Satire VI is the most famous of the sixteen Satires by the Roman author Juvenal written in the late 1st or early 2nd century. In English translation, this satire is often titled something in the vein of Against Women due to the most obvious reading of its content. It enjoyed significant social currency from late antiquity to the early modern period, being read as a proof-text for a wide array of misogynistic beliefs. Its current significance rests in its role as a crucial body of evidence on Roman conceptions of gender and sexuality. The overarching theme of the poem is a dissuasion of the addressee Postumus from marriage; the narrator uses a series of acidic vignettes on the degraded state of (predominantly female) morality to bolster his argument. At c. 695 lines of Latin hexameter, this satire is nearly twice the length of the next largest of the author's sixteen known satires; Satire VI alone composes Book II of Juvenal's five books of satire. Satire VI also contains the famous phrase "Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" (but who will guard the guards themselves?), which is variously translated as "But who will guard the guards?", "But who will watch the watchmen?", or similar. In context, it refers to the impossibility of enforcing moral behavior when the enforcers (custodes) are corruptible: The text of the poem is not quite certain. In particular, E.O. Winstedt in 1899 discovered in the Bodleian Library in Oxford in an eleventh-century or early 12th-century manuscript an additional 36 lines (34 placed after line 366 of the satire, and two more after line 373). The authenticity of these lines (which contain the famous quis custodiet passage above) has been debated, although in the opinion of one scholar, they are "fully worthy of Juvenal". In most modern texts the 34 lines are usually printed after line 345. There is a partial duplication between O30-O34 and 346–348.

The themes of the poem

The author commences Satire VI by contrasting women of the distant past with the kind of modern Roman women seen in the poems of Catullus and Propertius: Peter Green explains: "'Cynthia' was the pseudonym which Propertius used to indicate his mistress Hostia in his poems; the girl who wept for her sparrow was 'Lesbia,' the mistress of Catullus, whose real name was Clodia." While the equation of these pseudonyms with historical women is debatable, the reference within Satire VI to Propertius and Catullus is clear. In opposition to the sophisticated, urban woman of the elegiac ideal, the woman of the mythical golden age was a simple rustic. The constant touchstone of the remainder of the poem is the deviance of contemporary Roman women from an amorphous ideal located in the unspecified past. Though it is frequently decried as a misogynistic rant, feminist scholar Jamie Corson has pointed out: "Satire VI is not merely a diatribe against women, but an all-out invective against marriage. .. This decaying of Rome’s social and moral standards has caused marriage to become the offspring of greed and corruption. Men have become weak, and allow women to challenge male supremacy so that marital power relations now favour women." The author sets the frame for his satire with a hyperbolic presentation of the options available to the Roman male – marriage, suicide, or a boy lover: Juvenal was concerned with the morality and actions of the Roman elite; Satire VI can equally be read as an invective against the men who have permitted this pervasive degradation of the Roman world. The author harshly criticizes avaricious husbands who marry not for love but for the dowry and subsequently allow their rich wives to do whatever they wish (6.136-141). Similarly, men who care only for the fleeting beauty of their wives, and then divorce them as it fades, merit condemnation (6.142-48). While women are prone to temptation, Juvenal casts men as agents and enablers of the feminine proclivity toward vice. In the written Roma of the Satires, men will even impersonate eunuchs to get unmonitored access to corrupt a woman (6.O-20-30). The literary trope of luxury imported into Roma along with the spoils of conquest and the goods (and banes) of the world is employed by Juvenal to explain the source of degradation:

Synopsis of the Poem by Section

Proem

Lust

Pretentiousness

Quarrelsomeness

Lack of Restraint

Unsociability

Superstitions

Drugs and Poisons

Epilogue