Juvenal

Decimus Junius Juvenalis came of age in the late first century AD, though the details of his life remain murky. He began writing no earlier than the reign of Domitian, with one scholar placing his first book around 100 or 101. Over the next quarter-century he produced at least 16 satirical poems, following the tradition of Lucilius, Horace, and Persius but with a harsher edge. His fifth and final surviving book appeared sometime after 127. The Satires ranged across Roman life - greed, decadence, the indignities of patronage, the follies of ambition - rendered in dactylic hexameter that could flay and amuse in the same line. They remain a vital, if slippery, window into the world he inhabited: comic exaggeration that captures true feeling, even when the facts bend under the weight of his anger.