Nadeau's book is very useful. He is rigorously determined to pin down the tone and the flow of thought in the satire. He uses a wide range of intertexts (quoted in generous amounts) to elucidate the sense and flavour of individual words and the connections in and between sections (his lemmata are passages, typically of three to ten lines, rather than single words), and time and time again he adds nuance to, or emends, received understandings, or reveals double meanings, and sometimes more (a perhaps less convincing quadruple meaning at 6.216–18). This contributes much to the reader's sensitivity to Juvenal's tone. At the larger level, N. builds on this to draw a picture of Juvenal as an amoral wit (in the mould of Mason's image of the satirist). However, the reader can get a great deal from N. without agreeing to follow him down this route.
The introduction discusses text and persona. N. illustrates how editorial brevity can impede unequivocal communication. The point is fair, although N.'s treatment could have been much abbreviated. Moreover, when he introduces as a hypothetical reader ‘a first year undergraduate, fresh from Portobello Comprehensive’, and refers to this student consistently as ‘she/her’, issues of audience, class, and gender muddy the waters. As regards the person and persona, N. begins with the three epigrams of Martial which refer to a Juvenal. N. admits that they tell us little. I should prefer to have seen more explicitness, at least within the limits of what is possible, about when Juvenal was alive and when he was writing, since this issue intersects with that of intertextuality; the poets Juvenal uses seem to come, like his exempla, from ‘the past’. N. proceeds to review ideas from Mason (Arion 1 (1962), 8–44) to Freudenberg (Satires of Rome: Threatening Poses from Lucilius to Juvenal (2001)). He might usefully have incorporated Bramble's rather different account of the relationship between Martial and Juvenal (‘Martial and Juvenal’ in E. J. Kenney and W. V. Clausen (eds), Cambridge History of Classical Literature ii (1982), 597–623). For N., Juvenal uses two voices, one moralizing, one undercutting. The former shows ‘epic afflatus’ (N. does not make a serious attempt to consider metre in his account of Juvenal's style.), the latter adapts the situations, sentiments and incidents of elegy. In the commentary, N. calls these two voices Decimus and Junius: it is Junius who ‘says’ credo at 6.1, and the mocking Decimus is a metatextual voice which speaks ‘behind Junius’ back' (18) and indeed while Junius is speaking. We might well have had more about the mechanics here; Jensson's account of voice in Petronius could have added both finesse and a background in Roman rhetorical theory (The Recollections of Encolpius: the Satyrica of Petronius as Milesian Fiction (2004)).
N. is possibly too unconvinced by attempts to see morality in the satire. The commentary recurrently picks up the point that the mocking subversion seems to exclude this, but a moral sense may be implicit in the discords between what I would see as the satire's multiple voices. N. returns to the issue in the conclusion (332–40), and hints briefly at the possibility of something more than amoral wit. N.'s Juvenal uses ‘Horace’ to highlight the impossibility of satire in his own day; satire must now be a laughable ghost. However, the very fact that Juvenal writes satire signals that material worthy of satire exists, and the parade of his own powerlessness actually points towards it. Going further, N. wonders whether the serious Junius makes political gaffes and whether this ‘seeming unconscious mockery’ allows glimpses of the spirit of Lucilius (339). N. goes further, in a section headed ‘Satire 6 — a tribute to Roman women’: ‘the conjoined voices of Junius and Decimus portray [the women in the satire] for us as having retained a kind of liveliness, individuality, and independence which their male companions no longer enjoy under the Caesars.’ It seems as though N.'s Juvenal ‘attacks’ women in order actually to show that it is only bad women who escape the tyranny of Caesar, and that therefore imperial rule is the ultimate target of his satire.
The strength of the commentary lies in the attention to what Juvenal means and what flavour his words have. Very many of N.'s suggestions are tempting or convincing. There are inevitably omissions, or things that one might disagree with. The woman from Sulmo (6.187) thinks she is beautiful only if she speaks Greek: surely it is significant that Sulmo was Ovid's birthplace. At line 406, ‘the gossip knows all the positions the woman will assume …’: she knows how many (modis quot), not what, positions. There is a sort of competitive element in her curiosity. Psecas (6.491–4) is the name of a nymph (Ov., Met. 3.172) attending the bathing Diana (to whom her mistress then corresponds ironically). At 6.634–7, N. does not refer to Hor., Sat. 2.1.1–2 in dealing with the finem legemque priorum. Juvenal is asking whether we think that he has gone too far, but also insinuating that ‘going too far’ is part of the generic tradition.
