Translator's Note
Gaius Lucilius is a shadowy figure in Latin literature, in more than one sense of the term. As the “father” of the poetic genre of Roman satire, he casts a large shadow over the poetry of his successors—Horace, Persius, Juvenal—all of whom openly acknowledge his influence and self-consciously assess how their style and tone are distinct from his own. He was apparently a voluminous writer, producing about 30 books of satire in the period he was active (c. 180-103 BCE), and yet, because only fragments of his wide-ranging oeuvre remain, the scope of his impact is difficult to discern. The hazy details of his biography only contribute further to the umbrous picture we have of him in the modern era.
The images Lucilius conjures in his often brief fragments are anything but shady, at least in its literal sense. The world as it is represented by him is vivid, varied and, as we might expect from satire, full of life lived to its grittiest and gaudiest, at both the highest and lowest levels of Roman society. The very term satire comes from the Latin adjective satur, which means full, sated, usually with different types of food. As readers of Lucilius, we frequently find ourselves occupying the representational realm of the “lower bodily stratum,” as it was termed by Mikhail Bakhtin in his 1965 work, Rabelais and his World. References to food and its digestion abound in his work, as do those to sex, scandal, greed, lust, and the seedy underbelly of the city. Just a few short snippets serve to illuminate this world: “the cheese stinks of garlic” (481W), “she stains you, but on the other hand he soils you” (1182W), “get a move on, thieves, tricky and smart now with your hands!” (798W).
Reading through Lucilius’ fragments evokes a cartoonish cavalcade of images, a fun-house mirror depiction of life as it was lived in 2nd century BCE Rome. Of course, like a good satirist, he also turns the fun-house mirror on himself and draws for his readers a shifty and mocking self-caricature (or what is referred to by satire scholars as a persona). So he tells us, at 929-30W, “We have heard that he has invited some friends, including that rascal Lucilius.”
The issue of fragment numbers and line numbers in Lucilius is very messy. We refer to his work as individual fragments but the fragments of the entire corpus have been arranged and numbered as lines, from 1-1272. Most fragments are only one line long (or less) and therefore have one number (such as those I mention above), but some (like the fragment translated here) are longer, and so their multiple line numbers are used to identify the fragment. A further issue is that different editions of the fragments have different line arrangements; I have followed Warmington’s edition (conventionally noted with a W at the end of the number).
Lucilius’ longest preserved fragment, 1196-1208W, takes as its theme a serious topic for a genre as seemingly comical as satire: the definition of virtue. Virtus, or “manly excellence,” was the quintessential value an upstanding Roman man was expected to possess, and Lucilius’ poem—which is essentially a list of examples that explain how to properly perform virtue—has a decidedly moral ring to it, one that seems deeply informed by Stoic philosophy. The satirist’s message turns out to be no laughing matter, and in fact, his moralizing tone is very much in keeping with satire’s primary aims, both in ancient and modern contexts: to offer critique and set the boundaries of propriety—here in particular as they relate to gender roles and masculinity—and to thereby police behavior. By blaming and shaming those who deviate from social norms and expectations, satirists like Lucilius kept their fellow Romans in line.
Satire thus operates as a mechanism of control, but one that—as many have noted before me—is itself often out of control. This paradox is embodied not just in satire’s content, but in its structure and style as well. Like most ancient satire, Lucilius’ fragment is written in dactylic hexameter, which gives it an orderly rhythm. Yet it also has a sing-songy cadence with its variation of dactylic and spondaic feet, and its “shave-and-a-hair-cut” conclusion to each line. It also features repetitions, alliterations, and other wordplay that imbue it with a jocular and musical quality, one that undercuts or at least makes us question its presumably serious message. The word virtus, for example, punctuates the beginning of half the fragment’s lines (a feature I have preserved in my translation), while the letter “p” plays a prominent role throughout, particularly in line 1202 (pretium persolvere posse) and in lines 1205-6 (praeterea patriai prima putare deinde parentum). The contrasting effect this creates is actually perfectly in keeping with the distorting and hypocritical quality of satire.
In my translation, it was my aim to capture the fragment’s stylistic and thematic dissonance by translating it as if it were a popular Tin Pan Alley tune from the early 1900s, with catchy phrasing and a vaudevillian air. Much like satire, vaudeville was an “expressive, innovative and quirky form of entertainment” that “educated audiences,” in particular middle-class audiences, “about what behavior was acceptable” (Vale 2012). Songs performed on vaudeville stages were often comedic, though many contained sincere, mostly romantic messages wrapped in fun, upbeat jingles. And like Lucilius’ poetry, many of these songs would have long afterlives and would go on to influence a broad range of musical styles that emerged thereafter.
To our modern ears, the songs of this era now seem campy and old-fashioned, but I think, in this aspect perhaps more than any other, they provide a fitting parallel for Lucilius and his satire. Like the artists who sang these songs, he was a star whose fame was eventually obscured, though the bits of his free-spirited poetry that have endured remain as an offbeat yet enlightening relic of times long past.
Vale, M. (March 2012). “Vaudeville and the American Dream.” Artifacts Journal, Issue 6. https://artifactsjournal.missouri.edu/2012/03/vaudeville-and-the-american-dream/
Chiara Sulprizio