Juvenal

Juvenal was a Roman satiric poet of the late first and early second centuries. His satires attack wealth, patronage, corruption, social ambition and the perceived moral disorder of imperial Rome, though their speaker is deliberately exaggerated and difficult to treat as straightforward evidence.

Juvenal was born in Aquino and died in Rome. Juvenal’s sixteen surviving satires attack corruption, social pretension, patronage and moral hypocrisy in imperial Rome; their aggressive rhetorical voice profoundly influenced later European satire even though little certain is known about his life.

The Sixteen Satires preserves the body of work through which Juvenal is known to later readers. Its attacks on greed, patronage, sexual behaviour, social climbing, foreign influence and the humiliations of urban life create the fiercely indignant authorial persona associated with his name. The poems are deliberately exaggerated performances rather than straightforward autobiography or neutral social reporting, but they remain indispensable evidence for Juvenal’s literary method and for the anxieties that Roman satire could exploit under the empire.