Recognizing Persius (Martin Classical Lectures) - Hardcover

Reckford, Kenneth J.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 069114141X ISBN 13: 9780691141411

Verlag: Princeton Univers. Press, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

Recognizing Persius is a passionate and in-depth exploration of the libellus--or little book--of six Latin satires left by the Roman satirical writer Persius when he died in AD 62 at the age of twenty-seven. In this comprehensive and reflectively personal book, Kenneth Reckford fleshes out the primary importance of this mysterious and idiosyncratic writer. Reckford emphasizes the dramatic power and excitement of Persius's satires--works that normally would have been recited before a reclining, feasting audience. In highlighting the satires' remarkable honesty, Reckford shows how Persius converted Roman satire into a vehicle of self-exploration and self-challenge that remains relevant to readers today.


The book explores the foundations of Roman satire as a performance genre: from the dinner-party recitals of Lucilius, the founder of the genre, through Horace, to Persius's more intense and inward dramatic monologues. Reckford argues that despite satire's significant public function, Persius wrote his pieces first and mainly for himself. Reckford also provides the context for Persius's life and work: his social responsibilities as a landowner; the interplay between his life, his Stoic philosophy, and his art; and finally, his incomplete struggle to become an honest and decent human being. Bringing the modern reader to a closer and more nuanced acquaintance with Persius's work, Recognizing Persius reinstates him to the ranks of the first-rate satirists, alongside Horace and Juvenal.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Kenneth J. Reckford is the Kenan Professor Emeritus of Greek and Latin in the Department of Classics at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His books include Aristophanes' Old-And-New Comedy.

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"With effortless execution, Reckford draws the reader gently and persuasively into the remote world of this brilliant, young Roman satirist. This is a warm, deeply thoughtful, and perceptive book."--Dan Hooley, University of Missouri

"English language books focusing on Persius are few and far between. Reckford is well-versed in ancient satire and his close analyses of particular words, lines, and passages are often compelling."--Cedric Littlewood, University of Victoria

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"With effortless execution, Reckford draws the reader gently and persuasively into the remote world of this brilliant, young Roman satirist. This is a warm, deeply thoughtful, and perceptive book."--Dan Hooley, University of Missouri

"English language books focusing on Persius are few and far between. Reckford is well-versed in ancient satire and his close analyses of particular words, lines, and passages are often compelling."--Cedric Littlewood, University of Victoria

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Recognizing persius

By Kenneth J. Reckford

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2009 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-14141-1

Contents

Acknowledgments........................................ixPROLOGUE In Search of Persius.........................1CHAPTER ONE Performing Privately......................16CHAPTER TWO Seeking Integrity.........................56CHAPTER THREE Exploring Freedom.......................102CHAPTER FOUR Life, Death, and Art.....................130EPILOGUE From Persius to Juvenal......................161Notes..................................................181Bibliography...........................................219General Index..........................................233Index Locorum..........................................237

Chapter One

PERFORMING PRIVATELY

Here, more or less, are the facts, according to the unusually reliable Vita that has come down to us. Persius was born in Volaterrae (modern Volterra) in northwest Etruria on 4 December A.D. 34. He died of a stomach ailment on 24 November A.D. 62, shortly before his twenty-eighth birthday. A Roman knight with blood ties to senatorial families, he came from a rich old Etruscan family and received a first-class education in literature and rhetoric in Rome from two distinguished teachers, Remmius Palaemon and Verginius Flavus. Persius's father died when he was around six and his stepfather died not long afterwards. He was, says the Vita, "a person of gentlest ways, of virginal modesty, handsome repute, and exemplary devotion (pietatis ... exemplo sufficientis) to his mother, his sister, and his aunt." He was related to the younger Arria, whose parents were forced to commit suicide under the emperor Claudius after a failed conspiracy, and from the age of ten he enjoyed a close friendship with her husband, Thrasea Paetus, the best-known Stoic dissident under Nero. Persius's friends also included the poet Caesius Bassus and some older men who served as foster-fathers and mentors: Servilius Nonianus, a man of affairs; two philosopher-doctors from Greece and Asia; and most important, the learned Annaeus Cornutus, a freedman and scholar who wrote Greek treatises on theology and literature? the Stoic role model par excellence of Persius's Satire 5.

Although orientation in time and place is useful, I might better have let Persius speak for himself from the start. Biographical criticism in his case is always so tempting, and so misleading: partly, because we still know so little about his life and work; and partly, because that little has all too often produced a distorted, itself easily satirized image of a sheltered poet with little experience of the world, surrounded by philosophical treatises and adoring female relatives. The modernist reaction, as said earlier, redirected us to the safely bounded space of the text, the postmodernist to the unbounded vagaries of readers' imaginations. But now, I wonder: has the time come round to pay renewed attention to the author? Not just the "implied author" safely embedded in the text, but the person behind the text who lived and died; who fought hard, as it seems, for his integrity and moral freedom; and who, amid his many duties and concerns (to which I shall return in chapter 4), wrote Satires.

But why did he write satire? He was well-born, rich, and independent, with no need to secure a patron or consolidate his position in society. His own version in Satire 1 develops traditional lines of defense: he writes because he must; because truth will out; because if he doesn't cry out against the world's follies, he will simply burst. On closer inspection, it seems likely that Persius regarded his writings at once as playful self-indulgence, as a competitive bid for mastery in the field of Roman satire, and as a means of unusually intense self-scrutiny and self-debate, freely conducted but ultimately reinforcing the aim of living honestly and well. His satire attacks vice and folly, to be sure, and with greater urgency than ever; but it also affords a special kind of emotional self-recognizance, giving voice to powerfully distracting thoughts and feelings that require, even as they resist, Stoic reorganization and control—which will never in his lifetime be quite complete. In turn, I suggest, Persius felt enabled to compete with Lucilius and Horace, his predecessors, the "scourger of vice" and the master-ironist, not least because his satire had something new and exciting to discover, and to proclaim.

My first chapter focuses on Satire 1 and the theme of performance. In earlier Roman tradition, satire was usually performed at elite dinner-parties for a sympathetic audience of friends and allies before it was circulated and/or published. Against this background, and confronted now with bad performances of epic and tragedy, and also criticism, in a world increasingly hostile to free and honest speech, Persius gives his own very private nonperformance or metaperformance of satire, speaking his passionate findings into the as yet secret "hole" of his little book.

"Who'll Read This Stuff?" (Satire 1)

The beginning of Satire 1 plunges us into intense dialogue between undefined voices:

    O curas hominum! o quantum est in rebus inane!
    "quis leget haec?" min tu istud ais? nemo hercule. "nemo?"
    vel duo vel nemo. "turpe et miserabile." quare?
    ne mihi Polydamas et Troiades Labeonem
    praetulerint? nugae. non, si quid turbida Roma
    elevet, accedas examenve improbum in illa
    castiges trutina, nec te quaesiveris extra.
    nam Romae quis non—a, si fas dicere—sed fas
    tum cum ad canitiem et nostrum istud vivere triste
    aspexi ac nucibus facimus quaecumque relictis,
    cum sapimus patruos. tunc tunc—ignoscite (nolo,
    quid faciam?) sed sum petulanti splene—cachinno. (1–12)

    O cares of men! O how much emptiness
    there is in things! "Who'll read this stuff?"
    You're asking me that? No one, by Hercules.
    "No one?" Maybe two people, maybe no one.
    "Shameful and pathetic." Why? Afraid
    Polydamas and the Trojan Women might prefer
    Labeo to me? Nonsense. If muddled Rome
    makes light of something, you shouldn't join in;
    you shouldn't blame the faulty tongue of the scale
    or look outside yourself. For at Rome, who
    [is? or does?] not—ah, if it's right to speak—
    but of course it's right, when I look at those gray hairs
    and the grim, "grown-up" front we display, though living
    in any way whatsoever—it's then, it's then
    (sorry, can't help it, my spleen compels me), I have
    to roar with laughter.

Editors help, and commentators, going back to Persius's own time. Wendell Clausen's careful punctuation reflects his own interpretive efforts and, in...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Princeton Univers. Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2009
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 069114141X
• ISBN 13: 9780691141411
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 240
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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