Of Horace and his representation of Jewish life we have already spoken. It will be remembered that the one aspect which earned for the Jews his none too respectful raillery was their eager proselytism. And it is excellent evidence of how important this proselytism was in the Jewish life of the time, that in the two generations that stretched from Nero to Nerva the same aspect is present to men of such diverse types as Persius and Juvenal.
With Persius we enter a wholly different stratum of society from that of Horace and, as we shall later see, of Juvenal. Persius was by birth and breeding an aristocrat. He was descended from an ancient Etruscan house, and could boast, accordingly, of a nobility of lineage compared with which the Roman Valerii and Caecilii were the veriest mushrooms.[[348]] But he was almost wholly devoid of the vices that often mark his class. An austere Stoic, his short life was dedicated to the severe discipline that his contemporary and fellow-Stoic Seneca found it easier to preach than to practise.
Persius wrote little, and that little has all come down to us. His Latin, however, is so crabbed and difficult that he is easily the least read of Roman poets.[[349]] His productions are called Satires. They are less that than homilies, in which, of course, the virtues he inculcates are best illustrated by the vices he attacks.
One of these vices is superstition. The mental condition that is terrified by vain and monstrous imaginings of ignorant men is set forth in the Fifth Satire:[[350]]
But when the day of Herod comes and the lamps on the grimy sills, garlanded with violets, disgorge their unctuous smoke-clouds; when the tail of a tunny-fish fills its red dish and the white jar bursts with wine, you move your lips in silent dread and turn pale at the Sabbath of the circumcised.
As a picture of Jewish life on the eve of the Sabbath, this passage is invaluable. We can readily imagine how the activities of a squalid suburb inhabited by a brawling class of men, mostly of Oriental descent, must have impressed both the grandee and the Stoic.
But the passage is cited here, not merely as a genre-picture, but more especially because it is again the phase of Jewish life, so often neglected in histories, that has brought the Jews to Persius’ attention. The ordinary Roman, not saved from carnal weakness by Stoicism, is found to stand in particular dread of the strange and nameless God of the Jews, to whom he brings a reverence and awe that ought legitimately to be directed only to the gods of his ancestors.
Persius wrote while the temple was still standing. In 70 the temple was destroyed. A gaping mob saw the utensils of the inner shrine carried in triumph through the city, and could feast its eyes, if it chose, on the admirable portrayal of that procession, on the Arch of Titus near the Forum. It might be supposed that the God who in Roman eyes could not save His habitation from the flames, could hope for no adherents among His conquerors. But after the destruction of the temple, in the lifetime of the very men who cheered Titus when he returned from Palestine, we see the propaganda more vigorous, if anything, than before.
It is in the pages of Juvenal that we find evidence of that fact, and here again we are confronted with a sharply outlined personality. Decimus Junius Juvenalis was born near Aquinum in Southern Italy, where the Italic stock had probably suffered less admixture with foreign elements than was the case at Rome. What his intellectual training was we can only conjecture from its results, the turgid but sonorous and often brilliant eloquence of his Satires. Whether they are true pictures of Roman life and society or not may be doubted. But they indubitably reflect his own soul. We see there a soured raté, a man embittered by his failure to receive the rewards due to his merits. In the capital of the world, the city where he, the man of undoubted Roman stock, should have found a career open before him, he discovered himself to be a stranger. He was no match for the nimble-witted Greeks that thronged every profession and crawled into entrances too low to admit the scion of Cincinnatus and Fabricius. How much of this was the venom of defeated ambition, and how much was honest indignation at the indescribable meanness of the lives he depicted, we cannot now determine.
Throughout all his work one note may be heard, the note of rage at a Rome where everything characteristically Roman was pushed into the background, a Rome in the hands of Greeks, Egyptians, and Jews. And in the case of the last it is particularly the danger noted by Strabo and Seneca,[[351]] of an actual conquest of Rome by the Jewish faith, that rouses his savage indignation.