What a sight it was, what a picture it would make, when the Gaetulian monster carried the one-
eyed commander.And the great man is finally dispatched in some famous lines:
finem animae, quae res humanas miscuit olim,
non gladii, non saxa dabunt nee tela, sed ille
Cannarum uindex et tanti sanguinis ultor
anulus. 1, demens, et saeuas curre per Alpes
ut pueris placeas et declamatio fias.(163-7)
Not swords, not stones or spears shall put an end to the life of this man who once threw human
affairs into confusion, but that punisher for Cannae and avenger for so much blood, a little ring.
Go, madman, run over the savage Alps, to become the schoolboys' favourite and become a subject
for declamation.This is magnificent rhetoric. The epigrammatic sententia which concludes the passage has an irony that embraces
not just the boys in school but, more subtly, the poet as well: for what is he doing himself with Hannibal if not
declaiming about him? The little word 'anulus', thin and scornful in its isolation at the beginning of a new line,
contrasts admirably with the slow massive rhythm of the line before. But characteristically, the metrical
technique serves a visual purpose as well: it is a little ring in which Hannibal kept poison ('anulus' is a
diminutive, a fact which in the context is felt), and we are made to see how small an object has put an end to so
great a life.
Juvenal is, indeed, a masterly observer, with a brilliant eye for the telling detail: a woman's ear-lobes pulled
downwards by the weight of the pearls worn on them (6.458f.), the wife whose infidelity is betrayed to her
husband by her glowing ears (11. 189), the soldiers' 'brawny calves drawn up to big benches' when their civilian
victim appears before the military court (16.14). Often this vividness is enhanced by a touch of fantasy, and
inanimate things are 'brought to life'. The windows seem to be watching the man rash enough to walk through
Rome by night (3.275); roast boar, piping hot, seems to be foaming like the living boar of Meleager (5. 115f.);
the figure on an equestrian statue seems to be in the act of aiming his lance (7. 128); a purse crammed with
money 'swells with its mouth stuffed full' just like a greedy human being (14. 138). Some of his grimmest
inventions are poetically suggestive, as in this picture of one of the emperor Domitian's councillors (4. 109 f):
'saevior illo/Pompeius tenui iugulos aperire susurro' ('Pompeius, more savage than he [Crispinus] at slitting
throats with his thin whisper'). The sinister sound of the verse matches the sinister compression of phrase which
assimilates the thin sound of the informer's whisper to the thin edge of the razor cutting through flesh. Juvenal
has often enough been praised as a satirist; he deserves to be more widely known for his powers of poetic
imagination.