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The Neronian Literary Revolution Mark Morford the Classical Journal, Vol The Neronian Literary Revolution Mark Morford The Classical Journal, Vol. 68, No. 3. (Feb. - Mar., 1973), pp. 210-215. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0009-8353%28197302%2F03%2968%3A3%3C210%3ATNLR%3E2.0.CO%3B2-7 The Classical Journal is currently published by The Classical Association of the Middle West and South, Inc.. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/journals/camws.html. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academic journals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers, and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community take advantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. http://www.jstor.org Tue Jan 22 02:09:04 2008 THE NERONIAN LITERARY REVOLUTION N LITERATURE, as in politics and architecture, the Age of Nero was a time of I change. The absolutism of the principate and the new personal architecture represented by the Domus Aurea became the vehicles through which the personality and preferences of the princeps were to be expressed. No less did the literature of the time owe its fashion to Nero himself; an interesting development, however, is that in this field, unlike that of architecture, the most creative intellects refused to allow the independence of their genius to be circumscribed by the aesthetic tastes of the prin- ceps and, in one case at least (that of Lucan), chose to die rather than compromise artistic integrity. We are fortunate in that a considerable zmount of the works of lesser authors of the time has survived and can be compared with the masterpieces of Seneca, Lucan and Persius. The pleasant, but scarcely inspired, pastoral poetry of Calpurnius and of the author of the Einsiedeln eclogues show only too clearly how low the Muse's flight was when a moderate poetic ability met with a faithful knowledge of Vergil and a desire to please the emperor. The same limitations appear in the Ilias Latina, whose very subject matter, along with the emphasis put on Apollo in the shield-passage (862-891), is evidence enough for the same motivation. The other surviving minor poetry, the Aetna and the tenth book of Columella, are less courtly by the nature of their subjects; but they, too, plod where Vergil soared. In prose we are less fortunate; Tacitus' Dialogus suggests how much we have to regret in the loss of the works of the great orators, Eprius Marcellus, the friend of Nero, and Marcus Aper, who brought from Gaul to Rome a fresh infusion of vigor into Roman oratory, comparable to the literary contributions made by the Spanish family of the Annaei. We may feel less regret for the loss of historians such as Cluvius Rufus; valuable as their works would be for us as source material and as illuminating the methods of Tacitus, they could hardly have shown the independence of spirit that is the essential ingredient of the greatest historians. Sallust, Livy and Tacitus each spoke for himself; Cluvius, master of cere- monies for Nero's Hellenizing performances in A.D. 65, was too genial and too smooth a politician to further the independent development of history as the record and criticism of political man.l Nevertheless, Cluvius earned the praise of no less a figure than Helvidius Priscus for his impartiality; and it is true that in equally dangerous times Cremutius Cordus (under Tiberius) and Aufidius Bassus (under Claudius) had shown that history could still be written in an independent spirit even when freedom of speech was severely cir~umscribed.~ We should also regret the loss of the poetry of Caesius Bassus, who appears to have been the only lyric poet among the successors of Horace worthy to be mentioned with him.3 His friendship with Persius (perhaps some thirty years his junior), whose Satires he edited, may be taken as indicating that as a writer he was not likely to be subservi- ent to the autocrary of Nero. Yet, all in all, the literature of the age cannot be considered apart from the tastes of the emperor himself. The two greatest literary geniuses of the age, Seneca and Lucan, were closely connected with him; the poetry of Persius can hardly be considered in isolation from the work of these two Stoics, while Petronius to some extent at least, 1 See Suet., Nero 21; Pliny, Ep. 9.19.5;Tac., Hist. 4.43. 2 From Seneca, Ep. 30, we learn that by A.D. 62 Aufidius was very old and that he was concentrating upon philosophy and upon facing death. 3 Quint. 10.1.96. THE NERONIAN LITERARY REVOLUTION 2 11 reflects the tastes of the court of which he was for a time a leading ornament. As we examine Nero's literary development, we shall see that he sought to lead and to limit the work of his contemporaries. In their turn Seneca, Lucan, and Persius established their independence of the intellectual demands of the emperor, and it was to a large extent the pressures of Nero's political and aesthetic tyranny that led each of these authors to forge a new style. They created a literary revolution in terms different from those which the emperor himself had proposed. Even Tacitus vouches for the intellectual ability of Nero, while calling his interest in artistic and musical pursuits a perversion of his natural talent,4 which would most suitably have been exercised in rhetoric, a public intellectual pursuit considered respectable even by conservative nobles before ~ero'sreign. ~acitusadds in the same passage that Nero showed in his poetry the elementa doctrinae, and, if we remember that the word doctus was traditionally a term of high praise in Roman literary criti- cism, we can take it that Nero had some claim to include himself among the literary leaders around the Court. It was nothing new for the princeps to be himself something of a literary personage; Tacitus points out that Julius Caesar, Augustus, Tiberius, Gaius, and Claudius had all gained distinction as composers of speeches, and the first three of these principes had written poetry: Julius Caesar's poetic ability is dismissed by Tacitus, however, with the remark that he composed "not better than Cicero, but more fortunately, in that he wrote less."5 The literary and scholarly interests of Claudius are well-known. The four features that make Nero's attitude to literature essentially different from that of his predecessors are: (1) the literary and aesthetic components in his education; (2) the relative importance which he attached to litera- ture and art as suitable pursuits for a man in public life$' (3) a passion for Greek culture, which extended even to efforts to change the tastes of the Roman populace in its public games and spectacles; (4) a determination to gather round the princeps a circle of literary men whose intellectual and political lives were not separate. The literary patronage of Augustus had been exercised indirectly through subordinates like Maecenas; Nero himself was at the center of the court literarv circle, which included among its finest authors Seneca, the principal statesman of the early part of the reign, and the consular historian, Cluvius Rufus. Nero's own literary ability was sufficient to attract authors of the stature of Seneca and Lucan, so long as their literary relationship was as between friends and equals. The scanty remains of Nero's poetry are sufficient to indicate a taste for Alexandrian use of Greek mythology, and for alliterative, musical arrangement of words:7 the author of colla Cytheriacae splendent agitata columbae is clearly doing more than merely describing the sheen of feathers on a pigeon's neck. As for prose writing, Tacitus implies that Nero was the first princeps who employed a speechwriter for his major pronouncements. Elsewhere, however, he has Nero thank Seneca for teaching him skill in extemporaneous oratory, and we may conclude from the notices of the young Nero's speeches before Claudius on behalf of the citizens of Bononia, Ilium, and Rhodes, that Seneca had also taught his pupil the art of declamation in Latin and Greek.8 The one surviving speech of Nero, dating from 67 and preserved in an inscrip- 4 Tac.,Ann. 13.3. 5 Tat., Dialogus 21. For the literary activities of the early emperors see 0.A. W. Dilke, "The literary output of the Roman emperors," G&R 2.4 (1957) 78-97. 6 Cf, Suet., Nero 20: iactans occultae musicae nullum esse respectum. 7 See Morel, F.p.L. 131-132. 8 Tac., Ann. 13.3 (using a speech-writer); ibid. 14.55 (extempore speaking). For the three speeches see Tac., Ann. 12.58; cf. also Phoenix 22 (1968) 64. 212 MARK MORFORD tion from Acraephia in Boeotia, shows at least that Nero's speeches had considerable literary quality even after the death of Seneca.
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