This compact and critically up-to-date introduction to Roman satire examines the development of the genre, focusing particularly on the literary and social functionality of satire. It considers why it was important to the Romans and why it still matters. Provides a compact and critically up-to-date introduction to Roman satire. Focuses on the development and function of satire in literary and social contexts. Takes account of recent critical approaches. Keeps the uninitiated reader in mind, presuming no prior knowledge of the subject. Introduces each satirist in his own historical time and place – including the masters of Roman satire, Lucilius, Horace, Persius, and Juvenal. Facilitates comparative and intertextual discussion of different satirists.

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.

The fifteen essays collected here argue that Roman verse satire should be viewed primarily as an art form, rather than as a social document or a direct expression of social protest. Originally published between 1956 and 1974, they constitute an impressive attempt to free Roman satire from misinterpretations that arose during the romantic era and that continue to plague scholars in the field. The author rejects the proposition that Juvenal and other satirists expressed spontaneous, unadorned anger and that the critic’s best approach is the study of the historical, social, economic and personal circumstances that led to their statement of that anger. This work develops his thesis that Roman satire was designed as a literary form and that the proper stance of the critic is to elucidate its art. Focusing on the dramatic character of the first-person speaker in the satires of Horace, Persius, and Juvenal, the author shows both how the speaker’s role was shaped to suit the purposes of the individual poems and how that role changed over successive collections of satires. Several essays also discuss the ways in which the satirists employed metaphors and similes and used contemporary ethical and rhetorical themes. Originally published in 1982. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

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.

William Allan's Very Short Introduction provides a concise and lively guide to the major authors, genres, and periods of classical literature. Drawing upon a wealth of material, he reveals just what makes the 'classics' such masterpieces and why they continue to influence and fascinate today.

In this first comprehensive reading of Juvenal’s satires in more than fifty years, David H. J. Larmour deftly revises and sharpens our understanding of the second-century Roman writer who stands as the archetype for all later practitioners of the satirist’s art. The enduring attraction of Juvenal’s satires is twofold: they not only introduce the character of the “angry satirist” but also offer vivid descriptions of everyday life in Rome at the height of the Empire. In Larmour’s interpretation, these two elements are inextricably linked. The Arena of Satire presents the satirist as flaneur traversing the streets of Rome in search of its authentic core—those distinctly Roman virtues that have disappeared amid the corruption of the age. What the vengeful, punishing satirist does to his victims, as Larmour shows, echoes what the Roman state did to outcasts and criminals in the arena of the Colosseum. The fact that the arena was the most prominent building in the city and is mentioned frequently by Juvenal makes it an ideal lens through which to examine the spectacular and punishing characteristics of Roman satire. And the fact that Juvenal undertakes his search for the uncorrupted, authentic Rome within the very buildings and landmarks that make up the actual, corrupt Rome of his day gives his sixteen satires their uniquely paradoxical and contradictory nature. Larmour’s exploration of “the arena of satire” guides us through Juvenal’s search for the true Rome, winding from one poem to the next. He combines close readings of passages from individual satires with discussions of Juvenal’s representation of Roman space and topography, the nature of the “arena” experience, and the network of connections among the satirist, the gladiator, and the editor—or producer—of Colosseum entertainments. The Arena of Satire also offers a new definition of “Juvenalian satire” as a particular form arising from the intersection of the body and the urban landscape—a form whose defining features survive in the works of several later satirists, from Jonathan Swift and Evelyn Waugh to contemporary writers such as Russian novelist Victor Pelevin and Irish dramatist Martin McDonagh.

Maria Plaza sets out to analyse the function of humour in the Roman satirists Horace, Persius, and Juvenal. Her starting point is that satire is driven by two motives, which are to a certain extent opposed: to display humour, and to promote a serious moral message. She argues that, while the Roman satirist needs humour for his work's aesthetic merit, his proposed message suffers from the ambivalence that humour brings with it. Her analysis shows that this paradox is not only socio-ideological but also aesthetic, forming the ground for the curious, hybrid nature of Roman satire.

This survey of Roman satire locates its most salient possibilities and effects at the center of every Roman reader's cultural and political self-understanding. This book describes the genre's numerous shifts in focus and tone over several centuries (from Lucilius to Juvenal) not as mere 'generic adjustments' that reflect the personal preferences of its authors, but as separate chapters in a special, generically encoded story of Rome's lost, and much lionized, Republican identity. Freedom exists in performance in ancient Rome: it is a 'spoken' entity. As a result, satire's programmatic shifts, from 'open' to 'understated' to 'cryptic' and so on, can never be purely 'literary' and 'apolitical' in focus and/or tone. In Satires of Rome, Professor Freudenburg reads these shifts as the genre's unique way of staging and agonizing over a crisis in Roman identity. Satire's standard 'genre question' in this book becomes a question of the Roman self.

This volume, from an innovative scholar of Latin Literature and Greek Old Comedy, distills the modern corpus of scholarship on Roman Satire, presenting the genre in particular through the themes of literary ambition, self-fashioning, and poetic afterlife.