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5. Talking Heads and Canidian Poetics: Satires 1.8
- University of Wisconsin Press
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In Satires ..–, a man’s penis speaks to him about the folly of his desires, pointing out that his own sexual requirements (the phallus’s) are far more reasonable than his host’s.1 The satiric landscape in which Horace works has changed since Satires .: the talking phallus in Satires . is an uneasy rendition of the philosophically assured member of Satires ., and this is all the more surprising because this poem’s phallic speaker is the god Priapus. There are, in fact, three speakers in this poem that Priapus narrates, and Horace and Canidia are the other two. The poem undoes the power of each speaker, ambivalently in the case of the poet. Satires . begins with an announcement of the speaker’s identity, the only poem in the Satires to do so, and the only poem of the first book of Satires that is not narrated by a figure explicitly or implicitly identified with the persona of Horace. The poem thus provides an opportunity to examine a Horatian satire that is not tempered by the poet’s protestations about his own persona , and to consider the elements of this genre that the poet claims to reject as part of his repertoire. I suggest too that the poem’s two speakers, Priapus and Canidia, each act as a substitute for Horace’s own persona and present elements of satire that the poet has disavowed for himself, but that he also recognizes as elements fundamental to his genre, though these are problematic when spoken by his own persona. Within the triad of poems, Satires ., , and , Satires . presents abusive speech and . the wearisome garrulity condemned in Satires .. Between these two is Satires ., treating an issue critical to the discussion of satire in Satires ., the satirist’s menace and the fearful audience.2 Satires . resolves the Talking Heads and Canidian Poetics Satires . issue of menace to an audience by insisting that our response is to laugh, which indeed we do. The narrator of Satires ., Priapus, is not strictly a phallus, but that is the great distinguishing feature of this god derived from a Greek fertility deity; in his Roman context he protects boundaries by threatening trespassers with punishments inflicted by his outsized phallus.3 He is the speaker of an extant group of Latin poems, called Priapea, a work of uncertain date and authorship, in which Priapus relentlessly boasts and menaces and occasionally offers an assist to erotically challenged worshippers. The genre of Priapic poems was popular in the late republic and early empire in Rome, whatever the true provenance of the Priapea we possess.4 Though in those poems Priapus’s focus and distinguishing feature is his own exceedingly virile member, that organ plays no role in Horace’s tale of Priapus; the constant threats of anal and oral penetration in the Priapea serve as a latent memory in the depiction of the oral and anal ineptitude of the Priapus in Satires .. Horace gives us a Priapic narrator markedly different from the persona of the Priapea. Though Priapus begins the satire with a conventional boast of his menace, he proves to be a timorous version of himself, who succeeds only inadvertently in driving the trespassers, Canidia and Sagana, out of his garden. Horace’s version of a Priapic poem takes the sexual (and satiric) menace away from Priapus.5 The poem’s beginning is a conventional Priapic opener, with Priapus’s identification of himself: Olim truncus eram ficulnus, inutile lignum, cum faber, incertus scamnum faceretne Priapum, maluit esse deum. deus inde ego, furum aviumque maxima formido; nam fures dextra coercet obscenoque ruber porrectus ab inguine palus; ast importunas volucres in vertice harundo terret fixa vetatque novis considere in hortis. Sat. ..– Once I was a fig tree, a worthless piece of wood, when a woodworker, unsure whether to make a footstool or a Priapus, preferred to make the god. Hence god I am, and a terrible threat to thieves and birds; for my right hand restrains thieves, along with my red rod that towers from my naughty groin; Satires . and the reed stuck into the top of my head terrifies the marauding birds and keeps them from settling in the new gardens. Priapus tells us that he has been vulnerable from his very beginnings, when the faber who made him debated whether to make the fig-wood log into a god or a piece of furniture.6 His “self” was arbitrarily determined by the preference of the woodworker...