Introduction

This manuscript is a fifteenth-century edition of the Satyrae, or Satires, of the Roman poet Juvenal (born in the first century and active mainly in the second). The Satyrae, written in dactylic hexameter, were part of a Roman literary tradition that criticized and caricatured in verse the decadence of Roman life and the perceived decay of social mores. Their original audience consisted primarily of the Roman elite, and they criticized everything from hypocrisy to homosexuality, and from the degradation of urban life to the decay of feminine virtue. In the Middle Ages, copies of the Satyrae furnished a ready critique of a decadent, pagan Rome. During the Italian Renaissance, the Satyrae were the subject of renewed interest among fifteenth-century humanist scholars, and to this renewed interest we owe a great many of our surviving manuscript copies.

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