Latin Verse Satire
Page 1
LATIN VERSE SATIRE
Latin Verse Satire presents a comprehensive variety of texts by the classical Latin satirists and its structure provides students with a rich commentary and a selection of secondary literature. The book will have a broad appeal due to the careful choice of texts and features selections from Ennius, Lucilius, Horace, Persius and Juvenal. The focus on the relation of satire to political and social history makes this book ideal not only for courses on satire but also for those on Roman daily life and gender.
The selection allows students to trace a coherent narrative of the genre’s history and to understand its relation to the political and social changes that marked the transition from the Roman republic to the empire. The texts stretch from the genre’s earliest manifestations to its final classical flowering in Juvenal. They are accompanied by a detailed introduction that traces the lives and works of the major poets, the evolution of the form, and its relation to Rome’s political environment and social mores. The book includes works by Lucilius and Ennius, crucial figures in Roman satire, whose work has never before appeared in a text with appropriate aids and annotations for student translation. Particular attention is paid to the relation between satire and the significant Roman value of libertas.
Accessible commentary accompanies the text and focuses on the linguistic difficulties and problems of usage, then relates the individual selection to the author’s work as a whole and its historical context, and finally concerns itself with those aspects of metre and style necessary for an appreciation of the poetry. The volume closes with a selection of essays and critical excerpts that both elucidate the genre’s most salient features and help understand the history of its modern scholarly reception.
Paul Allen Miller is Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of South Carolina. He is author of Lyric Texts and Lyric Consciousness (Routledge 1994) and edited Latin Erotic Elegy (Routledge 2002). He is the editor of Transactions of the American Philological Association.
LATIN VERSE SATIRE
An anthology and critical reader
Edited, with an introduction and
commentary, by Paul Allen Miller
To Mom and Dad, with many thanks,
Love,
Allen
First published 2005 by Routledge
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© 2005 Paul Allen Miller; individual extracts, the contributors
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Latin verse satire: an anthology and critical reader / [edited by] Paul Allen Miller.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Verse satire, Latin. 2. Verse satire, Latin—History and criticism. I. Miller, Paul Allen,
1959–
PA6134.L38 2005
871’.070801—dc22
2004021780
ISBN 0-203-02283-1 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0–415–31715–0 (hardback)
ISBN 0–415–31716–9 (paperback)
CONTENTS
Preface and acknowledgments
Introduction
TEXTS
Ennius
Lucilius
Horace
Persius
Juvenal
COMMENTARY
Ennius
Lucilius
Horace
Persius
Juvenal
CRITICAL ANTHOLOGY
The Roman Genre of Satire and Its Beginnings
MICHAEL COFFEY
Roman Satirists and Literary Criticism
W. S. ANDERSON
The Programmatic Satire and the Method of Persius 1
JOHN BRAMBLE
Invective Against Women in Roman Satire
AMY RICHLIN
The Masks of Satire
SUSANNA MORTON BRAUND
The Bodily Grotesque in Roman Satire: Images of Sterility
PAUL ALLEN MILLER
Index
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This text is designed in the first place for students and teachers of advanced undergraduate and MA level classes, but scholars should find it of use as well. The introduction provides a general overview of the genre of Latin verse satire in its historical and literary context. The commentary is designed to aid students in understanding both the language and the poetry, but also contains original observations on the text and its interpretation. Discussion of textual matters and of sources has been limited to those cases where it is necessary for linguistic or artistic intelligibility. The critical anthology at the conclusion of the volume is designed to allow the student both a greater comprehension of the poems themselves and of the history of the debates surrounding them. The essays chosen, while they are all important, have been selected on the basis of their representing certain trends in scholarship on satire rather than on any claim that they are intrinsically better than others that might have been chosen. The emphasis has been on essays that deal with the genre as a whole. Unfortunately, this means that many fine pieces of scholarship have been left out.
Citations have been kept to the bare minimum to aid in accessibility. Those wishing to do further reading should refer to the select bibliography. The texts for the poems are based on OCT editions, except for Ennius where I have used Courtney (1993) and Lucilius where I have used Krenkel (1970). Changes from these texts are acknowledged in the notes.
This book’s completion and composition has been greatly aided by the help of my friends, colleagues and students. My friends and colleagues, David H. J. Larmour and Mark Beck, each read and provided invaluable commentary on the introduction, as did my assistant Brittany Powell. My students Priscilla Larkin, Jessica Harvey, and Betsy Williams used an early version of the text in class and were both good humored with its many failings and extraordinarily helpful in pointing them out. My dissertation student and assistant Christel Johnson lent invaluable aid in the initial preparation of the Latin text. To each of you, I owe a special debt of thanks. I also most gratefully acknowledge the Classics Departments at the University of Kansas, Syracuse University, and Hamilton College for allowing me to present the results of my ongoing research to them.
I am also very grateful to Richard Stoneman, my stalwart editor at Routledge who has seen me through three projects and counting. I owe special thanks to my teacher, Barbara Gold, who first taught me Latin satire and directed my MA thesis on Juvenal almost twenty years ago. A debt of gratitude is also owed to my parents, Joe and Mary Miller, who have offered me unwavering support in all my endeavors, to Ann who loves me even when I act like a dork, and to Sam, who is my shining light.
William S. Anderson, “Roman Satirists and Literary Criticism,” from Essays on Roman Satire © 1982 Princeton University Press, reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press. J. C. Bramb
le, “The Programmatic Satire and the Method of Persius 1,” from Persius and the Programmatic Satire: A Study in Form and Imagery © 1974 Cambridge University Press, reprinted by permission of Cambridge University Press. Amy Richlin, “Invective Against Women in Roman Satire,” Arethusa 17:1 (1984), 67–80 © The Johns Hopkins University Press, reprinted with permission of the Johns Hopkins University Press. Paul Allen Miller, “The Bodily Grotesque in Roman Satire: Images of Sterility,” Arethusa 31:3 (1998), 257–83 © The Johns Hopkins University Press, reprinted with permission of the Johns Hopkins University Press. Susanna Morton Braund, “The Masks of Satire,” from The Roman Satirists and Their Masks © 1996 S. Braund, reprinted with permission of S. Braund. Michael Coffey, “The Roman Genre of Satire and Its Beginning,” from Roman Satire © 1976, reprinted by permission of Gerald Duckworth and Co. Ltd.
Paul Allen Miller
May 19, 2004
Columbia, SC
INTRODUCTION
1. Satire is the quintessential Roman genre. Quintilian says famously, Satura quidem tota nostra est [“Satire indeed is wholly ours”] (Institutiones Oratoris 10.1.93). This has generally been interpreted to mean that Latin verse satire is without precedent in Greek literature and can therefore be seen as an exclusively Roman invention. Whereas epic, tragedy, comedy, bucolic, lyric, and epigram all have clear Greek models, and their Roman imitators prided themselves on being able to reproduce these forms in the Latin tongue and adapt them to Roman culture, satire, Quintilian argues, is different. He is not alone. Not one of the canonical satirists disagrees. Horace says he is following in the path of Lucilius, and names this work sermo and satura (1.4, 1.10, and 2.1); Persius cites the precedents of Lucilius and Horace (1); and Juvenal acknowledges Lucilius and Horace while also quoting Persius (1). None of them claims a specific Greek antecedent as founder of the genre and, indeed, one looks in vain for a Greek genre entitled satire.
2. Nonetheless, Quintilian’s claim that satire is wholly Roman has a greater significance than the common interpretation admits. What is at stake in this statement may well be more than literary originality, as becomes evident when examining Quintilian’s treatment of another genre: erotic elegy, a genre that shares important traits with satire—a first-person speaker, an urban setting, and an often biting and ironic intent. It too has no clear Greek progenitor. It is a commonplace of elegiac criticism that while the elegiac couplet was widely used in Greece and while Callimachus provided a model of the diction, themes, and mythological exempla that characterize Roman elegy, the peculiarly subjective genre that constitutes the Roman form is unique in ancient literature (Miller 2004). Nonetheless, Quintilian makes no analogous claim of exclusivity for the Roman elegists. Nor are the elegists themselves shy about claiming the authority of Callimachus and Mimnermus to authorize their own practices.
3. Clearly, there seems to be more to Quintilian’s claim of satire being uniquely Roman than the lack of an unambiguous Greek precedent for the genre. When this great second century CE scholar and rhetorician says “satire is wholly ours,” he points not simply to the fact that only the Romans have practiced this particular form of verse, but also to a sense that there is something peculiarly Roman about this genre. Satire is wholly Roman. The two central questions facing anyone who studies Latin verse satire, then, are: what is this genre and what makes it uniquely Roman? The first of these is the easiest to answer. The second will occupy us in one way or another for the rest of this introduction and throughout much of the commentary, but in fact the two questions are related.
4. Roman verse satire or satura does not denote what contemporary English speakers commonly mean by satire. In the modern world, satire is less a form than an attitude. We speak of satiric novels, plays, poems, and essays. For a Roman of the Classical period, however, satura meant something very specific. It was a long poem in hexameter verse that focused on a variety of everyday topics and offered moral, political, and/or aesthetic criticism in a witty or humorous fashion.
5. Normally, satura was written in the first person. Certain satires were written in the form of dialogues. Others featured characters besides the satirist as the principal speaker. In spite of these variations, in each book of satires a powerful image of the satirist as speaker emerges, and each has a distinctly different personality. Among critics, this image of the speaker is known as the satirist’s persona or mask (Anderson 1982; Braund 1996b). This concept was introduced to combat the all too easy equation of the character of the satirist with that of the poet himself. This distinction is important because not infrequently the character of the satirist is portrayed with as much irony as his ostensible targets.
6. The level of diction is mixed and varies according to the satirist, but in all cases there is a liberal dose of colloquial speech and common, everyday words. This can make satire a difficult genre for the modern reader who needs help with the informal vocabulary that pervades it. It should be remembered that the vocabulary of satire was probably no more difficult for its intended audience than modern slang is for us. The topics, while varied and often seeming to change in mid-poem, reflect the origins of the diction in daily life and feature a healthy emphasis on food, sexuality, the body, and Roman street life.
7. Latin verse satire’s cousin, the so-called Menippean satire, was a mixture of prose and verse with a humorous, and sometimes lampooning, intent. While a vague kinship between the genres was recognized, the unmodified term satura in the hands of Horace, Quintilian, and the late grammarian Diomedes, clearly referred to what was then perceived as a self-consciously unified literary form: the one practiced by Ennius, Lucilius, Horace, Persius, and Juvenal. This is the form that was in essence wholly Roman.
8. As the description of the genre just outlined makes clear, satura had two important qualities in the Roman literary imagination. First, it was a poetry of criticism or “blame,” a tradition with deep Greek (psogos) and even Indo-European roots (Nagy 1979). As satura grew into a complex, self-reflective literary form, the nature of its criticism often became ambiguous and multilayered. It found fault and assigned blame as much to itself as others.
9. Satire’s second important quality was that it pursued a studied variety of topics (adultery, travelogues, urban poverty, gastronomical excess, and male depilatory practices inter alia) both within individual poems and in the genre as a whole. It is not unusual for a satura to start off in one direction and end someplace very different, nor is there any one topic that defines the genre in the way love does elegy or war epic. It is a medley. Diomedes describes satire as follows:
a kind of poetry among the Romans, now composed as invective and for seizing upon the vices of men in the manner of Old Comedy. Lucilius, Horace, and Persius wrote such. But formerly, a kind of poetry that was made up of various poems was called satire. Pacuvius and Ennius wrote such.
(1.445)
The description, however, while useful, is a little too neat. Diomedes is oversimplifying at a distance of more than 400 years, and how much access he had to the complete works of Lucilius, Pacuvius, or Ennius is unclear. Ennius’s satires, as the selections included in the present volume make clear, are hardly devoid of blame, nor are the works of the later satirists far removed from the kind of medley attributed to its earliest exemplars. Nonetheless, few would argue with the contention that in Lucilius’s poetry blame becomes central to the genre’s self-definition. Likewise, Horace was more concerned with the issue of aesthetic unity than his predecessors had been.
10. In spite of its shortcomings, Diomedes’s description helps us come to grips with what is central to the genre and hence with what marks it as definitively Roman. If we ask ourselves what a form of discourse would look like whose most salient points were variety and blame, we would be required first to envision the perspective of someone—a voice, a persona, a character, or, at the limit, the satirist himself—for blame can only be assigned from a point of view. Second, that person or persona would present a series of pictures, scenes, or vignett
es, loosely connected to one another, each of which frames a vice, a fault, or some aspect of life that is, from the speaker’s point of view, in need of reproof if not remediation. This presentation will often take the form of a claim to speak the truth without regard to social niceties, known in Latin as libertas or in the Stoic and Cynic philosophy of the period as parrhesia. It is this combination of the episodic and discontinuous with the claim to represent unvarnished truth that Gilbert Highet refers to when he portrays the satirist as one who cries “I am a camera, I am a tape recorder” (1962: 3).
11. Of course, one cannot be naively taken in by the satirist’s assertion. Satire hardly gives us the unmediated access to social reality that Highet contends. The satiric voice is artful and formed. It claims to be realist by convention (that’s the nature of satire). In the hands of a deft literary artist such as Horace or Juvenal, however, the levels of irony quickly multiply (Anderson 1982). Nonetheless, the essence of Latin verse satire as exemplified by all its extant practitioners is precisely this presentation of a loosely connected series of scenes and characters from the perspective of one who blames, whether with gentle wit or cruel irony.
12. The various proposed etymologies of satura reflect this formal essence while inflecting the genre in the direction of a distinctly earthy realism. Although early in the Christian era, the spelling satyra arose and led to attempts to derive the genre’s name from the hearty vulgarity and grotesque sexuality of the half-man half-goat satyr, and from the comic satyr plays that were performed after the tragic trilogies of classical Athens, this was a specious etymology. Satura is a feminine adjective derived from satur meaning “stuffed, full” generally with food. Early on it comes to be used as a noun or substantive. Diomedes gives a number of possible meanings. The three most intriguing are:1) the lanx satura, a plate of mixed first fruits; 2) a kind of sausage in which a great variety of foods was ground up; and 3) the name of an omnibus bill in which a variety of different measures was mixed together without regard to their relation to one another. The last meaning is clearly metaphorical and based on the first two: a legal hash. Satura is a variety of ingredients blended together. It has clear reference to the world of food and the body, which is appropriate since, as the Russian literary theorist, Mikhail Bakhtin, has demonstrated, the lower bodily stratum, the world of food, digestion, sexuality, and excretion is the realm in which all that is high and idealized is brought low (1968). It is, thus, no accident that grotesque humor plays a central role in satiric invective and that Latin verse satire’s themes and images are often derived from the gastronomical, the sexual, and the scatological.