Juvenal

Decimus Junius Juvenalis

Juvenal was born around 55 to 60AD and died around 70 years of afe. He was one of the most powerful and influential of all Roman satiric poets. He left many an epigram that are still with us like “bread and circuses”, “Who will watch the watchers? (Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?)”

"The Rome that Juvenal loved ardently was fast disappearing; in its place a city of proud, haughty, arrogant, immoral people reared an ugly head. Evils abounded everywhere. This point is Juvenal's main theme; time and time again, and in every conceivable way, the social crisis is hammered home. Thus Juvenal 1 s fellow-men are not spared denunciation; their crimes filled to the brim the cup of pagan Rome."

In Satire 6, he criticized Rome's women, their arrogance, vanity, and cruelty in some 600 lines. Other satires attacked the wretchedness and poverty of the city's intellectuals who could not find decent rewards for their labors (Satire 7), and the cult of hereditary nobility (Satire 8).

Other quotes:

“Never does Nature say one thing and Wisdom another.”

“Many commit the same crime with a very different result. One bears a cross for his crime; another a crown.”

“No man becomes bad all at once.”

“Is it a simple form of madness to lose a hundred thousand sesterces, and not have a shirt to give to a shivering slave?”

“The people that once bestowed commands, consulships, legions, and all else, now concerns itself no more, and longs eagerly for just two things: bread and circuses!” (“Panem et circenses.”)

“All wish to possess knowledge, but few, comparatively speaking, are willing to pay the price.”

“It is to be prayed that the mind be sound in a sound body.

Ask for a brave soul that lacks the fear of death,
which places the length of life last among nature’s blessings,
which is able to bear whatever kind of sufferings,
does not know anger, lusts for nothing and believes
the hardships and savage labors of Hercules better than
the satisfactions, feasts, and feather bed of an Eastern king.
I will reveal what you are able to give yourself;
For certain, the one footpath of a tranquil life lies through virtue.”

“Honesty is admired, and starves.” ― Juvenal, Satires, Book I

“Dedicate one's life to truth”

“When Alexander The Great was alive the world was not big enough to contain his ambition but while Alexander chafed at the confines of the world in life, in death, “a coffin was enough.”

“while your mother in law still lives, domestic harmony / is out of the question.”

Heinrich Böll wrote of an anti Nazi teacher when he was in high school:

"Mr. Bauer realized how topical Juvenal was, how he dealt at length with such phenomena as arbitrary government, tyranny, corruption, 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 was a detective novel. It was one of the few books to which I persistently held on throughout the war (WWII) and beyond, even when most of my other books were lost or sold on the black market".