CHAPTER II
THE WORLD OF THE SATIRIST
Juvenal and Tacitus, although they moved in different circles and probably never met, have much in common. Both were released from an ignominious silence by the death of Domitian. Both were then at the age which combines the ripeness of experience and reflection with a fire and energy still unflagging.[344] They were, from different causes, both filled with hatred and disgust for the vices of their time, and their experience had engendered in both a pessimism which darkened their faith. Tacitus belonged to the senatorial order who had held high office, and had seen its ranks decimated and its dignity outraged under the tyranny. Juvenal sprang from the lower middle class, which hated alike the degenerate noble and the insolent parvenu far more than it hated even a Domitian. Yet both Juvenal and Tacitus are united in a passionate admiration for the old Roman character. Their standards and ideals are drawn from the half-mythical ages of the simple warriors and farmer-statesmen of the old Republic. And their estimate of their time needs to be scrutinised in the light both of their hatreds and of their ideals.
The life of Juvenal is wrapt in obscurity, although nine lives of him are extant.[345] Scholars are still at variance as to the date of his birth, the date of many of his satires, and especially as to the time and circumstances of his banishment, about which there is so uniform a tradition. But, for our purpose, some facts are clear enough. Juvenal was the son of [pg 59]a well-to-do freedman of Aquinum, and rose to the highest magisterial office in his native town at some time of his career.[346] He carefully hides his personal history from us; but we might gather from his Satires that he belonged to the lower middle class,[347] that he was in temper and tone an old plebeian of the times of the Republic, although vividly touched by the ideas of a new morality which had been afloat for more than two generations. But, like Tacitus, he has little sympathy with the great philosophic movement which was working a silent revolution. He had the rhetorical training of the time, with all its advantages and its defects. And he is more a rhetorician than a poet. We can well believe the report that his early literary enthusiasm found vent in declamation on those mythical or frivolous themes which exercised the youth in the Roman schools for many centuries. Although he was hardly a poor man[348] in the sense in which Martial, his friend, was poor, yet he had stooped to bear the ignominy and hardships of client dependence. He had hurried in rain and storm in the early morning to receptions at great houses on the Esquiline, through the squalor and noises and congested traffic of the Suburra.[349] He had doubtless often been a guest at those “unequal dinners,” where the host, who was himself regaled with far-fetched dainties and old crusted Alban or Setine wine, insulted his poorer friends by offering them the cheapest vintage and the meanest fare.[350] He had been compelled, as a matter of social duty, to sit through the recitation of those ambitious and empty Theseids and Thebaids, with which the rich amateur in literature in those days afflicted his long-suffering friends.[351] He may have been often elbowed aside by some supple, clever Greek, with versatile accomplishments and infinite audacity. He may have been patronised or insulted by a millionaire parvenu, like the Trimalchio of Petronius, tainted with the memories of a shameful servitude. He saw new vulgar wealth everywhere triumphant, while the stiff, yet, in many ways, wholesome conventionality of old Roman life was defied and trampled upon by an aggressive vulgarity. In such a world there was little room for the man whose wealth is [pg 60]in his genius, and who clings to the traditions of ages which believed that men had a soul as well as a body. A man like Juvenal, living in such a society, almost necessarily becomes embittered. Like Johnson, in his Grub Street days, he will have his hours when bitterness passes into self-abandonment, and he will sound the depths of that world of corruption which in his better moods he loathes. Some of the associates of Juvenal were of very doubtful position, and more than doubtful morals;[352] and the warmth of some of his realistic painting of dark sides of Roman life arouses the suspicion that he may have at times forgotten his moral ideal. He certainly knows the shameful secrets of Roman life almost as well as his friend Martial does. But his knowledge, however gained, was turned to a very different purpose from that which inspired Martial’s brilliant prurience.[353]
The Satires of Juvenal were probably not given to the world till after the death of Domitian.[354] The date of the earliest is about 100 A.D., that of the latest probably 127. Juvenal cautiously disguises his attacks on his own time. He whets his sword against the sinners whose ashes have long reposed beside the Flaminian and the Latin ways.[355] Very few of his contemporaries appear in his pages,[356] and the scenery is often that of the reigns of Tiberius, Claudius, or Nero. But his deepest and most vivid impressions must have come to Juvenal in that period which has been photographed with such minute exactness by Martial. And there is a striking correspondence between the two writers, not only in many of the characters whom they introduce, but in their pictures of the whole state of morals and letters.[357] They both detested that frigid epic which laboriously ploughed the sands of conventional legend, and they turned with weariness from the old-world tales of Thebes or Argos to the real tragedy or comedy of Roman life around them. Although they were friends and companions, it is needless to [pg 61]assume any close partnership in their studies. Starting with the same literary impulse, they deal to a large extent with the same vices and follies, some of them peculiar to their own age, others common to all ages of Rome, or even of the world of civilisation. A long list might easily be compiled of their common stock of subjects, and their common antipathies. In both writers we meet the same grumbling of the needy client against insolent or niggardly patrons, the complaints of the struggling man of letters about the extravagant rewards of low vulgar impostors. Both are bored to death, like the patient Pliny, by the readings of wealthy scribblers, or by tiresome pleadings in the courts, measured by many a turn of the clepsydra. They feel an equal disgust for the noise and squalor of the narrow streets, an equal love for the peace and freshness and rough plenty of the country farm. In both may be seen the scions of great houses reduced to mendicancy, ambitious poverty betaking itself to every mean or disreputable device, the legacy-hunter courting the childless rich with flattery or vicious compliance. You will often encounter the sham philosopher, as you meet him sixty years afterwards in the pages of Lucian, with his loud talk of virtue and illustrious names, while his cloak covers all the vices of dog and ape. Both deal rather ungently with the character of women,—their intrigues with actors, gladiators, and slaves, their frequent divorces and rapid succession of husbands, their general abandonment of antique matronly reserve. Both have, in fact, with different motives, uncovered the secret shame of the ancient world; and, more even than by that shame, was their indignation moved by the great social revolution which was confusing all ranks, and raising old slaves, cobblers, and auctioneers to the benches of the knights.
Yet with this resemblance in the subjects of their choice, there is the widest difference between the two writers in their motive and mode of treatment. Martial, of course, is not a moralist at all; the mere suggestion excites a smile. He is a keen and joyous observer of the faults and follies, the lights and shades, of a highly complex and artificial society which is “getting over-ripe.” In the power of mere objective description and minute portraiture of social life, Martial is almost unique. Through his verses, we know the society of Domitian [pg 62]as we know hardly any other period of ancient society. But this very vividness and truthfulness is chiefly due to the fact that Martial was almost without a conscience. He was indeed personally, perhaps, not so bad as he is often painted.[358] He knows and can appreciate a good woman;[359] he can love, with the simplest, unsophisticated love, an innocent slave-child, the poor little Erotion,[360] whom he has immortalised. He can honour a simple manly character, free from guile and pretence.[361] He has a genuine, exuberant love of the fresh joys of country life, sharpened, no doubt, by the experience of the client’s sordid slavery, amid the mingled poverty and lavish splendour of the capital.[362] Where could one find a fresher, prettier idyll than his picture of the farm of Faustinus, with its packed granaries, and its cellars fragrant with the juice of many an old autumn vintage, the peacock spreading his jewelled plumage, and the ring-dove cooing overhead from the towers? The elegant slaves of the great house in the city are having a holiday, and busy, under the bailiff’s care, with rural toils, or fishing in the stream. The tall daughters of the neighbouring cottages bring in their well-stocked baskets to the villa, and all gather joyously at evening to a plenteous meal.[363] Martial has, moreover, one great virtue, which is a powerful antidote for many moral faults, the love of the far-off home of his childhood, the rugged Bilbilis, with its iron foundries near the sources of the Tagus, to which he retreated from the crush and din of plebeian life at Rome, and where he rests.[364] But when charity or justice has done its best for Martial, and no scholar will repudiate the debt, it still remains true that he represents, perhaps better than any other, that pagan world, naked and unabashed, and feels no breath of inspiration from the great spiritual movement which, in paganism itself, was setting towards an ideal of purity and self-conquest.
Juvenal, at least in his later work, reveals a moral standard and motive apparently unknown to Martial.[365] It may [pg 63]be admitted, indeed, that Juvenal did not always write under the same high impulse. He had the rhetorician’s love of fine, telling phrases, and startling effects. He had a rare gift of realistic painting, and he exults in using it. He has also burning within him an old plebeian pride which looked down at once on the degenerate son of an ancient house, and on the nouveaux riches, whose rise seemed to him the triumph of vulgar opulence without the restraint of traditions or ideals. Conscious of great talents, with a character almost fierce in its energy, he felt a burning hatred of a society which seemed to value only material success, or those supple and doubtful arts which could invent some fresh stimulus for exhausted appetite. In Juvenal a great silent, sunken class, whom we hardly know otherwise than from the inscriptions on their tombs,[366] finds for once a powerful voice and a terrible avenger. But, along with this note of personal or class feeling, there is in Juvenal a higher moral intuition, a vision of a higher life, which had floated before some Roman minds long before his time,[367] and which was destined to broaden into an accepted ideal. Juvenal, indeed, was no philosopher, and he had, like Tacitus, all the old Roman distrust of the theories of the schools.[368] He had probably little respect for such teaching as Seneca’s.[369] Yet in important points he and Seneca belong to the same order of the elect. Although, perhaps, a less spotless character than Tacitus, he is far more advanced and modern in his breadth of sympathy and moral feeling. He feels acutely for the conquered provinces which have been fleeced and despoiled of their wealth and artistic treasures, and which are still exposed to the peculation and cruelty of governors and their train.[370] He denounces, like Seneca, the contempt and cruelty often shown to slaves. The man whose ideal seems often to be drawn from the hard, stern warriors who crushed the Samnites and baffled the genius of Hannibal, in his old age has come to glorify pity and tenderness for suffering as the best gift of God, the gift that separates him most widely from the brute [pg 64]creation.[371] He preaches sympathy and mutual help, in an age torn by selfish individualist passions. He denounces the lust for revenge almost in the tones of a Christian preacher.[372] What heathen moralist has painted more vividly the horrors of the guilty conscience, that unseen inquisitor, with sterner more searching eyes than Rhadamanthus? Who has taught with greater power that the root of sin is in the evil thought?[373] Juvenal realises, like Tacitus and Quintilian, the curse of a tainted ancestry, and the incalculable importance of pure example in the education of youth.[374] He, who knew so well the awful secrets of Roman households, sets an immense value on the treasure of an untainted boyhood, like that of the ploughman’s son, who waits at Juvenal’s simple meal “and sighs for his mother, and the little cottage, and his playmates the kids.”[375] Observation of character had also taught him the fatal law that the downward path in conduct, once entered on, is seldom retraced. And this moral insight seems to come to Juvenal not from any consciously held philosophic doctrine, nor from a settled religious faith. His faith, like that of many of his time, was probably of the vaguest. He scorns and detests the Eastern worships which were pouring in like a flood, and carrying away even loose women of the world.[376] He pillories the venal star-reader from the East and the Jewish hag who interprets dreams. But he has also scant respect for classic mythologies, and regrets the simple, long-gone age, before heaven became crowded with divinities, before Saturn had exchanged the diadem for the sickle, when Juno was still a little maid,[377] when the terrors of Tartarus, the wheel, the vulture, and the lash of the Furies had not taken the place of a simple natural conscience.[378]
Juvenal’s moral tone then appears to unite the spirit of two different ages. In some of his later Satires you catch the accent of the age which was just opening when Juvenal began to write, its growing sense of the equality and brotherhood of man, its cosmopolitan morality, its ideals of spiritual culture. But there are other elements in Juvenal, derived from old Roman [pg 65]prejudice and conventionality, or the result of personal temperament and experience, which are quite as prominent. Juvenal is an utter pessimist about his time, more extreme even than Tacitus. His age, if we believe him, has attained the climax of corruption, and posterity will never improve upon its finished depravity.[379] His long practice as a declaimer had given him a habit of exaggeration, and of aiming rather at rhetorical brilliancy than truth. Whole passages in his poems read like declamatory exercises turned into verse.[380] A mere hanger-on of great society, one of the obscure crowd who flocked to the rich man’s levée, and knowing the life of the aristocracy only by remote observation or the voice of scandalous gossip, he hardly deserves the implicit trust which has been often accorded to his indictments of the society of his day. His generalisations are of the most sweeping kind; the colours are all dark. He thinks that the number of decent people in his day is infinitesimally small. And yet we may reasonably suspect, from his own evidence, that he often generalised from single cases, that he treated abnormal specimens as types. His moral ideals cannot have been a monopoly of his own. In the palace of Nero in the worst days, there was a pure Octavia as well as a voluptuous Poppaea. The wife and mother of the gross Vitellius were women of spotless fame.[381] And in reading the fierce, unmeasured declamation of Juvenal, we should never forget that he knew nothing personally of Pliny or Tacitus, or of the circle which surrounded Verginius Rufus and Spurinna. He has the same pessimist theory of human declension which was held by Seneca and by Tacitus. Every form of crime and sensuality has been rampant since Rome lost the treasure of poverty, since the days when silver shone only on the Roman’s arms.[382] Juvenal’s ideal lies in that mythical past when a Curius, thrice consul, strode homeward from the hills, mattock on shoulder, to a meal of home-grown herbs and bacon served on earthenware.[383] It is the luxury of the conquered lands which has relaxed the Roman fibre, which has introduced a false standard of [pg 66]life, degraded great houses, and flooded the city with an alien crew of astrologers and grammarians, parasites and pimps.