Sixteen Satires (Penguin Classics)
by Juvenal
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Book Summary Information
Author: JuvenalTranslator: Peter Green
Introduction: Peter Green
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1999-02-01
ISBN: 0140447040
Number of pages: 320
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Book Reviews of Sixteen Satires (Penguin Classics)
Book Review: Beware the wasp - and the mullet!
Summary: 5 Stars
Yes, Dr Jones may well be right in suggesting that there are better editions than this (although it would have been useful if he'd told us exactly which ones and why!). However, Peter Green arguably offers the best introduction to Juvenal's Satires. After all, Green is not writing for the specialist but for the average, intelligent reader - the kind of reader that Penguin Classics habitually caters for. Jones probably has scholars like Susanna Braund in mind and I'd imagine that her editions are those that professional classicists like him find most valuable. She offers an extremely perceptive commentary, full Latin text and a translation that is, I suspect, closer to the letter than Green's. But Braund comes at a hefty price - £18 for Volume I alone.
In any case, this Penguin edition has lots to offer besides value. Green captures the spirit and vitality, as well as the sharply ironic humour, of the original at least as well as Braund or Rudd, the two main competitors. His Juvenal sounds fresh, witty and modern (as well as occasionally loathsome, misogynistic and xenophobic). His Introduction, moreover, is extensive and engaging. It may well be 'old-fashioned' in its lack of enthusiasm for the 'persona theory' (ie the view that the poet is donning a mask and not voicing his own opinions, thereby preventing us from reading the satires as self-revelation). But Green does at least address 'the much-vexed question of Juvenal's satirical persona', and gives us an alternative approach. He inclines to the view that Juvenal's savage indignation resulted from humbling personal experience. According to long-held tradition, he was exiled - probably to Egypt. Green surmises that this story of exile is true, and that it might well have taken the harshest form - 'deportatio' - involving the confiscation of everything dear to a Roman citizen: land, money, status. In the early satires, Green sees Juvenal as 'a waspish gadfly from Aquinum' and a 'snarling chip-on-the-shoulder flay-all'. The gradual softening of tone (anger - cynicism - irony) can be accounted for, Green thinks, by a gradual improvement in Juvenal's material circumstances. In this reading, therefore, the Satires are at least partly autobiographical.
So, maybe not definitive and certainly not radical, but an edition that's good enough for the vast majority of interested readers. Good enough even for Dr Jones himself, otherwise he wouldn't have used Green's translation in his (excellent) article 'The persona and the addressee in Juvenal's Satire 11' in Ramus, vol.19, no2, pp160-68, 1990, when Braund's and Rudd's alternatives were also available.
Oh, that mullet. You'll have to read Green's illuminating note to line 317 of Satire X.
Summary of Sixteen Satires (Penguin Classics)
Perhaps more than any other writer, Juvenal (c. AD 55-138) captures the splendour, the squalor and the sheer energy of everyday Roman life. In "The Sixteen Satires", he evokes a fascinating world of whores, fortune-tellers, boozy politicians, slick lawyers, shameless sycophants, ageing flirts and downtrodden teachers. A member of the traditional land-owning class that was rapidly seeing power slip into the hands of outsiders, Juvenal also creates savage portraits of decadent aristocrats - male and female - seeking excitement among the lower orders of actors and gladiators, and of the jumped-up sons of newly-rich former slaves. Constantly comparing the corruption of his own generation with its stern and upright forebears, Juvenal's powers of irony and invective make his work a stunningly satirical and bitter denunciation of the degeneracy of Roman society.Humor Books
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