When one has read his Horace, one feels personally acquainted with the poet, so frankly biographical is he. This is true, though to a much less extent, of Persius. But Juvenal is almost sphinxlike in regard to himself. What little we know is gained from a few indirect references in his writings themselves, and from the numerous and contradictory ancient lives which have come down to us prefaced to the different manuscripts of Juvenal's satires. From these we gather that he was born sometime between 48 and 55 A. D., at the town of Aquinum in Latium, and was the son of a well-to-do freedman who left him a patrimony sufficient for his modest maintenance through life. He had a good education in grammar and rhetoric, and devoted himself through a large part of his earlier life to rhetorical declamation; though he seems not to have made any professional or profitable use of the talent which he undoubtedly possessed for the vocation of the advocate. He enjoyed some unimportant though honorable civil employment under Titus and Domitian, and served for one period of his life in the army, probably in Britain, with the rank of military tribune. In Juvenal's later life he seems to have given offense either to Domitian by some lines which he wrote upon a favorite pantomime dancer of the emperor, or to Hadrian for a similar cause. By one or the other of these emperors, according to tradition, he was practically exiled by an appointment to a command of a legion in Africa. The date of his death is as uncertain as that of his birth, but it seems to lie between 128 and 138 A. D. It will be seen, therefore, that our poet was contemporaneous with ten Roman emperors, his life covering the period from Nero to Hadrian, inclusive. It was during the reign of Domitian, however, that Juvenal, now already well advanced to middle life, took up his residence in Rome and began that work which was to be his material contribution to life and letters. Life in Rome under Domitian!--what a challenge to the satirist! what a field for the preacher! These were the crowning years of well-nigh a century of ever-increasing horror. With the downfall of liberty and the republic, both of which had perished in fact long before their name and semblance vanished, wealth and luxury had poured into Rome from the conquered provinces, and with these that moral laxity against which Horace had aimed his satire, then in four successive reigns Rome had cringed and groaned under the absolute sway of cynic, madman, fool, and flippant murderer, each more recklessly disregardful than the last of civic virtue and the lives and common rights of man. Then three puppets within a year involving the world in civil strife were themselves swept off the stage by Vespasian and Titus, who did indeed give passing respite to the state. And then for fifteen years--Domitian! Of these fifteen years Tacitus, just emerging into the grateful light of Nerva's and of Trajan's reigns, indignantly exclaims: