DECIMUS JUNIUS, one of the greatest of the Roman classics, the details of whose personal history are both scanty and obscure. What little we know of his life is chiefly derived from a biographical sketch of him, purporting to be written by Suetonius, but more probably the work of some later hand. According to this authority he was the son or foster-child of a rich freedman of Aquinum, where he was born about A.D. 40, in the reign of Caligula. Though carefully trained to the bar, and extremely fond of declamation, he never pleaded professionally, but practised his art in the schools as a mental discipline. The praise awarded to some satirical lines which he composed on the actor Paris, then high in favour and power at court, encouraged him in that kind of composition. He suppressed his satires, however, for some time; but when at length he published them in his sixtieth year, they took the world by surprise, and gained a great name for their author. The severity with which the old poet lashed the degeneracy of public morals and the decay of the old national greatness became offensive at court, and Hadrian, on pretext of rewarding his services, gave him the command of a cohort, which was then on its way to garrison a frontier fortress of Egypt. Soon after reaching this place of honourable exile Juvenal died of chagrin and disappointment. At the time of his death he was in his eighty-first year. Such is the gist of the great satirist's life as given in the sketch attributed to Suetonius. Meagre as it is, however, much of it has been already shown by modern criticism to be un-authentic. All that we can accept as undoubtedly true is that the poet was born, or at least spent much of his time at Aquinum during the latter half of the first century after Juvenalis Christ. From other sources we know that he lived on terms of intimate friendship with the poet Martial.

To the scholar the works of Juvenal are of the highest value, from the insight which they give into the social and moral condition of Rome, during the first century of the Christian era. A richer or more tempting field has seldom opened to the satirist than offered itself to him. The foundations of the old Roman virtue had been sapped, and the worst vices had been openly practised and fostered by the Neros and Domitians. On such an age the genial humour and sly sarcasm of Horace would have been wholly thrown away. None who could not boldly and even fiercely denounce its vices, crimes, and follies, would have gained a hearing. Conscious of this, and imbued in no small degree with the vicious taste of the schools, Juvenal adopted that style of splendid and vehement declamation, which, had his force and weight of thought been less, might have degenerated into sheer bombast and hyperbole. Even as it is the rhetorician not seldom throws the moralist into the shade, and a wholesome lesson is often sacrificed to a brilliant point. This indeed is the capital defect of his writings—they are too ambitious, too obviously artistic, too manifestly designed to dazzle or to stun. At the same time it must be remembered, that, in so far as his aim was to produce effect, he succeeded as no Roman author, Horace himself hardly excepted, ever did. There is no Latin composition, from which so many thoughts and expressions have passed into the common speech of all languages, as the Tenth Satire of Juvenal—the highest flight of the satiric muse of Rome. It is in its author's best vein. Fulfilling the negative conditions of satire in ridiculing and denouncing vice and folly, it also fulfils the positive conditions of a moral essay by adorning and encouraging to virtue. In loftiness and purity of sentiment it stands unsurpassed in Greek or Roman literature, and the moral precepts it embodies may safely claim a high place even in the Christian ethics of modern times. In all his other satires the gold is mixed with much alloy. The vices which he lays bare and chastises he displays with a revolting minuteness of detail which disgusts the pure, while it feeds the morbid appetite of the depraved mind.

It is not easy to see how a man of strictly pure life should have that wonderful familiarity with the social corruptions of Rome under the empire which Juvenal delights to show. We have no grounds for asserting that he was personally tainted with any of those hideous vices which he describes with so much force and fulness. Yet his satires are manifestly the fruits of a personal experience, and their teaching is of that directly practical kind, which could only have been aimed at by one who had tracked vice and crime to their haunts, and seen with his own eyes their operation and results. It quite accords with the laws of human nature, that he should in his youth have drained the cup of dissipation, and when wisdom came with maturer years and cooler blood, that he should lash with no sparing hand the follies of his own early life. Many, if not most of the great satirists of the world, have merely reflected in their works their struggles with temptation, their defeat at first, and their final victory.

The editions of Juvenal are very numerous. That of Ruperti is the most popular, and, so far as the text is concerned, is the best; Heinrich's, in virtue, of its notes and commentaries, is better still. The editions of Henningus, Leyden, 1696; and Achaire, Paris, 1810, are also highly valuable. The English translations of Juvenal are numerous. Those of Holyday, Gifford, Badham, and Hodgson, are the most common. Dryden translated the First, Third, Sixth, Tenth, and Sixteenth Satires with great force and spirit, though often with little reference to the original. The French prose version of Dussaux, more elegant and correct than that of Gilbert, is less forcible and characteristic. K

K, the eleventh letter, and eighth consonant, of our alphabet, is formed by a guttural expression of the breath. Its sound is much the same with that of the hard c, or qu, and it is used for the most part only before e, i, and n, in the beginning of words, as ken, kill, know, and the like. It used formerly to be always joined with c at the end of words, but is now omitted. Thus, for publick, music, we now write public, music, and so on. However, in monosyllables it is still retained, as jack, block, &c.

K was borrowed from the Greek Καρχηδόνας, or the Oriental kaph, and finds only an ambiguous place in occidental alphabets. Priscian looked on it as a superfluous letter, and says that it was never to be used except in words borrowed from the Greek. Dauphin, after Sallust, observes that it was unknown to the ancient Romans. Indeed we seldom find it in any Latin authors, excepting in the word kalendae, where it sometimes stands instead of c. Carthage, however, is frequently spelt on medals with a K—SALVVS AVG. ET CAES. FEL. KART.; and sometimes the letter K alone stood for Carthage. M. Berger has observed, that a capital K, on the reverse of the medals of the emperors of Constantinople, signifies Konstantinou; and that on the Greek medals it signified KOIAH ΣΥΡΙΑ, Cela-Syria. Lipsius observes, that K was a stigma anciently marked on the foreheads of criminals with a red-hot iron. For its modern use, see Abbreviations.

K is also a numerical letter, signifying 250. When it had a stroke above it, K, this letter stood for 250,000. K on the French coinage denotes money coined at Bordeaux.