Abstract

The drunken bully of Juvenal's third satire should be read as an alternative satirical voice within the poem, as is illustrated by means of a comparison with the corpus of Roman satire—in particular Horace 2.1 and Juvenal's first book of satires. The identification of the bully as a satirist does explain some of the bully's odd behavior and also accords with satire's propensity for self-mockery and much of the other metapoetic discussion of the genre's powers and limitations.