‘Wait a minute.’Martin Amis, Time's ArrowWe start with a stop. In recent years, long pause has been taken for inquest into the narrative dynamics of ancient literature. How stories are told, by whom, in what order—these have become key questions of narratology, a discipline whose tools most critics would now keep somewhere in their kit. Narratological criticism of poetry has ‘naturally’ drifted towards poems of long narrative span (i.e. hexameter epics). Recently, however, the ‘smaller’ genres have been extended the benefits of narratological civilisation, particularly in the realm of temporality. To take a loaded and leading example, Latin love elegy has been well serviced by narratology of late; what was once considered a genre ‘unfit’ for narrative, let alone narratological study, is now a prime setting for both. But it surprised me that the recent volume Latin Elegy and Narratology all but neglected Ovid's most ‘narrative’ elegy of all: the Fasti. Such an editorial decision may have been motivated by the perception that the Fasti needs no reclamation as a narrative poem; at any rate, the volume's interests lie in the processes of ‘fragmentation’, the way that elegy claims its own non-narrativity as alternative. Whatever the reasoning, I felt that the Fasti's near-relegation from this fascinating volume was something of an oversight. Many of the concerns emerging from the chapters on ‘other’ elegy can be usefully transferred to the Fasti.

The satirist Juvenal remains one of antiquity's greatest question marks. His Satires entered the mainstream of the classical tradition with nothing more than an uncertain name and a dubious biography to recommend them. Tom Geue argues that the missing author figure is no mere casualty of time's passage, but a startling, concerted effect of the Satires themselves. Scribbling dangerous social critique under a historical maximum of paranoia, Juvenal harnessed this dark energy by wiping all traces of himselfsignature, body, biographical snippets, social connectionsfrom his reticent texts. This last major ambassador of a once self-betraying genre took a radical leap into the anonymous. Juvenal and the Poetics of Anonymity tracks this mystifying self-concealment over the whole Juvenalian corpus. Through probing close readings, it shows how important the missing author was to this satire, and how that absence echoes and amplifies the neurotic politics of writing under surveillance. TOM GEUE is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer in Latin at the University of St Andrews, and has published widely on the literature of imperial Rome. He is currently researching a book on anonymous Roman writing, which also considers how readers now and then cope with the power and problem of anonymity.

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Juvenal's third satire is a privileged piece of verbal diarrhoea. As the longest satire in Juvenal's well-attended Book 1, as the centre of this book, and as the one Juvenalian jewel that sparkles ‘non-rhetorically’, it has always been the critics’ darling. Its protagonist, on the other hand, has not always been so popular. Recently, reader sympathy for old Umbricius (the poem's main speaker) has shifted to laughter in his face; the old sense of ‘pathetic’ has ceded to the new. One of the central strategies of the ‘Umbricius-as-caricature’ camp has been to point to the overtime worked by ‘mock-epic’ in this poem: Umbricius self-inflates to become another Aeneas, fleeing a crumbling Troy (Rome). But an oppositio is wedged in imitando. Umbricius makes his lengthy verbal preparations to depart from Rome for Cumae; Aeneas had come to Rome through Cumae. Umbricius withdraws to set up shop in the meagre countryside; Aeneas had escaped to cap his exile teleologically with the (pre-foundation of the) Greatest City That Will Ever Be. Still, Virgil's paradigm tale of displacement, drift and re-establishment underlies Umbricius' self-definition as an exile. Indeed exile, with a large and ever-increasing stock of mythical and historical examples, was a situation ripe for self-mythologizing. Umbricius stands in Aeneas' shadow then, standing it on its head. His recession also makes him into a Iustitia/Dikē figure, the final trace of the golden age, off to alloy himself elsewhere. In his mind, exile is rationalized by distinguished past examples; in ours, we laugh at how disparate example and man really are. That side of Umbricius has been done to death; or at least, for present purposes, to exile.

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