Literary Parody in the Age of Nero (original) (raw)
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Hinc omnis pendet? Old Comedy and Roman satire
Classical World 105 (2011/12) 25-38
This article reconsiders the relationship between Horace's iter Brundisinum (Sat. 1.5), Lucilius' iter Siculum (book 3), and Aristophanes' Frogs. It argues that both Horace's poem and Lucilius' are more extensively indebted to Frogs than had previously been recognized; that Horace's claim (Sat. that Lucilius was "totally dependent" on Old Comedy has a superficial plausibility if one considers only Lucilius' first three books, though hardly applicable to his whole corpus; and that Horace chose to link Lucilian satura with Old Comedy, rather than with Archilochus and the iambographers, because in his Epodes he was presenting himself as Archilochus' heir.
Roman Satire and the Old Comic Tradition
2015
Roman Satire and the Old Comic Tradition Quintilian famously claimed that satire was tota nostra, or totally ours, but this innovative volume demonstrates that many of Roman Satire's most distinctive characteristics derived from ancient Greek Old Comedy. Jennifer L. Ferriss-Hill analyzes the writings of Lucilius, Horace, and Persius, highlighting the features that they crafted on the model of Aristophanes and his fellow-poets: the authoritative yet compromised author; the self-referential discussions of poetics that vacillate between defensive and aggressive; the deployment of personal invective in the service of literary polemics; and the abiding interest in criticizing individuals, types, and language itself. The first book-length study in English on the relationship between Roman Satire and Old Comedy, Roman Satire and the Old Comic Tradition will appeal to students and researchers in Classics, Comparative Literature, and English.
Roman Amatory and Satirical Literature: Catullus, Ovid and Petronius
Past and Future, 2024
Ancient Latin poetry and prose is worth intensive study in its own right, and also provides a window into Republican and Imperial politics and society. Catullus and Ovid, in particular, were able to distill and portray desire, passion and other emotions in all their forms. A selective analysis of the works of Catullus, Ovid and Petronius shows their ambiguous and problematic relationship with persons of power, including Julius Caesar, Augustus and Nero. Under Emperor Augustus, in particular, there was an effort to control the narrative of values that should be promoted for elite Romans, leading to patterns of patronage and cultural prescription. This moral agenda led to the relegation of Ovid from Rome to a remote city on the Black Sea. For the later writer Petronius, the situation was even starker, driving him to fiercely satirize the decadence of his own society. Though seen for a time as an 'arbiter of taste' for the Emperor Nero, he soon fell out of favour and was forced to commit suicide. Poets of the Empire, like its philosophers, would have to make a choice: aggrandisement and rhetorical flattery of the regime, or more oblique forms of social satire and comic dialogue. The works of Catullus, Ovid and Petronius, whether in or out of vogue during later periods, remain significant legacies for European and global literature. Indeed, they are brilliant explorations of what it is to be human, now and then. They deserve further study and prominence in the twenty-first century.
The Cambridge Companion to Roman Satire, 2005
Near the beginning of the tenth book of his Institutes, midway through a list of readings recommended for the orator in training, Quintilian, Rome's most prolific theorist of rhetoric after Cicero, takes a tendentious step towards satire's terrain by claiming that this particular genre can be accounted "totally ours." 1 The claim is tendentious because extreme, and true only in a highly qualified sense. For ancient critics had long since sought to establish the genre's Greek pedigree by tracing its development past its most obvious early practitioners in Republican Rome (Ennius and Lucilius, both of whom wrote in the second century bce) all the way to fifth-century Athens. Claims of satire's Greek provenience, although they could easily be stretched to an opposite extreme, are defensible and seem to have at least some narrow basis in fact. Horace, writing more than one hundred years before Quintilian, was aware of both extremes. Perhaps to goad those in his audience who adamantly defended the idea that satire sprouted entirely from Roman soil, but perhaps also to mimic those who wanted to believe that any good thing in Roman literature just had to come from the Greeks, Horace went so far as to assert that Lucilius did not a whit more to invent satire than to rework the meters of Greek Old Comedy ("having changed only their meters and rhythms," mutatis tantum pedibus numerisque, Sermones 1.4.7). Referring to Aristophanes, Eupolis, and Cratinus, the three canonical comedians of fifth-century Athens, Horace says "Lucilius relies on them entirely" (hinc omnis pendet Lucilius, Sermones 1.4.6). 2 So much for satire's being at all "ours," let alone "totally" so. 1 For Quintilian on satire, see Institutes 10.1.93-5. The difficulties surrounding the claim satura quidem tota nostra est are neatly summarized by Hendrickson (1927). 2 These sentiments have long been regarded by commentators as suspiciously overdone; see, for example, Rudd (1966) 89. I suspect that such patent exaggerations sample and send up the hard-line views of certain of Horace's critics; see Freudenburg (2001) 18-19. That such
Roman Satire and the Old Comic Tradition by Jennifer L. Ferriss-Hill
The Classical Journal, 2016
Roman satire from the Middle Ages onward was taught in schools not only for the sake of the moral lessons it offered but also for its peerless introduction to the vocabulary of everyday life, for children needed to learn to speak and write Latin as well as to read it. This connection with the concrete was long admired. In the 1960s, William Anderson, taken with New Criticism and reacting against Gilbert Highet's biographical approach to Juvenal, launched an approach that detached Juvenal's poems from their writer and his times. This caught on, appealing, in the heyday of postmodernism, to those for whom il n'y a pas de hors-texte was axiomatic, and now to a new generation with the return to aesthetics. After 1980, there was a burst of political and Bakhtinian analysis that reclaimed the bodily aspect of satire as an essential constituent, to which my own work belongs, as well as that of Barbara Gold, John Henderson, David Larmour, Paul Allen Miller, and sometimes Susanna Braund, Emily Gowers, and Ellen Oliensis. I say "reclaimed" and "essential" because, in its long run as a curricular favorite, satire has so often been bowdlerized that a sizeable proportion of extant satire has historically been excluded from study. Hence, it seems to me to be a step backward that so much of what has been written on Roman satire since the early 1990s has once again deleted the body by means of a return to aesthetics and Quellen. The two books here under review, both revised dissertations, are no exception, and must then be viewed as part of that disembodied conversation. In Roman Satire and the Old Comic Tradition, Jennifer Ferriss-Hill joins those fascinated by the self-reflexive aspects of ancient literature. Here the author is not so much deleted as placed in a literary Heaven where authors speak only to other authors and write mainly about themselves. She argues that Roman satire models itself on Old Comedy in several ways, all grounded in the text rather than in any historical or political context (so the translation of comedy's "agonistic poetics" to Rome "loses little from the fact that the Roman Satirists were not contemporaneous with each other," 172). The introduction lays out what Roman satirists wrote about Old Comedy and explains how they knew the plays; Ferriss-Hill argues that writers in both genres claim to tell the truth, and that the
Taking advantage of the fresh fragmentary discoveries in New Comedy, this paper focuses anew on the relationship between Roman Comedy and fourth-century Greek comedy, and argues that the two genres develop along similar structural principles because they embrace parallel philosophies of dealing with their potential literary models. Setting as premise that postclassical Greek comic drama is the outcome of a well-thought combination of individual genius and cleverly filtered sources, not always literary, the assessment of Plautine and Terentian dramaturgy advanced in this study, is based on extensive discussions of specific case studies and examines in detail the anatomy of a twofold methodology of model reception behind the texts of the palliata. The process in question transforms the so-perceived image of a spontaneous, improvisatory Plautine speech, by proving that Plautus’ literary language, no less than Terence’s own, involves complex intertextuality, which, in turn, comes in the aftermath of a long Quellenforschung whose successful conclusion presupposes critical acumen, powerful memory, and years of experience in viewing and performing Greek comedies.
The Margins of Satire: Suetonius, Satura, and Scholarly Outsiders in Ancient Rome
American Journal of Philology , 2020
[Proofs; now published in AJP (2020) 141: 575-601]. Scholars have long been interested in Suetonius' De Grammaticis et Rhetoribus for the evidence it preserves of the history of education and philology at Rome. This article focuses on a different aspect of the work: its repeated links with satire. Suetonius' grammatici are presented both as authors and targets of satirical attacks, and fragments of their work preserved in the De Grammaticis et Rhetoribus reveal a wider, sub-elite field of satirical writing occluded in the polished, literary genre of Roman satura.