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.
[citation needed] 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.
[1] The authenticity of these lines (which contain the famous quis custodiet passage above) has been debated,[2] although in the opinion of one scholar, they are "fully worthy of Juvenal".
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.
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: