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Satire writes ‘woman’: Gendersong1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2013

John Henderson
John Henderson
Affiliation:
King's College, Cambridge
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Extract

Satire is not ‘about’ women (or even ‘Woman’). But it is tied into social discourse on gender. If you ask me, feminism has it knocked into a cocked hat.

1. Roman, Human, Man:

The important thing is to have said I AM I, or even I AM AN I THAT IS IN WITH THE CROWD THAT LIKES TO SAY I AM LIKE THIS

It is not, I suppose, difficult to state the principle that no text can simply report, image, reflect or document the ‘position’ of women in culture. Nor would it be difficult to show that all writings, ancient or modern, are implicated in this truth. I feel it as I write, feel it as you read this.

In the first place, texts always do both more and less than ‘report’ – about anything. There could not be a text recognisable as a text which just offered information indifferently as to its recipients, impersonally so far as its authorship is concerned, neutrally in terms of its role within the social, political, cultural discourses which empower it to speak.

Type
Research Article
Information
Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society (Second Series) , Volume 35 , 1989 , pp. 50 - 80
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s). Published online by Cambridge University Press 1989

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References

NOTES

2. Ortner, S. B. and Whitehead, H. (eds.) Sexual meanings. The cultural construction of gender and sexuality (1981)Google Scholar Introd. 9 usefully discuss the intersection of the ‘domain’ of ‘gender/sexuality’ with others. For this kind of point cf. esp. Richlin, A., ‘Invective against women in Roman satire’ Arethusa 17 (1984) 67–80Google Scholar; Mulvey, L., ‘You don't know what is happening, do you, Mr. Jones?’ in Parker, R. and Pollock, G. (eds.) Framing feminism. Art and the women's movement 1970–85 (1987) 127Google Scholar; Booth, W. C., ‘Freedom of interpretation: Bakhtin and the challenge of feminist criticism’ in Morson, G. S. (ed.) Bakhtin. Essays and diologues on his work (1986) 159Google Scholar.

3. See esp. Richlin, A., The Garden of Priapus. Sexuality and aggression in Roman humor (1983) passimGoogle Scholar.

4. Bradbury, M., Unsent letters (1988) 174Google Scholar.

5. ‘To find bigotry funny implicates you in replicating bigotry’ (Richlin (n. 2) 73). ‘To talk of women unjustly is to act unjustly’ (Booth (n. 2) 155). Do you find this funny: ‘I refer without comment’ (my emphasis) ‘to some statements by a modern psychologist, which include the phrase “the female's more intense experience of pain and pleasure” …’? (Rudd, N., Themes in Roman satire (1986) 203 n.8)Google Scholar.

6. See Kappeler, S., The pornography of representation (1986) 108Google Scholar. On the ‘gatekeepers’ of Literature, cf. Cameron, D., Feminism and linguistic theory (1985) 81 fCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7. Weedon, C., Feminist practice and poststructuralist theory (1987) 102Google Scholar.

8. For arguments against such efforts to abort analysis see Belsey, C., The subject of tragedy. Identity and difference in Renaissance drama (1985) 5Google Scholar, (‘fiction’) and Booth (n. 2) 149 (‘aesthetics’). Davis, L. J., Resisting novels. Ideology and fiction (1987) 110Google Scholar sums up neatly: ‘Knowing is represented, not being’.

9. See Douglas, M., Purity and danger. An analysis of pollution and taboo (1966) 140Google Scholar; Cameron (n. 6) 62; Dworkin, A., Intercourse (1988) 175Google Scholar.

10. Weedon (n. 7) 118.

11. Cf. MacCannell, D. and MacCannell, J. F., ‘The beauty system’ in Armstrong, N. and Tennenhouse, L. (eds.) The ideology of conduct. Essays in literature and the history of sexuality (1987) 210Google Scholar. Docherty, T., John Donne, undone (1986) 57Google Scholar, explains how this model makes the human/male into what is ‘here’ but also ‘everywhere’, orientation round the male producing and produced by male-power, maleness, human selfness.

12. E.g. Dyer, R., ‘Male sexuality in the media’ in Metcalf, A. and Humphries, M. (eds.) The sexuality of men (1985) 28Google Scholar. On ‘generic’ use of ‘man’, see Greene, G. and Kahn, C., ‘Feminist scholarship and the social construction of woman’ in Greene, G. and Kahn, C. (eds.) Making a difference. Feminist literary criticism (1985) 2Google Scholar; Cameron (n. 6) 84f., Kramarae, C., ‘Proprietors of language’ in McConnell-Ginet, S., Borker, R. and Furman, N. (eds.) Women and language in literature and society (1980) 63Google Scholar. No one ‘position’ for women, but a contradictory construction across social discourses: Betterton, R., Looking on. Images of femininity in the visual arts and media (1987) Introd. 9Google Scholar; Ruthven, K. K., Feminist literary studies. An introduction (1984) 75Google Scholar; Greene & Kahn (above) 1.

13. Eg. Faust, B., Women, sex andpronography (1982) 97Google Scholar; Caplan, P. (ed.) The cultural construction of sexuality (1987)Google Scholar Introd. 1f., Connell, R. W., Gender and power. Societies, the person and sexual politics (1987) passimGoogle Scholar.

14. M. Wittig quoted in de Lauretis, T. (ed.) Feminist studies/critical studies (1988) 13Google Scholar; McConnell-Ginet et al. (n. 12) Introd. 16; Ortner and Whitehead (n. 2) Introd. 1f., Greene and Kahn (n. 12) 1f.

15. Weedon (n. 7) 140.

16. Belsey (n. 8) 149f.

17. Eg. Richlin (n.3) 56; Wittig, M., ‘The mark of gender’ in Miller, N. K. (ed.) The poetics of gender (1986) 65fGoogle Scholar. ‘Even to write of the masculine ego is caught in the narcissism it describes’ (Easthope, A., What a man's gotta do (1986) 44)Google Scholar.

18. Pollak, E., The poetics of sexual myth. Gender and ideology in the verse of Swift and Donne (1985) 77Google Scholar makes out a similar case à propos of Pope.

19. McCannell and McCannell (n. 11) 208.

20. ‘Aesthetic integrity and the expression of psychosocially “healthy” attitudes have been read as ideological innocence’ (Pollak, n. 18, 19, on Pope). Pollock, G. ‘What's wrong with “Images of Women”?’ in Parker, and Pollock, (n. 2) 132fGoogle Scholar. explains how ideology naturalises representations.

21. Cf. Booth (n. 2) 174.

22. For this analytic concept cf. eg. Heath, S., ‘Joan Rivière and the masquerade’ in Burgin, V., Donald, J. and Kaplan, C. (eds.) Formations of fantasy (1988) 50Google Scholar.

23. Greene and Kahn (n. 12) 22.

24. Weedon (n. 7) 147; Richlin (n. 2) 75.

25. Greene and Kahn (n. 12) 6; Weedon (n. 7) 167.

26. See Davis (n. 8) 167.

27. Belsey (n. 8) 6.

28. ‘Satire, insofar as it is built on the assertion of difference, is the most self-effacing and self-implicating of rhetorical strategies; even as it distances what we hate, it reflects the very image of ourselves’ (Pollak (n. 18) 179).

29. Quintana, R., ‘Situational satire: a commentary on the method of Swift’ in Tuveson, E. (ed.) Swift. A collection of critical essays (1964) 95Google Scholar.

30. All refs. are to the fragments as in Warmington, E. H., Remains of Old Latin, volume 3, Lucilius. The Twelve Tables (1979)Google Scholar.

31. Ramage, E. S., Sigsbee, D. L. and Fredericks, S. C., Roman satirists and their satire. The fine art of criticism in ancient Rome (1974) 2Google Scholar.

32. Ramage (n. 31) 40.

33. See what you make of this description: ‘the sensualist's rollicking description of pleasures and passions and also the moralizing satirist's condemnation of those of others’ (Coffey, M., Roman satire (1976) 52)Google Scholar.

34. Cameron (n. 6) 76f.

35. Cf. Docherty (n. 11) 61f. Maclean, M., Narrative as performance. The Baudelairean experiment (1988) 56fGoogle Scholar. shows just how the ‘world’ observed (ie. constructed) by the roving male eye/I strolling through (so articulating) public space makes of him that ‘man (of the world)’. A paradigm case would be the view of Horace in Serm. 1.2.1f. of street life and its motley crew of ‘street walkers’ over against the self-presentation of Horace as storyteller of his own performance ‘strutting his stuff’ down Easy Street in Serm. 1.9.1f. Maclean (126f.) incisively analyses ‘The tradition of rhetorical aggression’, including narration as the ritual display of male violence, the very core of the ‘Street legal’. The classic descriptions of the evil eye roving poisonously through civic space are Demosth. 25.52 and Rhet. Ad Herenn. 4.62.

36. Richlin (n. 3) 164ff.; Rudd (n. 5) 196f., 205f., 217f. for studies.

37. Coffey (n. 33) 221 n. 59 for ‘self-address’ in L.

38. Girls: Collyra 21, Cretaea 897, Hymnis, 887–99, 1166–8. Boys: Gentius, Macedo, 308–10; cf. Anderson (1982) 34; Coffey (1976) 51.

39. Cf. Heldmann, K. ‘Zur Ehesatire des Lucilius’ Hermes 107 (1979) 339f.Google Scholar, Richlin (n. 3) 173; Rudd (n. 5) 47. So L took care to mark out his patch at once in his first book (For us ‘Book 26’, = 632–736).

40. Rudd (n. 5) 10.

41. Anderson (n. 38) 21.

42. Williams, G., Tradition and originality in Roman poetry (1968) 452Google Scholar.

43. Coffey (n. 33) 45.

44. Weedon (n. 7) 78f., esp. 88, 173; Belsey (n. 8) Introd. ix.

45. Moi, T., Sexual/textual politics (1985) 8Google Scholar of the ‘phallic self’ – ‘self-contained’ and ‘powerful’.

46. Ramage etc. (n. 31) 32.

47. Rudd (n. 5) 226 for L's Greek.

48. Richlin (n. 3) 172; Rudd (n. 5) 5f.

49. Rudd (n. 5) 165 on slang and insults; cf. Harrison, G., ‘The confessions of Lucilius (Horace Sat. 21 30–4 CA 6 (1987) 38fGoogle Scholar. on the dubious ethics of free-speaking as betraying confidences.

50. Anderson (n. 38) Introd. viii.

51. Weedon (n. 7) 66; Jones, A. R., ‘Inscribing femininity: French theories of the feminine’ in Greene, and Kahn, (n. 12) 81Google Scholar; Rose, J., Sexuality in the field of vision (1986) 21Google Scholar: man as the origin of meaning by his propriation of naming.

52. On the wide range of libertas, Anderson (n. 38) 15f.; for L's ‘cult of his own personality’, Williams (n. 42) 449.

53. Dworkin, A., Pornography. Men possessing women (1981) 13Google Scholar, cf. Belsey (n. 8) 8.

54. Veyne, P., ‘Homosexuality in ancient Rome’ in Ariès, P and Béjin, A (eds.) Western sexuality. Practice and precept in past and present times (1985) 29Google Scholar; Veyne, P. (ed.) A history of private life, III (1987) 204Google Scholar; Richlin, A., ‘The meaning of irrumare in Catullus and Martial’, CPh 76 (1981) 42Google Scholar: rape women, anally rape boys, orally rape adult males, orally revile all.

55. Anderson (n. 38) 3.

56. Coffey (n. 33) 52.

57. Weedon (n. 7) 173.

58. Weedon (n. 7) 88; Belsey (n. 8) 5: ‘an effect of the meanings it seems to possess’.

59. Richlin (n. 3) 30, 170f.

60. Nisbet, R. G. M., ‘Persius’ in Sullivan, J. P. (ed.) Critical essays on Roman literature. Satire (1963) 49Google Scholar stresses the ‘personal’ over ‘invective’ in satire.

61. Anderson (n. 38) 30.

62. Raschke, W. J., ‘Arma pro amico – Lucilian satire at the crisis of the Roman republic’, Hermes 115 (1987) 329Google Scholar; Veyne (n. 54) 174f.

63. Cameron, D. and Frazer, E., The lust to kill (1987) 176Google Scholar.

64. Richlin (n. 3) 66. What follows is greatly influenced by Zetzel, J. E. G., ‘Horace's Liber sermonum: the structure of ambiguity’, Arethusa 13 (1980) 58–77, esp. 68fGoogle Scholar.

65. Virgil at Hor. Serm. 1.6.55f. plays both midwife and elder sibling, blazing the trail followed by Horace, his Bucolica a ‘Treaty of Brundisium’ in ten pieces for Pollio to Horace's ‘Treaty of Tarentum’ for Maecenas, cf. Van Rooy, C. A., ‘Imitatio of Vergil, Eclogues in Horace, Satires book 1’, A Class 16 (1973) 69–88Google Scholar.

66. Cf. Zetzel (n. 64) passim.

67. DuQuesnay, I. le M., ‘Horace and Maecenas: the propaganda value of Sermones 1’ in Woodman, A. and West, D. (eds.) Poetry and politics in the age of Augustus (1984)Google Scholar for an introduction to the politics of this book.

68. See Curran, L. C., ‘Nature, convention and obscenity in Horace, Satires 1 2’, Arion 9 (1970) esp. 230fGoogle Scholar. Cf. Stallybrass, P. and White, A., The politics and poetics of transgression (1986) 106Google Scholar: ‘Augustan satire was the generic form which enabled writers to express and negate the grotesque simultaneously’.

69. Eg. Hor. Serm. 1.2.1f., A Whole Sick Crew at Tigellius' wake and nil medium, 1.3.18f., etc. Cf. Weedon (n. 7) 112: ‘To be inconsistent in our society is to be unstable’.

70. Cf. Stallybrass and White (n. 68) 201 for the doubling-back in this process: ‘the dominant squanders its symbolic capital so as to get in touch with the fields of desire which it denied itself as the price paid for its political power’.

71. So, eg. Horace: Maecenas (in Serm. 1.1–3):: Pest: Horace (in Serm. 1.9), cf. Zetzel, J. E. G., ‘The poetics of patronage in the late first century B.C.’ in Gold, B. K. (ed.) Literary and artistic patronage in ancient Rome (1982) 94Google Scholar. With the emphatically foregrounded suppression of the Pest's name, Serm. 1.9.3, it becomes clear that we are to realise that there is only one person in this poem: ‘Horace’ meets and claims to trounce the ‘Horace’ of inuidia, the social-climber duly spotted by plebeian malice ( = commonsense), who is convicted twice-over by the satire: 1) he will not do for Pest-Self what Virgil did for him and 2) he protests overmuch that he cannot. (But that's not the way things are – ‘a likely story’ thinks the man in the street!). Cf. Wilson, P., ‘Feminism and the Augustans: some readings and problems’ in MacCabe, C. (ed.) Futures for English (1988) 82Google Scholar: ‘Augustan satire is perhaps uniquely adept at constructing the terms of its own criticism and at pre-emptive disablement of the opposition’.

72. Anderson (n. 38) Introd. xiv; cf. Zetzel (n. 64) 70f.

73. See Hubbard, T. K., ‘The structure and programmatic intent of Horace's first satire’, Latomus 40 (1981) esp. 317fGoogle Scholar.

74. Esp. Armstrong, D., ‘Horace, Satires 1.1–3: a structural study’, Arion 3 (1964) 86fGoogle Scholar.

75. Anderson (n. 38) 21.

76. Kennedy, D. F., Review of Woodman and West (n. 67) LCM 9 (1984) 158fGoogle Scholar.

77. See esp. Curran (n. 68).

78. Anderson (n. 38) 38.

79. MacCannell and MacCannell (n. 11) 207.

80. Dworkin (n. 9) 11.

81. Cf. Richlin (see above n. 2) esp. 72, McCannell and McCannell (see above n. 11) 211.

82. See esp. Curran (n. 68) 242f.

83. Dworkin (n. 9) 166.

84. Dworkin (n. 9) 77; Bristol, M. D., Carnival and theater. Plebeian culture and the structure of authority in Renaissance England (1985) 164Google Scholar.

85. Bushala, E. W., ‘The motif of sexual choice in Horace, Satire 1.2’, CJ 66 (1971) 312–15Google Scholar.

86. See curran (n. 68).

87. Weedon (n. 7) 37. Cf. Heath, S. ‘Psychopathia sexualis: Stevenson's strange case’ in MacCabe, (n. 71) 97fGoogle Scholar.

88. Pace Baldwin, B., ‘Horace on sex’, AJPh 91 (1970) 460–5Google Scholar. The Boys' Own proverb rex eris si recte facies is written loud and clear into the rhetorical force under-pinning the ‘Sheik buys mare for stable’ scene to model for ‘Everyman sorts out his he-man harem’ of Hor., Serm. 1.2. 86–90 (just quoted)Google Scholar.

89. For the mechanism of the purging of low, ambivalent, equivocal laughter into the ‘clean’ wit that may constitute a philosophy, cf. Bristol (n. 84) 125f.

90. Williams, G., ‘Horace’, G&R n.s. 6 (1972) 17, 18Google Scholar. Again, we are implicated in this abusive discourse on gender where Woman is treated here as the ‘fac-totem’, the one that gets men everywhere.

91. See Richlin (n. 3) passim. On 1.8 see Anderson (n. 38) 74f.; Hallett, J. P., ‘Pepedi/diffissa nate ficus. Priapic revenge in Horace Satires 1 8’, RhM 124 (1981) 341–7Google Scholar.

92. Hor. Serm. 1.8.3f. Cf. Heath (n. 87) 102, ‘Male sexuality is neither the foregone conclusion of an animal passion nor the horror of an unspeakable darkness but once it is envisaged within this system that is all that can be said, all that is allowed’.

93. Suet. Vit. Horat. ad fin., humatus et conditus est extremis Esquiliis iuxta Maecenatis tumulum. Bien trouvé?

94. See my (rude but right) essay ‘Suck it and see (Horace, Epode 8)’ in Whitby, M., Hardie, P. and Whitby, M. (eds.) Homo Viator. Classical essays for John Bramble (1987) 105–18, esp. 112Google Scholar.

95. On ‘bitchy’/‘crone’ Canidia as the ‘inspiration’ of Horace's pre-Actium poetry, poetic avatar of the Actium casulaty, namely Canidius Crassus, cf. Henderson (n. 94) 112f.

96. This is traditional, of course: perhaps it is even paradigmatically ‘tradition’ (I think of it silently, as ‘self-deprication’). Cf. Richlin (n. 3) 59, 124.

97. Richlin (n. 2) 69f.

98. Richlin (n. 2) 69.

99. Richlin (n. 2) 71; Dworkin (n. 9) 76. On ‘demonisation’ see Stallybrass and White (n. 68) 58.

100. Rudd, N., The Satires of Horace (1982) 72Google Scholar. For the point cf. Schor, N., ‘Dreaming dissymmetry: Barthes, Foucault and sexual difference’ in Jardine, A. and Smith, P. (eds.) Men in feminism (1987) 101 fGoogle Scholar. We could call what I am discussing ‘repressing fear by re-phrasing’.

101. Cf. Richlin (n. 2) 72.

102. See Hallett (n. 91). Story-telling is on show here as that primeval ‘tradition of male-bragging’, cf. Maclean (n. 35) 127f.

103. Cf. esp. Anderson (n. 38) 74f.; Van Rooy, C. A., ‘Arrangement and structure of satires in Horace, Sermones, book 1: Satire 7 as related to satires 10 and 8’, A Class 14 (1971) 83fGoogle Scholar.

104. DuQuesnay (n. 67) 38.

105. The pun on testis is foregrounded in the repetition with emphatic double negation (non … inultus) from Hor. Serm. 1.8.36 to 44 (Cf. the formulaic uidi egomet, 23 and then the poem's last word, uideres, 50).

106. MacCannell and MacCannell (n. 11) 212, and 234: ‘Women must pretend to be women so that men can be thought of as real’.

107. Cf. DuQuesnay (n. 67) 51f.

108. In his second book of satires, H falls still farther back, yielding almost entirely the aggressive voice of Egito to a series of all-too-knowing characters who demonstrate the principle discovered in Book 1, that you must say your philosophy for your self, what it all means depends on who voices what. In 2.5.74f. Tiresias is the one who tells Ulysses to trade Penelope in for a legacy. In 2.3.247f. it is Damasippus the bankrupt art-dealer who relates the Stoic Stertinius' sermon on the madness of erotic infatuation. In 2.7.46f. H's slave Davus re-tells the hall-porter's version of Stoic Crispinus' sermon on true freedom. (Or are these Saturnalian burlesques of 1 2?).

109. Foucault, M., The care of the self. The history of sexuality, III (1988) 51Google Scholar.

110. Bramble, J. C., Persius and the programmatic satire. A study in form and imagery (1974)CrossRefGoogle Scholar is the best book on gender in Roman representations.

111. A universal delusion takes the pervasive, indeed constitutive, re-working of H Flaccus by P Flaccus to signify (admiring) influence, rather than ‘anxious’, aggressive, inversion.

112. Grimes, S., ‘Structure in the satires of Persius’ in Dorey, T. A. and Dudley, D. R. (eds.) Neronians and Flavians. Silver Latin 1 (1972) 136fGoogle Scholar: ‘The character of the writer is not placed substantively in an external physical context; and the setting virtually consists of just an attitude, a strongly felt belief.’

113. Bramble (n. 110) 185f.; Jenkinson, R. ‘Interpretations of Persius' Satires 3 and 4’, Latomus 32 (1973) 521Google Scholar.

114. Eg. Belsey (n. 8) 35f.

115. Foucault (n. 109) 64f.

116. Foucault (n. 109) 45f. This is the libertas of Pers. 5.

117. Cf. Veyne (n. 54) 178 for the traditional ‘machismo’ against the solitary.

118. Bramble (n. 109) 35f.

119. ‘Ears’, esp. Reckford, K. J., ‘Studies in Persius’, Hermes 90 (1962) 476f.Google Scholar; ‘skin’: esp. Bramble (n. 109) 146f., 153f.

120. Cf. Bramble (n. 109) 41f. and passim on Pers. 1, e.g. Troades, 4; ingentis trepidare Titos, 20; (non-) viri, 36; trossulus leuis, 82; (self-condemning trendy critique of mansize) arma uirum, 96; haec fierent si testiculi uena ulla paterni/uiueret in nobis?, 103f.

121. Grimes (n. 112) 116.

122. Grimes (n. 112) 116f.; Peterson, R. G. ‘The unknown self in the fourth satire of Persius’, CJ 68 (1973–1974) esp. 209Google Scholar.

123. Kroker, A. and Kroker, M. (eds.) Body invaders. Sexuality and the postmodern condition (1988) 96CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For ‘phallogocentrism’ see above all Gallop, J., Feminism and psychoanalysis. The daughter's seduction (1982) 15fCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

124. Wilson, E., What is to be done about violence against women? (1983) 27Google Scholar.

125. Anderson (n. 38) 293f.

126. Bramble, J. C., ‘Martial and Juvenal’ in Kenney, E. J. and Clausen, W. V. (eds.) The Cambridge history of classical literature II. Latin literature (1982) 608Google Scholar.

127. Anderson (n. 38) 294.

128. Winkler, M. M., The persona in three satires of Juvenal (1983) 219Google Scholar.

129. Anderson (n. 38) 296.

130. Eg. Veyne (n. 54) 22f.

131. This account of J as a ‘Bullshitter’ extraordinaire is in the same territory as Anderson (n. 38), esp. 197f.

132. Cf. Weedon (n. 7) 101.

133. Cf. Weedon (n. 7) 101.

134. Veyne (n. 54) 22f.

135. Eg. Fredericks, S. C. ‘Irony of overstatement in the Satires of Juvenal’, ICS 4 (1979) 178–91Google Scholar.

136. This is the way to read J, without flinching. You'll find even (e.g.) Winkler (n. 128) constantly sliding back toward the humanist conception of the author.

137. Anderson (n. 38) Introd. 12.

138. On the vexed question of Laronia's status, see Braund, S. H. and Cloud, J. D., ‘Juvenal: a diptych’, LCM 6 (1981) 205Google Scholar.

139. On this poem see Anderson (n. 38) 209f.; Braund and Cloud (n. 138) 203f.; Winkler (n. 128) 90f.

140. Winkler (n. 128) 100.

141. Cf. Richlin (n. 3) 201 on the joke formulae used.

142. Cf. Anderson (n. 38) 212f.

143. Cf. Pollak (n. 18) 4f. on how ‘Women may be imaged favorably in a system of representation that operates on the ideological premise of their exclusion from the domains both of value and of meaning’. Goldberg, J., ‘Shakespearian inscriptions: the voicing of power’ in Parker, P. and Hartman, G. (eds.) Shakespeare and the question of theory (1985) esp. 118fGoogle Scholar. explains the sense in which power speaks ideology through no matter whose voice.

144. Eg. Belsey (n. 8) 213 explains how the ascription of deviancy preempts the threat of Woman.

145. For the military imagery through the poem see Anderson (n. 38) 211f.; on the inverted ‘strategy’, cf. Braund and Cloud (n. 138) 207f.

146. See Juv. 2.1–3 for J's ‘Goodbye, cruel world’: the whole poem can be read as preparation for the lovely last line's pun: 170, sic praetextatos referunt Artaxata mores, with its sound-play in which Artaxata is both a palindromous response to refer-unt and the echo and ‘mirror-image’ of praelextatos; we should also blur with mores, mora, urbem (= Roman), amator (cf. amor) in 167–8; and praetextatos is itself the pun to end all satirical puns, combining such meanings as ‘modestly dressed like a good Roman youth’, ‘the Latin for ephebic sex-pot’, ‘veiled to hide the truth’, ‘Obscenely in need of veiling’, ‘ripe for satirical revealing’, so ‘pure’ and ‘impure’: ‘(im)pure’, i.e. ‘just like satire’, ‘just like language’ and ‘just like your mind’.

147. For these and other old ‘Adultery themes’ in J see Richlin, A., ‘Approaches to the sources on adultery at Rome’ in Foley, H. (ed.) Reflections of women in Antiquity (1981) 393fGoogle Scholar.

148. Smith, W. S. Jr. ‘Husband vs. wife in Juvenal's sixth satire’, CW 73 (1980)Google Scholar for how to read J6. Cf. Winkler (n. 128) 146f.

149. See Loraux, N.The children of Athena (1987)Google Scholar 1.2 on the Greek rival, Semonides fr. 7, and its equivocal play with the genos gunaikon.

150. Cf. Juv. 11.162–70: ‘corrupt’ in more ways than one.

151. For Woman's active, central, excesses see Smith (n. 148) 329; Richlin (n. 3) 203f.

152. Foucault (n. 109) 95.

153. Veyne (n. 54) 43 for important reservations on this point.

154. Foucault (n. 109) 185; cf. Veyne (n. 54) 36f.; Van Geytenbeek, A. C., Musonius Rufus and Greek diatribe (1963)Google Scholar.

155. See esp. Bellandi, F. ‘Naeuolus cliens’ Maia 26 (1974) 279–99Google Scholar; cf. Winkler (n. 128) 107f.

156. This is the point of Bellandi (n. 155).

157. Naeuolus means ‘mole’, a natural endowment. ‘Warts and all’, then.

158. Foucault (n. 109) 34.

159. See Easthope (n. 17) passim. Another version of this paper, ‘Not ‘Women in Roman satire’ but ‘When satire writes’ ‘woman'’’ will have appeared in Braund, S. H. (ed.) Roman satire and society (1989) 89–125Google Scholar: it sets itself harder questions more simply and uses translations. What you must have noticed, if/since you read this far, is that this essay has proliferated (its own) certitudes, has tried to say that it feels bound so to do since/if it aspires to that ‘precarious minimum’ of change. It hints (at least) that any ‘explanation’ of its own treacheries could only pretend that it is ‘reporting’ an intent, namely the intent to bait mastery, while meantime it practises in unabated mastery that very system of undisturbed amassing with which Egito smears out difference. How could this Egito ‘know’ L H P or J so well, and make so many fragments – whether they be fragments of text or fragments of discourse – into such recognisable profiles? Presumably he did it by repeating the very prejudgements found in the scholarship he satirised, just as they themselves repeat the prejudgements that make up the texts of satire? How (else) could this essay ‘know’ so certainly the voicing of these texts, these above all, when it is so ‘knowing’ about the questions posed by satire, by all ‘literature’, by all ‘texts’ and by all writing, for (the possibility of) undiffracted voicing, for authentic representation, for author-isation? Bound to repeat – even now, for example – the footnote device of disavowal that is disowned above in footnote 5? Is this final footnote one last (p)lunge for accreditation? Is self-incrimination just another ruse? (But whose ‘self’? Mutato nomine de te/fabula narratur?)