Post-Augustan Poetry From Seneca to Juvenal Part 26

The accession of Hadrian has swept all the storm-clouds from the author's sky. But in the unhappy days but lately pa.s.sed 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 n.o.bly-born provincial governors. He concludes in his n.o.blest vein in praise of the great plebeians of the past, Cicero, Marius, the Decii, and Servius Tullius. It is in deeds, not in t.i.tles, that true n.o.bility 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 pa.s.sing 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 Seja.n.u.s, 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 chast.i.ty go hand in hand. Rather than pray for boons like these, 'entrust thy fortune to the G.o.ds 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 ign.o.ble ease.

The path to peace is virtue; what I show, Thyself may freely on thyself bestow; Fortune was never wors.h.i.+pped 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 G.o.ds 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 ill.u.s.trates 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 ill.u.s.trations 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 towns.h.i.+ps. 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 a.s.saulted 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 ill.u.s.trations, 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 n.o.bility of this ideal is not to be denied, but it is inadequate because it is wholly unpractical. There is no denying that the emanc.i.p.ation 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 cla.s.s supplied some of the most valuable of civil servants, and many must have been worthy of their emanc.i.p.ation and of their rise to power.[721] There was a higher h.e.l.lenism, 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 n.o.ble women of fine intellect and pure character. The spread of Roman citizens.h.i.+p 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 a.s.sume 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 Latera.n.u.s 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 Latera.n.u.s, et ipse, ipse rotam adstringit sufflamine mulio consul, nocte quidem, sed Luna videt, sed sidera testes intendunt oculos. finitum tempus honoris c.u.m fuerit, clara Latera.n.u.s luce flagellum sumet et occursum numquam trepidabit amici iam senis.

See! by his great progenitor's remains Fat Latera.n.u.s 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 a.s.sociate 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 c.u.m disc.u.mbere coepit laudat Vergilium, periturae ignoscit Elissae, committ.i.t 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 c.u.m 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 l.u.s.t, a traitor, a murderer.[723] The Jew is the sordid victim of a narrow and degrading superst.i.tion.[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 Roma.n.u.s 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 princ.i.p.ate 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 coa.r.s.eness for coa.r.s.eness' 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 coa.r.s.eness 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 quant.i.ty 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 ign.o.bilis 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 c.u.m 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 n.o.ble race, Followed with equal terror in his face; * * * * *

Monta.n.u.s' 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 n.o.blest 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 neglige_:--

ipsa dierum festorum herboso colitur si quando theatro maiestas tandemque redit ad pulpita notum exodium, c.u.m 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 b.u.mpkin 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 s.e.x 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 n.o.ble 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:

n.o.bis properantibus opstat unda prior, magno populus premit agmine lumbos qui sequitur; ferit hic cubito, ferit a.s.sere duro alter, at hic tignum capiti incut.i.t, 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.