ABSTRACT
This chapter is based on a close examination of Juvenal’s second satire. Juvenal wrote verse satires in Rome shortly after the turn of the first and second centuries CE. He was part of a Roman tradition of writing satura (a term which overlaps with, but is not exactly the same as, the English term ‘satire’), which by his day went back more than two centuries, and which Roman commentators saw as being a particularly Roman literary genre, or at least one in which, for once, they excelled Greek writers. 1 Satura was a loose genre (one explanation of the origin of its name was that it meant ‘a dish of many different ingredients’), but the feature which the work of all its exponents had in common was social and cultural commentary on Roman life, whether mild or acerbic. Juvenal eschewed the mild tone of his more immediate predecessors, Horace and Persius, adopting, at least in the earlier of his satires, the persona of ‘the angry man’, led by indignation to point out and attack breaches of traditional Roman social and cultural norms, of which he posed as the defender.
