The Invisibility of Juvenal James Uden Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2011 2011 James Uden All rights reserved. ABSTRACT The Invisibility of Juvenal James Uden This dissertation offers a reading of Juvenal’s Satires. It maintains that Juvenal consciously frustrates readers’ attempts to identify his poetic voice with a single unitary character or persona. At the same time, it argues that Juvenal’s poems are influenced in both form and theme by cultural trends in the early second century. The arguments staged in these poems constitute a critique of aspects of Roman intellectual culture in the reigns of Trajan and Hadrian. Contents Preface 1. Provoking the Charge: Epic Poet and Reticent Informer in Satire One The Recitation Hall (Part One) The Paradox of Contemporary Epic The Satirist as Delator The Crisis of Criticism Satiric Voices in Tacitus’ Dialogus de Oratoribus The Recitation Hall (Part Two) 2. The Invisibility of Juvenal ‘Atopic Topology’: The Thirteenth Oration of Dio Chrysostom Juvenal’s Second Satire: Strategies for Speech and Disguise Secrecy and Violence in Satire Nine 3. Satire Four: Playing the Panegyrist The Art of Exaggeration The Emperor over Nature Natural Reversal and Fish Savagery The Perils of Panegyrical Speech i 4. Cynic Philosophy and Ethical Education in Satires Ten and Fourteen Debasing the Coinage The Laugh of Democritus and the Cynic Ideal Satire Fourteen: The Domestication of Ethical Teaching 5. Satire Twelve: Repetition and Sacrifice in Hadrianic Rome Horatian Ritual and the “New Augustus” Substitution and Sacrifice: Animals and Humans in Satire Twelve The Gods and their Captatores Reading across Books: Atheism and Superstition in Satire Thirteen Appendix: Martial 12.18 and the Dating of Juvenal’s First Book ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thanks must go first to Gareth Williams, friend and mentor for the past half-decade. His support and unfailing confidence in me has always given me courage in my own ideas. Katharina Volk has been a shining academic example and valued friend over the same period. Kristina Milnor, Nancy Worman and Suzanne Saïd all had a profound impact on me in profoundly different ways, and I thank them for their generosity with their time, knowledge, and advice. I could not now imagine a place I would prefer to have spent my formative years as a classicist than Columbia, and for that I must also thank Alan Cameron, Marco Fantuzzi, Helene Foley, Liz Irwin, Elizabeth Scharffenberger, Deborah Steiner, and Jim Zetzel. Colette Boudreau, Selina Rivera and Gerry Visco also deserve thanks for eradicating any chance of boredom in the day-to-day running of the department. For financial support over this time, I thank Columbia for a graduate student fellowship, and the University of Sydney for three years’ support on a Cooper Travelling Scholarship. Joy Connolly, Kirk Freudenburg, Paul Allen Miller, and Alessandro Schiesaro kindly read individual chapters, and I thank them for their comments and criticisms. Brian Hook sent me unpublished work. I would like to thank Kirk Freudenburg (again) and Craig Williams for being part of my dissertation committee. On a more personal note, I am grateful to the University of Sydney Classics Department for my early training in Classics, especially Dexter Hoyos and Lindsay and Pat Watson. iii Maggie, Peter, and Rob Uden (my family) always supported me to pursue my ambitions in academia, even when it seemed to be far from a viable career choice. Erik Hamer has, for the past 10 years, been a solid friend, and the source of many, many books. Adam Winkel has influenced me in so many ways over the past 3 years, and I thank him for everything, along with Penny, Quevedo, Sunday Bob, and the other unforgettable inhabitants of apartment 63. Finally, I must acknowledge two teachers and scholars without whom I would never have become a classicist in the first place: Emily Matters and Frances Muecke. iv Experiar igitur, ut possum, quamquam oppletis auribus tuis, ut sic dixerim, insusurrare, sine aemulandi fiducia, cupidus imitandi. (Panegyrici Latini 12.1.5) v PREFACE This study of Juvenal’s Satires is guided by two basic ideas. First, rather than adopting any coherent persona throughout the Satires, Juvenal is invisible. The social criticism of his poems is transmitted through a crowd of voices, which constantly shift and are frequently inconsistent with one another, and the satirist consciously frustrates attempts to tie these voices to any unitary authorial persona. Second, despite this personal invisibility, rather than being detached from the political context in which they were produced, the five books of Satires engage closely and critically with the characteristic ideological controversies of the Trajanic and Hadrianic periods. The development from the earlier to the later books, usually charted in terms of a change in Juvenal’s satiric persona, should instead be linked to broader cultural shifts at Rome across the three decades of the poems’ composition. Neither timeless nor late, Juvenal is, in every sense, a satirist of the second century, in both theme and technique. The past fifty years have changed how we read Juvenal’s poetry, and Latin poetry in general. Highet’s Juvenal the Satirist (1954) was the last bastion of the strongly biographical approach. Influenced by Alvin B. Kernan’s study of Renaissance satire (1959), and more broadly by New Criticism, William S. Anderson reacted against this biographical approach by emphasizing instead that Juvenal’s poetic voice is precisely that – a deliberately constructed poetic voice, or persona (‘mask’), which ought not to be interpreted as a direct reflection of the satirist’s own beliefs. In his view, the angry speaker of the first and second books is a farcical, incompetent figure; then, as the books progress, the angry attacks of this vi figure are replaced with a more circumspect irony.1 ‘Persona theory’ was consistently presented in the scholarship as a corrective to the supposed naïveté of the biographical approach, but in fact it shares its basic premises. To speak of Juvenal’s persona is to imply that the poems construct a character that can be read from his poems, a character with at least enough internal coherence to be the recognizable object of satire. The reading process still involves connecting dots to assemble a composite picture of a speaker – albeit a speaker now understood as a fictional character rather than the author as historical figure. But then this approach typically involves constructing a picture of the author, too, and the cool control and (implicitly liberal) views of Juvenal the satirist are contrasted with the character that speaks in his poems. But rather than attempting to delineate the characteristics of Juvenal’s persona, we might better ask why he constantly frustrates the attempt. Unlike the other Roman verse satirists, Juvenal says almost nothing about himself, and rarely refers to his own experience as an ethical lesson or standard. His alienating, off-kilter poems, with their crowds of unknowable targets and their purposefully unbalanced structures, are an elaborate rhetorical exercise in self-concealment. In chapter two of this study, I demonstrate how Juvenal’s paradoxical combination of forceful indignation and personal ‘invisibility’ can be paralleled in other strands of early second-century intellectual culture, and particularly in the Greek sophistic displays associated with the Second Sophistic. On the other hand, it is precisely in the reader’s attempt to locate, define, and assess the nature and identity of the voices of his 1 Anderson’s articles are collected in Essays on Roman Satire (1982). His approach was developed most prominently by Winkler (1983) and Braund (1988) and (1996). Keane (2006: 138-40) and Rosen (2007: 220-23) have expressed dissatisfaction with the way the persona approach insulates the satirist’s voice from social reality and diminishes its responsibility for the views it espouses, concerns already aired by Braund (1997: 40). vii poems that the Satires communicate their message. It is key to Satire ten, for example, for the reader to realize the philosophical specificity of the poem’s Cynic speaker, and his incongruence with Juvenal’s other speakers. The uncomfortably extreme argument advanced in that poem therefore becomes a satiric critique on the dangerous extremism of contemporary Cynics. The questions about divine justice and the role of the gods in Satire thirteen, rather than being set out explicitly as in a philosophical dialogue, are instigated precisely by the reader’s task of disentangling the atheist from the superstitious voice in that poem. Much of the force of Satire four, on panegyric, consists in realizing the similarity between the voice of the satirist and that of the panegyrist, two forms of rhetorical discourse that depend on fictionalization and exaggeration as a protreptic to a particular view of the Empire. The fast-moving, ever-elusive ‘identity parade’2 of the Second Sophistic is transformed, in Juvenal’s texts, into a vehicle not merely for rhetorical display, but for vital, and pointedly Roman, cultural critique. Needless to say, this vision of Juvenal involves expanding our sense of the satirist’s contact with his surrounding intellectual milieu. Latinists’ instinct to use genre to organize and understand ancient literature emerges nowhere more strongly than in the case of Roman satire, the genre which, in the ubiquitously-quoted words of Quintilian, is ‘wholly ours’.3 Institutionally as well as generically, this is a Latin form, for Latinists, and the canon created by Quintilian for the purposes of Roman educational syllabi has proved an all-too convenient heuristic tool for modern literary critics in understanding these poets’ texts. Moreover, the movement dubbed the New Latin by Don Fowler introduced to the discipline, in the nineteen-eighties and nineties, more refined critical tools than ever to interpret the 2 Whitmarsh (2005: 32).