Berkeley Undergraduate Journal

In this paper, I offer a reading of Juvenal’s “Satire VI” as an example of ancient Roman satirists’ use of inversion, one of many techniques meant to invite political criticism without attracting the wrong kinds of autocratic attention. I claim that Juvenal inverts the paradigmatic father-son[-wife] relationship with a wife-husband-child chain to suggestively critique Roman governmental authority. This examination includes the relationship between the autocracy and aristocracy in ancient Rome, the nuances of the Roman household in relation to patriarchal representation, Roman satire’s social function, aristocratic expectations of satire, and alternative forms of luxurious entertainment. Knowing that their writing would not create immediate change, satirists such as Juvenal convert an aristocratic audience’s stress into humor, and in doing so channel a kind of “soft power” that aims to gently influence rather than directly attack. I conclude by restating that shying away from the search for meaning due to offensive metaphor (in this case, misogyny) is an academic mistake because it focuses on textual façade over underlying meaning. In fact, it is as these times of feeling offended that we should be more aggressive in our pursuit of meaning.