solid reward, wins no friendship or following or lasting gratitude,
naught save a transient applause, empty words of praise and a
fleeting enthusiasm.

The less fortunate poet had to betake himself to the forum or the public
baths or some temple, there to inflict his tawdry wares upon the ears of
a chance audience.[79] Others more fortunate would be lent a room by
some rich patron.[80] Under Nero and Domitian we get the apotheosis of
recitation. Nero, we have seen, established the Neronia in 60 and
himself competed. Domitian established a quinquennial competition in
honour of Jupiter Capitolinus in 86 and an annual competition held every
Quinquatria Minervae at his palace on the Alban mount.[81] From that
time forward it became the ambition of every poet to be crowned at these
grotesque competitions.

The result of all these co-operating influences will be evident as we
deal with the individual poets. Here we can only give a brief summary
of the general characteristics of this fantastic literature. We have a
striving after originality that ends in eccentricity: writers were
steeped in the great poets of the Augustan age: men of comparatively
small creative imagination, but, thanks to their education, possessed
of great technical skill, they ran into violent extremes to avoid the
charge of imitating the great predecessors whom they could not help but
imitate; hence the obscurity of Persius--the disciple of Horace--and of
Statins and Valerius Flaccus--the followers of Vergil. Hence Lucan's
bold attempt to strike out a new type of epic, an attempt that ended in
a wild orgy of brilliant yet turbid rhetoric. The simple and natural
was at a discount: brilliance of point, bombastic description, gorgeous
colour were preferred to quiet power. Alexandrian learning, already too
much in evidence in the Augustan age, becomes more prominent and more