Lucilius

Gaius Lucilius (fl. c. 130 bce–103/2 bce) was the inventor of Roman satire as we know it. Born of an equestrian family from Suessa Aurunca in Campania, he was an affluent landowner, the great uncle of Pompey the Great, and as such intended for a senatorial career, which he proudly turned down to undertake a career unprecedented for a Roman citizen: Lucilius was the first non-professional poet in Rome. He was a prominent figure in the Middle Republic, a personal friend of Laelius and Scipio Aemilianus, under whom he served in the Numantine War in 134/3 bce, and enjoyed such renown that he was awarded a public funeral, in Naples in 103/2 bce. He had an extensive Greek education and contacts with Greek intellectuals of his time; the skeptic philosopher Clitomachus, Head of the Academy (c. 127/6–110–109 bce), dedicated a work on problems of cognitive theory to him. Variety of themes, independence, and freedom of speech characterize his poetry, which he called sermones, “conversations,” apparently never using the term satura that his predecessor Ennius had given his experiments with miscellaneous verse. Personal poetry at Rome truly begins with Lucilius, whose pronounced subjectivity and unrestrained aggressiveness would become synonymous with satire itself for every subsequent writer in the genre, from Horace to Persius to Juvenal. Of Lucilius’s thirty books of verse satires––initially written in the iambo-trochaic meter of comic dialogue, before he settled on the hexameter––approximately thirteen hundred lines survive through the quotations of later writers from the late Republic through Late Antiquity.

Lucian of Samosata

This chapter discusses the comic-satiric work of the Syrian author Lucian of Samosata (ca.125–180). Traditional biographical accounts of Lucian’s life are avoided in the interest of focusing the reader’s attention on the ways in which Lucian presents a series of authorial personae throughout his large and diverse corpus. In particular, the chapter describes how an interest in the antithesis of Greek and barbarian animates much of Lucian’s work and discusses the series of Hellenized barbarians—both mortal and immortal—who populate Lucian’s comic dialogues. The chapter focuses as well on how Lucian explores the novelty of what he presents as his own invention of the generically transgressive Comic Dialogue—here as well, the chapter suggests, Lucian maps his concerns with generic hybridity onto culture and ethnicity. Finally, the chapter discusses Lucian’s abiding interest in the various types of imposters that defined contemporary intellectual, social, and religious life.

‘HIPPIAS, HANDSOME AND WISE’: A NOTE ON A BON MOT IN PLATO, HP. MAI. 281A1

Plato's Hippias Major has usually been taken to be a comic dialogue, and rightly so. Its main theme is the καλόν, but what is primarily targeted and harshly mocked throughout the dialogue is Hippias’ pretence of having σοφία, which should allow him to define what the καλόν consists in. Yet, καλόν is an ambiguous term since, besides its aesthetic meaning, it also usually means the ‘morally right’. Not being able to define what καλόν is therefore also amounts to being unable to define what the right is. And indeed, the genuine σοφία, as Plato will tell us explicitly, is the σοφία that helps people, especially the youth, to become morally better (see especially 283c4, where Socrates has Hippias wholeheartedly admitting that his σοφία is supposed to aim at εἰς ἀρετὴν βελτίους ποιεῖν). Thus, the serious conclusion Plato wants his reader to draw is, first, that the well-known sophist Hippias (and perhaps all the sophists, more generally) have no real σοφία despite their very name, and second, and most importantly, that they cannot help anyone become virtuous, and that therefore their claim of educating people in moral goodness proves to be specious.

V. Rhythm, Song, And Dance

Dikaiopolis and his followers speak contemporary Greek, but not, of course, as they would at home or elsewhere. Comic dialogue, like tragic, is in verse, and its characters normally carry on their conversation, as in tragedy, in iambic trimeters. The rhythm, however, as earlier noted, is a free one, which (a) admits a great deal of resolution: in the first five feet anapaests (besides the normal spondees), dactyls (in the first, third, and fifth), and tribrachs may represent iambi; (b) ignores Porson’s Law, i.e. permits a fifth-foot spondee to be shared between two words; (c) permits irregular word-division in trisyllabic feet; (d) neglects caesura. Aristophanes employs the line with skill and versatility — in its strictest tragic rhythm (C. 794-6), and at the other extreme resolved into five anapaests (W. 979, κατάβα κατόβα κατάβα κατάβα καταβήσομαι).