TESTIMONIALS

OF ANCIENT WRITERS

CONCERNING JUVENAL.

M. Fabius Quintilian, Book 1 of the Institutio Oratoria, ch. 1.

THERE are those who are famous today, and who will also be named in the future.

Martial, Book 7, Epigram 23.

To what, with my Juvenal, do you attempt to commit me?
What will a treacherous tongue not dare to say?
If you were to invent a crime, Orestes would hate Pylades:
Love would have deserted Theseus from Pirithous, etc.

And Book 12, Epigram 18.

While you, perhaps, wander restless,
Juvenal, in the clamorous Suburra,
Or wear down the hill of the mistress Diana:
While the toga, dripping with sweat, fans you
As you pass through the doorways of the powerful,
And the Greater and Lesser Caelian hills wear you out:
I have been received by my Bilbilis, proud in gold
And iron, which has made me rustic
After many repeated Decembers.

Ammianus Marcellinus, History, Book 28.

Some people, detesting doctrines as if they were poisons, read Juvenal and Marius Maximus with more careful study, handling no volumes other than these in their deep leisure.

From the Poem of C. Sollius Apollinaris Sidonius, which is to Magnus Felix the Consul.

Not he who in the time of the second Caesar
Dwelt in Tomi in eternal guilt;
Nor he who, by a similar fate thereafter,
To the thin breeze of the shouting mob
Was an exile of an angry actor.

To these add Julius Scaliger, who judges Juvenal thus in his Poetics:

Juvenal is sincere and easily the Prince of Satirists. For his verses are far better than those of Horace: his thoughts are sharper, and his phrasing more open.