The Sixteen Satires

1967

Brasch PA6447 E5 GS86 1967

Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin

Although it is claimed that the Romans never reached the dizzy intellectual heights of the Greeks, they can lay claim to satire as their own invention. Satire uses irony, sarcasm, scorn and parody to make comments on society and its conventions. It can be light-hearted and funny or cruel and scornful. Not much is known about Juvenal (c. 55-130 AD) but we have sixteen of his satires. He is described by Peter Green as ‘a distinguished pagan moralist’ but he could be xenophobic and misogynistic. In Satire VI Juvenal laments the ‘good old days’ when women knew their place and were chaste, and advises a friend, Postumus, against marrying as women had become adulterous and deceitful; he chastises men, too, for putting up with their wives’ behaviour in exchange for a large dowry.