Lightening the Load: Castration, Money, and Masculinity in Juvenal’s Satire 12

The fading or lost masculinity is a prominent issue in the Juvenalian corpus and in Satire 12 this is explored through a remarkable act of symbolic castration, when the merchant Catullus throws his goods overboard in a storm, “imitating the beaver, who makes himself a eunuch.” This reading focuses on the beaver simile as the ideological “ground zero” which ties together the poem’s complex interweaving of animal imagery, sailing, sacrifice and legacy-hunting. Through it, the satirist links castration and impotence in a novel way with the Roman moral discourse—visible in Seneca and others—surrounding greed and material possessions.