The trademark exuberance of Lucilius, gentleness of Horace, abrasiveness of Persius, and vehemence of Juvenal are the diverse satiric styles on display in this Reader. Witnesses to the spectacular growth of Rome's political and military power, the expansion and diversification of its society, and the evolution of a wide spectrum of its literary genres, satirists provide an unparalleled window into Roman culture: from trials of the urban poor to the smarmy practices of legacy hunters, from musings on satire and the satirist to gruesome scenes from a gladiatorial contest, from a definition of virtue to the scandalous sexual display of wayward women. Provocative and entertaining, challenging and yet accessible, Roman verse satire is a motley dish stuffed to its readers' delights.
-- Introduction -- Latin text with facing English translation -- Notes keyed to English translations -- Index of names Satura quidem tota nostra est (Satire is altogether ours) was the claim of the Roman Quintilian, the first century C.E. commentator on rhetorical and literary matters, for the literary world had not previously seen the likes of satire. This edition provides introduction to Roman verse satire for the English reader and aid to the Latin student in understanding these challenging, sometimes obscure texts. Lucilius, Horace, Persius, and Juvenal are equally represented, in an attempt to redress a tendency in other anthologies to favor Horace and Juvenal.
Maria Plaza sets out to analyse the function of humour in the Roman satirists Horace, Persius, and Juvenal. Her starting point is that satire is driven by two motives, which are to a certain extent opposed: to display humour, and to promote a serious moral message. She argues that, while the Roman satirist needs humour for his work's aesthetic merit, his proposed message suffers from the ambivalence that humour brings with it. Her analysis shows that this paradox is not only socio-ideological but also aesthetic, forming the ground for the curious, hybrid nature of Roman satire.
Brimming with notes, essays and more, this is a fully loaded resource giving an innovative reading of satire's relation to Roman ideology. A hugely student -friendly book and a valuable fund of knowledge for any Latin literature scholar.
This compact and critically up-to-date introduction to Roman satire examines the development of the genre, focusing particularly on the literary and social functionality of satire. It considers why it was important to the Romans and why it still matters. Provides a compact and critically up-to-date introduction to Roman satire. Focuses on the development and function of satire in literary and social contexts. Takes account of recent critical approaches. Keeps the uninitiated reader in mind, presuming no prior knowledge of the subject. Introduces each satirist in his own historical time and place – including the masters of Roman satire, Lucilius, Horace, Persius, and Juvenal. Facilitates comparative and intertextual discussion of different satirists.
This volume, from an innovative scholar of Latin Literature and Greek Old Comedy, distills the modern corpus of scholarship on Roman Satire, presenting the genre in particular through the themes of literary ambition, self-fashioning, and poetic afterlife.
The fifteen essays collected here argue that Roman verse satire should be viewed primarily as an art form, rather than as a social document or a direct expression of social protest. Originally published between 1956 and 1974, they constitute an impressive attempt to free Roman satire from misinterpretations that arose during the romantic era and that continue to plague scholars in the field. The author rejects the proposition that Juvenal and other satirists expressed spontaneous, unadorned anger and that the critic’s best approach is the study of the historical, social, economic and personal circumstances that led to their statement of that anger. This work develops his thesis that Roman satire was designed as a literary form and that the proper stance of the critic is to elucidate its art. Focusing on the dramatic character of the first-person speaker in the satires of Horace, Persius, and Juvenal, the author shows both how the speaker’s role was shaped to suit the purposes of the individual poems and how that role changed over successive collections of satires. Several essays also discuss the ways in which the satirists employed metaphors and similes and used contemporary ethical and rhetorical themes. Originally published in 1982. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
This survey of Roman satire locates its most salient possibilities and effects at the center of every Roman reader's cultural and political self-understanding. This book describes the genre's numerous shifts in focus and tone over several centuries (from Lucilius to Juvenal) not as mere 'generic adjustments' that reflect the personal preferences of its authors, but as separate chapters in a special, generically encoded story of Rome's lost, and much lionized, Republican identity. Freedom exists in performance in ancient Rome: it is a 'spoken' entity. As a result, satire's programmatic shifts, from 'open' to 'understated' to 'cryptic' and so on, can never be purely 'literary' and 'apolitical' in focus and/or tone. In Satires of Rome, Professor Freudenburg reads these shifts as the genre's unique way of staging and agonizing over a crisis in Roman identity. Satire's standard 'genre question' in this book becomes a question of the Roman self.
