Latin Literature

Extract

James Uden's impressive new study of Juvenal's Satires opens up our understanding not only of the poetry itself but also of the world in which it was written, the confusing cosmopolitan world of the Roman Empire under Trajan and Hadrian, with its flourishing of Greek intellectualism, and its dissolution of old certainties about identity and values. Juvenal is revealed as very much a poet of his day, and while Uden is alert to the ‘affected timelessness’ and ‘ambiguous referentiality’ (203) of the Satires, he also shows how Juvenal's poetry resonates with the historical and cultural context of the second century ad, inhabiting different areas of contemporary anxiety at different stages of his career. The first book, for instance, engages with the issues surrounding free speech and punishment in the Trajanic period, as Rome recovers from the recent trauma of Domitian's reign and the devastation wrought by the informers, while satires written under Hadrian move beyond the urban melting pot of Rome into a decentralized empire, and respond to a world in which what it means to be Roman is less and less clear, boundaries and distinctions dissolve, and certainties about Roman superiority, virtue, hierarchies, and centrality are shaken from their anchorage. These later Satires are about the failure of boundaries (social, cultural, ethnic), as the final discussion of Satires 15 demonstrates. For Uden, Juvenal's satirical project lies not so much in asserting distinctions and critiquing those who are different, as in demonstrating over and again how impossible it is to draw such distinctions effectively in the context of second-century Rome, where ‘Romanness’ and ‘Greekness’ are revealed as rhetorical constructions, generated by performance rather than tied to origin: ‘the ties that once bound Romans and Rome have now irreparably dissolved’ (105). Looking beyond the literary space of this allegedly most Roman of genres, and alongside his acute discussions of Juvenal's own poetry, Uden reads Juvenal against his contemporaries – especially prose writers, Greek as well as Roman. Tacitus’ Dialogus is brought in to elucidate the first satire, and the complex bind in which Romans found themselves in a post-Domitianic world: yearning to denounce crime, fearing to be seen as informers, needing neither to allow wrongdoing to go unpunished nor to attract critical attention to themselves. The Letters of Pliny the Younger articulate the tensions within Roman society aroused by the competition between the new excitement of Greek sophistic performance and the waning tradition of Roman recitation. The self-fashioned ‘Greeks’ arriving in Rome from every corner of the empire are admired for their cultural prestige, but are also met by a Roman need to put them in their place, to assert political, administrative, and moral dominance. This picture help us to understand the subtleties of Juvenal's depiction of the literary scene at Rome; when the poet's satiric persona moans about the ubiquitous tedium of recitationes, this constitutes a nostalgic and defensive construction of the dying practice of recitatio as a Roman space from which to critique Greek ‘outsiders’, as much as an attack on the recitatio itself. Close analysis of Dio Chrysostom's orations helps Uden to explore themes of disguise, performance, and the construction of invisibility. Greek intellectual arguments about the universality of virtue are shown to challenge traditional Roman ideas about the moral prestige of the Roman nobility, a challenge to which Juvenal responds in Satires 8. Throughout his study, Uden's nuanced approach shows how the Satires work on several levels simultaneously. Thus Satires 8, in this compelling analysis, is not merely an attack on elite hypocrisy but itself enacts the problem facing the Roman elite: how to keep the values of the past alive without indulging in empty imitation. The Roman nobility boast about their lineage and cram their halls with ancestral busts, but this is very different from reproducing what is really valuable about their ancestors and cultivating real nobility – namely virtue. In addition, Uden shows how Juvenal teases readers with the possibility that this poem itself mirrors this elite hollowness, as it parades its own indebtedness to moralists of old such as Sallust, Cicero, and Seneca, without ever exposing its own moral centre. In this satire, Uden suggests, Juvenal explores ‘the notion that the link between a Roman present and a Roman past may be merely “irony” or “fiction”’ (120). Satires 3's xenophobic attack on Greeks can also be read as a more subtle critique of the erudite philhellenism of the Roman elite; furthermore, Umbricius’ Romanness is revealed in the poem to be as constructed and elusive as the Greekness against which he pits himself. Satires 10 is a Cynic attack upon Roman vice, but hard-line Cynicism itself is a target, as the satire reveals the harsh implications of its philosophical approach, so incompatible with Roman values and conventions, so that the poem can also be read as mocking the popularity of the softer form of Cynicism peddled in Hadrianic Rome by the likes of Epictetus and Dio Chrysostom (169). Both Juvenal's invisibility and the multiplicity of competing voices found in every poem are thematized as their own interpretative provocation that invites readers to question their own positions and self-identification. Ultimately Juvenal the satirist remains elusive, but Uden's sensitive, contextualized reading of the poems not only generates specific new insights but makes sense of Juvenal's whole satirical project, and of this very slipperiness.