Latin Verse Satire by Miller Paul Allen

Author:Miller, Paul Allen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-134-37194-5
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

JUVENAL

1

How can anyone not write satire today? Juvenal in his opening programmatic satire explains why, unlike Lucilius (line 165) he will only attack the dead (lines 170–1). The burden of the poem is that vice has so overrun Rome that Juvenal can no longer remain silent. Each vice is lovingly sketched in its own individual vignette. One scene’s relation to the next is sometimes tangential, but the power of the individual images and their accompanying sententiae obscures the relative lack of narrative and argumentative development [10–13, 39, 75]. The effect is cumulative. “Every new figure he sees rouses him to fresh fury, for every new figure typifies a different kind of outrage on moral feeling” (Highet 1961: 50).

The basic thesis is that the traditional Roman virtues of fides and virtus cannot exist in a city such as that described in the first catalog of vices (lines 22–80) (Anderson 1982: 197–254). The root of this moral rot is two-fold [75]. In the first instance, it is the result of an influx of foreigners, mostly but not exclusively from the Greek east. Rome is no longer Roman in either values or bloodline. This is a theme that will be dealt with at some length in Satire 3. Yet, lest we oversimplify, as the opening of Satire 6 makes clear, the Romans themselves were never all that Roman. Or at least the good old days were not quite as good as they sometimes seem. So here in poem 1, we see Pyrrha portrayed as a procuress before the waters of the flood that was supposed to have wiped out human iniquity were even dry (line 84).

The second cause of moral decline is related to the first: social mobility. As Rome has become a more and more cosmopolitan city, the specter of the wealthy foreign freedman came to haunt the imagination of the city’s disenfranchised. One need only think of Trimalchio’s feast in the Satyricon to conjure the libertinus bogeyman in all his seeming vulgarity. Native Romans were in competition with freedmen and foreigners for the generosity of the wealthy. At the same time, in the absence of republican political institutions, the wealthy had less and less need of the services of the poorer classes either as voters in elections or to demonstrate their potential political power (lines 127–46). The material basis for relations between patron and client, which traditionally had bound the upper orders to their less fortunate confreres, had begun to erode with the establishment of imperial government. The result, as Juvenal depicts it, is a commodification of traditional power relations: clientes were seen less as amici and more as expenses (lines 97–101).

The fact is that the traditional class structure of an inherited senatorial élite, supported by wealthy equestrian gentry, had come under greater and greater strain during the first two centuries of imperial rule. Social mobility represented the antithesis of this old order (see Horace 1.4), and the wealthy foreign interloper crystallized the worst fears of the aristocracy and those who depended on it.

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