The Arena of Satire: Juvenal's Search for Rome is a sensitive study of Roman satire by a major critic in the field. If the book is ultimately less convincing and satisfying than it could have been, it nonetheless sets an invigorating agenda, urging us to see new patterns of imagery within the corpus and trace a legacy of Juvenalian writers in our own time. David Larmour's Juvenal is not the typical angry satirist. Instead, he is a questing, philosophical flâneur — a nihilist whose itinerant ‘search for Rome’ serves to expose how permeable and fluid the boundaries of ethnic and gender identity have become. L. casts the Satires as ‘loiterature’, a term drawn from a study of that name by Ross Chambers (University of Nebraska Press, 1999). They dramatize a restless, apparently aimless wandering through the spaces of Rome and its historical memory. Equally, L.'s study moves with a sense of restlessness forwards and backwards through the extant poems, and projects a vivid image of the author's own travel (the analysis is accompanied by his photographs and personal observations of France, Italy, Hungary and Estonia). When L. discusses an image of a statue being defiled in Satire 1, he says that ‘[o]ne is reminded of the fate of the Soviet war memorial in Budapest, which had to be fenced off a few years ago to prevent just such actions' (80). This roving scope of reference makes L. an especially engaging critical voice. In a field that has sometimes been stalled by inward-looking questions of genre and form, L. sets satire moving.

After its introduction, the bulk of the study is divided into four long chapters. The first expands previous work on sound, space and self-representation in Satire 1; the second demonstrates that those who violate gender norms are repeatedly associated with liminal space in Satires 2, 6 and 9; the third focuses on the Satires as both a product and mirror of amphitheatrical experience; and the fourth examines the brokenness and fragility of objects and monuments in the poems as representative of the impermanence of Roman ideals. Aside from an expository section summarizing ancient and modern views of the arena (165–98), L.'s analysis rarely stays in one place for long. The book is at its best in its passing attention to minute details and surprising thematic connections between the poems. Sweating, for example, is convincingly cast as a significant satiric motif (73–4), as is seasickness (42–4), urination (80–2), plague (108–9) and poison (161–2). In a fascinating conclusion (305–20), L. identifies a range of ‘modern Juvenalians', focusing on Evelyn Waugh, the dramatist Martin McDonagh and the Russian novelist Viktor Pelevin. This promising theme remains to be ‘treated in a separate study’ (305), L. says — he would be the one to write it.

Some aspects of the book are curious. John Henderson's formative work is misattributed to Jeffrey Henderson in the bibliography, and odd wording on p. 225 suggests that there are six extant books of Satires, not five. Debates over the satiric persona may indeed be ‘well-worn’, but I am not sure many will accept L.'s invitation to focus attention on echoes of the Etruscan funerary demon Phersu instead (207–10). Least satisfying is the sense of disconnection from history: although L. repeatedly identifies the breakdown of values in the poems as a symptom of transition between Foucauldian epistemes (13, 109, 305–6), there is very little attempt to delineate the historical circumstances that led to that ideological crisis, and we are merely referred back to the ‘plague of Julio-Claudians’ (161, 306), or, even further back, to the ‘painful passage from Republic to Empire’ (317). The book has an impressively broad range of philosophical and literary references, but almost no dates. Given that L. also resists attempts to trace changes in thought or tone over the course of Juvenal's career (7, 37), the book's vision of Juvenal feels strangely insular — wandering, yes, but usually back and forth within the same closed and circumscribed poetic space. Yet the ability to trace the ‘web of connections’ (18) within that space is one of L.'s strengths, and his book certainly moves beyond the standard canon of comparanda for Juvenal's text. The Arena of Rome shows us topoi — places — constructed by the Roman poet but inhabited by his successors, and suggestively leaves us with modern Juvenalians for whom the world remains a ‘body-strewn arena with all escape routes closed off’ (320). For those who like to loiter in Roman satire and its afterlife, it will be a stimulating companion.