The Satires of Juvenal

SATIRE I.

ARGUMENT.

THIS Satire seems, from several incidental circumstances, to have been produced subsequently to most of them; and was probably drawn up after the author had determined to collect and publish his works, as a kind of Introduction.

He abruptly breaks silence with an impassioned complaint of the importunity of bad writers and a resolution of retaliating upon them; and after ridiculing their frivolous taste in the choice of their subjects, declares his own intentions to devote himself to Satire. After exposing the corruption of men, the profligacy of women, the luxury of courtiers, the baseness of informers and fortune-hunters, the treachery of guardians, and the peculation theft or embezzlement of public funds of officers of state, he censures the general passion for gambling, the servile rapacity of the patricians, the avarice and gluttony of the rich, and the miserable poverty and subjection of their dependents; and after some bitter reflections on the danger of satirizing living villainy, concludes with a resolution to attack it under the mask of departed names.

Must I always be a listener? Shall I never repay, though I have been so often vexed by the hoarse Theseis A poem about the hero Theseus. of Codrus? Shall that poet, therefore, recite his comedies and this one his Elegies with impunity? Shall one consume a day, another with impunity?