Part 25 (1/2)
In giving back Caieta.n.u.s his IOU's, Polycharmus, do you think you are giving him 100,000 sesterces? 'He owed me that sum,'
you say. Keep the IOU's and lend him two thousand more!
Chloe, the murderess of her seven husbands, erects monuments to their memory, and inscribes _fecit Chloe_ on the tombstones:
inscripsit tumulis septem scelerata virorum 'se fecisse' Chloe. quid pote simplicius? (ix. 15).
On her seven husbands' tombs she doth impress 'This Chloe did.' What more can she confess?
WRIGHT.
Vacerra admires the old poets only. What shall Martial do?
miraris veteres, Vacerra, solos nec laudas nisi mortuos poetas.
ignoscas petimus, Vacerra: tanti non est, ut placeam tibi, perire (viii. 69).
Vacerra lauds no living poet's lays, But for departed genius keeps his praise.
I, alas, live, nor deem it worth my while To die that I may win Vacerra's smile.
PROFESSOR GOLDWIN SMITH.
All this is very slight, _merae nugae_; but even if the humour be not of the first water, it will compare well with the humour of epigrams of any age. Martial knows he is not a great poet.[681] He knows, too, that his work is uneven:
iactat inaequalem Matho me fecisse libellum: si verum est, laudat carmina nostra Matho.
aequales scribit libros Calvinus et Vmber: aequalis liber est, Cretice, qui malus est (vii. 90).
Matho makes game of my unequal verse; If it's unequal it might well be worse.
Calvinus, Umber, write on one dead level, The book that's got no up and down's the devil!
If there are thirty good epigrams in a book, he is satisfied (vii. 81).
His defence hardly answers the question, 'Why publish so many?' but should at least mollify our judgement. Few poets read better in selections than Martial, and of few poets does selection give so inadequate an idea. For few poets of his undoubted genius have left such a large bulk of work which, in spite of its formal perfection, is morally repulsive or, from the purely literary standpoint, uninteresting. But he is an important figure in the history of literature, for he is the father of the modern epigram. Alone of Silver Latin poets is he a perfect stylist. He has the gift of _felicitas_ to the full, but it is not _curiosa_. Inferior to Horace in all other points, he has greater spontaneity. And he is free from the faults of his age. He is no _virtuoso_, eaten up with self-conscious vanity; he attempts no impossible feats of language; he is clear, and uses his mythological and geographical knowledge neatly and picturesquely; but he makes no display of obscure learning. 'I would please schoolmasters,' he says, 'but not _qua_ schoolmasters' (x. 21. 5). So, too, he complains of his own education:
at me litterulas stulti docuere parentes: quid c.u.m grammaticis rhetoribusque mihi? (ix. 73. 7).
My learning only proves my father fool!
Why would he send me to a grammar school?
HAY.
As a result, perhaps, of this lack of sympathy with the education of his day, we find that, while he knows and admires the great poets of the past, and can flatter the rich poetasters of the present, his bent is curiously unliterary. He gives us practically no literary criticism. It is with the surface qualities of life that he is concerned, with its pleasures and its follies, guilty or innocent. He has a marvellously quick and clear power of observation, and of vivid presentation. He is in this sense above all others the poet of his age. He either does not see or chooses to ignore many of the best and most interesting features of his time, but the picture which he presents, for all its incompleteness, is wider and more varied than any other. We both hate him and read him for the sake of the world he depicts. 'Ugliness is always bad art, and Martial often failed as a poet from his choice of subject.'[682] There are comparatively few of his poems which we read for their own sake. Remarkable as these few poems are, the main attraction of Martial is to be found not in his wit or finish, so much as in the vividness with which he has portrayed the life of the brilliant yet corrupt society in which his lot was cast. It lives before us in all its splendour and in all its squalor. The court, with its atmosphere of grovelling flattery, its gross vices veiled and tricked out in the garb of respectability; the wealthy official cla.s.s, with their villas, their favourites, their circle of dependants, men of culture, wit, and urbanity, through all which runs, strangely intermingled, a vein of extreme coa.r.s.eness, vulgarity, and meanness; the lounger and the reciter, the diner-out and the legacy-hunter; the clients struggling to win their patrons' favour and to rise in the social scale, enduring the hards.h.i.+ps and discomfort of a sordid life unillumined by lofty ideals or strength of will, a life that under cold northern skies would have been intolerable; the freedman and the slave, with all the riff-raff that support a parasitic existence on the vices of the upper cla.s.ses; the noise and bustle of Rome, its sleepless nights, its cheerless tenements, its noisy streets, loud with the sound of traffic or of revelry; the shows in the theatre, the races in the circus, the interchange of presents at the Saturnalia; the pleasant life in the country villa, the simplicity of rural Italy, the sights and sounds of the park and the farm-yard; and dimly seen beyond all, the provinces, a great ocean which absorbs from time to time the rulers of Rome and the leaders of society, and from which come faint and confused echoes of frontier wars; all are there. It is a great pageant lacking order and coherence, a scene that s.h.i.+fts continually, but never lacks brilliance of detail and sharply defined presentment. Martial was the child of the age; it gave him his strength and his weakness. If we hate him or despise him, it is because he is the faithful representative of the life of his times; his gifts we cannot question. He practised a form of poetry that at its best is not exalted, and must, even more than other branches of art, be conditioned by social circ.u.mstance. Within its limited sphere Martial stands, not faultless, but yet supreme.
CHAPTER XII
JUVENAL
Our knowledge of the life of the most famous of Roman satirists is strangely unsatisfactory. Many so-called lives of Juvenal have come down to us, but they are confused, contradictory, inadequate, and unreliable.[683] His own work and allusions in other writers help us but little in our attempt to reconstruct the story of the poet's life.
Only by investigating the dates within which the satires seem to fall is it possible to arrive at some idea of the dates within which falls the life of their author. The satires were published in five books at different times. The first book (1-5), which is full of allusions to the tyranny of Domitian, cannot have been published before 100 A.D., since the first satire contains an allusion to the condemnation of Marius Priscus,[684] which took place in that year. The fifth book (13-16) must, from references in the thirteenth and fifteenth[685] satires to the year 127, have been published not much later than that date. The publication of the satires falls, therefore, between 100 and 130.
With these data it is possible to approach the question of the dates of Juvenal's birth and death. The main facts to guide us are the statements of the best of the biographies that he did not begin to write satire till on the confines of middle age, that even then he delayed to publish, and that he died at the age of eighty.[686] The inference is that he was born between 50 and 60 A. D., and died between 130 and 140 A. D.[687]
As to the facts of his life we are on little firmer ground. But concerning his name and birthplace there is practical certainty.
Decimus Junius Juvenalis[688] was born at Aquinum,[689] a town of Latium, and is said to have been the son or adopted son of a rich freedman. His education was of the usual character, literary and rhetorical, and was presumably carried out at Rome.[690] He acquired thus early in youth a taste for rhetoric that never left him. For he is said to have practised declamation up till middle age, not with a view to obtaining a position as professor of rhetoric or as advocate, but from sheer love of the art.[691] It is probable that he combined his pa.s.sion for rhetoric with service as an officer in the army. Not only does he show considerable intimacy in his satires with a soldier's life,[692] but interesting external evidence is afforded by an inscription discovered near Aquinum. It runs: