Post-Augustan Poetry From Seneca to Juvenal Part 25

In giving back Caieta.n.u.s his IOU's, Polycharmus, do you think you are giving him 100,000 sesterces? 'He owed me that sum,'

you say. Keep the IOU's and lend him two thousand more!

Chloe, the murderess of her seven husbands, erects monuments to their memory, and inscribes _fecit Chloe_ on the tombstones:

inscripsit tumulis septem scelerata virorum 'se fecisse' Chloe. quid pote simplicius? (ix. 15).

On her seven husbands' tombs she doth impress 'This Chloe did.' What more can she confess?

WRIGHT.

Vacerra admires the old poets only. What shall Martial do?

miraris veteres, Vacerra, solos nec laudas nisi mortuos poetas.

ignoscas petimus, Vacerra: tanti non est, ut placeam tibi, perire (viii. 69).

Vacerra lauds no living poet's lays, But for departed genius keeps his praise.

I, alas, live, nor deem it worth my while To die that I may win Vacerra's smile.

PROFESSOR GOLDWIN SMITH.

All this is very slight, _merae nugae_; but even if the humour be not of the first water, it will compare well with the humour of epigrams of any age. Martial knows he is not a great poet.[681] He knows, too, that his work is uneven:

iactat inaequalem Matho me fecisse libellum: si verum est, laudat carmina nostra Matho.

aequales scribit libros Calvinus et Vmber: aequalis liber est, Cretice, qui malus est (vii. 90).

Matho makes game of my unequal verse; If it's unequal it might well be worse.

Calvinus, Umber, write on one dead level, The book that's got no up and down's the devil!

If there are thirty good epigrams in a book, he is satisfied (vii. 81).

His defence hardly answers the question, 'Why publish so many?' but should at least mollify our judgement. Few poets read better in selections than Martial, and of few poets does selection give so inadequate an idea. For few poets of his undoubted genius have left such a large bulk of work which, in spite of its formal perfection, is morally repulsive or, from the purely literary standpoint, uninteresting. But he is an important figure in the history of literature, for he is the father of the modern epigram. Alone of Silver Latin poets is he a perfect stylist. He has the gift of _felicitas_ to the full, but it is not _curiosa_. Inferior to Horace in all other points, he has greater spontaneity. And he is free from the faults of his age. He is no _virtuoso_, eaten up with self-conscious vanity; he attempts no impossible feats of language; he is clear, and uses his mythological and geographical knowledge neatly and picturesquely; but he makes no display of obscure learning. 'I would please schoolmasters,' he says, 'but not _qua_ schoolmasters' (x. 21. 5). So, too, he complains of his own education:

at me litterulas stulti docuere parentes: quid c.u.m grammaticis rhetoribusque mihi? (ix. 73. 7).

My learning only proves my father fool!

Why would he send me to a grammar school?

HAY.

As a result, perhaps, of this lack of sympathy with the education of his day, we find that, while he knows and admires the great poets of the past, and can flatter the rich poetasters of the present, his bent is curiously unliterary. He gives us practically no literary criticism. It is with the surface qualities of life that he is concerned, with its pleasures and its follies, guilty or innocent. He has a marvellously quick and clear power of observation, and of vivid presentation. He is in this sense above all others the poet of his age. He either does not see or chooses to ignore many of the best and most interesting features of his time, but the picture which he presents, for all its incompleteness, is wider and more varied than any other. We both hate him and read him for the sake of the world he depicts. 'Ugliness is always bad art, and Martial often failed as a poet from his choice of subject.'[682] There are comparatively few of his poems which we read for their own sake. Remarkable as these few poems are, the main attraction of Martial is to be found not in his wit or finish, so much as in the vividness with which he has portrayed the life of the brilliant yet corrupt society in which his lot was cast. It lives before us in all its splendour and in all its squalor. The court, with its atmosphere of grovelling flattery, its gross vices veiled and tricked out in the garb of respectability; the wealthy official cla.s.s, with their villas, their favourites, their circle of dependants, men of culture, wit, and urbanity, through all which runs, strangely intermingled, a vein of extreme coa.r.s.eness, vulgarity, and meanness; the lounger and the reciter, the diner-out and the legacy-hunter; the clients struggling to win their patrons' favour and to rise in the social scale, enduring the hardships and discomfort of a sordid life unillumined by lofty ideals or strength of will, a life that under cold northern skies would have been intolerable; the freedman and the slave, with all the riff-raff that support a parasitic existence on the vices of the upper cla.s.ses; the noise and bustle of Rome, its sleepless nights, its cheerless tenements, its noisy streets, loud with the sound of traffic or of revelry; the shows in the theatre, the races in the circus, the interchange of presents at the Saturnalia; the pleasant life in the country villa, the simplicity of rural Italy, the sights and sounds of the park and the farm-yard; and dimly seen beyond all, the provinces, a great ocean which absorbs from time to time the rulers of Rome and the leaders of society, and from which come faint and confused echoes of frontier wars; all are there. It is a great pageant lacking order and coherence, a scene that shifts continually, but never lacks brilliance of detail and sharply defined presentment. Martial was the child of the age; it gave him his strength and his weakness. If we hate him or despise him, it is because he is the faithful representative of the life of his times; his gifts we cannot question. He practised a form of poetry that at its best is not exalted, and must, even more than other branches of art, be conditioned by social circ.u.mstance. Within its limited sphere Martial stands, not faultless, but yet supreme.

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 fifteenth[685] 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 Juvenalis[688] 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 pa.s.sion 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.[693]

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 munic.i.p.al 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 Calvinus[695] are mere names. Of Quintilian[696] 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 princ.i.p.ate 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 a.s.sert 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 Nero[706]--a manifestly absurd statement--others by Trajan,[707] while our best authority a.s.serts 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 a.s.serting 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 actor[712] 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 pa.s.sages 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 hoa.r.s.e 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, pa.s.sion, 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 surpa.s.sed. 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 h.e.l.lenism 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 coa.r.s.est 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 unchast.i.ty 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.