CLAS/HIST 4091/5091: The Roman Empire

Reading (7) for Friday October 26, 2007: Juvenal and Petronius: Satire in the City

Reading

LR sections 37-38 (p. 135-40)

Juvenal Satires 1 and 3 on the web at http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/ancient/juv-sat1eng.html and http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/ancient/juv-sat3eng.html

Petronius Satyricon chapters 27-78 on the web at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/5219/5219-h/5219-h.htm

Our word “Satire” comes from a Latin word meaning something like “smorgasbord”. In the 2nd C BC, a Latin poet invented the poetic genre of satire from a variety of generic and literary forms that already existed. The poetry he produced, a sort of smorgasbord of themes, techniques and tropes, was held together only by a common strain of biting, “satiric” wit. The Romans used this literary invention to great effect in the centuries to come, with a variety of authors choosing to work in the genre. Juvenal was the last great Roman satiric poet, writing sometime during the later years of Trajan and under Hadrian (c. 115-130). All of his 16 satires deal in various ways with life in the capital. They thus yield a wealth of humorous vignettes that tell us much about life in the big city. Even so, they must be read carefully. First of all, they are meticulously crafted works of poetry that make contemporary and mythological allusions that often fall flat with modern readers. Notes are provided at the end of your texts that should help you to figure out many of these, but you have to read both text and notes carefully. The text is short, so take the time to do it right and see if some of the humor doesn’t shine through. We must also be careful because, even more so than in previous sources, we cannot believe everything Juvenal says, nor can we accept his attitude as necessarily representative.

Petronius lived 60 years before Juvenal and wrote about the Rome of Nero, in whose court he served as “arbiter of good taste.” What survives to us of his writings is a short section of a much longer novel which also followed a tradition of satire, though satire in prose rather than verse. Petronius’ novel turns around two gay lovers, Encolpius and Giton, who wander Rome and the Italian world much as the mythical Odysseus had wandered the Mediterranean. Unlike Odysseus, however, who faced the god Poseidon in his struggles to return home, Encolpius is confronted with the fertility god Priapus who has stolen his sexual potency. Much of the novel is filled with bawdy goings on as Encolpius seeks a viagra-esque jump start. Among his adventures, he attends a dinner party together with his boy lover Giton and a sexual rival named Ascyltus at the house of a wealthy freedman named Trimalchio. The scene described by Petronius offers a textbook example of what some would call the “decadence” of Roman society in the period of Nero. For us, however, it is primarily interesting for what it portrays about classes other than the ruling aristocracy. As we read, we will see that one did not need class and breeding to acquire wealth, and that even so, one’s class and breeding were always a subject of scrutiny, no matter how wealthy a person became.

Questions

1. What exactly was a Roman city and what distinguished it from our modern cities? What are the essential components of both and what features and activities characterize both?

2. What are the advantages of living in a Roman city? What are the disadvantages?

3. How do Juvenal and Petronius compare the present with the past? Have we seen this anywhere before? How do they make use of the past to strengthen their points?

4. What sorts of racial and ethnic stereotypes does Juvenal employ? What sorts of people does he attack and why? How does this compare with modern racial and ethnic stereotyping?

5. What do Juvenal’s and Petronius’ works reveal about class / status distinctions in Rome? What do they think of the upper classes? The lower classes? Provincials? Freedmen? Slaves?

6. What sorts of stereotypes does Petronius apply in his characterization of freedmen? Would these have been universally applicable? What sort of status would a freedman enjoy?

7. What are Juvenal’s and Petronius’ takes on sexuality? What groups do they attack for their sexuality? Are their attitudes the same? Does this have parallels in the modern world?

8. What can we say about the relationship between wealthy people and their poorer clients? How does this patron-client relationship work? What social function does it serve?

9. Do you see Juvenal’s and Petronius’ attitudes as representative of their times? Are they exaggerations or do they reflect the norms?