D. JUNIUS JUVENALIS OF AQUINUM

L I F E.

Juvenal himself testifies that he is from Aquinum in Satire 3, verse 319. Others relate that he was born of a freedman father, or at least educated by one. He was taught by Fronto the Grammarian; and by Quintilian the Rhetorician, as some suggest. Certainly, he is said to be spoken of here by Juvenal in book 10, chapter 1, where, praising the Satiric poets, he says: There are those famous today as well, who will also be named in the future. He flourished under the Emperors Domitian, Nerva, Trajan, and even Hadrian, as will be evident from the Notes.

J. Lipsius in Epistolicæ Quæstiones, Book 4, Epistle 20, says, It is not without reason that there is doubt concerning the age of Juvenal. He declaimed until almost middle age and pleaded legal cases not without praise and glory. Afterward, he applied his mind to composing Satires. But when he had published certain verses—not absurd ones—against Paris the mime, he offended Domitian, who was a lover of that actor, in no small way. Concerning these, see Satire 7, 15, and 16. They say, therefore, that those who were provoked by shame and anger thought of removing Juvenal and, under the guise of an honor, sent him into exile, namely as prefect of a cohort that was being sent to Egypt. They say that when the reason for the prefecture was understood, he ended his life there out of weariness and anguish, surely an octogenarian. Furthermore, these things are neither all true nor all false: as Lipsius testifies in the cited passage, where he does not deny that Juvenal was exiled under Domitian, but he denies that he died while Domitian was alive. Indeed, he gathers from his Satire 4 that he wrote some Satires after him. And primarily from the final verses, he shows that he lived until the times of Trajan, and even Hadrian, from Satire 6, verse 406 and following, and Satire 13, verse 17, and considers him contemporary with Pliny the Younger and Tacitus.

Martial, in Book 7, Epigrams 23 and 90, and Book 12, Epigram 18, greatly commends Juvenal as his close friend. If Martial wrote this epigram while he was living in Spain, and after Domitian was already dead; which indeed he affirms in the aforementioned place in Lipsius, two things become clear to us: first, that Juvenal survived Domitian: second, that he by no means died in Egypt, but returned from there to Rome and wrote thereafter. For thus Martial says in the cited Epigram 18, Book 12, to Juvenal:

While you perhaps wander restlessly,
Juvenal, in the noisy Suburra,
Or wear down the hill of the mistress Diana;
While your sweaty toga beats against you
Before the thresholds of the more powerful, etc.

Otherwise, Julius Scaliger writes that Juvenal is to be preferred to all satirists, including Horace himself: and Lipsius asserts that nothing more true was written by him.