Producing Consensus: Reconfiguration of the Imperial City of Rome in the Satires of Horace, Petronius, and Juvenal
Keywords:
Roman satire; Roman empire; consensus or agreement; city; periphery; civitas; rus-in-urbe; romanitasAbstract
“Juvenal’s Error”, Theodor Adorno’s fragment on satire, offers a remarkable provision to study the genre of satire against its grain. Adorno reflects on the “impossibility of satire” in the modern capitalistic world, where agreement has “given way to universal agreement of content” and the world has been flattened to an indifferent unanimity” (Minima Moralia, III, 134). This conclusion is based upon the distinctive argument that traditionally satire (from ancient Rome to Enlightenment France) had targeted impostors and thrived by exposing the differences between claims and truth, ideology and reality; but itself satire was fuelled by its own conservatism, rather than a subversive intention.
In order to expose, satire had to be and was anchored in a certain ideological consensus or agreement that was always already present in the society waiting to be harnessed. Adorno calls this the “antinomy”; and this is nowhere clearer than in case of the Roman satirist where his relationship with the city of Rome was guided by an obvious paradox: he resided in and benefitted from the same city that he satirized. Far from being an occasion for conundrum, this paradox, in fact, stimulates their satire and the hypothesis that channelizes this paper.
With specific reference to Horace, Petronius and Juvenal’s satires, this paper studies how they are interlaced in the fabric of the Roman city as well as with the project of the empire, in which the city features prominently. It entertains the hypothesis that the Roman satirists probably never challenged the status-quo, but in seeking or producing the consensus, or at least the semblance of it as it were, these satires engendered the Roman imperial city as much as they inhered in it. This was done, of course, by the genre’s self-conscious realisation of its target, scope and readership.
What ensues in this paper, therefore, is a detailed discussion of the geographical, political, social and economic dimensions of the ancient city of Rome, its reconstruction for the Roman empire and the dynamics of its reconfiguration in the hands of the three satirists.
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