iv

PREFACE TO AMERICAN EDITION.

mon use. The Life of Juvenal is from Macleane ; and the arguments are based on his, but they have been entirely rewritten. I may add that I have procured from the English publishers their full consent to the publication of the work which is now submitted to American teachers and students.

S. H.

TRINITY COLLEGE, July, 1873.

LIFE OF JUVENAL.

THE character of Horace's mind was such, that his own experience and the events of his life come naturally into his writings, and a tolerably full and accurate biography of that poet has been gathered from his own pen. His poems form a gallery of contemporary portraits, including his own picture in every stage of life. It is not so with Juvenal. He had to deal with vice and folly more than a century older than the vice and folly of Horace's day, and a tyranny which Horace never witnessed. The playful personalities of Horace did not suit Juvenal's subject, and would not have represented his way of viewing it; nor did they suit the severe and defiant spirit in which he approached it. The consequence is that the traces of Juvenal's life in his Satires are very slight.

Adopting such data as appear to have any probability in them, the following may be laid down as a sketch of Juvenal's life, without pretending to accuracy, for which there are no materials.

His name was DECIUS JUNIUS JUVENALIS. He was born possibly at Aquinum, in Latium, about the beginning of Nero's reign, that is soon after A.D. 54, of respectable parents, his father being a rich libertinus, and he himself therefore ingenuus. He received the usual education of a Roman boy and youth. He took the 'toga virilis' about the beginning of Vespasian's reign, A.D. 70; and, having learnt rhetoric in the schools, he continued to practise it as a man, not professionally, but for his own amusement, through the reign of Vespasian and the greater part of Domitian's, that is till the year A.D. 94, in which year, or the next, he by some means offended Domitian, and was sent by him into Egypt with a military command, such as civilians often received during the Empire. In A.D. 96, Domitian was killed and Nerva succeeded him. Then, or soon afterwards, Juvenal was allowed to give up his command and return to Rome, being at the time of his return about forty years of age. An epigram of Martial proves that he was not altogether independent or comfortable about this time. Nerva reigned less than two years, and Trajan succeeded to the empire A.D. 98; and in the early part of his reign, soon after A.D. 100, Juvenal first published a volume of Satires (of which the first in our collection was one), having already recited them to large audiences. It is not unlikely that some of these, or parts of them, had been composed in the reign of Domitian, or even earlier, but that the poet had not ventured to make them public. He continued to write freely during Trajan's reign, which ended A.D. 117, when Juvenal was about sixty, and during the early years of Hadrian's reign, that is till about A.D. 120. During this reign he may have lived in comfort through the liberality of the emperor, though his household was on a frugal scale, as he tells us in Satire xi., from which we learn that he had property at Tibur. It is not impossible that he may have lived till the accession of Antoninus Pius, who succeeded

Hadrian A.D. 138, when Juvenal was, according to this sketch, eighty or a little more.

Thus the statements of the Grammarians in respect to the poet's age, and of that writer who says he died of old age in the time of Antoninus Pius, would be borne out. I have also allowed the fact of an honorable banishment into Egypt, though not the cause assigned by the Grammarians (the supposed attack on the pantomime Paris), which is impossible. That Juvenal did not professedly compose satire till late in life, is admitted and accounted for. Likewise that he may have written verses before he ventured to publish them, and that some of these were afterwards incorporated with his Satires, is allowed. It is also admitted that he attended the usual schools in early life, and practised rhetoric till middle age. Beyond these facts the Grammarians, I believe, have been misled.

Independently of the chronological difficulties in respect to Paris, it does not appear that the verses quoted by the Grammarians (vii. 90-92) were ever intended as a satire on him, but if any thing as a compliment. So at least they appear in the connection in which we have them. And it is perfectly clear that in that connection they could not have given offence to the emperor, whoever he was, since the Satire sets out from the first with such praise as the worst of these princes coveted and rewarded, praise for his exclusive support of learning. If therefore it had been possible to admit these verses as the cause of Domitian's displeasure, it must have been when they appeared separately as an epigram, or with a different context from the present, which it must be admitted they do not very well suit, if, as seems certain, the rest of the Satire was written long after Paris's death.

Of Juvenal's personal character it is not very easy to form an estimate from his writings. That his invectives against the vices of his time are not the mere artistic and declamatory compositions which some writers suppose them to be, but the fruits of an honest indignation, of rare powers of sarcasm, and of a large knowledge of the world, I think is manifest. His language is unreserved in dealing with the foulest vices, but there is no appearance of his being himself a loose liver in any part of his writings. When Horace is coarse, he betrays something of sympathy with vice, while Juvenal shows only contempt for it. Although therefore an expurgated edition of Juvenal would have more gaps than an expurgated edition of Horace, a well-regulated mind would be less offended with the entire text of Juvenal than with that of Horace. Juvenal's morality was of a higher and less technical sort than Horace's, and has led some into the notion that he drew it from the purest source, and was in understanding, if not by profession, a Christian. This of course is absurd. He knew human nature, and he knew right from wrong, and was not blinded by self-indulgence, and so was able to state the law of conscience in a way to astonish some Christians to whom that law is very imperfectly known.

Apart from his morality, Juvenal was a great master of words, and had a large fund of illustration. His pictures drawn from real life, as I have observed in the course of the notes, are particularly happy; whether they represent the common room of a tavern, or the deck of a ship, or the inside of a soldier's hut or of a camp, or a school-room, or the greedy crowd at the sportula, or the streets of Rome, or a drunken brawl, these and a hundred other scenes are so drawn that an artist would have no difficulty