VERSIONS OF THE SATIRIC CAREER

In discussions of Roman poets, the term ‘career’ is most often used in reference to authors who wrote in a variety of genres, such as Ennius, Virgil and Ovid. In the work of these poets, well-marked transitions from one genre to another adumbrate literary biographies of sorts. By contrast, the satiric poets, with the exception of the prolific and versatile Horace, are not described as having progressed through ‘careers’. This has several likely causes: the fact that most of the poets in question restricted themselves to satire, the different length and structure of each poet's contribution, differences among the authors' social and financial circumstances, the genre's strong associations with performance and the idea of the fictive persona, and the current interest in satire as social discourse. But the prominent constructed author figure and his commentaries on his environment, his memories and his aims, encourage us to consider satiric texts as stories about the author. Satire's characteristic subjectivity can be read as manifesting a ‘career consciousness’ in the generic formula. We may define the satiric career as the narrative that is strung together with even the briefest fictionalized portraits of the satirist figure, a narrative that posits an on-going and symbiotic relationship between the satiric text and the world that the poet inhabits and negotiates.