Juvenal Satires: Book IV

229 Pages·2016·2.302 MB·English

by  John Godwin

Aris and Phillips Classical Texts
JUVENAL
Satires
BOOK 4
Edited with an introduction,
translation and commentary by
John Godwin

To Heather
uxori dilectissimae
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© J. Godwin 2016
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Front cover: Dancer, detail of mosaic from the Domus of Stone Carpets, Ravenna.
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CONTENTS
Preface vii
Introduction 1
Juvenal Satires 21
Satire 10 22
Satire 11 44
Satire 12 56
Commentaries 64
Satire 10 64
Satire 11 137
Satire 12 181
Bibliography 208
Index 215

PREFACE
Juvenal wrote some of the most famous phrases in Latin. He was the one
who asked us ‘who guards the guards?’ and he it was who coined the
contemptuous phrase ‘bread and circuses’. He depicts life in the teeming
heat of imperial Rome, making us see, hear and smell the world around him
with the vividness of a great writer, and he deploys arguments to colour
our attitudes towards his material with all the fiery eloquence of an orator.
His attitudes are not politically correct – indeed his views on race, gender
and class would probably have him arrested if he were writing them now
in English – and yet he writes it all with such comic verve and articulacy
that we cannot help wondering just how seriously he means any of this.
His Latin sometimes reads as if it were spat onto the page with impetuous
venom, and yet there is nothing random about the way he uses the Latin
language and the way he uses the hexameter metre in which he composed.
We know little about his life, but that matters little when we have a text as
glowing with fire, energy and elegance as this to work on.
Juvenal’s early work makes him come across as a raging, sneering
underdog, but there is a definite shift in poetic attitude between this ranting
voice of Satires 1–6 (Books 1–2) and the later poetry. This more measured,
philosophical work forces us to reconsider our desires, face our realities
and perhaps be more content with our lot, without losing any of the energy
and the élan of the earlier work – along with his ability to persuade and to
entertain. This is the poet we meet in the later books (3, 4 and 5) and the
purpose of this present volume is to try to help readers to understand the
ideas being discussed and also to appreciate the literary quality of the Latin
in which these ideas are expressed. The commentary is keyed to the English
translation and I have attempted to make the explanations comprehensible
(wherever possible) to readers who have little (or even no) Latin. This
is something of an impossible task of course – poetry of its very nature
demands to be read and re-read in the original, and Juvenal is no exception
to this rule – but my hope is that even those with little Latin may – with the
help of the facing translation – be able to work out what is going on in the
text and see from the commentary some of the ways in which this poetry is
worth studying and enjoying.
viii Preface
I am indebted to all those giants of scholarship who have trodden this path
before me: I have consulted constantly the commentaries of Bracci, Braund,
Courtney, Duff, Ferguson, Mayor, and Rudd and found them inspiring and
informative in equal measure. I have enjoyed the assistance of Professor
Susanna Morton Braund, Dr Fred Jones and Mr Martin Thorpe: above all
I have had the unstinting editorial help of Professor Chris Collard who has
read the whole manuscript from cover to cover: it has gained hugely from
his perceptive eye for detail and his remarkable ear for poetry. All mistakes
which remain are (alas) my own.
JG
Shrewsbury August 2015
INTRODUCTION
I. What is satire?
Satire is a peculiar genre. It purports to tell its audience things which the
audience ought to hear, in the manner of an old-testament prophet, but it
does so with jeering mockery more in the manner of a stand-up comedian.
The satirist, it could be said, sounds like a moralist in a bad mood with a
good sense of humour. The genre is often intensely conservative, deploring
any changes in society and manners and longing for the good old days:
equally it often preaches the delights of the idyllic country life to an audience
living in the city and is a predominantly urban art-form. It rails against the
topsy-turvy world where the first are last and the last are first, where the ex-
slaves, the chalk still on their feet from the slave-market, are running Rome
while the scions of old Roman families go begging to upstart freedmen.
Satire often seem to be urging a return to decency in an age of decadence,
decrying luxury and greed and appealing for old-style austerity of life and
behaviour. Its targets are traditionally folly (where people are misguided in
their choices), and vice (where they deliberately outrage public morals): but
above all it loves to unmask the hypocrite who affects virtue while indulging
his real vices in private. Satire in all its forms is a literary genre – or even
a ‘supergenre’ in that it envelops and exploits all other available genres, as
Jones argues1 – but satire in verse is especially self-conscious of its own status
as an art-form and uses poetry to mock poetry, debunking poetic affectation
with its own brand of poetic parody but not above using poetic language to
enhance the vividness of the scene being described. It claims moral high
ground but also speaks commonly from the worm’s eye view of the common
man, engaging in inverted snobbery whereby the rich and powerful are
pathetic and vice-ridden while the poor lad from the hills is a finer specimen
of humanity: satire disapproves of sexual immorality and lavish luxury but
describes these vices in prurient lip-smacking terms which suggest that
the poet is rather enjoying his disapproval. It places itself with one foot
in the camp of ‘truth-telling’ and another in the camp of ‘entertainment’,
as famously epitomised in Horace’s (Satires 1.24) description of himself
as ‘telling the truth with a smile’ (ridentem dicere uerum). It differs from
1 See Jones (2007) 153–54.