Juvenal

Last winter I heard the eulogist of Abbot Aidan Shea say that in one of the upper level Latin classes about 1960, he had been unable to muster enthusiasm for Virgil, and that Father Shea had put him to reading Juvenal, whom he found more sympathetic: "sarcastic, rude, vulgar, right up my alley".

This weekend I happened to pull from the shelves Heinrich Böll's What's to Become of the Boy?: Or, Something to Do with Books, where I noticed, of one of Böll's high-school classes in Cologne in the late 1930s,

I don't know whether Juvenal was in our curriculum, or whether Bauer had recognized how topical he was and chosen him for that reason: in Juvenal, arbitrariness, despotism, depravity, corruption of political mores, the decline of the Republican idea, were described with ample clarity, even a few "June 30's", staged by the Praetorians, and allusions to Tigellinus.

Fortunate are the generations that can appreciate Juvenal for his sarcasm without finding him too topical.