While recent study has continued to illuminate Juvenal's place in the tradition of Roman verse satire, Juvenal's allusive relationship with poetic predecessors, satirical or otherwise, has not yet been fully explored. N.'s slim monograph thus arrives at an auspicious time to examine in greater depth the links between the texts of Juvenal and Horace. N. proposes that Juvenal's Satire 5 is an intertextual comment on an assortment of Horatian poems concerning, directly or indirectly, the ‘ideal’ model of friendship with the supreme patron Augustus.
The book alternates between close readings of selections of Satire 5 and the Horatian poems which, N. argues, Juvenal brings to bear in ironic counterpoint to the vile relationship of Trebius and Virro. According to N., Juvenal peppers his poems with clues hinting that the model for the perverted interaction between Trebius and Virro is that of Horace and Augustus. Juvenal thus transfigures Horace's portrait of an egalitarian friendship with his imperial benefactors by allusively relocating significant moments from Horace's discussions of patronage, status and parasitism to the debased world of the desperately mercenary Trebius and the brutally stingy Virro. Each Horatian poem is quoted extensively and analysed with particular attention to internal structural correspondences; N. prints the Horatian poems in two juxtaposed columns in order to facilitate recognition of these reciprocal symmetries.
N.'s argument to link Juvenal to Horatian discussions of status and patronage is complex, less sequentially linear than woven together by recurring threads that N. draws out from across Horace's corpus. A glance at the headings in N.'s extensive table of contents gives an idea of this cyclical method: ‘Horace's equestrian status’ serves as a heading, either alone or with further comment (e.g. heading K.73: ‘Horace's equestrian status – the gift of a god’) no less than ten times. N.'s frequent recapitulations at each new stage of his argument help the reader to sort out the allusive accumulations and elucidate N.'s claim for Juvenal's deviant reading of Horace.
To give a fuller impression of the kind of connections which N. identifies between Juvenal and Horace, it is valuable to examine this intertextual network in some detail. In the opening eleven lines of Satire 5, he finds major links to four poems of Horace: Epistle 1.1 (eadem est mens, Juv. 5.1 ~ eadem est … non mens, Hor. Ep. 1.1.4, the most familiar of the allusions argued for), Epistle 1.17 (through a subtle reference to Diogenes the Cynic at Juv. 5.8, crepido, as well as Horace's own mention of Aristippus at Ep. 1.1.18), Satire 1.5 (activated by Juvenal's mention of Sarmentus at line 3 ~ his appearance at Hor. S. 1.5.51ff.), and Satire 2.5 (the odd formulation quamuis iurato metuam tibi credere testi at Juv. 5.5, which N. links to the Horatian themes of parasitism and legacy-hunting). In the examination of these poems, N. posits that Juvenal positions himself as a Cynic, Diogenean antidote (the ‘Dog Bites’ of the title) to the fawning Aristippean voice that Horace projects in his behaviour towards Maecenas and Augustus (reading, for example, the supposed refusal in Epistle 1.1 to write more carmina as a feint in order subtly to praise his patrons).
N. continues his overall argument by connecting the debased treatment that the captator must suffer in Hor. S. 2.5.75–83 to the end of Satire 5, as well as to the ‘endurance’ of the Stoic sapiens in Epistle 1.16 – which also ties in with Horace's mercenary anxiety over his fragile equestrian status (a theme that N. had previously identified as a major subtext of Epistle 1.1). Finally, Juvenal stages ‘another parodic attack … upon Horace that works by “reversal in imitation”’ (p. 68) through reference to Satire 2.6 and the degradation of clients' officia in the interval between Horace's satires and Juvenal's. Finally, N. turns to Virgilian and Ovidian allusions in the digression at Satire 5.132–45 (which likewise connect to the legacy-hunting theme of Satire 2.5) before summing up Juvenal's deviant reading of the gap between the relationship that Horace projects of himself and his patrons and the ‘real’ nature of that interaction, now emblematised in Trebius and Virro. Though the book focuses mostly on Juvenal's poem as a re-reading of Horace's corpus, it suggests in its final paragraphs a more contemporary resonance and a general parallel between Augustus and the current Caesar.
N.'s examination of the opening lines of Satire 5 illuminates some of the advantages and disadvantages of his critical approach. He refuses, admirably, to take for granted any aspect of the interpretation of the poem, in particular, the significance of words often glossed in commentaries but whose full meaning is not always fully examined. This minute attention to individual cruces (e.g. what does it mean to call the mensas of Augustus Caesar iniquas in lines 3–4?) serves to reinvigorate the reader's own critical instincts. N.'s impulses lead to conclusions enlightening (such as the recognition that Teiresias' indirect praise of Augustus at Hor. S. 2.62ff. is, in effect, Horace reflecting Teiresias' insistence on the power of flattery) but sometimes also far-fetched (the insistence that the humiliation that Trebius is to suffer at Virro's hands at Juv. 5.170–3 is explicitly sexual in nature). Indeed, at various moments, N.'s analysis does not necessarily persuade but at least reminds us that difficult moments in Juvenal can be passed over all too casually. For example, despite an elaborate allusive argument embracing parallels in Horace, Ovid and Virgil, I remained unconvinced that Juvenal's reference to parvulus … Aeneas (lines 138–9) is meant to evoke the disputed legacy of Augustus nor that the subsequent picture of Virro's affection to Trebius' putative children at lines 141–5 should conjure an image of Augustus' own tenderness towards children (preserved in Suet. Aug. 83). Still, N.'s attempt to arrive at a more convincing interpretation of these lines reminds us of the still-unresolved difficulty of fitting them into the poem.
Though there are intriguing readings of Horace and Juvenal, particularly concerning the relevance of the former's social status in interpreting both his hexameter and lyric poems, there are some drawbacks to N.'s approach. In general, N.'s critical efforts are directed less towards an extensive reading of Juvenal's satire than the six Horatian hexameter poems listed in the title. Moreover, the book is curiously selective: most of Juvenal's poem is passed over without comment; N. focuses only on 47 of the poem's 173 lines (1–11, 156–73, 20–3 and 132–45), nor is there any discussion of the individual courses of Virro's banquet. Further, there is no study of the wider significance of Satire 5 in Juvenal's corpus: how might this intertextual attack on Horace be considered in light of Juvenal's jeremiads elsewhere on the decline of amicitia and patronage in Satires 1, 3 or 7 or in his manipulation of the Roman past and its exemplary models in Satire 8? Many of the recent seminal monographs on Juvenal and Roman Satire (e.g. those by C. Keane, Figuring Genre in Roman Satire [2008]; M. Plaza, The Function of Humor in Roman Verse Satire [2006]; and K. Freudenburg, Satires of Rome [2001]) do not appear in the bibliography, even where they might be helpful, such as Plaza's rich discussion of the various levels of Horace's sometimes self-destructive persona (Plaza [2006], pp. 171–221). More fundamentally, do we ‘need’ Juvenal to unlock these interpretative possibilities? Is it possible that Horace himself intended these subtle references to his status to be read by his contemporaries as an ironic comment on Augustan patronage instead of requiring, as N. does, that Juvenal invented this destabilising new reading as an attack on Horace and Augustus?
N.'s work, while not entirely satisfying, offers a rousing point of entry into a more sympathetic and systematic consideration of Juvenal's engagement with previous Latin poets; one hopes that others will investigate Juvenal's evocation not only of Horace or Persius, but also Virgil, Ovid and Lucan.
