UCLA UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Writing in the Street: The Development of Urban Poetics in Roman Satire Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7x66m4vs Author Gillies, Grace Publication Date 2018 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Writing in the Street: The Development of Urban Poetics in Roman Satire A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Classics by Grace Gillies 2018 © Copyright by Grace Gillies 2018 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Writing in the Street: The Development of Urban Poetics in Roman Satire by Grace Gillies Doctor of Philosophy in Classics University of California, Los Angeles, 2018 Professor Amy Ellen Richlin, Chair My dissertation examines Roman imperial satire for its relationship with non-elite street culture in the Roman city. I begin with a lexicon of sites and terms related to Roman concepts of disgust in the city, as they appear in the satiric sources I am working with. Then, in my next four chapters, I work chronologically through the extant satires to show how each author reflects or even appropriates practices from Roman street culture. Satirists both condemn parts of the city as disgusting—the parts and people in them who ignore social and cultural boundaries—and appropriate those practices as emblematic of what satire does. The theoretical framework for this project concerns concepts of disgust in the Roman world, and draws primarily on Mary Douglas (1966) and Julia Kristeva (1982). The significance of this work is twofold: (1) it argues that satire is, far from a self-contained elite practice, a genre that drew heavily on non-elite urban ii culture; (2) that it adds to a fragmentary history of Roman street culture. The introduction and lexicon establish a vocabulary and framework for examining the history of street culture, and the city in Roman satire. After the lexicon, I continue with the poet Horace, whose work shows evidence of the destruction of tenement housing and squatters' camps under Augustus (31BC- 14AD). I argue that the urban poor addressed in Horace's satires had a collective memory. My third chapter focuses on the Neronian satirists Persius and Petronius (54-68AD). Both of them, I argue, display a version of street culture for an elite readership, as a form of slum tourism. Persius both condemns poor or mixed-residence parts of the city as worth of disgust (and hence satire), and at the same time compares satire to practices that make the city disgusting, like public excretion. What remains of Petronius's novel satirizes poor communities in the streets and alleyways of Roman cities. My fourth and fifth chapters work with a final pair of Roman satirists from the end of the 1 st century AD, Martial and Juvenal. Both of these authors consistently visualize themselves as standing in the street, and incorporate aspects of oral street culture in their poetry, including street harassment and public sales and auctions. iii The dissertation of Grace Gillies is approved. Maria Teresa de Zubaiurre Chris Johanson Robert A. Gurval Amy Ellen Richlin, Committee Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2018 iv Table of Contents List of Figures vi Acknowledgements vii Vita viii Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Urban Sites of Disgust in Satiric Literature 18 Chapter 2: Contested Memories in the City Streets of Horace and Ovid 93 Chapter 3: Slum Tourism in Persius and Petronius 150 Chapter 4: Martial's Fear City 208 Chapter 5: Juvenal at the Crossroads 245 Conclusion: The Sewer in the City of God 317 Bibliography 325 v List of Figures 2.1. A fragment of the wall-painting from the praedia of Julia Felix. 99 2.2. A detail of the Esquiline hill. 107 2.3 A detailed reconstruction of the Gardens of Maecenas. 108 2.4 Häuber's reconstruction of the Gardens of Maecenas from 1990. 109 3.1 A screenshot from Ghostbusters (1984), showing the exterior of the firehouse. 154 3.2 A lararium from Pompeii, now in the Naples Archaeological Museum. 179 3.3 A painted warning against cacatores , now in the Naples Archaeological Museum. 180 3.4 A painted guard dog from the Tavern of Sotericus in Pompeii, I.12.3. 196 3.5 A mosaic of a sleeping dog from the entrance of the house of Caecilius Iucundus in 197 Pompeii, V.1.26. 3.6 A mosaic of a guard dog from the entrance of the house of P. Paquius Proculus in 197 Pompeii, I.8.1. 3.7 A mosaic of a guard dog with the caption cave canem from the entrance to the House 198 of the Tragic Poet in Pompeii, VI.8.5. 3.8 Relief from Ostia of woman selling food, Ostia Museum, inv. 134. 201 3.9 Episcopo relief depicting a woman selling vegetables, Ostia. 201 4.1 In The Out-of-Towners (1970) characters confront a sanitation strike with garbage that 211 was delivered by the Department of Sanitation. 4.2 Wall-painting from a taberna in Pompeii (Tavern of Salvias, VI.14.36). 217 5.1 Shadowman, Richard Hambleton, Downtown New York City, 1980 314 vi Acknowledgments I am deeply indebted to my professors at UCLA for their aid in bringing this project to fruition. I would particularly like to thank Professor Amy Richlin for all of her help, advice, and support. Before she ever became chair of my committee, Professor Richlin was a wonderful teacher and amazing mentor to me for years. As chair, she consistently went above and beyond the call of duty. I am also indebted to Professor Robert Gurval, who provided invaluable feedback while managing a busy schedule of international travel, as well as Professors Chris Johanson and Maite Zubiaurre for their ongoing support. I was also lucky enough to work with Professors Christopher Gregg, Evelyn Adkins, and Brandon Jones at the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies. In addition to being brilliant and wonderful colleagues, they provided a wealth of information and suggestions for my research. During a year of nearly constant teaching and travel, they gave me the most valuable thing of all: time to write. I would also like to extend warm thanks to friends and family: to Kristin Mann, for walking me off countless metaphorical ledges, in addition to providing support and feedback; to Katie Uva, for providing a number of sources on New York City's history, and a shoulder to kvetch on; and to Anastasia Baran, for her insights, feedback, and warmth. I would like to thank my mother, Sarah Robertson, for her love and encouragement through my academic career, and for her help in planning my wedding during the last chaotic months of writing. Finally, I would like to thank my soon-to-be husband, Ehren Murdick, for all of his love. vii VITA 2010 B.A. in Classics and Medieval/Renaissance Studies Wellesley College Wellesley, MA 2011-2012 Teaching Assistant Department of Classics University of California, Los Angeles 2012 M.A., Classics University of California, Los Angeles 2013-2014 Graduate Research Mentorship University of California, Los Angeles 2015-2016 Teaching Assistant Department of Classics University of California, Los Angeles 2015-2016 Collegium of University Teaching Fellowship University of California, Los Angeles 2016-2017 Instructor Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies Rome, Italy 2017 Citation for Teaching Excellence University of California, Los Angeles 2017-2018 Dissertation Year Fellowship University of California, Los Angeles PRESENTATIONS Gillies, Grace (January 2015) Staging Revolt: Theater in the Sicilian Slave Wars. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Classical Studies . ——— (January 2016) Constructing Identity in the Sepulchral Relief of Fonteia Helena and Fonteia Eleusis. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Classical Studies. ——— (May 2016) Street Harassment in Martial 2.17. Paper presented at Feminism and Classics VII. viii ——— (April 2018) Same Sex, Different Day: the Amazon Communities of Wonder Woman (2017) and Xena: Warrior Princess. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the ` Classical Association of the Middle West and South. ix Introduction This dissertation, Writing in the Street: The Development of Urban Poetics in Roman Satire , explores the picture of the city streets that is generated by Roman satire: what this image of the streets looks like, what sources satirists are drawing from in making it, and what role it plays in their work. The authors discussed include the imperial verse satirists, Horace, Persius, and Juvenal, as well as fragments of Lucilius. Other authors who use satiric themes, even if they are working within a different genre, have been included; Ovid, Petronius, and Martial also engage satirically with the urban landscape. Satire, as I will show, is not only a quintessentially urban genre, but as a genre plays the largest role in defining the culture of the Roman street, and the city outside of the limited scope of monumental buildings and elite use of public spaces. It is satire, more than any other genre, that gives us a picture of the Roman street. That picture is worth examining, because it has had such a long afterlife, and comes from such a skewed perspective. In each of these chapters, I examine ways in which satiric authors indirectly witness aspects of urban culture as they incorporate them into their own work. Frequently the places, people, and practices that are associated with the city streets are the objects of contempt—but it is this very contempt that generates satire, which leads to a kind of loving disgust on the part of the authors. They claim to be scouring the streets as a moralizing force, but at the same time gaze at the urban slums with pleasure, and even frame their own work in terms of the pollution of the city street.