Roman Satire and the Old Comic Tradition

Roman Satire and the Old Comic Tradition

Jennifer L. Ferriss-Hill

Language: English

Pages: 314

ISBN: 1107081548

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


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.

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The satirists, that he exhibits toward the city, he leaves with a heavy heart. Notably, Umbricius’ actual departure is never confirmed, as the furthest he manages to travel in the poem is to the Porta Capena and the Valley of Egeria, still within the confines of the Servian wall. Juvenal thus finds himself, like Aristophanes’ Dicaeopolis, trapped in the city, and even his representative is scarcely able to exit. If Juvenal’s third satire may be read as a rewriting, in negative form, of Horace’s.

Comedy to mind. Competitiveness was both an inescapable fact of the Athenian dramatic festivals and institutionalized in Old Comedy’s programmatics: its agonistic, intertextual, autobiographical parabases are entirely concerned with winning and losing. But by dismissing comedy specifically because of its competitive element, whereby commercial success or lack of it need not reflect a work’s merits, Horace reveals how his Roman Satire may be an improvement upon the Greek genre. The second adaptation.

Tradition of defensive poetics throughout the third and second centuries BCE: although neither presents a well-rounded abject persona such as the Old Comic poets do (being purely literary, rather than complemented by physical shortcomings), they play an important role in filtering and forming the literary response on its way from Old Comedy to Roman Satire. Terence, bound by the strictures of the stage, turns the failures of the earlier performances of Hecyra to his advantage, much as Aristophanes.

Successful one: it is not that some have not appreciated or understood his work, but rather that they will not admit to having enjoyed it. It seems that in actuality everyone likes this poet’s writings.126 Nevertheless, this ingratus lector is presented as the anti-reader, and the current one invited not to emulate him in his reaction not only to Epistles 1 but also to the Satires, as Horace once again deploys the device of a community of the learned to stratify his readership. Epistles 1.19 also.

Bad readers and (we think) invites – albeit through a 154 155 Cf. Reckford 1962: 498, Morford 1985: 2012, and Döpp 2003. They also invite comparison with the sons of centurions with whom Horace recalls he might under other circumstances have had to attend classes (Sat. 1.6.71–8; cf. Gowers 2012: 237). 165 166 Defensive Poetics chink of an entrance barely visible much of the time – the current reader to join his in-group. Juvenal’s satire is less programmatic than that of his.

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