Xenophobic utterances in Juvenal's satires

Abstract

The concept of xenophobia appears frequently in articles and monographs dealing with the Satires of Juvenal, where it is applied to the content of the poems, their narrator, and sometimes the poet. Although the usage of this term might seem anachronistic for an ancient context, it should not be dismissed as a speaker in Juvenal presents the features of xenophobia – both from the word’s lexical definition and its more complex descriptions, e.g. that one appearing in the Declaration on Racism (2001). However, this speaker is not the narrator of the Satires but rather the central figure of Satire 3, the interlocutor named Umbricius, whose character is purposefully rendered by Juvenal as having different characteristics and views from his narrator. In this article, I present arguments suggesting that Umbricius may rightly be named a xenophobic person, in contrast to the Satires’ narrator.