Juvenal - Life

Life

The precise details of the author's life cannot be definitively reconstructed based on presently available evidence. The Vita Iuvenalis (Life of Juvenal), a biography of the author that became associated with his manuscripts no later than the 10th century, is little or nothing more than extrapolation from the Satires themselves.

The traditional biographies, including the Vita Iuvenalis, give us the writer's full name, and also tell us that he was either the son or adopted son of a rich freedman. He is supposed to have been a pupil of Quintillian, and to have practised rhetoric until he was middle-aged, both as amusement and for legal purposes (the Satires make both frequent and accurate references to the operation of the Roman legal system). His career as a satirist is supposed to have begun at a fairly late stage in his life.

The biographies agree in giving his birthplace as Aquinum, and also agree in allotting to his life a period of exile due to insulting an actor with high levels of court influence: the emperor who banished him is given as either Trajan or Domitian, and all the biographies place his exile in Egypt, with the exception of one that opts for Scotland.

Only one of these traditional biographies supplies a date of birth for Juvenal: it gives 55 AD, which is most probably guesswork but accords reasonably well with the rest of the evidence. Other traditions have him surviving for some time past the year of Hadrian's death (138 AD). Some sources place this death in exile, others have him being recalled to Rome (the latter of which is considered more plausible by contemporary scholarship). If he was exiled by Domitian, it is then possible that he was one of the political exiles recalled during the brief reign of Nerva.

It is impossible to tell how much of the content of these traditional biographies is fiction and how much is fact. Large parts are clearly mere deduction from Juvenal's writings, but some elements appear more substantial. Juvenal never mentions a period of exile in his life, yet it appears in every extant traditional biography. Many scholars think the idea a later invention; the Satires do display some knowledge of Egypt and Britain, and it is thought that this gave rise to the tradition that Juvenal was exiled. Others, however - particularly Gilbert Highet - regard the exile as factual, and these scholars also supply a concrete date for the exile: 93 AD until 96, when Nerva became Emperor. They argue that a reference to Juvenal in one of Martial's poems, which is dated to 92, is impossible if at this stage Juvenal was already in exile or had served his time in exile, since Martial would not have wished to antagonise Domitian by mentioning such a persona non grata as Juvenal. If Juvenal was exiled, he would have lost his patrimony, and this may explain the consistent descriptions of the life of the client he bemoans in the Satires.

The only other available piece of biographical evidence is the following 19th-century dedicatory inscription, said to have been found at Aquinum with the text:

Scholars are usually of the opinion that this inscription does not relate to the poet himself: a military career would not fit well with the pronounced anti-militarism of the Satires, and moreover the Dalmatian legions do not seem to have existed prior to 166 AD. Therefore, however, it seems likely that this Juvenal was a later relative of the poet, as they both came from Aquinum and were associated with the goddess Ceres (the only deity the Satires shows much respect for). But if the theory that connects the two Juvenals is right, then the inscription does show that Juvenal's family was reasonably wealthy, and that if the poet really was the son of a foreign freedman, then his descendants assimilated themselves into the Roman class structure quickly. Green thinks it more likely that the tradition of the freedman father is false, and that Juvenal's ancestors were minor nobility of Roman Italy of relatively ancient descent.