Roman society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius / by Samuel Dill.

  • Dill, Samuel, 1844-1924.
Date:
1904
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Roman society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius / by Samuel Dill. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    149/672 (page 121)
    markable work of genius. And Sidonius seems to make its author a citizen of Marseilles.^ Yet silence in such cases may be very deceptive. Martial and Statius never mention one another, and both might seem unknown to Tacitus. And Tacitus, after the fashion of the Eoman aristocrat, in painting the character of Petronius, may not have thought it relevant or important to notice a light work such as the Satiricon, even if he had ever seen it. He does not think it worth while to mention the histories of the Emperor Claudius, the tragedies of Seneca, or the Punica of Silius Italicus.^ Tacitus, like Thucy¬ dides, is too much absorbed in the social tragedy of his time to have any thought to spare for its artistic efforts. The rather shallow, easy-going Pliny has told us far more of social life in the reigns of Domitian and Trajan, its rural pleasures and its futile literary ambitions, than the great, gloomy historian who was absorbed in the vicissitudes of the deadly duel between the Senate and the Emperors. One thing is certain about the author of this famous piece—he was not a plebeian man about town, although it may be doubted whether M. Boissier is safe in maintaining that such a writer would not have chosen his own environment of the Suburra as the field for his imagination.^ It is safer to seek for light on the social status of the author in the tone of his work. The Satiricon is emphatically the production of a cultivated aristocrat, who looks down with serene and amused scorn on the vulgar bourgeois world which he is painting. He is interested in it, but it is the interest of the detached, artistic observer, whose own world is very far off. Encolpius and Trimalchio and his coarse freedman friends are people with whom the author would never have dined, but whom, at a safe social distance, he found infinitely amusing as well as disgusting. He saw that a great social revolution was going on before his eyes, that the old slave minion, with estates in three continents, was becoming the rival of the great noble in wealth, that the new-sprung class were presenting to the world a vulgar caricature of the luxury in the palaces on the Esquiline. Probably he thought it all bad,^ but the bad ^ Sidon. Apoll. xxiii. 155, et te ^ Boissier, FOpp. p. 257, ce n’est Massiliensium per liortos sacri stipitis, pas la coutume qu’on mette son id^al Arbiter, colonimi Hellespontiaco parem pres de soi. Priapo, etc. Petron. 88, at nos vino scortisque ^ Tac. Ann. xii, 8; xiii. 2 ; xv. 45, demersi ne paratas quidem artes aude- 60, 65 ; Tac. Hist. iii. 65. mus cognoscere, sed accusatores anti-