Robert Santucci, Haverford College
Satirists love big fish. Domitian’s gigantic turbot in Juvenal 4 immediately springs to mind when one mentions satiric fish, but fish were popular as satiric symbols of excess and outlets for cultural uneasiness with Roman imperial maritime activity at least as far back as Lucilius. This paper analyzes one particular satiric fish, the mullet, as it swims from the pages of Horace to those of Seneca. Horace, in S. 2.2, castigates the absurdity of purchasing a three-pound mullet only to cut it up into small pieces anyway (ll. 33-4). Three pounds is quite big for a mullet, but where Horace is satisfied with three pounds, Seneca, in his attack on contemporary gourmandizing in Ep. 95, relates a story involving the emperor Tiberius selling one that weighed four and a half pounds. Elsewhere in his corpus he is interested in the aesthetic qualities of the mullet, too, particularly in his long description of diners’ obsession with the beauty of dying mullets in NQ 3.18. Here he repeats some variation of “nothing is more beautiful (formosius) than a dying mullet” three times. In Seneca’s hands forma refers not only to the outward appearance of the mullet but its existence in a material world made of Stoic matter (forma).
Why such giant mullets? I argue that Seneca purposely taps into cultural discourse surrounding big fish, as the satiric authority of big fish helps him reclaim a symbol of gustatory excess as a tool for teaching Stoic philosophy. In so doing I build on theories of satire as dialogic such as Griffin 1994, as well as readings of Seneca’s prose philosophy that emphasize its satiric elements (e.g. Motto 2001, Degl’Innocenti Pierini 2013, Edwards 2017). Seneca’s own version of Horace’s Sermones (or perhaps, in a Hindsian formulation, “Seneca’s Sermones”) sets the record straight: natura does not merely bestow length to fish and indicate which mushrooms are best (two foods with which Horace associates natura in the Sermones), but exercises its divine providence for higher Stoic purposes. Seneca thus uses the big mullet to do the improbable: rewrite the history of Roman literary food as a way for an informed reader to understand his decision to write Stoic philosophy in Latin. At the same time, he exploits cultural memory of what it means to write—and read—big fish.