I have intentionally selected for notice that rhetorical feature in Vergil's style which is, I think, the least obvious. How much of the Aeneidwas written ultimately by Epidius I hardly like to inquire. Nowhere does Vergil completely succeed in concealing his rhetorical schooling. Even in his greatest moments he is still to a large extent a rhetorician. Indeed I am not sure that he ever writes pure poetry—poetry which is as purely poetry as that of Catullus. Take the fourth book of the Aeneid, which has so much passionate Italian quality. Even there Vergil does not forget the mere formal rules of rhetoric. Analyse any speech of Dido. Dido knows all the rules. You can christen out of Quintilian almost all the figures of rhetoric which she employs. Here is a theme which I have not leisure to develop. But it is interesting to remember in this connexion the immense and direct influence which Vergil has had upon British oratory. Burke went nowhere without a copy of Vergil in his pocket. Nor is it for nothing that the fashion of Vergilian quotation so long dominated our parliamentary eloquence. These quotations had a perfect appropriateness in a rhetorical context: for they are the language of a mind by nature and by education rhetorical.
III
Roman poetry continued for no less than five centuries after the death of Vergil—and by Roman poetry I mean a Latin poetry classical in form and sentiment. But of these five centuries only two count. The second and third centuries A.D. are a Dark Age dividing the silver twilight of the century succeeding the age of Horace from the brief but brilliant Renaissance of the fourth century: and in the fifth century we pass into a new darkness. The infection of the Augustan tradition is sufficiently powerful in the first century to give the impulse to poetic work of high and noble quality. And six considerable names adorn the period from Nero to Domitian. Of these the greatest are perhaps those of Seneca, Lucan, and Martial. All three are of Spanish origin: and it is perhaps to their foreign blood that they owe the genius which redeems their work from its very obvious faults. It is the fashion to decry Seneca and Lucan as mere rhetoricians. Yet in both there is something greater and deeper than mere rhetoric. They move by habit grandly among large ideas. Life is still deep and tremendous and sonorous. Their work has a certain Titanic quality. We judge their poetry too much by their biography, and their biography too little in relation to the terrible character of their times. Martial is a poet of a very different order. Yet in an inferior genrehe is supreme. No other poet in any language has the same never-failing grace and charm and brilliance, the same arresting ingenuity, an equal facility and finish. We speak of his faults, yet, if the truth must be told, his poetry is faultless—save for one fault: its utter want of moral character. The three other great names of the period are Statius, Silius, and Valerius. Poets of great talent but no genius, they 'adore the footsteps' of an unapproachable master. Religiously careful artists, they see the world through the eyes of others. Sensible to the effects of Greatness, they have never touched and handled it. They know it only from the poets whom they imitate. The four winds of life have never beat upon their decorous faces. We would gladly give the best that they offer us—and it is often of fine quality—for something much inferior in art but superior in the indefinable qualities of freshness and gusto. The exhaustion of the period is well seen in Juvenal—in the jaded relish of his descriptions of vice, in the complete unreality of his moral code, in a rhetoric which for ever just misses the fine effects which it laboriously calculates.
The second century is barren. Yet we are dimly aware in the reign of Hadrian of an abortive Revival. We hear of a school of neoterici: and these neotericiaimed at just what was needed—greater freshness and life. They experimented in metre, and they experimented in language. They tried to use in poetry the language of common speech, the language of Italy rather than that of Rome, and to bring into literature once again colour and motion. The most eminent of these neotericiis Annius Florus, of whom we possess some notable fragments. But the movement failed; and Florus is the only name that arrests the attention of the student of Roman poetry between Martial and Nemesianus. Nemesianus is African, and his poems were not written in Rome. But his graceful genius perhaps owes something to the impulsion given to literary studies by Numerian—one of the few emperors of the period who exhibit any interest in the progress of literature. The fourth century is the period of Renaissance. We may see in Tiberianus the herald of this Renaissance. The four poems which can be certainly assigned to him are distinguished by great power and charm. It is a plausible view that he is also the author of the remarkable Peruigilium Veneris—that poem proceeds at any rate from the school to which Tiberianus belongs. The style of Tiberianus is formed in the academies of Africa, and so also perhaps his philosophy. The Platonic hymn to the Nameless God is a noble monument of the dying Paganism of the era. Tiberianus' political activities took him to Gauclass="underline" and Gaul is the true home of this fourth-century Renaissance. In Gaul around Ausonius there grew up at Bordeaux a numerous and accomplished and enthusiastic school of poets. To find a parallel to the brilliance and enthusiasm of this school we must go back to the school of poets which grew up around Valerius Cato in Transpadane Gaul in the first century B.C. The Bordeaux school is particularly interesting from its attitude to Christianity. Among Ausonius' friends was the austere Paulinus of Nola, and Ausonius himself was a convert to the Christian faith. But his Christianity is only skin-deep. His Bible is Vergil, his books of devotion are Horace and Ovid and Statius. The symbols of the Greek mythology are nearer and dearer to him than the symbolism of the Cross. The last enemy which Christianity had to overcome was, in fact, Literature. And strangely enough the conquest was to be achieved finally, not by the superior ethical quality of the new religion, but by the havoc wrought in Latin speech by the invasion of the Barbarians, by the decay of language and of linguistic study. To the period of Ausonius—and probably to Gaul—belong the rather obscure Asmenidae—the 'sons', or pupils, of Asmenius. At least two of them, Palladius and Asclepiadius, exhibit genuine poetical accomplishment. But the schools both of Ausonius and of Asmenius show at least in one particular how relaxed had become the hold even upon its enthusiasts of the true classical tradition. All these poets have a passion for triviality, for every kind of tour de force, for conceits and mannerisms. At times they are not so much poets as the acrobats of poetry.