The experience of identity as complicit with but not identical to the roles we adopt is essential to the way Roman identity played out in the late Republic and beyond. This allowed the assimilation and adaptation of Greek forms just as it was encouraged by the various therapeutic philosophies of the Hellenistic period which practiced selfsurveillance and self-discipline, and was nourished by the competing demands of selfinterest and religious obligation. It is not surprising, then, that persona - a term meaning ‘‘mask’’ and the origin of our word ‘‘person’’ - is essential to understanding satire, the one genre that the Romans of the Republic seem to have invented. Nor is it surprising that this genre is both deeply indebted to Greek forms (Stoic and Cynic diatribe, iambic poetry, mock epic, and even Aristophanic comedy) and as hybrid, complex, slippery, and socially adept as the clever slave of comedy. Although the genre includes many moods and personae (the angry satirist, the laughing satirist, the self-effacing satirist, the mock-epic satirist), it seems in general to be characterized by the witty attack upon the vices of others, popular moralizing, and autobiography. When characterized in this way, one can see that in many ways it translates the contests of the comic stage into an autobiographical and moralizing mode. To the extent that this mode is directed at others, satire pretends to be part of a moral and social pedagogy; to the extent that it is also directed upon the speaker (upon either his outrage or his foibles), the same genre participates in a kind of ironic self-therapy. In both instances, however, it fixes its aim on the external behaviors and postures by which we invent ourselves and present ourselves to others.
Ennius wrote the first satires, but it was Gaius Lucilius (d. 102), a friend of Scipio Aemilianus, who created the genre we know. We cannot here survey the fragments of the 30 books that he wrote, but we can make two points about his verse. First, he attacked an extraordinary range of the targets. Nothing in Roman intellectual, political, or social life seems to be outside his scope: literary bombast, superstition, avarice, hypocrisy, and anger. But the attacks themselves are usually not upon substance, but upon pretensions. Thus, after some stoic moralizing of his own, he makes fun of the pretensions of stoic moralizing. He aims at the masks that others wear:
Now, in fact, from morning to night, on vacation or at work, the entire population, commons and nobles alike, all of them deploy themselves in the Forum and never cease to give themselves to one and the same pursuit and artifice: to cheat provided that it can be done safely, to fight by duplicitous means, to compete with flattery, to present themselves as ‘‘a good man’’, and to lay traps as if everyone were an enemy to everyone else. (Luc. 1228-34 Marx = ROL 3:373, frags. 1145-51)
Satire like this is a diagnosis of Roman society.
The second point to make comes from an observation by Horace, the last satirist of the Republic: He says that Lucilius ‘‘would confide his innermost thoughts to his writings, as if they were his trustworthy comrades... And so it happens that all of the man’s life lies open as ifit were painted on avotive tablet’’ (Sat. 2.1.30-4). Horace is here being typically cagey. On the one hand, he describes the scope of Lucilian satire as essentially autobiographical (what he saw, did, and thought) - open, complete, honest. But then he says that it was like the gaudy paintings you find in temples, paintings that tell an exaggerated story of danger, shipwreck, and escape (see also Chapter 24). Horace’s analogy points to the potential for self-irony that is implicit in Lucilius’ range of personae: preacher, man of the world, buffoon, hurt friend, indignant critic, and philological grammarian. In the hands of Lucilius, then, the satiric tendency of comedy and diatribe begins to move in two directions: both out to the world of fools and pretenders and inward toward the satirist himself, another faker, another ‘‘skin-changer.’’
But it was Horace, born in Venusia in southern Italy in 65, who pulled together the many elements of this skin-changing ironic genre. We will not discuss the range of his satire nor illustrate its many and complex literary virtues, but instead look briefly at how comedic personae, social criticism, and autobiographical irony come together in a brilliant version of moral self-improvement. In Satire 1.4 Horace defends himself against charges that as a satirist he is a public nuisance who attacks anyone and whom everyone hates. In his defense, he claims that his habit of criticism is something he learned from his father. Then he describes his father, walking with him through the Forum, encouraging him to live well by pointing out the vices of others. Horace says that his satire is no more than the continuation of this habit, a minor vice that he learned from his father. He practices self-correction by noting the failures of others, and, only when he has time, does he write it up.
This vignette is both touching and literary. The father Horace describes may or may not be like his own father, but he is an explicit imitation of Demea in the Terence comedy, The Brothers. Not the Demea of the play’s last act who has learned to pretend to have social graces, but the Demea we see in the middle of the play glorying in his success as moral pedagogue for his son while wholly ignorant of the fact that his son has taken up with a prostitute. As he explains his technique of citing others as moral exempla, the slave mocks and parodies him.
When Horace adopts this figure as the model of his own satiric impulse and then stigmatizes his actions as a ‘‘minor vice,’’ we are caught in a complex relationship to the problem of moral pedagogy. Horace blurs the line between objectifying the vices of others and objectifying himself, as he presents the objectification of vices - including the self-importance which allows moral objectification - as both a vice and the way to see our own vices. The moral lesson here seems to be that we need to objectify ourselves, to see the roles we play in society, just as we need to objectify others to make moral progress, and part of this progress entails seeing the objectification itself as pretentious and misinformed. Horace imagines the moral life as an unending tension between the self we present to the world and the self that presents, directs, and deploys itself in the world. Between the two there is always a gap. In Horace that gap may be expressed as the contradiction of trying to bring an end to judgmental stigma by stigmatizing the practice of stigmatizing.
In the final analysis, who we are, that is, being a ‘‘Roman’’ or being a ‘‘moral person,’’ is a posture of self-surveillance, a ‘‘naturalized’’ status, a claim on the attention of others, but one that does not confuse role with identity or truth-claims with the truth. This, of course, creates a split or gap at the heart of Romanness, but it is one that allowed Roman literature to explore, if not create, an internal difference which will inform Western ethics and Western psychology right on down to the present day. We are not what we are, we are not a thing, but we are a way of being, an open capacity to assume new roles, endlessly troping ourselves.
World History
