JUVENAL
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':