MASK OR MIRROR? A STUDY OF JUVENAL'S SA TIRES AS A REFLECTION OF AUTHORIAL PERSONALITY AND PERSPECTIVE BY

This study aims to present Juvenal's Satires as a whole as the fundamentally coherent and plausible product of the author's own personality, convictions and circumstances-where the latter may be reasonably inferred. It therefore questions the view that the dichotomy which the persona theory creates between the author and his notional 'speaker ' provides the basis for a better insight into Juvenal's Satires. There is no compelling reason to reject the impression that in his earlier Books Juvenal was genuinely writing from the standpoint of a disaffected client; and an examination of the Epigrams of Juvenal's contemporary, Martial, suggests that complaints of paupertas should not be dismissed as a merely conventional literary facade. Juvenal's own resentment as a neglected dependant and his contempt for the corrupt Roman elite give the first three Books their basic coherence. However, while Satires 7, 8 and 9 are not characterised to the same extent by the strident invective which is the hallmark of the earlier poems, the notion that the image of the 'indignant ' satirist is deliberately abandoned, albeit tentatively, after Book 2 is less convincing, if one give