Juvenal: Satires Book I, Book 1

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Cambridge University Press, Mar 7, 1996 - History - 323 pages
This volume presents a new commentary on the first book of satires of the Roman satirist Juvenal. In the Introduction Braund situates Juvenal within the genre of satire and demonstrates his originality in creating an angry character who declaims in the "grand style." The Commentary illuminates the content and style of Satires 1-5. The essays on each of the poems together with the overview of Book I in the Introduction present the first integrated reading of these Satires as an organic structure.

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Contents

Introduction
1
3 The origins of Roman satire
3
4 Juvenals satire predecessors
7
a Lucilius
8
b Horace
10
c Persius
13
5 Juvenals life
15
indignation rhetoric and epic
17
9 An overview of Book I
30
a Rome
31
b Patrons and clients
32
c A day in the life?
34
e Running away from the city
35
g The power of food
36
11 Text and manuscripts
38
IVNII IVVENALIS SATVRARVM LIBER PRIMVS
43

b Rhetoric
18
c Epic
21
7 Juvenals style
24
8 Juvenals metre
29
Commentary
75
Bibliography
309
Index
319
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About the author (1996)

The 16 Satires (c.110--127) of Juvenal, which contain a vivid picture of contemporary Rome under the Empire, have seldom been equaled as biting diatribes. The satire was the only literary form that the Romans did not copy from the Greeks. Horace merely used it for humorous comment on human folly. Juvenal's invectives in powerful hexameters, exact and epigrammatic, were aimed at lax and luxurious society, tyranny (Domitian's), criminal excesses, and the immorality of women. Juvenal was so sparing of autobiographical detail that we know very little of his life. He was desperately poor at one time and may have been an important magistrate at another. His influence was great in the Middle Ages; in the seventeenth century he was well translated by Dryden, and in the eighteenth century he was paraphrased by Johnson in his London and The Vanity of Human Wishes. He inspired in Swift the same savage bitterness.

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