Conspiracy in the Satires of Juvenal

Victoria E. Pagán (University of Florida)

The Satires of Juvenal are riddled with petty conspirators of all sorts. The second satire targets un-masculine sexuality in such a way, as Walters has shown, as to implicate the readership in the spectacle of deviancy: “This is a satire in which the theme of secrecy and disclosure, of looking at what is or should be hidden, is central” (Arethusa 1998, 356). Hidden truth is brought to light, in spite of the fact that these kinds of deviant males stick together (magna inter molles concordia, 2.48). At Satire 3.222, Umbricius suspects that Persicus set fire to his own house in order to defraud his neighbors. At Satire 6.231-41, a mother-in-law conspires with her daughter. As Braund (Commentary 1996, 182; Beyond Anger 1988, 163-77) points out, secrets are a major theme of satire. Most recently, in her discussion of Satire 3, Shumate remarks on the “essentially paranoid character of [Juvenal’s] vision” in this poem, framed “in terms of conspiracy (ubiquitously suggested although never explicitly formulated as such),” (Nation, Empire, Decline 2006, 38).

A survey of the numerous allusions to conspiracy throughout the corpus are adduced to substantiate Shumate’s supposition. Juvenal calls on Catiline, Rubellius Blandus, and Sejanus. The historical conspiracies in the reigns of Claudius, Nero, and Domitian form such an indissoluble complex of allusions that the result is an impressionistic vision of conspiracy across time—uninterrupted, continuous, and pervasive. While would appear that Domitian is as far forward in time as Juvenal dare hurl his lampoons, into the past his aim is deep. In a passage toward the end of Satire 8, the speaker recounts the conspiracy to reinstall Tarquinius Superbus.

Thus, the sense of pervasive conspiracism that Shumate senses derives from Juvenal’s repeated and continuous allusions to historical conspiracies. This is not to say that Juvenal is a conspiracy theorist. Rather, he is a poet for whom conspiracy was a historical reality that shaped his perception of his society, a perception distilled, distorted, and disseminated through that most Roman of genres, satire.