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Ladies and gentlemen, today I am standing up for Juvenile.

Juvenile is the author of satires, or I often think of them as scurri, as rants.

Juvenile doesn't write for you to read him.

He writes to perform.

He is basically history's first great stand-up comedian.

So he writes these incredible rants, and for ages people puzzled that, you know,

where he goes off into this tangent and then there's some ring composition if you look at it as a comedian which is after all

what i used to do it makes perfect sense of course he goes off into a massive tangent comes back in

and carries on with the narrative that's what all comedians do and he is a great comedian he's not a

nice person but he is a great comedian he wrote 16 16 satires. He is responsible for some of the

most quoted, best-known lines in all of Latin literature. Whenever someone's being snooty about reality

TV and how too many of us watch strictly come dancing and not enough of us watch news night,

they invariably go, ah, bread and circuses, oh, bread and circuses. They are of course quoting Juvenile,

who says that the plebs, that would be us, sold our votes for Paramedka-Kensase, bread and the

games and the circuses. His biography, Juvenile's biography, is incredibly elusive. Now,

that might not seem unusual. He's from the ancient world. Lots of people in the ancient world

are elusive. But he lived in a time when there were loads of other writers whose work survives. He's from the ancient world. Lots of people in the ancient world are elusive. But he lived

in a time when there were loads of other writers whose work survives. He was born around the middle

of the first century CE. And we get a reference to him, I think two references to him in Marshall,

the epigrammatist. But otherwise, he's incredibly opaque. We can kind of sketch out a maybe biography,

but it is really maybe.

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