'I get around': sadism, desire, and metonymy on the streets of Rome with Horace, Ovid, and Juvenal

'How's a fellow supposed to get around in Rome?' 'Where's the action?' 'Nights can be dangerous. Watch out for muggers!' 'Things aren't like they used to be.' 'In the good old days, the streets were safe, a man could speak his mind, and sex was easy.' 'Even a moral reformer like the princeps should appreciate that.' Roman elegy and satire are the two urban genres par excellence. Each of them is self-consciously staged in a cityscape. Their pages teem with the life of the urbs aeterna: drunken young men crooning by torch light outside their beloved's windows and beating up passers-by, dinner parties with exotic dishes and sexual escapades, temples that double as singles bars, and the bustle of the street crowded with slaves, lictors, courtesans, bauds, and pimps. It is no wonder that both formal verse satire and erotic elegy have no precise analogues in the Greek tradition-they are genres that presume both a large cosmopolitan urban environment and a tradition of personal libertas (freedom of speech): a combination not to be found in Athens, Alexandria, Pergamum, or Jerusalem.1 Yet the genres themselves, while they are profoundly related in their urban thematics, their manifest ironic even satirical aims, and their subjective modes of presentation, ultimately portray very diVerent 1 Miller (2005: Introduction).