10 Facts About Juvenal

Juvenal is the author of the collection of satirical poems known as the Satires.

The details of Juvenal's life are unclear, although references within his text to known persons of the late first and early second centuries CE fix his earliest date of composition.

Juvenal wrote at least 16 poems in the verse form dactylic hexameter.

Juvenal is supposed to have been a pupil of Quintilian, and to have practised rhetoric until he was middle-aged, both as amusement and for legal purposes.

Only one of these traditional biographies supplies a date of birth for Juvenal: it gives 55 CE, which most probably is speculation, but accords reasonably well with the rest of the evidence.

Therefore, it seems likely that this reference is to a Juvenal who was a later relative of the poet as they both came from Aquinum and were associated with the goddess Ceres.

Green thinks it more likely that the tradition of the freedman father is false and, that Juvenal's ancestors had been minor nobility of Roman Italy of relatively ancient descent.

Juvenal is credited with sixteen known poems divided among five books; all are in the Roman genre of satire, which, at its most basic in the time of the author, comprised a wide-ranging discussion of society and social mores in dactylic hexameter.

Juvenal's Satires, giving several accounts of Jewish life in first-century Rome, have been regarded by scholars, such as J Juster and, more recently, Peter Nahon, as a valuable source about early Judaism.

Juvenal provided a source for the name for a forensically important beetle, Histeridae.