Book description
The splendour, squalor, and complexity of the Roman scene were never more vividly presented than by the satirist Juvenal (c. A.D. 55-130). His bitter and forcible verses were written during the reigns of Trajan and Hadrian, which Gibbon (from a safe distance) called "the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous". To quote Peter Green’s introduction, "Juvenal does not work out a coherent ethical critique of institutions or individuals; he simply hangs a series of moral portraits on the wall and forces us to look at them".
