I am thinking about satire. The literary genre, not the political kind, though that can be useful as well. In these times, comedy can be the thing that really helps us survive. And most of the best comedians these days that deal with political topics are having a field day with satire. But that’s not poetry.
The OED informs us that satire’s etymology is uncertain. One idea was to connect, via the root that gives us “saturate,” to the Latin expression lanx satura, or “full dish,” i.e. a miscellany of prose and verse. Another theory is that the word is of Etruscan origin, with obscure significance. Satire was also at one time associated with satyrs, and thus with the genre of satyr plays.
Satire as a literary genre began in Rome, and the first practitioner of it whose work has survived was Horace, in his poems known in Latin as Sermones, which could perhaps be translated nowadays as Riffs. Roman satire is appealing to me because of its form.
There is something about the form that seems quite modern to me. Like Propertius in his use of elegiac couplets, Horace, in his first book of Satires, published in 35 BCE, when he was 30, takes advantage of a conversational tone to give the poems an expansive, improvisational quality. Satire 1.9 is almost a Frank O’Harian “I do this I do that” poem. As the poem tells it, Horace is walking along the street in Rome when he is accosted by a drag of a person, who pesters Horace to introduce him to his patron, Maecenas. Horace is only saved at the last minute by a plaintiff in a court case against this person who drags him off to court.
Between Horace and Juvenal, there was another Roman satirist, Persius. Kenneth J. Reckford’s 2009 book, Recognizing Persius (Princeton) is an excellent introduction to this poet, who died at 27 and left six satires that we still have today. Reckford writes:
Persius gives us traces of an Aristophanic contest, or agon, between the Old Literature and the New: between the rugged old Classical authors like Pacuvius and Accius, nostalgically misremembered and praised by grumbling elders, and the smooth, effeminate, precious, hyper-Alexandrian verse beloved by modern youth, all about orgiastic Maenads and self-castrating Attises. It is all special effects nowadays, all style and no substance. Modern poetry has no balls. And not just poetry: for rhetorical pleading in the lawcourts, once the vital center of Roman political life, has also become theatricalized; defendants give artificial performances for show, just as their prosecutors do, and both sides hope mainly for applause. Underlying the parody is a dangerous thought. As Tacitus was later to demonstrate in his Dialogus, oratory atrophied under the empire because the lawcourts’ decision-making power had been taken over the emperor; what was left was flattery and self-display.
Horatian satire is generally considered to be lighter than that practiced by Juvenal some hundred years later. That has something to do with the times each poet lived in. Horace was writing at the height of the Augustan age, and what’s more, he was part of that emperor’s inner circle. Juvenal wrote during the period from Nero to Hadrian. Although he started publishing later in life, the fact that he survived the reigns of 10 emperors is in itself a testament to his shrewdness.
Rolfe Humphries’ translations of Juvenal, published in 1958, still have valor and bite to them. In his introduction, Humphries writes:
To Quintilian, and to Roman scholars and critics less well-known, the word satirehad a meaning, and connotations, less narrow than it has for us. Into these, and into the history of the art form, we need not go, for satire, as Juvenal writes it, cries with the saeva indignatio, the slashing sense of outrage, that we associate with the term. He is Swift’s cousin; we can feel at home. Not comfortably so, of course not, for this man is too good a hater.
What he hated were the ways of the world that Ovid, roughly a century before, had loved so dearly. Beau monde, haut ton—these did not amuse Juvenal. As for meretricious Rome, he shared the sentiments of (this too would have revolted him) an African king, Jugurtha the briber, dead before Ovid was born, who had called the city “venal and doomed if it only could find a purchaser.” It had found, Juvenal thought, more purchasers than one, and more than one debaucher. He did not like it at all, and he said so.
And finally, not a satirist, but a poet with a brilliantly satirical mind, as, in essence, many Roman poets were. The epigrammist Martial lived from 40 to 104 CE, meaning that he overlapped extensively with Juvenal. In poet Art Beck’s new translation, Martial: Mea Roma (Shearsman Books), we are given a sense of what makes this poet so eternally enticing. He’s famous for his lustful blasts, but he can be subtly philosophical as well. Here’s one in the latter vein that in a few syllables gets behind a famous myth in a way I would never have thought possible:
The Lyre
It returned Eurydice to the great poet: but then he lost her.
Because he loved with neither trust nor patience.
