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Literary understanding is often a matter of creating spaces. You read a poem and align it with another, and think about the aspects of each which are not there in the other. Literary genres often work in a similar way: they develop as writers work out and give shape to the space between themselves and their predecessors. This space might be chronological, geographical, temperamental, cultural, or linguistic; it might be narrowed by personal affinities, admiration, and cultural allegiance, or widened by differences in the forms of social relations experienced by each writer. But it is always there, even in those rare literary relationships when a writer seems to be consciously attempting to catch the flavor of a predecessor exactly. And it is by feeling what is not there in one poem or poet that you come to know what is there in another. The habitual mannerisms or recurrent points of unease of one writer are much more obvious when you read the work of another person who does not have them. This is why comparative literature matters, and this is why this volume not only contains but needs to contain chapters on the afterlife of Roman satire. Gaining a full understanding of Roman satire entails also understanding what it is not like, or not quite like, and imagining how it would look if some of its central concerns were altered or nudged slightly off center.
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