Juvenal's third satire is a privileged piece of verbal diarrhoea. As the longest satire in Juvenal's well-attended Book 1, as the centre of this book, and as the one Juvenalian jewel that sparkles ‘non-rhetorically’,Footnote 1 it has always been the critics’ darling. Its protagonist, on the other hand, has not always been so popular. Recently, reader sympathy for old Umbricius (the poem's main speaker) has shifted to laughter in his face; the old sense of ‘pathetic’ has ceded to the new. One of the central strategies of the ‘Umbricius-as-caricature’ camp has been to point to the overtime worked by ‘mock-epic’Footnote 2 in this poem: Umbricius self-inflates to become another Aeneas, fleeing a crumbling Troy (Rome).Footnote 3 But an oppositio is wedged in imitando. Umbricius makes his lengthy verbal preparations to depart from Rome for Cumae; Aeneas had come to Rome through Cumae. Umbricius withdraws to set up shop in the meagre countryside; Aeneas had escaped to cap his exile teleologically with the (pre-foundation of the) Greatest City That Will Ever Be. Still, Virgil's paradigm tale of displacement, drift and re-establishmentFootnote 4 underlies Umbricius' self-definition as an exile. Indeed exile, with a large and ever-increasing stock of mythical and historical examples, was a situation ripe for self-mythologizing.Footnote 5 Umbricius stands in Aeneas' shadow then, standing it on its head. His recession also makes him into a Iustitia/Dikē figure, the final trace of the golden age, off to alloy himself elsewhere.Footnote 6 In his mind, exile is rationalized by distinguished past examples; in ours, we laugh at how disparate example and man really are. That side of Umbricius has been done to death; or at least, for present purposes, to exile.
Another important strand underlying this withdrawal is the philosophical discourse of exile, which inverted the concept of ‘being-outside’ into a desirable existence.Footnote 7 The Cynics broadened exile to the metaphorical plane of ‘intellectual topography’,Footnote 8 idealizing separation from society as the access point for self-sufficiency (autarkeia); and this separation did not have to be physical. The perspective becomes the key: making sure you are ‘not at home even at home’.Footnote 9 Rejection of society expressed by physical withdrawal was equally a time-honoured philosophical tradition;Footnote 10 these paradigms furnish Umbricius with a wagon full of moral legitimacy. However, as we shall see, Umbricius' faith in the possibility of detachment is hopelessly obsolete amid the grinding gears of empire that undergird the whole world of Juvenalian satire. His expectations of exile are old-fashioned to the point of anachronism: he inhabits an outmoded mental universe, wherein City and Country are still separate worlds. In other words, as a relic, his exile is also temporal.Footnote 11
But the most relevant exilic source which I intend to bring (back)Footnote 12 to, and lay out on, Satire 3's table is that of Virgilian pastoral, particularly Eclogue 1. Throughout the poem Umbricius exercises a pastoral imagination, idealizing the countryside as a counterpoint to the sweeping condemnation of the city. His absolute displacement and dispossession render him a Meliboeus as much as an Aeneas, uirgo, poet or philosopher.Footnote 13 Satire 3's interpretation has much to gain from comparison with this (comparatively) overlooked intertext. As we shall see, this first Virgilian experiment with exile is the green backdrop shading our response to Juvenal's own smoggy pastoral: satiric countryside, in which every escape route leads back to Rome.
This article will fall into two main parts, accreting broadly around two related corollaries of exile. First, displacement: all the weird and wonderful forms of losing one's spot, but also the process whereby a place itself becomes negated. Second, dispossession: the loss of property, which is part and parcel of the ‘poverty’ of exile. Umbricius dwells at length on having nothing; a man with light luggage, but loads to say, his speech betrays an obsession with quantities, measurements, the how-much and the how-many. Both of these aspects of his exile have roots in Virgil's Eclogue 1; both will make us double-back to a grown-up Rome, once modestly encroaching (Eclogue 1), now unavoidably ubiquitous (Satire 3). Rome's pull makes it impossible to leave, and impossible to stop talking about. I shall close by teasing out some of the larger repercussions of this exilic frame for past poetry and present politics, the vertical and horizontal planes of Juvenalian satire.
First things first, lest we fall prey to the dangers of losing our place.
FROM NO PLACE TO (O)UTOPIA
Displacement manifests itself in many ways throughout Satire 3. At the level of the book, intertextuality with Virgil's œuvre renders the poem an epilogus in medio. Umbricius' name recalls the pastoral closure of umbrae in Eclogues 1.83, 10.75-6 and the final words of the Aeneid (sub umbras, 12.952); but it also famously replays the Cumaean katabasis of Aeneid 6, an (umbra-filled) epilogus in medio. Satire 3's seat in the book thus straddles middle and end. At a more obvious level, the poem is dramatically poised at the moment of departure: Umbricius is delivering his farewell speech before he jumps on his wagon, destination Cumae (sedem figere Cumis | destinet, 2-3).Footnote 14 There is a sense, however, that exile has already begun, even before he passes beyond the walls of his home city. In a reversal of the desire for nostos that usually binds the exile to his home,Footnote 15 he makes Rome into anything but home: unfamiliar, foreign, a paradoxical Graeca Vrbs (61).Footnote 16 The Rome that this loser is leaving is already exilic; the place itself has been displaced.Footnote 17 We see this in microcosmic form in the satire's prologue, which famously stages a double displacement. The natural tufa has been ‘upgraded’ to marble (15),Footnote 18 and the Jews have bumped the Muses into their own exile (20). More commercial material shunts natural numen out of the way. Early enough, we are rehearsing a version of the great centre/periphery equation that forms a central conceit of high empire, and a central gripe of Juvenalian satire: Rome is the world is Rome (more on this below).
As Fredericks has observed, all this displacement foreshadows Umbricius' own exclusion from Roman social structures in the rant proper.Footnote 19 His sweeping conclusion to the ‘Greeks everywhere’ section is non est Romano cuiquam locus hic (119—reiterating line 21). Umbricius is jostled out of his patron's threshold (limine summoveor, 124) by the Greek; he thus loses his position as client. An interlocutor sweeps the poor man from the good seats at the theatre (153–8).Footnote 20 Low-born nouveaux-riche take his place. You, poor addressee, are stuck below the high chair of Chione the prostitute: she is in the hot-seat of nobility now, while you dither around the bottom (134–6). Later this same generalizing ‘you’ is pitted against the drunken thug, hungry for a Homeric scale fight. He asks ‘you’ (/Umbricius) to state your position: unde uenis? … ede ubi consistas: in qua te quaero proseucha? (292–6). But the poor man's problem is that he has no position in/from which to stare or dicere. Satire 3 shows how many ways there are for the poor man to be denied a seat. His only hope is an oblique look-in from outside.
Displacement is thus complicated somewhat in Satire 3: the word implies that the displaced person originally had a place, but Umbricius' rhetoric turns Rome into a series of no-places, blocked paths and occupied seats. So there is a definite sense that he is already, and has always been, in a kind of exile at Rome. The problem with this Roman exile is its permanence: Umbricius' lack of place, according to him, is irreversible. This plays out in the imagery of stasis that pervades his experience. He is perpetually ‘stuck’; his mobility is restricted to the point of bodily incapacitation. At lines 47–8, he complains of not ‘going out’ (exeo—in the official capacity of imperial administration), and likens himself to a cripple. Umbricius' movement away from Rome, then, is not only tantamount to a rejection of the Vrbs, but also a reassertion of his ability to get out (cf. ire, 25; cedamus, 29); his migration shows us he has still got it, though on last legs (27–8). This is revenge, for all those times that poverty blocked the way up and forward (obstat, 164). Since money buys everything at Rome, it also buys mobility. The image of the rich man effortlessly ploughing through the crowd in his giant ‘Liburnian’ of a litter is set against Umbricius (or you, or me) being crushed by the countless obstacles at ‘sea-level’ (obstat again, 243). The same pathetic stasis can be seen in the underworld scene shortly after. While the slaves hurry along their domestic tasks unimpeded (unlike the properantes of 243), the nouicius stays put on one side of the river. He does not have the money to buy a crossing, so he is frozen in limbo (265). At Rome, poverty is paralysis. Without money, you cannot get anywhere: not even the right side of death.Footnote 21
Umbricius' staged exit from Rome is thus a middle finger to the years of obstruction that have hitherto hindered his movement. In this respect his exile is emphatically voluntary, despite the rhetoric of intolerability.Footnote 22 Another paradigm of voluntary exile, Horace's Regulus (Carm. 3.5), is an intriguing intertext here. Horace describes Regulus' final moments and movements in lines 41–56, all portraits of masculine motion unimpeded: he hurries (properaret, 48) out of the group (or flock?—egregius, 48) of mourning friends, shoves the obstacles out of the way (dimovit obstantes propinquos | et populum reditus morantem, 51–2) and leaves with a revealing simile (3.5.50-6):
[Regulus sliced through the kinsmen who stood in his way and the citizens who were blocking his return,] just as if he were now leaving behind the protracted day-to-day of his clients after deciding a court case, and heading for a mini-break to the Venafran countryside or Lacedaemonian Tarentum.
Despite marching to his death, Regulus is so Stoic that he leaves as if making for a country holiday. This is a comparison in which Umbricius inevitably gets dwarfed: he, as failed client retiring to greener pastures (note in agros, the line ending for Carm. 3.5.55 and Sat. 3.322), simply cannot measure up to Regulus, a patron actually bound for self-sacrifice but treating it as a pleasant retreat. That is a real Roman's journey to the underworld; Umbricius' trip to the Cumaean underworld just has the self-interested ‘better quality of life’ as its goal, literalizing Horace's simile. The poor man's exile is losing nobility by the second.
Umbricius, however ingloriously, exercises his right to move out. But, as with the self-imposed exile urged by the uates in Horace's Epode 16, there is a problem with the very concept of an ‘outside’, a destination discrete from the corruption of Rome. Epode 16 explicitly grapples with this issue as the speaker envisions a fantasy destination (the Blessed Isles), which is literally off the charts (57–60).Footnote 23 That absolute displacement is the only way to make a clean break out of civil war miasma. The situation is similar in Satire 3 (or at least Umbricius elevates it to that point). Rome is irremediably gone, so the only solution is to leave; but the vision of his destination seems no less fanciful than the happy lands of Epodes 16. First of all, the bi-directional interchangeability of Rome and Empire throws a spanner in the works. Umbricius gives us a picture of the world condensed into Rome, the Vrbs as orbis.Footnote 24 But this equation can go the opposite way. Note the beginning of Satire 2:
I'd gladly flee Rome to somewhere beyond the Sarmatians and icy Ocean, whenever … (2.1-2)
The satirist here assumes the empire-wide perspective of Roman corruption, in which real fuga is only possible at absolute periphery. The end of this satire is also relevant: the rot starts at Rome and spreads radially,Footnote 25 as foreigners pick up bad habits from Rome and take them back home with them (2.167-70). If empire fills the world with Rome, then exile is technically impossible.Footnote 26 Cumae, as some have argued, would be anything but empty (uacuis … Cumis, 2) at this historical period; it would be an annoying microcosm of the capital itself.Footnote 27 In addition, a paradigmatic Graeca urbs might not be the best destination for a man wishing to flee the Greek mob especially.Footnote 28 If Umbricius goes too far, he risks running head on into the foreigners he is trying to escape, at the very source; if he stays too close to Rome, he has not really left. If Cumae is a compromise … then Umbricius is still compromized: Juvenal positions it as the ianua Baiarum (4), and Baiae was a byword for extravagance.Footnote 29 Cumae is thus unlikely to accord with the vignettes of rustic simplicity that are ever deployed in the poem for rhetorical comparanda. Umbricius' movement becomes a journey from no-place (the constant evictions of Rome) to a no-place, an ou-topia (the imaginary comforts of Cumae).Footnote 30
The clues already lie in the not-quite-separation of urban and pastoral space in Virgil's Eclogues. Skoie has recently questioned the practical dichotomy ‘city/country’, showing that the ‘country’ was by no means independent of Rome, but inextricably bound into its socio-political networks.Footnote 31 In Eclogue 1, this entails Tityrus' absorption into big-city real estate: he may be able to maintain his property, but he is now at the behest of the iuuenis back in Rome. Thus, even in Tityrus' world, Rome pokes its antennae everywhere, unavoidably; Umbricius' implicit ambition to become a new Tityrus (via Meliboeus) fails to take account of the dependency of country on city, a dependency that has no doubt grown since Tityrus' time. The self-contained pastoral universe is no longer. It is even heading towards town, singing as it goes (Ecl. 9; cf. Calpurnius Siculus, Ecl. 7).
The end of the city as circumscribed geographical entity, its creeping diffusion as and across empire, is beginning already in Eclogue 1; likewise, Umbricius at the end of Satire 3 seems poised to have a hard time relapsing to authentic rusticity (exile). When departure time arrives, he winds himself up into the pastoral mode (316), his mind seemingly leaping forward to the idyll he is about to enact. But he does not even reach his destination before he leaves it again (3.318-22):
Farewell then, and don't forget me. And whenever Rome renders you over to your own Aquinum, rushing to be refreshed, grant me too a transfer from Cumae. I'll come to your nice cool countryside with heavy-duty footwear and listen to your satires—unless my presence embarrasses them.
Umbricius looks ahead to a time when he can leave Cumae and visit Juvenal at Aquinum. Superficially, no problem; it is just a short-term migration from one pastoral paradise to another. But the activities will not be confined to milking the cows. Rather, Umbricius hopes to become an auditor, a participant in that evil institution of the poetry recitation that kicked off the corpus (Sat. 1.1) and received an honourable mention in the abbreviated list of urban dangers in the prologue (Sat. 3.9).Footnote 32 Being a passive auditor, perhaps more than anything, epitomizes the frustrations of Rome. And our wannabe exile willingly offers to go back there. The type of poetry he wants to listen to, moreover, is completely city-centric: satire is parasitic on the Vrbs, it needs its food to survive. This is the ultimate paradox of exile in Satire 3: if Umbricius goes, the poet that writes him has to stay. The satirist can never really leave Rome.Footnote 33 Yet nor can the satirized. Translated into the country, Umbricius' part in status-conscious (ni pudet illas) urban contexts will continue. He will still be inviting himself over to someone else's place, the same loser lost in the audience. He will still look out of place: an auditor caligatus,Footnote 34 primed again, this time with proper footwear (at least), for the urban battle which has been steadily trampling him into the ground for so many years.Footnote 35 And will do so for many more. You can take the loser out of Rome; you can never take Rome out of the loser.
WHO'S COUNTING? UMBRICIUS' ARITHMETIC OF EXILE
We have looked at how Umbricius' rush into exile is decidedly more complicated than a straight movement outside. His displacement at Rome (pre-exilic exile) led into the question of his displacement from Rome, whether he can actually get beyond his longstanding exclusion—or whether displacement will follow him every place he goes. This section will consider that question from a different angle. Closely tied to the issue of displacement is the other kind of reduction in which Umbricius resembles a Meliboean exile: dispossession. Once again, the dis- prefix is slightly misleading; Umbricius was never possessed of much, just as he was never placed. But his focus on property, his obsession with quantification throughout the poem, can certainly be read in the light of an exile's preoccupation with the somethings of other people in contrast to his own totum nihil (‘whole lotta nothing’). This is where Eclogue 1 comes in, abundantly.
Eclogue 1 stages a big (or small) confrontation of scales. At a basic level, we have a Tityrus possessed of everything the herdsman could ever want, and a Meliboeus deprived of all that. Tityrus inflates his property throughout, and Meliboeus agrees: it is big enough for Tityrus (tibi magna satis, 47),Footnote 36 though small enough to show up Meliboeus' poetic muscles in full flex.Footnote 37 A juxtaposition of big and small can be traced earlier in the poem, however. Waxing lyrical after his trip to Rome, Tityrus alerts Meliboeus to the problems of perspective, size and scale: he wrongly thought the nearby country town to be on some kind of par with Rome, like puppies to dogs (sic paruis componere magna solebam, 23). But he subsequently realizes the difference is much, much bigger (24–5):
But this one has raised her head among other cities, as far above the rest as cypresses tend to be among the bending osiers.
When it comes to grandeur, Rome is in a league of its own.Footnote 38 Meliboeus responds to this language of quantity in his next question: et quae tanta fuit Romam tibi causa uidendi? (26). And so Tityrus replies, talking big: Libertas. The freedom, if nothing else, to own your own home.Footnote 39 Tityrus launches into his story of financial success, which plays Meliboeus' change of fortune in reverse. At first Tityrus was the one possessed (nos Amaryllis habet … | … dum me Galatea tenebat, 30–1), during which time his cash just slipped through his fingers (nec cura peculi, 32). Whether we read seruitium as real slavery or as seruitium amoris, Tityrus does eventually ‘get out’ (exire, 40) thanks to a benevolent iuuenis. He is indeed fortunatus, and Meliboeus cannot help looking on his opposite number's rura through a high-powered magnifying glass. To Meliboeus, Tityrus' property is a microcosm of pastoral perfection, fenced off nicely from the neighbours (50). He then turns his imaginative eye to his own former patch of grass, which becomes another exercise in perspective and amplification: even small things (pauperis et tuguri congestum caespite culmen | … aliquot … aristas, 68–9) can look big (regna, 69) to a man who has lost everything. The thought of a miles/barbarus taking possessionFootnote 40 of these bits and pieces seems to inflate them even more in Meliboeus' mind: the land becomes an agricultural universe (culta noualia, 70; has segetes, 71; agros, 72; piros, 73; uitis, 73). Despite this hot air, Meliboeus ends up on nothing, cancelling property and pastoral poetry (carmina nulla canam …, 77). Back comes Tityrus with some salt for the wound: his property stretches out amply (copia, 81), as does his gaze, which espies heights at long distance (summa procul … culmina … | … altis de montibus, 82–3). The very last line of the poem features growth, a getting-bigger (maiores … umbrae, 83). Tityrus is attuned to sizes and amounts because he has held onto his property; Meliboeus counts the square metres because he has lost it all. Both are drawn to scale.
Umbricius' possession-obsession can be read in the light (or shade) of this focus on magnitude in Eclogue 1. Satire 3, as elsewhere in Juvenal,Footnote 41 revels in striking disparities of quantity. It is suffused with the question: how much? Too much for us, if we set about (in parallel with Umbricius) enumerating examples of every point in the poem concerned with quantification. But in Juvenal, too much is never enough.Footnote 42
The prologue sets the meter counting. Juvenal, as so often observed, has an eye for close-ups and long-shots,Footnote 43 singles and multiples.Footnote 44 Umbricius’ donation of ‘one citizen’ (3) contrasts with the rhetorically large number of dangers in Rome (mille pericula, 8); the big/small interaction is more condensed in the pathetic image of his worldly possessions in line 10 (sed dum tota domus raeda componitur). The notion of rhetorical comparison, weighing up and setting off alternatives,Footnote 45 is there in praepono (5); general disparity thus informs the speaker's thought in the prologue. But Umbricius takes it out of all proportion. In his 300-hexameter diatribe, size does matter; numbers work 24/7, from giant to minuscule, to highlight the gulf between rich and poor. His first act is to measure his shrinking property (23–4). He chronically tags prices as he tries to reset value: tanti tibi non sit opaci | omnis harena Tagi quodque in mare uoluitur aurum (54–5). Not for all the gold in the Tagus should you lose sleep over under-the-table deals. There is ‘more than one’ (non una, 151) scar on the poor man's cloak, ironically the only thing he has a lot of (apart from nothing—totum nihil, 209). Umbricius is constantly roving between the poles of one thing (sometimes no-thing) and everything; always counting what counts.Footnote 46
In this respect, Umbricius is like everyone else in his Rome. As case in point for corruption of values, he hypothetically invites canonical Roman heroes (Scipio, Numa and Metellus) to the witness stand. But no one cares de moribus anymore (3.140-2):
Straight-up the question's about his wealth; his moral substance will be the last point of interest. ‘How many slaves does he feed? How many acres of land does he possess? How many and how big are the dishes he dines off?’
Line 140 sounds like a perversion of a censor's role, which in better times covered both financial and moral values;Footnote 47 nowadays the meaning of census is restricted to a mere ‘counting of property’. At some level, we could see Umbricius’ self-styling as extending to the censorship. He is a seasoned moralizer as well as a counter. Brief comparison with an epistle of Seneca—(also?) a figure whose ‘signposts always point traffic away from his point of departure, Rome, away from seething hordes of writhing hysteria in the ancient world's vastest ever conurbation’Footnote 48 —proves illustrative. In Epistle 87, Seneca is concerned with praising moral over monetary value. The drama sits Seneca on a very Umbrician unum … uehiculum (Ep. 87.2), which he has just used for a two-day jaunt to the country. General similarity is undeniable; even more so when we see how Seneca treats a certain Censor (Ep. 87.10):
O quantum erat saeculi decus, imperatorem, triumphalem, censorium, quod super omnia haec est, Catonem, uno caballo esse contentum et ne toto quidem.
Ah yes, how great the glory of Cato's age, that a general, a triumph-winner, a censor, and the best of all, a Cato, was happy with one horse—actually, not even a whole one!
uno caballo … contentum of course echoes Seneca's own demonstratively frugal unum uehiculum. Satire 3 takes up this Catonian censoriousness directly. Quantum-fication is one of Umbricius’ favourite devices (see below); here we have Seneca playing out the same paradox as Umbricius does in lines 312–14, where the past is ‘better’ because it is smaller (uno contentam carcere Romam, 314). So Umbricius tries to become another Seneca, who, by writing Cato into his exempla, himself impersonates a Catonian censor: the final step in the working would be Umbricius = Cato. Of course the equation requires wishful arithmetic. Juvenal also alludes to this Senecan passage in line 10, with a twist: tota domus raeda componitur una. While Cato is content with a horse that is not even whole (toto), Umbricius is so attached to his possessions that he takes measures to cram them all (tota) onto one wagon. Here is another comparison in which he is dwarfed (cf. Regulus above): but this time by enlargement, looking prosaically gargantuan (a whole wagonload) against Cato's heroic minimalism (not even a whole horse). Further to this, Umbricius’ censorship is, unlike Cato's, imposed by necessity: his ‘poverty’ conveniently allows him to step into the role of censor without the choice that contentus implies. Umbricius’ actual lack of satisfaction is evident in the spiralling plenitude of his speech (more on this below). Catonian standards of verbal restraint are lost in Satire 3's multitude of words;Footnote 49 Umbricius is a censor with no sense of proportion.
This fixation on quantity plays out most obviously in the frequency of questions and correlatives: ‘How much? How many? As many as …’. The rhetorical question at 61 apportions the blame to inferior-breed Greeks (quamuis quota portio faeces Achaei?). Correlatives show up the wonky scales of value at Rome: a slave can give as much as a military tribune's pay to bed a few prostitutes, once or twice (132–3). Prime real estate in the country can be bought for the same amount as is blown on a year's rent at Rome (223–5). An ultra-modest plot like this one (breuis, tenuis) could feed a hundred Pythagoreans (226–7); it is at least worth something to be proud owner of one lizard (unius … lacertae, 231). If that is something, then the catalogue of urban dangers at 268–314 is really something. There are so many measures to remark on here (quod spatium … quotiens … quanto … pondere) that Umbricius has to cut himself short with an emblematic co-ordination: adeo tot fata, quot illa | nocte patent uigiles te praetereunte fenestrae (274–5). Our list, like his, threatens to become endless.
Satire 3 goes one step further than mere juggling of big and small; it deals not just in static quantities, but in augmentation and downsizing as well. Umbricius, as mentioned above, is shrinking.Footnote 50 But the rich are getting richer. The purpose of clients at line 189 is to increase slaves’ pocket-money (augere peculia). Cordus in line 211 loses his ‘whole nothing’ in a fire, and no one pitches in to help him out; Persicus, by contrast, gets paid back in full and then some (meliora ac plura reponit, 220). And this phrase could, paradoxically, become a guideline for that most capacious, expansive thing of all: Umbricius’ discourse. He may have been robbed of rightful property, but his never-ending flow of speech more than compensates.Footnote 51 By the end, he has been adding more and more to his ledger for so long that we begin to suspect he will never shut up, especially with transitions like nec tamen haec tantum metuas (302). The man himself admits that he could go on indefinitely were it not for the external constraints of departure time;Footnote 52 (outstretching) echoes of Silenus’ song in Ecl. 6.84-6 are unmistakable here. The tumidity of Umbricius’ speech grows out of control, a rejoinder to a propertied (now silenced) Tityrus (Juvenal?) somewhere out there: ‘Hear this Meliboeus roar: I have nothing to own, but everything to say.’Footnote 53 Satire 3 is lopsided poetry; for this it owes a lot to the Meliboeus/Tityrus disparity of Eclogue 1, as well as to its status as satire.
Umbricius has a mind for quantification, which also involves equation. This predilection covers both quantity and quality: he praises the fact that white tunics are enough (sufficient, 179) for the highest aediles, and everyone looks the same in the country (aequales … similes, 177). In the city, however—hotbed of inequality—conventional tropes of likeness fail.Footnote 54 The Greek is a poet of the lowest grade, making a simile out of a vehicle and tenor that have absolutely no connection (like … Tityrus’ Rome in Eclogue 1?):
[and that Greek race] compares a weakling's lanky ‘neck’ to Hercules’ proper one, as he's holding Antaeus a long way from the earth. (3.88-9)
And yet the joke lies in Umbricius’ (immediately following) attempt at the same thing (the cock-and-hen simile in 90–1), which is even more awkward;Footnote 55 our loser unsuccessfully grapples with the problem of likeness in a city where no two things are equal (non sumus ergo pares: melior …, 104), and the only equality comes in the form of a false equation. Umbricius is consistently trumped, such that his ledger never balances: he is always in the unreconciled red, and the black is reserved for those qui nigrum in candida uertunt (3.30).
So a poetics of quantification is linked to a poetics of disparity; both reflect the mentality behind exile, always alive to winners, losers, reversals of fortune. Most importantly, the issues of scale which, I have shown, are common to both Satire 3 and Eclogue 1 can also be used to read their intertextual relationship. The balanced conflict of Eclogue 1 resides in the traded verses of winner vs. loser, a conflict where the stakes are (relatively) low: a few goats, some marshy land, a bit of cheese. But the conflict of Satire 3 is profoundly unbalanced, inflated to another degree entirely: one man takes on an enormous city.Footnote 56 Umbricius becomes Meliboeus to the nth power, pumping up the loser's volumeFootnote 57 so loud that it drowns out Juvenal, the Tityrus voice, completely.Footnote 58 In Eclogue 1, you win some, you lose some; come Satire 3, only the loser is left—and that loser has lost everything.
This modern Meliboeus gets the sweetest revenge when he appropriates what should be the Tityrus figure's final words of invitation (318–23). With these, Umbricius attempts to make the settlement beyond Rome stick, to become a Meliboeus-turned-Tityrus. However, the re-possession immediately gives way to a displacement (cf. above): Umbricius’ eyes roam back to other people's things (tuo … Aquino | …. ad Heluinam Cererem uestramque Dianam, 319–20), intimating that he will ever be a mal(e)content(us). Even, or especially, in the countryside, the grass in some places is greener than in others. The self-invitationFootnote 59 hints that he will continue to depend on other peoples’ hospitality, as much as he did when a clingy cliens.Footnote 60 We could read these lines as one last plea for inclusion, a terminal tug on the toga of the only connection Umbricius has left in Rome. The poem appropriately ends with a tag of pastoral satisfaction reminiscent of the end of the Eclogues (haec sat erit … ite domum saturae, uenit Hesperus, ite capellae, 10.70–77).Footnote 61 But the goats who have had enough (saturae) are transmuted into satires (saturae); not only this, but also the promise of more satires to come. When Umbricius finally does say when, then, it is an ending which parodies satiation by offering the prospect of more: more of that capacious urban genre which cannot exile itself from Rome, which does not know when to stop. So the loser ostensibly leaves: but he will not stop being a loser, even in exile … that is, he will not leave.
Ultimately, Umbricius’ ‘exile’ is nothing more than another rip-off transaction, packing him off to the ownership of another: his leftover currency is himself, all paid into the Bank of Sibyl (unum ciuem donare Sibyllae, 3). Through two different gates (displacement and dispossession) we have arrived at the same destination—the same as our origin, that is. No matter how much Umbricius tries to cash in on the repetitiveness of epic and become another Aeneas fleeing flaming Troy, no matter how dignified the philosophical pose of voluntary withdrawal from the city, it all adds up to nought, because ultimately he will not be able to shrug off Rome's gravitational field. He will keep hovering on the margins, neither here nor there:Footnote 62 another umbra on the sidelines of the feast, or haunting the road from Rome.
UNDOING ROME: UMBRICIUS’ DOING
We have mingled Umbrician exile with its Meliboean counterpart and seen how much they (mis)match. But the relationship between Satire 3 and its Virgilian intertexts (plural) deserves further unpacking. Satire 3 manages a titanic feat of appropriation: not only does it co-opt Eclogue 1 for meaningful backdrop, but wrestles down the Aeneid as well. Juvenal thus incorporates the whole ring-fenced Virgilian career, both earliest and smallest and latest and greatest, into the intertextual system of his own decadent tour-de-force. This is an ambitious poem, authorizing some larger commentary.
Eclogue 1, as hinted above, furnishes a scale against which the distorted world of Satire 3 appears both bigger and smaller. The comparison helps tell the tale of Rome's expansion, which underwrites satire's generic pre-eminence in the golden age of urban decline. What was just visible on the horizon in Eclogue 1—the nebulous new arbiter of possession and dispossession, the capital (V) Vrbs—now fills the horizon to saturation point.Footnote 63 There is no hors-Rome. But this is also the logical conclusion of the narrative process begun in the Aeneid: now, finally, the real telos of Rome's self-collapse, that which was only glimpsed from the peak of the Augustan settlement. Satire 3 is so potent precisely because it intervenes directly in the grand Virgilian story, appends a deliciously hopeless conclusion to the act of foundation, undoes all its good work. If the Aeneid reimburses Meliboeus in the form of Aeneas—i.e. restores the property and identity of the exile—then Satire 3 takes it all away, again. Rome is easing back into the ruins of the civilisation that was there before it; disintegrating into the graveyard of another Troy. Look how far we have come. Full circle, no escape.
Satire 3 is simultaneously a nightmarish realisation of the dream of the Aeneid, wherein Rome trespasses the limits of the globe, imperium sine fine; and a materializing of its worst nightmare, wherein Rome is on the edge of imploding, fin de siècle empire. The poem's tottering buildings return Rome to its roots in the ruins of Aeneid 8, that glimpse of cyclical destruction that Jupiter did not quite get round to in his shiny prophecy. It is this incomparable urban mass, slumping hard into full collapse, that helps vindicate the pre-eminence of Juvenalian satire as the genre of the century. The city is so swollen that it monopolizes all poetic consciousness; it muscles all other content out of the race. In this sense, Umbricius' rant is a representative form of the generic subsumption at work all over Juvenal's first book.Footnote 64 The monologic mode of these satires can function as an aggressive antidote to the two-way conversations (sermones) of Horace and Persius. But it can also be seen as a new type of pastoral, forcibly warping the gentle oscillation of the Eclogues book beyond its golden proportions. The Virgilian lullaby was perfectly poised between dialogue and monologue, amoebean and non-amoebean, five of each, delicately interlaced into their own dialogic rhythm. Juvenal tears off the dialogues with one hand and beefs up the monologues with the other, leaving us with just five screeching tirades on which to grate our ears. Like Umbricius, he brooks no talking back, no responsion, no traded equivocations. This Rome has lost its balance, and speaks but one voice at a time. The constant frustration of listening becomes an offshoot of the humiliations and emasculations of a mature principate: the sideways slips and slides, ‘multiple voices’ of pre-Actian poetry are bottlenecked into straight one-way traffic. Dialogue and fully-fledged autocracy just do not mix.
The textual career of Virgil, framed as it is by exiles at various stages of upward/downward spiral,Footnote 65 becomes more than a foil for Juvenalian satire. It looms larger than this: takes on a role as formal norm, relic of a golden age, barometer on which readings of poetic, political, social decline can be taken. Yet it also lurks lesser: becomes but a prequel in the cyclical exilic narrative to which Juvenal, living in the end times, reserves himself the right to pin another unending conclusion. The labour-intensive task of Rome's undoing: tantae molis erat Romanam perdere gentem.
POLITICAL EXILES AND EXILIC POLITICS
The annals of Roman (and Greek) literature were certainly puffed out with paradigms of exile. And I have argued that Satire 3 privileges the Virgilian corpus as its exilic master-model. But Juvenal also had recourse to a brand new bearded fashion for displacement at Rome. The rise of Cynic philosophy in the first century c.e. made trendy ‘exile’ an easy target. Renunciation of corrupt society, with all its bells and whistles, was all the rage. Cynic wannabes were (apparently) floating around all the street corners, barking their homilies for withdrawal.Footnote 66 While I have run thin on room for lengthy exposition, there is one more structural analogy to mention along these lines, before Umbricius the exile is left to leave in peace.
Dio Chrysostom was (we think) a near contemporary of Juvenal. Not long before Satire 3's publication, Dio was added to the formidable list of political exiles under the Principate. His thirteenth oration deals with the experience, and the perspective granted by it.Footnote 67 In this speech, Dio presents himself first processing his exile from the vantage point of the common herd, trained to think exile the worst fate possible through numerous literary examples of whingeing, nostos-obsessed vagrants. Eventually the values flip, however, and Dio is hit by the realisation (ἐνεθυμούμην, 13.8—after mulling over another exile story, Croesus) that flight is no bad thing, just like staying behind is no good. Our exile-authenticated maestro works his counter-intuitive rhetoric to make ἡ φυγή the time of his life, the best thing that ever happened to him; it is retrospectively remodelled as the watershed moment that enabled him to become the free-speaking philosopher of the hack-Socratic mould we listen to today. Only the state of exile brings home the home truths he will spout as wandering sage. In this way exile is redeemed as a precondition, indeed precipitator, of the philosophical epiphany: that nothing men consider good is really good. There is an attempt here to reassert some control over the ‘bolt from the blue’ depriving a citizen of everything intuitively valuable. If Dio's exile is involuntary, his philosophical journey initiated thereby is emphatically voluntary. From necessity, a good amount of virtue is wrung. And when the recall comes, a good amount of cultural capital can be wrung from that virtue. Dio's exile is also a priceless ticket back into the establishment, a certificate for eventual readmission to the imperial power structure he never liked anyway.
Dio's optimistic retrospective on the fate of exile—the ‘never liked it anyway’ pattern—is right up Umbricius' crowded alley. As is well documented, there are hints throughout the poem that his departure is a knock-on of incompetence: not that he will not participate in the rat race, but rather that he cannot.Footnote 68 Making the best of a bad situation is only human: necessary psychological damage control, to spin it positively. But here it may also be a specific response to the trending ‘exile redemption’ arguments doing the rounds of Rome at the time. Umbricius’ long speech on the way out reminds us of a Dio working up misfortune into something much more palatable, perhaps with one eye on how to claw his way back all along—and how empty that looks when laid bare in satire. If Satire 3 is also a targeted parody of a cynic-style harangue, it is one designed to make these affected ragamuffins look patently ridiculous. Making (up) virtues of necessity often necessitates making (up) cities of vice.
Umbricius' exile thus manages to hook a barb into contemporary ‘outsider’ culture even as it locks horns with the proudest myths of Roman self-definition and runs them into the ground. Even if he never made it to that Cumaean ‘exile’, resorbed immediately as he was into the ever-diffusing Big Smoke, this loser sure left behind some winning satire.
