-
Introduction: Satire and the Threat of Speech
- University of Wisconsin Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
The violence of Roman public life has a canonical beginning in , when Tiberius Gracchus, the tribune of the Plebs, was murdered by his political opponents. The person of the tribune was designated as sacrosanct by Roman tradition, and there is a special alarm in this murder that inaugurated a course of increasingly bloody political solutions in Rome. These solutions culminated in the long years of the civil wars. Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon in January of to fight the armies of his old friend and former son-in-law, Pompey the Great, and there was little peace until after Octavian, soon to be Augustus, settled matters with Antony and Cleopatra in . This public violence was the social practice and the reality of the society in which Horace wrote his Satires. For a long time—in fact since Horace’s texts have had readers—critics have speculated and made assertions about who the poet Horace was, his temperament, economic circumstances, family background, and so on; but they have had little to say about things concerning Horace that are more knowable, such as what the world that Horace inhabited was like. Our sources for the realia of Horace’s Rome may be exiguous, but they are more verifiable than the character of the “real” Horace. Yet it is that “real” man whom readers confidently sought and reconstructed from the canny beauty of Horace’s poetic art. This book is a literary exploration of that art, in the first book of Horace’s Satires. The purpose of the book is not to present a historical picture nor to offer an analysis of such a picture (others have done this). But if the climate in which Horace wrote offered violence as the prevailing solution to public conflict, then this would be a powerfully influential Introduction Satire and the Threat of Speech paradigm, and any artistic effort would be necessarily informed by it. The genre of satire flirts with verbal violence and has literary-genetic roots in speech genres of attack and coercion (iambic verse and magical incantation ). Horace is remarkably defensive about writing satire in his first book; he defines the genre by putting forward the expectations his audience has and then insisting he has no capacity to fulfill these expectations. I suggest that the extreme violence of political life in Rome while Horace was living there and writing the Satires figures profoundly in his use of satire. Once Horace has opened up his thesis in Satires . that satire is a genre that does harm and makes people afraid, he has introduced a model that is surely informed by the harmful and frightening acts perpetrated against people that were everywhere visible in Rome. Satire has never been congenial to category. While epic, tragedy, and comedy rest securely in our minds as literary entities and as recognizable media of the impulse to praise, to ponder, or to laugh, satire shifts and turns. Quintilian’s famously confident statement, “satura quidem tota nostra est” (satire is all our own), claims a Roman birth for the genre of satire, but does not address satire’s unsteady generic state. It is perhaps only in that characteristically equivocal Latin particle quidem that Quintilian lets in a whiff of satire’s uncertainty.1 The confused etymology of the name satura bespeaks the genre’s uncertainty: is “satire” born of the root sat-, meaning “full, full of mixture,” as a sacrificial plate filled with a mixture of herbs, or as a sausage filled with various food stuffs, or even as a law packed with codicils to please a variety of interests? Or does satire derive from satyr plays, the frisky conclusions to an Athenian day of tragedy viewing?2 Modern scholars favor the first etymology, but both attempts at fixing the history of the genre’s name reflect satire’s cloudy nature, mark its difference from a clear literary tradition. Indeed, the first etymology notes satire’s nonliterary nature, drawn from a homely realm of food and made metaphorical in law. Variety is the essence of this derivation, a neutral comment that satire is unfixed and contains many elements. To connect satire with “satyr” notes another element, which is the unconstraint of the satyr figure and the plays associated with it in the Greek dramatic tradition, not strictly comedy but performing some of comedy’s service to liberate the audience by permitting the speech and action that...