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Juvenal 8. 58–59
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 February 2009
Extract
Juvenal opens his eighth Satire with the question stemmata quid faciunt?, supplies an answer in line 20, nobilitas sola est atque unica virtus, and devotes the rest of the poem to exhorting his addressee to virtuous activity, both by negative exempla drawn from the degenerate nobility and by positive exempla drawn from the plebs, novi homines and the like. In lines 39–70 he addresses one particularly self-important noble and attempts to deflate his bombastic pride: in 56–67 he adduces an extended illustration from the animal world, apparently such as was common in the schools of rhetoric.
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References
1 For example, Quint. 5. 11. 3–4 ‘id est inductio… “quod est pomum generosissimum? nonne quod optimum?” concedetur. “quid equus? qui generosissimus? nonne qui optimus?” et plura in eundem modum. deinde, cuius rei gratia rogatum est, “quid homo? nonne is generosissimus qui optimus?” fatendum erit’; cf. Apul. apol. 21: ‘hocine homini opprobrari, pauperiem, quod nulli ex animalibus vitio datur, non aquilae, non tauro, non leoni? equus si virtutibus suis polleat, ut sit aequabilis vector et cursor pernix, nemo ei penuriam pabuli exprobrat, tu mihi vitio dabis quod non facti vel dicti alicuius pravitatem, sed quod vivo gracili lare…’.
2 sanctus haberi
iustitiaeque tenax factis dictisque mereris?
agnosco procerem; salve Gaetulice, seu tu
Silanus: quocumque alto de sanguine rarus
civis et egregius patriae contingis ovanti,
exclamare libet populus quod clamat Osiri
invento.
3 Ruperti, , D. Junii Juvenalis Opera Omnia (1820)Google Scholar.
4 Lewis, J. D., D. Iunii Iuvenalis Satirae (1873)Google Scholar; Pearson, C. H. and Strong, H. A., Thirteen Satires of Juvenal 2 (1892)Google Scholar; Friedländer, L., D. Junii Juvenalis Saturarum Libri V (1895)Google Scholar; Duff, J. D., Fourteen Satires of Juvenal (new edition 1970)Google Scholar; Housman, A. E., D. Iunii Iuvenalis Saturae (1905)Google Scholar; all ad loc.
5 Green, P., Juvenal: The Sixteen Satires (Penguin) (1967)Google Scholar.
6 See TLL v. 2, col. 1951, 40–1 exsulto IB2, ‘fere i.q. gaudio laetitiaque in voces et clamores effundi, iubilare…, instrumentis musicis tumultuari sim.’ b ‘de rebus: fere i.q. cum gaudio et clamoribus celebrari, concini’ and TLL vi. 1, col. 594, 5 ferveo IV ‘spectat ad sonitum: i.q. crepare, strepere’: both verbs are limited to the denotation of sound, which is plausible in view of rauco…circo but, as I shall argue, does not allow the broader connotations full range.
7 AJP 72 (1951), 369–94Google Scholar; Ovidiana (ed.) Herescu, N. I. (1958), 505–25Google Scholar.
8 e.g. 7. 115: Met. 13. 1 ff.; Highet and Thomas (n. 7)cite many more examples; and Highet writes (p. 381) that the Metamorphoses was Juvenal's ‘best-liked poem’.
9 Housman argues from a parallel for the phrase facili…palma (Cat. 62. 11); the contrast of plurima…victoria and rara…victoria (63); and parallels in Juvenal for the word-order. A further point can be made against the nominative: two adjacent pairs of words, each pair in the same case (facili cui dative, plurima palma nominative), would be unusual word-order for Juvenal, while the splitting of the ablative facili…palma is much more regular.
10 Anderson, W. S. (ed), Ovid's Metamorphoses Books 6–10 (1972)Google Scholar ad loc.
11 The interpretation proposed by Weidner, A. (D. Junii Juvenalis Saturae 1873)Google Scholar — that victoria means the cry, ‘Victory’ — has its apparent plausibility weakened by the fact that this would subtract one of these three motifs, i.e. the visual element of circus = pot, besides which ferveo and exulto only infrequently refer to noise, but usually to activity (and often mass human activity, e.g. ferveo: Luc. 9. 254, Petr. 123.1.214; exulto: [Sen.] Oct. 834–5, Tac. Ann. 14. 34).
Pearson and Strong's suggestion that ‘Victory is said to do (fervere) what the horseor the auriga actually does in consequence of the victory’ similarly diminishes the imaginative visualization of the circus in cooking-pot tumult, apart from not taking account of the frequent association of mass activity with ferveo (OLD 4).
12 Weidner: see n. 11; Creekmore, H., The Satires of Juvenal (translation) (1963)Google Scholar; Ramsay, G. G., Juvenal and Persius (Loeb) (1918)Google Scholar.