I would like first to apologise for the delay in producing this review, to the point where most scholars who care have almost certainly already read this important book. In part, the gestation period – longer, to be sure, than Horace's nine months (Sat. 1.6.61) waiting on Maecenas – was the result of the book taking me out of my comfort zone, productively so. Its signal advance on earlier studies is that, instead of re-treading the old campus of indebtedness to Lucilius, Horace and Persius with which most scholars might already be familiar (notwithstanding some excellent observations about earlier intertexts previously given little credit, as with Cicero's In Pisonem in Satire 8 at p. 128), U. has chosen to work synchronically, so to speak. He adopts a historicist approach whose signal innovation is to set Juvenal in his contemporary literary context, with its decidedly multicultural valence; thus Second Sophistic authors of various stripes and performance methods can unite as comparanda (though this is no arid prosopographical excavation) for their contemporary poet. Juvenal blurs into the mob. The book's stars tend to be Greek; writers not usually associated with Juvenal, on whom U. lavishes attention, include Artemidorus, Dio Chrysostom (especially prominent here), Favorinus, Fronto, Phlegon of Tralles (ghost-writing for Hadrian), Polemo and (inevitably) Suetonius and the writers of the Historia Augusta; some later personages such as Gellius and Lucian also feature. All of them spring out to bear witness that the satirist is engaged in more than polemic and works through his cultural cringe, Roman-style. In his discussions – notably when treating Isaeus (Juv. 3.74), who appears in passing in Pliny, Epist. 2.3 – U. extends an approach most influentially advanced (in English at least) by K. Freudenburg in his 2001 Satires of Rome (and in a subsequent 2005 book chapter), where Juvenal's satires were rightly seen to interact with Latin prose; but I at least had never properly joined the dots by which U. can, with argumentative flair, stress Pliny's reputation as an advocate of recitations in Latin or the links between Tacitus’ Dialogus and informers (Messalla as a step-brother of Pliny's bête noire Regulus).

Perhaps the book's most controversial chapter is the one most reliant on (a rather nuanced version of) persona theory, on Satire 10 as clothed deliberately in a Cynic voice, a manoeuvre designed to mock specifically ‘the efflorescence of (Greek) Cynicism in Rome in Juvenal's own period’ (p. 147). I am willing to accept that the constant devaluation of every Roman ideal and indiscriminate trashing of famous personages in this satire slot into an extremist Cynic attitude of abjection and desire for fragmentation. So, too, the unsatisfying emphasis on the body (un-)beautiful in the poem's close could be a nihilistic Cynic play. But not all will agree with this approach to Satire 10, which seems a curiously reductive view of this multifaceted truncheon of a poem. In contrast, it is whenever the Hadrianic court shades into view that this book shines brightest: the emasculated Virro of Satire 9 as a comment on creating principes by adoption; the ungovernable provinces of Satire 8 as critique of a Hellenising Spanish Emperor who advocates military retrenchment (and a resounding yes to the Syrophoenix of 8.160 parodying the phoenix on Hadrian's coinage); the Horatianisms of Satires 11 and, particularly, 12 as reflecting the new ‘new Augustus’ mindset of the court; Satire 15, with its precise dating, as exploding the pretensions to universality of the wandering Emperor pronouncing against cannibalism, his toy boy Antinous ‘drownded in the tide’ or maybe sacrificed. These readings are utterly brilliant.

If I were forced to name some ‘laments’ (to adopt U. himself at p. 20 n. 50), there would merely be uel duo uel nihil. First, the section on Defoe's ‘True-Born Englishman’ seems, while the discussion is both relevant and interesting, somewhat lonely as the sole aspect of early modern reception in the book. Next, it is refreshing to read a book on Juvenal which understandably, given its stated focus on the second century, strays from the relatively crowded paths of assessing the influence of the Flavians Statius (named by Juvenal) and Martial (not) on Juvenal; the latter is almost entirely absent until the appendix – which advances, almost nonchalantly, a spectacular, and to my mind convincing, argument for a much earlier date (100 or 101 ce) for Juvenal's Book 1 than is commonly held. Yet the result is that U. might have taken more account of the pervasive effect of circulating copies of Martial, fresh in the memory in the early second century, on Juvenal, principally in his first three Satires (as these are the ones on the docket in the book).

I also wish there had been detailed treatment in similar vein of the Juvenalian works that have been largely omitted from the book (even if small extracts pop up from time to time), namely 4–7, 11, 13–14 and 16, simply because the acuity of insight lavished on the (sections of) poems that are the focus whets the appetite for the rest. Given the likelihood of active readers (p. 8) for U.’s book, who can be visualised as writing a ‘choose-your-own-adventure’ satire through identification with Juvenal's personae, such lacunae will surely be a spur for future work. Indeed, it is very much to the book's credit that U.’s elucidation of Juvenal as immersed in his surroundings has also whetted the appetite, in its flashes of interaction with the now-renewed Augustan past, for further exploration of how second-century readers experienced and responded to Augustan texts (such as Horace beyond the Satires).

In the vanguard of the present resurgence in English-language Juvenalian studies, this book is at the top of the class. It formed part of the first cohort of this new reckoning, together with C. Keane's Juvenal and the Satiric Emotions (2015) and D. Larmour's Arena of Satire (2016). The second wave of monographs has now seen T. Geue's Juvenal and the Poetics of Anonymity (2017) (a book superficially similar to U.’s, but with an array of developments in different directions and more persistent close readings of the later poems), O. Urmurhan's Juvenal's Global Awareness (2017) and C. Nappa's Making Men Ridiculous (2017). Together, these herald a rebirth in the study of the canonical yet, as U. uses as his methodological hook, elusive satirist, and add something vivid to the much-needed conversation: ‘there is only one thing worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about’. It is fair to say that it will be difficult not to read and write about Juvenalian satire if one has this book in hand and in mind.