The Satires of Juvenal, Persius, Sulpicia, and Lucilius
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