Name: Having fun isn't hard when you're assessing poems against Roman bumsex
Item: Juvenal the satirist
Author: palazofhoon

Juvenal the satirist →

by Gilbert Highet

Having fun isn't hard when you're assessing poems against Roman bumsex

palazofhoon

Apr 30, 2025

Highet's monograph is dated now. No-one today would entertain much of his (admittedly ingenious) reconstruction of Juvenal's life—and certainly not his argument that the poet really did suffer exile in Egypt. But this doesn't matter to me. I read around Juvenal to understand his poems and Highet has all the sympathies you want in a critic of poetry. Rather more than you could easily get these days, in fact... To give only the most sensitive example, Juvenal the Satirist is an interesting relic of the transitional period between the taboo against homosexuality and the general acceptance of it. Highet stands at the crossroads: he has no odium towards the gays but it's no effort for him at all to entertain the attitudes of Juvenal (vituperation), Seneca (censoriousness) and Martial (jeering) towards them. Juvenal shocks different ages for very different reasons; and so it's a pleasure to read a critic who doesn't cast him as a mere unthinking reactionary (homophobe racist misogynist etc etc) as so many authorities do nowadays.

I'm writing this from memory a couple of months after I read the book or else I'd add a ton of quotation. I remember so often thinking how well a sentence or paragraph or sententia was turned. I really must learn to annotate to do books like this justice. It's 400 pages of scholarship that never once feels dusty. And not because it's fluff. The footnotes are a treasure-house of learning. There's a huge amount of obscure but allegedly excellent poetry—in English, Latin, French, Spanish, German and Italian—that the author plainly knew in his bones, and which is connected to Juvenal by the most abstruse threads, that you can be introduced to here.