Table Of ContentOXFORD READINGS IN CLASSICAL STUDIES
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OXFORD READINGS IN CLASSICAL STUDIES
Aeschylus
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TheAtticOrators
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Oxford Readings in Classical Studies
Persius and Juvenal
Edited by
MARIA PLAZA
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Contents
Introduction 1
MariaPlaza
I. PERSIUS
1. StudiesinPersius 17
K.J.Reckford
2. StyleandExpressioninPersius’FifthSatire 57
J.C.Bramble
3. Persius’DidacticSatire:ThePupilasTeacher 72
JohnHenderson
4. AssociationofIdeasinPersius 107
N.Rudd
5. TechniquesofIronyandComedy inPersius’Satire 138
MarisaSquillanteSaccone
6. PersiusandtheDecoctionofNero 173
EmilyGowers
7. FakingItinNero’sOrgasmatron:Persius1
andtheDeathofCriticism 199
KirkFreudenburg
8. OpenBodiesandClosedMinds?Persius’
SaturaeintheLightofBakhtinandVoloshinov 222
Francescad’AlessandroBehr
II. JUVENAL
9. Juvenal’sCanonsofSocialCriticism 257
UlrichKnoche
vi Contents
10. Survey 278
GilbertHighet
11. JuvenalandPriapus 305
AmyRichlin
12. TheBodilyGrotesqueinRomanSatire:ImagesofSterility 327
PaulAllenMiller
13. MakingaSpectacle:DeviantMen,Invective,
andPleasure 349
JonathanWalters
14. AngerinJuvenalandSeneca 361
W.S.Anderson
15. DeclamationandContestationinSatire 450
SusannaMortonBraund
16. Naevoluscliens 469
FrancoBellandi
17. SatiricGrotesquesinPublicandPrivate:Juvenal,
DrFrankenstein,RaymondChandler,
andAbsolutelyFabulous 506
S.M.BraundandW.Raschke
References 533
Acknowledgements 558
Introduction
Maria Plaza
Today, we tend to smile at the straightforward question of whether
Juvenal,orPersius,‘deal[s]with importantsubjects’,especiallywhen
posedinanabsolutesense—thatis,importantbothtohimandtous.1
Yet this has not always been so, and will probably not always be so
in the future. One way of looking at literary satire is in terms of
moral/ideological message and poetic form, as two points of focus
whichdonoteasilycreateacoherentpattern.ForroughlythelastWfty
years,scholarshiponPersius’andJuvenal’ssatirehasbeeninterested
in poetic form rather than ideology (with an exception formed by
representatives of feminist and/or post-colonial reading),2 yielding
illuminating insights and excellent interpretations on the way.
These satirists’ technique has been laid open and historicized,
1 Asposed,forinstance,inG.Highet’sJuvenaltheSatirist(Oxford,1954),161,
reprintedbelow,p.278.ThesamemaybesaidforalltheRomanversesatirists,by
whichImeanthelinebegunbyLuciliusandcontinuedbyHorace(inhisSermones
andEpistles),andthenPersiusandJuvenal.Forreasonsofspace,Horace’ssatiresand
thoseofPersiusandJuvenalhavecometobediscussedintwovolumesofORCS,the
present volume and Freudenberg (ed.), Oxford Readings on Horace: ‘Satires’ and
‘Epistles’;butreadersofRomansatirearerecommendedtoconsultboth,sincethe
scholarshiponthethreefullyextantversesatiristsnaturallysharesmanyconcerns.
ThepictureissomewhatdiVerentforVarro—Seneca’sApocolocyntosis—Petronius’
Satyrica,thelineofLatinprosimetricsatire,occasionallycalledMenippeansatire(for
these, see now K. Freudenburg (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Roman Satire
(Cambridge, 2005), esp. the articles by O’Gorman and Relihan, with their recom-
mendationsforfurtherreading,pp.95–122).
2 A.Richlin,TheGardenofPriapus:SexualityandAggressioninRomanHumor2
(Oxford,1992);J.Walters,‘MakingaSpectacle:DeviantMen,Invective,andPleasure’,
Arethusa, 31 (1998), 355–67; J. Henderson, ‘Satire Writes ‘‘Woman’’: Gendersong’,
PCPhS 215 (1989), 50–80, and ‘The Pupil as a Teacher: Persius’ Didactic Satire’,
Ramus, 20 (1991), 123–48. A section from Richlin’s book, Walter’s article, and
Henderson’s‘PupilasTeacher’arereprintedbelow.
2 Introduction
the I-speaker has been revealed to be a role variously manipulated,
metaphors have been dissected or put together in greater patterns,
jokes and dirty language have been shown to undermine the alleged
seriousnessofthesatiricprogramme.Itislargelythisjourneythatis
recorded by the present selection of scholarship. But as some critics
denymoralcontentinJuvenal,forexample,altogether,3otherswarily
reopenthedoortoitbyadmittingthereaderandhisreactions.4Both
Persius’andJuvenal’ssubjects,are,whenseenbroadly,important:how
shouldoneliveone’slife;howisamantobedeWned,orawoman;is
theresuchathingas‘thegood’?Withtime,satirecriticsmayperhaps
wanttoturntotheideologyagain,butastheydosotheymustdevelop
more precise instruments to analyse it. Which is not to say that
message and form are not intertwined—they are, painfully so, and
withtheRomansatiresitisjustthismixtureofimportantquestions
and irreverent formulation of these that teases, provokes, and
challengesreaders.Despiteourselves,webecomeinvolved.
The history of satire scholarship has recently been outlined else-
where,5andhereIwillonlysetoutacoupleofgeneralobservations,
beforeturningtoamotivationofmyselectionofarticlesonPersius
andJuvenal.
Just after the middle of the twentieth century, a short period of
time saw the appearance of several general studies on satire which
were to have a considerable impact on the reading of Roman verse
satirists: Alvin Kernan’s The Cankered Muse (1959) and The Plot of
Satire (1965), and R. C. Elliott’s The Power of Satire (1960). Elliott
connected literary satire to cursing, scapegoating, and other cult
practicesinvariouscultures,claimingforthesatiricgenreaheritage
in the rituals exorcizing unwanted behaviour from a society—thus
satire was seen as a healthy social phenomenon, and historicized as
partofanurgemoreancientandbasicthanthatexpressedinGreek
and Roman satirical literature.6 Kernan took more of a Formalist
3 R.M.Rosen,MakingMockery:ThePoeticsofAncientSatire(Oxford,2007).
4 Henderson(n.2above),Freudenburg,CambridgeCompanion,andid.,Satiresof
Rome:ThreateningPosesfromLuciliustoJuvenal(Cambridge,2001).
5 Freudenburg,CambridgeCompanion,‘Introduction,’esp.24–30.
6 Many of the same points about a basic human drive to satirize were (less
scientiWcally) made by Matthew Hodgart, Satire (London, 1969), though he sees
thisdrivelesspositively,stressingitsaggressiveside.
Introduction 3
approach as he turned to the ‘tensions’ between what the satirist
proposes to do and what he actually does. Foremost among these
tensions is that of ‘the artless artist’: the fact that the speaker of
satire claims to be a rough plain-speaker, while actually using
reWned rhetoric to argue his case. Kernan explained these tensions
as inherent to the genre, and solved them by analysing the satirical
persona, the I-speaker of literary satire, as distinct from the
author.7
What these two approaches had in common was that they both
freed the reader from the interpretation of satire as a personal
statement by a speciWc individual with his own psychological
make-up andlifeexperience. Elliottopenedthe perspective towards
a societal role, while Kernan opened it towards a literary device.
Kernan’s theses were applied to the material of Roman verse satire
bytheLatinistandcomparatistWilliamS.Anderson.Fromtheseries
of his ground-breaking, persona-oriented analyses one is reprinted
below,‘AngerinJuvenalandSeneca’(1964).8Thepersona-thesisthus
propounded was particularly well suited to Juvenal, because it freed
readersfromtheneedtotakehisunpleasantstatementsseriously.It
could now be claimed that the raging reactionary, misogynist, and
xenophobic speaker in Juvenal was not really the port-parole of the
author after all, but a mask for him to play with. This school of
critics, with Susanna Braund as Anderson’s most Wne-tuned and
7 Thesetheseswereradicalontheirappearance,butthatisnottosaythatelements
ofthemhadneverbeenseenbefore.TherhetoricalinJuvenal,forinstance,hadbeen
grappled with much earlier (e.g. in J. de Decker, Juvenalis declamans: e´tude sur la
rh´etorique de´clamatoire dans les satires de Juve´nal (Gand, 1913)). The same goes
fortheotherline,thatofhistoricizingRomansatireasbigger-than-Roman—theurge
to do so goes back to antiquity and the programmatic statements of the satirists
themselves.
8 Other excellent discussions are ‘Part versus Whole in Persius’ Fifth Satire’,
Philological Quarterly, 39 (1960), 66–81, ‘The Programs of Juvenal’s Later Books’,
CP 51 (1962), 145–60, and ‘The Roman Socrates: Horace and his Satires’, in J. P.
Sullivan(ed.),CriticalEssaysonRomanLiteratureII:Satire(London,1963),1–37.
These articles and several others are conveniently available in Anderson, Essays
in Roman Satire (Princeton, 1982). In fact, Freudenburg, Cambridge Companion,
28, points out that in his earliest writings on the subject Anderson precipitated
some of the points made by Kernan. In n. 58 Freudenburg discusses whether
these scholars’ respective theses may have been inXuenced by the academic
milieu of Yale University, where both wrote their doctoral dissertations in the
mid-1950s.
