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Juvenal's sixth Satire is a masterpiece of comic hyperbole, an outrageous rant against women and marriage which, in its breadth and density, represents the high point of the misogynistic literature of classical antiquity. The Introduction situates Juvenal within the wider tradition of Roman satire, interrogates afresh the poem's architecture and recurrent themes, shows how Juvenal systematically attributes to his monstrous women the inverse of the Roman wife's canonical virtues, traces the various literary currents which infuse the Satire, and lastly addresses the much-discussed issue of the poetic voice or persona from a sociohistorical as well as a theoretical perspective. Above all, the commentary strives to locate Juvenal in his historical, literary and cultural context, while simultaneously affording assistance with the nuts and bolts of the Latin, and always keeping in view two key questions: what was Juvenal's purpose in writing the Satire? How seriously was it meant to be taken?
Quintilian famously claimed that satire was tota nostra, or totally ours, but this innovative volume demonstrates that many of Roman satire's most distinctive characteristics derived from ancient Greek Old Comedy. Jennifer L. Ferriss-Hill analyzes the writings of Lucilius, Horace, and Persius, highlighting the features that they crafted on the model of Aristophanes and his fellow poets: the authoritative yet compromised author; the self-referential discussions of poetics that vacillate between defensive and aggressive; the deployment of personal invective in the service of literary polemics; and the abiding interest in criticizing individuals, types, and language itself. The first book-length study in English on the relationship between Roman satire and Old Comedy, Roman Satire and the Old Comic Tradition will appeal to students and researchers in classics, comparative literature, and English.
Henderson shows how Juvenal's eighth Satire makes fun of traditional Roman family values, and in the process reveals the ideas and practices of aristocratic culture - the display of genealogies, ancestral busts, proliferating names, the culture of exemplary legends.
Classical Literature: An Introduction provides a series of essays on all the major authors of Greek and Latin literature, as well as on a number of writers less often read. An introductory chapter provides information on important general topics, such as poetic metres, patronage and symposia. The literature is put in historical context, and the material is organized chronologically, but also by genre or author, as appropriate; each section or chapter has suggestions for further reading. The book ranges from Homer to the writers of the later Roman Empire, and includes a glossary, a chronology of literary and political events, and useful maps showing the origins of ancient writers. The collection will be essential for students and others who want a structured and informative introduction to the literature of the classical world.
