FLAVIAN LITERATURE 87 



expression is no proof that in his leisured youth he had only pretended 

 a zeal for letters and fine arts. Even during his reign, although in a 

 mistaken way, he attempted to encourage literature merely from political 

 shrewdness. But his actual influence was that of a strange disorder, 

 which, while favoring the growth of much foliage, precluded the matur- 

 ing of healthy fruit. The writer would find security for a harmless 

 and insipid muse, and ready rewards for a prostituted muse; but for 

 the muse that struggled to be chaste, or aspired to soar, there was either 

 lack of encouragement or even active repression. Accordingly, the 

 writings of his reign are for the most part placidly mediocre, or marred 

 by the most cringing flattery. Servility and truckling could go no 

 farther, and it was fortunate that Domitian was followed by a ruler 

 great enough to be contented with temperate praise, and good enough 

 to be praised without conscious blushing on the part of the eulogist. 



The reigns of Nerva and Trajan were marked by a genuine revival 

 in the spirit of literature. There were of course many things in common 

 with the preceding reign, the same endless list of scribblers, and nearly 

 the same general characteristics of style and language; but the tone 

 was changed. Even upon the adulation of Martial the new rule exer- 

 cised a beneficial influence. He loses some of the hypocrisy — not 

 less repulsive for being so naively confessed — that had marked his 

 previous work. In one of his epigrams, 1 worth nothing in itself as 

 evidence, he gives a very good summary of the way the change was 

 probably received by contemporaries. 



In vain, nymphs of flattery, wretched and with worn lips, do you come to me. 

 "Master" and "lord" (or even, "lord" and "god") will I not say. There is no longer 

 place for you in this city of ours. Get you gone to the bonneted Parthians, and as 

 base cringing suppliants kiss the feet of embroidered tyrants. We have no lord, but 

 an emperor, a senator the most righteous of all, one by whose hands rustic Truth 

 with uncared-for tresses has been brought back from the Stygian abode. Under this 

 prince, O Rome, if thou art wise, look to it lest thou use the words erstwhile in 

 vogue. 



Pliny in his Panegyric harps almost with suspicious insistence on the 

 new order of things as contrasted with the old, and his letters are almost 

 equally laudatory. But Pliny, I take it, with his academic quietism, 



"X,72. 



