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The Arena of Satire
Juvenal's Search for Rome
By David H. J. Larmour UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS
Copyright © 2016 University of Oklahoma Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8061-5504-3
CHAPTER 1
Satires from the Edge
Poets are not, as officious mythology would have it, sons of Apollo, but of Marysas. In his death cry they hear their own name. ... Thus even to the writer, perhaps to him more than others, silence is a temptation, a refuge when Apollo is near. — George Steiner, "Silence and the Poet," 38–39
Given the parrhesiastic claims of satire in general, and the foundation of Roman satire in Lucilius's celebrated libertas (roughly, "free speech" or "outspokenness") in particular, it is no surprise that the first theme to announce itself in Juvenal's poetry should be the tension between speech and silence, especially with regard to the satirist who addresses his reader and compatriots. Roman satire's central preoccupation is subjectivity, and especially how the male citizen speaks and what restrictions are placed upon his speaking. As Allen Miller has recently observed, satire "is the most Roman of genres because it is the form whose subject is libertas. ... The subject of satire is both the form's subject matter and the speaking subject who is empowered to forge this hash of humorous observations, personal reproof, and grotesque degradation. ... Satura is wholly Roman, then, because its evolution is inseparable from the intertwined political, aesthetic, and legal issues that define what it means to be civis Romanus [a Roman citizen]. As Thomas Habinek puts it, elaborating Quintilian's dictum, "We are the best at satire, but also, there is no 'we' without satire." It is Juvenal, writing furthest into the imperial era, who gives the dilemma between speaking and not speaking its most extended treatment. The series of questions at the beginning of the collection reminds us that satire is concerned not so much with What is to be done? as with Who is to speak? (1.1–14):
Semper ego auditor tantum? Numquamne reponam
vexatus totiens rauci Theseide Cordi?
Inpune ergo mihi recitaverit ille togatas,
hic elegos? Inpune diem consumpserit ingens
Telephus aut summi plena iam margine libri
scriptus et in tergo necdum finitus Orestes?
Nota magis nulli domus est sua quam mihi lucus
Martis et Aeoliis vicinum rupibus antrum
Vulcani; quid agant venti, quas torqueat umbras
Aeacus, unde alius furtivae devehat aurum
pelliculae, quantas iaculetur Monychus ornos,
Frontonis platani convolsaque marmora clamant
semper et adsiduo ruptae lectore columnae.
Expectes eadem a summo minimoque poeta.
Must I always be only a listener? Am I never to pay back
for being harassed so many times by the Theseid of raucous Cordus?
With impunity then shall this one here have declaimed his plays at me,
that one his elegies? With impunity shall that huge Telephus have taken up
the whole day, or an Orestes that fills even the margins of a big book and
still isn't finished even when it is written on the back cover?
No man's house is more familiar to him than that Grove of Mars
is to me, or Vulcan's Cave near the Aeolian Rocks;
what the winds are up to, which shades Aeacus torments,
whence that other one carries off the gold of a stolen fleecelet,
how big the ash trees hurled by Monychus are —
endlessly the plane trees and the quaking marble statues at Fronto's house
cry out, and the columns shattered by the unrelenting reader.
You can expect the same things from the best and the worst poet alike.
Juvenalian satire provokes confusion in the reader from the very beginning. Who is this shouting at us, and what does he want? Four questions follow upon each other in six lines, gradually getting longer and more involved, presaging how the discourse of this particular speaker seeks to close off the possibility of response and to silence the listener, in exactly the same way that he complains of being silenced by Cordus and the other declaimers of epics and tragedies. So, from the moment he opens his mouth, the satirist is marked by many of the features he imputes to those he is attacking. This is a very important realization, for it locates the satirist firmly within the realm he is describing from his self-consciously marginalized subject position. His outburst occurs against a background of noise — the verbal, literary, and ideological noise of Rome — to which it contributes, even as it struggles to be heard in contradistinction to it. As we shall see, for all its vehemence in setting up targets to assail, and in striving to reassert difference through such attacks, Juvenalian satire is not simply lashing out in reactionary panic like England's Daily Mail or America's Fox News; this is a discourse that, in spite of itself, ends up provoking as many questions as it answers.
Immediately after the first question, the theme of punishment appears (numquamne reponam vexatus totiens ... inpune ... inpune) and is then picked up in the allusion to Orestes (the last word of line 6 and the finale of the quartet of questions), who is the ultimate tragic avenger of wrongdoing. The speaker is as much concerned with taking vengeance upon poets like Cordus as he is with breaking free of his own speechlessness; in fact, the two are synonymous. Giving reciters some of their own medicine was no doubt a topos. Horace, in Epistle 1.19.35–40, a passage Juvenal may well have had in mind, distances himself from those who take revenge on other poets by reciting themselves:
Scire velis, mea cur ingratus opuscula lector
laudet ametque domi, premat extra limen iniquus:
non ego ventosae plebis suffragia venor
impensis cenarum et tritae munere vestis;
non ego, nobilium scriptorum auditor et ultor,
grammaticas ambire tribus et pulpita dignor.
You want to know why the ungrateful reader praises and loves
my little pieces at home, but criticizes them unfairly beyond the threshold?
I am not one who hunts for the votes of the fickle public
by standing dinners and by donating worn-out clothes;
I am not one who, a listener to noble writers and a requiter,
deigns to go around courting the tribes of professors and their platforms.
In this, as in many other areas, Juvenal would appear to have but little respect for his predecessor's reserve, even if he reworks many of his motifs and themes. In Horace's Satire 1.4, which may be regarded as his own programmatic statement in the genre, he contrasts himself with the long- winded Crispinus and Fannius and says that he recites only when he has to and then to his friends, "not just anywhere and in front of no matter whom." He further distinguishes himself from the "empty-headed" who like to recite in the middle of the Forum or at the baths because the enclosed space produces an echo (73–76). In Satire 1.3, a discussion about the need to differentiate among crimes and to exercise moderation in punishment is introduced via Tigellius, a singer who would not sing when his friends asked him to but would not stop singing if unasked. Martial has an epigram in which he depicts himself as harassed by the reciting Ligurinus, around whom "there is flight" (fuga est, 2) and who pursues the author as he seeks refuge in various locations, such as the baths and at the dinner table (3.44). Listening to other poets recite, in other words, motivates a poetic journey as an attempt to escape from, as well as to respond to, what the satirist hears.
But the Juvenalian auditor fits into a much larger category of the satirist as ultor, or punisher. For him, it is a short step from punishing other poets to punishing people in general. Indeed one of the satirist's main roles is to "make an example" of his targets, both literally — by including them in his lists of miscreants — and metaphorically — by chastising them with his rhetorical whippings. In Epistle 2.2.124, speaking of the exertion concealed by the player in a pantomime (ludentis speciem dabit et torquebitur), Horace speaks of the torture in achieving art that conceals art; here the torturing (of others and of language) is the art (of satire). The satirist produces a textual Triumph, a procession of "captured" enemies, whose crimes and punishments are vividly enacted for the pleasure of the reader. Here the image of Aeacus "torturing the shades (umbras)" in 10–11 telegraphs exactly what the satirist will set out to do in the last two lines of the poem: "I will attempt what may be permitted against those whose ashes are covered by the Flaminian and Latin roads" (experiar quod concedatur in illos / quorum Flaminia tegitur cinis atque Latina, 170–71). Since, as we shall see, he decides that it is too dangerous to attack the living by name, the satirist will judge the "shades" — in this case a parade of deceased Romans — and mete out appropriate punishment. This establishes a link between Rome and the Underworld that is exploited at various points hereafter, especially in the vision of the shocked shades of the Republic meeting dissolute recent arrivals at the end of Satire 2 and the departure of the speaker's old friend Umbricius ("the shadowy one") for Cumae, the location of the entrance to Hades in Roman myth, at the beginning of Satire 3. Safer as it may be to direct barbs at those in the past who cannot answer back, this is, of course, a periphrastic attack on the present, as any reader of Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita or Russian satire in general will readily appreciate. Juvenal plays with the permeability of the boundary to great effect. As Courtney observes, "In fact he often speaks of the dead as if they were still alive" and, one might add, of the living as if they are already dead (119).
The satirist's role as punisher is subtly expanded by the mention of Orestes in 6 and of Monychus hurling ash trees in 11. These two figures (each placed at the end of their respective lists) also alert us to the satirist's preoccupation with the violation of established gender roles. Orestes killed the dangerously "masculine" Clytemnestra, and when Juvenal mentions him again in Satire 8.216–17, he offers a comparatively positive characterization (as a counterexample to Nero, who, by killing his mother, committed the same crime but for a different motive): quippe ille deis auctoribus ultor / patris erat caesi media inter pocula (The fact is he was, by the authority of the gods, the avenger of his father, who was murdered among his cups). In Ovid's Metamorphoses, Monychus was the centaur who roused his cowed companions to destroy Caenis/Caeneus — the celebrated transsexual warrior of Greek myth — by wielding suitably phallic tree trunks. A figure rescued from his relative obscurity in myth (the name "One-Hoof" may have been invented by Ovid), Monychus's violent attack on a "hybrid" forms a doublet with Aeacus's torturing the dead to encapsulate the speaker's own program. It is not much of a leap for the reader to imagine the satirist as an Orestes or a Monychus, assailing contemporary incarnations of hybridity (nouveaux riches, foreigners living in Rome, and, above all, "feminine" males and "masculine" females) and, if they cannot be "speared" or "blooded," attempting to "bury" or "suffocate" them, to take away their voice and breath under the barrage of his rhetorical missiles.
Hurling missiles and vituperative forms of verse are naturally associated: iambus was thought to derive from iapto (throw), and so in Horace's Epode 17.10 the verses he now regrets having aimed at Canidia are analogous to the "sharp weapons" that Telephus hurled at Achilles (tela acuta torserat). There is a metapoetic coloring to Juvenal's use of torqueo with reference to Aeacus's torturing the shades (in 6.449–50, the female scholar "brandishes her speech and hurls — torqueat — a rounded syllogism"). By contrast, the words ending lines 7–9 (lucus, antrum, umbras) conjure up, amid the noise and the storm, a fleeting image of the rural peace and quiet that poets are often said to seek or need, as in Epistle 2.2.77–78: scriptorum chorus omnis amat nemus et fugit urbem, / rite cliens Bacchi somno gaudentis et umbra (The whole chorus of poets loves the grove and flees the city, duly clients of Bacchus who enjoys sleep and shade).
What is especially interesting here is the way in which punishing satire is connected with traveling and the quest, and, beyond that, with open-endedness and lack of closure. The first mythological allusion in the poem is to Theseus, recalling his clearing the road to Athens of monsters but also the labyrinth (1.2). In spite of Theseus's success in killing the Minotaur and escaping, the labyrinth retains its power here as a symbol of endless wandering, partly because Cordus's poem has been going on for so long amid other interminable works on mythological subjects. The winds of Aeolus allude to storm scenes in epic, such as in the Odyssey or the Aeneid, which tend to blow the hero off course and prolong his journey, while Aeacus recalls an Underworld katabasis, which usually comes in the middle of a hero's progress. The belittling characterization of Jason as alius undercuts the grand object of his particular quest, now just for "the gold of a stolen fleecelet." The overall effect of these allusions, then, is to create an impression of long, drawn-out, perhaps interminable, wanderings with no attainment of the original aim of the journey. In this regard, the fact that the Orestes story is unfinished "even when it is written on the back cover" is suggestive: it implies that the avenging hero never gets to complete his task or reach the cure for madness or be vindicated for the dispensing of justice.
The mythological caves, winds, and torturings in lines 7–10 reinforce the opening themes of noise (antrum / Vulcani; quid agant venti) and violent revenge or punishment (quas torqueat umbras / Aeacus). The four indirect questions relating to the content of these well-worn stories in lines 9–12 — all vividly relayed to us in the present tense — parallel the four direct questions in 1–6 about the ranting poets who compose them. Meanwhile, the plane trees and statues of Fronto's house continually cry out in pain (clamant / semper), as its columns are shattered by the "unrelenting reader" (adsiduo ... lectore). The semper of line 13 echoes the first word of the poem, adsiduo lectore picks up rauci Cordi, and the vexatus auditor is paralleled by the convolsa marmora and ruptae columnae, so that listener and location are fused as victims of poetic noise. Just how unrelenting the barrage is we can appreciate from the single eight-line sentence that extends over lines 7–13. We might expect the domus, a place of private retreat, to be at least relatively free from noise, but the image of Fronto's reverberating garden and pulsating peristyle puts paid to that hope of quietude. Here Juvenal again seems to be striking a contrast with Horace's programmatic satire, in which the poet presents himself as quietly (compressis ... labris, lips sealed) reflecting on his and others' behavior, while reclining on his study couch or strolling in his colonnade (cum lectulus aut me / porticus excepit, 1.4.133–34). Juvenal's concluding observation that you may expect to hear the same stuff from the greatest and the least of poets is not simply a throwaway line, contrary to the opinion of those who wish to delete it. A similar formulation appears in 6.349 — iamque eadem summis pariter minimisque libido (Nowadays the greatest and the lowest of women alike have the same lust) — and the purpose is to introduce the theme of the confusion of categories. It represents the oxymoronic collapse of all hierarchies in the moment of their assertion. From the intermingling of the best and worst poets, thanks to a lapse in standards of judgment and criticism by those who should know better — or in fact do — the speaker expands his scope to the confusion of categories throughout Roman society.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Arena of Satire by David H. J. Larmour. Copyright © 2016 University of Oklahoma Press. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS.
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