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the Complete Review
the complete review - poetry



The Sixteen Satires
(tr. Peter Green (1967))

by
Juvenal


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To purchase The Sixteen Satires


Title: The Sixteen Satires
Author: Juvenal
Genre: Poetry
Written: ca. 130 (Eng. 1967)
Length: 297 pages
Original in: Latin
Availability: The Sixteen Satires - US
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  • Latin title: Saturae
  • Originally published, over several decades, in six separate books
  • Translated and with an Introduction by Peter Green
  • First edition of this translation: 1967; a revised second edition was published in 1974; a third revised translation and edition appeared in 1998, and this is the current Pengun Classics edition
  • Other translations include those by: John Dryden and others, as The Satires of Decimus Junius Juvenalis (1693); William Gifford as The Satires of Decimus Junius Juvenalis (1802) and also together with Lewis Evans prose-translation in The Satires of Juvenal, Persius, Sulpicia, and Lucilius (1852); J.D.Lewis as Satiræ (1873); G.G.Ramsay in Juvenal and Persius (1918); Rolfe Humphries as The Satires of Juvenal (1958); Steven Robinson as Sixteen Satires Upon the Ancient Harlot (1983); Niall Rudd as The Satires (1991); and Susanna Morton Braund in Juvenal and Persius (2004); the Martin M. Winkler anthology, Juvenal in English (2001), also sounds useful

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Our Assessment:

A- : a classic work indeed, in a fun and solid translation

See our review for fuller assessment.



Review Summaries
Source Rating Date Reviewer
L'Antiquité Classique . (37:1) 1968 Daniel Knecht
Arion . (7:3) Fall/1968 J.P.Sullivan
The Classical Journal . (65:5) 2/1970 Vincent Cleary
Classical Philology . (65:1) 1/1970 B. Walker
The Classical World . (62:1) 9/1968 W.S.Anderson


  From the Reviews:
  • "Il en résulte une traduction hautement lisible, d'une vigueur et d'une clarté remarquables, et dont le charm n'est pas rompu par de continuels renvois aux notes explicatives" - Daniel Knecht, L'Antiquité Classique

  • "There is no doubt that Green's unblushing translation of Juvenal, when all qualifications are made, is a welcome addition to the series. The rendering is close; the many problems of interpretation receive carefully considered, if sometimes debatable, solutions, and Juvenal's frequent obscenity and the broader strokes of his wit are diligently represented. (...) The version, which is clearly the work of a serious, sympathetic, and well-read student of Juvenal, doggedly stresses his meaning and clarity, and so, as a guide through the text, it is far superior to other contemporary versions." - J.P.Sullivan, Arion

  • "As it stands, the introduction tends to detract from the considerable merit of the translation, rather than to enhance it. The same objection might be made to the notes, namely, that they are extraneous appendages which take away from rather than complement the craft of the translation. (...) The translation has much to recommend it and captures many of the qualities of the original -- Juvenal's angry disenchantment with all that is ignoble in life, as well as the spasmodic movement and lively, often epigrammatic, style of the poetry. And the tone seems so right !" - Vincent Cleary, The Classical Journal

  • "Appearing as one of the paperback Penguin Classics, this book may perhaps miss some of the serious attention it deserves. The notes alone would make it indispensable for future students of Juvenal and there is a valuable up-to-date bibliography. (...) G.'s translation is certainly free from pedantry and it is thoroughly contemporary in diction; it is also readable in long stretches, as no previous translation has succeeded in being. (...) The second quality in Juvenal which G. emphasizes is his extraordinary verbal dexterity and the spareness and subtlety of his language. Both translation and notes show continual perceptiveness of these qualities and will enrich any reader's appreciation of Juvenal as a writer. And as recorder of the scene Juvenal has never been more enjoyable." - B. Walker, Classical Philology

  • "The translation is very effective: it catches the jerkiness, violence, occasional lyricism, and irony of the satirist, and it makes Juvenal the entertaining reading he undoubtedly was in his own day. An introduction of some 55 pages presents a useful picture of Juvenal's life and works, following consciously in the path of Highet's well-known study. Extensive notes at the end of each Satire, both biographical and textual, reveal the translator's responsible labor. And a valuable bibliography is provided at the end. This combination of literary sensitivity and scholarly attention makes of Green's translation, in my opinion, the best version of Juvenal which has appeared in years, certainly the one which most Latinists would want to use in teaching Latin-less students." - William S. Anderson, The Classical World

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

[Note: this review is of the 1967 Penguin Classics first edition of Peter Green's translation, which differs markedly from the (currently in-print -- i.e. the one you'll get at your local bookstore) third edition (first published in 1998).
     Green mentions in his Preface to the third edition that he found himself: "making innumerable other changes, very often to get my version back nearer to the Latin, both in sound and sense", but it still seems worthwhile turning to the influential earlier one. (Besides, all the reviews are of that one.) (I do not have a physical copy of the third edition, but you'll find limited textual comparison below.)
     Nevertheless, readers should be aware that the translation in the current Penguin Classics edition is quite different; without the physical copy I can't judge whether the translation is more successful -- but Green does also note in his Preface to the third edition that: "My bibliographies, like my translation and notes, have been radically revised", and I think that it's reasonable to assume that the notes and bibliographies are more useful in the new(er) edition (though by now in some respects presumably also getting out of date ...).
     One particularly significant difference in the translations is that in the third edition Green made a much greater effort to maintain 'line-equivalence' in his translation, which he had failed to do in the first (with the 171 lines of Satire I, for example, coming in at some 200 lines). Compare, for example, the opening of Satire I:
Semper ego auditor tantum ? numquamne reponam
vexatus totiens rauci Theseide Cordi ?
     In Green's 1967 translation:
Must I always be stuck in the audience at these poetry-readings, never
Up on the platform myself, taking it out on Cordus
For the times he's bored me to death with ranting speeches
From that Theseid of his ?
     In Green's less-embellished 1998 translation:
Must I always be stuck in the audience, never get my own back
for all the times I've been bored by that ranting Theseid
of Cordus ?
     Beyond the somewhat more compressed expression, there are also a few things which wouldn't fly any longer by the 1990s, such as Green's take on: "loripedem rectus derideat, Aethiopem albus", toned down and condensed to: "Let whites mock blacks, or hale men cripples !" in 1998, as opposed to the much fuller but ... problematic: "It takes a hale man to mock a cripple, / And you can't bait niggers when you're tarred with the same brush". (Re-presenting Juvenal's profane, biting wit and uninhibited expression is always a tough call and while Green's expansive rendering here is beyond the pale the wordy execution and flavor gives some sense to the feel of the 1967 translation as a whole (and why it might be preferable to the 1998 version); there's also arguably something to be said for a translator of Juvenal who isn't worried about taboos (especially given how ... circumspect many of the earlier translations are).)]

       My first instinct, as always, would be to reach for the Loeb edition (or perhaps the Sammlung Tusculum one (though I suspect I'd prefer the 1993 Adamietz edition to this 2017 Lorenz one) -- not least, to have the Latin (closer) at hand. But for a first go at Juvenal, Green's (1967) translation doesn't seem the worst starting point, not least because it is in verse (while Braund's Loeb is a prose translation) -- and, after all, the Latin is easily found elsewhere (and I couldn't resist occasionally consulting it). (There's certainly also something to be said for an edition such as The Satires of Juvenal, Persius, Sulpicia, and Lucilius (e.g.), which offers both a prose-rendering (by Lewis Evans) as well as a 'metrical version' (by William Gifford).)
       Of course, Juvenal's verse (and Latin poetry in general) doesn't translate easily into English, with Green noting some of the hurdles (and what we miss -- more reason to have the original somewhere near) as he warns (or makes excuses):

No translator can hope to capture the condensed force of Juvenal's enjambed hexameters, his skilful rhythmic variations, his dazzling displays of alliteration and assonance and onomatopoeia: here I can claim no more than that I have recognized the problem, and done what I could to surmount it in a wholly different medium. It is hard to estimate the gulf which lies between an inflected, mosaic language such as Latin, and an uninflected language like English, with its plethora of controlling particles.
       Green's translation tends to the more expansive and florid, with a decidedly (and sometimes ill-judged) then-contemporary ring: for moechorum notissimus olim he has: "You were once the randiest / Hot-rod-about-town" (though his 1998 revision -- "that once most notorious co-respondent" -- doesn't impress nearly as much). (Even Braund reaches here in the Loeb, with the anachronistic: "the man who was once the most notorious of Casanovas".)
       Sometimes Green hits on something nice with his stretches, as in making: "astrological clap-trap / Is not in my stars" out of motus astrorum ignoro. The 1998 revision -- "Astral / motions I never learnt" -- may be 'closer' to the Latin, but isn't nearly as good; Braund's literal: "I'm ignorant of the movements of the stars" is also pretty bland. Elsewhere, too, the 1998 translation can feel like a step back, without really getting that much closer to the original: et quadringentis nummis condire gulosum / fictile, translated in the 1967 version as: "And spend their last fiver on dainties -- to eat off earthenware" becomes: "and spend their last fiver to add relish to their gourmet / earthenware" (compare also Braund's: "It's not hard for them to flavour their gourmet's earthenware at a cost of four hundred thousand", sigh )
       So, for better and worse, Green's (1967) translation is a lively and somewhat free one -- but at least one that feels like it's very much of and in Juvenal's spirit.
       The sixteen satires were not all written and published in one go, but rather over the course of quite a few years, in six books, in the early second century. Nevertheless, looking around him for all those times, Juvenal can well say that he didn't have much choice in turning to this form: as he notes in the first satire: difficile est saturam non scribere -- "it is harder not to be writing satires". (Even Braund, showing far more restraint in her use of italics-for-emphasis opts for it here: "it is hard not to write satire".) There's lots to skewer, and Juvenal does -- explaining also:
       Though talent be wanting, yet
Indignation will drive me to verse, such as I -- or any scribbler --
May still command
       In particular, he targets posturing, but also has harsh words for a variety of groups, from those in power to women generally and homosexuals, as well as ... Greeks. He really doesn't like Greeks, a race that: "remains my special pet aversion", beginning with their: "lingo and manners" (linguam et mores). He complains about the damn foreigners, who leave:
No room for honest Romans when Rome's ruled by a junta
Of Greek-born secret agents, who -- like all their race --
Never share friends or patrons.
       He sees Rome undermined by foreign ways and influence, and the (lust for) money brought with it:
Lucre it was that first brought these loose foreign
Morals amongst us, enervating wealth that
Destroyed us, over the years, through shameless self-indulgence.
       Egypt and the "crazy Egyptians" (demens Aegyptos), with the "monstruous deities" they worship, serve as another example -- though he notes that:
     But today the whole world
Has its Graeco-Roman culture. Smart Gaulish professors
Are training the lawyers of Britain: even in Iceland
There's talk of setting up a Rhetorical Faculty.
       Juvenal repeatedly makes the case for the more humble life, seeing greed as the root of many problems and arguing that: "In the old days poverty / Kept Latin women chaste" while now:
     Luxury, deadlier
Than any armed invader, lies like an incubus
Upon us still, avenging the world we brought to heel.
       He complains how easily people can be bought -- "I know nothing more cheaply / Satisfied than a belly" (which Green updated to: "Nothing I know asks less than the gut" in his 1998 edition) -- and of the rampant corruption of the day:
nos Urbem colimus tenui tibicine fultam
magna parte sui; nam sic labentibus obstat
vilicus et, veteris rimae cum texit hiatum,
securos pendente iubet dormire ruina.

We live in a city shored up, for the most part, with gimcrack
Stays and props: that's how our landlords arrest
The collapse of their property, papering over great cracks
In the ramshackle fabric, reassuring the tenants
They can sleep secure, when all the time the building
Is poised like a house of cards.
       No wonder that he claims:
     Myself, I would value
A barren offshore island more than Rome's urban heart:
Squalor and isolation are minor evils compared
To this endless nightmare of fires and collapsing houses,
The cruel city's myriad perils -- and poets reciting
Their work in August !
       (Always got to get those digs against the poets in.)
       In a rare sober turn, in Satire XIV, Juvenal (quite aggressively) sets out his ideal(s):
     If anyone asks me
Where we're to draw the line, how much is sufficient, I'd say:
Enough to meet the requirements of cold and thirst and hunger,
As much as Epicurus derived from that little garden,
Or Socrates, earlier still, possessed in his frugal home --
Nature never says one thing and Philosophy another.
Are those over-strict examples ? Am I cramping your style ?
       Even wealth and the wealthy were better in the good old days, with Juvenal lamenting (or complaining, as it likely also hit closer to home), that:
quis tibi Maecenas, quis nunc erit aut Proculeius
aut Fabius, quis Cotta iterum, quis Lentulus alter ?
tum par ingenio pretium

     Today the age
Of the private patron is over; Maecenas and Co.
Have no successors. Genius got its reward
In those days
       (That's a rare instance of Green being more concise than Juvenal, 'Maecenas and Co.' substituting for all those unfamiliar names which he presumably didn't want to explain in a footnote. (Disappointingly, he though the better of 'and Co.' in 1998 edition -- there it's: "Maecenas and his like", which isn't nearly as good.) Braund dutifully spells it all out: "Who these days will behave like a Maecenas, a Proculeius, or a Fabius ? Who'll be a second Cotta or another Lentulus ? In those days rewards matched genius", which is, of course, the right thing to do -- but Green's summary-version certainly reads and sounds -- and probably even conveys Juvenal's meaning -- better.)
       In Satire XIV Juvenal reminds of one of the reasons things have gone so bad, certain of the (generally bad) influence parents have on their children -- specifically that: "Bad examples are catching" (an interpolation not actually found in Juvenal, and which Green cuts from his 1998 edition). Juvenal gives quite a few examples of how easily kids are led astray -- or led to expect too much, so that, for example, if a child gets a taste of delicacies too early: "he'll never give up his passion / For luxurious meals, or lower his standards of haute cuisine" (for: cupiet lauto cenare paratu / semper et a magna non degenerare culina; even Braund opts for 'grand cuisine' in her translation).
       There's considerable dark comic exaggeration -- here even more pronounced than elsewhere, but found throughout --, as in:
How can you hope, you bumpkin, that the daughter won't sleep around
When however fast she gabbles the list of her mother's lovers
She must stop to get her breath back a score of times and more ?
       Sexual excess features prominently, as Juvenal deplores the modern lack of morals, now that: "Justice withdrew to heaven, and Chastity went with her, / Two sisters together, beating a common retreat". This comes in the longest of the satires, VI, in which he shakes his head at rash Postumus' intentions: "Postumus, are you really / Taking a wife ?"
       As Juvenal sees it:
Why endure such bitch-tyranny when rope's available
By the fathom, when all those dizzying top-floor windows
Are open for you, when there are bridges handy
To jump from ? Supposing none of these exits catches
Your fancy, isn't it better to sleep with a pretty boy ?
Boys don't quarrel all night, or nag you for little presents
While they're on the job, or complain that you don't come
Up to their expectations, or demand more gasping passion.
       Of course, the homosexual lifestyle comes with its own frustrations, as Naevolus explains in Satire IX, presented as a dialogue between him and the poet, complaining that, while: "Many have made a packet from my way of life,, but it's never / Brought me any decent pickings". Here, too, we find just how graphic Juvenal can get:
an facile et pronum est agere intra viscera penem
legitimum atque illic hesternae occurrere cenae ?
servus erit minus ille miser qui foderit agrum
quam dominum.

       Do you
Suppose it's easy, or fun, this job of cramming
My cock up into your guts till I'm stopped by last night's supper ?
The slave who ploughs his master's field has less trouble
Than the one who ploughs him.
       (Braund's: "Or is it easy and straightforward to drive a penis worthy of the name into your guts and there meet yesterday's dinner ? The slave who ploughs the soil will have an easier life than the one who ploughs his master" is, literally, closer -- 'straightforward' is certainly better for 'pronum' than 'fun' (and arguably even ... adds a bit to the image), but Green's more vulgar tone surely fits better.)
       Bonus points also to Green for 'muff-diving' ("Muff-diving on Rhodope") --- though he thought the better of it for the 1998 edition, opting there for: "going down on Rhodope", which will also do.
       Juvenal does refer to a variety of actual events and people but much is fairly general and offers a good (if opinionated, sometimes noxiously so) sense of the times; if too extreme -- most obviously, regarding, for example, women, or ... Greeks --, a surprisingly rich picture of Roman life emerges (such as through his condemnation of landlords, with Green explaining in his endnotes that: "The double danger of fire and collapsing houses became almost proverbial under the Empire. Jerry-built apartment blocks were run up to considerable heights in an effort to combat over-crowding: the upper storeys were usually constructed of wood. Fires were frequent and (since both water-supplies and fire-services were illregulated) tended to be devastating").
       Interesting, too, are such things as Juvenal's description of Jews -- with Green noting: "J., as Highet rightly points out (p. 283), knew more about the Jews than any other Roman writer with the possible exception of Tacitus" -- in verses such as:
Some, whose lot it was to have Sabbath-fearing fathers,
Worship nothing but clouds and the numen of the heavens,
And think it as great a crime to eat pork, from which their parents
Abstained, as human flesh. They get themselves circumcised,
And look down on Roman law, preferring instead to learn
And honour and fear the Jewish commandments, whatever
Was handed down by Moses in that arcane tome of his --
Never to show the way to any but fellow-believers
(If they ask where to get some water, find out if they're foreskinless),
But their fathers were the culprits: they made every seventh day
Taboo for all life's business, dedicated to idleness.
Most faults the young pick up spontaneously: one only,
Avarice, has to be taught them, against their natural instincts.
A deceptive vice, this, with the shadow and semblance of virtue --
Dour-faced, gloomy of mien, always dressed like an undertaker,
       If hardly understanding -- as Green notes, for example: "Both he and Tacitus attribute the workless Jewish Sabbath to natural laziness and indolence" -- it at least shows considerable familiarity with Jewish custom and life, and is at least slightly more generous than his descriptions of, for example, those crazy and -- so Juvenal in Satire XV -- cannibalistic Egyptians. (Juvenal here mentions Ulysses' claim but admits that his: "story was unsupported / by any eyewitness" -- but then offers a practically ripped-from-the-headlines-of-the-day example.)
       Green appends endnotes to each satire (instead of bunching them all together at the end of the book). These are mostly useful, if also somewhat idiosyncratic, as in pointed remarks such as: "J.'s knowledge of the proletariat is almost as deficient as his sympathies for them". So also, for example, Green offers explanations such as that:
The Cynics believed that the only good was virtue, and that pleasure, if pursued for its own sake, was a positive evil: they were thus marked by an aggressively puritanical contempt for wealth and achievement, and tended to be a 'protest group' rather than a constructive philosophical sect.
       (As I mentioned, Green writes in the Introduction to the 1998 edition that the notes (and the bibliographies) have been "radically revised", but I note that, at least in these two cases, he didn't change a thing.)
       The Introduction itself is long -- some sixty pages -- but informative, both about Juvenal and the Satires -- including the interesting point that:
It is a curious and infuriating paradox that we possess, probably, more manuscripts of Juvenal than of any other classical author, including Homer, but that only one of these -- P, the Codex Pithoeanus-Montepessulanus, preserved in the Medical School of Montpellier -- derives from a relatively sound and intelligent tradition.
       And it is also worth pointing out that two familiar phrases are first found in the Satires: 'rara avis' and 'quis custodiet ipsos custodes ?' Green translates the former -- fully: rara avis in terris nigroque simillima cycno -- as: "a rara avis, a black swan or the like", trusting that readers still knew or understood that much (or that bit of) Latin, but times have changed by 1998, and in that edition he writes: "a rare bird, a black swan or the like". (Braund similarly doesn't give her readers the benefit of the doubt and goes for the safe: "a rare bird on this earth, exactly like a black swan". As to the latter, sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes, that is, of course: "but who is to keep guard / Over the guards themselves ?".
       Juvenal promises a bit more than he can deliver in claiming:
quidquid agunt homines, votum, timor, ira, voluptas,
gaudia, discursus, nostri farrago libelli est.

All human endeavours, men's prayers,
Fears, angers, pleasures, joys and pursuits, these make
The mixed mash of my verse.
       But the Satires are a wonderfully rich mixed mash, and Green's (1967) translation a fun and spirited and reasonably true to the original take on them (with a sixties-bent that's to my liking but may not be everyone's cuppa). As with many of the classics, consulting several translations of the Satires is probably worth the reader's while, but Green's certainly can be enjoyed as is and on its own; it's far more hit -- especially as far as the overall feel of the Satires goes -- than miss. (But, yes, I will be turning to some of those other translations as well.)

- M.A.Orthofer, 16 October 2025

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Links:

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About the Author:

       Latin-writing poet Juvenal (Decimus Junius Juvenalis) lived ca.55 to 138.

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© 2025 the complete review

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