Chapter XII: Juvenal (1)

Our knowledge of the life of the most famous of Roman satirists is strangely unsatisfactory. Many so-called lives of Juvenal have come down to us, but they are confused, contradictory, inadequate, and unreliable.[683] His own work and allusions in other writers help us but little in our attempt to reconstruct the story of the poet's life.

Only by investigating the dates within which the satires seem to fall is it possible to arrive at some idea of the dates within which falls the life of their author. The satires were published in five books at different times. The first book (1-5), which is full of allusions to the tyranny of Domitian, cannot have been published before 100 A.D., since the first satire contains an allusion to the condemnation of Marius Priscus,[684] which took place in that year. The fifth book (13-16) must, from references in the thirteenth and fifteenth[685] satires to the year 127, have been published not much later than that date. The publication of the satires falls, therefore, between 100 and 130.

With these data it is possible to approach the question of the dates of Juvenal's birth and death. The main facts to guide us are the statements of the best of the biographies that he did not begin to write satire till on the confines of middle age, that even then he delayed to publish, and that he died at the age of eighty.[686] The inference is that he was born between 50 and 60 A. D., and died between 130 and 140 A. D.[687]

As to the facts of his life we are on little firmer ground. But concerning his name and birthplace there is practical certainty. Decimus Junius Juvenalis[688] was born at Aquinum,[689] a town of Latium, and is said to have been the son or adopted son of a rich freedman. His education was of the usual character, literary and rhetorical, and was presumably carried out at Rome.[690] He acquired thus early in youth a taste for rhetoric that never left him. For he is said to have practised declamation up till middle age, not with a view to obtaining a position as professor of rhetoric or as advocate, but from sheer love of the art.[691] It is probable that he combined his passion for rhetoric with service as an officer in the army. Not only does he show considerable intimacy in his satires with a soldier's life,[692] but interesting external evidence is afforded by an inscription discovered near Aquinum. It runs:

C_ERE_RI. SACRVM D. _IV_NIVS. IVVENALIS _TRIB_. COH. _I_. DELMATARVM II. _VIR_. QVINQ. FLAMEN DIVI. VESPASIANI VOVIT. DEDICAV_ITQ_VE SVA PEC.[693]

If this inscription refers, as well it may, to the poet, it will follow that he served as tribune of the first Dalmatian cohort, probably in Britain,[694] held high municipal office in his native town, and was priest of the deified Vespasian. But the _praenomen_ is wanting in the original, and the inscription may have been erected not by the satirist but by one of his kinsfolk. That he spent the greater portion of his life at Rome is evident from his satires. Of his friends we know little. Umbricius, Persicus, Catullus, and Calvinus[695] are mere names. Of Quintilian[696] he speaks with great respect, and may perhaps have studied under him; of Statius he writes with enthusiasm, but there is no evidence that he had done more than be present at that poet's recitations.[697] Martial, however, was a personal friend, and writes affectionately of him and to him in three of his epigrams.[698] Unlike Martial, whose life was a continual struggle against poverty, Juvenal, though he had clearly endured some of the discomforts and degradations involved by a client's attendance on his rich _patronus_, was a man of some means, possessing an estate at Aquinum,[699] a country house at Tibur,[700] and a house at Rome.[701] At what date precisely he began to write is uncertain. We are told that his first effort was a brief poem attacking the actor Paris, which he afterwards embodied in the seventh satire. But it was long before he ventured to read his satires even to his intimate friends.[702] This suggests that portions, at any rate, of the satires of the first book were composed during the reign of Domitian.[703] Juvenal had certainly every reason for concealing their existence till after the tyrant's death. The first satire was probably written later to form a preface to the other four, and the whole book may have been published in 101. It is noteworthy, however, that Martial, writing to him in that year, mentions merely his gifts as a declaimer, and seems not to know him as a satirist. The second book, containing only the sixth satire, was probably published about 116, since it contains allusions to earthquakes in Asia and to a comet boding ill to Parthia and Armenia (l. 407-12). Such a comet was visible in Rome in the autumn of 115, on the eve of Trajan's campaign against Parthia, while in December an earthquake did great damage to the town of Antioch. The third book (7-9) opens with an elaborate compliment to Hadrian as the patron of literature at Rome. As Hadrian succeeded to the principate in 117 and left Rome for a tour of the provinces in 121, this book must fall somewhere between our dates. The fourth book (10-12) contains no indication as to its date, but must lie between the publication of the third book and of the fifth (after 127). Beyond these facts it is hardly possible to go in our reconstruction of the poet's life. As far as may be judged it was an uneventful career save for one great calamity. The ancient biographies assert that Juvenal's denunciation of actors embodied in the seventh satire offended an actor who was the favourite of the princeps. They are supported by Apollinaris Sidonius,[704] who speaks of Juvenal as the 'exile-victim of an actor's anger', and by Johannes Malala.[705] The latter writer, with certain of the ancient biographies, identifies the actor with Paris, the favourite of Domitian; others, again, say that the poet was banished by Nero[706]--a manifestly absurd statement--others by Trajan,[707] while our best authority asserts that he was eighty years old when banished, and that he died of grief and mortification.[708] The place of exile is variously given. Most of the biographies place it in Egypt, the best of them asserting that he was given a military command in that province.[709] Others mention Britain,[710] others the Pentapolis of Libya.[711] Amid such discrepancies it is impossible to give any certain answer. But it is certain that the actor who caused Juvenal's banishment was not Paris, who was put to death by Domitian as early as 83, and almost equally certain that Domitian is guiltless of the poet's exile. It is, however, possible that he was banished by Trajan or Hadrian, though it would surprise us to find Trajan, for all the debauchery of his private life, so far under the influence of an actor[712] as to sacrifice a Roman citizen to his displeasure; while as regards Hadrian it is noteworthy that the very satire said to have offended the _pantomimus_ contains an eloquent panegyric of that emperor. Further, it is hard to believe the story that Juvenal was banished to Egypt at the advanced age of eighty under the pretext of a military command. The problem is insoluble.[713] The most that can be said is that the persistence of the tradition gives it some claim to credibility, though the details handed down to us are wholly untrustworthy, and probably little better than clumsy inferences from passages in the satires.

The scope of Juvenal's work and the motives that spur him are set forth in the first satire. He is weary of the deluge of trivial and mechanical verse poured out by the myriad poetasters of the day:

Still shall I hear and never quit the score,
Stunned with hoarse Codrus' Theseid, o'er and o'er?
Shall this man's elegies and t'other's play
Unpunished murder a long summer's day?
... since the world with writing is possest,
I'll versify in spite; and do my best
To make as much waste-paper as the rest.[714]

He will write in a different vein from his rivals. Satire shall be his theme. In such an age, when virtue is praised and vice practised, the age of the libertine, the _parvenu_, the forger, the murderer, it is hard not to write satire. 'Facit indignatio versum!'[715] he cries. 'All the daily life of Rome shall be my theme':

quidquid agunt homines votum timor ira voluptas
gaudia discursus nostri est farrago libelli.[716]

What human kind desires and what they shun,
Rage, passion, pleasure, impotence of will,
Shall this satirical collection fill.
DRYDEN.

Never was vice so rampant; luxury has become monstrous; the rich lord lives in pampered and selfish ease, while those poor mortals, his clients, jostle together to receive the paltry dole of the _sportula_; that is all the help they will get from their patron:

No age can go beyond us; future times
Can add no further to the present crimes.
Our sons but the same things can wish and do;
Vice is at stand and at the highest flow.
Thou, Satire, spread thy sails, take all the winds that blow.[717]

And yet the satirist must be cautious; the days are past when a Lucilius could lash Rome at his will:

When Lucilius brandishes his pen
And flashes in the face of guilty men,
A cold sweat stands in drops on every part,
And rage succeeds to tears, revenge to smart.
Muse, be advised; 'tis past considering time,
When entered once the dangerous lists of rhyme;
Since none the living villains dare implead,
Arraign them in the persons of the dead.[718]

No better preface has ever been written; it gives a perfect summary of the motives, the objects, and the methods of the poet's work in language which for vigour and brilliance he never surpassed. The closing lines show us his literary parentage. It is Lucilius who inspires him; it is the fierce invective of the father of Roman satire that appeals to him. Lucilius had scourged Rome, when the inroads of Hellenism and oriental luxury, the fruits of foreign conquest, were beginning to make themselves felt. To Juvenal it falls to denounce the triumph of these corroding influences. He has nothing of the almost pathetic philosophic detachment of Persius, nor of the easy-going compromise of Horace. He does not palter with problems of right and wrong, nor hesitate over his moral judgements; casuistry is wholly alien to his temper. It is indignation makes the verse, and from this fact, together with his rhetorical training, his chief merits and his chief failings spring. He introduces no novelty into satire save the almost unvarying bitterness and ferocity of his tone. Like Horace and Persius, he employs the dactylic hexameter to the exclusion of other metres, while, owing in the main to his taste for declamation, he is far more sparing in the use of the dialogue-form than either of his predecessors.

Before further discussing his general characteristics, it is necessary to take a brief survey of the remaining satires. The second and ninth are savage and, as was almost inevitable, obscene denunciations of unnatural vice. In the third, the most orderly in arrangement and the most brilliant in execution of all his satires, he describes all the dangers and horrors of life at Rome. Umbricius, a friend of the poet, is leaving the city. It is no place for a man of honour; it has become a city for Greeks; the worthless and astute _Graeculus_ is everywhere predominant, and, stained though he be with a thousand vices, has outwitted the native-born, and, by the arts of the panderer and the flatterer, has made himself their master. The poor are treated like slaves. Houses fall, or are burned with fire. Sleep is impossible, so loud with traffic are the streets. By day it is scarcely safe to walk abroad for fear of being crushed by one of the great drays that throng the city; by night there are the lesser perils of slops and broken crockery cast from the windows, the greater perils of roisterers and thieves. Rome is no place for Umbricius. He must go.

The fourth satire opens with a violent attack on the _parvenu_ Egyptian Crispinus, so powerful at the court of Domitian, and goes on by a somewhat clumsy transition to tell the story of the huge turbot caught near Ancona and presented to the emperor. So large was it that a cabinet council must needs be called to decide what should be done with it. This affords excuse for an inimitable picture of Domitian's servile councillors. At last it is decided that the turbot is to be served whole and a special dish to be constructed for it. 'Ah! why,' the poet concludes, 'did not Domitian devote himself entirely to such trifles as these?'

In the fifth satire Juvenal returns to the subject of the hardships and insults which the poor client must endure. He pictures the host sitting in state with the best of everything set before him and served in the choicest manner, while the unhappy client must be content with food and drink of the coarsest kind. Virro, the rich man, does this not because he is parsimonious, but because the humiliation of his client amuses his perverted mind. But the satirist does not spare the client, whose servile complaisance leads him to put up with such treatment. 'Be a man!' he cries, 'and sooner beg on the streets than degrade yourself thus.'

The sixth satire, the longest of the collection, is a savage denunciation of the vices of womankind. The various types of female degradation are revealed to our gaze with merciless and often revolting portrayal. The unchastity of woman is the main theme, but ranked with the adulteress and the wanton are the murderess of husband or of child, the torturer of the slave, the client of the fortune-teller or the astrologer, and even the more harmless female athlete and blue-stocking. For vigour and skill the satire ranks among Juvenal's best, but it is marred by wanton grossness and at times almost absurd exaggeration.

The seventh satire deals with the difficulties besetting a literary career. It opens with a dexterous compliment to Hadrian; the poet qualifies his complaints by saying that they apply only to the past. The accession of Hadrian has swept all the storm-clouds from the author's sky. But in the unhappy days but lately passed away, the poet's lot was most miserable. His work brings him no livelihood; his patron's liberality goes but a little way. The historian is in no less parlous plight. The advocate makes some show of wealth, but it is, as a rule, the merest show; only the man already wealthy succeeds at the bar; many a struggling lawyer goes bankrupt in the struggle to advertise himself and push his way. The teacher of rhetoric and the school-master receive but a miserable fee, yet they have all the drudgery of discipline and all the responsibility of moulding the characters of the young placed upon their shoulders. They are expected to be omniscient, and yet they starve.

The eighth satire treats the familiar theme that without virtue birth is of small account. Many examples of the degeneracy of the aristocracy are given, some trivial, some grave, but above all the satirist denounces the cruelty and oppression of nobly-born provincial governors. He concludes in his noblest vein in praise of the great plebeians of the past, Cicero, Marius, the Decii, and Servius Tullius. It is in deeds, not in titles, that true nobility lies. Better be the son of Thersites and possess the valour of Achilles, than live the life of a Thersites and boast Achilles for your sire.

The eighth satire may be regarded as the presage of a distinct change of type. Instead of the vivid pictures of Roman life and the almost dramatic representation of vice personified, Juvenal seems to turn for inspiration to the scholastic declamation which had fascinated his youth. Moral problems are treated in a more abstract way, and the old fierce onset of indignation, though it has by no means disappeared, seems to have lost something of its former violence. There are also traces of declining powers, a greater tendency to digression, a lack of concentration and vigour, and even of dexterity of language. But the change is due in all probability not merely to advance in years nor to the calming and mellowing influence of old age, but also to a change that was gradually passing over the Roman world. The material for savage satire was appreciably less. Evil in its worst forms had triumphed under Domitian. With Nerva, Trajan, and Hadrian virtue began slowly and uncertainly to reclaim part of her lost dominions.

The fourth book opens with the famous tenth satire on the vanity of human wishes. What should man pray for? The theme is hackneyed and the treatment shows no special originality. But the thought is elevated, the rhetoric superb, and the verse has a resounding tread such as is only found in Persius and Juvenal among the later poets of Rome. 'What shall man pray for?' Power? Think of Sejanus, Pompey, Demosthenes, Cicero! To each one greatness brought his doom. Think of Hannibal and Alexander, how they, and with them all their high schemings, came to die; Long life? What? Should we pray to outlive our bodily powers, to bewail the death of our nearest and dearest, to fall from the high place where once we stood? Beauty? Beauty is beset by a thousand perils in these vile days, and rarely do beauty and chastity go hand in hand. Rather than pray for boons like these, 'entrust thy fortune to the gods above,' or, if pray thou must,

stand confined
To health of body and content of mind;
A soul that can securely death defy,
And count it nature's privilege to die;
Serene and manly, hardened to sustain
The load of life and exercised in pain:
Guiltless of hate and proof against desire,
That all things weighs and nothing can admire;
That dares prefer the toils of Hercules,
To dalliance, banquet, and ignoble ease.
The path to peace is virtue; what I show,
Thyself may freely on thyself bestow;
Fortune was never worshipped by the wise,
But, set aloft by fools, usurps the skies.[719]

In the eleventh satire we drop from these splendid heights of rhetoric; to a declamatory invitation to dinner, which affords occasion for a denunciation of the extravagant indulgence in the pleasures of the table and for the praise of the good old days when Romans clave to the simple life. The dinner to which Juvenal invites his friend will be of simple fare simply served--

You'll have no scandal when you dine.
But honest talk and wholesome wine.

And instead of lewd dance and song, a slave shall read aloud Homer and Homer's one rival, Vergil.

The twelfth satire opens with a thanksgiving for the escape of a friend, Catullus, from a great storm at sea, and ends with a denunciation of legacy hunters, the connecting link between these somewhat remote themes being that Juvenal, at any rate, is disinterested in his joy at his friend's escape.

The thirteenth and fourteenth satires deal with more abstract themes, the pangs of the guilty conscience and the importance of parental example. In the first, Juvenal consoles his friend, Calvinus, who has been defrauded of a sum of money. The loss, he says, is small, and, after all, honesty is rare nowadays. Men have so little care for the gods that they shrink from no perjury. Besides, what is such loss compared with the many worse crimes that darken life. Why thirst for revenge? It is the doctrine of the common herd. Philosophy teaches otherwise. The torment of conscience will be a worse penalty than any you can inflict, and at last justice will claim its own. In the next satire, to emphasize the value of parental example, the poet illustrates his point from the vice of avarice, and finally, forgetting his original theme, lashes the avaricious man in words such as would never suggest that the question of parental example had been raised at all. It is noteworthy that throughout these two satires the poet draws his illustrations from the themes of the schools rather than from the scenes of contemporary life.

In the fifteenth satire, however, he returns to depict and discuss actual occurrences, but in how altered and strange a manner. His theme is a case of cannibalism in Egypt,[720] the result of a collision between religious fanatics of neighbouring townships. The aged poet spurs himself into one last fury against the hated Oriental, regardless of the fact that the denunciation of cannibalism to a civilized audience must necessarily be insipid. Last comes a fragment expatiating bitterly on the shameful advantages of a military career. The unhappy civilian assaulted by a soldier cannot get redress, for the case must be heard in camp before a bench of soldiers. The soldier, on the other hand, can get summary settlement of all his disputes, and alone of Romans is exempt from the _patria potestas_, can control his earnings and bequeath them to whom he will. At this point the satire breaks off abruptly, and we have no means of judging the extent of the loss. It is a striking reversion to his earlier manner. Once more the satire takes the form of a series of sketches from actual life.

Both of these satires, notably the fifteenth, show a marked falling off alike in style and matter. Both, in fact, have been branded as spurious, the latter from times as early as those of the scholia. But there is no real ground for such a suspicion. Both satires have all the characteristics of Juvenal, excepting only the vigour and brilliance of his earlier days. No poet's powers are proof against the advance of old age, and there is no vein of poetry more exhausting or more easily exhausted than satire. And, as has already been remarked, there are signs of a falling away before these satires are reached. Even the famous tenth satire, for all its indisputable greatness, does not demand or reveal, such special gifts of style and observation as the first and third. It is less in touch with actual life: it is a theme from the schools, and the illustrations, effective as they are, are as trite as the theme itself. Were it his only work, the tenth satire would give Juvenal high rank among Roman poets: it will always, thanks to the brilliance of its rhetoric and the wide applicability of its moral, be his most popular work: it is not his highest achievement.

It will have been obvious from this brief survey that the themes chosen by Juvenal are for the most part of a commonplace nature. It could hardly be otherwise. Satire, to be effective, must choose obvious themes. But in some respects the treatment of them is surprisingly commonplace. There is little freshness or originality about Juvenal's way of thinking. His morality is neither satisfying nor profound. His ideal is the old narrow Roman republican ideal of a chaste, vigorous, and unluxurious life, wherein publicity is for man alone, while woman is confined to the cares of the family and the household; the ideal of a society wholly Italian and free-born, untainted by the importations of Greece and Asia; of a state stern and exclusive, though just and merciful, sparing the subject and beating down the proud. The nobility of this ideal is not to be denied, but it is inadequate because it is wholly unpractical. There is no denying that the emancipation of women had led to gross evils, some of them imperilling the very existence of the State; nor can it be doubted that much of the Greek influence had been wholly for the bad, and that in many cases the introduction of the cults of the East served merely to cloak debauchery. The rich freedman, also, for whom Juvenal reserves his bitterest shafts, was often of vicious and degraded character and had risen to power by repulsive means. But there is another side to the picture, the existence of which Juvenal sometimes, by his vehemence, seems to deny. The freedman class supplied some of the most valuable of civil servants, and many must have been worthy of their emancipation and of their rise to power.[721] There was a higher Hellenism, which Juvenal ignored. The intellectual movements of the Empire still found their chief source in Greece, and the great Sophistic movement was already setting in, as a result of which Greek literature was to revive and the Greek language to supersede the Latin as the chief vehicle of literary expression even at Rome itself. The greater freedom accorded to women had its compensations; in spite of Juvenal, woman does not become worse or less attractive because she is cultured and well educated, and if there was much dissipation and debauchery in the high society of his day, even high society contained many noble women of fine intellect and pure character. The spread of Roman citizenship and the breaking down of the old exclusive tradition were potent factors for good in the history of civilization. It may be urged in Juvenal's defence that satire must necessarily deal with the darker side of life, that his silence as to the better and more hopeful elements in society does not mean that he ignored them, and that it is absurd to attack a satirist because he is not a scientific social historian. All this is true; but it is possible to have plenty of material for the bitterest satire and to indict gross and rampant vice without leaving the impression that the life of the day has no redeeming elements, without generalizing extravagantly from the vices of one section of society, even though that section be large and influential. The weakness of Juvenal is that he is too retrospective, both in his praise and in his blame. He dare not satirize the living, but will attack the dead. But it would be wrong to assume that in the dead he always attacks types of the living. There is always the impression that he is in reality attacking the first century rather than the second, the reigns of Nero and Domitian rather than the society governed by Trajan and Hadrian. He had lived through a night of terror and would not recognize the signs of a new dawn. Directing his attention too exclusively on Rome itself and on the past, he forgets the larger world and the future hope. It is to the impossible Rome of the past that he turns his eyes for inspiration. Hence comes his hatred, often merely racial, for Greek and Asiatic importations,[722] hence his dislike and contempt for the new woman. Moreover, he had lived on the fringe of high society and not in it; he had drunk in the bitterness of the client's life, and had lived in the enveloping atmosphere of scandal that always surrounds society for those who are excluded from it. A man of an acrid and jealous temperament, easily angered and not readily appeased, he yields too lightly and indiscriminately to that indignation, which, he tells us, is the fountain-head of all he writes. Satire should be something more than a wild torrent sweeping away obstacles great and small with one equal violence; it should have its laughing shallows and its placid deeps. But Juvenal's laughter rings harsh and wild, and wounds as deeply as his invective; he drives continually before the fierce gale of his spirit, and there are no calm havens where he may rest and contemplate the ideal that so much denunciation implies. He knows no gradations: all failings suffer beneath the same remorseless lash. The consul Lateranus has a taste for driving: bad taste, perhaps, yet hardly criminal. But Juvenal thunders at him as though he were guilty of high treason (viii. 146):

praeter maiorum cineres atque ossa volucri
carpento rapitur pinguis Lateranus, et ipse,
ipse rotam adstringit sufflamine mulio consul,
nocte quidem, sed Luna videt, sed sidera testes
intendunt oculos. finitum tempus honoris
cum fuerit, clara Lateranus luce flagellum
sumet et occursum numquam trepidabit amici
iam senis.

See! by his great progenitor's remains
Fat Lateranus sweeps, with loosened reins.
Good Consul! he no pride of office feels,
But stoops, himself, to clog his headlong wheels.
'But this is all by night,' the hero cries,
Yet the moon sees! yet the stars stretch their eyes
Pull on your shame!--A few short moments wait,
And Damasippus quits the pomp of state:
Then, proud the experienced driver to display,
He mounts the chariot in the face of day,
Whirls, with bold front, his grave associate by,
And jerks his whip, to catch the senior's eye.
GIFFORD.

Elsewhere (i. 55-62) the 'horsy' youth is spoken of as worse than the husband who connives at his wife's dishonour and pockets the reward of her shame. Among the monstrous women of the sixth satire we come with a shock of surprise upon the learned lady (434):

illa tamen gravior, quae cum discumbere coepit
laudat Vergilium, periturae ignoscit Elissae,
committit vates et comparat, inde Maronem
atque alia parte in trutina suspendit Homerum.

But of all plagues the greatest is untold;
The book-learned wife, in Greek and Latin bold;
The critic dame, who at her table sits,
Homer and Virgil quotes and weighs their wits,
And pities Dido's agonizing fits.
DRYDEN.

She figures strangely among the poisoners and adulteresses. Juvenal is misogynist by temperament as well as by conviction. Nero is a matricide like Orestes, but--

in scaena numquam cantavit Orestes,
Troica non scripsit. quid enim Verginius armis
debuit ulcisci magis aut cum Vindice Galba,
quod Nero tam saeva crudaque tyrannide fecit? (viii. 220).

Besides, Orestes in his wildest mood
Sung on no public stage, no Troics wrote.--
This topped his frantic crimes! This roused mankind!
For what could Galba, what Virginius find,
In the dire annals of that bloody reign,
Which called for vengeance in a louder strain?
GIFFORD.

It is almost a crime to be a foreigner. The Greek is a liar, a base flatterer, a monster of lust, a traitor, a murderer.[723] The Jew is the sordid victim of a narrow and degrading superstition.[724] The Oriental is the defilement of Rome; worst of all are the Egyptians;[725] they even eat each other. The freedman, the _nouveau riche_, the _parvenu_[726] are hated with all a Roman's hatred. The old patriotism of the city state is not yet merged in the wider imperialism. It is bitter to hear one of alien blood say 'Civis Romanus sum'.

This strange violence and lack of proportion are due in part to the poet's rhetorical training, which had warped still further a naturally biased temperament. He had been taught and loved to use the language of hyperbole. And he had lived through the principate of Domitian; it was that above all else which made him cry _difficile est saturam non scribere_. To this same tendency to exaggeration may be in part attributed the extreme grossness of so much of his work. It is true that vices flaunted themselves before his eyes that it would be hard to satirize without indecency. There is excuse to some extent for the second, sixth, and ninth satires. But even there Juvenal oversteps the mark and is often guilty of coarseness for coarseness' sake. It is easy to plead the custom of the age,[727] but it is doubtful whether such pleading affords any real palliation for a writer who sets out to be a moralist. It is easy in an access of admiration to say that Juvenal is never prurient: but it is hard to be genuinely convinced that such a statement is true, or that Juvenal's coarseness is never more than mere plain speaking.[728]

For not a few readers, this tenseness of language, this violence of judgement, and this occasional unclean handling of the unclean, make Juvenal an exhausting and a depressing poet to read in any large quantity at a time. Worse still, they lead the reader at times to harbour doubts as to the genuineness of Juvenal's indignation. Such doubts are not in reality justifiable. Juvenal sometimes goads himself into inappropriate frenzies and sometimes betrays a suspiciously close acquaintance with the most disgusting details of the worst vices of the age. But though he had something of the unreality of the rhetorician, and though his character may, perhaps, not have been free from serious blemish, he is never a hypocrite; nor, though he paints exclusively the darkest side of society, is there the least reason to accuse him of culpable misrepresentation of actual facts. He has selected the material most suited to his peculiar genius: we may complain of his principle of selection, and of his tendency to generalize. There our criticism must end.

These defects are largely the defects of his qualities and may be readily forgiven. We have Pliny the younger and the inscriptions to modify his sombre picture. When all is said, Juvenal had a matchless field for satire and matchless gifts, against which his defects will not weigh in the balance for a moment. His unrivalled capacity for declamation, for mordant epigram and scathing wit, more than compensate for his often ill-balanced ferocity; the extraordinary vividness of his pictures of the life of Rome makes up for lack of perspective and proportion, the richness and variety of his imagination for its too frequent superficiality, the vigour and trenchancy of his blows for the absence of the rapier thrust, the fervour of his teaching for its lack of breadth and depth. These qualities make him the greatest of the satirists of Rome, if not of the world.

It is, perhaps, his vividness that makes the most immediate impression. It would be hard to find in any literature a writer with such a power to make the scenes described live before his readers. The salient features of a scene or character are seized at once.[729] There is no irrelevant detail; the picture may be crowded, but it is never obscure; if there is a fault it is that the colouring is sometimes too crude and glaring to please. But before such word-painting as the description of Domitian's privy council criticism is dumb:

nec melior vultu quamvis ignobilis ibat
Rubrius, offensae veteris reus atque tacendae.
* * * * *
Montani quoque venter adest abdomine tardus,
et matutino sudans Crispinua amomo
quantum vix redolent duo funera, saevior illo
Pompeius tenui iugulos aperire susurro,
et qui vulturibus servabat viscera Dacis
Fuscus marmorea meditatus proelia villa,
et cum mortifero prudens Veiento Catullo,
qui numquam visae flagrabat amore puellae,
grande et conspicuum nostro quoque tempore monstrum,
caecus adulator, dirusque a ponte satelles
dignus Aricinos qui mendicaret ad axes
blandaque devexae iactaret basia raedae (iv. 104).

Rubrius, though not, like these, of noble race,
Followed with equal terror in his face;
* * * * *
Montanus' belly next, and next appeared
The legs on which that monstrous pile was reared.
Crispinus followed, daubed with more perfume,
Thus early! than two funerals consume.
Then bloodier Pompey, practised to betray,
And hesitate the noblest lives away.
Then Fuscus, who in studious pomp at home,
Planned future triumphs for the arms of Rome.
Blind to the event! those arms a different fate,
Inglorious wounds and Dacian vultures wait.
Last, sly Veiento with Catullus came,
Deadly Catullus, who at beauty's name
Took fire, although unseen: a wretch, whose crimes
Struck with amaze even those prodigious times.
A base, blind parasite, a murderous lord,
From the bridge-end raised to the council-board,
Yet fitter still to dog the traveller's heels,
And whine for alms to the descending wheels.
GIFFORD.

Figure after figure they live before us, till the procession culminates with the crowning horror of the blind delator, L. Valerius Catullus Messalinus. Equally vivid is Juvenal's description of places. There is the rude theatre of the country town with its white-robed audience _en négligé_:--

ipsa dierum
festorum herboso colitur si quando theatro
maiestas tandemque redit ad pulpita notum
exodium, cum personae pallentis hiatum
in gremio matris formidat rusticus infans,
aequales habitus illic similesque videbis
orchestram et populum, clari velamen honoris
sufficiunt tunicae summis aedilibus albae (iii. 172).

Some distant parts of Italy are known,
Where none but only dead men wear a gown,
On theatres of turf, in homely state,
Old plays they act, old feasts they celebrate;
* * * * *
The mimic yearly gives the same delights;
And in the mother's arms the clownish infant frights.
Their habits (undistinguished by degrees)
Are plain alike; the same simplicity
Both on the stage and in the pit you see.
In his white cloak the magistrate appears;
The country bumpkin the same livery wears.
DRYDEN.

There is the poor gentleman's garret high on the topmost story of some tottering _insula_, close beneath the tiles, where the doves nest:

lectus erat Codro Procula minor, urceoli sex
ornamentum abaci nec non et parvulus infra
cantharus, et recubans sub eodem marmore Chiro
iamque vetus graecos servabat cista libellos,
et divina opici rodebant carmina mures (iii. 203).

Codrus had but one bed, so short to boot,
That his short wife's short legs go dangling out
His cupboard's head six earthen pitchers graced,
Beneath them was his trusty tankard placed;
And to support this noble plate, there lay
A bending Chiron cast from honest clay;
His few Greek books a rotten chest contained,
Whose covers much of mouldiness complained;
Where mice and rats devoured poetic bread,
And on heroic verse luxuriously were fed.
DRYDEN.

There is the hurrying throng of the streets of Rome with all its dangers and discomforts:

nobis properantibus opstat
unda prior, magno populus premit agmine lumbos
qui sequitur; ferit hic cubito, ferit assere duro
alter, at hic tignum capiti incutit, ille metretam.
pinguia crura luto, planta mox undique magna
calcor et in digito clavus mihi militis haeret.
nonne vides quanto celebretur sportula fumo?
centum convivae, sequitur sua quemque culina.
Corbulo vix ferret tot vasa ingentia, tot res
inpositas capiti, quas recto vertice portat
servulus infelix et cursu ventilat ignem.
scinduntur tunicae sartae modo, longa coruscat
serraco veniente abies, atque altera pinum
plaustra vehunt, nutant alte populoque minantur (iii. 243).

The press before him stops the client's pace;
The crowd that follows crush his panting sides,
And trip his heels; he walks not but he rides.
One elbows him, one jostles in the shoal,
A rafter breaks his head or chairman's pole;
Stockinged with loads of fat town dirt he goes,
And some rogue-soldier with his hob-nailed shoes
Indents his legs behind in bloody rows.
See, with what smoke our doles we celebrate!
A hundred guests invited walk in state;
A hundred hungry slaves with their Dutch-kitchens wait:
Huge pans the wretches on their heads must bear,
Which scarce gigantic Corbulo could rear;
Yet they must walk upright beneath the load,
Nay run, and running blow the sparkling flames abroad,
Their coats from botching newly brought are torn.
Unwieldy timber-trees in waggons borne,
Stretched at their length, beyond their carriage lie,
That nod and threaten ruin from on high.
DRYDEN.

Even in the later satires, where with the advance of age this pictorial gift begins to fail him and he tends to rely rather on brilliant rhetorical treatment of philosophical commonplaces, there are still flashes of the old power. The well-known description of the fall of Sejanus in the tenth satire is in his best manner, while even the humbler picture of the rustic family of primitive Rome in the fourteenth satire shows the same firmness of touch, the same eye for vivid and direct representation:

saturabat glaebula talis
patrem ipsum turbamque casae, qua feta iacebat
uxor et infantes ludebant quattuor, unus
vernula, tres domini, sed magnis fratribus horum
a scrobe vel sulco redeuntibus altera cena
amplior et grandes fumabant pultibus ollae (166).

For then the little glebe, improved with care,
Largely supplied with vegetable fare,
The good old man, the wife in childbed laid,
And four hale boys, that round the cottage played,
Three free-born, one a slave: while, on the board,
Huge porringers, with wholesome pottage stored,
Smoked for their elder brothers, who were now,
Hungry and tired, expected from the plough.
GIFFORD.

His handling of the essential weapons of satire, scathing epigram, and impetuous rhetoric, contribute equally to his success. He has the capacity of branding a character with eternal shame in a few terse trenchant lines. Who can forget the Greek adventurer of the third satire?--

grammaticus rhetor geometres pictor aliptes
augur schoenobates medicus magus, omnia novit
Graeculus esuriens; in caelum miseris, ibit (iii. 76);

A cook, a conjurer, a rhetorician,
A painter, pedant, a geometrician,
A dancer on the ropes and a physician;
All things the hungry Greek exactly knows,
And bid him go to heaven, to heaven he goes.
DRYDEN.

or the summary of Domitian's reign with which he dates the story of the gigantic turbot?--

cum iam semianimum laceraret Flavius orbem
ultimus et calvo serviret Roma Neroni (iv. 37);

When the last Flavius, drunk with fury, tore
The prostrate world, which bled at every pore,
And Rome beheld, in body as in mind,
A bald-pate Nero rise to curse mankind.
GIFFORD.

or the curse upon the legacy-hunter Pacuvius?--

vivat Pacuvius quaeso vel Nestora totum,
possideat quantum rapuit Nero, montibus aurum
exaequet, nec amet quemquam nec ametur ab ullo (xii. 128).

Health to the man! and may he thus get more
Than Nero plundered! pile his shining store
High, mountain high: in years a Nestor prove,
And, loving none, ne'er know another's love!
GIFFORD.

Not less mordant in a different way is the savage and sceptical melancholy of the conclusion of the second satire, where he contrasts the degenerate Roman, tainted by the foulest lusts, with the noble Romans of the past, and even with the barbarians, newly conquered, on the confines of empire (149):

esse aliquos manes et subterranea regna
et contum et Stygio ranas in gurgite nigras
atque una transire vadum tot milia cumba
nec pueri credunt, nisi qui nondum aere lavantur.
sed tu vera puta: Curius quid sentit et ambo
Scipiadae, quid Fabricius manesque Camilli,
quid Cremerae legio et Cannis consumpta iuventus,
tot bellorum animae, quotiens hinc talis ad illos
umbra venit? cuperent lustrari, si qua darentur
sulpura cum taedis et si foret umida laurus.
illic heu miseri traducimur. arma quidem ultra
litora Iuvernae promovimus et modo captas
Orcadas ac minima contentos nocte Britannos,
sed quae nunc populi fiunt victoris in urbe,
non faciuut illi quos vicimus.

That angry Justice formed a dreadful hell,
That ghosts in subterranean regions dwell,
That hateful Styx his sable current rolls,
And Charon ferries o'er unbodied souls,
Are now as tales or idle fables prized;
By children questioned and by men despised.
Yet these, do thou believe. What thoughts, declare,
Ye Scipios, once the thunderbolts of war!
Fabricius, Curius, great Camillus' ghost!
Ye valiant Fabii, in yourselves an host!
Ye dauntless youths at fatal Cannae slain!
Spirits of many a brave and bloody plain!
What thoughts are yours, whene'er with feet unblest,
An unbelieving shade invades your rest?
Ye fly, to expiate the blasting view;
Fling on the pine-tree torch the sulphur blue,
And from the dripping bay dash round the lustral dew.
And yet--to these abodes we all must come,
Believe, or not, these are our final home;
Though now Ierne tremble at our sway,
And Britain, boastful of her length of day;
Though the blue Orcades receive our chain,
And isles that slumber in the frozen main.
But why of conquest boast? the conquered climes
Are free, O Rome, from thy detested crimes.
GIFFORD.

In the same bitter spirit, Umbricius is made to cry:

quid Romae faciam? mentiri nescio; librum,
si malus est, nequeo laudare et poscere; motus
astrorum ignoro; funus promittere patris
nec volo nec possum; ranarum viscera numquam
inspexi; ferre ad nuptam quae mittit adulter,
quae mandat, norunt alii; me nemo ministro
fur erit, atque ideo nulli comes exeo tamquam
mancus et extinctae, corpus non utile, dextrae (iii. 41).

What's Rome to me, what business have I there?
I who can neither lie nor falsely swear?
Nor praise my patron's undeserving rhymes,
Nor yet comply with him nor with his times?
Unskilled in schemes by planets to foreshow,
Like canting rascals, how the wars will go;
I neither will nor can prognosticate
To the young gaping heir his father's fate;
Nor in the entrails of a toad have pried,
Nor carried bawdy presents to a bride:
For want of these town-virtues, thus alone
I go conducted on my way by none;
Like a dead member from the body rent,
Maimed and unuseful to the government.
DRYDEN.

This bitterness Juvenal seasons at times with saturnine jests of a type that is all his own. Virro gives rancid oil to his poor guests as dressing to their salad:

illud enim vestris datur alveolis quod
canna Micipsarum prora subvexit acuta,
propter quod Romae cum Boccare nemo lavatur,
quod tutos etiam facit a serpentibus atris (v. 88).

Such oil to you is thrown,
Such rancid grease, as Afric sends to town;
So strong that when her factors seek the bath,
All wind and all avoid the noisome path.
GIFFORD.

When the blind _delator_, Catullus Messalinus, is summoned to give his advice concerning the gigantic turbot:

nemo magis rhombum stupuit; nam plurima dixit
in laevom conversus, at illi dextra iacebat
belua. sic pugnas Cilicis laudabat et ictus
et pegma et pueros inde ad velaria raptos (iv. 119).

None dwelt so largely on the turbot's size,
Or raised with such applause his wondering eyes;
But to the left (O treacherous want of sight)
He poured his praise;--the fish was on the right.
Thus would he at the fencer's matches sit,
And shout with rapture at some fancied hit;
And thus applaud the stage machinery, where
The youths were rapt aloft and lost in air.
GIFFORD.

Grimmest of all is the jest on the mushrooms set before Virro:

vilibus ancipites fungi ponentur amicis,
boletus domino, sed quales Claudius edit
ante illum uxoris, post quem nihil amplius edit (v. 146).

You champ on spongy toadstools, hateful treat!
Fearful of poisons in each bit you eat:
He feasts secure on mushrooms, fine as those
Which Claudius for his special eating chose,
Till one more fine, provided by his wife,
Finished at once his feasting and his life!
GIFFORD.

But Juvenal is not always bitter, nor always angry. His indignation is never absent, but takes at times a graver and a nobler tone. At times he preaches virtue directly, instead of doing so indirectly through the denunciation of vice. He has no new secret of morality to reveal, no fresh lights to throw upon problems of conduct; his advice is obvious and straightforward; neither in form nor matter is there anything paradoxical. He was no student of philosophy,[730] though naturally familiar with the more important philosophic creeds and disposed by temperament to fall in with the views of the stern Stoic school. The conclusion of the tenth satire quoted above owes much to the Stoics. 'Leave the ordering of your fortunes to the powers above. Man is dearer to them than to himself. The wise man is free from all desire, all anger and all fear of death.'[731] 'Revenge is an unworthy and degrading passion.'[732] 'Fate[733] and the revolution[734] of the stars in heaven rule all with unchanging law.' All these maxims have their counterpart in the Stoic creed. But there is no need of the philosophy of the schools to guide man to the paths of virtue.

numquam aliud natura, aliud sapientia dicit (xiv. 321).

Nature and wisdom never are at strife.
GIFFORD.

Philosophy has its value, but the good man is no less good for not being a philosopher:

magna quidem, sacris quae dat praecepta libellis,
victrix fortunae sapientia, ducimus autem
hos quoque felices, qui ferre incommoda vitae
nec iactare iugum vita didicere magistra (xiii. 19).

Wisdom, I know, contains a sovereign charm,
To vanquish fortune or at least disarm:
Blest they who walk in her unerring rule!
Nor those unblest who, tutored in life's school,
Have learned of old experience to submit,
And lightly bear the yoke they cannot quit.
GIFFORD.

He agrees with the Stoics just because their practical teaching harmonizes so entirely with the old _virtus Romana_, that is his ideal.

No more profound are his religious views: he hates the alien cults that work as insidious poison in the life of Rome; he rejects the picturesque legends of the afterworld, bred of the fertile imagination of the Greeks. But he is no unbeliever:

separat hoc nos
a grege mutorum, atque ideo venerabile soli
sortiti ingenium divinorumque capaces
atque exercendis pariendisque artibus apti
sensum a caelesti demissum traximus arce,
cuius egent prona et terram spectantia. mundi
principio indulsit communis conditor illis
tantum animas, nobis animum quoque, mutuus ut nos
adfectus petere auxilium et praestare iuberet (xv. 142).

This marks our birth
The great distinction from the beasts of earth!
And therefore--gifted with superior powers
And capable of things divine--'tis ours
To learn and practise every useful art;
And from high heaven deduce that better part,
That moral sense, denied to creatures prone
And downward bent, and found with man alone!--
For He, who gave this vast machine to roll,
Breathed life in them, in us a reasoning soul:
That kindred feelings might our state improve,
And mutual wants conduct to mutual love.
GIFFORD.

God is over all and guides and guards the world, and has ordained torment of conscience and slow retribution for sin.[735] Yet Juvenal does not definitely reject the gods of his native land; nor do these exalted beliefs cause him to refuse sacrifice to Jupiter, Juno, Minerva, and his household gods.[736] It is the creed, not of a theologian, but of a man with high ideals, a staunch patriotism, and a deep reverence for the past.

But this lack of profundity and philosophical training does not, as may be inferred from passages already quoted, prevent him from being intensely effective as a moral teacher. His platitudes are none the worse for not having a Stoic label and all the better for their simplicity and directness of expression. They do not reveal the hunger and thirst after righteousness that breathe from the lines of Persius, but they have at least an equal appeal to the plain man, and they are matchlessly expressed. His pleading against revenging the wrong done, if not on the very highest moral plane, possesses a grave dignity and beauty that brings it straight home to the heart:

at vindicta bonum vita iucundius ipsa.
nempe hoc indocti, quorum praecordia nullis
interdum aut levibus videas flagrantia causis.
* * * * *
Chrysippus non dicet idem nec mite Thaletis
ingenium dulcique senex vicinus Hymetto,
qui partem acceptae saeva inter vincla cicutae
accusatori nollet dare. plurima felix
paulatim vitia atque errores exuit omnes,
prima docet rectum sapientia. quippe minuti
semper et infirmi est animi exiguique voluptas
ultio. continuo sic collige, quod vindicta
nemo magis gaudet quam femina. cur tamen hos tu
evasisse putes, quos diri conscia facti
mens habet attonitos et surdo verbere caedit
occultum quatiente animo tortore flagellum?
poena autem vehemens ac multo saevior illis
quas et Caedicius gravis invenit et Rhadamanthus,
nocte dieque suum gestare in pectore testem (xiii. 180).

'Revenge,' they say, and I believe their words,
'A pleasure sweeter far than life affords.'
Who say? The fools, whose passions prone to ire
At slightest causes or at none take fire.
... ... ... Chrysippus said not so;
Nor Thales, to our frailties clement still;
Nor that old man, by sweet Hymettus' hill,
Who drank the poison with unruffled soul,
And, dying, from his foes withheld the bowl.
Divine philosophy! by whose pure light
We first distinguish, then pursue the right,
Thy power the breast from every error frees
And weeds out every error by degrees:--
Illumined by thy beam, revenge we find
The abject pleasure of an abject mind,
And hence so dear to poor, weak womankind.
But why are those, Calvinus, thought to 'scape
Unpunished, whom in every fearful shape
Guilt still alarms, and conscience ne'er asleep
Wounds with incessant strokes 'not loud but deep',
While the vexed mind, her own tormentor, plies
A scorpion scourge, unmarked by human eyes?
Trust me, no tortures which the poets feign,
Can match the fierce, the unutterable pain
He feels, who night and day, devoid of rest,
Carries his own accuser in his breast.
GIFFORD.

The same characteristics mark his praise of nobility of character as opposed to nobility of birth:

tota licet veteres exornent undique cerae
atria, nobilitas sola est atque unica virtus.
Paulus vel Cossus vel Drusus moribus esto,
hos ante effigies maiorum pone tuorum,
praecedant ipsas illi te consule virgas.
prima mihi debes anima bona. sanctus haberi
iustitiaeque tenax factis dictisque mereris?
adgnosco procerem; salve Gaetulice, seu tu
Silanus, quocumque alio de sanguine, rarus
civis et egregius patriae contingis ovanti (viii. 19).