A Companion to Persius and Juvenal

Susanna Braund, Josiah Osgood, Susanna Braund, Josiah Osgood

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781118301982
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Antike & klassische Literaturkritik

A Companion to Persius and Juvenal breaks new ground in its in-depth focus on both authors as "satiric successors"; detailed individual contributions suggest original perspectives on their work, and provide an in-depth exploration of Persius' and Juvenal's afterlives.

• Provides detailed and up-to-date guidance on the texts and contexts of Persius and Juvenal
• Offers substantial discussion of the reception of both authors, reflecting some of the most innovative work being done in contemporary Classics
• Contains a thorough exploration of Persius' and Juvenal's afterlives

Part I

Persius and Juvenal: Texts and Contexts

Chapter 1

Satire in the Republic: From Lucilius to Horace

Ralph M. Rosen

I've existed forever; the box that I exist in has always been around...but I'd like to know what I'm doing that's really different...? What is different about it that makes you so perplexed?

(Jon Stewart to Chris Wallace on Fox News, June 19, 2011)

Satire is always something of a problem, and all the qualities that literary history associates with satire rely on its being problematic. Satire ridicules, attacks, takes polemical stances, challenges political hegemony, and claims moral superiority. It may do this explicitly and vehemently, or subtly and obliquely, but satire will not be satire if, in the end, the author has not drawn clear lines in the sand separating the right-minded from the misguided. This is where the trouble begins: mockery and censure are aggressive postures that invite hostile reaction from targets and their sympathizers, and the lines between literary artifice and reality become quickly and easily blurred. Satire may be crafted in accordance with literary conventions, but its targets will often exist in the real world, and verbal abuse can sting even when it is supposed to be “literary.” In turn, satirists become anxious and paranoid, driven by a commitment to frank speech and justice, but aware that there will always be limits and that transgressing these limits may well backfire on them. Or so they claim – for a different order of problems arises when we consider that satirists have chosen a literary mode that thrives on provocation, and that much, if not all, of their risk-taking serves literary, not veridical, purposes. Satirists make strong and persuasive autobiographical claims all the time, but their first order of business is to write or perform well, and this means writing in such a way as to amuse an audience, insisting on truth-claims that may not be true, or that even if true may have no actual relevance to the success of the work as satire.

The history of Roman satire prior to Persius and Juvenal, which will be the concern of this chapter, can be written in a variety of ways, but at the most fundamental level it is a story of poets continually calibrating the literary demands of the genre to suit contemporary cultural and political conditions. All satirists may seek to be provocative and comical, or claim to instruct and edify, but exactly how they go about this must be tailored not only to the literary tastes of the age, but more specifically to the level of tolerance for satirical antagonism that audiences and targets can bear. Roman satirists were particularly attuned to this fact, and came to be increasingly self-conscious about the constraints and anxieties that they imagined always loomed over their chosen genre. Matters were further complicated by the fact that within the chronological boundaries of Roman verse satire – from Lucilius in the second century bce to Juvenal in the second century ce – Rome's political system moved from Republic to Empire, from a government based on electoral representation that allowed for considerable freedom of movement and expression (at least for the literate classes who comprised, by and large, the satirist's audience) to one of imperial autocracy, where law and social policy were ultimately shaped by the will of a single ruler. For the satirist, this radical and rather abrupt political transformation towards the end of the first century bce meant a change in attitude towards the unfettered speech on which satire relies. Suddenly the genre's commonplace trope of anxiety about the dangers of mockery and censure took on a new urgency, as open dissent, even in literary form, became increasingly problematic under a succession of volatile, often paranoid emperors (see further in this volume Roller, Chapter 13). Persius and Juvenal were creatures of this later, imperial period in Roman history, living under a line of emperors who were infamous for their sensitivity to criticism (Nero in Persius' lifetime, Domitian in Juvenal's) and often ruthless in their responses to it.

Our own conception of Roman satire is to a great degree an inheritance from antiquity, a self-consciously selective and tendentious construction begun by the poets themselves and then schematized by the early exegetical tradition. As early as the first century ce, Quintilian famously claimed (Inst. 10.1.93–95) satire as the one genre that Romans could call their own (tota nostra est), and proceeded to lay out a lineage from Lucilius to Horace to Persius, the last of whom was Quintilian's contemporary. We know from other sources (e.g., the third-century ce grammarian Porphyrio) that the early Roman poet Ennius (239–169 bce) composed a work in four books that he called saturae, but only a handful of fragments has survived and these are not especially illuminating. The fragments do contain precursors to some of the elements that came to be associated with Roman satire – the poet's personal involvement in a narrative, Aesopic fable, complaint and moralizing, for example – but Ennius' actual influence on later satirists seems to have been minimal (Coffey (1976) 32). It is surely significant, in any case, that Quintilian does not regard him as especially influential in the development of Roman satire as he understood it. Several centuries after Quintilian, the grammarian Diomedes (third to fourth century ce) likewise mentions Ennius (along with his nephew Pacuvius, about whose satires nothing substantive is known) only as an afterthought in his discussion of the Latin word satura:

carmen apud Romanos nunc quidem maledicum et ad carpenda hominum uitia archaeae comoediae charactere compositum, quale scripserunt Lucilius et Horatius et Persius. sed olim carmen quod ex uariis poematibus constabat satura uocabatur, quale scripserunt Pacuuius et Ennius.

(1.485 Keil, Gramm. Lat.)

a type of song among the Romans which is now invective and composed in the manner of Old Comedy for the purpose of censuring the bad behavior of men, such as Lucilius and Horace and Persius wrote. But at one time satire was the name given to a kind of song composed from different bits of poems of the sort that Pacuvius and Ennius wrote.

However many other satirical poets were writing in Rome from the late Republic through the early Empire, the canon of Roman verse satire took shape around the four figures Lucilius, Horace, Persius, and Juvenal (curiously, Diomedes himself does not mention Juvenal in the passage just cited; see Freudenburg (2001) 1–5 on the problems of canon inclusion in Roman satire). For Persius and Juvenal the juncture between the Republican and Imperial periods offered a further subdivision in the history of their genre, a pivot between two cultural attitudes towards satirical speech. When Persius and Juvenal looked to Lucilius and Horace as generic models, they found much to learn and assimilate, even replicate, but the deepest, most definitional core of satire as fundamentally a mode of verbal ridicule against contemporaries became problematic for them in a way that it never quite was for Lucilius and Horace. If the Republican satirists wondered what constituted good satire (as Horace, for example, often did in his Sermones), Persius and Juvenal had to wonder whether it was even safe for them to attempt writing satire in the first place. Our task in this chapter, then, will be to examine how the theoretical musings about satire embedded in the writing of Lucilius and Horace came to shape the contours of Persius' and Juvenal's own work.

1.1 Grandmaster Lucilius

On the numerous occasions when Persius and Juvenal invoked the Roman satirists of earlier periods, it was invariably with a kind of nostalgia for a lost libertas, for a time when any constraints on satire, if there were any, were imagined to be largely self-imposed, a matter of a poet's taste and judgment rather than prescriptions of a repressive autocratic state. At the root of this nostalgia for a notionally “pure” or “authentic” form of satire lay the figure of Lucilius, the great satirical poet of second-century bce Rome whose poetry was mythologized by subsequent Roman satirists as the benchmark of the genre – freewheeling, unbridled speech, including liberal, carefree use of obscenity, personal mockery of known individuals and stock character-types, a quasi-philosophical moralizing attitude, and a stance of unremitting indignation at the hypocrisies and assorted misbehaviors of humanity. For the subsequent history of Roman satire Lucilius was regarded as the genre's foundational patriarch, even if Ennius was, technically speaking, its “inventor.” It was Lucilius who settled on the dactylic hexameter as the canonical verse form, and he who gave sanction to vituperative comic mockery as the genre's defining quality. Roman satirists after Lucilius continually measured their work against the achievements of their great originary master. Their engagement with him was not always uncritical, as we shall see, but his presence was never far below the surface, especially when they mused (as satirists always seem to enjoy doing) about what satire is supposed to accomplish in the first place, and how best to go about it within the constraints of their own historical and cultural milieux.

The exact dates of Lucilius' life are uncertain, although the evidence from his fragments shows him to be active during the last decades of the second century bce (Coffey (1976) 35–38; Gruen (1992) 272–76; scholars have generally settled on 168–102 bce as not unlikely). His family was aristocratic and well connected – he was, for example, great-uncle to Pompey the Great – and this background afforded him easy access to the most influential political and social figures of his day. But while he had ample wealth and opportunity for a public or political career, he never pursued one, preferring instead the freer, more disengaged life of a poet. His social position and elite network, however, were especially useful for a poet drawn to satire. Satire, after all, often challenges those in power, constantly scrutinizing them for any instance of misbehavior or hypocrisy, and Lucilius' powerful connections provided plenty of “material for his act,” as we might say. Not only was Lucilius privy to information and gossip about the movers and shakers of his day, but his own elevated social status probably protected him from retaliation by targets who would have regarded him as, in some sense, one of their own. Even his famous personal relationship with the great politician Scipio Aemilianus (189–129 bce) could withstand the satirist's occasional ribbing. As Gruen ((1992) 316) has summed up, Lucilius “mocked friends and adversaries alike, lampooned public figures...parodied public actions...[and was] a contentious critic who could laugh at his own quarrels and even taunt his own readership.”

Through the surviving fragments and the ancient biographical testimony, one has the impression that Lucilius was quite at ease with his censorious mode. If we had more of the poetry itself, we would probably hear him complaining about being misunderstood by his audiences, as we later hear Horace complain that his own moralizing attacks on people and types are too often mistaken for mere Schadenfreude. Such complaints – often ironic or disingenuous – are part and parcel of every satirist's bag of tricks (see Rosen (2007) 243–45), but Lucilius' world nevertheless seems to have offered unusual scope for free speech with minimal repercussions. Whereas Persius' and Juvenal's anxiety about incurring imperial disfavor has at least some historical justification, it is hard to imagine Lucilius worrying much about his personal welfare as a consequence of his poetry. (It is worth noting, however, the tangled anecdotes about Naevius, the third-century bce poet, alleging that his comic attacks on the powerful Metelli landed him in prison; the stories themselves are probably fictional, but they illustrate once again the sense of risk that always hovers around satire. See Gruen (1990) 92–106.) All the subsequent Roman satirists imagined, in any case, that Lucilius had far more freedom...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World
• Title Page
• Copyright
• List of Illustrations
• Abbreviations
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Persius and Juvenal as Satiric Successors
• Part I: Persius and Juvenal: Texts and Contexts
• Part II: Retrospectives: Persius and Juvenal as Successors
• Part III: Prospectives: The Successors of Persius and Juvenal
• References
• Index Locorum
• General Index