A Companion to Persius and Juvenal by Osgood Josiah Braund Susanna & Josiah Osgood

Author:Osgood, Josiah, Braund, Susanna & Josiah Osgood
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2012-07-29T16:00:00+00:00

13.4 Invective

The satirist, to paraphrase Fredric Bogel's title (Bogel (2001)), “makes difference” by drawing lines. These lines distinguish his target – whether an individual or a group – from himself by locating the target in the realm of moral transgression, and himself on the side of normative values and the “true” beliefs and needs of the larger community. These acts of defining and distinguishing are played out before an audience of readers or auditors, embodying the community whose interests the satirist purports to represent. He seeks to recruit this audience to his own side, isolating the target and excluding it from the community as he stigmatizes its moral failings. These moves have obvious “political” implications, in the broader sense discussed above.

Invective is perhaps the most powerful line-drawing, difference-making tool in the satirist's kit. By “invective” I mean vituperative mockery or other verbal abuse, couched in explicitly or implicitly moral terms, directed by the satirist against a target. Its aim is to humiliate the target through the open declaration of faults. Invective occurs in many discursive forms. Especially well studied is its operation in Ciceronian oratory (Corbeill (2002); (1996) 16–20 and passim) and in “iambic” or similar poetic forms, which in certain respects resemble satire (Richlin (1992) esp. 81–163; Walters (1998); Wray (2001); in general, Rosen (2007)). In Persius and especially Juvenal, invective typically accompanies the pose of angry indignation, which is characterized by short, sharp sentences, rhetorical questions, exclamations, and apostrophes (Braund (1988) 1–6). Invective can be directed against a wide variety of characteristics or behaviors: it may allege crimes such as theft, fraud, forgery, or poisoning; vices such as cowardice, gluttony, drunkenness, greed, extravagance, sexual deviance, luxuriousness, ambition, meanness, or stinginess; physical and social characteristics such as being fat, bald, short, pale, or of low birth; any sort of behavior deemed inappropriate to the target's status or position; and so on. The topics of invective may be interlinked, as when clothing or poetic style or a physical characteristic is taken to betray sexual deviance (see below), or when low birth combined with extravagant living supports the inference that the wealth was gained by criminal means – forging a will, defrauding a ward, poisoning a rich relative. Of course, not all critical speech takes invective form. Blistering attacks may be delivered using the trope of irony, where the words employed “overtly” seem to confer praise, as in Laronia's speech in Juvenal 2.36–63. Also, there are gentle ways of expressing reservation or disapproval, as part of a strategy of correction or the simple registering of a different opinion (as in the satirist's reproach to his friend Umbricius, at Juv. 3.1–3).

A common topic of invective is sexual deviance. The affinity of invective for sexual topics is likely due, in part, to the universality of sexual behavior, along with the fact that sexual and scatological terms are especially arresting when deployed in public discourses from which notions of propriety normally exclude them (Richlin (1992) 1–31, (1984); Corbeill (1996) 128–69). The use of such

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