Lucilius and Satire in Second-Century BC Rome ed. by Brian W. Breed, Elizabeth Keitel and Rex Wallace (review)

This volume's theme combines two of the prevailing critical interests of the past half-decade in Latin literary studies: fragmentary texts of Republican Rome, and historical and contextual accounts of Roman satire. Much recent work on the satirists has attempted to see them as critical commentators on their different eras, and not merely as participants in an anachronistic, inward-looking dialogue about genre and form. Now arrives this volume about Lucilius and the second century bc, and it offers an opportunity to see the poet's extant work as more than simply a reflecting pool for later writers' interests. Although the focus of the chapters is more limited than it appears to be from the book's title, the best chapters do succeed in recovering a sense of Lucilius as an engaged recorder and critic of his own period.

The longest subsection is in fact devoted to linguistic papers, one of which (by Paolo Poccetti) is almost twice the length of any other chapter in the book. The volume's "particular emphasis on language" (8) makes sense given the nature and difficulty of the fragments that survive, and the editors help to bridge the sense of divide between linguistic and literary approaches by providing an interesting, accessible account of the linguistic diversity of the period (23–29). Anna Chahoud analyzes Lucilius' manipulation of compounds and his placement of conjunctions and prepositions in his verse. She demonstrates that archaizing features of his poetic idiom show common features with Plautus, Cato, and Ennius, "with no apparent genre-specific differentiation" (159). Giuseppe Pezzini offers an instructive account of Lucilius and the language of Roman comedy, arguing that he imitates the verbal exuberance of Plautus but also shows a tendency towards grammatical and metrical regularization typical of Terence. As for Angelo Mercado's forbiddingly complicated analysis of accent in Lucilian hexameters, I am not the right person to judge its success. He certainly makes few concessions for non-experts.

The best of the literary chapters present Lucilius' project in original and unexpected ways. Cynthia Damon's chapter convincingly demonstrates a preoccupation with prices and economics in the fragments, arguing that his practice as a poet is to "apply a price or a label" to values and people as well as objects (236). Ian Goh's inventive contribution suggests that Lucilius is as much a historian of Roman luxury as a critic of it, chronicling the changes in culinary practices that led to the sumptuary legislation of the mid-second century. On the other hand, Brian Breed attempts awkwardly to find in Lucilius the kind of self-consciousness about books and textuality that he found in Vergil in his study Pastoral Inscriptions: Reading and Writing Virgil's Eclogues (London 2006). He begins with overstatement ("the book takes on a new importance at Rome with Lucilius") and then backpedals (it is "not clear" how, when, or why Lucilius' books were arranged; "Nothing much can be said" about the composition of books 22–25; "Still, nothing tells against Lucilius as a likely candidate to be the innovator in bringing the poetic book to Rome," 60–61). Explicit questions of politics and philosophy arise only in Luca Grillo's chapter, the last and briefest of the book, arguing for Aulus Postumius Albinus as the addressee of the famous virtus fragment (1196–1208W). The second century of the title remains mostly an era of words and poems, not politics and ideas.

All in all, the volume testifies to the difficulty of reading Lucilius on his own terms, especially since, as Sander Goldberg emphasizes, the record of what remains has already been shaped by the motivations of later writers and lexicographers (43). But the most innovative literary and linguistic chapters find in Lucilius a position and purpose apart from Quintilian's artificial framework of Roman satura, and they should provide inspiration...