author
Juvenal
A fierce Roman satirist from the late first and early second century, he turned outrage into unforgettable poetry. His sharp portraits of corruption, vanity, and social ambition still feel startlingly alive.
1 Audiobook
The Satires of Juvenal, Persius, Sulpicia, and Lucilius Literally translated into English prose, with notes, chronological tables, arguments, &c.
by Juvenal, Gaius Lucilius, Persius, Sulpicia
About the author
Little is known for certain about Juvenal's life, which makes his voice in the poems stand out even more strongly. Usually identified as Decimus Junius Juvenalis, he lived around the late first and early second centuries CE and is best known for the Satires, a set of biting poems about Roman society.
Those poems made him one of the great masters of literary attack. Juvenal writes with anger, wit, and a taste for vivid extremes, taking aim at greed, moral hypocrisy, political flattery, and the excesses of city life. Famous phrases linked to him, including the ideas of "bread and circuses" and "who will guard the guards themselves?," have echoed far beyond ancient Rome.
For modern listeners, Juvenal can be both entertaining and unsettling: funny in his exaggeration, but also severe in his judgments. Even where the details of his biography remain uncertain, his work offers a powerful window into Roman culture and into satire at its most cutting.