Post-Augustan Poetry From Seneca to JuvenalButler, Harold Edgeworth
History
Post-Augustan Poetry From Seneca to Juvenal
Butler, Harold Edgeworth
Latin poetry -- History and criticism; Rome -- In literature
His life during this period was uneventful. He lived expensively and
continually complains of lack of funds and of the miseries of a client's
life. Once only (about 88) the discomfort of his existence seems to have
induced him to abandon Rome. He took up his residence at Forum Cornelii,
the modern Imola, but soon returned to Rome.[645] It was not till 98
that he decided to leave the capital for good and to return to his
Spanish home. A new princeps was on the throne. Martial had associated
his work too closely with Domitian and his court to feel at his ease
with Nerva. He sent the new emperor a selection from his tenth and
eleventh books, which we may, perhaps, conjecture to have been
expurgated. He denounced the dead Domitian in a brilliant epigram which
may have formed part of that selection, but which has only been
preserved to us by the scholiast on Juvenal (iv. 38):
Flavia gens, quantum tibi tertius abstulit heres!
paene fuit tanti non habuisse duos.
How much thy third has wronged thee, Flavian race!
'Twere better ne'er to have bred the other brace. ANON.
But he felt that times were changed and that there was no place now for
his peculiar talent for flattery (x. 72. 8):
non est hic dominus sed imperator,
sed iustissimus omnium senator,
per quem de Stygia domo reducta est
siccis rustica Veritas capillis.
hoc sub principe, si sapis, caveto
verbis, Roma, prioribus loquaris.
an emperor
Is ours, no master as of yore,
Himself the Senate's very crown
Of justice, who has called from down
In her deep Stygian duress
The hoyden Truth, with tangled tress.
Be wise, Rome, see you shape anew
Your tongue; your prince would have it true.
A. E. STREET.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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