Juvenal

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

Roman authors often worked in genres developed by the Greeks but verse satire was their own creation. Its last great practitioner, Juvenal, wrote at Rome’s imperial height, in the early second century CE. His early poems call out the criminals and fools populating the streets of the city and the mansions of the rich. In later works, indignation gives way to cooler cynicism: all human beings are prone to delusion. In this class, we will read all of Juvenal’s first book of satires and selected poems from the rest of his corpus. Topics for discussion include Juvenal’s relationship to earlier satirists and philosophers, his grand epic style, and the reliability of his narrators. We will also look at later imitations of his poems such as Samuel Johnson’s London and The Vanity of Human Wishes and see how Juvenal has shaped ideas of satire up to the present day.