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MARTIAL AND JUVENAL
relates from everyday life'. Likewise, the first satire recreates the world of
Martial. To quote from Townend again:
when Juvenal opens his first sketch of Roman life in i.23, he leaves no doubt that this
is Martial's scene, already several years, probably as much as twenty, in die past. Mevia,
Crispinus, Matho are all Flavian figures from Martial, as Massa and Carus are informers
from Domitian's last years, and die magni delator amici in line 33 can hardly be
other dien the great Regulus. Marius Priscus, die one apparent exception because his
prosecution falls in die year 100 under Trajan, is nonedieless a creature of Domitian's
reign, already in line for the proconsulate of Africa for 97/8, and perhaps actually
appointed before Domitian was murdered in September 96. What Juvenal is doing
in this section, and throughout the rest of the first satire, is to announce that his
material belongs to a previous generation but is still first-rate scandal, to be reproduced
widi mock horror, and enjoyed with gusto.
True, as far as concerns Martial, and Juvenal's immersion in the past. But given
Juvenal's fascination with bygone corruption, is he simply amoral, is his
horror merely false?
There has been much debate. Critics have differed, some claiming Juvenal
for a rhetorician, some for a social realist, others for a moralist — but not that
many for a satirist. 1 Some appear worried that his characters are dead: but that
hardly affects the issue. Given that his Rome is a recreation from the past, do
his writings simply amuse, or imply that life might be different? Do we require
a moral solution? Must his writings always be faithful? Ulrich Knoche, in his
book on Roman satire, goes some way — further than most critics — towards
answering these questions. Warning against the verisimilitude of Juvenal's
Rome, he remarks on his subjectivity yet his apparent lack of philosophic
commitment:
The individual case is usually raised to die level of die norm and for this reason die
individual picture itself is in turn raised to die monumental. The picture is meant to
be the direct expression of die poet's thought and opinion widi all their emotion and
fervour. In Juvenal diere is, generally speaking, no overlapping of pictures and
thought as is perhaps characteristic of Persius. But diere is an intensification of diought
through an extremely concentrated build-up of successive pictures in a step-by-step
process. Judgment as a rule results automatically from this without further deliberation
and then it almost seems as if Juvenal just records it. 2
Which, I think, is to say that there is no direct moral intervention, no evangelistic
design: the images are not informed by any obvious idea, the process of
1 H. A. Mason in Sullivan. (1963) 93—167, for instance, stresses the quality of rhetorical entertainment
in Juvenal, denying him moral concern, while Wiesen (1963) attempts to exculpate him from
the charge of moral anarchy by appeal to individual maxims; Green (1967), on the other hand, in the
preface to his translation, emphasizes the social aspect. An important study of rhetoric in Juvenal is
that by De Decker (1913).
2 Knoche tr. Ramage (1975) 151.
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