A History of Roman Literature

by Harold North Fowler

Juvenal can hardly be separated from Tacitus. Both depict the life of Rome in the same lurid light, and the picture presented by each agrees with that of the other. Juvenal. Juvenal’s diatribes seem to illustrate the statements of Tacitus, and Tacitus shows that Juvenal’s violence is justified by the facts. Of Juvenal’s life little is known. His full name is given in some manuscripts as Decimus Iunius Iuvenalis. One vita or life gives the date of his birth as 55 A. D., which may be correct, though there is no especial reason to regard it as exact. He was born at Aquinum, a town of the Volscians, where he held the offices of duumvir quinquennalis and of flamen Divi Vespasiani. He was also at one time a military tribune, serving with the first Dalmatian cohort, perhaps in Britain. This military service probably belongs to his youth, and the local offices to his later life. He evidently received a good education, and he appears to have practised oratory for some years. Martial, who mentions him several times, speaks of him as eloquent, not as poetic or satirical. The lives agree in stating that he was banished, but not in regard to the time or place of his banishment. He came to Rome about 90 A. D., was still there in 101 A. D., and probably spent part of some of the later years in the capital. At Rome he lived in the Subura, the plebeian quarter, but had access to the houses of rich nobles. His satires were written between 100 and 127 A. D., and he died about 135 A. D.

Juvenal is the harshest and most violent of the four great Roman satirists. The Satires. Lucilius was outspoken and sometimes bitter, but aimed to correct while he rebuked the follies of his time; Horace soon lost all bitterness and expressed good-humored raillery; Persius derived his themes from books and preached Stoic doctrines; but Juvenal attacks Roman society in fierce and biting verses, shrinking from no gruesome or indecent detail, showing no humor save of the grimmest and harshest sort, and with no hope of correcting the evils he depicts. He has all the variety of phrase of the accomplished rhetorician, and his lines have a rolling grandeur almost Virgilian. He shows, indeed, the influence of Virgil more than of any other previous writer, though traces of Homer, Herodotus, Plato, nearly all the Roman poets, and among Roman prose writers Cicero, Valerius Maximus, and Seneca are found in his satires. The violence of his satires is, however, not directed against his contemporaries. He seems to have in mind rather the Rome of Domitian than that of Trajan or Hadrian, under whose rule he wrote. The sixteen satires are divided into five books. Book I (Satires i-v) not earlier than 100 A. D., and Book II (Satire vi) not before 116 A. D. These are the most powerful, most violent, and least agreeable books. Book III (Satires vii-ix) was written about 120, Book IV (Satires x-xii) about 125, and Book V (Satires xiii-xvi) in 127 A. D. In these three books there is less virulence, but also less power than in the first two. Old age brought with it a loss at once of fierceness and of strength.

In the first satire, Juvenal gives his reasons for writing as he does. Contents of the Satires. He is tired of listening to endless epics, and the corruptions of the time are such that “it is difficult not to write satire,”[114] and “indignation makes verse.”[115] The evils to be attacked are enumerated in a series of rapidly sketched pictures, and the poet declares that “all that men do, their hope, fear, wrath, pleasure, joys, and gaddings make up the medley of my book.”[116] And in the following satires the faults of men, the dangers of the city, the court of Domitian, the pride of wealth, the crimes of women, the lack of honor paid to intellect, the worthlessness of noble birth without virtue, unnatural lust, the shortsightedness of human wishes, the wrong of setting children a bad example, and other striking features of the life of Rome are vividly presented and ruthlessly attacked. One of the most interesting satires is the third, in which the dangers of the city are described. A man who is leaving Rome for a small country town gives reasons for his departure:

What should I do at Rome? I can not lie;

I can not praise a book that’s bad and beg

A copy of it; I am ignorant

Of the motions of the stars; I neither will

Nor can make promise of a father’s death.[117]

The dirty streets, the water dripping from the aqueduct, the risk from falling tiles or household vessels, the drunken brawls in the streets, the rich man escorted home by clients and slaves with flaming torches, the danger from robbers—these and many other details of the ill regulated capital are set before us. This satire is imitated by Johnson in his London, which has rightly been called one of the finest modern imitations of an ancient poem, and the same author’s poem on The Vanity of Human Wishes is a less accurate, though not less admirable, imitation of Juvenal’s tenth satire. The closing passage of the tenth satire, in which the poet tells what are the proper objects of prayer, is a lofty utterance of human wisdom. The most savage of all the satires is, on the other hand, the sixth, in which the crimes of women are held up to execration.