Latin Verse Satire
Page 54
The training in all three kinds of public speaking was done through a combination of exercises and the study of specimen speeches. Students had to compose practice cases on specific or general themes. The earliest Roman handbook which survives, the Rhetorica ad Herennium, which dates from around 80 BC, shows the set topics which were thought likely to crop up in senatorial debates and in the law-courts. But our fullest source is the writings of the Elder Seneca of the first half of the first century AD. Seneca’s works are memoirs of famous rhetorical teachers and famous orators of his time. This body of Roman declamation, i.e. public speaking, is divided into Suasoriae (persuasions) and Controversiae (disputes).
Suasoriae consist of advice given to famous characters from history or legend on the proper course of action they should take. For example, ‘Agamemnon deliberates whether to sacrifice lphigeneia, for Calchas says that otherwise sailing is impossible’ (Seneca Suas. 3); ‘Alexander the Great, warned of danger by an augur, deliberates whether to enter Babylon’ (Suas. 4); ‘Cicero deliberates whether to beg Antony’s pardon’ (Suas. 5); ‘Antony promises to spare Cicero’s life if he burns his writings: Cicero deliberates whether to do so’ (Suas. 7). In giving this advice, the orator would often appeal to concepts such as honour (honestum), right (fas), fairness (aequum), advantage (utile), obligation (necessarium), duty (pium) and so on.
In a controversia, the speakers argued on opposite sides of a legal or quasi-legal case: competition was, therefore, a central feature of this kind of declamation. Plausibility was important, but so was innovation. These two demands pulled in opposite directions at times, as can be seen from a couple of examples. First, in the case of the prostitute priestess (Seneca Contr. 1.2), a virgin who had been captured by pirates and sold into prostitution but later returned to her family seeks a priesthood. The dilemma is deepened by the story: she appealed to her clients for assistance but when one client refused, a struggle followed in which she killed the man; she was, however, acquitted of his murder. The controversia consists of arguments as to whether or not the woman is eligible for priestly office, given the legal requirement that a priestess be chaste and pure. Another example is Sen. Contr. 1.5, ‘The man who raped two girls’. The law cited here is as follows: ‘A girl who has been raped may choose either marriage to her ravisher without a dowry or his death.’ The situation posed is this: ‘On a single night, a man raped two girls. One demands his death, the other marriage.’ The controversia consists of the arguments for and against the different outcomes. It is a matter of some debate how close such cases were to real-life legal cases. The general suspicion is that the emphasis on originality resulted in a lurid and grotesque flavour which seems to resemble the obsessions of our tabloid newspapers today.
Personae, persuasion and power
The Roman education system, then, was directed towards public speaking. The training in words was paramount: the emphasis was upon anything and everything that might impress and persuade: clever arguments, paradox, point (sententia), vivid description (enargeia), the arousal of emotions. And this training gave the speaker the means of adopting different personae on different occasions, depending on the circumstances, and of doing so convincingly. The young aristocrat needed this skill to succeed, because Roman public and political life centred upon public speaking. Power was in the word. And because this training was shared by the members of the elite, they were in a position to recognise and appreciate the use of precisely this skill by others both in declamation and in other spheres of expression, such as poetry.
Rhetoric and satire: Cicero and Juvenal
An example which brings together rhetorical theory and the practice of Roman satire will show how this works. Cicero provides a list of the topics which an orator can use to arouse indignation or pity from his audience in the conclusion (peroratio) of his speech On Invention (De inventione) 1.100–9. His extensive list of fifteen topics which can fire the audience’s indignation (1.100–5) shows a striking similarity to the kinds of things Juvenal’s angry speaker says. It would be possible to draw examples from throughout Satires 1–6 but the point is perhaps made most effectively by focusing upon one extended passage. The closing passage of Satire 6 (627–61) is in effect the peroration to Juvenal’s angry satires and it is particularly rich in these marks of indignation. The message here is that women are capable of the worst crimes. This general message corresponds to the following topics in Cicero’s list:
2. Passionate demonstration of the parties affected by the act which is being denounced: all people or superiors or peers or inferiors.
7. Demonstration that the deed was foul, cruel, wicked, tyrannical.
The passage starts with a warning addressed to wards and to children about their stepmothers and mothers:
Why, now it is lawful to murder a stepson.
I’m warning orphans as well: if you own a sizeable fortune,
watch out for your lives; don’t trust anything served at table.
Those blackening cakes are highly spiced with a mother’s poison.
Let somebody else be the first to munch what she who bore you offers you;
get your nervous tutor to test the drinks.
(Sat. 6.628–33)
This corresponds to topic no. 11 in Cicero:
11. Demonstration that the crime was committed by a person who least of all should have committed it and who might have been expected to prevent it happening.
The vivid picture created by the details of 631–3 is typical of the graphic descriptions which abound in Juvenal and which put into practice Cicero’s advice to the orator:
10. Enumeration of the attendant circumstances to make the crime as vivid as possible.
The speaker proceeds to appeal to the Roman state:
You think this is fiction? That my satire has donned theatrical boots,
that going beyond the bounds and law of earlier writers
I am raving in Sophocles’ gaping style a lofty song
of things unknown to Rutulian hills and Latin skies?
(634–7)
This connects with Cicero’s first piece of advice to the orator, that indignation may be aroused by:
1. Consideration of the great concern shown by the relevant authority
– the gods, ancestors, rulers, states, Senate, authors of laws – about
the matter under discussion.
The next lines make it clear that the woman’s murder of her children was premeditated:
Would it were all a dream. But Pontia cries ‘It was me!
I confess; I got some aconite and administered it to my children.
The murder was detected and is known to all; but I am the culprit!’
Two, do you say, at a single meal, you venomous viper,
two at a sitting? ‘Yes, and seven, had there been seven!’
(638–42)
This exactly puts into practice item 6 on Cicero’s list:
6. Indication that the act was premeditated.
By calling her a ‘venomous viper’ (641) the speaker places the murderess on a bestial level, fulfilling another element of Cicero’s advice:
8. Demonstration that the deed is unique and unknown even among savages, barbarians and wild beasts, typically acts of cruelty committed against parents or children or acts of injustice towards people who cannot defend themselves.
The remainder of the poem introduces a comparison between the horrific heroines of Greek tragedy and modern women which is designed to show how much worse modern women are:
Let us believe what tragedy says concerning Procne
and the cruel woman of Colchis; I won’t dispute it. They too
dared to commit some monstrous crimes in their generation –
but not for the sake of cash. Extreme atrocities tend
to cause less shock when fury incites the female to outrage,
and when, with their hearts inflamed by madness, they are carried down
like boulders wrenched from a mountain ridge
as the ground collapses
and the vertical face falls in from beneath the hanging cliff-top.
I cannot abide the woman who assesses the profit, and coolly
commits a hideous crime. They watch Alcestis enduring
death for her man, but if they were offered a similar choice
they would gladly let their husband die to preserve a lapdog.
Every morning you meet Eriphyles in dozens, and also
daughters of Danaus; every street has a Clytemnestra.
Whereas, however, Tyndareus’ daughter wielded an oafish
and awkward two-headed axe which needed both her hands,
now the job is done with the tiny lung of a toad –
though it may need steel if your son of Atreus is now immune,
as the thrice-defeated monarch was, through Pontic drugs.
(643–61)
This is an excellent case of Cicero’s ninth recommendation:
9. Comparison of the deed with other crimes to enhance the horror.
And, finally, it is clear that the speaker expects his audience’s sympathy throughout, just as the orator trying to simulate and provoke indignation does, according to Cicero:
14. Request to the audience to identify with the speaker.
The convergence of rhetorical theory and practice in this passage – and throughout Juvenal’s satires – would have been appreciated by his audience who had received the same grounding as the poet. When De Decker entitled his important monograph of 1913 Juvenalis declamans, he drew attention to a crucial aspect of Juvenal’s approach to satire. This was augmented by Scott’s 1927 study of the grand style in Juvenal: anger, after all, is a big emotion and needs an expansive form of expression.
Both scholars understood well the close relationship between Roman poetry and the rhetorical education of the Roman élite. (Modern reservations surrounding the word ‘rhetoric’ are completely inappropriate in a Roman context. In our society it is possible to say of a politician’s speech, ‘it’s just rhetoric’, as a way of dismissing that speech without engaging with it, probably because we feel distanced from the entire process of politics. The élite Romans with whom we are concerned here, by contrast, were constantly engaged in politics.) Juvenal, like his élite audience, was trained to be a showman: to create whatever persona is required for the context and to make it a convincing creation. And this does not apply to Juvenal alone. The same applies to whatever persona is selected: the mask of anger, the mask of mockery or the mask of irony. In every case, the poems of Roman satire are best understood as performances and as miniature dramas.
THE BODILY GROTESQUE IN ROMAN SATIRE: IMAGES OF STERILITY1
Paul Allen Miller
The joyful, open, festive laugh. The closed, purely negative satirical laugh. This is not a laughing laugh. The Gogolian laugh is joyful.2
It is virtually impossible today to write about the body, the grotesque, or the comic without encountering the work of Mikhail Bakhtin. Since the publication of Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin’s concepts of “carnival” and “grotesque realism” have become major players in all such discussions.3 One of the unfortunate side effects of this phenomenon has been that more often than not the historical and generic specificity of Bakhtin’s argument has been lost in the rush to hail the triumph of the lower bodily stratum, the celebration of fertility, and the subversion of authority wherever images of the grotesque are to be seen.4 This cavalier appropriation of his concept of carnival has, in turn, made it easy to discredit Bakhtin’s analyses by simply pointing out examples of the grotesque to which carnival exuberance seems foreign, if not antithetical.5 One such case is Roman satire.6 This paper, however, will demonstrate the essential correctness of the Bakhtinian position in regard to Latin satire by returning from the vague, widely disseminated image of carnival gaiety that has been attributed to Bakhtin to the specificity of his text in which he argues that satire, though often rich in grotesque imagery, is essentially bereft of the idea of its regenerative force. Consequently, the festive laughter of carnival and the negative laughter of satire are always, as in our epigraph, strictly distinguished.
More importantly, Bakhtin, in the chapter entitled “Rabelais in the History of Laughter” makes a sharp distinction between satire and the carnivalesque, and between the classical body and the grotesque. For him, satire, far from representing the revivifying gaiety of carnival festivity, exemplifies a one-sided negativity whose predominant thematic structure is one of stasis rather than growth.7 Any form of grotesque degradation that does not include a strong restorative element within it represents not the fulfilment of carnival but its loss. Writing about the grotesque ritual of crowning the king of fools and the consequent uncrowning of normative authority that he saw at the heart of carnival gaiety, Bakhtin notes:
This ritual determined a special decrowning type of structure for artistic images and whole works, one in which the decrowning was essentially ambivalent and two-leveled. If carnivalistic ambivalence should happen to be extinguished in these images of decrowning, they degenerated into a purely negative exposé of a moral or socio-political sort, they became single-leveled, lost their artistic character, and were transformed into naked journalism.8
This genre of the “purely negative exposé” represents for Bakhtin the world of satire. And while we may find the artistic evaluation of such works as “naked journalism”9 less than satisfying, this statement clearly demonstrates the impossibility of simply assimilating Bakhtin’s concept of satire to the carnival-esque. The presence of the grotesque is simply not a sufficient ground on which to determine that a given work belongs to the tradition of carnival.
In addition, the classical body, i.e., the ideal body of high classical sculpture and art, for Bakhtin is one which is sealed and finished. It does not leak. The grotesque body, however, is one whose orifices are open to the world. It spills over well-defined bounds. It is budding and feculent.10 If Bakhtin’s basic distinction between carnival and satire is accurate, then, we would not expect the grotesque bodies of Roman satire to produce images of carnival fecundity. Instead they would be negative creations—icons of sterility, degradation, and ultimately death.
This paper will argue that such a characterization of Roman satire is essentially correct and will examine six representative passages in this light, two from each of the major surviving Roman satirists: Juvenal 9.43–46, where the bisexual gigolo11 Naevolus negatively compares servicing his master’s cinaedic desires to the labor of a common slave ploughing his master’s field; Juvenal 6.116–35, in which the empress Messalina is shown moonlighting at a whorehouse; Persius 1.15–25, where bad (i.e., effeminized) poetry is represented as invading bodies whose orifices are open and liquid, penetrating the loins, tickling the innards, and feeding the ears; Persius 4.33–41, in which Alcibiades depilating his genitals is compared to a farmer weeding his field; Horace’s wet dream on the journey to Brundisium, Satires 1.5.82–85, a passage in which the poet’s comic, frustrated sexuality is implicitly juxtaposed with the serious political work of Maecenas, Antony, and Augustus; and Horace 2.8.42–56 in which the presentation of the pregnant lamprey at the climax of the Cena Nasidieni leads to the collapse of a dust-filled canopy hanging over the table. In each of these cases, the bodies in question appear as open, leaking vessels, and in each of these cases images of farming, food, or banqueting appear in close proximity, and in each case sexuality is present. Yet this intermixing of grotesque bodies, food, and sex does not lead to increase or growth, but rather to sterility, decline, and/or fruitless frustration.12
The truth of this understanding can perhaps best be seen by directly comparing the first scene from Juvenal to one in Rabelais, the birth of Gargantua. The birth of Gargantua is remarkable on a number of levels. The setting is a feast at Mardi Gras during which Gargantua’s mother consumes “sixteen quarters, two bushels, and six pecks” of poorly-washed tripe, as a result of which she has a monstrous attack of diarrhea that causes her to
go into labor. “O belle matiere fecale que doivoit boursoufler en elle” [Oh what fine fecal matter to swell up inside her!].13 The miraculous birth itself occurs as a result of a softening of the right intestine and the astringent which was applied as a remedy:
Dont une horde vieigle de la compaignie, laquelle avoit la reputation d’estre grande medicine … luy fesit un restrinctif si horrible que tous ses larrys tant feurent oppilez et reserrez que à grande pene, avecques les dentz, vous les eussiez eslargiz, qui est chose bien horrible à penser …
At this point a dirty old hag of the company who had the reputation of being a good she-doctor … made her an astringent so horrible that all her sphincter muscles were stopped and constricted. Indeed you could hardly have relaxed them with your teeth which is a most horrible thought …14
The medicine has a similarly constricting effect on Gargamelle’s womb, causing the young giant to be born from his mother’s ear (in a parody of Mary’s conception of Jesus through hearing the word of the Holy Spirit). This scene’s saturation with images of feasting, excrement, death, and new life is in many ways typical of Bakhtin’s understanding of grotesque realism. In it, the womb and the bowels, sexuality and shit, birth and death are here tied up into one “grotesque knot” of carnivalesque vitality.15
Juvenal’s view of the grotesque is very different. It is not fertile and revivifying, but sterile. The passage from Satire 9 at which I want to look has many of the same elements found in the birth of Gargantua. It contains images of eating, excrement, and sexuality in a context rich with metaphors of the earth and agriculture (9.43–46):
an facile et pronum est agere intra viscera penem