Pleasurable stabbings: Juvenal's gladiatorial satire Event as iCalendar
(Classics and Ancient History)
12 March 2019
4pm
Venue: Room 220, Te Puna Aronui / Humanities Building (206-220)
Contact info: Alecia Bland
Contact email: alecia.bland@auckland.ac.nz
Professor David Larmour | Texas Tech University
Gladiators and other spectacles feature prominently in Juvenal's Satires, as might be expected in this most abusive and combative of genres. Building upon a long tradition of gladiatorial imagery in Lucilius, Horace and other Latin writers, Juvenal systematically blurs the lines between fighter, victim, spectator, producer, poet and reader in a grotesque mirror of violence and vulnerability.
As the satirist relentlessly pursues, nets and skewers his targets, Professor David Larmour invites the audience to enjoy their own "pleasurable stabbings" in this simultaneously fascinating and unnerving "arena of satire".
