Dryden on Horace and Juvenal
- Dryden on Horace and Juvenal
Associate Professor of Classics, University College, University of Toronto
notes
1. Modern scholars agree with him in rejecting the derivation from the Greek satyroi, hut there is less certainty about the original connection with the Latin satur meaning “full,” though this was the standard Roman theory.
2. One small point is rather puzzling. On II, 70 of W. P. Ker’s edition (Oxford, 1902), Dryden says that Persius’ words “are not everywhere well chosen, the purity of Latin being more corrupted than in the time of Juvenal, and consequently of Horace, who writ when the language was in the height of its perfection.” This seems to imply that Juvenal preceded Persius, which is a serious mistake since Persius died in A.D. 62—the very decade in which Juvenal was born. On the other hand on page 103 we are told that in treating only one main subject in each satire “Juvenal… has chosen to follow the same method of Persius.” Presumably the former passage was a temporary aberration, for Dryden can hardly have imagined that the purity of Latin was in some way restored between A.D. 50 and 100.
3. The fourth book, which contains the attack on Lyce, was published over fifteen years after the Satires. The same historical error is repeated on page 101, where Dryden associates himself with Holyday’s view that “there was never such a fall as from his Odes to his Satires.” No doubt the mistake is largely due to the editors’ habit of printing the Odes before the Satires.
4. Epode 6 is aimed at a cowardly libeller. Cassius fearlessly denounced men and women of high rank. He died in a.d. 37, about seventy years after the poem was written.
5. See “The Names in Horace’s Satires,” Classical Quarterly, X (1960), 161–78.
6. Contrary to Dryden’s statement (84) there is no attempt to satirize “his hunting after business and his following the court.”
7. W. S. Anderson, in Classical Philology, LI (1956), 93. Anderson is one of the most helpful of modern Juvenalian critics.
8. It is a pity that Highet allowed his reconstruction (suggested as a hypothesis in TAPA [1937], and Juvenal the Satirist [1954]) to harden into fact in Poets in a Landscape (1957). It has been taken over as authentic biography by Miss Mary Lascelles in New Light on Dr. Johnson (1959). That is how illusion spreads.
9. Actually there is one Horatian character who has certain temperamental affinities with Zimri, viz. Tigellius the Sardinian. “The fellow was a bundle of inconsistencies; often he would dash along as if someone were after his blood, more often he would move like an attendant bearing the sacred vessels of Juno, One day he would talk in a high and mighty way about kings and princes, the next he’d say ‘I ask for nothing but a three-legged table, a shell of pure salt, and a coat, however coarse, to keep out the cold.’ If you’d given a thousand dollars to that model of thrift and simplicity it would have burned a hole in his pocket in less than a week. … He never went to bed until dawn, and then spent the whole day snoring. He was the most contradictory creature that ever lived” (Sat. 1.3. 9–19). At the opening of Sat. 1.2 we hear of his death. “The guilds of Syrian flute-girls, the drug-quacks, beggars, strippers, and clowns—all that crowd is in grief and mourning at the death of the singer Tigellius for he was ‘generous’.” Given the difference in status this is not unlike the man who was “so various, that he seemed to be/Not one, but all mankind’s epitome,” who was “everything by starts and nothing long,” and who “in the course of one revolving moon/Was chymist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon.” Zimri also resembled Tigellius in his use of money:
In squandering wealth was his peculiar art; Nothing went unrewarded but desert. Beggared by fools, whom still he found too late, He had his jest, and they had his estate.
Unlike Zimri, however...
