Recutitaque sabbata palles: Jews in Latin Satire
(2018) Hebrew, Jewish and Early Christian Studies Seminar: Invited Lecturer — Location: Cambridge, UK
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- Abstract
- The purpose of this paper will be to suggest that, beginning with Horace, the genre of Roman satire--a genre that Quintilian thought of as the prototypically Roman genre, quiddem tota nostra est--took up the Jews as one of its creative emblems. It has been difficult, perhaps, to perceive the role that Jews played in the corpus that survives--the poems of Horace, Persius, and Juvenal--not least because readings of the last of these poets, Juvenal, have tended to discolor scholarly views of his predecessors’ less frequent, but no less important, Judaic excursions. I say “discolor” because Juvenal’s take on the Jews appears anything but generous, and Juvenal’s apparent Judeophobia has contributed to a long tendency to read references to Jews in Horace and Persius as, similarly, malignant. Doing so, however, misconstrues Juvenal’s Judeophobia, and gets Horace and Persius’ wholly wrong. In fact, Jews, from Horace’s satires on, served as a mirror for Roman satirists, reflecting their image more truly, if more grotesque. As a glance at the numerous Juvenalian cf.’s of commentaries on Persius’ and Horace’s satires makes clear, Juvenal’s Jews have had an important influence on the interpretation of his predecessors, so it is with his work that we will begin, before turning back to the role of Jews in Horace, and ending with the interpretive puzzle of the one reference to the Jews in Persius. Taken as a whole, reading Jews as mirrors for satirist’s own poetic work will suggest that a model that involves tagging this or that passage as positive or negative, and then weighing up the whole to in order to draw up a sliding scale of global pagan Judeophobia or Judeophilia, may be insufficiently nuanced to account for what these poets saw in the Jews, and what the Jews could do for them.
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Trinity Cambridge
Citations
Kachuck, A. (2018). Recutitaque sabbata palles: Jews in Latin Satire. Hebrew, Jewish and Early Christian Studies Seminar: Invited Lecturer, Cambridge, UK. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/100983