This strange violence and lack of proportion are due in part to the poet's rhetorical training, which had warped still further a naturally biased temperament. He had been taught and loved to use the language of hyperbole. And he had lived through the principate of Domitian; it was that above all else which made him cry _difficile est saturam non scribere_. To this same tendency to exaggeration may be in part attributed the extreme grossness of so much of his work. It is true that vices flaunted themselves before his eyes that it would be hard to satirize without indecency. There is excuse to some extent for the second, sixth, and ninth satires. But even there Juvenal oversteps the mark and is often guilty of coarseness for coarseness' sake. It is easy to plead the custom of the age,[727] but it is doubtful whether such pleading affords any real palliation for a writer who sets out to be a moralist. It is easy in an access of admiration to say that Juvenal is never prurient: but it is hard to be genuinely convinced that such a statement is true, or that Juvenal's coarseness is never more than mere plain speaking.[728]
For not a few readers, this tenseness of language, this violence of judgement, and this occasional unclean handling of the unclean, make Juvenal an exhausting and a depressing poet to read in any large quantity at a time. Worse still, they lead the reader at times to harbour doubts as to the genuineness of Juvenal's indignation. Such doubts are not in reality justifiable. Juvenal sometimes goads himself into inappropriate frenzies and sometimes betrays a suspiciously close acquaintance with the most disgusting details of the worst vices of the age. But though he had something of the unreality of the rhetorician, and though his character may, perhaps, not have been free from serious blemish, he is never a hypocrite; nor, though he paints exclusively the darkest side of society, is there the least reason to accuse him of culpable misrepresentation of actual facts. He has selected the material most suited to his peculiar genius: we may complain of his principle of selection, and of his tendency to generalize. There our criticism must end.
These defects are largely the defects of his qualities and may be readily forgiven. We have Pliny the younger and the inscriptions to modify his sombre picture. When all is said, Juvenal had a matchless field for satire and matchless gifts, against which his defects will not weigh in the balance for a moment. His unrivalled capacity for declamation, for mordant epigram and scathing wit, more than compensate for his often ill-balanced ferocity; the extraordinary vividness of his pictures of the life of Rome makes up for lack of perspective and proportion, the richness and variety of his imagination for its too frequent superficiality, the vigour and trenchancy of his blows for the absence of the rapier thrust, the fervour of his teaching for its lack of breadth and depth. These qualities make him the greatest of the satirists of Rome, if not of the world.