Latin Verse Satire

by Miller, Paul Allen

  nunc mihi curto

  ire licet mulo vel si libet usque Tarentum

  ……………………………………………………………….

  hoc ego commodius quam tu, praeclare senator,

  milibus atque aliis vivo. quacumque libido est,

  incedo …

  [I can, if I want, ride a castrated mule all the way to Tarentum … In this way, my life is more pleasant than yours and than that of thousands of others. I go wherever I want.]

  (1.6.104–12)

  And though the word liberius is never used here, the import of the passage is clear: Horace enjoys a freedom superior to that of the traditional aristocratic definition, just as he claims in 1.4 and 1.10 that his satire is better and more polished than that of Lucilius. Horatian libertas is not that of the senator, the freedom to seek public office and control public affairs. His is the Epicurean freedom to mind his own business, write poetry, and ride his mule where and when he likes. A philosophical vision of subjective or interior freedom has come to qualify, if not replace, the more traditional aristocratic understanding of personal political freedom rooted in power.

  27. Lucilius enjoyed the right to expose vice and attack people by name, Horace tells us in 2.1.60–79, because he had the protection of such luminaries as Scipio Aemilianus Africanus and Laelius. Horace implies that he will be protected by Octavian and Maecenas in this new era, but at the same time he never attacks any of Octavian’s important political enemies by name. Rather Horace’s interlocutor in Satire 2.1, Trebatius, reminds the poet that there are laws against mala carmina (bad or evil poems), meaning slander and invective. Horace replies that Caesar thinks his poems are “good.” The conflation of aesthetic, legal, and political categories is typical, but we should linger a bit over this particular set of rhetorical gestures, for they tell us something about both the limits of republican libertas and the nature of its Horatian and Augustan redefinition.

  28. Libertas, as freedom of speech, never meant that just anybody could say just anything about anyone. There was a law against defamation as early as the Twelve Tables (Pliny the Elder, Historia Naturalis 28.4.18) and, until Sulla revised the law in the early first century BCE, it carried with it a capital charge. Yet we know that Lucilius attacked prominent people by name and was not only never brought up on charges but also became the founder of an important poetic genre. Likewise, Catullus accused both Caesar and Pompey of the most outrageous sexual improprieties, but no serious repercussions ensued. What constituted libertas and what constituted licentia or convicium (abuse) depended on the rank of the person speaking, the rank of the person addressed, and their respective political connections. This is not to say that people of the lower classes did not possess a right to free speech (libertas). It is to say, however, that in exercising that right they risked retribution, whether of a legal or extralegal sort, if they did not have powerful friends. It is this danger to which Horace humorously alludes in 2.1 (Lafleur 1981).

  29. Libertas as freedom of speech, then, always existed within a realm constrained by law and political alliance. In the rough and tumble world of competitive republican politics, libertas might well entail the abuse of political opponents and of those who did not share the same image of Roman aristocratic power and self-presentation. Lucilius ranges widely over topics as diverse as adultery, orthography, culinary delights, and petty graft. Satire for him is a tool of social discipline wielded in the perpetual struggle for power and prestige that the Romans defined as the essence of republican libertas, in the sense that both Trebonius and Cicero understand it. Licentia was in the eye of the beholder and the struggles that ensued as aristocratic competition degenerated into civil war in the first century BCE made this a deadly game indeed. Like Lucilius it was important both to have a high enough social standing to be able make such charges and also to have allies who would back one up. It was also important to make sure they were in a position to do so. By 43 BCE, Trebonius had been killed by the Caesarians’ henchman, Dolla-bella. Brutus and Cassius were not able to protect him in the skirmishes leading up to open warfare. Cicero himself would die later the same year as his reward for attacking Marc Antony in the Philippics.

  30. Horace presents an allegory of this sad history of libertas, licentia, and the law in Epistles 2.1. In this letter to Augustus, Horace describes how traditional forms of Roman invective grew into communally disruptive forms of licentia that masqueraded as libertas, until they were finally restrained by law. It is the story of anarchy in the guise of traditional rights and the final, necessary imposition of legal and aesthetic order. The images of the satirist’s bloody tooth, of menace going unpunished, and the call to put the care of the community before the individual are all clear, if implicit, references to the civil wars that wracked first-century Rome. The message is unmistakable: this is where republican libertas led. Only a more disciplined, classical form—a more restrained libertas—could be tolerated:

  The Fescinnine license [licentia] …

  Poured out rustic blame in alternating verses.

  And free speech [libertas] accepted through the years

  Played about amiably. Then a savage joke

  Began to turn into open madness and menace

  Went after respected households with impunity. Those provoked

  Were pained by the bloody tooth. Even those untouched

  Worried about the common condition; so that a law

  And a penalty were brought forth, saying no one should

  Be depicted in bad verse; fearing cudgels they found the limit

  And were led back to the well said and delightful.

  (Epistulae 2.1.145–55)

  As literary history, this is a fanciful reconstruction, but as an allegory of Horace’s own satirical practice and his need to redefine libertas, it is revealing. Satire in this new era will remain a discourse of aristocratic self-formation, but the nature of the self’s freedom must be fundamentally revised and with it the most Roman of genres.

  31. By the end of the Augustan regime, there were official book burnings and banishment for the writers of satirical pamphlets; with the accession of Tiberius, impolitic poets were sentenced to death (Syme 1978: 212–20). Traditional republican freedoms were no more respected by the later Julio-Claudian emperors (Wirszubski 1950: 159). As the definition of what it meant to be a free Roman citizen changed, so did the definition of satire. With Persius in the fifties CE, the redefinition of Lucilian satiric libertas becomes even more pronounced. Satire loses its vocation as a tool for social control. “Instead, its voice takes an inner turn and patrols the boundaries of a subjectivity in what is represented as a solitary, indeed near solipsistic, performance which is designedly attuned to a reader’s reapplication of its upshot to their Self” (Henderson 1993: 13). In the world of Neronian autocracy, satire becomes a technology of the self (Foucault 1986). Libertas, as defined in Persius’s Satire 5, is neither the condition of being a free man as opposed to a slave (5.82), nor the ability to exercise one’s social prerogatives, but the attribute of the Stoic sage who stands aloof from the vicissitudes of a world in which meaningful personal action, as traditionally understood by Romans of the governing class, has become all but impossible (Roller 2001: 276–80). This is not the world of Lucilius and Trebonius, nor even that of the late Horace, nor is this their satire either.

  32. With Juvenal, at the beginning of the second century CE, the satirist and his libertas have been reduced to parody. In Books 1 and 2, the pose of Lucilian indignatio is adopted and raised to epic heights but always deflated in a final moment of self-mocking bathos. It is the satire of contradiction. “He purports to describe the world as it really is, but at the same time feels free to indulge in exaggeration and sensationalism as it suits his purpose” (Fredricks in Ramage et al. 1974: 166). In Satire 1, he will lay bare the vice of the city but only attack the dead. The world of Rome is overrun with cheating foreigners, corrupt and avaricious patrons, adulterous matrons, and poetry recita
ls in mid-August. Juvenal is always playing a double game, at once invoking traditional values and undermining them. Where Horace evolved a new concept of libertas and a new function for satire, Juvenal reduced the virtue itself to mockery (Anderson 1982). Freedom is not the right of every Roman citizen, Umbricius announces in Satire 3, but a strictly class-based phenomenon:

  This is the freedom [libertas] of the poor man

  Beaten and struck down by fists, he asks and prays

  That he be allowed to go home with a few teeth.

  (3.299–301)

  The poor man is free to take a beating. But even this moment of ironic bathos is not allowed to stand unchallenged, because Umbricius, while the main speaker in Satire 3, is explicitly distanced from the satirist himself. Juvenal, while sympathetic to his friend’s complaint, will not join him in fleeing Rome. The satirist is as much satirized as satirizing. In the later books, this element of self-ironizing moralism will come to occupy a larger and larger place in relation to the claims of an uninhibited, but self-confessedly impotent, indignatio in Books 1 and 2 (Braund 1988).

  33. Satire, then, is the most Roman of genres because it is the form whose subject is libertas. Its origin and history are intricately related to the discourses of self-formation that find their origin in Roman literature as a self-conscious institution of aristocratic discipline and legitimation in the second century BCE. The subject of satire is both the form’s subject matter and the speaking subject who is empowered to forge this hash of humorous observations, personal reproof, and grotesque degradation. As the history of aristocratic self-formation becomes more problematic in relation to changing political and historical circumstances, satire becomes a more inward and ironic genre. Satura is “wholly Roman,” then, because its evolution is inseparable from the intertwined political, aesthetic, and legal issues that define what it means to be a civis Romanus.

  Comedy, iambic, and diatribe

  34. None of this, of course, means that the canonical satirists were ignorant of Greek literature or did not make conscious use of it. Horace sees a clear relation between Lucilius and Greek Old Comedy (1.4.1–6). His opinion is echoed by Diomedes the grammarian. On the level of form, the parallel is far-fetched. The Old Comic poets wrote dramas of music and spectacle with costumed choruses (frogs, birds, wasps, etc.); the stories often took place in fantastic environs (the clouds, the underworld, a bizarre Socratic “think shop”); and the poets cared little for the construction of plot or the realistic portrayal of daily life. Old Comedy was part of the Greater Dionysia and cannot be understood outside the democratic and religious institutions that characterized classical Athens. Lucilian satire was a low mimetic genre of social observation and criticism. It was literary—written to be read or declaimed, published in books—not dramatic.

  35. Nonetheless Old Comedy was very much part of civic life and directly named and satirized individual Athenian politicians. Aristophanes, the only Old Comic poet from whom a substantial corpus survives, never passes an opportunity to lampoon Cleon. He routinely attacks the tragedian Euripides and may well have contributed, however inadvertently, to Socrates’s condemnation with his devastating portait of the philosopher as a corrupt sophist in the Clouds. Similarly, Lucilius devoted Book 1 of his satires to a mock counsel of gods called to judge the life of Lentulus Lupus, the former princeps senatus (131–130 BCE). Book 2 was given over to the trial of Mucius Scaevola. Lucilius also finds fault with the diction of Accius (28.747) and the verse of Ennius (9.376–85). Indeed, as the fragments included in the present volume make clear, Lucilius does not hesitate to name important individuals in his poems, nor does he restrict himself to laudatory contexts. But in spite of these acknowledged parallels, Horace and the later grammatical tradition’s connection of Lucilius with Old Comedy finds no direct textual support in the works of the master himself.

  36. Parallels, however, can also be seen between Lucilius and one of Old Comedy’s predecessors, iambic (Coffey 1976: 54). The canonical iambic poets were Archilochus, Hipponax, and Semonides. Iambic in archaic Greece is a ritualized genre of blame poetry that features a number of stock motifs, including suicide by hanging of the named victim. Recent studies have shown that their victims were largely conventional and often had speaking names denoting their poetic function (Nagy 1979; Miller 1994). Nonetheless, the later tradition takes the attacks, which could be both quite direct and earthy, at face value. Archilochus, thus, in the famous Cologne Epode, attempts to seduce the younger daughter of his chief antagonist, Lycambes, while savaging the latter’s elder daughter Neoboule:

  Know this: let another man have Neoboule

  She becomes overripe

  Her maiden flower has fallen away,

  Just as the beauty that was there before.

  For she knows no satisfaction

  And, a frenzied woman,

  She has revealed the measure of her youth.

  To hell with her!

  The poem closes with an epic periphrasis describing the poet bringing himself to climax without actually penetrating the younger daughter. The result is a poem that not only attacks Neoboule, but effectively savages the reputation of Lycambes and the younger daughter as well. If Lycambes and his family are seen as historical individuals, this is invective of the first order, and iambic was recognized as such in the Roman literary tradition (see Catullus 40).

  37. The connection between iambic poetry and satire was openly acknowledged. Apuleius refers to Lucilius in his Apologia with the epithet iambicus, and Lucilius directly refers to Archilochus (27.732), although it is difficult to deduce much from this one-line fragment. The importance of iambic poetry to satire is also underlined by Horace. In Satires 2.3.11–12, Damasippus accuses the poet of wasting space in packing Plato, Menander, Eupolis, and Archilochus to take with him to the Sabine farm since Horace in fact writes so little. This self-deprecating humor is in part a programmatic statement on the nature of Horatian satire. Damasippus, an overzealous Stoic, indicates that Horace’s work was a combination of philosophy (Plato), Old Comedy (Eupolis), New Comedy (Menander), and iambic (Archilochus). This is not far from what Horace himself says in other programmatic passages (1.4 passim, see Piwonka 1978: 64–5), but it is not straightforward either since Horace at this very moment was also working on the Epodes, a collection of avowedly iambic poems. Iambic poetry and satire, while recognized as related genres, were considered separate in the Roman tradition. Quintilian treats each form independently.

  38. The Epodes were in fact directly modeled on Callimachus’s Iambi, an Alexandrian reworking of the archaic genre (Cameron 1995: 169–70). Yet, it would be a mistake to see this division between the genres as neat or rigid. For at the very moment Horace is composing the Epodes, he is also working on Book 2 of the Satires. There is in fact a great deal of cross-fertilization. Thus, in Satires 2.6.17, he refers to his saturae as composed under the sign of his musa pedestris or “walking muse.” This is a phrase meaning “prosaic.” It echoes 1.4’s claim that satire is not really poetry but a form of versified prose. Such an interpretation jibes well with the ultimate source of the phrase, Callimachus’s description of his Iambi as the “walking” or “prosaic pasture of the Muses” (Frg. 112; Cameron 1995: 143–5). Horace, thus, simultaneously recognizes the iambic nature of satire and clearly separates the Roman genre of satura from his iambic verse in the Epodes. Nor was he necessarily the first to make this connection between the musa pedestris and satire. Piwonka argued that Lucilius may have taken his inspiration as well from Callimachus’s Iambi (1978). Unfortunately, despite the brilliance of Piwonka’s speculations, the evidence from both authors is too fragmentary to allow a definitive conclusion to be reached about the degree of Callimachean influence on Lucilius. Horace, however, certainly sought to portray himself as much more the advocate of Callimachean polish and erudition than his predecessor (1.4.11).

  39. Callimachus (third century BCE) was in fact one of the formative influences on classical Roman poetics. Catullus, H
orace, Vergil, Tibullus, Propertius, Ovid, Persius, and Juvenal all either quote or allude to him. He was a complex and elusive poet, who was a scholar and librarian at the Museum in Alexandria. His poetry is characterized by learning and studied indirection. Unfortunately, most of his work survives only in fragments. The extant verses, however, are anything but dry and scholarly. They are the clever constructions of a court poet who appears in his poems as an opinionated narrator and polemical poetic theorist. His masterwork, the Aitia, opens with a prologue in which the poet defends himself against the charge that he is incapable of producing a single continuous narrative of epic proportions. His witty response is that Apollo had told him to make his sacrifices fat, but to keep his muse slender. The premium is on wit and sophistication: all that is raw and rough-hewn is to be avoided. When Horace in 1.4 charges Lucilius with dictating 200 lines while standing on one leg, he cast him as representing the opposite of Callimachus’s small, polished work.

  40. The last major influence on satire is Hellenistic diatribe. The world of post-classical Greece and Rome was filled with street-corner philosophers. These Stoic and Cynic preachers harangued their audiences on the importance of following virtue, the vanity of human wishes, and the venality of a life lived as a slave to passion. They used wit, paradox, and an often-coarse sense of humor to drive their points home. Like the authors of satura, they presented less a well-reasoned set of philosophical arguments than a series of striking vignettes and sententiae.