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:
“Anne: He hit me, Jack. My own brother, he hit me.
Jack: Your brother’s an old-fashioned man, he believes in a sister’s honor. Me, I’m Modern Man, the 20th-century type. I run.”
—Robert Rossen (1908–1966)
“It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden. Meantime, I seem to have been drifting into criticism myself. But that is nothing. At the worst, criticism is nothing more than a crime, and I am not unused to that.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“Reason, progress, unselfishness, a wide historical perspective, expansiveness, generosity, enlightened self-interest. I had heard it all my life, and it filled me with despair.”
—Katherine Tait (b. 1923)
“The hippie is the scion of surplus value. The dropout can only claim sanctity in a society which offers something to be dropped out of—career, ambition, conspicuous consumption. The effects of hippie sanctimony can only be felt in the context of others who plunder his lifestyle for what they find good or profitable, a process known as rip-off by the hippie, who will not see how savagely he has pillaged intricate and demanding civilizations for his own parodic lifestyle.”
—Germaine Greer (b. 1939)
“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)