Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Conventions
- Introduction
- 1 Epicurean anger
- 2 Cicero and the expression of grief
- 3 The subjugation of grief in Seneca's Epistles
- 4 A passion unconsoled? Grief and anger in Juvenal Satire 13
- 5 Passion, reason and knowledge in Seneca's tragedies
- 6 Imagination and the arousal of the emotions in Greco-Roman rhetoric
- 7 Pity, fear and the historical audience: Tacitus on the fall of Vitellius
- 8 All in the mind: sickness in Catullus 76
- 9 Ferox uirtus: anger in Virgil's Aeneid
- 10 ‘Envy and fear the begetter of hate’: Statius' Thebaid and the genesis of hatred
- 11 Passion as madness in Roman poetry
- Bibliography
- Index of ancient passages
- General index
4 - A passion unconsoled? Grief and anger in Juvenal Satire 13
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Conventions
- Introduction
- 1 Epicurean anger
- 2 Cicero and the expression of grief
- 3 The subjugation of grief in Seneca's Epistles
- 4 A passion unconsoled? Grief and anger in Juvenal Satire 13
- 5 Passion, reason and knowledge in Seneca's tragedies
- 6 Imagination and the arousal of the emotions in Greco-Roman rhetoric
- 7 Pity, fear and the historical audience: Tacitus on the fall of Vitellius
- 8 All in the mind: sickness in Catullus 76
- 9 Ferox uirtus: anger in Virgil's Aeneid
- 10 ‘Envy and fear the begetter of hate’: Statius' Thebaid and the genesis of hatred
- 11 Passion as madness in Roman poetry
- Bibliography
- Index of ancient passages
- General index
Summary
Anger is the passion which predominates in Juvenal's Satires. Indignatio is the driving force in the first two books, Satires 1–6. The later Satires present a rejection of indignatio which is initiated obliquely in Satire 9, the last poem in Book III, and made explicit briefly for the first time at the close of Satire 10, the opening poem of Book iv. Satire 13, the programme poem to Juvenal's fifth book, confronts the matter head-on, with an unsympathetic presentation of an angry man. This seems to invite reassessment of the angry speaker of the early books by offering a negative perspective on indignatio. The treatment of the passion of anger in Satire 13, then, has tremendous significance for our understanding of the development of Juvenal's satire. Here, however, the passion of anger concerns us in a broader sphere. The treatment of anger in Satire 13 demonstrates the vernacularisation of ideas about the nature and control of the passions which originate in the Hellenistic philosophical schools. That Juvenal not only incorporates such ideas into his satire but also exploits his audience's familiarity with them for satiric effect is an eloquent testimony to the interaction between different modes of ethical discourse.
The angry man in Satire 13 is Calvinus, the addressee in the poem, who has suffered a minor financial loss caused by fraud and perjury. Recent work has established that Satire 13 is an ironic consolatio, a mock-consolatio by the speaker to Calvinus in which the crime of fraud compounded by perjury is ‘equivalent’ to the death of a loved one and the addressee's reaction of anger is ‘equivalent’ to the bereaved person‘s reaction of grief. That is, in terms of the passions, anger replaces grief.
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- The Passions in Roman Thought and Literature , pp. 68 - 88Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1997
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