The Invisible Satirist: Juvenal and Second-Century Rome by James Uden (review)

The “invisibility” of Juvenal has frequently been noted, albeit mundanely, partly because we have so little biographical information about him (in comparison with, say, Horace), but also because the self-concealment of the speaker is one of the defining features of Juvenal’s art. In his poems, the satirical voice emanates, unhinged and unfixed, from an undefined space; indeed we may more accurately talk of “voices” than a single, unified, and consistent subject-position. Uden takes these features of invisibility and incoherence as the starting point for a rereading of several satires, based not around the tired old notion of Juvenal’s “persona” but on “the increasing fluidity, in the Trajanic and Hadrianic periods … of anybody’s Roman identity.” In the chapters that follow, he offers judicious and often enlightening examination of numerous passages and brings prose works by Tacitus, Pliny, and Dio Chrysostom usefully to bear on the primary concerns of Juvenalian satire.

In chapter 1, Uden treats Juvenal’s Satire 1 to some familiar commentary on satirist and audience while proposing an “active readerly hermeneutic” which invites contemporary readers to fill in the “gaps” designedly left open by the poet; he then takes up the topic of self-sabotaging criticism through a comparison with Tacitus’ Dialogus de Oratoribus. Chapter 2 situates Juvenalian invisibility in the same intellectual territory as Dio’s Oration 13 and makes some highly pertinent connections with the figure of the wandering Cynic and Cynic cosmopolitanism, before moving into a related discussion of Satires 2 and 9. In chapter 3, we revisit Satire 3, with its “grim but nuanced awareness of the way in which ethnic markers were being redefined in the inescapably multicultural Empire of the second century” (87), and here again Uden invites us to look beyond the text, this time to Pliny’s Letters. The association is a productive one, refining our understanding of Umbricius’ tirade by foregrounding philhellenism among the Roman elite and the social prominence of the sophists performing Hellenic identity in the Graeca Urbs of Rome.

Chapters 4 and 5, covering Satires 8 and 10 respectively, continue the author’s examination of crossovers in argumentation between Juvenal and Greek sophists and Cynic philosophers. After an enjoyable opening in the company of Daniel Defoe, Uden argues that the evident discontinuities in these satires serve as a means of criticizing the poet’s contemporary environment, with particular attention to its complex reinterpretations of ancestral genealogy and location of moral value. He concludes, for example, that the famous prayer for mens sana in corpore sano (10.356) implies “that we have been stripped of everything else.… We are left with only our bodies, in an extreme kind of self-reliance.… No matter how honourable this is to the Cynics, to conventional Roman thinking this is a sordid asceticism, which Juvenal’s audience is surely expected to reject” (168–69). In chapter 6, “Religion and Repetition,” an even more disjointed poem is discussed, Satire 12, which Uden interprets as a satire on the political manipulation of religion by Hadrian and his self-styling as the “new Augustus.” There is much that is novel here, as the author offers a systematic rereading of this complicated poem.

The book ends with an epilogue, entitled “Outsider Empire,” in which many of its threads are pulled together through some discussion of Satire 15: we are reminded here that Juvenal’s invisibility is not primarily a form of self-concealment but a means of dramatizing his main themes, as he shows us “the vanishing of Rome’s old certainties” (215–16). There is an appendix on the date of Juvenal’s first book, a good bibliography, a serviceable general index, and an index locorum.

At over 250 pages, this is a substantial monograph, the work of a conscientious and well-trained scholar, with much to draw the interest of those who study Juvenal and satire in general. It is clearly written...