Insult, Satire, and Invective

The creative use of insults and abuse language is notable in many genres of Latin literature, but most Classical scholarship on insults tends not to account for the dynamism with which Latin abuse language is deployed. Philological treatments of insult-language are largely atomistic, and often characterize insults as static, readily-categorized lexical entities (e.g, Opelt 1965, Dickey 2002).

Recent scholarship has demonstrated Virgil’s pervasive aemulatio in the Aeneid with Ennius’ Annales (see e.g. Casali 2007, Gildenhard 2007, Elliott 2013, and Goldschmidt 2013). But the reception of Ennius in Latin epic does not end with Virgil’s poem. This paper explores the imperial epic poet Lucan’s manner of polemical allusion to the father of Latin epic. Scholars have long noted the echoes of Ennius’ self-presentation at Annales 12-13 (Skutsch) in Lucan’s programmatic passage at 9.980-6 (see Zwierlein 1982 95-6 and Skutsch 1985 167-8).

Juvenal’s Fifteenth Satire and its indignant criticism of infighting Egyptians’ barbarous cannibalism has always proved a puzzle to scholars, beginning with Ribbeck’s outright rejection of Juvenal as the poem’s author. Satire 15 is a poem of winks and nods: Juvenal constantly shifts gears and all but begs the reader to dismiss his own veracity and moral sincerity.

This paper will explore the possibility that the Greek Anthology preserves the remnants of a collection of poems in iambic trimeter for Constantine I by the fourth-century Greek epigrammatist Palladas of Alexandria. Most attested poets from the Hellenistic to the Byzantine Age had some degree of contact with an imperial court. The same appears to be true of Palladas, although this has been obscured by the longstanding misapprehension of his dates.

At least as of the mid-fourth century BCE, it was forbidden in Athens to insult citizens for selling things in the agora. Our source for this prohibition is Demosthenes’ Against Euboulides (345 BCE), in which the speaker Euxitheus appeals his deme’s decision to remove him from the citizen rolls.