Most texts from the classical world — battered, bruised, in no shape to talk to anyone — drag with them the very barest bones of their authors; and all of those are strictly invisible. Juvenal has always been especially so. The binned scraps of biographical information about him only fed the juggernaut of the ‘persona’ criticism, for whose general dominance Anglophone Classics might even have Juvenal to thank. This stubborn mode of reading has been especially difficult to shake in Juvenal's case: for it was almost invented/customized for him. Thankfully, its time is up — and the future looks invisible.

James Uden has written a brilliant book. (And full disclosure: the dissertation prototype of this book was instrumental in helping me write my own dissertation and book on a very similar topic — now under review at CUP; lest I be accused of indirect self-legitimation, let it be known that U. does a much better job of it than the epigonal I.) U. seizes on the crux of any encounter with Juvenal, the very one that first created the persona monster: the satirist's discombobulating disappearance from his (her?) text. This paradoxically visible invisibility assumes many guises: a hyperactive roll-call of unattributable voices in the ether, a strange ‘atopic topology’ (58), a bizarre achronic chronology, a stuccoed blanking-out of all autobiographical details in a genre traditionally powered by fervent self-fashioning. The great move is not to patch this unnerving crack up, or paper over it with fine-grained analysis of self-contradictory rhetorical masks. Instead, U.'s Juvenal means something in the world of second-century Rome: a world wizened by, yet still profoundly suspicious of, the bulldozed fences of cosmopolitan empire; a world obsessed with identity performance through words, jaw permanently dropped before the steady stream of travelling-sophist novelties; a world convulsed by the consciousness that such performance was also being vigilantly watched, overheard, read, so you had better let others fill in the specifics. U. makes the vanishing author blend into all of these backdrops, and more. He manages to plunder the best of a once mighty, now stagnating persona tradition and work the spoils to serve a blast of historicist insight. It had to be done, and my, has he done it.

The introduction gives us the book's star: an author writing ‘zero-person poetry’ (6), whose hollowed subjectivity channels the ‘rootlessness’ and ‘restlessness’ (1) of the global melting pot that was a hyper-connected empire (not to mention mimicking the motion of The Restless Emperor Himself (Epilogue)). U. takes us through three key areas of previous Juvenalia (persona, place in the genre vs. place in contemporary life, relationship with epic), and modestly shows how his approach electrifies the debate in all of them. The first two especially: I only missed quite why the last (epic) had to be there (obligatory stalwart of past scholarship?), and perhaps U. could have played up more the authorial invisibility enabled by an impersonal epic voice. But it sure is a sign of a wonderful book that even when you sense it veering, its dazzling sights keep you glued to the window.

From then on, the book becomes a treasure trove of exceptional close readings, all studded with elegant (and not immediately obvious) connections to other texts of the time. U. cuts his title down the middle with a colon acting more as conjunction than diaeresis, and the book's form follows suit: the first two chapters are much heavier on the theme of ‘invisibility’, which takes a gracious backseat as it fans gently into the intellectual/cultural/historical context-ing of the last four — but the two strands are never separated for long throughout. Ch. 1 places the suggestive and insidious brand of Juvenalian ‘no-naming’ satire against the residual Domitianic paranoia over delatores; this section nails a comparative unearthing of similar anxieties in Tacitus’ Dialogus, in which close company U. would like to see Juvenal's first book (dating them both to the very early 100s a.d. — see his quietly radical redating (Appendix)). Ch. 2 scans invisibility from several angles, making inroads via Dio Chrysostom's ‘atopic’ thirteenth oration, and moving on to the disguise fetish of Sat. 2, then to the leaked secrets of Naevolus in Sat. 9 (pitting the invisible satirist against his all-too-visible nemesis Mr Warty). Chs 3 and 4 read Sat. 3 and 8 respectively with contemporary cultural politics: Umbricius’ Hellenophobia channels currents of debate on Greek vs. Roman identity, just as Sat. 8's Juvenal taps into sophistic discourse on genealogy (and the Hadrianic state of provincial government). Chs 5 and 6 again root their pet satires in that rootless world: ch. 5 with an outstanding illumination of Sat. 10 as a specific response to the Cynic philosopher mad-dogs lining the streets, ch. 6 with a convincing (if a little patchier) crack at the ever maligned Sat. 12 — in U.'s view a satire on Hadrian's retro-Augustanism, and a provocative double-hit at both captatio and religious sacrifice. The epilogue goes to ‘Outsider Empire’, which shows beautifully (with the cannibalistic Sat. 15) how this invisible satirist gets swamped in a cultural climate where identity distinctions are both obsessively policed, and utterly meaningless.

I have precious little negative to say about this stunning debut, but if I had to … I would note that U. seems to vacillate somewhat haphazardly on a natural big question of invisible satirising: text vs. performance. On some pages, U. throws full weight behind a Juvenal wowing audiences with recitation-grade special effects; on others, his readings (and they are emphatically that) are predicated on larger scale patterns of intra- and intertext. While they aren't mutually exclusive, the relationship does need theorization. One could disappear in plain sight, but might it not be easier in text?

Yet make no mistake: U. has rejuvenated both Roman satire and Second Sophistic studies. His invisible satirist will be a reluctant celebrity for years to come.