Kenney_and_Clausen B.M.W.(eds.) - Get a Free Blog

MARTIAL AND JUVENAL
rifle the resources of the tragedians and epicists, since life is larger than myth.
We have seen from Satire 8 that Nero's crimes were worse than those of
Agamemnon's son. And we find a similar lesson in his account of cannibalism
in Egypt: .
nos miranda quidem, sea nuper consule Iunco
gesta super calidae referemus moenia Copti,
nos uolgi scelus et cunctis grauiora cothurnis,
nam scelus, a Pyrrha quamquam omnia syrmata uoluas,
nullus apud tragicos populus facit. accipe, nostro
dira quod exemplum feritas produxerit aeuo. (15.27—32)
The incident I shall relate,
Though fantastic enough, took place within recent memory,
Up-country from sunbathed Coptos, an act of mob violence
Worse than anything in the tragedians. Search through the mythical
Canon from Pyrrha onwards, you won t find an instance of a
Collective crime. Now attend, and learn what kind of novel
Atrocity our day and age has added to history.
Juvenal, typically, has just written a review of Ulysses' after-dinner tales,
casting doubt on their credibility. Reality, as he says, exceeds the proportions
of myth: hence why should he submit to a set of stylistic laws which were
evolved for the description of follies and minor ofFences? Horace's bland disquisitions
and Persius' self-assured sermons are therefore replaced by parodistic
flights of sublimity and a wryly anarchic terribilita.
Yet the effect is not always unconstructive. True, his mock heroics occasionally
do little more than exaggerate vice to epic proportions — without a reminder
that life could be noble. But sometimes through the parody we glimpse a
nostalgia for lost ideals, and a more honest, worthwhile world: although even
then there is often a pessimism that curbs simplistic faith in the past. When
he calls his compatriots ' Troiugenae', as he is fond of doing, he invokes grand
associations: but if he writes about the past, he will often undercut that too. 1
Pathic Otho with his mirror occasions evocation of Turnus* spoils in war:
Hie tenet speculum, pathici gestamen Othonis,
Actoris Aurunci spolium, quo se ille uidebat
armatum, cum iam tolli uexilla tuberet. (2.99—101)
Here's another clutching a mirror —just like that fag of an
Emperor Otho, who peeked at himself to see how his armour looked
Before riding into battle.
This time the upshot is positive: the Virgilian quotation works, like the catalogue
of heroes in the poem's finale, as a touchstone for judgement:
1 2
For the place of allusions to the heroic past in Roman satire see Bramble (i974) 9ff»j and Lelievre
(1958) 22-5.
615
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