COMEDY

POLITICS 105Need to receive more callers and endure more visits,Take this friend along or the other, and never go outBy myself or get out to the country……In this, and in thousands of other respects,I am much better off than you, my dear Public Figure.(Horace, 1959:66–67)This sense of balance reflects the poet’s own relative investment in thestatus quo. He was a part of the literary circle gathered around theemperor Augustus’ finance minister Maecenas that included Virgil, thepoet of the Aeneid, a privileged group devoted to the Latinization ofGreek poetic forms and the enhancement of Roman poetry. We can alsodetect the influence of Stoicism, an Athenian philosophical systemwidely adopted in Rome. Stoicism’s chief ethical concern was thathumanity live according to the tenets of nature and reason. As allanimals have needs befitting their nature, such as the need for food,shelter, and a mate, humanity must live according to these needs, andthe actions that nature has prescribed as ‘appropriate’. But, as humansare possessed of reason, they can determine the quality of appropriateactions with greater accuracy and consistency than animals, allowingthem to move beyond simply answering their needs, and enabling themto act in concert with nature’s prescriptions. To act and understand inthis way is to act virtuously. Thus, while we can see that Horace is notan explicitly philosophical poet, his satire is concerned with thespiritual well-being of the individual, achieved through individualchoices and the reconciliation of self with its place in society.A century later, the satire of Juvenal suggests that Roman life hadchanged. Unlike Horace, Juvenal’s work was not popular or widely readin his own lifetime, in fact, he was not really ‘discovered’ until two anda half centuries after his death. Juvenalian satire is the satire of saevaindignatio, or savage indignation, the bitter condemnation of venal andstupid humanity. Whereas Horace scolds deviance from an essentiallybenign human nature, Juvenal starts from the position that vice is at itshighest point and virtue has been virtually extinguished. ‘When wasthere ever a time more rich in abundance of vices?’, he asks in his FirstSatire, ‘Wealth, in our hearts, is set in the veriest Holy of Holies’(Juvenal, 1958: 21). Juvenal’s two most influential satires, Satires IIIand X, focus on city living and its corruptions. Satire III, ‘Against theCity of Rome’, makes it clear that hypocrisy is necessary for those whowish to prosper: