Farm rivers, ports, and scour the drains for gold!
But why, my friend, should I at Rome remain?
I cannot teach my stubborn lips to feign;
Nor when I hear a great man's verses, smile,
And beg a copy, if I think them vile.
The worst feature is the predominance of crafty and cozening Greeks, who, by their versatility and diplomacy, can oust the Roman.
I cannot rule my spleen and calmly see
A Grecian capital�in Italy!
A flattering, cringing, treacherous artful race,
Of torrent tongue, and never-blushing face;
A Protean tribe, one knows not what to call,
Which shifts to every form, and shines in all:
Grammarian, painter, augur, rhetorician,
Rope-dancer, conjurer, fiddler, and physician,
All trades his own your hungry Greekling counts;
And bid him mount the sky�the sky he mounts!
The insinuating flatteries of these aliens are so masterfully contrived that the blunt Roman has no chance against such a nation of actors.
Greece is a theatre where all are players.
For, lo! their patron smiles�they burst with mirth;
He weeps�they droop, the saddest souls on earth;
He calls for fire�they court the mantle's heat;
"'Tis warm," he cries�the Greeks dissolve in sweat!
Besides, they are dangerously immoral. Their philosophers are perfidious. These sycophant foreigners can poison a patron against a poor Roman client. This leads to an outburst against poverty and its disadvantages.
The question is not put, how far extends
One's piety, but what he yearly spends.
The account is soon cast up: the judges rate
Our credit in the court by our estate.
Add that the rich have still a gibe in store,
And will be monstrous witty on the poor.
[Pg 211]
This mournful truth is everywhere confessed�
Slow rises worth by property depressed.
At Rome 'tis worse; where house-rent by the year,
And servants' bellies costs so devilish dear.
It is a city where appearance beyond one's means must he kept up; whereas, in the country one need never spend money even on a toga. Everything has its price in Rome. To interview a great man, his pampered lackeys must have a fee.
Then there are risks in a great capital unknown in country towns. There are tumble-down tenements with the buttresses ready to give; there are top garrets where you may lose your life in a fire. You could buy a nice rustic home for the price at which a dingy hovel is let in Rome. Besides, the din of the streets is killing. Rome is bad for the nerves. Folk die of insomnia. By day you get crushed, bumped, and caked with mud. A soldier drives his hobnails into your toe. You may be the victim of a street accident.
Heavens! should the axle crack, which bears a weight
Of huge Ligurian stone, and pour the freight
On the pale crowd beneath, what would remain,
What joint, what bone, what atom of the slain?
The body, with the soul, would vanish quite,
Invisible, as air, to mortal sight!
Meanwhile, unconscious of their master's fate,
At home they heat the water, scour the plate,
Arrange the strigils, fill the cruse with oil,
And ply their several tasks with fruitless toil.
But he, the mangled victim, now a ghost,
Sits pale and trembling on the Stygian coast,
A stranger shivering at the novel scene,
At Charon's threatening voice and scowling mien,
Nor hopes a passage thus abruptly hurled,
Without his farthing to the nether world.
In the dark there are equal perils.
Prepare for death if here at night you roam,
And sign your will before you sup from home.
Lucky if people throw only dirty water from their windows! Be thankful to escape without a broken skull. A drunken bully may meet you.
[Pg 212]
There are who murder as an opiate take,
And only when no brawls await them, wake.
And what chance have you, without attendants, against a street rough? Then there is the burglar; and the criminal classes are regularly increased in town whenever the authorities grow active enough to clear the main Italian roads of bandits.
The forge in fetters only is employed;
Our iron-mines exhausted and destroyed
In shackles; for these villains scarce allow
Goads for our teams or ploughshares for the plough.
Oh, happy ages of our ancestors,
Beneath the kings and tribunician powers!
One jail did all the criminals restrain,
Whom now the walls of Rome can scarce contain.
III.�A Satire on the Vanity of Human Wishes
Look round the habitable world; how few
Know their own good; or, knowing it, pursue.
To headlong ruin see whole houses driven,
Cursed with their prayers, by too indulgent heaven.
The several passions and aspirations of mankind, successively examined in the light of legend and history, prove how hollow, if not pernicious, are the principal objects of pursuit. Wealth is one of the commonest aims.
But avarice spreads her deadly snare,
And hoards amassed with too successful care.
For wealth, in the black days, at Nero's word,
The ruffian bands unsheathed the murderous sword.
Cut-throats commissioned by the government
Are seldom to an empty garret sent.
The traveller freighted with a little wealth,
Sets forth at night, and wins his way by stealth:
Even then he fears the bludgeon and the blade�
Starts in the moonlight at a rush's shade,
While, void of care, the beggar trips along,
And to the robber's face will troll his song.
[Pg 213]
What would the "weeping" and the "laughing" sages of ancient Greece have thought of the pageants of modern Rome? Consider the vanity of ambition. It is illustrated by the downfall of the powerful minister Sejanus. On his overthrow, the fickle mob turned savagely upon his statues.
What think the people? They!
They follow fortune, as of old, and hate
With all their soul the victim of the state.
Yet in this very hour that self-same crowd
Had hailed Sejanus with a shout as loud,
If his designs (by fortune's favour blessed)
Had prospered, and the aged prince oppressed;
For since our votes have been no longer bought,
All public care has vanished from our thought.
Romans, who once with unresisted sway,
Gave armies, empire, everything, away,
For two poor claims have long renounced the whole
And only ask�the circus and a dole.
Would you rather be an instance of fallen greatness, or enjoy some safe post in an obscure Italian town? What ruined a Crassus? Or a Pompey? Or a victorious C�sar? Why, the realisation of their own soaring desires.
Another vain aspiration covets fame in eloquence. But the gift of oratory overthrew the two greatest orators of Greece and Rome�Demosthenes and Cicero. If Cicero had only stuck to his bad verses, he would never have earned Antony's deadly hatred by his "Second Philippic" (see Vol. IX, p. 155).
"I do congratulate the Roman state
Which my great consulate did recreate!"
If he had always used such jingling words
He might have scorned Mark Antony's swords.
A different passion is for renown in war. What is the end of it all? Only an epitaph on a tombstone, and tombstones themselves perish; for even a tree may split them!
Produce the urn that Hannibal contains,
And weigh the paltry dust which yet remains.
And is this all? Yet this was once the bold,
The aspiring chief, whom Afric could not hold.
Spain conquered, o'er the Pyrenees he bounds;
[Pg 214]
Nature opposed her everlasting mounds,
Her Alps and snows. O'er these with torrent force
He pours, and rends through rocks his dreadful course.
Already at his feet Italia lies.
Yet, thundering on, "Think nothing done," he cries,
"Till Rome, proud Rome, beneath my fury falls,
And Afric's standards float without her walls!"
But what ensued? Illusive glory, say.
Subdued on Zama's memorable day,
He flies in exile to a petty state,
With headlong haste; and, at a despot's gate,
Sits, mighty suppliant, of his life in doubt,
Till the Bithynian monarch's nap be out!
Nor swords, nor spears, nor stones from engines hurled,
Shall quell the man whose frown alarmed the world:
The vengeance due to Cann�'s fatal field,
And floods of gore, a poisoned ring shall yield!
Fly, madman, fly! At toil and danger mock,
Pierce the deep snow, and scale the eternal rock,
To please the rhetoricians, and become
A declamation�for the boys of Rome!
Consider next the yearning after long life.
Pernicious prayer! for mark what ills attend
Still on the old, as to the grave they bend:
A ghastly visage, to themselves unknown;
For a smooth skin, a hide with scurf o'ergrown;
And such a cheek, as many a grandam ape
In Tabraca's thick woods is seen to scrape.
The old man rouses feelings of impatient loathing in those around him; his physical strength and faculties for enjoyment are gone. Even if he remain hale, he may suffer harrowing bereavements. Nestor, Peleus, and Priam had to lament the death of heroic sons; and in Roman history Marius and Pompey outlived their good fortune.
Campania, prescient of her Pompey's fate,
Sent a kind fever to arrest his date:
[Pg 215]
When lo! a thousand suppliant altars rise,
And public prayers obtain him of the skies.
The city's fate and his conspired to save
His head, to perish near the Egyptian wave.
Again, there is the frequent prayer for good looks. But beauty is a danger. If linked with unchastity, it leads to evil courses. Even if linked with chastity, it may draw on its possessor the tragic fate of a Lucretia, a Virginia, a Hippolytus, or a Bellerophon. What is a Roman knight to do if an empress sets her heart on him?
Amid all such vanities, then, is there nothing left for which men may reasonably pray?
Say, then, shall man, deprived all power of choice,
Ne'er raise to Heaven the supplicating voice?
Not so; but to the gods his fortunes trust.
Their thoughts are wise, their dispensations just.
What best may profit or delight they know,
And real good for fancied bliss bestow;
With eyes of pity they our frailties scan;
More dear to them than to himself is man.
By blind desire, by headlong passion driven,
For wife and heirs we daily weary Heaven;
Yet still 'tis Heaven's prerogative to know,
If heirs, or wife, will bring us weal or woe.
But (for 'tis good our humble hope to prove),
That thou mayst still ask something from above,
Thy pious offerings to the temple bear,
And, while the altars blaze, be this thy prayer:
O Thou, who know'st the wants of human kind,
Vouchsafe me health of body, health of mind;
A soul prepared to meet the frown of fate,
And look undaunted on a future state;
That reckons death a blessing, yet can bear
Existence nobly, with its weight of care;
That anger and desire alike restrains,
And counts Alcides' toils, and cruel pains,
Superior far to banquets, wanton nights,
And all the Assyrian monarch's soft delights!
[Pg 216]
Here bound, at length, thy wishes. I but teach
What blessings man, by his own powers, may reach.
The Path to Peace is Virtue. We should see,
If wise, O Fortune, nought divine in thee:
But we have deified a name alone,
And fixed in heaven thy visionary throne!
FOOTNOTES:
Juvenal was born, it is usually believed, at Aquinum, about 55 a.d. He lived to an advanced age, but the year of his death is unknown. Rome he evidently knew well, and from long experience. But there is great obscurity about his career. His "Satires," in declamatory indignation, form a powerful contrast to the genial mockery of Horace (p. 91): where Horace may be said to have a Chaucerian smile for human weakness, Juvenal displays the wrath of a Langland. Juvenal denounces abuses at Rome in unmeasured terms. Frequently Zolaesque in his methods of exposing vice, he contrives by his realism to produce a loathing for the objects of his attack. Dryden rendered into free and vigorous English several of the satires; and Gifford wrote a complete translation, often of great merit. The translation here has, with adaptations, been drawn from both, and a few lines have been incorporated from Johnson, whose two best-known poems, "London" and "The Vanity of Human Wishes," were paraphrases from Juvenal.
[Pg 217]
FRIEDRICH KLOPSTOCK[R]
The Messiah
I.�The Mount of Olives
Rejoice, ye sons of earth, in the honour bestowed on man. He who was before all worlds, by Whom all things in this visible creation were made, descended to our earth as your Redeemer. Near Jerusalem, once the city where God displayed His grace, the Divine Redeemer withdrew from the multitude and sought retirement. On the side where the sun first gilds the city with its beams rises a mountain, whose summit He had oft honoured with His presence when during the solitary night He spent the hours in fervent prayer.
Gabriel, descending, stands between two perfumed cedars and addresses Jesus.
Wilt Thou, Lord, here devote the night to prayer,
Or weary, dost thou seek a short repose?
Permit that I for Thine immortal head
A yielding couch prepare. Behold the shrubs
And saplings of the cedar, far and near,
Their balmy foliage already show.
Among the tombs in which Thy prophets rest
The cooling earth yields unmolested moss.
[Pg 218]
Jesus answered not, but regarded Gabriel with a look of divine complacency. He went up to the summit, where were the confines of heaven, and there prayed. Earth rejoiced at the renewal of her beauty as His voice resounded and penetrated the gates of the deep, but only He and the Eternal Father knew the whole meaning of the divine petition. As Jesus arose from prayer, in His face shone sublimity, love, and resignation.
Now He and the Eternal Father entered on discourse mysterious and profound, obscure even to immortals; discourse of things which in future ages should display to man the love of God. A seraph entered the borders of the celestial world, whose whole extent is surrounded by suns. No dark planet approaches the refulgent blaze.
There, central of the circumvolving suns,
Heaven, archetype of every blissful sphere,
Orbicular in blazing glory, swims,
And circumfuges through infinitude
In copious streams, the splendour of the spheres.
Harmonious sounds of its revolving motion
Are wafted on the pinions of the winds
To circumambient suns. The potent songs
Of voice and harp celestial intermingle
And seem the animation of the whole.
Up to this sacred way Gabriel ascended, approaching heaven, which, in the very centre of the assemblage of suns, rises into a vast dome. When the Eternal walks forth, the harmonic choirs, borne on the wings of the wind to the borders of the sunny arch, chant His praise, joining the melody of their golden harps. During the hymn the seraph, as messenger of the Mediator, stood on one of the suns nearest heaven. The Eternal Father rewarded the choirs with a look of benignity and then beheld the Chief Seraph, whose name with God is The Chosen, and by the heavenly host is called Eloah.
The awful thunder seven times rolled forth,
The sacred gloom dispelling, and the Voice
Divine gently descended: "God is Love.
E'er beings gently emanated I was Love.
[Pg 219]
Creating worlds, I ever was the same,
And such I am in the accomplishment
Of my profoundest, most mysterious deed.
But in the death of the Eternal Son
Ye learn to know Me wholly�God, the Judge
Of every world. New adoration then
Ye will to the Supreme of heaven address."
The seraph having descended to the altar of the earth, Adam, filled with eager expectation, hastened to him. A lucid, ethereal body was the radiant mansion of his blessed spirit, and his form was as lovely as the bright image in the Creator's mind when meditating on the form of man in the blooming fields of Paradise. Adam approached with a radiant smile, which suffused over his countenance an air of ineffable and sweetest dignity, and thus with impassioned accents he spoke.
Hail, blessed seraph, messenger of peace!
Thy voice, resounding of thy message high,
Has filled our souls with rapture. Son of God,
Messiah, O that Thee I could behold,
Behold Thee in the beauty of Thy manhood,
E'en as this seraph sees Thee in the form
Which Thy compassion prompted Thee to take
My wretched progeny from death to save.
Point out to me, O seraph, show to me,
Where my Redeemer walked, my loving Lord;
Only from far I will His step attend.
Gabriel descends again to earth, the stars silently saluting him with a universal morn. He finds Jesus placidly sleeping on a bare rock, and after long contemplation, apostrophises all nature to be silent, for her Creator sleeps.
II.�Of Satan Warring, and the Council of the Sanhedrim
The morn descends over the forest of waving cedars, and Jesus awakes. The spirits of the patriarchs see Him with joy from their solar mansion. Raphael, John's guardian angel, tells Jesus that this disciple is viewing a demoniac among the sepulchres on the Mount of Olives. He goes thither, and puts Satan to flight, who, returning to hell, gives an account of what he knows of Jesus, and determines that He shall be put to death. Satan is opposed by Abaddon. Another grim fiend speaks.
[Pg 220]
Then Moloch fierce approached, a martial spirit.
From mountains and entrenchments huge he came,
Which still he forms, thus the domains of hell
To fence, in case the Thundering Warrior e'er
(He thus the dread Eternal nominates)
From heaven descending, should th' abyss molest.