AGE OF TRAJAN AND THE ANTONINES.
Juvenal (40-125 A.D.), the single poet of this age, ranks with Rome’s great writers. The accounts of his life are fragmentary and obscure. A native of Aqui’num in Latium, he came to Rome, and was apparently a student of rhetoric, perhaps an advocate. A chance lampoon on an actor revealed to him his satirical talent, and forthwith he applied himself to that branch of poetry in which he became so eminent. Too modest at first to read his satires even before his friends, Juvenal postponed publishing them until his sixtieth year, when they took Rome by storm. Sixteen of them survive.
His fierce diatribes not unnaturally gave offence in high places; and at length the emperor Ha’drian[49] quietly sent their author off to Egypt, to command a Roman cohort stationed there—a disgrace which brought the old satirist in sorrow to the grave.
Juvenal probed Roman society to its very depths, laying bare vices of the blackest dye. In his day, the degenerate masters of the world even out-sodomed Sodom in depravity. Nobles and emperors openly perpetrated the vilest crimes. High-born ladies, in male attire, entered the arena to fight like gladiators; revelled in reckless extravagance; plunged into immoralities that call up a blush in the very recital, and even added the arts of the poisoner to their accomplishments. Thus the poet exclaims against these fashionable murderesses:—
“They see upon the stage the Grecian wife
Redeeming with her own her husband’s life;
Yet, in her place, would willingly deprive
Their lords of breath, to keep their dogs alive!
Abroad, at home, the Belides[50] you meet,
And Clytemnestras swarm in every street;