Satires
Saturae
Rome under the emperors has become intolerable to live in honestly, corrupt patrons, dangerous streets, social climbers everywhere, and only furious, exaggerated satire, indignation itself, can do justice to how bad it has gotten.
- indignation itself as satire's only honest register given Rome's condition
- 'bread and circuses' as enduring description of political cynicism
- unresolved ambiguity over how literally to read the satiric persona
- dominant model for the harsh, Juvenalian strand of later European satire
Sixteen satires composed across roughly three decades in the reigns of Trajan and Hadrian, in which Juvenal takes Roman verse satire's harsh register, inherited from Lucilius and Persius, to its extreme, attacking the degrading dependence of the client on wealthy patrons, the dangers of city life, and the corrupting influence of foreign culture on Roman tradition with a rhetorical violence that Juvenal frames, in his opening satire, as the only honest response to a city this far gone ('difficile est saturam non scribere,' it is hard not to write satire). Modern readers debate how literally to take Juvenal's persona, but lines like 'panem et circenses,' bread and circuses, have entered the standing vocabulary for political cynicism. Juvenal's savage register became the dominant model for later European satire, notably the eighteenth-century tradition running through Dryden, Swift, and Samuel Johnson.
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