Juvenal, Ancient Roman Poet
by Folger Shakespeare Library
Title
Juvenal, Ancient Roman Poet
Artist
Folger Shakespeare Library
Medium
Photograph - Photograph
Description
Decimus Iunius Iuvenalis, known in English as Juvenal, was a Roman poet active in the late 1st and early 2nd century AD, author of the Satires. Juvenal wrote at least 16 poems in dactylic hexameter covering an encyclopedic range of topics across the Roman world. The traditional biographies, including the Vita Iuvenalis, give us the writer's full name, and also tell us that he was either the son or adopted son of a rich freedman. He is supposed to have been a pupil of Quintillian, and to have practiced rhetoric until he was middle-aged, both as amusement and for legal purposes (the Satires make both frequent and accurate references to the operation of the Roman legal system). His career as a satirist is supposed to have begun at a fairly late stage in his life. The biographies agree in giving his birthplace as Aquinum, and also agree in allotting to his life a period of exile due to insulting an actor with high levels of court influence the emperor who banished him is given as either Trajan or Domitian.
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April 12th, 2015
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