Satire

In this paper, I first offer a reinterpretation of Juvenal 12 in which I argue that the apparent inconcinnity of the satire’s two parts, a problem for which scholars have long been seeking solutions, should be read as part of a carefully-orchestrated comedic performance of self-contradiction we also see at work in Juvenal 11. I then go on to argue that Juvenal 11-13 should be considered together as examples of a fruitful comedic strategy whereby traditional targets of satire occupy the positions of addressees and/or authors of literary genres associated with friendly correspondence.

In recent years, genre criticism has become an increasingly important means for understanding ancient epic (Harrison 2007). Many of these studies, however, deal almost exclusively with the genres “high up” on the generic hierarchy, such as tragedy (Soerink 2014, Augoustakis 2015, Marinis 2015), whereas the “lower” genres of comedy and satire have been neglected (Cowan 2011 is an important exception).

Juvenal’s Satire 3 opens with the narrator’s friend Umbricius’ emigration from Rome to Cumae. The impetus for the move is, as Umbricius explains, because “there is no place for any Roman here” (119). Recent work on the satirical nature of Satire 3 by scholars such as Victoria Baines, Tom Geue, and Gregory Staley has focused on Umbricius as a mock-epic exile, establishing a system of nostalgic references to Vergil, Homer, and Statius.

Though very little survives of the Hellenistic grammarian Neoptolemus of Parium (a mere twenty fragments, collected in Mette 1980), his influence upon subsequent literature has received substantial scholarly attention, due almost entirely to his apparent influence upon the Ars Poetica of Horace (see Brink 1963, Laird 2007, or, adversely, Wigodsky 2009).

Modern editors and commentators (Marx; Cichorius 63–98; Warmington; Krenkel; Christes and Garbugino) have assumed that the 30 known books of Lucilian poetry all circulated under the title Saturae. With a new analysis of the transmission of the fragments, this paper contends that only books 1–20 formed the Saturae. I will further argue that the designation alluded to "pork legislation" (leges saturae). While this proposition has been rejected by most scholars (e.g.