The Satires of Juvenal, Persius, Sulpicia, and Lucilius
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