Readers of this chapter may be surprised by its Greek content. Verse satire is certainly a Roman genre, but Menippean satire (as a generic term no older than the Renaissance) is a Greco-Roman phenomenon. Its founder and patron saint is the Greek Menippus, a Cynic of the third century bce; the Roman Varro names his literary experiments Saturae Menippeae after his Greek muse. But if we are to understand Menippus at all, we need to speak of Lucian, the prolific Greek belletrist of the second century ce. This Lucian is both a student of Greek literature and an observer of the Roman scene; the fourth century Roman emperor Julian, who writes in Greek and who is influenced in one of his satiric productions both by the Roman Seneca and by the Greek Lucian, helps to illumine both Seneca and the traditions of Menippean satire in late antiquity. These Greeks have a crucial place in this Roman book, for without them the history of Roman satire, both in late antiquity and in the Renaissance, cannot be written.

To extricate a history of the genre of Menippean satire in the classical period from our intractable welter of testimonia, fragments, and imperfectly preserved literary experiments – Varro’s Menippeans, Petronius’ Satyricon, and Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis are all to varying degrees incomplete – is to acknowledge that our data, as frustrating as they are, have also overwhelmed the texts that gave them birth. The little that we can know about Menippus the author, combined with the literary uses to which Lucian puts Menippus, as character as well as author, leads me to the following conclusion: that Menippean satire is a useful name for the epicenter of a range of phenomena, both stylistic and thematic, that in fact evolve over time.

Literary understanding is often a matter of creating spaces. You read a poem and align it with another, and think about the aspects of each which are not there in the other. Literary genres often work in a similar way: they develop as writers work out and give shape to the space between themselves and their predecessors. This space might be chronological, geographical, temperamental, cultural, or linguistic; it might be narrowed by personal affinities, admiration, and cultural allegiance, or widened by differences in the forms of social relations experienced by each writer. But it is always there, even in those rare literary relationships when a writer seems to be consciously attempting to catch the flavor of a predecessor exactly. And it is by feeling what is not there in one poem or poet that you come to know what is there in another. The habitual mannerisms or recurrent points of unease of one writer are much more obvious when you read the work of another person who does not have them. This is why comparative literature matters, and this is why this volume not only contains but needs to contain chapters on the afterlife of Roman satire. Gaining a full understanding of Roman satire entails also understanding what it is not like, or not quite like, and imagining how it would look if some of its central concerns were altered or nudged slightly off center.

Does a Companion suit Roman Satire?

Is a Companion what Roman Satire needs?

It is easy to see a point in building a team to accompany study of the topic. Satire doesn't immediately strike us as a conformist or consensual arena, and so it’s bound to be a good idea to have a line-up of experts all wanting to be our special friend and bag the attention. They are unlikely to prod us for where we are coming from; or to insist on laying out their own individual(ist) wares - exposing hopes and fears/proposing apparatus and theories. That is not how this contemporary genre of critical commentary works. Not everything, perhaps, in the present collection rides comfortably in the same carriage. But there is precious little friction between the contributions on view, and if you half-anticipated that the plainstyle writing of the textbook marketplace might meet the subject matter halfway with a dash of malice, a pound of scurrility, and a sprinkle of innuendo, you'll have to admit that you skipped or nodded - or else it passed you by.

Juvenal is the satirist of comparatives and superlatives. In exploiting hexameter satire’s partnership with epic, he sets out to look bigger, denser, ruder, slyer, angrier, fleshier, more sophisticated and bilious, to the power of ten, than all the other satirists before him put together. Next to this heavyweight, Horace’s bitter-sweet social commentary, or Persius' harsh medicinal concentrate, should begin to taste like very thin soup. Juvenal rejects outright Callimachean principles of slenderness, compression, and refinement, claiming instead to be driving his chariot “down the track which great Lucilius blazed” (1.19-20). Horace’s irony lite, or Persius' short sharp shock therapy, is to be replaced by behemoth-scale onslaughts inspired by the bellicose Republican freedom fighter. Whereas Horace buries Lucilian rage beneath manicured lawns, Juvenal digs up a century of pent up angst, yet only to hurl it at corpses who cannot answer back. This is war, and there is no escape, either for his victims or readers (and we may well suspect that they are one and the same in his book). The dysfunctional morass of contemporary Rome incites antirationalistic gibe, not spiritual inner journeys or jocular reflection among friends. “Today every vice has reached its zenith,” he announces in his opening poem (149); “doesn’t it make you want to cram wax tablets with invective right there on the street corner?” (63–4).

Roman satire describes itself as play more often than it describes itself as satire. Its playfulness consists in part of its relationship to other, ostensibly more serious, literary genres (e.g. epic, oratory, history). But in several instances Roman authors link satire with play of a non-literary sort. Thus we may regard the ancient representation of satire as play as an invitation to consider satire as a social practice as well as a literary genre. Satire, like all ancient literary genres, belongs to the history of practices as well as to the history of texts: this would be clear even without references to play. But play - its meaning, variants, and social functions - provides us with a useful means of situating satire among the practices that can be reconstructed from the largely textual remains of ancient Roman culture. Such an endeavor is valuable both as an interpretation of textual references to play (i.e. as an aspect of the so-called “literary” study of satire) and as part of the related enterprise of cultural history, which requires consideration of embodied practices, as well as of more readily accessible texts.

Horace’s two books of Satires have always lurked in the shadow of the Odes. Aside from such favourite anecdotes as the much-translated encounter with a literary gatecrasher on the Via Sacra, or the “granny’s tale” of the town mouse and the country mouse, they have for the most part been found strange, profoundly unsatisfying poems, whose self-deprecating tone has condemned them to neglect. They are also, by most standards, astonishingly unsatirical. The first book, published in 36/5 bce, is Horace’s poetic debut, an “integrational” book in which a freedman’s son marks his miraculous arrival in society (after being proscribed and fighting on the wrong side at Philippi), and justifies his envied niche as a civil servant (scriba quaestorius) and poet in the “pure house” of the millionaire Maecenas. The second, published in 30 bce after the battle of Actium, is tense with all the increasing restrictions of the new regime; Horace virtually gives up the right to speak, and directs his satire mostly against himself.

The satiric gaze: the physician, the body, and the mirror

Roman satirists are experts at reading the body’s signs. The satirist’s eye, like that of a physician or an expert in physiognomy, is keen at detecting indications of sickness or health, virtue or vice. That the satirist is able to “read past” the body for the condition of the soul is an idea solidly attested already in Lucilius at fr. 678W: “we see that one who is mentally ill gives an indication of this through his body.”

The principal object of the satirist’s gaze is the world of contemporary social experiences: he catalogues his society’s distortions, sometimes aggressively, sometimes with an ironic smile, but always respecting the body’s symbolic potentials as an index of moral values and internal states. This cognitive tension, by analogy, intrudes upon language by literalizing images or metaphors and reducing abstract concepts to their real or corporeal referents, thereby extracting from them a moral significance.

Among the many intriguing aspects of Roman verse satire is the fact that it was such an early creation. Only a generation before, Latin literature had begun with the deliberate translation and adaptation not just of Greek genres, but of individual works, such as Homer’s Odyssey. Paradoxically to modern perceptions, throughout the history of Latin literature acknowledgment of Greek predecessors was to remain a sign of high poetic ambition. Roman satire, on the other hand, although not totally without precedent in Greek literature, was destined to be the only kind of Latin poetry which had a Latin name and did not openly claim a Greek model.

Owing to the loss of most early Roman literature we simply do not have enough surviving evidence to trace the formation of Roman satire with exactness. To modern literary historians Quintus Ennius (239–169 bce) represents the first phase in the development of the genre. For the Romans, however, it was created anew by Gaius Lucilius (floruit 130–103 bce). It was the latter, not Ennius, who became the generic exemplar for Roman verse satire (Horace, Sermones 1.10.46–9, 64–7; Quintilian, Institutes 10.1.95 does not mention Ennius). In fact, it was perhaps not clear until after Lucilius had made satura a vehicle of mockery and invective that a new genre had been created.

One of the things Lucilius, Horace, Persius, and Juvenal have in common is their pleasure in a nice bit of epic furniture about the place. It is easy enough to install, since epic and satire both use the dactylic hexameter. It is fun to hear Horace describe the city mouse and the country mouse going to Rome in the kind of night that falls in Roman epic (Horace, Sermones 2.6.98-101). It is amusing to see a decadent Roman aristocrat as a “boy Automedon” (Achilles' charioteer, Juvenal 1.61), or to see the admirable Pyrrha, who helps repopulate the earth after the flood by throwing stones over her shoulder, through Juvenal’s jaundiced eyes, looking like a procuress setting out her girls (Juvenal 1.84). And of course everyone enjoys a nice swipe at bad epic poets now and then. But the function of epic allusion in Roman satire should not be understood as exclusively decorative. In many genres, poets use allusions to define their poetic projects and to articulate important themes. It is well understood that the Roman satirists use allusions to or descriptions of their satiric predecessors to articulate their poetic projects. What has been less appreciated is how precisely each poet chooses his allusions to epic to define his poetic project and its political dimension.

It is a time of trouble in California. Deaths from AIDS are everywhere. Nor is the wider political scene much brighter. In Reagan’s America the poor queue up for private charity. Thom Gunn writes to his brother from San Francisco to invite him to come and share dinner, walks, talk, community. The tone - intimate, conversational, relaxed, jokey, detached - darkens as Gunn turns to current discontents:

Persius is hard to read. He wants it that way. “If you do not wish to be understood, you should be left unread” (si non vis intellegi, debes neglegi) asserts a famous sentence of Ambrogius (some attributed it to Gerolamus) that would become the rallying cry of certain of Persius' modern detractors. Difficulty, though an inescapable fact of reading Persius, ought not to be made a cause of censure in his case, but a necessary point of interest for his interpretation. In fact, any interpretation that would propose to uncomplicate an author so obviously enamored of contradictions and short-circuitings of meaning might well be regarded as suspect.

One of the chief reasons for Persius’ complexity is that two of the principal components of his satire, the imitation of Horace and Stoic philosophy, are naturally in conflict with one another, and thus he toggles between opposite poles of outspokenness and silence, public engagement and disengagement, and so on. Paradox and conflict operate at many levels in Persius’ satires, found in what his poems assume, what they assert, and in the political context that they put us in mind of. Horace, Stoicism, and the question of freedom (satiric and political) are for Persius diverse aspects of the same search.

Seneca’s Menippean satire, often entitled Ludus de morte Claudii (“Funning with the death of Claudius”), offers a sort of interlude from the play of the Roman satirists and their critics. Indeed, many features of this branch of satire seem to preclude its being comfortably set alongside Horace, Persius, Juvenal, or even Petronius (which is not to imply that these four are at all comfortable set alongside each other …). While all satirists (sometimes angrily) celebrate their belatedness, their parasitic reliance upon the tropes of earlier genres and their mimicking even of these very celebrations, the Menippean satirist, eschewing indignation, turns to self-conscious mimicry - parody. Within this play of parody is created the image of an author both in control and not in control of the work he calls “his own.” Joel Relihan has elegantly formulated it thus: “Menippean satire, one may say, opposes the word-centered view of the universe, and is a genre that, in words, denies the possibility of expressing the truth in words.” How Seneca positions Roman culture, Roman emperors, and Roman authority within this generic view is the subject of this essay. By reading the Apocolocyntosis as a text engaged in the reception of classical literature, I hope to draw out the extent to which this satire, gleefully after every event, offers to subsequent writers and scholars a mode of expression which is more than just an admission of belatedness. The project of quotation and citation, as pursued in this paper, plays a fundamental role in the creation of classical literature as quotable, as worth alluding to.

The Roman satirist approached philosophy warily, first because it was Greek, and secondly because it seemed to set itself up as a rival to the native moral tradition. Satire is basically conservative in outlook, and Roman satire upholds Roman values: change is bad, the foreign is suspect. It is for this reason that Lucilius makes fun, through a persona, of a Roman Hellenomaniac, Albucius (fr. 87-93W), that Persius depicts a centurion bidding a clipped coin for a passel of cheap Greeks (5.189-91), and that Juvenal (again through a persona) expresses loathing of a Hellenized Rome (3.60-1) and of starveling Greeks generally (3.78).

More specifically, philosophy was so quintessentially Greek an activity that its Roman adherents in the ruling élite were open to censure or ridicule. Native hostility could be exploited even by the philosopher-friendly Cicero: in two trial speeches, the Pro Murena (§§60–6) and the In Pisonem, he mocked the ethical paradoxes of the younger Cato’s rigorous Stoicism and scathingly attacked the Epicureanism of L. Calpurnius Piso because he knew he would be sympathetically heard by a Roman jury. This antipathy is parodied by Petronius, Satyricon 71.12: the plutocratic vulgarian, Trimalchio, insists that his epitaph will record that he took no heed of philosophers.

Satire is about blame and about masks. Performance, ritual or other, is not far away. Already the (one-sided) dialogue which the persona in Roman satire develops, from Lucilius onwards, invites staging, most urgently perhaps in Persius' sophisticated satirical mimes. This has called for evolutionary models long before Tylor and Frazer made evolutionism a tool of cultural analysis, and it was always performance that commanded most of the scholarly attention. When situating his satirical poetry in the tradition of free speech, Horace derived satire - however playfully - from Athenian ancient comedy, naming Eupolis atque Cratinus Aristophanesque poetae among his poetical ancestors. The historian Livy, on the other hand, stuck to Italy and thought rather of dramas performed by indigenous actors (vernaculi artifices) who, following an Etruscan model, “performed satires in many varying metres, singing to the tune of a flute-player and moving in a fitting rhythm.”

Petronius' Satyricon has often been dubbed the most controversial and daedalic text in classical literature. The question of whether and how it should count as “satiric” has long preoccupied scholars, yet this contention is part of a broader debate about how to define a work parasitic on almost every known literary form, from the Greek romance (which it is often said to parody) to epic, historiography, New Comedy, Roman erotic elegy, the Milesian tale, and Greek and Roman mime. As Zeitlin argues, the Satyricon “seems to have been undertaken with the deliberate intention of defeating the expectations of an audience accustomed to an organising literary form.” There will always be problems involved in singling out one model or frame of expectations for such a generically complex text.

The Satyricon, or Satyrica (Greek genitive or nominative plural, with the former presuming the addition of libri, meaning “things associated with satyrs”), is an extended first person narrative told in the voice of Encolpius, a vagabond, myopic scholar who is also a protagonist in the events he recounts. The text survives fragmented: we probably have parts of (at least) books 14 and 16 and all of book 15, which likely coincided with the famous feast of Trimalchio, yet the original length remains a mystery.