41. Among the most important of these philosophical preachers was Bion the Borysthenite whose influence Horace acknowledges at Epistles 2.2.60. The alleged son of a fishmonger and a prostitute from the Black Sea, Bion arrived in Athens about 315 BCE where he studied philosophy under Academic, Peripatetic, Cyrenaic, and Cynic philosophers. He later went on to be a popular philosopher in his own right, and in his later years occupied a position at the court of Antigonus Gonatas in Macedonia. His influence can be seen most directly in Horace’s first three satires, but the influence of diatribe is clear in the hectoring satires of Juvenal and Persius as well as in Lucilius (Duff 1936: 28–33).
Meter and style
42. Ennius’s meters vary from iambics to dactylic hexameter and sotadaean. The iambic trimeter is a conversational meter often used in comedy. It allows a great deal of substitution. The basic unit is the iamb, which consists of a short syllable (˘) followed by a long (¯). The rules for determining the quantity of a given syllable can be found in any reference grammar. Iambic trimeter consists of three feet made up of two iambs each. In early usage, substitution of spondees (¯ ¯), anapests (˘˘¯), dactyls (¯˘˘), and tribrachs (˘˘˘) for iambs is possible throughout the line so long as it ends with a true iamb. Fragment 7 thus scans as follows:
[He dines without limit, by Hercules, to his great harm.]
The u in suo has hardened and is pronounced as a v (Gildersleeve and Lodge 1895: §723). Ennius’s satiric meters tend to be loose and conversational and take maximum advantage of the licenses offered.
43. The sotadaean meter is based on the ionic foot (¯ ¯ ˘˘). A line has three feet followed by a shortened or catalectic foot that begins with a long (¯) and ends with either a long or a short (x). The final syllable of a Latin verse, however, is always counted as long owing to the pause at the end of the line. Substitution is widely permitted, but the foot rarely begins with a short. The first line of Fragment 18 thus scans:
nam qui lepide postulat alterum frustrari
[For who cleverly claims to deceive another.]
44. The dactylic hexameter is introduced by Ennius as the meter of his epic on Roman history, the Annales. It also appears in two fragments of the satires, but the sample is so small that it is impossible to generalize from it. The basic foot of the hexameter is the dactyl (¯˘˘) for which a spondee (¯ ¯) can be substituted. In classical practice, substitution in the fifth foot is rare. Such lines are known as spondaic and are generally a sign of emphasis in formal epic verse. They were also a common feature of Hellenistic verse and were later popular with the neoteric poets such as Catullus and Calvus of the first century BCE. While it is impossible to know how frequent the spondaic hexameter was in Ennius’s satires, it does appear in one of the two fragments that survive:
[thence I survey the fixed and fluid regions of the heavenly place]
The concentration of alliteration (repetition of the same consonant, especially in initial position) and assonance (repetition of vowel sounds) is typically Ennian.
45. Lucilius’s early work (Books 26–30), like that of Ennius, was composed in a variety of meters. Books 26 and 27 feature a meter common in comic dialogue, trochaic septenarius. The basic foot is the trochee (¯˘), for which the spondee (¯ ¯), anapest (˘˘¯), dactyl (¯˘˘), tribrach (˘˘˘) and proceleusmatic (˘˘˘˘) may be substituted. A line consists of seven feet, plus an additional syllable at the end of each line. The seventh foot is always a trochee. Thus 26.1.589 scans as follows:
[now in like manner I do not wish to please the masses along with these writers]
Books 28 and 29 also include iambic trimeters.
46. Book 30 is in dactylic hexameters, as are Books 1–21. With this shift to the hexameter, the classical meter of satire is definitively established. In Books 22 through 25, at the end of his career, Lucilius appears to have included elegiac distichs, although only one complete couplet survives, and it appears to be a funerary epitaph, a genre conventionally composed in the elegiac meter. Horace, Persius, and Juvenal follow the main tendency in Lucilius’s work and compose all their satires, except for Persius’s brief prologue, in hexameters.
47. Lucilius’s hexameters are frequently end-stopped, that is to say the line forms a complete syntactical unit. Where enjambment occurs (the running over of the syntactical unit from one line to the next) it is seldom pronounced and often coincides with a sense pause. Lucilius also has a large number of elisions, giving his hexameters a harsher feel than those in Horace or Juvenal. Typical is 30.2.1007–8:
[Or when there is a journey somewhere and she invents a reason for a trip / either to the goldsmith’s shop, to her mother, cousin, to her friend]
Note the combination of assonance and alliteration, the frequency of elision, and the repetitive, paratactic syntax. These are all features typical of Lucilian style. Note also the decomposition of the archaic diphthong ai (ae in classical usage) into its component sounds (a + i) for purposes of prosody. These are the kind of licenses for which Horace would later censure Lucilius.
48. The Horatian hexameter is at once smoother in its prosody and more likely to feature enjambment. The result is a verse that, while not abandoning the dignity and regularity of the hexameter, carries with it the conversational tone of Lucilius’s and Ennius’s experiments with iambic and trochaic meters. Horatian style “is plain and unpretentious with a deceptive appearance of simplicity: the structure is loose but not rambling; the language is scrupulously correct” (Rudd 1982: 96). Satire 1.4.6–8 is typical in this regard:
[All Lucilius derives from here, having followed them / with only feet and meters changed, witty / with a keen nose, harsh in his writing of verse.]
The poet uses simple vocabulary, with a minimum of repetition. Assonance is present, but only slightly more pronounced than what would occur in normal conversation. The line end is only respected when it draws the thought to a natural close. Elision is used sparingly, and the meter is managed to produce specific effects. Observe the predominance of spondees in the final line where the emphasis is on the harshness of Lucilius’s versification.
49. Persius’s versification is superficially like Horace’s. He takes few licenses, and enjambment is frequent, but balanced by end-stopped lines that establish the flow of the verse. Hiatus is avoided. Elision is less frequent than in Lucilius and managed so as not to interrupt the flow of sense. Every line has a main caesura (||) or break that punctuates the sense and avoids prosodic monotony and often a secondary caesura as well (Knoche 1975: 134–5). Yet, where Horace aims for conversational ease, Persius strives for the harsh juxtaposition (iunctura … acri 5.14) and a boiled down style (decoctius 1.125) that jolts readers out of their habitual slumber. A good example can be seen in the following:
[Who does not have ass’s ears? I, this secret, / this laugh of mine, so worthless, I would sell for no / Iliad. Whoever you are, inspired by bold Cratinus, / you grow pale in study of angry Eupolis with the great old man, / take a look at these things too, if perchance you listen to something more boiled down.]
The combination of highly wrought verse with a deliberately harsh style ensures that his hexameters achieve the maximum impact. There can be no question but that each word is carefully chosen and consciously placed.
50. The prologue to Persius’s book of satires is written in “limping iambics.” This meter, invented by Hipponax, recalls both satire’s links to Greek iambic and Ennius’s and Lucilius’s early experiments with iambic meters. The limping iambic is an iambic trimeter whose last foot always ends ˘ ¯ ¯ x. Thus the first line of the prologue scans:
Nec fonte labra prolui caballino
[I have not rinsed my lips in the nag’s spring.]
51. Juvenal’s style strives neither for Horace’s conversational tone nor Persius’s deliberate use of estrangement effects, but for epic and declamatory grandeur. The combination of the high style—rhetorical questions, golden lines, sweeping periods, epic allusions—and satire’s low subject matter
creates a profound bathos that often results in hilarious laughter and a sense of the world turned upside down. The bathetic effect can be heightened by ending the line with a jarring monosyllable that stops the metrical flow. Juvenal occasionally uses hiatus and a spondaic fifth foot. These are features of epic style. Elision is less frequent than in Horace or Persius (Courtney 1980: 52). Another feature of Juvenal’s prosody is his use of the bucolic diaeresis, a strong break at the end of the fourth foot. A good illustration of his stylistic and metrical practice can be found in 1.49–50:
[Marius drinks from the eighth hour and profits from the gods’ / anger, but you the victor, province, weep]
The delay of iratis to the second line creates a kind of comic double-take. The first line ends with a jolt in the monosyllabic dis, leading the reader to expect that Marius, in spite of being an exile, is enjoying good fortune. The sheer perversity of the situation, however, only becomes clear when we realize that the line rather than being end-stopped is in fact enjambed and that the cause of Marius’s good fortune is that he has angered the gods! At the same time, the multiple pauses and the use of alliteration highlights the irony of the fact that it is the victorious province that weeps.
Lives and works
52. It is impossible in the space allowed to give a complete accounting of the texts and contexts surrounding each of our authors. Moreover, in many cases the information we have concerning their lives and personal development is scant, misleading, and highly speculative. Nonetheless, it is important to have a basic conception of the shape of each satirist’s work, to the extent it can be defined, and to understand the nature of the circumstances in which the work was produced, in so far as possible.
Ennius
53. Ennius was born in 239 BCE in Rudiae (modern Rugge) in southern Italy. He was a native Oscan, who grew up in a Greek-speaking region under Roman hegemony. He was fluent in all three languages. During his service as a mercenary in an Italian unit serving under Roman command on Sardinia, he met Cato the Elder, who brought him to Rome in 204. Once there, he earned his living as a poet, teacher, and commentator on Greek and Latin texts. Ennius accompanied Marcus Nobilius Fulvior, consul in 189 BCE, on his Aetolian campaign (189–187 BCE) as camp poet. This earned the latter the ire of Cato for introducing such Hellenistic refinements into a Roman military context. Marcus’s son Quintus arranged for Ennius to become a citizen in 184 BCE and provided the poet with an allotment of land that relieved him of the necessity of earning a living through teaching. Ennius was also close to Scipio Nasica and wrote a poem lauding Scipio Africanus the elder for his victory over Hannibal at Zama (202 BCE). The poet died in 169 after the production of his Thyestes.
54. Ennius’s poetic oeuvre was vast and exercised a formative influence on later Latin literature. The Annales, an epic poem in hexameters, narrated the history of Rome in eighteen books. Six hundred verses survive in 437 fragments. We have the titles of more than twenty tragedies, two Latin farces (praetextae), two Greek style comedies, and a variety of miscellaneous poems including the Hedyphagetica or “Fine Dining.” The latter is sometimes included among the satires. Regardless of its precise place in the canon, it shows an interest in matters gastronomical that becomes one of the major themes of later satire (Duff 1936: 42; Rudd 1982: 204–5).
55. It is generally thought that Ennius wrote four books of satires, although even here there is some disagreement since some of our fragments are attributed to a sixth book. Only thirty-seven possible lines survive, most quoted by later authors because of grammatical or lexical oddities, and in some cases the attribution to the satires is insecure. It is difficult to date the poems with any accuracy, and it is not known whether they were composed as a group or occasionally over a long period of time. It is also difficult to interpret the fragments with precision, since we often do not know who the speaker is, and it would be a mistake to assume that it was necessarily Ennius. As Quintilian recounts, one poem contained a debate between personified life and death (9.2.36). Likewise Gellius tells of Ennius’s use of Aesop’s fable of the crested lark. One should be wary, then, of assuming too much about a line or two pulled out of context. Whether it is spoken by the poet or a character in a narrative could change the meaning we assign to it. Nonetheless, from the fragments we possess, it seems evident that the satires provided Ennius with the opportunity to comment upon Roman daily life and to engage in a certain amount of social commentary whether directly or indirectly.
Lucilius
56. Lucilius was born in Suessa Aurunca on the border separating Latium from Campania. Saint Jerome gives his birth date as 148 BCE, but this would make him only fourteen when he served under Scipio Aemilianus Africanus at Numantia in 134. The most plausible solution to this problem is to back-date his birth to 180, when the consuls possessed the same nomina as they did in 148. Since Romans indicated years by the names of the consuls, this kind of mistake is relatively common. The dates of 157 and 167 have also been advanced but not won general assent. Lucilius died in 102 BCE at Naples and was granted a public funeral.
57. The first great satirist was born into a wealthy family and was himself a man of means. His brother was a senator and his grandnephew was Pompey the Great. He himself never pursued a political career and remained an equestrian. He had large estates in Apulia, Bruttium, Sardinia, and Sicily. In Rome, he moved in the highest circles and was a close associate of Scipio Aemilianus Africanus and Laelius. His prominence and reputation for learning were such that Clitomachus, the head of the Athenian Academy (127–110 BCE), dedicated a treatise to him.
58. Lucilius wrote no known poetry other than his satires. What we know as Books 26–30 were published first and, by internal references, can be dated to the period between 131 and 124 BCE. A later collection consisting of Books 1–25 was eventually published and became the basis for antiquity’s opera omnia. Book 1 was first published near 125 BCE, Book 2 after 119, Book 5 no later than 117, and Book 20 circa 107. When Lucilius died in 102 BCE he had published thirty books in less than twenty-nine years, an astounding rate of productivity.
59. Although Ennius had published his satirical miscellanies, and there was a tradition of both ritualized blame poetry and political invective in Rome, there was little real precedent for the satiric genre as Lucilius created it. Spurius Mummius, the brother of Lucius Mummius, sacker of Corinth (146 BCE), had sent home humorous verse epistles to his friends while serving in his brother’s camp. These would have been known to Lucilius, since Spurius was a member of Scipio Aemelianus Africanus’s circle of friends. Such witty, conversational verse between aristocratic amici would have served as a model for Lucilius, who, unlike Mummius, would eventually publish his work. But they hardly account for the genre as a whole.
60. Lucilius twice refers to his poetry as sermones (1090, 1091), both times in the context of someone objecting to being subjected to criticism (maledicendo). Sermo is a term Horace would later use as well. It does not denote ordinary speech, but refined aristocratic conversation that marked its practitioner as a gentleman. It was the badge of urbanitas and served both to admit those accomplished at its art into the charmed circle of aristocratic culture and to exclude those who could not compete in the cut and thrust of its witty repartee. For this reason, Cicero in De Officiis (1.133–7) recommends to his son, Marcus, deliberate training in the art of conversation (Ramage in Ramage et al. 1974:31). If we recall our earlier discussion of the role the emergence of Latin literature in the second century BCE played in recruiting and consolidating aristocratic culture in a time of perceived crisis, then the importance of Lucilian sermo as a public genre comes into sharper focus (Coffey 1976: 50). It provided a model of what a gentleman (nobilis) should strive both to be and to avoid.
61. By examining a series of fragments from Book 30, we can gain a better idea of what the texture of this Lucilian sermo might have been. Its witty back and forth can be paralleled to similar interchanges in Horace 1.4, where the latter specifically tries to define his ow
n ideal of satiric sermo in relation to that of Lucilius (Krenkel 1970: ad loc.). The reconstruction of the passage as a sequence is admittedly speculative, as all such reconstructions must be, but it in no way contravenes the evidence and gives a reasonable facsimile of the way Lucilian satire probably worked:
Interlocutor: Gaudes cum de me ista foris sermonibus differs, et maledicendo in multis sermonibus differs.
...........................................................
Lucilius: summatim tamen experiar rescribere paucis.
Interlocutor: quin totum purges, devellas me atque deuras Exultesque adites
Lucilius: omnes formonsi, fortes tibi, ego inprobus: esto. (1090–5)
[Interlocutor: You love it when you spread around those things about me in your satires, and you spread me wide open by attacking me in many satires.
.............................................................................................
Lucilius: Nonetheless, I shall try to respond briefly in a few words.
Interlocutor: Nothing keeps you from cleaning me out altogether, plucking me bare, singeing me, and insulting me, going after and harassing me.
Lucilius: To you everybody is fine and brave, and I’m the reprobate: fine!]
The general drift of the passage is reproduced almost exactly by Persius 1.107–11. Lucilian sermo and libertas define a certain intellectual and aristocratic style that is inherited, adapted, and problematized by each of its satirical inheritors. It is exemplified both in the censure of others and in the establishment of standards of linguistic and cultural behavior, embodied in the satirist’s persona, that serve as models of aristocratic comportment.
Latin Verse Satire Page 4