Latin Verse Satire

by Miller, Paul Allen

  227–32. The humiliations of physical debility. Coxa = “hip.”

  Luscis: see line 158.

  Conspectum = substantive.

  Rictum = “open mouth.”

  Hiat = “gapes.”

  Tantum ceu = “just so much as.”

  Pullus = “chick”.

  Hirundinis < hirundo, –inis: “swallow.”

  Ieiuna = “hungry” because she is giving the food to her young.

  232–6. Dementia, however, is the worst.

  236–9. The senile man disinherits his kin in favor of a skilled call-girl. Phialen = the mistress.

  Tantum artificis valet halitus oris = either “the breath of her skilled mouth was worth so much” or “the breath of her skilled mouth was so strong.” Fellatio was presumed to cause bad breath. See 6.47–9.

  Carcere = “cell.”

  Fornicis: see 3.156.

  240–2. “Even if you keep your senses, you’ll still bury your dear ones.”

  243–5. “You grow old in perpetual mourning for the ever renewed destruction (clade) of your house.”

  246–7. The first example is Nestor of Pylos. A cornice secundae = “second only to the crow,” who was believed to live nine generations.

  248–50. Nimirum = ironic intensifier, “certainly.”

  Saecula = “generations.”

  Dextra: ones and tens were counted on the left hand, hundreds and thousands on the right. Nestor was believed to have lived to one hundred.

  250–5. “I pray that you pay attention, however, to what the consequences of that long life are.” Nestor buried his son Antilochus at Troy. Parumper = “for a little while.”

  Stamina: “the spindle” upon which the thread of his life is wound.

  Acris = “fierce.”

  Ardentem: on the funeral pyre.

  256–7. Two quick examples: Peleus, the father of Achilles, and Laertes, the father of Odysseus. Ithacum = the Ithacan. Ithaca was the home of Odysseus.

  Natantem: on his ten-year return voyage from Troy, Odysseus was on two occasions shipwrecked and forced to swim for it.

  258–64. Having gone through the elderly fathers on the Greek side of the Trojan War, Juvenal turns his attention to the most famous father from the other side: Priam. Venisset: The protasis of the condition is delayed until line 263.

  Assaraci = the son of Tros and brother of Priam’s grandfather, Ilus.

  Funus = “corpse.”

  Ut: Ferguson’s note (1979) contains a salutary reminder, “In translation we have to choose between saying that ut introduces a clause defining Iliadum lacrimas and that ut means ‘when’ (the subjunctive being explained by the conditional), but to the Roman listener ut was ut, blending the senses we analyse as ‘when’, ‘as’, ‘in order to’, ‘with the result that’, etc. We can get around it by ‘with Cassandra leading’ or ‘and Cassandra would have led.’”

  Cassandra … Polyxena: Priam’s daughters. Cassandra was priestess of Apollo. She survived her father but was taken as a slave to Mycenae with Agamemnon where she was slain by his wife, Clytemnestra. Polyxena was sacrificed on the grave of Achilles.

  Palla = a long rectangular shawl worn over the head by Roman women. It reached the knees. The tearing of clothing is a common gesture of mourning.

  Carinas: i.e., the fleet in which Paris sailed to Sparta to seduce Helen.

  267–70. The death of Priam. Juvenal recounts in condensed form Aeneid 2.504–58. Tiara: a specifically Asian headdress. Note the sharp alliteration of the t’s in 267.

  268. Vetulus bos: the absurdity of Priam’s sacrifice is driven home, even as the line is brought up short. Compare Aeneid 5.481 for a similar line ending.

  269. Cultris: see Horace 1.9.72–4.

  270. Ab ingrato … aratro = ablative of agent, because feelings are attributed to the plough.

  271–2. Priam’s wife, Hecuba, outlived him, was taken captive by the Greeks, and ultimately was turned into a dog. Utcumque = “at any rate.” Understand est.

  273–5. Nostros = Romans.

  Regem … Ponti = Mithridates VI, see 6.660–1.

  Croesum = proverbially rich king of Lydia (sixth century BCE).

  Solonis = Solon (circa 640–560 BCE), the Athenian lawgiver and poet who, when asked by Croesus who was the luckiest man alive, replied Tellus, an Athenian who died in battle and whose two sons survived him. The probably fictitious story is told in Herodotus 1.28–34. It includes the notion that a man’s life can only be judged once we know his death.

  Spatia ultima = “the last lap.” Seneca in De Tranquilitate Animi 11 uses Croesus to make the same argument.

  276–82. Marius too outlived his triumphs. Gaius Marius (157–86 BCE) was a popular leader and general. Saving Italy from an invasion by German tribes (104–101 BCE), he held the consulship an unprecedented seven times. He was later ousted by Sulla and reactionary elements of the aristocracy. To escape capture he hid in the marshes at Minturnae (Minturnarumque paludes); he was caught, imprisoned, and condemned to death, but helped by his executioner to escape to Carthage where he lived for a time as a beggar, before rallying his troops and returning to Rome. Shortly after, his health failed. Hinc = “from too long a life.”

  Illo cive = ablative of comparison with beatius.

  Circumducto captivorum agmine = the line of captives in a triumphal procession (pompa). See lines 36–42. Note the serpentine procession of large alliterative words, underlined by elisions.

  There is hiatus [49, 51] between pompa and animam: the prosody imitates the general’s last gasp.

  Opimam = “glorious.”

  Teutonico: the Teutoni were one of the Germanic tribes over which he celebrated a triumph.

  283–6. Pompey almost died of fever in Campania (50 BCE). Cicero and Plutarch record his recovery as the cause of great rejoicing, but if the fever had taken him he would not have died wretchedly in Egypt, where he fled after having lost the civil war to Caesar and was then assassinated, his headless body left to molder on the beach. See lines 108–9.

  Multae urbes et publica vota: public prayers for recovery.

  286–8. “In contrast, Catiline and his co-conspirators suffered no such mutilation (cruciatu).” Lentulus = P. Cornelius Lentulus Sura, consul 71 BCE. After being expelled from the senate by the nota of the censor, he became praetor and later joined Catiline’s conspiracy. He was strangled in prison on the order of the consul, Cicero.

  Cethegus = C. Cornelius Cethegus, senator and another conspirator. He met the same end.

  Catilina = L. Sergius Catilina, dissolute aristocrat who, after being defeated for consul in 63 and 62 BCE, tried to overthrow the state. He was thwarted by Cicero and died fighting.

  289–345. Many mothers pray for beauty for their children, but it only brings them sorrow.

  289–91. Delicias = “an extravagance.”

  291–2. Corripias < corripio, –ripere, –ripui, –reptum: “seize, rebuke.” There’s humor in the mater addressing the satirist.

  293–5. The examples of Lucretia and Verginia are alleged to illustrate the perils of excessive beauty. Sextus Tarquinius raped Lucretia, the archetypically chaste wife of Collatinus. She later committed suicide. The ensuing uproar led to the overthrow of the Tarquins and the establishment of the republic.

  Verginia: the object of the lust of the decemvir, Appius Claudius, she was killed by her father to prevent her violation. According to the tale told in Livy (3.44–8), this led to the succession of the plebs in 449 BCE and the end of the regime of the decemviri.

  Rutilae = unknown.

  Gibbum = “hump.”

  Suam: understand faciem, accepting the reading of the lesser codices.

  295–8. Handsome sons are no better.

  298–306. “Their parents are bribed to become their panders, even if they are by nature chaste.” Licet … licet: two different uses of the same verb. The first is the idiomatic “although,” the second the impersonal verb with the dative.

  Veteres …
Sabinos = archetypes of traditional Italic virtue.

  306–9. The tyrant in his citadel (arce) was a staple of the rhetorical schools. Ephebum = a Greek term for a young man.

  There is no evidence that Nero castrated or raped free-born (preatextatum) boys. Slaves, however, as Horace points out in 1.2, were another matter. Loripedem = bandy-legged.

  Strumosum = “scrofulous,” i.e., afflicted with tuberculosis of the lymphatic glands and the resulting tumors.

  Utero = “belly.”

  310–11. “Rejoice in the face of your own son for whom greater marks of distinction await”: ironic.

  311–14. Mariti / irati: the genitive is awkward and in some later versions of the manuscript tradition an intrusive gloss (exigere) has crept in, but none of the proposed emendations has won wide assent and the dominant transmission is both readable and metrical.

  Martis: in the Odyssey (8.266–369) Homer tells the story of Ares (Mars) committing adultery with Aphrodite and being caught in a trap (laqueos) by Hephaestus.

  314–17. The outraged husband demands vengeance beyond even what the law allows. See Horace 1.2.41–6, 133. Mugilis = “the mullet,” a fish with backward pointing spines, inserted into the anus of adulterers by outraged husbands. See Catullus 15.

  319–22. “Soon aristocratic nymphomaniacs will be paying him for sex.” Servilia = a member of the aristocratic gens Servilia.

  Fiet = fiet adulter.

  Illius = Servilia.

  Non amat: a striking usage. In Roman poetry of the first century BCE, amo always includes the notion of sex, hence Catullus in poem 72 must struggle to distinguish emotional commitment from lust (amare). Here, amo is distinguished from the purely sexual. See Adams (1982: 188).

  Exuet omnem / corporis ornatum = “he will strip every jewel from her body.”

  Oppia: see 220.

  Catulla: mentioned at 2.49, otherwise unknown.

  323. Illic = inguinibus.

  324. The return of the satiric interlocutor.

  325. Hippolytus was the object of his stepmother, Phaedra’s affections. She, like Stheneboea with Bellerophon, alleged rape when refused. In Hippolytus’s case the result was death, in that of Bellerophon, banishment and attempted murder. Grave propositum = “serious intent.”

  326–8. Haec = Phaedra.

  Repulsa = ablative of the noun repulsa, –ae, governed by erubuit.

  Cressa: Phaedra was from Crete.

  Excanduit < excandesco, –descere, –dui: “to be hot” with passion.

  Se concussere = “worked themselves up.”

  328–9. An epigram worthy of Satire 6.

  329–31. “Say what is the advice to be given to someone whom Caesar’s wife is determined to marry.” The case referred to, as becomes clear in 333, is that of Messalina (see 6.114–35), who in 48 CE publicly married C. Silius while the emperor Claudius was away. When it was revealed to Claudius, Silius, Messalina, and many others were executed. Would the outcome have been any better for Silius, however, if he had said “no”? Messalina’s wrath was equally to be feared. Juvenal sets up the scene as a rhetorical suasoria, or a declamation exercise in which advice is given to a historical figure.

  331–6. Patriciae here = nobilis, not patrician in the technical sense.

  Rapitur: there is an ironic reversal of gender roles here: Silius is the one who is taken against his will.

  Sedet = another role reversal; normally in a Roman wedding the bride is led (deducta) to the groom.

  Flammeolo: the only instance in classical Latin of the diminutive form of flammeum: “bridal veil,” so-called from its orange color.

  Tyriusque palam genialis in hortis / sternitur: “the purple coverlet of the marriage bed is spread out openly in the gardens.” Messalina will not only marry her paramour publicly, but she will consummate the marriage in the open. The gardens (hortis) are those of Lucullus, which Messalina owned and where she took refuge after having been exposed to Claudius. Tyrius = “imperial purple,” so called because the dye was made from shellfish found near Tyre.

  Ritu decies centena … antiquo: she comes bearing a traditional and quite rich dowry of 1,000,000 sesterces.

  Signatoribus = “legal witnesses.”

  Auspex: “The auspex gave the sanction of heaven to the nuptials, taking the omens before the marriage and performing a sacrifice as part of the ceremony. On this occasion, as on others in private and public life under the Empire, divination was practiced by the inspection of entrails, not by the flight of birds […]. Messalina was determined to have everything done in proper form (legitime)” (Duff 1970). Cicero, however, notes that by the late republic the auspex served mainly as a witness (De Divinatione 1.28).

  337. Tu = Silius.

  339–41. “Whether you accept or reject her proposal, you fate is sealed.” Ante lucernas = “before the lighting of the lamps.”

  342. Note how this swift all dactylic line ironically underlines the fact that Claudius is the last to know. Dedecus = neuter.

  342–4. Imperio: another gender inversion; only the emperor held true imperium, but this is Messalina’s.

  Tanti = genitive of value.

  344–5. “Choose your poison.”

  346–66. Conclusion: what we should wish for.

  346–9. Let the gods work their will, they know what is best.

  350. A fine summary epigram.

  350–3. “We are led by blind impulse in our desires for spouses and issue, but the gods know what sort of wives and children we shall have in the end.”

  354–6. “Nonetheless we must pray for something when we make sacrifice, let it be for a sound mind in a sound body.” Sacellis = diminutive of sacrum: “chapels, shrines,” the first of three diminutives, at once ironic and underlining the modesty of proper sacrifice and prayer. The sense is that while these rituals must be done, they ought not to be taken overly seriously nor become the cause of ostentatious display.

  Exta = “entrails.”

  Tomacula = “sausages.”

  357–62. “Pray for a courageous soul, free from the torments of anger, desire, and greed.” Ponat = “counts.”

  358–62. Note the way the alliteration of the first line and three successive lines rhyming in -ores bring the proper wish to a crescendo. Herculis aerumnas = the labors of Hercules. These were originally assigned to him by king Eurystheus but the Stoics interpreted them as services to mankind by the hero. They thus became the objects of potential emulation.

  Pluma = “feather bed.”

  Sardanapalli = the Assyrian king, Assurbanipal, famed for his luxury.

  363–4. The aim of imperial philosophy was self-possession and self-sufficiency through the practice of virtue.

  365–6. “The goddess Fortuna is a purely human creation.”

  CRITICAL ANTHOLOGY

  THE ROMAN GENRE OF SATIRE AND ITS BEGINNINGS

  Michael Coffey

  1 Satire as a Roman literary genre1

  When in the later part of the third century B.C. the Romans experienced the overmastering influence of Greek literature, the Greeks had already developed and brought to perfection a wide range of poetic genres from heroic epic and tragedy to scurrilous epigram. The greatest achievements of the Greek city states, notably Athens and the cities of Ionia, were followed in the third century by those of the Hellenistic period of elegance and refinement in Ptolemaic Alexandria. The Romans, although already under Greek influence of many kinds from Sicily and the settlements on the Italian mainland, had developed no indigenous literary culture of their own apart from various rustic measures, and accepted the mature forms of the Greeks of the mainland and of Alexandria with enthusiasm, making them their own. From crude beginnings Latin writers, by a gradually improving process of creative imitation, developed and expanded the main forms, epic, tragedy, comedy and, later, elegy, in such a way that much of Roman literary history may be seen as an attempt to continue and to rival the Greek tradition. But there was one important exception. For the Greeks satire w
as not an independent literary form. This was a unique Roman invention.

  Towards the end of the first century A.D. the professor of rhetoric, Quintilian, in his work on the education of an orator, Institutio Oratoria, makes a critical comparison and evaluation of Greek and Roman literature genre by genre. Having asserted parity of success for Greeks and Romans in elegy he continues: satura quidem tota nostra est (satire is entirely Roman).2 At this point he is no longer comparing relative merits. His claim is based not merely on the positive achievement of Roman satire but also on the lack of a body of Greek literature to which it could properly be compared. He hints obliquely at the primitive early satire of Ennius, but regards Lucilius as the first major satirist. After evaluating Horace and Persius very briefly he praises certain contemporaries whom he does not mention by name. He was no doubt referring particularly to Turnus, a satirist of the age of Domitian, whose works are no longer extant. It is very unlikely that Juvenal published any satires until after the death of Quintilian. The rest of Quintilian’s syllabus of satire is devoted to Varro, who wrote in the alternative convention of a mixture of prose and verse the kind of satire that was usually known as Menippean.3 Quintilian offers no value judgement on Varro’s satires, perhaps discreetly, but praises the vast range of his scholarly antiquarian output. That he does not mention the two great examples of Menippean satire of the first century A.D. that have come down to modern times is not surprising: Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis was a slight work by an author for whom he had an unusual antipathy and the Satyricon of Petronius, in form a mixture of the Menippean convention and the despised genre of the novel, contained paederastic and other erotic topics such as could not have been prescribed to the youthful aspirant to eloquence.4

  Quintilian’s list makes it clear that we have access to all the Roman satirists except Turnus. Though the remains of the satires of Ennius, Lucilius and Varro are sets of disjointed fragments, the works of Horace, in Quintilian’s view the finest satirist of all, Persius and Juvenal, and the Apocolocyntosis, have been transmitted complete, and the cruelly mutilated remains of the Satyricon are substantial enough to allow the modern reader to appreciate the qualities of this hybrid composition. Juvenal was the last Roman satirist. It is thus possible to study the history of Roman satire as an evolving literary form and to assess with some confidence the individual qualities of most of its pre-eminent exponents.