Juvenal - too rude or simply forgotten?

[Karl Rommel]

On BBC Radio 3 programme: The Essay, is a good introduction to the Latin writer/satirist. The 15 minute programmes can be heard online.

A quick search here reveals he does not feature much on this site. I wondered why.

[mortalterror]

Juvenal is alright, but he's not even one of the top 5 Latin writers. Virgil is hardly read anymore. Ovid is one of my favorites but almost nobody has even heard of him. Horace used to be big news but since the Greek and Roman classics were taken out of the curriculum you hear about him even less than the others. Catullus was racy, and wrote mostly short works, so with the tendency to support longer works as important in academia he goes underrepresented. Search the boards and you won't find a lot of Plautus, Terence, or Seneca either. Tacitus, Livy, Caesar, Cicero, Sallust, Lucretius, and Suetonius didn't write literature so I guess that's a good reason for them not to be here; but Apuleius, Petronius, and others are also missing.

There is a slight bias towards modern novels on this site, and for Russian or American novels in particular. That's just indicative of the times we live in. I don't consider Juvenal too racy. He's even tame when held up in comparison to Henry Miller, William Burroughs, and Chuck Palahniuk.

[Walter]

Nice rundown. Many thanks.
I'm inclined to say there is more than a slight bias toward modern novels on most sites.

[Quark]

A quick search here reveals he does not feature much on this site. I wondered why.

None of the Roman satirists are much favored today. They greatly influenced British culture in the eighteenth-century when their works were often imitated. I believe Johnson's famous poem "The Vanity of Human Wishes" is based on Juvenal's tenth satire. Today, though, they're not so esteemed. I don't know if I've ever seen a copy of Juvenal, or Martial, or even Horace sold in a Borders or Barnes and Noble. Ovid remains sort of popular. I think the trend is moving away from him, though. Virgil is probably the most popular Latin poet. It's not uncommon to find the Aeneid on sale or talked about. Maybe readers today have a distaste for satire; or, maybe it's as mortalterror suggested, and there's a prejudice again shorter works.


Virgil is hardly read anymore.

Well there's always the LitNet discussion: http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?t=31392&page=9

[mortalterror]

I don't know if I've ever seen a copy of Juvenal, or Martial, or even Horace sold in a Borders or Barnes and Noble.

I'm pretty sure I saw copies of most major latin authors at Borders when I bought a copy of Ovid's Heroides. They're just rather more expensive than I like to pay for books that have been out for millenia. However, I can usually count on my local used bookstores and libraries to have varying amounts of good classics, and if I want a special translation there's always Amazon. I got a nice copy of Ovid's Amores by Guy Lee from there.

I know I've seen Juvenal around, here and there, but I'm not as familiar with him as I'd like to be. I think there's an oxford edition, and a competing penguin edition if my memory serves me right. There may even be a Wordsworth copy, though don't quote me on that. Juvenal is not dead by any means.

[curlyqlink]

I've been thinking lately of giving Ovid's Metamorphoses a try. I've never read any of the Latin fiction writers and I'd like to branch out a bit and give them a try. Recommendations?

[mortalterror]

Get the Rolfe Humphries translation it's awesome.

[Quark]

I'm pretty sure I saw copies of most major latin authors at Borders

I've seen Latin poets most often in collections. I have a book that's titled Post-Augustan Poetry, or something like that. Did you actually find something that's just Juvenal? What was it? Did he write anything besides the Satires?

[Aiculík]

Juvenal is alright, but he's not even one of the top 5 Latin writers. Virgil is hardly read anymore. Ovid is one of my favorites but almost nobody has even heard of him.

You don't learn about them in school??
Any 11-year old kid here would know who were Publius Vergilius Maro and Publius Ovidius Naso and what were they works.
They would be also expected to read at least some selection... but most kids usually cheat on that. :D But if they really have to, most of them will choose Metamorphoses.

[believin]

I have several volumes of books dedicated to individual writers listed above, some being single works by those authors — Juvenal, Ovid, Catullus, Apuleius, and so forth.

As for why they are not much discussed, I suppose it is like it is with Homer, Sophocles, Plato, or any of the classics... including Beowulf, Chaucer, and even perhaps Shakespeare and Dickens. I think most people read these works when they are in school, and only if they are "forced" to. There are fewer of us who continue to read things like this for fun well into our adult lives. That means that they become less marketable, and are not produced as widely as more modern novels (which are more accessible just because they are nearer to us — or so the thinking goes). That also accounts for their higher price tags.

All of them can, of course, be found in ebooks online free of charge. Not necessarily the easiest way to read them (for the eyes at least), but it is one way to make sure you get to read whatever you want from the body of classics without having to spend large sums of money to do so.

[mortalterror]

You don't learn about them in school??
Any 11-year old kid here would know who were Publius Vergilius Maro and Publius Ovidius Naso and what were they works.
They would be also expected to read at least some selection... but most kids usually cheat on that. :D But if they really have to, most of them will choose Metamorphoses.

In the United States of America, about a century ago, there was a drifting away from the classical literature studies and older educational models. The new model, encouraged and emphasized by the Cold War, stressed the need for creating a scientific and technological elite for the military industrial complex. Courses like literature, art, and music were often left underfunded or cut altogether.

At about the same time, there was a movement towards nationalism, independence from Europe, and a push to create a new culture in the New World. Local traditions were encouraged, with local artists who dealt with local issues. In the Western and Northwestern United States, our children often learn about the customs, mythology, and artistic styles of the several native tribes of our region. When they are old enough, instead of being indoctrinated with the received Eurocentric historical perspectives of past generations they are indoctrinated with a newer Amerocentric view of world history. We are taught that nothing important happened before the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock, and that WW2 began in 1941 when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.

We teach American literature instead of English literature as a whole. Instead of studying Milton, we study Walt Whitman or Robert Frost. Instead of Tennyson we study Longfellow or Dickinson. Shakespeare is still taught, but people like John Donne, William Wordsworth, and George Bernard Shaw are left off of the curriculum. There's a bit of an Us versus Them mentality which prevails, and it's results have been slightly xenophobic over the years.

When we don't teach the French, German, Italian, and Russian writers of the last few centuries, there's a tendency to just leave off the ancients all together. There's this idea in America that newer is better, that we're at the top of the pile, with more money, better technology, we're smarter, faster, stronger than everyone who's ever come before so what could anybody have to teach us? It's proud, and proud in it's ignorance, glad to not know what other, lesser people would know.

At the same time, the government doesn't invest in the arts like other countries do. There's a feeling that if something is worth knowing or doing then it will be self-sufficient and the free market will sort it out democratically. We don't fund theaters, museums, etc. and still less do we go to them. The rise of the movie and television industries created a popular mass culture which taught people that they didn't need an attention span, or a memory longer than a week, and when it wasn't glitzing them up and giving them the Hollywood treatment these media further shunted the classics to the sideline.

There are a lot of reasons why the classics aren't studied in America. These are just a few. It's easy to come down on the current state of American education. It has it's flaws and we accept that. But there are going to be preferences and areas of knowledge within any culture. For instance, what do most Europeans know about Islamic, Asian, and African literatures?

[Walter]

It sounds like you have a novel in you someplace waiting to be written for all of that.

But BTW, you wouldn't happen to have a reference or two would you?

Sounds like a European view to me, and isn't the classical word 'spleen?'

[curlyqlink]

When we don't teach the French, German, Italian, and Russian writers of the last few centuries, there's a tendency to just leave off the ancients all together. There's this idea in America that newer is better, that we're at the top of the pile, with more money, better technology, we're smarter, faster, stronger than everyone who's ever come before so what could anybody have to teach us? It's proud, and proud in it's ignorance, glad to not know what other, lesser people would know.
Sadly, all too true. And I think the ancients are under a double whammy. From the right, the American supremicists, as you say. But the left would condemn the Athenians as slave-owners, the Romans as imperialists. Poor role models, as the current jargon would have it. And being European cultures, neither is sufficiently "multicultural" to deserve space in the curriculum.



We are taught that nothing important happened before the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock, and that WW2 began in 1941 when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.
And of course that it was the Americans who won WW2, with some help from the Brits. The Russians contributed nothing, except severe winters. There was history before the Pilgrims, but it happened in the Americas, and happened to Native Peoples.


There's a feeling that if something is worth knowing or doing then it will be self-sufficient and the free market will sort it out democratically. We don't fund theaters, museums, etc. and still less do we go to them.
We don't fund them, corporations do (in exchange for tax deductions and publicity and goodwill). And we do go to them-- as long as they exhibit big-name artists on the walls or provide a chance to see a real-life TV celebrity on stage.

[Walter]

Now, after these two diatribes, I would like to seriously request a more careful use of the collective words "we" and "Americans."

If the respective authors feel that they are poorly educated or particularly unintelligent, or that they see Americans as supremacist or even themselves as particularly arrogant and stupid, then I would like to ask that they talk about themselves as being in those categories, and not so generously spread that derogatory stain to include the rest of us whom they don't know. Speak for yourselves!

In the somewhat famous words of Mel Brooks: "What you mean 'us'?"