Politics and Invective in Persius and Juvenal

negative differentiation, that is, through the repeated assertions of what something is not. Satire repeatedly disavows other discourses: it is not poetry, or rhetoric, or philosophy, even if it parasitically sustains itself on them. Imperial satirists drew on a range of rhetorical resources: technical categories from treatises, actual orations, and the practice speeches of the declaimers. At the same time authors insisted on the superiority of their own speech in the face of rhetorical discourse; like rhetoric but better than it. This mode of negative definition has considerable power, even in the present day. We can compare, for example, interdisciplinarity, whose cachet largely derives from the arresting power of its indefinite nature. Interdisciplinary scholarship authorizes itself by appropriating the putative authority of neighboring discourses (Garber (2001) 53-96 discusses disciplinary interaction in academia). For the Romans, satire's power included its expansive claim upon neighboring literary genres. It could not boast a rich heritage of Greek exemplars, and so turned to other possibilities in the processes of creation and re-creation inevitable to any tradition. For Persius and especially for Juvenal, the assumption of rhetoric was a further stage in that process, one which left an indelible stamp on the genre.