Making Men Ridiculous

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Preface Juvenal is a poet who has been understood in a variety of different, sometimes mutually exclusive, ways. This book continues the march away from the sincere and serious moralist, but it nevertheless finds in the poems the voice of someone reacting to a changing world and perhaps realizing that the battle for his own ideal was never, after all, winnable. Thus, I hope that I have been able to be one of the resisting readers envisioned by David Larmour (1991). Larmour’s 2016 study appeared too recently to have been fully taken into account in this manuscript, but our work explores many of the same issues. Throughout, I have largely followed the 1992 Oxford Classical Text by Clausen; where I follow a different editor or critic instead, I signal as much in the notes. All translations are my own; when I am conscious that my versions owe to published translations (usually Green 1998 or Braund 2004), I acknowledge that fact. I need now to express my gratitude for the various sorts of invaluable help I have had in writing this book. First of all, I must express thanks for a fellowship from the Loeb Classical Library Foundation, which, along with a sabbatical from the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota, gave me time to devote to research. From the College of Liberal Arts and also the Graduate School at the University of Minnesota I received funds that allowed me to employ three excellent research assistants, Heather Woods, M. Christine Marquis, and Rachael Cullick, who rendered a great deal of help and allowed me to try out my ideas. I single out Heather for her insightful reading of my work at a time when she was developing her own approach to Roman satire. Stephen C. Smith has been, as always, a source of intelligent and useful criticism; he deserves special thanks for gamely reading numerous drafts of a book about a poet he doesn’t especially like. Bernard Levinson and Elizabeth Belfiore offered encouragement and advice at a crucial juncture. Mark P. O. Morford, Kathryn Williams, John F. Miller, Jenny Strauss Clay, Amanda Wilcox, Oliver Nicholson, Nita Krevans, George Sheets, Andrew Gallia, Daniel Hooley, David Mankin, and Melissa Sellew have all helpfully discussed Juvenal and related issues with me at various times over the years. Portions of this book, in their infancy, were presented before audiences in Madison, Gainesville, Cincinnati, Charlottesville, Tucson, Iowa City, Oklahoma City, and Minneapolis; I am grateful for the insightful questions and comments I received on those occasions. I have been fortunate enough to discuss Juvenal and satire with students at the University of Minnesota in classes at every level. Ellen Bauerle and the readers for the University of Michigan Press, as well as Marcia LaBrenz and the excellent production staff, have done much to help this project along. I am sorry if I have left anyone out. Finally, of course, all of these individuals have contributed much to what follows, but none of them should be blamed for my stubbornness in the face of good advice.

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Abbreviations Abbreviations of ancient authors and works follow the fourth edition of the Oxford Classical Dictionary. Journals and reference works are abbreviated according to the list below. AATAtti della Accademia delle scienze di Torino, classe di scienze morali, storiche e filologiche AJPAmerican Journal of Philology ANRWAufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt AUDer altsprachliche Unterricht BStudLatBollettino di studi latini C&MClassica et Mediaevalia CAH2 The Cambridge Ancient History (2nd edition) CBThe Classical Bulletin CJThe Classical Journal CMLClassical and Modern Literature CPClassical Philology CRClassical Review CSCACalifornia Studies in Classical Antiquity CWThe Classical World EMCÉchos du monde classique = Classical Views (now Mouseion) G&RGreece & Rome HSCPHarvard Studies in Classical Philology ICSIllinois Classical Studies JRSJournal of Roman Studies LCMLiverpool Classical Monthly LECLes études classiques MDMateriali e discussioni per l’analisi dei testi classici OCD4 The Oxford Classical Dictionary (4th edition) PCPSProceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society RELRevue des études latines RhMRheinisches Museum

SIFCStudi italiani di filologia classica SLLRHStudies in Latin Literature and Roman History SOSymbolae Osloenses SyllClassSyllecta Classica TAPATransactions of the American Philological Association UCPCPUniversity of California Publications in Classical Philology YCSYale Classical Studies YJCYale Journal of Criticism

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Introduction nil habet infelix paupertas durius in se quam quod ridiculos homines facit. “Unhappy poverty entails nothing harsher than the fact that it makes men ridiculous.” (“Umbricius,” at Juvenal 3.152–53) This book is an attempt to describe some of the ways in which the poems of Juvenal explore the relationship of the elite individual in Rome under the high empire to the world in which he lives and, to some extent, to himself. The sentence that you have just read needs to be parsed. First, the gender of the pronoun is not intended to generalize. For Juvenal, the circumstances of women are only relevant inasmuch as they form part of the world of men. Second, various readers may query my use of the word “elite,” since Juvenal long ago managed to convince many of his readers that he was somehow an advocate for the common man. Juvenal never really says such a thing, and the common men of his poems are commonly those of the upper classes. Simply to decry the fact that others have greater wealth or power does not make one poor, and modern scholars too often forget that the term “middle class” is not meaningful for ancient Rome.1 Equestrians are pressed into service as middleclass everymen, but in fact, equestrians were rich.2 The historical Juvenal may have cared deeply for the lot of the urban poor, but even if he did, he rarely describes them in his poems—whatever his unhappy and ridiculous character Umbricius says. The Page 2 →poverty in Juvenal’s poems is itself a trope, and one only relevant to a class of people who are not themselves poor. My defense of the use of the masculine pronoun may seem to render my use of the word “individual” needlessly vague. Why not simply say “men”? The reason has to do with what I see going on in many ways throughout the Satires. It is true enough that manhood is central to the poems of Juvenal, but the concern with manhood as expressed in his poems is inextricably linked to other issues, and, in general, alongside a sense of anxiety over masculinity there is an anxiety over the relationship between the individual man and the various communities that make up his world.3 For Juvenal, all relevant individuals are male. The Juvenal of the poems cannot really conceive of a person who is not an elite male, or at least cannot be concerned with such persons as human subjects. My subtitle, then, is meant as a reminder that, where modern readers may see Roman males of a certain class, our text posits them simply as “people” and, in fact, as the only people. In short, this is a book about identity, what constitutes it, and what undermines or threatens it. My method throughout is close reading of individual passages that are structured around anxieties about identity. These anxieties follow the contours of the basic defining categories of persons in the Roman world: class, gender, and wealth, but also—if perhaps less obviously—the power that others can exercise even over members of the elite—that is, we, like Juvenal’s poems, will be concerned with who one is and where one sits in the complex hierarchies of Rome.4 Before proceeding to our exploration of Juvenal’s poetry, a number of preliminary issues need to be discussed. The first is that in what follows I concentrate less on providing readings of individual poems (with the exception of the first Satire) and more on looking at the details of the images that the poet creates. This may seem to separate passages from crucial contexts—although I try to avoid doing so—but as a method it has its advantages. Above all, it allows us to see continuities not only between poems but between books, and thus to Page 3 →recognize patterns of thought that are less visible when a passage is studied only in the context of an individual poem.

This method also raises certain questions about the speaker or speakers. The oldest phase of Juvenal scholarship saw the poems as expressions of the author’s own point of view as conditioned by his life experience. It is hard to doubt that an author’s experiences play a role in his or her work, but the correspondence between the lived experience of the author and the details of his poetry need not be perfect (and indeed may well be quite weak), and unfortunately the experiences invoked in reading Juvenal generally came from dubious reconstructions of a life about which we know, and can know, virtually nothing.5 In the 1950s, William S. Anderson ushered in a new approach to Roman satire and to Juvenal by importing the theory of persona as developed for English satire by Alvin Kernan.6 On this view, the historical authors of satire, despite writing in the first person, created personae different from themselves. The speakers of the poems, despite the use of the first person and the authors’ own names and personal circumstances, could voice ideas and opinions that were not necessarily those of the author, and the satirical speaker could even be one of the intended targets of the satirist. This approach, long dominant, had and still has much to recommend it; it has allowed inconsistencies between the attitudes expressed in different poems to be explained without creating a narrative of personal growth on the part of the poet or simply asserting without argument that neither persons nor poems are required to be consistent.7 It has also allowed scholars to see the Satires more fully as poems, creative texts that do more than express someone’s disapproval of all he saw around him. Perhaps most importantly, persona theory gave critics the freedom to find irony, which biographical approaches, particularly those that saw Juvenal as a sincere moralist, did and do not.8 Page 4 →Yet the theory of persona can create problems of its own. Critics, freed by this theory to find irony, have sometimes found nothing else, and explanations of individual poems sometimes represent them as saying something not merely beyond the obvious but, in fact, the opposite of it.9 Thus Juvenal often emerges as a fairly liberal modern Western man who opposes sexism, racism, and imperialism. This is quite as unlikely to be true of the historical Juvenal as the positions adopted by earlier scholars. In any case, we cannot really know.10 Moreover, persona-oriented criticism sometimes ignores a fundamental question raised by the concept itself: if the speaker is a persona for the author, does each of Juvenal’s poems have the same one? It is obvious that the poems might have different speakers, but this creates a special problem for Juvenal, since there seems to be a certain consistency throughout the sixteen Satires.11 It is true that the tone varies both between and within books and that there are occasional inconsistencies too, but much of the worldview and value system that underlies the first poem can be found in every one that follows.12 The chief inconsistency—and one that has taken center stage in discussions of Juvenal and persona, and more recently, even of Juvenal and the practice of satire generally—is how seriously we are to take the shift in tone between the speaking voice of Books 1 and 2, on the one hand, and 3 through 5 on the other. To Anderson, the shift from anger is crucial—hence also Braund’s title, Beyond Anger, for her study of Book 3.13 Personally, I, as a reader, find the shift less affecting or troubling, but other readers continue to make it central to their engagement with Juvenal’s text.14 We are left, then, to decide whether we have one speaker or more than one, and the answer would seem to be a bit of both.15 The theory of persona has always had its critics, starting with Gilbert Page 5 →Highet.16 More recently, critics such as Mayer and Iddeng have taken up the critique, arguing that the idea of persona is anachronistic for ancient Rome.17 Arguing from a different point of view, poststructuralists may find the concept of persona to be naГЇve, inasmuch as it is thought to rely on the notion of a fixed, autonomous self and an author’s conscious, allgoverning intention.18 That said, persona theory does still have its exponents and, one suspects, still dominates satire pedagogy in the Anglophone world.19 I suggest that we are best off looking at the persona as a tool used by the reader as well as, or even instead of, by the author.20 In other words, as I see it, the assumption of a persona allows us to read in certain productive ways but need not really imply either a conscious choice on the part of the author or a fixed entity that we can concern ourselves with, as we might if we hold the persona to be an intentional construct and choose to think tracing the author’s intention is our primary job. For that reason, I alternate throughout what follows between the name Juvenal and phrases like “the speaker” or “the satirist.” For my part, I think all first-person writing involves the existence of a persona, because, whether or not an author writes as accurately as possible about his

own experiences, a first-person character can only ever be a partial representation of such an author. No reader ever has access to every thought, emotion, or experience of any artist, and thus even if the historical Juvenal actually did have the personality and prejudices of his speaker or speakers, we as readers must still make do with the character(s) that emerge from the words of his text. All first-person speakers in writing are textual persons because we are inevitably presented with a selective version of the writer rather than the complete writer.21 The textuality of the first-person speaker is important for Juvenal because it is crucial to satire as he practices it. The character “Juvenal,” however we want to see the relationship between him and the author, is a creation of the text. I mean by this not that the author’s conscious choices did not create him, but that Page 6 →it is helpful to see the process in a different way. The first poem begins a process that recurs in every poem that follows. We are confronted by a satirist, a person who will describe the world he sees, but, at the same time, we have little access to the satirist except through these verbal descriptions, since he generally says very little about his own experiences. In other words, the personality that emerges in each poem derives its contours from the content and manner of the speaker’s descriptions of other people, just as those characters themselves do.22 Juvenal, therefore, is the water that takes the shape of the vessel that is the Satires, which is important to remember because the poems so often undermine the point of view from which the speakers speak. This has often been taken to mean that the satirist-character is one of the targets of the historical author, but this is oversimplified. In the verbal descriptions used to criticize so much behavior, we find—both explicit and implicit—a set of values and a view of the world. Scholarship sometimes distinguishes very neatly the historical author, the satirist-character, and this underlying value-system. Thus, the persona (the satirist) becomes a tool that the historical author uses to mock, criticize, or analyze the values and worldview espoused by the persona. The trouble with this model is that it requires the author to know that he is performing such an analysis or attack. Certainly this is possible in many cases, but it is often implausible. This should not be taken to mean that I see either a historical poet with no artistic control of his work or even a set of poems endlessly deconstructing themselves. My contention that an artist such as Juvenal does not control all aspects of his language, imagery, or ideology does not imply that his artistry is less artful, his witticisms less witty, or his insights less insightful. Yet the best arguments of the most acute speakers sometimes run wild; the best-trained dog may sometimes slip his leash. There is another disadvantage to persona theory as well, namely that this model encourages us to look toward larger textual structures (e.g., genres or arguments) and to ignore the information contained in the many detailed images. Part of what this book is meant to show is that the Satires repeatedly come back to a central problem: the code of values (generally) implicit in the words of the speaker(s) does not always make much sense.23 I leave it to others to Page 7 →study the macro-structures of Juvenal’s Satires. My contribution lies in decoding his pictures. In his influential investigation of the origins of satire, Elliot made a case for satiric invective as apotropaic gesture.24 In many ways, I think that this is an apt description of Juvenal’s poems. They constitute a kind of gesture that attempts to fend off and control the social and moral chaos that he describes occurring in Rome. And yet the gesture fails: everywhere in the Satires we find that the speakers are losing their battle.25 Chaos cannot be controlled by a vigorous assertion of the speakers’ values because the value-system is itself chaotic, arbitrary, and—that quality so abhorrent to Rome’s self-mythologizing—mutable. I avoid the question of persona in part because it too easily allows us to find coherence of thought where incoherence is part, sometimes all, of the point. In some cases, incoherence is, in my view, a critical tool used by the historical poet. In other cases, it may simply be an artifact of his culture and literary inheritance. In general, I do not try to distinguish between the two. So the satirist and his world are products of the words that call them into being, but this verbal world is part of a larger matrix. Recent work on Juvenal emphasizes the crucial role that the reader’s own attitudes and prejudices play in the effect (and effectiveness) of the Satires. As Rimell puts it, “[t]his satirist shames his audience into tasting the bile that spurs his verseВ .В .В .В , talks down from his lofty pulpit to taint readers with his own humiliation as a social outcast.”26 It should be clear from my preceding remarks that I am not arguing that the historical author Juvenal wrote with

the conscious intention of exposing fissures in Roman ideology, in other words, that the Satires essentially play out his rational critique of Roman values. Such a possibility can never be ruled out, but it is not the position I am taking here. I do not believe it is necessary for the kind of exploration of Roman identity that I see in the poems to arise from a conscious plan, and, in fact, I think it is perfectly likely that the critique of Roman elite ideology at its margins that the poems imply is merely a result of the Page 8 →author’s attempt to mock and reproach rather than his conscious goal in writing. Language often means more than its users want it to or even realize that it does, and we all reveal ourselves in every utterance, whatever our degree of self-knowledge. Thus, Juvenal’s scrutiny of Roman identity and elite anxieties about it may be a side-effect rather than a goal of the poems, but that does not matter for our purposes. Scholarship on Juvenal has tended to divide itself into several recognizable types.27 Works designed to prove the quality of Juvenal’s poetry have often tried to demonstrate the value of individual poems by showing the unity of the composition. Thus many articles on the poems try to show what overarching or undergirding structure unifies the apparently disconnected parts of Juvenal’s messy work.28 Another common type of study of Juvenal’s poetry is the essay that tries to unearth the logical argument in a poem. Here too there are problems: scholars make arguments, but that is their job. Satirists have the liberty to associate freely, to make accusations or claims unsupported by logic or evidence, even to blather on. In essence, each of these types of scholarship is essentially defensive. Those who find poetic quality in an aesthetics of unity—what we might call Augustan aesthetics in a Roman context—defend Juvenal’s poetry by defending him as a “classical” poet, one whose work would hold up to early- and mid-twentieth-century New Critical standards for poetry. Those who find the mean-spirited antilogic of the barroom tirade to be intolerable find in Juvenal’s works subtle arguments and rhetorically aware parody. Both kinds of scholarship have great value, but many individual contributions are cited rarely or not at all in what follows, since I neither feel a need to defend one of the world’s great satirists nor want, for my present purposes, to find the logic of the intellect or the control of the rhetorical school. As important as those things are in some of Juvenal’s poems, I am more interested in the side of Juvenalian satire that has inspired these Page 9 →critics to look for unity and logic in the first place: the chaotic, the irrational, and the weird. Garrod, denying Juvenal any skill as a poet, grants him distinction in the “rhetoric of rancour.”29 This book is as much interested in the rancor as the rhetoric, in exploring what Freudenburg has characterized as “a work of dead serious rage that borders on idiotic bluster.”30 A third kind of scholarship seeks to relate the poems to greater questions of satire’s generic matrix. This need not be defensive of Juvenal, and it has the merit of showing both how much Juvenal owes to his predecessors and how distinctive he is in his own right. The great question of scholarship on satire (Roman and later, verse and prose, literature and other media) is what satire actually is, what defines it, and what features it must have.31 Some definitions are so narrow that they exclude many works traditionally called satiric; others are so broad that it is difficult to see how any work of the imagination is not covered. This too is a set of questions that I am happy to leave to others. My fear is that beginning from the question of what satire is, or what is satiric in Juvenal, will lead back to positing a structure that controls the language of the poems because satire—as Juvenal practices it—is messy. The question of genre cannot be entirely left aside (as chapter 1 will make clear), but like questions of unity and logic, it will be avoided. Those important issues constitute the forest, but I am more interested in the trees.

Money This brings us to another issue that bedevils readings of Juvenal, namely whether poverty is the real problem of Juvenal and his ilk. This depends largely on how one defines poverty. Imagine a bitter screed on the discomforts and indignities of modern air travel—by a traveler who has never flown except in Page 10 →first class, a man who thinks of the coach seats as intended for the desperately poor and not simply the average traveler. Very few readers of this book will think of such a traveler as a “normal” person. Clearly, he is wealthy and out of touch with the realities that most of us know. The novels of Agatha Christie provide another example. Her characters represent themselves, usually, as typical, average people, but most of them are rich. Most of us will never enter the hotels that she describes; their restaurants serve and mean to serve relatively few patrons; and they sit beside our bitter traveler at the front of the plane, thinking little or nothing of the “destitute” behind

them. Many of her poorer characters live in comfort even when they lack baronial splendor. I contend that one of the elements of Juvenal’s satiric Rome that critics have most misunderstood is wealth. Obviously wealth is of great importance in the world of these poems, and scholars have indeed perceived this fact, but what they have not managed to grasp is what actually constitutes a high degree of wealth in imperial Rome.32 For example, in the ninth Satire, some scholars have sympathized with Naevolus’ “modest” requests from Virro.33 Naevolus wants some land (9.59–60); a considerable amount of money (9.140–41); a silver service of sufficient size to worry censors under the Republic (9.141–42); and a staff of slaves, to include at least litter-bearers (9.142–44), an engraver (9.145), a portrait artist (9.145–46), and an additional household slave (9.65–66). The skilled artisans that he asks for probably represent extra income, since it is likely that he hopes to sell their work. Quando ego pauper ero? Naevolus asks, “When will I be poor?” and some scholars have responded “when indeed?”34 This collusive tendency to side with the ancient rich is one of the worst features of the modern scholarship on satire, and especially on Juvenal.35 A version of it can be found among historians as well; describing modern historians of ancient Rome, Wells puts it thus: “.В .В .В and the Senate repaid [Septimius Page 11 →Severus] with dislike. This still redounds to his discredit with most modern historians, who unconsciously assume that they would have been senators if they had lived in Roman times.”36 A few examples may suffice to show that Juvenal’s Satires change their characters a great deal when one reads them with a more finely tuned sense of what money meant in ancient Rome. In the ninth Satire, Naevolus complains of having only one slave, and modern scholars sometimes treat this complaint as a serious admission of indigency, but they are wrong. All slaves were expensive—the truly poor did not own them, because even if they could manage the purchase price (which varied greatly in all periods), they would still have to pay to feed, clothe, and house them. The truth is that Naevolus is trying to become wealthier, and none of his stated desires really amounts to a wish for merely a dignified subsistence—yet we too often continue to read the ninth Satire as though the primary divide in it is between rich and poor. In fact, the real poor of ancient Rome play no role in this poem at all. Similarly, in a famous section of Satire 3, Umbricius contrasts the fate of a man whose mansion burns with the humble lot of an apartment dweller. I am convinced that when scholars read this part of the poem, they see a very rich mansion-dweller from modern times alongside the occupant of a twentieth- or twenty-first-century tenement.37 But does Umbricius’ portrait really bear this out? His point is that the very rich are treated better than everyone else—the loss of a mansion is considered worse than that of a “poor” man’s dwelling. It does not serve his purpose to say that some apartments might be rather nice. To judge from the remains of ancient apartment buildings (insulae) in Ostia, based on Roman design, many were not the ramshackle structures that Juvenal seems to describe.38 I suggest that this passage of Satire 3 has been misread through a modern filter and then made the basis for too many discussions of ancient housing. A more accurate look at ancient urban living conditions might reveal that while some apartments really were slums, others were not. Even Seneca, never in short supply of cash, represents himself as living in an apartment with a too intimate view of the baths (Ep. 56). He no doubt exaggerates for literary and philosophical reasons, but he could not really have expected his letter to have any effect if its fundamental premise was absurd. Discussing Ostia, Meiggs Page 12 →notes the disconnect between literary texts and many of the buildings of which we have remains: “From Martial and Juvenal we expect darkness, squalor, and general discomfort in the insulae; only poverty can compel a man to lodge there. These Ostian apartments are well lighted, spacious, and cheerfully decorated with wall paintings and mosaic pavements. Nor do the buildings themselves really correspond to what we should expect from the complaints of Seneca, Juvenal, and Martial.”39 It must have been possible for even the wealthy to live in insulae, and indeed Ostia possessed some that appear to have been luxury properties.40 In short, modern scholars, perhaps inadvertently, adopt the point of view of the ancient elite. The poverty attacked by Juvenal’s poem is not true destitution except in a few cases, for example some of the exempla mentioned in Satires 11 and 14, and in those cases destitution is usually the result of bad behavior. Unfortunately, in the real world, it usually isn’t. Reading with a clearer view of wealth and poverty in Juvenal’s Rome matters to how we understand his

works. To the extent that his poems represent a crisis in identity, it is vital that we understand the core of the problem: in “Juvenal” we are dealing not with an average Roman male but with a wealthy member of the elite who fears that he is on the lowest rung of the elite part of the social ladder. He worries that, despite his inherited marks of privilege (Italian heritage, male sex, free birth) the rest of “us” will begin to treat him like one of “them.”

In the Details Before I outline the chapters that follow, some further remarks on working method are in order. Juvenal scholarship often fails to consider the connection between statements or images, especially when they occur in different poems. This is particularly true of scholarship that tries to analyze individual poems as unified works. That approach tends to assume that the details of Juvenal’s pictures arise from a logical plan or argument rather than from a pattern of association.41 Part of what I am doing here is tracing those associations to create a new map of Juvenal’s satiric world. I have described that world as chaos, and I fully acknowledge that my map will have to be fragmentary. Page 13 →Juvenal’s images are often excessive in their detail, and it is not always clear why the details pile up exactly as they do.42 For example, in the second Satire, Juvenal decries the aristocratic Gracchus for marrying another man, and as the bride rather than the groom at that. The bare statement is enough to make his point, but a number of details are added. We see him dress for the wedding; we learn the amount of the dowry and the occupation of the groom; we are told that Gracchus is also a Salian priest. Shortly thereafter we find out that he is a gladiator too and what kind he is; this last detail is provided by information about his equipment and dress. It is clear that the detailed pictures are designed to be—and certainly are—entertaining. But the details matter, and so, before we return to Gracchus, it may be helpful to consider the question of satire and mimesis, the attempt to depict reality. When aspects of a text make it clear that language is being used to do more than represent reality in a straightforward way, readers are forced to try to decode the text.43 Features that fight mimesis can be nearly anything, from formal aspects of a text that are not necessary for mimesis, such as meter, rhyme, or other effects of sound, to aspects of content that turn the reader’s attention away from perceived reality and toward the text as a system of signs. Examples of this type include allusion, overdetermination, archaic diction, unusual word order, or statements that are only comprehensible after a special attempt at interpretation.44 Thus a relatively mimetic statement might consist of a friend saying “I’m feeling mixed emotions right now—I’m passionately attracted to someone I think is awful. I don’t know why this is happening, but I know that it is, and it’s tough.” Catullus’ famous two-line poem makes this very point, but it resists mimesis in numerous ways (Cat. 85): Page 14 →Odi et amo. quare id faciam fortasse requiris? nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior. I hate and love. Why do I do this, perhaps you ask? I don’t know, but I feel it happening and am tormented. Aside from the fact that the sentiment is now expressed in meter, there are also structural features that invite us to think about what is being said: the poem begins and ends, for example, with pairs of verbs joined even more closely by an elision between et and the verb that precedes. Moreover, each line begins with a verb or pair of verbs followed by a strong break, and each line has as its central element a generic word, the pronoun id (“it”) and the verb fieri (“to happen”). These may seem colorless words to make central to the poem, but the poem’s point is in part that Catullus has no name for what he is going through. The poem itself becomes the name for an emotion that the speaker can only identify as “it” and a situation that he can only describe as “happening.” The simple sentiment that the poem conveys is given every possible

reinforcement through such devices, but its status as a literary text is also foregrounded—we cannot forget that we are in “literatureland.”45 What makes this so interesting for Juvenal is that Roman satire attempts to stake a strong claim to almost absolute mimesis. This is apparent in several programmatic texts, ranging from Horace’s attempt to claim that his Sermones do not constitute poetry at all (1.4.39–62) to Persius’ gesture toward satire as a kind of discourse dealing with philosophical truth and even his prefatory poem, in which poetic inspiration is itself debunked, as he declares himself semipaganus, “kind of a hick” (pro. 6). Most prominent however is Juvenal’s own claim that his poetry will be absolutely frank and will deal with quidquid agunt homines, “whatever human beings do” (1.85). Similarly, he represents himself as standing on the street corner literally filling notebooks with what he sees, as though such writing merely depicts life as it is. Roman verse satirists paint themselves as plainspoken men who tell it as they see it. Yet Roman verse satire is engorged with antimimetic features, beginning with the simple fact that it is in verse. The satirists constantly engage in a dialogue with other literaryPage 15 → forms and individual texts, not at all essential for “telling it like it is.”46 Persius explicitly adopts a style that is so intricate, allusive, and unparalleled that he requires interpretation to be understood at all—and seems to have done so even for contemporary native speakers of Latin.47 A complete catalogue of Juvenal’s antimimetic features would take many pages. In addition to allusion, Juvenal’s imagery is radically overdetermined—details abound when few or none are required to make his point, and many details sit oddly in their contexts, forcing readers to take note. Even his style reinforces the idea that Juvenal’s language compels us to confront the fact that there is something underneath the surface, when, for example, one item in a list is separated from the remainder, drawing attention to itself. Now let us return to Gracchus. Assume for the moment that Juvenal’s subject here is based on an actual historical event, though there is no reason why we should. If, however, we do, we have an explanation for Juvenal telling us about the wedding, the priesthood, and the arena since these would be merely facts that he relates. He still does not need to describe the elements of the wedding ceremony, specify the groom’s occupation and the amount of the dowry, describe the clothing of Gracchus in the arena, and the like. Since other details could have replaced or supplemented these, our task is to trace the implication of this particular picture. Take the dowry: 400,000 sesterces. This detail, even if (especially if) exaggerated, picks at a wound: four hundred thousand is Juvenal’s magic number, the so-called equestrian census, the amount of wealth necessary to qualify a man to be enrolled in the equestrian order. Juvenal mentions this amount, explicitly or obliquely, frequently in the sixteen poems. He also mentions, or has characters mention, the stolen prerogatives of the equestrian class on many occasions, and one particular mark of disgrace is when an equestrian declines in wealth sufficiently to be taken off the equestrian roster. The gold ring of the upper classes is lost, and this ring too seems to be an image that sticks in the poet’s mind. It is with details such as those in the Gracchus exemplum that this book largely deals. Each of the five chapters that follow proceeds in a slightly differentPage 16 → way. The first presents a close reading of Satire 1 that focuses on the way the satirist conceives of writing satire and thus of his own emerging identity as a satirist. The first Satire is the only poem that I analyze in its entirety, and this is because it is both programmatic and the fullest exploration in the poems of why a particular individual behaves as he does. Important to this poem—and too little recognized—is the fact that the satirist is specifically characterized as a man. Accordingly, he is most outraged when manhood is threatened or when he perceives threats, real or imagined, to manhood as traditionally understood. My emphasis on masculinity is, in fact, one of the things that distinguishes my work from that of other recent scholars who otherwise share some of my major premises.48 It is important to realize that Juvenal’s images are not only the product of one very skilled literary artist, although they are obviously that too. Juvenal’s complaints and the detailed pictures in which he conveys them are the culmination of a long history of moralizing diatribe. For all his bluster about being unable to bear the enormities that he sees around him, Juvenal is mainly bothered by a totally unoriginal list of moral failings. But the isolated complaints of many former Romans—Cato’s invective against luxury; Horace on extravagance in food, dress, and housing; Seneca on the need of the rich for their own elegant bathhouses; Cicero on spendthrift young men—turn up in Juvenal as a kind of moralizing swill, a kind of undifferentiated cesspool of bad

behavior. Juvenal attacks the same evils that Romans always had; his innovation is to take on everything at once, to get so carried away that he cannot stick to one topic. This more than anything accounts for the rapid pace and breathless energy of the Satires. A bit of caution is in order here. As we probe the details of Juvenal’s elaborate vignettes and scenarios, we constantly run the risk of losing sight of one of the poems’ most prominent and rewarding qualities: they are outrageously funny. Analysis is notoriously lethal to jokes, and Juvenal’s humor is quite often black, especially to a modern reader. Like Ovid, he quite happily finds the absurdity in whatever situation he describes. It is too easy to wince at what we take to be mean-spirited abuse of anyone and anything that Juvenal dislikes, but much of what is really funny in Juvenal’s poems is not the mockery, it is rather the combination of the grotesque imagination with the feverish energy Juvenal brings to bear. There is everywhere in the poems a melding of absurdity and Page 17 →earnestness that we cannot help but laugh at. One striking example comes in Satire 15, when Egyptians become so angry that they consume another human being whole, so intent on devouring every bit of him that they even suck the blood out of the mud where he has died. Juvenal cannot conceive of any anger lesser than his own. Elsewhere, the poet describes women whose wanton disdain for any standard of proper behavior leads them not only to commit adultery but even to piss on the statue of Morality herself. Moreover, women in Juvenal do not merely engage in extramarital affairs; they participate in and preside over a nonstop, anything-goes parade of sexual excess. Actually, “anything goes” is wrong: nothing decent is allowed. In the work of a lesser misogynist, women might now and then cheat on their husbands; in Juvenal they do nothing but. For Juvenal, there is no moral lapse short of absolute depravity. Over time, scholarly readers of the first Satire have turned their attention from the vices described to the speaker who does the describing. Because it is a programmatic text that sets up so much of what will follow in the Satires, I will treat it somewhat differently from other poems of Juvenal, in that I will undertake here a running commentary on the poem. I think such an approach is especially worthwhile with this text because it may well have become too familiar to students of Juvenal. A detailed analysis of the poem as it unfolds reveals sometimes surprising facets of the speaker’s self-understanding and the nature of Juvenal’s satire. It may seem strange to focus so much on poetics in a book about status, gender, and identity, but in this poem satiric poetics are themselves structured by the satirist’s social position, and his status as a man. To be a successful elite Roman man—satirist or not—one must maintain the illusion of autonomy. I say “illusion” because true autonomy is rarely possible, and, in the patronage system of the Republic, it had obviously been available to few or none. Under the emperor, true autonomy was clearly out of the reach of all but one man, the emperor himself.49 Chapter 2 approaches the anxieties over lack of autonomy through a set of images of that fundamental icon of human autonomy, the body itself. In Juvenal, bodies are rebellious, manipulated, and even obliterated: the ultimate index of the lack of male (or for that matter female) autonomy is the undeniable fact that we cannot really control our own bodies. Page 18 →Chapter 3 examines exempla in which men of the elite behave badly. That is, they undertake behaviors, some of which are unexceptionable in themselves, that are not traditionally considered appropriate for their class. By looking closely at the details of such portraits we can see not only the obvious—that the speaker disapproves—but also some of the thinking (or, more to the point, the feeling) that underlies that disapproval. The question in this chapter is what is really at stake for Juvenal in the unseemly behavior of others. More than traditionalism is involved, since, for Juvenal, Roman society is a closed system in which everything affects everything else. Some of the behavior described is shocking to most modern readers, but even those acts that are not, like Lateranus driving his own cart, can seem to unravel the fabric of Roman society, and that fabric is a crucial part of the individual’s identity. This unraveling of identity in the face of others’ behavior is also at the heart of the fourth chapter. Here we watch Juvenal confront a world that excludes what he sees as normal men, but his descriptions of this feminine “anti-world” constantly undermine themselves. Passages, especially from the sixth Satire, ostensibly about women, effeminate men, and even eunuchs, turn out to be about manhood, but they also create a sense that, in Juvenal’s Rome, even gender itself is an unstable marker of identity.

The final chapter continues the theme of anxieties about manhood by looking at its connection to the control, loss, and manipulation of wealth. Here passages from several poems illustrate that, for Juvenal, wealth is connected intimately not only to social status but also to masculinity. Wealth can even become a kind of substitute masculinity, while overt gestures of manhood such as sexual penetration and paternity can be rendered unmanly because they are commodified. In terms of the question of elite identity that confronts us, these chapters deal with the essential defining categories in different measure. Chapter 1 is perhaps an exception, since the first Satire engages with issues of gendered behavior, class betrayal, pretension to higher status, ethnic origin, and above all wealth. Chapter 2 uses images of the body mostly to consider issues of class and power rather than ethnicity, gender, and wealth (not that those are ever far from the surface in Juvenal). Chapter 3 concerns itself largely with class, but class, as we shall see, can never be disentangled from gender or wealth. Chapter 4 takes on masculinity head on, but class and ethnicity remain ever present concerns. The final chapter looks at masculinity particularly as it relates to wealth. Page 19 →It remains, therefore, to lay out some basic concepts of class, ethnicity, gender, and wealth here. Class and wealth were so fundamentally intertwined that they must be treated together. In its early history, Rome had a system of two social classes for freeborn persons, but this system evolved rapidly.50 The land-owning aristocrats, the patricians, supplied all public officials and most religious ones; the plebeians were the poorer classes. No mechanism existed during the Republic to prevent patrician families from losing wealth or influence. Plebeian families had to struggle for political power, but they were not prevented from gaining wealth. Two developments complicated this simple system. The earlier of these is the rise of a new social class associated with the cavalry. By the end of the Republic, the knights (equestrians) had little real association with horses and were instead a class of moneyed businessmen. One could not be born an equestrian in the same way that one was born a plebeian or patrician; instead, there was a minimum property qualification. Over time, equestrians became politically influential. They did not need to be as wealthy under the empire as members of the senate did, but that should not mislead us into thinking that equestrians were not rich. The poorest equestrians normally possessed a great deal more than the average free resident of Rome. The other complication in the system of class by birth had to do with politics. By the late Republic, both patricians and plebeians could hold the highest office in the state, the consulship. Those families who produced one or more men of this rank became known as the nobiles, and this group of families formed a sort of elite within the elite. So knowing that a man was a patrician or a plebeian would not automatically reveal that he was an equestrian, a senator, or nobilis, and knowing the latter did not reveal class by birth.51 Augustus and his successors put particular stock in patrician birth and took steps to restore patrician prestige.52 At the same time, the senate sometimes resented the power that it lost to the emperors, and so the imperial administration often vested authority and influence in equestrians who had no interest in the senate. By the time of Hadrian, many of the most powerful members of the imperial administration were equestrians. As with senators, membership in the Page 20 →equestrian order brought with it certain privileges—among others, better seating at public events and the right to wear a gold ring. In Rome, status was supposed to be visible in everything from dress to seating arrangements, and confusion about status clearly troubles writers like Juvenal.53 In any case, status by economic and political categories remained important, and marks of preferment class the equestrians with the senators more often than not. In origin, Roman citizens were of central Italian stock that soon grew to include elements from further afield. In law and social custom, the Romans initially made distinctions between themselves and other Latins (Latinspeaking Italians from Latium) on the one hand and other Italians, Etruscans, Greeks, and finally those beyond the borders of Italian and Greek culture on the other. By the end of the Republic, most of the differences between Roman and Italian were obsolete, those between Italian and Etruscan fading; the distinction between Roman and Greek was still maintained, even though some Greeks had Roman citizenship—probably the language barrier helped keep the distinction alive, whereas the most prominent provincial families from the west had had Roman origins, and even some of the families of native stock from places like Gaul and Spain had long been Latinized Roman citizens. The distinction between Greco-Roman culture and all other cultures was as clear and important as ever.

By the end of the first century CE, however, and thus by the time Juvenal had begun to write, the distinction long maintained between Italo-Roman and Greek no longer made much sense in practical terms. While many Greeks knew little or no Latin, educated Romans were generally fluent in Greek and had long been sending their sons to the Greek east for higher education. Yet “Greek” is no simpler a category than Roman or Italian. The common culture and language shared by Greeks before the Hellenistic period had changed radically as it took in natives of the Near East, and the Greek language itself developed a dialect (the koine) simple enough to be used as a lingua franca by non-native speakers. To a very traditional-minded Roman, “Greek” could denote anyone from the great writers of Athens to the Jewish writers who might have been native speakers of Aramaic or Syriac. Still, it must have been clear that the great barrier between the Italians and the other residents of the empire had been undergoing erosion for a very long time. Page 21 →Gender is both the easiest and most difficult of our categories to define.54 At root there was the fact of biological sex: one was born male or female. As everywhere in the ancient Mediterranean, males were more highly prized. Yet gender is more than sex, and in Rome, gender as a category of identity was never separable from class. To be a proper Roman uir (“adult man”) required the constant display of uirtus, “manhood.” The masculinity of a Roman male must be maintained and proven in every aspect of life. In terms of sexuality, uirtus consists in penetrating but never being penetrated. In terms of status, it means being at the top and not the bottom. In terms of wealth, it ideally meant being rich and not poor. Above all, real men were supposed to be in control of themselves and those legitimately under their authority. Whereas womanizing and heavy drinking might serve to demonstrate machismo in modern Western culture, both suggested effeminacy to Romans, since both traits suggest a personality not firmly in control of itself. Thus the fullest possession of manhood might not be available simply by virtue of birth as a biological male. Slaves did not count as true uiri no matter how physically virile they might individually seem to us. Poor men could come closer, but any reminder that they were financially or otherwise in thrall to men wealthier and more powerful than themselves complicated the issue.55 The sexual and other behavior of the poorest men seems only to have been of real concern to the state when crime was involved. Moreover, anything that suggested servitude worked against the performance of masculine identity. This is obviously true in the case of slaves and freedmen, but it also lies behind attitudes such as the idea that freeborn persons should not be subject to beatings. To be beaten was to be punished like a slave and thus to be culturally more like a woman than a real man. We can reframe this discussion in terms of autonomy. “Autonomy,” as I understand it, is the ability—and publically acknowledged right—to control one’s own actions and obligations; it is especially the ability to refuse to do as one is told.56 One might even say that autonomy is the status of having to acknowledgePage 22 → no one with the ability to tell you what to do. Autonomy is the fundamental building block of Roman manhood. By Juvenal’s day, almost no Roman men would have known what it felt like. Thus, masculine gender for a Roman consisted not only in being male and behaving according to the rules for biological males. It is more accurate to think of several genders since biological sex could be trumped by class, wealth, and ethnicity.57 Patriarchy is often thought of as privileging male over female, but in ancient Rome it actually only favored some males over everyone else of either sex. The highest level of the social hierarchy did indeed belong to men, but, until Juvenal’s time, only to freeborn, Italian, wealthy men from elite families. Change any of those criteria and the individual’s position drops. Juvenal’s poetry is largely the product of fear that the criteria have been redefined to take him and men like him from the top to the bottom, in other words, to make them ridiculous.

Page 23 →

Chapter 1 The Failed Satirist and the Failed Man Juvenal’s first poem introduces us both to the nature (thematic, stylistic, ideological) of his poetry and to the “satirist” as Juvenal conceives of him. We will see easily enough that Juvenal’s satirist has numerous concerns about wealth, gender, literature, education—the list is endless, as the poem says, quidquid agunt homines, “whatever people do.” At the same time, I think it will become clear that fundamental to Juvenal’s conception of the satirist is a baseline idea of what it means to be a Roman man as traditionally defined. After this chapter, it will be obvious that all of the many concerns of Juvenal (person or persona) orbit a center that is a conception of normative masculinity as it fails. The poem begins with a frustrated outburst (1–6): Semper ego auditor tantum? numquamne reponam uexatus totiens rauci Theseide Cordi? inpune ergo mihi recitauerit ille togatas, hic elegos? inpune diem consumpserit ingens Telephus aut summi plena iam margine libri scriptus et in tergo necdum finitus Orestes? Will I always be only a listener? Harassed so often by the Theseis of hoarse Cordus, will I not get to pay back in kind? So one man gets away with reading me his Roman tragedies and another his elegies? Massive Telephus gets away with eating up a whole day? Or Orestes, when the margin at the end of the roll has been filled up, written—and not even finished—on the back? Page 24 →The speaker can no longer stand listening to the tired products of his contemporaries. Or that is how these opening lines are usually read, a reading that does, to some extent, account for the speaker’s words here.58 What follows will indeed strengthen this impression—at least for a while. The problem with this reading, however, is that it sees in the poem’s first short question only the element of frustration, while concentrating more on the lines that follow. But the question itself is important, not only because it sounds the keynote of frustration that will underlie so much of the first Satire. What exactly does the speaker mean when he asks, “Will I always be only a listener?” Given the lines that follow this sentence, almost all readings of Juvenal take it to mean that the satirist is frustrated by contemporary literature and feels that he might just do at least as well. Yet there is something else here too—“Will I always be only a listener?” does not imply that the speaker is bored or even angry with contemporary literature; it implies that the speaker is frustrated because he is not the performer. What the opening of the first Satire announces, quite powerfully, is that the emergent satirist is inspired by the desire to perform and to be known. Juvenal is the fan who wants to be a star too. If we ignore the desire to perform implicit in the opening question and concentrate only on the complaint about tired themes and bad poets, we miss a key element of the first Satire: Juvenal’s anger marks (and masks) the frustration of an individual who fears that he is an outsider.59 Also important in the opening question’s opposition between audience and performance—as the poem will soon bear out—is a palpable tension between insider and outsider that forms the substrate for so many of the binaries that structure Juvenal’s Satires: strong and weak, winner and loser, active and passive. Eventually—in this poem and elsewhere—we will see this tension, this sense of exclusion, played out in many

arenas. Here it has a very specific focus worthy of attention. The tired characters that so trouble Juvenal here are all Greeks. Shortly, Juvenal will complain about being shoved aside—quite literally—by foreigners and outsiders. Here, in this opening gambit, he is already being jostled by outsiders, the heroes of Greek mythology. But our heroes are outsiders not only because they are Greek; they are also displaced and to some Page 25 →extent washed up. They thus bear some uncomfortable similarities to Juvenal himself. Telephus was consumed by a wasting disease, but here he voraciously devours time. Orestes, who wandered Greece in search of purification and even made it all the way to the Crimea, still makes his way to the margins—the ends of the earth and the page alike. The endlessness of Orestes’ story is literalized here: it won’t stay in bounds. These Greeks may exclude Juvenal from the recitation, keeping him in the audience, but they share some concerns with the moralizing satirist. Theseus saves elite Athenians from the monstrous product of unnatural lust; he creates an Athenian state by ridding the world of freaks. Orestes is motivated by revenge. What’s more, he stands up for father against mother, and motherhood fares badly whenever Juvenal brings it up. Telephus needs the weapon that harmed him, just as Juvenal’s satire needs the vice it castigates.60 Superficially, this is all about the world of literature and literary performance; themes and plots are endlessly recycled. Yet the following lines—as limited as they may initially seem to be to the realm of the literary—begin to hint at a larger and more insidious problem than a spate of bad recitations. These are not simply tired themes, but they even make up the intellectual and imaginative world of our satirist, as he now tells us (7–18). nota magis nulli domus est sua quam mihi lucus Martis et Aeoliis uicinum rupibus antrum Vulcani; quid agant uenti, quas torqueat umbras Aeacus, unde alius furtiuae deuehat aurum pelliculae, quantas iaculetur Monychus ornos, Frontonis platani conuolsaque marmora clamant semper et adsiduo ruptae lectore columnae. expectes eadem a summo minimoque poeta. et nos ergo manum ferulae subduximus, et nos consilium dedimus Sullae, priuatus ut altum dormiret. stulta est clementia, cum tot ubique uatibus occurras, periturae parcere chartae. Page 26 →No one knows his own house the way I know the grove of Mars and Vulcan’s cave near the cliffs of Aeolus. What the winds do, the shades that Aeacus torments, the place the other guy carries off the gold of the stolen fleece from, the size of the ash trees that Monychus throws about: these are the things that Fronto’s plane trees and shaken marble always resound with, as well as the columns broken by the relentless reciter. You should expect the same from the least and greatest of poets. And so I submitted my hand to the rule too; I too gave advice to Sulla, that he should sleep deeply as

a private citizen. When you run into so many poets everywhere, it’s foolish mercy to spare the doomed page.

It is no wonder that the same worn topics are presented by the best and worst poets alike. The literary vernacular of Juvenal’s Rome is also its educational vernacular. Juvenal, like everyone else, was educated in the trite world he has come to hate.61 We should be sensitive here to another fact also, perhaps too easily lost on modern readers: this is the education of the elite. The literary and rhetorical training that defines Juvenal and his fellow writers is reserved for the upper classes.62 It forms their common language. At this point it is especially important to remember the significance of his opening outraged question: not (or at least not only) “Do I have to listen to this recycled drivel forever?” but “When do I get my turn?” Juvenal may be bored with the content, but he is also, and more importantly, bored with his role as audience member. His education, for better or worse, authorizes him to do exactly the same thing that he complains is done to him. Perhaps there is a way out of the prison of old mythical topics. Especially important to the construction of Juvenal’s satirist-character is the assertion that he will surpass his colleagues by turning to a different and more fruitful source of inspiration than the old epic and tragic tradition (19–21).63 cur tamen hoc potius libeat decurrere campo, per quem magnus equos Auruncae flexit alumnus, si uacat ac placidi rationem admittitis, edam. Page 27 →Still why it should be pleasing to run instead on this field—the one over which Aurunca’s great nursling drove his horses—I will reveal, if you have time and, calmly, you apply reason. The phrase Auruncae alumnus tells us Juvenal’s plan: he will become a new Lucilius. This pledge to become the new Lucilius is important for everything that follows in Juvenal’s poetry. This is not merely a matter of literary history and filiation: as we shall see, Satire 1 records and enacts a failed pledge. Probably the most crucial but easily overlooked element of this poem is that Juvenal fails at his task. The long section of the poem that follows gives a catalogue of moral and social corruptions in Juvenal’s contemporary world. The new Lucilius must attack and lay bare the moral failings inherent in each of the exempla that he relates, but Juvenal will do that and more, for his version of Lucilian satire is an exercise in unwitting selfrevelation. We will see time and time again that, for Juvenal, immorality is very often merely the failure to maintain norms of gender or class (22–30). cum tener uxorem ducat spado, Meuia Tuscum figat aprum et nuda teneat uenabula mamma, patricios omnis opibus cum prouocet unus quo tondente grauis iuueni mihi barba sonabat, cum pars Niliacae plebis, cum uerna Canopi Crispinus Tyrias umero reuocante lacernas uentilet aestiuum digitis sudantibus aurum

[nec sufferre queat maioris pondera gemmae,] difficile est saturam non scribere. When a tender eunuch takes a wife, and Mevia pegs a Tuscan boar, holding her hunting spear at her bare breast; when one man challenges every patrician in wealth (my heavy teenage beard rasped when he was a barber!); when one of the Nile commons, a native slave of Canopus, that Crispinus (his shoulder hitching up a Tyrian cloak) waves around summer gold on his sweaty fingers [and can’t even bear the weight of a heavier jewel]64.В .В . it’s hard not to write satire! Juvenal wants to write and perform—that is what he says in the poem’s first sentence—but he will be a new Lucilius, not yet another tragedian nor another Page 28 →epicist. He has been pushed in this particular direction by what he sees going on in his Rome; given the way people are behaving, it is hard not to write satire. The corruption of the city has influenced the genre and tone that the poet adopts. In a long tradition, poets had often claimed that their subject matter and even the form that their poetry took were determined by external forces—once again Juvenal is no different.65 As we shall soon see, the corruption that so incenses Juvenal falls into a few predictable categories: sex, greed, and inversions of gender or class. What this poem makes clear—and this above all makes it truly programmatic of the corpus as a whole—is how closely connected these categories really are. We are given three examples to demonstrate why satire is so necessary. The first is the eunuch who marries. In other words, a safely neutered male turns out to be sexually potent—and active—after all, or at least manages to support such a fiction. Next, a woman successfully hunts like a man. So far, we might think that improper adherence to traditional gender roles is the main problem here, but the third example makes it clear that Juvenal’s targets are broader. A certain Crispinus not only flaunts his wealth but even manages to rival the Roman patriciate. This Crispinus, who shows up elsewhere in the Satires too, is not merely a plebeian—some Roman plebeians had mastered social and economic well-being centuries ago—he is an Egyptian and one of low status, since he gets his start in Rome as a barber. The sententia that ends this passage is so famous that it tends to eclipse the three examples of social and moral problems that precede it. Critics these days notice mostly their shock value: the eunuch who marries, the mannish woman, and the rich, ostentatious foreigner, but each one deserves at least a second look. Juvenal’s first objectionable exemplum is a eunuch who marries. For Juvenal (and occasionally other authors), castration does not necessarily mean a loss of sexual potency.66 Scholars of satire sometimes accept this at face value, but it is in fact much more likely as a useful fiction, a kind of “scare figure.”67 Nevertheless, if we submit to this fiction, castration still suggests effeminization. So a eunuch represents an un-maled male. The fact that he is now marrying forcibly asserts the idea that a eunuch may be as sexually functional as any Page 29 →other man. It also makes it clear that some part of society is now able to accept this fact and to make the logical assumption that such a marriage is permissible. The married eunuch is a symbol, then, of contemporary Rome’s problematization of traditional ideas of masculinity (because the eunuch has been physically effeminized, only to function as a male anyway) and also of its tendency to adapt to changing paradigms of gender. One dangerous possibility posed by this married eunuch is that he represents a “safe” category—in this case, a group of men who have been made impotent so as to be useful to others—that has been compromised, and perhaps also that he represents how easily such safe cultural categories can fall apart—an anxiety to which the poems return again and again. But the married eunuch raises another possibility calculated to disturb conservative Roman sensibilities: perhaps this eunuch is every bit as impotent as expected. In that case his marriage will be a sham, but one that reveals something about contemporary Roman marriage. Whatever personal reasons our eunuch may have for marrying, Romans generally saw marriage as having a well-defined purpose, the procreation of legitimate children.68 If eunuchs marry, they subvert the institution. This anxiety about the misuse of marriage shows up elsewhere in Juvenal, most notably in Satire 6, with its speaker’s hysterical tirade against marrying, and in Satire 9, where Virro has a surrogate perform his sexual duties as husband. Mevia poses a related kind of threat by acting like a man, and, apparently, doing so with some success since she hits her prey.

She is like the married eunuch in that she troubles the traditional paradigms of gendered behavior. Crispinus is more complicated. Gender is not the chief problem in his case—his fault is linked to an intricate imbalance between wealth and birth. It is important to note the care with which Juvenal articulates the several problems with Crispinus. One axis in this description is social class by birth: the words patrician (patricios) and plebeian (plebis) both occur here. Another axis is class by ethnic origin: omnis patricios suggests Romans, but Crispinus is one of the “Nile commons,” a foreigner. Still another axis, though one obviously intimately connected to both of the preceding, is status based on economic background. In Juvenal’s youth, this man was a barber, and thus, most likely, either a slave or freedman. Thus Crispinus loses by three criteria: class by birth, class by nationality, and class by social status. And yet Crispinus has found a way to exert a countervailing pressure against the “winners” implied by Juvenal’sPage 30 → description. Though a foreign-born commoner who came to Rome as a slave or little better, he now rivals the aristocracy in wealth.69 In fact, he flaunts his wealth by ostentatiously waving around his heavy gold ring—probably the ring that marks him as an equestrian.70 Not only does each of these exempla represent a paradox that flies in the face of received social convention, but there is in each case an implied social context. The eunuch Juvenal mentions is able to participate in a socially sanctioned ritual from which he should be excluded under traditional norms. The eunuch’s marriage, Mevia’s hunting, and Crispinus’ wealth exist within the society and economy of Rome. This simple fact raises the possibility that his negative appraisals might not be universal; traditional Roman values may no longer hold sway.71 After denouncing two opportunists who gain wealth and power through untoward means (30–36), Juvenal points to the ways in which the corruption he witnesses becomes personal (37–44). cum te summoueant qui testamenta merentur noctibus, in caelum quos euehit optima summi nunc uia processus, uetulae uesica beatae? unciolam Proculeius habet, sed Gillo deuncem, partes quisque suas ad mensuram inguinis heres. accipiat sane mercedem sanguinis et sic palleat ut nudis pressit qui calcibus anguem aut Lugudunensem rhetor dicturus ad aram. [Who restrains himself] when people who earn their inheritances by night push you out of the way, men who have been carried to the heavens by the best route nowadays: a rich old woman’s crotch? Proculeius gets a twelfth, Gillo the rest: each heir gets a share in accordance with the size of his groin. Let him really get the wages of his vigor, and let him grow pale like one who has stepped barefoot on a snake or who is about to speak as a rhetor at the altar in Lyons. Page 31 →Here we have legacy hunters who are made the heirs of the women they sleep with.72 But a new note is added here with cum te summoueant (37). This cum-clause is one of two (the other begins in line 32) that explain why self-restraint is hard for a man like Juvenal. In this case, the reason is partly the immorality of becoming wealthy through sex, but also because the men in question displace men like Juvenal, since the second person te obviously indicates a sympathetic person like the speaker. As commentators note, two separate senses of the verb summoueant are relevant here.73 It can mean “to clear out of the way” as when lictors clear a crowd so that a magistrate can come through, and thus here Juvenal appears to say, “Who could restrain

himself when he’s (physically) pushed aside by gigolo-legacy hunters?” The word is also a technical term for excluding someone from a legacy, so that Juvenal is also saying “Who could restrain himself when he’s cut out of the will in favor of the gigolo?” The two images are complementary—legal exclusion from a rightful inheritance and physically being shoved aside, literally marginalized—coming together here to imply a sense of social displacement. The scandal here is that, in Juvenal’s mind, legacy hunting through sex is now a career, and one that is displacing men like himself socially. Semper ego auditor tantum? Juvenal asked, feeling excluded from writing and performing. By now we realize that he feels excluded in other ways as well. These gigolo-legacy hunters—along with the speaker’s reaction to them—serve a programmatic purpose. Both the legacy hunters and Juvenal here prefigure the gigolo Naevolus in Satire 9. Like these legacy hunters, Naevolus seeks prosperity based on the size of his penis, and, as we shall see, his idea of prosperity is not merely a vision of comfort but a desire for social advancement. But just as Naevolus will complain of being cast aside in favor of another “two-legged donkey,” the speaker of Satire 1 laments his own displacement by these wellhung gigolos. The open resentment over lack of wealth and status clearly explains much about the tone and topics our satirist chooses in his poems. This should not blind us to a further important fact: the first motive given by the satirist, as early as the first line of the poem, is a sense of exclusion and displacement. Juvenal’s satire is poetry of the excluded in a way that is not true of his satiric predecessors. Lucilius will be treated below, but it is worth briefly considering Horace Page 32 →and Persius here. The Horace of the hexameter Sermones is not an outsider. Indeed, throughout the Sermones he takes great pains to make the case that he is not too much of an insider by downplaying his relationship to Maecenas and Octavian.74 Persius, in his own programmatic first Satire, relishes the idea of being unread, of being excluded because he has chosen to stake out territory that others will find unapproachable. In a sense, he is the exclusive one. Unlike Horace and Persius, Juvenal figures satire as a means of compensating for being excluded. Mockery of the insiders in front of a sympathetic audience creates an oppositional community, one that now includes the formally excluded and in turn excludes others. We shall see soon enough, however, that Juvenal’s strategy of self-defense fails. Juvenal next turns to the subject of anger, artfully elaborated with a discussion of the trial of Marius Priscus (45–50).75 What concerns us here, however, is the literary reminiscence to which this discussion of anger leads (51–62). haec ego non credam Venusina digna lucerna? haec ego non agitem? sed quid magis? Heracleas aut Diomedeas aut mugitum labyrinthi et mare percussum puero fabrumque uolantem, cum leno accipiat moechi bona, si capiendi ius nullum uxori, doctus spectare lacunar, doctus et ad calicem uigilanti stertere naso; cum fas esse putet curam sperare cohortis qui bona donauit praesepibus et caret omni maiorum censu, dum peruolat axe citato Flaminiam puer Automedon? nam lora tenebat ipse, lacernatae cum se iactaret amicae.

Should I not think these things worthy of the lamp of Venusia? Am I not to deal with them (But what instead—Herculeses? Diomedeses? The bellow from the Labyrinth? The sea struck by a boy, and the flying craftsman?) when a pimp takes money from an adulterer, if the wife can’t inherit, [a pimp] who knows how to look at the ceiling and who knows how to snore in his cups with a nose that’s wide awake? when a man who’s given up his wealth in the stables and who lacks his Page 33 →ancestral estate still thinks it right to hope for charge over a cohort while he races along the Flaminian Way in a speedy chariot, a boy Automedon? Yes, he took the reins himself while he bragged to a girlfriend who’s wearing his coat! This passage begins with a programmatic reference to Horace, Sat. 2.1, and then recapitulates Juvenal’s opening salvo against tired poetic topics (52–53). Juvenal once again frames his options as a poet in terms of a dichotomy between mythological poetry and relevant criticism of contemporary mores. Yet the exempla that follow do not entirely support the existence of such a dichotomy. The first example is the man who connives at his wife’s adultery so that he can profit from the arrangement by being included in the adulterer’s will if his wife is not eligible to inherit.76 With a characteristic unwillingness to collude in the semantic veils people place over their actions, Juvenal makes it clear that such connivance amounts to prostituting one’s own wife. Thus the husband becomes a leno, “pimp,” while the wife becomes a prostitute. But there are two problems with this example as a source of outrage. The first is that its lack of specificity opens up the question of whether this is supposed to be aimed at an actual case or a common problem. This question leads directly to the second issue with Juvenal’s example here. The description recalls Ovid, who describes what can be accomplished by a wouldbe moechus while a husband’s attention wanders or he falls asleep at his cups.77 Juvenal’s poetry is important because of its relevance to contemporary corruption and vice, but the topicality of this poetry is rendered suspect since it is directed at what appears to be a conventional description. The next example raises similar issues. As in the first case, we are confronted by what seems to be a clear case: a youth who has already squandered his inheritance still hopes to command a cohort one day. His behavior does indeed suggest several problems to a traditional Roman mindset. He is, it would seem, a spendthrift who is still looking for a way out of his troubles. Moreover, he sees in his bad behavior nothing to disqualify him from military command. By Juvenal’s day there was a long tradition of associating spendthrift youth with moral softness, and part of Juvenal’s point here is that the youth who squanders Page 34 →his estate is almost certainly unworthy of high military responsibility. If that weren’t enough, the youth in question nurses his dreams of military prestige while he drives his own chariot along the Flaminian way with his girlfriend, who is wearing his cloak. Modern mythology, especially in America, contains so many images of young men driving around with their girlfriends that we might easily miss the point of the last image. Although some members of the Roman elite clearly enjoyed it, driving a chariot was considered a servile occupation. The most famous example of an elite male driving his own chariot for fun is Nero. The youth’s willingness to engage in this unworthy occupation—even to boast about it to his girlfriend—confirms the hint of softness latent in the accusation of wasteful spending. So far, this example would seem to justify the rage of our satirist, since it represents someone whose behavior flies in the face of traditional codes of conduct. Yet calling the youth “a boy Automedon” undercuts the outraged questions that begin in 52. Automedon, the charioteer of Achilles in the Iliad, is a reference to heroic epic. At the beginning of this passage the poet asserted the importance of topics of contemporary immorality as opposed to mythology. The first of his examples of a modern moral problem that deserved attention is in fact a highly conventional and literary portrait; the second ends by summing up the problematic individual by converting him into one of the mythological characters that Juvenal has said that he is above treating. Earlier, the speaker admitted that his education and literary background were the same as those of the mythological poets he despised. Here he confirms that statement since it proves easiest for him to convert a contemporary individual into a mythic character. This pattern, that is, the use of the same kind of poetry that he renounces to sum up and control examples of contemporary immorality, occurs in a number of Satires and is one of the dominant features of Juvenal’s poetry. Interestingly, it is much less prominent a habit of Horace, and it is Horatian satire that

Juvenal has promised to take up here. The next vignette includes an important contrast that again calls the power of Juvenal’s satire into question (63–68). nonne libet medio ceras inplere capaces quadriuio, cum iam sexta ceruice feratur hinc atque inde patens ac nuda paene cathedra Page 35 →et multum referens de Maecenate supino signator falsi, qui se lautum atque beatum exiguis tabulis et gemma fecerit uda? It’s satisfying, isn’t it, to fill up fat notebooks on the street corner, when—on six necks now, openly and in a nearly bare sedan (and very reminiscent of Maecenas on his back)—a man is carried here and there, a guarantor of fraud, who made himself elegant and well-to-do with thin notepads and a moist signet ring? Here we begin another catalogue of miscreants, but it is important to single this one out. The speaker begins by saying that it is satisfying to stand on the street corner watching a parade of corruption and immorality and filling up “fat notebooks” with satirical denunciations of misbehavior. The first example is a person who testifies falsely to guarantee acts of fraud, but the man’s criminal fraudulence may distract us from another important detail. Juvenal has begun this exemplum by saying that it is satisfying to fill fat notebooks, ceras capaces, with satire. Our fraud, however, has elevated himself into being one of the elite, a man elegant (lautus) and well-to-do (beatus) by merely signing, and not filling, “thin notepads” (exiguis tabullis). On the one hand, satire implies a certain excess, and certainly the fat notebooks of the satirist are a suitable image for the amount of vice there is for him to chronicle. Still, the thinness of the legal documents falsely guaranteed by the criminal makes an important contrast. The satirist, as we have already suspected, is not one of the lauti and beati—remember the sense of exclusion that underlies the early part of the poem. The criminal makes himself wealthy and powerful with an effort that can be summed up, and literally contained, in thin notepads, while the satirist must try to fill an expansive volume. Moreover, the criminal rides by in a litter while the satirist stands in quadriuio, on the corner of an intersection. We see the satirist busily jotting down notes in his big notebook when a litter sweeps by carrying a man made rich and important by a little pad (exiguis tabulis, 1.68) and signet—the image not only fleshes out the vignette, it also makes the difference in power between the two men unmistakably clear. Furthermore, it suggests that the satirist’s actions may be frustrating yet futile. Satire is laborious and heavy and gains the satirist nothing. All this is followed by another catalogue of villains, one that culminates in the most famous programmatic statement in Roman satire (69–80): Page 36 →occurrit matrona potens, quae molle Calenum porrectura uiro miscet sitiente rubetam instituitque rudes melior Lucusta propinquas per famam et populum nigros efferre maritos. aude aliquid breuibus Gyaris et carcere dignum,

si uis esse aliquid. probitas laudatur et alget; criminibus debent hortos, praetoria, mensas, argentum uetus et stantem extra pocula caprum. quem patitur dormire nurus corruptor auarae, quem sponsae turpes et praetextatus adulter? si natura negat, facit indignatio uersum qualemcumque potest, quales ego uel Cluuienus. When her husband is thirsty and she is ready to serve mild Calenian wine, an influential married lady comes by who mixes in toad-poison. This more competent Locusta teaches her unskilled neighbors to carry out for burial their blackened husbands amid rumor and the crowd. Dare some deed worthy of tiny Gyara and death row if you want to amount to anything! Upright behavior gets praised and shivers in the cold. To crime they owe pleasure gardens, mansions, dining tables, antique silver, and the goat that stands in relief on their cups. Who can sleep in the face of the seducer of his own greedy daughter-in-law? In the face of immoral brides-to-be and underage adulterers? If nature refuses, outrage produces the poetry, whatever kind it can—such as I write or Cluvienus. There is no need to treat the catalogue of greedy criminals in detail, except to note, with Braund, that our moral speaker describes himself as lying awake thinking of men having sex with their daughters-in-law, of betrothed girls who already practice immoral acts, and of boys who are already sleeping with married women.78 The precise phrasing is important, for the Latin of lines 77 and 78 does not say, “Who can sleep when he thinks of immoral acts such asВ .В .В .В ?” Instead the speaker asks his questions as if the immoral individuals themselves are present and keeping him awake. Contemporary immorality is not merely an abstract problem that occupies the speaker’s conscience and intellect as he tries to sleep—the promiscuous and greedy appear to harry him personally. One Page 37 →gets a definite picture of a man being kept awake by very vivid fantasies of what “those people” are doing. “If nature refuses,” writes Juvenal, “outrage produces the poetryВ .В .В .” and this passage has been used to show the importance of anger to Juvenal’s satire.79 Certainly anger is important, as we have already seen. We should not, however, forget the context. Juvenal’s full statement is, “If nature refuses, outrage produces the poetry, whatever kind it can—such as I write or even Cluvienus.” At the beginning of the poem, Juvenal made a play for inclusion. He’d had the same education, after all; why shouldn’t he be a performing poet too? But the desire to be included is also a desire to surpass. No need to write another Orestes—he would master instead the techniques of Lucilius and use them to attack contemporary problems. Juvenal would be relevant, a satirist instead of a rehasher of tired myths. And yet, he finally admits that whatever education he possesses cannot quite make up for a lack of talent. Perhaps his poetry will not flow from his natural gifts, but instead from outrage. The forceful sententia of line 79 seems designed to show that righteous indignation is sufficient to produce the poetry that will make Juvenal an insider, like the poets he attacks at the beginning of the poem. But line 80 suggests something very different. Outrage will produce verse—to the extent it can. Moreover the verse in question is compared to what Juvenal himself writes. Juvenal’s satiric art has been gutted. If he has no talent—at least, for his sake, the sentiment is conditional—his anger will produce a kind of poetry, and in fact it will produce verse like he or Cluvienus writes. The qualifier limits the power of satire, for the early promise of forceful writing that would allow Juvenal too to be a poet has fallen away. Juvenal will have to forgo talent for education and anger, and at least anger will produce some kind of verse. Just under halfway through the poem, Juvenal has already acknowledged that he may have to settle for second best.80 We now find yet another programmatic statement that calls itself into question (81–86):

ex quo Deucalion nimbis tollentibus aequor nauigio montem ascendit sortesque poposcit Page 38 →paulatimque anima caluerunt mollia saxa et maribus nudas ostendit Pyrrha puellas, quidquid agunt homines, uotum, timor, ira, uoluptas, gaudia, discursus, nostri farrago libelli est. From the time when Deucalion climbed a mountain in his ship (the stormclouds were raising the level of the sea) and consulted the oracle, and gradually soft rocks grew warm with souls, and Pyrrha showed naked girls to their husbands, whatever people do—their wishes, fear, anger, pleasure, joys, comings and goings—is the swill of my little book. There is a tension here between the very human focus of the programmatic statement, that human existence is the subject matter of the book, and the fact that the speaker puts this in the context of Greek mythology. Just as the supposedly antimythological speaker can only denounce the spendthrift youth as a “boy Automedon,” reaching back to the mythology (and epic genre) he despises, so here he can only conceive of the history of the human race in terms of mythological figures. He wants us to believe that he has things to say relevant to the real world and real people of his own day, but the human race in his description is the one created from stones by children of the Titans at the dawn of time. The satirist has not been able to break from the mythical and the literary. Lines 85 and 86 are particularly dense with programmatic associations that look back to Juvenal’s predecessors, above all Lucilius, while raising questions about the nature of his own work.81 Quidquid agunt homines, “whatever people do,” is first elaborated by a series of appositives and then defined as the subject matter of the poet’s work. The appositives (“wishes, fear, anger, pleasure, joy, comings and goings”) do a good job of suggesting the broad range of human activity and also human folly, but the defining statement nostri farrago libelli est not only completes the sentiment, it also characterizes the aesthetic of Juvenal’s poetry.82 Farrago, “swill,” refers to the kind of miscellaneous food scraps that one feeds to pigs, and as such it links Juvenal’s poetry to the idea of variety present in the word satura, which was often cited as the origin of the name of the genre.83 Page 39 →Thus farrago suggests the kind of miscellaneous collection that Lucilius wrote, and the poet reaffirms his relationship to that seminal figure. Farrago is also an excellent word for suggesting that all the varied human activities that Juvenal treats exist in his works in a disorganized amalgam—not a bad metaphor for the organization of the poems, especially, perhaps, of Satire 1 itself. Yet farrago is an intrinsically unflattering word; so too is libellus, an appropriate word for a collection of lyric or elegiac poetry perhaps, but, in the current context, it may well suggest a kind of political pamphlet attacking a public figure, the origin of our word “libel.” This too is an appropriate reference in a programmatic context, since the speaker has pledged to denounce what he sees around him. The problem is that our speaker has introduced the notion of his libellus and the swill of human activity it contains precisely by rejecting topicality. Earlier he voiced his disgust over tired mythological topics and pledged to focus on the present, but here he defines the content of his work as reaching back to the origins of the human race, revised to contain the humorous image of Pyrrha as madam. Moreover, by casting his work in the form of a libellus that attacks vice, he creates the association of his poems with political pamphleteering, but a political screed directed at remote antiquity is at least as useless as an epic on Hercules. In fact, political argument directed at the past or at figures from myth—and Deucalion indicates both—suggests declamation, the very educational practice that allows Juvenal to compete as a poet but that he seems to scorn for its impracticality. So, at the same time that he suggests a Lucilian attack on the whole range of human behavior, the satirist also paints a complementary portrait of himself as an exposГ© artist writing up screeds that denounce the figures of myth and history that populate the works of the writers he claims to despise. Juvenal will be a poet in many ways no

different from the ones he started by decrying, but will he use the Lucilian model to raise himself above them? More likely, Juvenal’s scandal sheet will feature the VIPs of myth and legend. These programmatic passages lay the groundwork for the failure of the satirist as Juvenal conceives of him. The literary contradiction of asserting independence from a tradition one cannot escape will, as we shall see, find its analog in the moral contradiction of satire itself: the satirist denounces vice, but he also describes it. Observer is simultaneously voyeur; moralist is also pornographer. Page 40 →

Patrons and Clients What follows brings us back to the present (87–95): et quando uberior uitiorum copia? quando maior auaritiae patuit sinus? alea quando hos animos? neque enim loculis comitantibus itur ad casum tabulae, posita sed luditur arca. proelia quanta illic dispensatore uidebis armigero! simplexne furor sestertia centum perdere et horrenti tunicam non reddere seruo? quis totidem erexit uillas, quis fercula septem secreto cenauit auus? And when was the supply of vices ever richer? When did greed’s purse gape wider? When did the dice stir up these passions? For people go to the risk of the gaming table not with wallets at their side; they play with stakes from treasure chests instead. What great battles you will see there when the dealer is the armor-bearer! Is it plain madness to lose a hundred grand and not give your shivering slave a shirt? What ancestor of ours built so many estates? Which one dined on seven courses by himself? Almost as if to make his verse topical again, the poet pulls us back to the present with the suggestion that greed is at an all-time high. There follows first the gambling scene, in which we learn that people lose immense sums and fail to provide basic necessities for their slaves. Moreover, the reference to the armor-bearer suggests that the satirist cannot quite break away from the idiom of epic; he sees its apparatus everywhere. This is capped off by an appeal to the past that sets up a contrast that will be important for what follows: what Roman of the past lived as extravagantly as people today? The reference to excessive building is conventional, and can be found in Augustan contexts (especially Horace), a fact that undercuts the topicality of the question. The next question implies that rich men in Juvenal’s day eat massive meals and do not share them. What may once have been considered a banquet is now a personal meal, eaten alone. This particular image, though not developed here, recurs at numerous other points in the Satires, most memorably in poem 4. The image of the rich man greedily eating his seven course meal alone introduces the first extended vignette to focus on one issue. This description of the sportula ritual in its decadent contemporaryPage 41 → form allows the poet to talk about the institution of patronage and, in doing so, to recapitulate a number of themes that we have already seen, especially the sense of exclusion that has fueled so much of the poem (95–99).

nunc sportula primo limine parua sedet turbae rapienda togatae. ille tamen faciem prius inspicit et trepidat ne suppositus uenias ac falso nomine poscas: agnitus accipies. Now the little dole sits at the edge of the threshold to be snatched up by a toga-clad mob. Still, he will examine your face first and fear that you might come under false pretenses and demand a share under a fake name: once you’re recognized, you’ll get your share. Nunc suggests a contrast with the past, and that contrast is elaborated in the phrase primo limine, “on the edge of the threshold.” The patron no longer receives his clients inside his home. Instead he leaves the sportula, traditionally a basket filled with edible gifts, outside the front door. Yet the indifference shown does not mean the patron is not concerned at all—he does want to make sure that he is not being swindled, and so he looks over each client to make sure he has a right to the sportula. The traditional form of this event was a daily visit to the patron’s house by his clientes; the formal term is salutatio, a word that suggests a morning greeting. Obviously such an event entails admitting the clients to the patron’s house, and, of course, patronage implies a personal relationship. In fact, the considerate term used of the participants was amici (“friends”).84 But the patron in Juvenal’s poem does not want his mob of clients in his house, and he does not even know them well enough to recognize them casually. Juvenal now reintroduces the palpable envy and resentment at being excluded that characterized the speaker in his initial outbursts—that is, in his rebirth as a satirist. Thus, the critique of modern patronage is not neutral social criticism. Our satirist has an interest (99–109). iubet a praecone uocari ipsos Troiugenas, nam uexant limen et ipsi nobiscum. вЂda praetori, da deinde tribuno.’ Page 42 →sed libertinus prior est. вЂprior’ inquit вЂego adsum. cur timeam dubitemue locum defendere, quamuis natus ad Euphraten, molles quod in aure fenestrae arguerint, licet ipse negem? sed quinque tabernae quadringenta parant. quid confert purpura maior optandum, si Laurenti custodit in agro conductas Coruinus ouis, ego possideo plus Pallante et Licinis?’ His order is that the very Trojans be summoned by his announcer, for they crowd the doorway—yes them!—along with us. “Give it to the praetor; give it to the tribune next.” But a freedman is first. “I’m ahead in line,” he says. “Why should I be timid or hesitate to defend my place—even if I was born alongside the Euphrates (as the effeminate holes in my ears prove, though

I myself deny it)? But my five pubs bring in 400 grand. What could I want that a senator’s purple would bring—if Corvinus watches over rented sheep in a Laurentine field, and I own more than Pallas and men like Licinius?”

The picture begins with a familiar Roman division by status that has nevertheless been twisted. The patron orders his steward to dispense the sportula first to a praetor and then to a tribune. These men of rank seem to be indicated in part by the epithet Troiugenas, “those descendant from Troy,” a term similar to American conceptions of ancestors who came over on the Mayflower. The Troiugenae are the Roman bluebloods, and one thinks instantly of the Julii and other families that traced their lineage back to Aeneas and his followers. Again, however, the relevant past is epic. The first problem with this vignette is that these bluebloods show up bright and early with Juvenal and men like him—their exalted lineage gets them no special treatment. Patronage is a social and economic system that allows separate strata of society to benefit from a kind of vertical exchange. Men at the top gain a body of supporters for all manner of projects, from guests at dinner parties to an entourage for public business to organized volunteers for a political campaign. At the same time, men lower in the social hierarchy gained too. A patron’s wealth and influence could open doors of every sort. A client could be called upon to travel with his patron on business, political or otherwise, but that patron could go to bat in court or elsewhere for the client, who then had a defender and advocate from a higher rung of the social elite. It is easy for us to Page 43 →look askance at patronage as a kind of “old boys” network of biased, cronyist preferments, but in Rome patronage had the important function of disseminating power and influence as well as wealth. In Juvenal’s scenario, however, the recipients of patronage include those who should be granting it. This raises the question implicit throughout Juvenal’s work of who really stands at the top of Rome’s economic and social hierarchy. If the Troiugenae are showing up at this patron’s door looking for a handout, who is this patron? We will return presently to the fact that Juvenal doesn’t answer this question. Praetor and tribune are both pushed aside by a freedman—and like Crispinus whom we met earlier, a foreignborn freedman at that. He is confident in asserting his rights, even if his manner of doing so makes it clear that he is aware of a certain prejudice. “Why should I be timid or hesitate?” he says, and thus indicates that he knows what is expected of him. Yet, as he points out, he has achievements too. He may not be praetor or tribune, but his businesses bring in enough money to qualify him as a knight, for four hundred thousand sesterces is the equestrian census. Moreover, men of traditionally powerful and wealthy families have taken jobs to support themselves while his businesses support him. The point here is money—the freedman makes enough annually to be counted an equestrian; birth into the senatorial order does not guarantee self-sufficiency. It would be easy to stop at noting Juvenal’s outrage at being displaced by such a man—and of course it does reinforce the sense of exclusion with which the poem begins—but something else is important here. Once again, we have to ask the identity of the patron wealthy and powerful enough to command praetors, tribunes, Juvenal, and our rich, Crispinus-like freedman. The obvious answer is the emperor himself, but the poem is coy about indicating him. The fact of the emperor, while not emphasized here as it will be in the fourth Satire, is not elided by this poem, since the reference to Pallas and “men like Licinius” obliquely suggests first the emperor Claudius and then Augustus, with whom they were respectively associated. In fact, the freedman’s use of these figures to indicate the scale of his wealth and influence is significant since it suggests that he has risen to a level of importance equal to, if not identical with, those in the emperor’s favor. Clearly the patron in this vignette is not a literal representation of any specific princeps. Nevertheless, the emperor has entered the text, because we have been shown a picture of the Roman social hierarchy in which all other traditionally powerful figures are already accounted for in supporting roles. Moreover, it is only the fact of the princeps that can allow such a situation to Page 44 →exist, since it is the reality of the principate that has displaced the magistrates (109–16). expectent ergo tribuni, uincant diuitiae, sacro ne cedat honori

nuper in hanc urbem pedibus qui uenerat albis, quandoquidem inter nos sanctissima diuitiarum maiestas, etsi funesta Pecunia templo nondum habitat, nullas nummorum ereximus aras, ut colitur Pax atque Fides, Victoria, Virtus quaeque salutato crepitat Concordia nido. And so let the tribunes wait, let wealth win out, lest someone who had recently come into the city with chalk-white feet yield to sacred office, since among us the most holy majesty is that of wealth, even though deadly Money does not yet dwell in a temple and we have raised no altars to Cash as we worship Peace and Faith, Victory, Courage, and Concord (who squawks when someone salutes her nest). Juvenal figures the displacement of traditional privilege by wealthy newcomers as an elevation of wealth over the personifications of civic values that had become a part of Roman religion. Though Money has no altar, it is worshipped in Rome. The pantheon that is being displaced is not the Italo-Greek collection of gods that dominate Latin literature and state cult but one of personified concepts. In other words, worship of wealth is represented not only as a kind of sacrilege but also as a betrayal of traditional values. The reference to an as yet nonexistent altar to money may seem to be nothing more than another way of saying that wealth has become as important as traditional values or the traditional gods, but there is something else to be considered. The opposition between a hypothetical altar or temple to wealth/money and the real if neglected sacred spaces devoted to personifications points up a similarity between two processes. Wealth is an abstract concept that becomes important when it can be expressed in practical terms, that is to say, in a quantifiable system. Currency is an obvious form for the exchange of wealth, particularly in a society that allows a fair amount of financial mobility. Wealth may obviously take the form of assets like real estate, but even that can be correlated back to the system of currency. The system by which abstract values get Page 45 →tangible sacred buildings and cults is not much different. Pax, Fides, Victoria, Virtus, and Concordia are human values that the state had elevated to sacred status, developing an iconography to go with each of these personifications. Whereas one could claim remote and unremembered origins for the worship of Jupiter, the cult of Pax had a more recent history.85 But a state that can decide to turn abstractions like Courage or Concord into anthropomorphic gods can just as easily create altars to Money. Juvenal suggests that the attempt to promote desirable values by imbuing them with religious significance and creating cult practice for them also reveals that undesirable, but widely held, values can be treated the same way. By creating personifications like Pax and Virtus the state defines a set of values that will have existed in vague and perhaps even self-contradictory forms before. Yet by undertaking that act of definition, the state also creates a system of values—that is to say, by defining the state’s “sacred” values, it opens up the possibility that other traditionally held behavioral codes will be questioned, modified, or jettisoned. Just as currency—money—provides a practical way to exchange and manipulate wealth, so does the practice of personifying values provide a possibility of an economy of values, a way to modify and manipulate traditional notions. That religious personifications like this can be used in attempts to manipulate the populace and create new, and often self-serving, social orders, is not a surprise. All of this is brought back to the life of individual Roman men in the next passage (117–26). sed cum summus honor finito conputet anno, sportula quid referat, quantum rationibus addat, quid facient comites quibus hinc toga, calceus hinc est

et panis fumusque domi? densissima centum quadrantes lectica petit, sequiturque maritum languida uel praegnas et circumducitur uxor. hic petit absenti nota iam callidus arte ostendens uacuam et clausam pro coniuge sellam. вЂGalla mea est’ inquit, вЂcitius dimitte. moraris? profer, Galla, caput. noli uexare, quiescet.’ Page 46 →But at the end of the year, when the highest magistrates count up what the dole brings in, how much it adds to their accounts, then what will their dependents do who have to get clothing and shoes from this source, from this source bread and firewood at home? A crowded fleet of litters comes begging for a hundred quadrantes. A wife, tired out or pregnant, follows her husband and makes the rounds. This man, skilled at a now well-known trick, asks for the dole for an absent woman, pointing to an empty and closed up sedan as a stand-in for his wife. “It’s my Galla, ” he says. “Hand it over quick. You’re hesitating? Stick your head out here, Galla. No, don’t bother her; she’s on the verge of sleep!” The description above decries a situation in which those men at the top of the state, because there was no automatic correlation of their positions with their wealth, might find a good use for a patron who could enhance their bank accounts, if not their prestige or political power. Yet this situation has implications. Consuls, praetors, and the like will have had their own dependents and clients, but when they subordinate themselves to the patronage system—that is, when the highest men in the state become clients as well as patrons—their own clients are necessarily pushed further down the ladder of resources that patronage represents. Nor is the system foolproof: some have figured out how to increase their take from the patron’s dole by the use of convenient fictions, and this brings us to the litter and the fake wife. Two points, I think, need to be made in connection with this scene. The first is that here again we see Juvenal’s concern with bad clients. The second point is perhaps very likely to be overlooked—especially if we are inclined to side with the clients against the stingy patron. The man who brings an empty litter in order to get his own portion of the dole and one for his wife as well is not himself poor. He shows up accompanied by a litter, albeit an empty one, that requires six to eight slaves to carry it. As we have seen, Juvenal uses litters elsewhere in this poem as symbols of the wealthy and, more importantly, of the way the wealthy literally sail over the heads of everyone else. In this picture, it is the wealthy who beg and cheat to get their share and more of the patron’s dole. In fact, they arrive, as it were, in a fleet of limousines (densissimaВ .В .В . lectica, 120–21). Juvenal follows the more leisurely portrait of the rich coming for the dole with a dense, fast series of images (127–31): ipse dies pulchro distinguitur ordine rerum: sportula, deinde forum iurisque peritus Apollo Page 47 →atque triumphales, inter quas ausus habere nescio quis titulos Aegyptius atque Arabarches, cuius ad effigiem non tantum meiere fas est. The day itself is marked out by a fine order of events: the dole, then the Forum, and Apollo the Legal Expert, and the statues of the triumphing generals, among which some Egyptian has dared to have his

inscriptions—a financier at whose image it is permissible not merely to piss.

Once the sportula ritual is over, the clients and patrons go about their days. Up to a point they follow the traditional routine. From the morning salutatio they go to the Forum for a variety of legal and public business. But the Forum is different—not only are there traditional signs of Roman grauitas, there is now a foreign element. An Egyptian financier has set up some sort of monument to himself as though he were on par with the great Roman triumphatores of the past. Juvenal then frames this in terms of extremes of sanctity. On the one hand, we have the sacred space of the Forum with its temples of the gods (here Apollo is singled out) and statues of great Romans. Desecration of such a space would be unthinkable to a traditional Roman mindset. On the other hand, the space now contains a monument so far from sacred that it is acceptable to defile it at will.86 The Forum itself is corrupted by the influence of the foreign and the profane. This sort of image—Rome being un-Romanized at its very core—comes up frequently in the Satires.87 More on the behavior of patrons follows (132–46): uestibulis abeunt ueteres lassique clientes uotaque deponunt, quamquam longissima cenae spes homini; caulis miseris atque ignis emendus. optima siluarum interea pelagique uorabit rex horum uacuisque toris tantum ipse iacebit. nam de tot pulchris et latis orbibus et tam antiquis una comedunt patrimonia mensa. nullus iam parasitus erit. sed quis ferat istas luxuriae sordes? quanta est gula quae sibi totos Page 48 →ponit apros, animal propter conuiuia natum! poena tamen praesens, cum tu deponis amictus turgidus et crudum pauonem in balnea portas. hinc subitae mortes atque intestata senectus. it noua nec tristis per cunctas fabula cenas; ducitur iratis plaudendum funus amicis. From the entry halls the old and worn-out clients depart, and they give up their wishes, although one’s longest lasting hope is that for dinner. The wretches have to buy their cabbage and firewood. Meanwhile their patron will devour the best produce of the woods and sea and lie alone on empty couches. For from so many beautiful, broad tables (and so ancient!) they eat up estates in one course! Presently there’ll be no parasite. Who could bear that filthy extravagance? How big is the gullet that sets before itself whole boars, an animal born for banquets! Still, the penalty’s effective, when you strip off your clothes and, bloated, carry into the baths an undigested peacock. From this you get a sudden death and an intestate old age.88 The news, and it’s not unwelcome, makes the rounds of all the dinner parties. The corpse is carried out to be applauded by angry

“friends.”

In this passage, Juvenal begins by making explicit what we have already realized—that those truly in need of patrons have to fend for themselves. The contrast he draws next, however, is not with the wealthy who have displaced them but with the patrons themselves. Here their greed becomes superhuman, as they devour the world around them wholesale.89 The boar, once the quarry in heroic hunts, is now “an animal born for dinner parties.” This same voracity shows up in the fourth Satire in part as criticism of Rome’s bloated regime: in the opening of that poem, Crispinus (again!) buys a fish large enough to feed a dinner party and eats it all by himself. This episode serves as the preface to an account of Domitian and his privy council as they try to figure out how to cook an enormous turbot (then as now a delicacy) that will not fit whole into any Page 49 →available cookware. The poem comments on imperial bureaucracy and greed. There it is a matter of the emperor; here the voracity of empire is echoed in the patron-client relationship of ordinary people. The gluttonous patron gets his comeuppance in a passage that again recalls Persius, as we see him carry his grotesque body into the bath only to die from the experience.90 Now that we see them doing something that belies any form of genuine friendship, Juvenal finally uses the correct term and calls the man’s clients “friends.”

Epic Fail Next we find that Juvenal’s Rome is, in his view, the acme of vice (147–50): nil erit ulterius quod nostris moribus addat posteritas, eadem facient cupientque minores, omne in praecipiti uitium stetit. utere uelis, totos pande sinus. There will be nothing worse for posterity to add to our ways; our descendants will do and desire the same things. All vice has come to stand on the edge. Take sail! Spread wide your full sheets! Moral decline apparently has an endpoint, and it is Rome. This exaggeration leads to the injunction, “take sail! ” but to whom is this addressed? It can be taken as an ironic address to vice and its practitioners—that is, “you’ve reached the promised land, do your worst!” Yet it also reinforces the link between the satirist and the corrupt world he decries, for he might also be taken to address himself and men like him: “Things have gotten to the worst possible state—so satire has to sail full speed now!” This second possibility may remind us that Juvenal’s form of satire—unlike Horace’s, for instance—requires vice, so that, in a sense, Juvenal has every reason to celebrate its supremacy. The identification of satire with its subject matter is again emphasized in the next lines, when Juvenal imagines someone reacting to the vastness of what he has just proclaimed (150–54). Page 50 →dices hic forsitan вЂunde ingenium par materiae? unde illa priorum scribendi quodcumque animo flagrante liberet simplicitas?’ cuius non audeo dicere nomen? quid refert dictis ignoscat Mucius an non?

At this point you’ll probably say “Where will you get the talent to match the material? Where will you get that directness of earlier generations for writing whatever they liked, spirits ablaze?” Whose name don’t I dare to mention? Why do I care whether Mucius forgives my words or not? These lines, which begin a dialogue between Juvenal and an interlocutor, have attracted much attention as the last instance of Juvenalian bravado before the satirist realizes that he will have to curb his tongue, but it is important to note too that Juvenal has cast the reader in the role of this interlocutor—dices hic forsitan, “at this point you’ll probably say.В .В .В .” The effect of this has not, as far as I know, been fully explored. The secondperson verb suggests that the speaker has been anticipating this reaction, that is, that he has been anticipating a hostile audience that does not believe he has the capacity for the poetic project he has taken on. Once again the satirist depicts himself as someone anxious about his status as an outsider: he is not one of the in-crowd writers from the beginning of the poem, not one of the rich, not one of the favored. At this point we realize that he does not quite think we will accept him either. Moreover, however disingenuous his suggestion that he lacks ingenium, he has once again raised the question. But Juvenal evades the hypothetical question he has put in our mouths. His response does not answer the whole question about ingenium and simplicitas but instead concentrates only on the second. His audience has questioned his talent—perhaps following the lead he gives in lines 79–80—but also his simplicitas, which the context tells us must mean “directness” or “frankness.” Juvenal uses it to refer to a fearless willingness to name names and attack vice wherever he finds it, but the word has other meanings. In rhetoric, simplicitas is the quality of making the persuasive rhetoric of a speech invisible.91 In making his interlocutor use the term simplicitas, then, Juvenal both raises the issue of his Page 51 →real frankness of speech and highlights that the transparency of his satire is, in fact, merely a feature of his rhetoric.92 This evasive half answer gives the interlocutor—gives us—an opening (155–70). вЂpone Tigellinum93, taeda lucebis in illa qua stantes ardent qui fixo gutture fumant, et latum media sulcum deducit harena.’ qui dedit ergo tribus patruis aconita, uehatur pensilibus plumis atque illinc despiciat nos? вЂcum ueniet contra, digito compesce labellum: accusator erit qui uerbum dixerit “hic est.” securus licet Aenean Rutulumque ferocem committas, nulli grauis est percussus Achilles aut multum quaesitus Hylas urnamque secutus: ense uelut stricto quotiens Lucilius ardens infremuit, rubet auditor cui frigida mens est criminibus, tacita sudant praecordia culpa. inde ira et lacrimae. tecum prius ergo uoluta haec animo ante tubas: galeatum sero duelli

paenitet.’ “Write up Tigellinus—you’ll shine in one of those torches in which people stand burning and smoking, throats impaled until your body94 cuts a broad furrow through the middle of the arena.” So a man who’s given poison to three uncles rides by on feather pillows and looks down on us from them? “When he comes by, zip up your lips with a finger! Anyone who’s said вЂIt’s him.’ will count as an informer. You can safely match up Aeneas with the fierce Rutulian. Stricken Achilles is a burden to no one, nor is much-sought-after Hylas who fell in after his pail. Whenever fiery Lucilius has roared with sword drawn, as it were, the listener whose mind is chill with crime grows red and his heart sweats with silent guilt. Next come anger and tears. So mull these things Page 52 →over in your mind before the starting trumpets. It’s too late to get cold feet about fighting once your helmet’s on.” The interlocutor, our representative within the text, responds to Juvenal’s bravado with the example of Tigellinus, the notorious praetorian prefect of 62 CE. Juvenal counters with another telling example of vice. Can he stay silent when he sees a murderer carried by in luxury and looking down his nose at decent people to boot? Yes, we answer. Stick with epic. It offends no one, and you will be safe. Satire, it turns out, arouses the anger of the guilty, and once the satirist speaks his fate is sealed.95 The striking portrait of Tigellinus’ victims recapitulates several themes of the poem. The victim is, first of all, censored in an extremely graphic way, gutture fixo—something has been stabbed through his throat, and the power of speech has been permanently removed. Like one overcome by anger, moreover, the victim burns. Earlier in the poem (45) we saw that Juvenal’s righteous indignation takes the form of a fire that parches his liver. Here we find that the powerful can take that metaphorical inner fire and make it real. If Juvenal wants to be a bold beacon venting his burning outrage over injustice, he will find a Tigellinus who obliges by making him into a human torch.96 Interestingly, the guilty listener a few lines later is described as one cui frigida mens est criminibus, “whose mind is chill with crime.” Heat belongs to the righteous satirist, but it will also be the tool that the cold-hearted criminal uses to silence him. Another noteworthy image here is the transformation of Lucilius, sword drawn, into an epic hero. This conception of the satirist is in contrast with two related images. The first, unfortunately, is somewhat difficult because of a gap in the text after line 156, but the satirist-victim of Tigellinus appears to end up being dragged through the arena. Lucilius may be an epic swordsman, but Juvenal is likelier to end up like a gladiator, or worse yet, a condemned prisoner whose punishment is to meet his fate in the arena. The other image ends the interlocutor’s speech. The time to consider whether or not to fight is before the trumpet sounds and the helmet is donned.97 So while Lucilian satire can be related to epic heroism, Juvenal’s satire makes him a fighter (and a victim) either Page 53 →in the arena or on the battlefield among the infantry; either is an image of subordination and defeat. Interestingly, epic plays a major role here at the end of the poem just as it did at the beginning. The epic bravado of Lucilian satire is unavailable to Juvenal, but his interlocutor does suggest that epic themes are safe. Not only does this push Juvenal toward the kind of poetry he began by decrying, but it also becomes a kind of literary metaphor for his relationship to Lucilius. For if the earlier satirist is an Achilles or Aeneas, Juvenal is urged to become a Homer or Vergil. This is a brilliant, if somewhat bizarre, metaphor for the belatedness of Juvenal’s poetry: he can still survey the epic battlefield (that is, human misbehavior) but only from a distance. But this is also a metaphor that mocks, since the poem has more than once raised the question of Juvenal’s talent. Our satirist may not be able to rely on ingenium, but he is sent off to become another Vergil. “If Nature refuses, outrage produces the poetry.” But that same indignation is just as likely to blaze into a fire that burns Juvenal as it is to serve the ends of justice or morality. There would appear to be no real way out, since Juvenal cannot be

either kind of poet that has been suggested. Furthermore, Aeneas does not merely dispatch Turnus because they are enemies on the battlefield. Aeneas famously erupts in a fit of anger (that really begins two books earlier) so striking that scholars still debate whether it exceeded not only what was justified but even what was acceptable according to Roman norms. If Juvenal cannot be a new Lucilius, his rendition of Vergil will still give vent to rage, since that is what killing Turnus is all about.98 He does have a solution, but it is also a capitulation (170–71). experiar quid concedatur in illos quorum Flaminia tegitur cinis atque Latina. I’ll try what is permitted against those whose ashes the Flaminian and Latin roads cover. This claim is perhaps the most discussed statement in the first Satire, and it will be useful to review some of the more interesting approaches taken to the lines. The scholiast glosses the roads named here with uiae, in quibus nobiles sepeliebantur,Page 54 → “roads along which aristocrats were buried,” making it clear that he takes Juvenal’s meaning to be that he will attack the upper classes. The scholiast has sometimes been followed in this, but Juvenal does criticize people for whom the term nobilis would have been a stretch.99 Also focusing on the specific roads named, Friedlaender takes the lines to mean that Juvenal will limit himself to people and events from the reign of Domitian, since he was buried on the Via Latina and his favorite, the actor Paris, was buried on the Via Flaminia.100 It is true that many of the targets of the first Satire, and, more to the point, the first book, come from Domitianic Rome, but enough come from earlier and later reigns that Friedlaender’s comment cannot really explain Juvenal’s meaning here. The 1950s saw a renewed interest in the question, as scholars became concerned to defend Juvenal from, on the one hand, the charge of writing badly constructed poems and, on the other, the charge of failing as a serious moralist. Lutz argues that Juvenal writes the last line as a kind of “hedge clause” to protect himself with a blanket statement that no one alive should see himself in his poems.101 On this view, Juvenal does continue to satirize the living under cover names. Highet combines this view with that of the scholiast, claiming that the poet attacks living aristocrats under the guise of attacking recently dead ones; he also thinks that Juvenal ennobles his satire by not restricting it to current events.102 Helmbold, writing between Lutz and Highet, also sees contemporary targets within Juvenal’s poem, in the persons of the readers themselves.103 Anderson too finds the Satires relevant to contemporary Rome, but his approach is different: for him, their contemporary relevance lies in their attack on those earlier times in which the roots of the present decadence and corruption lay.104 Page 55 →Syme, interested more in the period in which Juvenal was writing than in his poetics, forcefully brought into view the relevance of political and legal danger to the outspoken satirist, even in the era of Hadrian and Trajan.105 For him, Juvenal’s interlocutor was right to warn Juvenal of the potentially ruinous consequences of outspoken criticism. Kenney follows Syme in this but adduces literary history as another factor. In programmatic contexts, Horace and Persius also show a pattern of apology involving an interlocutor.106 Kenney also stresses the importance of exempla in satire.107 Returning to the position of the scholiast—and to some extent of Highet—Baldwin takes Juvenal to mean not that he will only attack the dead but that he will only attack aristocrats (who would have had family tombs outside of the city) rather than low-born upstarts who will overreact to criticism.108 Griffith largely accepts Kenney’s approach to the first Satire, but he adds two important nuances: the apologetic pattern originates, according to Griffith, in Lucilius’ own poetry, and Juvenal has constructed the end of his poem as a rhetorical color that speaks to potential legal challenges to his work.109 This is also the position taken by GГ©rard.110 Courtney, like the other scholars mentioned in this paragraph, sees the dangers of offense to the powerful as real, but he sees them as relating to Juvenal’s past under Neronian and Flavian Rome rather than to the time of composition and publication.111 Page 56 →Adamietz sees in Juvenal’s statement that he will only attack the dead not a capitulation but an emphasis on the importance and necessity of satire.112 Bartsch goes further. Like Syme, she sees real dangers in

attacking the powerful of Trajanic and Hadrianic Rome; for her, by using a Domitianic persona to talk about offending the powerful of Neronian Rome, Juvenal makes it clear that attacking the previous dynasty can be a way of making veiled criticisms of the reigning emperor.113 Two more critics also discuss these verses in terms of the poet’s persona. Fredricksmeyer argues that the failure to become a new Lucilius is part of a strategy of persona-making, and one that is used in some way in programmatic poems of Horace and Persius as well as Juvenal; in particular, a persona is created whose highminded crusade for morality cannot hold up to scrutiny.114 Braund, too, sees the final claim about the dead as creating the persona of a hypocrite.115 More recently, Freudenburg has seen in the final lines of the poem a hermeneutic problem posed by the text for individual readers.116 The responses catalogued here represent individual critics’ confrontation with Juvenal’s gambit, the new Lucilius who retreats from attacking those who can actually harm him. One school is solidly historical (e.g., Syme, Kenney, Courtney, and, to some extent, Bartsch). Some critics seek to defend Juvenal (especially Lutz; to some extent also Highet, Anderson, and Kenney); others feel no need to defend the satirist character of the poem (Fredricksmeyer, Bartsch, Freudenburg himself, and especially Braund). The variety of reactions points to the fact that there is Page 57 →no answer except those generated by our own expectations and biases. Freudenburg’s own confrontation with Juvenal’s pledge to attack only the dead raises questions about Juvenal’s project vis-Г -vis the equestrian and senatorial writers (and others) who, like Tacitus, spent a great deal of energy expressing outrage over the misdeeds of prior dynasties: is Juvenal parodying this cultural project or participating in it?117 Now that we have surveyed the diversity of approaches to the ending of the first Satire, I lay out my own view here. Juvenal’s satirist has been forced to admit that he does not possess libertas in its Republican form. In terms of literary program, it is easy to see the point: Juvenal will not be able to be a Lucilius or even a Horace after all, and his satiric poetics are themselves a kind of commentary on the age in which he lives.118 The speaker’s compromise of attacking only the dead does not render his satire as ineffective as it renders him. He can still castigate the immorality and folly around him, but he must do so after having admitted that he does not possess the status or wherewithal to speak openly. His attempt to claim Lucilian libertas results in his realization that he can never have it. This is not only a realization about his society but also one about himself: Juvenal’s satirist is fundamentally weak. In a society in which full possession of manhood is based on the premise of individual autonomy, realization that autonomy is gone is, in essence, admission of failed masculinity. The new Lucilius who cannot speak freely is not only a literary failure: the failed satirist is, in Juvenal’s conception, of necessity a failed man. This point might seem a stretch for this poem, but, once we encounter the speaking voice of other poems, we will see that the possibility of failed masculinity is one of the major concerns of the Satires. Let us now review the “plot” of the poem. Finally driven to the breaking point by frustration, the speaker flees from the recitation hall with its safe but unsatisfying literature. The problem is not merely one of quality; it is also that the topics of contemporary poetry are not contemporary. The poets whose verse drives the speaker to become the satirist can flourish only by retreating into a past that is literary and mythical. Our speaker runs into the street and, before our eyes, becomes a writer of satire and lays claim to Lucilian directness and venom. At this point he is forced to modify his plan because such men have Page 58 →been finding themselves silenced for quite some time, as the use of a Neronian exemplum indicates in a poem that cannot have been written before 100 CE at the earliest.119 He will still snarl at the immorality he sees around him but will only direct his attacks at the dead. His satire—even his transformation into a satirist—has been inspired by contemporary problems, but he has become a poet of the past. He ran from the backward-looking poets of the lecture hall only to find that he is now one of them. His poetry may (or may not) improve on theirs, but it will not replace it, and in fact, the newborn satirist will resemble his first targets often in the following poems—quid rides? mutato nomine de te fabula narratur, as his predecessor Horace said: “What are you laughing at? Change the name, and the story’s about you.”120 Yet the compromise that the satirist makes is also a capitulation, for he does not merely accept the reality of the violence he might suffer. The way he formulates his program acknowledges not only the ability of the offended to

cause harm but their authority to do so: experiar quid concedatur, “I shall try what is allowed.В .В .В .” This is not only a poetics of prudence or even of fear, but one that acknowledges the poet’s subordination to such a system. It does not even question the naturalness of the authority of the powerful. Juvenal’s satirist is not only a product of reaction to contemporary tastes and mores; he is also, and just as importantly, a product of the same type of accommodation that he began by decrying. Satire 1, therefore, constructs a satirist who is part of the tableau he is describing, a man whose bold claim to literary novelty is, perforce, transformed into a tacit admission that he is as much a poet of the past as those he initially rebelled against.121 Moreover, his implicit claim to moral superiority begins to unravel as we realize that his time is spent in contemplation of the seedy world he claims to hate. Lucilius, originally held up as the model after whom Juvenal’s satirist has fashioned himself, becomes instead the anti-Juvenal. His freedom and courage may have been—as Horace would have it—embodied in verses of old-fashioned and occasionally harsh roughness.122 At the same time, he did possess freedom and boldness, the libertas of the elite Roman when that still meant something. The post-Lucilian tradition of Roman satire constructs Lucilius as a literary innovator, whether he was or not. Satire 1 constructs the Juvenalian satiristPage 59 → as a poet who must write in a backward-looking frame. He admits that he does not possess freedom, and he makes a compromise so that boldness is not needed. For all the virulence of Juvenal’s poems, we learn right up front that they, and he, are tame—he may growl and bark, but he has no teeth. Yet Satire 1 does more than dramatize the failure of a literary program. It is also the story of a man’s fantasy of power. If the poems show us a poet surveying and passing over various literary possibilities for himself—he often refers to Horace and others but ultimately chooses, and loses, Lucilius—it also puts on display a Roman man selecting a role model. Juvenal’s choice was bold, well connected, and most importantly, able to get away with it. In his autonomy and libertas, Lucilius was a real man! But Juvenal’s claim that he will become the new Lucilius is destroyed by the reality that he is in no way like him. The satire makes clear that Juvenal is deeply worried about his status, not connected in the Roman society of his day, and unable to speak as he wishes. Lucilian freedom is a kind of virility, and this poem makes it clear that Juvenal lacks it and knows it. The main target of Satire 1 is not the immorality of Rome but Juvenal himself: a reporter of current events whose expertise lies in legend and myth; a hater of foreigners whose education has framed his world view in terms of Greek mythology and literature. Even his complaints about immorality had roots as old as Latin literature—in fact, choosing Lucilius itself admits that poetic invective against bad behavior was at least two hundred years old. His fantasy of becoming a new Lucilius is a claim to a kind of poetic machismo: no effeminate Greeklings for Juvenal, just a plainspoken, fearless Italian. The pomposity of this fantasy is matched by its hollowness. But if Juvenal cannot be the poet or the man he wants to be, at least he barks loud. It is significant also that our newly minted satirist associates himself at the end of the first poem not only with the dead but with the roadways leading out of Rome. In fact, the idea of a movement out of Rome is present in a number of Juvenal’s poems. Satire 15 defines Egypt as a territory of “not us,” which seems to mean, in that poem, not Greco-Roman—despite the fact that the Egypt of the second century CE was heavily Greek in culture and fully Roman in administration. In Satire 3 the discontented Umbricius is on his way out of Rome, whereas Satire 2 both begins and ends with images of faraway places; the former serves to emphasize Rome’s unusual corruption, the latter the inevitability of Rome’s dissemination of its diseased morality. The first Satire, then, ends by showing us not only the speaker’s capitulation but also his marginalization. To Page 60 →succeed as a Roman satirist, “Juvenal” must concede that the powerful and influential have taken from him libertas in both speech and action—and also that they have managed, before ever hearing his voice or reading his work, to exile him to the roads leading out of Rome. He is a poet of the past, but more a Greek Antimachus than a Roman Lucilius or Ennius; a poet of society, but not an insider, not a Horace, for example, but a man skulking on the edge of town. In the past, we may have wanted to say that Juvenal recognized that Rome’s new character was not suitable for a real, moral, Roman like him (as Umbricius does in poem 3); instead, it seems we must admit, with Juvenal, that he cannot face Rome and Rome cannot be bothered with him. If he makes himself a nuisance, he will be destroyed.

Finally, we can conclude that this poem about the morality of Rome and the poetics of satire is also a kind of meditation—intentional or not—on social status and the power brought by wealth. The real problem faced by our speaker is not that he has been forced to hear too much bad poetry. Rather, he has been forced to realize that he lacks the standing to say what he wants. The privilege he lacks belongs to those he wants to attack, or perhaps it is better to say that he wants to attack those who possess the privilege he lacks. The resident alien, the gender deviants, the women who take on male roles all possess a certain measure of autonomy that our would-be Lucilius lacks. The satirist who lacks true freedom of speech is perhaps Juvenal’s first and greatest example of manhood unmanned.123 We can now turn a more precise lens on some of the ways in which a lack of autonomy can be imagined in the Satires.

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Chapter 2 The Body and the Failure of Autonomy In the last chapter we examined Juvenal’s programmatic first poem and followed the speaker’s growing realization that the social, political, and economic realities of his Rome would be primary determinants of the nature of his poetry and thus of his identity as a satirist. Just as importantly, the Juvenalian satirist is always a failure because he has laid claim to a frankness of speech that he can never afford to use. Against this backdrop, let us turn now to the kinds of detailed images this satirist creates. What troubles this speaker, for whom speech can only ever be so free? While the last chapter examined a single poem that purports to be a unified expression of one man’s attempt to claim a role for himself in a society he perhaps does not fully understand, this one will look instead at a recurrent system of metaphors in Juvenal’s Satires, that is, the use of the body as an emblem for the individual human being. A series of very graphic images of (mostly male) bodies constitutes a way of thinking through the relationship between the external world and the individual. Images of the body help articulate anxieties over threats to masculine identity since one of masculinity’s central traits is autonomy—that is, for the Romans, masculinity is predicated on a man’s control of his body, his appetites, and his social, moral, and political fate. The passages discussed in this chapter rely on a very simple, but absolutely undeniable, fact: human beings—whatever their sex, race, class, or wealth—cannot really control what happens to their bodies. Moreover, and perhaps even scarier, even if we can control what we do with our bodies, we cannot control what our bodies do to us. The rebellious or manipulated body, therefore, is a useful tool for the satirist Page 62 →as he shows that men must admit that they no longer really possess full autonomy, that, in other words, they do not control themselves and their fates. The social and political realities—as our satirist sees them—of his Rome mean that the elite male body, and thus the elite male subject, can always become subject to others. Elite men may lack sufficient wealth or influence to protect themselves, or they may fall prey to the dangers of traditional Roman elite ambitions. Finally, even men who have remained safe from those dangers eventually fall to the irresistible attack of old age, which, in our satirist’s eyes, turns men into women. Students of satire and related genres have always been interested in the way the genre treats the body, particularly in the case of the grotesque or carnivalesque bodies so common in satiric writing, but also in the way that images of the body can signal truths about the individual described, as, for example, when Catullus uses the image of Furius’ desiccated body to suggest his perpetual poverty (c. 21). Juvenal has received less attention in this area than other satirists and writers of iambic verse—perhaps because he dwells more often on outrageous deeds than outrageous bodies. Yet in a number of cases Juvenal’s metonymic bodies can tell us a great deal about how the poet sees individuals in the context of the world around them. Rather than merely being a convenient kind of metonymy for what a person is in absolute terms (e.g., rich, poor, good, wicked), the body in Juvenal is often a way of talking about an individual’s changing status and importance over time. In other words, Juvenal’s bodies show who one is in Rome’s hierarchies. Before examining individual passages from Juvenal’s poems, it will be helpful to survey some of the theoretical approaches that might be taken to satiric bodies.124 At least for Roman satire and related genres, the first name invoked is usually that of Mikhail Bakhtin—though, as Paul Allen Miller has remarked, classicists have not always understood Bakhtin’s ideas clearly or made use of them well.125 Bakhtin has loomed less large in studies of Juvenal, however, since Juvenalian bodies are generally not the Rabelaisian bodies of carnival. Moreover, despite Juvenal’s tendency toward extremely detailed images, his descriptionsPage 63 → of bodies are not usually the elaborate grotesques favored by some authors. Instead, Juvenal focuses on what happens to bodies rather than on the qualities the bodies already possess.

More useful for my approach to Juvenal is the work of Blakey Vermeule.126 Vermeule draws on models from cognitive science to analyze certain techniques in eighteenth-century English satire. In particular, Vermeule looks at satiric technique with attention to what has been termed “situational mind blindness.” This phenomenon is the failure to recognize other people as having minds, whether as an intentional strategy or the result of a condition such as autism. A mind-blind person cannot or will not understand the behavior of others as arising from any sort of comprehensible motivation. To the mind-blind, people and animals are objects not essentially different from tables and chairs. In satire, “[s]ituational mind blindness is a trope of dehumanization, albeit a very complex one: the point of it is to deny other people the perspective of rational agency by turning them into animals, machines, or anything without a mind.”127 Vermeule uses the concept of mind blindness to show how satirists work. Often, the satirist turns his targets into machines, inanimate objects, or collections of body parts—this last a technique that Amy Richlin has identified as a central strategy of Roman misogynistic writing.128 For Vermeule, however, situational mind blindness is a point of view adopted principally by the satirist. It is his strategy for climbing “quickly out of the social fray, to extract one’s self from the myriad claims of human obligation.”129 In other words, the satirist becomes mind blind so that he does not have to treat his targets as rational agents or human beings with their own point of view. What I see happening in Juvenal is somewhat different. Yes, like Vermeule’s eighteenth-century satirists, Juvenal adopts a mind-blind posture to help demonize his satiric victims. He goes well beyond this, however, in that he implicitly recognizes that situational mind blindness exists and that it can be used by others on him or men like him just as he uses it on them. The Juvenalian satirist, then, acknowledges that he too can be treated as an object whose actions are not the product of intelligible intellectual and emotional motives. He knows that his own rational agency can be denied and that the legitimacy of his claims Page 64 →as an individual Roman can be ignored, especially by those with greater wealth and power. This is what lies behind Juvenal’s descriptions of the human body.130

Reduction to the Body A particularly striking image from the first poem will serve as a point of departure for our study (155–57): вЂpone Tigillinum, taeda lucebis in illa qua stantes ardent qui fixo gutture fumant, et latum media sulcum deducit harena.’ “Write up Tigellinus—you’ll shine in one of those torches in which people stand burning and smoking, throats impaled until your body cuts a broad furrow through the middle of the arena.” An interlocutor has warned Juvenal what the price for attacking the powerful by name might be.131 What concerns us here is the physicality of the image. It is, as has often been noted, gruesomely appropriate to punish someone for speaking out by impaling him through the throat.132 What may be less apparent is how appropriate the whole image is to the situation of Juvenal as he portrays himself in the first Satire, for the individual described here is indeed a boldly public figure, literally a beacon—and one who also has had the power of speech curtailed. In fact, as we saw in chapter 1, this image played a crucial role in Juvenal’s realization that he cannot be a new Lucilius after all. Though a textual problem Page 65 →makes the details a bit unclear, it remains obvious that the mutilated body described here ends up being dragged through the arena. This image emblematizes what can happen to the outspoken individual through a graphic representation of one kind of beacon (the outspoken Lucilian satirist) being rapidly transformed into another (a burning corpse). This is also a way of emblematizing the curtailing of free speech. Finally, there is also a loss of status, as the corpse is dragged through the arena—numerous passages in Juvenal make it clear that the arena is no place for a decent

person, a fact to which we will return in chapter 3 below. Yet this image does more than show the satirist’s fear of punishment; it also encodes a set of anxieties over what exactly can become of someone who runs afoul of the powerful—not merely corporal or capital punishment but also conversion into a spectacle, an ironic parody of one’s own aspirations and ambitions. It is important to note, however, that not only is this an image of individuals turned into public spectacles, it is also an image which treats individuals only as bodies. Juvenal relies on his audience to know what historical event is meant—the burning of Christians by Nero’s notorious praetorian prefect Tigellinus, but, while Tigellinus is named, his victims are not.133 Nor does the passage contain any definite nouns denoting people, using only the relative pronouns and participles. What distinguishes these people is what they have been turned into by someone more powerful than themselves. Thus, our image of the hypothetical punishment for a satirist is also a way of dealing with human individuals as nothing more than bodies. There is perhaps also a hint of the idea that the less powerful are only important for their roles in the activities of those with high status. Elsewhere we see this technique of dealing with an individual simply as a body applied by the speaker to a woman (6.142–48). вЂcur desiderio Bibulae Sertorius ardet?’ si uerum excutias, facies non uxor amatur. tres rugae subeant et se cutis arida laxet, fiant obscuri dentes oculique minores, вЂcollige sarcinulas’ dicet libertus вЂet exi. iam grauis es nobis et saepe emungeris. exi ocius et propera. sicco uenit altera naso.’ Page 66 →“Why is Sertorius on fire with desire for Bibula?” If you were to shake out the truth it’s the face that’s beloved, not the wife. Let three wrinkles encroach and her dry skin sag, her teeth grow discolored and her eyes shrink—“Gather up your baggage,” his freedman will say, “and get out. You’re a burden to us now and usually blowing your nose. Get out quickly and hurry. A dry-nosed replacement is on her way.” The speaker of Satire 6 has been denouncing the whole idea of marriage. Here he responds to a question that challenges his assertions that all wives are bad. Yet the speaker does not grant the validity of the implied objection. If Sertorius appears to be in love with his wife, that is really only his reaction to her face. Once her looks are gone, she’s sent packing.134 In the lines that follow this passage, the wife is shown greedily and imperiously exploiting her husband and his wealth, but here Juvenal has pictured her simply as facies.135 As such, she is subject to age, and she is also replaceable. We shall see that lack of individuality is associated in Juvenal’s poems with age and also that it tends to accompany Juvenal’s use of the body as a metaphor, as we have already seen in the case of the Christians in Satire 1. The picture of the body being burned alive suggests a certain sympathy—it is after all introduced as a warning about what could happen to a satirist. This picture of the aging wife is comic and unsympathetic, but it underscores the way such images of the body tend to be used. The simple message of the passage is that the pretty wife is discarded when she starts to age, but the details of the description reveal more. The wife is sent away by proxy—the practice of using a freedman to announce the intent to divorce was not unknown, but here, by having a freedman rather than the husband deliver the decisive exi (“get out”), the speaker emphasizes the easy replaceability of the wife.136 He mentions the coming replacement as though he has ordered her from a catalogue,

which is, of course, exactly the kind of business transaction that freedmen sometimes performed for their former masters. The wife here is objectified not only by the description of her face but more importantly by the way she is treated like a replaceable object. We can see in this description of the aging replaceable wife that, for Juvenal, anyone can be treated as a body, and therefore as a commodity. The replacement wife is similarly referred to by physical description. While Page 67 →altera does make clear that a woman is meant, its dominant connotation here is that she is next, the next wife and the next woman to be sent away by a freedman—her only salient characteristic is her (temporarily) dry nose.

The Beatable Body In the third Satire, Umbricius ends his long litany of Roman problems by complaining that a poor man is likely to be assaulted and beaten on his way home (3.278–80, 282–301).137 ebrius ac petulans, qui nullum forte cecidit, dat poenas, noctem patitur lugentis amicum Pelidae, cubat in faciem, mox deinde supinus: somnum rixa facit. sed quamuis inprobus annis atque mero feruens cauet hunc quem coccina laena uitari iubet et comitum longissimus ordo, multum praeterea flammarum et aenea lampas. me, quem luna solet deducere uel breue lumen candelae, cuius dispenso et tempero filum, contemnit. miserae cognosce prohoemia rixae, si rixa est, ubi tu pulsas, ego uapulo tantum. stat contra starique iubet. parere necesse est; nam quid agas, cum te furiosus cogat et idem fortior? “unde uenis” exclamat, “cuius aceto, cuius conche tumes? quis tecum sectile porrum sutor et elixi ueruecis labra comedit? nil mihi respondes? aut dic aut accipe calcem. ede ubi consistas: in qua te quaero proseucha?” dicere si temptes aliquid tacitusue recedas, tantumdem est: feriunt pariter, uadimonia deinde irati faciunt. libertas pauperis haec est: pulsatus rogat et pugnis concisus adorat

ut liceat paucis cum dentibus inde reuerti.138 Page 68 →A drunken and insolent man, who hasn’t happened to beat up anyone, pays for it! He suffers through the night of an Achilles mourning his friend—he lies face down, then right away he’s on his back. A fight brings on sleep. But however much a delinquent he is or hot-headed from wine, he’s wary of the man he’s warned to avoid by a red cloak and big entourage, along with the abundance of fire and the brazen lamp. He has disdain for me, whose escort is usually the moon or the meager light of a candle with a wick I measure out a bit at a time. Recognize the proem of the wretched fight—if it is a fight, when you do the beating and I only take it. He stands in your way and orders you to stop. You have to obey, for what would you do when someone enraged and stronger too forces you? “Where are you coming from?” he shouts, “Whose hock or beans are you bloated with? What cobbler has been eating spring leeks and boiled sheep’s lips with you? You won’t answer? Speak up or get stepped on. Tell me where you do your begging: in which synagogue shall I look for you?” If you try to say anything or withdraw in silence, it comes to the same thing. They hit you in tandem, and then in a huff they lay a charge against you! This is a poor man’s freedom: beaten and pummeled with punches, he begs and pleads to go away with a few teeth left. Similarly, the speaker of the sixteenth Satire extols the perks of being a soldier, one of which is freedom from beatings by civilians.139 Another is the freedom to beat civilians with impunity (16.7–22). commoda tractemus primum communia, quorum haut minimum illud erit, ne te pulsare togatus audeat, immo, etsi pulsetur, dissimulet nec audeat excussos praetori ostendere dentes et nigram in facie tumidis liuoribus offam atque oculum medico nil promittente relictum. Bardaicus iudex datur haec punire uolenti calceus et grandes magna ad subsellia surae legibus antiquis castrorum et more Camilli seruato, miles ne uallum litiget extra Page 69 →et procul a signis. вЂiustissima centurionum cognitio est, igitur de milite nec mihi derit ultio, si iustae defertur causa querellae.’ tota cohors tamen est inimica, omnesque manipli consensu magno efficiunt curabilis ut sit uindicta et grauior quam iniuria. Let us treat first their shared advantages, not least of which is the fact that a private citizen wouldn’t dare to beat you up—no, in fact, even if he were the one who gets a beating, he’d

lie about it and not dare to show his knocked-out teeth to the praetor, or the lump on his face, black with swollen bruises, or his remaining eye (with the doctor making no promises). A centurion’s boot is the judge provided to anyone who wants to punish these things, and for the jury, meaty calves—with the ancient laws of the camp and the custom of Camillus preserved: that no soldier go to court outside the wall and far from the standards. “The centurion’s trial is very fair where a soldier’s concerned, and I’ll not lack revenge as long as my case rests on a just complaint.” Nonetheless, the whole troop is hostile, and unanimously all the squads make sure that your “redress” needs medical attention and is worse than the injury.

Our hypothetical togatus fares badly in his encounter with a soldier. Not only is he described in terms of the injuries to his face, but his attempt at justice is also characterized by imagery that is strangely corporeal. The centurion who acts as judge is figured as a Bardaic boot and the jurors are grandes surae, “meaty calves.”140 What begins as a contrast between civilian and soldier turns momentarily into a competition between bodies: on the one side, a bruised, swollen, toothless, and partly eyeless head; on the other, a collection of legs and feet. By describing the trial in these corporeal terms, the speaker turns it into a reenactment of the original attack.141 The two spheres come into contact only in violence: the injuries to the civilian’s face may well suggest that he had been kicked in the head, and in court we first see the soldiers as feet. Just as Juvenal uses the mind-blind approach here when he turns the soldiers into a collection of feet, so too do the soldiers (and the bully from Satire 3) treat their victims as little more than bodies to be trampled. Page 70 →The idea that soldiers cannot be beaten while civilians can is an ironic inversion of Roman norms, for while tradition did not, in most cases, allow for corporal punishment of freeborn citizens, it had always made one notable exception: soldiers could be beaten as a disciplinary measure.142 For freeborn citizens outside of the military to be beaten or flogged represented extreme humiliation. Not only did corporal punishment evoke the punishment of slaves, but it could also be compared to sexual penetration.143 Admittedly there is a difference between legally imposed punishments and nighttime assaults on the street or drunken brawls with soldiers. Nevertheless, both of these poems represent as beatable the bodies of those not wealthy enough or well-connected enough to protect themselves. The beatable body of these citizens is evidence that they are becoming assimilated to slaves, who can be beaten and even penetrated with impunity. There is in these images, too, a sense of exclusion from power, for in each case legal redress is unavailable; in fact, the law that should protect these men helps their attackers, reenacting the physical beating in the social and legal sphere.144 In the case of Satire 16, the exclusion is made palpable in the image of the lone plaintiff having to go a distance to the soldiers’ camp, where the whole group of soldiers gangs up on him. Thus, the beatable body un-Romanizes Roman citizens and makes them legal outcasts. This gives added point to the bully’s insults in Satire 3: not only is the victim’s poverty mocked but he is also called a Jew, and thus, as Juvenal tends to see it, foreign, since he regularly links Judaism with the Greek east.

The Obliterated Body If the beaten body shows that average citizens have to fear marginalization and assimilation to slaves, then the body destroyed indicates an even more radical alienation. In a climate in which elite men might wonder just what value their lives had, even worse than death is utter annihilation such that no trace of an Page 71 →individual person remains. Commemoration was a central concern of the Roman elite, and so here we find an anxiety about a fate that would prevent adequate commemoration after death. In the third Satire, Umbricius must leave Rome, he says, because he can neither afford it nor endure the immoral behavior he would have to engage in to succeed there. Among other things, he cannot act like a Greek or engage in the various acts of deception and vice that might help him curry favor. Or at least this is his account—scholars long ago began to doubt Umbricius’ integrity.145 To Courtney, for example, he is someone who simply refuses to go out and get a job.146 His problem is not that he cannot survive but that he cannot win preferments in the new order that has arisen. He appears to be a bigot who wants to be handed an easy life. Moreover, whatever

attitudes he expresses, the poem casts him as a dead man: he is leaving the Rome he says he could not survive for Cumae, where tradition placed an entrance to the Underworld. This fits well with a character whose name can be interpreted to mean “Mr. Ghost.”147 Yet the poem’s speaker, who reports Umbricius’ speech to us, identifies Cumae with Baiae (3.4), the most famous of antiquity’s Italian resorts. The man who complains that he cannot afford the big city of Rome is moving to the Bay of Naples; a modern analogue would be to move from Beverly Hills to Palm Springs, to save money and lead a humbler life. Here I want to single out another character in Umbricius’ tale of woe, a hypothetical everyman designed to show us how far things have fallen in urban Rome. We meet him just after Umbricius describes some of the dangers of walking through the streets of Rome (3.254–56). Page 72 →.В .В . longa coruscat serraco ueniente abies, atque altera pinum plaustra uehunt; nutant alte populoque minantur. .В .В . a long fir tree wobbles when the heavy cart comes by, and other wagons carry pine. These beams shimmy high above and threaten the people. With the exception of the vehicles that carried building materials for public works, wheeled traffic was not permitted during the day in Rome, but, says Umbricius, these carts are bad enough.148 Some carry loads of logs that extend out of the carts, threatening to break away and fall onto the passing crowd. Other such wagons would carry loads of stone, and now Umbricius imagines what would happen if such a vehicle accidentally dumped its load onto a passerby (3.257–61). nam si procubuit qui saxa Ligustica portat axis et euersum fudit super agmina montem, quid superest de corporibus? quis membra, quis ossa inuenit? obtritum uolgi perit omne cadauer more animae. For if a vehicle carrying Ligurian stone has snapped its axle and dumped a mountain upside down onto the crowds, what remains of the bodies? Who finds the limbs? The bones? Every body of common men is worn down just as the soul. It is no surprise that a man crushed under a pile of large building stones is injured or even killed. Yet Juvenal focuses only on the body itself: there are no remains. Even more striking is the sententious obtritum uolgi perit omne cadauer / more animae, which sounds like a worker’s lament. It can be translated in several complementary ways, and it is important to see the fluidity of the description. As I have translated it above, for example, it has a general significance: for the uulgus, the body shows the marks of an oppressive life as does the soul. It also has a more literal application to the victim here: “The whole body of the common man has been ground away, like his soul had” (3.261–67). Page 73 →domus interea secura patellas iam lauat et bucca foculum excitat et sonat unctis striglibus et pleno componit lintea guto.

haec inter pueros uarie properantur, at ille iam sedet in ripa taetrumque nouicius horret porthmea nec sperat caenosi gurgitis alnum infelix nec habet quem porrigat ore trientem. Meanwhile his unworried household staff washes the dishes and puffs on the fire, bangs the oiled strigils, and sets out the towels once the oil bottle has been refilled. In the middle of all this, they hurry the slaves on various tasks, but the master himself sits on the bank and, a new arrival, shudders at the grim ferryman and has no hope of the unhappy boat on the marshy pool and no coin to offer from his lips. As we have seen, Umbricius (“Mr. Ghost”) is himself cast as a socially dead man, so that this character within his narration takes on significance as a representation of what Umbricius feels has happened to himself. Yet the portrait reveals more than a sense of exclusion tantamount to social death. Our victim has been described as one of the uulgus, a rank and file Roman below the level of the elite—and the humorous picture of him penniless on the bank of the Styx might seem to reinforce that image. Yet the contrasting scene set in the dead man’s house gives the lie to Umbricius’ assertion that the man is a sub-elite and poor. Presumably it also gives the lie to Umbricius’ own complaints about wealth. The scene on the shore of the Styx is not merely a humorous image with which to end this vignette; it also ties together a number of running motifs. Like Crispinus from the first Satire (along with all of Juvenal’s other parvenus), our obliterated Roman washes up penniless, a foreigner on someone else’s shore. The man Juvenal pities is now in a prime spot to begin his own social ascent as an outsider, unimportant at home. The fact that he has washed up in the Underworld is interesting too, since it is explicitly a Greek Underworld, with the familiar Greek Charon described by the Greek loanword porthmea. The Greeks that couldn’t be escaped in Rome are here too, but they are in charge. Perhaps there is a sly subtext: once the Greeks hold sway in Rome, it will be no different from the Underworld itself. In discussing this particular set of passages, Juvenal scholars have sometimesPage 74 → forgotten that the “poor” of Juvenal’s Satires are merely less rich than the very wealthy. This man, for example, has a household staff of slaves preparing for his return, and thus he must be wealthy enough to feed and house these slaves. Moreover their preparations suggest a well-to-do household, since the man will enjoy a massage and exercise before dinner, and it may even be implied that he has his own bathing facility, as some wealthy Romans did. Umbricius’ idea of what it means to be down and out seems still to amount to quite a bit of wealth, and we are reminded that his journey to the Underworld is also, in his case, a retreat that brings him to the area around the resort town of Baiae. Still, the imagery of being crushed out of existence is significant. For Umbricius, failure to operate on the highest levels of the elite is tantamount to death (as the poem casts him as a ghost who has to leave Rome), and in fact to a death so utter that not a trace remains. For a man such as this, his personal failure to succeed, whatever we think of it, means that he has ceased to exist in any way. (For another man very much like Umbricius see the discussion of Naevolus in Sat. 9, chapter 5.) But Satire 3 is not the only poem in which a man’s life ends when his body is literally erased from the world. In Satire 15, we find a gruesome description of cannibalism that raises similar issues, though the context is different.149 The poem begins as a kind of diatribe about the differences between savage Egypt and the civilized world of Greece and Rome. (This in itself is a striking change from the earlier poem in which all things Greek are universally despised, and it is difficult to know whether this ecumenism is simply a pose to sharpen the criticism of the Egyptians.) The scene that concerns us, and which dominates much of the poem, is one of murder and cannibalism at a festival. We’re told first that an ancestral religious hatred still rages between two villages (15.32–38):

inter finitimos uetus atque antiqua simultas, inmortale odium et numquam sanabile uulnus, ardet adhuc Ombos et Tentura. summus utrimque Page 75 →inde furor uolgo, quod numina uicinorum odit uterque locus, cum solos credat habendos esse deos quos ipse colit. Among neighbors an ancient and long-standing quarrel, a deathless hatred and wound never to be healed blazes still between Ombi and Tentyra. Hence for this crowd there is the greatest fanaticism on either side, because each place hates the other’s divinities, since each believes that only those that it worships should be considered gods. This opening description of long-standing religious hatred is important, not least because it points up the hypocrisy of the speaker, who has already denounced the Egyptians for having barbarous, absurd gods (15.1–12).150 It also lets us see from the start that the fanatical hatred and anger that lead to the grim murder have a specific context in which two groups exclude each other on what we might think of as ideological grounds. Thus this murder is inspired by the desire to hurt not simply a human being but specifically “one of them,” the outsider whose exclusion, and in this case whose murder and consumption, confirms the identity of the group. This, of course, is also one of the things that the speaker of Satire 15 as a whole does—he scapegoats the Egyptians in order to paint a unified and palatable picture of Greco-Roman culture. The cannibalism of the fifteenth poem is thus a graphic representation of the mechanism of satiric invective as well as abjection.151 What follows is a description of the festival itself. The people of Ombi are drunkenly celebrating a religious festival when the Tentyrans attack. The Tentyrans are driven away, but the festive mood of the Ombites has turned into anger and, in a fine phrase, ieiunum odium, “hungry hatred.” Most everyone is wounded, but to them this is child’s play, since no one has died. As the Tentyrans are chased away, things turn from a fight into murder (15.75–83). terga fugae celeri praestant instantibus Ombis qui uicina colunt umbrosae Tentura palmae. labitur hinc152 quidam nimia formidine cursum Page 76 →praecipitans capiturque. ast illum in plurima sectum frusta et particulas, ut multis mortuus unus sufficeret, totum corrosis ossibus edit uictrix turba, nec ardenti decoxit aeno aut ueribus, longum usque adeo tardumque putauit expectare focos, contenta cadauere crudo. As the Ombites press on, those who dwell near Tentyra of the shady palm turn their backs in swift flight. As he presses his escape, one of them falls on his face in excessive panic, and he is caught. But the victorious crowd eats him entirely, bones gnawed away too, once he has been cut into many bits and morsels so that one corpse might be enough for many. Nor did they cook him in the bronze

cauldron or on spits—they thought it would be drawn out and much too slow to wait for the fire, but were satisfied with raw cadaver.

This body, like that of the accident victim in the third Satire, is also destroyed utterly (totum), with the mob even gnawing at the bones. We are not being overliteral here—such a victim is not likely to have been eaten away into nonexistence, but that is how the satirist chooses to describe things. He is cut up and entirely consumed, his bones eaten away as well—and here the intensive prefix con- is important: they leave nothing. After a brief digression (15.84–88) in which the speaker congratulates the fire on having been spared the duty of cooking for cannibals, the fact that the man has been consumed utterly is reinforced by a particularly gruesome image (15.89–92). nam scelere in tanto ne quaeras et dubites an prima uoluptatem gula senserit, ultimus ante qui stetit, absumpto iam toto corpore ductis per terram digitis aliquid de sanguine gustat. For lest you ask or wonder whether, in so great an atrocity, the first throat tasted all the pleasure: when the whole body had already been consumed, the one who had been standing rearmost tasted some of the blood by scooping up earth in his hands. Cheated of flesh and bone, the latecomer sucks the blood out of the mud where the poor victim was killed. Page 77 →It is easy to be distracted by the horror of this scene, even as we recognize its undoubtedly comic exaggeration, but what I want to emphasize here is the way that, as in Satire 3, the poet uses an image of the destruction of the body to signal the fate of an individual who is at odds with a community.153 In the case of Umbricius, he does not fit into the framework of Roman elite society, and so he experiences what he sees as social death. He makes the metaphor of bodily destruction as destruction of the individual self explicit: obtritum uolgi perit omne cadauer more animae. Here, the Tentyran victim is destroyed by an enemy rather than an accident, but it is an ideological enemy. The hatred that inspired the outsider to attack his neighbors during a religious festival inspires them to retaliate by destroying him, by erasing what they cannot tolerate. They affirm their communal identity by consuming his individuality. However different they are, poems 3 and 15 share this image of a body utterly destroyed. Poem 3 makes explicit that this metaphor suggests the fate of an individual who is socially negligible, even if Umbricius is wrong about what constitutes socially negligible status. Poem 15 does not discuss social insignificance in quite the same way: the victim here is destroyed by the hatred of a mob motivated in part by religious prejudice. Yet the situation is essentially the same. In poem 3 a man is destroyed by the accidental collapse of a wagon carrying luxury building materials. Important people sail over the heads of the unimportant in litters (3.239–42), but this man must walk home, apparently unaccompanied by even a slave. The fact that he is unimportant, at least in the eyes of Umbricius, makes him vulnerable and negligible. In the fifteenth Satire, a man is obliterated because he represents an excluded point of view. Neither man is part of the “in crowd” as depicted in the respective poems, and the result is that that group, intentionally or not, destroys him. Thus each of these passages reflects a Rome in which Roman elite men fear the potential meaninglessness of that identity.154

The Ravages of Age So far, we have been examining passages in which external forces do great harm to the body, but the body’s own natural changeability also provides Juvenal with Page 78 →a rich source of metaphor. In the tenth Satire, he uses descriptions of aging to tease out a number of anxieties about what can potentially happen to anyone.155 The

poem consists of Juvenal’s criticisms of what people hope and pray for. His method is to state a common object of prayer (e.g., wealth, military success, political power) and then to present a series of exempla and images that show it to be highly undesirable. In response to a hypothetical prayer for long life, Juvenal tells us (10.190–95) sed quam continuis et quantis longa senectus plena malis! deformem et taetrum ante omnia uultum dissimilemque sui, deformem pro cute pellem pendentisque genas et talis aspice rugas quales, umbriferos ubi pandit Thabraca saltus, in uetula scalpit iam mater simia bucca. But a long old age is full of evils—how unceasing and how many! Above all a face deformed and harsh and unlike itself, deformed hide instead of skin, sagging cheeks, and, look, wrinkles like those that a mother ape scratches on her aged jowls where Thabraca spreads out its shady glades. Though he uses the word uultus instead of facies, here Juvenal uses an exemplum in which the identity of an individual is indicated only by reference to the face. It would perhaps be more usual to translate deformis simply as “ugly,” but here I think we need the force of the prefix de-. The point is not merely that old people are unattractive but that they have acquired ugliness as their earlier forma, “beauty,” has departed. There is a palpable sense of transformation throughout this passage. In old age the face is deformis and taeter, but it is also dissimilis sui, “unlike itself,” a phrase that definitely suggests change from an earlier, putatively normal state. Old age makes us ugly and unfamiliar, as the body alienates us from ourselves. Skin becomes leathery and more like hide, Page 79 →and this quality, along with copious wrinkles, suggests an old mother ape (on which comparison more below). Moreover, individuality is lost (10.196–202): plurima sunt iuuenum discrimina, pulchrior ille hoc atque ille alio, multum hic robustior illo: una senum facies, cum uoce trementia membra et iam leue caput madidique infantia nasi; frangendus misero gingiua panis inermi. usque adeo grauis uxori natisque sibique, ut captatori moueat fastidia Cosso. Very many differences exist among young men: one is more attractive than another, and he than a third; one is much stronger than another. Old men have one face, limbs shaking like their voices, a head now smooth, and a baby’s runny nose. Bread has to be crushed by the poor thing with his toothless gums. At length he’s so burdensome to his wife and children, even to himself, that he moves the legacy-hunter Cossus to disgust. The first transformation wrought by old age is ugliness, as people become unattractive, leathery, and finally ape-

like. The next transformation is uniformity, as all the variety of youth is sloughed off and replaced by a sameness most resembling infancy, but this time, a disgusting infancy, barely tolerable even to legacy hunters who will normally put up with anything in hopes of becoming wealthy. The face remains—for the moment—the important indicator: una senum facies, “old men have one face.” So far, we’ve seen old age change a man’s external features and relationships (and, as usual, Juvenal is thinking only of men), but age also changes one’s ability to enjoy life (10.203–9). non eadem uini atque cibi torpente palato gaudia; nam coitus iam longa obliuio, uel si coneris, iacet exiguus cum ramice neruus et, quamuis tota palpetur nocte, iacebit. anne aliquid sperare potest haec inguinis aegri canities? quid quod merito suspecta libido est quae uenerem adfectat sine uiribus? Page 80 →The pleasures of wine and food are not the same on a sluggish palate. And as for sex, it’s by now long forgotten—or if you try, the thin penis just lies there swollen-veined and, although it’s stroked all night, will continue to lie there. Or can the dotage of this feeble groin have any hope? What of the fact that lust that tries for sex without the vigor for it is rightly suspect? The pleasures of food, wine, and sex are no more in old age, but impotence doesn’t keep all old men from trying, and we are presented with a somewhat pathetic picture of an impotent old man trying to get an erection. This particular transformation of old age entails more than a change in lifestyle and a typically Juvenalian prurience about sex. We have already seen that the elderly individuals described by Juvenal are men, even though he has chosen to describe an old man as looking like a female ape. The detail of the ape’s sex seems gratuitous—do aged male apes really look better than females?—but that detail is perhaps more intelligible now that we read Juvenal’s question about “lust that tries for sex without the vigor for it.” Commentators note that Juvenal is alluding to oral sex but remain coy otherwise, but if our old man cannot develop an erection, what are his sexual options? He can have oral sex performed on him, but that would seem to run into the same problem as the masturbation implied by palpetur. He can perform oral sex on another person, female or male. Or he can allow himself to be penetrated rather than doing the penetrating. These last two possibilities involve violating cultural taboos, since freeborn men were not supposed to be penetrated and performing oral sex on a woman was considered even worse than performing fellatio on a man. Juvenal seems to be saying that an obviously impotent old man who is nevertheless determined to have sex will have to do it by becoming passive in some way, subordinating himself either to a man or a woman. Thus old age makes one ugly, infantile, and even effeminate. The common face of old men, after all, is that of a female animal. More follows (209–70) concerning the many ills of old age with three examples, Nestor, Peleus, and Priam, all taken from Homer. Priam is an example of someone who lives long enough to see his fortunes reversed, until he is slaughtered more like an animal than a king, but as if to bring home that old age and its attendant misfortunes transform us, Juvenal gives us the example of Hecuba, Priam’s wife (10.271–72): exitus ille utcumque hominis, sed torua canino latrauit rictu quae post hunc uixerat uxor.

Page 81 →That at least was a human ending, but the wife who survived him barked from a dog’s maw. If old age makes most of us look ape-like in the end, it turned Hecuba into an actual dog. It is true that everyone ages and that most people find the young more attractive than the elderly; it is true that old age is often accompanied by a decline in faculties. The literal transformation of Hecuba into a dog, however, underscores another point: in old age the voice is lost, since no one is listening anyway. Juvenal’s descriptions of aging point to the frailty of what he sees as a man’s hold on his proper identity, for even as the Satires posit freeborn men as the rightful holders of wealth and power, passages such as this suggest that virility and individual identity are transitory. Men can guard against effeminizing themselves through incorrect behavior, but they cannot prevent aging, and that process will effeminize them anyway. Thus the discussion of aging recapitulates the overall dynamic of Satire 10, in which unhappiness appears to be inevitable, at least for members of the elite, who are shown why they should not actively want anything. For the poem’s insistent reduction of all the kinds of life one normally finds desirable is another way of expressing the anxieties and sense of exclusion that underlie so many of the poems, especially the first Satire. Whatever the ostensibly benign philosophical purpose of Satire 10, the poem also allows the satirist to debunk any of the kinds of life readers might have wanted, as we find out that there is no point in asking to be (and thus, a fortiori, in being) powerful, articulate, beautiful, or even healthy. In Horace’s hands, there might have been a greater development of alternatives—a golden mean of contentment for those who knew what to ask for. But this satirist does not let us see any alternative except not praying for, and thus presumably not getting, anything we might want. Even Juvenal’s one apparently positive recommendation for something safe to desire, “a healthy mind in a healthy body” (mens sana in corpore sano, 10.356) will only work out if the healthy body doesn’t get old.156 Page 82 →

Surrogate Bodies In the passages discussed so far, Juvenal has been using the living and dead bodies of human beings as metaphors for a variety of things; he makes similar use of surrogate bodies such as statues.157 These bodies at a second remove allow Juvenal to suggest an important idea: if the individual can be treated merely as a body, he can also be replaced with a surrogate. Such surrogates can be manipulated and destroyed just as the real body can be, but there is a further implication too. Surrogate bodies are representations of the individual and as such they bring the individual into the realm of the textual. Thus, once the body is given a surrogate, the individual becomes subject not only to those things that can be done to his actual body but to the way he can be coopted and manipulated in the sphere of representation. The opening of the eighth Satire makes much of the statues and wax masks that are supposed to remind elite Romans of their ancestors (8.1–5, 9).158 Stemmata quid faciunt? quid prodest, Pontice, longo sanguine censeri, pictos ostendere uultus maiorum et stantis in curribus Aemilianos et Curios iam dimidios umerosque minorem Coruinum et Galbam auriculis nasoque carentem, si coram Lepidis male uiuitur?159 What use are genealogies? What good is it, Ponticus, to be valued because of a long bloodline, to

point to the painted faces of one’s ancestors, Aemiliani standing in their chariots, Curii (now only half), armless Corvinus, and Galba missing his ears and nose, if in front of the Lepidi one lives badly?

The ostensible point is that pedigree means nothing in the face of personal immorality, but it is striking that Juvenal moves from stemmata very quickly Page 83 →to physical representations of the great men of the past.160 The description of these images starts out neutrally enough, with the painted death-masks and statues of generals in their chariots (presumably represented as triumphatores), but it then becomes a representation of mutilated statues.161 As Courtney observes, the state of the statues connotes the decay of the old Republican families, and of Rome itself.162 As always in Juvenal, the details are suggestive. Some are half of what they were (Curios iam dimidios), others are armless (umerosque minorem Coruinum), but particularly interesting is the statue identified as Galba.163 It is missing the ears and nose, not an unlikely state for an antique statue. Yet these particular injuries on a living man would suggest that he had been caught and punished for adultery.164 If the august names attached to the statues provide a contrast to the debased state of their modern descendants, perhaps the statues themselves have become more of a mirror (8.9–12).165 effigies quo tot bellatorum, si luditur alea pernox ante Numantinos, si dormire incipis ortu luciferi, quo signa duces et castra mouebant? To what end so many images of warriors, if one shoots dice all night in front of the Numantini, if you go to sleep at sunrise, when the generals were moving the standards and their camps? Here again contrast is significant—the descendant of these generals gambles the night away in front of their images, going to bed at dawn, when the men portrayed would already have been awake and active in service to the state; thus he makes a mockery of his ancestors’ hard work on military campaigns. This is the first example of misbehavior in Satire 8, and it contrasts with the past only Page 84 →in the type of activity described. The use of a contrast to imply decline next unites with the imagery of the body (8.13–18). cur Allobrogicis et magna gaudeat ara natus in Herculeo Fabius lare, si cupidus, si uanus et Euganea quantumuis mollior agna, si tenerum attritus Catinensi pumice lumbum squalentis traducit auos emptorque ueneni frangenda miseram funestat imagine gentem? Why should a Fabius, though born in the household of Hercules, rejoice in statues of Allobrogici and the Great Altar, if he’s greedy, if he’s vain and ever so much softer than a Euganean fleece, if with his smooth butt, depilated with Catanian pumice, he betrays his hairy ancestors and, as a purchaser of poison, destroys his wretched family when his statue has to be smashed? Whether we take Allobrogicis to refer to the cognomen or the images of ancestors, we have already seen that these great names are attached in this poem to the physical representation of these ancestors—and thus they are

physical representations of family honor. This particular Fabius is not only described as greedy and vain; he is also described with reference to both body and the surrogate body of his statue. He is softer than fleece, and one of the ways in which he traduces his ancestry is by depilating his buttocks, a sign of effeminacy. There is a contrast here between his hirsute, manly ancestors and his own smooth, effeminate body, but there is also a contrast between the polishing he applies to himself and the state of the ancestral statues we have already seen.166 More important is what his purchasing of poison causes: it destroys (funestat) his family and causes his statue to be smashed because of his disgrace. It is not clear whether we should take the verb funestat literally, but if we do, this Fabius is represented as murdering his family (presumably with poison). Significantly, the destruction of the family, in this poem about pedigree, is also the destruction of the individual wrongdoer—and that destruction is carried out metonymically through his statue. Ironically, the disgraceful behavior of Fabius—signaled in the image of his soft, smooth, effeminate body—puts his statue very much in the shape of those other statues we have Page 85 →seen.167 Yet the presence here of a broken statue of Fabius among those of the honorable men of the past calls into question whether we should believe that they were all that honorable after all.168

Recycling the Mighty The surrogate body as a sign of the individual will continue with two related figures from Satire 10. Here the speaker focuses on the way an individual can become, in a certain sense, the property of the community—not literally as a slave but as an element of its discourse. In one sense, this is the opposite problem from that explored in images of the obliterated body. In those, anxieties over virtual social death or profound alienation are figured as erasure of the physical form. Here physical form is used, in the case of Sejanus, to emphasize his role in and usefulness to a discourse about power and, in the case of Hannibal, whose physical form ultimately gives way to a purely linguistic existence, to demonstrate the way importance and fame can ultimately turn one into a marker in someone else’s discursive games.169 To illustrate the ultimately unhappy fate of the powerful, the speaker again turns to the representation of individuals as statues (10.56–58).170 quosdam praecipitat subiecta potentia magnae inuidiae, mergit longa atque insignis honorum pagina. Power, subject to great envy, casts down some; their long and distinguished resumГ© of offices sinks them. What follows is, as we would expect, an exemplum, but it is one curiously and suggestively structured, since the identity of the exemplary figure is at first concealed.171Page 86 → This concealment supports the point: the powerful all end up the same way, and we are not surprised by the fate of such a person until the particular individual is named (10.58–64). descendunt statuae restemque secuntur, ipsas deinde rotas bigarum inpacta securis caedit et inmeritis franguntur crura caballis. iam strident ignes, iam follibus atque caminis ardet adoratum populo caput et crepat ingens Seianus, deinde ex facie toto orbe secunda

fiunt urceoli, pelues, sartago, matellae. The statues fall, toward the rope’s lead; next the axe blow cuts down the very wheels of the chariot, and the undeserving horses get their legs broken. Now hiss the flames; now, because of the bellows and the oven, the head the people adored blazes, and pop goes mighty Sejanus! And then from that face second in all the world are made jugs, plates, a skillet, and chamber pots. Here, as in our earlier examples from Satire 6 and 10, an individual is referred to simply as facies. While Sejanus’ actual body is not described, Juvenal has created an even more malleable stand-in. The statue is an artificial body that highlights the constructedness of identity and, more importantly, the role of other people in that construction, since a statue is made, viewed, destroyed, and recreated by individuals other than its subject. What is striking here is the indirectness of the description. We see first statues being pulled down and melted. Specifically, these are equestrian groups, and thus statues of the very great.172 We see a statue’s head going into the furnaces to be melted down and reused, but we still do not know whom we are seeing—only that the figure had been popular. We might expect, even as late as line 62, that the exemplum will be of a good statesman unjustly doomed, but just before it is consumed we recognize the features on the metal face: Sejanus, the most notorious of Rome’s (often) sinister praetorian prefects, right-hand man to Tiberius, and unsuccessful rival to his employer, destroyed, physically Page 87 →as well as politically and socially, by a letter from the emperor that denounced him before the Senate. So the mighty Sejanus is introduced to us first as a statue, and his downfall plays out as the destruction and recycling of his statues, but another transformation follows. Mighty Sejanus’ statues are reused as mundane vessels, a list culminating in matellae, chamber pots, the ultimate humiliation. More is being said here than that the mighty, when they fall, fall hard. The humble nature of the things made from Sejanus’ statues makes another point. The powerful are recycled. Their place above the crowd—Sejanus is described after all as facies orbe toto secunda (“the face second in all the world”)—is temporary, and the role they play as masters is closely related to their utility. The adoration of the people gave Sejanus statues, and now that emperor and people are both done with him, the statues become useful in another way. This exemplum is not over, and, again, the representation of the man and his fate is relentlessly physical (10.65–67). pone domi laurus, duc in Capitolia magnum cretatumque bouem: Seianus ducitur unco spectandus, gaudent omnes. Put laurels on the house; lead the great, chalked bull up to the Capitolium. Sejanus is dragged on a hook for all to watch—and everyone rejoices. As in the case of the Christians killed by Tigellinus, Sejanus too has become a spectacle. A hypothetical conversation between two men follows, who, now that the tide has turned, fall over themselves to vilify Sejanus. The man himself has become unimportant, and he is now only a marker in someone else’s gambit to defer disfavor (10.67–70). вЂquae labra, quis illi uultus erat! numquam, si quid mihi credis, amaui hunc hominem. sed quo cecidit sub crimine? quisnam delator quibus indicibus, quo teste probauit?’

“What lips he had! What a face! I never—if you trust me at all—liked this man. But what charge brought him down? Which informer proved it, using what proofs, what witness?” Page 88 →The first interlocutor looks down at the man and remarks on the lips and face. Earlier we learned that the head of Sejanus, at least in statuary form, was revered by the people. Here we cannot immediately tell whether this speaker is looking at such a statue or at the corpse itself, and Juvenal’s point is perhaps that it doesn’t matter much either way. Becoming mighty like Sejanus converts one into an inanimate object. Viewed this way, Sejanus can be treated as any other object, and the speaker, before wondering at Sejanus’ downfall, asserts his dislike for the man—an idea seriously undercut by the exclamations “What lips he had! What a face!” (10.81–89). вЂperituros audio multos.’ вЂnil dubium, magna est fornacula.’ вЂpallidulus mi Bruttidius meus ad Martis fuit obuius aram; quam timeo, uictus ne poenas exigat Aiax ut male defensus. curramus praecipites et, dum iacet in ripa, calcemus Caesaris hostem. sed uideant serui, ne quis neget et pauidum in ius ceruice obstricta dominum trahat.’ hi sermones tunc de Seiano, secreta haec murmura uolgi. “I hear that a lot of people are going to die.” “No doubt—the ovens are huge.” “My friend Bruttidius looked a little pale to me at the altar of Mars—how I fear that defeated Ajax will exact punishments on the grounds that he was badly defended. Let’s run right down and kick Caesar’s enemy while he’s lying on the shore. But let’s make sure the slaves see, so that none of them can deny it and drag his master to court with a noose around his neck.” These were the conversations about Sejanus then, these the secret mutterings of the crowd. The sudden downfall of Sejanus inspires fear, and these anonymous speakers wonder who is to be next. One voices concern for a friend—Sejanus’ crony and informant Bruttidius Niger—only to undercut the concern a moment later by suggesting that they run off and make sure they are seen mistreating the corpse.173 The great honorific equestrian statue of Sejanus was melted down to become, inter alia, chamber pots. Here, his corpse becomes a way to show loyalty.Page 89 → As a marker in this game of power and weakness, Sejanus has ceased to matter as an individual at all. Juvenal has more to say about Sejanus, but these passages in which his body and its surrogate are central may be helpfully read in conjunction with his discussion, later in the same poem, of Hannibal—the most menacing nonRoman the Romans had ever encountered. Juvenal’s descriptions here are less overtly concerned with the realities of the body, but, in fact, the lack of corporality itself becomes an important part of what he is saying (10.147–50).174 expende Hannibalem: quot libras in duce summo inuenies? hic est quem non capit Africa Mauro percussa oceano Niloque admota tepenti

rursus ad Aethiopum populos aliosque elephantos. Weigh Hannibal: how many pounds will you find in the greatest general? This is the man whom Africa did not contain, Africa that takes a pounding from the Moorish surf and stretches to the tepid Nile, right down to the peoples of Aethiopia and their peculiar elephants. Expende Hannibalem is a distinctly physical image, suggesting not only the apparatus of the scale but the weight of the object, or person, weighed.175 The image that follows, of a man so great that Africa could not hold him, only adds to the metaphor’s insistence on weight and even physical size. Magnitude of one sort is troped as magnitude of another. But a greater transformation is yet to come for Hannibal and any who would be like him (10.157–67). o qualis facies et quali digna tabella, cum Gaetula ducem portaret belua luscum! exitus ergo quis est? o gloria! uincitur idem nempe et in exilium praeceps fugit atque ibi magnus mirandusque cliens sedet ad praetoria regis, donec Bithyno libeat uigilare tyranno. Page 90 →finem animae, quae res humanas miscuit olim, non gladii, non saxa dabunt nec tela, sed ille Cannarum uindex et tanti sanguinis ultor anulus. i, demens, et saeuas curre per Alpes ut pueris placeas et declamatio fias. O what a face, what a portrait it deserved, when a Gaetulan beast was carrying the one-eyed general! So how did he end up? Oh glory! He loses of course and flees straight into exile, and there he sits at the king’s tent, a great and wondrous client, until it please the Bithynian monarch to wake. The end of that life that once had thrown human affairs into turmoil will be brought about by neither swords, nor stones, nor spears. Rather the one to vindicate Cannae and avenge so much blood will be a ring. Go, madman, and speed across the wild Alps to please schoolboys and become a declamation. Once again facies is used to denote the person. In a passage just before this (10.155–56), Hannibal looked a bit ridiculous announcing his plan to plant the Carthaginian flag in the Subura; here he looks absurd and grotesque, as, having lost an eye, he rides an elephant (or, rather, is carried by one, as though we can already see a hint of weakness).176 We see him brought low as the client of an eastern king, sitting and waiting for his master to wake up. Nor in the end does he get a proud military death—instead he is poisoned. The poem deflates not only Hannibal but also Rome. Cannarum uindex should denote Scipio Africanus, the victor of Zama and thus the general who brought Rome victory in the Second Punic War. Instead, his job is here attributed to an inanimate object, a poisoner’s ring. The changes in Hannibal’s fortunes are signaled by his changed body. Whereas he was too big for Africa to hold with all its elephants, he is now carried on a single elephant’s back, and he has lost an eye as well. Hannibal has another fate in store for him too, and it is this one that represents the final and most striking

transformation of the great general. Hannibal and any like him mad enough to pursue greatness as a general are told that the most they can hope for is an afterlife in classroom exercises. Et declamatio fias is one of Juvenal’s most original and most challenging phrases, one that, like modern language of “becoming a statistic,” efficiently expresses a certain dehumanization. Interestingly, that modern example shows how dehumanizing it Page 91 →can be to treat an individual human being as a number or as a set of abstract characteristics, while Juvenal’s example might, by ancient standards, indicate the opposite, that survival as an exemplum in literature or even in schoolbooks preserves one’s glory. Instead, Juvenal’s reduction of Hannibal to a practice exercise indicates that the famous, like the human statistics of our newspapers, become something abstract and convention-bound, susceptible to and manipulated by the rules of a game, literary, educational, and otherwise. Satire 1 forcefully made the case that continual appearance in the arenas of epic and tragedy rendered the great heroes safe not glorious. Paradoxically, the more distinguished one’s achievements are, the more likely one is to be controlled and altered by tradition. Enough distinction and one becomes indistinct. Just as images of the obliterated body might trigger concern over failure of commemoration, the image of Hannibal’s endless commemoration in school exercises raises a related problem: commemoration only in a form useful to one’s enemies and at one’s own expense. Moreover, Hannibal and his story can now be easily manipulated, and Juvenal’s poem is itself a rhetorically savvy manipulation of the Hannibal tradition. The mighty Hannibal has been transformed by Juvenal into the plague of the rhetoric teachers described in Satire 7 (154): crambe repetita, “bubble-and-squeak rehashed” to quote Peter Green’s fine translation.177 Hannibal’s body was first represented as massive to underscore his importance and power. His changed lot in the world was represented in part by the maiming of that body, just as Sejanus’ statue and corpse were treated differently after his downfall. Hannibal’s final form, however, is not corporeal at all. Instead he exists as a topos that can be endlessly recycled and manipulated. He has become a stock part of the apparatus of Roman education, more fully enslaved by his enemy than he would have been if he had been led in a triumph through Rome itself. Two more points connect Hannibal here to the concerns of the Satires more broadly. The first is that, once brought low, Hannibal becomes exactly the kind of put-upon client Juvenal sees himself as being, especially in poem 1. The once great Hannibal—Rome’s greatest individual foe—waits in the morning like a good, dependent Roman. Ironically, Hannibal becomes a symbol of Juvenal’s typical elite Roman, once great but now the mistreated hanger-on of a more important personage, and a foreigner to boot. Hannibal’s transformation into a Page 92 →declamation, moreover, both reinforces Juvenal’s presentation of him and reminds us of the deficiencies that Juvenal occasionally reveals in his own talent. Early in the first Satire, Juvenal admits that he has a thorough grounding in myth and in declamation. In keeping with this training he can summon and manipulate Hannibal, a tried and true topos, at will. At the same time, this display of declamatory ability reminds us of the failure, in Satire 1, to transcend declamation and its tired topics. Juvenal may not be wrong in labelling Hannibal a hackneyed rehash, but perhaps it takes one to know one. The bodies we have seen in this chapter have been used to represent a number of different anxieties about status. While anyone might be prone to such anxieties, they would mostly have concerned male members of the elite who felt that they were near the bottom of that group socially and financially. Fears that the body can be beaten with impunity activate a set of anxieties that historic protections for free citizens no longer matter in the new order. Describing the annihilation of the body becomes a way of giving voice to feelings of exclusion from the elite—for men like Umbricius, such exclusion is death and, moreover, a death tantamount to the complete erasure of the individual who has been excluded. So too does the outsider—the ideological foe—find himself not only attacked but actually deleted by his enemies. Such images reflect a worry that an individual may not be as firmly embedded in the ranks of the elite as he should be. As in these cases, Sejanus’ statues, markers of his identity and status, are destroyed when his power is lost. But alongside these external threats, Juvenal also shows that one’s identity can be altered by the body’s own inevitable transformations. Age obliterates signs of individuality and turns at least some men more or less into women. If some bodies are destroyed because they belong, as it were, to nobodies, other bodies become a means of representation to be used by other people—as if a chess player were suddenly to find himself as a pawn on the board. Not mere grotesques, Juvenal’s bodies

are a means of expressing fears about what does, and what can, happen to a Roman man.

Page 93 →

Chapter 3 The Dangers of Debasement Manhood and Class In the previous chapter, we saw that the body that cannot be protected, controlled, or even stabilized in a coherent male form serves as an index of the male subject who is always also potentially an object, a man whose lack of wealth or status can turn him into punching bag, scapegoat, school exercise, or ultimately even a woman. We have examined ways in which Juvenal’s poetry uses images of the body to play on and work out anxieties about what becomes of individuals who unwisely confront the powerful; who become, or believe that they have become, too insignificant for their societies to notice; who find themselves consumed by the irrational hatred of others; or who, through their power, notoriety, or historical importance, become public property subject to the whims of language and tradition. In contrast, this chapter will look at a variety of men who have, in the eyes of the speaker, debased themselves willingly. No outside force—whether natural, like age, or human, like an emperor—brings about their downfall. Nor indeed, and this is particularly infuriating to our satirist, do they necessarily have a downfall. It will become clear that descriptions of men who behave in ways which are, according to traditional standards, inappropriate to their station furnish Juvenal with another rich source for exploring the nature of Roman society and its crises of elite male identity, since these negative examples make it clear that everyone in Rome is interconnected, and thus private vice becomes a public problem. Accordingly, they highlight another potent anxiety in Roman elite culture: the identity, the status, and even, to some extent, the morality of an individual cannot entirely be safeguarded by that individual alone; individuals can never be quite separated from their social class. In other words, the betrayal Page 94 →of elite norms and values by one person can devalue even those members of the elite who do not do such things. Ultimately, the misbehavior of individuals threatens Rome as a state; even when private vices would seem to have a more limited scope, they threaten to unravel the complicated fabric of society.

Mulio consul We begin with Lateranus (8.146–50):178 praeter maiorum cineres atque ossa uolucri carpento rapitur pinguis Lateranus, et ipse, ipse rotam adstringit sufflamine mulio consul, nocte quidem, sed Luna uidet, sed sidera testes intendunt oculos. Right by the ashes and bones of his ancestors fat Lateranus is whisked along in his winged chariot, and he himself—he himself!—applies the brake, a muleteer consul. At night, yes, but the moon sees, the stars look on with witnessing eyes. Even though he is consul, Lateranus drives himself about, at least at night. To underline the sense of decadence here, Juvenal emphasizes that Lateranus’ night rides take him right by the tombs of his ancestors, and we are left to imagine their silent outrage. Thus, Lateranus is reminiscent of the young nobles of Sat. 8 who carry out their gambling and nocturnal revels in front of the images of their ancestors. The moon and stars—traditional

witnesses of clandestine activities such as theft and adultery—look on, a detail that lets us know how we must regard Lateranus’ strange class betrayal.179 The phrase mulio consul is brilliant, since the two words fight each other on a very basic level, something like “king of the beggars.” The distance the phrase traces between the height of the consulship and the lowly status of a muleteer is reinforced by the kind of cart that Lateranus drives, a carpentum, a vehicle with associations both of low status and of women in particular. A consul should ride in state, driven by another; Lateranus drives himself about in the most ridiculous vehicle he can find. Page 95 →The speaker seems to feel that the consulship exercises at least some restraining influence on Lateranus’ behavior, as he next imagines Lateranus once that influence has been removed (8.150–57). finitum tempus honoris cum fuerit, clara Lateranus luce flagellum sumet et occursum numquam trepidabit amici iam senis ac uirga prior adnuet atque maniplos soluet et infundet iumentis hordea lassis. interea, dum lanatas robumque iuuencum more Numae caedit, Iouis ante altaria iurat solam Eponam et facies olida ad praesepia pictas. Once the period of his office has ended, Lateranus will take up the whip in broad daylight, and never will he fear meeting his friend, already an old man, but he’ll greet him with his riding crop, loosen the bundles of hay, and pour out the barley for his exhausted team. Until then, while he is slaughtering the sheep and the ruddy bullock in Numa’s prescribed manner, he swears before Jupiter’s altar—but by Epona alone and her painted image in the smelly stables. Lateranus’ clandestine activities will become shamelessly public as soon as his consulship is over. Then, he won’t even do aged friends the courtesy of not addressing them in public while engaged in such an absurd act—instead, he is even envisioned as feeding and grooming his team in front of the (presumably) respectable friend. This image of Lateranus as a muleteer, coming after he has been explicitly called such, leads the speaker back to the present with a new twist on his accusations. As consul, Lateranus must make the annual sacrifice to Jupiter Latiaris at the Feriae Latinae, but, we are told, as he sacrifices at Jove’s altar, he will swear only by a different deity, the Gallic import Epona.180 Several aspects of this image deserve comment. The scholiast tells us that Epona was the goddess of muleteers (dea mulionum est), though this has been doubted by some commentators.181 This attribution does, however, fit the logic of the passage—if Lateranus is really a muleteer consul, does he swear by a consul’s god or a muleteer’s? Yet even if Epona cannot be linked as specifically as we Page 96 →might like to the occupation of muleteer, the speaker’s point in evoking her is clear. A consul who drives himself around in a cart can be presumed to have defected from Roman values at a very deep level, replacing Jupiter himself with a Gallic goddess, and one whose primary associations were with animals and animal handlers at that. Long before Juvenal wrote, a variety of non-Italian divinities had established cults in Italy and in Rome itself. Some of these, especially the Greek cults of Apollo, Hercules, and Aesculapius, had become so naturalized that, for Juvenal’s period, it only makes sense to consider them Greek cults rather than Roman for purely historical or technical reasons. Others, though they had wide followings, still occasionally drew suspicion or were the subjects of scandal; among these were the cults of Isis and the Syrian goddess. (Half a century later, Apuleius would have great fun describing and mocking the immoral devotГ©s of such cults.) By associating Lateranus with

the cult of Epona, then, Juvenal suggests that he is somehow not a real Roman. He also links him to several characters in the second Satire whose behavior likewise gives the lie to their outward appearance and similarly brands them as inauthentic Romans. (As we shall see below, one of these, a certain Gracchus, also presents us with a religious problem.) Juvenal has developed the conceit of the muleteer consul into a literal image of Lateranus performing some of a muleteer’s tasks; he then transferred the emphasis this image placed on mulio in the phrase mulio consul to the word consul, but we saw that the muleteer was still present even in the most Roman and consular of settings. The image of Lateranus swearing by Epona before Jupiter’s altar suggests sacrilege and a disregard for Roman religious tradition. A similar emphasis on non-Roman religions and on a general disrespect for religious propriety underlies what follows (8.158–62). sed cum peruigiles placet instaurare popinas, obuius adsiduo Syrophoenix udus amomo currit, Idymaeae Syrophoenix incola portae hospitis adfectu dominum regemque salutans, et cum uenali Cyane succincta lagona. But when he’s in the mood to reconsecrate the all-night dives, a Phoenician runs up to meet him, dripping with the inevitable perfume, one of those Phoenicians who lives at the Idumaean Gate, greeting him with a host’s fondness as Page 97 →“master,” and “my lord,” and [up runs] Cyane, with her tunic girt up and a bottle for sale.182 Lateranus is in the habit of visiting popinae, drinking-houses. The verb instaurare is pointed: it is a technical term for renewal of a religious ritual, and as such it hints that visiting such places in the middle of the night is of a piece with Lateranus’ religious behavior.183 Along with his obvious familiarity to the owner of the place, it also suggests that this is not Lateranus’ first visit. The emphatic designation of the host as a Phoenician (Syrophoenix) plays into this also. The consul Lateranus betrays his station and his office by driving himself around, by preferring Epona to Jupiter even while sacrificing at the latter’s altar, and by hanging out with foreigners in inappropriate places. Yet the host is not only foreign, he is also Jewish—since the “Idumaean Gate” apparently refers to the fact that a large Jewish neighborhood stood near the Porta Capena. After he issues an obsequious greeting, Cyane arrives. A play on words hints that she is offering Lateranus more than a drink, since the uenalis lagona she brings can suggest both a jug of wine and her own genitals.184 This should make clear that the establishment in question is not a fit place for a consul. The speaker next imagines (8.163–64) an objection that Lateranus is only doing the sort of things one does in youth, and he responds (8.164–67) that boys may indeed be indulged for a time. Lateranus, however, is no boy (8.167–71). Lateranus ad illos thermarum calices inscriptaque lintea uadit maturus bello Armeniae Syriaeque tuendis amnibus et Rheno atque Histro. praestare Neronem securum ualet haec aetas.

Lateranus goes to those bars at the baths and their painted awnings at an age fit for war and guarding the rivers in Armenia and Syria, or the Rhine and the Danube. He’s the right age for keeping Nero safe. Page 98 →Two things surface here. The first is simply one more inappropriate place we might find Lateranus: the bars that could be found at the baths. The other is the implied insertion of the un-Roman Lateranus into the realm of war. Part of the problem, then, with Lateranus as consul is that he is more suited to the stable and the bar than to military command on Rome’s borders. Juvenal’s Satires are full of anxiety about foreign elements flooding Rome, and elsewhere too the problem turns out to be not on the borders but in the heart of Rome itself.185 Lateranus is the consul, the highest office under the republic and, during the principate, second in prestige only to the emperor—yet he isn’t policing the boundaries and keeping Rome Roman; he’s hanging out with a Phoenician Jew and worshipping a barbarian goddess. What follows continues the theme of Lateranus as commander not only because the behavior of commanders is highlighted throughout the poem but also as a way of showing how far his class betrayal has progressed (8.171–76).186 mitte Ostia, Caesar, mitte, sed in magna legatum quaere popina: inuenies aliquo cum percussore iacentem, permixtum nautis et furibus ac fugitiuis, inter carnifices et fabros sandapilarum et resupinati cessantia tympana galli. Send to Ostia for him, Caesar, yes send, but look for your lieutenant in a large tavern: you’ll find him reclining with some murderer, right in the midst of sailors and thieves and runaway slaves, among torturers and undertakers, and the idle drums of a lolling castrato-priest. The translation here cannot do justice to Juvenal’s dense Latin. The scholiast points out that Juvenal has supplied popina where he has led us to expect castris or a similar military word; moreover, as Ferguson notes, he has also surprised us twice with the same paraprosdokian, since he had already used the word as a Page 99 →surprising object for the religious verb instaurare.187 The emperor’s lieutenant cannot be found except among lowlifes. The company he keeps is described with a certain amount of double entendre; Caesar will find him iacentem, “reclining” (i.e., as often at parties) next to a murderer, but there is a sexual undertone to iacentem as well.188 Similarly, Juvenal avoids the bland inter until he has already used the participle permixtum with a similar meaning. Above I translate this word as “right in the midst of,” but it too suggests sex: Lateranus is “intermingling with” sailors, thieves, and runaway slaves. But it is a mixed company in other ways too: the next kind of disreputable person listed, right after the runaway slaves, is the carnifex (literally “butcher”), a person whose job was usually the torture of slaves. There are also undertakers and, finally, a Gallus—that is, a castrated priest of Cybele. This one is not currently making the loud orgiastic music associated with Cybele, since he is “lolling back,” presumably drunk. So if Caesar were to go looking for Lateranus he’d find him lying among a group that completely encapsulates the chaos of class, race, and gender that the Satires so often decry.189 It is also a group in which the enforcers of the law (a consul, a professional torturer) lie intermingled with criminals (a murderer, thieves, runaway slaves).190 Here too is the ultimate symbol of what is not Roman—the foreign priest of a foreign

goddess, unmanned and unmanly. Siting the consul in this company shows what Rome has become and what Lateranus really is: the consul is no better than a runaway slave or drunk eunuch. The speaker then makes the sense of intermingling—and of reversal of status—all the more clear (8.177–82). aequa ibi libertas, communia pocula, lectus non alius cuiquam, nec mensa remotior ulli. quid facias talem sortitus, Pontice, seruum? nempe in Lucanos aut Tusca ergastula mittas. at uos, Troiugenae, uobis ignoscitis et quae turpia cerdoni Volesos Brutumque decebunt. Page 100 →In that place liberty is equal-opportunity: cups are shared, no one has his own bed or a private table. What would you do, Ponticus, if you happened to get a slave like that? You’d send him to the workhouses of Lucania or Tuscany, of course. But you all, you scions of Troy, pardon yourselves, and what a tradesman would think disgusting is considered fitting for Brutus and Volesus. Aequa ibi libertas, “In that place liberty is equal-opportunity,” is likely to sound better to modern readers than to ancient ones, who would not generally have thought that runaway slaves deserved liberty of any kind, whatever they thought about murderers and Galli.191 The sexual undertones return here too: these men share cups, couches (lecti, also the regular word for beds), and tables. I do not think that Juvenal is trying to hint that Lateranus is sleeping with all sorts of men (though he doesn’t seem to be ruling it out either). Rather, the point is that it doesn’t matter—if Lateranus’ drinking bouts aren’t actual orgies, they might as well be.192 Behavior that would earn a slave harsh punishment, and that the working class would find beneath them, is now apparently forgivable in the upper classes, since the names Brutus and Volesus suggest Roman aristocrats from ancient families.193 Lateranus is a perfect emblem for social chaos.

A See-Through Lawsuit Before we continue with Satire 8, it will be useful to look at the second Satire and another Roman man whose personal misbehavior may have consequences for social stability, especially since it is carried on publicly and while dealing with the administration of Roman law (2.65–71).194 Page 101 →sed quid non facient alii, cum tu multicia sumas, Cretice, et hanc uestem populo mirante perores in Proculas et Pollittas? est moecha Fabulla; damnetur, si uis, etiam Carfinia: talem non sumet damnata togam. вЂsed Iulius ardet, aestuo.’ nudus agas: minus est insania turpis. But what won’t others do, Creticus, when you put on see-through mesh, and, while the people

look at this garment in amazement, you speak out against women like Procula and Politta? Fabulla is an adulteress; let Carfinia be found guilty too, if you like. Convicted, she still won’t put on a toga of that sort. “But July is blazing—I’m burning up.” Go to court in the nude—madness, but less disgusting.

Creticus is represented as pleading a court case, prosecuting women for adultery, and thus upholding Domitian’s adultery laws, but he does so wearing a see-through tunic. His improper clothing is contrasted with two other states: wearing the toga that convicted adulteresses were forced to wear and wearing nothing at all. The women whom Creticus prosecutes may be adulteresses but they would still draw the line at his level of immodesty. His state of dress is also contrasted with nudity, and, in particular, the nudity of an insane man. While Juvenal is obviously highlighting Creticus’ hypocrisy in inveighing against immorality while allowing himself to be seen less modestly dressed than convicted adulteresses, what follows goes beyond the idea of hypocrisy (2.72–76). en habitum quo te leges ac iura ferentem uulneribus crudis populus modo uictor et illud montanum positis audiret uulgus aratris. quid non proclames, in corpore iudicis ista si uideas? quaero an deceant multicia testem. Just look at the outfit in which you’re heard citing laws and statutes by the people (wounds still fresh and recently victorious) and the crowd from the mountains, their plows abandoned! What wouldn’t you shout if you were to see that get-up on the body of the judge? I wonder whether mesh is fitting for a witness. Page 102 →Juvenal mentioned the staring crowd (populo mirante, 67) earlier, but here he elaborates in a number of telling ways. Part of the problem is that Creticus is dressed immodestly while he invokes the law, and there is a contrast too with the character of his audience.195 Creticus stands before them in his gauzy tunic, an example of over-refined and effeminate luxury. The audience is depicted, however, as battle-hardened soldiers and rustic farmers. The man who should be a source of authority for them is quite obviously less moral than they. In an attempt to make Creticus aware of how inappropriate he must seem to such an audience, the speaker asks him to consider two other participants in the trial, much as he had used the supposedly greater modesty of the adulteresses earlier. “Wouldn’t you be outraged,” the speaker asks, “if the judge (iudex) showed up in such a thing?” He next wonders aloud whether such a garment is appropriate for the witness (testem) in such a trial. Creticus, of course, is not allowed to answer, but the implication is that even Creticus would object to the judge dressing in such a fashion, and certainly a witness dressed in an immodest manner would have little or no credibility.196 If, as the speaker assumes, Creticus himself recognizes the inappropriateness of such an outfit on others at the trial, shouldn’t he also recognize it in his own case? But the problem with Creticus’ behavior goes beyond either effeminacy or hypocrisy (2.77–83). acer et indomitus libertatisque magister, Cretice, perluces. dedit hanc contagio labem et dabit in plures, sicut grex totus in agris unius scabie cadit et porrigine porci

uuaque conspecta liuorem ducit ab uua. foedius hoc aliquid quandoque audebis amictu; nemo repente fuit turpissimus. Fierce and undaunted, champion of freedom, Creticus, you’re transparent. Infection has passed on this stain and will pass it on to even more, just as the whole herd in the fields falls because of the scurf and mange of a single pig, and a bunch of grapes takes on the bad color from a bunch in sight of it. You’ll one Page 103 →day dare something more disgusting than this outfit: no one has become utterly debased all at once. Acer et indomitus is another of Juvenal’s ironic quotations, for Lucan uses it to describe Julius Caesar (BC 1.146); the use of the phrase here is especially rich. The obvious implication, of course, is that Creticus is no Caesar, but on second thought, maybe he is like Caesar after all, for Suetonius tells us that Caesar too was thought to wear effeminate, if not see-through, clothing.197 The worst aspect of Creticus’ behavior—wearing the effeminate clothing—is that he engages in it even as he plays the role of libertatis magister. This phrase is extremely suggestive. It might imply that Creticus is a champion of freedom in a positive sense; that is, he is a defender of the liberty and autonomy that is supposed to characterize the freeborn citizens of Rome. Libertas can also be used of the frankness and freedom of speech that are supposed to characterize the good stoic.198 The speaker can suggest these meanings of libertatis magister only in an ironic sense, but that should not make us discount them, for it is exactly Creticus’ moral pose that makes him not only a hypocrite but potentially also a dangerous role model. We have seen that he is being scrutinized by the old-fashioned and apparently virtuous crowd while citing Roman law; if his pose as magister, that is, teacher and defender, is successful, then his bad behavior too becomes a lesson; Juvenal has of course been playing on words, for libertatis magister can also mean “teacher of license.”199 The point, as I see it, is not so much to show that Creticus really is the one thing and not the other: as the similes about contagion make clear, the real anxiety here is that his behavior will spread.200 Rather than say that Creticus is only pretending to be a champion or teacher of freedom (in its positive senses) while he is really a teacher of licentious behavior, it is preferable to say that he is simply libertatis magister. The problem is that, because of Creticus’ behavior, libertas is itself redefined so that licentiousness and liberty are now the same thing. The watching soldiers and Page 104 →farmers—two iconic categories in the Roman imagination—hear the same rhetoric about libertas that Romans always had, but libertas has been transformed from a concept of personal autonomy within a traditional moral framework to one of freedom from that framework.

Aristocrats on Stage To return to the eighth Satire, much of the denunciation of Lateranus has been only hypothetical, but our speaker wants us to know how bad things might get (8.183–88). quid si numquam adeo foedis adeoque pudendis utimur exemplis, ut non peiora supersint? consumptis opibus uocem, Damasippe, locasti sipario, clamosum ageres ut Phasma Catulli. Laureolum uelox etiam bene Lentulus egit, iudice me dignus uera cruce. What if there never comes a time when we cite examples so disgraceful and so shameful that even

worse do not remain?! Now that your wealth is gone, Damasippus, you’ve leased your voice to the stage, so that you can play the noisy “Specter” of Catullus. Even nimble Lentulus was good in “Laureolus.” (In my opinion they should have crucified him for real.)

As bad as Lateranus is, there are others who go further. Damasippus is a cognomen used by some of the Licinii and Junii, two of Rome’s pedigreed noble families. While this particular Damasippus cannot be identified, it is clear that he is an aristocrat who has run through his fortune and fallen far enough that he now works on stage. We are not told why Lentulus has taken up acting, whether from financial exigency or personal whim, but the speaker makes clear that it doesn’t matter to him: Lentulus’ appearance as the condemned bandit Laureolus ought to merit the same fate that Laureolus suffered in the mime named for him. For the Romans, dramatic and musical performance was nearly the lowest of occupations, and the performers themselves were often felt to be little better Page 105 →than prostitutes.201 In fact, actors were legally classed as infames and thus had diminished rights as citizens.202 Yet even at the bottom of the social ladder there is a kind of hierarchy: Phasma (“Specter”) may refer to a play based on the respectable poet Menander, but Laureolus is the title of a mime. Mimes were short plays that largely depicted base topics—this one dealt with a notorious bandit. Of all performers the mime actors are the lowest—indeed, the words mimus, mima and their derivatives are often used as an insult, something like the use of “slut” in colloquial American English.203 At the same time, mime was an extremely popular art form among spectators, and this is perhaps the real problem with Damasippus and Lentulus: not only do they debase themselves by performing, but they do so in venues guaranteed to bring in an audience. They make spectacles of themselves, and they do so in front of a lot of people.

The Salian Bride Somewhat later in the eighth Satire we encounter Gracchus. Before discussing his role in this poem, however, let us begin with an earlier appearance in the second Satire, where he is introduced as another man’s bride (2.117–23). quadringenta dedit Gracchus sestertia dotem cornicini, siue hic recto cantauerat aere; signatae tabulae, dictum вЂfeliciter,’ ingens cena sedet, gremio iacuit noua nupta mariti. o proceres, censore opus est an haruspice nobis? scilicet horreres maioraque monstra putares, si mulier uitulum uel si bos ederet agnum? Gracchus gave four hundred thousand sesterces—as a dowry to a horn-player (or he may have played a straight instrument); the contract has been signed, congratulations said, a huge dinner awaits, the bride reclines in her husband’s lap. O you noblemen! Is it the censor that we need or the diviner? Really, would Page 106 →you shudder and think them greater enormities if a woman gave birth to a calf or a cow gave birth to a lamb? Scholars have generally been preoccupied with the image of a male bride, but class-betrayal is an important part of what the speaker is reacting to. Gracchus’ husband is a cornicen, that is, most likely a slave or freedman who played the curved cornu—the occupation is highlighted by the emphatic position of cornicini. Juvenal then jokes that the husband may play the straight tuba (rectum aes) instead, hinting, of course, at oral sex. While it is not conceivable that a large part of Juvenal’s audience would have looked kindly on an actual same-sex

wedding even if the husband were of high status, it does seem important to this description that he is decidedly of low birth. The religious imagery continues in what follows, but in a way that is an even worse indictment of Gracchus (2.124–26). segmenta et longos habitus et flammea sumit arcano qui sacra ferens nutantia loro sudauit clipeis ancilibus. He puts on flounces and the long gown and the veil, he who, carrying the sacred objects bobbing on the mystic strap, sweated under the holy shields. This description identifies Gracchus as one of the Salian priests, who performed a bi-annual rite in which they carried sacred shields, said to be copies of one that fell from heaven during the reign of Numa. The Salii were priests of Mars and their rites marked the beginning and end of the campaigning season; moreover, only patricians were eligible for this important priesthood.204 As we have seen in other cases, class-betrayal is generally marked by other kinds of defection from one’s appropriate public and private identity. Patrician Gracchus’ transgression of gender norms is compounded by his choice of husband, but, as in the case of Lateranus, there is a religious problem too. Not only does the idea of a patrician male becoming a bride to a lower status (and possibly servile) man constitute, in the speaker’s eyes, a religious prodigy, but Gracchus himself has devalued the Salian rites by becoming womanly. These are rites of Mars and closely associated with the military, but here the regalia of those rites Page 107 →is put in pointed contrast to the bridal clothing that Gracchus is said to wear on his wedding day. We see Gracchus dress in the proper bridal attire only to have this image stripped away, revealing the Salian priest. Surely Mars himself must be outraged, and the speaker now addresses him under his title Gradivus (2.126–32). o pater urbis, unde nefas tantum Latiis pastoribus? unde haec tetigit, Gradiue, tuos urtica nepotes? traditur ecce uiro clarus genere atque opibus uir, nec galeam quassas nec terram cuspide pulsas nec quereris patri. uade ergo et cede seueri iugeribus campi, quem neglegis. O father of our city! From what source comes so great an abomination for the shepherds of Latium? From what source does this urge touch your descendants, Gradivus? Look—a man distinguished by birth and wealth is given in marriage to a man and you don’t shake your helmet or beat the ground with your spear or complain to your father. So go away and leave the acres of the stern field that you are neglecting. Rome is unmanned—its martial priesthood subverted and made womanly because Mars himself pays no attention. Juvenal then tells him to get lost.205 The same-sex wedding, the wedding of an aristocrat to a cornicen, the willingly debased Salian priest, like the existence of a mulio consul, all represent an unravelling of the social

fabric, but this time the fabric unravels all the way up to the level of the gods. Here again Juvenal creates an image which drives his point home. One aspect of this exemplum that has not been recognized is the way in which Mars himself parallels Gracchus. Juvenal’s exhortation of Mars to leave Rome parodies the traditional rite of euocatio, in which Roman priests ask gods to leave enemy cities that they are about to sack.206 In the outrage leading up to this, he castigates Mars for not shaking his helmet or beating the earth with his spear, actions that would resemble the core of the traditional Salian rite, in which the priests struck the Page 108 →earth with spears. Thus, the Salian priest fails where the Salian god does. If Mars himself doesn’t care to make the noise of war when he sees his city falling into moral chaos, how can his priest be anything but a travesty of the original?207 A passage follows in which Juvenal imagines that such weddings are becoming common, the only consolation being the inability of these male brides to give birth (2.132–42). For all his outrage that Gracchus has married another man, the satirist has a bigger—and to his mind worse—surprise in store (2.143–48). uicit et hoc monstrum tunicati fuscina Gracchi, lustrauitque fuga mediam gladiator harenam et Capitolinis generosior et Marcellis et Catuli Paulique minoribus et Fabiis et omnibus ad podium spectantibus, his licet ipsum admoueas cuius tunc munere retia misit. The trident of tunic-clad Gracchus outdid even this abomination, and he crisscrossed the arena in flight as a gladiator; a man higher born than the Capitolini and Marcelli and the descendants of Catulus and Paulus and the Fabii and all of the spectators in the private boxes—even if you add to these the man at whose expense he threw his nets. The ultimate outrage is not the wedding to another man: it’s fighting in the arena.208 Gladiatorial combat was considered unfit for freeborn men, though some are known to have done it.209 Like actors, gladiators were infames, and when freeborn men fought of their own accord it was felt to be a response to Page 109 →dire poverty—in other words, they had reached a point at which they were willing to forfeit any place in Rome’s social hierarchy and be considered virtually slaves.210 So ingrained were Roman attitudes about this that freeborn gladiators typically had formally to give up the rights of a citizen.211 This description recalls a number of the themes which we have been exploring. Gracchus’ movement around the arena is denoted by the verb lustrare, which can describe various kinds of motion but is often used with a specifically religious sense.212 Moreover, the outfit of the retiarius mocks that of the Salian priest, who would have worn the uniform of an early Roman soldier.213 Thus Gracchus’ role as priest of Mars is not entirely absent even in the arena (something we will be forcefully reminded of when we meet him again in Satire 8). Just as the worst thing about Creticus’ cross-dressing was its potential effect on the audience, so too is Gracchus’ behavior carried out in front of a large audience. By birth, Gracchus “outranks” most of Rome’s noble families—perhaps even that of the emperor himself (“the man at whose expense he threw his nets”).214 This would certainly be true of any emperor after Nero. Thus we have the social inversions represented by Gracchus mapped out in family names (“the Capitolini and Marcelli and the descendants of Catulus and Paulus and the Fabii”). He should be the most elite of the blue-blooded spectators, but instead he lets them watch him fight among slaves and criminals. Moreover, the fact that he carries a trident and throws a net makes clear that he is the kind of gladiator known as a retiarius (net-man). As with actors, there was a status hierarchy even among gladiators, and the retiarii were at the bottom of it.215

After Juvenal reveals that Gracchus was the bride in a wedding to another man, he addresses his next remarks first to elite Romans (o proceres, 121) and then to Mars (o pater urbis, 126). Thus these two audiences become the implied standard of Juvenal’s attack. That is, his denunciation of Gracchus is expected to make sense according to elite values and religious traditions. We have already seen that the address to Mars turns into a request for him to leave, since he neglects Rome anyway, but it is important to note the role of the proceres, especiallyPage 110 → in light of the end of the passage, where so much is made of Gracchus’ noble birth. Just as the speaker’s conviction that Gracchus wedding is a monstrum runs aground on his own suggestion that the gods do not care, so too does Gracchus’ noble birth constitute a problem for his invocation of the aristocrats and their values. Whatever the other well-born men of the elite may have thought about Gracchus’ behavior, the speaker cannot alter the fundamental truth of his patrician birth. Juvenal wants to use the outrage of the proceres as a benchmark against which to judge Gracchus, but he is left to lament that Gracchus is one of the proceres. The speaker’s complaint about social inversion collapses in on itself as he cannot find a birth-based standard higher than the one he is attacking. Perhaps there can be no social inversion if the top and the bottom are so easily confused in the first place, or if those at the top do not, in any case, agree with the moral standards of the moralizing speaker. In that case, perhaps the values themselves are the problem. But Gracchus’ own class betrayal is not the only social inversion hinted at in Satire 2’s description of his behavior. At the very beginning, Juvenal chooses to tell us about Gracchus’ same-sex wedding by stating the amount of his dowry and the occupation of his future husband. We have already seen the problem with the occupation of horn-player: Gracchus is giving himself as bride to a man of a far lower social station. The amount of the dowry is also significant, for Gracchus gives his new husband four hundred thousand sesterces, the amount of wealth necessary to claim membership among the equestrians. Whether or not we should see the cornicen as ascending to that class in a literal sense, the gift of so much wealth means a major disruption of categories of status.216 We have seen in Satire 1 that one of Juvenal’s major concerns is an inappropriate confusion of wealth with status; in other words, the substitution of a purely wealth-based system of social class and the related perquisites for a system governed by birth and the traditional divides between patrician and plebeian, between freeborn, freed, and servile. When Gracchus, born into the highest echelon of the old order, not only debases himself by becoming both bride and gladiator but also elevates someone from a much lower class with the gift of so much wealth, he confuses the “appropriate” social order to such an extent that it ceases to exist in any meaningful way. If the cornicen husband is not now a knight, he may as well be, just as Gracchus may as well be, a slave and a Page 111 →woman. If these things are true, we must think further about the speaker himself. He has appealed, in the Gracchus vignette, to the leading men of the elite and to Mars himself, but, as we have seen, there is little use in these appeals: men like Gracchus are the proceres to whom Juvenal appeals, and his invocation of Mars ends up exiling Mars from Rome. The speaker has been unmoored, for if neither the old social hierarchy nor the gods offer support for the speaker’s position, perhaps his own dizzying description of what might come true (marriages between men becoming common, for example, or men of consular rank lying about in dives) is what will be left. The apotropaic gesture of the satiric attack on men like Lateranus and Gracchus, once the rug has been pulled out from under the speaker, may be doomed to failure. Potentially, Gracchus is the standard bearer for the new order and the satirist is the exemplum of a failed Roman. Gracchus returns in the eighth Satire, immediately following the description of aristocrats who go on stage at 8.183–88. Here too he is a gladiator, and here too Juvenal exploits the image of an aristocrat in the arena to highlight the implications of class betrayal (8.199–210). haec ultra quid erit nisi ludus? et illic dedecus urbis habes, nec murmillonis in armis nec clipeo Gracchum pugnantem aut falce supina; damnat enim talis habitus [sed damnat et odit, nec galea faciem abscondit]: mouet ecce tridentem.

postquam librata217 pendentia retia dextra nequiquam effudit, nudum ad spectacula uoltum erigit et tota fugit agnoscendus harena. credamus tunicae, de faucibus aurea cum se porrigat, et longo iactetur spira galero. ergo ignominiam grauiorem pertulit omni uolnere cum Graccho iussus pugnare secutor. What will surpass these acts if not the gladiatorial school? There too you have a public disgrace, a Gracchus fighting and not even in the armor of a murmillo, not even with a shield or curved sword; he disdains such an outfit [but he disdains and hates it, and no helmet covers his face]. Look! He wields a trident! Page 112 →Once he has, with a balanced hand, cast his weighted net—and missed—he raises his bare face to the crowd and, bound to be recognized, he takes flight across the whole arena. Let’s be convinced by the gold tunic, since it extends from his throat and a ribbon bounces on his tall cap. And so the secutor who had been ordered to fight with Gracchus has endured disgrace worse than any wound. Murmillones and secutores are types of gladiators. The secutor was typically paired with a retiarius armed with his net and a trident.218 As in Satire 2, Gracchus is a retiarius. Fighting as a gladiator was never a respectable pursuit for an elite Roman, but as we have seen, Gracchus has chosen to fight as the worst sort of gladiator. Moreover, the passage makes clear that Gracchus is easily recognized, clearly unconcerned that his identity will be obvious to all. Two half-lines, generally deleted from modern texts, go so far as to suggest that Gracchus is making sure to be seen: sed damnat et odit, / nec galea faciem abscondit (“but he disdains and hates it [a murmillo’s outfit], and no helmet covers his face”); even if these verses are only an explanatory gloss that was later accidentally incorporated into the text, they still reflect the text’s anxiety over publicity.219 A more difficult aspect of this passage is the description of Gracchus’ hat and tunic. While numerous diverse interpretations of lines 207–8 have been proposed, the likeliest is that of Colin, followed in varying degrees by Courtney, Ferguson, and Green.220 According to this reading, the “tall cap” shows that Gracchus is a Salian priest—another detail also mentioned in the second Satire. Juvenal’s technique here is almost cinematic. Once he has made us envision Gracchus looking bare-faced and shameless at the crowd, recognized by all, he chooses to draw out some implications in equally visual terms: the reader becomes the spectator who, upon seeing a lowly retiarius put to flight, realizes that he is looking at the nobleman Gracchus, only to have it dawn on him that the runaway retiarius is, in fact, a Salian priest; the priestly regalia cannot be forgotten and becomes part of the image, as if gladiator becomes priest before the spectator’s eyes. As in the case of Lateranus, then, religion is used as a final index of how far one can fall from authentically Roman and elite behavior. Understanding the return of the religious motif from the second Satire Page 113 →makes sense of the way Juvenal ends this description, pointing to the shame felt by Gracchus’ adversary in the fight. Since secutores are routinely paired with retiarii in gladiatorial fights, it cannot be merely that which so shames him here. It must be the fact that he is fighting against a retiarius who is especially debased because Gracchus’ appearance constitutes sacrilege. In the second Satire it was made clear that the arena had become a place where elite Romans could, thanks to Gracchus, watch the traditional social hierarchy of Rome be rendered meaningless. In the eighth, the arena becomes a place where Rome’s religious downfall is staged for all to see, a spectacle so humiliating that even a secutor finds it hard to tolerate. Satire 2 offered the very crisp conceit of showing Gracchus in his wedding dress only to juxtapose that image with one of him in his priestly regalia, carrying the sacred ancilia in the rites of Mars; here a similar conceit is at work, for we see Gracchus the net-man and Gracchus the priest at the same time.

Again comparison with Lateranus is useful. That character is made to seem ridiculous when Juvenal imagines imperial minions searching for Caesar’s general amid the lowlifes in seedy dives. The juxtaposition of the highest military offices in the state with the haunts typical of Lateranus, and the suggestion that Rome’s military might is faltering, hint at practical consequences of class betrayal. In the Gracchus exempla, the most important image, I suggest, is not Gracchus as bride or Gracchus as gladiator; rather, it is the image, suppressed at first in both poems, of the Salian priest of Mars. This figure combines within it the soldier and the priest, and so it is especially apt for conveying the power and stability of the Roman order—just as Juvenal paired soldiers and farmers in Creticus’ audience in order to represent Rome’s traditional strong, sober populace. To suggest the kinds of inversions typical of his collapsing society, Juvenal dresses up the priest of Mars first as a bride and then as a gladiator, letting the dissonances in the image he creates speak for themselves. But in doing so, he always runs the risk that these images, rather than being too dissonant and disturbing for his reader to accept—thus pushing us back toward the kind of values he seems to espouse—will exercise instead a harmful appeal. We may end up in the bar with Lateranus or signing up for the arena ourselves. It may strike modern readers as strange that performing on stage or even fighting in the arena could stir up such outrage, but, as Edwards points out, men who do such things constitute an implied threat to the established social hierarchies since their actions show that such hierarchies need not be valued in Page 114 →the first place.221 It is bad enough for Gracchus, but an even worse case confronts us next (8.211–30): libera si dentur populo suffragia, quis tam perditus ut dubitet Senecam praeferre Neroni? cuius supplicio non debuit una parari simia nec serpens unus nec culleus unus. par Agamemnonidae crimen, sed causa facit rem dissimilem. quippe ille deis auctoribus ultor patris erat caesi media inter pocula, sed nec Electrae iugulo se polluit aut Spartani sanguine coniugii, nullis aconita propinquis miscuit, in scena numquam cantauit Oresten, Troica non scripsit. quid enim Verginius armis debuit ulcisci magis aut cum Vindice Galba, quod Nero tam saeua crudaque tyrannide fecit? haec opera atque hae sunt generosi principis artes, gaudentis foedo peregrina ad pulpita cantu prostitui Graiaeque apium meruisse coronae. maiorum effigies habeant insignia uocis, ante pedes Domiti longum tu pone Thyestae syrma uel Antigones seu personam Melanippes,

et de marmoreo citharam suspende colosso. If free votes were given to the people, who is so far gone that he would hesitate choosing Seneca over Nero, a man whose punishment demands procuring not just one monkey, just one snake, and just one sack? The crime’s the same as Agamemnon’s son’s, but the motive makes the deed different. The latter, of course, with the gods as sponsors was the avenger of a father murdered at table, but he didn’t stain himself with Electra’s throat or his Spartan wife’s blood; he mixed poison for no kin; he never played Orestes on stage; he didn’t write a Troica. What did Nero do in such a savage and cruel tyranny more deserving of armed vengeance by Verginius—or Galba and Vindex? These are the works, these the arts of a noble emperor, who enjoys prostituting himself with disgusting song on foreign stages and having won parsley in Greek crowns. Let your Page 115 →ancestors’ images have the souvenirs of his singing: put Thyestes’ long gown or Antigone’s, or Melanippe’s mask, at Domitius’ feet and hang your lyre from your own marble colossus. Some well-born men may have disgraced themselves by appearing as actors, but Nero surpassed them by committing worse crimes than those on the tragic stage. He not only committed matricide; he even played Orestes on stage—along with murdering a number of other relatives and two of his wives.222 Our first hint at murder of close relatives comes when Juvenal tells us that you’d need more than one monkey, snake, and sack to punish Nero—the traditional punishment for murder of kin involved sewing up the perpetrator in a bag with these animals. Orestes may have killed his mother with divine approval, but Nero has not only killed most of his close relatives, he’s even sung the part of Orestes on stage—thus finding a way to commit double matricide.223 The implication is clear: anyone who would so betray his station (and Nero’s birth is highlighted by generosi in line 224) would betray his family. Violence against one’s birthright becomes violence against one’s lineage, and, to a mind so warped, trophies of his wins in foreign singing competitions become worthy gifts for the family cult. The tragic competitions so prized in Greece are here trivialized by the phrase Graiae apium coronae, which emphasizes not so much the victor’s garland as it does the humble parsley it is made of. Moreover, the image here recalls the decayed statues with which the poem opens.224 There we had the dilapidated statues of men of distinguished lineage; here we have the statue of Domitius, unceremoniously decked out in actors’ garb and wearing a woman’s mask, while Nero’s immense statue boasts a lyre: a giant advertisement of what is cast here as his servile nature. Perhaps the point about social inversion is made clearest in one of the speaker’s sarcastic questions: what did Nero do in his savage reign that more deserved vengeance? When the man with the highest of all possible ranks behaves as a slave, Rome ends up with a saeua crudaque tyrannis.225 Page 116 →

The Dangers of Fine Dining Gracchus is not the only elite Roman to become a gladiator in Juvenalian satire. In the eleventh Satire, one Rutilus is about to become a gladiator because his taste for expensive delicacies has bankrupted him.226 He does not much sympathize with Rutilus and those like him, but, as the beginning of the eleventh Satire shows, Juvenal also posits a moral ambiguity in the way such men are treated within Roman society. The poem opens with a not entirely clear contrast (11.1–2): Atticus eximie si cenat, lautus habetur, si Rutilus, demens. If Atticus dines luxuriously, he is considered elegant; if Rutilus does, he is considered mad. We find out next that Rutilus cannot afford to eat the way he does, so that the contrast is, at least apparently, one between a man who has wealth and thus can afford gourmet dining and someone who dines vastly above his

means.227 Yet later in the poem Juvenal will return to such a contrast in a way that calls its simplicity into question (11.21–23): in Rutilo nam luxuria est, in Ventidio laudabile nomen sumit et a censu famam trahit. For in the case of Rutilus, it is decadence; in the case of Ventidius, he derives an illustrious name and, from his expense, he draws a reputation. These lines indirectly suggest that there may be more reasons than gluttony for Rutilus to behave as he does. Ventidius gains Г©lan and reputation from his habits.Page 117 → For the Roman elite, dining was an important means of social interaction.228 Since he is able to do it lavishly, Ventidius can use dining to gain status. It may be true that Rutilus is a gourmand who is addicted to expensive luxury items, but Juvenal’s comment about Ventidius opens the way to another interpretation of Rutilus’ behavior, namely that his dining habits are also aimed at achieving greater social status. Moreover, Ventidius’ own habits do not entirely escape unscathed: even though the poet asserts that the problem with Rutilus is the fact that he spends more than he can afford, the wording of his comment on Ventidius can be taken to hint at an alternative outcome for his own entertaining.229 The phrase laudabile nomen sumit can mean, as I have translated it above, “he derives an illustrious name,” but it can equally mean “he consumes an illustrious name.”230 In a poem that centers on the problems with very expensive dining, this is a striking image of consumption, and it is similar to many Roman remarks on wastrels “eating up” estates and inheritances.231 Moreover the fama that Ventidius gains is itself suspect, since fama often, though certainly not always, denotes an unsavory reputation.232 Ventidius and Atticus look more and more like Rutilus if we consider the opening section of Satire 11 in light of the overall thrust of the poem. This elaborate invitation poem, in many ways the most Horatian of Juvenal’s Satires, makes the case that the simple dinner to which the speaker invites Persicus is superior to the elaborate dinners favored by many elite Romans. Thus the poem’s early contrasts between, on the one hand, Rutilus, and, on the other, Atticus and Ventidius, fall apart as all luxury dining and entertaining turn out to be suspect and inappropriate. The fate of Rutilus differs from those of the others only incidentally. It is important to realize here that another party is being indicted, if in a very indirect way. In the opening lines of the poem, when Atticus and Rutilus are compared, the word habetur (“is considered”) suggests an audience of observers who find fault with Rutilus but not with Atticus. Such observers both parallel the satirist, inasmuch as they too find fault with others’ behavior, and Page 118 →themselves fall prey to him, since the distinctions that they have been making end up being elided in this poem. Read in this way, the denunciation of Rutilus is not just an attack on this one man or even on spendthrift gluttons; it is also a way of using an individual case of bad behavior to point to larger issues. Rutilus’ Rome is one in which dining is both a way up and a way down. For Ventidius and Atticus, it allows them to display both wealth and status in order to enhance the latter. For Rutilus it merely drains his assets until he must willingly sign up as a gladiator, eating gladiator’s hash (miscellanea ludi, 11.20) and taking on infamia. Yet the satire hints that the problems encountered by the spendthrift Rutilus may loom even for the rich Ventidius, since his rise in status suggestively mimics Rutilus’ consumption of his own wealth. While I would not suggest that Juvenal is expressing sympathy for Rutilus, the treatment of this fallen Roman is different from that given to Gracchus. In Gracchus’ case, all of his betrayals of class are laid at his own feet—we are never given to believe that he has ended up in the arena through poverty, and it is clear that he is wealthy enough to give a small fortune to his cornicen husband. Rutilus gourmandizes his way to the life of the gladiator, but the poet does allow us to glimpse a possible reason for his doing so—and he suggests that the

problem could spread. By giving us a glimpse of a potential reason for Rutilus’ fall, Juvenal again undermines his own indignation over Rutilus’ misbehavior, and the validity of the criticism itself is called into question. In a sense, then, we reach a similar impasse as at the end of the first Satire. The shock we feel—if we are good, conservative Romans—at Gracchus’ ostentation in the arena is problematized in the case of Rutilus, who was, potentially, only trying to be a good, conservative Roman.

Kitchen Corruptions So far we have been dealing with fairly public cases of class-betrayal by aristocrats, but even in more private settings one can behave in a way unworthy of one’s station. If, as we have seen, one’s behavior can cast doubt whether one deserves high office, a priesthood, or a place among the nobiles at all, it can also call into question freeborn status. The fifth Satire is an attack on one Trebius, a neglected and mistreated cliens of the malicious patron Virro.233 The setting is a Page 119 →dinner party at which the host insults his lower-status guests both verbally and by making their status, and his scorn for it, obvious through the quality of the meal provided. Whereas Virro himself dines on delicacies and drinks wine of an excellent vintage, Trebius is served disgusting food and cheap wine. To make matters worse, Virro’s slaves make it clear that they resent having to wait on someone as lowly as Trebius. Yet Trebius endures, hoping, despite the obvious message sent by Virro, that his clientela will eventually pay at least a modest culinary dividend. This poem has generally been seen as a denunciation, albeit a clever one, of bad patrons and greedy clients; thus it is usually seen as one of several treatments (e.g., poems 1, 3, 7, 9) of the problems with patronage under the empire.234 This is certainly an aspect of the poem—put simply, if men like Trebius would stand on their dignity and stop putting up with patrons like Virro (presumably easier said than done), then patronage would not be the perverse institution that it had become. Yet for our purposes, what I want to focus on is the way Juvenal concludes his attack on Trebius (5.161–70): tu tibi liber homo et regis conuiua uideris: captum te nidore suae putat ille culinae, nec male coniectat; quis enim tam nudus, ut illum bis ferat, Etruscum puero si contigit aurum uel nodus tantum et signum de paupere loro? spes bene cenandi uos decipit. вЂecce dabit iam semesum leporem atque aliquid de clunibus apri, ad nos iam ueniet minor altilis.’ inde parato intactoque omnes et stricto pane tacetis. ille sapit, qui te sic utitur. You consider yourself a free man and your lord’s guest; he thinks that you’re captivated by the aroma of his kitchen—and his guess isn’t bad. For who is so destitute that he would put up with him twice, whether he wore the Etruscan gold locket as a boy or even just the knot and sign from pauper’s leather? Hope for fine dining has taken you in. “Look! Now he’ll give us some half-eaten rabbit Page 120 →and a bit of the boar’s haunch. Now the rest of the bird will be coming round to us.”235 Then, when your baguette is ready, untouched, and drawn, you all stay silent. The man who treats you like this, he has wit.

Trebius’ pathetic hope for some of Virro’s fine food—and presumably for the respect it implies—renders suspect his own view of himself as liber, a freeborn man, and as a conuiua, an invited guest, rather than part of the entertainment. Juvenal mocks Trebius and then, in suggesting that Virro has wit (sapit), he also notes that one might judge Virro’s behavior here as showing good taste, since the verb sapere can mean either “to be witty” or “to have taste.”236 But Juvenal does not leave his message at such a degree of subtlety (5.170–73). omnia ferre si potes, et debes. pulsandum uertice raso praebebis quandoque caput nec dura timebis flagra pati, his epulis et tali dignus amico. If you can put up with everything, you deserve to. You’ll be offering yourself, head shaved, for a beating, and since you’re not afraid for your life or of getting a beating, you are worthy of this feast and a friend like this. “You think you’re free,” says Juvenal, “but Virro knows better: you’re a slave of his kitchen and your own ridiculous hopes for first-class treatment. In fact, you’ve made yourself into a comic buffoon, not only a slave, but a slave from the stage, whose primary role is getting beaten to make an audience laugh.” Whatever Trebius’ actual status, his behavior undermines the fundamental distinction between free man and slave.237 Here Juvenal implies that Trebius’ misunderstanding of his relationship with Virro is tantamount to an admission that he is not properly a free man at all, and this misunderstanding is mischievously encapsulated in the very last word of the poem: amicus. In a traditional patronage relationship, patron and client refer to each other as Page 121 →amici, which implied mutual respect if not social or economic equality, as we have already discussed in relation to the first Satire.238 In the ninth Satire also, Juvenal highlights a misunderstanding of patronage by oblique reference to this term (9.9).239 There he has Naevolus, who believes that he is performing a client’s officia for a patron, refer to himself as cliens, while tacitly (and perhaps unconsciously) acknowledging that his patron does have legitimate amici. Cliens is the technical term for a Roman client, as patronus is for the patron himself, but these are words that others might use to describe the participants in a patronage relationship. By using the outsiders’, and not the insiders’, term for his role as client, Naevolus shows that he is not one after all. Trebius becomes worthy of such an amicus as Virro only by reaching the point of being a willing slave and a comic buffoon. But once again we return to the lesson of Ventidius. As our speaker paints things, Trebius is a victim of his own poor intelligence and—to use a modern idiom—low self-esteem. Yet here too a savvy Roman reader might see in Trebius a version of himself. Trebius the client may be accused of foolishly expecting gourmet fare, but he may only want to know that he is accorded sufficient respect to be offered a decent meal. Like Ventidius, Trebius may be trying to better himself socially by attending a wealthier man’s dinner parties.240

Things Fall Apart We have now examined a number of case studies in class betrayal, defined as engaging in behavior inappropriate for one’s social class, but it is not enough merely to conclude that class betrayal is bad and that Juvenal would prefer that Rome’s social stratification and attendant traditions go unchallenged. Instead, it is important to see what is at stake in the portrait of these aristocrats who behave in ways more appropriate to the lower classes, or even to slaves and freedmen. In the descriptions of Lateranus and Gracchus, it becomes clear that Juvenal links the failure to maintain proper elite behavior to problems in the religious sphere—as foreign gods take precedence over Jupiter in a central ritualPage 122 → of state cult and Mars himself neglects his own city. Moreover, both of these cases also indicate an anxiety over the connections between elite behavior and military prowess and thus over Rome’s place in the world. The various kinds of inversion that Juvenal indicates represent to him a

departure from Rome’s past glory that may signal a change in its fortunes. This is in fact one of the important themes of the second Satire, which ends its sequence of exempla by imagining Romans in the Underworld (2.149–59): esse aliquos manes et subterranea regna, Cocytum et Stygio ranas in gurgite nigras, atque una transire uadum tot milia cumba nec pueri credunt, nisi qui nondum aere lauantur. sed tu uera puta: Curius quid sentit et ambo Scipiadae, quid Fabricius manesque Camilli, quid Cremerae legio et Cannis consumpta iuuentus, tot bellorum animae, quotiens hinc talis ad illos umbra uenit? cuperent lustrari, si qua darentur sulpura cum taedis et si foret umida laurus. illic heu miseri traducimur. That ghosts are real and there are kingdoms beneath the earth, Cocytus and black frogs in the pool of Styx, and so many thousands cross the shoals in a single skiff—not even boys believe that (except the ones who don’t yet pay at the baths). But suppose it’s true: What does Curius think and both the Scipios? What do Fabricius and the ghost of Camillus think? Cremera’s legion and the youth lost at Cannae, the dead of so many wars, what do they think every time a shade like that comes to them from here? They’d want to be purified if sulfur and torches were on hand and if there were any wet laurel. In that place, alas, we are the wretches led in the triumph. It is usual to take “a shade like that” (talis umbra, 2.156–57) as meaning an effeminate man, since most scholars have read the second Satire as an attack on either homosexuals or sexually misbehaving hypocrites, but the immediately preceding passage features Gracchus in the arena. There too names of great families are used to show the incongruity of Gracchus’ behavior. Thus I would suggest that the kind of spirit Juvenal thinks will offend the honored dead of Rome is essentially anyone who betrays his appropriate niche in Roman society. In other words, nearly everyone. Page 123 →The image of Romans being led as captives in a triumph is striking and has much in common with the earlier image from this same poem of Mars being exiled from Rome.241 Yet it is important to see that, in both instances, Juvenal undercuts himself, since in the one case his strong rebuke of Mars also informs us that, contrary to the speaker’s hopes, the gods don’t really mind what Romans are doing these days; in the present passage, Juvenal’s evocation of the virtuous dead—that is, the memory of the virtues of Rome’s past—is introduced by his own disbelief that there is an Underworld or ghosts in the first place. What the dead would think is irrelevant since, according to Juvenal, they don’t exist and thus can’t think. Juvenal’s outrage leads him to verbal excesses such as banishing Mars from Rome and imagining ghostly Romans shamed in the triumphal procession, but the very excesses of his imagery point to an absurdity in his moralistic diatribes, which are revealed by the exaggerated claims to be driven by emotion rather than argument. The idea that Rome’s disgraceful present state is at odds, or should be, with its military role is developed in what follows (2.159–70):

arma quidem ultra litora Iuuernae promouimus et modo captas Orcadas ac minima contentos nocte Britannos, sed quae nunc populi fiunt uictoris in urbe non faciunt illi quos uicimus. “et tamen unus Armenius Zalaces cunctis narratur ephebis mollior ardenti sese indulsisse tribuno.” aspice quid faciant commercia: uenerat obses, hic fiunt homines. nam si mora longior urbem indulsit242 pueris, non umquam derit amator. mittentur bracae, cultelli, frena, flagellum: sic praetextatos referunt Artaxata mores. We have, I admit, advanced our arms beyond Irish shores as well as the recently subdued Orkneys and the Britons who are content with very little night, but the ones we’ve conquered don’t do the things that go on in the victorious people’s city. Page 124 →“And yet a certain Armenian named Zalaces, more effeminate than all the other youths, is said to have indulged a horny tribune.” See what foreign relations do? He had come as a hostage; here they become “human beings.” For if too long a stay in the City has indulged boys, they’ll never lack a lover. They’ll give up trousers, blades, reins, and whip: that’s how they bring the habits of Roman youth back to Artaxata as spoils. Moving from his hypothetical Underworld to present-day Rome, Juvenal signals that Rome does indeed have a great empire but then suggests that it is spreading corruption rather than civilization. As I have punctuated the text above, following Lewis and more recently Braund, an interlocutor objects to Juvenal’s statement that only Romans indulge in the kind of vices he has been attacking by pointing to a story about Zalaces, who satisfied a tribune’s lust.243 However, even if we take this to be a comment of Juvenal’s own, it shows an awareness that his indictment of Roman morals is not airtight. He responds by pointing to this as an instance of foreigners learning bad behavior from Rome. The Armenian had come to Rome as a hostage, and thus he himself must have been of noble birth. At this point Juvenal switches to the generalizing plural: hic fiunt homines, “here they become human beings,” 2.167. Homines suggests two things: status as a civilized person (that is, someone who shows humanitas) and status as a human but not necessarily a uir, “man.” Children of important men from elsewhere were routinely sent to Rome as obsides. The modern translation of this word, “hostages,” has unfortunate connotations, but in fact these obsides seem largely to have been guests of well-off Roman families. This system provided the Romans with a means by which they might control foreign kings and the like, since their children were in Rome, but it also gave such children access to Roman education and in fact to connections in the city that could help them later in life. When they returned home, they would participate in what modern historians sometimes call Romanization. But in Juvenal’s vision of the world, Romanization means not only giving up obvious signs of barbarism but also of taking on the vices of the capital. Thus we can see in the end of the second Satire the same dynamic that Juvenal feared in the specific cases of

Creticus and Gracchus: by displaying bad behavior one spreads bad behavior. This is the problem with freeborn Romans behaving badly—their disgrace not only shows them individually for what they Page 125 →are, it also taints everyone else. It is worth considering one final aspect of this, perhaps the most undercutting of all: as a satirist, Juvenal is constantly displaying bad behavior, albeit accompanied by criticisms and tones of outrage, and so he too is a corrupting influence. In the case of Lateranus he painted a picture of a consul or consular lounging among lowlifes of various kinds. With Gracchus he expressed outrage that one so well-born would make himself into the most despised kind of gladiator. Yet gladiators and the denizens of Lateranus’ dive are Juvenal’s own stock in trade. The class betrayals of the men discussed in this chapter are, we have seen, acts that call into question their manhood and that imperil Romanitas generally, and the satirist is caught in the fundamental dilemma that in order to attack them he becomes their spokesman.244 The satirist’s dilemma—denouncing behavior only to promote it—matches that of men like Rutilus and Trebius. Rising socially, maintaining and preserving elite status, paradoxically involves constantly flirting with losing that status. This was an old paradox for Romans, as perhaps it must be for anyone in a society so thoroughly hierarchical. Rising, or even staying in place, in a social hierarchy generally requires successful subordination to those higher up in the hierarchy, but such subordination continually underscores the fact that one is “beneath,” “below,” and possibly downwardly mobile. For Roman men the problem was even more acute, since full possession of manhood meant staying in the elite. If Trebius and Rutilus want to keep their connection to the elite, they have to try their luck at the dining tables. The examples of Creticus, Gracchus, and, in Satire 8, the aristocrats who take to the stage also make it clear that we should expect defection from elite status to include defection from appropriate gender-related behavior. In denouncing Gracchus both as male bride and as gladiator, Juvenal includes reference to the fact of his noble birth. The very fact that Gracchus is a Salian priest means that he is a patrician. What I think is suggested is not so much that Juvenal would condone or approve of marriages between lowborn men but that the same-sex marriage of Gracchus is of a piece with his disregard for his own status. Once one steps out of his appropriate social niche, all standards of behavior fail together. Horn players get rich; Salian priests put on wedding dresses; actors and gladiators, rather than representing one of the lowest orders of life in the Roman world—a safe spectacle for the audience—turn out to be the highest of the aristocracy, superior in birth, if not in power, to the emperor himself. Page 126 →When the high born and respectable play roles on stage, they end up revealing that “high born” and “respectable” are also merely roles. The reality of Roman hierarchy (social, moral, economic) is challenged and found wanting. This brings us to the most dangerous aspect of Lateranus, Gracchus, and even Nero: their behavior is attractive. All are free from the constraints imposed on them by their social class. Juvenal may deplore the things they do, but, if that is his only motive, why the detailed and loving rehearsal of their vices? Just as he leers over the sexual misdeeds he began to retail in the first Satire, so too does he envy the freedom, the anarchy, these betrayers of class represent.

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Chapter 4 A Woman’s World “When gender codes expire, they rot and crumble.” W. R. Johnson245 As we saw in chapter 1, the first two examples of outrageous behavior in Juvenal’s Satires both have to do with male anxieties about gender (1.22–23): cum tener uxorem ducat spado, Meuia Tuscum figat aprum et nuda teneat uenabula mammaВ .В .В . When a tender eunuch takes a wife, and Mevia pegs a Tuscan boar, holding her hunting spear at her bare breast.В .В .В . The eunuch who marries and the woman who hunts both challenge ideas about how gender works. In this chapter, we will consider the way characters in Juvenal’s poems voice or embody anxieties about the ways in which masculinity, as traditionally defined, is threatened and altered in a Rome drastically changed from the one that had produced those traditional definitions.246 We will also see Page 128 →that Juvenal’s radical attack on women (the sixth Satire) responds to anxieties over whether there are fundamental flaws in the understanding of masculinity and status on which both his rant and his apparent sense of identity are premised.

The Sixth Satire The most pronounced and extreme example of manhood under stress in Juvenal’s poetry is the notorious sixth Satire. The meaning, and even the topic, of the poem have been the subject of debate.247 Though it has often been seen as an attack on women as a sex, Susanna Braund has argued that the poem is an invective against marriage rather than women.248 More specifically, she argues, the poem is modelled on the rhetorical exercises known as progymnasmata, in which students were asked to compose on a set theme. One such theme was whether marriage was appropriate for a given kind of man, for example, the philosopher. Juvenal’s version, Braund argues, is an outrageous extension of such a theme—not “Should philosophers marry?” but “Should any man marry?” Page 129 →Braund’s argument has much to recommend it—especially in that it offers an explanation for what may have inspired this unusual poem—but we should be careful of forgiving the poem a more general misogyny too. Admittedly, the speaker does avoid arguing from perceived defects in the female body or character.249 He does not, for example, say that women with literary and historical interests are worthy of attack because of their congenital unsuitability or inferiority in those subjects—rather, they should not be studying such things because of the embarrassment and annoyance they may cause their husbands.250 The problem is not that women are stupid but that they are not so. Nor does he argue explicitly that women’s sexual misdeeds arise from a natural lack of the self-control that should characterize men, although this is a common prejudice in ancient texts. The speaker of the sixth Satire attacks the behavior of women precisely as behavior; their misdeeds are produced by their refusal, not their inability, to behave correctly. At the same time, the poem contains passages that point to women in general rather than only married women. Rather than marry, for example, the addressee is advised to find a pusio (“boy,” 6.36) since these will not constantly quarrel, demand gifts, or criticize his sexual performance.251 If marriage, aside from any misogyny, were the whole problem, why does the speaker not recommend a female prostitute or mistress? As we shall see, the speaker’s recommendation of a boy instead

of a woman is in keeping with this poem’s overall approach to the relationship between proper Roman manhood and the world of the female and alien: what is threatened by women and the foreign is not just men but maleness.252 Others have also read the sixth Satire as a poem about masculinity and the way in which it is constructed rather than simply as an attack on women. Johnson is worth quoting at length: But the speaker’s real problem is his incipient (and accurate) feeling that the unity of language and institutions which his identity relies on is coming undone, or, to put it another way, what he is feeling is that language and institutions are no longer interacting “naturally”. He may even be seeing better than he is willing to say, that the relation between language and institution is one not Page 130 →founded on nature. He may be realising that the patriarchy which supplies him with identity is not a natural phenomenon but one constructed by human will and reason and energy. Finally, he may have begun to guess that the male identity that he wants and on which the patriarchy itself is founded is also not something that nature produces (as it produces apples from apple trees or rain from clouds) but is rather, like the patriarchy, something, an idea, a word, a picture, that human minds produce and keep (re)producing (keep trying to clone).253 Gold writes of “the satirist’s deep-seated anxieties, which were not after all about women in particular—or maybe even women at all—but about the rips in the system that flattened the hierarchy, confused the clear-cut boundaries of gender and sexuality, and called into question social and political roles.”254 Insightful as these analyses are—and there is certainly much in each with which I fully agree—they do not always cover more than a few passages in detail, hardly surprising for so long a poem.255 Thus, while I agree with Johnson and Gold that failed masculinity is at the heart of this poem, I want to trace more thoroughly the contours of that sense of imperiled manhood always just under the surface, to follow the way in which the speaker’s recital of traditional codes of masculine and feminine twists under the pressure of the very world he describes until, like Morris Zapp’s deconstructionist, he saws off the branch he is sitting on.256 Ultimately, I think it will emerge, the speaker reveals not only a sense of failed masculinity but also, on some level, a failure of Romanness, or even a profound doubt about how valid such concepts were in the first place. What is most interesting about all of this is that the speaker is undone by his own scare figures—the foreign, disgusting, absurd; the weak males and the strong females; the whole parade of the laughable and grotesque that Juvenal attempts to ridicule turn the tables on him, or rather, they let him turn the tables on himself. Juvenal attempts to stage a freak show, and he and Postumus turn out to be the star attractions. Given all of this, it may be well to attend to the name of the addressee: althoughPage 131 → it probably had other origins, the cognomen “Postumus” was normally given to children born after their fathers had died or at least made a will, and so we might wonder if Postumus’ own mother had herself become a murderess.257 The above summary must make it clear that the poem has little formal structure besides that of an angry rant.258 Nevertheless, a number of themes recur throughout. One is the problem of money—women are expensive and they drain their husbands’ resources without shame or restraint, a problem to be examined further in the next chapter. Moreover, women persistently desire the wrong kinds of men and surround themselves with as many unRoman elements as possible. In this connection ugliness and beauty form an interesting duality throughout the poem, as women continually represent what is malformed, grotesque, and ugly. What follows will approach these themes in two ways, bringing in other satires as well. First we will examine the exclusion of men like the speaker and Postumus from a world made up of the female and alien rather than the male and Roman. We will then turn to the wives of emperors and examine the ways in which the exceptional power and depravity of women like Messalina, Caesonia, and Agrippina the Younger could warp the fabric of Roman society in a way far more sinister than even the most corrupt wife of a senator or soldier could ever have done.

What Women Want

One of the most prominent themes of the sixth Satire is (as the speaker sees it) women’s improper choice of sexual partners. The impropriety of their choices, however, goes beyond the immorality of adultery (i.e., choosing to have sex with men besides their husbands) and extends to a preference for everything that is alien to normative Roman elite manhood. The theme is introduced with the description of women who go for actors (6.63–66): chironomon Ledam molli saltante Bathyllo Tuccia uesicae non imperat, Apula gannit, Page 132 →[sicut in amplexu, subito et miserabile longum.] attendit Thymele: Thymele tunc rustica discit. When effeminate Bathyllus is dancing Leda in the pantomime, Tuccia loses control of her bladder, Apula whinnies [as if in his embrace, suddenly and pitiably long]; Thymele pays attention; then backwoods Thymele gets a lesson! Even watching Bathyllus is a turn-on to Tuccia and Apula, while Thymele, herself probably a mime actress, takes lessons in portraying the part of a woman.259 That a woman named Tuccia loses control of her bladder is a parody of the story of the Vestal Tuccia who proved her innocence on the charge of incestum by carrying water in a sieve from the Tiber to the Forum.260 Two things are highlighted here.261 One is the exaggerated arousal experienced by Tuccia and Apula, which indicates a shameless disregard for modesty as well as attraction to an actor in a particularly low form of entertainment.262 The other is the notable effeminacy of the performer: not only are these women aroused, they are aroused by a man who is portraying a woman so well that an actress can take notes.263 His name, moreover, marks him as effeminate, since it is shared with the favorite of Maecenas.264 The speaker expands on this passage by talking first about women who have to make do with souvenirs when there are no shows on (6.67–70) and then by denouncing the amount women will spend to bed an actor (6.73–75). .В .В . sunt quae Page 133 →Chrysogonum cantare uetent, Hispulla tragoedo gaudet: an expectas ut Quintilianus ametur? There are women who prevent Chrysogonus from singing; Hispulla enjoys her tragic actor. Or did you think Quintilian would be an object of desire? It was sometimes thought that singers’ performance was enhanced by abstinence from sex, and women are preventing Chrysogonus from singing by having sex with him.265 Important here is the contrast between the Greek-named Chrysogonus and the tragic actor in whom Hispulla delights, on the one hand, and, on the other, the elite Roman Quintilian, here ruled out as a plausible sex-object. Thus the speaker not only draws attention to the tendency of women to lust after performers; he also makes clear that this tendency is a preference that works against respectable Roman men. Occupation is at issue: performers, including the particularly disreputable performers in mimes, are preferred to well-known professors of rhetoric. The ability at public speaking that marks the elite male is replaced with the actor’s ability to use language and his body to inspire adulterous lust. This lust has consequences for the husbands as well as the wives (6.76–81): accipis uxorem de qua citharoedus Echion aut Glaphyrus fiat pater Ambrosiusque choraules.

longa per angustos figamus pulpita uicos, ornentur postes et grandi ianua lauro, ut testudineo tibi, Lentule, conopeo nobilis Euryalum murmillonem exprimat infans. You’re taking a wife by whom lyre-playing Echion or Glaphyrus would become a father, the flautist Ambrosius too. Let’s set up the long stands in the narrow streets; let the posts and door be decked out with grand laurel, Lentulus, so that your “well-born” child in his tortoise-shell cradle might resemble the gladiator Euryalus. Liaisons with performers produce illegitimate offspring in Rome’s great houses. Page 134 →Lentulus gets a parade in public but at home rears a child who is really a gladiator’s son. This concern with watering down the elite occurs elsewhere in the poem too, but here it serves to elaborate the contrast we saw earlier between performers and Quintilian. The wife’s preference for the gladiator Euryalus finds a permanent echo in the person of her son, here juxtaposed with his legal father’s public status.266 Furthermore, this passage again points to the seductive beauty of the “improper” classes. Our gladiator is named Euryalus, a name that points to Vergil’s character, “than whom none of the Trojans was more beautiful.” The mention of an adulterous affair with a gladiator leads the speaker to a fuller exemplum, that of Eppia, a senator’s wife who ran off following a troupe of gladiators to Egypt (6.85–87): inmemor illa domus et coniugis atque sororis nil patriae indulsit, plorantisque improba natos utque magis stupeas ludos Paridemque reliquit. Forgetting her house and husband and sister, she took no care for her country, and, wicked, abandoned her weeping children and (what you’ll gasp at more) the games and Paris! The betrayal of Lentulus had left him with an un-Roman, presumably Greek, child. Here the adulterous lust for a gladiator is described as virtual treason (nil patriae indulsit) and involves literally going to foreign territory—and of all places, Egypt, which the Satires repeatedly decry.267 As often in Juvenal, the scandal is deflated with a final shock: in addition to leaving homeland and family, she will even follow her gladiator beau at the expense of the games and the gladiator Paris. The gorgeous Trojan prince Paris could seduce Helen and start the Trojan war, but here his namesake too is abandoned.268 Even the irresistible beauty of mythic heroes pales next to the attraction of Eppia’s boyfriend. The speaker next draws another contrast between what women do in the cases of their husbands and in those of their lovers. For husbands, women find the sea intolerable; for lovers, they virtually become sailors themselves (6.88–102). Page 135 →We have been led to believe that Eppia’s beloved is someone quite special, and Juvenal next paints his picture in vivid colors (6.103–13). qua tamen exarsit forma, qua capta iuuenta Eppia? quid uidit propter quod ludia dici sustinuit? nam Sergiolus iam radere guttur coeperat et secto requiem sperare lacerto;

praeterea multa in facie deformia, sicut attritus galea mediisque in naribus ingens gibbus et acre malum semper stillantis ocelli. sed gladiator erat. facit hoc illos Hyacinthos; hoc pueris patriaeque, hoc praetulit illa sorori atque uiro. ferrum est quod amant. hic Sergius idem accepta rude coepisset Veiiento uideri. What beauty did she burn for? What youthfulness made Eppia captive? What did she see to put up with being called an arena-girl? You see, darling Serge had already started to shave his throat and hope for retirement because of his injured arm. What’s more, his face was very ugly; for example, he had a huge wart, irritated by his helmet, on the middle of his nose, and the bitter affliction of an ever-dripping eye. But he was a gladiator! This fact turns them into Hyacinthuses. It’s this she preferred to her sons and country, this to her sister and husband. It’s the sword they’re in love with. This very Sergius, once his wooden sword had been received, would have started to look like Veiiento. Just as those women who lust after actors and singers do so despite (or perhaps because of) the effeminacy of those professions, preferring their low status and bad reputation to the pedigree of respectable Roman men, so too does Eppia’s affection for Sergius the gladiator baffle the speaker. It isn’t as though he is young and beautiful. In fact he is grotesque, with an ugly, mutilated face and an injured arm.269 He is also old enough to shave his beard off completely (which Roman men usually did at around age forty).270 Yet his status as a gladiator makes him attractive to Eppia. Should he accept the wooden sword that marked a gladiator’s retirement, his appearance would Page 136 →be transformed. It is unclear who Veiiento is—perhaps Eppia’s husband, in which case Sergius too will be discarded eventually.271 There is a rather obvious sexual pun in this: women are really in love with the steel sword (ferrum), not the gladiator himself; when he is old (and perhaps injured) enough to have a wooden substitute, he is no longer desirable.272 Before we leave Sergius behind, we should concentrate on the fact that our speaker paints him as a grotesque. This is, I suggest, more than a way of linking him to other puzzling objects of female desire, such as men who portray women. It also introduces into the poem an association between female sexuality and physical ugliness. This is brought out most clearly in the description of women dressing up (6.457–73): nil non permittit mulier sibi, turpe putat nil, cum uiridis gemmas collo circumdedit et cum auribus extentis magnos commisit elenchos. [intolerabilius nihil est quam femina diues.] interea foeda aspectu ridendaque multo pane tumet facies aut pinguia Poppaeana spirat et hinc miseri uiscantur labra mariti. 463 tandem aperit uultum et tectoria prima reponit, 467

incipit agnosci, atque illo lacte fouetur propter quod secum comites educat asellas exul Hyperboreum si dimittatur ad axem. ad moechum lota ueniunt cute. quando uideri 464 uult formonsa domi? moechis foliata parantur, 465 his emitur quidquid graciles huc mittitis Indi. 466 sed quae mutatis inducitur atque nouatur tot medicaminibus coctaeque siliginis offas accipit et madidae, facies dicetur an ulcus? There’s nothing a woman doesn’t permit herself, nothing she thinks grotesque, when she wraps emeralds around her neck and hangs huge pearls from Page 137 →stretched-out earlobes. [Nothing is more intolerable than a rich woman.] Meanwhile, her disgusting and ridiculous face is packed with a lot of dough and smells of Poppaea’s ointments, so her poor husband’s lips get stuck. Finally, she exposes her face, peels back the first layer, begins to be recognizable, and is soothed by asses’ milk (she’d bring asses along if she were exiled to polar Hyperborea!). They arrive at their lovers’ with clean skin. When does she want to look pretty at home? For their lovers, scents are obtained; for them, there’s a purchase of whatever you effeminate Indians export here. But a face that’s treated and revamped with so many changes of dressing, that takes lumps of hot, dripping dough—will you call it a face or a sore?273 Putting on her expensive jewelry makes a woman vaguely ridiculous, but her skin-care regimen transforms her into a complete grotesque.274 Once again there is a contrast between husband and lover: the one sees her only after the facial has had its effect; the other is forced to witness the disgusting process. The speaker compares her face during the facial to a building having a layer of stucco (tectoria prima) removed.275 He finally asks whether, if a face needs to be treated this way, it should perhaps be called a sore instead. This question seems to imply that even when they are not in the middle of the beautification process, the speaker sees women as grotesque and disgusting, and so the problem is not merely that wives are willing to undergo such facial treatments for their adulterous lovers rather than for their husbands. Once again, women’s idea of physical attractiveness is the speaker’s idea of ugliness. It is important that we realize that the speaker’s condemnation of female ugliness is strangely absolute. The over made-up woman implies that there exists in fact a preferable natural beauty that women foolishly conceal or destroy, but the speaker nowhere really acknowledges that possibility.276 Another scene in which we see a woman getting ready to meet her lover Page 138 →connects beauty with violence. The adulterous wife’s form is beautified, but this beauty is obtained at the expense of others (6.487–95): nam si constituit solitoque decentius optat ornari et properat iamque expectatur in hortis aut apud Isiacae potius sacraria lenae, disponit crinem laceratis ipsa capillis nuda umeros Psecas infelix nudisque mamillis.

вЂaltior hic quare cincinnus?’ taurea punit continuo flexi crimen facinusque capilli. quid Psecas admisit? quaenam est hic culpa puellae, si tibi displicuit nasus tuus? For if she’s made a date and wants to be done up more attractively than usual, and is in a hurry, already expected in the gardens (or more likely at the precinct of Isis the Madame), then poor Psecas fixes her hair with her own hair torn out, and her shoulders and breasts stripped bare. “Why is this curl too long?” Right away, the leather lash punishes the crime and outrage of the out-of-place curl. What did Psecas do wrong? What fault is it of the girl, if you’re unhappy with your own nose? The speaker’s main point here has to do with the cruelty of women toward those around them, but the image of the mistreated slave girl arranging the hair of her mistress leads us back to women as comic grotesques. Psecas, it turns out, has another slave helping her, while what amounts to a privy council sits by and advises on the best coiffure (6.495–501). The finished product is one of the elaborate hairstyles so familiar from the portraits of Flavian women (6.502–4): tot premit ordinibus, tot adhuc conpagibus altum aedificat caput: Andromachen a fronte uidebis, post minor est, credas aliam. With so many levels she weighs down her head; she builds it quite high with so many stories. From the front, you see Andromache; from behind, she’s shorter—you’d think it was someone else. Just as the woman earlier strips the poultice off her face as though it is a wall having its plaster removed, this woman has her hair erected like a building. Page 139 →She’s tall—or so she seems from the front. Each woman is more a building than a human being, and their careful preparations serve both to hide their absurd grotesqueness from their lovers and to insure that they are even more disgusting to their husbands. Just as the speaker expresses dismay over the lust women feel for effeminate performers, he also describes the influence, sexual and otherwise, that effeminate men have over certain women.277 This passage—the notorious O fragment—combines the anxiety over the displaced authority of respectable men with fear that effeminacy is covering up adultery.278 Each of these anxieties will return in the case of the eunuchs we will discuss below (6. O 1–6). in quacumque domo uiuit luditque professus obscenum et tremula promittens omnia dextra, inuenies omnis turpes similesque cinaedis. his uiolare cibos sacraeque adsistere mensae permittunt, et uasa iubent frangenda lauari cum colocyntha bibit uel cum barbata chelidon.

In whatever house there resides and cavorts a professional creature of filth, who offers every deed with his twitchy right hand, there you’ll find everyone who’s base and faggot-like. They let these men defile the food and take their place at the sacred table—and they have glasses washed that should be smashed, once Zucchini and the Bearded Swallow have drunk from them. It is difficult to know what to make of these lines for a number of reasons. First of all, in a poem that foregrounds the bad behavior of women, why is it necessary to have a professus obscenum in order to find a house full of corrupt effeminate men?279 Moreover, why is it that these men are similes cinaedis? This would appear to mean—and the subsequent text will confirm—that such houses contain men whose effeminate appearance and behavior suggests, falsely, that they are exclusively interested in passive sex with other men. Yet what follows still suggests a certain passive sexuality, and the mouths of such men, nicknamed, for reasons not always well understood, Colocyntha (which I Page 140 →have translated “Zucchini”) and barbata chelidon (“the Bearded Swallow”) defile the drinking vessels they use—presumably because these men perform oral sex on men, women, or both.280 And yet the speaker’s rant reveals a potential problem with his rhetoric: the women of the house see no problem with admitting such men (whomever their lusts prefer) to table; nor do they see any point in shattering the cups they’ve drunk from. The speaker’s outrage over the defiled house is potentially his alone. He strengthens his case by stating (6. O 7–13) that even the gladiator’s school is better. Next we find that women take no pains to protect their households and husbands from contact with the corruption of the Other (6. O 14–16). sed tibi communem calicem facit uxor et illis cum quibus Albanum Surrentinumque recuset flaua ruinosi lupa degustare sepulchri. But your wife has the cup shared between you and them—the ones with whom the blonde whore at the decaying tomb would refuse to share a drink of Alban or Surrentine wine. Again the wife breaks down boundaries between the elite, respectable, and Roman, on the one hand, and the debased, disgraced, and alien, on the other. The husband’s ability to separate himself from the disreputable and corrupt is compromised by his wife, who runs a household in which one cannot tell the difference between sexually passive deviants and men who merely resemble them. Yet the men admitted by wives to such houses pose another, even worse problem—and perhaps this is the most honest confession of what the speaker dislikes about such men (6. O 17–20): horum consiliis nubunt subitaeque recedunt, his languentem animum †seruant†et seria uitae, his clunem atque latus discunt uibrare magistris, quicquid praeterea scit qui docet. Page 141 →It’s at their advice that they get married and suddenly divorce; to them they †confide†that their souls are perishing, and the problems of their life; with them as teachers they learn to shake their ass and hips, and whatever else their instructor knows.281 The problem, then (so far at least), is that the effeminate men who are brought into the house by the wife exercise an authority over them, and one that far outstrips that of a mere husband: women marry and divorce (at an instant) on the advice of such men; they tell them all their secrets; and from them they learn salacious behavior, obviously not for the benefit of their husbands.

The effeminacy of such men is again cited as a problem, but not in the way we might expect (6. O 20–26): haud tamen illi semper habenda fides: oculos fuligine pascit distinctus croceis et reticulatus adulter. suspectus tibi sit, quanto uox mollior et quo saepius in teneris haerebit dextera lumbis. hic erit in lecto fortissimus; exuit illic personam docili Thais saltata Triphallo. Still, you can never trust him: he makes his brows richer with mascara, an adulterer, his saffron robe undone and wearing a hairnet. Suspect him—the more womanly his voice and the more frequently his right hand will cling to his soft groin. He’ll be very aggressive in bed—that’s where he’ll step out of character: Thais has been performed by an expert Triphallus! The clause with which this begins, haud tamen illi semper habenda fides, uses the word fides in an unexpected way. The speaker does not mean to say that such a man cannot be trusted; the point, rather, is that the speaker acknowledges here that men like himself cannot always rely on cherished stereotypes: the men who seem like passive homosexuals may not be, and in fact they may prove especially virile in bed.282 The female courtesan Thais is in fact merely a performance by Triphallus, whose name suggests masculinity multiplied times three. Page 142 →There follow a few more obscure verses of the O fragment (6. O 27–34), part of which is repeated elsewhere in the troubling text of the sixth Satire, including one of Juvenal’s most famous lines: sed quis custodiet ipsos / custodes? (“but who will guard the guards themselves?”). The point of all of this would seem to be that clever wives suborn and perhaps subvert those entrusted with guarding them. The speaker and men like him cannot win—even the passive homosexuals who should pose no threat turn out to be virile lovers of their wives. It is only they themselves who are excluded. If apparently effeminate men can turn out to be just as virile as anyone else, if Thais is merely a subterfuge concealing the Гјbermacho Triphallus (“Triple-Dick”), perhaps the speaker can at least take refuge in the obvious physical effeminacy of the eunuch, who, one might expect, will be less masculine and less authoritative than he by dint of biological necessity. Our speaker is not so lucky.

Juvenal’s Eunuchs For a man interested in proving a strictly binary and hierarchical notion of gender and behavior, the eunuch should provide the perfect foil. The eunuch is biologically male but is robbed of sexual virility and forced to develop female secondary sexual characteristics, such as a lack of body hair and a higher voice. By pointing to such a figure, a male can establish what it is that makes him, unlike the eunuch, a real man.283 Yet this strategy will not work in Juvenal’s Satires, since almost all of the eunuchs he describes succeed in one or more of the “real” man’s domains. We have already seen that the very first thing that Juvenal chooses to decry is a eunuch who takes a wife (1.22). We are not told what sexual arrangements will accompany the marriage, but it is unimportant, because the point is that once the biological male becomes a eunuch he, in the eyes of the speaker, should be ineligible to marry. Yet, somehow, this one has gotten himself a wife. Before we look at eunuchs in Satire 6, it will be helpful first to look at a brief passage from Satire 2 in which it is made clear that sexual passivity in men is a disqualification from manhood tantamount to castration (2.115–16):

Page 143 →quid tamen expectant, Phrygio quos tempus erat iam more superuacuam cultris abrumpere carnem? So what are they waiting for? It’s past time that they cut off their useless meat with knives, the Phrygian way. The context is a long, convoluted denunciation of men who cross-dress and have orgies with other men, often under the cover of foreign religious practices. Such men, the speaker of the second Satire declares, may as well be eunuchs, like certain Phrygian priests. So, while these lines define sexually passive men as virtual eunuchs, they also define eunuchs as sexually passive effeminates. This may seem obvious, but one need not associate sexual passivity with castration. Clearly, however, Juvenal does. The active virility of the sexually penetrative male is lacking from eunuchs and effeminates; it is therefore posited as a necessary characteristic of real men. Yet when the speaker of Satire 6 turns to the topic of eunuchs, we see the failure of this understanding of the eunuch as inevitably, if not passive, at least impotent. Some women, it turns out, like eunuchs (6.366–68). sunt quas eunuchi inbelles ac mollia semper oscula delectent et desperatio barbae et quod abortiuo non est opus. There are women whom unsoldierly eunuchs and their always effeminate kisses delight—no hope of a beard and no need for abortifacients. For this speaker at least, eunuchs are unmanly and their kisses are always effeminate, but they are nevertheless potential erotic rivals. So many of the problems with feminine behavior in the sixth Satire come down to women preferring different kinds of men to the kind of man the speaker thinks he is. Here they not only prefer the soft, smooth-cheeked eunuchs, but, as the comment about abortifacient drugs makes clear, they value them for the possibility of sex with no worry of pregnancy. Thus these unmanly eunuchs are useful precisely as penetrators. They are manly without being men, or perhaps more worrying for our speaker, men without being manly. Even among eunuchs, there are more and less popular models (6.368–76). Page 144 →illa uoluptas summa tamen, quom iam calida matura iuuenta inguina traduntur medicis, iam pectine nigro. ergo expectatos ac iussos crescere primum testiculos, postquam coeperunt esse bilibres, tonsoris tantum damno rapit Heliodorus. mangonum pueros uera ac miserabilis urit debilitas, follisque pudet cicerisque relicti. conspicuus longe cunctisque notabilis intrat balnea nec dubie custodem uitis et horti

prouocat a domina factus spado. In any case, that’s their greatest pleasure, when (youth already hot-blooded, bush already black) grown-up groins are handed over to the doctors. And so, once they’ve begun to be big, Heliodorus snatches away the testicles that had been cultivated and invited to grow—a loss only to the barber. A real and pitiable weakness burns the slave-dealer’s boys, and they’re ashamed of their hollow sacks and the chickpeas they’re left with. But the one made a eunuch at the behest of the lady of the house is obvious from far off and enters the bath remarkable to everyone, and without a doubt he challenges the guardian of the vine and garden. This passage does more than insult the behavior or insatiable lust of women, and it says at least as much about the speaker as it does about women of any sort. First of all, it provides a detailed description of two different kinds of eunuch—and makes the case for castration, if delayed until full sexual development, as an ironic enhancement of masculine sexual desirability. Such eunuchs are contrasted with those castrated while still children, whose genitals never fully develop through lack of testosterone at puberty. So just as there is a binary opposition between male and female that is reflected by one between real men and effeminates (including eunuchs), within the category of eunuchs the speaker has developed such an opposition also. The speaker himself is somewhat difficult to place among all these oppositions. Theoretically, he’s a traditional Roman “real” man, but his description of eunuchs in this passage is an odd mix of antipathy, sympathy, and voyeuristic glee. The speaker expresses no sympathy for already developed late adolescents who endure castration. It’s only the barber’s loss, he says, but surely the boys Page 145 →themselves will have felt it was their loss too. Perhaps such eunuchs get no sympathy because they are a kind of threat.284 The well-hung eunuchs are the height of pleasure for women. They are also the objects of everyone’s gaze—and therefore of the speaker’s gaze—when they enter the public baths.285 They may give pleasure, visual or tactile, to their mistresses at home, but at the baths it will mostly be men who ogle them. Rather than unmanning them, castration has turned them into human versions of Priapus. On the other hand, the other kind of eunuch seems to be the object of some compassion on the speaker’s part. They lack obvious signs of virility just as the other kind possess exaggerated signs of it; they are comforting to the speaker because they are pathetic. But there is another way in which virile eunuchs can threaten men like the speaker and his idea of what manhood is. These eunuchs are commissioned by their mistresses—they are men made by women, and thus more in line with what women want.286 The speaker’s masculinity is defined by and for other men, but in this poem that so often takes women to task for preferring the wrong kind of man, it is clear that sexual success with women is part of what the speaker sees as manliness. Now he is confronted with masculinity as defined by women. Here Juvenal raises the possibility not of women as the teller of the tales but of women as the creators of men and manhood. The maternal aspect that Juvenal’s women suppress is here reimagined as women’s capacity to create their own lovers. Perhaps in reaction to feeling threatened by the virility of the eunuchs and the power of women in shaping male bodies as they would have them, the speaker ends this discussion of eunuchs with an interesting and unexpected piece of advice (6.376–78). dormiat ille cum domina, sed tu iam durum, Postume, iamque tondendum eunucho Bromium committere noli. Page 146 →Let that eunuch, Postumus, sleep with your wife, but don’t you entrust to the eunuch your Bromius, already hearty and needing a haircut. The virile Priapic eunuch can be allowed to sleep with the master’s wife, but he must not be allowed to have

sex with the master’s slave boy.287 The usual explanation, dating to the Renaissance, is that his huge penis will damage the boy during anal sex, and while this probably explains one aspect of the lines, it does not really explain why this advice is needed, or the striking fact that the slave boy himself appears to be too old to be serving as his master’s sexual favorite in the first place.288 In fact, the slave boy who has to be protected, in a way the wife does not, is himself nearing the age at which the Priapic eunuch was created—the name Bromius itself (“Roarer”) may even suggest that the boy’s voice is changing.289 I suggest that the concern for the young slave has to do with desire as a gendered phenomenon. The eunuch, a woman-made man, can be allowed to service his mistress, who after all probably had him produced in the first place and who is already lost to her husband anyway. But the now maturing, presumably uncastrated Bromius, even if used as a passive object of penetration by Postumus, is still an object of desire in the world of men. That is, though passive, he is the “male” equivalent of the eunuch, an object of desire that responds to the master’s desires, as the eunuch is tailored for those of his mistress. The eunuch is an object of desire made by the mistress, and whether his endowment would hurt the boy or not, sex between them is liable to turn the boy from the objectified possession of his master to that of the eunuch, making him part of the effeminized, woman-created world of the eunuch—further robbing the master of sexual objects, as the wife is serviced by the eunuch, and the eunuch by Bromius.290 Postumus, and by extension men like the speaker, are left out in the cold, without sex (the act of penetration) because they do not belong to the world of the castrated, the passive, or the female. And without penetrating, can they be, in the speaker’s eyes, men?291 Page 147 →Similar anxieties over effeminate men succeeding in traditionally masculine pursuits are found in the second Satire. In that poem, several unmanly men play roles of clear importance in Roman society. Gracchus, whom we met in chapter 3 fighting as a gladiator while wearing his priestly regalia, is shown to be male bride, gladiator, and Salian priest all at once. Creticus, effeminately dressed in a see-through garment, is a magistrate, but the most important figure of all is the emperor (2.99–109). ille tenet speculum, pathici gestamen Othonis, Actoris Aurunci spolium, quo se ille uidebat armatum, cum iam tolli uexilla iuberet. res memoranda nouis annalibus atque recenti historia, speculum ciuilis sarcina belli. nimirum summi ducis est occidere Galbam et curare cutem, [summi constantia ciuis Bebriaci campis] solium adfectare Palati et pressum in faciem digitis extendere panem, quod nec in Assyrio pharetrata Sameramis orbe maesta nec Actiaca fecit Cleopatra carina. He [an effeminate] holds a hand-mirror, ornament of the faggot Otho, “spoils of Auruncan Actor, ” in which he would look at himself in armor, when he was ordering the standards moved. A thing to be recorded in the modern annals and recent history: a mirror as gear for civil war! Of course it takes a top-notch general to kill Galba while taking care of his complexion, [the stalwartness of the highest citizen on the battlefield at Bebriacum] to make a play for the Palatine throne while smearing on a face mask made of bread with his fingers—something not accomplished by arrow-bearing Semiramis off in Assyria nor sad Cleopatra in her ship at Actium.

M. Salvius Otho, an associate of Nero and the former husband of Poppaea Sabina, was emperor for a short time in 69 CE after the defeat of Galba on the battlefield.292 Juvenal compresses the events into a single (misleading) image of Otho personally killing Galba while giving himself a facial. Page 148 →Otho’s preening before the mirror reflects a number of cultural tensions. Mirrors were considered instruments of women’s vanity, so the simple fact that Otho likes to look at himself in one shows that he is effeminate—as does the epithet pathicus, of course. Yet Otho likes to look at himself dressed in the ultimate manly outfit, armor. Pathici gestamen Othonis (“ornament of the faggot Otho”) is an allusion to Book 3 of Vergil’s Aeneid (3.286), and Actoris Aurunci spolium is a direct quotation from Book 12 (12.94), where it describes Turnus’ spear. These references suggest that Otho is a kind of warped epic hero. But like the virile, Priapic eunuchs discussed in the sixth Satire, Otho is playing a traditionally male role as general and soldier. However brief his reign, he was indeed emperor of Rome. Juvenal points to Tacitus when he describes Otho’s mirror and preening as res memoranda nouis annalibus atque recenti / historia (“a thing to be recorded in the modern annals and recent histories”). As Courtney points out, it may be more or less coincidental that the statement seems to use the titles of Tacitus’ major historical works, but Tacitus would still seem to be suggested, since he is the only well-known historian writing on the appropriate events.293 The reference to Tacitus is suggestive, since he does not in fact discuss Otho’s mirror in the Histories (in which the emperor is otherwise discussed), and while he does comment on the mollitia (“effeminacy”) and luxuria (“decadence”) of Otho (Hist. 1.21–22), he also makes sure to record that he died a noble death (Hist. 2.46–50).294 Unlike Galba, whose story ends in Tacitus with a stern but witty denunciation of his capacity to rule, Otho committed suicide at the approach of Vitellius and his legions, precisely to end rather than prolong the violence of civil war. The speaker of Satire 2 tries to correct Tacitus by emphasizing Otho’s effeminacy, but the correction also raises the possibility that the audience will remember that Otho’s effeminacy is accompanied by uirtus, just as the putatively unmanly eunuch can turn out to possess his own especially potent and attractive form of manliness. The dissonance between Otho’s outward effeminacy, on the one hand, and his martial success and noble self-sacrifice, on the other, calls into question the values of the speaker who can or will see only one side of the truth. Page 149 →

The Language of Lust Several times in the preceding discussion the tendency of women to prefer what is alien and foreign has been noted. The respectable elite male speaker describes a kind of otherworld from which he has been excluded. Now we turn to further features of this upside-down world in which the Roman male elite is excluded, humiliated, and marginalized—in which the man who feels that he is naturally an insider finds himself everywhere confronted by a Rome that has become an alien, foreign landscape (6.184–87).295 quaedam parua quidem, sed non toleranda maritis. nam quid rancidius quam quod se non putat ulla formosam nisi quae de Tusca Graecula facta est, de Sulmonensi mera Cecropis? Sure, some [faults] are small, but husbands shouldn’t tolerate them! For what is more disgusting than the fact that no woman thinks herself beautiful unless she’s gone from a Tuscan to some sort of Greekling? From Sulmonese to pure Athenian?! Italian women’s preference for appearing Greek is introduced as a minor failing but one still not to be endured by husbands. These women associate Greek style with beauty, and thus this passage is related to the same theme explored in those passages, discussed above, in which women’s ideas of beauty are declared by the

speaker to be ugly and disgusting. Here, however, this preference for Greek style extends well past physical adornment (6.187, 189–90). omnia Graece: hoc sermone pauent, hoc iram, gaudia, curas, hoc cuncta effundunt animi secreta.296 Page 150 →Everything’s in Greek. In this tongue they are afraid; in it they pour out their wrath, their joy, their stress; in it, all the secrets of their soul. Women do not simply adorn themselves Г la mode grecque when they want to look attractive; they speak Greek as well. To twenty-first-century Americans, at least, speaking French when it is unnecessary may be the best modern analogue. Yet the problem with this fault (still minor at this point?) is that it goes beyond mere affectation. They use Greek for their private thoughts and emotions, and thus, perhaps we are meant to think, Greek is really more natural to these women than Latin. If this is true, then Italian men are different from their wives not only in sex but also in culture. Just as women’s preference for actors, gladiators, and eunuchs of their own making can be seen as a kind of repudiation of sex with “normal” men, their Greek leanings have a sexual dimension too, and one that blurs not only the boundary between Italian and foreign, but also that between acceptable and unacceptable sexuality (6.190–99). quid ultra? concumbunt Graece. dones tamen ista puellis, tune etiam, quam sextus et octogensimus annus pulsat, adhuc Graece? non est hic sermo pudicus in uetula. quotiens lasciuum interuenit illud О¶П‰бЅґ ОєО±бЅ¶ П€П…П‡О®, modo sub lodice relictis uteris in turba. quod enim non excitet inguen uox blanda et nequam? digitos habet. ut tamen omnes subsidant pinnae, dicas haec mollius Haemo quamquam et Carpophoro, facies tua conputat annos. What’s worse? They hit the sheets in Greek. Say you grant that to girls—do you still use Greek, a woman whose eighty-sixth year is pounding down her door? This is not respectable speech in an old lady. Every time that naughty ma vie, mon Гўme makes an appearance, you’re using in public words only to be employed under the sheets! What groin does that caressing, wicked phrase not get excited? It has fingers. Still, to lower your crest: suppose you say these things more sensuously297 than Haemus or Carpophorus, your face still counts off the years! Page 151 →Speaking Greek extends to the bedroom, and bedroom language makes its way into public. Beyond this passage lies a long tradition of Vetula-skoptik, mockery of old women, usually for bibulousness or, as here, inappropriately trying to remain sexually active. Yet it is important to see how this arises in context. Italian

women are first said to transform themselves into Greeks in order to look beautiful. Then it turns out they speak Greek as well, and especially for their most private and intimate feelings—making women seem more and more foreign. Finally, even sex is carried out in Greek, but this does not merely suggest that they are really Greek within. The use of Greek in sexual contexts is associated with two problematic excesses: the continuation by women of sexual activity into an unacceptable age and the use of sexual language outside of the appropriate place. There is an additional suggestion that the use of Greek leads to, or at least accompanies, promiscuity, since the old woman whom the speaker addresses, it is implied, uses her naughty Greek endearments in turba, literally “in the midst of a crowd.” Important also is the fact that the speaker reveals that this erotic use of the Greek language works.298 Who doesn’t get turned on by it, he asks, and thus we see the idea of exclusion reinforced. Women use Greek to turn men on, but the poem makes it clear that women don’t generally want men like our speaker. Thus he is both excluded but excited—aroused by the Greek language and the woman he so excoriates, and yet not likely to find an outlet for his frustration. Moreover, by admitting that men like himself share women’s attraction to Greek in erotic contexts, he undermines the sense of distance he has tried to create between himself and the feminine and alien, something that we will see him do again nearer the end of the poem (discussed below), when he undermines all aspects of his and Postumus’ own identities. Women’s preference for and association with the alien and un-Roman is not limited to the Greek language. Superstitious women may find foreign advisors, as Satire 6’s final memorable eunuch enters (6.512–21). Bellonae matrisque deum chorus intrat et ingens semiuir, obsceno facies reuerenda minori, mollia qui rapta secuit genitalia testa iam pridem, cui rauca cohors, cui tympana cedunt plebeia et Phrygia uestitur bucca tiara. Page 152 →grande sonat metuique iubet Septembris et austri aduentum, nisi se centum lustrauerit ouis et xerampelinas ueteres donauerit ipsi, ut quidquid subiti et magni discriminis instat in tunicas eat et totum semel expiet annum. The chorus of Bellona and the Mother of the Gods comes in along with a huge half-man, a countenance to be revered by a lesser pervert, who long ago cut off his soft genitals with a potsherd he’d snatched up. By him the noisy company is outdone, by him the drums are, and his plebeian face is covered by the Phrygian miter. He shouts at great volume and bids that the coming of September and the south wind be feared—unless she purify herself with a hundred eggs and give him old gowns so that whatever sudden, great danger looms will enter the dresses and make expiation for the whole year at one stroke. This eunuch is followed by a whole parade of foreign cults that get (or allow) wives to do outrageous and impious things. First (6.522–41) come the Egyptians: Isis, Anubis, and Osiris.299 We should perhaps see here an oblique reference to a sex scandal of 19 CE: an unscrupulous man impersonating Anubis, with the connivance of the priests in the temple of Isis, had sex with a respectable woman who believed that she was sleeping with the god; when the truth came out the woman’s husband took the matter to Tiberius, who had the priests crucified

and the temple destroyed.300 Jews follow (6.542–47), selling fraudulent interpretations of dreams, along with soothsayers from Armenia and Commagene (6.548–52), who promise a young lover or an inheritance.301 But Jews and other easterners cannot hold a candle to the Chaldaean astrologers, particularly those whose credibility has been verified by exile (6.553–64). Women’s reliance on astrology is more than a matter of credulity, for the speaker now explains what these women want astrology to reveal (6.565–68). consulit ictericae lento de funere matris, ante tamen de te Tanaquil tua, quando sororem Page 153 →efferat et patruos, an sit uicturus adulter post ipsam; quid enim maius dare numina possunt? Your Tanaquil enquires about the death (long in coming) of her jaundiced mother—she’s already done so in your case. She enquires when she’ll bury her sister and uncles, or whether her lover will live on after her. For what greater favors can divinity grant? As often in Juvenal, wives want to profit from the death of husbands and other relatives. This wife is also, clearly, adulterous, as the word adulter makes clear. The name Tanaquil has special point here. The speaker may seem to give it to the woman he describes ironically, that is, simply as a reference to a wife devoted to the success of her husband, as this wife clearly is not. Yet we should keep in mind that Tanaquil was herself a foreigner: an Etruscan (and therefore, according to tradition, eastern) woman, married to a Greek, who put upon the throne of Rome a boy of uncertain and possibly servile origin, and who herself was skilled at reading signs (Livy 1.34.9).302 At least the superstitious women we have been discussing still need to consult such foreigners; the next woman we meet does not (6.569–76). haec tamen ignorat quid sidus triste minetur Saturni, quo laeta Venus se proferat astro, quis mensis damnis, quae dentur tempora lucro: illius occursus etiam uitare memento, in cuius manibus ceu pinguia sucina tritas cernis ephemeridas, quae nullum consulit et iam consulitur, quae castra uiro patriamque petente non ibit pariter numeris reuocata Thrasylli. At least this one doesn’t know what Saturn’s grim star threatens, under what sign Venus declares herself fertile, which months are assigned to loss, which seasons to profit. Remember to stay out of the way of that woman, in whose hands you spy the ephemeris, well-thumbed, like a damp ball of amber—the woman who consults no one and who now is consulted in her own right. She Page 154 →won’t go with her husband whether he’s heading for camp or home, not if she’s been recalled by Thrasyllus’ calculations. We have a transition here from women who are superstitious and consult foreigners, and who are corrupted by

them or at least abetted in their corruption.303 We now encounter a type of woman who goes further; she can scorn the foreign authorities not because they are un-Roman but because she too is an authority. She has expert knowledge of Thrasyllus, private astrologer to Tiberius, and, as the following passage (6.577–84) shows, of others, such as Petosiris. The foreignness of the priests and astrologers has turned a Roman wife into one of them. The speaker rounds out his tirade on women who consult astrologers and soothsayers by noting that while the rich woman consults a Phrygian, thus recalling the eunuch advisor, even the commoner has soothsayers to consult (6.585–91). What follows makes the connection between women and the Other especially clear, and ultimately explains why it is so troubling to the speaker (6.592–601). hae tamen et partus subeunt discrimen et omnis nutricis tolerant fortuna urguente labores, sed iacet aurato uix ulla puerpera lecto. tantum artes huius, tantum medicamina possunt, quae steriles facit atque homines in uentre necandos conducit. gaude, infelix, atque ipse bibendum porrige quidquid erit; nam si distendere uellet et uexare uterum pueris salientibus, esses Aethiopis fortasse pater, mox decolor heres impleret tabulas numquam tibi mane uidendus. At least these women both undergo the peril of childbirth and endure all the work of nursing when fortune demands. But in the gilded bed lies scarcely a single woman in labor—so strong are the skills, so strong the drugs of the woman who makes them sterile and is hired to kill people in the belly. Cheer up, loser, and give her whatever she needs to drink yourself. For if she were willingPage 155 → to stretch and torment her womb with kicking babies, perhaps you’d become the father of an Ethiopian; soon your off-color heir would be first in your will, though you could never look at him in the morning. Throughout the sixth Satire, women of the Roman elite have been continually associated with everything alien and un-Roman, and we have just seen that some women who favor foreign superstitions become expert in those alien practices themselves. Here we find that elite women shun childbirth and, when they do go through with it, actually produce the alien. Thus Roman women promote the un-Roman in two ways—by refusing to give birth to future Romans and by introducing the sons of foreigners into the elite houses of Rome (6.602–9).304 transeo suppositos et gaudia uotaque saepe ad spurcos decepta lacus, saepe inde petitos pontifices, salios Scaurorum nomina falso corpore laturos. stat Fortuna inproba noctu adridens nudis infantibus: hos fouet omni inuoluitque sinu, domibus tunc porrigit altis

secretumque sibi mimum parat; hos amat, his se ingerit utque suos semper producit alumnos. I pass over substitute children and the joys and hopes often mocked at the dirty latrines, the priests often sought at those places, the Salian priests who will bear the names of the Scauri in their fraudulent persons. At night, naughty Fortune stands smiling down on the naked infants. She fondles them and takes them up in her full embrace; then she places them in the great houses and readies for herself a secret farce. These are the ones she loves; on these she dotes and promotes them always as her own wards. Fortune helps Roman wives cheat their husbands’ hopes of paternity; they feign pregnancy and substitute an heir picked up at a public latrine (or cistern, as some take lacus to mean).305 Thus these children of unknown origin take places Page 156 →in the great families of Rome. As we saw frequently in the previous chapter, bad behavior on the part of the elite can have religious implications too; it certainly does here, since these suppositious children are taking the priesthoods reserved for the sons of the elite. In the second Satire, the nexus of associations that connects religious piety (and its efficacy in maintaining the pax deum), elite heritage, and proper behavior was threatened by Gracchus, whose improper behavior (as gladiator and bride) made a mockery of his role as a Salian priest and his very blue blood. Here the future behavior, and the religious status, of these nurslings of Fortune is called into question by the falseness of their heritage. 306 Fortune’s secret farce yet again recalls the Roman stage. The phrase secretumque sibi mimum parat points not only to mimes but also to Greek and Roman New Comic plots (and the novels that made such use of the same plot devices). In those plays, low-class children routinely turn out to be high-born and respectable. Fortune there makes the unsafe family scenario—for example a son in love with a slave girl or future prostitute—safe again. Here, however, the plot device is not so felicitous. Rather than hide the elite in low places, Juvenal’s Fortuna hides the servile and foreign in great houses. The phrase his se ingerit is hard to translate; I have rendered it as “on these she dotes,” but we can take it—and her—more literally: “she piles herself on them” as a shower of wealth. Juvenal’s Fortune is both money and the randomness that has given that money to others and lets it be spread about willy-nilly by the bad wives of Rome. So the attraction of elite women to all things foreign and un-Roman—including the gladiators, musicians, and actors, who, if not actually foreigners, are associated with them—culminates in the eventual transformation of Rome into a city of outsiders. The us/them mindset of the poem’s speaker is confronted with the possibility of a world only of “them,” in which he too is alien to what he took to be normal Roman manhood. It is important to realize the full significance of Fortune’s private farce: the speaker and his addressee Postumus may themselves be such children. Perhaps the speaker, whose attempt to convince Postumus not to marry has been premised on the idea that they represent secure Romanitas, is himself already one of the foreigners he inveighs against.307 Page 157 →The crucial thing is that only Fortuna can know, and thus any social system based on birth, and any concomitant ideology, is called into question.

Emperors’ Wives By producing heirs who are not appropriate to the religious and other tasks that their false parentage entitles them to, women subvert Rome’s social institutions, but the sixth Satire is not the only poem in which elite marriage is made into a means of subversion by a woman. The tenth Satire introduces us to Gaius Silius, “most beautiful of Roman youths.” His looks attracted the attentions of the world’s most powerful woman, Messalina, wife of the emperor Claudius. His story is also told by the historians Cassius Dio and Tacitus, though in a very different way (10.329–38).308 elige quidnam suadendum esse putes cui nubere Caesaris uxor

destinat. optimus hic et formonsissimus idem gentis patriciae rapitur miser extinguendus Messalinae oculis; dudum sedet illa parato flammeolo Tyriusque palam genialis in hortis sternitur et ritu decies centena dabuntur antiquo, ueniet cum signatoribus auspex. haec tu secreta et paucis commissa putabas? non nisi legitime uolt nubere. Select whatever you think should be recommended to the one whom Caesar’s wife marks out to marry. This one, the most excellent and also the most beautiful of the patrician class, is carried off to his doom, the wretch, by the eyes of Messalina. Long has she been sitting with her veil at the ready; the Tyrian couch Page 158 →is spread for all to see in the garden; according to the ancient custom a million will be given as a dowry; the officiant will come with the witnesses. Were you thinking that these things were secret and entrusted to only a few? She won’t wed except properly! In the Tacitean account, the doomed patrician is a coconspirator of Messalina, through whom he plans to take the throne and assassinate the emperor. Juvenal’s Gaius Silius, by contrast, is more victim than villain—significantly, Silius is not the subject of a single active verb here (10.338–45). quid placeat dic. ni parere uelis, pereundum erit ante lucernas; si scelus admittas, dabitur mora paruula, dum res nota urbi et populo contingat principis aurem. dedecus ille domus sciet ultimus. interea tu obsequere imperio, si tanti uita dierum paucorum. quidquid leuius meliusque putaris, praebenda est gladio pulchra haec et candida ceruix. Tell me what you would decide. If you won’t obey her, you’ll have to die before sunset. If you commit the crime, you’ll get a brief delay—until an event known to the city and the people reaches the emperor’s ear. He’ll be the last to know the disgrace to his house. In the meantime, you obey the command, if a few days of life is worth so much. Whatever course you think easier and better, this fine, fair neck must be offered up to the sword. Juvenal’s ostensible point is to show that beauty is not something to be wished for. In contrast to Tacitus, Juvenal sympathizes with Silius, who is a victim of Messalina’s lust and arrogant stupidity (in that she insists on a public wedding when she is already married). Moreover, Silius is doubly trapped: if he does the honorable thing and resists Messalina, he will be murdered. If he goes ahead with the wedding, he will be executed by the emperor.309

Whereas Tacitus makes Gaius Silius at least equally responsible for the affair—it appears to be his way of maneuvering onto the throne—Juvenal Page 159 →strips any hint of a planned coup from the passage, even though it is only such an attempt that makes sense of either party’s willingness to go through with the wedding. Thus Juvenal’s Silius becomes the victim of the capricious, even irrational Messalina. I want to extract several points from Juvenal’s exemplum. The first is that Juvenal’s Silius is a victim, whose victimization underscores the warped state into which Rome has gotten itself. The weak have always been prey to the strong, but Silius himself was one of the strong (optimus hicВ .В .В . idem/gentis patriciae). The existence of a woman with the singular power possessed by an emperor’s wife suggests a dangerous inversion of Rome’s social and gender hierarchies, since, before there was an emperor, the wives of even the most powerful men of the elite would still largely have been unable to control the fates of powerful men.310 The emperor’s wife, however, has a real, if extra-legal, ability to do so. This is even truer of the emperor himself, whose existence renders everyone else powerless. In Juvenal’s sympathetic retelling, Silius becomes an adulterer, a conspirator, and ultimately a corpse, because of the empress’ lust. Moreover, this exemplum shows something about the way the emperor and his wife affect traditional institutions. We have already noted that Silius’ status as a high-born patrician is now meaningless, since he is effectively treated like a slave. But marriage is also warped by Messalina’s insistence on a proper, public wedding. By insisting on doing a traditional thing in the wrong way, Messalina inverts traditional notions of marriage. Marriage has in fact turned into a form of adultery. In addition, this is a wedding in which the bride calls the shots. It is a kind of anti-wedding that turns marriage into adultery, a man into a kind of bride, and a patrician into a slave. Most important in all this is the way Silius is represented as a human being whose downfall is simultaneously selfinflicted (he goes ahead with adultery and a very public, and illegal, insult to the emperor) and imposed by realities beyond his control: he is physically beautiful, the empress cannot be resisted, and the emperor is the ultimate source of punitive power. Thus, Juvenal’s Silius is a person who does the wrong things but whose character is ambiguous, since we sympathize with his plight. Caught in a web, Silius reacts. He might have Page 160 →become an exemplum of an honorable young man doing the right thing when propositioned by a powerful but unscrupulous woman—as Bellerophon and Hippolytus, mentioned just before our passage (10.325), had done. Instead he became an exemplum of vice. It must not escape us that either way he becomes an exemplum, as do a number of figures in the tenth Satire.311 His status as a unique human being is eventually lost as he becomes a kind of textual marker, a sign of the instability of social institutions under the pressures exerted by the ultimate power couple. It is true that Messalina’s power depends, to some extent, on her role as emperor’s wife, and thus we might think that Juvenal’s target in such an exemplum is really the emperor or even autocracy. Yet Claudius was an emperor notoriously prone to control by two groups over whom he should have resolutely exercised power: his wives and his freedmen. Indeed, Tacitus’ account of the Messalina-Silius affair and its aftermath emphasizes both the way that Messalina treats Claudius as an obvious fool and the role his freedmen played in deciding how she and Silius should be punished. So for Juvenal, the emperor’s wife may have gained her power over others from her fortunate marriage, but she was also a woman trying to free herself from subordination to her husband. Juvenal and all Roman men now have to contend with a woman more powerful than any man. The narrative of Gaius Silius is particularly pointed in this regard since it emphasizes that he is in fact a man of high birth, but his high birth cannot help him in the face of the empress’ power. A passage from Satire 6 makes this same point. After saying that wives buy love-philters and drugs to give them power over their husbands, the speaker puts this practice in an imperial context (6.614–20). tamen hoc tolerabile, si non et furere incipias ut auunculus ille Neronis, cui totam tremuli frontem Caesonia pulli

infudit. quae non faciet quod principis uxor? ardebant cuncta et fracta conpage ruebant non aliter quam si fecisset Iuno maritum insanum.312 Page 161 →Still, this might be tolerable if you wouldn’t begin to rave like that uncle of Nero, into whom Caesonia poured the whole caul of a shaky-legged foal. What woman won’t do what the emperor’s wife does? The universe blazed and fell apart, its structure broken, just as if Juno had driven her husband insane. Caesonia gave her husband Caligula a love potion made from the notorious hippomanes, the membrane taken from the forehead of a newborn foal, making him lose his mind. Since the emperor’s wife will be a role model for all women, her destructive misbehavior will spread in that way.313 This idea that a woman of such power will inspire other women even as she causes trouble by driving mad an immensely powerful man inspires the speaker to move from the imperial to the divine. When Caesonia poisoned her husband he went mad and entered on a reign of terror. It was as if the sky was falling and the world on fire—just as if Juno had driven Jupiter mad.314 This image not only emphasizes what is as stake when powerful men succumb to their wives; it also suggests that even the divine male is ever in danger from women. In keeping with the sixth Satire’s insistence that women constitute a kind of anti-order that excludes and even destroys men, we find that Jupiter’s orderly universe is itself in danger of plunging into Junonian chaos. In that case, how can any man be safe? As elsewhere, there is a core of anxiety at the heart of these poems that the universe itself may offer no support to the ideology of the elite Roman man. To emphasize the danger posed by Caesonia’s act, Juvenal turns ironically to a more positive exemplum (6.620–26). minus ergo nocens erit Agrippinae boletus, siquidem unius praecordia pressit ille senis tremulumque caput descendere iussit in caelum et longa manantia labra saliua: haec poscit ferrum atque ignes, haec potio torquet, haec lacerat mixtos equitum cum sanguine patres. tanti partus equae, tanti una uenefica constat. Page 162 →So Agrippina’s mushroom will be less harmful, if indeed it stopped the heart of one old man and ordered his trembling head, its lips dripping with long strands of drool, to descend to heaven. This [Caesonia’s] potion demands fire and the sword; it tortures; it mangles senators and knights alike. Such is the power of a mare’s offspring; such is the power of one poisoner. One emperor is murdered by his wife, another driven mad. But Agrippina, Claudius’ wife after Messalina, did little damage in comparison to Caesonia, whose poison left her husband alive but cost the lives of many others. It is not irrelevant here that Caligula’s (and thus Caesonia’s) victims are described as a mix of senators and equestrians, for this exemplum, like that of Gaius Silius, shows that no rank below that of emperor is of any use

against an emperor’s wife. The supposed counterexample of Agrippina shows that even emperors aren’t really safe from women. The irony of the Agrippina example is twofold. First, it suggests that a woman who murders her husband can somehow be preferred to one who merely tries to control him. Second, Agrippina’s murder of Claudius put Nero in power, and Nero, both in Juvenal’s poetry and elsewhere, would seem to be little alternative to Caligula. In fact, in Juvenal’s day Nero and Caligula were the two most notorious emperors to date—at least among the Roman senatorial elite, on whom they seem to have vented particular rage. The sixth Satire reconfigures their behavior as the product of female intervention. Here we see another aspect of what the speaker seems to view as women’s perverse desire to subvert: the monstrous misbehavior of Caligula and Nero is essentially another of the grotesque productions of women, like the unnatural partus equae (“mare’s offspring”), or the stud-eunuchs they create for themselves, or the imposter children they foist off on the great houses of Rome, when they consent to raise children at all. Let us return to Messalina, when she appears at an earlier moment in the poem; her monstrous lusts may serve as emblem for all of Juvenal’s women, above all those with power (6.115–32): respice riuales diuorum, Claudius audi quae tulerit. dormire uirum cum senserat uxor, sumere nocturnos meretrix Augusta cucullos ausa Palatino et tegetem praeferre cubili linquebat comite ancilla non amplius una. Page 163 →sed nigrum flauo crinem abscondente galero intrauit calidum ueteri centone lupanar et cellam uacuam atque suam; tunc nuda papillis prostitit auratis titulum mentita Lyciscae ostenditque tuum, generose Britannice, uentrem. excepit blanda intrantis atque aera poposcit. [continueque iacens cunctorum absorbuit ictus.] mox lenone suas iam dimittente puellas tristis abit, et quod potuit tamen ultima cellam clausit, adhuc ardens rigidae tentigine uoluae, et lassata uiris necdum satiata recessit, obscurisque genis turpis fumoque lucernae foeda lupanaris tulit ad puluinar odorem. Consider the rivals of the gods—listen to what Claudius put up with. When his wife could tell that her husband was asleep, the whore empress dared to take up a nighttime hood and prefer a mat to her

Palatine bedroom, which she left with no more than one maid attending her. But with a blond wig covering her black locks, she went into a brothel musty from old blankets—and into an empty room, her own! Then she stood for sale, naked, nipples gilded, a fake placard calling her “She-Wolf,” and she made a show, high-born Britannicus, of the womb that bore you. She politely welcomed those who came in and asked them for payment [and lying there, without cease she took a pounding from all of them.] Soon enough, when the pimp was already sending his girls home, she went away disappointed—and still she closed up shop as late as she could, still blazing from the stiffness of her hard clitoris. She departs exhausted by the men but not sated by them, and, disgusting, her cheeks dark and smudged by the smoke of the lamp, she brought the whore-house smell to the royal bed.

Reminding us that vice flourishes at all levels of society, Juvenal presents us with Messalina in her most notorious exploit—moonlighting in a brothel under an assumed name.315 Several aspects of this image concern us. First, her lust is such that she wants more customers even when professional prostitutes have decided to call it a night. This is expressed in a decidedly overdetermined way: she departs disappointed (tristis), stops offering her services last and even as Page 164 →late as she could make it, has a clitoris that is still stiff from lust, and has been “working” long enough that the smoke from the oil lamp has dirtied her face. The rigid clitoris is especially telling, since the phrasing is at least as suitable for describing a male erection.316 Similarly, two proper names—Claudius and Britannicus—remind us that her adulterous, monstrous lusts and actions stain the emperor and his son. She returns to the palace smelling of sex with numerous strangers, defiling the emperor’s bed and mocking her role as wife; in the brothel itself she stands naked, displaying the womb from which the heir apparent to the Roman empire was born, betraying her role as mother.317 And yet, Messalina is truly imperial in this passage. She leaves the Palatine for a brothel—where she has parttime work—but she still brings a maid with her. Juvenal emphasizes that it is only one, but the fact that she has a retinue even of one shows that she is not the typical employee of a lupanar. Moreover, she shows that criminal voracity so typical of the imperial family—adultery isn’t enough, nor is even prostitution; Messalina must outlast the whole brothel staff. Finally, as she stands naked and on sale, she displays gilded nipples. She is still one of the mighty. Messalina then is a fitting image for what is wrong with the women of Rome. She stains husband and child; she confounds the hierarchy by which she should be high and common whores low; she is more man than woman; and she is available to the lusts of men of all classes—except perhaps the husband whose clueless sleep she exploits in leaving, and whose bed is fouled by her when she returns.

Rome Unmanned We have seen that Juvenal’s poetry often makes clear that one of the speaker’s chief anxieties is exclusion, as, for example, in the description of the eunuch who represents a sexuality for women that does not require the presence of elite Roman males, that has in fact dispensed with “proper” males all together. This sense of exclusion is reinforced by the constant association of elite Roman Page 165 →women not with elite Roman men but with everything alien and base.318 Ultimately the elite Roman women of the poem pervert nature and Rome not so much through their greed and criminality, however bad those things are, as through their unwillingness to produce legitimate Roman offspring and their willingness to subvert social codes by using fraud or even their own bodies to produce un-Roman imposters, whose place in Rome’s elite families, political institutions, and religious offices renders all the activities of the state meaningless. In the sixth Satire, the speaker’s emphasis on the exclusion of men such as himself from the world of women and the alien perhaps reaches its culmination in the description of Fortune’s secret farce, since that image holds out the possibility that the speaker himself, that every proper Roman man, is already an imposter.319 Nothing good comes from Juvenal’s women, and that is perhaps a way of voicing the ultimate anxiety—that there is, in fact, no Rome, since there are no legitimate Romans.320

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Chapter 5 Economies of Manhood Our discussion so far has examined the particular ways in which Juvenal explores elite male anxieties over masculinity. As we have seen, women and effeminate men, the two contrastive categories that should help define a masculine norm, come under attack in Juvenal’s poetry only to call into question that norm, to suggest that the “real” men may be the ones missing out on the rewards of being men, or even worse, that those groups whose marginalization keeps the center central have developed ways of outdoing traditional Roman men. Thus they redefine the center as the edge and reverse the old positions on the hierarchy of power, a process that may go so far that no “real” Roman men are left. But this is Juvenal, and there is always more. Another set of passages from Juvenal points to a different, but complementary, anxiety, namely one over the connection between masculinity, status, and wealth. Anthropologists and others who have studied masculinity in a variety of cultures and historical periods will find this anxiety unsurprising. In Manhood in the Making, David D. Gilmore examines the way adult masculine identity is constructed in a number of cultures from around the world, including some modern Mediterranean cultures, some from South America, and others from the South Pacific, with North American culture brought in by way of comparison. With surprisingly few exceptions, gaining and controlling wealth is a central component of what makes grown males into men within many cultures.321 Still, even those cultures that share this preoccupation with wealth vary in how they do so. For some cultures, Page 168 →gaining wealth through work is what matters. For elite Romans, however, inherited wealth is always best. To some extent, wealth is such a fundamental concern of Juvenalian satire—perhaps of all satire—that one can see this connection between masculinity and money in any of his poems, but several of the Satires brood over the economy that has come to exist within the personal sphere of elite (and some nonelite) men. Satire 12, for example, uses an extended metaphor of financial loss as castration to make a variety of points about the way that the desire for money and material luxury, once a trait to be hidden, has become a defining part of elite life.322 Like most of Juvenal’s poems, it also calls into question the speaker’s own values and certainly his success at being a good Roman, whether by old-fashioned standards or “modern” ones. For, in this satire, the speaker ostensibly attacks the way that legacy hunters try to ingratiate themselves with the rich by making elaborate sacrifices on their behalf. He does so by noting his own much more modest sacrifice in thanksgiving for his friend Catullus’ safety after a storm at sea. Yet the speaker also makes it clear that he could inherit only little from Catullus in any case, since the merchant not only has jettisoned his belongings, and thus his wealth, to save his life, but also has living children in the first place (12.94–95). Thus it becomes unclear whether the speaker is not himself among the lavish legacy hunters because he despises their parasitic way of life or simply because his own chosen mark no longer has much to offer.323 Larmour has gone farthest in analyzing the connections between wealth, greed, and Roman masculinity in Satire 12. His conclusion is worth quoting: [H]ere Juvenal uses the motif [self-castration] in order to focus attention on the links between the pursuit of material goods and the loss of the “masculine” virtues of the Roman male citizen. His Catullus, in an act of desperation, more cowardly than courageous, throws his goods over board in a manner which is explicitly likened to self-castration by a cornered animal. The ship—representing both him and the state—gets its mast cut off. Such an ejection of material goods ought to signify “manliness”—for their acquisition is routinely associated with its opposite—but the polarity breaks down.324 Page 169 →Satire 12 is not the only poem in which the expected binary oppositions of the Roman gender system break down; we have already seen that Satire 6 presents us with a eunuch more virile than “whole” men. In

this chapter, we shall find that, while in some places Juvenal maintains the inherited prejudice that love of wealth is unmanly, elsewhere he lays bare a reality in which money is effectively the only remaining form of manhood. Satire 13 is another poem in which money and manhood intersect in interesting ways.325 Here Juvenal constructs a consolatio for one Calvinus, who has lost not a loved one but a sum of money. The connection between wealth and masculinity may seem suppressed here, since the speaker’s arguments mostly involve justice, but the consolatio form itself comes with gendered baggage. In particular, the typical consolatio for the grieving emphasizes male strength over female weakness.326 Consolationes warn against the womanliness of grief, and even consolationes addressed to women heap praise on women who behave more like men in the face of personal tragedy. Thus, unlike the modern tradition of consolation as the soothing of a person’s mental and emotional pain, the ancient consolatio is more of a masculinity-affirming pep-talk. That Calvinus needs this merely for the loss of money reaffirms that Roman men felt, or could easily be perceived as feeling, that control and preservation of money were central to manliness. Other poems in which connections between wealth and masculinity would seem less central cannot be completely ignored here. For example, the mistreated Trebius of poem 5 is not necessarily explicitly called unmanly, but he is assimilated to a comic slave, and, as we saw in the Introduction, full possession of manhood entails not only free status but social superiority. One of the dangerous things about wealth in Juvenal’s Rome is that it can trump seemingly more basic constituents of masculine identity, just as it can allow upstarts and even foreigners to usurp the prerogatives of the old elites.

Women and Wealth in the Sixth Satire We have surveyed some of the poems that display a general connection between the possession and control of wealth and masculinity. We return now to Page 170 →Satire 6, a poem in which this correlation is central. The metaphor of loss of property as castration that structures the twelfth Satire, as we have seen, speaks very clearly of a social reality in which perceptions of virility and possession of wealth go hand in hand, and this perhaps explains why so much of the sixth Satire focuses on wealth. In answering a question from his interlocutor, the speaker tries to explain why some men seem devoted to their wives, even though they should not be (6.136–41): вЂoptima sed quare Caesennia teste marito?’ bis quingena dedit. tanti uocat ille pudicam, nec pharetris Veneris macer est aut lampade feruet: inde faces ardent, ueniunt a dote sagittae. libertas emitur. coram licet innuat atque rescribat: uidua est, locuples quae nupsit auaro. “But why is Caesennia called excellent on her husband’s testimony?” She gave him a million sesterces. For that price he’ll call her chaste. He isn’t wasting away from Venus’ arrows or burning from her torch. The torches blaze because of the dowry; the arrows come from it. Her freedom’s been bought. She can flirt and reply to lovers’ notes right in front of him: a rich woman who marries a greedy man is single. Caesennia’s husband calls her optima, “an excellent wife,” because her dowry has made him a rich man. Since the husband has been purchased in this way, he does not object to his wife’s dalliances with other men. The fact that the wife will not really be under the control of her husband is highlighted by the use of the

word libertas; the purchase of her freedom has turned her into a kind of freedwoman, but this may also remind us of the fact that in some aristocratic marriages husbands had manus over their wives, and this is the same term used for his power over his slaves.327 In marrying for money, then, this husband has shown himself incapable of controlling those legitimately under his authority. The amount of her dowry, one million sesterces, is also important for what it suggests about the effect of Caesennia’s wealth on her husband’s social status: one million sesterces was the amount of wealth required for a man to hold Page 171 →senatorial rank. We are not told whether Caesennia’s husband has indeed become a senator, but the amount suggests that he either is one or aspires to be; by implication, then, his role in politics and government, along with the attendant prestige, is a gift from his wife. Thus Caesennia’s great wealth not only lets her turn her husband into a willing cuckold and prove that he cannot handle his wife in the traditionally approved way, it also calls into question the foundations of the traditional senatorial aristocracy, since it leads us to ask if senators are really just husbands who collude in their rich wives’ adultery.328 Caesennia’s husband highlights the fact that possession of enough wealth to be a senator is also possession of more than enough wealth to be corrupt. The point that lies behind this passage and others is that men should be in control of their money; even to get too much of it as a dowry implies an unmanly subservience or at least a lack of ability to maintain a husband’s proper status vis-Г -vis his household. When Catullus loses his profits and merchandise in poem 12 by willingly throwing his property overboard, he is symbolically castrating himself (12.34–36), a point brought home when he actually has the mast of his ship cut down (12.53–56). When Caesennia’s husband marries to become wealthy, he achieves his goal, but he may as well be dead—her marriage has, by dint of a pun, made her a widow: uidua can denote a woman never married as well as one single because she has lost a husband. Given that Caesennia’s husband is symbolically dead, and perhaps a member of the senate only by dubious means, it is no wonder that we never learn his name. A similar anxiety surfaces in the very next exemplum. This one has to do with the unlucky Sertorius, who seems actually to love, or at least desire, his wife Bibula. In chapter 2, we saw how Juvenal does away with poor Bibula by reducing her to nothing more than a pretty, but aging and replaceable, face. After that, however, we get to see Bibula while she is still in favor—and in charge (6.149–57): interea calet et regnat poscitque maritum pastores et ouem Canusinam ulmosque Falernas— quantulum in hoc!—pueros omnes, ergastula tota, Page 172 →quodque domi non est, sed habet uicinus, ematur. mense quidem brumae, cum iam mercator Iason clausus et armatis obstat casa candida nautis, grandia tolluntur crystallina, maxima rursus murrina, deinde adamas notissimus et Beronices in digito factus pretiosior. In the meantime, she’s in favor and runs the place; she demands from her husband shepherds and sheep in Canusia, a Falernian vineyard—very little value in that!—all his slaves, whole gangs! Whatever she doesn’t have (but a neighbor does) is to be bought. Indeed in December—when Jason the merchant is hemmed in and white canvas blocks his armed sailors from view—massive crystal vases are carried off, the largest agate ones too, then a renowned diamond, made more

expensive on Berenice’s finger.

While her husband is still enamored of her, Bibula bleeds him dry. She wants gifts that are not merely expensive but outrageously so—sheep farms and vineyards, but only of the high-end variety, since Canusian wool and Falernian wine were both expensive luxury items. Because they produce sellable products, these are also means of gaining even more wealth, so that Bibula’s marriage has a mercantile quality to it. For her personal use she requisitions all of her husband’s slaves, demanding, according to our speaker, not only all of the individual slaves but also the barracks in which slave gangs were housed. Bibula’s drain on her husband’s wealth is truly grand in scale. She does not merely spend his money; she appears to convert his agricultural holdings and the servile staff for them to her personal use. However much Bibula makes from her enterprises, she spends money too—she wants whatever her neighbor has but she doesn’t. What is most significant here is that her rivalry is not with another woman but with a uicinus. Just as she demands much more from her husband than dresses or luxury items for the home, she looks to the possessions of her male neighbors to know what she wants. This underscores the way that wealth and masculinity are related in Juvenal’s Satires: the pretty young wife controls sufficient wealth to compete with men rather than women, but what does this say about the men, above all her husband? Not that Bibula overlooks luxury items—at an annual Saturnalia market valuable vases and the like are bought, including jewelry that comes with a pedigree. The verb Juvenal uses here, tolluntur, suggests that the market Page 173 →is being plundered.329 The diamond in question once belonged to Berenice, probably the ambitious and scandal-ridden Judaean queen, so it is suggestive of the connection Juvenal so often sees between women, immorality, and the foreign east.330 Yet it also tells us something about Bibula’s self-image: she is a queen. We remember that this passage makes her the subject of the verb regnat (149), literally, “she rules like a monarch.” Her consort Sertorius seems to be the distinctly subordinate partner. Later (6.200–5), the speaker asserts that marriage is pointless except for men who actually love their wives; for them things are even worse, since wives who are loved tyrannize, control, and torment their husbands (6.206–11).331 The examples that follow make it clear that the form this domination takes is fundamentally economic (6.212–18): nil umquam inuita donabis coniuge, uendes hac obstante nihil, nihil haec si nolet emetur. haec dabit affectus: ille excludatur amicus iam senior, cuius barbam tua ianua uidit. testandi cum sit lenonibus atque lanistis libertas et iuris idem contingat harenae, non unus tibi riualis dictabitur heres. You’ll never make a gift, if your wife’s unwilling; you’ll never sell anything if she’s opposed; nothing will get bought if she refuses. She’ll assign your affections: “let him be kept out”—that friend of yours whose beard your threshold witnessed [as it first came in], a bit older now. Although pimps and gladiators’ coaches are free to make wills—the arena gets the same right too—more than one rival of yours will be prescribed as your heir. If a man loves his wife, she uses this fact to control his dispositions of property, taking authority over any gifts, sales, or purchases her husband might make. Page 174 →Moreover, she’ll tell him who his friends can be. The image of the aging, lifelong friend being excluded from the house is not only an indication of the wife’s

tyranny. Rather than simply refusing to admit the friends out of sheer mean-spiritedness, she is controlling access to her husband. This image directly responds to her husband’s inability to make gifts as he chooses and leads into a discussion of his will.332 The wife will choose where his money goes, and in place of his friends he’ll have to leave property to her lovers. This brings together the poem’s theme of adultery with its emphasis on women and wealth. Not only is the man’s wealth now under his wife’s control, but she even uses it as part of the humiliation of cuckolding him. Moreover, if we try to view things from her perspective, the husband is merely a financial asset. In the last chapter, we saw that Juvenal’s Roman wives routinely prefer everything un-Roman to their husbands and even to legitimate Roman offspring, or at least elite Roman offspring. Here we see an extension of that idea. Not only do wives alienate the property of Roman families by giving their husbands heirs produced by other parents (or at least other fathers), they also funnel money directly to the husband’s adulterous rivals. The woman who gets power in her husband’s house uses it not simply to enrich herself or feed her appetite for luxury; she literally begins the process of dispersing the wealth of the domus. By linking the control over money and wealth to the husband’s role as cuckold, the sixth Satire makes it clear that, just as adultery now poses a financial threat, the loss of wealth, or control thereof, is itself a diminution of manhood. The link between money and manhood is especially clear in the passages we have been discussing because of the transfer of the cuckold husband’s estate to his adulterer rival. In the Roman imagination, adultery is a problem for multiple reasons. For one, it presents the possibility of a woman who will not be controlled by husband or father. Moreover, it raises the troubling prospect of a man rearing children not his own. Perhaps most fundamentally, however, adultery constitutes an indictment of the masculinity of the cuckolded husband. Thus, the woman who redirects her husband’s estate to her lovers, his rivals, is simply making a logical extension of the adultery. Sex with adulterers shows the inadequacy of her husband’s masculinity; redirecting his wealth is simply the same thing in financial terms. As the description of this husband and wife continues (6.219–28), her behaviorPage 175 → might seem to have no direct financial consequences, since she is first described as capriciously ordering the execution of a slave in the face of her husband’s protestations of the slave’s innocence and humanity, and then going off to a new husband leaving a newly redecorated house behind. Yet each of these actions entails not only cruelty (to the slave she has killed and the husband she abandons), but also financial loss. The slave will have to be replaced, and the house has been redone to suit the tastes of a mistress it no longer has. This redecorating and running away is in keeping with the effects wives have on the elite domus elsewhere: just as they diffuse its property, distributing it to everyone but the appropriate parties, and insure that its future generations are actually suppositious foreigners, here we see a wife spend her husband’s money on luxuries of her choosing (since we have already been told nothing can be bought without her approval) and then moving on, having redone the house in her own image. Mothers-in-law both aggravate the adulterous tendencies of their daughters and attempt to profit from their sonsin-law as well (6.231–41), and this reminds us that the corruption and alienation of the domus by Roman wives is, according to Juvenal, a tradition of long standing.333 As in the previous chapter’s discussion, we have to wonder about both our speaker and his addressee, Postumus: What were their mothers like? Whose children are they? Are they really even Roman? If we can believe our speaker at all, many Romans are really only “Roman.” Why not our speaker and Postumus as well?334 What follows describes a variety of female misdeeds, including litigiousness, training for the arena, and quarrelling with husbands to conceal, or defend, adulteries (6.242–85). All of this leads the speaker to answer the hypothetical question of the source of women’s bad character (6.286–93): in the old days fear of the enemy and their own humble position kept Latin women on their best behavior. Since then, however (6.294–300), nullum crimen abest facinusque libidinis ex quo paupertas Romana perit. hinc fluxit ad istos

et Sybaris colles, hinc et Rhodos et Miletos atque coronatum et petulans madidumque Tarentum. Page 176 →prima peregrinos obscena pecunia mores intulit, et turpi fregerunt saecula luxu diuitiae molles. No crime or outrage of lust has been absent since Roman poverty died; from this time on Sybaris, Rhodes, and Miletus have poured onto Rome’s hills; Tarentum too, garlanded, rude, and drunk. Dirty cash was the first to bring in foreign morals, and effeminate wealth shattered our age with its disgusting decadence.335 Following the moralizing tradition well known from writers such as Sallust and Livy, Juvenal locates the origin of Rome’s moral decline in the influx of wealth following the fall of Carthage and Corinth in 146 BCE. On this view, wealth brought foreign ways to Rome and destroyed Roman morality, but it is worth considering the details of this description of wealth pouring into Rome. The death of Roman poverty (paupertas Romana) meant the arrival of notorious Greek practices, represented here by Sybaris, Rhodes, Miletus, and Tarentum—but the only thing so far suggested is drunken reveling and insolence (petulans), since, in a notorious incident, a Tarentine had once insulted a Roman ambassador.336 In the speaker’s description, wealth itself is “dirty” (obscena) and “effeminate” (molles).337 Women have become corrupt and corrupting under the influence of wealth; their good behavior (not seen, apparently, for some 250 years) is associated with paupertas Romana. So far, this is in keeping with the idea that the control of wealth is properly gendered male and intimately linked to manhood. Wealth itself is figured as immoral, effeminate, and even foreign. Women misbehave in part because they are rich, and their riches came to them on a tide of Greek decadence. Yet that same tide brought wealth to Roman men as well—and the bare assertion that “effeminate riches” corrupted the age does not exonerate men; rather it suggests that the equation of elite manhood with ownership and autonomous control of wealth is itself part of the process of corruption; it is important to remember that wealth is described as having come to Rome in an overwhelming flood. Just as they are supposed to control women and their own bodily appetites, Roman men must control money and what it can buy—but Page 177 →Satire 6 represents wealth as a tidal wave. The language of this image is worth analyzing. The verb fluo might suggest a gentle flowing, but the tense of fluxit in line 295 suggests a sudden arrival; similarly, the “water” that is wealth here is flowing toward, rather than away from, hills. Roman manhood is thus predicated on an unwinnable fight to control something fundamentally out of control.338 Although he began by talking about the bad behavior of Roman women, his explanation makes no exception for men. Once again the speaker has undermined his own position. The idea of drunkenness recurs in what follows: women will do anything when drunk, especially engaging in base sexual acts (6.300–8). This all yields to one of the most arresting images in the whole poem. The setting is the altar of Pudicitia, “Feminine Virtue” (6.309–13): noctibus hic ponunt lecticas, micturiunt hic effigiemque deae longis siphonibus implent inque uices equitant ac Luna teste mouentur, inde domos abeunt: tu calcas luce reuersa coniugis urinam magnos uisurus amicos.

At night they stop their litters here; here they piss, soaking the goddess’ statue with long streams, and, taking turns, they mount each other and grind away, the moon looking on. Then they go off home. When light has returned and you are off to visit important friends, you step in your wife’s urine. Drunkenness has just been linked to the influx of foreign wealth. It aggravates female promiscuity and perversity, and women of status (indicated by their litters) now sacrilegiously defile the image of the goddess who should preside over their sexual respectability. Not for the first time do Juvenal’s gods appear to take no interest in human misbehavior: Mars, after all, had not cared that his Salian priest was also a gladiator and the bride of another man (see chapter 3). But what is most striking here is the finale in which the wretched husband, on his way to the morning salutatio at the houses of men of stature, steps in his wife’s urine. The image crystalizes the opposition between the world and order Page 178 →of the male Roman elite, with its diurnal systems of patronage and amicitia, and the nocturnal world of women, with their wild and uncontrolled sexuality.339 The salutatio implies an orderly network of economic and social exchange relying on respect for traditional roles and relationships between men, while the women depicted here make a point of flouting traditional respect. Husband’s world intersects with wife’s only in the tangible residue of how meaningless his world is to her. Just as Caesennia’s husband may be a senator whose rank is only an adjunct to her own erotic libertas, so does the man who steps in his wife’s urine embody the point that male systems of prestige, wealth, and power are in danger not only of subversion by but of subordination to women and their allies—if they haven’t been subordinated already. Patronage does not come off well elsewhere in Juvenal, and the image of the husband going off to his patrons’ houses with urine on his feet reminds us that the respectability of his world is itself questionable. Juvenal’s magni amici generally treat their lesser amici badly (e.g., in poems 1, 3, and 5); and clients often seem like opportunistic parasites rather than honorable dependents. Perhaps, then, the fact that the husband steps in his wife’s urine is not only a way of demonstrating how her immorality humiliates him but also of raising the possibility that his respectable male world is already corrupt, just as wealth, in these poems, is both necessary to claim manhood and antithetical to it.

Purchasing Manhood We have already seen, in the sixth Satire, that giving a woman control of one’s wealth is equated with a loss of virility and, in the twelfth, that willingly jettisoning one’s property and financial interests is tantamount to self-castration. Thus money and the actions that control its exchange (e. g., buying, selling, giving, bequeathing) can be correlated with manhood. In other words, real men buy, sell, give, and bequeath. This may seem to yield a simple scenario in which more wealth equals greater virility and perhaps greater status, but in fact it opens the door to other possibilities as well. For when anything is set equal to one or more units of exchange, it becomes a commodity and is thus exchangeable and negotiable in a kind of economy. Just as loss of money through one’s Page 179 →wife’s depredations can be seen as producing diminished virility, the process is potentially reversible, as processes of exchange generally are: perhaps wealth can substitute for more traditional markers of virility, or those signs of manhood can be loaned or borrowed as a way of building wealth and status.340 The ninth Satire examines the way such an economy of manhood might function. The poem presents us with an admittedly one-sided view of a relationship between two men: Virro, a wealthy member of the elite, and Naevolus, who is essentially a gigolo with pretensions to respectability and ambitions for greater wealth and, perhaps, also status.341 Before we go on, a few preliminaries: not all would agree that the Virro mentioned at Satire 9.35 is to be identified with Naevolus’ patron, who would then obviously not be identified with Trebius’ patron in Satire 5, but I think that enough connections between the two poems have been identified to justify seeing him as the same character.342 Poem 9 is also Juvenal’s only dialogue satire: the poem’s speaker addresses Naevolus, hints at his unsavory past, and then discusses his current troubles—that is, his now defunct relationship with Virro.343 It is through this dialogue that we see two competing visions of what is going

on here: the speaker casts Naevolus as a known prostitute, while Naevolus describes his relationship as one of patronage.344 While the idea of a perverse sort of patronage is certainly part of the poem’s humor, I do not see the importance of patronage as central to the poem’s critique of Roman culture.345 In order to better understand Naevolus’ motives here, we need to understand just what rewards he hopes to get from his relationship with Virro. For his sexual exertions he wants a little bit of land, for early on in his conversation with the speaker, Naevolus recounts a conversation with Virro (9.54–62). Page 180 →dic, passer, cui tot montis, tot praedia seruas Apula, tot miluos intra tua pascua lassas? te Trifolinus ager fecundis uitibus implet suspectumque iugum Cumis et Gaurus inanis— nam quis plura linit uicturo dolia musto?— quantum erat exhausti lumbos donare clientis iugeribus paucis! meliusne hic rusticus infans cum matre et casulis et conlusore catello cymbala pulsantis legatum fiet amici? Tell me, darling, for whom are you saving so many mountains, so much Apulian acreage, all the tired kites within your pastures? The land of Trifolium enriches you with productive vineyards, as does the ridge overlooking Cumae, and empty Gaurus—for who seals more jars with long-lasting vintages [than you do]? Is it such a big thing to reward the loins of your exhausted client with a few acres?! Or is it better that this country babe with his mother, their little house, and his playmate doggy become the inheritance of some cymbal-pounding friend of yours? This is obviously an exorbitant wish, since the average legitimate client would not expect a parcel of land. Naevolus’ idea of modest wealth is not itself modest, and we can see a few lines later a little more about his standards of wealth: he needs more money from Virro because his slave is complaining, and soon he’ll need to buy a second one (9.63–69). “improbus es cum poscis” ait. sed pensio clamat “posce,” sed appellat puer unicus ut Polyphemi lata acies per quam sollers euasit Vlixes. alter emendus erit, namque hic non sufficit, ambo pascendi. quid agam bruma spirante? quid, oro, quid dicam scapulis puerorum aquilone Decembri et pedibus? “You’re wicked to ask,” he says. But my rent cries out “Ask!” But my slave calls out, single like Polyphemus’ big eye, by which clever Ulysses made his escape. I’ll have to

buy another, for this one is not enough—and both will have to be fed. What will I do when winter blasts? What, I ask, what am I to say to the slaves’ shoulders and feet in December’s chill wind?

Page 181 →Though it is easy to forget, the truly poor did not often own slaves, and Naevolus’ wish for two, along with some land to live on, suggests that he is trying to enter a higher economic bracket with the increase in prestige implied by that move.346 Naevolus returns to his wants and needs at the end of the poem, and they have grown no more reasonable—though some scholars have thought them to be (9.137–41).347 o parui nostrique Lares, quos ture minuto aut farre et tenui soleo exorare corona, quando ego figam aliquid quo sit mihi tuta senectus a tegete et baculo? uiginti milia fenus pigneribus positisВ .В .В . O little Lares, my own, whom I usually worship with a bit of incense or spelt and a meagre garland, when will I get something fixed to safeguard my old age from a mat and a crutch? Twenty thousand capital invested.В .В .В . [or, interpreted slightly differently] Twenty thousand in interest from investments.В .В .В . First he asks for a stable income, but it is not entirely clear how much he wants. Saller, followed by Green, takes it to be twenty thousand in invested capital.348 This is itself an exorbitant amount, especially since he expects to get it as a reward for sexual services. Others, like Courtney and Braund, think that Naevolus is asking for twenty thousand in annual interest.349 If this is true, Naevolus wants not only a stable income, but in fact the four hundred thousand sesterces of the equestrian census.350 If this interpretation is correct, as I am inclined to think it is, then Naevolus wants both wealth and a jump in social status—for, despite some attempts, there is no reason to suggest that he is already an equestrian.351 Again we should keep in mind that equestrians are men of modest means only in comparison with the very wealthy senators. Finally we find that Page 182 →Naevolus has a few additional needs, such as a quantity of silver vessels and a staff of at least four (9.141–47). argenti uascula puri, sed quae Fabricius censor notet, et duo fortes de grege Moesorum, qui me ceruice locata securum iubeant clamoso insistere circo; sit mihi praeterea curuus caelator, et alter qui multas facies pingit cito; sufficiunt haec. quando ego pauper ero? .В .В . a set of pure silver, but the kind that Fabricius the censor would write up, and two strong Moesians to bid me rest secure on their rented necks at the noisy circus. Let me have a hunched-over engraver too, and someone else to do a lot of portraits quickly. That’s enough. When will I be

merely poor?

Here too some have seen only a modest request, yet Naevolus asks for silver enough to worry a censor and additional servants yet again, this time to carry him around and provide such unlikely necessities as portraits and engraved work.352 Again his true ambitions show through. In fact, the wish for an engraver and portrait artist supports the idea that Naevolus is trying to get into the equestrian class, since such slaves are probably intended to produce work that he could sell for profit. The relationship between Naevolus and Virro is primarily sexual and economic. Taking the active role, Naevolus provides sexual services to the effeminate Virro. Mostly those services are direct—Naevolus penetrates Virro. But Naevolus, as one of the poem’s most memorable scenes tells us, has also slept with Virro’s wife, at Virro’s behest, for the explicit purpose of providing him with heirs (9.70–78). uerum, ut dissimules, ut mittas cetera, quanto metiris pretio quod, ni tibi deditus essem deuotusque cliens, uxor tua uirgo maneret? scis certe quibus ista modis, quam saepe rogaris et quae pollicitus. fugientem saepe puellam Page 183 →amplexu rapui; tabulas quoque ruperat et iam migrabat; tota uix hoc ego nocte redemi te plorante foris. testis mihi lectulus et tu, ad quem peruenit lecti sonus et dominae uox. But though you pretend not to see, though you dismiss everything else, how much do you think it’s worth that, if I hadn’t been your dedicated and devoted client, your wife would still be a virgin? You know well how, and how often, you asked for those services—and what you promised. I often took the girl in my arms when she was in the middle of leaving you. She’d torn up the contract and was already moving out. I only just managed it the whole night through, with you bawling outside the door. My witness is the bed—and you, since the bed’s creaking and your wife’s voice reached you. So far, two such heirs have appeared, and Naevolus has even suggested fathering a third child with his “patron’s” wife so that Virro might receive full benefit of the coveted ius trium liberorum (9.82–90). nullum ergo meritum est, ingrate ac perfide, nullum quod tibi filiolus uel filia nascitur ex me? tollis enim et libris actorum spargere gaudes argumenta uiri. foribus suspende coronas: iam pater es, dedimus quod famae opponere possis. iura parentis habes, propter me scriberis heres,

legatum omne capis nec non et dulce caducum. commoda praeterea iungentur multa caducis, si numerum, si tres impleuero. Is it no service, you ungrateful traitor, no service at all that your little son and daughter are sired by me? You acknowledge them and delight in scattering proofs of your manhood in the daily papers. Hang garlands on your door! You’re a father now—I gave you something you could fight a bad reputation with. You have a father’s rights. Because of me you’re enrolled as an heir; you take every legacy and even the sweet transferred legacy too. What’s more, many advantages will go along with the transferred legacies if I round the number out to three. Page 184 →This passage makes it clear that Naevolus knows exactly what is at stake for a man like Virro to remain childless. It also makes clear that the legal benefits of parenthood are a serious issue in this text. Virro’s children serve a social function—that is, they establish their father’s credentials as a man and prove his virility. They are thus, as Naevolus calls them, argumenta uiri (“proofs of manhood”), but they also serve a more immediately practical purpose: under the leges Iulia and Papia Poppaea, which established the ius trium liberorum in the first place, fathers received numerous advantages and freedom from certain disadvantages.353 The exact provisions of the laws are not certain, but the following picture would seem to be largely reliable. On the positive side, fathers, especially those who had three children, had preference in standing for magistracies, as well as seniority once in office and even in the assignment of proconsulships. They may also have had special seats in theaters. They were exempt from the otherwise compulsory burden of acting in the capacity of tutor or guardian. On the negative side, unmarried or childless men had limitations placed on their right to accept legacies. Moreover, caduca, legacies that could not be claimed because an heir was childless or otherwise ineligible, were transferred to any parents named in the will. It is true that some of these benefits began when a married man became the father of his first legitimate child, but three children were required for a Roman to get the full benefits, and it was in this form that emperors would sometimes grant the ius trium liberorum to men who had not met the requirements, a fact to which we shall return. The effeminate Virro not only derives pleasure from his male prostitute, he also gets a spurious masculinity in the form of his children. Naevolus displays virility in the most graphic way possible—penetrative sex. He proves his manhood with Virro, with Virro’s wife, and really, if not openly, through the children that Virro claims as his own. It would seem, then, that we might read the poem as a simple equation: Naevolus is manly, if unpleasant, and Virro is effeminate. Yet this oversimplifies. The text makes it clear that Naevolus not only depends on Virro’s wealth, he also fears Virro’s power (9.93–101). Page 185 →haec soli commissa tibi celare memento et tacitus nostras intra te fige querellas; nam res mortifera est inimicus pumice leuis. qui modo secretum commiserat, ardet et odit, tamquam prodiderim quidquid scio. sumere ferrum, fuste aperire caput, candelam adponere ualuis non dubitat. nec contemnas aut despicias quod his opibus numquam cara est annona ueneni.

ergo occulta teges ut curia Martis Athenis. Just remember to keep what I’ve told you only to yourself and silently bury my complaints within yourself. For a pumice-smooth foe is something lethal. As soon as he’s vouchsafed a secret, he rages and hates as though I’ve betrayed whatever I know. He doesn’t hesitate to take up the sword, split heads with a club, take a torch to your doors. And don’t discount or make light of the fact that a stock of poison is never expensive to such wealth. So cover up my secrets like Mars’ court in Athens. Whatever obvious, graphic assertions of manhood Naevolus seems to make are undercut by the fact that the inherited cultural equation of virility with power and control have broken down here. Naevolus provides the physical tokens of manhood, but Virro holds all the real power, and power here is wealth.354 Moreover, Naevolus’ very desire for wealth and status effeminizes him, since the poem shows us an economy in which virility is the wealth and status that Naevolus obviously lacks. Proofs of manhood help Virro, but, ironically, Naevolus has none. The role of Virro in this poem deserves a little more direct attention. Traditional Roman canons of behavior do not allow much sympathy for the adult Virro’s desire to be penetrated by other men, and I would not argue that Juvenal is showing much sympathy here. Still, even traditionally minded Romans would sympathize with his desire for children, for economic benefits, and especially for status. Long before Juvenal’s day, the legal status of father had become, at least in part, a legal fiction. Some angled for and received the grant of the ius trium liberorumPage 186 → without producing children, or at least not enough children. This status could be and was granted by emperors as a reward for service of various kinds. A famous example, roughly contemporary with Juvenal, is Pliny the Younger, but in fact exceptions started under Augustus and continued regularly under his successors.355 A particularly telling example of the seriousness that some recipients did not impute to the whole thing is a poem by Martial, also roughly Juvenal’s contemporary, who happily dismisses his wife since he has been granted the ius trium liberorum and no longer has much use for her (Mart. 2.92): natorum mihi ius trium roganti Musarum pretium dedit mearum solus qui poterat. ualebis, uxor. non debet domini perire munus. He who alone had the power gave me the right of three children when I asked for a reward for my Muses. Good-bye, wife. Our prince’s gift ought not go unused. This example shows that, for some, the grant of the rights of a father could be a way around marriage and fatherhood. Virro, then, wants economic benefits that hinge on proof of masculinity and on adherence to a kind of familyvalues politics that stand revealed as empty or at least incomplete. He purchases manhood from Naevolus in the obvious form of sexual penetration but also as a kind of ruse to get around a law that privileges traditional manly behavior by granting it special economic status—but which also thereby turns manhood into a commodity, one which can now be traded like any other commodity. Now that manhood has an economic dimension, a man like Naevolus can attempt to trade obvious, traditional signs of masculinity for the wealth and status that he lacks. It is important to differentiate this from simple prostitution. Naevolus is not merely offering to perform sexual acts for money or other tangible gain—he is

attempting to trade his sexual services, his obvious outward acts of penetrative masculinity, for other signs of masculinity: wealth and social Page 187 →status. Our poem signals a frustration with this new equation of wealth and masculinity, for by acknowledging that masculinity can now be viewed in primarily economic terms—that is, by acknowledging that virility and fatherhood can be legal fictions with economic value—the poem reaches well beyond the effeminate, pathetic Virro and the uncouth and unpleasant gigolo Naevolus to take on the system itself. The system I mean here is not patronage—which is, I think, only an incidental target—but the legal and political posture that grants financial advantages to outward signs of traditional masculine elite identity. That is, the laws that grant advantages to Roman fathers, and specifically to fathers with multiple children, are clearly not seriously based on a real or notional adherence to morality and virtue, at least not in practice. We might say that fatherhood had become sufficient but not necessary to garner the rights and status of a father. I want to trace out two further implications of the poem’s scrutiny of this particular legal and political situation. The first has to do with Virro’s willingness to pay another man to penetrate him. I would not suggest that an individual’s sexual or other appetites are generated wholly by external forces, but, as scholarship on a number of different cultures has shown, sexual behaviors are implicated in a greater system of relationships between the individual and society.356 Traditional Roman morality castigated passive participation in sex by freeborn males, and while there were obviously men who flouted this behavioral code, there were also significant reasons to avoid or hide such behavior, especially for men who wanted to maintain their status among the elite. In a climate, however, in which masculinity has become a commodity to be exchanged for status and money, traditional canons of behavior involving masculine identity would necessarily also change. If children, the most obvious public proof of virility, can be granted by fiat through a legal fiction aimed at providing status and wealth, then it follows that manhood itself is a negotiable state. That is, if one can be a father without children in this new order, then one can be a uir without performing the traditional behaviors that constitute Roman masculinity. If one can purchase manhood in the form of the ius trium liberorum, or be granted manhood as a gift in that form, then by implication other behaviors associated with masculine identity can similarly be performed through economic surrogates. Virro can be a man while enjoying the passive Page 188 →role in sex because he retains wealth and social position, which have become the real masculinity of imperial Rome, and because he purchases from Naevolus outward signs of masculine identity. Thus the legal and political situation created by laws like the leges Iulia and Papia Poppaea is responsible not only for the ruse of hiring a surrogate father but also for unmooring Roman manhood from its traditional attitudes and behaviors. Men like Virro can act on their desires because they have found that there are multiple ways to perform masculinity—wealth can be exchanged for it. In other words, the ninth Satire highlights the status of masculinity in imperial Rome: one component of uirtus as traditionally defined was control of wealth, but, in keeping with the centrality of money to all aspects of Juvenal’s Rome, the ideal of the proper management of wealth has yielded to simple possession of wealth as the ideal of masculinity. Moreover, this aspect of ideal manliness has become the dominant one. Control of one’s body and one’s appetites matters less in this version of Rome than the size of one’s bank account. The situation Juvenal describes is given perfect visual form in a famous (or infamous) painting from the House of the Vettii in Pompeii. Priapus, or at least a prodigiously well-endowed man, weighs his erection on a scale, the other pan of which contains a bag of gold coins. The scales are in balance. Whatever the size of his endowment, however, poor Naevolus can’t pull this off. But laws do not enact themselves, and the next issue I want to address has to do with reasons for the new order. I suggest that Satire 9, like other poems of Juvenal, provides evidence for suspicion of the way the emperor affects the Roman people, and in particular the Roman elite. I do not mean any specific emperor, but the office of emperor: Augustus’ autocratic imposition of the unpopular Julian laws and the modifications of the same by himself and his successors are figured in this poem as a process of unravelling Roman masculine identity. Thus, the ninth Satire can be read as an indirect critique of autocracy, for the top-down imposition of moral—specifically marital—legislation under Augustus did not shore up the position of the Roman elite within society as it was seemingly intended to do. For various reasons, Augustus tried to legislate not morality but personal behavior, and while the former, inasmuch as it is an abstract system of values, probably can be influenced by legislation that reshapes perceptions of it and reactions to it, the latter, one suspects, is less prone to legislative and other attempts to change it. A similar question of autocracy may lie behind the sixth Satire’s

example of Caesennia and her nameless Page 189 →husband. By dispensing a million sesterces, Caesennia purchases libertas within her marriage; libertas is exactly what her husband and other elite Roman men worried that they had given up when the functions of the Senate passed to the emperors and their advisors. Augustus’ successors implicitly recognized the failure of the legislation when they allowed the perks of marriage and fatherhood—the proofs of masculine elite identity as correctly performed and displayed—to accrue to men who had not behaved, perhaps would not behave, as the Augustan legislation had intended, and by Juvenal’s day such proofs had become negotiable terms in the elite economy. The emperors had made them into commodities. Men like Virro merely figured out new ways to exchange them. The worst part of all of this for men like Juvenal is not so much the passivity or false fatherhood of Virro or Naevolus’ prostitution and misunderstanding of patronage. Those things, bad as they might be, are just symptoms of a much deeper problem: manhood, a fundamental characteristic of the proper, elite male, is itself liable to be bought, sold, and traded. If masculinity is supposed to be the bedrock of a Roman man’s identity, then the suspicion that it is no more secure than an investment is truly a nightmare. And this brings us back to the wives of the sixth Satire, since that poem too implies that as wives control the finances, they diminish their husbands’ manhood, through that and other means. So too are we reminded of the many points in that and other poems at which the imagery the speakers produce seems to reveal anxieties about a fundamental unRomanness at the heart of Rome. At this point we might turn again to the inevitable Gracchus, since he too provides an example of the way that wealth and status tend to double for old-fashioned masculine behavior. Juvenal makes clear that Gracchus excels everyone in traditional markers of elite identity. He is from an important patrician family and can boast that he is a Salian priest of Mars. Yet Gracchus betrays his pedigree, his status as a well-born male, in two ways: he betrays his social class by fighting voluntarily as a gladiator and he betrays his gender by marrying another man in the role of the bride. When, however, Juvenal throws up his hands, he makes it clear that not even Mars cares what Gracchus has done. By complaining that such marriages may become common, he reveals that there isn’t public outrage either or, at least, that he fears that there won’t be. Clearly Gracchus, like Virro, can be as effeminate and degraded as he likes, and that is what really offends and terrifies Juvenal: perhaps manhood doesn’t matter. Page 190 →

Paternity Tested We finish with an important aspect of Satires 9 and 6 that has not received sufficient attention. Each poem takes on the question of paternity and its place in society. The central private institution of Roman society was the domus, “household.” Ideally, it had as its head the paterfamilas, a figure of proverbial severity. Such men possessed patria potestas, “the father’s power,” and could—and were expected to—control the women, children, and slaves of the household.357 Law and the literary tradition emphasize the power of the father even over adult sons and grandsons. Reality seems to have been somewhat gentler than the cultural stereotype; nevertheless, the idea of the powerful father remained central to Roman culture, very much as it does in modern psychoanalytic theory. Yet the father does not fare well in Juvenal’s poems. When the speaker of Satire 2 banishes Mars from Rome, he calls him “father,” and in Satire 14, fathers mainly serve to train their children in vice. John Henderson has perceptively argued that Book 3 of the Satires takes on the whole industry of reproducing new generations of elite Roman men—beginning with the deflation of rhetorical and literary education in Satire 7, proceeding through Satire 8’s attack on pedigree, and culminating in the false fatherhood of Satire 9.358 I think we can take this even further: Satires 6 and 9 can both be read as devastating attacks on fatherhood. Let us start with the sixth Satire. Like myself, Johnson and Gold have argued that this is a poem that uses women primarily to talk about male anxieties about men.359 By addressing not only masculinity but paternity specifically in our analysis, we can take this much further. In her well-known study, Male Subjectivity at the Margins, Kaja Silverman examines a number of cinematic examples of narratives in which the subjectivity of the primary male

characters is problematized.360 Her approach draws heavily on psychoanalysis and, in particular, on the idea of identification with the father, but her discussions are interesting for us because of her argument that society’s dominant fiction is intimately bound up with the family.361 Men become men by identifying with the father and denying the mother. This oversimplifies Silverman’s work, but it nevertheless highlights a similarity between her twentieth-century narratives and Page 191 →Juvenal’s sixth Satire. Whether or not we accept the psychoanalytic premises of Silverman’s approach, it cannot be denied that Roman society, like ours, put a high premium on functioning, traditional families. Thinking about our text through the lens Silverman provides proves fruitful. For modern westerners, paternity is a matter of biology. By impregnating a woman and becoming a biological father, a man becomes a father tout court. Paternity can be achieved even by men who do not help raise the children they have fathered. Legally, they may or may not retain parental rights—and they may never be married to the mothers—but in our cultural imagination they are still fathers; in fact, a great deal of modern literature and film deals with questions about absent fathers. In Rome, the situation was somewhat different. A man might father one child or twenty, but the fathering of legitimate children is what mattered—that is, the offspring of the man himself and a wife legally wed to him. He might, of course, adopt and attain a legal fatherhood separate from biological paternity, but he could not rely on biology alone, and, as we have seen, legitimate fatherhood during the principate might be merely a legal fiction. The speaker of the sixth Satire —like some of Silverman’s male characters—does not identify with the father. On the one hand, he urges that no man marry; he does not even recommend female mistresses or prostitutes for companionship. In the speaker’s ideal scheme, no man can attain paternity, and thus the dominant fiction, the one that organizes Roman society into family groups and valorizes the right of fathers to primacy in the state, is destroyed. Juvenal advocates no alternative, and so the sixth Satire proposes a kind of nihilism. Moreover, the speaker constantly challenges paternity and maternity both. Mothers murder sons and husbands, and women do their best to resist motherhood in the first place. Fathers are often not the real father after all. The final selfdefeating gesture of this poem is that the speaker not only fully rejects the mother, but he also calls into question all notions of paternity. In doing so, he dismantles the social fiction that makes his arguments about female (and male) behavior relevant in the first place. In his rant about a world of illegitimate children, Juvenal delegitimizes himself. The ninth Satire also takes on paternity. If the sixth Satire called into question whether any Roman children are legitimate, the ninth offers us two competing visions of fatherhood. There is biological fatherhood, represented by the gigolo Naevolus, and legal fatherhood, represented by the effeminate Virro. As Braund has noted, legal language is common in the ninth Satire, particularly Page 192 →where issues of paternity are involved.362 Perhaps the ideal of what is socially and legally valid—as opposed to what is factually true of any given person—inspires Juvenal in a striking point of diction. When Naevolus describes what he does for Virro, he does so in particularly graphic terms (9.43–46): an facile et pronum est agere intra uiscera penem legitimum atque illic hesternae occurrere cenae? seruus erit minus ille miser qui foderit agrum quam dominum. Or is it easy to a drive a proper tool into his guts and run into last night’s supper there? The slave who plows the field will be less of a wretch than the one who plows the master. Leaving aside for now the comparison to a field slave, we might wonder what is meant by penem legitimum. On the surface, Naevolus only means that his penis is properly manly—big and good for penetrating. Yet the word also lays claim to a nonspurious masculinity. As opposed to Virro, Naevolus has a real man’s penis, one that

fathers children and produces the kind of domus so valued in Roman culture. Unfortunately for him, in the world described by this poem, his penis legitimus legitimizes only Virro. The most obvious of all signifiers of manhood—the phallus—has lost its meaning.363 It is precisely illegitimus. If we put ourselves in the place of a Roman male reader, identification with either father is problematic.364 In the case of Virro, the father is marked by wealth and public recognition of fatherhood, but the poem makes it clear that he is a father only through fraud. Significantly, Naevolus is not simply the adulterous lover of Virro’s wife—he is paid for stud service; Virro’s method of becoming a father is financial. So, the legitimate, legal father—the Roman paterfamilias—is a pathic. That model of fatherhood has been made to fall apart. To identify with Naevolus is, if anything, even more problematic.365 While he Page 193 →shows physical virility by penetrating both Virro and Virro’s wife, he remains troublingly immoral by Roman standards.366 He seems to have aspirations to higher social station, and he would clearly be happy to be among the legitimate amici of his wealthy “patron.” Yet he is obviously little more than a specialized prostitute, and he has no knowledge of elite Roman behavioral standards. He may avoid the legal infamia of prostitution, but only by using patronage as a fiction in the same way that Virro has used Naevolus and spurious fatherhood to attain legal rights and social status. We have already seen that Naevolus resembles both Umbricius in Satire 3 and Trebius in Satire 5.367 With Trebius, he shares a pitiful dependence on Virro, but he shares another characteristic with him too. Trebius’ dependence on Virro leads the speaker of poem 5 to characterize him as an animal, a performing monkey; Virro keeps him around because he is willing to play that role. In Satire 9, Virro is also primarily interested in Naevolus’ resemblance to an animal, for when the speaker asks about Virro’s response to Naevolus’ entreaties for more, Naevolus responds (9.92): neglegit atque alium bipedem sibi quaerit asellum. He doesn’t care, and he’s looking for another two-legged donkey for himself. If earlier Naevolus was implicitly like a farm slave, here he’s become a beast.368 His enormous penis marks a physical virility but a moral animalism. Just as Trebius is metaphorically a performing monkey who sits at the Page 194 →dinner table as if he were an honored guest, so is Naevolus a donkey who aspires to knighthood.369 The ninth Satire splits paternity in two and makes the two halves incompatible with one another. On the one side there is biological paternity, but it is associated here with illegitimacy as well as social and moral inferiority. On the other, legal and public paternity is only a fiction that hides passivity. Legal rights and honors go to the individual who is wealthy and powerful; actually fathering the children is irrelevant, just as the legal fiction by which one is granted the ius trium liberorum made the fathering of actual children unnecessary. The dominant fiction of Roman society requires families to be headed by fathers, but the sixth Satire made the case that the children in Roman households may only rarely be legitimately those of the paterfamilias. The ninth Satire goes even further by dismantling the notion of paternity and transforming it into a financial matter—just as Augustus had done when he established economic rewards for parenthood.370 In Roman terms, to read the ninth Satire and identify with either of its forms of paternity, to assimilate oneself consciously or not to the paradigm of Virro or Naevolus, is to oscillate uncomfortably between all of the different components of ideal elite identity and its opposite. In Virro, effeminacy correlates not to low social standing but to wealth, power, and public recognition of masculinity; he possesses, after all, argumenta uiri, “proofs of manhood.” Vir is the Latin word used to denote a “real” man as opposed to women and effeminates, and Virro’s name is thus a joke—our pathicus is Mann! Yet the rhetoric of the poem turns the irony back on itself and perhaps on the reader. Just as legitimus comes, in this poem, to mean its polar opposite, so too does the joke of calling an effeminate man Virro fail, because the poem has shown us a new kind of manhood based on wealth. Virro is the uir in this poem after all, because the terms of identity have changed in this version of Rome.371 Yet in the case of Naevolus, virility and sexual dominance—with men or women—bring no social reward and, in fact, lead him to identify himself as an animal.372 If the Page 195 →speaker of Satire 6

inadvertently undermines his own identity as a legitimate male, the more measured speaker of Satire 9 presents a Rome in which identity is only a fiction determined by money. Just as poem 8 concludes with a revelation that all Romans ultimately descend from scum, so too does Satire 9 manage to denigrate both Naevolus and Rome itself. Just before Naevolus retails his modest needs (9.135–50, quoted above), the speaker consoles him, tongue firmly in cheek, since he is worried about his prospects (9.130–33): ne trepida, numquam pathicus tibi derit amicus stantibus et saluis his collibus; undique ad illos conuenient et carpentis et nauibus omnes qui digito scalpunt uno caput. Have no fear, so long as these hills stand safe, you’ll never lack a faggot friend; from everywhere they’ll come together here by cart and boat, all those who scratch their head with one finger. The famed hills of Rome are reinterpreted as the final destination for the world’s passive homosexuals.373 If Naevolus wants to keep up his peculiar form of clientela, he’ll always find an amicus. But things will never get any better for him. Times have changed, and now money is manhood. As the speaker says, there will always be enough faggots in Rome to keep Naevolus in business, but they’re the only real men left.

Page 196 →Page 197 →

Conclusion Juvenal, or at least the speaker of each poem, is often considered a Roman conservative whose anger (in the indignant poems) is occasioned by the increasingly frequent refusal of others to play by the old rules and whose resignation (in those poems in which the speaker seems less angry) is to life in a world that, to his traditionalist sensibilities, has gone mad. Yet this formulation doesn’t always fit the work we have. As we have seen, the conservative rhetoric often undercuts itself. In some cases, this is accomplished through irony, but in other cases something more profound happens.374 Quoting Michael Seidel, Larmour says of Juvenal’s poetry that “the urge to reform is literally overwhelmed by the urge to annihilate.”375 Nowhere is this more true perhaps than in Satires 6 and 9, where our “conservative” author mounts a frontal assault on patriarchy itself by denying to Roman men an acceptable or even stable form of paternity. What I have tried to do in the preceding chapters is examine the way that speakers of Juvenal’s poems (and thus, collectively, Juvenal) undermine not only their own individual arguments and positions but the ideological foundations they think they are standing on. The moralizing pose of the satirist(s) of these poems is always defeated by the elaborate images they create to make their points as underlying anxieties rise to the surface and fight the positions the “satirists” stake out. Perhaps the single most obvious example is the speaker’s detailed description in Satire 6 of a eunuch who is more manly than he. Page 198 →The poems of Juvenal seem to represent a distinct class consciousness, voiced in various ways with various emphases, and showing the contradictions any ideology shows. It may be true, as scholars have often argued, that this is the outlook of the equestrian class, but I would suggest that, if so, Juvenal’s poems speak to only a portion of that group: those whose status may have begun to look questionable as the world marched forward—how often, after all, do the poems mention how easy it is to lose that status? The poems speak best to those worried about being displaced by the Other at a time when, on some level, they have already seen the writing on the wall. There is no reason to believe the author himself was especially different. Where persona is a useful concept is in showing us the absurdity of some of the views expressed—we need not believe that Juvenal himself really urged all the men he knew never to marry or reproduce. At the same time, it becomes very easy to use the idea of persona to support a reading of each statement a speaker makes as an enthusiastic endorsement of the opposite. What I have tried to do instead is use Juvenal’s elaborate flood of images to trace the ways that the ideology being expressed falls apart on further scrutiny. In the first chapter, we saw that the Juvenalian satirist is a failure from the outset. His claim to Lucilian frankness must be abandoned, as he realizes that he can only attack the dead. Yet the fact that the poet can only attack the dead, and therefore people of the past, ironizes a central tenant of his ideology from the beginning. Juvenal poses as a laudator temporis acti, one who praises the better morals of the past, but, whatever his intent, all of his examples of bad behavior are drawn from the past as well. If, in the first poem, Juvenal’s satirist is a failure because he realizes that he cannot resist those more powerful than he is, that sense of powerlessness recurs throughout the poems. Chapter 2 examined the way that the body of the individual functions as a metonym for the individual as the various markers of his identity change or are changed. Thus Juvenal’s bodies show what happens to social status, masculinity, even humanity as they are beaten, destroyed, or brutalized by age. Almost always in Juvenal’s poetry this concern is for men, despite the occasional image of aging women. Chapter 3 explored the anxieties raised by the misbehavior of others, particularly men of the elite. As the speakers denounce a variety of men for their bad behavior, we begin to see the underlying associative and emotional patterns that structure the failing ideology of a certain class of Roman men. By looking at these denunciations, we can see what at least some Romans thought Page 199 →the consequences of bad behavior and class betrayal should be in spheres such as the religious and military. We can also watch the speakers try to figure out why the “obvious” consequences don’t happen, and what that may mean.

Though treated in the first three chapters, masculinity under threat is the central topic of chapters 4 and 5. In the first of these, passages from Satires 2, 10, and most importantly 6 show that various kinds of effeminacy and womanly behavior are a threat not because—or not only because—they represent a usurpation of traditional male prerogatives; rather, the world of women and their allies—effeminate men, foreigners, and the socially stigmatized—constitutes a kind of shadow-land that threatens to displace the civic world of male privilege. Moreover, the exclusion of “normal” elite males from that world destabilizes the notion that there even is a normal male in the first place. Chapter 5 explores the connections in Juvenal between masculinity and wealth. The loss of wealth can be seen as an effeminizing process, often going hand in hand with wives’ victimization of their husbands through adultery. The equation between wealth and manhood is of special importance for the ninth Satire, in which two men trade sex and money in a strange mixture of prostitution and patronage that allows a sexually passive male to have all the legal and financial rewards of fatherhood; it also (falsely) promises a gigolo hope of becoming wealthier and more prestigious.

Ever Thus An optimist might think that the world will have changed substantially in the time since Juvenal, but everything we have been following in the pages of Juvenal still comes in for outrageous (and outraged) treatment in various media, not always by satirists, and rarely by those of Juvenal’s caliber as a shaper of language and image.376 Anyone who has followed politics in the United States, at least since 2008, gets a daily dose of all of the things Juvenal attacked in his promise to cover quidquid agunt homines, “whatever human beings do.” One constantly hears about the danger to the social fabric posed by, inter alia, same-sexPage 200 → marriage; foreigners stealing the prerogatives of American citizens (strikingly few of whom belong to the indigenous peoples long since displaced, when not destroyed, by Europeans); the encroachment of languages (usually Spanish or Arabic) other than English; a dangerous foreign religion from the East; and the mysterious birth and background of an emperor, that is to say, a president, whose connections to the East threaten to undermine everything the country stands for. That regime ends with the rise of another, premised on the idea of a return to authentic values that were never as widely shared as is alleged. “Freedom,” like libertas in post-Flavian Rome, is still a watchword, and a contested one. “Frankness,” simplicitas, is evoked as a virtue just when it is most suspect. I have mentioned the United States; other Western nations might be substituted just as easily. The rhetoric has not much changed either. The values one is supposed to defend in the present are allegedly those of a hardworking people from centuries past who would not approve of the changes that the Other is subversively engineering when (s)he is not openly screaming for them.377 Juvenal’s indignatio did not die with him. Nor did his theatricality, as every anxiety of a class obviously aware that it is dying is given voice in staged events of every kind, whether televised or not, and just as Juvenal is a new Lucilius who has little right to the name, values might be defended at “tea parties” that bear no real resemblance to their own remarkable forebear and “facts” invoked that neither are, nor are even alleged to be, events that actually happened or information that reflects reality. Thus, I am arguing that the fictions of Juvenal’s Satires are not really fictions, just as I have tried to show that his speakers’ truths are not necessarily true. His poems derive their remarkable energy from the death throes of a Rome that had always putatively but perhaps never truly existed. By his day, however, the writing was on the wall; soon things would never be the same, and the myths of a dying ideology could not stop the future from coming. The poems suggest—whatever their author, speakers, and characters may have wanted—that the language of identity may fail and may be undermined from without, or even that it may have been based on false premises in the first place. The satirist must criticize the dead because the living are outside of and indifferent to his rhetoric. The man must not marry because his vision of women and all that is associated with them presents a challenge to his manhood and even his selfhood. The upholder of traditional values continually revealsPage 201 → that things were never any better or any worse. The pious man’s own bombastic rhetoric denounces the gods. One might counter Umbricius’ statement by asserting that poverty makes you ridiculous only if you believe that the poor are ridiculous, but there is more to it than that. Poverty makes Juvenal’s speakers and his male characters ridiculous because they are not poor and don’t know what poverty is. Their own rhetorical posture is that

things were better in the past, when people were poor, yet they, more than any of their satirical targets, have bought in to the idea that great wealth and influence are the norm. All of this sounds very serious, and Juvenal’s poems are very funny. Perhaps it is so easy to laugh because we are smart enough to see how ridiculous people are—especially people like Juvenal’s speakers, who take themselves so very seriously. Perhaps as we laugh we should take a lesson from Horace, an earlier satirist: “What are you laughing at?” he asks, “Change the name and the story’s about you.”378

Footnotes 1. MacMullen 1974, 88–120 is very useful on the intersection of class and wealth, and what “middle class” does and does not mean in a Roman context. 2. Armstrong 2012 with further references. 3. In Shumate’s (2006) discussion of nationalist and colonialist rhetoric as it manifests itself in both ancient Roman and later European texts, it emerges clearly that the Other is feminine and abnormal. Thus, for Juvenal, the individuals whose circumstances count are uniformly male—in such a schema, “man” and “person” are synonyms. 4. See also Hooley 2007, 136: “Juvenal has built a literary funhouse where middle-class Roman paranoias and resentments loom in hugely exaggerated form. He fashions it out of superbly crafted language that overwrites itself, that slips into ludicrous caricature—and thus into betrayal of its own ostensible project.” 5. The best assessment of the evidence for Juvenal’s life and career is to be found in two essays (both 1979) by Ronald Syme. Highet 1954 is a very full reconstruction, but it strains the evidence in support of a biographical reading. Armstrong 2012 is a more recent, and reasonable, attempt to incorporate biography into a reading of the poems. 6. Anderson’s most specific general statement on the topic came in a 1964 essay (Anderson 1964b), but he had put the method into practice earlier in Anderson 1957. The relevant essays are also collected in Anderson 1982. For Kernan’s theory of satire and persona, see Kernan 1959, especially 1–36. 7. Persona-oriented criticism of Roman satire, and Juvenal in particular, has had too many exponents to list all of them. The essays collected in Anderson 1982 are fundamental, as are Winkler 1983 and Braund 1988. 8. In addition to the question of persona, twentieth-century studies of Juvenal debated the extent to which he should be seen as having a sincere moral agenda. Two crucial works that argue against such a position are Marmorale 1950 (updating his 1938 original) and Mason 1962. 9. Uden 2015, 5: “The manifold ironies of Juvenal’s texts do not exist merely to be recognized as such.” 10. See Hooley 2007, 134. 11. On the problem of consistency in this set of inconsistent texts, see Winkler 1983, 16. 12. On inconsistency in Juvenal’s persona, see Hooley 2007, 131–32 and Uden 2015, 2: “The lack of firm grounding in any knowable character or voice itself becomes a means of critiquing aspects of contemporary culture.” 13. See Anderson, especially 1962, 1964a, and 1970; Braund 1988. 14. Most recently, for example, this change plays a major role in the work of Keane, especially 2015. 15. The third Satire is instructive. While “Juvenal” is the first speaker in the poem, he soon quotes another character, Umbricius, for the remaining 302 lines. While some scholars, such as Courtney (1980, 152–53), Frueland Jensen (1986), Braund (1996, 233–34), Shumate (2006, 45–46), and Gallia (2016, especially 336–37) have seen evidence that the original speaker is quoting Umbricius to ridicule him or people like him, others feel that the two characters coalesce and that Umbricius is very similar in attitude to the speaker(s) in other poems, at least in Books 1 and 2. See, e.g., Bellandi 2009, 503 and throughout, as well as Keane 2015, 56–62. 16. Highet 1974. 17. Iddeng 2000; Mayer 2003; and Bellandi 2009, 504. 18. See, for example, Miller 2004, 51. 19. For their take on current objections to persona theory with a cogent response, see Watson and Watson 2014, 38–39. They offer a sensible approach to its use vis-à -vis Satire 6 at 40–48—they are particularly useful on the need to correlate persona with history as we know it. Nadeau 2011 also makes explicit, if somewhat idiosyncratic, use of persona theory. 20. Thus, despite significant divergences, my work has strong affinities with the highly rhetorical readings of Keane 2015. 21. See Nappa 2001, 25–27. 22. See also Keane 2002c, 3: “Satire does not mirror the world, but makes it. . . .”

23. See Uden 2015, 7: “The satirist avoids crafting any authoritative individual who epitomizes and speaks for the Roman culture of his time, because he writes in a persona newly aware of the absence of any central, unified notion of what Rome is.” 24. Elliot 1960. 25. See Larmour 1991, 41: “As a starting point, it is instructive to consider the Satires not as truth-laden creations of the individual poet-uates, but as discourses of marginality.” Larmour 2016 is also highly relevant to my work in this study, but it appeared too late for me to take full account of it. 26. Rimell 2005, 81–82. For other critics concerned with the way Juvenal’s work incorporates, validates, challenges, or contests readers’ guiding (though often unconscious or unexamined) assumptions, see Henderson 1989, 1997, and 1999 and Hooley 2007, 112–40. 27. The first two paragraphs of Larmour 1991 are an excellent summary of scholarship on Juvenal. We are, mostly, past the era of defending Juvenal as either a poet or a moralist. Serafini 1957 is a good example of a book that tries desperately to show that Juvenal is both a good poet and a good man. Much of it is laughable by today’s standards. For only one example (124): “Resta da dire che nessuno dei satiri latini aveva ancora attacato la pederastia e l’omosessualità : non Lucilio, non Orazio, non Petronio, non Persio: il quale ultimo solo, avrebbe potuto dal piedistallo della sua rettitudine mettere alla gogna questo vizio infamante. Solo G. ebbe il coraggio di farlo, togliendo ogni velo alla sua espressione: e questo, mentre testimonia il suo moralismo, ne costituisce anche uno dei meriti più significativi.” 28. Such scholarship can sometimes be quite helpful, since it may reveal a great deal about the composition of a poem. Townend’s study of the seventh Satire (1973) is a case in point. He identifies the poem’s apparently disjointed nature as the product of intertextual play with Suetonius’ De uiris illustribus, thus shedding light on a chapter of literary history that might otherwise have remained closed. 29. Garrod 1921, vii: “In the rhetoric of rancour he is a distinguished practitioner. But he wants two qualities essential to great poetry—truth and humanity. I say this because there are critics who speak of Juvenal as though he were Isaiah.” 30. Freudenburg 2001, 266. 31. Too many scholars have taken up the issue of defining satire as a genre for me to furnish a complete catalogue. Griffin (1994, 6–34) provides a useful survey for satire in general. Keane 2006 is an important recent attempt to trace some of the thematic generic markers of Roman verse satire; an older attempt may be found in Highet 1962. Jones 2007 looks at the generic affiliations of Juvenal in particular. Freudenburg 2001 examines the Roman verse satirists and above all their relationship to the Lucilian tradition. The question of genre is frequently linked to questions about satire’s origins. See Hendrickson 1927 and Sibley 1995. On the origins and meaning of the word satura, see van Rooy 1966, 1–29 and throughout. 32. MacMullen (1974, 120) has good remarks on this. 33. E.g., Green 1998, 180–81, but Green also takes seriously Naevolus’ poverty in a way that I cannot. 34. Not every reader of Satire 9 is quite so convinced of Naevolus’ indigency; see, for example, Braund 1988, 155–56: “For although he considers these demands moderate, they reveal that he has no conception of real poverty but seeks the life-style of someone with the equestrian census.” Bellandi (2009) realizes that Naevolus is not really indigent, but he does seem to sympathize with Naevolus’ wish to have the lifestyle of an eques. 35. Armstrong 2012, arguing from the point of view that both historical poet and literary persona are Roman equites at the lower end of the elite hierarchy, acknowledges that Juvenalian paupertas is, in fact, the solid if not princely financial status of such men. I differ from Armstrong in greater skepticism about the historical Juvenal, but I do agree that we are talking here only about members of the elite even if not those of its upper echelon; on Juvenal’s speaker as a member of this elite see Armstrong 2012, 62–63. 36. Wells 1984, 268. 37. See, for example, Courtney 1980, 181 on 3.198. 38. On the range of insulae in Ostia, and the range of incomes they accommodated in Juvenal’s own day, see Meiggs 1973, 235–62. For Satire 3’s relationship to real urban realities, see Braund 1989, 26–39. 39. Meiggs 1973, 249–50.

40. See Meiggs 1973, 249–50: the House of the Muses, the House of the Paintings, and the House of the Painted Ceiling seem to have catered to relatively well-off clientele. 41. For a good example of Juvenal’s associative style, see Watson and Watson 2014, 14–18. 42. Weisinger 1972, 227: “Perhaps the most typical characteristic of Juvenal’s style is the rapid flow of almost disconnected images which bombard the reader, or the listener, with a series of hard, precise details.” See also Jenkyns 1982, 175: “Sometimes Juvenal’s pictorial details seem to serve no satiric purpose, and to be simply the outcome of an alert enjoyment of the external world.” Two important studies of Juvenal’s use of language in his images are Wiesen 1989 and Schmitz 2001. Neither relates Juvenal’s images to wider cultural concerns to the extent that I try to in this study. 43. This concept can be found in the work of numerous literary theorists, though often explained in different ways. For Riffaterre (1978, passim), antimimetic elements constitute “ungrammaticalities” that require explanation. Others speak of Leerstellen, calls to interpretation embedded in texts; a concise summary can be found in Schmitz 2007, 86–97 (with further bibliography). Hexter 1990 has examined passages in Vergil’s Aeneid in which paradox and inconsistency demand that the reader make a special effort to interpret. 44. Fredericks (1979, 191) argues that Juvenal’s exaggeration, use of myth, etc., play a similarly antimimetic role, but for him they draw our attention to unreality in order to give us a “disillusioned sense of reality.” For me, such antimimetic structures point the way not to the reality outside the text but to the mechanisms of the literary universe that the text creates, to the text’s status as its own reality. 45. I borrow this phrasing from Amy Richlin’s recent essay (2007) on Petronius, “Sex in the Satyrica: Outlaws in Literatureland.” 46. On Juvenal in particular, see Hooley 2007, 115: “Juvenal more than any other satirist builds his poems out of a massive intertextuality comprising rhetoric, tragedy, epic, and philosophy.” 47. The commentary of “Cornutus” that has come down to us is probably not the work of Persius’ teacher of that name, but the fact that tradition fathers this work on a contemporary of the poet suggests that there was at least some awareness that the obscurity of Persius’ verse was noted by his earliest readers. 48. Especially Uden 2015, 8. 49. Even the emperor’s autonomy was not absolute—numerous anecdotes attest to the fact that the emperors too had, on occasion, to obey the unwritten protocols of the larger social system. 50. On Roman social class and the role of wealth as they developed over time, see Alföldy 1988. For the Republic, there is much useful information on Roman society in Nicolet 1980. For the principate, Garnsey 1970 is essential. 51. There were, however, often indicators such as family names that would let many Romans know each other’s status—at least at any given place and time. 52. Augustus was a patrician by virtue of his adoption into the gens Iulia. The Octavii were plebeians, but this fact did not diminish Augustus’ zeal for the prerogatives of the patricians. 53. On the difference between class and status, see Saller 2000, 827–34. 54. The secondary literature on Roman masculinity—to say nothing of masculinity in other times and places—has gone from being minimal to enormous. Williams 2010; McDonnell 2006; and Edwards 1993, 63–97 are the best places to start. The topic is treated more fully in chapter 4. 55. I treat the way that the need to curry favor with more prominent and powerful men gives rise to anxieties over masculinity in Nappa 2001 (on Catullus and late Republican culture). 56. Especially important here is the connection of freedom and masculinity as outlined most conveniently by Skinner 2014, 253–77 and McDonnell 2006 throughout. On liberty as a concept operative at the level of political institutions, and in particular, the effect on liberty of the emperor, see two helpful essays on Tacitus: Morford 1991 and Oakley 2009. 57. On the anomalies that prevent us from making too neat divisions based on any one category of identity (e.g., class or rank), see Saller 2000, 832–34. 58. See Uden 2015, 29 for the way this opening question allows any audience member to take the place of the ego who speaks in this poem. 59. As the first poem in Book 1 and the collection as a whole, Satire 1 has often been treated by scholars. For the question of the poem’s structure, see Kenney 1962; Helmbold 1951 is still useful too, but his

argument is based on many outmoded assumptions. For questions of unity of theme, see Anderson 1982, 197–209 and Martyn 1970. 60. These are only the first of many characters who take on some of the role of the satirist. The most recent treatment is Moodie 2012, with references to older work. 61. On the way this passage links the poem to the generic traditions of satire, see Keane 2002d. For a potential debt to Petronius here, see Nappa 2010b. 62. Horace is a good example of someone whose education was intended to elevate his social and financial standing, as he tells us in Sat. 1.6. 63. Henderson (1999, 249–73) shows how deeply invested the speaker is in the literary traditions he castigates here. Freudenburg (2005) argues that the dichotomy between relevant and hackneyed themes is also a dichotomy between Roman and Greek. 64. Nisbet (1988, 86–87) persuasively identifies line 29 as an interpolation. 65. This is of course a major strategy of the recusatio. Ovid uses it also to explain the genesis of the Amores (1.1). 66. See 6.366–78. 67. See Courtney 1980, 309–10 on 6.366; on sexual or gender-related “scare-images” such as this, see Skinner 2014, 154–57. 68. See Treggiari 1991, 8 (with sources) and passim. 69. Juvenal does occasionally use the word patricii to denote any elite Romans of good family rather than simply patricians in the technical sense. See Courtney 1980, 485 on Sat. 10.331. 70. If line 29 is, in fact, genuine then this ring does not indicate equestrian status since such rings would not have had jewels, but Crispinus was indeed an equestrian (see Sat. 4.34), and Nisbet’s argument that line 29 (in which the jewel is mentioned) is an interpolation seems to me persuasive. 71. See Anderson 1982, 201: “As one of his crucial methods throughout this section, he indicates the total overthrow of Roman virtus by transferring terms of moral approval to the description of immorality, by which he implies the transvaluation which has occurred among most Romans.” 72. Legacy hunting has a rich history in satire, but only a tenuous one outside of it. It is an easy accusation to make, but, like that of marrying for money, it is virtually impossible to prove. See now Woods 2012. 73. Courtney 1980, 93 and Braund 1996, 85. 74. On the uses of Horace within Satire 1 of Juvenal, see Facchini Tosi 1976. 75. On the Marius Priscus exemplum here, see Nappa 2013. 76. The mention of the wife’s ineligibility to inherit has puzzled people, and various legal explanations have been sought. It is true that the lex Voconia forbade women from receiving inheritances above a certain amount and that the leges Iulia and Papia Poppaea contained provisions that might disqualify one from inheriting, but the solution seems to me simpler. By leaving a legacy to the husband, the adulterers deflect suspicion that might be aroused both by the inclusion of another man’s wife in one’s will and by visits to (or by) the couple. 77. See, e.g., Ovid, Ars Am. 1.579–80 and Amores 2.19 and 3.4. 78. Braund 1996, 119–21. 79. On these lines, see Kenney 1963, 711–12. 80. Juvenal’s programmatic statement in lines 79 and 80 follows a catalogue of villains that itself follows by not too many lines a reference to Horace. It is possible that the reference to Locusta the poisoner points to another predecessor, the unfortunately lost Neronian satirist Turnus, whose one surviving fragment deals with Locusta; see Courtney 1980, 81–83. If this is true, then Juvenal’s poem engages at some point all of his major predecessors. 81. Harrison (1937) argues that lines 85–86 should be excised, at least from this poem, but the majority of Juvenal scholars accept them as genuine, since Harrison cites no solid evidence that the lines are out of place. Helmbold (1951, 54) also rejects the lines, but he argues only from Harrison’s authority. For arguments in favor of their authenticity, see Martyn 1970, 54–56 and Anderson 1982, 203. 82. On the programmatic nature of the word farrago, see Cloud and Braund 1982, 78–79. 83. The fullest discussion of ancient evidence for and debate on the origins of the name satura is van Rooy 1966, 1–29. 84. See Saller 1982, 11.

85. On such “personified abstractions,” see Beard, North, and Price 1998 vol. 1, 62. Pax plays no role in Cicero’s discussion of such figures at De nat. de. 2.60–62; her cult seems primarily to have developed under Augustus, and was particularly emphasized by Vespasian. See Wissowa 1912, 334–35. 86. This passage seems to be a reference to Persius 1.112–14. 87. Perhaps the best example is the passage in Satire 2 (treated in chapter 3 pp. 107–11) in which the speaker is so outraged over the behavior of Romans that he tells Mars himself to leave the city. 88. I have quoted and translated Clausen’s text, but intestata in line 144 has been controversial, and none of the solutions proposed commands general assent. Nisbet (1988, 87–88) proposes that the line is an interpolation; others have proposed various emendations for intestata itself. Cloud (1989, 58) argues that the man in question dies so suddenly that he has no time to make a will. This is indeed the best explanation if the line is not interpolated and intestata is genuine. 89. Recently scholars have traced the way that the imagery of devouring characterizes Catullan discourse on Rome’s imperial enterprises as well as individual behavior analogous to imperial expansion. See Putnam 1989 and 1995–96, 86–88; Greene 2007, 142–46; and Konstan 2000, 224–28 and 2007. 90. Persius, Sat. 3.98–106. 91. Lausberg 1998, 152–53 В§325 and 772 s. v. II. 92. The classic study of Juvenal as rhetorician is de Decker 1913. 93. Clausen prints Tigillinum, a variant spelling, but here I use the spelling more common in Englishlanguage discussions. 94. There must be a lacuna here, in one line of which something like the translation provided occurs. See Courtney ad loc. 95. Here too Juvenal looks to his predecessors, since Horace had also tackled the issue of causing offense in Sat. 2.1; see Baldwin 1967, 310–11. 96. See Freudenburg 2001, 244–45, who discusses the literalization of metaphor in this scene. 97. Roman soldiers put on their galeae only when the enemy was at hand. See Courtney 1980, 419 on Sat. 8.238. 98. If Juvenal is now Aeneas slaying Turnus, it is interesting to wonder whether he is also killing off his real-world predecessor, the Neronian satirist Turnus. 99. Highet 1954, 56–58 is the clearest example. Yet this approach requires us to assume a high degree of sympathy in Juvenal’s portrayals of Umbricius in Sat. 3, Trebius in Sat. 5, and Naevolus in Sat. 9, which I, like many readers of the poems, cannot find. 100. Friedlaender 1895, 162. 101. Lutz 1950; she cites Phaedrus and other examples to show that writers under the principate made use of such statements. 102. Highet 1954, 56–58; in particular 57: “The name of a vicious aristocrat recently dead would serve instead of the name of a living example of vice. This is probably what Juvenal chiefly intends. He has already said that the crimes and vices of Rome cry out for exposure and punishment. He has been told that it is dangerous to point out the living criminals. He replies, вЂThen I shall use names drawn from the past.’ The vice will be living, but it will wear a death-mask.” 103. Helmbold 1951, 57–58: “[H]e will employ a cunning device: though he may seem to be dealing in stock figures, his intention will be precisely the same as that of Lucilius. He means, in fact, that he is about to attack you, ungentle reader.” 104. Anderson 1982, 206–8 (originally published in 1957), especially 207: “Therefore, by illos he refers to the dead of the recent past, the villains of the Flavian Era. In attacking the dead by name, however, the satirist exposes the vices which now dominate Rome. What he describes, though localized in the past, has influenced the present and threatens the future. Because the vice of the past has contemporary repercussions, Juvenal can still be angry, sensing that his native Rome is foundering.” 105. Syme 1958, 499: “The living were immune. Junius Juvenalis proclaims that his attacks will be confined to those whose ashes are entombed beside the Latin or the Flaminian Way. Of necessity. The poems confirm. Juvenal cannot visit scorn and derision on the men who have wealth and place and power. He anxiously avoids the new aristocracy now dominant, that issued largely from Spain or Narbonensis, and the dynastic houses from the eastern lands. Nor can he touch the themes of imperial policy. Literature or fiction furnished most of his requirements, with an especial debt to the reigns of Nero and Domitian.”

106. Kenney 1962, 34–40. 107. Kenney 1962, 38: “Horace, Persius and Juvenal, then, do not attack and could not have attacked living persons of consequence. Do they then attack the dead? No, they do not, appearances and commentators to the contrary notwithstanding: they do something rather different—they use the dead as exempla.” 108. Baldwin 1967. While his criticisms of Highet and Syme are valuable, his conclusion is suspect. In particular, he puts too much emphasis on the passage of Tacitus (Hist. 1.1) that says that freedom of speech had returned under Nerva. Libertas was indeed a Nervan motto, but we do not need to believe all propaganda. Moreover, Baldwin’s argument assumes that the speaker of Satire 1 is talking about the real circumstances of the historical Juvenal. 109. Griffith 1970, especially 63: “The thought runs: вЂA modern Lucilius pricks tender consciences: hinc ira et lacrimae. Think twice before you enter the fray and it’s too late to withdraw. If pressed, I shall rely on the defence that I shall test by legal process how far liberties may be taken against the dead.’” 110. GГ©rard 1976, 24–26. 111. Courtney 1980, 80–83. “We must infer that the grim past had so ingrained itself in Juvenal’s mind that to some extent he failed to recognise contemporary realities” (82). 112. Adamietz 1986, 247: “Gemeint ist offenbar: Zu einem grundsГ¤tzlichen Wechsel der Gattung kГ¶nnen die EinwГ¤nde den Dichter keineswegs bewegen. Wenn auch EinschrГ¤nkungen in der Kritik hingenommen werden mГјssen, so wird doch—entsprechend den Г„uГџerungen bei Horaz und Persius—am Willen zur Satire, und zwar mit grimmiger Entschlossenheit, festgehalten; das Ziel sind dann eben die Größen von einst.В .В .В . Die SchluГџpartie (147–171) vertritt das Recht auf satirischen Tadel und bestimmt, wessen Fehler das Thema sein kГ¶nnten.” 113. Bartsch 1994, 90–93. “Moreover, the Domitianic setting itself provides an answer to the difficulty of a precaution against offense that is itself offensive. Juvenal places himself in the past even as he resolves to address the dead alone, rendering his comments about the dangers of allusion as the comments of a poet writing under Domitian—and knowing what criticism of Tigellinus might bring. Perhaps no more foolproof a precautionary measure than any other, it was such a measure nonetheless. Moreover, its very existence served to make the most important point: that its author was including it at all because he felt it was in some sense necessary” (93). 114. Fredricksmeyer 1990, 800: “The satirist professes to have the courage to write like Lucilius, but subsequently shows that here as elsewhere his implicit claim to moral superiority is a fallacy.” 115. Braund 1996, 116–21. “Is this fiercely indignant character really a coward in the face of danger, in short, a hypocrite? A closer examination of Satire 1 suggests that J.’s creation is a hypocrite in several other respects” (119–20). 116. Freudenburg 2001, 234–42. 117. Freudenburg 2001, 239: “We are left to wonder whether what we hear in Juvenal’s first poem are the sounds of honorable indignation, the genuine article, or a parodic shakedown of the whole indignation industry.” 118. As Courtney 1980, 81 acknowledges. 119. The prosecution of Marius Priscus took place in 100 CE. 120. Serm. 1.1.69–70. 121. See also Freudenburg 2005a, 87–88. 122. Serm. 1.4.6–13 and 1.10.1–3. 123. Libertas in speech was an important issue in the times in which Juvenal lived and wrote. The key text is Tacitus’ Dialogus, but it is relevant throughout Tacitus’ work. On libertas as a concept in Tacitus (and to some extent Pliny the Younger), see Morford 1991. 124. Barchiesi and Cucchiarelli (2005) examine the way satirists use images of their own bodies for a variety of thematic and programmatic purposes. Perhaps because Juvenal so rarely alludes to his own body, they focus more on Lucilius, Horace, and Persius. 125. Miller 1998. It is perhaps worth noting that different students of Bakhtin’s writings do not always agree about some of his concepts. For the student of satire, Bakhtin’s most important work is Rabelais and His World. For his theory of the grotesque, see Bakhtin 1984, 303–436. For other modern theories of

the grotesque, see Barasch 1993 and Edwards and Graulund 2013. 126. Vermeule 2002. 127. Vermeule 2002, 87. 128. Richlin 1984. 129. Vermeule 2002, 99. 130. I have found two other theories of the body helpful as well. The first is the idea of the uncanny as developed by Freud (2003, originally 1919; from the work of E. Jentsch 1908). One of Freud’s examples of the uncanny is the body part that has been removed and is encountered outside of the context of the whole body. I would argue that the kind of reduction of a human being to a mere body that we encounter in Juvenal can have the same effect: the sense of self breaks down as the individual sees himself as nothing more than a body or realizes that others do; the images Juvenal gives us show subjects transformed into objects. Similarly, Kristeva’s (1982) idea of abjection can usefully be applied to some of Juvenal’s bodies, as the human individual is treated as an unclean presence that must be either expelled or destroyed. Kristeva’s theory of abjection has recently been employed in the study of Juvenal by David Larmour (2007) and (2016). His focus is the way in which significant spaces within Rome function in the Satires, but this question is, as he shows, inextricable from discourse about the body. 131. For a fuller discussion of this passage and its role in the construction of the Juvenalian satirist, see Chapter 1 pp. 50–60. 132. See Freudenburg 2001, 244–45 on the “demetaphorizing” nature of Tigellinus’ torture. 133. On the question of a full-scale persecution of Christians under Nero, see Shaw 2015. 134. For the double meaning of subeant in v. 144, see Watson and Watson 2014, 119–20. 135. Schmitz 2001, 150–61 discusses Juvenal’s reduction of human beings to “das entscheidende Detail.” 136. On the parody of divorce in these lines, see Courtney 1980, 279 and Schmitz 2001, 207–8. See also Watson and Watson 2014, 120. 137. Satire 3 has attracted a great deal of attention. For overviews of the poem as a whole, see Anderson 1982, 219–31; Fredericks 1973; Freudenburg 2001, 264–77; Frueland Jensen 1986; Gallia 2016; Hardie 1997–98; Motto and Clark 1965; Shumate 2006, 41–46; and Witke 1962. 138. I have omitted line 281, an obvious interpolation. It reads ergo non aliter poterit dormire; quibusdam (“therefore he will not be able to sleep otherwise; for, for some people . . .”). 139. Because of its fragmentary state, Satire 16 is one of Juvenal’s most neglected works. For overviews, see Clark 1988 and Keane 2007, 48–51. For the argument that the poem’s details about soldiers are all taken from the Praetorian Guard, see Durry 1935. 140. On the synecdoches here, see Schmitz 2001, 159. 141. See also Jenkyns 1982, 201. 142. Watson 1969, 125. 143. On the way that the liability to be beaten could be seen as analogous to sexual penetrability—and the connotations of servility as well—see Walters 1997, 39–40. For the paradoxical position of the soldier in this schema, see Walters 1997, 40. 144. On the ways in which satire takes violence and coercion (legal and otherwise) as one of its generic models, see Keane 2006, 42–104. 145. Witke (1962, 246) perhaps shows the most sympathy: “Umbricius must flee from home because his talents go begging; his patron has rejected him; his capital is diminishing. Umbricius, whoever he is, is clearly no average man in the street but a figure of some importance who is reduced by adversity to slender means.” Anderson (1982, 223 and 232) also sees Umbricius in a fairly positive light. For the other point of view, see Courtney 1980, 152–53; Braund 1996, 233–34; Frueland Jensen (1986), who sees Umbricius as deluded both about himself and his reasons for leaving Rome; Shumate 2006, 41–46. Most recently, see Uden 2015, 104: “On the other hand, there is no better example of artifice and deception in the poem than the character of Umbricius himself”; and Gallia 2016. 146. Courtney 1980, 152. 147. This interpretation, first advanced by Motto and Clark (1965), derives the name Umbricius from umbra, literally “shadow,” but also “ghost.” Other interpretations of the name are possible: for the possibility that it derives from umbra meaning an “uninvited guest” or “tag along,” see

Freudenburg 2001, 267; for the idea that it suggests ignorance or stupidity, see Winkler 1983, 222–23. Of course, the different derivations need not be seen as mutually exclusive. Scholars now tend to see the suggestive name as a redender Name, but a gens Umbricia is attested. 148. See Courtney 1980, 186 on 3.236 with sources. 149. On Satire 15 in general, see Anderson 1987; Ehrhardt 2014; Fredericks 1976; McKim 1986; Shumate 2006, 130–58; Singleton 1983; and Tennant 1995. Of these, Singleton, McKim, Anderson, and Shumate see in the poem implied criticism of Roman practices and of the poem’s own bigoted speaker. Tennant disagrees and finds the speaker’s racism sincere. Powell 1979 attempts to link the cannibalism in the poem to Egyptian ritual and mythology. Keane (2007, 41–48) does a good job of situating the poem amid the concerns of Book 5 as a whole. Ehrhardt 2014 explores the relationship between poem 15 and Ovid. 150. On the opening of Satire 15, see Shumate 2006, 132–33. 151. As described by Kristeva 1982. 152. On the reading hinc for hic here see Courtney ad loc. Of recent editors hinc has also been adopted by Braund. 153. On the humorous elements in Satire 15’s description of cannibalism, see Plaza 2006, 338–40. 154. See also Uden 2015, 215: “Satire 15 is a poem about the loss of any solid notion of what being Roman means. If Rome is everywhere, the satirist grimly suggests, then Rome is nowhere.” 155. The tenth Satire has received less attention from critics than one might expect given its importance for later European satire. For overviews of its structure and themes, see Highet 1954, 125–29; Eichholz 1956; Lawall 1958; Courtney 1980, 446–54; Tengström 1980; Braund 1988, 184–86; Fishelov 1990; and Hooley 2007, 123–24. The poem has often been seen as a serious work of moral advice. My own view follows Fishelov 1990, 375: “Juvenal is interested, first and foremost, in explaining the various (tragic, or better, grotesque) ironies that arise from the fulfillment of human wishes, not with any moral reproaching of hypocrisy.” On the description of aging in particular, see Fishelov 1990, 377–80. 156. On the connection between the description of aging and the end of the poem, see Fishelov 1990, 381 and Hooley 2007, 124. The end of the poem has traditionally been understood to be sincere advice, but I prefer the ironic reading of Fishelov and Hooley. More recently, Uden (2015, chapter 5) has argued that Satire 10 uses Cynic techniques to unmask Cynicism’s corrupting influence on Roman intellectual discourse. 157. On the way that statues of emperors could function as their surrogates, see Varner 2005. 158. For the eighth Satire generally, see Fredericks 1971; Braund 1988, 69–129; and Henderson 1997. Braund and Henderson are by far the fullest accounts of this once neglected poem; each finds in it a kind of irony. For Braund the speaker is really only a pseudo-moralist. For Henderson, this discourse on proper behavior deflates the whole cultural project of educating Roman sons and shaping their character. Fredericks, by contrast, finds a more sincere moral statement in the poem. 159. Three lines, 6–8, are routinely bracketed by editors as being an interpolation; I have omitted them in my discussion above but include them here: quis fructus generis tabula iactare capaci / Coruinum, posthac multa contingere uirga / fumosos equitum cum dictatore magistros . . . . The text as it stands must be corrupt and cannot be translated without emendation; see Courtney 1980, 384–86. 160. See Uden 2015, 123 on the opening question in Satire 8. 161. Henderson (1997, 25–41) probes the connections between these statues, their specific physical forms, and the men they probably represent. 162. Courtney 1980, 386. See also Keane 2006, 34–35. 163. Henderson 1997, 41: “Grisly, but Juvenal’s imago may show us a battered relic saved through a millennium, a carelessly mistreated carve-up of a more recent Galba, a head now so battered that it has lost all face, and could be any Galba you please (even none?).” Henderson’s discussion underscores the point made elsewhere in this chapter, namely that treating individuals as bodies destroys their individuality. 164. See Martial 2.83.1–3 and 3.85.1. 165. Uden (2015, 124–25) points out that Juvenal mentions families here that have already died out. 166. See Braund 1988, 108. 167. Similar perhaps is the speaker’s comparison of the worthless Rubellius Blandus to a castrated herm at 8.53; see Braund 1988, 104–5 and 108.

168. Braund 1988, 104 thinks that the decrepit statues of earlier generations do represent men who were actually virtuous. I prefer to think that Juvenal here hints that the past was not substantially superior to the present in terms of morality, just as he admits in the final lines of the poem that all Roman pedigrees stem from lowlifes seeking asylum. This supports Braund’s contention that the speaker’s pompous moralizing ultimately falls apart. 169. On the Sejanus and Hannibal exempla as a pair, see Fredericks 1979, 185–87. 170. On the particular image here, see Lawall 1958, 29. 171. For Juvenal’s technique in the description of Sejanus’ downfall, see Lawall 1958, 28–29; Maier 1983, 50–51; and Fishelov 1990, 376. 172. Equestrian statues were generally only made in the likeness of men with distinguished careers. 173. On the way in which no one is spared attack in Juvenal’s discussion of Sejanus, see Eichholz 1956, 66. 174. On Juvenal’s technique in his discussion of Hannibal, see Eichholz 1956, 66–67 and Maier 1983, 51–52. 175. On the details of the Hannibal passage, see Jenkyns 1982, 210–11. 176. On the depiction of Hannibal in this passage, see Plaza 2006, 313–14. 177. Green 1998, 59. 178. For general interpretations of the eighth Satire, see the works cited in n. 35 to chapter 2 above. On the identity of Lateranus, see Ferguson 1979, 239. 179. See Catullus 7.7–8 for the stars as witnesses of the clandestine activities of human beings. 180. On Epona, see Wissowa 1912, 377. 181. Courtney 1980, 407 accepts the scholiast’s remark; Ferguson 1979, 240 calls it “a guess.” 182. This passage may contain one or more textual problems; following Courtney (1980, 408), I have adopted Leo’s reading salutans in line 161, though Housman may have been right to posit a missing line after 160. 183. On instaurare here, see Courtney 1980, 408. 184. Ferguson 1979, 240. 185. This is especially true of the second Satire, which begins with a wish that the speaker might flee to the ends of the earth and ends with the revelation that an Armenian has come to Rome only to become corrupt there. Roman morals are morally dangerous exports. 186. On the theme of command in the poem, see Braund 1988, 90–102. 187. Ferguson 1979, 240. 188. See Braund 1988, 117. 189. Braund (1988, 104) notes that Lateranus’ companions are associated in various ways with death. 190. See also Uden 2015, 137: “. . . a place where the nobilis Lateranus relaxes boundaries rather than reinforcing them.” 191. See Henderson 1997, 90: “His Lateranus’ speak-easy is full of a levelling down he can ironically dub aequa . . . libertas. . . .” While the speaker may use the phrase ironically, it also points to an anxiety that such uses of the word libertas may not be ironic after all—that is, that the speaker here utters a phrase sarcastically that others would use, with the same meaning, quite sincerely. See also Braund 1988, 117. 192. See Braund 1988, 117, who also sees “sexual innuendo” here. 193. Brutus was the first consul and had been responsible for the expulsion of the kings; Volesus was a fellow immigrant of the Sabine co-king Titus Tatius; he stands at the head of the illustrious family of the Valerii. 194. The once neglected second Satire has in recent years attracted a great deal of attention. See Braund and Cloud 1981, 203–8; Winkler 1983, 90–107; Richlin 1992, 201–2; Nappa 1998; Walters 1998; and Freudenburg 2001, 248–58. Much older work on the poem is marred by outmoded views of Roman sexuality. 195. On Creticus and the law, see Adamietz 1986, 248. 196. On the ways in which the satirist focuses on clothing and other externals to describe effeminacy, see Uden 2015, 67. 197. Suetonius, Iul. 45. See also the discussion at Patterson 2009, 129–30.

198. Courtney 1980, 134; Braund 1996, 144. 199. On this phrase, see also Braund 1996, 144. 200. I have discussed the way that Satire 2 approaches “moral leveling” in Nappa 1998. My argument there is essentially that the observation of immoral behavior, at least in the second Satire, spreads that behavior, bringing the highest level of morality down to the lowest on display. The fourteenth Satire also makes the point that bad behavior is learned through observation, in that case, of parents by children. 201. Edwards 1993, 98–136 is the most convenient discussion of the status of stage performers in ancient Rome. 202. Edwards 1993, 123–26. 203. For mimus and mima as terms of reproach, see TLL s.v. I.A.1. 204. Wissowa 1912, 555–59. 205. Cf. abi at Horace, Carm. 4.1.7, where the poet tells Venus to leave him alone because he is too old for love affairs. 206. Wissowa 1912, 383–84 and Beard, North, and Price 1998, 34–35 and 132–34. 207. Cf. Catullus 29.5 and 9–10 (quoted here): cinaede Romule, haec uidebis et feres? / es impudicus et uorax et aleo. (“Faggot Romulus, will you see these things and put up with them? You are indecent and voracious and a gambler.”) Catullus has been describing the predatory spendthrift Mamurra, and he has already said (29.1–2) that no one could see such behavior and endure it nisi impudicus et uorax et aleo (“unless he’s indecent and voracious and a gambler.”) Scholars debate whom Catullus indicates with the phrase cinaede Romule (either Julius Caesar or Pompey), but what is interesting vis-à -vis Juvenal’s second Satire is the way that the phrase attributes the vices of Mamurra to his human patron under the name of the divinized founder of Rome. Caesar and Pompey (since the poem hints at both), under the name “Romulus,” are very much treated like Gradivus who, like them, can watch disgraceful behavior and stand it. 208. The idea that Juvenal would rank fighting as a gladiator as worse than marriage between men has troubled scholars. Willis (1992) does not accept the order of the passages as transmitted for that reason, and Courtney (1980, 122) finds the passage on the arena to be something of a digression. Konstan (1993), however, makes good sense of the transmitted text by examining it against the backdrop of Roman ideas about “normal” sexual behavior. See also Nappa 1998, 104–5. 209. Wiedemann 1995, 28–30. 210. Edwards 1993, 123. 211. Wiedemann 1995, 102–27. 212. Braund 1996, 160. 213. Wissowa 1912, 556. 214. “The man at whose expense (munus)” is the munerator, the person paying for the games and presenting them to the public. In many cases, this would be the emperor himself. It seems to make sense given the rhetoric of the Gracchus exemplum to include the emperor here—no one outdoes Gracchus in status by birth. 215. Braund 1996, 159. 216. Cornicines and men of similar professions were often slaves or freedmen, and freedmen were usually not eligible to be enrolled in the equestrian order, though some exceptions are known. See Alföldy 1988, 124. 217. I follow Courtney’s suggestion (1980, 415) here in reading librata for the uibrata of the mss. 218. Wiedemann (1995, 184–86) provides a convenient glossary of the terminology of the arena. 219. Courtney 1980, 415. 220. Colin 1955; Courtney 1980, 415–16; Ferguson 1979, 242; and Green 1998, 175. 221. Edwards 1993, 133. 222. Nero’s performances and literary interests became the stuff of legend. See Bartsch 1994, 1–62. 223. The reading Oresten, on which the translation presented here relies, is a conjecture that most now accept; see Courtney 1980, 417. It is important to note that my interpretation changes only very little if we read Orestes (now subject of the sentence) instead. The point then becomes “Orestes may have killed his mother, but at least he never sang on stage.” The essential idea is still that Nero had no business playing any role on stage. See also Bartsch 1994, 50.

224. Discussed in chapter 2. 225. On the interplay between the implications of performance and writing, on the one hand, and danger to the state, on the other, see Cowan 2009, especially 84: “To sing about the destruction of Troy is equivalent to bringing about the destruction of Rome, an exceptionally reified example of the topos whereby a poet is portrayed as enacting the events which he describes.” Uden (2015, 142–43) suggests that Juvenal uses Nero in poem 8 to stand in for Hadrian. 226. For general accounts of Satire 11, see Highet 1954, 130–33; McDevitt 1968; Felton and Lee 1972; Weisinger 1972; Facchini Tosi 1979; and Jones 1990. In general, most work on the poem has focused on justifying the apparent dissonance between the first fifty-five lines and the remainder of the poem. For connections between this poem and other literary works, see Adamietz 1986, 115–59. 227. On the way in which the initial contrast between Atticus and Rutilus is destabilized, see Jones 1990, 161. On the importance of the opening lines to the poem as a whole, see Facchini Tosi 1979, 190–92. 228. On the social importance of dining, see D’Arms 1984 and 1990 and Hudson 1989, 81–85. 229. See Weisinger 1972, 229. 230. The addressee of the poem, Persicus, also has an illustrious name and one that may hint at eastern decadence. It has been suggested that the name has been chosen since it indicates that the speaker’s invitation to dine on simple fare is ironically directed to a glutton; see Jones 1990, 160. Perhaps there is an allusion as well to Horace, Carm. 1.38. 231. Edwards (1993, 173–206) discusses the moralizing tradition of inveighing against prodigality. 232. For fama as a bad reputation, see TLL s.v. I.A.1. 233. On the fifth Satire generally, see Anderson 1982, 197–254; Morford 1977; Gowers 1993, 211–19; and Freudenburg 2001, 264–77. For connections between this poem and poem 9, see Courtney 1980, 230; Hopman 2003, 571–73; and Rosen 2007, 236–42. Like Morford, Jones 1987 explores the relationship of Satire 5 to Satire 4 and the remainder of Book 1. 234. See especially Morford 1977. 235. It is difficult to decide exactly what the phrase minor altilis means. Of the various possibilities mentioned by commentators, I prefer to see it as referring to a bird that is “smaller” (minor) in that it has already been partially eaten. See Courtney 1980, 250. 236. OLD s.v. 5 and 6a. 237. One can perhaps go even further. Just before the speaker’s epilogue (5.153–55), Trebius is reminded that his dessert is what would be given to a performing monkey. On the implied comparison, see Morford 1977, 233–34 and Freudenburg 2001, 274–75. 238. On the terminology of patronage, see Saller 1982, 11. 239. It is interesting that the “patron” of Satire 9 is generally taken to be the same Virro as that of poem 5. Courtney (1980, 230) notes that Trebius and Naevolus are both enslaved by their dependence on him, and Hopman 2003 argues that the effeminacy foregrounded in Satire 9 is hinted at in Satire 5. 240. So Jones 1987, 151: “his [Trebius’] aspirations seem to aim at a position hardly different from Virro’s.” See also Keane 2006, 66. 241. On military imagery and metaphor in the second Satire, see especially Anderson 1982, 209–19. 242. The reading indulsit is not certain, but the general meaning is clear. See Nisbet 1988, 91 and now Uden 2015, 68 on the reading induerit, which would produce “If too long a stay in the city has dressed the boys. . . .” 243. See Braund 1996, 165. 244. Or, as Habinek (2005, 182) puts it: “Satire needs its playmates too much to destroy them.” 245. Johnson 1996, 183. 246. See Habinek 2005, 181, discussing satire generally: “Yet the pervasiveness of play in Roman culture poses a set of interrelated problems for satire itself and for any analysis that would focus exclusively on satire’s relationship to normative masculinity. As the satirist moves about the city he inevitably encounters rivals for the authority of the élite male who are engaged in their own game of ludic substitution. These rivals must be ridiculed into silence lest they threaten the security of élite male identity as well as the privileged status of the satirist as the premier player thereof.” See also Shumate 2006, 20: “[F]eminization is the glue that holds together the composite Other looming so large in the speaker’s fevered imagination.”

A great deal of work has been done on masculinity as constructed in different cultures and historical periods. I am especially indebted to Gilmore 1990, Silverman 1992, Brod and Kaufman 1994, Simpson 1994, and Connell 2000 and 2005. For Rome in particular, see Edwards 1993, 63–97; Gleason 1995; Walters 1997; and Williams 2010. Richlin 1992 examines the Priapic nature of male sexuality in Rome and the way it plays out in humor and invective. Skinner 2014, 280–86 is a useful short introduction to the subject. 247. The sixth Satire has gone from being a neglected work to one of the most studied Roman satires. General discussions of note include Courtney 1980, 252–59; Smith 1980; Cecchin 1989; Richlin 1992, 202–9; Winkler 1983, 146–206; Wilson and Makowski 1990, 21–34; Braund 1992; Gold 1994; Johnson 1996; Battisti 1996; and Gold 1998. Richlin 1984 and Henderson 1999, 173–201 are valuable as well, though neither is limited to Satire 6 or Juvenal. Nardo 1973, Keane 2002c, and Watson 2007 usefully connect the poem to the genre of love elegy. As Gold (1994, 103) notes, much older work on the poem unfortunately participates in its misogyny. See, for example, Vianello 1930; Highet 1954, 100; and Madia 1957; the ending of the last is priceless (28): “E Giovenale? Egli appare come un maestro d’ingegno, di cultura, di entusiasmo, e, sopratutto, di buona volontà . Un maestro perseguito, sottovaluto, misconosciuto, in un secolo di vile e basso mercato dove tutti i valori sono e appaiono capovolti. Giovenale, in una parola, è un retore di cattivi tempi, un censore di pessimi costumi.” Similarly, there is much blatant homophobia in (even relatively recent) scholarship on Juvenal. Bond (1979) recognizes that the sixth Satire expresses misogynistic views, but unfortunately seems to believe that the behavior described in the poem reflects the reality of women’s behavior in imperial Rome. 248. Braund 1992; Highet 1954, 91–103 also reads the poem as primarily being a satire on marriage. Watson (2007) too sees marriage, or at least wives, as central to what the speaker is trying to get across: by turning Roman matronae into anti-matronae, the poet exploits connections to elegy. For the threat that these deviant matronae present to husbands, see Richlin 1992, 203. For those who see Satire 6 as an attack on women as a sex, see, e.g., Anderson 1982, 275 and Winkler 1983, 146 and throughout. 249. See Watson and Watson 2014, 32 for differences in this regard from Richlin 1984. 250. I disagree with Johnson (1996, 172–73) who argues that the poem has a “single message, women are inferior.” If anything, the speaker of poem 6 finds women not inferior enough. 251. On this passage see Gunderson 2005, 231. 252. On the association of even Roman women with everything alien and un-Roman, see Shumate 2006, 22–29. 253. Johnson 1996, 178–79. 254. Gold 1998, 382–83. See also Richlin 1992, 208–9: “His satire, full of threats, reverberates with fear.” 255. For three longer, more comprehensive accounts of the sixth Satire, see Battisti 1996, Nadeau 2011, and Watson and Watson 2014. Nadeau uses persona theory—treating Satire 6 as a dialogue between the main speaker, whom he calls Junius, and an interlocutor, Decimus—to understand the poem. Battisti sees the poem as an exercise in the rhetoric of misogyny, whose speaker is more captivated by the language and literary history of misogyny than by misogyny itself. 256. So described in part 2, chapter 2 of D. Lodge, Small World (page 118 of the 1995 Penguin edition). 257. For the idea that “Postumus” was used for children whose fathers had died before they were born, see Varro De lingua Latina 9.60; see also OLD s.v. postumus 1b–c. For a different interpretation of the name as used in poem 6, see Freudenburg 2001, 253. 258. On the structure of the poem, see Anderson 1982, 255–76; Smith 1980, 323–38; Wilson 1995; and Winkler 1983, 147–51. 259. On pantomime, see Watson and Watson 2014, 96–97. 260. See Wildfang 2006, 85–86 with sources. 261. On this passage, see Gunderson 2005, 236. 262. There is satiric precedent for performance causing arousal at Persius 1.17–22: sede leges celsa, liquido cum plasmate guttur / mobile conlueris, patranti fractus ocello. / tunc neque more probo uideas nec uoce serena / ingentis trepidare Titos, cum carmina lumbum / intrant et tremulo scalpuntur ubi intima uersu, “. . . you read from your high seat, once you’ve lubricated your variable throat with a liquid foam, weak with your orgasmic eye. Then you’d see great Tituses (respectable manner and calm

voice lost) trembling when the verses penetrate their loins and when their deepest parts are grazed by warbling song.” 263. It is possible to see Thymele not as a mima but as another of the women who are aroused by Bathyllus. An actress named Thymele is mentioned at 1.36, and the fact that this Thymele seems to be learning something from Bathyllus here suggests that she is another performer. On the other reading, discit would be a euphemism, but then the point of rustica is less clear. 264. Maecenas’ effeminacy is a prominent topic of Seneca, Ep. 114. For Maecenas and the actor Bathyllus, see Tacitus, Ann. 1.54: indulserat ei ludicro Augustus dum Maecenati obtemperat effuso in amorem Bathylli (“Augustus had indulged this show in deference to Maecenas, who was consumed by love of Bathyllus.”) 265. To discourage sexual activity, some singers were fitted with infibulae, pins that fastened the opening of the foreskin shut. It is very likely that Juvenal’s original audience will have seen a reference to that practice here. See Courtney 1980, 272 on 6.73 and Watson and Watson 2014, 99–100. 266. The difference between legal/social status between father and illegitimate son is realized even in the boy’s bedding. See Watson and Watson 2014, 101–2. 267. Viz. 1.26, 130; 4.26; and 15 (entire). 268. Eppia is otherwise like Helen in abandoning husband (Menelaus) and family (including Clytemnestra) and going off to Egypt in a way that brings her country into a disastrous war, thus committing a kind of treason. Hence the irony that Eppia will abandon even Paris. 269. On Juvenal’s technique in describing Sergiolus, see Schmitz 2001, 80–81. 270. See Courtney 1980, 220 on 4.103. 271. On the significance of the name Veiiento here, see Courtney 1980, 275. If Watson and Watson (2014, 108–9) are right about the identity of Veiiento, namely an important consularis of Flavian Rome, this passage is another good example of the difference—in our speaker’s eyes—between Roman male and female priorities. 272. On ferrum here, see Watson and Watson 2014, 108. 273. The text as printed here adopts Courtney’s educat for educit in 469, Nisbet’s nouatur for fouetur in 471, and Ruperti’s placement of lines 464–67 after 470. Of these, Courtney’s change to the transmitted text is certain; the other alterations are less so. In any case, adopting the transmitted readings makes no difference to my argument. 274. For the Ovidian ancestry of these lines, see Watson 2007, 637–38. For the luxus of jewelry, perfume, and cosmetics, see Watson and Watson 2014, 223–24; for conflicting traditions regarding cosmetics, see 224–25. 275. See Courtney 1980, 323 on 6.467. If the “made-up” woman resembles a building with its stucco or plasterwork, is this another metaphor for the constructedness of woman? 276. Elsewhere in Roman poetry, women are criticized for ruining natural good looks through cosmetics and hair products or for distracting from their beauty with expensive clothes and the like; see Propertius 1.2, Ovid Am. 1.14. 277. For the scholarly history of the O fragment, see Griffith 1963; Luck 1972; and Courtney 1980, 304–9. A useful recent overview is Watson and Watson 2014, 52–53 with further references. Few now doubt that it is genuine. 278. For an introduction to this fragment and the associated problems, see Watson and Watson 2014, 51–55. 279. On the phrase, see Watson and Watson 2014, 185. 280. Bastomsky 1993 presents an ingenious but unnecessary explanation of these lines. For the controversy, see Watson and Watson 2014, 186–88. They are, in my view, too quick to dismiss Housman on the significance of barbata, and, while their informative explanation of Colocyntha (with reference to mollitia) may be correct, they seem to me to overlook a rather obvious possibility, namely that “Gourd,” as a nickname, means “Gourd-Eater.” The simplest understanding of the names given is that they reveal the sex of the men’s partners when they perform oral sex: Colocyntha (“Zucchini”) services men and barbata chelidon (“the bearded swallow”), women or men. 281. Seruant, the reading of the mss. at 6. O 17, makes no sense; Axelson’s reserant may be right, but it is far from certain. The sense would seem to require that women confide in these men, instead of their

husbands and other reliable confidants. 282. On this passage, see Gold 1998, 376. 283. See Gunderson 2005, 229: “Vile, castrated bodies are the prerequisite for the satirical nostalgia for wholeness.” 284. So Johnson 1996, 175: “Like the faux cinaedus, the amazing African is more of a real man than the Roman males who affect to scorn him.” It is unclear to me why Johnson takes the eunuch to be an African, since the text says no such thing, but it does not detract from his basic point. 285. While mixed-sex bathing was not entirely unheard of, the norm seems to have been that men and women either bathed in separate facilities or at different times of day. In fact, in Juvenal’s time, Hadrian banned mixed-sex bathing. See Fagan 1999, 26–29. 286. Winkler (1983, 182) sees the fact that castration has been ordered by a woman as of a piece with the gynophobia of the poem as a whole. 287. Not everyone understands Bromius to be the master’s favorite; see Smith (1980, 327), who takes Bromius to be the eunuch himself. For the reading followed here, see, e.g., Anderson 1982, 311. The fact that the puer delicatus is already growing unsuitably old for his role is perfectly in keeping with the poem’s troubling of gender and social roles. 288. Bromius needs a haircut and seems to be reaching physical maturity, both signs that, according to typical norms, his role as puer delicatus should be nearing its end. 289. I owe this last observation to Stephen C. Smith. 290. The increasing maturity of “Bromius” may also suggest that the mistress will be having him castrated next. 291. Compare 10.190–209, discussed in chapter 2, in which it is clear that a man suffering from impotence due to old age is essentially effeminate. 292. Otho was also rumored to be Nero’s lover. Lelièvre (1958, 22–23) has suggested that our passage of Juvenal hints at this in the quotation of Vergil, Aen. 12, since Nero was known to portray Vergil’s Turnus. On this reading, the name Actor becomes a signpost of an allusion to the stage-struck emperor. 293. See Courtney 1980, 139. 294. On the connections between Juvenal and Tacitus (or historiography in general) here, see Freudenburg 2001, 256–58. 295. See Gold, 1994, 109 (although she is commenting on a different passage of Satire 6): “The portrayal of women here sums up everything that men have always feared or suspected about them: they are drunken, sex-crazed, iconoclastic, irrational, and sacrilegious. . . . These women observe no boundaries at all: not class, not gender, not social, not the line between fantasy and reality or even between human and animal.” 296. Line 188 in the transmitted text makes little sense and appears to have been a quotation interpolated into the poem. It reads cum sit turpe magis nostris nescire Latine, “although it is worse for our own to be ignorant of Latin.” As Watson and Watson (2014, 135) put it, “a banal interpolation.” 297. I have borrowed the translation “sensuously” for mollius from Susanna Braund’s Loeb edition. 298. On both the literary history of this passage and its remarkable effectiveness, see Jenkyns 1982, 178. 299. I follow Courtney here in taking lines 522–25 with the Egyptian passage that follows rather than as a pendant to the Phrygian eunuch passage that precedes. 300. See Josephus, AJ 18.3.4. 301. It’s worth noting that 19 CE, the year of the scandal in the temple of Isis, also saw the expulsion of Jews, apparently after a similar scandal. See Tacitus, Ann. 2.85 and Josephus, AJ 18.3.5. It has been suggested that the same matrona was involved in both scandals; see Rogers 1932. 302. On the putative eastern (Lydian) origins of the Etruscans, see Herodotus 1.94 with Briquel 2013. Following Briquel 1991, most scholars no longer accept the Lydian origin story; for a handy summary, see Ridgway 2012. 303. On the technical side of astrology as represented by lines 569–71, see Watson and Watson 2014, 253–54. 304. On lines 592–97 on contraception and abortion, see Watson and Watson 2014, 259 and 261. On

598–601, on suppositious children and the seriousness with which the matter was taken, see Watson and Watson 2014, 260. 305. Following Lachmann and Courtney, I have translated lacus to mean public latrines; others understand it to refer to public cisterns, made filthy (spurcos) by the constant traffic of animals and people. Either location might make an attractive, as it were, location for depositing an unwanted child, since their frequent use would promote the chances of the baby being found and taken in. On Fortuna as “acting a terrible parody of maternal affection,” see Jenkyns 1982, 195. 306. On the religious problems caused by suppositious heirs, see Watson and Watson 2014, 264. 307. The blurring of the distinction between the speaker and those whom he attacks occurs in at least three other points in the poem: the women at 6.61–75, who resemble the satirist in their knowing, and highly sexualized, viewing of actors’ performances (on which see Keane 2006, 38–40); the women at 6.190–99, who use Greek in erotic contexts, since the speaker seems to acknowledge its allure; and the women at 6.366–68 who take pleasure in the virile eunuch, since, as we have seen, our speaker leers along with them. The revelation at 6.602–9 that all Romans may be spurious merely completes the latent chain of identification with the Other that fuels the anger of this poem. See also Freudenburg 2001, 254–55. 308. I treat the story of Messalina and Silius in both Juvenal and Tacitus more fully in Nappa 2010a. My discussion here compresses but reproduces my discussion of Juvenal in that article. 309. It is worth noting that suicide, a traditional stoic means of avoiding dishonorable behavior, is nowhere mentioned here. 310. The late Republic was rife with rumors about the viciousness of women carried out through, when not on, their husbands, for example, in the proscriptions. The civil wars and the fall of the Republic can be seen in part as the result of the inappropriate confusion of the domestic and public spheres. See Milnor 2005, 186–238 on the triumviral period and Keith 2000, 65–100 on the association between women and war in Roman epic. 311. Cf. Hannibal at 10.147–67 with my discussion in chapter 2. 312. I’ve omitted three lines usually bracketed by editors and numbered 614A, B, and C. For their omission, see Courtney ad loc. 313. Thus Caesonia is one of many figures in Juvenal’s poetry who themselves usurp the powers of the satirist. Just as he does, she provides exempla. 314. For sources on fire and ruina (literally “collapse”) as characteristic of Caligula’s reign, see Watson and Watson 2014, 268–69. 315. On the passage treated here, see Winkler 1983, 156–58. 316. Watson and Watson 2014, 114. 317. Lycisca is an obvious Greek version of Latin lupa, “she-wolf,” the lowest kind of whore. Does this mean that Messalina, really the mother of Britannicus, also stands in for Acca Larentia, the foster mother of Romulus and Remus, since Livy (1.4.7) says that she went by that name? 318. See Gunderson 2005, 232: “What these others want is not вЂus.’ On the one hand they get their pleasures elsewhere, and on the other hand it seems entirely likely that we do not have what it takes to satisfy them in any case. вЂOur’ outrage at вЂthem’ is specifically grounded in their failure to desire us as good men, in their failure to recognize our goodness and act accordingly.” 319. Henderson 1997 situates the eighth Satire in Book 3 by considering it as, in part, a deflating discourse on Roman fathers and sons and the educational apparatus that surrounds shaping young men’s characters for the future; he thus links Satire 8 to the educational themes of Satire 7 and the idea of suppositious fatherhood in Satire 9. I would argue that this project begins in the sixth Satire’s revelation that no paternity or identity is ever certain. See Henderson 1997, especially 94–96. 320. Johnson 1996, 172 on the speaker of Satire 6: “He yearns for Rome when it was Rome still, when it was his Rome. He wants back into the world (that womb with a view) from which he was (he feels) ejected, a world where slaves were slaves and women were women and men wereВ .В .В . men. But if men were men then, what are men now?” 321. Gilmore 1990 throughout. The only exception to the manhood = money equation that Gilmore discusses is traditional Tahitian culture; see Gilmore 1990, 201–19. On the connections between wealth and masculinity in Roman thought, see Larmour 2005, especially 139–40.

322. On Satire 12 and masculinity, see Larmour 2005. Other readings of the poem also try to find unity between the different parts; see Ramage 1978, Ronnick 1993, and Littlewood 2007. For the irony of Satire 12, see Smith 1989. 323. The idea that the speaker of poem 12 may himself be something of a legacy hunter is hinted at by Hooley (2007, 125). 324. Larmour 2005, 168–69. 325. Most studies of Satire 13 engage with the consolatio model; the most useful for our purposes are Edmunds 1972, Morford 1973, Braund 1997, and Keane 2007, 30–35. See also Fredericks 1971 and Adamietz 1984. 326. See Edmunds 1972, 64–65; Courtney 1980, 539 on 13.12; and Braund 1997, 78. 327. See Treggiari 1991, 16. 328. It may be worth pointing out that, by Juvenal’s day, various emperors had called the importance of the Senate into question through actions hostile to senators and their families and through restructuring functions of government so as not to rely on senators. Thus Juvenal’s suggestion that senatorial status was not all it was cracked up to be may have had fertile ground to fall on where traditionalist sensibilities were concerned. 329. OLD s.v. tollo 11. 330. In Judaea, Berenice was rumored to have carried on an incestuous affair with her brother Agrippa; see Josephus, AJ 20.7 and Watson and Watson 2014, 123–24. She became the lover of Titus before he became emperor and lived with him in Rome as if she were his wife even after he did so. He dismissed her from Rome against his will (Suetonius, Tit. 7) for reasons that are not clear. Crook 1951 is a useful discussion of our sources and the rumors that circulated about Berenice. 331. Some follow Ribbeck in deleting 209–11, but as I see it these lines are perfectly in keeping with the tone and thought of the passage. 332. On the distortion here—not all of these infames Roman men could legally make wills—see Watson and Watson 2014, 141. 333. On this passage and its relationship to elegy, see Watson 2007, 635–37. 334. Henderson (1997, 94–96) has identified a debunking of the Roman notion of elite fathers and sons as lying to some extent behind all three of the poems in Juvenal’s third book, especially 8 and 9. This anxiety ultimately begins here, in the sole satire of Book 2. 335. I borrow the translation “disgusting decadence” from Braund’s Loeb translation. 336. The incident is described at Cassius Dio fr. 39.5. 337. The Roman imagination often connects women and dirt. See Joshel 1997, 231–32 for the way in which Tacitus characterizes Messalina as dirty. 338. See also Plaza 2006, 161: “Yet sex and money are fleeting and unstable principles, ready to destroy not only the traditional order they oppose, but also the easy riders who momentarily seem to be the winners of their commerce.” Plaza is discussing Satire 9, but the remark holds for Juvenal’s poems in general. 339. On this passage, see Larmour 2007, 183–85. He traces the associations here between women, bodily fluids, and that which is abject and disgusting. 340. See Highet’s (1954, 119) description of Naevolus in Satire 9: “Everything he does is convertible into cash or real property.” 341. Like Satires 2 and 6, this once neglected poem has attracted attention in recent years. The fullest studies are Braund 1988; Rosen 2007, 223–42; and Bellandi 2009 (a translation and updated version of the 1974 original). See also Habinek 2005, 185–88. 342. Courtney 1980, 424; contra, see Bellandi 2009, 502. 343. Braund (1988, 143–49) discusses the importance of the dialogue form of Satire 9. 344. For the idea that Satire 9 is essentially an attack on corruption or misuse of the patronage system, see Bellandi 2009 and Tennant 2003. The idea was introduced, but not developed, by Highet (1954, 120–21). Winkler (1983, 107) takes the poem’s subject to be sexual behavior between men as examined through the lens of patronage. In a yet unpublished paper, Heather Woods has argued that the speaker of the poem is himself a man like Naevolus who has made money from working as a gigolo. There is much to recommend this argument, though it does not change my reading here. Scholars have typically been more inclined to see

him as a man of Virro’s class, if they address his identity at all. 345. Tennant (2003) analyzes the poem as another of Juvenal’s complaints about the decay and corruption of the patronage system—to him, Virro is more of a villain than Naevolus. 346. See Braund 1988, 135–40. 347. E.g., Bellandi 2009 throughout, but especially 482 n. 21 and 500–1. 348. See Green 1998, 180–81 and Saller 1983. 349. Courtney 1980, 443 on 9.140–41. 350. Braund 1988, 155–56. 351. Despite agebas / uernam equitem in lines 9–10. The implication of this phrase is that Naevolus has been putting on airs by acting as a legitimate eques when he is something else—in fact, Naevolus is a horseman only inasmuch as he resembles a horse physically and also mounts like one. On Naevolus’ social expectations here, see Winkler 1983, 122. 352. Bellandi 2009, 501. 353. The intent behind the Julian laws has been a matter of some debate. For the nature and effects of the Julian laws and the modifications they underwent over time, see Treggiari 1991, 60–80. For these laws in the wider Augustan context, see Galinsky 1996, 128–40. For an attempt to understand these laws as having a more practical purpose than simply reforming morality, see Wallace-Hadrill 1981. 354. On the importance of secrecy or the lack of it, see Uden 2015, 77. 355. In fact, some of the special privileges of parents were granted to women; the first glaring exceptions to the Augustan regulations were probably granted to Augustus’ own wife Livia. See Treggiari 1991, 79. 356. See for example the case studies of different kinds of masculine identity in Brod and Kaufman 1994, Simpson 1994, and Connell 2005: different economic, political, and social landscapes produce men who want and need different things. See also Laqueur 1992. 357. See Crook 1967, 107–13. 358. Henderson 1997, 94–96. 359. Johnson 1996; Gold 1998. 360. Silverman 1992. 361. See in particular Silverman 1992, 15–121. 362. Braund 1988, 166. 363. Winkler (1983, 117) also traces ways in which “Naevolus is reduced to the state of a slighted woman.” 364. Gold (1994) describes the ways in which the sixth Satire thwarts resisting readers by giving them no characters with whom to identify. Here, I am arguing that the ninth Satire uses a similar strategy. 365. To maintain my focus on the connections between masculinity and wealth, I have left aside one important strand in the interpretation of Satire 9, namely that inaugurated by Braund (1988, 170), which claims that “[i]ndirectly and obliquely, perhaps, Satire 9 can be seen as an allegory of the procedure of satire.” This has been developed recently by Rosen (2007, 223–42). Rosen, like Braund, suggests that Naevolus represents the satirist, and goes further to suggest that Juvenal is willing to have such an unpleasant surrogate because “the poem’s central focus is poetics rather than, in any significant sense, morality” (225). See also Plaza 2006, 164–66. While I do agree that Satire 9 can be read as an account of satiric poetics, I think the fact that Naevolus functions like a satirist is also compatible with my reading of Satire 9—like all of Juvenal’s poetry—as a text that works to find a fundamental instability or lack at the heart of Roman culture. For Juvenal, a Roman satirist can be represented by the indecent Naevolus, just as he can be represented by the prostitute Laronia, because in his “Rome,” there are no decent people. On Juvenal’s use of Laronia in this regard, see Winkler 1983, 100–1. 366. On the character of Naevolus, see especially Courtney 1980, 424–27 and Braund 1988, 135–43. 367. See Tennant 2003, 126–27 on connections between Satires 5 and 9. For connections between 3 and 9, see especially Bellandi 2009. 368. On the resonances of the image here of Naevolus as asellus, see Hendry 2000, 88–90. Simpson (1994, 141) offers an interesting parallel. Discussing depictions of virility in gay pornography, he describes the on-screen persona of a particular actor, Jeff Stryker, who always portrayed dominant (i.e., penetrative) masculinity within the narrative of his films (like Naevolus, with both men and women). Nevertheless, on Simpson’s reading Stryker functions as a kind of slave of the viewers, who have fetishized his

dominance and body. Just as Naevolus’ supposed sexual dominance and physical virility assimilate him to beast of burden and slave—both forms of property—the modern performer’s persona of unambiguous dominance and virility within a film convert him from person to (collectively owned) property in the economy of production and consumption that surround it. 369. Tennant (2003) thinks that, since he is not sexually submissive, Naevolus is in some way presented as superior to Virro. It seems to me that the poem does not allow us to see him as superior (unless we agree that being sexually penetrated necessarily means being inferior): he is manifestly the social inferior of Virro, and, by his own admission, he is treated like an animal or slave. 370. Uden 2015, 80–81 is an interesting discussion of Virro’s household and the way it may reflect both general fears about destabilization from within and particular fears about the imperial household. 371. See Habinek 2005, 187: “[I]t is clear that Virro, the receptive partner, is the one who exercises control over Naevolus.В .В .В . Naevolus is, in sum, the Г©lite male Roman in a state of flux, even disintegration—a figure of ridicule, but a serious figure as well.” 372. For Plaza (2006, 159–66) “Naevolus is sexually both passive and active, a вЂsuperstud’ presenting himself as a cinaedus, a satisfaction both for men and for women.” Plaza’s reading has affinities with mine inasmuch as it recognizes that Naevolus’ acts of penetration are—in this poem—subsumed in a greater economy in which Naevolus is effeminized by what would, according to traditional Roman values, be considered his own acts of domination and thus virility. I differ with Plaza especially over her identification of Naevolus as a cinaedus, since the term strongly denotes a male who prefers being penetrated rather than simply any male who has sex with other males. Moreover, the cinaedus seems to have an established identity—in Petronius, for example, cinaedi are recognizable because of their clothes. I see no evidence in Satire 9 of Naevolus being penetrated, and his own account suggests a disdain for passivity or, in Latin, mollitia; see 9.38: quod tamen ulterius monstrum quam mollis auarus? (“So what monster’s more outrageous than an effeminate miser?”). So too Richlin, who certainly does not label Naevolus a cinaedus, 1992, 202: “.В .В .В the homosexual prostitute Naevolus (вЂLittle Wart’). He is not, however, a pathic but a вЂstud’ who services women as well as men.” See also Habinek 2005, 186. See Skinner 2014, 280–82 and 326–27 for sensible remarks on what we know of cinaedi in Roman culture and for some of the controversies surrounding them in modern scholarship. 373. On the speaker’s “consolation” of Naevolus here, see Richlin 1992, 202: “But once again the satirist imagines the whole city of Rome as pathic.В .В .В . In general, Satire 9 is more Priapic in its stance than Satire 2 is, since it assumes that the whole of Rome is filled with pathics suitable for Naevolus’ attentions. The satirist in effect rapes Rome with Naevolus as his agent—an agent at whom he jovially sneers.” 374. Braund 1988 is a good analysis of three satires (7–9) in which irony is a major determinant of meaning. 375. Larmour 2005, 140: “Juvenalian satire is defined by absence and loss, for it is a variety in which, to quote Michael Seidel in Satiric Inheritance, вЂthe urge to reform is literally overwhelmed by the urge to annihilate.’” 376. Shumate (2006, 19–54 and 129–58) traces the ways in which the rhetoric of Juvenal’s poetry prefigures nationalist, colonialist, and reactionary rhetoric in the modern period. Other studies which try, with varying degrees of success, to connect Juvenalian satire with twentieth- and twenty-first-century texts and themes are Braund and Raschke 2002, Jones 2009, Rosen and Baines 2002, and Wilson 1995. 377. On this point, at least, Juvenal knew better, as Winkler (1983, 23–58) has decisively shown. 378. quid rides? mutato nomine de te / fabula narratur, Horace, Sat. 1.1.69–70.

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Passages Cited Cassius Dio fr. 39.5, 176n16 Catullus 7.7–8, 94n2 21, 62 29.5, 9–10, 108n30 85, 13–14 Cicero De natura deorum 2.60–62, 45n28 Herodotus 1.94, 153n58 Horace Carmina 1.38, 117 4.1.7, 107 Satirae 1.1.69–70, 58n63, 201n5 1.4.6–13, 58n65 1.4.39–62, 14 1.6, 26n5 1.10.1–3, 58n65 2.1, 33, 52n38 Josephus Antiquitates Judaicae 18.3.4, 152n57 18.3.5, 152n57

20.7, 173n10 Juvenal Satirae 1.1–6, 23–25 1.7–18, 25–26 1.19–21, 26–27 1.22, 142 1.22–23, 127 1.22–30, 27–30 1.26, 134n23 1.30–36, 30 1.36, 132n19 1.37, 31 1.37–44, 30–31 1.45, 52 1.45–50, 32 1.51–62, 32–34 1.52–53, 33 1.63–68, 34–35 1.68, 35 1.69–80, 35–37 1.77–78, 36 1.79, 37 1.79–80, 37n23, 50 1.80, 37 1.81–86, 37–39 1.85, 14 1.85–86, 38 1.87–95, 40–41

1.95–99, 41 1.99–109, 41–43 1.109–16, 44–45 1.117–26, 45–46 1.127–31, 46–47 1.130, 134n23 Page 216 →1.132–46, 47–49 1.147–50, 49 1.150–54, 49–51 1.155–57, 64–65 1.155–70, 51–53 1.170–71, 53–60 2.65–71, 100–1 2.72–76, 101–2 2.77–83, 102–3 2.99–109, 147–49 2.115–16, 142–43 2.116–23, 105–6 2.124–26, 106–7 2.126–32, 107–8 2.132–42, 108 2.143–48, 108–9 2.149–59, 122–23 2.156–57, 122 2.159–70, 123–24 2.167, 124 3.152–53, 1 3.236, 72n25 3.239–42, 77

3.254–56, 71–72 3.257–61, 72 3.261–67, 72–74 3.278–301, 67–70 4.26, 134n23 4.34, 30n13 5.153–55, 120n60 5.161–70, 119–20 5.170–73, 120–21 6.36, 129 6.61–75, 156n63 6.63–66, 131–32 6.67–70, 132 6.73–75, 132–33 6.76–81, 133–34 6.85–87, 134 6.88–102, 134 6.103–13, 135–36 6.115–32, 162–64 6.136–41, 170–71 6.142–48, 65–67 6.149, 173 6.149–57, 171–73 6.184–87, 149 6.187, 189–90, 149–50 6.188, 149n52 6.190–99, 150–51, 156n63 6.200–5, 173 6.206–11, 173

6.212–18, 173–74 6.219–28, 174–75 6.231–41, 175 6.242–85, 175 6.286–93, 175 6.294–300, 175–77 6.295, 177 6.300–8, 177 6.309–13, 177–78 6.366, 28n10 6.366–68, 143, 156n63 6.366–78, 28n9 6.368–76, 143–45 6.376–78, 145–46 6.457–73, 136–37 6.464–67, 470, 137n29 6.487–95, 138 6.495–501, 138 6.502–4, 138–39 6.512–21, 151–52 6.522–25, 152n55 6.522–41, 152 6.542–47, 152 6.548–52, 152 6.553–64, 152 6.565–68, 152–53 6.569–71, 154n59 6.569–76, 153–54 6.577–84, 154

6.585–91, 154 6.592–601, 154–55 6.592–97, 155n60 6.598–601, 155n60 6.602–9, 155–57, 156n63 6.614–20, 160–61 6.614A–614C, 160n68 6.620–26, 161–62 6.0 1–6, 139–40 6.0 7–13, 140 6.0 14–16, 140 6.0 17, 141n37 6.0 17–20, 140–41 6.0 20–26, 141–42 6.0 27–34, 142 7.154, 91 Page 217 →8.1–9, 82–83 8.6–8, 82n36 8.8–12, 83 8.13–18, 84–85 8.53, 85n44 8.146–50, 94 8.150–57, 95–96 8.158–62, 96–97 8.163–64, 97 8.164–67, 97 8.167–71, 97–98 8.171–76, 98–99 8.177–82, 99–100

8.183–88, 104–5, 111 8.199–210, 111–13 8.207–8, 112 8.211–30, 114–15 8.238, 52n40 9.9, 121 9.9–10, 181n31 9.35, 179 9.43–46, 192 9.54–62, 179–80 9.63–68, 180–81 9.70–78, 182–83 9.82–90, 183–84 9.92, 193–94 9.93–101, 184–85 9.130–33, 195 9.135–50, 195 9.137–41, 181 9.141–47, 182 10.56–58, 85 10.58–64, 86–87 10.62, 86 10.65–67, 87 10.67–70, 87–88 10.81–89, 88–89 10.147–50, 89 10.155–56, 90 10.157–67, 89–92 10.190–95, 78–79

10.190–209, 146n47 10.196–202, 79 10.203–9, 79–80 10.209–70, 80 10.271–72, 80–81 10.325, 160 10.331, 30n12 10.338–45, 158–69 10.356, 81 11.1–2, 116 11.21–23, 116–18 12.34–36, 171 12.53–56, 171 12.94–95, 168 15.1–12, 75 15.32–38, 74–75 15.75–83, 75–76 15.84–88, 76 15.89–92, 76–77 16.7–22, 68–70 Livy 1.34.9, 153 1.4.7, 164n73 Lucan Bellum civile 1.146, 103 Martial 2.83.1–3, 83n41 2.92, 186

3.85.1, 83n41 Ovid Amores 1.1, 28n8 1.14, 137n32 2.19, 33n20 3.4, 33n20 Ars Amatoria 1.579–80, 33n20 Persius pro. 6, 14 1.17–22, 132n18 1.112–14, 47n29 3.98–106, 49n33 Propertius 1.2, 137n32 Seneca the Younger Epistulae 56, 11 114, 132n20 Suetonius Divus Iulius Page 218 →45, 103n20 Titus 7, 173n10 Tacitus Annales 1.54, 132n20 2.85, 152n57

Historiae 1.1, 55n51 2.46–50, 148 Varro De lingua Latina 9.60, 131n13 Vergil Aeneis 3.286, 148 12.94, 148

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Index abjection, 64n7, 75 abortion, 143, 155n60 Achilles, 34, 51, 53, 68 actor, 105, 108, 109, 115, 125, 131–33, 135, 150, 156 Adamietz, J., 56 adultery, 17, 32–33, 36, 83, 94, 101–2, 131, 139, 159, 164, 171, 174, 175, 199 Aeneas, 42, 51, 53 Africa, 89–90 Agrippina the Younger, 131, 161–62 amicus, amicitia, 41, 48–49, 120–21, 174, 177–78, 193, 195 Anderson, W. S., 3, 4, 54, 56 anger, 4, 17, 24, 32, 37, 52, 53, 75, 156n63, 197. See also outrage apartment. See insula Apollo, 47, 96 arena, 15, 53, 64–65, 108–9, 111–13, 118, 122, 135, 173, 175 astrology, 152–54 Atticus, 116–18 Augustus, 19, 43, 45n28, 132n20, 186, 188, 189, 194 Automedon, 33–34, 38 autonomy, 17, 21–22, 57, 59, 60, 61–62, 103–4, 176 Bakhtin, M., 62 Baldwin, B., 55 Bartsch, S., 56 Bathyllus, 132 Berenice, 172, 173 Bibula, 66, 171–73 body, 17, 61–92, 93, 129, 133, 142n39, 145, 165, 188, 198

Braund, S. M., 4, 36, 56, 124, 128–29, 181, 191 Britannicus, 163, 164 Brutus, 100 Caesar (imperial title), 88, 98, 99, 113, 157. See also emperor Caesennia, 170–71, 178, 188–89 Caesonia, 131, 161 Caligula (Gaius), 161–62 Calvinus, 169 cannibalism, 74–77 castration, 28, 85n44, 99, 142–46, 168, 170, 171, 178 Catullus, 13–14, 21n55, 48n32, 62, 94n2, 104, 108n30 Catullus (character in Juvenal), 168, 171 censor, 10, 105, 182 chariot, 34, 83, 94 Christians, 65, 66, 87 Cicero, 16, 45n28 cinaedus, 108n30, 139, 145n40, 194n52 civilian, 68–70 class, 2, 18–19, 22, 27, 28, 29, 61, 93, 98–99, 106, 110, 113, 118, 121, 126, 164, 189, 198, 200 Claudius, 43, 157, 160, 162–64 client, clientela, 40–49, 91, 118–21, 180, 195. See also patron; patronage Page 220 →Cluvienus, 36–37 cognomen, 84, 104, 131 Colin, J., 112 commemoration, 71, 91 consolatio, 169, 195n53 consul, consulship, 19, 46, 94–100, 111, 125, 136n27 contraception, 155n60 cornicen, 106, 107, 110, 118

Courtney, E., 55, 56, 71, 83, 112, 148, 181 Creticus, 100–3, 109, 113, 124, 125, 147 Crispinus, 27, 28, 29, 30, 43, 48, 73 Cumae, 71, 180 Cybele, 99. See also Mother of the Gods declamatio, 39, 90, 92 Deucalion, 38, 39 divorce, 66, 141 dole. See sportula Domitian, 48, 54, 101 domus, 174–75, 190, 192 dowry, 13, 15, 110, 158, 170–71 education, 20, 23, 26, 34, 37, 39, 59, 82n35, 91, 124, 165n75, 190 Edwards, C., 113 effeminacy, 21, 28–29, 42, 80–81, 102–3, 121n62, 122, 124, 132n20, 135, 139–48, 167, 176, 182–87, 191, 194, 199 Egypt, Egyptians, 17, 28, 47, 59, 74–75, 134, 152 elegy, 23, 39, 128n3, 128n4, 175n13 elite, 1, 2, 7–8, 10n35, 12, 18, 22, 34, 35, 42, 62, 70–74, 77, 81, 82, 92, 93–94, 109–13, 117, 121–22, 125, 131, 133–34, 140, 149, 155–57, 159, 161, 162, 164–65, 167–69, 174–75, 178, 179, 187–89, 190, 193, 198–99 Elliot, R. C., 7 emperor, 17, 19, 43–44, 49, 82n34, 87, 93, 98, 99, 109, 114, 125, 131, 147–48, 157, 158, 162, 164, 171n8, 173n10, 184, 186, 188–89, 191 emperor’s wife, 159, 160, 161 epic, 26, 28, 34, 38, 39, 40, 42, 52–53, 91, 148, 159n66 Epona, 95–97 Eppia, 134–36 equestrian, 1, 10n34, 10n35, 19–20, 30, 43, 57, 110, 162, 181–82, 194, 198 equestrian census, 15, 43, 181. See also 400,000 sesterces ethnicity, 18–19. 20, 22, 29

Etruscan, Etruscans, 20, 153 eunuch, 18, 27–30, 99, 127, 139, 142–46, 148, 150, 151–54, 156n63, 162, 164, 169, 197 Euryalus, 133–34 exchange, 42, 44–45, 178–79, 187–89 exclusion, 18, 24, 30, 31–32, 35, 41, 43, 70, 73, 75, 77, 81, 92, 131, 142, 149–51, 161, 164–65, 199 Fabius, 84–85 face, 66, 78–79, 86, 87, 90, 171 facie. See face fama, 117 farrago, 38–39 fatherhood. See paternity Ferguson, J., 112 Flaminian Way. See Via Flaminia Fortuna, 155–65 400,000 sesterces, 15, 42, 43, 105, 110, 181 Forum, 47, 132 Fredricksmeyer, H. C., 56 freeborn, 12, 19, 21, 22, 70, 80, 81, 103, 108–9, 110, 118, 120, 124, 187 freedman, 21, 28, 43, 66, 106, 110, 121, 160, 170 freedom, 58–59, 68, 103–4, 126, 169, 170, 184, 200 Freud, S., 64n7 Freudenburg, K., 9, 56–57 Friedlaender, L., 54 Friend. See amicus Gaius Silius, 157–60, 162 Galba, 82–83, 114, 147 Gallus (priest of Cybele), 99–100, 143 gambling, 40, 83, 94, 108n30 Garrod, H. W., 9

gender, 2, 17, 21–22, 23, 27–29, 60, 99, 106, 125, 127, 142, 146, 159, 169, 176, 189 genealogy, 82 GГ©rard, J., 55 gigolo, 31, 179, 187, 191, 199 Gilmore, D. D., 167 gladiator, 13, 52, 108–13, 116, 118, 125, 133–36, 147, 150, 156, 173, 177, 189 glutton, 49, 116–18 Gold, B. K., 130, 190 Gracchus, 15, 96, 109–10, 118, 121, 124, 126, 147, 156, 189 Page 221 →as gladiator, 108–9, 111–14, 116, 118, 122, 125 marriage to another man, 13, 105–6, 110, 113, 125 as Salian priest, 13, 106–8, 112–13, 125; Gradivus. See Mars Greece, Greeks, 20, 24–25, 26n6, 59, 70, 71, 73, 74, 96, 114–15, 133, 134, 149–51, 153, 176 Greek language, 20, 149–51, 156n63, 164n73 Green, P., 91, 112, 181 Griffith, J. G., 55 Hadrian, 19, 55, 115n48, 145n41 Hannibal, 85, 89–92, 160n67 Hecuba, 80–81 Helmbold, W. C., 54 Henderson, J., 190 Hercules, 39, 84, 96 Highet, G., 4–5, 54–56 Homer, 53, 80 Horace, 14, 16, 26n5, 31–34, 37n23, 40, 49, 52n38, 55–60, 62n1, 81, 117, 201 Sermones, 14, 32 House of the Muses (Ostia), 12n40 House of the Painted Ceiling (Ostia), 12n40

House of the Paintings (Ostia), 12n40 House of the Vettii (Pompeii), 188 husbands, 128n4, 129, 131, 133, 134, 137–41, 149, 153, 155, 159n36, 160, 170–75, 178, 189, 199. See also marriage; wives Iddeng, J., 5 identity, 2, 7–8, 12, 17–18, 21, 61, 77, 81, 86, 93, 151, 165n75, 167–69, 187–89, 194–95, 198–200 Idumaean Gate. See Porta Capena Iliad, 34 impotence, 29, 80, 143, 146n47 infamia, 105, 108, 118, 174n12, 193 instaurare, 97, 99 insula, 11–12 Isis, 96, 152 Italy, Italians, 12, 20, 22, 59, 150–51 ius trium liberorum, 183–88, 194. See also lex Iulia de maritandis ordinibus; lex Papia Poppaea Jews, Jewish, 20, 70, 97–98, 152 Johnson, W. R., 127, 190 Josephus, 152n56, 152n57, 173n10 Judaea, 173 Julian laws. See ius trium liberorum Julius Caesar, 103, 108n30 Juno, 161 Jupiter, 95–97, 121, 161 Juvenal, life of, 3 Book 1, 24n2, 118n56 Book 2, 175n14 Books 1–2, 4 Book 3, 165n75, 175n14, 190 Book 5, 74n26

Books 3–5, 4 Sat. 1, 2, 6, 16, 17, 18, 23–60, 61, 64–65, 66, 73, 81, 91, 92, 119, 121, 178, 198 Sat. 2, 13, 47n30, 59, 96, 98n8, 100–10, 112–13, 122–2334, 142–43, 147–48, 156, 179n21, 190, 199 Sat. 3, 4n15, 11, 59, 67–68, 69, 70–74, 76, 77, 119, 178, 193; Sat. 4, 40, 43, 48, 118n56 Sat. 5, 118–21, 169, 178, 179, 193 Sat. 6, 5n19, 18, 29, 66, 86, 128–46, 148, 149–57, 160–65, 169–78, 179n21, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192n44, 194, 195, 197, 199 Sat. 7, 8n28, 91, 119, 165n75, 190 Sat. 8, 82–85, 94–100, 104–5, 109, 111–13, 115n48, 125, 165n75, 175n14, 190, 195 Sat. 9, 10, 11, 29, 31, 74, 118n56, 119, 121, 165n75, 175n14, 177n18, 178–95, 197, 199 Sat. 10, 78–81, 85–92, 157, 160, 199 Sat. 11, 12, 116–18 Sat. 12, 168–69, 170–71, 178; Sat. 13, 169 Sat. 14, 12, 103n23, 190 Sat. 15, 17, 59, 74–77, 134n23 Sat. 16, 68–70 Kenney, E. J., 55–56 Kernan, A., 3 Kristeva, J., 64n7, 75n28 Knight. See equestrian Larmour, D. H. J., 168, 197 Laronia, 192n45 Lateranus, 18, 94–100, 104, 106, 111–13, 121, 125–26 Latin language, 20, 150 Latin Way. See Via Latina Latium, Latins, 20, 107, 175 Laureolus (bandit), 104 Page 222 →Laureolus (mime), 104–5 legacy hunters, 31, 79, 168 Lentulus, 104, 133–34

lex Iulia de maritandis ordinibus, 33n19. See also ius trium liberorum lex Papia Poppaea, 33n19. See also ius trium liberorum libertas, 55n51, 57–60, 99–100, 103–4, 170, 178, 189, 200 liberty, 21n56, 103 litter, 35, 46, 77, 177 Locusta, 36, 37n23 Lucan, 103 Lucilius, 9n31, 27, 31, 37–39, 49–60, 62n1, 64–65, 198, 200 lustrare, 109 Lutz, C. E., 54, 56 Maecenas, 32, 35, 132 Mamurra, 108n30 Marius Priscus, 32, 58n62 marriage, 29, 30, 66, 125, 128–29, 142, 157, 159, 170, 173, 186, 189, 200. See also husbands; wives Mars, 26, 47n30, 88, 106–13, 122, 123, 177, 185, 189, 190 Martial, 186 masculinity, 2, 16, 18, 21–22, 23, 29, 57, 61, 93, 125, 127–31, 142, 145–48, 156, 167–69, 172, 174, 176, 177, 178–95, 198–99, 200. See also uirtus; virility Mayer, R., 5 Meiggs, R., 11 Messalina, 131, 157–64, 176n17 Mevia, 27–30 military, 33–34, 70, 78, 83, 98, 106, 113, 122–23, 199. See also soldier Miller, P. A., 62 mime, mimus, 104–5, 132–33, 156 mimesis, 13–14 misogyny, 17, 63, 128n3, 129, 130n11 mollitia, 148, 194n52 money, 9, 11, 43, 44, 131, 156, 167–95, 199 monstrum, 110. See also prodigy

Mother of the Gods, 152. See also Cybele muleteer, 94–96 murmillo, 111–12. See also gladiator mythology, 24, 26, 32–34, 37, 39, 57, 59, 92 Naevolus, 10, 11, 31, 54n42, 74, 121, 178–95 Nero, 34, 65, 97, 109, 114–15, 126, 147, 161–62 Nerva, 55n51 Nestor, 80 nobilis, 19, 54, 118 Numa, 95, 106 O fragment, 139, 142. See also Juvenal, Sat. 6 old age, 62, 66, 78–81, 92, 93, 146n47, 198 Ombi, Ombites, 74–77 Orestes, 25, 114–15 Orestes (literary work), 23, 37 Ostia, 11n38, 12, 98 Other, the, 2n3, 154, 198, 200 Otho, 147–48 outrage, 16, 26, 33, 36–37, 43, 46n50–52, 53, 57, 94, 102, 107–8, 110, 113, 123, 125, 140, 165n27, 176, 189. See also anger Ovid, 28n8, 33, 74n26, 137n32 Pallas (freedman of Claudius), 42, 43 parasite, 48, 178 paterfamilias, 190, 192, 194 paternity, 134, 165n75, 183–94, 197, 199 pathicus, 148, 192, 194 patria potestas, 190 patricians, 19, 27–30, 106, 110, 125, 157–59, 189 patron, 40–49, 118–21, 193. See also client; patronage patronage, 17, 40–49, 118–21, 178–95, 199. See also client; patron

paupertas. See poverty pax deum, 156 pedigree, 82, 84–85, 104, 135, 189, 190 penetration, sexual, 70, 80, 143, 146, 182–93 Persicus, 117 Persius, 14–15, 32, 49, 55–56, 62n1, 132n18; Sat. 1, 32 persona, theory of, 3–7, 10n35, 56, 130n11, 198 Petronius, 14n45, 26n4, 194n52 Phoenician, 96, 97, 98 Phrygian priest. See Gallus plebeians, 19, 28, 29, 110, 152 Pliny the Younger, 60n66, 186 Ponticus, 82, 100 popinae, 97, 98 Porta Capena, 96, 97 Postumus, 130–31, 146, 151, 156, 175 Page 223 →poverty, 2, 9, 10n35, 12, 62, 70, 109, 118, 176, 201 praetor, 42–43, 46 praetorian prefect, 52, 65, 86 Priapus, 145, 188 Princeps. See emperor Principate. See emperor prodigy, 106. See also monstrum progymnasma, 128 prostitute, prostitution, 33, 105, 129, 156, 162–64, 179, 184–95, 199 puer delicatus, 146n43, 146n44 Pyrrha, 38, 39 Quintilian, 133, 134 “real” man, 21, 59, 142, 144, 167, 178, 192, 194. See also uir

religion, 44, 96, 97, 106–14, 121, 143, 156–57, 165, 199 Republic, Republican, 10, 17, 19, 57, 83, 98, 159n66 retiarius, 109, 112–13. See also gladiator Richlin, A., 63 Rimell, V., 7 Romulus, 108n30, 164n73 Rutilus, 116–118, 125 sacrilege, 44, 96, 113, 149n51, 177 Salian priesthood, 13, 106–14, 125, 147, 155–56, 177, 189 Saller, R. P., 181 salutatio, 41, 47, 177–78 secutor, 112–13. See also gladiator Seidel, M., 197 Sejanus, 85–89, 91–92 Senate, senator, 19–20, 42, 43, 57, 87, 162, 171, 181, 189 Seneca the Younger, 11, 16, 114, 132n20 Sergius, 135, 136 Sertorius, 66, 171–73 Servility. See slave Servitude. See slave Silverman, K., 190–91 simplicitas, 50, 200. See also speech, freedom of slave, slavery, 11, 21, 29, 30, 34, 40, 70, 73, 77, 85, 88, 98–100, 106, 109, 110, 115, 118–21, 138, 146, 153, 156, 159, 169, 170, 172, 175, 180, 181, 192, 193n48 soldier, 52n40, 68–70, 102, 109, 113. See also military spectacle, 65, 87, 105, 113, 125 speech, freedom / frankness of, 49– 60, 61, 65, 103, 198, 200 sportula, 40–47 status, 17–21, 28–31, 42, 57, 59–60, 62, 65, 77, 92, 93, 94, 99, 105n24, 106, 109–11, 116–21, 125, 128, 134, 135, 159, 167, 169–71, 177, 178–95, 198

stemmata, 82 Suetonius, 8n28, 103, 173n10 summoueo, 31 Syme, R., 55, 56 Tacitus, 21n56, 55n51, 57, 60n66, 132n20, 148, 152n57, 157–60, 176n17 talent, 37, 50, 53, 92 Tanaquil, 153 Tarentum, 176 Telephus, 25 Telephus (literary work), 23 Tentyra, Tentyrans, 74–77 Thais, 141–42 Theseis, 23 Theseus, 25 Tiberius, 86, 152, 154 Tigellinus, 51–52, 64–65, 87 tragedy, 23, 26, 27, 91, 115 Trebius, 54n42, 118–21, 125, 169, 179, 193 tribune, 42–44, 124 Triphallus, 141–42 triumph, 91, 122, 123 triumphatores, 47, 83 Troiugenae (Trojans), 42–43 Tuccia, 132 Turnus (Rutulian), 53, 147n48, 148 Turnus (satirist), 37n23, 53n41 uir, 21, 124, 187, 194. See also real man uirtus, 21, 148, 188. See also masculinity; virility Umbricius, 1, 11, 54n42, 59, 60, 67, 71–74, 77, 92, 193, 201

Underworld, 71–74, 122–24 United States, 199–200 values, 30, 44–45, 94, 96, 109, 110, 113, 148, 168, 188, 194n52, 200 Page 224 →Varro, 131n13 Veiiento, 135–36 Ventidius, 116–18, 121 Venus, 107n28, 153, 170 Vergil, 53, 134, 147n48, 148 Vermeule, B., 63 Via Flaminia, 33, 34, 53–54 Via Latina, 53–54 virility, 59, 81, 142–48, 170, 178–95. See also masculinity; uirtus Virro, 10, 29, 118–21, 178–95 virtue, 123, 177, 187 wealth, 1, 2, 10, 12, 18–22, 23, 29–31, 42–46, 60, 61, 62, 64, 73–74, 78, 81, 93, 107, 110, 116–18, 156, 167–74, 176, 178–95, 199, 201 Wells, C., 10 wives, 33, 46, 66, 128n4, 131, 133, 140, 142, 149–66, 169–75, 189, 199. See also husbands; marriage women, 1, 17, 60, 62, 92, 94, 127–65, 167–78, 186n35, 190, 191, 198, 199 Zapp, Morris, 130