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.'