Making Mockery: The Poetics of Ancient Satire (Classical Culture and Society) PDF
Preview Making Mockery: The Poetics of Ancient Satire (Classical Culture and Society)
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 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Copyright © 2007 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. 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 This page intentionally left blank “I” is only a convenient term for somebody who has no real being. —Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own This page intentionally left blank 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—
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