From Latin 'juvenalis' meaning 'youthful'; also borne by the famous Roman satirist.
Juvenal derives from the Latin juvenalis, an adjective simply meaning youthful or pertaining to youth, from juvenis, a young person. The Romans valued youthful energy as a civic virtue — juventus, the Roman goddess of youth, was honored in the early Republic — and names built on this root carried aspirational connotations of vitality and vigor. As a given name it was in modest use across the Roman world before one towering figure made it immortal.
Decimus Junius Juvenalis, writing in Rome during the late 1st and early 2nd centuries CE, produced sixteen Satires that remain among the most scorching indictments of Roman society ever written. It is Juvenal who gave us panem et circenses — bread and circuses — to describe how rulers pacify the masses, and who coined the phrase mens sana in corpore sano, a healthy mind in a healthy body. His sharp, furious rhetoric against corruption, hypocrisy, and moral decay was so vivid that later generations returned to him again and again whenever they needed a framework for social criticism.
In the 17th and 18th centuries Samuel Johnson and John Dryden translated and imitated him, and the satirical tradition he embodied runs through Swift, Pope, and into modern political comedy. As a given name today, Juvenal is extremely rare in English-speaking countries but remains in use in parts of Latin America, France, and among Catholic communities honoring the Roman tradition of saints named Juvenal. It carries an almost paradoxical weight: a name meaning youthful that is forever associated with ancient, bone-deep cultural knowledge. For families with a love of the classical world or the satirical tradition, it is a name of extraordinary intellectual pedigree.