Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 13.djvu/839

JUVENAL 805 was by character from the new men who rose to wealth by servility under the empire. Juvenal is no organ of the pride and dignity, still less of the urbanity, of the cultivated representatives of the great families of the republic. He is the champion of the more sober virtues and ideas, and perhaps the organ of the rancours and detraction, of an educated but depressed and embittered middle class. The literary representative of such a class might well be found in the heir of a well-to-do freedman, born and bred in a provincial town, too independent both in position and character to become permanently a hanger-on of the great, and perhaps too ungracious in manner and uncompromising in speech to mix easily with the class which inherited the aristocratic and courtly traditions of Roman literature. The statement that he was a trained and practised declaimer is confirmed both by his own words (i. 16) and by the rhetorical mould in which his thoughts and illustrations are cast. The allusions which fix the dates when his satires first appeared, and the large experience of life which they imply, agree with the statement that he did not come before the world as a professed satirist till after middle age. The statement that he continued to write satires long before he gave them to the world accords well with the nature of their contents and the elaborate character of their composition. They are not the expression of some passing impulse, but seem to sum up the experience of a lifetime. They hive indeed the freshness of immediate impressions, but they are so combined as to show that they have been long brooded over before assuming their final form. And- that he was known as a, writer of satires for years before the publication of any of them in their present form might almost be inferred from the emphatic but yet guarded statement of Quintilian in his short summary of Roman literature. After speaking of the merits of Lucilius, Horace, and Persius as satirists, he adds, " There are, too, in our own day, distinguished writers of satire whose names will be heard of hereafter" (fust. Or., x. 1, 94). There is no Roman writer of satire who could be mentioned along with those others by so judicious a critic, and whose names have been heard of in after times, except Juvenal. The motive which a writer of satire must have had for secrecy under Domitian is sufficiently obvious ; and the necessity of concealment and self-suppression thus imposed upon the writer may have permanently affected his whole manner of composition. So far the various authors of these lives have followed a probable and consistent tradition. But when we come to the story of the poet s exile, they are at variance both with probability and with one another. Some apparent confirmation is given to the tradition by the lines of a poet of the 5th century, Sidonius Apollinaris : " Nee qui consimili deinde casu Ad vulgi tenuern strepcutis auram Irati fuit histrionis exul." There is no reason to doubt that these lines refer to Juvenal, but they only prove that the original story from which all the varying lives are derived was generally believed before the middle of the 5th century of our era. If Juvenal was banished at the age of eighty, the author of his banishment could not have been the " enraged actor " in reference to whom the original lines were written, as Paris was put to death in 83, and Juvenal was certainly writing satires long after 100 A.D. The satire in which the lines now appear was probably first published soon after the accession of Hadrian, when Juvenal was not an octogenarian but in the maturity of his powers. The cause of the poet s banishment at that advanced age could not therefore have been either the original composition or the first publication of the lines. But it has been conjectured that the anger of another actor, a favourite of the emperor, may have been excited by a later application of them on some public occasion, and that the poet was punished for this unfortu nate revival of lines which had never been intended for the person who resented them. Against this conjecture, based on a number of confused, uncertain, and contradictory traditions, we have to weigh the intrinsic improbability of the story. An expression in sat. xv. 45 is quoted as a proof that Juvenal had visited Egypt. He may have done so as an exile or in a military command ; but it seems hardly consistent with the importance which the emperors attached to the security of Egypt, or with the concern which they took in the interests of the army, that these conditions were combined at an age so unfit for military employment. If any conjecture is warrantable on so obscure a subject, it is more likely that tKis temporary disgrace may have been inflicted on the poet by Domitian. Among the many victims of Juvenal s satire it is only against him and against one of the vilest instruments of his court, the Egyptian Crispinus, that the poet seems to ,be animated by personal hatred. 1 A sense of wrong suf fered at their hands may perhaps have mingled with the detestation which he felt towards them on public grounds. But if he was banished under Domitian, it must have been either before or after the year 93 A.D., at which time, as we learn from an epigram of Martial, Juvenal was in Rome. The whole story may be ranked with the tradition of the love potion which is said to have maddened Lucretius, as one resting on such slight evidence as to admit neither of confirmation nor refutation. More ancient and apparently more authentic evidence of the position filled by Juvenal during some period of his life has been recovered in recent times, in the form of an inscription found at Aquinum, recording, so far as it can be deciphered, the dedication of an altar to Ceres, by Junius Juvenalis, tribune of the first cohort of Dalmatians, "duumvir quinquennalis," and "flamen Divi Vespasiani." The terms of this inscription, when read along with one of the few passages in the satires iu which Juvenal distinctly speaks of himself (iii. 318 sq.) " Et quotiens te Koma tuo refici properantem reddet Aquino, Me quoque ad Helvinam Cererem vestramque Dianam Converte a Cuinis: satirarum ego, m pudet illas, Auditor gelidos veniani caligatus in ngros leaves little doubt that the author of the inscription was either the poet himself or some member of his family, of whose existence we have no other indication. If then, as is most probable, Juvenal is himself the author of it, we learn that he did hold, at one period of his life, a post of military rank, one of municipal importance in his native town, and a priesthood of the deified Vespasian. But to what period of his life does this tablet bear evidence 1 ? The fact that he filled the position of " duumvir quinquen nalis " shows that he was a man of influential position in the munidpium, but the office was only held for a year, the year apparently in which the census was taken at Rome, and its tenure does not imply any prolonged absence from the metropolis. The satires, though they indicate an occasional preference for the simpler life of the country towns, are the product not of leisure in the pro vinces but of immediate and intimate familiarity with the life of the great city ; and an epigram of Martial, written at the time when Juvenal was most vigorously employed in their composition, speaks of him as settled in Rome. It is possible, but not likely, that he may have retired to his native town in the latter years of his life, and that the last book of his satires (xiiL-xvi.), which contains no im- 1 For the possible connexion of Crispinus with Juvenal s banish ment compare Mayor, vol. ii. p. 421.