CULTURE 209The imperial system imposed new constraints upon literature.^2 Historians,
with few exceptions men of high rank for whom politics was a central
concern, were most obviously vulnerable to criticism or attack. Augustus
burned the works of the provocative T. Labienus; Tiberius burned those
of Cremutius Cordus, historian of the proscriptions stage- managed by
Augustus himself (as Octavian). According to Tacitus ( Ann. 1.1; cf. Hist.
1.1), after Augustus contemporary history was acceptable only if adulatory.
The relations between emperors and the writers of imaginative literature
were complex. Writers needed patrons. An emperor interested in supporting
literature was a patron to outbid all rivals. Like any patron, he required
praise. An emperor offered unusual scope for praise, but he could make
unusual demands. Augustus required nothing less from his clients (and from
those authors patronized by his confi dant of the 30s and 20s, Maecenas)
than the organization of opinion in support of his regime. His attitude to
those not involved in his patronage network is unclear. Did he exile Ovid for
the carmen or the error , for a poem ( Ars Amatoria ) conspicuous for its
un-Augustan view of love and marriage, or for some indiscretion, perhaps
complicity in the scandal of the younger Julia? Or for both? At the least
Augustus expected of public fi gures, whether writers or politicians, that they
not actively undermine his regime and its values.
The response of the Augustan poets to pressure from above is diffi cult to
measure. Did Virgil and Horace undermine their own panegyrics (if
panegyrics they were)? Is Propertius revealed in his poems as an admirer or
a dissident? What was the effect on contemporary writers of Ovid’s fate, and
more generally, of the experience of creative writers under the Augustan
Principate? The great days of personal elegy came to an end with Ovid. Is
this a vindication of the verdict of Velleius Paterculus, a fi rm supporter of
the Principate and a contemporary, that literary genres by a natural law
enjoy only a brief effl orescence (1.16–17)? Or was the death of elegy not
entirely natural?
The history of Latin literature as a whole under the Principate poses the
same dilemma. The rich vein of imaginative literature that produced the
Augustan writers, Petronius, Lucan, Martial, Juvenal, Tacitus and numerous
other substantial fi gures, was worked out by the end of the 120s. It is
arguable that Latin literature had no distinguished representative (with the
possible exception of Apuleius) between the fi rst quarter of the second
century and the last quarter of the fourth. It is tempting to argue that the
attitudes of emperors and the changed political climate in general had a
dampening effect on artistic creativity in Rome. Yet the age of Augustus
witnessed a remarkable fl owering of Latin literature, and there were minor
peaks in the reigns of Nero and Domitian, no champions of freedom. The
benefi cial and inhibiting effects of monarchy have to be weighed against
each other.
While the classic genres of Latin literature – epic, elegy, drama, satire and
history – faded out, oratory, or rhetoric, was fl ourishing. The monarchy