Change, decline, progress, and satire in Juvenal's third book

Cathy C. Keane (Washington University)

This paper argues that Juvenal employs the conflicting themes of progress and decline in his third book of Satires in order to highlight and provoke reflection about his own development as a satirist. The peculiar third book, which marks a rhetorical departure from the preceding "angry" satires, is made up of three poems concerned with tradition and change. Considered together, these poems defy a monolithic moral interpretation of historical change as either decline or progress. Juvenal's ambivalent take on his subjects has metapoetic resonance at this transitional point in his poetic career: specifically, it hints at both the gains and the losses involved in his move toward more nuanced satiric modes and away from the genre's authentic (in his own view) anger and libertas.

Satires 7-9 have been described as the "transitional" and "ironic" phase of Juvenal's oeuvre, a bridge between the angry Satires 1-6 and the cynical later poems (Anderson 1962, 1982; Braund1988). These seminal rhetorical studies suggest that the rejection of anger is a philosophical and moral decision on the poet's part; yet Satire 1 makes the case that righteous anger has a longtime and legitimate generic role, and that the loss of this mode is a loss for the genre (cf. Freudenburg 2001). In this "nostalgic" model, the genre's past is both angry and great. Meanwhile, if Juvenal's rhetorical experimentation indeed reflects an interest in refining the genre, then this agenda relies on a "progressive" model that must remain in conflict with the nostalgic.

I propose that our interpretation of Juvenal's rhetoric and style would benefit from more consideration of the satirist's choices of subject matter at different stages of his career, and in the rest of this paper I perform a reading of Satires 7-9 that supports this thesis in the case of book 3. The advice to young men of letters in Satire 7, the lament for declining Roman virtue in 8, and the dialogue between different satirist figures in 9 all underscore the idea that the satirist too is changing as we read, while thwarting our attempts to evaluate that change. In Satire 7, the models of decline and progress are clearly in tension, as Juvenal first applauds the possibilities represented by an arts-loving princeps (1-21), then laments at length the general decline in patrons' generosity and the status of intellectuals. Satire 8 invests advice and even hope in its young addressee, but mainly deplores the loss of traditional virtues among the nobility, embracing the nostalgic model. This sets the stage for the tension-filled Satire 9, a "metasatiric" dialogue between Naevolus (modeled on the angry Juvenal; cf. Braund 1988 and Rosen 2007) and the new, detached, ironic satirist. The hypocrisy-exposing Naevolus represents and encourages nostalgia for anger as an expressive mode, while his interlocutor represents curiosity about other possibilities for satire. Ultimately, Juvenal exposes the pitfalls of blanket evaluative schemes, for history and for satire. We are thus caught between characterizing his own transformation as maturation and refinement, and regarding it as the end of a great tradition.