1. Plato, Republic, 607d, 401a (5th cent. BCE - 4th cent. BCE)
| 401a. and in all similar craftsmanship—weaving is full of them and embroidery and architecture and likewise the manufacture of household furnishings and thereto the natural bodies of animals and plants as well. For in all these there is grace or gracelessness. And gracelessness and evil rhythm and disharmony are akin to evil speaking and the evil temper but the opposites are the symbols and the kin of the opposites, the sober and good disposition. Entirely so, he said. |
|
2. Cicero, Orator, 85 (2nd cent. BCE - 1st cent. BCE)
|
3. Horace, Odes, 1.6.9 (1st cent. BCE - 1st cent. BCE)
|
4. Horace, Letters, 1.2.59, 1.2.62 (1st cent. BCE - 1st cent. BCE)
|
5. Horace, Sermones, 2.7.44 (1st cent. BCE - 1st cent. BCE)
|
6. Ovid, Fasti, 1.13 (1st cent. BCE - 1st cent. CE)
|
7. Propertius, Elegies, 2.1.45, 4.1.61 (1st cent. BCE
|
8. Persius, Satires, 3.18 (1st cent. CE - 1st cent. CE)
|
9. Persius, Saturae, 3.18 (1st cent. CE - 1st cent. CE)
|
10. Plutarch, Dialogue On Love, 769c (1st cent. CE - 2nd cent. CE)
|
11. Quintilian, Institutes of Oratory, 4.1.28 (1st cent. CE - 1st cent. CE)
| 4.1.28. For I do not share the opinion held by some, that the exordium and the peroration are to be distinguished by the fact that the latter deals with the past, the former with the future. Rather I hold that the difference between them is this: in our opening any preliminary appeal to the compassion of the judge must be made sparingly and with restraint, while in the peroration we may give full rein to our emotions, place fictitious speeches in the mouths of our characters, call the dead to life, and produce the wife or children of the accused in court, practices which are less usual in exordia. |
|
12. Seneca The Younger, Apocolocyntosis, 1.1, 1.3 (1st cent. CE - 1st cent. CE)
|
13. Tacitus, Agricola, 3.1 (1st cent. CE - 2nd cent. CE)
|
14. Tacitus, Annals, 1.1.1-1.1.2, 4.32-4.35, 11.11.1 (1st cent. CE - 2nd cent. CE)
| 1.1.1. Rome at the outset was a city state under the government of kings: liberty and the consulate were institutions of Lucius Brutus. Dictatorships were always a temporary expedient: the decemviral office was dead within two years, nor was the consular authority of the military tribunes long-lived. Neither Cinna nor Sulla created a lasting despotism: Pompey and Crassus quickly forfeited their power to Caesar, and Lepidus and Antony their swords to Augustus, who, under the style of "Prince," gathered beneath his empire a world outworn by civil broils. But, while the glories and disasters of the old Roman commonwealth have been chronicled by famous pens, and intellects of distinction were not lacking to tell the tale of the Augustan age, until the rising tide of sycophancy deterred them, the histories of Tiberius and Caligula, of Claudius and Nero, were falsified through cowardice while they flourished, and composed, when they fell, under the influence of still rankling hatreds. Hence my design, to treat a small part (the concluding one) of Augustus' reign, then the principate of Tiberius and its sequel, without anger and without partiality, from the motives of which I stand sufficiently removed. 4.32. I am not unaware that very many of the events I have described, and shall describe, may perhaps seem little things, trifles too slight for record; but no parallel can be drawn between these chronicles of mine and the work of the men who composed the ancient history of the Roman people. Gigantic wars, cities stormed, routed and captive kings, or, when they turned by choice to domestic affairs, the feuds of consul and tribune, land-laws and corn-laws, the duel of nobles and commons â such were the themes on which they dwelt, or digressed, at will. Mine is an inglorious labour in a narrow field: for this was an age of peace unbroken or half-heartedly challenged, of tragedy in the capital, of a prince careless to extend the empire. Yet it may be not unprofitable to look beneath the surface of those incidents, trivial at the first inspection, which so often set in motion the great events of history. 4.33. For every nation or city is governed by the people, or by the nobility, or by individuals: a constitution selected and blended from these types is easier to commend than to create; or, if created, its tenure of life is brief. Accordingly, as in the period of alternate plebeian domice and patrician ascendancy it was imperative, in one case, to study the character of the masses and the methods of controlling them; while, in the other, those who had acquired the most exact knowledge of the temper of the senate and the aristocracy were accounted shrewd in their generation and wise; so toâday, when the situation has been transformed and the Roman world is little else than a monarchy, the collection and the chronicling of these details may yet serve an end: for few men distinguish right and wrong, the expedient and the disastrous, by native intelligence; the majority are schooled by the experience of others. But while my themes have their utility, they offer the minimum of pleasure. Descriptions of countries, the vicissitudes of battles, commanders dying on the field of honour, such are the episodes that arrest and renew the interest of the reader: for myself, I present a series of savage mandates, of perpetual accusations, of traitorous friendships, of ruined innocents, of various causes and identical results â everywhere monotony of subject, and satiety. Again, the ancient author has few detractors, and it matters to none whether you praise the Carthaginian or the Roman arms with the livelier enthusiasm. But of many, who underwent either the legal penalty or a form of degradation in the principate of Tiberius, the descendants remain; and, assuming the actual families to be now extinct, you will still find those who, from a likeness of character, read the ill deeds of others as an innuendo against themselves. Even glory and virtue create their enemies â they arraign their opposites by too close a contrast. But I return to my subject. 4.34. The consulate of Cornelius Cossus and Asinius Agrippa opened with the prosecution of Cremutius Cordus upon the novel and till then unheard-of charge of publishing a history, eulogizing Brutus, and styling Cassius the last of the Romans. The accusers were Satrius Secundus and Pinarius Natta, clients of Sejanus. That circumstance sealed the defendant's fate â that and the lowering brows of the Caesar, as he bent his attention to the defence; which Cremutius, resolved to take his leave of life, began as follows:â "Conscript Fathers, my words are brought to judgement â so guiltless am I of deeds! Nor are they even words against the sole persons embraced by the law of treason, the sovereign or the parent of the sovereign: I am said to have praised Brutus and Cassius, whose acts so many pens have recorded, whom not one has mentioned save with honour. Livy, with a fame for eloquence and candour second to none, lavished such eulogies on Pompey that Augustus styled him 'the Pompeian': yet it was without prejudice to their friendship. Scipio, Afranius, this very Cassius, this Brutus â not once does he describe them by the now fashionable titles of brigand and parricide, but time and again in such terms as he might apply to any distinguished patriots. The works of Asinius Pollio transmit their character in noble colours; Messalla Corvinus gloried to have served under Cassius: and Pollio and Corvinus lived and died in the fulness of wealth and honour! When Cicero's book praised Cato to the skies, what did it elicit from the dictator Caesar but a written oration as though at the bar of public opinion? The letters of Antony, the speeches of Brutus, contain invectives against Augustus, false undoubtedly yet bitter in the extreme; the poems â still read â of Bibaculus and Catullus are packed with scurrilities upon the Caesars: yet even the deified Julius, the divine Augustus himself, tolerated them and left them in peace; and I hesitate whether to ascribe their action to forbearance or to wisdom. For things contemned are soon things forgotten: anger is read as recognition. 4.35. "I leave untouched the Greeks; with them not liberty only but licence itself went unchastised, or, if a man retaliated, he avenged words by words. But what above all else was absolutely free and immune from censure was the expression of an opinion on those whom death had removed beyond the range of rancour or of partiality. Are Brutus and Cassius under arms on the plains of Philippi, and I upon the platform, firing the nation to civil war? Or is it the case that, seventy years since their taking-off, as they are known by their effigies which the conqueror himself did not abolish, so a portion of their memory is enshrined likewise in history? â To every man posterity renders his wage of honour; nor will there lack, if my condemnation is at hand, those who shall remember, not Brutus and Cassius alone, but me also!" He then left the senate, and closed his life by self-starvation. The Fathers ordered his books to be burned by the aediles; but copies remained, hidden and afterwards published: a fact which moves us the more to deride the folly of those who believe that by an act of despotism in the present there can be extinguished also the memory of a succeeding age. On the contrary, genius chastised grows in authority; nor have alien kings or the imitators of their cruelty effected more than to crown themselves with ignominy and their victims with renown. 11.11.1. Under the same consulate, eight hundred years from the foundation of Rome, sixty-four from their presentation by Augustus, came a performance of the Secular Games. The calculations employed by the two princes I omit, as they have been sufficiently explained in the books which I have devoted to the reign of Domitian. For he too exhibited Secular Games, and, as the holder of a quindecimviral priesthood and as praetor at the time, I followed them with more than usual care: a fact which I recall not in vanity, but because from of old this responsibility has rested with the Fifteen, and because it was to magistrates in especial that the task fell of discharging the duties connected with the religious ceremonies. During the presence of Claudius at the Circensian Games, when a cavalcade of boys from the great families opened the mimic battle of Troy, among them being the emperor's son, Britannicus, and Lucius Domitius, â soon to be adopted as heir to the throne and to the designation of Nero, â the livelier applause given by the populace to Domitius was accepted as prophetic. Also there was a common tale that serpents had watched over his infancy like warders: a fable retouched to resemble foreign miracles, since Nero â certainly not given to self-depreciation â used to say that only a single snake had been noticed in his bedroom. |
|
15. Tacitus, Histories, 1.1.1-1.1.3, 1.2, 2.50.2, 4.34-4.35 (1st cent. CE - 2nd cent. CE)
| 4.34. The generals on both sides by equal faults deserved their reverses and failed to use their success: had Civilis put more troops in line, he could not have been surrounded by so few cohorts, and after breaking into the Roman camp, he would have destroyed it: Vocula failed to discover the enemy's approach, and therefore the moment that he sallied forth he was beaten; then, lacking confidence in his victory, he wasted some days before advancing against the foe, whereas if he had been prompt to press him hard and to follow up events, he might have raised the siege of the legions at one blow. Meanwhile Civilis had tested the temper of the besieged by pretending that the Roman cause was lost and that his side was victorious: he paraded the Roman ensigns and standards; he even exhibited captives. One of these had the courage to do an heroic deed, shouting out the truth, for which he was at once run through by the Germans: their act inspired the greater confidence in his statement; and at the same time the harried fields and the fires of the burning farm-houses announced the approach of a victorious army. When in sight of camp Vocula ordered the standards to be set up and a ditch and a palisade to be constructed about them, bidding his troops leave their baggage and kits there that they might fight unencumbered. This caused the troops to cry out against their commander and to demand instant battle; and in fact they had grown accustomed to threaten. Without taking time even to form a line, disordered and weary as they were, they engaged the enemy; for Civilis was ready for them, trusting in his opponents' mistakes no less than in the bravery of his own troops. Fortune varied on the Roman side, and the most mutinous proved cowards: some there were who, remembering their recent victory, kept their places, struck at the enemy, exhorted one another and their neighbours as well; reforming the line they held out hands to the besieged, begging them not to lose their opportunity. The latter, who saw everything from the walls, sallied forth from all the gates of their camp. Now at this moment Civilis's horse happened to slip and throw him; whereupon both sides accepted the report that he had been wounded or killed. It was marvellous how this belief terrified his men and inspired their foes with enthusiasm: yet Vocula, neglecting to pursue his flying foes, proceeded to strengthen the palisade and towers of his camp as if he were again threatened with siege, thus by his repeated failure to take advantage of victory giving good ground for the suspicion that he preferred war to peace. 4.35. Nothing distressed our troops so much as the lack of provisions. The legions' baggage train was sent on to Novaesium with the men who were unfit for service to bring provisions from there overland; for the enemy controlled the river. The first convoy went without trouble, since Civilis was not yet strong enough to attack. But when he heard that the sutlers, who had been despatched again to Novaesium, and the cohorts escorting them were proceeding as if in time of peace, that there were few soldiers with the standards, that their arms were being carried in the carts while they all strolled along at will, he drew up his forces and attacked them, sending first some troops to occupy the bridges and narrow parts of the roads. They fought in a long line and indecisively until at last night put an end to the conflict. The cohorts reached Gelduba, where the camp remained in its old condition, being held by a force which had been left there. They had no doubt of the great danger that they would run if they returned with the sutlers heavily loaded and in a state of terror. Vocula reinforced his army with a thousand men picked from the Fifth and Fifteenth legions that had been besieged at Vetera, troops untamed and hostile toward their commanders. More men started than had been ordered to do so, and on the march they began to murmur openly that they would no longer endure hunger or the plots of their commanders; but those who were being left behind complained that they were being abandoned by the withdrawal of part of the legions. So a double mutiny began, some urging Vocula to return, others refusing to go back to camp. |
|
16. Apuleius, The Golden Ass, 1.1.1, 1.1.5 (2nd cent. CE - 2nd cent. CE)
|
17. Lucian, How To Write History, 2, 24, 38, 61, 7, 9, 13 (2nd cent. CE - 2nd cent. CE)
|
18. Aquila Romanus, De Figuris Sententiarum Et Elocutionis, 3 (3rd cent. CE - 3rd cent. CE)
|
19. Manilius, Astronomica, 3.29
|
