If this inscription refers, as well it may, to the poet, it will follow that he served as tribune of the first Dalmatian cohort, probably in Britain,[694] held high municipal office in his native town, and was priest of the deified Vespasian. But the _praenomen_ is wanting in the original, and the inscription may have been erected not by the satirist but by one of his kinsfolk. That he spent the greater portion of his life at Rome is evident from his satires. Of his friends we know little. Umbricius, Persicus, Catullus, and Calvinus[695] are mere names. Of Quintilian[696] he speaks with great respect, and may perhaps have studied under him; of Statius he writes with enthusiasm, but there is no evidence that he had done more than be present at that poet's recitations.[697] Martial, however, was a personal friend, and writes affectionately of him and to him in three of his epigrams.[698] Unlike Martial, whose life was a continual struggle against poverty, Juvenal, though he had clearly endured some of the discomforts and degradations involved by a client's attendance on his rich _patronus_, was a man of some means, possessing an estate at Aquinum,[699] a country house at Tibur,[700] and a house at Rome.[701] At what date precisely he began to write is uncertain. We are told that his first effort was a brief poem attacking the actor Paris, which he afterwards embodied in the seventh satire. But it was long before he ventured to read his satires even to his intimate friends.[702] This suggests that portions, at any rate, of the satires of the first book were composed during the reign of Domitian.[703] Juvenal had certainly every reason for concealing their existence till after the tyrant's death. The first satire was probably written later to form a preface to the other four, and the whole book may have been published in 101. It is noteworthy, however, that Martial, writing to him in that year, mentions merely his gifts as a declaimer, and seems not to know him as a satirist. The second book, containing only the sixth satire, was probably published about 116, since it contains allusions to earthquakes in Asia and to a comet boding ill to Parthia and Armenia (l. 407-12). Such a comet was visible in Rome in the autumn of 115, on the eve of Trajan's campaign against Parthia, while in December an earthquake did great damage to the town of Antioch. The third book (7-9) opens with an elaborate compliment to Hadrian as the patron of literature at Rome. As Hadrian succeeded to the principate in 117 and left Rome for a tour of the provinces in 121, this book must fall somewhere between our dates. The fourth book (10-12) contains no indication as to its date, but must lie between the publication of the third book and of the fifth (after 127). Beyond these facts it is hardly possible to go in our reconstruction of the poet's life. As far as may be judged it was an uneventful career save for one great calamity. The