Juvenal n : Roman satirist who denounced the vice and folly of Roman society during the reign of the emperor Domitian (60-140) [syn: Decimus Junius Juvenalis]

English

Etymology

juvenalis, from juvenis, young one

Adjective

juvenal

1. Of a young bird, that has its first flying plumage.

Noun

juvenal

1. A juvenal bird.
2. A juvenile.

Related terms

• juvenile

Decimus Iunius Iuvenalis, known in English as Juvenal, was a Roman poet active in the late 1st and early 2nd century AD, author of the Satires. The details of the author's life are unclear, although references within his text to known persons of the late 1st and early 2nd centuries AD fix his terminus post quem (earliest date of composition). In accord with the vitriolic manner of Lucilius – the originator of the genre of Roman satire – and within a poetic tradition that also included Horace and Persius, Juvenal wrote at least 16 poems in dactylic hexameter covering an encyclopedic range of topics across the Roman world. While the Satires are a vital source for the study of ancient Rome from a vast number of perspectives, their hyperbolic, comedic mode of expression makes the use of statements found within them as simple fact problematic, to say the least. At first glance the Satires could be read as a brutal critique of (Pagan) Rome, perhaps ensuring their survival in Christian monastic scriptoria, a bottleneck in preservation when the large majority of ancient texts were lost. The Satires have inspired many authors, including Samuel Johnson, who modeled his “London” on Satire III and his “Vanity of Human Wishes” on Satire X. Juvenal is the source of many well-known maxims, including:

• that the common people—rather than caring about their freedom—are only interested in “bread and circuses” (panem et circenses 10.81; i.e. food and entertainment),
• that—rather than for wealth, power, or children—men should pray for a “sound mind in a sound body” (mens sana in corpore sano 10.356),
• that a perfect wife is a “rare bird” (rara avis in terris nigroque simillima cycno 6.165; a rare bird in the earth and most similar to a black swan)
• and the troubling question of who can be trusted with power—“who will watch the watchers?” or "who will guard the guardians themselves?" (quis custodiet ipsos custodes 6.347-48).

Life

The precise details of the author's life cannot be securely reconstructed based on presently available evidence. The Vita Iuvenalis (Life of Juvenal), a biography of the author that became associated with his manuscripts no later than the 10th century, is little or nothing more than extrapolation from the Satires themselves.

The traditional biographies, including the Vita Iuvenalis, give us the writer's full name, and also tell us that he was either the son or adopted son of a rich freedman (sometimes specified as a Spanish freedman). He is supposed to have been a pupil of Quintillian, and to have practised rhetoric until he was middle-aged, both as amusement and for legal purposes (the Satires make both frequent and accurate references to the operation of the Roman legal system). His career as a satirist is supposed to have begun at a fairly late stage in his life. The biographies agree in giving his birthplace as Aquinum, and also agree in allotting to his life a period of exile due to insulting an actor with high levels of court influence: the emperor who banished him is given as either Trajan or Domitian, and all the biographies place his exile in Egypt, with the exception of one that opts for Scotland.

Only one of these traditional biographies supplies a date of birth for Juvenal: it gives 55 AD, which is most probably guesswork but accords reasonably well with the rest of the evidence. Other traditions have him surviving for some time past the year of Hadrian's death (138 AD). Some sources place this death in exile, others have him being recalled to Rome (the latter of which is considered more plausible by contemporary scholarship). If he was exiled by Domitian, it is then possible that he was one of the political exiles recalled during the brief reign of Nerva.

It is impossible to tell how much of the content of these traditional biographies is fiction and how much is fact. Large parts are clearly mere deduction from Juvenal's writings, but some elements appear more substantial. Juvenal never mentions a period of exile in his life, yet it appears in every extant traditional biography. Many scholars think the idea a later invention; the Satires do display some knowledge of Egypt and Britain, and it is thought that this gave rise to the tradition that Juvenal was exiled. Others, however - particularly Gilbert Highet - regard the exile as factual, and these scholars also supply a concrete date for the exile: 93 AD until 96, when Nerva became Emperor. They argue that a reference to Juvenal in one of Martial's poems, which is dated to 92, is impossible if at this stage Juvenal was already in exile or had served his time in exile, since Martial would not have wished to antagonise Domitian by mentioning such a persona non grata as Juvenal. If Juvenal was exiled, he would have lost his patrimony, and this may explain the consistent descriptions of the life of the client he bemoans in the Satires.

The only other available piece of biographical evidence is the following 19th-century dedicatory inscription, said to have been found at Aquinum with the text:

...]RI·SACRVM

...]NIVS·IVVENALIS

...] COH·[.]·DELMATARVM

II·VIR·QVINQ·FLAMEN

DIVI·VESPASIANI

VOVIT·DEDICAV[...]UE

SVA PEC

CERE]RI·SACRVM

D(ECIMVS) IV]NIVS·IVVENALIS

TRIB(VNVS)] COH(ORTIS)·[I]·DELMATARVM

II·VIR·QVINQ(VENNALIS)·FLAMEN

DIVI·VESPASIANI

VOVIT·DEDICAV[ITQ]UE

SVA PEC(VNIA)

To Ceres (this) sacred (thing)

(Decimus Junius?) Juvenalis

military tribune of the 1st cohort of the Dalmatian (legions)

Duovir, Quinquennalis, Flamen

of the Divine Vespasian

vowed and dedicated

at his own expense

(Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum X.5382)

Scholars are usually of the opinion that this inscription does not relate to the poet himself: a military career would not fit well with the pronounced anti-militarism of the Satires, and moreover the Dalmatian legions do not seem to have existed prior to 166 AD. Therefore, however, it seems likely that this Juvenal was a later relative of the poet, as they both came from Aquinum and were associated with the goddess Ceres (the only deity the Satires shows much respect for). But if the theory that connects the two Juvenals is right, then the inscription does show that Juvenal's family was reasonably wealthy, and that if the poet really was the son of a foreign freedman, then his descendants assimilated themselves into the Italian class structure with rapidity. Green thinks it more likely that the tradition of the freedman father is false, and that Juvenal's ancestors were minor Italian nobility of relatively ancient descent.

The Satires and their genre

Juvenal is credited with sixteen known poems divided between five books; all are in the Roman genre of Satire, which, at its most basic in the time of the author, comprised a wide-ranging discussion of society and social mores in dactylic hexameter. In Satire I, concerning the scope and content of his work, Juvenal asserts that:

Back from when Deucalion climbed a mountain in a boat

as the clouds lifted the waters, and then asked for an oracle,

and then little by little spirit warmed the soft stones

and Pyrrha showed naked girls to their husbands,

whatever men do – prayer, fear, rage, pleasure

joy, running about – is the grist of my little book.

ex quo Deucalion nimbis tollentibus aequor

nauigio montem ascendit sortesque poposcit

paulatimque anima caluerunt mollia saxa

et maribus nudas ostendit Pyrrha puellas,

quidquid agunt homines, uotum, timor, ira, uoluptas,

gaudia, discursus, nostri farrago libelli est.

(1.81-86)

In sum, Juvenal claims as his purview the entire gamut of human experience since the dawn of history. Quintilian – in the context of a discussion of literary genres appropriate for an oratorical education - claimed that, unlike so many literary and artistic forms adopted from Greek models, “satire at least is all ours” (satura quidem tota nostra est). At least in the view of Quintillian, earlier Greek satiric verse (e.g. that of Hipponax) or even Latin satiric prose (e.g. that of Petronius) did not constitute satura per se. Roman Satura was a formal literary genre rather than being simply clever, humorous critique in no particular format.

• Book I: Satires 1-5
• Book II: Satire 6
• Book III: Satires 7-9
• Book IV: Satires 10-12
• Book V: Satires 13-16 (Satire 16 is incompletely preserved)

The individual Satires (excluding Satire 16) range in length from 130 (Satire 12) to c. 695 (Satire 6) lines. The poems are not individually titled, but translators have often added titles for the convenience of readers.

Significance of the Satires

Although Juvenal has enjoyed a wide readership across the centuries, the content and tone of the Satires have become increasingly problematic and unpalatable with the rise of the feminist movement and greater awareness (and rejection) of intolerance in all forms. While Juvenal's mode of satire has been noted from antiquity for its wrathful scorn towards all representatives of social deviance, scholars such as W.S. Anderson and later S.M. Braund have suggested that this apparent anger is merely a rhetorical persona (mask) taken up by the author to critique the unbalanced anger aroused by the sort of elitism, sexism, and xenophobia that the Satires seem replete with at first glance. The aphoristic, absolutist character of the text lends itself all too easily to indiscriminate application of critiques originally directed at literary exemplars of particular vices. In the interest of keeping the text from total eclipse by such concerns, it is vital that the text and its author be distinguished from the manner in which they have commonly been read. As has been noted by the literary theorist Stanley Fish, the reading of a text is as much a product of the reader’s beliefs and prejudices as of those contained within the text. The misogyny and other forms of hatred perceived in the text are as attributable to what readers across the centuries have brought to the reading as to what Juvenal intended. It would be an equally grave error to read the Satires as a literal account of normal Roman life and thought in the late 1st and early 2nd centuries CE, just as it would be an error to give credence to every slander recorded in Tacitus or Suetonius against the members of prior imperial dynasties. Themes similar to those of the Satires are present in authors spanning the period of the late Roman Republic and early Empire ranging from Cicero and Catullus to Martial and Tacitus; similarly, the stylistics of Juvenal’s text fall within the range of post-Augustan literature as represented by Persius, Statius, and Petronius. Finally, it is necessary to realize that the conceptual system present within the text is most representative of only a portion of the Roman population; the Satires do not speak clearly for the concerns of women, immigrants, slaves, children, or even men who deviated from the elite, educated audience intended by the author. With these caveats held in mind, it is possible to approach the Satires as a helpful source for studying the culture of early Imperial Rome. In addition to a wealth of incidental information on everything from diet to décor, the Satires of Juvenal reveal what is most essential to a civilization: the issues at the core of the Roman identity. Rather than revealing the myriad potential answers spanning the diverse Roman population, Juvenal reveals the questions pivotal to Roman society.

References

• Anderson, William S.. 1982. Essays on Roman Satire. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Braund, Susanna M.. 1988. Beyond Anger: A Study of Juvenal’s Third Book of Satires. Cambridge: Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge.
• Braund, Susanna. 1996. Juvenal Satires Book I. Cambridge: Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge.
• Braund, Susanna. 1996. The Roman Satirists and their Masks. London: Bristol Classical Press.
• Courtney, E.. 1980. A Commentary of the Satires of Juvenal. London: Athlone Press.
• Edwards, Catherine. 1993. The Politics of Immorality in Ancient Rome. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Gleason, Maud. W. 1995. Making Men: Sophists and Self-Presentation in Ancient Rome. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Gowers, Emily. 1993. The Loaded Table: Representations of Food in Roman Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Highet, Gilbert. 1961. Juvenal the Satirist. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Juvenal. 1982. The Sixteen Satires. Trans. Peter Green. London: Penguin Books.
• Juvenal. 1992. The Satires. Trans. Niall Rudd. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Juvenal. 1992. Persi et Juvenalis Saturae. ed. W. V. Clausen. London: Oxford University Press.
• The Oxford Classical Dictionary. 1996. 3rd ed. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Richlin, Amy. 1992. The Garden of Priapus. New York : Oxford University Press.
• Rudd, Niall. 1982. Themes in Roman Satire. Los Angeles: University of California Press.
• Syme, Ronald. 1939. The Roman Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Notes

External links

• Latin text of The Satires of Juvenal at the The Latin Library
• English translations of all 16 satires at the Tertullian Project. Together with a survey of the manuscript transmission.
• English translations of Satires 1, 2, 3, 6, 8 and 9
• Juvenal's first 3 "Satires" in English
• SORGLL: Juvenal, Satire I.1-30, read by Mark Miner