Foreigners in Greek Rome – Xenophobia in the Juvenalian Satires

Abstract

The word ‘xenophobia’ is frequently found in the scholarship on Juvenal’s Satires, in relation to the content and the narrator of the poems as well as to the poet himself. Although the use of this term may seem anachronistic in an ancient context, the examination of the question is justified by its large number of occurrences in the relevant literature and the fact that one satire does include a figure who bears the main characteristics of xenophobia – however, this is not the narrator of the satires, but the central figure of Satire 3, the interlocutor called Umbricius. In my paper, I present the arguments suggesting that, unlike the narrator (and, of course, the poet), it is Umbricius who can be rightly labelled xenophobic in Juvenal’s poems.