The drunken bully of Juvenal's third satire should be read as an alternative satirical voice within the poem, as is illustrated by means of a comparison with the corpus of Roman satire—in particular Horace 2.1 and Juvenal's first book of satires. The identification of the bully as a satirist does explain some of the bully's odd behavior and also accords with satire's propensity for self-mockery and much of the other metapoetic discussion of the genre's powers and limitations.
Umbricius’ speech, which comprises the majority of Juvenal’s third satire, should be read as the character’s syntaktikon , or farewell speech, to Rome, as it provides a totalizing portrait of the city’s physical and social topography. The theme of fullness, mixture of influences, and the expansion of satire’s generic boundaries allow Juvenal to represent the city, culturally bloated and socially fractured, in verse form while simultaneously reaffirming the genre’s urban nature and illustrating its post-Lucilian decline.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.