Maya Chakravorty, Boston University
Juvenal’s second Satire is the focus of a diverse and varied scholarship, including the narrator’s tirade about the sexual transgressions of elite, effete Roman men (Stewart: 309-332, Nappa 1998: 90-108 and 2018: 93-166, Walters: 355-67, and Freudenberg: 248-58), intertextual connections with Cicero, Vergil, and Lucan, and persona and identity (Fratantuono: 141-50, Celotto: 25-35, Uden: 65-66, and Ritter 2015: 83-99 and 2019: 250-74). However, there has been little attention given to Juvenal’s use of Republican exempla and imagery. Throughout Satire 2, the reader is bombarded with memories of early and Republican Rome. I argue that many of these references are problematic and undercut the expectation that Republican memories and exempla remain worthwhile into the first and second-centuries CE. Juvenal’s famous indignatio and pessimism is not necessarily rooted in “anger at everything that appears to the satirist not to be consonant with traditional Roman values” (Ferriss-Hill: 26), but rather denotes his frustration with the pretenses and mimicry of Republican values which no longer work in the Empire.
I begin with the opening lines of Satire 2 (1-5), which express dissatisfaction with those “who imitate people like the Curii and live a Bacchanalian lifestyle”, while filling their houses with busts of Greek philosophers (4-5). Although there has been much interest in the presence of the philosophers, I argue that Juvenal evokes the traditional institution of the imagines, and then satirizes it – instead of wax masks of ancestors, we have busts of philosophers. The reference to the Curii, recalling Manius Curius Dentatus, reminds readers of Republican statesmen, while simulant, “they imitate”, brings to mind the exemplary process of imitatio. Because simulant conveys a sense of disingenuity, there is a subversion of exemplary expectations: by donning the imagines, one became their ancestors. Yet these men are pretenders and indocti (4), or “untaught” and “unlearned”. The exemplary cycle has become stale, and without the requisite context and education, these traditions have become meaningless, giving rise to indocti who botch these sacrosanct rituals.
I continue with the story of Gracchus, a Salian priest, who marries a trumpeter (2.124-29). After describing Gracchus as a bride (124), Juvenal then whisks his readers back to early Rome, where Romulus, pater Urbis, is invoked (126). Gracchus surely hints at the famous Republican Gracchi brothers, and this rustic description is certainly far better suited to Gracchus as a Salian priest than as the bride of a cornicen. Juvenal uses outdated language - Romans citizens are called Latin shepherds, and Mars is called Gradivus, a Vergilian and Livian archaicism. Just as this Gracchus has no place in this old-fashioned world, so too does early Rome have no place in the Imperial court. Once again, the exemplary cycle has gone awry: it is not tradition and virtus which is being handed down, but rather vice and debauchery. By focusing attention on the failure of Republican exempla, I conclude that Juvenal’s second Satire offers a new perspective on Roman exemplarity as well as the new political climate.