Satire VI

Satire VI is the most famous of the sixteen Satires by the Roman author Juvenal written in the late 1st or early 2nd century. In English translation, this satire is often titled something in the vein of Against Women due to the most obvious reading of its content. It enjoyed significant social currency from late antiquity to the early modern period, being read largely as a proof-text for a wide array of misogynistic beliefs. Its current significance rests in its role as a crucial—although problematic—body of evidence on Roman conceptions of gender and sexuality. The overarching theme of the poem is a dissuasion of the addressee Postumius from marriage; the narrator uses a series of acidic vignettes on the degraded state of (predominantly female) morality to bolster his argument. At c. 695 lines of Latin hexameter, this satire is nearly twice the length of the next largest of the author's sixteen known satires; Satire VI alone composes Book II of Juvenal's five books of satire. In addition, Satire VI contains the famous phrase, "Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" (but who will guard the guards themselves), which is variously translated as "But who guards the guards?", "But who watches the watchmen?", or similar. (This phrase has been used as an epigraph to numerous works, most notably Watchmen and the Tower Commission Report.) In context, it refers to the impossibility of enforcing moral behavior when the enforcers (custodes) are corruptible: