Making Mockery: The Poetics of Ancient Satire (Classical Culture and Society)

311 Pages·2007·1.36 MB·English

by  Ralph Rosen

Making Mockery
CLASSICAL CULTURE AND SOCIETY
Series editors
Joseph Farrell and Ian Morris
Emotion, Restraint, and Community in Ancient Rome
Robert A. Kaster
Making Mockery: The Poetics of Ancient Satire
Ralph M. Rosen
Making Mockery
The Poetics
of Ancient Satire
Ralph M. Rosen
1
2007
1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rosen, Ralph Mark.
Making mockery : the poetics of ancient satire / Ralph M. Rosen.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-19-530996-6
1. Verse satire, Classical—History and criticism. I. Title.
PA3022.S28R67 2007
880.09—dc22 2006023216
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
For Charlotte and Benny
tevkna fivltata
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“I” is only a convenient term for somebody who has no real being.
—Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
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P R E F A C E
One wonders whether, after painting pictures on the walls of their caves, our
primeval ancestors then had to explain them. This might well have marked
the birth of aesthetic criticism, a history of negotiation between artist and au-
dience, producers and consumers entangled in a messy web of fictions, truths,
and everything in between. As the Greeks figured out early on, poiêsis—artis-
tic creation in all its varieties—traffics in the representation of things and ideas,
but its representations can never actually be what they purport to represent.
As long as our hypothetical cave dwellers painted scenes of woolly mammoths
and domestic life, or, in the verbal realm, as long as they told imaginative sto-
ries that did not cleave too closely to the lived experiences of their audiences,
no one needed to worry much about ontology. Fictions can be entertaining,
after all, even if not true.
But things get far more complicated when artists do things that unsettle
audiences and force them to pay closer attention to that perennially blurred
line between fiction and reality than they might under less troubling circum-
stances. Such poiêsis has taken many forms in the verbal and visual arts, and
each plays out differently within its own historical moment, but they all end
up forcing a confrontation of sorts with an audience over meaning and inten-
tion. Our cave-dwelling audience may smile placidly at depictions of an excit-
ing hunt or a successful battle with hostile neighbors, but what about the
painting that caricatures their leader, or the song that uses taboo language or
violates other norms of cultural decorum? Why do some people find such rep-
resentation amusing, others offensive? And for which of these two groups is
such art actually intended in the first place? Such questions are notoriously
difficult to answer, especially since it is never entirely clear whether we can or
should trust the answers given by the artists themselves, or whether these are
even meaningful questions to pose. And yet these, and other questions of this
sort, always seem to arise when art aggressively and overtly transgresses norms
or appears to scandalize at least some portion of a putative audience.
Nowhere, perhaps, is the relationship between artist and audience more
fraught than in the case of satirical poetry, where a peculiar mixture of comedy
and didactic posturing—what the Greeks came to refer to as spoudaiogeloion—