on display. Juvenal, by contrast, reveals very little of himself. His voice is exceedingly distinctive, but we learn
next to nothing of the man behind it. The combination of impersonality and distinctive timbre recalls Lucretius;
and it is again Lucretius whom of all Roman poets he most resembles in his blend of satiric sharpness with the
grand manner. Many details of style and allusion show that the poet who most influenced him, surprising as it
may at first seem, was Virgil, echoes of whom he sometimes uses to point an ironic contrast between the
imaginary worlds of heroic or pastoral poetry and the ugly realities of the present time. Though he pays lip-
service to the memories of Lucilius and Horace in his first satire, they seem to have made no substantial
impression on his verse.
Much ink has been spilled on the question whether Juvenal was a genuine moralist or an opportunist who did not
care what his target was, provided he could make a poem out of it; but the whole debate is to some extent
misconceived. Though in a few of his later (and generally weaker) satires he assumes a high moral tone, he is for
the most part concerned to excoriate human behaviour not for being wicked but for being sordid, vulgar, or
disgusting. He is above all a social observer, who combines exactness of observation with imagination. We do
not turn to him for wisdom, and he did not intend that we should.
In his first satire Juvenal presents himself as almost overwhelmed by the chaos of his own impressions; and the
sixth, a diatribe against the female sex almost 700 lines long, is (by design, we may suppose) a vast ramshackle
edifice in which women are assailed for every vice from promiscuity to artiness, and even for being tediously
virtuous. But he also liked to organize his satires along a particular line of argument illustrated by a mass of
examples, a technique borrowed from the declaimers. Thus Satire 8 opens with the words 'What is the use of
family trees?', and the entire poem argues the vanity of noble birth. Even the sixth satire is strung along a thread
of this kind, however loosely: the poet purports to be giving an acquaintance the reasons for not marrying. This
technique is seen at its most impressive in the tenth satire. 'What should a man pray for?' is the theme, and
Juvenal passes one by one over the traditional objects of human aspiration- power, fame, conquest, long life,
beauty-exposing the vanity of each by a succession of illustrations from history, mythology, and Roman life:
Sejanus, Cicero, Hannibal, Alexander, Priam are all paraded before the reader's eyes.
Juvenal's favourite line of attack is to display things exactly as they are: to refuse to be deceived, as he sees it, by
ideas and abstractions. What is military glory, with its processions of captured weaponry and triumphal arches, if
you simply look at it? Juvenal gives us the answer (10. 133-6): 'The spoils of war, a corslet fastened to a stump
as a trophy, a cheek-piece hanging from a broken helmet, a yoke shorn of its pole, the flagstaff of a captured
trireme and a sad prisoner at the top of an arch ...' Broken objects and wretched humanity-that is all there is to
see, if one looks with Juvenal's dispassion.
In similar spirit, the first question that he asks about Hannibal is how much does his dust now weigh; the solid,
physical world is what concerns him. And Hannibal's ambition-to ride in triumph through Rome-is viewed with
the same harsh literalism: he wanted to plant his standard in the Subura, a shabby and crowded part of the city.
The Carthaginian general had lost an eye, and he rode upon an elephant (a 'Gaetulian beast'). Juvenal puts these
facts together, considers the picture that they make (notice the words 'fades' and 'tabella') and ends up with a
vision both strange and ludricous:
o qualis fades et quali digna tabella
cum Gaetula ducem portaret belua luscum.(157 f.)