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  • Persius: A Study in Food, Philosophy, and the Figural by Shadi Bartsch
  • Timothy Haase
Persius: A Study in Food, Philosophy, and the Figural, by Shadi Bartsch. Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 2015. viii, 260 pp. $50.00 US (cloth).

Even for most scholars of Roman literature, the tiny corpus of the Latin verse satirist and Stoic philosophical poet Persius (six poems of only about seven hundred lines total) remains an unbroached subject because of two key obstacles. One, any satisfactory reading of Persius (34–62 ce) must consider how he straddles the identity of satirical philosopher and philosophical satirist. Second, an interpreter must overcome the disgust that arises in response to the violence of Persius’s language and thought: his imagery is grotesque (often featuring bodies in states of decay, analogized to cracked objects or oozing flesh), his metaphors are bold and off-putting (orgasming eyes, dismembered poems, throats debrided by philosophy), and, consequently, his meaning is seldom transparent.

In her recent monograph, Persius: A Study in Food, Philosophy, and the Figural, Shadi Bartsch, Helen A. Regenstein Distinguished Service Professor of Classics and the Program in Gender Studies at the University of Chicago, faces these twin challenges head-on and presents a compelling new entry-point for the study of Persius through a deep analysis of his use and abuse of systems of figural language for philosophic ends. Suggesting that Persius’s use of language preordains our readerly disgust, Bartsch argues that Persius “leans heavily on a transformative use of metaphor” (5) to create a philosophically coherent yet paradoxically “self-cancelling collection of images that demand to be transcended in favor of something else” (11). Over the course of five chapters, she surveys how Persius’s metaphorical imagery and aggressive style are not subsidiary to his Stoic message of emotional detachment, nor is philosophy merely an appendage to an audacious stylistic program. Persius draws on aesthetic and philosophical expectations — on the one hand, the classicizing norms of unity and pleasure and, on the other, the philosophical goal of linguistic transparency (or “language degree zero,” in Bartsch’s formulation [8, 166]) — only to subvert them. His linguistic violence is the main conveyor of his philosophical message of wisdom through disengagement, even if it achieves this goal counterintuitively.

In the first three chapters of the book (subtitled “Cannibals and Philosophers”), Bartsch lays out a system of metaphorical references scattered over various poems by which Persius characterizes contemporary Roman poetry, his own production in response, and the contrasting effects of each upon their audience. In particular, he associates his contemporaries’ decadent verse with nauseatingly rich and sweet foodstuffs; more disturbing, Bartsch shows how Persius connects the consumption of his rivals’ poetic output — which includes among its subjects mythological [End Page 111] cannibalism, such as the myth of Thyestes, tricked by his brother Atreus into eating his own children — with the consumption of human flesh. This kind of poetry, according to Persius, is bound to cause widespread “intestinal” discomfort, literal and figurative. The remedy? Persius’s own poetry, figured as a medicinal brew, astringent but curative, and a vegetarian diet, simple and purgative. Bartsch connects these images of food and medicine to larger frameworks of philosophical pedagogy which Persius likewise rejects, namely a Platonic relationship between teacher and student based on sublimated erotics, and which he replaces with humbler, more modest images of his own Stoic guide, Cornutus.

In the second half of the work (“The Metaphorics of Disgust”), Bartsch shifts from considering how Persius creates a system of metaphors to describe poetry (his own and his rivals’) to how Persius views metaphors themselves, and she questions whether the curative program of philosophy he associates with his poetry through these metaphors is fundamentally undercut by the very use of figural language at all. If, as Bartsch demonstrates, the ancients associated metaphor with the pleasure of poetry, can Persius’s metaphors, shocking though they are, be divorced from sweetness and delight? Even if they can, why should they be? As Bartsch argues, the Stoic school that Persius represents aimed at expressing its ideas in clear language and was strongly concerned about the corrupting power of overly enticing verse. And, further, what to...

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