Chapter III: Juvenal (1)

Perplexities of biography—Medieval _uitae_—Contradictory
and incredible elements—Tradition of Juvenal’s exile—Was
he in Egypt?—Was he in Britain?—The lost inscription from
Aquinum—Martial and Juvenal—Publication of the Satires in
books—A few dates obtainable—Survey of the Satires—Motives
for writing—Pretence of satirizing a previous generation—Men
of evil life—A gallery of detestable women—An honest Roman’s
farewell to Rome—Dramatic elements—Hosts and clients—Prospects
of literature—Vanity of human wishes—Plain living and
extravagance—Legacy-hunters—Revenge a weakness—Parental
example—Egyptian villages at feud—A soldier’s advantages—Change
of spirit in later Satires—Lucilius, Horace, Juvenal—Power
of vivid delineation—Dark colours—Grimness of humour—Control
of rhetorical artifice—Familiar quotations—Debt to
predecessors—Juvenal’s hexameter—Words from the common
speech—Influence on later writers.

The life of D. Junius Juvenalis[1746] is full of perplexities which investigation has not disentangled. Outside the scanty data obtainable from his works and certain scholia, there is little on which to rely with absolute security: yet there is a considerable amount of apparent evidence consisting of some thirteen biographies, mostly medieval, attached to many of the interpolated MSS., an inscription of possible relevance from Aquinum, three poems addressed by Martial to a Juvenal whom we can hardly suppose to have been other than the satirist, mention by a few later authors,[1747] and an allusion in a hendecasyllabic poem by Sidonius Apollinaris[1748] to one who had the misfortune, like Ovid, to be banished and who was the “exiled victim of an actor’s wrath” (_irati fuit histrionis exul_). Since the banishment of Juvenal is a tradition among the _uitae_, though its alleged time and place vary, this last allusion is not unnaturally taken to apply to him. Juvenal was too much of a contemporary to figure in Suetonius’s book _De Viris Illustribus_,[1749] so that even the best written of the _Lives_—namely, that added to the Codex Montepessulanus or Pithoeanus in a later hand—cannot be surmised to rest on so good a foundation as Suetonius, or indeed to be of earlier date than the fourth century. Twelve _uitae_ seem to be variations of the earliest one, independent variations being almost certainly attempts to add conjectures based upon passages in the satires. Thus, the prevailing tradition of a banishment to Egypt is varied in two _uitae_ to “_contra Scotos_”—a change presumably suggested by Juvenal’s references to Britain. How little intelligence might underlie a _uita_ can be gauged from the absurd explanation, given by one in a Harleian MS., that Juvenal’s last satire, an attack on the unfair advantages of soldiers, was meant to encourage recruiting. This looks as if the innocent fabricator had confined himself to the opening sentence—_Quis numerare queat felicis praemia, Galli, militiae?_

The chief statements in the most highly commended _uita_ are that Juvenal was either a son or foster-son of a rich freedman (a closely allied _uita_ adds Aquinum as his birthplace); that he practised declamation until middle life more for the sake of amusement (_animi magis causa_) than for academic or forensic use; that he composed lines directed against Domitian’s pantomime-actor Paris; that later, when he had become famous, he inserted those lines into what we know as the seventh satire;[1750] that there happened then to be at court a favourite actor who took the lines as directed against himself; that Juvenal’s supposed allusion was resented in the highest quarters; and that, under pretext of giving him a military command but in reality by way of punishment, the authorities gazetted him at the age of eighty to the prefecture of a cohort in a distant part of Egypt, where he very soon (_intra breuissimum tempus_) died of grief and weariness.

Difficulties arise at once. If Juvenal was either son or foster-son of a rich _libertinus_, how comes it that he is so obviously acquainted with poverty at first hand, and why does he assail the class of freedmen, if he owed it either birth or up-bringing? His tone convinces us that, for at least one part of his life, far from being wealthy, he had experienced the indignities put upon clients, hated the pampered lackeys of arrogant patrons, and felt deep sympathy with the poor.[1751] Horace could attack an individual freedman, as he did in the fourth epode, but Juvenal detests the whole category: not only does he despise the purse-proud upstart who had once been his barber, but he writes in general with so Roman a prejudice against the foreigner that one cannot but distrust the allegation of an alien strain in him.[1752] The more one examines the _uitae_, the more do they appear to be manufactured: here the suspicion arises that Juvenal, being a satirist, has been by some wrong-headed parallel-hunter credited with a _libertinus_ for a father simply because Horace had one before him. If it is just conceivable that the lines cited as offensive enough to get him banished might have been twisted against the author in the way alleged, at any rate the appointment of an octogenarian to a military post in an important province appears too incredible a prank for the Roman Empire: and, in any case, this statement in three _Lives_ is contradicted by that in another group, which indicates it was Domitian, not Trajan, who punished Juvenal. According to that, the exile would have occurred earlier in Juvenal’s career.

Confusion increases as we look through the _uitae_. One declares Juvenal to have come back to Rome from his command, and to have died of melancholy because he did not see his friend Martial (who had left the city for Spain in A.D. 98): another declares he died worn out with old age as late as the reign of Antoninus Pius, having been exiled by Domitian but not recalled by his immediate successors. In this latter _uita_ he is said to have “amplified his satires in exile and made many changes in them,” a statement which bore fruit in part of Ribbeck’s theory about two Juvenals. An additional _uita_ found by Dürr in a MS. in the Palazzo Barberini at Rome agrees with twelve of the _uitae_ that Juvenal belonged to Aquinum: it also provides him with a mother and sister named alike Septumuleia, which betrays medieval ignorance of the classic usage whereby any daughter of Junius Juvenalis would have been called Junia. The inconsistencies in these biographies cannot but throw doubt even on any consistent residuum, unless it be independently supported. Though a majority of the _uitae_ mention a military command in Egypt, one has the uncomfortable suspicion that this may have come from an impression that Juvenal’s treatment of an Egyptian subject in Satire XV necessarily implied residence near its scene:[1753] and, again, though in a majority of the _uitae_ he is said to have practised declamation till middle life, this may have been an invention from the rhetorical manner characteristically persisting in satires which were manifestly composed long after he had been an academic pupil.[1754]

The all but unanimous record of a banishment appears to receive some confirmation in the allusion already cited from Sidonius Apollinaris; but one realizes that there is no certainty about the emperor who pronounced the sentence, nor any means of deciding whether the command in Egypt is or is not a confusion with previous military service in Britain. The almost complete consensus about Aquinum as Juvenal’s birthplace agrees with, and indeed may be ultimately due to, the passage in the third satire where Umbricius, who is supposed to be saying good-bye to the poet, employs the phrase “tuo Aquino.”[1755] That there was a Juvenal at Aquinum is clear from the inscription discovered there and long since lost.[1756] It recorded a dedication to Ceres (the very goddess mentioned towards the close of the third satire) by Junius Juvenalis (the _praenomen_ had disappeared), who was an officer in a cohort of Dalmatians, and who, in respect of being a _duumuir quinquennalis_ and _flamen_ of the deified Vespasian, was evidently the holder of two local offices of importance. The reference to Vespasian-worship places the inscription late in the first century, and, as more than one Dalmatian cohort served, we know, in Britain about this period, it is tempting to think that here we have an explanation of the satirist’s repeated references to so far-off an island—his mention of the captured Orkneys and the short night of the North, the chariot-fighting of Britons, the oysters of Rutupiae (Richborough in Kent), the British whale, the forts of the Brigantes in Yorkshire, the spread of Latin eloquence to Thule (a designed exaggeration), and his use of the rather official form _Brittones_.[1757] But here again questions arise. If Juvenal had seen war-service, did it leave him inimical to a military life, as he appears to be in his last satire? And, in addition to his undoubtedly close acquaintance with Roman city life, was he long enough resident at Aquinum to hold important magistracies there?

If Martial’s Juvenal is, as seems most likely, our Juvenal, then we have the evidence of two epigrams in the seventh book belonging to A.D. 92, and one in the twelfth book issued in 101 or 102, after Martial had returned to Spain.[1758] By 92 Juvenal is regarded by his friend as _facundus_, which may refer either to style in writing or to eloquence in speech. The eloquence has in this case generally been associated with rhetorical powers, but it may have a forensic reference. Juvenal is possibly speaking of his own practice at the bar when, after stigmatising the high fee paid to a nobleman as advocate, he adds “and yet _we_ pleaded better.”[1759] Besides, it is worth noting that Martial applies the epithet _facundus_ to his lawyer friend Pliny, and that Juvenal too uses it of lawyers.[1760] Granted that banishment ever befell Juvenal, there was time for it to have occurred between 92 and 101 or 102, when Martial again addressed Juvenal; and whether Juvenal was an advocate or not, he was then pictured as a struggling citizen wearing his sweaty gown (_sudatrix toga_) at receptions in the mansions of the great. Between the two poets a great sympathy of outlook is discernible[1761]. They not only touch often upon the same subjects and persons, but adopt a very similar attitude towards literature and patronage; they unveil alike the vices of their day; and they exhibit considerable resemblance in words and expressions.

Fortunately a few unquestioned dates can be extracted from his works. The sixteen satires were issued in five sets or books at different times.[1762] Internal evidence as to date discoverable from any one satire has therefore significance for the whole volume to which it belongs. The first book contained satires I-V, and the bitter tone regarding Domitian in the second and fourth satires would alone prove that their composition was later than his assassination in 96.[1763] But we do not need to rely on inference; for a definite reference is made in the fourth satire to his murder.[1764] The opening satire, which, being prefatory, may have been written last, alludes to the sentence on Marius Priscus for misgovernment in Africa;[1765] and, as we can date this trial, in which Pliny held a prosecuting brief, at A.D. 100, we see that Juvenal’s earliest published work belongs to the beginning of the second century. It seems natural to think that Domitian’s reign was not yet far in the past, and that Juvenal writes with a fierce, because recent, recollection of the repression which had been removed to the equal relief of writers like Pliny and Tacitus. This spirit makes it difficult to believe that Friedländer is right in dating the first book so late as the years between 112 and 116 in order to bring it nearer in time to the succeeding book.

The long sixth satire formed the second book. The comet and the earthquake[1766] there mentioned have been convincingly assigned to the year 115, so that the volume can be dated about A.D. 116.

The third book consisted of satires VII, VIII and IX. The first of these three opens with the declaration that the future of literature depends on the emperor entirely—_et spes et ratio studiorum in Caesare tantum_. Which Caesar? Some have said Trajan; Nettleship argued for Domitian,[1767] without winning much support for a theory which would badly break the chronological sequence of the volumes. A more fitting emperor and period can be found in Hadrian, soon after his accession. He had poetic tastes, and Juvenal’s words were a not unbecoming compliment to the new ruler who reached Rome from the East in 118. Satire VIII was probably written earlier: its allusion to Marius Priscus suggests a date not long after A.D. 100.[1768]

The date of the fourth book, containing X, XI and XII, is undiscoverable. The remaining four satires constituted the fifth book. Two passages in it give clues to a date, and fix the thirteenth satire to 127 and the fifteenth to 128 A.D.[1769]

This brief summary indicates a literary activity of some thirty years. If, as we may infer, Juvenal had reached middle life when the first volume was published, a date about A.D. 60 might be conjectured for his birth. By the time of the eleventh satire he writes as an old man.[1770] Unlike Lucilius and Horace, his acknowledged masters in satire, Juvenal reveals little about himself. His rhetorical education was the one customary for Romans of standing.[1771] For the philosophy professed by exalted minds he felt a respect proportionate to his contempt for philosophical hypocrites; but the philosophy which appealed to him was not so much that of the Greek schools[1772] as that of life:

Great is Philosophy, whose holy writ
Ordains commandments and who conquers Chance.
We deem those happy too whom life hath taught
To bear life’s ills nor fret against the yoke.[1773]

He himself had been schooled by hardship, though later in his career we know he owned a small farm at Tibur, and was able to offer hospitality to friends in his own house at Rome.[1774]

The sixteen Satires consist of nearly 3900 hexameters, and range in length from the 661 lines (or, including the Bodleian[1775] fragment, 695 lines) of the devastatingly horrible sixth satire to the 60 lines of the incomplete sixteenth. In particular, the first, third and tenth—each making a different appeal—can be read again and again without losing their freshness: they stand the true test of the classical. It is impossible to miss either the nobility of spirit pervading the thirteenth or the terrific, if overdriven, power of the indictment against women in the sixth.

The first satire is a characteristic prelude—the poet’s _apologia_, to explain why he should write satire, and what his manner and matter should be. A careful examination of it, therefore, reveals the underlying aim. Deafened with recitations from authors, and, like Martial, sick of hackneyed mythology, must not Juvenal too have his say?

Shall I just listen always? ne’er repay
Hoarse Cordus bawling his heroic lay?
Shall one recite his comedies at me,
Another elegiacs, and go free?...
I too learned rhetoric beneath the cane:
My essays counselled Sulla sleep to gain
In private life. ’Tis clemency misplaced,
When everywhere with swarms of bards you’re faced,
To spare the paper someone sure will waste.

So much to justify writing. But why satire? Why should Juvenal follow the career of Lucilius? The answer comes pat: the difficulty is _not_ to write satire (_difficile est saturam non scribere_). The prominence of offensive and vicious persons goads one into invective. One loathes the spectacle of the impotent who dares to marry, or the masculine woman aping a man, or the fabulously wealthy ex-slave and ex-barber flaunting his riches. Annoying beyond endurance are the over-smart lawyers, the treacherous informer and the unabashed will-hunter. How one’s anger blazes to think of an innocent ward driven to evil courses by the knavery of an unscrupulous guardian, or of a guilty proconsul receiving so light a sentence that he can enjoy exile on his ill-gotten gains! Such abuses need the Venusian lamp of Horace, and, somewhat in Martial’s spirit, Juvenal claims that he has no taste for legendary themes, when, from lust of filthy lucre, a cuckold encourages his wife’s lover, or when horse-racing spendthrifts expect commissions in the army. In fact, the temptation is rather to compose a whole volume in the open street, when an imposing _lectica_ brings along a forger lolling at ease, or a wealthy widow who poisoned her husband. If you would cut a figure, dare some black deed that ought to earn transportation or jail: honesty gets praise but is left in the cold (_probitas laudatur et alget_):

To crime men owe their table, park, estate,
Goblets in high relief or antique plate.
Say, who could find the calm repose they need
When a son’s wife is bribed to sin for greed,
When brides prove frail and boys turn paramours?
Though nature jibs, yet wrath my verse ensures.
(_si natura negat, facit indignatio uersum_).

So, like Martial again, but in an angrier tone, Juvenal proclaims his subject to be human life—a gallimaufry of everything from the days of the Flood:

Whate’er men do, their vows, fears, pleasure, rage,
Joys, hustle, make the hotchpotch of my page.[1776]

And when was there ever a heavier crop of villainy and avarice? Picture the gamester attended by his steward, armed squire-like with a money-chest for the battle of the gaming-table, ready to stake a fortune but refusing raiment to a shivering slave. Think of the many country-seats one rich individual may possess; think of his dining off seven courses in solitary state; think of the miserable dole of the _sportula_ given at his door to poor dependents, and the care taken to confer this charity upon as few as possible. The scramble for the dole, and the degrading tricks by which it is sought, are inimitably narrated with all Juvenal’s power of realistic detail. “Wealth,” he remarks bitingly, “is our most revered divinity: how singular that we Romans have raised no temple to Money—no altars to the coinage to match our worship of Pax, Fides, Victoria, Virtus and Concordia!” The gluttony of the rich, however, brings its penalty in sudden death: and no one feels sorry. Nowadays vice has reached its zenith—“so then, my satire, hoist sail, crowd on full canvas!” (_utere uelis, totos pande sinus_). Yet one caution must be observed. If, following Lucilius, you attack those in high station, you may be sentenced to a cruel death. Therefore count the cost before the trumpet sounds. It is safer to satirise a past generation—those who lie buried beside the Great North Road (the _Flaminia_), or the South-Eastern Road (the _Latina_). Dead men do not retaliate.

Juvenal’s claim here to occupy himself with the past is noteworthy. The profession is less an attempted blind for his own safety, than simply another way of disavowing, as Martial explicitly did, the intention of attacking individuals of his own times. Some critics have emphasised the unreality of Juvenal’s working himself into a fury against dead men and bygone abuses; but it may be urged that conceivably part of his material was secretly written up (it was certainly noted in the mind) under Domitian, and that anyhow, as society does not radically change within a few years, there obviously remained, even under the better rule of Trajan, abundance of human types inviting satiric attack. Contemporary observation would then reinforce memory. The theory that represents Juvenal’s eye as mainly upon the past fails to account for his vigour of style, which is not adequately explained as artificial rhetoric.

Satires II, VI and IX may be considered together. Their plainspokenness on sexual excess or perversion has excluded them from many editions. Satire II denounces the atrocious profligacy of hypocritical philosophers “who pose as Puritans, but live in vice” (_qui Curios simulant at Bacchanalia uiuunt_). After a Zolaesque glance at diseases caused by evil living, it is conceded that an open offender is less obnoxious than a counterfeit moralist: “who’d stand a Gracchus railing at revolt?” (_quis tulerit Gracchos de seditione querentes?_). In contrast with the sixth satire, a woman is here introduced as a critic of the unnatural depravity of some of the male sex. She protests that not women, but men deserve the rigours of the law. Yet “censure acquits the crow but damns the dove” (_dat ueniam coruis uexat censura columbas_). Men begin with effeminate luxury and end as such monstrosities that the other world would have to be disinfected after receiving them! One great lesson is driven home—the steps in degradation must be jealously watched; “No man becomes a blackguard in a trice” (_nemo repente fuit turpissimus_).

Satire VI is a long gallery of women to be avoided. Some are incurably bad and deserve all they get: others, whom we might call merely objectionable, like the loud-voiced virago or ostentatious she-pedant, incur equal castigation from the angry author. About his brilliant vehemence there can be no doubt. One must, however, not expect a strictly logical summary; for careful planning is not Juvenal’s forte. He will not limit his energy to a fixed programme. Thus in VI he harks back to its opening jeremiad on the disappearance of primitive chastity from a degenerate world; and more than once he introduces the capricious cruelty of mistresses to slaves, or the passion for public spectacles. It is inevitable, then, that, in satires like the first, critics should note signs of imperfect construction. What, however, is lost in methodical arrangement is often gained in free vigour.

His immediate keynote is the insanity of a man’s contemplating marriage so long as ropes are available to hang himself with! With characteristic exaggeration he declares there are few pure women left in Rome—few that do not behave as dangerous temptresses. Can one imagine a woman content with one husband? Scarcely could one discover an honest girl in the country. Roman ladies are spectators of indecent pantomimes, they fall in love with players or gladiators—they will desert home and children for a pet “Sergy”—and they prove exacting in the costliest fancies.

Should you chance on that astounding rarity (_rara auis in terris nigroque simillima cygno_)—a good woman—she is likely to exhibit intolerable pride (_grande supercilium_): and the boastfulness that ruined Niobe spoils all other feminine merits. Then there is the annoying affectation of using Greek words (like the wanton ζωή and ψυχή) which turned an Italian girl into “a maid of Athens” with Hellenic blandishments. Even true love for your bride constitutes a danger; you become her thrall and _Madame_ rules the house, prescribing your affections, settling your will, sentencing a slave to death, and in the end leaving you if it suits her. Figure to yourself the wife of eight husbands in five autumns—an elegant epitaph! (here again Martial might be speaking). Besides, there is your mother-in-law, schooling the young mistress in rapacity and duplicity. If there is a law-suit, _cherchez la femme_ (_nulla fere causa est in qua non femina litem mouerit_). Another bugbear is the unsexed woman who takes up fencing, or the guilty consort whose hypocritical tears conceal her offence, who brazens out the charge if detected in an amour, and is eloquent where a trained rhetorician would be hard put to it for an excuse. Riches, drunkenness, foreign ways, strange rituals have all contributed to Rome’s deterioration. The advice may be offered to set a guard on one’s wife—“but who shall guard the guards themselves?” (_quis custodiet ipsos custodes?_)

The unpleasant series of portraits continues:—the housewife whose ruinous extravagance knows no bounds and takes no lesson; she who dotes on eunuchs or musicians; the gossip who retails the latest news with additions; the bad-tempered woman, imperious in demands on her slaves and coolly keeping guests waiting for dinner if she chooses to have a bath. There is also the victim of disgusting intemperance; but Juvenal’s grim humour represents as worse still[1777] the lady who will talk literature at table—Madam Oracle, beside whom not even another woman (to say nothing of an attorney or town-crier) could get a word in:[1778] and, with a suggestive alliteration, he adds:

The wave of words, you’d swear, that from her wells
Sounds like so many basins banged with bells.[1779]

Therefore do not let the Roman matron go in too much for logic, history, grammar, or rhetoric, for she will then quote verses you don’t know, and pedantically correct her friend’s slip in grammar. He returns to the maltreatment of slaves—a displaced curl may cost a lashing: he then pillories the devotees of Eastern superstition, and those who avoid motherhood, smuggle supposititious children into a home to delude a husband, and resort to magic charms or philtres or even to poisons. But—and here Juvenal anticipates the criticism that he paints too dark a picture—you will say, this is all tragic rant.[1780] No, it is too true: Roman women are guilty of the enormities described. Alcestis died for her husband; the modern woman would have a husband die for a pet dog. There are Clytemnestras everywhere.

It is a lurid ending, all the more effective after the clever protest that he has only been telling the truth. In this satire we seem far away from the respectable society of the satirist’s contemporary, Pliny the younger. Yet if the picture is too much overdrawn to be sound history, the genius of the author makes it great literature.

The ninth satire need not occupy us fully. In treating the unpleasant theme of a reprobate’s sorrows, Juvenal introduces just enough of the element of dialogue to remind one of the manner of Persius. Answering the interlocutor’s request that he should withhold his revelation of depravity in high circles, the poet asks in turn whether rich offenders can ever successfully hide their infamy—the very talk of one’s slaves should set a check on evil living. The other, mourning over years misused, replies in one of the most notable passages in Juvenal:

What cure for my lost time and hopes deceived?
The little span of our poor narrow life
Hastes like a fading blossom to a close.
We drink; we call for garlands, perfumes, girls;
But Age creeps on us ere we understand.[1781]

Satire III, paraphrased by Johnson under the title of “London,” as he paraphrased Satire X under the title of “The Vanity of Human Wishes,” is deservedly among the most admired of Juvenal’s poems. The picture of Rome as a good place to be out of lends itself to so much realistic and even dramatic treatment that it forms an unforgettable social document. The attack is put in the mouth of one of the poet’s friends, Umbricius, who unburdens his mind just outside the Porta Capena, as he and a cartful of household belongings are about to quit the city and take the road for Cumae on the Bay of Naples. The capital is no place, he asserts, for honourable men or honest work; he cannot be a useful accomplice in crime; he cannot lie and flatter like smooth-tongued versatile jacks-of-all-work from Greece or yet further East. Bitter invective is directed against the _Graeculus esuriens_ who belongs to a nation of consummate actors, cringing sycophants, and dangerous spies; but there is also much stinging criticism upon the Rome and Romans of the day. Where money, not worth, is the test of character, poverty meets with the unkindest cut of all—it is jeered at.[1782] How hard it is to rise in straitened circumstances! Rural simplicity is in sharp contrast to the showiness of the town, where everything has its price, where one must bribe a pampered valet for an interview with his master, where life is threatened by tumble-down tenements or conflagrations or street accidents.

The sudden collapse of a waggon loaded with marble is made the subject of a miniature drama worthy of the ancient traditions of _satura_. Within fourteen lines[1783] we have three vivid scenes:

I. A street in Rome; heavy traffic; cart upset; fatal accident
to a passer-by.

II. (The scene is changed, _domus interea_). The victim’s home;
busy slaves, in unconscious dramatic irony, preparing the bath
for their master who will never return alive.

III. (Another change of scene). Hades, whither master has
already gone (_at ille iam sedet in ripa_), a shuddering novice
waiting for the dread ferryman across the gloomy stream.

Nor are the perils less by night. Make your will before you venture to sup from home! A strikingly picturesque sketch is given of the dark streets where the drunken swashbuckler bullies those he can waylay. Here again Juvenal shows mastery of his effective semi-dramatic method in a series of brief scenes:

I. Night: restless _apache_ of ancient Rome tossing sleepless
on his couch; he has killed nobody that day; hence his
insomnia!—murdering is an indispensable soporific.

II. Dark street; _apache_ eluding the patrol.

III. Moonlight; lonely wayfarer returning from a supper-party;
enter _apache_ (_stat contra_):

He calls a halt: and you must needs obey:
What else? he’s wild, and brawn can force its way.

Swift angry dialogue follows, if dialogue it can be called, where the surprised citizen scarcely gets time to reply. “And where may you come from?” he bawls: “whose sour wine and beans have blown you out? Who’s the cobbler you’ve been with gorging chopped leeks or boiled sheep’s head? Eh? no answer? Speak or take a sound kicking! Out with it! Where do you hold forth? In what praying-shanty am I to look for you?” It is the poor man’s privilege to get mauled and implore leave to go home with just a few teeth left! After a final complaint about shopbreakers, footpads and highwaymen, Umbricius, in Juvenal’s hyperbolical manner, affects to fear a shortage of iron owing to the quantity of chains needed for the criminal population.

Satire IV is a half-playful account of an enormous turbot which a fisherman decided must be presented to Domitian, who summons his privy council to deliberate on the proper treatment of the fish. We are made vividly to realize the perilous friendship of an imperial tyrant, his distrust of his counsellors, and their pallid nervousness in his proximity. The brief strokes of portraiture which recreate the figures at court show great power.

The fifth satire is a scathing exposure of the shabby entertainment of clients by mean hosts. “If,” says the poet to the client, “you can tamely suffer the indignities put upon you at a rich patron’s table, you must be absolutely worthless. Better be a beggar out and out. The height of your aspiration (_uotorum summa_) is to get even the worst place at the great man’s board, where one is not allowed to drink the same wine, or eat the same bread or fish as he. A blackamoor rascal attends to you whom you wouldn’t like to meet on a dark night (_cui per mediam nolis occurrere noctem_) on the Latin Way, while a handsome slave stands by your patron, who regales himself upon _foie gras_, capon and boar with truffles in season. The best dainties you are permitted to watch without tasting. Don’t suppose all this is entirely mean economy on your host’s part: he does it maliciously to wound: it is such fun to watch a client’s angry disappointment. To endure such insults proves you deserve them (_omnia ferre si potes, et debes_).”

Satire VII anticipates the dawn of better days for literature and learning under the patronage of a new ruler (_et spes et ratio studiorum in Caesare tantum_). In contrast with these brighter prospects, the poem is a growl of discontent over the present condition of literature, which does not pay. Patrons are mean and poverty chills authorship. Only the pantomime actor thrives and wields influence (_quod non dant proceres dabit histrio_): so the most promising thing poets can do is to sell a libretto for a _fabula saltica_ on the stage: otherwise a Statius might starve in spite of popular readings from his _Thebaid_. Take the literary professions: they are all miserably rewarded. The historian gets no adequate return for his exacting toil: the advocate is not recompensed in proportion to real skill—a jockey of the red colour can eclipse in fortune a hundred lawyers. Nowadays a Cicero would not be prized unless he wore a fine ring: a poor man has no chance, however eloquent (_rara in tenui facundia panno_), and would do well to retire to Gaul or Africa—a sagacious testimony by Juvenal to the intellectual force of these provinces. The teachers of declamation are no better off: they are killed by the deadly monotony of repeated exercises (_occidit miseros crambe repetita magistros_). They are expected to post students up in useful points without receiving proper fees (_scire uolunt omnes, mercedem soluere nemo_), and they are blamed for a pupil’s want of proficiency. Compute the fees earned by a teacher of singing and music, and you will tear up your manual of rhetoric. If a great professor like Quintilian made a good income, that was an exceptional freak of fortune. And, with a touch of poetry, Juvenal calls for heaven’s blessing on former generations who knew how to respect the instructor of the mind:

Grant that the earth, ye gods, above the shades
Of our forefathers may lie soft and light:
Sweet-breathing crocus, spring that never fades,
Grant to the tombs of those who held it right
To honour teachers as one would a sire.[1784]

In the eighth satire the uselessness of pedigrees is exposed (_stemmata quid faciunt?_) as Juvenal laughs at the claims of long descent on the part of those who live unworthy lives:

Though decked with olden busts great halls may be,
Virtue remains the sole nobility.[1785]

Good character is the true patent of high rank:[1786] there should be a rapturous welcome for real goodness to match that of votaries greeting Osiris. In breeds of dumb animals we expect the old qualities to be maintained: otherwise, the degenerate is rejected: so a man must be capable of winning distinction by his own conduct instead of relying on his ancestors’ renown (_miserum est aliorum incumbere famae_). Juvenal nowhere strikes a loftier ethical note than in his admonitions here that the truth must be spoken were it even at the risk of torture, that a governor of a province must rule his own desires, that the triumphs of peace outnumber those of war (_plures de pace triumphos_), and—in two of his most memorable lines—that death is preferable to disgrace.

Hold it black sin ’fore honour breath to choose—
For living’s sake the grounds of life to lose.[1787]

With the famous tenth satire we encounter Juvenal’s later and more reflective manner. In length it comes next to the sixth, though about 300 lines shorter. The main thesis is that a survey of mankind over the globe from the Pillars of Hercules to the Ganges, or, as Johnson has it, “from China to Peru,” shows the blind foolishness of human desires. Ignorant of what is really beneficial, man everywhere craves for what may prove his ruin. Such a world of idiocy may move equally well a Democritus to laughter or a Heraclitus to tears. The theme is vigorously illustrated by instances exhibiting the perils of political ambition (Sejanus, Crassus, Pompey, Caesar); eloquence (Demosthenes and Cicero); military glory (Hannibal, Alexander the Great); long life (Nestor, Priam, Croesus, Marius, and others who outlived their best days); beauty (Lucretia, Virginia, Hippolytus, and Messalina’s ill-starred favourite Silius). More abstract in subject, the satire retains much of Juvenal’s old vivid and dramatic manner. In one compact line an admirably complete picture can be conveyed: a traveller, nervous over the risk of robbery on a lonely road (like the Appian), passes through a marshy district (such as the Pomptine), and in the moonlight fancies each stirring of the bulrushes may mean a lurking highwayman.[1788] Nothing could exceed the vigour shown in describing the outburst of popular fury against the statues of the fallen idol, Sejanus, and in the dramatic comments by those whom we might introduce as “first citizen” and “second citizen.”[1789] Much else remains familiar in the satire—the gibe at Cicero’s poetry, the nauseous realism in recounting drawbacks of old age, and the sketch of Hannibal’s career leading up to the contemptuous dismissal:

Go, madman, o’er the cruel Alps make speed
To please young spouters of a college screed![1790]

Juvenal’s cynicism is not entirely negative. After denouncing all ordinary human aims, he still leaves something to pray for. The concluding passage owes much of its nobility to the Stoicism which inspires it; and though there is no need to question the author’s sincerity, he comes in one flippant line very near spoiling the whole effect. Half ashamed of his own seriousness, he seems unable to resist the temptation to have his jest at one of the religious rituals of the day (_exta et candiduli diuina tomacula porci_):

Shall men then pray for naught? If ’tis advice
You crave, then let the deities themselves
Apportion us our due and helpful lot.
The gods will grant not joys but all that’s meet.
They love man more than man loves self. Impelled
By yearning heart, by might of blind desire,
We seek a bride and offspring; but the gods
Alone know what the child or wife will be.
Still, that you may ask something, paying vows
At shrines with victims’ entrails, offering
Prophetic mincemeat of a piglet white,
Pray for a sound mind in a body sound.
Ask for the valiant soul that fears not death,
But counts the final lap of life a gift
From nature, and can suffer any toil,
Stranger to wrath and lust, preferring all
The cruel toils and woes of Hercules
To banquets, love, or cushions from the East.
Behold—I show what you may give yourself—
Through goodness lies the only path of peace.
O Chance, thy power is foiled if men be wise:
We men make thee a goddess in the skies.[1791]

The interest of the eleventh satire, which contrasts plain living with sumptuous junketing, is in part autobiographic; for after its prelude of 55 lines on the folly of extravagant gourmands who neglect the heaven-sent and ever-valuable maxim “Know thyself,” it consists of an invitation from the poet to a simple meal which shall draw produce from his own Tiburtine farm. Only Homer and Virgil are to be read at table, while the roar of the holiday-makers in the circus can be heard afar off. The author’s old age is suggested in his declaration that it is for the young to attend the games and shout and bet with a smart damsel seated by their side: “but let my shrivelled skin bask in the spring sunshine free from the formal gown.”[1792]

Though the twelfth is the shortest of the satires except the fragmentary sixteenth, it hardly makes an artistic unity. The safe arrival of Juvenal’s friend Catullus at Ostia after imminent danger of shipwreck gives occasion for a pious sacrifice in token of thanksgiving by the poet. His motives however must not be misconstrued. He is no legacy-hunter seeking to curry favour. An awkward transition leads to a gibe at such legacy-hunters as would purchase a place in a will by offering the costliest victims, an elephant (and here the satire becomes doubly elephantine), or a slave, or a child devoted like Iphigeneia. The closing note is the forcible imprecation on a fortune-seeker:

Long may Pacuvius live, as Nestor old,
Possess as much, as Nero snatched, pile gold
In mountains, loving none, by none beloved.[1793]

The elevated moral teaching of Satire XIII must win our admiration. Calvinus has been cheated of 10,000 sesterces by a fraudulent friend. The solace which the poet has to offer is that genuine punishment is inflicted by a guilty conscience: no wrong-doer can elude that court. After all, we live no longer in the Golden Age, but in corrupt times, when money exerts its lure and perjury is rampant. “The wrath of gods is great, yet worketh slow” (_ut sit magna tamen certe lenta ira deorum est_). The offender, then, must be left in the hands of heaven; and Juvenal feels for vindictive passions only a biting, and, at the same time, misogynistic contempt:

Vengeance is the delight of petty minds,
Paltry and weak. Infer this truth, because
None like a woman dotes upon revenge.[1794]

The influence of parental example is the theme of Satire XIV—the third longest of the collection. There are many faults which children learn from their parents, such as gambling, gluttony, cruelty, intrigue. Therefore all that is unseemly to hear or see must be excluded from the home: the utmost respect is due to the child (_maxima debetur puero reuerentia_). You take pains to make your house clean to receive a guest: should you not, for your son’s sake, keep it free from evil? The later part of the poem deals with avarice, a fault which the young practise reluctantly and which wears a spurious resemblance to virtue. Hence too often a father inculcates the passion for gain upon a son by precept and example; and hence the modern quest for wealth at the cost of crime and risk of death. The final counsel is to get enough for the support of life; and, with a glance at the Stoic ideal of living _secundum naturam_, he declares:

Nature ne’er contradicts Philosophy.[1795]

If you need more, adopt the equestrian income as a standard, or even twice that amount; beyond that, the treasures of Croesus are little likely to satisfy your desires.

The fifteenth satire tells of a feud between two Egyptian townships, Ombi and Tentyra. The Tentyrites having attacked their neighbours in the midst of a festival were put to flight. In the retreat one fugitive who slipped was hacked to pieces by the victors and devoured. This revolting cannibalism gives Juvenal occasion for the reflection that tenderness of heart as shown by tears is the noblest attribute of man.[1796]

Only partially finished, the last satire complains of unfair advantages possessed by a soldier over a civilian. When it is cited as evidence throwing doubt upon the records of Juvenal’s military service, one ought in fairness to remember that not every soldier leaves the army as its panegyrist.

In spirit there are signal differences between the earlier and the later satires. If Satires X and XII-XV be compared with the rest, an increase in prolix bookishness will be noted alongside of a decrease in concrete force. Ribbeck’s theory of two Juvenals, a genuine satirist and a spurious declaimer, is long since dead; but it possessed the merit of resting upon a close examination into points of difference in the satires. The hypothesis viewed the traditional Juvenal as a Janus-head (_Janus-kopf_) looking on one side at the full fresh life of Rome and the present, but on the other side at the dead past and the dusk of academic tradition. The contrast was likened to passing from one of Schiller’s dramas to a drowsy afternoon sermon (_eine sanft einschläfernde Nachmittagspredigt_). Unfortunately the theory overestimated the differences, failed to see that there was no fundamental incompatibility in style, and interpreted the actual differences with a perverse misconception of the true explanation. Above all its other absurdities, the theory would ask us to believe that the tenth satire was the work of some unknown forger and was merely one of the alleged “drowsy afternoon sermons.” The solution lies not in positing a duality of authorship, but in recognizing that the real Juvenal had grown older, and in his later manner let his satire down from the old level of full-blooded vitality and devil-may-care invective. The figment of the true and the false Juvenal could be maintained only in cheerful oblivion of the evolution, and sometimes deterioration, in style characteristic of many other authors. There is no greater unlikeness between the early and the late Juvenal than between the Horace of the earliest _Satires_ and the Horace of the _Epistles_; or, to cite a prose-writer, between the first and last works of Tacitus. In modern English, Carlyle and Browning are apt parallels.

Juvenal, we have seen, proclaims his literary ancestry in his first satire, legitimately affiliating his _genre_ to that of both Lucilius and Horace. His insistence on indignation as the mainspring of his censorious utterances definitely connects him with the fierce invective of the former. Though the influence of Horace is manifest in his language, one finds no imitation of Horatian geniality. To turn from Juvenal to the fourth satire in Horace’s first book is to breathe an entirely different atmosphere. We are there in the company of an apologist for the satiric attitude who does not wish to be feared or hated or to write dangerously, who guarantees that ill-natured rancour shall be absent from his sketches, and who pleads for an indulgent attitude towards any outspoken jest.[1797] Aware of his own faults, Horace can take himself, as well as others, gently to task, with a sort of Chaucerian smile for pardonable human weaknesses. His very habit of jotting things down on paper (_inludo chartis_) is one of those venial peccadilloes (_mediocribus illis ex uitiis unum_). This is the reason why his sportive verses win the reader’s heart, as Persius felt—_circum praecordia ludit_. Juvenal’s strength lies elsewhere: the genial smile has gone: he cannot laugh at himself as Horace does. There is no self-revelation; for Juvenal takes himself as seriously as he takes the world. If there is humour, it is grim; since the times are out of joint, the lash must be plied to put them right again. Some elements of Persius’s earnest spirit, especially some Stoic traits, enter into him, though his method of censure is not so much homily as fiery attack. Both alike, however, are fighters, waging a warfare to improve the diseased society against which they find themselves in reaction.

For Juvenal’s purpose he had at his command the gift of extraordinarily vivid and succinct presentation of men and things. This gift renders him the most powerful delineator of Roman society at the beginning of the second century, so that he recreates for his readers the life that was led then and the human figures who moved in the street, house, or palace. This constitutes what, for want of a better term, we call his realism. The secret of it he had learned, not in any rhetorical academy, but in the severe school of life:[1798] he had undergone the privations of poverty, and almost certainly of war and exile: he possessed the observant eye, the retentive memory, the faculty of direct expression needed to make an experience live again in literature. A few essential and picturesque details, recorded with the utmost parsimony, place a whole scene before us. Thus, we cannot fail to see the scramble for the dole, with such subterfuges as the curtained, though empty, _lectica_ supposed to contain a lady caller.[1799] Again, we seem to be uncomfortably present among Domitian’s counsellors—one, an unwieldy mountain of flesh (_uenter adest abdomine tardus_); another, an informer whose gentle whisper could slit a victim’s throat (_tenui iugulos aperire susurro_); yet another, a repulsive blind flatterer, pouring out words of admiration for the emperor’s great turbot, and at the same time “turning to the left, though in fact the fish was lying on his right!” In the same passage[1800] the allusion to “the beggar at the carriage wheels, who throws wheedling kisses as it drives down hill” is as true to Italy to-day as it ever was. Certain dramatic aspects of this realism have been illustrated in the survey of the Satires. Not unnaturally it is a realism concentrated mainly on what will favour satiric treatment. A satirist never achieves, or even aims at, a universal or impartial view of life. Juvenal’s professed subject may be the _farrago_ of all mankind’s doings during postdiluvian ages; but actually a great proportion of human affairs can offer no challenge to a mordant critic. Goodness, for instance, even at its most humdrum, is little likely to stir the _indignatio_ which is Juvenal’s driving force. That he should be darkly pessimistic is involved in the nature of the case and in his temperament. He tends to look only at the gloomy side, and therefore to obscure the fact that not everything around him was a cesspool of vice, but that on the contrary much in contemporary Roman and Italian life was sound, healthy, and beautiful. Undeniably, we could have spared some of the coarseness with which he made wickedness revolting.

What humour exists in Juvenal is of a kind to match his serious disposition. It tends to be grim and ironical: and the want of kindly sunshine in it has led some to doubt its existence.[1801] His roundabout allusive manner sometimes produces quaintly humorous effects through its smack of flippancy: thus he substitutes “Ceres’ son-in-law” for Pluto; and “the youth preferred to jealous Iarbas” for Aeneas. But his grim irony is best seen in passages like those in which he treats the unexpected fate of the citizen killed in the street accident of the third satire, or when he sums up the aim of all ambition as nothing but the laudatory inscription on a sepulchre which is itself so far from immortal that even a tree may burst it asunder—“the very tombs have their allotted span” (_data sunt ipsis quoque fata sepulcris_, X, 146). Here he has taken one impressive step beyond the idea in Gray’s line, “The paths of glory lead but to the grave.”

Occasionally there is a feeling for beauty, doubly welcome because not much may be expected in a satirist. A transient gleam of romance illumines the grotto of the inspired Egeria when he prefers nature’s loveliness to artificial improvements:

Down to Egeria’s vale we fared, to caves
From Nature’s work transformed. How much more near
Would be the fountain nymph, if simple grass
Enclosed the waters with its margent green,
Nor marble kerb profaned the native stone.[1802]

Allusion has already been made to the beauty of idea and language in his prayer that the last resting-place of those who revered the teachers of the young shall be brightened by “fragrant crocus and unfailing spring” (_spirantisque crocus et in urna perpetuum uer_, VII, 208).

It is not however in the realm of pure poetry but in his free mastery of rhetoric and his skill in adapting it to his literary aims, that Juvenal’s true eminence lies. This is not to suggest that he could ever be dismissed as a rhetorician. He is not controlled by, but controls, his instrument. It is very easy to accumulate copious examples of his recourse to rhetorical artifices—interrogation, apostrophe, antithesis and the rest. Scores of _sententiae_ could be reckoned up, like

Travellers with naught sing in the robber’s face.[1803]

or

“There’s many a thing which they
Whose coats are tattered never dare to say.”[1804]

Attention could also be called to his fondness for hyperbole, like “men at sea outnumber those ashore!” or “pillars split by the everlasting reciter,” or the jest that, if asked to enumerate the legion ailments of old age, one could more readily tell “how many patients Dr. Themison killed off in one autumn season.”[1805]

Akin to this penchant for overstatement is his diverting use of an anticlimax where a series of objectionable things or persons ends intentionally in a surprise. Thus, nothing worse, he says, could be conceived than to stay in Rome dreading conflagrations, the constant fall of houses, the thousand dangers of a cruel town, and—to cap all—poets giving readings from their works in the hot August days![1806] But the truth is that, tricks notwithstanding, his style in its complexity and individuality is much more than merely rhetorical. The statement of the _uitae_ that he practised declamation till middle life has produced a misleading effect on some critics who have impeached his sincerity. His place, however, in literary history is secure: he is one of the great satirists—to some the greatest—and one refuses to believe that greatness of style can be based on rhetorical knack alone. Admittedly declamatory, he yet drew his real strength from a passion for serious morality, which, without, perhaps, very deep religious feeling[1807] or convinced attachment to philosophy,[1808] still gave him the right to cherish his _saeua indignatio_ against abuses constituting social dangers.

Genuine feeling, then, forced him to raise an original voice in utterances which the world has not allowed to die. Lines or phrases that readily recur to the memory (some of them already quoted) are so many reminders of his permanent contribution to literature: _e.g. probitas laudatur et alget; quis tulerit Gracchos de seditione querentes? nemo repente fuit turpissimus; omnia nouit Graeculus esuriens; haud facile emergunt, quorum uirtutibus obstat res angusta domi; nemo malus felix; rara auis in terris; hoc uolo, sic iubeo, sit pro ratione uoluntas; sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes? soloecismum liceat fecisse marito; facies dicetur an ulcus? occidit miseros crambe repetita magistros; stemmata quid faciunt? propter uitam uiuendi perdere causas; panem et circenses; mens sana in corpore sano; pictores quis nescit ab Iside pasci? prima est haec ultio, quod se iudice nemo nocens absoluitur?; maxima debetur puero reverentia; lucri bonus est odor ex re qualibet_.

Allusions and verbal reminiscences prove Juvenal’s memory for previous literature. His reader is expected to understand an ordinary reference to Greek poetry or history and to recognize now a Horatian, now a Virgilian tag, as, for example, we find _rusticus expectas_ and _parcendum est teneris_ in the same satire.[1809] As regards his versification, he makes a noticeable departure from his fellow-satirists, Horace and Persius, in favour of Virgil. His control, and it is masterly, over the hexameter is in the main Virgilian rather than Ovidian, though it has some Lucretian quality. One finds, then, in him an epic ring, which appears to suggest that at least in his longer passages Juvenal may be represented in English by the traditional blank verse of narrative poetry more appropriately than by what too easily becomes the ding-dong of the rhymed heroic couplet.