Books by Juvenal

This volume presents a new commentary on the first book of satires of the Roman satirist Juvenal.

"... gives us all sixteen of the satires in the tough, slashing manner of the original, unheard in Dryden and the few others who tried it." ΓÇöSaturday Review

Juvenal's sixth Satire is a masterpiece of comic hyperbole, an outrageous rant against women and marriage which, in its breadth and density, represents the high point of the misogynistic literature of classical antiquity. The Introduction situates Juvenal within the wider tradition of Roman satire, interrogates afresh the poem's architecture and recurrent themes, shows how Juvenal systematically attributes to his monstrous women the inverse of the Roman wife's canonical virtues, traces the various literary currents which infuse the Satire, and lastly addresses the much-discussed issue of the poetic voice or persona from a sociohistorical as well as a theoretical perspective. Above all, the commentary strives to locate Juvenal in his historical, literary and cultural context, while simultaneously affording assistance with the nuts and bolts of the Latin, and always keeping in view two key questions: what was Juvenal's purpose in writing the Satire? How seriously was it meant to be taken?

First published in 1932, as the sixth edition of an 1898 original, this collection of some of Juvenal's satires, including the often-overlooked sixth satire, was edited and abridged by noted Juvenal scholar James Duff. Duff begins the book with a biography of the poet and an overview of satire before Juvenal.

Juvenal, writing between AD 110 and 130, was one of the two great satirists of ancient Rome (the other being Horace). His powerful and witty attacks on the vices of the big city have been admired and used by many English writers including Dr Johnson. Niall Rudd's translation aims to reproduce Juvenal's livliness and energy whilst maintaining the poet's general stylistic and metrical effect.

Perhaps more than any other writer, Juvenal (c. AD 55-138) captures the splendour, the squalor and the sheer energy of everyday Roman life. In The Sixteen Satires he evokes a fascinating world of whores, fortune-tellers, boozy politicians, slick lawyers, shameless sycophants, ageing flirts and downtrodden teachers. A member of the traditional land-owning class that was rapidly seeing power slip into the hands of outsiders, Juvenal also creates savage portraits of decadent aristocrats - male and female - seeking excitement among the lower orders of actors and gladiators, and of the jumped-up sons of newly-rich former slaves. Constantly comparing the corruption of his own generation with its stern and upright forebears, Juvenal's powers of irony and invective make his work a stunningly satirical and bitter denunciation of the degeneracy of Roman society