Review of O. Monno, Iuvenalis docet
Descrição do Produto
Monno, Olga: Iuvenalis docet. Le citazioni di Giovenale nel commento di Servio. Bari: Edipuglia 2009 (Biblioteca Tardoantica 4) Reviewer: Kirk Freudenburg, Yale University This book sets out to analyze the many citations of Juvenal by Servius to see what Servius’ penchant for citing Juvenal might tell us about his commentary project, his pedagogy, as well as about the reception of Juvenal at the end of the 4th century CE. Citations of Juvenal are first separated into their types according to the sorts of problems that they are used to solve: linguistic-‐grammatical, etymological, metrical-‐ prosodic, antiquarian. Chapter 1 treats citations of Juvenal that crop up in certain marquee locations in the prefaces to Servius’ commentary. Chapter 2 explores the question of Juvenal’s auctoritas, i.e. his curious standing as a neotericus who in many instances is allowed by Servius to stand toe-‐to-‐toe with the grand auctores antiquiores et idonei. Chapter 3 treats those citations of Juvenal that, taken together, add up to more than the sum of their functional/explanatory parts by speaking to the issue of how Servius sees Juvenal re-‐reading and re-‐purposing Virgil, an idea explored further in Chapter 4 around the theme of Juvenal’s being put to work by Servius as a laudator temporis acti, and again in Chapter 5 in the analysis of glosses that pair Juvenal with Horace in the explication of problems encountered in Virgil. As Monno points out, many of these glosses seem under-‐motivated as solutions to obvious problems. Instead, they speak to a desire on Servius’ part to put Juvenal, qua reader and re-‐creator of Virgil, before his readers’ eyes. It is in exploring these further non-‐ (or not entirely) exegetical aims of Servius’ citations of Juvenal that this book does some of it best and most creative work.
Monno’s explorations here speak to what’s quite possibly ‘there’ in the glosses that Servius writes, but left unsaid. On p. 34, for example, she shows that Servius cites Juv. 1.13 ad Georg. 3.328 rumpent arbusta because the shattered columns and ‘shouting’ trees (platani clamant) of Juvenal’s opening lines are, in fact, a parodic literalizing of Virgil’s ‘hedges bursting with the cicada’s querulous song’ (cantu querulae rumpent arbusta cicadae). In other words, there is an idyllic Virgilian scene of nature ‘bursting’ with noise behind Juvenal’s hellish, and very funny, literalizing of that idea in the opening lines of his first satire. In citing Juvenal in this way, we see Servius taking stock of Juvenal’s engagement with Virgil. A similar case is made by Monno for Servius’ recognition of a strong and sustained engagement on Juvenal’s part with the iconic mad women of the Aeneid in the figuring of many of the crazed and outrageous women of Satire 6. In her fine analysis of Servius’ multiple citations of Juvenal’s Caesonia (6.616-‐17), Monno points out that where Servius cites Juvenal’s Caesonia to explain a crazed woman in Virgil, the scholiasts of Juvenal cite mad women in Virgil (esp. Dido) to explain Juvenal’s Caesonia. Monno has little to say about how this criss-‐crossing of explanandum with explanans might have come about, and she leaves unexplored the very interesting question of to what extent, and in what sources, Juvenal’s outrageous imperial women, such as Caesonia, might already have been Dido-‐ized by the morally outraged historians who told of their misdeeds. The larger ‘Juvenal Renaissance’ of the mid-‐to-‐late fourth century (Ammianus, Ausonius, Claudian, Prudentius) and the relation of that resurgence of interest in Juvenal to the satirist’s earlier Christian repurposing by Tertullian and Lactantius is
regrettably left unexplored by Monno. No big picture of late fourth century literary culture is painted to help make sense of Servius’ interest in Juvenal. Instead, Monno gives us a Servius who works as a lone wolf to evangelize a new generation about the lost treasures he has discovered in Juvenal. That said, the value of this book is in what it tells us, by way of specific demonstration, about Servius’ appreciation of Juvenal as an intertextual poet.
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