The famous story of king Alfred burning the cakes in the humble kitchen of the country wife is first recorded in Latin in the first Life of St. Neot, written in the eleventh century, before the Norman Conquest. It is interesting in containing not only a Biblical reference, but also a reference to Juvenal’s seventh satire.Here the original version of this literary vignette is compared with a briefer post-Conquest version in the Annals of St. Neot’s and an expanded version from the thirteenth century, from the Chronicle of John of Wallingford, which preserves the reference to Juvenaland the Biblical reference used in the original but adds other references.

Chapter 5 looks at passages of carpe diem within longer texts, such as satires of Horace and Juvenal, Petronius’ Satyrica and Vergil’s Georgics. As carpe diem poems are read and re-read, they become independent textual objects: they can be inserted just about anywhere but never lose their lyric splendour. Thus, Vergil applies the carpe diem motif to a context as humble as cattle-breeding, while both Seneca and Samuel Johnson ignore the context and treat this section as vatic wisdom. This chapter analyses how such excerpts relate to Latin satire, which bastardised other texts, to late antique anthologising, medieval florilegia, and early modern commonplace-books. The chapter also proposes a new model for understanding textual allusions and intertexts in classical literature. Finally, the chapter argues that clichés are important features of classical culture that are worthy of close study.

Juvenal was the satirist’s satirist, a writer whose output consisted only of poems in that genre. An uncompromising cataloguer of the crimes of Romans, Juvenal was also intensely masculine, his oeuvre implicitly addressed to men, with one satire (vi) devoted to the shameful derelictions of women (the source of much unimaginatively imitative misogyny during the Restoration). Juvenal’s obscenity, and the exclusion of women from classical learning, added to the sense that Juvenal was not suitable source material for aspirant women writers. This chapter, however, working from Penny Wilson’s sense of an “economy of makeshifts” in women’s engagement in classical literature, examines the cracks in that monolithic facade, starting with Juvenal’s own text, which contains an oddly sympathetic female satirist. Women did read Juvenal fairly extensively, albeit often in translation, and women writers did confront, adapt, and rework Juvenalian phrasing and attitudes in a wide range of forms – poetry, fiction, journalism, diaries. While there was no linear process of rapprochement between women writers and the foundational text of male satire, nor any single “female” mode of responding to that legacy, women writers found a surprising number of ways to absorb and transform it in their own satiric work.

From John Dryden’s essays onward, satire has persisted in English critical discussions as the domain of male writers. Dryden’s contemporary, Aphra Behn, has, accordingly, been excluded from consideration as a major satirist despite critics’ ongoing recognition of satiric elements in her works, especially her plays, and the reclamation of a couple of her obviously satiric poems. This essay examines masculine critical traditions set by Dryden and his successors along with their considerations of Juvenalian, Horatian, and Menippean satire in order to expose the forces shaping conceptions of satire as an inherently masculine genre. It simultaneously foregrounds the role satire plays in shaping eighteenth-century genres as it frames Behn as a major satiric writer. Ultimately, this essay places Behn alongside her male contemporaries, as satirist and – through satire’s deconstructive forces – as facilitator of new generic modes, notably literary criticism, miscellany poems, the novel, and comedy of manners. Just as she was second only in productivity to John Dryden, Behn rivaled him in witty social commentary on literary traditions and in challenges to those traditions by producing varied works that were satiric in their fabric.

Eighteenth-century women writers excelled in the formal satiric style associated by contemporaries with the Roman poet Horace. While formal verse satire was especially fashionable in mid-century, two accomplished poets illustrate the rise and decline of this phenomenon. Anne Finch (1661–1720), writing at the beginning of the satiric vogue, professed to hate satire but incorporated corrective criticism into many poems; she wrote only one formal verse satire and kept it in manuscript. Anna Seward (1742–1809), who identified herself as a poet of sensibility, wrote satirically in prose but rarely produced formal satiric verse. Like Finch, Seward kept her sole formal satiric poem in manuscript until authorizing its posthumous publication. Finch exemplifies how a woman might hesitate to write in the Roman style because Restoration satire was a “masculine” poetic form associated with classical education, public affairs, and personal invective. Seward illustrates why a late-century poet might have moved away from formal verse satire despite a predilection for its tone and purpose. Both poets show how women readily adapted the poetic fashions of their lifetimes to suit their satiric purposes.

Catullus features heavily in Chapter 21 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho, but he is by no means the only Roman literary figure to have found in Sappho an important predecessor. Ovid, Horace, and others give powerful evidence of her influence in Latin literature.

This chapter examines the role played by lectica (litter) in Roman literature. Investigating Roman accounts of the conveyance's origins, it shows how lectica was repeatedly framed as an exotic import from the Near East, only available to Romans upon their exposure, through the process of imperial expansion, to Eastern softness. But such a projection involved carefully distinguishing this ‘decadent’ litter from already existing, sanctioned litter use (including its use as a 'stretcher'). The litter’s status as a newfangled import is moreover belied by coexisting narratives of republican-era patriarchs riding in lectica because of injury, old age, or disability, and numerous able-bodied Roman commanders who take the field in a lectica. That Cicero could at one moment lambast his juridical or political opponents for employing the litter and then invite a friend for a lectica joy-ride points up how such an object was used to focalize moral discourses in conflict. The chapter ultimately argues that the vehicle's configuration as an awkward boundary-crosser, constantly out of place whether in public or in private, helps shore up other more dominant categories, vehicular and otherwise.

This introduction explores the widespread moralizing rhetoric that constitutes – both underlies and articulates – literary representations of problematic forms of Roman transit, first surveying portraits of the outrage voiced by disapproving observers when confronted with luxurious or ostentatious transportation, and then homing in on a special, written variety of this broader discursive phenomenon: the set-piece account of the staged confrontation between opposing embodiments of transportational ethics. The next section unravels the rhetoric of depictions of Romans whose involvement in their mode of transport is conspicuously physical, and examines the unequal distribution of praise and blame on travelers for such behavior. This is followed by a discussion of the underlying tendency of such portrayals to employ them as a means of promoting a higher, ethical ideal that transcends such bodily concerns: the rhetoric of Roman transportation uses such representations as a way to reach another end. An analysis of depictions of Roman traffic follows next. Finally, the introduction is concluded by a catalogue of the full fleet of attested Roman vehicles.