Chapter 20. “Wounded by Tooth that Drew Blood”: The Beginnings of Satire in Rome

“Satura quidem tota nostra est,” wrote Quintilian. “Satire is entirely ours [Roman].” [1] Thus blame in verse, of a certain type, was a characteristically Roman genre, despite some influence from Hellenistic Greek poetry. [2] Cicero, in the Tusculan Disputations, tells us that “Cato, that most authoritative author, said in the Origins that our ancestors had this custom at feasts, that they would sing to the flute, one after another, the praises and braveries of outstanding men, as they were reclining,” but soon after this he speaks of “poems made for the injury of someone else” in archaic Rome. “The Twelve Tables show that songs used to be written already at that time, because they made it illegal for a song to be written to injure someone else.” [3] Valerius Maximus adds this important passage: Thus narrative poetry, as martial paraenesis, is central to archaic Roman culture; it also seemingly has an aspect of ancestor worship in it.

Though this passage speaks only of praise, martial blame would have been an inextricable component of the poetry, as we have seen in the martial paraenesis of the Iliadic Agamemnon and in Tyrtaeus. [4] We find comparable praise and blame expressed in Roman funeral ritual: according to Pliny, the Romans kept wax portraits of their illustrious ancestors around the house, along with accompanying spoils of battle, pedigrees, archives, and statues—“so that the houses continued to triumph eternally even after they had changed masters.” But a specific purpose of all this praise of deeds of ancestors was martial blame: “This was a powerful stimulus, when the walls each day reproached an unwarlike owner for having thus intruded upon the triumphs of another.” [5] Polybius describes the Roman funeral, where men wore these masks in procession, and where the funeral orator recaps all of the illustrious deeds of the deceased’s ancestors. [6] So we see that praise, blame, and cult of martial ancestors linked together.

The laws of the Twelve Tables, referred to above, show the power of blame in early Rome: Qui malum carmen incantassit … ([He or she] who has chanted an evil song … [will be punished]). [7] Elsewhere, Cicero quotes the Twelve Tables as saying, si quis occentauisset ([He or she] who has sung a satire against someone [will be punished], Cicero On the Republic 4.10.12). Some scholars believe that this is a variant reading for the same law, and that occentassit should be the correct reading; others believe that the word occentassit is connected with a different law or a different section of the law. In any case, this word places the offense in the realm of personal attack, slander, and verbal abuse. Festus explains: “Our ancestors used to say ‘he has sung an abusive song’ [occentassit] for what we say now, ‘he has made a convicium,’ because it is done openly and with a certain clamor, so that it can be heard at a great distance. Which is held to be shameful, because it is not thought to be done without cause.” [8]

With incantassit, we have more of an occult context: the connection will be with incantatio ‘incantation, enchantment’. However, it would be a mistake to separate satirical destructive language from magico-religious destructive language too completely, as often curses used abusive language. This kind of attempted separation can result from imposing neat modern categories—magic and religion versus literature—on the archaic mind. James Boykin Rives writes, “we should see ‘magic’ and ‘slander’ not as exclusive alternatives, but as points on the same spectrum.” [9]

The punishment for breaking this law was capital, as supporting texts show us. Cicero writes: Considering the role of invective in Cicero’s career and death, this is a highly ironic passage; he assumes that a system of justice will be just.

Horace (Epistles 2.1.139–155) offers a useful historical outline of Roman blame: According to Horace, then, Roman blame thus started from light-hearted ritual abuse at harvest festivals; this became more and more abusive and political, and was turned against the aristocracy. Society, even those who were not attacked, saw it as a major problem, and the Twelve Tables law was passed against it, after which poets had to be more civil and even entertaining.

Like many historical outlines, this one is suspect. Certainly, these “eras” shaded into one another; violent personal abuse surely coexisted with ritual abuse from times immemorial. [14] And “damaging” poetry postdated the law of the Twelve Tables, as our examples of exiled Roman poets will show. But even if this is not a strictly chronological schematic outline, all of the poetic phenomena described in it probably existed. It is valuable as a witness to the cultural situation that brought about the perceived need for punitive poetic legislation, the Twelve Tables laws. These laws, of course, explicitly suggest the trial of the poet and his punishment, execution by clubs. Horace portrays the satirical poets unsympathetically; yet their crime was attacking the aristocracy (honestas … domos), perhaps as representatives of the lower classes. Someone who had less identification with upper classes might view the satirists more sympathetically. The fact that an aristocratic satirist like Lucilius could go unscathed legally [15] may show that this law, like many laws, prosecuted selectively, legislated against the politically oppressed. [16]

While abuse and blame were not always expressed metrically, they were always an important part of Roman society, even under the emperors. “Rome, said Cicero, was a maledica civitas; slander was a national pastime.” The full Ciceronian passage is worth quoting: “[Caelius had not departed from the right way] How do we know? There were no expenses, no financial loss, no borrowing. But there was gossip. How many are there who can escape that, especially in such a slanderous state?” [17] The virulence of Cicero’s oratorical abuse, a keynote of his most prominent speeches, from the For Roscius Amerinus to the Catilines, the For Caelius, the Verrines and Philippics, was one of the sources of his popularity, legal effectiveness, and political power. [18]

Thus, poetic/verbal abuse was a well-attested phenomenon in ancient Rome. And the companion theme, the exiled or executed poet, is attested at the beginnings of Rome’s literary history, in Naevius, and continues through the Empire, with such a poet as Ovid, and into Silver Latin, with Juvenal.