Juvenal

Juvenal, full name Decimus Junius Juvenalis (c. 65-c. 128), Roman satirical poet, born in Aquinum in southern Italy. All that is known of his life is conjecture; it is believed that he had a short army career, fell out of favour with the Emperor Domitian, and was exiled (perhaps to Egypt). On his return to Rome he reputedly lived in poverty, but towards the end of his life his circumstances improved—possibly because of the patronage of the Emperor Hadrian.

The period of Juvenal’s literary activity extended from about 98 to 128, during which time he wrote the 16 extant Satires upon which his reputation is based. Remarkable for their brilliant, epigrammatic style, they are unsparing attacks upon the follies and vices of imperial Roman society and give a vivid description of life in the city. Juvenal claimed that he was influenced by the writings of Lucilius and Horace, but his work has none of the humour found in Horace’s Odes and is instead bitter and pessimistic. Many of the Satires reveal his moral indignation at a variety of society’s outrages—hypocrisy, the abuses by the rich of the poor, gluttony and material greed, the corruption of Domitian’s administration. The topic of one of his Satires is a misogynistic condemnation of the whole female sex. Juvenalian satire was particularly admired by such 17th- and 18th-century British poets as John Dryden, Jonathan Swift, and Samuel Johnson, who translated Juvenal’s work and modelled their own satirical verse on his. Johnson’s Vanity of Human Wishes (1749), for example, is an imitation of the tenth satire.