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THE
SATIRES
OF
JUVENAL, PERSIUS,
SULPICIA, AND LUCILIUS,
Literally Translated into English Prose,
WITH NOTES, CHRONOLOGICAL TABLES, ARGUMENTS, &c.

BY

THE REV. LEWIS EVANS, M.A.,

LATE FELLOW OF WADHAM COLLEGE, OXFORD.

TO WHICH IS ADDED THE

METRICAL VERSION OF JUVENAL AND PERSIUS,

BY THE LATE

WILLIAM GIFFORD, ESQ.

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1881.

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PREFACE BY THE TRANSLATOR.

While the poetical versions of Juvenal deservedly hold a very high place in the literature of this country, it is a curious fact that there exists no single prose translation which can stand the test of even ordinary criticism. Whether it be that the temptation to a metrical version of a poetical writer is too great with some, or whether the labor of faithfully representing the genius of confessedly the most difficult writer in the Latin language has deterred others, the fact is undeniable, that there is no prose version from which the unclassical reader can form any adequate idea of the writings of the greatest of Satirists.

Madan, though faithful, is utterly unintelligible to any one who has not the Latin before him. Sheridan is far too free, in every sense of the word, to be either a fair expositor of his original, or to suit the taste of the present day; and without any disparagement of the labors of Sterling, Nuttall, Smart, or Wallace, it was found impossible to adopt any one of them even as the basis of a version which should be worthy of a place in the present series.

The accompanying translation, therefore, is entirely original; and the translator is not aware of having copied a single line from any previous version. How far he has succeeded in giving a faithful transcript of the author, and in, at the same time, infusing some spark of the fire and spirit of the original, must be for others to determine; all that he dares venture to assert is, that he has brought to the task an enthusiastic admiration of his author, and a careful study of many years. The same remarks apply to the translation of Persius.

The notes are to a considerable extent original, and the English, perhaps even the classical, reader may not be displeased at the occasional introduction of passages from metrical versions in which the sense appeared to be the most forcibly given.

A Chronological Table has been added, which the labors of Mr. Clinton have enabled the Translator to present in a far more correct form than heretofore.

The poetical version by Gifford has been annexed, as having the greatest hold on the public favor, and as being perhaps the best, because the most equal; though, unquestionably, in all the Satires which Dryden translated, he has immeasurably surpassed Gifford in fire and spirit, as Hodgson has in elegance and poetic genius, and Badham in taste, scholarship, and terse and vigorous rendering. But Gifford is always equal, and generally faithful.

The remains of Sulpicia and Lucilius appear now for the first time in English. Of the value of the latter, and of the propriety of appending his Fragments to a translation of the great Roman Satirists, no scholar-like reader of Juvenal and Horace can entertain a doubt. The recent labors of foreign scholars have presented us with the text in a purer form than almost any collection of Fragments of the older Latin writers. In the Arguments prefixed to the several Books, and in the notes, will be found the essence of the criticisms of Jan. Dousa, Van Heusde, Corpet, Schoenbeck, Schmidt, Petermann, and especially of Gerlach, whose readings have in general been preferred.

L. E.

CONTENTS.

THE LIFE OF JUVENAL,
BY WILLIAM GIFFORD, ESQ.

Decimus Junius Juvenalis,[1] the author of the following Satires, was born at Aquinum, an inconsiderable town of the Volsci, about the year of Christ 38.[2] He was either the son, or the foster-son, of a wealthy freedman, who gave him a liberal education. From the period of his birth, till he had attained the age of forty, nothing more is known of him than that he continued to perfect himself in the study of eloquence, by declaiming, according to the practice of those days; yet more for his own amusement, than from any intention to prepare himself either for the schools or the courts of law. About this time he seems to have discovered his true bent, and betaken himself to poetry. Domitian was now at the head of the government, and showed symptoms of reviving that system of favoritism which had nearly ruined the empire under Claudius, by his unbounded partiality for a young pantomime dancer of the name of Paris. Against this minion, Juvenal seems to have directed the first shafts of that satire which was destined to make the most powerful vices tremble, and shake the masters of the world on their thrones. He composed a few lines[3] on the influence of Paris, with considerable success, which encouraged him to cultivate this kind of poetry: he had the prudence, however, not to trust himself to an auditory, in a reign which swarmed with informers; and his compositions were, therefore, secretly handed about among his friends.[4] By degrees he grew bolder; and, having made many large additions to his first sketch, or perhaps re-cast it, produced what is now called his Seventh Satire, which he recited to a numerous assemblage. The consequences were such as he had probably anticipated: Paris, informed of the part which he bore in it, was seriously offended, and complained to the emperor, who, as the old account has it,[5] sent the author, by an easy kind of punishment, into Egypt with a military command. To remove such a man from his court must undoubtedly have been desirable to Domitian; and, as he was spoken of with kindness in the same Satire, which is entirely free from political allusions, the "facetiousness" of the punishment (though Domitian's was not a facetious reign) renders the fact not altogether improbable. Yet, when we consider that these reflections on Paris could scarcely have been published before LXXXIV., and that the favorite was disgraced and put to death almost immediately after, we shall be inclined to doubt whether his banishment actually took place; or, if it did, whether it was of any long duration. That Juvenal was in Egypt is certain; but he might have gone there from motives of personal safety, or, as Salmasius has it, of curiosity. However this may be, it does not appear that he was ever long absent from Rome, where a thousand internal marks clearly show that all his Satires were written. But whatever punishment might have followed the complaint of Paris,[6] it had no other effect on our author, than that of increasing his hatred of tyranny, and turning his indignation upon the emperor himself, whose hypocrisy, cruelty, and licentiousness, became, from that period, the object of his keenest reprobation. He profited, indeed, so far by his danger or his punishment, as to recite no more in public; but he continued to write during the remainder of Domitian's reign, in which he finished, as I conceive, his second, third,[7] fifth, sixth,[8] and perhaps thirteenth[9] Satires; the eighth[10] I have always looked upon as his first.

In XCV., when Juvenal was in his 54th year, Domitian banished the philosophers from Rome, and soon after from Italy, with many circumstances of cruelty; an action, for which, I am sorry to observe, he is covertly praised by Quintilian. Though Juvenal, strictly speaking, did not come under the description of a philosopher, yet, like the hare in the fable, he might not unreasonably entertain some apprehensions for his safety, and, with many other persons eminent for learning and virtue, judge it prudent to withdraw from the city. To this period I have always inclined to fix his journey to Egypt. Two years afterward the world was happily relieved from the tyranny of Domitian; and Nerva, who succeeded him, recalled the exiles. From this time there remains little doubt of Juvenal's being at Rome, where he continued his studies in tranquillity.

His first Satire after the death of Domitian, seems to have been what is now called the fourth. About this time, too, he probably thought of revising and publishing those which he had already written; and composed or completed that introductory piece,[11] which now stands at the head of his works. As the order is every where broken in upon, it is utterly impossible to arrange them chronologically; but I am inclined to think that the eleventh Satire closed his poetical career. All else is conjecture; but in this he speaks of himself as an old man,

"Nostra bibat vernum contracta cuticula solem;"

and indeed he had now passed his grand climacteric.

This is all that can be collected of the life of Juvenal; and how much of this is built upon uncertainties! I hope, however, that it bears the stamp of probability; which is all I contend for; and which, indeed, if I do not deceive myself, is somewhat more than can be affirmed of what has been hitherto delivered on the subject.

Little is known of Juvenal's circumstances; but, happily, that little is authentic, as it comes from himself. He had a competence. The dignity of poetry is never disgraced in him, as it is in some of his contemporaries, by fretful complaints of poverty, or clamorous whinings for meat and clothes: the little patrimony which his fosterfather left him, he never diminished, and probably never increased. It seems to have equaled all his wants, and, as far as appears, all his wishes. Once only he regrets the narrowness of his fortune; but the occasion does him honor; it is solely because he can not afford a more costly sacrifice to express his pious gratitude for the preservation of his friend: yet "two lambs and a youthful steer" bespeak the affluence of a philosopher; which is not belied by the entertainment provided for his friend Persicus, in that beautiful Satire which is here called the last of his works. Farther it is useless to seek: from pride or modesty, he has left no other notices of himself; or they have perished. Horace and Persius, his immediate predecessors, are never weary of speaking of themselves. The life of the former might be written, from his own materials, with all the minuteness of a contemporary history: and the latter, who attained to little more than a third of Juvenal's age, has left nothing to be desired on the only topics which could interest posterity—his parent, his preceptor, and his course of studies.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] "Junius Juvenalis liberti locupletis incertum filius an alumnus, ad mediam ætatem declamavit, animi magis causa, quam quod scholæ aut foro se præpararet." The learned reader knows that this is taken from the brief account of Juvenal, commonly attributed to Suetonius; but which is probably posterior to his time; as it bears very few marks of being written by a contemporary author: it is, however, the earliest extant. The old critics, struck with its deficiencies, have attempted to render it more complete by variations, which take from its authenticity, without adding to its probability.

[2] I have adopted Dodwell's chronology. "Sic autem (he says) se rem illam totam habuisse censeo. Exul erat Juv. cum Satiram scriberet xv. Hoc confirmat etiam in v. 27, scholiastes. 'De se Juv. dicit, quia in Ægypto militem tenuit, et ea promittit se relaturum quæ ipse vidit.'" Had not Dodwell been predisposed to believe this, he would have seen that the scholium "confirmed" nothing: for Juvenal makes no such promise. "Proinde rixæ illi ipse adfuit quam describit." So error is built up! How does it appear that Juvenal was present at the quarrel which he describes? He was in Egypt, we know; he had passed through the Ombite nome, and he speaks of the face of the country as falling under his own inspection: but this is all; and he might have heard of the quarrel at Rome, or elsewhere. "Tempus autem ipse designavit rixæ illius cum et 'nuper'[12] illam contigisse dicit, et quidem 'Consule Junio.' Jun. duplicem habent fasti, alium Domit. in x. Consulatu collegam App. Junium Sabinum A.D. lxxxiv.; alium Hadriani in suo itidem consulatu III. collegam Q. Junium Rusticum. Quo minus prior intelligi possit, obstant illa omnia quæ in his ipsis Satiris occurrunt Domitiani temporibus recentiora." Yet, such is the capricious nature of criticism! Dodwell's chief argument to prove the late period at which Juvenal was banished, is a passage confessedly written under Domitian, and foisted into a satire published, as he himself maintains, many years after that emperor's death! "Posteriorem ergo intellexerit oportet. Hoc ergo anno (CXIX.) erat in exilio. Sed vero Roma illum ejicere non potuit Trajanus, qui ab anno usque CXII. Romæ ipse non adfuit; nec etiam ante CXVIII. quo Romam venit imperator Hadrianus. Sic ante anni CXVIII. finem, aut CXIX. initium, mitti vix potuit in exilium Juvenalis: erat autem cum relegaretur, octogenarius. Proinde natus fuerit vel anni XXXVIII. fine, vel XXXIX. initio." Annal. 157-159.

I have made this copious extract from Dodwell, because it contains a summary of the chief arguments which induced Pithæus, Henninius, Lipsius, Salmasius, etc., to attribute the banishment of the author to Hadrian. To me they appear any thing but conclusive; for, to omit other objections for the present, why may not the Junius of the fifteenth Satire be the one who was Consul with Domitian in 84, when Juvenal, by Dodwell's own calculation, was in his 47th instead of his 80th year.

[3] "Deinde paucorum versuum satira non absurde composita in Paridem pantomimum, poetamque Claudii Neronis" (the writer seems, in this and the following clause, to have referred to Juvenal's words; it is, therefore probable that we should read Calvi Neronis, i. e. Domitian; otherwise the phrase must be given up as an absurd interpolation), "ejus semestribus militiolis tumentem: genus scripturæ industriose excoluit." Suet.

[4] "Et tamen diu, ne modico quidem auditorio quicquam committere ausus est." Suet. On this Dodwell observes: "Tam longe aberant illa a Paridis ira concitanda, si vel superstite Paride fuissent scripta, eum irritare non possent, cum nondum emanassent in publicum," 161. He then adds that "Martial knew nothing of his poetical studies,[13] who boasted that he was as familiar with Juvenal as Pylades with Orestes!" It appears, indeed, that they were acquainted; but I suspect, notwithstanding the vehemence of Martial's assertions, that there was no great cordiality between minds so very dissimilar. Some one, it seems, had accused the epigrammatist to the satirist, not improbably, of making too free with his thoughts and expressions. He was seriously offended; and Martial, instead of justifying himself (whatever the charge might be), imprecates shame on his accuser in a strain of idle rant not much above the level of a schoolboy. Lib. vii. 24.

But if he had been acquainted with his friend's poetry, he would certainly have spoken of it. Not quite so certainly. These learned critics seem to think that Juvenal, like the poets he ridicules, wrote nothing but trite fooleries on the Argonauts and the Lapithæ. Were the Satires of Juvenal to be mentioned with approbation? and, if they were, was Martial the person to do it? Martial, the most devoted sycophant of the age, who was always begging, and sometimes receiving, favors from the man whose castigation was, in general, the express object of them. Is it not more consonant to his character to suppose that he would conceal his knowledge of them with the most scrupulous care?

But when Domitian was dead, and Martial removed from Rome, when, in short, there was no danger of speaking out, he still appears, continue they, to be ignorant of his friend's poetic talents. I am almost ashamed to repeat what the critics so constantly forget—that Juvenal was not only satirist, but a republican, who looked upon Trajan as a usurper, no less than Domitian. And how was it "safe to speak out," when they all assert that he was driven into banishment by a milder prince than Trajan, for a passage "suspected of being a figurative allusion to the times?" What inconsistencies are these!

[5] "Mox magna frequentia, magnoque successu bis ac ter auditus est; ut ea quoque quæ prima fecerat, inferciret novis scriptis,

'Quod non dant proceres dabit histrio,' etc.
Sat. vii., 90-92.

Erat tum in delitiis aulæ histrio, multique fautorum ejus quotidie provehebantur. Venit ergo in suspicionem quasi tempora figurate notasset; ac statim per honorem militiolæ, quanquam octogenarius, urbe summotus, missusque ad præfecturam cohortis in extrema parte tendentis Ægypti. Id supplicii genus placuit, ut levi atque joculari delicto par esset. Verum intra brevissimum tempus angore et tædio periit." Suet. Passing by the interpolations of the old grammarians, I shall, as before, have recourse to Dodwell. "Recitavit, ni fallor, omnia, emisitque in publicum CXVIII. (Juvenal was now fourscore!) postquam Romam venissit Hadrianus quem ille principem à benevolo ejus in hæc studia animo, in hac ipsa satira in qua occurrunt verba illa de Paride commendat." 161. Salmasius supposed that the last of his Satires only were published under Hadrian; Dodwell goes farther, and maintains that the whole, with the exception of the 15th and 16th[14] ("si tamen vere et illa Juvenalis fuerit"), were then first produced! "Illa in Paridem dicteria histrionem, in suum (cujus nomen non prodidit auctor) histrionem dicta interpretabatur Hadrianus. Inde exilii causa. Scripsit ergo in exilio Sat. XV. Sed cum 'nuper Consulem Junium' fuisse dicat, ante annum ad minimum CXX. scribere illam non potuit Juv. Nec vero postea scripsisse, exinde colligimus, quod 'intra brevissimum tempus' perierit." 164. Such is the manner in which Dodwell accommodates Suetonius to his own ideas: which seem, also, to have been those of a much higher name, Salmasius; and, while I am now writing, to be sanctioned by the adoption of the learned Ruperti. I never affected singularity; yet I find myself constrained to differ from them all: but I will state my reasons. In his 7th Satire, after speaking of Quintilian, Juvenal adds,

"Si fortuna volet, fies de rhetore consul:
Si volet hæc eadem fies de consule rhetor."

Which, taking it for a proverbial expression, I have loosely rendered, Fortune can make kings of pedants and pedants of kings. Dodwell, however, understands it literally. "Hæc sane cum Quintiliani causa dicat, vix est quin Q. talem ostendant è rhetore nimirum 'nobilem, senatorium, consularem,' et quidem illis divitiis instructum, quæ essent etiam ad censum senatorium necessariæ." 152. Now, as Pliny, who probably died before Trajan, observes that Quintilian was a man of moderate fortune, it follows that he must have acquired the wealth and honors of which Juvenal speaks at a later period. Dodwell fixes this to the time when Hadrian entered Rome, CXVIII., which he states to be also that of the author's banishment. It must be confessed that Juvenal lost no time in exerting himself: he had remained silent fourscore years; he now bursts forth at once, as Dodwell expresses it, recites all his Satires without intermission ("unis continuisque recitationibus"), celebrates Quintilian, attacks the emperor, and is immediately dispatched to Egypt! 162. Here is a great deal of business crowded into the compass of a few weeks, or perhaps days; but let us examine it a little more closely. Rigaltius, with several of the commentators, sees in the lines above quoted a sneer at Quintilian, and he accounts for the rhetor's silence respecting our author, by the resentment which he supposes him to have felt at it. As this militates strongly against Dodwell's ideas, he will not allow that any thing severe was intended by the passage in question; and adds that Quintilian could not mention Juvenal as a satirist, because he had not then written any satires. 160. I believe that both are wrong. In speaking of the satirists, Quintilian says that Persius had justly acquired no inconsiderable degree of reputation by the little he had written. Lib. x., c. 1. He then adds, "sunt clari hodieque, et qui olim nominabuntur." There are yet some excellent ones, some who will be better known hereafter. It always appeared to me, that this last phrase alluded to our author, with whose extraordinary merits Quintilian was probably acquainted, but whom he did not choose, or, perhaps, did not dare to mention in a work composed under a prince whose crimes this unnamed satirist persecuted with a severity as unmitigated as it was just. Quintilian had no political courage. Either from a sense of kindness or fear, he flatters Domitian almost as grossly as Martial does: but his life was a life of innocence and integrity; I will therefore say no more on this subject; but leave it to the reader to consider whether such a man was likely to startle the "god of his idolatry" by celebrating the Satires of Juvenal.

Nor do I agree with the commentators whom Dodwell has followed, in the literal interpretation of those famous lines. "Unde igitur tot," etc. Sat. vii., v. 188-194. Quintilian was rich, when the rest of his profession were in the utmost want. Here then was an instance of good fortune. He was lucky; and with luck a man may be any thing; handsome, and witty, and wise, and noble, and high-born, and a member of the senate. Who does not see in this a satirical exaggeration? Wisdom, beauty, and high birth luck can not give: why then should the remainder of this passage be so strictly interpreted, and referred to the actual history of Quintilian? The lines, "Si fortuna volet," etc., are still more lax: a reflection thrown out at random, and expressing the greatest possible extremes of fortune. Yet on these authorities principally (for the passage of Ausonius,[15] written more than two centuries later, is of no great weight) has Quintilian been advanced to consular honors; while Dodwell, who, as we have seen, has taken immense pains to prove that they could only be conferred on him by Hadrian, has hence deduced his strongest arguments for the late date of our author's Satires; which he thus brings down to the period of mental imbecility! Hence, too, he accounts for the different ideas of Quintilian's wealth in Juvenal and Pliny. When the latter wrote, he thinks Quintilian had not acquired much property, he was "modicus facultatibus:" when the former, "he had been enriched by the imperial bounty, and was capable of senatorial honors." Yet Pliny might not think his old master rich enough to give a fortune with his daughter adequate to the expectations of a man of considerable rank (lib. vi., 32), though Juvenal, writing at the same instant, might term him wealthy, in comparison of the rhetoricians who were starving around him; and count him a peculiar favorite of fortune. Let us bear in mind, too, that Juvenal is a satirist, and a poet: in the latter capacity, the minute accuracy of an annalist can not be expected at his hands; and in the former—as his object was to show the general discouragement of literature, he could not, consistently with his plan, attribute the solitary good fortune of Quintilian to any thing but luck.

But why was Quintilian made consul? Because, replies Dodwell (164), when Hadrian first entered Rome he was desirous of gaining the affections of the people; which could be done no way so effectually as by conciliating the esteem of the literati; and he therefore conferred this extraordinary mark of favor on the rhetorician. How did it escape this learned man, that he was likely to do himself more injury in their opinion by the banishment of Juvenal at that same instant? an old man of fourscore, who, by his own testimony, had spoken of him with kindness, in a poem which did more honor to his reign than any thing produced in it! and whose only crime was an allusion to the influence of a favorite player! Indeed, the informers of Hadrian's reign must have had more sagacious noses than those of Domitian's, to smell out his fault. What Statius, in his time, was celebrated for the recitation of a Thebaid, or what Paris, for the purchase of an untouched Agave? And where, might we ask Dodwell, was the "jest" of sending a man on the verge of the grave, in a military capacity, into Egypt? Could the most supple of Hadrian's courtiers look on it as any thing but a wanton exercise of cruelty? At eighty, the business of satirizing, either in prose or verse, is nearly over: what had the emperor then to fear? And to sum up all in a word, can any rational being seriously persuade himself that the Satires of Juvenal were produced, for the first time, by a man turned of fourscore?

[6] But why should he complain at all? Was he ashamed of being known to possess an influence at the imperial court? Those were not very modest times, nor is modesty, in general, the crying vice of the "quality." He was more likely to have gloried in it. If Bareas, or Camerinus, or any of the old nobility, had complained of the author, I should have thought it more reasonable: but Domitian cared nearly as little for them as Paris himself did.

[7] I hold, in opposition to the commentators, that Juvenal was known in Domitian's time, not only as a poet, but as a keen and vigorous satirist. He himself, though he did not choose to commit his safety to a promiscuous audience, appears to make no great secret of his peculiar talents. In this Satire, certainly prior to many of the others, he tells us that he accompanied Umbritius, then on his way to Cumæ, out of the gates of Rome. Umbritius predicted, as Tacitus says, the death of Galba, at which time he was looked upon as the most skillful aruspex of the age. He could not then be a young man; yet, at quitting the capital, he still talks of himself as in the first stage of old age, "nova canities, et prima et recta senectus." His voluntary exile, therefore, could not possibly have taken place long after the commencement of Domitian's reign; when he speaks of Juvenal as already celebrated for his Satires, and modestly doubts whether the assistance of so able a coadjutor as himself would be accepted.

This, at least, serves to prove in what light the author wished to be considered: for the rest, there can, I think, exclusively of what I have urged, be little doubt that this Satire was produced under Domitian. It is known, from other authorities, that he revived the law of Otho in all its severity, that he introduced a number of low and vicious characters, "pinnirapi cultos juvenes, juvenesque lanistæ," into the Equestrian Order, that he was immoderately attached to building, etc., circumstances much dwelt on in this Satire, and applicable to him alone.

[8] The following line, "Dacicus et scripto radiat Germanicus auro," seems to militate against the early date of this Satire. Catanæus and Arntzenius say that Juvenal could not mean Domitian here, because "he did not think well enough of him to do him such honor; whereas he was fond of commending Trajan." I see no marks of this fondness; nor were the titles, if meant of Domitian, intended to do him honor, but to reprove his vanity.

Whether medals were ever struck with the inscription of Dacicus and Germanicus in honor of Domitian, I am not qualified to determine. Certain it is, however, that he assumed both these titles; the latter, indeed, in common with his predecessors from the time of Germ. Cæsar; and the former, in consequence of his pretended success in the Dacian war, for which he is bitterly sneered at by Pliny, as well as Dio. It is given to him, among others, by Martial, who dedicates his eighth book, "Imper. Domit. Cæs. Augusto Germanico Dacico." Dodwell appropriates (as I do) the line to Domitian—a little inconsistently, it must be confessed; but that is his concern. If, however, it be adjudged to Trajan, I should not for that bring down the date of the Satire to a later period. Juvenal revised and enlarged all his works, when he gave them to the public: this under consideration, in particular, has all the marks of having received considerable additions; and one of them might be the line in question.

[9] This satire has contributed as much perhaps as the seventh to persuade Lipsius, Salmasius, and others, that Juvenal wrote his best pieces when he was turned of fourscore.

"——Stupet hæc, qui jam post terga reliquit
Sexaginta annos, Fonteio Consule natus!"

There were four consuls of this name. The first is out of the question; the second was consul A.D. 13, the third in 59, and the fourth in 68. If we take the second, and add any intermediate number of years between sixty and seventy, for Calvinus had passed his sixtieth year, it will just bring us down to the early part of Domitian's reign, which I suppose to be the true date of this Satire; for I can not believe, as I have already observed, that this, or indeed any part of Juvenal's works, was produced when he was trembling on the verge of ninety, as must be the case if either of the latter periods be adopted. But he observes, "Hæc quota pars scelerum quæ custos Gallicus urbis," etc. Now Rutilius Gallicus was præfect of Rome from the end of 85 to 88 (Domitian succeeded his brother in 81), in which year he died. There seems to be no necessity for mentioning a magistrate as sitting, who was not then in existence; nor can any reason be assigned, if the Satire was written under Hadrian, for the author's recurring to the times of Domitian for a name, when that of the "custos urbis" of the day would have better answered his purpose. It is probable that Gallicus succeeded Pegasus, who was præfect when the ridiculous farce of the turbot took place (Sat. iv.); this would fix it to 85, the year before Fuscus, who was present at it, was sent into Dacia.

[10] This Satire is referred by the critics to the reign of Trajan, because Marius, whose trial took place under that prince, is mentioned in it. I have attributed it to an earlier period; principally moved by the consideration that it presents a faithful copy of the state of Rome and the conquered provinces under Nero, and which could scarcely have been given in such vivid colors after the original had ceased to affect the mind. What Rome was under Domitian, may be seen in the second Satire, and the difference, which has not been sufficiently attended to, is striking in the extreme. I would observe too, that Juvenal speaks here of the crimes of Marius—they might be, and probably were, committed long before his condemnation; but under Domitian it was scarcely safe to attempt bringing such gigantic peculators to justice. Add to this, that the other culprits mentioned in it are all of them prior to that prince; nay, one of them, Capito, was tried so early as the beginning of Nero's reign. The insertion of Marius, however (which might be an after-thought), forms a main argument with Dodwell for the very late date of this Satire; he observes that it had escaped Lipsius and Salmasius; and boasts of it as "longe certissimum," etc. 156.

[11] I have often wondered at the stress which Dodwell and others lay on the concluding lines of this Satire: "Experiar quid concedatur," etc. They fancy that the engagement was seriously made, and religiously observed. Nothing was ever farther from the mind of Juvenal. It is merely a poetical, or, if you will, a satirical, flourish; since there is not a single Satire, I am well persuaded, in which the names of many who were alive at the time are not introduced. Had Dodwell forgotten Quintilian? or, that he had allowed one of his Satires, at least, to be prior to this?

[12] This "nuper" is a very convenient word. Here, we see, it signifies lately; but when it is necessary to bring the works of our author down to a late period, it means, as Britannicus explains it, "de longo tempore," long ago.

[13] But how to this ascertained? Very easily; he calls him "fecundus Juvenalis." Here the question is finally left; for none of the commentators suppose it possible that the epithet can be applied to any but a rhetorician. Yet it is applied by the same writer to a poet of no ordinary kind;

"Accipe, facundi Culicem, studiose. Maronis
Ne, nugis positis, arma virumque canas."
Lib. xiv., 185.

And, by the author himself, to one who had grown old in the art:

"————tunc seque suamque
Terpsichoren odit facunda et nuda senectus."

Let it be remembered, too, that Martial, as is evident from the frequent allusions to Domitian's expedition against the Catti, wrote this epigram (lib. vii., 91) in the commencement of that prince's reign, when it is acknowledged that Juvenal had produced but one or two of his Satires.

[14] The former of these, Dodwell says, was written in exile, after the author was turned of eighty. Salmasius, more rationally, conceives it to have been produced at Rome. Giving full credit, however, to the story of his late banishment, he is driven into a very awkward supposition. "An non alio tempore, atque alia de causa Ægyptum lustrare juvenis potuit Juvenalis? animi nempe gratia, και της ἱστοριας χαριν, ut urbes regionis illius, populorumque mores cognosceret?" Would it not be more simple to attribute his exile at once to Domitian?

With respect to the 16th Satire, Dodwell, we see, hesitates to attribute it to Juvenal; and, indeed, the old Scholiast says, that, in his time, many thought it to be the work of a different hand. So it always appeared to me. It is unworthy of the author's best days, and seems but little suited to his worst. He was at least eighty-one, they say, when he wrote it, yet it begins—

"——Nam si——
Me pavidum excipiet tyronem porta secundo
Sidere," etc.

Surely, at this age, the writer resembled Priam, the tremulus miles, more than the timid tyro! Nor do I believe that Juvenal would have been much inclined to amuse himself with the fancied advantages of a profession to which he was so unworthily driven. But the Satire must have been as ill-timed for the army as for himself, since it was probably, at this period, in a better state of subjection than it had been for many reigns. I suppose it to be written in professed imitation of our author's manner, about the age of Commodus. It has considerable merit, though the first and last paragraphs are feeble and tautological; and the execution of the whole is much inferior to the design.

[15] "Q. consularia per Clementem ornamenta sortitus, honestamenta potius videtur quam insignia potestatis habuisse. In gratiar. act." Quintilian, then, was not actually consul: but this is no great matter—it is of more consequence to ascertain the Clemens by whom he was so honored. In the preface to his fourth book, he says, "Cum vero mihi Dom. Augustus sororis suæ nepotum delegavit curam," etc. Vespasian had a daughter, Domitilla, who married, and died long before her father: she left a daughter, who was given to Flavius Clemens, by whom she had two sons. These were the grandchildren of Domitian's sister, of whom Quintilian speaks; and to their father, Clemens, according to Ausonius, he was indebted for the show, though not the reality, of power. There is nothing incongruous in all this; yet so possessed are Dodwell and his numerous followers (among whom I am sorry to rank Dusaulx) of the late period at which it happened, that they will needs have Hadrian to be meant by Domitianus Augustus, though the detestable flattery which follows the words I have quoted most indisputably proves it to be Domitian; and though Dodwell himself is forced to confess that he can find no Clemens under Hadrian to whom the passage applies: "Quis autem fuerit Clemens ille qui Q. ornamenta illa sub Hadriano impetraverit, me sane fateor ignorare!" 165. Another circumstance which has escaped all the commentators, and which is of considerable importance in determining the question, remains to be noticed. At the very period of which Dodwell treats, the boundaries of the empire were politically contracted, while Juvenal, whenever he has occasion to speak on the subject, invariably dwells on extending or securing them.

AN
ESSAY ON THE ROMAN SATIRISTS,
BY WILLIAM GIFFORD, ESQ.

It will now be expected from me, perhaps, to say something on the nature and design of Satire; but in truth this has so frequently been done, that it seems, at present, to have as little of novelty as of utility to recommend it.

Dryden, who had diligently studied the French critics, drew up from their remarks, assisted by a cursory perusal of what Casaubon, Heinsius, Rigaltius, and Scaliger had written on the subject, an account of the rise and progress of dramatic and satiric poetry among the Romans; which he prefixed to his translation of Juvenal. What Dryden knew, he told in a manner that renders every attempt to recount it after him equally hopeless and vain; but his acquaintance with works of literature was not very extensive, while his reliance on his own powers sometimes betrayed him into inaccuracies, to which the influence of his name gives a dangerous importance.

"The comparison of Horace with Juvenal and Persius," which makes a principal part of his Essay, is not formed with much niceness of discrimination, or accuracy of judgment. To speak my mind, I do not think that he clearly perceived or fully understood the characters of the first two: of Persius indeed he had an intimate knowledge; for, though he certainly deemed too humbly of his poetry, he yet speaks of his beauties and defects in a manner which evinces a more than common acquaintance with both.

What Dryden left imperfect has been filled up in a great measure by Dusaulx, in the preliminary discourse to his translation of Juvenal, and by Ruperti, in his critical Essay "De diversa Satirarum Lucil. Horat. Pers. et Juvenalis indole." With the assistance of the former of these I shall endeavor to give a more extended view of the characteristic excellencies and defects of the rival Satirists than has yet appeared in our language; little solicitous for the praise of originality, if I may be allowed to aspire to that of candor and truth. Previously to this, however, it will be necessary to say something on the supposed origin of Satire: and, as this is a very beaten subject, I shall discuss it as briefly as possible.

It is probable that the first metrical compositions of the Romans, like those of every other people, were pious effusions for favors received or expected from the gods: of these, the earliest, according to Varro, were the hymns to Mars, which, though used by the Salii in the Augustan age, were no longer intelligible. To these succeeded the Fescennine verses, which were sung, or rather recited, after the vintage and harvest, and appear to have been little more than rude praises of the tutelar divinities of the country, intermixed with clownish jeers and sarcasms, extemporally poured out by the rustics in some kind of measure, and indifferently directed at the audience, or at one another. These, by degrees, assumed the form of a dialogue; of which, as nature is every where the same, and the progress of refinement but little varied, some resemblance may perhaps be found in the grosser eclogues of Theocritus.

Thus improved (if the word may be allowed of such barbarous amusements), they formed, for near three centuries, the delight of that nation: popular favor, however, had a dangerous effect on the performers, whose licentiousness degenerated at length into such wild invective, that it was found necessary to restrain it by a positive law: "Si qui populo occentassit, carmenve condisit, quod infamiam faxit flagitiumve alteri, fuste ferito." From this time we hear no farther complaints of the Fescennine verses, which continued to charm the Romans; until, about a century afterward, and during the ravages of a dreadful pestilence, the senate, as the historians say, in order to propitiate the gods, called a troop of players from Tuscany, to assist at the celebration of their ancient festivals. This was a wise and a salutary measure: the plague had spread dejection through the city, which was thus rendered more obnoxious to its fury; and it therefore became necessary, by novel and extraordinary amusements, to divert the attention of the people from the melancholy objects around them.

As the Romans were unacquainted with the language of Tuscany, the players, Livy tells us, omitted the modulation and the words, and confined themselves solely to gestures, which were accompanied by the flute. This imperfect exhibition, however, was so superior to their own, that the Romans eagerly strove to attain the art; and, as soon as they could imitate what they admired, graced their rustic measures with music and dancing. By degrees they dropped the Fescennine verses for something of a more regular kind, which now took the name of Satire.[16]

These Satires (for as yet they had but little claim to the title of dramas) continued, without much alteration, to the year 514, when Livius Andronicus, a Greek by birth, and a freedman of L. Salinator, who was undoubtedly acquainted with the old comedy of his country, produced a regular play. That it pleased can not be doubted, for it surpassed the Satires, even in their improved state; and, indeed, banished them for some time from the scene. They had, however, taken too strong a hold of the affections of the people to be easily forgotten, and it was therefore found necessary to reproduce and join them to the plays of Andronicus (the superiority of which could not be contested), under the name of Exodia or After-pieces. These partook, in a certain degree, of the general amelioration of the stage; something like a story was now introduced into them, which, though frequently indecent and always extravagant, created a greater degree of interest than the reciprocation of gross humor and scurrility in unconnected dialogues.

Whether any of the old people still regretted this sophistication of their early amusements, it is not easy to say; but Ennius, who came to Rome about twenty years after this period, and who was more than half a Grecian, conceived that he should perform an acceptable service by reviving the ancient Satires.[17] He did not pretend to restore them to the stage, for which indeed the new pieces were infinitely better calculated, but endeavored to adapt them to the closet, by refining their grossness and softening their asperity. Success justified the attempt. Satire, thus freed from action, and formed into a poem, became a favorite pursuit, and was cultivated by several writers of eminence. In imitation of his model, Ennius confined himself to no particular species of verse, nor indeed of language, for he mingled Greek expressions with his Latin at pleasure. It is solely with a reference to this new attempt that Horace and Quintilian are to be understood, when they claim for the Romans the invention[18] of this kind of poetry; and certainly they had opportunities of judging which we have not, for little of Ennius, and nothing of the old Satire, remains.

It is not necessary to pursue the history of Satire farther in this place, or to speak of another species of it, the Varronian, or, as Varro himself called it, the Menippean, which branched out from the former, and was a medley of prose and verse; it will be a more pleasing, as well as a more useful employ, to enter a little into what Dryden, I know not for what reason, calls the most difficult part of his undertaking—"a comparative view of the Satirists;" not certainly with the design of depressing one at the expense of another (for, though I have translated Juvenal, I have no quarrel with Horace and Persius), but for the purpose of pointing out the characteristic excellencies and defects of them all. To do this the more effectually, it will be previously necessary to take a cursory view of the times in which their respective works were produced.

Lucilius, to whom Horace, forgetting what he had said in another place, attributes the invention of Satire, flourished in the interval between the siege of Carthage and the defeat of the Cimbri and Teutons, by Marius. He lived therefore in an age in which the struggle between the old and new manners, though daily becoming more equal, or rather inclining to the worse side, was still far from being decided. The freedom of speaking and writing was yet unchecked by fear, or by any law more precise than that which, as has been already mentioned, was introduced to restrain the coarse ebullitions of rustic malignity. Add to this, that Lucilius was of a most respectable family (he was great-uncle to Pompey), and lived in habits of intimacy with the chiefs of the republic, with Lælius, Scipio, and others, who were well able to protect him from the Lupi and Mutii of the day, had they attempted, which they probably did not, to silence or molest him. Hence that boldness of satirizing the vicious by name, which startled Horace, and on which Juvenal and Persius delight to felicitate him.

Too little remains of Lucilius, to enable us to judge of his manner: his style seems, however, to bear fewer marks of delicacy than of strength, and his strictures appear harsh and violent. With all this, he must have been an extraordinary man; since Horace, who is evidently hurt by his reputation, can say nothing worse of his compositions than that they are careless and hasty, and that if he had lived at a more refined period, he would have partaken of the general amelioration. I do not remember to have heard it observed, but I suspect that there was something of political spleen in the excessive popularity of Lucilius under Augustus, and something of courtly complacency in the attempt of Horace to counteract it. Augustus enlarged the law of the twelve tables respecting libels; and the people, who found themselves thus abridged of the liberty of satirizing the great by name, might not improbably seek to avenge themselves by an overstrained attachment to the works of a man who, living, as they would insinuate, in better times, practiced without fear, what he enjoyed without restraint.

The space between Horace and his predecessor, was a dreadful interval "filled up with horror all, and big with death." Luxury and a long train of vices, which followed the immense wealth incessantly poured in from the conquered provinces, sapped the foundations of the republic, which were finally shaken to pieces by the civil wars, the perpetual dictatorship of Cæsar, and the second triumvirate, which threw the Roman world, without a hope of escape, into the power of an individual.

Augustus, whose sword was yet reeking with the best blood of the state, now that submission left him no excuse for farther cruelty, was desirous of enjoying in tranquillity the fruits of his guilt. He displayed, therefore, a magnificence hitherto unknown; and his example, which was followed by his ministers, quickly spread among the people, who were not very unwilling to exchange the agitation and terror of successive proscriptions, for the security and quiet of undisputed despotism.

Tiberius had other views, and other methods of accomplishing them. He did not indeed put an actual stop to the elegant institutions of his predecessor, but he surveyed them with silent contempt, and they rapidly degenerated. The race of informers multiplied with dreadful celerity; and danger, which could only be averted by complying with a caprice not always easy to discover, created an abject disposition, fitted for the reception of the grossest vices, and eminently favorable to the designs of the emperor; which were to procure, by universal depravation, that submission which Augustus sought to obtain by the blandishments of luxury and the arts.

From this gloomy and suspicious tyrant, the empire was transferred to a profligate madman. It can scarcely be told without indignation, that when the sword of Chærea had freed the earth from his disgraceful sway, the senate had not sufficient virtue to resume the rights of which they had been deprived; but, after a timid debate, delivered up the state to a pedantic dotard, incapable of governing himself.

To the vices of his predecessors, Nero added a frivolity which rendered his reign at once odious and contemptible. Depravity could reach no farther, but misery might yet be extended. This was fully experienced through the turbulent and murderous usurpations of Galba, Otho, and Vitellius; when the accession of Vespasian and Titus gave the groaning world a temporary respite.

To these succeeded Domitian, whose crimes form the subject of many a melancholy page in the ensuing work, and need not therefore be dwelt on here. Under him, every trace of ancient manners was obliterated; liberty was unknown, law openly trampled upon, and, while the national rites were either neglected or contemned, a base and blind superstition took possession of the enfeebled and distempered mind.

Better times followed. Nerva, and Trajan, and Hadrian, and the Antonines, restored the Romans to safety and tranquillity; but they could do no more; liberty and virtue were gone forever; and after a short period of comparative happiness, which they scarcely appear to have deserved, and which brought with it no amelioration of mind, no return of the ancient modesty and frugality, they were finally resigned to destruction.

I now proceed to the "comparative view" of which I have already spoken: as the subject has been so often treated, little of novelty can be expected from it; to read, compare, and judge, is almost all that remains.

Horace, who was gay, and lively, and gentle, and affectionate, seems fitted for the period in which he wrote. He had seen the worst times of the republic, and might therefore, with no great suspicion of his integrity, be allowed to acquiesce in the infant monarchy, which brought with it stability, peace, and pleasure. How he reconciled himself to his political tergiversation it is useless to inquire.[19] What was so general, we may suppose, brought with it but little obloquy; and it should be remembered, to his praise, that he took no active part in the government which he had once opposed.[20]

If he celebrates the master of the world, it is not until he is asked by him whether he is ashamed that posterity should know them to be friends; and he declines a post, which few of his detractors have merit to deserve, or virtue to refuse.

His choice of privacy, however, was in some measure constitutional; for he had an easiness of temper which bordered on indolence; hence he never rises to the dignity of a decided character. Zeno and Epicurus share his homage and undergo his ridicule by turns: he passes without difficulty from one school to another, and he thinks it a sufficient excuse for his versatility, that he continues, amid every change, the zealous defender of virtue. Virtue, however, abstractedly considered, has few obligations to his zeal.

But though, as an ethical writer, Horace has not many claims to the esteem of posterity; as a critic, he is entitled to all our veneration. Such is the soundness of his judgment, the correctness of his taste, and the extent and variety of his knowledge, that a body of criticism might be selected from his works, more perfect in its kind than any thing which antiquity has bequeathed us.

As he had little warmth of temper, he reproves his contemporaries without harshness. He is content to "dwell in decencies," and, like Pope's courtly dean, "never mentions hell to ears polite." Persius, who was infinitely better acquainted with him than we can pretend to be, describes him, I think, with great happiness:

"Omne vafer vitium ridenti Flaccus amico
Tangit, et admissus circum præcordia ludit,
Callidus excusso populum suspendere naso."

"He, with a sly insinuating grace,
Laugh'd at his friend, and look'd him in the face:
Would raise a blush, where secret vice he found,
And tickle, while he gently probed the wound:
With seeming innocence the crowd beguiled;
But made the desperate passes when he smiled."

These beautiful lines have a defect under which Dryden's translations frequently labor; they do not give the true sense of the original. Horace "raised no blush" (at least Persius does not insinuate any such thing), and certainly "made no desperate passes."[21] His aim rather seems to be, to keep the objects of his satire in good humor with himself, and with one another.

To raise a laugh at vice, however (supposing it feasible), is not the legitimate office of Satire, which is to hold up the vicious, as objects of reprobation and scorn, for the example of others, who may be deterred by their sufferings. But it is time to be explicit. To laugh even at fools is superfluous; if they understand you, they will join in the merriment; but more commonly, they will sit with vacant unconcern, and gaze at their own pictures: to laugh at the vicious, is to encourage them; for there is in such men a willfulness of disposition, which prompts them to bear up against shame, and to show how little they regard slight reproof, by becoming more audacious in guilt. Goodness, of which the characteristic is modesty, may, I fear, be shamed; but vice, like folly, to be restrained, must be overawed. Labeo, says Hall, with great energy and beauty—

"Labeo is whipt, and laughs me in the face;
Why? for I smite, and hide the galled place.
Gird but the Cynic's helmet on his head,
Cares he for Talus, or his flayle of lead?"

Persius, who borrowed so much of Horace's language, has little of his manner. The immediate object of his imitation seems to be Lucilius; and if he lashes vice with less severity than his great prototype, the cause must not be sought in any desire to spare what he so evidently condemned. But he was thrown "on evil times;" he was, besides, of a rank distinguished enough to make his freedom dangerous, and of an age when life had yet lost little of its novelty; to write, therefore, even as he has written, proves him to be a person of very singular courage and virtue.

In the interval between Horace and Persius, despotism had changed its nature: the chains which the policy of Augustus concealed in flowers, were now displayed in all their hideousness. The arts were neglected, literature of every kind discouraged or disgraced, and terror and suspicion substituted in the place of the former ease and security. Stoicism, which Cicero accuses of having infected poetry, even in his days, and of which the professors, as Quintilian observes, always disregarded the graces and elegancies of composition, spread with amazing rapidity.[22] In this school Persius was educated, under the care of one of its most learned and respectable masters.

Satire was not his first pursuit; indeed, he seems to have somewhat mistaken his talents when he applied to it. The true end of this species of writing, as Dusaulx justly says, is the improvement of society; but for this, much knowledge of mankind ("quicquid agunt homines") is previously necessary. Whoever is deficient in that, may be an excellent moral and philosophical poet; but can not, with propriety, lay claim to the honors of a satirist.

And Persius was moral and philosophical in a high degree: he was also a poet of no mean order. But while he grew pale over the page of Zeno, and Cleanthes, and Chrysippus; while he imbibed, with all the ardor of a youthful mind, the paradoxes of those great masters, together with their principles, the foundations of civil society were crumbling around him, and soliciting his attention in vain. To judge from what he has left us, it might almost be affirmed that he was a stranger in his own country. The degradation of Rome was now complete; yet he felt, at least he expresses, no indignation at the means by which it was effected: a sanguinary buffoon was lording it over the prostrate world; yet he continued to waste his most elaborate efforts on the miserable pretensions of pedants in prose and verse! If this savor of the impassibility of Stoicism, it is entitled to no great praise on the score of outraged humanity, which has stronger claims on a well-regulated mind, than criticism, or even philosophy.

Dryden gives that praise to the dogmas of Persius, which he denies to his poetry. "His verse," he says, "is scabrous and hobbling, and his measures beneath those of Horace." This is too severe; for Persius has many exquisite passages, which nothing in Horace will be found to equal or approach. The charge of obscurity has been urged against him with more justice; though this, perhaps, is not so great as it is usually represented. Casaubon could, without question, have defended him more successfully than he has done; but he was overawed by the brutal violence of the elder Scaliger; for I can scarcely persuade myself that he really believed this obscurity to be owing to "the fear of Nero, or the advice of Cornutus." The cause of it should be rather sought in his natural disposition, and in his habits of thinking. Generally speaking, however, it springs from a too frequent use of tropes, approaching in almost every instance to a catachresis, an anxiety of compression, and a quick and unexpected transition from one overstrained figure to another. After all, with the exception of the sixth Satire, which, from its abruptness, does not appear to have received the author's last touches, I do not think there is much to confound an attentive reader: some acquaintance, indeed, with the porch "braccatis illita Medis," is previously necessary. His life may be contemplated with unabated pleasure: the virtue he recommends, he practiced in the fullest extent; and at an age when few have acquired a determinate character, he left behind him an established reputation for genius, learning, and worth.

Juvenal wrote at a period still more detestable than that of Persius. Domitian, who now governed the empire, seems to have inherited the bad qualities of all his predecessors. Tiberius was not more hypocritical, nor Caligula more bloody, nor Claudius more sottish, nor Nero more mischievous, than this ferocious despot; who, as Theodorus Gadareus indignantly declared of Tiberius, was truly πηλον αἱματι πεφυραμενον· a lump of clay kneaded up with blood!

Juvenal, like Persius, professes to follow Lucilius; but what was in one a simple attempt, is in the other a real imitation, of his manner.[23] Fluent and witty as Horace, grave and sublime as Persius; of a more decided character than the former, better acquainted with mankind than the latter; he did not confine himself to the mode of regulating an intercourse with the great, or to abstract disquisitions on the nature of scholastic liberty; but, disregarding the claims of a vain urbanity, and fixing all his soul on the eternal distinctions of moral good and evil, he labored, with a magnificence of language peculiar to himself, to set forth the loveliness of virtue, and the deformity and horror of vice, in full and perfect display.

Dusaulx, who is somewhat prejudiced against Horace, does ample justice to Juvenal. There is great force in what he says; and, as I do not know that it ever appeared in English, I shall take the liberty of laying a part of it before the reader, at the hazard of a few repetitions.

"The bloody revolution which smothered the last sighs of liberty,[24] had not yet found time to debase the minds of a people, among whom the traditionary remains of the old manners still subsisted. The cruel but politic Octavius scattered flowers over the paths he was secretly tracing toward despotism: the arts of Greece, transplanted to the Capitol, flourished beneath his auspices; and the remembrance of so many civil dissensions, succeeding each other with increasing rapidity, excited a degree of reverence for the author of this unprecedented tranquillity. The Romans felicitated themselves at not lying down, as before, with an apprehension of finding themselves included, when they awoke, in the list of proscription: and neglected, amid the amusements of the circus and the theatre, those civil rights of which their fathers had been so jealous.

"Profiting of these circumstances, Horace forgot that he had combated on the side of liberty. A better courtier than a soldier, he clearly saw how far the refinement, the graces, and the cultivated state of his genius (qualities not much considered or regarded till his time[25]), were capable of advancing him without any extraordinary effort.

"Indifferent to the future, and not daring to recall the past, he thought of nothing but securing himself from all that could sadden the mind, and disturb the system which he had skillfully arranged on the credit of those then in power. It is on this account, that, of all his contemporaries, he has celebrated none but the friends of his master, or, at least, those whom he could praise without fear of compromising his favor.

"In what I have said of Horace, my chief design has been to show that this Proteus, who counted among his friends and admirers even those whose conduct he censured, chose rather to capitulate than contend; that he attached no great importance to his own rules, and adhered to his principles no longer than they favored his views.

"Juvenal began his satiric career where the other finished, that is to say, he did that for morals and liberty, which Horace had done for decorum and taste. Disdaining artifice of every kind, he boldly raised his voice against the usurpation of power; and incessantly recalled the memory of the glorious æra of independence to those degenerate Romans, who had substituted suicide in the place of their ancient courage; and from the days of Augustus to those of Domitian, only avenged their slavery by an epigram or a bonmot.

"The characteristics of Juvenal were energy, passion, and indignation: it is, nevertheless, easy to discover that he is sometimes more afflicted than exasperated. His great aim was to alarm the vicious, and, if possible, to exterminate vice, which had, as it were, acquired a legal establishment. A noble enterprise! but he wrote in a detestable age, when the laws of nature were publicly violated, and the love of their country so completely eradicated from the breasts of his fellow-citizens, that, brutified as they were by slavery and voluptuousness, by luxury and avarice, they merited rather the severity of the executioner than the censor.

"Meanwhile the empire, shaken to its foundations, was rapidly crumbling to dust. Despotism was consecrated by the senate; liberty, of which a few slaves were still sensible, was nothing but an unmeaning word for the rest, which, unmeaning as it was, they did not dare to pronounce in public. Men of rank were declared enemies to the state for having praised their equals; historians were condemned to the cross, philosophy was proscribed, and its professors banished. Individuals felt only for their own danger, which they too often averted by accusing others; and there were instances of children who denounced their own parents, and appeared as witnesses against them! It was not possible to weep for the proscribed, for tears themselves became the object of proscription; and when the tyrant of the day had condemned the accused to banishment or death, the senate decreed that he should be thanked for it, as for an act of singular favor.

"Juvenal, who looked upon the alliance of the agreeable with the odious as utterly incompatible, contemned the feeble weapon of ridicule, so familiar to his predecessor: he therefore seized the sword of Satire, or, to speak more properly, fabricated one for himself, and rushing from the palace to the tavern, and from the gates of Rome to the boundaries of the empire, struck, without distinction, whoever deviated from the course of nature, or from the paths of honor. It is no longer a poet like Horace, fickle, pliant, and fortified with that indifference so falsely called philosophical, who amused himself with bantering vice, or, at most, with upbraiding a few errors of little consequence, in a style, which, scarcely raised above the language of conversation, flowed as indolence and pleasure directed; but a stern and incorruptible censor, an inflamed and impetuous poet, who sometimes rises with his subject to the noblest heights of tragedy."

From this declamatory applause, which even La Harpe allows to be worthy of the translator of Juvenal, the most rigid censor of our author can not detract much; nor can much perhaps be added to it by his warmest admirer. I could, indeed, have wished that he had not exalted him at the expense of Horace; but something must be allowed for the partiality of long acquaintance; and Casaubon, when he preferred Persius, with whom he had taken great, and indeed successful pains, to Horace and Juvenal, sufficiently exposed, while he tacitly accounted for, the prejudices of commentators and translators. With respect to Horace, if he falls beneath Juvenal (and who does not?) in eloquence, in energy, and in a vivid and glowing imagination, he evidently surpasses him in taste and critical judgment. I could pursue the parallel through a thousand ramifications, but the reader who does me the honor to peruse the following sheets, will see that I have incidentally touched upon some of them in the notes: and, indeed, I preferred scattering my observations through the work, as they arose from the subject, to bringing them together in this place; where they must evidently have lost something of their pertinency, without much certainty of gaining in their effect.

Juvenal is accused of being too sparing of praise. But are his critics well assured that praise from Juvenal could be accepted with safety? I do not know that a private station was "the post of honor" in those days; it was, however, that of security. Martial, Statius, V. Flaccus, and other parasites of Domitian, might indeed venture to celebrate their friends, who were also those of the emperor. Juvenal's, it is probable, were of another kind; and he might have been influenced no less by humanity than prudence, in the sacred silence which he has observed respecting them. Let it not be forgotten, however, that this intrepid champion of virtue, who, under the twelfth despot, persisted, as Dusaulx observes, in recognizing no sovereign but the senate, while he passes by those whose safety his applause might endanger, has generously celebrated the ancient assertors of liberty, in strains that Tyrtæus might have wished his own.

He is also charged with being too rhetorical in his language. The critics have discovered that he practiced at the bar, and they will therefore have it that his Satires smack of his profession, "redolent declamatorem."[26] That he is luxuriant, or, if it must be so, redundant, may be safely granted; but I doubt whether the passages which are cited for proofs of this fault, were not reckoned among his beauties by his contemporaries. The enumeration of deities in the thirteenth Satire is well defended by Rigaltius, who admits, at the same time, that if the author had inserted it any where but in a Satire, he should have accounted him a babbler; "faterer Juv. hic περιλαλον fuisse et verborum prodigum." He appears to me equally successful, in justifying the list of oaths in the same Satire, which Creech, it appears, had not the courage to translate.

The other passages adduced in support of this charge, are either metaphorical exaggerations, or long traits of indirect Satire, of which Juvenal was as great a master as Horace. I do not say that these are interesting to us; but they were eminently so to those for whom they were written; and by their pertinency at the time, should they, by every rule of fair criticism, be estimated. The version of such passages is one of the miseries of translation.

I have also heard it objected to Juvenal, that there is in many of his Satires a want of arrangement; this is particularly observed of the sixth and tenth. I scarcely know what to reply to this. Those who are inclined to object, would not be better satisfied, perhaps, if the form of both were changed; for I suspect that there is no natural gradation in the innumerable passions which agitate the human breast. Some must precede, and others follow; but the order of march is not, nor ever was, invariable. While I acquit him of this, however, I readily acknowledge a want of care in many places, unless it be rather attributable to a want of taste. On some occasions, too, when he changed or enlarged his first sketch, he forgot to strike out the unnecessary verses: to this are owing the repetitions to be found in his longer works, as well as the transpositions, which have so often perplexed the critics and translators.

Now I am upon this subject, I must not pass over a slovenliness in some of his lines, for which he has been justly reproached by Jortin and others, as it would have cost him no great pains to improve them. Why he should voluntarily debase his poetry, it is difficult to say: if he thought that he was imitating Horace in his laxity, his judgment must suffer considerably. The verses of Horace are indeed akin to prose; but as he seldom rises, he has the art of making his low flights, in which all his motions are easy and graceful, appear the effect of choice. Juvenal was qualified to "sit where he dared not soar." His element was that of the eagle, "descent and fall to him were adverse," and, indeed, he never appears more awkward than when he flutters, or rather waddles, along the ground.

I have observed in the course of the translation, that he embraced no sect with warmth. In a man of such lively passions, the retention with which he speaks of them all, is to be admired. From his attachment to the writings of Seneca, I should incline to think that he leaned toward Stoicism; his predilection for the school, however, was not very strong: perhaps it is to be wished that he had entered a little more deeply into it, as he seems not to have those distinct ideas of the nature of virtue and vice, which were entertained by many of the ancient philosophers, and indeed, by his immediate predecessor, Persius. As a general champion for virtue, he is commonly successful, but he sometimes misses his aim; and, in more than one instance, confounds the nature of the several vices in his mode of attacking them: he confounds too the very essence of virtue, which, in his hands, has often "no local habitation and name," but varies with the ever-varying passions and caprices of mankind. I know not whether it be worth while to add, that he is accused of holding a different language at different times respecting the gods, since in this he differs little from the Greek and Roman poets in general; who, as often as they introduce their divinities, state, as Juvenal does, the mythological circumstances coupled with their names, without regard to the existing system of physic or morals. When they speak from themselves, indeed, they give us exalted sentiments of virtue and sound philosophy; when they indulge in poetic recollections, they present us with the fables of antiquity. Hence the gods are alternately, and as the subject requires, venerable or contemptible; and this could not but happen through the want of some acknowledged religious standard, to which all might with confidence refer.

I come now to a more serious charge against Juvenal, that of indecency. To hear the clamor raised against him, it might be supposed, by one unacquainted with the times, that he was the only indelicate writer of his age and country. Yet Horace and Persius wrote with equal grossness: yet the rigid Stoicism of Seneca did not deter him from the use of expressions, which Juvenal perhaps would have rejected: yet the courtly Pliny poured out gratuitous indecencies in his frigid hendecasyllables, which he attempts to justify by the example of a writer to whose freedom the licentiousness of Juvenal is purity! It seems as if there was something of pique in the singular severity with which he is censured. His pure and sublime morality operates as a tacit reproach on the generality of mankind, who seek to indemnify themselves by questioning the sanctity which they can not but respect; and find a secret pleasure in persuading one another that "this dreaded satirist" was at heart no inveterate enemy to the licentiousness which he so vehemently reprehends.

When we consider the unnatural vices at which Juvenal directs his indignation, and reflect, at the same time, on the peculiar qualities of his mind, we shall not find much cause, perhaps, for wonder at the strength of his expressions. I should resign him in silence to the hatred of mankind, if his aim, like that of too many others, whose works are read with delight, had been to render vice amiable, to fling his seducing colors over impurity, and inflame the passions by meretricious hints at what is only innoxious when exposed in native deformity: but when I find that his views are to render depravity loathsome; that every thing which can alarm and disgust is directed at her in his terrible page, I forget the grossness of the execution in the excellence of the design; and pay my involuntary homage to that integrity, which fearlessly calling in strong description to the aid of virtue, attempts to purify the passions, at the hazard of wounding delicacy and offending taste. This is due to Juvenal: in justice to myself, let me add, that I could have been better pleased to have had no occasion to speak at all on the subject.

Whether any considerations of this or a similar nature deterred our literati from turning these Satires into English, I can not say; but, though partial versions might be made, it was not until the beginning of the seventeenth century that a complete translation was thought of; when two men, of celebrity in their days, undertook it about the same time; these were Barten Holyday and Sir Robert Stapylton. Who entered first upon the task, can not well be told. There appears somewhat of a querulousness on both sides; a jealousy that their versions had been communicated in manuscript to each other: Stapylton's, however, was first published, though that of Holyday seems to have been first finished.

Of this ingenious man it is not easy to speak with too much respect. His learning, industry, judgment, and taste are every where conspicuous: nor is he without a very considerable portion of shrewdness to season his observations. His poetry indeed, or rather his ill-measured prose, is intolerable; no human patience can toil through a single page of it;[27] but his notes will always be consulted with pleasure. His work has been of considerable use to the subsequent editors of Juvenal, both at home and abroad; and indeed, such is its general accuracy, that little excuse remains for any notorious deviation from the sense of the original.

Stapylton had equal industry, and more poetry; but he wanted his learning, judgment, and ingenuity. His notes, though numerous, are trite, and scarcely beyond the reach of a schoolboy. He is besides scandalously indecent on many occasions, where his excellent rival was innocently unfaithful, or silent.

With these translations, such as they were, the public was satisfied until the end of the seventeenth century, when the necessity of something more poetical becoming apparent, the booksellers, as Johnson says, "proposed a new version to the poets of that time, which was undertaken by Dryden, whose reputation was such, that no man was unwilling to serve the Muses under him."

Dryden's account of this translation is given with such candor, in the exquisite dedication which precedes it, that I shall lay it before the reader in his own words.

"The common way which we have taken, is not a literal translation, but a kind of paraphrase, or somewhat which is yet more loose, betwixt a paraphrase and a translation. Thus much may be said for us, that if we give not the whole sense of Juvenal, yet we give the most considerable part of it: we give it, in general, so clearly, that few notes are sufficient to make us intelligible: we make our author at least appear in a poetic dress. We have actually made him more sounding, and more elegant, than he was before in English: and have endeavored to make him speak that kind of English, which he would have spoken had he lived in England, and had written to this age. If sometimes any of us (and it is but seldom) make him express the customs and manners of his native country rather than of Rome, it is, either when there was some kind of analogy betwixt their customs and ours, or when, to make him more easy to vulgar understandings, we gave him those manners which are familiar to us. But I defend not this innovation, it is enough if I can excuse it. For to speak sincerely, the manners of nations and ages are not to be confounded."[28]

This is, surely, sufficiently modest. Johnson's description of it is somewhat more favorable: "The general character of this translation will be given, when it is said to preserve the wit, but to want the dignity, of the original." Is this correct? Dryden frequently degrades the author into a jester; but Juvenal has few moments of levity. Wit, indeed, he possesses in an eminent degree, but it is tinctured with his peculiarities; "rarò jocos," as Lipsius well observes, "sæpius acerbos sales miscet." Dignity is the predominant quality of his mind: he can, and does, relax with grace, but he never forgets himself; he smiles, indeed; but his smile is more terrible than his frown, for it is never excited but when his indignation is mingled with contempt; "ridet et odit!" Where his dignity, therefore, is wanting, his wit will be imperfectly preserved.[29]

On the whole, there is nothing in this quotation to deter succeeding writers from attempting, at least, to supply the deficiencies of Dryden and his fellow-laborers; and, perhaps, I could point out several circumstances which might make it laudable, if not necessary: but this would be to trifle with the reader, who is already apprised that, as far as relates to myself, no motives but those of obedience determined me to the task for which I now solicit the indulgence of the public.

When I took up this author, I knew not of any other translator; nor was it until the scheme of publishing him was started, that I began to reflect seriously on the nature of what I had undertaken, to consider by what exertions I could render that useful which was originally meant to amuse, and justify, in some measure, the partiality of my benefactors.

My first object was to become as familiar as possible with my author, of whom I collected every edition that my own interest, or that of my friends, could procure; together with such translations as I could discover either here or abroad; from a careful examination of all these, I formed the plan, to which, while I adapted my former labors, I anxiously strove to accommodate my succeeding ones.

Dryden has said, "if we give not the whole, yet we give the most considerable part of it." My determination was to give the whole, and really make the work what it professed to be, a translation of Juvenal. I had seen enough of castrated editions, to observe that little was gained by them on the score of propriety; since, when the author was reduced to half his bulk, at the expense of his spirit and design, sufficient remained to alarm the delicacy for which the sacrifice had been made. Chaucer observes with great naiveté,

"Whoso shall tell a tale after a man,
He moste reherse as neighe as ever he can
Everich word, if it be in his charge,
All speke he never so rudely and so large."

And indeed the age of Chaucer, like that of Juvenal, allowed of such liberties. Other times, other manners. Many words were in common use with our ancestors, which raised no improper ideas, though they would not, and indeed could not, at this time be tolerated. With the Greeks and Romans it was still worse: their dress, which left many parts of the body exposed, gave a boldness to their language, which was not perhaps lessened by the infrequency of women at those social conversations, of which they now constitute the refinement and the delight. Add to this that their mythology, and sacred rites, which took their rise in very remote periods, abounded in the undisguised phrases of a rude and simple age, and being religiously handed down from generation to generation, gave a currency to many terms, which offered no violence to modesty, though abstractedly considered by people of a different language and manners, they appear pregnant with turpitude and guilt.

When we observe this licentiousness (for I should wrong many of the ancient writers to call it libertinism) in the pages of their historians and philosophers, we may be pretty confident that it raised no blush on the cheek of their readers. It was the language of the times—"hæc illis natura est omnibus una:" and if it be considered as venial in those, surely a little farther indulgence will not be misapplied to the satirist, whose object is the exposure of what the former have only to notice.

Thus much may suffice for Juvenal: but shame and sorrow on the head of him who presumes to transfer his grossness into the vernacular tongues! "Legimus aliqua ne legantur," was said of old, by one of a pure and zealous mind. Without pretending to his high motives, I have felt the influence of his example, and in his apology must therefore hope to find my own. Though the poet be given entire, I have endeavored to make him speak as he would probably have spoken if he had lived among us; when, refined with the age, he would have fulminated against impurity in terms, to which, though delicacy might disavow them, manly decency might listen without offense.

I have said above, that "the whole of Juvenal" is here given; this, however, must be understood with a few restrictions. Where vice, of whatever nature, formed the immediate object of reprobation, it has not been spared in the translation; but I have sometimes taken the liberty of omitting an exceptionable line, when it had no apparent connection with the subject of the Satire. Some acquaintance with the original will be necessary to discover these lacunæ, which do not, in all, amount to half a page: for the rest, I have no apologies to make. Here are no allusions, covert or open, to the follies and vices of modern times; nor has the dignity of the original been prostituted, in a single instance, to the gratification of private spleen.

I have attempted to follow, as far as I judged it feasible, the style of my author, which is more various than is usually supposed. It is not necessary to descend to particulars; but my meaning will be understood by those who carefully compare the original of the thirteenth and fourteenth Satires with the translation. In the twelfth, and in that alone, I have perhaps raised it a little; but it really appears so contemptible a performance in the doggerel of Dryden's coadjutor, that I thought somewhat more attention than ordinary was in justice due to it. It is not a chef-d'œuvre by any means; but it is a pretty and a pleasing little poem, deserving more notice than it has usually received.

I could have been sagacious and obscure on many occasions, with very little difficulty; but I strenuously combated every inclination to find out more than my author meant. The general character of this translation, if I do not deceive myself, will be found to be plainness; and, indeed, the highest praise to which I aspire, is that of having left the original more intelligible to the English reader than I found it.

On numbering the lines, I find that my translation contains a few less than Dryden's. Had it been otherwise, I should not have thought an apology necessary, nor would it perhaps appear extraordinary, when it is considered that I have introduced an infinite number of circumstances from the text, which he thought himself justified in omitting; and that, with the trifling exceptions already mentioned, nothing has been passed; whereas he and his assistants overlooked whole sections, and sometimes very considerable ones.[30] Every where, too, I have endeavored to render the transitions less abrupt, and to obviate or disguise the difficulties which a difference of manners, habits, etc., necessarily creates: all this calls for an additional number of lines; which the English reader, at least, will seldom have occasion to regret.

Of the "borrowed learning of notes," which Dryden says he avoided as much as possible, I have amply availed myself. During the long period in which my thoughts were fixed on Juvenal, it was usual with me, whenever I found a passage that related to him, to impress it on my memory, or to note it down. These, on the revision of the work for publication, were added to such reflections as arose in my own mind, and arranged in the manner in which they now appear. I confess that this was not an unpleasant task to me, and I will venture to hope, that if my own suggestions fail to please, yet the frequent recurrence of some of the most striking and beautiful passages of ancient and modern poetry, history, etc., will render it neither unamusing nor uninstructive to the general reader. The information insinuated into the mind by miscellaneous collections of this nature, is much greater than is usually imagined; and I have been frequently encouraged to proceed by recollecting the benefits which I formerly derived from casual notices scattered over the margin, or dropped at the bottom of a page.

In this compilation, I proceeded on no regular plan, farther than considering what, if I had been a mere English reader, I should wish to have had explained: it is therefore extremely probable, as every rule of this nature must be imperfect, that I have frequently erred; have spoken where I should be silent and been prolix where I should be brief: on the whole, however, I chose to offend on the safer side; and to leave nothing unsaid, at the hazard of sometimes saying too much. Tedious, perhaps, I may be; but, I trust, not dull; and with this negative commendation I must be satisfied. The passages produced are not always translated; but the English reader needs not for that be discouraged in proceeding, as he will frequently find sufficient in the context to give him a general idea of the meaning. In many places I have copied the words, together with the sentiments of the writer; for this, if it call for an apology, I shall take that of Macrobius, who had somewhat more occasion for it than I shall be found to have: "Nec mihi vitio vertas, si res quas ex lectione varia mutuabor, ipsis sæpè verbis quibus ab ipsis auctoribus enarratæ sunt explicabo, quia præsens opus non eloquentiæ ostentationem, sed noscendorum congeriem pollicetur," etc. Saturn., lib. i., c. 1.

I have now said all that occurs to me on this subject: a more pleasing one remains. I can not, indeed, like Dryden, boast of my poetical coadjutors. No Congreves and Creeches have abridged, while they adorned, my labors; yet have I not been without assistance, and of the most valuable kind.

Whoever is acquainted with the habits of intimacy in which I have lived from early youth with the Rev. Dr. Ireland,[31] will not want to be informed of his share in the following pages. To those who are not, it is proper to say, that besides the passages in which he is introduced by name, every other part of the work has been submitted to his inspection. Nor would his affectionate anxiety for the reputation of his friend suffer any part of the translation to appear, without undergoing the strictest revision. His uncommon accuracy, judgment, and learning have been uniformly exerted on it, not less, I am confident, to the advantage of the reader, than to my own satisfaction. It will be seen that we sometimes differ in opinion; but as I usually distrust my own judgment in those cases, the decision is submitted to the reader.

I have also to express my obligations to Abraham Moore, Esq., barrister at law, a gentleman whose taste and learning are well known to be only surpassed by his readiness to oblige: of which I have the most convincing proofs; since the hours dedicated to the following sheets (which I lament that he only saw in their progress through the press) were snatched from avocations as urgent as they were important.

Nor must I overlook the friendly assistance of William Porden, Esq.,[32] which, like that of the former gentleman, was given to me, amid the distraction of more immediate concerns, with a readiness that enhanced the worth of what was, in itself, highly valuable.

A paper was put into my hand by Mr. George Nicol, the promoter of every literary work, from R. P. Knight, Esq., containing subjects for engravings illustrative of Juvenal, and, with singular generosity, offering me the use of his marbles, gems, etc. As these did not fall within my plan, I can only here return him my thanks for a kindness as extraordinary as it was unexpected. But I have other and greater obligations to Mr. Nicol. In conjunction with his son, Mr. William Nicol, he has watched the progress of this work through the press with unwearied solicitude. During my occasional absences from town, the correction of it (for which, indeed, the state of my eyes renders me at all times rather unfit) rested almost solely on him; and it is but justice to add, that his habitual accuracy in this ungrateful employ is not the only quality to which I am bound to confess my obligations.

FOOTNOTES:

[16] The origin of this word is now acknowledged to be Roman. Scaliger derived it from σατυρος (satyrus), but Casaubon, Dacier, and others, more reasonably, from satura (fem. of satur), rich, abounding, full of variety. In this sense it was applied to the lanx or charger, in which the various productions of the soil were offered up to the gods; and thus came to be used for any miscellaneous collection in general. Satura olla, a hotch-potch; saturæ leges, laws comprehending a multitude of regulations, etc. This deduction of the name may serve to explain, in some measure, the nature of the first Satires, which treated of various subjects, and were full of various matters: but enough on this trite topic.

[17] It should be observed, however, that the idea was obvious, and the work itself highly necessary. The old Satire, amid much coarse ribaldry, frequently attacked the follies and vices of the day. This could not be done by the comedy which superseded it, and which, by a strange perversity of taste, was never rendered national. Its customs, manners, nay, its very plots, were Grecian; and scarcely more applicable to the Romans than to us.

[18] To extend this to Lucilius, as is sometimes done, is absurd, since he evidently had in view the old comedy of the Greeks, of which his Satires, according to Horace, were rigid imitations:

"Eupolis atque Cratinus, Aristophanesque poëtæ
Atque alii, quorum comœdia prisca virorum est;
Si quia erat dignus describi, quod malus, aut fur,
Quod mœchus foret, aut sicarius, aut alioqui
Famosus, multa cum libertate notabant.
Hinc omnis pendet Lucilius, hosce secutus,
Mutatis tantum pedibus, numerisque."

Here the matter would seem to be at once determined by a very competent judge. Strip the old Greek comedy of its action, and change the metre from Iambic to Heroic, and you have the Roman Satire! It is evident from this, that, unless two things be granted, first, that the actors in those ancient Satires were ignorant of the existence of the Greek comedy; and, secondly, that Ennius, who knew it well, passed it by for a ruder model; the Romans can have no pretensions to the honor they claim.

And even if this be granted, the honor appears to be scarcely worth the claiming; for the Greeks had not only Dramatic, but Lyric and Heroic Satire. To pass by the Margites, what were the Iambics of Archilochus, and the Scazons of Hipponax, but Satires? nay, what were the Silli? Casaubon derives them απο του σιλλαινειν, to scoff, to treat petulantly; and there is no doubt of the justness of his derivation. These little pieces were made up of passages from various poems, which by slight alterations were humorously or satirically applied at will. The Satires of Ennius were probably little more; indeed, we have the express authority of Diomedes the grammarian for it. After speaking of Lucilius, whose writings he derives, with Horace, from the old comedy, he adds, "et olim carmen, quod ex variis poematibus constabat, satira vocabatur; quale scripserunt Pacuvius et Ennius." Modern critics agree in understanding "ex variis poematibus," of various kinds of metre; but I do not see why it may not mean, as I have rendered it, "of various poems;" unless we choose to compliment the Romans, by supposing that what was in the Greeks a mere cento, was in them an original composition.

It would scarcely be doing justice, however, to Ennius, to suppose that he did not surpass his models, for, to say the truth, the Greek Silli appear to have been no very extraordinary performances. A few short specimens of them may be seen in Diogenes Laertius, and a longer one, which has escaped the writers on this subject, in Dio Chrysostom. As this is, perhaps, the only Greek Satire extant, it may be regarded as a curiosity; and as such, for as a literary effort it is worth nothing, a short extract from it may not be uninteresting. Sneering at the people of Alexandria, for their mad attachment to chariot-races, etc., he says, this folly of theirs is not ill exposed by one of those scurrilous writers of (Silli, or) parodies: ου κακως τις παρεποιησε των σαπρων τουτων ποιητων·

Ἁρματα δ' αλλοτε μεν χθονι πιλνατο πουλυβοτειρῃ,
Αλλοτε δ' αεξασκε μετηορα· τοι δε θεαται
Θωκοις εν σφετεροις, ουθ' ἑστασαν, ουδ' εκαθηντο,
Χλωροι ὑπαι δειους πεφοβημενοι, ουδ' ὑπο νικες
Αλληλοισι τε κεκλομενοι, και πασι θεοισι
Χειρας ανισχοντες, μεγαλ' ευχετοωντο ἑκαστοι.
Ἡυτε περ κλαγγη γερανων πελει, ηε κολοιων,
Ἁι τ' επει ουν ζυθον τ' επιον, και αθεσπατον οινον,
Κλαγγῃ ται γε πετονται απο σταδιοιο κελευθου. κ. τ. λ.
Ad Alexand. Orat. xxxii.

[19] I doubt whether he was ever a good royalist at heart; he frequently, perhaps unconsciously, betrays a lurking dissatisfaction; but having, as Johnson says of a much greater man, "tasted the honey of favor," he did not choose to return to hunger and philosophy. Indeed, he was not happy; in the country he sighs for the town, in town for the country; and he is always restless, and straining after something which he never obtains. To float, like Aristippus, with the stream, is a bad recipe for felicity; there must be some fixed principle, by which the passions and desires may be regulated.

[20] He is careful to disclaim all participation in public affairs. He accompanies Mæcenas in his carriage; but their chat, he wishes it to be believed, is on the common topics of the day, the weather, amusements, etc. Though this may not be strictly true, it is yet probable that politics furnished but a small part of their conversation. That both Augustus and his minister were warmly attached to him, can not be denied; but then it was as to a plaything. In a word, Horace seems to have been the "enfant gaté," of the palace, and was viewed, I believe, with more tenderness than respect.

[21] Mr. Drummond has given this passage with equal elegance and truth:

"With greater art sly Horace gain'd his end,
But spared no failing of his smiling friend;
Sportive and pleasant round the heart he play'd,
And wrapt in jests the censure he convey'd;
With such address his willing victims seized,
That tickled fools were rallied, and were pleased."

[22] Dusaulx accounts for this by the general consternation. Most of those, he says, distinguished for talents or rank, took refuge in the school of Zeno; not so much to learn in it how to live, as how to die. I think, on the contrary, that this would rather have driven them into the arms of Epicurus. "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die," will generally be found, I believe, to be the maxim of dangerous times. It would not be difficult to show, if this were the place for it, that the prevalency of Stoicism was due to the increase of profligacy, for which it furnished a convenient cloak. This, however, does not apply to Persius.

[23] I believe that Juvenal meant to describe himself in the following spirited picture of Lucilius:

"Ense velut stricto quoties Lucilius ardens
Infremuit, rubet auditor, cui frigida mens est
Criminibus, tacita sudant præcordia culpa."

[24] This is an error which has been so often repeated, that it is believed. What liberty was destroyed by the usurpation of Augustus? For more than half a century, Rome had been a prey to ambitious chiefs, while five or six civil wars, each more bloody than the other, had successively delivered up the franchises of the empire to the conqueror of the day. The Gracchi first opened the career to ambition, and wanted nothing but the means of corruption, which the East afterward supplied, to effect what Marius, Sylla, and the two triumvirates brought about with sufficient ease.

[25] This is a very strange observation. It looks as if Dusaulx had leaped from the times of old Metellus to those of Augustus, without casting a glance at the interval. The chef d'œuvres of Roman literature were in every hand, when he supposed them to be neglected: and, indeed, if Horace had left us nothing, the qualities of which Dusaulx speaks might still be found in many works produced before he was known.

[26] I have often wished that we had some of the pleadings of Juvenal. It can not be affirmed, I think, that there is any natural connection between prose and verse in the same mind, though it may be observed, that most of our celebrated poets have written admirably "solutâ oratione:" yet if Juvenal's oratory bore any resemblance to his poetry, he yielded to few of the best ornaments of the bar. The "torrens dicendi copia" was his, in an eminent degree; nay, so full, so rich, so strong, and so magnificent is his eloquence, that I have heard one well qualified to judge, frequently declare that Cicero himself, in his estimation, could hardly be said to surpass him.

[27] With all my respect for the learning of the good old man, it is impossible, now and then, to suppress a smile at his simplicity. In apologizing for his translation, he says: "As for publishing poetry, it needs no defense; there being, if my Lord of Verulam's judgment shall be admitted, 'a divine rapture in it!'"

[28] He evidently alludes to the versions of the second and eighth Satires by Tate and Stepney, but principally to the latter, in which Juvenal illustrates his argument by the practice of Smithfield and Newmarket! Indeed, Dryden himself, though confessedly aware of its impropriety, is not altogether free from "innovation;" he talks of the Park, and the Mall, and the Opera, and of many other objects, familiar to the translator, but which the original writer could only know by the spirit of prophecy.

I am sensible how difficult it is to keep the manners of different ages perfectly distinct in a work like this: I have never knowingly confounded them, and, I trust, not often inadvertently; yet more occasions perhaps of exercising the reader's candor will appear, after all, than are desirable.

[29] Yet Johnson knew him well. The peculiarity of Juvenal, he says (vol. ix., p. 424), "is a mixture of gayety and stateliness, of pointed sentences, and declamatory grandeur." A good idea of it may be formed from his own beautiful imitation of the third Satire. His imitation of the tenth (still more beautiful as a poem) has scarcely a trait of the author's manner—that is to say, of that "mixture of gayety and stateliness," which, according to his own definition, constitutes the "peculiarity of Juvenal." "The Vanity of Human Wishes" is uniformly stately and severe, and without those light and popular strokes of sarcasm which abound so much in his "London."

[30] In the fourteenth Satire, for example, there is an omission of fifteen lines, and this, too, in a passage of singular importance.

[31] Sub-Dean and Prebendary of Westminster, and Vicar of Croydon, in Surrey.

[32] The architect of Eton Hall, Cheshire, a structure which even now stands pre-eminent among the works which embellish the nation, and which future times will contemplate with equal wonder and delight.

CHRONOLOGY OF JUVENAL, PERSIUS, AND SULPICIA.

APPENDIX, ON THE DATE OF JUVENAL'S SATIRES.

The first Satire appears, from internal evidence, to have been written subsequently to at least the larger portion of the other Satires. But in this, as probably in many others, lines were interpolated here and there, at a period long after the original composition of the main body of the Satire; the cycle of events reproducing such a combination of circumstances, that the Satirist could make his shafts come home with two-fold pungency. For instance, the lines 60 et seq., which probably were in the first edition of the Satire directed against Nero and his favorite Sporus, would tell with equal effect against Hadrian and Antinous.

It is impossible, therefore, from any one given passage, to assign a date to any of the Satires of Juvenal. All that can be done, is to point out the allusion probably intended in the particular passages, and by that means fix a date prior to which we may reasonably conclude that portion could not have been written.

In those Satires whose subject is less complicated and extensive, a nearer approximation may be obtained to the date of the composition; as e. g. in the case of the second and eleventh Satires, and we may add the thirteenth and fifteenth.

But in the first Satire, the allusions extend over so wide a period, that unless we may suppose, as in the case just cited, that other persons are intended under the names known to history, to whom his readers would apply immediately the covert sarcasm, we can hardly imagine that they could all at any one given time serve to give point to the shaft of the Satirist. Thus Crispinus, mentioned l. 27, was made a senator by Nero, and lived probably under Domitian also. The barber alluded to in l. 25 (if, as the commentators suppose, Cinnamus is the person), must have lost all his wealth, and been reduced to poverty, somewhere about A.D. 93, the date of Martial's seventh book of Epigrams (who mentions the fact, and advises him to recur to his old trade, Ep. VII. lxiv.). Massa and Carus (l. 35, 36) are mentioned by Martial as apparently flourishing when he wrote his twelfth book, which was sent to Rome A.D. 104. Again, line 49 seems to refer to the condemnation of Marius as a recent event; but this took place in A.D. 100. And in that same year M. Cornelius Fronto was consul with Trajan; and may have been the proprietor of the plane-groves, mentioned l. 12. But then, again, we hear of Julius Fronto in A.D. 129, and Hadrian's conduct toward Antinous in that and the following year, might well have given occasion to the 60th and following lines; and if we are right in applying line 40 to Plotina's manœuvring to secure the succession to Hadrian, it will furnish an additional argument for supposing these passages to have been added some time after. We may therefore offer the conjecture, that the first Satire was written shortly after the year A.D. 100, as a preface or introduction to the book, and that a few additions were made to it, even so late as thirty years subsequently.

The second Satire was, in all probability, the first written. The allusion in the first line to the Sarmatæ, may perhaps be connected with the Sarmatian war, which took place A.D. 93, and in which Domitian engaged in person. And this date will correspond with the other references in the Satire by which an approximation to the time of its composition may be obtained. In A.D. 84 Domitian received the censorship for life (l. 121), at the same time that he was carrying on an incestuous intercourse with his own niece Julia. This connection was continued for some years. Shortly after the death of Julia, the Vestal virgin Cornelia was buried alive, A.D. 91. These are alluded to as recent events (l. 29, "nuper"). Agricola, too, the conqueror of Britain, died A.D. 93 (cf. l. 160), whose campaigns are spoken of as recent occurrences, "modo captas Orcadas." The mention of Gracchus also connects this with the eighth Satire, part of which at least was probably written soon after the consulship of Lateranus in A.D. 94. We may therefore conjecture that the Satire was composed between the years A.D. 93 and 95.

The third Satire may perhaps have been written in the reign of Domitian, and may refer to the general departure of men of worth from Rome, when Domitian expelled the philosophers, A.D. 90. Umbritius, who predicted the murder of Galba, A.D. 69, might have been alive at that time; and, from his political views, would have been a friend of Juvenal, who was a bitter enemy of Otho. The nightly deeds of violence perpetrated by Nero would have been still fresh in men's memories (l. 278, seq.; cf. Pers., Sat., iv., 49); as would the judicial murder of Barea Soranus, and the arrogance of Fabricius Veiento (l. 116, 185). Still there are other parts of the Satire that seem to bear evidence of a later date. The name of Isæus would hardly have been so familiar in Rome till ten years after this date, l. 74. It was not till A.D. 107 that Trajan undertook the draining of the Pontine marshes; to which there is most probably an allusion in l. 32 and 307; to which nothing of importance had been done since the days of Augustus. The great influx of foreigners into Rome, in the train of Hadrian, at a still later date, A.D. 118, probably gave rise to the spirited episode from l. 58-125. (See Chronology.) We may therefore consider it probable that the main body of the Satire was written toward the close of the reign of Domitian, and received additions in the commencement of the reign of Hadrian.

The fourth Satire in all probability describes a real event; and would have possessed but little interest after any great lapse of time, subsequent to the fact described. We may therefore fairly assign it to the early part of Nerva's reign, very shortly after the death of Domitian, which is mentioned at the close of the Satire.

The fifth Satire contains nothing by which we can determine the date. From Juvenal's hatred of Domitian, we may suppose that l. 36 was suggested by the condemnation of Senecio, who was put to death for writing a panegyric on Helvidius Priscus, A.D. 90. If the Aurelia (l. 98) be the lady mentioned by Pliny (Epist., ii., 20), this would strengthen the conjecture, as Pliny's second book of Epistles was probably written very shortly before that date.

There is little doubt that considerable portions of the sixth Satire were written in the reign of Trajan. 1. The lines 407-411 describe exactly the events which took place at Antioch, in A.D. 115, when Trajan was entering on his Armenian and Parthian campaigns. 2. The coins of Trajan of the year A.D. 110, have the legend Dacicus and Germanicus, cf. l. 205; and although Domitian triumphed over the Dacians and Germans, none of his extant coins bear that inscription; the general title being Augustus Germanicus simply. 3. Again, l. 502 describes a kind of headdress, very common on the coins of the reigns of Trajan and Hadrian, representing Plotina the wife of Trajan, Marciana his sister, and Sabina the wife of Hadrian, and others: and this fashion was a very short-lived one. Beginning with the court, it probably soon descended to the ladies of inferior rank; but like its unnatural antitype, the towering, powdered, and plastered rolls of our own countrywomen, in the degraded days of the two first Georges, it was too unnatural and disfiguring to remain long in vogue with that sex, to whom "tanta est quærendi cura decoris tanquam famæ discrimen agatur aut animæ." 4. The subject itself also affords an additional reason for supposing that the Satire was composed when the poet was advanced in life. The vices of women are hardly a topic for a young writer to select; but the vigorous manner in which he handles the lash, rather marks the state of mind of the man who has outgrown the passions of early manhood, and from "the high heaven of his philosophy" looks down with cold austerity on the desires, and with bitter indignation at the vices, of those whose feelings he has long since ceased to share. Juvenal was, as Hodgson says, "an impenetrable bachelor," and if, as he conjectures, he was jilted in his early youth, this fact would give additional bitterness to the rancor which in old age he would feel toward the sex by whom his personal happiness had been embittered, as well as the ruin of his native country precipitated. 5. If we are right in supposing that by Heliodorus, Juvenal meant Artemidorus Capito (and the change in the name is both simple and readily suggested), this would also bring down the date of this Satire to Juvenal's later years, as about A.D. 122 was the time when this court-physician of Hadrian had attained his greatest reputation. 6. In line 320, Saufeia is spoken of in similar terms to those employed in the eleventh Satire, which was confessedly the work of his later years. 7. Compare also the mention of Archigenes (l. 236) with the 98th line of the thirteenth Satire, written A.D. 118. 8. The allusions to the importation of foreigners, with their exotic vices, would also refer to the same date. See Chron., A.D. 118.

The date of the seventh Satire will depend mainly on the question, Whom does Juvenal intend to panegyrize in his 1st line?

"Et spes et ratio studiorum in Cæsare tantum."

Gifford pronounces unhesitatingly in favor of Domitian, and his argument is very plausible. "The Satire," he says, "would appear to have been written in the early part of Domitian's reign; and Juvenal, by giving the emperor 'one honest line' of praise, probably meant to stimulate him to extend his patronage. He did not think very ill of him at the time, and augured happily for the future." Juvenal's subsequent hatred of Domitian was caused, he thinks, by his bitter mortification at finding, in a few years, this "sole patron of literature" changed into a ferocious and bloody persecutor of all the arts. This opinion he supports by some references to contemporary writers, and by the evidence of coins of Domitian existing with a head of Pallas on the reverse, to symbolize his royal patronage of poetry and literary pursuits. But in almost every instance Gifford errs in assigning too early a date to the Satires; and one or two points in this clearly show that we must bring it down to a much later period. Domitian succeeded to the throne A.D. 81, and it could only have been in the earlier years of his reign that even his most servile flatterers could have complimented him upon his patronage of learning. Now, 1. It was not till about ten years after this that the actor Paris acquired his influence and his wealth; and even allowing the very problematical story of the banishment of Juvenal having been caused by the offense given to the favorite by the famous lines (85-92) to be true, this would bring it down to a time subsequent to the banishment of philosophers from Rome; after which act Juvenal, certainly, would not have written the first line on Domitian. 2. Again, in A.D. 90, Quintilian was teaching in a public school at Rome, and receiving a salary from the imperial treasury; it could hardly therefore be so early as this date that he had acquired the fortune and estates alluded to in l. 189. 3. In l. 82, the Thebaid of Statius is mentioned. This poem was finished A.D. 94; and though it is true that Statius might, most probably, have publicly recited portions of it during its progress, it would have hardly earned the great reputation implied in Juvenal's lines, at a sufficiently early date to allow us to assign it to the first two or three years of Domitian's reign.

I should, therefore, rather suppose that by Cæsar we are to understand Nerva. The praise of Domitian is incompatible with Juvenal's universal hatred and execration of him. The opening of the reign of the mild and excellent Nerva might well inspire hopes of the revival of a taste for literature and the arts; and I would conjecture the close of A.D. 96 as the date of the Satire. Before the end of the year Statius was dead; but Juvenal's words seem to imply that he was still living. Again, Matho the lawyer has failed, and is in great poverty (l. 129), to which Martial alludes in lib. xi., Ep., part of which book was evidently written shortly before A.D. 97. But if we are right in supposing the first Satire to have been written about A.D. 100, the intervening years will have given Matho ample time to retrieve his fortune by his infamous trade of informing, and reappear as the luxurious character described Sat., i., 32.

Of the eighth Satire, if "Lateranus" be the true reading (l. 147), or if he be intended by "Damasippus," as I believe, we may assume the year A.D. 101 or 102 as the probable date: Lateranus had been consul A.D. 94, and in the year A.D. 101 Trajan for the first time extended the arms of Rome beyond the Danube. Cf. l. 169.

The plunder of his province of Africa, by Marius Priscus, was a recent event (l. 120 "nuper"); but, as we have said above, he was impeached by Pliny and Tacitus in the year A.D. 100. Ponticus, to whom the Satire is addressed, may be the person to whom Martial refers in his twelfth book, which was written A.D. 104.

There are two allusions by which we may form a conjecture as to the date of the ninth Satire. Crepereius Pollio is mentioned as nearly in the same circumstances of profligate poverty (l. 6, 7) as is described in the eleventh Satire (l. 43), which was undoubtedly written in Juvenal's later years; and he alludes (l. 117) to Saufeia, in very much the same terms in which he speaks of her in the sixth Satire (l. 320), which we suppose to have been written in his old age.

The internal evidence, supplied by the sustained majesty and dignified flow of language of the tenth (as well as of the fourteenth) Satire, without taking into consideration the philosophical nature of the subject of both, is quite sufficient to prove that they must have been the finished productions of a late period of a thoughtful life. We are therefore quite prepared to admit the conjecture that the allusion in line 136 is to the column of Trajan, erected in the year A.D. 113. The repetition of the line (226) also connects this with the first Satire, which it probably preceded only by a short interval.

The 203d line of the eleventh Satire fixes its date to the later years of Juvenal's life. It breathes, besides, throughout the spirit of a calm and philosophic enjoyment of the blessings of life, that tells of declining age; cheered by a chastened appreciation of the comforts by which it is surrounded, but far removed from all extraneous or meretricious excitement, and utterly abhorrent of all noisy or exuberant hilarity. An additional argument is mentioned in the Chronology for referring it to the date A.D. 124.

The twelfth Satire contains nothing by which we can fix its date with any certainty. If, however, as the commentators suppose, the wife of Fuscus, in the 45th line, be Saufeia, it will be connected with the sixth, ninth, and eleventh Satires, and may probably be considered the work of his advanced age.

The thirteenth Satire is fixed by line 17 to the year A.D. 118, the 60th after the consulship of L. Fonteius Capito. This is the only Satire to which Mr. Clinton has assigned a date.

The argument applied to the tenth Satire will apply with nearly equal force to the fourteenth. We are therefore prepared to admit the plausibility of the conjecture, that l. 196 refers to the progress of Hadrian through Britain, which would fix the date to A.D. 120; a very short time previous to the composition of the following Satire.

The event recorded in the fifteenth Satire occurred shortly after the consulship of Junius, l. 27, "nuper consule Junio gesta." This was, in all probability, Junius Rusticus, who was consul with Hadrian A.D. 119. The 110th line also probably refers to the influx of Greeks and other foreigners into Rome, in the train of Hadrian (to which we have alluded in discussing the date of the third Satire), which took place in the preceding year.

The sixteenth Satire may have either been the draft of a longer poem, commenced in early life (as l. 3 may imply), which the poet never cared to finish; or an outline for a more perfect composition, which he never lived to elaborate. The mention of Fucus may connect it with the twelfth Satire. But though there is quite enough remaining to warrant us in unhesitatingly ascribing the authorship to Juvenal, there is too little left to enable us to form even a probable conjecture as to the date of its composition.

It is hardly necessary to add, that, after a careful examination of the foregoing Chronology, it must be evident to every novice in scholarship, that the whole life of Juvenal, as usually given, is a mere myth, to which one can not even apply, as in many legendary biographies, the epithet of poetical.

L. E.

ARGUMENTS OF THE SATIRES OF JUVENAL.

SATIRE I.

This Satire seems, from several incidental circumstances to have been produced subsequently to most of them; and was probably drawn up after the author had determined to collect and publish his works, as a kind of Introduction.

He abruptly breaks silence with an impassioned complaint of the importunity of bad writers, and a resolution of retaliating upon them; and after ridiculing their frivolous taste in the choice of their subjects, declares his own intention to devote himself to Satire. After exposing the corruption of men, the profligacy of women, the luxury of courtiers, the baseness of informers and fortune-hunters, the treachery of guardians, and the peculation of officers of state, he censures the general passion for gambling, the servile rapacity of the patricians, the avarice and gluttony of the rich, and the miserable poverty and subjection of their dependents; and after some bitter reflections on the danger of satirizing living villainy, concludes with a resolution to attack it under the mask of departed names.

SATIRE II.

This Satire contains an animated attack upon the hypocrisy of the philosophers and reformers of the day, whose ignorance, profligacy, and impiety it exposes with just severity.

Domitian is here the object; his vices are alluded to under every different name; and it gives us a high opinion of the intrepid spirit of the man who could venture to circulate, even in private, so faithful a representation of that blood-thirsty tyrant.

SATIRE III.

Umbritius, an Aruspex and friend of the author, disgusted at the prevalence of vice and the disregard of unassuming virtue, is on the point of quitting Rome; and when a little way from the city stops short to acquaint the poet, who has accompanied him, with the causes of his retirement. These may be arranged under the following heads: That Flattery and Vice are the only thriving arts at Rome; in these, especially the first, foreigners have a manifest superiority over the natives, and consequently engross all favor—that the poor are universally exposed to scorn and insult—that the general habits of extravagance render it difficult for them to subsist—that the want of a well-regulated police subjects them to numberless miseries and inconveniences, aggravated by the crowded state of the capital, from all which a country life is happily free: on the tranquillity and security of which he dilates with great beauty.

SATIRE IV.

In this Satire Juvenal indulges his honest spleen against Crispinus, already noticed, and Domitian, the constant object of his scorn and abhorrence. The introduction of the tyrant is excellent; the mock solemnity with which the anecdote of the Turbot is introduced, the procession of the affrighted counselors to the palace, and the ridiculous debate which terminates in as ridiculous a decision, show a masterly hand. The whole concludes with an indignant and high-spirited apostrophe.

SATIRE V.

Under pretense of advising one Trebius to abstain from the table of Virro, a man of rank and fortune, Juvenal takes occasion to give a spirited detail of the insults and mortifications to which the poor were subjected by the rich, at those entertainments to which, on account of the political connection subsisting between patrons and clients, it was sometimes thought necessary to invite them.

SATIRE VI.

The whole of this Satire, not only the longest, but the most complete of the author's works, is directed against the female sex. It may be distributed under the following heads: Lust variously modified, imperiousness of disposition, fickleness, gallantry, attachment to improper pursuits, litigiousness, drunkenness, unnatural passions, fondness for singers, dancers, etc.; gossiping, cruelty, ill manners; outrageous pretensions to criticism, grammar, and philosophy; superstitious and unbounded credulity in diviners and fortune-tellers; introducing supposititious children; poisoning their step-sons to possess their fortunes; and, lastly, murdering their husbands.

SATIRE VII.

This Satire contains an animated account of the general discouragement under which literature labored at Rome. Beginning with poetry, it proceeds through the various departments of history, law, oratory, rhetoric, and grammar; interspersing many curious anecdotes, and enlivening each different head with such satirical, humorous, and sentimental remarks as naturally flow from the subject.

SATIRE VIII.

Juvenal demonstrates, in this Satire, that distinction is merely personal; that though we may derive rank and titles from our ancestors, yet if we degenerate from the virtues by which they obtained them, we can not be considered truly noble. This is the main object of the Satire; which, however, branches out into many collateral topics—the profligacy of the young nobility; the miserable state of the provinces, which they plundered and harassed without mercy; the contrast between the state of debasement to which the descendants of the best families had sunk, and the opposite virtues to be found in persons of the lowest station and humblest descent.

SATIRE IX.

The Satire consists of a dialogue between the poet and one Nævolus, a dependent of some wealthy debauchee, who, after making him subservient to his unnatural passions, in return starved, insulted, hated, and discarded him. The whole object seems to be, to inculcate the grand moral lesson, that, under any circumstances, a life of sin is a life of slavery.

SATIRE X.

The subject of this inimitable Satire is the vanity of human wishes. From the principal events of the lives of the most illustrious characters of all ages, the poet shows how little happiness is promoted by the attainment of what our indistinct and limited views represent as the greatest of earthly blessings. Of these he instances wealth, power, eloquence, military glory, longevity, and personal accomplishments; all of which, he shows, have proved dangerous or destructive to their respective possessors. Hence he argues the wisdom of acquiescing in the dispensations of Heaven; and concludes with a form of prayer, in which he points out with great force and beauty the objects for which a rational being may presume to approach the Almighty.

SATIRE XI.

Under the form of an invitation to his friend Persicus, Juvenal takes occasion to enunciate many admirable maxims for the due regulation of life. After ridiculing the miserable state to which a profligate patrician had reduced himself by his extravagance, he introduces the picture of his own domestic economy, which he follows by a pleasing view of the simplicity of ancient manners, artfully contrasted with the extravagance and luxury of the current times. After describing with great beauty the entertainment he proposes to give his friend, he concludes with an earnest recommendation to him to enjoy the present with content, and await the future with calmness and moderation.

SATIRE XII.

Catullus, a valued friend of the poet, had narrowly escaped shipwreck. In a letter of rejoicing to their common friend, Corvinus, Juvenal describes the danger that his friend had incurred, and his own hearty and disinterested delight at his preservation, contrasting his own sacrifices of thanksgiving at the event, with those offered by the designing legacy-hunters, by which the rich and childless were attempted to be insnared.

SATIRE XIII.

Calvinus had left a sum of money in the hands of a confidential person, who, when he came to re-demand it, forswore the deposit. The indignation and fury expressed by Calvinus at this breach of trust, reached the ears of his friend Juvenal, who endeavors to soothe and comfort him under his loss. The different topics of consolation follow one another naturally and forcibly, and the horrors of a troubled conscience were perhaps never depicted with such impressive solemnity as in this Satire.

SATIRE XIV.

The whole of this Satire is directed to the one great end of self-improvement. By showing the dreadful facility with which children copy the vices of their parents, the poet points out the necessity as well as the sacred duty of giving them examples of domestic purity and virtue. After briefly enumerating the several vices, gluttony, cruelty, debauchery, etc., which youth imperceptibly imbibe from their seniors, he enters more at large into that of avarice; of which he shows the fatal and inevitable consequences. Nothing can surpass the exquisiteness of this division of the Satire, in which he traces the progress of that passion in the youthful mind from the paltry tricks of saving a broken meal to the daring violation of every principle, human and divine. Having placed the absurdity as well as the danger of immoderate desires in every point of view, he concludes with a solemn admonition to rest satisfied with those comforts and conveniences which nature and wisdom require, and which a decent competence is easily calculated to supply.

SATIRE XV.

After enumerating with great humor the animal and vegetable gods of the Egyptians, the author directs his powerful ridicule at their sottish and ferocious bigotry; of which he gives an atrocious and loathsome example. The conclusion of the Satire, which is a just and beautiful description of the origin of civil society (infinitely superior to any thing that Lucretius or Horace has delivered on the subject), founded not on natural instinct, but on principles of mutual benevolence implanted by God in the breast of man, and of man alone, does honor to the genius, good sense, and enlightened morality of the author.

SATIRE XVI.

Under a pretense of pointing out to his friend Gallus the advantages of a military life, Juvenal attacks with considerable spirit the exclusive privileges which the army had acquired or usurped, to the manifest injury of the civil part of the community.

JUVENAL'S SATIRES.

SATIRE I.

Must I always be a hearer only? Shall I never retaliate,[33] though plagued so often with the Theseid of Codrus,[34] hoarse with reciting it? Shall one man, then, recite[35] to me his Comedies, and another his Elegies, with impunity? Shall huge "Telephus" waste a whole day for me, or "Orestes," with the margin of the manuscript full to the very edge, and written on the back too,[36] and yet not finished, and I not retort?

No one knows his own house better than I do the grove of Mars, and Vulcan's cave close to the Æolian rocks. The agency of the winds,[37] what ghosts Æacus is torturing, whence another bears off the gold[38] of the stolen fleece, what huge mountain-ashes Monychus hurls, all this the plane-groves of Fronto,[39] and the statues shaken and the columns split by the eternal reciter, are for ever re-echoing. You may look for the same themes from the greatest poet and the least.

And yet I too have shirked my hand away from the rod.[40] I too have given advice to Sylla, that he should enjoy a sound sleep by returning to a private station.[41] When at every turn you meet so many poetasters, it were a foolish clemency to spare paper that is sure to be wasted. Yet why I rather choose to trace my course over that plain through which the great foster-son of Aurunca[42] urged his steeds, I will, if you are at leisure, and with favorable ear listen to reason, tell you. When a soft eunuch[43] marries a wife; when Mævia[44] transfixes the Tuscan boar, and, with breasts exposed, grasps the hunting-spears; when one man singly vies in wealth with the whole body of patricians, under whose razor my beard, grown exuberant, sounded while I was in my prime;[45] when Crispinus, one of the dregs of the mob of the Nile, a born-slave of Canopus, (while his shoulder hitches up his Tyrian cloak,)[46] airs his summer ring from his sweating fingers, and can not support the weight of his heavier gem;—it is difficult not to write satire. For who can be so tolerant of this iniquitous city, who so case-hardened,[47] as to contain himself! When there comes up the bran-new litter of Matho[48] the lawyer, filled with himself; and after him, he that informed upon his powerful friend; and will soon plunder the nobility, already close-shorn, of the little that remains to them; one whom even Massa fears, whom Carus soothes with a bribe; or a Thymele suborned by some trembling Latinus.[49] When fellows supplant you, who earn their legacies by night-work, lifted up to heaven[50] by what is now the surest road to the highest advancement, the lust of some ancient harridan. Proculeius gets one poor twelfth; but Gillo has eleven twelfths. Each gets the share proportioned to his powers. Well! let him take the purchase-money of his blood, and be as pale as one that has trodden on a snake with naked heel, or a rhetorician about to declaim at the altar at Lyons.[51]

Why need I tell with what indignation my parched liver boils, when here, the plunderer of his ward (reduced by him to the vilest gains) presses on the people with his crowds of menials, and there, he that was condemned by a powerless sentence. (For what cares he for infamy while he retains the plunder?) Marius,[52] though an exile, drinks from the eighth hour, and laughs at the angry gods, while thou, O Province, victorious in the suit, art in tears! Shall I not deem these themes worthy of the lamp of Venusium?[53] Shall I not lash these? Why rather sing tales of Hercules or Diomede, or the bellowing of the Labyrinth, and the sea struck by the boy Icarus, and the winged artificer?[54] When the pander inherits the wealth of the adulterer (since the wife has lost the right of receiving it),[55] taught to gaze at the ceiling, and snore over his cups with well-feigned sleep. When he considers himself privileged to expect the command of a cohort, who has squandered his money on his stables, and has run through all his ancestors' estate, while he flies with rapid wheel along the Flaminian road;[56] for while yet a youth, like Automedon, he held the reins, while the great man showed himself off to his "mistress-in-his-cloak."[57] Do you not long to fill your capacious tablets, even in the middle of the cross-ways, when there comes borne on the shoulders of six slaves, exposed to view on either side, with palanquin almost uncurtained, and aping the luxurious Mæcenas, the forger, who made himself a man of splendor and wealth by a few short lines, and a moistened seal?[58] Next comes the powerful matron, who when her husband thirsts, mingles the toad's-poison in the mellow wine of Cales which she is herself about to hand him, and with skill superior even to Locusta,[59] initiates her neighbors, too simple before, in the art of burying their husbands, livid from the poison, in despite of infamy and the public gaze.[60]

Dare some deed to merit scanty Gyarus[61] and the jail, if you wish to be somebody. Honesty is commended, and starves. It is to their crimes they are indebted for their gardens, their palaces, their tables, their fine old plate, and the goat standing in high relief from the cup. Whom does the seducer of his own daughter-in-law, greedy for gold, suffer to sleep? Or the unnatural brides, or the adulterer not out of his teens?[62] If nature denies the power, indignation would give birth to verses, such as it could produce, like mine and Cluvienus'.

From the time that Deucalion ascended the mountain in his boat, while the storm upheaved the sea,[63] and consulted the oracle, and the softening stones by degrees grew warm with life, and Pyrrha displayed to the males the virgins unrobed; all that men are engaged in, their wishes, fears, anger, pleasures, joys, and varied pursuits, form the hotch-potch of my book.

And when was the crop of vices more abundant? When were the sails of avarice more widely spread? When had gambling its present spirits? For now men go to the hazard of the gaming-table not simply with their purses, but play with their whole chest[64] staked. What fierce battles will you see there, while the steward supplies the weapons for the contest! Is it then mere common madness to lose a hundred sestertia, and not leave enough for a tunic for your shivering slave![65] Which of our grandsires erected so many villas? Which of them ever dined by himself[66] on seven courses? In our days the diminished sportula is set outside the threshold, ready to be seized upon by the toga-clad crowd.[67] Yet he (that dispenses it), before giving, scans your features, and dreads lest you should come with counterfeit pretense and under a false name. When recognized you will receive your dole. He bids the crier summon the very Trojugenæ themselves. For even they assail the door with us. "Give the prætor his! Then to the tribune." But the freedman must first be served! "I was before him!" he says. "Why should I fear or hesitate to stand up for my turn, though I was born on the banks of Euphrates, which the soft windows[68] in my ears would attest, though I myself were to deny the fact. But my five shops bring me in four hundred sestertia. What does the Laticlave[69] bestow that's worth a wish, since Corvinus keeps sheep for hire in the Laurentine fields? I own more than Pallas[70] and the Licini. Let the tribunes wait then!" Let Riches carry the day, and let not him give place even to the sacrosanct magistrate, who came but the other day to this city with chalked feet.[71] Since with us the most revered majesty is that of riches; even though as yet, pernicious money, thou dwellest in no temple, nor have we as yet reared altars to coin, as we worship Peace and Faith, Victory and Virtue, and Concord, whose temple resounds with the noise of storks returning to their nests.[72] But when a magistrate of the highest rank reckons up at the end of the year, what the sportula brings him in, how much it adds to his revenue, what shall the poor retainers do, who look to this for their toga, for their shoes, their bread and fire at home? A closely-wedged crowd of litters is clamorous for the hundred quadrantes, and his wife, though sick or pregnant, accompanies and goes the rounds with her husband. One practicing a crafty trick now worn threadbare, asks for his wife though really absent, displaying in her stead an empty and closed palanquin: "My Galla is inside," he says, "dispatch us with all speed. Why hesitate?" "Put out your head, Galla!" "O don't disturb her! she's asleep!"

The day is portioned out with a fine routine of engagements. First the sportula; then the Forum,[73] and Apollo[74] learned in the law; and the triumphal statues, among which some unknown Egyptian or Arabarch has dared set up his titles, whose image, as though sacred, one dare not venture to defile.[75] At length, the old and wearied-out clients quit the vestibule and give up all their hopes;[76] although their expectation of a dinner has been full-long protracted: the poor wretches must buy their cabbage and fire. Meanwhile their patron-lord will devour the best that the forest and ocean can supply, and will recline in solitary state with none but himself on his couches. For out of so many fair, and broad, and such ancient dishes, they gorge whole patrimonies at a single course. In our days there will not be even a parasite! Yet who could tolerate such sordid luxury! How gross must that appetite be, which sets before itself whole boars, an animal created to feast a whole company! Yet thy punishment is hard at hand, when distended with food thou layest aside thy garments, and bearest to the bath the peacock undigested! Hence sudden death, and old age without a will. The news[77] travels to all the dinner-tables, but calls forth no grief, and thy funeral procession advances, exulted over by disgusted friends![78] There is nothing farther that future times can add to our immorality. Our posterity must have the same desires, perpetrate the same acts. Every vice has reached its climax. Then set sail! spread all your canvas! Yet here perchance you may object, whence can talent be elicited able to cope with the subject? Whence that blunt freedom of our ancestors, whose very name I dare not utter, of writing whatever was dictated by their kindling soul. What matter, whether Mucius forgive the libel, or not? But take Tigellinus for your theme, and you will shine in that tunic, in which they blaze standing,[79] who smoke with throat transfixed, and you will draw a broad furrow in the middle of the sand. "Must he then, who has given[80] aconite to his three uncles, be borne on down cushions, suspended aloft, and from thence look down on us?" Yes! when he meets you press your finger to your lip! There will be some informer standing by to whisper in his ear, That's he! Without fear for the consequences you may match[81] Æneas and the fierce Rutulian. The death of Achilles breeds ill-will in no one; or the tale of the long-sought Hylas, who followed his pitcher. But whensoever Lucilius, fired with rage, has brandished as it were his drawn sword, his hearer, whose conscience chills with the remembrance of crime, grows red. His heart sweats with the pressure of guilt concealed. Then bursts forth rage and tears! Ponder well, therefore, these things in your mind, before you sound the signal blast. The soldier when helmeted repents too late of the fight. I will try then what I may be allowed to vent on those whose ashes are covered by the Flaminian[82] or Latin road.

FOOTNOTES:

[33] Reponam, "repay in kind." A metaphor taken from the payment of debts.

[34] Codrus; a poor poet in every sense, if, as some think, he is the same as the Codrus mentioned iii., 203.

[35] Recitaverit. For the custom of Roman writers to recite their compositions in public, cf. Sat. vii., 40, 83; iii., 9. Plin., 1, Ep. xiii., "queritur se diem perdidisse." Togata is a comedy on a Roman subject; Prætexta, a tragedy on the same; Elegi, trifling love-songs.

[36] In tergo. The ancients usually wrote only on one side of the parchment: when otherwise, the works were called "Opisthographi," and said to be written "aversa charta."

[37] Venti; cf. xii., 23, where he uses "Poëtica tempestas" as a proverbial expression.

[38] Aurum; probably a hit at Valerius Flaccus, his contemporary.

[39] Julius Fronto was a munificent patron of literature, thrice consul, and once colleague of Trajan, A.D. 97. Cassiod.

[40] "Jam a grammaticis eruditi recessimus." Brit.; and so Dryden.

[41] "That to sleep soundly, he must cease to rule." Badham.

[42] Lucilius was born at Aurunca, anciently called Suessa.

[43] Spado, for the reason, vid. Sat. vi., 365.

[44] Mævia. The passion of the Roman women for fighting with wild beasts in the amphitheatre was encouraged by Domitian, but afterward restrained by an edict of Severus.

[45] "Who reap'd my manly chin's resounding field." Hodgson. Either Licinus, the freedman of Augustus, is referred to (Hor., A. P., 301), or more probably Cinnamus. Cf. Sat. x., 225. Mart., vii., Ep. 64.

[46] This is the most probable meaning, and adopted by Madan and Browne; but there are various other interpretations: e. g., "Cumbered with his purple vest." Badham. "With cloak of Tyrian dye, Changed oft a day for needless luxury." Dryden. "While he gathers now, now flings his purple open." Gifford. "O'er his back displays." Hodgson.

[47] Ferreus, "so steel'd."

[48] "Fat Matho plunged in cushions at his ease." Badham.

[49] Cf. Mart., i., v., 5, "Quâ Thymelen spectas derisoremque Latinum."

[50] Cœlum. There is probably a covert allusion here to Adrian, who gained the empire through the partiality of Plotina, in spite of the will of her dying husband Trajan.