Juvenal

Biography

Juvenal, whose full name was Decimus Junius Juvenalis, was a Roman poet, the fiercest satirist of ancient Rome. Almost nothing certain is known of his life: he was probably born at Aquinum, south of Rome, around the middle of the first century, and the poet Martial, his friend, addressed three epigrams to him. In the early second century, under the emperors Trajan and Hadrian, he published sixteen satires in verse, collected in five books. A late and unreliable tradition says that in old age he was sent into exile in Egypt for mocking a favourite of the court.

His satires attack the greed, luxury, flattery and corruption of Roman society with burning indignation, and describe the noise, dangers and humiliations of life in the great city. The tenth satire, on the vanity of human wishes, gave the world two of its most famous Latin phrases, bread and circuses and a sound mind in a sound body, and the sixth asks who will guard the guardians themselves. Rediscovered in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, he shaped the satire of later centuries, and Samuel Johnson based his poems London and The Vanity of Human Wishes on Juvenal’s third and tenth satires.