Juvenal's Lesson

It's a strange bit of self-centered fact that each generation feels it lives in the best or worst of times. We haven't been any stupider or progressive (depending who you read or listen to) at any point in our history.

As one of history's greatest satirists, in Juvenal this picture is perfectly described in poetic prose. Juvenal spoke of Rome's many vices and virtues much as we do today for own times. Collectively, the west seems to have become jaded and cynical about many things. Politics seems so unhinged and the obsession with celebrity culture more perverse than ever; while personal integrity has been murdered to be buried along the Flaminian Way.

Not much is known about Juvenal. Whatever is known is subject to spirited debates among scholars but whatever his intentions were or his persona (deliberately or otherwise) may have been, Juvenal speaks to us in ways that beguile our minds in its starkness and accuracy.

To him, vices swirled all around him. Speak to a spiritual person and they will say as much of today. The forces of evil are slowly taking over as black angels roam the earth. Some days I feel that way. Life is too absurd and contradictory to not think this at times. Consider:

"In an age when each pimp-husband takes gifts from his wife's lover (if she can't inherit by law): and is adept at watching the ceiling, or tactfully snoring, still will wide awake, in his wine, will such things suffice?"

"If you want to be someone today, dare acts that could earn you prison or exile."

"Today every vice has its ruinous zenith."

"Who can sleep easy today? Avaricious daughters-in-law and brides are seduced for cash, schoolboys are adulterers."

These are quotes from Satire I (Why Satire?). Juvenal wrote sixteen satires. Satire II (Hypocritical Perverts) opens up with "Northward beyond the Lappsto the frozen Polar ice-cap is where I long to escape when I hear high moral discourse from raging queens who affect ancestral peasant virtues. An ignorant crowd, too, despite all those plaster busts of Stoic philosophers on display in their houses: intellectual perfection in their case means hanging up some original portrait - Aristotle, or one of the Seven Sages. Appearances are deceptive: every back street abounds with solemn-faced humbuggers. You're castigating vice, you, the most dyke among all our Socratic fairies?"

Talk about an indictment of posers and all things trendy. I can't help but think of Madonna and her Kabbalah escapades or any celebrity who hijacks into a new philosophical path. Empty is their spirit. If only they knew that a slight shifting of their minds was all they needed. At least in Juvenal's time people had a picture of Aristotle on the wall. Today, we don't even bother. Ari-who? It is much easier to parade along the highway of false idols.

Of course, Juvenal also takes his stabs at homosexuality. But it's hard to conclude if he attacks homosexuality per say or more the wanton deliberate descending into the act of sexual debauchery for its own sake. Did he feel homosexuality was a choice? Specifically, he mocked Emperors who legislated moral values but acted in complete lasciviousness.

Nonetheless, doesn't it ring true for contemporary society? Sure, Rome was different from today but the core of his message is universal. Makes you wonder if we have evolved at all. M'lord, had Juvenal been today might he have a ball? Or would it all be so obvious to him leaving him bored and disillusioned?

Juvenal was bitter, skillful and poignant. He was perhaps the most vulgar of all Roman satirists. When he spoke of virtue he harked to a simpler time when Rome was but a mere Republic. We do the same. We always look romantically back on a perceived simpler time. Rousseau spoke of the 'noble savage' but Juvenal beat him to the punch and we have proven to be utterly unoriginal on these utterances.

When one reads Juvenal the reader can't help but wonder if human history is circular. Or if it's linear with circular motions built along the line. Either way, man can create but his soul remains the same. The universal principle was the same then as it is today.

Juvenal reminds us that the world has its optimists and pessimists. How one sees the world is determined by this innate fact. Juvenal was not impressed by what he saw in Rome. His poems read like a long Lou Reed song in hexameter form. From whores to homosexuals and cross-dressers to the unbelievable hypocrisy of the aristocracy to 'gross greed' the song remains the same.

Finally. Juvenal once suggested to his friend Postumus to hang or drown himself or jump out of a window upon hearing that Postumus was to marry. The joke (?) has stuck around ever since. Only this time men drink beer, watch football and play pool while they do it.

Speaking of women, if men think that they don't make women like they used or that women of a previous generation were more virtuous consider once more one of Juvenal's rants.

About women of a 'Golden Age.' "Women suckled huge infants with their functional breasts and were often shaggier than their acorn-belching husbands." Good times, good times indeed. "Modern wives, on the other hand, have orgasms while watching homosexual dancers at the theater and become the groupies of musicians and gladiators. Nowadays a chaste wife is a rare bird on this earth, sort of like a black swan."

One must wonder just how Juvenal would have handled the cult of political correctness.

The irony of course is that Juvenal wrote in the 2nd century AD. A period in Rome's history that Gibbon described as "the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous."