Roman Satire

About the lecture

In this lecture we provide an introduction to Roman satire, focusing in particular on: (i) the status of satire within Roman culture; (ii) the figure of Gaius Lucilius (2nd century BC), the inventor of the form, and the extent to which he embodied the Roman virtue of libertas (‘freedom’, ‘freedom of speech’); (iii) the figures of Horace (65-8 BC) and Persius (34-62 AD) and the limitations of free speech in the Roman empire compared to the Roman republic; (iv) Juvenal’s statement in his first Satire that he will write only about those who have already died; (v) the similarities between Juvenal and Lucilius, especially their aggressiveness and expansiveness; (vi) the significance of the metre of Roman satire, and the extent to which Juvenal’s Satires in particular imitates and subverts epic poetry.

About the lecturer

Llewelyn Morgan is a Classicist, a Fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford. The focus of most of his research is Roman literature and culture, and he is the author of the well-received study of Roman poetic form, Musa Pedestris: Metre and Meaning in Roman Verse (Oxford, 2010).

But he also has a longstanding fascination for Afghanistan, contemporary and historical, which he traces to his discovery, at an impressionable age, of a Russian samovar inscribed “Candahar 1881”. He has made several visits to Afghanistan in recent years, and his most recent book, The Buddhas of Bamiyan (Profile Books and Harvard University Press, 2012), traces the history of these remarkable monuments from their Buddhist origins 1,400 years ago, through their celebrity in Islamic wonder literature and European travel writing, up until their destruction in 2001.

Morgan is a regular public speaker, on many aspects of Classics and Afghanistan, appears occasionally on BBC Radio 4, and writes slightly less occasionally for the Times Literary Supplement.