Juvenal's "Satires"

It’s high time for me to write about another favourite book. This time I’ve chosen Juvenal’s Satires.

In the popular imagination, the Romans tend to be associated with seriousness, gravity, militarism, piety… well, with everything except humour. So it may be a surprise to some that the Romans excelled in that species of literature we call “satire”. Indeed, the best of Roman satirists will still measure up with any modern satirist you can think of. And in my opinion, the best of the best was Juvenal.

Almost nothing is known about Juvenal except his full name (Decimus Iunius Iuvenalis), thanks to a single inscription, and that he lived roughly in the late first and early second centuries AD. He seems to have socialized in fairly high circles, for he tells us much about high society, along with tidbits about the goings-on in the court of the Emperor Domitian (reigned AD 81-96).

Good satire always seems to flourish in bad societies. And if you peel off the outer layer of humour, you will usually find that good satire is motivated by anger, and by a deep cynicism about the age in which the author writes. This deep-seated moral outrage is what made Swift’s satire so effective. It’s easy to make the mistake of attributing anger and cynicism to the misanthropic tendencies of the writer himself, but more often we ought to point our collective finger at the society in which the writer lives. When we refuse to point our collective finger at society, it is the task of our satirists to do it for us. Instead of dismissing the Jon Stewarts of the world as cynics, we should rather blame the President Bushes of the world for making them so.

And we must not lose sight of the fact that we are society, and as such, we must each shoulder some blame for the bad state of things. Good satire holds up a mirror before us, and the better the satire, the uglier the image reflected. By this standard, Juvenal was either the one of the best satirists that has ever lived, or Imperial Rome was one of the worst societies that has ever existed.

Some ages and societies absolutely cry out to be satirized. Imperial Rome seemed to cry out the loudest, and Juvenal was happy to oblige. When surveying his times, he noted that, difficile est saturam non scribere, “it is hard not to write satire” (I.30). “We are,” he wrote, “living in the ninth age, an era worse than the age of iron. Nature herself can find no name for its wickedness and has no metal to label it” (nona aetas agitur peiorque saecula ferri / temporibus, quorum sceleri non invenit ipsa / nomen et a nullo posuit natura metallo, XIII.28-30).

What was so terrible about Juvenal’s “ninth age”? For one thing, he deplored the totalitarianism of Rome’s Imperial political order and its debased citizenry:
…iam pridem, ex quo suffragia nulli
vendimus, effudit curas; nam qui dabat olim
imperium fasces legiones omnia, nunc se
continent atque duas tantum res anxius optat,
panem et circenses.
(“Now that no one buys our votes, the public has long since cast off its cares; the people that once bestowed commands, consulships, legions and all else, now meddles no more and longs eagerly for just two things – bread and circuses,” X.77-81).

Much of Juvenal’s satire turns on a people who have given themselves over to pleasure-seeking, no longer interested in public service, or in the martial virtues that made Rome great but that are incompatible with the life of perpetual self-indulgence.

The fourth satire tells the tale of an extraordinarily large mullet caught by a fisherman and brought to the court to curry favour with Domitian; the fisherman himself, quips Juvenal, could be purchased at a lower price than his catch will command, implying that money is no object when spent on little delicacies, but human life is rather cheaply bought. This is consistent with a Rome flooded with the cheap slave labour of its conquered peoples, an industrial army of surplus labour which the sturdy independent Roman farmers of old could no longer compete with. Rome, you see, also outsourced its economy, but where we send jobs to China and India, Rome brought India and China to the city itself. There was a large underclass living off the public dole, while a wealthy owning class lived off moneylending or from the rents of extensive estates worked by slave gangs.

The ceaseless and amoral chasing after wealth and pleasure of the more fortunate classes was mirrored by the corrupt and decadent Imperial court, with its armies of eunuchs and shameless flatterers, in which the tyrant regnant, Domitian, heard little that could displease the Imperial ear, for nihil est quod credere de se / non possit cum laudatur dis aequa potestas (“there’s nothing that godlike power can’t believe of itself when it’s praised,” IV.70-71).

The limitless money-grubbing of Juvenal’s time would put even our casino capitalism to shame. One stock figure that appears regularly in the Satires is the wealthy, unmarried, and childless old man who uses his unique position to manipulate another stock figure, the legacy hunters who chase after him in the hope of ingratiating their way into his will.

Even worse, the worship of the almighty denarius interferes with Nature herself, subverting the family, making sons anxious for fathers to die, and, in the following sinister passage, giving fatherless orphans good reason to fear their mothers: livida materno fervent adipata veneno. / mordeat ante aliquis quidquid porrexerit illa / quae peperit, timidus praegustet pocula papas (“Those pastries are steaming darkly with maternal poison. Get someone else to taste first anything offered to you by the woman who bore you. Get your terrified tutor to drink from the cup before you,” VI.631-633). Thus, sadly, another stock character in Juvenal’s satire is the female poisoner. Familial affection is replaced by love of gold and silver, to such an extent that only “the loss of money is mourned with real tears” (ploratur lacrimis amissa pecunia veris, XIII.134).

What is perhaps most disconcerting about Juvenal’s Satires besides the rage and nihilistic cynicism they contain, is their frightfully modern ring. Take, for example this comment on the obsession with outward beauty: sed quae mutatis inducitur atque novatur / tot medicaminibus coctaeque siliginis offas / accipit et madidae, facies dicetur an ulcus? (“But when she’s coated and freshened up with all those concoctions one after another, and had lumps of hot, moist dough applied, will you call it a face or a sore?” VI.471-473). Which of us is not familiar with this phenomenon in all those ghastly images of aging celebrities who obviously go to superhuman efforts to continue looking young, to the point that they begin to resemble their own cadavers after the undertaker is done rouging them?

Worst of all, in all of this decadence, Juvenal offers not even the hope of a universal justice that could re-establish order, as the very gods seemed to have abandoned Rome. In any case, no one really believed anymore that the gods watched over anything, for ut sit magna, tamen certe lenta ira deorum est (“great though it is, the anger of the gods is, all the same, really slow,” XIII.100).

In Juvenal, we are presented with a Rome in decline. The irony is that his fellow citizens seemed to see themselves as perched at the very apex of civilized life, blissfully unaware that they had already lost everything that made them great. What neither Juvenal nor his fellow citizens could know was that Rome’s imperial glory was destined to sputter along for another generation or two — at least if “glory” can mean wealth without honour, and success without desert.

Honour Killing

Honour killing is not new. Nor has it been, historically speaking, peculiar to non-Western cultures.

In the seventh century BC, Rome was at war with the neighbouring city of Alba Longa. It was agreed between the warring parties that the outcome of the contest would be decided by a battle of picked champions. The champions were unusual: two sets of triplets, the brothers Horatii on the Roman side, and the brothers Curiatii on the Alban side.

The Horatii won, although only one of the brothers survived. Horatius brought home his spoils in triumph, but upon seeing him, his sister broke out into lamentations. As it turned out, one of the dead Curiatii was her fiancé. Enraged that she rained on his parade, Horatius slew his sister on the spot, proclaiming, “So perish any Roman woman who mourns the enemy.” He was condemned to death for the murder, but was let off after his father appealed to the people. It seems that the Roman people did not altogether disapprove of Horatius’ conduct. For form’s sake, the family were required to expiate the crime by performing certain sacrifices.

As the old saying goes, “The Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, Roman, nor an empire.” In a somewhat similar vein, one could say that honour killing is neither done by someone honourable, nor necessarily done to someone honourable, nor does it really serve to restore lost honour. As such, it is a puzzling term.

Not only is it puzzling, but some would say that the term obscures what is often really going on when someone kills a — usually female — relation who has supposedly shamed the family. I was led to some reflections on “honour killing” by an interesting exchange I heard recently on a radio program.

One of the participants in the discussion was making the case that we should stop thinking of the phenomenon in terms of “honour killing” and instead view it under the category of “violence against women”. To a certain extent, one can see her point. After all, most honour killing does tend to be perpetrated against women. She was also concerned that the concept of honour killing, as portrayed in the media, tends to vilify immigrant communities, particularly Muslims — a group already labouring under unfair prejudice by much of mainstream North American culture. Again, point taken. Furthermore, many so-called “honour killings” have little or nothing to do with honour at all. Rather, “honour” provides a convenient pretext for disputes over money and property. Again, I don’t disagree with her point.

However, honour killing of women is quite different from, say, “run-of-the-mill” North American spousal violence in at least one crucial respect. Much like in the story of Horatius, an honour killer’s reprehensible action too often garners the (tacit) approbation of his community. Horatius' father defended his son's action, and in two recent local cases of honour killing, sons assisted fathers in murdering female relations. As long as there is broad cultural support — or at least nodding indulgence — of the practice, these men will lack a certain external source of restraint on their behaviour. On the other hand, North American wife beaters do not normally garner our support. They are correctly seen by most right-thinking people for the brutes they are. And they certainly do not get assistance from other family members.

If mainstream society treats honour killing as plain violence against women, our disapproval of the act is directed only at the perpetrator himself; the minority community may still indulge the practice. But by treating it as a culturally-embedded phenomenon, we are enabled also to direct our disapproval at those communities that lend support to it. If those communities wish to avoid such disapproval, they will have an incentive to enforce new internal norms that forbid the practice. Only once this is achieved can honour killing be treated as violence against women as such.

Betting on God

Some time ago in this blog I made a claim to the effect that theistic philosophers of religion have produced a remarkable number of really bad arguments, arguments so bad in fact, that one must sometimes question the arguer’s intellectual honesty (“The Problem of Evil”, May 22, 2009). I do not wish to retract this provocation. Instead, I wish to give another example to prove my point.

I just finished reading a book by Jeff Jordan entitled Pascal’s Wager: Pragmatic Arguments and Belief in God (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006). Jordan is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Delaware. Now, since I am about to say some unkind things about Professor Jordan’s book, it is only fair to admit that despite its flaws, I quite enjoyed reading it. It's packed full of stimulating and ingenious arguments, and it is the best single overview I know of that deals with Pascal’s famous “wager” argument in support of theistic belief.

Before proceeding any further, I suppose I should explain the nature of Pascal’s Wager. It is a philosophical argument famously proposed by the seventeenth-century French mathematician and thinker Blaise Pascal. It purports to demonstrate the rationality of believing in God, even on the assumption that we have no evidence one way or another of God’s existence. This last part is important, for it seems to violate the traditional stricture that belief should always be tailored to evidence.

There are quite a few variants of Pascal’s Wager, so I will give a highly simplified version of it. It goes something like this: Let us assume that we have no evidence one way or another of God’s existence. Nonetheless, if He exists and we believe in Him, we stand to gain an infinite reward. On the other hand, if we believe and He doesn’t exist, we sacrifice very little (indeed, Pascal claimed that we would be gainers even here, because of the positive influence of religion in our worldly lives).

If we do not become believers and He doesn’t exist, we neither gain nor lose (excluding whatever meagre rewards accrue to worldly sinners). If we do not become believers and He does exist, we will be subject to infinite punishment. This latter point is unnecessary, for the argument can work quite well without the prospect of Hell: we need only compare the “swamping value” of the infinite heavenly payoff with the relatively neutral expected utility of the other possible outcomes, to see that it is — at least according to Pascal and company — a good gamble to wager on God's existence.

Obviously, we cannot just make ourselves believe something we do not currently believe, and for which there is no evidence. However, Pascal contended, with some justification, that by going through the motions — incense and holy water and all that — one could come to believe.

The “Many Gods” Objection, or OMG

There are many possible objections to the Wager, and Jordan’s book is fairly comprehensive in dealing with them. There is one, however, Jordan’s treatment of which illustrates the sort of intellectual trickery that theists seem all too apt to engage in. It is called the objection of “Many Gods” (let’s call it OMG for short).

In the normal Wager, we bet on either of two possible states: either God exists, or He doesn’t. According to OMG, we can add the possibilities that any number of other kinds of gods exist besides the usual Judeo-Christian one. For example, we might posit the existence of a sort of Nietzschean god who punishes all and only those who worship a deity and rewards those strong-willed enough not to need divine support. In other words, he has contempt for the sort of mortal slaves weak enough to have need of a god. Such a deity would undermine the traditional Wager, because if we wager on the traditional God, we are now faced with the prospect of coming out big losers. Furthermore, because we could invent as many gods with as many qualities as we care to, the prior probability of the traditional God’s existence (in the absence of any evidence one way or the other) shrinks from 0.5 in the traditional Wager, to some infinitesimal probability equal to the probability that any one of the numberless other gods we care to invent exists.

How does Jordan deal with OMG? Very underhandedly, I’m afraid. Remember that in the traditional Wager we’re supposed to bet in the absence of any evidence one way or the other that God exists. Now Jordan tells us we needn’t consider the many invented gods, because the probability of their existence is vanishingly small compared to the probability that the traditional God exists. Really? Based upon what evidence? How can he assign such probabilities?

Jordan has reduced himself to the intellectual trickery of assuming a greater probability that the Judeo-Christian God exists. But if we could have assumed this all along, then we wouldn’t need Pascal’s Wager in the first place, would we? I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve seen theistic philosophers of religion resort to this move — assuming the existence of that (God) which they were supposedly demonstrating.

In the words of Cicero, sed nescio quo modo nihil tam absurde dici potest quod non dicatur ab aliquot philosophorum, “somehow or other no statement is too absurd for some philosophers to make” (Cicero, De Divinatione, 2.119). Old time religion can make people say and do some pretty dumb things, and it seems logically-trained philosophers are not immune to this effect.

Custom and Precedent

Stare decisis is the common law doctrine that judges are bound to uphold previous decisions. It is more commonly known as the doctrine of precedent. There is a tendency to think of adherence to precedent as somehow closely related to custom; by binding themselves to precedents, judges are thought to preserve customary ways of doing things. By contrast, legislation overturns precedents and customary law.

However, a precedent is a precedent because at some point in past time it was first established as such. It may even have become established by overriding a previously established precedent or custom.

More interestingly, though, are situations where precedent points in one direction and custom points in another. The following story from the Roman historian Livy (Bk. 27, ch. 8) illustrates what I’m getting at.

The Priesthood of Gaius Flaccus

In 209 BC Gaius Valerius Flaccus, a young and dissolute Roman nobleman was assigned — very much against his will and inclination — to the position of flamen Dialis, a priesthood associated with the god Jupiter. Perhaps it was hoped that the various taboos and constraints associated with this priesthood would have a reformative effect on the young prodigal’s character.

It seems to have worked, for by all accounts Flaccus transformed himself into a serious, diligent, and virtuous citizen. However, a complication arose when Flaccus attempted to claim a seat in the Senate by right of his priestly office. He was opposed by the praetor Publius Licinius, on the ground that no flamen Dialis had claimed a Senate seat in living memory. According to Livy, “the praetor maintained that a right was based not upon outmoded instances from the annals, but in each case upon very recent practice [consuetudinis = ‘custom’].” In short, the praetor appealed to current custom or practice, rather than to ancient precedents.

(Although Livy doesn’t say as much, there may have been a problem with Flaccus’ age: the term senatus is related to senex, or “old man”, implying that the Senate was supposed to be a council of elders, while Flaccus was a mere youth.)

On the other hand, the tribunes defended Flaccus by claiming that the fact that recent priests had neglected to exercise their right should have no bearing on whether or not Flaccus could exercise it. As they put it, “obsolescence due to the indolence of flamens was justly accounted their own loss, not a loss to the priestly office.” In other words, precedent — however old or outdated — trumps custom. The precedent speaks for a Senate seat being attached to the office of flamen Dialis, regardless of the custom or practice of particular holders of the office.

The position of the tribunes was probably the correct one: rights should follow precedent, not custom. If I have, for example, a right to free expression that is constitutionally guaranteed to me by virtue of my status as a citizen, I do not lose that right because my fellow citizens have chosen not to exercise their similar right. Only a change in legislation could have this effect (and if one believes in “natural rights”, then not even then).

So what was the outcome for Flaccus? According to Livy, neither custom nor precedent decided the matter. Rather, Flaccus won his seat, “for it was the opinion of everyone that the flamen had carried his point rather by the uprightness of his life than by virtue of priestly privilege.” Thus, it remains an open question how the case would have been decided if Flaccus had not undergone a reformation of character.

Further Reading

Andrew Lintott. The Constitution of the Roman Republic. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Livy. History of Rome (Vol. VII). Frank Gardner Moore (trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.

Richard E. Mitchell. “The Definition of patres and plebs: An End to the Struggle of the Orders,” in Kurt A. Raaflaub (ed.), Social Struggles in Archaic Rome. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005.

Fritz Schulz. Principles of Roman Law. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956.