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From the name of Tacitus that of Juvenal is inseparable. The pictures drawn of the Empire by the historian and the satirist are in such striking accordance that they create a greater plausibility for the common view they hold than could be given by any single representation; and while Juvenal lends additional weight and colour to the Tacitean presentment of the imperial legend, he acquires from it in return an importance which could hardly otherwise have been sustained by his exaggerated and glaring rhetoric.
As regards the life and personality of the last great Roman satirist we are in all but total ignorance. Several lives of him exist which are confused and contradictory in detail. He was born at Aquinum, probably in the reign of Nero; an inscription on a little temple of Ceres, dedicated by him there, indicates that he had served in the army as commander of a Dalmatian cohort, and was superintendent (as one of the chief men of the town) of the civic worship paid to Vespasian after his deification. The circumstance of his banishment for offence given to an actor who was high in favour with the reigning Emperor is well authenticated; but neither its place nor its time can be fixed. It appears from the Satires themselves that they were written late in life; we are informed that he reached his eightieth year, and lived into the reign of Antoninus Pius. Martial, by whom he is repeatedly mentioned, alludes to him only as a rhetorician, not as a satirist. The sixteen satires (of which the last is, perhaps, not genuine) were published at intervals under Trajan and Hadrian. They fall into two groups; the first nine, which are at once the most powerful and the least agreeable, being separated by a considerable interval of years from the others, in which a certain softening of tone and a tendency to dwell on the praise of virtue more than on the ignoble details of vice is united with a failing power that marks the approach of senility.
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| Juvenal: as Roman Poet |
Juvenal is the most savage—one might almost say the most brutal—of all the Roman satirists. Lucilius, when he "scourged the town," did so in the high spirits and voluble diction of a comparatively simple age. Horace soon learned to drop the bitterness which appears in his earlier satires, and to make them the vehicle for his gentle wisdom and urbane humour. The writing of Persius was that of a student who gathered the types he satirised from books rather than from life. Juvenal brought to his task not only a wide knowledge of the world—or, at least, of the world of the capital—but a singular power of mordant phrase, and a mastery over crude and vivid effect that keeps the reader suspended between disgust and admiration. In the commonplaces of morality, though often elevated and occasionally noble, he does not show any exceptional power or insight; but his graphic realism, combined (as realism often is) with a total absence of all but the grimmest forms of humour, makes his verses cut like a knife. Facit indignatio versum, he truly says of his own work; with far less flexibility, he has all the remorselessness of Swift. That singular product of the last days of paganism, the epigrammatist Palladas of Alexandria, is the only ancient author who shows the same spirit. Of his earlier work the second and ninth satires, and a great part of the sixth, have a cold prurience and disgustingness of detail, that even Swift only approaches at his worst moments. Yet the sixth satire, at all events, is an undeniable masterpiece; however raw the colour, however exaggerated the drawing, his pictures of Roman life have a force that stamps them permanently on the imagination; his Legend of Bad Women, as this satire might be called, has gone far to make history.
It is in the third satire that his peculiar gift of vivid painting finds its best and easiest scope. In this elaborate indictment of the life of the capital, put into the mouth of a man who is leaving it for a little sleepy provincial town, he draws a picture of the Rome he knew, its social life and its physical features, its everyday sights and sounds, that brings it before us more clearly and sharply than even the Rome of Horace or Cicero. The drip of the water from the aqueduct that passed over the gate from which the dusty squalid Appian Way stretched through its long suburb; the garret under the tiles where, just as now, the pigeons sleeked themselves in the sun and the rain drummed on the roof; the narrow crowded streets, half choked with builders' carts, ankle-deep in mud, and the pavement ringing under the heavy military boots of guardsmen; the tavern waiters trotting along with a pyramid of hot dishes on their head; the flowerpots falling from high window ledges; night, with the shuttered shops, the silence broken by some sudden street brawl, the darkness shaken by a flare of torches as some great man, wrapped in his scarlet cloak, passes along from a dinner-party with his long train of clients and slaves: these scenes live for us in Juvenal, and are perhaps the picture of ancient Rome that is most abidingly impressed on our memory. The substance of the satire is familiar to English readers from the fine copy of Johnson, whose London follows it closely, and is one of the ablest and most animated modern imitations of a classical original. The same author's noble poem on the Vanity of Human Wishes is a more free, but equally spirited rendering of the tenth satire, which stands at the head of the later portion of Juvenal's work. In this, and in those of the subsequent satires which do not show traces of declining power, notably the eleventh and thirteenth, the rhetoric is less gaudy and the thought rises to a nobler tone.
The fine passage at the end of the tenth satire, where he points out what it is permitted mankind to pray for, and that in the thirteenth, where he paints the torments of conscience in the unpunished sinner, have something in them which combines the lofty ardour of Lucretius with the subtle psychological insight of Horace, and to readers in all ages have been, as they still remain, a powerful influence over conduct. Equally elevated in tone, and with a temperate gravity peculiar to itself, is the part of the fourteenth satire which deals with the education of the young. We seem to hear once more in it the enlightened eloquence of Quintilian; in the famous Maxima debetur puero reverentia he sums up in a single memorable phrase the whole spirit of the instructor and the moralist. The allusions to childhood here and elsewhere show Juvenal on his most pleasing side; his rhetorical vices had not infected the real simplicity of his nature, or his admiration for goodness and innocence. In his power over trenchant expression he rivals Tacitus himself. Some of his phrases, like the one just quoted, have obtained a world-wide currency, and even reached the crowning honour of habitual misquotation; his Hoc volo sic iubeo, his Mens Sana in corpore sano, his Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? are more familiar than all but the best-known lines of Virgil and Horace. But perhaps his most characteristic lines are rather those where his moral indignation breaks forth in a sort of splendid violence quite peculiar to himself; lines like—
Et propter vitam vivendi perdere causas, or—Magnaque numinibus vota exaudita malignis,
in which the haughty Roman language is still used with unimpaired weight and magnificence.