The satirist we know as Juvenal was well aware of ‘the unique potential of text as a “technology of absence”’, G. states in his opening remarks (p. 2), and goes on to style him as ‘Anon’ for this contribution to the field of Juvenalian studies, a thorough examination of Juvenal's self-banishment to the furthest margins of his satirical enterprise. Couching his study in terms of ‘paranoia’ and ‘the volatile relationship between literature and power among the Roman elite’ (p. 12, with n. 53), G. detects an intensification of anxiety about visibility under the actively ‘poetic’ Hadrian (p. 13) and raises, logically enough, the possibility that Juvenal's poems could have been circulated anonymously (pp. 17–18). These ideas underpin much of what follows in the next four chapters, wherein various aspects of Anon's withdrawal and absence are elaborated through close readings of many of the 16 surviving satires, with other occasional speculative leaps thrown in. Clever turns of phrase sometimes buttress the argument, not unlike some of Juvenal's own aphorisms: for instance, ‘to avoid accusations of delation, Juvenal partakes of a subtle self-deletion’ (p. 39); some of the sub-section headings are similarly indicative: ‘All Overboard (AuthorShip)’ (3.2, p. 181, in relation to Satire 12) or ‘Pointing without Point’ (2.3, p. 242, of the failed didacticism of Satire 14).

In Chapter 2, ‘Anonymity Programmed’, G. re-reads Satire 1 and (in greater detail) 7 in light of – or, rather, in the shadow of – what he terms the ‘Hadrianic context of monopolised poetry and criticism’ (p. 51), and suggests that the paradoxical ending of Satire 1 is the springboard for the ‘apologia for mediocrity’ that is Satire 7 (pp. 53–68). G. finds indications of Hadrian as a ‘paranoid poet out to dominate the scene’ and of ‘solicitation bordering on surveillance’ (p. 51). At the very least, this approach does make us re-think a too easy contrast between the dark Domitianic horrors of Satire 4 and the presumed sunny safety of Trajan's or Hadrian's reigns. And, after all, the disturbing image of the furrow (sulcus) traced in the bloody sand of the arena in the Pone Tigillinum … scene of Satire 1.155–7 does reappear, albeit in a less unnerving context, in Satire 7.48 (p. 58). G.’s interpretative lenses help us to draw out the implications of such moments of recapitulation or ambiguity in the text; he can be quite inventive in his observations: for example, he suggests that Juvenal deploys pronouns with conscious subtlety in his ‘project of anonymity’, including in an acrostic in 1.52–5 (pp. 45–6); whether or not one ultimately accepts this, G. must be given credit for the way he marshals his arguments here, and elsewhere, for such speculative turns.

In Chapter 3, ‘The Anatomy of Anonymity: Bodies and Names’, we have an extended treatment of the erasing of the satirist's own body (in stark contrast to his voyeuristic probing and ocular consumption of the bodies he presents to us) – ‘Juve the Obscure’, as sub-heading 3.1 appositely has it (since Hardy's use of the epithet was designed to suggest his central character's mediocrity, anonymity, failure). Some perceptive, occasionally provocative, readings of passages from Satires 3, 4, 10 and 11 are followed by an extended analysis of the puzzling dialogue of Satire 9, before turning back to Satire 8 to consider ‘the evacuation of names’ as another, related, component of Juvenal's poetics of anonymity. Readers will find much of interest throughout these carefully woven 60 pages. In his brief encounter with Umbricius (pp. 76–82) G. wonders (p. 82 n. 30) about the MS variant adiutor for auditor in the last line of Satire 3 and what that would suggest; in connection with Satire 2's Laronia (pp. 83–7) he raises the possibility that Larga's unnamed daughter in Satire 14.25–33 might serve as a second female surrogate for the satirist (pp. 87–91); revisiting (pp. 96–100) the decay of the geriatric body of Satire 10.196–200 leads him to observe that ‘a kind of old age’ connects many of Juvenal's alter egos, along with bodily visibility and vulnerability (p. 100), then explored further in Satire 9 (pp. 101–13).

In Chapter 4, ‘Shrinking, Slinking, and Sinking’, after the nimble footwork of the previous chapter, G. announces a satire-by-satire approach to the second half of the collection, ‘this stranger satiric twilight’ (p. 131), which continues into Chapter 5, ‘Consolation, Isolation, Indigestion’. There is always a problem with designating these books as ‘later’ because we do not know how many Juvenal actually wrote, and designating them as products of his old age carries similar risks. G. lays bare his strategy here ‘to furnish individual close readings of each poem, bundle them into a book-sized package, and bind them to the great process of self-concealment (backbone of Anon's unseen body)’ (p. 131). He duly finds plenty of evidence in Satires 10–15 for the continuation of the strategy of anonymity and, scrutinising Satire 15 at some length in connection with Hadrianic Egyptomania (pp. 243–85), views it as ‘the culmination of Anon's self-concealing enterprise’ with the satirist burying his voice ‘in the crowds, anatomical parts, ingestions and transmigrations of cannibalism’ (p. 243). Again, however, it is the detailed readings of passages within the individual poems of Books 4 and 5 that stand out by their novelty and persuasiveness, such as when G. examines the storm-and-shipwreck narrative of Satire 12 as a story about a crisis of poetry (pp. 181–91) and the ensuing sacrifice scene as relatedly metapoetic (pp. 191–6). This is capped by a discussion of the ‘submerged poetics’ of this ‘castrated satire’ as a response to the problem of producing poetry ‘without threatening Rome's most powerful poet’ (p. 197).

The conclusion, after a brief comparative glance at the possible anonymity of the Apocolocyntosis (pp. 286–91), takes another logical step in terms of G.’s overarching thesis, namely raising the possibility that the unfinished Satire 16, which breaks off apparently in medias res as the corpus comes down to us, could be viewed as a ‘meant’ and ‘meaningful’ end, by analogy with other works in Latin literature that simply stop – such as Ovid's Fasti. G. does his best to point out elements in the poem that might prepare us for this abrupt silence, or self-silencing, and marshals all the verbal, thematic and metapoetic evidence he can find (repetitions, echoes of earlier poems, ‘old soldier Priam’) and foregrounds the ‘uncanny’ fact that the final sentence of Satire 16 begins with a reference to the Emperor himself (ipsius certe ducis hoc referre videtur, line 58). Earlier on, G. had observed ‘As soon as we admit symbolic hints of closure, hints multiply’ (p. 298) – ‘Well, of course they do!’ a critic might reply. And yet, … G.’s concluding picture does pack a critical as well as an emotional punch: ‘As soon as Hadrian arrives with his gang of boots and fists, Juvenalian satire is no more: kicked away to become an eternal condemnation of the capricious power it could no longer elude’ (p. 307).

In this wide-ranging and well-written study G. has staged an enlightening encounter with the satirist as Anon, an encounter that resonates all the more loudly in an era when the dangers of producing satire, even in notionally benign settings, are ever more apparent. The book is pleasingly produced with notes conveniently placed at the bottom of the page; the documentation throughout is painstaking; and readers will benefit from perusing the admirably succinct notes as they go along, for these contain much of value and interest, including discussions of textual problems.