The Invisible Satirist offers a fresh new reading of the Satires of Juvenal, rediscovering the poet as a smart and scathing commentator on the cultural and political world of second-century Rome. Breaking away from the focus in recent scholarship on issues of genre, this study situates Juvenal's Satires within the context of the politics, oratory, and philosophy of Rome under Trajan and Hadrian. In particular, the book shows how Juvenal offers a distinctively Roman response to the Greek sophists and philosophers of the so-called "Second Sophistic." Whereas earlier studies argued for the satirist's adoption of an ironic persona in his poems, this book stresses the absence of any guiding, coherent first-person voice in his work, emphasizing instead the poems' plurality of voices and thematic preoccupation with performance and disguise. These sprawling rhetorical texts, intricately constructed but deliberately lacking any strong personal voice, ultimately communicate a sense of rootlessness and loss of identity-a sense of being invisible-within the cosmopolitan second-century world. The book will appeal to students and scholars of Roman satire, Imperial Roman culture, and Second Sophistic literature.

About the Author
James Uden is Associate Professor of Classical Studies at Boston University.

Reviews
J. Uden has written a very important, readable and intelligent new book. Unlike many other books on Juvenal, J. Uden does not place the poet in a generic sequence of verse satire. That field has been well ploughed, and it is not perhaps how writers actually work... This is a significant work and anybody who reads it will, like me, be challenged and inspired to read more. * John Godwin, Le Fascicule 76/4 *
...[a] brilliant and original new look at the Satires. ...the willingness to take interpretive risks, among other factors, makes Uden's book one of the more important to have been published on Juvenal in the past two decades. * Arion *
...an interesting and valuable book.... This is a thought-provoking book which will find appreciative readers not just with specialists in Juvenal but also amongst scholars of Greek and Latin literature of the early second century. * Bryn Mawr Classical Review *
James Uden's impressive new study of Juvenal's Satires opens up our understanding not only of the poetry itself but also of the world in which it was written.... Uden's sensitive, contextualized reading of the poems not only generates specific new insights but makes sense of Juvenal's whole satirical project.... * Greece & Rome *
Uden's wide-ranging study situates Juvenal's satires squarely in the context of a multicultural second-century world, in which firm boundaries between identities were hard to uphold, and he watches the ironies of Juvenal's xenophobia unfold. * The Times Literary Supplement *
Uden has rejuvenated both Roman satire and Second Sophistic studies. * The Journal of Roman Studies *



Book Information
ISBN 9780190886967
Author James Uden
Format Paperback
Page Count 274
Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
Weight(grams) 398g
Dimensions(mm) 235mm * 155mm * 16mm