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Ionian Rhapsody - The Milesians

Euge!

Welcome to 2015 where we start the year with the group of thinkers known to modernity as the Pre-Socratics and since there are quite a lot of them it would make sense to try to look at them in a series of groupings. One such group which can be gathered together under the twin roofs of geography and time are Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes. These three early thinkers were all living in the Ionian city of Miletus at around the early to mid-6th century BCE and although it’s not clear exactly what the relationship between them is, it has long been a convention to call them the Milesians.

 Why Miletus? What was so special about this city that it became the locus for these early thinkers? It could be due to the status of the city as an important stage on the busy and lucrative trading routes between Egypt via Lebanon to the Ionian coast and even as far as the earliest Black Sea colonies. Miletus benefitted from its position and quickly became a prominent and wealthy polis, where merchants would bring not only produce but ideas and news from distant lands, perhaps there may have even been a wise man or two on the run from the Egyptian or Babylonian authorities of the day who, having ended up in Miletus with its increasingly affluent and literate elite citizens, made a home for himself and traded ideas, techniques, science even for a moderate income. It could even be that men such as Thales had themselves travelled to Egypt and Babylon and picked up some knowledge from the temple priests. What is clear is that these men were the among the first individual we know about in Greece who started making statements about the world around them in an altogether different way from what had been the norm - it has been described by scholars as a paradigm shift, that of the move from trying to structure and describe the physical universe and its phenomena in terms of rational thought (logos) instead of anthropomorphised gods (mythos).

 It is important here to make it clear that pre logos systems such as that of Hesiod or Homer, and for that matter earlier thought systems are not irrational but use mythos to build and make sense of the world around them. Hesiod's system of gods has a method to it and is not the product of madness. But there is a clear difference when we come to the Pre-socratics in that they tried to rationalize phenomena without the aid of the gods as it were and to view the world as a single ordered system subject to natural and laws. The gods are removed from the picture and this alone is a major shift in itself considering the kind of Homeric and Hesiodic paradigms that had defined cosmic understanding up until that time. It must have nothing short of revolutionary to have uttered such new and strange ideas in a god built and god structured universe that was taken as a given by so many. It may even have been politically sensitive and quite dangerous. As is often the case great changes in thought systems are accompanied or even catalysed by upheavals in the political and technological sphere. This was a time when Ionia was becoming a loose federation of increasingly affluent and powerful city states - caught between the machinations of great warring empires, Egypt and Assyria, and due to its neutral or multivalent position, at times feared, at others courted for aid in one campaign or another, finally conquered and then the scene of a tumultuous revolt, the playground of tyrants and sinister intrigues. All of this activity must surely had have some role to play in the dissemination of new ideas, political, technological and philosophical.

The testimonia (following the arrangement as set out by Waterfield in his translation OUP 2000) for these three total 41 short pieces by various ancient sources, notable amongst them, Herodotus (for Thales T1-3), Aristotle (T8,9,11) and our old stoic friend, Seneca (T10). These fragments illuminating as they often are tend to be laced with extraneous elements from the ancient sources themselves and so should be read with caution. There is a potential extra layer of confusion in that the earliest thinkers themselves may not have been unambiguously straightforward or consistent in their utterances and the doxographers could be accurately portraying what were on the face of it, quite dogmatic positions or inconclusive musings open to wide interpretation even in their own time.

The reason for this caveat is that we have to rely on the works of these other ancient writers for much of our information on the presocratics, since their work has not survived in anything more substantial than fragments and partial inscriptions. It is not clear even whether these early thinkers wrote much of their ideas down in any ordered way that we can recognise, and we have to rely on the commentaries of the so-called doxographers, writers whose work consisted of summarising and commenting on the ideas of earlier philosophers. While we owe a lot to these later writers, in particular Aristotle and his pupil Theophrastus, we must always be on our guard and be ready with the salt cellar as we read them.

T1-11 deal with Thales, whose floruit can be dated by the story of his prediction of a solar eclipse, in either 585 or 582 BCE. Anaximander and Anaximenes were probably a bit younger than Thales and his junior contemporaries although its not clear whether they knew each other and if they did what kind of interaction they had with each other, pupils? rivals. Perhaps there was an early school of thought, although its unlikely given the variations in their ideas and fields of interests.

The first testimonia for Thales give the picture of a man interested in celestial phenomena but someone also involved with the powers of the day, perhaps as a kind of military or strategic and political advisor. His loose prediction of the eclipse during the battle between the Lydians and the Medes, the diversion of river courses so that they could be forded, and his involvement in Ionian statecraft lend some credence to this. He may have been more like an early sophist in the sense of using the technical knowledge available at the time to advance a career with the powers of the day. He may even have been on a military payroll for his valuable and mysterious services. He comes across as someone who has realised that the observable phenomena are not the divine workings of gods but rather have some kind of rational and potentially discoverable laws underlying them, which, once discovered can be used to human advantage. T8 (Source: Aristotle, Metaphysics 983b6-32 Ross) gives some more details about what we might loosely describe as Thales conclusions about cosmology or the primordial building material of the cosmos. Aristotle reports that for Thales it was water, although whether this is based upon Aristotle's extended speculation is not entirely clear. Thales may have only said that the earth rests upon water and that because the other Milesians are reported as being interested in the primordial element of the universe, Aristotle is ascribing or adducing here.

The most intriguing thing that Aristotle ascribes to Thales is his belief that 'all things were full of gods'. Again, how much of this is the later philosopher is not clear but it seems likely that the early thinkers were still taxed with the position of the consciousness of the universe, especially since they had moved away from mythos but were not able or willing to completely jettison the role of the divine, still mystified as to what powered life itself or what set the elements of the sky in motion or cause man and the beasts to breathe and have motion. The perspective has changed to a human rather than a god interpreted cosmos but the gods or god has not as yet been entirely dethroned by logos.   Even Socrates, who pressed the reset button on a lot of the loose and ambiguous groping in the dark of the early thinkers, still had his divine or spirit advisor and often talked in terms of the god or the divine' - so perhaps it never quite leaves Greek philosophy at all, at least as far as the Classical period is concerned.

Anaximander (T12-28) is attributed with the discovery of the gnomon, the construction and installation of sundials, and the observation of various celestial phenomena. He is also the first to draw a map of the inhabited world on a tablet. Its an incredible idea, even if the map itself was most probably more a highly imaginative sketch based upon navigators experience, hearsay and rumour. Herodotus remarks acidly that it was an amateurish effort drawn with a pair of compasses, noting that Europe and Asia are completely out of proportion.

T15 is where Anaximander is at his most interesting with his idea of the boundless (apeiron in Greek). This seems quite a leap of thought, a boundless not of any element like water or air but of an indeterminate formlessness from which somehow, the opposites and their inter-reactions can develop and lead to the more familiar elements themselves which in turn lead to all other elements and materials as they condense. More interestingly, these elements will decay and fall back into the boundless ' according to necessity; for they give justice and reparation to one another for their injustice in accordance with the ordinance of time'. Its not quite GUT (Grand Unified Theory) but nonetheless is a prime example of the paradigm shift that is taking place in the Greek world at this time, a period in which the gods for the majority were very much alive and the source of all wisdom, flowing down to man on a one way channel. Anaximander is wiping that world away with a rational attempt at explicating the very fabric of the cosmos  and how it leads to the world in which we walk and breathe, all without the aid or inclusion of Zeus. What's more interesting is the mileage this concept has enjoyed through philosophy, theological speculation (its similarity to the Late Hellenistic and Gnostic 'pleroma' is striking) and finally science down the centuries. Heisenberg gives a nod to Anaximander when talking about where quanta might originate - and he thought that is something very akin to the apeiron. The fact that in 2015 we are still not entirely sure renders Anaximander's leap of speculation even more astounding.

Anaximander has some fascinating speculations regarding the physical more local phenomena of the universe such as the earth itself, which is 'cylindrical in shape, and three times wide as it is deep' (T22 Ps.-Plutarch, Miscellanies 2.5-11 Diels), and further in T23 where a kind of proto inertia or gravity theory is hinted at. According to the Anaximandrine view of the immediate cosmos, hot and cold became separated, hot moving out and coalescing to a layer of fire, which grew around the earth like a layer of bark, later breaking off and leading to the formation of the stars as isolated patches of this fire. Finally in T27-28, the origin of human life is tentatively theorized, with humans carried until puberty inside fish like creatures from the sea. Its almost there in terms of the first glimmerings of understanding a linear process of development as opposed to the magical 'just-so' creation stories of mythos.

 

Anaximenes T29-41, Shares some concepts with Anaximander but decides that the boundless does have a form and that is air and it is the condensation and rarefaction of this element which leads to the creation of everything in the universe. Cicero goes as far to state that Anaximenes identified air as a God. Again its not clear who is speaking here of the two ancients but it could be possible as I have mentioned before that air as 'divine breath' animated all life and movement in the universe as its mysterious motive force. In the absence of anything else, the earliest thinkers may have used the divine as a handy shorthand for filling in what at the time they could not easily theorize upon. It could also be just the milieu and the times that they lived in - it being literally unthinkable to speak or think entirely in de-mythologised terms.

I have only briefly outlined the main ideas of these three thinkers and it would be quite easy to go into a lot more detail - especially since it's clear from a cursory glance at the bibliography that there is a lot more scholarship on them, particularly Thales and Anaximander. I look forward to sharing your thoughts on these curious figures of early cosmology. 

Plutarch's Moralia

I am marching my way through the Moralia by Plutarch (and possibly others depending on the scholar you happen to follow), currently on volume III where he deals with the moral nature and habits as well as pithy quotations of the Spartans. By all accounts a stern bunch and as happy fighting as throwing themselves from crags or rooftops to preserve their honour. The translations vary, all being Loeb but from different decades. The current volume is Frank Cole Babbit who is reassuringly inter-war 1920s in tone!


Euge!

Works and Days - The Two Strifes

Right at the start of Hesiod’s Works and Days (WD), we come across the startling revelation that there is not one Strife (Eris) but two.

‘So in fact, there was not just one birth of Strifes but there are two Strifes upon the earth. One of these a man would honour once he got to know it, but the other is blameworthy; and they have totally opposed spirits. Since one fosters evil war and conflict-the cruel one, no mortal loves it, but it’s out of necessity (hup’anankes) that they honour the oppressive Strife, according to the plans of the Gods. But the other one was first born from Night; and Kronos’ high-throned son, who dwells in the aether, set it in the roots of the earth, and it is much better for men. It rouses even the helpless man to work. For a man who is not working but who looks at some other man, a rich one who is hastening to plough and plant and set his house in order, he envies him, one neighbour envying his fellow who is making haste to get wealth; and this Strife is good for mortals. And potter is angry with potter, and builder with builder, and beggar begrudges beggar, and poet poet. ‘(WD 11-26)

There are two things that make this section stand out for me. One is the fact of the apparent correction or editorial process that Hesiod applies to his earlier proclamations on Eris in the previous work the Theogony. This is a first in the sense that previous to written texts such a correction would have been unthinkable or unnecessary. I say unthinkable since with many different performers, who had no text to prepare from, the changes could be all true and none of them true at the same time. It is the arrival of the fixed text that heralds other textual and written technologies involved with the recording and transmission of literature as well as culture and eventually religious and ritual practice. Hesiod has his Theogony as a realised material object which can be examined, altered, critiqued, and added to, all of the things that you can do with a written text that cannot be done within the previous oral tradition. It’s nothing less than the quantum leap that takes us out of the archaic period into the classical period.

The other striking point lies in the contrast between the two Strifes. Like a split pharmakon, we now have a good Strife in addition to the traditional (albeit second born) evil war type Strife which is just an all-round bad trip for mortals and something which the Gods seem to like inflicting on us in order to play out their inscrutable divine plans or to play out on a miniscule scale their mere Olympian squabbles.

 The good Strife then appears to be the envy of wealth which spurs men on to get some for themselves and jostle against each other in all walks of life for a piece of the action.  It seems very close to our later formulations of the Capitalist spirit and the ideology of man as a basically selfish individual struggling and vying for riches against ones fellow as opposed to working with him for happiness. I can imagine this passage being quite a favourite of the more conservative leaning Classicists such as  Boris Johnson! Peer envy is healthy and the kind of rivalry it involves, along with the begrudging and anger with which Hesiod colours it, is accepted as both necessary and good. I wonder if Hesiod envisaged  any room for overlap or bleed between the two Strifes which rather seem at least to moderns to be two aspects of one being rather than two totally separate and opposed spirits as they are described here (andicha thumon).

 I wonder how in Hesiod’s understanding they are totally opposed yet both involve anger and begrudging, emotions which can easily escalate into open conflict even on an individual or minor group scale. Is it entirely clear how these two Strifes are totally opposed? Perhaps he means coming from totally different directions, one from the Immortals upon high...and the other buried deep in the earth. Perhaps we could look at this in more detail when we meet!

Euge!

Hesiod - The Big Crunch

Chairete!

We come back to Greece with a bang and a cosmic one at that. Or rather a crunch since the Theogony (literally the birth or coming into being of the gods), composed at some point towards the end of the 8^th Century or beginning of the 7^th Century BCE, appears to take us on a journey from the outermost primal elements of the creation gradually moving through the grades of divine beings and monsters to heroes and finally humans with the two lines at the end of the work presaging the Catalogue of Women. It also culminates in establishing Zeus as the supreme judge and arbiter of justice.

This is a startling work from the end of a transitional period from oral to literary transmission of the names and pedigrees of the gods. Hesiod stands at the very beginning of Greek literature, giving definition to the primordial mythic landscape and in the opinion of many ancients and scholars after, practically inventing Greek religious practice and could possibly be the earliest of philosophers to boot (if we take the view that the Theogony is a cosmography in the tradition of which the pre-Socratic philosophers such as Empedocles and Parmenides are members).

 It’s quite an achievement and although it is a literary production, one of the first texts open to comment and criticism by ancients, it still belies its oral origins. The language is replete with assonance and alliteration, literary devices which helped in its committing to a poets memory for later and repeated performance.

 It is a thoroughly bardic work in tone and purport and it should be seen in the context of the wandering poets of the archaic period and earlier, in particular Homer. The two poets or at least one and a half poets are intricately bound up together being the subject of intense debate even now as to who was the earliest on the scene. It’s a question that will probably never be resolved but there are some interesting contrasts between the two works as well as similarities. Homer never refers to himself throughout the whole of the Iliad and the Odyssey, where Hesiod does refer to himself and his brother Perses on several occasions throughout his work. He is the first ancient Greek writer to do so – it’s such an innovation and one perhaps born of the relatively new technology of written literary culture that one is tempted to view Homer as perhaps coming from the end of the oral tradition and Hesiod at the beginning of the new written tradition. It will have to remain an idle fancy since there is no way to decide with the current evidence available to us who is the earlier. The current middle ground consensus is that they are rough contemporaries, that is, if Homer is a person rather than a composite construct of bards, the best bits of Phemius, Demodocus et aliis. To be fair to both there has been considerable and sustained scholarly debate over the question of whether we are dealing with actual historical figures here at all or rather authorised constructs – the so-called Homeric (or indeed Hesiodic) authorial question.

The other factor that doesn’t lend credence to my fantasy is the relatively higher level of poetical sophistication in Homer, although that may be due in part to the kind of works that we are faced with. The Theogony is a depiction of the cosmos and an explanation of how everything came to be so that humans can see their place in the religious, physical and moral order – it’s the tube map of the ancient Greek divine cosmos. To name the gods is to create them. This is the dramatic ritual enactment of each sacred performance/utterance of the Theogony.

With Homer I think we have very much the later intricate interactions of the worlds of Gods Heroes and Men – it’s as if Homer has set the world described in the theogony in movement and is skilfully recounting its detailed action.  Hesiod as astrolabe constructor and Homer who sets the wheels in beautiful motion detailing all of its intricate movements with consummate poetic skill.

This is not to detract from the skill and surprising deftness of Hesiod’s work. He has artfully linked the names of the gods and other beings as well as the key activities that led to the formation of the ancient Greek system into a flowing inspired hexameter form. It’s a song essentially where the words and possibly the music (that must have existed) literally bring the burgeoning universe to life before the very eyes and ears of the listener. The recitation of names alone (for it was key to a Greeks identity to know who ones father was and where one was born) would have caused intense delight familiar as they were to ancient audiences, but this added and totally new concept of linking the brief oral passages (perhaps originally short songs themselves from earlier oral times and diverse regions all over Greece) stitching them together into a sustained narrative with its own structure and solidity and direction of thought must have seemed nothing less than astounding. Reading parts of it aloud can give a slight hint of the magical hypnotic effect it must have had. It’s a both a colourful and beautiful work with great contrasting passages of darkness and light as well the frenzied interplay of the elements.

The Theogony provides a neat counterpart to the Works and Days where we move to the world of men and how best they might function in the world which the former work has so lavishly, even luridly, depicted.  Taken together they constitute a macro to micro view of the cosmos, geospatially and ethically positional for man and protreptic in intent.  We have the image before us of the muse-struck shepherd singing of the world of the Gods and also of man’s place and duty within it, linking the themes of the two complimentary texts.

I look forward to discussing the Theogony and the Works and days in more detail when we meet again!

Euge!

Persius - A nasty little piece of work

Aules Persius Flaccus 34-62 CE

Imagine the scene if you will…a drinking party in Hades where all three chief Satirists are gathered. Horace would probably entertain you with mildly barbed repartee, enjoying a jewel studded goblet of Falernian wine with you as he subtly and wittily took you to task for your most recent shady business dealings (while benefiting handsomely from some of the resulting largess at the same time), Juvenal? He would be wagging his finger at you loudly and eloquently censuring your shortcomings and urging you not to get married to that rich aging freedwoman as he sipped from a glass of sparkling apple juice (homemade of course)…and what about Persius/ What would he do?

He’d probably punch you in the face - and leave after insulting the other guests as fakes, warning them not to listen to those other has-beens. Yes, Persius seems to be the sort of chap that might have carved ‘4 Real’ into his forearm with a razor if you so much as utter the barest whimper of doubt in the direction of his ‘semipaganus’ street cred. He was hard-core. You can tell this right from the start of his programmatic Satire...where he informs us he doesn’t drink from the same trough as the other windbags and tells it like it is. He might have been even more live and direct had his erstwhile mentor and posthumous amanuensis Cornutus not fluffed the text over, removing any potentially insulting references to the Imperial elite.

‘Nec fonte labra prolui caballino

Nec in bicipiti somniasse Parnaso

Memini, ut repente sic poeta prodirem.

Heliconidasque pallidamque Pirenen

Illis remitto quorum imagines lambunt

Hederae sequaces; ipse semipaganus

Ad sacra vatum carmen adfero nostrum.

Quis expedivit psittaco suum  ‘chaere’

Picamque docuit nostra verba conari?’

(Prologue l.1-9)

The immediate thing we note with the Prologue is its metre, limping iambics or choliambic. This is a metre which originated with the lyric iambic poet of 6^th Century Ionia, Hipponax.

The USP of this choliambic is its unexpected substitution of a long breathing instead of the expected short, thus giving a kind of limping or disjointed or interrupted flow to the line. A bit like an unusual time signature used by a jazz guitarist or a deliberate ‘bum-note’ used in a saxophonist’s phrasing to comment on a section or take the rise out of a particular riff or style. Hipponax was apparently well known for using this style to great effect, ripping into his subjects and using the long pause at the end for an extra sonic surprise lunge at the target. What is Petronius telling us here with the use of this metre?

  

III.l00. 'sed tremor inter vina subit...'

To me it firstly acts a s a punch in the face of those satirists who proudly declare Satire as a truly Roman invention (a half-truth at best of times since it refers to Satiric verse only ignoring its dues from earlier Greek iambs), re-establishing and underlining the Greek iamb tradition in opposition to what Persius perceives as mere effete posturing in a Greek mode as opposed to the real thing. It also gives him a chance to set himself as distinct and apart from the other poets and marks him out as a purist devoted to his art. Perhaps it’s also a bit flash like a hot blues riff that shows up the others as mere imitators and him as a bit of a nerd into the hard-core stuff of the roots of what he perceives to be true Satire. Hence his side swipe at those’ parrots taught to say Chaire’ (the Greek form of Greeting…fashionable in those days as say French was during certain periods of English history), not so much a dig at the Greekness since I think he regards earlier iamb and its exponents with honour and respect, but a sneer aimed at those who use Greek for effect without really knowing its meaning or application. Persius is aiming at the money grubbing literary dilettante who might pepper his or her work with superficial or clichéd Greekisms and bon mots but in reality unable to properly use speak the language itself – hence a mere parrot or performing monkey.

Persius would have us know that he stands in noble isolation, disdainful of the herd and its vanities and from this self-elevated position looks down on the ravens, and magpies of the contemporary literary scene – a scene to which as semipaganus, he only half belongs.

Vale!

In Praise of Damnation - Satire VI

Salve Indignates!

Juvenal devotes an entire book (Book II) to the follies and crimes of women...or to be more accurate starts off with a harangue at the ills of marriage having heard that Postumus a friend of his is contemplating marriage. The guns are soon lowered on anything female in sight and we follow the satirist’s line of fire as he piles barrage upon barrage never failing to miss a target.

l. 63-4
'Tuccia vesicae non imperat'

It’s a 661-line sustained attack on the ills of matrimony and by extension women in general and has often been written off as an extreme misogynist rant but there is more than meets the eye here.  Juvenal sends everything up and nothing seems sacred ;even the sacred rite of Bona Dea, an all women rite re-imagined as a license for orgy and the occasional man in drag as sexual invader, even to the classic stereotypical Roman images of the chaste pre-lapsarian Hesiodic country lass, all hairy boobs and munching acorns like the best of –them, or the haughty moralistic matron mother of the Republican freedom fighters and latter Empire builders as well, figures which you would think his chauvinism would spare by way of contrasted models of feminine virtue.

But no, all fall under his merciless high epic cleaver and in the process undermining the vantage point of the misogynist itself and it is this that makes me sense that earlier readers (Dryden for one – who wondered what had happened to Juvenal that had turned him so much against all womanhood) and some moderns are mistaken if they take Juvenal or indeed his constructed persona of the outraged equestrian jade at face value branding him in the process as a class ‘A’ Gender-war-criminal. Perhaps this less enlightened, black and white view has tended to diminish as modern scholarship focusses more on the concept of the Juvenalian satiric persona and its role in the presentation and development of the satires.

Its worth reproducing a part of Dryden's Argument to the Sixth Satyr by way of illustration of the extent and limit of his understanding. Its very perceptive as far as it goes but Dryden still appears to miss the possibility that it could be a conscious effort rather than an accidental result on Juvenals/his constructed persona's part which results in the reverse of its ostensible aim, that of the denigration and damnation of womankind and all her works. The underlinings are my own.

l.481 'verberat atque obiter faciem linit'

' This Satyr, of almost double length to any of the rest, is a bitter invective against the fair Sex. 'Tis, indeed, a Common-place, from whence all the Moderns have notoriously stoln their Sharpest Raileries. In his other Satyrs, the Poet has only glanc'd on some particular women, and generally scourged the men. But this he reserved wholly for the Ladies. How they offended him I know not. But upon the whole matter he is not to be excus'd for imputing to all, the Vices of Some few amongst them. Neither was it generously done of him, to attack the weakest as well as the fairest part of the Creation: Neither do I know what Moral he could reasonably draw from it. It could not be to avoid the whole Sex, if all had been true which he alledges against them: for that had been to put an end to human Kind. And to bid us beware of their Artifices, is a kind of silent acknowledgement that they have more Wit than Men: which turns the Satyr upon us, and particularly upon the Poet, who thereby makes a Compliment, where he meant a libel. If he intended only to exercise his Wit, he has forefeited his judgement, by making one half of his Readers his Mortal Enemies: and amongst the Men, all the happy Lovers by their own Experience, will disprove his Accusations.'

So much for Dryden. I can wholeheartedly recommend you to read the whole of the Argument as well as his Englishing of the Satyr itself. It flows well and sparkles as it fills the glass, ageing into an extremely fine vintage.

 Satire VI starts off innocently enough with Juvenal’s ‘credo’ of a time where chastity and simplicity existed on the earth before the silver age (Hesiod’s ‘Arguron Genos’ the second of five ages of man), the time he tells us when the first adulteries took place, once the gods and the female divinities of chastity and modesty had fled the human world. The fact that it is a credo indicates that even this stock Alexandrian epyllonic mythic framing is already pretty suspect in Juvenal’s eyes and worth a quick sneer a la Johnny Rotten. Things go downhill pretty fast from there. Juvenal considers that his friend Postumus has gone mad and suggests some easier methods of self- destruction but Postumus counters that even the well-known gigolo Ursidius is getting hitched.

This is the blue touch paper for Juvenal and what ensues is a coruscating display of outrages – in high epic style. Readers must have recognised many of the allusions, some of them pretty obvious such as Messalina, the wanton and debauched wife of Claudius with her clandestine part-time job at the brothels and stews of Rome by night, but others, although they must have raised a laugh amongst the in-crowd of the time, are somewhat lost to us. Actors, gladiators, dancers, lyre players, teachers of all things (god forbid!) Greek and other names and allusions to figures now obscured by the clouds of time add a touch of obscurity, no doubt compounded by the often corrupted text. The sections referring to gladiators (The 'O' Passage and l.370/373A-350) are particularly difficult to unpack and interpret.

 The translation I am reading (The Loeb translation of Susanna Morton Braund 2003 HUP), although quite often innovatively accurate fails in my opinion to catch of the double or even other layers of meaning hinted at throughout the text (I am thinking for example of the senator’s wife Eppia l.82 ff.  who prances about on deck copping a feel of the sailor boy’s hard ropes! L.101 ‘haec inter nautas et prandet et errat per puppem et duros gaudet tractare rudentis’).  Braund puts it more tamely as ‘handling the rough ropes’ but for me this doesn’t convey the full implication of ‘duros….rudentis’. But then again perhaps I am getting carried away again on an over inspired cloud of translucent chiffon! Juvenal can tend to do this to me…don’t get me started on the many references to swords, practice posts and grunting of female wannabe Murmillones!

 Throughout VI, the satirist displays a mastery of rhetorical technical devices, literary allusions and socio-historical references which his educated audience must have revelled in and found levels of amusement which are regrettably lost to us. That notwithstanding, a lot of the force and majesty of the satire can still shine through and Juvenal uses a wide range of poetical and linguistic devices, alliteration, assonance, chiasmus and other clever arrangements which add colour and spice to this crushing bravura performance. The satire is so relentless and forceful that he takes things right to the possible limit of satire…up to the ramparts where his indignation and disgust can find no more space in which to flail and hack….like the roadrunner he has run out of tarmac at the end of the satire and it squeals to an end with the terrible and debased image of the botched poisoning of a husband aided by a swift stab of steel – ‘ferrum est quod amant’. It is no surprise then that he has to start off on a different tack with the next Satire having mined this vein to its roots.

l.76-7 'accipis uxorem de qua citharoedus Echion aut Glaphyrus fiat pater..'

There are interrogations to be made of this tour-de-force of savage indignation. Juvenal doesn’t leave us with a definitive answer to the issue or a final judgement or any moral direction. It is effectively a catalogue of crimes with the cataloguer becoming the figure of satire himself by his over-excessive zeal, shooting himself in the foot where a potential model of feminine virtue presents itself.  Is it misogyny? Or perhaps Misogamy? Is there a difference? Can we usefully apply such a term with all of our modern baggage associated with the term? In other words what did misogyny mean to the ancients, (e.g. Semonides of Amorgos Poem VII)? It’s interesting to contrast Semonides and his earlier iambic work, a more straightforward lambast of the ‘types’ of women sent by Zeus to plague us blokes with Satire VI since it further underlines the level of sophistication of the latter work with all its crazy hyperbole and sustained rhetorical power riffing.

 By pushing the Satire to its limits and beyond and, as its perverse internal logic dictates, undermining its own theoretical foundations, has Juvenal escaped such accusations of mere misogyny? If this is plausible then can we in any way sympathise with him in his subtle praise by vitriolic yet ironic damnation? If his subtle conceit is successful, what in turn does that imply for the role and purpose of his particular form of satire? If there is no clear moral instruction on offer what can we expect to take away from a deeper reading of Satire VI?

Vale!