The aim of L.’s volume is to offer the ‘first comprehensive reading of Juvenal's Satires in more than fifty years' (front cover), taking up the legacy of G. Highet's influential monograph Juvenal the Satirist (1954). The rich harvest of scholarship produced over the last decades made this task obviously arduous; however, L. is able to guide the reader in an interpretative path across the poems of Juvenal and the pages of his modern interpreters.

The starting point of L.’s encounter with Juvenal is the satirist's self-presentation as a charioteer charging across the same plain as Lucilius (Sat. 1.19–21). If compared with the description of Juvenal's typical day offered by Martial (12.18.1–6), the image of the poet-charioteer immediately points to the perpetual motion that underlies Juvenal's Satires. L.’s Juvenal is a restless flâneur who endlessly wanders through his city, exposing ‘the fault lines of Roman self-definition’ (p. 5); consequently, the process of reading Juvenal's Satires is considered in this volume as ‘a repetition of the search for anchors of stability to which the Roman male subject might affix his identity and of the almost total failure to find such points of security’ (p. 5). Following Juvenal in his observation of Rome, L. intentionally avoids dissecting the Juvenalian corpus according to differences of ‘tone’, but rather interprets such discrepancies in perspective as ‘manifestations of the text's inherent fluidity’ (p. 7). The breadth of L.’s analysis is enhanced by a constant search for common grounds between Juvenal and classical sources as well as the reception of Juvenalian satire in the works of later satirists.

A very close reading of Satire 1 forms the framework of the first chapter, ‘Satires from the Edge’. Starting from Juvenal's programmatic statements in the opening lines of his first poem, and following him in his list of invectives and satirical caricatures, L. unravels an elaborate network of internal links with the other Satires of Book 1 as well as with the previous satirical tradition, especially with Horace. L. investigates a field repeatedly trodden by modern scholarship, but he finds an innovative path of interpretation: this is the case, inter alia, of the connection he discovers between the ‘punishing’ purpose of Juvenal's first Satire, which gives contemporary reciters and declaimers their own medicine, and the sense of ‘lack of closure’ (p. 60) L. identifies in the selected mythological exemplification, such as the epic storms evoked in the allusions to Aeolus or the heroic scenes of katabasis underlying the reference to Aeacus' tortures (Sat. 1.7–10: see p. 60). L.’s analysis proceeds down to the most minute details of the stylistic and rhetorical strategies deployed by Juvenal, such as the well-known ‘uncoupling’ of epic form and trivial content: this distinctive feature of Juvenalian poetics demonstrates, in L.’s reading, the impossibility of finding refuge in the grounding signifiers of Romanitas (p. 64).

The second chapter, ‘Beyond the Pale’, focuses on the close connections between space and gender in Satires 2 and 6, where the spatial wandering is connected with ‘anxieties about masculinity and femininity’ (p. 105). L. reads Satire 2 as a poetic journey that takes the reader back to the lowest points of the Republican era, at the beginning of the decay of the traditional ideals that Juvenal scrutinises in his Satires. Inevitably, the crucial point in the process of Roman moral decline is seen in the contact with the ‘diseased’ non-Roman: a close reading of Satires 2 and 6, with the Eastern setting of their closing scenes, leads to the conclusion that ‘expansion ensures destruction, as the distinction between Roman and non-Roman proves unsustainable’ (p. 162).

The most original part of L.’s volume is Chapter 3, ‘The Arena of Satire’, which aims at exploring the connections between Juvenal's Satires and the Colosseum, ‘one of the central locations of Roman cultural display and self-validation’ (p. 163). Having stated the ideological importance of the arena as a means of inculcating the structuring Roman ideals as well as controlling the populace (p. 164), L. demonstrates that the arena space itself can be considered ‘as a meticulously plotted map of Romanitas' (p. 167), where the hierarchies in Roman social stratifications can be ‘viewed, reinforced, and absorbed’ (p. 167). L. does not limit his analysis to Juvenal, but enlarges his scope to the other writers of the imperial age who found inspiration in the microcosm of the arena: Calpurnius Siculus' Eclogues, Statius' Silvae, Lucan's epic poetry, the historiographical accounts by Suetonius and Cassius Dio and Seneca's philosophical works are surveyed in some of the most enjoyable pages of this volume, which convincingly demonstrates that what happens in the arena is a reduced-scale reproduction of the human condition in all its variety. Special attention is devoted to the arena borrowings in the satiric tradition: L. points out the patent connection between the aggressive Lucilian satire and the violence of the gladiatorial games, then detects ‘unmistakable impulses to the more combative original version’ (p. 190) also in the more urbane form that Horace achieved for his satire; Martial's epigrams offer a rich repertoire of cases in which the arena setting is exploited to ‘manipulate the curious gaze of the spectator … through display of the strange, deformed Other’ (p. 194); eventually, an in-depth analysis of the imagery of the arena in Juvenal's satire demonstrates how ‘Juvenalian satire magnifies and probes painful points of ideological instability in the Roman imperial body, in a manner whose closest analogy is the spectacle of violence in the amphitheater’ (p. 198).

Chapter 4, ‘Melting Down the House’, focuses on the search across Roman space and time for anchors of stability, as deployed in Juvenal's Books 4 and 5. Underneath the philosophical facade of his latest poems, L. spots the themes that are by now familiar to Juvenal's reader: thus, the geographical setting of the imagery of Satire 10, spanning from Cadiz to the Ganges, displays the anxiety of a man ‘roaming about at home and abroad on a quest for destructive objects of desire’ (p. 234); the fine and solid objects described in Satires 11 and 12, far from being the anchor of stability they seem to promise, turn out to be prone to being melted down, as an emblem of the ‘broader deterioration of … Romanitas itself’ (p. 250). The corrosive view of life deployed in Satires 13 and 14 does not spare the sacred statues or the imagines of the ancestors, no longer bearers of shared memories but fellow-victims of the general decay; finally, the imagery of the gladiatorial combat explodes again in Satire 15, in a dramatic description of a mob violence in the Egyptian desert.

L.’s volume offers the reader a wide spectrum of stimuli and suggestions. The breadth of references to ancient and modern interpreters, the mastery of bibliographies in different fields, and a sound interpretative method, yield a renewed understanding of Juvenal's poetry. Future scholarship shall not neglect the only cornerstone of Juvenal's Rome that has remained untouched by L., namely the declamatory background that grants the poet his inventory of characters, loci communes and rhetorical strategiesFootnote ¹ ; but this book has finely paved the way for fruitful studies on the interactions between ancient literature and the physical and metaphorical spaces in which it saw the light.