- Silver Latin Poetry And The Latin Novel
(By Richard Jenkyns)The Silver Age: Problems and Solutions
The word 'silver', applied to those Latin poets who wrote after the death of Augustus, is a modern label. Like all
such labels, it can easily be misleading; time flows on continuously, and any attempt to divide the past into ages
or periods is bound to be a more or less artificial attempt to impose simple patterns upon a complex and
unceasing flux. None the less, the phrase 'silver age' has its uses. We customarily think of the Augustan age as a
time of dazzling poetic achievement, but it is often forgotten that this achievement belongs largely to the first
half of Augustus' long reign. During his last twenty-five years and more there was no major poet still active
except Ovid; and there is evidence in his later work that Ovid saw himself as a lone survivor, the last of a line.
The quarter century following Ovid's death is one of the most barren for poetry in Latin literary history; it is not
unrealistic to think in terms of one chapter closing and another beginning.
The term 'silver age' is of course designed to contrast with the 'golden age' which preceded it. This implied
contrast contains, once again, a truth and a danger. We should not let ourselves be trapped by a mechanical view
of the rise and fall of cultures into supposing that the silver age was a second-rate period which necessarily
produced second-rate literature; it includes, at the lowest estimate, at least one poet of genius and several
distinctive talents of a lesser order, and it also gave birth to a great historian and by far the best prose fiction to
come out of the ancient world. On the other hand, it is indeed true that the poets who came after the Augustans
were faced with a peculiar difficulty and a peculiar challenge; and to understand -what these were we must first
recall the situation of their predecessors.
From the start the Latin poets wrote in the consciousness that the Greek achievement loomed large behind them;
the shadow of a mighty past falls dark across their verses. The Greeks seemed to have mastered every field of
literature; how could Latin poets hope to produce anything that would not seem a pale and lifeless imitation?
That was their dilemma, and a number rose to the challenge by openly acknowledging their debt to Greece,
sometimes boldly, sometimes with a studied modesty. The aim was to point the reader's attention to the Greek
models, in order to draw out the no less significant divergences from those models; imitation could thus become
a kind of originality. The supreme example of this technique is the Aeneid.
The silver poets inherited this situation, but with a new difficulty. There was now a mighty body of Latin classics
as well. Virgil, Horace, and Ovid, in their different ways, had brought the various genres which they had
attempted to such a pitch of perfection that it must have seemed impossible for their successors to develop them
further. How could one now -write an epic poem which would not read like a pastiche of Virgil, or lyric poetry
which would not seem a mere shadow of Horace? It is interesting to find Velleius Paterculus, who wrote second-
rate history during the reign of Augustus' successor Tiberius, observing that the highest achievements in any
particular genre of literature all occur within a relatively brief period of time; he concludes that genius,
despairing of surpassing what has already been perfected or seeking for new territory to conquer, passes on to
new fields of endeavour. These remarks are significant precisely because Velleius was himself no genius: he
reflects the attitudes of a more or less conventional literary gentleman. We find much talk of decline in the
writers of the first century A.D. Some of them assert that there has indeed been a decline, others indignantly
deny it. Naturally there was no general agreement; what matters is that the state of contemporary literature was