Literature in the Second Century

Hadrian has been called the most typical man of his age. In his personality, which Professor Rowell has so well described, we see outstanding all the principal attitudes of mind and temperament which determined the nature of literature in the second century, and which are everywhere manifested in it. Indeed we may say of that literature, if we personify it, what was said of Hadrian himself, that it is omnium curiositatum explorator, in omnibus rebus uarius. Before dwelling on this literature more specifically, let us ask ourselves what kind of an outlook on life in general is implied by these attitudes, and by the Hadrianic psychosis. How shall we define this Weltanschauung with reference to its underlying essentials? And how, moreover, did it come into being, and finally pass away? On these large topics very little can be said in fifteen minutes;¹ but it is important to view the thing in historical perspective. Let us call what we are speaking about, for convenience, the “Hellenistic soul.”

Well, this Hellenistic soul is profoundly uninterested in the realities of here and how. It looks outward and away from society as it is, seeking its satisfactions in the form of escapes into what is far off in time, space or possibility, or in what is purely personal and apart from the normal activities of the contemporary world—which world seemed to offer to most men no worthy theater for the exercise of their energies, hopes, and ambitions. Ever since the time of Alexander, thinking men and intellectuals, including philosophers, scientists, scholars, poets and rhetoricians, had been living and working—with lessening vigor and enthusiasm as time went on—in the proverbial ivory tower of academic scholarship. They were talking to each other rather than to the world at large, but not yet entirely to themselves, like the muttering Marcus Aurelius, who with his contemporaries stands in the twilight of Hellenistic culture; and, great though the achievements of these intellectuals were in some fields of science, philosophy and criticism, yet they exercised very little influence upon the generality of mankind; and the great masses of ordinary men continued to move throughout on a very different and lower plane of thought and feeling; and it was their will and sentiment, and not that of the intellectuals, which, in the long run, decided the turn of history and brought about, at the end of a long cultural cycle, in the form of internationally established Christianity, a closed form of society—a form of society which gave to Western man much of the spiritual poise and comfort which he had once enjoyed in the closed society of the old city-state. That earlier way of life, wherein the city taught the man and gave meaning, direction [295|296] and importance to his career, and in which the interests of the individual were bound up by many ties with those of his fellow citizens, was something very dear to the heart of ancient men, something which they had lost, not through any will of their own (as in the time of the French Revolution), but by a fatality. What happened to the Hellenistic soul with the passing of the city-state might be called emancipation in terms of the usual present-day values, in that the minds of men were freed to a great extent from the control of custom and fixed beliefs, and their intellectual and spatial horizons enormously widened. But this event was more like an explosion in its effect than like a liberation; and the Hellenistic man was not glad about it, nor hopeful, and did not see it as Progress, Freedom or Enlightenment, or as the dawn of opportunity for Everyman. Unlike our modern romantics, he was not forward-looking. He was deeply, if not always consciously, unhappy in having had his soul blown into fragments and scattered abroad into a vastly expanded world, wherein he himself, as an isolated and excommunicated individual, lost nearly all his quondam importance and representative significance, having become too tiny to be tragic, or heroic, or poetic, or symbolical of anything more than himself or a...