Juvenal and the Reign of Trajan

The literary evidence for the Trajanic period presents a remarkably difficult problem; for though a fair number of writers whose work is extant today lived and sometimes wrote during the period, they provide information which is disproportionately and disappointingly little in quantity, and in the main highly tendentious. We also lack a biography of Trajan, since Suetonius ended his series not so much at a round dozen as at the end of a dynasty, while the egregious compiler of the Augustan History elected to begin with Hadrian. The reason in the former case is clear and compelling; whatever the motive in the latter, the value of what we have missed as a result is to say the least dubious. Frontinus has no observations on matters outside the scope of his technical discourses; Pliny’s letters, the most extensive of the Latin prose sources, throw valuable light on certain aspects of imperial administration, and offer a rather gingerbread portrait of his own circle of career civil servants and literary dilettanti. In Greek literature, Plutarch is almost devoid of contemporary references, while the orations of Dio Chrysostom have been milked dry, without providing us with any real factual material.