Nubit amicus. Literary Tradition and Social Criticism in Juvenal’s Portrait of Gracchus’ Wedding (Sat., 2.117-148)

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Juvenal’s Satire 2 features the wedding between a Gracchus and a horn-blower. After clarifying the intertextual background of this episode, my essay addresses two debated issues: the identity of Gracchus, and why Juvenal has him marry a horn-blower. I maintain that Juvenal is not reporting an historical event, but he is creating a paradigmatic episode that will serve the purposes of his earliest satires; the choice of having Gracchus marry a man of an incomparably lower status, and in particular a musician, is in itself driven by a literary memory: a traditional episode portrays a more famous Gracchus as consistently accompanied by a musician; such an anecdote was probably twisted by Juvenal into the portrait of a wedding meant to symbolize the decay of contemporary morality.