The moral purpose of literature, taken over from the Greeks and emphasized in numerous apologias for the time spent on composition, is especially prominent in historiography, where there is a claim that reading about the past will enlighten and improve the quality of life, private and public, in the future; Cicero adds that this interest was not confined to the elite (De Or. 11.5 9-61). There is a similar assumption that the main funcdon of satire is moral, if not precisely didactic. Yet in Horace's Satires it is apparent that his primary purpose is neither to attack vice nor to advocate virtue: it is rather to discuss themes, ostensibly moral or not, in such a way as to involve the reader in a humane attitude to life and mankind. Only perhaps in the sequel, the first book of Epistles, can Horace be felt to provide specific moral admonishment to his addressee and thus to the reader, as when he encourages Tibullus to count his blessings and enjoy life as Horace does (4.12-16), or warns Celsus not to be too pleased with himself (8.15-17); and even in this book the majority of poems are concerned rather to play round quasi-philosophical commonplaces. Persius, Horace's successor in the Lucilian tradition, preaches with some fervour the urgent need for moral reform and for escaping from the ties which hinder moral freedom, but in such a way that everything takes second place to style and the striking expression. Seneca, whose philosophical works are certainly less theoretical than practical, uses the epistolary form to exhort his friend Lucilius, and so the general reader, often with a personal reference to his own circumstances and shortcomings which owes something to Horace and contributes a good deal to Persius. The moral dialogues are more remote and less immediately cogent; only the manifesto De Clementia appears seriously to aim at prescribing moral standards and political advice to the new emperor Nero. If moral impact is to be sought anywhere in the period, it is to be found most effectively in Virgil's Georgics and Aeneid, both ostensibly devoted to quite different objectives, but expressing a view of man's position in the universe and relationship to nature which goes well beyond Augustus' declared doctrine of restoring the morality of Roman life.
The overt declarations of poets and prose-writers alike seldom reveal their true objectives. Horace's division between the utile and the dulce (Ars 343) draws attention to the rarity with which it is claimed that literature exists to give pleasure to the reader — that is, that literature is virtually an end in itself. This view, already apparent in Catullus, ties in with the recognition, most explicit in Horace, that literature is for the elite, a limited number of devotees - for those few who are capable of appreciating the writer's artistry in whatever field he chooses to operate. From this point of view, the moral and erotic themes of Horace, the piety and patriotism of Virgil, the love-affairs in the elegists, the Stoicism and republicanism in Lucan, all form the material which the poet exploits to create different literary masterpieces.
There is a curious conflict concerning the writer's originality: poets continually claim to be the first to strike out a particular line, but this means for the most part a new line in Latin.20 Explicitly or implicitly, there is always the assumption of accepted conventions within which a new work must develop, and the concept of imitatio of predecessors is seldom far away, together with the practice of allusiveness to recall the reader to the earlier masters, Greek or Latin, who have provided ideas for the new writer to play with and make his own. This is most evident in Virgil's deliberate evocation of (successively) Theocritus, Hesiod and Homer in his three great works; in Horace's use for the Odes of both the early lyricists and the Alexandrians; in the elegists' open acknowledgement of their debts to Callimachus, Philitas, Euphorion and others,
20 Williams 1968 (a 105) 2)5-267, with (e.g.) Virg. C. hi. 10-12, Hor. Carm. 111.50.13-14.
whose influence we should recognize if their works had not been wholly or mainly lost.[1119]
Most contentious and debatable here is the role of Cornelius Gallus as in some sense the founder of the whole Augustan movement. The discovery in 1978 of a papyrus containing two tetrasdchs and fragments of other lines, clearly belonging to Gallus, has done little to clarify the nature of his poetry and the limits of his influence on his successors.22 His influence on the young Virgil especially cannot be doubted, but the precise part he plays in the sixth and tenth Eclogues still defies secure definition, while the pursuit of themes and phrases from Gallus in Propertius is a still-growing industry. One feature can be detected, in accordance with previous expectation: the emphasis on the poet's own personality and experience as a major element in his poetry and the development throughout a book of elegy of the course of a love-affair, which was to provide an important bridge between the personal poetry of Catullus (and very likely of other members of his circle) and the 'subjective love-elegy' of the Augustans. This autobiographical tendency in Latin poetry, not necessarily always based on reality, appears to take its origin in the satires of Lucilius, reporting 'the whole of life' according to Horace (Sat. 11.1.3 2-4); and it developed in Horace's Satires and Epistles alongside the similar phenomenon in elegy and to a great extent in his own Odes. The personal and conversational becomes a characteristic of the greater part of Augustan poetry, although making little impact in Virgil.
An important issue here is the recognition that an intimate knowledge of the poetry of Gallus, and perhaps of other lost poets such as Cinna and Valerius Cato, could be taken for granted by the Augustan poets; and the alert reader would pick up many references and echoes which escape us today. This does not mean that Gallus was regarded as a completely satisfactory modĉl for aetiological or erotic verse — certainly the surviving fragments contain usages which were totally rejected by the next generation. The concept of the master as model seems only to be fully developed after the climax of the Augustan age, when Virgil's preeminence is so universally recognized that epic poets feel obliged to follow him more or less closely, unless they take a positive step, as Lucan did, in abandoning all of Virgil's heroic machinery and writing a fundamentally different sort of historical epic. Horace's mastery in lyric poetry, on the other hand, appears virtually to have prevented later poets from attempting to operate within the genre at all; while Statius' two essays in Alcaic and Sapphic in the fourth book of Silvae (5 and 7) simply demonstrate that nothing was left for an imitator to achieve. Whatever Caesius Bassus composed to deserve respectful comments from Persius (vi. i) and Quintilian (x. i .96), not a line of his lyrics has survived to show us whether his achievement was worth anything. However justified Gallus' reputation was among the Augustans, at least he never discouraged others from pursuing the tradition he had started.