Juvenal
Juvenal in Latin) is a poet, satirical Latin from the late first century and early second century AD. He is the author of sixteen satires together in a single book written between 90 and 127.
After two centuries of oblivion, Juvenal was widely read from the Late Antiquity and Middle Ages - there were nearly 500 medieval manuscripts of the Satires - and his life is very poorly known. The biographers are reduced to conjectures inspired by events, can be real for some of them, which he refers in the Satires.
Summary |
Biography
Probably born during the reign of Claude - but the dates vary from 45 - to Aquinum in Campania , if one believes him, he began his career as professor of eloquence, whose job it appears to have lived quite properly, because it seems he bought a small farm in Tiber (now Tivoli ).
A great friendship between him and Martial , the author of Epigrams. He apparently visited the Egypt when he was an octogenarian. Some even make the trip into exile together with a vague military mission, the result of imperial disgrace of Hadrian. Satire XV also refers extensively to Egypt and tells the story of a scene of cannibalism that took place there in 127. He died, perhaps in exile after 128.
His work
Hating Rome , or rather what she became, Juvenal is a painting of his contemporaries acerbic and merciless. It is a world which is difficult saturam scribere not (it is hard not to write satire) .
Imperial Rome has indeed turned into a huge city, a monstrous theater full of buffoons who are unaware of sharks and a brothel.
There remains little choice to the old Latins: they will flee and take refuge in the provinces, or will be resolved to come to the court of all stripes, from emperor to gigolo enriched. Finally, and the choice of Juvenal, they can post themselves at intersections and roar with laughter at the sight, for example, a castrato, a former slave Rich, who struggles to raise his ring, the stone is so heavy!
Juvenal knows nothing of political correctness : he attacks, in turn, women who, when they do not cocufient their husbands, their erudition by poison before doing so in earnest and touching inheritance, for fathers la shame that conceal their evil gay males in their words and diaphanous silk garments, the rich increasingly refined in their depravity and suffering from a sordid avarice when it comes to treating their customers or giton ; to effeminate who marry them if they can not bear children; Orientals of all kinds, slaves freed , especially the Greeks, who are crowding out the old Romans responsibilities; the hypocrites, who invoke the gods to help relieve the gogo its beautiful silver. Juvenal does not hesitate to approach the tone of the political farce, dangerous game, where talk of rain and the weather is quickly you disgrace or death. Table (parody of a lost work) that it proposes to the court of Domitian , the " Nero bald ', if full of grotesque ratings, making it very well the nightmarish atmosphere of a period that exuded terror. Finally, in the Rome of Juvenal, sometimes a empress, more often than not, do the hustler or a princess gives birth to a series of aborted fetuses, all faithful copy of one that is both their uncle and father, the Emperor.
We can not talk without anachronism of freedom of expression when it comes to imperial Rome, Juvenal and is careful not to attack the reigning emperors. This did not prevent his contemporaries to read about his allusions to current events of his time. That would have earned him exile in Egypt , under the guise of a vague military mission. There would be dead.
The language of Juvenal can get an idea of the variety of spoken Latin, between social classes and regions. It is both strong, even raw, and learned. Juvenal enjoys playing with the contrast between the manners of the ancient Romans, frugal and bearded, and those of his contemporaries, lost luxury and effeminate.
With Horace , Juvenal will be a model for the seventeenth century to the Satires of Nicolas Boileau ( 1666 ) . Immanuel Kant remembered for his satires their moral dimension, and include Juvenal, repeatedly, in Latin, in his Critique of practical reason.
Quotes
Juvenal is best known for these expressions:
- "Dat veniam Corvis, harassment Censura Columbas," "Censorship savings ravens and doves turmoil."
- "Panem and circuses": "bread and circuses", a term relating to the manners of the people under the Roman Empire (see evergetism )
- Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes? ":" But keep these guards? "(XV, 331)
- " mens sana in corpore sano ":" a healthy mind in a sound body "(X 356)
- "Rara Avis in Terris": " rare bird on earth '(VI, 165)
- "Vitam impendere vero": "Devoting his life to the truth" (IV, 91)
- "Minuti semper nurse and is cramped animi uoluptas Ultio": "Vengeance is the pleasure of souls weak, narrow and petty" (XIII, 189-191)
- "Salva concordia socru Desperanda tibi": "Without hope, peace in your household, as a stepmother is in good health" (VI, 232)
- "In Tiberim Defluxed Orontes": "The Orontes flowed into the Tiber "(III, 62), an expression which denounces the excesses of syncretism Roman.
References
Bibliography
- Juvenal, Satires (text, translation and commentary by Stone Labriolle Franois Villeneuve and Olivier Sers), Paris, CUF, Les Belles Lettres , 1996. ISBN 2-251-01102-1
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