Literature and history

Hello and welcome to literature and history.

Episode 72

Bread and Circuses.

This program is about the Roman writer Decimus Unius Unallius, known to us today as

Juvenile who between about 100 and 130 CE wrote C.E. wrote some of history's most influential works of satire.

Juvenile 16 satires, though they vary in length and content,

are today perhaps most famous for their ruthless,

obscene, snarling criticism of Roman culture. Specifically, the culture of Rome during the late Flavian and early Nerva Antonine

dynasties. In a sentence juvenile satires are an angry denunciation of

Roman decadence of the grotesque materialism, hedonism, and disingenuousness

of Roman culture during the opening decades of the 100s, CE, and to a lesser extent a nostalgic

threnity for the lost Republican past. A conservative and a critic of social change, Juvenile looked at the world around him and he saw decay, sensualism, and vice.

While juvenile satires have been popular since late antiquity, indeed surprisingly popular, considering

their crude and often disgusting content, we know very little for certain about the poet himself. Modern scholars propose a birth

date of 55 or 60 CE and the poet lived until a decade or so after 1.30.

Living then, likely into his 70s or even 80s,

juveniles saw Rome go through some striking changes.

By most accounts, he was born in the latter part of Nero's reign. Juvenile

Juvenile would have been a child during the year of the four emperors between 68 and

69 come of age under the reigns of Vespation and Titus, and spent his

late 20s and much of his 30s under the dictatorial reign of the Emperor Demission.

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