Juvenal: Satires

also natural, for the earlier bitterness and liveliness of feeling had given way to the cooler way of life and experience of a man; the poet lacks, as it were, the patience for deepening and for entering into the satirical theme, and he contents himself with a satirical introductory or concluding remark¹).

§ 19.

Regarding the two last satires of the entire collection, it is impossible to give a certain judgment. As certain as it is that the fifteenth satire was composed after the year 127, its tendency remains enigmatic. The darkness that previously lay over the fragment of the sixteenth satire is now somewhat illuminated. It is certain that in the Pithoeanus the most important manuscript of Juvenal, the final verse stands on the last page of a quaternion and that there is no subscription at the end, which is otherwise never missing at the end of the other books¹). Therefore, one or two leaves must have been lost after the last quaternion, which contained the remaining larger part of the satire. It is only remarkable that all manuscripts of the second class, whose original manuscript goes back to the fifth century, also lack the same part of the satire. This phenomenon can only be explained by the fact that the archetype of our Pithoeanus was already just as mutilated in the fourth century and that the editors of the archetype of the second class had no other manuscript before them than the archetype of the Pithoeanus or a similar, in any case incomplete, copy²).

§ 18.

1. We do not know, however, whether Juvenal did not have models here as well, perhaps in Lucilius; cf. on 11, 56—63. Satire allowed itself strange freedoms in composition. Such magnificent and closed poems as Horace, Satire I 9, II 1, 8, 6, 5 are also rare in Horace; most satires of the first book, especially I 1, 2, 3, 6, 10, show a rather loose structure.

§ 19.

1. Cf. R. Beer, Spicilegium Iuvenalianum [Gleanings on Juvenal] 47. 2) It was not uncommon in the Middle Ages to precisely reproduce the copies in their external form according to the original. If the archetype was written in uncials, the Pithoeanus could be rewritten in Carolingian minuscule without the number of quaternions and the number of verses on each page being changed; only a smaller format was chosen for the copy. If, incidentally, the Nicene recension corrected a copy of the Pithoean original manuscript, then most changes will probably be based on conjecture; it is, however, still possible that a text less distorted by scribal errors was at hand, so that not all deviations from the Pithoeanus necessarily have to be arbitrary changes.