Literature of the Opposition

It proved, however, yet a more difficult task to encounter the opposition in a field, to which it turned with the greater zeal the more it was dislodged from direct political action.  This was literature.  Even the judicial opposition was at the same time a literary one, and indeed pre-eminently so, for the orations were regularly published and served as political pamphlets.  The arrows of poetry hit their mark still more rapidly and sharply.  The lively youth of the high aristocracy, and still more energetically perhaps the cultivated middle class in the Italian country towns, waged the war of pamphlets and epigrams with zeal and success.  There fought side by side on this field the genteel senator’s son Gaius Licinius Calvus (672-706) who was as much feared in the character of an orator and pamphleteer as of a versatile poet, and the municipals of Cremona and Verona Marcus Furius Bibaculus (652-691) and Quintus Valerius Catullus (667-c. 700) whose elegant and pungent epigrams flew swiftly like arrows through Italy and were sure to hit their mark.  An oppositional tone prevails throughout the literature of these years.  It is full of indignant sarcasm against the “great Caesar,” “the unique general,” against the affectionate father-in-law and son-in-law, who ruin the whole globe in order to give their dissolute favourites opportunity to parade the spoils of the long-haired Celts through the streets of Rome, to furnish royal banquets with the booty of the farthest isles of the west, and as rivals showering gold to supplant honest youths at home in the favour of their mistresses.  There is in the poems of Catullus(9) and the other fragments of the literature of this period something of that fervour of personal and political hatred, of that republican agony overflowing in riotous humour or in stern despair, which are more prominently and powerfully apparent in Aristophanes and Demosthenes.

The most sagacious of the three rulers at least saw well that it was as impossible to despise this opposition as to suppress it by word of command.  So far as he could, Caesar tried rather personally to gain over the more notable authors.  Cicero himself had to thank his literary reputation in good part for the respectful treatment which he especially experienced from Caesar; but the governor of Gaul did not disdain to conclude a special peace even with Catullus himself through the intervention of his father who had become personally known to him in Verona; and the young poet, who had just heaped upon the powerful general the bitterest and most personal sarcasms, was treated by him with the most flattering distinction.  In fact Caesar was gifted enough to follow his literary opponents on their own domain and to publish—­ as an indirect way of repelling manifold attacks—­a detailed report on the Gallic wars, which set forth before the public, with happily assumed naivete, the necessity and constitutional propriety of his military