The Satires of Juvenal

informers; and his compositions were, therefore, secretly handed about among his friends. By degrees he grew bolder; and, having made many large additions to his first sketch—or perhaps having recast it entirely—he produced what is now called his seventh Satire, which he recited to numerous gatherings. The consequences were such as he had probably anticipated: Paris, informed of the part he played in it, was seriously offended and complained to the emperor, who, as the old account has it, sent the author away to Egypt with a military command as an easy kind of punishment. To remove such a man from his court must undoubtedly have been desirable to Domitian; and, as he was spoken of with kindness in that same Satire—which is entirely free from political allusions—the "facetiousness" (or irony) of the punishment (though Domitian's was not a facetious reign) makes the fact not altogether improbable.

Yet, when we consider that these reflections on Paris could scarcely have been published before 84 AD, and that the favorite was disgraced and put to death almost immediately after, we shall be inclined to doubt whether his banishment actually took place, or, if it did, whether it was of any long duration. That Juvenal was in Egypt is certain; but he might have gone there from motives of personal safety or, as Salmasius suggests, out of curiosity. However this may be, it does not appear that he was ever long absent from Rome, where a thousand internal marks clearly show that all his Satires were written. But whatever punishment might have followed the complaint of Paris, it had no other effect on our author than that of increasing his hatred of tyranny and turning his indignation upon the emperor himself, whose hypocrisy, cruelty, and licentiousness became, from that period, the object of his keenest reprobation (strong condemnation). He profited, indeed, so far by his danger or his punishment as to recite no more in public;