The AJP Best Article Prize for 2020 has been Presented by the American Journal of Philology to James Uden Boston University

Abstract

for his contribution to scholarship in “The Margins of Satire: Suetonius, Satura, and Scholarly Outsiders in Ancient Rome,” AJP 141.4 (Winter 2020): 575–601. In this article Uden explores the grammatici of the Imperial period and their relationship to satire as portrayed in Suetonius’ De Grammaticis et Rhetoribus. As school teachers, scholars, and intellectuals on the fringes of society (many were born into slavery and/or were outsiders to Rome), the grammatici occupy a paradoxical position in relation to the literature they oversee, emerging as both cultural insiders and sub-elite targets of mockery. Yet Uden also shows how these grammatici adopt the masks and strategies of satirical discourse for themselves, by authoring attacks on others as well as cultivating abject and isolated personas in their own self-presentation. Through a careful reading of the fragments and anecdotes of the grammatici recorded by Suetonius in the DGR (at one point examined in relation to Juvenal Satire 7), Uden asks us to rethink our understanding of the genre of hexametric satura by including those critics who claim a stake on its margins. In their position as mocking misfits, the grammatici can be understood as doubles or “photo-negatives” for the satirical poets. They appear in Suetonius’ record as figures who openly admit and even cultivate their status as social and economic outsiders. Uden draws illuminating parallels with Edward Said’s portrait of the modern scholar as a “voluntary exile” and Aaron Lecklider’s “egghead” theory that charts the ambivalent and suspicious conception of the intellectual in the United States since the 1950s. In all three cases, the role of the critic is fashioned or self-fashioned as unsettling or dangerous to the status quo. In the case of the Roman grammatici, that subversion falls within a decidedly satirical framework. By adopting an original and cohesive approach to a text that is often consulted only for reference, Uden builds a far-reaching argument about the relationship between hexametric satura and the wider, sub-elite field of critical and satirical speech, as he also offers a method of reading for and from the social and literary margins in Rome.