Characterising Juvenal: part III
Food
negability players have noticed that I lean pretty heavily on the food angle in the game, portraying Juvenal as a bit of a gourmand. Reasons for this (and possible objections) follow.
Food was a big concern for middle-class Romans in Juvenal's day, although the tales of Roman excess in dining are probably somewhat exaggerated. Even allowing for that, however, we get quite a bit more detail on food in Juvenal's satires than we really need. Satires 4 and 5 are entirely about food, in fact, and in both food is used to signify power.
Satire 4's topic is fish. It opens with a brief pantomime involving Crispinus, an Egyptian dignitary in the imperial court. Crispinus is a former fishmonger who made good, and he is derided for spending a ridiculous amount of money on a fish--the fisherman, Juvenal points out, could have been bought at a lesser price. More importantly, Crispinus's mistake is not so much in buying the fish, but in failing to put it to good use:I'd happily praise his clever move, had he used the present
to grab the most favoured place in the will of a childless dotard,
or (a better ploy) had given it all to a high-born mistress
who rode in a cavernous litter with screens on its picture windows.
Nothing like that; he bought it for himself.
The scene changes to a mock-epic describing the court of Domitian convening to discuss what to do with an enormous turbot. This satire has taken a lot of flack for having a weak structure, but when viewed in the food=power light, it makes sense: Crispinus has squandered his food-power on personal gratification, and his ability to buy this fish represents how far he has arisen in the world, while Domitian is squandering his very real power on food and (by extension) gratification of his ego. The great fish presented to Domitian is even interpreted as an omen of victory in war:Veiento rose to the challenge, and, like a priest of Bellona
goaded to frenzy, broke into prophecy: 'There,' he intoned,
'you have a gigantic omen of great and glorious victory.
You will take some monarch prisoner; or else Arviragus will tumble
from the pole of a British chariot. Like him, the creature is foreign;
look at the spikes that march up his spine!'
The satire ends on a note of class warfare, just as Crispinus's miniature portrait made reference to his ascent from the fish markets. Juvenal says, rather oddly, that Domitian's downfall came when he "aroused the workers' fears", when in fact Domitian was assassinated by his own wife, among others. This makes a nice symmetry with Crispinus, in any case, and it cements the relationship between food and power.Yes, and how much better, had he spent on these silly amusements
all those savage years when he plundered Rome of her noblest
and most distinguished souls with none to avenge or punish!
(This, by the way, is genuine anger. The theatrical, exaggerated indignatio against Crispinus that opened the satire is replaced with real rage against a target really worthy of it.)
The Dinner Party
Satire 5 is entirely taken up with a dinner party. Here again, food and power are linked: the wealthy and avaricious patron is having his client for dinner, and making a special point of serving terrible food to the client in order to humiliate him. Satire 1 also criticises patrons for dispensing with the traditional dinner party altogether:Weary old clients trudge away from the porches, resigning
what they had yearned for, though nothing stays with a man so long
as the hope of a dinner. Cabbage and kindling have to be purchased.
Meanwhile the magnate will lounge alone among empty couches,
chewing his way through the finest produce of sea and woodland.
[...] But who could abide
that blend of luxury and meanness? What size of gullet could order
a whole boar for itself, an animal born for parties?
But a reckoning is nigh. When you strip and, within that bloated body,
carry an undigested peacock into the bath-house,
death steps in, too quick for a will; old age is cancelled.
At once the joyful news goes dancing around the dinners.
The funeral cortege departs to the cheers of indignant friends.
Satire 5 expands on this theme greatly. It's the funniest satire of them all, I think, and the most accessible. There are a lot of references to "long-haired consuls" and names that send you looking for the footnotes, but food is a universal thing.If the food and wine have brought a fever to the master's stomach,
sterilised water is ordered, more cool than the Getic snows.
Did I complain just now that you had a different wine?
Your water is different!
Juvenal goes through every course of the meal in indignant fashion, with his usual eye for uncomfortable details: cold rain running in rivulets down his cloak, the bony hands of the African slaves, the splendid jasper on the rich man's cups, the arrogant curve of the lobster's tail compared with a prawn crouched on a saucer, a blotchy bass from the Tiber.
The Romans were fond of dinner-parties, yes. But if we look at Juvenal's friend and contemporary Martial, the pattern is different. Martial talks about food and dinners now and then, but food doesn't loom in the foreground as it does in Juvenal (sex is Martial's preoccupation). We've noticed Juvenal speaking against excess in food and drink, but here he scorns the client who puts up with the insult of being served food like this. Although he says "nothing I know calls for less expense the belly", he's clearly not willing to fill it with cabbage that stinks of lamp-oil or an eel from a drain in the Subura. [This, in fact, is one of Juvenal's little ironic undercuts mentioned in the last entry.]
Juvenal does give us a picture of his ideal dinner much later in the 11th Satire. It's certainly plainer food than the rich man's meal in Satire 5, but neither is it poor or bad food -- it is, indeed, a metaphor for the ideal condition of man: neither under someone else's thumb nor exploiting other people and wasting resources. On Juvenal's small country estate at Tivoli, he offers his friend a local kid, freshly killed, asparagus, eggs, hens, preserved grapes, pears, and apples. He emphasises self-sufficiency and the "Roman dream" of being a farmer and living a simple country life, but there is also a very physical relish to his descriptions of the menu. This is the elder Juvenal, by the way: we still get occasional vicious thrusts at this or that, but the irony is gentler here, reading more like Horace, and the persona is far more attractive. The speaker is generous to his friends, happy with his lot in life, and even solicitous of his slaves. He's relaxed, in fact, which is not how we readily think of Juvenal--Martial, the great master of getting a portrait in a few deft strokes, assigns his friend two well-chosen adjectives: eloquent and restless. But we can easily imagine enjoying an afternoon spent with this old man, chowing down on chicken and asparagus and listening to the sounds of crowds at the races in the Circus. Virtues are much harder to fake than vices, which is one reason I'm convinced that the real Juvenal was far less bilious and cruel than his satiric persona.Here I shall worship my household Jove, offering incense
to the family gods, and scattering pansies of many a hue.
Everything is gleaming.
We only see him happy in these later satires, and that happiness is linked inextricably with his home and with the physical comforts it provides.
Satura et Farrago
It's an interesting coincidence, in light of all this, that the two words Juvenal uses to describe his writings are actually words pertaining to food. A satura, derived from satur for "full, sated", was a stewed dish of various ingredients, and therefore a medley, a hodgepodge. Elsewhere he talks of his writing as a farrago, which was mixed grain fodder for cattle. Juvenal's satires are known for their wandering structures and the way they barrage the reader with a panoply of people, names, places, and outrageous events. They're full of tangents and comparisons, imitating an angry man's apoplectic ranting, so furious that he can't stick to an outline or even make clear his train of thought.
Satire as such is claimed as a Roman invention. But wait, you may be saying, is there no connection to the satyr plays of Greece, which burlesqued the serious dramas as a subversive chorus? Probably not, although the Greeks certainly had satire. It's interesting, however, that satyrs are linked with satire in that way, since they represent physical desires and impulses, all the "lower" functions that Juvenal details so extensively in his poems.
Aren't things like that necessarily the material of satire? No. A social critic could easily have found material in the intellectual and political world of Rome, but none of that seems to interest Juvenal. He gestures vaguely at Stoic and Epicurean philosophy, but spends very little time on it. He skewers the rich and the powerful, but exclusively through the lens of hard cash, fine meals on the good china, giant turbots in specially-cast ovens, fringes swinging on canopies of litters.
[All quotes from Rudd and Barr's translation.]
negability players have noticed that I lean pretty heavily on the food angle in the game, portraying Juvenal as a bit of a gourmand. Reasons for this (and possible objections) follow.
Food was a big concern for middle-class Romans in Juvenal's day, although the tales of Roman excess in dining are probably somewhat exaggerated. Even allowing for that, however, we get quite a bit more detail on food in Juvenal's satires than we really need. Satires 4 and 5 are entirely about food, in fact, and in both food is used to signify power.
Satire 4's topic is fish. It opens with a brief pantomime involving Crispinus, an Egyptian dignitary in the imperial court. Crispinus is a former fishmonger who made good, and he is derided for spending a ridiculous amount of money on a fish--the fisherman, Juvenal points out, could have been bought at a lesser price. More importantly, Crispinus's mistake is not so much in buying the fish, but in failing to put it to good use:I'd happily praise his clever move, had he used the present
to grab the most favoured place in the will of a childless dotard,
or (a better ploy) had given it all to a high-born mistress
who rode in a cavernous litter with screens on its picture windows.
Nothing like that; he bought it for himself.
The scene changes to a mock-epic describing the court of Domitian convening to discuss what to do with an enormous turbot. This satire has taken a lot of flack for having a weak structure, but when viewed in the food=power light, it makes sense: Crispinus has squandered his food-power on personal gratification, and his ability to buy this fish represents how far he has arisen in the world, while Domitian is squandering his very real power on food and (by extension) gratification of his ego. The great fish presented to Domitian is even interpreted as an omen of victory in war:Veiento rose to the challenge, and, like a priest of Bellona
goaded to frenzy, broke into prophecy: 'There,' he intoned,
'you have a gigantic omen of great and glorious victory.
You will take some monarch prisoner; or else Arviragus will tumble
from the pole of a British chariot. Like him, the creature is foreign;
look at the spikes that march up his spine!'
The satire ends on a note of class warfare, just as Crispinus's miniature portrait made reference to his ascent from the fish markets. Juvenal says, rather oddly, that Domitian's downfall came when he "aroused the workers' fears", when in fact Domitian was assassinated by his own wife, among others. This makes a nice symmetry with Crispinus, in any case, and it cements the relationship between food and power.Yes, and how much better, had he spent on these silly amusements
all those savage years when he plundered Rome of her noblest
and most distinguished souls with none to avenge or punish!
(This, by the way, is genuine anger. The theatrical, exaggerated indignatio against Crispinus that opened the satire is replaced with real rage against a target really worthy of it.)
The Dinner Party
Satire 5 is entirely taken up with a dinner party. Here again, food and power are linked: the wealthy and avaricious patron is having his client for dinner, and making a special point of serving terrible food to the client in order to humiliate him. Satire 1 also criticises patrons for dispensing with the traditional dinner party altogether:Weary old clients trudge away from the porches, resigning
what they had yearned for, though nothing stays with a man so long
as the hope of a dinner. Cabbage and kindling have to be purchased.
Meanwhile the magnate will lounge alone among empty couches,
chewing his way through the finest produce of sea and woodland.
[...] But who could abide
that blend of luxury and meanness? What size of gullet could order
a whole boar for itself, an animal born for parties?
But a reckoning is nigh. When you strip and, within that bloated body,
carry an undigested peacock into the bath-house,
death steps in, too quick for a will; old age is cancelled.
At once the joyful news goes dancing around the dinners.
The funeral cortege departs to the cheers of indignant friends.
Satire 5 expands on this theme greatly. It's the funniest satire of them all, I think, and the most accessible. There are a lot of references to "long-haired consuls" and names that send you looking for the footnotes, but food is a universal thing.If the food and wine have brought a fever to the master's stomach,
sterilised water is ordered, more cool than the Getic snows.
Did I complain just now that you had a different wine?
Your water is different!
Juvenal goes through every course of the meal in indignant fashion, with his usual eye for uncomfortable details: cold rain running in rivulets down his cloak, the bony hands of the African slaves, the splendid jasper on the rich man's cups, the arrogant curve of the lobster's tail compared with a prawn crouched on a saucer, a blotchy bass from the Tiber.
The Romans were fond of dinner-parties, yes. But if we look at Juvenal's friend and contemporary Martial, the pattern is different. Martial talks about food and dinners now and then, but food doesn't loom in the foreground as it does in Juvenal (sex is Martial's preoccupation). We've noticed Juvenal speaking against excess in food and drink, but here he scorns the client who puts up with the insult of being served food like this. Although he says "nothing I know calls for less expense the belly", he's clearly not willing to fill it with cabbage that stinks of lamp-oil or an eel from a drain in the Subura. [This, in fact, is one of Juvenal's little ironic undercuts mentioned in the last entry.]
Juvenal does give us a picture of his ideal dinner much later in the 11th Satire. It's certainly plainer food than the rich man's meal in Satire 5, but neither is it poor or bad food -- it is, indeed, a metaphor for the ideal condition of man: neither under someone else's thumb nor exploiting other people and wasting resources. On Juvenal's small country estate at Tivoli, he offers his friend a local kid, freshly killed, asparagus, eggs, hens, preserved grapes, pears, and apples. He emphasises self-sufficiency and the "Roman dream" of being a farmer and living a simple country life, but there is also a very physical relish to his descriptions of the menu. This is the elder Juvenal, by the way: we still get occasional vicious thrusts at this or that, but the irony is gentler here, reading more like Horace, and the persona is far more attractive. The speaker is generous to his friends, happy with his lot in life, and even solicitous of his slaves. He's relaxed, in fact, which is not how we readily think of Juvenal--Martial, the great master of getting a portrait in a few deft strokes, assigns his friend two well-chosen adjectives: eloquent and restless. But we can easily imagine enjoying an afternoon spent with this old man, chowing down on chicken and asparagus and listening to the sounds of crowds at the races in the Circus. Virtues are much harder to fake than vices, which is one reason I'm convinced that the real Juvenal was far less bilious and cruel than his satiric persona.Here I shall worship my household Jove, offering incense
to the family gods, and scattering pansies of many a hue.
Everything is gleaming.
We only see him happy in these later satires, and that happiness is linked inextricably with his home and with the physical comforts it provides.
Satura et Farrago
It's an interesting coincidence, in light of all this, that the two words Juvenal uses to describe his writings are actually words pertaining to food. A satura, derived from satur for "full, sated", was a stewed dish of various ingredients, and therefore a medley, a hodgepodge. Elsewhere he talks of his writing as a farrago, which was mixed grain fodder for cattle. Juvenal's satires are known for their wandering structures and the way they barrage the reader with a panoply of people, names, places, and outrageous events. They're full of tangents and comparisons, imitating an angry man's apoplectic ranting, so furious that he can't stick to an outline or even make clear his train of thought.
Satire as such is claimed as a Roman invention. But wait, you may be saying, is there no connection to the satyr plays of Greece, which burlesqued the serious dramas as a subversive chorus? Probably not, although the Greeks certainly had satire. It's interesting, however, that satyrs are linked with satire in that way, since they represent physical desires and impulses, all the "lower" functions that Juvenal details so extensively in his poems.
Aren't things like that necessarily the material of satire? No. A social critic could easily have found material in the intellectual and political world of Rome, but none of that seems to interest Juvenal. He gestures vaguely at Stoic and Epicurean philosophy, but spends very little time on it. He skewers the rich and the powerful, but exclusively through the lens of hard cash, fine meals on the good china, giant turbots in specially-cast ovens, fringes swinging on canopies of litters.
[All quotes from Rudd and Barr's translation.]