Customer Reviews

The Satires (Oxford World's Classics)

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Juvenal is best understood when you liken his satire to drama. You're actually not supposed to identify with the speaker. The satirist's harsh indignance forces you to be skeptical in the way you read, and the way you look at the world. Rudd has produced a good translation, and his preference for generalizing over historical specifics is helpful for most readers, though slightly prohibitive for the student. Adequate notes and helpful introduction.

Since Amazon insists on posting my review of Rudd's translation to Braund's Cambridge text, I must admit that I have not used Braund's text. The series, though, is consistently good, and Braund is a natural choice to comment on the Satires. I am confident from reading her other scholarship on Juvenal that her commentary is educated, her viewpoint modern, and her commentary very helpful.

These 16 essays aren't satires, in the modern sense of comedic exaggerations. Instead, they are serious commentary on some of the many failings of a time in social decline - topics that will often send a familiar chill through a modern reader.

Juvenal's complaints are numerous and well-founded: hypocrisy in general, physical and moral risks of urban living, marital infidelity, abuse of power by the military (were they the police?), abuse of trust by almost anyone, and more. Along with his generally gloomy outlook (e.g. 'The Futility of Aspirations') and incipient sense of persecution ('The Plight of Intellectuals'), one struck close to home for me.

'The Influence of Vicious Parents' repeats something both obvious and in desperate need of repetition. Children learn what they see, not what they're told, and the adult acts as the child learned to act. If only one quote from this book sticks with me, I hope it's this: "A child demands the utmost respect, so think twice if you have someting nasty in mind."

Although generally readable, it doesn't flow as easily as other translations I've seen. Profuse endnotes (about 40% of the book's total mass) address many issues of culture, cross-reference, and linguistic interest. I'm a general-interest reader with a deepset habit of reading footnotes, and often found the commentary more pedantic than enlightening. Specialists and scholars may appreciate the detail; I just found it distracting.

//wiredweird

We don't know too much about Juvenal - likelihood is he was a not particularly wealthy Plebeian living in Rome around 55AD, but he did leave a bitter core of writings that will echo with the modern reader.

He picks apart the hypocricies and moral faults of urban Roman society in a manner that resonates clearly with the current boom/credit crunch metropolises: 'few can distinguish the genuinely good from the reverse', 'we are too quick to imitate depraved examples', 'so rare is the union of beauty with modesty', 'the people long for just two things: bread and circuses' (read today: reality television). Ha!

Juvenal's satires are not comic exaggerations in the modern sense - they are too severe and bitter for that - but they do fulfil the satirists ultimate purpose: to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Western civilisation has always been enriched by the work of a few lonely souls who chose to go through life as an embittered minority of one, rejecting the gravy train of an easy life and pulling apart the filth and injustices of the societies in which they live.

Juvenal was one of these people and he left a rich satirical legacy, a vein that runs through the likes of the great Jonathan Swift and Dr Johnson (and you can pick up resonances in Will Self, writing today). Juvenal's prose is truly writing that is for all time.

Rudd's translation is a pleasure to read. He manages to stick closely to the Latin of Juvenal while also conveying the liveliness and humor of the Satires. I would recommend it not only for a student who is struggling through the Latin, but also the casual reader.

Maybe these "satires" preach to the choir.

Reading Juvenile later in life assures certain frustrations that forewarned would not sting so bad.

They aren't quite the facts of life, but "The Satires" are frustratingly accurate descriptions of frequently unspoken, unreported failures one feels living in Rome - and likely any other metropolitan area.