Making Mockery

Abstract

Abstract This book explores the dynamics of comic mockery and satire in Greek and Latin poetry, and argues that poets working in such genres composed their "attacks" on targets, and constructed their relationships with audiences, in accordance with a set of common poetic principles, protocols, and tropes. It encourages a synoptic, synchronic view of such poetry, from archaic iambus through Roman satire, and argues that only when we appreciate how an abstracted "poetics of mockery" governs individual poets can we fully understand how such poetry functioned diachronically in its own historical moment. The book examines in particular the strategies deployed by satirical poets to enlist the sympathies of a putative audience and convince them of the legitimacy of their personal attacks. It discusses the tension deliberately created by such poets between self-righteous didactic claims and a persistent desire to undermine them, and concludes that such poetry was felt by ancient audiences to achieve its greatest success as comedy precisely when they were left unable to ascribe to the satirist any consistent moral position. Several early chapters look to Greek myth for paradigms of comic mockery, and argue that these myths can illuminate the ways in which ancient audiences conceptualized specifically poeticized forms of satire. Poets addressed in this part of the book include Archilochus, Hipponax, Horace, Homer, Aristophanes, and Theocritus. Two chapters follow which address the satirical poetics of Callimachus and Juvenal, and a final chapter on the question of how ancient audiences responded the inherently controversial elements of such poetry.

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