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tunity of development,) none but Livy and Ovid survived him; and of these, Ovid was already banished in disgrace, probably for an intrigue with the emperor's licentious daughter, while Livy never completed the history of Augustus' reign. It was the cruel, and yet not undeserved destiny of this proud and selfish prince, to bury scholar after scholar, friend after friend, and one adopted child after another, till he was left solitary and sad, amid the tantalizing splendour and power of his unbounded empire.

Augustus was succeeded by the jealous and dissembling Tiberius, who obliged the senate to flatter him, and then railed at them for it in Greek as he left the Senate-house, and who compelled the aged and blameless historian, Cremutius Cordus, to starve himself to death for having dared to praise Brutus, and to style Cassius "the last of the Romans." After him came in rapid, and yet too slow succession, those weak-headed and black-hearted monsters, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero, who all gave promise of a mild and virtuous reign at first; but, after having squandered the treasures of the empire, burned the city, and murdered by wholesale the citizens, died by violence, only regretting that they had not been able to finish the work of destruction with greater despatch, and leaving behind them names which have ever since been synonymes of tyranny and crime in every language throughout the civilized world. Of course, they found fit tools of their cruelty in the soldiers; fit instruments, as well as fit victims, in the citizens,-the mass of whom lived on their largesses, fattened on their vices, and were in due season sacrificed to their jealousy or their pleasure, their convenience or their caprice. During these reigns, literature was well-nigh crushed beneath the weight of tyranny, or died out amid the general decay of morals.

But such crimes and cruelties could not always last; the scene of blood ended in the civil wars of Galba, Otho, and Vitellius, each of whom took the sword, and after having fought his way to the seat of a little brief authority, fell by the sword, and gave place to "other men, but not other manners." The military and civil virtues (not without vices) of Vespasian at length won an established throne, and he died in his bed, or rather he died standing, which, he said, was the only death suitable for an emperor. His sons also held the reins with a firm, hand: and though Titus (delight of the Romans) reigned too short a time for the accomplishment of his liberal and magnificent designs, and the cruel Domitian banished philosophers, as his father had done before him, and looked with a jealous eye on all scholars who did not flatter him with literary as well as civil preeminence; yet, with the return of partial liberty and peace, (those

sister nurses of science and art,) literature began to revive. And when at length, under the imperial Trajan, born to command, that period of rare felicity arrived in which men might think what they pleased, and speak what they thought,* literary culture reached a second culminating point-second in order of time, and second in order of excellence, to that of the Augustan age, and standing to it somewhat in the relation of the literature of Queen Anne's reign to that of Queen Elizabeth's-a culminating point, from which it declined but slowly during the happy reign of the peace-loving and art-cherishing Hadrian, and sank to an evening of glory with the setting sun of the philosophical Antoninus.

To this second period, commonly called the silver age of Roman literature, belong the names of the two Plinies, Martial, Juvenal, Statius, Quinctilian, Suetonius, Tacitus; and to bring the Greek writers of the same age into the same category, Pausanias, Josephus, Philo Judæus, Plutarch, Epictetus, and not a few others less known and less deserving. The philosopher Seneca and his nephew, the poet Lucan, may be considered as the pioneers of this corps of authors; they both died under Nero. The elder Pliny and Statius died before the reign of Trajan; Martial, Juvenal, the younger Pliny, and Tacitus, all probably died during that reign. Suetonius, Quinctilian, Plutarch, and Epictetus, survived Trajan, only, however, by a few years. Such were the contemporaries-such the times-of Plutarch! A bright, but not unclouded sky, set with brilliant stars, but by no means of the first magnitude.

That night of storms and thick darkness, which settled down upon the Roman empire after the death of Augustus, never wholly passed away. At such a time, philosophers (if philosophers there be) will be either Stoics or Epicureans; and panegyric or satire is almost the only alternative that remains for writers. All these extremes, at this time, took on their extremest forms. The many who aspired to any kind of culture, revelled in the garden of Epicurus, and sank into the lowest abyss of sensual gratification. The few, deeming life ignoble in so corrupt and servile an age, vaunted their Stoicism, courted martyrdom, and soon met the fate they coveted. Seneca and Thrasea were among the less impracticable of Stoics; but Nero put them both to death, and so won a sure title to immortality. Helvidius Priscus provoked the same doom, even under the mild and tolerant sway of Vespasian.

The epigram now assumed a pungency which had not before belonged to it, but which has since become its established prerogative

* Histories of Tacitus.

and characteristic. The epigrams of Martial resemble those of the earlier Latin and Greek poets only in the name.

The satire, too, of this age is quite another thing not only from that of the Greeks, but also from that of Lucilius and the earlier Romans. The playful and pointed satire of Horace was suited to the refined and luxurious vices of the Augustan age. But the monstrous corruption and degradation of the Claudian period called for the bitter sarcasm and vehement denunciation of Juvenal-a style of writing which even had its influence on the language, though not a malign influence on the spirit of the Histories of Tacitus.

It is only in this period that the Greek word, navηyvρikóç, passes over into the sense of the English panegyric. It had originally meant a festival oration, a funeral eulogium, such as were pronounced at the Olympic games, or on special occasions before the assembled multitude. It now came to mean a flattering, and for the most part false, address to the reigning prince. Such panegyrics, particularly on Nero and Domitian, disfigure the poems of Lucan and Statius, and even the prose writings of Quinctilian. Even the panegyric of Pliny on the Emperor Trajan must be reckoned extravagant and fulsome, though not altogether undeserved and false. Both the panegyric and the satire of this age were too extravagant to be altogether sincere. Sometimes, as in Lucan, the poem begins with encomium, written in the sunshine of court favour, and ends with censure on the same emperor, composed in banishment or disgrace. And we mistrust the fierce invective which Juvenal launches against vice scarcely less, than the courtly compliments which many a writer of questionable character lavishes upon virtue.

Not only poetry, but history, was made the vehicle of flattery and calumny. Suetonius, to say the least, retails a vast deal of scandal in his Lives of the Caesars. And Tacitus charges almost the entire body of historical writers, after the age of Augustus, with being swayed by favour or awed by fear.* For himself, he professes entire impartiality. His works, so far as they are extant, justify the claim. And the same high praise-of candour amid prejudice, of truthfulness amid insincerity-is awarded, without a dissenting voice, to Plutarch. Indeed, by a natural law of reaction, there are in these, and several of the best men of this corrupt age, an ardent love of truth, a devout veneration for virtue, and an intense hatred of vice and falsehood; there are also a depth of thought, an elevation of sentiment, a fervour of emotion, and an earnestness of expression, which, while they mar the classic simplicity and repose of

* Histories, lib. i., chap. 1.

their style, yet speak to the hearts of men, in times so exciting as ours, with stirring eloquence and commanding power. And degenerate as the literary taste and execution of the age must be conceded to have been in comparison with the Augustan standard, still we find in the elder Pliny an extent of learning; in Quinctilian, a justness of criticism; in Tacitus, a profound philosophy of history; and in Seneca, Plutarch, and Epictetus, a purity of ethics, approaching to the Christian code of morals, such as all the vaunted, and, in many respects, real superiority of the Augustan age never reached.

In accordance with the practical tendencies of his age, Plutarch was more a moral than a metaphysical philosopher. But he did not go to either of the then prevalent extremes. He would not have been found with either of the sects whom Paul encountered at Athens. He exposed the errors and contradictions of the Stoics in more than one set treatise; and, in another, he showed that to live according to the principles of Epicurus, was to fail even of the happiness which his followers regarded as life's chief end. His teacher, Ammonius, was an Aristotelian.* He himself is usually reckoned as a disciple of Plato. He was, however, a New-Platonist; or, to designate the thing more exactly by the name, an Eclectic. He received more of the doctrines and spirit of the Academy than of any other school. But he confined himself to no one sect. His system, if system it may be called, combined the most useful, while it eschewed the hurtful, elements of all the schools. It embraced the logic and natural science of the Peripatetics, without their endless disputations and barren distinctions; the modest and inquiring spirit of the Academicians, without the skepticism or the mysticism that was too often coupled with it; the high-toned and heroic morality of the Stoics, disincumbered of their affected insensibility and mad extravagance. From Pythagoras, he adopted the doctrine of the transmigration of souls; and, like that philosopher, he inferred from it the duty of kindness to brutes, and of abstinence from animal food. In his theological opinions and his religious character, he differed little from Socrates. He withheld his assent from the superstitions of the multitude, and yet did not renounce the religion of the State. The national worship was not only essential to curb the passions, and to meet the wants of the vulgar; but the most enlightened, he thought, might use it as a help to devotion-as an appropriate symbol of a purer and more spiritual worship. A religion that was not national, but universal, was a thing of which the ancients could not conceive, till the idea was forced upon them by Christianity; and then they

*Smith's Dict. of Biog., art. Ammonius.

were very slow to receive it. "The man who can believe it possible," says Celsus, "for Greeks and barbarians, in Europe, Asia, and Africa, to agree in one code of religious laws, must be quite void of understanding." But Plutarch thought there was essential truth in all national religions. "As sun and moon, sky, earth, and sea,” he says,* “are common to all, while they have different names among different nations; so, likewise, though there is but one system of the world which is supreme, and one governing Providence, whose ministering powers are set over all men; yet there have been given to these, by the laws of different nations, different names and modes of worship." His doctrine, in short, is essentially that of Pope's Universal Prayer, which, in the mouth of a Christian, is but a refined species of infidelity; but among Polytheistic pagans might be expressive of the highest attainable Monotheism and spirituality. Plutarch believed in one Supreme Divinity, self-existent, eternal, omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent, unchangeable by time or place; immutable also in truth, justice, wisdom, and goodness; the common Father and Ruler of all mankind, and the proper object of religious worship by all his creatures. At the same time he admitted, as did also Socrates, the existence of a class of inferior deities or demigods, stretching through all the interval between the Most High and mortal men, and serving as a medium of communication in various ways between heaven and earth. Of this number were the gods of oracles, of dreams, and of all manner of revelations. Such, too, in Plutarch's opinion, was the daípov of Socrates.† They, in short, are the agents of Divine Providence, and the administrators, to a great extent, of the divine government among

men.

The age of Plutarch was deeply infected with the spirit of universal skepticism. The Greeks, whose religion was always more æsthetic than moral, had long had their sophists and skeptics, who laboured to undermine the foundations of all faith; and their most enlightened men were, to a great extent, atheists, or, at best, pantheists, who either renounced all religion, or held on to it only as an engine of personal or political policy. The religion of the Romans had in it more of the moral element, and, therefore, laid hold of the conscience by a firmer grasp. But now old things were passing away, and all things were to be made new. And it is affecting to see how such observing and thoughtful men as the elder Pliny and Tacitus, had lost their faith in all that was old, without, as yet, having found anything new to place in its stead. "If," says Tacitus, * On Isis and Osiris, as quoted by Neander in his His. Chr. Church. t See his Treatise on that subject.

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