Et spes et ratio studiorum in Caesare tantum. Solus enim tristes hac tempestate Camoenas Respexit.[421] It is the one word of praise he ever gives to the autocrat, be it Domitian or another; and the commentators decide that only at the beginning of Domitian's reign would it apply. In effect, the satire is a description of the Roman upper class as grown indifferent to poetry, or to any but their own. But it is not on the economic side that the autocracy and the aristocracy of the Empire are to be specially indicted. The economic difficulty was very much the same under the Republic, when only by play-writing could literary men as such make a living. As Juvenal goes on to say, Horace when he cried Evohe was well fed, and if Virgil had lacked slave and lodging the serpents would have been lacking to the fury's hair, and the tongueless trumpet have sounded nothing great. Lucretius, Catullus, and Virgil were all inheritors of a patrimony; and Horace needed first an official post and later a patron's munificence to enable him to live as a poet. The mere sale of their books could not possibly have supported any one of them, so low were prices kept by the small demand.[422] What was true of the poets was still truer of the historians. Thus in the Republic as in the Empire, the men of letters, apart from the playwrights, tended to be drawn solely from the small class with inherited incomes. The curse of the Empire was that even when the sanest emperors, as the Antonines, sought to endow studies,[423] they could not buy moral or intellectual energy. The senate of poltroons who crouched before the Neros and Caligulas were the upper-class version of the population which lived by bread and the circus; and in that air neither great art nor great thought could breathe. Roman sculpture is but enslaved Greek sculpture taken into pay; Latin literature ceases to be Roman with Tacitus. The noble apparition of Marcus Aurelius shines out of the darkening ages like some unearthly incarnation, collecting in one life and in one book all the light and healing left in the waning civilisations; beside the babble of Fronto his speech is as that of one of the wise Gods of the ancient fantasy. Henceforth we have but ancillary history, and, in imaginative literature, be it of Apuleius or of Claudian, the portents of another age. _Roma fuit._