mitian (A. D. 81-96), or even earlier, but that the poet had not ventured to make them public. He continued to write freely during Trajan's reign, which ended a. D. 117, when Juvenal was about sixty, and during the early years of Hadrian's reign, that is, till about A. D. 120. In this reign he may have lived in comfort through the liberality of the emperor, though his household was on a frugal scale, as he tells us in Sat. xi., from which (verse 65) we learn that he had property at Tibur. It is not impossible he may have lived till the accession of Antoninus Pius, who succeeded Hadrian A. D. 138, when Juvenal was eighty or a little more.”

I have omitted in this sketch any allusion to Juvenal's banishment, on account of the great uncertainty which attends the whole subject. The pseudo-Suetonius says of Juvenal, "Having written a clever satire of a few verses on Paris the pantomimus, and a poet of his who was puffed up with his paltry six months' military rank, he took pains to perfect himself in this kind of writing. And yet for a very long time he did not venture to trust anything even to a small audience. But after a while he was heard by great crowds, and with great success, several times; so that he was led to insert in his new writings those verses which he had written first:

quod non dant proceres, dabit histrio: tu Camerinos
et Bareas, tu nobilium magna atria curas?

praefectos Pelopea facit, Philomela tribunos. - (vii. 90 sqq.)

"The player was at that time one of the favorites at court, and many of his supporters were daily promoted. Juvenal, therefore, fell under suspicion as one who had covertly censured the times; and forthwith, under color

of military promotion, though he was eighty years of age, he was removed from the city, and sent to be praefectus of a cohort which was stationed in the farthest part of Egypt. That sort of punishment was determined upon as being suited to a light and jocular offence. Within a very short time he died of vexation and disgust."

There are things intrinsically difficult of credence in this story, and it is told with great variations in the different manuscript lives. The part of the offended emperor is played by Nero and Trajan, as well as Domitian, and three of the lives make Scotland the scene of the exile, whither Juvenal is sent as praefectus militum in the hope that he would be killed in battle. Of recent scholars who accept the banishment, Hermann makes Domitian send the satirist to Scotland, Friedländer dates the event under Trajan, with whom the actor Pylades had great influence, Ribbeck under Hadrian. Macleane discredits the whole story, although allowing that, if placed in the reign of Domitian, it is not chronologically impossible. It is thought that Sidonius Apollinaris refers to Juvenal in the lines, where, after mentioning the banishment of Ovid, he adds:

Carm. ix. 270.

appear that Ju

From the Satires themselves, it would venal was most certainly writing after Domitian had perished in a. D. 96, for he speaks of the death of that emperor (iv. 153); and after the conviction of Marius Priscus (i. 47), which we know to have taken place in A. D. 100. The thirteenth satire was probably written as late as A. D. 127 (see verse 17); the fifteenth soon after that date (see verse 27).

There are three epigrams in Martial containing allusions to a Juvenal who is probably our satirist: one (vii. 24) against a slanderer who tried to bring about a quarrel between the two poets; another (vii. 91), sent with a Saturnalian present of nuts, in which the recipient is addressed as "facunde Juvenalis ;" and a third (xii. 18), which begins with the following lines:

Dum tu forsitan inquietus erras
clamosa, Juvenalis, in Subura,
aut collem dominae teris Dianae,
dum per limina te potentiorum
sudatrix toga ventilat, vagumque
major Caelius et minor fatigant,
me multos repetita post Decembres
accepit mea rusticumque fecit
auro Bilbilis et superba ferro.

One other witness has come down to us from the times of our poet. There is an inscription (Mommsen Inser. Neapol. 4312) at Aquinum, which (with the omissions supplied in small letters) runs thus:

The inscription marks an altar dedicated by Juvenal to the Helvina Ceres mentioned in Sat. iii. 320.

The most interesting speculation of recent times in regard to our author was originated by Ribbeck, in his treatise Der echte und der unechte Juvenal, which appeared in Berlin in 1865. According to this acute scholar, the first nine satires, with the exception of verses 1--36 in the fourth, the eleventh satire, with the exception

of verses 1-55,- and possibly the sixteenth, are the only genuine productions of Juvenal preserved to us, and they themselves are disfigured with interpolations, corruptions, and transpositions of verses. The remaining satires, together with the introductions to the fourth and eleventh, are the tasteless forgeries of some unknown declamator, a hungry commonplace poet, to whose combination with a speculating bookseller they owe their origin.

That there is a marked difference between the two divisions of the reputed works of Juvenal which Ribbeck has made, cannot be denied. The satires admitted to be genuine, deal directly with men, manners, vices, follies, and are a rich storehouse of information in regard to the condition of Roman society in the time when they were written. They are the indignant voice of a live man lashing real vices of real men. The satires of the other class are declamations on stock themes, illustrated by stock characters, - Alexander, Hannibal, Priam, gods and goddesses. They could have been written by a recluse pedant; the others could only have come from a man of vigorous sense and keen observation, who knew the world. In literary execution, the satires of the second class are inferior to those of the first; it has been charged against them, not without truth, that they are spun out, their style is sometimes turgid, the illustrations sometimes inapt. These differences Ribbeck undoubtedly exaggerates. He speaks of the declamator with a contempt quite unwarranted. There are great beauties in the disputed satires, — whatever their defects,-to which the world will never refuse its admiration.

Ribbeck has probably succeeded in opening a question which will never be fully settled. The vital defect, however, of his argument lies in the impossibility of fixing

the precise limits of possible variation in quality between different productions of the same mind. It would not be difficult to cite among the acknowledged works of other authors, ancient and modern, instances of as great difference as exists between these two divisions of Juvenal's satires. Nor is a satisfactory explanation of the variance impossible. The lively, vigorous, burning satires wrote themselves. Fecit indignatio versum. The others were written in cold blood, either (as I think it most probable) by a man whose reputation was already established, so that he had a market for his wares, and at an advanced age when calm reflection and even commonplace generalization are more natural than keen observation and impetuous sallies of temper, or by a young rhetorician whose fiery zeal is yet to be excited when he leaves his books and reads in actual life the stern lessons of which the seething mass of Roman society in the imperial times was full.

We have more reason to doubt whether all the satires as we have them received their author's final touches and editorial revision. Carelessness may account for some of the faults which have been charged to forgery.

It is generally safe to leave a reader to discover and observe for himself the characteristics of the author who engages his attention; but I can hardly refrain from inserting here some lively remarks of Lewis upon the great Roman satirist :

"In depicting character, in drawing scenes, even in turns of expression, Juvenal is, of all ancient authors, the most distinctly modern. His scenes are manipulated with a few broad touches, in which the salient points are always brought into the foreground; and it has been well observed that a painter of kindred genius would have