Juvenal and the Poetics of Anonymity

Abstract

The satirist Juvenal remains one of antiquity's greatest question marks. His Satires entered the mainstream of the classical tradition with nothing more than an uncertain name and a dubious biography to recommend them. Tom Geue argues that the missing author figure is no mere casualty of time's passage, but a startling, concerted effect of the Satires themselves. Scribbling dangerous social critique under a historical maximum of paranoia, Juvenal harnessed this dark energy by wiping all traces of himselfsignature, body, biographical snippets, social connectionsfrom his reticent texts. This last major ambassador of a once self-betraying genre took a radical leap into the anonymous. Juvenal and the Poetics of Anonymity tracks this mystifying self-concealment over the whole Juvenalian corpus. Through probing close readings, it shows how important the missing author was to this satire, and how that absence echoes and amplifies the neurotic politics of writing under surveillance. TOM GEUE is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer in Latin at the University of St Andrews, and has published widely on the literature of imperial Rome. He is currently researching a book on anonymous Roman writing, which also considers how readers now and then cope with the power and problem of anonymity.

THE POET AND THE EVANGELIST IN NONNUS’PARAPHRASE OF THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO JOHN

“…37This fact has also allowed the Paraphrase to be misattributed, by Sherry (1996), to a Pseudo-Nonnus; for the history of this question and the current consensus in favour of Nonnus’ authorship see Shorrock (2011) 51 and Accorinti (2016b), both with further bibliography. My argument here will be that the poet's anonymity is programmed; for another poet whose anonymity has recently been examined as intentional and productive, but in an entirely different context, see Geue's (2017) study of Juvenal.…”

TROUBLE AT SEA IN JUVENAL 12, PERSIUS 6 AND THE PROEM TO LUCRETIUS,DE RERUM NATURA2

“…4As Romano (1979) 175 writes, ‘the satirist deliberately looks at reality through literature-coloured glasses and informs the reader that he is doing so’; Larmour (2005) 151 points out that ‘the satirist casts himself in the role of the presenter of a spectacle’ with words like ecce at line 24. Geue (2017) offers a metapoetic reading of Juvenal 12. He argues that ‘its key motifs of storm, shipwreck and sacrifice all show dense metapoetic histories’, including allusions to Catullus 64, Virgil, Eclogues 3 and 4, Parthenius of Nicaea and Moschus’ Europa (181).…”