FLAVIAN LITERATURE 85 



ment is reached when one is confronted with the question of what 

 society could have found pleasure in a still more abominable literature 

 that seems to have been freely circulated among the reading public. 1 

 Juvenal's arraignment of the times is corroborated by the evidence of 

 Martial, and we are compelled to believe that the less said about the 

 moral and social corruption the less we shall have to decry and deplore. 

 On the other hand, even if many more cases were typified by " Artemi- 

 dorus amat" 2 than by "Calliodorus arat," there were many redeeming 

 features. We have been too prone to base our judgments on the highly 

 colored lines of Martial or Juvenal rather than the more subdued pages 

 of men like Pliny, or on the quiet evidence of inscriptions. Tacitus 

 puts forward the thought : " Nor were all things better in former genera- 

 tions; our age, too, has produced many examples of noble character 

 and talent to be emulated by posterity;" 3 and in other connections 

 he points out that the age is by no means barren of good qualities. 

 Martial, despite his general popularity and his assurances of the purity 

 of his heart, is called upon to answer charges of being unseemly in his 

 freedom, so that there was evidently a certain element that had not 

 sunk to the general level. Paetiis and Arria, again, demonstrate the 

 possibility of pure and undying conjugal affection even in the period 

 of decline. These random cases serve to suggest the error of an unquali- 

 fied condemnation of the moral life of the times; but they cannot alto- 

 gether lighten the gloom that pervades the picture. 



The political mask that disguised every citizen was a natural sequence 

 of the vicissitudes of government through a hundred years. The reigns 

 of the different monarchs had presented strange fluctuations, and the 

 people had learned to rise and fall with the wave. How thoroughly 

 and painfully this lesson had been grasped may be judged from Juvenal's 

 sketch of the conduct of the populace after the fall of Sejanus. 4 Even 

 more instructive is the estimate of the position by the great contem- 

 porary historian, 5 and probably we cannot do better than give a tran- 

 scription thereof: 



We read in history that Arulenus Rusticus and Herennius Senecio paid with their 



1 Mart., XII, 43, 95. * Mart., IX, 21. 3 A »., Ill, 55, fin. 



« X, 81. s Tac, Agr. 2 and 3. 



