This leads to a question which is especially pressing in connexion with the opening decades of the Principate: the tendency of poets to propound a set of values totally at variance with the major programme of moral reform whereby Augustus was hoping to bring Rome back to the greatness of earlier centuries. Respectable private and public behaviour, the marriage of Roman men to Roman women, the production of true Roman children to fight Rome's wars and carry on the traditions of 700 years - these are the most obvious of the ideas on which the Julian legislation and Augustus' own injunctions sought to base the new society of citizens. Of the poets who might be expected to promote these ideas, Virgil never married, and seems to have had homosexual inclinations, if any. Horace likewise remained celibate, although he gives the impression that he followed the Epicurean practice of sexual indulgence with women and boys indiscriminately to work off natural needs when they arose, as first Lucretius and then the satiric spokesman of Sat. 1.2 had recommended. This may be merely the convention of the genre, but Horace nowhere attempts to suggest anything else — certainly not that he ever contemplated any sort of permanent union.
For the three elegists, things are no better. Tibullus and Propertius, as
12 VI.868-86, with Otis 1963 (в 133л) 303-4.
poets, are romantically inclined bachelors, Tibullus expressing affection for boys no less than for girls; as men, they may have had wives and children. The anonymous life of Tibullus is too fragmentary to establish his marital status, unless by negative inference, although Pliny's friend Passennus Paulus (Ep. vi.15) appears to have claimed direct descent from Propertius. Whatever may be the truth of that, their love-poetry is as extramarital as that of Catullus, without ever a hint of true love leading to marriage or to possible divorce and the infringement of the rules of class. The only claim to paternity in the whole of Augustan poetry is Propertius' negative assertion (11.7.14) that he would produce no sons to fight Rome's wars — no sons at all, indeed, for this is no pacifist manifesto
and that the emperor's wishes have no validity in the context of love. Ovid is even worse. He married three times and, like Augustus, produced one daughter, the only attested child of any major republican or Augustan poet; but his poetry reveals a still more irresponsible rejection of the Augustan ideal. In the Ars Amatoria, as already in the Amoves, he describes a world devoted to philandering and promiscuity. In particular, he pays what must have been a most unwelcome tribute to the age of Augustus and its moral climate, when he declares (Ars Am. hi. 121-2), 'I congratulate myself on being born now and no earlier: this age is suited to my way of life.' On this reckoning, the new pax Augusta had produced the circumstances for an unworried self-indulgence, quite unaffected by the emperor's pronouncements and legislation aiming at the restoration of old-fashioned values. This attitude of Ovid's ('prisca iuvent aliis') must have been largely responsible, perhaps even more than his questionable complicity in the intrigues of Augustus' granddaughter, the younger lulia, for his banishment to the Black Sea in a.d. 8
the clearest example known to us of a decisive punishment visited by Augustus on an offensive writer, and one never revoked by his successor.
In his attempts to secure his recall from exile, Ovid indulged to some extent in the sort of flattery which becomes more and more noticeable as the Julio-Claudian age advances. In Tiberius' reign, Velleius Paterculus, while evidently paying due credit to the emperor's earlier successes as a military leader, clearly expresses himself in stronger terms than the truth required.13 Poets in the following reigns were guilty of increasing servility, often revealing a tendency to build up the achievements, or at least the promise, of a new emperor by blackening the name of his predecessor. There is some evidence that the same is true of some of the lost historians of the Julio-Claudians, such as Servilius Nonianus and Cluvius Rufus, if not of the more solid annalists, Aufidius Bassus and the
13 E.g. 11.94.1-5,124.1-5; but see Woodman 1977 (в 202) 54-5; Goodyear in Kenney and Clausen 1982 (в 95) 639—40.
elder Pliny.14 Certainly Seneca's Apocolocyntosis (if that is the proper name of the Ludus de morte Claudii), mocks the dead Claudius and exalts the young Nero in a way which appears to illustrate the development of the historical tradition from reign to reign. Even the very fulsomeness of flattery may sometimes have suggested an element of irony which rather implies mockery - a device which many have seen in Catullus' praise of Cicero in poem 49. The subtlety which this technique would require means that today we can never confidendy assess the poet's sincerity.
Flattery must necessarily have occupied a great amount of the oratory which was delivered during the period, if Pliny's surviving Panegyric provides a fair example for this earlier part of the century. But that speech, delivered in a.d. 100 under Trajan, is the first we possess in full since the death of Cicero. The considerable fragments of Claudius' speech delivered in a.d. 48 on the admission of Gallic notables to the Senate and preserved on a bronze tablet at Lyons, reveal the antiquaria- nism of the speaker, who knows that he does not need eloquence or cogency to gain his point. Tacitus, who claimed that the role of oratory had virtually ceased with the end of open discussion under the Republic (Dial. 40-1), gives his own version of the same speech, with considerable freedom, but reproducing the same qualities accurately enough {Ann. xi.24). We cannot tell whether other speeches from the period inserted in the Annals are as closely related to the speaker's recorded words; but it is noticeable that the most powerful come from men of independent mind upholding their own ideas of freedom — ideas which interested the historian far more than any speeches which have simply approved of the emperor's policy. Thus we have a speech from M. Terentius (vi.8), protesting against the doctrine of guilt by association; from Cremutius Cordus (iv.34-5), defending the rights of the historian; and from Thrasea Paetus (xv.20-1), upholding the old values of Roman administration by Roman magistrates. The eloquence may be Tacitus' own, interested to emphasize the voices of independent spirits. In any case, there is a significant, and probably deliberate, link with the republican ideal of unfettered rights to express one's beliefs and act according to one's conscience, without ever proposing any genuine reform of the imperial system or expressing concern for the great majority of people whose interests might be affected.
This ideal, harking back to the heroic names of the younger Cato, of Brutus and Cassius, appears to have provided a continuous focus for discontent among senators throughout the first century. We lack Tacitus' account of the debate which followed the murder of Caligula, when the abolition of the Principate was allegedly debated for the first and last time; but hostility to tyranny, if not to autocracy, plays an active
14 G. B. Townend Hermes 88 (i960) 98-120, 89 (1961) 227-48.
part in the literature of the period. The actual expression of this hostility in the political field is regarded by Tacitus as fruitless and exhibitionist (Agr. 42.4-5); and he puts similar words into the mouth of Tigellinus, which he himself might not totally disclaim, blaming Stoicism for this truculence and mischief-making (Ann. xiv. 5 7, supported by Agr. 4-4-5 )-15