Roman Satire and the Fall of Rome : Juvenal, Gibbon, and the Problems of the Past

Examines the intersecting receptions of Juvenal's satires in Gibbon's Decline and fall of the Roman Empire to generate interdisciplinary dialogue between several areas of scholarship, such as the theory and practice of satire; eighteenth-century intellectual culture; classical receptions; and postcolonial theory and comparative empire studies.

Roman Satire and the Fall of Rome reveals the involvement of the satirist Juvenal in composing the history of Roman decline. He was perhaps the most fashionable classical author in England in the eighteenth century, when Edward Gibbon wrote The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88). Juvenal's satires enjoyed a similar level of notoriety among the Roman writers of late antiquity, who furnished Gibbon with the materials for his history. This book traces the reverberations of Juvenal's satirical rhetoric between these different periods. Ian Fielding offers detailed new readings of the responses to the satires in the works of Ammianus Marcellinus and Claudian, while also examining the responses to those responses in Gibbon's Decline and Fall. The complex case of Juvenal's reception shows how satire, the quintessentially Roman genre, has represented the problems of the Roman past as a warning for modern times.