[Sidenote: The Satires.] Juvenal is the harshest and most violent of the four great Roman satirists. Lucilius was outspoken and sometimes bitter, but aimed to correct while he rebuked the follies of his time; Horace soon lost all bitterness and expressed good-humored raillery; Persius derived his themes from books and preached Stoic doctrines; but Juvenal attacks Roman society in fierce and biting verses, shrinking from no gruesome or indecent detail, showing no humor save of the grimmest and harshest sort, and with no hope of correcting the evils he depicts. He has all the variety of phrase of the accomplished rhetorician, and his lines have a rolling grandeur almost Virgilian. He shows, indeed, the influence of Virgil more than of any other previous writer, though traces of Homer, Herodotus, Plato, nearly all the Roman poets, and among Roman prose writers Cicero, Valerius Maximus, and Seneca are found in his satires. The violence of his satires is, however, not directed against his contemporaries. He seems to have in mind rather the Rome of Domitian than that of Trajan or Hadrian, under whose rule he wrote. The sixteen satires are divided into five books. Book I (Satires i-v) not earlier than 100 A. D., and Book II (Satire vi) not before 116 A. D. These are the most powerful, most violent, and least agreeable books. Book III (Satires vii-ix) was written about 120, Book IV (Satires x-xii) about 125, and Book V (Satires xiii-xvi) in 127 A. D. In these three books there is less virulence, but also less power than in the first two. Old age brought with it a loss at once of fierceness and of strength. [Sidenote: Contents of the Satires.] In the first satire, Juvenal gives his reasons for writing as he does. He is tired of listening to endless epics, and the corruptions of the time are such that “it is difficult not to write satire,”[114] and “indignation makes verse.”[115] The evils to be attacked are enumerated in a series of rapidly sketched pictures, and the poet declares that “all that men do, their hope, fear, wrath, pleasure, joys, and gaddings make up the medley of my book.”[116] And in the following satires the faults of men, the dangers of the city, the court of Domitian, the pride of wealth, the crimes of women, the lack of honor paid to intellect, the worthlessness of noble birth without virtue, unnatural lust, the shortsightedness of human wishes, the wrong of setting children a bad example, and other striking features of the life of Rome are vividly presented and ruthlessly attacked. One of the most interesting satires is the third, in which the dangers of the city are described. A man who is leaving Rome for a small country town gives reasons for his departure: What should I do at Rome? I can not lie; I can not praise a book that’s bad and beg A copy of it; I am ignorant Of the motions of the stars; I neither will Nor can make promise of a father’s death.[117]