PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION.

IN the first edition I confined myself almost exclusively to such annotations as a reader of Juvenal's own day might have required, if very stupid and not very ignorant. Even from this point of view the commentary should have been fuller than it was then, perhaps than it is now. In the present edition I have tried to give just enough information about the proper names mentioned in Juvenal (when anything is known) to save beginners the trouble of a search in Dr Smith's valuable dictionaries, which every schoolboy can hardly be expected to possess, though they ought to be in every school library. It was beyond both my ambition and my power to add anything to the illustrative materials which have been accumulated already. Fortunately it lay more within the scope of the Catena Classicorum to try to disengage the exegetical results on which Mr Mayor's magnificent series of parallel passages seem to converge. His edition would leave no room for mine if schoolboys and undergraduates liked their work well enough to linger over it. The personal and subjective character of Mr Macleane's edition seems at first obtrusive; in time his manliness becomes attractive; at last his independence becomes suggestive. Second thoughts have convinced me that he

vi PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION.

was right in more than one passage, especially on questions of punctuation where in the first instance I had followed Mayor. Wherever the text was simply a matter of manuscript authority, I have been glad to give Jahn's without discussion; where the various readings affected the sense or had a character of their own, it seemed better to choose for myself and to give my reasons: there is always something irritating about an edition which indicates a variety of reading without giving a clue to the editor's principle of selection.

Juvenal is a writer in whom every attentive reader may hope to discover something fresh, while every reader whose vigilance has not been chastened into sagacity must expect sometimes to discover more than is there; but in dealing with Juvenal it is safest to err on the side of excess. In a highly literary age artificial connexions and effects occur more readily than natural; a writer can hardly employ an expression which does not imply a train of half-forgotten thought. The chronology of Juvenal's life and writings suggested in the Introduction, which has been materially expanded, is of course very precarious; but it seems to rest upon facts which have still to find their place in a really, adequate conception of his system of satirical allusion.

Three satires have been altogether omitted as not required in University Examinations, which proceed on the creditable hypothesis that all candidates for a pass or honours either possess or cultivate the temper to which such reading is as painful as it ought to be.

INTRODUCTION.

ABOUT the life of Juvenal only three things can be said to be known; that he was the heir of a wealthy freedman; that he practised declamation till middle life, when he found out his talent for declamatory satire; and, lastly, that he was banished to a frontier command, as a punishment for affronting an actor. Cf. VII. 88-92.

It is more than probable, from the Fifteenth Satire, that Egypt was the scene of his banishment, in which case the Scotti, mentioned in the fifth and sixth of the seven lives, printed by Jahn, must either be a copyist's blunder, founded on Coptos, or a false inference from XIV. 193. Some have conjectured, from the great variety of emperors specified as having sacrificed the poet to the vanity of a discreditable favourite, that the whole story is a fiction, based on the satirical allusion to Paris, in the Seventh Satire, and the expressions in the Fifteenth, which imply a personal acquaintance with Egypt. This is supported by the observation, that Paris was put to death by Domitian, A. D. 83, while no Junius was consul till A. D. 84. We have no right to reject the story of the exile, supported as it is by Sidonius Apollinaris, who refers to it (IX. 266) as the established belief of the fifth century; and the chronological difficulty about its cause may perhaps be removed by observing, that all the lives but one treat the emperor as the offended party, and that three state expressly that it was only on their republication that the lines on Paris gave offence. Domitian was quite capable of resent

ing the imputation of conferring military commands at the suggestion of an actor, especially when the actor's influence had been removed; nor would his resentment be lessened if Juvenal had deliberately republished, with an application to his own reign, what had been originally directed against the earlier Paris, the favourite of Nero. A wider question suggests itself here. Did Juvenal begin to write under Nero, and to publish under Domitian, while the revised edition of his works was interrupted by death, perhaps in Trajan's reign?

That some such revised edition was attempted is probable, from the statement of one old biographer, that a considerable interval elapsed between the original composition of the lines on Paris, and their reappearance in the Seventh Satire; from the remark of another, that he enlarged (ampliavit) his satires in exile; and from the curious circumstance that there are MSS. in which the Sixteenth Satire, a mere fragment is placed before the Fifteenth. Obviously, copyists must have changed the order which Juvenal intended, in order that all the satires might appear to be finished, except the last; perhaps also those who doubted the genuineness of the fragment may have wished to propagate their suspicions by relegating it to a sort of Appendix. If Juvenal was in the habit of retouching his compositions, it is obviously unsafe to infer the date of a satire from single lines; for in such a laboured style innumerable additions and insertions would be possible, which would improve the brilliancy of the general effect, without impairing its unity. Hence we cannot build much upon the following list of passages.

In I. 47, VIII. 120, Juvenal mentions the exile and rapacity of Marius Priscus, who was condemned for oppression in proconsular Africa, A. D. 100, which is the latest date that we can fix with certainty.

In vi. 502, there is an allusion to the successive layers of curls, which cannot be traced on the imperial busts, our only authority, higher than the reign of Trajan; but (ib. 385) a musician is mentioned, who was already famous when Mar