"No one ever became extremely wicked suddenly"
About this Quote
Evil, Juvenal suggests, is less a lightning strike than a slow apprenticeship. “No one ever became extremely wicked suddenly” isn’t a comforting claim about human decency; it’s a warning about how quickly we normalize what once disgusted us. The line works because it frames “extremely wicked” as a destination reached by routine decisions, small compromises, and the social rewards that come with looking the other way. It’s about habit, not monsters.
As a Roman satirist, Juvenal is allergic to the convenient story that corruption arrives as an external shock. In his world, vice is infrastructural: lubricated by money, status, patronage, and the everyday theater of respectability. The subtext is accusatory. If wickedness is gradual, then everyone who benefits from the system has had time to notice it forming. There’s no plausible deniability, only a record of earlier exits you didn’t take.
The sentence is also a neat rhetorical trap. It sounds almost compassionate - people don’t just “turn bad” overnight - but it lands as indictment. Juvenal shifts the focus from sensational crimes to the warm-up acts: the first bribe accepted, the first cruelty excused as a joke, the first silence purchased for comfort. By denying the drama of sudden moral collapse, he makes wickedness feel intimate and civic, the kind that grows in public while citizens congratulate themselves on private virtue.
Read now, it punctures our obsession with the “bad apple” narrative. Juvenal’s point is nastier: the barrel teaches the apple.
As a Roman satirist, Juvenal is allergic to the convenient story that corruption arrives as an external shock. In his world, vice is infrastructural: lubricated by money, status, patronage, and the everyday theater of respectability. The subtext is accusatory. If wickedness is gradual, then everyone who benefits from the system has had time to notice it forming. There’s no plausible deniability, only a record of earlier exits you didn’t take.
The sentence is also a neat rhetorical trap. It sounds almost compassionate - people don’t just “turn bad” overnight - but it lands as indictment. Juvenal shifts the focus from sensational crimes to the warm-up acts: the first bribe accepted, the first cruelty excused as a joke, the first silence purchased for comfort. By denying the drama of sudden moral collapse, he makes wickedness feel intimate and civic, the kind that grows in public while citizens congratulate themselves on private virtue.
Read now, it punctures our obsession with the “bad apple” narrative. Juvenal’s point is nastier: the barrel teaches the apple.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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