12
Satire
Llewelyn Morgan
1. Introduction : definition and beginnings. In Satire we have the most developed surviving specimen of an ancient literary genre—as it was invented, by Quintus Ennius; achieved its seminal shape, in the works of Gaius Lucilius; and then developed in a classic pattern of imitation and reaction from one exponent of the form to the next (Horace to Persius to Juvenal) over a period (all told) of four centuries. Ironically, though, this near-perfect literary genre consistently disputed the suggestion that it was in any proper sense literary at all, and made a rich career out of doing precisely what literature shouldn’t.
It is appropriately as an alternative to (proper) literature that ‘satire’ makes its first appearance in Latin letters. The word satura as a description of a type of writing (for its use in Livy’s description of dramatic performances, see Goldberg, Chapter 1 above, and Panayotakis, Chapter 9 above) originates in connection with Quintus Ennius, author of the great national epic Annales. Alongside this more serious, public poetry, Ennius seems to have composed occasional pieces which were diverse in topic and (especially metrical) form, but consistently of a less elevated nature than the Annales. Only ‘seems’, because our knowledge of Ennius’ Satires is extremely limited, only a few fragments surviving. But we can tell that he wrote about his own everyday experiences in these poems, moralized a little, and delivered some homespun philosophy. The later satirist Persius has Ennius writing his satire (specifically, in this case, exhorting his readers to visit a particular seaside resort) after he had ‘snored off being Quintus Homer’, that is, laid off pretending to be the awkward Roman version of Homer which (Persius thought) Ennius couldn’t help but be in his epic poetry. In Persius’ account, at least, Ennius’ satire is associated with a disdain for higher art (and for the pretence that was part and parcel of it) which is very familiar from the later history of the genre: Ennius’ satire is a case of ‘waking up’ to reality, from the dream which corresponds to literary production. But as far as the future of the genre was concerned, Ennius’ greatest contribution was the name itself, satura, a word whose rich associations would continue to be felt in the genre, and to shape it (or misshape it, as we shall see), throughout its history. The source of the word is discussed in what is for us a precious passage in a grammarian called Diomedes:
‘Satire’ (satira) is the name for a type of Roman poetry which is now abusive and designed to attack human failings on the model of Old Comedy, such as was written by Lucilius, Horace and Persius. At one time also poetry which was composed out of diverse small poems, such as was written by Pacuvius and Ennius, was called ‘satire’… The word ‘satire’ (satura) comes from the dish (lanx) which in ancient times was crammed with a large number of diverse first fruits during religious rites and offered to the gods and which was called ‘full to bursting’ (satura) from the abundance and plenitude (saturitas) of the material…, or else from a particular type of sausage which was crammed with many things and according to Varro was referred to as ‘stuffed’ (satura)… Others think that the name came from the ‘catch-all law’ (lex satura), which encompasses in one bill many provisions at the same time, the argument being that in the poetry known as ‘satire’ (satura) many small poems are combined together…
We can, following Gowers (1993a) 109-26, take from this passage at least four associations that the term satura will have possessed for authors and readers of a genre bearing the name. Satura describes things which are disorderly agglomerations, mixtures of subordinate objects—laws, fruits or poems—made without much concern for organisation. Satura also implies a characteristically exuberant excess: the dish of first fruits, the catch-all law, and the sausage all comprise materials that are in constant danger of breaking out of their confines. Satura is thus poetry which is ‘full to bursting’ in this respect as well as in its internal disorder, always threatening that quality of order and system that is an intrinsic feature of conventional literature. But satura is also a low, subliterary word, a term properly applied to things as alien to literature, as generally understood, as food, or messy food-like phenomena such as the ‘catch-all law’, more literally ‘mishmash law’, a pejorative description not unlike our ‘dog’s breakfast’. Finally, though, satura is a word with clear nationalistic associations. The Greek epigrammatist Meleager, apparently referring to the lanx satura mentioned by Diomedes, talks of the ‘Roman dish’, suggesting it was a dish with the same kind of associations as roast beef or apple pie, capable of representing the Roman race itself. In short, then, by virtue of writing a style of literature going by the name of satura, satirists were committing themselves to literature which had no internal consistency, no external shape, and low to non-existent artistic aspirations, but which was Roman to the core. Each one of those characteristics could amount to a denial of literary status tout court. It was a recipe rich in contradictions, which would provide fuel for creativity for a long time to come.
2 : Lucilius (see also Goldberg, Chapter 1 above). There is more of Lucilius’ satire surviving than Ennius’s, but then again there was much more to lose, thirty books in total. Even the fragments fill a whole volume, Warmington (1938). This is a deplorable loss, since Lucilius set the terms of the genre for his successors in an unusually authoritative way. But we have some extended fragments from his works which allow us to see how the characteristics hinted at by Diomedes may have played themselves out. A fragment survives from Book 17 in which somebody, probably Lucilius’ satirical persona, attacks and debunks, in terms instantly recognisable from later satire, complimentary descriptions of women, specifically those found in Homeric epic (frs. 567-73 Warmington):
num censes calliplocamon callisphyron ullam
non licitum esse uterum atque etiam inguina tangere mammis,
conpernem aut uaram fuisse Amphitryonis acoetin
Alcmenam atque alias, Ledam ipsam denique—nolo
dicere; tute uide atque disyllabon elige quoduis—
couren eupatereiam aliquam rem insignem habuisse,
uerrucam naeuum punctum dentem eminulum unum.
You don’t think, do you that any ‘fair-tressed’, ‘fair-ankled’ woman
could not have touched belly and even groin with her breasts,
or that Alcmena ‘spouse of Amphitryon’ could not have been knock-kneed or bandy-legged,
and that others, even Leda herself, could not have been—I don’t want to say it:
see to it yourself and choose any disyllable you want—
that ‘a girl of good parentage’ could not have had some outstanding mark,
a wart, a mole. a spot, one little protruding tooth?
This passage very obviously rejoices in demeaning its subjects. It takes glamourizing descriptions of women and exposes them for their dishonesty. The flattering descriptions are, not coincidentally, all in Greek: the collision between misleading fantasy and brute reality is at the same time one between glib Greek and honest-to-goodness Latin. They are all from Homer, too, so the passage is also, amongst other things, a critique of specifically epic ways of speaking. But the antagonistic stance it adopts towards high literature is perceptible in other ways too. One of Lucilius’ most telling contributions to satirical practice is his decision early on in his career to abandon the motley collection of mainly dramatic metres Ennius had used in his satire, and to compose exclusively in the hexameter, the form associated with the epic poetry of Homer and Ennius. But Lucilius’ hexameter is a standing affront to the principles of order and beauty for which the epic hexameter was meant to be the vehicle. In this passage the fragments of Homeric verse are a reminder of how hexameters should flow, the splendid cadence of ‘Amphitryonis acoetin’, ‘spouse of Amphitryon’, for example, from the Odyssey. The line before it is an equally splendid piece of metrical vandalism on Lucilius’ part. It is huge, at first sight far too big for the metrical scheme, but crammed in by means of elision between vowels of a staggering order: the central part of the line (licitum esse uterum atque etiam inguina) has to be pronounced something like ‘licitwessuterwatquetiaenguina’, a gobstopper worthy of James Joyce, another exuberant abuser of Homer’s Odyssey. Lucilius is deliberately misusing the glorious metrical vehicle of epic, in other words, even to the extent (in the fourth and fifth lines) of resigning control of his composition to another party: asking an interlocutor to complete the fourth line however he wants is a marvellous way of demeaning the hitherto mystical process of composing in the measure of heroes. But bound up with this abuse of the metrical form is a commitment to the satirical anti-principles of shapelessness and disorder. Like Diomedes’ sausage, the second line is barely contained by its formal structure, and in its bloatedness obviously reflects the bloated female body it describes. The passage as a whole represents the unstructured drift of an ordinary conversation, as far from the artificial linguistic forms of conventional hexameter poetry as it is possible to imagine. In all these respects, then, this fragment from the middle of Lucilius’ collection exemplifies satire’s hatred of artificial order, which it identified with deceit, its impulse towards the ugly, its glorious shapelessness, but above all perhaps its Romanness. Satire was the only genre that Romans could with any confidence claim as their own, as opposed to borrowed from the Greeks. In its exposure of Greek modes of expression, its corruption of a Greek metrical form and most of all its adoption of such a brutally misogynistic standpoint (Romanness and virility were concepts thoroughly interlinked), this piece of satire is a potent exercise in racial, cultural and national self-definition.
This being so, it is little wonder that Lucilius’ satire occupied a very special place not only on Romans’ bookshelves but also in their very sense of themselves. Lucilius was outspoken, politically opinionated and in ways we have investigated self-consciously Roman. Later Romans, consequently, were in the habit of reaching for the satire of Lucilius when they wanted to express something essential about their culture. Cicero, for example, describing to Atticus how surprisingly pleasant a visit to his villa had been by the dictator Caesar, lets his sense of the normality of an event which could so easily have driven home the massive gulf which separated these former political equals express itself through quotation of Lucilius’ prescription for a perfect dinner party (Cic., Att. 13.52.1):
Strange that so onerous a guest should leave a memory not disagreeable! It was really very pleasant… After anointing he took his place at dinner. He was following a course of emetics, and so both ate and drank with uninhibited enjoyment. It was a really fine, well-appointed meal, and not only that but
‘well cooked and
garnished, good talking too—in fact a very pleasant meal.’
Adoption of the Lucilian mode conveys that all is right with the Roman world, is one way of putting it. And as DuQuesnay (1984) 27-32 has suggested, this is not the least important reason for Horace’s adoption of that mode under circumstances not dissimilar to those obtaining at the time of Cicero’s letter to Atticus.
3 : Horace. In 35BC, amid the troubled conditions of the Second Triumvirate (see Farrell, Chapter 3), Horace composed the first of two books of satires, one of the aims of which was to exploit the nostalgic associations of the form to improve the standing of the warlord to whom Horace had tied his colours, the future emperor Augustus. Here was Lucilius’ style of literature being deployed to represent the circle of Augustus and Maecenas in the way Lucilius had depicted the lives of his contemporaries and friends Scipio Aemilianus and C. Laelius, Roman heroes of a bygone age. But if readers of Horace’s satires were expecting the blunt frankness and explicit politics, the libertas, of his predecessor, the quality which endeared Lucilius more than anything else to Romans, they were disappointed. The dramatic changes in Roman public life since Lucilius’ time, the movement from the rough and tumble of oligarchic politics to the restrictions of autocracy, show up clearly in the satirical genre. Horace’s satire has its fascinations, but they are of a quite different kind from Lucilius’s. Targets of abuse have become anonymous, or generalized into stock characters; the aggressive tone of Lucilian satire has been moderated; and the key virtue of libertas is in a process (continued later by Persius) of becoming more and more a quality of the individual soul, less and less of interactions between members of an active political elite. Satire is being privatized, in other words, and Horace adopts an oblique, ironic style fundamentally true to the restrictive political circumstances of his time.
Much of the energy which Lucilius expended on political tirades Horace diverts into dwelling almost obsessively on his relation to his dominating predecessor. Poem 1.5, for example, briliantly analysed by in Gowers (1993b), describes a rather aimless (from Horace’s viewpoint) journey in the direction of Brundisium, carefully avoiding letting us in on the precise nature and purpose of the mission (though we’re told enough to appreciate it’s important and worth knowing) and engaging at the same time in a complex and elusive contest with a poem of Lucilius which had described a similar journey away from Rome. The grounds for competition are largely provided by the Callimacheanism which Horace consistently professes in this collection. Lucilius’ undisciplined prolixity in his journey poem is countered by brevity and polish in Horace’s—except that so unequivocal a correction would be far too straightforward for Horace. What makes his satire so demanding and compelling, so much more difficult, ultimately, than the superficially more obscure satire of Persius, are the layers of irony and evasion in which he wreathes his material. 1.5 is a very short poem, by his own standards let alone by Lucilius’s (whose journey poem is still sizeable even in fragments). And yet Horace insists on how long his poem is: ‘Brundisium is the end of a long text and journey,’ is how it concludes. Elsewhere Horace draws attention to his extremely sluggish progress as compared with Lucilius (1.5.3-6):