Joseph Dreogemueller, University of Michigan
At the onset of Plautus’ Mostellaria, two serui, Tranio and Grumio, accost each other because of their odors. Tranio reeks like exotic perfume and Grumio like, among other things, garlic and dog mixed with goat (38-44). According to Tranio and Grumio, their respective scents betray their ways of life, each one detestable in its own respects. Smell has an extremely close
relationship with character in Roman comedy (see Allen, 2015), and by the time of the Augustan-age, this relationship between smell and character seems to have solidified into a set of stereotypes so well-known that the satirist Horace can sum it up in barely more than one line in Satires 1.2, on moderation: “Rufillus reeks like lozenges, Gargonius like goat. There is no inbetween” (pastillos Rufillus olet, Gargonius hircum/ nil medium est I.2.26). Upon deeper reading of the Satires, however, smell functions as more than just a jaded stereotype. In this paper I will use studies of ancient and modern odors to show how Horace employs olfactory elements associated with stock characters of Roman comedy as a means of subtle critique and as a way to establish his character as the narrator. This means of critique ultimately betrays Horace, however, when Davus, a real comedic seruus, calls the narrator out on his smell.
While Horace attempts to distance himself from other satirists “with hay on their horns (34)” in Satires I.4, claiming not to write simply to attack others, the employment of stereotypes can still cause harm to real people in the Roman world. In addition to showing how Horace employs olfactory stereotypes within his Satires to various effects, I will also attempt to understand the harmful nature of these stereotypes. In the fields of Black and Asian American studies, smell has been shown to have functioned as a means of racial identification and oppression both on the individual level and on larger scales, with authors such as Hsuan Hsu identifying the ways in which Asiatic atmospheres were represented as toxic through various olfactory means, beginning with miasma theory in the nineteenth century (2020, 119). I will apply lenses from these areas of study to Horace’s Satires to show how Horace’s use of smell in relation to Roman comedy sanitizes the brutal reality for some of the real-life versions these stock characters.