ness for children and a sufficiency of good taste to prevent his Epigrams, whereof there are altogether z 5 books, degenerating into mere lampoons; while his great skill gave them vividness, polish, variety, and point that have hardly been excelled. A much more bitter commentator on society was his contemporary Juve nal (D. Iunius Iuvenalis), who has left us 16 satires, the last unfinished. His merits, which have won him readers ever since his own day, are remarkable powers of eloquent invective, in spired by a righteous indignation certainly not always simulated, and a mastery of solemn and impressive commonplace, as in the famous tenth Satire, the original of Johnson's Vanity of Human Wishes. His defects are a too great fondness for lingering over the details of the vices he attacks, and an utter lack of any sense of proportion, which leads him to inveigh as violently against mere bad form as against the most hideous crimes.
All this time, what may be called scientific prose had continued to flourish. Of the great antiquary, Verrius Flaccus, who wrote under Augustus, we possess only a meagre epitome, made in the 4th century by one Festus, and even that is largely lost and must be supplied as well as may be from the Carolingian epitome of it by Paulus Diaconus, and from sundry glosses which drew upon it.' But apart from such writers as Pomponius Mela (? time of Claudius), who wrote a respectable little handbook of geography, L. Iunius Moderatus Columella, contemporary of the younger Seneca and author of a treatise on agriculture, A. Cornelius Cel sus, the writer on medicine (part of an encyclopaedia, the rest of which is lost), the jurists, whereof the Digest preserves us frag ments, and other writers, of whom many are now lost, this age produced the very remarkable Naturalis Historia of the elder C. Plinius Secundus (Pliny), dedicated to Vespasian. When Pliny tries to be eloquent and impressive, the result is not happy; he is credulous, uncritical, and very inaccurate; but his prodigious learning makes the book perhaps the most valuable epitome of the science and pseudo-science of a whole age that ever was writ ten. His nephew, the younger Pliny (C. Plinius Caecilius Secun dus), who proved a good civil servant and an able barrister, under Trajan, was a faithful imitator of Cicero, whom indeed he resem bled alike in his disarmingly childish vanity and in his real hon esty and kindness of heart. His letters, including a series of dis patches to Trajan, with the emperor's answers, have obviously been revised for publication, but are none the less full of interest and paint a far less depressing picture of the times than that given by Juvenal or Tacitus ; his one surviving speech, a pane gyric on Trajan, is of some historical importance, but exceedingly dull. It was, however, much admired at the time.
Tacitus, Other Writers.—But by far the greatest writer of the Silver Age, one of the greatest of all time, is Tacitus (Cor nelius Tacitus, friend of the younger Pliny, exact dates un known). To explain the extreme bitterness with which he handles everything belonging to the Empire, it is necessary to remember that a great part of his manhood was spent under Domitian, and that he lived through the reign of terror, directed especially against the senatorial class, with which that unhappy and mor bid prince closed his career. Add to this the sentimental repub licanism of the older senatorial families, and the bias against which Tacitus honestly but vainly struggles is easily explained. It is also easily allowed for, and so does not greatly affect the historical worth of his writings. Much more serious than any of his faults as a historian is the lamentable chance which has lost us the greater part of the Histories and much of the Annals. Of his minor works, the Germania is the most important of our scanty documents for the early history of Germany; the Agricola holds a corresponding place for Roman Britain; and the Dialogus is of especial interest as showing clear traces of the Ciceronian movement in literature of which Quintilian was the foremost champion. A later and much lesser historian was the polymath Suetonius (C. Suetonius Tranquillus) from whom we have Lives of the Caesars from Julius to Domitian, brilliant things of their kind, if superficial, also fragments of a biographical work on literary men (De Grammaticis et Rhetoribus, a section of a large edition by W. M. Lindsay was in course of preparation in 1928.
longer treatise De Viris A minor writer, Q. Curtius Rufus, wrote a history of Alexander, of more literary than his torical merit ; one might almost class him among the writers of the Alexander-romance. His date is uncertain.
The drama flourished, but only in its lower forms. It is a pity that we have quite post the mimes, or farces, which delighted this and the preceding age, and appear to have been very curious and not over-decent performances ; but the loss to literature as such is probably not great. Lost also are the libretti of the pieces played by pantomimi or dancers, whose writers included Statius. They were the ancient equivalent of our film-dramas. Closet drama is represented for us by the tragedies of the younger Sen eca and his imitators. Despite Seneca's ingenuity of style and good command of metre, they are wretched compositions; but their great influence on later European play-writing makes them important in the history of literature. Of the imitators, one, the author of the Octavia, has some merit.