And don’t get me started on the woman who, as soon as she sits down to dinner,
lauds Vergil, makes excuses for the fallen Dido,
pits the poets against each other, and weighs up
Maro and Homer in a balance scale.
Teachers give way, professors are vanquished, the whole crowd
falls silent, the lawyers and hawkers can’t get a word in—
not even another woman!
…
Don’t sit down to dinner with a woman
of that loquacious sort who slings a tricky syllogism
with her whirling talk, who knows all the histories,
but rather one who isn’t well read.
I can’t stand a woman who is always going on about the grammatical arts,
whose talk is always in tune with the laws of logic
and who has some verses of an antique poet I’ve never heard of on her lips.
– Juvenal, Satires 6.434-40, 448-54
(My own translation)
This bit of the Roman satirist Juvenal’s harangue against women—directed at those who have the audacity to read books, have opinions on them, and not give way to men who think they know better—sounds to me a lot like certain modern men’s bellyaching on social media about women who insist on having opinions on comic books, sci-fi movies, video games, or other pieces of popular culture.
There are two broad schools of thought on Juvenal. One takes his curmudgeonly satires at face value and sees him as a butt-hurt bro throwing a tantrum. I incline towards the other school of thought which sees Juvenal’s satiric persona as a put-on performance, like Stephen Colbert’s old schtick. The real target of Juvenal’s ire was not well-read women but his fellow Roman men who were sore about women having ideas about books they hadn’t even read themselves.
Serving exactly what it sounds like, the Quotes feature excerpts other people’s thoughts.
Co-Geeking 