Satiric Advice on Women and Marriage: From Plautus to Chaucer

Six. Advice on Sex by the Self-Defeating Satirists: horace Sermones 1.2, juvenal Satire 6, and roman satiric writing

111 Six Advice on Sex by the Self-Defeating Satirists horace Sermones 1.2, juvenal Satire 6, and roman satiric writing Warren S. Smith c The literary and artistic consciousness of the Romans could not imagine a serious form without its comic equivalent. The serious, straightforward form was perceived as only a fragment, only half of a whole. . . . As in the Saturnalia the clown was the double of the ruler and the slave the double of the master, so such comic doubles were created in all forms of culture and literature. —M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination THE MARRIAGE JOKE he Greek and Roman comic traditions embraced the marriage joke early and ubiquitously and took a firm, unequivocal stance. Susarion of Megara, of uncertain date but, according to tradition, the “inventor” of Greek Old Comedy, told “the world’s oldest joke” in a famous fragment. kako;n gunai`ke", ajll jo{mw", w\ dhmo Vtai, ou[k ejstin oijkei`n oijkivan a[neu kakou`. T [Women are evil, but still, my neighbors, one can’t live in a home without some evil.]1 There are similar observations in Semonides’ memorable poem comparing wives with animals (seventh century B.C.), which proclaims, at the culmination (96–98) of the rogue’s gallery of types of wives, “Yes, Zeus made this greatest pain of all: women.”2 The theme was to have widespread literary repercussions and was appreciated by no audience more than the Romans, who—in comedy, satire, and incidental witticisms—came up with endless variations on Susarion’s marriage joke, often emphasizing not so much the “evil” of women as the inability of men to live with or stay faithful to them. Thus in Plautus’s Asinaria , Argyrippus, carousing with his father, Demaenetus, engages in a dialogue form of the joke with the old man, transparently setting him up to deliver his punch line with its not-so-subtle double entendre. Argyr. Quid ais, pater? Ecquid matrem amas? Dem. Egone illam? Nunc amo, quia non adest. Argyr. Quid cum adest? Dem. Perisse cupio. [Argyr. Tell me father, don’t you love mother at all? Dem. Me love her? Yes, I love her now, because she’s not here. Argyr. And when she is here? Dem. Death is what I long for.] A somewhat subtler form of the joke, but with the same surprise sting at the end, is Cicero’s story in De oratore 2.278 about the Sicilian who, when told by a friend that his wife had hung herself from a fig tree, replied, Amabo te, da mihi ex ista arbore quos seram surculos [Please give me some shoots from that tree to plant]. The Roman versions of the marriage joke certainly do not absolve the man of all guilt. Part of the resulting laughter is that men know that marriage is an “evil” yet still feel they cannot do without it. In other words, men are not mere innocent victims of the troubles in store if they choose to live with women; they knowingly bring them on themselves. This sets up a dichotomy that we can see as peculiarly Roman and characteristic of satiric writing. Thus Lucilius (644–45), the pioneer Roman satirist, concludes: Satiric Advice on Women and Marriage 112 Homines ipsi hanc sibi molestiam ultro atque aerumnam offerunt: Ducunt uxores, producunt quibus haec faciant liberos. [Men bring this trouble and annoyance on themselves of their own accord. They marry wives and produce children for whose sake they do all this.] The fault may be on the part of the man who is incapable of loving even an excellent wife for an entire lifetime. This is the point of a poem attributed to Petronius. Uxor legitimus debet quasi census amari. Nec censum vellem semper amare meum.3 [A wife should be loved like a fortune got legally. But I would not wish to love even my fortune forever.] If the Romans, as Bakhtin argued, saw a comic side to every issue, balancing and coexisting with the serious, how much more inevitably is the comic aspect likely to receive prominence when the discussion is about sex. Discussions of sex certainly lend themselves easily to satiric treatment, because the sex drive puts otherwise levelheaded people in situations where they act ridiculous. If sober argument will not deter them from the distractions and disappointments of courtship, a snapshot of their laughable behavior may do so. One obvious...