INTRODUCTION. LIFE OF JUVENAL. DECIMUS JUNIUS JUVENALIS is said in a life of uncertain authenticity to have been born at Aquinum. This statement is to some extent corroborated by a line in the third Satire, where the speaker suggests that his friend, who is presumably Juvenal, may some day or other be visiting his own Aquinum. It is made more probable still by the fact that a tablet has been dug up at Aquinum, in which D. Junius Juvenalis, of the cohort of the Dalmatians, duumvir quinquennalis, and flamen to the deified Vespasian, dedicates a shrine to Ceres. Helvina Ceres is alluded to in the third Satire as a deity reverenced at Aquinum. Further, there is no reason for referring Juvenal to any other place but Aquinum, though a single scholiast says that some persons took him to have been a Gaul on account of his great size. The biographies prefixed to his Satires in the MSS. are as numerous as they are unsatisfactory. Of these lives there are nine, seven of which are printed by Otto Jahn in his edition of 1851. An eighth was published from a Harleian MS. by Rühl in the 'Neue Jahrbücher' of 1854; a ninth has been found by Professor Nettleship in a Bodleian MS. of the thirteenth century, and a tenth has been printed by Professor Dürr from a MS. in the Barbarini Library. In point of Latin style, and presumably therefore of antiquity, the best of these memoirs is that printed by Jahn as No. 1. The author imitates the style of Suetonius, but not his clearness or accuracy. Of this memoir Borghesi rightly observes that Suetonius could never have written in so unsatisfactory a way of so distinguished a contemporary. The date of Juvenal's birth is unknown. It is variously stated in the three memoirs which mention the event, one placing it in the reign of Claudius, another in that of Nero. Assuming him to be the author of the sixteen Satires that pass under his name, he · was alive a little after A. D. 127, as he speaks in the fifteenth Satire of 'things that were done lately when Juncus was consul,' and Juncus-an Aemilius Juncus, as Borghesi has proved—was consul in 1271. Assuming him again, as is probable, to be the Juvenal addressed by Martial in three epigrams, he was grown up, and of such literary eminence that he could be called 'facundus 2, corresponding to 'fluens,' or 'eloquens ' in 93. An attempt has been made to fix his birth in the year 60 or 67, on the supposition that the words 'Fonteio consule natus,' Satire xiii, refer to himself; but the more natural construction of the passage-it may almost be said, the only natural construction-makes them relate to his friend Calvinus. If we accept the tradition that Juvenal attained the age of 80, and assume that he did not live beyond the year A. D. 128, the date of his birth would be about A.D. 48, which would agree tolerably well with the facts of his history; while if we accept the more precise statement of one of the lives, he was born in the year 55, when Claudius Nero and L. Antistius were consuls. For practical purposes it is sufficient to observe that what we know of him as a man does not take us back beyond Titus at furthest, or below Hadrian. He Juvenal is said by all his biographers to have been the son or the adopted son of a wealthy freedman. His mother was named Septimuleia and was a townswoman of Aquinum. had a sister, also Septimuleia, who married Fuscinus*. seems to have been brought up at a good school. chief instructor, when he began to study rhetoric, was Protus of Berytus, a teacher who was noted for his provincial and antiquarian tastes, and whose practice it was to restrict the His Mr. Lewis and Dean Merivale prefer the reading Junius. Junius was consul in 119, which would throw back the fifteenth Satire to about 120. 2 Prof. Nettleship rightly remarks that facundus ' may be used of style, as in Mart. xii. 43 and Statius, Silvae i. 4. 28. 3 Dürr, Das Leben Juvenals, ss. 11. 28. Sat. xiv. 1. 1. The particulars about Juvenal's family are derived from a life discovered by Dürr (Leben Juvenals). They are rejected by Friedländer (Berliner Philolog. Wochenschrift, April 17, 1890) but accepted by Prümers (Wochenschrift für Klassische Philologie, 4 Dec.1889). Satire i. 1. 15. Compare Pliny's letter (iv. 13), showing that a town in Tuscany might be so poorly provided with teachers that the children of the townspeople had to be sent to Milan. number of his pupils to three or four, and to converse with these in the Socratic fashion, rarely lecturing to them. Another teacher was Antonius Liberalis, of whom we know only that there was a bitter feud between him and the arrogant Palaemon, so that no one could study under both at the same time1. Juvenal is believed to have practised declamation till he was of middle age, though rather as men of fortune are sometimes called to the bar in England, for the sake of an occupation, than to make money by it. The inscription at Aquinum shows that he served the most important magistracy in his native town, and held the honourable position of titular chaplain, so to speak, to Vespasian. We know that when the first college or chapter of flamens to a dead Emperor was instituted, Tiberius, Drusus, Germanicus, and Claudius were enrolled as members, and that the rest were chosen by lot out of the first families in Rome (Tacitus, Annals i. 54). As Domitian was very careful to maintain the dignity of the Flavian line, it would seem that Juvenal's social position was good, or he would not have been admitted to this office. Later on we find him praefect or tribune of the cohort of the Dalmatians. This cohort of infantry was stationed in Britain during the times of Trajan and Hadrian, and there are traditions, one of which states that Juvenal was made praefect against the 'Scoti' by 'the tyrant,' while another represents Trajan as banishing him to the chief command in the war against the Scoti2. The difficulties of understanding 1 Dürr, Das Leben Juvenals, s. 26. Suetonius Vitae Grammat., c. 24. 2 It has been argued that the mere mention of a command against the Scoti convicts the writers of these lives of compiling in recent times, because for the first eight centuries of our era 'Scotus' always means a dweller in Ireland, not a dweller in North Britain. It must be remembered, however, that the Irish (Scoti) are habitually mentioned with the Picts and Saxons as enemies whom the Roman troops in North Britain had to encounter. 'Picti Saxonesque et Scoti et Attacotti Britannos aerumnis vexavere continuis,' Ammian. Marcellin. xxvi. 4, cf. xxvii. 8. Victricia Caesar Signa Caledonios transvexit ad usque Britannos. Fuderit et quamquam Scotum et cum Saxone Pictum,' Sidonius Apollinaris, Carmen vi. 333. Venit et extremis legio praetenta Britannis, Quae Scoto dat frena truci, ferroque notatas Perlegit exsangues Picto moriente figuras,' Claudian de Bello Getico, ll. 416-418. As Agricola brought the Lowlands under Roman rule (A. D. 80-85), the chief danger to the North-West coast of England would certainly be from Irish sea-rovers. all this are enormous. Properly ten years' service in the ranks was required before a man could be tribune or praefect. It is true this was sometimes set aside in favour of men of position; but Juvenal, in the form in which the story has come down to us, had offended one of the Emperors by an allusion to a favourite actor, and was not therefore a man to be picked out for special distinction. Then, again, he must have been a man of a certain age, forty if not fifty, at the time of his honorary banishment. Nevertheless there is some incidental evidence that Juvenal was connected with the army, and may have been in Britain. In the third Satire he complains obliquely of the smallness of a tribune's pay. In the first (1. 58) and seventh (1.92) he declaims against promotion by favour. In the fourteenth he scoffs at the rewards of military service. 'Destroy,' he says, 'the huts of the Moors or the forts of the Brigantes, that you may get the rank of ensign with better pay when you are sixty1. When we remember that in A. D. 103 the fourth cohort of the Dalmatians was stationed among those very Brigantes, the coincidence is at least remarkable, and it looks as if the poet were calling to mind his own unrequited service, or that of some obscurer comrade. Finally the allusions to the British whale, to British lawyers, to the British King Arviragus, and to the short night in Britain 2, are a little more numerous and precise than we should expect from one who had never been in the country. The best solution of the difficulty would seem to be if we could suppose that Juvenal, finding civil advancement out of the question, transferred himself to the army when he was no longer quite a young man, expecting by favour to be exempted from the annoyance of service abroad, and that, when he allowed his unruly pen to transgress, he was punished by being ordered on active service, as Russian liberals are sent to the Caucasus. This explanation has not taken into account the common story related in Life IV, as given by Jahn, that Juvenal was sent into exile for the lines relating to Paris, the actor, that We may observe also a certain use of military terms, 'decurrere,' i. 19, and an admiration of military virtue, viii. 21. 'Esto bonus miles' is his first advice to a young man, viii. 79. 2 Sat. x. 14, xv. 111, iv. 127, ii. 161. is, that he was exiled by Domitian in some year before 83 A.D., when Paris died. There are insuperable difficulties about that story in its common form. One is, that the seventh Satire would appear in that case to open with a high compliment to the very Emperor whom the attack on his favourite a little further on is supposed to have alienated. The other is that the legendary account represents Juvenal as dying of grief in his banishment, whereas he certainly survived Domitian by more than thirty years. Mr. Lewis disposes of these difficulties by assuming that the 'histrio' mentioned in 1. 90 is different from 'Paris,' and that the Satire really belongs to the time of Hadrian, 'who banished and afterwards put to death Apollodorus the celebrated architect, owing to a sarcastic expression of the latter.' It may be added that Juvenal's complaints would excite much more indignation if he was in the army. One of the lives which seems to refer the composition of the Satire to the time of Trajan, reports Trajan as having commented upon it with the remark, 'Why, you yourself got your promotion through Philomela!' This would appear to show that Juvenal owed his own appointment in the first instance to his literary work. By another account however it was Hadrian, who wrote satirically on the commission which banished him to Egypt 'Praefectos Pelopea facit, Philomela tribunos.' The last epigram addressed by Martial to Juvenal, which was written about A. D. 104, shows that he was then in Rome making a round of visits to his patrons. This is not necessarily inconsistent with the fact that his cohort was stationed in Britain. He may have applied for furlough to visit his friends, and have tried while he was at home to get moved into Italy or to get increase of rank. Neither, however, is it impossible that by this time Juvenal had completed his term of service. There remains the story that he ended his days in Egypt. That he visited that country at some time seems probable from the life-like reference to the big breasts of the women of Meroe (xiii. 16), and almost demonstrated by the fifteenth Satire, which must have been written towards the close of his life, and which certainly seems composed on the spot. The date of this we have seen can be fixed between 121 and 128 A. D. or thereabouts. It was therefore Hadrian who banished him; and Juvenal must |