Critical Essays on Roman Literature

Satire

J. P. Sullivan

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781134876846
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

First published in 1963, this book is the second of two volumes which bridge the gap between the study of classics and the study of literature and attempt to reconcile the two disciplines. Focusing on satire, this collection of essays offers a critical examination of Latin literature and aims to stimulate critical discussion of a selection of Latin poets.

This experimental and ground-breaking book will be of particular interest to students of Roman Literature, Classics and Poetry.

IS JUVENAL A CLASSIC?

An Introductory Essay

H. A. Mason

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‘EVERYTHING depends on the reality of a poet’s classic character. If he is a dubious classic, let us sift him; if he is a false classic, let us explode him. But if he is a real classic, if his work belongs to the class of the very best (for this is the true and right meaning of the word classic, classical), then the great thing for us is to feel and enjoy his work as deeply as ever we can, and to appreciate the wide difference between it and all work which has not the same high character.’

After G. G. Ramsay had pronounced, in the introduction to the Loeb translation, that Juvenal is ‘the greatest satirist, and one of the greatest moralists, of the world’, it would seem an odd pretension for an amateur to suppose that any arguments he might put forward for contesting these two claims could serve to clarify serious thinking about Juvenal. At the same time, this remark of Ramsay’s could not be made with any claim to critical authority by a mere specialist. For these assertions presuppose comparison of the Latin poet with all other moral satirists before Juvenal and after him down to the time of writing, and any such comparison could obviously not be made by a committee each member of which was a competent judge in only one of the relevant literatures. And if we inquire into the status of Juvenal as a classic, there is a further implication that, whoever proposes the sentence, the jury appealed to is the common sense of mankind.

It would nevertheless be an absurd pretension to put forward an account of Juvenal that contradicted the consensus of the scholars. After all, most of what occurs when an amateur reads a Latin author is the taking over of meanings established by learned commentators who have examined all the other contexts in which the author’s words have come down to us. And even on matters of taste it seems reasonable to listen first to those who have made a special study of the author’s manner and spirit. About Juvenal’s merits, however, there is no scholarly consensus: the specialists do not speak with one voice. It would be easy to quote opinions from them showing that Juvenal’s status as a classic is not securely established. Moreover, quite apart from the comparative merits of Juvenal among the world’s moral satirists, there is no agreement about what might seem to be almost matters of fact: the qualities that mark Juvenal out as a poet distinct from other Latin poets.

The contention of this essay is that the characteristic qualities of Juvenal’s art are such that he cannot be described as a classic of moral satire. To establish such a contention would clearly involve a vast European debate, which could not take place until common ground had been made to bring all the competent witnesses into effective opposition. In the present state of classical studies the prospect of setting up anything of this kind is remote. To judge by the standard works and recent essays on Juvenal written in the chief European languages, the learned authors all seem to exemplify the German phrase aneinander vorbeireden. While apparently addressing their colleagues across the national frontiers they have in fact no common set of critical presuppositions or standards.

If this is broadly true, it would not after all seem odd for the amateur to address some interrogatory remarks to the body of the learned. But he is in a very much happier position when he turns to those who may be styled in comparison with himself beginners. The principal object of this essay is to communicate delight, or to make faintly comprehensible what Dryden may have meant when he said of Juvenal, ‘he gives me as much pleasure as I can bear’. It is because I think Ramsay’s claim distracts attention from what is delightful in Juvenal that I have tried in my amateur way to demolish it. Moreover, delight breeds understanding: to relish Juvenal’s real qualities is to gain in appreciation of an unfamiliar branch of satire, and when we see how it differs from the branch which the ordinary cultivated reader knows better, that of Boileau, Dryden, Pope and Johnson, we read these later authors with increased delight.

The only peculiarity I am conscious of displaying in this summary account of the pleasures obtainable from a reading of Juvenal is that while I have picked up innumerable hints from the scholars referred to above, my chief debts are to those modem satirists who enjoyed Juvenal but chose different paths. Nevertheless I would be prepared to claim that this special route is the most profitable one for developing the necessary flair to appreciate Juvenal’s real qualities. I do not see how we can hope to become literary critics of any foreign poetry without first graduating as critics of the poetry that is nearest to us. The royal road to Juvenal is through profound enjoyment of the poetry of Eliot and Pound.

The amateur rightly diffident when addressing scholars may turn with equal happiness to his fellows and particularly to those who have made their own comparisons among the satirists of classical and modern times. Here I am conscious of parting company with those of my fellow-amateurs who see Juvenal as a neurotic sufferer from ill-treatment by Domitian; full of pent-up feelings all clamouring for simultaneous expression; with a prophet’s diagnosis of the true ills of his times and a prophet’s mission to set them right; deeply indignant, morally earnest, passionately sincere; simple-minded and literal on the whole; a man with something of a philosophy, though not a formal philosopher; and at the same time an admirable witness to what was really happening on the seamy side of Rome. To this false image, as it seems to me, I am not dogmatically but deliberately opposed. I shall, however, avoid the temptation to sharpen my opposition, since gentle persuasion is the only hopeful critical tool. It is a deplorable lapse in critical manners to attribute ‘hostility’ or ‘prejudice’, a mind closed to experience, to those who place the main accent in a different place than that which seems the only right place to ourselves. We should take a warning from recent differences of opinion about Milton. Here I assume that the debate is between amateurs in the sense of lovers, between those who say, ‘I love my love with an A’ and those who would substitute B or even Z.

There can be no debate, however, without common ground. To wean fellow-lovers of Juvenal from their cherished image, it will be necessary to go over the poems which seem most to favour this image. It is not part of my case that those with whom I disagree have overlooked the best poems of Juvenal. I am not proposing an alternative selection from the œuvre. But before engaging with the recognized masterpieces I should like to comment on one poem in which all the real qualities of Juvenal seem to me strikingly present, and so challenge those who believe in the ‘false’ image to a preliminary skirmish. It will be my contention that what holds good of the ninth satire is true of the third, the sixth and the tenth, the satires which seem to offer the best support for the account of Juvenal I shall attempt to discredit. I also think that this ninth satire is the best introduction for the unprejudiced beginner.

Here, however, I imagine the friendly expert remonstrating: ‘Surely this is an odd way to introduce new readers to Juvenal? You have chosen a back entrance to the palace and one, too, you must confess, that leads through the offices, if not the very sewers and drains. It is not only for the sake of sixth-formers that there has never been a detailed commentary on it in English. You yourself would be unable to expound some parts of it in public.’ The expert, however, would, I take it, concede that here we have Juvenal’s art in the purest, most concentrated form. The particular advantage I wish to take by this beginning is to isolate these artistic qualities in a context which marks Juvenal off from any modern European writer.

My first contention is that Juvenal appears here without the faintest moral concern about the subject-matter he has chosen as the substratum of his poem. He never for one moment directs his attention to the verdict he would have to give on his hero if he had been an actual figure in Roman society. Juvenal’s interest at no point overlaps with that of, say, Marcel Proust dealing with the sexual monsters of his day. Nor, on the other hand, can we conclude from this poem that Juvenal in private life would have been either fascinated with or cynical about such abominable behaviour. The effect of the poem is to direct our attention into a region remote from that of the social commentator.

Why then, the rejoinder might come, does Juvenal abound and even seem to delight in the abundance of pointed obscenities? My second contention is that the key to Juvenal’s art lies in the study of Martial. The two poets appeal to the same taste and presuppose the same habits in their listening and reading public. Since our taste and habits are quite different from theirs, it will be necessary to define some of the respects in which their world is separated by a gulf from ours.

We should not, however, suppose, when we find Martial and Juvenal making poems out of matters of obscenity, that their audience consisted of dissolute rakes or perverts without moral sense or taste. The gulf between them and us lies in their attitude towards such poems. That the pervert offended against a clearly held social and moral standard can be seen from a short epigram of Martial’s (9.63) which depends on the two meanings of purus (‘bright’ and ‘pure’) and the name, Phoebus, the bright, of the victim:

ad cenam inuitant omnes te, Phoebe, cinaedi.

mentula quem pascit, non, puto, purus homo est.

Purebright, you are a welcome guest at the tables of all the pathics in town: a man who pays for his dinner by satisfying them may be bright but he cannot, I think, be called pure.

Yet what is puzzling is that Martial supposed his poems would be acceptable to men of strict life while producing upon them the extreme effects of pornography:

o quotiens rigida pulsabis pallia uena

sis grauior Curio Fabricioque licet! (11.16)

That Martial was correct in his supposition is shown by two letters (4.14 and 5.3) of Pliny the Younger, the soul of Roman gentility. In both letters his defence of obscenity in his poems is the same: ‘If you find any of them rather too risqué, I must ask you to recall from your wide reading the names of those famous men of a pronounced serious cast of mind who wrote little poems of this kind in which they not only dared to treat scabrous themes but were not afraid to use the naked language of obscenity.’ ‘Nor do I mind shocking people who think it odd that...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• The Roman Socrates: Horace and His Satires
• Persius
• Satire and Realism in Petronius
• Is Juvenal a Classic?
• Index of Names
• Index of Passages