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THE SATIRES OF ENNIUS AND LUCILIUS
culture and nationalism and the originality of Roman literature vis-a-vis Greek.
However, as Ennius said (Sat. 70 V = ROL 27), quaerunt in scirpo soliti quod
dicere nodum' As the common saying is, they are looking for a knot in a bulrush.'
Livy's dramatic satura is plausibly explained as a confused and confusing attempt
by Livy's source to include in the pedigree of Roman comedy an equivalent to
the satyr plays of Greek drama, just as we find a rough Italian counterpart
earlier in his account for the Old Comedy of Athens. 1 He or some other
cultural nationalist may have patriotically derived literary satire from that
source. There is indeed something specially Roman in Lucilius' (not Ennius')
satire: the combination of his caustic tone, his impudent disregard for the
decorum of literary theory, his use of his own experiences and encounters, and
his variety are unique, not but what each separate trait can be found somewhere
in Greek literature. It does not follow, however, that critics in the first century
B.C. or the earlier twentieth A.D. were justified in inferring the existence of a
lively native Italian tradition of satirical character passing back through Ennius
to a hypothetical form of popular drama.
The only evidence for Latin satire before Ennius is in fact a single quotation
of' Naeuius in Satyra' (Festus p. 306 L); the line is a Saturnian, and therefore
cannot come from a play called Satura 'The Pregnant Woman* (cf. Plautus.
Amph. 667 and the title of an Atellana by Pomponius and a togata by Atta).
With all due caution one may reckon with the possibility that Naevius did write
occasional poems; his supposed epitaph (Saturnians: Gell. N.A. 1.24.2, from
Varro), the line fato Metelli Romae fiunt consules (ps.-Asconius ad Cic. Verr.
1.10.29) cited as a senarius, but possibly a saturnian matching the reply malum
dabunt Metelli Naeuio poetae, and the naughty story in iambic septenarii about
the young Scipio Africanus (Gell. N.A. 7.8.5) might belong here. However,
even if Naevius did write and circulate occasional poems in various metres, it
does not follow that he issued a collected 'edition', still less that he himself
called die collection a 'Salad-dish' or 'Medley'.
3. LUCILIUS
Nothing is known of the saturae of Ennius' nephew Pacuvius, and it is only by
chance that we hear of the letters written at Corinth in 146 B.C. by Sp. Mummius
uersiculis facetis, in witty verse, and sent to his familiares, his private friends (Cic.
Att. 13.6a). There may have been much more of this domestic lusus, verse-play,
than we know: Lucilius himself refers to a comic verse-edict regulating behaviour
at banquets, the Lex Tappula of one Valerius Valentinus (.(lib. inc.)
1307, 1316 M = ROL 1239—40), and in an early poem Lucilius implies that if
his were the most notorious occasional verses, they were not the only ones
1 Waszink (1972) 107-9; Coffey (1976) 18-22. See p. 78.
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