Recycling the Mighty:
Sejanus and Hannibal in Juvenal’s Tenth Satire

Christopher Nappa (University of Minnesota)

Juvenal’s tenth satire begins with an assertion that human beings ask the gods for all the wrong things, and it proceeds by naming various human aspirations (political power, military glory, wealth, beauty, long life, etc.) and then by using a variety of exempla to show the dangers, moral and otherwise, associated with each one. This paper will treat two of Juvenal’s exempla in order to point toward a reading of the poem that, unlike many interpretations, finds in the tenth satire many of the same concerns that exist elsewhere in Juvenal’s oeuvre: the exempla in question, Sejanus and Hannibal, point to anxieties over the way rhetoric and politics under the emperors transform even the most powerful into something else.

In the case of Sejanus, his downfall is portrayed as the recycling of his statue. The treatment of this physical icon is a meatphor for the way that powerful individuals are treated both by the fickle mob and by the emperor. The notorious and very distinctive Sejanus is revealed to be interchangeable with anyone who wants to rise in power under an autocrat. Hannibal, at the end of his exemplum, is told i demens...et declamatio fias. Whereas Sejanus’ rise to power transformed him into an object that could literally be recycled, Hannibal’s turns him into a school exercise.

In the end, both men have become the common property of many. They have become rhetorical exempla and, even more significantly, tropes in the rhetoric of satire—just as Cicero, Demosthenes, and Marius do elsewhere in the poem. Since exemplary individuals are open to infinite manipulation within a variety of rhetorical frameworks (including satire), they are not individuals at all. Since it can be shown that the different ambitions deconstructed by the tenth satire are largely those of the elite, the poem can be seen as an expression of elite anxiety: those aspirations that characterize the Roman elite tend, under the emperors, to reduce individuals to interchangeable units that can easily be manipulated and destroyed in the same social and political system that changed republican rhetoric into declamation.