Readings, Access

Read Juvenal Satires 2 (pp. 9 ff.) and 6 (35 ff.) in the Penguin translation (Green, translator — 1999), one of your print texts.

Warning: This Reading Will Likely Offend

In an age of literary misogynists, racists, and cinaedus-bashers, the first-person voice in Juvenal surely stands out. But we still have to view that as a poetic-rhetorical dramatization, a kind of textual playacting. (See further below on Juvenal and satire.)

Still, his poetry cannot fail to shock. Note, for instance, Satire 2 line 23: loripedem rectus derideat, Aethiopem albus, literally, "Let the straight-limbed man deride the one with deformed foot, let the white man deride the black African." Add to that Green's translation choices. What with terms like like "dyke," "fag," etc., Green's renderings at times seem almost too well designed to capture the bigoted tone of the original. And such renderings can confuse matters, sort of deciding the issue of stereotype-continuity (did Latin mollis really carry the same derogatory force as modern "fag"?) almost before the question's even been asked.

So should I not have assigned these two readings? But how would students have otherwise had a chance to get a sense of the kind of mentality that could direct the writing and thinking of ancient Romans? We really cannot afford to avoid these readings in a course such as ours, but neither can we afford to disregard all the venom that this poet's writing exudes. I encourage you to register your thoughts and feelings. But I'd still like us to ponder just how this racism, sexism, and bigotry generally reflect not necessarily a pan-cultural, pan-historical mindset but something distinctively Roman.

Journal Entries

What would Juvenal (or more accurately, the dramatized speaker's voice in Juvenal's satires) say about either Finnis or Nussbaum? I'm not interested in whether he would speak abusively of them (doubtless he would), but whether the value systems oridea systems animating Juvenal would "resonate" (agree) in any way with Finnis/Nussbaum? Why or why not?

Study Guide Proper

Juvenal and Satire

All that we can say with reasonable assurance about Decimus Junius Juvenalis is that he "was either the son, or the adopted son, of a wealthy freedman, and 'practiced rhetoric till about middle age" (Green's translation, intro., p. 10), and that he wrote probably during the 110s through 120s CE under the emperors Trajan and Hadrian. Though his writing can be nasty and obscene, it clearly is intended for a well-educated, sophisticated audience expecting from our author a highly finished and clever example of satire. So the extremism of Satires 2 and 6 will involve a significant element of poetic self-dramatization, one might say self-fictionalization: the satirist-speaker as both an outraged traditionalist and as an over-the-top bigot.

And that, naturally, leads to its own question: are the two — outraged traditionalist and over-the-top bigot — necessarily distinct categories or do they overlap? Does the poet's voice, however fictionalized here, project a bigotry central, one might even say essential, to the Roman sensibility? Or is a certain over-the-top-ness its salient feature, one distinctively Roman in its own way?

Turning to issues of genre (an issue very much relevant to our encounters with the assigned readings), satire itself (Latin satura/satira, "fullness," "abundance" — no connection with Greek satyrs) the Romans claimed as a genre entirely their own (Quintilian). Of course, both Greeks and Romans could write in what we'd understand to be a satirical vein. Feinberg describes satire as "the playfully critical distortion of the familiar" (The Satirist p. 7, quoted p. 1 of the Loeb Juvenal), and that certainly applies to Juvenal. It becomes, then, dangerous to extrapolate from his satire precise data as to the attitudes of his time and place. What we can do, though, is consider how the familiar becomes a medium of expression for Juvenal, and thus a medium of reception for his original audience. We can, in other words, consider Juvenalian satire as a social-cultural product, not as a perfectly reliable mirror of the world it inhabited,but as a part of that world and as interacting with it.

As mentioned above, what stands out for the modern American reader of these satires is their unremitting cynicism — that combined with grotesque exaggeration and vituperative venom. Though, as argued above, genre accounts for much, genre (Roman satire as characteristically vituperative, exaggerated, etc.) won't explain everything. But neither will recourse to the (presumably) bigoted attitudes of most Romans of the time. In getting at what is distinctively Roman here, in class I will try to get us to explore Roman preoccupations with the monstrous: a sort of vicariously self-indulgent self-emersion in the grotesque and deviant, in impossible extremes.

Juvenal Satire 2 (attacking effeminate men who attack effeminate men)

In Satire 2, Juvenal starts with the hypocrisy of sexually deviant, profligate, immoral writers whose writings attack what Juvenal alleges them to practice. He then delivers a broadside against all manner of male sexual immorality. Note that some of Juvenal's targets are men who prosecute women accused of adultery, the irony being that "even a proven whore [even one a Roman matrona convicted of adultery under the Augustan law] wouldn't dare / rig herself out like that [dress as effeminately as does the prosecutor in question]" (pp. 10-11).

So two questions:

1. Does sexual stereotyping here equate with more modern stereotyping? Don't be confused by the translator's choices — mollis translated as "fag" etc. That doesn't prove anything. Still, do we see here an ancestor to modern stereotypes? Does a source like Juvenal validate or interrogate the "essentialists"? Note that scholars themselves by no means agree. Validates/doesn't Finnis and/or Nussbaum?
   
   
2. Note especially Juvenal's attack upon same-sex marriage. What is that all about? How does his rhetoric sound similar to modern anti-gay polemic? How different? What do those similarities and differences tell us about modern attempts to validate this or that sexual morality in the Western tradition? (Especially here the Nussbaum-v.-Finnis angle.)

Juvenal Satire 6 (attacking women)

This is Juvenal's infamous attack on women. Brace yourselves: it's undiluted vitriol.

In this poem, Juvenal addresses someone called Postumus to convince him not to marry. Juvenal develops what by this time have become traditional themes of misogynistic literature: women as constitutionally adulterous, etc. etc. — themes prominent already in Greeks like Hesiod, Semonides, and Aristophanes. But those poets show at least some ambivalence: Hesiod's Pandora as a "beautiful curse," Semonides "bee woman," Aristophanes' "can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em" in Lysistrata. Juvenal, by contrast, finds even good women intolerable (pp. 39-40). Indeed, it is something to discuss how he could turn a Cornelia, the legendary mother of the Gracchi, into a monster just for being herself.

Note that this poem is sort of constructed as a dialogue, with Juvenal ranting at length in response to Postumus' objections.

Questions:

1. Now that we know a thing or two about the Romans, how would a Roman reader have responded to the poem? What sexual-gender protocols come into play? How do YOU respond to the poem? How, especially, to explain the apparently complete absence of any supposedly "good" woman? That, I'd suggest, we haven't yet seen in any of our readings. But it may be key to something "Roman" about works like Juvenal 2 and 6.
   
   
2. Related is the question of whether Juvenal's is a misogyny distinctive to his world or one that is culturally-historically universal.

Notes Keyed into Reading

Satire 2

p. 75

• "humbuggers" — Latin tristibus obscenis, "grim perverts"
• "notable dyke among all our Socratic fairies " — cum sis inter Socraticos notissima fossa cinaedos, "given that you're the most notorious 'female furrow' amid the Socratic pathics"
• "piles" — i.e., hemeroids — the doctor laughs to see that his patient's rectum is well-worn. The ancients believed hemeroids to be caused by anal sex
• "eunuch priest" — Juvenal means one of the Galli, the eunuch priests of Cybele. Brought to Rome in 205/4 BCE (to save Rome from being conquered), the cult of Cybele was occasionally banned over the next few centuries. Under the emperor Claudius (41-54 CE), Roman citizens could become priests; before that, not
• "It takes a hale man to mock a cripple, / And you can't bait *****s when you're tarred with the same brush" — that loosely translates loripedem rectus derideat, Aethiopem albus, "Let the straight-limbed man deride the one with deformed foot, let the white man deride the black African." Green's translation is, here at least, way more racist than the original — though the original is racist, too

p. 76

• "... when you-know-who was busy reviving those stern decrees against adultery" — Juvenal refers to the emperor Domitian's (r. 81-96 CE) legislation aimed at toughening up the Augustan marriage legislation (McGinn PSL ch6 ). Note that Domitian reportedly seduced his own niece It may also allude to the same emperor's correctio morum, various measures aimed at a "reform of morals." There is some question whether Domitian's correctio abridged the rights of prostitutes
• "Uncle" is the emperor Domitian
• "How lucky we are" — that's a prostitute lecturing a moralist-hypocrite. The idea may be (just a guess!) that this lawyer is prosecuting prostitutes under legislation enacted by Domitian, but that's just a theory (McGinn would likely disagree)
• "Sodomy Act " — the lex Scantinia, which may or may not (so Williams) have outlawed consensual sex with Roman male citizens
• "queers" — molles, "softies," i.e., effeminates

p. 77

• "doubly anaemic" — according to an ancient authority, that refers to (a) licking of the male genitalia, and (b) allowing oneself to become the victim of stuprum
• "You censure the dove, yet absolve the perverted raven" — Ravens were believed both to copulate and to give birth through the mouth

p. 78

• "queer brotherhood " — not exactly in the Latin, which rather refers to effeminate men as those who dress and behave like women
• "great Mother goddess" — not Cybele here but Bona Dea, the "Good Goddess" worshipped only by women
• "women's oaths" — Women, not men, would swear (not obscenely) "by Juno" (per Iunonem ), the the guardian of women
• "when the randy Thracian priests outwore the Goddess herself" — in Latin, talia secreta coluerunt orgia taeda | Cecropiam soliti Baptae lassare Cotyton, literally, "such mysteries the Baptae, accustomed to wearing out Athenian Cotytos, celebrated by secret torchlight" (lines 91-92). Juvenal means that the rites of the Bona Dea, when celebrated (as they ought not to be) by men, resemble those of a Thracian goddess, Cotytos, worshipped at Athens. It is thought that the cult of Cotytos involved men's cross-dressing
• "Just like that fag of an emperor / Otho" — pathici Othonis, "of pathic Otho" (reigned briefly in 69 CE). pathicus carries much the same meaning as cinaedus or mollis. Green's "fag" gets the insult but arguably misreads the sexuality

p. 79

• "these are the Goddess's minions" — Galli again (see above, p. 75)
• "noble sprig" — a male Gracchus (noble Roman name) marrying a male horn-player. (Gay marriage?)
• "Father of our City" — Romulus, mythical founder of Rome

p. 13

• "Roman pansies" — cunctis narratur ephebis | mollior, "described as more effeminate than all the lads of the east" (line 164-165). Again, does modern "pansy" mean the same thing as early 2nd-century Latin mollis?

Satire 6

p. 127

• "During Saturn's reign I believe that Chastity still / Lingered on the earth" — "Saturn's reign" was the mythical Golden Age, the age of the earliest humans. According to myth, it was a time of primitive innocence, when gods and humans still associated with one another. "Chastity" is the virtue Pudicitia, here personified. According to myth, under Saturn's son Jupiter, the world became corrupt and deities of innocence — Chastity and Justice — withdrew from the world
• "Cynthia" and "the girl who wept, red-eyed, for that sparrow's death" are, respectively, Hostia, the poet Propertius' Roman mistress, and Clodia, Catullus' mistress. We're talking adultery (again)

p. 128

• "bitch-tyranny" — Latin domina suggests a (bossy?) mistress of the house
• "the Family Encouragement Act" — the lex iulia et papia, which see
• "fathers who wouldn't shrink from their kisses " — Juvenal refers to a daughter's kisses tainted because she fellates her boyfriend, what the Romans called os impurum, "impure mouth"

p. 129

• "pansy Bathyllus" — "pansy" translates mollis. Respectable citizens were strongly discouraged from performing as dancers, actors, etc.
• "defibulate" — unclasp someone's robes
• Eppia, the senator's wife, has run off to Egypt with her lover, a gladiator. Juvenal suggests that a respectable Roman woman would not relish the thought of such an unpleasant voyage, but bold Eppia doesn't mind

p. 131

• Messalina, wife of the emperor Claudius, was a notorious adulterer
• "whore empress" — the Latin is meretrix Augusta
• "The Wolf-Girl" — Latin Lycisca (from Greek Lukiske). Ancient Greeks and Romans imagined prostitutes to be wolf-like; the word lupa, in Latin, "She-Wolf," also meant prostitute

p. 133

• "Sabine / Maidens who stopped the fighting " — The girls whom the earliest Roman men kidnapped and married ("Rape of the Sabine Women") later forced a truce between Romans fighting Sabines. These women could be taken as emblematic of traditional virtue etc.
• "Cornelia" — the famous mother of the Gracchi (Roman statesmen), and a paragon of the ancient wifely virtues

p. 134

• "tarted up à la grecque" — de Tusca Graecula facta est, literally, "has been transformed from a Tuscan [i.e., Italian] girl to a contemptible Greekling"

p. 135

• "Crucify that slave!" — Juvenal imagines and quotes an imperious wife ordering her husband to punish an undeserving slave

p. 136

• Juvenal Complains about wives who like to fight in the public arena — women gladiators and such; avers that such behavior is un-womanly

p. 137

• Quintilian was a famous rhetoric professor. The wife in this passage, caught at adultery, wants a lawyer's argument from the great Quintilian

pp. 138

• Just to be clear, Maura and Tullia, who piss on the statue of Chastity, are lesbian lovers
• "the Good Goddess" — the Bona Dea again, whose special rites were attended only by women. See terms, bona dea. See also Priapus (Juvenal imagines an orgy admitting male lovers to the Good Goddess' rites)

p. 139

• "cock their dish for a donkey" — mora nulla per ipsam | quo minus inposito clunem summittat asello (333 f.), literally, "without delay, a woman of her own accord will present her buttocks to the donkey that has mounted her"
• "Clodius in drag" — see terms, bona dea
• "camp if not actually queer" — the Latin says similesque cinaedis, "like male effeminates," i.e., men who resemble cinaedi
• "La Courgette," "the Bearded Cowrie" — Green's translation of what seem meant to be nicknames for male effeminates

pp. 139-140

• lanista — a gladiator trainer. It's ironic that a debased gladiatorial school would be cleaner than a "respectable" Roman citizen's house

p. 140

• "fag targeteers" — Green's perhaps pretty-good guess at the rhetorical force of a difficult and unclear passage (the psilus was a light-armed gladiator, though the word here may also imply depilated effeminates)

p. 141

• "There are girls who adore unmanly eunuchs" — Juvenal describes how a male, if castrated after puberty, can after castration retain potency for sex, though he will not produce fertile seed

p. 143

• "jordan" — British slang for chamber-pot (Latin, pelvis)

p. 146

• Isis — see terms, Isis

p. 147

• "the Lady herself" — Isis
• "Palsied Jewess" — Latin Iudaea tremens, "palsied Jewish woman." She's a dream interpreter; the Latin comes across no less antisemitic than its translation. Juvenal doesn't like Greeks either, or Syrians or Armenians or Africans or people with limps

pp. 149-150

• "some blackamoor's father . . . / . . . whose off-color face you'd rather not see by daylight" — the Latin says: esses | Aethiopis fortasse pater, mox decolor heres | impleret tabulas numquam tibi mane uidendus, literally "or you might turn out to the father of a black African; next, an off-color heir, one you'd never want to see in the morning [light], would fill up your will" (lines 599-601). These to my mind are the most racist — and misogynist — lines of the poem. Note that Juvenal here and elsewhere imagines the supposedly respectable Roman matrona as longing for lovers beneath her station in all sorts of ways. Note too the speaker's fear: that women's lust, if given free reign, will disturb the process of legitimate inheritance