Roman Verse Satires

Ebook available to libraries exclusively as part of the JSTOR Path to Open initiative.

The Romans claimed to have invented satire—one of the most enduring and certainly one of the most entertaining genres of literature bequeathed to posterity from the ancient world. Modern satire aims generally to puncture pretence and to hurt its targets with withering caricature and bruising irony, but Roman satire was not so easy to characterise.

One of the earliest exponents (Lucilius) went in for some personal invective and set the tone for many a 21st-century scribbler keen to wound his enemies with well-chosen words, but later writers in the Roman tradition distanced themselves from the tradition of personal critique and were reluctant to paint themselves as in any sense attack-dogs.

If they were inveighing against folly and vice, it was (they claimed) more in a spirit of positive encouragement to us all to live better and happier lives, freed from the shackles of character-flaws and absurd behaviour. Satire in verse was also a highly self-conscious literary exercise which invested its moral message with layers of irony and wit. This tradition of both personal and philosophical satire laid the foundations for the massive tradition of satire in Europe which continues to this day.

Roman Verse Satires will examine the tradition of hexameter verse satires as practised by Ennius, Lucilius, Horace, Persius, and Juvenal and will also present something of the massive influence which this complex, at times contradictory and entertaining Roman genre had on later literature, culture and film.