Watching the World Unravel: Juvenal’s Satirical Mechanics

By Timothy Michael Haase

B.A., Fordham University, 2005

Dissertation

Submitted in partial fulfillment for the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Classics at Brown University

PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND

MAY 2013

© Copyright 2013 by Timothy M. Haase

This dissertation by Timothy Haase is accepted in its present form by the Department of

Classics as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Date John Bodel, Advisor

Recommended to the Graduate Council

Date Joseph Reed, Reader

Date Kirk Freudenburg, Reader

Approved by the Graduate Council

Date Peter M. Weber, Dean of the Graduate School

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CURRICULUM VITAE

Timothy M. Haase was born on June 3, 1983 in Metairie, Louisiana, USA. He first began Latin at the age of 13 in his first year at Jesuit High School in New Orleans, LA, starting Greek a year later. He continued his studies of Latin and Greek at Fordham University in Bronx, NY; he excelled there, a member of the highly select Honors Program and elected to Phi Beta Kappa in his junior year (2003-4). He graduated from Fordham in 2005 summa cum laude, in cursu honorum, with a major in Classical Languages and a minor in Classical Civilization, having completed an honors thesis (advised by Harry B. Evans) entitled “Amor and Rape: Sexual Violence in Ovid’s Fasti.” He immediately began his graduate career as a Ph.D. student at Brown University in the fall of 2005, having been awarded a Jukowsky Fellowship upon his admission. During his graduate career, he held several positions of service to his department and the graduate school; in particular, he served, with Lauren Donovan (Ph.D., Brown ’11), as Co-Coordinator of Professional Development for Graduate Students in the Classics Department. He has presented several papers at graduate student and professional conferences, mostly related to the interplay between content and mechanics in Greek and Latin texts. In addition, since 2011 he has been a Visiting Instructor of Classics at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work would simply not exist without the presence of friends, colleagues, and loved ones who have supported me throughout its long gestation period. First and foremost is John Bodel, whose tireless support and encouragement has given me a following wind ever since my arrival in Providence. My work has also become much more rigorous and incisive as a result of the insightful comments of my readers, Jay Reed and Kirk Freudenburg. A final thanks is owed to the entire faculty and staff of the Brown Classics Department, especially those who have helped improve my writing and thought over the years via thoughtful commentary on other projects. A second debt of gratitude is due to all my graduate student colleagues whom it has been my pleasure to befriend and engage with since 2005. I have been blessed to enter as encouraging and fruitful an intellectual atmosphere as the Brown Classics Department. Though it would be impossible to list all those from Classics and affiliated programs who have somehow helped bring this project to fruition through intellectual or emotional support, a few figures deserve to singled out for especial recognition: Lauren Donovan (one could not ask for a better cohort), Leo Landrey, Cynthia Swanson, Mitchell Parks and Scott DiGiulio. One last figure who deserves to be singled out for her assistance in helping me formulate, refine, and express my thought about Juvenal as this project coalesced is Robin McGill; answering her probing questions on our commute together to Wheaton College was a necessary step in defining the boundaries and goals of this dissertation. Gratitude is likewise due to the unstinting support and respect of my parents and the surrogate families that have adopted me since my move to the Northeast 12 years ago (especially the Ciarcias, the Griffins, the Brunos, and the Giulianis). Finally, endless love and thanks are due to my wonderful and caring wife and “executive producer,” Delphina Ciarcia-Haase, without whose patience, selflessness, and devotion this project could never have been realized.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS pg.

Introduction and Orientations: From “Voice” to “Vision”………...... …....1 A. Will the “real” Juvenal please stand up? ...... 6 B. Orientations: Vision in Ancient Rome………………...... ……...... 14 C. Visualized Meaning in Juvenal…………………………………...... 22 D. What are we looking at? Meaning and Representation in Juvenal’s World………………………………………...... 30

Chapter 1. A Panopticon of Vice: The Rhetoric of Exposure in Juvenal 2….... 45 A. The Hair Down There………………………………………...... 49 B. The Translucent Show: Laronia and Creticus……………………...... 55 C. Behind Closed Doors………………………………...... 63 D. Monsters and their Mates: Gracchus on Parade…………………...... 67 E. Bottom Floor: Ancestors and Perverts…………………………...... 75

Chapter 2. The Mirage of “Nobility”: Reference and Negotiation in Juvenal 8...78 A. Home is Where the Hatred is…………………………………...... 82 B. What’s in a Name(d)? ………………………………………...... 88 C. Let’s Talk It Out: Rubellius and Ponticus………………………...... 92 D. Liminality and the Immoral Show of Rome………………………...... 103 E. The History Lesson…………………………………………...... 119

Chapter 3. Laughter and Myopia: the Worldview of Juvenal 10…...... 126 A. Who’s Laughing Now? ……………………………………...... 133 B. Have You Heard the News About Sejanus? ……………………...... 142 C. All the King’s Horses and All the King’ Speeches………………...... 151 D. …Long After the Thrill of Living is Gone………………………...... 168 E. Eye of the Beholder…………………………………………...... 187 F. The Answer Behind the Curtain………………………………...... 197

Chapter 4. The Devils Inside: Female “Threats” to Roman Satire in Juvenal 6...203 A. She Takes Just Like a Woman… ……………………………...... 210 B. Ugly on the Inside: Women, Cosmetics, and Deception…………...... 223 C. The Bleeding Heart Show……………………………………...... 231 D. You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet…………………………………...... 247

Conclusion...... 255

Appendix: Juvenal and Modern “Self-Consuming” Literature...... 262

Bibliography…………………………………………………...... 271

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Introduction and Orientations: From “Voice” to “Vision”

You walk for days among trees and among stones. Rarely does the eye light upon a thing, and then only when it has recognized that thing as the sign of another thing: a print in the sand indicates the tiger’s passage; a marsh announces a vein of water; the hibiscus flower, the end of winter. All the rest is silent and interchangeable; trees and stones are only what they are. Finally the journey leads to the city of Tamara. You penetrate it along streets thick with signboards jutting from walls. The eye does not see things but images of things that mean other things: pincers point out the tooth-drawer’s house; a tankard, the tavern; halberds, the barracks; scales, the grocer’s. Statues and shields depict lions, dolphins, towers, stars: a sign that something—who knows what?—has as its sign a lion or a dolphin or a tower or a star. Other signals warn of what is forbidden in a given place (to enter the alley with wagons, to urinate behind the kiosk, to fish with your pole from the bridge) and what is allowed (watering zebras, playing bowls, burning relatives’ corpses). From the doors of the temples the gods’ statues are seen, each portrayed with his attributes—the cornucopia, the hour-glass, the medusa—so that the worshiper can recognize them and address his prayers correctly. If a building has no signboard or figure, its very form and the position it occupies in the city’s order suffice to indicate its function: the palace, the prison, the mint, the Pythagorean school, the brothel. The wares, too, which the vendors display on their stalls are valuable not in themselves but as signs of other things: the embroidered headband stands for elegance; the gilded palanquin, power; the volumes of Averroes, learning; the ankle bracelet, voluptuousness. Your gaze scans the streets as if they were written pages: the city says everything you must think, makes you repeat her discourse, and while you believe you are visiting Tamara you are only recording the names with which she defines herself and all her parts. However the city may really be, beneath this thick coating of signs, whatever it may contain or coneal, you leave Tamara without having discovered it. Outside, the land stretches, empty, to the horizon; the sky opens, with speeding clouds. In the shape that chance and wind give the clouds, you are already intent on recognizing figures: a sailing ship, a hand, an elephant. . . . (“Cities and signs. 1.” from Invisible Cities [Calvino 1974: 13-14])

Juvenal was supposed to be the easy Roman satirist. The reader does not have to attempt to stitch together tatters from what was clearly a variegated satiric quilt, as he does for Lucilius. Juvenal likewise seems to lack the self-consciously multi-dimensional irony that defines the work of Horace (hexameter, iambic, and lyric alike) nor is he clouded by the obscuritas and motley imagery that pervade Persius. In the scholarship of

1 the last several decades, Horace remains the detached, ironical teacher; yet, perhaps because of the obvious multivalence, the “meaning” of Horace’s task seems somewhat easier to pin down, in that it is supposed to be hard to pin down. His text is rich in its interaction with its generic models (which include New Comedy and Hellenistic diatribe along with Horace’s stated predecessor Lucilius) and contemporary politics; but, because

Horace makes himself a moving target, his readers’ attention has been all the more focused.1 Similarly, Persius’ difficulties in language and imagery have similarly made sympathetic readers that much more attuned and ingenious; his intertextual relationship with Horace and the complex bond he creates between his private devotion to Stoicism and the public orientation of satire create an intimidating surface, but, upon penetrating, he appears somewhat straightforward. 2

Juvenal was originally so much the easier to categorize, but the categorizations kept contradicting each other: Is he the poet of saeva indignatio3 or is the coolly

“rhetorical” satirist?4 Is Juvenal’s language an amalgam of grand style and sermo

1 Recent full length studies include Schlegel 2006, Freudenburg 1993, and Oliensis 1991 along with informative chapters/sections in the major monographs on satire that emerged at the outset of the 21st century: Freudenburg 2001, Plaza 2006, and individual sections of each of the generic explorations of Keane 2006.

2 Cucchiarelli 2005 gives an excellent succinct summary of the intertextual and Stoic aspects of Persius’ satiric approach. Bramble 1974 remains the departure point for contemporary studies of Persius; for a more recent full length study, see Hooley 1997.

3 The collocation is first made in the epitaph of that most Juvenalian of modern authors, Jonathan Swift, who lies interred in Dublin under the inscripition, “Ubi sæva Indignatio/ Ulterius/Cor lacerare nequit.” (ll. 5-7). See Weber 1981 for more on the reception of verse satire in the English Augustan era and how this has affected the constructions of our satirical categories (namely, “Horation” and “Juvenalian” as general critical terms).

4 The classic catalogue on the source of Juvenal’s thought in his rhetorical milieu is de Decker 1913. For a more recent discussion of the impact of rhetoric on the style and content of Persius and Juvenal, which identifies a more dynamic interaction between the satirists and the “authority” of imperial rhetoric, see van den Berg 2012. 2 pedestris or are the heights towards which he stretches one big joke?5 He appears the most politically engaged of the Roman satirists (naming half a dozen previous emperors, and none kindly).6 But his victims, emperors included, are all dead—as he himself tells us (1.170-71).7 Is he then using the dead as timeless models for contemporary social ills?

Or is he the “real” ill?8 Further, Juvenal appears to draw on many of the genres he lambasts in his opening lines:

Semper ego auditor tantum? numquamne reponam vexatus totiens rauci Theseide Cordi? inpune ergo mihi recitaverit ille togatas, hic elegos? inpune diem consumpserit ingens Telephus aut summi plena iam margine libri 5 scriptus et in tergo necdum finitus Orestes? (1.1-5)

Will I always be just an audience? Will I never get to take my revenge, when I’ve been exasperated so many times by the Theseid of Cordus, going hoarse? So they’ll get away with all these declamations at me? That one, plays with togas, this one, elegies? They’ll get away with their huge Telephus gobbling up my. Entire. Day. or that Orestes, scribbled up to the very edges of the paper and on the back to boot, still not finished?9

Recent scholars have tracked within his work the footprints of elegy (particularly in Satire 6),10 Horace’s lyric,11 philosophical texts,12 epigram,13 history,14 the theater (see

5 Scott 1927, though dated, remains the most detailed exposition of Juvenal’s relationship with the so-called “Grand Style.” See Powell 1999 for objections to the communis opinio on the grand style of Juvenal, particularly as seen in the famous passage 6.634-638, the most frequent citation of Juvenal’s “tragic” satirical program.

6 See Ramage 1989 for an extended catalogue and discussion of Juvenal’s reference to imperial predecessors.

7 The bibiliography on these two lines is immense. Important contributions include Anderson 1982: 207-9. (orig. 1957), Kenney 1962, Martyn 1970, Griffith 1970, Fredericksmayer 1990, Freudenburg 2001: 234-42, and Plaza 2006: 46-50.

8 See, in particular, Winkler 1983, discussed below (in section A) and Anderson 1982: 297-314 (orig. 1964).

9 All quotations of Juvenal, unless otherwise noted, are drawn from Clausen’s OCT; all translations are my own.

10 Nardo 1973 and, more recently, Watson 2007a and Watson 2007b. Farrell 2003, in his discussion of the development of Roman elegy, tantalizingly hints at some of shared traits of Roman elegy and satire, but leaves them unexplored (406 n. 44). 3 section C below), and, most of all, epic.15 Does Juvenal subordinate these genres to satire or, perhaps more problematically, does he place these literary endeavors alongside his own, hinting that it will suffer from the same vulnerabilities as they do?

Recent scholarship has fully embraced this ambivalence. What this study will add to contemporary trends is a detailed consideration of Juvenal’s satire as a self-conscious construction of a “visual text” of Rome. Juvenal’s “mechanics,” i.e. the way that his words construct that text (whether by dramatizing his victims in tableaux throughout

Rome or metonymically reducing their rotten character to concrete external details or

“renaming” them as figures from Rome’s past), rely on a straightforward semiotic formula: scene A or physical feature A or name A points unambiguously to moral flaw or folly B. I will argue below that this formula is tied to visual models of depiction and interpretation in Juvenal.

Yet what comes to define the Rome of Juvenal is exactly the breakdown of these easy associations and metonymies; the semiotic logic underlying Juvenal’s methods can thus be shown to be self-defeating in light of his satiric object. This “failure,” the short- circuiting of straightforward correspondence between sign and meaning, is precisely what

11 Littlewood 2008, which traces overlaps of the idyllic scenes of sacrifice in Sat. 12 with scenes from Horatian lyric.

12 Even as Juvenal claims to have ignored it: accipe quae contra valeat solacia ferre/ et qui nec Cynicos nec Stoica dogmata legit/ a Cynicis tunica distantia, non Epicurum/ suspicit exigui laetum plantaribus horti (13.121-24). Keane 2007 gives a recent account of the interaction, identifying models for each of the satires in Bk. 5 in different philosophical texts, such as Satire 15’s debt to Cicero’s Tusculan Disputationes.

13 On the relationship, see especially Mason 1963, Anderson 1982: 362-95, and Colton 1991, who gives an exhaustive survey, satire by satire, of Juvenal’s intertextual debt to Martial.

14 Keane 2012 has argued for a much more dynamic, almost competitive, edge to Juvenal’s allusions to Tacitus.

15 Henderson 1999: 249-73, Connors 2005 (on all the satirists), Freudenburg 2005a; Jones 2007: 95-116 considers epic to be the primary genre against which satire defines itself. 4 will define the representative process of the text. For the compromised way in which

Juvenal’s satires will come to represent Rome embodies the unruly atmosphere better than mere specular reflection would have. Juvenal’s image of the disruption of traditional value and meaning in Rome will operate not only at the level of content (e.g. his depiction of the elevation of the vulgar freedman over decent, hard-working Roman in

Umbricius’ monologue in Satire 3) but also at the level of mechanics, problematizing his means of depicting the turbulence of Rome.

What will invoke these complex ideas of representation is the way that Juvenal draws on the visual practices, both social and aesthetic, of contemporary Rome. Recent studies of Roman visual practice have elucidated the importance of vision in, e.g., epic,16 but less focus has been paid to satire, particularly its most vivid practitioner, Juvenal. In the following pages, this study will propose a scheme of understanding Juvenal that moves away from overriding considerations of the satirist’s “voice” and towards an understanding of his visual practices. I will argue that the prominence of visualization itself as moral comment in Juvenal will evoke literary problems of representation, namely the question of the correspondence between a depicted object and the text which contains that depiction. I will begin with some remarks on the troubling aspects of the still dominant theory of Juvenal’s “voice,” especially as it appears in discussions of the persona theory. As background to a new, more visually-oriented critical approach to

Juvenal, I will then briefly sketch the cultural background of visual practices and how notions of vision were brought to bear morally, socially, and aesthetically in the Rome of

Juvenal’s era. I will continue by giving a few examples of how Juvenal constructs satirical meaning in a fundamentally visual way and will then demonstrate how this

16 See, e.g., Leigh 1997; Lovatt 2006. 5 visualizing and externalizing mode runs counter to its content, arguing that this clash is a basic part of Juvenal’s poetic program of depicting Rome. This study will examine

Satires from the first four books of Juvenal’s Satires to show that, though there are diachronic developments in Juvenal, his concerns with meaning and representation can be identified throughout his corpus.17

A. Will the “real” Juvenal please speak up?

Juvenal remains one of the most mysterious and least attested figures in the Latin classical canon. There exist few certain references to him besides three epigrams of

Martial (7.24, 7.91, 12.18).18 Nor does he talk much of himself in his satire.19 It should be said at the outset of this review that all we have of Juvenal the author is his text, and any judgments about his sincerity, moral purpose, or identity must stem entirely from it.

Though challenges to the “sincerity” of the poet’s voice began to find an outlet near the turn of the 20th century, 20 it was William S. Anderson who single-handedly advanced formal criticism of Roman verse satire. In response to the biographical

17 Cf. Knoche 1970: 499, who posits a Geist common to all of Juvenal’s satires; this study will be more precise in assigning this shared “attitude” a much more specific reference, namely, the examination of issues of meaning and its self-consuming discursive practices.

18 Syme 1979b examines particularly the value of the inscription at Arpinum recording the name sometimes used of him, Decimus Iunius Iuvenalis, eventually dismissing its value in identifying the poet. Instead, he suggests a provincial origin—North Africa perhaps? Syme 1979a more fully considers possible interactions with two major contemporaries (Tacitus and Pliny) and gives a dating scheme based on the publication histories of the Annales and Juvenal’s presumed interaction with them. He concludes: “To posterity the satirist Juvenal remains an isolated and enigmatic figure (he willed it thus). No friend is verifiable and tangible, except for Martial.” (15)

19 1.15-17, 11.203-8, and 15.45 are among the few references Juvenal seems to make to his youth or adulthood.. See Keane 2002 and Plaza 2006: 235-43 on some of the interpretive possibilities of these limited references.

20 Inaugurated by the groundbreaking study of rhetorical commonplaces in Juvenal by Josué de Decker, Iuvenalis Declamans (1913). Wiesen 1963 and Kenney 1963 give a good summary of the two positions, then alive in the contemporary debate, and thus offer a valuable snapshot of the landscape of Juvenalian scholarship before Anderson’s innovations became absorbed into the critical mainstream. 6 approach of scholars such as Gilbert Highet,21 Anderson adapted the approach used by

Alvin Kernan toward English satire in his Cankered Muse: Satire of the English

Renaissance (1959). In a series of articles published in the 1960s,22Anderson separated

“author” and “satirist” and identified a set of contradictions that constitute of the figure of the “satirist,” a mask (persona) thought to be consciously constructed by the author.

Satire becomes a kind of “self-consistent drama,” acted by satirist figures whose bluster, self-contradictions, and hyperboles become part of the drama.

In addition, Anderson specifically situated this play of satirist and author in a

Roman context: “Juvenal devised angry satire in order to exploit the long moralistic tradition of Roman culture and to utilize the possibilities for ambivalence in the role of the indignant moralist.”23 He further argued that the Roman audience would not have sided with the speaker, as he displayed a level of anger that would have been philosophically unacceptable, and readers may even have refigured their own moral attitudes in response to his example.24 This is further confirmed, according to Anderson, by Juvenal’s deliberate abandonment of the “angry” satirist from Satires 1 through 6 and his construction of new personae, becoming the “Democritean” satirist in Bk. 4 and even more detached and cynical in Bk. 5.25 In Anderson’s conception, Juvenal’s satire

21 Embodied in Highet 1954, which, as the only English full-length overview of Juvenal’s career, retains some value, especially in his discussion of Juvenal’s medieval and renaissance reception (180-232), despite its defunct chapters of biographical reconstruction (1-41).

22All reprinted in Anderson 1982: 197-486.

23 Anderson 1982: 390 (orig. 1970)

24 The main point of Anderson 1982: 293-361 (orig. 1964). Anderson 1985 offers a similar use of this approach as applied to a later satire, Satire 15.

25 Anderson 1982: 277-292 (orig. 1962); cf. Braund 1988: 184-98. Anderson argues against prevailing views that the obvious change in mood is rather prompted by a decline in satirical powers (Highet 1954) or 7 becomes on this reading considerably more opaque vis-à-vis its supposed topics, as the audience’s gaze shifts from the satirists’ objects to the satirist himself.

Despite a cogent response by Highet,26 Anderson’s approach was fully integrated into scholarship within a decade: it became regular, for example, to include a disclaimer separating the “satirist” from the author Juvenal (even if this distinction was not necessarily pertinent).27 Susanna Braund, the most prominent Juvenalian scholar of the last few decades indebted to Anderson’s approach, has consistently heralded its value and expanded its boundaries.28 Martin Winkler, focusing on the three most sexually charged satires (2, 6, and 9) took the approach perhaps to its logical extreme: to Winkler, the biased satirist himself (i.e. “Juvenal”) is the “true” social ill that the author Juvenal describes.29

Yet more recent challenges have emerged to the persona theory, attacking both its premises and its basis in supposedly ancient conceptualizations of the distance between author and internal speaker. Of considerable weight is Roland Mayer’s recent summary of the ancient evidence for the approach: “The modern concept of the use of the authorial persona was demonstrably unavailable to the ancient reader or writer-as-reader, who had

in light of the development of his biography (Lindo 1974, who uses Horace’s biography and poetic career as analogous).

26 Highet 1974, perhaps dated in its formal criteria (the separation of narrative/dramatic poetry from lyric-I poetry, and the further subdivision of the I-poetry), anticipates the moral recent work of Mayer investigating the ancient concept of the authorial voice and ancient reading practices more carefully.

27 A small sample: Sweet 1979: 283-4; Romano 1979: 19 (and 220 n. 86); Hudson 1989: 71 and 136 n. 6; Keane 2006: 9.

28 See Braund 1988 (which, though focusing on the transitional ‘ironic’ persona of Bk. 3, offers a general account of the development of Juvenal’s persona over the his entire oeuvre, esp. 1-23 on the indignant satirist), Braund 1992, Braund 1996a, and Braund 1996b. The title of the last, an overview of Roman satire, confirms the primacy of the persona in her approach: Roman Satirists and Their Masks.

29 Winkler 1983, esp. 207-229. 8 his own very different notion about the use made by the personal poet of masks.”30 He argues that Roman authors read their predecessors’ works biographically, including the satirists themselves (cf. Horace’s picture of a Lucilius who entrusted his life to his books as if to a friend, Serm. 2.1.30-34).31 Though Mayer seems to ignore some important evidence (the milieu of declamatio in which Juvenal emerges plays a large role in

Anderson’s original argument, but is not mentioned by Mayer), the objections he raises on the ancient primary evidence are pertinent.

Maria Plaza, in a section of her recent monograph on humor in Roman verse satire (“The Question of Trust in Juvenal’s Speaker”, a subsection of her more general overview of Juvenal’s subject-oriented humor, “Juvenal: To Laugh with Him or at

Him?”), specifically takes on the question of persona as it involves Juvenal and “whether the blatantly prejudiced and extremist persona of many of his satires…should be read as undermined or endorsed by the author.”32 After an account of Juvenal’s ambivalent portrayal of Umbricius, she then moves on to the modern arguments concerning

“Juvenal” (as satirical construct of Juvenal), cataloguing several serious methodological problems. For example, such arguments often work by implication and generalization; comparisons with other genres can be deceptive, as these comparisons often ignore

30 Mayer 2003: 57.

31 Mayer further argues that the poems usually summoned as ancient evidence of the separation of subject and author (such as Cat. 16) are inconclusive, because they are read out of the specific context in which that separation is generated. Nor would a persona offer the kind of protection from prosecution or infamy often imagined; LaFleur 1988 takes seriously Horace’s warning about excessive criticism and points to the possible legal consequences of insulting the wrong people. As Mayer flatly states, “the persona really offered no protection.” (Mayer 2003: 77)

32 Plaza 2006: 243. 9 inherent generic differences in approach and goal.33 Often, as Plaza shows, the more detached, ironic attitude of the later poems in Juvenal’s corpus is used as a benchmark to judge the earlier poems without acknowledging the inherently destabilizing effects of irony or justifying why the later poems should be a yardstick for the earlier. More importantly, she argues that commentators’ attempts to instate the persona of “Juvenal” as the “real” object of the satire, in order to save the apparent objects of his satiric attack, probably derives from modern sensibilities and an impulse to exonerate Juvenal from the views that the modern progressive reader does not find appropriate.34 Nor does the persona answer the questions which the construction seeks to address: as Ralph Rosen has argued, couched in a larger discussion about Juvenal’s place in the larger ancient tradition of aischrôlogia and ponêria, the persona-approach does not really resolve the content of satire, that is, its “fundamental didactic and moral claims.”35

As Plaza rightly points out, another consequence of too enthusiastically embracing the orthodox view of Juvenalian persona is that it downplays the remarkable insights made in recent years as regards Juvenal’s depiction of Rome as an example of

Roman ideology. Indeed, the personal and cultural objects of Juvenal’s satire, rather than its subject (“Juvenal”), have received the most sophisticated and nuanced examinations in recent years.

33 In particular, Anderson’s argument concerning a Roman audience’s reception is founded on a comparison of Juvenal with Senecan philosophy (Anderson 1982: 293-361, orig.1964)

34 She compares Juvenal’s reception to that of Archie Bunker, a character who was warmly received even by those who found his views distasteful; she contines, “liberal readers, liking the impression of the satire but disliking its prejudiced hero, are trying to save at least the poet through the gap that humour creates between the author and his bigoted character.” (Plaza 2006: 256 n. 174)

35 Rosen 2008: 219-222, quote from 222. 10

Recent readings have argued that Juvenal does reveal a kind of “reality,” but an ideological rather than physical one. The ideological reality of satire has been examined particularly richly through the prism of feminist approaches, particularly in Satires 2, 6, and 9. Amy Richlin’s Garden of Priapus, on sexual aggression in Roman humor, which devotes an entire chapter to Juvenal, remains a groundbreaking example of this approach.36 Her study is founded on the psychological theory of “outsider” mockery, which often acts to reaffirm social norms by mockery of their opposite. For Richlin, the ithyphallic, aggressive guardian god Priapus acts as an symbol for the attack of Roman sexual poetry, in which obscenity works to stain its object as Priapus threatens to penetrate those who enter his garden. When Juvenal “makes the mask of Priapus his own persona,” he does not then remove it to wink at a tolerant and knowing audience.37

John Henderson has given a more intricate and complex view of the intertwining of ideology and Roman satire, underlining how problematic the satiric project is, in that it tends to attack its own authority in a frenzied act of (self-)cannibalism.38 Kirk

Freudenburg, in a recent monograph, also imagines the social project of satire and its politics in an attempt to move away from overly formalist critiques.39 He focuses on how

36 Richlin 1983.

37 Richlin 1983: 195. Much feminist scholarship on Juvenal, unsurprisingly focusing on Sat. 6, has followed in this mold, including Johnson 1996, Gold 1994, and Gold 1998. Similarly ideological in vein, though expanding beyond a strictly “feminist” approach, is Shumate 2006: 19-54, which demonstrates the way that Juvenal, as a part of project to define Roman, masculine identity, often conflates three separate groups of Others (women, homosexuals, and foreigners) so that they have matching characteristics; she then gives a modern analogue in the depiction of various groups of “Others” in the propaganda of Nazi Germany.

38 Henderson 1999: 173-201.

39 Cf. his introduction to his edited companion to Roman Satire: “But this kind of study, by now, has perhaps gone on too long. Or, to put this more positively, the time is now ripe for it to be pushed farther and made to pay bigger dividends. For such studies in the field of classics especially, useful as they are, have tended to blunt satire’s political edge by focusing on how certain effects are mechanically produced 11 the development of a narrative of a genre, “Roman Satire,” is a construction best examined in light of another construction, “Rome,” particularly in the way that Lucilius’ successors in Roman satire chose to deal with the “loss” of the libertas which was thought to characterize his verses. In the chapter devoted to Juvenal, Freudenburg focuses on Juvenal’s explicit belatedness and how it participates in the Trajanic-era practice of retrospective demonizing of Domitian (showing contemporary parallels in Pliny and

Tacitus), each man scrambling to prove how anti-tyrannical he was—but only after the fact, and while remaining reticent on more strictly contemporary affairs. Juvenal both performs this task and, in passages of ambiguous interpretation, questions it—challenging his audience’s ability to claim the libertas they think they are entitled to.

Though the concerns of this study will prove to be more poetological, it is indebted to this renewed focus on the “objects” of Juvenal’s satire and the destabilizing implications of his attack. In light of the some of the limitations and blind spots of persona theory raised by Mayer, Plaza, Rosen, et al., this study will move away from the idea of “voice” as the primary critical concept in reading Juvenal. In its place, it will focus on Juvenal’s “vision,” that is, the visual logic of the construction of Rome in his text. I will argue that the satiric value of Juvenal’s text lies in the way he envisions the

Roman social and moral landscape and the way he simultaneously he challenges the operations of that visionary project.40 This challenge will emerge most obviously in those

rather than on how they have played in the highly tendentious political worlds wherein they were produced. This is the downside of analysis fixated on form.” (2005b 28-29)

40 My use of “landscape” here is decidedly metaphorical. Though I will take some account of Roman topography and its metonymic significance as it appears in Juvenal, for the most part, I am less concerned with how Juvenal maps Rome than with how he “maps” satire. Gold 1999 and Larmour 2007 both offer reviews of the major defined topographical features in Juvenal (the Subura, the Porta Capena, sites of spectacle, etc.), but the movement, which Larmour (174) traces in Satire 6, into the undefined space of 12 satires in which he tries vigorously to control the slippage of meaning and value in Rome

(namely, Satires 2, 8, and 10)

Indeed, scholars have often praised Juvenal for his visual imagination and vigor.

As Victoria Rimmel notes, scholars often employ metaphors from cinematography and the visual arts to describe Juvenal, giving an example: “[The] hyperbolic is lined up with the microscopic,…painting in epigrammatic flashes or zooming in for a close-up before panning out for the skyline shot.”41 The reader comes face to face with this visualizing impulse in Juvenal almost immediately: after Juvenal takes a deep breath (1.1-21),42 he presents a scene of unbearable vice:

cum tener uxorem ducat spado, Mevia Tuscum figat aprum et nuda teneat venabula mamma, patricios omnis opibus cum provocet unus quo tondente gravis iuveni mihi barba sonabat, 25 cum pars Niliacae plebis, cum verna Canopi Crispinus Tyrias umero revocante lacernas ventilet aestivum digitis sudantibus aurum nec sufferre queat maioris pondera gemmae, difficile est saturam non scribere. 30 (1.22-30)

When the “tender” eunuch takes a wife, and Mevia snags a Tuscan boar and holds the nets with her tit showing, when one man challenges all the patricians with his wealth—a guy who used to make my beard resound with his snipping!—when some piece of the Egyptian mob, some house-slave of Canopus, Crispinus, while his shoulder hitches up

Roman streets and “neighborhoods” (e.g., Clytemnestram nullus non vicus habebit, 6.656) figures, to an extent, the importance of specific topographical reference in the whole of the corpus.

41 Rimmel 2005: 86. Braund and Raschke 2002: 80, similarly use camera imagery when discussing how Juvenal describes a parade of evildoers through one or two features. Rosen 2008, commenting on 9.145-46 (sit mihi praeterea curvus caelator, et alter/ qui multas facies pingit cito), when Naevolus (acting as Juvenal’s stand-in for the moment, as Rosen argues) adds an engraver to the list of the entourage to which he feels entitled: “Does not the satirist “engrave” vivid images of his characters, or paint the portraits of multas facies?” Cf. Kenney 1963: 719; Jenkyns 1982: 173-81; Witke 1970: 117 etc. Though Juvenal is not, strictly speaking, a narrative, we can still profitably consider the schema of narratological perspectives available to the narrator, located along two axes, a) from panorama to scenic to close-up and b) focalized within a character’s perception or not, as discussed by De Jong and Nünlist 2004.

42 The best exposition of Juvenal’s opening section is Henderson 1999 249-73, where he discusses the identification of writer and reader which this mimetic opening enacts (which he terms antimetathesis) as well as the play of allusion, particularly with Valerius Flaccus’ Argonautica, that the dense epic imagery of lines 7-13 activates. 13

some scarlet cloak, he flutters the steamy gold on his sweaty fingers, and he can’t even endure to hold up the weight of the bigger gem, it is difficult not to write satire.

Before considering in greater detail the visual orientation of Juvenal’s satirical techniques, it is necessary to review the relationship between Juvenal’s visual imagination and Roman social, moral, and artistic practices of visuality, that is, the obsessively visual nature of Roman cognition, judgment, and expression.

B. Orientations: Vision in Ancient Rome

“Being, for a Roman, was being seen…[The] spectator was, for the Romans, an inspector, judge, and connoisseur.”43 In the “specular world of Roman politics,”44 the realm of the visible encompassed the social, political, and moral milieu, and to be an elite

Roman meant subjecting oneself to the judgmental gaze of fellow Romans. Shadi Bartsch has recently given the most extensive review of what she terms the “skopic paradigms” of ancient Rome.45 As she shows, in the arena of elite self-display, there was a self- conscious focus on following and providing exemplary models, coupled with a profound sense of being watched. To be an elite Roman, an orator or politician or general, meant constantly subjecting oneself to appraisal, which, in turn, meant becoming vulnerable to the penetrating power of the gaze.46

43 Barton 2002: 221; she specifically discusses the relationship between verecundia/pudor and seeing in Rome and the need to display oneself for purposes of honor while simultaneously keeping oneself inviolable. Bartsch 2006: 132-36 is hesitant to adopt the older version of the binary of shame/guilt (where the former is external and the latter is purely internal) in Roman culture, but she sees the usefulness of the schema in bringing the external obsessions of Roman society to the foreground.

44 Bartsch 2006: 130. Cf. Elsner 2007, who mentions the “remarkably ocular culture” at Rome in his discussion of the literary gaze in ekphrasis (68).

45 Bartstch 2006: 115-82.

46 Bartsch 2006: 117-38 for elite self-display; she later (138-52) discusses “dangerous” aspects of the gaze in ancient Rome (such as the “evil eye”), connecting it to a discussion of ancient optical theories which posit sight as a tactile experience, involving contact between seer and seen (58-67). Frederick 2002a gives 14

For an ancient Roman, the awareness of an audience was thought to be a spur to virtue.47 Nor need the audience be animate, for the most effective audience in the Roman aristocratic household was thought to be the wax-masks (imagines) of one’s ancestors, stored in special cupboards (armaria) in the Roman noble’s atrium and produced, inter alia, for aristocratic funerals.48 As Harriet Flower has argued, imagines were constructed as an audience in one’s own home: “through his life, a Roman was expected to act as if constantly in their presence and to consider himself answerable to them.”49

The politics of Roman space, from private house to public square, emphasized the

“accessibility” of the elite and reminded Romans of the constant presence of vision and judgment. The Roman house, whose axis was “social,” rather than gendered (as in the division between men’s and women’s living quarters in Athens) or aged (as we might now think of the children’s part of a house), was designed with few truly private spaces; most rooms in it fall somewhere on a spectrum between totally private and totally

a useful review of the challenges in applying notions of the “gaze” to ancient Rome, which has often been erased or elided into Greek practices and evidence in discussions of ancient sexuality, as well as the history of the “gaze” as a critical concept and how it might be thought to apply to Roman culture (13-24). Mulvey 1975, still provocative, is one of the basic texts in formulating the idea of the “gaze,” oriented towards film studies along the lines of Lacanian psychoanalysis. It discusses how films unconsciously demonstrate the socially established codes of looking and their role in establishing gendered identity through difference. Elsner 2007: xi similarly points out the usefulness of the gaze in our cultural studies of Rome because it refracts the act of looking into a combination of an object (situated in a specific context) and the “psychological investments” of a subject (either individual or collective and culturally charged).

47 Bartsch 2006: 18-28 explores how the mirror in the ancient world similarly acted as a check on behavior, as it transformed the self into a “judging other” by imagining oneself being looked at. The goal in this moral theory was to live up to (if handsome) or transcend (if less so) one’s outward appearance: “handsomeness must be confirmed by good deeds, rather than conferred by it” (21).

48 Flower 1996 is the definitive treatment of imagines in Rome; for their presence at funerals (the procession and the accompanying ritual of the laudatio, the eulogy), see Flower 1996: 91-158.

49 Flower 1996: 14, 185-222 on the significance of imagines in the Roman atrium (quote: 221). For more on imagines as audience in Juvenal, see Ch. 2. A. What makes the imagines an example of the “gaze” is their physical presence; whereas the abstract memory of one’s deeds could function as a model for virtue (cf. especially Tac. Agr. 46.3, which prioritizes forma mentis aeterna over imaginibus quae marmore aut aere finguntur in encouraging virtue), the imagines represent those deeds physically instantiated in such a way so to actually look at present-day Romans (because they are shaped like faces). 15 public.50 The very design of the house emphasizes, in its performance of social boundaries, the importance of observation in the maintenance of social roles: the servile section was effectively invisible while the section for elites, where public business took place (such as the receiving of clients for the morning salutatio), was designed to promote “visual transparency” through unbroken sight-lines from atrium into deeper portions of the house.51

Similarly, public space, especially the theater, was a sphere where one might especially be expected to be judged. Holt Parker has reviewed the theater as a locus for elite self-fashioning in Rome (as well as fissures and failures in those attempts at self- promotion).52 As he argues, the social structure was reflected in the structure of the theater: the lex Roscia (67 B.C.E.) created an elaborate hierarchy of tiers in the seating of the theater, where the Roman noble was flanked by views from both the front and back

(i.e. the performers and the lower classes). This prominence at the theater is an example of the importance of visibility for elite social identity but also shows that visibility entailed vulnerability: as one could be acclaimed by applause, so too could one be crippled by rejection. The importance of controlling one’s image while even entering the theater was paramount.53

Indeed, even more than the social vulnerabilities were the moral ones. By their visibility elites became structurally similar, “though at different ends of the spectrum of

50 For the axes of the Roman house, see Wallace-Hadrill 1994: 10-14.

51 Wallace-Hadrill 1994: 44-47; see esp. the Casa del Menandro, pll. 2-3 for the unobstructed sightlines of the elite Roman house.

52 Parker 1999. He compares this visibility to the public spectacle of the census, where hierarchy is literally paraded (173-75); for more on the census procession, see Wiseman 1969.

53 Parker 1999: 166-75. 16 class, vulnerability, and virtus,”54 to the class of Roman who regularly submitted themselves to the spectacular gaze (namely, actors and gladiators), whose position entailed a severe restriction of legal rights. As with prostitutes, actors and gladiators suffered legal infamia , which meant they could not hold magistracies or make accusations, nor were they protected against corporal punishment, “one of the hallmarks of Roman citizenship.”55 Holt Parker connects this condemnation with the susceptibility of their bodies to the “penetrating” gaze.56 Though this danger of “being assimilated to those who appeared on stage or in the arena”57 does not seem to have troubled the

Romans as much as some have argued,58 it does remind us of the pervasiveness of the gaze at Rome and its critical possibilities. As shown in recent analyses of physiognomic texts and ancient references to the process of “reading” bodily signs, the gaze was the means to interpret a complicated externalized sign system, where gender, identity, and deviance were mapped onto physique, clothing, gesture, and gait.59 As Seneca tells his pupil, external features are to be read as manifestations of internal character:

Omnia rerum omnium, si observentur, indicia sunt, et argumentum morum ex minimis quoque licet capere: impudicum et incessus ostendit et manus mota et unum interdum responsum et relatus ad caput digitus et flexus oculorum; improbum risus, insanum vultus habitusque demonstrat. Illa enim in apertum per notas exeunt: qualis quisque sit scies, si

54 Bartsch 2006 152.

55 Edwards 1993: 124. For the low status of performers, see esp. Edwards 1993: 121-26 and Edwards 1997.

56 Parker 1999: 164-65, followed by Bartsch 2006: 152-57. For a rejoinder to overly expanding the semantic field of “penetration” as Parker (and Frederick 2002b) argue for, see Williams 2010: 260-62.

57 Parker 1999: 167.

58 Bartsch 2006: 157-64 offers some suggestions as to why these structural similarities were not more troubling to ancient Romans; for example, the social distinctions were clearly marked by external signs like dress, i.e. the toga.

59 See Gunderson 2000 on physiognomy and rhetoric in Rome and Gleason 1995 on Imperial Greece, esp. 29-37 on the 2nd century C.E. physiogonomic text of Polemo. 17

quemadmodum laudet, quemadmodum laudetur aspexeris. (Seneca Ep.52.12)

All things are indicators of everything, if they should be inspected carefully, and it is permitted to take evidence of someone’s character from even the littlest details: the walk and the movement of the hand and the halting response and the finger brought to the head and the deflection of the eyes reveal the impure man, laughter points out impure man, the face and clothing the insane one. For those things lay out in the open through marks: you will know what kind of man anyone is, if you look at how he praises and is praised in return.60

The importance of vision in Rome found expression in literary modes as well, which were not, strictly speaking, “visual.” Rome’s visual culture, and the way that culture engaged with the past, was mapped out in the extensive use of exempla in Roman literature.61 The preface to Livy’s history presents us with the most important explicit example of the interplay between visuality and exempla, where he imagines his work as a visual artifact:

Hoc illud est praecipue in cognitione rerum salubre ac frugiferum, omnis te exempli documenta in inlustri posita monumento intueri; inde tibi tuaeque rei publicae quod imitere capias, inde foedum inceptu foedum exitu quod vites. (Livy, Praef. 10)

In the understanding of events, this is chiefly what is healthful and profitable, that you gaze upon specimens (documenta) of every example positioned on a conspicuous monument (inlustri monumento); from there you can understand for yourself and for your republic what to imitate and, from there, what to avoid, foul from conception to expiration.

Recent studies have shown how Livy engages actively with the exempla he employs within his texts by analyzing how Livy’s historical actors themselves utilize models from the past within the historical narrative and enact his program of following and avoiding

60 Cf. Cic. De Orat. 3.221: imago animi vultus, indices oculi.

61 For a convenient summary of the rhetorical operations of exempla, see Demoen 1997, based on Greek rhetorical texts starting with Aristotle. Of particular note to readers of Juvenal are his discussion of “inductive” exempla, when a particular instance is used an illustration of a general principle (134-35) and refutation either by counterexample or an attack on the validity of the application to a particular case (137). 18 past examples.62 Jane Chaplin notes that exempla are thought to be effective because they fit into a larger literary and historical cognition of “vividness”: in the “deeply visual nature of Roman memory, exempla advance an argument because they put the past in front of the audience’s eyes.”63 As Andrew Feldherr has shown in his analysis of Livy’s creation of highly visual and spectacular situations, where the internal audience gives the

Augustan reader an index for how to interpret history, exempla are part of a larger program of vivid depiction in Livy’s history.64

Indeed, the “vividness” (enargeia) that is one of Juvenal’s most time-honored qualities is specifically tied to turning “hearers” into “viewers” in ancient poetic practice.65 “Vividness” appears in both Greek and Roman rhetorical texts, originating as a technical term (enargeia) by at least the 2nd cent. B.C.E., and is variously cast into Latin as demonstratio, evidentia, illustratio, repraesentatio, and, most tellingly, sub oculos subiectio. Quintillian, discussing the difference between simple clarity (perspicuitas) and

“vividness” (here, evidentia/repraesentatio) says that the latter “shows itself in a certain way” (hoc se quodam modo ostendit), and, rather than being limited to the hearing (usque ad aures valet) and simply “narrated” (narrari), vividness is “shown to the imagination”

(oculis mentis ostendi, Quint. 8.3.61-62). Quintillian argues later that one way to achieve

62 See especially Chaplin 2000; Chaplin 2000: 6-31 reviews the role of exempla in previous historiography, Greek and Roman, and in Roman education, emphasizing how exempla makes history useful (cf. salubre and frugiferum above).

63 Chaplin 2000 14. She points out that the imagines, as vivid reminders of the historical achievements of one’s ancestors, could be thought as a material instantiation of an exemplum in its protreptic function.

64 Feldherr 1998. For Livy as a particular “vivid” author, see the metaphors of light in Quintillian’s appraisal: cum in narrando mirae iucunditatis clarissimique candoris (Quint. 10.100.1).

65 Scott 1927: 20-31 gives a good account of Juvenal’s use of enargeia, though couched in a now dubious discussion of how enargeia was meant to evoke the high style and sublimity. For a history of the term, see Zanker 1981. Scholz 1999 is also useful, focusing on Quintillian and describing enargeia specifically in relation to ekphrasis. 19 this feeling of vividness, particularly relevant to an analysis of Juvenal’s poetic techniques, was through the use of vivid details, rather than broad strokes; one creates the effect of subiectio sub oculos by an effusion of particulars (nec universa, sed per partes,

Quint. 9.2.40).

For the purposes of this discussion, one of the most important associations of enargeia in ancient rhetorical criticism was its association with the mode of ekphrasis.66

Though usually deployed in scholarship as a generic term, i.e. the literary description of an art object either on its own (such as Philostratus’ Imagines) or positioned in a longer narrative work (Achilles’ shield in Iliad 18, the temple walls at Carthage in Aeneid 1), in ancient rhetorical treatises its primary significance was as a descriptive mode: as with enargeia, it is meant to evoke sight on the part of a listener. The analogy of text with visual art opens up several meaningful interpretative questions, especially concerning mimesis and representation: what are the consequences of a text trying to map itself onto an external object? How will they correspond, and how might a text thematize places where they cannot?

It is useful at this juncture to think briefly about the nature of representation or mimesis before considering what Juvenal’s text might be thought to represent. Stephen

Halliwell has recently demonstrated that ancient discourses of mimesis, which came to be flattened in Romantic attacks on notions of classical “naturalism,” were in fact a complex spectrum residing between two competing notions of representation and aesthetics (i.e. how to judge the success of those representations).67 In brief, we might think of the two

66 See Webb 1999 for an account of the origins of the term in the 20th century as a generic term (i.e. the literary description of an art object).

67 Halliwell 2002. 20 poles of mimesis (roughly defined by Halliwell as “the use of an artistic medium to signify and communicate certain hypothesized realities”) as “world-replicating” and

“world-creating,” representation of the world or representation of a world:

First, the idea of mimesis as committed to depicting and illuminating a world that is (partly) accessible and knowable outside art, and by whose norms art can therefore, within limits, be tested and judged; second, the idea of mimesis as the creator of an independent artistic heterocosm, a world of its own, though one that, as in Goethe’s case, may still purport to contain kind of “truth,” about, or grasp of, reality as a whole.68

These two conceptions of representation thus generate two contrasting aesthetics: one which focuses on “realism” or “naturalism” and which places emphasis on “outward- looking” correspondence between performance and reality, and another focusing on formal coherence/congruity, where formal satisfaction creates success.69 Representation, by its very nature, opens up a gap between itself and its object; in fact, mimesis depends on the viewer recognizing this gap for its aesthetic effect.70 We must know that Zeuxis’ grapes are painted, and thus not real, to be impressed that the birds mistook them for reality.71

Visuality at Rome, that is, the conceptualization of “meaning” as something which can be expressed visually,72 thus operated on numerous levels simultaneously

(bodily, social, moral, physical, rhetorical, cognitive), and Juvenal’s text will be no

68 Halliwell 2002: 16.

69 Halliwell 2002: 23.

70 Cf. Freedberg 1989: 343-44 (quoted at Elsner 2007: 114), on Ovid’s Pygmalion narrative: “The great paradox and the great tragedy that lies in making the protagonist an artist is that the object he made was only beautiful because of his skills, because it was art; but as soon as it came alive, it was no longer a piece of art at all. It was indeed, and no less, than the body itself.”

71 In a famous story recounted by Pliny the Elder (NH 35.65), Zeuxis’ paintings of grapes were so convincing that birds flew to the painting and tried to eat them.

72 Cf. the figuration of Elsner 2007 of “visuality” as a “screen”: “My focus then is on the pattern of cultural constructs and social discourses that stand between the retina and the world, a screen though which the subjects of this inquiry (that is, Greek and Roman people) had no choice but to look and through which they acquired (at least in part) their sense of subjectivity” (xvii). 21 exception. Yet Juvenal will not simply be an example of these visual practices in social and moral arenas; he will also engage with the aesthetic issues that visualized meaning in literary text raises. This engagement with visualizing practices will become central to

Juvenal’s representational content in his “compromised” picture of Rome. It will be helpful to first review the particularly “visual” mode of satirical content in Juvenal, using examples drawn from throughout the corpus.

C. Visualized Meaning in Juvenal

A few examples of Juvenal’s visual mechanics, focusing on how his visualizing processes construct a meaning through image (or analogy to image) alone, will establish the satirical logic of Juvenal’s visuality (which I will argue is eventually problematized by what they portray).73 Indeed, to examine the scene quoted above (1.22-30), Juvenal elaborates his satirical picture for nine lines before any explicit condemnation. The externalizing weight of the lines functions as condemnation before we even reach the exasperated exclamation at line 30: “[when all this is happening,] it’s difficult not to write satire.”74 Juvenal will engage with Rome’s visualizing conceptual modes to craft what I will refer to frequently throughout this study as “externalizing” satire.

Though there is no shortage of verbal commentary in Juvenal, often his outbursts only restate the satiric content which his images have already transmitted. Older

73 This is not to say that Juvenal does not often work discursively. In fact, the “rogues’ gallery” of Satire 1 (1.22-80), as Braund 1996a 112-14 shows, is focused around an interplay between exhibition and exposition, “showing” and comment.

74 Freudenburg 2001: 213-15 gives a particularly interesting reading of these lines in light of the distance between the Domitianic milieu of Bks. 1 and 2 (made explicit in 2.29-33 and 4.37ff.) and their date of publication several decades after the “dramatic” date; after all, that’s what Juvenal has been doing, not writing satire. Syme 1979a asserts, using the publication scheme of Tacitus’ Annales and its links with moments in Juvenal’s text, publication dates from 117-132 C.E. 22 commentators, such as Joachim Classen, have often recognized this conception:

“[Juvenal] describes reality in the hope that reality as such, unmasked and exposed in its brutal nakedness—often of course exaggerated like a cartoon—will make an impression on his readers and will make them react—just as an artist, e.g. a painter, hopes to achieve the same simply by presenting reality, or even like a historian who gives facts without comment.”75 Despite failing to see that this picture is Juvenal’s comment, Claasen gives an accurate description of his mechanics.

In this opening passage, we can see several of what I will argue are Juvenal’s characteristic externalizing techniques. At lines 22-23, he portrays a female gladiator participating in a venatio, with just enough detail to make the scene come alive in its outrageous glory: she is named (Mevia), as is the boar (Tuscum), and she exposes her breasts in the manner of one imitating an Amazon in the arena.76 Crispinus, who appears twice more in Sat. 4 (4.1ff., 107-8), is satirized through close-ups of particular parts of his body and objects whose moral significance is indicated by their charged or degrading description; for his shoulders are syntactically “wrapped” with a Tyrian cloak (Tyrias umero revocante lucernas, 27) and his “sweaty” fingers (sudantibus, 28) are weighed down by gold and gems so heavy he can barely hold them.77 Each is a concrete manifestation of wealth, but the particular description gives the possession of that wealth a moral charge whose significance is matched by the earlier, more discursive introduction

75 Classen 1998: 101 [emphasis mine]. Similarly, the comment of Witke 1970 on the interjection by the Egyptian freedman (1.102-109) in the extended sportula scene later in the same satire: “The scene needs no comment, for Juvenal lets the Asiatic nouveau-riche provide his own interpretation” (120).

76 Cf. Mart. Lib.Spect. 6b. for a female in a venatio (there chasing a “Nemean” lion in imitation of Hercules).

77 For the moral significance of Tyrias, compare Lucian’s description of the rich at Rome as “showing forth scarlet cloaks and holding out their fingers.” (Nigrinus 21) and see Ch. 4. A, on the female gladiator and her endromidas Tyrias (6.246). 23 of the nouveau riche (24-25). Crispinus’ origin (verna Canopi, 26) is significant too; unlike the proper name of Crispinus himself (whose referent is an actually existing person) or Mevia at line 22 (used to evoke a generalized aristocrat),78 Crispinus is called a “house slave of Canopus” for the moral associations that the city evokes, even though the historical Crispinus was probably from Memphis.79 In each of these techniques, there is a kind of “moral correspondence” or “satiric iconography,” where the image or word is meant to evoke an unmediated moral association. What will become paramount to the significance of this “iconography” is how these techniques are linked to ancient discourses of literary vision and thus will be subject to the same interpretative difficulties.80

I categorize these “externalizing” or “visualizing” techniques in three ways, each of which is represented in the passage above: “concretizing,” “dramatizing,” and

“nominalizing.” “Concretizing” involves objectifying moral traits into external features, such as clothing, food, or facial features, for the purposes of mockery. One could point to the evocation of Greek booties (rusticus ille tuus sumit trechedipna, 3.67—worn by a rustic!) or the crack of castanets (testarum crepitus, 11.172)81 or the literal rottenness of the clients’ stingy meal in Satire 5 (e.g. soldiae iam mucida frusta farina, 5.68; tu scabie

78 Cf. Ferguson 1987: 154.

79 On Canopus, see 15. 45-6 (luxuria, quantum ipse notavi,/ Barbara famoso non cedit turba Canopo); on Crispinus’ likely origins from Memphis, see Mart 7.99.1-2: Sic placidum uideas semper, Crispine, Tonantem/nec te Roma minus quam tua Memphis amet.

80 Others have shown Juvenal’s dependence on this kind of moral shorthand when discussing food (Hudson 1989) and the city/country dichotomy (Braund 1989b), but I wish to assert that this process is particularly at play in Juvenal’s visual constructions.

81 The context of this phrase in Satire 11 is significant, for the castanets are evoked as representative of salacious Spanish dancers that Juvenal won’t have at his “modest” dinner, but that he will include in his satiric cena-poem. 24 frueris mali, 5.153)82 or the denigration of poetic works by being included in an auction catalog alongside “wine-jugs,” “cupboards,” and the like (oenophorum, tripedes, armaria, cistas,/ Alcithoen Pacci, Thebas et Terea Fasti, 7.11-2). There is an element of “exposure” in the satirical gaze that Juvenal casts on these objects, as if he is salvaging moral cargo sunk deep in his objects’ character and fishing it out for us to see.83

This notion of “exposure” is even more prominent in Juvenal’s “dramatizing” patterns, where Juvenal stages a scene for his satiric audience, giving at least a vaguely concrete mise-en-scène and props.84 These scenes can be long (the sportula scene at 1.95-

126, the concilium principis at 4.73-136; the entirety of Satire 9) and can include passages of direct speech or dialogue; but the idea of dramatization can also encompass microscenes compressed into a single line or less. We should conceptualize not just fully

“dramatic” scenes but also tableaux vivants or, coming back to the realm of visual arts,

“sequential art,” where Juvenal jumps from panel to panel in an effort to create a fully textured satiric scene.85 Under this concept, one could fit the snapshots of jobs which

Umbricius cannot stoop to in degraded Rome ([vivant] quis facile est aedem conducere, flumina, portus,/ siccandam eluviem, portandum ad busta cadaver,/ et praebere caput domina venale sub hasta, 3.31-33) or the perjurer counter-suing his accuser (tunc te sacra

82 For more on food’s programmatic place in satire, see Gowers 1993: 211-19 on Sat. 5 in particular.

83 Cf. Witke 1970: Juvenal “conceives of the inner state as static. With him, outward description of activity is the primary access to inner motivation” (151). Jenkyns 1982: 205-219 has perhaps given the best exposition of how Juvenal uses objects in his satire, describing both his “literalism” (his denigration through description of objects “as they are”) and his “fancy” (his animation of objects to give lively comment).

84 Keane 2006: 30 discusses how Juvenal can be thought to unite 2 previous satiric modes, the rhetoric of “exposure” that Horace conceives for Lucilius of “unmasking” hidden faults (cf. detrahere et pellem, nitidus qua quisque per ora/ cederet, introrsum turpis, H.S.2.1.64-65) and “Horace’s own method of putting targets on a metaphorical stage—namely, the fictional vignettes of his satire.”

85 The term “sequential art” was coined by Michael Eisner in his groundbreaking work on the “poetics” of 20th century comics, Comics and Sequential Art (Eisner 1985). 25 ad delubra vocantem/ praecedit, trahere immo ultro ac vexare paratus, 13.107-8).

Although the cultural significance of the stage is an important undercurrent in deploying this technique, as Catherine Keane has thoroughly shown,86 for our purposes, the significance of the method is its structural shape, where action (determined by writer- director Juvenal) is depicted externally, to be interpreted by the viewer-reader.87

Finally, Juvenal can use significant names as metonymizing substitutes, either from mythology or from literature (especially Martial) or from history, sometimes with ironic force.88 The logic of the deployment of names is the same as in the more obviously visual modes of concretization and dramatization; the name is to be recognized as having a specific reference which does not need explanation. At the outset of Satire 5, Juvenal compares Trebius, his addressee, to two famous scurrae associated with Maecenas and

Augustus, Sarmentus and Gabba, (si potes illa pati quae nec Sarmentus iniquas/ Caesaris ad mensas nec vilis Gabba tulisset, 5.3-4),89 thus setting up the devastating climax: the stingy patron Virro turns Trebius into a fine show indeed (quae comoedia, mimus/ quis

86 Keane 2003: 258-63 gives a review of Roman attitudes towards the theater and spectacle in Juvenal. Keane 2006: 28-41 more fully considers the ideological role of “theater” in Roman society (both as institution and as metaphor) and how Juvenal self-consciously implicates himself into those structures; cf. Knoche’s description of a Juvenalian world where everything has been turned into Bühnenspiel (519). For all the sophistication of her location of Juvenal in the nexus of the paradoxical attitudes towards the theater, she does not fully consider the structural possibilities of theatrical depiction in Juvenal. Imagining Juvenal as theater opens up possibilities for metatheatrical gestures concerning the elision between satirist-subject and satiric-object, which I will explore more fully below.

87 Schmitz 2000: 20-34 is an excellent account of Juvenal’s visualizing processes, which she terms his “Staging of Reality” (Inszenierung der Wirklichkeit), which transforms the satiric audience into a “spectating reader” (zuschauend Leser, 21).

88 Jones 2007: 48-75 (56-60 on Juvenal) gives the best account of names as used in the satirical poets (among whom he classes Martial and Catullus). He argues that Juvenal’s mixture of sources for his exempla is a programmatic gesture, signifying the mixed nature of Juvenal’s satire as much as his play with linguistic registers.

89 Sarmentus, in fact, appears in the flesh Horace in a degraded Battle of the Bards: nunc mihi paucis Sarmenti scurrae pugnam Messique Cicirri,/ Musa, velim memores… (H.S.1.5.51-53); For Gabba, see Martial 10.101. 26 melior plorante gula, 5.157-58).90 However when one views the thorny problem of

Juvenal’s use of names in light of the closing lines of Satire 1, where he all but invalidates any notion of true onomasti komoedein for his satire, the issue of the references of names become unusually complex.91

As one can see from the passage from Satire 1, these techniques are usually intertwined within a single passage in Juvenal. Two further examples, drawn them from later books of Juvenal, will test the truism that Juvenal’s visual presentation grows dimmer later in his corpus.92 The first, taken from Satire 7, on the wretched place of intellectuals in Rome, is a snapshot of a hapless causidicus pleading his case in Juvenal’s mythological burlesque and earning a pitiful reward for his efforts:

consedere duces, surgis tu pallidulus Aiax 115 dicturus dubia pro libertate bubulco iudice. rumpe miser tensum iecur, ut tibi lasso figantur virides, scalarum gloria, palmae. quod vocis pretium? siccus petasunculus et vas pelamydum aut veteres, Maurorum epimenia, bulbi 120 aut vinum Tiberi devectum, quinque lagonae. (7.115-121)

The “generals” sit down, and you rise, a translucent Ajax, in order to address some oxherd judge on behalf of dubious liberty. Burst your strained liver, so that green palms of victory can be rigged up for you in your exhaustion, the glory of the walk-up! And your reward for your advocacy? A dry little ham-bone and a jar of tuna-fish or old onions,

90 Baumert 1989: 738 similarly argues that these procedures can be combined: “Leading-before-the-eyes (Vor-Augen-Führen) can go from a judgmental naming and an amusing display to a depiction in which the contradiction in the nature of things is revealed.”

91 “I will undertake what is allowed against those whose ashes are covered by the Via Flaminia and Via Latina” (experiar quid concedatur in illos/ quorum Flaminia tegitur cinis atque Latina). The question of what the names of the dead represent, especially when called upon as if they were contemporaries, remains vexed: are they allegorical attacks on the present, where the named figures represent particular contemporary figures? Are they stand-ins or paradigms, ad vitium replacing ad hominem attacks (e.g. Fredericksmayer 1991: 797)? The indeterminancy of the reference may be the entire point, but my concern is about the structure of the reference: it talks as if it is naming something and, in naming, confers meaning (in the form of judgment or mockery), so the original referent itself is somewhat immaterial.

92 Cf. Baumert 1989: 741n.35 and 743; Henderson 1997: 139 n.38. I maintain that Juvenal’s “vision” and its concomitant concerns with representation is used throughout the corpus, as even the more purely discursive satires (Satire 13 being the most) can still reflect some of the mimetic concerns in the subtle psychological turns which the speaker makes. 27

rations for the Maurians, or some wine sent downstream from the Tiber (send it back!)— five jars to have (when you’re having more than one).

Juvenal first gives us a brief scenic glimpse of this “rather pallid” Ajax (pallidulus Ajax

115) re-enacting a perverted version of the Iudicium Armorum from Ovid’s

Metamorphoses93 and “glorying” in his scanty prize, fastening branches to the stairs to his garret (117-18). There is a double layer to the drama of the first tableau (in court):

Juvenal’s use of the mythological name (as well as the allusion to Ovid’s epic) to recast the trial as re-enactment of a noble scene from Greek mythology smashes headlong into the real nature of the court, syntactically delayed until we meet the “oxherd judge”

(bubulco/ iudice, 116-17). Further he breaks down the lawyer’s fee into a series of food items, which he then degrades, to show the true “value” of the lawyer’s efforts: not just a ham, but a “dry hamlette” (siccus petasunculus, 119) or cheap jug-wine instead of imported fineries—but at least he gets a lot of it! (quinque lagonae, 121). This series of images and metonymies effectively function as comment, with its full significance coalescing in the “viewer’s” mind with little comment from Juvenal needed.

In the middle of Satire 14, concerning the transmission of greed along genealogical lines, Juvenal contrasts his portrayal of the simplicity of ancient Rome with a vivid picture of a contemporary father’s aspirations for his son:

haec illi veteres praecepta minoribus; at nunc post finem autumni media de nocte supinum 190 clamosus iuvenem pater excitat: 'accipe ceras, scribe, puer, vigila, causas age, perlege rubras maiorum leges; aut vitem posce libello, sed caput intactum buxo narisque pilosas adnotet et grandes miretur Laelius alas; 195 dirue Maurorum attegias, castella Brigantum, ut locupletem aquilam tibi sexagesimus annus

93 Cf. Ovid Met.13.1-2. Consedere duces et vulgi stante corona/ surgit ad hos clipei dominus septemplicis Aiax... 28

adferat; aut, longos castrorum ferre labores si piget et trepidum soluunt tibi cornua ventrem cum lituis audita… 200 (14.189-200)

These were the precepts those outdated men used to hand down to children; but nowadays at the end of autumn in the middle of the night a bellowing father shakes awake the son, lying on his back: “Here, take these wax tablets! Write, boy, stay up all night! Plead cases, read the red-letter laws of our ancestors; or demand a centurion’s staff with a letter of recommendation, but make sure Laelius takes note of your head, unblemished by comb, and your hairy nostrils and is impressed by your huge armpits; destroy the Moors’ tents, the strongholds of the Britains, so your sixtieth year provides you with a rich senior position, the standard! No? If you loathe the thought of tolerating the long labors of the camp and the clarions and claxons let slip of the “dogs” of your nervous belly when you hear them…

Here, the dramatic introduction of the father’s speech is even more pronounced: we are given a dramatic occasion and see him vigorously shake his son awake and pelt him with a long harangue about ambition. Each of the occupations listed in the speech (causidicus, soldier, and, not quoted from later in his speech, merchant) is given some visualizing touch, though the most elaborate concerns soldiery. Besides using geographical names which stretch across the Empire (from North Africa to Northern Britain) to generate an image of his future career careening across Europe, he evokes the name of a putative superior (Laelius) to promote his petition, whose name might be thought to evoke old

Romanitas.94 Even more vivid are the father’s objectifications of military life into, at the bodily level, unkempt appearance and “huge armpits” (caput intactum buxo narisque pilosas…grandes…alas, 194-5) and, at the material level, blaring horns (cornua…cum lituis, 199-200). Finally, one must note how the messiness which the father projects onto his son is meaningful only if it is seen by Laelius (adnotet…miretur Laelius, 195).

94 Ferguson 1987: 131 identifies the name with C. Laelius, son of C. Laelius, a friend of Scipio Aemelianus with some military and political success, though he states flatly, “He is here simply the type of the man who will foster his subordinate’s future.” 29

We can never fully disentangle language and image in Juvenal,95 but this exposition shows how much Juvenal turns his audience/readership into viewers96 and how he deploys and engages with cultural practices of envisioning in a specifically satirical context. Though turning his readership into viewers has been explored from psychoanalytic perspectives (where “viewer” becomes “voyeur”),97 this study is more concerned with the following question: what are we “looking” at when we read Juvenal?

As I will argue, the answer is far from straightforward.

D. What Are We Looking At? Meaning and Representation in Juvenal’s World

How then might we describe Juvenal’s world? To call it “chaotic,” while certainly true, does not quite precisely delineate the problem. In Juvenal’s world, the systems of meaning have gone haywire: women are becoming men (esp. Satire 6: see Chapter 4), men are becoming women (esp. Satire 2: see Chapter 1), Greeks are becoming Romans and Romans Greeks (Sat. 3: non possum ferre, Quirites,/ Graecam Urbem, 3.60-1). The vulgar are becoming wealthy, the wealthy are becoming vulgar (Sat 8: see Chapter 2), while the talented and deserving stay poor (see above on Crispinus; Sat. 7 and, ironically,

95 For the most part throughout this study, I will not be discussing the rhetoric of Juvenal’s techniques except in the ways that his verbal texture can self-consciously play with his world construction (cf. Ch 4, section B on 6.479-85).

96 Since the visual operation comes to fruition in the imagination of his reader, the point remains whether Juvenal imagines his addressee as an audience (at a recitatio) or as a readership. Each situation would come with its own advantages: an audience would allow for more dramatic play by the speaker in any given performance, while reading creates a more complete analogy between visual world and visual text.

97 Gunderson 2005 and Miller 2007 are the fullest explorations of these impulses; Braund and Rachske 2002 similarly argue that Juvenal’s spectacle turns his audience into voyeurs (69); Cf. Elsner 2007: 178- 179 who argues for the structural similarities created by Seneca’s text between the reader and the onanistic voyeurism of Hostrius Quadra from Seneca’s Natural Quaestiones (1.16), who positioned distorted mirrors so that he could watch himself penetrate and be penetrated. See Ch. 2, n. 72. 30

Sat. 9). Even as Juvenal’s later satires are less closely tied to the social milieu of Rome and his issues are abstracted into a more universal moral discussions, the problem remains: men have turned ambition into pure greed and frugality into miserliness (Sat.

14), they misunderstand the correct sources and directions for anger (Sat. 13),98 the meaning of friendship (Sat. 12), in fact, the meaning of everything (Sat. 10: see Chapter

3).

A few close readings will demonstrate how Juvenal discusses this change of value and the slipperiness of meaning in various ways in his text. One particularly rich locus for these notions is in the decaying relationships between patrons and clients that Juvenal portrays, particularly in his first and third books of Satires. It has been argued, in fact, that the idea of the broken system of amicitia provides an over-arching structure to the entirety of book 1.99 Indeed, it appears as the final word of the book:

ille sapit, qui te sic utitur. omnia ferre 170 si potes, et debes. pulsandum vertice raso praebebis quandoque caput nec dura timebis flagra pati, his epulis et tali dignus amico. (5.170-73)

He’s the smart one, the one who takes advantage of you this way. If you can endure anything, you deserve to. And so you will provide your head—shaved on top—to be struck whenever and you won’t shrink back from suffering hard thwacks. You deserve these banquets and this sort of “friend.”

The lines function to complete the conversion, enacted over the satire, of Juvenal’s attitude towards his addressee Trebius, for whom he had originally concocted the

98 See especially Braund 1997 and Fredericks 1971b for the subtle psychological “narrative” of anger in the Satire.

99 Cloud and Braund 1982; LaFleur 1979.

31 imaginary cena of Satire 5 as an exemplum for Trebius to avoid in its foulness.100 Here, though, he unveils his contempt for Virrones and Trebii alike in the final five words. The irony is thick, for Juvenal uses amicus to demonstrate simultaneously what “friendship” has become in the world of Juvenal and how one would correctly denote that relationship.

As Richard LaFleur has shown, the notion of perverted amicitia runs throughout the world of Book 1, from the abject flattery of Domitian’s courtiers, “whom he actually hated,” and whose “friendship” was actually fear, barely disguised (ergo in consilium proceres, quos oderat ille,/ in quorum facie miserae magnaeque sedebat/ pallor amicitiae,

4.73-75), to the greedy miser, whose gruesome death is welcomed by “friends” with open arms (ducitur iratis plaudendum funus amicis, 1.146). Instances of amicus and its cognates point both to the perversion of the patron-client relationship and how this perversion has transformed the meaning of the word itself.101

This social relationship of stingy patron-marginalized client is portrayed again, in even more ironic terms, in Satire 9.102 The infamous Naevolus, explaining to Juvenal the reason for his unkempt appearance (vultus gravis, horrida siccae, silva comae,/ nullus tota nitor in cute…sed fruticante pilo neglecta et squalida crura, 9.12-3, 15), discusses that his patron Virro, to whom Naevolus prostitutes himself as stud for patron and his wife, has stiffed him. Reflecting the irony of the grotesque patron-client relationship of

100 There is a particularly rich banquet of readings of Sat. 5, to which I am certainly indebted but which I here intend to put to more abstract purposes: Morford 1977; Freudenburg 2001: 264-77; Keane 2006: 30-1; Gowers 1993: 211-19; and Braund 1996a’s commentary (275-308).

101 Anderson 1982: 201 looks at a similar string of “positive” terms of moral valuation used ironically in Sat. 1, e.g. qui testamenta merentur/ noctibus, in caelum quos evehit optima summi/ nunc via processus (1.36-8)

102 For more on Satire 9, see especially Braund 1988: 130-77, Plaza 2006: 159-66, Henderson 1999: 199- 200 (on Naevolus), Tennant 2003, and the recent metapoetic discussion of Naevolus as stand-in for Juvenal at Rosen 2008: 223-35. 32

Bk. 1 taken to a more absurd level, Naevolus’ description of himself as “dedicated and devoted client” comes in the context of his mercenary “duty” of breeding with his patron’s wife: “Fine, so you can pretend and ignore my other services, but how much is it worth to you that, were I not a dedicated and devoted client to you, your wife would still be a virgin?” (verum, ut dissimules, ut mittas cetera, quanto/ metiris pretio quod,/ ni tibi deditus essem/ devotusque cliens, uxor tua virgo maneret?, 9.70-2). When Naevolus earlier describes Virro as a mollis avarus, the patron himself represents a kind of syntactical monstrum (quod tamen ulterius monstrum quam mollis avarus, 9.38), for it is impossible by text alone to distinguish modifier and modified, essential trait and accidental qualifier. Is he a greedy patron who also happens to be a pathic, or a pathic who, in addition to being penetrable, is miserly? This is brought out a few lines later by a grotesque hendiadys, computat et cevet (9.40), where the full force of juxtaposition comes in envisioning the acts as simultaneous. Even as he showers disdain on Virro for his “stinginess” and his “disease” (iam nec morbo donare paratis?, 9.49), Naevolus represents the corrupt system in two ways, both describing it and acting as a corrupt participant inside of it.

Nor is this problem of meaning restricted merely to social constructions. In Satire

15, the Egyptians mistake animals for humans in two diametrically opposite ways, overly abstemious vegetarianism and savage cannibalism:

porrum et caepe nefas violare et frangere morsu (o sanctas gentes, quibus haec nascuntur in hortis 10 numina!), lanatis animalibus abstinet omnis mensa, nefas illic fetum iugulare capellae: carnibus humanis vesci licet. (15.9-13)

It is a crime to ravage and crack with your bite leeks and onions (O sacred races, for whom these divinities are brought to life in their gardens!), every table abstains from

33

wooly creatures, and it is an unspeakable crime there to sacrifice a kid’s offspring: it is permitted, however, to dine on human flesh!

Such a perverted people these are that they cannot tell the difference between what to eat and what not to! Nor are they consistent with their very natures, for despite their dinky clay Nile-boats, this “useless mob” displays the ferocity not even demonstrated by the

Britons or Germans (qua nec terribiles Cimbri nec Brittones umquam/ Sauromataeque truces aut inmanes Agathyrsi,/ hac saeuit rabie inbelle et inutile uolgus/ paruula fictilibus solitum dare uela phaselis/ et breuibus pictae remis incumbere testae, 15.124-

28).103

Yet Juvenal can be shown, like his satirical objects, to be participating self- consciously in the same malfunction of discourse. As with Naevolus above, Juvenal’s deployment of verbal irony “represents” destabilization in two ways. The ironic deployment of words like amicitia and amicus or morbus (9.49) not only portrays the destabilization of traditional meaning, it participates in it, for Juvenal uses the old term in its new warped connotation. He uses a corrupt sign-system against itself. Similarly, when he follows the declaration above (15.9-13) with a long excursus on its credibility (15.13-

31), as opposed to the mythical travelers’ tales of Odysseus related to the court of the

Phaeacians without a witness,104 it actually performs the opposite, raising concerns about the veracity of his fabula.

Note that this destabilization does not come at the level of mere content, though that will have its place in our analysis. It’s not simply that Juvenal “contradicts” himself

103 See Schmitz 2000: 43.

104 Juvenal is playing on a discourse between truth and fiction already inaugurated in Homer himself, when he says that his characters tells “many lies which sound like the truth,” (ἴσκε ψεύδεα πολλὰ λέγων ἐτύμοισιν ὁμοῖα, Hom. Od. 19.203) and thematized by Hesiod in the Initiation by the Muses at the opening to the Theogony (ἴδμεν ψεύδεα πολλὰ λέγειν ἐτύμοισιν ὁμοῖα,/ ἴδμεν δ᾽, εὖτ᾽ ἐθέλωμεν, ἀληθέα γηρύσασθαι, Theo. 27-8). 34

(cf. the mockery of vegetarianism above is at odds with the use of Pythagorean vegetarianism as a representative of humanitas at 15.169-74).105 Instead, what is so striking about Juvenal’s undermining of value and meaning is that it operates at the level of mechanics, that is, how Juvenal’s satire constructs meaning. As this study will examine in more detail in Chapters 1-3, if words and images in his world no longer have their traditional valence, what effect does that have on this construction of that world?

What exactly is Juvenal portraying?

When Juvenal mechanically designs his text like a visual object, Juvenal necessarily evokes the same problems of interpretation that visuality and its textual representations have evoked in other Roman literary productions. The examples above are all explicitly analogized to visual performance: the lines on amicitia in Sat. 5 are situated inside a comparison which frames Trebius’ “performance” at the dinner as the fulfilling the role of the stupidus character in a mime, marked by his shaved head.106

Similarly, Sat. 9 is Juvenal’s only truly dramatic satire, with nothing falling outside of the mouths of the dramatic actors.107 Finally, the story of cannibalism in Satire 15 is explicitly compared to a tragedy (15.29-31), unlocking the dramatic possibilities of the extended narration of the scene.108 Juvenal’s text might be analogized to an enormous ekphrasis of Rome, for his text purports to a literary representation of “real” visual

105 See Anderson 1985 and Singleton 1983 and the reply of Tennant 1995 for how to interpret this clash. This kind of inconsistency is not peculiar to Juvenal: Roller 1996 gives an outstanding reading of how competing ethical discourses operate in Lucan, including in the mouth of the poet; O’Hara 2007 gives a synoptic account of inconsistent voices in Roman epic from Lucretius to Lucan.

106 Vertice raso; see RE s.v. Mimos 1748.22.

107 For the relationship of Satire 9 to dramatic forms like mime and Atellan farce and its performability, see Braund 1988: 170-77.

108 Pace Schmitz 2000: 42-44, who argues that the reference to tragedy, cunctis graviora coturnis (15.29), refers strictly to the outsized content of the satire. 35 phenomena which exist outside of the confines of that description.109 Thus, as with more

“traditional” ekphrases, the evocation of vision becomes “itself a potential literary metaphor for reading.”110 As Jaś‎ Elsner has described, literary ekphrases are necessarily paradoxical in their representational strategies, for they both enable our view (“in helping the viewers it is training to see”) and obstruct it (“in the veil of words with which it screens and obscures the purported visual object”).111 Certainly what Elsner says of the reader confronted with the tapestry of Ariadne’s lament in Catullus 64 can be mapped onto Juvenal’s audience as well: the reader is figured as an extratextual viewer, “whose access to this picture is always vicariously through its description, and whose response to the subject of the description is continuously focalized through [Ariadne’s] lament.”112

Similarly, the famous ekphrasis of the events of Troy at Juno’s temple in Carthage, where

Vergil seamlessly intertwines Aeneas’ responses to the painting with the description of the painting, stresses that there is more than one way to read symbols, even within a historicist framework.113

109 The “reality” of the object is certainly at play in epic narrative, for neither the Shield of Achilles/Aeneas nor the tapestry at the wedding of Peleus and Thetis “really” exist, though they of course exist for the actors within the narrative (i.e. in the fictional world of epic). See below for more on how this idea of fictional world might be thought to apply to Juvenal. Fowler 2000 offers an excellent summary of some of the issues of ekphrasis, as well as accompanying bibliography; see also, more recently, the volume of Classical Philology co-edited by Jaś Elsner and Shadi Bartsch with articles on the theoretical and practical issues of ekphrasis (Bartsch and Elsner 2007).

110 Elsner 2007: 68; at 67-109, he examines more fully the mechanics of the gaze in ekphrases of Catullus and Vergil and how they ignite interpretive subjectivities, comparing them to visual representations of the gaze in wall painting at Pompeii.

111 Elsner 2007: 68.

112 Elsner 2007: 70.

113 Fowler, 2000: 81; see Fowler 2000: 77 n. 40 for further bibliography of the scene. 36

Scholars have long acknowledged Juvenal’s “selectivity” and “exaggeration”114 and one of the most positive developments of the persona approach is that it no longer made Juvenal a transparent source for social history.115 Indeed, if one imagines the drama of Juvenal’s text as mechanical, rather than metaphorical, we might even have moments of metatheatricality in Juvenal, moments where Juvenal lets the scripted nature of his performance show out.116 In the famous sportula scene in Satire 1, Juvenal reveals the strings of his marionettes when he has a rich freedman vent his frustration while waiting for his dole:

sed libertinus prior est. 'prior' inquit 'ego adsum. cur timeam dubitemve locum defendere, quamvis natus ad Euphraten, molles quod in aure fenestrae arguerint, licet ipse negem? sed quinque tabernae 105 quadringenta parant. quid confert purpura maior optandum, si Laurenti custodit in agro conductas Corvinus ovis, ego possideo plus Pallante et Licinis?' expectent ergo tribuni, vincant divitiae,… 110 (1.102-110)

But the freedman is first. “I am first,” he says, “Why should I be afraid or hestitate to defend my spot, even if I was born at the Euphrates—which these soft windows in my ear attest to, though I myself deny it? But five inns provide 400,000. What desirable thing does the higher-tiered purple provide, if Corvinus guards hired sheep in a Laurentine field, while I have more than Pallas and Liciniuses?’ So let the tributes keep waiting, let wealth win out…

114 E.g. my emphasis in the quote of Joachim Classen above or the description in Braund 1989 of Juvenal’s construction of Rome through a technique of “distortion by suppression and omission of ordinary, everyday, and uninteresting aspects of life in the city and by exaggeration of the extraordinary, colorful, and fascinating aspects of life in the city” (25).

115 He is still, however, often read as an example of “ideologies,” particularly regarding his views on gender and class (see above), though this approach requires the same rhetoric of “reality” as looking for “social” truths, for it attempts to “see through” the text to find some kind of encoded “reality,” the rhetorical clause where “something stands only for itself, seemingly circumscribed…and we say that something is something, the ‘be-all and end-all.’” (Kennedy 1993, 9). Kennedy 1993: 1-23, reviewing the conflict between postmodern textuality and historicism in the context of reading Roman elegy, is a good reminder of the impossibility of closure in our texts and our readings as critics, though he models an alternative reading, focusing on Roman elegy, of how to read texts as performing their own contexts.

116 See Postlewait and Davis 2003, focusing on properly dramatic texts, for the full range of the meanings of “theatricality,” which can roughly refer to the ways real life might impinge on the theater or vice versa. 37

In a feature which Christine Schmitz has termed “speech inconsistent with character”

(charakterinkonsistentes Sprechen), she argues that Juvenal’s text sacrifices its mimetic authenticity to make satirical point, because the freedman never would have called himself mollis (104).117 Nor would the freedman likely referred to his ear-piercing as a

“window” (fenestrae, 104), though Juvenal might. This kind of moment, much more so than previous discussions about Juvenal’s “voice,” calls into question the nature of

Juvenal’s satirical objects and their correspondence with “reality.” One perhaps thinks of the reflections on the role of artistic creator in the apologia of sultry Jessica Rabbit from

Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988): “I’m not bad. I’m just drawn that way.”118

Nor is this not an idle reference, as that film is expressly set in a world whose actors must often confront the logical consequences of a fantastical proposition: what would happen if the world of cartoons were to intersect with the world of “reality”?119

Despite recognizing the construction of Juvenal’s text, too seldom do we grapple with the issues at play in Juvenal’s representative discourse. We can assert that satire must have some kind of correspondence with reality to have been meaningful to its readers,120 but how do we establish what his representative value might be?

We should think of Juvenal’s text as self-consciously locating itself somewhere between these two kinds of mimetic aesthetics established above. It is clear that Juvenal’s

117 Schmitz 2000: 31-34.

118 Cf. Freudenburg 2005a: 82, on the how the myth of epic, monstrous vice in Juvenal’s satire creates the necessity of his characters, who are, to use dramatic metaphors, “players acting out pre-assigned roles in a highly orchestrated discourse that requires them to be silly and nefarious and greedy, and so on, so that the satirist might arrive on the scene.”

119 Eco 1990: 69, in his survey of possible-world modality and fiction, briefly considers how this film plays with the possibilities of fictional worlds overlapping.

120 Most powerfully stated by Kroll 1988: 92 (quoted by Williams 2010: 425 n.2): Immerhin hätten ihre unzählingen Anspielungen kein Verständnis gefunden, wenn die Sache nicht allgemein verbreitet gewesen ware. 38 text is not “naturalistic” in its focus on the grotesque, the out-sized, the ludicrous. But to declare Juvenal’s universe a mere fictional one, whose correspondence to the real world is tenuous,121 debases not only the charge of its ideological content in 2nd century Rome and 21st century America but the value of reading it at all. Yes, Juvenal is good show, but surely there is something more to it? What I will argue in the following chapters is that

Juvenal constructs his text as a “debased” form of representation, whose internal mechanisms for depicting the world of “Rome” are compromised by the influence of

Rome on itself. Juvenal is, indeed, a “mirror of degradation,” but Juvenal’s text is not a

“direct transcription of scene[s] from everyday life.”122 Rather, to extend the metaphor of the mirror in a different way, Juvenal’s text is indeed an accurate “reflection” of its time, for it enacts the problems of meaning and value which Juvenal identifies in Rome. I will argue that the implication and problematization which John Henderson identifies as naturally occuring in comic and satiric texts in Rome applies not only to its ambivalent ideological stance but to its poetological one.123

121 Doležel 1988: 475-480 reviews the development of mimetic orientations towards the correspondence between narrative fiction and “reality,” dismissing 3 different conceptions in turn. Do particulars in a fictional work correspond to really existing people? Do they correspond to a more universal conception, instantiated in a text by particular characters (Trimalchio and Fortunata in the Satyricon representing some kind of “truth” about contemporary freedman; cf. Auerbach 1953: 24-49)? If we posit the existence of a fictional world, are we required to consider it to have prior existence? (For a crisp statement of this problem of fictional worlds, see Leithauser 2012: is a text a “box” which contains characters’ lives in their entirety or a “keyhole” through which the reader catches a passing glance into another world?). Doležel eventually discusses (481-493) how the use of “possible-world modalities” (a logical mode of thought where our actual existence is posited as only one occurrence from an infinity of possible occurences) might be developed to answer some of these questions such that a fictional world can take account of the real world but retains its fictional particularity (more fully fleshed out in Doležel 1998). This theory, though expressly oriented towards “constructional” fictional narratives (of which Juvenal is not at all a narrative and a complicated version of “fiction”) rather than “descriptive texts,” can still be useful in creating a model for interpreting Juvenal because it allows for a correspondence while not requiring it. See Eco 1990: 64-82 for more on the usefulness of “possible-worlds” semantics in reading fictional narratives.

122 Witke 1970: 120; 115.

123 Cf. Henderson 1999: “In every case, I shall claim, the Latin texts smudge substantial lines of cultural power. And they all find a branch to sit on while they gleefully saw it through” (ix). 39

Thus, the textual landscape (“Rome”) that Juvenal will recreate in verse for the reader will be shown to correspond to the spectacle which Juvenal shows himself confronted with (Rome). As Juvenal looks at Rome, so we will look at “Rome” (i.e.

Juvenal’s text). His method will not be exclusively visual, but it will depend on the logic of the visual, of correspondence between satiric sign A and “Roman” phenomenon B. If

Rome to Juvenal has become a spectacle where nothing is as it seems, the most piquant way to represent that crisis is to attack the apparatuses of his own representative project.

Juvenal will re-enact his dilemma in his satire and, by projecting that problem onto the reader, challenge the reader with an analogously complicated interpretive situation. The mechanics of visuality in Juvenal do provide a model of interpretation; but, unlike visual reading in, e.g., Livy,124 Juvenal’s argument is that this model will necessarily be debased by its environment.125 Though it is difficult not to write satire in Rome (1.30), this does not mean it is not difficult to write satire in Rome.

In Chapters 1-3, I will survey three moments in Juvenal’s corpus where the metapoetic difficulties of Juvenal’s enterprise of representing Rome intertwine explicitly with the satirical topics at hand. At the outset of Satires 2, 8, and 10, he expressly confronts some issue of meaning or definition, which in turn becomes the point of departure for the rest of the satire. In each of these three satires, there is similar structural procedure: Juvenal will set a watchword for Roman vice or degeneration or folly early in

124 Chaplin 2000, esp. 73-106; Feldherr 1998: 11.

125 Cf. Henderson 1989: 195n.4 on the relationship between language as depicted in the principate and used in Tacitus’ Annales: “Already in their 1st chapter, Annals indissolubly associate the fraud and deception suavely tooled into the control of society through violence done to language with the falsification and disfigurement of historiography. ‘Tacitus’ is not silent on the doublebind knotted in his writing, though, as with the declamatory writers, most obviously Juvenal, readers are ill-advised to search his work for the editorial comment, the emotional outburst, the forced interpretation which betrays the historian’s true- sincere-inner-underlying deep ‘view,’ so do not expect to catch him with his rhetorical trousers down, his work is ironized beyond anything so crude.” 40 the satire (2.8, 8.20, 10.2-4) which will prove to open up meaningful avenues of reading for the rest of the poem when redirected back onto the logic of Juvenal’s text. For each of these satires, I will give a close, consecutive reading of the whole satire, in order to plot the emergence of the paradox whereby the satirical means which he uses to discuss the main topic of the satire begins to be woven self-destructively into that satire’s content.

The “form” will thus come to represent the content, in all its contradictions and complications. I have chosen both early and later satires (though I have not accounted for

Book 5 in depth) to demonstrate an underlying concern with processes of meaning throughout Juvenal’s oeuvre, despite great changes in tone and rhetoric.

The world of gender transgression in Satire 2 could be politely described as “a wretched hive of scum and villainy.” Juvenal initially takes aim at the most notorious offenders, those who exhibit virtue in their deportment while secretly reveling in sexual deviance. In my first chapter, “A Panopticon of Vice: The Rhetoric of Exposure in

Juvenal 2,” I will argue that Juvenal’s initial advice to be suspicious of external appearance (frontis nulla fides, 2.8) has destabilizing consequences when juxtaposed with the strongly visualized mechanics of his satire. I will argue that Satire 2 displays in each of its objects of attack some kind of contradiction between internal and external, emblematic of a larger chaos of sexual reference; yet, as I will also show, the satire itself depends on a logic of coherent correspondence in order for that satirical attack to be meaningful.

In Satire 8, as Juvenal moves away from the intensely visualized mode of Satire 2, his final object of discussion becomes similarly discursive. Satire 8 interrogates the true meaning of “nobility” in light of the decadence of modern nobles, arriving early at the

41 maxim that “virtue is the one and only nobility” (nobilitas sola est atque unica virtus,

8.20). Yet, as I will argue in my second chapter, “The Mirage of “Nobility”: Reference and Negotiation in Juvenal 8,” Juvenal’s mocking discourse will rely on the essential connection between birth and status even as it tries to disengage them and re-hinge status to virtue. Juvenal will insinuate that birth should be dispensed with as a meaningful criterion for judgment by showing various ways in which nobles from both recent and distant past dissolved the essential connection between birth and virtue or muddied the boundaries between high and low status. Yet his satirical techniques, particularly in their reliance on exemplary names to stand for a particular brand of virtue or vice, must rely on the fixity of reference. His intimations about the value of birth thus threaten to turn his satire into a self-negating discourse.

Satire 10 begins by invoking a world where men have difficulty distinguishing

(dinoscere, 10.2) true goods from false through the fog of misconception (erroris nebula,

10.4). This misunderstanding leads men to mistakenly desire apparent goods which lead only to their own destruction. Juvenal sets out to correct those impressions. I will argue in my third chapter, “Laughter and Myopia: The Worldview of Juvenal 10,” that this initial evocation of “mistaken” objects of desire, in turn, sparks a subtle critique of the satirical perspectivizing which Juvenal embarks upon by insinuating himself into the world of the satire through the stand-in satirist Democritus. The centrifugal irony of the situations that

Juvenal will describe often turns out to run counter to the finality of the meaning he tries to impose on those situations. Notions of “vision” in Satire 10 will be both mechanical

(the reliance on the logic of self-affirming appearance) and metaphorical (the self- conscious clash of cognitions of Rome). The weakness of the attempt to resolve the

42 satire’s difficulty in the final 20 lines will only serve to underscore the contingency of the satirical view Juvenal has adopted.

Satires 2, 8, and 10 come together, then, to form a kind of “shadow” or “anti-

”program in Juvenal’s satires, the goal of which is to expose to the reader fissures and contradictions in Juvenal’s discourse. Juvenal’s satires do indeed mean what they say, but they can also show how “meaning” what you “say” is more slippery business than he initially claims. The reader of Juvenal’s satire is saddled with the same interpretative burden that Juvenal depicts himself lugging around Rome. In my final chapter, “The

Devils Inside: Female Threats to Roman Satire in Juvenal 6,” I wish to offer a case-study demonstrating how this “anti-program” may reveal the same interpretative crisis in a satire that does not explicitly activate issues of meaning in the same way as Satires 2, 8, and 10. In the overwhelming blunderbuss of Satire 6, Juvenal charts the degeneration of

Roman women from chaste (though indelicate) prehistoric women (6.1-20) to the honest

Roman matron of yesteryear (6.286-291) and culminating in the tragic murderesses of today (6.634-661). Many of the aspects he will deplore in Roman women (gender and social transgression, deception, etc.) will be shown to have a metapoetic significance to his own project, revealed through, and reflected in, the satirical means by which he identifies those faults. I offer a new reading of the final section of the Satire 6 which argues that the notoriously evasive programmatic discussion at 6.634-38 (fingimus haec altum…) is an apocalyptic dovetailing of the social and poetological concerns of the satire The end of poem thus reveals how his satirical perspective has been indelibly

“corrupted” by the panoply of vicious women it has just finished envisioning.

43

After a brief conclusion, I will examine some modern texts in order to chart how

Juvenal’s self-consuming discourse has unexpected analogues in recent metafictional literature. This appendix will survey three 20th century novels (Don Delillo’s White Noise,

Paul Auster’s City of Glass, and Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch) to show how aspects of contemporary literary technique can be thought analogous to Juvenal, not only in their experimental mechanics, but also in their representational strategies.

44

Chapter 1: A Panopticon of Vice: The Rhetoric of “Exposure” in Juvenal 2

After a two line introduction about fleeing to the ends of the earth (Ultra

Sauromatas fugere hinc libet et glacialem/ Oceanum, quotiens aliquid de moribus audent, 2.1-2), which gives the satire both apocalyptic and universalizing implications,

Juvenal launches into what appears to be his object of attack for the satire: qui Curios simulant et Bacchanalia vivunt (2.3).1 Immediately at the outset, Juvenal’s use of proper names concretizes an abstract notion of hypocrisy: he does not say that his targets preach one thing and practice another, but, more precisely, that they wear the mask of Curii while actually acting out Bacchic revels. This is not to say that the metonymy of Curii2 for proper Republican mores is a difficult transference; it will become important however, in light of the explosive claim a few lines later, about the untrustworthiness of external appearance.

Juvenal continues in this “externalizing” vein in the next few lines as he stages a kind of distorted Roman atrium outfitted with the busts and books of philosophers:

Indocti primum, quamquam plena omnia gypso Chrysippi invenias; nam perfectissimus horum, 5 Si quis Aristotelen similem vel Pittacon emit Et iubet archetypos pluteum servare Cleanthas. (2.4-7)

Firstly, the untutored, although you would find everything stuffed with the gypsum of Chrysippus; for he is the most perfected of these men, if he has purchased an almost- Aristotle or Pittacus and bids his bookshelf keep safe originals of Cleanthes.

1 Cf. the similar opening to Sat. 10 (Omnibus in terris, quae sunt a Gadibus usque/ Auroram et Gangen, 10.1-2), which is often cited as corresponding to Juvenal’s move away from Roman topics and more towards universal ethical issues in Bks. 4 and 5 of the Satires (Anderson 1982: 288; Reeksmans 1977: 117). For the global scope of Juvenal’s satiric corpus, see Rimmel 2005: 83.

2 Though see Ferguson 1987: 75-76 for a detailed account of major members of the Curii, of whom some were less upright and law-abiding than others. 45

These objects stand not only for moral tenets espoused by his satiric objects but also, through their mere materiality, for their hollowness of those tenets in light of their hypocrisy.3 In particular, we should note how similem Aristotelen (6) plays up the gap between ostensible belief and practice: these busts are similar—but only similar—to

Aristotle, i.e. they share only his external appearance of philosophy without the underlying significance.4 Similarly, the bust of Chrysippus is referred to by a periphrasis of its material, gypsum (gypso/ Chrysippi, 4-5); the way the poet has emphasized the materiality of the figure undercuts the impression that the hypocrites attempt to transmit through displaying it. These props prepare the stage well for our actors to come.

And then the immediate Juvenalian right hook: frontis nulla fides (2.8): “Don’t trust what’s in front of you!” Scholars are divided on the import of this line to the rest of the poem’s theme. One school has seen the entire satire, in light of this line, as dealing with moral hypocrites; the theme, as pithily summarized by Willibald Heilmann, concerned the distinction between Sein und Schein, as symbolized by Rome’s self- destructive sexual mores, particularly in the form of pathic homosexuality.5 Yet later

3 Cf. Weisen 1989: 715. As we shall see, the opening of Satire 8 uses a similar technique with the busts of philosophers replaced with imagines and broken statues. Barchiesi and Cucharelli 2005 discuss how the satirists “reduc[e] abstract concepts to their real or corporeal referents, thereby exacting from them a moral significance,” in the context of how they apply this strategy to their own bodies and the gaps that are thereby opened up (207). This strategy is made later explicit within the text, as Juvenal remarks on Naevolus’ downcast appearance as marking his decline at the opening of Satire 9: deprendas animi tormenta latentis in aegro/corpore, deprendas et gaudia; sumit utrumque/inde habitum facies. Igitur flexisse videris/propositum et vitae contrarius ire priori. (9.18-21). Cf. also Lucil. Fr. 638: animo qui aegrotat, videmus corpore hunc signum dare.

4 On the choice of statues: Chrysippus and Cleanthes, as early representatives of Stoicism make sense not only in light of the emphasis on ethics in Stoicism but also for the enthusiastic adoption of Stoicism by certain senators during the early Empire. Pittacus, as one of the Seven Sages, stands in for general wisdom; Aristotle is convenient perhaps for his Nicomachean Ethics and also for his more material and empirical approach to philosophy, over and against Plato’s idealism.

5 Heilmann 1967, followed by, e.g., Winkler 1983, Schmitz 2000: 60 (Satire 2 depicts “Widerspruch zwischen Schein und Sein”; further, 128-137). 46 scholars pointed out the inadequacies in applying the theme of appearance versus reality to the whole satire. For one, there is a clear shift from secrecy to ostentation in the figures’ presence in the second half of the poem such as Creticus or Gracchus’ public performance in the arena. Scholars have responded to this objection by showing how the climaxing structure of the poem enacts the exposing rhetoric that Juvenal begins here, as

Juvenal displays ever more brazen forms of social inversion and perversion.6 All the figures may not be hypocrites per se, but Juvenal uses the untrustworthy nature of appearances to advance the logic of exposure of their hidden parts before a satiric audience. This exposure originates in the first part of the poem in grotesque images of the body7 and then moves into a less physically localized “putting on stage of deviants performing reprehensible behavior.”8 Jonathan Walters has shown how the “theme of secrecy and disclosure” is enacted in this poem in the recreation of private activity for the public gaze.9

But the logic of this exposure depends, paradoxically, on the reliability of appearances. Even if we distrust the visual stimuli we receive from the world (or, in this

6 E.g. Nappa 1998, who tracks the climaxing movement of the poem through increasing debasement and how this mirrors, inversely, the loss of Roman vigor by the collapsing of social paradigms. Nappa, in general, views Juvenal’s satiric technique as more dynamic than that allowed previously by, e.g. W.S. Anderson, who argued that, unlike Horace, Juvenal’s satires consist of an elaboration and aggregation of images and examples related to a given theme rather than a development of that theme (Anderson 1982: 253). Braund and Cloud 1981: 203-208 outline a neat diptych structure, with 2.81-83, on the spread of vice analogized to a viral contagion, as a pivot point; each half of the diptych (climaxing respectively in Creticus and Gracchus in the arena) portrays a movement from secrecy to openness (cf. Schmitz 2000: 132ff.).

7 Gunderson 2005 discusses the clash between “lying bodies” and the truth, where “vile bodies speak against their owners” (227). Cf. Romano 1979: 81 on the “irony of self-betrayal” at play in the this opening section.

8 Walters 1998: 355. Walters discusses the social implications of this staging and the way that, on the one hand, it creates community norms by defining certain deviations while also allowing the viewer to take pleasure in the portrayal of these deviances, even while keeping themselves firmly in the normal category.

9 Walters 1998: 361. 47 case, the actors populating this satirical world), we must have some baseline of reliability to read the visual meaning that these satirical pictures create. At some point, we must be able to believe what we see, depending on who is doing the showing; in a world overrun with play-actors who display one behavior while secretly practicing another,10 we have to trust in the meaningfulness of those “secret” behaviors—the behaviors that are exposed to us by the satirist. That is, there must exist a coherent system of reading and decoding images, whereby Juvenal’s gestures of showing the “real” world, stripped of its masks, still has a coherent meaning.11

Yet, the second satire revolves around those instances where this consistency is attacked. I wish to argue that the maxim frontis nulla fides is indeed the lynchpin of the satire and that Satire 2 does revolve around a contradiction between Schein und Sein; we must, however, include under the rubric of Schein the meaning-making act of satire itself.

Satire 2 is the most vivid example of the way Juvenal uses visuality to make satiric meaning while implicitly calling meaning into question. Indeed, the poem is exceptionally staged, such that one could think of it not merely as what Paul Allen Miller calls “enchainment of images,”12 but a series of playlets, particularly those of Laronia

(34-65), Creticus in his see-through tunic (65-78), the travesty of the Bona Dea by a group of effeminates (83-116), the marriage of Gracchus to the cornicen, presented in a series of snapshots from engagement to wedding night (117-136), the appearance of

10 Keane 2006: 29 discusses this section as an example of the issues of performative identity and theatricality as a social phenomenon depicted in Juvenal (and emblematized by Juvenal as satirist himself).

11 Cf. the formulation of Winkler 1983: 90-96, where reading Satire 2 is described as watching Juvenal “tearing down the elaborate front” emblematized by the false philosophers.

12 An apt description of both Roman elegy and satire by Miller 2007: 142, who seeks to trace in Rome the “movement of desire” (rather than a path logical or mimetic) between these enchained images in selections from Horace, Ovid, and Juvenal. 48

Gracchus in the arena (143-148), and the confrontation between modern-day effeminates and the grim Romans of yore in the underworld (149-158).

Obviously, one need only look at the gaps in the line numbers above to see that this strategy of spectacle-making does not encompass the satire in its entirety. Still, what

I will show is how the obsessively “presented” nature of this satire (whether through a reliance on concrete objectifications or satirical dramaturgy) interacts with the theme of referential coherency. There has been a breakdown in Rome, so Juvenal says, in the ability to construct a sound model of behavior and reality, yet this impression of a world out-of-joint applies to Juvenal’s satirical world as well. I will focus my analysis then on those visual images and the resulting satirical short-circuit that occurs when we as readers take Juvenal’s claim of all-consuming inconsistency seriously.13

A. The Hair Down There

Indeed, the next sentence after the stunning frontis nulla fides confirms a kind of universalizing impulse to Juvenal’s skepticism: “For what district isn’t swimming with grim-faced perverts [or perverted grim-faces]?” (quis enim non vicus abundant/ tristibus obscenis, 2.8-9).14 Though tristibus obscenis refers primarily to the hypocrites already hinted at line 3 and further described in grotesque detail in the following lines (10-33), on

13 This line of thought is certainly indebted to Kirk Freudenberg’s (Freudenberg 2001: 234-242) exposition of the cognitive dissonance that results for readers at the notorious end of Sat. 1.170-171, where Juvenal claims to attack the dead. Freudenberg reminds us that satire creates a body of readers engaged in a process of reading and deciphering, a process which is not always straightforward.

14 Weisen 1989: 715 highlights out the doubleness in Juvenal’s pairs of adjectives, such as tristibus obscenis, where it becomes unclear which of the pair is meant to be substantive (cf. 9.38 mollis avarus of Naevolus’ patron). One can see here an attempt to destabilize meaning at the level of the individual word by vacillating between an attribute and what it is being attributed to (despite the efforts of commentators to flatten this effect; cf. Courtney’s insistence in reference to 9.38 that avarus is a noun; cf. Courtney 1980: 643, Index III [Style, Grammar, Latinity, Metre], s.v. “Adjectives: as nouns”) 49 another level, it embraces the contradiction at the heart of the satire: how can a Roman be tristis and obscenus at once? One answer: he can live two lives which should be mutually exclusive (e.g. our hypocrites who “talk about virtue while wagging their asses,” de virtute locuti/ clunem agitant, 2.20-21); but on another, more basic, level he can’t be both, at least not at the same time. This is precisely the unhinged world in which this satire portrays itself operating, with ramifications that collapse back onto it.

Juvenal next maps out this contradictory state of affairs onto the bodies of individual offenders. With satirical precision, Juvenal identifies that part of the body most emblematic of this contradiction—the anus—and exposes it (or, rather, depicts it being exposed) first through coarse metaphor, then through a stand-in for the satirist:

castigas turpia, cum sis inter Socraticos notissima fossa cinaedos? hispida membra quidem et durae per bracchia saetae promittunt atrocem animum, sed podice levi caeduntur tumidae medico ridente mariscae. (2.9-13)

You criticize foulness, even while you yourself are the most notorious trench among the Socratic faggots? Yeah, your limbs are hairy and the hard bristles all over your arms show a harsh heart, but I know. Your swollen piles are dissected from a smooth ass— with the doctor laughing the whole time.

Juvenal is not the first to identify Stoic philosophizing, emblematized by hairiness,15 contradicted by sexual submissiveness of its proponents. Indeed, Shadi Bartsch has tracked this phenomenon of supposed sexual debasement among Stoic philosophers occurring in many sources in the 1st century C.E., particularly Martial.16

15 Cf. Gleason 1995: 67-70 on Stoic codes of hairiness.

16 Bartsch 2006: 164-82. Plotting this against Roman notions of the link between inpenetrability, masculinity, and libertas (and their inverses), she argues that the Stoic transfer of inviolability from body to mind, figured in the elevation of the importance of patientia, had the unexpected consequence of equating Stoics with passi (patior), pathic homosexuals. 50

In order to see the contrast in mechanics, it is valuable to compare at a poem of

Martial’s that, while not about Stoics specifically, hews particularly closely to Juvenal’s picture of the hirsute pervert:

Aspicis incomptis illum, Deciane, capillis, cuius et ipse times triste supercilium, qui loquitur Curios adsertoresque Camillos? Nolito fronti credere: nupsit heri. (Mart. 1.24)

You see that one, with his hairs undid, Decianus, whose grim arched eyebrow even you are afraid of, who is always talking about Curii and Camilli, restorers of liberty? Don’t believe the hype: he was given away in marriage yesterday.

The joke is almost exactly the same, but the way that Juvenal and Martial tell it are radically different. It isn’t just that Juvenal’s joke is situated in a different generic mode, the expansiveness of satire rather than the compression of epigram.17 Martial works verbally through the tension and release of the elegiac couplet, which unrolls before the satisfying deployment of the punchline in the last line. But for Juvenal the hypocrisy is not revealed not verbally but visually. The coarseness of the metaphor fossa is suitably aggressive, but the next lines make clear the significance of “reading” the body.18 As Maud Gleason has shown in her discussion of self-construction in Imperial

17 Colton 1991: 67-72 discusses Juvenal’s debt to Martial in these lines, though not with especial insight. Mason 1963 and Anderson 1982: 362-96 both give interesting discussions of how Martial’s jokes drastically change meaning when imported into satirical discourse, even if the content of the joke is exactly the same.

18 It is worth reminding ourselves here how the metaphor works, in this case taking a part of the body and transforming it into something else. It requires a kind of faith that the image will be comprehensible to the reader, i.e. will be clearly enough connected to the original object being depicted to be recognizable, while also creating a new set of meaningful associations through the transference (that is, using fossa for something more literal, like podice in l. 12). The process of metaphor then, like the materialization of the bust of Chrysippus discussed above, reminds us as readers that satirical language itself is an “external”, something mapped over the satirical object depicted.

51

Rome, there was a bodily “language,” rooted in physiognomy, a semiotic system which could be depended on to discern masculinity from its deviations.19

We see these bodily semiotics play out here. One aspect of the hypocrites’ bodies declaim their old-fashioned virtue (hispida membra...durae per bracchia saetae, 10; atrocem animum, 12), while another (tumidae...mariscae, 13) reveals their perverted behavior, with the figure of the doctor standing in for the satirist, with his laughter authorizing ours.20 Erik Gunderson describes well the satirical situation: “smutty volumes are legible on the body’s surface and the narrator reads them to us.”21 Yet, at the moment of exposure by doctor-cum-satirist, the levis podex (12) that betrays its owner (the “truth- telling private parts” in Gunderson’s words, the truths that are the poetry itself)22 is just as much an external trait as the bristly limbs. Only the authority of the satirist makes the podex a more veracious orifice than the mouth spouting virtues a little later.

But considerably more disconcerting is the effect that this revelation has on the original set of signs, namely the hairy limbs. For, according to the logic that the poem has presented so far, signs of manliness point to effeminacy. Juvenal, adding a few other externalized signs such as a penchant for dour silence and extremely short hair (magna libido tacendi/ atque supercilio brevior coma, 2.14-15), upsets the reliability of our

19 Gleason 1995: 55-81, esp. 58-70. See Gleason 1995: 29-37 for an account of the physiognomic texts which survive from the imperial period. For the conscious construction of masculinity of Romans through “performance,” either exemplary (like orators) or monstrous (like actors, orators’ perverted Doppelgänger), see Gunderson 2000. Indeed, this code could be put to political use: Corbeill 2002 gives an interesting account of ways of deportment and walking could be used rhetorically by Cicero to “identify” and censure a popularis politician. 20 See Braund 1996 ad loc, Keane 2006: 64, Plaza 2006: 158.

21 Gunderson 2005: 227, who likewise describes how the reader of satire must “decipher the flesh” (228). Freudenberg 2001: 249ff. similarly plays up the problematic “peep-show” aspects of Satire 2: “His counter tirade, in turn, is itself explicit and titillating. Its ability to arouse is thus one of the problems it presents” (250).

22 Gunderson 2005: 227. 52 physiognomic iconography by undercutting exactly those gestures which should guarantee a properly Roman masculinity. Thus, as Gleason shows, one reason that hypocrites were so vociferously denounced is because of the fundamental danger they posed to interpretative codes of gender: “Those who tampered with the most visible variables of masculinity in their self-presentation provoked vehement moral criticism because they were rightly suspected of undermining the symbolic language in which male privilege was written.” Gunderson likewise asserts that the satirist requires us to “accept the rhetorical proposition that ‘bodily style is the man,’” yet Juvenal goes to great pains to show us that bodily style is not the man here.23 As Barbara Gold has pointed out in her discussion of the appearance of women’s bodies in Juvenal, his “implied ideal Roman

[who] displays no discrepancy between outer appearance and internal character” does not properly exist in Juvenal: “the perfect, contained male body is conspicuous by its absence.”24

Nor does Juvenal admit of the opposite possibility, whereby feminine traits might somehow belie masculine character (at least not here: see Ch. 4, Section A). He continues with an ironic approval of the confessed pathic Peribomius (“Peribomius acts more truthfully and genuinely; I blame the fates for this one who confesses his disease in his face and gait”, verius ergo/ et magis ingenue Peribomius; hunc ego fatis/ inputo, qui vultu morbum incessuque fatetur, 2.15-17), making it clear how we are to read these

23 Gunderson 2005: 228, citing the classic formulation of the proposition that a man’s rhetorical character reveals his inner one: talis hominibus fuit oratio quails vita (Sen.Ep.114.1). Gunderson recognizes the instability of J’s bodily semiotics (cf. “how can one be confident in a building erected upon the quicksand of flabby depravity?” [228]), but he redirects this challenge towards a psychoanalytic reading of the narrator’s desire for a “lost whole,” which uses vile bodies as foil (229f.)

24 Gold 1998: 371. This notion of the closed, classical body is paramount to the limitations of applying notions of the Bahktinian grotesque, which prioritizes an open, fluid body and ambivalence encompassing both death and renewal, to Roman satire, as Bahktin himself recognized. See Miller 2001: 153-157.

53 signs. More ironically, he allows a pervert (infamis Varillus, 2.22)25 to similarly interject on behalf of these openly effeminate men: “‘Am I supposed to be afraid of you as you grind, Sextus? How am I worse than you?’” (‘ego te ceventem, Sexte, verebor?...quo deterior te?’, 2.21-22)

The reader is here left adrift, with a dependable paradigm neither for manliness nor, at a slightly further remove, for truth itself; the poem is dependent on visual signs to make satirical meaning or, more precisely, on the reliable correspondence between those signs and internal character.26 In a poem so intimately concerned with static categories of status and gender, Juvenal has disrupted the evaluative measures by which we are to judge those categories.27 Domitian stands as the embodiment of this disorder, who even as he reinstitutes moral legislation condemning adultery, is an “adulterer polluted by a tragic coupling” (tragico pollutus adulter/ concubitu, 2.29-30); in a perverse act of exposure by Juvenal the aborted fetus which Julia expels is described as a “lump resembling its uncle” (patruo similes…offas, 2.32).28 Here, we are presented with the grim paradox that underlies the tensions of Satire 2: we must use one visual sign (the graphically coarse description of the fetus) to disprove another (Domitian’s legislation).

As with the doctor above, the authority of the satirist’s language (particularly its increase

25 The anonymity of this “notorious” figure may be part of the joke; cf. Ferguson 1987 237 for the lack of reference. 26 This satire in particular emblatizes Juvenal’s “satirical dismemberment,” by bringing visual attention to selected body parts which are taken to stand for the whole; cf. Braund and Racschke 2002:74, 80, which compares Juvenal’s satirical monstra to Dr. Frankenstein’s, particularly in the grotesque amalgamation of parts, and Weisen 1989: 716.

27 Cf. Plaza 2006 311-312, who argues that line 23 (loripedem rectus derideat, Aethiopem albus) introduces a notion of “relativity in the laughable.”

28 For Domitian’s moral legislation, see Braund ad loc and Stewart 1994: 310-315. Keane 2012: 415 also suggests that Juvenal’s description of the aborted fetus metapoetically points to Domitian’s monstrous depiction in literature of the next generation. Domitian’s true “legacy,” his simulacrous abortions, is his presence in the literary record. 54 in graphic intensity) directs us to the correct prioritization of reading these signs, but it does not remove the underlying problem of the unreliability of signs in general. Even as the poem later shifts from the contradiction between two sets of visual signs (the hairiness vs. the hemorrhoids) to the contradiction between status or gender and activity

(usually presented visually, whether quasi-dramatically or concretized into objects), this uneasiness about straightforwardly reading Juvenal’s moral spectacle should remain.

B. The Translucent Show: Laronia and Creticus

The notion of hypocritical moralists continues after the horror of Domitian’s

“children”, but presented in a different way. With lines 34-65, Juvenal presents a tidily framed dramatic scenelet, the extended interjection of one Laronia. Laronia, introduced

“as if she had been standing in the wings listening,”29 no longer able to bear the jeremiads of the false moralists,30 bursts onto the scene and launches into an extended rant of her own. Indeed, she enacts the situation of the lines just prior: “Wouldn’t the worst flaws then rightly and deservedly censure these made up Scauri and bite back when criticized?”

(nonne igitur iure ac merito vitia ultima fictos/ contemnunt Scauros et castigata remordent, 2.34-35).31

29 Braund 1995: 207.

30 Note especially the use of fero in her introduction: non tulit ex illis torvum Laronia quendam, 2.36. The language of “bearing” and “enduring” is central to the tone of indignatio that Juvenal develops in his early books of satires: cf. Anderson 1982: 278, 427, Braund 1988: 3, Schmitz 2000: 62.

31 Because of the neatness of the way this couplet introduces Laronia, I feel that there should be a slight shift in standard paragraphing of Satire 2. Usually 34-35 are thought to be a kind of summation of the previous 32 lines, with parallels with the opening lines pointing to ring composition (e.g. castigas, l. 9 ~ castigata l.35; cf. Braund 1996a ad loc). Yet these lines introduce a new notion that the Laronia scene dramatizes: the criticized striking back, using the same standard of measurements by which they have been attacked. I think we should imagine, then, the next section of the poem beginning at line 34, not 36. 55

In her extensive denunciation, she uses some of the same techniques as Juvenal himself. For example, she points to contradictory external signs that undercut the moralists’ claims (the clash between perfume and hairiness: sed tamen unde/ haec emis, hirsute spirant opobalsama collo/ quae tibi?, 2.40-42); she draws our attention visually to the object of attack (respice primum [i.e. before scrutizing women]/ et scrutare viros,

2.44-45). She introduces, on Juvenal’s behalf (see below), the theme that will come to dominate much of the second half of the poem, the conflict between the men’s proper social roles and their degrading activity (whether actually more “feminine,” such as taking a “husband,” or simply a degrading analogy to actions commensurate with female social roles, such as fighting in the arena). The most striking inversion in men’s practice, according to Laronia, is weaving: “you draw out the wool and carry back the finished pelts to the baskets, better than Penelope, more lightly than Arachne, you twist the spindle, pregnant with thin thread,” (vos lanam trahitis calathisque peracta refertis/ vellera, vos tenui praegnantem stamine fusum/ Penelope melius, levius torquetis

Arachne, 2.54-56).32

Much of the controversy concerning Laronia’s place in Satire 2 has revolved around whether or not we are to think of her as an independent female speaker, Juvenal’s one concession to the female voice. It has now been demonstrated convincingly that

Laronia is simply a satirical ventriloquist’s dummy espousing Juvenal’s own views.33 We

32 Praegnantem (55) becomes especially relevant in light of Juvenal’s emphasis on the infertility of the perverted Roman body; cf. Julia’s abortion at ll.32-33 and Juvenal’s one “comfort” in the light of Gracchus’ marriage, that two men cannot get pregnant (sed melius, quod nil animis in corpora iuris/ natura indulget: steriles moriuntur, 2.139-140). For the infertility of the bodily grotesque in Roman Satire, see Miller 1998 and Miller 2001: 153-157. For the ideological import of weaving in Juvenal, cf. his picture of the “good old days” at 6.289-290: vellere Tusco/ vexatae duraeque manus.

33 By, inter alias, Braund 1995, Schmitz 2000: 60, and Plaza 2006: 155-59. Braund 1995 summarizes the point nicely: Laronia effectively “bolster[s] a masculine view of the world, a view which condemns the 56 cannot recuperate Laronia to make her voice more acceptable to our sensibilities. We can, however, on the other hand, consider how she destabilizes Juvenal’s attack, if we think of her as another weapon in Juvenal’s arsenal. She continues, in her own way, the problem that arises in a world where nothing matches appearances (frontis nulla fides), by transferring the problem from the conflict between two opposing signs (one internal and one external, where only the authority of the speaker can direct us on how to choose between the two) to the internal conflicts within the sign maker him- (or rarely, as here, her-) self.

Laronia, though she may not be a prostitute as used to be claimed, is certainly implied to be an adulteress.34 Her presence is decried by the hypocrites with the exclamation “Where are you sleeping now, Julian Law?” (‘ubi nunc, lex Iulia, dormis?’,

2.37).35 Though Laronia can cite the lex Scantinia as a counterblow to the moralists

(quod si vexantur leges ac iura, citari/ante omnis debet Scantinia),36 she never answers their original objection. Laronia subverts traditional standards of judgment by her enthusiasm in handing down judgment from a problematic position.37 As Susanna Braund

assimilation of men to women” and collaborates in their alienation (214). Freudenberg 2001: 252-53 discusses Laronia as a kind of proto-Juvenal, but claims that she is not to be trusted because of the categorical nature of her attack. As I argue below, if anything it is exactly the opposite: it is not that Laronia is wrong, but rather that she is right, and so are her accusers. 34 See Braund 1995 and Braund 1996a ad 36-38 for arguments that she is an adulteress. See Williams 2010: 103-36 on adultery and the Roman concept of stuprum.

35 For a discussion of the adultery and Lex Julia de Adulteriis Coercendis, passed by Augustus in 17 B.C.E. and later renewed by Domitian in his moral legislation (as evidenced by flattering poems of Martial [6.7] and Statius [Silv.5.101-2]), see Treggiari 1991: 262-98 (277-98, on the lex Julia). Braund 1996 ad loc evinces another wink, pointing out how the wording implies that the law itself may be adulterous: “with whom are you sleeping, lex Iulia?”

36 For the controversy about the exact nature of this law, presumably forbidding intercourse between men, see, inter alios, Richlin 1993, Williams 2010: 130-136, and Fantham 2011.

37 Stewart 1994 313-14; Nappa 1998: 99.

57 has shown, Laronia’s speech functions both as attack on hypocritical men and as a

“defense” of women.38 However successful she is thought to be in the former, in the latter, Laronia’s moral authority is undermined from “outside,” by the one deploying her as a satirical tool, Juvenal himself. Laronia, in her attack, argues that women do not usurp men’s role:

non erit ullum exemplum in nostro tam detestabile sexu. Tedia non lambit Cluuiam nec Flora Catullam: Hispo subit iuuenes et morbo pallet utroque. 50 numquid nos agimus causas, ciuilia iura nouimus aut ullo strepitu fora uestra mouemus? luctantur paucae, comedunt coloephia paucae. (2.47-53)

There’s not example in our sex so despicable. Tedia doesn’t lick Cluvia, nor Flora Catulla: Hispo plays the bottom for young men and goes pale with each disease. Do we ever plead cases, learn tort law or disturb your fora with any clatter? Few women wrestle, few women munch on the athlete’s Atkin’s.

Yet each of the examples she gives (rejection of lesbianism, 49; rejection of the law courts and public life, 51-52; rejection of athletics, 53), can be “disproven” by these very accusations appearing against women, both in Juvenal’s contemporary Martial39 and, more to the point, in Juvenal’s sixth satire.40 The reader may not know these specific contradictions within Juvenal’s text but Laronia’s obvious adultery will cause us to question her claims. Indeed, whether we consider lines 34-35 to introduce Laronia or close out the first main section (see note 31), the sting of declaring Laronia the ultima vitia (2.34) does not fade, even if she is granted the right to bite back. The metonymy

38 Braund 1995: 211, 213. 39 In particular the notorious tribad Philaenis at Martial 7.67, who is both athletic and a lesbian, even actively penetrating men.

40 For female homosexuality, cf. 6.311, inque vices equitant ac Luna teste moventur; for women in public, cf. 6.242-45; for female athletes, 6.246-268. I discuss each of these instances in Ch. 4. 58 transforms a person into an abstract (rather than vice versa, as usual in Juvenal) and is extremely inauspicious way to introduce a figure who advocates your message.

The final message is murky. If Laronia’s objections against the hypocrites are sound, despite her problematic position, how do we treat the moral injunctions of the hypocrites? Surely what they espouse is not wrong, simply because they are the ones espousing it? Juvenal’s rhetoric of exposure, that is, his denunciation by signs, depends on some kind of reliable baseline of criticism, yet the poem makes it still unclear what that baseline would be in a world of universal vice. Everyone—Juvenal, Laronia, even the hypocritical philosophers—and, simultaneously, no one has the authority to issue satirical criticism. The issues of who is allowed is make satirical meaning is underlined by the way that the satirical mockery is shaped into a quasi-dramatic confrontation between two actors. The voice of Juvenal fades into the background and the figures of his satire—object, names, or actors—take center stage to speak for themselves. The structure of the dramatic scene means its satirical authority lies entirely in recognizing and accepting an underlying code of correspondence which the drama plays out, even if its content involves a world where things do not correspond as they should.

Laronia’s tableau ends with a scripted exeunt of the despicable actors (fugerunt trepidi vera ac manifesta canenetem/ Stoicidae; quid enim falsi Laronia? 2.64-65), dramatizing the effectiveness of her criticism. Her job complete, she herself is shuffled unceremoniously offstage, only to be replaced with a character who looks suspiciously similar to her, the pleader Creticus. Juvenal introduces him with reference to his distinguishing characteristic, his gauzy attire, before he is even named. He then

59 immediately draws attention to two other aspects of Creticus pertinent to his appearance in the satire, his prosecution of adulterers and the spectacle he attracts:

sed quid 65 non facient alii, cum tu multicia sumas, Cretice, et hanc vestem populo mirante perores in Proculas et Pollittas? est moecha Fabulla; damnetur, si vis, etiam Carfinia : talem non sumet damnata togam. 70 (2.65-70)

But what else will others not do, when you put on that flimsy teddy, Creticus, and, even as the people gawk at this garment, plead against Proculas and Pollittas? Fabulla is an adulteress; if you want, let Carfinia be condemned: even condemned, she would not put on this sort of toga.

Juvenal brings our gaze directly to bear on Creticus and the way his external display creates a conflict of interest with his prosecutions.41 On the other hand, Juvenal does not exclude the adulterous Romans from criticism; “condemn them!” he says (damnetur, 69).

Though Laronia claims that Roman moralists “forgive the crows and censure the doves”

(dat veniam corvis, vexat censura columbas, 2.63), Juvenal here shows his tendency to imply that everyone is at fault. Creticus is not at fault in his prosecutions, only in his attire (talem/...togam, 69-70).

Again, we have a character from a problematic position inveighing against the moral faults of Rome, yet here that character has become the object of satire, rather than its exponent. The parallels to Laronia’s situation are not accidental. Moreover, that position is highlighted via an appeal a clear-cut external feature, namely the multicia

(66), even though Juvenal has previously muddied straightforward meaning. Creticus name too could be considered another locus of disorder. “Creticus” certainly evokes a noble line, and part of the incongruence that underlies Juvenal’s criticism (and which will

41 Cf. Gold 1998: 378: “[Creticus’] clothes show the slippage between pretended character and underlying perversion.” and Cloud and Braund 1982: 205. Nappa 1998 argues that “his effeminacy has rendered his authority invalid,” (101) but this ignores the lines following on the legitimacy of Creticus’ charges.

60 become more explicit in his discussion of Gracchus) is the conflict between Creticus’ noble birth/name (an essential trait) and his appearance and behavior (an external one). 42

Laronia’s name similarly evokes a noble heritage.43

The notion of correspondence underlying the logic of exposure, which Juvenal initiated through the laughing doctor who merely had to “show” us the hemorrhoids (and we all know what those mean) continues in this section, but with a slightly tweaked mechanic. Rather than reveal the hidden private parts that clash with the openly displayed traits (as at 2.11-15) or using a well-informed stand-in to condemn the hypocrites dramatically (Laronia at 2.34-65), Juvenal simply stages the conflict openly for us to watch.44

en habitum quo te leges ac iura ferentem vulneribus crudis populus modo victor et illud montanum positis audiret vulgus aratris. (2.72-74)

Why, the sort of clothes in which the people should listen to you citing laws and statutes, that people just now victorious with untended wounds and the mountain crowd with their ploughshares put aside!

More precisely, he re-stages the spectacle that Creticus has already created unintentionally and subsumes his external audience, we the readers, into its internal

42 Creticus is one name of the Caecilii Metelli, who would have been extinct by the time of Juvenal’s writing, though Martial (7.90) mentions a Creticus; see Ferguson 1987: 71 and Tennant 2001: 188n49 for a brief overview of the lineage. Whatever the exact reference, as with the Scaurii earlier, we are certainly meant to imagine a nobleman. We must remember that, for an ancient, the status conferred by birth was essential, not accidental, and was expected to be manifest in behavior. Henderson 1997: 13 reminds us that “‘ birth’ concerns not just gentility, nor only family and inter-familial claims made for and against recognition of the value of descendants, but rather all competing ‘axiological-deontological systems’ (the nexus of thought and utterance regulated between considerations of worth and of duty) that dispute truth, power, and authority, in whatever social arenas” [emphasis mine].

43 See Braund ad loc. For more on Juvenal’s play with noble names here, see Stewart 1994: 315.

44 Walters 1998 focuses on this sort of spectacle in the second satire, but is more concerned with the way that it works socially, that is, the way that it puts on wrongdoers on stage to create community standards (from which these wrongdoers diverge) and, paradoxically, the sadistically sublimated pleasure that this staging arouses in satirist and audience.

61 audience. 45 We are the “dumbfaced people” (populo mirante, 67) and he projects a little later an internal audience for his spectacle, with whom we are to identify

(montanum...audiret vulgus, 74).

However we read the credibility of this audience,46 it is clear that Juvenal’s flair for spectacle has become ever more explicit here. And yet the conflict between status and behavior that Juvenal seeks to expose through the staging and visual emblematization of

Creticus’ garment is the very rift that problematizes the convenience of that iconography.

Unlike the piles on display to the surgeon’s knife or the explicit perversions in the two next tableaux, the Bona Dea re-enactment and Gracchus’ marriage, Creticus’ deviance is localized entirely in his stage costume.47

In his final farewell to Creticus, Juvenal sardonically describes him as

“transparent”: “You zealous and indomitable master of liberty, Creticus—I can see right through you” (acer et indomitus libertatisque magister,/ Cretice, perluces, 2.77-78).

Perluces is usually recognized as having the double meaning of “transparent”: not only is

Creticus’ cloak see-through, but so is Creticus! We can see his perversion reflected on the outside, through his multicia. I wish to suggest a third metapoetic connotation, which reflects on the “transparency” of Juvenal’s language. Juvenal, as should be clear by now, has undermined (though, importantly, not totally destroyed) his claim that we are able to get a glance at his actors’ internal natures through external manifestations like these. It is

45 See Ch 2, Section D on acting nobles in Satire 8 for a more detailed discussion of the implications of this gesture.

46 Weisen 1989: 719, for example, sees the insubstantiality of Roman idealism exposed by the mythical idealistic descriptions of Creticus’ onlookers.

47 Compare the figure of Rubellius Blandus in Sat. 8.39-70; as I show in Chapter 2, Section C, his only true flaw, according to Juvenal, unlike the debased nobles that begin the satire, is overly enthusiastic pride in his noble lineage. 62 this “transparency” that the second satire keeps calling into question by the very contradictions it seeks to address. Visualizing satirical language is never “transparent”; it is yet another “external”, a surface on which we are told we can spy the nature of the things that language depicts.48 Laronia and Creticus are the lynchpins of the satire: one offers a spot where satirical authority is problematically ceded to an actor within the satire (Laronia), the other a scene in which satirical criticism is couched in visual, morally charged “staging” (complete with audience).

C. Behind Closed Doors

The intersection of spectacle, exposure, and externalization of vice comes to the fore in the next section, on the pathic travesty of the Bona Dea celebrations (84-116).

This scene is a highlight of Juvenal’s technique of scene-painting crammed with auditory and visual shorthand, a clatter of blasphemy and a dramatic tableau of morally meaningful objects. These lines operate as yet another variation of the exposure motif as originally presented in the opening lines, projected beyond the locus of the individual body to a group of those individual bodies interacting. There is a raucousness to the scene—a sense that it is overcrowded with voices and characters—that enacts the implication of the previous verses on the viral spread of vice at Rome (dedit hanc contagio labem/ et dabit in plures, sicut grex totus in agris/ unius scabie cadit et

48 Cf. Introduction, note 72, for Jaś Elsner’s definition of visuality as a metaphorical “screen” which the Romans necessarily looked through to perceive and create social, intellectual, moral, etc. meaning.

63 porrigine porci/ uvaque conspecta livorem ducit ab uva, 2.78-81).49 Here, rather than use dramatic technique as an opportunity to let another character speak his sentiments

(Laronia’s interjection, problematic as it itself turns out to be) or to underscore, by re- staging for the reader, the degrading spectacle that the object of satire already puts on for

Rome (Creticus), Juvenal here produces for his Roman reader a dramatic scene and lets the scene speak almost entirely for itself, particularly the props and costumes of the participants. The scene, though “staged” publicly for his readership, is a private one and fits into the earlier satirical rubric of “exposing”—that is, projecting vices visually for our inspection.50 Yet Juvenal does very little denouncing in the main body of the scene itself.

The large absence of critical comments is crucial: we must already accept Juvenal’s premises about value of these objects for the scene to have satirical meaning. There is little satirical authority to interpret these symbols for us, even as the satire wants us to question the straightforward interchange between one kind of meaning (social and ritual roles governed by gender) and another (the actual activity of men).

For the scene is wholly predicated on the erasure of dependable systems of ritual meaning through travesty: the participation of effeminate men in a celebration of a goddess exclusively for Roman women. Indeed, the irony of the reversal is pointed out

49 Freulend Jenson 1981: 160-161 sees this passage as emblematic of the attitude of the early satires towards vice, namely, that vice victimizes and exploits others while remaining unharmed and unpunished itself (cf. 1.3-4 inpune ergo mihi recitaverit ille togatas/ hic elegos?) For more on the association of disease and cinaedi, see Williams 2010: 197-200. 50 Courtney ad 84 (domi): “They are a secret society.” Walters 1998 describes how the “vivid depiction for the audience exactly what was going on indoors recreates it for the public gaze” (359) and compares Juvenal’s procedure here to a kind of flagitatio. For more on the relationship between flagitatio and the procedures of the Roman satirists, see Graf 2005. This undercuts those scholars who see the second half of the satire (usually thought to begin with Creticus’ introduction) as focusing on those who are more flagrant and public with their misdeeds, e.g. Winkler 1983: 101ff., 138 n.61. What is more relevant here is that, in another way, there is no movement, since whether hidden/private or public, all the deeds are exposed to public examination by the same visualizing mechanics. This is to say nothing of the related issue of the reliability of Juvenal’s reports of private misdeeds, an issue taken up through the analogy of the ‘private eye’ by Braund and Raschke 2002: 67ff. 64 immediately by the expulsion of women from the premises: “No woman enters—they’ve already been driven far away: the altar of the goddess lies open to males alone. “Get out, profane women!” goes the shout, “With no horn is a flute-girl going to groan here!”

(exagitata procul non intrat femina limen:/ solis ara deae maribus patet. ‘ite, profanae,’/clamatur, ‘nullo gemit hic tibicina cornu.’ 2.88-90).51 On the social level, this perversion of the Bona Dea ritual underlines the corrupting influence of vice in Rome.52

Yet, on a more fundamental level, trammeling over distinctions of gender in ritual is merely another example of how definitional problems have run amok in Juvenal’s Rome.

This is not to say that the irony and confusion underlined at the outset makes the scene completely uninterpretable; rather, as Juvenal himself has said, one cannot take for granted the correspondence of image and meaning. These objects and gestures would have had significance for the Roman audience Juvenal constructs, but there is an undeniable paradox in using a fixed system of moral imagery to uncover cognitive dissonance. Men’s appearance, status, sex—these can no longer be taken for granted as pointing to inner, reliable meaning.

As in Satire 6, where women act like men, these men challenge the fundamental semantic and social construct in the Roman mind: gender. Barbara Gold emphasizes how cross-dressing turns these men into an “in-between” gender who are men by one criteria, but women by another; “such men,” she continues, “are defined in visual, material, and external ways by their bodily adornments, which locate them in an ambiguous place on

51 Romano 1979: 84 on the “total usurpation of sexual status expressed in solis maribus.”

52 Stewart 1994: 316-320.

65 the gender scale.”53 Indeed, the vividness of Juvenal’s externalizing imagery reaches its peak here, in details such as the fluttering eyelashes during the application of mascara

(ille supercilium madida fuligine tinctum/ obliqua producit acui pingitque trementis/ attollens oculos, 2.93-5) and the splash of colors in their gawdy garments (reticilumque comis auratum ingentibus implet/ caerulea indutus scutulata aut galbina rasa, 2. 96-7).

Juvenal also provides aural details, particularly in the “broken voice” of the participants

(hic turpis Cybeles et fracta voce loquendi/ libertas, 2.111-12).54 Similarly, Nancy

Shumate argues that the similarities between this scene and the orgy that takes places when the women celebrate the Bona Dea in Satire 6 (6.314-51) “implicates this group in female sexual excess ipso facto.”55

That the boundaries separating men and women are symbolically destroyed by this ritual travesty is emphasized metapoetically through the insertion of the short

“digression” on Otho that the mention of one effeminate’s mirror brings to mind (ille tenet speculum, pathici gestamen Othonis, 2.99).56 The logic of the satirical attack on

Otho is the same, focusing vividly on objects and the dissonances that their employment

53 Gold 1998: 377, 380. As Gold points out (378), this attitude reaches its climax in Juvenal’s final words to the celebrants to bring to fruition their effeminate program and literally un-man themselves: quid tamen expectant, Phrygio quos tempus erat iam/ more supervacuam cultris abrumpere carnem? (2.115-116: “What are they waiting for then? They should have lopped off with blades that useless flesh, like good Phrygians, a long time ago.”). Nappa 1998: 104 similarly discusses 2.137-142, on homosexual sterility, as evidence for pathics as a kind of liminal third gender 54 The text here is problematic: one must either take turpis as substantival and the genitive Cybeles as depending on it, or turpis can modify libertas (if nominative) or Cybeles (if genitive), which leaves Cybeles to trail unpleasantly on libertas.

55 Shumate 2006 : 25.

56 Schmitz 2000: 132 has argued that this “digression” is actually central to the poem’s theme of the spreading contagion in its juxtapositions of these private activities and their more public manifestations in a single scene.

66 creates.57 One should note the loaded enjambment at the opposed binaries at lines104-7: nimirum summi ducis est occidere Galbam/ et curare cutem,…solium adfectare Palati/ et pressum in faciem digitis extendere panem (“Of course, only the greatest leader can kill

Galba and take care of his pores…or reach for the Palatine’s throne and to take the bread with his fingers and mush it into his face”). Yet, though the interjection is thematically coherent with the context, it strongly disturbs the momentum of the spectacle: Juvenal freeze-frames mid-line on the mirror in the pathic’s hand at line 99 and breaks off to discuss the global implications of the role reversal and ritual travesty, as emblematized by

Otho’s equipment. The disturbance of the satirical presentation itself mid-thought similarly embodies the confusion of the world in which Juvenal is trying to create meaning.

D. Monsters and Their Mates: Gracchus on Parade

This violation of “dramatic” boundaries and conventions is continued to an even more striking extent in the depiction of the climactic “villain” of the satire, Gracchus.58

Gracchus, certainly a nobleman, though his identity cannot be pinned down precisely, is the protagonist of two consecutive spectacles which, taken together, function as the

57 Cf. Wiesen 1989: 721. Freudenberg 2001: 256-7 argues slyly for another kind of dissonance in the reference to Otho’s mirror as res memoranda novis annalibus atque recenti/historia (almost certainly a reference to Tacitus’Histories concerning the civil war of 69 C.E).: if one went looking for this story in Tacitus, one wouldn’t find it; this absence draws the clearer moral distinctions of the historian into the satirist’s own “self-defeat.” Keane 2012: 413-15 also shows that Juvenal’s deployment of figures from Tacitus in Satire 2 is representative of the way he inverts Tacitus’ historical analysis. Rather than interrogating the heights of power and their corrupting influence on the body politic, he posits these authoritative figures as mere examples of a larger social phenomenon: “Juvenal is able to convert historical material on one theme (for example, civil war) into satiric material that emphasizes another (i.e. effeminancy)…[he] find[s] new themes that enable a different perspective on the same events.” 58 Ferguson 1987: 105-106 argues that he is the grandson of Sempronius Gracchus who was an associate of Lucius Caesar and follows J. Dürr in positing a Domitianic date for the character; whatever his precise identity, Juvenal makes the fact of his noble lineage clear (ll. 124-26, 145-46; see below for more). 67 climax of the issues of incoherence, giving a final yank to the social and gendered threads that have been unraveling throughout Satire 2. In the first (117-136), Gracchus is seen marrying an unnamed cornicen. In the second scene, after a short intrusion about the satirical “comfort” provided by the sterility of such unions (sed melius, quod animis in corpora iuris/ natura indulget, 2.139-40), he describes a final degradation that is explicitly marked as the climax of vice (vicit et hoc monstrum, 2. 143), Gracchus’ appearance in the arena as a retiarius.59

The designation of Gracchus’ marriage as a monstrum a little into the passage

(scilicet horreres maioraque monstra putares, 2.122), where Juvenal compares the marriage of two men to prodigies such as a woman giving birth to a calf or a cow giving birth to a sheep (si mulier vitulum vel si bos ederet agnum, 2.123), releases, in a single word, the entire complex of issues which Juvenal has tensely coiled into his satire. The

Roman concept of a monstrum, which in its development is related to the Greek use of

τέρας,60 embodies a violation of the laws of nature which, simultaneously, must be addressed and interpreted as a sign. As it often pointed out, monstrum is etymologically related to both monere and monstrare. 61 Prodigies or monstra are not merely freaks or grotesques or hybrids.62 Their appearance as violations of natural law represents a

59 The momentum and rhythm of this satire is particularly well-constructed for Juvenalian standards, as the transitions between each section are well-marked and create a sense of increasing escalation and crescendo. Besides the final lines on Gracchus, there is also the transition between the individual figure of Creticus and the crowd of celebrants of the Bona Dea: foedius hoc aliquid quandoque audebis amictu;/nemo repente fuit turpissimus. accipient te [sic Creticus]/paulatim qui… (“At some point you will do something fouler and more bold than this garment; no one becomes grossest overnight. They will take you in, little by little, those who…, 2.82-84).

60 See Moussy 1977 for a discussion tracing the development of monstrum measured against τέρας. 61 E.g. Plaza 2006: 308.

62 Nadeau 2011: 179-80, who follows the incidence of each occasion of monstrum in Juvenal’s corpus, recognizes that it represents a “perversion of the laws of nature,” but entirely fails to recognize its referential quality, as a sign of the gods pointing to vice. 68 warning from the gods, a symbol of the gods’ anger at the sinfulness of parents or society, demanding purification.63

The monstrous has also been thought a metapoetic symbol for Juvenal’s satire as well,64 and it occurs particularly appropriately here. These prodigies conjure a vision which performs both horror and interpretation. Their nature as an index of man’s perversions, a physical embodiment of larger societal transgression, points to the complex hermeneutic circle of prodigia, whose appearance was thought to be directly generated by, and read as a symbol of, a perverted world. Yet, as I have argued, one of the themes of this satire hinges on the difficulty of interpreting visual signs. The conjuring of a monstrum here in Satire 2 thus collapses notions of hybridity, transgression, visuality, and interpretation into a single image. If we think of Juvenal’s satire as a monstra, we must ask ourselves what exactly are we to read it as a sign of.

The first section on the marriage of Gracchus marks a continuation of some of the staging techniques Juvenal employs with Creticus and the Bona Dea celebrants, but re- envisioned as a montage. Rather than an extended scene or tableau, Juvenal presents a number of snapshots of the ceremony interspersed with comments in his own voice, addresses to the Roman people (121-123) and to Mars, here stylized archaically as

Gradivus (126-132). This constant vacillation between seeing Gracchus married off like a

63 Garland 1995: 59-72. The appearance of the haruspex in line 121 (o procures, censore opus est an haruspices nobis?) may point to an allusion of the role of haruspex, according to Livy (cf. 27.37.6), in expiating 2nd century Rome from the threat of hermaphrodites, a physical embodiment of society’s gender transgression; for more on hermaphrodites as monstra, see Garland 1995: 68-70. 64 Cf. Winkler 1991: 23, who points to Juvenal’s fondness for hybrid as an indication of the affinity of his text with painting. Plaza 2006: 305-337, discusses the appearance of “monsters” in Juvenal’s text at some length, though she rather stretches the semantic field of the word. Braund and Raschke 2002: 75-82 ponder the moral question of producing a monstrous text: what responsibility does Juvenal have for unleashing this spectacular monster upon the world? In the end they conclude that the staging of the monstrous is merely emblematic of contemporary society’s decay. I, on the other hand, argue that, by occurring here, monstra evokes the problems of reading signs as emblematic in the first place.

69 bride65 and Juvenal’s dramatization of his own fury creates a kind of jagged rhythm that has the same effect on the reader of satire as the situation depicted in the satire itself, namely, a sense of derailment and confusion,. A good encapsulation of this rhythm is provided at the very opening, when Juvenal reports that Gracchus has given a large dowry to a cornicen…”or is it a tubicen?,” he immediately interjects (quadraginta dedit

Gracchus sestertia dotem/ cornicini, sive hic recto cantaverat aere, 2.117-118).

True “marriage” between males is a difficult to substantiate in ancient Rome.66 It defies the primary political and social purpose of a Roman marriage, namely the procreation of legitimate children.67 What is most important for our purposes is how homosexual marriage would have represented an irresolvable conceptual dissonance in the Roman mind: “In this sense, ‘matrimony’ between two men was an anomaly in the conceptual and linguistic terms of traditional Roman belief systems. It was impossible for both men to keep their gendered identity as viri intact.”68 Indeed, all the more perverse is that Gracchus is said to play the bride in this arrangement: he gives a dowry (dedit

Gracchus sesteria dotem, 2.117), wears a bridal veil (flammea sumit, 2.124), and is

65 In particular, note the force of ecce at 2.129 in the address to Mars (traditur ecce viro clarus genere atque opibus vir…) to focus visual attention on our villain; cf. Schmitz 2000: 26-27 for this use of ecce as parts of Juvenal’s program of Inszenierung. 66 Williams 2010: 279-86 gives an interesting discussion of the possibility of the marriage between males, sorting between rhetoric (such as Cicero’s accusations about Antony at Phil.2.44) and well-attested historical instances involving Nero, which according to our sources (Dio Cassius, Suentonius, and Tacitus) were publicly celebrated.

67 Treggiari 1991 5-13, esp. “it was necessary for the state that citizens should marry and produces new citizens,” (8-9). This volume remains the most extensive source for the basic workings of every aspect of Roman marriage from engagement until death or divorce.

68 Williams 2010: 281.

70 referred to as “the newly wedded bride” (the almost tender image, gremio iacuit nova nupta mariti, 2.120).69

Juvenal again uses clothing as a marker of dissonance, when Gracchus’s wedding dress is contrasted with the accoutrements of his role as Salian priest in a procession:

Segmenta et longos habitus et flammea sumit arcano qui sacra ferens nutantia loro sudavit clipeis ancilibus. (2.124-26)

He is putting on his flounces and trailing gown and veil, the same one who, while carrying the swinging sacristies from the mystic thong, sweated because of the sacred shields.

We have here two ritual-spectacles juxtaposed and emblematized through the external marker of clothing, the perverted wedding ceremony and the traditional leaping procession of the Salii through the streets of Rome in March and October. We return again to the dilemma of the opening lines: how can one man participate in two acts with mutually exclusive moral connotations? The juxtaposition brings together how Gracchus travesties simultaneously his gender and his lineage.70 We see here, yet again, the dependence on the visual and dramatic logic to create a world of categorical chaos at

Rome. Even further, the spectacles that Juvenal depicts and creates will soon take place publically: “Let me live a little longer, and those things will happen, they will! and in the open! They’ll even want them reported in the daily tribune!” (liceat modo vivere, fient,/

69 For these aspects as distinctively referring to the bride’s role in the wedding, see now Hersch 2010, 94- 106, 123. Williams 2010: 281-83 argues that it was precisely the male bride that was the locus of anxiety for Romans, rather than the male “husband” in the pair. Yet, in this scene, I believe that he also ignores how Juvenal thematizes Gracchus’ status a little later, compounding the various lines of identity which Gracchus can be thought to pollute. 70 Nappa 1998: 103: “Gracchus therefore has inverted social relations in three ways: he has participated in a marriage between men, he has taken the role of a woman, and he has violated the station to which he was born.” This contradiction is similarly evinced at the level of language a little later in a moment of quasi- dialogue, when someone reports to Juvenal, in direct quotation, that they have “business” the next day: ‘nubit amicus/nec multos adhibet’ (2.134-35). Juvenal points out the incoherence very economically: since nubere is a word technically used with the bride as the subject (cf. Mart. 1.24.4, quoted above), another gap in meaning is opened up by the use of the masculine amicus. 71 fient ista palam, cupient et in acta referri, 2.135-6). The open performance of these travesties in the future will render unnecessary Juvenal’s role as reporter and interpreter and will leave the reading up to us. Even as these deeds will become manifest, they may yet become paradoxically unclear because we will no longer be able to rely on the satirist’s interpretation of the visual signposts and correspondences needed to read Rome.

This danger is reflected subtly in a detail concerning the appearance of Gracchus in the arena (143-148), which acts not only as the climax of the satire but also the encapsulation of some concerns which arise from satire’s reliance on externalization, here through spectacle, as a way of creating meaning. This second section on Gracchus has often been considered befuddling, if we claim that the poem concerns the sexual mores of

Rome.71 Scholars have now addressed this objection by noting that the poem, at its heart, addresses sexual roles, rather than sexual behaviors, and the inversion of those roles in contemporary Rome; scholars studying the interplay, in conceptions of masculinity, between the low status of Roman spectacle and the display of the body have convincingly shown how this section works relative to the entire satire.72 More pertinently for this reading, these lines act as a final summation of the dissonant clashes along the axes of

71 E.g. Courtney’s desire to enclose the section in parentheses; for his explanation, see Courtney 1980: 122.

72 See esp. Walters 1998: 363. Konstan 1993 discusses the poem in the light of the poles of dominance and masculinity arrayed against submissiveness and effeminacy. As he notes, “the polarities of gender and class are homologous,” (13) so Gracchus’ appearance in the arena is an abomination because he is assuming a role normally conferred upon a conquered foreigner (cf. Edwards 1997 for more on the low status of gladiators and other performers). This “crossing of status categories” (Konstan 1993: 14) is equivalent to a playing of the female role, in sexual activity or otherwise. Walters 1998, drawing on the analogy of the grotesque display of Hostius Quadra at Sen.N.Q. 1.16, who placed an elaborate apparatus of mirrors so as to watch himself be all-penetrated and penetrating, argues for a connection in the Roman mind between unmanliness and the public display of the body. For more on Hostius, see Elsner 2007: 178-79 and esp. Bartsch 2006: 103-14. Nappa 1998: 107-108 similarly points out that “passive submission concretely realizes the elusive but overwhelmingly important moral category of effeminacy” and that it is this slide into effeminacy that is so dangerous to the moral stability of Rome. 72 gender and class in the system of chaotic sexual vice which Juvenal has created in this poem.

The passage features emphasis again on Gracchus’ clothing and equipment as a way of identifying him (specifically as a retiarius) but also a remarkable excursus on

Gracchus’ “internal” nature, his lineage, which is unparalleled elsewhere in the satire:

Vicit et hoc monstrum tunicate fuscina Gracchi lustravitque fuga mediam gladiator harenam et Capitolinis generosior et Marcellis 145 et Catuli Paulique minoribus et Fabiis et omnibus ad podium spectantibus, his licet ipsum admoveas cuius tunc munere retia misit. (2.143-48)

The fuscina of the tunic-wearing Gracchus surpasses even this horror and he as a gladiator surveyed the middle of the arena in flight, more well-born than Capitolini and Marcelli and the descendants of Catulus and Paulus and Fabii and all those gazing at the box seats, though you add the very one for whose games he cast his nets.

For the first time in the satire, Juvenal explicitly discusses the noble lineage of his satirical object, casting that lineage as an essential, internal characteristic which stands as foil to Gracchus’ ostensible (and ostentatious) behavior. Though not as effective as some of his more notorious oxymorons (such as meretrix Augusta, 6.118) because of the separation between the two words, we should read the pair gladiator…generosior (144-

45) as presenting yet another problem of “reading” and interpreting. How is it possible for Gracchus to be a nobleman and a gladiator?73 More compellingly, the reaction of the crowd (which is also implicitly satirized) is to watch.74 When presented with the same satirical information, the same conflict of various kind of signs—social, visual, etc.— they do not erupt into a satirical rant, but rather simply absorb the spectacle.

73 Indeed, this would have been legally “impossible” at Rome because of certain strictures on the participation of nobles in ludi; see Levick 1983 for a decree from Larinum on the punishments accorded to nobles for appearing on stage.

74 Schmitz 2000: 136. 73

Evidently, Juvenal’s interpretation of the clash of definitions is not as self-evident as he would have us believe. Though some scholars have argued that Juvenal uses his satirical spectacle as a kind of sadistic stand-in, whereby his viewers can participate in vice vicariously by watching,75 I would think it has the opposite effect: the image of spectacle here unhinges Juvenal from his audience, showing the possibility of various interpretations. Unlike the horrified onlookers to Creticus, Juvenal subtly creates another response for those confronted with contemporary Rome. To show how un- straightforward reading the world has become, he gives us a second paradigm: mute observation and, perhaps, even enjoyment.76

Nor should this be surprising, if we have been paying attention; in a satirical world where external characteristics are constantly at variance with true meaning, the notion of sifting through those appearances and arriving at a monolithic conclusion, the one that Juvenal urges us to draw, seems overly restrictive. He has identified those gaps in society where behavior somehow fails to match external characteristics or where irreparable damage is being done to our social and sexual iconography; yet by exploring these issues he shows how his own discourse is dependent on a similar logic of correspondence in its “iconography” and is thus equally threatened by its disrepair.

75 Walters 1998: 365; Gunderson 2005: 234.

76 Contrast this attitude with his explicit condemnation of those who enjoy the spectacle of the nobles in Satire 8 (nec tamen ipsi/ignoscas populo; populi frons durior huius,/qui sedet et spectat, 8.188-90). This fragmentation of perspectives will be central to my reading of Satire 10 (Ch. 3). 74

E. Bottom Floor: Ancestors and Perverts

The thematic “descent” that has taken place in Satire 2, where each example is worse than the one that proceeds and vice spreads like a contagion across Rome and the text, is literalized in the poem’s coda:

esse aliquos manes et subterranea regna, Cocytum et Stygio ranas in gurgite nigras, 150 atque una transire vadum tot milia cumba nec pueri credunt, nisi qui nondum aere lavantur. sed tu vera puta: Curius quid sentit et ambo Scipiadae, quid Fabricius manesque Camilli, quid Cremerae legio et Cannis consumpta iuventus, 155 tot bellorum animae, quotiens hinc talis ad illos umbra venit? cuperent lustrari, si qua darentur sulpura cum taedis et si foret umida laurus. (2.149-158)

That there are some manes and subterranean kingsdoms, Cocytus and black frogs in the Stygian pool, and that so many thousands cross the stream on a single canoe—not even little boys believe it, unless they are not old enough to be washed for a quadrans. But pretend they’re real: what do Curius and both scions of Scipio feel, what do Fabricius and the shades of Camillus feel, what do the legion of Cremera and the youth eaten up at Cannae feel, so many ghosts of battles, whenever this sort of shade comes to them from here? They would like to be purified, if they were given some sulphur along with torches and if there was some wet laurel.

In Juvenal’s katabasis, the viewer does not need to leave his seat since Rome has already become a kind of chaotic underworld. Juvenal stages a different kind of scene here than the previous spectacles of Gracchus, Creticus, and the perverted Bona Dea festival.

Rather than put the objects on stage and let their props, costumes, and actions speak

(mostly) for themselves, he sets up this scene as a foil, depicting vicariously the proper response of the audience of the satirical show of Satire 2. Juvenal uses Roman names again as moral markers; here, though, rather than evoking the contradiction between that name and its representative’s inappropriate behavior (Laronia, Creticus, Gracchus), they have their expected significance: they indicate the souls of virtuous high-born Romans

75 and Roman soldiers.77 What should these good Romans—and by extension, we—feel when they witness the progress of these kind of shades into the underworld? A desire for immediate purification.

Yet, wedged between the scene-setting in lines 149-15178 and the confrontation scene is another explosive tag (nec pueri credunt, nisi qui nondum aere lavantur./ sed tu vera puta, 152-53) rendering the entire passage absurd. The verb introducing indirect discourse that begins at line 149 is delayed until the start of line 152 and it is a negative: no one believes that these things exist, except for the youngest children. Still, Juvenal urges us, let’s pretend that the following scene could happen, explicitly exposing the rhetorical fiction of this section.79 We have here another clash between the Schein of satire, the visualizing narrative of Rome that Juvenal constructs, and “true” Sein, since his moral content is debunked as factually empty by Juvenal himself. It speaks metapoetically of the techniques of satire as a whole which parades before us the shades of evildoers (recall 1.180-181: experiar quid concedatur in illos/ quorum Flaminia tegitur cinis atque Latina) at which we are supposed to look and retch. Are we as insubstantial as the shades that populate these juvenile beliefs? The scene opens up those same rifts that this satire has examined explicitly among the Romans, those moments of

77 Anderson 1982: 211-216 is the most thorough treatment of the military imagery in Satire 2, showing how it is deployed with negative irony with reference to hypocrites (e.g. qui talis verbis/Herculis invadunt, 2.19- 20) or positively, as a foil to the military virtue which effeminate Rome now lacks. Connors 2005: 139 suggests a parallel with the parade of descendants in Aeneid 6. 78 One especially notes the almost certain allusion to Aristophanes’ Frogs in ranas in gurgite nigras (150); this could simply bring to a mind a dramatic context and technique or, if we think more carefully of the plot of the play, we might consider the overlap between the respective Underworld travelers: the sexually ambiguous Dionysius in Aristophanes and the effeminate shade in Juvenal.

79 Anderson 1982: 305. Others have seen the consciously revealed fantasy as thematically expressive of either the stagnation and emptiness of references to the past (Weisen 1989: 722; Smith 1989: 818) or used as representative of the topsy-turvy world at Rome (Tennant 2001: 190). 76 semantic static where the clashing of several sets of signs has frustrated efforts to find coherent meaning in Rome—or in satire about Rome.

The poem ends with a final ironic couplet, where the Armenian hostage, who has become a “human” at Rome (venerat obses,/ hic fiunt homines, 2.166-67),80 takes back perverted Roman “virtues” to his homeland:

mittentur bracae, cultelli, frena, flagellum: sic praetextatos referunt Artaxata mores. (2.169-170)

There will be sent trousers, knives, bridles, and a whip: so they bring back to Artaxata Roman “morals.”

Juvenal again uses objects as a moral iconography of manliness; but, in a reversal, this equipment belongs to an Easterner. It portrays the inverse of the objects now used by

Romans, those accoutrements of the Bona Dea festival: the needle for applying mascara

(94), the glass phallus-shaped drinking vessel (95), and especially the mirror (99ff.). The semantic confusion which the satire portrays and embodies might be thought to be summarized in the cutting irony of the final word; the “morals” they will bring back81 will be of a debased and meaningless sense.

80 Scholars’ varying interpretations of the force of the word homines might be counted as a nice emblem of the semantic confusion this satire represents: for example, Courtney 1980 ad loc sees is contrasted with viri (i.e. they become men, but not “men”—or, perhaps, they become “men”, but not real men; again the question of the essential definition is at stake), while Braund 1996 points out the possibility of a paraprosdokian for pathici, with homines standing for an ironic euphemism.

81 Cf. Keane 2006: 131 for the way that this passage, as well as 2.82-84 earlier (see note 59) fits into the patterns of “learning” vice in Juvenal. 77

Chapter 2: The Mirage of “Nobility”: Reference and Negotiation in Juvenal 8

Though Satire 8 is more discursive and less intensely visualized than Satire 2, it can be still shown to contain the same problems of definition and incoherence, with the same accompanying problems for satire. Indeed, it will similarly rely on signposts both visual and semiotic to explore a different crisis of categories in Juvenal’s Rome: the definition of “nobility.” Although John Henderson’s explorations of Juvenal’s provocative use of exempla in this Satire is fundamental to understanding its play with the political mechanisms of nobilitas at Rome,1 I will argue that the questions which

Juvenal raises about the “meaning” of nobility in Satire 8 cannot help but apply to the

“meaning” of his own satire.

In the first very line, Juvenal lays out the problem of defining what nobility is or, more precisely, defining what the point of nobility is, asking, “What do family-trees do?”

(Stemmata quid faciunt? 8.1).2 His nominal answer appears twenty lines later: “Virtue is the one and only nobility” (nobilitas sola est atque unica virtus, 8.20). The sententious nature of the answer, almost oracular in its sweeping simplicity, indicates to the reader that Juvenal’s topic concerns more than how contemporary nobles (or those of two generations past, or twenty) disgrace their noble lineage through their peccadilloes.

Indeed, its deceptively simple syntax represents how easily and instinctively categorical definitions can be absorbed, both at Rome and in satire.

1 Henderson 1997. The other major studies are comparatively few: Braund 1988 69-129, and Fredericks 1971a.

2 For stemmata as painted family trees in the atrium, see Flower 1996: 40. 78

A closer look at line 20 reveals the underlying irresolution of Juvenal’s answer, for the syntax of the line, whereby virtus is the subject and nobilitas sola…atque unica is the predicate,3 is unsettled. Without the preceding lines, the sentence as it stands could just as well read “nobility is the one and only virtue.” The context of this opening— plotting an abstract definition of “virtuous nobility” over and against its degraded particular representatives in contemporary culture—would, of course, support the first reading.

Yet Juvenal also seems to argue that these Romans have forfeited their claims to the cachet of nobility by their behavior; thus the “true” noble would necessarily be virtuous by definition, thus making the sentiment tautologous. John Henderson describes well how slippery and open-ended the line is: “The release of that last word, virtus, which has been jacked up higher with every word that precedes, in the outcome carries only a spurious, formal finality. So far, we’re scarcely the wiser for it.”4 The problems of stability of the definition of Roman nobility will come to be condensed near the end of the satire into an escalating depiction of the noble actors, who, on Juvenal’s estimation, become a grotesque hybrid, a social adunaton corresponding to the sexual adunata of

Satire 2: how can someone be a noble and an actor? It is no coincidence that Juvenal stages Gracchus’s momentous appearance in the arena at, or near, clearly marked climactic moments in both satires.5

3 As e.g. Courtney 1980 would have it.

4 Henderson 1997: 62. Cf. Henderson’s statements elsewhere that Juvenal “tak[es] the greatest care to show up in his syntax how utterly both these master-terms, nobilitas and virtus, depend on context for meaning” (61)

5 Sat 2: vicit et hoc monstrum tunicati fuscina Gracchi (2.143); Sat 8: haec ultra quid erit nisi ludus? (8.199). Only the princeps citharoedus Nero can be deployed to top Gracchus in Sat. 8 (211-230). See Ch. 79

Most scholars who have discussed the whole of Satire 8 have focused on it purely as a denigration of the nobility and their arrogant, and unwarranted, pride in their ancestry.6 John Henderson has most closely explored the semantic open-endedness of

Satire 8, particularly in the catalogue of famous Roman cognomina in the opening nineteen lines and the discussion of euphemism following; in the end, though, he sees

Satire 8 as most concerned with the meaning of genealogies (including satirical

“genealogies”) and how investigating them is a politically destabilizing move: “What questioning gentility (family distinction) does, on the other hand, is court destabilization of the working of hereditary systems in the operation of civic institutions, by focusing on the few who enjoy the privilege which these deliver.”7 Satire 8, to Henderson, is concerned with the meaning-making institutions of Rome, the “prestige industry” as he terms it, namely heredity, used to reinforce an unbalanced system of power that perpetuates itself through the valuing of a characteristic unable to be achieved by an individual’s effort.

The analysis of this chapter will focus insetad on how the deconstruction of the process of Roman nobility is reflected in Juvenal’s own mechanics. In order to enact his project of satiric denigration of the fallen Roman nobility, Juvenal must rely on the implication that nobilitas does, in fact, have a fixed meaning, referring to the essential value conferred by lineage alone. For something to be coherently mocked, there must be

1.D for more on the place of Gracchus at the climax of Sat. 2 and the critical problems that have arisen stemming from it.

6 E.g. Fredericks 1971a: “It is correct to call the poem ‘cynically humorous’ or ‘humourously cynical,’ but not morally hopeful, for its real subject matter is the absurdity of stemmata as a moral ideal…The whole pursuit of family pedigrees is a foolhardy system of values” (124-125, 126) and later: ”What [Juvenal] says in his own hyperbolical fashion is not that contemporary nobles are curable, but that they do indeed pursue the wrong ideals.” (132)

7 Henderson 1997: 11. 80 a stable standard of judgment against which to mock it as deviant. Yet, since Juvenal explores the incoherence of the definitions of nobility (is it virtus or gens?), his discourse will destabilize the fragile categories it relies on to operate. 8

The basic satiric situation of Satire 8 is the social crisis emblematized by the deviations of “modern” nobles from the path of the forebears who conferred value upon their nomina. 9 There is, however, a more fundamental crisis of meaning, with even more profound implications, of which the breakdown in the signification of nobilitas is a potent symbol. Juvenal will expose thus two related paradoxes in his satirical discourse, such that his own satire will become a representation, in two senses, of Rome-in-flux, both depicting it and embodying its contradictions. For Juvenal will mock the transgressions of Roman nobles by relying on a fixed system of relations (whereby nobility through birth is supposed to correlate with virtue), even as his satire will call the fixity of this system into question by positing an alternate definition of nobility conferred not by birth, but in spite of it. Further, he will rely on a semiotic toolkit which will depend on an analogous fixity in linguistic reference even as he represents a world in which

8 For a recent reappraisal of the idea of the gens in Roman culture and early Republican history, see Smith 2006; especially of interest are his account of the ancient evidence (12-64, esp. 15-20, for the inheritance of membership in a gens through a common male ancestor and its relationship with nomina and cognomina, 32-44, for the legendary and mythological genealogy of some Roman clans, and, 55-63, for the role of the gens, however contested, in elite self-definition and whether gens was a term denied to plebeians) and the relationship between the patriciate, the familia, and the gens in the Early Republic (251-80), particularly in maintaining patrician privileges and status (302-35).

9 Regardless of the historicity of a “social crisis” in early 2nd century C.E. Rome, it is unquestionable that the “Rome” of Juvenal’s Satires is marked by social porousness. Reekmans 1977 is still the most useful systematic catalog of the change in social categories in Juvenal’s Rome (and how his depiction of them reflects back on their creator, who is deemed an “authoritarian personality” [161]); see also Knoche 1970 510ff. Plaza 2006: 114-27 focuses on how Juvenal depicts money as creating a new set of meanings and values related to that crumbling social order; see also Courtney 1980: 27. Shumate 2006: 19-54 examines how Juvenal works to reaffirm those values by his delineation of Romans and The Other (in which is contained notions of femininity, foreignness, and sexual deviance, often elided into each other). Malnati 1988 compares the views of social mobility presented in Martial and Juvenal, noting how, for Juvenal, “social mobility is in itself a cause of indignation,” (134) while Martial is less concerned with aristocratic rigidity and more with exposing pretense. 81 uncomplicated denotation is becoming unhinged. As in Satire 2, he will continue to use a visual language of satiric iconography, as well as a more discursive symbolic system in his employment of Roman names as both historical figures and, transhistorically, as representations of virtue or, more frequently, vice.

A. Home is where the Hatred is

Discussing the entrenched crisis in Roman signs, Juvenal starts in the heart of an imagined Roman house, the atrium. Indeed, the atrium is an appropriate place to begin, a nexus of the display of a Roman family’s social value (to be deciphered by visitors). As

Andrew Wallace-Hadrill has shown in his exposition on the design of the Roman house, whose structure could be thought to “perform” social boundaries, the atrium was designed primarily as a public place which was oriented around accessibility and transparency.10 More importantly, it was also where the status objects of the imagines and stemmata (painted family trees) were displayed, both as an exemplum for the occupants to follow and a demonstration of elite standing.11

This notion of the atrium as an intersection of Roman social and familial identity dovetails appropriately with the opening of Juvenal’s satire, as the first twenty lines have long been recognized as a flashpoint for Juvenal’s techniques of externalization via

10 Wallace-Hadrill 1994, esp. 44-47. Likewise, Edwards 1993: 160-61 describes how the Roman house is also a locus of moralistic attacks because it reflects the entrance of symbolic disruption by those attempting to enter the elite through expansion of wealth. Henderson 1997: 10 also discusses the atrium as an appropriate metapoetic symbol for satire’s exposure and conflation of private and public: “[The satirist’s] reach claims this threshold conduit linking interior privacy and the public highway for the social realm of civic intercourse.”

11 See Flower 1996: 16-31, for a brief summary of the value of the imagines and, 185-222, for their presence in the Roman house, displayed in the atrium (211-220). Henderson 1997: 19 deconstructs the significance of the ancestor masks, which are part of a larger scheme of the logic and significance of Roman naming conventions, clustering around ancestry (19-21). 82 concrete objects as a means of social criticism. Two parallel patterns of meaning-making, social and satirical, thus converge in the scene.

Satire 8 begins with the reader-viewer surveying the wreckage:

Stemmata quid faciunt? Quid prodest, Pontice, longo sanguine censeri, pictos ostendere vultus maiorum et stantis in curribus Aemilianos et Curios iam dimidios umeroque minorem Corvinum et Galbam auriculis nasoque carentem, 5 quid fructus generis tabula iactare capaci ?Fabricium?, post haec multa contingere virga fumosos equitum cum dictatore magistros si coram Lepidis male vivitur? Effigies quo tot bellatorum, si luditur alea pernox 10 ante Numantinos, si dormire incipis ortu luciferi, quo signa duce set castra movebant? cur Allobrogicis et magna gaudeat ara natus in Herculeo Fabius lare, si cupidus, si vanus et Euganea quantum vis mollior agna, 15 si tenerum attritus Catiensi pumice lumbum squalentis traducit avos emptorque veneni frangenda miseram funestat imagine gentem? tota licet veteres exornent undique cerae atria, nobilitas sola est atque unica virtus. 20 (8.1-20)

5-6 om. G, del. Hermann 6-8 del. Guyet 7 habent PG, om corvinum P: corvini G censorem Harrison fabriciumpontifices posse ac Housman

What do family trees do? What’s the benefit, Prodicus, of being approved by a blood stretching back, of showing the painted faces of your ancestors and Aemeliani standing on chariots and Curii, now missing his other half, and Corvinus short a shoulder, and Galba in need of earries and a nose, what is the fruit of boasting of Fabricius with a huge family chart, and, after these, to connect with many a branch smoke-stained masters of horse and a dictator, if the Lepidi’s public life is ill? What’s the meaning of representations of so many warriors, if you play an all-night dice game before the Numantines, if you go to bed at the sun’s first rise, the very time when they used to deploy standards and troops? Why does Fabius, born in a Herculean home, rejoice in the Allobrogici and the great altar, if he is covetous, if he is empty and however softer than a Venetian lamb, if he, rubbed smooth in his tender groin by Catinensian pumice-stone, betrays his hairy grandfathers and, a buyer of poison, ruins his wretched line with a statue worth shattering? Though the old wax-faces adorn the atrium on all sides, virtue is the one and only nobility.12

12 The textual difficulties are thick here. I accept at line 4 here the texts of Clausen and Braund, which follow the proposal of Prateus, where umero is an ablative of degree of difference (“less by a shoulder”), rather the mss. Greek accustative umeros interpreted by Housman (though he finds the statement obscure) 83

There is a palpable air of disrepair hanging over the scene. As one reads, the notions of decay seep in at line 4, when Curios is immediately qualified by dimidios

(Curios iam dimidios); in particular, the temporal texture of iam (the Curii are “now” missing its other half) underscores the notion of decline and deterioration. The degradations to the statues become increasingly abject, covered in smoke or with ears and noses lopped off. Scholars have long recognized how the pile-up of visual details of abuse and neglect of the ancestral images (whether wax imagines, busts, or statues) is analogous to the breakdown in morals among the descendants, especially as the figures in the opening lines becoming increasingly decrepit.13

Yet already there are hints of semantic imprecision in the Juvenal’s use of names, a difficulty in both reference and resonance. John Henderson has closely studied this section, ruthlessly unspooling the possible implications behind each one of the Roman cognomina that Juvenal uses. It is not always precisely clear whom each cognomen refers to14 or, more importantly, how straightforward these moral identifications are.15 Already,

as meaning habentem minores umeros, i.e. “armless” (followed by Courtney 1980). I also translate Fabricium, a Renaissance conjecture, followed by Henderson 1997 (145 n. 68 for his answers to Housman’s objection to Fabricium), for mss. repeated Corvinum. A proper name seems demanded by the context of the tabula generis, rather than the more generalized censorem (Braund) or pontifices (Housman); otherwise, what is the reference of the genus?

13 For example, Courtney ad l.4: “The physical decay of these portraits symbolizes the decline of the noble republican ideals and traditions.” See also Jenkyns 1982: 212 and Winkler 1983: 33-34, who argues that the statues mark not only present day decline but how that decline can negatively impact the reputations of the dead.

14 In particular, he examines the shift between the singular, such as Corvinum and Galbam, and in l. 5, and plurals, like Aemelianos and Curios ll. 3 and 4, and the play between the singularity of those figures and their exemplary meaning in defining gentility (Henderson 1997: 29-33). Javier Uría, in discussing the use of names in Ciceronian invective, gives a helpful paradigm of how to consider the way that names do work beyond their linguistic intention of either reference (connecting A with the name B) or appellation (giving A the name B), taking on, in Roman thought, extended meanings and connotations. This observation is invaluable considering the frequent use Juvenal makes not only of extended depictions of past figures as exemplars of vice or virtue but even of names themselves as stand-ins for qualities (cf. sed nunc ad quas 84 this ambiguity should clue the reader into the ambivalence of Juvenal’s use of names, for as he uses names from the past as representative of certain vices of crimes (treason, sexual improprieties, etc.), Juvenal will undo easy dichotomies between past virtue and present-day corruption.

As in Satire 2, there arises a play between Sein und Schein, though oriented slightly differently. In Satire 2, Juvenal concerned himself (at first) with the incoherence between the visual signs of sexual continence and masculinity (hairiness) and actual behavior (namely, signs hidden from view: piles and depilated genitals) and then exposed various examples of semantic and ideological incoherence around the axis of sexual propriety. Here, the outer signs are abundantly clear, as Juvenal depicts them. The dilapidated state of the statues is a result and manifestation of “modern” nobles’ disregard for the mores that are supposed to be linked to the meaning of maiores. Evoking the incoherence of Roman masculinity in Satire 2, the contrasting juxtaposition of present- day depilation (tenerum attritus Catiensi pumice lumbum, 16) and past ruggedness

(squalentis avos, 17) provide a transparent text of Roman decline, easy to read for satirist and, one degree removed, for satiric viewer. Similarly, the simultaneous staging of the youthful disgracer as engaged in frivolous, all-night “warfare” and the military accomplishments of his forebears (9-12) assumes an unproblematic rubric of

non Clodius aras?, 6.345 or my remarks in Chapter 1 about Curios in at 2.3). For more on Juvenal’s use and abuse of Roman notions of names and exemplarity, see the introduction, section B, and Ch. 3. C.

15 In particular, he charts out the full Fabian line and its decline, identifying the “intolerable psychic burdens” of being unable to ever top Fabius Cunctator. (Henderson 1997: 51-59). Indeed, it had died as a noble line, with Paullus Fabius Persicus, co. AD 34, as the last consul among the patricians. 85 interpretation; there is posited a stable idea of what nobilitas is, in order to chart present- day deviations.16

The modern-day dice player empties his ancestor’s accomplishments of meaning by perversely re-enacting them. Indeed, even more grotesque, he does it before their very eyes and, in turn, ours. In this satire, Juvenal will again and again call forth a structure of judgmental vision, whereby the reader is transported into the satire to assume the standpoint of a viewer of Roman deviance. Yet this structure of satiric spectatorship will only serve to underscore its current impotence and the breakdown in its effectiveness in enforcing social codes of identity, for those figures in the satire who act as stand-ins for the reader are one and all objects from the past. They are helpless to interact with an increasingly perverse environment; not only is a triumphal statue inanimate, it is emphatically by-gone, representing a lost age.17 In this scene the imaginary audience, appropriately enough, is made up of the ancestors themselves, especially as manifest in the form of the imagines.18 Yet the conduit between past and present which the imagines represent has been severed, and the weight of their gaze thuds uselessly to the ground.

This stand-in audience for the satiric reader will serve as a potent symbol of the position of Juvenal and the reader in Satire 8. Juvenal’s frustration at present-day nobility comes precisely from the fact that these signs are either misread or ignored by his fellow

16 See Henderson’s remarks on our dice-player, similarly tracing the implication of this visualized juxtaposition: “For this ‘Caesar,’ the die is cast every single night: mobile Rome, the army striking camp, is for him just ‘shifting statues’ round the atrium HQ. In the poetics of satiric scorn, it is ‘shifting signs.’ A tin-soldier play of metaphor (signa…movebant: the art in artillery?)” (Henderson 1997: 49).

17 In fact, this age is so lost that eventually it will be shown never to have existed at all (see section D below). For the paradox of Roman statues as both “alive” and a byword for dead, dull, or unfeeling, see Stewart 2003: 36-45.

18 Cf. Bartsch 2006: 124-27. Pliny HN 35.4-7 provides an interesting counterpoint to Juvenal, because in his moral account of the development of art, the imagines were degraded by becoming more extravagant. 86

Romans, for this perversion of noble responsibility is not accompanied by any apparent loss of power and influence.

Indeed, it is appropriate to consider briefly Juvenal’s place in the history of

Roman moralizing discussion about the overlap of mores and maiores. Susanna Braund has carefully detailed the patterns and motifs of literature on “true nobility,” identifying three main treatments: Romans who have maiores but not mores, Romans who are endowed with mores but lack maiores, and Romans who have both. She then compares

Juvenal to previous handlings of the theme and eventually arrives at the conclusion that

Juvenal’s treatment is ultimately unoriginal.19 For Braund, however, this unoriginality is meaningful in constructing the speaker of Satire 8 and coloring our reading of the satire’s content thereby: “triteness serves the specific purpose of parody and caricature.” In her analysis, Satire 8 stands as the reductio ad absurdum of the virtus/nobilitas theme.

Though Braund’s formulations about the satire are unfortunately marred by a priori assumptions about satirical persona inherited from W.S. Anderson and Alvin

Kernan, the apparent ineffectuality of Juvenal’s treatment of the topic is a useful notion.

Rather than focusing on the speaker and whether he is a moralist or a pseudo-moralist,20 it is profitable to consider how the content of the satire and its obvious inheritance from

19 Braund 1988: 79-102. She lists an invaluable set of comparanda from the late Republic and early Empire in both Greek and Latin at pp. 122-29.

20 Braund 1988: 111ff. gives a detailed reading of Satire 8 based on the idea of a vacillation between “moralist” and “pseudo-moralist”, where the latter indicates moments where the speaker slips into material or an irreverent tone not appropriate for a moralist or where hyperbole sends the speaker over the edge. Yet this reading is based on presumptions about the boundaries of “moralism” created by Alvin Kernan (as formulated for Roman poetry by Anderson 1982: 277-361), especially concerning the speaker undercutting his moral authority by wallowing in vice. One need only consider the Seneca the Younger’s depiction of Hostius Quadra (lovingly described at NQ 1.61.1; for more, see the sources in Ch. 1, n 72) or Cicero’s indelible portrait of a drunk Antony vomiting at a state function at Phil.2.63.13 to wonder about the legitimacy of such a critique. Few would accuse either of being self-destructively ironic. The one place where this reading does activate meaning is at 8.103ff., Juvenal’s advice not to plunder subject states; see section C below. 87 the previous tradition points up the ineffectuality of that tradition itself. The very continuity of 150 years’ worth of moral exhortation highlights the necessity of that discourse to instruct nobles to live up to their ancestry.21 Braund is correct to show that

Satire 8 cannot be thought to participate in that discourse in a traditional way, but, rather than commenting on the nature of the speaker, this lack of participation reflects on the nature of the discourse itself. The most explosive word in the condition (si coram Lepidis male vivitur, 9), with which the characteristically long Juvenalian period at lines 2-9 climaxes, is not male but coram. Despite the long-standing tradition of moral bluster,

Juvenal shouts, these things are happening right in front of our faces! Indeed, Juvenal’s gradual descent into unpleasant material from the past (first Neronian, then deep into the

Republican period) which closes the satire will serve to problematize any solid conceptual notion of prisca virtus against which to compare present-day folly. The inability for this discourse to posit fixed moral points of reference projects instability onto Juvenal’s own satiric discourse, which Juvenal will directly address in the next section of Satire 8.

B. What’s in a Name(d)?

Inversely, the recognition by scholars of the moral value of Juvenal’s broken imagines takes for granted the process of satirical meaning taking place: so thoroughly are we naturalized to Juvenal’s techniques that we fail to recognize that Juvenal’s constructs the seen “reality” of the Rome in his satires to correspond to the reality of

21 Braund lists a series of parallels dating back to Sall. BJ. 85. 88 noble decline (as he sees it).22 Richard Jenkyns describes the two main motifs of Satire 8 as “names and how they fail to make a simple connection with reality” and “statues and images,” whereby these motifs are “presented not just as ideas but as scenes or pictures.”23 Yet these two motifs are, in a way, incoherent; if names cannot be thought to correspond straightforwardly to reality, why should Juvenal’s images?

Indeed, after the traditional moral material immediately following upon line 20

(which advises Ponticus to be “noble” in his mores and his “true” nobility will be recognized: agnosco procerem, 8.26),24 itself somewhat curious,25 the next paragraph explicitly discusses the slippery correspondence between an object’s name and its manifest traits:

quis enim generosum dixerit hunc qui 30 indignus genere et praeclaro nomine tantum

22 John Henderson alone, it seems to me, has briefly mentioned the implications of this sleight of hand: “Again, Juvenal sees what he means to see: talking up a perfectly ordinary bust into a ‘symbol [of] the decline of the noble republican ideals and traditions,’ indeed; or pecking his own heirloom to pieces; or vandalizing the human icon to mock the vanity of its pretensions to incarnate the dead and gone; or making fun of his own own efforts to write life into craven images.”(Henderson 1997: 40). Similarly: “Where the face does duty for the person, is there anything else on view besides looks?” (Henderson 1997: 28) Jenkyns 1982: 212-19. recognizes the satirical technique at play, of allowing objects to say more than what is there, but he does not explore it fully beyond describing its satirical effectiveness. The importance of the face here reflects Roman conceptions of individualizing art, for, in Roman statuary, there was a much greater variety of heads than body-types, which were often interchangeable (cf. Stewart 2003: 47-59).

23 Jenkyns 1982: 206.

24Ferguson 1989: 188, explores the origins of the name, “not found among older aristocracy,” but which implies an ancestor who had enjoyed military success, à la Africanus or Germanicus. Henderson’s suggestions are even more aggressive, such as an indication of non-Roman eastern origin (see Henderson 1997: 25-26). An unpleasant Valerius Ponticus appears in Tacitus (Ann. 14.41) under Nero. In poetry, the name appears in Martial (several times), Propertius (as the straw-men composer of a Thebaid at 1.7.9) and, perhaps most significantly, as a adjective meaning “Pontic” in Horace’s Ship of State ode, 1.14. For more on the possible allusion to Horace, see Braund 1988: 226 n.59.

25 There is certainly an ironic incoherence in the passage ll.26-30, where Juvenal cynically describes that rara avis, the citizen of high birth outstanding in service (alto de sanguine rarus/ civis et egregius, 27-28), so rare that they are received by an overjoyed fatherland (ovanti patriae, 28) with the same acclaim shown by followers of Isis in the celebration of the ritual discovery of Osiris (29-30; for more on this feast, called the Heuresis, after the cry heurêka by the devotees, see Courtney 1980 ad. 29). The comparison of a Roman ovation to a ritual originating in Egypt is odd enough; but even further, Juvenal, in a way, performs this ovation himself in the previous line: salve Gaetulice, seu tu/ Silanus (26-27). 89

insignis? nanum cuiusdam Atlanta vocamus, Aethiopem Cycnum, pravam extortamque puellam Europen ; canibus pigris scabieque vetusta levibus et siccae lambentibus ora lucernae 35 nomen est pardus, tigris, leo, si quid adhuc est quod fremat in terris violentius. ergo cavebis et metues ne tu sic Creticus aut Camerinus. (8.30-38)

For who would call that one “noble” who is unworthy of his family and is remarkable (?) only because of an outstanding name. We call someone’s dwarf “Atlas,” an Ethiopian “Swan,” the bent and deformed girl “Europa”; for dogs which are lazy and made smooth by chronic mange and licking the edges of a lamp dry, their name is “panther,” “tiger,” “lion,” or something else which roars more violently on the earth. Therefore, be you wary and fear being called “Creticus” or “Camerinus” in this way.

Juvenal asks, who could apply the attribute generosus to someone whose actions and character blatantly falls short of the prestige their name bestows? The following lines provide a subtle, cynical answer to this query: anyone! For we are accustomed not simply to call things by inappropriate names (vocamus, 32),26 but to call them by names which are diametrically opposed to their clearly distinguishable traits. In lines 37-38, superficially meant as advice to the addressee Ponticus, the off-handed sic (ergo cavebis/ et metues ne tu sis sic Creticus aut Camerinus) delivers the final blow. Juvenal outlines the “new” logic of definition in the disordered world of Rome: to give someone a noble name is actually an offence to their mores since, fitting into an established pattern of contradiction between name and behavior, the designation would imply its opposite.27

More and more, not just the concretely described dregs of nobility but Juvenal’s own way of framing the discussion makes a final definition of nobility anything but transparent.28

26 The first person plural vocamus rather than a third or second person is significant here: we Romans? we humans? we readers of satire?

27 The phenomenon is termed by ancient rhetoricians antiphrasis (e.g. Quint. 9.2.47); comparable examples in English are Robin Hood’s fellow “Little John” and the ironic description of especially large men as “Tiny.”

28 Henderson 1997: 71 also observes here how euphemism becomes dysphemism, but he is, as in general, more concerned with the implications social rather than poetological. 90

In Rome, a word can point to both its meaning and its opposite. This exposure of incongruous naming conventions thus ironizes and debunks coherent patterns of definitions. This debunking can also be thought to represent as transition in method in

Satire 8: it will move away from an attack on the discrepancy between the prestige granted to his satiric objects by society and their “real” natures based only on piquant visualized representations. Satire 8 will instead embrace a subtler, more discursive brand of incoherence. Though Juvenal’s arsenal will continue to include dramatization and objectification (especially concentrated in the section on stage-struck patricians), his

“moral metonymy” will become broader in Satire 8, though equally paradoxical.

Juvenal’s reliance on terms with fixed moral resonance, particularly his use of exemplary names, will metapoetically play out the central issue of the satire (namely, if virtus is the one and only nobilitas, what need is there for “nobility” in the first place?). For Juvenal makes comments that, rather than simply trying to reconstitute the “true” definition of nobilitas imply that the concept should be dispensed with altogether. Yet the indeterminancy of “nobility” will run counter to Juvenal’s discursive practices, which rely on the fixity of moral associations to land their satiric blows. Juvenal will show that nobilitas has no essential connection to mores (and never has, 8.231-75), but Juvenal’s mockery has have no resonance unless “nobility” continues to have meaning.

The conflict between what Juvenal says throughout Satire 8 and the suitability of positing a “noble” class can sometimes arise from bouts of near-pleonasm or, conversely, at those times when Juvenal explicitly or subconsciously dismisses “nobility” as a useful term. An example of the first comes above, just after the opening lines set in the nobleman’s atrium. Juvenal bids his pledge Ponticus to “be you a Paulus or Cossus or

91

Drusus in your behavior” (Paulus vel Cossus vel Drusus moribus esto, 8.21). Is moribus necessary to say? The names Paulus, Cossus, and Drusus must already have moral connotations for their use as a referent here to be meaningful.29 Yet the statement would almost certainly lack clarity without moribus; indeed, it appears that it is the reference to the noblemen which is pleonastic since it is exactly noble mores which are at issue. This is not mere verbosity, for this combination of words, situated early in the satire, helps unlock the issues of definition and reference that course through the rest of the poem.

C. Let’s Talk it Out: Addressing Rubellius and Ponticus

More globally, Juvenal can undercut the point of discussing “nobility” entirely even as his stated project is meant to remove the impurities from the nobility by forging a better definition of nobilitas. Several moments from the following scene with Rubellius

Blandus illustrate this. After the discussion of antiphrasis, Juvenal then turns his glance towards one particularly egregious noble, Rubellius Blandus (8.39-70),30 and stages a conversation with him (his ego quem monui? Tecum mihi sermo, Rubelli/ Blande., 8.39-

40)—though considering Blandus gets only three lines of dialogue, it might hardly be termed sermo. Juvenal attacks Rubellius’ blusterous pride in his own heritage and allows him to speak only in order to hang himself with his own noose:

his ego quem monui? tecum mihi sermo, Rubelli Blande. tumes alto Drusorum stemmate, tamquam 40

29 Ferguson 1987 suggests that Paulus in 8.21 is L. Aemilius Paullus Macedonicus, that Drusus is almost certainly Nero Claudius Drusus, but that Cossus is likely more generalized, perhaps Sergius Cornelius Cossus or Cornelius Lentulus Cossus. Henderson 1997: 71 argues for the ambiguity of the names themselves, that are a “generous range of heroes, Paulus, Cossus, and Drusus, paradigmatically ambivalent.”

30 Since he is depicted as Neronian (inflatum plenumque Nerone propinquo, 8.72), he is a member of the Drusi and certainly related to, but not identical with, a) C. Rubellius Blandus suffect co. 18 C.E. who had a son b) Rubellius Plautus, executed in 62 C.E. See Ferguson 1987: 199. 92

feceris ipse aliquid propter quod nobilis esses, ut te conciperet quae sanguine fulget Iuli, non quae uentoso conducta sub aggere texit. 'uos humiles' inquis 'uolgi pars ultima nostri, quorum nemo queat patriam monstrare parentis, 45 ast ego Cecropides.' (8.39-46)

And whom have I been advising with these words? I’ve got to have some words with you, Rubellius Blandus. You swell because of the high family-tree of the Drusi, as if you did something to earn your nobility, such that a matron whose blood beshone of the Julii conceived you, and not someone who weaves for hire along the wind-swept outskirts. ‘You lowly creatures,’ you say, ‘the lowest part of our crowd, none of whom would be able to point out his parent’s homeland—me though, I’m a pure-blooded Crecropian.’

Here, Juvenal depicts Rubellius committing a less debauched but still distasteful offense: rather than reveling before the broken statues of his forebears, Rubellius is simply overly and undeservedly proud of his lineage, though he himself has no achievements to have warranted birth from someone noble (42) rather than a meager weaver-woman (43). The underlying meaning is clear: birth is irrelevant unless one has done “something for which you might be noble” (41). Rubellius’ snide derision of the common people is completely undone by his designation of himself as not quite a Roman noble after all, but instead a “pure-blooded Cecropian” (46).31

Juvenal introduces something dangerous to his discourse when he implies the the primary reference of “nobility” should be transferred from birth to virtue because it undermines the necessity of defining anything as “noble” at all, if it merely functions as a byword for “virtuous.” Juvenal continues the discussion of the value (or lack thereof) of bloodlines themselves by pointing out that it is in fact the skilled lower classes who plead the cases of the lazy nobles, who “split the knot of the laws and unravel legal riddles”

(veniet de plebe togata/ qui iuris nodos et legume aenigmata solvat, 8.49-50), and who

31 Cecropides is a loaded term for a Roman to use to describe oneself; although it metonymically refers to the Athenian notion of autochthony and, thus, here points to Rubellius’ pride in his Italic origins, it surely contains a self-destructive nugget, which is what Juvenal lobs back at Rubellius. 93 make the most effective and hard-working soldiers (8.51-52). “But you” Juvenal intones,

“you’re nothing but a pure-blood Cecrops and, just like a Herm,…missing a bit” (at tu/ nil nisi Cecropides truncoque simillimus Hermae, 8.52-53). Juvenal takes Rubellius’ own term of pride (“Cecropian”) 32 and unleashes its ironic implications, adding that, not only is he an Athenian, but he is a Herm—and a “busted” one at that. The allusion to the

Mutilation of the Herms throughout Athens on the eve of the departure of the Athenian expedition to Sicily in 415 B.C.E.33 not only suggests Rubellius’ similarity with the disgruntled noble oligarchs who probably perpetrated it, but it renews the imagery of broken statues with which the satire began.34 Here, Juvenal takes the imagery further: whereas before the broken statuary was a physical reflection of the criminal activity taking place at its feet, here human actually becomes statue: Rubellius is alive (nullo quippe alio vincis discrimine quam quod/ illi marmoreum caput est, tua vivit imago, 8.54-

55). Yet even the tag on Rubellius’ “life” is double-sided, as it is his imago, i.e. his ancestor mask, which “lives”: Rubellius is not exactly a living death, as some have claimed, but a living instantiation of a dead ancestor.35 Rubellius is playing an endless worldwide tour in an ancestor cover band, never stooping to write his own songs.36 Woe betide the atrium that Rubellius’ imago will one day ornament. The message is clear:

32 Or, more precisely, the one that Juvenal has given to him.This is another example of Christine Schmitz’s “Character-inconsistent Speech” (see Intro, section D) and a good way of drawing out the mimetic paradox of satirical ventriloquism here.

33 Courtney ad loc. is hesitant, but next to Cecropides, trunco Hermae must conjure up the mutilated herms. The story is related canonically at Thucydides 6.28-29, 53ff.

34 Fredericks 1971a: 120. Note too the metrical harshness of three monosyllables in a row, two ending the hexameter, one beginning the next (at tu/ nil, 8.52-53)

35 Fredericks 1971a: 120; Courntey ad 8.55. As Flower 1996: 2 insists, an imago should not be construed as a proper “death mask.”

36 As James Uden has recently pointed out (Uden 2013), the statement cuts both ways because, if Rubellius were truly a living embodiment of his ancestry, Juvenal would be praising, not criticizing him. 94

Rubellius’ birth has no standing unless correlated with virtuous achievement—which is another way of saying that it has no standing at all.

Juvenal slyly moves from comparisons with inanimate objects to the animal kingdom and here the argument turns explicitly against the value of birth: dic mihi,

Teucrorum proles, animalia muta/ quis generosa putet nisi fortia? (“Tell me, those of

Trojan stock, who would think the dumb animals ‘noble’ unless they were strong?”, 8.56-

57).37 Juvenal then describes how the palm of victory is awarded on the basis of success

(i.e. speed: cuius/ clara fuga ante alios et primus in aequore pulvis, 8.60-61) and not linked in any way to genealogy (sed venale pecus Coryphaei posteritas et/ Hirpini, si rara iugo Victoria sedit, 8.62-63).38 Though an analogy of humans to animals would not be read as controversial, Juvenal’s attack on heredity is sweeping for a Roman, in its destruction of the importance of birth in establishing identity and value. As he continues,

Juvenal notes that among horses (ibi) there is “no respect for ancestors, no favor for the shades” (nil ibi maiorum respectus, gratia nulla/ umbrarum, 8. 64-65).39 Indeed, when

Juvenal returns to the world of men, he wants to be impressed by achievement and

37 Though the argument from analogy with animals may seem unusual, it is a commonplace in rhetorical texts, particularly of horses, such as Quintillian 5.11.4 and Dio Chry. 15.30.

38 Coryphaeus and Hirpinus being, of course, members of successful horse teams; Hirpinus also appears in Martial (3.63.12).

39 Though Courtney argues that the ibi indicates that Juvenal is referring exclusively to the world of horses, this argument ignores that the section as a whole concerns an analogy between animals and men. He does not follow this statement by stating, “but among men, it is different,” but simply gives an account of the punishment of the slow-footed horse (segnipedes, a play on the elevated compound sonipes, as at Verg. Aen.11.600), namely, their cheap exchange between masters and labor at the mill (ll.65-67). It is no coincidence that the mill is often the threatened punishment for human troublemakers in Plautus (e.g ut ferratus in pistrino aetatem conteras, Bacch. 4.6.11), and, indeed, in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, our asinine friend Lucius, condemned to the mill, gives a grim description of human slaves toiling in the mill with him (9.13.1-2). See Bradley 2000 for more on the “animalizing” discourse of slavery which underscores the fictional scene. Later in the satire, Juvenal asserts that if a servant acted the way the nobles do, Ponticus would dispatch them to prison-farms (quid facias talem sortitus, Pontice, servum?/ nempe in Lucanos aut Tusca ergastula mittas, 8.179-180). 95 dismisses the value of birth: “Thus, so we can admire you, not your relations, give us something I could carve on a stone beyond those honors which we gave and give to those to whom you owe everything” (ergo ut miremur te, non tua, privum aliquid da/ quod possim titulis incidere praeter honores quos illis damus ac dedimus quibus omnia debes,

8.68-70). Here, ergo points back to the conclusion to draw from the analogy, the importance of new individual achievement in maintaining one’s noble status.

It could be objected here that damus and dedimus in line 70 indicate that Juvenal does in fact give respect to ancestry, through his acknowledgment of their monumentalization on stone. Yet Juvenal gives those honors not to abstract ancestry, but to concrete ancestors, whose deeds and successes contribute to, but are not dependent on, the reputation of their own predecessors any more than the victories of a racehorse are tied to its parents. Juvenal thus ends his imaginary address to Rubellius Blandus with this explicit dismissal of the connection between birth and achievement and his assertion that repute should be founded on the latter instead of the former. Juvenal adds a subtly ironic tag that Rubellius actually reflects the trend of his family ties, rather than bucks it: iuvenem quem nobis fama superbum/ tradit et inflatum plenumque Nerone propinquo

(“the youth who, so the story goes, was haughty and puffed and full of his nearness to

Nero,” 8.72). Though Juvenal states simply that Rubellius is haughty because of his family connection to Nero, the mention of a genealogical relationship with Nero subtly foreshadows the dissolution which is emblematic of nobility in general. As Juvenal begins to stretch back in time, subtly here, more directly later, the implications of the antiphrasis section loom larger. The assumptions at the outset concerning the connection between nobility and virtue, which latter-day representatives were thought to pervert, are

96 becoming ever more tenuous. It is this hint which Juvenal expands in the following section concerning the history of gubernatorial ransacking of the provinces.

But first, in a moment of transition, he turns back to Ponticus, giving a series of seemingly moral exhortations to be a good and honest Roman, either as a soldier, teacher, or lawyer (esto bonus miles, tutor bonus, arbiter idem/ integer, 8.79-80).40 Though these terms are themselves uncomplicated in their moral associations, Juvenal’s reliance in these lines on externalized or metonymic symbols of morality or immorality (particularly the mention of the tyrant Phalaris, alluding to the torture device of the bronze bull, 8.81-

82) seems to run counter to a philosophy that urges its audience not to “lean on the reputation of others” (miserum est aliorum incumbere famae, 8.76). In a satire where

Juvenal questions not only the current equation of nobility (i.e. birth) to “nobility” (i.e. virtue) by using marked examples to the contrary but also considers whether “nobility” is a useful term at all, his reliance on moral iconography may lead the reader to worry whether his satiric scaffolding is similarly primed for collapse: ne conlapsa ruant subductis tecta columnis (8.77).41 Another example of Juvenal’s resort to the obvious

(both in a sense of “visualized for the satiric audience” and “easily accessible, even cliché”) is the snapshot of the perjurer-cum-gourmand, slurping down expensive oysters and bathed in fine perfumes: dignus morte perit, cenet licet ostrea centum/ Gaurana et

Cosmi toto mergatur aeno, 8.85-86).

40 It may considered perhaps slightly ironic that Juvenal mentions “teacher” among the models of Roman virtue, considering the poor treatment that teachers of grammar and rhetoric had just received in Sat. 7.150- 240 in the same book. See Weisen 1973 and Braund 1988 24-68 for a discussion of the treatments of teachers in Sat. 7, including Juvenal’s own reinforcement of their degradation.

41 Compare the columns cracking at the opening of Satire 1, worn down by the prolific and blusterous performance of poetic recitation: Frontonis platani convolsaque marmora clamant/ semper et adsiduo ruptae lectore columnae (1.12-13) 97

Suddenly, Juvenal gives his discussion a much more specific frame: he depicts himself giving instructions to Ponticus before he is dispatched to be governor of a province (expectata diu tandem provincia cum te/ rectorem accipiet, 8. 87-88).42 In this passage, he moves again towards the thematic irony underlying the notion that the most profound thieves of provinces have always been corrupt Roman noblemen, for it is precisely the social position granted by birth which enables their rapaciousness by providing the opportunity to govern the provinces they defraud. The entire section is filled with references to Roman plunderers, who drained provincials dry (ossa vides regum vacuis exucta medullis, 8.90) and take more as governors than as conquerors

(plures de pace triumphos, 8. 108).

Thus, alongside the paradox of redefining nobility while jettisoning it entirely, runs another contradiction illuminated by Juvenal’s move backwards into the past, for the binary corrupt-cum-contemporary Rome and virtuous-cum-bygone Rome is countered by

Juvenal’s extended discussion of readily identifiable noble brigands from previous generations. This further widens the gap between nobility and virtue which the satire has initially set out to bridge. Of the prosecuted governors mentioned by Juvenal who can be identified definitively, the most recent is Marius Priscus (cum tenuis nuper discinxerit

Afros, 8.120), whose trial and condemnation by Tacitus and Pliny the Younger in 100

C.E. was already two decades old. He draws from almost a century prior (Capito et

42 Henderson 1997 85 suggests that this move outward to the provinces suggests the universal implications of the poem’s imagery, globally and temporally. Braund 1988: 95-102 embarks on an extended generic analysis of the section, describing it as a propemtikon in the terms of the 4th c.e. century grammarian Menander Rhetor, and argues for the points of contact between this seeming digression and the rest of the poem. I agree with her that this sub-section operates like a case study of the whole, especially as it repeats, contorts, and undercuts the moral content, but I will assert that this repetition has a different result, resulting in the same poetological morass of the rest of the poem, rather than establishing further the pseudo-moralistic persona of the speaker. 98

Tutor…piratae Cilicum, 8.93-4; Cossutianus Capito, prosecuted in 57 C.E.)43 or even two centuries before (his mention of the notorious sacrilegus Verres, 106, immortalized by

Cicero’s condemnation in 70 B.C.E.). Juvenal relies on the immediate resonance of these by-gone names to carry the weight of condemnation in the same way that current nobles rely on the resonance of their cognomina to grant them their prestige and the license

(provincial or otherwise) that accompanies it. Indeed, Juvenal does not even mention the crimes of two governors: inde Dolabella † atque hinc† Antonius. (8.105).44 Their names alone are notorious enough for Juvenal’s purposes, particularly the additional resonance that many of them escaped unscathed or relatively unscathed from the trials: quid damnatio confert? (“What does it matter if you are condemned?”, 8.94).45 That Tutor cannot be definitely identified (8.93)46 may only add to the picture of pervasive corruption, for the text prods the reader into understanding the implication of a name that may not actually refer to anyone.47

43 Cf. Tac. Ann.13.33 and 16.21 and Quint. 6.1.14.

44 Though the sense is clear enough, the exact reading of the unmetrical line has not been settled satisfactorily. Common emendations involve keeping atque and inserting some kind of adjective or noun in apposition in front of Antonius (Cf. Braund’s reading: Dolabella praedoque Antonius). See Courtney ad loc. for more.

45 One points especially to his mention of Marius (cum tenuis nuper Marius discinxerit Afros?, 8.120; the nuper is especially sardonic considering it forms Juvenal’s justification for avoiding being assigned to Africa). Despite his successful conviction at the hands of Tacitus and Pliny the Younger (which Pliny had rhapsodized at length, Epist. 2.11), Juvenal mentions him in Satire 1 in the “rogues’ gallery” as rather flourishing even as an exile: exul ab octava Marius bibit et fruitur dis/ iratis, at tu victrix, provincia, ploras, 1.49-50). In her chapter discussing the intersecting of law and satire, Keane examines this passage as evidence that Juvenal’s satire depicts that justice is not served in the courts, but outside them (Keane 2006: 97-98).

46 Syme 1979a: 271-72, argues, though not forcefully, for accepting the alternate manuscript reading of Numitor, which metonymically refers to Epirus Marcellus (co. 74 for the second time), linked with Cossutianus Capito twice in Tacitus (Ann. 13.33; 16.28.1). Ferguson 1987, with no great confidence, explains that it may refer to the son of C. Vellaeus (suffect consul in 28 C.E.). 47 Eco 1990: 79-82, describes the expectation of an author for “cooperative good will” from his Model Reader, wherein the reader pretends he understands the references to the Realien in a fictional world, especially geography. He gives an example from Victor Hugo’s Quatrevingttreize of an incredibly long and 99

At lines 100-104, he again uses his technique of letting a scene and its objects explain moral decline on their own:

plena domus tunc omnis, et ingens stabat acervos 100 nummorum, Spartana chlamys, conchylia Coa, et cum Parrhasii tabulis signisque Myronis Phidiacum vivebat ebur, nec non Polycliti multus ubique labor, rarae sine Mentore mensae. (8.100-104)

At that time, their homes were full, and there stood a huge pile of money, and Spartan cloaks, and Coan silks, and, alongside paintings of Parrhasius and statues of Myron, the ivory of Phidias was alive, and there was not lacking many a labor of Polyclitus everywhere, rare were the tables without a Mentor.

Here, Juvenal uses many of the nomimalizing techniques as before, but inverted. Instead of a list of names of corrupt Roman nobles, he lists artists (Parrhasius, Myron, Phidias,

Polyclitus, and Mentor) each representative of the pinnacle of their field,48 whose names convey the priceless nature of the artistic treasures once stockpiled in provincial homes.

The objects listed here, including a statue described as “alive” (Phidiacum vivebat ebur,

103; contrast this with the nobles as living imago above) are referentially ironic, for they denote what isn’t there.49 These objects exists only in the provincials’ past (tunc, 100), because they have been embezzled, one and all. Juvenal uses names (here, of artists instead of governors) to similarly recall noble crimes, focusing on the plundered rather than the plunderer and wistfully locating the objects in the past. detailed catalogue of revolutionary outposts which, he argues, is not meant to send the reader to the encyclopedia, but simply to reinforce the scope of the revolutionary network: “The Reader is supposed to take all these names as mere rigid designators referring to imprecise baptismal ceremonies.” (81)

48 Those fields are painting, bronze sculpture, ivory sculpture, marble sculpture, and silverwork. Cicero similarly uses a profusion of masterworks to characterizes the brazenness of a plunderer’s fraud : Huic hereditas ad HS facile triciens venit testamento propinqui sui Heraclii, plena domus caelati argenti optimi multaeque stragulae vestis pretiosorumque mancipiorum; quibus in rebus istius cupiditates et insanias quis ignorat? Erat in sermone res, magnam Heraclio pecuniam relictam; non solum Heraclium divitem, sed etiam ornatum supellectile, argento, veste, mancipiis futurum (Cic. Verr.2.35).

49 Juvenal uses the referential trick to even more ironic ends in Sat. 11, where he gives a salacious description (cf. magis ille extenditur, et mox/ auribus atque oculis concepta urina movetur, 11. 169-70) of the Spanish dancing girls who won’t be at his modest dinner party (11.161-70) 100

The irony of these noble misdeeds, conveyed through drawing on well-trodden names and tangible objects, is matched by a similar irony in this section concerning the choice of province. Juvenal advises Ponticus to choose a province precisely based on its likelehood to resort to mutiny, implying that Ponticus will be no better than his forebears.

Previous commentators have well identified how Juvenal undercuts the moral point by focusing on the expedient justifications for not defrauding his province: “The governor is advised to look after his own skin and warned not to provoke insurrections by fierce nations (lines 112-24).”50 Juvenal embarks on a long list of provinces to avoid (Spain,

Gaul, Africa, Illyria, etc.) because they are too drained to be worth robbing and because provincials reduced to desperation pose a danger. A little before, Juvenal had portrayed the ineffective pleading and attempts at prosecution of a typical provincial; Juvenal had advised a provincial to give up rather than risk losing his fare home: praeconem,

Chaerippe, tuis circumspice pannis,/ cum Pansa eripiat quidquid tibi Natta reliquit,/ iamque tace; furor est post omnia perdere naulum, (8.95-97). Here the options available to plundered peoples are more ominous:

tollas licet omne quod usquam est auri atque argenti, scutum gladiumque relinques [et iaculum et galeam; spoliatis arma supersunt]. quod modo proposui, non est sententia, verum est; 125 credite me vobis folium recitare Sibyllae, (8.122-126).

Though you take away what gold and silver are anywhere, you will leave behind shield and sword [and spear and helmet; arms are the only things left for the pillaged]. What I have just now laid down is not some mere pointed phrase, but the truth! Imagine me as if I were reciting it to you from the Sibylline books.51

50 Braund 1988: 101; similarly, Fredericks 1971a: 123 points to Juvenal’s “argu[ing] to Ponticus’ weaker nature.”

51 Though l. 124 was originally deleted by Hermann, Courtney points out there is no good internal reason to argue that the lines are not genuine. They are simply not preferred by most critics. Hendry 1998 tries to salvage the lines by substituting aera for arma, which he finds reduces the tautology and provides a more effective sententia. 101

Though Juvenal then goes on to give positive advice (don’t allow your entourage free reign, don’t stand for bribery, make sure your wife is honest, 8.127-130; more activities to avoid at 8.135-139), it is precisely these lines about the mutinous threat that

Juvenal marks as especially sententious (125-26). In a satire where the “reality” of nobility and its ties to virtue are up for grabs, it is important that Juvenal’s most emphatic assertion of the truth of his advice comes at one of its most cynical moments, even as it appears to be couched in a section of positive moral exhortation. The inevitability to noble corruption is implied here, even at the moment Juvenal stages himself molding a prototypically good noble.52 He soon claims that faults, when committed by nobles, are that much more prominent because of the stature of the offender (omne animi vitium tanto conspectius in se/ crimen habet, quanto maior qui peccat habetur, 8.140-41), yet this is only half-true. These men’s crimes are that more conspicuous in that they provide material to stage and expose them in satire.53 It is also clear that they remain unpunished, thus enabling the opportunity for Juvenal to arrange that material. More and more, as the reader proceeds through the satire, the initial question of defining nobility with regards to virtue becomes ever more self-defeating. As Juvenal depicts it, virtue in deeds and nobility by birth—which Juvenal had initially merged into nobility by deeds (nobilitas sola est atque unica virtus, 8.20)—are contradictory in terms, challenging the very notion of defining “nobility” at all. How can Juvenal claim that the “nobility of your very parents begin to stand against/in contrast to you,” (incipit ipsorum contra te stare

52 Cf. Keane 2006: 97 on the “real” lessons of 8.94: “A governor-to-be might be encouraged by the satirist’s remark ‘what different does a conviction make?’ (94), even in the context of a sermon about the numerous motivations for noble behavior.”

53 Notice the imagery of “nobility” casting light onto something hidden (incipit…nobilitas claramque facem praeferre pudendis, 8.138-39), which is exactly what Juvenal’s satires can be thought to do. 102 parentum/ nobilitas, 8.138), when he shows that generation after generation of Roman

“nobles” are anything but?

D. Liminality and the Immoral Show of Rome

Indeed, delving deeper into the satire, Juvenal focuses exclusively on the moral and social failings of the nobility, proceeding ever backward in time until arriving at the first Roman, Romulus himself. It is significant that Juvenal returns to techniques of staging and objectification in the next two main sections, one on the debauched consul

Lateranus (146-162) and his celebrated account on nobles on stage (183-230). At the very point where the intersection of name (i.e. birth) and virtue is muddied, Juvenal marks a return to an apparently straightforward visual program.

With this return to visualizing technique, the satire shifts from focusing on immorality per se to an emphasis on social deviants who bestride an uncomfortable crossroads. Beginning with Lateranus and culminating with Nero, the next two major sections involve figures who challenge straightforward delineations between nobility and non-nobility. Just as in Satire 2, Juvenal’s externalizing satirical technique, which relies as much on readers’ correct interpretation of satirical signs as on direct condemnation, is accompanied by the depiction of figures who reflect the porousness of boundaries and definition.

Though social and moral strongly intersect in Roman thought, making social transgression equivalent to moral deviance,54 it is relevant that the section of transition

54Edwards 1993, whose chapter on Roman attitudes towards acting is particularly relevant here (“Playing Romans: representations of actors and the theatre”, 98-136), has extensively studied this intersection. In the particular case of Satire 8, I will show that these strains of sociopolitical morality are problematized by the context of the discourse in which they appear. 103 from Juvenal’s moral exhortation to Rubellius Blandus and Ponticus (39-140) to the staging of Lateranus (146-82) focuses on two undeniably “moral” crimes, perjury and adultery:

Quo mihi te, solitum falsas signare tabellas, in templis quae fecit avus statuamque parentis ante triumphalem? Quo, si nocturnus adulter tempora Santonico velas adoperta cucullo? 145 (8.141-145)

What does it matter to me that you are accustomed to put your seal on forged testaments, in the very temples which your grandfather constructed and in front of the triumphal state of your father? What does it matter, if you, a nighttime adulterer, veil and cover your temples with a Gallic hood?

The return to Juvenal’s satirical iconography is clear: besides the cucullus, which usually has the loaded connotation in Juvenal of being used to cover nefarious nighttime deeds,55

Juvenal’s morally loaded backdrop (in templis quae fecit avus, 143)56 emphasizes the helpless spectatorship of the triumphal statue,57 just as coram had underscored his condemnation of the nobles’ flagrant misdeeds at the beginning of the satire (si coram

Lepidis male vivitur?, 8.9).

Further, the referent of te is difficult to pin down: who exactly is Juvenal staging as perjurer and adulterer? John Henderson takes it as referring to Ponticus himself,58 but this interpretation is extremely difficult, even in light of the implications that Juvenal makes about Ponticus’ impending propraetorship in 8.116-124. As the moral advice

55 See 6.330 and especially its use by the infamous nymphomaniac Messalina in Sat 6: dormire virum cum senserat uxor,/ sumere nocturnos meretrix Augusta cucullos...(6.116, 118 as ordered in Clausen’s text), where the word order textually enacts its function, “clothing” Messalina. Note too the use of an oxymoron (meretrix Augusta) to mark a spot of mutually exclusive identities, a figure of thought which will appear twice in the section from Lateranus to Nero.

56 Temples were not an unusual place of doing testimonial business (cf. Mart. 10.70.7) but their appearance cannot help but emphasize the outrageousness of the perjury.

57 Keane 2006: 34-35.

58 Henderson 1997: 92. 104 which precedes these lines has become increasing generalized, the figure of Ponticus has faded into the background. Nor could it be Lateranus, since this would undercut the marked dramatic flourish with which he is introduced immediately afterward, especially the delay of his name (see below). The only wrongdoer he has addressed with the second person in the satire is Rubellius Blandus, long since gone from the audience’s sight. One must conclude that, like Teucrorum proles (8.56) and Troiugenae (8.181), he is addressing a generalized Roman audience itself; in those two places, Juvenal is chastising

Romans for different kinds of sins, their misconstrual and misconstruction of “nobility”

(8.56-57, introducing the section on the “nobility” of animals) and their willingness to indulge the debauched patricians (see below). Juvenal will later indict his audience for their willing spectatorship to Gracchus’ spectacle (populi frons durior huius, 8. 189); but here at line 141, even worse, the average Roman (te) is an actual participant in Juvenal’s vicious spectacle, not merely a jaded observer. These moments of address show how the misreading of nobility and the willingness to permit gross transgressions of social station is a widespread phenomenon and indicate the helplessness of Juvenal’s satiric project of definition, which he apparently embarks on alone.

Whoever the second person refers to, these obvious misdeeds cannot help but contrast with the lesser evil of Lateranus’ driving his own chariot, introduced in the very next lines: “past the ashes and bones of his ancestors, on a swift cart flies fat Lateranus, and he himself—on his own!—tightens the wheel with the brake—a consul driving a mule!” (praeter maiorum cineres atque ossa volucri/ carpento rapitur pinguis Lateranus, et ipse/ ipse rotam adstringit sufflamine mulio consul/, 8.146-148). Reference to

Lateranus’ ancestors (cineres atque ossa maiorum, 146), as with parentis and avus in line

105

142, reignites the motif of the immense gulf between present day nobles and their ancestors as well as the helpless position of those ancestors, condemned to watch but not intervene. In the previous propemptikon section, however, Juvenal had seriously undercut the process of assigning value based on birth, nor does the topic of Lateranus’ birth per se arrive again in the brilliant sketch of the tavern-visiting, cart-driving consul. Further,

Juvenal continues the projection of vice backwards in time, again short-circuiting easy opposition between present and past.59

Instead, Juvenal focuses on depicting Lateranus’ marginal existence, fully inhabiting neither the noble nor the vulgar class. This liminal identity continues the internal challenges to the kind of categorical thinking required to decisively define nobility with regards to virtue. His twofold existence is encapsulated in the oxymoron mulio consul, a juxtaposition of two mutually exclusive social and political worlds.60 As

S.C. Fredericks astutely points out, the symbols of Lateranus’ office are transformed into the instruments of the muleteer, further driving home the dissonance between Lateranus’ proper bearing and his actual behavior: “The virga of the consul’s office (mentioned as such previously in lines 23 and 136) is for Lateranus the mule-driver’s rod (virga, 153).

The manipli (153) are not companies of Roman soldiers but the bundles of hay that

Lateranus feeds his horses.” Fredericks also points out the religious contradictions that

Lateranus embodies, swearing by Epona, the goddess of horses, in front of the very altars

59 Lateranus was consul designate in 65 C.E. before being executed as a member of the Pisonian conspiracy. For more on this identification, see the arguments in Ch. 3, n. 6.

60 Of course, Lateranus is not the only man for whom mule-driving symbolized how high-flown identity could clash with humble station. The humble origins of Ventidius Bassus (co. 43 B.C.E.) were encapsulated in the sneer “mulio” cast by Cicero among others (so Pliny reports, HN 7.135); Suetonius reports that Vespasian was similarly reminded of his lowly beginnings by catcalls of mulio (Vesp.4.3). Yet Lateranus is the exact inverse of these, for he embraces the servile rank of which the character of his noble birth defines him as essentially the opposite. For more on the economic and social realities of muleteers in the Empire, see Bodel (forthcoming). 106 of Jupiter (Iovis ante altaria iurat/ solam Eponam et facies olida at praesepia pictas, 8.

156-157).61

Further, Juvenal immediately calls upon our viewership to underscore the immensity of Lateranus’ behavior: “[he does this] at night at least, but Luna sees it, and the stars bear down with witnessing eyes” (nocte quidem, sed Luna videt, sed sidera testes/ intendunt oculos, 8.149-150). We are again projected into the position of an ineffectual observer, simultaneously distanced and involved. Through the focalized lens of the moon, Juvenal elides us into the properly appaled Roman perspective; yet this identification only serves to heighten our frustration as the wrongdoers always separated from our agency by the gulf of time and, in the case of the moon, space. Soon, Lateranus’ contemporaries will similarly be observers: Juvenal continues that this “restraint” is caused only by his office and, at the end of his term, he intends to drive his chariot in the light of day (clara Lateranus luce flagellum/ sumet, 8.151-152). Lateranus’ own liminal identity is matched by the overlap between the borders of night and day.62

Juvenal continues his exploitation of sensory cues as he goes on to describe

Lateranus at the pub, using words and a style of depiction of immediate moral resonance.

We see Lateranus frequenting low taverns (popinas, 8.158)63 at all hours of the night

(pervigiles, 8.158), staffed by perfumed foreigners (obvius adsiduo Syrophoenix udus

61 Fredericks 1971a: 127.

62 Larmour 2007, comparing 6.309-313, where the hapless husband treads on the pool of urine, representing the remnants of the his wife’s debauchery the previous night (in that passage note especially Luna teste and luce reversa, ll. 311 and 312, respectively), remarks that the signs of nighttime corruption are visible in the daytime, if one simply looks hard enough (202-4). Braund 1988: 106-7 also includes night and day, and conspicuousness and obscurity, as two examples of the binary motifs that structure the thought of the whole satire.

63 See Courtney ad loc. for references to the low status of these establishments. 107 amomo, 8.159),64 who effusively greet their beloved guest (hospitis adfectu, 8.161). Even the placement of the bar at the Porta Capena (sardonically called the porta Idymaeae because of the settlement of Jews nearby, 8.160)65 is meaningful, reinforcing the transgression of Lateranus’ behavior by locating it at a border region of the city, where, as David Larmour asserts, inside and outside, past and present, and natural and unnatural commingle.66 Lateranus’ behavior subverts the determination (and determinism) of social status based on birth and threatens Juvenal’s own project by further disconnecting and isolating inherited station as a meaningful criterion for judgment. Juvenal shows

Lateranus not committing “crimes” but acting basely and, in so doing, transgressing the proper boundaries of nobility, even as Juvenal tries to ordain a final meaning for

“nobility” by securing it to virtuous behavior.

Here arises a defender to excuse Lateranus’ behavior: “An advocate of his fault will tell me, ‘We did the same things too when we were young.’ (defensor culpae dicet mihi ‘fecimus et nos/ haec iuvenes,’ 8.163-64). Juvenal actually concedes this point (esto,

8.164),67 though he limits his pardon to the young (indulge veniam pueris, 8.167), rather than for a man at the right age for leading soldiers into battle (maturus bello, 8. 169). The reference to battle surely evokes the perverted all-night “battles” we witnessed at the

64 Compare the earlier depiction of the gourmand, “steeped in a whole container from Cosmus” (Cosmi toto mergatur aeno, 8.86). Cosmus, famous for his cosmetics and perfumes, appears likewise in Martial associated with luxury (1.87, 3.55, etc.). The obviously foreign name Syrophoenix is repeated contemptuously in the next line for effect.

65 Courtney ad loc.

66 Larmour 2007: 202-7. He compares the appearance of the Porta Capena here with its loaded significance at the Satire 3, whereby the once pristine natural spring has been “corrupted” by, e.g., fancified decorations of marble (nec ingenuum violarent marmora tofum, 3.20).

67 In this respect, Juvenal’s depiction of Lateranus differs from the transgressors of Satire 2, as the only proxy speaker there, Laronia, acted against the interests of the hypocritical perverts, rather than speaking at all in their favor. 108 outset of the satire (cf. 8.9-12) and intimates that the only kind of “battle” that Lateranus and his ilk will be prepared for is combat over the dice table.68 There is a hint here, then, of the normality and ubiquity of what Juvenal portrays as the transgressive, undermining the moralist’s attempts at defining social morality.

Juvenal’s depiction of Lateranus continues with a brilliantly grotesque scene (into which we are again inserted as viewers, invenies, 173) of his coterie sprawled around him:

mitte Ostia, Caesar, mitte, sed in magna legatum quaere popina: invenies aliquo cum percussore iacentem, permixtum nautis et furibus ac fugitivis, inter carnifices et fabros sandapilarum 175 et resupinati cessantia tympana galli. aequa ibi libertas, communia pocula, lectus non alius cuiquam, nec mensa remotior ulli. (8.171-178)

Dispatch him, Caesar, dispatch your legate to Ostia, but first look for him in a huge bar: you’ll find him there, lying about with some murderer, mixed in with sailors and thieves and runaway slaves, among hangmen and coffin-makers and the clanging drums, at rest, of a reclining eunuch-priest. There is liberty for all, shared cups, the couch has no preferential spot, nor is anyone cut off from the table.

Here, again, Juvenal uses the setting and the dramatis personae to tell the story, with an extravagant list of the gypsies, tramps, and thieves with whom Lateranus associates. A walking contradiction, a man between worlds, Lateranus represents a transgressive challenge to Roman nobility. Ironically, that these men share the loving cup (literally: pocula communia, 177) is, in fact, a sign of their degeneracy, since the nobility, by definition, are supposed to be removed from their company. 69 Juvenal imports a charge

68 Cf. the battle imagery at 1.88-92: alea quando/ hos animos? Neque enim loculis comitantibus itur/ ad casum tabulae, posita sed luditur arca./ proelia quanta illic dispensatore videbis/ armigero!

69 One wonders if the scene is not meant to make the reader recall, as least in its general outline, the famed Cena Trimalchionis from the Neronian era Satyricon, with its admixture of our learned and noble hero Encolpius with the upwardly mobile freedman. 109 of hypocrisy against the nobles on this very point, for they are happy to excuse their own behavior even while they condemn servants for similar activity (at vos, Troiugenae, vobis ignoscitis et quae/ turpia cerdoni Volesos Brutumque decebunt, 8.181-182).70 These lines further hone in on the confusing and contradictory nexus of virtue, birth, and “nobility” with the contemptuous vocative “sons of Troy” (Troiugenae); the bombastic form of address points precisely to where that arrogance on the part of the nobles originates, their descent.

Even more transgressive of social boundaries than Lateranus are nobles who make a spectacle of themselves, either as actors, or mimes, or even in the arena, reaching its nadir with the supreme example of a noble actor, Nero.71 Before dropping the curtain on the nobles on stage, Juvenal remarks that his satire’s exempla will here increase in turpitude (Quid si numquam adeo foedis adeoque pudendis/ utimur exemplis, ut non peiora supersint, 8.183-84). Some scholars have found his insistence on the heinousness of these nobles on stage absurd, or even ironic or parodic.72 Yet Catherine Edwards has shown how Romans viewed the theater as a dangerous import from Greece and the shame involved in making oneself a public spectacle. Actors had the technical restriction of

70 Juvenal 11.1-55 is founded on a similar difficulty in establishing a shared set of moral codes for the wealthy and poor concerning consumptions, also taking on an ironic perspective on trying to establish an all-embracing social code. See Jones 1990 and Weisinger 1972 for more on Satire 11.

71 Of course, the issue of nobles on stage was not simply a Juvenalian metaphor. It is well attested in the sources (e.g. Tac. Ann. 14.14: nobilium familiarum posteros egestate venales in scaenam duxit) and now in the material record, as demonstrated by a senatus consultum recovered at Larinum concerning noblemen appearing on stage and at gladiatorial games, first published in 1978 (Levick 1983). Indeed, the decree shows that acting on stage carried real-world penalties, such as the interdiction of “due burial” (libitinam, l. 15) if one had acted “in contravention of their order” ([contra dignitatem ordinis], ll. 14-5, as restored by Levick). In a review of imagery of the spectacular spaces in Rome, Gold 1999 argues that the theater embodies a locus of “counter-behavior” where “actors…betray their appropriate class and status.” (64)

72 E.g. Braund 1988: 119: “[On Nero] How can anyone rate histrionics as more serious than matricide?” For Braund in particular, this absurdity reflects the absurdity of the moralizing position of the speaker in Satire 8. 110 infamia, nor were they protected from corporal punishment, and were associated with license and sexual immorality.73 So, one must take seriously the moral connotations that the incoherence of Roman nobles appearing on stage would raise. These nobles stand as the most flagrant representative of discord in Juvenal’s Rome, since the very way that they choose to trample on the borders between noble and lower class (namely, appearing in spectacles) is exactly what makes this trampling more visible and more profound.

One might also note that Juvenal’s technique shifts; rather than simply depict the nobles and let their illicit crossing of boundaries speak for themselves, here Juvenal intersperses these grotesque performances with moral comment. These nobles basely show themselves, appearing in mimes recognizable to the satiric audience (consumptis opibus vocam, Damasippe, locasti/ sipario, clamosum ageres ut Phasma Catulli, 8.185-

186).74 But what is more, they show themselves willingly and at prominent festivals where they could be easily recognized in the open: “they sell [their beatings] without a

Nero forcing them, and they do not hesitate to sell them at the games of the praetor sitting on high” ([sc. verbera] vendunt nullo cogente Nerone/ nec dubitant celsi praetoris vendere ludis, 8. 193-194).75 According to Juvenal, evening a looming death would be no excuse for this lowly participation in the theater, for playing stock roles like the jealous

73 Edwards 1993: 98-123. For their sexual immorality in Juvenal, see, e.g. the memorably suggestive image of Roman women itching for the accoutrements of Accius (tristes/ personam thyrsumque tenent et subligar Acci, 6.69-70). See Edwards 1997 for more on their social position, which was analogous to prostitutes.

74 For Catullus the mimographer, see also Sat.13.111 and Mart.5.30.3. One supposes that Juvenal may be indicting his own audiences implicit endorsement of these foul spectacles in that they can instantly recognize and understand the moral connotations of the mention of Catullus here. Henderson 1999: 249-73 argues that Juvenal plays a similar game of reference in the opening lines of Satire 1 (1.1-21), where recognition of his references becomes an act of self-indictment for participating in the vapid recitation culture he attacks.

75 Taking Courtney’s suggestion of verbera for the very difficult in sense funera at l.192. Griffith 1962 retains the ms., arguing that funera refers to “stage-deaths,” citing the parallel of the Laureolus mime-cum- execution at Mart. Lib.Spect. 7 (see the next note for more on this poem) 111 husband of Thymele (8.195-197). The mixture of proper names, some noble (Lentulus,

8.187; Fabios, 8.191; Mamercorum, 8.192) and others related to the theater, either writers, actors, or characters (Catulli, 8.186; Thymeles and Corinthi, 8.197), shows how these performances muddy the boundary between noble and lowborn.

One could, however, also view this shift from mere showing to a combination of showing and comment as Juvenal’s self-conscious projection of himself as moralizing spectator. In depicting the audience (including himself), the stage he sets metatheatrically encompasses not only the action onstage, but offstage as well. He deliberately puts himself and his reaction on view. When the noble Lentulus plays Laureolus (a fictitious highwayman in a crufixion mime), Juvenal indignantly remarks that Lentulus is worthy of a “real cross” (Laureolum velox etiam bene Lentulus egit,/ me iudice dingus vera cruce, 8.187-88). Juvenal depicts Lentulus as operating in a dangerous liminal space when, as a noble, he takes up a part meant for a low actor; in his comment, Juvenal collapses the performance and reality.76 By “offering a critical response to the shows [the

Romans] watch,” 77 Juvenal essentially inserts himself into the action, continuing the collapse of boundaries that the noble mime (mimus/ nobilis, 8.198-199) embodies.78

76 Indeed, the collapse is actually a little more complex. This theatricality was already at play in Roman practice, as evidenced both by Shadi Bartsch’s discussion of the effect of Nero’s spectatorship on Imperial audiences at events (Bartsch 1994: 1-35) and by what Kathleen Coleman has catalogued as “fatal charades,” the punishment of a criminal in a role-playing situation, often involving a perverted mythological situation (Coleman 1990). As she discusses (64-65), the development of the situation of Laureolus (a bandit-leader) into fatal charade took three steps: first, the actual career of Laureolus, ending with his execution by crucifixion; then, the creation of a mime where an actor was mock-executed; finally, a re-enactment of that mime with a real execution, as documented in Mart. Spect. 7, where Laureolus, though eventually eaten by a bear, was “hung on a real cross” (non falsa pendens in cruce, l. 4; cf. Bartsch 1994: 51-53 on Spect. 7). Juvenal thus adds a fourth step, collapsing the Laureolus execution and Laureolus mime into a suitable penalty for the transgressive noble.

77 Keane 2006: 34.

78 The enjambment between these words especially emphasizes the oxymoronic incoherence in meaning. 112

Yet Rome, as depicted here and elsewhere, undoubtedly had a strong taste for spectacle.79 Here he turns to the crowd and lambasts them for their endurance of these sights:

Nec tamen ipsi ignoscas populo; populi frons durior huius, qui sedet et spectat triscurria patriciorum, 190 planipedes audit Fabios, ridere potest qui Mamercorum alapas. (8.188-192)

Nor should you forgive the people themselves; hard is the front of this populace, which sits and watches the three-fold-jesters of the nobles, who listen to flat-flooted Fabii, who can laugh at the Mamerci’s boxed ears.

Juvenal’s field of vision encompasses all of Rome, from viewer to performer. Yet this move is inherently dangerous: in morally collapsing spectacle and spectator, he implicitly threatens his own audience. For what is Juvenal’s satire here but a restaging of nobles on stage, for the self-congratulating delight in partaking in vice vicariously?80 If his project in Satire 8, as defined at the outset, is to delineate the boundaries of the “nobility” and to combat the permeability which figures like noble actors create, here he himself participates in collapsing those boundaries. Though the moral distance of the readers of satire does not make us completely equivalent to the spectators that Juvenal criticizes, surely those readers can also be said to “laugh at the Mamerci’s boxed ears.”

He continues this restaging of marginal figures with the return of Gracchus from

Satire 2. Whereas there Juvenal combined Gracchus’ performance as retairius with a story about his sexual deviance, here the performance stands on its own. As with

Lateranus, the introduction of the name is dramatically delayed for maximum impact:

79 Edwards 1993: 120. Besides the evidence in Juvenal (here, or in the famous condemnation of Rome’s elevating “bread and circuses” over suffrage), one could identify this trend already in Horace (Cf. Epist. 2.1.182-207).

80 Here I may hesitantly accept the truth of one of Kernan’s paradoxes of the satirist, that of “saint vs. sensationalist” as laid out by Anderson 1982: 305-8. 113

“What is there left except the gladiatorial school? There, you have the shame of the city, fighting not in the arms of a murmillo, Gracchus, nor with shield nor curved hook” (haec ultra quid erit nisi ludus? Et illic/ dedecus urbis habes, nec murmillonis in armis/ nec clipeo Gracchum pugnantem aut falce supina, 8.199-201). As in Satire 2, Gracchus, to his even greater shame, fights as a retiarius rather than a murmillo or Thraex.81 Even more grotesque in Juvenal’s accouting, Gracchus allows himself to be recognized in the costume of a Salian priest. Juvenal vividly82 restages for us the recognition of Gracchus, not only by the spectators but by the gladiators themselves:

Movet ecce tridentem. postquam vibrata pendentia retia dextra nequiquam effudit, nudum ad spectacula voltum 205 erigit et tota fugit agnoscendus harena. credamus tunica, de faucibus aurea cum se porrigat et longo iactetur spira galero. ergo ignominiam graviorem pertulit omni volnere cum Graccho iussus pugnare secutor. (8.203-210)

Behold! he brandishes a trident. After he has uselessly released the hanging net from his poised right hand, he raises his naked face to the crowd and flees, recognizable, in the entire arena. We should trust in the cloak, when the golden cord shows itself forth from the entrance-way and is cast about from the long Salian cap.83 Thereupon who but the chaser bears a heavier shame than any wound, upon being bid to fight with Gracchus.

Here again Juvenal inserts a metatheatrical moment. Rather than equating role with reality as with the crucifixion mime described above, here a participant in the spectacle (the secutor assigned to attack Gracchus, who has apparently become helpless without his net, if we take the lines as recreating a single performance) replicates the

81 Cf. his licet ipsum/ admoveas cuius tunc munere retia misit, 2. 147-48. For the low status of the retiarius, even amongst gladiators see 6.O7-11, where he is even said to fight “nude” (i.e. wearing only a sugligaculum, without even a tunic).

82 Note especially the force of ecce at l. 203 in establishing the visual enargeia so pervasive in Juvenal. Cf. Schmitz 2000: 26-27, who notes that at such spots, ecce is external in that it points to the reader/listener of Juvenal’s satires.

83 This follows the interpretation of Courtney on ll. 207-210, where the spira is the cord that holds up the galerus (his Salian cap, with which Gracchus is not supposed to appear outdoors) by the chin. 114 reaction of the crowd: horror and shame. Or, rather, this should be the audience’s reaction, but there is no indication that the crowd, who must recognize this deviant Salian priest (agnoscendus, 206; ad spectacula, 205)—and who readers recognize from his appearance in the second Satire—share this reaction. In a further move towards incoherence, just as the high-born man shames himself by appearing in gladiatorial combat, only the (implicitly) low-born gladiator has the correct reaction to it. Juvenal uses the uncomfortable position of siding with the judgment of a mere gladiator as an example of the topsy-turviness of the world in which his project is trying to operate.

Earlier in the satire, nobles had forfeited their claims to “nobility” by resting on the prominence of their station, even while committing official and personal misdeeds.

Here, even more destructively, Juvenal’s spectacle-loving patricians have renounced their nobility by acting entirely or, worse, attempt to bridge the yawning gap between the significance of their station (emblematized by Gracchus’ cap) and their behavior (his fighting in the arena). Of course, the image of Gracchus appearing in his Salian garb is profoundly ridiculous; indeed, it perfectly summarizes how Juvenal’s compression of meaning into juxtaposed images can take on a mercenary quality. Verisimilitude is sacrificed for effective visual point: Gracchus’ contradictory appearance in the arena matches the clashing identities of Salian priest and lowly retiarius. Moreover, this incoherence applies to Juvenal as well, since only by concocting a ridiculous and unrealistic image can he effectively capture the intensity of Gracchus’ transgression. Just as before, nobles embraced the living death of their statuary (cf. 8.55, tua vivit imago),

Gracchus is an oxymoron come to life.

115

But it is Nero who climactically encapsulates the boundary-collapsing effects of the betrayal of status and the metatheatrical. Juvenal has already hinted that, in his satire restructured as an account of ever-escalating noble decline, Nero will serve as the nadir.

Through another grotesque contradiction in terms, the “noble mime” is only fitting for an era led by a “balladeer-cum-emperor”: res haut mira tamen citharoedo principe mimus/ nobilis (8.198-199). After denouncing Nero’s patricide (one punishment isn’t enough for

Nero, 8.213-214), Juvenal makes an extended comparison between Juvenal and Orestes which introduces the destabilizing significance of Nero’s fondness for playacting:

par Agamemnonidae crimen, sed causa facit rem 215 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 cantavit Oresten, 220 Troica non scripsit. (8.215-221)

His crime was equal to the son of Agamemnon’s, but the reason makes the case different. For that one, with the gods’ directing, was the avenger of the father, cut down amongst his cups, but he did not befoul himself with the cut throat of Electra nor the blood of the Spartan wife, he did not mix wolf’s-bane for any relatives, he never sang an “Orestes” on the stage, he did not write “The Fall of Troy.” 84

Unraveling all the implications of line 220 (in scena numquam cantavit Oresten) in particular, concerning Juvenal’s claim that Orestes never played “Orestes” on stage, entails re-igniting the confusion that that Nero’s theatrical habits sparked. For the idea is both that Nero played the character “Orestes” in some tragedy and that Nero played himself, who, as a person, was the extreme reenactment of a modern-day Orestes;

84 Though Clausen’s text follows the codices in reading Orestes, Weidner’s reading of Oresten followed by e.g. Braund, Bartsch 1994: 49-50, and Courtney is probably better. The reading Orestes as nominative is a) unnecessary since ille is already clear enough as representing Orestes as the subject and b) less effective, since the accusative will bring into the focus the various metatheatrical boundaries which Nero steps over, both in playing himself and in “playing” “himself”. Even the original reading, however, underscores this point by introducing an ambiguity between the “two” Orestes (this Orestes and “that” one), which underscores the transgression of the boundaries of identity. 116

Orestes, of course, is said to have done neither, which would have been one and the same for him. As Robert Cowan remarks, noting that Nero is supposed to have acted using a mask that resembled his own face,85 “Nero’s portrayal of Orestes, wearing a Nero mask, does not simplistically mean that he is portraying himself. Rather it blurs the distinction between playing Orestes and playing Nero until the distinction between Orestes and Nero is itself blurred.”86

The metatheatrical conceit, which might be paraphrased by Shadi Bartsch on this instance as an inability to choose between one of the two mutually exclusive frames of real and representational, underlines the problems of definition and identity which underpin the entire satire. 87 As we have seen throughout the satire, the meaning of nobility is muddied by Juvenal’s use of names with a two-fold significance: they represent the prestige earned by the noble ancestors but also the degenerate state of their current holders. Juvenal aligns Nero’s metatheatrical boundary-crossing with the transgression of his high lineage and his nationality: “these were the works and these the arts of our noble emperor, who loved to prostitute himself on the foreign stage with a foul

85 This affectation leads to a memorable anecdote in Suetonius Ner. 21.3, where a soldier seeing Nero wearing a Nero mask depicting Hercules in chains rushed on stage to save his emperor from confinement. Bartsch 1994 46-50 discusses this incident as yet another instance of general rise of “theatrical” behavior amongst an audience whose reactions were under constant surveillance and where the wrong response could have devastating implications.

86 Cowan 2009: 79. Indeed, as Cowan continues (80-83), Juvenal’s contrasting synkrisis actually fails since Orestes is constantly associated in drama with deception and role-playing. The best example is surely Orestes’ appearance in Sophocles’ Electra, where he, playing a messenger bearing news to Clytemnestra of Orestes’ death, invents an elaborate and detailed account of a chariot accident which never happened (ll. 680-764).

87 Cowan 2009 argues that Nero is thus a representative of the problematic semantics of “identity” in Satire 8 (“Identity and the ability of names to establish it are at issue”) and claims that “since virtuous commoners are preferable to degenerate aristocrats,” noble lineage is irrelevant (83). He also wishes to extend this confusion to the identity of Juvenal’s persona (87). What I claim instead is that this blurring has a different kind of poetological implication on the operation of the satire; in fact, Juvenal cannot completely dismiss the claim that noble lineage is relevant because doing so would upset the metonymic mechanics of his satire, which depends on the resonance of nobility in its instantiations in names to have meaning. 117 song and to have earned the parsley-crown of Greece” (haec opera atque hae sunt generosi principis artes,/ gaudentis foedo peregrina ad pulpita cantu/ prostitui

Graiaeque apium meruisse coronae, 8.224-226). Though we may think that Juvenal overstates the moral implications of Nero’s play-acting, we must take seriously not only the real significance that acting would have had in the Roman moral imagination, particularly in the figure of the emperor,88 but also its effect on Juvenal’s poetics. Nero’s transgression is symbolic of the disorder of the Roman universe depicted in Satire 8. This disorder is summarily envisioned at the climax of the passage:

maiorum effigies habeant insignia vocis, ante pedes Domiti longum tu pone Thyestae syrma vel Antigones aut personam Melanippes, et de marmoreo citharam suspende colosso. (8.227-230)

Let your ancestors’ statues hold the rewards for your voice, you, place before the foot of Domitius the trailing tragic robe of Thyestes or Antigone or the mask of Melanippe, and hang your citha from the marble colossus.

Two elements of Nero’s identity symbolically clash. The ancestral statues

(maiorum effigies, pedes Domiti, 227-28) stand for the noble lineage that Nero has systematically abandoned through his dramatic and lyric performances, concretized as performative accoutrements (syrma Thyestae, personam Melanippes, citharam, 228-30).

Indeed, insignia vocis stands as a kind of oxymoron, for these insignia represent not the triumphs to be earned by a vigorous emperor, but rewards “for his voice.” Juvenal

88 Edwards 1993 136: Through his appearance as actor, “[Nero] revealed himself a dissembler, of uncertain gender, whose words could not be trusted, whose actions had no consequences, in sum, that antithesis of (Ro)manhood, an actor.” For more on the referential chaos that the imperator scaenicus (Plin. Paneg. 46.4) raised in the Roman records, see Edwards 1994, esp. 93: “Under the actor-emperor, appearance and reality were confused, categories collapsed. The relationship between sign and meaning was irredeemably corrupted.” 118 envisions a grotesque colossus from which Nero is to hang up his cithara,89 physically representing the enormity of Nero’s transgression against gender and class. Thus, the metatheatrical gestures of this scene, both in content (nobles conflating life and death in the Laureolus mime; Nero’s various personae) and in form (Juvenal’s own staging and his insertion of himself into the audience) animates the transgression which the nobles enact in their performances in spectacle.90

E. The History Lesson

This abandonment of noble ancestry by the most powerful man in Rome serves as transition to the final section of Juvenal’s poem, wherein he further undercuts the value of noble origins by continuing to proceed backward in time, ending with the figure of

Romulus, and questioning the very foundation of the connection of noble lineage to

“noble” virtue (231-275). In the previous section Juvenal had attacked walking contradictions like Lateranus, Gracchus, and Nero, who had willingly crossed class- and status-boundaries, thereby undermining the meaning of those boundaries. This smashes headlong into the original intentions of Juvenal’s stated project—What is nobility? What does nobility do?—which depended on a crisp delineation of noble from ignoble to instill the proper connection of true nobility to virtue. As with the provincial governors, the figures in Juvenal’s history lesson are unquestionably of noble origin and poor character.

89 It is not universally accepted this is meant to represent the colossal statue he constructed of himself during his lifetime (Sue. Nero 31). Courtney denies this possibility because Nero’s Colossus was made of bronze, but it is hard to imagine what else Juvenal would be referring to.

90 It is thus even more pronounced that Cicero’s strategy of metaphorically subsuming Clodius into an actor (a mime actor, to boot) at Pro Sestio 116ff. For more on Cicero’s invective logic there, see Parker 1999: 175. 119

He begins as explosively as possible: “What, Catiline, will anyone find more high-flown than your birth and that of Cethegus?” (quid, Catilina, tuis natalibus atque

Cethegi/ inveniet quisquam sublimius?, 8.231-232). At line 232 tamen emphasizes how

Catiline and Cethegus should be thought to violate not just the boundaries of nobility, but of Romanitas itself: despite their Roman birthlines, their actions bespeak Gallic origins.

Juvenal, making references to the Gallic sack of Rome in 390 B.C.E. (ut bracatorum pueri Senonumque minores, 8.234), implies that their crimes have transformed them into non-Romans, projecting them into a field even further removed from that of Roman nobility. Juvenal then summons the character of Cicero as a counterpoint, not just to

Catiline and Cethegus’s destructive intentions towards Rome, but to their origins as well, describing Cicero as novus, a municipalis eques, and, most importantly, ignobilis (8.237-

238). Finally fulfilling the implication of the definition of nobility at the outset of the poem, nobility is conferred onto Cicero by his virtue (tantum igitur muros intra toga contulit illi,/ nominis ac tituli, 8.240-241), though the description of those gains is undercut by the reference in the next lines to the wholesale slaughter by Augustus at

Philippi and Actium (8.241-243).91 What seems to be overlooked is the central point of the passage: despite Cicero’s virtue, the existence of Catilines and Cetheguses, even before contemporary times of the opening lines or the Neronian milieu of Lateranus,

Gracchus, and Nero himself, challenges the very notion of nobility as a meaningful category to correlate with virtue. Juvenal’s satire here parodies the reliance on a straightforward meaning of “then” and “now”, where “then” is supposed to indicate a

91 One should note how contulit in 8.240, of Cicero’s achievements, is contrasted with abstulit, describing Augustus’. Juvenal likewise uses Octavius, rather than the honorific Augustus or Caesar, in order to denigrate Augustus’ position. 120 time of virtue and “free Rome” (Roma…libera, 8.244) and “now” (which itself has a slippery definition in this poem) represents a moment of unstoppable decline.92

Juvenal makes a similar points in the next lines about Marius, who begins, according to Juvenal, as merces and an arator, yet ends up conquering the Cimbri and

Teutones in 102-101 B.C.E. (8.245-53).93 Though it is difficult to judge the exact tone of the passage on Marius,94 a similar point is made about the usefulness, or lack thereof, of ideas of nobility and their connection to success or virtue. For Marius’ noble colleague, whose lineage is emphasized by leaving him unnamed except for the attribute nobilis

(nobilis ornatur lauro collega secunda, 8.253), receives second place to this man of humble origins.

In the next lines (8.254-58), Juvenal remarks on the Decii and their devotiones in

340, 295, and 279 B.C.E. and draws a contrast between their plebeian origins and their service to Rome. Here again Juvenal is ensnared by a central paradox in discussing the contrast between those who are virtuous but ignoble, and those who are noble but impious or treacherous. His criticism is founded on a traditional definition of “nobility”, where high birth corresponds to virtue and low birth does not; there must be boundaries

92 A similar point might be made at 6.340ff about the contrast between “then” and “now” which likewise undercuts the straightforward meaning of describing “then.” There Juvenal describes how modern-day women pervert the celebration of the Bona Dea, ending with the memorable tag sed nunc ad quas non Clodius aras? (“now, to what altars does not a Clodius come?”, 6.345). Yet Juvenal’s ability to use Clodius as a rhetorical resource nevertheless prefigures his existence. Surely, he is meant to be an aberration of the times “then” (quis tunc hominum contemptor numinis…?, 6.342), yet one could answer Juvenal’s questions at 6.341-345 with “Clodius, that’s who.”

93 Courtney ad 246, argues that, in fact, accounts of Marius’ origins, drawn from, inter alios, Pliny the Elder (NH 33.150), were exaggerated by Juvenal’s time in the rhetorical schools.

94 Winkler 1983: 34-5 argues that the reference to rods being broken on Marius’ back (nodosam post haec frangebat vertice vitem, 8.247) are intended to undercut Juvenal’s nostalgic description of the past. One might also add the macabre detail describing the surprise of crows eating the dead flesh at the magnitude of the bodies of the Cimbri (qui numquam attigerant maiora cadavera corvi, 8.252). Still, falling back on a sarcastic or ironic persona hardly seems necessary to assert, since the content of the passage is enough to show the emptiness of relying on models of nobility. 121 for Nero or Gracchus or Catiline to transgress for the discourse on nobility to be meaningful. The repetition of tamen and its adversative force (232, 249, 255) now takes on another meaning, as it demonstrates that the notion of plebeia nomina (plebeiae

Deciorum animae, plebeia fuerunt/ nomina, 8.254-255) still has meaning; indeed the syntactical structure of these lines implicitly equates the “names” of the Decii with their

“lives,” even as it seeks to show how they overcame that equation.95 Again, for the description of Servius Tullius that follows (ancilla natus trabeam et diademe Quirini/ et fascis meruit, 8.259-260), Juvenal, even as he offers a counter-example, relies on the assumption that being born to a slave relates to one’s moral value.

The final set of historical exempla takes the reader back to the founding of the

Republic and the conspiracy of sons of Brutus with Lars Porsenna to restore Roman monarchy. They are described as “sons of the consul himself” (iuvenes ipsius consulis…,

8.262), thereby confirming their noble origins, and simultaneously marking them as fit to act virtuously on behalf of the state (…et quos/ magnum aliquid dubia pro libertate deceret, 8.263). The et, which Courtney describes as “harsh,”96 is significant, as the polysyndeton underscores the implied equation between nobility reckoned as birth and virtue that Juvenal is showing to be inadequate. That his ignoble but virtuous foils to

95 Housman, followed by Clausen and Braund, deletes 8.258, “for the Decii were worth more than those things which are saved by them” (pluris enim Decii quam quae servantur ab illis), describing it as a marginal summary of Juvenal’s thought which found its way into the text. Yet perhaps this introduces a slightly new idea, that the definition of “noble” and “ignoble” in Juvenal’s historical account are reversed. In this world, nobility almost seems to guarantee vice, and humility virtue. Juvenal had argued similarly above, in the section on antiphrasis. S.C. Fredericks argues that these lines are intended as a parody of historical projects like that of Livy, which “justified the pride of the noble houses in their family traditions, whereas Juvenal does just the opposite and shows their claims are not so important” (Fredericks 1971a: 130).

96 Courtney ad 261-2. 122 noble corruption include a woman (virgo, 8.265) and a slave (servus, 8.266) serves to further challenge the point of defining “nobility” at all.97

Juvenal concludes the satire with a short passage that exemplifies the problems of reading and evaluating character based on birth. Juvenal first compares two mythological exempla, Thersites representing low birth and Achilles high, then moves on to the very origins of Rome itself:

malo pater tibi sit Thersites, dummodo tu sis Aeacidae similis Volcaniaque arma capessas, 270 quam te Thersites similem producat Achilles. et tamen, ut longe repetas longeque revolvas nomen , ab infami gentem deducis asylo; maiorum primus, quisquis ille fuit, tuorum aut pastor fuit aut illud quod dicere nolo. 275 (8.269-275)

I prefer your father be Thersites, as long as you yourself are like to Achilles and take up arms made by Volcan, than that an Achilles brought you forth similar to Thersites. And still, though you seek back a name a long ways and unfurl a long ways, you spin out a race from an infamous exile; the first of your ancestors, whoever he was, was a shepherd or something I don’t want to name.

Juvenal again relies on already established symbols which we are meant to read straightforwardly: Achilles is not only of high birth, but this high birth is reflected in his actions; Thersites is not only of mean origins, but equally base in his deeds, though

Thersites’ misdeeds are never explicitly mentioned.

Yet it is the final lines that are the most challenging, for Juvenal undoes the very meaning of gentility. The destabilizing sting of the tail has not gone unrecognized,98 but few have teased out its implications towards satiric discourse itself. By claiming that no

97 The lines reference Cloelia, who escaped the clutches of Lars Porsenna by swimming across the Tiber (quae/imperii finis Tiberinum virgo natavit, 8.264-265), and Vindicus, who revealed the conspiracy of Brutus’ sons (occulta ad patres produxit criminal servus, 8.266).

98 Winkler 1983: 36 sees this sting, but he is more concerned with the persona’s ironic attitude towards the Roman past. Braund 1988: 121-22, in her argument on the pseudo-moralizing persona, sees these lines as a final move which undoes the credibility of the speaker by not returning to the moralizing underlying the satire, but simply ending. 123 one is truly noble, since all family lines can be traced back to humbler origins eventually,

Juvenal challenges the reading of the Roman world based on birth, which he himself had just employed in characterizing Thersites and Achilles. He does not merely “attack the origins of aristocratic pride,”99 as in the previous section debunking a straightforward reading of Roman history; he attacks the very existence of a definition for nobility.

Throughout the discussion of virtue and nobility in Satire 8, Juvenal has relied on external signs, especially in his visualizing material or his employment of loaded Roman names, which must be read as clear-cut signs to be meaningful. Yet in this final section, where he notes that Rome itself originated from those seeking asylum (infami…asylo,

8.273), the idea that anyone can be a “noble” Roman by birth collapses.

This cannot but have an effect on the way we read the long satire that has preceded. Just as it reveals nobilitas to be a broken word—just as often indicating the very opposite of what it says and which is no longer able to correspond to a uncomplicated meaning—it challenges the satirical technique that underlies the creation of Juvenal’s discourse. In a dilemma of modern resonance, Juvenal must use language to describe a world where language is broken.

Juvenal’s satire has reached a symbolic impasse. For the issue at stake is not merely the meaning of nobilitas and the relationship of the noble past and its accompanying discourse with the creation of Romanitas (as John Henderson would have it), but also the meaning of satire itself. The conservative nature of the Juvenal’s worldview on nobility and sexuality, where boundaries are meaningful and clear-cut, clashes with the depiction of a world which, simply put, has become difficult to read. It already signals from the start a retreat into a world of ideas paradoxically divorced from

99 Fredericks 1971a: 131 124 the intensely visualized nature of Juvenal’s satire. When we cannot read the world, how are we to read the world of satire?

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Chapter 3: Laughter and Myopia: the Worldview of Juvenal 10

Though it is a truism that Juvenal enacts a new phase of his satirical career with

Satire 10, upon closer inspection, Juvenal continues to focus on the problems of meaning and interpretation that I have spotlighted at emerging the outset and middle of his oeuvre.

Commentators have found the monumental shift from the “indignant” satirist of Bks. 1-2 to the more hopeful and “rational” 1 satirist that we see in Bks. 4-5 emblematized in a passage, universally agreed to be programmatic, which portrays Heraclitus’ and

Democritus’ contrasting reactions to human pursuit and folly (10.28-53). Though I do not discount the change in tone, this chapter will, in the course of a close reading of Satire 10, show how this passage on Heraclitus and Democritus fits into a larger satiric program challenging straightforward attempts to make and interpret meaning, which has already been identified in Satires 2 and 8. Whether focusing on Roman vice or human folly,

Juvenal emphasizes the indecipherability of the world and the consequent effect of this atmosphere on the representative project of satire itself.

In Satire 2, Juvenal had emphasized the contrast between external features and true nature (through those explicitly branded hypocrites or nobles whose behavior diverged from their essential lineage) while simultaneously relying on a coherent set of external signs to create satirical meaning. In Satire 8, his discourse had absorbed the definitional tensions accompanying contemporary nobility; the logic of his mockery depended on retaining the essentializing associations of high birth, even while the content

1 Using the terms of Anderson 1982: 288ff. Though the causes of this shift shifted from biographical claims (e.g. Lindo 1974) to artistic choices with the advances of Anderson’s persona approach, the shift is agreed on just the same. 126 of his exempla argued that it should be dispensed with. Here, though the program is similar, insofar as it often relies on externalized depictions of folly or the tragic results of folly, there is an added nuance. For, by careful reading, we will come to understand that these depictions in Satire 10 are self-consciously framed as only one individual’s overwhelmingly negative, reading of the world. The “objective” nature of that world thus eludes our grasp. Juvenal’s text will use the stand-in satirist of Democritus to demonstrate its own contingency, problematizing the notion of interpreting the world “correctly” by setting forth a self-consciously slanted interpretation.

As with Satires 2 and 8 Juvenal immediately states the problem at the outset of the satire:

Omnibus in terris, quae sunt a Gadibus usque Auroram et Gangem, pauci dinoscere possunt vera bona atque illis multum diversa, remota erroris nebula. Quid enim ratione timemus aut cupimus? Quid tam dextro pede concipis ut te 5 conatus non paeniteat votique peracti? Evertere domos totas optantibus ipsis di faciles. Nocitura toga, nocitura petuntur militia; torrens dicendi copia multis et sua mortifera est facundia; viribus ille 10 confisus periit admirandisque lacertis ; sed pluris nimia congesta pecunia cura strangulat et cuncta exuperans patrimonia census quanto delphinis ballaena Britannica maior. (10.1-14)

In all the lands, which stretch from Gades all the way to the land of the rising sun and the river Ganges, few are able to distinguish true goods and things quite far apart from them, once the cloud of error has been lifted. For what do we fear or desire out of reason? What project do you begin on such a lucky note that you don’t regret the attempt and the wish once it is fulfilled? The gods easily overturn whole houses—and the people ask them for it! The toga inevitably harms us, so does military might, yet we seek them anyway. A gushing torrent of words and eloquence are their own poison. That one died because he trusted in his strength and his marvelous arms; but more do our money-piles throttle with overwhelming anxiety along a with a property—overwhelming entire fortunes to the same extent that whales are bigger than dolphins.

127

Not only do these lines expand the geographical and temporal scope of Juvenal’s satire, as has been noted,2 but they also reintroduce a dilemma central to the satires so far examined, namely the inability to correctly read and decipher (dinoscere, 2), here between fruitful and self-destructive wishes. Rome—and the world in general—is clouded by confusion (nebula erroris, 4), and there is a constant discrepancy between our intentions and their results. Our desires and fear are not based on a rational interpretation of facts (quid enim ratione timemus/ aut cupimus, 4-5); instead, in our pursuits we blindly ignore the possibility or, for Juvenal, the likelihood of failure (quid tam dextro pede concipis/ ut te conatus non paeniteat votique peracti, 5-6). Indeed, the ironic force of ipsis optantibus and petuntur in lines 7 and 8, where men voluntarily, indeed willfully, seek the very things that lead to their demise, emphasizes that this demise originates in the misformulation of desire. Simply put, men overvalue things that they should not. The gods’ apparent delight in granting destructive wishes, intimated in di faciles (8) will come to match the cynical cackle that characterizes Juvenal’s depiction of Democritus

(rigidi…cachinni, 10.31).

Juvenal, in response then to man’s failure to read the world properly, provides in

Sat. 10 his own reading of the world. He reveals, however, through the techniques he uses to portray that world, that his own vision is equally tendentious and contingent upon his own satirical perspective. Juvenal professes that he will show the world as it really is and thus posits Sat. 10 as objective counterpoint to men’s misconceptions of the world.

His discourse, however, will come to replicate the flawed and incomplete perspective of the human figures he is satirizing and addressing.

2 E.g. Anderson 1982: 345. 128

In short, the world of Juvenal 10 is partial in two senses: it originates from a biased interpretation of the world (embodied within the satire by Democritus) and, in turn, is not the completely realized vision that Juvenal claims it to be. Juvenal invokes the problems and difficulties of interpretation itself (globalized from strongly Romanized portrayals of this problem in Satires 2 and 8) and simultaneously offers a self-reflexive representation through satire. Juvenal dramatizes, often ironically, an epistemological rift between “the” world (which he claims to expose) and the world of satire, with interesting complications for what satire can be thought to communicate and for our own interpretations of it.

This rift can open with even a carefully placed ambiguous word, which, in context, expresses the opposite meaning that it should express in describing the world. In lines 10-11, Juvenal argues that physical prowess is no match for the vicissitudes of life: viribus ille/ confisus periit admirandusque lacertis (“that man, trusting in his strength and his admirable arms, perished because of that strength”).3 With the carefully deployed word and visually loaded admirandus, Juvenal draws our visual attention to the arms and comments on them positively, implying that, indeed, the arms are impressive. Yet this word occurs in a negative context, whereby those very features initially determined to be good are, when read “correctly,” actually self-destructive. That visual marker should thus conjure a mental image of Milo’s gruesome death and how it was that very strength, seemingly so “impressive,” that contributed to it. Of course, to be more precise and sensitive to the word order, this operation occurs in reverse: first Juvenal gives the negative context through reference to Milo’s fate at the hands of his hands

3 Taking viribus apo koinou with both the participle and the main verb, as Courtney ad loc recommends. The lines are a reference to Milo of Croton who was attacked by wolves after jamming his arms too deeply into a tree he was trying to split barehanded (cf. Strabo 6.1.12; Pausanias 6.14.8). 129

(viribus…periit) and then remarks retroactively on the incredible nature of his strength.

We glimpse two simultaneous readings of Milo, one, the athlete of inspiring feats of power, and the other, a foolish man whose overconfidence in those feats resulted in his death.

What this satire will dramatize then, is whether the latter reading (death, overconfidence) should necessarily supersede the former, or whether, in fact, they exist as complementary though contradictory readings in an uneasy balance. Juvenal’s attempts to offer a final reading of the world will be programmatically unsuccessful, whether because of clashes of tone and perspective or a cognitive dissonance between what Juvenal is depicting and how he is depicting it; the world of Satire 10 is necessarily incomplete.

Similarly in this opening section, facundia in line 10 implies a praise of eloquence but matched with the admittedly deprecating expression, “the churning supply of words at hand” (torrens dicendi copia, 9)4 and in a context where that eloquence “seals its own fate” (sua mortifera, 10). At the end of this long statement of purpose, Juvenal lurches into a downright absurd reading, comparing the ever-increasing money piles that throttle us with anxiety, increasing one over another at the discrepancy in size between a whale and a dolphin (quanto delphinis ballaena Britannica maior).5 The incongruity and irrelevance of the juxtaposition of whale/dolphin is not just a passing joke, positioned as

4 Cf. the reference to the sly foreigners that flood Rome in the third Satire: ingenium velox, audacia perdita, sermo/ promptus et Isaeo torrentior (3.73-74).

5 Plaza 2006 uses this passage as an example of what she terms “non-aligned” humor, through the association of the whale with other comical monstrosities in Juvenal, wherein “the laughter spreads wider than the one straight direction” since the image does more than just prove the point (316-17). 130 it is at the beginning of the satire. Instead, it will show itself to be an index of the worldview of the satire.

In the following section, on the way that excessive possessions lead inevitably to misery, even death, Juvenal seemingly ignores his own previous depictions of Rome’s unsavory characters and of debilitating poverty. Several times in Satire 10, Juvenal will rewrite his own world through ironic recollections and re-evaluations of material from previous satires (or even of material from earlier in this very satire!). Villains will become victims, and miseries will become advantages. We are told an entire cohort of soldiers besieged the “outstanding” house of the Laterani (egregias Lateranorum obsidet aedes/ tota cohors, 17-18), Juvenal referencing the fate of Plautius Lateranus, killed by the order of Nero in 65 C.E. (iussuque Neronis, 15). As with admirandis above, labeling the home of the Laterani egregias has an ironic force, for Juvenal argues that these estates’ very outstanding quality which makes them attractive targets. Even more, disregarding Juvenal’s historical inaccuracy, this is arguably the same Lateranus who

Juvenal notoriously depicted as a mulio consul in Sat. 8, flying shamefully past the ashes of his own ancestors (praeter maiorum cineres atque ossa volucri/ carpento rapitur pinguis Lateranus, 8.147-48) and associating at the pub with sailors, coffin-makers and other low-lifes (8.173-76).6 Whereas there Lateranus was an emblem of the confusion

6 As Courtney notes ad 8.147, Plautius Lateranus never reached his suffect consulship in 65 C.E. because of his execution, despite Juvenal depicting his Lateranus at 8.150ff. as a consul (finitum tempus honoris/ cum fuerit, 8.150-51). The identity of the two figures is controversial. Ferguson 1987: 134 argues forcefully that the man from Satire 8 is T. Sextius Magius Lateranus, cos 94 C.E., but he is forced to completely dismiss an explicit reference to Nero there (8.170) as a metonymy for Domitian, adducing 4.38 as evidence (where Domitian is called a “bald Nero”, calvo…Neroni). Yet the reference at 4.38 is paired with an explicit mention of Domitian (Flavius…ultimus, 4.37-8), and the milieu of the entire poem is explicitly Domitianic, particularly the catalogue of councilors (4.73-118), which has long been recognized as a parody of De Bello Germanico, an epic poem by Statius on Domitian’s triumphs, the only traces of which are preserved by the scholiast of Juvenal. Conversely, Ferguson’s other evidence of “Nero” used for Domitian, Mart. 11.38, makes no reference which must necessarily refer to Domitian; in fact, it references 131 instantiated in transgression of the boundaries of nobility, there is no such dissonance here, as he is here categorically elided into wealthy victims of Nero along with Seneca and Longinus in line 15-16.7

Juvenal similarly reworks his depiction of poverty when he claims that one advantage of poverty is the lack of interference by soldiers (rarus venit in cenacula miles,

“rarely do you get a soldier entering the garrets,” 10.18). Yet these same garrets

(cenacula) are the neglected homes on the verge of collapse in Sat. 3 (3.190-96) and prone to fire: “I [Umbricius, speaker of Sat. 3, on the verge of departure from Rome] have to live where there are no fires or nightly fears” (vivendum est illic ubi nulla incendia, nulli/ nocte metus, 3.197-98). When fire in the lower stories breaks out, “you” are so high that “you” aren’t even aware (3.199-202).8 After a short catalogue of the meager possessions of an archetypal pauper named Cordus (contrasted later with an expansive catalogue of the impressive possessions of a rich man which are enthusiastically replaced by the community, 3.215-222), we are told, in a profoundly pitiful phrase, that Cordus lost “the entire nothing” he has (nil habuit Cordus, quis enim negat? et tamen illud/ perdidit infelix totum nihil, 3.208-9).

the “leek-green” faction at the Circus (prasinus, ll. 1, 4), said by Suetonius to be a favorite of Caligula and Nero (Suet. Ner. 22). Nor then is the inscription (CIL XV.7536) at St. John Lateran, commemorating the house of the Sexti Laterani on the Caelian Hill, necessarily connected (for the controversy, see Lexicon Topigraphicum Urbis Romae s.v. Domus Laterani). Thus, the figure from Satire 8 should be considered the Neronian Lateranus and thus identical to the Lateranus mentioned here, with the inaccuracies to be traced to a “willingness to embroider [historical fact] without checking the accuracy of his statements” (Courtney ad 8.146).

7 Though the name of the latter actually represents the property of C. Cassius Longinus (cf. Tac. Ann.13.48, 14.43-5), as the syntax shows (Longinus is an accusative parallel to hortos in l. 16 and aedes in l. 17).

8 Tabulata tibi iam tertia fumant:/ Tu nescis (3.199-200): The indeterminancy of the reference of tu (certainly not Umbricius’ dramatic addressee Juvenal, but Cordus is not named for several more lines) helps to universalize the danger Rome poses. 132

There is further contradiction in his contrast in Satire 10 of two men at night making for home, one fearful for the money he is carrying (10.19-21), the other strolling fearless with empty pockets, even humming a tune (cantabit vacuus coram latrone viator,

10.22), if one recalls the man assaulted in the street by young thugs despite his poverty, also in Satire 3 (278-301). While giving him a sound thrashing, these thugs abuse him verbally, berating him about the low quality of the meal from which he is returning

(3.292-94) and even calling him a beggar (in qua te quaero proseucha, “in what synagogue should I look for you?”, 3.296). The only “freedom” of poverty (libertas pauperis, 3.299), as Juvenal had earlier formulated, is the ability to beg that you be allowed to keep your teeth (adorat/ ut liceat paucis cum dentibus inde reverti, 3.300-1).

A. Who’s Laughing Now?

With these ironies in place (the double valence of admirandus, facundia, and egregias; the reversal of the value of poverty and villainy) Juvenal then begins the famous section on Democritus and Heraclitus (10.28-53). He chooses these two figures to embody two interpretations of the Roman world: for Heraclitus, the world is an endless font of tears, but, for Democritus, it is a wellspring of laughter:

Iamne igitur laudas quod de sapientibus alter ridebat, quotiens a limine moverat unum protuleratque pedem, flebat contratius auctor? 30 Sed facilis cuivis rigidi censura cachinni: mirandum est unde ille oculis suffecerit umor. Perpetuo risu pulmonem agitare solebat Democritus, quam non essent urbibus illis praetexta, trabeae fasces, lectica, tribunal. 35 (10.28-35)

And do you now praise what one of the philosophers used to laugh at, whenever he stepped foot outdoors, while the opposing philosopher used to weep? But for anyone easy is the corrective power of the giddy cackle: it’s wonder that one could ever find a supply

133

of tears! Democritus used to shake his sides with unending laughter, and he didn’t even have in his towns youths or stripes or rods or litters or the speaker’s platform.

Juvenal gives a portrait of Democritus and Heraclitus, in characterizations popularized by

Seneca,9 confronting the world in opposite ways (contrarius auctor, 30). The world is both a generalized one (implied in quod in 28) and a specifically Roman one, which

Juvenal objectifies by listing a series of Roman institutions, material and spatial: praetextae, trabeae, fasces, lectica, tribunal (35). Between those two perspectives—tears and laughter—Juvenal demonstrates a clear favorite, sardonically dismissing Heraclitus’ dejection (“You’d think he’d run out of tears eventually”) and foregrounding Democritus’ reaction to Roman spectacle in the following lines (36-53). Most critics embrace this passage as indicating Juvenal’s new adoption of a Democritean persona, whose tone will shift from indignant anger to cynical laughter.10

Yet there is an important additional nuance to these lines that commentators up to now have left unnoticed, encapsulated in the position of Heraclitus. For this passage operates in tandem with the opening: if the opening lines depict the problem of a world that men have trouble deciphering, these lines depict two opposing interpretations of that world and thus make the choice of a single perspective contingent upon the viewer. When

Juvenal claims that the choice of laughter is the easiest way “for anyone at all” (facilis cuivis…censura), he seemingly ignores the existence of any opposing viewpoint. Indeed,

9 Cf. Courtney ad 28-30 and Anderson 1982: 341-44.

10 The thought goes back to Hendrickson 1927: 52-55, but the most influential reading of this shift is Anderson 1982: 288ff and 340-61, originally printed in 1962 and 1964 respectively. He saw Democritus as representative of a new program guided by reason, rather than anger, the prototype of the satirist in Juvenal 10-16, and in him an “ironic withdrawal from the passions of mankind” (1982: 348). Braund 1988: 184-189 claims that, in Book 4, Juvenal crafts a specifically “Horatian” persona, drawing parallels with Horace’s subject, scope, and tone in Satires 10, 11, and 12. See also Keane 2006: 35-37, Courtney 1980: 446, Plaza 2006: 32-37, and Eichholz:1956 (who, prior to Anderson, recognized that this Democritus was a symbolic rather than historical figure). 134 before Anderson’s influential account of the place of the “Democritean satirist,” it was argued by Gilbert Lawall that Juvenal himself vacillates between adopting a Heraclitan and Democritean view (though he conceded that Juvenal tends towards the cynical rather than the pathetic).11 It is hard to argue that Juvenal’s satire is entirely fueled by harsh cackling (cachinni, 31) when one encounters such pitiful situations as the parade of funerals experienced by those “blessed” to grow old (10.240-242). Juvenal, even while he asserts a monolithic view of the world, creates the possibility of other views, with the corresponding danger that his own attempt to interpret the world for his reader is merely his own.12

Juvenal continues by depicting Democritus absorbing the Roman spectacle of the pompa circensis, in which the president of the games, imitating a triumphal procession in

Juvenal, initiated the games at the Circus Maximus:

Quid si vidisset praetorem curribus altis extantem et medii sublime pulvere circi in tunica Iovis et pictae Sarrana ferentem ex umeris aulaea togae magnaeque coronae tantum orbem, quanto cervix non sufficit ulla? 40 Quippe tenet sudans hanc publicus et, sibi consul ne placeat, curru servus portatur eodem. Da nunc et volucrem, sceptro quae surgit eburno, illinc cornicines, hinc paecedentia longi agminis officia et niveos ad frena Quirites, 45 defossa in loculos quos sportula fecit amicos. tum quoque materiam risus inuenit ad omnis occursus hominum, cuius prudentia monstrat summos posse uiros et magna exempla daturos ueruecum in patria crassoque sub aere nasci. 50 ridebat curas nec non et gaudia uolgi,

11 Lawall 1958.

12 It is perhaps the internalization by critics of this monolithic view that has led to a surprising paucity of extended criticism of Satire 10, despite its “classic” status, confirmed by its reception, particularly in English poetry (cf. Ben Jonson’s play Sejanus: His Fall [1603] and Samuel Johnson’s version of Satire 10 in English “The Vanity of Human Wishes” [1749]). 135

interdum et lacrimas, cum Fortunae ipse minaci mandaret laqueum mediumque ostenderet unguem. (10. 36-53)

But if he had seen the praetor standing out from the high chariot covered in dust in the middle of the circus in Jove’s tunic while carrying Tyrian hangings—more like curtains—and the orb of a huge crown, which his neck can’t even hold up. For a sweating slave holds it and, so the consul doesn’t flatter himself too much, is carried in the same chariot. While you’re at it, add a bird, which rises from an ebony scepter, horners on that side, and over here the studiousness of a long company walking in front, and snow-white Romans (!) at the bit, the ones whom an offering—buried in their pocketbooks—turned into friends. At that time too he found material for comedy at man’s every meeting, he whose prudence shows that great men, men who provide great examples, can be born in the land of mutton and in a, so to speak, “dense” atmosphere. He was laughing at the crowd’s cares, and their joys too; and while he was at it, their tears, while he for his part, would offer Fortune a noose when she loomed and showed her his middle finger.

Catherine Keane has analyzed this passage against a similar portrayal of

Democritus creating a spectacle for himself at Horace Epistles 2.1.194ff., where

Democritus gazes out at a slack-jawed crowd enraptured by an exhibition of exotic animals and subsequently turns the audience itself into an object of spectacle.13 Whereas

Horace’s Democritus “creates” the spectacle in Horace, Keane sees Democritus here as a passive spectator in a prefabricated Roman entertainment.14 Yet this approach ignores a central idea in the lines immediately following: tum quoque materiam risus invenit (“at that time too he found material for mockery,” 10.47). Democritus doesn’t simply stumble upon the object of his derision. On the contrary, Juvenal depicts his stand-in as an active participant in the construction of satirical object. The following lines, then, are not a

“transcription” of spectacular Roman folly, but a construction focalized through the imaginary viewpoint of Democritus. What Juvenal depicts is not Democritus watching

13 Cf. Juv.14.256-264, where Juvenal himself performs a similar operation. Maier 1983: 49, in her argument that the major figures in Sat. 10 are not only emblems but actors, states the similarity between the pompa circensis and a procession from a tragedy. Schmitz 2000: 27-28 also recognizes a theatrical context where Democritus is spectacularized himself, as we look upon Democritus looking at the procession.

14 She adds that this “lack of autonomy underscores the programmatic theme of degradation associated with theatre and shows” (Keane 2003: 73); cf. Keane 2006: 37, where she describes Democritus’ “disempowered, scripted, theatrical role.” 136 the Roman world and acting as a mere mocking observer of quotidian affairs; instead,

Democritus creates his own interpretation of that world, based on a pre-existing perspective of cynicism and contempt (revealed by the universality of his mockery at lines 51-52). In this light, we must reread the many humorous, exaggerated, or cynical details in this now self-aware depiction—the praetor covered in dust (medii sublimem pulvere circi, 37), wearing a toga long enough to be a theater curtain and a crown which his head could not support (ferentem/ ex umeris aulaea togae mangaeque coronae/ tantum orbem, quanto cervix non sufficit ulla, 38-40),15 while the servant carrying it sweats (sudans, 41); the bird on the scepter prioritized syntactically over the scepter itself

(da nunc et volucrem, sceptro quae surgit eburno, 43); the clients walking in front equated syntactically with cornicines (all the objects of da, 43) and ironically referred to as “snow-white” Quirites (niveos ad frena Quirites, 45)16 whose venal friendships were purchased by the dole ([Quirites] quos sportula fecit amicos, 46)—these details are to be read as Democritus’ own personal reading of the spectacle unfolding before him.17

Indeed he finds all business laughable (tum quoque materiam risus invenit ad omnis occursus hominum, 47), just as Juvenal in the opening satire had found the overwhelming tide of vice surrounding him unbearable. The two words are central in the picture of Democritus which Juvenal adopts as his stand-in: omnis signals Democritus’

15 Schmitz 2000: 27-28 notes how the term aulaea is both appropriate (considering the spectacular context) and exaggerating: “the outward heightening proves to be empty appearance” (Der aüßerliche Erhöhung…erweist sich als nichtiger Schein, 28). This notion of appearance (Schein) has perhaps an additional connotation, namely that the term underscores the “depictedness,” if you will, of the entire passage.

16 Courtney ad loc argues that the use of the technical term for citizen “ironically hint[s] that they abase their station by servility.” There is a discrepancy, then, between what the word implies and the social role they actually take.

17 D.E. Eichholz had already argued this (“Everything hencreforth is to be viewed through the pitiless eye of a Democritus” with the magistrate’s procession as a “foretaste” of the whole satire”, 65) but did not reflect on the poetological impact of dramatizing the adoption of a jaded worldview. 137 universal cynicism and mockery, and occursus recalls the earlier image of Juvenal in

Satire 1, an embedded “reporter” in the hostile territory of Rome (cf. occurrit matrona potens, 1.69). Maria Plaza has made the connection between the “easy” laughter of

Democritus (sed facilis cuivis rigidi censura cachinni, 10.31) and the “ease” of writing indignant satire for Juvenal (difficile est saturam non scribere, 1.30).18 Further, it was argued convincingly long ago that the sweeping objects of Democritus’ mockery cover the same ground as the topics Juvenal claims to address in the opening satire.19 Compare then the lines on Democritus’s satirical objects to Juvenal’s in his original programmatic satire: ridebat curas nec non et gaudia vulgi,/ interdum et lacrimas, (51-52) pair neatly with “whatever men do, their wishes, fears, anger, pleasures, joys, their bustling—these will be the fodder for our meager volume” (quidquid agunt homines, votum, timor, ira, voluptas,/ gaudia, discursus, nostri farrago libelli est, 1.85-86). 20

By combining these observations, we can see an added significance of Juvenal eliding himself into Democritus. Despite Democritus’s detachment in tone—cynical laughter rather bitter anger—he is depicted here as an engaged viewer, who actively interprets the world according to his own cynical rubric. Democritus gives Fortune the finger (mediumque ostenderet unguem, 10. 53), dismissing the goddess who most

18 Plaza 2006: 35. She also astutely notes that sed facilis in 10 and difficile est in 1 occupy the same metrical position. The litotes of difficile…non, not technically identical to facilis, fits into the mock-modest program of Juvenal 1, fulfilled later in the connection of his satire to neither to ars nor ingenium, but indignatio and his facetious comparison of his own work to some contemporary poetaster (si natura negat, facit indignation versum/ qualemcumque potest, quales ego vel Cluvenius, 1.79-80).

19 Hendrickson 1927: 55.

20 There is certainly a parallel between farrago (“fodder”) at 1.86 and materiam at 10.47, though the former is a considerably more rich term. For more on the exact significance of the term farrago, see the contrasting views of Powell 1987 and Braund 1996a ad 1.85-6. 138 represents a destabilizing element that changes the value and meaning of things.21

Despite this rejection of Fortune, his use of Democritus shows that Juvenal himself will depict a world that, although with pretense of being the correct interpretation of social and historical realities, is necessarily limited.

It may seem platitudinous to claim that Juvenal is innovating by giving his own selective interpretation of the world, a practice which would certainly apply to the other satirists and likewise to any historiographer. Two points make Juvenal exceptional. One, he actually stages himself in these lines, through his proxy Democritus,22 selectively depicting the world, focusing on its tendency towards the laughable. Second, he slyly portrays this operation in the very satire in which he questions other men’s ability to correctly evaluate and interpret their own intentions. Mechanically, Juvenal offers us this newly realized, “correct” worldview by employing external depictions to create this world matter-of-factly, 23 even as it was the outer appearance of the world that led us astray. In short, Juvenal claims men cannot read the world, but offers little justification for the reliability of his own reading beyond the plausibility of his externalized representations. The rest of this chapter will closely examine the main body of Satire 10 to demonstrate how Juvenal’s discourse reveals a displacement between the world and

Juvenal’s representation of it, focusing particularly, but not exclusively, on those places where the mechanics attempt the generate the matter-of-fact interpretation which Juvenal had initially denied to others.

21 See the discussion below, in section D.

22 For convenience’s sake, I will use “Juvenal” throughout the rest of this chapter to indicate the focalization of this Democritean view of the world.

23 Cf. Jenkyns 1982: 209, on how Juvenal uses the technique of “literalism” in Satire 10 to “see through the fog of convention to see what is truly there.” 139

Indeed, internal and external correspondence is already challenged in this very section. For, a fixed characteristic of Democritus, namely his birth in Abdera, conflicts with his demonstrable prudentia: cuius prudentia monstrat/ summos posse viros et magna exempla daturos/ vervecum in patria crassoque sub aere nasci (10. 48-50). Democritus should be as “dense” (crassus) as the environment he was born into, yet his intelligence manages to betray the inaccuracy of this supposedly straightforward association. The lines are also a demonstration of Juvenal’s “Democritean” mockery directed at his very inspiration; though he explicitly praises Democritus’ wisdom, Juvenal can’t resist associating him with the lands of lunkheads. The lines are thus an appropriate cap to the ironization of straightforward meaning and satiric mockery introduced in this opening section.

The Satire that follows is one of Juvenal’s neatest. After his brief statement of purpose, Juvenal gives a cleanly structured catalog (though internally the episodes can messily spill into one another, especially in the opening section on Sejanus) of misguided wishes: power (56-113), eloquence (114-132), military success (133-187), long life (188-

288), and beauty (289-345). He closes with a problematic solution to the problem of the right orientation of prayers (346-366).

Though he frames his project with the image of pious supplication and requests from the gods (propter quae fas est genua incerare deorum? 10.55), similar to Persius

2,24 he makes it clear here that his goal is to show men the true value of the goods they desire by identifying those which are “empty” or “destructive” (ergo supervacua aut

24 For the parallels, see e.g. Highet 1954: 276 n.1; the key point that distinguishes the two satires, as Fishelov 1990: 372-75 has shown, is that the falseness of the petitioners in Persius 2, who cover up their real desires with socially acceptable ones (cf. Pers.2.39-40: negato,/ Iuppiter, haec illi, quamvis te albata rogarit), is shifted onto the objects of the desires themselves. 140 quae perniciosa petuntur? 10.54). David Fishelov has plotted the dynamic of Sat. 10 as one that reenacts for readers the notion of wish-fulfillment on the part of the actors.25

That is, just as the players in Juvenal’s human drama mistakenly understand the consequences of their prayers and are eternally frustrated in their pursuits, so too are the reader’s hopes for a positive outcome continuously thwarted. Fishelov describes Satire 10 as a “zigzag curve, where the apexes of the curve stand for the content of human wishes while the sharply falling curve—on which Juvenal likes so much to linger—represents the pernicious outcomes.”26 He then forms an analogy between these prayers and the wishes of the reader hoping finally for a good outcome, only to be continually frustrated.

Before Juvenal embarks, he frames the discussion that follows as orientated around a central discrepancy between the value that men wrongly attach to certain goods and their actual fates when acquiring them. This discrepancy will, in turn, point to a subtle but fundamental assumption that Juvenal’s methods will undercut, namely that

Juvenal can deliver a final version of reality.27 With this mind, we move into the first, and most energetic, section of the satire, on political ambition.

25 Fishelov 1990.

26 Fishelov 1990: 376. Others have noted Juvenal’s exclusive focus on the disastrous and inevitable consequences of wishes. Cf. Courtney 1980, commenting on Juvenal’s statement of theme (ergo supervacua aut quae perniciosa petuntur?, 10.54), suggests that Juvenal focuses on the destructive because “supervacua are not so well suited to satire” (446).

27 John Henderson has seen a somewhat similar dynamic operating in the totalizing preface of Tacitus’ Annales, which move from foundation to empire in only 68 words: the neat teleological drive towards empire “fragments and dissipates its own authority as narration, not least by directing its readers unmistakably to notice its narratology, the fix of it all” (Henderson 1989: 172). See too his reflection on how Tacitus’ depiction of the manipulation of maiestas in the Tiberian books could apply to Tacitus himself: maiestas in Tacitus is about “power as power over meaning. Wor(l)d Power. The misnomer maiestas de-stabilizes Roman discourse. Systematically. Into Pieces.” (177). 141

B. Have You Heard the News about Sejanus?

The first subject that Juvenal addresses is the desire for power (potentia, 10.56),28 beginning with a staging of the fall of Sejanus that has become one of the most famous scenes of the poem (10. 58-89). The incident dramatically re-enacts the drastic reinterpretation by contemporary Romans of the value of one supremely powerful individual (though Juvenal, with characteristic slyness, delays an explicit mention of

Sejanus’ name until line 63).29 The section is ostensibly about Sejanus’ own misinterpretation of “what ought to be wished for” (ergo, quid optandum foret, ignorasse fateris/ Seianum, 10.103-4),30 but it also records a radical shift in attitude by the people of

Rome towards authority. Juvenal’s historical quasi-drama (especially the depiction of lively dialogue amongst those celebrating Sejanus’ death)31 represents a paradox:

Juvenal’s externalizing mechanic sets up a clear interpretation of a scene, the purpose of which is to demonstrate the fickleness of the crowd and the inability to trust in categorical or permanent judgments. That valued objects (here, external honors and authority) are sometimes subject to destructive re-evaluation conflicts with Juvenal’s project (a categorical correction of our valuations) and means (transparent depiction, made both vivid and convincing through its abundance of visual detail). Juvenal therefore cannot guarantee the definitiveness of his vision.

28 The entire phrasing of the line is significant: subiecta potentia magnae/ invidiae, 10.56-57. Juvenal immediately reveals his focalization, then, of the depiction of power; as I will show, not every section will begin as overtly negatively.

29 Keane 2012: 420-24 has given a rich reading in how the delayed employment of Sejanus’ name shows the permeability between human and material, where it is unclear when Juvenal is talking about the man and when about the statue.

30 Note how the lines feature the same enjambment used at the introduction of Sejanus at line 63.

31 See Maier 1983: 50; cf. Mason 1963: 111, who states that Juvenal’s effects for Sejanus are “mainly for the outer eye.” Schmitz 2000: 29 further comments that “the reader becomes a spectator not only of the downfall of power but also the reaction of his one-time adherents.” (29) 142

At the outset of the scene, Juvenal metaphorically dramatizes the very action which he is engaging in and shows how objects, in this case statues of Sejanus, can be changed from one form into another:

Descendunt statuae restemque secuntur, ipsas deinde rotas bigarum inpacta securis caedit et inmeritis franguntur crura caballis. 60 Iam strident ignes, iam follibus atque caminis ardet adoratum populo caput et crepat ingens Seianus, deinde ex facie toto orbe secunda fiunt urceoli, pelves, sartago, metallae. (10.58-64)

The statues come down and chase the rope, the axe dashed upon them then cuts the very wheels of the carts and the legs of horsies undeserving are broken. Now the fires are roaring, and in the furnaces and bellows that once beloved head is burning and great Sejanus crackles, then out of that face which was, in the whole world, second only to the emperor—you get little jars, basins, frying pans, and pisspots!

The viewer is plunged in medias res into a scene of destruction without being told who is being condemned.32 We only see at first the destruction of someone’s status, a re-reading of someone’s worth, physicalized in the treatment of the statues.33 Sejanus, when finally introduced, has been objectified into his own statue (crepat ingens/Sejanus, 62-63), crackling as it is shoved into the furnace.34 Juvenal means to show us what these statues really represented all along: “jars, basins, saucepans, and pisspots” (64). The last item in particular, through its coarseness, represents a verbal humiliation to match the physical one the statue suffers. Yet even Juvenal must admit that this was not Rome’s original

32 Courtney ad 58 suggests that an audience alive at the death of Domitian may have been familiar with such a scenes of the desecration of public statues.

33 Schmitz 2000: 29 notes how the transformation of the statue into objects shows the fall of Sejanus “in visual ways” (in anschaulicher Wiese). See Stewart 2003: 265-79 for a discussion of the significance of statue destruction in cases of damnatio memoriae. Note especially his point (276-78) that the ill treatment of statues, meant to efface them from the material record (ironic, of course, as these condemnations are preserved in the historical record: cf. the sarcasm of Tacitus when the Senate “reminds” doddering Claudius of Messalina’s death by issuing a damnatio, 11.38.3), is a reversal of the honor once bestowed on them.

34 Cf. the degrading materialization of the degenerate nobles into Sat. 8 to broken herms (see Ch. 2. C) 143 conception of Sejanus, for the statue represents a man once “adored by the people”

(adoratum populo caput, 62). Juvenal’s text simultaneously shows two separate

“readings” of Sejanus, temporally distanced through the use of a past participle

(adoratum) and the present active main verb (ardet). In one, Sejanus is a beloved figure; in the other, a man beyond contempt.

In the next lines, Juvenal shows the joyous populace sacrificing (65-66) and reemphasizes the spectacular aspect of Sejanus’ downfall (Seianus ducitur unco/ spectandus, “Sejanus—you have to see him—is being dragged by the hook,” 10.66-67).

He then draws us into a short dialogue between two onlookers which dramatically emphasizes the shift in status that has taken place: “What lips he had! And that face!

Never, if you trust me at all, did I love this man” (‘quae labra quis illi/ vultus erat!

Numquam, si quid mihi credis, amavi/ hunc hominem,’ 10.67-69). Sejanus’ visage is scornfully taken as manifest evidence of his true character, even after Juvenal has shown that his face was not originally “read” this way. Further, Juvenal subtly indicts the anonymous man for his very fickleness, having him introduce a disclaimer (si quid mihi credis, 68) before unequivocally stating his hatred for Sejanus. The aside implies that we should not trust the sincerity of the man’s condemnation, or, rather, that we should believe that he loved Sejanus just as sincerely before as he hates Sejanus now.

A little later in this same playlet, Juvenal offers a metapoetic nod to the power of words to reconfigure the “true” nature of a man’s position. For, in discussing the source of Sejanus’ ruin, one speaker notes that he was executed not after a trial but after the dispatch of a mere letter from Tiberius on Capri (verbosa et grandis epistula venit/ a

Capreis, 10.72-73). Catherine Keane has read this as a cue of the association between

144 violence, law, and language and the “potential of language to function as a weapon.”35

Beyond this there is, I believe, another layer of nuance, namely the hint of the satirist’s own ability to reconfigure the world through verbal discourse.36 In his ability to not just show the re-evaluation of Sejanus that Tiberius’ letter sparks, but to perform that same act through satire, Juvenal occupies a position parallel to Tiberius’s.

Juvenal similarly turns on the capriciousness of the crowd, whom he attacks directly:

Sed quid turba Remi? Sequitur fortunam ut semper et odit damnatos. idem populus, si Nortia Tusco fauisset, si oppressa foret secura senectus 75 principis, hac ipsa Seianum diceret hora Augustum. (10.73-77)

And what about the crowd of Remus? It follows fortune as always and hates men once they have been condemned. The selfsame populace, if Nortia had favored the Etruscan, if the guarded old age of the emperor had been snuffed out, that very hour would declare Sejanus Augustus.

Besides the scorn of the loaded word Remi (73),37 Juvenal expressly states the principle of instability of meaning that he had shown in the previous lines of animated dialogue. The people follow whomever Fortune favors and, as soon as a man’s status changes, so too does their reckoning of him. In the condition in the following lines (74-

77), where Juvenal states that, were circumstances different, Sejanus would be emperor, the stress should be laid on idem populus (74). Whereas before Heraclitus’ and

35 Keane 2006: 99.

36 Juvenal perhaps even makes a joke at his own expense since verbosa and grandis could surely apply to his own discourse.

37 Courtney points out that Remi is frequently used for Romuli in the poets for metrical reasons (as the cretic of Romuli is incommensurable with dactylic hexameter). Yet considering the contemptuous context, it is hard to ignore a fuller, negative reading of the word. For more on Remus’ place in the foundational imagination of Rome, see Wiseman 1995, esp. 1-17 and 103-50. 145

Democritus’ notional perspectives were diametrically opposed, thus precipitating their varying reactions to the world around them, here we have the same “reader” (namely, the people) radically changing its viewpoint based on shifting circumstances. Their own viewpoint is completely contingent on external factors. Nor is it difficult to extend that contingency to Juvenal’s own viewpoint, which begins from a Democritean premise of universal folly.

Juvenal then memorably digresses, describing how the people have surrendered their agency and interest in politics and now care about only two things: the dole and the races (nunc se/ continent atque duas tantum res anxius optat,/ panem et circenses, 10.79-

81). Though Catherine Keane is concerned with the social aspects of Juvenal’s shifting blame onto the people for its lust for games,38 what is equally pertinent here is the basic shift in the attitude and interest of the people away from political concerns (effudit curas,

10.78.) to what Juvenal chides as frivolous spectacle. Another notable feature is that this shift, rather than being tied to the machinations of Fortune, is chosen willingly by the people. Juvenal’s claim that this began “ever since we sold our right to vote for nothing”

(ex quo suffragia nulli/ vendimus, 10.77-78) suggests a doubling of perspectives between

Juvenal and the rest of Rome. The active verb implies a conscious and willing adoption of a new set of values (“we did it”), yet Juvenal’s sneer that we did it “for nothing” (nulli) casts this turn to spectacle in a negative light. The consequences of the shift in concern are more dangerous than frivolous (for Rome and for Juvenal), for they represent the larger implication that any system of values is necessarily impermanent. This, then, is the

38 Indeed, Keane 2006: 36-37 challenges Juvenal’s assessment, arguing that “Juvenal’s transformation of that populi is highly over-determined, airing several conflicting justifications for the political rearrangement.” Edwards 1993: 24, discussing the notional exemplarity of the social elite in Roman society, states, “Juvenal implies that social betters were to blame.” 146 relevance, for the dramatic change in circumstances in Sejanus’ disgrace piece shows not just the folly of ambition but the tangible power of perspective, how Rome can cast her eyes twice upon the same thing and see two different images, with vicious consequences.

The dialogue which Juvenal interrupted at line 72 continues, exposing the fear of the noblemen in not appearing hostile enough towards Sejanus’ corpse and memory.

They then launch into a remarkable exclamation, which caps the concern with interpretation throughout this section:

Curramus praecipites et, 85 dum iacet in ripa, calcemus Caesaris hostem. sed servi videant, ne quis neget et pavidum in ius cervice obstricta dominum trahat. (10.85-88)

Let’s run right away and, while he’s lying on the river bank exposed, tread the enemy of Caesar underfoot. But make sure the servants see it, so no one could deny it and drag a trembling master into court with his neck restrained.

Whether or not the noble’s recommendation belies a sincere hatred of Sejanus or not, it reveals a powerful concern with how his actions will be seen by others, especially his slaves. Besides being another indictment of the widespread atmosphere of play-acting which Juvenal attacks,39 it shows again the power of interpretation and the impossibility of a unitary reading. The very concern that he will be dragged into court and betrayed by his slaves (ne quis neget et pavidum in ius/cervice obstricta dominum trahat, 87-88) demonstrates the fragility of meaning, where the same action (desecrating the corpse) might be read in two different ways. Indeed, Juvenal even inserts a sly bit of his own perspective into the speech of the noble. For the noble describes himself, in another example of Schmitz’s “uncharacteristic speech,” as pavidum dominum, a word which

39 See Keane 2006: 29-32. 147 truly applies to the master but which he would hardly use of himself.40 Yet the word can be pushed harder; Juvenal, in this brief moment of anti-focalization, if you will, nods to his own construction of a scene, even he depicts the noble intending to construct their own theatrical scene.

Moving away from the vividness of Sejanus’ ruin, Juvenal stages a new dialogue, this time with his satiric audience (10.90-113). There is a high concentration of second person verbs (e.g. visne, 90; vis, 94; cupias, 96, etc.) and the style immediately becomes less visually intense. He starts by asking his interlocutor if he would like to be “greeted like Sejanus” (visne salutari sicut Seianus, 10.90). At the outset of Juvenal’s exchange with his audience, salutari has a double valence frequent in Satire 10: looking backward it recalls the disgusted reaction of the nobleman to Sejanus’ mangled face; looking forward, it will (in the text) also symbolize Sejanus’ real temporal authority. He then proceeds to summarize the extent of Sejanus’ power with a series of increasingly vivid descriptions, from wealth (habere/ tantundem, 10.90-91) to assigning military commands

(illum exercitibus praeponere, 10.92), and ends with a sardonic description of Tiberius’ later years: “to be considered the protector of an emperor sitting on the narrow crag of

Capri with his Chaldean flock” (tutor haberi/ principis angusta Caprearum in rupe sedentis/ cum grege Chaldaeo, 10.92-94). In this last phrase, we see again the perspectivizing of Juvenal through a Democritean lens. From a neutral description of

Sejanus’ extent of influence, Juvenal shades into the cynical with several humorous

40 Schmitz 2000: 32 specifically notes this occurrence. In addition, the shift from 1st person plural (curramus… calcemus, ll. 85, 86) to speaking about himself in the 3rd person singular sounds odd. Perhaps Juvenal has him refer to himself in the third person in order to imply that this fear was rampant among the entire populace. Freudenburg 2001: 12 further suggests a metapoetic charge to the grim horror of kicking the prone body of Sejanus; it insinuates Juvenal into this picture because of the way it makes us reconsider Juvenal’s program of attacking the dead as introduced at the end of the first Satire (1.170-1). 148 verbal details: Tiberius needs a tutor as if he were a minor, he sits idly (sedentis, 93), pasturing a flock of astrologers (in particular Thrasyllus).41 Juvenal, as he will do throughout the satire, uses humor or sarcasm to stack the deck, aiming to “reveal” the ridiculous even as he constructs it.

A little later, there is again an example of ambiguity through the use of positive terms in a negative context. Juvenal asks, “But what outstanding and prosperous things are worth so much that the measure of evils [associated with them] is equal to pleasant occurrences?” (sed quae praeclara et prospera tanti,/ ut rebus laetis par sit mensura malorum, 10.97-98). The perspective becomes confusing, for praeclara et prospera do not appear to be the appropriate words to describe the excesses of power that leads to utter ruin and disgrace. Juvenal, following a Roman topos,42 sees Sejanus building a veritable tower, the height of which corresponds to the intensity of its precipitous collapse: “he was preparing a multi-storied turret on high, from where his fall could be higher and the collapse of tower, once pushed, precipitous” (numerosa parabat/ excelsae turris tabulata, unde altior esset/ casus et inpulsae praeceps inmane ruinae (10.105-7).43

In any other place, praeclara and prospera would be unambiguously positive, so it is interesting that they do not neatly correspond to the context here. Again, Juvenal gives a slight glimpse of the limits of his worldview, where his words do not necessarily correspond with their expected meanings, and demonstrating the possibility of alternate perspectives.

41 I am indebted to Courtney’s commentary for noticing these details, though he does not draw any larger conclusions from them.

42 E.g. [Seneca] Octavia 379.

43 Juvenal cannot help but to literalize the metaphor by using tabulata, as if Sejanus were continually adding stories to his ill-fated “tower.” 149

This becomes more obvious when Juvenal gives the reader an absurd set of alternatives:

Huius qui trahitur praetextam sumere mavis an Fidenarum Gabiorumque esse potestas 100 et de mensura ius dicere, vasa minora frangere pannosus vacuis aedilis Ulubris? (10.99-102)

Do you prefer to take the toga praetexta of the one who was dragged or to be the figurehead of Fidenae and Gabii and to proclaim justice about weights and measures, and clad in rags at Ulubri (ugh!) to break smaller vases.

We are given a choice between two equally unappealing alternatives: a predetermined ignominious death or a minor post determining weights and measures in deserted backwaters (vacuis Ulubris, 102).44 The description of the rural post again builds to a sarcastic anticlimax in the duties at Ulubrae, smashing petty vessels (minora vasa, 101) while clothed in rags even during official duties (pannosus…aedilis, 102). The exaggeration of pannosus is is not just humorous but meaningful, for it emphasizes

Juvenal’s creation of a paradox. The choice is not between power and no power, but self- destructive power and meaningless power. Here, even the structurally positive option is a parody of a desirable post. When Juvenal asks immediately afterward if the reader will confess that Sejanus had mistaken desires and had miscalculated value (ergo quid optandum foret ignorasse fateris/ Seianum, 10.103-4), one is tempted perhaps to say

44 Nor do we have to take Juvenal at face value. Gabii, Fidenae, and Ulubri are described by Augustan and Neronian writers as remote and deserted: Livy calls the Gabii of his day a mere statio on the via Praenestina (Liv. 1.53.4); Horace describes uses Gabii and Fidenae as exempla of ghost towns (Gabiis desertior atque/ Fidenis vicus, Hor. Ep.1.11.7-8) and Pliny calls Ulubri abandoned (HN 3.64). Yet, in the case of Gabii, there is evidence of a revival in the Hadrianic era, including the construction of an aqueduct (cf. CIL 14.2797). If Juvenal was aware of this development, perhaps we also have here an ironic warning not to take literature at face value. 150

“No!” when the only safe alternative is a gloomy minor administrative assignment in some godforsaken burg.45

Several other details which cast power in an inevitably poor light litter the end of the section. When describing the first triumvirate, Crassus and Pompey are left without modifiers, while Caesar is described as one “who lead conquered Romans down towards the lash” (ad sua qui domitos deduxit flagra Quirites, 10.109). Juvenal locates their downfall in “great prayers which were attended by the gods—malicious gods, that is”

(magnaque numinibus vota exaudita malignis, 10.111), where the delay of malignis until the end of the line makes us reconsider the gods’ benevolence in fulfilling prayers. Men’s destruction is assured by granting their desires, indicating their inability to understand the mechanisms of the world, or at least Juvenal’s world.46

C. All the King’s Horses and All the King’s Speeches…

After concluding with a sententia about the unlikelihood of a peaceful death for kings (ad generum Cereris sine caede ac vulnere pauci/ descendunt reges et sicca morte tyranni, 10.112-113), 47 Juvenal shifts gears to discuss a new topic: the eloquence and fame of orators (eloquium ac famam Demosthenis aut Ciceronis, 10.114). Unlike the introduction of potentia, which is already painted as destructive from the outset (cf.

10.55-56), the aim of eloquentia is not immediately dismissed as valueless. Juvenal will

45 That temptation would again demonstrate that Juvenal’s apparently unitary perspective an be challenged by alternate viewpoints.

46 Cf. Lawall 1958, which sees the underlying theme of the satire as “a basic and universal frustration of man’s attempt to exploit or control the world in which he lives” (30); Fredericks 1979: 189, argues that Bk. 4 in general shows the “total perversion of the human capacity to evaluate what is worth doing.”

47 Again, seemingly trivial details such as the roundabout identification of Pluto as the “son-in-law of Ceres” help to emphasize the presence of Democritus’ sardonic filter. 151 establish, however, his mocking interpretation of the worth of eloquence through his portrait of the people who value it. We will see the two contrasting perspectives of value of eloquence, one refracted through the other; namely, Juvenal shows the schoolboys who hope for the gift of rhetorical success, but shows them in such a way as to make them look silly and frivolous:

eloquium ac famam Demosthenis aut Ciceronis incipit optare et totis quinquatribus optat 115 quisquis adhuc uno parcam colit asse Mineruam, quem sequitur custos angustae uernula capsae. (114-117)

He begins to desire the eloquence and the subsequent fame of Demosthenes and Cicero and he keeps on desiring through every Quinquatratia, whoever still worships stingy (parcam) Minerva with a single penny, whom the bonded guardian of a constricted purse follows.

Juvenal gives three roundabout ways of imagining the schoolboy, none of which involves him actually being in school: on holiday, celebrating the feast of Minerva (totis quinquatribus, 114-15); paying a fee to his teacher to be deposited in Minerva’s treasury

(116) 48; and accompanied by a house-slave on his way to school (117). 49 One should note the somewhat desperate resonance of incipit optare…optat (“he starts to desire and keeps on desiring,” 115), depicting the boy with a constant desire to wring out his hoped- for rhetorical prowess. Through this accumulation of scenarios for the schoolboy away from his lessons proper, Juvenal’s omission demonstrates the empty results of that schooling, which can, in reality, be broken down to holidays, fees, and guardianship.

48 The force of parcam is disputable, for it can be to read as “stingy,” thus casting Minerva herself in a negative light. Courtney ad loc sees parcam as either transferred from asse, or perhaps as “’thrifty,’ building up her treasure from tiny contributions” (this positive application is followed at TLL s.v. col. 342.46, which refers to Courtney’s commentary). The word is illustrative for our dilemma as critics and readers, for it is impossible to use “context” to determine a definitive denotation, since Juvenal has no qualms mocking the august (cf. 13.83 on divine “weapon-cubbies” armamentaria caeli) or the tragic (cf. 10.252 on the “burning beard” as a synecdoche for the corpse of Nestor’s son on the pyre).

49 Cf. Courtney on vernula ad loc: “Even he only rates a modest dimunitive.” 152

Of course, this is not the first time that Juvenal has portrayed the emptiness of school lessons. In Satire 7.217-244, Juvenal depicted the petty frustrations of the grammaticus, the lowest tier of introductory rhetorical teacher in Rome. To use only one example of Juvenal’s perspectivizing there, Juvenal depicts the very air of the schoolrooms as oppressive and smoky, staining the very busts (or texts)50 of the introductory authors: “…as long as it doesn’t go to waste that you had to breathe as many lamps as there were boys on their feet, while the entire Flaccus gets stained and soot accumulates on Vergil and makes him black” (…dummodo non pereat totidem olfecisse lucernas/ quot stabant pueri, cum totus decolor esset/ Flaccus et haereret nigro fuligo

Maroni, 7.225-27). There, Juvenal is depicting the irritations of school from the perspective of the teacher, rather than the pupil, and focuses on the poor returns of intellectual work, but the same feeling of emptiness pervades the description.51

Yet what distinguishes the depiction of school in Satire 7 from Satire 10 are the lines which immediately follow: “But both orators [i.e. Demosthenes and Cicero] perished because of their eloquence, and the generous and overflowing fountain of talent gave each to death” (eloquio sed uterque perit orator, utrumque/ largus et exundans leto dedit ingenii fons, 10.118-19). Again, with the partial perspective Juvenal has adopted, eloquence leads not merely to frustration and failure, but inevitably to death! The very hyperbole of the interdiction of Satire 10 when compared with the depiction of

50 See Courtney ad 7.226 for the difficulty of establishing whether the metonymies Flaccus and Maroni there represent busts or texts of the poets.

51 Cf. the final lines of Satire 7, where Juvenal quotes the stingy parent (with another example of uncharacteristic speech, namely the interjection victori populus quod postulat): ‘haec’ inquit, ‘cura; sed cum se verterit annus,/ accipe, victori populus quod postulat, aurum’ (7.242-43). Of course, throughout that satire, Juvenal is simultaneously satirizing the intellectuals for embarking on this unfulfilling work. For more on this aspect of Sat. 7, see Weisen 1973 and Braund 1988: 24-68, who considers the double-pronged attack of Juvenal in Sat. 7 to be representative of a new “ironic” persona. 153 intellectuals and declaimers in Satire 7 indicates how the Democritean worldview that

Juvenal has adopted is inevitably compromised in its objectivity. Failure is one thing, but eloquence as a guarantee of destruction simply goes too far.52

Nor does Juvenal depict Cicero in the most charitable light. Even when depicting

Cicero’s bloody epilogue, his body dismembered and displayed on the rostra, Juvenal implicitly describes him as a mere petty lawyer (nec umquam/ sanguine causidici maduerunt rostra pusilli, 10.120-21) rather than a noble orator.53 But to Juvenal Cicero is equal parts tragic and ridiculous; his gift of words guaranteed his death, yet one form of speech he practiced—his poetry—was hilariously amateurish, and harmless to boot:

'o fortunatam natam me consule Romam:' Antoni gladios potuit contemnere si sic omnia dixisset. ridenda poemata malo quam te, conspicuae diuina Philippica famae, 125 uolueris a prima quae proxima. (10.122-126)

“Since I was consul, O happy the fate of the Roman state because of my birth date!” He could have brushed off the swords of Antony if he had said everything this way. I prefer those laughable poems, though, to you, blessed Philippics of remarkable repute, which you have to unroll next to the first one.

Quoting from Cicero’s Suus Consulatus, Juvenal brings Cicero’s notorious line of poetry to the forefront, boiling down Cicero’s rhetorical virtuosity to a piece of doggerel. 54 By ignoring Cicero’s real achievements, Juvenal creates both an inevitably partial picture of

Cicero and a limited and partial view of the world.55 Indeed, Juvenal continues by

52 Cf. Fishelov 1990: 376, reviewing ll. 67-72, the display of the body of Sejanus: “This self-propelling dynamics [sic] is the hallmark of Juvenal’s poetics. The drive to explore more and more striking illustrations for the ruinous outcomes of the fulfillment of prayers seems to overshadow everything else.”

53 Cf. 7.106-49 for the abject humility of the causadici, though they outrank the grammatici and rhetores.

54 Juvenal was not alone in his dismissal of Cicero’s poetry; cf. Quint. Inst.9.4.41, who derides the line for the excessive play of sound.

55 Even more, Winkler 1988 argues, from an allusion he sees at 14.179-88 to Cicero’s memorable series of prosopopoiiai from the Pro Caelio, that Juvenal actually acknowledges Cicero’s rhetorical gift even while 154 mocking Cicero’s line by making the same play on sound in his own voice, with the assonance of si sic at line 123 (emphasized by the placement of the two monosyllables, unusually, at the end of the line).56

These lines in their way even go so far as to acknowledge a prejudiced view of

Cicero by alluding to and then directly mentioning one of the highlights of his rhetorical career (and the speech which most contributed to his proscription), his Second Philippic.

First, the lines allude to the fearless declaration Cicero cast at Antony, “I contemptuously ignored the blades of Catiline; I do not shrink back from yours” (contempsi Catilinae gladios, non pertimescam tuos, Cic. Phil 2.118 ~ Antoni gladios potuit contemnere,

10.123). Juvenal then goes on to say that he actually prefers Cicero’s “laughable poems”

(ridenda poemata malo, 10.124) to his Philippics, presumably because of the way that they sealed his fate. Even his mention of the Second Philippic is not free from sardonic wit: at first introduced with unambiguous praise (conspicuae divina Philippica famae,

10.125), our reception of the speech is then framed with a convoluted periphrasis for the ordinal number “second” (volveris a prima quae proxima, 10.126).57 Whatever the value of the speech itself, it’s clear that it can be discursively envisioned in two contradictory ways. Indeed, Juvenal highlights the obvious eminence of the speech (note conspicuae famae, 10.125),58 mirroring the Democritean program of the poem in recognizing the folly of apparent goods which in fact contribute to human misery. Words do not have the meaning they should have; in the logic of the satire, the meaning of praise and reputation openly or subtly mocking his poetry or other shortcomings at various places throughout his oeuvre. Juvenal does not deny Cicero’s rhetorical power but instead gives a new interpretation of its significance for Cicero.

56 Courtney ad 122; Winkler 1988: 86.

57 Winkler 1988 86; Courtney ad loc.

58 Here representing the sense of both subiectum oculis and insigne; cf. TLL s.v. col 498.56 – 499.52. 155 has become reversed. Juvenal, then, exercises his limited perspective in two ways: first, he mentions only the speech that brought Cicero’s downfall, and second, he mostly ignores that speech in favor of a mocking assessment of Cicero’s poetic shortcomings.

The success of Demosthenes is similarly undercut in the next lines (10.126-132).

After a description of the rapture in which he held the Athenian assembly (quem mirabantur Athenae/ torrentem et pleni moderantem frena theatri, 10.127-28), Juvenal gives a lavish and vivid description of Demosthenes’ humble origins, specifically the distorted view of Demosthenes’ father as a sword-maker, “bleary-eyed from the soot of the burning lumps” (ardentis massae fuligine lippus, 10.130). 59 The proliferations of concrete objects (the burning mass, coal, tongs, swords, an anvil; massae…carbone…forcipibus…gladiosque…incude, 10.130-32) in this scene not only have the effect of increasing the vividness, but also of reducing Demosthenes’ origins to a cache of blacksmith paraphernalia. Just as Juvenal re-read Cicero as a pathetic poet,

Juvenal re-reads Demosthenes as a soot-stained youth.60 Thus, as with the options given to the ambitious (10.90-104), the alternatives to the apparent goods promised by eloquence (ridenda poemata, the sword-factory) are portrayed in a similarly negative light; in Juvenal’s satirical world, there are no positive alternatives to destructive eloquence.

Juvenal returns to a strong emphasis on the physical and concrete construction of satirical meaning in the following section, which discusses fame as earned through

59 I suggest that this physical limitation of sight is matched by a mental one, in the inability to see the true value, results in his dispatching his son to the rhetorical school. Cf. the metaphor of “clouded” judgment in the opening: erroris nebula, l. 4. There is probably an additional significance in the repeated sound between Philippica and lippus, used only here in Juvenal. Courtney ad 130-2 discusses the contrast between Demosthenes’ father’s actual occupation (the wealthy owner of a sword-factory) and the use to which that occupation was put in the rhetorical schools.

60 Winkler 1988: 85. 156 military victory.61 At the start, military glory is heavily reified through the use of concrete objects, but, what is more, many of those objects take on a particular moral interpretation:

bellorum exuuiae, truncis adfixa tropaeis lorica et fracta de casside buccula pendens et curtum temone iugum uictaeque triremis 135 aplustre et summo tristis captiuos in arcu humanis maiora bonis creduntur. (10.133-37)

The remnants of battles, armor nailed to a tree stripped bare, the broken cheek- pieces hanging off of a broken helmet, and the yoke truncated of its pole and the ornament of a conquered trireme and sad captives in the highest citadel—these are believed to be greater than human goods.

The passage starts objectively (in two senses) enough, with the mention of trophies, but then takes on a decided spin through the accumulation of meaningful moral detail: the cheek-piece is broken (fracta…buccula, 134), the chariot is incomplete (curtum…iugum), the trireme is represented by stern ornament alone (victaeque triremis/ aplustre, 135-36), and the captives are—unsurprisingly—gloomy (tristis captivos, 136). Previous commentators, including Edward Courtney and Richard Jenkyns, have certainly noticed this, comparing the scene to the opening statues of Satire 8 (8.1-19).62 As in Satire 8, where Juvenal used broken objects to represent the ills of the contemporary nobility but subtly hinted at the self-aware construction of the symbolic language of condemnation, here too trophies can also be seen as both marking the hollowness of military victory and simultaneously drawing attention to the satirical lens through which Juvenal presents the world (and through which we view it as we read Satire 10). He makes clear that the issue at hand is military glory (as depicted in the wreckage of battle) misunderstood as “greater

61 It is significant that mentions of fama and gloria effectively act as bookends for the passage (ll. 140 and 187) yet the passage focuses exclusively on the inevitability of physical death (Hannibal and Alexander) and failures of military success (Xerxes).

62 Jenkyns 1982: 209-212; Courtney ad loc. 157 than man’s goods” (humanis maiora bonis creduntur, 137). Especially in this passage, the unconvincing and contradictory nature of the exempla further the possibility that

Juvenal’s revision of value is neither singular nor exclusive.

The mention of a “foreign commander” (barbarus induperator, 10.138) shows again how words themselves change reference and resonance in Juvenal. It is originally an august word, appearing first in Ennius in place of imperator, which is metrically forbidden in dactylic hexameters (e.g. Enn. Ann.83). In fact, the change of resonance of induperator takes place in two stages in Juvenal: it is a savagely sarcastic description of

Domitian in Satire 4, utterly undermined by juxtaposition with the coarsely physical glutisse: “this was the sort of banquet we think the emperor glugged down…” (qualis tunc epulas ipsum glutisse putamus/ induperatorem, 4.28-9).63 Here, Juvenal goes even further in using it to exhibit the emptiness of title and prestige, as it is applied to a foreign general. The manipulation of multiple connotations of a single word at once are typical of

Juvenal’s procedure in this satire.

Nor is “emptiness” even the sole way of reading military glory in Juvenal. Even as Juvenal opines, in strongly physical language, that “so much more is the thirst for fame than for that of virtue” (tanto maior famae sitis quam/ virtutis, 10.140), he ignores his own previous depiction of virtue embodied in accomplishments, including military.

Indeed, as we saw, he had previously chided Postumus in Satire 8 that he has received all of his prestige from his ancestors, rather than earned it: “so we can be amazed by you, not your paraphernalia, give me something personal which I could carve as inscriptions on your tomb beyond those honors which we gave and keep giving to those, to whom you owe everything.” (privum aliquid da/ quod possim titulis incidere praeter honores/ quos

63 Anderson 1980: 236. 158 illis damus ac dedimus, quibus omnia debes, 8.68-70).64 Surely those honors can be imagined to include military success as well as political office.

Indeed, here again achievement is markedly physicalized through inscriptions

(tituli), with the full implications of their “concrete” nature, including its vulnerability:

Quis enim virtutem amplectitur ipsam, praemia si tollas? patriam tamen obruit olim gloria paucorum et laudis titulique cupido haesuri saxis cinerum custodibus, ad quae discutienda ualent sterilis mala robora fici, 145 quandoquidem data sunt ipsis quoque fata sepulcris. (10.142-146)

Who embraces virtue on its own, if you were to take away the rewards? This destroyed the fatherland once, the glory of a few and desire for praise and inscriptions stuck on rocks which guard but ashes, and which the evil branches of the infertile65 fig tree is strong enough to crack, when the fates of the tombs themselves are considered.

It is paradoxical that Juvenal counteracts mankind’s excessive concretization of virtues, reducing them to words and physical monuments (laudis titulique, 143) by concretizing their folly, showing the transience of the tombstones themselves and implying that achievement is similarly short-lived (besides being destructive, patriam tamen obruit olim, 142). Yet the satirical technique opens up the same interpretative possibilities outlined already, namely, that by conveying a fixed view of the world which is markedly different from the conventional one, the satire opens up the possibility of other new worldviews. For example, the passage above seems to ignore that these tombs, though transient, are mere physical symbols of an intangible repute which is permanent. Juvenal

64 See Ch. 2.C for more on the particular charge this exhortation to accomplishment has on the intersecting discourses of nobility in Satire 8.

65 Courtney ad loc. relates the significance of this detail: “The wild fig cannot propagate itself; nor can their hoped-for fame, which cannot resist it.” There is perhaps the possibility that we recall the theme of sterility in Sat. 2 and how it underscored the problems of gender definition by showing one concrete way that effeminate men cannot be women (cf. Miller 1998 on sterility in satire). 159 refuses to recognize that the ephemerality of the physical monument might actually highlight, by contrast, the eternity of immaterial glory.

This inherent danger of a revisionist program should be in our minds as Juvenal recounts what he sees as the three foremost examples of his idea that military glory ignores the transience of life or leads to an ignominious death: Hannibal (147-167),

Alexander (168-173), and Xerxes (173-187). He begins by deflating Hannibal into a mere body, measured out in ounces alone: “Weigh up Hannibal: how many pounds will you find in the highest commander?” (expende Hannibalem: quot libras in duce summo/ invenies?, 10.147-48). Juvenal slyly transforms what we would expect to be the metaphorical meaning of expendo into its core physical meaning halfway through the line, precisely at the strong caesura (expende Hannibalem: || quot libras) 66. The satirical conceit, created by this reduction of Hannibal to his material substance, certainly betrays its own absurdity: why should we think of Hannibal in mere pounds alone?

Considering the imaginary exhortation of the imperative here, it is useful to a moment to consider the use of the second person singular throughout the poem. Besides the imperative and second singular verbs here (expende and invenies, 147, 148) Juvenal uses a second person singular three times in his summary of the section on Sejanus

(visne, 90; vis, 94; mavis, 100). At the start of the section on old age, he projects a wish directly into the audience’s mouth: ‘da spatium vitae, multos da, Jupiter, annos (10.188).

Though this could be counted as a symptom of Juvenal’s tendency to switch between first, second, and third person to convey vividness, there is a further significance here.

Juvenal projects onto the reader the misguided view of the world that he attributes to humankind in general and which he seeks to correct. Yet this insinuation also opens up

66 TLL s.v. col. 1639.44-45. 160 the possibility of our reading against his interpretations of value and meaning. We readers of this satire are told that we misread the world, so perhaps we should turn the tables on

Juvenal himself.

The passage continues in a physical vein as it briskly moves through Hannibal’s achievements—whether to downgrade their value or merely to enhance the rhetorical presentation is not clear—by saying that Africa could not “contain” Hannibal (10.148-50; capit, 148).67 Juvenal then, through a direct quote, stages Hannibal, fresh from his struggles in the Alps and about to launch his assault on Rome: “‘Count nothing done,’” he said, ‘unless with my Punic army we break the gates and I place my standard right in the middle of…the Subura!’” (‘acti’ inquit, ‘nihil est, nisi Poene militae portas/ frangimus et media vexillum pono Subura,’ 10.155-56). Here, ironically through the voice of Hannibal himself (more “character-inconsistent speech”), Juvenal gives his own jaundiced vision of Rome, now “reduced to its least patrician district.”68 What Juvenal has been doing to him, Hannibal does to Rome. Immediately afterward, Juvenal draws our visual attention to Hannibal’s face: “And what a face he had—worthy of some kind of account, that’s for sure—when the Gaetulian beast was carrying the gimp-eyed man!”

(o qualis facies et quali digna tabella,/ cum Gaetula ducem portaret belva luscum,

67 A somewhat bizarre sidenote to this passage is the obscurely allusive use of alios elephantos (...rursus ad Aethiopum populos et alios elephantos, 10.150) to identify eastern Africa near Elephantine among the peoples and places conquered. Pliny the Elder distinguishes between three kinds of elephants, specifically dividing African and “Ethiopian” elephants (NH. 8.32). The periphrasis is, in fact, thematically relevant, as with Juvenal’s strange denotation of the Second Phillipic (10.126): the force of the periphrasis is not just an allusive play but a game of linguistic reference, showing how language can be used to obfuscate through obscurity just as much as to enlighten through clarity.

68 Gold 1999: 61, after surveying various uses of the Subura in Juvenal. Is it coincidental that this is the very district that Martial’s famous epigram on Juvenal (12.18) imagines him walking around in? (Dum tu forsitan inquietus eras/ clamosa, Iuvenalis, in Subura, 12.18.1-2). 161

10.157-58). The spectacle climaxes with a sardonic reference to one particular physical feature of Hannibal, his missing eye (luscum), and omits all others.

This satirical abjection appropriately glides into a historical one, Hannibal’s disgrace after the battle of Zama in 202 B.C.E. Juvenal records that Hannibal eventually became a “remarkable servant” (mirandusque cliens, 10.161)69 at the court of Bithynia, ending with another ironic anticlimax with the object of his suicide, a ring, denoted with a diminutive (anulus, 10.166) in which he carried poison, rather than swords or rocks or weapons (gladii…saxa…tela, 10.164). Juvenal seems to forget his own point, quoted above, that the powerful rarely avoid violent and sudden death (10.113-14). Yet the ultimate spectacle of indignity for Juvenal is Hannibal’s afterlife as a subject of rhetorical exercise, doomed to constantly reenacted by inept schoolboys (I, demens, et saevas curre per Alpes,/ ut pueris placeas et declamation fias, 10.166-67). Of course,

Juvenal is using Hannibal in essentially the same way, turning Hannibal into a mere exemplum in a catalogue of misguided human folly. His comments reflect back on the rhetorical and satirical exercise of his own poetry, though his performance is self-aware in a way that the pupils’ suasoriae are not.

Throughout this passage, the reification of Hannibal throughout, as body weight, as one-eyed, as declamation, has two distinct significances, one poetic, one poetological.

On the one hand, it obviously serves the satiric purpose of the passage by reducing the grandeur of Hannibal and, in turn, his achievements. Yet satirical perspectivizing has again come into play as one of many ways of reading the world, flouting Juvenal’s

69 Courtney’s exclamation ad 161, is notable: “Roman customs are observed in Bithynia!...Hannibal has to get up early [namely, for the salutatio] like a Roman client.” The suggestion that Hannibal “plays” a Roman client is an interesting one, another instance of spectacle and play-acting. Note too another ironic use of mirandus. 162 attempt to impose a singular view. We are by no means forced to accept Juvenal’s reduction of Hannibal’s body to a single feature or his claim that the true extent of

Hannibal’s fame is his resurrection by schoolboys.

In the short passage on Alexander, Juvenal vacillates between Alexander’s point of view and the satirical perspective he is preaching:

unus Pellaeo iuueni non sufficit orbis, aestuat infelix angusto limite mundi ut Gyarae clausus scopulis paruaque Seripho; 170 cum tamen a figulis munitam intrauerit urbem, sarcophago contentus erit. mors sola fatetur quantula sint hominum corpuscula. (10.168-173)

One globe is not enough for Alexander, who burns unlucky at the narrow limits of the world as if he penned in on the crags of Gyara or little Seriphus. Still, when he enters the city fortified by potters, he will fit his coffin. Death alone can confess how little men’s bodies are.

In the first part of the passage, Juvenal focalizes Alexander’s point of view, a kind of megalomaniacal claustrophobia: the world’s boundaries are too “narrow” (angusto, 169), and Alexander feels “as if he were cooped in” (ut clausus, 170) on Gyara or “small”

Seriphus (parva, 170), two desolate locales of exile. The irruption into the satiric discourse of a viewpoint almost sympathetic to Alexander’s frustrations and anxieties offers a brief, but meaningful, glimpse into another world, a world where Alexander’s motivations make sense. This kind of lapse (which becomes increasingly prominent in the second half of the poem) briefly jeopardizes the satire’s conceit, which relies on the self-explanatory foolishness of human desires, when seen “correctly”, that is, as they actually “are.”

But when he describes Alexander’s triumphant entrance into Babylon, Juvenal reverts to deprecation through a colorful satirical description, referring to Babylon allusively as a “city fortified by potters” (a figulis munitam…urbem, 171). Continuing his

163

Democritean procedure of universal mockery (see 10.48, quoted above), Juvenal again manipulates the features of his satirical object; even more, he enacts this procedure against something basically tangential to his main point (though reducing Babylon’s grandeur to its materiality helps to undercut Alexander’s achievements). Using the same conceit of concretization that he used to denigrate Hannibal, Juvenal concludes by returning to the idea of extent with which he began, for outsized Alexander still will fit inside a coffin. The two diminutives (quantula…corpuscula, 173) in the final line of the section underscore this reduction of magnitude.

With the first word of the next passage concerning Xerxes, creditur (10.173),

Juvenal shifts his attack. Rather than belittle the body or achievements of the ambitious general, he dismisses their credibility. If Hannibal and Alexander are reduced to mere mortal bodies, Xerxes’ impressive feats—crossing the Hellespont by pontoon bridge, his army draining rivers dry (10.175-178)—are reduced even to a pure rhetorical existence.

They are words, nothing more than “whatever deceptive Greece dared [to report] in its histories” (quidquid Graecia mendax/ audet in historia, 10.174-75, with line-end emphasis on mendax) and “what Sostratus chimes with drenched armpits” (madidis cantat quae Sostratus alis, 10.178). 70 Here, we the audience (credimus, 10.176) are subtly accused of constructing another false image of the world, this one based on false report rather than false hopes.

Yet Juvenal depends equally on the veracity of this account in his condemnation of Xerxes. For the marvelous deeds for which Juvenal lambasts Xerxes are likewise

70 Cf. 14.240 (si Graecia vera); similarly Pliny N.H. 5.4 portentose Graeciae mendacia. The scholiasts identify Sostratus as a poet, but Thomson 1951 suggests that this may be the same figure that Aristotle referred to as Sosistratus, an example of a rhapsode overly gesticulates like a bad actor (Arist. Poet. 26. 1426a). If the identification with a poet is correct, a deep irony certainly reflects back onto Juvenal himself 164 drawn from “lying Greece”: Xerxes considered the winds his private chattel to be whipped (in Corum atque solitus saevire flagellis barbarus, 10.180-81); he enchained the

Hellespont (ipsum conpedibus qui vinxerat Ennosigaeum, 10.182), stopping just short of tattooing it like a runaway slave (“what? did he not think worthy of the tattoo?”; non et stigmate dignum/ credidit, 10.184).71 As part of his general revisionist project, Juvenal tries to challenge our reading of historical achievement by challenging history itself; but, in his rush to create the exemplum of an evil tyrant who receives of the just punishment of total destruction (10.185-87), he fails to extricate himself from the grasp of history.

It is worth considering here the role of exempla in Juvenal’s project here in Satire

10 and how they reinforce the contingency of the satirical vision. Earlier, I reviewed exempla in their place in Roman visual culture,72 but it seems necessary here to further consider a further essential trait of exempla, namely their malleability. It is not enough to say that Juvenal simply employs traditional commonplaces: as Andrew Feldherr has remarked on Livy’s use of the tradition, “questions of sources and of the historian’s originality become less relevant than tracing connections that give his choices meaning within this larger whole. For my purposes, even if the ‘content’ of Livy’s narrative of an episode, even some of the language itself, derives from an earlier source, the task of interpreting its significance in Livy’s text still remains.”73

71 Cf. Herodotus 7.35. See Jones 1987 for an explanation of terminology and procedures of ancient tattooing and an argument that stigma does not mean “brand,” despite frequent assumptions to the contrary. Courtney 1980: 470 points out the various manipulations and inaccuracies that Juvenal makes of Herodotus’ account, e.g. solitus for an action only said to be performed once and directed against the Hellespont, not the winds.

72 See Introduction, section B.

73 Feldherr 1998: x. 165

Jane Chaplin has used the narrative of the incident at the Caudine Forks in Livy

Bk. 9, where the Romans surrendered disgracefully to the Samnites, as an instance where the same event can shift in meaning diachronically or mean different things, depending on the motivations of the speaker summoning an incident as exemplum. She shows how, in the story of Caudium, while debating whether or not to surrender to the Samnites, the earlier Capitoline Siege by the Gauls (narrated by Livy in Bk. 5) is called to mind by internal speakers in two different ways.74 As Chaplin argues, the “instability of exempla” is deeply involved in negotiations with the past and its continuity with the present.75

Yet for Juvenal, especially in Satire 10, the emphasis has shifted; for, if Livy’s concern is using the volatility of exempla to chart and model a more dynamic relationship between history and contemporary life, Juvenal’s interest lies squarely with the self- conscious malleability itself. One of his primary concerns in Satire 10 is the way that figures unintentionally set themselves up as models, which Juvenal in turns reads

“against the grain,” so to speak. Velleius Paterculus once cautioned that exempla often take on a life of their own:

Quod haut mirum est: non enim ibi consistunt exempla, unde coeperunt, sed quamlibet in tenuem recepta tramitem latissime evagandi sibi viam faciunt, et ubi semel recto deerratum est, in praeceps pervenitur, nec quisquam sibi putat turpe, quod alii fuit fructuosum. (Vell. Pater. 2.3.3-4)

This is not surprising: for exempla do not stand in place, whence they began, but, though set out on a narrow track, they make a passageway for themselves for wandering far and wide, and, once it has been set to wandering, it veers headlong, nor does anyone think foul for himself, what was profitable for another.

74 Chaplin 2000: 39-40. She continues by showing how the surrender at Caudium itself is interpreted internally in different ways (41-47); similarly, the multiple meanings of Cannae as event and exemplum are underscored by different interpretations in the text itself (70).

75 Chaplin 2000: 40. For more on Livy between past, present, and future, see Chaplin 2000 137-67. 166

Michele Lowrie, in a recent discussion of the complexities of exemplarity and exceptionality, has recently pointed out that Cicero himself was a good model for this fact, for the exempla he evokes in the First Catilinarian to justify his summary executions were turned against him by Clodius to secure his exile.76

Juvenal subtly demonstrates how exempla are a form of textual discourse masquerading as history. They are a constructive principle used to persuade, and, in

Satire 10, both terms of that statement are thematized: the aim of Juvenal’s text is both to sway us from the false allure of eloquence or beauty or longevity but also to point to its own textuality. We are meant to interrogate their use and ask whether the singular figures that Juvenal employs are outstanding models of a “universal” truth or simply exceptional; would they have persuasive value if they were “mere” exceptions?77 If an exemplum can be thought by ancient definitions to have three elements, content, function, and discourse,78 Juvenal simultaneously playfully engages all three. By framing his content

(res gestae) in unusual ways, he exposes the manipulation (suasio) inherent in deploying exempla (commemoratio) in the first place.

Thus, through his use of exempla, Juvenal shows himself reading world history

(as refined by the schools of declamation into self-contained gems) in a way that reminds one of Eric Auerbach’s literary approach of reading mimesis in fictional narratives,

76 Lowrie 2007: 93-96.

77 Similarly Lowrie 2007 on the “paradoxical” nature of an exemplum: “do these things stand out in their singularity or are they part of the norm?” (105).

78 Cf. Quin.5.11.6: potentissimum autem est inter ea quae sunt huius generis, quod proprie vocamus exemplum, id est rei gestae aut ut gestae utilis ad persuadendum id quod intenderis commemoratio (where res gestae is the content, suasio is the function, and commemoratio is the discourse). 167 where fictionalized particulars become representative of larger social or universal meaning.79 As stated tendentiously by Lubomír Doležel:

The dubious epistemological foundation of this interpretative practice becomes especially obvious if we note that an Auerbachian critic performs a double operation. First, he selects an interpretive system (ideological, psychological, sociological, etc. [in our case, the emptiness and self-destructiveness of human prayers, ergo supervacua aut quae perniciosa petuntur, 10.54]) and transcribes reality into its abstract categories; second, he matches the fictional particulars with the postulated interpretive categories. Since one and the same person performs both the categorization of reality and the matching of fictional individuals, we should not be surprised by the high ratio of “success” of universalist interpretations.80

It is this selectivity that comes to the fore in exempla that seem out of place or puzzling.

Exempla necessarily flatten historical and mythological figures into a singular distinctive trait but dismiss all other traits as irrelevant. Whatever the implications of Juvenal’s use of exempla on the Roman project of the past, it is clear that their role in Satire 10 is to self-consciously draw attention to the malleability and contingency of that project.

D. …Long After the Thrill of Living is Gone

The notion of fragile bodies, exemplified by Hannibal’s weight and Alexander’s coffin, comes to the fore in the next section, a repudiation of the desire for old age. As discussed above, Juvenal here projects the desire onto the viewer through direct quotation, ‘da spatium vitae, multos da, Iuppiter, annos.’/ hoc recto voltu, solum hoc et pallidus optas (“‘Jupiter, give me expanse of life, give me many years’. This is what you hope for with face upright, this when you are shivering with fear,” 10.188-189).81 Juvenal

79 Auerbach 1953.

80 Doložel 1988: 478.

81 Braund follows Guyet and Markland in deleting line 189, which is filled with difficulties in the manuscripts and interpretation, but it should be retained for its contribution thematically to the uncontroversial line with precedes it, especially in the use of the 2nd person verb optas. 168 dismisses this overestimation of a long life with an exasperated exclamation: “But old age is filled with so many constant perils!” (sed quam continuis et quantis longa senectus/ plena malis!, 10.190-91); the disjunctive sed announces a strong objection and underscores again that the direction of desire is mistaken.

Juvenal offers his own satirically morbid view of old age in the following lines, which should perhaps be divided into the infirmities of old age (191-232, transiting with a brief discussion of dementia, 233-239) and the turbulent sadness incumbent upon a long life (240-288). In the first section, Juvenal offers his limited perspective in yet another physicalizing way. He effectively dismembers and deconstructs the body of the elderly man until he becomes entirely a complex of twisted joints, impotent members, and lost sense.82 It is not that Juvenal is alone in plotting the sinking topography of old age.83

Rather, by setting his catalogue of the infirmities of old age within the framework of Sat.

10, wherein he is ostensibly attacking the misguided selectivity of worldviews that lead to misguided wishes, he implicates that catalogue as another manifestation of the same impulse. His vision is ironically seductive because of, not despite, its repulsiveness, for it is this quality which gives it the air of capturing “truth.” Indeed, this seductive quality is exactly what aligns it with the analogous seductiveness of the desire to have lengthened years. Of course rejection of old age is tempting if it spotlights only its infirmities and deformities, and old age—even eternal life—is equally tempting if one ignores these

82 Fredericks 1979: 188 remarks that it is the accumulation of infirmities which is absurd. He argues that Juvenal is sincerely countering wish-fulfillment, however, even through ironically unrealistic pictures of the dangers of longevity or beauty. I, on the other hand, am trying to suggest that in addition to the discourse of countering wish-fulfillment, Juvenal is reflecting on the limitations of the satiric discourse itself. That is, satire, by being satire, is a necessarily limited way of reading the world and transmitting the “truth” about it, even as it claims to do just that.

83 One could compare, from the satiric tradition, Lucil. frag. 331: quod deformi’ senex, arthriticus ac podagrosus/ est, quod mancu’ miserque, exilis, ramice magno. 169 conditions. For, if growing old is as manifestly and obviously unpleasant as Juvenal depicts it to be—not even apparently good—why would it be desirable in the first place?

Juvenal immediately draws our attention again to the face, just as we had gazed upon Sejanus and Hannibal, as a self-explanatory marker of the perils of old age:

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. (10.190-195)

But long senescence is overflowing with evils—constant and excessive! Look! deformed and foul—above all—is the face, not even looking like itself, a deformed pelt rather than skin and the drooping cheeks and wrinkles like the kind—where Thabraca extends its shady groves—the momma ape claws in her old cheek.

The verb aspice is particularly powerful as it draws the attention of the viewer whom

Juvenal had just depicted making the ill-fated prayer in the previous lines. We are invited to “read” the lines on the old man’s face as a self-explanatory object lesson on why to avoid old age. He not only begins by reducing a man to merely a face (as he had reduced

Hannibal and Sejanus), he further reduces that face to a disconnected string of repellent features: leathery skin, sagging cheeks, and furrowed wrinkles. The face has become discordant to itself, making him unrecognizable (dissimilem sui, 192); old age changes the very definition of a man’s makeup, as externalized through his face.84 Juvenal re- reads human skin (pro cute, 192) as if animal pelt (pellem, 192). The wrinkles are given a particularly satirical touch: in a dynamic that is particularly Juvenalian, he introduces a comparison with an elevated phrase (quales…saltus, 194, particularly the compound umbriferos) only to demolish that elevation in the immediately following line, where the

84 Juvenal will play with a similar notion in his discussion of women’s cosmetics; see the discussion of the scene of the women at toilette in Satire 6 (6.457-473; 487-506) at Ch. 4.B. 170 wrinkles become like…to a mommy monkey’s cheeks (in vetula…mater simia bucca,

195).85

Thus, while young people differ from each other in various ways, in strength, in beauty, etc., “there is only one face for the old” (una senum facies, 10.198).86 Focusing mostly on the face, Juvenal’s old man is just bald head, runny nose, and mashing gums: cum voce trementia membra/ et iam leve caput madidique infantia nasi;/ frangendus misero gingiva panis inermi (10.199-200).87 Juvenal cannot resist the satirical jab that the old man’s ugliness is enough to disgust not just his wife and children, but even the captator Cossus (usque adeo gravis…ut captatori moveat fastidia Cosso, 10.201-2). Old age is so repellent that the captator forgets his satirical own role of defrauding the old man and pities him instead.

Expanding beyond merely the face, but staying squarely in the physical realm,

Juvenal then moves southward from the palate (non eadem vini atque cibi torpente palato/ gaudia, 10.203-4) to the penis, where he dramatizes an incident of impotence in the old man: “if you try, that little organ with its hernia is taking a nap and, although it’s massaged all night, it will keep sleeping.” (vel si/ coneris, iacet exiguus cum ramice nervus/ et quamvis tota palpetur nocte, iacebit, 10.204-6). Juvenal slyly inserts the

85 Courtney ad loc. argues for parody from an unidentified sources. This procedure of undercutting any pretenses to the so-called Grand Style by immediately introducing some low or vulgar verbal element is well documented by Powell 1999; Schmitz 2000 points to this passage in particular as an example of Juvenal’s employment of a single word to puncture stylistic registers (97-107; 106-7 on umbiferos).

86 There is a certain irony in the anonymity of the old here, considering truisms about the veristic style of Roman portraiture, particularly in the Republic.

87 Plaza 2006 finds the effect of old age as “leveling” similar here as at the climax of Hor. Serm.1.8, where the wooden Priapus’ side-splitting (literally) fart breaks down the witch’s defenses and sends them scattering. Citing an incidence of Bahktin’s material bodily stratum, she states that [Priapus’] victims are exposed as overwhelmingly human, and all attention is focused on their old age, nakedness, and fear— degrading and leveling phenomena.” (71). Yet, in Juvenal’s picture, any of the regenerative implications of the lower bodily stratum have been completely displaced, thus underlining the problem of easy equations of Roman satire and Bahktinian thought on laughter in Rabelais (cf. Miller 2001). 171 viewer into the scene via the second person verb coneris, though it is unclear whether this makes us the impotent man or, perhaps, his partner (palpetur at line 206 is frustratingly passive). In the next line, he turns the groin into a new face, grotesquely visualizing the whitened pubic hairs: “Is the salt-and-pepper of your infirm groin able to expect anything?” (anne aliquid sperare potest haec inguinis aegri/ canities?, 10.206-7).

Canities, set off by enjambment, usually refers to the whiteness or greyness of hairs on the head (or the grey-white hairs themselves), but here is transferred concretely—and vulgarly—to pubic hair.88

Juvenal then bids us turn our attention (aspice again in line 209) to a new kind of infirmity, the loss of hearing. As this infirmity cannot be physically mapped onto the external body, Juvenal instead stages a vignette of hearing damage involving an act of spectatorship in the theater. The old man is unable to hear the musicians in the theater, either singers or cithaerodes or pipe-players. What difference does it then make where you sit, Juvenal asks, when you can barely hear the clattering of the orchestra (10.210-

215). The depiction of the old man’s worn out perception here has a triple significance.

For the discrepancy between the actual volume and the volume inside the old man’s head

(clamore opus est ut sentiat auris, 10.214-215) is a symbol of the decline of old age and, more subtly, of the gap between hopeful expectations of old age and the actual realities of old age, once attained. Even more, though, by externally staging the scene for us (one almost imagines a man cartoonishly raising an old-fashioned ear trumpet), Juvenal simultaneously flattens its meaning, for he has completely ignored any of the moral

88 Cf. TLL s.v. col. 260 30-84. The TLL lists this occurrence under the transferred sense of old age (col. 261 4-5); but it seems clear that the reference is meant to be concrete and grotesque. 172 connotations with which he often imbues dramatic and musical performance in Rome.89

Perhaps it would be better, according to Juvenal’s other appraisals of music and the theater, for the old man not to hear.

Juvenal then turns for the first time to more internal ailments, such as tendency to fever (10.217-18). He uses this introduction to launch into one of the most memorable and bizarre digressions in his corpus:

Praeterea minimus gelido iam in corpore sanguis febre calet sola, circumsilit agmine facto morborum omne genus, quorum si nomina quaeras, promptius expediam quot amauerit Oppia moechos, 220 quot Themison aegros autumno occiderit uno, quot Basilus socios, quot circumscripserit Hirrus pupillos, quot longa uiros exorbeat uno Maura die, quot discipulos inclinet Hamillus; percurram citius quot uillas possideat nunc 225 quo tondente grauis iuueni mihi barba sonabat. (10.217-26)

Beyond this, the lack of blood in a now frigid body warms up only with a fever, and every kind of disease surrounds him in assembled formation, which, if you wanted me to search for their names, more quickly could I enumerate how many adulterers Oppia bagged, how many sick men Themison laid low in a single autumn, how many allies Basilus hoodwinked—and Hirrus how many students—how many men vigorous Maura sucked down in a single day, how many students Hamillus bent over; more swiftly will I run through how many villas are owned now by the guy who used to shave my beard when I was young!

Up to now, besides the scene incident on the introduction of Democritus, Satire 10 has mostly ignored the world of “Roman satire,” which (for Juvenal) is oriented on the pervasive spread of vice throughout the city and embodied by a troupe of evil-doers. And though the form points back to epic catalogue, the milieu is decidedly satirical in its list of characters which spring from that world: the female adulterer, the baleful doctor, 90 the

89 E.g. Sat 6.379ff, on women’s excessive adoration of musicians.

90The theme is more common in Martial’s epigrams. Cf. Mart. 1.30, 1.47 (about one Diaulus who changed careers from doctor to undertaker), 8.74. 173 schemer and the fraud, the “generous” prostitute,91 the corrupting tutor, 92 the prosperous nouveaux riche. In Satire 10, for the most part (with Xerxes as the primary exception), the satirical targets are less immoral than misguided, incorrectly judging the value of ostensible goods. Here, we have a much more blatant satirical voice, one that cannot resist framing even a simple number of diseases in terms of moral vice.93 Indeed, the final tag of the digression is a direct quote from his first satire, where it similarly occurs in a catalogue and makes reference to the inordinate property now possessed by the once humble barber (patricios omnis opibus cum provocet unus/ quo tondente gravis iuveni mihi barba sonabat, 1.24-25).94

These lines, then, act as a kind of interjection from the world of Roman satire.

Here Juvenal shows a vacillation between the sardonic cynicism of Democritus and the directly indignant voice of “old” Juvenal, especially when one considers parallels between the lines and the similar catalogues of Satire 1 (e.g., the series of cum-clauses beginning at line 1.32 and continuing to some extent until line 1.62). We should recall that there Juvenal depicted himself as “standing in the middle of a crossroads filling huge tablets” with his account of Roman vices (licet medio ceras implere capaces/quadrivio,

1.63-64). In Satire 1, Juvenal had staged for his audience the very act of composing satire in which he is engaged, with the conceit of merely recording the world around him rather

91 We should recall the voraciousness of Messalina in Sat. 6, who closes up shop at the brothel every night, “worn out by the men but not yet satisfied”(lassata viris necdum satiata recessit, 6.130).

92 Though the parallel is not exact, the lines should bring to mind the fraudulent guardian of Sat. 1, who ends up prostituting the child to whom he is assigned (hic spoliator/ pupilli prostantis, 1.46-47).

93 Fishelov 1990: 378-79 remarks on the irrelevance of the catalogue and its inconsistency with the topic at hand, but does not expand upon the poetological possibilities of this gap and the way it recalls other satires of Juvenal.

94 Courtney ad 225-26 mentions Griffith’s omitting 10.225-26 as a “decency-interpolation” for the previous sexually charged lines, who adduced the repetition itself as evidence. This ignores the richness of the intratextual interjection. 174 than creating it. Yet, when we consider how Democritus both observes and creates satire through the lens with which he observes the world, one should similarly see Juvenal there writing a distinctly satirical construction.95 Thus the catalogue in Satire 10 is a heavy- handed wink towards the construction of its “satirical” vision and its concomitant limitations. The suddenness of the intrusion, giving the sense that the lines are out of place (though not un-Juvenalian)96 reinforces the notion that the cross-section of the world presented in Sat. 10, intended to be final and definitive, is anything but.

Juvenal returns to physical discourse following this satirical interjection: his rapid catalogue dismembers the human body into loci of possible degeneration: the shoulder, the groin, the side, the eyes, the lips, the fingers (ille umero, hic lumbis, hix coxa debilis; ambos perdidit ille oculos et luscis invidet; huius/ pallida labra cibum accipiunt digitis alienis, 10.227-29). Yet, for all its apparent “gravity,” Juvenal shows himself again unable to resist a mocking footnote, claiming that the blind envy the one-eyed and portraying the infirm man being fed as a drooling, slack-jawed chick receiving food regurgitated by a mother swallow (ipse ad conspectum cenae diducere rectum/ suetus hiat tantum ceu pullus hirundis, ad quem/ ore volat plena mater ieiuna, 10.230-32).

The next brief section on the onset of dementia (233-239) acts as a transition between the satirical discourse of physical ailments of the elderly and the more tragic exempla of the perils of a long life to follow. In two descriptions of the effects of dementia on the old man’s relationships, the first (a pitiful description of forgetfulness,

95 It must be mentioned that one need not have recourse the “persona” theory concerning Juvenal’s construction of the speaker of the satire still almost universally accepted as true, since the notion of self- consciously assuming a worldview is staged within Satire 10 itself.

96 Cf. Courtney 1980: 48 on Juvenal’s verbositry; he even advises a few places where Juvenal could have trimmed “unnecessarily long lists,” including this passage. 175

10.234-36)97 is more straightforward, pointing ahead to the mostly uncomplicated exempla to follow. In the second, Juvenal presents a scene of a last will and testament guaranteed to the fellatrix Phiale rather than to his own children:

nam codice saeuo heredes uetat esse suos, bona tota feruntur ad Phialen; tantum artificis ualet halitus oris, quod steterat multis in carcere fornicis annis. (10.236-240).

For in his unsympathetic will, he forbids his own sons to be heirs and instead all the goods are conveyed to Phiale; so strong was the “breath” (wink) of her skillful mouth, which had stood for many years in the cell of the brothel.

The scene points backwards to the “satiric” actors we last saw at lines 217-226 and recollects a world of vice to contrast with the world of tragic and historical exempla to follow. One should note the editorial comment of saevo codice and the additional detail that the girlfriend is not merely a prostitute but a fellatrix, especially looked down upon in Roman society.98

Juvenal then moves stridently into the realm of the tragic. Even if one outlasts all these troubles, Juvenal states flatly, one will inevitably run into the helplessness of watching others succumb to them: “assuming your senses remain vigorous, still the funeral processions of your children will go forth, you will have to gaze upon the beloved wife’s pyre, and the brother’s, and you will fill urns with what was once your sisters” (ut vigeant sensus animi, ducenda tamen sunt/ funera natorum, rogus aspiciendus amatae/ coniugis et fratris plenaeque sororibus urnae, 10.240-42). Juvenal provides the blanket impression that the perils of old age are completely inescapable, confirming in miniature

97 One could suggest that this “failure of recognition” in the old man’s forgetfulness (nomina servorum nec voltum agnoscit amici/ cum quo praeterita cenavit nocte, nec illos quos genuit, quos eduxit) mirrors the failure that the once young hopeful petitioner displayed in wishing for long life.

98 For the moral register of oral sex in Rome, see Williams 2010: 218-24. 176 his intention of crafting a vision of the entire world. One should compare the all- embracing sweep of the lines to his outright refusal in Satire 6 of admitting the existence of the worthwhile woman (6.161-66). In that satire, an unnamed interlocutor, perhaps a stand-in for the exasperated audience, asks: “Does no woman from so great a flock seem worthy [of marriage]?” (‘nullane de tantis gregibus tibi digna videtur’, 6.161). Juvenal replies that she could be beautiful, chaste, rich, fertile, and yet that these very virtues would make her unbearable (quis feret uxorem cui constant omnia?, 6.166). Here,

Juvenal again opens up the possibility of hope—old age without dementia or infirmity (ut vigeant sensus animi, 10.240)—only to smash it with the promise of funerals; to

Fishelov, Juvenal’s real purpose is merely to display catastrophe.99

It is valuable to reconsider Gilbert Lawall’s older argument that rather than the

Democritean, mocking perspective being the exclusive viewpoint of the satire, Juvenal vacillates between Democritean and “Heraclitan” examples, that figure who could not control his tears once he crossed his threshold. Though Lawall acknowledges that the former perspective, where mocking humor undercuts potentially tragic moments, reigns throughout most of the poem, he is right to assert a connection in this section between the exempla of the tragedies of a long life (Nestor, Peleus, Priam, Marius, and Pompey) and

“tearful” Heraclitus.100 Yet, where Lawall considers this vacillation between mockery and tragedy to be a grasp towards universality embraced by the two divergent approaches,101 I would argue, as with the catalogue at line 220-26, exactly the opposite. The interjection

99 Fishelov 1990: 380.

100 Lawall 1958: 27.

101 Lawall 1958: 29; he argues later that a Stoic perspective can help one escape the cycle of tragedy and mockery (31). 177 of a second, “Heraclitan” perspective in this section dramatizes the limitations of

Juvenal’s universalizing conceit. He claims to present the world before our eyes as it truly is, yet the alternation of the tragic here only intensifies the focus throughout the satire on the interpretative act taking place through the earlier stand-in “Democritus.”

There is an internal disagreement in perspective displayed here, an acknowledgment that it is futile to encapsulate the world with a single voice—beyond simply declaring everyone else wrong.

Further, Juvenal begins not with atemporal personal catastrophe or with historical exempla, but, for the first time in Satire 10, with mythological illustration. It is ironic that

Juvenal, who had previously sought to discredit the achievements of Xerxes as inventions by Greek historians eager to please audiences hungry for wonders (cf. 174-175), falls back on fictional exempla here. Though the examples here are more straightforwardly tragic and thus less “satirically” filtered, the effect of using these fictional examples should not be overlooked. Juvenal begins the satire in a rationalizing manner, hoping to clear the “error which clouds” (erroris nebula, 10.4) our judgment. Similarly,

Democritus’ appearance is imagined as unveiling the hollowness of Roman social practices. Here, however, Juvenal lapses into mythological stories, which, though illustrating his intended point (the figures do, in fact, demonstrate the possibility of outliving one’s kin), ignore his previous program. He introduces Nestor, but then immediately calls his entire Homeric narrative into question (rex Pylius, magno si quicquam credis Homero, 10.246). We see another example of the kind of satirical irony in words with double valence, as Juvenal calls Homer “great” at the very moment that he questions his credibility.

178

In the mythological section (246-272), the employment of tragic and fictional details reinforce the clutter of perspectives which has rendered the universal conceit of

Juvenal’s project invalid. Even as he moves into the historical world (273-288), the jarring effect of the tragic, even sympathetic details, maintain the same function. The opening lines of the section, which describe the punishment for a long life as “constantly reliving the house’s downfall in great grief and unending sadness and growing old in mourning clothes” (haec data poena diu viventibus, ut renovata/ semper clade domus multis in luctibus inque/ perpetuo maerore et nigra vesta senescent, 10.243-45), function in a parallel way to, e.g., the selective dismemberment of the elderly body of the previous section, in that they serve as a textual manifestation of the limited vision of Sat. 10: there

“satirical,” here “tragic.”

It is not necessary to survey these tragic notes in as much detail, as they are not as subtly worked out and since the thematic significance, I suggest, is the sudden change of perspective itself. Yet some points bear remarking. Juvenal begins an extended sentence on Nestor’s plaints about too long an apportionment of life (nimio de stamine, 10.253), with a request to his audience: “Please, give your attention for a second …” (oro parumper/ attendas…, 10.250-51). He draws in the audience again—though not necessarily indicting them as before with mistaken views of the world—for a dramatization of Nestor’s woes (perhaps evoking an actual dramatic representation, as

Courtney suggests).102 We are told to look upon Nestor as Nestor himself looks upon the pyre of his son Antilochus (cum videt acris/ Antilochi barbam ardentem, 10.252-53); here again, metaphorical dramaturgy is employed to attempt to create a flat and

102 Courtney ad 251, suggests that Juvenal may be evoking an actual dramatic representation, putting forward Aeschylus’ Memnon as a possibility. 179 straightforward reading of the world. And indeed, the scene is straightforward enough as is (though the odd synecdoche of the “burning beard”, barbam ardentem at line 253, hints at the tone adopted through the rest of the satire),103 but the straightforward has already been discounted in this satire. Paradoxically, even those elements which are straightforward only help to confirm the divergent currents running through the poem.

Juvenal, for his depiction of Priam, constructs an even more pitiful scenario, staging the imaginary funeral that would have taken place “if he [Priam] had died at a different time, when Paris had not yet begun to build his bold ships” (si foret extinctus diverso tempore, quo non/ coeperat audaces Paris aedificare carinas, 10.263-64). In this scene, all the actors from the Priam’s family who later succumbed to tragic fates have a role: Hector carries the body (Hectore funus/portante, 10.259-60) with his brothers (ac reliquis fratrum cervicibus, 10.260), and Cassandra and Polyxena lead the lamentations

(ut primos edere planctus/ Cassandra inciperet scissaque Polyxena palla, 10.263).

Subtly, Juvenal projects a bit of wish-fulfillment here himself, as if Priam’s “untimely” death (i.e. coming too late, rather than too early) precipitated Troy’s collapse. Yet he makes the real significance completely clear: the only difference that the timing of

Priam’s death would make is whether he would see Troy falling (omnia vidit/ eversa et flammis Asiam ferroque cadentem, 10.265-66), not whether Troy would survive or not.

He does not claim that the grim fates of the funeral participants, alluded to by their very mention at Priam’s own “funeral,” would have been forestalled in any way.

103 There may be a similar infelicity, of a metrical variety in a the lines coming just afterwards about the sorrows of Peleus and Laertes, where the word lugere is repeated twice in two lines and almost overlaps in metrical position (…cum luget Achillem/…lugere natantem, 10.256-57), to say nothing of the rhyming jingle usually avoided in Latin poetry or the description of Odysseus the “swimmer” (natantem) rather than the “son” (natum). 180

The overwhelming tragic atmosphere reaches it pinnacle in Juvenal’s brief reenactment of Priam’s death in the Aeneid at the hands of Pyrrhus (Aen.2.506-558). Yet

Juvenal, even here, injects a bit of gallows humor. He compares Priam to an “oldie” oxen

(ut vetulus bos, 268) and then later recounts Hecuba’s transformation into a dog: “and grim she barked from her dog’s jaws—the wife who had survived this one” (sed torva canino/ latravit rictu quae post hunc vixerat uxor, 10.272). Juvenal here ties the old age of these august figures to the bodily discourse of the earlier section on old age, returning to the animal imagery of old age that he had begun in the comparison of the feeble old man to the chick being fed.

Juvenal continues his tragic account with Roman examples, passing briefly over

Croesus and Mithridates (10.273-275), though not without summoning the famous confrontation between Solon and Croesus from Herodotus 1.32 (et Croesum, quem vox iusti facunda Solonis/ respicere ad longae iussit spatial ultima vitae, 10.274-75). The seemingly coincidental line tidily condenses some of the themes and concerns of the satire so far. First, the use of facunda implies an incoherence with Juvenal’s previous discussion of the ill rewards for eloquence (10.10, sua mortifera est facundia), underscoring the difficulties that Juvenal embraces when positing the worldview of

Democritus as all-embracing and correct. Next, with respicere, Juvenal again reinforces the theme of “mis-reading” the world in visual terms, with Croesus unable to comprehend the final bounds of life through the agency of his interpretative gaze. Third, respicere also recalls our own efforts at “looking” at Juvenal’s poem.104 Indeed, the realization of the

104 Cf. Elsner 2007: 67-8, with references, on how in scenes of ekphrasis the narrated act of the gaze on an object, piece of art, landscape, or scene can function as an analogue for the reader’s visual consumption of the text. 181 limitation of Juvenal’s perspectives on the world has to be enacted in our own experience of reading his satirical construction.

Finally, the line allows Juvenal to restage the debate of Solon on the best end of life in Roman terms: when is the ideal moment for a Roman to perish? The answer that

Juvenal provides is fascinating:

exilium et carcer Minturnarumque paludes et mendicatus uicta Carthagine panis hinc causas habuere; quid illo ciue tulisset natura in terris, quid Roma beatius umquam, si circumducto captiuorum agmine et omni 280 bellorum pompa animam exhalasset opimam, cum de Teutonico uellet descendere curru? (10.276-282)

Exile and prison and the swamps of Minturnae and begging for bread in conquered Carthage had their origins from this; what thing more blessed could nature in all the lands give than that citizen, what could Rome ever give, if, while he was flanked by company of captives and all the pomp of wars, he had exhaled his final breath, when he was desiring to come down from the Teutonic chariot?

Juvenal uses Marius as his example, whom Juvenal inaccurately implies ended his life as a poor outcast in the swamps at Minturnae (10.276-77), ignoring his return to Rome and his eventual death.

How then should he have died? At the height of his glory, Juvenal claims, during his triumphal procession after his victory over the Teutoni and Cimbri in 105 B.C.E. The incoherence of these lines with the previous viewpoints taken at various places in the satire is stunning. Nothing could be “more blessed” (beatius, 279) than Rome and nature’s endowment of the world with Marius in his triumph, with none of the ironic charge of the description of Nestor as “too happy” (felix nimirum, 10.248). Marius would have released the best last breath at this point in his career (animam exhalasset opimam,

281). To create this image, Juvenal is forced to completely ignore his own earlier complete dismissal of the value of military triumph, which he had reified into, amongst

182 other things, the “trophies of war” (bellorum exuviae, 10.133; cf. omni/ bellorum pompa,

280-81, in the same metrical position) and “sad captives at the top of the citadel” (summo tristis captivos in arcu, 10.136; cf. circumducto captivorum agmine, 280).

Further, the triumphal procession resembles Juvenal’s earlier presentation of the pompa circensis, the very spectacle which would have made Democritus burst into laughter; indeed, they match in the detail of the slave accompanying the presider/victor so as to avoid Nemesis (cf. quippe tenet sudans hanc publicus et, sibi consul/ ne placeat, curru servus portatur eodem, 10.41-42).105 In the accumulation of scornful details in the earlier scene, the reader saw earlier how Democritus “re-wrote” that scene through his own satirical lens; yet here that lens is seemingly abandoned. The significance of such a blatant contradiction is surprising, another manifestation of the fragmentation of perspectives in the second half of the satire. Just as the tragic depictions of old age clash with the mordant discourse which preceded, so too do these details explicitly conflict with the views taken elsewhere in this very satire. One could write this off as merely a flaw of Juvenal’s style in the satire, more interested in scenes than large scale operations,106 or as an example of Juvenal’s satirical “opportunism.”107 Yet the very point of Satire 10 is its universal scope of re-evaluating human goods. Contradictions are not a mere commentator’s inconvenience, but run contrary to the program of the whole

105 In fact, it appears that Juvenal has imported this detail into the scene of pompa circensis to reinforce that we are meant to read the two processions against each other.

106 E.g., Courtney, who sees Juvenal as typical of the era’s poets: “The final summing-up must be that this poem, fine as it is, is less successful in the whole than the sum of its parts. This is very characteristic of Silver Latin generally, and it is due to the methods and canons of composition promoted by the practice of recitation, which encouraged concentration on small-scale effects at the expense of sustained execution of a well-planned overall design” (454).

107 See esp. Tennant 1995, in disagreement with previous scholars’ remarks on the inconsistencies and problems of Satire 15 as a sign of Juvenal’s satirical object being the voice of the speaker itself. 183 poem—or, rather, the stated program, for these contradictions, on the other hand, neatly coincide with the undercurrent of indecipherability and impossibility of finality in imaging the world.

The subsequent section revives the program considering the misinterpretation of worldly goods using poor Pompey, already a victim of ambition (10.198). Juvenal begins from Pompey’s sickness in 50 B.C.E., which he, with now familiar irony, describes as

“desirable” fevers (febres/ optandas, 10.283-84). He then portrays how the misguided prayers of the people preserved him for a worse fate: “many cities and public prayers won out; thereupon, the very man’s and the city’s Fortune cut off the conquered man’s head, which had been preserved” (sed multae urbes et public vota/ vicerunt; igitur

Fortuna ipsius et urbis/ servatum victo caput abstulit, 10.284-86).108 One notable facet of this grimly ironic turn of events is that it is not Pompey himself, but his supporters, who contribute to his ignominious downfall by not allowing the fevers to take him. Indeed, throughout this section on the reversals of life’s fortune inherent in living for a long time, it is not clear that these long lives were desired by the actors inhabiting them. Fortune is described as the agent who precipitates Pompey’s (and by extension, Marius’, Priam’s, etc.) late-life disasters.

Fortune as personified goddess is an interesting figure in Juvenal’s satires in general and makes three important appearances in this poem. The first comes at the end of the description of Democritus, where he is pictured telling Fortune to toss off and throwing it an obscene gesture: cum Fortunae ipse minaci/ mandaret laqueum mediumque ostenderet unguem (10.52-53). Maria Plaza has discussed how Fortune and

108 These prayers are not an invention of Juvenal’s: for evidence, see Cic. Ad Att. 8.16.1, Vell. Pat. 2.48.2, CIL 13.128. 184 money (a man’s personal fortuna) act as destabilizing elements in Juvenal’s world, for they elevate the actors of the world beyond the status determined by their ethical worth.109 Reflecting on Demoncritus’ middle finger, she connects his materialistic world view, with all existence determined by a fixed and predictable movement of atoms, to

Juvenal’s “deterministic world-view in moral and social terms, [his desire for] a world where all could be explained by every person’s intrinsic value, which would lead to his fair advance or downfall with the same clear exactitude as in the movement of the atoms.”110 She connects this impulse through a structural parallel to what she sees as the satirist’s own operation of raising his targets artificially in order to give himself a lowered position from which to humorously attack (and thereby lower them).111 In this way,

Juvenal as satirist can be thought to take control back from Fortune.

Yet Maria Plaza does not touch upon the possible implications of the invocation of Fortune here at 10.285. For, upon closer inspection, we can see the limitations of

Democritus’ attempt to establish a totalizing and determined worldview. Fortune is here personified as a powerful goddess who manipulates and exploits the designs of men for the worse. The world that Fortune governs is far from a pre-determined world, whose causes and processes can be read definitively, either through knowledge of the atoms of through the intercession of the satirist’s vision. The machinations of Fortune represent the world “kicking back,” undercutting Democritus’ view of the world as predictable and

109 Plaza 2006: 125ff. She elaborates that “Fortuna, like money, is a force that moves people up and down on the scale of well-being and power without taking account of their intrinsic merits…He [Juvenal] dreams of a static world based on innate merit (moral-intellectual-aesthetic), a world that will not be disturbed and turned upside down by the workings of such fleeting and destabilizing forces as Fortune and Money” (125- 26).

110 Plaza 2006: 125-27 (quote, 126).

111 Plaza 2006: 127; for this procedure of humorously raising and lowering through satiric attack in Juvenal, see Plaza 2006: 105-166, in her section on “Object-Oriented Humour.” 185 readable and, in turn, metapoetically challenging the ways in which the satire tries to impose those views (such as a myopic focus on the physicality of Alexander and

Hannibal). Democritus’ rejection of Fortune and its implied imposition of order and readability upon the world fails in the face of the operations of Fortune as described here.112 Fortune makes a final appearance in an extremely ambiguous section of the ending of the poem and so I will hold off considerations of her until reached there.

After this allusion to Fortune engineering Pompey’s decapitation, Juvenal invokes a downright bizarre contrast to the fate of the Catilinarian conspirators: “Lentulus was spared this torture, Cethegus this punishment—and he fell, his body not missing anything, and Catiline lay dead, his corpse complete” (hoc cruciatu/ Lentulus, hac poena caruit ceciditque Cethegus/ integer et iacuit Catilina cadavere toto, 10.286-88). This appraisal is vastly different than the last appearance of the archetypal Republican conspirators in Juvenal’s corpus (8.231-235) where the very mention of them conjures a

“crime that deserves a tunica molesta” (ausi quod liceat tunica punire molesta, 8.235).

To say that the ends of their lives outrank Pompey’s, simply because their bodies remained intact, is roundly absurd and demonstrates the flaws in Juvenal’s worldview in this poem. His absolutizing Democritean perspective forces him to sometimes absurd statements to maintain a consistent view of the flaws of interpretation that men have in

112 Fortune has in fact already represented a moment where Juvenal’s attempt to craft a totalizing satiric perspective has slipped. In Sat. 7, where Juvenal argues, essentially, for the universal poverty of intellectuals, an unnamed interlocutor objects by citing Quintillian as an example of a successful rhetor : ‘unde igitur tot/ Quintilianus habet saltus?’ (7.188-89). Juvenal is forced to concede that Quintilian is felix (though he implies that this exception proves the rule) and cites the disruptive powers of Fortune: si Fortuna volet, fies de rhetore consul;/ si volet haec eadem, fiet de consule rhetor (7.197-98), the latter referring to Valerius Licinianus, also appearing in Pliny Ep.4.11, though he was only a praetor, not a consul. Plaza 2006: 126 discusses this reference to Fortune, but does not account for the contradiction it implies with the context. 186 their desires for a long life. Juvenal ends his long discussion on old age on this precise note of reductio ad absurdum, before brusquely transitioning to the next topic.

E. Eye of the Beholder

The final object of desire Juvenal means to debunk is beauty. It is appropriate that a satire which often relies on externalized images to expose the vast divide between expectation and fulfillment should climax in an object which is by its nature external. In fact, this section will replay the dynamic of the satire in miniature. First, Juvenal will identify how prayers for beauty stem from the misreading or misunderstanding of its value; he will then attempt to supplant that viewpoint with the “correct” one which exposes the “real” nature (and costs) of beauty and which veers inevitably into the satirical, in both content and tone. Again the central paradox lies in this turn, in the paradox between the stated program and the mechanics of accomplishing it. For it will again reveal the limitations in a program of “revelation,” where one contingent perspective on the world is replaced with another.

As with the pupils of rhetoric hoping for the benefits of facundia (10.114-17) and the wish for old age projected onto the reader (10.188), this section begins with a depiction of the actual wish itself:

formam optat modico pueris, maiore puellis murmure, cum Veneris fanum uidet, anxia mater 290 usque ad delicias uotorum. 'cur tamen' inquit 'corripias? pulchra gaudet Latona Diana.' sed uetat optari faciem Lucretia qualem ipsa habuit, cuperet Rutilae Verginia gibbum accipere †atque suum† Rutilae dare. 295 (10.289-95)

The solicitous mother desires beauty for her children, with a modest murmur for her sons, a louder one for her daughters, when she visits the temple of Venus, to excesses of prayers. She says, “Why then would you criticize me? Latona took joy in beautiful

187

Diana.” But Lucretia would bid such a face as she herself had not be desired, Verginia would like to take Rutila’s hump and give [her face] to Rutila.113

The dynamic of this introduction is revealing. Juvenal here actually allows his object to respond to the implied criticism of excess in her prayer (usque ad delicias votorum, 291), only to cruelly cut her down. When the mother responds with a typically

“misguided” sentiment, calling on the precedent of Latona’s delight in Diana’s beauty,

Juvenal seizes on the note of virginity coincident with mention of Diana. He retorts with an allusion to the sexual assaults of Lucretia and Verginia in early Roman history. Not only would Verginia relinquish her beauty she would exchange it for a hunchback (294-

95).

The procedure should be familiar by now. Mother makes foolish prayer based on a mistaken impression,114 that beauty for children is a good in which even the gods delight. Juvenal corrects mother’s impression with reference to exempla, countering mythological with historical. What completes the dynamic that Satire 10 has enacted throughout is the force of the physical deformity, gibbum. Whereas physical ailments and deformities have been used previously for mockery (in particular, mocking the one-eyed

Hannibal astride his elephant)115 or to reify the ills of old age in physical form, here a hunchback becomes an ironically desirable trait. Just as with the emblems of power in the

113 The received atque in l. 295 requires emendation. The easiest solution, reflected in my translation is the change to osque, leading to the paleographical error otque. There is another appealing suggestion made by Housman, followed by Courtney, which transforms the sentence into an address to Verginia herself (cuperetcuperes in l. 294 and suumtuum in l. 295). If accepted, there would be something distinctively Juvenalian about this technique of rapid shift in addressees, especially as the lines already involve interaction between the poet and his subjects.

114 The transition from the people’s misguided prayers for the safety of Pompey in ll. 284-5 to the mother’s is not inconsequential, demonstrating that the agency of prayer does not necessarily coincide with the inevitably “punished” recipients of those wishes.

115 Juvenal, of course, is not alone in mocking the deformed; see Garland 1995:73-86 for other examples in the ancient world. 188 section on Marius above, Juvenal reverses the previously established register of words or concepts in order to make a new satirical point. Just as positive words like admirandus and egregius had come to be used in negative contexts, gibbus thus takes on a new meaning in light of beauty’s devaluation.

This shift in the meaning and register of terms is important as Juvenal shifts into the main discourse of the topic on beauty: the vulnerability of beautiful young men to either overly indulge their appetites or to become victims of the appetites of voracious women. The discussion shifts markedly with the introduction of filius autem at line 295, for the rest of the section (295-345) will concern itself with the beauty of young men, rather than women.116 Juvenal opens with a paradox familiar to readers of Satire 10 by now, whereby a word of assumedly positive connotation is given a negative one by the context. Here that word is again egregius, where the possibility of a son’s outstanding beauty leads, paradoxically, to miserable, rather than overjoyed, parents (filius autem/ corporis egregii miseros trepidosque parentes/ semper habet, 10.295-97). The universality of semper should likewise be recognizable by now by the exhausted reader as a possible opening for rebuttal (“Really Juvenal? Always?”).

What comes next will focus on a key satiric discrepancy in the universe of Satire

10, between external beauty and internal modesty: rara est adeo concordia formae/ atque pudicitiae (10. 297-98), already signaled by the paradox of egregius. The prototypical boy is provided with a good family background (though one should not ignore the absurd humor of horrida…domus, 10.298-99, nor that this externalization of rustic, manly virtue in “hairiness/bristliness” has its own problems; cf. 2.11, hispida membra) and even an

116 Even though the primary focus of the mother’s prayers was beauty for her daughters: cf. formam optat modico pueris, maiore puellis/ murmure, 10.289-90. Juvenal’s focus on young men is a deflection, an enactment of the unpredictable way Fortune brings wishes to pass. 189 inborn pure nature (castum ingenium voltumque modesto/ sanguine ferventem, 10.300-1).

But the lines climax with the explosive satiric sexual tag, non licet esse viro (“he is not allowed to be—a real man,” 10.304). He will inevitably play the passive role in intercourse.117 Beauty has apparently disrupted the proper definition of manhood, as those with the former cannot but have an absence of the latter. From here on, the satire takes a turn into the distinctly satirical world of sexual impropriety, first suggested by the elaborate digression on numbers in the section on old age (cf. quot discipulos inclinet

Hamillus, 10.224).

Yet where that section introduced a mere peek back into that satirical world as a counterpoint to the world of Satire 10 as a demonstration of the impossibility of final readings, at this point, we return fully to that “earlier” Juvenalian world, where the impudent corruptor attempts to ply the parents of a desirable boy with bribes (10.304-6).

The paradox of “useful ugliness” crashes headlong into another irruption, from the world of declamatio, which itself then elides into the historical world:

Nam prodiga corruptoris Improbitas ipsos audet temptare parentes: tanta in muneribus fiducia. nullus ephebum deformem saeva castravit in arce tyrannus, nec praetextatum rapuit Nero loripedem nec strumosum atque utero pariter gibbo tumentem. (10.304-309)

For the generous depravity of the corruptor dares to tempt the parents themselves: such a good investment in gifts! No tyrant—sitting in his savage tower—ever castrated an ugly youth, nor did Nero ever snatch up a gimp-footed or scrofulous or—ugh--hunchbacked and swollen-bellied Roman youth.

117 Williams 2010: 157, discussing this line, points out that Roman discourses about masculinity are not always as straightforward as they are here. Roman masculinity is not embodied in sexual practices (such as the passive role in intercourse or adultery); rather an effeminate man is imagined as dominated, whether by another person or their own desire. He also surveys the evidence for the appeal of young men as sexual object, a concern not exclusive to satire (78-84). 190

The paradox of the shifting signification of beauty and ugliness—whereby having a physical deformity becomes advantageous because it does not attract the sexual attention of dastardly predators—is jointed meaningfully with the shift from the “world” of satire

(the corruptor), to that of declamation, populated by evil tyrants, to the Roman world of

“historical” tyrants.118

Whereas in previous sections, the shift into a “satirical” world—and the limitations necessarily coupled with that shift—were enacted by the sardonic mockery of

Democritus’ voice or selective perspectivization, here that shift comes from the selectivity of the topic embraced by Juvenal for the next forty lines, adultery. We may lose sight somewhat of Democritus’ voice in the ensuing section, but the key feature of that voice—its selectivity—certainly features in Juvenal’s discussion of the perils of beauty.

Bracketing the section off with another second person appeal to the hopeful parent, this time in the form of an injunction to “go off now and be delighted in the beauty of your youth” (i nunc et iuvenis specie laetare tui, 10.310), Juvenal warns of the

“dangers” (discrimina, 10.311) which await the young charge even after he grows up.

Rather than be the target of sexual predators, as before, he will become a celebrated mercenary lover himself (adulter/ publicus, 10.311-12) and thereby run the risk of getting caught by a jealous husband and suffering satirically escalating penalties: “death…bloody lashes…and, for certain lovers, one mullet up the gullet” (necat…cruentis/ verberibus, quosdam moechos et mugilis intrat, 10.316-317). Juvenal climaxes with the punishment

(perhaps) least physically serious but most humiliating—and thus, most appropriate to

118 Courtney ad loc. lists examples of declamatory topoi in each element of the depiction of the tyrant. Nero is said to have castrated and then taken as bride one Sporus, who, unlike the ephebum above, was decidedly not freeborn (Suet. Nero 28; Dio Cass. 62.28.3). 191 satire.119 Though these dangers do not have much other mention in Juvenal,120 they certainly have a satirical pedigree in Horace. One need recall not only the hilarious climax in Sermones 1.2, which features a Horace fleeing for his life with his pants around in ankles in fear for his safety (metuat…egomet mi./ discincta tunica fugiendum est ac pede nudo, ne nummi pereant aut puga aut denique fama./ deprehendum miserum est, H.

Serm.1.2.131-134), but also the list of sufferings endured by sexually unrestrained, which include scourging, as here (ille flagellis/ ad mortem caesus, H. Serm.2.1.41-42), being thrown off a building, ransoming, and even (in Horace’s own crescendo) castration (H.

Serm.2.1.37-46).

Closer to Juvenal’s heart is the turn to insatiable female desire with which the rest of the section is occupied, recalling various salacious sections of Satire 6. First, assuming the man becomes a willing adulterer, Juvenal describes the abjections to which the women will sink out of desire (10.318-323).121 The claim that the women drunk on passion will hand over her jewelry to her lover (exuet omnem/ corporis ornatum, 320-21) is especially forceful in light of the attachment that women have to jewelry and ornament, according to “earlier” Juvenal (nil non permittit mulier sibi, turpe putat nil/ cum viridis gemmas collo circumdedit et cum/ auribus extentis magnos commisit elenchus, 6.457-59).

Similarly, the attribution of women’s character to “dripping loins” (udis/ inguinibus,

10.321-22) mirrors the moist imagery of women’s reactions to the pantomime early in

Satire 6: chironomon Ledam molli saltante Bathyllo/ Tuccia vesicae non imperat (6.63-

119 That is, the forcible insertion of the grey mullet into the anus (cf. Catullus 15.16ff), similar in kind to the Greek punishment for adultery, raphanizô, as at Aristophanes Nub.1083.

120 Though Cf. 6.44: quem totiens texit perituri cista Latini, referring to the protagonist of the adultery mime, though the punishment is not mentioned. For more on the scene in context, see Ch. 4, Section D.

121 It is not immaterial that Juvenal loses sight of his main point for a moment, that is, the inherent dangers of beauty whether being the active pursuer or the passive recipient of passion. 192

64). Finally, Juvenal references his previous turn back at lines 219-226 into the world of satirical assault and away from the Democritean task of realigning incorrect impressions of the world by mention of the notorious adulteress Oppia (sive est haec Oppia sive

Catulla, 10.322). Again, these details and cross-references back to another brand of

Juvenalian satire reflect the failure of his discourse to be the all-embracing vision which he intended at the outset. Earlier in Satire 10 Juvenal’s single-minded focus on the negative and the satiric techniques that underscored that myopia disenabled his “new” approach.122 Here it is those direct references back to past obsessions that cloud Juvenal’s ability to depict the “real” world, rather than an imaginary cesspool of vice and sin.

This impression is only increased when, in the next sections, Juvenal tackles women who are not only insatiable but aggressive and thereby deadly. There comes another imaginary outburst, objecting that Juvenal’s equation of forma and improbitas is not the inevitable conclusion that Juvenal claims: “‘But what harm can beauty due to a chaste soul?’” (‘sed casto quid forma nocet?’, 10.324). No matter, says, Juvenal, since the beautiful man will be subject to the passionate and destructive whims of powerful women. Though the text of the following lines is garbled,123 Juvenal makes clear reference to two dramatic exempla of amorous fervor: Stheneboea towards Bellerophon and Phaedra towards Hippolytus.124 It is no coincidence that the figures are drawn from the stage: not only does it re-introduce the motif of satirical spectacle that is enacted in

122 Though one may note the satiric force of the deflation of myth in calling the rich matrona’s lover tuus Endymion (10.318), mocking the pretensions of focalizing one’s desires through mythological models; Mars is similarly deflated as an example of an adulterer caught in the act at ll. 313-14—a good pedigree!

123 Markland claimed a missing line after 325, which Courtney supplements, e.g. as hospita cum stuprum suaderet sive noverca, Courtney ad 325. Knoche deleted line 326, omitted in one ms., entirely.

124 Euripidean characters, likewise paired at Arist. Fr. 1043ff. by Aristophanes’ Aeschylus, speaking of shameful matter—women in love—which he himself would not produce. 193 the following scene of Messalina redux, but it is also resembles a similar catalogue of female murderousness using characters from Greek tragedy in Sat. 6: “Many Danaids and

Eriphylas run into you in the streets, every morning! Nor does any district lack its

Clytemnestra” (occurrent multae tibi Belides atque Eriphylae/ mane, Clytemnestram nullus non vicus habebit, 6.655-56).125 The implication in occurrent—that you can’t help but “bump into” these vicious women—of the overlap between modern life and the tragic stage is especially relevant here, where Phaedra and Stheneboea, the most vicious women

(mulier saevissima, 10.328) are depicted as if real dangerous Roman matrons.

Indeed, Juvenal transitions from the mythological to the historical, similarly given a dramatic cast,126 moving on to perhaps the most notorious figure from Satire 6, the meretrix Augusta herself, Messalina. Here, Juvenal stages the sham marriage forced onto

Gaius Silius, dispensing with concerns about realigning values and moving to pure satirical attack and exposure. He begins by simplifying for his reader the dilemma of poor

Gaius: “Tell me, what you do you think should be said to the one whom the wife of

Caesar has become fixated on?” (elige quidnam/ suadendum esse putes cui nubere

Caesaris uxor/ destinat, 10.329-31). Whereas Juvenal must go “undercover” to depict what happens behind the curtain at the brothel,127 Juvenal depicts Messalina staging herself for all to see (palam…in hortis, 334) with the props appropriate for a Roman wedding: a veil (parato/ flammeolo, 10.333-34); a dowry (ritu decies centena dabuntur/

125 For a full account of the dramatic and metatheatrical implications of the lines, see Ch. 4.D.

126 See Maier 1983, though, as with the Sejanus scene, she fails to consider the possible satirical implications of the techniques of the theater.

127 For the problems of satiric reliability in depicting what happens “behind closed doors” in Juvenal, see Braund and Raschke 2002: 63-70. 194 antiquo, 10.335-36); witnesses: (veniet cum signatoribus auspex, 10.336).128 He addresses Messalina herself, questioning whether she believes she can keep the truth from being exposed: “did you really think these things could stay secret, committed to only a few? (haec tu secreta et paucis commissa putabas? 10.337).

Yet the narrative of Silius also serves to conjure a competing version. Not only does the account of the doomed marriage previously appear in Tacitus’ Annales (11.26-

38), but Juvenal certainly means for us to compare the two accounts. Indeed, his account is incomplete unless one recognizes its allusion to Tacitus’ version, because he never explicitly names his exemplary victim of beauty and female lust, only alludes to him as

“the best and most beautiful youth of the patrician class…” (optimus hic et formonissimus idem/ gentis patriciae, 10.331-2).129

As Christopher Nappa has shown, the main discrepancy between Juvenal’s version and Tacitus’ is the agency of Silius: in Tacitus, he is energetic and proactive in pursuing a marriage with Messalina in order to overthrow Claudius (11.26.1-2), while

Juvenal’s Silius is the passive victim of the lust of a powerful woman (rapitur miser,

10.332).130 Nappa argues that for each author the scene is a paradigm of some larger point in his thematic program. For Tacitus, Messalina’s marriage and subsequent downfall is illustrative of the instability of Claudius’ court; for Juvenal, Messalina

128 See Hersch 2010 for these symbols of a legitimate wedding. They certainly evoke another perverted marriage in Juvenal, that of Gracchus and the cornicen in Sat. 2 (cf. flammea summit, 2.124; quadringenta…sestertia dotem, 2.117).

129 Keane 2012: 423.

130 Nappa 2010: 198, points out that Silius is not the subject of a single active verb in the whole passage. 195 represents an example of his broader satiric topos of the control of powerful and dangerous women, over even supremely powerful men.131

When Juvenal does return to how the misguided wish for beauty is self- destructive, he does so in a formally unusual way. In the following lines, he projects the dilemma of Silius onto the reader himself:

non nisi legitime uolt nubere. quid placeat dic. ni parere uelis, pereundum erit ante lucernas; si scelus admittas, dabitur mora paruula, dum res 340 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. (10.338-345)

He does not want to be given away in marriage, unless it’s lawful. Tell me what you would want to do. If you do not wish to obey, you’ll have to die before morning; if you give in, you’ll the tiniest of delays until the matter becomes known to the city and people and reaches the ear of the princeps. That one is always the last to know the shame of his household. Meanwhile you follow the command, if life for a few more days is worth that much to you. Whatever you think lighter and better, you still have to hand over your pretty white neck to the executioner’s sword.

This conceit to project Silius’ dilemma onto the audience, and the subsequent pointlessness of “choice” that the dilemma illustrates, also serves to prioritize Juvenal’s version of events as the real lesson of the story. The irony of erasing Silius’ choice is that it paradoxically underscores Juvenal’s in constructing his satiric argument. Silius is already doomed no matter what he chooses; his neck is destined for execution because of the desire of Messalina (344-45).

Further, the inevitability of the choice underscores the meaningless of the intention of the whole satire: no matter what concrete thing one prays for, it leads

131 Nappa 2010: 201-2 compares the scene to 6.614-26 where Caesennia and Messalina are “responsible” for the insanity and senility of their respective husbands. 196 inevitably to death or, at best, simple misery. Juvenal has yet to give a positive standard for “reading the world,” a method of interpretation and valuation that would reorient our

(inevitably foolish) desires. Juvenal had initially claimed to correct our impressions, but instead has merely demolished them. Are we to wish to be an ugly, short-lived, inglorious, dull-tongued, powerless Roman? Juvenal has exhaustively depicted only one half of the world, the perniciosa and supervacua (10.54) and has entirely ignored the task of redirecting those wishes. By projecting the reader into Silius’ hopeless position,

Juvenal at the climax of his satire has left us without tether, without escape from an overwhelmingly bleak and incomplete vision of the world. Though lines 344-45 cap the discussion of beauty, if one removes the significant words candida and pulchra, they form a nice climax to the entire satire: whatever one chooses, one is cast inevitably into doom.

F. The Answer Behind the Curtain

Juvenal detects this exasperation on our part and immediately voices it himself:

“Will men then desire nothing?” (nil ergo optabunt homines?, 10.346). Yet Juvenal, in the next twenty lines, answers this question in a deliberately unsatisfying and ironic way.

Juvenal seems to only begrudgingly address our concerns with si consilium vis at line 346

(“if you really want my advice…”) and he directs our concerns to the gods themselves:

“Allow the divine powers themselves to weigh out what is suitable for us and what is advantageous to our affairs. For the gods will give the fittest rather than the pleasant”

(permittes ipsis expendere numinibus quid/ conveniat nobis rebusque sit utile nostris;/ nam pro iucundis aptissima quaeque dabunt di, 10.347-49). The gods read the world

197 better than men and thus can provide the “fittest” goods (aptissima, 10.349). Juvenal returns explicitly to the notion of misery arising out of misinterpretation, confirmed in the next line, in which men are described as “lead by the whim of our hearts and a blind, powerful desire” (nos animorum/ inpulsu et caeca magnaque cupidine ducti, 10.350-51).

The metaphors and analogues from vision that Juvenal has peppered throughout the satire are brought to bear by caeca at line 351: we misread and misunderstand what the gods can see clearly (cf. line 352-53: illis/ notum qui pueri qualisque futura sit uxor).132 In a return to his original conceit, Juvenal paints himself as revealing the world to our eyes as it truly is.

The seemingly begrudging tone of line 346 (si consilium vis) becomes even more prominent in the lines which precede the famous declaration orandum est ut sit mens sana in corpore sano (10.356): “Well, so you can ask for something and make at your precious temples an offering of guts and the blessed sausagettes of a bright white piglet…” (ut tamen et poscas aliquid voveasque sacellis/ exta et candiduli divina tomacula porci, 10.354-55). The cynical cast is unmistakable here, starting with the opening words ut tamen. The introduction of a final clause paired with an adversative particle provides the sense that the reader, inattentive to the entire train of thought of the previous 350 lines, is desperate to find some purposeful sacrifice. If he must, Juvenal sighs, he will provide that purpose. This irony continues in the explosion of dimunitives,

132 Considering the use of the 1st person in this passage (nos...petimus, ll. 350, 352), one must consider where Juvenal positions himself in order to gain such preternatural understanding. Though some see this rooted in a philosophical background (the seemingly Stoic references to the agency of the gods in ll. 348ff., the reference to Hercules in Juvenal’s final summation of what to wish for, Herculis aerumnas…saevosque labores, l. 361; Dick 1969 argues for a Senecan background to the entire satire; Highet 1949 identifies an Epicurean streak running through the conclusion of the poem), one could just as well see it rooted in nothing at all, which confirms the operation of the Democritean filter coloring the supposedly “objective” content. There is a certainly at least a hint of arrogance appropriate to the satirist in monstro quod ipse tibi possis dare at line 364. 198 three in only two lines (sacellis, candiduli, tomacula), which deride the place of sacrifice and the offering itself, twice over. Traditionally line 356 was read as a positive exhortation without reading the two lines which precede it.133 Exposing his Democritean lens through his deflating choice of vocabulary, Juvenal has upended the straightforward meaning of the text itself, prompting us to question how to read it.

It must be admitted that the lines that follow (357-362) are more straightforward.134 They describe a seemingly positive set of desirable wishes, all internal

(freedom from fear and anxiety, a natural limit to age, steadfastness in the face of adversity) as a counterpart to the externalized wishes already listed in the bulk of the satire or the pleasures of sex or dining or comfort (et venere et cenis et pluma

Sardanapalli, 10.362). Besides the way those little sausagettes color these lines,135 one might additionally point out the implications of cupiat nihil in line 360: Juvenal here invalidates the choice of wishes altogether, just as he had problematized the possibility of meaningful choice in the case of Gaius Silius just before. We are to surrender our agency, which makes our worldview—to correcting which Juvenal has directed much of his effort—meaningless anyway.

133 Mason 1963:121 had already noticed this discrepancy, as part of his interpretation of Juvenal’s main purpose to demonstrate his wit and facility and power of expression. Lawall 1958 acknowledges the problem of the “Democritean character” of the lines (following Eichholz 1956) but insists that Juvenal “is going beyond the tragedy and mockery symbolized by Heraclitus to a semi-philosophical conclusion” (31). Courtney, too, ad loc., has recognized that the “irony is hardly opportune here as it casts doubt on the sincerity of the following advice,” without considering that this might be the very point.

134Still, Fishelov 1990 points to a certain clumsiness in the lines, particularly in the triple rhyme of labores/potiores/labores at lines 359-61, as well as the reuse of the labores itself as a sign of the “playful tone hidden in the description of the Epicurean sage” (382). Cf. the jingle mentioned above in lines 256-57.

135 E.g. Fishelov 1990 believes that even the “desirable picture of the Epicurean sage depicted on lines 357- 62” seems to be in doubt (382). For Fishelov, this doubt is cast by the mechanism of the “continual pendulum” of Satire 10’s momentum, wherein the reader’s wishes for positive outcomes are repeatedly squashed. 199

His final estimation should sound strikingly familiar: semita certe/ tranquillae per virtutem patet unica vitae (“A one and only path of a tranquil life lays open: virtue,”

10.363-64). This recalls, with remarkable coincidence, Juvenal’s definition of nobility in

Sat. 8: nobilitas sola est atque unica virtus (8.20). Just as that line had helped to activate the problems of definition of nobility which plagued Satire 8, reflecting and manifesting the slipperiness of noble roles in Rome, so too does this line cap a satire also concerned with the practical implications of definition and interpretation. Previous scholars have identified the overwhelming cynicism of the Democritean tone adopted in Satire 10, but their conclusions fail to point to any possible larger meaning to this cynical outlook, other than as a progression in the development of Juvenal’s voice.

Yet I think that the notion of a singular, unitary path (semita certe…unica) to tranquility has been severely ironized by the flashes of different modes of perspectivizing throughout the poem. The poem aims at singularity, yet its mechanics reveal multiplicity.

Juvenal uses the perspective of Democritus to open up a question of interpretative choice: will we buy into Democritus’ interpretation of the world? Certainly many have. I think, however, that the self-conscious adoption of a lens itself is meaningful; it embodies a program of problematizing arrival at a fixed meaning for the world and for satire, the difficulty in establishing permanent values for social roles, physical objects, or outward signs.

This conflict has bled over into the world of satire itself, with satire presenting an endless feedback loop where it demonstrates and reflects the problem of establishing meaning in Rome, and meaning in satire itself. Satire 10 concerns itself with an objective presentation of the world and claims to realign our misreading of the values which we

200 have attached to goods, such as longevity, beauty, power, or position which are decidedly

“apparent,” both in the sense of being illusory and externalized by the mechanics of satire itself. That Juvenal offers his reading as explicitly colored by the gaze of Democritus upon the ridiculous crowd at Rome reinforces the very problem of establishing fixed and objective value. Though Juvenal moves beyond Rome in Satire 10, employing exempla from mythological and legendary storerooms, it intimately shares the problems expounded in Satires 2 and 8. The issues raised apply not only to Rome but to satire: external appearances and actions are an untrustworthy guide to internal meaning, the definition and significance of terms is slippery, value is attached to things in an arbitrary and misguided way.

The final lines (“You have no power—at least if we had good sense; it is we, we who have made you a goddess, Fortune, and who helped you ascend heavenward”; nullum numen habes, si sit prudentia: nos te,/ nos facimus, Fortuna, deam caeloque locamus, 10.365-66)136 feature the final appearance of Fortune at a key juncture. They have been seen as a positive reflection of Juvenal’s Democritean persona, which, as we recall, raised its middle finger to Fortune. Yet, as with Pompey, Fortune simultaneously recalls instability of position—smiling as it lifts and casts down mankind pell-mell

(Fortuna…adridens, 6.605-6)—and the subsequent inability of Juvenal to arrive at a final meaning. The overlap between Juvenal and Democritus is confirmed in this final tag, as well as all of the implications of that overlap. Juvenal speaks for himself “through”

136 It is controversial whether these lines should be included or not. They are repeated nearly verbatim at 14.315-316, though the final half-line has been changed. Knoche, following Guyet, in his edition deleted them, which leaves the line on virtue as the final line of the poem. A neat conclusion to be sure, but unsatisfying in a different way, since it provides a false impression of simplicity and neatness that the poem demonstrably lacks. It is appropriate to retain them, as Clausen and Braund do in their editions. 201

Democritus, but, in the end, his totalizing project comes to naught, in a suitable reflection of the world he aims to depict.

202

Chapter 4: The Devils Inside: Female “Threats” to Roman Satire in Juvenal 6

By the standards of one conception of Juvenal’s body of work, as “saeva indignatio,” the Sixth Satire may well be Juvenal’s masterpiece. Despite the intractability of its structure,1 it contains some of Juvenal’s most arresting and outrageous images, crowned early by the scandalous depictions of the nocturnal dalliances of Messalina, the meretrix Augusta (6.118).2

Keeping in mind this imagistic quality and the self-reflexive mechanics of both identifying and reflecting referential and representational transgression that were identified in Satires 2, 8, and 10 (dramatization, objectification, schemes of metonymic correspondence), this study will now embark on a reading of Satire 6. Each of these readings demonstrated explicit “crises of meaning” at play in Juvenal’s Rome: the cognitive dissonance of Roman masculinity in Satire 2; the erosion of the discourse of nobilitas in Satire 8; the inability to properly interpret and value the world in Satire 10.

Further, as I argued, there were metapoetic directions in each of these satires that the issues discussed would be self-consciously exhibited and enacted by Juvenal’s satirical mechanics; thus, Juvenal’s literary product became a homologous representation of those

1 There has yet to be a fully successful exposition of the structure: the attempts of Highet 1954: 267-68 n.2, and Anderson 1982: 255-76 (orig. 1952) are dismissed by Coffey 1976: 246n.3, who notes that the catalogue form was often used in antiquity for misogynistic literature. Courtney 1980: 259 similarly suggests that the poem may originally have been conceived with a tighter structure, but became crowded with secondary points which suggested themselves to Juvenal as he was composing it. Smith 1980 argues that the poem is structured as a narrative, which traces Postumus’ marriage and subsequent misery, finally culminating in his murder by his bride. The reading is ingenious, but, for obvious reasons, not entirely convincing.

2The visual quality of the satire is well noticed. For example, Smith 2005: 126 describes the satire’s “little vignettes”; Weisen 1989: 730, discussing Satire 6, notes that Juvenal excels in presenting subjective situations externally; Plaza 2006 posits an “alternating rhythm between theatrical showing and dismissive commentary in Juvenal’s portrait of women” (138). 203 crises. To turn to a poem which contains similar problems but which does not internally challenge its representational authority, Satire 6, this chapter will demonstrate how the notion of Juvenal’s problematization of his mechanics can still be profitably applied in considering the intersection between content and method in other satires. Although I will draw especially on the pertinent parallels in content and technique between Satire 2 and 6

(which taken together form a unit on the apocalypse of Roman gender), concerns about language and perspectivization will also be examined.

In Satire 6, the offenses of Roman women (and certain men) are shown to challenge fixed notions of masculinity and femininity, and thus to challenge the ideological ground on which Roman identity is based.3 Juvenal’s satire is forced to grapple with women who are changing the blueprints of Roman language and thought, while using the very categories which are being renegotiated by these women. Juvenal’s depiction of women who blithely rewrite rules of gender and society will thus run counter to his satirical techniques of depicting these women. In an analysis of the final lines, I will suggest that one important reason Juvenal fulminates so vigorously against women here is the danger they pose not just to Rome, but specifically to his literary enterprise.

Using the insights about satiric meaning and technique unlocked in my readings of Satires 2, 8, and 10, I will discuss selected scenes from Satire 6 which focus on Roman women changing their sex, or their natural appearance, or their social status, and reflect

3 See Henderson 1999: 175-179 for the centrality of ‘woman’ as a lens for constructing cultural categories, usually hierarchal, with sexual difference used as the basis for creating other differences. Johnson 1996 is the most thorough reading on the way that Satire 6 unconsciously reflects the decline of Roman masculinity and power, inverse to the increase in liberated femininity depicted. Overall, he discusses the gender performance of men—self-construction, in psychoanalytic terms—and how the Roman sign-system went haywire. Similarly, Gold 1998 claims that Satire 6 is less about “women” than what they symbolize, namely, rips in the ideological system. As I remarked in reference to Henderson 1997 and Satire 8 (see Ch. 2, Section B), I hope to add another dimension to these discussions by showing the poetological (rather than ideological) implications of the world Juvenal creates. 204 on the implications these scenarios have on satire’s project of depicting Rome. I will address, in turn, some of Juvenal’s “unsexed” 4 creations (such as the female gladiator or the gender-bending men in the O fragment); Juvenal’s portrayal of women distorting their appearance (particularly through makeup); and Juvenal’s revelations on the sexual indiscretions of women (especially with actors, their social inferiors). In the end, I will offer a new reading of the closing section (beginning with the famously programmatic lines comparing his satire to a new-fangled form of tragedy, 6.634-38) based on the notion that the feminine perversions Juvenal has attempted to document have irreparably

“damaged” the DNA of satire itself.

Before discussing these portraits, I wish to make some preparatory remarks regarding some differences between Satires 2 and 6 and, in turn, my discussions of the two satires. First, rather than offer a exhaustive and sequential reading of the poem, as I have performed with Satires 2, 8, and 10, I will only discuss significant selections. This is not to thoughtlessly sidestep the unwieldy and messy reality of the satire itself. Instead, this reading of significant parts of Satire 6 will also take account of the poem’s overall structure, which is framed by three significant moments: the Golden Age scene (6.1-20), the discussion of Rome’s decline (6.286-305), and the final paragraph on the overlap between tragic villainesses and contemporary Roman women (6.634-660). This reading will reflect an understanding about the way satire works gleaned from reading Satire 2 from start to finish as written.

Second, this reading will uncover slightly different tensions tied to Juvenal’s satiric depiction in Satire 6 versus Satire 2. There is a significant distinction to be made

4 This odd word is used by, inter alios, Courtney 1980: 257 to refer to the section on the “blue-stocking” (434-56), itself an odd (and unintentionally revealing) anachronism: see n. 25 below. 205 between the leading ideological dyad of Satire 2 (masculinity/perversity) and that of

Satire 6 (masculinity/ femininity). The internal quality “masculinity” is essentially inscrutable and “subjective”; that is, inner character and perversity can only be represented (by satirist and Roman alike) by outer qualities. Certainly the Romans had standards for what behavior would constitute deviations from masculinity,5 yet it is exactly a tension between conflicting external self-representations which ignites the opening of Satire 2, on hypocritical moralists. According to Juvenal’s traditional Roman ideology, on the other hand, sex, like birth, is an “objective” characteristic, an essential internal quality which should correspond to a predefined set of external traits. More recent feminist perspectives aside,6 I will stand firm to a binary between the biological fact of “sex” and the societal norm “gender” which is predicated upon that fact because

Satire 6 is so concerned with showing moments where the latter should, but does not, conform to the former.

A result of this shift between ideological binaries (from masculinity and its deviants to masculine vs. feminine) is a subsequent shift in conception of Juvenal’s mechanic. For, while Juvenal’s technique (as he demonstrates them for us) might be termed “revealing” or “exposing” in Satire 2, it is relegated more to “admiring” and

“recording” in Satire 6.7 This “relegation,” so to speak, from active exposer to more passive transcriber, will have significant implications for satire’s impotent perspective on

5 Williams 2010: 137-245.

6 E.g. Henderson 1999: 177-78, which, reflecting perhaps more radical recent feminist arguments, suggests that the assertion of the “fact” of chromosomal difference is yet another ideological strategy of ordering the body.

7 Even activities that take place in broad daylight in Satire 2, such as Creticus’ see-through garment, rely on a model of satirical exposure, visually highlighting for the audience something that we would have seen without the intervention of the satirist; see the discussion of the multivalence of perluces (2.78) above (Ch 1. B). 206 the events it records throughout Satire 6, a new facet to the notion of satirical problematization of categories. Juvenal’s language depends on a fixed paradigm of moral resonance in its depiction of Rome, yet the objects of Juvenal’s scorn will blatantly ignore this resonance.

Finally, I should note that in many ways my reading will intersect with previous readings which discuss, through a feminist lens, how women in Juvenal are reinventing the normative codes of Roman gender.8 I will venture in a new direction, however, by suggesting the metapoetic implications of this social development (as Juvenal depicts it).9

Juvenal begins his satire with a famously ambiguous section on an imagined

Golden Age that immediately suggests that moral interpretation of the past, and the

8 E.g., Gold 1998: 382; Johnson 1996: 176-77. Roman women could also fit into Knoche 1970’s account of the topsy-turvy dynamism of Juvenal’s Rome, where social orders are similarly coming undone (508ff.)

9 As throughout this work, this parenthesis is a nod to the necessary gap between the “actual” Roman world and the Rome as Juvenal depicts it. Yet this is especially relevant here, when one risks taking Juvenal’s description of Roman women run mad at face value. Indeed, our reaction to Satire 6 taps directly into the significance of reading Juvenal in the 21st century: do we see Juvenal as a representative of patriarchy, verbally raping women by depicting them as almost daemonically powerful in order to give Roman men further reason to quash them? (Richlin 1983: 202-206; Gold 1994 and Gold 1998; cf. Shumate 2006: 19-32, who notes how women collapse into a monolithic Other along with effeminates and foreigners). Is this speaker merely a parody of angry Roman patriarchy who would have been rejected by the enlightened Roman audience, as persona theorists suggest (e.g. Winkler 1983: 207-35)? Is there a hidden triumph of women, as suggested by the ingenious “resisting reading” of Maria Plaza (Plaza 2006: 127-55)? Was there really an upsurge in female authority in the home in the early 2nd century C.E.? John Henderson reminds us of how Classics as a field, in its construction of Rome, is implicated in a similar process of gendering ideology as Rome itself (Henderson 1999: 178-79); one does not forget that Gilbert Highet as recently as a half century ago seemed to sympathize with the “truth” of Juvenal’s position (Highet 1954: 100). I do not suggest that these issues are irrelevant, but rather that, for my reading, these issues are subordinate to a more fundamental crisis that Juvenal depicts concerning categorical thinking and the ability of language to encompass reality. Indeed, part of the scope of this project is to suggest a contemporary resonance to Juvenal, not merely as a document of Roman ideological attitudes, many of which have become repugnant (cf. Richlin 1991: 158-79, on rape in Ovid’s corpus as a reminder of the continuing relevance of depictions of gendered violence in antiquity), but as an example of a writer grappling with serious issues on the meaning and purpose of literature by depicting it entangled in a contemporary external (i.e. social/ideological/etc.) crisis. There is an analagous impulse in the Roman historiographers, who draw on a tradition which equates recording great deeds with doing them (cf. Livy Prae.; Sall. Cat. 1-5; Tac. Agr. 1.1, Ann. 1.1-3; see e.g. Feldherr 1998: 32, who discusses the significance of this cultural impulse in Livy). A similar complexity can be found in reading Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and its tortured attitude to colonialism in a postcolonial world. Paul Armstrong 2011: 102-104, has recently proposed that Heart of Darkness is best read in a simultaneously bifurcating way: it is certainly a product of its time (and is thus “racist,” as Nobel laureate Chinua Achebe controversially accused), but it also presciently grapples with the contradictions of colonialism that would be explicitly confronted decades after Conrad’s death in 1924 . 207 categories which underpin this interpretation, are no longer straightforward in the present age:

Credo Pudicitiam Saturno rege moratum in terris visamque diu, cum frigida parvas praeberet spelunca domos ignemque laremque et pecus et dominos communi clauderet umbra, silvestrem montana torum cum sterneret uxor 5 frondibus et culmo vicinarumque ferarum pellibus, haut similis tibi, Cynthia, nec tibi, cuius turbavit nitidos extinctus passer ocellos, sed potanda ferens infantibus ubera magnis et saepe horridior glandem ructante marito. (6.1-10)

I believe that Chastity lingered around on the land and was seen for a while, while Saturn was king, while a cold cave would provide scanty shelter and would enclose the hearth and home and flock and masters with a common shadiness, while a country wife would spread a forested bed with leaves and straw and the skins of neighboring animals—not like you at all, Cynthia, nor you whose dainty shining eyelets the dead sparrow wrecked, but a woman with great udders for the drinking by big children and often hairier than her acorn-belching groom.

Besides the somewhat disquieting affect of the opening word credo,10

Commentators have long pointed out that the features of his primitive couple Juvenal chooses to foreground are less than complimentary. To review: while creating a homey domestic scene of marital simplicity, some of the details by which Juvenal defines the couple, such as the hairiness of the wife (montana…uxor…horridior, 5, 10) and her large, pendulous breasts (properly, “udders”: potanda ferens infantibus ubera marito, 9), and climaxing with an uncouth belch from her partner (glandem ructante marito, 10), seem by their flippancy to introduce ambivalence towards idealizing the past.

10 Why does Juvenal cast this opening gambit into indirect discourse? By the very fact of emerging from the mouth of the speaker, it is clear that this is what he believes. Courtney points out the contrast of credo at line 1 with forsitan at line 16, but this hardly answers the question. Though I agree with recent commentators’ identifications of serious methodological flaws in the persona-readings inaugurated for Juvenal by William Anderson (see the objections in Introduction, Section A), this may perhaps be a piece of objective textual evidence that Juvenal’s words are refracted through a speaker with a discernibly different personality; Nadeau 2011 17-19 (ad 1-2) recognizes a similar fracture at credo and pursues this notion aggressively, though not convincingly, in his commentary, arguing for Satire 6 as a dialogue between two voices, whom he names Decimus and Iunius—analogous to a vaudeville act with straight man and a funny man (14-16). 208

The presence of this ambivalence has led to widespread and continuing debate on the moral seriousness of the passage. To simplify, there are three main schools. One,

Juvenal retains his traditional title of laudator temporis acti.11 Two, Juvenal is depicting the past seriously, without idealizing its harsher features.12 Three, Juvenal is actually mocking the notion of praising the past, by casting it in ridiculous terms.13

Rather than give a definitive answer, I propose that the ambiguity of Juvenal’s portrayal of the primitive couple here has another function. Considering the numerous concrete details which Juvenal uses to realize his picture (the creation of the cave as a backdrop, 2-3; the pile of leaves and animal skins which functions as a bed, 5-7), might not the ambivalence created in lines 10-11 suggest that straightforward reading of such signs is inherently problematic? Juvenal uses externalizing details—which are intended to promote straightforward reading, a moral transitive property where a = b = (im)moral—to

11 Scott 1927: 101-102, for example, recognizes the Golden Age descriptions as sincere, even if they contain a certain light mockery; cf. Tennant 2002: 164-67; Jenkyns 1982: 162-68. Some complexities: Plaza 2006: 325-337, in a close reading of this passage alongside two other extended depictions of an idealized past in Juvenal from later satires (13.38-52 and 14.166-71), places the inhabitants of the Golden Age among Juvenal’s “monsters”, yet assert that they should counted as positive models, even if admittedly placed at the periphery of Juvenal’s overall dim view of life. Though Braund does not take Juvenal’s depiction of Rome at face value, she does seem to argue that the moral symbolismof the past, such as the country as the place of moral purity, depicted at 6.1-20 straightforwardly reflects Roman attitudes, particularly towards historical decline (Braund 1989: 45). Anderson 1982: 258 sees ambivalence in the prologue—perhaps the world of the past is not so desirable—but asserts that the lines introduce the theme of Pudor and its absence in contemporary Rome.

12 Singleton 1972 examines in detail some of the intellectual background behind the prologue to Juvenal 6, particularly the harsh primitivism of Lucretius 5.925-1104 (though this flattens similar issues in Lucretius on the nature of the prehistoric age: cf. Campbell 2003: 10-15), and concludes that Juvenal is heralding civilization over an ideal primitive state while recognizing that civilized development necessarily implies the emergence of sin. Courtney ad 6.1-24 also points out that Juvenal’s harshness, according to the model of decline introduced later (6.286ff.), “links morality with a hard life” though Courtney also recognizes that Juvenal “likes to deflate even what he holds up for imitation.”

13 Winkler 1983: 23-58 argues that objects of the past are consistently degraded in Juvenal, and identifies this cynicism with the real Juvenal. Weisen 1989: 724 notes that the origin of both of the straw-women depicted here, the Golden Age wife and the contemporary lovers, are drawn from literature, with the lovers transformed into characters from Roman love poetry (Cynthia and Lesbia in her sparrow poems, Cat. 2 and 3). Weisen uses this as fuel for his argument that part of Juvenal’s project involves an attack on “the vacuity of culture of luxury and material abundance and of highly sophisticated language (as demonstrated by the poem itself)” (724). 209 contradictory ends here, showcasing a picture once homely and ridiculous.14 Likewise, doesn’t Juvenal’s momentary slip into the voice of the elegiac poet in line 8—the death of Lesbia’s sparrow disturbs not her “eyes” (oculos) but her “little eyes” (ocellos)— jeopardize the transparency of language? That the scene is set definitively in the distant past defines the contemporary world as one where language and the categories they create have already long been problematic. These lines appropriately set the stage for the war between competing systems of meaning that is currently waged on the streets and in the houses of Rome.

A. She Takes Just Like a Woman…

As we read those instances where Juvenal’s women openly flaunt traditional gender categories, we should keep the opening in mind, because it introduces a satirical universe where moral standards, as encased in visual signs, are muddled. For instance, after a short but note-worthy depiction of the female litigator (6.242-45, including the detail at line 244 of the libellos, i.e. legal briefs, which they carry around),15 Juvenal introduces one of his most memorable creations in Satire 6, the female athlete:

Endromidas Tyrias et femineum ceroma quis nescit, vel quis non vidit vulnera pali,

14 There may be a similar effect in Petronius’ Satyricon; when Encolpius enters the hut of the witch Oenothoe, the narrative erupts into a rapturous song describing her hut in idealizing terms which are meant to recall Callimachus’ Hecale (Cf. Courtney 2001: 203). Yet the “objective” picture Encolpius offers in prose shows the ramshackle and shabby dwelling as it really is. Beck 1973: 48-49 analyzes the scene as showing how Encolpius the narrator highlights the naivete of his “earlier” self through the inconcinnity of prose and verse. The relevance to this passage is to remind ourselves that the “real” version of our conception of our environment is continually negotiated and contingent.

15 Courtney ad loc is troubled by the dissonance between these lines and Laronia’s explicit rejection of women acting as advocates at 2.51-52 (numquid nos agimus causas, civilian iura/ novimus aut ullo strepitu for a vestra movemus?). Yet, as Braund 1995: 211-213 shows, Laronia’s (or rather Juvenal-through- Laronia’s) concern at that moment is to deflect claims that women are entering male societal roles (she also denies female participation in active sexuality and athletics, 2.49 and 53, respectively) as a way to spotlight men entering the female sphere. 210

quem cavat adsiduis rudibus scutoque lacessit atque omnis implet numeros dignissima prorsus Florali matrona tuba, nisi si quid in illo 250 pectore plus agitat veraeque paratur harenae? quem praestare potest mulier galeata pudorem, quae fugit a sexu? vires amat. haec tamen ipsa vir nollet fieri; nam quantula nostra voluptas! (6.246-254)

Who doesn’t know about the Tyrian-red cloaks and ladies’ mud, or who hasn’t seen the wounds on the stake, which the matron hollows out with blow after blow of the sword and strikes with the shield and she also follows all the steps, right and ready for the sound of the tuba at the Floralia—except if she aims at something more in her heart and is prepared for the real arena? What shame can a helmeted woman display, who flees from her sex? She loves the violence. Not that she actually would want to become a man—for we don’t get enough pleasure!

Even from the outset, Juvenal’s language reflects the normative tension these athletes embody. The opening details are explosively paradoxical: a coarse outer wrap used during strenuous exercise to prevent a chill (endromidas, 246) has become luxurious with the addition of the attribute “Tyrian” (Tyrias, 246); the adjective “womanly”

(femineum, 246) comes to modify a wrestling-ring (ceroma, 246)!16 Juvenal proceeds to make clear how widespread this spectacle is: “who doesn’t know, who doesn’t see” (quis nescit, vel quis non vidit, 247). There is a certain self-defeating irony in Juvenal’s ploy of

“anti-praeteritio,” his display to us of a representative of the disorder of gender in Rome followed by an insistence on our familiarity with it.

It is precisely this paradoxical context which endows mere vivid description (such as the nicks in the training post, described as “wounds,” vulnera, 247) with a moralizing character: something that would be ordinary for a male gladiator becomes preposterous and dangerous in the hands of a woman. Similarly, the insertion of matrona (250) in reference to women’s games at the Floralia has the effect of recasting something ordinary

16 Plaza 2006: 139 argues that these details are added to make the figure less threatening by reminding the reader that she is still biologically female: “She is meant to be a monster, neither male nor female, but the imagery in fact suggests that she is both.” 211 to something perverse.17 The visual image of the “helmeted woman” (mulier galeata, 252) is echoed immediately by explicit verbal comment in the relative clause, describing her

“fleeing from her sex” (quae fugit a sexu, 253).

Juvenal posits this woman as the realization of the porousness of gender, and each new concrete or objectified detail, though morally neutral on its own, contributes to this picture because of the context. The subsequent catalogue of gladiatorial props put up for auction—her “baldric and arm-guards and crest and the half of a shin guard for her left leg” (balteus et manicae et cristae crurisque sinistri/ dimidium tegimen, 6.256-57) or her

“greaves” (ocreas, 6.258)—is enough to conjure the absurd yet unsettling image of the female gladiator.18 Yet these possessions appropriate from the men’s arena are immediately put into stark relief by the insubstantial feminine garments which cause discomfort: “These are the same ones who sweat in a thin robe, whose sensitive bits even a silken scrap irritates” (hae sunt quae tenui sudant in cyclade, quarum/ delicias et panniculus bombycinus urit, 6.259-60).19

This inconsistency reinforces why the female gladiator is so problematic: she occupies a perverse liminal territory between woman and man. The visualized nature of

17 According to the scholiast ad loc, prostitutes used to fight at the Floralia like gladiators (meretrices nam Floralibus ludis armis certabant gladiatoriis atque pugnabant). For more on the Floralia in the Republic and early Empire, see Wiseman 1999. Courtney ad loc. points out the loaded juxtaposition (typical of Juvenal) between Florali, a festival associated with prostitutes, and matrona. Plaza 2006: 136-137 discusses how this association is especially effective because of the stereotypical disjunction between Roman lady and prostitutes that is itself manifest externally though the prostitutes’ donning of the toga. She continues, “This matron skips the middle stage of the prostitute, and goes directly to invade the athlete’s equipment, the male outfit at the maximum remove from her matronly role” (136).

18 Lines 256-57 (until the full stop) should be noted for combining, in a virtuosic sweep, Juvenal’s satirical techniques of morally loaded inanimate objects (Cf. Jenkyns 1982 212 and Weisen 1989 728) and dismembering objects into constituent and fragile parts (Weisen 1989 727; in the context specifically of women’s bodies in Satire 6, Gold 1998 373ff.), since each item evokes the body part of the woman it protects.

19 Cf. the discussion below (Section D) on women’s “selective” sea-sickness (ll. 93-102) 212 concrete detail (Juvenal specifically bids us to “look!” [aspice] at line 261) urges us towards singular readings of Juvenal’s language (and, in turn, the ideology they promote), yet his satiric object’s re-gendering is exactly the reason those objects have moral significance. A paradox emerges: to portray an environment in which the line between man and woman is becoming indistinct, he employs satiric objects whose moral charge has altered because of that very environment. To land its punches, his satire must accommodate the shifting ground which it ostensibly deplores.20 Juvenal does not merely depends on his object’s existence to fuel his attack; the very linguistic methods with which he attacks them depends on their subversion of convention.

Maria Plaza, in an in-depth study of the humor of Satire 6 using the feminist technique of “resisting reading” pioneered by Judith Fetterly, includes this scene as an example of a moment where the balance of power shifts from Juvenal’s dismissive comments to the woman he portrays.21 According to Plaza, Juvenal’s attempts to assert satiric authority over his objects fails, partially because their display is more captivating than his comment.22 Plaza’s reading is certainly enticing for the modern progressive

20 Indeed, one could note the numerous transliterated Grecisms in this passage, e.g. endromidas or cyclade (246, 259), which Courtney ad locc. identifies as critical. Doesn’t this, however, simultaneously point to another disputed border, that between Latin and Greek? Juvenal himself lambasts women for the fashion of speaking omnia Graece (6.187), while allowing himself the liberty of using untransliterated Greek (ζωὴ καὶ ψυχή, l.195). In only one other place does Juvenal speak Greek in his own voice (the injunction γνῶθι σεαυτόν at 11.27, ironically reapplied to financial rather than moral “self-knowledge”), and it is not coincidental that the fascinating gender transgressor Naevolus is the only other direct Greek speaker in Juvenal, characteristically perverting a quotation of the Odyssey at 9.37 (αὐτὸς γὰρ ἐφέλκεται ἄνδρα σίδηρος, Od.16.294, 19.13 αὐτὸς γὰρ ἐφέλκεται ἄνδρα κίναιδος.). Here the common process of code- switching in the Empire (On code-switching in Latin, focusing on Cicero as a case-study, see Adams 2003 297-416) takes on a thematic and moral significance. This foil of Foreign/Greek vs. Latin(ity) similarly underlies Juvenal’s attack on the devotion of Roman women to foreign cults and astrologers that makes a large portion of the end of Satire 6 (6.508-591).

21 Plaza 2006: 127-55.

22 In her formulation, “the overwhelming presence of triumphing transgressive women will not be erased by a lesser amount of commentary” (Plaza 2006: 154). 213 reader, but her discussion may misread the import of Juvenal’s techniques. For Plaza, in positing a twofold dynamic of women displayed and then subsequently attacked by the satirist, seems to ignore the satiric value of the display itself. In fact, this very method of display is the attack itself, and, if women appear to come out on top, it only reinforces the atmosphere of crisis which pervades the satire. Depiction of their “empowerment” is both the object and the substance of Juvenal’s attack.

The climax of the scene urges the audience to laugh when a woman is forced to admit her femininity by using the ancient chamber-pot used exclusively by women (ride positis scaphium cum sumitur armis, 6.264). Yet, as Plaza points out, the structure of the sentence, which brackets scaphium cum sumitur with positis armis, leaves the weapons set aside in view, so to speak, of the reader.23 Though here Juvenal gets the last laugh

(ride) by having “sex” conquer “gender” (biology over cultural construction),24 the line nonetheless encapsulates the contradiction that Juvenal’s female gladiator embodies, a clash of outward signs indicating the difficulty of reading gender in Juvenal’s Rome.

Juvenal both reflects and even participates in this trend. Our laughter is certainly uneasy.

Juvenal elsewhere explicitly points to women’s transgressions into male territory.

In his attack on female intelligentsia (6.434-56),25 he claims that “the woman who wants to look like she’s overly learned and eloquent ought to hike up her slacks to mid-calf, sacrifice a pig to Silvanus, and be bathed for a penny” (nam quae docta nimis cupit et

23 Plaza 2006: 138.

24 Cf. Gold 1998: “Women are often described as trying to emulate men in their behavior, but they cannot ever become men in substance or mind since their fundamental beings are characterized by qualities completely opposite to those ascribed to men.” (376)

25 It is interesting that modern commentators in English have often employed the outmoded euphemism “blue-stocking,” referring to a stratum of female intellectuals in 18th-century England, when referring to this treatment of educated women. It is a vivid reminder of the troubling continuities of ideology that we sometimes perpetuate in our efforts towards “objective” commentary of the past. 214 facunda videri/ crure tenus medio tunicas succingere debet,/ caedere Silvano porcum, quadrante lavari, 6.445-47).26 If she wants to look smart and eloquent (i.e. she wants to look like a man), Juvenal says, she should go whole-hog, namely by adopting other external signs (wearing a tunica instead of a stola) and behaviors of masculinity

(sacrificing to the slave- and farmer-god Silvanus or paying the men’s fee in the bath).27

Underlining the dissonance created by this image, Juvenal juxtaposes with this gender grotesque of woman-as-man a prescription of what intellectual background a Roman lady should—or rather should not—have (non habeat matrona… dicendi genus, etc., 6.448ff.).

On the other hand, we must recognize that even as Juvenal lambasts this woman’s attempts to redefine her gender (or so Juvenal sees it), he himself transforms her from human into clattering noise-machine, comparing her torrent of words to the clang of wash-basins or bells or horns (verborum tanta cadit vis,/ tot pariter pelves ac tintinnabula dicas/ pulsari. iam nemo tubas, nemo aera fatiget…, 6.440-42). This transfiguration conforms to Juvenal’s style of satiric attack, but it also flirts with the very permeability of categories of meaning for which Juvenal criticizes her.28

The very line between subject (namely, our speaker Juvenal) and object may be dissolving. There is a tiny hint that Juvenal takes the aspirations of the know-it-all quite

26 The place of these lines in the section has become somewhat disputed. In Clausen’s OCT, following the mss. the lines come in the middle of the section discussing the know-it-all ending with a joke where Juvenal begs her to ignore her husband’s grammatical mis-steps (opicae castiget amicae/ verba: soloecismum liceat fecisse marito, 6.455-56). Braund 2004, following Heinrich, transposes ll. 445-47 to immediately after l. 456. Though her text is certainly tempting (and places what I am arguing are thematically central lines in climactic position), I believe that Juvenal would more likely have written it as the manuscripts record, climaxing in an exasperated joke about allowance for husbands’ grammatical slips (cf. the list of dangers in Rome ending with Augusto recitantes mense poetas, 3.9).

27 Cf. Cato De Agr. 83. Cicero makes a salacious accusation against Clodia involving her entering the men’s section of the baths (Pro Caelio 62).

28 Though, perhaps, from Juvenal’s standpoint, the lady transforms herself into these objects, and he is merely recording that transformation. 215 personally: “I hate the woman who,…like some dusty old librarian, has at her command verses that I don’t” (odi/ hanc quae…ignotosque mihi tenet antiquaria versus, 6.451-52,

454).29 Does this woman have a better command of Rome’s poetic past than Juvenal? Is it possible that, behind Juvenal’s denunciation of the obnoxiousness of her discussions of

Vergil at dinner (quae cum discumbere coepit/ laudat Vergilium, periturae ignoscit

Elissae, 6. 434-35), lies a genuine fear of the generic implications of her intellectual ambitions? The jab at her learning30 means that at least she won’t be writing satire, right?

The gossip (398-412) represents another figure who both displays some of

Juvenal’s qualities qua poet and is depicted as bridging the gap between male and female.31 Juvenal dramatizes her flitting around the city:

Sed cantet potius quam totam pervolet urbem audax et coetus possit quae ferre virorum cumque paludatis ducibus praesente marito 400 ipsa loqui recta facie siccisque mamillis. (6.398-401)

But better she sing than zip boldly around the whole city and be one who is able to handle the commerce of men and to speak with uniformed generals—while her husband is right there!—look them in the eye with dried out breasts.

29 Johnson 1996: 175, in his discussion of Juvenal’s portrait of the decline of male power, pinpoints the underlying attitude of inferiority in these lines.

30 Is there the possibility of a programmatic Callimachean tag in those “antiquarian verses,” where the lines might allude to the celebrated opening of Horace’s Roman Odes: Odi profanum uolgus et arceo/ Fauete linguis: carmina non prius/ audita Musarum sacerdos/ uirginibus puerisque canto (Hor. Carm. 3.1.1-4)? The lines might then be, like 1.1-14 another programmatic statement about Juvenal’s relationship with contemporary poetry, but again negotiated in an ironic way, for the programmatic meaning would only “activate” if one recognized the allusion.

31 Umurhan 2011 has similarly discussed the parallels between gossip and Juvenal (cf. Umurhan 2011: 230- 33 for a more detailed list of the overlaps), seeing an element of self-mockery in Juvenal’s depiction of her gender confusion. Umurhan argues that the satirical volleys he lobs at the gossip, who is his satiric stand-in, reflect back onto him, creating an echo chamber of mockery: “We, the audience, laugh at Juvenal, who laughs at us for those very moral failings we laugh at him for showcasing” (241). I assert instead that the gossip represents a threat in her similarity to Juvenal, a menacing figure whose confusion of gender boundaries is also metapoetically equated with a collapse of the boundaries between satiric subject and object. 216

Juvenal posits this woman as another gender grotesque in two ways. On the one hand, he drains her of femininity by depicting her breasts as dried-out (siccis mamillis, 401).

Barbara Gold has analyzed the “iconography” of breasts (as well as genitals) in Satire 6, and Juvenal maps the gossip’s indeterminate gender onto her body.32 Second, Juvenal stages her in commerce with other men, even generals (coetus possit quae ferre virorum/ cumque paludatis ducibus, 399-400), as if an equal. Juvenal even adds the galling detail of her husband’s (emasculated) presence (praesente marito, 400). She simultaneously tries to play the role of a man while failing to fulfill the physical role of a woman.

Yet what makes her truly unsettling is how much she knows and how eager she is to share. The extent of her universal knowledge (haec eadem novit quid toto fiat in orbe,

6.402) covers not only historical or political events (such as a passing comet, 6.407, or the flood of the Niphates, 6.409-411) ,33 but also more tawdry matters, particularly regarding illicit love (6.403-406). In fact, the catalogue of erotic dealings that Juvenal presents her knowing strongly resemble the kind of sensational details that Juvenal revels in.34 The gossip knows what words the lovers use in bed (quibus verbis concumbat quaeque, 6.404), and so does Juvenal (concumbunt Graece, 6.191). Even where the verbal parallels are not as close, there is a sense that the gossip embraces the same kind of nocturnal, titillating material as Juvenal’s satires. One could compare the secreta the

32 Gold 1998: 373-74, in her discussion of Juvenal’s constant emphasis on women’s corporeality and materiality. She rightfully notes the contrast between the infertility implied by siccis mamillis and the swollen breasts of the primitive women at line 9. This “modern” infertility is also brought to the foreground in a discussion of abortifacients at 6.592ff.; see Miller 1998 for a more general discussion of the images of sterility in Roman satire. I believe, however, she misses the satirical ambivalence in Juvenal’s “model” for fertility (see above) and the poetological problems that it creates at the opening of the satire.

33 Syme 1979a: 251-52 closely examines these lines in reference to Juvenal’s chronology, arguing they need not imply that Juvenal composed while the catastrophe of the earthquake in 115 was still fresh (cf. 6.407: instantem regi Armenio).

34 For Juvenal’s sensationalism, see, e.g., Anderson 1982: 305-8. 217 gossip spreads (6.403) with the details of the orgy of the Bona Dea earlier in the satire

(6.314-345), or, in Satire 1, the man who earns his inheritance the “old-fashioned way,” if you will (qui testamenta merentur/ noctibus, 1.37-38).35

Even further, she is driven to share her chatter incessantly, to any unfortunate passerby: “at any-old crossroad, whomever she meets, she’ll tell her story” (quocumque in trivio, cuicumque est obvia, narrat, 6.412). We cannot help but recall Juvenal’s own dramatization of himself composing satire at a crossroads (nonne libet medio ceras implore capaces/ quadrivio, 1.63-64), describing the criminals who are constantly jostling him (cum te summoveant…occurit, 1.37, 69).36 Is not the almost pathological desire for the gossip to spread rumor (emphasized by the universalizing force of the indefinites quocumque and cuicumque) similar to Juvenal’s depiction of his own composition of satire as motivated by the outpouring of emotion (difficile est saturam non scribere…facit indignatio versum, 1.30, 79). This gender-bender assumes a role not unlike that of the satirist himself; as Juvenal depicts, she not only crosses the line between male and female but also between subject and target. The most troubling implication about this overlap? Juvenal claims that, while this gossip has her finger on the pulse, she’s not immune from occasionally taking a few poetic liberties with her material (famam rumoresque illa recentis/ excipit ad portas, quosdam facit, 6.409).

Nor are women the only figures who blend male and female together in the world of Satire 6. In the difficult O-fragment of Satire 6, which appears only in a single

35 Cf. the discussion of Braund 1988: 163-70 on secreta as part of the thematic interplay in Sat. 9.

36 Larmour 2007: 180 argues for the metapoetic significance of quadrivium in Juvenal: “By positioning himself at the quadrivium, the speaker reminds us that satire is a genre formed by the conglomeration of disreputable exempla and by the confluence of different literary, forms, conventions, and techniques.” There may be an additional joke that Juvenal’s gossip doesn’t quite reach his level for she only stands in a trivium instead of a quadrivium (a much rarer word in literary contexts). 218 manuscript and remained undiscovered until 1899,37 Juvenal focuses his attack on the morally debauched house companions of women. Everywhere in Rome, Juvenal intones, men who are by all appearances cinaedi are actually full-blooded heterosexuals,38 eager to couple with Roman matrons when the husband lets down his guard. These men, to unmetrically appropriate Ovid’s designation of the minotaur,39 are the semifeminae viri to the semiviri feminae elsewhere in the satire, equal counterparts in gender confusion in

Rome.40 Unlike the gossip or the female intellectual, these men do pervert not only their own sexuality alone but the secure sexuality of others. Their category-crashing is contagious, for, as Juvenal tells us, they will morally pollute the entire household: wherever they are, “you will find everyone’s filthy and just like cinaedi” (invenies omnis turpes similesque cinaedis, 6.O3).41

Not only do these supposed un-men openly declare their feminity (professus/ obscenum), they displays it through signs, namely a quavering hand (et tremula

37 Though prominent scholars of the past debated the authenticity of the fragment (to give two only notable examples, it was accepted by Housman in his text, while it was rejected as spurious by Anderson 1982 [orig. 1956]: 266-68), it is now safe to say that the fragment, though understandably riddled with corruption, is unanimously accepted as genuine and it seems no longer necessary to rehearse arguments for or against. Nadeau 2011: 230-35, in his argument for a radical rearrangement of the lines, gives a detailed account of the controversies surrounding where the lines should be placed (in the O manuscript, after line 365; in, e.g., Braund, after line 345).

38 I use this term for lack of a more precise one in English, though with some hesitation, as Roman conceptions of masculinity would have condemned, as effeminate, both a desire to be penetrated by another man as well as unrestrained sexual cravings (see Edwards 1993: 81-84 and Williams 2010: 157-170 on the Roman type of the “womanish womanizer”). Juvenal, however, draws a clear line between the open cinaedus and the sexually voracious heterosexual (whom he calls a purum…virum, 6.O28).

39 The original line describes the minotaur as a semibovemque virum, semivirumque bovem (AA.2.24).

40 See Williams 2010: 177-248 for the fullest discussion of cinaedi and their place in the moral discourse of sexuality in Rome. In fact, cinaedi simultaneously embody gender transgression and ethnic permeability, for the word, as Williams argues, necessarily carries Eastern connotations (even if the original meaning of “Eastern style of dancer” had long since dissolved).

41 For language of contagion, see 2.78-81, as well as Williams 2010: 197-200. 219 promittens omnia dextra, 6.O2).42 Later in the passage, this unsavory character looks identical to the participants of the topsy-turvy Bona Dea festival in Satire 2 (2.83-116): he “feeds the eyes with mascara” (oculos fuligine pascit, 6.O21; cf. ille supercilium madida fuligine tinctum/ obliqua producit acu pingitque trementis/ attollens oculos, 2.92-

94); he wears flamboyantly colored garments (distinctus croceis, 6.O22; cf. galbina rasa,

2.97) 43 and a hair net (reticulatus, 6.O22; cf. reticulumque comis auratum ingentibus implet, 2.96); he speaks in an affected tone of voice (vox mollior, O23; cf. fracta voce loquendi, 2.111).44

These later details from the O-fragment about the manner of dress of the would- be cinaedus are couched in lines where Juvenal calls into question the house companion’s sexuality, but in a paradoxically reversed way from his previous accusations. Juvenal began Satire 2 by identifying a phenomenon whereby apparently virile and outspokenly

“moral” men—at least according to their external attributes—were secretly and hypocritically effeminate pathic homosexuals. I previously suggested the serious repercussions a statement like this has for Juvenal’s moral evaluations: for, if external signs of manliness were shown to have no correspondence with internal sexual morals, what could be the basis for determining real Roman men? And then there was the

42 Following here the text of Braund, who accepts von Winterfield’s emendation of the metrically corrupt manuscript reading, et tremula promittit.

43 Cf. Petr. 67.4, where galbina is a specifically female garment worn by Fortunata.

44 Winkler 1983: 176-180 remains one of the few close readings of the passage and is especially astute in drawing parallels between details which characterize the objects of Satire 2 and here. Though Winkler (178) notes that “In view of the close parallels between him and the perverts of Satire 2 it is remarkable that this man, although called a cinaedus (cf. 2.10) and evidently highly effeminate, is also a heterosexual adulter (O 22) of great virility (in lecto fortissimus, O 25),” I argue that this contradiction is essential to the place of the passage within the categorical permeability thematized by this satire as a whole. 220 possibility of the converse: if men who acted masculine were really effeminate, could men who acted effeminate be masculine?

The answer, evidently, is yes:

suspectus tibi sit, quanto vox mollior et quo saepius in teneris haerebit dextera lumbis. hic erit in lecto fortissimus; exuit illic O25 personam docili Thais saltata Triphallo. quem rides? aliis hunc mimum! sponsio fiat: purum te contendo virum. contendo: fateris? an vocat ancillas tortoris pergula? (6.O23-29)

The softer his voice and the more often his hand is hanging onto his tender loins, the more suspect he is to you. He will be the strongest man around—in bed; that one has stripped off his mask, a Thais danced by a well-trained Triphallus. “Who are you laughing at? Save this charade for others! Let’s make a wager: I bet you’re a real man. I bet: do you confess? Or does the torturer’s rack need to summon the attendants?

Though Juvenal does not represent these men’s sexuality as any more acceptable than the corrupt philosophers of Satire 2, there is no question that they are “men” by his definition—and what men they are (in lecto fortissimus, Triphallo; O25, O26)!45 Juvenal compares the house companion’s performance of effeminacy to a comedy (as if a courtesan character Thais) and reveals who he really is when he takes off his “mask”

(personam, O26). He then jarringly changes perspective,46 dramatically projecting his words through the mouth of the husband in a fit of pique (O27-34).47 The reader’s difficulty in understanding the exchange reflects, as I see it, the difficult position that the

45 Edwards 1993: 82-84, esp. n. 71, locates this paradox in a nexus of Roman sources, ranging in time from Lucilius (cf. Lucil. 1058, inberbi androgyni, barbati moechocinaedi, though the context of this line is lost) to Ovid to Clement of Alexandria. Though Edwards demonstrates here that excessive lust for women was interpreted by the Romans as a sign of effeminacy, this fact does not negate the notion of Juvenal employing the paradox here for reasons that relate to his own satirical procedure as much as Roman society.

46 As Courtney ad loc points out, this use of prosopoiia differs from the instance earlier in the same satire (6.172-73), where Amphion had loudly condemned Niobe’s pride, by lacking any formal introduction (such as Amphion clamat, 6.172; cf. Pontia at the end, clamat Pontia, 6.638).

47 Winkler 1983: 85 posits an elaborate scenario for these lines (the husband discovering the wife in bed with this lover), but it seems unnecessary to posit a scenario more specific than the husband simply confronting the ersatz cinaedus. 221 pervert creates as regards assessing gender.48 In the confrontation, the husband points out the resemblance to the stage (“save this show for others!”; aliis hunc mimum, O27).49 In light of how dramatized the scene becomes as it races to a conclusion, there arises a complex of ideas about dramatic presentation, both the pervert’s and Juvenal’s. Simply put, Juvenal role-plays even as he denounces deceptive role-playing. Rome has taken on a foul comic air in Juvenal.

The sense of confusion between male and female continues into the next section, where Juvenal describes Roman ladies’ passion for eunuchs (6.366-378). Here, the internal paradox of the virile effeminate is enacted onto the body of Roman men, particularly in the case of a man transformed into a eunuch by order of a Roman matron

(a domina factus spado, 6.376). Unlike the boys who are castrated before maturity (and are left with only shriveled genitals, compared cruelly to a chickpea: mangonum pueros vera ac miserabilis urit/ debilitas, follisque pudet cicerisque relicti, 6.373A-B), these broken men—whose testicles are removed after pubescence (quom iam calida matura iuventa/ inguina traduntur medicis, 6.369-70)—retain enough virility to penetrate both women and men (6.376-78). Here, even biological sex is up for grabs; Juvenal’s crucial point is that the normative havoc that the intersex figure of the eunuch wreaks results from the active agency of Roman women.

48 One could similarly consider the interplay between the harsh complexity of Persius’ language, especially in his first Satire, and gender perversion; see especially Freudenburg 2001: 162-65 on the full force of the vexed image of the “coming eye” (patranti ocello, Pers.1.18): “Thus the moment of climax in this performer’s tear-jerking(-off) show, the point where he breaks into breathy, quavering tears, Persius figures as a climax of a very different kind.” (164)

49 Courtney ad 6.O27 insists that there is no connection to the stage in mimum, since masks were not a part of the mimic performance. Yet elsewhere he points to the “inconcinnity” (ad 25) of the passage, especially the use of the word saltata (more appropriate to a pantomimic performance, such as that described at 6.63, chironomon Ledam molli saltante Bathyllo), which he argues that Juvenal employs merely to connect to his previous description as instructing the household women in forbidden dances (his clunem atque latus discount vibrare magistris, 6. O19). 222

Through a series of grotesque portrayals of masculinized women and effeminized men, Juvenal has demonstrated that what can be thought to constitute “male” or “female” can no longer be taken for granted in Rome. Even as he counters these attempts to rewrite gendered meaning, Juvenal cannot help be but implicated in them, since his satire’s effectiveness similarly depends on imbuing objects and situations with new meaning, a moralizing distortion.

B. Ugly on the Inside: Women, Cosmetics, and Deception

Satirical distortion comes to the fore in the depictions of women actively changing their outer appearances (6.457-473, 487-506). Along with their gender transgressions, perhaps the most common underlying accusation towards women in Satire

6 is their deceptiveness. Juvenal outlines various situations in which Roman women deceive their husbands (such as boldfaced lying about their adulterous liaisons, cf. 6.279-

285), but, in the sections on cosmetics, Juvenal advances the notion that women’s very forms are untrustworthy. 50

Nancy Shumate and Martin Winkler both apply the key dictum frontis nulla fides from 2.8 to women in Satire 6 in general, 51 but the parallels are most apt here, in a discussion where the deceptiveness of women is projected directly onto aspects of their external appearance. At Satire 2.11-13, Juvenal, through his stand-in the “laughing doctor”

(medico ridente, 2.13) had turned the hypocrites’ bodies against them, satirically exposing the body parts that revealed their true character. Likewise here Juvenal relies on the self-evident ridicule of exposure:

50 Gold 1998: 372.

51 Shumate 2006: 24; Winkler 1983: 169. 223

Interea foeda aspectu ridendaque multo pane tumet facies aut pinguia Poppaeana spirat et hinc miseri viscantur labra mariti. ad moechum lota veniunt cute. quando videri vult formonsa domi? moechis foliata parantur, 465 his emitur quidquid graciles huc mittitis Indi. Tandem aperit vultum et tectoria prima reponit, incipit agnosci, atque illo lacte fovetur propter quod secum comites educat asellas exul Hyperboreum si dimittantur ad axem. 470 sed quae mutatis inducitur atque fovetur tot medicaminibus coctaeque siliginis offas accipit et madidae, facies dicetur an ulcus? (6.461-473)

Meanwhile, her face, foul to look upon and laughable, swells with all the bread or she exhales rich Poppaean unguents and her lips get stuck to those of the wretched husband. To her lover, she comes with skin washed. When does she want to seem beautiful at home? It’s for the paramours that aromatics are gotten, for them that whatever you skinny Indians send here is bought. Finally she opens her face and scrapes away the primer layers, she begins to be recognized, and she is refreshed by that milk for which the exile would hire out companion-asses with herself if she were exiled to the Hyperborean pole. But that which is coated and reinvigorated by so many changed blends and receives the clumps of cooked, wet dough—should it be called a face or an sore? 52

The paradox of beautification, as described by Juvenal, is twofold: the woman becomes uglier, both morally and physically. For, in the former case, Juvenal implies the danger of female cosmetics by associating it with adultery (464-66).53 This gambit implicitly allies the cosmetic behavior with the other deceptions practiced on behalf of erotic rendezvous, such as the mother-in-law outwitting guards or feigning illness to

52 Braund follows Ruperti in printing 464-66 after 470, which creates a more coherent scene by grouping together the beautification process (461-63, then 467-70) and then giving a motivation for the cosmetics, rather than have lines 464-66 stand as a somewhat awkward parenthesis in the description of the process. As I argue below, however, the placement of 464-66 as transmitted is crucial in connecting feminine beauty with deception, not just in relation to adultery but to identity itself.

53 As Watson 2007b demonstrates, Juvenal’s technique in Satire 6, and especially in this section, is to “take a scenario which is not in itself out of the ordinary but distort it in such a way as to make the everyday appear both sinister and ludicrous” (376), specifically here by the association with adultery, profligacy (6.457-59, 465-66), and, intertextually, with meretrices through allusion to their cosmetic behavior in Roman elegy and beyond (Watson 2007b: 382-384). For more on the connection between elegy and Satire 6, see Watson 2007a and her bibliography. 224 assist in her daughter’s assignations (decipit illa/ custodes aut aere domat. tum corpore sano/ advocat Archigenen onerosaque pallia iactat, 6.234-36).54

Even more ironic in Juvenal’s portrayal of the beautified woman is her seemingly obvious ugliness. During the first stage of the process, Juvenal mocks her face as a grotesque accumulation of beauty product, “foul” and “laughable” (foeda…ridenda, 461); he further evokes olfactory and tactile disgust, describing the perfumed creams she applies and the image of her husband’s lips caught in the viscous unguent (462-63).

Further on, the built up glop of various kinds of authentic ancient beauty treatments

(particularly the vivid image of the sloppy clumps of dough applied to her face, coctaeque siliginis offas/…et madidae, 472-73)55 renders the face indistinguishable from an oozing sore (facies dicetur an ulcus?, 473).

Still, the heart of the section reveals a bizarre paradox of identity: after she peels away the beauty products, as if they were layers of stucco (prima tectoria, 467), to reveal her face, she “begins to be recognized” (or, perhaps, “recognizable”; incipit agnosci, 468).

Thus, the Roman woman’s “true” face, according to Juvenal, requires cosmetics to become realized. According to the order of the lines in the manuscript, Juvenal forges a necessary link between beauty and deceit as he describes how women pursue beauty for deceitful purposes (or, more precisely, for purposes requiring deception). Yet it is the face which the woman reveals at the end of the process which Juvenal considers her “true” one: her counterfeit beauty reflects a similarly duplicitous character. The Roman

54 Such is the interpretation of lines 235-36 by the scholiast ad loc.: simulat aegritudinem socrus ut habeat facultatem ad se filia veniendi causa adulterii. Braund 1992: 76 lists the almost obsessive ubiquity of adultery in Satire 6, even in places where it is not the main object of attack.

55 Watson 2007b : 382ff. describes the historical background for these products, while also pointing to a second stroke of satirical attack, namely the associations with some of the products with medical treatments for ulcerated sores. 225 woman’s external beauty in Juvenal should be regarded as both “false”—insofar as it conceals what she actually looks like—and “true”—insofar as its accurately reflects an identity founded on duplicity. After all, she only wants to “seem” beautiful (videri/ vult formonsa, 464-65).56

In Juvenal’s Rome, the woman is indeed accurately defined by the façade she creates—or, rather, he creates. For we as readers must reconcile this connection of outward appearance with innate deceptiveness with Juvenal’s own satiric logic of

“revealing” grotesqueries, whereby makeup becomes stucco (467) and faces become ulcers (473). Just as the laughing doctor at 2.13 relied on a competing set of external signs (the piles on the depilated anus) even as Juvenal challenged the very notion of trusting externals, here Juvenal connects external appearance with deception even while using external visualizations to his satiric advantage. He is no more willing to present an unvarnished woman for appraisal than the women are themselves. There is a maddening irony between Juvenal’s appropriation of the correspondence of reality and appearance

(which provides him with the vehicle of exposing the behavior of Roman women) and his implication that Roman women’s appearance is necessarily bogus.

In the following section on women’s daily activites (474-511), Juvenal frequently returns to this connection between the modern Roman woman’s appearance and deception, consequently reawakening the paradoxes about his own depiction of women.

The scene is considerably more dramatic than before, with Juvenal staging an extended

56 As Bartsch 2006: 115-16 shows, using it a departure point for a discussion of the intersection of the moral and visual at Rome, that there was a more general paradox in moral thought in Rome, for virtue was supposed to be sincere (the maxim esse quam videri; e.g. Cic. Amit.98: Virtute enim ipsa non tam multi praediti esse quam videri volunt) and yet highly visible. 226 vignette of a woman bullying her attendants after a marital quarrel (475-486) and then being dressed before a tryst (487-507).

The first scene of her mistreating her servants does not directly concern her appearance. Being sandwiched between the two rants on cosmetics and dressing, however, it will come to evoke moments where meaning is distorted, both by the imperious women and, metapoetically, by the satirist. After a nocturnal argument with her husband, the woman retaliates by turning on her staff. One slave is punished for supposedly arriving late: “the Liburnian is said to have come late and is forced to pay the penalty for another person’s sleep” (tarde venisse Liburnus/ dicitur et poenas alieni pendere somni/ cogitur, 6.477-79). Juvenal subtly reveals how the woman’s emotions have distorted reality; either the mistress simply invented a reason for the slave to be beaten, settling on lateness, or she is so upset that she actually thinks the slave is late, though the dicitur at line 478 indicates that the charge is false. Whether malicious invention or emotional confusion, either case could be thought to have metapoetic implications. That is, it is possible to imagine Juvenal, structurally positioned in the same spot as the Roman matron,57 either spitefully creating images of Roman women out of thin air to satirize or not recognizing the stained lens of his own perception of the Roman matrons occupying the world around him and transmitting those smudged images down to us.58

57 For the way that Juvenal’s satire metapoetically registers itself as abusive “attack” and abuse, see Keane 2006: 63-72; cf. 65-66 on Umbricius’ role in Satire 3 in putting “the pauper into situations that are increasingly physically threatening,” as well as degrading.

58 This mise en abyme is especially unsettling, for its depiction of either of tainted cognition or self- deception applies to the matron’s “reading” of the slave’s behavior, Juvenal’s “reading” of Roman women, and our own “reading” of Juvenal’s text. This hall of mirrors, I think, is exactly what Juvenal’s text so rewarding. Cf. Kennedy 1993: 8-9 on how acknowledging these kinds of complexities does not lead to 227

A little later, the effectiveness of the metrical structure underlines the artifice of the scene as linguistically depicted and jeopardizes the self-evident force of dramatizing the accusations. Juvenal stages the procession of activities the mistress goes through, such as powdering her nose, admiring her clothes, and checking the household books, while slaves are continually assaulted in the background:

verberat atque obiter faciem linit, audit amicas aut latum pictae vestis considerat aurum et caedit, longi relegit transversa diurni et caedit, donec lassis caedentibus “exi” intonet horrendum iam cognitione peracta. (6.481-485)

She beats them and meanwhile she powders her nose, listens to her friends or inspects the golden embroidered stripe of the painted dress—and beats them—she rereads the vertical rolls of the long account-book—and beats them—until, when the beaters are tired out, she shouts “Get out!” monstrously, now that the trial is over.

The identical placement of et caedit in lines 483-84 mimics the casual, repetitive brutality of the beatings and thus underlines the callousness of her nonchalance. Yet, the structure of the words also undercuts the images, even as they enhance them, because they bring to the fore the artificiality of satiric language.

These activities help to introduce the extended scene of the Roman matron at toilette, which begins with a conscious decision to embellish her appearance for the sake of her lover (nam si constituit solitoque decentius optat/ ornari etc., 6.487ff.).59 She lashes out at her hairdresser Psecas, again inventing a charge as grounds on which to punish her servant mercilessly. “Why is this curl so high?” (‘altior hic quare cincinnus?’,

6.492), the lady accuses; but Juvenal identifies the real source of her rancor, addressing the matron directly: “Why is it the slave-girl’s fault that you don’t like your nose?”

“silence or madness,” for we can strike a balance between concerns of historical contextualization and textuality.

59 For the amorous connotation of constituo, cf. the sacrilegious intimation on the real nature of Numa’s late-night meetings with the nymphs at 3.12: hic, ubi nocturnae Numa constituebat amicae, etc. 228

(quaenam est hic culpa puellae,/ si tibi displicuit nasus tuus?, 6.694-95). Again, as line

464-66, Juvenal associates the act of embellishing one’s appearance with adulterous deception. Again, as at lines 477-79, there is ambiguity in the matron’s accusation, for she demonstrates either a lack of self-awareness (a self-deception, not recognizing that her anger at her appearance derives from something out of the hairdresser’s control) or a deceptive maliciousness (consciously redirecting her frustrations about her fixed appearance onto the hairdresser). Just as before, the lines helps bring into focus the possible extent of Juvenal’s fingerprints in this section: scenes of beautification become a locus of distortion, perhaps willful, both at the matron’s level and Juvenal’s.

The following lines cast the “debate” over style as a bizarre parody of a Senate meeting or a meeting of the emperor’s council:

Est in consilio materna admotaque lanis emerita quae cessat acu; sententia prima huius erit, post hanc aetate atque arte minores censebunt, tamquam famae discrimen agatur 500 aut animae: tanta est quaerendi cura decoris. (6.497-501)

Sitting in council is her mother’s slave, who was promoted to woolworker after serving her time in the needle brigade; she gets sententia prima; after her the subordinates in age and skill give their advice, as if the matter being handled were concerning repute or life and death: that’s how much care is taken in seeking beauty.

The mother’s slave casts the first “vote” (sententia prima, 498) based on her seniority

(for she has “retired” from the hairpin corps, emerita, 498)60 and the others gives their opinions (censebunt, 500) in turn, based on rank and age (aetate atque arte minores, 499), in the actual procedure of the Senate.61 Juvenal appeals to a two-fold disgust, both at the

60 For this metaphorical sense of emerita, see TLL emereo col. 471.67.

61 Watson 2007b: 391n.66, discusses which details would fit with either Senate adjudication or consilium principis, but the picture is intentionally muddled. It’s not that Juvenal is unconcerned or ignorant of the procedural details—he uses technical terms like prima sententia and censere, after all—as much as he 229 amount of effort devoted to something as frivolous as ornament (500-501) and, implicitly, at Roman women’s impersonation of the male public sphere.62

The context of Juvenal’s argument, however, against a devotion to the deceptive external undercuts the employment of a dramatized parody such as this. The metaphors of the next line counteract the matron’s attempt at beauty by transforming her into a building: tot premit ordinibus, tot adhuc conpagibus altum/ aedificat caput (6.502-3).63

Returning to the building metaphor of line 467 (tectoria), the matron adds “stories” to the construction of her hair,64 making her unrecognizable (“you will see an Andromache in front, but in back, you’d believe she was a different woman,” Andromachen a fronte videbis, post minor est, credas aliam, 6.503-4). Yet this is exactly what Juvenal is doing, altering a Roman woman going through, by all accounts, a fairly ordinary scene in domestic life and transforming it into something sinister and ridiculous.65 Juvenal associates women’s pursuit of aesthetic perfection with deception at his own peril, for

Juvenal shows himself falling back onto the hairpins and beauty creams (given the

wants to convey the ridiculousness of the scene from as many avenues as possible. The gold standard for the mock-council on frivolous matters is Domitian’s council on the Fate of the Fish in Sat. 4.72ff.

62 Cf. 6.484-86, done lassis caedentibus ‘exi’/ intonet horrendum iam cognitione peracta./ praefectura domus Sicula non mitior aula, where the matrons’ treatment of their servants is compared to a judicial inquisition at a court harsher than those of Sicilian tyrants.

63 As a counterpart to this phenomenon (Juvenal transforming the animate into the inanimate), Weisen 1989: 728 points to line 493, when Juvenal sarcastically claims that the matron’s hair has committed a crime (flexi crimen facinusque capilli), anthropomorphizing the inanimate.

64 Despite the insistence at Watson 2007b: 392, that the hairstyle parodied is a contemporary one (for “the picture would lose all impact in Juvenal’s readers were not familiar with it from recent experience”), it is unnecessary to assert that Juvenal is attacking a contemporary hairstyle. Even if the fashion of elaborately constructed vertical curls was no longer in fashion, the reader can easily abstract the underlying theme of the scene (the excessive focus of women on beauty and deception) and apply it to any era or hairstyle.

65 Watson 2007b recognizes Juvenal’s techniques of distortion and morally dubious association (the callbacks to meretrices or the acting profession through the mention of the high-soled boots of the tragic actor, nullis adiuta coturnis, 6.506), but she does not go further and assert their troublesome implications on Juvenal’s satiric project. 230 context, perhaps they should be “ugly creams”?) of satire: dramatic scenes and externalized details which are purportedly transparent. Just as the short woman would appear ridiculous, having to stand on her tippy-toes to kiss her husband, without the support of her high-heels (6.504-7), so would Juvenal’s satire fall flat without its reliance on grotesque metaphors and distorted language.66

C. The Bleeding Heart Show

This paradox in Juvenal is an enactment of the paradox in Rome, whereby the conception of Roman “men” and “women” has become permanently unrecognizable.

Juvenal, in an earlier section of Satire 6, had himself addressed the source of this change:

“So you ask where all these monsters come from, what source?” (unde haec monstra tamen vel quo de fonte requiris?, 6.286). The answer is not entirely surprising. Juvenal, in a narrative that had long become familiar at Rome,67 claims that Rome’s victory in the

Punic Wars deprived her of poverty, which had kept her honest, and in return provided her with the luxury which continues to sap her lifeblood (6.292-295).68

Juvenal thus locates this shift in meaning decisively in the past, effectively perverting the relationships and actions of woman in the present day. He segues seamlessly into a description of contemporary misconduct, connecting sexual

66 Indeed, there is a parallel in that both are said to wear high-soled cothurni (l. 506 of the matron; l. 634 of Juvenal, or, more precisely, his satire: satura sumente coturnum)

67 E.g. Sallust BC 10. See Courtney ad 6.290-1 for further references. Suffice to say that the narrative of decline arising from the successes of the Punic War was not unique; for Weisen 1989: 731, the literary nature of this answer to unde monstra is exactly the point, insofar as it exemplifies a world bereft of original ideas, where the hollowness of values is underscored by the creative vacuum of the language transmitting those values.

68 Anderson 1982: 263-64 identifies this as the moment the theme of the poem shifts from pudor (introduced in the opening section by the flight of Pudicitia in the Golden Age, 6.1ff.) to luxuria, pointing out the verbal juxtapositions of luxury and sexual impropriety: obscena pecunia, turpi…luxu, divitiae molles (6.298, 299, 300). 231 improprieties with luxury: the woman who slurps down oysters and parties all night until the room is spinning (6.302-305) doesn’t “know the difference between her crotch and her face” (inguinis et capitis quae sint discrimina nescit, 6.301).69 Juvenal then brings into focus how luxury enables gender confusion in a scene of two debauched women:

i nunc et dubita qua sorbeat aera sanna Maura, Pudicitiae veterem cum preaeterit aram, 308 Tullia quid dicat, notae collactea Maurae. 307 noctibus hic ponunt lecticas, micturiunt hic effigiemque deae longis siphonibus implent 310 inque vices equitant ac Luna teste moventur, inde domos abeunt: tu calcas luce reversa coniugis urinam magnos visurus amicos. (6.306-313)

Go on—ask yourself why Maura takes in air with a sneer, when she passes by the old altar of Chastity, what Tullia says, the foster-sister of notorious Maura. At night they put their litters down here, here they pee and cover the statue of the goddess with long spurts and take turns riding each other and “moving” around—with the Moon as my witness— and then they go home. You, when light returns, tread on your wife’s piss on the way to visit your great friends.70

Juvenal expands on his portrayal of the late night party just described by following the dissipated activities of two participants. These women pervert gender in any numbers of ways. They engage in lesbian activity, sketchily described.71 The

69 The tense of the verbs shifts similarly from perfect (perhaps to be considered present perfects?) to presents at lines 299-300 (et turpi fregerunt saecula luxu/ divitiae molles. quid enim venus ebria curat?).

70 I follow Clausen’s OCT in taking the order of the lines as preserved in the ms. K Vat. Reg. 2029; Courtney, noting that some mss. omit line 307, suggests they might be spurious, but this depends on his mistaken interpretation that the series of plural verbs beginning with ponunt at l. 309 should be ascribed to “women in general, the coniuges of tu” and not the Maura and Tullia just mentioned.

71 It is not thematically insignificant that inque vices equitant and particularly the vague moventur (l. 311) do not really elucidate exactly what the women are doing. Nor is Juvenal afraid of exhibiting perversity in matter-of-fact detail: cf. the vivid description a little later of a woman submitting herself to penetration by an ass (quo minus inposito clunem summittat asello, 6.634) or the obscene description of on-the-job hazard of male prostitution (9.43-44). Horse-riding is a common enough metaphor for sex in Greek and Latin (cf. Adams 1990: 34, 74 n.2, 165; for Greek, Henderson 1991: 165), but not typically of an encounter between two women. Female homoeroticism in Rome usually recalls the tribas, the female-penetrating-female monster described by, e.g., Martial 7.67 (featuring the notorious Philaenis, who even penetrates men, thus evoking the masculinization of Roman women), yet that is not a secure fit with the mechanics described by equitant. For more on the tribas in Latin literature, see most recently Swancutt 2007 who lists this passage as an instance of tribadism even though, by her own admission “Juvenal does not name their act as tribadic” 232 depiction of long streams (longis siphonibus) of urine are more appropriate for male rather than female urination.72 The final insult is that their husbands will unknowingly go traipsing through their wives’ urine come morning (312-13); the power relations are reversed, and women are ascendant. Considering the passage as a whole, the train of thought is clear: stemming from Rome’s victory in the past, present-day Roman women are no longer women (and, conversely, men are no longer men).73

The only witness to this degradation, Juvenal tells us, is the moon (Luna teste,

311).74 The heavenly body must look upon Rome’s degradation but lack the agency to stop it. In Juvenal 6, not only must the husband feebly look upon his wife’s activities; so too must Juvenal’s satiric audience. Thus, another effect of Juvenal’s relentless dramatization in Sat. 6 is to reinforce the permanence of the topsy-turvy state of Rome

(ironically inaugurated by her military success over Carthage) and to instill in the reader-

[53]. Nadeau 2011: 180-184, claiming the language of urination is concerned here with sexual activity, has most recently proposed an elaborate and unlikely scenario where the women are thought to penetrate the statue of Pudicitia with strap-on phalluses (olisboi, which he finds in the text at siphonibus) My alternate suggestion is that the vagueness of the scene (especially for an author known for florid concrete description) matches a kind of intellectual horror at the developments of Roman women since the Punic War; Juvenal’s language is inadequate in capturing exactly what these women do, which is precisely what makes them so horrible.

72 Richlin 1983: 206. The lines may also hint at male ejaculation as well; see Adams 1990: 142 for the conflation of urination and ejaculation, as well as Horace S. 2.7.52 and Persius 6.73. In general, Juvenal is not always precise when describing sexual organs (cf. vetulae vesica beatae, 1.39, where “bladder” stands in for, e.g., vulva).

73 Johnson 1996 focuses in his discussion of this passage (174-179) particularly on the hyper-masculine model of the soldier-husbands at the gate (stantes Collina turre mariti, 6.291) and its contemporary absence in Juvenal’s Satire, where men are constantly helpless spectators (cf. above on praesente marito, 6.400). Stewart 1994: 317-21, though she does not discuss this passage on the Punic Wars, connects the depiction of the intergender threat with Roman anxieties of an “eastern” threat to the empire (in fact, stated explicitly here: saevior armis/ luxuria incumbit victumque ulciscitur orbem, 6.292-93). These ideological concerns are important, but what I am more concerned with here are “threats” posed not to the Roman poet qua Roman, but to the Roman poet qua poet.

74 I retain the ms. reading Luna over Hendry’s suggestive emendation nullo (followed by Braund). Though nullo opens up some linguistic possibilities (namely, allowing for a pun on testis, “witness” or “testicle”), there are no difficulties with Luna (the idea appears elsewhere in Juvenal, when discussing Lateranus in Sat. 8: nocte quidem, sed Luna videt, sed sidera testes/ intendant oculos). Further, Luna fits better with the strain of helpless spectatorship that runs throughout Sat. 6. 233 viewer a sense of his inability to correct Roman women’s transgressions. Juvenal employs the language of the concrete and objective in order to portray rampant gender and social confusion, yet this language simultaneously distances the satiric audience from its object. Because of Juvenal, we can clearly see the horrors of Rome, but we are limited to seeing alone.

The first substantial section of the poem (6.38-135) after the prologue on Pudicitia

(1-24) and the introduction of the rhetorical situation, namely, dissuading Postumus for marriage (25-37) concerns adultery, particularly with actors and gladiators, and unites many of the themes already discussed. It will serve to set the issues which will surface throughout the rest of the poem, both among Roman women and in Juvenal’s mechanics, such as categorical confusion and satirical impotence. This section finds women creating semiotic chaos across social rather than sexual boundaries: rather than acting like men,

Roman women choose lovers from outside the confines of the pool of appropriate partners, especially in their rabid attraction to actors and gladiators. Further, unlike various misdeeds at night, such as Messalina’s excursions after dark in or Maura and

Tullia’s impiety above, the women in this section challenge Juvenal’s rhetoric of exposure by engaging in unseemliness in broad daylight. Juvenal’s women here seem enormously unconcerned with exposure, raising the question, “What is there left for satire to do?”

Spectacle and real life bleed together in these opening sections, with consequences both for Rome and for the poem. A little before Juvenal directs his gaze towards the theaters and auditoria, Juvenal turns to the infamous adulterer Ursidius as an example of the unpredictable and chaotic world of sexual politics at Rome:

234

Quid fieri non posse putes, si iungitur ulla Ursidio? Si moechorum notissimus olim Stulta maritali iam porrigit ora capistro, Quem totiens texit perituri cista Latini? (6.41-44)

What would you think couldn’t happen, if a woman marries Ursidius—if the former world champion of adulterers submits his dumb head to the marital yoke—the guy that time after time had to hide in the trunk of Latinus, about to get it?

On one level, there is an inverted humor in Juvenal’s categorical expectations for

Ursidius: it’s immoral, but if you’re going to be an adulterer at least be consistent!75

Juvenal himself activates a generic confusion in these lines with the mention of the famous mime-actor Latinus.76 In Satire 1, Juvenal had used a mime plot involving

Latinus trying to cozy up to his co-star Thymele with gifts as a parallel to the abject toadying that men (even other delatores)77 would submit themselves to in order to avoid the condemnation of a powerful delator: in Juvenal’s gallery of rogues, you might spot

“behind this guy, an informer against his powerful friend, and intending to snatch what’s left from the picked over carcass of nobility—even Massa is afraid of him and Carus placates him with a gift like a Thymele sent secretly by a nervous Latinus” (Post hunc

75 Juvenal is not as vituperative about Ursidius’ erotic dalliances as one might expect. Juvenal is more critical of his stupidity: in the lines that follow, Juvenal points out that any expectations for fidelity Ursidius has might not be well thought out: quid quod et antiquis uxor moribus illi/ quaeritur? O medici, nimiam pertundite venam (6.45-46). Indeed, considering the ubiquity of adultery in Sat. 6, Juvenal’s condemnation is curiously one-sided towards the female participants; only when the adulterer is simultaneously a gender-pervert does he come under serious fire (see above on 6.O20ff.). 76 He appears in several epigrams of Martial (e.g. 1.4.5, with Thymele; 2.72.3; 5.51.7, etc.) as well as mentioned in passing in Suet. Dom. 15.3.

77 Specifically Baebius Massa and Mettius Carus, both infamous informers under Domitian (cf. Tac. Agr. 45.1, where they appear together, Tac. Hist. 4.50.2, and Mart. 12.25.5, which, written under Trajan, uses Carus as a byword for a Domitianic informer). For a recent treatment on delatores in the empire, see Rutledge 2001, especially 202-4 and 245-6 for prosopographical information on Baebius and Mettius, respectively. 235 magni delator amici/ et cito rapturus de nobilitate comesa/ quod superset, quem Massa timet, quem munere palpat/ Carus, ut a trepido Thymele summissa Latino, 1.33-36).78

Juvenal here in Satire 6 evokes a particularly popular mime plot-form involving an adulterer, a woman, and a cuckolded husband.79 The comparison with a farcical comedy in Satires 1 and 6 does not merely play up the atmosphere of play-acting and identity negotiation rampant in Juvenal’s Rome.80 Here, the play between Roman and dramatic character goes even further.81 Whereas Thymele-Latinus was used purely as analogy (with ut accepted at 1.36), here Ursidius blends permeably with the mime role: are we supposed to imagine that Ursidius himself was often forced to take cover in a closet to prevent being discovered or simply that this scene is a simply a stand-in to recall

Ursidius’ illicit exploits? One could argue that the former seems over-determined by literature and thus implausible even to Juvenal, but Juvenal makes no such allowances for not allowing elegiac scenarios into Satire 6 throughout.82 Is this dramatic reference the medium of the satirical reality or a representation of actual reality? Juvenal elides the boundaries between dramatic fiction and satirical reality while he describes a character who violates his own category of “adulterer.”

78 Accepting ut for the mss. et l. 36, since while sources indicate that Latinus was close to Domitian (cf. the scholium on 4.53, quoting the 3rd cent. C.E. biographer Marius Maximus that Latinus was among the potentes apud Domitianum), there is little evidence that he was himself a delator. Contra Rutledge 2001: 244, which, though acknowledging a lack of contemporary evidence, supports the manuscripts’ sense, given the reliability of the scholiasts in identifying delatores.

79 For a complete account of this mime family (“The Adultery Mime”), encompassing its variants and witnesses including early Christians, see Reynolds 1946. Another notable reenactment of the scenario in a non-dramatic context occurs in the so-called “Tale of the Tub” in Apul. Met. 9.22-28, with the narrator taking a similar moralistic tack.

80 For this notion of theatricality in Juvenal, see Keane 2006: 29-32.

81 To say nothing of the confusion of role and actor, since Juvenal technically means not “Latinus” but “the role that Latinus played.”

82 E.g. an illicit exchange of letters at 6.233-34, advice Ovid similarly gives to women at AA 3.475. 236

Juvenal makes it clear that Roman matrons now lack the fidelity and chastity which used to define them. Finding a woman “of the old character” and “a matron with a chaste mouth” (antiquis…de moribus, 6.45; capitis matrona pudici, 6.49) calls for a celebration in this day and age. Juvenal even jokes that Roman matrons are as likely to embrace the idealized chaste woman encapsulated by the term univira as to become one- eyed (uniocula, perhaps?): “Does one husband suffice for Hiberina? You’d sooner twist it out of her that she be content with one eye” (unus Hiberinae vir sufficit? Ocius illud/ extorquebis, ut haec oculo contenta sit uno, 6.53-54).83 Nor does the “backwoods” woman retain the same valence as before: at the objection that a woman living on her father’s country estate has great repute, Juvenal counters that she is unlikely to continue living that way even in remote places like Gabii or Fidenae, let alone at Rome (magna tamen fama est cuiusdam rure paterno/ viventis. Vivat Gabiis ut vixit in agro,/ vivat

Fidenis, et agello cedo paterno, 6.55-57).

Thymele too reappears in Satire 6 a moment later when Juvenal moves into the seedy epicenter of Roman female immorality: the porticoes and, especially, the theater

(porticibusne tibi monstratur femina voto/ digna tuo? Cuneis an habent spectacula totis/ quod securus ames quodque inde excerpere possis?, 6.60-62). There is a humorous cross- pollination of genres activated here, as these sites of Rome were exactly those places which Ovid suggested one start hunting for available women in the opening of the first

83 Keane 2006: 63 sees this line as an example of Juvenal’s predilection towards grotesques in the form of missing eyes (cf. Juvenal’s description of luscus Hannibal at 10.158) and contrasts this with Persius’ dismissal of this sort of humor as cheap in his first satire (non hic qui in crepidas Graiorum ludere gestit/ sordidus et lusco qui possit dicere ‘lusce’, Pers.1.127-8). See Lightman and Zeisel 1977 for an account of how the use of univira did in fact change over the course of Roman history, being “adapted to cultural and social transformations within society” (19). 237 book of the Ars Amatoria.84 But the theater becomes in Juvenal a particularly symptomatic locus of female degradation, acting both as a physical site of female impropriety (from which he launches an extended critique of women’s outrageous sexual appetites) and a symbol of Rome’s perverted tastes.85 Juvenal begins by describing abandoned behavior at the show itself:

chironomon Ledam molli saltante Bathyllo Tuccia vesicae non imperat, Apula gannit [sicut in amplexu, subito et miserabile longum.] 65 attendit Thymele: Thymele tunc rustica discit. (6.63-66)

While “graceful” Bathyllus dances a gesticulating Leda, Tuccia can’t control her bladder, Apula snarls, [as if in an embrace, all of a sudden and for a long wretched time.] Thymele is paying attention: at that moment, she’s the bumpkin who has something to learn.

The show in Juvenal’s text is two parts. First there is the sexually charged pantomime of Leda, “smoothly” acted out by the Bathyllus (where molli almost certainly has double force, considering the importance of the word in Roman moral discourse),86 who has a thing or two to teach even to the experienced mime-actress Thymele. The other half of Juvenal’s spectacle comes in the reaction of Tuccia and Apula, who grunt and wet themselves with pleasure. Juvenal thus heightens the intensity of our outrage with the contrast between Thymele’s model of viewing, scouring Bathyllus’ performance for

84 Scattered amongst various landmarks, including temples, Ovid mentions the Portico of Livia at AA 1.71- 72 (Nec tibi vitetur quae, priscis sparsa tabellis,/ porticus auctoris Livia nomen habet) and the theater at 1.89 (Sed tu praecipue curvis venare theatris). Watson 2007a correctly sees references like these as part of overall generic program in Juvenal 6 to equate the Roman matrona with the fickle, imperious, and sexually unrestrained meretrix/puella of Roman elegy.

85 Winkler 1983: 195 n. 21 argues for a pun of cuneis (cuneis an habent spectacular totis, 6.61) and cunnis, recalling the wedge shapes of the sections of seats; the place for spectating—as captured by Juvenal’s language—then already evokes female genitals even before Juvenal narrates Roman women’s unrestrained craving for men on stage.

86 Pace Courtney ad loc. who reads it strictly in regards to the “sensuous movement of the dancer’s pliant limbs.” See Edwards 1993: 63-97 and Williams 139-45 for a full discussion of the discourse of mollitia in Rome. 238 pointers as a fellow craftsperson in the perverted arts, and the abandoned sexuality of the

Roman matronae.

Whatever the “sophistication” of the spectatorship of the matrons,87 two basic points which will affect our understanding of the rest of the section concerning Roman women’s fascination with men on stage are clear. One, Juvenal has transformed their behavior at a spectacle into the spectacle itself, by turning his satirical lens towards them.88 Second, and even more important, the Roman women are so consumed with desire for the man underneath the costume that they are completely unconcerned with

Juvenal’s satirical attack. Their unrestrained sexual behavior takes place in broad daylight without concern for being observed by fellow spectators.

This second point sets up a key paradox between Juvenal’s satirical methods and their accomplishment in this section of the satire. Juvenal aims to “expose” the naughty behavior of women, but they take no effort to hide it. The women in these lines and following are completely open in their devotion to their actor, and the lines depict their gradual progression from admiration to more “intimate” contact. As he proceeds, Juvenal

87 Freudenburg 2001: 254-55, reads the passage as a mirror of how Juvenal turns the camera on himself and, as he portrays himself as spectator to the wicked “realities” of Rome, becomes a frothing spectacle; he finds the actions of both sets of spectators rooted in “failing to separate myth from lived experience,” causing each to lose control (255). Keane 2006: 38-40 counters by pointing out the savvy of the female audience, despite being the object of satire, for, they “look past the dramatic illusion itself and fixate, with strong emotion, on the mechanics of the production,” in a structurally similar way to Juvenal’s program of exposing the real nature criminals and hypocrites (40). In her discussion, Keane notably retains line 65 (“as if in a long embrace…”), deleted by Guyet (and followed by Housman, Clausen, Courtney, and Braund) because of the difficulties of interpreting the mss.; the line seems to indicate that the women project themselves into the show on stage (sicut in amplexu), imagining themselves as part of the sexual spectacle. Nadeau 2011 also retains the lines, altering subito to subitum with the following punctuation: sicut in amplexu, subitum et miserabile. Longum/ attendit Thymele.

88 This conceit—the viewers of one spectacle becoming the object of a satirical spectacle—is not new, appearing in, e.g., Horace (Ep. 2.1.194-98, on Democritus’ expected reaction to being inserted into a contemporary Roman audience: spectaret populum ludis attentius ipsis, 197). Indeed, the Roman public’s awareness of itself being watched in the stands takes on ominous tones under Nero and his expectations of audience participation; see Bartsch: 1994: 1-35. 239 moves away from the overt spectacle-within-the-spectacle with which he began, even as he continues to discuss the perverted spectatorship of Roman women. For, even when games and theatrical displays are not in progress (6.67-68), women sentimentally fondle the dramatic equipment and (Juvenal’s climax) undergarments of their favorite actors

(tristes/ personam thyrsumque tenent et subligar Acci, 6.69-70).

The relationships become more obviously sexual when the women begin to interfere in their lovers’ dramatic practices for the sake of their erotic appetites, such as the woman who bribes the comic actor to undo the infibulation preventing sexual activity and thus thought to preserve his voice (solvitur his magno comoedi fibula, 6.73).89 They reach the highest degree of brazenness when the husband is able discern the performer- lover’s appearance in “his” son:

accipis uxorem de qua citharoedus Echion aut Glaphyrus fiat pater Ambrosiusque choraules. longa per angustos figamus pulpita vicos, ornentur postes et grandi ianua lauro, ut testudineo tibi, Lentule, conopeo 80 nobilis Euryalum murmillonem exprimat infans. (6.76-81)

You are taking a wife that made a father out of the guitar-player Echion and Glaphyrus and the piper Ambrosius. Let’s erect long platforms through the narrow neighborhoods! Let’s decorate the lintels and door-jambs with huge wreaths of laurel, just so your high born infant, in his tortoise-shell cradle, can exhibit to you, Lentulus, the face of Euryalus the gladiator!

The visualizing mechanic reinforces not only the horror of the incident (by concentrating it into a single point—the baby’s face)90 but also its obviousness. The Roman wife’s

89 See Nadeau 2011: 85 and 235-36 for more on infibulation; Celsus 7.25.3 describes the process and it is mentioned as preserving the singing voice in Martial 7.82 and 14.215, apparently a tag to be attached to an actual fibula.

90See Edwards 1993: 52-53 on the simultaneous violation of status distinctions and Roman sexual mores at play in this interaction between upper-class woman and lower-class man. Note too how the Latin words for the infant’s face (nobilis…exprimat infans) bracket the identity of the real father. 240 infidelity has become literally as plain as the nose on her child’s face.91 Juvenal’s tactics fail to “expose” any adultery, as it is already clearly discernible from the appearance of the bastard; ironically, this appeal to revelation only underscores the openness of women’s behavior. Juvenal’s satires shows us that the ubiquity of female crime is already there for us to read, yet also demonstrates, through this rhetoric of “showing” vice, that we are insufficient to contain it.

Our notions of “uncovering” hidden female vice take on another wrinkle in the following extended vignette, detailing the exploits of Eppia, a senator’s wife, in her pursuit of a gladiator named Sergius across the sea (6.82-114). Juvenal explicitly confirms Roman women’s lack of regard for how they are morally received, linking it, somewhat paradoxically, with their high status: “Long ago she had dismissed her reputation, the loss of which registered little amongst her soft sedans” (famam contempserat olim,/ cuius apud molles minima est iactura cathedras, 6.89-91).92

What is more curious to Juvenal is their disregard for the hardships of sea travel in their pursuit of their paramours, despite their pampered upbringing (6.88-90). Yet

Juvenal paints an arresting picture of their double natures when confronted with the perils of the sea:

Tyrrhenos igitur fluctus lateque sonantem pertulit Ionium constanti pectore, quamvis mutandum totiens esset mare. iusta pericli

91 Juvenal returns to this image (a baby manifestly not from his father’s stock) at the end of the Satire, in a section on Roman matrons’ avoidance of child-bearing: if she were willing to have a child, Juvenal says, it probably wouldn’t be yours! (nam si distendere vellet/ et vexare uterum pueris salientibus, esses/ Aethiopis fortasse pater, mox decolor heres, etc…6.598-600). It is another case of Juvenal’s obsessive tendency to return to adultery in this satire, among the reasons Braund 1992 labels the satire on the whole as more oriented to dissuading marriage than defaming women.

92 Juvenal connects this disregard of moral judgment elsewhere with wealth, where wealth buys a husband’s complicity (Caesennia’s unnamed husband at ll. 136-141: vidua est, locuples quae nupsit avaro, 6.141) 241

si ratio est et honesta, timent pavidoque gelantur 95 pectore nec tremulis possunt insistere plantis: fortem animum praestant rebus quas turpiter audent. si iubeat coniunx, durum est conscendere navem, tunc sentina gravis, tunc summus vertitur aer: quae moechum sequitur, stomacho valet. illa maritum 100 convomit, haec inter nautas et prandet et errat per puppem et duros gaudet tractare rudentis. (6.92-102)

Therefore she endures the Tyrrhenian waves and the Ionian sounding far and wide with an unmoved heart, although the sea will change—as it must—so often. If the reason for the danger is just and honest, they are afraid and are frozen along with her shivering breast and cannot even stand on wobbly feet: they provide a brave heart to those things which they do foully. If their husband should order it, it’s a demanding just to board the ship: then the bilge is intense, then the sky above starts spinning. If she is following her paramour, she is strong in stomach. The former vomits all over the husband, the latter eats among the sailors and wanders around through the poop and rejoices in drawing coarse ropes.

Juvenal offers two contradictory portraits of women on board, showing the connection between their actions open to view and their inner fortitude for their lovers (constanti pectore, 93). Juvenal offers the faint-hearted steps (tremulis plantis, 96) and sea-sickness

(illa maritum/ convomit—the extra sting that she vomits in the lap of her husband, 100-1) of the woman accompanied by her husband, contrasted with the bold-hearted fraternization and exploration of the adulterous woman (inter nautas et prandet et errat/ per puppem, 101-2). Although Juvenal marks this contrast by opposing demonstratives

(illa, 100, of the husbanded matron; haec, 101, of the lover-bound), what is clear is that this contradiction could be embodied within a single woman. Nor is it strictly a matter of mere play-acting. With their husbands in tow, they do not pretend to be afraid of the boat: they are afraid (timent, 95). His attention to the external shows that the woman is not

“acting” around her husband only to reveal her true resilience when in pursuit of a lover; rather, she is a necessarily two-faced creature.93

93 Weisen 1989 sees this scene as dramatizing the poverty of genuine emotions in the intellectually deadened environment of Satire 6 (“In a world where inertness so completely dominates vivid intelligence, 242

Yet the continuity between the woman on board and adulterous woman, exposed through the infant’s face, comprises more than the mere similarity of choice of paramour.

Her vacillation between timidity and audacity is not hypocrisy; unlike with the moralists which open Satire 2, Juvenal does not open up a hidden reservoir of guilt. Her behavior is, in fact, the opposite of active concealment of those moralists or the controlled play-acting of the notorious Greek flatterer who belches and shivers in tune with his mark (3.100-

109), leading Juvenal to dub “this whole nation a sitcom” (natio comoeda est, 3.100). It is merely the expression of a profoundly self-contradictory identity. What can satire do, if women have no qualms about openly displaying her allegiances this way? Satire pinpoints the significance of their incongruous behavior on the boat, yet the analytical distance established through observation of the behavior only furthers the notions of women as overwhelming and reduces the satiric audience to helplessness.

Herein lies the significance of the choice of lover: even as women collapse the distance between performer and audience, satire consequently increases it. The more

Juvenal shows women’s behavior in pursuit of their erotic objects, the more we realize how detached we are from it. The externalizing mechanics of Juvenal, aiming at exposure, are disrupted by the women in this section of Satire 6, for they hide nothing.94 Juvenal ends this section by aiming to debunk the mystique of Sergius:

what role is there for genuine human emotions? Who can even tell the difference between honest behavior and acting?” 729), though I see it as reflecting the paradox of the mechanics of visualization in this section of the satire.

94 Though these notions on the helplessness of the satiric audience overlap with some of the notions of Plaza’s resisting reading of Satire 6, what distinguishes this reading from that is twofold. First, Plaza’s reading is posited as deliberately in contradiction with the ideology espoused by Satire 6, while I am arguing that many of these contradictions can be extracted merely from the paradox which Juvenal’s satirical techniques themselves galvanize. Second, and an extension of the first, my conclusions aim at conceiving of Juvenal’s program as failed, not because Roman women could be read from a feminist perspective as getting the uncontested upper hand in the world of Satire 6, but because the world that 243

qua tamen exarsit forma, qua capta iuuenta Eppia? quid uidit propter quod ludia dici sustinuit? nam Sergiolus iam radere guttur 105 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; 110 hoc pueris patriaeque, hoc praetulit illa sorori atque viro. ferrum est quod amant. hic Sergius idem accepta rude coepisset Veiiento videri. (6.103-113)

So what form was Eppia set on fire by, by what youth was she captured? What reason did she see for enduring being called a gladiator’s groupie? For her precious Sergius had by then begun to shave his throat and to hope for retirement with his arm slashed. In addition, there is much out of place on his face, like a huge wart, worn raw by his helmet and right in the middle of his nose as well as a nasty problem of an always dripping eyelet. But he was a gladiator. This makes them Hyacinths; this is what they prefer to their children and fatherland and sister and husband. It’s the iron that they love. This same Sergius, once he got his retirement sword, would have begun to look like Veiiento.

Just as with the women in makeup, Juvenal aims to show us the ugly truth that lies behind the charisma of the performer, warts and all (pun intended). Juvenal contrasts this depiction of Sergius’s true ugliness with the fawning obliviousness of Eppia’s devotion.

Indeed, Juvenal actually acts out her devotion, for he focalizes the gladiator’s name through Eppia as “Sergiolus” (105) and similarly refers to his weeping “eyelet” (ocelli,

109; cf. the use of ocellos at line 8 of Lesbia).95 He then reveals the “true” source of her affection (ferrum est quod amant) and argues that, without his sword, Sergius becomes as unattractive…as any other Roman man.96

Juvenal aims to capture in his Satires is so steeped in contradictions of meaning that the generic devices to depict these contradictions necessarily break down.

95 Cf. Courtney ad 105 for Juvenal’s use of the “caressing dimunitive” (hypokorisma).

96 Courtney ad 113 and Ferguson 1987: 238-9 go through the options for the identity of Veiento, equating him with the Domitianic character from Satire 4’s council room (cf. 4.113, prudens Veiiento) or suggesting that he is the senatorial husband of Eppia or a “repulsive old man.” Neither of these suggestions seem necessary, in light of the joke at 6.75: “What do you think they’re going to go for? Quintillian?” (an expectas ut Quintilianus ametur?, part of Juvenal’s generally unflattering portrait of Quintillian throughout 244

Yet even as Juvenal exhibits Sergius’ actual loathsomeness, he also demonstrates that he cannot undo Eppia’s devotion. Indeed, his determination of the key facet of

Sergius’ charm—the “iron” of his profession—might very well not be a revelation to

Eppia herself, for the women Juvenal has made a spectacle of show a conscious self- awareness that the source of their affections lies in the spectacular nature of their boyfriends’ professions. After all, we see their passion to the actors either while they are onstage (64,71-2) or in caressing not the actors themselves, but the articles of their profession (70).97 And when are the women the most crestfallen (tristes, 6.69)? Between the theatrical seasons, when their lovers are not on stage (6.67-69). Juvenal’s women are one step ahead again.

Although, the discourse of exposure becomes meaningful again in the next section, concerning Messalina’s prostitution (114-135), since Messalina would slink off at night to the brothel, clothed in nocturnos cucullos (6.118), the feeling of helplessness sinks in again on the part of the audience. Besides being set in the past, the incident shows how even men in the highest echelons of power are forced to endure women’s offences: “look at rivals of the gods, hear what things Claudius endured.” (respice rivales divorum,

Claudius audi/ quae tulerit, 6.115-6).98 Juvenal visualizes the scene immediately with the imperative respice; even more, the following imperative audi refers not only to the act of listening to the poet recite, but to the more immersive act of imagining the aural backdrop

the satires; see Anderson 1982: 398-402). In this case, he need only represent an average Roman, unattractive purely for his lack of performative mystique.

97 Cf. the way the music-crazed woman fondles her instruments (6.379-84).

98 One wonders if there is perhaps a glancing evocation of Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis here, considering the ironic word order juxtaposing Claudius’ “divinity” with his humiliation. 245 for the following visual spectacle.99 Indeed, the intensity of the show evokes other senses, such as the foul “smell of the brothel” she tracks home (fumoque lucernae/ foeda lupanaris tulit ad pulvinar odorem, 6.131-2) or the extreme heat of the prostitute’s booth

(calidum veteri centone lupanar, 6.121). We are forced to inhabit the foul scene without any escape route.

The spectacle ends with each side unsatisfied: just as Messalina begrudgingly heads back to the palace wanting more (adhuc ardens rigidae tentigine volvae/ et lassata viris necdum satiata recessit, 6. 129-30), so too does Juvenal himself, forced to endure and present this lurid spectacle, hand it off to us like a rotten baton, and Juvenal’s audience further fails to achieve any satisfaction from the show. Juvenal ends with a praeteritio promising that this is not even the worst:

hippomanes carmenque loquar coctumque venenum privignoque datum? faciunt graviora coactae imperio sexus minimumque libidine peccant. (6.133-35)

Should I speak about horse-rage and spells and poisons, cooked and given to the step-son? Women do worse evils, forced by the command of being a woman, and err the least because of pleasure.

Assuming the text is retained,100 Juvenal, with a wink, rounds off the end of his discussion of perverted sexuality and simultaneously points out to what will be the true climax of “typically” female behavior: murderousness.

99 Though Juvenal does not use any specifically onomatopoetic words or other words specifically of sound, there are certainly moments which evoke sound, such as the elided command of the proprietor dismissing the women at the end of the shift (mox lenone suas iam dimittente puellas, 6.127) or the problematic line evoking the rhythmic thumping of sexual intercourse (continueque iacens cunctorum absorbuit ictus, 6. 126; cf. the sound evoked by describing adultery as “shaking another’s bed,” alienum lectus/ concutere, 6.21-22). The latter line is usually deleted because of poor manuscript authority; see Courtney ad loc for the mss. issues and possible variants.

100 Braund, following Gruppe and Ribbeck, delete the lines; Courtney ad loc insists that minimumque ought to be replaced with either summum or peius as a “corruption of some word of exactly the opposite sense.” The entire escalating section on adultery, proceeding from unnamed matrons and even poor women (such as Aelia at l.72) to a senator’s wife (the extended story of Eppia) to the empress herself at the seat of 246

D. You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet

Near the end of Satire 6, Juvenal again brings up potions and spells

(cantus…philtra, 6.610-11), used to madden the mind of the husband, either deliberately or inadvertently. The potion concocted by Caesonia unlocked the daemonic energies of

Caligula and unleashed a rain of destruction down on Rome, which makes Agripinna’s poisonous mushroom pale in comparison in destructiveness (6.614-626). Juvenal grows more intense as he proceeds to women’s homicidal impulses towards their young stepchildren and fatherless charges (pupilli), who must be constantly wary of a mother’s poison (materno…veneno, 6.631).

Though these scenes are less visually concretized than others (though Juvenal gives us the memorable image of a petrified tutor forced to act as poison-tester for his charge, timidus praegustet pocula papas, 6.633), Juvenal involves his audience into both of these sections through the use of second person verbs and imperatives. In the first instance, the victim of the potion, a generalized Roman man, become doddering and vulnerably senile, is elided into the audience: “…philters, with which she might be able to disturb the mind of the husband and smack his buttocks with a shoe. This is the source of your madness, this is the cause of your foggy mind…” (…philtra, quibus valeat mentem vexare mariti/ et solea pulsare natis. quod desipis, inde est,/ inde animi caligo…,

Roman power (Messalina), expects some kind of commenting cap from Juvenal, especially given the rapid formal transition to the next section (framed in a question-and-answer format). Similarly, Courtney’s objection to the transmitted text does not seem necessary given that Juvenal will return to exactly these crimes later in the satire, even using some of the same language (e.g. privigno, l. 134 ~ privignum, l.628; hippomanes, 133 ~ totam tremuli frontem…pulli, 617). Juvenal even connects the two sections through the appeal to the empress as models of criminality for other Roman women: Cf. ll.115-16, quoted above, and l. 617: quae non faciet quod principis uxor? Instead, we should see this as a typically Juvenalian anticlimax and an acknowledgment of, and play on, the length and scope of a satire where an action as shocking and outrageous as Messalina’s brothel-hopping doesn’t constitute the climax of its own poem. 247

6.611-13). In the second use, we are projected into the role of the rich but helpless ward and given advice on how preserve our health: “You too, wards, I warn, whoever has a rather expansive property, guard your lives and trust no table: the sweetcakes grow hot and dark from mother’s poison” (vos quoque, pupilli, moneo, quibus amplior res est,/ custodite animas et nulli credite mensae:/ livida materno fervent adipata veneno, 6.630-

32). As with the conversion of Silius’ dilemma to our own in Satire 10 (see Ch. 3, E), the reader is implicated into the text by these second person verbs and enveloped by Roman vice; they also point forward to the way that “tragic” viciousness will seep through the

“fourth wall” between stage and audience and into the streets of Rome.

From the introduction of poisons and homicidal tendencies (motivated by greed, as touched on by Juvenal’s warning to wards who are explicitly wealthy, quibus amplior est res), Juvenal launches into one of the most controversial programmatic statements in his corpus:

fingimus haec altum satura sumente coturnum scilicet, et finem egressi legemque priorum 635 grande Sophocleo carmen bacchamur hiatu, montibus ignotum Rutulis caeloque Latino? nos utinam uani. (6.634-38)

Are we making this up—surely we are!—my satire’s slipping on its high tragic boot, and, exceeding the limit and law of our predecessors, are we now frenzying an imposing song from our Sophoclean crack, a song unheard of to the Rutulian mountains and the Latin sky? I wish we were making it up.

The interjection of these lines into an otherwise cohesive train of thought (610-626, on potions given to husbands; 627-633, on murdering children; 638-661, on murdering children and husbands, with tragic exemplars) marks them as significant and to be read carefully with what follows. This passage completes the chronological triad which structures Satire 6, begun with the opening portrait of the Golden Age (1-24) and

248 continued with the traditional portrait of Rome in decline after the Punic Wars (286-300).

Each of these three sections engages with the legendary, historical, or mythological past in order to presage the present breakdown. These lines effectively round off the subtle crescendo of Satire 6’s structural frame and trump the other two passages in emotional intensity. The ironic detachment marking the Golden Age section in its portrayal of the ideal couple (e.g. the belching husband at 6.10) proceeds to the stern moralizing of the section on the origin of Roman vice, peaking here in the utter hysteria of “tragic” Rome.

There are several issues involving tone, satiric program, and genre, which have been unpacked by previous scholars. Are we meant to take the lines at their feverish face value? Are these lines meant to act as a defense against a supposed objection by the audience (implied by scilicet, 6.635) or imply an actual break with Juvenal’s previous satiric program? What do the lines imply about the relationship between Juvenal’s satire and tragedy? My view owes a debt to these many of these discussions, but my introduction of the paradox of visualized meaning (explicitly identified in Satire 2) into the discourse of Satire 6 adds another layer of significance to these lines.

In addressing some of these questions, I will show how these lines fit into the overall scheme of Satire 6’s engagement with the various problems of meaning and genre in Juvenal’s Rome, especially how those issues have been activated by the intensely visualized discourse of Juvenal’s satire. What women have done through their promiscuity, vanity, and authority is to subvert the stability of Roman society, dependent on a steady (and hierarchal) relationship of men and women, and have dismantled the genre of Roman satire along with it. The accumulation in Satire 6 of so much female mischief and crime exposes, according to Juvenal, the generic fissures of satire; by

249 rewriting a dynamic definition of contemporary womanhood—in license, in appearance, and in sexuality—Roman matrons have debased not only static social categories but also generic ones.

A few points must be acknowledged before looking closely at the lines themselves and the climactic picture of a Rome brimming with tragic villainesses. First, the lines should not be regarded as any kind of revision of Juvenal’s satiric program.101

Though we must dismiss out of hand the literal implication that Juvenal is “introducing” tragedy to Roman shores (esp. line 637), Catherine Keane has shown how the lines posit

Juvenal as an importer.102 They evoke the entrance of tragedy and drama into Rome as controversial103 and suggest a parallel between the destructive force of mixing native

Roman stock with foreign influences.104 By this logic, Juvenal associates himself with transgression, exactly that quality which he posits as so dangerous in the women of Satire

6. The lines show how transgression operates on two levels in satire: definitional

101 Though Morford 1972 correctly understands how Juvenal’s world has become so extreme that the boundaries between tragedy and satire have dissolved and the whole world has essentially become another satiric stage, he argues that this picture contrasts with Juvenal’s previous denunciation of contemporary tragedy and that it forms a defensive revision of his satiric plan from Satire 1. Yet the tone and language of the lines is not dramatically different from the overall language of Juvenal’s first two books of satires, and the references to the poor quality and irrelevance of contemporary tragedies in Satire 1 (cf. inpune diem consumpserit ingens/ Telephus aut summi plena iam margine libri/ scriptus et in tergo necdum finitus Orestes, 1.4-6) have more to do with the worthlessness of “modern” authors than the genre of tragedy itself. Indeed, as Freudenburg 2005a has shown, already in Satire 1 characters drawn from the fictional worlds of epic and satire make their appearance in Juvenal’s satire: epic monsters, rather than acting as a benchmark for epic “unreality” (as they do in, e.g., Martial 10.4.9-10: non hic Centauros, non Gorgonas Harpyiasque/ invenies: hominem pagina nostra sapit) are imported into satirical “reality.”

102 Keane 2003: 267-69

103 One controversial version of this narrative can be found at Livy 7.2; for more on Livy’s account, notable for giving Roman satire a dramatic origin, see Coffey 1976: 18-22 and Feldherr 1998: 178-87, where he argues for its programmatic use as a foil by Livy to his own spectacular techniques.

104 Keane 2003: 267, giving examples such as the noble actor or the influx of foreign customs (e.g. Juvenal’s metaphor from streams merging together at 3.60-63: non possum ferre, Quirites,/ Graceam urbem. quamvis quota portio faecis Achaei?/ iam pridem Syrus in Tiberim defluxit Orontes/ et linguam et mores etc.). 250 inconsistencies are, on one level, satiric objects, exampled by the anathema Juvenal pours onto women in Rome attempting to straddle the gendered boundaries between men and women. Yet they are also embodied in the various contradictions of the text itself; it is at this moment when Juvenal finally acknowledges how these problems have spilled out into his own verse. Even as he then goes on to enact this generic paradox in a phantasmagoric vision of murderous tragic protagonists still stalking the earth, this vision of havoc should also be projected on Juvenal’s generic project itself. Indeed, Roman women, Juvenal corrects himself, are worse than these tragic models because of the baseness of their motives: “And those women used to dare great monstrosities in their own times, but not for money!” (et illae/ grandia monstra suis audebant temporibus, sed/ non propter nummos, 6.644-46).105

Indeed, the tragic and satiric overlap merely in subject matter, but in form, as

Juvenal immediately launches into a highly dramatic confrontation with one of these dastardly murderers:

sed clamat Pontia 'feci, confiteor, puerisque meis aconita paraui, quae deprensa patent; facinus tamen ipsa peregi.' 640 tune duos una, saeuissima uipera, cena? tune duos? 'septem, si septem forte fuissent.' (6.638-642)

But Pontia shouts, “I did it, I confess, I prepared wolfsbane for my boys—which was found out and is now public! Still, I accomplished this deed all on my own!” You did it, two children at one dinner, you most vicious viper? Two? “And I would done seven, if I happened to have seven!”

105 There is a similar ironic joke, where Juvenal takes an already scandalous assertion about the past (women murdering husbands and children!) and then finds a present circumstance which manages to top it, at 15.116-119, where Iphigenia’s (attempted) sacrifice in Tauris is contrasted positively with Egyptian cannibalism since “at least Iphigenia only had to worry about the sacrificial knife!” (ulterius nil/ aut gravius cultro timet hostia). 251

Though the use of sed at line 638 makes such a reading tempting in its literalness, we should dismiss the urge to take seriously Juvenal’s claims or worries about credibility expressed just before.106 Instead, we should focus on how these lines mirror moments from throughout the rest of Satire 6 and transition to enacting in satire the conflict taking place on Roman streets. Pontia’s boldness in admitting her guilt represents the same unconcerned dismissal of Juvenal’s moral protestations as we saw in the shameless loves early in Satire 6.107 Further, the disbelief of Juvenal’s question tune duos, emphasized by the anaphora at lines 641-42, stems from her violation of gender norms: Juvenal cannot imagine that a woman would be capable of this.

Yet the interjection immediately preceding it gives the reader a new lens to view the form of the lines as well. These moments of drama reflect an irruption of the problems of Rome into satiric verse itself; Roman women are, day by day, becoming more like tragic villainesses and, just as “worrisome,” satire is becoming more like tragedy in form and content.108

106 Powell 1999, arguing strongly against using this or any passage as evidence for the intrusion of the high style into Juvenal, asserts that Juvenal is merely asserting the credibility of the subject matter to follow, rather than making any implications about his style. He notes that Pontia which immediately Juvenal’s declaration (ll. 638-40) speaks in ordinary, unpoetic Latin, completely unlike a character from, e.g., a tragedy of Seneca. This reading, besides being uninspiringly literal, ignores previous uses of hiatus to indicate a high style: quid dignum tanto feret hic promissor hiatu, Hor.AP.138 (cf. fabula seu maesto ponatur hianda tragoedo, Pers. 5.3). Indeed, although Powell correctly plots how Juvenal is constantly undercutting his own use of high language (e.g. pairing the solemnly archaic induperatorem with the rough glutisse at 4.28-29), he doesn’t fully address what effect the prevalence of this language has in Juvenal, however much it comes to parody. Add, now, Nadeau 2011 Appendix 1 (358-439) for a systematic appraisal of Juvenal’s (ab)use of the Grand Style.

107 Cf. the outrageous defense of the wife caught in flagrante delicto earlier in the satire (just before the interlude on the Punic War), comically calling on Quintillian for a rhetorical strategem (dic aliquem sodes hic, Quintiliane, colorem, 6.280) and climaxing in her assertion, ’homo sum’ (6.279-285).

108 Keane 2006: 15-18 is right to emphasize the ambiguity of 6.634ff., arguing that the reader must determine for him/herself what is Juvenal’s exact relationship with drama. Keane uses these lines as a springboard into a discussion of the “dramatic project” of satire, where satirists play directors, performers, and spectators, one and all, and inhabit a world defined by performance and theatricality. Her observations about how to read satire’s continual fascination with the theatrical and the spectacular remain valuable, but 252

The remainder of the satire bounces between “actual” Roman women and their tragic models; indeed, it is sometimes unclear whether Juvenal is discussing Roman women through the lens of tragic heroines (i.e. Roman women are like Clytemnestras and

Danaids, but worse) or if he is commenting on the new-found plausibility of tragedy in light of contemporary “tragic” crimes (credamus tragicis quidquid de Colchide torva/ dicitur et Procne, 6.643-44). Juvenal contrasts how acts of passion and anger—tragic motivations—incur less astonishment (minor admiratio, 6.646) 109 than cold-blooded murder of women today (scelus ingens/ sana facit, 6.651-52). The permeability of boundaries in Rome is thus reflected in the metatheatrical gestures that cap the section, for Juvenal. He climaxes with a nightmarish hallucination of Roman streets teeming with tragic murderesses: “Many Danaids and Eriphylas will run into you every morning, no neighborhood will be without its Clytemnestra” (occurent multae tibi Belides atque

Eriphylae/ mane, Clytemnestram nullus non vicus habebit, 6.655-56). In Juvenal, tragic villainesses step off of the dramatic stage and into the world of Rome; the world of the theater messily spills over into the world of satire. The evocation of the image in Satire 1 of being jostled and bumped by all the dregs and criminals of Rome (cf. cum te summoveant qui…, 1.37; occurit matrona potens, quae…, 1.69)110 is a fitting bookend to

in this section the primary issue is the one of transgression that she herself had fleshed out in an earlier study (Keane 2003: 267-69). My concern lies not with the general relationship of satire and drama/spectacle, but with the way that Juvenal posits tragedy, at this moment, as intruding into his satiric discourse and suggesting that this intrusion is programmatic in a new way. Namely, it underscores how the behavior of the women in Rome, depicted by Satire 6 as muddying conceptual waters in Rome, has the same clouding effect on satiric discourse as well.

109 The word is strongly visualizing and the notion of the Roman reader “watching” a tragedy unfold is mirrored almost immediately in the image of watching a dramatic performance an Alcestis (spectant subeuntem fata mariti/ Alcestim, 6.652-3; are the subjects/spectators clueless husbands himself?), and the contrast of this drama with actual female behavior in Rome (similis si permutation detur,/ morte viri cupiant animam servare catellae, 6.653-4).

110 Indeed, the “powerful matron” from 1.67ff. is a poisoner of her husband herself! 253 the unit formed by Books 1 and 2 of Juvenal’s Satires, yet the image from Satire 6 goes further. Rome has become so unstable because of the female behavior depicted in Satire 6 that the lines between tragedy and satire and the lines between fact and fiction have become permeable.

Juvenal wraps up the satire with an anti-climactic joke (that women use poison instead of axes these days, only resorting to good old-fashioned butchery if you’ve inured yourself to poison like Mithridates, 6.657-61), but the damage has been done. Juvenal offers an apocalyptic vision for Rome and for Roman satire, wherein the deviancy rampant in the former infects the latter.111 Note that the verbs at lines 655-56 are not present, but future (occurent, habebit): the reader is left with an overwhelming feeling that Rome has reached some kind of critical mass, yet will somehow continue to get worse.112 The rigidity of Juvenal’s categories (gender and genre) has been permanently undermined, and, in depicting Rome, Juvenal’s dependence on categorical thought implicates his satire in the same struggle for meaning that Roman conceptions of gender have been experiencing. The gloomy end of the satire makes it clear who “wins” this struggle.

111 Juvenal famously uses idea of vice as infection in a non-programmatic way at 2.78-81: dedit hanc contagio labem/ et dabit in plures, sicut grex totus in agris/ unius scabie cadit et porrigine porci/ uvaque conspecta livorem ducit ab uva.

112 Cf. 1.147-49: nil erit ulterius quod nostris moribus addat/ posteritas, eadem facient cupientque minores,/omne in praecipiti vitium stetit. 254

Conclusion

Juvenal’s satiric picture of Rome is complicated by an interpretative paradox. On one hand, the backdrop of Rome which Juvenal so memorably presents throughout the satires, whether focusing on concrete social and moral perversions in the first three books of Satires or framing more universal ethical considerations with a peculiarly Roman flavor in later books,1 is a chaotic and unstable place: the proper value of things has been overturned, words point to their opposites, and social and moral categories have been diametrically reversed. Juvenal’s way of envisioning Rome, on the other hand, relies on stable correspondences: that external features, bodily or otherwise, can carry a single, recognizable meaning; that dramatic reenactment of vice and folly can serve on its own to reveal those failures; that names and exempla can be deployed unproblematically to refer to traits to follow or avoid.

Juvenal’s satire can hardly escape unscathed from the environment that it creates and that it claims to originate from. Indeed, the contradiction between these two concerns—the muddle of signs at Rome and the straightforward references of satiric discourse—emerges most aggressively at those moments in which Juvenal attempts to impose satirical order on Rome’s semiotic conflicts. This study has targeted Satires 2, 8, and 10 because each of these satires alerts the reader metapoetically to the underlying logical contradiction between Juvenal’s mechanics and his objects; this recognition authorizes the reader to fashion a new critical lens which especially highlights referential

1 E.g. the pompa circensis in Sat. 10 (discussed at Ch. 3.A); the irruption of a harangue against captatores (12.93-130) into the account of a friend’s homecoming in Sat. 12; the evocation of villas at Caieta, Tibur, and Praenestina as emblems of self-destructive consumption in Sat. 14 (14.87-95). Indeed, though one need not fully accept the thesis of Anderson 1985 (that Juvenal is trying to criticize the “prejudices” of the speaker of Satire 15), Anderson is convincing in showing that the view of foreign inhumanity (and the hypocritical disavowal of the same faults by Romans) is particularly Roman.

255 paradox as an integral part of Juvenal’s satiric program. Juvenal’s satire becomes, on this model, not just a picture of the ills of contemporary Rome, but a demonstration of how those ills complicate the very process of recording them.

In Satire 2, Juvenal crafts one of his most visually arresting and imaginative pictures of Roman sexual deviance; his approach initially founds itself on “exposure,” drawing to the surface the grimy secrets which Rome’s inhabitants have kept under wraps or in their bedrooms, until it climaxes with the figure of Gracchus, a publically social and moral self-contradiction: a noble who crosses lines of class to fight in the arena and a man who is married as bride to another man. Juvenal clothes and stages his Roman actors not as they do look but as they should, so as to reveal to the reader’s imagination their true natures. Yet Juvenal’s opening conceit, that manly external appearances have become an unreliable token of internal sexual propriety, destabilizes the foundation of

Juvenal’s envisioning from the outset. Appearing at the opening of Juvenal’s satiric corpus, Satire 2 reveals a subtle dimension of Juvenal’s depiction of widespread perversion at Rome: satire, in its attempt to document the interpretative crises rampant in Rome, will inevitably absorb them.

Juvenal opens Satire 8 with a vivid tableau of noble dissipation to win the reader’s sympathy for a systematic rebranding of Roman nobilitas. It begins uncontroversially enough, with Juvenal insisting that the prestige that birth conveys ought to be correlated instead with virtue; nobilitas should again become a watchword for virtus. Yet as

Juvenal’s picture of Roman nobility develops, his satire remains unable to find a point in the Roman past where the virtuous mos maiorum was, in fact, the rule. Likewise, his attacks on the evaporating social boundaries between the noble-born and the vulgar

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(emblematized by Lateranus and the patricians on stage, 8.146-230) become meaningless if his concern is to realign virtue with benefits conferred by birth. His discussion vacillates in its concern between nobility (the reified class of patrician Romans whose transgressions Juvenal catalogs) and “nobility” (the essential characteristic which is the origin of that class’ elevated ideological position and which should coincide with virtus).

His techniques reveal and reflect this instability: his metatheatrical conceits generically replicate the transgressions of the Roman nobles, and his metonymic use of names is paradoxically founded on a stable reference to ideas of “nobility” and “virtue.” The reoccurrence of the same referential tensions that arose in Satire 2 demonstrates that the instability of meaning and its self-conscious reflection in satire’s discourses is a problem that acts across books of Juvenal’s corpus, regardless of the changes in tone or mode

(more ironic, less vivid) between them.

Though Book 3 remains solidly grounded in critique of Roman society (patronage and vice), the first satire in Book 4, Satire 10, moves immediately to more global concerns. Despite Juvenal’s evolving mode of satire, there is an underlying continuity to his concerns and outlook. He continues to hone in on tears in the fabric of interpretation by insisting that the way we have become accustomed to evaluating the world is simply wrong. He proposes to replace our damaged perspective with that of Democritus, who

Juvenal claims saw the folly of the world as it actually was and whose personal remedy for the blindness of others was universal mockery. Yet his process of recasting reveals itself as necessarily contingent; Democritus’ authority for the accuracy of his worldview rests only on the self-evident folly of the world as he envisions it. The introduction of the stand-in figure of Democritus is exactly what makes the reader realize how provisional

257 the satiric worldview is and ironizes its claims to be totalizing. The straightforward understanding of Juvenal’s visual practices in Satire 10, which purports to demonstrate unequivocally the world’s irrationalities, is undercut by a self-conscious recognition that they are projections, rather than reflections, of Rome.

Indeed, when one reads these three satires against each other, one can see not just an underlying concern with meaning and value compromised by vice or folly; more precisely, one can understand how Juvenal’s explicit discussion of the problems of meaning at Rome locates satire itself within her boundaries. Satire, in Juvenal’s hands, becomes a metapoetic reflection of the very crises which it depicts. This understanding opens up valuable new avenues in satires which manifest problems of reference without explicitly addressing them. Through an application of this model to Satire 6, the reader becomes aware of how the mechanics of Juvenal’s satire manifests some of the very traits which he lambasts in Roman matrons. Female deceptiveness, for example, captured in

Roman women’s love for cosmetics designed to redefine external features, finds its counterpart in Juvenal’s love of externalized depiction and satiric condensation. This intersection between mechanics and object reaches its fulfillment in the coincidence of an apocalyptic vision of Rome overrun by murderous women and a poetological declaration that the boundaries of Roman satire have been penetrated by Greek tragedy.

This work does not claim to be a singular, final view of Juvenal or visuality in

Roman verse satire. It does not rigorously examine the full range of categories or tools of ancient visual criticism that the poet trained in rhetorical schools of the 1st century C.E. would have had at his disposal. It is also true that the visualizing model becomes weaker in the later satires of Juvenal, though often the logic of correspondence, which fuels

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Juvenal’s visual practices, remains. Still, Book 5 too can be read profitably in light of the critical model of this study. Indeed, Satire 14, one of the most ignored satires in Juvenal’s corpus,2 adds a new facet to visual imagination in Juvenal, for it considers the effect of satiric vision on its imagined audience. Satire 14 begins by claiming that we pass on our vices to the next generation through example, using dice-games as its first illustration of dissolution:

Plurima sunt, Fuscine, et fama digna sinistra et nitidis maculam haesuram figentia rebus, quae monstrant ipsi pueris traduntque parentes. si damnosa senem iuvat alea, ludit et heres bullatus parvoque eadem movet arma fritillo. 5 (14.1-5)

There are very many things, Fuscinus, worthy of a bad reputation and fixing a stain sure to stick on splendid things, which parents themselves show and hand down to their children. If prodigal dice-games amuse the old man, his heir, still with his youthful amulet, plays too and dispatches his troops with a little dice- box.

There is a metapoetic resonance to these lines to unpack, for what has Juvenal’s project been but to show (monstrant, 3) his reader examples of Roman vice? Later in the satire,

Juvenal says precisely that, likening his picture of the world to a spectacle which bests any “official” show: “I am showing an outstanding pleasure, which you couldn’t find the equal to in any theater or on any platforms of a luxurious praetor, if you should watch…”

(monstro voluptatem egregiam, cui nulla theatra/ nulla aequare queas praetoris pulpit lauti/ si spectes…, 14.256-68). When Juvenal associates “showing” vice and

“transmitting” it (tradunt, 3), he endangers his own project by making it vulnerable to the reproach that it contributes to the very phenomenon it describes.

2 The only studies up to this point are Keane 2007: 35-41, Corn 1992, and Stein 1970, though none are outstanding.

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In fact, this opening intertextually “inherits” (heres, 4) a satirical conceit already used twice in Juvenal, the derisive comparison of a dice game to warfare. In the opening satire, the bankrupts playing dice acted as a symbol of Rome’s rich supply of vice, their tools compared to armories and their games to battles:

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. 90 proelia quanta illic dispensatore uidebis armigero! (1.87-92)

And when has there been a richer reserve of vices? When has a greater opening for greed laid open? When has dice these minds? For there is no journey to the fortune of the gaming table with mere pocketbooks as companions; instead they play with an entire safe wagered. How many battles will you see there with the accountant as shield bearer!

We have likewise seen this image used in the opening scene of Satire 8, where Juvenal pictures Roman nobles shaming their forebears by staging their dice games as debased re- enactments of their ancestors’ military achievements (8.9-12; see Ch. 2. A). Satire 14 thus opens by destructively demonstrating its own message, for Juvenal’s previous satires have “handed down” the image of the dice-battle for the later one to “learn.” Indeed, a detailed reading of Satire 14 would reveal that a great deal of the satire collects and repeats satiric accounts of vice and foolishness already discussed in different contexts in

Juvenal. The model posited by this study could in turn shed a new poetological light on these repetitions, by demonstrating how they connect with a larger program of self- defeating discourse.

By closely analyzing the logical consequences of Juvenal’s mechanics, the reader recognizes that Juvenal programmatically undercuts his goal of representing Rome as it is. Yet, paradoxically, this difficulty is also what makes Juvenal’s satire an accurate

260 depiction of Rome. As our reading attempts to make sense of the motley clatter of

Juvenal’s text, we can be thought to re-enact the same referential struggles that Juvenal’s text envisions as integral to experiencing contemporary Rome. Juvenal’s singular achievement is a text truly representative of Rome, a behemoth of labyrinthine complexity, in which we must try not to get lost.

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Appendix: Juvenal and Modern “Self-Consuming” Literature

The model of reading Juvenal that this study has proposed, which identifies one aspect of satire’s content as the referential difficulties of Rome, activated self-consciously by mechanics in depicting it, should be familiar to readers of modern novels, particularly literature produced in Europe and America since the end of the Second World War. I would like to offer a survey of a few seminal texts of contemporary literature (Don

DeLillo’s White Noise [1985], Paul Auster’s City of Glass [1985], and Julio Cortazar’s

Hopscotch [Spanish: Rayuela; 1963, 1966]) to demonstrate some recent examples of reflexive poetics incorporated into a strategy of cultural representation. Despite the vast differences in time, form, and ideology, each of these novels investigates, and integrates in its construction, some of the same issues of reference and representation as Juvenal’s

Satires.

These citations are not meant to be anachronistic intimations that Juvenal was secretly a “postmodern classic” all along.1 Rather, I discuss them to argue for the value of my approach as a prismatically “contemporary” reading of Juvenal, where the notion of contemporaneity refracts in two directions. On the one hand, I feel that those concerns which have become centrally manifest on my reading of Juvenal—reference, contingency, indeterminancy—remain “live” issues in the cultural and literary discourse of the 21st century. They give us a reason to read (and re-read) Juvenal beyond the appeal of a documentary or artifact (of society, of rhetoric, of ideology). Nor is a historicist

1 Cf. the now-ironic title of Kevin McCabe’s interrogation of the applicability of modern critical theory to Juvenal: “Was Juvenal a Structuralist?” (McCabe 1986). The article is enlightening as a critical specimen, for it is now dated on two fronts: it rejects out of hand any “modern” critical approach to Juvenal as more appropriate for the decadent and impoverished texts of Pound and Eliot, and it uses a more or less discarded term, which rarely exists in critical discussion in its “pure” form, as a watchword for all modern theory. 262

approach irrelevant here (as I have shown in my references to Roman cultural practices and history), for Juvenal’s text positions itself self-consciously as a project of its time.

The metaficational projects of DeLillo, Auster, and Cortázar are likewise self- conscious artifacts of their own time and can be profitably analyzed as documents of the issues and concerns of their cultural origins (Latin America in the 1960s, the United

States in the 1980s). Patricia Waugh’s succinct 1984 survey of the explosion of self- conscious experimental fiction in the decades after World War II offers a specimen of a contemporary reading of those works which envisions them as representational. For

Waugh, the experimentation of post-war metafiction is a particular way of inscribing the world—described in some ways that seem remarkably similar to the “Rome” of

Juvenal—in a text:

The historical period we are living through has been singularly uncertain, insecure, self- questioning and culturally pluralistic. Contemporary fiction clearly reflects this dissatisfaction with, and breakdown of, traditional values…Contemporary metafictional writing is both a response and a contribution to an even more thoroughgoing sense that reality or history are provisional: no longer a world of eternal verities but a series of constructions, artifices, impermanent structures. The materialist, positivist, and empiricist world-view on which realistic fiction is premised no longer exists. (Waugh 1984, 6-7, emphasis mine)

Though Juvenal’s text is certainly a less radical negotiation of societal instability than, e.g., Alain Robbe-Grillet’s La Maison de rendez-vous (1965), in which the “same” fictional events are retold several times over in radically different configurations

(different settings, different endings, different characters), the notion that Juvenal’s text reflects, and reflects on, its world in a serious way is what has energized this study. These modern works are valuable analogues to Juvenal because an account of what constitutes their “content” must include not just their thematic concerns but their mechanics, i.e. how the text itself manifests that content.

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Don DeLillo’s classic Reagan-era novel, White Noise (1985) examines our processes of making sense of a world of unceasing, unfiltered data. One particularly cogent flashpoint for the over-driven world in which we are embedded is the modern grocery store. Early in the novel, the protagonist, Jack Gladney, a professor of “Hitler

Studies” at an imaginary Midwestern American liberal arts college encounters a fellow professor, Murray Jay Siskind, an outsider who is particularly fascinated with American consumer culture:

We ran into Murray Jay Siskind at the supermarket. His basket held generic food and drink, nonbrand items in plain white packages with simple labeling. There was a white can labeled CANNED PEACHES. There was a white package of bacon without a plastic window for viewing a representative slice. A jar of roasted nuts had a white wrapper bearing the words IRREGULAR PEANUTS. Murray kept nodding to Babette [Gladney’s wife] as I introduced them. “This is the new austerity,” he said. “Flavorless packaging. It appeals to me. I feel I’m not only saving money but contributing to some kind of spiritual consensus. It’s like World War III. Everything is white. They’ll take our bright colors away and use them in the war effort. He was staring into Babette’s eyes, picking up items from our cart and smelling them. “I’ve bought these peanuts before. They’re round, cubical, pockmarked, seamed. Broken peanuts. A lot of dust at the bottom of the jar. But they taste good. Most of all I like the packages themselves. You were right, Jack. This is the last avant-garde. Bold new forms. The power to shock.”

(DeLillo 2009: 18-19)

Murray reflects on bland packaging as a kind of “empty signifier,” where the blankness of outer contextual reference serves to simultaneously frame and obfuscate our experience of what’s within. Yes, the jar of “IRREGULAR PEANUTS” does contain unusual shapes and much refuse, but this label does not necessarily determine the final

“meaning” of the peanuts: “But they taste good,” Murray asserts.

Indeed, DeLillo’s own peculiarly objective style in the novel also positions the novel as another instantiation of our ways of filtering and deciphering meaning, in which the reader has to go through the same procedures as the protagonists (who are, after all,

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contemporary to the original audience). A little later, DeLillo gives another description of a supermarket:

Steffie took my hand and we walked along past the fruit bins, an area that extended about forty-five yards along one wall. The bins were arranged diagonally and backed by mirrors that people accidentally punched when reaching for fruit in the upper rows. A voice on the loudspeaker said: “Kleenex Softique, your truck’s blocking the entrance.” Apples and lemons tumbled in twos and threes to the floor when someone took a fruit from certain places in the stacked array. There were six kinds of apples, there were exotic melons in several pastels. Everything seemed to be in season, sprayed burnished, bright. People tore filmy bags off racks and tried to figure out which end opened. I realized the place was awash in noise. The toneless systems, the jangle and skid of carts, the loudspeaker and coffee-making machines, the cries of children. And over it all, or under it all, a dull and unlocatable roar, as of some form of swarming life just outside the range of human apprehension. (DeLillo 2009: 36).

As with perluces at 2.78 (where the “transparency” of Creticus’ garment has a metapoetic signifiance by bringing to mind the mechanical correspondence of external detail to inner characters and the problems of that equation)2 the deployment of the word “noise” comes at exactly the right moment of the description to take on two significations at once, including a self-reflexive one. “Noise” is a metaphor for the experience of modern life as an unfiltered barrage of semiotic data one must filter, process, and frame to avoid being overwhelmed.3 But at the very moment of its deployment it also symbolizes that

DeLillo’s negotiation with that “noise,” namely the discussion of his text, also embodies it. In its pedestrian evocation of apples and melons and lemons and sounds, it poses itself as a representative of the larger system of meaning which it explicitly questions.4 His text

2 Cf. the full discussion at Ch. 1, B.

3 Note, for example, the evocation of an ominous cloud of insects (locusts, ants, bees, or the like) by the intimations of the ambient hum of activity in the store (the “skid” of carts, the “loudspeaker”, the “cries,” the “roar”) and the metaphor of pulsating “swarm” of noise, just under (or on top of?) the surface.

4 Nor has the harmony of inquisition and style endeared him to every reader. See especially Myers 2001, which, in an attack on the prestige of fashionably “literary” writers (Annie Proulx, Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, Paul Auster, and David Guterson), discusses DeLillo under the rubric of “edgy” prose: “This is the sort of writing, full of brand names and wardrobe inventories, that critics like to praise as an ‘edgy’ take on the insanity of modern American life. It's hard to see what is so edgy about describing suburbia as a 265

thus forces us to determine what words or images are meaningful and what is "noise" in

DeLillo's world.

What constitutes the “reality” of the experience of life in DeLillo’s novel then?

This confrontation plays out in the plot of the novel through the main characters’ exposure, during what is euphemistically dubbed an “airborne toxic event,” to a potentially lethal chemical agent. Gladney’s obsession with his mortality comes to frame his motivations and interactions with the other characters of the work, particularly his wife. But as the passage shows, the question remains unsettled. Here, DeLillo ambivalently locates the “noise” as both an externalized feature and an internalized character of life, for the roar is “unlocatable”: “over it all, or under it all”? [my emphasis]. In Juvenal’s world of visual reference, is the truth (the “noise” in DeLillo’s structure) on the surface or under it? Because Juvenal’s chosen mode is more compressed than the expansive modern novel, we do not necessarily have to sift through a plethora of verbal details to grasp the significance of Juvenal’s moral sketches; yet the “noise” in

White Noise and the moral iconography of Juvenal require the same active interpretative process to decipher, with the possibility of short-circuiting.

Likewise, modern novels have been particularly rich in their explorations of the semoitic breakdown that Satire 8 manifests in its discussion of nobilitas. In Paul Auster’s novel City of Glass, one character (Peter Stillman) seeks to create a new utopia in

America by “repairing” language and recreating the scenario of the Tower of Babel

wasteland of stupefied shoppers, which is something left-leaning social critics have been doing since the 1950s. Still, this is foolproof subject matter for a novelist of limited gifts. If you find the above shopping list fascinating, then DeLillo's your man. If you complain that it's just dull, and that you got the message about a quarter of the way through, he can always counter by saying, ‘Hey, I don't make the all-inclusive, consumption-mad society. I just report on it.’” [final emphasis mine]. Besides simply different aesthetic viewpoints, what I think Myers fails to appreciate about DeLillo is that the “consumerism” of White Noise is itself just a metaphor for a more interesting, and less obviously temporally bounded, process. 266

where all men could collaborate through a shared language. He provides a long rambling manifesto about what might be described as broken words, the gap of meaning that opens up between language and its corresponding objects:

“For our words no longer correspond to the world. When things were whole, we felt confident that our words could express them. But little by little these things have broken apart, shattered, collapsed into chaos. And yet our words have remained the same. They have not adapted themselves to the new reality. Hence, every time we try to speak what we see, we speak falsely, distorting the very thing we are trying to represent. It’s made a mess of everything…Consider a word that refers to a thing—‘umbrella,’ for example. When I say the word ‘umbrella’ you see the object in your mind. You see a kind of stick, with collapsible metal spokes on top that form an armature for a waterproof material which, when opened, will protect you from the rain…What happens when a thing no longer performs its function? Is it still the thing, or has it become something else? When you rip the cloth off an umbrella, is the umbrella still an umbrella? You open the spokes, put them over your head, walk out into the rain, and get drenched. Is it possible to go on calling this object an umbrella? In general, people do…Because it can no longer perform its function, the umbrella has ceased to be an umbrella…[The word] is imprecise; it is false; it hides the thing it supposed to reveal.”

(Auster 2006: 76; emphasis mine)

These words fittingly coincide with the way that the form of Auster’s novel clashes with its plot. Ostensibly, City of Glass is a detective novel. The opening words propel it dramatically into the world of hard-boiled detective fiction, but immediately introduce a tension between two of the central themes of the work, retrospective interpretation (making sense of narratives) and indeterminancy through chance (which counteracts our attempts to control it):

It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not. Much later, when he was able to think about the things that happened to him, he would conclude that nothing was real except chance…The question is the story itself, and whether or not it means something is not for the story to tell. (Auster 2006: 1)

The protagonist, Daniel Quinn, is sent on a quest to follow the speaker of the harangue above (Peter Stillman), who eventually disappears. The story will eventually “fail” as detective fiction, for the conventions of the detective novel dictate searching for, and

267

arriving at, an absolute “solution” which resolves all the loose ends of the story. Auster’s plot ends in mystery and without finals answers or determinations.5 So too does Juvenal manipulate the discourse of nobilitas which he has inherited from his satiric and moralizing predecessors without coming to a final determination on what “nobility” is, what connection it has with virtue, even who should be considered noble.6 In Satire 8,

Juvenal frustrates our search to find a final signification for nobilitas and, in turn, the prestige it can confer.

In Satire 10, Juvenal expanded that indeterminancy to our interpretation of the whole world. There, using the proxy figure of Democritus within the poem, he crafted a deliberately partial viewpoint and demonstrated along the way the limitations and contradictions that confront a “Democritean” view of the world, even as he asserted that there was no other “correct” perspective. Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch (Spanish: Rayuela) creates a similarly manifold text through an experimental use of non-linear narrative. His novel consists of 155 chapters which do not need to be read consecutively, though in the preface (“Table of Instructions”) he gives two “authorized” schemes (either to read the first 56 chapters linearly and then stop or to follow an elaborate leaping “hopscotch” through the chapters).7 Even to compare the authorized schemes reveals two radically different ways for the reader to situate himself in the narrative. Chapter 1 begins an elliptical but clearly personal tale, situated in a precisely mapped Parisian landscape:

5 Contrast this with Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose (1980, trans. 1983), a similar fusion of detective story and exploration of hermeneutics. For all the mystery of the Benedictine abbey, we do find out in the end who the “real killer” was.

6 See my discussion of the final four lines (8.272-76) in Ch. 2.E. 7 Besides these two schemes, the number of possible combinations is staggering: 4.78 * 10273, which outnumbers the number of atoms in the universe, though this uncountably huge variety remains dwarfed by the uncountable infinitude of books in Borges’ “Library of Babel” (La biblioteca de Babel, 1941). 268

Would I find La Maga? Most of the time it was just a case of my putting in an appearance, going along the Rue de Seine to the arch leading into the Quai de Conti, and I would see her slender form against the olive-ashen light which floats along the river as she crossed back and forth on the Pont des Arts, or leaned over the rail looking at the water. It was quite natural for me to climb the steps to the bridge, go into its narrowness and over to where La Maga stood. She would smile and show no surprise, convinced as she was, the same as I, that casual meetings are apt to be just the opposite…

(Cortázar 1966, 3)

In the alternate version, Cortázar bids us to begin at Chapter 73, which contains a larger, more depersonalized landscape (though still Paris) and whose language is more evocative, reflective, and self-conscious:

Yes, but who will cure us of the dull fire, the colorless fire that at nightfall runs along the Rue de la Huchette, emerging from the crumbling doorways, from the little entranceways, of the imageless fire that licks the stones and lies in wait in doorways, how shall we cleanse ourselves of the sweet burning that comes after, that nests in us forever allied with time and memory…How often I wonder whether this is only writing, in an age in which we run towards deception through infallible equations and conformity machines. But to ask one’s self if we will know how to find the other side of habit or if it is better to let one’s self be borne along by happy cybernetics, is that not literature again?...The very fact that one asks one’s self about the possible choice vitiates and muddies up what can be chosen. Que sí, que no, que en ésta está . . . It would seem that a choice cannot be dialectical, that the fact of bringing it up impoverishes it, that is to say, falsifies it, that is to say, transforms it into something else … … No one will cure us of the dull fire, the colorless fire that at nightfall runs along the Rue de la Huchette. Incurable, perfectly incurable, we select the Great Screw as a ture, we lean towards it, we enter it, we invent it again every day, with every wine-stain on the tablecloth, with every kiss of mold in the dawns of the Cour de Rohan, we invent our conflagration, we burn outwardly from within, maybe that it is the choice, maybe words envelop it the way a napkin does a loaf of bread and maybe the fragrance is inside, the flour puffing up, the yes without the no, or the no without the yes, the day without manes, without Ormuz or Ariman, once and for all and in peace and enough. [end of chapter] (Cortázar 1966, 383, 384-5)

At the end of this short chapter, Cortázar directs us back to Chapter 1, giving us an entirely new frame of reference in which to view the action of the protagonists of

“main” story (Horacio Oliveira and La Maga, his mistress). Even more relevant for our purposes is his discussion of the complexities of “choice,” which he ironizes in two ways.

On one level, it brings to our attention the non-linearity of the novel form as he has cast

269

it; but, of course, Cortázar just as quickly takes it away, for he directs us to follow his alternate, but still fixed, route (shades of semita certe from 10.363).

Cortázar as author plays with the notion of will in the world, projecting the issues of choice onto the agency of the reader: will we follow “his” path or make our own?

Juvenal similarly plays with choice in Satire 10, especially in the final conceit of his last major topic, where he turns Gaius Silius’ dilemma into our own (10.338-345).8 Even as

Juvenal’s main thrust in Satire 10 is to posit a singular, monolithic view of value and human motivation, he challenges the authority of that view by subtly giving an alternate

“table of instructions,” which self-reflexively highlights the gaps and fissures of the text in an ultimately familiar way.

8 See my discussion in Ch. 3. E. 270

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