[11] I have often wondered at the stress which Dodwell and others lay on the concluding lines of this Satire: "Experiar quid concedatur," etc. They fancy that the engagement was seriously made, and religiously observed. Nothing was ever farther from the mind of Juvenal. It is merely a poetical, or, if you will, a satirical, flourish; since there is not a single Satire, I am well persuaded, in which the names of many who were alive at the time are not introduced. Had Dodwell forgotten Quintilian? or, that he had allowed one of his Satires, at least, to be prior to this?
[12] This "nuper" is a very convenient word. Here, we see, it signifies lately; but when it is necessary to bring the works of our author down to a late period, it means, as Britannicus explains it, "de longo tempore," long ago.
[13] But how to this ascertained? Very easily; he calls him "fecundus Juvenalis." Here the question is finally left; for none of the commentators suppose it possible that the epithet can be applied to any but a rhetorician. Yet it is applied by the same writer to a poet of no ordinary kind;
"Accipe, facundi Culicem, studiose. Maronis
Ne, nugis positis, arma virumque canas."
Lib. xiv., 185.
And, by the author himself, to one who had grown old in the art:
"————tunc seque suamque
Terpsichoren odit facunda et nuda senectus."
Let it be remembered, too, that Martial, as is evident from the frequent allusions to Domitian's expedition against the Catti, wrote this epigram (lib. vii., 91) in the commencement of that prince's reign, when it is acknowledged that Juvenal had produced but one or two of his Satires.
[14] The former of these, Dodwell says, was written in exile, after the author was turned of eighty. Salmasius, more rationally, conceives it to have been produced at Rome. Giving full credit, however, to the story of his late banishment, he is driven into a very awkward supposition. "An non alio tempore, atque alia de causa Ægyptum lustrare juvenis potuit Juvenalis? animi nempe gratia, και της ἱστοριας χαριν, ut urbes regionis illius, populorumque mores cognosceret?" Would it not be more simple to attribute his exile at once to Domitian?
With respect to the 16th Satire, Dodwell, we see, hesitates to attribute it to Juvenal; and, indeed, the old Scholiast says, that, in his time, many thought it to be the work of a different hand. So it always appeared to me. It is unworthy of the author's best days, and seems but little suited to his worst. He was at least eighty-one, they say, when he wrote it, yet it begins—
"——Nam si——
Me pavidum excipiet tyronem porta secundo
Sidere," etc.