A new commentary on the first book of satires of the Roman satirist Juvenal. The essays on each of the poems together with the overview of Book I in the Introduction present the first integrated reading of the Satires as an organic structure.

First published in 1932, as the sixth edition of an 1898 original, this collection of some of Juvenal's satires, including the often-overlooked sixth satire, was edited and abridged by noted Juvenal scholar James Duff. Duff begins the book with a biography of the poet, an overview of satire before Juvenal, as well as an assessment of the available manuscripts and the rich scholia handed down from antiquity. The notes include a summary of each satire and commentary on the text. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in Juvenal or the history of satire.

This survey of Roman satire locates its most salient possibilities and effects at the center of every Roman reader's cultural and political self-understanding. This book describes the genre's numerous shifts in focus and tone over several centuries (from Lucilius to Juvenal) not as mere 'generic adjustments' that reflect the personal preferences of its authors, but as separate chapters in a special, generically encoded story of Rome's lost, and much lionized, Republican identity. Freedom exists in performance in ancient Rome: it is a 'spoken' entity. As a result, satire's programmatic shifts, from 'open' to 'understated' to 'cryptic' and so on, can never be purely 'literary' and 'apolitical' in focus and/or tone. In Satires of Rome, Professor Freudenburg reads these shifts as the genre's unique way of staging and agonizing over a crisis in Roman identity. Satire's standard 'genre question' in this book becomes a question of the Roman self.