CUP (2017) h/b 352pp £75 (ISBN 9781108416344)
This book is a tour de force of superb writing and meticulous scholarship. It is rare to find a book about Juvenal which is almost as lively as the old satirist himself, but G. certainly comes closer than the rest of us manage. His thesis is simple and maintained throughout this long but hugely readable book: Juvenal keeps himself safely out of sight in his text and avoids self-revelation at all costs. This is the Ockham’s Razor answer, perhaps, to the old conundrum of the ‘two Juvenals’: how comes it that the indignatio of books 1-3 is replaced by the more mellow ironic Democritean stance of later poems—what a student of mine said was like going from Mad Max to the Archbishop of Canterbury?
This apparent self-contradiction requires either a change of ‘heart’ at the end of book 3, or for (at least) one of the Juvenals to be an impostor. G. suggests that as Juvenal does not (unlike his satiric predecessors) foreground his own experience in the first person, then he is neither of the ‘Juvenals’ as such, but simply presents himself as an observer, keen to show us his view of life but keeping himself out of the picture and that ‘he’ was not there at all.
This is not perhaps a totally new idea. Anderson and Braund gave us the influential persona theory—the poet is offering a script of a performance in which he adopts a ‘role’ which may or may not reflect some sort of unrecoverable truth behind the words—and then James Uden argued for the poet ‘hiding in plain sight’ in his brilliant 2015 book The Invisible Satirist. G. takes this further and gives us a Juvenal who is truly a Man without Qualities, who ‘sees without being seen … [and] names without being named’ (p.100), a creator of satire ‘that cannot be tied to any identifiable body, not muted along with it’ (p.113).
Uden placed firmly Juvenal in the intellectual world of the Second Sophistic: G. puts him in the paranoid world of homo homini lupus Rome. Juvenal (‘Anon.’) fears for his safety in a world where the emperor rules what we say as well as what we do, and his style is like that of a photographer behind the lens, telling us constantly to look (aspice) at what he is seeing but never risking being ‘shot’ himself. He is an anonymous internet troll, sniping behind the camouflage. His anonymity is his cover and even his name may be a front. What little autobiographical detail we find is standard stuff (rhetorical education, having the beard shaved, old guy sitting in the sunshine) and only makes the writer sound Roman: an Every(ro)man in fact.
This theme continues in Sat. 10.196-200, where old men are also all alike, and so he blends into the senile mob. In pp. 286-291 G. adduces the similar case of Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis which also disclaims authorship and hides behind an anonymous auctor. In Sat. 3 Juvenal disclaims the words by ventriloquising the shadowy Umbricius (rather like Ofellus in Horace Sat 2.2)—thus having his anonymous cake and eating it.
Right from Sat. 1 Juvenal makes it clear that writing satire is dangerous, and G. argues that this is especially so when the emperor is himself a poet. A philistine emperor would not read at all, and, as Hadrian wanted to be the best at everything, you had better not upstage the prince. Satires 1 and 7 (G. suggests) argue that poets are all second-rate these days—including Juvenal—and that our poet makes himself sound like everyone else to avoid being singled out. This is an extreme position to take, and one which readers of Juvenal will baulk at, recalling how J. established his own poetic credentials while disassociating himself at once (Sat. 1.1-18) from the tedious poets of the day (p. 53), showing that he can take them on with one hand tied behind his back and has much better stuff to deliver. Far from blending into the crowd he is attracting a lot of attention.
Juvenal does not share his personal bodily experiences with his readers, unlike Horace, Persius and Lucilius. Where Horace lays out his own experience as if it could be ours too, Juvenal shows us other people’s bodies. If Horace is the television doctor trying out the drugs so we don’t have to, using his body as a screen for public display, Juvenal keeps his own body well screened and lets (e.g.) Naevolus in Sat. 9 bare his body for public shame. Juvenal is also bilious about fame and celebrity, and Satire 8 tells us to take down the monuments to ourselves, as famous folk cannot get away with the sins of their inferiors (pp. 117-8). Big names like Catiline are caught red-handed and the day is saved by the novus ignobilis Cicero. Cicero, I would also argue, is not named at 8.236-9 because at that stage he did not have a name to conjure with, while Catilina and Cethegus had large reputations to lose. Once the orator has made his name, Juvenal uses it (8.243-4).
G. sees Sat. 10 from the point of view of the paranoid poet. ‘Poetry is a pursuit in which it is equally perilous to stand out from the crowd’ (p.137), and Juvenal frames the poem with Ciceronian bad verse (pp.152-3). Satire 10 certainly provides good ammunition for the thesis that political and sexual eminence is risky: but the long central part of the poem, where old age in all its repellence is subjected to scrutiny and found undesirable, does not fit the same bill. Here, after all, in the mental vacuity of advanced dementia, we all achieve anonymity even from ourselves (10.232-9), but Juvenal is not advocating this as a lifestyle choice.
Satires 11 and 13 are, G. argues, both exercises in satirical table-turning. In 11 Persicus is the quarry, and our oh-so-friendly interlocutor turns anything but friendly as he airs his friend’s dirty laundry in public while giving nothing away about himself. The poem begins with bathhouse gossip, but by the end the talk there is all about Persicus. Sat. 13 does a similar job with Calvinus who (it is implied) is a drama queen and a liar, his accusation all a big fake. This differs from the standard ‘philosophical’ reading of 13 whereby Juvenal is the voice of sweet reason talking down Calvinus from shooting up the town over a few quid. G. convincingly presents Juvenal in both poems as the anonymous infiltrator and exposer of the enemy, the fake sheikh unmasking others to their shame.
G. suggests that Sat. 12 is a poem about ‘submerged poetics’ (196): Catullus (a significant name) has to jettison his poetic goods to reduce the weight of the ship [of poetry] to its bare bones in an allegorical revelation of this poet’s self-concealment as the poet sheds his poetic load to sail the choppy waters of Hadrianic Rome. This theme is varied in Sat. 14 where ‘Anon’ revels in his own impotence and even recycles his own lines as examples of the ‘needle stuck in the groove of modern education’. G. argues neatly that one of Juvenal’s best tropes is to make objects into persons and persons into objects (p.55): this is most fully realised in Sat. 15 where he deals with an instance of cannibalism, where people become bits of meat—an event which prompts one of Juvenal’s most ardently pessimistic riffs (15.159-74, discussed pp. 258-9). This poem has been criticised for being an inconsistent mash-up of misanthropy and idealism and also for being inconsequential (why paint us all as bad just because some Egyptians ate each other?). G. makes a good attempt to cover this with some ingenious suggestions. ‘You are what you eat’ is literally true in Latin where esse (to be) = esse (to eat) (pp.278-9) and G. brings out some revealing readings (e.g. of mollissima corda 15.131). Theorizing cannibalism is not easy, but G. seeks to show that both anthropophagy and philanthropy are two sides of the same coin, as both seek to ‘internalise’ the other. He also pays due reference to Uden’s political glimpse of the Roman Empire as a beast which eats up the provinces, and takes Uden’s argument (Uden p. 215 ‘If Rome is everywhere…Rome is nowhere’) to bolster his own anonymity theory.
The final Satire ends abruptly mid-sentence, and as with Lucan (and the half-lines in the Aeneid) it is tempting to see this as intentional rather than accidental. G. manages to offer an anonymous reading of the episiopesis: soldiers can beat up anyone, and so our man is left helpless—unable to see or say anything—and so he has become a silent nobody. The poem stops as soon as direct mention is made of Hadrian. ‘As soon as Hadrian arrives with his gang of boots and fists, Juvenalian satire is no more: kicked away to become an eternal condemnation of the capricious power it could no longer elude’ (p.307). This of course depends on ipsius … ducis at 16.58 referring to Hadrian himself (not proven and not agreed by all) but it does allow G. to finish his thesis with a rhetorical flourish.
The argument is superbly sustained and G. has many excellent things to say. There are gaps of course: he acknowledges (p. 11) that he has left Sat. 6 largely out of the discussion, although it could have been made to show the anonymous male impotently naming and shaming named females. The snag with Satire 6 on that reading is that dirt sticks, perhaps, and G. wishes to ‘reclaim Juvenal for the feminist guard’, though quite how this is to be done is not revealed. Sat. 6 is a good case for persona theory as it presented a pathetic man flailing his poetic arms around at the female sex and showing himself up in the process: it is less good at showing an undercover agent blasting the world around him.
Satire often presents a philosophical side and G. downplays this. There is no mention of Lucretius in the book and didaxis is mentioned only once (p. 228, 42n.), even though Juvenal is audibly aping the de rerum natura in places. Satire 8.1-12, for example, tells us to take down the monuments to ourselves, just as Lucretius (3.78) mocked those who give their lives statuarum et nominis ergo. Is there no crossover worthy of a footnote between the anonymous satirist and the apolitical Epicurean stance of λάθε βιώσας? G. sees Juvenal’s few lines of parainesis at the end of 10 as equally anonymous, as it consists of ‘whatever bargain-basement street-level pop philosophy springs to mind’ (p.152), and he sees the advice at end of Sat. 14 as a blur of contradictory bits of advice. In poem 13 we are told that we do not need philosophers and any servant of ‘Philippus’ will do just as well (13.125): Philippus, the commentators all agree, is an unknown man—QED. Poems like 12 and 13 could have been rescued as philosophical in tone if only because the safe probing interlocutor is loosely modelled on the ironic Socrates of the aporetic dialogues of Plato who demolishes his opponent without giving much away about his own views.
Typos are very few (p. 44: Martial 5.13.4 ends with dedit not dedi: p. 121 n. 105 should read Nietzsche and not Nietszsche, p.104 75n HopMan should read Hopman and I have no idea what ‘tis-speeches’ are on p. 264). The bibliography is excellent (one omission: pp. 72-3 Barchiesi and Cucchiarelli (2005) is an article in Freudenberg (2005b)) and we are provided with both a general index and an index locorum.
The style of this book is eminently readable and entertaining. I found myself laughing out loud in many places—a treat which reviewers of classical books do not enjoy very often. The Latin is (mostly) translated into fluent and highly modern English so that (e.g.) cadavere crudo (15.83) becomes ‘corpse sashimi’ and later on ‘human Parma ham’. The girls in 11.164 are expected to ad terram tremulo descendant clune which becomes ‘shuffling to the ground in a vigorous twerk’ (p. 170). Throughout the book G. pays great attention to making his own text readable and jargon-free, and he maintains an air of excitement and passion for the text under scrutiny which is as infectious as it is impressive. There is not a dull sentence anywhere, and all students of this wonderful poet will find this book invigorating and enlightening.
John Godwin