Mens Sana: Authorized Emotions and the Construction of Identity and Deviance in the Saturae of Juvenal.

Abstract

Juvenal does not seek to produce a fully rationalized philosophical system in the Satires. There is thus no need to attribute apparent departures from a previous stance to a pointed hypocrisy. The dictates of the genre are confined to the discourses present in the literature of second-century Rome and those earlier works with intertextual importance. Taken in sum, the author offers his audience an interpretational framework often grounded in the worst of human emotions and authorizes these responses as authentically Roman. Juvenal writes in a highly empathetic manner of the travails of the near-elite, yet the primary concern of the author rests with those whose station affords them the ability to make morally significant choices. The author engages in one textual performance after another, but I suggest that the authorial voice of Juvenal is extensively preserved within the hexameters. We may call shifts in aspect or tone personae, but there is no valid rational for completely divorcing the poet from the content of his poetry or for setting the various personae against one another in a contest to determine which is the genuine authorial voice: all are, and none are. Biography is certainly not present in his poetry, yet the choice of themes and modes of argument are themselves significant. I suggest that the discursive force of the claim to be writing inside the ambit of a prior author is an overt attempt to guide the reading of the intended audience. This fundamental question of what observable actions were consonant with Roman identity is explored by Juvenal through every aspect of action and daily life. Among this plethora of criteria, the author frequently returns to the use of food, gender, and space as a prime signifiers of Romanitas and Otherness. In each of the discourses that this study explores, the author identifies the personal agency within selection and expenditure as the moral crux. Spanning what I suggest is an essentially unitary corpus of texts, the authorial voice of Juvenal vividly models for his audience the authorized emotional responses of a mens sana (healthy mind) confronted by the spectacle of deviance.