But here the difference lies—those bungling wives
With a blunt axe hacked out their husbands’ lives;
While now the deed is done with dexterous art,
And a drugged bowl performs the axe’s part.”
In the blaze of his satire Juvenal brought out the representative characters of his time. Parasites, hypocrites, and panders, upstarts, legacy-hunters, and gamblers, ballet-dancers and fortune-tellers, gluttons and sots,—defile before us in his pages till we turn with nausea from the revolting panorama. Well might the poet sigh:—
“Oh! happy were our sires, estranged from crimes;
And happy, happy were the good old times,
Which saw beneath their kings’, their tribunes’ reign,
One cell the nation’s criminals contain!”
Juvenal’s vividness of description and minuteness of detail show him to have been personally familiar with the vices he lashed; that he kept himself unspotted we can neither assert nor deny. His satires are full of moral precepts and virtuous sentiments; the Tenth, perhaps the gem of the collection, has lent more thoughts and expressions to modern times than any other Latin poem of equal length. It closes with a beautiful petition:—