See Virgil, Aeneid, xii. 139 and Servius ad loc.; Ovid, Fasti, ii. 583–616; Valerius Maximus, i. 8. 1; L. Deubner, “Juturna und die Ausgrabungen auf dem römischen Forum,” in Neue Jahrb. f. das klassische Altertum (1902), p. 370.
JUVENAL (Decimus Junius Juvenalis) (c. 60–140), Roman poet and satirist, was born at Aquinum. Brief accounts of his life, varying considerably in details, are prefixed to different MSS. of the works. But their common original cannot be traced to any competent authority, and some of their statements are intrinsically improbable. According to the version which appears to be the earliest:—
“Juvenal was the son or ward of a wealthy freedman; he practised declamation till middle age, not as a professional teacher, but as an amateur, and made his first essay in satire by writing the lines on Paris, the actor and favourite of Domitian, now found in the seventh satire (lines 90 seq.). Encouraged by their success, he devoted himself diligently to this kind of composition, but refrained for a long time from either publicly reciting or publishing his verses. When at last he did come before the public, his recitations were attended by great crowds and received with the utmost favour. But the lines originally written on Paris, having been inserted in one of his new satires, excited the jealous anger of an actor of the time, who was a favourite of the emperor, and procured the poet’s banishment under the form of a military appointment to the extremity of Egypt. Being then eighty years of age, he died shortly afterwards of grief and vexation.”
Some of these statements are so much in consonance with the indirect evidence afforded by the satires that they may be a series of conjectures based upon them. The rare passages in which the poet speaks of his own position, as in satires xi. and xiii., indicate that he was in comfortable but moderate circumstances. We should infer also that he was not dependent on any professional occupation, and that he was separated in social station, and probably too by tastes and manners, from the higher class to which Tacitus and Pliny belonged, as he was by character from the new men who rose to wealth by servility under the empire. Juvenal is no organ of the pride and dignity, still less of the urbanity, of the cultivated representatives of the great families of the republic. He is the champion of the more sober virtues and ideas, and perhaps the organ of the rancours and detraction, of an educated but depressed and embittered middle class. He lets us know that he has no leanings to philosophy (xiii. 121) and pours contempt on the serious epic writing of the day (i. 162). The statement that he was a trained and practised declaimer is confirmed both by his own words (i. 16) and by the rhetorical mould in which his thoughts and illustrations are cast. The allusions which fix the dates when his satires first appeared, and the large experience of life which they imply, agree with the statement that he did not come before the world as a professed satirist till after middle age.
The statement that he continued to write satires long before he gave them to the world accords well with the nature of their contents and the elaborate character of their composition, and might almost be inferred from the emphatic but yet guarded statement of Quintilian in his short summary of Roman literature. After speaking of the merits of Lucilius, Horace and Persius as satirists, he adds, “There are, too, in our own day, distinguished writers of satire whose names will be heard of hereafter” (Inst. Or. x. 1, 94). There is no Roman writer of satire who could be mentioned along with those others by so judicious a critic, except Juvenal. The motive which a writer of satire must have had for secrecy under Domitian is sufficiently obvious; and the necessity of concealment and self-suppression thus imposed upon the writer may have permanently affected his whole manner of composition.
So far the original of these lives follows a not improbable tradition. But when we come to the story of the poet’s exile the case is otherwise. The undoubted reference to Juvenal in Sidonius Apollinaris as the victim of the rage of an actor only proves that the original story from which all the varying versions of the lives are derived was generally believed before the middle of the 5th century of our era. If Juvenal was banished at the age of eighty, the author of his banishment could not have been the “enraged actor” in reference to whom the original lines were written, as Paris was put to death in 83, and Juvenal was certainly writing satires long after 100. The satire in which the lines now appear was probably first published soon after the accession of Hadrian, when Juvenal was not an octogenarian but in the maturity of his powers. The cause of the poet’s banishment at that advanced age could not therefore have been either the original composition or the first publication of the lines.
An expression in xv. 45 is quoted as a proof that Juvenal had visited Egypt. He may have done so as an exile or in a military command; but it seems hardly consistent with the importance which the emperors attached to the security of Egypt, or with the concern which they took in the interests of the army, that these conditions were combined at an age so unfit for military employment. If any conjecture is warrantable on so obscure a subject, it is more likely that this temporary disgrace should have been inflicted on the poet by Domitian. Among the many victims of Juvenal’s satire it is only against him and against one of the vilest instruments of his court, the Egyptian Crispinus, that the poet seems to be animated by personal hatred. A sense of wrong suffered at their hands may perhaps have mingled with the detestation which he felt towards them on public grounds. But if he was banished under Domitian, it must have been either before or after 93, at which time, as we learn from an epigram of Martial, Juvenal was in Rome.
More ancient evidence is supplied by an inscription found at Aquinum, recording, so far as it has been deciphered, the dedication of an altar to Ceres by a Iunius Iuvenalis, tribune of the first cohort of Dalmatians, duumvir quinquennalis, and flamen Divi Vespasiani, a provincial magistrate whose functions corresponded to those of the censor at Rome. This Juvenalis may have been the poet, but he may equally well have been a relation. The evidence of the satires does not point to a prolonged absence from the metropolis. They are the product of immediate and intimate familiarity with the life of the great city. An epigram of Martial, written at the time when Juvenal was most vigorously employed in their composition, speaks of him as settled in Rome. He himself hints (iii. 318) that he maintained his connexion with Aquinum, and that he had some special interest in the worship of the “Helvinian Ceres.” Nor is the tribute to the national religion implied by the dedication of the altar to Ceres inconsistent with the beliefs and feelings expressed in the satires. While the fables of mythology are often treated contemptuously or humorously by him, other passages in the satires clearly imply a conformity to, and even a respect for, the observances of the national religion. The evidence as to the military post filled by Juvenal is curious, when taken in connexion with the confused tradition of his exile in a position of military importance. But it cannot be said that the satires bear traces of military experience; the life described in them is rather such as would present itself to the eyes of a civilian.
The only other contemporary evidence which affords a glimpse of Juvenal’s actual life is contained in three epigrams of Martial. Two of these (vii. 24 and 91) were written in the time of Domitian, the third (xii. 18) early in the reign of Trajan, after Martial had retired to his native Bilbilis. The first attests the strong regard which Martial felt for him; but the subject of the epigram seems to hint that Juvenal was not an easy person to get on with. In the second, addressed to Juvenal himself, the epithet facundus is applied to him, equally applicable to his “eloquence” as satirist or rhetorician. In the last Martial imagines his friend wandering about discontentedly through the crowded streets of Rome, and undergoing all the discomforts incident to attendance on the levées of the great. Two lines in the poem suggest that the satirist, who inveighed with just severity against the worst corruptions of Roman morals, was not too rigid a censor of the morals of his friend. Indeed, his intimacy with Martial is a ground for not attributing to him exceptional strictness of life.
The additional information as to the poet’s life and circumstances derivable from the satires themselves is not important. He had enjoyed the training which all educated men received in his day (i. 15); he speaks of his farm in the territory of Tibur
