4 - A passion unconsoled? Grief and anger in Juvenal Satire 13

Summary

Anger is the passion which predominates in Juvenal's Satires. Indignatio is the driving force in the first two books, Satires 1–6. The later Satires present a rejection of indignatio which is initiated obliquely in Satire 9, the last poem in Book III, and made explicit briefly for the first time at the close of Satire 10, the opening poem of Book iv. Satire 13, the programme poem to Juvenal's fifth book, confronts the matter head-on, with an unsympathetic presentation of an angry man. This seems to invite reassessment of the angry speaker of the early books by offering a negative perspective on indignatio. The treatment of the passion of anger in Satire 13, then, has tremendous significance for our understanding of the development of Juvenal's satire. Here, however, the passion of anger concerns us in a broader sphere. The treatment of anger in Satire 13 demonstrates the vernacularisation of ideas about the nature and control of the passions which originate in the Hellenistic philosophical schools. That Juvenal not only incorporates such ideas into his satire but also exploits his audience's familiarity with them for satiric effect is an eloquent testimony to the interaction between different modes of ethical discourse.

The angry man in Satire 13 is Calvinus, the addressee in the poem, who has suffered a minor financial loss caused by fraud and perjury. Recent work has established that Satire 13 is an ironic consolatio, a mock-consolatio by the speaker to Calvinus in which the crime of fraud compounded by perjury is ‘equivalent’ to the death of a loved one and the addressee's reaction of anger is ‘equivalent’ to the bereaved person‘s reaction of grief. That is, in terms of the passions, anger replaces grief.