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
Before further discussing his general characteristics, it is necessary
to take a brief survey of the remaining satires. The second and ninth
are savage and, as was almost inevitable, obscene denunciations of
unnatural vice. In the third, the most orderly in arrangement and the
most brilliant in execution of all his satires, he describes all the
dangers and horrors of life at Rome. Umbricius, a friend of the poet, is
leaving the city. It is no place for a man of honour; it has become a
city for Greeks; the worthless and astute _Graeculus_ is everywhere
predominant, and, stained though he be with a thousand vices, has
outwitted the native-born, and, by the arts of the panderer and the
flatterer, has made himself their master. The poor are treated like
slaves. Houses fall, or are burned with fire. Sleep is impossible, so
loud with traffic are the streets. By day it is scarcely safe to walk
abroad for fear of being crushed by one of the great drays that throng
the city; by night there are the lesser perils of slops and broken
crockery cast from the windows, the greater perils of roisterers and
thieves. Rome is no place for Umbricius. He must go.
The fourth satire opens with a violent attack on the _parvenu_
Egyptian Crispinus, so powerful at the court of Domitian, and goes on
by a somewhat clumsy transition to tell the story of the huge turbot
caught near Ancona and presented to the emperor. So large was it that
a cabinet council must needs be called to decide what should be done
with it. This affords excuse for an inimitable picture of Domitian's
servile councillors. At last it is decided that the turbot is to be
served whole and a special dish to be constructed for it. 'Ah! why,'
the poet concludes, 'did not Domitian devote himself entirely to such
trifles as these?'
In the fifth satire Juvenal returns to the subject of the hardships
and insults which the poor client must endure. He pictures the host
sitting in state with the best of everything set before him and served
in the choicest manner, while the unhappy client must be content with
food and drink of the coarsest kind. Virro, the rich man, does this
not because he is parsimonious, but because the humiliation of his
client amuses his perverted mind. But the satirist does not spare the
client, whose servile complaisance leads him to put up with such
treatment. 'Be a man!' he cries, 'and sooner beg on the streets than
degrade yourself thus.'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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