Juvenal and the Satiric Emotions Juvenal and the Satiric Emotions Catherine Keane 1 1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 © Oxford University Press 2015 All rights reserved. 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ISBN 978–0–19–998189–2 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper CONTENTS Acknowledgments vii Note on Texts and Translations ix Introduction 1 Generalizing about Juvenal 3 Satire and Affect 8 Satiric Emotions as Subjects and Tools 11 Themes in Roman Satire Studies 16 How to Do Things with Feelings 21 Chapter 1 Anger Games 26 The Indignant Performer 26 The Contexts of Juvenalian Anger 29 The Rhetoric Student at Work 35 Histories of Anger 38 Suppression, Contestation, Compensation 44 Anger between Friends 53 Chapter 2 Monstrous Misogyny and the End of Anger 68 Bringing It All Back Home 70 Farrago and Phantasia 73 A Look in the Mirror 79 Passing On the Burden 83 Chapter 3 Change, Decline, and the Progress of Satire 87 The Janus View 89 Anger without Eloquence 91 Ante Ora Parentum 98 Sermo and Sirens 108 Chapter 4 Considering Tranquility 117 Democritus on Display 122 Beyond Laughter 127 Democritus in Rome? 130 Demolition and Reinvention 136 The Senecan Model 146 The Satirist behind Closed Doors 150 Outside-In Satire 153 Reclaiming a Legacy 160 Chapter 5 The Praegrandis Senex 168 Rethinking the Grand Narrative 169 The Satiric Senex and the Emotional Plot 171 Old Men and Sermo 174 Nestor Redivivus 181 Not Your Father’s Ira 192 On Reading the End, or “You and What Army?” 205 Conclusion 213 Bibliography 219 Index Locorum 239 General Index 247 vi | Contents ACKNOWLEDGMENTS his book has been long in the making, and I finish it in debt to Tmany people. Over the past decade, my colleagues and students at Washington University were willing to listen to me talk about Juvenal again and again, keeping me focused on the project even as other responsi- bilities kept progress slow. Proto-chapters and overviews were also shared at conferences and colloquia in Columbia, Missouri; San Francisco; Oxford; Urbana-Champaign; Tucson; Ithaca; Austin; and Miami, Ohio, and on each occasion my audience taught me a great deal. During a luxu- rious year’s leave in 2012–13, I benefited from the help of my summer research assistant, Jacob Emmett (and from research funds provided by my department and administration); from Washington University’s Center for the Humanities, where I spent the fall as a Faculty Fellow; and from the University of Cincinnati Department of Classics, where I was a spring Tytus Fellow. As I peruse parts of the book in the future, I will be visited with visions of the different offices and desks where they were created. I will also remember the many individuals who helped make these experi- ences possible and useful, including George Pepe, Tim Moore, Caroline Bishop, Joe Loewenstein, Erin McGlothlin, Steve Zwicker, Dan Hooley, John Henderson, Susanna Braund, Barbara Gold, Susan Prince, Daniel Markovic, and Lauren Ginsburg. I have been unbelievably lucky in other mentors, supporters, friends, and readers; quite a few have left marks on this project through conversa- tions, invitations, careful evaluations, and/or other forms of inspiration. Their interventions and encouragement helped me go in new directions and solve nagging problems, and any flaws that remain in the book are my own doing. I particularly thank Ralph Rosen, Joe Farrell, Jen Ebbeler, Amanda Wilcox, Carlos Noreña, Allen Miller, David Larmour, Brian Hook, Henry Dyson, Bryce Walker, Heather Elomaa, Eric Brown, Christine Johnson, Denise McCoskey, Kirk Freudenburg (special thanks for reading a big chunk of the manuscript at a pivotal stage), and John Henderson (again). Two scholars in particular have oriented and inspired me many times over with their work and, even more important, welcomed me warmly into the field. I feel I owe as much to W. S. Anderson and Susanna Braund as Juvenal does (and that’s an awful lot). Finally, I must also single out Dan Hooley again because I have been so lucky to have him as a neighbor and to benefit from his hospitality and professional wisdom. He has given an enormous amount of the greatest gift in our line of work, time, in reading and commenting on this and other manuscripts for me. Stefan Vranka has given solid and patient support for several years now, assisted by Sarah Pirovitz, who efficiently and cheerfully shepherded my manuscript back and forth across the country and the Internet. It has been an honor to work with Oxford University Press again. The produc- tion process has been smooth and reassuring, thanks to the professional- ism of Pete Mavrikis and Susan Ecklund. Chris Lovell provided valuable advice and assistance on the indices. I thank my parents, Barry and Clare, whose sense of humor has sustained us all for forty-odd years and made it inevitable that I would be drawn to ancient comic literature. More thanks to the rest of our family—John, Angela, Dave —for cheering me on as I completed the book, and to our new joy Elizabeth for special inspiration these last few months. Finally, and for always, I am most grateful to David Scheu, who gave practical help and moral support from the proposal stage up through the proofing and indexing, and who with his matchless opti- mism has helped the good and civilized emotions prevail in our life. October 2014 viii | Acknowledgments NOTE ON TEXTS AND TRANSLATIONS or quotations, I use the Oxford texts of ancient authors wherever pos- Fsible (Juvenal and Persius: Clausen, 1992; Horace: Wickham and Garrod, 1912; Seneca’s dialogues: Reynolds, 1977). All exceptions are cited. Translations are my own except where others’ are quoted or adapted, with citations. Juvenal and the Satiric Emotions Introduction Is a satirist supposed to express emotion? Should satire engage its audi- ence’s emotions as well as its intellect and appetite for play? Precisely what feeling or feelings are appropriate to express, or to elicit, in the practice of mockery and social criticism? Any student of literature who volunteers answers to these questions has been influenced, directly or indirectly, by one Roman satiric poet. Juvenal’s sixteen Satires, written in the early second century c.e., offer memorable commentary on the role of emotion in satire. Juvenal did not simply suggest answers to the questions I pose above, but prompted the questions themselves, thus helping to shape the reception of his work and his genre. In this way as in others, “Juvenal’s satiric perspective has become completely ours.”1 In this book, I argue that my opening questions about emotion were central to Juvenal’s definition of the satirist’s role. They inspired the first pose he struck and guided his subsequent creation of satiric verse. Juvenal connects the matter of emotion’s role in satire to a broader idea that dominates satiric theory from antiquity to the present: namely, the notion that there are a variety of ways to do satire. This idea affects even the rela- tively narrowly defined Roman verse genre, which consists largely of mono- logues on moral topics or social ills. It is not simply that satire was seen as a genre “not bound, either in form or matter, by rigid rules.”2 It is more accurate to say that varietas was a definitive feature of the genre, “staged as a problem of writing . by the ancient satirists themselves” and replicated in satiric 1.Winkler, “Media Age,” 542. 2.Duff, Iuvenalis Saturae XIV, xxx–xxxi. theory.3 It is inevitable that this generic theme would permeate the work of the most prolific extant Roman satirist. The corpus of Juvenal, despite the acci- dent of transmission that severed off part of the last poem, totals nearly four thousand lines of hexameter and would originally have filled five book rolls. This is close to twice Horace’s satiric output, and more than five times that of Persius. It could only have been surpassed by the prodigious thirty books of the genre’s “inventor,” Lucilius, now almost entirely lost. Juvenal was a career satirist. He spent at least a dozen years (by some accounts, closer to thirty) producing his poems and left no other works.4 By comparison, Horace wrote satire only during the first decade of a long and generically diverse poetic career, while Persius had not even finished his single book when he died.