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20
Decline and Nostalgia
Stephen Harrison
1. Introduction. From the late Republic onwards, Roman writers often
spoke of the present as corrupt, and of Rome’s past as a prelapsarian golden age; at
least in their high literature, the inhabitants of the imperial metropolis looked back
with some nostalgia to the supposedly pristine morals and lifestyle of the early
Republic, and Rome’s imagined beginnings as a primitively virtuous rustic
community. Decline was often thought to have started when in the second century BC
Rome came into closer contact through conquest and cultural exchange with the larger
and more ‘corrupt’ world of the Mediterranean. Paradoxically, this was often
accompanied by a recognition of vast material progress, of extraordinary cultural
advances through contact with the Greeks, and of a remarkable ascent to international
hegemony. But even in its most triumphalist moments, post-Republican Roman
culture could still think of itself as morally inferior to the values of its ancestors, the
conservative mos maiorum. The purpose of this chapter is to explore in a little detail
the representations of this complex of ideas in literary texts.
2. Decline, expansion and civil war. Ideas of national decline seem to
emerge after the end of the Republic in the civil wars of the first century BC (for the
period see Levene, Chapter 2 above and Farrell, Chapter 3 above). The historians of
the late Republican and triumviral periods suggested several crucial dates for the
onset of decline, all in the second century BC when Rome conquered large areas of
the Mediterranean. Livy (39.6.7) reports the version that Rome was first corrupted by
the luxurious booty brought back from Asia by the victorious army of Manlius Vulso
in 187 B.C, and represents the elder Cato as stressing as early as 195 BC that
increased prosperity and luxury through expansion into Greece and Asia is weakening
the moral strength of the Republic (34.2.1-2); even the embassy to Rome of the two
Greek philosophers Carneades and Diogenes the Stoic in 155 BC, a landmark in
Roman Hellenism, was seen by Cato at the end of his life as a symptom of the
corruption of old Roman values through contact with Greek culture (Plutarch Cato
49-50). The Greek historian Polybius, writing in 2nd BC Rome with extensive contact
with the Roman elite, makes an explicit link between Roman world domination after
the defeat of Greece in 168 BC and moral decline (31.25.3ff), while his younger
contemporary the Roman annalist Piso identified 154 BC as the beginning of the rot,
pointing to the portent of the destruction by a storm of a fig-tree in the national temple
of Jupiter Capitolinus (Pliny NH 17.244).
The most notable expression of these ideas in literature is perhaps in Sallust’s
Catiline 10-13, where (writing in the 40’s BC) he lays out the decline of Rome as a
background for Catiline’s depravity in the 60’s, constructing a two-stage process, the
beginnings of ambition for power and the beginnings of material greed. The first stage
is the final defeat and destruction of Carthage by Rome at the end of the Third Punic
War in 146 B.C. : as Sallust puts it (10.1-2) :
‘But after the state had grown through hard work and just behaviour, great kings had
been conquered in war, fierce tribes and mightly peoples had been overcome by force,
Carthage, Rome’s rival for overall power, had perished root and all, and all the seas
and lands lay open to Rome, Fortune began to be cruel and to throw everything into
confusion. Those who had easily endured tribulations, dangers, unstable and difficult
circumstances found leaisure and riches, desirable in another context, a burden and a
misery. And so desire for power grew, and then desire for money; that was the raw
material of all Rome’s misfortunes. For greed overturns loyalty, honesty and all the
other good qualities, and teaches instead pride, cruelty, neglect of the gods, and to
think that everything has its price’.
This was very influential; 146 BC was the date most favoured by subsequent
historians as the beginning of Roman decline (e.g. Velleius 2.11, Florus 1.33.1; cf.
Augustine Civ.1.30), and the defeat of Rome’s last great rival for international
hegemony at a time of rapid and luxurious Hellenisation is a natural candidate. But
Sallust’s second stage is much later, the return of Sulla from the East in 84 BC, which
he sees as the origin of modern avarice. The corruption of Sulla’s army in the
fleshpots of the East through the unRoman indulgence of their commander is linked
with their close personal loyalty to him which allowed him to use them in his invasion
of Italy, thus suggesting a direct causal connection not just with the decline of Roman
morals but also with the downfall of the Republic (11.5-6) :
‘Lucius Sulla had treated the army which he had commanded in Asia with an
extravagant indulgence and excessive laxity which contravened the practice of our
ancestors, in order to render it loyal to himself. Beautiful locations and places of
pleasure had easily softened the fierce spirit of the soldiers in time of peace. There it
was that the army of the Roman state first learnt to whore, drink, and admire statues,
paintings and engraved vessels, to appropriate the latter on an individual and
collective scale, to despoil shrines and pollute all areas both sacred and profane’.
Note how the fine arts of Greek culture are on the same level as other more physical
temptations, all portrayed as turning the manly Roman from his proper warlike
activities, and corrupting his natural tendency to ascetic virtue.
In the last decades of the Republic, ethical decline is also a common theme in
poetry. Catullus’ long epyllion, poem 64, presents a vigorous indictment of morals
towards its end (64.397-408):
sed postquam tellus scelere est imbuta nefando
iustitiamque omnes cupida de mente fugarunt,
perfudere manus fraterno sanguine fratres,
destitit extinctos gnatus lugere parentes,
optauit genitor primaeui funera nati,
liber ut innuptae poteretur flore nouercae,
ignaro mater substernens se impia nato
impia non uerita est diuos scelerare penates.
omnia fanda nefanda malo permixta furore
iustificam nobis mentem auertere deorum.
‘But after Earth was stained with crime unspeakable
And all evicted Justice from their greedy thoughts,
Brothers poured the blood of brothers on their hands,
Sons no longer grieved when parents passed away,
Father prayed for death of son in his first youth
So as freely to possess the bloom of a new bride,
Mother, lying impiously with ignorant son,
Dared impiously to sin against divine Penates,
Our evil madness by confounding fair with foul,
Has turned away from us the Gods’ forgiving thoughts’.
(tr. Lee 1990).
Though many of the more spectacular vices here (fratricide, incest) echo the world of
heroic myth in which the poem is set rather than contemporary society, it is not
surprising that this passage is written in the dying decades of the Roman Republic,
perhaps even as late as the 40’s BC. Though Catullus’ datable poems belong to the
50’s, there is no reason why he should not have lived into the 40’s, since the only
ancient evidence on his life (Jerome) suggests that he died in 58 B.C, before datable
allusions in the poems (cf. Wiseman (1985) 189-91) ; the main location of the poem is
in fact Pharsalus, scene of the decisive battle between Caesar and Pompey in 48 BC .
A more philosophical view of Roman ethical anxiety in this period is to be
found in Catullus’ contemporary Lucretius. He strikingly describes a modern Roman,
unable to escape from the material concerns of life, travelling between his multiple
homes in the ancient equivalent of a sports car (3.1057-67) :
ut nunc plerumque videmus
quid sibi quisque velit nescire et quaerere semper,
commutare locum, quasi onus deponere possit.
exit saepe foras magnis ex aedibus ille,
esse domi quem pertaesumst, subitoque revertit,
quippe foris nihilo melius qui sentiat esse.
currit agens mannos ad villam praecipitanter
auxilium tectis quasi ferre ardentibus instans;
oscitat extemplo, tetigit cum limina villae,
aut abit in somnum gravis atque oblivia quaerit,
aut etiam properans urbem petit atque revisit.
‘Just as now we generally see them do, each ignorant what he wants, each seeking
always to change his place as if he could drop his burden. The man who has been
bored to death at home often goes forth from his great mansion, and then suddenly
returns because he feels himself no better abroad. Off he courses, driving his Gallic
ponies to his country house in headlong haste, as if he were bringing urgent help to a
house on fire. The moment he has reached the threshold of the huse, he yawns, or falls
into heavy sleep and seeks oblivion, or even makes haste to get back and see the city
again.’ (tr. Smith 1975).
This is an eerily modern view of an affluent society without an ethical direction,
presenting material wealth and mental poverty.
In the 30’s BC we find poetry responding directly to the moral crisis of the
civil wars, now in their last phase. Horace’s Epodes, published about 30, contain two
poems, 7 and 16, which can be plausibly seen as belonging to the early 30’s and the
renewal of civil war against Sextus Pompey (Nisbet 1984). Epode 16, after claiming
that degenerate modern Romans are destroying their own country, undefeated by a
whole host of past enemies from Porsenna to Spartacus, presents an ironic solution in
a proposal of mass emigration to the mythical and paradisiacal Islands of the Blest,
while Epode 7, similarly framed as an address to all Romans, interestingly reverses
the normal idea of decline from initial virtue in claiming that Rome’s internecine
struggles derive from the foundational fratricide of Romulus (17-20) :
sic est: acerba fata Romanos agunt
scelusque fraternae necis,
ut inmerentis fluxit in terram Remi
sacer nepotibus cruor.
‘The case is made. It is harsh fate that drives
the Romans, and the crime of fratricide
since Remus’ blameless lifeblood poured upon the ground –
a curse to generations yet unborn’.
(tr. West 1997).
The finale of the first book of Vergil’s Georgics, reflecting the atmosphere of the
mid-30’s rather than of the poem’s date of publication c.29, ends with an apocalyptic
vision of the civil wars, and sees the young Caesar (the future Augustus) as a potential
solution, but ends with a vivid picture of an anarchic world at war, with no guarantee
that control will be re-restablished (509-14) :
hinc mouet Euphrates, illinc Germania bellum;
uicinae ruptis inter se legibus urbes
arma ferunt; saeuit toto Mars impius orbe,
ut cum carceribus sese effudere quadrigae,
addunt in spatia, et frustra retinacula tendens
fertur equis auriga neque audit currus habenas.
‘There the East is in arms, here Germany marches :
Neighbour cities, breaking their treaties, attack each other:
The wicked War-god runs amok through all the world.
So, when racing chariots have rushed from the starting-gate,
They gather speed on the course, and the driver tugs at the curb-rein
- his horses runaway, car out of control, quite helpless’.
(tr Day Lewis, 1940/1983).
The civil war has moved to total conflict at global level, with accompanying further
fear and anxiety about the future of Rome.
3. The Golden Age, decadence and nostalgic primitivism
After Actium in 31 BC it could of course be claimed that control had been reestablished by Augustus as ‘charioteer’, and even that the Golden Age had returned.
In a post-Actium passage in the Georgics, praising Italy, Vergil describes Italy as a
modern paradise (2.136-76), flowing with gold (2.166), and the idea that the Golden
Age has now returned is a key feature of Augustan art and literature, no doubt
stimulated from the top (Galinsky (1996) 90-120). This idea of the Golden Age is
associated with the figure of Augustus, his bringing of domestic peace and morality,
and his pacification through conquest of the larger world, and can be seen in two
typical passages. The first is from Vergil’s Aeneid, where Aeneas’ father Anchises
waxes lyrical on seeing the future Augustus in the Underworld, ready to enter life
(6.791-5) :
hic uir, hic est, tibi quem promitti saepius audis,
Augustus Caesar, diui genus, aurea condet
saecula qui rursus Latio regnata per arua
Saturno quondam, super et Garamantas et Indos
proferet imperium.
‘This is the man, this is he, whom you hear so often promised to you, Augustus
Caesar, stock of the gods; he will again found a Golden Age through the fields long
ago ruled by Saturn, and will carry his power beyond the Garamantes and Indians’.
The last of Horace’s Odes, though not using the idea of gold, makes much the same
points, responding to the particular propaganda context after the Ludi Saeculares of
17 B.C., technically proclaiming the coming of a new age (Odes 4.15.4-16) :
tua, Caesar, aetas
fruges et agris rettulit uberes
et signa nostro restituit Ioui
derepta Parthorum superbis
postibus et uacuum duellis
Ianum Quirini clausit et ordinem
rectum euaganti frena licentiae
iniecit emouitque culpas
et ueteres reuocauit artes
per quas Latinum nomen et Italae
creuere uires famaque et imperi
porrecta maiestas ad ortus
solis ab Hesperio cubili.
‘Your age, Caesar, has brought lush crops back to the fields and restored to our
Jupiter the standards ripped from the proud doorposts of the Parthians, and has closed
the temple of Janus Quirinus, free from war, has imposed right order as a curb on
wandering self-indulgence, has removed our guilt, and revived the character of old
through which the Latin peoples and the power of Italy grew, and the majesty of our
dominion was stretched out from the western bed of the sun to his eastern rising’.
Peace and plenty at home, suppression of enemies abroad, and the ethical renewal of
Rome through Augustan moral legislation and the propaganda festival of the Ludi
Saeculares suggest that Rome is re-achieving the political and moral status it has lost
through decades of civil war.
But peace has its anxieties no less than war, and Republican Roman worries
about the corrupting effects of world conquest, material luxury and self-indulgence on
its citizens continue well into the Augustan age. Livy, for example, in the preface to
the first pentad of his history which is likely to date from the 20’s BC (for the dating
and a full discussion see Moles 1993), suggests that Rome, having expanded so much
over the years, is struggling under its own size (praef.4), picking up a point made by
Horace in the 30’s (Epodes 16.2), and in particular that the reader can see that the
moral decline of Romans since the virtuous early Republic has hastened in his own
time (praef.9) :
labente deinde paulatim disciplina velut desidentes primo mores sequatur animo,
deinde ut magis magisque lapsi sint, tum ire coeperint praecipites, donec ad haec
tempora quibus nec uitia nostra nec remedia pati possumus perventum est.
‘Then let him follow in his mind how (as it were) morals at first subsided as selfdiscipline began to slip, and then how they fell further and further, and then began to
rush headlong down, until we have arrived at this time of ours in which which we can
endure neither our own vices nor their remedies’.
The vices are then defined as avaritia and luxuria (praef.11), brought on by
acquisition of wealth and territorial possessions : in the old days, Livy pithily states
(praef.12), quanto rerum minus, tanto minus cupiditatis erat, ‘fewer possessions
meant less greed’.
Similar concerns with the negative aspects of affluence and success are to be
found in some of the most ‘Augustan’ writing of the same period, the Roman Odes
(Odes 3.1-6) of Horace, published c.23 BC.. The first of these poems, which use a
prophetic persona and an often obscure oracular style to comment on the major issues
of contemporary Rome, climaxes by condemning the vanity of luxurious building
(3.1.33-48) and the third presents Rome as ideally leaving gold in the ground rather
than mining it to its own moral loss (3.3.49-52), but full moral weight is reserved for
the sixth poem. Here the poet castigates contemporary citizens in a dark and detailed
vision of contemporary vices, a vision surely connected with Augustan religious and
moral reforms, looking back to pre-Actium civil wars as the cause of modern
degeneracy (3.6.17-20) :
Fecunda culpae saecula nuptias
primum inquinauere et genus et domos:
hoc fonte deriuata clades
in patriam populumque fluxit.
‘These ages, fertile in crime, first stained marriage, family and households; from this
spring flowed the disaster which poured upon our country and people’.
After cataloguing modes of adultery, the poem concludes with an unrelievedly
negative climax (3.6.32-48) :
Non his iuuentus orta parentibus
infecit aequor sanguine Punico
Pyrrhumque et ingentem cecidit
Antiochum Hannibalemque dirum;
sed rusticorum mascula militum
proles, Sabellis docta ligonibus
uersare glaebas et seuerae
matris ad arbitrium recisos
portare fustis, sol ubi montium
mutaret umbras et iuga demeret
bobus fatigatis, amicum
tempus agens abeunte curru.
Damnosa quid non inminuit dies?
aetas parentum, peior auis, tulit
nos nequiores, mox daturos
progeniem uitiosiorem.
‘Not such were the parents of the army which stained the sea with Punic blood, and
laid low Pyrrhus, great Antiochus and the accursed Hannibal; but they were the manly
issue of peasant soldiers, well versed in turning the soil with Sabine mattocks and
carrying sticks cut to the will of a severe mother, when the sun changed the shadows
cast by the mountains and unharnessed the yokes from tired oxen, bringing on the
kindly time of rest with its departing chariot. What has time which brings only loss
not diminished ? The age of our parents, worse than our grandparents, brought forth
us, more wicked, set in due course to spawn an even more vicious stock’.
Decadent,cosmopolitan contemporary Romans are morally inferior to their virtuous
peasant ancestors, who lived a pure, bucolic life, and are doomed to go on getting
worse – unless, the poet implies, they mend their ways by avoiding the kind of
behaviour castigated in this poem.
These lines gather together many of the images concerned with Roman decline
and nostalgia. The material corruption and moral decadence of Rome since the glory
days of the Punic Wars, the idealising picture of their simple Italian ancestors, and a
warning that Rome will continue to get worse without correction all seem to be
elements which appeal at a fundamental level to the anxieties of Roman selfperception.
As just evidenced, the Latin literature of the Augustan age is often concerned
with the contrast between primitive and modern Rome. This contrast is often
articulated through the presentation of the city itself, above all in the eighth book of
Vergil’s Aeneid, where Aeneas visits Pallanteum, a primitive village built on what
will become the site of Rome, and is guided by its king Evander around the locations
of future city landmarks, identified in the omniscient voice of the narrator; the
Capitol, the ideological heart of the city, is merely a hill covered with scrub (8.348-9):
hinc ad Tarpeiam sedem et Capitolia ducit,
aurea nunc, olim silvestribus horrida dumis.
‘From here he leads him to the Tarpeian seat and the Capitol, now golden, but once
bristling with woody thorn-bushes’.
This interest in the primitive landscape of Rome, providing a firm contrast between
then and now, naturally lent itself to the Callimachean framework of aetiology,
concerned to seek the distant and preferable primitive origins of contemporary
institutions. It is in this spirit that it is deployed by Propertius, who begins his fourth
book with a tourist-type monologue on the past of Rome which obviously owes much
to Evander's guided tour for Aeneas (4.1.1-4) :
Hoc quodcumque vides, hospes, qua maxima Romast,
ante Phrygem Aenean collis et herba fuit;
atque ubi Navali stant sacra Palatia Phoebo,
Euandri profugae procubuere boves.
‘All the region you see, guest, where mighty Rome now is, was hills and grass before
Trojan Aeneas; and where the Palatine stands, sacred to naval Apollo, the refugee
cattle of Evander lay down’.
The moral simplicity of those early times is also stressed in the poem (4.1.37-8) :
Romans then had no wealth apart from their names, and could not be pretentious
about their ancestry when ‘descended’ from a she-wolf (the famous wet-nurse of
Romulus and Remus). The book as a whole goes on to give explanations dating from
early Rome or the legendary period for a range of features of modern Rome – the
statue of Vertumnus (4.2), the Tarpeian rock (4.4), the Ara Maxima (4.9) and the
temple of Jupiter Feretrius.
This Augustan romantic cult of the primitive, simple and virtuous past of the
city of Rome is turned on its head with typical irreverence in a passage of Ovid, who
rejoices in Rome’s growth from a primitive village into a cosmopolis (Ars 3.113-34);
he rejects the types of decadent affluence lamented by Horace, but only because these
are subordinate to urban civilzation in general, which far surpasses old-fashioned
peasant culture (3.121-8) :
Prisca iuvent alios: ego me nunc denique natum
Gratulor: haec aetas moribus apta meis.
Non quia nunc terrae lentum subducitur aurum,
Lectaque diverso litore concha venit:
Nec quia decrescunt effosso marmore montes,
Nec quia caeruleae mole fugantur aquae:
Sed quia cultus adest, nec nostros mansit in annos
Rusticitas, priscis illa superstes avis.
‘Let others take pleasure in the old; I congratulate myself for being born in this late
time, and this age is suitable for my ways. This is not because now pliant gold is
mined from the earth, or because the conch-shell comes gathered from a far-off shore,
or because mountains are shrinking with the digging-out of marble, or because blue
waters are displaced by building piles, but because civilisation is now here, and
peasant ways have not lasted up to our times, surviving from our ancestors of old’.
But even Ovid felt the need to subscribe to this cult in his elegiac Fasti, a later poem
partly aimed (like the elegiac Propertius 4) at learned Callimachean exegesis of
Roman phenomena, in this case the festivals of the newly-revised religious
calendar,and obligingly provides a range of explanatory stories from primitive and
heroic times (see Gale Chapter 7 above and Gibson Chapter 11 above).
3. Imperial decline. For authors writing under the empire, especially
authors who had experienced tyrannical emperors, there was a strong temptation to
idealise the Republican past by contrast with the Imperial present. This is certainly a
key element in Lucan’s Bellum Civile, written under Nero, on the civil war between
Caesar and Pompey (see further Hardie, Chapter 6), which laments the passing of
Republican freedom and its replacement by slavery to the Caesars : Lucan talks
strikingly of the perpetual gladiatorial contest between freedom and Caesar (7.695-6
sed par quod semper habemus, / libertas at Caesar). In the poem Pompey is the most
sympathetic character, though he in some sense represents in his own role the decline
of Republican virtue; Cato, though proclaimed as the exemplar of ancestral and Stoic
values (cf. 2.380-391), seems at times surreally and obsessively severe, but is still
more attractive than the daemonically evil Caesar (cf.e.g. 7.786-99). Naturally enough
in a poem on this topic, the Roman talent for self-destruction and propensity to
decline is stressed: in a stretch of the poem which describes the causes of the war, the
poet virtually versifies the kind of concerns found in Livy and Sallust about Rome’s
incapacity to deal with its own growth (1.71-2 nimioque graves sub pondere lapsus, /
nec se Roma ferens, ‘and terrible falls under an excessive weight, and Rome unable to
support herself’).
Similar concerns are found in the works of Tacitus, who in his Annals and
Histories set out the foibles and tyrannies of Roman emperors from the death of
Augustus to that of Domitian. A famous passage of the Histories, stimulated by the
civil war for imperial power between Otho and Vitellius, connects wealth, world
dominance and autocracy as the causes of Roman decline and internecine strife,
bringing together a number of the themes we have already considered (2.38) :
‘The old ingrained human passion for power has matured and burst into prominence
with the growth of the empire. With straiter resources equality was easily preserved.
But when once we had brought the world to our feet and exterminated every rival
state or king, we wer left free to covet wealth without fear. It was then that strife first
flared up between patricians and plebeians: at one time arose seditious tribunes, at
another over-mighty consuls: in the Forum at Rome they had trial runs for civil war.
Before long, Gaius Marius, rising from the lowest ranks of the people, and Lucius
Sulla, the most cruel of all the nobles, crushed our liberty by force of arms and
substituted a despotism. Then came Gnaeus Pompey, whose aims, though less patent,
were no better. From that time on the one end sought was autocracy’ (tr. Fyfe/Levene,
1997).
Another connected aspect of perceived decline under the Empire was that of
oratory: the advent of the emperor as supreme political and judicial arbiter naturally
downgraded the function of senatorial and court-room oratory from its central
importance in the late Republic (see Mayer, Chapter 4 above and Berry, Chapter 18
above). This is the central topic of Tacitus’ Ciceronian-style dialogue Dialogus de
Oratoribus, probably published soon after the death of Domitian (96 AD), and of a
number of other imperial texts (see conveniently Mayer (2001) 12-16). The character
Maternus in the Dialogus seems to envisage a limited but effective role for oratory
despite its agreed decline in importance under imperial rule, and although Quintilian
wrote a (lost) work on corrupt features in contemporary oratory, his extant work on
the training of the orator takes a positive view. The triteness and artificiality of
declamation, the school-room practice oratory which grew massively in popularity
and importance under the Empire, is an easy target in satirical writers such as
Petronius and Juvenal (1.15-17); in Petronius the mediocre poet Eumolpus claims that
declamation has led to the decline of poetry (Sat.118), a view which has found strong
echoes in modern criticism (though for objections see Williams (1978) 267-71).
The dilution of Roman values through an increasingly diverse and fluid
society is also a concern in imperial Latin literature; Petronius’ vulgar millionaire
Syrian freedman Trimalchio is a case in point (see Harrison, Chapter 15). The great
bard of Roman xenophobia (see further Syed, Chapter 25 below) is Juvenal (see
further Morgan, Chapter 12), whose satires (he claims) are partly motivated by the
prosperity of socially mobile foreign freedmen at the expense of ‘genuine’ Romans
(1.24-30) :
patricios omnis opibus cum prouocet unus
quo tondente grauis iuueni mihi barba sonabat,
cum pars Niliacae plebis, cum uerna Canopi
Crispinus Tyrias umero reuocante lacernas
uentilet aestiuum digitis sudantibus aurum
nec sufferre queat maioris pondera gemmae,
difficile est saturam non scribere.
‘When a fellow who made my stiff young beard crunch with his
clippers,
can challenge the whole upper class with his millions, single-handed;
when Crispinus, a blob of Nilotic scum, bred in Canopus,
hitches a cloak of Tyrian purple onto his shoulder
and flutters a simple ring of gold on his sweaty finger
(in summer he canot bear the weight of a heavy stone),
it’s hard not to write satire.’ (tr. Rudd 1991).
In his third satire Juvenal’s mouthpiece Umbricius attacks Greeks and (Greekspeaking) Syrians for ethnically ‘polluting’ Rome (3.60-62) :
. non possum ferre, Quirites,
Graecam urbem. quamuis quota portio faecis Achaei?
iam pridem Syrus in Tiberim defluxit Orontes…
‘My fellow Romans, I cannot put up with
a city of Greeks; yet how much of the dregs is truly Achaean ?
The Syrian Orontes has long been dischargiing into the Tiber…’
(tr. Rudd 1991).
All these ideas share the view that Rome is not what it was. In literary terms,
the consciousness on the part of Latin authors of ‘belatedness’, that Roman imperial
writing comes in a decadent period after the great literature of the Augustan period, is
not uncommon (see especially Hardie 1993). Where Augustan writers claimed parity
with or superiority to the Greek writers in their genres, writers of the Roman imperial
period often looked back in deference to their established Latin predecessors from the
Augustan age, and in one famous case actually proclaimed the inferiority of a work to
its Augustan predecessor (see Gibson, Chapter 5 on the end of Statius’ Thebaid). In
the later second century, such ideas of belatedness and decadence led to a search for
the past which went back before the Augustan period. Roman literary culture was to
be renewed by returning to its roots; hence the archaising movement, which sought to
imitate the early Latin writers such as Plautus, Ennius and Cato (see also Chapter 5).
4. Conclusion. Roman anxieties about decline and decadence are a major
theme in Latin literature from the late Republic on, stimulated especially by the
decades of civil war which created some national psychological trauma, and by the
contrast between the supposedly ‘free’ Republic and the monarchic control exercised
under the empire after Augustus. The sense of ancestral values enshrined in the mos
maiorum, and a general opposition to change (it is not for nothing that the Latin for
‘revolution’ is simply res novae, literally ‘new things’) tended to create an
environment in which the past was viewed nostalgically as a golden age, and in which
present decline and decadence was consequently inevitable. Attempts to invoke a new
Golden Age (e.g. in the Augustan period) cut across this deep cultural value, and
Romans were very aware of their success as an imperial, conquering culture; but often
we find a sense of the moral values and simple life lost in becoming a rich, successful
and diverse world-state. Such discomfort with material success and longing for a
better past strikes interesting chords with the world of the twenty-first century, where
globalisation and prosperity can cause similar anxiety, and where similar longings for
a simpler and less luxurious lifestyle can be found.
Guide to Further Reading
This chapter touches on some fundamental issues of Roman cultural values.
There are many helpful books in this general area. Of older works Earl (1961) and
Wilkinson (1975, more literary) both chart the history of Roman values from the
beginning of Roman literature to the fall of the Western empire (410). Hopkins (1978)
and (1983) provides stimulating examinations of Roman attitudes to death and
slavery, grounded in sociological models and telling detail; in the same tradition but
more literary and nuanced is Edwards (1993), looking at Roman ideas of (im)morality
in their cultural contexts. The two books of Carlin Barton provide striking and often
fascinating perspectives on the anxieties of Roman elite psychology (1993) and the
Roman sense of honour (2001). Some key areas are also well treated in Braund
(2002).
For more particular topics, Gruen (1993) is especially helpful on the
complexities of Roman Hellenism; on the Golden Age and other Augustan ideas see
Wallace-Hadrill (1982) and Galinsky (1996), and for Roman ideas on primitivism see
still Lovejoy and Boas (1935/1997). On ideas of decline in imperial Roman literature
see Williams (1978), and on the ‘anxiety of influence’ felt by post-Augustan poets see
Hardie (1993). On the description of and attitudes to civil war in Latin literature the
standard work and collection of material is still Jal (1963, French), though some of the
essays in Henderson (1998) are provocative and stimulating (see also the material on
civil war in Barton 1993). On Roman attitudes to non-Romans see Balsdon (1979)
and Veyne (1993), Syed in Chapter 25 below and Syed (forthcoming).