Been reading with much enjoyment Juvenal’s Tenth Satire, possibly the gloomiest major poem ever written. George Gilbert Ramsay, who translated it for the Loeb Classical Library, calls it “a profoundly depressing and pessimistic poem.” Just my cup of tea. There’s a 1693 translation, only patchily good, by John Dryden on Google Books. Dr. Johnson used the Tenth Satire as a model for his terrific “Vanity of Human Wishes” (1749).
Here’s what I want to know. After 345 lines of telling us how pointless everything is, Juvenal perks up at the end with an appeal to trust to the Gods. In Dryden’s translation:
What then remains? Are we depriv’d of will,
Must we not wish, for fear of wishing ill?
Receive my counsel, and securely move;
Intrust thy fortune to the Powers above.
Leave them to manage for thee, and to grant
What their unerring wisdom sees thee want:
In goodness as in greatness they excel;
Ah that we lov’d ourselves but half so well!
We, blindly by our headstrong passions led,
Are hot for action, and desire to wed;
Then wish for heirs: but to the gods alone
Our future offspring, and our wives are known;
Th’ audacious strumpet, and ungracious son.
Yet not to rob the priests of pious gain,
That altars be not wholly built in vain;
Forgive the gods the rest, and stand confin’d
To health of body, and content of mind:
A soul, that can securely death defy,
And count it nature’s privilege, to die;
Serene and manly, harden’d to sustain
The load of life, and exercis’d in pain:
Guiltless of hate, and proof against desire;
That all things weighs, and nothing can admire:
That dares prefer the toils of Hercules
To dalliance, banquet, and ignoble ease.
The path to peace is virtue: what I show,
Thyself may freely on thyself bestow:
Fortune was never worshipp’d by the wise;
But, set aloft by fools, usurps the skies.
But would a man of Juvenal’s time and place — he was a Roman, writing around a.d. 120 — really have believed in the rather cheesy Roman pantheon? (Which at that point included three or four dead emperors, whose personal foibles were known to all.) We don’t actually know anything about Juvenal, other than what he tells us in his poems, but is it likely? Wasn’t official Roman religion strictly for the common folk — and not much regarded even by them? That’s been my impression from reading authors like Gibbon and Balsdon. Any classicists out there care to give an opinion?
The answer to that would be yes, and you don’t have to be a classicist to see that.
If you’ve read the Aeneid, when Virgil talks about Jove, one can see that he isn’t talking about a ‘superman’ with lighting bolts, he’s talking about God as a theist (who might not necessarily be , but could be, a Christian, obviously) would talk about him.
His opinion, also, of images is very agreeable to the doctrine of Pythagoras; who conceived of the first principle of being as transcending sense and passion, invisible and incorrupt, and only to be apprehended by abstract intelligence. So Numa forbade the Romans to represent God in the form of man or beast, nor was there any painted or graven image of a deity admitted amongst them for the space of the first hundred and seventy years, all of which time their temples and chapels were kept free and pure from images; to such baser objects they deemed it impious to liken the highest, and all access to God impossible, except by the pure act of the intellect.
That’s a quote from Plutarch about God (also translated by Dryden) from his life of Numa Pompilius. This is pretty standard boilerplate for the time, and is also known as the ‘God of the philosophers’.
Also, if one reads Epicurus arguement as to why there is no God, (or more to the point, if God is, he’s a nasty piece of work) the God he’s talking about is the God of the philosophers, not Zeus.
Last, but not least, the Christian God is a version of the God of the philosophers, Christianity ‘ate’ (Greek) philosophy right from the beginning. In the Book of Acts, Paul goes to Athens and has a debate with the philosophers of the ‘hidden God’, the God of the philosophers. Paul isn’t there telling them that they think is wrong, he’s there to tell them that he knows some more about God than they do, and he’d be happy to fill them in.
#1: My impression has always been that it was more a case of those clever Greeks (Hellenized Jews, whatever) “eating” Judaism, as a different bunch of clever Greeks (Hellenized Indians, whatever) had “eaten” Buddhism over in Bactria a couple centuries earlier. But I’ll take another look.
The world sure would have been a dull place without those pesky Greeks.
don’t leave out zoroastrianism’s influence on exilic judaism.
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Never mind all that, the following lines do not rhyme. What’s up
with that?
Receive my counsel, and securely move;
Intrust thy fortune to the Powers above.
Leave them to manage for thee, and to grant
What their unerring wisdom sees thee want:
Then wish for heirs: but to the gods alone
Our future offspring, and our wives are known;
Th’ audacious strumpet, and ungracious son.
Yeah, yeah, everybody’s a critic.
“Never mind all that, the following lines do not rhyme. What’s up
with that?”
The way English is pronounced has changed since Dryden’s time.
Yes, I know. One sees this frequently in Pope. But it still “clangs” in the ear, and ruins the poetic flow. I’ve always felt that some worthy and talented revisionist should take a shot at reworking the offending lines. “Outrageous!”, some would say, but this is not like music, say, where harmonious notes stay true throughout all time. If I were a poet who labored hard to find rhyme, and then pronunciation custom changed, I would welcome a high quality re-write that kept the spirit of the lines. It’s not THAT many lines that need fixing, after all.
For example, off the top of my head:
Receive my counsel, and do move secure;
Intrust thy fortune to the Powers endure.
Leave them to manage for thee, and to sire
What their unerring wisdom sees thee desire: