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59-486: Juvenal wrote at least 16 poems in the verse form dactylic hexameter . These poems cover a range of Roman topics. This follows Lucilius —the originator of the Roman satire genre, and it fits within a poetic tradition that also includes Horace and Persius . The Satires are a vital source for the study of ancient Rome from a number of perspectives, although their comic mode of expression makes it problematic to accept

118-571: A caesura: lines ending in a one-syllable word or in words of more than three syllables: or even lines starting with two short syllables: However, most of these features were abandoned by later writers or used only occasionally for special effect. Later Republican writers, such as Lucretius , Catullus , and even Cicero , wrote hexameter compositions, and it was at this time that the principles of Latin hexameter were firmly established and followed by later writers such as Virgil , Horace , Ovid , Lucan , and Juvenal . Virgil 's opening line for

177-411: A feminine or weak caesura, such as the following, there is inevitably a coincidence of meter and accent in the 3rd foot: To offset this, whenever there was a feminine caesura in the 3rd foot, there was usually also a masculine caesura in the 2nd and 4th feet, to ensure that in those feet at least, the word accent and meter did not coincide. By the age of Augustus , poets like Virgil closely followed

236-439: A following 4th-foot caesura ensures that all the last four feet have word accent at the beginning, which is unusual. The monotonous effect is reinforced by the assonance of dent ... dent and the alliteration of S ... S: Dactyls are associated with sleep again in the following unusual line, which describes the activity of a priestess who is feeding a magic serpent ( Aen. 4.486). In this line, there are five dactyls, and every one

295-408: A mountain in a boat as the clouds lifted the waters, and then asked for an oracle, and then little by little spirit warmed the soft stones and Pyrrha showed naked girls to their husbands, whatever men do—prayer, fear, rage, pleasure, joy, running about—is the gist of my little book. Juvenal claims as his purview, the entire gamut of human experience since the dawn of history. Quintilian—in

354-460: A period of exile in his life, yet it appears in every extant traditional biography. Many scholars think the idea to be a later invention; the Satires do display some knowledge of Egypt and Britain, and it is thought that this gave rise to the tradition that Juvenal was exiled. Others, however—particularly Gilbert Highet —regard the exile as factual, and these scholars also supply a concrete date for

413-507: A rhetorical persona (mask), taken up by the author to critique the very attitudes he appears to be exhibiting in his works. In any case it would be an error to read the Satires as a literal account of normal Roman life and thought in the late first and early second centuries CE, just as it would be an error to give credence to every slander recorded in Suetonius against the members of prior imperial dynasties . Themes similar to those of

472-522: A satirist is supposed to have begun at a fairly late stage in his life. Biographies agree in giving his birthplace as the Volscian town of Aquinum and in allotting to his life a period of exile, which supposedly was due to his insulting an actor who had high levels of court influence. The emperor who banished him was Trajan or Domitian . A preponderance of the biographies place his exile in Egypt, with

531-404: A separate syllable. Tro-i-us "Trojan" has three syllables, but Tro-iae "of Troy" has two. In some editions of Latin texts the consonant v is written as u , in which case u is also often consonantal. This can sometimes cause ambiguity; e.g., in the word uoluit (= vol-vit ) "he rolls" the second u is a consonant, but in uoluit (= vo-lu-it ) "he wanted" the second u

590-566: A single consonant, so that in the word aqua "water" the first syllable is short, not like the Italian acqua . In certain words like Iuppiter , Iovem , iam , iussit , and iēcit , i is a consonant, pronounced like the English y, so Iup-pi-ter has three syllables and iē-cit "he threw" has two. But in I-ū-lus , the name of Aeneas's son, I is a vowel and forms

649-588: A spondee, but this is rare, as it most often is a dactyl. The last foot is a spondee. The hexameter is traditionally associated with classical epic poetry in both Greek and Latin and was consequently considered to be the grand style of Western classical poetry. Some well known examples of its use are Homer 's Iliad and Odyssey , Apollonius of Rhodes 's Argonautica , Virgil 's Aeneid , Ovid 's Metamorphoses , Lucan 's Pharsalia (an epic on Caesar's civil war ), Valerius Flaccus 's Argonautica , and Statius 's Thebaid . However, hexameters had

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708-428: A valuable source about early Judaism . The Satires have inspired many authors, including Samuel Johnson , who modeled his " London " on Satire III and his " The Vanity of Human Wishes " on Satire X . Alexander Theroux , whose novels are rife with vicious satire, identified Juvenal as his most important influence. Juvenal also provided a source for the name for a forensically important beetle, Histeridae . Juvenal

767-552: A wide use outside of epic. Greek works in hexameters include Hesiod 's Works and Days and Theogony , Theocritus 's Idylls , and Callimachus 's hymns. In Latin famous works include Lucretius 's philosophical De rerum natura , Virgil's Eclogues and Georgics , book 10 of Columella 's manual on agriculture, as well as Latin satirical poems by the poets Lucilius , Horace , Persius , and Juvenal . The hexameter continued to be used in Christian times, for example in

826-431: Is a vowel. A hexameter line can be divided into six feet (Greek ἕξ hex = "six"). In strict dactylic hexameter, each foot would be a dactyl (a long and two short syllables, i.e. – u u), but classical meter allows for the substitution of a spondee (two long syllables, i.e. – –) in place of a dactyl in most positions. Specifically, the first four feet can either be dactyls or spondees more or less freely. The fifth foot

885-660: Is accented on the first syllable: Peter Green (historian) Peter Morris Green (22 December 1924 – 16 September 2024) was an English classical scholar and novelist noted for his works on the Greco-Persian Wars, Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic Age of ancient history, generally regarded as spanning the era from the death of Alexander in 323 BC up to either the date of the Battle of Actium or

944-592: Is by nature more spondaic. Thus the Latin hexameter took on characteristics of its own. The earliest example of hexameter in Latin poetry is the Annales of Ennius (now mostly lost except for about 600 lines), which established it as the standard for later Latin epics; it was written towards the end of Ennius's life about 172 BC. Ennius experimented with different kinds of lines, for example, lines with five dactyls: or lines consisting entirely of spondees: lines without

1003-436: Is considered more plausible by contemporary scholars). If he was exiled by Domitian, then it is possible that he was one of the political exiles recalled during the brief reign of Nerva . It is impossible to tell how much of the content of these traditional biographies is fiction and how much is fact. Large parts clearly are mere deduction from Juvenal's writings, but some elements appear more substantial. Juvenal never mentions

1062-640: 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 . In Satire I , concerning the scope and content of his work, Juvenal says: ex quo Deucalion nimbis tollentibus aequor nauigio montem ascendit sortesque poposcit paulatimque anima caluerunt mollia saxa et maribus nudas ostendit Pyrrha puellas, quidquid agunt homines, uotum, timor, ira, uoluptas, gaudia, discursus, nostri farrago libelli est. Back from when Deucalion climbed

1121-440: Is followed by a word starting with a vowel, the last vowel is usually elided (i.e. removed or pronounced quickly enough not to add to the length of the syllable), for example, Iun(ō) aeternum; poss(e) Ītalia; Teucrōr(um) āvertere, iamqu(e) eadem . Again, "h" is ignored and does not prevent elision: monstr(um) (h)orrendum . In Greek, short vowels elide freely, and the elision is shown by an apostrophe, for example in line 2 of

1180-495: Is known as a strong or masculine caesura. When the 3rd foot is a dactyl, the caesura can come after the second syllable of the 3rd foot; this is known as a weak or feminine caesura. It is more common in Greek than in Latin. An example is the first line of Homer's Odyssey : In Latin (but not in Greek, as the above example shows), whenever a feminine caesura is used in the 3rd foot, it is usually accompanied by masculine caesuras in

1239-406: Is known as scansion. A syllable is long if it contains a long vowel or a diphthong: Ae-nē-ās , au-rō . It is also long (with certain exceptions) if it has a short vowel followed by two consonants, even if these are in different words: con - dunt , et ter rīs , tot vol -ve-re . In this case a syllable like et is said to be long by position. There are some exceptions to

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1298-404: Is the first line of Virgil's Aeneid : The scansion is generally marked as follows, by placing long and short marks above the central vowel of each syllable: (Spaces mark syllable breaks) In dactylic verse, short syllables always come in pairs, so words such as mīlitēs "soldiers" or facilius "more easily" cannot be used in a hexameter. In Latin, when a word ends in a vowel or -m and

1357-698: Is the source of many well-known maxims, including: ASICS, the footwear and sports equipment manufacturing company, is named after the acronym of the Latin phrase "anima sana in corpore sano" (a sound mind in a sound body) from Satire X by Juvenal (10.356). In his autobiography, the German writer Heinrich Böll notes that in the high school he attended when growing up under Nazi rule, an anti-Nazi teacher paid special attention to Juvenal: "Mr. Bauer realized how topical Juvenal was, how he dealt at length with such phenomena as arbitrary government, tyranny, corruption,

1416-456: Is usually a dactyl (around 95% of the lines in Homer). The sixth foot can be filled by either a trochee (a long then short syllable) or a spondee. Thus the dactylic line most normally is scanned as follows: (Here "–" = a long syllable , "u" = a short syllable, " u u " = either one long or two shorts, and "x" = an anceps syllable, which can be long or short.) An example of this in Latin

1475-500: The Carmen paschale of the 5th-century Irish poet Sedulius and Bernard of Cluny 's 12th-century satire De contemptu mundi among many others. Hexameters also form part of elegiac poetry in both languages, the elegiac couplet being a dactylic hexameter line paired with a dactylic pentameter line. This form of verse was used for love poetry by Propertius , Tibullus , and Ovid , for Ovid's letters from exile, and for many of

1534-453: The Aeneid is a classic example: In Latin, lines were arranged so that the metrically long syllables—those occurring at the beginning of a foot—often avoided the natural stress of a word. In the earlier feet of a line, meter and stress were expected to clash, while in the last two feet they were expected to coincide, as in prímus ab/ óris above. The coincidence of word accent and meter in

1593-768: The Southern Humanities Review . Green was born in London on 22 December 1924. He went to school at Charterhouse . During World War II , he served with the Royal Air Force in Burma . In Firpo's Bar in Calcutta , he met and became friendly with future novelist, Paul Scott , who later used elements of Green's character for the figure of Sergeant Guy Perron in The Raj Quartet . After

1652-761: The Greek island of Lesbos , where he was a translator and independent scholar. In 1966 he moved to Athens, where he was recruited to teach classics for College Year in Athens , and published Armada from Athens , a study of the Sicilian Expedition of 415–3 BC (1970), and The Year of Salamis , a history of the Greco-Persian Wars (1971). In 1971, Green was invited to teach at the University of Texas at Austin , where he became Dougherty Centennial Professor of Classics in 1982, emeritus from 1997. In 1986, he held

1711-516: The Iliad : ἣ μυρί᾽ Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε᾽ ἔθηκε ( hḕ murí᾽ Akhaioîs álge᾽ éthēke ) "which caused countless sufferings for the Achaeans". However, a long vowel is not elided: Πηληϊά δεω Ἀχιλῆος ( Pēlēïá deō Akhilêos ). This feature is sometimes imitated in Latin for special effect, for example, fēmine ō u lulātu "with womanly wailing" ( Aen . 9.477). When a vowel is elided, it does not count in

1770-457: The Satires and, moreover, the Dalmatian legions do not seem to have existed prior to 166 CE. Therefore, it seems likely that this reference is to a Juvenal who was a later relative of the poet, however, as they both came from Aquinum and were associated with the goddess Ceres (the only deity the Satires shows much respect for). If the theory that connects these two Juvenals is correct, then

1829-490: The Satires are present in authors spanning the period of the late Roman Republic and early empire ranging from Cicero and Catullus to Martial and Tacitus; similarly, the stylistics of Juvenal's text fall within the range of post-Augustan literature, as represented by Persius , Statius , and Petronius . 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

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1888-463: The Vita Iuvenalis , give us the writer's full name and also tell us that he was either the son, or adopted son, of a rich freedman . He 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. The Satires do make frequent and accurate references to the operation of the Roman legal system. His career as

1947-531: The 2nd and 4th feet also: Sometimes a line is found without a 3rd foot caesura, such as the following. In this case the 2nd and 4th foot caesuras are obligatory: The hexameter was first used by early Greek poets of the oral tradition, and the most complete extant examples of their works are the Iliad and the Odyssey , which influenced the authors of all later classical epics that survive today. Early epic poetry

2006-750: The Mellon Chair of Humanities at Tulane University in New Orleans . He was last an adjunct professor at the University of Iowa and also has held visiting appointments at Princeton University and at East Carolina University in Greenville , North Carolina . Bob Dylan used Green's translations of Ovid , found in The Erotic Poems (1982) and The Poems of Exile: Tristia and the Black Sea Letters (1994) as song lyrics on

2065-435: The above rules, however. For example, tr , cr , pr , gr , and pl (and other combinations of a consonant with r or l ) can count as a single consonant, so that the word patrem could be pronounced either pa-trem with the first syllable short or pat-rem with the first syllable long. Also the letter h is ignored in scansion, so that in the phrase et horret the syllable et remains short. qu counts as

2124-547: The albums Love and Theft (2001) and Modern Times (2006). Green was a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books . At the time of his death, Green was working with Glenn Storey on a new translation of the works of Herodotus with full commentaries. That work is expected to be published in 2025. In 1954, Green married Lalage Isobel Pulvertaft, a novelist and Egyptologist. They had three children, including Sarah Green . Green's second marriage

2183-408: The blacksmith sons of Vulcan forged Aeneas' shield. The five spondees and the word accents cutting across the verse rhythm give an impression of huge effort: A slightly different effect is found in the following line (3.658), describing the terrifying one-eyed giant Polyphemus, blinded by Ulysses . Here again there are five spondees but there are also three elisions, which cause the word accent of all

2242-432: The consistent descriptions of the life of the client he bemoans in the Satires . The only other biographical evidence available is a dedicatory inscription said to have been found at Aquinum in the nineteenth century, which consists of the following text: Scholars usually are of the opinion that this inscription does not relate to the poet: a military career would not fit well with the pronounced anti-militarism of

2301-405: The content as strictly factual. At first glance the Satires could be read as a critique of Rome. Details of the author's life cannot be reconstructed definitively. The Vita Iuvenalis (Life of Juvenal), a biography of the author that became associated with his manuscripts no later than the tenth century, is little more than an extrapolation from the Satires . Traditional biographies, including

2360-432: The context of a discussion of literary genres appropriate for an oratorical education—claimed that, unlike so many literary and artistic forms adopted from Greek models, "satire at least is all ours" ( satura quidem tota nostra est ). At least in the view of Quintillian, earlier Greek satiric verse (e.g. that of Hipponax ) or even Latin satiric prose (e.g. that of Petronius ) did not constitute satura , per se. Roman Satura

2419-625: The death of Augustus in 14 AD. Green's most famous books are Alexander of Macedon , a historical biography first issued in 1970, then in a revised and expanded edition in 1974, which was first published in the United States in 1991; his Alexander to Actium , a general account of the Hellenistic Age , and other works. He was the author of a translation of the Satires of the Roman poet Juvenal , now in its third edition. He also contributed poems to many journals, including to Arion and

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2478-609: The degradation of public morals, the decline of the Republican ideal and the terrorizing acts of the Praetorian Guards . (...) In a second-hand bookshop I found an 1838 translation of Juvenal with an extensive commentary, twice the length of the translated text itself, written at the height of the Romantic period . Though its price was more than I could really afford, I bought it. I read all of it very intensely, as if it

2537-399: The epigrams of Martial . Ancient Greek and Latin poetry is made up of long and short syllables arranged in various patterns. In Greek, a long syllable is συλλαβὴ μακρά ( sullabḕ makrá ) and a short syllable is συλλαβὴ βραχεῖα ( sullabḕ brakheîa ). In Latin the terms are syllaba longa and syllaba brevis . The process of deciding which syllables are long and which are short

2596-431: The exception of one that opts for Scotland. 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. Other traditions have him surviving for some time past the year of Hadrian 's death (138 CE). Some sources place his death in exile, others have him being recalled to Rome (the latter of which

2655-445: The exile: 93 CE until 96, when Nerva became emperor. They argue that a reference to Juvenal in one of Martial 's poems, which is dated to 92, is impossible if, at this stage Juvenal was already in exile, or, had served his time in exile, since in that case, Martial would not have wished to antagonise Domitian by mentioning such a persona non grata as Juvenal. If Juvenal was exiled, he would have lost his patrimony , and this may explain

2714-452: The forms of words to allow them to fit the hexameter, typically by using a dialectal form: ptolis is an epic form used instead of the Attic polis as necessary for the meter. Proper names sometimes take forms to fit the meter, for example Pouludamas instead of the metrically unviable Poludamas . Some lines require a knowledge of the digamma for their scansion, e.g. Iliad 1.108: Here

2773-401: The hexameter is usually as follows (writing – for a long syllable, u for a short, and u u for a position that may be a long or two shorts): Here, "|" (pipe symbol) marks the beginning of a foot in the line. Thus there are six feet, each of which is either a dactyl (– u u) or a spondee (– –). The first four feet can either be dactyls, spondees, or a mix. The fifth foot can also sometimes be

2832-417: The inscription does show that Juvenal's family was reasonably wealthy, and that, if the poet really was the son of a foreign freedman, then his descendants assimilated into the Roman class structure more quickly than typical. 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

2891-477: The last two feet could be achieved by restricting the last word to one of two or three syllables. Most lines (about 85% in Virgil) have a caesura or word division after the first syllable of the 3rd foot, as above ca/nō . This is known as a strong or masculine caesura. Because of the penultimate accent in Latin, this ensures that the word accent and meter will not coincide in the 3rd foot. But in those lines with

2950-445: The later rules of hexameter composition have their origins in the methods and practices of Homer. The hexameter came into Latin as an adaptation from Greek long after the practice of singing the epics had faded. Consequentially, the properties of the meter were learned as specific rules rather than as a natural result of musical expression. Also, because the Latin language generally has a higher proportion of long syllables than Greek, it

3009-455: The line into two parts. Homer employs a feminine caesura more commonly than later writers. An example occurs in Iliad 1.5: Homer's hexameters contain a higher proportion of dactyls than later hexameter poetry. They are also characterised by a laxer following of verse principles than later epicists almost invariably adhered to. For example, Homer allows spondaic fifth feet (albeit not often), whereas many later authors do not. Homer also altered

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3068-492: The rules of the meter and approached it in a highly rhetorical way, looking for effects that can be exploited in skilled recitation. For example, the following line from the Aeneid (8.596) describes the movement and sound of galloping horses: This line is made up of five dactyls and a closing spondee, an unusual rhythmic arrangement that imitates the described action. A different effect is found in 8.452, where Virgil describes how

3127-420: The scansion; so for the purposes of scansion, Iu-n(o) ae-ter-num has four syllables. Almost every hexameter has a word break, known as a caesura / s ɪ ˈ z j ʊ ə r ə / , in the middle of the 3rd foot, sometimes (but not always) coinciding with a break in sense. In most cases (85% of lines in Virgil) this comes after the first syllable of the 3rd foot, as in ca/no in the above example. This

3186-782: The war, Green attended Trinity College, Cambridge , where he achieved a Double First in Classics, winning the Craven Scholarship and Studentship in 1950. He subsequently wrote historical novels and worked as a journalist , in the capacity of fiction critic for the Daily Telegraph (1953–63), book columnist for the Yorkshire Post (1961–62), television critic for The Listener (1962–63), film critic for John O'London's (1961–63), as well as contributing to other journals. In 1963, he and his family moved to

3245-523: The word ἔπος ( epos ) was originally ϝέπος ( wepos ) in Ionian; the digamma , later lost, lengthened the last syllable of the preceding εἶπας ( eipas ) and removed the apparent defect in the meter. A digamma also saved the hiatus in the third foot. This example demonstrates the oral tradition of the Homeric epics that flourished before they were written down sometime in the 7th century BC. Most of

3304-523: The words but ingens to coincide with the beginning of each foot: A succession of long syllables in some lines indicates slow movement, as in the following example where Aeneas and his companion the Sibyl (a priestess of Apollo) were entering the darkness of the world of the dead: The following example ( Aeneid 2.9) describes how Aeneas is reluctant to begin his narrative, since it is already past midnight. The feminine caesura after suadentque without

3363-465: Was a detective novel . It was one of the few books to which I persistently held on throughout the war and beyond, even when most of my other books were lost or sold on the black market". Dactylic hexameter Dactylic hexameter (also known as heroic hexameter and the meter of epic) is a form of meter or rhythmic scheme frequently used in Ancient Greek and Latin poetry. The scheme of

3422-617: Was a formal literary genre rather than being simply clever, humorous critique in no particular format. The individual Satires (excluding Satire 16) range in length from approximately 130 (Satire 12) to 695 (Satire 6) lines. The poems are not entitled individually, but translators often have added titles for the convenience of readers. While Juvenal's mode of satire has been noted from antiquity for its wrathful scorn toward all representatives of social deviance, some politically progressive scholars, such as William S. Anderson and later Susanna M. Braund , have attempted to defend his work as that of

3481-399: Was also accompanied by music, and pitch changes associated with the accented Greek must have highlighted the melody, though the exact mechanism is still a topic of discussion. The first line of Homer's Iliad provides an example: Dividing the line into metrical units or feet it can be scanned as follows: This line also includes a masculine caesura after θεά , a break that separates

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