it are occasionally as great as in the earlier satires, and although
touches of Juvenal's saturnine humour, and especially of his misogyny,
appear in all the satires of this book, yet their general tone shows
that the white heat of his indignation is abated; and the lines of the
eleventh, already referred to (201 seq.),
"Spectent juvenes quos clamor et audax
Sponsio, quos cultae decet assedisse puellae:
Nostra bibat vernum contrada cuticula solem,"
leave no doubt that he was well advanced in years when they were
written.
Two important dates are found in Book V., comprising satires xiii.-xvi.
At xiii. 16 Juvenal speaks of his friend Calvinus as now past sixty
years of age, having been born in the consulship of Fonteius. Now L.
Fonteius Capito was consul in 67. Again at xv. 27 an event is said to
have happened in Egypt "nuper consule Iunco." There was a L. Aemilius
Iuncus consul _suffectus_ in 127. The fifth book must therefore have
been published some time after this date. More than the fourth, this
book bears the marks of age, both in the milder tone of the sentiments
expressed, and in the feebler power of composition exhibited. The last
satire is now imperfect, and the authenticity both of this and of the
fifteenth has been questioned, though on insufficient grounds.
Thus the satires were published at different intervals, and for the most
part composed between 100 and 130, but the most powerful in feeling and
vivid in conception among them deal with the experience and impressions
of the reign of Domitian, occasionally recall the memories or traditions
of the times of Nero and Claudius, and reproduce at least one startling
page from the annals of Tiberius.[4] The same overmastering feeling
which constrained Tacitus (_Agric._ 2, 3), when the time of long
endurance and silence was over, to recall the "memory of the former
oppression," acted upon Juvenal. There is no evidence that these two
great writers, who lived and wrote at the same time, who were animated
by the same hatred of the tyrant under whom the best years of their
manhood were spent, and who both felt most deeply the degradation of
their times, were even known to one another. Tacitus belonged to the
highest official and senatorial class, Juvenal apparently to the middle
class and to that of the struggling men of letters; and this difference
in position had much influence in determining the different bent of
their genius, and in forming one to be a great national historian, the
other to be a great social satirist. If the view of the satirist is
owing to this circumstance more limited in some directions, and his
taste and temper less conformable to the best ancient standards of
propriety, he is also saved by it from prejudices to which the
traditions of his class exposed the historian. But both writers are
thoroughly national in sentiment, thoroughly masculine in tone. No
ancient authors express so strong a hatred of evil. The peculiar
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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