A much better writer was his nephew Lucan (M. Annaeus Lu canus, A.D. 39-65), author of an unfinished poem on the civil wars between Caesar and Pompey, generally known as the Phar salia, besides several other works now lost. It is versified rhetoric and not poetry; its faults of taste are glaring; and Lucan's sen timental republicanism leads him into depreciating Caesar and making a hero out of the impossible pedant, Cato the Younger; yet it is full of passages of the most glowing eloquence and fervid imagination, which all the schoolboy learning and other imma turities cannot efface.' For the work of a man under 30, at first favoured and then snubbed by Nero—who wished well by poetry, but was too madly jealous of all whose talents surpassed his own to be a reassuring patron—it is an astonishing achievement.
Manilius, Persius, Statius, etc.—It is interesting to contrast with these three clever Spaniards the work of two men, one of unknown nationality, the other an Etruscan, who wrote verse in the times of Tiberius and Nero respectively. Marcus Manilius, author of the Astronomica, in five books, which has come down to us, seems to have been moved to write a counterblast to the Epicureanism of Lucretius, of whose style he has now and then an echo, although his technique in general bears witness that he comes after Ovid. He appears fully to have believed in astrology, which he expounds at length in his poem, and to have been, like many Stoics, a man of a genuine moral earnestness; and these qualities give rise to a certain number of passages not without poetical worth. But in general he was no great poet, and his crabbed subject often results in a most contorted and obscure style.' A. Persius Flaccus (Persius), like Lucan, died young; like him, he was a Stoic, and lived in the time of Nero. There the re semblance ends. His surviving work consists of six satires, in a style which, although reminiscent of Horace, is singularly difficult, allusive, and cloudy, yet not without a fascination of its own. The first of these is literary and contains a vigorous onslaught on those who despise the older Roman writers and spend their time over Ovidian The rest are on ethical topics, and marked quite as much by their earnest and obviously sincere tone as by their quaintness of diction. Persius was admired and imi tated in antiquity, Manilius neglected.
The old forms of literature, of course, continued one and all to be practised, and several examples have come down to us.
Bucolic poetry, neat and pretty but wholly artificial, was written in the time of Nero by T. Calpurnius Siculus, who of course imi tated Virgil; much later he himself found an imitator, not wholly contemptible, in the person of M. Aurelius Olympius Nemesianus, who lived in the time of Carus and his sons. Fragments of a third bucolic poet, unknown, are preserved in an Einsiedeln ms.
Epic proper—for the poem of Lucan is rather chronicle-epic is represented chiefly by P. Papinius Statius, who was exceedingly popular in the time of Domitian and exercised great influence in the middle ages, partly because of his merits as a rhetorician, partly from a legend that he was secretly a In modern times he has found much less favour. If learning and industry could make a poet, he would be one of the greatest; as it is, his Thebais is somewhat heavy reading, although here and there passages genuinely poetical occur. His unfinished Achilleis, so far as it goes, is rather better ; the five books of occasional poems called Silvae ("Leaves from a Notebook") contain much that is of interest. A poet rather neglected since his own day, but ad mired and regretted by his contemporary Quintilian, is Valerius Flaccus (C. Valerius Flaccus Balbus Sentinus), author of an un finished Argonautica, in which the well-worn theme is handled not without originality, grace and romantic feeling.' Martial, the Plinies.—But the best verse, on the whole, was satiric and epigrammatic. Martial (C. Valerius Martialis, another Spaniard), did most of his work under Domitian. A poor hanger on of Roman society and distinguished neither for self-respect, elevation of character, or fastidiousness in his choice of topics, he had a mordant and cynical wit, coupled with a genuine fond lAfter much useful work on the mss. by Carl Hosius, the Pharsalia has at last been satisfactorily edited by A. E. Housman (first ed., 1926).
'A. E. Housman thinks better of him, and in his edition emends away many faults of argument and diction. The mss. are poor.
'See Rose in Class. Rev. xxxviii. P. 64.
'See Dante, Purgatorio, 64 ff.