This recent monograph by N. offers a new reading of Juvenal's poems. As stated by the subtitle, N. focuses on a theme so far neglected by specialised scholarship and reads the Satires as an expression of the anxieties of both the satirist and the Roman male elite citizens who we may assume as his intended audience.
The introduction offers useful insights into N.’s working method, along with a well-balanced survey of previous scholarship on long-standing critical issues in the interpretation of Juvenal. I found particularly appropriate N.’s position regarding the scholarly debate on Juvenal's persona loquens: N. maintains that ‘all first-person writing involves the existence of a persona, because … a first-person character can only ever be a partial representation of such an author’; and since we can access the personality of the satirist through the selective version of himself that he intended to offer to his audience in his verses, ‘we as readers must still make do with the character(s) that emerge from the words of his text’ (p. 5).
Chapter 1 focuses on Juvenal's Satire 1. N. shows that the many concerns displayed by Juvenal in this poem orbit a centre that is a conception of normative masculinity as it fails; Juvenal's programmatic satire, thus, is the expression of a sense of frustration: Juvenal aims at being no longer a listener, but the protagonist of the poetic arena. Yet, the poet's ambition is doomed to be frustrated, and this produces a form of satire that may be labelled as ‘poetry of the excluded’ (p. 31). The speaker of Satire 1 guides his audience into a meditation on social status, as he realises that he lacks the standing to say what he wants; as a satirist who does not enjoy true freedom of speech, he embodies a first example of unmanned manhood (p. 60). This is an interesting intuition, which yields a new and persuasive overall interpretation of Sat. 1; yet, as N. moves from the overall interpretation to the close readings of specific passages, his argumentation is not always adequately grounded in Juvenal's text: for instance, commenting on Juv. 1.22–30 (pp. 27–9), N. assumes, without any discussion, that the barber mentioned in lines 1.24–5 and Crispinus (1.26–30) are the same person, although the series of cum-clauses of the text points against such an interpretation and, most importantly, we learn that the same Crispinus used to be a vendor of low-quality fish from Juv. 4.32–3 (a passage not exploited in drawing the profile of this character). Also, as he comments on the desecration of the statue of an Egyptian in the Forum described in 1.127–31, N. states that such an act ‘would be unthinkable to a traditional Roman mindset’ (p. 47); yet, the act of defecating on statues and even tombs in public places was a form of desecration deplorably common and as such sanctioned by the laws, as proved by the texts collected in A. Stramaglia's note on this passage (Giovenale, Satire 1, 7, 12, 16 [2008], p. 92).
Chapter 2 turns to the images created by Juvenal for his satiric purposes, with specific attention to the system of metaphors using the human body as an emblem for the individual human being. N. surveys a variety of theoretical approaches to satiric bodies, exploiting in particular Vermule's concept of mind-blindness – i.e. the failure to recognise other people as having minds and to understand the behaviour of others as arising from comprehensible motivation. Applying this concept to Juvenal's Satires, N. shows that the satirist becomes deliberately mind-blinded so that he does not have to treat his targets as rational agents; Juvenal, however, is aware that he too can be turned into an object (p. 63) and, as such, be excluded from the power and the circles that matter. A survey of the poems in which bodies are more evidently exploited in this perspective confirms the impression of a satire pervaded by the sense of exclusion: in Sat. 3, for instance, Umbricius cannot find a place in the highest levels of the Roman elite, and this failure pushes him away from Rome (p. 74); in Sat. 15 the image of the destruction of a body is exploited to emphasise the reciprocal exclusions of two cultural and ethnic groups and, in particular, to signal the fate of an individual at odds with the community: metaphorically, the image of a destroyed body reflects a Rome in which elite men fear the potential meaningless of their identity (p. 77). N. goes on to explore the transformation of the body due to old age (particularly as portrayed in Sat. 10: pp. 77–81) and the use of surrogate bodies such as statues (in Sat. 8: pp. 82–5): N. persuasively argues that the use of these bodily images is meant to represent a number of anxieties about social status.
In Chapter 3 N. guides the reader through a survey of passages in which Juvenal looks at men who have debased themselves willingly: such is the case of Lateranus, the consul who made himself a mulio (8.146–50); of Creticus, who pleads in court in see-through vests (2.65–71); of the aristocrats who put themselves on stage (8.183–8) and in particular of Gracchus, the Salian priest who displays himself as the bride of a flute-player (2.117–43). N. offers a coherent and persuasive interpretation of these passages, but does not focus on the literary background that Juvenal exploits in each of these cases: for instance, the scene of Gracchus' wedding is deeply indebted to Martial and to a whole tradition of same-sex wedding celebrated with all the attributes of Roman traditional ceremonies (see e.g. Nero's weddings with the freedmen Sporus and Pythagoras) (for further bibliography on this Gracchus see G. Dimatteo, Giovenale, Satira 8 [2014], pp. 219–20).
Chapters 4 and 5 focus on scenes from the Satires in which Juvenal addresses two complementary sorts of anxiety. In Chapter 4 the reader is offered an overall interpretation of Sat. 6: this poem, which should not be entirely forgiven its misogyny (p. 129), responds to anxieties connected to the understanding of masculinity. In fact, the outcome of the association of elite women with non-elite men is a further example of the sense of exclusion of Roman men; and this is a way of voicing the ultimate anxiety of a Roman elite member: as the existence of legitimate fatherhood in Rome is questioned, the very identity of a Rome in which legitimate Romans no longer exist is endangered. In Chapter 5, finally, N. sheds light on passages in which manhood is threatened by direct association with status and wealth.
N.’s volume offers pleasant reading, rich of insights for readers interested in Juvenal and more generally in ancient satire. A more systematic exploitation of the commentaries devoted to individual satires (besides the overall commentaries by E. Courtney and J. Ferguson regularly quoted in this book) and of scholarship in languages other than English would have probably enhanced N.’s points and prevented some lack of argument; however, this book will definitely be a fine addition to the recommended reading for any course on Juvenal and will no doubt foster new research on the Satires and their author.
