For what by pay is earn'd, by plunder won, VER. 71. For what by pay is earn'd, &c.] This law, which was introduced so early as the time of Julius Cæsar, was meant to encourage the soldiery, the attachment of whom was now become of importance to the ambitious chiefs who contended for the empire. The privileges which he granted, his successours were careful to extend, till about the time this Satire was probably written, nothing remained for them to bestow; and the distribution of favours-imperium, fasces, legiones, omnia-naturally changed hands. I know nothing of Coranus, who was probably a soldier of fortune:-but there is something ludicrous, amid the disgusting picture of avaricious depravity, in making a father, tottering on the verge of the grave, (jam tremulus,) pay servile court to a son, in the full vigour of life, in hopes to be named his heir! By the law, or rather the constitution of the republick, the power of a father over a son was unbounded; it extended not only to his property but his person, and terminated but with the death of one of the parties: yet it must be confessed that we do not find many instances in the Roman history, of its being abused: Natural affection is an excellent corrector of the anomalies of tyranny. VER. 77. And every prudent chief &c.] O most lame and im potent conclusion! To have a bitter sarcasm on the abuses of a military despotism suddenly terminate in a dull panegyrick on a soldier, which old Coranus himself might have delivered, was little to be expected from any man of judgment, and least of all from Juvenal, whose genuine compositions (a fact which I strongly recommend to the reader's attention) invariably close with an epigrammatick smartness; and whom, therefore, I am desirous of exonerating from having written this Satire, |