Portrait Of A Woman from Roman Egypt (first half of second century A.D.). Juvenal's denunciation of women in
his sixth satire includes scathing references to female self-adornment, such as the wearing of emerald necklaces,
heavy pearl ear-rings, and make-up.
His contemporary Tacitus remarks (Ann. 4. 32), 'nobis in arto et mglorius labor' ('Mine is a narrow and
inglorious task'). We catch a similarly self-contemptuous note in the poet; we are often reminded of Juvenal's
claim that 'indignatio' inspired his verse, less often of the context in which that claim was made:
si natura negat, facit indignatio uersum
qualemcumque potest, quales ego uel Cluuienus.(1-79f.)
If nature denies, scorn makes such verses as it can-such as I write or Cluvienus.In other words, the kind of verse that scorn produces is poor stuff. Yet both the poet and the historian, we may
feel, protest too much. Tacitus would not really prefer, as he pretends, to be relating the glorious deeds of the
Roman republic: the very bleakness and narrowness of his subject have a poetic grandeur of a novel kind. The
same moral may be applied to Juvenal: his bitter, grating voice and narrowness of theme are not at odds with the