THE BULLY AS SATIRIST IN JUVENAL'S THIRD SATIRE

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.