Poetry and Friendship in Juvenal's Twelfth Satire

Generic oppositions create an interplay of different voices in Satires 12, particularly between the genus tenue, variously nuanced, and the big genres of epic and tragedy. The integrity of the poetic idylls of a lyric Horace is contrasted with the more compromised sanctuary of Juvenal, struggling to accommodate his luxurious friends or, less kindly, practising friendship in a world in which everything is negotiable. Beyond an ahistorical opposition of generic voices emerges a narrative of intertextual influence in which Juvenal is drawn from an idyll of Augustan purity into the mercantile space of his contemporary Martial.