Anna Chigas’s Reviews > Latin Literature: A History > Status Update

On this basis it is likely that a sense of mixture and variety was the original source, and that it was felt in the literary employment of the term. Quintillian said that satire is a completely Roman genre and the attempts of the satiric poets themselves, especially Horace, to create a retrospective geneology dating back to fifth-century Attic comedy do not affect this basic fact. However, satire recieved many Greek contributions along the way- the open structure of the genre itself encouraged grafting and mixing- but the original impulse is specifically Roman.

This impulse may be understood as the search for a literary genre suitable for conveying the author's personal voice. Latin Literature was quite developed by this point, but we notice that none of the standard poetic genres- epic, tragedy, comedy- provide a space for direct expression, in which the poet can reflect his relationship to himself and to contemporary reality.

Satire, varying in meter and personal in nature, open to the poet's voice and to everyday realism, presented itself to Lucilius as an ideal means of expression to be developed. The development of satire also signified the growth of a new audience, one interested in written poetry, culturally aware and eager for a literature that stayed close to real people.

We cannot say to what extent Lucilius's satires were tied to a unified program. Even his political engagement may have been discontinuous and changeable: his relation with the Scipionic circle is evident in the first satire, but the poet survived his political patrons by many years. There can be no doubt, however, about the existence of an innovative literary program, sustained by a personality with a lively nonconformity. His poetry rejects a single stylistic level and is open on all sides. It amalgamates the elevated language of epic, relived as parody; the specialized vocabularies that until then had been excluded from Latin poetry, such as technical terms from rhetoric, science, medicine, sex, gastronomy, law and politics; and forms of everyday language, drawn from different social strata and including an enormous number of Grecisms. From this point Lucilius, like Petronius, is as close to modern realism as Latin Literature ever gets; he even tends to feign improvisation. The poet's criticism, with its lively humor, hits at the most diverse aspects of human life, which are taken up in their physical and linguistic concreteness, brought to life in the light of philosophical ideals, and viewed in their contrast with reality. In this sense the satire has a certain commitment to education, intimately bound up with social criticism and nonconformity. The disharmony of Lucilius's style is a deliberate choice.