Announcement: Juvenal Reformatted

Some time between 1998 and 2000 – I really should have kept better records – I uploaded a complete on-line text of Juvenal’s Satires, with brief apparatus criticus and some original conjectures. Though it has not been updated since (I think) 2004, it has won some praise: the new Blackwell’s Companion to Persius and Juvenal (Braund and Osgood, 2012) calls it “excellent” (464), and six of my conjectures are printed in the text of Braund’s Loeb Juvenal (2004), one more in the apparatus.

Unfortunately, the format in particular is showing its age: it was never very attractive, and looks quite repulsive on today’s wider screens. I have therefore reformatted text and commentary in the style of my later texts of Martial IV and Ovid, Heroides I. Just click on ‘Juvenal (1st edition 2000)’ in the right margin. Anyone who wishes to see it in its original ugly format (perhaps as a warning) will find a further link on that page. I call it the “1st edition” because I will very soon begin reediting Juvenal for a second, much improved on-line edition. It will have a fuller apparatus which includes many new conjectures (some mine, some not) and omits or demotes to the apparatus a few older readings that no longer please. It will be done as part of my textual database QLTP, for easy selection and reformatting. Most important, the construction of the text will, I hope, be to some extent interactive. As each satire is uploaded, it will be accompanied by a public on-line textual-interpretative seminar (not a MOOC but a POTIS), in which I will present my Adversaria in blog form, one post per passage or problem discussed, and invite comments and suggestions for the improvement of the text and interpretation of Juvenal. Some of the conjectures I have already published have never been explained in print, some need to be reargued, and I have many questions about passages that I hope others will be able to help me answer. Over the next few years, I plan to do the same work – text plus POTIS – for Persius and the rest of Martial and the Heroides. Watch this space to see what comes first.

By the way, this blog is currently set up so the first comment from any user is held for moderation, so please don’t repost your first comment. However, once the first comment is approved further comments will appear immediately, unless someone is foolish enough to post a comment that earns a place on the blacklist.

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