Both Persius and Juvenal accord more prominence than Horace does to rhetoric perse in this futilely centrifugal, satiric game of hide and seek, and I want to devote the remainder of this survey primarily to them. Persius, born in 34 ce, forty-two years after Horace’s death and twenty-one years before Juvenal’s birth, has left us only six extant satires. While much dependent on Horace, Persius wrote in a manner radically unlike his satiric forebear: densely difficult Latin, deeply informed by Stoicism, choked with strained metaphor and conceits. His first satire is pervasively programmatic; from beginning to end its subject is the place of poetry in the corrupted culture of the modern Roman world, and the place of Persius’ satire within that poetry. Yet his first line, taken, the scholiast tells us, from the satirist Lucilius, has a strongly declamatory ring: o curas hominum! o quantum est in rebus inane! (“o cares of men, o the inanity of the world,’’ 1.1). The oral quality of the phrases is reminiscent of one of the major traditions influencing particularly Horatian satire: diatribe, that hectoring, street-corner rhetoric of Cynic preachers (cf. Hor. Epist. 2.2.60). If the line is meant to mime the preaching of diatribe, Persius follows it immediately with correction in the voice of an interlocutor: quis leget haec? (“who will read this stuff?’’, 1.2) -“read,’’ that is, not listen to. Another complication appears in the fact that it is a quotation: if the scholiast is right, the line appears in Lucilius’ first book and probably its first poem; hence it fits into the logic of literary program there, and the interlocutor’s “who will read this?’’ reflects on the paradigmatic model of literary satire, Lucilius, as well. Commentators do not generally acknowledge the estranged quality of that first verse: not only its declamatory nature but also its quaint, old-fashioned simplicity runs hard up against the register of the prevailing Persianic voice: tense, conversational, compressed, choppy, burdened, abrasive, always on the edge of cynical:
“quis leget haec?’’ min tu istud ais? nemo hercle. “nemo?” vel duo vel nemo. “turpe et miserabile.’’ quare? ne mihi Polydamas et Troiades Labeonem praetulerint? nugae.
(Persius, Saturae 1.2-5)
“Who’ll read this stuff?’’ Talking to me? No one, by God.
“Nobody?’’
Maybe one or two. “Wretched shame.’’ Why?
That Polydamas and the women of Troy may prefer Labeo to me? Who cares?
You can see the compression in the Latin - min for mihine; ne.. .praetulerint, missing an introducing metuam, “should I be afraid?’’ - a compression that extends even to the allusion that would properly be explained in translation (Hector feared the censure of the Trojan women and Polydamas; Labeo was a bad translator of Homer). The language runs to an extreme from what appears almost a guileless naivety in the opening words. Take this as programmatic too, then: Persius sets up an immediate counterregister for his satire, a tenor that will be worlds away from the preachy rhetoric of diatribe, from the far less rebarbative sermo of Horace, and from even the differently aggressive Lucilius. Persius’ satiric rhetoric is original, defined by contrast with other possible voices.
A bit later on, rhetoric of another kind makes an appearance:
Scribimus inclusi, numeros ille, hic pede liber, grande aliquid quod pulmo animae praelargus anhelet. scilicet haec populo pexusque togaque recenti et natalicia tandem cum sardonyche albus sede leges celsa, liquido cum plasmate guttur mobile conlueris, patranti fractus ocello. tunc neque more probo videas nec voce serena ingentis trepidare Titos, cum carmina lumbum intrant et tremulo scalpuntur ubi intima versu.
(Persius, Saturae 1.13-21)
We write shut-in; this one metrically, another free verse, something big for “recitation” by puffed-up lungs.
Of course in public, neatly combed, clean suit,
Birthday-bejeweled, a little pale, you’ll read it out
High on the platform, supple throat well-lubricated,
Languid, leering eye, seductive voice,
Then not-nice in move or voice
You’ll thrill the boys when your poems
Slip into loin and groin.
This is the same kind of public recitation of poetry that moved Juvenal to indignation in Satire 1.1-14 (Barr and Lee 1987 ad loc.; Quint. Inst. 11.3.137-49). It is not the trivialized declamation satirized in Persius 3.44-7 or Juvenal 1.15 — 16, but a species of public rhetoric closely indexed to the moral register of Rome’s popular taste. The modern poetry that comes under criticism in this most literary of all Roman satires is faulted for hackneyed themes (33-5), easy popular acclaim (38-9), compositional incompetence (4, 50-1, 70-5), popular dilettantism (51-3), archaism (76-8), slick metrical polish and posh stylistic effects (63-6, 85-6, 92-7), and effeminacy (98-106). There are ways in which most of these points occur naturally as features of recitation/oration, and in that sense Persius may be seen to be taking his shots at an entire cultural climate in which poetry and rhetoric are interrelated modalities of expression. And it is certainly true that in some sense Persius’ literary criticism in this poem is designedly synecdochic: the broader ethos of Neronian Rome, its hothouse literary and cultural climate, its want of principled political discourse - indeed any viable political discourse - in whose absence arise venues of self-cultivation and cults of celebrity in which disciplina is given over to empty display.
But what is striking and characteristic ofPersius in this passage is the incorporation of the satirist’s disgust in images of bodily attitude and display. And here is where
Rhetoric becomes more than just one of the ways poetry was publicly circulated. Rhetoric, that is the scene and manner of recitation, functions for Persius as the objectification, the public image, of poetry - corrupt in its various ways. Rhetoric, as the art, literally, of expression, is itself the vehicle of embodiment, the realization of decadence within. Thus as this recitation scene unfolds, so too does the speaker, progressively making explicit, unfolding, what for Persius is an inner rottenness, dramatizing it in gesture and voice, and culminating in the startling image of recitation as public sodomy. The shocking effect of the image literally depends on the display of public rhetoric in transforming a poetaster’s words into something far more damning than any strictly literary criticism of its faults or features could be. Recitation, species and perhaps emblem of rhetoric, functions then as a vehicle for tendentious translation: highlighting, focusing, transposing from aural reception to visual image. As a poetic device, it is a remarkable adaptation and use of what might otherwise be seen as a cognate medium of expression: here the scene and devices of rhetoric become a powerful mechanism of rendering poetic expression. Just a few lines later, the poem’s interlocutor reinforces the essentiality of rhetorical delivery:
Quo didicisse, nisi hoc fermentum et quae semel intus innata est rupto iecore exierit caprificus?
(Persius, Saturae 1.24-5)
Why learn all this stuff if the froth, once within, doesn’t burst out from the insides like a wild fig?
The claim made is that the display of recitation enacts the poetry, is its raison d’etre. And the satirist goes on to criticize this compulsion for fame, ostentation. But again it is the enfiguration that matters: here Persius glosses rhetorical display as grotesquery, a wild fig seed having taken root in the poet’s spleen, bursting into an ugly denaturing and uncontrolled ‘‘ramification’’ of what might have been the (poetic) self’s integrity, its wholeness.
At 83-91 Persius takes a related tack and explicitly criticizes forensic rhetoric’s ornamental and artificial side, its distance from substantial argument:
Nilne pudet capiti non posse pericula cano pellere quin tepidum hoc optes audire ‘‘decenter’’?
‘‘fur es’’ ait Pedio. Pedius quid? crimina rasis
Librat in antithetis, doctas posuisse figuras
Laudatur: ‘‘bellum hoc.’’ hoc bellum? an, Romule, ceves?
Men moveat? quippe, et cantet si naufragus, assem
Protulerim? cantas, cum fracta te in trabe pictum
Ex umero portes? verum nec nocte paratum
Plorabit qui me volet incurvasse querella.
(Persius, Saturae 1.83-91)
Don’t you feel any shame that you’re not able to get an old man off without hoping to hear someone begrudge you a ‘‘decently done’’? Someone charges Pedius with theft. What does he do?
He’s praised for balancing learned figures in tight
Antitheses: ‘‘Pretty!’’ Pretty?! Did Romulus mince?!
So I’m to be moved and cough up my penny when a shipwrecked sailor sings his appeal? When toting around your image on a broken board, do you sing? Whoever wants to move me had better do it with real, not rehearsed tears.
This is explicit enough: rhetoric seen from without, as the art of verbal decoration. It reads as an anachronistic criticism of Quintilian who recommends feigning emotions realistically (Inst. 11.3.62; noted by W. Anderson 1982c: 426). The charge is old and abiding: the more rhetorical, the less genuine. In Satire 5.25 Persius repeats the complaint, distinguishing between words that ‘‘ring solid’’ and the ‘‘false stucco of the painted tongue.’’ The disposition, taken up by many who valorize plain talk over rhetoric’s artifice, is not nearly so anti-intellectual in Persius as in others. For Persius fashions in his own verse a knotted, gnarled anti-rhetoric, learned, metaphorical - an unlovely, unbalanced, unpolished, befuddling, utterly original poetry that nonetheless speaks with startling immediacy and power.
The uglification of the rhetorically prettified continues with a final twist:
Hic aliquis, cui circum umeros hyacinthina laena est, rancidulum quiddam balba de nare locutus Phyllidas, Hypsipylas, vatum et plorabile siquid, eliquat ac tenero subplantat verba palato.
(Persius, Saturae 1.32-5)
Here someone, draped in hyacinthine cloak ‘‘elocutes’’ something rancid, nasally lisping, dripping out Phyllises and Hypsipyles and other weepies of the bards, tripping out his words from tender palate.
Again poetic recitation is cast in repellent corporeal imagery; the insipidity of hackneyed subjects becomes reified as something oozing, dripping from the poet’s lisping mouth:
Summa delumbe saliva
Hoc natat in labris et in udo est Maenas et Attis...
(Persius, Saturae 1.104-5)
This lame stuff swims in saliva on the lips, soggy maenads and Attises. . .
As always in Persius, soft or liquid imagery is negative. Here, however, there is an acute specificity of degrading image: poetry as the dribble of spit. Not only because the poet’s words and saliva come flying from his mouth when delivered on the public stage of recitation, but - just possibly - because orality is a particular crux for this poet. In Persius, poetry is usually (though not always) enfigured in oral terms. That’s natural given that poetry is one of the oral arts, its reception in Rome at least on one axis being oral/aural. But for Persius the mouth is the site of poetry, the point of utterance, public(-)ation, and, crucially, translation, materialization of that which is within the poet’s mind/heart. A rhetorical ‘‘delivering’’ into the world, its way lubricated by the reciter’s gargle:
Liquido cum plasmate guttur mobile conlueris...
(Persius, Saturae 1.17-18)
You rinse [conlueris] your supple throat with clear(-ing) gargle...
Even when referring to himself, the satirist can’t but conceive of poetry in similar terms, as he does in his opening prologue: nec fonte labra prolui caballino... (‘‘I didn’t rinse my lips in the nag’s spring...,’’ praef. 1). That’s a parody of Hippocrene, sacred spring of the muses on Mt Helicon, tapping into an old conceit about poets thus drawing in inspiration. Persius’ satiric reductio calls in other conceits about the digestion and processing of literary models in his imagination of poetry as alimentary process, where magister artis ingenique largitor / venter (‘‘belly [is] the master of art and patron of genius,’’ praef. 10-11), and what emerges from the ‘‘creative'' processing is what ‘‘crow poets and magpie poetesses'' consider ‘‘Pegasean nectar’’ ( coruos poetas et poetridas picas cantare credas Pegaseium nectar, praef. 13-14): another liquid to be reprocessed by auditors and imitators. The idea is indeed meant to ‘‘taste bad,'' to disgust, and intended thus to capture Persius' own distaste for the thing Rome has become.
Through all this perfervid oral imagery, rhetoric per se is of course not his target; Persius scarcely notices it as an art separate from the practice of poetry, so integral is rhetoric to educated expression in Nero’s Rome. As in Horace, rhetoric in early education is crucial to cultural patterning; to be(-come) Roman is to take in the cultural models promulgated via rhetorical training and to espouse them in school exercise and public declamation. In the rhetorical swim of education a Roman finds/ makes his identity. Which makes that setting precisely the right starting point for the satirist’s exploration of that (Roman) self/persona inhabiting satirized Rome. What is made by this acculturating force and how it is unmade by other forces becomes satire’s descriptive mission. But Persius will take rhetoric as a more particular kind of embodiment, and reification, of rhetoric, specifically of recitation but more broadly of the oral incarnation of ideas and moral qualities into words. For this satirist, rhetoric functions as a specific literary device, a trope, a means of presenting, as it were, the presentation of the corrupted self, the spit of words.
Juvenal is the rhetorician’s special case. In describing his differences from his satiric predecessors, critics regularly isolate his satire’s ‘‘rhetorical’’ and ‘‘epic’’ qualities. The two generic influences are not unrelated; Juvenal’s is a bigger voice than either Horace's or Persius'. It is, moreover, overtly public in a way that the others are not: Horace writes as much to his closed patronage circle as he does to a wider audience, and Persius writes, explicitly, to a small audience (1.2-3); perhaps finally to himself most of all. Having survived Domitian’s deadly and repressive rule, Juvenal publishes his satires in the relatively more open and tolerant Rome of Trajan and Hadrian. It is a literary climate quite different from anything that preceded it. The patronage circles of the Augustan age are long gone - though not so long gone as to escape the memory of Juvenal who claims to wish for the privileged security they offered. To be sure, moneyed aristocrats like Pliny could live as men of letters in the manner of old; but unconnected writers, writers on the make like Juvenal seemed to have lived very much by dint of their hard literary labor. Their audience was therefore necessarily broader, their choice of genre (as with Martial’s epigrams) having something analogous to ‘‘mass-market’’ appeal. In such a situation, the tools of rhetoric, particularly declamation learned at school, could be remarkably appropriate (see Coffey 19892: 244 n38, quoted by Henderson 1999: 327). Not only would similarly trained readers and auditors recognize the idiom and appreciate literary adaptations of it, but declamation offered an identifiable ‘‘public’’ voice that could at once seem the embodiment of personal indignation and a medium of artful expression. Juvenal, however literally or seriously we take his attitudes and poses, can direct his satiric gaze across the canvas of Rome, Domitianic and after, can speak out on the ways of his world (as he or his poems’ speakers see it); in short, compose a public satire.
This post-Domitianic opportunity to write ‘‘honestly’’ - a word that has to be used advisedly - and the popular reception for his art coincide nicely with longstanding developments in Roman poetry, which had for well over a century been increasingly dominated by rhetoric (see Kenney 1963: 706-7). As Kenney and Sarafini point out, Juvenal, after Ovid, Lucan, Seneca, and the rest, could scarcely not write in a rhetorical style (Kenney 1963: 706; Sarafini 1957: 236, quoted by Kenney). Moreover, Juvenal may have had a special interest. Martial, another self-consciously rhetorical stylist, refers to him as facundus (‘‘eloquent’’): de nostro, facunde, tibi, luvenalis, agello Saturnalicias mittimus, ecce, nuces (‘‘from my little farm, eloquent Juvenal, look, I send you Saturnalian treats,’’ 7.91.1-2). That poem was published, most likely, before 93, which would reflect Juvenal at about age thirty-eight, supporting (or giving rise to) a suggestion in the Life ofJuvenal that up to his middle years, the poet practiced declamation. No surprise, then, that when he began to write poetry he did so in step with his literary times and his own practiced competence. Substantial studies of the rhetorical features of the satires lay out the range of that competence (Friedlander 1895; De Decker 1913; Scott 1927; Gauger 1936; Highet 1954; W. Anderson 1954, 1982c). Within the blunt characterization ‘‘rhetorical’’ scholars have isolated figures, topoi, tropes, types of rhetorical characterization, rhetorical ‘‘kinds’’ (theses, or general questions; genus deliberativum, genus iudiciale; suasoriae, controversiae), stock questions and categories, and have bracketed out particularly ‘‘rhetorical’’ satires (e. g., Satires 3, 5, 6, 8, 13). Frequently pointed out also are Juvenal’s use of rhetorical questions, loci communes on riches, on contemporary corruption, on fortune, and so forth, dramatic shifts in stylistic level, and exempla. As Braund points out, there is a particular affinity between the manners of satire and the use of exempla in declamatory rhetoric: if one is illustrating varieties of sin and excess, rhetorical compendia and both deliberative and forensic speeches are full of (re-)usable resources (S. Braund 1996: 19; see Quint. Inst. 5.11). Then there are the pithy, summarizing sententiae theorized in Quintilian, Institutio 8.5, so prominently a feature of Juvenal’s work. A few well-known phrases from Satire 10 will do byway of example: panem et circenses (‘‘bread and circuses,’’ 81); pauci... / descendunt... sicca morte tyranni (‘‘few tyrants die a bloodless death,’’ 112-13); mens sana in corpore sano (‘‘sound mind in a sound body,’’ 356); i, demens, et saevas curreper Alpes/ utpuerisplaceas et declamatio fias (‘‘push on, madman [Hannibal], right over the Alps, to delight schoolkids and become a declamation,’’ 166-7); caput... ingens / Seianus.../... pelves, sartago, matellae (‘‘the bronze head of mighty Sejanus... [melted]... for basins, pans, and pisspots,’’ 62-4); unus Pellaeo iuveni non sufficit orbis /.../ cum tamen a figulis munitam intraverit urbem, / sarcophago contentus erit (‘‘one world was too small for Alexander.. .yet coming to Babylon, a coffin was big enough,’’ 168-71). These sententiae are more than merely catchy rhetorica incorporated into the satire, more even than favorite stylistic tics. Juvenal uses them structurally as closural devices to complete exemplary vignettes - themselves drawn from the palate of rhetoric. Satire 10 is structured rather tightly in just this way: illustrating the ‘‘theme’’ of the folly of human desires, beauty, strength, power, fame, empire, long life, even, in a wonderfully self-referential moment, eloquence, through various diverting digressions, he resolves (most of) each with a deflating reductio expressed so memorably as to leave a lasting trace of the poem’s argument in the reader’s mind.
The picture of Juvenal’s satires as it develops, then, is of a pervasive rhetoricity: any of the sixteen satires can be analyzed in detail along the lines of contemporary rhetorical theory, particularly that of Juvenal’s older contemporary Quintilian (40-118 ce). The detailed excursus on style in Courtney’s commentary on Juvenal’s Satires illustrates the kind of thing that can be done, too, across poems (Courtney 1980: 42):
Attention has already been drawn to those modes of speech which excite and exploit the emotions of the audience, e. g., rhetorical questions... and figures of speech depending on repetition of words, such as anaphora. Here are a few more illustrations. Eight begins with 15 lines of rhetorical questions (cf. 3.81 sqq.); rhetorical questions and anaphora combined at 1.77-8,2.127-8, 5.129-30,10.278-9; anaphora is accumulated 3.197-9,7.229 sqq. Other figures depending on repetition of words are anadiplosis or reduplicatio (6.345, 7.213-14, 8.159-60; 2.135-6, 5.112-13, 6.166-7 and 279-80, 8.147-8, all with the last word of a line and the first word of the next); geminatio or epanalepsis (5.133,9.67-8, 10.365-6, 12.48, 6.693-5); and redditio (9.82, where 81 also adapts a rhetorical figure, 3.208-9, 5.14-15; at 3.166-7,6.212-13 and457-8 redditio is combined with anaphora).
At 6.569-71 we see polyptoton (cf. 7.152-3), at 6.15-16 reduplicatio combined with anaphora, at 2.53 epiphora (the repetition of paucae at the end of successive clauses; cf. 6.483-4 et caedit), at 15.160 sqq. polyptoton with rhetorical questions.
Courtney’s discussion spans the range of possible rhetorical presence, inventio, dis-positio, and elocutio, with an emphasis on Juvenal’s demonstration by exemplum, on the rhetorical arrangement of at least some of the satires (5, 8, 10, 16), and on many of the expressive rhetorica mentioned in the quoted paragraph. Given, then, this kind of pervasive rhetorical presence, the appropriate question might not be ‘‘how is Juvenal’s satire rhetorical?’’ but ‘‘how does Juvenal make satire as he employs these rhetorical resources?’’ A brief look at a single poem is all space allows for here, but even a glance may be illustrative.
Braund (1989: 23-47) helpfully discusses the third satire in rhetorical terms (cf. S. Braund 1997: 153-5). She, following Cairns, observes that its broad structural outline is that of a rhetorical type, the syntacticon, a traveler’s farewell; that its theme reflects a standard school commonplace, the relative virtues of city and country living (Quint. Inst. 2.4.24); and that the conversation between ‘‘Juvenal’’ and the fleeing
Umbricius soon turns into a rhetorical diatribe addressed by the latter to Roman citizens (Quirites, line 60) in general (Cairns 1972: 38-40, 47-8; also S. Braund 1996: 230-6). These and other features of its rhetoric have made it the paradigm of many anti-urban diatribes since, including Johnson’s great London. The ‘‘good, old versus bad new days’’ commonplace runs of course through the whole, as a blissful past (thus imaginatively construed) is contrasted with the sundry corruptions of modernity:
Felices proavorum atavos, felicia dicas
Saecula quae quondam sub regibus atque tribunis
Viderunt uno contentam carcere Romam.
(Juvenal, Saturae 3.312-14)
Happy our ancestors, happy the ages once living under kings and tribunes, when one prison sufficed for Rome.
Rhetorical questions and sententiae litter the expressive rhetoric of the satire, often in combination with an ironic reductio or anticlimax:
Nam quid tam miserum, tam solum vidimus, ut non deterius credas horrere incendia, lapsus tectorum adsiduos ac mille pericula saevae urbis et Augusto recitantes mense poetas?
(Juvenal, Saturae 3.6-9)
What place so wretched and lonely have we seen that you wouldn’t think it worse to live in dread of fires, constantly collapsing houses, the thousand threats of the savage city, and poets reciting in August?
Sometimes with a darker cast:
Quid quod materiam praebet causasque iocorum omnibus hic idem, si foeda et scissa lacerna, si toga sordidula est et rupta calceus alter pelle patet, vel si consuto volnere crassum atque recens linum ostendit non una cicatrix? nil habet infelix paupertas durius in se quam quod ridiculos homines facit.
(Juvenal, Saturae 3.147-53)
What of the fact that the poor man is the occasion
Of jokes for all, if his cloak is dirty or torn,
If his toga is soiled or the leather of one of his shoes
Is split, or scars show their marks where the skin’s been sewn
Or where rough thread highlights a new wound?
Unlucky poverty entails nothing harder than making men ridiculous.
Sometimes with a lighter touch:
Nam quae meritoria somnum admittunt? magnis opibus dormitur in urbe.
(Juvenal, Saturae 3.234-5)
What rented digs will let you sleep?
A good night’s rest is expensive.
So too the poem throughout makes its case in ways characteristic of declamation, by exemplum rather than logical or reasoned argument, by use of type characters (Verres, line 53, Protogenes, Diphilus, Hermarchus, line 122), by congeries, caricature, exaggeration, and partiality.
It is this ‘‘partiality’’ that taps into some of the more culturally implicated aspects of this rhetorical satire. Qua satire, the poem begins conventionally, locating itself within the tradition of Horace’s dialogue satires of the second book, where Horace’s exchanges with interlocutors turn into diatribes (conspicuously against Horace). Juvenal plainly draws on the paradigm to introduce his character Umbricius, mouthpiece for the extended diatribe on Rome, and just possibly on Juvenal himself as one of its dependent denizens. The diatribe runs a fair gamut of discontents: traffic, crime, substandard housing, the immigration offoreigners and their displacement ofRomans from traditional occupations, social positions, and perquisites. He rants at full xenophobic throttle about Greeks (meaning Greek-speaking immigrants from the wider Hellenistic world rather than the more respectable Greek mainland) and Jews. The satire is rarely seen these days as an objective, historically reliable picture of second-century Rome; rather, we have a range of views that take into account Juvenal’s focalizing this ‘‘Rome’’ through the eyes of his speaker, Umbricius, a character who has been understood variously, from a disappointed, conservative rentier, to merely a jealous failure who blames others, those immigrants, for his own shortfalls (Green 1967: 26; S. Braund 1996: 233). Whatever the nuance, the poem, via the voice of this Umbricius, reads like a brilliantly conceived, vastly entertaining screed. But its larger appeal lies in its beginning, as we have noted, well within the ordinary purview ofsatire as a reader of Horace would understand it - and then moving beyond the old limits. For despite all that is trivial and mean in its discourse, there is a deeply resident seriousness about this satire. Umbricius, in his departing Rome, echoes the far more melancholy description of the exile of the shepherd Meliboeus in Vergil’s first Eclogue, the earlier poem’s pastoral setting finding reflection in the pastoral locus amoenus outside the Porta Capenathatis the site of this dialogue (noticed by others; see Braund 1996: 2356 for a good, summarizing analysis). Juvenal’s ‘‘rustic’’ landscape is a burlesque, but precisely by virtue of that draws into the satire a range of emotional feeling rather new to satire. In Vergil’s last line, Tityrus, Meliboeus’ interlocutor, offers his friend a last night’s rest in his pastoral retreat:
Sunt nobis mitia poma, castaneae molles et pressi copia lactis, et iam summa procul villarum culmina fumant maioresque cadunt altis de montibus umbrae.
(Vergil, Eclogues 1.80-4)
Here are for us sweet apples,
Soft chestnuts, a supply of good cheese,
And now, in the distance, smoke rises from cottage roofs, and greater shadows fall from the high mountains.
That poignant last line, maioresque cadunt altis de montibus umbrae, gives Juvenal in its last word the name of his Umbricius, who himself asks the Juvenal of the poem for an invitation to stay - if ever he should venture to some rustic retreat out of Rome. While the theme of this satire arises out of stock rhetorical arguments about city and country life, its invocation of Vergil’s moving meditation on the idea of pastoralism in the context of the political and social ascendance of this urbs, Rome, leverages into the poem an unexpected poignancy.
So we wonder just who is this character Umbricius. Shadow-man, shade of old Rome, or shady-man, partisan, bigoted, ‘‘the manifestation of the petty greed and jealousy that haunts the city of Rome’’ (S. Braund 1996: 236)? Or another kind of shade: the poisoned, dispirited shadow of a better human possibility? Juvenal gives no easy answer. But he hints that the satire means more than what it manifestly claims to be, a rhetorically overwrought satirical diatribe on urban life. Rhetoric itself is part of that meaning. Take a typical vignette, selected almost at random:
Non est Romano cuiquam locus hic, ubi regnat Protogenes aliquis vel Diphilus aut Hermarchus, qui gentis vitio numquam partitur amicum, solus habet. nam cum facilem stillauit in aurem exiguum de naturae patriaeque veneno, limine summoveor, perierunt tempora longi servitii; nusquam minor est iactura clientis.
(Juvenal, Saturae 3.119-25)
There’s no place here for any Roman, where any old Protogenes, or Diphilus or Himarchus rules, the sort that never shares a friend (a Greek habit), but keeps him for himself. For as soon as he drips a little Greek poison into his patron’s ear,
I’m pushed out the door; long, loyal service is gone.
Nowhere is the loss of a client so trivial a thing.
Less interesting than the expressive presence of rhetoric here - the stock characters meant to stand for a whole race of resented intruders, the color seen in the anti-Greek innuendo, the closing sententia - is what rhetoric here and elsewhere in the poem does. As color, a tendentious ‘‘take’’ on things, it plays to, even creates its own audience, precisely crafting a voice, perspective, worldview shared with insiders. People like this Umbricius, with some of the same resentments, perhaps. Or, less transparently, a more prosperous class of readers feeling a degree of xenophobic antipathy but also taking amusement in the troubles of those less secure than they. In any case they are Roman. And Umbricius’ mention of the displaced ‘‘Roman’’ in 119 designates a constellation of collective values and sympathies. A Roman here is meant to be what these Greeks are not. While Greeks are versatile, clever, voluble, inventive, flattering, insinuating, learned, master of every craft and art (3.58-80), Romans are constant, honest, decent, simple, candid, true friends to friends. If that construction was not true - and it was not - this is the division of the world as Juvenal’s rhetoric makes it. And rhetoric itself, the acculturating, identity-imprinting system ofeducation and language ofcivic discourse, is part and parcel of this Romanitas. The school exercises, suasoriae and controversiae, along with the ancient Romans of legend that were their subjects, and their heroic rhetorical stands in the senate and assemblies - all these modeled a certain eloquent, confident, masculine Romanness that citizens wanted, even in the face of disappointing reality, to believe in. The denizens of school exercises and heroes of the senate like Cicero (as Quintilian has him), after all, exemplified a kind of control and certainty absent in most real life but viable as an imagined national ideal. Rhetoric is thus part of Juvenal’s story in this satire, the value-defining discourse behind the satiric parade of rascals. We know these Greeks and Jews and swindlers and upstart freedmen are bad and wrong because they have not read Roman rhetoric’s script. And even Romans who have read it have begun to forget; when Umbricius observes, ‘‘Nowhere is the loss of a client so trivial a thing,’’ he is referring to the clientela, that patron-client institution dating from Rome’s earliest days and so ingrained in practice as to have been written into the Twelve Tables. Idealized (in reality it was far from ideal or entirely Roman), it made for a stable social infrastructure based on loyalty and observed obligation. Its easy dismissal in Juvenal’s Rome represents the decay of much. Or so Umbricius would have it.
Yet Juvenal has made this appeal to Rome’s rhetorical/ideological foundations out of rhetoric, and will not let us leave without a hint that the dominant mode of his discourse is more complicated than Umbricius’. If rhetoric is the idiom of Roman self-identification, of Rome’s particular sort of political discourse, and of social stability, it is also destabilizing, dangerous, and unsettling. And it is Greek, as even Umbricius’ rant acknowledges, ‘‘[the Greek is] teacher of grammar and rhetoric’’ (grammaticus, rhetor..., 3.76). If Umbricius’ Rome is threatened by these immigrating Greeks, it is threatened too by the (Greek, Greek-taught, Roman) rhetoric that has made Rome Rome. Causes and effects, who’s in, who’s out, are all progressively less certain the closer one reads this satire on the city. What is certain, as the allusions to Vergil and other passages tell us, is that this satirical-rhetorical rumination is playing about things that matter, and that this language is meant to be thought about and thought through.
FURTHER READING
This chapter depends on the substantial work of Anderson (1954; 1982b: 293-361; 1982c: 396-486) and of Braund (1989: 23-48; 1988; 1996; 1997: 147-65). Kenney (1963) and Scott (1927) are accessible and worth consulting. A study on Juvenal’s forensic rhetoric appears in Keane (2007). The bibliography on the separate fields of Roman satire and rhetoric is vast; in addition to the works mentioned in this chapter, the work of Gunderson (2000, 2003), whose thinking about rhetoric and Roman culture has a significant bearing on Roman literature, is worth special mention. See also Bloomer (1997a) and the introduction to rhetoric by Habinek (2005).
A Companion to Roman Rhetoric Edited by William Dominik, Jon Hall Copyright © 2007 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd
World History
