Recognizing Persius

Kenneth J. Reckford

• Verlag: Princeton University Press
• Jahr: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781400830756
• Thema: Letteratura
• Thema: Critica letteraria antica e classica

Recognizing Persius is a passionate and in-depth exploration of the libellus --or little book--of six Latin satires left by the Roman satirical writer Persius when he died in AD 62 at the age of twenty-seven. In this comprehensive and reflectively personal book, Kenneth Reckford fleshes out the primary importance of this mysterious and idiosyncratic writer. Reckford emphasizes the dramatic power and excitement of Persius's satires--works that normally would have been recited before a reclining, feasting audience. In highlighting the satires' remarkable honesty, Reckford shows how Persius converted Roman satire into a vehicle of self-exploration and self-challenge that remains relevant to readers today.
The book explores the foundations of Roman satire as a performance genre: from the dinner-party recitals of Lucilius, the founder of the genre, through Horace, to Persius's more intense and inward dramatic monologues. Reckford argues that despite satire's significant public function, Persius wrote his pieces first and mainly for himself. Reckford also provides the context for Persius's life and work: his social responsibilities as a landowner; the interplay between his life, his Stoic philosophy, and his art; and finally, his incomplete struggle to become an honest and decent human being. Bringing the modern reader to a closer and more nuanced acquaintance with Persius's work, Recognizing Persius reinstates him to the ranks of the first-rate satirists, alongside Horace and Juvenal.

Chapter One

PERFORMING PRIVATELY

HERE, more or less, are the facts, according to the unusually reliable Vita that has come down to us. Persius was born in Volaterrae (modern Volterra) in northwest Etruria on 4 December A.D. 34. He died of a stomach ailment on 24 November A.D. 62, shortly before his twenty-eighth birthday. A Roman knight with blood ties to senatorial families, he came from a rich old Etruscan family and received a first-class education in literature and rhetoric in Rome from two distinguished teachers, Remmius Palaemon and Verginius Flavus. Persius's father died when he was around six and his stepfather died not long afterwards. He was, says the Vita, “a person of gentlest ways, of virginal modesty, handsome repute, and exemplary devotion (pietatis…exemplo sufficientis) to his mother, his sister, and his aunt.” He was related to the younger Arria, whose parents were forced to commit suicide under the emperor Claudius after a failed conspiracy, and from the age of ten he enjoyed a close friendship with her husband, Thrasea Paetus, the best-known Stoic dissident under Nero. Persius's friends also included the poet Caesius Bassus and some older men who served as foster-fathers and mentors: Servilius Nonianus, a man of affairs; two philosopher-doctors from Greece and Asia; and most important, the learned Annaeus Cornutus, a freedman and scholar who wrote Greek treatises on theology and literature—the Stoic role model par excellence of Persius's Satire 5.

Although orientation in time and place is useful, I might better have let Persius speak for himself from the start. Biographical criticism in his case is always so tempting, and so misleading: partly, because we still know so little about his life and work; and partly, because that little has all too often produced a distorted, itself easily satirized image of a sheltered poet with little experience of the world, surrounded by philosophical treatises and adoring female relatives. The modernist reaction, as said earlier, redirected us to the safely bounded space of the text, the postmodernist to the unbounded vagaries of readers’ imaginations. But now, I wonder: has the time come round to pay renewed attention to the author? Not just the “implied author” safely embedded in the text, but the person behind the text who lived and died; who fought hard, as it seems, for his integrity and moral freedom; and who, amid his many duties and concerns (to which I shall return in chapter 4), wrote Satires.

But why did he write satire? He was well-born, rich, and independent, with no need to secure a patron or consolidate his position in society. His own version in Satire 1 develops traditional lines of defense: he writes because he must; because truth will out; because if he doesn’t cry out against the world's follies, he will simply burst. On closer inspection, it seems likely that Persius regarded his writings at once as playful self-indulgence, as a competitive bid for mastery in the field of Roman satire, and as a means of unusually intense self-scrutiny and self-debate, freely conducted but ultimately reinforcing the aim of living honestly and well. His satire attacks vice and folly, to be sure, and with greater urgency than ever; but it also affords a special kind of emotional self-recognizance, giving voice to powerfully distracting thoughts and feelings that require, even as they resist, Stoic reorganization and control—which will never in his lifetime be quite complete. In turn, I suggest, Persius felt enabled to compete with Lucilius and Horace, his predecessors, the “scourger of vice” and the master-ironist, not least because his satire had something new and exciting to discover, and to proclaim.

My first chapter focuses on Satire 1 and the theme of performance. In earlier Roman tradition, satire was usually performed at elite dinner-parties for a sympathetic audience of friends and allies before it was circulated and/or published. Against this background, and confronted now with bad performances of epic and tragedy, and also criticism, in a world increasingly hostile to free and honest speech, Persius gives his own very private nonperformance or metaperformance of satire, speaking his passionate findings into the as yet secret “hole” of his little book.

“Who’ll Read This Stuff?” (Satire 1)

The beginning of Satire 1 plunges us into intense dialogue between undefined voices:

O curas hominum! o quantum est in rebus inane!

“quis leget haec?” min tu istud ais? nemo hercule. “nemo?”

vel duo vel nemo. “turpe et miserabile.” quare?

ne mihi Polydamas et Troiades Labeonem

praetulerint? nugae. non, si quid turbida Roma

elevet, accedas examenve improbum in illa

castiges trutina, nec te quaesiveris extra.

nam Romae quis non—a, si fas dicere—sed fas

tum cum ad canitiem et nostrum istud vivere triste

aspexi ac nucibus facimus quaecumque relictis,

cum sapimus patruos. tunc tunc—ignoscite (nolo,

quid faciam?) sed sum petulanti splene—cachinno. (1–12)

O cares of men! O how much emptiness

there is in things! “Who’ll read this stuff?”

You’re asking me that? No one, by Hercules.

“No one?” Maybe two people, maybe no one.

“Shameful and pathetic.” Why? Afraid

Polydamas and the Trojan Women might prefer

Labeo to me? Nonsense. If muddled Rome

makes light of something, you shouldn’t join in;

you shouldn’t blame the faulty tongue of the scale

or look outside yourself. For at Rome, who

[is? or does?] not—ah, if it's right to speak—

but of course it's right, when I look at those gray hairs

and the grim, “grown-up” front we display, though living

in any way whatsoever—it's then, it's then

(sorry, can’t help it, my spleen compels me), I have

to roar with laughter.

Editors help, and commentators, going back to Persius's own time. Wendell Clausen's careful punctuation reflects his own interpretive efforts and, in turn, shapes mine, which I convey through different fonts on my Macintosh. The old scholiasts tell us that Persius quotes Lucilius in line 1—or is it line 2?—but we don’t have the context, or much of Lucilius, for that matter.¹ We learn that Labeo wrote a Latin Iliad (apparently, an overliteral translation): how is this relevant? We must recreate for ourselves the conventions of Prologue Satire that Persius inherited from Lucilius and Horace, the expectations of the audience for whom he refuses to write. Still more, we must recreate for ourselves from reading and rereading Persius the tone and rhythm of this passage: the quick, passionate exchanges; the scornful rejection of contemporary Roman criticism, wonderfully represented by “Polydamas and the Trojan women” out of the Iliad, once Homer's, now the wretched Labeo's; the great, dangerous Question that desperately wants to be posed but can’t be, yet; and the renewed, now doubly intense build-up of scornful indignation, with its premature climax (so to speak) of wild, helpless laughter.

In the usual reading of these lines, Persius announces his great satiric theme of human folly (in a line probably taken from his satiric grandfather Lucilius and enriched with Lucretian resonances of “the void in things”; the result is something like the opening of Ecclesiastes, where the Preacher proclaims, “Vanity of Vanities, all is vanity” [or “vapor”]);² but he is interrupted by an interlocutor, perhaps a concerned friend. “ ‘Who’ll read this stuff?’ ” A good, practical question, then as now. It also hints at a warning that will be made explicit later in the satire, one that was well established in satiric tradition and in readers’ expectations, and that acquires new urgency under Nero: “Why offend tender little ears with the biting truth? Be careful, or important people's doors will freeze you out.” Satire is offensive, and the satirist will pay.

“Who am I? In what genre am I writing, and why, and for whom?” A Prologue Satire usually answers these questions, however ironically or obliquely; Lucilius started the trend of conveying the answers rhetorically as a response, whether to kindly warnings, importunate suggestions, or outright attacks. (In other genres, too, real or imagined attacks provide an excellent excuse for the writer's apologia, a reasoned account of his life and work.) Fragments of Lucilius's satires, scattered lines or groups of lines, show him debating with adversaries. “You are malicious,” they say, “You like to hurt people. And you’ll be sorry.” They want him to keep quiet, perhaps only “mutter,” if he must, under his breath. To which he answers that he is a good, honest man who speaks from the heart, unlike flatterers and hypocrites, and who must speak out: it is his way, and it benefits society.³ Differently, a respected older friend advises and warns Lucilius: writing satire is dangerous; wouldn’t it be better, say, to write historical epic? That would “bear fruit” (fructum, implying usefulness, money, success). In response, Lucilius presumably explains why he writes, and for whom. We have the second part. He writes, not for just anybody, but for an educated minority, neither philistines nor pedants, who will appreciate what he has to say.⁴

Horace develops similar arguments in his literary satires 1.4 and 1.10, polishing them with wonderfully teasing irony as he turns Lucilian statements against the very critics who would defend their beloved Lucilius, their classic satirist, against this interloper. His satire (he alleges) is not malicious, or dangerous, or even public; he only shows it (unlike Lucilius?) to a few very select readers and critics, men of true discrimination for whom, in the end, he writes. And if he criticizes Lucilius for his stylistic faults and the generally rough carelessness of his satire writing, he is only following the master, who criticized epic and tragic poets in his time, and bringing him up to date. The attacks on Horace, real or imagined or a mixture of both, once again provide the rhetorical impetus for the poet's full, if ironic, statement of his aesthetic and moral standards and intentions in writing satire. Differently, in Satires 2.1, the prologue to Book 2 (and Persius's chief model), an older friend, the lawyer Trebatius, warns Horace that satire is dangerous: better an epic praising Caesar! Horace replies with wonderful excuses. He writes because he has to; it is his bent, or hobby; a weapon, yes, but only for self-defense, or Lucilian self-revelation—not antisocial, in the end, but beneficial. The satire ends jokingly, or not so jokingly, with Horace receiving Caesar's seal of approval. So much for law!

When, therefore, Persius's interlocutor asks “ ‘Who’ll read this stuff?’ ” we quickly envision the speaker as a helpful friend concerned with Persius's practical success and, still more, with the riskiness of satire writing. Again, as with Lucilius and Horace, the warning provokes Persius to say why he writes, and for whom. He writes, as we learn later, because he has to—has to voice the truth, somehow, about a society whose moral and aesthetic standards are totally corrupt. But he is silenced, or almost silenced, for the same reason. Unlike Lucilius and Horace, he has virtually no audience left. “Maybe two people, maybe no one.” The riddle remains unsolved,⁵ but Persius will show us, in this first satire, why he can’t write for an audience like Lucilius's or Horace's. Those reasonable, moderately educated people are gone. But the danger is more real than ever, the warning more necessary, the challenge greater. Why, and how, and for whom (ultimately) should one write satire in the age of Nero?

As it turns out, Persius's first question, “ ‘quis leget haec?’ ” is integrally involved with the second, “nam Romae quis non…,” broken off at line 8 and only completed at 121: “auriculas asini quis non habet?” “Who [at Rome, maybe in the whole world] hasn’t asses’ ears?” The reference is to the Midas story. Asked to judge a musical contest between Apollo and Pan (or, in some versions, the satyr Marsyas), Midas chose Pan and was given asses’ ears for his bad taste.⁶ He hid them under a cap. His barber learned the secret, could not speak out, but desperately wanted to tell it, so he dug a hole in the ground and whispered the truth into that hole, which he covered up; but reeds grew up, and when a breeze blew, you could hear the reeds saying, “King Midas has asses’ ears.” So Persius will whisper the truth, the dread secret, into his little satire book. It looks as if some early commentator, meaning to be helpful, wrote in the gloss, “auriculas asini Mida rex habet” (“King Midas has asses’ ears”), and someone else then probably explained this gloss by means of a new story: evidently, Persius's friend and mentor, the Stoic philosopher Cornutus, had induced him to substitute the generalizing “quis non habet” (“who hasn’t…?”) for the direct mention of Midas, which might strike Nero's ears as too personal.⁷ Obviously, the story is foolish. In Nero's world, any reference to Midas's story, however indirect, was quite sufficient to get one exiled or killed (and there was no shortage of informers ready and willing to serve as amateur literary critics).⁸ Obviously, too, the punch line, “auriculas asini quis non habet,” precisely completes the revelation broken off much earlier, “nam Romae quis non…?”

I propose that Persius's two questions are interdependent. It is a case of “the reciprocal clarification of two unknowns.” Let x stand for Persius's readership and y for the dangerous, unspoken truth about Rome. Persius teases us by delaying his revelation; he plays games of desire and constraint, pressure and (self-)censorship, and explosive bursts of uncontrollable laughter; but the delay also gives him time to show us the corruption of taste at Rome, building (when we are ready) to the full revelation of the second question, and clarifying the acute problem of the first.

So far my reading of Persius's opening lines has been fairly traditional. Let me now try a different reading, which I prefer. I suggest that line 1, probably taken from Lucilius, presents human folly as the satire book's general theme; and that the first half of line 2, probably also taken from Lucilius, introduces the specific theme of Satire 1. In part, then, it serves as a subtitle. But the old warning given by an opponent or external adviser has now become internalized, a voice from within the poet himself, anxious about his effectiveness.⁹ Will his satire be read? Will it make a difference? This is the voice of common sense—a rather Horatian voice, in fact. But a second, stronger voice rejects the very question, with all its implied concerns. It rejects, contemptuously and decisively, any imagined compromise with what will turn out to be a world of flattery, falsehood, and bad taste. “You know better,” it says, “than to take popular opinion seriously, to measure the worth of anything by public standards. Don’t look outside yourself.”

From line 2, then, Persius brings himself (and us, with him) into a passionately intense inner dialogue. The words “min tu istud ais” (“You’re asking me that?”) are an inside joke. And the culminating advice, “nec te quaesiveris extra,” is grammatically ambiguous: more ...