Juvenal: Difference between revisions

'''Decimus Junius Juvenalis''' --— generally known as '''Juvenal''' --— was a Roman satirist who lived in the first and second centuries AD -- roughly from the time of Nero to the time of Hadrian. He's perhaps best known as the originator of the phrases, "Who will watch the watchmen?"<ref>''Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?''</ref> and "bread and circuses."<ref> ''panem et circenses''</ref> He lends his name to the brand of satire known as [[Captain Obvious|Juvenalian]], which consists of scathing attacks on people and things the writer considers to be evil.

His [[satire]]s are written from the point of a financially distressed member of the upper classes -- the kind that in Victorian England would have been called "shabby genteel" (or in other words, a literal [[Impoverished Patrician]]). The narrator saves his bitterest vile for the upstarts, ex-slaves, and foreigners who dominated early Imperial times, but he spears almost everyone and everything: [[Stay in the Kitchen|upstart women who don't sit at home and spin]], [[Older Than They Think|gay men who think they can ''marry'']], uncaring patrons who feed their dependents plain olive oil while keeping the extra-virgin olive oil for themselves, [[Vice City|the teeming, dangerous city that gets worse every day]], the cruel, rapacious Emperor who cares more about the delicacies of his own table than he does about starving soldiers (probably talking about Domitian, the Nero of his time). It's usually assumed that the narrator is Juvenal himself, frustrated into invective by the "moral degeneracy" of his time, but a modern [[Alternative Character Interpretation]] is that Juvenal was actually poking fun at the kind of stuffy, stuck-up old guard that would come up with these things. It's plausible, given that Juvenal (like [[Creator/Horace|Horace]]) might have been the son of an ex-slave himself. Or he might have been the son of a noble. Nobody really knows.