JUVENAL (DECIMUS IUNIUS IUVENALIS) (c. A.D. 6o-14o), Roman satirist and poet, was probably born at Aquinum. Our knowledge of his life is slight, though various mediaeval mss. of his works have a Life of the author prefixed to them. Many of the statements they contain are improbable, and most of the rest seem to be deductions from passages in his works, and not derived from any independent source. Our material con sists of 13 of these Lives, an inscription from Aquinum which may or may not be relevant, three poems addressed to Juvenal by Martial, and an allusion, almost certainly to him, in Sidonius Apollinaris. The most reliable of the Lives tells us that Juvenal was the son or ward of a wealthy freedman; it is impossible to tell if this is true or not; if it is, the rancour with which he attacks the whole class in his satires is surprising; that until middle age he practised declamation, which is not improbable; that he published his satires late in life, when they met with great success, and that an actor of the time, annoyed at a passage really aimed at Paris, Domitian's favourite, had the poet banished, under the form of a military appointment, to Egypt, where he died at the age of eighty. The only independent tradition in all this is the reference to his exile. The idea of military service, in Egypt of all places, being used as a cloak for exile does not sound particularly convincing, but the tradition is persistent. The story of military service is to some extent confirmed by an inscription found at Aquinum (CLL. X., 5382), recording the dedication of an altar to Ceres by a Iunius Iuvenalis, tribune of the first cohort of Dalmatians, duumvir quinquennialis and flamen Divi Vespas iani. On the question whether this is or is not the poet, opinions differ flatly. Duff (preface to his edition of the Satires) is against the identification, Friedlander for it. Juvenal certainly does not write like a soldier, nor like a man who has held important offices in a country town. On the other hand it is tempting to relate his obvious interest in, and one might almost say personal acquaint ance with, Britain to service with a corps which is known to have been there.
From the poems of Martial addressed to Juvenal we may con clude that Juvenal was in Rome in 92 (Epig. VII., 91) and Pm (XII., 18). Martial addresses Juvenal as facundus, into which phrase it is possible to read as little as a mere reference to the eloquence of Juvenal's verse, or as much as a definite implication that Juvenal had a forensic practice. Sidonius' reference (farm. IX., 269) has no further value than to show that the tradition of his exile was prevalent in the 5th Century A.D.
The Satires were published at intervals, grouped in books as we have them now, but they were not necessarily written in that order, or even at about the same times. Repeatedly there are references to the life, public, literary and private, of Domitian's reign as if it belonged to the present, while the first book was cer tainly not published till the beginning of Trajan's reign. Juvenal would not be the only man of letters of the period who shunned publication till that tyranny was overpast.