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The De Ira: Seneca's Satire of Roman Law Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 1996 The De Ira: Seneca's Satire of Roman Law William E. Wycislo Loyola University Chicago Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss Part of the Classics Commons Recommended Citation Wycislo, William E., "The De Ira: Seneca's Satire of Roman Law" (1996). Dissertations. 3598. https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/3598 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Copyright © 1996 William E. Wycislo LOYOLA UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO THE DE IRA: SENECA'S SATIRE OF ROMAN LAW A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF CLASSICAL STUDIES BY WILLIAM E. WYCISLO CHICAGO, ILLINOIS JANUARY 1996 Copyright by William E. Wycislo, 1996 All Rights Reserved 11 Parentibus Carissimis Meis Primis Magistris Meis Pietate 111 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS For the completion of this study I gratefully acknowledge the direction of Drs. John F. Makowski, Alexander P. MacGregor, Jr., and Edwin P. Menes, whose criticism, advice, and inspiration have been of inestimable value. Loyola University most kindly provided a full-year fellowship for the completion of this project. I also gratefully acknowledge the suggestions and encouragement of Dr. James G. Keenan, whose generosity of time at odd hours has been unstinting, and the continuous inspiration and friendship of Dr. Harry White of Northeastern Illinois University. I owe special thanks to Dr. John W. Thomas III for his ongoing support, example, and friendship. I would like to thank numerous friends for their patience for the duration of this project, especially Walter Warlyn, George Hogen, and Richard Zabransky. Finally, I must thank the members of the Classics Department at the University of Illinois at Chicago, especially Dr. Alexander P. MacGregor Jr., for their longstanding faith in my abilities, and my wife, Patricia, for whose understanding and patience I am forever grateful. IV TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS . iv IN'IRODUCTION . 1 CHAPTER ONE. THE DE IRA AS TOPICAL PROTEST . 21 TWO. INIURIA ....................................... 59 TlffiEE. REFORM ................................... 102 FOUR. THE DE IRA AND THE JUDICIAL RESPONSUM . 148 FIVE. THE DE ffiA AS PARODY . 205 CONCLUSION ....................................... 253 APPENDIX: SENECAN LEGAL VOCABULARY . 260 WORKS CITED . 263 VITA ............................................... 271 v INTRODUCTION If one accepts the standard ancient definitions of satire, Seneca's De Ira must be excluded from consideration as an example of the genre. Quintilian, certainly one of the most severe critics of Senecan style, mentions Seneca among Rome's philosophers as the author of Dialogi, a term which has befallen the De Ira and eleven other extant works of similar structure.1 Along with the equally comprehensive Moral Essays, the term remains a convenient heading under which to pigeon-hole the De Ira.2 Both titles firmly represent a philosophical and more specifically an ethical focus whose abiding consequence has been abundant scholarly enthusiasm for those aspects of the De Ira. The Apocolocyntosis easily admits association with Seneca the satirist; the De Ira evokes only Seneca philosophus. The designation Dialogus or Moral Essay supposedly establishes that the De Ira contains what the title describes: a philosophical dialogue or a Stoic moral essay on the vice of anger. If so, there is little to suggest that 1Quintilian Institutio Oratoria 10.1.125ff. 2John W. Basore, Seneca: Moral Essays I (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1928), xi. 2 the De Ira could be classified a satire. According to Diomedes, a fourth- century grammarian, satire must be verse, a conclusion which precludes the possibility that the De Ira could be satire on structural grounds alone.3 A false and twofold inevitability is thus sustained: first, the De Ira cannot be other than its traditionally received classification; second, its prose medium disqualifies it as satire ipso facto. Yet Seneca's essay will prove an exception to perscriptive definitions of class or division for reasons peculiar to satire as a genre and its historical development-- matters whose neglect have hitherto led to conclusions of premature finality.4 If avoidance of cut-and-dried opinion is to be achieved and the possibility of gauging the elements of satire in the De Ira established, historical debate over the definition of satire and attendant problems must be taken into consideration. Relatively recent acknowledgement that 3H. Keil (ed.), Grammatici Latini I, (Leipzig, 1857; repr., Hildesheim and New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1981), 485. The definition appears as follows: Satura dicitur carmen nunc quidem maledicum et ad carpenda hominum vitia compositum, quale scripserunt Lucilius et Horatius et Persius. 4The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), s.v. "Satire," by R.C. Elliott. "The formal verses. as composed by Horace, Persius, and Juvenal is the only satiric form to have even a remotely determinate structure, and it furnishes exceptions to every generalization ("qui dit satire latine, dit melange," writes Lejay)." 3 satire cannot be neatly or conveniently classified is an admission that even the most widely accepted generalizations about satire from Quintilian or Suetonius to the present offer only an incomplete description at best, a difficulty to which other genres are unaccustomed. 5 Questions of genre, obviated by sharp demarcations of structure and subject-matter, are not put to tragic drama or lyric poetry. But satire is a late arrival as a genre; its name as well as efforts to summarize its aims are of still later provenance, and Horace, looking at his own output, called it not satire but chats or conversations. 6 Both circumstances contribute to the disagreement over its nature. To the extent that definitions agree, both during antiquity and afterward, accord is generally founded on tone, theme, or use of figurative language; in short, features related to content.7 Scholarly dissension is usual on issues of etymology, orthography, or the genre's origins; there is a consensus on purpose (viz., censure of vice and folly), topical commentary 5Ibid., 739. Elliott summarizes the problem well: "But the spirit which informs them is too mercurial to be confined to exclusive literary structures; it proliferates everywhere, adapting itself to whatever mode (verse or prose) seems congenial. Its range is enormous ... " 6Quintilian Institutio Oratoria 10.1.93. 7Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 738. The definition of Dr. Johnson offered here, as "a poem in which wickedness or folly is censured," is but one of many in which the function of satire is continually observed. 4 on the socio-political milieu, or satirical wit and its accessory stratagems-- ridicule, parody, and caricature, when these are the preponderant topics. 8 Yet it is the very question of morphology that definition strives to resolve which elicits fiercest controversy. But here one must challenge the ipse dixit of the venerable Quintilian--however esteemed his critical acumen-- to whose auctoritas most arguments ultimately appeal, for his is perhaps the most formidable of tribunals before which to appraise a literary work's compliance with the lex operis. Among the assessments of genre formation in Quintilian's synopsis are the celebrated remarks with respect to satire's origin and forms: a terse declaration of its Roman genesis, with comments descriptive of the usual structures.9 The critic's observations have occasioned prescriptive consequences: nevertheless, the actual combinations of verse, or mixed verse and prose, must stand. Despite the modern concession that works designated satires subsequent to antiquity are exempt from this formula, there is relative unanimity that Quintilian's formulary stipulations apply 8Michael Coffey, Roman Satire (London and New York: Methuen, 1976), 3-23. This furnishes perhaps the best recent account. Ulrich Knoche, Roman Satire, trans. Edwin S. Ramage (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975), 3-16. Knoche's initial remarks are a worthwhile introduction to the relevant issues. However, he later hedges his early insistence upon strict definition by acknowledging (p. 89) the status of Horace's Epistles as satire. 9Quintilian Institutio Oratoria 10.1.93. 5 to all satire written during antiquity.10 In sum, Seneca's De Ira was not considered satire by the very critic who described the genre's inception and general features, and who also knew Seneca's writings. Admittedly, modern allowances for the later transformations of satire do not negate the testimonia of Seneca's own and immediately succeeding eras.11 Indeed, the De Ira's prose framework and abstract features support the judgment that it is a philosophical work. Modern criticism, without dismissing the extant examples of Roman satire, draws our attention to its intrinsic nature and expression, aside from the artifice of definition prescribed by the critics of a given epoch--even the epoch in which the definition was first formulated.12 Acknowledgement of Roman derivation and conventions,
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