Liverpool UP (2024) h/b 166pp £85.00 ISBN 9781802974679
In this welcome and useful book the author’s learning is unobtrusively presented. It is aimed ‘primarily at readers who know little or nothing about the authors discussed in it or the language in which they spoke’; thus all Latin quotations—there are not many—are translated, and even so familiar a phrase as ridentem dicere verum is originally given in English. The book has six chapters, comprising an introduction to the subject, chapters on Lucilius, Horace, Persius, and Juvenal, and a final chapter on ‘The ongoing tradition: satire since Antiquity’. There are no footnotes or endnotes, a fact which in no way diminishes the book’s utility, while enhancing its readability.
Cited in chapter one (‘What were Roman satires?’,) Quintilian famously wrote satura quidem tota nostra est. However, G. points out that Roman satire cannot be appreciated ‘without a working knowledge of Greek culture’, and it may be that Quintilian is saying that the Romans excelled in satire, and took it much further than the Greeks ever did: the unpleasant attack on women by Semonides of Amorgos in the 7th century BC is a catalogue of insults rather than satire; nor can Aristophanes, Menander, Theophrastus, Herodas, or the disagreeable Hipponax, be summed up as satirists, although there are satiric elements in them —hardly so, however in Archilochus, the harshness of whose verses is said to have driven some of its victims to suicide.
G. sees Roman Satire as a ‘mishmash’ which eludes easy categories. But he singles out a number of regular features: the element of critique of oneself and others; a didactic tone, for which the satirists settled on the hexameter metre (in a sense following Hesiod, but also because it lends itself to writings de longue haleine, as we shall see in the cases of Horace, Persius and Juvenal: Lucilius, at least at first, used other metres). Then there are the questions of performance and reception: public recitation? Hardly. And, says G., these ‘texts are highly self-conscious poetry … satire is perhaps the most parasitic of genres’ (it is surely permissible to suggest that parody shares parasitism with satire). G. mentions Ovid and Catullus, Cicero and Tacitus, as authors who could employ a satiric or parodic style, and even satiric passages from Lucretius are called in evidence. To quote Jasper Griffin (as G. does) ‘in poetry the raw eggs of real life have been whipped into the soufflé of poetry’. It remains to be seen whether, as Persius urged, the style of the poetry is revelatory of the character of the poet.
Chapter 2: ‘The beginnings: scouring the city with caustic wit’. Lucilius (who later stood for satire in much the same way as did Orbilius for tough school-mastering or Lucullus for lavish feasting) is the subject of this chapter, although we have no complete work by him: the 1300 odd lines that have come down to us present no coherent whole, being (for example) instances of unusual linguistic usages quoted by grammarians. The fact that Lucilius (180-103 BC) was an eques and a friend of Scipio Aemilianus may have given him more freedom than might otherwise have been the case in satirising named individuals (take the case of the rather earlier poet Naevius, who offended the influential Metelli; dabunt malum Metelli Naevio poetae ran the sinister Saturnian line, and Naevius was prosecuted, exiled, and died in Utica).
Lucilius we see through the eyes (or pens) of others: ‘Now, Lucilius, you lash us one by one with your verbal abuse’. His successors describe him as wielding the sword of satire slashing away at his enemies—G. gives references to Horace, Persius and Juvenal. In his book 2 Lucilius mocks the trial of Q.M. Scaevola, who had been arraigned on a range of offences—and when Scaevola retorts effectively to his prosecutor, it is not obvious on whose side Lucilius stands—was he simply enjoying the scandal which he is describing? Of course, a satirist will often utter moral judgments, and G. quotes the longest fragment that we have, on the subject of virtu—manliness/excellence—which could come from any handbook on practical ethics. Lucilius was free to speak out to express his own personality in a way which would have been highly imprudent under, say, the principate of Domitian. The image presented of Lucilius was, says G., that of an attack dog, quoting aptly from Persius and Horace (here, in the reviewer’s opinion, G.’s references to books by Jonathan Coe and Tom Wolfe, or to Charlie Hebdo, run the risk of becoming as well-nigh unintelligible in the future as, say Simplicissimus must do to most people today—especially if this book, as it deserves, has a long shelf-life: but G. is not the only ‘offender’ in this regard). Yet despite the best efforts of G., the fragments of Lucilius, taken together with the pen-portraits offered by his satiric successors, present a tattered canvas.
In Chapter 3 (Horace: ‘Telling the truth with a smile’) we are in more familiar territory. Horace called his satires Sermones (conversations), and their tone could hardly be more distant from that of Lucilius. G. takes, or seems to take, the Iter Brundisinum as a diary of a genuine event (possibly lasting about 10 days—but G. sensibly spends no time on the journey’s duration.) G. shows that there is mockery of epic language, slapstick and parody of the Odyssey—but the focus is on the humdrum and the everyday (we cannot know, but it is permissible. if unhelpful, to wonder whether the short passage of indelicate revelation [lines 82-85] matches a similar passage in Lucilius’ own Journey to Sicily). For G., Horace composes controlled and economical verses—which notably show a lack of political engagement with national events. In Satire 10, he sets out his literary stall: he seeks the approval of Maecenas, Virgil, Pollio and a few others—by displaying the qualities of brevity, clarity, purity of diction and smoothness of composition (did he perhaps have Callimachus in mind?). In the second Satire of Book 2, G. shows us Horace equivocating: is the poet railing against the land depredations of Octavian—now the emperor Augustus? Or telling us that, after all, one’s living needs do not have to be other than minimal? G.’s carefully detailed account of Horace’s sermones brings out much that a less careful reader would pass over. Of course we are a long way from Lucilius, but would Horace, even if he wanted to, have dared to open fire on Augustus or Maecenas, his benefactor and friends? (It is the presence of Maecenas and Virgil in the Iter Brundisinum which, for this reviewer, help to give credibility to its overall veracity).
The tenets of Stoicism had been introduced to Rome by Panaetius in the 2nd century BC, and were much in vogue (visible in Lucilius, less so in Horace [Epicuri de grege porcum], and especially so in Persius). Persius (Chapter 4: ‘Burning while Rome Fiddles’) composed only six satires in his short life: they are of great interest, but remarkably difficult Latinity, not to say obscurity. When we read libertate opus est in Satire 5 we might expect his disclaimer of interest in a slave’s manumission, but we do not then get a diatribe about the iniquities (doubtless covertly expressed ) of the Principate—he was writing under Nero, and had connections with some important figures in a ‘so-called Stoic opposition’—but rather a lecture on how we are enslaved to vices, with copious examples vigorously expressed. The Stoic dictum is ‘Only the wise man is free’.
Juvenal, ‘The Artist of the Topsy-Turvy world’ in chapter 5, is much the best known and most vocal of the entirely satirical writers (Horace standing a bit to one side), even if sometimes he ‘doth protest too much’. Of his life, virtually nothing is known: he probably lived between AD 55 and 138 (so G.), and thus will have lived under Domitian, not an Emperor whom a sensible author would wish to cross. G. takes us through his career, starting from the ‘ranting malcontent’ of Satires 1-5 (Rome itself comes under heavy fire in Satire 3). Then comes Satire 6, a ‘massive tour de force attack on women’—all of them, with Messalina receiving special attention. Then, as G. observes, ‘some of the later poems are more mellow in character’, Satire 10 being singled out as a particular example; Satire 14 has harshly written lines about the associated vices of avarice and meanness, while by contrast a long extract from Satire 15 ‘ends with some moving words about shared human values’. G. takes us in a satisfactorily complete way through the Satires (16 may not have been completed) and in so doing demonstrates Juvenal’s mastery of his medium. G.’s book also covers (more briefly) Martial; the final chapter (7) takes an extended look at satire since Antiquity.
In a relatively brief book, G. has given us a survey at once detailed and wide-ranging of authors who might seem to deny summary or abbreviation, and never forgetting the pervasive presence of the tenets of the Stoics, even when those tenets are being spectacularly ignored. G. tackles manfully the frequent gross indelicacy of his authors, not hesitating to call a spade a spade when necessary. The reputations of Horace, Persius, and Juvenal emerge, if anything, enhanced: in the case of Lucilius, despite the paucity of the evidence, at least we are more fully informed. As for Persius, time, surely, to replace Conington’s commentary of 1893? And where could a better author be found than the one being noticed here?
There is a brief and well-organized Bibliography and an Index.
Colin Leach