This volume considers linguistic, cultural, and literary trends that fed into the creation of Roman satire in second-century BC Rome. Combining approaches drawn from linguistics, Roman history, and Latin literature, the chapters share a common purpose of attempting to assess how Lucilius' satires functioned in the social environment in which they were created and originally read. Particular areas of focus include audiences for satire, the mixing of varieties of Latin in the satires, and relationships with other second-century genres, including comedy, epic, and oratory. Lucilius' satires emerged at a time when Rome's new status as an imperial power and its absorption of influences from the Greek world were shaping Roman identity. With this in mind the book provides new perspectives on the foundational identification of satire with what it means to be Roman and satire's unique status as 'wholly ours' tota nostra among Latin literary genres.
Quintilian famously claimed that satire was tota nostra, or totally ours, but this innovative volume demonstrates that many of Roman satire's most distinctive characteristics derived from ancient Greek Old Comedy. Jennifer L. Ferriss-Hill analyzes the writings of Lucilius, Horace, and Persius, highlighting the features that they crafted on the model of Aristophanes and his fellow poets: the authoritative yet compromised author; the self-referential discussions of poetics that vacillate between defensive and aggressive; the deployment of personal invective in the service of literary polemics; and the abiding interest in criticizing individuals, types, and language itself. The first book-length study in English on the relationship between Roman satire and Old Comedy, Roman Satire and the Old Comic Tradition will appeal to students and researchers in classics, comparative literature, and English.
Composed in Germany by a monastic poet steeped in classical lore and letters, the Satires of Amarcius (Sextus Amarcius Gallus Piosistratus) unrelentingly attack both secular vices and ecclesiastical a
"Offering fresh readings of numerous Neo-Latin texts, Medical Analogy in Latin Satire provides an introduction to medical issues in the tradition of Latin satire. The book explores what functions phys
Concentrating primarily on the literary and social functions of satire, Hooley (classical studies, U. of Missouri, Columbia) writes for undergraduate readers seeking relevance to modern life in their
Satire as a distinct genre of writing was first developed by the Romans in the second century BCE. Regarded by them as uniquely 'their own', satire held a special place in the Roman imagination as the one genre that could address the problems of city life from the perspective of a 'real Roman'. In this Cambridge Companion an international team of scholars provides a stimulating introduction to Roman satire's core practitioners and practices, placing them within the contexts of Greco-Roman literary and political history. Besides addressing basic questions of authors, content, and form, the volume looks to the question of what satire 'does' within the world of Greco-Roman social exchanges, and goes on to treat the genre's further development, reception, and translation in Elizabethan England and beyond. Included are studies of the prosimetric, 'Menippean' satires that would become the models of Rabelais, Erasmus, More, and (narrative satire's crowning jewel) Swift.
Scholars of classics and religion, mostly British or American, sample satiric attitudes about women and marriage written in Latin from about 200 BC through Walter Map in the 12th century, with two clo
While nineteenth-century scholars debated whether the fragmentary Satyrica of Petronius should be regarded as a traditional or an original work in ancient literary history, twentieth-century Petronian
First published in Paris in 1511, The Praise of Folly has enjoyed enormous and highly controversial success from the author's lifetime down to our own day. The Folly has no rival, except perhaps Thoma
The three medieval texts that make up Jankyn's Book of Wikked Wyves have formed a vital part of Chaucerian research for more than half a century. Integrated here for the first time, these texts now fo
The writings of Horace have exerted strong and continuing influence on writers from his day to our own. Sophisticated and intellectual, witty and frank, he speaks to the cultivated and civilized world