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MARTIAL AND JUVENAL
tives, Grecisms, words from the lower literary strata — these have the function of
insisting on reality, and when they are placed next to grandiloquent language,
what often greets us is a sense of dislocation, a feeling that there is a gap
between life as it might be and life as it is.' Satire 4 is a case in point, where, with
admirable control, Juvenal manipulates the associations of epic, and the silly
business about the catching of the fish, in order to impress us with the notion
that Rome is sick, unworthy of the pompous assumptions with which she
hides her weakness. Epicisms here are at one and the same time cynical and
positive: cynical because the trappings are vain, mere cloaks for deformity,
but positive in that the language employed to describe them looks back to
earlier days when Rome could take pride in an empire. Juvenal constantly
belabours us with military and imperial allusion, contrasting it with diction
which pinpoints cold realities. He begins with a preamble about Crispinus and
a mullet: if an upstart Egyptian can spend so much on a fish, what should we
expect when it comes to the tastes of the master of the world? The high style
first appears when Crispinus buys his fish:
mullum sex milibus emit,
aequantem sane paribus sestertia libris,
ut perhibent qui de magnis maiora loquuntur. (4.15—17)
He bought a red
Mullet for sixty gold pieces — ten for each pound weight,
To make it sound more impressive.
Soon, Crispinus and the fish are put into perspective by the use of ordinary
language:
hoc tu,
succinctus patria quondam, Crispine, papyro?
hoc pretio squamas?
Did you pay so much for a fish, Crispinus, you who once
Went around in a loin-cloth of your native papyrus?
Through the delayed and unexpected gibe in papyro, and the bald realism of
squamas, the pretence is undermined. But better is to come, in the passage of
transition from Crispinus to Domitian, where low and high language meet,
to remind us of what Rome should be, and thereby indict the sordid actualities
that are hidden by mere names:
qualis tune epulas ipsum gluttisse putamus
tnduperatorem, cum tot sesertia, partem
exiguam et modicae sumptam de margine cenae,
purpureus magni ructauit scurra Palati;
iam princeps equitum, magna qui uoce solebat
uendere municipes fracta de merce siluros? (4.28—33)
1
For Juvenal's diction, see in particular Anderson (1961) 51—87; also id. (1957) 33—90.
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