to the early period of his life under Domitian. The intensity of his feeling against that Emperor would be easily explained, if Domitian really ordered him away from Rome and quartered him in a country which above all others must have been uncongenial to a townsman.

This hypothesis involves the apparent difficulty that Juvenal did something to displease Domitian, and yet did not publish the Satires which attack the Emperor till after his death. The difficulty is not a great one. The traditional life, which is all we have to go upon, except the tablet of Aquinum, represents Juvenal as practising declamation for a long time, and he may have given offence by the topics treated in his declamations. The remark ascribed to Trajan, that Juvenal owed his promotion to Philomela, shows that the poet was at one time favourably noticed at the court for his literary work-not necessarily a poem called Philomela-and there is no difficulty in assuming that the favour was afterwards forfeited by an indiscretion. The evidence that the seventh Satire in its present form was addressed to Hadrian and not to Domitian seems too strong to be lightly disregarded, not only because it is inconsistent with Juvenal's general estimate of Domitian, but because Quintilian, who took pupils for twenty years, can hardly have acquired the great wealth which Juvenal commemorates as early as the year 83 A.D., when Paris was put to death. At the same time it must be borne in mind that Juvenal's Satires bear the marks in many instances of having been composed piecemeal. Often the composition is not homogeneous, as for instance in the second Satire, where an invective against the appearance of a patrician in the amphitheatre is tacked on to a diatribe against unnatural vice. Sometimes a favourite line is repeated or imitated. More often the changes are rung upon a single simile till the effect is weakened instead of being intensified. It seems probable that Juvenal was at first essentially a reader in the Roman salons, and that he purposely constructed his poems so as to be able to omit a passage when it would be dangerous, and allowed himself a choice of illustrations which he could vary at pleasure. Later on, when the Satires were transcribed, either the poet could not bring himself to strike out the redundant lines, or the copyist collating various editions put all that he

There remains Ribbeck's theory that the more general and impersonal of Juvenal's Satires, the tenth, twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth, with perhaps the sixteenth, and with parts of the fourth and eleventh, were not Juvenal's, but were the work of an imitator. Concerning this it may be said that, while it would strike out two of the weakest, the fifteenth and sixteenth, it would also take away from Juvenal the tenth and thirteenth Satires, which are among his most finished and best. There is nothing in Roman literature of the poet's time, in Persius and Martial, in Lucan or Statius, that approaches the level of these for vigour or poetic feeling. Therefore, as Mr. Lewis has pointed out, we have the difficulty of being compelled to find a place for a poet who was only second to Juvenal, yet who was content to let his best work pass under Juvenal's name, and whom his contemporaries never detected in his forgeries. Let it be granted that it was easy for a forger to imitate Juvenal's style and to dovetail expressions that had been carefully parodied into a didactic poem. Was it equally easy to affect Juvenal's whole tone of thought, so that there should not appear the least incongruity between the teaching of the true and of the false Satires? Mr. Lewis's suggestion that the declamatory Satires were the work of Juvenal's youth, and were 'touched up and added to and published along with his Satires when he had become famous through the latter,' is of very different critical value, though it can only be treated, in the present state of our knowledge, as mere conjecture. Certainly a man trained to declamation might naturally break ground on themes of such a general kind as were treated in the schools. On the other hand, Satire xiii seems to be referable to a really late date, and it is perhaps natural to suppose that Juvenal, as he advanced in years and lived at a distance from Rome, was less and less personal in his treatment of society, more and more wary how he offended great men. The offence given to Hadrian at the close of his life may have been for a very fanciful cause. The crime for which Apollodorus was put to death was nothing worse than a criticism on some shrines for sitting goddesses, which he said had been built so low that if the goddesses rose they would carry off the roofs. Lastly, when we remember that Romans who suffered from chest complaints went to Egypt for the sake of the climate, it will appear possible that Juvenal also went

there of his own accord, and that the visit to a sanitarium was confounded by tradition with his disgrace under Domitian.

In a tabular form Juvenal's life may be thus arranged conjecturally :

Decimus Junius Juvenalis born A.D. between 48 and 55 at Aquinum.

Between the age of 20 and 25 studies declamation; Vespasian being Emperor 70-79.

Is duumvir quinquennalis and flamen Vespasiani under Titus and Domitian.

Is sent on military service to Britain, where he perhaps serves under Agricola, who was recalled in A.D. 86.

Satirises Crispinus in Satire iv.

Domitian (81-96) being still alive, Juvenal is alluded to by Martial as 'facundus,' and in lines which imply that they were intimate and that a slanderer had tried to separate them.

Publishes Satires iii and iv, under Nerva, A. D. 96–98.

Is alluded to by Martial as paying visits to great men's houses, apparently as a courtier1.

Publishes Satires i and viii, in the early part of Trajan's reign, about 101.

Aet. 70-72 or 78-80, writes Satires xi, xiii, and xv, under Hadrian. In xi speaks of himself as an old man living in the country: in xiii fixes the date at near 119 or 127; in xv is evidently in Egypt, to which by tradition he has been banished.

Juvenal's special place in literature is due very much to the fact that he belongs to the limited class of satírists proper. We are not diverted from the consideration of his artistic workmanship by needing to follow a narrative. Neither is his satire the mere relief to an argument or a declamation, as is habitually the case with Cicero or Burke. Every line of the Roman poet is instinct with moral purpose, and beauty of form, though aimed at and attained in a singular degree, is throughout secondary to this. Dean Milman has spoken of Horace's Satires as 'the highest order of the poetry of society,' able to bear 'the same definition as the best conversation-good sense and wit in equal proportions.' No one would speak of Juvenal's Satires as the the poetry of society. Whatever their success in Roman salons

1 See p. 41.

may have been, it must have been due to the fact that their terrible directness of purpose and austere morality were congenial to the revival of faith and earnestness for which the period between Domitian and Marcus Aurelius is memorable. Bitter as Juvenal's epigrammatic touches are, we feel throughout that he wishes to gibbet the sin rather than the man. Even where he pauses to trifle with his subject, his sport is never the dalliance of a man of the world, impressed with the humorous side of a baseness or crime. It is the grim earnest of the teacher, determined that what is trivial and grotesque shall be lashed, before a heavier scourge descends upon what is wicked.

Why Juvenal should have chosen verse as the appropriate vehicle of his thoughts may seem at first a little difficult to explain. M. Nisard has expressed an opinion that Juvenal's real position in literature is that of a declaimer; and that his style represents a constant struggle between the energetic conciseness natural to himself and the diffuseness taught in the schools of rhetoric. We have seen from the scanty records of Juvenal's life that he declaimed in the schools till he was nearly of middle age; and no one can doubt that his style everywhere recalls the orator. The lavish use of illustration, the frequent introduction of dialogue, the fervid straightforwardness of words, are all congenial to the best practice of the orator. Nevertheless the very terms of M. Nisard's criticism suggest a doubt as to its thoroughness. We have in Juvenal a consummate master of style, who has been trained for twenty years as a rhetorician, and who wields a language that was at least as perfect for prose as for verse. All at once this man deliberately chooses verse as the vehicle of his thoughts, and creates unmistakeable masterpieces, transcending his own rude models, Lucilius, Varro, ay, and even Horace, and influencing modern literature in its best period. Can anyone seriously think that Juvenal would have left his mark in this way, if he had written prose declamations? Would he have achieved higher success than Seneca or Boethius? Is it not the case that, like every great satirist, he is even further removed from the orator than from the poet, and has no affinities whatever with the declaimer of schools?

Quintilian has told us, in an instructive passage, that there is

practically no difference between forensic oratory and declamation. The object of each is to prove a case. (Institutes, lib. xi. cap. 10). The object of the satirist is to deal with indisputable principles, to recall or enforce truths that lie outside demonstration or doubt, and to impress not the intellect but the moral sense. A declamation on the excellence of chastity, on the advantage of scorning wealth or of living up to the obligations of a noble ancestry, would have been received with frigid acquiescence in any respectable salon of Rome. Juvenal's first object, as has been said, was to gibbet the vice; but to spare the person and expose the vice has always been a cheap exercise of virtue. The satire, however carefully constructed, was pregnant with banishment or death, and the man who dealt in work of this kind carried his life in his hands. The satirist is not properly a poet, for the poet is concerned with absolute beauty, the satirist with the awful contrasts of beauty and foulness, order and disorder. Juvenal, though he has the poetic fire, and here and there the artist's touch, stops short of being a poet, because he cares more for right and wrong than for art. Nevertheless the satirist has this in common with the poet, that his work is best done when it is achieved with the fewest possible strokes. The thought that goes to the heart, the remembrance that stirs conscience, the brief word that rings in the ear, these are the appropriate weapons of the satirist. The rhetorician, on the other hand, has to expand a theme, and no beauty of imagery, no play of feeling, no wealth of happy description, can turn a sermon into a poem. Whenever thought ceases to be suggestive and becomes dialectical, poetry and satire fade away. In either it is an acknowledgement of weakness to analyse. The sense of beauty cannot be tested with tube and crucible. The inspiration of the Hebrew prophet must flow forth unchecked like a message from God. It is the strength of moral passion, at once reticent and intense, saying little because it feels much, that imposes conciseness upon the satirist, that drew Juvenal away from the declaimer's tribune.

This theory of course implies that Juvenal was penetrated with the thoughts his verses express. M. Nisard, who wishes to change his place in literature, has felt accordingly that it is first necessary to prove that he was a sceptic and of not more than average morality. 'One seems to feel that this man is indifferent,