1. Barthes, Roland, S/Z, tr. Richard Miller (New York 1974), 5Google Scholar. For a lucid discussion of what is involved in trying to appreciate the plural, see Silverman, Kaja, The Subject of Semiotics (Oxford 1983), 246Google Scholar: ‘The writerly text comes into existence as an archaeological dig at the site of a classic text. It exhumes the cultural voices or codes responsible for the latter’s enunciation, and in the process it discovers multiplicity instead of consistency, and signifying flux instead of stable meaning. The writerly text is one which the reader or viewer has obliged to reveal the terms of its own construction, one which has been made available as discourse instead of as a transparent poetic, novelistic, or cinematic fiction.’ It is the ‘cultural voices’ that the poem speaks from and for and to that constitute the plural I am trying to describe (rather than ‘interpret’).

2. This ‘artificial’ bracketing off of what Barthes terms ‘linguistic sensuality’ (as if one were speaking, could speak, from ‘un lieu moral, nettoyé de toute sensualité de langage’ (Le plaisir du texle [Paris 1973], 86Google Scholar) is a necessary fiction for us (one not unlike ‘the strategic essential’) when we are reading texts that are offensive (to us) in the contexts we read them in. But this strategy (of pleasure abolished or deferred) is harder for some readers to adopt than it is for others (that it is, say, for those who don’t enjoy the way words taste on their tongues, who don’t respond viscerally to the sights and sounds that words make as they careen through their skulls). For a recent sample of expert appreciation of Juvenal’s expertise as an inmate of Wortwelt, see Jenkyns, Richard, Three Classical Poets: Sappho, Catullus, and Juvenal (Cambridge MA 1982), 203fGoogle Scholar. on 143–48.

3. See Macherey, Pierre, A Theory of Literary Production (London 1986), 132Google Scholar, for the principle involved here.

4. ‘The War Between Men and Women’ (from Men, Women, and Dogs [New York 1943]Google Scholar) is most easily found in The Thurber Carnival (New York 1945Google Scholar); the drawings are astutely, if generously, described by Kenney, Catherine McGhee, Thurber’s Anatomy of Confusion (Hamden CT 1984), 55–57Google Scholar. From this same era come Philip Wylie’s once very famous Juvenalian observations on American women (Cinderella, Momism) in Generation of Vipers (New York 1942Google Scholar) which his postscripts in the revised edition (1955) hardly succeed in erasing.

5. An interesting and venerable statement of these twin essences (eternal masculine/eternal feminine) is Varro’s de lingua latina, 5.58–61.

6. Some ‘readers’ of Thurber’s battle cartoons may find themselves in a spot (or perspective) not unlike the one that Juvenal’s poem puts them in. As a gay and queer man who admires what feminism has contributed to various debates, I want to read these cartoons and this poem as a readerly text of (patriarchal) pleasure and demystify it; see Silverman (n.l above), 244: ‘The readerly text thus attempts to conceal all traces of itself as a factory within which a particular social reality is produced through standard representations and dominant signifying practices.’ But I am also a white bourgeois male who cannot resist (sometimes) slipping back into (relabor, says Horace, master of fragmented subjectivity) a perspective from which this text becomes (is, will be again) a text to be enjoyed, not demystified. In this matter, I am the product of at least two sign-systems (note the parallel problem in n.2 above). See Barthes (n.2 above), 26, for the classic discussion of the ‘anachronistic subject’ who wants to enjoy ‘the consistency of his selfhood (that is his pleasure), and seeks its loss (that is his bliss). He is subject split twice over, doubly perverse.’ For a subtle discussion of the later Barthes’ formulations of the dynamics of (dis)equilibrium that constitute writing/reading subjects, see Lawrence Schehr, The Shock of Men: Homosexual Hermeneutics in French Writing (Stanford 1995), 95–127. I don’t expect my reader to find me and my reading as interesting as I find myself and my reading, but I emphasise myself as reader, particularly for this notoriously fragmented and quintessential (totalised, totalising, unified) patriarchal text in order to remind myself and my readers that the myth of the pure, unified reader purely reading (responding to, flawlessly, ‘naturally’ deciphering) pure, unified texts is no longer, ‘at this point in time’ (as technocrats are fond of saying), available to us.

7. The generalisation makes use of the essentialist universal patriarchy. For a complex, interesting study of the problems of American patriarchy in transition, see Pfeil, Fred, White Guys: Studies in Postmodern Domination and Difference (London and New York 1995Google Scholar), esp. 208–61; for a lucid example of the dynamics involved in the contingent (re)formations of various masculinities and their sign systems, see Tosh, John, ‘Domesticity and Manliness in the Victorian Middle Class,’ in Michael Roper and John Tosh (eds.), Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain since 1880 (London and New York 1991), 44–73Google Scholar.

8. Juvenal: The Sixteen Satires, tr. P. Green (Harmondsworth 1967Google Scholar).

9. See Simpson, John, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs (Oxford 1982), 279fGoogle Scholar.

10. See Nealon, Jeffrey T., Double-Reading: Postmodernism After Deconstruction (Ithaca 1993), 29–41Google Scholar, 154–59, for a description of what happens once the primary stage of a double reading is completed; for a tidy specimen of double reading, see ‘active/passive’ in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (New York 1977), 133Google ScholarPubMed.

11. Richlin, Amy, The Garden of Priapus: Sexuality and Aggression in Roman Humor (repr Oxford 1992), 205Google Scholar, comments on the clichés. See also Braund, S.H., Beyond Anger: A Study of Juvenal’s Third Book of Satires (Cambridge 1988), 19Google Scholar, on the ‘rhetorical question’ in this passage. For Winkler, Martin M., The Persona in Three Satires of Juvenal (Wiesbaden 1983), 31fGoogle Scholar., the clichès and the rhetoric are ‘undercut,’ and this subversion unmasks the hysterical speaker (who is being satirised in his bumbling efforts at satirising ‘decadence’). For Highet, Gilbert, Juvenal the Satirist (Oxford 1954), 100fGoogle Scholar., what seem to him the speaker’s heart-felt clichés contain the truth of Roman destiny and character.

12. Richlin (n. 11 above), 207, sees that ‘the satirist’s hostility is expressed against other men as well as against women,’ that he ‘thinks women make other men fools, hence both women and other men are the butt of the satire’; but ‘other’ is rather fuzzy here, since the speaker and his audience are united against women and (other) weak men (not us). They can’t ask ‘why don’t they (= not us) beat some sense into the ladies?’ because that question always already supposes the question, ‘why don’t we (I and you) do something about it?’ In short: they are busy denying (by projecting their fear and guilt on women and weak men) that they are those others, that they are themselves the problem.

13. For this interpretation of these verses, see Courtney, E., A Commentary on the Satires of Juvenal (London 1980), 311Google Scholar.

14. See Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble: Feminism and Subversion of Identity (London and New York 1990), 16–25, 36–39Google Scholar.

15. Ibid., 145.

16. Ibid., 65, 76f., 135, 148.

17. Ibid., 24f., 146f. For a good discussion of the issues involved here, see Elam, Diane, Feminism and Deconstruction: Ms en Abyme (London and New York 1994), 49fGoogle Scholar.

18. Simpson, Louis, Male Impersonators: Men Performing Masculinity (London and New York 1994Google Scholar) offers acute and often hilariously Barthesian (Mythologies) dissections of styles of reconstructing patterns of masculinity as these manifest themselves in various aspects of popular culture.

19. Butler (n.14 above), 140.

20. See Henderson, John, ‘Satire Writes “Woman”: Gendersong’, PCPS 35 (1989), 69Google Scholar, for this egregiously misogynistic moment as being one which may mark (he cites here the arguments of Veyne and Foucault) a transition in styles of constructing the masculine subject, one which shows ‘the shift in how culture spoke—and so (?) thought—of husbands and wives’. I am less concerned with whether such a transformation was in fact taking place in Juvenal’s time (or later) than I am in the way his poem (and its audiences) point to the collapse of the patriarchal sign-systems it derives from and seeks desperately to rescue from what is thought to be destroying it.

21. Dio’s Roman History, tr. Earnest Cary (London and Cambridge MA 1917), vi.145–47Google Scholar.

22. Cornell, Tim, ‘The End of Roman Imperial Expansion’, in War and Society in the Roman World, ed. John Rich and Graham Shipley (London 1993), 165fGoogle Scholar. (see also 154–64, 167f.); see also Keppie, Lawrence, The Making of the Roman Army from Republic to Empire (Totowa NJ 1984), 146–55Google Scholar, 180–82; Raaflaub, Kurt, ‘The Political Significance of Augustus’ Military Reforms’, in W.S. Hanson and L. Keppie (eds.), Roman Frontier Studies, part 3 (1978), 1011, 1019fGoogle Scholar.

23. The translation is Radice’s, Betty (Pliny: Letters and Panegyricus, vol. 2 [Cambridge MA and London 1969]Google Scholar).

24. See Aldrich, Robert, The Seduction of the Mediterranean: Writing, Art, and Homosexual Fantasy (London and New York 1993), 179f.Google Scholar, for interesting observations on ghosts of the old icons of masculinity that linger (à la Braudel); for a readable, probing discussion of the mechanics of modern Western masculinity and its ideologies that may be profitably contrasted with the ancient Roman versions, see Easthope, Anthony, What a Man’s Gotta Do (London 1992Google Scholar), passim. Very useful here are Silverman’s, Kaja observations on patriarchal sign-systems in disrepair, particularly her chapter, ‘Historical Trauma and Male Subjectivity’, with its discussion of The Best Years of Our Lives and It’s a Wonderful Life, in Male Subjectivity at the Margins (London and New York 1992), 52–121Google Scholar.

25. For an interesting discussion of desperate remedies invented for the shattering masculinities in this period, see Gleason’s, Maud W. ingenious descriptions of the theory and practice of oratorical and sophistical male-gendering: Making Men: Sophists and Self-Presentation in Ancient Rome (Princeton 1995Google Scholar), passim. Different generations, different remedies. One mistake the poem’s speaker makes is to assume, in a fit of nostalgia, that earlier Roman males were free of the problems (that is, the misogynistic hates and fears) that dog his own era. But a glance at the pair of speeches that Livy devotes to the ‘woman problem’ shows that ‘always already’ Rome’s patriarchy, like others in this regard (different though it was in others) had slept badly (sometimes less, sometimes more) because of its insecurities, its sense that the phallos is not as big or invincible as it’s supposed to be. In Rome, as in most patriarchies, men were not so much worried about women and their vices and the threats they posed as they were about the fragility of their own power; for interesting comments on these matters, see Orgel, Stephen, Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge 1996), 109–26Google Scholar; for the anxieties of colonisers over the slandered virilities of the colonised and how these slanders indicate deep concern for their own ‘menhood’ (such fears would not be unlikely in the imperial Rome of Juvenal’s time), see Bleys, Rudi C., The Geography of Perversion: Male-to-Male Sexual Behavior Outside the West and the Ethnographic Imagination (New York 1995), 89–98, 147–52Google Scholar, 272.

26. See Winkler (n.ll above), 220–24; on the poem’s length, see Braund (n.ll above), 20f. For excellent arguments against a satirist out to ‘undercut’ the diatribe against women that he puts in the mouth of his persona, see Gold, Barbara, ‘Humor in Juvenal’s Sixth Satire’, in Siegfried Jaekel and Asko Timonen (eds.), Laughter Down the Centuries (Acta Universitatis Turkuensis 208 [1994]), 107fGoogle Scholar.

27. For interesting observations on these matters, see Wrlls, Gary, ‘John Wayne’s Body’, The New Yorker, August 19 1996, 38–49Google Scholar; because of his emphasis on this cowboy hero’s (Roman, imperial) flair discipline (46–49), Wills may have been led to underestimate something softer in the mesh of the viewed and his viewers: the degree to which Wayne’s fans (even in the 40’s and certainly in the 50’s and later) were drawn to the mechanism of nostalgia that he provided for them; more richly than all others in this most sentimental of genres, he fed their yearning for a vanished frontier and its vanished individualisms even as he kept on whetting it.

28. In a somewhat different version, this paper was first given as the second John Sullivan Memorial Lecture at the University of California at Santa Barbara in February 1996. I am very grateful to Professor Robert Renehan and to the Classics Department for their kind hospitality.