**Decimus Junius Juvenalis** (Aquinum, between 50 and 60 A.D. – Rome, after 127 A.D.) was a Roman poet and rhetorician. He wrote until the reign of Emperor Hadrian, and the exact date of his death is unknown, though it certainly occurred after 127 A.D., the latest chronological reference that can be derived from his works.
Information about his life is scarce and uncertain, inferred from the rare autobiographical references found in his sixteen Satires.
The Satires constitute the only literary production of the poet that has come down to us: they consist of sixteen compositions published in five books.
They represent the last great expression of a genre that Quintilian defined as uniquely Roman, a definition that suits Juvenal well, given his aversion to the Graeculi and to their literature and philosophy.
Juvenal states from the very beginning that what drives him to write is indignation at the degradation of the society in which he lives. The targets of his satire are numerous and belong to every social class: the entire Roman society of his time is condemned in fiery terms. Satire XV is a moralistic composition in which he attacks religious fanaticism and the barbarity of Egypt, describing a horrifying episode of cannibalism arising from local feuds between Ombi and Tentyra in the Nile Delta. Through a dark and indignant style, the poet uses Egyptian brutality to denounce human degeneration. It is in this context that he employs a hyperbole connected to Scylla and to what her figure represented in the imagination of the classical world, establishing a point of comparison: what appears monstrous and unbelievable in myth is, in reality, less shocking than what truly happens among men.

“From fleecy animals every table there
Must abstain; and a grievous crime it would be
To slaughter the tender offspring of a goat
Still newly weaned from its mother.
Yet there exists no law there
That forbids the eating of human flesh.
A crime that left Alcinous astonished
When Ulysses revealed it to him at supper.
He drew laughter from many, and perhaps anger from others,
Being thought a lying braggart:
Does no one cast into the sea this man,
Worthy of a truer Charybdis?
This man who dares hope that one may believe
In the savage Cyclops and the ravenous Laestrygonian?
And Scylla, and the Cyanean rocks rather
Would I believe to meet and exchange places.
I would sooner trust, they said, the fierce winds
Shut within Aeolus’ bags,
Or Elpenor turned into a swine, and sailors
Reduced to grunting, deprived of human speech.”

Satire XV of Juvenal denounces with extreme severity the loss of humanity in mankind, taking as its starting point an episode of cannibalism in Egypt to demonstrate that human beings, when they abandon reason and pietas, can become more cruel than beasts themselves.
In the proposed passage this idea emerges through a powerful reversal of values: in that place it is considered a crime to kill animals regarded as sacred, such as goats, yet there is no law prohibiting the consumption of human flesh.
Juvenal thus highlights a morally inverted world, where what ought to be most sacred—human beings—is instead what is violated.
To strengthen his denunciation, the poet introduces a reference to the Odyssey: when Ulysses recounts his adventures at the court of Alcinous, king of the Phaeacians, he is considered a liar because his stories of monsters and wonders seem unbelievable.
Juvenal takes this disbelief and amplifies it, citing a series of increasingly extreme mythical figures, culminating in Scylla and Charybdis.
Here the figure of Scylla assumes particular significance not only as a monstrous creature but also as a real and well-known geographical location in the ancient world.
Scylla is not merely a monster of imagination: she is linked to a specific place, the strait between Italy and Sicily, where ancient sailors located the danger of Scylla on one side and Charybdis on the other.
Thus Scylla stands midway between myth and reality: she is a fantastic creature, yet rooted in a concrete experience of navigation and in a genuinely existing place.
When Juvenal states that he would more readily believe in Scylla and her rocks, he is not invoking just any monster, but something that for his readers possessed a geographical and almost tangible reality. For this very reason the reference is even more effective: Scylla represents one of the strongest symbols of monstrosity in ancient culture—a hybrid, ferocious, inescapable creature embodying an almost inconceivable danger, the ultimate limit of peril, yet a limit situated on the border of reality rather than in a wholly invented world.
The result is a powerful reversal: what appears monstrous and unbelievable, poised between reality and myth, such as Scylla in the Strait, nevertheless seems less shocking than the historical reality denounced by Juvenal.
Human beings, through their behavior, surpass even that limit.
It is no longer the monsters of the sea that devour men, but men themselves.
In this way, the mention of Scylla becomes central to the passage.v It serves to establish a comparison between myth and reality and, above all, to overturn it: myth, with all its terrifying creatures, proves less disturbing than contemporary historical reality.
Thus Scylla becomes the term of comparison that allows Juvenal to emphasize the fundamental idea of the satire, namely that true monstrosity belongs neither to myth nor to the extreme places of the world, but manifests itself in the everyday reality of humankind, capable of actions that render even legendary creatures less terrible.

Giuseppe Ribuffo