Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Roman Verse Satires: Spleen and Ideal

Roman Verse Satires: Spleen and Ideal

Godwin, John

Paperback

Series: Greece and Rome Live

Literary CriticismAncient Rome

ISBN10: 1805968939
ISBN13: 9781805968931
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Published: Apr 7 2026
Pages: 184
Weight: 0.59
Height: 0.39 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.21
Language: English

Ebook available to libraries exclusively as part of the JSTOR Path to Open initiative.

The Romans claimed to have invented satire--one of the most enduring and certainly one of the most entertaining genres of literature bequeathed to posterity from the ancient world. Modern satire aims generally to puncture pretence and to hurt its targets with withering caricature and bruising irony, but Roman satire was not so easy to characterise. One of the earliest exponents (Lucilius) went in for some personal invective and set the tone for many a 21st-century scribbler keen to wound his enemies with well-chosen words, but later writers in the Roman tradition distanced themselves from the tradition of personal critique and were reluctant to paint themselves as in any sense attack-dogs. If they were inveighing against folly and vice, it was (they claimed) more in a spirit of positive encouragement to us all to live better and happier lives, freed from the shackles of character-flaws and absurd behaviour. Satire in verse was also a highly self-conscious literary exercise which invested its moral message with layers of irony and wit. This tradition of both personal and philosophical satire laid the foundations for the massive tradition of satire in Europe which continues to this day.

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