SATIRE

…. is all ours

Cicero’s humor 1

• A man is visiting a friend’s garden. The host points to a tree and explains, “this is the tree from which my wife hanged herself.”

• — Gee! Could I have sprout to plant it in my orchard? With some luck, my wife may get the same idea.

Martial: Maronilla has a cough

• Gemellus is eager to marry Maronilla• He insists, begs, and offers her gifts. • Is she so pretty? No! She really foul. • So why is is he after her? It’s the cough.

Martial: While Teeth

• Thais has black teeth, Laecania has white• Why? The first has her own.

Traditional Latin entertainment:

• Fescennine ritual jokes

• Satura ‘medley’

• Atellane Oscan farce

Fescennine

• Originated at harvest festivals

• Improvised at weddings and triumphs;

Versus fescennini 2

• “Urbani servate uxores, moechum calvom adducimus”

Suet. Iul. 51

“Citizens, hide your wives,

We are brining in the bald ******

• Caesar’s soldiers were also mocking his meager vegetarian diet while in on campaign in Dyrrahium

Catullus

• Mr Dick is fooling around. Of course.

• What else could he do with a name like this.– Maurra

Plan

• Historical survey of Roman satire

• Focus on– HORACE– JUVENAL

SATURA

• Satyrus may be associated with Greek satyr plays

• Lanx satura = a full dish, an offering at a harvest home including a variety of fruit

• = pot pourri

Satire linked to Ritual

• Cursing

• Shaming

• Improvised Versus Fescennini

• Cf. French charivari (mock serenade for the newlyweds)

Satire and ritual

• Public ritualized blame used to enforce community values and punish transgressions

• Akin to, but more aggressive, than carnivalesque laughter

Pieter Breughel The Elder Battle of carnival and lent

Greek precedents

• Mime (sketches depicting scenes from every-day life)

• Diatribe (ethical sermon preached by a philosopher)

Menippus of Gadara

• third century BCE

• a Cynic philosopher

• wrote diatribes in a mixture of prose and poetry

• mixture of seriousness and laughter

By Diego Velasquez

The genre

• Early Roman satura

• described by Livy

• dramatic performance involving dance & music

Roman Satire before Horace

• Quintus Ennius (3rd-2nd BCE) four books in a variety of meters.

Lucilius (2nd BCE)

• Inventor of the genre• Specialized in personal invective

– naming the victim • “After spending some money in his sleep, Hermon the miser was so

mad hanged himself.”

Varro

• M.T. Varro 1st BCE volumes of satire imitating Menippus– “He who runs away his

own, will run for a long time”

Horace

• Born at Venusia in 65 BCE

• Son of a freedman, educated in Rome, and Athens.

• 40 – 30 BCE Epodes and Satires

Roman Satire after Horace and before Juvenal

• Petronius (d. 66 CE) Satiricon, a novel in Meippean satire.

Decimus Iunius Iuvenalis

• 1st 2nd CE

• Writing after the death of DOMITIAN

• good rhetorical training

• little interest in philosophy

• Sixteen satires in hexameter, subdivided into five books.