SATIRES OF JUVENAL (REMOTE)

Juvenal’s satires, which he began publishing in Rome shortly after 100 CE, deal with the usual targets of moralists (e.g., greed, hypocrisy, promiscuity, folly), but with the trenchant wit, humor and sometimes vulgar frankness we associate with modern satire. In this class we will read and discuss his five most famous satires with attention to how Juvenal exaggerates and distorts the societal realities he is criticizing and to his influence on subsequent writers. In our final meeting we will look at Samuel Johnson’s London and Vanity of Human Wishes, written in imitation of Juvenal’s third and tenth satires respectively.