Studies in the Poetry of Italy, Part I. Roman

by Frank Justus Miller

SATIRE

Satire has always shone among the rest,
And is the boldest way, if not the best,
To tell men freely of their foulest faults,
To laugh at their vain deeds and vainer thoughts.

1. INTRODUCTION AND EARLY SATIRE

What prophecy was to the ancient Hebrews, the drama to the Greeks, the purpose-novel and the newspaper editorial to our own day, satire was to the Roman of the republic and the early empire—the moral mentor of contemporary society. This conception of the prophet as the preacher of his day is often obscured by the conception of him as one who could reveal the future; but a closer study of the life and times of these great religious leaders shows them to have been men profoundly interested in current life, who gave all their energies to the task of raising the standard of the religious and social thought of their own day. The function of Greek tragedy was ever religious. It had its very origin in the worship of the gods; and the presence of the altar as the center of the strophic movements of the chorus was a constant reminder that the drama was dealing with the highest problems of human life. Added to the general religious atmosphere of tragedy were the direct moral teachings, the highest sentiments of ancient culture, which constantly sounded through the play. Greek comedy, especially of the old and middle type, also served a distinct moral purpose in society. It did not, indeed, sound the same lofty notes as did its sister tragedy; but it was the lash which was mercilessly applied, at first with bolder license to individual sinners in high places, and afterward in a more guarded manner to the vices and follies of men in general. In either case, the powerful stimulus of fear of public ridicule and castigation must have had a real effect upon the manners and morals of the ancient Greeks.

When we turn to our own time, we find the literary preacher at the novelist's desk or in the editor's chair. The influence of the purpose-novel and the editorial can hardly be overestimated. In the generation immediately preceding our own, a very direct influence upon the public social life of his day was wielded by the pen of Dickens. His eyes were open to abuses of every kind—in educational, charitable, legal, and criminal institutions; and he used every weapon known to literary art to right these wrongs. In this task he was ably assisted by men like Thackeray, Reade, Kingsley, and others. And there can be little doubt that the improved conditions in the England of to-day are due in generous measure to the work of these novelist preachers. The editor's function is still more intimately and constantly to hold the mirror up to society, revealing and reproving its faults. And to-day there is probably no more potent force acting directly upon the opinions and conduct of men than the daily editorial.

Now, the literary weapon of the Roman moralist was satire. It flourished in all periods of Roman literature, both the word satire and the thing itself being of Latin origin. In other fields of literature there is a large imitation of Greek models. Roman tragedy was at first but little more than a translation of the Greek plays, and the same is true of comedy. Cato, Varro, Vergil, and the rest who wrote of agriculture, had a Greek prototype in Hesiod, who in his Works and Days had treated of the same theme; Lucretius was the professed disciple and imitator of Epicurus; Cicero, in oratory, had ever before his eyes his Demosthenes, and in philosophy his Plato and Aristotle; Vergil had his Homer in epic and his Theocritus in pastoral; Horace, in his lyrics, is Greek through and through, both in form and spirit, for Pindar and Anacreon, Sappho, Alcæus, Archilochus, and the whole tuneful line are forever echoing through his verse. Ovid, in his greatest work, only succeeded in setting Greek mythology in a frame of Latin verse, though he told those fascinating stories as they had never been told before; while the historians, the rhetoricians, the philosophers—all had their Greek originals and models.

But in the field of satire the Romans struck out a new literary path for themselves. Even here we are bound to admit that the spirit is Greek, the spirit of the old comedy, of bold assault upon the evils of government, of society, of individuals. But still satire, as a form of literature, is the Roman's own; and beginning with Lucilius, the father of satire in the modern sense, the long line of satirists who followed his lead sufficiently attests the strong hold which this particular form of literature gained upon the Roman mind.

We have said that Lucilius was the father of satire in the modern sense; but the name at least, together with many of the features of his satire and that of his successors, reaches far back of him into the recesses of an ancient Italian literature, long since vanished, of which we can gain only the faintest hints. These hints as to the character of that ancient forerunner of the Lucilian satire come to us from two sources—the discussions of the Latin grammarians as to the derivation of the word satura (satire), and the remote reflections and imitations of the old satura in later works.

These far-off imitations give some idea of the character of the genuine satire of the earliest time,—that of a medley of verse of different meters, intermingled with prose, introducing words and phrases of other languages, and treating of a great variety of subjects. This literary medley or jumble probably had its origin in the farm or vineyard, where, in celebration of the "harvest home" or other joyous festival, it would be brought out, perhaps accompanied by some kind of musical recitation, and of course loaded with the rude wit of the time.