While on my present sabbatical from writing new material, I decided to take-up one my usual pastimes, again: voracious reading. The past two weeks have found me perusing The Sixteen Satires by Second Century Roman rhetorician, Juvenal. The translation by scholar and Hellenistic academic, Peter Green, is superb, as are his endnotes. Though Green admits to a host of varying opinions about the satires (of course), his work seems to be the most definitive regarding one of antiquity’s greatest—but most incisive—misanthropes.
I don’t know why it took me so long to get to Juvenal; the Plutarchs, Herodotuses, Plinys, Ovids, and Aureliuses, etc. have all been stacked in my library for years. Maybe I was reluctant, subconsciously, to see our present world mirrored in Juvenal’s take-no-prisoners looking glass. My conclusion is terse:
Ancient Rome has nothing on the most degraded sectors of contemporary Western society. Past is not merely prologue, dearies. It’s present and future.
Or maybe it’s all just the perpetual nature of the beast(s).
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[ THE WEDNESDAY BOX, a dark fable by Jonathan Kieran, along with titles from his exciting new ShadowPyx Short Story Collection, are available on Amazon.com, HERE. ]
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