Persius, as we might expect, uses the same conventional argument in his Program Satire. The persona says: “Like Midas’s barber, I am bursting with the truth about mankind and must speak out. However, I am no high-flown poet, but a half-boor (semipaganus) in matters of art; I produce pretty modest stuff, a great deal of nothing (tam nil), boiled down (decoctius) and direct rather than ornate.” Our external controls on this disarming confession do not help us so much here. Six short Satires of Persius have survived and nothing else but fourteen apparently prefatory lines; in addition, a good biography was produced within a few generations of his death. However, unlike the persona of Horace’s Satires, who is pleasing and constitutes a good model of sound moral thinking, the persona of Persius offends many and is so radically inconsistent with his programmatic disclaimer that critics find vast difficulties with these Satires.
There are many who eagerly agree with Persius that he is no poet and so pursue the usual factual material offered by any literature. Their favorite interest is the Stoic substance of Persius’s discourse. By proving the self-evident, that Persius uses Stoic ideas, they believe that they have contributed immensely to the understanding of the Satires. Then, there are those who chase the red herring of political allusions. Persius wrote, they say, under the monstrous Nero; it is inevitable that he would make some references to the emperor. And they can find them everywhere! Almost any innocent remark, political or otherwise, made by the earnest persona can be twisted into a sneer against Nero. The climax of such maunderings—at least, I hope it is—is the recent hypothesis by one of Belgium’s most eminent Classicists that Nero had Persius poisoned!
Italy celebrated this past year the anniversary of Persius’s death, with a typical Italian festa in Persius’s home town, Volterra. On this august occasion, various dignitaries assembled to do honor in their own academic way to the distinguished citizen of the town. Among the lectures delivered to commemorate the poet’s passing was one that has since been twice printed, apparently because the speaker, the noted Latinist Paratore, did not wish the world to miss his brilliant thesis. He develops an interesting twist on the biographical fallacy. The authoritative biography tells of a session where Persius apparently recited some of his works and the young Lucan, when his turn to recite came around, burst out with rapturous words of praise. But, notes Paratore, Satire 1 opens with a sharp attack on the institution of public readings (recitationes). We must conclude from Satire 1, then, that Persius loathed such sessions and would never stoop to reading his Satires in public, and consequently it is necessary to emend the biography by removing the offending passage. Thus, the persona forces the facts about the poet to conform!
Meanwhile, the literary problems connected with Persius languish. If critics could grasp the fact that his Stoic ideas are so superficial as to be negligible and his political ideas non-existent, they might realize that Persius’s main claim to glory is his fascinatingly labored manner of expressing these commonplaces through a specially contrived persona. With him more than any other satirist in poetry, the gap between the disavowal of poetic ability and the vast effort made to produce poetic moralization is patent. Therefore, the task of the critic—that ideal critic who has not appeared for Persius in 1900 years—remains to interpret those poetic methods first, knowing quite well that the disclaiming of talent forms a conventional and always ambiguous aspect of the persona, that the producer of poetic satire would not have essayed the genre without fundamentally poetic purposes.
The last victim of distorted criticism is a far greater poet than Persius, but one would hardly learn this from reading some of the latest discussions. In the conventional manner, Juvenal lets his persona make the same statements in Satire 1 as were made in the satires of his predecessors: “It is difficult not to write satire, for I cannot endure the many vicious scoundrels of this corrupt city. I admit that I have little talent, but my spontaneous indignation makes my verse, such as it is.” Once again, the critics face these programmatic statements, identify them with the feelings of Juvenal, and try to decide whether this vaunted indignation is as sincere as the speaker makes it out to be. Those who, like Gilbert Highet in his Juvenal the Satirist, feel the sincerity of this anger then pursue the source of it. Highet argues this way: “Something very strange and violent must have happened in the first part of Juvenal’s life to produce such powerful repercussions in the second [that is, the indignant Satires]. … Satirists are peculiarly sensitive, and their sensitivity means suffering. They have come into personal conflict with stupidity and injustice, and their satires are the direct result.” Accordingly, Highet constructs an ingenious biography for Juvenal. Juvenal’s indignation in the early Satires, he argues, resulted directly from his hatred of the villainous emperor Domitian, who had exiled him in or about A.D. 93 to Egypt.
It is not impossible that Juvenal was in fact exiled, but the evidence is ambiguous. Highet goes wrong in generalizing erroneously about the suffering of satirists—Lucilius, Horace, and Persius had no such impetus to write that we can discover—and then searching for some traumatic experience to motivate Juvenal’s indignation. Similarly, when he comes to Satire 6, Highet feels compelled to explain its violent attack on women through an imaginary chain of sad circumstances, a fictional marriage of Juvenal with a proud, selfish, and intolerable Roman lady. Granted, the indignation of the persona strikes the reader as something new and powerful in Roman satire. However, it is no more original than Horace’s smiling irony or Persius’s intolerant Stoicism, and it can be successfully explained on a poetic level without resort to biographical conjecture. Merely that we lack any good biography of Juvenal does not mean that we should allow our imaginations free rein.
It must be said in behalf of Highet that he likes Juvenal and uses his biographical methods to give the Satires a sympathetic interpretation. Opposed to him are those who deny the sincerity of Juvenal, who insist on a sharp dichotomy between what Juvenal says and what he does. According to one of the most vigorously antagonistic critics, De Decker, there is in the Satires a poet occasionally, but more frequently an orator who undermines the work of the poet by his patently false methods for displaying indignation. Juvenal is, then, predominantly a declamator, a declaimer for the audience. With the help of misunderstood Crocean ideas, the Italian Marmorale has refurbished the dichotomy. Since in his view Juvenal lacks sincerity and emotional depth and, on the other hand, manipulates the literary topoi dexterously, Marmorale denies to him the rank of poet and instead christens him a “letterato,” a professional writer, in the pejorative sense.
Light comes to the darkened minds of Classicists these days from their more sophisticated colleagues in English. In the past twenty or thirty years, English satire has become again a respectable field for scholarship, and some of the sharpest brains have concentrated their labors on Dryden, Pope, and Swift. Maynard Mack’s delightful essay, “The Muse of Satire,” starts from disagreement with Highet’s biographical methods and proceeds to outline the conventional character of the persona in Pope. More recently, Alvin Kernan has discussed Jacobean satire in an important book, The Cankered Muse. Kernan has shown that the Jacobeans favored a violent persona like that of Juvenal, whereas the Augustans favored Horatian methods. Even more important, it seems to me, is Kernan’s suggestion that, in the case of these violently indignant speakers, the poet has deliberately attributed to them objectionable and offensive ways, more or less as a warning to the audience to dissociate itself from their indignation. In other words, sometimes the persona created by the satiric poet is so distinct from the poet’s biography that the two are opposites.
I suspect that Kernan’s theories provide the solution to the critical dilemma over Juvenal: that Highet is right in a sense to argue for sincerity and Marmorale right in a sense to belabor the insincerity. If, following Kernan, we maintain a distinction between Juvenal and the speaker he creates for the Satires, then we can call the speaker genuinely indignant; but we must also add that Juvenal has so port
rayed him that his prejudices and exaggerations are unacceptable, and for sound poetic reasons. The persona is indignant, but wrong, in many cases, as, for example, in his universal denunciation of women, even the most upright; reading or listening to such ranting, the Roman audience recognized the untruth and re-interpreted the described situations, stimulated by the Satires, more accurately.
We are possibly, therefore, at the beginning of a new era in studies of Roman satire, lagging as usual a generation behind the critics of English literature. We are discovering the conventions of the genre and seeing some of the implications of the critical doctrine that separates poet from personal speaker in the poem. When, therefore, the speaker in satire tries to distract us from the art of the poet and forces us to attend to his so-called “truth,” we are less willing to be deceived than formerly. Nor shall we be perturbed to find that, after all, Roman satire is poetry.
THE PROGRAMMATIC SATIRE AND THE METHOD OF PERSIUS I
John Bramble
It was common practice for the Roman satirist to give an account of his genre, arraigning public vice, perhaps ridiculing the insufficiencies of the other literary forms, and informing the reader of the tone which he himself intended to adopt. The vehicle for this account was the programmatic satire. It is quite clear that Horace Satires II.1, Persius I, and Juvenal I are related compositions. Their shared features have been duly discussed in the secondary literature. Noting that a scholiast entitles Juvenal’s first satire cur satiras scribat, also the corresponding formal characteristics of the three programmes, L. R. Shero concludes:1 ‘Each of the satires is constructed upon a traditional framework; and we may reasonably conclude that a satire of this type, ostensibly justifying the writing of satire by means of conventional devices and stock arguments, came to be looked upon as an indispensable feature of the satirist’s stock-in-trade.’ More recently, E. J. Kenney has detected the following ‘pattern of apology’:2 ‘First, a pronouncement, lofty to the point of bombast, of the satirist’s high purpose and mission. Second, a warning by a friend or the poet’s alter ego or the voice of prudence – call it what you will. Third, an appeal by the satirist to the great example of Lucilius. Fourth, a renewed warning. Fifth and last, evasion, retraction and equivocation.’3 But similarities apart, there is a marked degree of divergence in procedure. It is this – innovation within convention – which will occupy my attention.
First, we notice that Persius’ programme deals with the blight which has invaded contemporary literature; secondly, that this blight is indicative of moral deficiency. Through criticism of style, the satirist effects another, more serious criticism – of morals. By way of contrast, he emerges with his chosen genre, and his exclusive audience, as one of the last ethically irreproachable Romans, and as the last adherent of sanity and health in style. The major part of the satire is composed of a subtle commerce between style and morals, which engineers an impression of total corruption. Previous critics have noted the presence of a moral dimension alongside the literary-critical, but there has been no analysis of the exact nature of their interaction. We are correctly guided by the comment of, for example, G. C. Fiske, ‘His main concern is after all rather with literature as a social phenomenon than with literature as an art’, also, ‘Persius is, as usual, more concerned than Horace with the social conditions which breed poetry of this type’;4 compare Shero, ‘It is important to remember that Persius’ attack upon the literary tendencies of his day, with which the greater part of the satire is occupied, is in reality an attack upon the prevailing moral corruption of which these tendencies are the efflorescence. The underlying moral debasement is suggested especially in vss. 15–21,5 30–35, 83–87, 103–106’,6 and W. H. Semple, ‘It is this change in literature, originating in the common luxury of the age, that Persius regrets in his first satire.’7 The position is clarified by Kenney, who notes the all-important link between the programme of Persius and Seneca’s one hundred and fourteenth Epistle: ‘The body of the satire between vv. 12 and 120 is taken up with a dissertation on literature and morals at Rome, much of which recalls the 114th Epistle of Seneca and which is founded on the same text, talis hominibus fuit oratio qualis vita.’8 Style reflects life.
Like Persius, Seneca attributes decline in literature to the decadence of the times. After the preliminary formulation of the principle, we find that style follows the proclivities of society – genus dicendi aliquando imitatur publicos mores …; and can be proof of moral decay – argumentum est luxuriae publicae orationis lascivia (§2) – that is, it can operate as a symbol of decadence. Maecenas is singled out to illustrate the proposition, non oratio eius aeque soluta est quam ipse discinctus?, §4; soluta and discinctus could be interchanged. Man and style are identical. His literary affiliations are paralleled by the outward display of his personal life, non tam insignita illius verba sunt quam cultus, quam comitatus, quam domus, quam uxor, §4. A list of the stages in luxury’s progress which have prepared for the downfall of Roman literature occurs at §9, the catalogue including cultus corporum, supellectilis, ipsae domus, cenae, symptoms of decline similar to those of Persius, who inveighs against physical appearance – cultus corporum – at 1.15 f., furniture – supellectilis – at 17 and 52–3, and banquets – cenae – at 30 ff. and 51 ff. Here, then, is a series of potential correlatives to the phenomenon of stylistic decay.
The history of the idea behind the Senecan Epistle, that literature is a guide to morals, is partly documented in the excursus at the end of this chapter. Adopting the concept, Persius in turn made morals mirror style, assisted in his dramatic development of the principle by the extensive possibilities inherent in the moralistic colour of literary-critical vocabulary. For rhetoricians and critics employed an idiom which was equally valid in matters of style and matters of morality: in particular, literary blemishes were chastised as if moral offences. Sometimes the analogy is only latent, or even inactive: witness Quint. VII. 3.56, id est mala affectatio, per omne dicendi genus peccat, nam et tumida et pusilla et praedulcia et abundantia et arcessita et exultantia sub idem nomen cadunt, where peccat is the only unequivocally moral element, even though the various stylistic faults might have been developed into concrete representations of vice. For instance, turgidity – tumida – need not have been so closely confined to style: parallel images from those vices which swell the human body – gluttony, perhaps, or gout – could have expanded its area of reference. Likewise, pusilla might have been accompanied by a depiction of mental weakness, praedulcia and exultantia by images of effeminacy and sexual excess. A similar catalogue of defects occurs at Quint. XII. 10.73:
falluntur enim plurimum qui vitiosum et corruptum dicendi genus, quod aut verborum licentia exultat aut puerilibus sententiolis lascivit aut inanibus locis bacchatur aut casuris si leviter excutiantur flosculis nitet aut praecipitia pro sublimibus habet aut specie libertatis insanit, magis existimant populare et plausibile.
Again, the terminology has latent moral import, but is metaphorically weary, tied by a merely tenuous thread to its place of origin in life.
But properly handled, it had distinct potential. Many terms drawn from human moral existence were at the satirist’s disposal: for example, besides those already seen in Quintilian, effeminatus, ebrius, pinguis, and meretricius. So when Persius turned to the shortcomings of contemporary literature, he was not only equipped with a principle which directly correlated life and style, but he also had at hand a vocabulary predisposed to disapprobation. If he had used it as it stood, the first satire would have contained a moral dimension anyway, an inevitable circumstance of the terms. But his focus would have been centred on literature, since nobody acquainted with the metaphors of the schools would have been led by mere recurrence to the awareness of moral corruption required by Persius as satirist. In effect, he would have remained a literary critic. But in order to justify his choice of genre, evidence of moral concern must coincide with treatment of literature, so earning the title of satirist, as well as literary critic.9 His sol
ution is to rejuvenate the stylistic metaphors, by taking them back to their place of genesis in life, so reversing the process which gave them birth. Actual effeminacy now corresponds to stylistic effeminacy; gluttony to turgidity; over-meticulous dress to fussy ornament in style; disease and distortion to disfigured composition. From the theoretical principle, talis hominibus fuit oratio qualis vita, and its ramifications in literary-critical terminology, Persius creates a class of images which refer simultaneously to life and letters. To these he adds several reminders of the now dishonoured past, and through the recurrent incidence of auricula, backed up by the repeated euge and belle, insinuates that Rome’s ears are diseased and incapable of true judgement. My next chapter will be devoted to these various motifs and images, in an attempt to discover something of their history and background, before I go on to assess their function in the context of the first satire.
But first a few words on ancestry. It has been observed that the programmatic satire had its own conventions: can we find a Lucilian or Horatian precedent to the method of Persius – to the depiction of life and letters as interrelated entities? In the case of Lucilius exact conclusions are difficult. Ingredients of the later prescription can be discerned, in book twenty-six for instance, of which J. H. Waszink writes: ‘His program … presents a discussion of the poet with a friend who, like Trebatius in Horace, tries to persuade him out of his purpose of writing satires, but who finally – again like Trebatius – capitulates before Lucilius’ argument, viz., that the poet has not only the right but also the duty towards his fellow-citizens to attack and blame anything detrimental to Roman society.’”10 Then there is book thirty, with its disclaimer of malicious intent. There are observations on the moral mission of satire, and on its style; but it is hard to say if there was anything which fore-shadowed Persius’ sustained identification between the two. Such evidence as remains is collected in the excursus.
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