In Our Time - Roman Satire

Episode Date: April 22, 2010

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Roman Satire. Much of Roman culture was a development of their rich inheritance from the Greeks. But satire was a form the Romans could claim to have invented. The grandfather of Roman satire, Ennius, was also an important figure in early Roman literature more generally. Strikingly, he pioneered both epic and the satirical mockery of epic.But the father of the genre, Lucilius, is the writer credited with taking satire decisively towards what we now understand by the word: incisive invective aimed at particular personalities and their wrongs.All this happened under the Roman Republic, in which there was a large measure of free speech. But then the Republic was overthrown and Augustus established the Empire.The great satirist Horace had fought to save the Republic, but now reinvented himself as a loyal citizen of the Imperium. His satirical work explores the strains and hypocrisies of trying to maintain an independent sense of self at the heart of an autocracy.This struggle was deepened in the work of Persius, whose Stoicism-inflected writing was a quietist attempt to endure under the regime without challenging it.The work of the last great Roman satirist, Juvenal, was famously savage - yet his targets were either generic or long dead. So was satire a conservative or a radical genre? Was it cynical or did it aim to 'improve' people? Did it have any real impact? And was it actually funny?With:Mary BeardProfessor of Classics at Cambridge UniversityDenis FeeneyProfessor of Classics and Giger Professor of Latin at Princeton UniversityDuncan KennedyProfessor of Latin Literature and the Theory of Criticism at the University of BristolProducer: Phil Tinline.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, the ancient Romans prided themselves on inventing at least one new form of literature, satire. And yet it's sometimes hard to pin down exactly what made Roman satire satirical.

It covered subjects from rat-infested taverns to the vogue for foreign cults. It's little wonder that its name came from the Latin for Mishmash. Nevertheless, through the work of Lusilius, Horace and Juvenal, in particular, Roman satire was sharpened into the lacerating of Kant and hypocrisy, whose legacy remains with us today. The story of Roman satire takes us from the free-booting liberty of the Republic through to the fear and self-censorship of the empire. It's a genre that provides an intimate glimpse of Roman citizens' personal lives

as one social class was losing its power and another gaining it. with me. To discuss Roman satire at Duncan Kennedy, Professor of Latin Literature on the Theory of Criticism at the University of Bristol. Dennis Feeney, Professor of Classics and Geiger Professor of Latin at Princeton University. And Mary Beard, Professor of Classics at Cambridge University. Mary Beard, given the rich legacy of Greek culture which infused Rome, was satire the only form that Rome could call its own? That's what they said.

but that's in itself quite problematic. And I think what you have to do to understand quite how Roman this form is is you need to go back to the third century BC and to the first work of literature which was called satires, which was written by a very famous early Roman poet called Ennis. And although only about 30 lines of this survives,

we do have these few precious fragments, the things that call themselves Saturai. Now, there's all sorts of things that are interesting about this. First of all, you can look at these often one-line fragments. And you can see in these fragments things that you're going to find later in the Roman satiric tradition. For instance. The poet kind of sort of talks about himself in a sort of quite a feisty way,

is one nice line against. Just one line where he says, I only do poetry when I'm gouty. It looks as if, and this is all a bit of a jigsaw puzzle, looks as if you've got bits of moralising, you've got some, stop characters coming in, the old sponger comes in, and it's a favourite character in Roman satire.

and people now would tend to say, look, Ennius is, here's where we've got the grandfather of Roman satire. There's something quite interesting, though, if what you want to do is to say, so is this a really Roman genre. First of all, although I called Ennius Roman, he doesn't come from Rome, he comes from South Italy,

he's trilingual, he speaks Greek, Latin, and the native Italian dialect of Oskine. So he is its grandfather, It's a very, very mixed tradition. And also, as you said, the idea of it being a mishmash is terribly interesting in terms of what it really is. I mean, Sato, you could call Satter is a bit like a sausage. And it doesn't really come from anywhere.

There's Greek bits in it, there's Roman bits in it. It's a melange and medley. It began in the Roman Republic then before the empire took over. How important was it, have the freedom to mock the elite? What sort of freedoms it ennius? Let's say with Ennis and not go much further. How many freedom would they have? Well, the only thing about Ennius is that, so far as we can tell from the fragments,

there's rather little mockery in his satire. But in general, I think it's fair to say that satire is the kind of literature you might well expect to come out of the Roman Republic. Because the Roman Republic, this is before the empire, this is democratic, elected Republican government. We tend to... We're an Irish-secretting icing. All the politicians are rich.

That said... And the same families get to boss people around. But... True in a way. But the key thing is that they're not the kind of pompous, old, serious guys that we tend to think they are.

And what the Republic trades on, the democracy of the Republic, trades on in your face, banter, elections, being rude about people, being straight, what you look like, what your body's like. And you can see that, interestingly, the best case to kind of put next to satire is simply what the Romans call themselves. You've got all these guys who go and conquer the world.

And you look at what their names are. They all have little extra names, which are things like fatty and baldy. And so we've got guys who are at the top of the Roman tree, but everybody's saying, oh, look at him. He's a bit overweight. Duncan Kennedy, can you take us to Lusilius, and who is much more of his stuff remains, and he could have, be said,

to have set up the engine of what we now call Sarty. Can you tell us a bit about him, and can you give us his dates? Yes. Well, his writing dates are really the important ones. He starts to write in the 130s BC, and we know he died in 102 BC, so it's the last three to give.

of the second century. Now, Lusilus is, however, still fragmentary, but we do get a much better impression, as you said, of the kinds of things he talked about. But importantly, he too was a South Italian. He was a fairly rich man. We know he had plenty of estates, which he visited and so on. But he wasn't the kind of figure in himself who would necessarily rise to the top of the political tree. but very importantly he was taken up by one of the most important politicians at the time, a man called Scipio Imelianus, who was, amongst other things, the man who conquered Carthage in 146.

So what did Lusilius have a go at? Lusilius had a go at some of Scipio's enemies. As Mary said, there was a lot of banter and by-play, some of it quite vicious. and the Roman institutions themselves, for example, the censorship allowed you to get at your enemies by criticising them. If you were censor, you could say, well, so-and-so is not behaving properly. We can perhaps expel him from the Senate. And so the position of censor was quite important.

Scipio had been censor. An opponent of Scipio's had been censor, a man called Metellus. and Lusilius starts attacking Micellas. How does he attack him? What does he say that's attack? Well, Mettellus had made a great play when he was censor about the behaviour of women, what made a good wife. And basically you didn't look for companionship of women.

Women were there to procreate. And Lusilius starts attacking him because Scipio had a notoriously unhappy marriage and he had no children from it. So one can see that Scipio was perhaps a little bit on the defence about this. Lusilius writes one of his satires about the position of women, and it seems to be entering into that debate so that Lusilius in some sense becomes the literary equivalent of a political censor.

And another opponent of Scipio was a man called Lentulus Lupus. and after his death, Lusilius attacks him by creating a satire in which the gods meet in council, and they decide what they're going to do about Lentulus, what judgment are they going to pass on them. So in some sense, this Council of the Gods is itself almost a satire about senatorial business, except the gods are the protagonists within it. aware of Lusilius being aware of his audience? Probably to some extent, yes,

because a key feature of his satire's, and this was something that was taken up by those who came later, especially Horace, was that Lusilius was very keen to include everything about his own life, his interest in sex, his interest in food, his interest in literature, his interest in language, particularly. And he presented himself as very much a Roman blunt speaker in a society that was becoming increasingly open to cosmopolitan influences.

So Lusilius presented himself as very much the voice of the traditional Roman male. Did he kick up a fuss? I mean, is there any evidence of people saying, down with that man? We'll expel him. We'll find ways to punish him for being satirical about us. We don't get much impression about that. but of course he had powerful friends, and I think that helped. He may not have had quite the freedom to speak as he did,

had he not been a member of Scipio's circle. And Denis Feeney, where the epic form looked at Romans society, you could say, from the top-down, satire might be called something that looked it from the bottom of, if you want to have the little balancing acts. But it was always written by members of the elite. Can you unravel that a little? Yes, it is a paradox. It's very striking that, as Mary pointed out, Ennis is the father of Roman satire.

He's also the father of Roman epic. Enius is remembered in the tradition as the person who first imports Homer's great meter of the hexameter into Latin so that he can write a great national epic. And it's very interesting all the way through the Roman literary tradition to see the way that the great authoritative, powerful, dignified form of epic, which is telling you, you know, we Romans are a scene. entered from the gods and we're on a mission from God and we're going to rule the world, is always accompanied by the scurrilous counter voice of satire. And the same person naturally founded both forms is really very intriguing. So... So any, as you say, founded both forms?

Yeah, or he's remembered in the tradition as having founded both forms. It felt like whispering in the ear of the conquering hero coming to Rome, remember that you're human. There is that. Roman society is far more complex than people usually want it to be. And the Romans, to be a well-educated Roman, to have a good idea of what being a Roman is all about. to have a good idea of what the standing of Rome in the world was.

You needed both forms. You needed your epic, you needed your satire. So the satirist is writing in the same meter as Epic. Lusilius experimented with various meters, but very early on decided he was going to use Hixameter. And so what you have is this meter of the Hixameter, which is being used for the great imperial mission of Epic, and also for the scurrilous counter-voice of satire.

It's being written for the same audience, written by people who are also, you know, members of the elite. It's not yellow press journalism or anything like that. But it's a very, very strange phenomenon. So the Council of the Gods that Duncan mentioned where they meet to discuss the fate of Lupus, Mr. Wolfman, is a parody of a Council of the Gods in Ennis. And in fact, in the later tradition, if you stopped most Roman literary critics in the street and said mention a famous council of the gods, they would say, well, Lusilius, So Ennis' own counsel got a little bit sidelined because the parody was so much more memorable and so much more powerful. So instead of sitting around and deciding what we're going to do about Romulus,

you're sitting around deciding what we're going to do about this skunk lupus, Mr. Wolf. So all the way through the Roman tradition, the satirist has got to sign up to the idea that Epic is the other voice, is the enemy. Can you give us some idea, and Denis Vien, about the language being used? As I understand it, the satirists used high forms but also like to use low language. It's a really fascinating medley. As Mary said, it's a sausage. It's a mishmash. So you've got linguistic mishmash as well.

We get high language, certainly. It's high meter. But at any moment, they can... The meter being is that the hermeric meter? Exactly, the hermeric meter, as domesticated into Latin by Ennis. So at any given moment, you can have even an Etruscan word come in. Barrow, seems to be an atruscan word for blout or blockhead or fool, you know, which is used by Lusilius, it's used by Persi.

You get low words, popular words, which we don't encounter anywhere else. Perseus, the later satirist writing under Nero, for example, uses the word la laure, which seems to mean a lullaby, sing a lullaby. Horace turns the tables on himself when he describes his introduction to this great man, Mycinas, friend of Augustus. He says to Mycinas, I'm not a grand man, I haven't got a big, famous father. I don't ride around my estates on a fancy, and we expect the word, horse at the end of the line, and we get the word for horse, but we don't get the right word for horse.

The right word for horse is equus that we get equitation and equestrian from. Horace says on a caballo, which is the word that we get in the romance languages, you know, in Italian and French, cheval for horse. So I don't write around on a fancy dot dot, dot, nag. So you get this ability to introduce low language, popular language. Greek, of course, too, is everywhere. Already Lusilius is complaining about the way that people like to use posh French. Greek words He says, no one says the foot of a bed

anymore, they don't say Pedezlecti, they talk about cleanipods. So it's as if you make fun of someone for saying serviet instead of napkin. So there's this incredibly heightened linguistic awareness all the way through. Now, be it, can we turn to Horace and the situation he found himself in as the Roman Republic was

overthrown by the Roman Emperor? He was there from the Battle of Actium. Anyway, away you go. Yeah, well, there's a funny change happens at this point. And in some ways, the feeling that you get when you read Horace is that everything's got a little bit softer. And that's partly because of Horace's own story.

Because if we've left satire with Lusilius in the middle of the cut and thrust of Roman democracy, we pick it up with the next great satirist just on the cusp of Roman imperial one-man rule. and Horace is a guy who is himself deeply implicated in the very story of the origin of empire, the origin of autocracy at Rome, and the move away from any form of democracy. Because he, in fact, he's probably wealthy, but he is the son of an ex-slave. He's not an aristocrat by birth. He also comes from South Italy. but in the great wars that followed the assassination of Julius Caesar

and which led ultimately to the establishment of the Roman imperial one-man rule, Horace starts off fighting on the wrong side. He's with the assassins of Caesar, not with what's going to be the monarchical side. He fights at the Battle of Philippi, and claims to run away and thrown away as she. He's a loser. Now, that's 44.

We pick him up again in the 30s, when first of all he's come back to Rome and he's got a job as a screber, as a kind of high-cloth secretary. And he's obviously already writing poetry. And interestingly, despite being on the wrong side, he gets picked up by Augustus' the new now emperor.

He gets picked up by Augustus' actually just before he becomes emperor, but we're going in that direction. A minister of culture, a man called Mycinas. And he moves from being an enemy of the Augustine side into being eventually really a court poet in the new imperial autocratic regime. The satires he writes, which he calls both satires

and also I think quite interestingly, Cermone's, Conversations, very conversational work. They're some of the earliest things he wrote, and they come absolutely at the very beginning of the imperial regime. The first book, he has two main books of satires. The first book is written just before Octavian, who's going to be Augustus, finally Thwax, Anthony and Cleopatra, and the other one, the second book, is written just after. So he's absolutely at the very beginning of empire. it's hard not to think reading these now

slightly chatty, often slightly homely, bits of moralising personal stories of encounters with Mycinas and co. It's hard not to think that although some bits of satire the satiric tradition survive,

this is all frightfully gentle new regime stuff. Duncan Kennedy, so can you give us some examples of what he did then? Mary's given us a right platform Can you give us examples of why he should be called a satirist? Well, he very much adopts the form. He explicitly appeals to Lusilius as a precedent,

but it's a very almost sanitised view of Lusilius. This isn't Lusilius the one who blazes away against the enemies of Scipio. It's rather the man who presents his whole life for the world to see, and this is the side of Lusilius that Horace wants to take up. He also wants to situate himself in relation to Lusilius as a much more cultured, sophisticated, elegant writer than Lusilius had been. Now, he still needs to meet in some sense the expectations that satire is going to involve attack on people.

But he negotiates this in a number of ways. One is that he exploits the capacity of very common Roman names to suggest characteristics. So the satires are peppered with names, but we don't know whether any of these people existed or not. For example, he will talk about a figure like Porchius to suggest gluttony. He will suggest Fabius as a windbag because the verb to speak was fary, so Fabius might in itself suggest that. He suggests Novius as the new man in Roman politics, the up-and-coming man, from no particularly distinguished background. But what he doesn't tend to do is to attack the enemies of his patron. What he tends to do, rather, is to emphasize the quality of friendship that he feels towards his circle.

And so he says at one point, in my right mind, I wouldn't compare anything to a pleasant companion. And so the figures who are instantly recognizable as historical figures like Virgil, like Mycena's, like Octavian, they are mentioned in terms of their positive characteristics. And the way in which Horace tends then to displace the aggressive tendencies of satires is to turn it back on himself. He has a famous tag which is Mutato Nominate De Té Fabula Narata. So he says you can go around attacking people, but change the name, and it applies to you just as much as it does to the people you're attacking.

So he tends to make himself the butt of the satirical voice within his work. Dennis Feene, can you take that any further? Can we bring Horace into a recognizable satirical framework? It's very recognizable to us, though, certainly. it's a complicated story because, as people have pointed out already, Lysilius is fragmentary. So our impression of Lysilius, a lot of it comes from what Horace says. And so poets always create their own predecessors. And therefore what Horace is doing is deliberately choosing to write in a genre

where you should be, according to him, performing in this very aggressive and outspoken way, and yet he can't. So there's a great deal of self-conscious disabling. Here I am. I'm meant to be an aggressive satirist. And in fact, because of the changes in the new regime, because of my relationship with the new regime, I can't in fact act out the kind of role that I should be acting out. Why did he want to be a satirist then?

If you were so prior into the new regime and wanted to get in with my CNAs, who was an extremely wealthy, and I'd switch sides and so on. Why did he, in a sense, why did he take that risk? In a way, it's a roadmap for how to behave under the new circumstances. You've got to police your speech. Li Beritas was free speech, which was. the motto of Lusilius, it was the motto of the swash-buckling republic, you could get up and say whatever you wanted about anyone else.

Libertas's free speech was also the password at the Battle of Philippi that Horace would have shouted as he went into battle to fight against the people that he later became friends with. And Libertas, everyone knew was on the way out. You had to guard your speech, you had to police your speech. And so part of the sort of banity of Horace, part of the toned-down atmosphere of Horace is a deliberate self-inflicted painting of himself into a corner.

He's trying to act out for us. These are the new circumstances. These are the new ways that Roman citizens have to behave, the new ways that Roman poets have to behave. And there's quite a lot, I think, of self-anger, quite a lot of guilt, quite a lot of rage directed at himself. He is the butt of a great deal of his own criticism. So how does he pull the rug?

I'm not quite there yet. Please forgive me. What can you say that is what, in that way he was satirical and had a satirical effect on those who prepare to read and listen? Well, he's certainly very happy to denounce the follies that satirists love to denounce and he loves to prick the balloon of pomposity and cant and snobbery. What's curious about him, though, is the way that, in the case of snobbery, for example, he doesn't just make fun of people who are snobs.

He involves us as readers in being snobby ourselves. So one of my favorite poems of Horace, one of many people's favorite poems of Horace, the ninth poem in the first book, describes him strolling along through the forum, and he bumps into some person who's never named, and this person wants to get in. This person wants to become part of the circle too.

He's probably a poet. He thinks he's very smart. He wants to become friends with Mycinas. And as we're reading this, we're feeling, oh, Horace is such a tactful guy. He knows how to behave, and this other guy is really bad. and we're being invited to side with Horace against this gauche,

in comprehending person who's trying to muscle in. On the other hand, by the time you get to the end of the poem, you realize that, in fact, we're out too. We're not part of the group. We're not part of the circle. And Horace has, in fact, managed very cunningly to make us realize that he is actually the insider. We are the outsider.

But there's still something kind of strange, isn't there? complete surviving Roman satire that we have. And it's actually very soft. It's very Greek, loads of Greek philosophy, oozing out all over it. And it stands in rather strange contrast to the vision, which Horace is quite happy to produce himself, the vision of satire as being old, free-talking, Roman, tough and insulting. So satire is already, when we meet it first in its full form,

got this strange paradox about how we see it and how it kind of thinks of itself as being. Can we? Just say with you, Marion, and talk about Roman religion in relation to say the work of Seneca and Seneca's attack on Claudius. Yeah, well, so far what we've been talking about is verse satire, actually. It's verse. And we've also not really been quite confessing.

It isn't really terribly funny. satire is meant to be funny. I was going to ask some jokes. So that question is. But happily, there are all sorts of other traditions which are on the margins of what we've been talking about. And I think there is actually one work of Roman literature, which has made me laugh.

It's the only work of Roman literature that's made me laugh. And ever. And it's a prose, a part prose, part verse, satire. by Seneca, who was Roman philosopher, tutor of the emperor, Nero, really big in the Roman court. At least we think it's by Seneca. And it is a spoof very much in the modern satirical tradition on the deification of the recently dead Emperor Claudius. And in the Roman tradition, emperors die, and if they've been decent, if they've been decent to the upper class, there's a strong chance that they will be turned into gods

given temple, given a cult. And this wonderful satire actually parodies the whole institution of the deification of emperors. What it does is it imagines, Claudius has died, and it imagines what happens next. How is Claudius going to be made a god or not made a god? And so what we see is this rather bumble.

old guy, the old dead emperor, making his way up to Mount Olympus to ask if he can be let in. And we have actually, interestingly, another assembly of the gods on Mount Olympus. So we're looking back to Lysilius again, where they're going to have to decide whether to make Claudius one of their number, whether he's going to become in the Olympian Senate. And it's actually a very funny account because First Emperor Augustus, gets up in the middle of this account because he had been made a god but we discover that he's a terribly terribly

junior god in the Assembly of Olympus and he'd never actually spoken in the Senate before and he votes against Claudius he doesn't want Claudius this both murderous and doddery old guy joining them so Claudius is sent down the gods

say sorry mate you can't come he sent down to the underworld and he ends up actually being a legal clerk of his pre-decent classer Calicula. Now, what's great about this is that it is actually examining and exposing in partly the idiocy of Rome's own traditions of making emperor's gods. So it's taking a pot shot at religion. Can you, Dennis Feeney, tell us how satire engage with prevalent philosophy? It's something that is there in the form from the beginning. Lusilius, New Sautier,

Greek philosophers who visited Rome. Lusilius talks about this. He's interested in the issues. As usual, we can first really properly track it in Horace, and it becomes extremely important in this strange person, Perseus, who wrote under the Emperor Nero in the 60s. But one of the favorite butts for the Roman satirist is the philosophy of stoicism, because stoicism is an extremely paradoxical and extremist philosophy. We think of stoicism in a diluted way

as being stiff up a lip and not getting too upset if something bad happens but in the ancient world it's an extremely systematic, extremely well-thought-out philosophy with very pointed views on ethics and theology and everything else in the world. And they used to love to make points by asserting extremely paradoxical points. So they would say things like only the wise man is free And that sounds reasonably all right. But then they would say only the wise man is a good cobbler,

even if the wise man has never handled a piece of leather in his life. And this is the sort of argument that they would use as a way of getting into position to talk about wisdom and folly. But to someone like a satirist, to someone like Horace, of course, this is an irresistible target. And he has a wonderful poem in the second book where a friend of his tells him about a lecture he heard from a stoic, who's called Stertinius, which is a great word,

because it comes from the Latin word to snore sterto, so he's Mr. Snora. So if you listen to 300 lines of this man's lecture, is going to send you to sleep. And this lecture is all about how everyone is mad apart from the wise man. And then he gets the tables turned on himself in the normal way. At the end of the book, his slave, Davos, gives him a lecture on how only the wise man is free. Horace is not free.

The slave, who is a slave, can tell the free man, the master, that he is not free. Duncan, Haddock Kennedy, can we move to Juvenile now? And introduce us to the work of June, why he was important in this roll call. Yes. Well, he comes about a generation after the Noronian period. He's writing in around the period of 100 AD. And it's in the immediate aftermath of the death of one of the most hated of the Roman Emperor's demission. But when juvenile comes to satire, he plays around with the notion that the default position of satire, the default assumption about satire is the Lusilian one,

that you're there to attack living people aggressively. And Juvenile says that, well, if you do that nowadays, there are so many powerful people around who could actually turn you into a human torch in the arena if it suited them to do so. So that he's not going to attack living people. He says he will only attack those whose tombs lie along the Flaminian and the Latin roads leading outside Rome.

So the rich and the famous dead. And he does attack people like Domitian and Demission Circle. But it's hard to sort of think of these in terms of direct political targets. It rather more links in to the Roman historical education where individuals from history became exemplary of particular vices or virtues. And so the targets for juvenile in satire are really things. thematic rather than personal. So take Messalina, for instance. Yes, and that will be

the wives of the emperors, as it were, female sexual behaviour. He's very interested in the themes of sex, he's very interested in the themes of money, particularly social status and social mobility and hypocrisy. And then the names of famous Romans from the past, sometimes the recent past,

sometimes the very distant past, become the pegs on which he can develop witty ways of discussing and thinking about these thematic ideas. Would you say, Dennis Fien, that the juvenile was, again, when juvenile was a reactionary? And there's beginning to be the feeling that satire is a conservative for. There's a lot in that. I mean, the satirist is almost inevitably measuring present decay,

present collapse, present luxury and indulgence, against some idealized past. and that's certainly true in many of the poems of Juvenile. On the other hand, the satirist's view of the world is such a corrosive acid that he's always aware that they never were any good old days. And in satire 8, for example, Juvenal starts off with this lovely tag. Stemeter could fact you want. What do do anyway?

And he goes through saying, first of all, all the families have fallen off from where they were. We don't have great illustrious people anymore. everyone's decayed. But then at the end of the poem, he says, well, as a matter of fact, if you go back and look right at the origin of Roman history, all of us Romans were actually the dregs of the world. When Romulus set up the city, there were no people to populate it with, so he set up an asylum and said any murderer, cattle rustler, rapist can come here and be a Roman. And so that's how the poem ends. And this leaves you with the feeling, well, all right, okay, the families have fallen off, but they've fallen off, in fact, from a zero beginning point. We have a feeling there obviously of a very mixed city A lot of Greeks coming in A lot of immigrants Rome and saying Used to be our city

And now it's their city And this is picked up by Johnson In his imitation where he says I cannot bear a French metropolis So this is something else that I think is very important about the form Is that it is an urban form It is the form of the city And Rome we have to remember

Was freakishly big In the time of Horace and Juvenile It was a million people Yeah a million people It's absolutely extraordinary and it was only 200 years ago that another city in Europe became that big when London reached a million people in 1800.

Mary, I know you want to come in, but can I ask you to take on the idea that the Tatarists wanted to correct folly, perhaps, they wanted to send it up, but they also reveled in it. Well, one of the reasons that juvenile is the person for whom we have probably more medieval manuscripts

than any other writer is that is reveling in the folly of Roman and culture went down really big in the monasteries because it seemed... Can you give us a few examples of this reveling? Oh, well, let's think of. A great satire he goes on about the wickinesses of women and one of my favourite bits in that

is conjuring up the image of the woman Epia, who's a senator's wife, and what does Epia do? Well, she likes a bit of hunkish gladiatorial flesh, so she runs off with her favourite gladiator. Now, it provided marvellous, really marvellous opportunity for devout monks to say, look how bad the pagans really were and to convict them actually out of their own mouths. But, I mean, I think more interesting in a way is that when you read this stuff, there is a bit of

a problem about whose side you're on. And if you're laughing at all, who you're laughing at. Because you can read juvenile banging on and on about how dreadful women are. You know, they're insatiable for sex. They're always getting into kinky religion or the rest. And you can say, yeah, every Roman male reader is saying, yeah, God, they're terrible, you know. And we all join in with the satirist in saying, yeah, it was, we've got to decry all this. But it could be that we're also partly laughing at the satirist himself.

We're laughing at this silly bloke who is coming out with all these ridiculously conservative ideas that are so silly. We're laughing at the very pretensions of morality. But does the satirist know we're laughing at him? Well, that's always the $64,000 question about satire. And, you know, that's always been, that's the case with television satire. 64,000, don't you? Were we laughing at Alph Garnet or with Alphan.

You know, I don't know. Dennis, Dennis. I think Horace certainly knows that we're laughing at him. But the second to last poem in his collection, when he has his slave making fun of him, his slave ticks off all of Horace's follies, and precisely all of the follies that Horace have been denouncing in everybody else,

you know, for the 17 poems up till now. You could have easy sex with a prostitute, but you insist on having affairs with married women. You always go on about what nice, easy meals we should be having, and you order peacock and mullet, you know. So Horace sets himself up as the fore guy. He's someone who can talk the talk, but he can't walk the walk.

He can't follow his own lessons. Have we any evidence that this satire met its story? had an effect on its audience at the time. I don't suppose be many people going to the 18th century. I don't suppose many people got out of bed and decided I'm not going to eat mullet anymore.

Duncan Kennedy Can you just before we come towards the consequences of it, what is that I said at the beginning or somewhere rather that it revealed the under side, the minutiae of Roman life in a way. Is that true and could you give us one of two examples? It is true.

in the sense that most Roman literature did not concern itself with the life and the activities of the people at the lower end of society. And satire glories in the minutiae, as you call them, the table furniture, the meals, the menus, the different kinds of things that each social class got up to and the contrast between them. but in looking at these minutiae, they're always being packaged for us, they're always being represented for us. There's a very good example in Juvenile Satire 3, which is about the evils of having to live in Rome. And one of them is the danger for the poor people of living in tenements that are likely to go on fire. And you get the scene set up as though it were a kind of latter-day sack of Troy. so there is this epic framework. But within it, you see figures who are desperately trying to get their freevala, their knick-knacks, their trinkets out.

And the poor guy who's up in the top floor and doesn't hear the alarm call go off, he's got his six little mugs, his little bust of the centaur Chiron. And Juvenal says of him, Cordas, he even gives him a name, Cordes had nothing to lose, but he lost all of that nothing. So the minutia of life there are brought to your attention, but also to give a sense of pathos to the figure who's being represented. I mean, there is a health warning problem here because it's not just the medieval monks who pillaged juvenile.

You could not write a book on everyday life in Rome without extracting nice little nuggets from juvenile, and to some extent, Horace. And you really have to be very careful when you read these nuggets because nobody ever confesses to you that this nice little thing about the tenement falling down is actually part of a huge moralistic tirade. Can we say what is the biggest, this small group of people,

we spoke about four or five people, three or four or five people, three or four, Prince,ry, Denis Finney, they had a very great impact. Let's just take this contrary to it. They had a big impact. They did. And I think the work of Johnson that I mentioned earlier, Life in London, which comes from the poem that Duncan just mentioned in Juvenile Number 3. I think there's a lot of, partly of course these people have been, it's been part of their education, they know these poems very well anyway.

But I think what Johnson, for example, responds to when he reads about the city of Rome is precisely the parallelism with this fantastically expanding and burgeoning metropolis that he finds himself in, the center of a new world empire. full of foreigners coming in and so on. So there is this sense of identity and difference. I mean, this is what always makes the classics good to work with. They're near enough that we can feel the similarity. They're distant enough that we have to do some work to bridge the gap. And this is what makes them intriguing and fascinating. So I think that sense of being in the middle of a great empire,

the sense that you're surrounded by hypocrites, fools, buffoons. I think this is something which Johnson relishes. And I do think that it's funny. I've got to disagree with Mary. When John Dryden said about juvenile, the juvenile gives me as much pleasure as I can bear. I mean, I can relate to that. It's a disgusting kind of funny a lot of the time.

One of the most revolting moments of that's one of the most revolting moments of juvenile is when he says he go to the dinner party and your host has this wonderful mullet that costs thousands. And you're given a fish which is covered in grey blotches because it's been feeding on the sewer outlets and the tiber. It's funny, but it turns your stomach. I think it's boy's humour, I think. Boy's humour.

But you're invited into this, you're invited to laugh at it, to in a sense get beyond your cultured façade and perhaps think, is this the voice that's going on secretly in my head as well? Yeah, I think what we learn is not just how to be critical, though, with these sotas. It's all about learning to be self-critical to you, and that's the legacy of it. Well, thank you all very much. Thanks, Mary Beard, Duncan Kennedy, Dennis Feeney. Next week, we're talking about the Great Wall of China, constructed at the command of the First Emperor from 221 BC.

So there we are. Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast, why not try others, such as Thinking Aloud, where Laurie Taylor discusses the latest social science research. To find out more, visit bbc.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4.