All the doings of mankind, their wishes, fears, anger, pleasures, joys, and varied pursuits, form the motley subject of my book.

This line is commonly given as an English rendering of Juvenal’s programmatic statement near the opening of his Satires, where he explains why he writes satire and what it will treat. Writing in imperial Rome, Juvenal frames his work as a response to the spectacle of contemporary life—public vice, private folly, and the social anxieties of the city. In the proem he presents satire as a genre capacious enough to encompass the whole range of human behavior and emotion, and he signals that his subject will be the everyday moral and psychological drama of Romans rather than epic heroes or mythic themes.

The quote asserts satire’s scope: the “motley” variety of human motives and feelings is itself the material of literature. By listing wishes, fears, anger, pleasures, and pursuits, Juvenal implies that what drives history and society is not lofty ideals but ordinary passions and appetites. The phrase also functions as a manifesto: his book will be a mirror of humanity, exposing contradictions and hypocrisies through a deliberately mixed, many-colored subject matter. In effect, Juvenal elevates the commonplace and the morally compromised into a serious object of scrutiny, claiming that the full spectrum of human life—especially its follies—deserves to be written about.