Modern Criticism and Historical Context of The Satires
While Juvenal's mode of satire has been noted from antiquity for its wrathful scorn towards all representatives of social deviance, some politically progressive scholars such as W.S. Anderson and later S.M. Braund have attempted to defend his work as actually 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 1st and early 2nd centuries AD, just as it would be an error to give credence to every slander recorded in Tacitus or 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. Certainly the Satires represent only the world view of a portion of the Roman population, not speaking of the concerns of women, immigrants, slaves, children, or men not of the elite, educated audience addressed by the author.
With these caveats, it is nonetheless possible to approach the Satires as a helpful source for studying the culture of early Imperial Rome. In addition to a wealth of incidental information on everything from diet to décor, the Juvenal's work reveals what is most essential to a civilization: the issues at the core of the identity of a society such as Rome.
Read more about this topic: Juvenal
Famous quotes containing the words modern, criticism, historical, context and/or satires:
“The experience of the gangster as an experience of art is universal to Americans. There is almost nothing we understand better or react to more readily or with quicker intelligence.... In ways that we do not easily or willingly define, the gangster speaks for us, expressing that part of the American psyche which rejects the qualities and the demands of modern life, which rejects “Americanism” itself.”
—Robert Warshow (1917–1955)
“A tailor can adapt to any medium, be it poetry, be it criticism. As a poet, he can mend, and with the scissors of criticism he can divide.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)
“This seems a long while ago, and yet it happened since Milton wrote his Paradise Lost. But its antiquity is not the less great for that, for we do not regulate our historical time by the English standard, nor did the English by the Roman, nor the Roman by the Greek.... From this September afternoon, and from between these now cultivated shores, those times seemed more remote than the dark ages.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The hard truth is that what may be acceptable in elite culture may not be acceptable in mass culture, that tastes which pose only innocent ethical issues as the property of a minority become corrupting when they become more established. Taste is context, and the context has changed.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“All the satires of the stage should be viewed without discomfort. They are public mirrors, where we are never to admit that we see ourselves; one admits to a fault when one is scandalized by its censure.”
—Molière [Jean Baptiste Poquelin] (1622–1673)