Persius: A Study in Food, Philosophy, and the Figural

Persius

Persius

A Study in Food, Philosophy, and the Figural

Shadi Bartsch

University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

SHADI BARTSCH is the Helen A. Regenstein Distinguished Service Professor of Classics at the University of Chicago.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2015 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2015.

Printed in the United States of America

24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-24184-5 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-24198-2 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226241982.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bartsch, Shadi, 1966– author.

Persius : a study in food, philosophy, and the figural / Shadi Bartsch.

pages ; cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-226-24184-5 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-226-24184-X (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-24198-2 (e-book)

1. Persius—Themes, motives. 2. Persius—Philosophy. 3. Persius—Language. 4. Food in literature. 5. Satire, Latin—History and criticism. 6. Satire, Latin—Themes, motives. I. Title.

PA6556.B35 2015

871'.01—dc23

2014029932

♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part I: Cannibals and Philosophers

Chapter 1: The Cannibal Poets

1. The Ars poetica and the Body of Verse

2. Consuming the Poets

3. A Discourse on Digestion

4. The Echoing Belly

Chapter 2: Alternative Diets

1. Satire’s Decoction

2. The Philosopher’s Plate

3. Madness, Bile, and Hellebore

4. The Mad Poet

Chapter 3: The Philosopher’s Love

1. The Seduction of Alcibiades

2. The Philosopher-Sodomite

3. Cornutus and the Stoic Way

4. Vel duo vel nemo

Part II: The Metaphorics of Disgust

Chapter 4: The Scrape of Metaphor

1. The Pleasures of Figure

2. The acris iunctura

3. The Maculate Metaphor

4. A Stoic Poetics

Chapter 5: The Self-Consuming Satirist

1. Satire’s Shifting Figures

2. Shins and Arrows

3. The Return of the Cannibal

4. Mind over Matter

Appendix: Medical Prescriptions of Decocta for Stomach Ailments or Other Problems

Reference List

Index

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

This small book on Persius’ Satires started out (far too many years ago) as the 2007 Gray Lectures at Cambridge. Since then I have accumulated many scholarly debts and not that many more pages!

For their feedback and comments on presentations and chapters, or other forms of assistance, I think Susanna Braund, Fanny Dolansky, Alex Dressler, Kirk Freudenburg (who read the entire manuscript), Myrto Garani, John Henderson, Stephen Halliwell, Daniel Hooley, Nicholas Horsfall, David Konstan, Josiah Osgood, Victoria Rimell, Ralph Rosen, Ineke Sluiter, Bart van Wassenhove, Nicolas Wiater, Gareth Williams, Greg Woolf, my colleagues in Classics at the University of Chicago, and of course the University of Chicago Press’s anonymous reader. Many audiences heard various chapters in various stages and offered useful feedback: they were at—in no particular order—St. Andrews, Brown, Chicago, Columbia, Yale, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Cambridge, Johns Hopkins, Ohio Wesleyan, Duke, the University of Georgia, the University of Texas–Austin, Amherst College, the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana, Leiden, and the Franke Institute for the Humanities at the University of Chicago.

I was able to try out many of the ideas in the book on the excellent students in my Persius seminar at the University of Chicago in 2006: Ursula Bergstrom, Diana Moser, Aaron Seider, and Lawrie Dean. Diana Moser, as my graduate research assistant, painstakingly combed through Pliny’s Natural History and Celsus’ De medicina to index all the stomach remedies in their pages. Her results appear as the appendix to this volume. And I owe a particular debt of gratitude to my editor at the University of Chicago Press, the indomitable Susan Bielstein, for signing on this project when I told her its readership would surely be vel nemo, vel duo, and that parts of the book would be, like Persius’ Satires themselves, quite unappealing. Finally, my excellent editor at the press, Carol Fisher Saller, caught errors that were both elusive and embarrassing. I also owe thanks for sabbatical support to the Guggenheim Foundation (2006–2007) and the University of Chicago (2013–2014).

A shorter version of chapter 3, titled Persius’ Socrates and the Failure of Pedagogy, appears in M. Garani and D. Konstan (eds.), The Philosophizing Muse: The Influence of Greek Philosophy on Roman Poetry (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming); an adaptation of chapter 2 will appear as Philosophy, Physicians, and Persianic Satire, in John Wilkins (ed.), On the Psyche: Studies in Ancient Literature, Psychology and Health (Oxford University Press, forthcoming); and some of the ideas in this volume were aired in my essay Persius, Juvenal, and Stoicism, in S. Braund and J. Osgood (eds.), A Companion to Persius and Juvenal (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012). For the Satires, I have used the Teubner text of W. Kissel, A. Persius Flaccus Saturarum Liber (Berlin, 2007). Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.

To my readers, I can only say that I hope this ridiculus mus, for all its shortcomings, at least turns out to be tastier and less salubrious than a prescription of cold beets and a shot of hellebore.

Introduction

Persius’ small body of satires ranks as one of our most peculiar inheritances from classical literature. Six short hexameter poems preceded by eight lines of choliambic, the satires are notoriously difficult—and disorienting—to work one’s way through, curiously abrupt, full of unusual terminology, difficult to unpack, and often bordering upon distasteful. In addition, they are riven with obvious contradictions. The high moral tone that often characterizes the satirist’s message sets a strange contrast to the poems’ colloquial vocabulary and Rabelaisian concerns; the biographical depiction (both within and outside the corpus) of Persius himself as bookish and devoted to philosophy clashes with the sheer distemper of the poet’s speaking voice; the reliance throughout on the precedent of Horace’s Satires, tweaked just so, is at odds with the wildly original usage our author makes of his intertexts. Not surprisingly, then, the Satires’ reception has been mixed, as even a brief sketch of Persius’ fortunes shows. On the one hand, at least according to the Life found in the manuscripts, Persius’ work found eager buyers in his own day.¹ In the fifty years after his death, Lucan, Quintilian, and Martial voiced admiration for him,² and the Satires seem to have been used as a school-text more or less continually from the first century.³ The author’s harsh sermonizing and bashful modesty (so the Life) was especially attractive to the Church Father Jerome and later moralizers; Persius was highly ranked among pagan authors in the medieval period, and the French scholar Isaac Casaubon (1559–1614) defended Persius’ language and deemed him the best of the Roman satirists for his unwavering commitment to Stoicism.⁴

On the other side, the Satires, and especially their idiom—marked as it is by obscurity, figure, and colloquialism—have been singled out for criticism since at least the sixth century.⁵ J. P. Sullivan (1985, 111) described Persius’ style well when he described the satires as a careful amalgam of archaisms, vulgarism, literary allusions, the clipped affectation of real dialogue, and the homely, or sometimes vivid, language of the household and the harbor.⁶ It is an amalgam that has exasperated readers since Dryden, who was not beyond using his own vivid metaphors to object to those of Persius, noting in the Discourse concerning the Original and Progress of Satire (1693) that his Verse is scabrous, and hobbling, and his Words not everywhere well chosen . . . ; his diction is hard; his Figures are generally too bold and daring; and his Tropes, particularly his Metaphors, insufferably strain’d.⁷ Persius’ imagery is indeed conveyed via metaphors that bring together strikingly different registers of life, much of it in contravention of the prescriptions of the traditional rhetorical and poetic commentaries. A small body of almost unreadable poetry, then, scratched out by a youth who purportedly never moved out of his aunt’s home and died in his late twenties: no wonder our satirist is not a household name. If we needed further evidence for these difficulties, the very existence of Kissel’s massive 1990 commentary, with 884 pages to elucidate less than 700 lines of verse, provides an eloquent witness.

Beyond these specific difficulties, the reception of Persius’ corpus has also been complicated by the procrustean philosophy which it has made its bed: that of Stoic philosophy. Roman satire, while a source of common-sense commentary on the foibles of one’s fellow men, was not a natural home for the more rarified perspective derived from the philosophical schools, and the satiric view of philosophy tended to be complex. As Roland Mayer (2005, 146) points out, The Roman satirist approached philosophy warily, first because it was Greek, and secondly because it seemed to set itself up as a rival to the native moral tradition. This native tradition, the mos maiorum, was where the satirists usually found their moral ground. It was backed by historical exempla and held up as an uncontested standard—at least in lip service and at least among the upper classes. When the early satirist Lucilius defines virtus, it bears little resemblance to the doctrines of any philosophical school but is distinctively Roman in its perspective: To place first the welfare of our country, second that of our parents, third and last our own.⁸ When Horace speaks of his own education, he describes for us how his father taught him by negative exempla, pointing out people he ought not to imitate, such as spendthrifts and adulterers (Sat. 1.4.105–29). Along the same lines, Juvenal emphasizes that while wisdom (sapientia) is well enough, those too are happy whom life teaches equanimity in the face of loss (13.19–22).⁹

Accordingly, while Persius’ fellow satirists might have echoed some of the more common wisdom of the Epicurean and Stoic schools, they maintained an ironic distance from doctrinal claims and those who preached them.¹⁰ Horace, for example, mocked the Stoic view that the wise man is king (Sat. 1.3.124–42), and while he engages with Stoic interlocutors in satires 2.3 and 2.7—the recent convert Damasippus and his own slave Davos—they are undercut by the non-Stoic mishmash of rationalizing they use to present their views, and the satirist is comically dismissive of both them and himself. Gaius Lucilius in the second century BCE derides the Stoic sage (fr. 1189–90 in the Warmington edition) and waxes scornful on philosophers in general: If you’re asking: a cloak, an old nag, a slave, a wrapper are all more useful to me than a philosopher (fr. 508).¹¹ And at the end of the first century Juvenal joins the mêlée with his proud announcement that he has neither read the Cynics and Stoics nor taken up Epicurus as his own (Sat. 13.121–23). The philosopher and his teaching were in satire more often the butt of criticism than a figure held up for imitation: Roman satire prided itself on being tota nostra, a product original to Rome (Quintilian 10.1.93), while philosophy was traditionally associated with Greeks and their quibbling ways.

And yet Persius is worth reading partly because he has nestled a Stoic outlook in unsuitable poetic bedding. His small corpus, in combining poetry and philosophy, manages to offer a remarkably trenchant critique of prior traditions, both philosophical and poetic. For one, the satires daringly and deliberately revise the most influential programmatic statement of the Roman literary scene, Horace’s Ars poetica. Even as he evokes Horace’s language, Persius overturns his predecessor’s judgments on taste, norms, and poetic propriety. This critique of normative ancient thought about the place of imagery and the figural in poetry offers a backdrop to the question of whether philosophy can indeed reside in poetry, and serves as a trenchant response to Lucretius’ philosophical De rerum natura and its claim to mix utility and pleasure for the benefit of the reader. And finally, Persius’ corpus enters into dialogue with the erotic Platonic dialogues and their problematic relation with pleasure. By the end of the satires, we might claim, Persius has undertaken nothing less than to provide a new, non-Platonic and nonsatiric answer to the question of what a philosophical poetry’s content and medium should be.

In suggesting a new relationship between the traditionally opposing poles of poetry and philosophy, Persius leans heavily on a transformative use of metaphor, putting this figure to use in the service of his Stoic goals while aiming to escape its traditional association with readerly pleasure. Lucretius was open about the need to smear honey on his philosophical cup—this image itself a metaphor for the poetic pleasures that tricked his readers into swallowing his bitter Epicurean teachings. Part of this pleasure, he acknowledged (like Plato before him, cf. Gorgias 501d–502d), came from poetry’s figures, which were a source of the sweet pleasure it provided to its audience. But Persius tries to deploy the figural elements of poetry to provide his readers with a medicine that remains unsweetened. In setting up this gambit, he borrows Lucretius’ language of tasting, and thus, like Lucretius, uses metaphor to talk about the use of metaphor. But he goes beyond this to build an elaborate metaphorical structure that equates all his poetry with medically beneficial comestibles. Of course, Plato too was suspicious of the sweetness of persuasive language, and in his dialogue Gorgias set good medicine in opposition to bad cookery, using the two fields as parallels to justice (good) and rhetoric (bad). But Persius sets up his own contrast between healthy consumption and sickening consumption as the twin correlates within the genre of poetry, one philosophically healing, the other a poison for the mind. In reacting to philosophers’ strictures on poetry, poets’ views of philosophers, and satire’s depiction of its own generic traits, Persius’ deployment of a philosophical form of satire thus rings the changes on previous possibilities for what poetry could do.

If this already suggests that the place to look for meaning in the Satires is in their choices of figure, it is a direction that recent critical attention has not neglected. It has become clear to modern readers that it is not the immediate message of Persius’ poetry that demands our concentration: for the most part, he offers us the basic tenets of Stoic philosophy. In satire 2, for example, he mocks men’s prayers to the gods for wealth, heirs, and a healthy old age, and declares that purity of intent is more pleasing to the gods than lavish sacrifices. In satire 3 he lambastes the lack of self-control of the lazy and the irascible, the self-indulgence of those who need to be shaped as much as if they were wobbly clay on the potter’s wheel. These men should reflect on their role in life, what it is right to desire, what to bestow on friends and family, whom the god wishes them to be. Satire 4 takes up the themes of the pseudo-Platonic dialogue Alcibiades I and revisits the figure of the young Alcibiades, chided by Socrates for his unfounded ambition: how can Alcibiades hope to lead the state when he has as of yet no self-knowledge? His focus on wealth, luxury, and fame as the chief goods reveals his moral weakness, and he would do better to dwell with himself and reflect on his limitations. In satire 5 the satirist recounts his own apprenticeship to the Stoic philosopher Cornutus, who molded Persius’ soul with reason; the second half of this satire dwells on the Stoic paradox that only the wise man is free; although the ex-slave vaunts his freedom, he—like the general walk of mankind—is at the mercy of his passions, the real masters (domini) of the non-Stoic.

Less obvious, but worth pointing out, is that in those areas where Persius might seem to have drifted away from orthodoxy, or where his emphasis falls on one area of Stoicism to the detriment of others, his deviations are those of his Stoic peers in first-century CE Rome. That is, Persius’ Stoicism specifically reflects the orientation and emphases of his fellow Stoics Seneca and Epictetus. Among all three writers specific philosophical themes are emphasized, the most important three being the treatment of the body as a debased container for the mind rather than a neutral material coextensive with it; the interest in self-shaping and self-improvement via the meditatio and/or internalized dialogue; the importance of the retreat into the self and the dismissal of the opinions of the crowd (and political life generally). These are the concerns that are processed through Persius’ poetic grinder, coming out the other side as satura (fittingly, a Latin term for a kind of forcemeat) and reshaped into strikingly repulsive images and metaphors that imprint themselves upon the soul. Most strikingly, the debased status of the body in Roman Stoicism represents a movement away from the orthodox Stoic view of the body as ethically neutral and physically coextensive with the pneuma of the soul; instead, it tends toward the view of the body-as-container that emerges from the Platonic school.¹² Seneca dismisses the body as a digestive pipe for food and drink, a thing diseased and disintegrating, putrid and perishable (putre . . . fluidumque, Ad Marc. 11.1ff.). Clearly, he says, this is the meaning of the ancient command to know thyself: it reminds us that the body is a weak and fragile thing, an earthenware vessel that breaks when it is shaken, a thing unable to bear cold or heat, doomed to decay, quick to sicken and quick to rot (Ad Marc. 11.1ff.). Epictetus in turn, dismissing the value of a body if the soul is cowardly, denigrates it as a carcass and a pint of blood, and nothing more (Disc. 1.9.33); a little portion of paltry flesh (4.104). And indeed, the body in Persius is likewise a disaster-zone of liability and the site of the grotesque. Inside the casing of flesh, there is nothing where there should be a divine soul: the body is caelestium inanis. And the flesh itself is repulsive: it is meat, pork, organs; bodies are scabrous and swollen with bile; we guess at what gods want by extrapolating from this wicked flesh (scelerata pulpa, 2.64). Angry men split in rage, boastful men explode their lungs, the ignorant drown in their own flesh. Persius’ vile bodies are as Stoically oriented as their Senecan and Epicurean fellows.

None of this is surprising from a Stoic philosophical point of view, at least in terms of its content. But recent scholars have significantly developed our understanding of Persius by taking the imagery in which he couches these teachings, in all of its disturbing complexity, to be a crucial part of his ultimate aims for his verse rather than a feature to be laid down to poetic liberty.¹³ Persius himself seems to announce his dedication to a program of difficult metaphor when he characterizes himself as iunctura callidus acri (Sat. 5.14), skilled at the harsh juxtaposition. (For a full discussion of the term, see chapter 4). For his metaphors are indeed difficult—this much we must grant to Dryden. Not only do they often make no sense upon a first reading, their vehicles are drawn from unsavory walks of life and aspects of human existence more usually kept under covers. Nor are they always without victims within the body of the Satires. Where his predecessor in satire, Horace, settled for making fun of human weaknesses by provoking laughter from the very subject of his lambasting (cf. Hor. Sat. 1.116–17),¹⁴ Persius’ persona often goes for the jugular in a series of attacks on his peers that are couched in violent and distasteful imagery: unholy combinations of eyeballs and orgasms, pork products and people, statecraft and sodomy punctuate these rebukes of folly. What sense are we to make of the author’s fondness for these metaphors that are strained, sometimes disgusting, and in flagrant violation of the classical guidelines for poetic propriety and utility? Despite the scholarly explication of many of Persius’ metaphors and the understanding that his corpus relies on a certain shock value, here is still no satisfactory answer to the question of what the philosophical impact of this choice may ultimately be.

The Satires’ Stoic framework adds to the difficulty of this question, for Stoic philosophy was not silent on the topic of language. Instead, the evidence suggests that the school favored plain speaking and avoidance of figure: a sort of language degree zero, if that were ever possible. Cicero’s famous comments in the De oratore (2.159; 3.65–66; cf. Brutus 118) on the dry and jejune nature of Stoic rhetoric and on its failure to persuade provide a backdrop against which Persius’ wild language and lavish use of figure looks decidedly odd. It is true that there is precedent in Cynic philosophy for coarse speech and action in the name of philosophical instruction, in order to expose human custom as false coin; the fourth-century BCE Cynic Diogenes of Sinope famously urinated and defecated in public and generally insulted his interlocutors. But we have to acknowledge a serious difference between acting out a form of parrhesia in public, and writing difficult and obscure satires framed by metaphors while professing no interest in reaching a wide audience—as our satirist does. Faced with two reasons why Persius’ metaphorical usage is counter to norms—Stoic-philosophical and normative-poetical norms—we must, I think, accept that his practice has a significant importance for the body of his work, and that Persius’ revolution in the poetics of metaphor is the place to look for his contribution to the ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy.

It goes without saying that to take Persius’ imagery seriously in this way is also to move beyond the idea that poetic accoutrements such as figure and imagery function to create a pleasurable but essentially trivial poetics that, like the honey on the cup, induces us to take the philosophical medicine that lurks within the cup.¹⁵ It is to suggest instead, as I will eventually do, that both the content of these images and our very distaste for them becomes part of what Persius is trying to do via his strange marriage of satire and philosophy, and part of what is didactically meaningful in the reading experience. The predominance of the vividly imagistic in the Satires ends up being a gateway into some of the more wide-ranging interpretive issues that come with this poet: How can the satirist justify writing in a medium (verse) that his own school, Stoicism, believes should be approached with caution and strict pedagogical guidance? What is accomplished by bringing together satire (and its metaphors) and philosophy (and its content) into a single medium? How do we avoid (as some critics have done) privileging one of them, depending on which the critic chooses to identify as his real purpose? (Is he a Stoic philosopher, compromising his teachings by violent verse, or an outrageous satirist, with shock factor stapled to a dull moral backbone?)¹⁶

Lector intende: this volume is not a comprehensive study, and its scope is limited to the claims of its title. In the five chapters that follow, I do not pretend to offer an analysis of all of Persius’ poetry, satire by satire, or to engage with every passage in the corpus. Instead, I try to keep in mind three particular backdrops: Persius’ literary manipulations of his predecessors (especially Horace);¹⁷ the role of Roman Stoicism in his program;¹⁸ and most importantly, the extended cultural significations and connotations that are embedded in Persius’ strange repertoire of figures and imagery. So while there is much interesting work to be done on the issue of, say, persona, in the Satires, this will not be within my scope; instead, I use Persius as a shorthand for "the personae Persius uses" (they are not necessarily identical from poem to poem). Even satire 6 is left aside as nonrepresentative of the project of satires 1–5; its epistolary form, its imagery, the change in its tone, all mark it as part of a new direction—perhaps one cut short by Persius’ fatal stomach ache of 62 CE. And another absence from the volume is Nero himself—just as in Persius’ Satires, for like Seneca in his Letters to Lucilius, Persius never once mentions Nero by name. It is undeniable that Nero’s existence shadows this body of work, as it does the Letters, and many scholars (and even scholiasts) have traced his presence in particular parts of the Satires—for example, in the rich and tasteless poetasters of satire 1, in the repressed comments about people with asses’ ears, or in the narcissistic Alcibiades of satire 4.¹⁹ Still, I have taken to heart the cautions of K. Freudenburg (2001, 45–46) that to look too hard for Nero is to forget that the Satires are about us. Persius makes it clear that criticizing others rather than oneself represents a failure of self-knowledge on our own part: satire 4 puts on display just this kind of deferral, showing us one figure after another intent on ripping into someone else’s narcissism, sexuality, and avarice. Descend into yourself instead, is the satirist’s advice.

In concentrating on Persius’ metaphors as its main topic, and in exploring how several central motifs in Persius’ oeuvre define his mission qua philosopher-satirist, this short book presents instead a series of case studies in specific semantic fields, especially the alimentary, the bodily, digestion, medicine, poison, male-male sexuality, and philosophy. The scope of these programmatic issues is broad enough that each of them has been noted and remarked upon by previous scholarship; none, however, has received sufficient credit for its programmatic pervasiveness in the Satires, nor has Persius’ originality in developing them as the framework of his literary project been recognized. These metaphors give shape to such topoi as literary reception as a form of cannibalism; the idea of a good poetics as having curative force for the insanity of the nonphilosopher; the idea of metaphor itself as a medicine that can be sweet and harmful, or unpleasant and salutary; the criticism of the Platonic philosophic model as based on pandering and desire.

In the end, the body of Persius’ satires is driven by metaphor. It is metaphor that supplies the culinary framework for his aesthetic program; it is metaphor that suggests that reading the satires is a healing draught; it is even the use of metaphor that strips his poetry of the taint of pleasure by contravening the received wisdom on what metaphors do and what their purpose should be. It is through metaphors of pedagogic internalization that we see how we are to come to a more Stoic form of wisdom—or do we? In the final chapter of this study, I move away from these claims about the content of the metaphors and look, instead, for the points where the edifice of the Satires, if pressed, collapses upon itself. For it is my contention that such spots exist, and that their existence is deliberate. If Persius has puzzled us by taking on a markedly corporeal world in a philosophical context that points to the nonsignificance of such a world, perhaps it is because he plans to leave us with a self-canceling collection of images that demand to be transcended in favor of something else. Letting us choose, he nonetheless offers up the possibility of reading the Satires in order to get to a place where we can dismiss bodies and boils, sweet pleasures and sex, earthly disease and death, and rejoin the Stoic view of the world from its famously detached Archimedean point.

Part I

Cannibals and Philosophers

Chapter One

The Cannibal Poets

One of Persius’ most striking conceits is that of the poem made flesh. This idea does not merely recycle the synesthetic metaphor (common in antiquity, as in the present) of poetic taste, but links fleshiness to particular kinds of poetry—the styles and genres that Persius despises and that he sets in opposition to his own satiric verse. Nor is he content to let the metaphor stop here, but pushes it to an extreme by suggesting that consuming such bad poetry, like stuffing ourselves with too much heavy meat, will render us dyspeptic to the point of possible death. The starting point for this conceit is not an unfamiliar one, since it relies upon a cluster of prior literary traditions: the treatment of literary texts as bodies, the idea that good literature could be nourishing, and even the famous Horatian image of poetic words taken out of context as the limbs of a dismembered poet (Sat. 1.4.62). What Persius adds to the mix is the grotesque suggestion that reading bad poetry is akin to the worst and most savage kind of flesh-eating that can exist, cannibalism. If the path to this conclusion already lay open at the crossroads of the poem-as-food and the text-as-body, the idea of cannibalism remained up to his time all but untapped as the next step on the metaphorical road.

Persius develops his motif from an innocuous starting point in Horace’s Ars poetica, whose injunctions on what is not decorous in poetry—precisely tales of human dismembering and consumption—he reworked to introduce a sharp contrast between his own vegetarian verse and his rivals’ disgusting and inappropriate fare. Like Horace, Persius is concerned to distinguish between low and high genres of poetry and their content; unlike Horace, he systematically uses meat eating and cannibalism to demarcate the difference between humble satire and the loftier genres. The metaphor is evocative on many levels: cannibalism was not only the most degraded form of meat eating (and a possibility that lurked behind all consumption of animals, according to the reincarnation-preaching philosopher Pythagoras): the desire to engage in it was also Greek epic’s ultimate expression of murderous hate, while the fact of having engaged in it provided the tragic denouement of several Greek dramas. The metaphor thus provided Persius with a genre-appropriate way of criticizing these literary forms in his own day while relying on cannibalism’s native shock value to disgust his readers and reinforce his point: that only his own satires, and not the high-falutin’ production of his peers, provided healthy foodstuff for consumption. And if poetry is food for men—whether they be vegetarian or carnivorous—then poetry can take on much of the metaphorical weight assigned to foodstuffs as a cultural element as well: it can work in a symbolic field that engages with the ethically charged ideas of greed, desire, sickness, self-control, health, and wisdom, all to make philosophical points about the value of poetry and its consumption.

The analogy also provides Persius with a way to talk about poetic reception and poetic imitatio: do poets suffer from the anxiety of influence, as Harold Bloom would have it, or can they simply consume the prior tradition and eliminate parts of it as waste while producing an entirely new concoction?¹ Can they (as Seneca and others would so nicely put it) flit from work to work, drawing sustenance from each one but blending them together in their poetic bellies to create something both derivative and new, like honey from nectar? If so, of course, poets had better be careful of what they take in, in the search for good raw materials: pollen is one thing, and pork is another—and now we have come full circle back to meat and its various gastric effects. Meanwhile, what Persius himself consumed above all seems to have been the work of his satiric predecessor, Horace, turning his well-known texts into a startlingly new body of satires with a very different message. And so, to trace Persius’ development of the elaborate sustaining metaphor of flesh-loving poets, we must return to his own sources for the figure, especially Horace’s famous Ars poetica. If this poem begins by evoking the comparison of bad poetry to paintings of badly formed bodies, its eventual foray into questions of propriety, pleasure, and poetic inspiration allow Persius to borrow from it widely while formulating his own content for an art of poetry. And while the Ars has little to say about cannibalism, it says just enough that Persius can regurgitate his predecessor in an entirely new form.

1. The Ars poetica and the Body of Verse

In their reception of Horace’s Ars poetica, Persius’ first and fifth satires re-evaluate one of the best-known texts of classical antiquity, a poem as well known as Persius’ own are obscure. Horace’s programmatic work functions as the main backdrop against which our satirist chooses to carve out his own programmatic path,² and Persius’ statements about poetry—both his own verse and that of his peers—borrow deeply from this treatise, echoing its language and its concerns even while transforming and reversing several key Horatian themes.³ While Horace’s instructions for propriety in poetic composition purported to offer guidance to composers of the high genres of epic and tragedy, Persius reworks the Ars not to instruct other poets, but to condemn them, and to set himself up—like a new and irascible Horace—as the avatar of good taste. Accordingly, Persius does not offer us abstract rules in a witty guidebook, but counts on us to understand