Page:Juvenal and Persius by G. G. Ramsay.djvu/41

 Juvenal was no politician; he never casts an eye on the political conditions of his day. He is as blind as Persius to the effects on Roman life and character of the loss of public freedom. Though a passionate admirer of the Republican heroes ot old Rome, he never expends a sigh upon the downfall of the Republic; he has none of the belated and despairing republicanism which inspires the sonorous hexameters of Lucan. He does not hesitate to dwell on the crimes and vices of individual emperors; but he accepts their rule as a matter of course. He never connects the autocratic character of the government with the degradation of the Roman people which he deplores. He is essentially the moralist of private life; perhaps the only distinctly political observation that can be discovered in his satires is when he declares that Rome was free in the day's when she called Cicero the "Father of his Country";

Sed Roma parentem, Roma palrem patriae Ciceronem libera dixit. (viii. 243-4.) 



The classical passage on Roman Satura is to be found in Quintilian, ''Inst. Orat.'' X. i. 93-95;—

Satura quidem tota nostra est, in qua primus inisignem laudem adeptus Lucilius quosdam ita deditos sibi adhuc xxxvii