Latin Verse Satire

by Miller, Paul Allen

  legitimum atque illic hesternae occurrere cenae?

  seruus erit minus ille miser qui foderit agrum quam dominum.16

  Do you think it’s nice and easy to thrust a proper-sized penis

  into a person’s guts, encountering yesterday’s dinner?

  The slave who ploughs a field has a lighter task than the one

  who ploughs its owner.17

  Although we have in this scene the same essential set of elements as in the birth of Gargantua, the accent placed on them is very different.18 Everything here leads to nothing. Food does not produce new life, only excrement that, far from representing a potential source of renewed fertility, functions only as an obstacle to a sexual activity that brings neither pleasure nor fruit to the speaker. Thus Ferguson observes that the “agricultural metaphor” of ploughing “is common of sex … but in agriculture … the plough looks forward to harvest.”19 In this scene, however, there is nothing positive, or even profitable, about the activity since Naevolus’ rhetorical question occurs in the course of a conversation about his difficulty in receiving proper remuneration for the services he renders. This sexual act is sterile not only in the literal sense, because it cannot produce offspring, but also metaphorically because it is without rewards, either monetary or emotional. Time in this poem is not pregnant with the future but held static in the sterility of the present.20 The grotesque in Juvenal’s satire, as Winkler notes, does not revitalize but represents “ambivalence, alienation, the crossing of established boundaries and aggression,”21 all of which are treated as negative values.

  Roman satire, thus, like Roman sexual norms generally, does not exalt the fluid and the open, but the solid, the closed, the literally impenetrable. In the Roman world, as Catharine Edwards argues:

  Virtue is noble, dry and hard … found in public places, pursuing the public good, winning public renown. Pleasure, on the other hand, is wet, soft (mollis, enervis) and characteristic of slaves … The ultimate fate of pleasure is not fame, but disgrace and death … virtue is presented as masculine, pleasure as feminine.22

  Unsurprisingly, Roman satire, like Roman society in general, also exalts the hard, the dry, and the masculine and degrades the soft, the liquid, and the feminine.23 It is a phallic form that specifically eschews the relativizing and revitalizing dialectic of the carnivalesque in which top and bottom, life and death, inside and outside constantly metamorphose into one another.

  True to this concept of the genre, Satire 6 features a misogynistic narrator who directs his ire against women and marriage. In the process, there are numerous descriptions of feminine behavior and sexuality, representing them as simultaneously grotesque and sterile. The open sexual body of the woman here does not give birth to new life as in the case of Gargantua’s mother but to a kind of wasting lust that saps the generative powers of both the family and the state. A prime example can be found in the description of the empress Messalina slipping out to a whorehouse as Claudius slept (6.120–32):24

  sed nigrum flavo crinem abscondente galero

  intravit calidum veteri centone lupanar

  et cellam vacuam atque suam; tunc nuda papillis

  prostitit auratis titulum mentita Lyciscae

  ostenditque tuum, generose Britannice, ventrem.

  excepit blanda intrantis atque aera poposcit.

  [continueque iacens cunctorum absorbuit ictus.]25

  mox lenone suas iam demittente puellas

  tristis abit, et quod potuit tamen ultima cellam

  clausit, adhuc ardens rigidae tentigine volvae,

  et lassata viris necdum satiata recessit,

  obscurisque genis turpis fumoque lucernae

  foeda lupanaris tulit ad pulvinar odorem.

  But with her black hair hidden beneath a blonde wig,

  she entered the steamy bordello with its old quilt

  and took up her empty cell. Then naked with gilded nipples

  she hawked her wares beneath the lying name plate, “Coyote,”

  and displayed the belly that was your home, noble Britannicus.

  She blithely received everyone, demanding cash from all comers.

  (Lying down, one after another, she absorbed the thrusts of all.)

  Then, when the pimp sent his girls home, she left sadly,

  though she stayed as long as she could and was the last

  to close her cell, still afire with the lust of her erect clitoris,

  and exhausted from, but not yet sated with, men, she went home,

  and filthy, her cheeks black from the smoke of the shameless lamp,

  she bore the odor of the bordello to the imperial pillow.26

  No doubt there is grotesque degradation in this scene. The sexualized, lower bodily stratum is featured prominently, and the heights of Roman society are brought low by their contact with it.27 But degradation is only half the story of carnival. The other half is revitalization.28 The fact that Messalina’s body had produced new life is explicitly acknowledged in the apostrophe to Britannicus. Yet that moment seems long past. Indeed, Britannicus is only addressed because his position as heir to the throne—which is underlined with generose—is being undermined by his mother’s behavior, behavior that ultimately leads to (or at least provides the rationalization for) Messalina’s execution, Claudius’ marriage to Agrippina, the adoption of Nero, and the latter being named Claudius’ heir. As a result of these events, Britannicus is removed from the line of succession and, thus, his death at the hands of his stepbrother is ensured, since Nero could hardly afford to have a pretender to the throne alive in the imperial palace (Dio 61.34–35; Tacitus, Annales 11.12, 26, 29–32, 34–38; 12.1–3, 8–9; 13.14–17; Suetonius, Divus Claudius 36–39; Nero 33.2–3). Sexuality in this satire doesn’t lead to new life but death.

  Nor does the erotic lead to happiness or pleasure in Satire 6. As with the case of Naevolus, sexuality is reduced to its least idealized, most materialized manifestations, providing neither joy (Messalina is exhausted but not satisfied) nor gain. The open sexual body is reduced to a mechanism, a sort of shock absorber that receives the thrusts of phallic sexuality in a repetition compulsion that has neither erotic nor reproductive rhyme nor reason. It is reductively anatomized in the image of the rigida volva, which is pictured as a burning (ardens), autonomous entity that exists beyond the structures of human control and certainly outside of any festive community. Indeed, it has a mind of its own, representing a species of erotic hunger that knows no satisfaction. Its voracity is limited neither by Messalina’s extraordinary efforts to feed it nor by the social laws that forbid it. By the same token, Messalina is here pictured as having an unsatisfiable erection (a kind of female satyriasis) and is therefore implicitly gendered as male. As such her sexual relations, on the ideological level, become every bit as homoerotic, and hence unregenerative, as those between Naevolus and his master in Satire 9. Finally, in the last line lupanar’s (whorehouse) assonance with pulvinar (divine or imperial pillow) identifies the imperial bed with that of the bordello. Again we have degradation without redemption. For this identification signifies neither the sexual regeneration of the imperial household nor a positive release of libidinal energy.

  The same terms, seen in the two scenes from Juvenal, are found again in the same essential relation in Persius: food that does not revivify; sex that does not satisfy; and grotesque degradation that does not edify. Our first example comes from Persius 1. In it, we move from the literal buggering of Naevolus to figurative sodomy. The penetrating party here is not a degraded gigolo, but a degraded and effeminized poetry that lacks the rough solidity that Persius and Roman ideology prizes. This kind of poetry, as Maria Wyke has recently pointed out with special reference to this passage, is most traditionally embodied within the Roman universe of genres by the soft verse of elegy, which stands in opposition to the phallic and hypermasculine form of satire.29 By the same token, the penetrated party is not the literal empress, but Rome’s cultural elite attending a recitation in the capital
. The imagistic context of this poetic pedication is important. It is filled with liquidity, trembling, and food (1.15–25):30

  scilicet haec populo pexusque togaque recenti

  et natalicia tandem cum sardonyche albus

  sede leges celsa, liquido cum plasmate guttur

  mobile conlueris, patranti fractus ocello.

  tunc neque more probo videas nec voce serena

  ingentis trepidare Titos, cum carmina lumbum

  intrant et tremulo scalpuntur ubi intima versu.

  tun, vetule, auriculis alienis colligis escas,

  articulis quibus et dicas cute perditus “ohe”?

  “quo didicisse, nisi hoc fermentum et quae semel intus

  innata est rupto iecore exierit caprificus?”

  Truly you will read these things from a lofty chair to the public, your hair slicked back, wearing your new toga, and pale then with your birthday sardonyx, when you will have lubricated your quavering gullet with a fluid modulation, effeminate31 with your lusting eye. Then you may see huge Tituses all aquiver in a manner unseemly and their voices unsettled, while poems penetrate their loins, and their secret parts are tickled by feathery verse. You old reprobate, do you gather delicacies for others’ ears that would cause you, all eaten up with gout and dropsy, to cry, “Stop, that’s enough”? “But why have such learning, if this ferment and this wild fig tree, when it has grown inside, might not burst forth from my ruptured liver”?

  The shifting images that characterize this scene offer a fascinating tour of the Roman satirical grotesque in all its sexual and alimentary dimensions. We begin with the dandified poet whose pallor is a sign of excessive sexual passion.32 The emphasis on the throat, its moisture and rippling quality, put the reader in mind of the reciter’s affected speech and prepare the audience for the combined images of perversion and gourmandise yet to come.33 The throat is not only the site of poetic articulation and potential gluttony but also of the passive sexuality implicit in the poet’s demeanor. This reading is strengthened by the description of the poet as both effeminate and possessed of a lusting, indeed “orgasmic” eye, whose quivering adds yet another level of fluidity that threatens to undermine the dry, solid virtues of the masculinist, Roman norm.34 The poetry itself becomes the instrument by which the audience is sodomized, unmanning even the most burly of old-time Romans, as these huge Tituses are pictured as being metonymically penetrated by the poet’s throat (i.e., his quavering organ of poetic articulation). This creates a bizarre image of oral/genital, or more probably oral/anal, contact in which both parties are passive—since the action moves from one open orifice to the other—a kind of impossible sexual monstrosity in Roman ideology’s normative zero-sum game.35 This last image in turn is metamorphosed into an evocation of poetry as a kind of food for the ears in which the image of penetration is transformed into one of passive consumption, but with the emphasis once again on the use of an inappropriate orifice.36 This is not the revivifying food of the Rabelaisian feast, nor does it recall the birth of Gargantua through Gargamelle’s ear. These poetic mignardises are the refined delicacies of decay. They are associated with dropsy and gout, the diseases of decadence and impotence, rather than with fuel for new life.37 Thus the grotesque marriage of food and sexuality in Persius’ satire brings forth, not a new generation of laughing giants, but sterility, decline, and ultimately death. It is not so much a feast for the ears as a plague. The final image of fermentation and sterility that we see in the wild fig, which by definition bears no fruit (Pliny NH 15.79, Juvenal 10.45),38 bursting forth from the frustrated poet’s guts sums up the sterile perversity of the poetic exercise. At the same time, the phallic thrust of the fig tree39 from the poet’s liver, the seat of lust,40 implies a destructive and empty eroticism more reminiscent of Messalina’s moonlight excursions than Gargamelle’s tripe-induced labor.

  This intermingling of sexual and gastronomic imagery stands out even more sharply in our second passage, taken from the conclusion of Persius 4. Here the young Alcibiades, whose political aspirations have at the beginning of this satire been deflated by Socrates’ biting irony, is pictured sunning himself naked when a stranger, in language grotesque and obscene, suddenly compares the young man’s efforts at depilation to those of a man unsuccessfully weeding his garden (4.33–41):41

  at si unctus cesses et figas in cute solem,

  est prope te ignotus cubito qui tangat et acre

  despuat: “hi mores! penemque arcanaque lumbi

  runcantem populo marcentis pandere vulvas.

  tum, cum maxillis balanatum gausape pectas,

  inguinibus quare detonsus gurgulio extat?

  quinque palaestritae licet haec plantaria vellant

  elixasque nates labefactent forcipe adunca,

  non tamen ista filix ullo mansuescit aratro.”

  But if all oiled up you should be relaxing and fixing the rays of the sun in your skin, there is a stranger nearby who touches you with his elbow and bitterly spits out, “What morals! To show the people both how you weed round your cock and the hidden part of your groin, your shriveled hollows.42 But when you comb the balsamed wool on your chops, why does a shaven little whistle stand out from your groin. Though five official oilers and depilators should pluck those seedlings and shake your boiled buttocks with hooked tweezers, nonetheless that hedge would not be tamed by any plow.”

  The passage starts on a tone of effeminate luxury as the well-oiled Alcibiades is pictured sunning himself in the nude. The use of the verb figo for the rays of the sun, however, introduces a sharper tone, giving us a first, veiled image of penetration. The exclamation Hi mores in 35 reminds the reader of Cicero’s famous, O tempora, o mores! at the beginning of the first Catilinarian,43 a reminiscence whose resonance is reinforced by Alcibiades’ political ambitions, discussed at the satire’s beginning. With the very next word, penem, the satirical process of grotesque degradation begins, illustrating for the reader not only how far this work is from a discussion of affairs of state, but also, to the Stoic audience for whom Persius was consciously writing, how far a satire of Alcibiades in the age of Nero was removed from the moral condemnation of Catiline in the time of Cicero. The irony is only heightened by a comparison of the inconsequential nature of the former to the genuine drama of the latter. The stakes for the republic in Persius’ day could not have been lower. The battle has already been lost. The young, dissolute aristocrat is no longer threatening to overturn the republic, but has become emperor in the person of Nero.

  This implicit contrast between present decadence and past vigor is continued throughout the passage by a series of allusions to the poetry of Cicero’s contemporary, Catullus (cf. c. 49). Thus in the very next line the interlocutor accuses Alcibiades of displaying his depilated private parts to the general public. The verb he chooses, pando, is used in almost the exact same context in Catullus 6, where the poet demands that Flavius display his latera ecfututa. The word pando is not widely used by most authors and is found nowhere else in Latin literature in an explicitly sexual context.44 Thus Persius’ usage is striking and the sentence penemque arcana lumbi / … marcentis pandere vulvas can be fruitfully read as an allusion to its lone literary predecessor, latera ecfututa pandas. Yet, while the contexts of the two passages are similar in their graphic sexuality and imagery, the upshot of Catullus’ call for Flavius to display his debauched loins is not merely shame and degradation but also the invocation of genuine carnival renewal. Flavius is said to be enjoying a hot, if rather déclassé, affair, and Catullus proposes to call both him and his febriculosum scortum to the heavens with his verse, revealing that which Flavius had hoped would remain hidden, but immortalizing his erotic adventures at the same time. The tone is playful and teasing. It is far different in the case of Persius. The result of Alcibiades’ public display of his private parts will be shame alone.

  A second Catullan allusion can be seen in line 41. The plough that the interlocutor claims will not be able to tame the brush that grows round Alc
ibiades’ anus (non … ullo mansuescit aratro) reminds the attentive reader of Catullus’ evocation of Lesbia at the end of poem 11. Here her voracious, phallic sexuality is compared to the traditionally masculine image of the plough, and Catullus himself is portrayed as the effeminized flower that is her victim (flos … tactus aratro est).45 In both Persius and Catullus the central point of the image is the inversion of expected gender relations; neither Catullus nor Alcibiades should be ploughed. But whereas the image in Catullus is pathetic, since he is portrayed as the victim of Lesbia’s brutality, in Persius, Alcibiades is portrayed as merely perverse. Moreover, while Lesbia’s sexuality in 11 is seen as too robust, it is not inherently different from that of Flavius’ febriculosum scortum in poem 6, which like poem 11 forms part of the opening sequence of the Catullan libellus. Vigorous female sexuality, however, only had its place within the Roman imaginary among the scorta Flavius frequented. Thus Lesbia’s sexual passion is not irredeemable per se, but inappropriate for one of her social station and for the kind of relationship Catullus assumed to exist between them. It is this knowledge of wasted potential that gives the Catullus and Lesbia story its pathos, its sense of lost joy, of love betrayed. It is why Lesbia’s sexuality continues to haunt him long after he has ceased to esteem her (c. 72). Alcibiades on the other hand is not only inherently perverse in his pursuit of his cinaedic desires, but those desires will also remain unfulfilled. Depilate as he might, no plough will ever penetrate that bracken. He can never be either Catullus or Lesbia.

  The tissue of republican literary allusions that Persius deploys here shows that on every level Alcibiades is an absurd and degraded figure. He not only lacks the stature of a statesman such as Cicero, but even of a villain like Catiline. His déclassé erotic adventures lack both the carnivalesque potential for redemption of Flavius and his scortum in Catullus 6 and the tragic irony of Lesbia’s phallic voracity in poem 11. Indeed, they appear to lack the prospect of pleasure at all. These references to the literary past, therefore, create a subtle counterpoint that reinforces the univocal condemnation of the object of grotesque degradation in Persius’ satires, a process continued in the agricultural metaphors that run throughout the passage. Beginning with runcans [“weeding”] in line 36, continuing with plantaria [“seedlings” or “hair”] in line 39, and finishing with filix [“hedge”] and aratrum [“plough”] in line 41, Alcibiades’ groin is consistently allegorized as a field of weeds.46 Yet this profusion of vegetative growth gives no hint of a future harvest to be enjoyed. The closest the reader comes to a feast here is the boiling (elixus)47 of Alcibiades’ buttocks, preparatory to the failed attempt at depilation. This too, however, like all the others, is to be a fruitless sexual endeavor.48