Juvenal. Decimus Junius Juvenalis was born about 55 A.D. at Aquinum, in the Volscian country, where his father, a free Roman citizen, possessed an estate. He received the usual rhetorical education in Rome, and became the friend of Martial, and at least the acquaintance of Statius and Quintilian. Probably under Titus, or early in Domitian's reign, he served as tribune in the army, and in his native town filled the important posts of censor and flamen of the deified Vespasian. We know from an inscription apparently written by himself that he was in Britain and returned home in safety, but there is no evidence that he was there in a military capacity. That he was in Upper Egypt is certain, but that he was banished thither by Hadrian is merely a more plausible conjecture than that he died an octogenarian under Antoninus Pius.
His interest for posterity depends altogether on his sixteen satires, still extant, which occupy the very first rank in satirical literature, and are of priceless value as pictures of the Roman life of the Empire. The order in which these compositions follow each other in the earliest manuscripts and latest editions seems to have been that in which they were originally published. They were grouped probably by Juvenal himself into five books, and these were given to the world at intervals, during which he seems to have undergone notable changes of mood. The first book contains the first five satires, and saw the light in the early years of Trajan's government. It presents Juvenal's powers at their highest and most sustained pitch, fresh from living experience of Domitian's brutalising sway, the forms and effects of which constitute their main theme. Book second consists of one satire, the sixth, levelled at females in general, of whom, in their degraded, unsexed condition under the empire, he draws a well-nigh savage picture, unrelieved by any touch of that chivalry which belongs to a later and christianised civilisation. By many (chiefly French and Italian) critics it is reckoned his chef-d'œuvre. It probably appeared a little before the death of Trajan. The third book was published soon after Hadrian's accession, and comprises the seventh, eighth, and ninth satires. Interwoven with passages of earlier composition than that date, these touch, without uniformly maintaining, the high level of the preceding ones. The fourth book, also published under Hadrian, is made up of the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth satires, and in the best of them, the tenth, on the 'Vanity of Human Wishes,' notwithstanding its fine declamatory swing and its characteristic misogyny, there is a softer spirit, as of the 'years that bring the philosophic mind,' or at least temper the impetuosity of earlier manhood. The fifth book, again given to the world in Hadrian's time, contains satires thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen, and even more than its predecessor betrays the softening influence of age, while distinctly the least vigorous and effective of the series.
Juvenal and Horace respectively represent the two schools into which satire has always been divided; and from one or other of them every classical satirist of modern Europe derives his descent. As Horace is the satirist of Ridicule, so Juvenal is the satirist of Indignation. Juvenal is not a man of the world so much as a reformer, and he plays in Roman literature a part corresponding to that of the prophets under the Jewish dispensation. He uses satire not as a branch of comedy, which it was to Horace, but as an engine for attacking the brutalities of tyranny, the corruptions of life and taste, the crimes, the follies, and the frenzies of a degenerate society. He has great humour of a scornful, austere, but singularly pungent kind, and many noble flashes of a high moral poetry. It should be noted that the old Roman genius—as distinct from the more cosmopolitan kind of talent formed by Greek culture—is plainly discernible in Juvenal. He is as national as the English Hogarth, who perhaps gives a better image of his kind and character of faculty than any single English humorist or moralist that we could name. Juvenal has been better translated in our literature than almost any other of the ancients. Dryden's versions of five of his satires are amongst the best things he ever did. Dr Johnson imitated two of the most famous in his London and Vanity of Human Wishes; and the version of the whole of them by Gifford is full of power and character.
The latest and best editions of Juvenal are those of O. Jahn (2d ed. by Bücheler, 1886), A. Weidner (Leip. 1889), and J. E. B. Mayor (Lond. 1878-86). Other annotated editions are those of Macleane, Lewis (with a literal prose translation), and Pearson and Strong.