Summary
Matthew Parris invites writer and comic Natalie Haynes to explain why her nomination for a Great Life is a Roman poet about whose life we know very little. Dr Llewelyn Morgan of Brasenose College Oxford helps her explain the enduring appeal of this scurrilous writer.
On the face of it, Juvenal's life is hard to defend as a Great one. In the first place - as Dr Llewelyn Morgan, lecturer in Classical Languages and Literature at Oxford, confirms - we know very little about his life. He may have been a first-generation Roman from a Spanish family; he may have served in army; he may have been sent into exile. None of this can be confirmed. What we do know is that he uses his Satires to rant and rail against women, foreigners, gays and the upstarts who are all ruining Rome - which might make him hard to love. But Natalie Haynes, veteran of the stand-up circuit and now a writer and critic, finds Juvenal an indispensable part of her life and is very happy to explain why.
Producer Christine Hall
From 2012.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and I'd like to tell you a bit about the |
| 0:03.8 | podcast I work on. I'm Dan Clark and I commissioned factual podcasts at the BBC. |
| 0:08.6 | It's a massive area but I'd sum it up as stories to help us make sense of the forces shaping the world. |
| 0:15.0 | What podcasting does is give us the space and the time to take brilliant BBC journalism |
| 0:20.0 | and tell amazing compelling stories that really get behind the headlines. |
| 0:23.7 | And what I get really excited about is when we find a way of drawing you into a subject |
| 0:28.3 | you might not even have thought you were interested in. |
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| 0:40.6 | Thank you for downloading this great lives podcast from BBC Radio 4. |
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| 0:52.0 | Gay marriage. Radio 4. Gay Marriage, if only we live long enough, we shall actually see these things reported in the newspapers. |
| 1:00.0 | So said our great life about 2,000 years ago and I have a bit of a problem with him. |
| 1:06.8 | Not only has our subject written extensively and furiously against women, foreigners and gays and I might add politicians and Jews as well, but we hardly know anything |
| 1:17.7 | about his actual life or so I felt reading through my research. So much of what our subject, the great Roman satirist |
| 1:27.0 | said, so much of what he magnificently mocked, so little about who he really was but maybe our proposer knows more. |
| 1:36.4 | She is Natalie Haynes, the author of The Ancient Guide to Modern Life. |
| 1:41.8 | She's also a leading young female stand-up. Natalie, name our great life. |
| 1:48.0 | I picked the satirist juvenile, although I would suggest that he might not actually be a satirist. We call them satire as the |
| 1:55.3 | 16 poems that we have, but I think there's a lot to be said for the fact that they might instead |
| 1:59.7 | be scurri-rants. I think he turned up and recited them. I think lots of people, lots of scholars have been very, very grouchy about how the structure of a juvenile satire works because he'll suddenly leap from one topic to another and then he'll suddenly cut back and people |
| 2:14.0 | maybe we've lost a line here or should amend the text and undoubtedly the text of juvenile |
... |
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