For all its cosmopolitanism and sophistication, ancient Rome – the city, that is – turned out few homegrown writers of note. Curiously, nearly all of those authors one associates with that time and place hailed from some Italian municipality or distant province.
And though these wordsmiths had come to the Eternal City to seek their fame and fortune, they seem never to have fully embraced it. Like the song says, “I Left My Heart In San Francisco”. Each appeared to have left his heart in Tusculum, Sulmo, or Verona, or in Gaul, Spain, Greece, or North Africa. This lingering attachment to the soil of their birth can often be seen in or inferred from their writings.
In his correspondence, Cicero clearly shows that he made it a point to visit his childhood town of Arpinum as often as his busy agenda allowed. Writing to Brutus in 46 B.C., for example, he boasts:
“…quam diligenter soleam meos municipes Arpinates tueri.”
…How conscientiously I always support my fellow townsmen, the Arpinati.
Quite a number of these scribes chose to spend their retirement years back home among their hometown folks. For instance, Martial, who achieved renown in Rome as a satirist and epigrammatist, moved back to his farm in Spain as soon as he had accumulated enough money to use as a pension, enough to enjoy a life of leisure with dignity. (‘Otium cum dignitate,” as Cicero liked to put it.) Livy, the historian, spent his twilight years back in his native Patavium (Padua) in well-earned relaxation. And several others did likewise, retreating to the places of their youth.
Venusia (now called Venosa), down in the heel of the boot of Italy, gave to Rome’s literati community the satirist Horace. Mantua, way up in the Po Valley, sent Publius Virgilius Maro (i.e. Virgil); Comum (Como) the two Plinys, Spain the two Senecas, plus Martial and Quintilian among others. Lucan, the poet/rhetorician, also came down to Rome, from Corduba (ancient Córdoba), in Spain. His best known work was the epic poem Bellum Civile, about the civil war between the legions of Caesar and the troops of Pompey. Neapolis (Naples) provided Statius, the court poet laureate to the Emperor Domitian.
Throughout his lyrical odes, Horace reminisces about his boyhood. In Ode III.4, for example, he writes: “Do you hear me, or does a lovely madness delude me? I dream of still wandering across the hallowed groves with her where lovely cool streams flow and gentle breezes blow. Just near the border of Apulia where one day I as a lad, worn to exhaustion from playing on the slopes of Mount Vultur, fell asleep outdoors. Pigeons covered me with leaves to keep me safe from snakes.” I grew up in that region, in the town of Venusia.
Virgil too, fondly recalls his boyhood in his pastoral poetry, the Eclogues. In one of these there is a dialogue in which a shepherd (i.e. himself) laments the government confiscation of private property to give possession of it to returning veterans. (Augustus instituted this ancient version of a G.I. Bill. Many of his successors continued this practice.) “Ah,” Virgil wrote, “will I now gaze, after all these years, at my old cottage and farm. These days an arrogant ex-soldier owns my well-kept fields, a barbarian the crops we sowed. See what the war has resulted in?”
The author of the great epic, Aeneid goes on to enshrine country life in his pastoral verses. His works, along with those of Horace, Ovid, and Livy, later generations would consider “The Golden Age of Latin Literature.” With deep nostalgia for his roots, this laureate Virgil, captured, in onomatopoeic lines, the music of a summer night back home: the choir of birds, the singing of insects, the cadence of cicadas, and so on.
As for Ovid, his love and nostalgia for the land of his youth are often included in his writings. In his work Tristia, Book IV.10 he tells us about his beloved hometown, far from the bedlam of Rome.
“Sulmo mihi patria est, gelidis uberrimus undis, milia qui nouiens distat ab Urbs. Editus hic ego sum.”
(Sulmo is my homeland, rich in cold mountain streams, 90 miles from the City. Here I was born and raised.)
Ovid wrote love poems. One of his early works, Amores, a collection of love elegies, brought him instant fame. His most acclaimed work, however, is his Metamorphoses, a collection of myths where gods, humans, and nature turn into new forms, such as trees (Apollo’s Daphne, for example).
Pliny the Elder served as the admiral of the Roman fleet anchored in the harbor of Misenum, on the Bay of Naples. In the preceding years he worked on his many-volumed encyclopedia, Naturtalis Historia. His nephew, Pliny the Younger, had his essays published. He kept copies of all the many letters he had sent to friends, with an eye toward publication of them someday, too. This collection became a best-seller with the Roman readership.
The two Plinys made annual trips back home to Comum (Como) on the dazzlingly beautiful lake. The younger, on one such trip, left enormous sums of money to his beloved hometown for the building of schools and a state-of-the-art local public library.
The poet Statius produced collections of poems along with two epics: One on the war over the throne of Thebes, the other on the life of Achilles. Statius in his literary efforts frequently sang the praises of the beauty and tranquility of his Neapolis, its harmonious bay, its traces of Greek culture and the warmth of its people.
The elder Seneca’s written works include Controversiae, a volume of student debates on imaginary court cases; and Suasoria, a book of speeches that persuaded real or imaginary persons on how to make correct decisions.
The younger Seneca published a collection of letters to a friend Lucilius. (Whether this friend was real or imaginary depends on the classicist one consults.) At any rate, in these epistles the writer dispenses his advice on living well by adhering to the tenets of Stoicism, a philosophy exalting self-control, e.g.
Vita, si scias uti, satis longa est..
(Life is long enough if you know how to use it.)
Ignis aurum probat, miseria fortes viros.
(Fire tests gold; suffering tests a man’s courage.)
In short, a Stoic preaches that one should accept with equanimity whatever comes along in life.
(The Emperor Marcus Aurelius, a steadfast Stoic, wrote a volume on the benefits to be reaped from that philosophy. The book is called Meditationes.)
Quintilian, a teacher of rhetoric, also joined the writers’ ranks with his highly regarded textbook on that subject. He was born and grew up in Calahorra (Calagurris) in southern Spain. During his many years as a scholar he learned to acknowledge in Cicero the epitome of eloquence. Quintilian was a close friend of his colleague Martial.
From Volterra in Etruria (now Tuscany) there’s Aulus Persius, who, like all the others, came to Rome in pursuit of a literary career. Persius, too, wrote an apologetic on Stoicism.
Lucretius, Rome’s chief exponent of Epicurean philosophy, also came from the region of Campania, perhaps from the ill fated city of Pompeii. His “De Rerum Natura” (About the Nature of Things) earned him rave reviews. This long poem is considered to be the most beautiful didactic poem of ancient times.
Many of these locales still show their pride in the literary accomplishments of their native sons through monuments, piazzas, and street names. The facade of its liceo (high school) rural Arpino, as it’s called today, displays a bust of Cicero. In its main square, Venosa features a bronze statue of Horace. One of Como’s principal thoroughfares is the Via Plinio. On the front of Como’s Catholic cathedral, flanking the central doors, are marble effigies – one of Pliny the Elder, the other of Pliny the Younger.
The migration of writers to the banks of the Tiber began as early as the third century before Christ. Somewhere around 230 B.C. a young man named Titus Maccius Plautus left his boyhood home in Sarsinia, Umbria, to make a name for himself creating stage comedies in Rome. The theater-going crowd there at once loved Plautus’ guffaw-evoking, slapstick farces. The Umbrian’s biggest hit was the Menaechmi, literally a comedy of errors. His works remain today among the most widely read of the Latin classics. In his play, Montellaria, he gives a nod to his hometown: “Quid? Sarsiniatis ecqua est si Umbrian non habet?” (Well? How about a lovely girl from Sarsinia then, if you haven’t got one from Umbria?)
That same era saw the success of another playwright, Quintus Ennius, from the town of Rudiae, not far from Horace’s Venusia. In addition to his tragedies, comedies, and satires, Ennius also published the Annales, an epic poem on the history of Rome. In some quarters he was considered “The Father of Latin Poetry”. A thousand years later, Dante paid this tribute to Ennius: “Tu se solo colui da cu’io tolsilo bellstile. (You are the only one whose beautiful style I took as my own.)
A contemporary and friend, Marcus Porcius Cato, from Tusculum in the Alban Hills, also gained renown as a writer. This war hero and statesman published prolifically. His De Agricultura sang the praises of the pure and simple farm life of Tusculum, of the work ethic of its old- time landowners, “men of the soil.” The hawkish patriot was convinced that Rome’s survival hinged on the elimination of Carthage as a rival world power. He would end every speech by shouting “Carthago delenda est!” (Carthage must be destroyed) and storm from the floor of the Senate.
Out of Africa in the second century B.C. came the playwright Terence. To ensure that his homeland would bask in any glory he achieved, the Carthage-born writer assumed a cognomen so that his full name would be Publius Terentius Afer.
From Reato (Rieti) in the Sabine country, early in the pre-Christian era, Marcus Terentius Varro relocated to Rome to help his budding literary career. Among Varro’s scores of publications were an encyclopedia (Antiquitates Rerum Humanarum), and a three volume treatise on agriculture (Rerum Rusticarum Libri). In the latter, hardly a page goes by without a nostalgic mention of Reato and its people. The historian Sallust joined the writing ranks of Rome from Amiternum, also in the Sabine territory. His Bellum Catilinarium and Bellum Jugurthinum afforded the folks back home more bragging rights.
One of history’s first practitioners of biography, Cornelius Nepos, moved to Rome from somewhere in Northern Italy. His De Viris Illustribus was long a favorite text for beginning Latin students.
Romeo and Juliet’s fair Verona was the birthplace of the celebrated “love poet,” Gaius Valerius Catullus. In his mid-twenties he traded the tranquility of that region for the nightlife and dinner parties of the Capital. With his pen he immortalized his illicit lover, Clodia Metti, whom he called “Lesbia,” and titillated Rome society:
“Vivamus mea Lesbia, atque amemus...”
(Let us live my Lesbia and let us love…)
Catullus also wrote longingly of “enchanting Sirmione” on Lake Garda where he spent his idyllic boyhood summers:
“Paene insularum, Sirmio, insularumque ocelle, quascumque in liquentibus stagnis marique vasto fert uterque Neptunus….”
(Sirmione bright eye of all peninsulas and islands that in liquid lakes and vast ocean
Neptune bears…..)
From Patavium (Padua), Rome imported her finest historian, Livy. Propertius the splendid elegist came down from Assisium (Assisi). In Rome he forged a close friendship with Publius Ovidius Naso, or Ovid, if you will. Resolved to make his town of Sulmo (Sulmona) in the Paelignian mountains proud of him, Ovid wrote: “I can see some visitor to Sulmo, taking in its tiny scale, the streams, the walls, and exclaiming: ‘Any township, however small, that could breed so fine a poet, I consider great.” His Amores and Metamorphoses readily achieved that goal. Livy wrote a comprehensive History of Rome titled Ab Urbe Condita (From the Founding of the City). One classical scholar claimed, metaphorically, that this magnum opus was and remains, “The Most grandiose monument ever erected to the glory of ancient Rome.” Livy traces Rome’s history from Alba Longa, the “Mother City” (12th century B.C.), to the ninth year before the Christian era.
The two Senecas – father Marcus and son Lucius – through their writings brought credit to Corduba (Cordova) in the first century of our era. Seneca senior wrote a collection of oratory exercises for use by schools of rhetoric, and ten books, the Controversiae (imaginary legal cases and methods of presenting them). Of these, five books are still extant. The younger Seneca authored many excellent essays among which are: De Providentia (On Providence); De Ira (On Anger); De Sapientis Constantis (On the Constancy of the Wise Man): De Tranquillitate (on how to combat inner restlessness and lack of peace). He also produced nine tragedies. These were adaptations of plays by Sophocles and Euripides but with a tendency toward the pathetic and the macabre. He is also remembered for serving as private tutor to the young Nero.
And yet another product of Spain, Martial, from the town of Bilbilis, made a splash on the literary scene in Rome with his witty, pithy, epigrams.
Around this time, Flavius Josephus, a Jewish scholar from Jerusalem, was in Rome working on his history of the Jewish War, Bellum Judaicum.
Another historian, Tacitus, reached Rome by way of Narbonensis in Transalpine Gaul (near modern Narbonne in France). Petronius, the “novelist” as some scholars refer to him, also came down to Rome from Transalpine Gaul from the port of Massalia (i.e. Marseille, France). He is best known for his book the Satiricon, of which only fragments still exist, the most important and most amusing chapter of which is the Banquet of Trimalchio, a satire on the braggadocciio of the nuoveau riche host. Suetonius, the biographer of the Caesars, was North African by birth. So too was Apuleius, sometimes called “The Novelist.” Their era (A.D. 14-138) was what scholars call the Silver Age of Latin Literature. Pliny the Younger belonged to this gifted crop of Roman writers.
The satirist Juvenal so loved his native village of Aquinum that he used it as a metonymy for everyone’s place of birth:
“Et quotiens te tuo reddet Aquino...”
(And whenever you return to your Aquinum…)
Tertullian, the first important Christian Latin author, came to Rome from Carthage (Tunisia). He converted to Christianity at age 35 and wrote an eloquent defense of his new faith against paganism: the Apologia.
These are but some of the authors, poets, scholars and playwrights who followed one of the many roads that lead to Rome in quest of literary immortality.
The poet Martial versified it all this way:
Verona docti sillybos amat vatis,
Marone felix Mantua est,
Censetur Aponi Livio sua tellus
Stellaque nec Flacco minus;
Appllodoro plaudit imbriger Nilus,
Nasone Paeligni sonant,.
Duosque Senecas unicumque Lucanum
Facunda loquetur Corduba.
Verona loves the work of its learned poet,
Mantua is proud of her Maro,
Padua is noted for its Livy
And no less for Stella and Flaccus
The rain-swollen Nile applauds Apollodorus,
The Paeligni resound with Ovid,
The two Senecas and the one and only Lucan
Give Corduba eloquence…
