Studies in the Poetry of Italy, Part I. Roman

by Frank Justus Miller

Upon such a world as this did Juvenal, in the prime of manhood, his powers of reason, observation, and expression fully ripened, look out from his home in the Roman Subura;[C] with the product of such times did he mingle in the crowded reception-rooms of rich and noble patrons. He looked upon society and noted it, and long restrained his speech. But at last, as Tyrrell has well expressed it, "the flood of indignation, pent up in furious silence for forty years, once loose, carried away on its current or tossed aside every obstacle that impeded its onward rush."

[C] A quarter in Rome given up to markets and tenement-houses.

And this is that which mainly distinguishes him from Horace—his tremendous moral earnestness, his fiery indignation. His spirit did not allow him to play with his theme; there were hard blows to strike at outbreaking sins, and he would strike them. And if venial faults were struck as hard as more serious offenses, that was a proof not of inconsistency, but of an earnestness that could not stop to distinguish; if he writes of practices too shameful for telling in the hearing of polite ears, it is because his righteous indignation was in no mood to mince words, but would hold up vice in all its hideousness to the fatal light. He speaks with frankness of shameful sins, but only to hurl his denunciations at them. He is always in a rage,—strenuous where Horace is gently satirical and whimsical; didactic and straightforward where Horace is conversational and dramatic. At the same time he paints most vivid pictures, filling in the lines with tremendous sweeps of his rhetorical brush.

He tells us that he was fairly driven to write satire by the very atmosphere and daily occurrences of folly and sin around him.[D]

[D] The quotations from Juvenal which follow are taken from the excellent prose version of Leeper.

For who so tolerant of this wrong-headed city, who so callous, that he can contain himself when lawyer Matho's brand-new litter comes along, filled with his Greatness, and after him the betrayer of his distinguished friend, who will soon finish off the remnants of our nobility already preyed upon.... Is not one moved to fill a bulky note-book right in the middle of the cross-roads, when a man is carried past, already indulging in six bearers, showing himself to view on both sides—a forger who has made himself aristocrat and millionaire with a little tablet and a damp seal? Now you are confronted by a lady of position, who, when her husband is thirsty, just before she hands him the mild Calenian, puts in a dash of poison, and, like a superior Lucusta, teaches her unsophisticated kinswomen to carry their livid husbands to burial right through the town and all its gossip.... It is to crime that men owe their pleasure-grounds, their castles, banquets, old silver, and goblets with goat's figure in relief.... When nature refuses, sheer scorn produces verse—the best it can.

He cannot abide the Greeks. His national pride is touched at the thought that not only do they swarm in Rome, monopolizing by their superior shrewdness all profitable employments, but that Rome itself has gone crazy after them, and things Greek are all the rage.

And now I will at once admit to you,—no false shame shall stop me,—what class is most in favor with our wealthy men, and whom most of all I am flying from. I cannot abide, fellow-citizen, a Greecized Rome.... Your yeoman citizen, Quirinus, dons his Greek boots and wears a Greek collar upon a neck rubbed with Greek ointment.... What a quick intellect, what desperate effrontery, what a ready tongue, surpassing Isæus himself in fluency. Tell me now, what do you take him for? In his own person he has brought us—why, whom you will—critic, rhetorician, geometer, painter, trainer, prophet, rope-dancer, doctor, sorcerer. The starveling Greek knows everything.... Mark how that race, so adroit in flattery, extols the foolish friend's conversation, the ill-favored friend's features; how they compare some weakling's scraggy neck with the throat of a Hercules, or admire a harsh voice which is not a whit better than the cry of a cock.... The whole breed of them are actors. If you but smile, your Greek shakes his sides with heartier merriment; he weeps, if he has spied a tear in his friend's eye, and yet he feels no grief. If you ask in winter time for a bit of a fire, he takes an overcoat: should you remark, "I feel warm," he is in a sweat.

Juvenal complains bitterly of the unproductiveness of honest toil in literature and the professions. It's all very well to talk about the poet's inspiration, but Pegasus does not fly upon an empty stomach.

He has dined, has Horace, when he shouts his "Evoe." ... Were Vergil left without a slave and a decent lodging, then every snake would tumble from his locks: his trumpet would be hushed, and sound forth no more impressive notes.... Historians, is your toil more productive? It demands more time and more oil. Each of you, doubtless, has his pages rising by the hundred, knowing no limit, growing towards bankruptcy with the pile of papyrus. But what is your harvest—what does opening up that field yield you? Who will pay a historian as much as he would pay a reporter?... Then say what public services and the ever-present big packet of documents bring in to our advocates. Would you know their real gains? In one scale set a hundred advocates' estates; in the other just that of Lacerna, the Red Jockey.