Juvenal’s Second Satire

Juvenal’s second satire provides the most detailed literary description of cinaedi in antiquity. This chapter uses the poem’s central image of a double contagion—the mange spread among a herd and the blight passed between fruits—to execute a double reading of Juvenal’s text. It first explores the cinaedus’ legibility as a pervert, a significance which has been particularly generative for scholars of the history of sexuality, by exploring how the satire’s exhortation to seek out secret cinaedi resonates with the production of knowledge termed “the epistemology of the closet” by Eve Sedgwick, and by asking to what extent cinaedi constituted a clandestine subculture in early imperial Rome. It then mines the text for performative cues to argue that echoes of various forms of kinaidic speech can be found throughout the satire. Such echoes affirm that the cinaedus’ occupational and ontological significances are ultimately enmeshed and inseparable—a feature most clearly evidenced by the status category of infamia, a limitation of rights applicable to cinaedi whether they performed onstage, undertook sex work, or, as Roman men, allowed themselves to be penetrated.