Tag Archives: Juvenal

What Would Juvenal Say in the Age of Chips?

I put on my bifocals to read Chris Miller’s Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology.

The book was on my bedside table, on top of one of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple books. Christie is more appropriate nocturnal reading, but I am “studying” computer chips, because I am paranoid  about the tracking devices on phones, computers, tablets, etc.  Even the books have barcodes – are those chips?  We don’t have a smart refrigerator, but the toaster might be smart. Not very, though.

I have a split consciousness: I am aware of computer surveillance but use computers every day.

Chip War is not the book I’d expected.  Miller writes about electronic chips and global power, and analyzes the chip competition between the U.S. and China. He says that the best and fastest chips will determine the extent of economic and military power in the twenty-first century. The U.S. is still ahead.

On the cover of Chip War is an image of an American flag with a chip where the stars should be.  

This is an excellent, important book, but I need something less global.

After this I was in the mood to read something amusing: I wanted satire. Because how did the world  become dependent on chips for every aspect of life?

 The Roman satirist Juvenal wryly writes, …difficile est saturam non scribere.  (It is difficult not to write satire.)  And if Juvenal were around, he’d write an elegant satiric poem on the ubiquity of chips.

Roman satire takes the form of witty epigrams or satiric monologues. The satires are rooted in morality, even when they use obscene language: they hilariously attack Roman vice and hypocrisy.  Juvenal, the wittiest and the most elegant satirist, is a comedian who inveighs against politicians, eunuchs, gossips, hypocrites, adulterers, homosexuals, women, lawyers, pimps,  landlords, bad parents, the nouveau riche, and the general decadence of Rome.  Juvenal is careful not to portray specific individuals but sometimes names notorious characters from the past. And careful though he was, he was exiled eventually. Writers do get exiled from Rome: Cicero and Ovid, too.

So how can I connect Juvenal to chips?  Well, one could say that the chips are akin to the thuggish informers he attacked in Satire 1.  In modern life, chips are the informers, or the tools of informers.

Do read Juvenal:  he’s better in Latin, but he will make you laugh in English, too.  Here is a paraphrase of a bit of Satire I.

It is difficult not to write satire.  For who, enduring this iniquitous city, would be so cruel as to hold back… when a litter passes by with the informer who ratted out his patron and now intends to wreck what survives of the ruined nobility?  Massa [an informer] fears him, and  Carus [another informer] bribes him with gifts, and the frightened actor Latinus has sent his actress girlfriend, Thymele, to appease him. 

The Romans feared the informer as we should fear the chip.

And yet here we are.

The Chastity Question:  Juvenal’s “Satire VI” and Euripides’s “Hippolytus”

It is fair to assess Juvenal as a sexist, and to admire Euripides for his sympathy toward women.   And that’s why I was startled to read Juvenal’s satire on chastity (Satire VI) and Euripides’s Hippolytus and realize they were writing about the same subject.

Two writers could not be more different in style and approach. in fifth-century Athens, Euripides was often satirized by Greek poets and his tragedies were not appreciated until after his death. Juvenal, a satirist in Rome in the late first century and early second century A.D., was a stand-up comic poet who dealt in jeers and gibes: he lampoons every hypocrite, hack writer, whore, adulterer, aristocrat, politician, shopkeeper, and street vendor. in his view, Rome literally stank. Satire VI is a comical but overlong and often tiresome invective against unchaste women.

 On the other hand, Euripides is a compassionate realist who parses the emotions that drive his characters. Euripides is generous; it is the gods who are unkind.  In Hippolytus, Queen Phaedra, who honors the goddess Aphrodite, falls in love with her stepson, Hippolytus, a fanatically chaste, arrogant worshiper of Artemis.

But let me start with Juvenal’s one-sided perspective on unchaste women. He begins Satire VI at the beginning of time, when the Earth was new. (The translations of Juvenal below are mine.)

“I believe,” Juvenal begins, “that Chastity lingered for a long time on Earth, when Saturn was king, when the cave provided homes and the fire and household gods and masters were covered with common darkness, and when the mountain wife strewed the woodland couch with leaves and and straw and skins of wild animals.“

After this pastoral introduction, Juvenal  begins to rage. Comic rants are the gist of his satire.  He raves that men should not marry: they would be better off sleeping with pretty boys than being married to cheating women. 

Here’s why women won’t be chaste:  Juvenal says they would rather have sex with gay actors, or run away with ugly, famous gladiators than stay with the boring husbands who support them.  Aelia is in love with a queer actor who plays women’s roles in tragedy, while Hispulla is having a passionate affair with another tragic actor.  Juvenal asks if young Hispula can really be expected to prefer an aging professor, Quintilian? After this brief taunt, Juvenal returns to lambasting women.

But here’s my favorite passage:  Juvenal says that bluestocking women are even more disagreeable than the unchaste women.  When an educated woman talks about poetry at a dinner party, it stops all conversation. 

She praises Virgil, forgives Dido about to kill herself, and compares poets, balancing Virgil on one side of the scale and  Homer on the other. The grammarians yield to her expertise, the orators are overcome, the whole crowd is silent, and neither the special pleader nor the herald speak up. And not even another woman.

Euripides’s Hippolytus is complex and sympathetic, sensitive to the plight of a powerful woman.  Phaedra, the wife of King Theseus, is restless and disturbed: she has fallen in love with her stepson, Hippolytus, a chaste devotee of the goddess Artemis. Hippolytus spends his time in healthy pursuits, riding horses and driving chariots on the beach. No doubt he flexes his gleaming muscles and enchants everyone. Phaedra is lovesick but has no intention of telling her love..

She is cynical about chastity. The following passages are translated by David Grene.

Truly, too,/ I hate lip-worshippers of chastity who own/ a lecherous daring when they have privacy./ O Cypris, Sea-Born Goddess, how can they/ look frankly in the faces of their husbands/ and never shiver with fear lest their accomplice,/ the darkness, and the rafters of the house/ take voice and cry aloud?

And then a disaster occurs. Phaedra’s nurse betrays her, thinking that Hippolytus will reciprocate Phaedra’s feelings and rush into her arms.  The nurse does not understand the complexity of the situation.

rHippolytus’s sneering, hubristic reaction is similar to Juvenal’s rant.

Women!  This coin which men find counterfeit /  Why, why, Lord Zeus, did you put them in the world,/ in the light of the sun? If you were so determined/ to breed the race of man, the source/ should not have been women.

And now we reach the impasse, aporia (literally “no way out”). Phaedra is “ruined” by her nurse’s interference;. Hippolytus sneers at her and looks forward to telling his father.  Who is right?  Who is wrong?  Phaedra intended to keep her feelings private: it is the nurse who took it upon herself to play the go-between. Hippolytus has an extreme case of hubris, and yet we understand his repulsion. Both characters are out of balance because of their failure to honor both Aphrodite and Artemis.

Nothing good will come of this. There is no deus ex machina here.

I love Euripides, but, as always, have mixed feelings about Juvenal.

What the Dickens? The Funniest Annotation Ever on Juvenal & Indecipherable Travel Notes

We have duplicate copies of Dickens’s novels.  If it exists, we would like to  donate them to the  What the Dickens? bookshop

My husband points out that the name What the Dickens? would be a PR disaster.  For one thing,  people no longer say, “What the Dickens?” For another, the average person, unless he or she is shopping at Barnes & Noble,  prefers  to frequent bookshops with simple names containing the word ”books.”   And it is true that every independent bookshop in the state (except one) is called [Something] Books or the [Something] Bookshop.

The phrase “What the Dickens?” is obsolete in the 21st century, of course. It was not thriving in the 20th century, either. “What the Dickens are you doing?” my mother occasionally said. The phrase was  a polite reprimand for any number of silly, annoying things:  burning incense (it stank), wearing an Army jacket (we were citizens co-opting an army jacket as an anti-war protest tactic), or pinning a Frodo Lives! button on  a good sweater.

And it turns out that the expression What the Dickens? has nothing to do with Dickens. When  I looked it up in an old Webster’s dictionary I learned that  “dickens” means “devil” or “demon,” and is “used in exclamations or as a mild imprecation.” It is related to the proper names, Dick and Dicken, and was first seen 1590-1600, the lexicographer believes.

One shouldn’t even capitalize Dickens. What the dickens?

More on Annotation & a Comic Note on Juvenal’s Satires

Journal, 2015-2017

I have gently mocked the personal annotation trend and recommended keeping books pristine.

I am a notebook fan when it comes to note-taking. Today I came across an orange Moleskine notebook, which I dedicated to a variety of purposes from 2015 to 2017.

It is mostly a traditional book journal, with a few jottings and quotes. And t wrote what is probably the funniest modern annotation  on  Juvenal’s Satire VI (p. 40, in the Foiio Society edition). Juvenal in English is not for prudes, but his satires are more obscene in Latin, and like all Roman satirists, he is a misogynist. (The gentle Horace is even more misogynistic in his satires.) It is a genre thing. You have to accept it. Like Lenny Bruce.

Juvenal’s derision of women who fit the profile of groupies is so sharp and funny and true that I noted in response:   “Monica Lewinsky.”

Juvenal writes, “Others in winter, when the theaters are closed…/ will yearningly fondle souvenirs of their favorite actor,/their tragedy king-  his mask, his thyrsis, his jock-strap.”

My illegible travel writing is less successful. I observed on one trip,  “It is a [something] culture.” But what kind of culture? i can make out an “s.t”  Stream?  Street?  Steampunk?  Stylish? Stodgy? Stunning?

At the time the notes meant something [Something?].

Juvenal, Satire V: Don’t Have Dinner with Virro

Frontispiece from John Dryden, “The
Satires of Decimus Junius Juvenalis: And of Aulus Persius Flaccus”

One of the most charming ancient genres is the Roman dinner invitation poem. “You will dine well if you bring your own,” writes the poet Catullus (13), adding humorously that “his purse is full of cobwebs.” And Horace (Epistle I.5) writes, “If you don’t mind reclining on a scruffy couch and eating a dinner of cheap greens, I will wait for you at home at sunset.”

The impoverished poets love to entertain. If only all of our dinner invitations could be metrical!  How about a poem where, as a modern poet, you offer only spaghetti and charming company because your food was spoiled in the power outage?

Juvenal spins the trope differently from his predecessors.  He is cranky, mordant, and so politically incorrect you will either laugh or slam the book shut. (I advise you to avoid Satire II and Satire VI, both of which are obscene and offensive.) His good satires are great:  in Satire I, he lists a catalogue of immoral and crass practices in Rome. Then he justifies his lampoon by saying, “It is difficult not to write satire.”

He skewers everything from bad poetry to unfaithful wives to gay marriage to the impossibility of making a living in Rome (he, for one, refuses to write good reviews of bad books) to the entire female sex (I sighed, but read it) to the myth of heredity making a difference.

In Satire V, which is my favorite, Juvenal warns Trebius, an impoverished man who lives from hand to mouth, not to dine with Virro, a sadistic boor who invites his dependents if he needs an extra guest. The rich will eat game, fish, truffles, mushrooms, and fruit while the poor gnaw on hard bread and spoiled food. Even the water is different for the rich, and the poor can’t even get the slaves to pour them a glass of murky liquid.

Begging, Juvenal says, is preferable to accepting this pointless invitation.

Is there no sidewalk to beg on? No bridge or scrap of a mat too small by half? Is the insult of this dinner of such value, is your hunger so gnawing, that a man couldn’t more honorably shudder at and eat filthy dog food?

Virro’s dinner party is the reverse of the nouveau riche Trimalchio’s feast  (Petronius’s Satyricon): instead of the guests enjoying the most extravagant entertainment, watching in horror the host shit in a gold chamber pot, and dining on dishes almost too fantastic for a modern chef to imagine, Virro and the rich enjoy watching the  poor starve while they scarf down so much food it upsets their stomachs.

The translations from the Latin are my own. Here are the Latin lines from Juvenal.

nulla crepido uacat? nusquam pons et tegetis pars
dimidia breuior? tantine iniuria cenae,
tam ieiuna fames, cum possit honestius illic               10
et tremere et sordes farris mordere canini?

And you can read my post on Horace’s poem here