The year 2015 may go down as a Golden Age in the modern study of Juvenal. This year saw the publication of the first major monographs on the Roman satirist since Braund's Beyond Anger (1988). While there had been many articles and chapters, and Braund's own Green and Yellow commentary on Juvenal Book 1, there had not been a major reassessment of the author as a whole for more than twenty-five years, and 2015 saw the publication of two major books, Catherine Keane's, which is the primary object of the current review, and David Larmour's The Arena of Satire: Juvenal's Search for Rome (reviewed by James Uden in JRS 106 (2016), 352), as well as Uden's Juvenal the Invisible Satirist which the reviewer has not read. Where Larmour's book asks us to reframe our understanding of Juvenal's project through two primary images — (1) the satirist as flâneur searching the streets of Rome for the residual signs of a true romanitas, and (2) the satirist as gladiator, as an artist with a rhetorical sword who seeks the blood of the other for our entertainment — K.’s book very much continues in the vein of Braund's Beyond Anger, examining both the function of indignatio in Books 1 and 2, and its displacement, if not elimination, in Books 3 through 5. In some ways, it would be hard to imagine two more different books on the same author, and yet they are oddly complementary. Where Larmour is sweeping and metaphorical, K. is careful and literal. Where Larmour moves easily between close readings of specific passages and moments of theoretical insight, K. is thorough and methodical, examining all major points in the previous literature. Future readers of Juvenal will need to approach his text with one of these books in each hand.

For K. the emotions of satire — indignatio, ira, but also ironia and tranquillitas — are never simply the expression of a point of view, whether that of the author or the persona, but always the raw materials with which the satirist works. Juvenal does not write angry satires but satires ‘about’ anger. K. grounds her work both in the recently expanding field of the history of emotions as pioneered by Konstan, Braund and Gill, but also in the rhetorical and philosophical literature of the period, Seneca, Quintilian, Cicero and Aristotle. ‘Ancient literary appreciation was really appreciation of rhetoric — and as an instrument of power, rather than an object to be dissected’ (37).

In Books 1 and 2, K. makes us aware, the poet not only examines the sources of anger — pushy foreigners, social climbers, moral hypocrites, corrupt aristocrats who do not recognize their social obligations, and uppity women who plot against their men — but also the pleasures of anger, the emotional charge of giving way to rage. Who after all does not enjoy a good rant now and again? And this was often deemed the special province of the Roman citizen of sufficient standing, the proof of his libertas. There was, as Quintilian implicitly recognized, something deeply Roman about satiric indignatio. Yet there was also something disturbing in all this. The person who gave way to anger, who could not master his emotions, became their slave. The audience response to anger was then, K. observes, ‘complex’, both identifying with and enjoying this eloquent venting of spleen and recoiling before the image of a personality possibly gone off the rails. It is a duality and a complexity that anyone familiar with the modern politics of resentment will instantly recognize, whether in the figure of a Boris Johnson or a Donald Trump. K. argues that the scholarly challenge is to resist either the identification with or the ironization of the satirist in favour or a more distanced reading that examines how these texts participate in a story about anger: its sources, its expression and its effects.

As K. directly acknowledges, the satires of Books 3 through 5, the ones that seem to move beyond anger, have been relatively neglected by later readers. K. believes that disappointment with the later satires is programmed into the project as a whole, ‘I propose that the readers who are disappointed in the later Satires are feeling the effects of the “training” they have undergone in recognizing the conditions for indignation throughout Satires 1 through 6’ (90–1). In Satires 7–9, it is not that such conditions have disappeared, but rather that the satirist is no longer the primary voice of disgust, having now become the ironic lens through which the anger of others is focalized. ‘In Satire 8, statues, wax imagines, and the like suggest disregarded, paralyzed and silent human beings, watching the parade of modern vice in silent horror’ (105). Likewise, in Satire 9, it is Naevolus, the disillusioned bisexual gigolo, who assumes the voice of the satirist, while Juvenal poses as his ironic interlocutor.

In the final two books, the satirist posits at least the possibility of a bemused, ironic tranquility before the human comedy, perhaps most fully instantiated in the figure of the laughing Democritus of Satire 10: though, as K. is quick to remind us, Democritus’ evil twin — the weeping Heraclitus — is never far behind. Indeed, in poems such as Satire 14, K. argues, the satirist has become a kind of parody of his old self, the paradigmatic grumpy old man. The assumption of this rôle, she admonishes us, should not be viewed as simply expressing the reality of an aging satirist or of his persona, but as a dramatization of the genre itself, ‘a kind of retrospective on the satiric tradition’ (183). The satiric emotions, in the end for K., may not be many — anger, indignation, irony and bemusement — but they are neither simple nor straightforward, and for K.’s Juvenal they have become the stuff of literature and rhetoric, rather than the expression of a point of view.