In his sixteen verse Satires, Juvenal explores the emotional provocations and pleasures associated with social criticism and mockery. He makes use of traditional generic elements such as the first-person speaker, moral diatribe, narrative, and literary allusion to create this new satiric preoccupation and theme. Juvenal defines the satirist figure as an emotional agent who dramatizes his own response to human vices and faults, and he in turn aims to engage other people's feelings. Over the course of his career, he adopts a series of rhetorical personae that represent a spectrum of satiric emotions, encouraging his audience to ponder satire's proper emotional mode and function. Juvenal first offers his signature indignatio with its associated pleasures and discomforts, then tries on subtler personae that suggest dry detachment, callous amusement, anxiety, and other affective states. As Keane shows, the satiric emotions are not only found in the author's rhetorical performances, but they are also a major part of the human farrago that the Satires purport to treat. Juvenal's poems explore the dynamic operation of emotions in society, drawing on diverse ancient literary, rhetorical, and philosophical sources. Each poem uniquely engages with different texts and ideas to reveal the unsettling powers of its emotional mode. Keane also analyzes the "emotional plot" of each book of Satires and the structural logic of the entire series with its wide range of subjects and settings. From his famous angry tirades to his more puzzling later meditations, Juvenal demonstrates an enduring interest in the relationship between feelings and moral judgment.

Satirists are social critics, but they are also products of society. Horace, Persius, and Juvenal, the verse satirists of ancient Rome, exploit this double identity to produce their colorful commentaries on social life and behavior. In a fresh comparative study that combines literary and cultural analysis, Catherine Keane reveals how the satirists create such a vivid and incisive portrayal of the Roman social world. Throughout the tradition, the narrating satirist figure does not observe human behavior from a distance, but adopts a range of charged social roles to gain access to his subject matter. In his mission to entertain and moralize, he poses alternately as a theatrical performer and a spectator, a perpetrator and victim of violence, a jurist and criminal, a teacher and student. In these roles the satirist conducts penetrating analyses of Rome's definitive social practices "from the inside." Satire's reputation as the quintessential Roman genre is thus even more justified than previously recognized.
As literary artists and social commentators, the satirists rival the grandest authors of the classical canon. They teach their ancient and modern readers two important lessons. First, satire reveals the inherent fragilities and complications, as well as acknowledging the benefits, of Roman society's most treasured institutions. The satiric perspective deepens our understanding of Roman ideologies and their fault lines. As the poets show, no system of judgment, punishment, entertainment, or social organization is without its flaws and failures. At the same time, readers are encouraged to view the satiric genre itself as a composite of these systems, loaded with cultural meaning andhighly imperfect. The satirist who functions as both subject and critic trains his readers to develop a critical perspective on every kind of authority, including his own.