Juvenal and the Satiric Emotions
Language: English
Pages: 264
ISBN: 0199981892
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In his sixteen verse Satires, Juvenal explores the emotional provocations and pleasures associated with social criticism and mockery. He makes use of traditional generic elements such as the first-person speaker, moral diatribe, narrative, and literary allusion to create this new satiric preoccupation and theme. Juvenal defines the satirist figure as an emotional agent who dramatizes his own response to human vices and faults, and he in turn aims to engage other people's feelings. Over the course of his career, he adopts a series of rhetorical personae that represent a spectrum of satiric emotions, encouraging his audience to ponder satire's proper emotional mode and function. Juvenal first offers his signature indignatio with its associated pleasures and discomforts, then tries on subtler personae that suggest dry detachment, callous amusement, anxiety, and other affective states.
As Keane shows, the satiric emotions are not only found in the author's rhetorical performances, but they are also a major part of the human farrago that the Satires purport to treat. Juvenal's poems explore the dynamic operation of emotions in society, drawing on diverse ancient literary, rhetorical, and philosophical sources. Each poem uniquely engages with different texts and ideas to reveal the unsettling powers of its emotional mode. Keane also analyzes the "emotional plot" of each book of Satires and the structural logic of the entire series with its wide range of subjects and settings. From his famous angry tirades to his more puzzling later meditations, Juvenal demonstrates an enduring interest in the relationship between feelings and moral judgment.
up among younger statesmen (795b–c). Quintilian too weighs in (Inst. 11.1.31–32): just as younger men may be able to get away with sporting brilliant purple clothing, they can safely experiment with oratory that is “full and elevated and bold and florid” (plenum et erectum et audax et praecultum), even “adventurous” (periclitantia), whereas older men are better off sticking to the “compressed and mild and polished” (pressum et mite et limatum) style. The advantage for old men is that audiences
he is resisting” (torrens iudicem vel nitentem contra feret). 51. Allecto violently plants a version of her own ira in Turnus’s breast at A. 7.445–62 (iras . . . ira), a process that seems to transfer rage entirely to the human sphere (Fantham, “Angry Poet,” 237). 52. See, e.g., Cic. de Orat. 2.35.6, 2.189.1, and 2.190.7; Brut. 86.10 (“fire” in dicendo) and 276.12; Orat. 27.2 (on the fiery verbum), 99.2 (linked with the adjectives gravis and acer), and 132.8 (“burning” oratio). Cf. Quint. Inst.
action.104 He is abandoning a ruined city where he is vulnerable to literal conflagrations, the seething criminality of his social superiors, and his own burning bile, while the satirist stays behind to continue “shuddering at fires” (horrere incendia, 7) and enduring the presence of criminals who are “boiling over” with guilty secrets (fervens/occultis . . . tacendis, 49–50). The physiology (of both wrongdoers and speaker) is Juvenalian and Lucilian, although Umbricius feeds it into a mock-epic
large, impossibly decorated and crowded atrium. His addressees change their identities, and the ancestor images Juvenal evokes are many and varied (whom does this Ponticus person actually claim as ancestors?30 is any modern-day aristocrat obligated to live up to every Roman leader’s example?). This fuzziness makes it difficult to believe that Juvenal means to earnestly employ the convention of invoking exemplary ancestors to lecture their descendants. Adding to the ambiguity in line 8 is the
vernis). There are also echoes of Horace’s protests to Maecenas and Florus at the end of his lyric career: Ep. 1.1.4 (non eadem est aetas, non mens) and Ep. 2.2.55–57 (singula de nobis anni praedantur euntes;/ eripuere iocos, venerem, conuiuia, ludum;/tendunt extorquere poemata). 43. Change, Decline, and the Progress of Satire | 111 With these afflictions, Naevolus makes an appropriate successor to the other victims of Book 3. But his body is not only defined by deterioration; another story