Classical World

Rosen boldly claims that here we will see, for the first time, a sustained attempt to conceptualize all mocking ancient poets as participants in the same literary paradigm, transcending “the boundaries of single authors, genres, and temporalities” (4). His study is to be praised for making good this claim with considerable success, thanks to the author’s learning and unusual breadth of perspective. Nevertheless, some problems remain, as will be demonstrated below.

Rosen explicitly limits his study to poetry, not prose, and to that part of satirical narratives which entails mockery. “Satirical” is understood in a broad, transgeneric sense, so as to comprise both Greek and Roman texts, or parts of these. [End Page 197]

More implicitly, it emerges that his approach is not to offer analyses of satirical poetry as such, but rather to read various ancient texts as metaliter-ary comments on stylized mocking.

Several points crystallize as essential to this book’s anatomy of satire: The poet’s mockery is ontologically different from real-life insults; the poet always claims that he, or his cause, is righteous, and within the frame of the satire, this is so; despite (1), the poet uses I-narrative and other devices to make his work look like autobiographical statements in propria persona, and thus his mockery is constantly being mistaken for real insults; although (3) is potentially dangerous to the mocking poet, he plays with this aspect, now warning against it, now invoking it.

In line with this vision of satire, we are given fine interpretations of the myths of “Iambe and Demeter” and “Heracles and the Cercopes” as aetia for Greek comic (mocking) writing. Chapters 3 and 4, on perspectives shifting from one literary treatment to another, deal with Thersites, and Odysseus vs. Polyphemus, respectively. There follows one chapter on how Hipponactean mockery is adapted to serve the needs of Callimachus in his Iambi, and one chapter on Roman material: Juvenal’s Satires 5 and 9. The seventh, and last, chapter turns instead to the audience of Graeco-Roman satirical writing, and analyzes various ancient reader-responses to Archilochus.

The Thersites chapter may serve as an example of how Rosen’s wide knowledge of the sources proves a real asset. The discussion ranges from the Thersites episode in Iliad 2.211–78, over the Epic-cycle poem Aethiopis (as recorded by ancient sources), and to the pictorial narrative on a fourth-century Apulian krater known as the Thersitoktonos vase. The author both clearly and elegantly shows Thersites as a labile figure, emblematic now of the self-righteous blame poet, now of the target of ridicule. In the Iliad, Rosen observes, Homer is so much in favor of Thersites’ attacking antagonist Odysseus, that Thersites is only a target, while he plays the role of a real blame-poet in the Aethiopis and the vase narrative, where it is rather Thersites’ enemies that are shown as targets—misreading his conscious, stylized mockery, they overreact in killing him.

On the other hand, the essential satirical ingredients enumerated above are more commonsensical than revolutionary in our day, when the satiric tradition in ancient literature has been intensely problematized, and it is in this aspect that the limitations of Rosen’s study are found. In a way, the problem of satire’s essence is postponed rather than solved. Once we have agreed that ancient satire is both dangerous and playful, what is it really about? What Rosen himself says in criticism of persona theory may be applied to his own book: “ . . . .eventually an audience will want to know what the point of all the joking is. And if one responds that the point is simply to raise a laugh, an attentive listener might still want to know why the jokes were configured as they were” (222; original emphasis).

The undersigned listener remains unsatisfied, for instance, upon hearing the conclusion that in his enigmatic ninth satire, Juvenal “was far more interested in obfuscating, rather...