dead. For if Tigellinus is merely the disguise of another reigning favourite, it would be necessary to prove, in the first place, that Trajan had a favourite who had power to persecute; and impossible to prove, in the second place, that any danger of the kind, which may have existed, could be avoided by only admitting names whose owners had departed; for Tigellinus had been dead nearly forty years; and the warning implies that his name was a transparent pseudonym for some well-known character, whom Juvenal's public were certain to recognize as the evil genius of Trajan. If we suppose that the real Tigellinus was meant, the allusion to Crispinus, in v. 27, is no objection to the theory that most of the satire was written under Nero, who raised Crispinus to the senate, according to Probus, though his fortune culminated under Domitian.

The date of the Eighth Satire is yet more ambiguous. Besides the allusions already discussed to the Euphrates and the eagles which control the Batavian, we read (167-171) how Lateranus goes to drink in the tavern and feed with its greasy napkins, though he is of age for the wars of Armenia and Syria, for the defence of the river Danube and the river Rhine; old enough, in fact, to guarantee the security of Nero. Further on, at v. 193, the author speaks of his contemporaries as selling themselves to the stage and the arena, without a Nero to compel them; and at v. 221, we are informed that the musical tastes of Nero were the worst atrocity which called for the righteous vengeance of Vindex and Galba. Of course these last lines must have been written after Nero's death; and they explain the ambiguity of v. 198, where citharaedo principe, &c., must mean after an emperor had taken to music, what wonder that the nobility took to pantomime; for nullo cogente Nerone must be taken as a proof that the shameful devotion of men of rank to the stage was an effect which had survived its cause. Some old copyists seem to have felt citharaedo principe as a difficulty after Nero's death; hence the gloss natus, which has replaced mimus

in most MSS. It remains to explain the allusion to Lateranus, as of age to defend Nero, and the address to Rubellius Plautus or Blandus. In the first place, we may observe that the general and shameless relaxation of manners suits better with the age of Nero, than with that of Domitian, the reviver of the censorship; in the second place, Lateranus must obviously be a contemporary of Nero; in the third place, it is exceedingly improbable that the younger Blandus (if there ever was one) could be the child of an imperial mother; because if Plautus, like his father, had married into the imperial family, Tacitus would have mentioned it as an additional reason for the jealousy of Nero; and it is not likely that Juvenal would have confounded Plautus with his son. It would be less violent to suppose that Juvenal wrote Plaute under Nero, having taken offence at the seclusion, which Tacitus and his class admired; and afterwards, when preparing his satires for publication, decided on altering an obsolete apostrophe, but forgot to change the circumstances when he altered the name. this hypothesis seems complicated, it must be remembered that all the MSS. have Blande or Plance, while Plaute rests only on the high authority of Lipsius; that the hero of the second Dunciad, in addition to his own sins, has to endure much inappropriate invective due to the peculiar dulness of the hero of the first; and that what was possible to Pope in an elaborate work, was not impossible to Juvenal in a passing digression.

If

One piece of evidence still remains for notice,—the allusions in Martial to a Juvenal with whom he lived on terms of affectionate familiarity at Rome, when he published his Seventh Book (where the twenty-fourth epigram is addressed to Juvenal, and the ninety-first alludes to him), and who was still presumably at Rome as a restless suitor for preferment in the beginning of Trajan's reign, while Martial having given up the struggle, was enjoying the repose of his native Bilbilis (Mart. xii. 18. 1). As none of these epigrams contain any allusion to our Juvenal's career as a satirist, as the gentlemanly

mendicancy implied in the latest epigram is incompatible with the statement of the biographers that he could go on with the study of declamation for amusement till middle life, and with his own allusions to a modest competence; and as Juvenal himself says nothing of Martial, I am inclined to believe that there were two Juvenals who lived at Rome in the time of Martial.

On the whole, therefore, it is not impossible that Juvenal was born about 20 or 30 A.D., and lived into Trajan's reign, which would make him seventy or eighty years old at the condemnation of Marius Priscus,-the one date we are able to fix with confidence in the whole of Juvenal's life. He began to write in the last years of Nero, and probably had prepared most of the materials which he finally placed in the First and Eighth Satires, and perhaps the rough draughts of others, before he published the little jeu d'esprit on the actor Paris. Before A.D. 84, he had poems enough completed to be published, with the enlarged version of Satire VII., now pointed against the favourite of Domitian, who had just been sacrificed to the jealousy of his master. In that year he was banished to Egypt, probably for six months, and there witnessed the savage outbreak of fanaticism, which is recorded in the Fifteenth Satire. He returned to Rome in a state of suppressed indignation against the tyrant who had appropriated a doubtful compliment to a fallen favourite as a reflection on his own good government, while he had entirely disregarded the decorous homage to himself, with which the satire opens. After Domitian's death, he relieved himself in the Fourth Satire, which, on this hypothesis, must be taken to prove that, like Landor, he retained his energy as well as his malice late; for he must have been nearly seventy, and may have been nearly eighty, when Domitian died. His own death I am inclined to place early under Trajan's reign; for there is no distinct allusion to Trajan's victories, which would have been quite in place in the Eighth Satire, or in the Fourteenth, where, on the contrary, he implies (v. 193) that

a

frontier hostilities of the most paltry kind afford the only chance of military distinction. Nor is it likely that he undertook any fresh satire under Trajan, except perhaps the Sixteenth, which would suit very well with a time when a little military insolence was the most serious evil which a satirist with failing powers could select for attack.

From this sketch, it appears that Juvenal must have been from five and twenty to thirty years in writing sixteen satires, one a fragment; and the difficulty is not greatly diminished, if we take the second Junius and Fonteius; for even then his literary activity must be made to extend from the death of Domitian to at least 120 A.D. Nor can we assume that Juvenal wrote slowly, because he wrote in a laboured style; for Statius, whose style is far more laboured, has left it on record that he finished poems as long as most of Juvenal's satires in two or three days. It is safer to remember the busy idleness in which a Roman gentleman passed his life at the capital, and the lazy leisure of the country holidays, which is indicated by Horace's Epistles, and the Eleventh Satire of Juvenal, and to conclude that the main business of Juvenal's life was to live, and that his satires were only occasional ebullitions of an indignation, not without intervals and consolations. "Facit indignatio versum" is his own motto; and indignation is not a permanent motive for exertion, since it is generally mixed with contempt; for there cannot be a better excuse for indolence than scorn of the only activity in which it is possible to take part. Our own Gifford was often invoked to lash the vices and follies of the age, but sensibly concluded that it was not worth while to be always in hot water for the sake of an age which needed so much lashing.

More light is thrown by Juvenal's writings on his character than on his history. Like Molière and Aristophanes, he endeavoured to combat vice by consecrating prejudice; and his character might be determined by a list of the prejudices which he wished to erect as bulwarks against the torrent of corruption. Like other satirists, he

knows no higher ideal than the "honest man." If he presents this ideal in a duller form than usual, the fault may be excused by the depressing circumstances of his time; and no satirist has to answer for fewer attacks on what is really valuable. Aristophanes contributed directly to the condemnation of Socrates; Molière devoted one of his best comedies to the sanctity of passing conventionalities; another to the indelibility of social distinctions; another to the utter ineptitude of female culture. The worst that can be laid to the charge of Juvenal is a somewhat exaggerated regret for the old obsolete life of the Sabine farmer, where the men of the family worked all day in the fields, and came home to a huge bowl of porridge, while the women kept their hands coarse and their hearts clean by spinning; and everybody was convinced, without quite knowing what purple was, that it was something wicked and outlandish. This antiquated patriotism leads to a somewhat ungrateful affectation of owing nothing to the cosmopolitan culture of Stoicism, to which Juvenal was really indebted for popularizing his effective commonplaces on education and humanity, remorse, and prayer. It does not excuse his ingratitude, that the Stoics were guilty of teaching that the Wise Man was a citizen of the world, and so of aggravating the liberality of the imperial system, which disgusted Juvenal by allowing foreigners as good a career at Rome, as the sons or fosterlings of native freedmen. Other instances of his provincial narrowness are to be found in his reluctance to allow women to have an opinion on the comparative merits of Homer and Virgil, and in the unintelligent fervour of his denunciation of Nero's performances as a musician and charioteer. The test of provincialism is, that it is transitory. We should be shocked if a member of our aristocracy were to sing in public, except for a charity; but we should see no objection to his rowing in a public race, or belonging to a four-in-hand club; while to an American, the field sports, on which we pride ourselves, appear as barbarous as boxing.

It would carry us too far to investigate how much of this