Drawing blanks: The pale shades of ‘phaedrus’ and ‘juvenal’

This chapter examines two exponents of satiric literature written under the politically fraught conditions of the Roman Principate, Phaedrus and Juvenal. It is unclear who (or what) both were; their names, shorthands for de-authored texts rather than stand-ins for historical individuals. The literal self-effacement at work here creates a paradoxical authority: the words on the page, loosened from a definite first-person speaker identity, slip and slide easily from person to person, yet the concealment wreaks havoc with the readerly desire to know the source behind the words, generating an energetic ‘erotics’ of the weaker voice. This chapter analyses their shared yet distinctive strategies of authorial self-erasure, arguing that both not only render key markers of Roman elite male identity-name, body, and autobiography—ineffective, but that, in doing so, they also foreground and relish the particular potential of literature as the written word in its supposed inferiority to author-bound speech.