Tadeusz MAZUREK Satirist As Judge: Programmatic Ramifications


Noting the success which Old and New Comedy enjoyed in mocking legal procedures, Roman satirists often alluded to the law to develop settings, characters and ethical appeal. After a very brief look at New Comedy’s treatment of the law, this study will examine Lucilius’ use of the law to help define his satire and conclude with a close scrutiny of Horace’s manipulation of legal metaphors in his three programmatic satires.

For the ancient Romans there was a precariously fine line between Trachalio and Gripus’ farcical debate for the trunk in the Rudens and a civil suit for property, and Plautus and his audience felt it. Lucilius takes Plautus’ farcical legal scenes one step further by actually placing his litigants in formal legal debates. In Book I, the gods acting as Roman senators (Mosca 1960) try Lentulus Lupus. In Book II, in a lengthy scene later echoed by Horace in Satires 1.7, the jurist Q. Scaevola and Titus Albucius exchange invectives in the midst of a court trial. Can justice be served in the midst of such a slanging match? “No,” implies the satirist, “Look to me for true justice.”

Like Lucilius, Horace well understood the advantages of having his satirist absorb for himself the moral authority of the law, so that he emerges as a judge more worthy of the name than any praetor. By the end of Satires 1.3, the satirist has established his credentials as a worthy dispenser of justice, in sharp contrast to the Stoic sapiens or the jurists Labeo and Alfenus (l.3.80-142). In the programmatic satires, the satirist cleverly transforms his garnered authority as a judge of society to emerge as the quintessential judge of literature. The censor decori becomes a censor litterarum, who indicts (notare) those who act immorally or write poorly, a correlation Horace later expressed clearly in Epist. 2.2.109-10. The censorial metaphor continues on into Satires 1.10, which ends with the words haec subscribe libello. The highly legalistic and technical connotations of subscribere (subscriptio censoria was essentially synonymous with nota censoria) and libellus (a formal legal indictment) reveal that these closing words of Book I are no mere afterthought. Satires I is a mock-legal pamphlet aimed at literary and political foes and composed by a censor who authoritatively ascribes his final nota against Demetrius, Tigellius and their ilk. In Satires 2.1, the satirist continues to define his genre and literary agenda in legal terms. The key allusion to the XII Tables at the poem’s conclusion is not made by a satirist who is confused or sloppy in his use of legal language, as has so often been suggested. He alludes to the XII Tables and not to the praetorian edict on libel for satiric and programmatic reasons. The praetorian edict did not use the term carmina, which forms the crux of the pun (ll. 82-83) and of the poem’s message. The satirist’s carmina will be considered bona and non-libelous by Octavian because of their exceptional poetic quality. His libellus bypasses the laws of the state (as the satirist has superseded the law) and of the genre (as previously defined by Lucilius). This is Horace’s redefinition of the lex operis of satire. Its exceptional literary character makes Horace’s satire truly ultra legem (2.1.1-2), but in a way none of the satirist’s critics had imagined. The satirist stands above social and literary laws as witness and commentator.