Juvenal and the Satiric Genre. By FREDERICK JONES. Classical Literature and 
Society. London: Duckworth Publishers, 2007. Pp. x + 214. Paper, $31.00. 
ISBN 978–0–7156–3686–2.

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A CJ Online Exclusive: 2008.09.02

Frederick Jones (J.) has written many articles on satire and is well 
qualified to write a book on the subject. But imagine the task at hand: to 
write a book on the genre of satire when satire is famously a composite 
genre, and to do so for an audience “with or without knowledge of the 
Greek or Latin languages and with or without an acquaintance with the 
civilization of the ancient world” (p. vii)—and to do so concisely. J. 
got the page-count right—154 pages of text— and in keeping with his aim 
at a general audience, the presentation of material outweighs scholarly 
argument and conclusion: of the eight chapters, the longest is only 28 
pages, and each chapter is broken into sub-headed sections of no more than 
3 pages, some as brief as a paragraph. But J.’s content wavers in his 
address to a general audience and is more uneven than its subject.
	
After an initial chapter that reviews programmatic statements of Lucilius, 
Horace, Persius and Juvenal and surveys what the satirists say about their 
satiric predecessors and about other literary models, J. presents the 
interpretive core of his book in the second chapter, “The Generic 
Landscape.” He is sensitive to the many tensions of satire, especially 
the satirists’ tendency to pose as “being somehow outside literature” 
(p. 1) while incorporating many literary forms and functions. J. emphasizes 
that epic is the dominant genre for Roman poets and the one that satire 
(and love elegy) most react against. He defines genre (or “kind,” p. 
27) as a simultaneously fixed and fluid category that combines distinctive 
features (e.g. content, style, size, meter) with different or 
“transgressive” material drawn from other “kinds” of literature. J. 
proposes “competitive inclusiveness” as the dynamic that governs the 
desire “to write something new starting from a given framework” (p. 
34). He provides examples from Latin poets across genres. Catullus and 
Ovid, given their generic miscegenation, are frequent examples; Stephen 
Hinds’ Allusion and Intertext is something of an interpretive polestar. 
J. concludes the chapter with four general principles that constitute an 
“author-reader contract,” which includes the intriguing claim that 
generic boundaries create “invisible spaces on a generic grid, spaces 
which may be activated by a modification or specialisation of prior 
genre(s)” (p. 46).

So what does this say about satire or Juvenal specifically? J. offers 
surprisingly little about satire in this chapter, though he presents three 
passages of Juvenal, two from the third satire, to reveal the complexity of 
generic combination (pp. 40–3). Nor does the first chapter provide much 
of an introduction to Juvenal, who, as J. notes, “is arguably the most 
literary … and yet … the least inclined to present any other form of 
literature in the role of model” (p. 19). Presumably J. felt the need to 
speak broadly for the sake of his putative audience, and is aware of the 
generalizations of his arguments and marks them: “Crudely…” (p. 30), 
“At the risk of gross oversimplification” (p. 35), “it is worth 
setting the question in a very general light” (p. 46), “which is of 
course simplified here” (p. 103).

Generalizations notwithstanding, this book is not for the reader with no 
knowledge of Latin literature. Poems and works are routinely cited without 
quotations or details of content (e.g. references to Catullus’ poems on 
p. 30, to “the two Cynthia poems in book 4” of Propertius at p. 37, to 
Calpurnius Siculus’ eclogues at p. 124, to Petronius at pp. 135–6). 
Such examples are not illustrative for the reader who does not already know 
them, and even those who are generally familiar with the context may have 
to scurry for the texts to see exactly what J.’s point is. This shorthand 
extends to the notes (pp. 166–96). The first footnote of Chapter 5, for 
example, is appended to its title, “The Satirists and Epic,” where one 
reads: “For another perspective, see Connors (2005).” The second 
footnote appears after a mention of Lucan as an epic poet whose work 
contains “subversive elements,” and states: “Passages in Lucan may 
resemble (in advance) Juvenal, but this is rather part of the general 
influence of declamatory moralising than Juvenal drawing on the satiric 
strand in Lucan’s epic….” No examples of Lucan’s “satiric 
strand” or of resemblances between Lucan and Juvenal are given.

This combination of generalization and relative lack of support is most 
felt in the fifth chapter, on satire and epic (pp. 95–116). J. notes 
features of epic, such as war, journeys, divine councils and catalogs, that 
are parodied in satire, and also notes epic features absent from satirical 
parody (e.g. love). The individual satirists are cursorily treated. 
Horace’s view of epic is represented by Serm. 1.5. None of Juvenal’s 
satires is studied in detail, although epic features of Satires 1, 3, 4, 6, 
9, 10 and 15 are briefly mentioned (pp. 111–16). J.’s main point seems 
to be that satire attacks epic as “divorced from reality in terms of 
content and style,” but reveals epic’s absurdity by appropriating its 
conventions (pp. 95–7). Similarly, a welter of topics is combined in the 
seventh chapter, “Juvenal and Performance” (pp. 133–44), including 
the theatricality of Roman life during certain periods of the Empire, 
impersonation and “multi-interpretability” (p. 136), the indeterminate 
authorial voice, the “dramatic” conflict of genres and the teasing of 
Juvenal’s readers—each developed in no more than 3 pages. J. detects a 
particular metatheatricality in Juvenal’s later satires, particularly in 
11 and 12, which explains the “piquant variety in tone” that undermines 
“dramatic coherence” (p. 143). All this in a chapter of 12 pages.
	
Not all the material is of this sort. The third and longest chapter, 
“Names and Naming in Satire and Other Genres” (pp. 48–75), studies 
human, topographical, divine and mythological names as “generic 
indicators” in authors from Catullus to Statius’ Silvae. This chapter 
is thick with detail supported by an appendix (pp. 155–6), and apparently 
distills work J. published previously elsewhere.
	
Despite the title of the book, Juvenal is not the principal focus. Only the 
last two chapters are devoted to him, and he is largely studied in terms of 
how he fits into the genre rather than how he differs from his 
predecessors. J. notes differences in Juvenal’s use of names, his 
antagonism to epic, his literariness and his variegation of voice, but 
these are differences of degree.
	
J.’s work appeared too late to take account of other recent good and 
cogent work on satire and genre, including M. Plaza, The Function of Humour 
in Roman Verse Satire: Laughing and Lying (2006); R. Rosen, Making Mockery: 
The Poetics of Ancient Satire (2007); and especially C. Keane, Figuring 
Genre in Roman Satire (2006). The bibliography is somewhat uneven, but a 
general audience has less need for thoroughness in this area. Every 
audience, however, needs sources recognized. On the last page, J. suggests 
that Juvenal’s Satires constitute a “supergenre” that stands above 
other genres and presides over them (p. 154). In a footnote to the term 
“supergenre,” he states “I have not seen this term used elsewhere.” 
But it is found in the first paragraph of S.J. Harrison’s article on Ovid 
and genre in The Cambridge Companion to Ovid (2002), which appears in 
J.’s bibliography.
	
As for what satire essentially is, J. identifies two characteristics that 
recur throughout the book, namely, a concern for “realism” or 
ostensible “engagement with real or non-literary life” (p. 46, also pp. 
18, 24, 60, 74, 94, 149–50), and the form of an “anarchic patchwork of 
the literary heritage” (p. 147, also pp. 47, 123, 150, and 136 
[“unharmonious patchwork”] and 132 [“unruly chromaticism”]). If one 
searches for J.’s definition of “realism” in Roman literature, 
however, one must be content with a list of the “litter and detritus of 
the real world: cobblestones, gold rings, birds under temples eaves, and so 
on” (p. 149), examples of “cinematic focus” (p. 150), and a footnote 
reference to an earlier work by J. himself, on realism in Petronius (p. 177 
n. 19). What does J. conclude about satire’s “anarchy”? This is less 
clear. J. seems to present Juvenal as the most dissonant and variegated of 
the satirists, but it is not clear what “organizing viewpoint” (p. 47) 
he sees in Horace and Persius. J. suggests that there are harmonizing 
factors in Juvenal’s “anarchic” satire—the voice, the declamatory 
web, the tension with epic—but that the anarchy is the point: “We take 
this discordant material inside us and it tries to resolve itself there, in 
our hearts, but the resolution is not an easy one” (p. 152). Perhaps the 
same can be said of J.’s own study.

BRIAN S. HOOK
University of North Carolina at Asheville	


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