I wish here simply to record my debts, which are many. I should like to thank Messrs R. G. G. Coleman and A. G. Lee, Dr A. J. Woodman, and Professors C. O. Brink and W. J. N. Rudd for their comments on parts or the whole of earlier drafts, Miss R. S. Padel for helpful suggestions about pruning at a later stage, Dr R. O. A. M. Lyne for reading the proofs, and, above all, Professor E. J. Kenney for his encouragement and patience as he was presented with this study in one amended version after another. A further debt to Professor Rudd is in respect of his – and his publishers' – permission to print an adapted version of his recent translation of Persius' first satire from The Satires of Horace and Persius (Penguin Books 1973). My gratitude is also due to the staff of the Cambridge University Press for the care and expertise applied by them to the process of publication. Finally, I wish to thank the Master and Fellows of Peter-house, Cambridge, for their award of a Stone Research Fellowship for the period 1967–70, during which time the ideas for this book were first formulated.

It was common practice for the Roman satirist to give an account of his genre, arraigning public vice, perhaps ridiculing the insufficiencies of the other literary forms, and informing the reader of the tone which he himself intended to adopt. The vehicle for this account was the programmatic satire. It is quite clear that Horace Satires II. I, Persius I, and Juvenal I are related compositions. Their shared features have been duly discussed in the secondary literature. Noting that a scholiast entitles Juvenal's first satire cur satiras scribat, also the corresponding formal characteristics of the three programmes, L. R. Shero concludes: ‘Each of the satires is constructed upon a traditional framework; and we may reasonably conclude that a satire of this type, ostensibly justifying the writing of satire by means of conventional devices and stock arguments, came to be looked upon as an indispensable feature of the satirist's stock-in-trade.’ More recently, E. J. Kenney has detected the following ‘pattern of apology’: ‘First, a pronouncement, lofty to the point of bombast, of the satirist's high purpose and mission. Second, a warning by a friend or the poet's alter ego or the voice of prudence – call it what you will. Third, an appeal by the satirist to the great example of Lucilius. Fourth, a renewed warning. Fifth and last, evasion, retraction and equivocation.’ But similarities apart, there is a marked degree of divergence in procedure. It is this – innovation within convention – which will occupy my attention.

I have recently touched on the attitude of the ‘moderns’ to Virgil. Who precisely were these moderns, and why did they scorn the Aeneid? The first question involves the history of mannerism in Rome. Firstly there is the problem of original Roman contact with Alexandrianism, and more specifically, Callimacheanism. Ennius, Catulus and Lucilius seem to have been acquainted with Callimachus: Ennius with his dream at the beginning of the Annales, and his claim to be a polished modern at 214–16 V, Catulus with his adaptation of Callim. Epigr. XLI at fr. 1 M, and Lucilius with his knowledge of Callimachean literary theory. Next, there is the question of Ciceronian poetic practice, and Ciceronian taste, both of them relative factors. He seems to have gravitated away from modernism towards conservatism: in poetry, away from (probably) the ἔπος τυτθόν and Aratus, towards a more grandiose hexameter manner; in taste, towards antipathy against the novi of his later years, with concomitant admiration for the veteres. Of course, ‘old’ and ‘new’ have no absolute sense: the terms at this stage are entirely relative. All we can say of the traditional ‘poetae novi’ of the older literary histories, from Ciceronian evidence at least, is that a group of moderns shared certain metrical traits – the σπονδϵιάЗοντϵζ described in the reference to οἱνεώτεροι at ad Att. VII. 2.I, in November 50 B.C., and the regard for final s in prosody, mentioned at Or. 161, six years later, in 44 B.C.

At the end of the Satyricon, by means of a simple play on the verb comedere, Petronius creates an horrific scene in which a dying man requests that his body be eaten by his legatees. All that Petronius has done is remind his reader of the literal sense of a verb frequently used as a metaphor for squandering an inheritance. Concrete embodiment of commonplace metaphor is likewise found at the opening of Persius' third satire, where the vocabulary of philosophical enlightenment, signalised by clarum mane and lumine, is interwoven with more mundane detail concerning windows and chinks in the shutters: metaphor is translated into the fabric of a realistic situation.

Most of the following pages are devoted to an examination of Persius' employment of a similar technique in his first satire – to a study of the way that he takes the concepts and metaphors of literary criticism back to their physical origins, so concretely dramatising an analysis of the causes of decadence in contemporary letters. I have attempted to find out why the composition has this particular form rather than any other, an enquiry which has involved speculation about the conceptual stage prior to actual composition. I have also dealt with the expressivist implications of the prelude to the fifth satire, and with Juvenal's adoption of the high style. Additional material relevant to, or arising from, my main concerns appears in excursuses or appendixes.

The following translation is based on the rendering by Professor Niall Rudd in The Satires of Horace and Persius published by Penguin Books in 1973:

Ah, the obsessions of men! What an empty world we live in! ‘Who will read this?’

Are you asking me? Why, no one.

‘No one?’

Well, perhaps one or two.

‘Disgraceful! Pathetic!’

But why?

Are you worried in case ‘Polydamas and the Trojan ladies’ prefer Labeo to me? What the hell. If woolly old Rome attaches no weight to a piece of work, don't you step in to correct the faulty tongue on her balance. Ask no one's view but your own. Is there any Roman who hasn't – if only I could say it – but I can, when I look at our venerable hair and that austere demeanour and all we've been at since we gave up marbles and assumed the wisdom of disapproving uncles, then – sorry, I don't want to – I can't help it – it's just my irreverent humour – I guffaw!

Behind our study doors we write in regular metre, or else foot-loose, a prodigious work which will leave the strongest lungs out of breath.

The most important, and most complex aspect of the metaphoric background to the first satire is that category of images and motifs which has simultaneous moral and literary force. For it is mainly from this that Persius elaborates his pose of satirist and critic of letters. But there are other, ancillary motifs, one moralistic, some literary-critical, which play a part in his programme. The various classes sometimes overlap, but in the majority of cases the divisions have a good degree of validity.

LITERARY-CRITICAL MOTIFS

Firstly, three complementary motifs which are predominantly relevant to the literary part of the campaign against mid-century Rome. Though in the first instance aimed directly at lack of taste, during the course of the satire they gather moral force.

EARS

Most prominent are the allusions to ears, their function one of indicting insensibility. Hendrickson has remarked that the ear is the medium for the reception of literature, and that Persius' question, nam Romae quis non, line 8, answered finally by auriculas asini quis non habet?, line 121, implies ‘who is a competent reader?’ To quote at length:

Persius was not a wanton obscurantist. He wrote as he did for a reason; discontented with the state of literature, he required something other than the traditional poetic idiom for the expression of his ideas. Conventional literary language had, in his opinion, become too bland and voluble to have any true reserve of meaning. From the first satire we see that he regarded contemporary literature as utterly decadent and meaningless. This work will occupy my attention for most of this study, but for the moment I should like to consider two passages which occur towards the beginning of the fifth satire. One of these is openly programmatic, the other only obliquely so, but both are more informative guides to Persius' stylistic aims than anything in the predominantly negative first satire. Here we are allowed insight into the reasons for his adoption of a difficult and complex manner as an antidote to triviality. The first passage, V. 14–16, is commonly adduced with reference to Persius' methods. After a scornful repudiation of the high style, represented here by the hundred voices of the inspired bard, he advises himself, through the medium of an interlocutor, of the procedure to be adopted:

Jahn's note on Pers. I. 20 correctly aligns physical hypertrophy with mental crassness: ‘hoc vocat ingentes, ut V. 190, ingentem centurionem, III. 86, multum torosam iuventutem, V. 95, calonem altum, ut animum prae corpore neglectum significet.’ He might have added II. 71 f., quin damus id superis de magna quod dare lance/non possit magni Messallae lippa propago, where size, measured in terms of social importance, is a disqualification from acceptance by the gods, and V. 190, ingens Pulfenius, of an immense centurion amused by philosophy. As for the Horatian background to this fastidiousness about size, we can adduce the striking repetitions, magno magnum and grandes …\grande at Sat. II. 2.39 and 95–6, debunking the appetite for sheer quantity; magni quo pueri magnis e centurionibus orti, I. 6.72–3, an expression of scorn for his insensitive school-mates; the social satire of magno prognatum … magno at I. 2.70–2, and magna … cena at II. 6.104; then the philosophic irony of I. 3.136, magnorum maxime regum. For pinguis in the ironic self-identification of Ep. I. 15.24–5:

The matter of the punctuation and ascription of 76–8 presents various difficulties:

If Persius speaks the words as a question, not as a statement, we have the anomaly of a satirist espousing the cause of an inflated and outmoded genre – this, in complete contradiction to the tradition bequeathed by Lucilius and Horace. If the interlocutor speaks them as a question, the position is much the same: for scornful dismissal by the interlocutor implies that the satirist favours the awkward archaic cause.

Another problem, concerning the monitus and sartago loquendi of the subsequent passage, arises from the assumption of an interrogative, 79 if.:

If Persius has lamented the neglect of archaic tragedy by terminating 76–8 with a question-mark, the topics of paternal advice and corruption of poetic diction are left suspended, devoid of acceptable relationship to the enquiry which immediately precedes their introduction: the sole, and exceptionally weak solution would be to suppose that Persius' question implies that the old men have warned the youth away from archaic literature. This harsh sequence of thought would follow with greater ease if the interlocutor had dismissed archaic tragedy with a contemptuous question.