Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 13.djvu/838

804 JUVENAL JUVENAL (DECIMUS Juxius JUVENALIS) has been more read and admired in modern times than any other Latin poet, with the exception of Virgil, Horace, and perhaps Ovid. The attraction which he has had, not for scholars only, but for men of letters and men of the world, is probably due less to any intrinsic superiority of genius,- for in genius he is not the equal of Lucretius or Catullus, but to a quality of his writing to which one of the most recent and best of his English editors has drawn attention. "In depicting character," says Mr Lewis, 1 "in drawing scenes, even in turns of expression, he is, of all ancient authors, the most distinctly modern." But besides this attraction, which is due to the fact that he wrote at a time when the interest in social life and manners had superseded that formerly felt in the commonwealth, he has his own peculiar value to students of antiquity. He closes the roll of the great writers of Rome, and is the last vital represen tative of her national spirit and genius. It is mainly from his representation that the picture of the social life of the imperial city during the first century of our era lives in the imagination of the world: He is the most effective satirist of Rome, not because he was the greatest writer who made satire his theme, but because the age in which he lived supplied the largest material for purely satiric representa tion, and because his eye was fixed on the more sombre aspects of his time to the exclusion of those happier or more genial aspects which are reflected in the pages of Statius, Martial, and Pliny. The first impression produced by the satire of Juvenal is more powerful than that produced by the satire of Horace, as the impression produced by the tragical and sensational incidents of life is greater than that produced by its ordinary course and its lighter humours. The final verdict as to their relative excellence need not be in accordance with the first impres sion, but will be determined by the abiding sense of truth and conformity with real life which each representation leaves upon us. But Juvenal does stand prominently out, not in ancient literature only, but in the literature of the world, as the typical example of a social satirist, writing with a serious purpose. The burning indignation to which he attributes the inspiration of his verse, and its not unfrequent accompaniment, the "censure of a sardonic laugh," are his distinguishing notes. Nor is it only in respect of subject-matter and the spirit in which that is treated, but also in respect of literary form and style, that poetical satire finds its typical representa tive in Juvenal. The systematic treatment of some special topic, the sustained rhetorical pitch, so unlike the natural conversational manner of Horace, at which the treatment is maintained, the strongly-drawn scenes and portraits illustrative of the theme, the effort to make every line effective by point and emphasis, which distinguish some of the great products of modern poetical satire, have their prototype in Juvenal. The frank communicativeness, the impulse to establish a confidential relation with the reader, which made the writings of Lucilius appear to a later generation like a " picture of his life " drawn by his own hand, and which gives to the satires of Horace all the charm of an autobiography, has altogether disappeared from the satire of Juvenal, and given place to an attitude almost as impersonal as that assumed in the letters of Junius. And this is the attitude which modern poetical satire for the most part maintains. It commands respect by the boldness and incisiveness of its assaults on classes and individuals, or it gains popularity by gratifying the natural love of detraction, but it leaves to the prose essayist and the novelist the humaner part of acting on the reader through his sympathies. 1 D. Junii Juvenalis Satire, with a literal English prose transla tion and notes, by John Delaware Lewis, M.A. This absence from the writings of Juvenal of that personal element which played so large a part in the satires of Lucilius and Horace forces us to depend almost entirely on external evidence for our knowledge of his life. And our available external evidence is unfortunately very meagre and untrustworthy. After reviewing it all and reading it as far as possible by light derived from his own writings, we shall have to acknowledge that we know very little with certainty of his career, that the impression we form of his character and associations is indistinct and perhaps fallaci ous, and that even the indications which seem to fix the date of the composition of various satires may be misleading. Still, in order to read his writings with full profit and pleasure, we must try to bring ourselves in thought as near to the writer as our knowledge admits of. The ideal presentation of human life and character in an epic poem or drama bears its own evidence of its truth. It either conforms to, or fails to conform to, what the imagination conceives of the capabilities of human nature. In read ing the realistic representation of an exceptional phase of society, we wish to know whether the painter of it was, from his position, likely to have seen and understood it, whether his object was to describe it as he saw it, and whether he was a man capable of judging it reasonably and candidly. A brief account of Juvenal s life, varying considerably in some of its details, is prefixed to the different MSS. of his works. But the original on which these various versions of the life are founded cannot be traced to Suetonius or to any competent authority, and some of the statements contained in it are intrinsically improbable. According to the form prefixed to the most valuable of the MSS., " Juvenal was the son or ward of a wealthy freedman ; he practised declamation till middle age, not as a professional teacher, but as an amateur, and made his first essay in satire by writing the lines on Paris, the actor and favourite of Domitian, now found in the seventh satire (line 90 .sq.) : Quod non dant procercs, dabit his trio, 1 &c. Encouraged by their success, he devoted himself diligently to this kind of composition, but refrained for a long time from either publicly reciting or publishing his verses. When at last he did come before the public, his recita tions were attended by great crowds and received with the utmost favour. But the lines originally written on Paris, having been inserted in one of his new satires, excited the jealous anger of an actor of the time, who was a favourite of the emperor, and procured the poet s banishment under the form of a military appointment to the extremity of Egypt. Being then eighty years of age, he died shortly afterwards of grief and vexation." In one account the time of his banishment is said to have been the last years of Domitian ; in another he is said to have been appointed to a command against the Scots by Trajan, in another to have died in exile in the reign of Antoninus Pius, and in another to have died of a broken heart on his return to Rome, because he found his friend Martial was no longer there. One account even makes Claudius the author of his banishment. In several Aquinum is mentioned as his birthplace, and in one he is said to have been born in the time of Claudius. Some of these statements are so much in consonance with the indirect evidenc e afforded by the satires that they might almost be supposed to be a series of conjectures based upon them. The rare passages in which the poet speaks of his own position, as in satires xi. and xii., indicate that he was in comfortable but moderate circumstances. We should infer also that he was not dependent on any professional occupation, and that he was separated in social station, and probably too by tastes and manners, from the higher class to which Tacitus and Pliny belonged, as ho