I should, therefore, rather suppose that by Cæsar we are to understand Nerva. The praise of Domitian is incompatible with Juvenal's universal hatred and execration of him. The opening of the reign of the mild and excellent Nerva might well inspire hopes of the revival of a taste for literature and the arts; and I would conjecture the close of A.D. 96 as the date of the Satire. Before the end of the year Statius was dead; but Juvenal's words seem to imply that he was still living. Again, Matho the lawyer has failed, and is in great poverty (l. 129), to which Martial alludes in lib. xi., Ep., part of which book was evidently written shortly before A.D. 97. But if we are right in supposing the first Satire to have been written about A.D. 100, the intervening years will have given Matho ample time to retrieve his fortune by his infamous trade of informing, and reappear as the luxurious character described Sat., i., 32. Of the eighth Satire, if "Lateranus" be the true reading (l. 147), or if he be intended by "Damasippus," as I believe, we may assume the year A.D. 101 or 102 as the probable date: Lateranus had been consul A.D. 94, and in the year A.D. 101 Trajan for the first time extended the arms of Rome beyond the Danube. Cf. l. 169. The plunder of his province of Africa, by Marius Priscus, was a recent event (l. 120 "nuper"); but, as we have said above, he was impeached by Pliny and Tacitus in the year A.D. 100. Ponticus, to whom the Satire is addressed, may be the person to whom Martial refers in his twelfth book, which was written A.D. 104. There are two allusions by which we may form a conjecture as to the date of the ninth Satire. Crepereius Pollio is mentioned as nearly in the same circumstances of profligate poverty (l. 6, 7) as is described in the eleventh Satire (l. 43), which was undoubtedly written in Juvenal's later years; and he alludes (l. 117) to Saufeia, in very much the same terms in which he speaks of her in the sixth Satire (l. 320), which we suppose to have been written in his old age. The internal evidence, supplied by the sustained majesty and dignified flow of language of the tenth (as well as of the fourteenth) Satire, without taking into consideration the philosophical nature of the subject of both, is quite sufficient to prove that they must have been the finished productions of a late period of a thoughtful life. We are therefore quite prepared to admit the conjecture that the allusion in line 136 is to the column of Trajan, erected in the year A.D. 113. The repetition of the line (226) also connects this with the first Satire, which it probably preceded only by a short interval.