Kenney_and_Clausen B.M.W.(eds.) - Get a Free Blog

MARTIAL AND JUVENAL
to laud the new masters, Nerva and Trajan. There are 1,561 epigrams in all:
1,235 written in elegiacs; 238 in hendecasyllables; 77 in scazons, and a few in
hexameters and iambics. He knew, or at least addressed, the important figures
of the Flavian literary establishment — Silius, Valerius, Pliny, Quintilian — and
Juvenal as well.
Of Juvenal's career we know much less. Birth dates of A.D. 67, 60 and 55
have been suggested, but arguments are not conclusive. 1 Of his name, it has
been argued that the gentile name Junius suggests possibly Spanish origin,
while Juvenalis, his cognomen, is perhaps a sign of lowly birth. 2 Much has
been made of an inscription from Aquinum — a place seemingly close to the
satirist (3.318fF.); but it is unlikely that we shall ever know for certain if the
Junius Juvenalis there mentioned, duumvir quinquennalis, flamen of Vespasian,
and tribune of the soldiers, is the poet of the satires. 3 Juvenal claims autopsy
of Egypt (15.45), but that need not have been as a soldier; nor is there strong
reason for linking the reference to Ceres at the end of the third satire with the
Ceres honoured in the inscription. We have several ancient lives, but they
represent a single tradition. 4 According to the common source, 5 Juvenal, son
of a wealthy freedman, declaimed into middle age — a story which may be
based on extrapolation from the satires themselves (i.i5ff.), and perhaps, to
some extent, on conflation with Horace, libertino patre natus (Sat. 1.6.6). Then
follows the tale of exile: Juvenal, now an old man, is sent to hold command
on the furthest borders of Egypt, in disgrace for his comments about Paris the
actor. The story is a part of Domitian's bad press, a concoction of later antiquity,
intended to supply the wanted evidence for a writer about whom hardly
anything was known — yet in recent times the tale has been revived: bitter
and poor from his exile, Juvenal starts to write to voice the hatreds of his
youth. 6 In fact, we know no more than that his output is a product of the first
quarter of the second century. If he was active in the nineties, our only evidence
would be Martial's seventh book, composed in A.D. 91—2, where the epithet
facunde, addressed to Juvenal in the ninety-first epigram, perhaps suggests
poetry: but declamation could explain it too, and Juvenal, it seems, had been a
rhetorician. In A.D. 102, he might have been engaged on Book 1 of his satires —
if that is what Martial has in mind when, in that year, he describes Juvenal as
leading the life of a cliens. The clues are slight, but enough to make one think
of the wretched existence portrayed in the early satires:
1 As Coffey (1976) 120 points out, A.D. 55, the date offered by the Vita, is too early. Syme (1958)
774f. argues for A.D. 67, Highet (1954) 5 and 11—12, unconvincingly, for A.D.