Satura nos est
13. In what sense is this genre—whose self-definition is that of a loosely structured series of vignettes, a hash, or, in Juvenal’s terms, a farrago, which is articulated from the perspective of an identifiable speaker as a discourse of disproval, and whose very name implies an intrinsic relation to the bodily grotesque—specifically Roman? To answer this question will require us to move from the realm of formal description to that of history and ideology. The key term we must historicize in our formal description is that of the “speaker” or “persona,” which I shall hereafter refer to as the “subject of satire.” This term is deliberately ambiguous. It refers simultaneously to the voice that says “I” or ego in satire, the subject matter of that voice, and the process of subjection that is implied in the formation of the voice. My argument in the next paragraphs is that satire is a genre of aristocratic self-formation. It is intimately connected with the very nature of what it means to be Roman. As that definition changed over time, so did the aim and subject matter of satire.
14. Early in the second century BCE, Ennius wrote the first work explicitly labelled satura. While we have only scattered fragments, they seem, as our discussion has led us to expect, to contain the poet’s observations about life in the capital. As Knoche in his classic treatment of the genre contends, “Ennius in his satire produced for the first time in the Latin language a poetic form in which the individual could express himself and describe his own experiences in a very personal way” (1975: 22). Ennius’s nephew Pacuvius continued to work in the same vein according to the ancient testimony, although none of his work survives.
15. In the last quarter of the second century, Lucilius took up the genre, giving the form its definitive shape and providing satura with a distinctly public function by engaging in political invective. From the fragments we possess, it is unclear how much, if any, inspiration Lucilius drew directly from Ennius’s earlier essays in satura. With Lucilius, however, satire comes to occupy a prominent position within Roman literary culture. It moves from being a miscellaneous genre of social observation by professional poets who are the dependents of the aristocratic élite and becomes a form of expression by that élite. To return to Knoche’s formulation, “Lucilius was the first Roman poet of rank for whom poetry was an expression of personality and not just an amusement” (1975: 34). With Lucilius, satura becomes satire.
16. That the genre’s initial efflorescence took place at this time, I would contend, is no accident of history. The second century BCE is a period of rapid expansion, in which Roman hegemony was extended across the Mediterranean. It is also a time of cultural revolution that saw the birth of a properly Roman literature and of increased political conflict. Republican Rome was at the height of its power with the end of the Third Punic War. Vast amounts of wealth flooded into the coffers of the leading citizens: the result was increased social inequality and political disruption (Sallust, Bellum Catilinae 9–11). These were the circumstances in which Lucilius came to the fore. As Ramage observes, “There was […] a continuing restlessness in politics at Rome during Lucilius’s lifetime. The senate maintained its power, but under successful challenge from popular leaders like the Gracchi” (Ramage et al. 1974: 27–8).
17. In 133 BCE, Tiberius Gracchus was elected tribune of the people. He passed sweeping land reform that provided small allotments from the ager publicus to Rome’s landless peasants and urban poor. This public land was leased to private citizens who were supposed to pay a percentage of their harvest to the state in return for its use. Over time, however, the rich magnates who had acquired this land and worked it with slaves came to regard it as theirs by right and ceased paying the fee. Gracchus presented the redistribution of public land as a method of addressing pressing social and political problems. Nonetheless, much of the senatorial class found the proposed redistribution an infringement of their traditional prerogatives and refused to consider the bill. When Gracchus took the extra-constitutional step of presenting his proposal directly to the people, where it passed easily, his outraged opponents viewed this as an attempt to overthrow the state. After a series of complex and questionable maneuvers on both sides, a gang of senators caught, cornered, and beat to death the tribune and more than one hundred of his followers.
18. As Habinek has argued (1998), the invention of a self-conscious Roman literature was in part a response to the larger set of problems of which Tiberius Gracchus and later his brother, Sempronius, were a symptom. Roman literature, as a cultural practice of the aristocracy that defined, expressed, and constructed the definition of what it meant to be an élite male in Roman society, was neither a spontaneous product of the Latin imagination nor a simple import from Greece. It was a complex set of institutions of which satire was one of its first and most original forms. Certainly there were traditional songs, verse forms, and even farces that pre-dated the second century and can be traced back ultimately to a common Indo-European inheritance (Dumézil 1943). These included ritualized forms of blame poetry such as the obscene Fescinnine verses sung at Roman weddings and the ribald songs with which Roman troops regaled triumphing generals. But the beginning of a self-conscious literary culture is dateable to the appearance of Livius Andronicus in the third century BCE, the first poet in Latin to produce tragedies, comedies, and epic poetry in the Greek manner.
19. Livius Andronicus was a freedman, and he, like Plautus, the comic writer of the next generation, was a producer of entertainments for the Roman people and for the senatorial and equestrian orders whose patronage sustained his work. Ennius himself, the first to write works entitled saturae, was an Oscan from the south who only acquired citizenship through the good offices of his aristocratic patron Quintus Nobilior. The first Roman poets, then, were lower-class entertainers who were completely dependent on the patronage of their aristocratic sponsors.
20. Lucilius, however, was a wealthy equestrian. With his generation—that of the elder Cato, Terence (himself a freedman), and the orator G. Laelius Sapiens (consul 140 BCE)—the self-conscious elaboration of an aristocratic literature that seeks to form and enforce codes of conduct, define Latinitas, and establish a properly Roman identity comes into being. Roman literature as an institution for the production of cultural legitimation and value is in part a product of this moment of ideological and political challenge to the traditional Roman élite (Albrecht 1997: 1.253). As Habinek observes:
All aristocracies must devise strategies of recruitment and acculturation […] Whatever the background of the new aristocrats, they must be inculcated into the protocols of aristocratic behavior, and their qualifications as aristocrats must be defended against rival or alternative claimants to authority. At Rome literature participates in the “formation” of the aristocracy in both senses of the word, that is by defining, preserving, and transmitting standards of behavior to which the individual aristocrat must aspire and by valorizing aristocratic ideals and aristocratic authority within the broader cultural context.
(1998: 45)
Lucilian satire, therefore, presents one model of the aristocratic speaking subject, even as it dramatizes the subjection of the individual to the norms that make that model possible. Likewise, satura through its practice of blame and grotesque degradation stigmatizes deviation from those norms. Humor and invective were long recognized as an effective means of both social power and political subversion in Roman society. For this reason, Julius Caesar—and later Augustus—made efforts to control, even if they could not eliminate, the jokes made by their opponents (Suetonius Divus Iulius 56; Corbeill 1996: 3–9).
Satura est nostra libertas
21. Lucilian satire’s essential quality was, as Horace notes (1.4), libertas. Libertas is a complex and contested term to which the mere translation as “freedom” or “liberty” does not do justice. On one level, libertas is the quality that defines the civis Romanus (Roman citizen) as opposed to the servus (slave), libertinus (freedman), or any foreigner who does not enjoy citizen’s rights
(Cicero, Contra Verrem 2.1.7). On another level, libertas denotes a set of prerogatives that are only able to be exercised fully by the aristocratic élite. The most noted of these rights is freedom of speech. Libertas also signifies a fundamental notion of self-determination. This is commonly understood as the ability to be subject to the will of no one else and hence often implies the capacity to enforce one’s will upon others. Libertas was actualized most concretely by traditional Roman élites through their participation in competitive politics and the governance of the state (Wirszubski 1950: 38; Syme 1960: 155). Thus, Tacitus at the beginning of the Annales describes the loss of senatorial freedom under the principate, saying that Augustus
gradually increased his power and gathered into himself the duties of the senate and the legal magistrates with no one opposing him, since those who were the most warlike had fallen in battle or during the proscriptions. The rest of the nobles were brought along by being offered high office and great wealth, which made them all the more ready for servitude, so that becoming enriched under the new state of affairs they preferred the safe world of the present to the dangerous world of the past.
(Annales 1.2)
Clearly, Tacitus has a very aristocratic notion of freedom since it can be lost by accepting high office or substantial wealth. This would be a nonsensical description of the loss of libertas for the Roman masses since they never had political power in this manner, nor were they likely to be offered wealth and the semblance of personal power in return for their acquiescence to Augustan rule. For the governing classes, however, who had defined their status as free men in terms of their ability to rule others, the acceptance of wealth and titles in return for ceding effective political power to the principate could quite reasonably be portrayed as a form of slavery.
22. Matthew Roller has recently argued that all discussions of libertas in Roman ideology have at their root the opposition between freedom and slavery and that, therefore, it is a mistake to argue for different meanings of the term (2001: 213–87). He grants that there may be different metaphorical usages derived from this initial meaning and that those metaphorical usages can be deployed in a variety of different and even opposed contexts, but he contends that the meaning itself does not change and that therefore historians like Wirszubski (1950), Syme (1960), and Ste Croix (1981) are mistaken to see in this term a variety of different significations for different factions and classes. On one level, Roller is right. The opposition between libertas and servitium is fundamental to all uses of our term. But, on another, his analysis is oversimplified, for it is precisely in the redefinition of libertas and the negotiation of its competing meanings that the history of satire can be traced. Moreover, in as much as this term is central to defining what it means to be a civis Romanus, then satura as the genre that is defined in terms of the changing concept of libertas is necessarily a form that is “wholly Roman.”
23. The problem is that libertas is not in a simple binary relationship with servitium, which, as Roller correctly observes, always functions as an antonym to libertas. Libertas is also simultaneously opposed to licentia [licence, excessive liberty] (Wirszubski 1950: 7–8; Ste Croix 1981: 366). Libertas, therefore, represents not simply the absence of constraint, but a deliberate balance or an achieved condition. It requires restraint and formation to be achieved in its full sense. Thus, Messalla in Tacitus’s Dialogue of the Orators, immediately after a discussion of the role demagogic oratory had played in the civil wars, notes that what men call libertas with regard to public speaking, i.e., freedom of speech, is in fact often licentia and “a goad to an unrestrained populace” (40). It is not possible to understand libertas in this context as merely the opposite of servitium. Rather, as Cicero makes clear in his speech On His House, the libertas of the people is dependent on the respect owed to the authority of the senate (130). Here we clearly have two different notions of libertas, that of the people, who are guaranteed their freedom and hence restrained from licentia through their willing subjection to the senate, and that of the senate or nobiles who assert their own libertas through a self-restraint that validates their authority over the people. The terms of this opposition, which are only implicit here, become explicit later in the same passage. There, Clodius, the demagogic tribune of the people, is attacked for his erection of a sacred statue of Libertas on the site of Cicero’s home. The cult statue was dedicated to celebrate the orator’s exile at the urging of the fiery tribune. This sculpture, Cicero notes, would more properly have been erected to licentia than to libertas because Clodius’s freedom represents the opposite of senatorial restraint (131). Libertas, then, is not an abstract concept with a single meaning that is merely deployed in different metaphorical contexts. It is the site of a contest about what it means to be a civis Romanus and who can claim what rights in relation to whom. Nor is libertas commutable. The libertas of one group is not equivalent to that of another. The conditions that constitute libertas for the people, according to Cicero, would be servitium if imposed upon the senate, while if the people or their protectors usurp senatorial prerogatives it is not libertas but licentia.
24. In other contexts, libertas often means “free speech” (Cicero Pro Cluentio 118), but it is the free speech of those who have the right to exercise it. In this sense, it is expressly associated with satire as practiced by Lucilius. Satirical libertas is the ability to define proper behavior, to exercise one’s prerogatives, and to discipline those who either deny one the ability to exercise those prerogatives or violate the norms of conduct. It thus becomes a word in which legal and political rights, artistic license, and aristocratic privilege all come into play. The following passage from a letter to Cicero dated 44 BCE by Trebonius, the conspirator who detained Antony outside the senate on the Ides of March, displays the presence of these different levels of meaning, even as it connects libertas directly with satire in the Lucilian mode:
I heard that there was a certain disturbance, which I certainly hope to be false, so that we might at some point enjoy untroubled freedom [libertate]; which I have had very little experience of to this point. Nonetheless, having procured a bit of leisure while we sailed, I put together a little gift for you […]. In these verses if I seem to you rather plain spoken in certain words, the vileness of the person [Marc Antony] whom I am assailing rather freely [liberius] will vindicate me. You will also forgive our anger, which is just against men and citizens of this type. Moreover, why should Lucilius be more allowed to take up of this sort of liberty [libertatis] than we are, since although his hatred for those he attacked was equal to our own, nonetheless the men he assailed with so much freedom [libertate] in his words were certainly no more deserving?
(Ad Familiares 12.16)
This letter is a virtual fugue on republican libertas. In the first use, the term means freedom from political strife. It refers to the existence of a stable constitutional order and political leadership. The comparative adverb liberius refers to the freedom of speech one aristocrat had to assail another in the traditional politics of competitive élites that characterized the Roman republic. The very use of the comparative implies that there were degrees of this freedom and that the possibility of tipping over into licentia or at least boorishness had to be guarded against (Corbeill 1996: 16–20, 105–6). The last two uses refer specifically to Lucilius’s exercise of this aristocratic freedom of speech in satiric verses directed against the poet’s political enemies who are portrayed as no more worthy of public censure than Marc Antony. In such a context, it is difficult indeed to know where one sense of the term leaves off and the next begins. The political, the legal, and the aesthetic are so deeply intertwined that each only gains its full meaning in relation to the other.
25. Nine years later when Horace was preparing to publish his first book of satires he almost certainly had this text or others like it in mind. In 1.4, he begins by contrasting his own practice of satire with that of Lucilius who censured the faults of others freely (libertate) in the manner of the Greek Ol
d Comic poets. He then goes on to redefine the practice of satiric censure as a private matter of self-formation learned from his father (himself a libertinus), which aims not at public control or political reproof, but private virtue. Near the end of this complex and multileveled poem in which Horace simultaneously lays claim to and distances himself from that same Lucilian tradition that Trebonius invokes, Horace too apologizes if he, like Caesar’s assassin, speaks a little too freely (liberius, 1.4.103). It would, of course, have been missed by no one in Horace’s audience that the satirist too had sided with Brutus and the defenders of republican libertas before their defeat at Philippi (Roller 2001: 215).
26. Horace in 1.4 and the following poems is redefining satire for a new era, and consequently redefining freedom itself. He is moving from a political definition of free speech and self-determination toward an Epicurean vision of private virtue (Freudenburg 1993: 72–88). In the process, he is redefining what it means to be a civis Romanus for a new era in which the politics of competitive élites has become a dangerous anachronism. Thus in 1.6 where Horace recounts his introduction to Maecenas, Octavian’s right-hand man in Rome and his informal minister of culture, the satirist contends that even though his father had been a freedman, he nonetheless lives a less constrained, and hence freer, life than that of a famous (praeclarus) senator. The senator is beset by a thousand obligations and forced always to travel in style. The burden of societal expectations weighs upon him constantly. Horace, however, is free to do as he pleases:
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