Juvenal

Decimus Junius Juvenalis, known in English as Juvenal (c. 55–c. 128), was a Roman poet of the late first and early second centuries. He wrote in Latin, in dactylic hexameter, and is the author of the Satires, a collection of poems that continued a tradition begun by Lucilius and later practised by Horace and Persius. He matters because his verses are one of the most quoted sources on everyday life in imperial Rome, although their comic exaggeration means they must be read with care.

Little about his life can be established with certainty. The Vita Iuvenalis, which became attached to his manuscripts no later than the tenth century, is little more than an extrapolation from the Satires themselves. According to this tradition, he was the son, or adopted son, of a rich freedman and a pupil of Quintilian. He practised rhetoric for many years, partly as a pastime and partly for legal purposes, and the Satires refer to the workings of the courts with a precision that makes this plausible. Accounts disagree about when his career as a satirist began, some placing it early and others in middle age. Martial seems to have known him, and a farm at Tibur is attributed to him, though none of this can be fully verified.

Traditional biographies agree that he was exiled after insulting a powerful actor, possibly the comedian Paris. Most place the exile in Egypt, although one prefers Scotland, and the emperor responsible was either Trajan or Domitian. Juvenal never mentions any exile, so many scholars think it was a later invention, perhaps prompted by the references to Egypt and Britain in his poems. Gilbert Highet, by contrast, accepted it as fact and proposed a specific period, from 93 to 96, arguing that a line by Martial from 92 would be hard to explain if the poet were already banished. If so, he would have lost his property, which would fit his complaints about the miseries of clientage.

An inscription found at Aquinum names a Juvenal who held local magistracies and a military post. Few scholars link it to the poet: a military career sits badly with the Satires' anti-militarism, and the Dalmatian legions seem to postdate 166. It may refer to a later relative, which would suggest a comfortably off family. Green thought it more likely that the story of a freedman father was false and that Juvenal's ancestors belonged to the minor Italian nobility.

The Satires form five books and sixteen poems. The humanist Julius Caesar Scaliger summed up his manner in a Latin formula: Juvenal burns, attacks openly, cuts the throat; Persius stings; Horace mocks. His starting point is anger at a Rome he presents as corrupt, and his famous line, difficile est saturam non scribere, admits how hard it is not to write satire about such a world. Quintilian insisted that satire was the one literary genre that was entirely Roman. Juvenal claims to cover the whole range of human experience, from desire and fear to anger and pleasure. Satire I mocks bad poets and warns of the danger of attacking the powerful; Satire III rejects life in the capital; Satire VI, the longest in Book II, denounces unfaithful wives with examples such as Messalina. His exaggerated humour means his portraits should not always be taken literally.

His poems were copied in Christian monastic scriptoria, perhaps because their criticism of pagan Rome could be put to other uses. His name has stayed attached to moral satire, and his verses are still read both as evidence of Roman society and as a model of indignant irony.