Book two contains only the famous sixth satire, directed against the female sex. The theme is "Why marry, as long as there is still rope to hang oneself with?", illustrated by portraits of every variety of female horror from Messallina to the bluestocking. The allusion to a comet boding disaster to Parthia can be related to Trajan's Eastern campaign, and will give us 116 as a date.
The third book, Satires 7-9, seems to be dated by its opening to the accession of Hadrian (118), though the eighth satire was probably written earlier. The seventh satire hails the new reign as the dawn of better days, but laments that literature (unless one is a writer of pantomime) is still an unprofitable profession, and rhetoric is in the same plight. The eighth is on a well-worn Stoic theme, stemmata quid faciunt?, rely on the distinction of personal virtue, not on the fame of your ancestors.
The fourth book cannot be exactly dated. It contains the famous tenth satire, the eleventh and the twelfth. In the tenth, imitated by Johnson as the Vanity of Human Wishes, the various objects of ambition and desire are recounted, with examples of the disasters that have befallen those who have achieved them. The eleventh is an invitation to dinner, contrasting his simplicity with the fashionable luxury ; here he states directly what the abatement of his former tremendous energy and indignation suggest, that he is growing old.
Nostra bibat vernum contracts cuticula solem.
The twelfth is a portrait of a legacy-hunter.
The fifth book, satires 13-16, can be dated 127-128. The work is now on a lower level, its tone gentler and its grip less powerful. The outstanding poem in the book is the fourteenth, on the power of parental example for good and ill. The last is unfinished.
From the change of tone discernible from the tenth satire, on wards, the increasing prolixity and tendency to abstraction, Rib beck (Der echte and der unechte Juvenal, Berlin, 1865) sought to deduce a double authorship of the Satires. Nobody believes this now.
Juvenal had a decisive influence in the history of satire. Before him the satire in Latin literature had been true to its name, a sort of hotch-potch. The term covered equally the mixed verse and prose extravaganza of Petronius and the easy conversational sermons of Horace. But Juvenal was the outstanding, as he was the first, example of a truly great tragic Satirist. He carried the rhetorical form of Satire to the utmost limits of excellence. He was the first in whose work there shows no negligence, but rather an excess of elaboration. His diction is full, even to excess, of meaning, point and emphasis. Juvenal might seek to affiliate his work to Horace, but his real prototype is Lucilius ; with his moralist temper, his rhetorical training and his Stoic philosophy, Juvenal turned the easy-going Latin satura into a fixed verse form restricted, practically speaking, to the note of denunciation.
There is little humour in Juvenal, and what there is, is grim; there is less kindliness, though the helpless and dependent, the "homesick boy from the Sabine highlands," are sometimes treated more gently than the rest of the world. His most remarkable gift, apart from the blazing indignation with which all his work is suffused, and the terrific power and violence with which it is expressed, is his gift of presentation. The satires are studded with unforgettably vivid single sketches of various kinds : histori cal vignettes like that of Sejanus, characters hit off in a line or elaborately drawn, and scenes from everyday life that set the Rome of his day alive before us ; perhaps one should say, the Rome of his earlier days, for in the true temper of the satirist Juvenal fails to do justice to the improvements, at any rate in public life, that followed the bad times of Domitian.
Juvenal leaves a mixed impression, both as a poet and as a man. In neither capacity is it easy to feel affection for him, or to refuse him respect. His verse is powerful and well-constructed, true Silver Age Latin in its epigrammatic force and point, if often overstrained. It is superb rhetoric nearly always; hardly ever, perhaps, true poetry. Yet Pope himself never enriched a language with so many crisp, clean-cut phrases of the sort that pass inevitably into common use : nam quis custodiet ipsos Custodes? Mens sana in corpore sano: Nemo repente fuit turpis simus: Maxima debetur pueris reverentia: Panem et circenses: these are but a few. As the style, so the man; he is harsh but undeniably strong. Swinbume said that Juvenal knew what he hated, and that was tyranny and democracy; but this seems un duly limited. He hated nearly everything he saw, impartially; not only the vice and cruelty of his age, but its luxury, its art, its poetry, even its philosophy. He is a sort of Cato, cut off from public life and forced to express his combative nature in litera ture; what seem to us his most surprising lapses of judgment, his habit, for example, of placing at the head of a list of appalling crimes what is at worst an error of taste, all this is due to his intensely Roman feeling, his hatred of any degeneration from the old Roman standard of manliness and self-respect. He could cnly see the evil effects of Greek influence, and they blinded him to its humanising value.