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MARTIAL AND JUVENAL
output of the later books. But his analysis is intelligent and approaches more
closely to Juvenal's general ethos than many more recent discussions: more
closely, for instance, than H. A. Mason's assessment, which finds no moral
centre, and unfairly condemns him through comparison with the confidence
of Johnson's unquestioned moral standards; or D. Wiesen's apologia, which
attempts vindication by appeal to moral apophthegms taken out of context. 1
Juvenal, it must be repeated, is a satirist, not a moralist. He does not record,
or pass immediate, obvious judgement: he creates, and closes in on chimaeras,
pretending uncertainty, to make us uncertain too. We are assaulted by the
attractions of vice, attractions that he has fabricated, but then we are refused
the prerogative of coming to a verdict. Seduced by the glamour of a world he
forces on us, we find our morals failing when we try to interpose objections:
for Juvenal will allow no absolutes, no self-satisfied ideals. Black honesty is
his only retort to our feeble cries for justice, yet somehow it unnerves us more.
Myths which nourished ancestors are exposed for what they are — easy and
insubstantial, the progeny of false rhetoric and poetic nostalgia. Vice and
corruption had shocked, or titillated before — but puritan answers were present,
in the shape of golden age myths and pastoral idylls. Utopianism had been the
keynote of much popular philosophy, 2 and the Romans with their sense of
original sin and collective guilt — their feeling that Romulus and Laomedon
had somehow mortgaged their innocence 3 — were inordinately disposed to
excuse their unwillingness, or inability, to reform by self-righteous identification
with caricatures of virtue, with honour now lost. Juvenal, by way of
answer, is negative, or at least assumes a negative posture, in order to question
the values that we vaunt, but sometimes more than that: for negativity on
occasions can redeem outworn ideals. Pretending to worthlessness, through
the persona of the perverted Naevolus, the querulous male prostitute of the
ninth satire, or through the indignant but ineffectual client of the first book,
Juvenal's way is to intimate that our golden age yearnings are literary, self-conscious
and futile, that his are being poisoned too, by the insufferable communal
worldliness, but that, because at least he has some insight, his own corruption
is less. Not an innocent, and perhaps, except for intimations, never one, Juvenal
takes hell as a given fact, as something banal; he is insistent but resigned,
sometimes persecuted, and yet he never grovels: there is no overt self-pity,
little pity for others except occasionally glimpsed — but then maybe that is
because it is he himself that suffers, with his regretful laughter and censorious
anger, far more than his unfeeling crowd. Yet although he will entertain no
solutions, he is not the monumental despairer, he never dabbles in ennui, he is
1 See above, p. 606 n. 1.
1 See Ferguson (1975) and the important collection of texts in Lovejoy and Boas (1935).
3 See Jal (1963) 406-11.
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