SATIRE IX. Argument. No part of Juvenal's works has given such offence as this Satire; in which, he is accused of speaking too openly of that most execrable practice, in which the ancients, to their eternal shame, so freely indulged. Vice, as Pope has well observed, "Vice is a monster of so foul a mien, "That to be hated, needs but to be seen;" but we fear to strip her, and thus conceal half her enormity. Juvenal had no such apprehensions: he, therefore, exhibits her in all the deformity of nakedness, and the spectacle strikes us with disgust and horror. Far from him was the idea of corrupting the heart, of inflaming the passions, by a partial exposure of the profligacy he pretends to censure: no, his aim was direct, and his immediate purpose, to impress the minds of others with the same loathing he felt himself for a crime, which to name is to condemn. This is no place to enter into the disputes respecting the propriety of his object: granting it, however, to be legitimate, he will be universally allowed to have pursued it with no ordinary degree of dexterity and success. The Satire consists of a dialogue between himself and one Navolus, an enfranchised slave; a poor wretch, who, from a kind of jester or dabbler in small wit for a meal, had become what is called a man of pleasure; and thence, by a regular gradation, a dependant of some wealthy debauchee (here named Virro,) who made him subservient to his unnatural passions; and in return, starved, insulted, hated, despised, and discarded him! This miserable object Juvenal rallies with infinite spirit, on his disconsolate appearance; and, by an affected ignorance of the Rr cause, engages him to enter into a detailed account of his infamous life. The gravity with which this is done constitutes, in the opinion of Gibbon, the whole pleasantry of the Satire. Pleasantry is not the word. There is a loathsomeness in Navolus's part of the dialogue, which, though admirably calculated for the end our author had in view, never yet exsited one agreeable sensation; and, in that of Juvenal, a vein of keen and sarcastic ridicule, that may provoke indignation, but cannot create mirth. This, however, is far from being the only merit of the piece; it has many beautiful, and many moral passages, exclusive of the grand and important lesson, which, whether Juvenal meant it or not, it is our duty to gather from it; that a life of sin is a life of slavery, that those who embrace it for the sake of profit, are deluded in their expectations from day to day, till in age they sigh to be emancipated from that state of misery which they voluntarily adopted, and from which, while they view it with eyes of anguish and despair, they have no longer strength or resolution to fly therefore, in the words of Divine Wisdom, "they shall eat of the fruits of their own way, and be filled with their own devices." : SATIRE IX. v. 1-12. Juv. WHAT all amort, good Nævolus! O say, What time he trudg'd through every street in town, But seriously, (for thine's a serious case,) How came those sudden wrinkles in thy face? VER. 3. This copy of flay'd Marsyas ?] The story of Marsyas, who was overcome by Apollo in a musical contest, and afterwards flayed alive by him for his presumption, is known to every school-boy. Juvenal here alludes to a very celebrated statue of this baffled champion, which stood in the Forum, so that the comparison must have been sufficiently striking. VER. 7. Not Pollio, &c.] We find this liberal-hearted gentleman again in the eleventh Satire; but his circumstances do not seem to have improved in the interval, for he is there reduced to pawn his last article of value for a dinner. I knew thee once, a gay light-hearted slave, What dost thou with that dull, dead, wither'd look, Like some old debauchee, long ague-shook? All is not well within; for still we find The face the unerring index of the mind, And as this feels or fancies joys or woes, For late, as I remember, at all haunts At Isis, and at Ganimede's abodes, At Cybele's, dread mother of the gods, The face the unerring index of the mind,] So Ovid, in vultu pignora mentis habet: and Achilles Tatius more fully. O yap vas & poi doxes λeλexδοχει λελεχ θαι καλώς είναι αορατο το παρα παν· φαίνεται γὰρ ακριβως, ως εν κατοπρῳ, ε Tw wроowww. Am. Clit. lib. VI. VER. 31. At Isis, and at Ganimede's abodes, At Cybele's, &c.] This enumeration of temples consecrated to the purposes of debauchery, presents a frightful picture of the state of morals at Rome. It must be confessed, indeed, that the name of some of those deities, Nay, at chaste Ceres, (for at shame they spurn, Murmuring retired; wives, daughters, were thy own, NEV. Right and to some this trade has answer'd yet: But not to me; for what is all I get? A drugget cloak, to save my gown from rain, And a few pieces of the "second vein!" does not suggest the idea of much purity in their votaries: we need not, therefore, be greatly surprised at the use which was made of the temple of Ganimede, or of Cybele, or of Isis, who, as Ovid says, had made many women what she herself was to Jupiter: but that Ceres, the patroness of chastity, whose fillets it was unlawful for any suspected person to bind, or even to touch, that her temple should be prostituted to the same shameful purposes, sufficiently proves that the city must now have been in the last stage of depravity! This horrible desecration did not escape the notice of the first Christians, who speak of it with an indignant freedom, not unworthy of Juvenal himself. Ubi autem, says Minucius Felix, magis à sacerdotibus quam inter aras et delubra conducuntur stupra, tractantur lenocinia, adulteria meditantur? frequentiùs denique in ædituorum cellulis quam in ipsis lupanaribus flagrans libido defungitur! And Tertullian, whom he seems to have had in view, Cæterum si adjiciam, quæ non minus conscientia omnium recognoscent, in templis adulteria componi, inter aras lenocinia tractari, in ipsis plerumque ædituorum et sacerdotum tabernaculis, sub iisdem vittis, et apicibus, et purpuris, thure flagrante, libidinem expungi, &c. VER 43. of the "second vein!"] Venæque secundæ, i. e. says Grangæus, quod nostri non amplius argentum vocant, sed billon. Silver adulterated with brass below the standard; base metal, in short. |