Halicarnassus or the elder Pliny. It may well be that these libraries were such easy victims of deliberate arson in later times of trouble that their collections would provide relatively few archetypes for transmission, and that the chances were better for books in private houses. Yet from Pompeii and Herculaneum together we have recovered only one library, consisting of Epicurean treatises otherwise lost, and not a single book from any other house. The element of hazard in the survival of books was so great that, apart from the evidence of wide circuladon, largely dependent on use in the schools, of a few major writers like Virgil, Horace and Cicero, no safe conclusion can be drawn about the number of copies ever made. The total loss of Varius' poems or the histories of Cremutius Cordus (officially destroyed but preserved for subsequent distribution) and of the elder Pliny may indicate either a lack of quality or an excess of quantity, which made copying impracticable and allowed most of Livy to survive only in epitomes; but Pliny's Natural History has nevertheless survived, and so have the Neronian pastoralists.
The evidence for the familiarity of the great writers outside the educated elite is very small, almost limited to the few tags written on the walls of Pompeii, which do not extend far beyond arma virumque and conticuere omnes (the opening words of the first two books of the Aeneid) and a variety of odd lines from different parts of the same poem, evidently employed for writing exercises, from places as remote as Masada and Vindolanda.30 Of specifically popular literature we have hardly any traces. When Horace wishes to contrast his own supposedly good taste with that of his down-to-earth slave (Sat. 11.7.95—101), he chooses painting, not literature, as the field of aesthetic expertise. But perhaps Davus could not afford books in any case, or could not read, at least well enough to do so with pleasure. His knowledge of Crispinus' philosophy he attributes to the oral teaching of Crispinus' porter. The press, providing the great majority of people with their main or sole reading today, was represented by the Acta, certainly not mass-produced and hardly likely to have a general appeal.
Where the modern world suggests fiction as the obvious type of literature to attract a wide public, we hear of little but 'the Milesian tale', suitably bawdy indeed and made available in Ladn by Sisenna in the first half of the second century B.C. The Milesian tradition is certainly traceable in episodes of Petronius' Satiricon, such as the tale of the Widow of Ephesus, and may have played a considerable part in the origin of the whole of that work, with contributions from the Greek novel, evidently available to, and perhaps popular with, the large Greek-speaking element in the population of Rome and other Italian cities. The Satiricon, even in its mutilated state, is much too complex and sophisticated a work
30 A. K. Bowman and J. D. Thomas, in JRS 76 (1986) 122, and in Britannia (1987) 125-142 with a useful list of such quotations and their provenances.
to have arisen from nothing,31 although, as mentioned above, it fits awkwardly into the genre of Menippean satire and is totally ignored by Quintilian, who would have been hard pressed to recommend it for the training of the young orator, even if he had ever come across a copy of it. Although the low language and the low subject-matter might well appeal to a popular readership, a great deal of literary cridcism and similar matter seems to be aimed only at a very limited circle; and the same is true of the other Menippean satire to survive, the Apocolocyntosis, patently written for circulation among a select group of readers at a particular point in time.
We do possess one writer, from the reign of Tiberius, who stands altogether apart from the fashion and attracted no attention from literary critics, although he may have been considerably more popular and widely read than many more imposing poets. Phaedrus was an imperial freedman, who was at one time involved in trouble with Sejanus. He versified a large number of supposedly Aesopian fables, adding some of his own, including a few on distinctively Roman contemporary topics. He is no master, but writes engagingly and unpretentiously, arousing the question as to how unusual his writing was in an age of great sophistication, and how far he was writing for a distinct level of reader. With his simple language and metre and his improving morals, he appears to be aiming at the younger pupils of thtgrammaticus-, and these qualities probably contributed to his survival into the modern world. The fables would certainly have greater appeal to an elementary reader than the Twelve Tables of early law which at one time seem to have served this purpose; but we have no direct evidence of Phaedrus' use in the schools.
What is most striking in the Roman world is the lack of any basic text which was read by any who could read and listened to regularly by all, as the English bible was for at least 300 years, providing a common focus of language and knowledge. To a certain extent Homer had filled this place in some Greek cities at least in the classical period and probably later; although his language was far removed from colloquial Greek even in the fifth century b.c. and his very bulk made him difficult to assimilate. Virgil could make some claims to have become the bible of Rome, almost as soon as the Aeneid appeared; but the occasions of hearing him read cannot have been frequent, and an influence on Roman life which might have been a major force on the side of humanity and peace was never allowed to become really widespread. It is hard to imagine that any other writer of the period, even Horace or Seneca, can have had even that slight chance of exercising serious influence on the society to which they belonged.
31 P. Parsons, in BICS 18 (1971) 5 3—66, sees some parallel to the Satiricon in a Greek papyrus, probably of the second century a.d. (POj5010), suggesting the existence of a picaresque narrative tradition in Greek on which Petronius may have drawn.
CHAPTER 20 ROMAN ART, 43 B.C. TO A.D. 69
MARIO TORELLI
i. the general characteristics of augustan classicism
In the history of ancient art few changes are so dramatically apparent as that which unfolded, gradually yet unmistakably, during the first two decades of the reign of Augustus. This change came about under the banner of a Classicism inspired by the great Attic examples of the fifth and fourth centuries в.с. The origins of this Classicism were, however, remote. In the architectural and art-historical context of late republican 'Asiatic luxury' (luxuria Asiatica), both the Classical models, which were already present in the Hellenistic culture inspiring that luxuria, and the genuinely baroque practices, which were peculiar to middle and late Hellenistic art, had been enthusiastically welcomed by Roman patrons of the ruling class.1 But in the Augustan and Julio-Claudian age, Classicism became an official artistic programme and one unique to the capital,2 and from this centre emanated the models adopted by greater and lesser private patrons, as well as by Italian and provincial municipalities, especially in the West. Both taste and knowledge were so deeply affected that the history of Roman imperial art can to a large extent be seen as a series of variations on and interpretations of the Classicizing message.