The Invisibility of Juvenal

This dissertation offers a reading of Juvenal's Satires. It maintains that Juvenal consciously frustrates readers' attempts to identify his poetic voice with a single unitary character or persona. At the same time, it argues that Juvenal's poems are influenced in both form and theme by cultural trends in the early second century. The arguments staged in these poems constitute a critique of aspects of Roman intellectual culture in the reigns of Trajan and Hadrian.