Roman Satire

In Our Time

BBC

History

4.6 • 9.2K Ratings

🗓️ 22 April 2010

⏱️ 42 minutes

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Summary

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Roman Satire. Much of Roman culture was a development of their rich inheritance from the Greeks. But satire was a form the Romans could claim to have invented. The grandfather of Roman satire, Ennius, was also an important figure in early Roman literature more generally. Strikingly, he pioneered both epic and the satirical mockery of epic.But the father of the genre, Lucilius, is the writer credited with taking satire decisively towards what we now understand by the word: incisive invective aimed at particular personalities and their wrongs.All this happened under the Roman Republic, in which there was a large measure of free speech. But then the Republic was overthrown and Augustus established the Empire.The great satirist Horace had fought to save the Republic, but now reinvented himself as a loyal citizen of the Imperium. His satirical work explores the strains and hypocrisies of trying to maintain an independent sense of self at the heart of an autocracy.This struggle was deepened in the work of Persius, whose Stoicism-inflected writing was a quietist attempt to endure under the regime without challenging it.The work of the last great Roman satirist, Juvenal, was famously savage - yet his targets were either generic or long dead. So was satire a conservative or a radical genre? Was it cynical or did it aim to 'improve' people? Did it have any real impact? And was it actually funny?With:Mary BeardProfessor of Classics at Cambridge UniversityDenis FeeneyProfessor of Classics and Giger Professor of Latin at Princeton UniversityDuncan KennedyProfessor of Latin Literature and the Theory of Criticism at the University of BristolProducer: Phil Tinline.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thanks for downloading the Inartime podcast. For more details about Inartime and for our terms of use,
0:05.4	please go to bbc.co.uk forward slash radio for. I hope you enjoy the program.
0:12.1	Hello, the ancient Romans prided themselves on inventing at least one new form of literature,
0:16.8	satire, and yet it's sometimes hard to pin down exactly what made Roman satire satirical.
0:22.1	It covered subjects from rat infested taverns to the vogue for foreign cults.
0:26.7	It's little wonder that its name came from the Latin form Mishmash.
0:30.1	Nevertheless, through the work of Lucilius, Horus and Juvenile in particular,
0:34.2	Roman satire was sharpened into the lacerating of Kant and hypocrisy whose legacy remains with us today.
0:40.8	The story of Roman satire takes us from the free-booting liberty of the Republic through
0:44.8	to the fear and self-sensorship of the Empire. It's a genre that provides an intimate glimpse
0:50.0	of Roman citizens' personal lives as one social class was losing its power and another gaining it.
0:55.2	With me, to discuss Roman satire, a Duncan Kennedy, professor of Latin literature on the theory
1:00.4	of criticism at the University of Bristol, Denys Feeney, professor of classics and Geiger
1:05.9	professor of Latin at Princeton University, and Marybeard, professor of classics at Cambridge University.
1:12.1	Marybeard, given the rich legacy of Greek culture which infused Rome, was satire the only form
1:19.1	that Rome could call its own. That's what they said, but that's in itself quite problematic.
1:27.8	And I think what you have to do to understand quite how Roman this form is, is you need to go back
1:35.1	to the third century BC and to the first work of literature which was called satires, which
1:45.1	was written by a very famous early Roman poet called Enius, and although only about 30 lines
1:56.0	of this survives, we do have these few precious fragments, the things that called himself Saturai.
2:04.2	Now, there's all sorts of things that are interesting about this. First of all, you can look at these
2:10.2	often one-line fragments, and you can see in these fragments things that you're going to find later
	...

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