Page:Juvenal and Persius by G. G. Ramsay.djvu/38

 private life of the Rome of his day, and by the most caustic and trenchant invective seeks to shame her out of her vices. He was thus eminently fitted on the ground of personal experience to describe the manners of Imperial Rome at the period of her worst corruption, and long practice had put in his hands a weapon which enabled him to castigate them with matchless power and severity.

Juvenal's pictures are doubtless exaggerated; all brilliant rhetoric is more or less overstrained, and the peculiar doctrines of Stoicism naturally lent themselves to paradox and exaggeration. But apart from Stoicism, there are certain fundamental prejudices in Juvenal's mind which, though honestly entertained, and natural in one who was always looking back to the worthies of old Rome for examples, are pressed upon us with a frequency and an emphasis which seem excessive. His belief in the virtue of primitive times; his hatred of the foreigner, especially one coming from Greece and the East; his tirades against wealth and the wealthy, and his suggestion that wealth is always acquired by unworthy means; his laudation of mere poverty; his incapacity to see any object in trade except that of self-enrichment, or any value at all in humble or menial occupations, however useful to the community (Sat. iii. 71-2)—all these ideas belong to what we may call the old Roman part of Juvenal's prepossessions. They serve to account for the xxxiv