"It is not easy for men to rise whose qualities are thwarted by poverty"
About this Quote
Merit, Juvenal implies, is a fragile thing when it has to fight hunger first. The line reads like moral advice, but it’s really a Roman sneer aimed at a society that congratulates itself on virtue while quietly rigging the game. “Not easy” is doing the dirty work: it understates the violence of the obstacle. Poverty doesn’t just slow a person down; it “thwarts” qualities, turning talent into something wasted, warped, or invisible.
Juvenal is writing from an empire that loved the rhetoric of dignity and stoic self-mastery, even as it ran on patronage, inherited status, and the humiliating economics of dependence. If you want to “rise,” you need time, education, connections, clean clothing, a reputation protected from necessity. Poverty corrodes all of that. It forces compromises that the comfortable later read as character flaws. The subtext is bitterly modern: society treats poverty as a personal failing, then uses the damage poverty causes as proof the poor deserved it.
As a poet-satirist (and Juvenal is nothing if not a master of civic disgust), he’s also warning the audience who prides itself on “recognizing talent.” You can’t celebrate exceptional men while starving the conditions that let them become exceptional. The line cuts because it refuses the comforting fairy tale that greatness naturally surfaces. It says: look at the system, not the myth.
Juvenal is writing from an empire that loved the rhetoric of dignity and stoic self-mastery, even as it ran on patronage, inherited status, and the humiliating economics of dependence. If you want to “rise,” you need time, education, connections, clean clothing, a reputation protected from necessity. Poverty corrodes all of that. It forces compromises that the comfortable later read as character flaws. The subtext is bitterly modern: society treats poverty as a personal failing, then uses the damage poverty causes as proof the poor deserved it.
As a poet-satirist (and Juvenal is nothing if not a master of civic disgust), he’s also warning the audience who prides itself on “recognizing talent.” You can’t celebrate exceptional men while starving the conditions that let them become exceptional. The line cuts because it refuses the comforting fairy tale that greatness naturally surfaces. It says: look at the system, not the myth.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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