Satires (Juvenal)

The Satires are a collection of satirical poems by the Latin author Juvenal written in the late 1st and early 2nd centuries AD.

Juvenal is credited with sixteen known poems divided among 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. The poems are not individually titled, but translators have often added titles for the convenience of readers.

Roman Satura was a formal literary genre rather than being simply clever, humorous critique in no particular format. Juvenal wrote in this tradition, which originated with Lucilius and included the Sermones of Horace and the Satires of Persius. In a tone and manner ranging from irony to apparent rage, Juvenal criticizes the actions and beliefs of many of his contemporaries, providing insight more into value systems and questions of morality and less into the realities of Roman life. The author employs outright obscenity less frequently than Martial or Catullus, but the scenes painted in his text are no less vivid or lurid for that discretion.

Juvenal

Decimus Iūnius Iuvenālis [ˈdɛkɪmʊs ˈjuː.ni.ʊs ˈjʊ.wɛ.naː.lɪs], known in English as Juvenal /ˈdʒuːvənəl/, was a Roman poet active in the late 1st and early 2nd century CE, 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 CE fix his terminus post quem (earliest date of composition).

In accord with the 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, comic mode of expression makes the use of statements found within them as simple fact problematic. At first glance the Satires could be read as a 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.