Forum / Juvenal Today, Tomorrow, the Day after Tomorrow

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    strannikov
    Jul 27, 03:10pm

    The career of the Roman satirist Juvenal flourished in the first third of the second century of the Common Era.

    If you have heard of Juvenal in spite of your exposure (prolonged or truncated) to the institution of American public education, you might also be acquainted with the content of his first satire, as the numeration of his Latin texts has come to us across the intervening nineteen centuries.

    The theme of Juvenal’s first satire is stated succinctly in line 30 of the text that has survived: “difficile est saturam non scribere”, which even an imbecile product of American public education can somewhat readily translate as “it is difficult not to write satire” (the resort to italics within the proffered translation can be construed as an orthographic pun).

    If not writing satire was a difficult task nineteen centuries ago—as Romans were beginning to approach the middle of their Imperial Era—it is manifestly impossible not to write satire in the United States in the middle of the third decade of the twenty-first century of the Common Era, as the institutional shambles, petty public squabbles, widespread corruption, ceaseless influence jockeying, and shameless self-promotion typical of the late Roman Republic assail with full force and fury the American Republic in its decline approaching the end of its Constitutional era (we might also cite the unabashed worship of Mammon typical of the opening century of the Roman Empire): all the more odd, then, that we see so little literary satire being produced or published these days. (The imbecile product of American public education in these latter days would be obliged to investigate the career of the earlier Roman satirist Lucilius to gain appreciation for the intensity of the scathing tones, the incisive substance and content of satiric treatment, and the apt choices of satiric targets found in Juvenal’s satires.)

    We may soon be reminded of the relevance of these disparate facts courtesy of whatever pageantry our able historians and academic custodians of literature might care to perpetrate. The tricentennial of the publication of arguably the greatest prose satire composed in the English language (English being another of Latin’s linguistic descendants at least as much as England fashioned itself to become a direct political descendant of the Roman Empire) will arrive in October 2026, should the planet endure through whatever aggravations Technogenic Climate Change might bring in the interim or through whatever threats and perils might be posed by the advent of artificial and augmented intelligences (much more gifted intellectually and more ruthless than their artificers, we may learn).

    Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels will be the deserving subject of literary festivities and celebrations through the end of 2026, which would merit frank acknowledgment of the travesties perpetrated by Disney cartoon productions and by defective and anemic television adaptations across recent decades. We might hope that the entire scope of Swift’s satiric literary output will enjoy at least a few new sales of fresh or existing editions and will gain at least a few hundred if not a few thousand new readers, to the negligible extent that English and British literary history continues to be observed or studied on either side of the Atlantic.

    Perhaps possibly maybe, we might be able to measure by the end of 2026 the success of the celebration of Swift’s magnificent satire in order to learn whether those festivities will have stimulated sales of new translations or new editions and new readerships of Juvenal’s sixteen able satires and whether, incidentally, products of a new and overdue industry in apt, incisive, measured, and suitably savage contemporary satire will have begun to emerge, given the numerous and conspicuous satiric targets of woeful human ambition, befuddlement, corruption, decadence and depravity, envy and errancy, flattery and felony, gullibility and grotesquerie, haughtiness and hideousness, idiocy, ignorance, and inanity thriving in the world today, waiting to be diagnosed and treated by able, attentive, and caring satirists. (Surely by October 2026 we will not have stumbled into a new era of graceful etiquette and courteous manners, one in which the bland civilities and stylish observations of Horace’s satires could do much good or attract much notice—satires that would hardly leave a toothmark, with venom far too weak to leave a lasting blister. While Swift could dabble in Horatian mode in his day, when polite society could be said still to be just barely hanging on, our age surely merits or demands the venom, the vigor, and the vitriol of the satires of Juvenal, packaged and delivered cask-strength with Lucilian brio.)

    Inasmuch as it was Juvenal who coined the enduring locution “panem et circenses” (“bread and circuses”—“bread and games” or “bread and races”, at the translator’s discretion) in his Satire X (“The Vanity of Aspirations”, c. 120 to 125 CE) to name the substance of Rome’s imperial administration of domestic affairs: let the games begin, with or without the crumbs.

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