"Facit indignatio versum
Qualemcunque potest, quales ego vel Cluvienus."
These two qualities, vexation (vexatus toties, i. 2) and indignation, are the salient characteristics of Juvenal. How far the vexation was righteous, the indignation sincere, is a question hard to answer. There is no denying the power with which they are expressed. But to submit to this power is one thing, to sift its author's heart is another. After a long and careful study of Juvenal's poems, we confess to being able to make nothing of Juvenal himself. We cannot get even a glimpse of him. He never doffs the iron mask, the "rigidi censura cachinni;" he has so long hidden his face that he is afraid to see it himself or to let it be seen. Some have thought that in the eleventh and twelfth Satires they can find the man, and have been glad to figure him as genial, simple, and kind. But it is by no means certain that even these are not mere rhetorical exercises, modelled on the Horatian epistles, but themselves having no relation to any actual event. The fifteenth, again, represents a softer view of life, the thirteenth and fourteenth a higher faith in providence; in these, it has been thought, appears the true nature, which had allowed itself to lie hid among the denunciations of the earlier satires. But, in truth, the character of Juvenal must be one of the incognita of literature. It is a retaliation on Satire's part for the intimate knowledge she had allowed us to gain of Horace and Persius through their works. [22]
In manner Juvenal is the most original of poets; in matter he is the glorifier of common-place. His strength lies in his prejudices. He is not a moralist, but a Roman moralist; the vices he lashes are not lashed as vices simpliciter, but as vices that Roman ethics condemn. This one- sided patriotism is the key to all his ideas. In an age which had seen Seneca, Juvenal can revert to the patriotism of Cato. The burden of his complaints is given in the third Satire:
"Non possum ferre Quintes Graecam Urbem." [23]
While the Greeks lead fashion, the old Roman virtues can never be restored. If only men could be disabused of their strange reverence for all that is Greek, society might be reconstructed. The keen satirist scents a real danger; in half a century from his death Rome had become a Greek city.
In estimating the political character of Juvenal's satire we must not attach too much weight to his denunciation of former tyrants. In the first place "tyrannicide" was a common-place of the schools: [24] Xerxes, Periander, Phalaris, and all the other despots of history, had been treated in rhetoric as they had treated others in reality; Juvenal's tirade was nothing new, but it was something much more powerful than had yet been seen. In the second place the policy of Trajan encouraged abuse of his predecessors. He could hardly claim to restore the Republic unless he showed how the Republic had been overthrown. Pliny, the courtly flatterer, is far more severe on Domitian than Juvenal; and in truth such severity was only veiled adulation. When Juvenal ridicules the senate of Domitian, [25] we may believe that he desired to stimulate to independence the senate of his day; and when he speaks of Trajan, it is in language of enthusiastic praise. [26] Flattery it is not, for Juvenal is no sycophant, nor would Trajan have liked him better if he had been one. Indeed, with all his invective he keeps strictly to truth; his painting of the emperors is from the life. It is highly coloured, but not out of drawing. Juvenal's Domitian is nearer to history than Tacitus's Tiberius.
It is in his delineations of society that Juvenal is at his greatest. There is nothing ideal about him, but his pictures of real life, allowing for their glaring lights, have an almost overpowering truthfulness. Every grade of society is made to furnish matter for his dramatic scenes. The degenerate noble is pilloried in the eighth, the cringing parasite in the fifth, the vicious hypocrite in the second, the female profligate in the sixth. It is rarely that he touches on contemporary themes. His genius was formed in the past and feeds on bitter memories. As he says, he "kills the dead." [27] To attack the living is neither pleasant nor safe. Still, in the historic incidents he resuscitates, a piercing eye can read a reference to the present. Hadrian's favourite actor saw himself in Paris. Freedmen and upstarts could read their original in Sejanus. [28] Frivolous noblemen could feel their follies rebuked in the persons of Lateranus and Damasippus. [29] Even an emperor might find his lesson in the gloomy pictures of Hannibal and Alexander. [30] So constant is this reference to past events that Juvenal's writings may be called historic satire, as those of Tacitus satiric history.
The exaggeration of Juvenal's style if employed in a different way might have led us to suspect him of less honesty of purpose than he really has. As it is, the very violence of his prejudices betrays an earnestness which, if his views had been more elevated, we might have thought feigned. A man might pretend to enthusiasm for truth, or holiness; he would hardly pretend to enthusiasm for national exclusiveness, [31] or for the dignity of his own profession. [32] When Juvenal attacks the insolent parvenu, [33] the Bithynian or Cappadocian knight, [34] the Greek adventurer who takes everything out of the Roman's hands, [35] the Chaldean impostor, [36] we may be sure he means what he says.
It is true that all his accusations are not thus limited in their scope. Some are no doubt inspired by moral indignation; and the language in which they are expressed is noble and well deserves the praise universally accorded to it. But in other instances his patriotism obscures his moral sense. For example, the rich upstarts against whom he is perpetually thundering, are by no means all worthy of blame. Very many of them have obtained their wealth by honourable commerce, which the nobles were too proud to practise, and the rewards of which they yet could not see reaped without envy and scorn. [37] The increasing importance of the class of libertini, so far from being an unmixed evil, as Juvenal thinks it, was productive of immense good. It was the first step towards the breaking down of the party-wall of pride which, if persisted in, must have caused the premature ruin of the Empire. It familiarised men's minds with ideas of equality, and prepared the way for the elevation to the citizenship of those vast masses of slaves who were fast becoming an anachronism.
Popular feeling was ahead of men like Juvenal and Tacitus in these respects. In all cases of disturbance the senate and great literary men sided with the old exclusive views. The emperors, as a rule, interfered for the benefit of the slave: and this helps us to understand the popularity of some even of the worst of their number.