Nor is it only in respect of subject-matter and the spirit in which that is treated, but also in respect of literary form and style, that poetical satire finds its typical representative in Juvenal. The systematic treatment of some special topic, the sustained rhetorical pitch, so unlike the natural conversational manner of Horace, at which the treatment is maintained, the strongly-drawn scenes and portraits illustrative of the theme, the effort to make every line effective by point and emphasis, which distinguish some of the great products of modern poetical satire, have their prototype in Juvenal. The frank communicativeness,—the impulse to establish a confidential relation with the reader, —which made the writings of Lucilius appear to a later generation like a “picture of his life” drawn by his own hand, and which gives to the satires of Horace all the charm of an autobiography, has altogether disappeared from the satire of Juvenal, and given place to an attitude almost as impersonal as that assumed in the letters of Junius. And this is the attitude which modern poetical satire for the most part maintains. It commands respect by the boldness and incisiveness of its assaults on classes and individuals, or it gains popularity by gratifying the natural love of detraction, but it leaves to the prose essayist and the novelist the humaner part of acting on the reader through his sympathies.

This absence from the writings of Juvenal of that personal element which played so large a part in the satires of Lucilius and Horace forces us to depend almost entirely on external evidence for our knowledge of his life. And our available external evidence is unfortunately very meagre and untrustworthy. After reviewing it all and reading it as far as possible by light derived from his own writings, we shall have to acknowledge that we know very little with certainty of his career, that the impression we form of his character and associations is indistinct and perhaps fallacious, and that even the indications which seem to fix the date of the composition of various satires may be misleading. Still, in order to read his writings with full profit and pleasure, we must try to bring ourselves in thought as near to the writer as our knowledge admits of. The ideal presentation of human life and character in an epic poem or drama bears its own evidence of its truth. It either conforms to, or fails to conform to, what the imagination conceives of the capabilities of human nature. In reading the realistic representation of an exceptional phase of society, we wish to know whether the painter of it was, from his position, likely to have seen and understood it, whether his object was to describe it as he saw it, and whether he was a man capable of judging it reasonably and candidly.

A brief account of Juvenal’s life, varying considerably in some of its details, is prefixed to the different MSS. of his works. But the original on which these various versions of the life are founded cannot be traced to Suetonius or to any competent authority, and some of the statements contained in it are intrinsically improbable. According to the form prefixed to the most valuable of the MSS., “J uvenal was the son or ward of a wealthy freedman; he practised declamation till middle age, not as a professional teacher, but as an amateur, and made his first essay in satire by writing the lines on Paris, the actor and favourite of Domitian, now found in the seventh satire (line 90 sq.)

‘ Quod non dant proceres, dabit histrio,’ &c.

Encouraged by their success, he devoted himself diligently to this kind of composition, but refrained for a long time from either publicly reciting or publishing his verses. When at last he did come before the public, his recitations were attended by great crowds and received with the utmost favour. But the lines originally written on Paris, having been inserted in one of his new satires, excited the jealous anger of an actor of the time, who was a favourite of the emperor, and procured the poet’s banishment under the form of a military appointment to the extremity of Egypt. Being then eighty years of age, he died shortly afterwards of grief and vexation.” In one account the time of his banishment is said to have been the last years of Domitian; in another he is said to have been appointed to a command against the Scots by Trajan, in another to have died in exile in the reign of Antoninus Pius, and in another to have died of a broken heart on his return to Rome, because he found his friend Martial was no longer there. One account even makes Claudius the author of his banishment. In several Aquinum is mentioned as his birthplace, and in one he is said to have been born in the time of Claudius.

Some of these statements are so much in consonance with the indirect evidence afforded by the satires that they might almost be supposed to be a series of conjectures based upon them. The rare passages in which the poet speaks of his own position, as in satires xi. and xii., indicate that he was in comfortable but moderate circumstances. We should infer also that he was not dependent on any professional occupation, and that he was separated in social station, and probably too by tastes and manners, from the higher class to which Tacitus and Pliny belonged, as ho was by character from the new men who rose to wealth by servility under the empire. Juvenal is no organ of the pride and dignity, still less of the urbanity, of the cultivated representatives of the great families of the republic. He is the champion of the more sober virtues and ideas, and perhaps the organ of the rancours and detraction, of an educated but depressed and embittered middle class. The literary representative of such a class might well be found in the heir of a well-to-do freedman, born and bred in a provincial town, too independent both in position and character to become permanently a hanger-on of the great, and perhaps too ungracious in manner and uncompromising in speech to mix easily with the class which inherited the aristocratic and courtly traditions of Roman literature. The statement that he was a trained and practised declaimer is confirmed both by his own words (i. 16) and by the rhetorical mould in which his thoughts and illustrations are cast. The allusions which fix the dates when his satires first appeared, and the large experience of life which they imply, agree with the statement that he did not come before the world as a professed satirist till after middle age.

The statement that he continued to write satires long before he gave them to the world accords well with the nature of their contents and the elaborate character of their composition. They are not the expression of some passing impulse, but seem to sum up the experience of a lifetime. They hive indeed the freshness of immediate impressions, but they are so combined as to show that they have been long brooded over before assuming their final form. And. that he was known as a writer of satires for years before the publication of any of them in their present form might almost be inferred from the emphatic but yet guarded statement of Quintilian in his short summary of Roman literature. After speaking of the merits of Lucilius, Horace, and Persius as satirists, he adds, “There are, too, in our own day, distinguished writers of satire whose names will be heard of hereafter” (Inst. Or., x. 1, 94). There is no Roman writer of satire who could be mentioned along with those others by so judicious a critic, and whose names have been heard of in after times, except Juvenal.

The motive which a writer of satire must have had for secrecy under Domitian is sufficiently obvious; and the necessity of concealment and self-suppression thus imposed upon the writer may have permanently affected his whole manner of composition.

So far the various authors of these lives have followed a probable and consistent tradition. But when we come to the story of the poet’s exile, they are at variance both with probability and with one another. Some apparent confirmation is given to the tradition by the lines of a poet of the 5th century, Sidonius Apollinaris :—

“Nec qui consimili deinde casu Ad vulgi tenuem strepentis auram Irati fuit histrionis exui.”

There is no reason to doubt that these lines refer to Juvenal, but they only prove that the original story from which all the varying lives are derived was generally believed before the middle of the 5th century of our era. If Juvenal was banished at the age of eighty, the author of his banishment could not have been the “enraged actor” in reference to whom the original lines were written, as Paris was put to death in 83, and Juvenal was certainly writing satires long after 100 a.d. The satire in which the lines now appear was probably first published soon after the accession of Hadrian, when Juvenal was not an octogenarian but in the maturity of his powers. The cause of the poet’s banishment at that advanced age could not therefore have been either the original composition or the first publication of the lines. But it has been conjectured that the anger of another actor, a favourite of the emperor, may have been excited by a later application of them on some public occasion, and that the poet was punished for this unfortunate revival of lines which had never been intended for the person who resented them. Against this conjecture, based on a number of confused, uncertain, and contradictory traditions, we have to weigh the intrinsic improbability of the story. An expression in sat. xv. 45 is quoted as a proof that Juvenal had visited Egypt. He may have done so as an exile or in a military command; but it seems hardly consistent with the importance which the emperors attached to the security of Egypt, or with the concern which they took in the interests of the army, that these conditions were combined at an age so unfit for military employment. If any conjecture is warrantable on so obscure a subject, it is more likely that this temporary disgrace may have been inflicted on the poet by Domitian. Among the many victims of Juvenal’s satire it is only against him and against one of the vilest instruments of his court, the Egyptian Crispinus, that the poet seems to ,be animated by personal hatred. A sense of wrong suffered at their hands may perhaps have mingled with the detestation which he felt towards them on public grounds. But if he was banished under Domitian, it must have been either before or after the year 93 a.d., at which time, as we learn from an epigram of Martial, Juvenal was in Rome. The whole story may be ranked with the tradition of the love potion which is said to have maddened Lucretius, as one resting on such slight evidence as to admit neither of confirmation nor refutation.

More ancient and apparently more authentic evidence of the position filled by Juvenal during some period of his life has been recovered in recent times, in the form of an inscription found at Aquinum, recording, so far as it can be deciphered, the dedication of an altar to Ceres, by J unius J uvenalis, tribune of the first cohort of Dalmatians, “duumvir quinquennalis,” and “flamen Divi Vespasiani.” The terms of this inscription, when read along with one of the few passages in the satires in which Juvenal distinctly speaks of himself (iii. 318 sq.) —

“Et quotiens te Roma tuo refici properantem reddet Aquino, Me quoque ad Helvinam Cererem vestramque Dianam Converte a Cumis: satirarum ego, ni pudet illas, Auditor gelidos veniam caligatus in agros—”

leaves little doubt that the author of the inscription was either the poet himself or some member of his family, of whose existence we have no other indication. If then, as is most probable, Juvenal is himself the author of it, we learn that he did hold, at one period of his life, a post of military rank, one of municipal importance in his native town, and a priesthood of the deified Vespasian. But to what period of his life does this tablet bear evidence! The fact that he filled the position of “duumvir quinquennalis” shows that he was a man of influential position in the municipium, but the office was only held for a year,— the year apparently in which the census was taken at Rome,—and its tenure does not imply any prolonged absence from the metropolis. The satires, though they indicate an occasional preference for the simpler life of the country towns, are the product not of leisure in the provinces but of immediate and intimate familiarity with the life of the great city; and an epigram of Martial, written at the time when Juvenal was most vigorously employed ‘in their composition, speaks of him as settled in Rome. It is possible, but not likely, that he may have retired to his native town in the latter years of his life, and that the last book of his satires (xiiL-xvi.), which contains no immediate references to Rome, and is written in a less angry mood than the earlier ones, may be the work of this retirement, and that it may have been during that time that he filled this office. On the other hand, it was by Domitian that the worship of Vespasian was established with especial sanctity, and it may be doubted whether a priesthood instituted in his honour would be recorded as a title of dignity late on in the reign of Hadrian. The lines already quoted from satire iii. imply that during his early career as a satirist Juvenal maintained his connexion with Aquinum, and that he had some special interest in the worship of the “Helvinian Ceres.” Nor is the tribute to the national religion implied by the dedication of the altar to Ceres inconsistent with the beliefs and feelings expressed in The satires. While the fables of mythology are often treated contemptuously or humorously by him, other passages in the satires clearly imply a conformity to and even a respect for the observances of the national religion. The. spirit of Juvenal, which sought for a standard of right action rather in the old Roman and Italian traditions than in the tenets of philosophy, would incline him to sympathize with the revival of religious observance and also of a kind of belief in divine agency on human affairs, which accompanied the establishment of the empire. The evidence as to the military post filled by him is curious, when taken in connexion with the confused tradition of his exile in a position of military importance'; and there appears to be some further evidence that the cohort of which he was tribune was quartered in Britain. But it cannot be said that the satires bear traces of military experience. The life described in them is such as would present itself to the eyes of a civilian, and would be talked about and commented on at the dinner tables and in the clubs, baths, theatres, and places of public resort in the great metropolis.

The only other contemporary evidence which affords a glimpse of his actual life is contained in three epigrams of Martial. Two of these (vii. 24 and 91) were written in the time of Domitian, the other (xii. 18) early in the reign of Trajan, after Martial had retired to his native Bilbilis. The first of these epigrams, addressed to some backbiter who had endeavoured to embroil the two friends with one another, attests the strong regard which Martial felt for him; but the subject of the epigram seems to hint that there may have been something suspicious or uneasy in the temper of the satirist, which made the maintenance of a steady friendship with him difficult. In the second of these epigrams, addressed to Juvenal himself, the epithet “facundus” is applied to him, one which might equally be employed whether he was best known at the time as a writer of poetic satires or as an eloquent rhetorician. In the last Martial imagines his friend wandering about discontentedly (inquietus) through the crowded streets of Rome, and undergoing all the discomforts incident to attendance on the levees of the great

‘ ‘ Dum per limina te potentiorum Sudatrix toga ventilat.”

Two lines in the poem (22-3) suggest that the satirist, who has inveighed with just severity against the worst corruptions of Roman morals, was not too rigid a censor of the morals of his friend. Indeed, his intimacy with Martial is a ground for not attributing to him exceptional strictness of life.

The additional information as to the poet’s life and circumstances derivable from the satires themselves is not important. He tells us what might easily be inferred from the number of allusions to the Greek and Latin poets contained in his satires, that he had enjoyed the training whmh all educated men received in his day (i. 15); he indicates, as was mentioned above, his connexion with the old Volscian town Aquinum; he speaks of his farm in the territory of Tibur (xi. 64), which furnished a young kid and mountain asparagus for a homely dinner to which he invites a friend during the festival of the Megalesiaca. In the satire in which this invitation is contained, and in one or two more of the later ones, he seems partially to remove the mask which he wears in the earlier and more directly aggressive satires. From it we are able to form an idea of the style in which he habitually lived, and to think of him as enjoying a hale and vigorous age (line 203), and also as a kindly master of a household (159 sq.). The negative evidence, afforded in the account of his establishment, and the bitter tone in which his friend is reminded of his domestic unhappiness (186-9), suggest the inference that, like Lucilius and Horace, Juvenal had no personal experience of either the.cares or the softening influence of family life. A comparison of this poem with the invitation of Horace to Torquatus (Ep., i. 5)...