JUVENAIIS, DECIMUS JUNIUS, the Roman satirist, was U. at the Volscian town of Aquintim. The year of his birth is unknown; but it may be taken for granted that he was a youth in the reign of Nero; that he was come to man's estate, and was writing in that of Domitian (81-96 A.D.); and that he survived into time times of Hadrian (117-38 A.D.). He seems to have enjoyed a competence. Ile practiced at Rome as an advocate; and there are some reasons for supposing that he visited Egypt. Among his friends were Martial and Statius, and perhaps Quintilian. But nothing is known of his personal history except a few leading facts—among them that he recited some of his satires in public with much and even these facts are not known to us in any detail. His interest for posterity depends altogether on his writings—on his sixteen satires, still surviving, which occupy time very first rank in satirical literature, and are of priceless value as pictures of the Roman life of the empire. Juveualis and Horace respectively represent the two schools into which satire has always been divided; and from one or other of them every classical satirist of modern Europe derives his descent. As Horace is the satirist of ridicule, so Juvenalis is the satirist of indignation. Jove nahs is not a man of the world so much as a reformer, and he plays in Roman literature a part corresponding to that of the prophets under the Jewish dispensation. Ile uses
satire not as a branch of comedy, which it was to Horace, but as an engine for attack ing the brutalities of tyranny, the corruptions of life and taste, the crimes, the follies, and the frenzies of a degenerate state of society. He has great humor of a scornful, austere, bat singularly pungent kind, and many noble flashes of a high moral poetry. We would especially point out that the old Roman genius—as distinct from the more ,?.os mopolitan kind of talent formed by Greek culture—is distinctly discernible in Juvenalis. He is as national as the English Hogarth, who perhaps gives a better image of his kind and character of faculty than any single English humorist or moralist that we could name. :fuvenalis has been better translated in our literature than almost any other of the ancients. Dryden's versions of five of his satires arc amongst the best things Dryden ever did. Dr. Johnson imitated two of the most famous in his London and Vanity of Human Wishes ; and the version of the whole of them by Gifford is full of power and charac ter. The best-known modern edition of Juvenalis is that of Ruperti, and there are good recent English ones by Idacleane and Mayor.