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MARTIAL AND JUVENAL
That seems to have influenced Juvenal when he professed to restrain his freedom
of speech. But at a more general level all three extant satirists appear to have
paid court to the rhetorical theory of humour: jests must be constructive, not
aimed in any spirit of vindictdveness at accidental defects, directed instead at
culpable faults. It would have been illiberal, according to theory, to deliver
indiscriminate broadsides at individuals; hence epigram, iambic, and satire —
although in the last case there was the related tradition about the legal and
personal perils of mentioning names — made the equitable insistence that their
verse contained no malice, no animus against persons. Instead, although sometimes
with irony, and sometimes self-contradiction, they adopted the liberal
posture, presuming to defend the individual and his right to anonymous contemplation
of vice other than his own. Martial, like the other practitioners of
the lower genres, claims to take the general and the typical as his province,
disregarding individuals: hence no ofFence to reputation or privacy. He sums
up the doctrine at 7.12.9:parcerepersonis, dicere de uitiis 'to spare the individual,
and talk about the vice'. Persons will be spared, in favour of generalities. The
policy is stated elsewhere: at the very start, in the preface to Book 1, "where
he expresses the intention to avoid personal attacks — contrary to the practice
of the older authors, meaning Catullus, and probably Lucilius — also in random
epigrams scattered throughout the collection, for instance 2.23, 7.12, and 9.95.
So when at the end of his first satire, Juvenal talks of the dangers of mentioning
names, and says that his intention is to satirize the dead, he not only has in
mind the conventional fear of the law relating to libel, but is also sending up
the equally conventional theory appertaining to charity in humour. In attacking
the dead he pretends to avoid the opprobrium attached to invective against the
living — to be devoid of malice, a gentleman acquainted with the polite theories
of rhetoric. But his conflation of the dangers of libel with the theory of the
liberal jest turns out to be negative and sardonic: by exchanging malice towards
the living for malice towards the dead, he incurs the wrath of his reader. For
through this deliberately tasteless gesture he implies that his audience is smug
and respectable, far too content to view a generalized spectacle of vice from
a position of comfort. We do not wish to be reminded of the way we might
react to his criticism, of the "way that our self-righteouness has necessitated
flight from the present and refuge in safe stereotypes taken from the past. True,
the exemplary status of names now dead and gone allows satire and epigram
a general dimension: rhetorical education ensured a wide publicity for the
anecdotes and associations surrounding the names of famous men. Exempla
literature — typical stories with self-contained morals, like the tale of Cato's
Stoic death, or Sulla's cruel proscriptions — provided a storehouse of symbols,
a short-hand for satire. But Juvenal, the reader wishes, might have been more
tactful in telling us what we want, in reminding us of the rhetorical techniques
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