In September 1976, I appeared in a one-man show called Juvenalia, and it proved to be the surprise sensation of the fringe season that year, lauded with rare unanimity by all the major national newspapers. But the triumph was essentially Juvenal's. His scabrous commentary on his own times was perceived as startlingly pertinent and laugh-out-loud funny: filthy and deeply, gloriously, politically incorrect, even for 1976, when the concept had yet to be articulated.
The moment Richard Quick picked up Peter Green's translation of Juvenal's 16 Satires, he saw its theatrical potential. At the time he was performing virtuoso character monologues in comedy clubs around the country and immediately recognised an ancestor. The very first sentence of the first Satire reads like a script, or, more to the point, like a comic routine:
Must I always be stuck in the audience at these poetry readings, never
Up on the platform myself, taking it out on Cordus
For the times he's bored me to death with ranting speeches
From that Theseid of his?
Juvenal is a great comic performer, with, needless to say, a large axe to grind and the deadly seriousness of all truly great comedians. "A foul-tempered Woody Allen," said the headline in the Times review of Juvenalia; "if Lenny Bruce had not been a Jewish junkie," opined the Financial Times, "he might have turned out a little like Juvenal." Before Richard chanced on Green's translation, neither he nor I had known much about Juvenal beyond the famous tags – a healthy mind in a healthy body, bread and circuses, who will guard the guards themselves? There was precious little to know, actually: after the initial success of the Satires, not only he but the entire genre of satire fell out of favour, and he and his work disappeared into obscurity, where they remained for three nearly centuries. It is nonetheless generally agreed that Decimus Iunius Iuvenalis was born c AD55. He has been widely assumed to have been the son of a wealthy freedman, though the evidence is by no means conclusive. He was certainly born during Nero's alarming tenure of the imperial throne, and was a teenager during the terrible year – AD69 – in which three emperors came and went, two slaughtered, the third killed by his own hand; they were succeeded that same year by Vespasian, who at last introduced a modicum of stability into public affairs.
At some unknown time during Vespasian's reign, Juvenal moved to Rome, where he may have studied with the great literary critic and master of rhetoric, Quintilian. He subsequently practiced as a rhetorician, not, it appears, for financial gain, but for personal pleasure, all the while privately pursuing what he called the irresistible itch of writing, chipping out the verses that eventually made him immortal. At a certain point – in fact, a very uncertain point – he appears to have caused imperial offence by mocking the undue influence of a dance master at court; the offending verses quickly reached the ears of the emperor, the unstable Domitian, and Juvenal's little jest was paid for with exile, probably to Egypt, possibly Scotland.
When he returned he started publishing the Satires, in which he gave such uninhibited expression to the disgust he felt at what he saw all around him. The 16 Satires appeared in five books, and each anatomises a different aspect of modern life; the longest, the sixth, with its hair-raising denunciation of the disgraceful behaviour of women, fills a whole volume. What the reviewers of Juvenalia discerned was true not just of our little show, but of the original from which it was drawn: the Satires stand in a tradition to which Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce and Woody Allen, but equally Max Miller and Jackie Mason and Bernard Manning all belong, the comic improvisation on a theme.
You there – have you the nerve to thunder at vice, who are
The most notorious dyke [LAUGH] among all our Socratic fairies? [LAUGH]
Your shaggy limbs and the bristling hair on your forearms
Suggest a fierce male virtue [CHUCKLE]; but the surgeon called in
to lance your swollen piles [BIG LAUGH] dissolves in laughter [GURGLE]
at the sight of that well-smoothed passage [ROAR].
He picks off one sitting duck after another – phony politicians, flashy oligarchs, gay marriage – all on a wave of brilliantly modulated outrage. Like all standup comedians, he addresses himself to people whom he thinks of as fellow sufferers – like-minded people. Because of the precision of his marksmanship, very little of his ruthless satire has dated: he is forever topical. The sense of plus ça change is overwhelming, partly because his great subject is money and its unjust distribution. All the corruption he sees around him is, he believes, the outcome of the wrong people getting the money, his main thesis is, as Green puts it, "the appalling influence which mobility of income can have on a static class-structure".
Juvenal's moral position is essentially one of personal grievance: he neither knows nor wishes to know how to outsmart people who have made fortunes by their wits. He has no real programme for reform but to wind the clock back. His purpose is not to change, but to punish, which makes the invective so deeply gratifying.
He is perfectly oblivious, as Green says, of the availability of a simple remedy to his ills: "to get a useful job of work." But that, of course, would be socially beneath him. And he is subject to mood swings, in the grip of what would now no doubt be diagnosed as borderline bipolarity, switching between savage outrage and a sense, which expresses itself at its most dolorously magnificent in the sustained lament of Satire X, of profound hopelessness at the caprices of Fortune. Here too, he is weirdly prescient. A statue of Sejanus, commander of the Praetorian Guard, is pulled down after his fall. For Sejanus read Ceausescu, Dzerzhinsky, Stalin, Lenin ...
The ropes are heaved, down come the statues,
Axes demolish their chariot wheels, the unoffending
Legs of their horses are broken. And now the fire
Roars up the furnace, now flames hiss under the bellows:
The head of the people's darling glows red-hot, great Sejanus
Crackles and melts. Those features, once second in all the world
Are turned into jugs and basins, frying-pans, chamber pots.
Eventually, things began to look up for Juvenal. It seems that when Hadrian took the purple, he was one of the beneficiaries of the new emperor's policy of supporting the arts. He left the city he had so brutally denounced, and some of the fire went out of his belly. He appears never to have married, but on the strength of Satire VI, his experience of women can scarcely have been a happy one. His rage against them is matched only by his contempt for homosexuals, although, as Green puts it, "what excites his anger and contempt is the adult invert, the transvestite queen, the middle-aged or elderly fellator, above all the habitually sodomised". But the tenderness, the affection, he feels towards his young servants is genuine enough, on its own terms, and gave an emotional centre to our show.
He seems in later life to have found some sort of serenity, underpinned by the Stoic philosophy which, superbly stated, ends Satire X:
Still, if you must pray for something, if at every shrine you offer
The entrails and holy chitterlings of a white piglet
Then ask for a healthy mind in a healthy body,
Demand a valiant heart for which death holds no terrors,
That reckons length of life as the least among the gifts
Of nature, that's strong to endure every kind of sorrow,
That's anger free, lusts for nothing, and prefers
The sorrows and labours of Hercules to all
Sardanapulus' downy cushions and women and junketings.
What I've shown you, you can bestow on yourself: there's one
Path, and only one, to a tranquil life – through virtue.
Fortune has no divinity, could we but see it: it's we,
We ourselves, who make her a goddess, and set her in the heavens.
This tremendous passage is of course a great deal more than the comedian's parting: "Bless you, you've been a wonderful audience, look after each other, thank you, good night," though it has some of the same effect, a moment of still truth in the midst of the carnival of wit and raillery.
When Peter Green walked into my dressing room at the Bush theatre on the last night of the London run, he hailed me with one word: "Juvenal!" If I was able to channel the man, it was entirely due to Green, who has truly brought him and his work back to us with all his uproarious, dangerous vitality intact. In 1967, he doubted whether it was possible actually to like Juvenal; by 1997 he had succumbed. I don't see how it is possible to read the book without feeling that Juvenal has entered one's life for good.
• Simon Callow in Juvenalia is at the Assembly Hall, Edinburgh until 25 August. tickets.edfringe.com. Juvenal's Sixteen Satires, translated by Peter Green with illustrations by David Hughes, is published on 15 August by the Folio Society. foliosociety.com
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