Perhaps more than any other writer, Juvenal (c. AD 55-138) captures the splendour, the squalor & the sheer energy of everyday Roman life. InThe Sixteen Satireshe evokes a fascinating world of whores, fortune-tellers, boozy politicians, slick lawyers, shameless sycophants, ageing flirts & downtrodden teachers. A member of the traditional land-owning class that was rapidly seeing power slip into the hands of outsiders, Juvenal also creates savage portraits of decadent aristocrats - male & female - seeking excitement among the lower orders of actors & gladiators, & of the jumped-up sons of newly-rich former slaves. Constantly comparing the corruption of his own generation with its stern & upright forebears, Juvenal's powers of irony & invective make his work a stunningly satirical & bitter denunciation of the degeneracy of Roman societyLess is known about the life of Juvenal (D. Iunius Iuuenalis) than was once believed -a key source, an inscription naming one Iunius Iuuenalis, refers to a later descendant, not the satirist -& such evidence as there is remains sadly inadequate. Much of it comes from Juvenal's own work.We know that the family was from Aquinum in Latium near modern Monte Cassino. One ancient Life offers a plausible birth date of AD 55. Another states that till middle-age Juvenal practised rhetoric, not for professional reasons but as an amusement, which implies a private income. Book I of the Satires was not published till c. 110-12, when the poet was in his fifties, & is clearly the work of an impoverished & embittered man who has come down in the world - a hanger-on of wealthy patrons with a chip on his shoulder - but the precise circumstances of Juvenal's fall from grace are unclear.