OF NARRATIVE AND COSMOGONY: PERSIUS AND THE INVENTION OF NERO

Neronian satire. Generally we take that to mean “Persius.” But let's allow the idea to sink in beyond that. Without Persius to tell us what “Neronian satire” actually entails, the words may be felt to repel one another because, for us, with Neronian imaginations configured by the tales of the moralizing historians Tacitus, Suetonius, and Dio, it is hard to imagine Nero taking an open view towards the writing of satire in his narrowly scrutinized Rome. The ambition has the look of a scripted death-wish, especially since, we are quite sure, Nero himself would have to be any “real” satirist's chief target. The historians assure us that he was a sadistic monster, fed fat on flattery and on the sweet blood of his many enemies, erstwhile friends, rivals, and all the various nobodies who happened to get in his way on one of his many bad days. Satire under Nero? Who could have ever come up with such a warped ambition, and what would that “satire” look like?

Putting the question that way, with emphasis heavily on the absurdity of the enterprise, allows us to feel a bit more comfortable with our almost unbearable, but only non-Menippean solution: Persius. The poems of Persius, some scholars are quick to remind us, look the way they look because they were produced under Nero: six small hexameter poems and a choliambic Prologue, truncated, veiled, and safely “philosophical.”