Juvenal writing about the debauched governing class of Imperial Rome sounds like a modern blogger

Rereading Juvenal's Satires, it is hard not to see Juvenal as a modern day blogger. Especially Satire I in which he lays out the case that satirical comment is not only an option but almost a necessity given the fallen state around him.

For every example of his catalog of social climbers, chancers, grifters, cheaters, dodgers, etc. there are obvious modern equivalents among academia, media, Deep State leakers, Third-wave feminists, pederast-enablers, cancel culture, woke Hollywood, and other such bad-actors. Juvenal, faced with this plethora of pitiable behavior, cannot stop himself from his tart commentary.

Babylon Bee, Carpe Donkum and their ilk - all children of Juvenal.

Must I always be stuck in the audience, never get my own back
for all the times I’ve been bored by that ranting Theseïd
of Cordus? Shall X go free after killing me with his farces
or Y with his elegies? No come-back for whole days wasted

on a bloated Telephus, or Orestes crammed in the margins,
spilling over on to the verso, and still not finished?
I know all the mythical landscapes like my own back-room –
the grove of Mars, Vulcan’s cave near Aeolus’ rocky island;
what the winds are up to, which phantoms Aeacus

is tormenting, from where old what’s-his-name’s carrying off
the golden fleecelet, the size | of those ash-trees the Centaurs hurled –
rich Fronto’s plane-trees and quivering marble statues
echo such rubbish non-stop: recitation cracks the columns.
You can expect the same from established | poets as from tyros.

I too have winced under the cane, concocted ‘Advice
to Sulla’: The despot should now retire into private life,
take a good long sleep. When you find such hordes of scribblers
all over, it’s misplaced kindness not to write. The paper
will still be wasted. “Yet why drive my team down the track

which the great Auruncan blazed? If you have the leisure
to listen and reason calmly, I will enlighten you.
When a flabby eunuch marries, when well-born girls go crazy
for pig-sticking up-country, bare-breasted, spear in fist;
when the barber who rasped away at my youthful beard has risen

to challenge good society with his millions; when Crispinus –
that Delta-bred house-slave, silt washed down by the Nile –
now hitches his shoulders under Tyrian purple, airs
a thin gold ring in summer on his sweaty finger
(‘My dear, I couldn’t bear to wear my heavier jewels’) –

it’s harder not to be writing | satires; for who could endure
this monstrous city, however | callous at heart, and swallow
his wrath? Here’s a new litter, crammed with that shyster lawyer Matho.
Who’s next? An informer. He turned in his noble patron,
and soon he’ll have gnawed away what little remains on the bone

of nobility. Lesser informers, terrified, stroke him with bribes:
nervous actors send their wives round to do the stroking for them.
We find ourselves elbowed aside by men who earn legacies
in bed at night, who these days scale the heavens
via that best of all routes – a well-fixed old trot’s bladder.

Her lovers divide the estate: Proculeius gets one-twelfth,
but Gillo the rest, a fair match for the size of their – services.
All that sweat deserves some reward: they’re both as pallid
as though they’d trodden barefoot on a snake, or were waiting
their turn to declaim, at Lyons, in Caligula’s competitions.

Need I tell you how anger burns in my heart when I see
the bystanders jostled back by a mob of thugs, whose master
has debauched and defrauded his ward? The verdict against him
was a farce. What’s infamy matter if you keep your fortune?
Exiled, the governor drinks | the day away, revels in heaven’s

wrath: it’s his province that suffers, though it won its case.
Are not such themes well worthy of Horace’s pen? Should I
not attack them too? Why rehash Hercules’ labours, or what
Diomedes did, all that bellowing in the Labyrinth, or the legend
of the flying craftsman, and how his son went splash in the sea?

In an age when each pimp-husband takes from his wife’s lover
(if she can’t inherit by law): and is adept at watching the ceiling,
or tactfully snoring, still wide awake, in his wine,
will such things suffice? When a rake who’s lost his family fortune
on racing-stables still reckons to get his cohort? Watch him

race down the Flaminian Way like Achilles’ charioteer,
reins bunched in one hand, showing off to his mistress
who stands beside him, wrapped in his riding-cloak!
Don’t you want to cram whole notebooks with scribbled invective
when you stand at the corner and see some forger carried past

exposed to view on all sides, in an all-but-open litter,
on the necks of six porters, lounging back with the air
of Maecenas himself? A will, a mere scrap of paper,
a counterfeit seal – these brought him wealth and honour.
Do you see that distinguished lady? She has the perfect dose

for her husband – old wine with a dash of parching toad’s blood.
Locusta’s a child to her; she trains her untutored neighbours
to bury their blackened husbands, ignore the gossip.
If you want to be someone today, dare acts that could earn you
prison or island exile. Probity’s praised – and freezes:

gardens, palaces, furniture, those antique silver cups
with their prancing repoussé goats – crime paid for the lot of them.
Who can sleep easy today? Avaricious daughters-in-law
and brides are seduced for cash, schoolboys are adulterers.
Though talent be wanting, yet indignation will drive me

to verse such as I – or any scribbler – can manage.
All human endeavours, men’s prayers, fears, angers, pleasures,
joys and pursuits, make up the mixed mash of my book.
Since the days of the Flood, when Deucalion first ascended
that mountain-top in his vessel, and looked for a sign,
        
and slowly the hard stones warmed into living softness,
and Pyrrha confronted those early | males with their naked mates,
when has there been so abundant a crop of vices? When
has the purse of greed yawned wider? When was gambling
more frantic? Today men face the table’s hazards

with not their purse but their strong-box open beside them.
Here you’ll see notable battles, with the croupier for squire,
stakes for arms. Isn’t it crazy to lose ten thousand
on a turn of the dice, yet grudge a shirt to your shivering slave?
In the old days who’d have built all those country houses, or dined

off seven courses, alone? Now citizens must scramble
for a little basket of scraps on their patron’s doorstep.
He peers into each face first, scared stiff that some imposter
may give a false name and cheat him: you must be identified
before you get your ration. The crier has his orders:

even the Upper-Ten must answer his summons, they’re scrounging
along with the rest. ‘The praetor first, then the tribune –’
but a freedman blocks their way. ‘I got here first,’ he argues,
‘Why shouldn’t I keep my place? Oh, I know I’m foreign:
look here, at my pierced ears, no use denying it – born

out East, on the Euphrates. But my five shops bring in
four hundred thousand, see? So what’s in a purple border,
what’s it really worth, if a Corvinus is reduced
to herding sheep up-country, while I have more in the bank
than any Imperial favourite?’ Then keep the Tribunes waiting,

let money reign supreme; we can’t have a Johnny-come-lately,
the chalk just off his feet, flout this sacrosanct office!
Why not? Of all gods it’s Wealth that compels our deepest
reverence – though as yet, | pernicious Cash, you lack
your own temple, though we’ve raised | no altars to Sovereign Gold

(as already to Honour and Peace, to Victory, Virtue
and Concord – where storks’ wings rattle as you salute their nest).
When the Consul himself tots up, at the end of his year,
what the dole is worth, just what it adds to his income,
how are we poor folk to manage? Clothes and shoes must be bought

from this pittance, and food, and fuel. But a throng of litters
gets in line for the hand-out; a husband even, sometimes,
will go the rounds with a sickly or pregnant wife in tow,
or better (a well-known dodge) pretend she’s there when she isn’t,
and claim for both, displaying a curtained, empty sedan.

‘My Galla’s in there,’ he says. ‘Let us through! You doubt me? Galla!
Put out your head! Don’t disturb her – she must be sleeping –’
The day’s marked by its prescribed and fascinating routine.
Dole first: then attendance down in | the Forum, where Apollo-
as-jurisconsult surveys the Law Courts, and triumphal

statues abound, including a jumped-up Egyptian Pasha’s,
whose effigy’s only fit for pissing on – or worse.
Experienced clients follow their patron home again,
hoping in desperation (what expectancy lasts longer?)
for that invitation to dinner which never comes: worn out,
they drift away, poor souls, to buy cabbages and kindling.

But their lord meanwhile will loll alone at his guestless
dinner, scoffing the choicest produce of sea and woodland.
These fellows will gobble up whole legacies at one sitting,
off the finest, the largest, the rarest | antique dining-tables:
soon there won’t be a parasite left. But who could stomach

such meanness in gourmands? What gross greed it takes to dine
off a whole roast boar – a creature meant for banquets!
But you’ll soon pay a heavy price, when you undress and waddle
into the bath, still full of undigested game-meat –
hence sudden deaths, and old age interrupted.

The story goes round as the latest dinner-table joke,
and your funeral procession draws mocking cheers from your ‘friends’.
To these habits of ours there’s nothing more, or worse, to be added
by posterity: our grandsons will share our deeds, our longings.
Today every vice has reached its ruinous zenith. So hoist

your sails, cram on all canvas! But where, you may wonder,
is a talent to match the theme? and where our outspoken
ancestral bluntness, that wrote at burning passion’s behest?
‘Whose name do I dare not utter?’ Lucilius cried: ‘Who cares
whether the noble Consul forgive my libel or not?’

But name an Imperial favourite, and you’ll blaze, a human torch,
bound upright, half-choked, half-grilled, your calcined carcase
leaving a broad black trail as it’s dragged across the sand.
What price the man who’s poisoned three uncles with belladonna?
Is he to ride feather-bedded, and look down his nose at us?

Yes; and when he approaches, put a finger on your lips –
just to say That’s the man will brand you an informer.
It’s safe enough to retell how Aeneas fought fierce Turnus;
no one’s a penny the worse for Achilles’ death, or the frantic
search for Hylas, that time he plunged in after his pitcher.

But when fiery Lucilius rages with Satire’s naked sword
his hearers go red; their conscience freezes with their crimes,
their innards sweat in awareness of unacknowledged guilt:
hence wrath and tears. So ponder these things in your mind
before the trumpet sounds. Any later’s too late

for a soldier. I’ll try my hand on the famous dead, whose ashes
repose beside the Latin and the Flaminian Ways.

Brought to mind while reading this indictment were

Al Gore
Hillary Clinton
Bill Clinton
Barrack Obama
Jeffrey Epstein
Harvey Weinstein
Jussie Smollett
Reality TV shows
Paris Hilton
Roman Polansky
Many Hollywood poseurs
Kenneth Lay
Bernie Madoff
Matt Lauer
Woke Sillicon Valley
Devos attendees
Telephone and email scammers
Welfare cheats
Activist Foundations
Burning Man Festival
Woke social media mobs
John Kerry

Each has a Juvenal line seemingly written just for them.