Kenney_and_Clausen B.M.W.(eds.) - Get a Free Blog

MARTIAL AND JUVENAL
image of the rusticus infans. Likewise his recommendation of a house out in the
provinces turns into a miniature satire of the values supposedly espoused:
hortulus hie puteusque breuis nee reste mouendus
in tenues plantas facili diffunditur haustu.
uiue bidentis amans et culti uilicus horti.
unde epulum possis centum dare Pythagoreis. (3.226—9)
A garden-plot is thrown in
With the house itself] and a well with a shallow basin —
No rope-and-bucket work when your seedlings need some water.
Learn to enjoy hoeing, work and plant your allotment
Till a hundred vegetarians could feast off its produce.
Horace, too, had his joke about the vegetarian Pythagoreans. But Juvenal is
more abrasive, and there is worse to come:
est aliquid, quocumque loco, quocumque recessu
unius sese dominum fecisse lacertae. (3.230—1)
It's quite an achievement, even out in the backwoods,
To have made yourself master of, well, say one lizard, even.
The joke about the lizard is rather weak, but the procedure is quite typical:
a Parthian shot let loose, at the very end of a section, at a set of ideas which
have hitherto been promoted. Towards the close of the satire we find the same
technique, but employed with less bad taste:
qua fornace graues, qua non incude catenae?
maximus in uinclis ferri modus, ut timeas ne
uomer deficiat, ne marrae et sarcula desint.
felices proauorum atauos, felicia dicas
saecula, quae quondam sub regibus atque tribunis
uiderunt uno contentam carcere Romam. (3.309—14)
Our furnaces glow, our anvils
Groan everywhere under their output of chains and fetters.
Thai's where most of our iron goes nowadays: one wonders
Whether ploughshares, hoes and mattocks may not soon be obsolete.
How fortunate they were {you may well think), those early
Forbears of ours, how happy the good old days
Of kings and tribunes, when Rome made do with one prison only.
Deliberate scurrility is absent from the passage: but even though the echoes
of Virgil in the lines about the farm implements produce a moral insistence on
the virtues of agriculture — albeit that in Virgil it was epic swords, not mean,
ignoble fetters, that were forged from the innocent ploughshare 1 — there is
treachery afoot in Juvenal's parting gesture, in the cynical suggestion that
even Rome's heroic days harboured a few criminals.
1
Virg. Geo. i.5o6f. and Aen.
620
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