The Satires of Juvenal, Persius, Sulpicia, and Lucilius. Sulpicia

and incessantly recalled the memory of the glorious æra of independence to those degenerate Romans, who had substituted suicide in the place of their ancient courage; and from the days of Augustus to those of Domitian, only avenged their slavery by an epigram or a bonmot.

      "The characteristics of Juvenal were energy, passion, and indignation: it is, nevertheless, easy to discover that he is sometimes more afflicted than exasperated. His great aim was to alarm the vicious, and, if possible, to exterminate vice, which had, as it were, acquired a legal establishment. A noble enterprise! but he wrote in a detestable age, when the laws of nature were publicly violated, and the love of their country so completely eradicated from the breasts of his fellow-citizens, that, brutified as they were by slavery and voluptuousness, by luxury and avarice, they merited rather the severity of the executioner than the censor.

      "Meanwhile the empire, shaken to its foundations, was rapidly crumbling to dust. Despotism was consecrated by the senate; liberty, of which a few slaves were still sensible, was nothing but an unmeaning word for the rest, which, unmeaning as it was, they did not dare to pronounce in public. Men of rank were declared enemies to the state for having praised their equals; historians were condemned to the cross, philosophy was proscribed, and its professors banished. Individuals felt only for their own danger, which they too often averted by accusing others; and there were instances of children who denounced their own parents, and appeared as witnesses against them! It was not possible to weep for the proscribed, for tears themselves became the object of proscription; and when the tyrant of the day had condemned the accused to banishment or death, the senate decreed that he should be thanked for it, as for an act of singular favor.

      "Juvenal, who looked upon the alliance of the agreeable with the odious as utterly incompatible, contemned the feeble weapon of ridicule, so familiar to his predecessor: he therefore seized the sword of Satire, or, to speak more properly, fabricated one for himself, and rushing from the palace to the tavern, and from the gates of Rome to the boundaries of the empire, struck, without distinction, whoever deviated from the course of nature, or from the paths of honor. It is no longer a poet like Horace, fickle, pliant, and fortified with that indifference so falsely called philosophical, who amused himself with bantering vice, or, at most, with upbraiding a few errors of little consequence, in a style, which, scarcely raised above the language of conversation, flowed as indolence and pleasure directed; but a stern and incorruptible censor, an inflamed and impetuous poet, who sometimes rises with his subject to the noblest heights of tragedy."

      From this declamatory applause, which even La Harpe allows to be worthy of the translator of Juvenal, the most rigid censor of our author can not detract much; nor can much perhaps be added to it by his warmest admirer. I could, indeed, have wished that he had not exalted him at the expense of Horace; but something must be allowed for the partiality of long acquaintance; and Casaubon, when he preferred Persius, with whom he had taken great, and indeed successful pains, to Horace and Juvenal, sufficiently exposed, while he tacitly accounted for, the prejudices of commentators and translators. With respect to Horace, if he falls beneath Juvenal (and who does not?) in eloquence, in energy, and in a vivid and glowing imagination, he evidently surpasses him in taste and critical judgment. I could pursue the parallel through a thousand ramifications, but the reader who does me the honor to peruse the following sheets, will see that I have incidentally touched upon some of them in the notes: and, indeed, I preferred scattering my observations through the work, as they arose from the subject, to bringing them together in this place; where they must evidently have lost something of their pertinency, without much certainty of gaining in their effect.

      Juvenal is accused of being too sparing of praise. But are his critics well assured that praise from Juvenal could be accepted with safety? I do not know that a private station was "the post of honor" in those days; it was, however, that of security. Martial, Statius, V. Flaccus, and other parasites of Domitian, might indeed venture to celebrate their friends, who were also those of the emperor. Juvenal's, it is probable, were of another kind; and he might have been influenced no less by humanity than prudence, in the sacred silence which he has observed respecting them. Let it not be forgotten, however, that this intrepid champion of virtue, who, under the twelfth despot, persisted, as Dusaulx observes, in recognizing no sovereign but the senate, while he passes by those whose safety his applause might endanger, has generously celebrated the ancient assertors of liberty, in strains that Tyrtæus might have wished his own.

He is also charged with being too rhetorical in his language. The critics have discovered that he practiced at the bar, and they will therefore have it that his Satires smack of his pro[Pg xxviii]fession, "redolent declamatorem."[26] That he is luxuriant, or, if it must be so, redundant, may be safely granted; but I doubt whether the passages which are cited for proofs of this fault, were not reckoned among his beauties by his contemporaries. The enumeration of deities in the thirteenth Satire is well defended by Rigaltius, who admits, at the same time, that if the author had inserted it any where but in a Satire, he should have accounted him a babbler; "faterer Juv. hic περιλαλον fuisse et verborum prodigum." He appears to me equally successful, in justifying the list of oaths in the same Satire, which Creech, it appears, had not the courage to translate.

      The other passages adduced in support of this charge, are either metaphorical exaggerations, or long traits of indirect Satire, of which Juvenal was as great a master as Horace. I do not say that these are interesting to us; but they were eminently so to those for whom they were written; and by their pertinency at the time, should they, by every rule of fair criticism, be estimated. The version of such passages is one of the miseries of translation.

      I have also heard it objected to Juvenal, that there is in many of his Satires a want of arrangement; this is particularly observed of the sixth and tenth. I scarcely know what to reply to this. Those who are inclined to object, would not be better satisfied, perhaps, if the form of both were changed; for I suspect that there is no natural gradation in the innumerable passions which agitate the human breast. Some must precede, and others follow; but the order of march is not, nor ever was, invariable. While I acquit him of this, however, I readily acknowledge a want of care in many places, unless it be rather attributable to a want of taste. On some occasions, too, when he changed or enlarged his first sketch, he forgot to strike out the unnecessary verses: to this are owing the repetitions to be found in his longer works, as well as the transpositions, which have so often perplexed the critics and translators.

      Now I am upon this subject, I must not pass over a slovenliness in some of his lines, for which he has been justly reproached by Jortin and others, as it would have cost him no great pains to improve them. Why he should voluntarily debase his poetry, it is difficult to say: if he thought that he was imitating Horace in his laxity, his judgment must suffer considerably. The verses of Horace are indeed akin to prose; but as he seldom rises, he has the art of making his low flights, in which all his motions are easy and graceful, appear the effect of choice. Juvenal was qualified to "sit where he dared not soar." His element was that of the eagle, "descent and fall to him were adverse," and, indeed, he never appears more awkward than when he flutters, or rather waddles, along the ground.

      I have observed in the course of the translation, that he embraced no sect with warmth. In a man of such lively passions, the retention with which he speaks of them all, is to be admired. From his attachment to the writings of Seneca, I should incline to think that he leaned toward Stoicism; his predilection for the school, however, was not very strong: perhaps it is to be wished that he had entered a little more deeply into it, as he seems not to have those distinct ideas of the nature of virtue and vice, which were entertained by many of the ancient philosophers, and indeed, by his immediate predecessor, Persius. As a general champion for virtue, he is commonly successful, but he sometimes misses his aim; and, in more than one instance, confounds the nature of the several vices in his mode of attacking them: he confounds too the very essence of virtue, which, in his hands, has often "no local habitation and name," but varies with the ever-varying passions and caprices of mankind. I know not whether it be worth while to add, that he is accused of holding a different language at different times respecting the gods, since in this he differs little from the Greek and Roman poets in general; who, as often as they introduce their divinities, state, as Juvenal does, the mythological circumstances coupled with their names,