Chapter XII Juvenal
Our knowledge of the life of the most famous of Roman satirists is strangely unsatisfactory. Many so-called lives of Juvenal have come down to us, but they are confused, contradictory, inadequate, and unreliable.683 His own work and allusions in other writers help us but little in our attempt to reconstruct the story of the poet’s life.
Only by investigating the dates within which the satires seem to fall is it possible to arrive at some idea of the dates within which falls the life of their author. The satires were published in five books at different times. The first book (1-5), which is full of allusions to the tyranny of Domitian, cannot have been published before 100 A.D., since the first satire contains an allusion to the condemnation of Marius Priscus,684 which took place in that year. The fifth book (13-16) must, from references in the thirteenth and fifteenth685 satires to the year 127, have been published not much later than that date. The publication of the satires falls, therefore, between 100 and 130.
With these data it is possible to approach the question of the dates of Juvenal’s birth and death. The main facts to guide us are the statements of the best of the biographies that he did not begin to write satire till on the confines of middle age, that even then he delayed to publish, and that he died at the age of eighty.686 The inference is that he was born between 50 and 60 A. D., and died between 130 and 140 A. D.687
As to the facts of his life we are on little firmer ground. But concerning his name and birthplace there is practical certainty. Decimus Junius Juvenalis688 was born at Aquinum,689 a town of Latium, and is said to have been the son or adopted son of a rich freedman. His education was of the usual character, literary and rhetorical, and was presumably carried out at Rome.690 He acquired thus early in youth a taste for rhetoric that never left him. For he is said to have practised declamation up till middle age, not with a view to obtaining a position as professor of rhetoric or as advocate, but from sheer love of the art.691 It is probable that he combined his passion for rhetoric with service as an officer in the army. Not only does he show considerable intimacy in his satires with a soldier’s life,692 but interesting external evidence is afforded by an inscription discovered near Aquinum. It runs:
C_ere_ri. Sacrvm D. _iv_nivs. Ivvenalis Trib. Coh. I. Delmatarvm II. Vir. Qvinq. Flamen Divi. Vespasiani Vovit. Dedicav_itq_ve Sva Pec
If this inscription refers, as well it may, to the poet, it will follow that he served as tribune of the first Dalmatian cohort, probably in Britain,694 held high municipal office in his native town, and was priest of the deified Vespasian. But the praenomen is wanting in the original, and the inscription may have been erected not by the satirist but by one of his kinsfolk. That he spent the greater portion of his life at Rome is evident from his satires. Of his friends we know little. Umbricius, Persicus, Catullus, and Calvinus695 are mere names. Of Quintilian696 he speaks with great respect, and may perhaps have studied under him; of Statius he writes with enthusiasm, but there is no evidence that he had done more than be present at that poet’s recitations.697 Martial, however, was a personal friend, and writes affectionately of him and to him in three of his epigrams.698 Unlike Martial, whose life was a continual struggle against poverty, Juvenal, though he had clearly endured some of the discomforts and degradations involved by a client’s attendance on his rich patronus, was a man of some means, possessing an estate at Aquinum,699 a country house at Tibur,700 and a house at Rome.701 At what date precisely he began to write is uncertain. We are told that his first effort was a brief poem attacking the actor Paris, which he afterwards embodied in the seventh satire. But it was long before he ventured to read his satires even to his intimate friends.702 This suggests that portions, at any rate, of the satires of the first book were composed during the reign of Domitian.703 Juvenal had certainly every reason for concealing their existence till after the tyrant’s death. The first satire was probably written later to form a preface to the other four, and the whole book may have been published in 101. It is noteworthy, however, that Martial, writing to him in that year, mentions merely his gifts as a declaimer, and seems not to know him as a satirist. The second book, containing only the sixth satire, was probably published about 116, since it contains allusions to earthquakes in Asia and to a comet boding ill to Parthia and Armenia (l. 407-12). Such a comet was visible in Rome in the autumn of 115, on the eve of Trajan’s campaign against Parthia, while in December an earthquake did great damage to the town of Antioch. The third book (7-9) opens with an elaborate compliment to Hadrian as the patron of literature at Rome. As Hadrian succeeded to the principate in 117 and left Rome for a tour of the provinces in 121, this book must fall somewhere between our dates. The fourth book (10-12) contains no indication as to its date, but must lie between the publication of the third book and of the fifth (after 127). Beyond these facts it is hardly possible to go in our reconstruction of the poet’s life. As far as may be judged it was an uneventful career save for one great calamity. The ancient biographies assert that Juvenal’s denunciation of actors embodied in the seventh satire offended an actor who was the favourite of the princeps. They are supported by Apollinaris Sidonius,704 who speaks of Juvenal as the ‘exile-victim of an actor’s anger’, and by Johannes Malala.705 The latter writer, with certain of the ancient biographies, identifies the actor with Paris, the favourite of Domitian; others, again, say that the poet was banished by Nero706—a manifestly absurd statement—others by Trajan,707 while our best authority asserts that he was eighty years old when banished, and that he died of grief and mortification.708 The place of exile is variously given. Most of the biographies place it in Egypt, the best of them asserting that he was given a military command in that province.709 Others mention Britain,710 others the Pentapolis of Libya.711 Amid such discrepancies it is impossible to give any certain answer. But it is certain that the actor who caused Juvenal’s banishment was not Paris, who was put to death by Domitian as early as 83, and almost equally certain that Domitian is guiltless of the poet’s exile. It is, however, possible that he was banished by Trajan or Hadrian, though it would surprise us to find Trajan, for all the debauchery of his private life, so far under the influence of an actor712 as to sacrifice a Roman citizen to his displeasure; while as regards Hadrian it is noteworthy that the very satire said to have offended the pantomimus contains an eloquent panegyric of that emperor. Further, it is hard to believe the story that Juvenal was banished to Egypt at the advanced age of eighty under the pretext of a military command. The problem is insoluble.713 The most that can be said is that the persistence of the tradition gives it some claim to credibility, though the details handed down to us are wholly untrustworthy, and probably little better than clumsy inferences from passages in the satires.
The scope of Juvenal’s work and the motives that spur him are set forth in the first satire. He is weary of the deluge of trivial and mechanical verse poured out by the myriad poetasters of the day:
Still shall I hear and never quit the score,
Stunned with hoarse Codrus’ Theseid, o’er and o’er?
Shall this man’s elegies and t’other’s play
Unpunished murder a long summer’s day?
… since the world with writing is possest,
I’ll versify in spite; and do my best
To make as much waste-paper as the rest.714
He will write in a different vein from his rivals. Satire shall be his theme. In such an age, when virtue is praised and vice practised, the age of the libertine, the parvenu, the forger, the murderer, it is hard not to write satire. ‘Facit indignatio versum!’715 he cries. ‘All the daily life of Rome shall be my theme’:
quidquid agunt homines votum timor ira voluptas gaudia discursus nostri est farrago libelli.716
What human kind desires and what they shun,
Rage, passion, pleasure, impotence of will,
Shall this satirical collection fill.
DRYDEN.
Never was vice so rampant; luxury has become monstrous; the rich lord lives in pampered and selfish ease, while those poor mortals, his clients, jostle together to receive the paltry dole of the sportula; that is all the help they will get from their patron:
No age can go beyond us; future times
Can add no further to the present crimes.
Our sons but the same things can wish and do;
Vice is at stand and at the highest flow.
Thou, Satire, spread thy sails, take all the winds that blow.717
And yet the satirist must be cautious; the days are past when a Lucilius could lash Rome at his will:
When Lucilius brandishes his pen
And flashes in the face of guilty men,
A cold sweat stands in drops on every part,
And rage succeeds to tears, revenge to smart.
Muse, be advised; ’tis past considering time,
When entered once the dangerous lists of rhyme;
Since none the living villains dare implead,
Arraign them in the persons of the dead.718
No better preface has ever been written; it gives a perfect summary of the motives, the objects, and the methods of the poet’s work in language which for vigour and brilliance he never surpassed. The closing lines show us his literary parentage. It is Lucilius who inspires him; it is the fierce invective of the father of Roman satire that appeals to him. Lucilius had scourged Rome, when the inroads of Hellenism and oriental luxury, the fruits of foreign conquest, were beginning to make themselves felt. To Juvenal it falls to denounce the triumph of these corroding influences. He has nothing of the almost pathetic philosophic detachment of Persius, nor of the easy-going compromise of Horace. He does not palter with problems of right and wrong, nor hesitate over his moral judgements; casuistry is wholly alien to his temper. It is indignation makes the verse, and from this fact, together with his rhetorical training, his chief merits and his chief failings spring. He introduces no novelty into satire save the almost unvarying bitterness and ferocity of his tone. Like Horace and Persius, he employs the dactylic hexameter to the exclusion of other metres, while, owing in the main to his taste for declamation, he is far more sparing in the use of the dialogue-form than either of his predecessors.
Before further discussing his general characteristics, it is necessary to take a brief survey of the remaining satires. The second and ninth are savage and, as was almost inevitable, obscene denunciations of unnatural vice. In the third, the most orderly in arrangement and the most brilliant in execution of all his satires, he describes all the dangers and horrors of life at Rome. Umbricius, a friend of the poet, is leaving the city. It is no place for a man of honour; it has become a city for Greeks; the worthless and astute Graeculus is everywhere predominant, and, stained though he be with a thousand vices, has outwitted the native-born, and, by the arts of the panderer and the flatterer, has made himself their master. The poor are treated like slaves. Houses fall, or are burned with fire. Sleep is impossible, so loud with traffic are the streets. By day it is scarcely safe to walk abroad for fear of being crushed by one of the great drays that throng the city; by night there are the lesser perils of slops and broken crockery cast from the windows, the greater perils of roisterers and thieves. Rome is no place for Umbricius. He must go.
The fourth satire opens with a violent attack on the parvenu Egyptian Crispinus, so powerful at the court of Domitian, and goes on by a somewhat clumsy transition to tell the story of the huge turbot caught near Ancona and presented to the emperor. So large was it that a cabinet council must needs be called to decide what should be done with it. This affords excuse for an inimitable picture of Domitian’s servile councillors. At last it is decided that the turbot is to be served whole and a special dish to be constructed for it. ‘Ah! why,’ the poet concludes, ‘did not Domitian devote himself entirely to such trifles as these?’
In the fifth satire Juvenal returns to the subject of the hardships and insults which the poor client must endure. He pictures the host sitting in state with the best of everything set before him and served in the choicest manner, while the unhappy client must be content with food and drink of the coarsest kind. Virro, the rich man, does this not because he is parsimonious, but because the humiliation of his client amuses his perverted mind. But the satirist does not spare the client, whose servile complaisance leads him to put up with such treatment. ‘Be a man!’ he cries, ‘and sooner beg on the streets than degrade yourself thus.’
The sixth satire, the longest of the collection, is a savage denunciation of the vices of womankind. The various types of female degradation are revealed to our gaze with merciless and often revolting portrayal. The unchastity of woman is the main theme, but ranked with the adulteress and the wanton are the murderess of husband or of child, the torturer of the slave, the client of the fortune-teller or the astrologer, and even the more harmless female athlete and blue-stocking. For vigour and skill the satire ranks among Juvenal’s best, but it is marred by wanton grossness and at times almost absurd exaggeration.
The seventh satire deals with the difficulties besetting a literary career. It opens with a dexterous compliment to Hadrian; the poet qualifies his complaints by saying that they apply only to the past. The accession of Hadrian has swept all the storm-clouds from the author’s sky. But in the unhappy days but lately passed away, the poet’s lot was most miserable. His work brings him no livelihood; his patron’s liberality goes but a little way. The historian is in no less parlous plight. The advocate makes some show of wealth, but it is, as a rule, the merest show; only the man already wealthy succeeds at the bar; many a struggling lawyer goes bankrupt in the struggle to advertise himself and push his way. The teacher of rhetoric and the school-master receive but a miserable fee, yet they have all the drudgery of discipline and all the responsibility of moulding the characters of the young placed upon their shoulders. They are expected to be omniscient, and yet they starve.
The eighth satire treats the familiar theme that without virtue birth is of small account. Many examples of the degeneracy of the aristocracy are given, some trivial, some grave, but above all the satirist denounces the cruelty and oppression of nobly-born provincial governors. He concludes in his noblest vein in praise of the great plebeians of the past, Cicero, Marius, the Decii, and Servius Tullius. It is in deeds, not in titles, that true nobility lies. Better be the son of Thersites and possess the valour of Achilles, than live the life of a Thersites and boast Achilles for your sire.
The eighth satire may be regarded as the presage of a distinct change of type. Instead of the vivid pictures of Roman life and the almost dramatic representation of vice personified, Juvenal seems to turn for inspiration to the scholastic declamation which had fascinated his youth. Moral problems are treated in a more abstract way, and the old fierce onset of indignation, though it has by no means disappeared, seems to have lost something of its former violence. There are also traces of declining powers, a greater tendency to digression, a lack of concentration and vigour, and even of dexterity of language. But the change is due in all probability not merely to advance in years nor to the calming and mellowing influence of old age, but also to a change that was gradually passing over the Roman world. The material for savage satire was appreciably less. Evil in its worst forms had triumphed under Domitian. With Nerva, Trajan, and Hadrian virtue began slowly and uncertainly to reclaim part of her lost dominions.
The fourth book opens with the famous tenth satire on the vanity of human wishes. What should man pray for? The theme is hackneyed and the treatment shows no special originality. But the thought is elevated, the rhetoric superb, and the verse has a resounding tread such as is only found in Persius and Juvenal among the later poets of Rome. ‘What shall man pray for?’ Power? Think of Sejanus, Pompey, Demosthenes, Cicero! To each one greatness brought his doom. Think of Hannibal and Alexander, how they, and with them all their high schemings, came to die; Long life? What? Should we pray to outlive our bodily powers, to bewail the death of our nearest and dearest, to fall from the high place where once we stood? Beauty? Beauty is beset by a thousand perils in these vile days, and rarely do beauty and chastity go hand in hand. Rather than pray for boons like these, ‘entrust thy fortune to the gods above,’ or, if pray thou must, stand confined
To health of body and content of mind;
A soul that can securely death defy,
And count it nature’s privilege to die;
Serene and manly, hardened to sustain
The load of life and exercised in pain:
Guiltless of hate and proof against desire,
That all things weighs and nothing can admire;
That dares prefer the toils of Hercules,
To dalliance, banquet, and ignoble ease.
The path to peace is virtue; what I show,
Thyself may freely on thyself bestow;
Fortune was never worshipped by the wise,
But, set aloft by fools, usurps the skies.719
In the eleventh satire we drop from these splendid heights of rhetoric; to a declamatory invitation to dinner, which affords occasion for a denunciation of the extravagant indulgence in the pleasures of the table and for the praise of the good old days when Romans clave to the simple life. The dinner to which Juvenal invites his friend will be of simple fare simply served—
You’ll have no scandal when you dine.
But honest talk and wholesome wine.
And instead of lewd dance and song, a slave shall read aloud Homer and Homer’s one rival, Vergil.
The twelfth satire opens with a thanksgiving for the escape of a friend, Catullus, from a great storm at sea, and ends with a denunciation of legacy hunters, the connecting link between these somewhat remote themes being that Juvenal, at any rate, is disinterested in his joy at his friend’s escape.
The thirteenth and fourteenth satires deal with more abstract themes, the pangs of the guilty conscience and the importance of parental example. In the first, Juvenal consoles his friend, Calvinus, who has been defrauded of a sum of money. The loss, he says, is small, and, after all, honesty is rare nowadays. Men have so little care for the gods that they shrink from no perjury. Besides, what is such loss compared with the many worse crimes that darken life. Why thirst for revenge? It is the doctrine of the common herd. Philosophy teaches otherwise. The torment of conscience will be a worse penalty than any you can inflict, and at last justice will claim its own. In the next satire, to emphasize the value of parental example, the poet illustrates his point from the vice of avarice, and finally, forgetting his original theme, lashes the avaricious man in words such as would never suggest that the question of parental example had been raised at all. It is noteworthy that throughout these two satires the poet draws his illustrations from the themes of the schools rather than from the scenes of contemporary life.
In the fifteenth satire, however, he returns to depict and discuss actual occurrences, but in how altered and strange a manner. His theme is a case of cannibalism in Egypt,720 the result of a collision between religious fanatics of neighbouring townships. The aged poet spurs himself into one last fury against the hated Oriental, regardless of the fact that the denunciation of cannibalism to a civilized audience must necessarily be insipid. Last comes a fragment expatiating bitterly on the shameful advantages of a military career. The unhappy civilian assaulted by a soldier cannot get redress, for the case must be heard in camp before a bench of soldiers. The soldier, on the other hand, can get summary settlement of all his disputes, and alone of Romans is exempt from the patria potestas, can control his earnings and bequeath them to whom he will. At this point the satire breaks off abruptly, and we have no means of judging the extent of the loss. It is a striking reversion to his earlier manner. Once more the satire takes the form of a series of sketches from actual life.
Both of these satires, notably the fifteenth, show a marked falling off alike in style and matter. Both, in fact, have been branded as spurious, the latter from times as early as those of the scholia. But there is no real ground for such a suspicion. Both satires have all the characteristics of Juvenal, excepting only the vigour and brilliance of his earlier days. No poet’s powers are proof against the advance of old age, and there is no vein of poetry more exhausting or more easily exhausted than satire. And, as has already been remarked, there are signs of a falling away before these satires are reached. Even the famous tenth satire, for all its indisputable greatness, does not demand or reveal, such special gifts of style and observation as the first and third. It is less in touch with actual life: it is a theme from the schools, and the illustrations, effective as they are, are as trite as the theme itself. Were it his only work, the tenth satire would give Juvenal high rank among Roman poets: it will always, thanks to the brilliance of its rhetoric and the wide applicability of its moral, be his most popular work: it is not his highest achievement.
It will have been obvious from this brief survey that the themes chosen by Juvenal are for the most part of a commonplace nature. It could hardly be otherwise. Satire, to be effective, must choose obvious themes. But in some respects the treatment of them is surprisingly commonplace. There is little freshness or originality about Juvenal’s way of thinking. His morality is neither satisfying nor profound. His ideal is the old narrow Roman republican ideal of a chaste, vigorous, and unluxurious life, wherein publicity is for man alone, while woman is confined to the cares of the family and the household; the ideal of a society wholly Italian and free-born, untainted by the importations of Greece and Asia; of a state stern and exclusive, though just and merciful, sparing the subject and beating down the proud. The nobility of this ideal is not to be denied, but it is inadequate because it is wholly unpractical. There is no denying that the emancipation of women had led to gross evils, some of them imperilling the very existence of the State; nor can it be doubted that much of the Greek influence had been wholly for the bad, and that in many cases the introduction of the cults of the East served merely to cloak debauchery. The rich freedman, also, for whom Juvenal reserves his bitterest shafts, was often of vicious and degraded character and had risen to power by repulsive means. But there is another side to the picture, the existence of which Juvenal sometimes, by his vehemence, seems to deny. The freedman class supplied some of the most valuable of civil servants, and many must have been worthy of their emancipation and of their rise to power.721 There was a higher Hellenism, which Juvenal ignored. The intellectual movements of the Empire still found their chief source in Greece, and the great Sophistic movement was already setting in, as a result of which Greek literature was to revive and the Greek language to supersede the Latin as the chief vehicle of literary expression even at Rome itself. The greater freedom accorded to women had its compensations; in spite of Juvenal, woman does not become worse or less attractive because she is cultured and well educated, and if there was much dissipation and debauchery in the high society of his day, even high society contained many noble women of fine intellect and pure character. The spread of Roman citizenship and the breaking down of the old exclusive tradition were potent factors for good in the history of civilization. It may be urged in Juvenal’s defence that satire must necessarily deal with the darker side of life, that his silence as to the better and more hopeful elements in society does not mean that he ignored them, and that it is absurd to attack a satirist because he is not a scientific social historian. All this is true; but it is possible to have plenty of material for the bitterest satire and to indict gross and rampant vice without leaving the impression that the life of the day has no redeeming elements, without generalizing extravagantly from the vices of one section of society, even though that section be large and influential. The weakness of Juvenal is that he is too retrospective, both in his praise and in his blame. He dare not satirize the living, but will attack the dead. But it would be wrong to assume that in the dead he always attacks types of the living. There is always the impression that he is in reality attacking the first century rather than the second, the reigns of Nero and Domitian rather than the society governed by Trajan and Hadrian. He had lived through a night of terror and would not recognize the signs of a new dawn. Directing his attention too exclusively on Rome itself and on the past, he forgets the larger world and the future hope. It is to the impossible Rome of the past that he turns his eyes for inspiration. Hence comes his hatred, often merely racial, for Greek and Asiatic importations,722 hence his dislike and contempt for the new woman. Moreover, he had lived on the fringe of high society and not in it; he had drunk in the bitterness of the client’s life, and had lived in the enveloping atmosphere of scandal that always surrounds society for those who are excluded from it. A man of an acrid and jealous temperament, easily angered and not readily appeased, he yields too lightly and indiscriminately to that indignation, which, he tells us, is the fountain-head of all he writes. Satire should be something more than a wild torrent sweeping away obstacles great and small with one equal violence; it should have its laughing shallows and its placid deeps. But Juvenal’s laughter rings harsh and wild, and wounds as deeply as his invective; he drives continually before the fierce gale of his spirit, and there are no calm havens where he may rest and contemplate the ideal that so much denunciation implies. He knows no gradations: all failings suffer beneath the same remorseless lash. The consul Lateranus has a taste for driving: bad taste, perhaps, yet hardly criminal. But Juvenal thunders at him as though he were guilty of high treason (viii. 146):
praeter maiorum cineres atque ossa volucri carpento rapitur pinguis Lateranus, et ipse, ipse rotam adstringit sufflamine mulio consul, nocte quidem, sed Luna videt, sed sidera testes intendunt oculos. finitum tempus honoris cum fuerit, clara Lateranus luce flagellum sumet et occursum numquam trepidabit amici iam senis.
See! by his great progenitor’s remains
Fat Lateranus sweeps, with loosened reins.
Good Consul! he no pride of office feels,
But stoops, himself, to clog his headlong wheels.
‘But this is all by night,’ the hero cries,
Yet the moon sees! yet the stars stretch their eyes
Pull on your shame!—A few short moments wait,
And Damasippus quits the pomp of state:
Then, proud the experienced driver to display,
He mounts the chariot in the face of day,
Whirls, with bold front, his grave associate by,
And jerks his whip, to catch the senior’s eye.
GIFFORD.
Elsewhere (i. 55-62) the ‘horsy’ youth is spoken of as worse than the husband who connives at his wife’s dishonour and pockets the reward of her shame. Among the monstrous women of the sixth satire we come with a shock of surprise upon the learned lady (434):
illa tamen gravior, quae cum discumbere coepit laudat Vergilium, periturae ignoscit Elissae, committit vates et comparat, inde Maronem atque alia parte in trutina suspendit Homerum.
But of all plagues the greatest is untold;
The book-learned wife, in Greek and Latin bold;
The critic dame, who at her table sits,
Homer and Virgil quotes and weighs their wits,
And pities Dido’s agonizing fits.
DRYDEN.
She figures strangely among the poisoners and adulteresses. Juvenal is misogynist by temperament as well as by conviction. Nero is a matricide like Orestes, but—
in scaena numquam cantavit Orestes, Troica non scripsit. quid enim Verginius armis debuit ulcisci magis aut cum Vindice Galba, quod Nero tam saeva crudaque tyrannide fecit? (viii. 220).
Besides, Orestes in his wildest mood
Sung on no public stage, no Troics wrote.—
This topped his frantic crimes! This roused mankind!
For what could Galba, what Virginius find,
In the dire annals of that bloody reign,
Which called for vengeance in a louder strain?
GIFFORD.
It is almost a crime to be a foreigner. The Greek is a liar, a base flatterer, a monster of lust, a traitor, a murderer.723 The Jew is the sordid victim of a narrow and degrading superstition.724 The Oriental is the defilement of Rome; worst of all are the Egyptians;725 they even eat each other. The freedman, the nouveau riche, the parvenu[726] are hated with all a Roman’s hatred. The old patriotism of the city state is not yet merged in the wider imperialism. It is bitter to hear one of alien blood say ‘Civis Romanus sum’.
This strange violence and lack of proportion are due in part to the poet’s rhetorical training, which had warped still further a naturally biased temperament. He had been taught and loved to use the language of hyperbole. And he had lived through the principate of Domitian; it was that above all else which made him cry difficile est saturam non scribere. To this same tendency to exaggeration may be in part attributed the extreme grossness of so much of his work. It is true that vices flaunted themselves before his eyes that it would be hard to satirize without indecency. There is excuse to some extent for the second, sixth, and ninth satires. But even there Juvenal oversteps the mark and is often guilty of coarseness for coarseness’ sake. It is easy to plead the custom of the age,727 but it is doubtful whether such pleading affords any real palliation for a writer who sets out to be a moralist. It is easy in an access of admiration to say that Juvenal is never prurient: but it is hard to be genuinely convinced that such a statement is true, or that Juvenal’s coarseness is never more than mere plain speaking.728
For not a few readers, this tenseness of language, this violence of judgement, and this occasional unclean handling of the unclean, make Juvenal an exhausting and a depressing poet to read in any large quantity at a time. Worse still, they lead the reader at times to harbour doubts as to the genuineness of Juvenal’s indignation. Such doubts are not in reality justifiable. Juvenal sometimes goads himself into inappropriate frenzies and sometimes betrays a suspiciously close acquaintance with the most disgusting details of the worst vices of the age. But though he had something of the unreality of the rhetorician, and though his character may, perhaps, not have been free from serious blemish, he is never a hypocrite; nor, though he paints exclusively the darkest side of society, is there the least reason to accuse him of culpable misrepresentation of actual facts. He has selected the material most suited to his peculiar genius: we may complain of his principle of selection, and of his tendency to generalize. There our criticism must end.
These defects are largely the defects of his qualities and may be readily forgiven. We have Pliny the younger and the inscriptions to modify his sombre picture. When all is said, Juvenal had a matchless field for satire and matchless gifts, against which his defects will not weigh in the balance for a moment. His unrivalled capacity for declamation, for mordant epigram and scathing wit, more than compensate for his often ill-balanced ferocity; the extraordinary vividness of his pictures of the life of Rome makes up for lack of perspective and proportion, the richness and variety of his imagination for its too frequent superficiality, the vigour and trenchancy of his blows for the absence of the rapier thrust, the fervour of his teaching for its lack of breadth and depth. These qualities make him the greatest of the satirists of Rome, if not of the world.
It is, perhaps, his vividness that makes the most immediate impression. It would be hard to find in any literature a writer with such a power to make the scenes described live before his readers. The salient features of a scene or character are seized at once.729 There is no irrelevant detail; the picture may be crowded, but it is never obscure; if there is a fault it is that the colouring is sometimes too crude and glaring to please. But before such word-painting as the description of Domitian’s privy council criticism is dumb:
nec melior vultu quamvis ignobilis ibat Rubrius, offensae veteris reus atque tacendae. * * * * * Montani quoque venter adest abdomine tardus, et matutino sudans Crispinua amomo quantum vix redolent duo funera, saevior illo Pompeius tenui iugulos aperire susurro, et qui vulturibus servabat viscera Dacis Fuscus marmorea meditatus proelia villa, et cum mortifero prudens Veiento Catullo, qui numquam visae flagrabat amore puellae, grande et conspicuum nostro quoque tempore monstrum, caecus adulator, dirusque a ponte satelles dignus Aricinos qui mendicaret ad axes blandaque devexae iactaret basia raedae (iv. 104).
Rubrius, though not, like these, of noble race,
Followed with equal terror in his face;
* * * * *
Montanus’ belly next, and next appeared
The legs on which that monstrous pile was reared.
Crispinus followed, daubed with more perfume,
Thus early! than two funerals consume.
Then bloodier Pompey, practised to betray,
And hesitate the noblest lives away.
Then Fuscus, who in studious pomp at home,
Planned future triumphs for the arms of Rome.
Blind to the event! those arms a different fate,
Inglorious wounds and Dacian vultures wait.
Last, sly Veiento with Catullus came,
Deadly Catullus, who at beauty’s name
Took fire, although unseen: a wretch, whose crimes
Struck with amaze even those prodigious times.
A base, blind parasite, a murderous lord,
From the bridge-end raised to the council-board,
Yet fitter still to dog the traveller’s heels,
And whine for alms to the descending wheels.
GIFFORD.
Figure after figure they live before us, till the procession culminates with the crowning horror of the blind delator, L. Valerius Catullus Messalinus. Equally vivid is Juvenal’s description of places. There is the rude theatre of the country town with its white-robed audience en négligé:—
ipsa dierum festorum herboso colitur si quando theatro maiestas tandemque redit ad pulpita notum exodium, cum personae pallentis hiatum in gremio matris formidat rusticus infans, aequales habitus illic similesque videbis orchestram et populum, clari velamen honoris sufficiunt tunicae summis aedilibus albae (iii. 172).
Some distant parts of Italy are known,
Where none but only dead men wear a gown,
On theatres of turf, in homely state,
Old plays they act, old feasts they celebrate;
* * * * *
The mimic yearly gives the same delights;
And in the mother’s arms the clownish infant frights.
Their habits (undistinguished by degrees)
Are plain alike; the same simplicity
Both on the stage and in the pit you see.
In his white cloak the magistrate appears;
The country bumpkin the same livery wears.
DRYDEN.
There is the poor gentleman’s garret high on the topmost story of some tottering insula, close beneath the tiles, where the doves nest:
lectus erat Codro Procula minor, urceoli sex ornamentum abaci nec non et parvulus infra cantharus, et recubans sub eodem marmore Chiro iamque vetus graecos servabat cista libellos, et divina opici rodebant carmina mures (iii. 203).
Codrus had but one bed, so short to boot,
That his short wife’s short legs go dangling out
His cupboard’s head six earthen pitchers graced,
Beneath them was his trusty tankard placed;
And to support this noble plate, there lay
A bending Chiron cast from honest clay;
His few Greek books a rotten chest contained,
Whose covers much of mouldiness complained;
Where mice and rats devoured poetic bread,
And on heroic verse luxuriously were fed.
DRYDEN.
There is the hurrying throng of the streets of Rome with all its dangers and discomforts:
nobis properantibus opstat unda prior, magno populus premit agmine lumbos qui sequitur; ferit hic cubito, ferit assere duro alter, at hic tignum capiti incutit, ille metretam. pinguia crura luto, planta mox undique magna calcor et in digito clavus mihi militis haeret. nonne vides quanto celebretur sportula fumo? centum convivae, sequitur sua quemque culina. Corbulo vix ferret tot vasa ingentia, tot res inpositas capiti, quas recto vertice portat servulus infelix et cursu ventilat ignem. scinduntur tunicae sartae modo, longa coruscat serraco veniente abies, atque altera pinum plaustra vehunt, nutant alte populoque minantur (iii. 243).
The press before him stops the client’s pace;
The crowd that follows crush his panting sides,
And trip his heels; he walks not but he rides.
One elbows him, one jostles in the shoal,
A rafter breaks his head or chairman’s pole;
Stockinged with loads of fat town dirt he goes,
And some rogue-soldier with his hob-nailed shoes
Indents his legs behind in bloody rows.
See, with what smoke our doles we celebrate!
A hundred guests invited walk in state;
A hundred hungry slaves with their Dutch-kitchens wait:
Huge pans the wretches on their heads must bear,
Which scarce gigantic Corbulo could rear;
Yet they must walk upright beneath the load,
Nay run, and running blow the sparkling flames abroad,
Their coats from botching newly brought are torn.
Unwieldy timber-trees in waggons borne,
Stretched at their length, beyond their carriage lie,
That nod and threaten ruin from on high.
DRYDEN.
Even in the later satires, where with the advance of age this pictorial gift begins to fail him and he tends to rely rather on brilliant rhetorical treatment of philosophical commonplaces, there are still flashes of the old power. The well-known description of the fall of Sejanus in the tenth satire is in his best manner, while even the humbler picture of the rustic family of primitive Rome in the fourteenth satire shows the same firmness of touch, the same eye for vivid and direct representation:
saturabat glaebula talis patrem ipsum turbamque casae, qua feta iacebat uxor et infantes ludebant quattuor, unus vernula, tres domini, sed magnis fratribus horum a scrobe vel sulco redeuntibus altera cena amplior et grandes fumabant pultibus ollae (166).
For then the little glebe, improved with care,
Largely supplied with vegetable fare,
The good old man, the wife in childbed laid,
And four hale boys, that round the cottage played,
Three free-born, one a slave: while, on the board,
Huge porringers, with wholesome pottage stored,
Smoked for their elder brothers, who were now,
Hungry and tired, expected from the plough.
GIFFORD.
His handling of the essential weapons of satire, scathing epigram, and impetuous rhetoric, contribute equally to his success. He has the capacity of branding a character with eternal shame in a few terse trenchant lines. Who can forget the Greek adventurer of the third satire?—
grammaticus rhetor geometres pictor aliptes augur schoenobates medicus magus, omnia novit Graeculus esuriens; in caelum miseris, ibit (iii. 76);
A cook, a conjurer, a rhetorician,
A painter, pedant, a geometrician,
A dancer on the ropes and a physician;
All things the hungry Greek exactly knows,
And bid him go to heaven, to heaven he goes.
DRYDEN.
or the summary of Domitian’s reign with which he dates the story of the gigantic turbot?—
cum iam semianimum laceraret Flavius orbem
ultimus et calvo serviret Roma Neroni (iv. 37);
When the last Flavius, drunk with fury, tore
The prostrate world, which bled at every pore,
And Rome beheld, in body as in mind,
A bald-pate Nero rise to curse mankind.
GIFFORD.
or the curse upon the legacy-hunter Pacuvius?—
vivat Pacuvius quaeso vel Nestora totum, possideat quantum rapuit Nero, montibus aurum exaequet, nec amet quemquam nec ametur ab ullo (xii. 128).
Health to the man! and may he thus get more
Than Nero plundered! pile his shining store
High, mountain high: in years a Nestor prove,
And, loving none, ne’er know another’s love!
GIFFORD.
Not less mordant in a different way is the savage and sceptical melancholy of the conclusion of the second satire, where he contrasts the degenerate Roman, tainted by the foulest lusts, with the noble Romans of the past, and even with the barbarians, newly conquered, on the confines of empire (149):
esse aliquos manes et subterranea regna et contum et Stygio ranas in gurgite nigras atque una transire vadum tot milia cumba nec pueri credunt, nisi qui nondum aere lavantur. sed tu vera puta: Curius quid sentit et ambo Scipiadae, quid Fabricius manesque Camilli, quid Cremerae legio et Cannis consumpta iuventus, tot bellorum animae, quotiens hinc talis ad illos umbra venit? cuperent lustrari, si qua darentur sulpura cum taedis et si foret umida laurus. illic heu miseri traducimur. arma quidem ultra litora Iuvernae promovimus et modo captas Orcadas ac minima contentos nocte Britannos, sed quae nunc populi fiunt victoris in urbe, non faciuut illi quos vicimus.
That angry Justice formed a dreadful hell,
That ghosts in subterranean regions dwell,
That hateful Styx his sable current rolls,
And Charon ferries o’er unbodied souls,
Are now as tales or idle fables prized;
By children questioned and by men despised.
Yet these, do thou believe. What thoughts, declare,
Ye Scipios, once the thunderbolts of war!
Fabricius, Curius, great Camillus’ ghost!
Ye valiant Fabii, in yourselves an host!
Ye dauntless youths at fatal Cannae slain!
Spirits of many a brave and bloody plain!
What thoughts are yours, whene’er with feet unblest,
An unbelieving shade invades your rest?
Ye fly, to expiate the blasting view;
Fling on the pine-tree torch the sulphur blue,
And from the dripping bay dash round the lustral dew.
And yet—to these abodes we all must come,
Believe, or not, these are our final home;
Though now Ierne tremble at our sway,
And Britain, boastful of her length of day;
Though the blue Orcades receive our chain,
And isles that slumber in the frozen main.
But why of conquest boast? the conquered climes
Are free, O Rome, from thy detested crimes.
GIFFORD.
In the same bitter spirit, Umbricius is made to cry:
quid Romae faciam? mentiri nescio; librum, si malus est, nequeo laudare et poscere; motus astrorum ignoro; funus promittere patris nec volo nec possum; ranarum viscera numquam inspexi; ferre ad nuptam quae mittit adulter, quae mandat, norunt alii; me nemo ministro fur erit, atque ideo nulli comes exeo tamquam mancus et extinctae, corpus non utile, dextrae (iii. 41).
What’s Rome to me, what business have I there?
I who can neither lie nor falsely swear?
Nor praise my patron’s undeserving rhymes,
Nor yet comply with him nor with his times?
Unskilled in schemes by planets to foreshow,
Like canting rascals, how the wars will go;
I neither will nor can prognosticate
To the young gaping heir his father’s fate;
Nor in the entrails of a toad have pried,
Nor carried bawdy presents to a bride:
For want of these town-virtues, thus alone
I go conducted on my way by none;
Like a dead member from the body rent,
Maimed and unuseful to the government.
DRYDEN.
This bitterness Juvenal seasons at times with saturnine jests of a type that is all his own. Virro gives rancid oil to his poor guests as dressing to their salad:
illud enim vestris datur alveolis quod canna Micipsarum prora subvexit acuta, propter quod Romae cum Boccare nemo lavatur, quod tutos etiam facit a serpentibus atris (v. 88).
Such oil to you is thrown,
Such rancid grease, as Afric sends to town;
So strong that when her factors seek the bath,
All wind and all avoid the noisome path.
GIFFORD.
When the blind delator, Catullus Messalinus, is summoned to give his advice concerning the gigantic turbot:
nemo magis rhombum stupuit; nam plurima dixit in laevom conversus, at illi dextra iacebat belua. sic pugnas Cilicis laudabat et ictus et pegma et pueros inde ad velaria raptos (iv. 119).
None dwelt so largely on the turbot’s size,
Or raised with such applause his wondering eyes;
But to the left (O treacherous want of sight)
He poured his praise;—the fish was on the right.
Thus would he at the fencer’s matches sit,
And shout with rapture at some fancied hit;
And thus applaud the stage machinery, where
The youths were rapt aloft and lost in air.
GIFFORD.
Grimmest of all is the jest on the mushrooms set before Virro:
vilibus ancipites fungi ponentur amicis, boletus domino, sed quales Claudius edit ante illum uxoris, post quem nihil amplius edit (v. 146).
You champ on spongy toadstools, hateful treat!
Fearful of poisons in each bit you eat:
He feasts secure on mushrooms, fine as those
Which Claudius for his special eating chose,
Till one more fine, provided by his wife,
Finished at once his feasting and his life!
GIFFORD.
But Juvenal is not always bitter, nor always angry. His indignation is never absent, but takes at times a graver and a nobler tone. At times he preaches virtue directly, instead of doing so indirectly through the denunciation of vice. He has no new secret of morality to reveal, no fresh lights to throw upon problems of conduct; his advice is obvious and straightforward; neither in form nor matter is there anything paradoxical. He was no student of philosophy,730 though naturally familiar with the more important philosophic creeds and disposed by temperament to fall in with the views of the stern Stoic school. The conclusion of the tenth satire quoted above owes much to the Stoics. ‘Leave the ordering of your fortunes to the powers above. Man is dearer to them than to himself. The wise man is free from all desire, all anger and all fear of death.’731 ‘Revenge is an unworthy and degrading passion.’732 ‘Fate733 and the revolution734 of the stars in heaven rule all with unchanging law.’ All these maxims have their counterpart in the Stoic creed. But there is no need of the philosophy of the schools to guide man to the paths of virtue.
numquam aliud natura, aliud sapientia dicit (xiv. 321).
Nature and wisdom never are at strife.
GIFFORD.
Philosophy has its value, but the good man is no less good for not being a philosopher:
magna quidem, sacris quae dat praecepta libellis, victrix fortunae sapientia, ducimus autem hos quoque felices, qui ferre incommoda vitae nec iactare iugum vita didicere magistra (xiii. 19).
Wisdom, I know, contains a sovereign charm,
To vanquish fortune or at least disarm:
Blest they who walk in her unerring rule!
Nor those unblest who, tutored in life’s school,
Have learned of old experience to submit,
And lightly bear the yoke they cannot quit.
GIFFORD.
He agrees with the Stoics just because their practical teaching harmonizes so entirely with the old virtus Romana, that is his ideal.
No more profound are his religious views: he hates the alien cults that work as insidious poison in the life of Rome; he rejects the picturesque legends of the afterworld, bred of the fertile imagination of the Greeks. But he is no unbeliever:
separat hoc nos a grege mutorum, atque ideo venerabile soli sortiti ingenium divinorumque capaces atque exercendis pariendisque artibus apti sensum a caelesti demissum traximus arce, cuius egent prona et terram spectantia. mundi principio indulsit communis conditor illis tantum animas, nobis animum quoque, mutuus ut nos adfectus petere auxilium et praestare iuberet (xv. 142).
This marks our birth
The great distinction from the beasts of earth!
And therefore—gifted with superior powers
And capable of things divine—’tis ours
To learn and practise every useful art;
And from high heaven deduce that better part,
That moral sense, denied to creatures prone
And downward bent, and found with man alone!—
For He, who gave this vast machine to roll,
Breathed life in them, in us a reasoning soul:
That kindred feelings might our state improve,
And mutual wants conduct to mutual love.
GIFFORD.
God is over all and guides and guards the world, and has ordained torment of conscience and slow retribution for sin.735 Yet Juvenal does not definitely reject the gods of his native land; nor do these exalted beliefs cause him to refuse sacrifice to Jupiter, Juno, Minerva, and his household gods.736 It is the creed, not of a theologian, but of a man with high ideals, a staunch patriotism, and a deep reverence for the past.
But this lack of profundity and philosophical training does not, as may be inferred from passages already quoted, prevent him from being intensely effective as a moral teacher. His platitudes are none the worse for not having a Stoic label and all the better for their simplicity and directness of expression. They do not reveal the hunger and thirst after righteousness that breathe from the lines of Persius, but they have at least an equal appeal to the plain man, and they are matchlessly expressed. His pleading against revenging the wrong done, if not on the very highest moral plane, possesses a grave dignity and beauty that brings it straight home to the heart:
at vindicta bonum vita iucundius ipsa. nempe hoc indocti, quorum praecordia nullis interdum aut levibus videas flagrantia causis. * * * * * Chrysippus non dicet idem nec mite Thaletis ingenium dulcique senex vicinus Hymetto, qui partem acceptae saeva inter vincla cicutae accusatori nollet dare. plurima felix paulatim vitia atque errores exuit omnes, prima docet rectum sapientia. quippe minuti semper et infirmi est animi exiguique voluptas ultio. continuo sic collige, quod vindicta nemo magis gaudet quam femina. cur tamen hos tu evasisse putes, quos diri conscia facti mens habet attonitos et surdo verbere caedit occultum quatiente animo tortore flagellum? poena autem vehemens ac multo saevior illis quas et Caedicius gravis invenit et Rhadamanthus, nocte dieque suum gestare in pectore testem (xiii. 180).
‘Revenge,’ they say, and I believe their words,
‘A pleasure sweeter far than life affords.’
Who say? The fools, whose passions prone to ire
At slightest causes or at none take fire.
… … … Chrysippus said not so;
Nor Thales, to our frailties clement still;
Nor that old man, by sweet Hymettus’ hill,
Who drank the poison with unruffled soul,
And, dying, from his foes withheld the bowl.
Divine philosophy! by whose pure light
We first distinguish, then pursue the right,
Thy power the breast from every error frees
And weeds out every error by degrees:—
Illumined by thy beam, revenge we find
The abject pleasure of an abject mind,
And hence so dear to poor, weak womankind.
But why are those, Calvinus, thought to ‘scape
Unpunished, whom in every fearful shape
Guilt still alarms, and conscience ne’er asleep
Wounds with incessant strokes ‘not loud but deep’,
While the vexed mind, her own tormentor, plies
A scorpion scourge, unmarked by human eyes?
Trust me, no tortures which the poets feign,
Can match the fierce, the unutterable pain
He feels, who night and day, devoid of rest,
Carries his own accuser in his breast.
GIFFORD.
The same characteristics mark his praise of nobility of character as opposed to nobility of birth:
tota licet veteres exornent undique cerae atria, nobilitas sola est atque unica virtus. Paulus vel Cossus vel Drusus moribus esto, hos ante effigies maiorum pone tuorum, praecedant ipsas illi te consule virgas. prima mihi debes anima bona. sanctus haberi iustitiaeque tenax factis dictisque mereris? adgnosco procerem; salve Gaetulice, seu tu Silanus, quocumque alio de sanguine, rarus civis et egregius patriae contingis ovanti (viii. 19).
Fond man, though all the heroes of your line
Bedeck your halls, and round your galleries shine
In proud display: yet take this truth from me,
‘Virtue alone is true nobility.’
Set Cossus, Drusus, Paulus, then, in view,
The bright example of their lives pursue;
Let these precede the statues of your race,
And these, when consul, of your rods take place,
O give me inborn worth! Dare to be just,
Firm to your word and faithful to your trust.
Then praises hear, at least deserve to hear,
I grant your claim and recognize the peer.
Hail from whatever stock you draw your birth,
The son of Cossus or the son of Earth,
All hail! in you exulting Rome espies
Her guardian power, her great Palladium rise.
GIFFORD.
This is rhetoric, but rhetoric of the noblest kind. Of pure poetry there is naturally but little in Juvenal. Neither his temperament nor his subject would admit it. He had too keen an eye for the hideous and the grotesque, too strong a passion for the declamatory style. Hence it is rather his brilliant sketches of a vicious society, his fiery outbursts of rhetoric, his striking sententiae that primarily impress the reader:
expende Hannibalem: quot libras in duce summo invenies? (x. 147).
Great Hannibal within the balance lay,
And count how many pounds his ashes weigh.
DRYDEN.
finem animae quae res humanas miscuit olim, non gladii, non saxa dabunt nec tela, sed ille Cannarum vindex et tanti sanguinis ultor anulus. i demens et saevas curre per Alpes, ut pueris placeas et declamatio fias (x. 163).
What wondrous sort of death has heaven designed
For so untamed, so turbulent a mind?
Nor swords at hand, nor hissing darts afar,
Are doomed to avenge the tedious bloody war;
But poison drawn through a ring’s hollow plate,
Must finish him—a sucking infant’s fate.
Go, climb the rugged Alps, ambitious fool,
To please the boys, and be a theme at school.
DRYDEN.
nemo repente fuit turpissimus (ii. 83).
For none become at once completely vile.
GIFFORD.
summum crede nefas animam praeferre pudori
et propter vitam vivendi perdere causas (viii. 83).
si natura negat, facit indignatio versum (i. 79).
Think it a crime no tears can e’er efface,
To purchase safety with compliance base,
At honour’s cost a feverish span extend,
And sacrifice for life, life’s only end!
GIFFORD.
It is lines such as these that first rise to the mind at the mention of Juvenal. But he was no mere declaimer. Here and there we may find phrases of the purest poetry and of the most perfect form. Far above all others come the wonderful lines of the ninth satire:
festinat enim decurrere velox flosculus angustae miseraeque brevissima vitae portio; dum bibimus, dum serta unguenta puellas poscimus, obrepit non intellecta senectus (ix. 126).
For youth, too transient flower! of life’s short day
The shortest part, but blossoms—to decay.
Lo! while we give the unregarded hour
To revelry and joy in Pleasure’s bower,
While now for rosy wreaths our brow to twine,
While now for nymphs we call, and now for wine,
The noiseless foot of time steals swiftly by,
And, ere we dream of manhood, age is nigh!
GIFFORD.
Of a very different character, but of a beauty that is nothing less than startling in its sombre surroundings, is the blessing that he invokes on the good men of old who ‘enthroned the teacher in the revered parent’s place’.
di maiorum umbris tenuem et sine pondere terram spirantesque crocos et in urna perpetuum ver, qui praeceptorem sancti voluere parentis esse loco (vii. 207).
Shades of our sires! O sacred be your rest,
And lightly lie the turf upon your breast!
Flowers round your urns breathe sweets beyond compare,
And spring eternal shed its influence there!
You honoured tutors, now a slighted race,
And gave them all a parent’s power and place.
GIFFORD.
The sensuous appeal of the ‘fragrant crocus and the spring that dies not in the urn of death’ is unique in Juvenal. This slender stream of definitely poetic imagination reveals itself suddenly and unexpectedly in strange forms and circumstances. At the close of the passage in the third satire describing the perils of the Roman streets, Juvenal imagines the death of some householder in a street accident. All is bustle and business at home in expectation of his return:
domus interea secura patellas iam lavat et bucca foculum excitat et sonat unctis striglibus et pleno componit lintea guto. haec inter pueros varie properantur, at ille iam sedet in ripa taetrumque novicius horret porthmea nec sperat caenosi gurgitis alnum infelix nec habet quem porrigat ore trientem (iii. 261).
Meantime, unknowing of their fellow’s fate,
The servants wash the platter, scour the plate,
Then blow the fire with puffing cheeks, and lay
The rubbers and the bathing-sheets display,
And oil them first, each handy in his way.
But he for whom this busy care they take,
Poor ghost! is wandering by the Stygian lake;
Affrighted by the ferryman’s grim face,
New to the horrors of the fearful place,
His passage begs, with unregarded prayer,
And wants two farthings to discharge his fare.
DRYDEN.
Out of the grotesque there gradually looms the horror of death and the friendless ghost sitting lost and homeless by the Stygian waters.
That there is small scope in his work for such distinctively poetic imagination is not Juvenal’s fault, nor can we complain of its absence. But in technical accomplishment he shows himself a writer of the first rank. His treatment of the hexameter exactly suits his declamatory type of satire. The conversational verse of Horace, with its easy-going rambling gait, was unsuitable for the thunders of Juvenal’s rhetoric. Something more massive in structure, more vigorous in movement, was needed as the vehicle of so much rhetoric and invective. The delicate tripping hexameter of contemporary epic was equally unsuitable.
Unlike the majority of post-Augustan poets, Juvenal is almost untouched by the Ovidian influence. As far as his metre has any ancestry, it is descended from the Vergilian hexameter, though with the licence of satire it claims greater liberty in its treatment of pauses and of elision. The post-Augustan poet with whom in this respect Juvenal has greatest affinity is Persius. For vigour and variety he far surpasses all other poets of the age; while even Persius, although at his best and in his more declamatory passages he is at least Juvenal’s equal, does not maintain the same level of excellence, and his more frequent employment of the traditional dialogue of satire gives him fewer opportunities for striking metrical effect.
As regards his diction Juvenal is equally remarkable. He has suffered little from the schools of rhetoric and has gained much. He is pointed and clear, without being either obscure737 or mechanical. There is no vain striving after antithesis and no epigram for epigram’s sake. Grotesque he is not seldom, but the grotesqueness is deliberate and effective, and no mere affectation.
His one serious weakness is his lack of constructive power and his incapacity to preserve due proportion between the parts of his satires. The most glaring instances of this failing are to be found in the fourth, twelfth, and fourteenth satires, but except the third there is hardly a satire that can be regarded as wholly successful in point of construction. This defect, it may be admitted, is less serious in satire than in almost any other branch of literature. Such discursiveness was justified by the tradition and by the inherent nature of satire. But Juvenal offends in this respect beyond due reason, and only his extraordinary merits in other directions save him from the penalties of this failing.
Juvenal is the last of the poets of the Silver Age, and the only one of them to whom the epithet ‘great’ can reasonably be applied. He is no faultless writer, but he has genius and power, and has risen superior to the besetting sins of the age. He is a rhetorician, it is true, but he chose a form of literature where his rhetoric could have legitimate play. But he is no plagiarist or imitator; though, as in any other poet, we may find in him many traces and even echoes of his predecessors, he is in the best sense original. He is never a mere juggler in words and phrases, he is a true artist. Form and matter are indissolubly welded and interfused one with another. And this is because, unlike other writers of the age, he has something to say. He is poet by inspiration, not by profession. His excessive pessimism, his tendency to bias and exaggeration, cannot on the worst estimate obscure his merits either as artist or moralist. His picture of society has large elements of truth, and we can no more blame him for his tendency to caricature than we can blame Hogarth. Satire, especially the satire of declamatory invective, must be one-sided, and the satirist must select the features of life which he desires to denounce. And if this leads us at times into unpleasant places and among unpleasant people unpleasantly described, that does not justify us in denouncing the satirist. It must be remembered that the true satirist is not likely to be a man of perfect character. He must have seen much and experienced much; if his character has in the process become not merely unduly embittered, but perhaps somewhat smirched, these failings may be redeemed by other qualities. And in the case of Juvenal they are so redeemed.
He has not the lucid judgement of Horace nor the pure fervour of Persius. He is more positive than the former, more negative than the latter. But he has lived in a sense in which Persius never had, and possesses the gift of direct and lucid expression; therefore, when he strikes, he strikes home. He cannot, like Horace, ‘play about the hearts of men,’ he will have nothing of compromise, he cannot and will not adapt himself to his environment. The doctrine of [Greek: m_eden agan], the aurea mediocritas, have no attractions for him. Hence his ideal is often unpractical; ‘the times were out of joint,’ and Juvenal was not precisely the man to ‘set them right’. But at least he sets forth an ideal, that any honest man must admit to be noble. It is precisely because he is no casuist, because he hits hard and unsparingly, and is translucently honest, and because his weapon is the most fervid and trenchant rhetoric, that Juvenal is the most quoted and one of the most popular of Latin poets. He has contributed little to the thought of the world, but he has taught men to hate iniquity. He does not rise to the height of such an immortal saying as virtutem videant intabescantque relicta; he is no philosopher, and his ideals have neither the exaltation nor the stimulating power of the Stoic ideal. But he unveils vice and folly, so that men may fly from their utter hideousness, in such burning words as it has fallen to few poets to utter. He is ‘dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn’; had he possessed also the ‘love of love’, he might have reached greater heights of pure poetry, but he would not have been Juvenal, and the world would have been the loser.
Footnotes
1. See Teuffel and Schwabe, § 272.
2. Cf. Tac. Ann. i. 1. Velleius Paterculus is a good example of the servile historian. For an example of servile oratory of. Tac. Ann. xvi. 28.
3 Suet, Tib. 21.
4 Dion. 1 vii. 22; Tac. Ann. vi. 39; iv. 31.
5 Tac. Ann. iv. 34.
6. Dion. lviii. 24 [Greek: math_on oun touto ho Tiberios, eph’ eaut_oi tote to epos eir_esthai eph_e, Atreus dia t_en miaiphonian einai prospoi_esamenos.] Tac. Ann. vi. 29.
7 ‘Pulsi tum Italia histriones,’ Tac. Ann. iv. 14.
8 III Prol. 38 sqq., Epil. 29 sqq.
9 Suet. Tib. 42.
10 Tac. Ann. iii. 49; Dion. lvii. 20.
11 Suet. Tib. 70
12 Suet. Tib. 71
13 Suet. Tib. 61
14 Suidas, s.v. [Greek: Kaisar Tiberios].
15. Suet. Tib. 70.
16 Suet. Tib. 70.
17 Suet. Cal. 53.
18 Suet. Cal. 53.
19 Suet. Cal. 16.
20 Dion. lix. 20.
21 Suet. Cal. 27.
22 Dion. lix. 19.
23 Suet. Cal. 34 ‘nullius ingenii minimaeque doctrinae’.
24 Suet. Cal. 20.
25 For his writings generally of. Suet. Claud. 41, 42.
26 Tac. Ann. xiii. 43.
27 Suet. Claud. 33.
28 For his writings generally of. Suet. Claud. 41, 42.
29 Suet Claud. 11.
30 Suet. _Claud. 41. This is borne out by the fragments of the speech delivered at Lyons on the Gallic franchise. C.I. L. 13, 1668.
31 Suet. Claud. 28.
32 Sc. in the Apocolocyntosis.
33 Suet. Ner. 52.
34 Suet. Ner. 49 ‘qualis artifex pereo!’
35 Suet. Ner. 52; Tac. Ann. xiii. 3.
36 Tac. Ann. xiv. 16.
37 Suet. Domit. 1; Tac. Ann. xv. 49; Suet. Ner. 24.
38 Mart, ix. 26. 9; Plin. N. H. xxxvii. 50.
39 Persius is sometimes said to quote from the Bacchae. Cf. Schol. Pers. Sat. i. 93-5, 99-102. But see ch. in, p. 89.
40 Juv. viii. 221; Serv. Verg. Georg. iii. 36, Aen. v. 370.
41 Dion. lxii. 29.
42 Dion. lxii. 18; Suet. Ner. 38; Tac. Ann. xv. 39. For fragments of his work see Baehrens, Poet. Rom. Fragm., p. 368.
43 Suet, Ner. 10, 21.
44 Philostr. vit. Apoll. iv. 39 [Greek: ad_on ta tou Ner_onos mel_e … ep_ege mel_e ta men ex Oresteias, ta d’ ex Antigon_es, ta d’ opothenoun t_on prag_odoumen_on aut_o kai _odas ekampten oposas Ner_on elugize te kai kak_os estrephen].
45 Suet. vita Lucani; see chapter on Lucan, p. 97.
46 See chapter on Lucan, p. 98.
47 Suet. Luc.; Tac. Ann. xv. 49.
48 Suet. Ner. 39.
49 It may be urged that the damage lies not in the loss of poetry suppressed by the Emperor, but in the generation of a type of court poetry, examples of which survive in their most repulsive form in the Silvae of Statius and the epigrams of Martial. The objection has its element of truth, but only affects a very small and comparatively unimportant portion of the poetry of the age.
50 See Tacitus, Dial. 28 sqq. on the moral training of a young Roman of his day. Also Juv. xiv.
51 After the death of the great Augustan authors Alexandrian erudition becomes yet more rampant. It was a great assistance to men of second-rate poetical talent.
52 Quint, i. 1. 12.
53 Quint, i. 8. 3; Plin. Ep. ii. 14.
54 Quint, i. 9. 2; Cic. Ep. ad Fam. vi. 18. 5; Quint. i. 8. 6; Stat. Silv. ii. 1. 114; Ov. Tr. ii. 369.
55 Cp. Wilkins, Rom. Education, p. 60.
56 Op. Juv. vii. 231-6; Suet. Tib. 70. The result of this type of instruction is visible throughout the poets of the age, whereas Vergil and the best of the Greek Alexandrians had a true appreciation of the sensuous charm of proper names and legendary allusions, as in our literature had Marlowe, Milton, Keats, and Tennyson. Cp. Milton, Paradise Lost, Bk. 1:
What resounds
In fable or romance of Uther’s son
Begirt with British and Armoric knights;
And all who since, baptised or infidel,
Jousted in Aspramont or Montalban,
Damasco, or Marocco, or Trebisond,
Or whom Biserta sent from Afric shore,
When Charlemain with all his peerage fell
By Fontarabia.
Or compare Tennyson’s use of the names of Arthur’s battles, ‘Agned Cathregonion’ and the ‘waste sand-shore of Trath Treroit.’
57 Wilkins, Roman Education, p. 72.
58 See Wilkins, op. cit, p. 74.
59 Wilkins, Roman Education, p. 75.
60. The most striking instances of this precocity are Q. Sulpicius Maximus, who at the age of twelve and a half won the prize for Greek verse at the Agon Capitolinus A.D. 94 (cp. Kaibel, Epigr. Gr. 618), and L. Valerius L. F. Pudens, aged thirteen, who won the prize for Latin verse in A.D. 106. Cp. C.I.L. ix. 286.
61 For the importance attached to imitation sec Quint, x. 2.
62 The Greek rhetoricians of this period lay great stress on the importance of avoiding declamatory rhetoric. They belong to the Attic revival. But the Attic revival never really ‘caught on’ at Rome; by the time of Quintilian the mischief was done.
63 Sen. Suas. 3.
64 Ib. 7.
65 Ib. 2. I subjoin the text of the last. The author is Triarius.’ ‘Non pudet Laconas ne pugna quidem hostium, sed fabula vinci? Magnum est alumnum virtutis nasci et Laconem: ad certam victoriam omnes remansissent: ad certam mortem tantum Lacones. Non est Sparta lapidibus circumdata: ibi muros habet ubi viros. Melius revocabimus fugientes trecenos quam sequemur. Sed montes perforat, maria contegit. Nunquam solido stetit superba felicitas et ingentium imperiorum magna fastigia oblivione fragilitatis humanae conlapsa sunt. Scias licet non ad finem pervenisse quae ad invidiam porducta sunt. Maria terrasque, rerum naturam statione immutavit sua: moriamur trecenti, ut hic primum invenerit quod mutare non posset. Si tam demens placiturum consilium erat, cur non potius in turba fuginius?’
66 Latro is the author of the following treatment of the theme. ‘Hoc exspectastis ut capite demisso verecundia se ipsa antequam impelleretur deiceret? id enim decrat ut modestior in saxo esset quam in sacrario fuerat. Constitit et circumlatis in frequentiam oculis sanctissimum numen, quasi parum violasset inter altaria, coepit in ipso quo vindicabatur violare supplicio: hoc alterum damnatae incestum fuit, damnata est quia incesta erat, deiceta est quia damnata erat, repetenda est quia et incesta et damnata et deiceta est, dubitari potest quin usque eo deicienda sit, donec efficiatur propter quod deiecta est? patrocinium suum vocat pereundi infelicitatem. Quid tibi, importuna mulier, precor nisi ut ne vis quidem deiceta pereas? “Invocavi,” inquit, “deos”, statuta in illo saxo deos nominasti, et miraris si te iterum deici volunt? si nihil aliud, loco incestarum stetisti.’ Sen. Cont. i. 3.
67 e.g. Sen. Cont. i. 7 ‘Liberi parentes alant aut vinciant: quidam alterum fratrem tyrannum occidit, alterum in adulterio deprehensum deprecante patre interfecit. A piratis captas scripsit patri de redemptione. Pater piratis epistolam scripsit, si praecidissent manus, duplam se daturum. Piratae illum dimiserunt: patrem egentem non alit.’
68 For a brilliant description of the evils of the Roman system of education see Tac. Dial. 30-5. See also p. 127 for the very similar criticism of Petronius.
69 ce. 28-30. Cp. also Quint, i. 2 1-8.
70 The schoolmaster was not infrequently, it is to be feared, of doubtful character. Cp. the case of the famous rhetorician Remmius Palaemon. Cp. also Quint, i. 3. 13.
71 c. 35.
72 Tac. Dial. 26.
73 The influence of rhetoric was of course large in the Augustan age. Vergil and still more Ovid testify to this fact. But the tone of rhetoric was saner in the days of Vergil. Ovid, himself no inconsiderable influence on the poetry of the Silver Age, begins to show the effects of the new and meretricious type of rhetoric that flourished under the anti-Ciceronian reaction, when the healthy influence of the great orators of a saner age began to give way before the inroads of the brilliant but insincere epigrammatic style. This latter style was fostered largely by the importance assigned to the controversia and suasoria as opposed to the more realistic methods of oratorical training during the last century of the republic.
74 See Mayor on Juv. iii. 9.
75 Cp. Juv. i. 1 sqq., iii. 9. For the enormous part played in social life by recitations cp. Plin. Ep. i. 13, ii. 19, iv. 5, 27, v. 12, vi. 2, 17, 21, viii. 21.
76 Cp. especially the speeches of Lucan.
77 For some very just criticism on this head cp. Quint, viii. 5. 25 sqq.
78 For amusing instances of rudeness on the part of members of the audience ep. Sen. Ep. cxxii. 11; Plin. Ep. vi. 15.
79 Petr. 83, 88-91, 115. Mart. iii. 44. 10 ‘et stanti legis et legis cacanti. | in thermas fugio: sonas ad aurem. | piscinam peto: non licet natare. | ad cenam propero: tenes euntem. | ad cenam venio: fugas sedentem. | lassus dormio: suscitas iacentem.’ Cp. also 3, 50 and passim. Plin. Ep. vi. 13; Juv. i. 1-21; iii. 6-9; vii. 39 sqq.
80 Plin. Ep. viii. 12.
81 Suet. Dom. 4.
82 Tac. Dial. 35
83 See ch. v.
84 There had always, it may be noted, existed an archaistic section of literary society. Seneca (Ep. cxiv. 13), Persius (i. 76), and Tacitus (Dial. 23) decide the imitators of the early poets of the republic. But virtually no trace of pronounced imitation of this kind is to be observed in the poetry that has survived. Novelty and what passed for originality were naturally more popular than the resuscitation of the dead or dying past.
85 Boissier, L’Opposition sous les Césars, p. 238.
86 Macrobius (Sat. 10. 3) speaks of a revival of the Atellan by a certain Mummius, but gives no indication of the date.
87. Juv. viii. 185.
888. Suet. Calig. 57; Joseph. Ant. xix. 1. 13; Juv. viii. 187.
89 Mart. de Spect. 7.
90 Plutarch, de Sollert. Anim. xix. 9.
91 Suet. Tib. 45.
92 ib. Ner. 39.
93 Ib. Galb. 13.
94 Ib. Dom. 10.
95 Ib. Calig. 27; Nero, I. c.; Tac. Ann. iv. 14.
96 C. I. L. ix. 1165.
97 Ep. vi. 21.
98. Suet. Ner. II.
999. Quint, xi. 3. 178.
100 Juv. iii. 93.
101 x. 1, 99.
102 Lucian, de Salt. 27.
103 Suet. Ner. 24.
104 Lucian, de Salt. 79.
105 Suet. ap. Hieronym. (Roth, p. 301, 25).
106 Plut. Qu. Conv. vii. 8. 3; Sen. Contr. 3. praef. 10.
107 Lucian, op. cit., 37-61.
108 Plut, Qu. Conv. iv. 15. 17; Libanius (Reiske) iii, p. 381.
109 Lucian, op. cit., 69 sqq.
110 e.g. Pasiphae, Cinyras and Myrrha, Jupiter and Leda. Lucian, 1. c.; Joseph. Ant. Iud. xix. 1. 13; Juv. vi. 63-6.
111 For the effect of such dancing cp. the interesting stories told by Lucian, op. cit., 63-6. Cp. also Liban., in, p. 373. For the importance attached to gesture in ancient times see Quint. xi. 3. 87 sqq.
112 Story of Turnus; Suet, Ner. 54. Dido; Macrob. Sat. v. 17. 15.
113. See p. 100.
114 Juv. vii. 92.
115 For the general history of the pantomimus see Friedländer, Sittengeschicht, II. in. 3, and Lucian, de Saltatione.
116 Dion. liv. 17; Tac. Ann. i. 54 and 77; Dion. lvii. 14.
117 Suet. Ner. 46.
118 There is no clear proof of the performance on the Roman stage of any tragedy in the strict sense of the word during the Silver Age. The words used e.g. in Dio Chrys. (19, p. 261: 23, p. 396), Lucian (Nigrin. 8), Libanius (iii, p. 265, Reiske) may refer merely to the performance of isolated scenes. See note on Vespasian’s attitude to the theatre, p. 166.
119 Pliny the elder wrote his life. Plin. Ep. iii. 5. Cp. also Tac. Ann. v. 8; xii. 28; Plin. N.H. xiii. 83.
120 Ribbeck, Trag. Rom. Fr. p. 268, fr. 1; p. 331 (ed. 3).
121 Ann. xi. 13.
122 Charis, Gr. Lat. i. p. 125, 23; p. 137, 23.
123 Tac. Dial. II.
124 Ib. 2, 3.
125 Ib. 3.
126 Ib. 3.
127 Ib. II.
128 Juv. vii. 12.
129 Juv. vii. 12.
130 Ib. vii. 72.
131 He flourished in reign of Domitian. Schol. Vall. luv. i. 20; Mart. xi. 9 and 10; Donat. Gramm. Lat. iv. p. 537, 17; Apollin. Sid. ix. 266.
132 In the fragment preserved by Donatus (Ribbeck, Trag. Rom. Fr. p. 269) the chorus address Hecuba under the name Cisseis. ‘Fulgentius expos. serm. antiq. 25 (p. 119, 5, Helm) says Memos (Schopen emends to Memor) in tragoedia Herculis ait: ferte suppetias optimi comites.’
133 xi. 2. 8.
134 Mart. i. 61, 7; Poet. Lat. Min. iv. p. 62, 19, Bachrens.
135 Tac. Ann. xv. 73; xvi. 17.
136 Tac. Ann. xv. 73; xvi. 17.
137 Sen. ad Helv. de Cons. xix. 2.
138 Sen. ad Helv. 1. c.; Ep. lxxviii. 1. Dion. Cass. lix. 19.
139 5 Dion. Cass. 1. c.
140 Suet. Calig. 53. See ch. i. p. 4.
141. Ep. cviii. 17 sqq.; Hioronym. ad ann. 2029. That he knew and never lost his respect for the teaching of Pythagoras is shown by the frequency with which he quotes him in the letters.
142 Ep. cviii. 3 sqq.
143 Cp. the speech of Suillius, Tac. Ann. xiii. 42; Dion. Cass. lxi. 10.
144 ad Helv. de Cons. 6 sqq.
145 ad Polyb. de Cons.
146 The Apocolocyntosis—almost undoubtedly by Seneca—hardly falls within the scope of this work. Such intrinsic importance as it possesses is due to the prose portions. In point of form it is an example of the Menippean Satire, that strange medley of prose and verse. The verse portions form but a small proportion of the whole and are insipid and lacking in interest.
147 He was forbidden by Agrippina to give definite philosophical instruction. Cp. Suet. Nero, 52.
148 Cp. ad Ner. de Clem. ii. 2; Henderson, Life of Nero, Notes, p. 459.
149 For what may be regarded as an academic apologia pro vita sua, cp. Ep. 5; 17: 20; de Ira, in. 33; de Const. Sap. 1-4, 10-13; de Vit. Beat. 17-28, &c.
150 Dion. Cass. lxi. 4. 5.
151 Tac. Ann. xvi. 28.
152 This is Dion’s view, lxi. 10. For an ingenious view of Seneca’s character see Ball, Satire of Sen. on apotheosis of Claudius, p. 34. ‘It may be that Seneca cared less for the realization of high ideals in life than for the formulation of the ideals as such. Sincerity and hypocrisy are terms much less worth controversy in some minds than others.’
153 Tac. Ann. xv. 61-4.
154 Quint, x. 1. 125-9.
155 Fronto, p. 155, N.
156 Quint, x. 1. 129. Over and above his writings on moral philosophy we possess seven books ad Lucilium naturalium quaestionum.
157 Patruos duos more naturally, however, refers to Gallio and Mela, in which case Marcus is the son of Seneca himself.
158 Cp. P.L.M. iv. 15, 8; Plin. N.H. xvi. 242.
159. For these cp. Ep. xiv. 13; ib. civ. 29.
160 e.g. 7l ‘de Atho monte’, 57 ‘de Graeciae ruina’, 50 ‘de bono quietae vitae’, 47, 48 ‘morte omnes aequari’, 25 ‘de spe’.
161 There is, in fact, direct evidence that he wrote such verses. Plin. Ep. v. 3. 5.
162 Cp. p. 263.
163 Cp. the not dissimilar situation in Sen. Oed. (936), where Oedipus meditates in very similar style, as to how he may expiate his guilt. The couplet vivere si poteris, &c., is nothing if not Senecan.
164 Quint, viii. 3. 31 (‘memini iuvenis admodum inter Pomponium ac Senecam etiam praefationibus esse tractatum, an “gradus eliminet” in tragoedia dici oportuisset’) shows Seneca as critic of dramatic diction; there is no evidence to show what these praefationes were, but they may have been prefaces to tragedies. The Medea (453) is cited by Quintilian ix. 2. 8. For later quotations from the tragedies, cp. Diomedes, gr. Lat. i. p. 511, 23; Terentianus Maurus, ibid. vi. p. 404, 2672; Probus, ibid. iv. p. 229, 22, p. 246, 19; Priscian, ibid. ii. p. 253, 7 and 9; Tertullian, de An. 42, de Resurr. 1; Lactantius, Schol. Stat. Theb. iv. 530.
165 Cp. also the iambic translation of Cleanthes, Ep. cvii. 11:—
duc, o parens celsique dominator poli, quocunque placuit: nulla parendi mora est. adsum impiger. fac nolle, comitabor gemens malusque patiar, facere quod licuit bono. ducunt volentem fata, nolentem trahunt.
166 Some of the more remarkable parallels have been collected by Nisard (Études sur les poètes latins de la décadence, i. 68-91), e.g. Med. 163 ‘qui nil potest sperare, desperet nihil’. Ep. v. 7 ‘desines timere, si sperare desieris’. Oed. 705 ‘qui sceptra duro saevus imperio regit, timet timentes: metus in auctorem redit’. Ep. cv. 4 ‘qui timetur, timet: nemo potuit terribilis esse secure’. de Ira_, ii. 11 ‘quid quod semper in auctores redundat timor, nec quisquam metuitur ipse securus?’-Oed. 980 sqq.; de Prov. v. 6 sqq.; Phoen. 146, 53; Ep. xii. 10; de Prov. vi. 7; Herc. F. 463, 464; Ep. xcii. 14.
167 The arguments against the Senecan authorship are of little weight. It has been urged (a) that the MSS. assign the author a praenomen Marcus. No Marcus Seneca is known, though Marcus was the praenomen of both Gallio and Mela, and of Lucan. Mistakes of this kind are, however, by no means rare (cp. the ‘Sextus Aurelius Propertius Nauta’ of many MSS. of that poet: both ‘Aurelius’ and ‘Nauta’ are errors), (b) Sidonius Apollinaris (ix. 229) mentions three Senecas, philosopher, tragedian, and epic writer (i.e. Lucan). But Sidonius lived in the fifth century A.D., and may easily have made a mistake. Such a mistake actually occurs (S. A. xxiii. 165) where he seems to assert that Argentaria Polla, Lucan’s faithful widow, subsequently married Statius. The mistake as regards Seneca is probably due to a misinterpretation of Martial i. 61 ‘duosque Senecas unicumque Lucanum facunda loquitur Corduba’. Not being acquainted with the works of the elder Seneca the rhetorician, Sidonius invented a new author, Seneca the tragedian.
168 See ch. on Octavia, p.78.
169 Leo, Sen. tragoed. i. 89-134.
170 It is not even necessary to suppose with Leo that these were the earliest of the plays and that these metrical experiments were youthful indiscretions which failed and were not repeated. Leo, i. p. 133.
171 For a detailed treatment see Leo, i. p. 48. Melzer, de H. Oetaeo Annaeano, Chemnitz, 1890; Classical Review, 1905, p. 40, Summers.
172 See p. 39 on relation of epigrams to dramas.
173 Ann. xiv. 52.
174 See also note on p. 42 for Leo’s ingenious, but inconclusive theory for the dates of the Agamemnon and Oedipus.
175 There is but one passage that can be held to afford the slightest evidence for a later date, Med. 163 ‘qui nil potest sperare, desperet nihil’ seems to be an echo of Ep. v. 7 ‘sed ut huius quoque diei lucellum tecum communicem, apud Hecatonem nostrum inveni … “desines”, inquit, “timere, si sperare desieris”.’ This aphorism is quoted as newly found. The letters were written 62-5 A.D. This passage would therefore suggest a very late date for the Medea. But Seneca had probably been long familiar with the works of Hecato, and the epigram is not of such profundity that it might not have occurred to Seneca independently.
176 For comparative analyses of Seneca’s tragedies and the corresponding Greek dramas see Miller’s Translation of the Tragedies of Seneca, p. 455.
177 The Phaedra of Seneca is interesting as being modelled on the lost Hippolytus Veiled of Euripides. Phaedra herself declares her passion to Hippolytus, with her own lips reveals to Theseus the pretended outrage to her honour, and slays herself only on hearing of the death of Hippolytus. Cp. Leo, Sen. Trag. i. 173. The Phoenissae presents a curious problem. It is far shorter than any of the other plays and has no chorus. It falls into two parts with little connexion. I. (a) 1-319. Oedipus and Antigone are on their way to Cithaeron. Oedipus meditates suicide and is dissuaded by Antigone. (b) 320-62. An embassy from Thebes arrives begging Oedipus to return and stop the threatened war between his sons. He refuses, and declares the intention of hiding near the field of battle and listening joyfully to the conflict between his unnatural sons. II. The remaining portion, on the other hand, seems to imply that Oedipus is still in Thebes (553, 623), and represents a scene between Jocasta and her sons. It lacks a conclusion. These two different scenes can hardly have belonged to one and the same play. They may be fragments of two separate plays, an Oedipus Coloneus and a Phoenissae, or may equally well be two isolated scenes written for declamation without ever having been intended for embodiment in two completed dramas. Cp. Ribbeck, Gesch. Röm. Dichtung, iii. 70.
178 Sen. Trag. i. 161.
179 Leo, op. cit., i. 166 sqq.
180 530-658. The Oedipus is based on the O. Rex of Sophocles, but is much compressed, and the beautiful proportions of the Greek are lost. In Seneca out of a total of 1,060 lines 330 are occupied by the lyric measures of the chorus, 230 by descriptions of omens and necromancy.
181 It is also to be noted that the nurse does not make use of this device till after Hippolytus has left the stage, although to be really effective her words should have been uttered while Hippolytus held Phaedra by the hair. The explanation is, I think, that the play was written for recitation, not for acting. Had the play been acted, the nurse’s call for help and her accusation of Hippolytus could have been brought in while Hippolytus was struggling with Phaedra. But being written for recitation by a single person there was not room for the speech at the really critical moment, and therefore it was inserted afterwards—too late. See p. 73.
182 Similarly, Medea, being a sorceress, must be represented engaged in the practice of her art. Hence lurid descriptions of serpents, dark invocations, &c. (670-842).
183 Seneca never knows when to stop. Undue length characterizes declamations and lyrics alike.
184. As a whole the Troades fails, although, the play being necessarily episodic, the deficiencies of plot are less remarkable. But compared with the exquisite Troades of Euripides it is at once exaggerated and insipid.
185. Cp. Apul. Met. x. 3, where a step-mother in similar circumstances defends her passion with the words, ‘illius (sc. patris) enim recognoscens imaginem in tua facie merito te diligo.’
186 This speech is closely imitated by Racine in his Phèdre.
187 2: Cp. esp. 995-1006: the agnosco fratrem of Thyestes is perhaps the most monstrous stroke of rhetoric in all Seneca. Better, but equally revolting, are ll. 1096-1112 from the same play.
188 For other examples of dialogue cp. esp. Medea, 159-76, 490-529 (perhaps the most effective dialogue in Seneca), Thyestes, 205-20; H. F. 422-38. for which see p. 62.
189 Pro M. 61 ‘Fuit enim quidam summo ingenio vir, Zeno, cuius inventorum aemuli Stoici nominantur: huius sententia et praecepta huiusmodi: sapientem gratia nunquam moveri, nunquam cuiusquam delicto ignoscere; neminem misericordem esse nisi stultum et levem: viri non esse neque exorari neque placari: solos sapientes esse, si distortissimi sint, formosos, si mendicissimi, divites, si servitutem serviant reges.’ &c. He goes on to put a number of cases where the Stoic rules break down.
190 Cp. Eurip. Andr. 453 sqq.
191 For still greater exaggeration cp. Phoen. 151 sqq,; Oed. 1020 sqq.
192 Cp. Sen. Contr. ii. 5; ix. 4.
193 Cp. Sen. de Proc. iv. 6 ‘calamitas virtutis occasio est’.
194 Cp. Sen. Ep. xcii. 30, 31 ‘magnus erat labor ire in caelum’.
195 Cp. Sen. Ep. xcii. 16 sqq.
196 Ep. cviii. 24.
197 Cp. Macbeth ii. 2. 36, Macbeth does murder sleep, &c. For other Shakespearian parallels, cp. Macbeth, Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased? H.F. 1261 ‘nemo pollute queat | animo mederi.’ Macbeth, I have lived long enough…. And that which should accompany old age, As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends, I must not look to have. H.F. 1258 ‘Cur animam in ista luce detincam amplius | morerque nihil est; cuncta iam amisi bona, | mentem, arma, famam, coniugem, natos, manus.’ J. Phil. vi. 70. Cunliffe, Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy.
198 An exception might be made in favour of the beautiful simile describing Polyxena about to die, notable as giving one of the very few allusions to the beauty of sunset to be found in ancient literature (Troad. 1137):
ipsa deiectos gerit vultus pudore, sed tamen fulgent genae magisque solito splendet extremus decor, ut esse Phoebi dulcius lumen solet iamiam cadentis, astra cum repetunt vices premiturque dubius nocte vicina dies.
Fine, too, are the lines describing the blind Oedipus (Oed. 971):
attollit caput cavisque lustrans orbibus caeli plagas noctem experitur.
199 pp. 52 sqq., 59.
200 Cp. Eur. H.F. 438 sqq.
201 For further examples cp. H.F. 5-18, Troades 215-19.
202 This terse stabbing rhetoric is characteristic of Stoicism; the same short, jerky sentences reappear in Epictetus. Seneca is doubtless influenced by the declamatory rhetoric of schools as well, but his philosophical training probably did much to form his style.
203 Exceptions are so few as to be negligible. The effect of this rule is aggravated by the fact that in nine cases out of ten the accent of the word and the metrical ictus ‘clash’, this result being obtained ‘by most violent elisions, such as rarely or never occur in the other feet of the verse’. Munro, J. Phil. 6, 75.
204 The older and more rugged iambic survives in the fables of Phaedrus, written at no distant date from these plays, if not actually contemporary.
205 Cp. Leo, op. cit. i. 166, 174.
206 See p. 29.
207 These horrors go beyond the crucifixion scene in the Laureolus (see p. 24), and the tradition of genuine tragedy was all against such presentation. As far as the grotesqueness and bombast of the plays go, the age of Nero might have tolerated them. We must remember that seventeenth-century England enjoyed the brilliant bombast of Dryden (e.g. in Aurungzebe) and that the eighteenth delighted in the crude absurdities of such plays as George Barnwell.
208 Cp. also Phaedra 707, where Hippolytus’ words, ‘en impudicum crine contorto caput | laeva reflexi,’ can only be justified as inserted to explain to the hearers what they could not see. See also p. 48, note.
209 They have been influenced by the pantomimus and the dramatic recitation so fashionable in their day, inasmuch as they lack connexion, and, though containing effective episodes, are of far too loose a texture to be effective drama.
210 See R. Fischer, Die Kunstentwicklung der englischen Tragödie; J. W. Cunliffe, Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy; J. E. Manly, Introductory Essay to Miller’s Translation of the Tragedies of Seneca. The Senecan drama finds its best modern development in the tragedies of Alfieri. Infinitely superior in every respect as are the plays of the modern dramatist, he yet reveals in a modified form not a few of Seneca’s faults. There is often a tendency to bombast, an exaggeration of character, a hardness of outline, that irresistibly recall the Latin poet.
211 The debt is as good as acknowledged, ll. 58 sqq.
212 ll. 310 sqq.
213 l. 915.
214 There is no direct evidence of the sex of the chorus in the Octavia. In Greek drama they would almost certainly have been women.
215 The diction is wholly un-Senecan. There is no straining after epigram; the dialogue, though not lacking point (e.g. the four lines 185-8, or 451-60), does not bristle with it, and is far less rhetorical and more natural. The chorus confines itself to anapaests, is simpler and far more relevant. The all-pervading Stoicism is the one point they have in common.
216 The imitation of Lucan in 70, 71 ‘magni resto nominis umbra,’ is also strong evidence against the Senecan authorship.
217 Probus, vita. ‘A. Persius Flaccus natus est pridie non. Dec. Fabio Persico, L. Vitellio coss.’ Hieronym. ad ann. 2050=34 A.D. ‘Persius Flaccus Satiricus Volaterris nascitur.’ Where not otherwise stated the facts of Persius’ life are drawn from the biography of Probus.
218 Quint, vii. 4, 40; Tac. Ann. xv. 71.
219 Suet. de Gramm. 23.
220 Bassus was many years his senior—addressed as senex in Sat. vi. 6, written late in 61 or early in 62 A.D.—and perished in the eruption of Vesuvius, 79 A. D. Cp. Schol. ad Pers. vi. 1.
221 Lucan was five years his junior. Cp. p. 97.
222 Cp. Tac. Ann. xiv. 19; Dial. 23; Quint. x. 1. 102.
223 This friendship lasted ten years, presumably the last ten of Persius’ life; cp. Prob. vit.
The second satire is addressed to Plotius Macrinus, who, according to the scholiast, was a learned man, who ‘loved Persius as his son, having studied with him in the house of Servilius Nonianus.’
224 See O. Jahn’s ed., p. 240.
225 Prob. vit.’decessit VIII Kal. Dec. P. Mario, Afinio Gallio coss.’ Hieronym. ad ann. 2078—62 A.D. ‘Persius moritur anno aetatis XXVIII.’
226 Prob. vit.
227 Such at least is a plausible inference. Probus tells us that he used to travel abroad with Thrasea. It is a natural conjecture that these hodoeporica were in the style of Horace’s journey to Brundisium.
228 Cp. Mart. i. 13; Plin. Ep. iii. 16. She was the mother of the wife of Thrasea.
229 This may mean that the last satire was actually incomplete, but that the omission of a few lines at the end gave it an appearance of completion; or that a few lines intended for the opening of a seventh satire were omitted.
230 So Probus. Cp. also Quint. x. 1. 94 ‘multum et verae gloriae quamvis uno libro meruit.’ Mart. iv. 29. 7.
231 Hieronym. in apol. contra Rufin. i. 16 ‘puto quod puer legeris … commentarios … aliorum in alios, Plautum videlicet, Lucretium, Flaccum, Persium atque Lucanum.’ The high moral tone of the work, coupled perhaps with the smallness of its bulk, is in the main responsible for its survival. Scholia from different sources have come down to us under the title of Cornuti commentum. Whether such a person as the commentator Cornutus existed or not is uncertain. The name may have been attached to the scholia merely to give them a spurious importance as though possessing the imprimatur of the friend and teacher of the poet.
232 The choliambi are placed after the satires by two of the three best MSS., but before them by the scholia and inferior MSS. It is of little importance which we follow. But it seems probable that Probus (see below) regarded the choliambi as a prologue. Such at least is my interpretation of sibi primo (i.e. in the prologue) mox omnibus detrectaturus. The lines have rather more force if read first and not last.
233 Prob. vit. ‘sed mox ut a schola magistrisque devertit, lecto Lucili libro decimo vehementer saturas componere studuit; cuius libri principium imitatus est, sibi primo, mox omnibus detrectaturus, cum tanta recentium poetarum et oratorum insectatione,’ &c. This can only refer to the prologue and the first satire, and seems to point to its having been the first to be composed. According to the scholiast the opening line is taken from the first satire of Lucilius.
234 Porphyr. ad Hor. Sat. i. 10. 53 ‘facit autem Lucilius hoc cum alias tum vel maxime in tertio libro, … et nono et decimo.
235 Cp. Nettleship’s note ad loc., and Petron. 4.
236 e.g. Dama, Davus, Natta, Nerius, Craterus, Pedius, Bestius.
237 Instances might be almost indefinitely multiplied. The whole of Pers. i, but more especially the conclusion, is strongly influenced by Hor. Sat. i. 10. Cp. also Pers. ii. 12, Hor. Sat. ii. 5. 45; Pers. iii. 66, Hor. Ep. i. 18. 96; Pers. v. 10, Hor. Sat. i. 4. 19, &c., &c.
238 i. 92-102. According to the scholiast the last four lines—
torva Mimalloneis implerunt cornua bombis, et raptum vitulo caput ablatura superbo Bassaris et lyncem Maenas flexura corymbis euhion ingeminat, reparabilis adsonat echo (i. 99)—
are by Nero. But it is incredible that Persius should have had such audacity as openly to deride the all-powerful emperor. The same remark applies to other passages where the scholiast and some modern critics have seen satirical allusions to Nero (e.g. prologue and the whole of Sat. iv). The only passage in which it is possible that there was a covert allusion to Nero is i. 121, which, according to the scholiast, originally ran auriculas asini Mida rex habet. Cornutus suppressed the words Mida rex and substituted quis non. For an ingenious defence of the view that Persius hits directly at Nero see Pretor, Class. Rev., vol. xxi, p. 72.
239 i. 76 ‘Est nunc Brisaei quem venosus liber Acci, | sunt quos Pacuviusque et verrucosa moretur | Antiopa, aerumnis cor luctificabile fulta.’
240 The description of the self-indulgent man who, feeling ill, consults his doctor and then fails to follow his advice (iii. 88), is a possible exception. It is noteworthy that in Sat. iv he addresses a young aspirant to a political career as though free political action was still possible at Rome.
241 e.g. iv. 41.
242 But see below, p. 91.
243 Prob. vita Persii.
244 Our chief authorities for Lucan’s life are the ‘lives’ by Suetonius (fragmentary) and by Vacca (a grammarian of the sixth century).
245 Vacca.
246 Tac. Ann. xvi. 17.
247 Vacca.
248 Vacca.
249 The young Lucan is said to have formed a friendship with the satirist at the school of Cornutus; Persius was some five years his senior. Vita Persii (p. 58, Bücheler).
250 Suetonius and Vacca. The latter curiously treats this victory as one of the causes of Nero’s jealousy. Considering that the poem was a panegyric of the emperor, and that it was Lucan’s first step in the imperial favour, the suggestion deserves small credit.
251 Sueton. There is an unfortunate hiatus in the Life by Suetonius, occurring just before the mention of the visit to Athens. As the text stands it suggests that the visit to Athens occurred after the victory at the Neronia. Otherwise it would seem more probable that Lucan went to Athens somewhat earlier (e.g. 57 A.D.) to complete his education.
252 Sueton., Vacca.
253 Vacca; Tac. Ann. xv. 49; Dion. lxii. 29.
254 Vacca.
255 Suetonius.
256 Suetonius.
257 Sueton.; Tac. Ann. xv. 56.
258 Vacca; Sueton.; Tac. Ann. xv. 70. Various passages in the Pharsalia have been suggested as suitable for Lucan’s recitation at his last gasp, iii. 638-41, vii. 608-15, ix. 811.
259 Statius, in his Genethliacon Lucani (Silv. ii. 7. 54), seems to indicate the order of the poems:
ac primum teneris adhuc in annis ludes Hectora Thessalosque currus et supplex Priami potentis aurum, et sedes reserabis inferorum; ingratus Nero duleibus theatris et noster tibi proferetur Orpheus, dices culminibus Remi vagantis infandos domini nocentis ignes, hinc castae titulum decusque Pollae iucunda dabis adlocutione. mox coepta generosior iuventa albos ossibus Italis Philippos et Pharsalica bella detonabis.
Cp. also Vacca, ‘extant eius complures et alii, ut Iliacon, Saturnalia, Catachthonion, Silvarum x, tragoedia Medea imperfecta, salticae fabulae xiv, et epigrammata (MSS. appamata sive ippamata), prosae orationes in Octavium Sagittam et pro eo, de incendio Urbis, epistularum ex Campania, non fastidiendi quidem omnes, tales tamen ut belli civili videantur accessio.’
260 Vacca.
261 See chapter on Statius.
262 See chapter on Drama.
263 Cp. Mart., bks. xiii and xiv.
264 There are two fragments from the Iliacon, two from the Orpheus, one from the Catachthonion, two from the Epigrammata, together with a few scanty references in ancient commentators and grammarians: see Postgate, Corp. Poet. Lat.
265 Vacca, ‘ediderat … tres libros, quales videmus.’
266 Sueton. ‘civile bellum … recitavit ut praefatione quadem aetatem et initia sua comparans ausus sit dicere, “quantum mihi restat ad Culicem”.’ Cp. also Stat, Silv. ii. 7. 73:—
haec (Pharsalia) primo iuvenis canes sub aevo
ante annos Culicis Maroniani.
Vergil was twenty-six when he composed the Culex. Cp. Ribbeck, App. Verg. p. 19.
267 Vacca, ‘reliqui septem belli civilis libri locum calumniantibus tanquam mendosi non darent; qui tametsi sub vero crimine non egent patrocinio: in iisdem dici, quod in Ovidii libris praescribitur, potest: emendaturus, si licuisset, erat.’
268 See p. 4.
269 Boissier, _L’Opposition sous les Césars (p. 279), sees some significance in the fact that the list of Nero’s ancestors always stops at Augustus. But there was no reason why the list should go further than the founder of the principate. It is noteworthy that Lucan’s uncle Seneca wrote a number of epigrams in praise of the Pompeii and Cato. The famous lines, quis iustius induit arma scire nefas: magno se iudice quisque tuetur, victrix causa deis placuit, sed victa Catoni (i. 126), are supremely diplomatic. Without sacrificing his principles, Lucan avoids giving a shadow of offence to his emperor.
270 See p. 116.
271. Petron., loc. cit.
272 v. 207, vii. 451, 596, 782, x. 339-42, 431.
273 i. 143-57.
274 ii. 657 nil actum credens cum quid superesset agendum.
275 v. 317 meruitque timeri non metuens.
276 See Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, Preface.
277 vii. 45-150.
278 vii. 342.
279 vii. 647-727.
280 Cp. the epigrams attributed to Seneca, P. L. M. iv, Anth. Lat. 7, 8, 9.
281 The one exception is Curio, sec iv. 799.
282 i. 185:
ut ventum est parvi Rubiconis ad undas, ingens visa duci patriae trepidantis imago, clara per obscuram voltu maestissima noctem turrigero canos effundens vertice crines caesarie lacera nudisque adstare lacertis et gemitu permixta loqui: ‘quo tenditis ultra? quo fertis mea signa, viri? si iure venitis, si cives, huc usque licet.’
283 iii. 1:
propulit ut classem velis cedentibus Auster incumbens mediumque rates movere profundum, omnis in Ionios spectabat navita fluctus; solus ab Hesperia non flexit lumina terra Magnus, dum patrios portus, dum litora numquam ad visus reditura suos tectumque cacumen nubibus et dubios cernit vanescere montes.
284 v. 722-end.
285 vii. 6-44.
286 iii. 399-425.
287 iii. 399.
288 Cp. Seneca, Oed. 530 sqq. The description of a grove was part of the poetic wardrobe. Cp. Pers. i. 70.
289 See p. 103.
290 iii. 509-762. For a still more grotesque fight, cp. vi. 169-262; also ii. 211-20; iv. 794, 5.
291 v. 610-53. Cp. also ix. 457-71.
292 Sir E. Ridley’s trans.
293 Sir E. Ridley’s trans.
294 ix. 619-838.
295 ix. 946, 7.
296 For examples of erudition, cp. ix. loc. cit., where the origin of serpents of Africa is given, involving the story of Perseus and Medea, iv. 622 sqq. The arrival of Curio in Africa is signalized by a long account of the slaying of Antaeus by Hercules.
297 i. 523-end.
298 ii. 67-220.
299 ii. 392-438. Cp. the geography of Thessaly, coupled with a description of its witches, vi. 333-506.
300 v. 71-236.
301 vi. 507-830. It is noteworthy, also, that incidents not necessarily irrelevant in themselves are treated with a monstrous lack of proportion, e.g. the siege of Massilia is not irrelevant; but it is given 390 lines (iii. 372-762), and Lucan forgets to mention that Caesar captured it.
302 e.g. iv. 799-end, vii. 385-459, 586-96, 617-46, 847-72, viii. 542-60, 793-end.
303 vii. 385-459.
304 There is nothing in these last seven books that can be regarded as in any way written to please Nero, save the description of the noble death of Domitius Ahenobarbus, Nero’s great-great-grandfather (vii. 597-616). On the contrary there are many passages which Lucan would hardly have written while he was enjoying court favour: e.g. iv. 821-3, v. 385-402, vi. 809, vii. 694-6, x. 25-8.
305 See p. 98.
306 e.g. the two speeches of Cato quoted above.
307 He is, moreover, very careless in his repetition of the same word, cp. i. 25, 27 urbibus, iii. 436, 441, 445 silva, &c.; cp. Haskins, ed. lxxxi. (Heitland’s introd.)
308 He is far less dactylic than Ovid. For the relation between the various writers of epic in respect of metre, see Drobisch, Versuch üb. die Formen des lat. Hex. 140. The proportion of spondees in the first four feet of hexameters of Roman writers is there given as follows: Catullus 65.8%, Silius 60.6%, Ennius 59.5%, Lucretius 57.4%, Vergil 56%, Horace 55%, Lucan 54.3%, Statius 49.7%, Valerius 46.2%, Ovid 45.2%.
309 Tac. Ann. xvi. 18, 19 (Church and Brodribb’s trans.).
310 c. 118 sq.
311 cc. 1-5.
312 The first reference in literature to the Satyricon is in Macrobius, in Somn. Scip. i. 2, 8.
313 cc. 1-5.
314 MS. fortuna.
315 MS. dent.
316 c. 83
317 Cp. Juv. Sat. 7; Tac. Dial. 9.
318 c. 89. It has been suggested that this poem is a parody of Nero’s Troiae halosis! But the poem shows no signs of being a parody. It is obviously written in all seriousness.
319 MS. minor, I suggest minans as a possible solution of the difficulty.
320 c. 93.
321 Cp. also 128 and the spirited epic fragment burlesquely used in 108.
322 See p. 36.
323 Baehrens, P. L. M. iv. 74-89.
324 Nos. 76 and 86. Cp. Fulg. Mythol. i. I, p. 31; Lactant. ad Stat. Theb. iii. 661; Fulg. Mythol. iii. 9, p. 126.
325 Baehrens, P.L.M. iv. 90-100.
326 Poitiers, 1579 A.D.
327 Fulg. Mythol. i. 12, p. 44.
328 That the attribution to Petronius rests on the authority of the lost MS. is a clear inference from Binet’s words, cp. Baehrens, P.L.M. iv. 101-8, ‘sequebantur ista, sed sine Petronii titulo, at priores illi duo Phalaecii vix alius fuerint quam Petronii.’
329 Baehrens, P.L.M. iv. 101-8.
330 See note 4.
331. Petr. cc. 14, 83; Baehrens, P.L.M. iv. 120, 121.
332 Cp. Satyr. 127, 131; P.L.M. iv. 75; S. 128; P.L.M. iv. 121; S. 108; P.L.M. iv. 85; S. 79, iv. 101.
333 P.L.M. iv. 75.
334 P.L.M. iv. 81.
335 The MS. is hopelessly corrupt at this point. I suggest naidas alterna manu as a possible correction of the MS. Iliadas armatas s. manus.
336 P.L.M. iv. 84.
337 P.L.M. iv. 85.
338 Ib. 76.
339 Ib. 82.
340 Ib. 78.
341 P. L. M. iv. 99. Cp. also 92 and 107.
342 569 sqq.
343 17-22, 43 sqq. He falls into the same error himself (203).
344 76 sqq.
345 88 sqq.
346 220 sqq.
347 96 sqq.
348 178 sqq.
349 400 sqq.
350 333 sqq.
351 294.
352 So Ellis (Corp. Poet. Lat., vol. ii. pref.); Baehrens, P. L. M. ii. pp. 29 sqq.
353 Serv. ad Verg. Aen. praef. Donatus, vita Verg., p. 58 R (‘Scripsit etiam de qua ambigitur Aetnam’).
354 Sen. Nat. Quaest. iii. 26. 5. He also wrote in verse on philosophical subjects; cp. Sen. Ep. 24, 19-21.
355 So Wernsdorf, von Jacob, Munro (edd.), Wagler de Aetna quaest. crit., Berlin, 1884.
356 Sen. Nat. Quaest. iv. 2. 2.
357 Sen. Ep. 79. 5.
358 So many Italian scholars of sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, among them Scaliger.
359 Cornelius Severus wrote a poem on the Sicilian War of Octavian and Sext. Pompeius; cp. Quint, x. l. 89.
360 Cp. Nat. Quaest. iii. 16. 4, Aetna, 302 and 303. But this may be due to the fact that both Seneca and the author of Aetna get their information from the same source, perhaps Posidonius; cp. Sudhaus, introd. to his edition, p. 75.
361 It is not improbable that in 293 sqq. the poet refers to the mechanical Triton shown at the Naumachia on the Fucine Lake at a festival given by Claudius in honour of Nero’s adoption in 50 A. D.
362 425-34.
363 Baehrens would put the lower limit at 63 A. D., the year in which severe earthquakes first indicated the reviving activity of Phlegraean fields. But earthquakes, though often caused by volcanic action, do not necessarily produce volcanoes.
364 viii. 16. 9; 10. 185.
365 iii. 3. 3 ‘his certe temporibus Nomentana regio celeberrima fama est illustris, et praecipue quam possidet Seneca, vir excellentis ingenii atque doctrinae’. He is quoted by Pliny, not infrequently. Columella was an old man when he wrote; cp. 12 ad fin. ‘nec tamen canis natura dedit cunctarum rerum prudentiam’.
366 Cp. C.I.L. ix. 235 ‘L. Iunio L. F. Gal. Moderato Columellae Trib. mil. leg. VI. Ferratae’. That this refers to the poet is borne out by two facts. (1) Gades belonged to the Tribus Galeria. (2) At this date the legio VI. Ferrata was stationed in Syria; cp. Col. ii. 10. 18 ‘Ciliciae Syriaeque regionibus ipse vidi’.
367 Cp. i. 1. 7. He speaks as a practical farmer; cp. ii. 8. 5; 9. 1; 10. 11; iii. 9. 2; 10. 8, &c. He writes primarily for Italy, not for Spain; cp. iii. 8. 5.
368 Cp. x. praef.: also ix. 16. 2, which tells us that Gallio, Seneca’s brother, had added his entreaties.
369 xi. praef.
370 He also wrote a treatise against astrologers (cp. xi. 1. 131) and a treatise on religious ceremonies connected with agriculture (cp. ii. 21. 5). This latter work was perhaps never completed (cp. ii. 21. 6). In any case both treatises were lost. There survives a book on arboriculture which is not an isolated monograph, but portion of a larger work, at least three books long, for it alludes to a ‘primum volumen de cultu agrorum’ (ad init.). It probably consisted of four books, since Cassiodorus (div. lect. 28) speaks of the sixteen books of Columella.
371 siderei Maronis, 434.
372 Cp. esp. 196 sqq.
373 Cp. 130 sqq., 320 sqq., 344 sqq.
374 102 sqq.
375 45-94.
376 29-34.
377 196 sqq.
378 Tac. Ann. xii. 58.
379 M. Haupt, Opusc. i. 391; Lachm. Comm. on Lucret. 1855, p. 326 Schenkl (ed. Calp. Sic., p. ix).
380 Or de laude Pisonis. See Baehrens, Poet. Lat. Min. iii. 1. For the question of authorship see p. 159.
381 It was long believed that there were eleven, but the last four eclogues of the collection are shown by their style to be of later date, and there can be little doubt that the MSS. which attribute them to Nemesianus of Carthage are right. We know of a Nemesianus who lived about 290 A.D. and wrote a Cynegetica, a portion of which survives. Comparison with these four eclogues shows a marked resemblance of style.
382 Verg. Ecl. vii. 1:
forte sub arguta consederat ilice Daphnis, compulerantque greges Corydon et Thyrsis in unum, Thyrsis oves, Corydon distentas lacte capellas, ambo florentes aetatibus, Arcades ambo, et cantare pares et respondere parati.
Calp. ii. 1:
intactam Crocalen puer Astacus et puer Idas, Idas lanigeri dominus gregis, Astacus horti, dilexere diu, formosus uterque nec impar voce sonans.
The conclusion is borrowed from Vergil, Ecl. iii. 108:
non nostrum inter vos tantas componere lites. et vitula tu dignus et hic et quisquis amores aut metuet dulces aut experietur amaros. claudite iam rivos, pueri; sat prata biberunt.
Calp. ii. 95-100:
‘iam resonant frondes, iam cantibus obstrepit arbos: i procul, o Doryla, rivumque reclude canali et sine iam dudum sitientes irriget hortos’ vix ea finierant, senior cum talia Thyrsis, ‘este pares …’
383 Cp. also v. 50 sqq.
384 See Baehrens, Poet. Lat. Min. vol. iii. p. 60. The first poem is unfinished, the award of Midas being missing.
385 Bücheler, Rhein. Mus. xxvi. p. 235.
386 So Bücheler, loc. cit. respexit is a mere conjecture: corrumpit, the MS. reading, is meaningless, and no satisfactory alternative has been suggested. The lines may merely refer to Apollo, but et me suggests strongly that Ladas retorts, ‘I, too, have Caesar’s favour.’ Cp. L. 37, where hic vester Apollo est! clearly refers to Nero.
387 In a MS. at Lorsch, now lost; but used by Sechard for his edition of Ovid, Basle, 1527.
388 In Parisinus 7647 (Florileg.). Sec Baehrens, P. L. M. i. p. 222.
389 Tac. Ann. xv. 48 ‘facundiam tuendis civibus exercebat, largitionem adversum amicos et ignotis quoque comi sermone et congressu.’
390 Schol. Vall, ad Iuv. v. 109 ‘in latrunculorum lusu tam perfectus et callidus, ut ad cum ludentem concurreretur.’
391 Cp. ll. 190 sqq.
392 Cp. ll. 190 sqq.
393 Baehrens, Fragm. Poet. Rom. p. 281.
394 Priscian, Gr. Lat. i. 478.
395 Persius derides a certain Labeo (i. 4) and a writer named Attius (i. 50) for his translation of Iliad. On this last passage the scholiast says, ‘Attius Labeo poeta indoctus fuit illorum temporum, qui Iliadem Homeri foedissime composuit.’ The names are found combined in an inscription from Corinth, Joh. Schmidt, Mitt. des deutsch. archäol. Inst. in Athen, vi (1882), p. 354.
396 Schol. ad Pers. i. 4 (p. 248, Jahn).
397 Schol. ad Pers. i. 4, ex cod. Io. Tillii Brionensis episc., cited by El. Vinetus.
398 Sen. ad Polyb. de Cons. viii. 2, and xi. 5.
399 Vualtherus Spirensis Vs. 93. X cent. (ed. Harster, Munich, 1878, p. 22). Eberhard Bethunensis, Labyr. Tract. iii. 45.
400 This apparent confusion between Homer and Pindar is first found in Benzo, episc. Albensis (Monum. Germ. xi. 599) circa 1087. In Hugo Trimbergensis (thirteenth century) Pindar is the translator: ‘Homero, quem Pindarus philosophus fertur transtulisse.’ Cp. L. Müller, Philol. xv, p. 475. So, too, in Cod. Vat. Reg. 1708 (thirteenth and fourteenth centuries); in Vat. Pal. 1611 (end of fourteenth century), he is styled Pandarus. See Baehrens, P. L. M. iii. 4.
401 Seyffert, in Munk, Geschichte der Röm. Litt. ii, p. 242. Bücheler, Rhein. Mus. 35 (1880), p. 391.
402 Baehrens (P. L. M. iii) reads (7) ut primum tulerant for ex quo pertulerant. The corruption is unlikely, especially since the corresponding line in the Iliad (i. 6) begins [Greek: ex ou]. In line 1065, for quam cernis paucis … remis, he reads remis quam cernis … paucis, a distinct improvement. Some of those who retain MSS. in (7) attempt to explain Italice as a vocative or adverb. But ex nihilo nihil fit. For a summary of these unprofitable and generally absurd speculations, cp. Schanz, Gesch. Röm. Lit. § 394.
403 Vindobon. 3509 (fifteenth or sixteenth centuries).
404 Mart. vii. 63.
405 Vagellius, Sen. N.Q. vi. 2. 9. Antistius Sosianus, Tac. Ann. xiii. 28. C. Montanus, ib. xvi. 28. 29. Lucilius junior, see p. 144.
406 Tac. Ann. iv. 46; C.I.L. ii. 2093.
407 Dion. lix. 22; Tac. Ann. vi. 30.
408 Dion. loc. cit.; Suet. Claud. 9.
409 Plin Ep. v. 3. 5; Mart. i. praef.
410 Ap. Sid. Ep. ii. 10. 6.
411. v. 16; vi. 190, 331; vii. 71, 244, 245, 275, 354; xi. 409.
412 Baehrens, Poet. Rom. Fragm. p. 361.
413 Quint, x. 1.96 ‘at lyricorum Horatius fere solus legi dignus:… si quem adicere velis, is erit Caesius Bassus, quem nuper vidimus; sed eum longe praecedunt ingenia viventium’.
414 e.g. perhaps Martial, Sulpicia, and some of Pliny’s poet friends, see pp. 170 sqq.
415 See p. 80.
416 See Teuffel and Schwabe, Hist. Röm. Lit. § 304; Schanz, Gesch. Röm. Lit. 384 a.
417 Schol. Pers. vi. 1.
418 Ithyphallicum, Archebulium, Philicium, Paeonicum, Proceleusmaticum, Molossicum. Baehrens, Poet. Röm. Fragm. p. 364.
419 Ioseph. vita 65.
420 Suet. Vesp. 17, 18.
421 Ib. 8.
422 Ib. 19 ‘vetera quoque acroamata revocaverat’.
423 Ib. 18.
424 Dion. lxvi. 13, in 71 A.D. That this act was ineffectual is shown by Domitian’s action in 89-93 A.D.
425 Plin. N.H. praef. 5 and 11.
426 Suet. Dom. 2; Tac. Hist. iv. 86; Quint, x. 1. 91.
427 Suet. Dom. 18.
428 Quint. loc. cit.; Val. Fl. i. 12; Mart. v. 5. 7.
429 Suet. Dom. 4.
430 6 Stat. Silv. iv. 2. 65, v. 3. 227.
431 Suet. Dom. 20. This may have been creditable to him as ruler of the empire, though Suetonius undoubtedly wishes us to regard Tiberius’ memoirs as a manual of tyranny.
432 Suet. Dom. 10.
433 Suet. loc. cit.; Hieronym. ad ann. 89 and 95 A.D. The latter date is wrong: cp. Mommsen, Hermes, iii (1869), p. 84.
434 Tac. Agr. 2.
435 Quint. x. 1. 89. There is no clear indication of his date, but he is coupled with Saleius Bassus by Juvenal (vii. 80), a fact which suggests that he belonged to the Flavian period.
436 x. 1. 90.
437 Juv. vii. 79.
438 Stat. Silv. v. 3.
439 Stat. Silv. i. 2. 253; Mart. iv. 6. 4, i. 7, vii. 14.
440 Schol. Vall, ad Iuv. i. 20; Mart. xi. 10; Rut. Nam. i. 603; Schol. Iuv. i. 71. For his brother Scaevus Memor see p. 30.
441 Plin. Ep. v. 3. 5, vi. 10. 4.
442 Ib. iii. 1. 11, ii. 7. 1
443 Mart. viii. 70. 7.
444 Plin. Ep. v. 3. 5.
445 Priscian, Gr. Lat. ii, p. 205, 6.
446 Plin. Paneg. 47; Ep. iii. 18. 5.
447 Dion. lxviii. 16; Gellius xi. 17. 1.
448 See p. 25. Other names are Octavius Rufus, Plin. Ep. i. 7; Titinius Capito, C. I. L. 798, Plin. Ep. i. 17. 3; viii. 12. 4; Caninius Rufus, Plin. Ep. viii. 4. 1; Calpurnius Piso, Plin. Ep. v. 17. 1.
449 Ep. vi. 15.
450 Ep. ix. 22.
451 Gaius Passennus Paulus Propertius Blaesus was his full title. He derives his chief interest from the fact that the inscription at Assisi which preserves his name is our most conclusive evidence for the birthplace of Propertius. Haupt, opusc. i. p. 283, Leipz. (1875).
452 Ep. iv. 27.
453 viii. 21. 14.
454 vii. 9. 10.
455 iv. 14. 2.
456 iv. 14. 4.
457 He also translated the Greek epigrams of Arrius Antoninus. Cp. Ep. iv. 3. 3, and xviii. 1. One of these translations is preserved. Baehrens, P.L.M. iv. 112.
458 ii. 90. 9.
459 In the sixth Satire.
460 See Schanz, Gesch. Röm. Lit. § 284.
461 Apoll. Sid. ix. 261 ‘quod Sulpiciae iocos Thalia scripsit blandiloquum suo Caleno’. Auson. Cento. Nupt., 4 ‘meminerint prurire opusculum Sulpiciae, frontem caperare’. Fulgentius, Mythol. 1 (p. 4, Helm.) ‘Sulpicillae procacitas’
462 Schol. Vall, ad Iuv. vi. 537, unde ait Sulpicia: si me cadurcis dissolutis fasciis nudam Caleno concubantem proferat.
463 Mart. x. 38. 9:
vixisti tribus, o Calene, lustris: aetas haec tibi tota computatur et solos numeras dies mariti.
The first edition of Martial, Book x, was probably published in 95 A.D. If Sulpicia married Calenus at the age of 18-25, her birth will therefore fall between 55 and 62 A. D.
464 Cp. Mart. x. 38. 4-8.
465 Cp. Mart. x. 38. 9-11. It is, of course, possible that mariti is a euphemism.
466 Mart. x. 35. 1.
467. See Ap. Sid. loc. cit.
468 Sulp. Sat., lines 4, 5.
469 Raph. Volaterr. comment. urban. (fol. lvi. 1506 A.D.), ‘hic (sc. at Bobbio) anno 1493 huiuscemodi libri reperti sunt. Rutilius Namatianus. Heroicum Sulpici carmen.’ The first edition was published in 1498, with the title Sulpitiae carmina quae fuit Domitiani temporibus: nuper a Georgio Merula Allexandrino, cum aliis opusculis reperta. queritur de statu reipublicae et temporibus Domitiani. The MS. is now lost.
470 Cp. line 62. Domitian’s edict seems to have threatened the security of Calenus. In the lines which follow, Domitian’s death and overthrow are foretold. The poem, therefore, if genuine, must have been published soon after Domitian’s assassination in 96, though it may have been composed in part during his lifetime.
471 The work is generally rejected as spurious. Bachrens (P. L. M. v. p. 93, and de Sulpiciae quae vocatur satira, Jena, 1873) holds that the work is contemporary with Ausonius. Boot (de Sulpiciae quae fertur satira, Amsterdam, 1868) goes further, and regards the work as a renaissance forgery. He is followed by Bücheler. But there is no reason to doubt the existence of the Bobbian MS. The metrical difficulties can be remedied by emendation palare for palari (43) is a solecism, but many verbs are found in both active and deponent forms, and palare may be a slip, or even an invention by analogy. captiva (52) does not = the Italian cattiva or the French chétive. The most that we can say is that the work shows no resemblance to any extant contemporary literature. That does not necessarily prove it to be of later date. The problem cannot be answered with certainty. On the whole, to us the difficulty of supposing it to be a late forgery seems greater than the difficulty of supposing it to be by Sulpicia.
472 An exception must be made of the Silvae of Statius.
473 Or Balbus Setinus.
474 Schenkl, Stud, zu V. F. 272.
475 Mart. i. 61 and 76.
476 i. 5:
Phoebe mone, si Cymaeae mihi conscia vatis
stat casta cortina domo.
In Cymaeae vatis there is an allusion to the custody of the Sibylline books.
477 x, 1. 90.
478 i. 7-12.
479 i. 13, 14:
Solymo nigrantem pulvere fratrem spargentemque faces et in omni turre furentem.
Domitian pretended to be a poet and connoisseur of poetry. See p. 167.
480 iii. 207:
ut mugitor anhelat Vesvius, attonitas acer cum suscitat urbes
481 vii. 645; viii. 228. If these allusions be to events of 89 A. D. they point to the view that the last two books were composed shortly before the poet’s death, and confirm the opinion that the Argonautica was never finished.
482 A few instances will suffice. In iii. 302 Jason asserts that seers had prophesied his father’s death; this is nowhere else mentioned; on the contrary, at the beginning of the second book, it is specially told us that Juno concealed from Jason the fact of his father’s death, while in vii. 494 Jason speaks of him as still alive. In vii. 394 Venus is represented as leaving Medea in terror at the sound of her magic chant, while five lines later it is implied that she is still holding Medea’s hand. In viii. 24 Jason goes to the grove of Mars to meet Medea and to steal the fleece of gold; but no arrangement to this effect has been made between Jason and Medea at their previous meeting (vii. 516). Instances might be multiplied. See Schenkl, op. cit. 12 sqq.; Summers’ Study of Argonautica of Valerius Flaccus, p. 2 sqq. The inconsistency which makes the Argo to be at once the first ship and to meet many other ships by the way is perhaps the most glaring, but its rectification would have involved very radical alterations.
483 Cp. viii. 189:
inde sequemur ipsius amnis iter, donec nos flumine certo perferat inque aliud reddat mare.
484 Summers, op. cit. 6.
485 e.g. Argous Portus, Cales, the portico of the Argonauts at Rome.
486 i. 7-12.
487 Summers, p. 7.
488 i. 806; ii. 4.
489 Valerius was no slavish imitator of Apollonius. Some of his incidents are new, such, as the rescue of Hesione (ii. 450 sqq.). Many of the incidents in Apollonius are omitted (e.g. Stymphalian birds, A.R. ii. 1033, and the encounter with the sons of Phrixus, A.R. ii. 1093). Other incidents receive a fresh turn. In both poets the Argonauts see traces of the doom of Prometheus. But in A. he is still being devoured, in V. he is being freed by Hercules amid an earthquake. Again V. often expands or contracts an incident related by A. E.g. Contraction: The launching of Argo, V.F. i. 184-91; A.R. i. 362-93. Expansion: The story of Lemnos V. ii. 72-427; A. i. 591-884: here there is not much difference in length, but V. tells us much more. The visit to Cyzicus, V. iii. 1-361; A. i. 947-1064: note also that in V. the purification of the Argonauts, 362-459, takes the place of the irrelevant founding of the temple of Rhea on Dindymus, A. i. 1103 sqq. The debate as to whether to abandon Hercules, who has gone in search of Hylas, V. iii. 598-714; in A. the Argonauts sail without noticing the absence of Hercules and Hylas, and the debate takes place at sea, A. i. 1273-1325. As a rule, however, V. is longer than A., partly owing to longer descriptions, partly owing to the greater complication of the plot at Colchis. On the other hand, there is much imitation of A. Cp. V.F. i. 255; A.R. i. 553; V.F. iii. 565-97; A. i. 1261-72; V.F. iv. 733; A. ii. 774; V.F. v. 73-100; A. ii. 911-929.
490 In Apollonius the aid of Aphrodite and Eros is requisitioned to make Medea fall in love with Jason, but there is no further conventional supernatural interference. In Valerius, Juno (v. 350, vi. 456-660, vii. 153-90) kindles Medea’s passion with Venus’s aid. In vii, 190 sqq., Venus goes in person.
491 As evidence for Apollonius’ superiority cp. V.F. v. 329 sqq.; A.R. iii. 616 sq.; V.F. vii, 1-25; A.R. iii. 771 sq.; V.F v. 82-100; A.R. ii. 911-21.
492 v. 418. Cp. Apollon. iv. 272; Herod, ii. 103; Strab. xvi. 4. 4; Plin. N.H. xxxiii, 52.
493 vi. 118. Cp. also v. 423:
Arsinoen illi tepidaeque requirunt otia laeta Phari.
494 Cp. vii. 35 sqq.
495 As, for instance, in the Alcestis of Euripides and Callimachus’ Hymn to Artemis.
496 A.R. i. 1167 [Greek: d_e tot anochliz_on tetr_echotos oidmatos olkous | messothen axen eretmon atar tryphos allo men autos | amph_o chersin ech_on pese dochmios, allo de pontos | klyze palirrothioisi pher_on. ana d’ hezeto sig_e | paptain_on cheires gar a_etheon _eremeousai].
497 Cp. also V.F. iv. 682-5; viii. 453-7.
498 For obscurity cp. also iii. 133-7, 336-7; vii. 55.
499 Valerius is fond of such inversions, especially in the case of particles, pronouns, &c.; cp. v. 187 iuxta; ii. 150 sed; vi. 452 quippe; vi. 543 sed.
500 Cp. i. 436-8; ii. 90; iii. 434; vi. 183, 260-4.
501 See p. 183.
502 The passage may conceivably be only a rough draft, cp p. 197 note.
503 Cp. also i. 130-48, 251-4.
504 There is little evidence that he had any influence on posterity, though there may be traces of such influence in Hyginus and the Orphic Argonautica. Of contemporaries Statius and Silius seem to have read him and at times to imitate him. See Summers, pp. 8, 9. Blass, however (J. f. Phil. und Päd. 109, 471 sqq.), holds that Valerius imitates Statius.
505 Cp. V. F. i. 833 sqq.; Aen. vi. 893, 660 sqq., 638 sqq.; V. F. i. 323; A. viii. 560 sqq.; V. F. vi. 331; A. ix. 595 sqq.; V. F. iii. 136; A. xii. 300 sqq.; V. F. viii. 358; A. x. 305; V. F. vi. 374; A. xi. 803. See Summers, pp. 30-3. His echoes from Vergil are perhaps more obvious in some respects than similar echoes in Statius, owing to the fact that he had a more Vergilian imagination than Statius, and lacked the extreme dexterity of style to disguise his pilferings. But in his general treatment of his theme he shows far greater originality; this is perhaps due to the fact that the Argonaut saga is not capable of being ‘Aeneidized’ to the same extent as the Theban legend. But let Valerius have his due. He is in the main unoriginal in diction, Statius in composition.
506 Cp. Summers, p. 49. See also note, p. 123.
507 Cp. beside the passages quoted below iii. 558 sqq., 724, 5; iv. 16-50, 230, 1; v. 10-12; vii. 371-510, 610, 648-53.
508 One is tempted at times to account for the profusion and lack of spontaneity of similes in poets of this age by the supposition that they kept commonplace books of similes and inserted them as they thought fit.
509 vi. 260:
qualem populeae fidentem nexibus umbrae siquis avem summi deducat ab aere rami, ante manu tacita cui plurima crevit harundo; illa dolis viscoque super correpta sequaci inplorat ramos atque inrita concitat alas.
510 vii. 124:
sic adsueta toris et mensae dulcis erili, aegra nova iam peste canis rabieque futura, ante fugam totos lustrat queribunda penates.
511 iv. 699:
discussa quales formidine Averni Alcides Theseusque comes pallentia iungunt oscula vix primas amplexi luminis oras.
512 This simile is a free translation from Apollonius, iii. 966 [Greek: t_o d’ aneo kai anaudoi ephestasan all_eloisin, | h_e drusin h_e makr_esin eeidomenoi elat_esin, | ai te parasson ek_eloi en ourresin erriz_ontai,| n_enemiae meta d’ autis upo mip_es anemoio | kitumenai omad_esan apeiriton _os ara t_oge | mellon alis phthenchasthai upo pnoi_esin Er_otos.] Valerius has compressed the last three lines into rapidus nondum quas miscuit Auster. The effective miscuit conveys nearly as much as the longer and not less beautiful version in the Greek.
513 This accumulation is probably due to the lack of revision. obvius … pavor fits the context ill and is curiously reminiscent of I. 392 (‘iam stabulis gregibusque pavor strepitusque sepulcris inciderat’), while II. 400-2 would probably have been considerably altered had the poem undergone its final correction. There are other indications of the unfinished character of the work to be found in this passage (p. 181, note).
514 Cp. also viii. 10, where Medea bids farewell to her home. ‘O my father, would thou mightest give me now thy last embrace, as I fly to exile, and mightest behold these my tears. Believe me, father, I love not him I follow more than thee: would that the stormy deep might whelm us both. And mayest thou long hold thy realm, grown old in peace and safety, and mayest thou find thy children that remain more dutiful than me.’
515 Ap. Rh. iii. 1105 sqq.; cp. also Murray on Apollonius in his History of Greek Literature, p. 382.
516 Silv. v. 3. 116 sqq.
517 Ib. 146 sqq.
518 Ib. 163.
519 Ib. 141.
520 Ib. 195-208. This passage suggests that the elder Statius died soon after 79 A.D. On the other hand, he probably lived some years longer as the Thebais, inspired and directed by him, was not begun till 80 A.D. He must, however, have died before 89 A.D., the earliest date assignable to Statius’ victory at the Alban contest.
521 Silv. v. 3. 225.
522 Juv. vii. 86. Paris had fallen from imperial favour by 83 A.D. Dio. lxvii. 3. 1.
523 Silv. v. 3. 215.
524. Juv. vii. 82.
525 Silv. v. 3. 227. The subject of his prize recitation was the triumph of Domitian over the Germans and Dacians; i.e. after 89 A.D.
526 Praef. Silv. i. ‘pro Thebaide quamvis me reliquerit timeo.’ The first book of the Silvae was published in 92 A.D. For the time taken for its composition and the poet’s anticipations of immortality see Th. xii. 811 sqq.
527. See previous note.
528 Silv. iii. 5. 28, v. 3. 232. The Agon Capitolinus was instituted in 86 A.D. The contests falling in Statius’ lifetime are those of 86, 90, 94 A.D. As his failure is always mentioned after the Alban victory, 94 A.D. would seem the most probable date.
529 Rutilius Gallicus had just died when the first book was published; cp. Praef., bk. i. This took place in 92 A.D.; cp. C.I.L. v. 6988, vi. 1984. 8. Silv. iv. 1 celebrates Domitian’s seventeenth consulate (95 A.D.).
530 See previous note.
531 Such at least is a legitimate inference from the fact that it is not mentioned before the fourth and fifth books of the Silvae; cp. iv. 4. 94, iv. 7. 23, v. 2. 163.
532 Written probably in 95 A.D. Statius promises such a work in Silv. iv. 4. 95. Four lines are quoted from it in G. Valla’s scholia on Juv. iv. 94:
lumina: Nestorei mitis prudentia Crispi et Fabius Veiento (potentem signat utrumque purpura, ter memores implerunt nomine fastos), et prope Caesareae confinis Acilius aulae.
533 Praef. Silv. iv ‘Maximum Vibium et dignitatis et eloquentiae nomine a nobis diligi satis eram testatus epistula quam ad illum de editione Thebaidos meae publicavi.’
534 Witness poems such as the Villa Surrentina Pollii. Silv. ii. 2. 3, 1.
535 Silv. iii. 5. 13.
536 Praef. Silv. iii. and iii. 5. He was married soon after beginning the Thebais, i.e. about 82 A.D. (cp. S. iii. 5. 35). Claudia had a daughter by her first husband, iii. 5. 52-4.
537 v. 5. 72-5.
538 iii. 5. 13, iv. 4. 69, v. 2. 158. It is worth noting how late in life all his best work was done, i.e. 80-95 A.D.
539 The well-known passage of Juvenal, vii. 86 (‘cum fregit subsellia versu, esurit, intactam Paridi nisi vendit Agaven’), as has been pointed out, is only Juvenal’s exaggerated way of saying that the Thebais brought Statius no material gain. The family was not, however, rolling in wealth; cp. v. 3. 116 sqq.
540 His friendships do not throw much light on his life, though they show that he moved in high circles. Rutilius Gallicus (i. 4) had had a distinguished career and rose to be praefectus urbis; Claudius Etruscus (i. 5), originally a slave from Smyrna, had risen to the imperial post a rationibus; Abascantus (v. 1) held the office known as ab epistulis; Plotius Grypus (iv. 9) came of senatorial family; Crispinus (v. 2) was the son of Vettius Bolanus, Governor of Britain and afterwards of Asia; Vibius Maximus (iv. 7) became praefect of Egypt under Trajan; Polla Argentaria (ii. 7) was the widow of Lucan; Arruntius Stella (i. 2) was a poet, and rose to the consulship. Most of these persons must have been possessed of strong literary tastes. Some are mentioned by Martial, e.g. Stella, Claudius Etruscus, Polla Argentaria. Atedius Melior and Novius Vindex were also friends of the two poets. Both must have moved in the same circles, yet neither ever mentions the other. They were probably jealous of one another and on bad terms.
541 e.g. ii. 2. Cp. also i. 3. 64-89.
542 Dante regards him also as a Christian. This compliment was paid by the Middle Ages to not a few of the great classical authors. It was not even a fatal obstacle to have lived before the birth of Christ. Cicero, for instance, was believed to have been a Christian. The description of the Altar of Mercy at Athens (Th. xii. 493) has been regarded as a special reason for the Christianizing of Statius: cp. Verrall, Oxford and Cambridge Review, No. 1; Arturo Graf, Roma nella memoria del medio evo, vol. ii, ch. 17.
543 This statement does not, however, apply to the Silvae.
544 Ov. Am. i. 15. 14.
545 Merivale, Rom. Emp. viii. 80, 1.
546 Merivale, Rom. Emp. viii. 80, 1.
547 The sources for his story were the old Cyclic poem, the later epic of Antimachus, the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, that draw their plots from the Theban cycle of legend. The material thus given him he worked over in the Vergilian manner, remoulding incidents or introducing fresh episodes in such a fashion as to provide precise parallels to many episodes in the Aeneid. He also drew certain hints from the Phoenissae and Oedipus of Seneca: for details see Legras, Étude sur la Thébaide de Stace, part i, ch. 2, part ii, chh. 1 and 2. The subject had been treated also by one Ponticus, the friend of Propertius (Prop. i. 7. 1, Ov. Tr. iv. 10. 47) and possibly by Lynceus (Prop. ii. 34).
548 Legras, Les Légendes Théb., ch. iii. 4. The [Greek: Amphiaraou exelasis] mentioned by Suidas s.v. [Greek: Hom_eros] is sometimes identified with the Thebais; but it is more probably merely the title of a book of that epic. Still the fact that the [Greek: Amph. exel.] is given such prominence by Suidas does lend some support to the view that he was the chief character of the epic. He is certainly the most tragic figure.
549 Porphyr. ad Hor. A.P. 146.
550 Vergil had given six books to the wanderings of Aeneas; Statius must give six to the preparation and march of the Thebans!
551 See Legras, op. cit., pp. 183 ff.
552 x. 632.
553 xi. 457. Cp. also the strange and stilted description of the cave of sleep, x. 84, where Quies, Oblivio, Ignavia, Otium, Silentium, Voluptas, and even Labor and Amor are to be found. But with the exception of Amor these abstract personages are inventions of Statius. Virtus and Pietas had temples at Rome.
554 iv. 32-308; vii. 250-358.
555 x. 262-448.
556 vi. 1-921. Two other funerals are to be found, in. 114-217, xii. 22-104.
557 Th. i. 557 sqq.; Verg. Aen. viii. 190 sqq.
558 v. 17-498: with this compare the version of the story given by Valerius Maccus, ii. 78-305; except in point of brevity there is little to choose between the two versions. But it is not a digression in Valerius, and it is told at less inordinate length. The versions differ much in detail, and Statius owes little or nothing to Valerius.
559 Op. Legras, Les légendes Thébaines, ch. ii. 4, Welcker, Ep. Cycl. ii. 350. The story was well known. Aeschylus probably treated it in his [Greek: Nemea,] Euripides certainly in his [Greek: ypsipel_e]. The legend gives the origin of the Nemean games.
560 The speeches in the Thebais, though they lack variety, are almost always exceedingly clever and quite repay reading; see esp. i. 642; iii. 59, 151, 348; iv. 318; vi. 138; vii. 497, 539; ix. 375; xi. 155, 677, 708.
561 iii. 348.
562 v. 660.
563 vii. 538.
564 viii. 751. Tydeus bites the severed head of Melanippus to the brain, thereby losing the gift of immortality that Pallas was hastening to bring him. The incident is revolting, but Statius has merely followed the old legend recorded by Aesch. Sept. 587; Soph. Fr. 731; Eurip. Fr. 357.
565 Cp. in this context Atalanta’s beautiful lament on his departure for the war, iv. 318.
566 Every book, however, abounds in echoes of Vergil, both in matter and diction; e.g. Aen. vii. 475, Allecto precipitates the war by making Ascanius kill a tame stag. Theb. vii. 562, an Erinnys brings about the war by causing the death of two pet tigers sacred to Bacchus. Aen. xi. 591, Diana orders one of her nymphs to kill the slayer of Camilla. Theb. ix. 665, she tells Apollo that the slayer of Parthenopaeus shall perish by her arrows, for which see Th. ix. 875. Cp. also Th. ii. 205; Aen. iv. 173, 189; Th. ii. 162; Aen. xi. 581. The passage previously referred to concerning the exploits of Dymas and Hopleus is especially noteworthy as openly challenging comparison with Vergil; cp. x. 445. For verbal imitations cp. Aen. v. 726, 7; Th. ii. 115; Aen. i. 106; Th. v. 366; Aen. vii. 397; Th. iv. 379, &c. It is no defence to urge that the ancients held different views on plagiarism, that Vergil and Ovid pilfered from their predecessors. For they made their appropriations their own, and set the stamp of their genius upon what they borrowed. And, further, the process of borrowing cannot continue indefinitely. The cumulative effect of progressive plagiarism is distressing. For Statius’ imitation of other Latin poets, notably Lucan, Seneca, and Ovid, see Legras, op. cit., i. 2. Such imitations, though not very rare, are of comparatively small importance.
567. ix. 315 sqq.
568 Statius is imitating early Greek epic. That might excuse him if these similes possessed either truth or beauty.
569 See p.123, note.
570 i. 841-85 gives a good idea of the Achilleis at its best. The passage describes the unmasking of the disguised Achilles.
571 Quint, x. 3. 17.
572 Silv. i. 1. 6; iii. 4; iv. 1. 2, 3.
573 ii. 1. 6; iii. 3.
574 v. 1. 3, 5.
575 iii. 5; iv. 4. 5, 7; v. 2.
576 i. 4.
577 iii. 2.
578 i. 3. 5; ii. 2; iii. 1.
579 i. 2.
580 ii. 7.
581 iv. 6.
582 ii. 4. 5.
583 v. 4.
584 Cp. also the extravagant dedication of the Thebais.
585 It is hard to select from the Silvae. Beside, those poems from which quotations are given, iii. 5, v. 3 and 5 are best worth reading. But the average level is high. The Sapphic and Alcaic poems (iv. 5 and 7) and the hexameter poems in praise of Domitian (i. 1, iii. 4, iv. 1 and 2) are the least worth reading.
586 The poem on the death of his father (v. 3) shows genuine depth of feeling, but its elaborate artificiality is somewhat distressing, considering the theme. (The same is true to a less degree of v. 5.) V. 3 must be, in portions at any rate, the earliest of the Silvae, for (l. 29) the poet states that his father has been dead but three months. But it records (ll. 219-33) events which took place long after that time (i.e. victory at Alba and failure at Agon Capitolinus). The poem must have been rewritten in part, ll. 219-33 at least being later additions. The inconsistency between these lines and line 29 is probably due to the poet having died before revising bk. v for publication.
587 viii. 8; ii. 17; v. 6.
588 With Statius, as with Martial, the hendecasyllable always begins with a spondee. The Alcaics of iv. 5 and Sapphics of iv. 7 call for no special comment. They are closely modelled on Horace. The two poems fail because they are prosy and uninteresting, not through any fault of the metre, but it may be that Statius felt his powers hampered by an unfamiliar metre.
589 If iuvenis be taken to refer to Statius, the poem must be an early work or depict an imaginary situation. The alternative is to take it as a vocative referring to Sleep.
590 C.I.L. vi. 1984. 9, in the ‘fasti sodalium Augustalium Claudialium’. In MSS. Pliny and Tacitus, he is Silius Italicus, in Martial simply Silius or Italicus.
591 Plin. Ep. iii. 7. In the description of his life which follows, Pliny is the authority, where not otherwise stated.
592 Pliny writes in 101 A.D. to record Silius’ death. Silius was over seventy-five when he died.
593 Italicus might suggest that he came from the Spanish town of Italica. But Martial, who addresses him in several epigrams of almost servile flattery, would surely have claimed him as fellow-countryman had this been the case.
594 Pliny, loc. cit.; Tac. Hist. iii. 65.
595 His poem was already planned in 88; cp. Mart. iv. 14 (published 88 A.D.). Some of it was already written in 92; cp. legis, M. vii. 62 (published 92 A.D.). But the allusion to Domitian, iii. 607, must have been inserted after that date, while xiv. 686 points to the close of Nerva’s principate. Statius, Silv. iv. 7. 14 (published 95 A.D.) seems to imitate Silius:
Dalmatae montes ubi Dite viso pallidus fossor redit erutoque concolor auro.
Sil. i. 233 ‘et redit infelix effosso concolor auro.’ The last five books, compressed and markedly inferior to i-xii, may have been left unrevised.
596 In 101 A.D. at the age of seventy-five.
597 Epict. diss. iii. 8. 7.
598 Mart. xi. 48:
Silius haec magni celebrat monumenta Maronis, iugera facundi qui Ciceronis habet. heredem dominumque sui tumulive larisve non alium mallet nec Maro nec Cicero.
That it was the Tusculanum and not the Cumanum of Cicero that Silius possessed is an inference from C.I.L. xix. 2653, found at Tusculum: ‘D.M. Crescenti Silius Italicus Collegium salutarem.’
599 Enn. Ann. vii, viii, ix.
600 Sec p. 103.
601 i. 55.
602 iv. 727.
603 viii. 28.
604 x. 349.
605 ix. 484.
606 xvii. 523.
607 iv. 675.
608 xi. 387.
609 ix. 439.
610 ii. 395.
611 xvi. 288.
612 ii. 36.
613 iii. 222 and viii. 356.
614 xiii. 395.
615 e.g. the Funeral Games, the choice of Scipio (xv. 20), the Nekuia.
616 At Nola.
617 Cp. x. 628 ‘quod … Laomedontiadum non desperaverit urbi’. The tasteless Laomedontiadum as a learned equivalent for Romanorum is characteristic. Silius has the Aeneid in his mind when he chooses this word: his literary proclivities lead him astray; where he should be most strong he is most feeble.
618 Vide infra for his treatment of Paulus’ dead body after Cannae.
619 Trebia, iv. 480-703; Trasimene, v. 1-678; Cannae, ix. l78-x. 578.
620 Mart, vii. 90.
621 See p. 123, note.
622 Bk. vi.
623 xii. 212-67, where the death of Cinyps clad in Paulus’ armour is described, are pretty enough, but too frankly an imitation of Vergil to be worth quoting. The simile 247-50 is, however, new and quite picturesque.
624 Sights of Naples, xii. 85; Tides at Pillars of Hercules, iii. 46; Legend of Pan, xiii. 313; Sicily, xiv. 1-50; Fabii, vii. 20; Anna Perenna, viii. 50; Bacchus at Falernum, vii. 102; Trasimenus, v. ad init.
625 See note on p. 13.
626 Plin. Ep. i. 13.
627 Mart. vii. 63.
628 On the modern Cerro de Bambola near the Moorish town of El Calatayud.
629 Cp. ix. 52, x. 24, xii. 60.
630 Cp. v. 34.
631 ix. 73. 7.
632 In x. 103. 7, written in 98 A. D., he tells us that it is thirty-four years since he left Spain.
633 iv. 40, xii. 36.
634 He is found rendering poetic homage to Polla, the wife of Lucan, as late as 96 A. D., x. 64, vii. 21-3. For his reverence for the memory of Lucan, cp. i. 61. 7; vii. 21, 22; xiv. 194.
635 Cp. his regrets for the ease of his earlier clienthood and the generosity of the Senecas, xii. 36.
636 ii. 30; cp. 1. 5:
is mihi ‘dives eris, si causas egeris’ inquit. quod peto da, Gai: non peto consilium.
637 Vide his epigrams passim.
638 xiii. 42, xiii. 119. Perhaps the gift of Seneca, cp. Friedländer on Mart. i. 105.
639 ix. 18, ix. 97. 7, x. 58. 9.
640 Such is the most plausible interpretation of iii. 95. 5, ix. 97. 5:
tribuit quod Caesar uterque ius mihi natorum (uterque, i.e. Titus and Domitian).
641 iii. 95, v. 13, ix. 49, xii. 26.
642 iii. 95. 11, vi. 10. 1.
643 xiii. 4 gives Domitian his title of Germanicus, assumed after war with Chatti in 84; xiv. 34 alludes to peace; no allusion to subsequent wars.
644 I, II. Perhaps published together. This would account for length of preface. II. Largely composed of poems referring to reigns of Vespasian and Titus. Reference to Domitian’s censorship shows that I was not published before 85. There is no hint of outbreak of Dacian War, which raged in 86.
III. Since bk. IV contains allusion to outbreak of revolt of Antonius Saturninus towards end of 88 (11) and is published at Rome, whereas III was published at Cornelii forum (1), III probably appeared in 87 or 88.
IV. Contains reference to birthday of Domitian, Oct. 24 (1. 7), and seems then to allude to ludi saeculares (Sept. 88). Reference to snowfall at Rome (2 and 13) suggests winter. Perhaps therefore published in Saturnalia of 88.
V. Domitian has returned to Italy (1) from Dacian War, but there is no reference to his triumph (Oct. 1, 89 A. D.). Book therefore probably published in early autumn of 89.
VI. Domitian has held his triumph (4. 2 and 10. 7). Julia (13) is dead (end of 89). Book probably published in 90, perhaps in summer. Friedländer sees allusion to Agon Capitolinus (Summer, 90) in vi. 77.
VII. 5-8 refer to Domitian’s return from Sarmatic War. He has not yet arrived. These epigrams are among last in book. He returned in January 93. His return was announced as imminent in Dec. 92.
VIII. 21 describes Domitian’s arrival; 26, 30, and others deal with festivities in this connexion. 65 speaks of temple of Fortuna Redux and triumphal arch built in Domitian’s honour. They are mentioned as if completed. 66 speaks of consulate of Silius Italicus’ son beginning Sept. 1, 93.
IX. 84 is addressed to Appius Norbanus Maximus, who has been six years absent from Rome. He went to Upper Germany to crush Antonius Saturninus in 88. 35 refers to Agon Capitolinus in summer of 94.
X. Two editions published. We possess later and larger. Cp. x. 2. 70. 1 suggests a year’s interval between IX and X. X, ed. 1 was therefore perhaps published in Dec. 95. X, ed. 2 has references to accession of Trajan, Jan. 25, 98 A. D. (6, 7 and 34). Martial’s departure for Spain is imminent.
XI. 1 is addressed to Parthenius, executed in middle of 97 A. D. xii. 5 refers to a selection made from X and XI, perhaps from presentation to Nerva; cp. xii. 11.
XII. In preface Martial apologizes for three years’ silence (1. 9) from publication of X. ed. 2. xii. 3. 10 refers to Stella’s consulship, Oct. 101 or 102. Three years’ interval points to 101. It was published late in the year; cp. 1 and 62. Some epigrams in this book were written at Rome. But M. says that it was written paucissimis diebus. This must refer only to Spanish epigrams, or the book must have been enlarged after M.’s death.
For the whole question see Friedländer Introd., pp. 50 sqq.
645 iii. 1 and 4.
646 Cp. xi. 3.
647 xii. 21, xii. 31. There is no reason to suppose with some critics that she was his wife.
648 xii. praef. ‘civitatis aures quibus adsueveram quaero.’
649 Ib. ‘accedit his municipalium robigo dentium.’
650 See p. 271. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that this silence was due to dislike or jealousy.
651 Mackail, Greek Anthol., Introd., p. 5.
652 Domitius Marsus was famous for his epigrams, as also Calvus, Gaetulicus, Pedo, and others.
653. See p. 36.
654 See p. 134.
655 The best of his erotic poems is the pretty vi. 34, but it is far from original; cp. the last couplet:
nolo quot (sc. basia) arguto dedit exorata Catullo
Lesbia; pauca cupit qui numerare potest.
656 Cp. Cat. 5 and 7; Mart. vi. 34; Cat. 2 and 3; Mart. i. 7 and 109 (it is noteworthy that this last poem has itself been exquisitely imitated by du Bellay in his poem on his little dog Peloton).
657 Cp. Ov. Tr. ii. 166; Mart. vi. 3. 4; Ov. F. iii. 192; Mart, vi. 16. 2; Ov. A. i. 1. 20; Mart. vi. 16. 4; Ov. Tr. i. 5. 1, iv. 13. 1; Mart, i. 15. 1. His imitations of other poets are not nearly so marked. There are a good many trifling echoes of Vergil, but little wholesale borrowing. A very large proportion of the parallel passages cited by Friedländer are unjust to Martial. No poet could be original judged by such a test.
658 There is little of any importance to be said about Martial’s metre. The metres most often employed are elegiac, hendecasyllabic, and the scazon. In the elegiac he is, on the whole, Ovidian, though he is naturally freer, especially in the matter of endings both of hexameter and pentameter. He makes his points as well, but is less sustainedly pointed. His verse, moreover, has greater variety and less formal symmetry than that of Ovid. On the other hand his effects are less sparkling, owing to his more sparing use of rhetoric. In the hendecasyllabic he is smoother and more polished. It invariably opens with a spondee.
659 Cp. vii. 72. 12, x. 3.
660 Cp. vii. 12. 9, iii. 99. 3.
661 Catull. xvi. 5; Ov. Tr. ii. 354; Apul. Apol. 11; Auson. 28, cento nup.; Plin. Ep. vii. 8.
662 We might also quote the beautiful extra fortunam est quidquid donatur amicis: quas dederis solas semper habebis opes (v. 42).
What thou hast given to friends, and that alone,
Defies misfortune, and is still thine own.
PROFESSOR GOLDWIN SMITH.
But the needy poet may have had some arrière-pensée. We do not know to whom the poem is addressed.
663 Cp. the description of the villa of Faustinus, iii. 58.
664. Their only rival is the famous Sirmio poem of Catullus.
665 Even Tennyson’s remarkable poem addressed to F. D. Maurice fails to reach greater perfection.
666 e.g. Arruntius Stella and Atedius Melior. Cp. p. 205.
667 Cp. the poems on the subject of Earinus, Mart. ix. 11, 12, 13, and esp. 16; Stat. Silv. iii. 4.
668 Mart. vi. 28 and 29.
669 The remaining lines of the poem are tasteless and unworthy of the portion quoted, and raise a doubt as to the poet’s sincerity in the particular case. But this does not affect his general sympathy for childhood.
670 101 provides an instance of Martial’s sympathy for his own slaves. Cp. 1. 5:—
ne tamen ad Stygias famulus descenderet umbras,
ureret implicitum cum scelerata lues,
cavimus et domini ius omne remisimus aegro;
munere dignus erat convaluisse meo.
sensit deficiens mea praemia meque patronum
dixit ad infernas liber iturus aquas.
671 i. 13.
672 i. 42.
673 i. 21. He is perhaps at his best on the death of Otho (vi. 32):
cum dubitaret adhuc belli civilis Enyo
forsitan et posset vincere mollis Otho,
damnavit multo staturum sanguine Martem
et fodit certa pectora tota manu.
sit Cato, dum vivit, sane vel Caesare maior:
dum moritur, numquid maior Othone fuit?
When doubtful was the chance of civil war,
And victory for Otho might declare;
That no more Roman blood for him might flow,
He gave his breast the great decisive blow.
Caesar’s superior you may Cato call:
Was he so great as Otho in his fall?
HAY.
674 It is to be noted that even in the most worthless of his epigrams he never loses his sense of style. If childish epigrams are to be given to the world, they cannot be better written.
675 Cp. Juv. 5; Mart. iii. 60, vi. 11, x. 49; Plin. Ep. ii. 6.
676 v. 18. 6.
677 This is doubly offensive if addressed to the poor Cinna of viii. 19. Cp. the similar vii. 53, or the yet more offensive viii. 33 and v. 36.
678 More excusable are poems such as x. 57, where he attacks one Gaius, an old friend (cp. ii. 30), for failing to fulfil his promise, or the exceedingly pointed poem (iv. 40) where he reproaches Postumus, an old friend, for forgetting him. Cp. also v. 52.
679 See p. 252.
680 Cp. the elaborate and long-winded poem of Statius on a statuette of Hercules (Silv. iv. 6) with Martial on the same subject, ix. 43 and 44.
681 Cp. viii. 3 and 56.
682 Bridge and Lake, Introd., Select Epigrams of Martial.
683 The ancient biographies of the poet all descend from the same source: their variations spring largely from questionable or absurd interpretations of passages in the satires themselves. The best of them, if not their actual source, is the life found at the end of the codex Pithoeanus, the best of the MSS. of Juvenal. It was in all probability written by the author of the scholia Pithoeana—to whom Valla, on the authority of a MS. now lost, gave the name of Probus—and dates from the fourth or fifth century.
684 L. 41. Cp. Plin. Ep. ii. 11.
685 xiii. 17 ‘sexaginta annos Fonteio consule natus’. xv. 27 ‘nuper consule Iunco’.
686 Vita 1 (O. Jahn ed.): 1 a (Dürr, Das Leben Juvenals). A life contained in Cod. Barberin. viii. 18 (fifteenth century), says Iunius Iuvenalis Aquinas Iunio Iuvenale patre, matre vero Septumuleia ex Aquinati municipio, Claudio Nerone et L. Antistio consulibus (55 A. D.) natus est; sororem habuit Septumuleiam, quae Fuscino nupsit. This may be mere invention on the part of a humanist of the fifteenth century. The life contains many improbabilities and the MS. is of suspiciously late date. But see Dürr, p. 28.
687 Vitae 2 and 3 ‘oriundus temporis Neronis Claudii imperatoris’. Vit. 4 ‘decessit sub Antonino Pio’.
688 So Cod. Paris. 9345; Vossian. 18 and 64; Bodl. (Canon Lat. 41); Schol. Pith, ad vit. 1.
689 So all ancient biographies except 1. In Sat. iii, Umbricius, addressing Juvenal, speaks of tuum Aquinum: cp. also the inscription found near Aquinum and quoted later.
690 This is only conjecture, but the son of a rich citizen of Aquinum would naturally be sent to Rome for his education. For his rhetorical education cp. i. 15-17.
691 Vita 1.
692 Cp. especially the whole of xvi; also i. 58, ii. 165, iii. 132, vii. 92, xiv. 193-7.
693. C.I.L. x. 5382.
694 C.I.L. vii, p. 85; Hübner, Rhein. Mus. xi (1857), p. 30; Hermes, xvi (1881), p. 566.
695 Satt. 3, 11, 12, 13. Trebius in 5 is perhaps an imaginary character.
696 vi. 75, 280, vii. 186.
697 vii, 82.
698 Mart. vii. 24, 91, xii. 18.
699 vi. 57.
700 xi. 65.
701 xi. 190, xii. 87.
702 Vita 1.
703 There are, however, allusions to Domitian as dead in ii. 29-33, iv. 153.
704 Ap. Sid. ix. 269.
705 Joh. Mal. Chron. x, p. 341, Chilm.
706 Vita 7. Schol. ad vii. 92.
707 Vita 6.
708 Vitae 1, 2, 4, 7. Perhaps an inference from Sat. xv. 45.
709 See 708.
710 Vitae 5 and 6. If the inscription (see p. 288) refers to the poet, this view has further support.
711 Joh. Mal., loc. cit.
712 Trajan had, however, a favourite in the pantomimus Pylades. Dio. Cass. Ixviii. 10.
713 The simplest suggestion is that Juvenal was at some time banished, that the reason for his banishment was forgotten and supplied by conjecture. Cp. Friedländer’s ed., p. 44. There is no real evidence to prove that Juvenal was ever in Egypt or Britain. His topography in Sat. xv is faulty, and allusion to the oysters of Richborough (ostrea Rutupina, iv. 141) would be possible even in a poet who had never visited Britain.
714 i. 1-3, 17, 18 (Dryden’s translation).
715 i. 79.
716 Ib. 85.
717 Ib. 147-50.
718 i. 165-71.
719 x. 356-66 (Dryden’s translation).
720 There is nothing in this satire to suggest that Juvenal had or had not visited Egypt. The legend of his banishment to Egypt may be true, but it is quite as likely that this satire caused the scholiast to localize his traditional exile in Egypt. The theme of cannibalism was sometimes dealt with by the rhetoricians. Cp. Quintilian, Decl. 12.
721 e.g. Claudius Etruscus, who held the imperial secretaryship of finance under Nero and Vespasian, and Abascantus, the secretary ab epistulis to Domitian. Stat. Silv. iii. 3, v. 1.
722 For a fine picture of the exclusive Roman spirit, cp. Le procurateur de Judée, by Anatole France in L’Étui de nacre.
723 iii. 60-125.
724 xiv. 96 sqq.
725 i. 130 sqq, and the whole of xv. Above all, he hates the Egyptian Crispinus, cp. iv. 2.
726. i. 102 sqq.
727 For the tradition of coarseness see chapter on Martial, p. 263.
728 It has been pointed out that the epigrams of Martial addressed to Juvenal are disfigured by gross obscenities. It is, however, a little unfair to make Juvenal responsible for his friend’s observations.
729 The sixth satire abounds throughout its great length with sketches of the most appalling clearness and power, though they tend to crudeness of colour and are few of them suitable for quotation.
730 xiii. 120 sqq.
731 x. 346 sqq.
732 xiii. 180.
733 ix. 32, xii. 63.
734 vii. 194 sqq., ix. 33.
735 xiii. 192-249.
736 xii. 3-6, 89 sqq.
737 Such obscurity as he presents is due almost entirely to the fact that we have lost the key to his topical allusions. He has a strong affection for ingenious periphrases (e.g. v. 139, vi. 159, x. 112, xii. 70), but they are as a rule effective and amusing.