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MARTIAL AND JUVENAL
Faustinas' villa at Baiae, Bassus, has no fruitless spaces of open land, laid out with
idle myrtles, sterile planes or boxwood hedges, but is happy with real country and
uncultivated land. . .
inspires as little enthusiasm as Statius' occasional poems, with which it has
obvious affinities. 1 Another example of such dalliance with the Muse, wellwritten
but unconvincing, is the thirtieth epigram of Book 10:
o temperatae dulce Formiae litus,
uos, cum seueri fugit oppidum Martis
et inquietas fessus exuit curas
Apollinaris omnibus locis praefert.
non ille sanctae dulce Tibur uxoris
nee Tusculanos Algidosue secessus
Praeneste nee sic Antiumque miratur;
non blanda Circe Dardanisue Caieta
desiderantur, nee Marica nee Liris
nee in Lucrina lota Salmacis uena.
O well-climed Formiae, pleasant shore, you, when he escapes austere Mars' town
and weary sheds unquiet cares, Apollinaris prefers to every spot. Not so highly does
hepri^e his chaste wife's dearest Tibur, the retreats ofTusculum or Algidus, Praeneste
or Antium; not so deeply does he miss the charming headland of Circe and Trojan
Caieta, or Marica or Liris, or Salmacis bathed in the Lucrine stream.
Anyone could have written that: and twenty lines follow in the same tedious
vein. But, for the most part, he adheres to epigram's prevalent ethos, of
rhetorical point and cynical comment, couched in everyday speech.
Juvenal, as "we have seen, is less obedient to the rules of his genre and sometimes
even anarchic, his language a medley of high and low, his tone contemptuous,
and, in any normal sense of the words, unconstructive, negative.
Tragedy no longer capped life in its horrors: hence his self-granted permission
to depart from the canons of Horace and Persius — his deliberate resort from
the pedestrian muse to upper reaches trodden as yet only by schoolboys and
bards. He tells us in the preface to his programmatic satire that so far he has
only listened — to bombastic recitations, to the nonsense of the schools. Yet
he too has the training: so why spare the paper any longer? And since life is
now so ghastly, why not be immodest and depart from prior tradition? 2 Irony,
too urbane and content a device, is replaced by malevolent verbal extravagance,
and an arch and vengeful stance. His arena is that of Lucilius, depicted as
a charioteer, then later as a warrior: the inventor of the genre would hardly have
agreed to the pretensions of the portrait. And in tone as in style the sweeping
1 For Statius' Silvae, see above, pp. 561—72.
1 See in particular i.iff., I5ff., and the comments of Bramble(1974) 164—73, on the first satire's
implications that the style should now be high.
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