Context

  • like most Roman authors, we know nothing about him with certainty
  • Full name suspected to be "decimus juvenis juvenalis"
    • he said in Satire III (lines 319-320) he said that his hometown is Aquinum, and in Aquinum a stone inscription was found with "decimus juvenis juvenalis"
  • Born during reign of Nero (who suppressed free speech etc)
  • Grew to adulthood during reign of Domitian
    • Domitian was less suppressive than Nero
    • Juvenal hated Domitian (according to his satires)
  • A lot of biographers try to mine his Satires for biographical information
    • problem is that they are mixing up juvenal, the real person, and Juvenal's persona that appears in satires
      • the persona in the satires hates Domitian; does actual Juvenal hate Domitian?

Themes in Juvenal

  • indignatio
    • anger
      • linguistic signs of anger
        • rhetorical questions
        • exclamations
        • rapid changes of addressee
        • repetition
        • anaphora
        • apostrophe
        • diminutives
        • bathos
          • descent from the sublime to the ridiculous
        • hyperbole
        • rare/obscure vocabulary
          • in dictionaries for words only attested once or twice sometimes they will say "from Juvenal xyz"

Juvenal vs Horace

  • Horace vs Juvenal
    • Horace satires tend to be more individual, "I was walking down the street one day...."
    • Juvenal is more like "THE WORLD SUCKS"
  • Juvenal is an edgelord
    • An edgelord is someone, typically on the Internet, who tries to impress or shock by posting exaggerated opinions such as nihilism or extremist views.
  • Targets
    • Horace
      • social climbers, targets all social climbers through targeting a "stereotype"
    • Juvenal
      • targets society in general - targets the concept of social climbing

On Translations/Commentaries

  • Loeb
    • published in 20th century to make classics more accessible
    • red is Latin, green is Greek
    • tend to be more literal than Penguin translations
    • since published in 19th century, tend to be misogynist and homophobic etc.
  • Poetry In Translation
    • modern and "better" -- according to Brophy
    • Brophy chooses unseens by looking through the Poetry In Translation text and seeing which bits are interesting
  • since Juvenal mentions genitalia etc. sometimes, commentaries/texts might cut that bit out entirely, or translate it very vaguely
  • this one edition that included every satire except for bits from the women one and all the homosexuality ones (even though they were criticising homosexuality)

On Reading

Is juvenal:

  1. genuine
    • e.g. juvenal is genuinely a bigot
  2. genuine & knows he can get away with it (???)
  3. not genuine, pretending to be genuine to make fun of bigots
    • satire in the modern sense
    • using the language of bigots to make fun of the bigots
      • like that guy who pretends to be a trump supporter at trump rallies and leads them into logical flaws by agreeing with them
      • and the jewish guy touring USA and showing how people in pubs sing "throw the jews down the well"