We critics usually want to see our authors talking with one another.1 And if they happen to look the other way, committed to riding out the cringe of reciprocal snubbing, we have ways of making them talk. 2 Intertextuality -at least its current form in mainstream Latin studies -is one such way of forcing the conversation.The reader-response slant of this intertextuality 3 empowers the critic as host to make use of many gestures, from the minute verbal echo to the macrocosmic structural parallel, to shoehorn even the most autistic of authors into meaningful 'interaction'.And yet, as many of this volume's contributions caution, the toolkit for these acts of socio-textual engineering has been assembled from the texts of a very different time, and a very different Rome. 4 In addition, the model of a coterie gluing itself together through adhesive allusivity works well for the interactions seen in our grand document of the age, Pliny's correspondence; but it gets on less well in the darker corners of the Nervan-Trajanic-Hadrianic network.This chapter will worry about what we do with one mute partygoer stewing in his own isolation, the one who fails to say much to or about anyone important, and fails to have anything much said to or about him: that silent assassin of post-Domitianic life, the satirist Juvenal.Juvenal presents a problem for tracking literary interactions.The founding pose of his first satire (1-18) is that of an audience member standing up to be counted after years passively enduring a stagnant (where Pliny might say flourishing) literary scene: no more.Juvenal's first act as mayor of his own making is to retract himself from the society of letters trending around him: a society of one-way traffic jammed between booming soliloquisers and studiously ignored audiences.And, if our speculative dates 5 hold true enough, that society took its revenge by genteel neglect of his roaring protestations.Save Martial (probably/perhaps 6 ), no contemporary names Juvenal or alludes to the Satires.1 Thanks to the editors and conference participants for talking with me, and making this project such an interactive pleasure.2 Cf.Gibson in this volume, whose fictional dialogue is a nice way of sublimating this desire for interaction.3 Hinds 1998: 10, 47-51 notably privileges (or at least raises to equality) the reader as agent in the intertextual transaction.4 See e.g.Uden (this volume): 3. 5 Publication dates for the works treated in this paper are notoriously fuzzy, and that is part of the interactive entertainment.For Juvenal (the star of my second-rate show), I follow broadly the contours of Syme 1979 and Courtney 1980, but take Uden 2015's redating very seriously; suffice to say the Satires were being trotted out somewhere between the posts of AD c. 100 and c. 130. 6 Though see Kelly in this volume.Ash (also this volume) puts late Juvenal together with Martial only through their common funnelling of mirabilia discourse; this interaction is diachronic, indirect, but no less interesting for it.Uden (this volume) shows Juvenalian interaction through introversion in a nice juxtaposition of Pseudo-Plutarch, Quintilian, and Juvenal 14.12 See Buckley (this volume).13 See Whitton (this volume): 3. On interaction without lexical repetition, see Uden (this volume): 2-3.14 This is less controversial when presence draws attention to absence (such as with Marchesi 2013's reading of the relationship between Pliny and Martial); this paper argues that we can look to absences full stop, even when we miss all-out authorising markers (such as named mention of the author in question somewhere else in the text).See also Marchesi's chapter in this volume.
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