Monday, February 12, 2018

 

Juvenal

Peter Green, "Juvenal and His Age," The Shadow of the Parthenon: Studies in Ancient History and Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), pp. 216-267 (at 233, footnote omitted):
Juvenal was a bred-in-the-bone rentier, with all the characteristics of his class: contempt for trade, indifference to practical skills, intense political conservatism, with a corresponding fear of change and revolution; abysmal ignorance of, and indifference to, the economic realities governing his existence; a tendency to see all problems, therefore, in over-simplified moral terms, with the application of right conduct to existing authority as a kind of panacea for all ills.
Without being a rentier (Oxford English Dictionary: "A person who derives his or her income from property or investment"), I possess some of the same characteristics.



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