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A New Approach to Juvenal’s First Satire*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 May 2015
Extract
Francis Bacon, in his unfinished dialogue entitled ‘An Advertisement touching an Holy War’, ends a fierce attack on unnatural social orders with these words: ‘For these cases, of women to govern men, (and) slaves (to govern) free men, are total . . . perversions of the laws of nature and nations.’ In Bacon’s dialogue, Zebedaeus was in fact referring these two cases of perversion to the mythical Amazons and to the slaves of the Sultanry of the Mamaluches. However, his words could equally well apply to the two major themes of Juvenal’s early satires, themes which are skilfully foreshadowed in his programmatic poem, Sat. i. For I suggest that ‘perversion’ is the key theme in this satire, its two main examples being, first, the unnatural roles of the two sexes and, secondly, the servitude of free-born Roman clients to ex-slave patrons and their lackeys; the sexual perversion being emphasized throughout the second section of Sat. i (vv. 22-86), and the clientela anomaly being the dominant theme in the balancing section, vv. 87-146. And I suggest that these two forms of perversion are then fully worked out in the first three books of Juvenal’s Satires, the former, sexual perversion, in Sat. ii and vi, the latter, the clientela paradox, in Sat. iii and v, and both of them in the ironical self-exposure of the client-cumprostitute, Naevolus, in Sat. ix.
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- Copyright © Australasian Society for Classical Studies 1970
References
1 Hardy’s, E.G.second edition (London, 1891) has eight divisions, including 73–80,Google Scholar 81–6, 87–126. Valla’s 1491 edition has no paragraphs, but the break after 80 was common by the end of the seventeenth century, as in Farnabius (1683), Casaubon (1695), Prateus (1715), Juvencius (1717) etc., yet never after 86. I have examined over fifty editions, and most of this century’s translations and articles, and only one other supports my thesis: a short but perceptive study of ‘Juvénal Satire I, 81–86’, by De Decker, J., RIB 4 (1912), 178–85;Google Scholar as far as it went his article made a reasonable case for a new paragraph at v. 87, but scholars have subsequently ignored it; indeed, Decker’s, Deown scheme in his Juvenalis Declamans (Gand, 1913), p. 71,Google Scholar divides Satire i into the following four sections: 1–18, 19–21, 22–150 and 150–71. MacKay, L.A., ‘Notes on Juvenal’, CPh 53 (1958), 238,Google Scholar suggests continuing w. 79–80 with w. 81–4, making Juvenal trace Satire back to Deucalion; this is highly improbable. He avoids the difficulty of w. 85–6.
2 ‘The First Satire of Juvenal’, PCPhS viii (1962), 29–40.
3 Cf. his programmatic poems in Books xxvi and xxx especially.
4 ‘Studies in Book I of Juvenal’, TCS xv (1951), 31–90.
5 Op. cit. 33.
6 Op. cit. 39.
7 Lustrum viii (1963), 203.
8 Helmbold, W.C., ‘The structure of Juvenal 1, Univ. Calif. Publ. Class. Phil, 16 (1954), 47–59.Google Scholar
9 Harrison, E., ‘Juvenal I, 81–9’Google Scholar, CR li (1937), 55–6. His excision and reading of ecquando were not original; cf. Scholte, A., Observationes criticae in saturas D. Iunii Iuvenalis (Utrecht, 1873), p. 5:Google Scholar ‘omissis his versibus (85–6) et mutato et quando (vs. 87) in ecquando, omnia artissime cohaerebunt . . . .’ Griffith, J.G., in ‘Frustula Iuvenaliana’, CQ 19 (1969), 379–80,CrossRefGoogle Scholar argues at length for et quando rather than ecquando, after postulating a most unlikely ‘parenthesis’ for vv. 85–6. His failure to appreciate Juvenal’s penchant for the ridiculum 
(see note 14 below) is also apparent in his comments on Sat. 7, 124–8 (op. cit. 382–3), where he has Aemilius shutting one eye (lusca) to fire his ‘bowshaft’ (hostile). Surely nothing could be more typical of Juv.’s wit than the lengthy, grandiloquent crescendo of quadriiuges … vestibulis … feroci … bellatore … minatur … eminus … meditatur proelia, reaching its deflating climax with the short, derogatory adjective, lusca (‘one-eyed’); curvatum also seems derisive, but in its hyperbolical context it is better taken as an extra-long, and therefore ‘whippy’, javelin (hostile).
10 In his article ‘Is Juvenal a classic?’, in Critical Essays on Roman Literature, II: Satire, ed. Sullivan, J.P. (London, 1963), p. 163.Google ScholarGreen, P., Juvenal, The Sixteen Satires (Penguin translation, 1967), p. 73,Google Scholar mentions Sullivan J.P. as a supporter of the lines’ excision. He himself inserts them after line 80—they would be better left as ‘homeless wanderers’! Nisbet, R.G.M., in reviewing Clausen’s, W.V.edition of Juvenal (Oxford, 1959) in JRS 52 (1962), 33,Google Scholar depores the fact that Clausen only deleted 36 lines as interpolations, and lists i 85–6 as his first example of such sins of omission.
11 Op. cit. 33.
12 For Lucilius as ‘chevalier romain’ cf. Heurgon, J., ‘Les éléments italiques dans la satire romaine’, Wiss. Zs. der Univ. Rostock, 15 (1966) [Römische Satire], 431–3. Of course the reference is mock-heroic; even Lucilius’ memory would not be sacred before Juvenal’s wit.Google Scholar
13 Cf. Knapp, C., –A Brief Review of Juvenal Satire I’, CW 19 (1925), 19,Google Scholar where he rightly comments on the ‘sarcasm in voluptas, “sensual pleasures”, and in discursus, “hurry-skurry”, “helter-skelter”, “the gabble, gobble and git” of contemporary life’. However, he takes the lines as a prologue to the second half of the satire. I suggest that they better suit the general parade of perverts in the second section, to which they act as an epilogue. In the context of Sat. i, surely ira is sadistic, gaudia perverted, votum materialistic and timor obsequious; Highet, G., Juvenal the Satirist (Oxford, 1954), p. 248,Google Scholar n. 10, rightly describes them as the four cardinal passions, but ignores their highly ironical context. Cf. also De Decker, J., op. cit. 181–2.Google Scholar
14 Cf. esp. the climax to Sejanus’ fall, Sat. x 63–4. In Sat. vii, the section on the law-courts ends with nutricula causidicorum (cf. my article, ‘Juvenal on Latin Oratory’, Hermes xcii (1964), 121–3). In Sat. i 38–9, the grand build-up to a noble career, in caelum quos evehat optima summijnunc via processus, leads into the 
vetulae vesica beatae, a derogatory diminutive again paired with a crude metaphor from the sermo plebeius. For Persius’ similar mock-epic beginning, followed by an ironical self-depreciation, cf. his choliambics (esp. semipaganus: on its full significance, see Anderson, W.S., ‘Persius and the Rejection of Society’, Wiss. Zs. der Univ. Rostock 15 (1966) [Römische Satire], 409–16).Google Scholar
15 Cf. Hanssen, J.S.Th., Latin Diminutives. A Semantic Study (Bergen, 1953), pp. 215 ff.Google Scholar De Decker J., op. cit. 184, takes farrago as an agricultural term, a ‘melange’, forming an oxymoron with libelli, and suggests, rightly, that ‘son emploi ici est avant tout brusque et trivial’. On similar terms for Roman Satire, see my article ‘Satis Saturae?’ in Mnemosyne (forthcoming).
16 Op. cit. 33.
17 Op. cit. 20–1.
18 Cf. Hor. Serm. i 2. 104–5 pretiumque avellier ante/quam mercem ostendi?; also Juv. vi 589 quae nudis longum ostendit cervicibus aurum; and x 53 mediumque ostenderet unguem. It seems that in Horace and Juvenal nudus and ostendo were commonly associated with lowest priced meretrices; in contrast, cf. iii 135 vestiti … scorti, for an expensive ‘call-girl’. As N. Rigault rightly observed (quoted by Mayor, J.E.B., Thirteen Satires of Juvenal [London, 1886], Vol. 1, p. 130): ‘de Pyrrha loquitur, ut de lena quadam.’ De Decker, J., op. cit. 181, uses almost the same words.Google Scholar
19 Op. cit. 33.
20 Op. cit. 53.
21 Op. cit. 203.
22 Op. cit. 34–45.
23 G. Knapp, op. cit. 19, suggests that the sportula scene is expanded because it lends itself so well to Juvenal’s ‘Kabinettstücke’, and aptly quotes Pliny’s luxuriae et sordium nova societas (Ep. ii 6. 7), but still condemns the length of the distribution scene. This may be due to Juvenal’s discursiveness (see Friedländer’s Essays on Juvenal, trans. Martyn, J.R.C. [Amsterdam, 1969], pp. 39–42,Google Scholar 44–5), but more probably served both to highlight the main battleground of the client’s day, and to expand the theme sufficiently to balance the second section of Satire i and fully foreshadow the following satires.
24 Op. cit. 33.
25 Op. cit. 45–55.
26 Op. cit. 205.
27 Lines 136, 184, 232, 270, O 14, 432: see Coffey, op. cit. 207.
28 For a recent analysis of this development, see Heilmann, W., ‘Komposition der vierten Satire und des ersten Satirenbuches Juvenals’, RhMus 110 (1967), 366–70;Google Scholar he rightly applies Highet’s ‘climactic scheme’ to the clientela (367): ‘Das Verhältnis Klient-Patron wird dagegen … in einer Steigerung von der ersten über die dritte (vgl. ngff., 188f.) zur fünften Satire hin dargelegt.’ However, he subordinates the clientela theme to an ‘Urbs-Thema’, and makes no mention of Sat. ix (see below).
29 Cf. 166 spes bene cenandi vos decipit.
30 Pryor, A.D., in a recent assessment of Sat. 9 (Proceedings of the Ninth Congress of AULLA [Melbourne, 1964], pp. 33–4)Google Scholar suggested that it had a climactic role and formed part of two trilogies of the clientela and sexual themes; however, he failed to relate the latter to Sat. i, and omitted Umbricius in the former, incorporating instead the purely introductory and general treatment of clients in Juvenal’s programmatic satire.
31 De Decker, J., Juvenalis Declamans, p. 143,Google Scholar n. 1, comments: ‘Le mot monstrum était cher aux rhéteurs.’ Juvenal certainly found it so, using it thirteen times in all, four times for sexual perversion (ii 122, 143; vi 286; ix 38), twice for monstrous individuals (iv 2, 115), twice for murderesses (vi 645, 647), twice for cannibalism (xv 121, 172) and once for unnatural honesty (xiii 65). In contrast to these eleven unnatural perversions of human behaviour, there are just two cases of the normal sense, ‘prodigies’, both monsters of the deep (iv 45; xiv 283). In Lucilius’ fragments, and in the satires of both Horace and Persius, the word is never used for human monstrosities, emphasizing Juvenal’s obsession with it, and with the perverted society is symbolized. On a similar climactic use of monstrum, see Luce, J.V., ‘Cleopatra as Fatale Monstrum’, CQ,13 (1963), 251–7,CrossRefGoogle Scholar who argues that in the key, transitional phrase of the Cleopatra Ode, monstrum is neither vituperative (as it normally is in Cicero) nor ironical, but has mythical and ethical associations, and the sense of an ‘unnatural freak’, suggesting, as when applied to Catiline by Cicero in the Pro Caelio, ‘both a perverse and a formidable opponent’. Virro exactly.