Already in the time of Augustus, a dearth in literature begins which is a striking contrast to the great number of poets in the days of the dictator Cæsar: not one poet can be named who was young in the latter years of Augustus. I could not undertake to explain this; yet it is a phenomenon which has very often been repeated in modern times. But prose was likewise barren. Even in the best days of Roman literature, the influence of the Greek Rhetoricians had become very considerable, and the writers after Cicero, Cæsar, and Sallust, are not altogether free from the effects of these school exercises: many passages may be shown in Livy, which he would not have written had he not passed through the declamation school. But in the later times this influence became still more powerful, and of this period we may get the best idea from the Suasoria and the Controversies of the elder Seneca: those symptoms then broke out, which are described in Tacitus’ excellent dialogue de Oratoribus. From this school, of which it was the sole task, without regard to the contents of a work, without any subject-matter to awaken thought, to make an effect merely by unexpected turns, a swell of words, far-fetched thoughts, and a jingle of periods, arose the era of Seneca; for it must in justice be ascribed to him. The elder Seneca still belongs to a different age, and he remembers very well the earlier and better taste. From what he writes to his sons, it may be seen to how low an ebb taste had then fallen: he rails at them for their fondness for the new manner, but has himself already acquired a sort of relish for it: he wrote his Controversies when an old man upwards of eighty. The philosopher Seneca is the most remarkable character of that time, and one of the few eminent persons living in it: not to be unjust to him, one must know the whole range of that literature to which he belonged, and then one sees how well he understood how to make something even of what was most absurd. To the self-same school of literature belongs the elder Pliny, although his is quite a different mind: this is what is called the argentea ætas. This sort of division is very silly; one should divide Roman literature quite differently: it is a senseless thing to put Tacitus, Seneca, and Pliny side by side; they do not bear the smallest resemblance to each other. This literary period began as early as the reign of Augustus, and it lasted down to that of Domitian, when absurdity reached its height; only we have lost its coryphæi, such as Aufidius, and others. Tacitus does not by any means belong to this rabble, as the earlier school continues along with a modern one.

Seneca is a man of real genius, which after all is the main thing: his influence upon literature has been a most beneficial one; and this I say the more readily, as I dislike him so much. The opinion Dio Cassius gives of him, has a great deal in it which is true and correct; but it is exaggerated, and much too bitter. His affected and sentimental style, strikingly reminds one of a French school, of which Rousseau and Buffon were the founders, and which owing to its faults would be quite unbearable, had it not originated from men of such transcendent talent. Seneca, however, is not to be compared with either of them for loftiness of intellect. Diderot’s Essai sur le règne de Claude et de Néron, is a very remarkable book, and the contrast between him and Dio Cassius is highly interesting: his too was a very ingenious mind, and his manner was like that of Seneca, as he also was but the creature of his age. In the time of Nero, lived Lucan, whose poetry is of the school of Seneca, a striking proof how much more intolerable this mannerism is in poetry than in prose. Bernardin de St. Pierre and Chateaubriand are of the same school: it would be still more bearable, did it not always fall into moralizing sentimentality, which is the case with the former, whilst Chateaubriand is neither more nor less than a bad Lucan. The latter kept his ground until late in the middle ages, and was immensely read, almost as much as Virgil: people were divided into the Virgilian and Lucanian school. The true restorator of good taste in Rome was Quintilian, who is by no means to be reckoned as one of the argentea ætas. With that insupportable mannerism Nero also was tainted; whose talent no one can deny, but who, wherever he was not a fiend, showed himself strange and wrong-headed. In prose the same tone pervaded history also: Fabius Rusticus, who was so much read, has undoubtedly written likewise in the Annæan manner.

The empire was, on the whole, in a prosperous condition. Certain it is that during the eighty years after the battle of Actium, in a time of profound peace, and of great vitality, which only required that there should not be any devastations and destructions,—men felt very comfortable and happy, and recovered their strength. Caligula’s exactions, it is true, were very hard to bear; yet they did not so very much check this development: the population after the wars was certainly more than doubled, the towns became filled with inhabitants, and the wastes were peopled. Unhappy Greece alone remained a wilderness, even to the reign of Trajan. Such countries as had fallen into the hands of the farmers-general,—who, using them as pastures, would not rebuild the towns, nor allow of any tillage,—lay waste; yet they were gardens indeed in comparison with what they were at the time of the battle of Actium. It was just the same in Italy; there the fields were cultivated by bondmen, and the population was indeed restored by slaves who were imported, though it increased in quite a different ratio from what it did in the provinces, where it was recruited by ingenui. It is not mere declamation in Lucan, when he says with regard to the state of Italy,

Marriage, although it was so easy to dissolve, was distasteful to most persons, so that they lived in concubinage; the many freedmen whose names are found on the inscriptions of that period, are the children whom the masters had by their female slaves. This gave rise to those celebrated laws, the Lex Julia and the Lex Papia Poppæa. The degeneracy and profligacy of the freeborn female citizens was so awful, that many a man who was no profligate, may have found a much more faithful and estimable partner in a slave than in a Roman lady of high birth; and thus it was looked upon as a point of conscience not to marry. Hence there were now many more born slaves and libertini than there were freeborn citizens; besides which, in the great houses, innumerable hosts of bought slaves were kept. In the provinces, where the parsimonia provincialis was still reigning, there was no such disproportion: these had a population of ingenui; in some it was also restored and recruited by the military colonies;—such a soldier, though he may formerly have been a brigand, might after all have turned out quite a respectable man, after having once got a home of his own. These men made the use of the Latin language more general. Nor could this be helped: for what was spoken in those countries was but a jargon, from which the people did their best to wean themselves; and they were none the worse for it. The main object of the provincials could not have been, and indeed was not, anything else but to become Romans. In the midst, therefore, of the most detestable tyranny, the vital energies of the countries bordering upon the Mediterranean revived. The tyranny of the governors was, however, far less than what it had been in the times of the republic; at least, it was so under Tiberius, in whose reign a fraudulent proconsul would certainly not have been acquitted.