Post-Augustan Poetry From Seneca to Juvenal Part 29

Something more ma.s.sive 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 surpa.s.ses all other poets of the age; while even Persius, although at his best and in his more declamatory pa.s.sages 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 obscure[737] or mechanical. There is no vain striving after ant.i.thesis 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 n.o.ble. 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.

INDEX OF NAMES

Abascantus 205 _n_, 299 _n_.

Accius 12, 71, 89.

Aeschylus 207 _n_, 212 _n_, 216 _n_.

Aetna 140-6, 156.

Afranius 12, 25.

Agrippina 25, 74, 76.

Antimachus 207 _n_, 209, 210.

Antistius Sosia.n.u.s 163 _n_, 164.

Apollonius Rhodius 182 sqq.

Aquilius Regulus 256.

Arria 81, 275.

Arrius Antoninus 173 _n_.

Arulenus Rustieus 168.

Asellius Sabinus 3.

Asinius Pollio 18.

Atedius Melior 205 _n_, 230, 256, 272.

Attalus 32.

Attius Labeo 160.

Ausonius 174, 175.

Ba.s.sus, Caesius 80-2, 163-5.

Ba.s.sus, Saleius 19, 168, 169.

Bathyllus 27.

Caecilius 12.

Caesar, C. Julius 103 sqq., 263.

Caesennia 163.

Calenus 175.

Caligula 4, 5, 31, 163.

Callimachus 207.

Calpurnius Piso 35, 99, 152, 156-9, 251.

Calpurnius Siculus 137, 150-9, 245.

Calpurnius Statura 80.

Calvinus 289.

Carinas Secundus 4.

Ca.s.sius Rufus 256.

Cato 37, 38, 58, 101, 103 sqq., 262.

Catullus, C. Valerius 2, 123 _n_, 176, 260, 261, 263.

Catullus (writer of mimes) 24.

Catullus (friend of Juvenal) 289, 297.

Cicero 58, 172, 238.

Claudia 204.

Claudia.n.u.s 174.

Claudius 5, 25, 32, 36, 63.

Claudius Agathurnus 80.

Claudius Augustalis 146.

Claudius Etruscus 205 _n_, 231, 256, 299 _n_.

Clutorius Priscus 3.

Codrus 291.

Columella 137, 146-9, 180.

Cornelius Severus 144.

Cornutus 6, 79-82, 94, 95, 97, 267.

Cremutius Cordus 2, 101.

Crispinus (1) 205 _n_.

---- (2) 294.

Curiatius Maternus 30.

Decia.n.u.s 257, 264.

Demosthenes 128.

Domitia.n.u.s 19, 21, 25, 168, 176, 181, 203, 204, 228, 229, 252, 271, 287, 293, 296, 303, 305.

Earinus 229.

Einsiedeln Fragments 151, 156, 157.

Ennius 12, 23.

Epictetus 70, 238.

Erotion 272.

Euphorion 3.

Euripides 45, 46, 74, 127, 207 _n_, 212 _n_, 216 _n_.

Faustus 30.

Flaccilla 251, 272.

Flaccus (father of Persius) 79.

Flaccus of Patavium 180, 281.

Fronto (rhetorician) 35.

Fronto (father of Martial) 251, 272.

Fulgentius 134, 135.