The Arena of Satire: Juvenal's Search for Rome by David H. J. Larmour

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS 507 STEPHANIE MCCARTER Sewanee: The University of the South, samccart@sewanee.edu * * * * * The Arena of Satire: Juvenal’s Search for Rome. By DAVID H. J. LARMOUR. Oklahoma Series in Classical Culture Vol. 52. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016. Pp. xi+356. Hardcover, $34.95. ISBN 978-08061515-64. This decade has seen a welcome burst of new treatments of Juvenal’s Satires. But David Larmour’s interest in the corpus goes back many years, and his new book reflects careful organization of well-percolated ideas and synthesis of much scholarship and theory. At the center is the figure of the Juvenalian satirist, who is efficiently introduced as distinct from his generic predecessors by virtue of his urban identity and context. While Larmour’s Juvenal is not exactly more visible to the reader than Uden’s (2015), who crafts criticism in ways that allow him to stay hidden, he is more perceptible as the agent who maps satire’s territory and evaluates what he sees there. The book reads two metaphorical roles in the Juvenalian satirist, one conceptualized in modern theory, the other rooted in Roman culture. First there is Benjamin’s idea of the urban flâneur whose wanderings generate a “city-text.” Larmour observes that the Juvenalian satirist moves not just through the space of the imperial capital, but also, in his imagination, across the empire and back and forth in its history. The satirist wanders in search of stable meaning in his physical and social environment, but in the world he sees and describes, places and bodies have no stable identities or boundaries. To point to one key category, historic features of Rome’s topography have become divorced from their original purposes or significances. Such conditions activate the second satiric role: that of the Roman editor of spectacles with sensational content (perverse pageants on ancient Roman roads, women urinating on altars, etc.). Unsurprisingly, these lenses for reading Juvenal privilege the ever-compelling Satires1, 2, 3 and 6, which are featured prominently in multiple chapters on different themes (satire’s mission, space and boundaries, the arena metaphor, the functions of objects). But room is made for examination of passages from the later Satires, where the metaphor of the arena endures even as Juvenal directs attention to more intimate spaces and interactions. 508 BOOK REVIEWS Larmour’s Juvenal provocatively uses concepts of space, boundaries, origins and flow, mapping them onto everything from human bodies to visions of the empire. In one sense the book’s identification of these themes will not feel new to those familiar with Anglophone scholarship on Roman sexual and social invective (Amy Richlin, Barbara Gold, Paul Allen Miller). But Larmour considers them in connection to deeper questions of identity and meaning; he maintains Juvenalian satireis“speculativeandphilosophicalinafundamentalsense”(320).Thisisacted out not only in Juvenal’s imagery, but in his rhetorical procedures: for example, frequent questions beginning with unde convey that “the satirist’s pose is to gaze aroundandask,‘Wheredothesepeoplecomefrom?’”(109).UnlikeFreudenburg (2001), Larmour understands the audience of satire as automatically compliant (“the listener and reader … become flâneurs in the text,” 22). Larmour concentrates on the satirist figure and his material, reading Juvenal’s imagery in ways that are usually inspired by ancient thought (e.g. the role of the limen in ritual) but in some cases suggested by modern satire or theory. He seems to leave few stones of classical scholarship unturned, finding value in philological andtheoreticalstudiesalike.Larmour’scomfortwithcriticaltheorymeansthathis readings of the Satires are punctuated with explications of pertinent ideas from Benjamin, Kristeva, Lacan, Scarry and Frye. Meanwhile, there is plenty of engagement with other classical themes and texts, making for striking juxtapositions and treats (especially in the middle chapter on the discourse of the arena across Roman sources). Ancient comparanda and influences get the sustained treatment they deserve; for example, Livy’s treatment of the problem of the Bacchic cult in 186 BCE is read next to Satire 2. Another kind of juxtaposition is effected with the author’s numerous photographsofsitesandintersectionsinRomethatshowtheliteralfragmentation of the ancient past and its coexistence with modern life. These illustrate the vision of the wandering satirist who is jarred by the ways “eternal” Rome is changing around him. Finally...