Classics 301B
May 6, 2025

Happy 2,778th (April 21, 2025), Roma!

Paper #2 Topics (due Friday, May 9, 11:59pm in D2L)

Study Guide for Final Examination (Monday, May 12, 3:30-5:30pm)

Juvenal & Roman Satire

• Roman innovation: satura quidem tota nostra est (“satire in fact is all ours", Quintilian 10.1.93); not based on distinct Greek poetic genre; in epic dactylic hexameters
  
  
• obscure roots: satura (adj., “full”), (lanx) satura ("full dish"), satura ("stuffed sausage"); cf. farrago ("mixed fodder, buffet") – "What humankind does, its prayers, fears, angers, and pleasures, / Delights and excursions, all that farrago’s in my little book" (Juvenal, Satire 1.85-6)
  
  
• topics: fullness, mixture & variety, e.g. moral censure & instruction, criticism of individuals & society, philosophizing, education, literature & literary criticism, parody, nugatory subjects (e.g. dinner parties, cuisine) > blended "banquet" of subjects
  
  
• presentation: monologue of 1st person speaker ("autobiographical" persona, "mask") & dialogues (multiple voices & narrative styles); various registers (colloquial, fables, epic, tragic, didactic, etc.) > verbal & rhetorical abundance
  
  
• extant Roman satirists:
  
  (1) Lucilius (180-102 BCE; fragments); celebrated as quasi-inventor, outspoken social critic of Republic (Horace, Satire 1.10.3, “he scoured the city with much salt”); “Lucilius the great, from Aurunca” driving his epic-satirical chariot to battle (Juvenal, Satire 1.20)
  
  
  Di Chirico, Quintus Horatius Flaccus (ca. 1870)
  
  (2) Horace (65-8 BCE): "old Horace" (Juvenal, Satire 1.51); son of freedman writes congenial Augustan satire for circle of elite literary friends
  
  (3) Persius (34-62 CE): Neronian satires marked by stern Stoicism, crabbed & highly allusive writing
  
  
  (4) Juvenal (Decimus Iunius Iuvenalis), born ca. 60 CE, died after 127 CE: “indignant” moral satire (“indignation can fashion my verse", Satire 1.79); nothing known of life (aristocratic family (?) from Aquinum, Latium, Rome: cf. Satire 3.318ff., ". . . whenever Rome sends / You hastening back, for a rest in the country, to your own Aquinum, / Invite me from Cumae too . . . I'll listen to your Satires")
  
  
• Juvenal's indignant satirical mask & audience – his own target (cf. The Colbert Report, 2005-2014)? canonized for poetic & rhetorical skill (powerful metaphors, sententiae, vividly glomerative argumentation)
  
  L: Trajan (emp. 98-117 CE); R: Hadrian (emp. 117-138 CE)
  
  
• 16 satires written after reign of oppressive Domitian (emp. 81-96 CE) in period of general optimism following emperor’s death (Pax Romana, of 2nd century CE, age of imperial expansion, political & economic stability, bureaucratic efficiency, etc.)
  
  
• Satire 1, programmatic opening of 1st published book (Satires 1-5): speaker’s dissatisfaction with stale literary scene (esp. epic), satire as rhetorical exercise
  
  Satire 1.1ff.
  Must I be a listener forever? Never reply,
  Tortured so often by throaty Cordus’s Theseus?
  Must I let this fellow recite his Roman comedies,
  Unpunished, and that one his elegies? Unpunished,
  Consuming my whole day on some endless Telephus,
  Or unfinished Orestes, the cover full and the margins?
  
  [hackneyed examples of epic poetry follow, "Fronto's plane-trees, cracked marble, and columns / Fractured by non-stop readings, ring with this stuff"]
  
  . . . I too have snatched my hand from under the cane,
  I too have given old Sulla 'good advice': get lost, enjoy [suasoria, "persuasive exercise"]
  A good rest. It’s false mercy, when you trip over poets
  Everywhere, to spare the paper they’re all ready to waste.
  
  
  Cloaca Maxima (Rome, ca. 600 BCE)
  
  
• Rome's degraded literary society > corrupt society
  
  Satire 1.22-9 (what's wrong in Rome?)
  When a tender eunuch takes him a wife; when Mevia
  Fights a Tuscan boar, with bare breasts, gripping the spear;
  When a fellow can match all the aristocrats in wealth
  Who made me cry with pain when he used to shave me;
  When a pleb from the Nile, when a slave from Canopus,
  One Crispinus, hitching his Tyrian cloak on his shoulder,
  Wafts the gold of summer about on his sweaty fingers,
  Simply unable to suffer the dreadful weight of a gem;
  It’s hard not to write satire! 
  
  
• further moral issues, social inversions, old stereotypes:
  
  imperial informers (1.32ff.)
  legacy hunters (Proculéius and Gillo and "a rich old woman's 'purse' [lit. "bladder"], size matters", 1.37ff.)
  forgers of wills & poisoners (1.45ff.)
  adultery (husbands pimping wives, 1.55ff.)
  patron/client system broken (wealthy immigrant-freedman first in line for "paltry handout-basket", 1.93ff.)
  even young people suck! ("racing his speeding chariot down the Flaminian Way, Like some puny Autómedon . . . showing off to his girlfriend", 1.61ff.)
  
  
  
  

  
  
• satirist's self-representation (persona): angry moralist, de-centered, powerless, displaced & impoverished citizen in cosmopolitan & dynamic, entrepreneurial, multi-cultural Rome = unjust society (inversions of class, wealth, gender, status, ethnicity) where unworthy profit, "Pecunia (Cash) has no temple as yet" (1.113)
  
  
• satire of grievance, lost privilege, nostalgia (not corrective): cf. Umbricius in Satire 3, "Is it nothing that in my youth I was nurtured on Sabine olives?" (3.84), "There's no room here for the Romans" (3.119)
  
  
• speaker claims to follow aggressive satire of Lucilius as "epic" satirist in degraded, non-heroic world: close of Satire 1 – self-deprecating & self-satirizing fear of offending powerful
  
  Satire 1.151ff. (satirist's dialogue with cautioning voice)
  Perhaps you’ll say "Where
  Is the power to match your subject? Where will you find
  The frankness of those who wrote as they chose
  With passionate spirit?" Well who do I dare not name?
  What matter if Mucius could never forgive my words? [Mucius Scaevola, Lucilius' prominent contemporary]
  "Well, try Tigellinus, and you’ll be the flame to his torch [head of Nero's Praetorian Guard]
  That scorches men upright, their bound throats smoking,
  And score a wide track with your corpse over the sand." [amphitheater]
  Do I let him ride by, then, that man who’s poisoned three
  Of his uncles, and despise us from his feather cushions?
  " . . It’s fine to pit pious Aeneas against the fierce Rutulian
  . . . But when fiery Lucilius roars as if waving his naked
  Blade, the hearer whose criminal mind is long-frozen,
  Reddens and sweats, his conscience new-stricken by guilt.
  Then, there’ll be anger and tears. So think about it first,
  Before you go sounding your trumpet: too late to regret
  Arming when you’re at war." Then I’ll see what they can do
  To me, whose ashes the Via Latina and Via Flaminia shroud.
  
  
  Cato the Elder transported to 2nd century CE Rome's metropolis
  
  Satire 3: City of Rome – a rhetorical exercise?

• Umbricius’ ("Shade") speech at Porta Capena: nostalgia for idealized rustic past vs. degraded urban present, city represented as in Satire 1 (corruption, immigration, social inversions, "money first", 3.140, etc.), with elaborations on urban life
  
  
• setting out for “Cumae, where weary Daedalus doffed his wings” (3.25); Aeneid 6 – Umbricius' choice? ("You’d be somebody, whatever the place, however remote, / If only because you’d be the master of a solitary lizard", 3.230-1)
  
  Satire 3.1-9 (satirist's initial assessment of Umbricius' decision)
  Though I’m disturbed by an old friend’s departure, still
  I approve his decision to set up home in vacant Cumae
  And devote at least one more citizen to the Sibyl.
  It’s the gateway to Baiae, a beautiful coast, sweetly
  Secluded. I prefer Prochyta’s isle to the noisy Subura.
  After all, is there anywhere that’s so wretched and lonely
  You wouldn’t rather be there than in constant danger of fire,
  Of collapsing buildings, and all of the thousand perils
  Of barbarous Rome, with poets reciting all during August!
  
  
  
• Umbricius' class perspective: "real Romans" crowded out of Rome, "Let the men who turn black into white remain, / Who find it easy to garner contracts for temples, and rivers, / Harbours, draining sewers, and carrying corpses to the pyre" (3.30-2)
  
  
• memorable, anachronistic (cf. philhellenic Hadrian) portrait of "Greekling" (Graeculus)
  
  Satire 3.74ff. (rant against sycophantic Greeks & other immigrants)
  Just say what you want them
  To be. They’ll bring you, in one person, whatever you need:
  The teacher of languages, orator, painter, geometer, trainer,
  Augur, rope-dancer, physician, magician, they know it all,
  Your hungry Greeks: tell them to buzz off to heaven, they’ll go . . .
  . . . And aren’t they the people most adept at flattery, praising
  The illiterate speech of a friend, praising his ugly face, ['friend' = patron]
  Likening a weak, scrawny neck to that of brave Hercules . . .
  . . . We too can offer praise in just the same way: but they
  Are the ones believed. What comic actor’s better at playing
  Thais, the whore, or the wife, or Doris, the slave-girl, out
  Without her cloak? It’s as if a woman were speaking not
  Merely a mask: you’d think all was smooth and lacking
  Below the belly, and only split there by a slender crack . . .
  
  [topic of Greek's sexual prowess follows, even "friend's grandma" his target]
  
  

• Umbricius' Rome: crowding, stress, high cost of living, inequality, noise, traffic, pollution, crime, poor construction, fires, social dislocation & alienation
  
  
• constant hazards & inequities of poor man in Rome
  
  3.198-215 (an apartment building fire)
  The place to live is far from all these fires, and all these
  Panics in the night. Ucalegon is already summoning a hose,
  Moving his things, and your third floor’s already smoking: [cf. Aeneid 2.311, "Ucalegon's [palace] next door was bright with flame"]
  You’re unaware; since if the alarm was raised downstairs,
  The last to burn will be the one a bare tile protects from
  The rain, up there where gentle doves coo over their eggs.
  Cordus had a bed, too small for Procula, and six little jugs
  Of earthenware to adorn his sideboard and, underneath it,
  A little Chiron, a Centaur made of that very same ‘marble’
  And a box somewhat aged now, to hold his Greek library,
  So the barbarous mice gnawed away at immortal verse.
  Cordus had nothing, who could demur? Yet, poor man,
  He lost the whole of that nothing. And the ultimate peak
  Of his misery, is that naked and begging for scraps, no one
  Will give him a crust, or a hand, or a roof over his head.
  If Assaracus’s great mansion is lost, his mother’s in mourning,
  The nobles wear black, and the praetor adjourns his hearing.
  Then we bewail the state of Rome, then we despair of its fires.
  
  Satire 3.256-67 (pathos of poor man's street death)
  They [loaded carts of the rich] teeter threateningly over the heads of those people below.
  Now, if that axle breaks under the weight of Ligurian marble,
  And spills an upturned mountain on top of the dense crowd,
  What will be left of the bodies? What limbs, what bones will
  Survive? Every man’s corpse wholly crushed will vanish along
  With his soul. Meanwhile his household, oblivious, are scouring
  The dishes; are puffing their cheeks at the embers; are clattering
  The oily back-scrapers; by full oil-flasks, arranging the towels.
  The slave-boys bustle about on various tasks, while their master
  Is now a newcomer on the banks of the Styx, shuddering there
  At the hideous ferryman, without hope, poor wretch, of a ride
  Over the muddy river, and no coin in his mouth for the fare.
  

• satirist’s reaction to Umbricius’ rant – is Rome habitable?
  
  Satire 3.315-22 (Umbricius' final departure for Cumae)
  I could add a host of other reasons to these, but the beasts of burden
  Are braying, the sun is setting. It’s time for me to leave; the muleteer
  Has been waving his whip, to signal he’s been ready to go for a while.
  So farewell, keep me in your memory, and whenever Rome sends
  You hastening back, for a rest in the country, to your own Aquinum,
  Invite me from Cumae too, to visit the Ceres of Helvius, and your
  Diana. I’ll come in my nail-shod boots, I’ll come and visit your chilly
  Fields, and, if they’re not totally shameful, I’ll listen to your Satires.