At least one can find in Lucan enough independence from tradition to grant him a degree of self-confidence hardly to be matched elsewhere in the derivative literature of the period. Our other surviving Silver Latin epics, by Silius Italicus, Valerius Flaccus and Statius, date from the Flavian dynasty; but they continue the general tendencies of the Julio- Claudian writers virtually unchanged, with the same desire for effect, which had begun as early as the major elegists, together with the same sensationalism and bloodthirstiness. All look back rather than forward, with Virgil always at hand as a modeclass="underline" the contemporary world or the future has no part in their scheme. It seems most unlikely that Statius' German War cut any new ground, in manner or subject-matter.
There may have been other important poets in the period from Tiberius to Nero, but even their names are lost. We do possess a number of minor poems, some falsely attributed to the young Virgil, perhaps to replace the master's lost juvenilia. These are commonly dated after the death of Augustus, but are essentially continuations of the practices of the great Augustans. None contains a hint of genuine creative potential. More interesting is the group of more or less court poems from the reign and perhaps from the circle, of Nero: pastorals from Calpurnius Siculus and from an anonymous poet preserved in a manuscript at Einsiedeln, quite competent but uninspired pastiches of Virgil's Eclogues, though hardly to be mistaken for Virgil, containing considerable florid emphasis on the golden age of the young Nero and no likelihood at all that their panegyric is ironical. Likewise, and possibly from the pen of these same writers, is the panegyric of Calpurnius Piso, perhaps the patron of Calpurnius Siculus, which essays to praise without relevant material to hand. This ineffectual praise points to a subject as dubious as the supposed leader of the Pisonian conspiracy of a.d. 65, and underlines the lack of valid themes for poetry during this period. What we know of Nero's own poetry on the Trojan War does not suggest that he was concerned with anything but the manipuladon of words or hoped to establish any relevance of the Trojan War to his own day.
The reaction against these poetical fashions, especially epic as written by Nero himself, is found in Petronius, rather too intimate a member of the imperial clique for his esoteric criticisms of Lucan and others to be fully comprehensible to us[1118] (neither as parody nor as models for improvement do they really make sense). And in Persius, whose charges of vapidity, affectation and effeminacy show at least that he has not got Lucan in mind, there is a strong protest against those who have nothing to say and use fanciful and contorted language to say it (1.32—5, et alibi). Yet Persius, setting out to write satire in the tradidon of Lucilius and Horace, has chosen an almost impossible course. He declares his intention of using everyday language (v. 14, verba togae), as his predecessors had done, but his complex allusiveness requires an intimate knowledge of Horace and probably of other writers no longer available to us. His dizzying switch of metaphors and his unexpected Unking of words produce a texture which is anything but conversational (as satire or sermo had come to expect), straightforward or unaffected. And his material is all from stock: themes and phrases from Horace and the Stoic tradition make up a great part of it. But at least Persius comes closer to touching the heart than any other writer in a period when literature is tending to become a private pursuit to be practised and enjoyed in the sort of group of mutual admirers described by Persius in satire 1 and by Tacitus in Ann. xiv. 16, as led by Nero and evidently supported by Lucan before the rupture. Horace and Virgil may to some extent have distanced themselves from all but a very select public by the complexity of their texture and their demands on the reader's knowledge and sensitivity; but they still provided plenty to engage a wide interest, with no reason for anyone to complain of the irrelevance of their poetry to the contemporary world.
One method of finding material for poetry without touching too directly on the perilous issues of the day, a method already practised by Catullus and followed by the Augustans and on into the Silver Age, was the Alexandrine device of exploiting Greek mythology to provide either examples or actual subjects for poetry. Virgil's use of the Trojan War and the adventures of the Trojan Aeneas to provide an aetiology for Rome and for the Augustan settlement is on a different level (or series of levels) from any other borrowing we are aware of. The use of lesser myths, some of extreme obscurity, by Horace, Tibullus and Propertius to illuminate erotic and other topics in contemporary life, whether seriously or ironically, enriches their poetry immensely, without necessarily adding to the impact.19 Ovid, after playing with Greek stories similarly in his early love-poetry, turns to myth as a subject in its own right for the Metamorphoses and the Fasti, largely in order to deal with erotic themes without causing further offence to the moral climate of Augustan reform. With very little serious intention and with all the apparatus of rhetorical mastery, he tells his stories for their own sake and with immense success.
Major Greek myth serves a much more solemn purpose in Seneca's tragedies, a field in which Roman subjects had hardly ever proved effective; although, as already remarked, some fairly close follower of Seneca was before long to devise in the Octavia a tragedy built round the efforts of Seneca himself to dissuade Nero from adopting the role of tyrant, and Tacitus (Dial. 2—3) reports the immediate impact of dramas on the themes of Domitius and Cato at about the same date. Epic, with the major exception of Lucan, depends likewise on myth, as we see it in the Flavian age with Valerius Flaccus' retelling of the Argonaut story and with Statius on the Theban and Trojan wars. For Silius Italicus the Punic War was very nearly as mythical as the legendary wars of Greece; and Curtius' version of the history of Alexander in prose is essentially part of the same process. Juvenal, in his first satire, laments the tedious dominance of the Greek cycles of mythology, in tragedy and epic alike, and he is supported by numerous epigrams of Martial. Their criticism evidently applies to almost the whole of the first century after Christ.
IV. THE JUSTIFICATION OF LITERATURE
Various reasons were advanced during the period for writing and for reading different sorts of books. For Quintilian, writing on the training of the young orator, almost all literature could contribute to the mastery of rhetorical techniques, even Catullus and Lucretius. He has no place for works which do not belong to the recognized genres, such as Phaedrus' fables or Petronius' picaresque novel.
19 E.g. Hor. Carm. iii.i i and 17; Prop. 1.20 and passim.
Again, as Homer was often regarded by the Greeks as a repository of knowledge on all manner of practical matters, so a whole range of Latin works existed primarily as sources of information. Here Vitruvius On Architecture is an accepted example, with no literary pretensions, but demonstrating his practical value when he became a working handbook for Renaissance architects. Mela's Geography, limited though it is, could be of some use. Celsus On Medicine, as on other branches of knowledge in books now lost, seems to have been properly and exclusively concerned to impart information.
With the agricultural writers, however, Varro's practical application seems largely to be sacrificed to literary considerations, Columella's rather less so; but when Columella completes his treatise with a book in hexameter verse, he is deliberately placing himself beside Virgil's Georgia, the practical value of which, whether for constructing a plough, selecting a lucky day for various activities, or replacing a stock of bees, makes no claim at all for serious consideration. Likewise Manilius, following Cicero's translation of the hellenistic Aratus' astronomical poem, is concerned rather to write poetically than to provide genuine information; and it is noticeable that Tiberius' heir, Germanicus, during the same period chose to attempt an improvement on Cicero's Aratea as a purely literary challenge. For Quintilian, such didactic poets as Lucretius and Aemilius Macer are classified along with Virgil, as writers of epic, without concern for their subject-matter. It is certainly difficult to regard Grattius on hunting, Horace on poetry, or Ovid on the calendar (and perhaps on fishing) as allowing their subject to take precedence over their art.