Recognizing Persius (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Recognizing Persius Paul Allen Miller Kenneth J. Reckford . Recognizing Persius. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009. x + 240 pp. Cloth, $45. Reckford has produced a very serviceable introduction to a very difficult poet. Written with genuine verve and passion, this personal look at what many view as a crabbed and uncongenial writer is a welcome addition to an all too small English bibliography on Rome's third great satirist, after Lucilius and [End Page 706] Horace. Beginning its life as the Martin lectures delivered at Oberlin a decade ago, this generous, often nostalgic look at the work of a young Stoic under the reign of Nero will surely help him find a wider audience among today's ambitious undergraduates and beginning graduate students. To get a feel for both the texture and the nature of Reckford's project, I would like to begin with a longish quote from the final pages of its actual treatment of Persius (there is a supplemental chapter on Juvenal at the end of the book): "What I have come to admire in Persius, through his Satires, is not anything like completion of the Stoic journey toward sainthood, but rather a clear vision of what that journey entails: unblinking awareness of the human condition, one's own especially, and the will to keep striving in the face of innumberable obstacles, both without and within. It is the cumulative sense of this awareness and this striving that helps us see Persius as more than the satiric persona 'Persius,' and as more than the sum of the different voices in the Satires. We see that he knows his, and our, limitations better than most, but that he is resolved, all the same to become a real person, a genuine human being" (160). This passage demonstrates well the warm, soft-focus humanism that illuminates much of this book. There is a kind of confessional tone to much of it as the reading of Persius becomes the occasion for recollections of undergraduate days at Harvard, travels in Italy, favorite passages from D. H. Lawrence and Shakespeare, and reflections on the inevitability of death. Persius becomes a means of the author's (and presumably our own) self-construction and self-recognition, even as we come to recognize Persius in his struggle to recognize himself. This essay in mutual recognition will strike some readers as dated. Nonetheless, it must be acknowledged that the absolutely unselfconscious use of terms like "the human condition" is of a piece with the effort to conjure from these crabbed little poems—often riddled with obscenity (e.g,. orgasmic eyes, depilated anuses), strange images (e.g., wild fig trees bursting from livers), and some of the most difficult Latin produced in the classical era—"a real person, a genuine human being." This is a book that strives to commune with the author behind the text and is resolute in its belief in each of us having the desire and the ability to do so. Indeed, it predicates our ability to recognize and fashion ourselves on our ability to recognize others in their own similar travails. Given the nature of this project, then, there is little time spent on close readings of individual passages. Ambivalences, ambiguities, and interpretive cruces are passed over quickly in favor of getting the right impression and painting the big picture. In place of detailed philological exegeses or extended meditations on method, we are frequently reminded that Persius would have read and perhaps even performed his poems aloud, and, thus, much that seems obscure to us now would have been made clear through tone of voice, dramatic gesture, and facial expression. Indeed, the claim is made more than once that if only we would read the Latin aloud, many of our interpretive aporias would be conjured away. Typical is the following passage: "I want to argue that, despite all those famous 'difficulties,' if we will just read Persius's Satires aloud as they were meant to be [End Page 707] read . . . then we shall recover more than we might expect of the pleasure of the performance, the delight that balances out pain" (13). In such passages, the nostalgia for a simpler hermeneutics...