This essay is dedicated to the memory of Thomas Tuckett. It arises from a paper for D.W.T.C. Vessey’s Seminar on ‘Didactic Poetry’ at the Institute of Classical Studies. My thanks to Tony Boyle and John Penwill for helpful suggestions.

1. Riley, D., Poems, in C. MacCabe (ed.), Futures for English (Manchester 1988), 52Google Scholar. I shall be returning passim, in bold, to the terms of this considerable text. Its poetry has something about it of the Persian.

2. Preminger, A., Warnke, F.J. and Jr.Harrison, O.B. (edd.), Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (London 1975), 190Google Scholar.

3. Jenkinson, J.R., Persius: The Satires (Warminster 1980), 4Google Scholar.

4. Ramage, E.S., ‘Persius the Philosopher-Satirist’, in E.S. Ramage, D.L. Sigsbee and S.C. Fredericks (edd.), Roman Satirists and their Satire: The Fine Art of Criticism in Ancient Rome (Park Ridge NJ 1974), 114Google Scholar.

5. E.g. Harvey, R.A., A Commentary on Persius (Leiden 1981), 1Google Scholar.

6. E.g. Reckford, K.J., ‘Studies in Persius’, Hermes 90 (1962), 476–504Google Scholar, eloquently defends Persius’ poetry from casting as Stoic doctrine. Somehow this position is often geared in with the view I satirised above from Jenkinson.

7. G. Lee, and Barr, W., The Satires of Persius (Liverpool 1987), 7, 3Google Scholar.

8. Dessen, C.S., Iunctura Callidus Acrk A Study of Persius’ Satires (Urbana 1968), 29.Google ScholarGuilhamet, L., Satire and the Transformation of Genre (Philadelphia 1987), 34fCrossRefGoogle Scholar., views Persius’ as ‘deliberative satire’.

9. Abel, K., ‘Die dritte Satire des Persius als dichterische Kunstwerk’, in U.J. Stache, W. Maaz and F. Wagner (edd.), Kontinuität und Wandel Lateinische Poesie von Naevius bis Baudelaire (Hildesheim 1986), 151. CfGoogle Scholar. Coffey, M., Roman Satire (London, 1976), 111Google Scholar, ‘protreptic zeal’; Ramage, E.S., ‘Method and Structure in the Satires of Persius’, ICS 4 (1979), 138Google Scholar, ‘strongly…/… heavily didactic atmosphere… almost a tutorial situation’. Relihan, J.C., ‘The Confessions of Persius’, ICS 14 (1989), 145–67Google Scholar, argues the fine thesis ‘that the topic of the Satires as a book is how Persius fails to be a satirist’ (166): ‘He knows that a satirist is a social evil’ (167): the goal is ‘self-revelation,… self-communion,… inner dialogue and confession,… self-examination’. I shall address this briefly as I conclude.

10. We do not need to believe the encomiastic fictions of the Vita: they prompt useful questions.

11. Veyne, P. (ed.), A History of Private Life, Volume 1 (Cambridge MA 1987Google Scholar).

12. Brown, P., The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York 1988Google Scholar).

13. Foucault, M., The Care of the Self: The History of Sexuality, Volume 3 (London 1988Google Scholar). See the important review discussion of Cameron, A., JRS 96 (1986), 266–71Google Scholar.

14. Bernauer, J. and Rasmussen, D. (edd.), The Final Foucault (Cambridge MA 1988Google Scholar).

15. Martin, L.H., Gutman, H. and Hutton, P.H. (edd.), Technologies of the Self. A Seminar with Michel Foucault (Amherst 1988Google Scholar).

16. Cf. Alliez, E. and Feher, M., ‘Reflections of a Soul’ in M. Feher, R. Naddaff, N. Tazi (edd.), Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part 2 (New York 1989), 54fGoogle Scholar. Once we re-conceive ‘Philosophy’ in terms of institutionalised ideology, the study of imperial ‘Stoicism’ pivots naturally around questions of pragmatic education; cf. Shaw, B.D., ‘The Divine Economy: Stoicism as Ideology’, Latomus 44 (1985), 33Google Scholar: ‘[The] educative and pragmatic strain in early Stoicism later became, in the period of the Roman Empire, almost its sole raison d’être and the sole practical content of the philosophy which stripped itself of most vestiges of earlier “philosophical” aspects to become the educative instrument of the rulers’ (i.e. the élite echoing Finley: cf. n. 37).

17. M. Foucault, Technologies of the Self in Martin (n.15 above), 18. For a recent sketch of medical regimen at Rome, cf. Jackson, R., Doctors and Diseases in the Roman Empire (London 1988), 32ffGoogle Scholar.: ‘Fitness, Food and Hygiene’. On Hellenistic philosophy as medicalised therapy cf. Nussbaum, M., ‘Therapeutic Arguments: Epicurus and Aristotle’, in M. Schofield and G. Striker (edd.), The Norms of Nature: Studies in Hellenistic Ethics (Cambridge 1987), 31 - 74Google Scholar.

18. Cf. Ulmer, G.L., Applied Grammatology: Post(e)-Pedagogy from Jacques Derrida to Joseph Beuys (Baltimore 1985), 161Google Scholar.

19. Scholes, R., ‘Is there a Fish in this Text?’, in M. Blonsky (ed.), On Signs (Oxford 1985), 309Google Scholar.

20. Cf. Kaufer, D. and Waller, G., ‘To Write is to Read is to Write, Right?’, in G.D. Atkins and M.L. Johnson (edd.), Writing and Reading Differently: Deconstruction and the Teaching of Composition and Literature (Lawrence KS 1985), 72f., 75Google Scholar; Bannet, E. Tavor, Structuralism and the Logic of Dissent: Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan (London 1989), 254Google Scholar (quoting E. Copferman, Problemes de la Jeunesse, ‘… [the] Master—the term takes on all its meaning—distributes knowledge and inculcates principles rigorously defined by other adults.’)

21. This is the dispute at the heart of reading the Platonic ‘Dialogue’. Cf. Hadot, P., Exercices Spirituels et Philosophie Antique (Paris 1981), 29ffGoogle Scholar., esp. 31: ‘La mission de Socrate consiste à inviter ses contemporains à examiner leur conscience, à se soucier de leurs propres intérieurs… Le dialogue socratique apparalt done ainsi comme un exercice spirituel pratiqué en commun qui invite à l’exercice spirituel intérieur’; Teloh, H., Socratic Education in Plato’s Early Dialogues (Notre Dame 1986), 14, 21Google Scholar: ‘One reason Socrates is a true teacher is because he attempts to fit his logoi to the psychai of his answerers… Socrates practises the only method which could achieve his purpose. If he were to transmit beliefs, then the subject matter of education would not be the beliefs of the answerer but a subject matter independent of the answerer… Greek culture, as much as our own, favored teaching by transmission, but Socrates rejects transmission. Socrates uses the only method which he believes could motivate people to engage in dialectic’ (This view falls critically short of the bouleversement envisaged by the ‘Lacanian’ model; cf. Kouchner and Burnier quoted by Tavor Bannet [n.20 above], 255, ‘Master and pupil are simply situated on different rungs of the ladder of non-knowledge’. Augustine’s dialogue [‘with’ his son] de Magistro proposes [46] ‘there are really no teachers at all’—cf. Howie, G., Educational Theory and Practice in St. Augustine [London 1969], 185ffGoogle Scholar.,esp. 192; his de Catechizandis Rudibus sets out an ancient ‘Activity Method’ [158ff.], a mutual ‘Teacher-Pupil Relationship’ [150ff.], in which ‘the learner… is central; he teaches himself’: ‘The Teacher must have regard not to what he wishes to teach, but to what his pupils desire to learn’ [51 ]. ‘Transference’ works beyond ‘mutuality’ to an insistence on the positioning of the ‘learner’ within, and around, discourse. Cf. Burnyeat, M.F., ‘Wittgenstein and Augustine De Magistro’, Inaugural Address, Aristotelian Society, 1987.CrossRefGoogle Scholar)

22. Wright, E., Psychoanalytic Criticism: Theory in Practice (London 1984), 15Google Scholar, 17, 67, 123, 131. Cf. Bennington, G., ‘Deconstruction Is Not What You Think’, in The New Modernism: Deconstructionist Tendencies in Art/Art & Design Profile 8/Vol. 4.4 (1988), 7Google Scholar (‘Reading is not performed by a subject set against the text as object; reading is imbricated in the text it reads’), and G. Ulmer (n.18 above), 157–88.

23. Dillon, G.L., Rhetoric as Social Imagination: Explorations in the Interpersonal Function of Language (Bloomington 1986Google Scholar), I.

24. J. Bernauer, ‘Michel Foucault’s Ecstatic Thinking’, in Bernauer and Rasmussen (n.14 above), 67; cf. ‘What is morality if not the practice of liberty, the deliberate practice of liberty?’ (Foucault [n.17 above], 4).

25. The question behind this paper might run: Is the University always already an ‘ideological finishing-school’? (B. Johnson, Interview in Salusinszky, I., Criticism in Society [London 1987], 171fGoogle Scholar.)

26. Dillon (n.23 above), 130.

27. Bolles quoted ibid.

28. Felman, S., ‘Psychoanalysis and Education: Teaching Terminable and Interminable’, in B. Johnson (ed.), The Pedagogical Imperative: Teaching as a Literary Genre (New Haven 1982), 37Google Scholar.

29. M. Ryan, ‘Deconstruction and Radical Teaching’, in Johnson (n.28 above), 58.

30. Cf. Norris, C., Derrida (Glasgow 1987), 157f.Google Scholar, and see esp. Derrida, J., ‘The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of its Pupils’, Diacritics 13.3 (1983), 3–20Google Scholar.

31. A political shift to the right, epidemiological pressure to police our sexualities, diet, body-size, the under-threat mentality of terrorised academies… It is indicative that Jonathan Culler has made this his latest subject for critical investigation—the investigation of ‘Criticism and its Institutions’: cf. ‘One can distinguish two general models… The first makes the university the transmitter of a cultural heritage, gives it the ideological function of reproducing culture and the social order. The second model makes the university a site for the production of knowledge, and teaching is related to that function: in early years students are taught what they need to know in order to progress to more advanced work; in later years they follow or even assist their teachers’ work at the frontiers of a discipline’ (Culler, J., Framing the Sign [Oxford 1988], 33Google Scholar. This particular opposition sells the alternative woefully short: rather, students’ ‘advanced work’ must—a.s.a.p.—turn the tables and advance over ‘their teachers’ work’ to reach the ‘frontiers’. At their most charitable they might mark the odd script ‘Good for its age’.) Culler, J., ‘Criticism and Institutions: The American University’, in D. Attridge, G. Bennington and R. Young (edd.), Post-Structuralism and the Question of History (Cambridge 1987), 82ffGoogle Scholar., shows how changes in critical practice and allegiance arise less from doctrine than from institutional frames, through a process of negotiated and contested slippage (see esp. 85).

32. Felman (n.28 above), 22.

33. When the Emperor welcomes writing, what text escapes the condition of ‘adulation’? (The problem presented as Juvenal 7, for example. What resistance is available to a subsidised writer? Is the only recourse to write off the client [sc. as befitting the patron]?).

34. This is ‘the production of the capillary nature of the power, as Foucault calls it’ (Tambling, J., Confession: Sexuality, Sin, the Subject [Manchester 1990], 212Google Scholar). Cf. Rutherford, R.B., Marcus Aurelius (Oxford 1989Google Scholar), passim. Of what, then, is the institutional focus of academic theorising a monition?

35. Brown (n.12 above), 126ff. (on Clement).

36. Long, A.A., ‘Socrates in Hellenistic Philosophy’, CQ 38 (1988), 150–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37. T. Flynn, ‘Foucault as Parrhesiast: His Last Course at the Collège de France’, in Bernauer and Rasmussen (n.14 above), 106.

38. Clarke, M.L., Higher Education in the Ancient World (London 1971), 94Google Scholar; cf. Hadot (n.21 above), 51: ‘La vraie philosophie est done, dans l’Antiquité, exercice spirituel.’

39. Ramage (n.4 above), 125.

40. Clarke (n.38 above), 94; cf. M. Foucault, ‘The Ethic of the Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom’ in Bernauer and Rasmussen (n.14 above), 13ff. Nock, A.D., ‘Conversion and Adolescence’, in T. Klauser and A. Rücker (edd.), PisciculL Studien zur Religion und Kultur des Altertums (Mūnster 1939), 165–77Google Scholar, shows how ‘Philosophy’ spelled the call to youths to treat living seriously.

41. E.g. Lee and Barr (n.7 above), 3, speak implausibly of a ‘political vacuum’.

42. Flynn (n.37 above), 109.

43. Cf. Foucault (n. 17 above), 26.

44. Foucault (n.13 above), 44ff. Cf. Veyne (n.l 1 above), 36ff.

45. Flynn (n.37 above), 108; cf. Buford, T., ‘Plato on the Educational Consultant: An Interpretation of the Laches’, Idealistic Studies 7 (1977), 151–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

46. Bruell, C., ‘Socratic Politics and Self-Knowledge: An Interpretation of Plato’s Charmides’, Interpretation 6 (1977), 141–203, esp. 154ffGoogle Scholar.

47. L.H. Martin, ‘Technologies of the Self and Self-Knowledge in the Syrian Thomas Tradition’, in Martin, Gutman and Hutton (n.l5 above), 55.

48. See Clarke (n.38 above), 93, for ‘Philosophy Clubs’.

49. Cf. Moore, T. and Carling, C., The Limitations of Language (London 1988), 106fCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

50. Foucault (n.l3 above), 60; Hadot, I., Seneca und die griechisch-römische Tradition des Seelenleitung (Berlin 1969), 68ffGoogle Scholar.

51. Foucault (n.l3 above), 62f.

52. Ibid. 48; cf. Foucault (n.l7 above), 26.

53. Foucault (n.l3 above), 46; cf. Foucault (n.l7 above), 34.

54. Foucault (n.l3 above), 57; Hadot (n.50 above), 17ff.

55. Foucault (n.l3 above), 58ff; cf. Foucault (n.l7 above), 36f.

56. Foucault (n.l3 above), 65.

57. Brown (n.l2 above), 128f; cf. Foucault (n.l3 above), 54.

58. Ibid.; cf. Foucault (n.17 above), 31. This could not strike any imperial subject in this way, however, since ancient medicine always turned so preponderantly to preventive prophylaxis, to bodily régime.

59. Alliez and Feher (n.16 above), 55. For Foucault’s ‘flip’ of ‘the logic of repression’ by which ‘a discursive strategy for producing depths in the individual’ becomes visible, see Armstrong, N. and Tennenhouse, L. (edd.), The Violence of Representation: Literature and the History of Violence (London 1989), 6ffGoogle Scholar.: ‘The point of this discourse is to suggest there is always more there than discourse expresses, a self on the other side of words, bursting forth in words, only to find itself falsified and diminished because standardised and contained within the categories composing the aggregate of “society”.’

60. Foucault (n.13 above), 52.

61. Ibid. 55.

62. Ibid. 57. Cf. ‘the saying, “A sin confessed is half pardoned”’ (Sartre in Tambling [n.34 above], 174). Cf. Docherty, T., John Donne, Undone (London 1986), 212Google Scholar: ‘A symbolic act of physical self-mutilation in Donne is seen as being therapeutic spiritually.’ (See his Chapter 7, ‘Writing as Therapy: A Fairy Tale and a Diet of Worms’.)

63. Rudd, N., ‘Imitation: Association of Ideas in Persius’, in his Lines of Enquiry: Studies in Latin Poetry (Cambridge 1976), 163CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for refs. On the necessity of the patient’s narration of his sickness, cf. Brody, H., Stories of Sickness (London 1988Google Scholar); Docherty (n.62 above), 218 and 221, points out the double-bind: ‘Here, confession of one transgression leads… into the commission of another “imperfectness”. The talking cure becomes an exercise in self-wounding… The therapeutic exercise of self-exposure can bring about its own woundings or disease… The confession narrative involves excuse and so exculpation and therefore undoes itself, leaving a residue of “wound”.’ Such is the ‘figure’, or ‘reading-strategy’, which produces the doubleness of autobiographic attention from the reader and in their reading; cf. Tambling (above n.34), ch.1.

64. Foucault (n.17 above), 35.

65. ‘Their S(w)ay’ Cf. Foucault (n.40 above), 5f.

66. Foucault (n. 13 above), 51.

67. Foucault (n.17 above), 27.

68. Dillon (n.23 above), 94; cf. Bernauer (n.24 above), 54.

69. Dillon (n.23 above), 96 etc.

70. Moore and Carting (n.49 above), 161.

71. Cf. Ulmer(n.l8 above), 161.

72. Foucault (n.13 above), 48.

73. Ibid. 50.

74. Cf. Morford, M., Persius (Boston 1984), 39fGoogle Scholar. Foster, D.A., Complicity in Narrative (Cambridge 1987Google Scholar), usefully discusses a propos ‘confessional narrative’ the ‘complicity’ of the reader in transferentially trying out the writer’s illusion of mastery over meaning.

75. Cf. B. Johnson, ‘Teaching Deconstructively’, in Atkins and Johnson (n.20 above), 148: ‘Socialisation is training in allegorical interpretation.’

76. Cf. Henderson, J., ‘Lucan/The Word at War’, in A.J. Boyle (ed.), The Imperial Muse: To Juvenal Through Ovid (Berwick Vic. 1988), 122–64Google Scholar, on Lucan/Nero, , and ‘Tacitus/The World in Pieces’, in A.J. Boyle (ed.), The Imperial Muse: Flavian Epicist to Claudian (Berwick Vic. 1990), 167–210Google Scholar, on the ‘ephebic’ colour of Tacitus’ ‘Nero’ Books.

77. The compactness or compression of Persius’ work was at once read as intrinsic to its significance; see Mart. 4.29.

78. Cf. Grimes, S., ‘Structure in the Satires of Persius’, in D.R. Dudley (ed.), Neronians and Flavians (London 1972), 119Google Scholar and 14If.

79. The paradosis tells us we have no right to entitle it ‘Prologus’ or ‘Prologue’ vel sim.— only the desire to ‘place’ the piece beyond ‘nagging’ uncertainty.

80. Pasoli, E., ‘Attualita di Persio’, ANP.W 11. 32.3 (Berlin 1985), 1817Google Scholar.

81. Witke, E.C., ‘The Function of Persius’ Choliambics’, Mnemosyne 15 (1962), 151–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the topoi involved, cf. Miller, J.F., ‘Disclaiming Divine Inspiration: A Programmatic Pattern’, WS 99 (1986), 159Google Scholar.

82. For the cliché, cf. Korzeniewski, D., ‘Die erste Satire des Persius’, in D. Korzeniewski (ed.), Die romische Satire (Darmstadt 1970), 386Google Scholar.

83. Cf. Bramble, J.C., Persius and the Programmatic Satire: A Study in Form and Imagery (Cambridge 1974), 185ffCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

84. Jenkinson (n.3 above), 97ff.

85. This will be the first column-shattering travesty from the thunderous voice of Juvenal, Trajan’s Epic Satirist.

86. The aposiōpēsis obliges the reader to complete the question, the question ‘What being is most ubiquitously, funnily, obviously, Roman at Rome?’, for their Self, then to compare the answers) they find with the one eventually provided by the text—perhaps itself the Roman joke, but also mobilised by the text as the joke on us and on the joke(s) on Rome we found ours…

87. Grimes (n.78 above), 136; cf. Korzeniewski, D., ‘Die zweite Satire des Persius’, Gymnasium 77(1970), 209fGoogle Scholar.

88. See L., and Brind’amour, P., ‘La deuxième satire de Perse et le dies lustricus’, Latomus 30(1971) 999–1024Google Scholar.

89. Cf. Abel (n.9 above), 145.

90. Cf. Clay, D., Lucretius and Epicurus (Ithaca 1983), 179Google Scholar, on this passage (3.79–84).

91. Clarke (n.38 above), 107.

92. Foucault (n. 13 above), 45; Foucault (n. 17 above), 23f. Cf. Dillon, J., The Middle Platonists: A Study ofPlatonism 80 B.C. to A.D. 220 (London 1977), 305Google Scholar. Dessen (n.8 above), 58ff. and 97–105, sizes the poem against the dialogue.

93. See Connor, P., ‘The Satires of Persius: A Stretch of the Imagination’, in Boyle (n.76 above 1988), 56Google Scholar.

94. Cf. Peterson, R.G., ‘The Unknown Self in the Fourth Satire of Persius’, CI 68 (1973-4), 208Google Scholar.

95. On Vettidius (4.25f.) as exemplary criticism telling on the critic, cf. Jenkinson, J.R., ‘Interpretations of Persius’ Satires 3 and 4’, Latomus 32 (1973), 524Google Scholar.

96. Cf. Morford (n.74 above), 54f.

97. Cf. Nock (n.40 above), 171 and n. 40.

98. Martin, J.M.K., ‘Persius—Poet of the Stoics’, G&R 8 (1939), 174Google Scholar, vs. Nisbet, R.G.M., ‘Persius’, in J.P. Sullivan (ed.), Critical Essays on Roman Literature: Satire (London 1963), 61Google Scholar: my Teacher, through whom I learned that I—we—shirk, uncritical.

99. Anderson, W.S., ‘Part versus Whole in Persius’ Fifth Satire’, in Essays on Roman Satire (Princeton 1982), 161CrossRefGoogle Scholar; cf. Harvey (n.5 above) 134f…

100. Anderson (n.99 above), 167.

101. Connor (n.93 above), 65.

102. Cf. Korzeniewski (n.82 above), 404 n. 59, on the puer senex in ‘philosophical education’: the satirist’s hero is this, but at the same time he is a cradle-snatching old lecher and an old fool (even if he is a good old fool).

103. Cf. Edwards, M., ‘Locus Horridus and Locus Amoenus’, in M. Whitby, P. Hardie and M. Whitby (edd.), Homo Viator Classical Essays for John Bramble (Bristol 1987), 269fGoogle Scholar.

104. For this Roman/Latin character, cf. Korzeniewski (n.82 above), 389 n.17.

105. For the Will as a focal, even a ‘primal’, scene in the Roman social imagination, cf. Veyne (n.l 1 above), 30f.

106. Cf. Beikircher, H., Kommentar zur VI Satire des A. Persius Flaccus (Vienna 1969), 125fGoogle Scholar; Morford (n.74 above), 69. Cornutus’ (presumably abrasive?) editing made ‘Persius’ even more purely ‘Persius’ than Persius had managed/ imagined…

107. Dryden, J., ‘A Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire’, in J. Kinsley and G. Parfitt (edd.), John Dryden: Selected Criticism (Oxford 1970), 251Google Scholar.

108. See the Proem.

109. See Henderson, J., ‘Entertaining Arguments: Terence Adelphoe’, in A. Benjamin (ed.), Post-Structuralist Classics (London 1988), 192–226Google Scholar, esp. 213ff.

110. Saccone, M.S., ‘La Poesia di Persio alia luce degli studi piu recenti (1964–83)’, ANRW II. 32.3 (Berlin 1985), 1783fGoogle Scholar.

111. Ibid. 1785f.

112. On these characterisations, see the reviews by Saccone (n.l 10 above), 1784ff., and Scholz, U.W., ‘Persius’, in J. Adamietz (ed.), Die römische Satire (Darmstadt 1986), 214ffGoogle Scholar. For ‘surrealism’—and ‘hyperrealism’—see esp. Bardon, H., ‘Perse et la réalité des choses’, Latomus 34 (1975), 319–35Google Scholar, and Paratore, E., ‘Surrealismo e iperrealismo in Persio’, in M. Renard and P. Laurens (ed.), Hommages à Henry Bardon (Brussels 1985), 277–89Google Scholar, and for ‘collage’ see esp. Bardon, H., ‘À propos de Perse: surrealisme et collage’, Latomus 34 (1975), 675–98Google Scholar; for ‘catachresis’, cf. Anderson (n.99 above), 186, ‘Persius and the Rejection of Society’.

113. Abel (n.9 above), 173.

114. Paratore (n.l 12 above), 289. The fate of the reader will be that of Donne’s according to Docherty (n.62 above), 189: ‘The reader is afflicted by glottophagia, swallowing her or his tongue as s/he digests the material of the text; the material thus absorbed is then re-produced, but transformed…’

115. Harvey (n.5 above), 4.

116. Anderson (n.99 above), 186f.; Saccone (n.l 10 above), 1785.

117. Pasoli (n.80 above), 1842; Anderson (n.99 above), 186.

118. Saccone (n.l 10 above), 1795; cf. Morford (n.74 above), 93f.

119. Grimes (n.78 above), 145; Saccone (n.l 10 above), 1792f.

120. Jenkinson (n.3 above), 6.

121. Saccone (n.l 10 above), 1785; Pasoli (n.80 above), 1822f.; and esp. Rudd (n.63 above); Henss, D., ‘Die Imitationstechnik des Persius’, Philobgus 99 (1955), 277–94Google Scholar; Harvey (n.5 above), 18f.; Hooley, D.M., ‘Mutatis Mutandis: Imitations of Horace in Persius’ First Satire’, Arethusa 17(1984), 83…Google Scholar

122. Johnson (n.75 above), 144.

123. Ibid. 145.

124. Flintoff, E., ‘Food for Thought: Some Imagery in Persius Satire 2’, Hermes 110 (1982), 352Google Scholar. The main pioneers in this criticism are: Reckford (n.6 above), 476f., 489f.; Anderson (n.99 above), 175f.; Bramble (n.83 above), 7f., 26f. Cf. Morford (n.74 above), 86f., and Saccone (n. 110 above), 1792 n. 21. The Vita (9) is trying to tell us of Persius’ life (sc. of his writing life) when it tells us of Persius’ death, uitio stomachi…

125. Peterson (n.94 above).

126. Grimes (n.78 above), 138f. Cf. Ellmann, M., The Poetics of Impersonality: T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound (Hemel Hempstead 1987), 8Google Scholar: ‘The more the text revolves around the self, the more fragmentary that self appears… When Self is most itself, least lumbered with otherness, it paradoxically grows other to itself: “not I”.’

127. Ramage (n.9 above), 137f.; Abel (n.9 above), 103; Saccone (n.1 10 above), 1790f. n.18.

128. One simple way to realise the compulsion to make up (—‘compose’—) the text as you(r) read(ing) is to print it out without all the violence, the policing of our interpolated punctuation, thus: o curas hominum o quantum est in rebus inane quis leget haec min tu istud ais nemo hercule nemo uel duo uel nemo turpe et miserabiie quare ne mihi polydamas et troiades labeonem praetulerint nugae non si quid turbida roma eleuet accedas examenue improbum in ilia castiges trutina nee te quaesiueris extra nam romae quis non a si fas dicere sed fas tum cum ad canitiem et nostrum istud uiuere triste aspexi ac nucibus facimus quaecumque relictis cum sapimus patruos tunc tunc ignoscite nolo quid faciam sed sum petulanti splene cachinno (1.1–12.) Reading the corpus ‘proper’, then, begins (as it proceeds) with disorienting insecurity: even the ‘authorship’ of the first verse will be argued eternally (and inconclusively: but the point is that the dispute opens up debate of our conceptualisation of ‘authorship’). Cf. Zetzel, J.E.G., ‘Lucilius, Lucretius, and Persius 1.1’, CPh 72 (1977), 40–2Google Scholar; so, too, the verse is divided against itself, a repetition-structure (homines res, in a satiric psychocosmology of curae inane), but also an (empty?) exclamation that provokes in its turn an (empty?) exclamation on its ‘emptiness’. The voicing of the next verses is similarly the first in an unending series of such problems (cf. Collinge, N.E., ‘A Conversation in Persius’, CR 17 [1967], 132Google Scholar): the text could not more explicitly point to its own cancellation than it does, re-citing a(n empty?) tag about the ‘emptiness’ in our universe, emptying it of context so that it can be no more than a fragment of expressive exclamation, referring to it as an ‘excerpt’, perhaps a typical excerpt from a discourse (—but which?—), only to deny it an audience and a hearing, so that it can go nowhere… And yet this performance, like the whole of the libellus, has undecidable claims to be canonical satire aimed at the traditional target of grandeur, no more. Johnson, W.R., Momentary Monsters: Lucan and his Heroes (Ithaca 1988), 43Google Scholar n.127, calls quantum inane ‘the hallmark of the Neronians: it is the way they saw the world’. Persius will then be saying that no Neronians have time for this sort of view, but meaning that they have no time for the expressive exclamation of this view, and doing—performing—a quantessentially inane (—‘Neronian’—) act of expressive exclamation. But what is Persian here is the Satirist’s fragmentation of unanchored discourse.

129. Ulmer (n.18 above), 174: product of ‘(the illusion of) the teacher’s excentricity to the scene’.

130. Sharratt, B., Reading Relations, Structures of Literary Production: A Dialectical Text I Book (Hemel Hempstead 1982), 228Google Scholar.

131. See Wright (n.22 above), 61, and Dillon (n.23 above), 138, for the main species.

132. See Freund, E., The Return of the Reader: Reader-Response Criticism (London 1987), 87Google Scholar.

133. Ibid. 129.

134. Dillon (n.23 above), 147.

135. Ibid. 18f.

136. Brooks, P., ‘The Idea of a Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism’, in S. Rimmon-Kenan (ed.), Discourse in Psychoanalysis … Literature (London 1987), 1 If., 13fGoogle Scholar.

137. M. Bal, ‘Myth à la lettre: Freud, Mann, Genesis and Rembrandt, and the Story of the Son’, in Rimmon-Kenan (n.136 above), 62.

138. S.R. Suleiman, ‘Nadja, Dora, Lol V. Stein: Women, Madness and Narrative’, in Rimmon-Kenan (n.136 above), 127.

139. E. Wright, ‘Transmission in Psychoanalysis and Literature: Whose Text Is It Anyway?’, in Rimmon-Kenan (n.136 above), 93.

140. Sharratt (n.130 above), 85–7.

141. Johnson (n.28 above), 3.

142. The climax, this, of Persius’ most-ingens poem, his ‘all-too-unsatirical’ paean of praise for Teacher: the return of its (barely) repressed. Release—in and as Satire. For the characteristic satiric staining in Persius, cf. Richlin, A., The Garden of Priapus: Sexuality and Aggression in Roman Humor (New Haven 1983), 185ffGoogle Scholar., ‘a grossly distorted, as it were urinary, Latin’, and Henderson, J., ‘Satire Writes “Woman”: Gendersong’, PCPS 215 (1989), 63fGoogle Scholar.

143. See esp. Connor (n.93 above), 60f.

144. Cf. Norris, C., Paul De Man: Deconstruction and the Critique of Aesthetic Ideology (London 1988), 112Google Scholar.

145. Anderson (n.99 above), 179.

146. E.g. Bardon, H., ‘À propos de Perse: Morale et Satire’, RCCM 18 (1976), 49–70Google Scholar; Saccone (n.110 above), 1975 n.30.

147. Hoggart, R., ‘The Role of the Teacher’, in J. Rogers (ed.), Teaching on Equal Terms (London 1969),59Google Scholar.

148. Barr, W.,‘“Res” = “a thing”? Persius 4.1’, PLUS 3 (1981), 422fGoogle Scholar.

149. Dickens, David Copperfield, ch.42 (see Tambling [n.34 above], 138).

150. Tambling (n.34 above), 31.

151. Tambling (n.34 above), 182.

152. Tambling (n.34 above), 212 and passim.

153. Hoggart (n.147 above), 57.