The Campanian Case of Gaius Lucilius: Downtrodden Satire from Suessa Aurunca

Abstract

The hometown of the verse satirist Gaius Lucilius was Suessa Aurunca, on the border between Latium and Campania. This chapter investigates the remnants of Campania in this poet’s surviving fragments and reception, mostly in Horace but also in Cicero and Juvenal. Horses, gladiators, pots, theater, and pronunciation are all Campanian aspects of the satirist’s cultural identity, despite his invention of a Roman genre. Contexts of arrogance and militarism, harking back to fighting against Rome in centuries-old wars, mingle in Lucilius with tourism and conspicuous consumption as markers of insider and outsider positioning vis-à-vis Campania, a half-forgotten homeland for the satirist.

The inventor of Roman verse satire,¹ Gaius Lucilius, was born, probably in 180 BCE,² in the town of Suessa Aurunca, on the border between Latium and Campania, between the rivers Liris and the Vulturnus, a town colonized by the Romans in 313 BCE.³ We know Lucilius was from there because of the scholium to some programmatic lines of Juvenal:

cur tamen hoc potius libeat decurrere campo,per quem magnus equos Auruncae flexit alumnussi uacat ac placidi rationem admittitis, edam.

(Juv. 1.19-21)⁴

But why I choose to traverse the same plain across which Aurunca’s star student steered his horses, I’ll tell you, if you are free and take in my rationale calmly.

This town, Suessa Aurunca, was traditionally a stronghold of the Aurunci, their major base. To explain why it might be important to Campanian identity, the theme of this collection of essays, we need to invoke the Great Latin War of almost two centuries before Lucilius’ floruit. In this major turning point for Roman history, the Latin league, including Volsci, Campani, and Aurunci, were beaten by the Romans and Samnites. At least one battle was fought, as Diodorus Siculus has it,⁵ at Suessa Aurunca:

Ῥωμαῖοι δὲ πρὸς Λατίνους καὶ Καμπανοὺς παραταξάμενοι περὶ πόλιν Σούεσσαν ἐνίκησαν καὶ τῶν ἡττηθέντων μέρος τῆς χώρας ἀφείλοντο. ὁ δὲ κατωρθωκὼς τὴν μάχην Μάλλιος ὁ ὕπατος ἐθριάμβευσεν.

(Diod. Sic. 16.90.2)

And the Romans, drawn up around the town of Suessa against the Latins and Campanians, defeated them, and annexed part of the land of the conquered. Manlius, the consul who had won the battle, celebrated a triumph.

This campaign was famous because, as Livy recounts, it led to Manlius Torquatus celebrating a triumph in 340 BCE, having in its course put his son to death for disobeying his orders (Liv. 8.7.1-22); so, too, this section of Livy contains the equally exemplary story of the deuotio of Decius Mus (Liv. 8.8.19-11.1).⁶ And as a result of this war, ciuitas sine suffragio was extended to the defeated Latin peoples, and Rome’s hold over the Italian peninsula started to take shape.⁷

Talking the cultural identity talk, as I intend to do about Lucilius, is important because, as Quintilian famously observes, Roman satire is the one genre that “at least is wholly ours” (quidem tota nostra est, Inst. 10.1.93). And Suessa Aurunca, Lucilius’ hometown, is important for early interactions between Rome and Campania proper because the Via Appia originally ran through it.⁸ However, after 296 BCE the town was bypassed by the redirection of the Appia from Minturnae through nearby Sinuessa. Hence Horace missed Suessa on his journey to Brundisium in Satire 1.5, and instead he met some dear friends, including Virgil, at Sinuessa:

Plotius et Varius Sinuessae Vergiliusqueoccurrunt, animae quales neque candidioresterra tulit neque quis me sit deuinctior alter.

(Hor. S. 1.5.40-42)

Plotius and Varius and Virgil ran into us at Sinuessa; the earth never bore brighter souls, and none to whom I was more attached.

The choice of this meeting-point, in terms of its proximity to Naples with the Epicurean school of Philodemus and Siro (with which Varius, Virgil, and Horace had connections),⁹ has the advantage of effectively erasing Lucilius from the northern Campanian landscape. We know from Porphyrio on Satire 1.5 that that poem is modelled on a voyage taken and/or described by Lucilius in his book 3, so that the absence of a pilgrimage to Lucilius’ hometown, and indeed its replacement by a location with a similar name, might be taken as sacrilege against the founder of satire. And yet, later in the same poem, there is a famous problem: the travelling companions end up staying at a town whose name cannot be represented in hexameter (1.5.84-90). Although many options have been suggested—principally, Equus Tuticus, Ausculum, and Herdoniae¹⁰—and indirection is part of Horace’s point, I am tempted by Gowers’ candidate, Venusia.¹¹ This was Horace’s hometown, and the inability to reveal its name is a joke indebted to Lucilius, as the earlier poet had done the same for a slaves’ festival (228-29 Marx = 252-53 Warmington).¹² If, for argument’s sake, we take the town in question to be Venusia, then Horace, by withholding the name, is being coy about visiting his birthplace on this journey. Essentially, the end result is that he has not explicitly passed through it—which is of a piece with his refusal to so much as glimpse at the birthplace of his illustrious satiric predecessor, much less pay homage. Perhaps Lucilius played the same literary game in his book 3.¹³

I should declare, as is customary at such a juncture, that my investigation into Lucilius’ Campanian origins is fraught with difficulty, not least because his thirty books of satires exist only in a fragmentary state, 1,400 lines or part-lines largely bereft of context that require speculation to make some sense of them. While there are tantalizing hints there about Lucilius’ Campanian identity, such as the fact that Lucilius was given a public funeral in Naples according to Jerome (Chron. 148e Helm), they are unfortunately even flimsier than the remainder of what I have to say here. One thing will be clear, however: I consider Lucilius’ third book to be of vital importance to our understanding of his relationship with the regions outside Rome, and so I will circle back to the so-called Iter Siculum in the second half of this article. Also, on one of the biggest questions, namely to what extent we can explain Horace’s avowedly Roman reaction to Lucilius’ inclusion of Greek vocabulary in his poetry,¹⁴ I will offer some thoughts at the end of this article, by using the elder poet’s heritage in Campania and exposure to Greek influences. But note that the principal aim of my essay is to uncover a putative construction of Campanian significance: Lucilius surely offered a self-fashioned persona of equal complexity and subtlety to Horace’s later intimations of Apulian identity. An all too easy fallback position, when responding to the lacunae which the fragments present stems from Horace (whose attitude to Campania in his two books of satires I will be equally concerned with here) He treats Lucilius as a purely literary construct, not a real individual, when he sets the earlier poet up as the primus inuentor of the genre of satire. As I shall also show in this article, though, our ideas about Lucilius should not be drawn solely from Horace’s deliberately confining picture of an unsophisticated, verbose satiric predecessor, even if we discern some reflection of rustic, provincial life away from Rome in the fragmentary remains.

Instead of offering a central thesis about Lucilius’ Greekness, then, I will dance around the subject of Magna Graecia, so to speak, as I discuss thematically other aspects of Lucilius’ poetry that could be described as non-Roman, and specifically Campanian. That itself is a tough task when only two fragments use the adjective Campanus, one of which is mostly useless for our purposes as it consists of just the two words Campana Capua (1125 Marx, not assigned by Warmington).¹⁵ Of course, there has long been discussion about whether Lucilius was in fact a Roman citizen, or whether as an eques municipalis he was an outsider in the “Big Smoke.”¹⁶ We at least know he was an equestrian (although that order was not responsible for horse provision, which had been outsourced to auxiliaries, by Lucilius’ time). That fact, together with his seeming fixation on horses, may serve as our initial link for him to the Campanians, who, as Tim Cornell writes, espoused an “addiction to horse-breeding and cavalry prowess.”¹⁷

Only Fools and Horses

That horse jokes are part of satire’s Campanian inheritance is borne out at another point on Horace’s Satire 1.5 journey. The traveling companions are witness, in a tavern, to a war of words between one of their party, a scurra named Sarmentus,¹⁸ and a local magistrate, Messius Cicirrus. Sarmentus’ opening gambit is to call Messius a unicorn (the traditional translation, despite Plin. Nat. 8.76): ‘equi te / esse feri similem dico’ (“I say you’re like the wild horse,” S. 1.5.56-57). The reason is perhaps the scar on his head which Sarmentus pretends is where Messius’ horn had been cut off (1.5.58-60); this could well be a growth resulting from “the Campanian disease”:

Campanum in morbum, in faciem permulta iocatus,pastorem saltaret uti Cyclopa rogabat:nil illi larua aut tragicis opus esse cothurnis.

(Hor. S. 1.5.62-64)

Joking some more at his features and the Campanian disease, Sarmentus asked Messius to dance like a shepherd Cyclops: nor did he need a mask or the tragic boots.

Whatever this local illness may have been—and Ortwin Knorr may be right that that physical symptom is a red herring and the malady may be merely a manifestation of the typically Campanian trait of arrogance,¹⁹ to which I shall return—the episode shows that a Campanian presence seems to be bound up with popular entertainment and the problem of acceptable invective. It is no surprise that Messius’ origin is apparently Oscan (1.5.54), whence according to the commentator Pseudo-Acro the etymology of obscenus: this reference alludes to forms of local entertainment, fabulae Atellanae, a slapstick genre of Italian farces.²⁰

The conuiuium would have been a suitable, if smaller-scale, place for such entertainment, and a riddle that appears in Lucilius may have been rehearsed in that context. It features a horse being watched:²¹

quis hunc currere ecum nos atque equitare uidemus,his equitat curritque. oculis equitare uidemus:ergo oculis equitat.

(Lucil. 1284-86 Marx = 1250-52 Warmington)

What we see this horse run and go with, by means of those things he runs and goes. We see him running by means of our eyes, therefore he goes by means of eyes.

The puzzle, noteworthy for its repetition (typical of such a captio or ἐνθύμημα), requires no equestrian knowledge and, indeed, echoes (at some remove) Aristotelian logic.²² It speaks more to abstract than to practical concerns. The opposite seems to be true of a fragment which Gellius tells us came from book 15, when citing it to prove that mille is always singular (Gel. 1.16.10). These three lines feature a contest between two horses, judged on the basis of speed, so again we have an appraisal, but seemingly about success rather than semantics:

hunc milli passum qui uicerit atque duobusCampanus sonipes succussor nullus sequeturmaiore in spatio ac diuersus uidebitur ire.

(Lucil. 506-8 Marx = 511-13 Warmington)

A bumpy clatterer from Campania, although he might gain the lead over this horse in race of one or two miles, will not only trail him in a longer race, but seem to be going in the opposite direction.

Now, the high-flown word sonipes, which first appears in Accius but may be an Ennian coinage,²³ and the adjective Campanus denoting the hypothetical horse’s provenance, both jar with the derogatory succussor, if the other Lucilian use of the word, which equates a “jolter” with a “slow, ugly horse,” is any indication.²⁴ While I do not know where some commentators on the fragment get the idea that the unnamed hunc comes from Spain,²⁵ what happens when we identify the Campanus with Lucilius himself, bearing in mind his origins in Campania? The conjunction of sonipes and succussor is reminiscent of the mash of hexameter with down-home subjects that embodies Lucilius’ greatest innovation, the regularization of verse satire in a set meter.²⁶ If the satirist’s stand-in is put on the back foot by a speaker in his own poem, authorial claims to expertise become unstable. Indeed, this fragment is about the insubstantiality of victory and defying appearances. At a stretch, it might be about the diversity of satire, that catchall medley of a genre; we could even be reminded in diuersus uidebitur ire of the Stephen Leacock bon mot, “Lord Ronald said nothing; he flung himself from the room, flung himself upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions.”²⁷

More seriously, the denigration of the Campanian horse sits oddly with Horace’s stance towards Lucilius in the matter of chosen mounts:

ut ueni coram, singultim pauca locutus(infans namque pudor prohibebat plura profari)non ego me claro natum patre, non ego circumme Satureiano uectari rura caballo,sed quod eram narro.

(Hor. S. 1.6.56-60)

When I came face to face with you, I gulped out a few words (because childish shame prevented me from speaking further), and I told you not that I was the son of a distinguished father, not that I rode around the country on a Satureian steed, but what I was.

When he first encounters Maecenas in Satire 1.6, the shy and stuttering Horace claims not to be high-born or wealthy, not to be the kind of person who pilots a horse around the countryside.

This noble rider has long been identified with Lucilius.²⁸ Shortly afterwards in the same poem Horace claims that for him himself a ramshackle steed will suffice, a mere mule disfigured because it has been castrated—cut short, like his Iter Brundisinum poem Satire 1.5:

        nunc mihi curtoire licet mulo uel si libet usque Tarentummantica cui lumbos onere ulceret atque eques armos.

(Hor. S. 1.6.104-6)

As it is, if I like I can go right up to Tarentum on a gelded mule, whose loins the saddlebag chafes, and whose shoulders the horseman wounds.

Horace is an equestrian willing to ride a mule.²⁹ But then again, so was Lucilius: the Lucilian line that Porphyrio adduces as a comparandum (ad Hor. S. 1.6.104-6), mantica cantheri costas grauitate premebat (“the saddlebag was pressing on the mule’s ribs because of its weight,” 1207 Marx = 101 Warmington), suggests a similar occurrence.³⁰ My point is that even though Horace looks askance at Lucilius’ superiority, Lucilius may have already cast himself as a ramshackle Campanian rider. And if we accept that, the information in 506-8 Marx = 511-13 Warmington that the Campanian horse is good for short courses should condition our unthinking acceptance of Horace’s other famous contrast between his short-winded satires and Lucilius’ muddy (lutulentus, S. 1.4.10) flow: Lucilius may already have claimed—ironically, even—brevity for himself.

While this seems a lot of weight for an innocuous three-line fragment to bear when it does not certainly relate to Lucilius, we can set its playfulness in the context of Campanian humor, construed as autochthonous, native, and earthy. Cicero demonstrates a feel for the genre in his correspondence with Paetus:

itaque, te cum uideo, omnes mihi Granios, omnes Lucilios—uere ut dicam—Crassos quoque et Laelios uidere uideor: moriar, si praeter te quemquam reliquum habeo, in quo possim imaginem antiquae et uernaculae festiuitatis agnoscere.

(Cic. Fam. 9.18.4)

And so, when I see you, it is as though I am seeing the likes of Granius and Lucilius entire—truth to tell, the likes of Crassus and Laelius as well. I’ll be damned if I have anybody but you left, in whom I could recognize the image of our olden-day and native humor.

Paetus is living in Campania, and a noteworthy aspect of the line-up of comedians cited by Cicero is that it is not strictly Roman, consisting as it does of two native Campanians and two Romans who owned property there (Granius was a Campanian auctioneer who seems to feature prominently as a character in Lucilius).³¹ But Cicero has equated Paetus with these jesters past in terms of homegrown Roman wit. Another letter that revolves around food gags of the kind Lucilius might have enjoyed culminates in the encouragement to come back and join the staff of Cicero’s “philosophical school.” What is more, Paetus, Cicero then jokes, was so desperate for food or money that he sold (or ate?) his horse and will only have a mule on which to return to Rome.³² Even if Horace, riding his mule away from Rome, is not mindful of Cicero’s ribbing of Paetus, it is surely significant that Paetus is both a mere equestrian (like Lucilius) and in Campania.³³ The question is: how much of an outsider does one have to be before urbanitas becomes impossible, or libertas possible? Is Campania far enough? After all, Cicero had to endure invective about his supposedly humble upbringing in Arpinum, away from the bustle of the capital.³⁴

A Lucilian line quoted by Cicero shows that Lucilius’ satires were not entirely concerned with running wild and getting ahead: sustineas currum, ut bonus saepe agitator, equosque, “hold back your chariot and horses as a good driver often does” (1305 Marx = 1249 Warmington). Cicero adduces the sentiment in a letter to Atticus (Att. 13.21.3), when admitting that he had been wrong about translating the Greek ἐποχή, “suspension of judgment” with a Latin equivalent, inhibere, “to hold back,” literally “to back water with the oars.” His mistake was, so he says, to think that the command involved stopping rowing. Checking oneself requires effort, according to Lucilian advice, and the context of Cicero’s quotation, in a discussion of translation from Greek, anticipates the Greek telos of this article. Thus it is a mistake to think (following Horace) that Lucilian poetics involved pure “sound and fury”: decorum and self-effacement, we are seeing, may have played a role.

Gladiators, Ready (for the Pot)

In line with this apparent need for self-control, when we consider what makes up the liberal jest, the important issue is a disavowal of belligerence.³⁵ I suggest that it is the powerful association of Campania with gladiatorial combat, thanks to its training schools in Capua,³⁶ which lies behind the portrayal of aggression in Lucilius. The swaggering authority required by competitors is on show in Lucilius’ fourth book, where a famous gladiator, Pacideianus, is set to compete against another named Aeserninus:

Aeserninus fuit Flaccorum munere quidamSamnis, spurcus homo, uita illa dignus locoque.cum Pacideiano conponitur, optimus multopost homines natos gladiator qui fuit unus.

(Lucil. 149-52 Marx = 172-75 Warmington)

In the show put on by the Flacci there was a certain Aeserninus, a Samnite, a nasty fellow, worthy of that life and position. He was matched with Pacideianus, who was by far the single best gladiator after the creation of man.

The fragment, which Cicero cites in his discussion of anger in the Tusculan Disputations (4.48), that editors universally suppose follows on from this, features Pacideianus arrogantly ranting about how he is going to lay waste his opponent:

‘occidam illum equidem et uincam, si id quaeritis’, inquit.‘uerum illud credo fore: in os prius accipiam ipsequam gladium in stomacho furi ac pulmonibus sisto:odi hominem, iratus pugno, nec longius quicquamnobis, quam dextrae gladium dum accommodet alter:usque adeo studio atque odio illius ecferor ira.’

(Lucil. 153-8 Marx = 176-81 Warmington)

“I for my part will kill him and win, if you ask for it,” he said. “But I think it will happen like this: I’ll receive his blows to my face before I stick my sword in the wretch’s gut and lungs. I hate the man, I fight in anger, and we won’t delay any longer than it takes for one of us to fit a sword in his right hand: so much am I transported by rage, passion and hatred of him.”

Lucilius makes Pacideianus speak poetry, with imaginative pretensions of his own: “I think it will happen like this.” And yet the Lucilian example, being “eigentlich unprofessionelle,”³⁷ is cited by Cicero as the exception that proves the rule of gladiatorial equanimity as ideal before a contest. What I am interested in right now is the identification of Aeserninus as a Samnite. According to Livy gladiators were originally Samnite prisoners of war, referred to in derogatory fashion and forced to perform:³⁸

et Romani quidem ad honorem deum insignibus armis hostium usi sunt: Campani ad superbiam et odio Samnitium gladiatores, quod spectaculum inter epulas erat, eo ornatu armarunt Samnitiumque nomine compellarunt.

(Liv. 9.40.17)

So the Romans made use of the splendid armor of their enemies in honor to the gods: while the Campanians, in consequence of their pride and in hatred of the Samnites, equipped after this fashion the gladiators who furnished them entertainment at their feasts, and bestowed upon them the name of Samnites.

The aetiology, with its identification of Campanian influence, is apposite to our theme.³⁹ I suspect that the effusive praise of Pacideianus and extravagant blame of Aeserninus can be linked to a Campanian distaste for Samnites, or even Samnite militarization,⁴⁰ rather than “a certain contempt for what is not of the city.”⁴¹

Pacideianus is the “single best gladiator since the origin of man”⁴²—perhaps a cue to think about where Lucilius was born (natus), and then the extent to which the satirist is himself a performer of ambiguous status, pugnacious in his faultfinding.⁴³ What kind of entertainment did Lucilius provide, and for whom? In Horace’s portrait of his predecessor from Satire 2.1, more conciliatory than his portrayals before, Lucilius is shown as a boon companion of the nobles Scipio Aemilianus and Laelius:

quin ubi se a uulgo et scaena secreta remorantuirtus Scipiadae et mitis sapientia Laeli,nugari cum illo et discincti ludere, donecdecoqueretur holus, soliti.

(Hor. S. 2.1.71-74)

In fact, when the brave Scipionic scion and gentle, wise Laelius had withdrawn from the crowd and left the stage for a private place, they were accustomed to fool about with him, and to play with their belts loosened, while the cabbage cooked down.

Their fun and games together, while the cabbage—that humble country food—is boiling away (presumably in a pot, to which we shall return), are conducted away from the public stage, which Peter Wiseman wants to read as an admission that satire was designed to be recited or even acted out in theaters.⁴⁴ At this juncture, I want to explore the role of the gladiator in relation to the satirist as public rather than private entertainment and, in particular, in terms of the luxurious implications of leisure activities (ludere in the Horatian extract). We should remember the claim in the opening of Terence’s Hecyra that the play’s second performance, when it had been revised after the work’s invidious premiere, at the funeral games of Aemilius Paullus in 160 BCE was derailed by an influx of a crowd who had heard that “there was going to be a gladiator show” (datum iri gladiatores, Hec. 40). This famous passage may well be disingenuous,⁴⁵ but it does give a flavor of what theatrical performances were up against—or associated with. Gladiatorial entertainments could have taken place in theaters as part of ludi funebres that would also have included stage performances,⁴⁶ although they were, up to Augustus’ reign at least, not part of public Roman religious festivals, but restricted to private shows.⁴⁷

If gladiators were seen as swaggering actor-type celebrities with extravagant habits, they might be anathema to those preaching restraint and humble moderation, as a Lucilius who liked a quiet supper of cabbage might have done, even if it was with noble friends. A fragment of book 26 describes someone as “having returned and footed it back so that he might avoid Rome with its gladiators” (rediisse ac repedasse, ut Romam uitet gladiatoribus, 677 Marx = 636 Warmington).⁴⁸ We might well ask: back to where? Of course, our inability to gauge whether the fragment is in the voice of, or refers to Lucilius himself, means we cannot work out whether Lucilius felt this way about gladiatorial shows, or even about city living in the manner of Umbricius in Juvenal 3. But shows took place in the city, where one would have seen “the forum sometimes adorned with lamps in the Roman games” (Romanis ludis forus olim ornatus lucernis, 146 Marx = 148 Warmington).⁴⁹ And adjacent to this last fragment in book 3 Lucilius may have compared that picture of the forum to the sparks flying from a volcano.⁵⁰ The public decoration of the forum was the responsibility of the aedile organizing the games there,⁵¹ and we must ask whether luxurious ornament was expected.⁵² Bronze lamps placed in equally prestigious candelabra would count as a luxury.⁵³ Even if the candelabrum was primarily a private household item,⁵⁴ it may have suited the privately sponsored nature of gladiatorial munera.⁵⁵ This kind of light fixture was immortalized by Lucretius, whose examples, part of a critique of luxury, take the form of torch-bearing youths (Lucr. 2.24-26). However, we should bear in mind that they were not necessarily a symbol of inappropriate decadence:

et reliqua ex collocatione uerborum quae sumuntur quasi lumina magnum afferunt ornatum orationi. sunt enim similia illis quae in amplo ornatu scaenae aut fori appellantur insignia, non quia sola ornent sed quod excellent.

(Cic. Orat. 134)

The other ornaments derived from combinations of words bring great decoration like lights to an oration. They are like those objects which in the full embellishment of a stage or forum are called outstanding, not because they are the only ornament, but because they stand out.

If we recall that Livy’s passage about the origins of armed gladiatorial traditions, quoted above, observes that the Romans (in contrast to the Campanians) set up the Samnite spoils as offerings (9.40.17, just before the passage quoted above), then, even though that description is part of a critique of luxury,⁵⁶ we can claim that Lucilius’ flashes from the forum, comparable to Cicero’s rhetorical embellishments, might be caused by the light glinting off this ostentatious armor. So it is not such a bad thing after all. Still, the discourse of luxury means that the Samnite armor was not actually especially manly.⁵⁷ If Lucilius is to be comparable to a gladiator, it is not necessarily such a fighter’s masculine aggression that would have rubbed off on him, but a love for luxury.

The haughtiness of Pacideianus in comparison to Aeserninus is pertinent too.⁵⁸ We should remember that Cicero attributes arrogance to the Campanians on account of their “fertile lands, abundant crops and healthiness, arrangement, and beauty of their city” (Agr. 2.95). That city would be Capua.⁵⁹ He continues, in the same speech, by contrasting the cramped confines of Rome, on its hills,⁶⁰ with the spacious outlook of the premier Campanian city:⁶¹

Romam in montibus positam et conuallibus, cenaculis sublatam atque suspensam, non optumis uiis, angustissimis semitis prae sua Capua planissimo in loco explicata ac praeclarissime sita irridebunt atque contemnent.

(Cic. Agr. 2.96)

They will laugh at and disdain Rome, placed in mountains and valleys, hung up and supported from its rooftops, its roads not the best, its paths the narrowest, in comparison with their own Capua, spread out on the widest of plains and situated beautifully.

The luxurious fertility of Campania, which lies behind this passage, made the province’s major product wine⁶² and encouraged Campanians to become commercially savvy.⁶³ Lucilius certainly evinced an interest in money matters⁶⁴ and liked to indulge in “gutem, reinem, italischem Wein.”⁶⁵ However, these are admittedly not specifically Campanian traits, even if we may suspect that Horace, in his self-effacing assertion, shortly after the Satire 2.1 passage quoted above, that he is “beneath Lucilius in standing/wealth and talent” (infra Lucili censum ingeniumque, S. 2.1.75), is playing with the regional connotations of Lucilius’ place of origin. After all, Horace has already in that poem talked about his own roots, relative to Lucilius, in Apulia (sequor hunc, Lucanus an Apulus anceps, “I follow this man [i.e., Lucilius], whether as a Lucanian or an Apulian,” 2.1.34).⁶⁶ Yet the vocabulary of Lucilian indulgence may still have Campanian resonance in the fact that the region is mentioned by Horace in satire, at least, not so much for its wine but for its crockery.⁶⁷ Black-glazed ware went under the name of “Samian” for much of the Republic,⁶⁸ and—in opposition to silver or later Arretine ware—it was cheapskate and unfashionable. So much so, that it could be used for a sordid task, as Lucilius describes:⁶⁹

hanc ubi uult male habere, ulcisci pro scelere eius,testam sumit homo Samiam sibi, ‘anu noceo’ inquit,praeceidit caulem testisque una amputat ambo.

(Lucil. 279-81 Marx = 303-5 Warmington)

When the man wants to spite this woman, and take vengeance for her crime, he takes to himself a Samian pot-sherd, saying, “I am hurting the old woman,” and cuts off the stalk and lops off both balls at once.

The use of a humble pot-sherd—presumably there isn’t enough money to buy a knife to do the job properly—by this man at the end of his tether to castrate himself is testimony to the multivalency of Campania. It may be fertile,⁷⁰ yet not only does it provide the vehicle for infertility in this particular fragment but it also can be luxurious (like Capua) as well as impoverished (like the cheap pottery produced locally). This is a bundle of contradictions ripe for satirizing. But is it really coincidence that that same description could easily characterize Lucilius himself, simultaneously genteel and rough-and-ready, elite and outsider all in one?

Comic Weakness and Greekness

In my delineation—and no more than that is possible, I again stress—of a Campanian strain to the satirist Lucilius, we have repeatedly seen the poet on the back foot, whether as a decrepit racehorse, a would-be gladiator reliant on Scipio and his set for patronage, or on the losing side in an ancient conflict.⁷¹ An episode later than the Great Latin War, in which Livy might admittedly have played fast and loose with the facts,⁷² shows the Aurunci as dependent on Rome for protection in 337 BCE:

The blessings of peace were now enjoyed everywhere, a peace maintained not more by the power of Rome than by the influence she had acquired through her considerate treatment of her vanquished enemies, when a war broke out between the Sidicines and the Auruncans. After their surrender had been accepted by the consul Manlius, the Auruncans had kept quiet, which gave them a stronger claim to the help of Rome. The senate decided that assistance should be afforded them, but before the consuls started, a report was brought that the Auruncans had been afraid to remain in their town and had fled with their wives and children to Suessa—now called Aurunca—which they had fortified, and that their city with its ancient walls had been destroyed by the Sidicines.

(Liv. 8.15.1-5)

Such weakness seems to me as plausibly Auruncan, a characteristic of Lucilius as the conventional picture of satire’s primus inuentor playing the condemnatory scourge.⁷³ For instance, it is all too easy for Juvenal to exploit vague recollections of Auruncan wars, let alone Lucilius’ military service under Scipio at Numantia (which I have ignored in this article),⁷⁴ as the opportunity to turn the poet into a swashbuckling hero, as he does at the end of his first satire:

ense uelut stricto quotiens Lucilius ardensinfremuit, rubet auditor cui frigida mens estcriminibus, tacita sudant praecordia culpa.

(Juv. 1.165-67)

But whenever Lucilius blazes and roars as if with a drawn sword, the listener whose mind is chilled with guilt blushes, and his heartstrings sweat with silent guilt.

“As if with a drawn sword”: not a real sword, then, if we take the uelut seriously.⁷⁵ It is not long after this, if we read the book sequentially, that we encounter Juvenal’s only other reference to Aurunca, in the middle of the rant against secret homosexual orgies. Juvenal grafts together two excerpts from Virgil’s Aeneid, using epic parody to cast satiric aspersion on the ways in which effeminate men transgress and pervert the Bona Dea ritual: ille tenet speculum, pathici gestamen Othonis, / Actoris Aurunci spolium (“he holds the mirror, the accessory of the pathic Otho, the spoil of Auruncan Actor,” Juv. 2.99-30).⁷⁶ The first allusion to the epic defaces Aeneas’ dedication of Abas’ shield at Actium, magni gestamen Abantis (“tool of great Abas,” Virg. A. 3.286); the second quotes from Turnus’ rush to battle clutching a spear, the original spolium, in the Aeneid (12.94).⁷⁷ Given that the place-name’s first appearance was strongly associated with Lucilius, it is tempting to speculate that the second may also call the Republican satiric predecessor to mind. But if a mirror is now the spoil taken from an actor from Aurunca,⁷⁸ then Lucilius, having lost control of his legacy (you have to be defeated to have spoil taken from you), has fallen from the pedestal he occupied in Juvenal’s first satire. He has gone from charioteer to comic actor, if we adduce the famous proverb about comedy as holding a mirror up to daily life.⁷⁹ If we accept Lucilius as a referent here, Juvenal makes Lucilius a standard-bearer for comedy. This characterization may well be derived from Horace’s attempted dismissal of Lucilius as a follower of comic poets:

hinc omnis pendet Lucilius, hosce secutusmutatis tantum pedibus numerisque; facetus,emunctae naris, durus componere uersus: nam fuit hoc uitiosus.

(Hor. S. 1.4.6-9)

On these authors Lucilius depends entirely, following them with only their meters and rhythms changed; he was witty, with a cleaned-out nose, but rough in composing his verses: in this he was at fault.

The poets cited as Lucilius’ models are Greek Old comedians: Eupolis, Cratinus, and Aristophanes (S. 1.4.1). Finally therefore we must turn to the possibility that the inheritance Horace identifies for Lucilius is Greek because he came from a province in Magna Graecia.

I here sketch three ways in which the idea could play out: topographic, Homeric, and theatrical. First, if we look to the descriptions of places in Lucilius’ Iter Siculum we find the following note: inde Dic[i]architum populos Delumque minorem (“from there to the people of Dicaearchitae, and the lesser Delos,” 123 Marx = 118 Warmington). The information provided by Paulus (Paul. Fest. p.109 Lindsay), the preserver of the fragment, is that both of these are terms that describe the town of Puteoli, in Campania. While it is true that the name Puteoli would not fit into a hexameter,⁸⁰ it is difficult to read the tone of “lesser Delos”: celebratory, neutral, or snide? I would argue that the explanatory bent (Puteoli, after all, could have been smaller in extent than Delos) is not imperialistic but touristic, as some lines that seem to propose visitor attractions further South demonstrate:⁸¹

        et saepe quod anteoptasti, freta, Messanam, Regina uidebismoenia, tum Liparas, Facelinae temple Dianae.

(Lucil. 102-4 Marx = 143-45 Warmington)

And as you often desired before, you will see the straits, Messana, the walls of Rhegium, then Liparae and the temple of Diana Facelina.

These references to possible sightseeing landmarks also fit in with another celebrated fragment from earlier in Lucilius’ Iter Siculum, if the journey was described chronologically:

uerum haec ludus ibi, susque omnia deque fuerunt,susque et deque fuere, inquam, omnia ludus iocusque:illud opus durum, ut Setinum accessimus finem,αἰγίλιποι montes, Aetnae omnes, asperi Athones.

(Lucil. 110-13 Marx = 102-5 Warmington)

But there everything was a game, free and easy; things were free and easy, I say, the whole thing a jest and a joke: that was a hard task, when we reached the border of Setia, goat-free mountains, all Mount Etnas and rough Athoses.

Setia (modern Sezze), though in Latium, is on the way out of the old province, hence finem, and thus arguably the gateway to Campania.⁸² One way of reading the joke, that the foothills there are the equivalent of the famous mountains Etna and Athos, is to observe that these disparate locations are being assimilated to one another. What this implies is a form of pan-Mediterranean unity and a détente with Greek culture.⁸³

The second possibility feeds off a variety of circumstantial evidence regarding the Greek hero Odysseus. The postulated descent of Campanians from the man of many wiles may have been a racial stereotype invented to explain their treacherous behavior.⁸⁴ Most pertinently for my purposes perhaps, Verrius Flaccus (Paul. Fest. p.16 Lindsay) claimed that Auson, son of Odysseus and Calypso, founded Suessa Aurunca.⁸⁵ A satirical inheritance from the Odyssey exists too: if Horace’s journey in Satire 1.5 is a veiled homecoming, with the town (as I argued above) that is not able to be named in hexameters, Horace’s own hometown of Venusia, one of its intertexts must be the nostos of Odysseus, and the presence of a Campanian Cyclops-figure (Messius Cicirrus, S. 1.5.63 as above) is especially appropriate.⁸⁶ It is therefore not out of the question that Lucilius’ Iter Siculum also owed something in structure to the Odyssey. In this vein, we can return to the susque deque fragment above (110-13 Marx = 102-5 Warmington). The word aigilipos used to describe the hills at Setia may recall the Catalogue of Ships, as one of the lands that Odysseus is credited with holding in that list is called “rough Aigilips” (Il. 2.633).⁸⁷ And there seems to be engagement with the idea of being Odysseus elsewhere in the Lucilian corpus:⁸⁸ witness the fragment nupturum te nupta negas, quod uiuere Vlixen / speras (“married as you are you deny that you will get married, because you hope Ulysses is alive,” 538-39 Marx = 565-66 Warmington).⁸⁹

My third option stems not from Lucilius proper but from one last mention of Campania in Horace’s Satires. At the climax of Fundanius’ report of Nasidienus’ banquet in Satire 2.8, a tapestry falls on the eel dish that the host intends as the pièce de résistance:

interea suspensa grauis aulaea ruinasin patinam fecere, trahentia pulueris atriquantum non Aquilo Campanis excitat agris.

(Hor. S. 2.8.54-56)

And now the suspended tapestries fell heavily on to the dish, bringing down more black dust than the North Wind stirs up from the Campanian fields.

Campania enters this equation as the source of the dust in this comparison, which brings to mind a fragment of Accius (566-67 Ribbeck = 242-43 Dangel), quoted by Cicero (Tusc. 1.68), that talks of the Aquilo sweeping down from the frozen north. Horace, by locating the reference in a burlesque of tragedy,⁹⁰ in a recounting by a comic poet (Fundanius), is saying something important about satire’s relationship to the province. We have already seen references to fabula Atellana and homegrown Oscan farces. What has not yet been mentioned is the Lucilian connection: the likelihood that he responded to Oscan as something he had learned in Suessa Aurunca.⁹¹ Now, one poet who advocated Oscan spellings (with doubled vowels) was Accius.⁹² Even though this polymathic and long-lived author was from Pisaurum in Umbria, he did write, as well as tragedies, a fabula praetexta that treated the deuotio in the Third Samnite War of Decius Mus—the son of the eponymous commander who committed a similar self-sacrifice in the Great Latin War against the Aurunci.⁹³ If Accius’ drama contained a flashback to earlier events (or if, indeed, he had written a separate play on that theme),⁹⁴ then perhaps we could have a partial explanation for why it is that Porphyrio attests that Lucilius especially attacked Accius in his third book of poetry, as the satirist journeyed through lands relevant to that praetexta’s plot, or at least to the lead-up to its events.⁹⁵

Horace seems to imply that Lucilius’ criticisms pertained to Accius’ tragedies: nil comis tragici mutat Lucilius Acci? (“doesn’t Lucilius the charmer change anything of the tragedian Accius?” S. 1.10.53), and I did promise tragedy above.⁹⁶ However, tragedy—at least, the Attic variety—seems to have been more of a Tarentine and Lucanian concern than a Campanian one;⁹⁷ the most we can say with certainty about a link to our subject province is that many of the pots which depict scenes from tragedy are from Campania.⁹⁸ One other option is that Lucilius played with the abjection of tragic heroes, perhaps in a ‘hotel inspector’ mode as he journeyed south: a fragment from book 3 mentions Tantalus paying a penalty (140-41 Marx = 136-37 Warmington), which could easily be assimilated to a traveller’s burning thirst. This identification may have been the rationale behind a fragment describing a despondent character (599-600 Marx = 727-28 Warmington) that some grammarians link with Accius’ Telephus.⁹⁹ It has been suggested that on the book 3 journey a sickness afflicted somebody close to Lucilius, a ploughman named Symmachus, and the party stopped over in Capua:¹⁰⁰

Symmacus praeterea iam tum depostus bubulcusexspirans animam pulmonibus aeger agebat.

(Lucil. 105-6 Marx = 133-34 Warmington)

Besides, Symmachus the ploughman was already at that time on point of death, breathing his last, sick in the lungs.

Perhaps Lucilius assimilated his fate (assuming depostus in the last fragment equals depositus, meaning “having died”) to a tragic hero’s; it is perhaps interesting that the idea of the magister pecoris “losing his breath,” in the literal meaning of exspirans animum,¹⁰¹ foreshadows another vocally challenged Lucilian character, “a tragic man who destroys songs with a hoarse Orestes” (rausuro tragicus qui carmina perdit Oreste, 567 Marx = 594 Warmington).¹⁰² But even though this focus on physical frailty resembles the infirmity we earlier identified as typically Auruncan,¹⁰³ I admit that here I have only had to offer the kind of claim which Stefan Faller labels “vage Spekulationen.”¹⁰⁴

Me Talk Pretty One Day

However, Accius is not the most obvious poet with links to Campania of whom Lucilius and Horace may have been aware: that honor belongs to Naevius, who is as far as we know the founder of the genre of fabula praetexta. He was supposedly flung into jail by Rome’s principes, where he wrote two plays before winning his release.¹⁰⁵ Whether or not the anecdotes about Naevius’ exile following his taunting of the Metelli and Scipio Africanus have any truth, I wonder about whether Lucilius’ Iter Siculum could be seen as an ironic form of exile, with the poet fleeing Rome for the sake of privacy after the concentration on civic matters that dominated books 1 and 2, the (very different) trials of Lentulus Lupus and Mucius Scaevola. The journey then becomes a reversal of the poet’s arrival in the city, as could be documented in a line where the diminutive puellus carries a sexual charge, replacing the colloquial (and cretic, therefore non-hexameter) word pusio:¹⁰⁶ “then he came to Rome, a delicate fellow while still a boy” (inde uenit Romam tener ipse etiam atque puellus (425 Marx = 453 Warmington). Might this be an autobiographical reminiscence, visualizing Lucilius himself as once a similarly lowly and inexperienced newcomer to the city?

This focus on language as a marker of relative status is a fitting place to round off our survey of Campanian tropes in Lucilius. Naevius’ epitaph apparently demonstrated his Campanian arrogance (plenum superbiae Campaniae, Gel. 1.24.2).¹⁰⁷ One way in which superiority can be presented is through the medium of accent-based racial mockery. When it comes to the ambiguity we identified above as a feature of Campania, shellfish are an important part of it because they were both a highly prized delicacy and readily available.¹⁰⁸ On Lucilius’ journey south, he seems to complain a lot (in a mock-tragic manner?);¹⁰⁹ “no oysters,” he claims at one point (132 Marx = 126 Warmington). But while the word for oyster, ostrea, is feminine in gender, on one later occasion it seems to appear in the neuter plural:

        quid ergo, si ostrea Cercocognorit fluuium limum ac caenum sapere ipsum?

(Lucil. 328-29 Marx = 357-58 Warmington)

What then if Cerco finds that oysters taste of the very mud and mire of the rivers?

This question, which Nonius records as being in book 9, can be deemed an example of the speech of a person of lower social rank (such as a cook), with the neuter plural ostrea, as if transliterated from Greek, an affectation showing pretensions to hyper-correctness.¹¹⁰ Although we may be dealing with a generation before Gaius Sergius Orata’s supposed foundation of artificial oyster beds on the Lucrine Lake early in the first century BCE,¹¹¹ I still think—in view, for instance, of the sumptuary laws of 115 BCE that regulated shellfish consumption (Plin. Nat. 8.223)—that Campanian oysters might have been a flashpoint for Lucilian grumbling.¹¹² Another relevant issue of pronunciation may lie behind the much-disputed fragment, Broncus Bouillanus dente aduerso eminulo hic est / rhinoceros (117-18 Marx = 109-10 Warmington, in Warmington’s rendering).¹¹³ The crux in transmitted Noui†tlanus has been interpreted as Noulitanus, denoting a man from Nola, that is a Campanian, with a strange way of pronouncing the vowel o.¹¹⁴

Once more we see that however much Campania is suggestive culturally or topographically for Lucilius, it always ends up as having literary significance or at least mediated through literary sources. In this regard I have combined two approaches here, diachronic and synchronic ones, in the sense of paying attention to contemporary realities as well as historical inheritance. Let us return to the first mention of satire’s primus inuentor in Juvenal (1.19-21), where we began. There the magnus alumnus Auruncae guided his horses (plural, i.e., a chariot?), forcing Juvenal to follow him, to decurrere campo. The plain in this instance is always supposed to be located at Rome. However, just because Juvenal’s plain is both the field of satiric poetry and literally the Campus Martius, which was also outside Rome’s pomerium anyway,¹¹⁵ does not mean that Lucilius’ was. Capua’s plain perhaps was always a site for Lucilian satire—and I would at the very least aver that it is only by excavating a deep Campanian past that we can illuminate the satiric present. The province’s old conflicts, the Great Latin War onwards, live on in Lucilius and the reception of Lucilius.