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MARTIAL AND JUVENAL
selection is apparently random and objective, but at root intensely personal.
Emotion is lavished on the object, not on its significance. Juvenal is possessive
with his material, but will not arrange it into easy patterns or expected sermons;
and so he abandons the precedent of Horace, with all his disguising irony, and
the methods of Persius, for whom reality was a web of Stoic prohibitions and
ideals. To quote from Knoche again:
He confronts monstrous depravity, "which he identifies everywhere, bravely and
boldly as an individual. He is not the man to take refuge in the realms of mythology
as so many other poets of the time did. He identifies anger and indignation as the
driving forces of his satiric poetry, and these are genuine and strong. It is not fair
either to Juvenal's attitude or to his poetic achievement to brush him off as a declaimer,
for as such he would not be part of his subject, and •what he had to say would have
only a virtuoso value. Juvenal's poetry aims at being a personal creed, and the poet
is always directly concerned with his subject. Actually, he could be criticised for an
excess of inner commitment rather than the opposite. The subject matter, as a matter
of fact, takes him prisoner, and he hardly ever has the power to separate himself from
it and to raise himself above it. This is the powerful source of his descriptive strength,
but it is also probably the main reason that Horace's joy in understanding, especially
understanding the weaknesses of his fellow man, is missing in him, as is the ironic
laughter which finds its high point in the amiable self-irony of the earlier satirist.
From this outlook of his Juvenal gathers the power to praise and condemn without
compromise, the right to make everything either black or •white. Attempts have been
made to deny him this right also, since it has been asserted that he lacked any ideal
that had to be based on philosophical principles. Certainly, while the influence of
popular moral philosophy, especially that with a Stoic direction, on Juvenal's satires
may be indisputable, a philosopher the poet most certainly was not, and he himself
rejected a commitment to philosophy. But a guiding principle is by no means missing
from his judgments on this account.
His opinion is firmly and clearly determined by his wide practical experience and
his respect for the old Roman traditions; he clings firmly to these. And since the life
of his time ran directly contrary to these ideals, because he also recognised the impossibility
of bringing the old values into play again generally, and because, moreover,
all of this appeared to him to be natural necessity arising from the human plan, he had
to pass unilateral judgment, and frequently with a sharpness and accentuation 'which
from the modern point of view does not always completely suit the subject. This,
however, is no declamatio (declamation), but in spite of all the strangeness in the
individual instance, the indignation is always genuine and sincere. Here is where the
essential point of this brittle poetic personality with its fundamental pessimism lies.
Of course, personal disillusionment and bitterness may have had a part to play in
shaping his conception of life, but this determines the degree of his censure, not its
subject matter and direction.'
Knoche's position is possibly too simple: Juvenal can be more distanced and
less positive than he suggests; nor does he take into account the less abrasive
1 Ibid, IJO-I.
607
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