Poetry and Friendship in Juvenal's Twelfth Satire

Abstract

Generic oppositions create an interplay of different voices in Satires 12, particularly between the genus tenue, variously nuanced, and the big genres of epic and tragedy. The integrity of the poetic idylls of a lyric Horace is contrasted with the more compromised sanctuary of Juvenal, struggling to accommodate his luxurious friends or, less kindly, practising friendship in a world in which everything is negotiable. Beyond an ahistorical opposition of generic voices emerges a narrative of intertextual influence in which Juvenal is drawn from an idyll of Augustan purity into the mercantile space of his contemporary Martial.

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

“…19So Ramage (1978) 229; Ferguson (1979) 294; Smith (1989) 296; Henke (2000) 202–6; Littlewood (2007) 402; Woods (2012) 97–138; Uden (2015) 177. Cf.…”

“…22The divestment of goods is explicitly, and the severing of the mast (12.53–4) implicitly, compared to a beaver's supposed self-castration in order to escape death at the hands of hunters seeking the valuable beaver by-product castoreum (12.34–6): so Ramage (1978) 229 and n. 19; Smith (1989) 294; Littlewood (2007) 404; Adkin (2008) 130; and Larmour (2005) 141. Ehlers (1996) 63, rejecting outright this interpretation of the beaver-simile, argues that it misunderstands the fable and its function: ‘Es heißt die Fabel, das Gleichnis und seine Funktion mißzuverstehen, wenn hier jüngst von einer Art Selbstkastration des Catullus gesprochen wurde.’ In his reading, the beaver-simile is not a sign of greed-caused effeminacy, but of a non-stereotypical, non-satiric wisdom: ‘[w]äre Catullus so habgierig, wie ein typischer Kaufmann der Satire zu sein hat, wäre er natürlich mit dem Schiff untergegangen, ohne auch nur den geringsten Teil seines Besitzes zu opfern’ (64).…”

“…When it comes to contextualising the ship-at-sea motif, scholars have compared a number of texts other than Lucretius. For example, Warren S. Smith, Jr. (1989) 292 points out the shipwreck scene's connection to declamatory commonplaces; Cedric A. J. Littlewood (2007) 397 and n. 31, in contextualising Juvenal's poem as an instance of the storm-at-sea topos in Roman poetry, compares lines 41–2 with Statius, Siluae 1.4; and James Uden (2015) 183–5, citing storms in Virgil, Aeneid 5 and Silius Italicus 12, argues that echoes of Horace ( Carmina 1.34, 3.29 and elsewhere) mark the storm-tossed ship of Juvenal 12 as ‘a Ship of State’. David Larmour (2005) compares Juvenal 12 to Catullus 63, discusses a reference to Valerius Flaccus, Argonautica 2.292–312 and adduces the parallel of the roughly contemporaneous Nauigium of Lucian; Robert Colton (1972) sees the poem as indebted to Martial's epigrams, while Smith (1989) 292 contrasts it with Tacitus, Annales 2.23, and both Joachim Adamietz (1983) and Widu-Wolfgang Ehlers (1996) 61 liken it to parts of Horace's Carmina 3 .…”

“…Textual issues: Helmbold (1956); Kilpatrick (1971); LaFleur (1974); Jones (1982); Ronnick (1993b, 1995); Adkin (2004–5, 2008). Connection to ‘higher’ genres: Littlewood (2007); cf. Cairns (2007) 20–3.…”

“…5Representative assessments are from Smith (1989) 291 – ‘The narrator cynically shrugs off his friend's concern about his safety: if you are fool enough to risk a sea-voyage, this kind of thing is bound to happen’ – and from Littlewood (2007) 397: ‘The satirist narrates the storm but with an irony that disassociates him from it. The mock-heroic pretension of the narration can be read rather as a reflection of the life style of Catullus.’…”