THE

HE literature of the nations of antiquity is, after all, our best guide to a knowledge of the nations themselves. For the ideas of men are better expressed in words than in marble or brass; we know more of a people when we trace the thoughts of their minds, than when we study the works of their hands; last year's file of a New York daily paper can give future ages a better idea of that city than could possibly be gathered from a study of its houses, its offices, its workshops, and its stores, if they could all be suddenly closed and kept untouched for centuries. Pompeii shows us the external part of the life of the Romans and suggests to us a way of imagining something of the springs of action which guided that life; but we feel that we know more of the Greeks than we could ever have learned from a buried Athens or Corinth. The masterly poems of Aristophanes, which an ingenious writer has called "the newspapers of Athens," give us a view of all that complicated machinery which moved the Greek mind and the Greek hand, and thereby the world. For, as we have just said, what we need. to know of any people in order to understand them aright is not so much their food and drink and clothing, their architecture and their coinage, as "their prayers, their fears, their angers, their pleasures, their joys, their fickle pursuits," the reasons why they

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'Walsh's Aristophanes, Pref. p. x. London, 1848. Juvenal, Sat. i. 85.

did what they did and as they did it, and the judgments which they passed upon themselves either accusing or excusing their former actions.

In the partly moralizing, partly humorous, and partly indifferent manner in which our daily paper records our daily news, did Aristophanes tell the Athenians the "new things" of the season. He wrote one heavy article, the "parabasis," corresponding to the "leader" of our day, bearing on the social or political questions which were uppermost in the minds of the Athenians; he gave his audience the latest bits of gossip, the freshest sallies of wit, the choicest bits of humor, sly thrusts at his opponents in politics, open denunciation of those whom he considered the enemies of the State; in short, all that variety which we expect to find in our morning journal. And as we base much of our ordinary conversation each day upon what we read at the breakfast-table, so, we may well suppose, the Athenians talked of the ideas which were suggested by the last comedy or discussed the opinions which were advanced in it, until the next comedy was announced. Thus we know the salientand therefore the vulnerable-points in the character of the men of whom and for whom Aristophanes wrote. They stand before us, not like the Egyptian mummies in the show-case, but as living, thinking, acting men, having real loves and hates and desires and fears, with noble points of character and yet practising abominable sins, strong in some points and very weak in others; in short, allowing for the change of times and manners, very like ourselves. The old comedian has taught us to know the men of whom he wrote, and, spite of all their faults, to feel strongly drawn toward them, and often to love them.

If our readers agree with us in this opinion, we think that they will not be unwilling to look elsewhere than to the photographs of ancient ruins or to the voluminous dissertations on "Antiquities for their best ideas of the Romans of the Commonwealth and the Empire. Unfortunately, however, the Republic produced no great authors who wrote of men and things as they saw them; or, at least, no writings of this kind have come down to us. And, as a consequence, such ideas of that important time as we possess, are either the frigid suggestions of the cold-blooded annalist, or the untrustworthy imaginations of our own brains attempting to galvanize these suggestions into something resembling life. But the men of the Empire we know, even if we can rarely love them. They are persons, not only living in houses and eating and drinking, but loving and hating, hoping and fearing, doing noble and mean acts, exhibit

ing grand-because religious-traits of character and descending to wickedness the accounts of which we are unwilling to believe and sometimes (to our credit be it said) cannot understand. We know of what they thought; we see the hidden springs which guided their actions; we sympathize with them, in so far at least as we learn that they were of flesh and blood like ourselves, sharing with us in a corrupt nature, exposed like us to temptations, and often falling-as who shall say we may not fall?-into disgraceful sins. We know the men of the Rome and the Pompeii of the first century; yet not alone, or chiefly, from what may be seen in the museums or in the once buried streets; we know them because they and their character have been painted for us in the undying words of JUVENAL. The third of the great Roman Satirists, the greatest of them all, is for that part of the world and that age what Aristophanes is for the Athenians of the days of Socrates and of Cleon. Nay, he is much more than this, by as much as the pencil of the painter is more accurate than the description of the speaker, by as much as the tongue of the preacher is more severe and searching than the voice of the comedian. The Satirist places us by his side in the thronged part of the streets and bids us note what we see. As men and women pass by, he tells us what they are and what they do. The man who has made himself rich by forging wills, the woman who shows her neighbors more skilfully than Locusta could do it how to bury their poisoned husbands, the unscrupulous lawyer, the selfish delator, the spoiler of his ward, the condemned but unpunished plunderer of a province, the panderer for legacies, the successful criminal-they are all realities to us.1 And we do not believe that it is by accident that we happen to see them on the street just now; it is a fair sample of what would meet our eyes on any other corner and at any other hour; and a pencil as bold and as truthful as Hogarth's sketches the picture, and a tongue as vehement as that of the golden-mouthed Patriarch of Constantinople draws the moral. "Indignation makes the verse; " but it is not because "nature denies her aid; "2 and we feel that the awful days of which the poet writes are realities; we are ashamed of them, as if we were living in them; we hide our eyes from the picture, as if we were afraid of seeing ourselves portrayed in it; we writhe under the denunciations which we hear, as if we thought that the next sentence might cut us to the quick. Juvenal is the painter and the preacher of his time. And the fact that he is so truthful both to what he saw and to his own con

1i. 22-78.

2 i. 79.

victions of right has given him a desirable and honorable popularity. The monk of the middle age and the divine of our own time, the pedantic scholar and the pleasure-seeking reader of the classics, the writer of articles for the encyclopaedia, and the student of men, all are drawn by a strange attraction to the sixteen satires of the Poet of Aquinum.1 The satires are destined, we believe, to become more widely read and better understood, and therefore more fully appreciated and more popular, and at last to be recognized as the best exponents of the character of one of the most important periods in the world's history, being, as they are, among the most searching and truthful sermons which were ever preached from the pulpit of Natural Religion.

And, indeed, why should we, who believe the truths of Christianity, be unwilling to recognize the truths of natural religion? The latter is, as really as the former, a revelation from God; and when Christianity came into the world, it did not abrogate natural religion; but rather, as Bishop Butler has so well shown, it gave it a new sanction and called attention again to what had been once known, but was in part at least forgotten. It deepened its convictions of duty; it added weight to its threatenings and denunciations; it showed a way in which forgiveness and help might be secured. But the feeling of obligation, the sense of sin, and the dread of punishment were not brought into existence by a written law or by the revelation of the Gospel. They all had a place, and a very real place, in the teachings and the workings of Natural Religion. The heathen knew that covetousness and murder and lust were sins; they suffered from the tortures of a guilty conscience; they knew that God's dreadful judgment hung over the sinner. It seems strange that Christians should be unwilling to recognize these important truths, though they are, as St. Paul shows in words to which we shall presently have occasion to refer, of the utmost importance in establishing the revelation in which they believe.

We look at Juvenal, therefore, as a teacher of Natural Religion. We see no reason for assuming, as some have done, in the face of all the facts which almost demonstrate the contrary, that the passages in which he teaches a high morality or urges exalted truth were inspired by a knowledge of the revelation3 which had been given to

1It is beside our purpose to enter into a discussion of the theory by which Ribbeck would separate the writings of the "true Juvenal" from those of the "declamator;" it will be sufficiently evident from what we have to say, that we do not assent to it. 2 Analogy, Part II. chap. 1, 1.

'See Gifford on Sat. xiii.; and read by all means Macleane's masterly reply in his introduction to this Satire.

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the world but a few years before he wrote. And we notice, in the first place, his conviction of the sinfulness of sin and the powerful words in which he endeavors to impress that conviction upon others. As he describes those awful sins of the flesh1 of which "it is a shame even to speak," or denounces drunkenness, or shows the meanness of luxury, or protests against the base avarice of his day," or lifts his voice in favor of a nobler and a holier education of youth, or scathes the fawning flattery which preferred money and purple to friendship and truth and honesty-how awfully he shows himself in earnest, how fully he realizes that he is engaged in a real contest with a real enemy, how deeply he is assured that truth and right are on his side! And though he draws the picture with a bold pencil, it is not that he may gloat his eyes with the foul representation; it is that he may show, in all its native ugliness, the deformity and the repulsiveness of sin. "Nos utinam vani! "'8 is written on every page; but, if Rome would be shamed by vile Canopus; if an Empress is a common prostitute,10 or goes through the semblance of a formal marriage with a paramour; "1 if Senators are flatterers; 12 if a self-exiled Emperor is living a shameful life with his Chaldean herd on the rocks of Capreae; 13 if the poor man has no liberty except that of being thrashed, and no hope of compassion or justice or of a better lot; 14 if fathers and mothers are killed in cold blood; 15 if honest men are scarcely as many in number as the gates of Thebes or the mouths of the Nile; 16 if the age, in short, has become so bad that there is no metal base enough to give it a suitable name; then, indeed, the preacher has a right to speak, and cannot but speak: "difficile est satiram non scribere." 18

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And, as the heathen writer testifies to the conviction of sin, so he bears witness to the condemning and threatening voice of conscience. Human words have never depicted more terribly the stings of conscience than those which the satirist uses in writing to his friend, Calvinus.19 It does not follow, he argues, that because the Praetor acquits a criminal, he goes free of all punishment. The judges of the nether world never invented a torture which can equal that of the man who carries within his bosom a witness against himself.