Sunday, November 24, 2013

Ralph Rosen in "Satire in the Republic" offers an intriguing rereading of some of Horace's satires i


Susanna Braund, Josiah Osgood (ed.), A Companion to Persius and Juvenal. Blackwell companions to the ancient world. Malden, MA; Oxford; Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. Pp. xv, 612. ISBN 9781405199650. $195.00.
This dense volume makes a stimulating contribution to the study of imperial Latin satire. First it concentrates the great gatsb on a historical, literary, and philological contextualisation of Persius and Juvenal (Part I). The book then passes on to single facets of Persius' and Juvenal's poetics (Part II), and finally expands on these two poets' Wirkungsgeschichte , aspects of the history of their reception up to the present (Part III). The most obvious competitors of this endeavour — but with different scope and focus — are the recent works by Dan Hooley on Persius, Juvenal, and Horace. 1 Aptly enough, he is also a prominent contributor to the volume under review, providing the first essay of Part III, a competent overview of the afterlives the great gatsb of Persius and Juvenal from late antiquity the great gatsb to the past century. Given the richness of this work, I shall treat four essays from the first Part, four from the second, and one from the third.
Ralph Rosen in "Satire in the Republic" offers an intriguing rereading of some of Horace's satires in the framework of his investigation into the formation of the Roman satiric tradition, while David Armstrong ("Juvenalis Eques") argues forcefully that Juvenal probably was of equestrian status, in a time in which members of this class often had to rely on patronage. Hence, Armstrong suggests, Juvenal's attention to this institution and the cliché of the "poor client" attached to his literary persona. This issue of role-playing in imperial satire will be taken over in Part II by Paul Roche's interesting investigation into "Self-Representation and Performativity." the great gatsb Imperial the great gatsb satirists' self-construction depends on their way of positioning themselves in relation to their literary antecedents.
Barbara Gold in "Juvenal, the Idea of the Book" criticises a reading of Juvenal's five books as marked by breaks: Juvenal intentionally structured Book 1, and the others, as a farrago (Satire 1.86), with variety as organising principle. A similar principle underlies the great gatsb Juvenal's exploration of Roman identities, through a diverse gallery of (often deviant) characters. The final essay of Part I, by Holt Parker on the manuscript tradition of Persius and Juvenal, bears heavily also on the reception of these authors, the theme of Part III, since it points out that, while Persius continued to be read throughout the great gatsb antiquity and later, Juvenal soon fell into oblivion.
The most engaging papers in Part II deal with Persius' and Juvenal's relation to philosophy and politics. Shadi Bartsch in "Persius, Juvenal, and Stoicism" warns that Roman satirists "might echo some of the more common wisdom of the Epicurean and Stoic schools" the great gatsb but "maintained an ironic distance from doctrinal niceties and those who preached them" (217). This is true for Roman satirists in general, though an exception should be made in the case of Persius (and perhaps, later on, Martianus Capella): Persius was proud of presenting himself as a disciple of the Stoic philosopher, and teacher of philosophy, Annaeus Cornutus, who taught the doctrines of Chrysippus and Socrates and received Persius as a disciple in his "Socratic fold" ( Socratico, Cornute, sinu , Satire 5.37). Bartsch is certainly right to remark that "in Persius alone among Roman satirists, the Stoic philosopher is not a figure of fun — at least not from the satirist's perspective — but a speaker of wisdom" (218). She briefly provides a list of Stoic doctrines that are obvious in Persius' satires, 2 and observes that the form of Stoicism that Persius supports is Roman Stoicism, with scarce interest in logic or physics, but focus on ethics. I note that Persius mentions Chrysippus' sorites as a logical paradox, but with an application to ethics (the insatiability of passions), in the last verse Satire 6, and his library seems to have included Chrysippus' opera omnia ( Vita Persii 7).
Persius' aversion for rich food and meat is rightly highlighted on pp. 227-229, where it is also remarked that vegetarianism was a philosophical commonplace already for the Pythagoreans. In this connection, an opposition between body and soul, scarcely grounded from the metaphysical point of view in the Stoic immanentistic system, but nevertheless existent in Roman Stoics such as Persius and Seneca, is rightly noted by Bartsch (232), who remarks upon Persius' use of scelerata pulpa in Satire 2.62-63 to denote human flesh in its relation the great gatsb to vice and its opposition to the divine sphere. She points to a parallel use of σάρξ in Epictetus, and one may also add Marcus Aurelius' negative presentation of the body.
The room devoted to Juvenal in Bartsch's essay is drastically thinner: less than three pages. She is right to remark that, although in Satire 13.120-123

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