[In the following excerpt, Sikes discusses Lucan's portrayal of Cato as a Stoic hero.]

IV

… The Pharsalia, like Paradise Lost, has been' said to want a hero; and, in the popular sense of the word, the criticism is quite true. Caesar is no more, if perhaps no less, the hero than is Milton's Satan, being rather the villain of the piece, although Lucan is forced to admit his greatness. Pompey is at least on the side of the angels, standing for law and order, for the established constitution, and for the unenlightened oligarchs whom Lucan thought to be champions of "freedom". But, in the Civil War, Pompey had become "the shadow of a mighty name", and, with the best will, Lucan could not make him a worthy match for Caesar. His death inspires some fine rhetoric on his former glory, but no rhetoric could disguise the weakness which marked the last phase of his life; and the poet could do no more than make excuses for his failure.

But there was one man whose part in the war, from Lucan's point of view, was perfect. Cato had a double claim to his admiration. In the first place, he was—after Pompey's death—the leader of the Senatorial party, for which Lucan hardly cares to conceal his sympathies. In the second place, Cato was a thorough Stoic, and—though Lucan was not perhaps an orthodox philosopher—the general tone of the Pharsalia is patently Stoic.¹ From the moment of his death at Utica, Cato had been cast for the rôle of hero in any epic on the Civil war. His suicide had raised him to the rank of a martyr for the Republic, and a whole literature of pamphlets took him as subject for praise or blame. Caesar himself answered Cicero's eulogy with an Anticato, and, later, Augustus joined in the fray. It is to the credit of that emperor that Cato could be safely praised, if not for his politics, at least for his nobile letum.² Horace was as free as Marvell, whose ode to Cromwell, fitly called "Horatian", is no less generous—did Marvell think of Cato when he wrote of Charles? After the death of Augustus, Cato's fame grew with the growing Stoic opposition to the empire. Men like Thrasea took him as their model; Seneca preferred him even to the official Stoic patron, Hercules; his dying speech suggested a stock theme for recitation; and his life, no less than his death, had become an exemplum virtutis³—the type of the Wise man pitted against adversity, whom Seneca thought a "peer of God".⁴

The real Cato may, or may not, have deserved this canonization; but at all events, he was something more than the Don Quixote of the aristocracy, "one of the most melancholy phenomena in an age so abounding in political caricatures."⁵ Mommsen's biassed judgment is itself a caricature of the truth. The Romans were good judges of a man, and Cato's own contemporaries would not have trusted and followed a mere eccentric. As a politician he was no doubt unpractical and uncompromising—a visionary who spoke as if he lived in the Republic of Plato instead of the dirt of Romulus.⁶ In his private life he was obsessed with the idea of the stern Roman, and either inherited or copied the rough manners of the elder Cato, although Cicero once reminded him that there was a gentler side of the great Censor's character.⁷ But his real honesty and dogged purpose were assets to a party whose chief characteristics were self-seeking and vacillation. He was at least a sincere Stoic, as his death was to prove; and, a certain eccentricity being the hall-mark of a Stoic, Lucan may well have accentuated, though he did not invent, the strict and rather ostentatious virtue of the Wise man.

During the first period of the war, Cato was of course obscured by Pompey; but, even so, the poet manages to bring him, if not into the limelight, at least on to the stage. The second book gives Lucan an opportunity of describing his hero's character:

Stern and undeviating, Cato showed
The constant practice of a rigid code:
Steadfast to make the Mean his only guide
—Never from Nature's path to turn aside,
—To spend his life for Rome, and deem his
 birth
Not purposed for himself, but all the earth.
His was a feast, to vanquish hunger's pain,
A palace, if his roof withheld the rain.
For costly garments, he was rich enough,
Clothed in a Roman gown of homespun stuff.
Creating sons, Desire was satisfied,
And Rome herself was Cato's child and
 bride.
Justice and Honour ruled his single mind,
Whose Good lay in the Good for all
 mankind;
And in no deed of his might Pleasure dare
To steal an entrance or demand a share.⁸

After Pompey's death, the whole interest of the Pharsalia is transferred to Cato. This could be justified on purely military grounds, as Cato had at least an independent command in Africa, although he did not succeed to Pompey's position as generalissimo. But it is clear that Lucan cared much less about strategy than character, and Cato alone fulfilled his ideal of

A brave man struggling in the storms of fate,
And greatly falling, with a falling state.⁹

In the dangers of the Libyan desert, the Stoic leader receives a eulogy such as the most successful general might envy. He reminds his men that honour lies in the effort, not the event—ire sat est. He marches on foot, and, though parched with thirst, waits—like a Sidney—for the humblest camp-follower to drink before him. His route lies near a famous oracle, which his staff urge him to consult; but, though a Stoic did not officially deny the truth of oracles, a philosopher had no need of a refuge for weaker brethren.¹⁰ Thinking of these, Lucan himself deplored the silence of the Delphic oracle as the greatest loss of his own age; but his Cato—satisfied with the "diviner" of his own heart—refuses to consult the shrine, in a speech of real dignity and even sublimity of thought:¹¹

Within his heart the silent voice divine
Prompted an answer worthy of the shrine:
What should I ask? "Whether I choose to fall
Free to the end, or live a tyrant's thrall?"
Or, "Is life nothing, be it brief or long?"
"Can any violence work a good man wrong?"
"Is Fortune's threat on Virtue vainly spent?"
Or, "Does Success add nothing to the good
 intent?"
All this we know; Ammon can do no more
Than testify the truth we knew before.
God is about us; and, do what we will,
We do God's bidding, though his voice be
 still.
He needs no revelation, having shown
Once, at our birthtime, all that may be
 known.
Nor has he plunged the Truth in barren sand
For a few travellers in a desert land.
Wherever there is earth and sea and air,
Wherever Heaven and Virtue—God is there.
Shall we search further? Vainly shall we
 rove,
When every feeling, every sight, is Jove.
Doubters may fear, and seek prophetic aid;
I, being sure of death, am unafraid.
Death waits alike the coward and the bold:
—Thus hath God said; 'tis all we need be
 told.

Lucan's character of the Happy Warrior may challenge comparison with a more modern and more famous eulogy. Cato, with this "triumph" in the sands of Africa, had won a nobler victory than Pompey, who had thrice mounted the Capitol in his triumphal car. Such a man, to Lucan, seemed divine—indeed, if Rome were but free, she would have given him his apotheosis. The celebrated line

victrix causa deis placuit sed victa Catoni

has been called a bathos as well as a blasphemy. But in reality it is neither. As Lucan's uncle had said, we are all very near God—prope est a te deus, tecum est, intus est;¹² and the Stoic was nearest of all. With due allowance for a flourish of rhetoric, the antithesis in the epigram is sound Stoicism.

The poet did not live to describe the last act in Cato's drama. That act would have crowned the play; for to a Stoic—as is well known—self-destruction was not a weakness to be blamed or at best condoned, but an example to be admired—a vindication of the right to show free will, by disobeying Fate without sin, if honour demanded. Lucan could sometimes be as sublime as he was often ridiculous; and, if he rose high in his panegyric on Pompey, he would surely have risen far higher in his final estimate of Cato. Nevertheless, for our purposes, his portrait is complete. Whatever we may think of the Stoic type in general, or of Lucan's Cato in particular, we must admit that the figure stands out in bold relief, as contrasted with the rather sketchy drawing of the other characters in the Pharsalia. We may not like his Cato, or admire his virtue overmuch. We may prefer Aeneas, who is not so immaculate. But we cannot deny that Cato has been drawn by a loving hand, so that he embodies, once for all, the type which the best Romans thought most worthy of imitation. To our minds, perhaps, the worst that can be said of the type is that it is so largely negative. It would not, indeed, be fair to condemn Lucan's Stoics, as Johnson condemned Addison's, with the sarcasm that the object of all the characters and the result of every situation seems to be, how not to act. On the contrary, the Stoics of the Pharsalia—whether a humble centurion like Volteius, or Cato himself—can act as well as talk; but it must be acknowledged that the typical Roman Stoic, though by no means a pacifist, is happiest in passive resistance. Addison—in the most celebrated passage of his tragedy—was here true to his original: Cato does not care to command success, provided that he deserves it.

There was good reason for the eighteenth century to admire a Cato, whether in Lucan or Addison. The ages of the two poets (from a literary point of view) had so much in common that a modern translator of Lucan instinctively turns to the Popian couplet, which alone seems to preserve the savour of Lucan's rhetoric. Both ages, moreover, sought only for the embodiment of the universal idea—the business of the poet was "to examine not the individual but the species; to remark general properties and large appearances. He does not number the streaks of the tulip, or describe the different shades in the verdure of the forest".¹³

It is easy enough, at the present day, to find fault with the Johnsonian theory, and to point out that the poet's real business is to handle the type in such a way as to give it individuality. The characters of Chaucer and Shakespeare have "general properties" and "large appearances"; but, none the less, the Wife of Bath and Hamlet have just those "streaks of the tulip" that give them a vivid and intense personality. The danger of the purely "typical" delineation of character lies in a temptation to force the note. A Miles Gloriosus or a Trimalchio, who had been created simply as the embodiment of a single characteristic—to be "conceit" or "snobbishness" personified—is bound to be exaggerated. Their creator cannot draw on individual peculiarities and personal mannerisms to vary the monotony of the leit-motif The Epic heroes, although they were sketched boldly and, to some extent, in outline, were never merely typical, because they were first and foremost men. Achilles and Odysseus have each a dominant characteristic; but, though the one is "warlike" and the other "wily," neither is confined to a single Humour.¹⁴ Both are complex, versatile, personal. In Latin epic, as we have just seen, Aeneas—if tending rather more to the type—is still essentially a Greek heto; a superman, but still a man. Lucan, however, whether consciously or unconsciously, pushed the Aristotelian theory of the Universal to an extreme from which Aristotle himself might well have recoiled. Aristotle's favourite character—the Oedipus of Sophocles—is much more than a typical hero; he is also an individual, with human failings as well as heroic excellence. But, the Roman poetic "character" deliberately shunned complexity. Here the poets were far behind the historians and biographers: the Hannibal of Livy has great virtues and "equal vices"; the Tiberius of Tacitus may be overdrawn, but (though suspicious and cruel) he is by no means a mere embodiment of Suspicion and Cruelty. Roman historians, in fact, were as realistic as the Roman sculptors, whose gallery of the Emperors reveals a deep psychological study of persons. The Roman poets, however, followed a different tradition, ultimately derived from Plautus and Terence, who, in their turn, had borrowed stock types of the New Comedy. If it is asked why Menander and Diphilus, in their Greek Comedy, were content with the stock types, the answer must be that they were the first to bring Comedy into touch with ordinary life; and drama cannot proceed per saltum, from the ideal flower to the streaks of the tulip. There must be an intermediate stage in which it is sufficient to note the general properties and large appearances. Greek comedy was arrested at this stage, and the Romans took over the typical slave, or the old miser, or young lover. The matter was, at its outset, mere literary tradition, for there is no reason to suppose that Plautus and Terence troubled themselves over Aristotelian theories; but tradition was afterwards supported by the usual misunderstanding of Aristotle. The Greek philosopher had bidden the poet to copy the Type, and his followers held that the Type must not be contaminated. Horace's advice:

respicere exemplar vilae morumque iubebo
doctum imifatorem

might well refer, in theory, to the actual imitation of life, as we know it, full of inconsistencies, vacillations, compromises; but in practice the Chremes must always be "angry," the Medea "ferocious". Here, at least, the neo-classics not unfairly interpreted the Romans: as John Dennis understands Horace: "When a Poet would draw the Character of a covetous or a revengeful person, he is not to draw after Lucius or Caius; but to consult the universal pattern within him, and there to behold what Revenge or Covetousness would do in such and such Natures, upon such and such Occasions"—for Lucius and Caius, he adds, are but imperfect copies of the Idea, and the poet, in copying them, must degenerate still further from theoriginal.¹⁵

For modern appreciation, perhaps, the Cato of Lucan is an unfortunate example of the Roman theory. His hero is not merely a type, but something aesthetically worse—a type of Perfection. Ethically, the perfect Stoic was well worth drawing, not only for the Romans, who imagined no higher ideal than Stoicism, but for ourselves, who can still learn much from that noble philosophy. Artistically, however, Lucan's Cato is a failure. We miss the fault or weakness which Aristotle knew was needful for a hero's fall; we are merely dazzled by a blaze of light which leaves no shade; and we have learnt that no human being is a compendium of either virtues or vices.

So far—if this criticism is sound—the influence of the Stoics on Lucan's poetry was a doubtful blessing. But this inspiration did not end with portraiture. It is not too much to say that the whole conception of the Pharsalia would have been different, if Lucan had never heard of Stoicism. Commentators have strangely underrated the importance of philosophy as the chief—if not the only—cause of Lucan's complete break with Epic convention.¹⁶ Virgil, it is true, had toned down the more savage or puerile aspects of the Olympian religion. He had rejected the crude theomachy of Homer; but his gods, if they no longer fought each other, at least took sides in the human conflict, and helped or hindered the fortunes of Aeneas. Lucan swept away the whole Homeric machinery. Beyond and above the human actors, there is only Fate or that parens rerum, a god who is indistinguishable from Fate, to order and direct events. Now, classical poetry is so wedded to tradition, Roman art so dependent on Greek, that only the very strongest motive could have caused this rebellion. It has been thought that the disappearance of the gods is simply due to the historical subject: they might well have intervened in the days of Aeneas, or even in the Punic war, but theycould not directly prompt a Caesar or Pompey, in whose time—less than a century before Lucan—the gods no longer walked with men. But Lucan's contemporary, Petronius, disproves this theory. His chief criticism on the Pharsalia—for he had certainly that poem, or part of it, in mind—turns on this very question. A poet, he says, must not neglect the supernatural; he must make his characters move per deorum ministeria; and then Petronius shows how a poem on the Civil War should be written, using all the hackneyed resources of divine interference. Petronius, at least, saw nothing grotesque in the mythical convention applied to recent history; and, even in the age of Nero, there might have been many readers who would have accepted the deorum ministeria as no convention at all, but actual truth; just as in one battle, fresh to present memory, human heroism was thought by many to be more than human, and only to be explained by the theory of angelic aid. Anyhow, Petronius won, for all later Roman epic returned to the Myth. To Statius and Valerius Flaccus the first essential was to follow in Virgil's footsteps; even Silius—although we are told that he was a Stoic—allowed tradition to override philosophy; so that it must have required some courage for Lucan to break away from "the fair humanities of old religion," even if they no longer "lived in the path of reason.""¹⁷ Stoicism alone could have given him the courage. How might deities be ranged on this side and on that? God is not Many, but one God, and He is the minister of Fate—

Iuppiter est quodcunque vides, quodcunque  moveris

—a line which, as Mr. Abercrombie well remarks, would certainly explode any supernatural machinery that could be invented.¹⁸

Lucan was therefore forced to follow the "historical" method, and so came under the censure of Petronius, who remarked that poetry could not compete with history—the historians could do the thing better. It is unfortunate that this critic's own version of the Civil War is flat and conventional enough; but negatively, at least, Petronius had a strong case. The purely historical method—such as we see, for example, in Lucan's actual account of the battle of Pharsalus—is not poetry at all. But Lucan, after all, was well aware that history is not poetry, that a particular action has no poetic meaning unless it can be translated into universal terms. The motives of human action are often as mysterious as the mystery of the physical Universe; and though a poet cannot explain the ultimate causes of existence, he must adopt some working hypothesis, assuming some power or agency to symbolize—if not to cause in any literal sense—the mainspring of events. Lucan himself was content with Fate; but Fate or Fortune or Chance is a shadowy, unsubstantial being, more suited to the scientific than the poetic mind. Poetry, as Wordsworth saw, needs flesh and blood—in a word, personality. And hence every great poet has instinctively sought for some Person or Persons who should be responsible for human affairs, or, if not directly responsible, at least cognisant of their meaning. Poetically, the need is so strong that such a Person must be invented, if the poet does not believe him to exist. We have seen how Lucretius felt, and tried to solve the problem. A modern avatar of Lucretius offers a still more striking analogy. In the Dynasts, Mr. Hardy stands in precisely the same relation to Napoleon as Lucan stood to Caesar. Both poems were written about a century after the events, when some perspective could be attained, but when the action had not yet passed into ancient history, too remote to affect the life and interests of the reader. Both poets disbelieve in any interference with human doings by supernatural powers, the only difference being that, while Lucan's Fate is at least a sentient force, Mr. Hardy's "Immortal Will" is unconscious and unimpassioned, with clock-like laws—

An automatic sense
Unweeting why or whence.

It is interesting to observe how the two epic poets—for the Dynasts, though formally a drama, is really, of course, an epic—have evaded the pure historic method. Lucan might have taken for himself as a text the Virgilian line

Flectere si nequeo Superos, Acheronta  movebo:

the gods being ruled out, he has recourse to Hell, and loves to transplant his hearers from the historic (and prosaic) stage of reality to the mysterious world of the imagination, where a Thessalian witch may raise the unwilling spirit of a dead soldier, or the ghost of Cornelia may visit her husband before his final catastrophe. In Lucan, the half-gods at all events remain, when the gods have disappeared. But now that even witches have joined the twilight of the gods, one might have thought that an Epic poet would be hard pressed to find compensation for the loss of supernatural agency. Mr. Hardy has thought it necessary to suspend his disbelief. His Intelligences or Spirits, who comment on the human actors, are as indispensable to his poetry as they are unjustifiable to his philosophy. It is by means of this supernatural chorus, now mocking, now compassionate, that the English poet has given unity to his vast drama, and has pointed its significance.

Opinions may differ as to the success of Mr. Hardy's experiment. It has been held that his attempt to poeticize Schopenhauer's metaphysical theory of the World as Will is unconvincing. Yet the use of the supernatural in the Dynasts—even though there is only "a willing suspension of disbelief"—is one which Lucan might have welcomed, if it had not been outside the range of classical imagination. The machinery was ready to hand—no nation deified abstract qualities so profusely as the Romans, with their Justice, Shame, Faith, Honour, and a hundred more. All these "Personifications," as they are commonly and not very correctly called, might have played the part of Hardy's mocking or pitiful spirits. But the real obstacle was that the Romans never used these personifications as persons. They were too remote, too bloodless and abstract, to be of any value for a Roman poet, just as they are nearly always frigid and unsatisfactory in their eighteenth-century revival. Dr. Johnson was quite right in remarking that these "airy beings are suffered only to do their natural office and retire," though he was unfortunate in choosing Victory as an example, since that abstraction, at least, rose to the dignity of a real and personal goddess, round whose altar were fought the last desperate battles of dying paganism.¹⁹

No doubt the case against abstraction—strong as it is—may be pressed too far. To the Romans a personified Quality was not quite the unsubstantial shadow of neoclassic imitation. From time immemorial they had been accustomed to worship indigitamenta, unembodied spirits which presided over every action of life—Terminus, the spirit of boundaries, Domiducus, of the bride's journey to her husband's home, and the like—and this animism, though overlaid by personal Olympian deities, was always a potent force in popular religion. Several of these abstract Qualities (besides Victory) were raised to the status of an official cult, with temples and flamens, and the whole apparatus of organized worship. A people who thus personified Faith and Concord were prepared to find a poetic as well as a religious place for these so-called abstractions. Horace's Virtus or Virgil's Fama belonged to a sisterhood of Good or Evil Spirits, which, if not of human flesh and blood, could bevisualized as concretely as the goddesses of Olympus. They may have had no mythology, but they had at least as much personality as some (though not all) of Milton's angels.

Even in modern times, the Personification has a use, despite Romantic disgust.²⁰ A living poet—after commenting on the usual frigidity of the Popian abstraction, acknowledges the success of Drayton's sonnet:

—Now, at the last gasp of his latest breath,
When, his pulse failing, Passion speechless
 lies,
When Faith is kneeling by his bed of death,
And Innocence is closing up his eyes.…²¹

Mr. Laurence Binyon might have added another poem—written no doubt with something of Drayton's inspiration—in which Rupert Brooke (otherwise no friend of the Absolute) spends all the resources of abstraction over the funeral of Youth. If Brooke could discover poetic value in what—to us—is a mere personified quality, a Roman must have derived far more satisfaction from the same concept, which hovered on the borderline of divinity. Horace could speak of this very abstraction—Juventas, Youthfulness—as forming a pair with Mercury, one of the most human of gods. The little poem, in which he invokes Venus to enter Glycera's new shrine, may be quoted as an example of this easy transition from the abstract concept to the anthropomorphic god:²²

Queen of Cyprus, hasten thence,
 Leave thy Grecian isles divine;
Take my lady's frankincense,
 Enter this fair-fashioned shrine.

With thee bring thy frolic Boy,
 Nymph and Grace in ungirt dress;
Mercury bring, and, strange to joy,
 If without thee, Youthfulness.

It may be objected that the word Juventas, which I have translated Youthfulness, is simply the Latin version of Hebe, who in Homer is a personal goddess. Surely, however, the Roman Juventas was far nearer to the class of Fides and Pax and Virtus, any one of whom might readily have taken her place in the poem, if the context had permitted. She belongs to the Indigitamenta rather than to the Pantheon.

Such Qualities, however—it must be confessed—are but poor substitutes for the humanized gods whose virtues—or vices—brought them into touch with men. To be worshipped, saints must have a golden legend, or at least some individual history. St George, even with his dragon, can never have the interest of Ste Jeanne d'Arc. Peace may have an altar; but, for all her good works, she cannot stir the emotions like even the most useless of the gods—a Proteus, rising from the sea, or a Triton, blowing his wreathed horn.

Lucretius made one attempt to enlarge the magic circle: he tried to personify the sum-total of naturalexistence, Nature herself. But here even Lucretius faltered, and stopped short with the compromise—if Nature were given a voice, she would reproach the man who complained of her laws.²³ He must have felt that to personify the sum-total of atoms—to humanize a formula—was to place a heavy strain on Roman imagination. Later than Lucretius, a goddess Electricity was tried and found wanting. So, instead of a vague and unsubstantial abstraction, he was thrown back on the myths which his philosophy rejected, and the Prayer to Venus stands, as we have seen, a splendid monument to the eternal truth that Truth is not the same as Fact.

Lucan, more uncompromising than the great Epicurean, because he was a lesser poet, could neither find a poetic place for the gods, nor invent a convincing substitute. Like his own Cato, he was too thorough and—may one say?—too narrow to bow the knee, even though the god were not a Baal, but the beautiful goddess for whom Lucretius was willing to forgo his philosophy. It is something to trample superstition under foot, and Lucan, though in a less degree than Lucretius, is entitled to that honour. But a poet must be master not only of Superstition but of Philosophy itself; and Lucretius alone could show that, when Philosophy has done her best or worst, there still remains Poetry, who can bid the dead gods rise up and live again in her own kingdom.

V

It is perhaps in Satire—if that form of art is allowed to be poetical—that the closest alliance between Poetry and Philosophy might be expected. For satire deals with morals, with fact rather than imagination, and requires a standard by which to test the morality. This standard need not, of course, be philosophical: the great satirists of the world have for the most part been content with more or less elastic judgments of good taste, refinement, or moderation, and Roman satire was no exception. Horace, though in his "Satiric" period a mild Epicurean (with a strong distaste for Stoic arrogance), judges as a "gentleman" rather than as a philosopher. Juvenal has no philosophic bias at all: he may pay a vague compliment to Wisdom—victrix fortunae sapientia—but, as he takes care to add, Life is his only master; and Martial—a satirist in spirit, though not in form—owns precisely the same allegiance.²⁴ All the philosophy that Juvenal can claim—as in the Eighth Satire, on Virtue, or the noble conclusion of the Tenth—is the commonplace of the schools, such as had passed beyond the region of controversy into the stock of accepted Roman ethics. Indeed, it has recently been argued that, from Lucilius to Juvenal, the presentation of popular Stoic doctrine forms the essential basis of the whole satiric genre.²⁵ This is true, if we lay emphasis on the word "popular." None the less, as Satire was the most original and characteristic expression of Roman art, and as Stoicism was the predominant form of Roman thought, it was natural that the two should, at least once, come together, in Persius. The young contemporary of Lucan had more need of a Stoic training than either Horace or Juvenal, since he had far less knowledge of life. A youth "of the gentlest character, of virginal modesty, affectionate, frugal, and chaste"—so his biographer describes him—Persius was but slenderly equipped by experience to follow Horace. From a formal point of view, his originality lay only in substituting a crabbed, obscure, and allusive style for the simple clarity of his model. But here imitation ends: the earnest pupil of the great teacher Cornutus owes no spiritual debt to a predecessor, whose code of the Golden Mean was so lenient that his satire served as a chronicle rather than a criticism of life. The fire and enthusiasm, the passionate love of virtue, which are the real and lasting distinction of Persius, are as far removed from the good-natured tolerance of Horace as from the indignation of Juvenal. For Persius never rouses the uneasy suspicion that Juvenal'ssaeva indignatio is a rhetorical pose. This is the more creditable, since—as we see from almost any page of Seneca—Stoicism was a forcing-house for rhetoric. To Seneca, the tyrant—in contrast to the Wise man, the only true "King"—evokes a plethora of invective;²⁶ Persius, with fine restraint and monumental brevity, can sum up the vices and sorrows of tyranny in a single line: "let tyrants see Virtue and pine for her loss:"

virtutem videant intabescantque relicta.27

The Stoicism which appealed to Persius was purely spiritual. There is no suggestion that the poet, like Lucan, took refuge in philosophy as a political creed. The reference to tyranny is common form, and need not imply an oblique criticism of the principate. Nor has Persius the least concern with the physical speculations which the Stoics had once shared with Epicureans. He invites his reader to learn "the causes of things," using the very words of Virgil's famous allusion to the physics of Lucretius; but these causes are final—"what we are, and what is the purpose of the life we are born to live."²⁸ Stoicism is now contracting its wide sphere of interest; it is shedding both metaphysics and science, in order to concentrate more nearly on morals; it is on its way to become the personal religion of Musonius, Epictetus, and Aurelius. This estimate of Persius may perhaps be questioned by some who, with his greatest editor, will see in him no anticipation of the last Stoic phase, and will prefer to class him with the earlier Stoics of the empire to whom he chronologically belongs. But it cannot be denied that the dominant note of their Stoicism was aggressive and political, whereas Persius cares only for the inner life. Military glory—to take a single point—means much to Lucan who, in spite of his fulminations against the "disgrace" of civil war, is at least an admirer of heroism, especially if the hero is a Stoic. Persius, when he speaks of the army at all, is frankly contemptuous: his centurion, a rough, "goat-smelling," uneducated boor, values a hundred Greek philosophers at a brass farthing: he has nothing in common with his brother officer in Lucan—the Volteius who, after fruitless bravery, could teach his men how Romans—and Stoics—should die.²⁹

With Lucan and Persius, the direct influence of philosophy on the poets comes to an end, until the fourth century revival was almost spent. As far as philosophy was concerned, there were no doubt political reasons for its breakdown as a poetic stimulus. Lucan's death was not encouraging to the others, though Stoic opposition to the principate continued, and Vespasian (who seems to have been long-suffering) was compelled to execute Helvidius Priscus, the son-in-law of Thrasea, and to banish all philosophers, except Musonius, for conspiracy. Even Epictetus was driven from Rome in a later persecution by Domitian. The times were plainly unfavourable for any philosophic sympathies, though the "tyranny" of the empire may easily be exaggerated. Under the Flavians, Nero's acts, at all events, were always a subject for free speech, so that Statius, in one of his finest poems, could eulogize the author of the Pharsalia, and Stoicism, as long as it kept to the ethical sphere, was always immune. After Domitian's death it had finally severed all connexion with politics; but the very fact that it had become a personal religion still further restricted its service for poetry. Stoicism grew too serious for amalgamation with the rhetoric which had now captured the Muses. It is significant that Aurelius, who had practised poetry and studied rhetoric in his youth, was grateful to his master Rusticus for having weaned him from both. On the side of poetry there were even stronger grounds for the divorce. Philosophy, as we have seen, was incompatible with the Myth, and the Flavian poets were desperately anxious to carry on the classical tradition, pouring out Thebaids orArgonautica or Punica on the well-worn lines of construction.³⁰ Lucan's poem may or may not have been a failure—the ancients themselves were divided on the question—but at all events he failed to create a school. Poets must imitate Virgil, but not the Virgil of the Sixth Aeneid. Ever since Boissier pointed out the "conspiracy of silence" which prevented allusion to Christianity in Ausonius and Claudian, it has become a commonplace to remark on the strong resistance of the old poetry to the new religion.³¹ But it has not been so clearly observed that, long before the fourth century, the poets no less ignored the old philosophy. The point is not unimportant; for, if Christianity alone had been tabooed, the natural inference would be that the silence was due to religious hostility alone. There may have been such hostility, though Ausonius, at least, seems to have been quite indifferent—indeed, although nominally a Christian, he was essentially a pagan—but the fact that pagan philosophy shared the taboo points to the conclusion that the reasons were rather literary than intellectual. An educated Roman certainly "believed" in some form of philosophy, whereas he could not have believed in Homeric or quasi-Homeric gods; but tradition demanded the presence of the gods, and, as philosophy could not be allowed to clip the angel's wings, it must go. A union which had been blessed by Lucretius and had lasted for a century was thus dissolved by mutual consent.…

Notes

¹ See Heitland's Introd. to Haskins' ed. p. xlviii f.

² Some of the praise in Augustan poetry (Virg. Aen. 8, 670; Hor. Ep. i. 19, 13), may refer to the elder Cato; but in Hor. Od. 1, 12, 35; 2, 1, 23 Cato Uticensis must certainly be meant. So Manil. 1, 797.

³ Sen. de const. 2, 1 and often; Pers. 3, 45. On the exempla virtutis see H. W. Litchfield in Harvard Studies Class. Phil. xxv. p. 1.

⁴de prov. 2, 9, ecce par Deo dignum—vir fortis cum mala fortun compositus.

⁵ Mommsen, Hist. of Rome (E.T.) iv. p. 156.

⁶ Cic. ad Attic. 2, 1; see Boissier, Cicero and his Friends (E.T.), 277 f.

⁷Mur. 31.

⁸Phars. 2, 380-391.

⁹ W. C. Summers' view (Silver Age of Lat. Lit. p. 41) that there are three heroes—Pompey, Caesar, and Lucan himself—implies, I suppose, that Lucan read himself into Cato.

¹⁰ Epict. Diss. 2, 7, 3; Cic. Div. 1, 5, 9; 6, 10. See Lucan 5, III.

¹¹ 9, 564 f.

¹² Sen. Ep. 4, 12.

¹³ Johnson, Rasselas, ch. 22. See Dennis, Reflections upon a Late Rhapsody (annotations).

¹⁴ Macaulay's Review of Madame D'Arblay (1843) should perhaps have the credit of finally exploding the doctrine of Humours in literature.

¹⁵Reflections upon a Late Rhapsody (annotations).

¹⁶ Neither Heitland in his masterly Introduction nor Butler (Post-Augustan Poetry) suggests the view here stated.

¹⁷ Coleridge after Schiller. Plessis (la Poésie lat. p. 560) wrongly attributes the absence of myth to the example of Ennius. That poet certainly used the Olympian machinery; see Serv. on Aen. 1, 20; 1, 254; 1, 281; 4, 576 and other fragments.

¹⁸ L. Abercrombie, Epic, p. 75.

¹⁹Lives (Milton), 256.

²⁰ Personification is not disowned by the modern painter or sculptor—a statue of Liberty has an emotional appeal (apart from its formal beauty) to those who have, or claim to have, liberty.

²¹ L. Binyon in Proceedings Brit. Acad., June, 1918 (English Poetry in its Relation to Painting and the Other Arts).

²²Od. 1, 30.

²³ 3, 931. At a much later date, Claudian (de laud. Stilich. 2, 431) could do nothing more for Nature than make her portress at the door of the cave of the Years, who bows down before the Sun-god.

²⁴ Juv. Sat. 13, 20 f. and 120; Mart. 10, 4.

²⁵ C. W. Mendell in Class. Phil. xv. (1920), p. 138 f.

²⁶ E.g. in the Thyestes. See generally F. L. Lucas, Seneca, p. 61 f.

²⁷ 3, 38.

²⁸ 3, 66.

²⁹ Lucan 4, 474 f.; Pers. 5, 189; cf. 3, 77.

³⁰ Martial (4, 49; 10, 4) protested against this outworn mythology: so Juvenal (1, 1 f.).

³¹Fin de Paganisme 1, 5, ch. ii.