BOOK III. ERA OF THE DECLINE. CHAPTER I. DECLINE OF ROMAN LITERATURE-IT BECAME DECLAMATORY-BIOGRAPHY OF PHEDRUS-GENUINENESS OF HIS FABLES-MORAL AND POLITICAL LESSONS INCULCATED IN THEM-SPECIMENS OF FABLES-FABLES SUGGESTED BY HISTORICAL EVENTSSEJANUS AND TIBERIUS-EPOCH UNFAVOURABLE TO LITERATURE-INGENUITY OF PHÆDRUS-SUPERIORITY OF ESOP-THE STYLE OF PHÆDRUS CLASSICAL. WITH the death of Augustus1 commenced the decline of Roman literature, and only three illustrious names, Phædrus, Persius, and Lucan, rescue the first years of this period from the charge of a corrupt and vitiated taste. After awhile, indeed, political circumstances again became more favourable-the dangers which paralyzed genius and talent, and prevented their free exercise under Tiberius and his tyrannical successors, diminished, and a more liberal system of administration ensued under Vespasian and Titus. Juvenal and Tacitus then stood forth as the representatives of the old Roman independence; vigour of thought communicated itself to the language; a taste for the sublime and beautiful to a certain extent revived, although it did not attain to the perfection which shed a lustre over the Augustan age. The characteristic of the first literature of this epoch was declamation and rhetoric. As liberty declined, true natural eloquence gradually decayed. When it is no longer necessary or even possible to persuade or convince the people, that eloquence which calms the passions, wins the affections, or appeals I Á. D. 14. BIOGRAPHY OF PHÆDRUS. 391 to common sense and the reasoning powers, has no opportunity for exercise. Its object is a new one-namely, to please and attract an audience who listen in a mere critical spirit: the weapons which it makes use of are novelty and ingenuity; novelty soon becomes strangeness, and strangeness exaggeration; whilst ingenuity implies unnatural study and a display of pedantic erudition-the aiming at startling and striking effects -and at length ends in affectation. If this was the prevailing false taste under the immediate successors of Augustus, it is not surprising that it affected poetry as well as prose; and that the principal talent of the poet lay in florid and diffuse descriptions, whilst his chief fault was a style overladen with ornament. The tragedies ascribed to Seneca are theatrical declamations; the satires of Persius are philosophical declamations; whilst the poems of Lucan and Silius Italicus, though epic in form, are nothing more than descriptive poems, and their style is rather rhetorical than poetical. PHÆDRUS. Fable had been long known and popular amongst the Romans before the time of Phædrus. Livy could not have attributed the well-known one to Menenius Agrippa, unless it had been a familiar tradition of long standing. Fables amused the guests of Horace, and furnished subjects to those of Ovid. In this, as in other fields of literature, Rome was an imitator of Greece; but nevertheless the Roman fabulist struck out a new line for himself, and in his hands fable became, not only a moral instructor, but a severe political satirist. Phædrus, the originator and only author of Roman fable, flourished on the common confines of the golden and the silver age. His mode of thought, as well as the events which suggested both his original illustrations and his adaptations of the Æsopean stories, belong to that epoch of transition. His works are, as it were, isolated: he has no contemporaries. Although he was born in the reign of Augustus, he wrote when the Augustan age had passed away. Nevertheless his solitary voice was lifted up when those of the poet, the historian, and the philosopher were silenced. Phædrus, like Horace, is his own biographer; and the only knowledge which we have respecting his life is furnished by his Fables. In the prologue to the third book he informs us that he was a native of Thrace: "I," he says, "to whom my mother gave birth on the Pierian hill Ego quem Pierio mater enixa est jugo." And, again, he exclaims, "Why should I, who am nearer to lettered Greece, desert for slothful indolence the honour of my fatherland, when Thrace can reckon up her poets, and Apollo is the parent of Linus, the muse of Orpheus, who by his song endowed rocks with motion, tamed the wild beasts, and stopped the rapid Hebrus with welcome delay?— Ego literatæ qui sum propior Græciæ, From the title, "Augusti Libertus," prefixed to his fables, it is clear that he adds one more distinguished name to that list of freedmen, who were celebrated in the annals of literature. Although, in the preface to his work, he modestly terms himself only a translator of Æsop, Esopus auctor quam materiam repperit still, for many of his fables, he deserves the credit of originality. Probably he enlarged and extended his original plan; for he afterwards speaks of simply adopting the style and not the matter of the Esopean fable.2 He does not appear to have gained much fame or popularity; for he is only twice mentioned by ancient authorities, namely, by Martial3 and Seneca. The latter, writing to Polybius, a fa 1 Prol. lib. i. 2 Prol. lib. iii. Lib. iii. 20. THE FABLES OF PHÆDRUS. 393 vourite freedman of Claudius, encourages him to enter upon the field which Phædrus already occupied, asserting that fables in the style of Æsop constituted a work hitherto unattempted by Roman genius (intentatum Romanis ingeniis opus.) Either, therefore, the fables of Phædrus were little known and appreciated, or Seneca purposely concealed from the Emperor's favourite the fact of their existence, in order to flatter him with the hopes of his thus becoming the first Roman writer in his style. The persecution to which literary men were subject under the worst Emperors, of which Phædrus hints obscurely that he was a victim1—the perils to which he would have been exposed by strictures upon persons in power, which, concealed under the veil of fiction, appear now dark and enigmatical, but which might have spoken plainly to the consciences of the actors themselves -probably rendered it a wise precaution to conceal his works during his lifetime; hence they would be little known, except to a chosen few, and the few copies made of them would account for the rarity of the extant manuscripts. Owing to the deficiency of ancient testimony, the genuineness of the Fables has been disputed; but the purity of style, and the natural allusions to contemporary events render it almost certain that they belong to the age in which they were supposed to have been written. No one but a contemporary could have written the fable commencing Narrabo memoria quod factum est mea.2 The prologue to the third book evidently speaks of the author's own calamities; and the way in which the name of Sejanus is connected with the event, hints, although obscurely, that that prime minister of tyranny was the author of his sufferings. It is scarcely probable that he would have ventured to attack Sejanus during his lifetime. It may, therefore, be assumed that Phædrus lived beyond the eighteenth year of the reign of Tiberius, in which year Sejanus died. The original manuscript followed in the early editions of 1 Prol. lib. iii. 2 Lib. iii. 40. Phædrus was discovered in the tenth century: it contained ninetyseven fables, divided into five books. But N. Perotto, an archbishop of Manfredonia, in the fifteenth century, published a miscellaneous collection of Latin fables, and amongst them were thirty-two new fables attributed to Phædrus, which were not found in the older editions. These were at first supposed to have been writted by Perotto himself; but the manifest inferiority of some poems known to be the work of the archbishop, and the Augustan purity of style which marks the newly-discovered fables, leave little doubt of their genuineness. Consequently, they were published by Angelo Mai as supplementary to those which had already appeared. The circumstances of the times in which he lived suggested the moral and prudential lessons which his fables inculcated. The bane of Rome, under the empire, was the public informer (delator,) as the sycophant had been the pest of Athens. Life and conduct, private as well as public, were exposed to a complete system of espionage: no one was safe from this formidable inquisition; a man's familiar associate might be in secret his bitterest enemy. But the principal victims were the rich: they were marked out for destruction, in order that the confiscation of their property might glut the avarice of the Emperor and the informers. For this reason, Phædrus himself professes always to have seen the peril of acquiring wealth Periculosum semper reputavi lucrum. And we cannot be surprised that the danger of riches, and the comparative safety of obscurity and poverty, should sometimes form the moral of his fables. That of the Mules and the Thieves, which is entirely his own, teaches this lesson: Muli gravati sarcinis ibant duo; |