Roman Satire

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

This course offers an introduction to satire in verse, a genre invented by Romans and imitated widely from the Renaissance onwards. Students will become acquainted with the origins of Roman satire and the way it changed as freedom of speech was circumscribed under the rule of the emperors. Readings in Latin will be one book each of satires by Horace and Juvenal, to be supplemented with a few other shorter selections. Special emphasis is placed throughout on distinctive features of the satirists’ language, their manipulation of poetic meter, and their use of (often unreliable) internal narrators. We shall also look briefly at the greatest imitators of the Roman satirists writing in English, Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson.