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Full Circle: Juvenal’S Egyptians And The Return Of The “Angry White Man” In Satire 15, Nancy Shumate

Classical Languages and Literatures: Faculty Publications

Some critics have seen a softening of Juvenal’s signature anger in the later satires, while others argue, on the contrary, that the indignatio animating the earlier poems resurfaces toward the end of the corpus. This paper supports the second position by comparing the characterization of speakers in the first six satires and in the fifteenth. In spite of its different setting and quasi-philosophical trappings, the (virtually) last poem’s speaker emerges as a variation of the same reactionary character type so fully drawn in the first two books. The Satires are thus framed by prototypes of the grievance-driven “angry white man” …