Juvenal - Modern Criticism and Historical Context of The Satires

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.