CHAPTER II THE RELATION OF LUCILIUS AND THE SCIPIONIC CIRCLE TO THE NEW GREEK LEARNING AND LITERATURE My task in this chapter is to consider the relation of Lucilius to the Scipionic circle and to the new Greek learning, enthusiasm for which was perhaps the most potent factor in uniting the members of the circle. These influences, generated in this circle, gained cumulative effect, and new and nicer definition in the period separating the Scipionic from the Augustan period. The critical theories of Horace as to satiric composition must, therefore, be studied as affected by this stream of influence. Before entering upon such a study, however, it is well to recall the existence of certain external resemblances and differences between the life and environment of the two men which in themselves would attract Horace to his great predecessor. Both Lucilius and Horace, like so many Roman writers, were born in the southern provinces; Lucilius at Suessa Aurunca in Campania, and Horace at Venusia in Apulia. These towns were originally Latin military colonies. The former was founded as a fortress on the old Appian road from Rome to Capua, during the years 314-312 B.C.; the latter, a fortress of the first class, designed to aid in the control over the later extension of that road from Samnium to Tarentum, was founded in 244 B.C. Thus the most impressionable years of both satirists were passed in districts populated by vigorous frontier folk, who would cherish with pride the tradition of Rome's hard won struggles over Oscan and Greek neighbors. Horace certainly was deeply impressed with the warlike atmosphere of Venusia for in sat. 2, 1, 34 ff. he associates it with his comparison of the polemical element in his own satire and in Lucilius: sequor hunc, Lucanus an Appulus anceps: nam Venusinus arat finem sub utrumque colonus, missus ad hoc, pulsis, uetus est ut fama, Sabellis, quo ne per vacuum Romano incurreret hostis sive quod Appula gens seu quid Lucania bellum quemquam animantem et me veluti custodiet ensis Along the great road, also, must have come to the two colonies the sturdy Oscan peasant proprietors, who were anxious to sell the products of their farms. Greek traders with the more luxurious wares of Capua and of Tarentum brought with them some suggestion of the complex culture of those great centres of Greek civilization. Lucilius knew Oscan, and in Ofellus Horace has sketched for all time the hard-handed and clearheaded Italian peasant proprietor, not unacquainted with the elaborate dishes of the triclinium of the town, but deliberately preferring the tenuis victus, his plain fare and plain art of living. But in descent and social position a marked difference appears. Horace was a freedman's son, descended from some conquered Lucanian or Apulian family, not from some one of the 20,000 Roman colonists sent to Venusia in 294 B.C. Lucilius, on the other hand, was probably a Roman citizen, and possibly of local equestrian rank.1 It is surely not fanciful to attribute to this contrast in social standing some of the differences which in a stratified society like that of Rome differentiate Lucilius' relations with Scipio from Horace's relations with Maecenas. In spite of his complete independence of action Horace is not entirely unconscious of those social and economic gradations which tend to erect reserves even between the most intimate friends. This feeling appears in satires 1, 6 and 2, 6, in the fable of the frog who attempts to imitate the ox at the close of the third satire of book 2, and in such epistles as the 7th and 17th of the first book. I hardly believe that the friendship of Horace and Maecenas ever relaxed its bonds in such unrestrained frolics as the Commentator Cruquianus attributes to Scipio and Lucilius, in his note on Horace's sat. 2, 1, 71 ff. It is impossible to imagine the fat little Augustan poet, armed with a twisted napkin chasing the hypochondriac Maecenas about the dining room.2 Nor is the greater restraint with which Horace employs invective entirely due to the greater stringency of legal enact ments and the rise of Augustan urbanity. The freedman's son is forewarned and forearmed, as he himself tells us in his conversation with Trebatius Testa, sat. 2, 1, 39-46. He does not have that lust of combat, which Juvenal 1, 165-167, apparently in direct allusion to the defensive conception of satire advocated by Horace in such a passage as sat. 2, 1, 39 ff., attributes to Lucilius: ense uelut stricto quotiens Lucilius ardens Both But intellectual and spiritual sympathy counted far more than the influence of provincial environment and descent in attracting Horace to Lucilius. Both men were Greco-Roman rather than Italic in their outlook on life and literature. sought to combine all that was best in the old Roman conception of virtus with that broader appreciation of learning and culture, that sympathetic and emotional interest in the common fate of mankind, which are connoted by the new word humanitas. The truly Roman spirit which animates the Lucilian definition of an originally Stoic virtus in fragment 1326 ff. is of the same strain as that which finds such noble utterance in the Roman odes of Horace. Neither the one nor the other could have been written except under the compelling force of an idealistic Stoic conception of the true citizen in a Roman commonwealth. As Greco-Romans, Horace, and probably Lucilius, supplemented their studies in rhetoric and philosophy on Roman soil by visits to Athens. A critical analysis of the fragments of Lucilius reveals an intimacy with Athenian institutions and social usages, with vulgar and dialectical Greek, which can hardly have been acquired in any other way than by a sojourn of some length at Athens. Lucilius was, moreover, acquainted with the Academic philosopher Clitomachus, who dedicated a book to him, and may even have studied under Carneades at Athens. It is possible that this intimate acquaintance with Athenian life, with Athenian men of letters and philosophers dated from the year 139 B.C., when Scipio visited Athens. Similarly Horace studied the Academic philosophy at Athens." From that scholastic centre he was sucked into the rising tide of civil war.8 This military apprenticeship of the two men has left a distinct impress upon the content and spirit of their satires. Horace served under Brutus at Philippi, where he even commanded a legion as military tribune. Lucilius served a much severer apprenticeship as eques under Scipio at the siege of Numantia, where he remained for 15 months in the year 134133, B.C. Of his experiences in these campaigns he has left us some record in satires in books 11, 14, and 15.10 But we have also in the remains of book 7 and 30, in the Incertae sedis fragmenta, and in other allusions from books 11, 14, and 15, a number of fragments which reveal so minute a familiarity with the troubled course of the Spanish wars from 139-134 B.C. (before the arrival of Scipio) that Cichorius" is inclined to believe that Lucilius saw some service within that period. The seventh satire of Horace's first book is a direct reminiscence of this period of his life. Such common military apprenticeship probably had its influence in inspiring that admiration for disciplinary values which appears so clearly in both satirists. Both satirists repeatedly hold up to ridicule the spendthrifts, the gluttons, the fortune hunters, the whole company of egotists, whose theories and practices threatened to transform the traditional Roman concern with public affairs, negotium into a selfish otium of pleasure and languid dilettanteism. For Lucilius and Horace alike culture is a robust and hard-won discipline designed to enlarge the sympathies and inform the understanding of the leaders of the state.12 We find also certain similarities between the attitude of Lucilius and of Horace to contemporary philosophy and even to scholastic controversies. Both men are eclectic.13 Their eclecticism is based on the practical Roman perception that ethics, the philosophy of right action, is and should be the main concern of all philosophic inquiry and teaching. But something more than a vague eclecticism unites the two men. With increasing age, deeper study, and riper experience with life, this eclecticism shows a growing sympathy with Stoic ideals of life and conduct, but with Stoic ideals so purged of scholastic rigidity as to constitute a more humane reinterpretation of the old Roman mos maiorum. The earlier studies of Lucilius had attached him to the Academic school, and had probably won for him the personal intimacy and regard of such philosophers as Carneades and Clitomachus. His early satire shows a lively interest in Academic philosophy.14 In this period he may even have assailed the Stoics.15 As a member of the Scipionic circle, however, although he may at first have upheld his Academic principles he gradually came to adopt a much more sympathetic attitude towards the Stoics. This was the inevitable result of the Stoic atmosphere surrounding Scipio. So Horace was at first, a follower not of the Academy but of Epicureanism, and a witty assailant of Stoicism, as we may see from such satires as the first, second, and third of the first book. Yet in spite of this moderate and somewhat superficial personal hedonism he gradually came to feel that regeneration for the individual, as for the state, can only be attained through the practice of the Stoic virtues and adherence to a liberally interpreted Stoicism. Hence in the second book of satires the second, third and seventh satires are essentially Stoic. In the third and fourth book of the odes and above all in the epistles Horace constantly interprets the problems of life and conduct from the Stoic point of view. In mature life both Lucilius and Horace became members of the most important literary and political coterie of their period. By virtue of such association both came to understand and to sympathize with the programme of moderate social and political reform as conceived by the most enlightened body of contemporary statesmen. Moreover, both poets influenced by these ideals of their patrons Augustus, Agrippa, and Maecenas in the later period, Scipio and Laelius in the earlier, sought to win by their writings a wider adherence for those principles of progressive amelioration which played so important a part in the plans of Scipio, Maecenas, and Augustus.16 It therefore seems desirable to touch briefly upon the personality, social, and political ideals of some of the leading members of the Scipionic circle, that we may have a clearer standard of comparison with which to measure the ideals of the better known circle of Maecenas. Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus Aemilianus," the son of Lucius Aemilius Paulus, the conqueror of Pydna, was born about 185 or 184 B.C. From earliest youth he received a liberal |