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INTRODUCTION

DECIUS JUNIUS JUVENALIS is the latest of the four Roman poets whose writings have been most universally and most constantly read, and he differs widely from the other three. Virgil, Horace and Ovid lived in the brilliant and prosperous time of Augustus, and with the circumstances of their lives and writings we are fairly well acquainted; the mere fact that they belong all three to the same period of literary and political history invites the establishment of relations and comparisons between them. But Juvenal stands apart, divided no less by nature than by circumstance; the outlines, much more the details, of his history are exceedingly difficult to gather, and no agreement has yet been reached among those who make his satires their special study as to his method, character, or object: in fact, while the Satires have been for centuries and perhaps still are as widely read and freely quoted as is the work of any Roman poet, yet about few authors is the evidence to be drawn from external sources so slight, the conclusions reached from internal criticism so contradictory. Without entering into the details of a yet undecided question of chronology,* it may be stated that

* Thus Prof, Bury gives 55 A.D., Mr. Duff 60-72 A.D., as the approximate date of Juvenal's birth; Merivale prefers 59 A.D.

V

Juvenal was born at Aquinum, an Italian town some
seventy-five miles south-east of Rome, at some time
during the last years of Nero's reign, or shortly after his
death; that he lived to an advanced age is inferred from
some references in the Satires themselves, while the date
of his death is entirely unknown, except that it must have
been after 128 A.D.†

Here, then, is a long life, of which the boundaries are
very indistinct, and the incidents conjectural: for besides a
number of short biographies of the poet attached to manu-
scripts, confused and contradictory, and three references
by Martial, the satires themselves form the one certain
source of information. The stories of Juvenal's poverty
or wealth, of his banishment to Egypt, and of his military
command, were in all probability suggested by the Satires,
not drawn from any external authority.

According to the traditional account, Juvenal's parents
were people of substance, and sent him to Rome in early
youth to learn rhetoric; that he was a rhetorician by
nature, if not also by art, the Satires sufficiently prove, and
at Rome, after giving examples of oratorical ‡ power, he
began to attempt satire-that "mixed mode” including
prose and verse, serious and comic, the ridiculous and the
sublime. Domitian's death in 96 A.D. was the signal for
an outburst of free speech, no less than for the return of
many exiles, so that the first publication of the first book
of Juvenal's Satires took place after 96: it would have
been impossible before. There is no reason for supposing

* S. XI, 203; XIII, 17.

+ S. xv, 27:

That is the common deduction from Martial's application
to him of the word facundus.

that his production or publication were hindered by Trajan or Hadrian.

What then was the Rome which Juvenal found, and how did it impress him? Were the circumstances of his life such as to account for the vehemence and justify the bitterness of his invective? Rome had changed since the days of Augustus; then a wise and statesmanlike ruler had conciliated a people and a nobility by whom the traditions of freedom were not yet forgotten; with the principate not yet assured, and the senate still powerful, there had been need of caution and moderation; a century of civil war and depredation had demanded peace and made economy advisable. But now, when, at the age perhaps of eighteen or twenty, Juvenal came to Rome, Domitian was on the throne; Rome was the recognised centre and capital of a vast empire, and for the traditional simplicity and rigour of a single free city, had substituted the motley habits and the combined luxury and excesses of a swarm of various peoples, united only in servility to one despotic ruler; and the power that raised him was often the sword that slew his predecessor.* The senate had declined to impotence, and the army was supreme.

It resulted from the growth to maturity of the imperial system that Rome became a capital as vast, as varied, as rich and as poor, as is London or Paris to-day; by the time of Domitian the old Roman pride and Roman stoicism were confined to a few families, and had become unpopular, not to say dangerous, possessions. The people of influence might be freedmen or foreigners, actors or gladiators, only they must be favourites of the Emperor, and they must be wealthy. So far from Cato had the

* Cf. S. x, 112, 113.

Romans sunk, that the Latin language was neglected with the Latin dress and the Latin religion. From the East there flowed into Rome a perpetual stream of new cults, new superstitions, and new vices; the most exclusive of cities had become the most cosmopolitan.

It is partly to his life in Rome at this time that Juvenal owes his startling "modernity," the feature which perhaps most forcibly strikes his readers to-day. True, that unless he had been also a keen and candid observer of the "constant" part of life-the passions, pleasures, fears, and affections of men- -the accidental similarity between Rome and London (vividly portrayed in Johnson's paraphrase of the third satire) would not have survived for our notice; but now, when the poet's strictures and mockeries of vice and folly are as true as they have always remained, and when London and Paris present the same hybrid features and revolting contrasts as did Rome in 100 A.D., when the nearest parallel to the Roman citizen is the British subject-now the "modernity" of the Satires is as striking and as trustworthy a witness to the constancy of human nature as to the insight of Juvenal.

Here, at Rome, less in the study of rhetoric, it is probable, than in the study of the city and its populace, Juvenal spent his youth; and thus he became imbued with the indignation which fires his first nine satires. Conversant as his writing shows him to have been with every line of Virgil, and clinging to the old Roman ideals, he was perpetually contrasting that simple "virtus" and "nobilitas with the flippant viciousness and the mean greed of this heterogeneous Rome. When at last Domitian died, the iron had entered into Juvenal's soul; so soon as the gag was removed, he burst out in a torrent of angry