Beyond the Rhetoric (Part 1): Juvenal and the Roman Élite in Satires 1–3

Beyond the Rhetoric (Part 1): Juvenal and the Roman Élite in Satires 1–3 Peter Tennant University of Natal I The application of the persona theory to the Satires of Juvenal and scepticism about the role of authorial intention have served to distance the poet from his audience or reader.1 It is currently unfashionable to believe that the author’s own character, viewpoints, idiosyncrasies and personal circumstances have a direct bearing on his or her writing: in the words of Anderson (313):2 … the reader should start as the Roman audience nineteen hundred years ago, with a clear realization that the poet is a rhetorical artist and that what he allows to be said in his poems, whether in the 1 For the development and application of the concept of the literary persona to English literature in particular, see, for example, Mack and Kernan; Elliott (3–18) provides a useful survey of the persona debate. For the persona theory as applied to Roman satire, see Winkler 1–22. 2 cf. Freudenburg (3): “the speaker who delivers his criticism in the first person is not the poet himself but the poet in disguise.” 170 SYLLECTA CLASSICA 12 (2001) first or third person, does not correspond exactly to his own psychological state: the poet dons a mask or creates an objective character. In Juvenal’s case, the dearth of reliable biographical information and his highly rhetorical style (particularly in Books 1 and 2) have made his poems a particularly fertile field for the application of thepersona theory.3 However, while it is true that Juvenal provides far less information about his background and upbringing than, for example, Horace does, this does not mean that such reticence extends to the revelation of his own personality and attitudes.4 If Horace, like Juvenal, had not provided us with as much biographical detail as he did, that would not prevent us from gaining a reasonably clear impression of his personality and outlook on life.5 His satirical modus operandi (ridentem dicere verum, Serm. 1.1.24) clearly accords with the genial and positive personality which emerges from the Sermones and, indeed, from his poetry in general. Juvenal, on the other hand, strikes one as a fundamentally cynical and negative 3 See, for example, the following discussions: Ferguson (1979) xv–xix; Courtney 1– 11; Gérard 6–13; Braund (1996) 15–16; Green (1998) xii–xxv. 4 Hutchinson (34) warns against imposing a firm distinction between the poet himself and the personality which he projects: “We are discouraged from simply assuming that the utterance of ‘Juvenal’ shows us the historical Juvenal in his actual beliefs. At the same time, it would be wrong to divorce Juvenal’s speaker from a formal and notional sense of the poet, and to turn him into a third-person figure, himself the main object of exposure.” See also Rudd. 5 Armstrong (4): “It must be admitted that Horace is as elusive as he is allusive, but in the end, part of what he says about himself must be as true of the real person as of his carefully constructed poetic self-presentation … What little we know about Horace from sources other than himself seems to suggest that his elaborate self-portrait is not all fiction by any means.” See also Levi (1): “What we are told of the story of his life is a feeble but at least a genuine guide through the maze of his poems. The poetry shows his development only when it is carefully sorted through as biography.” Lyne (vii) believes that the concept of the ‘mask’ does not preclude knowledge of the real person: “I think that of all ancient poets Horace is the one who most invites us to look through his poem to his ‘life’ … Horace dons mask after mask, changing, for example, as he changes genre; we can never be sure that we have penetrated to the man behind the mask. But to accept the invitation to find even a masked figure is surely reasonable, and it is certainly fascinating. And sometimes I think we can penetrate to the man in all his reality, and appreciate the reality of his difficulties.” TENNANT...