Quis leget haec? whines the anonymous interlocutor at the start of Persius' first satire. Every self-conscious author, editor and reviewer must echo the question. Companions sometimes suffer from the pressure to please all and sundry, answering that question with ‘everyone and no one’. But the editors of this helpful new volume have hit the balance well: contributions range from introductory fleshing designed for the student tackling these difficult poets on the fly, right across to flashy new material bound to jump-start even the tiredest Juvenalian crank. Over half a millennium of pages confronts the start–finish reader, so I must be on my best behaviour and condense.
The book is companionable in three sections: ‘Part I – Persius and Juvenal: Texts and Contexts’; ‘Part II – Restrospectives: Persius and Juvenal as Successors’; ‘Part III – Prospectives: The Successors of Persius and Juvenal’. Osgood prefaces the whole with a good introduction unfurling the rationale of the volume: the push for a distinct category of ‘Imperial Satire’. This concept takes several leaves out of Philip Hardie's ‘Epic Successors’ book in branding Persius and Juvenal poets obsessed with, defined by, their belatedness; such a critical move may be calculated to bring these self-styled outsiders more into the mainstream of contemporary Latin studies, but it is spot on nonetheless. Tethering Persius to Juvenal has a rich history, as several contributors acknowledge. And in this history Juvenal has almost always asserted masculine swagger over sickly, feminine precocity; the odd couple has usually been ‘Juvenal and Persius’, rarely ‘Persius and Juvenal’. As such, the volume's title plays its cards in its determinedly chronological ordering: we are implicitly promised fair attention to each.
How far this works in practice is another matter; the old hierarchy clings in many places, and Persius certainly gets shorter shrift than Juvenal simply because the volume's ‘reception’ section is so swollen. There Juvenal naturally occupies the lion's share, for it is difficult to rustle up ‘influence’ when Persius was long a mere trickle. The aim to restore parity is noble, if a little let down by the skewed treatment of the texts themselves: standard, well-known passages tend to be recycled in discussion across chapters. Despite Osgood's good intentions in recruiting the overlooked Juvenal 12 as a programmatic hinge in the introduction, for example, the later satires feature all too seldom. Gold promises big corpus-spanning things in her chapter on the ‘idea of the book’, but ends up sticking quite tamely to the well-trodden. Roche even mistakes Sat. 13's Calvinus for 12's Corvinus (201), and that slip, together with the fact that the editors missed it, confirms the suspicion that no one really reads these things.
Bracketing Persius and Juvenal off as primarily ‘successors’ has its benefits; but it takes its toll too. Some chapters are happily confined to focusing on one or the other, breathing easy without the burden of comparative companionship. But the volume feels uneven precisely because most chapters are compelled to consider both authors together — and companionship suits some topics much better than others. Bartsch, for instance, rolls out a neat chapter on Persius' Roman Stoicism, but is then obliged by comparative stricture and structure to whimper a tacked-on discussion of Stoicism in Juvenal, relying lamely on a hoary article from the '60s comparing Sat. 10 with Seneca. Why should the successor be lumped in with an inappropriate philosophical framework, just because his predecessor adopted it so emphatically? So too with sections on Persius’ and Juvenal's ‘Callimacheanism’ (Cucchiarelli, McNelis). It depends on which or whose tendentious version of Callimachus you are working with, yes; but it turns out much harder to make a case for Callimachus as prime model for Juvenal than it is for Persius. Perhaps this is one more instance of the neurotic Latinist's compulsion to recuperate these poets by showing that they are just as ‘Callimachean’ (i.e. good) as the best Augustans, and that critical tools applied to more gilded Latin poets serve just as well on rough-and-tumble satirists. But if the coupling of Persius and Juvenal sometimes proves unhappy, that is best seen as the collateral damage of a iunctura acris forcing us to see them in a productive new light.
It is an accurate (some, not I, would say sad) reflection of the current state of Classics that most of the volume's energy is generated in the reception wing. Hooley gives a masterful whistlestop of the authors' travels from antiquity to the twentieth century; Sogno nails late antique reception, introducing juicy new material for run-of-the-mill classicists; Gillespie's Renaissance expertise glitters; Braund and Osgood handle Dryden's Discourse (again in ‘succession’ terms) nicely; Parker and Braund make the minutes of the history of Persian/Juvenalian scholarship interesting; Richlin covers the often condescendingly dismissed school texts brilliantly. Perhaps the stand-out coupling is the awkward final duet: Nisbet fires off a bracing analysis of the institutional and ideological infrastructure around the art of paternalistic translation in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century England, of which we moderns like to suppose ourselves (impossibly) wholly innocent. He shows us the systematic élite containment of these authors along nationalist, classist and sexist lines. But then Winkler fills out an amorphous and superficial romp through ‘Juvenal and Persius in the Media Age’ with precisely another version of the same problematic bid for cultural ownership that Nisbet had so convincingly called out: ‘And Juvenal's satiric perspective has become completely ours.’ ‘Ours’? tota nostra? You mean the rich white anglosphere male's? ‘Our’ satirists could scarcely have despatched it better themselves.
