the whole, the least interesting part of the work, for they are pale copies of Greek architecture not always very artistically adapted. A good many of the ruined monuments of Rome to which the pious traveller now directs his footsteps date from the Augustan period. Many of the temples of the Republic were now rebuilt on the old plan with more sumptuous materials, as, for example, the round shrine of Mater Matuta,[57] commonly called the Temple of Hercules. Technical innovations include the debasement of the Doric column by omitting those subtle flutings which gave it all the grace whereby its strength was saved from clumsiness, and by erecting it upon a pedestal. But the Romans preferred the more exuberant Corinthian order with its florid capital of acanthus foliage, a type which the Greeks had used very sparingly and seldom externally. Again, the Romans had discovered improved methods of construction which enabled them to use a wider span in roofing, but they made no artistic advantage out of this fact. On the contrary, by dispensing with the peristyle or surrounding colonnade they rendered the exterior of their temples much less interesting.

The principal surviving relics of Augustan temples are eight columns of the Temple of Saturn[58] which still stand in the Forum at Rome. The celebrated Pantheon[59] is now recognised to be a work of Hadrian’s time though its plan probably repeats that of the temple erected on the site by Agrippa. But the clearest picture of the ecclesiastical architecture of the day is to be seen on the reliefs of the Altar of Peace, which reproduce the appearance of actual temples with almost photographic exactitude. The finest extant example is undoubtedly the temple at Nismes, known as the Maison Carrée,[60] a graceful erection of this period which exhibits the Corinthian style without undue extravagance.

As the Romans of this day had scarcely any trace of genuine religious feeling it is not surprising that they had little of their own to contribute to temple architecture except wealth and magnificence. But they were naturally devoted to building and that was the favourite extravagance of the rich. Nothing but a few pavements survives of all the handsome villas which dotted the hill-sides at Tibur and Præneste, or lined the coast at Baiæ, Naples, and Surrentum. But there are several secular buildings of Augustan date in which we can see a handsome Græco-Roman style of architecture wherein Greek columns and entablatures were used by Roman architects chiefly as ornament. The Theatre of Marcellus,[61] built in 13 B.C., still presents considerable remains, which though much defaced exhibit an appearance of bygone splendour. The lower story is Doric, the second is Ionic, and the third which has perished was probably in the Corinthian style. We may judge its effective appearance from the copy of its elevation which Michael Angelo produced in his design for the inner court of the Farnese Palace at Rome.[62] The Renaissance learnt much of its architecture from Augustan Rome and these very designs may be seen springing up around us to-day in the banks and town-halls of London. Thus Augustan Rome holds a supremacy for secular building even greater than Periclean Athens achieved for temples. Where magnificence and solidity—and it may be added cheapness—are the principal motives of construction, the Græco-Roman style of the First Century B.C. is unmatched.

The most gorgeous of the architectural creations of Augustus was, however, that Temple of Mars the Avenger which he set up in memory of his triumph over Antony and his punishment of the conspirators. Round it was a piazza (forum) adorned with imaginary portrait statues of all the Roman heroes of history with biographical inscriptions on the bases. In all the Augustan culture we see the impress of the prince’s own Græco-Roman taste. It was all planned to achieve his object of dazzling the multitude and yet gaining over to his side the highest intellect and taste of his day. His own tastes were refined and fastidious: he hated extravagance and utility was always before his eyes. “He read the classics in both tongues” says Suetonius, “principally in order to find salutary precepts and examples for public and private life. He would copy these out word for word and send them to his servants or to the governors of armies and provinces or to the magistrates of the city whenever they required his admonitions. He used to read whole volumes to the Senate, and often publish them in an edict.” We learn further that he always prepared his more important orations most carefully, writing them down and keeping the manuscript close at hand. This practice he followed even in his discourse with his wife. Augustan culture has just this quality: it takes immense pains and succeeds by virtue of them. It lacks a good deal in spontaneity but it makes up in excellence of technique.

VI

THE GROWTH OF THE EMPIRE

IN these words, pregnant and terse as ever, Tacitus gives us a key to the true reading of imperial Roman history. “It is easy,” he says, “to discount the self-interest of the historian and to reject his eulogies, but his malicious criticisms are greedily swallowed. For flattery bears the odious stamp of servility, while malignity wears the false disguise of independence.” Thus out of his own mouth the foremost historian of the early Empire gives us the right to read the literary sources in a spirit favourable to the emperors. So when the historians describe Tiberius as a bloodthirsty tyrant who hid himself away in the island of Capri, and there (at the age of seventy!) began to devote himself to disgusting orgies of lust and cruelty, we shall prefer to reject that story as absurd, and to regard Tiberius as a proud and reserved aristocrat who found it impossible to tolerate the mixture of adulation and spite with which he was treated by the other nobles of Rome, and withdrew from the capital in order to escape it. When Gaius (Caligula) is represented as a lunatic, we merely understand that he was unpopular; when we are told that he made his horse a consul, we recognise a satirist’s humorous exaggeration of his neglect of some noble family’s claims to that office; when we read that he set his army to collect oyster shells on the coast of Normandy, we only conclude that his surrender of the projected invasion of Britain was a subject of ridicule in Rome. Claudius is described as a stupid and clumsy pedant, deformed and inarticulate: in reality he seems to have been a scholar with a leaning towards antiquarian and republican traditions. Even in the case of Nero, the savage ferocity with which he is charged is chiefly due to the fact that his hand lay heavy on the senators. He was undoubtedly popular with the commons, and his real offence was to possess more refinement and culture than was considered proper in a Roman noble, to be too fond of Greeks and art and music. Nevertheless it is impossible to write history in whitewash, and the only safe method of dealing with a period like this is to ignore the personalities on the throne of the Cæsars, and to attempt a broad treatment of the general tendency of these times.

But by neglecting the gossip and the personalities we do, I fear, run the risk of missing much of the interest of the period, and perhaps we lose an important part of the truth. We must not allow ourselves to be wholly deprived of that impression of purple and splendour which hangs about the Golden House of Nero, nor to forget the taint of crime which clings to the palaces of the Cæsars. The latter in particular is an essential part of imperial history. As we have seen, this Empire founded on compromise was and remained illegitimate. The succession was always open to question; there was no law of heredity. This fact was emphasised by the barrenness of the Roman aristocracy. For a hundred years no prince had a son to succeed him, so that the palace was always full of intrigue. Finally, the wickedness of the women is one of the most sinister features of the time. Though it was, indeed, no innovation of the Empire, it now gains a terrible significance in the dynastic conflicts which surrounded the throne. Every one of the early reigns is stained with murders and fearful crimes in the palace. No doubt much of this history is false and malicious. For example, it is by no means likely that Germanicus was poisoned. There were always scandal-mongers to hint at poison when any member of the ruling house died of disease. But even with the most liberal discount for exaggeration, the record is a black one. Let us select two typical stories, in order to suggest the kind of satanic halo which surrounds the imperial houses, as the ancient historians depict them.