Britain and Rome: Caesar to Claudius by P J O'Gorman;

Author:P J O'Gorman;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HISTORY / Military / Ancient
Publisher: Casemate Publishers & Book Distributors, LLC
Published: 2022-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

I shall be asked how I expect to escape the vengeance of those whom I satirise. Well, if I cannot show the names of the living, I must attack them under guise of the dead.33

According to Suetonius, it was Juvenal’s failure to ‘covertly satirize’ which saw him exiled to Egypt in his eightieth year.34 Juvenal’s coyness is expected and understandable but, nonetheless, his statement neither suggests nor proves that he was writing beyond the reign of Nero. Claudius and Nero are both mentioned by name several times and Juvenal makes relevant references to them also. It is wrong to presume that every named individual in the Satires is automatically an alias. Each time Claudius and Nero are explicitly mentioned, they are clearly not the butt of Juvenal’s joke and required no disguise. However, the satirist conspicuously avoids naming the emperor who ‘captured the Orkneys’ and the emperor who subscribed to obscure oracles inferred from the condition of a fish. Similarly, when Juvenal attacked unscrupulous governors, ‘who have made greater triumphs in time of peace than were ever made in time of war’, he employed the guise of the dead – using the name ‘Marius’.

Traditionalist assumptions have misrepresented Juvenal’s Marius to be Marius Priscus. T.H.S. Escott explains that Juvenal’s ‘mention of the condemnation of Marius’ links him to ‘an event which occurred A.D. 100’.35 Escott accepts that ‘this is really the only sign in the satire which gives us certain knowledge as to its chronology’. However, this is patently untrue. It is worth highlighting that this enlightening event, which Escott cites as ‘certain knowledge’, comes by way of the dubious discoveries of Tacitus during the Renaissance. Nevertheless, Juvenal’s ‘Marius’ appears twice in his Satires – in Satire I and VIII, and was specifically singled out because he represented ‘governors…who have made greater triumphs in time of peace than were ever made in time of war’.36 Juvenal asks his audience ‘not [to] despise Spain, Gaul, Illyricum, and Africa’ because ‘Marius has robbed all these’.37 He is patently referring to Gaius Marius, famous for his Marian reforms circa 107 BC, who notoriously plundered all of the aforementioned regions. Gaius Marius stands alone as one who enjoyed seven consulships, as well as multiple governorships, and remains as remarkable and recognizable today as he evidently was to Juvenal’s audience.

The creation of Tacitus, and especially his Agricola, have continued to fool traditionalists into assigning Juvenal’s work to ‘the end of Domitian’s reign or at the beginning of that of Nerva or of Trajan’.38 This short-sighted assertion relies on Juvenal’s reference to the Orkneys in his second satire, which the creator of Tacitus cynically lifted into a bogus biography of his protagonist’s fictitious father-in-law. However, both Juvenal and the Brittonic source predate the farcical find of ‘Tacitus’ in the fifteenth century. Moreover, both assign Rome’s subjugation of the Orkneys to Claudius’ reign and confirm it as valid satirical fodder for Juvenal. He rightfully ridicules Claudius’ advance ‘beyond the Irish coast’ but categorically avoids naming Claudius, presumably because of his stated fear of ‘vengeance’.

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