Roman Satire and the Old Comic Tradition by Jennifer L. Ferriss-Hill

Abstract

Reviewed by: Roman Satire and the Old Comic Tradition by Jennifer L. Ferriss-Hill Catherine Keane Jennifer L. Ferriss-Hill. Roman Satire and the Old Comic Tradition. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. x, 302. $95.00. ISBN 978–1-107–08154–3. The late antique grammarian Diomedes enigmatically describes Roman satire as “composed in the style of Old Comedy.” Horace casually posits a genealogical [End Page 424] connection between the genres (Satires 1.4), and praises certain stylistic virtues “to be emulated” in the Old Comic poets (1.10). Generations later, Persius imagines his ideal reader as someone who enjoys reading the Old Comic plays. There is nothing self-explanatory about these assertions of a connection between a dramatic genre that flourished in Classical Athens and a textual verse genre that first appeared two and a half centuries later in Rome; they are striking and suggestive programmatic gestures. Accordingly, the book is dedicated to unpacking all the ways in which the four Roman satirists (even the fragmentary Lucilius is represented) borrow from Old Comedy’s poetics of abjection and agonism. The key correspondences, covered in four chapters, are in the stance of the poet figure, his poetics of self-defense, literary criticism, and the selection of “comedo-satiric” targets. These topics are all interrelated, so there are many cross-references between chapters. A great deal of groundwork is laid in the introduction and first chapter, with subsequent chapters getting progressively shorter. This is a synoptic study of mostly programmatic discourse. Consideration of the external contexts for the genres’ production is more or less restricted to the point that both genres flourished during periods of “vibrant intellectual activity” and in “rich environments” for the production of scoptic verse (203, 216). Beyond that, the historical picture recedes, so that the Old Comedy that is scrutinized is the textual artifact (albeit one evocative of the Classical Athenian scene) encountered by the Roman satirists as readers. It is also the self-referential and inter-textual genre of which the parabasis is the heart (cf. T. Hubbard, The Mask of Comedy: Aristophanes and the Intertextual Parabasis [Ithaca and London 1991] and R. M. Rosen, Making Mockery: The Poetics of Ancient Satire [Oxford 2007]), and the precursor to Callimachean and Terentian agonism, “intermediaries” between Old Comedy and satire (128). Looking at the other side of the equation, Ferriss-Hill’s Roman satire is essentially that of the great persona studies (W. S. Anderson, Essays on Roman Satire [Berkeley and Los Angeles 1982]; Susanna Braund’s several pertinent publications; K. Freudenburg, The Walking Muse: Horace on the Theory of Satire [Princeton 1993]). While the persona is treated as the genre’s defining (if not unprecedented) element, alimentary imagery is another big theme, and much use is made of Emily Gowers’ The Loaded Table: Representations of Food in Roman Literature (Oxford 1993). The familiar programmatic poems and passages serve as the main exhibits, with regular looks at other poems; the latter are not, however, discussed as individual texts. On the other hand, the familiar parameters of Roman satiric poetics are fruitfully expanded by discussion of Horace’s Epistles and Ars Poetica as “part of [Horace’s] satire” (43). This book inaugurates an important project by looking at patterns in Horace’s explicit constructions of the poetic persona and aesthetic criteria in both collections. The aim here is not to write a chronology of the Horatian persona, but to examine the different hexameter collections synoptically as variations on a theme. Juvenal gets less space, for he is identified at the outset as a “literary apostate” (21). While he mimics some Old Comic programmatic strategies, Juvenal seems to gesture to tragedy as his model, and this is taken as evidence that Horace and Persius had so successfully established the Old Comic aition for satire that Juvenal felt pressure to innovate. This is intriguing, but one should be careful about branding Juvenal as a “late practitioner of a well-established genre” (22) when he was not so much “later” than the (lost) Flavian Turnus or, in the grand scheme of things, than Persius. [End Page 425] Within this territory, Ferriss-Hill has given herself room for interesting new examinations...