Satires (Juvenal)

Satires
by Decimus Junius Juvenalis
Page from a 1632 manuscript, with Satire 15 and annotations
Original title	Saturae
Translator	Niall Rudd Rolfe Humphries Peter Green G. G. Ramsay William Stewart Rose Lamberto Bozzi
Written	c. AD 100–127
Country	Roman Empire
Language	Latin
Genre(s)	Satire
Form	16 poems divided into five books
Meter	dactylic hexameter
Publication date	1467
Published in English	1647
Media type	manuscript
Full text
The Satires of Juvenal at Wikisource

The Satires (Latin: Saturae) are a collection of satirical poems by the Latin author Juvenal written between the end of the first and the early second centuries A.D.

Frontispiece depicting Juvenal and Persius, from a volume translated by John Dryden in 1711

Juvenal is credited with sixteen poems divided among five books; all are in the Roman genre of satire. The genre is defined by a wide-ranging discussion of society and social mores in dactylic hexameter. The sixth and tenth satires are some of the most renowned works in the collection.

• 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)

In a tone and manner ranging from irony to rage, Juvenal criticizes the actions and beliefs of many of his contemporaries, providing insight into value systems and questions of morality as opposed to the realities of Roman life. The author makes constant allusion to history and myth as a source of object lessons or exemplars of particular vices and virtues. Coupled with his dense and elliptical Latin, these references indicate that the intended reader of the Satires was highly educated. The Satires are concerned with perceived threats to the social continuity of the Roman citizens: socially ascendant foreigners, unfaithfulness, and other more extreme excesses of the Roman aristocracy.

Scholarly estimates for the dating of the individual books have varied. It is generally accepted that the fifth book must date to a point after 127, because of a reference to the Roman consul Lucius Aemilius Juncus in Satire 15. A recent scholar has argued that the first book should be dated to 100 or 101. Juvenal's works are contemporary with those of Martial, Tacitus and Pliny the Younger.

Manuscript tradition

The controversies concerning the surviving texts of the Satires have been extensive and heated. Many manuscripts survive, but only P (the Codex Pithoeanus Montepessulanus), a 9th-century manuscript based on an edition prepared in the 4th century by a pupil of Servius Honoratus, the grammarian, is reasonably reliable. At the same time as the Servian text was produced, however, other and lesser scholars also created their editions of Juvenal: it is these on which most medieval manuscripts of Juvenal are based. It did not help matters that P disappeared sometime during the Renaissance and was only rediscovered around 1840. It is not, however, uncommon for the generally inferior manuscripts to supply a better reading in cases when P is imperfect. In addition, modern scholarly debate has also raged around the authenticity of the text which has survived, as various editors have argued that considerable portions are not, in fact, authentically Juvenalian and represent interpolations from early editors of the text. Jachmann (1943) argued that up to one-third of what survives is non-authentic: Ulrick Knoche (1950) deleted about hundred lines, Clausen about forty, Courtney (1975) a similar number. Willis (1997) italicizes 297 lines as being potentially suspect. On the other hand, Vahlen, Housman, Duff, Griffith, Ferguson and Green believe the surviving text to be largely authentic: indeed Green regards the main problem as being not interpolations but lacunae.

In recent times debate has focused on the authenticity of the "O Passage" of Satire VI, 36 lines (34 of which are continuous) discovered by E. O. Winstedt in an 11th-century manuscript in Oxford's Bodleian Library. These lines occur in no other manuscript of Juvenal, and when discovered were considerably corrupted. Ever since Housman translated and emended the "O Passage" there has been considerable controversy over whether the fragment is in fact a forgery: the field is currently split between those (Green, Ferguson, Courtney) who believe it is not, and those (Willis, Anderson), who believe it is.

Genre

Saturae, 1535

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. In Satire I, concerning the scope and content of his work, Juvenal says:

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.

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 gist of my little book.

—(1.81–86)

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 (although Satire 16 is incomplete)

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

Modern criticism and historical context

While Juvenal's mode of satire has been noted from antiquity for its wrathful scorn toward all representatives of social deviance, some politically progressive scholars, such as William S. Anderson and later Susanna M. Braund, have attempted to defend his work as that of a rhetorical persona (mask), taken up by the author to critique the very attitudes he appears to be exhibiting in his works.

In any case it would be an error to read the Satires as a literal account of normal Roman life and thought in the late first and early second centuries CE, just as it would be an error to give credence to every slander recorded in 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.

Juvenal's Satires, giving several accounts of Jewish life in first-century Rome, have been regarded by scholars, such as J. Juster and, more recently, Peter Nahon, as a valuable source about early Judaism.

Literary and cultural influence

The Satires have inspired many authors, including Samuel Johnson, who modeled his "London" on Satire III and his "The Vanity of Human Wishes" on Satire X. Alexander Theroux, whose novels are rife with vicious satire, identified Juvenal as his most important influence. Juvenal also provided a source for the name for a forensically important beetle, Histeridae. 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, eloquence, or children—one 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, a modified form of which is the modern phrase "a black swan", since black swans are rarer than white.)
• that "honesty is praised and left out in the cold" Probitas laudatur et alget (I, line 74).
• 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).

ASICS, the footwear and sports equipment manufacturing company, is named after the acronym of the Latin phrase "anima sana in corpore sano" (a sound mind in a sound body) from Satire X by Juvenal (10.356).

In his autobiography, the German writer Heinrich Böll notes that in the high school he attended when growing up under Nazi rule, an anti-Nazi teacher paid special attention to Juvenal: "Mr. Bauer realized how topical Juvenal was, how he dealt at length with such phenomena as arbitrary government, tyranny, corruption, the degradation of public morals, the decline of the Republican ideal and the terrorizing acts of the Praetorian Guards. (...) In a second-hand bookshop I found an 1838 translation of Juvenal with an extensive commentary, twice the length of the translated text itself, written at the height of the Romantic period. Though its price was more than I could really afford, I bought it. I read all of it very intensely, as if it was a detective novel. It was one of the few books to which I persistently held on throughout the war and beyond, even when most of my other books were lost or sold on the black market".

References

• Anderson, William S.. 1982. Essays on Roman Satire. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Adams, J. N.. 1982. The Latin Sexual Vocabulary. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins 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.
• Edwards, Catherine. 1996. Writing Rome: Textual Approached to the City. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Freudenburg, Kirk. 1993. The Walking Muse: Horace on the Theory of Satire. Princeton: Princeton 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.
• Hutchinson, G. O.. 1993. Latin Literature from Seneca to Juvenal. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• 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.
• Uden, James. 2015. The Invisible Satirist: Juvenal and Second-Century Rome. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Walters, Jonathan. 1997. Invading the Roman Body: Manliness and Impenetrability in Roman Thought. in J. Hallet and M. Skinner, eds., Roman Sexualities, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Juvenal. 1998. The Sixteen Satires. Trans. Peter Green. London: Penguin Books.

External links

• Juvenal's 16 "Satires" in Latin, at The Latin Library
• Juvenal's Satires 1, 2, and 3 in Latin and English (translation G. G. Ramsay) at the Internet Ancient History Sourcebook
• Juvenal's Satire 3 in Latin and English, at Vroma
• Juvenal's Satires 1, 10, and 16, English translation by Lamberto Bozzi (2016–2017)
• Juvenal's Satires in English verse, through Google Books
• The Satires of Juvenal, Persius, Sulpicia, and Lucilius in English prose, through Google Books
• Commentary on the Satires by Edward Courtney
• Satires public domain audiobook at LibriVox