Getting the Joke

This paper examines intertextuality between Martial’s Epigrams and the opening of Juvenal’s first Satire, aiming not just to define its effects on Juvenal’s representation of Rome, but to rethink its implications for his self-presentation and poetics. The beginning of Satire 1 is saturated with images and jokes reminiscent of the world constructed in the Epigrams. It picks up where Martial (either near the end of his career, or already dead) left off while also promoting an image of Juvenal as a solitary literary rebel.

Depictions of religious practice are widespread in Plautus's plays, but literary scholarship has thus far given little attention to how Plautus deploys this "serious" content for comic effect. Gods, prayers, and religious rites are essential to many Plautine plots (as in e.g., Amphitruo, Mercator, and Rudens), and the centrality of religious elements to Plautus's literary style has been broadly outlined in several major studies (e.g. Hanson 1959, Dunsch 2009).

I propose a reading of the ambiguous ending of Juvenal Satire 1 as a programmatic statement of Juvenal’s appropriation of Lucilius and Horace through the echo of words and themes from Horace Epistle 1.19. I do not propose a single, stable meaning for Juvenal’s complex ending, but the dialogue with Horace provides a literary rather than social context and thus a more positive reading.

On the reverse of a denarius minted in 56 B.C., the monetalis C. Memmius hails his more famous uncle, also a C. Memmius (pr. 58), with the legend Memmius Imperator on either side of a trophy and a kneeling captive (Crawford RRC 427/1).