Umbricius’ Farewell Tour

Umbricius’ speech, which comprises the majority of Juvenal’s third satire, should be read as the character’s syntaktikon, or farewell speech, to Rome, as it provides a totalizing portrait of the city’s physical and social topography. The theme of fullness, mixture of influences, and the expansion of satire’s generic boundaries allow Juvenal to represent the city, culturally bloated and socially fractured, in verse form while simultaneously reaffirming the genre’s urban nature and illustrating its post-Lucilian decline.