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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 July 2014
Pliny, Tacitus, and Juvenal were all released by the death of Domitian in A.D. 96 and the succession of Nerva, then of Trajan in 98 to embark on their separate careers of public and literary life. While Pliny reflects a happy present time, Tacitus and Juvenal look back on earlier times with disgust and indignation. But that, too, could well imply that, secure with the Trajanic Era, they were seeking more dramatic material for their comfortable audiences. When Trajan died in 117, Juvenal had published two books of poems consisting of what we call Satires 1 to 6. Trajan's successor, Hadrian, was a considerably different man, not only a capable soldier and administrator but a person of culture, widely travelled, fond of architectural experimentation, with a life-style that included both a wife and a handsome Bithynian named Antinous. Life was not so predictable under Hadrian for anybody. Pliny had already died, and Tacitus may not have survived very long into the new reign, but Juvenal was still alive and writing after 127.
1. The conviction that Juvenal seriously denounces cannibalism is shared by the most recent writers on this satire, Fredericks, S. C in ICS 1 (1976) 174–89Google Scholar; and Edward Courtney, in his invaluable Commentary on Juvenal 15 (London 1980) 590–612Google Scholar. Ribbeck, Otto, Der echte und der unechte Juvenal (Berlin 1865 Google Scholar), believed that Satire 15, along with four other of the late poems, was the wretched work of a declaimer, not Juvenal. That solution has found few supporters. Although Satire 15 differs from the earlier satires, especially 1–6, it is, in my opinion and that of Fredericks, a remarkably skilful poem and worthy indeed to be assigned to Juvenal.
2. Courtney (n.1 above) on line 1.
3. Aegyptiorum tnorem quis ignorat, quorum imbutae mentes pnmtads ermribus quamvis camificinam prius subierint quam ibim out aspidem out faelem out canem out crocodilum violent?
4. Cicero’s information about the Egyptians, though perfunctory, does not differ appreciably from the relatively favourable data provided by Herodotus in his description of Egypt.
5. So, too, Courtney (n.1 above) on 13, licet.
6. E.g., Courtney (n.1 above) on 13, tale facinus.
7. In Seneca’s tragedy Thyestes, Atreus derives inspiration from Tereus’ misfortunes: he aims to surpass them by killing the three children of his brother and deceiving him into cannibalism. Tereus had eaten only one child. Thus, he says: maius … aliquid dolor/inveniat (273f.), ‘let my pain find something greater’, ‘greater’, that is, than what Tereus suffered.
8. Compare the title of Aeschylus’ tragedy on the death of Orpheus, Bassarae or Bassarides.
9. The main entries under Roman necessity in Val. Max. 7.6 merely lead up to the examples of un-Roman desperation in the ‘external’ section: Ext. 1 records the behaviour of besieged under conditions of thirst; they drank urine. Ext. 2 and 3 form a climax with the cannibalism at Numantia and Calagurris.
10. 15.100f., hostibus ipsis / pallorem ac maciem et tenuis miserantibus arms (‘when the enemy themselves were pitying their paleness, wasted appearance, and emaciated limbs’). A few lines later, he then asks us the rhetorical question: What men, what gods would refuse to pardon such desperate cannibalism, especially when the victims were capable of pardoning it? (103–6). Val. Max. 7.6. Ext. 3 says that Pompey was commanding the Roman besiegers, but he makes no mention of Roman pity (probably a bit of special pleading by this biased satirist). Instead, he anticipates the speaker’s intolerance towards the Egyptians earlier (cf. 33 and 159ff.) by comparing this human feritas unfavourably with the ‘humanity’ of snakes and wild beasts.
11. One might ask facetiously whether Quintilian was a descendant of one of those warriors who survived by cannabalism.
12. The families of both emperors had long lived in Italica in the region of Baetica. Trajan and his father were born there, but both had distinguished careers in the army which took them far from Spain. Hadrian, though born in Rome, proudly claimed that his family had settled in Italica in the time of Scipio. Cf. SAH 1.1.1.
13. Val. Max. 6.6, Ext. 2. Other references to Saguntine loyalty (Sallust, Livy, Pliny) may be found in Courtney’s note (n.1 above) to 114.
14. Petronius, Sat. 141.9–11.
15. This ambivalent view of human progress is most tellingly presented in the anthropological section of Lucretius 5.
16. This commonplace about animals is nicely caught in a saying quoted by Varro in Ling. Lat. 7.3., canis caninam non est (‘a dog does not eat dog-flesh’). See also Seneca Epistles 95.31 and Pliny N.H. 7.5.
17. Herodotus 3.38 and 4.26. Strabo 4.5.4 tells a similar story about the Irish.
18. Aristotle N.E. 1148b22 and Pol. 1338b20.
19. Dio Cassius also reports for the year 172–3 that an Egyptian revolt produced cannibalism, an expression of Egyptian hatred for the oppressing Roman army: they killed and ate a Roman centurion.
20. Juvenal’s awareness of Petronius’ satiric use of cannibalism might encourage us to recognise other literary influences on the satire. I think particularly of two passages of Ovid’s Metamorphoses which I believe point to the folly and hypocrisy of the speaker in Satire 15. After recording the act of cannibalism, the satirist apostrophises Prometheus and the element of fire in this fashion (84–87; I use the text of Courtney [Rome 1984]): hie gaudere libet quod non violaverit ignem, quern summa caeli raptum de parte, Prometheu, donasti terris; elemento gratulor, et te exultare reor. (84–87) Here it pleases me to rejoice that the Egyptian rabble did not violate fire, which you stole, Prometheus, from the highest part of heaven and presented to the earth; I congratulate the element, and I dare say that you are delighted. This sanctimonious superiority should be compared with that of Orpheus in Met. 10.304ff. Note especially 305–7: gentibus Ismariis et nostro gratulor orbi, gratulor huic terrae, quod abest regionibus illis, quae tantum genuere nefas. I congratulate the people of Thrace and our part of the world, I congratulate this land, that it is distant from those regions which spawned so great an evil. Orpheus is congratulating the Thracians for being untainted by incest; but Ovid has already told the far more criminal story of Thracian Tereus’ rape of Philomela and then his cannibalism. Complacent self-congratulation or congratulation of others is an ideal device for sabotaging a speaker; Ovid did it strikingly with Orpheus and earlier, I think, when he has his praeceptor amoris congratulate himself on being born in a sophisticated age which fits his morals (Ars Amat. 3.121f.). The other passage in Satire 15 which operates intertextually with Ovid is the ending, where the satirist asks with rhetorical indignation: What would Pythagoras say or to what remote spot would he not flee in response to the atrocity at Ombi? That might, in that summary, not seem to be very Ovidian, but consider the way the satirist then characterises the Greek wise man in the final two lines (173f.): Pythagoras, cunctis animalibus abstinuit qui tamquam homine et ventri indulsit non omne legumen.
Pythagoras, who abstained from all animal flesh as if from human flesh and did not even indulge his stomach with every kind of vegetable.
The awkward rhythm and word order of the first line’s ending, the anti-climactic organisation to put final emphasis on legumen (emphasized by the litotes of non omne) alert us to the comic sabotage of the speaker’s rage. The Pythagorean bean becomes the perfect measure of the uninformed chauvinism of Juvenal’s satirist. This use of Pythagoras is reminiscent of the most elaborate spoof of Pythagoras in Roman literature, the long speech which Ovid assigns to the Greek in Met. 15.75ff. There, the silly doctrine behind vegetarianism (that, in the words of a favourite children’s song, ‘a duck may be somebody’s brother’) frames the much more relevant material about cosmic metamorphosis, and so makes the whole context playfully ambiguous. Thus, I suggest that Juvenal has used two well known passages of Ovidian self-sabotage by speakers to reinforce the self-destruction of his satiric speaker.
This essay was written and submitted when there reached the library of my university the journal which contained McKim, Richard, ‘Philosophers and Cannibals: Juvenal’s Fifteenth Satire’, Phoenix 40 (1986) 58–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar. McKim also argues that the speaker of the satire is someone whom Juvenal progressively discredits, but, as his title indicates, he sees the speaker defending different values than those I emphasise. Thus, our two interpretations can be profitably compared.
