Gaius Lucilius

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Gaius Lucilius (* after 180 BC in Suessa Aurunca , Campania ; † 103 BC in Naples ) was a Roman poet who played a key role in the development of satire and gave it its current meaning. He has been considered the archegete of the genus since ancient times , which is evident from the statements of Quintilian and Horace , who calls him the inventor.

Life

Both his praenomen and his nomen gentile are documented by the poet himself and by other sources. On the one hand there is an inscription on a mirror from today's Palestrina, a city east of Rome. On this stands Ceisia Loucilia written what is proof that the name Lucilius among the Latins was very old. On the other hand, there are references to the name of the poet in Cicero.

Lucilius was born in the city of Suessa, which was located in the land of the Aurunker , which in turn was located between the regions of Campania and Latium. This emerges clearly from a statement by the satirical poet Juvenals, who describes Lucilius as an important offspring of this city.

Lucilius was most likely not married, as he has been critical of the marriage at various points in his fragments and has also opposed the policy pursued by the Censor Metellus Macedonicus to increase the number of marriages. Nevertheless, one must approach this with caution, since in the genre satire one always has to reckon with exaggeration and irony. After all, Juvenal also spoke out in the so-called women satire in a critical-satirical way about women and here satirical elements cannot be denied.

Regarding the poet's family, it can also be established that he had a brother who was roughly the same age as himself. This brother had a daughter named Lucilia who was married to Gnaeus Pompeius Strabo , the consul of 89. From this marriage, the later triumvir Gnaeus Pompeius , who was honored for some time with the cognomen "Magnus", emerged. The marriage should be shortly before the birth of Cn. Pompey took place in 106. Also of importance is the formulation of Velleius stirpis senatoriae , which indicates that the brother of the poet - in contrast to Lucilius himself - was a senator. As a supporting link in the chain of evidence, a certificate from Adramyttium must be used, which is an arbitration award ordered by a senior official on the basis of a senate resolution. Cichorius has now proven with great certainty that one of the signatories of this document - namely M. Lucilius - was probably the brother of the poet and therefore actually a senator. Furthermore, according to Cichorius, he is said to have been the great-uncle of the politician Gaius Lucilius Hirrus .

As far as the poet's social background is concerned, one can assume that Lucilius not only came from a well-to-do family and probably belonged to the equites himself , but that he also had Roman citizenship. Different arguments can be put forward for both: Citizenship is likely to have passed from the father to Lucilius and his brother, so that this could become a senator. A comparison Horace made between himself and the satirical poet with regard to their two fortunes, among other things, makes it probable that Lucilius was a large landowner. In addition, Cicero also expresses himself in this way about the satirist's financial situation by speaking of Lucilius having been accused of grazing his cattle on an ager publicanus , a public piece of land. On the basis of various other testimonies, one can assume that Lucilius was in possession of estates in and around Taranto, Consentina, Bruttium, Suessa, Naples and on Sicily and Sardinia. In addition to these rural possessions, the poet was also able to call a palace in Rome and apparently a property in Naples his own. The palace in Rome was originally built for the residence of the Seleucid prince Demetrios , who had come to Rome as a hostage.

In summary, it can be said about the social position of Lucilius that he was almost certainly a Roman citizen who, as a large landowner, had numerous latifundia - scattered throughout the Mediterranean. This high position also opened up for him equal treatment with other high-ranking personalities such as Fr. Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus Africanus Minor. Without such a position in Roman society, it would probably not have been possible for him to criticize in such harsh form - even of important fellow citizens - as he did.

Despite his high social position, he never held a political office or even took up the cursus honorum . Despite his retreat in the otium , the poet did not neglect his duties as a Roman citizen, for he served as eques in the Numantine War under Scipio from 134 to 133 , as we learn from the testimony of Velleius.

But the friendship between him and Scipio seems to have developed earlier, since Scipio's possessions in Lavernium were in close proximity to the Lucilii estates, so that Scipio and Lucilius knew each other from their youth. This friendship is of vital importance to the work of the satirical poet in that he shared friend and foe with Scipio. This led on the one hand to the fact that he was a member of the so-called Scipionenkreis, on the other hand that the criticism felt in the fragments is also shaped by political motives and directed against political opponents of Scipio.

As can be seen from the numerous Graecisms in the surviving fragments of his work, the poet mastered Greek and was also very familiar with Greek literature. This exact knowledge of Greek literature emerges in numerous references to Greek authors, for example Homer , Euripides , Archilochus , Aristophanes , Pherekrates , Telekleides , Euclid , Demosthenes , Isocrates and Plato . In general, this weakness for Greek is not surprising in view of the Grecophile Scipion circle. The important position that Greek culture occupies for Lucilius is also expressed in the fact that the Greek philosopher Kleitomachos dedicated a book to him. From this and from reinforcing interpretations of various fragments, Cichorius concludes that Lucilius spent a certain time in Athens for the purpose of the educational trip to Greece, which is usual in this class, as it is e.g. B. later also did Marcus Tullius Cicero .

plant

Lucilius wrote 30 books of satires, of which, however, only fragments - a total of approx. 1300 verses - have been preserved because they were quoted by other ancient and late ancient authors. In addition to Marcus Tullius Cicero , Lactantius and the grammarian Sextus Pompeius Festus , the grammarian Nonius Marcellus must be mentioned in this context, in whose work De compendiosa doctrina a large part of the fragments that have survived have been handed down. The longest fragment we have left is the so-called virtus fragment, which is a definition of virtue that is close to the Stoic philosophy of Panaetius .

The 30 satire books were not obtained in a single publication, but were probably made available to the public in three different corpora. At the beginning there is the oldest corpus, which includes books 26 to 30. This can be demonstrated by historical allusions in the surviving fragments of these books. This is followed by the books of the second collection 1 to 21, which, like the first corpus, were probably edited by Lucilius himself. The remaining books 22 to 25, on the other hand, cause difficulties. Due to the fact that they contain poems that are not satires but, for example, epigrams, they may not have been composed for the purpose of publication. Hence, firstly, they could have been edited posthumously, and secondly, by some grammarian, they could have been added as a supplement to the larger of the two separately circulating corpora, namely 1 to 21.

The main criterion for deciding the chronology of the satire books was the meter: here, Lucilius can trace a development that had significant effects on the satire genre itself. The first corpus (26–30) is characterized by its polymetric, ie it contains trochaic septa (book 26 and 27) as well as iambic senare (book 28 and 29) and dactylic hexameter (book 30). Once Lucilius had found the meter which in his eyes best suited his poems, he only stuck to this meter - the dactylic hexameter - in which he completely wrote the second book collection.

So if Ennius did not yet have a uniform meter in his books of Saturae , Lucilius saw a development from this very polymetric to the dactylic hexameter, which thus became the constituent meter of the satire genre and later also of subsequent satirical poets such as Horace and Juvenal and Persius was used.

The question of what title Lucilius gave his poems cannot be answered with complete certainty, since various names can be found in his oeuvre: e.g. B. poemata or ludus ac sermones . The grammarians later call it satirae . Lucilius may have titled his works as saturae to illustrate his literary relationship with Ennius.

In contrast to Ennius, the main topic is the “satirical” treatment of everyday events in our sense, which includes above all a harsh criticism of his contemporaries. It was precisely this polemic that was considered the characteristic feature of Lucilius' satires in ancient times. The poet achieved fame and fame in antiquity through the acerbitas and mordacitas ascribed to him , the polemical element in his poetry, which was directed against both the high and the low in contemporary society.

In this respect, he also follows a line of tradition that goes from Archilochus to Aristophanes, the most important exponent of ancient comedy in Athens, when he targeted leading men of the state. A characteristic of his closeness to Aristophanes is in particular that the victims of his ridicule are named, as was customary in the Attic Old Comedy. Horace also tells us about this dependence in Satires 1, 4, 1–7.

After the surviving fragments of Lucilius had remained unnoticed for centuries, the Dutch philologist Frans van der Does , son of the eminent Dutch scholar Jan van der Does (Janus Dousa), was the first to take care of them and organize them in the period of Renaissance humanism 1597 the complete first edition ( editio princeps ) of the Lucilian fragments under his Latin name Franciscus Dousa . It was reprinted several times over the centuries and remained the authoritative edition on Lucilius until it was replaced by Friedrich Marx's authoritative text edition in 1904/1905 ( Lucilii Carminum Reliquiae , two volumes).

Text output

  • C. Lucilii carminum reliquiae . re. enarious. Friedrich Marx . 2 volumes, Leipzig 1904/05 (reprint Stuttgart / Amsterdam 1963).
  • Lucilius: Satires (= SQAW 23 : 1-2). Latin and German by Werner Krenkel . 2 volumes, Berlin / Leiden 1970.
  • Lucilius: Satires (= texts for research 106). Latin and German. Introduced, translated and explained by Johannes Christes and Giovanni Garbugino. Darmstadt 2015.

literature

Overview representations

Investigations

  • Karin Haß: Lucilius and the beginning of personality poetry in Rome (= Hermes . Individual writings. Vol. 99). Steiner, Stuttgart 2007, ISBN 978-3-515-09021-6 (also: Freiburg (Breisgau), university, dissertation, 2004).
  • Dietmar Korzeniewski (ed.): The Roman satire (= ways of research. Vol. 238, ISSN  0509-9609 ). Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 1970, pp. 161–274 (two articles by Werner Krenkel and Jan H. Waszink)

reception

  • Philipp Kamphausen: The Lucilius edition of Franciscus Dousa (1597) in its scholarly environment. Scientific publishing house, Trier 2014, ISBN 978-3-86821-549-6

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ inst. 10.193
  2. ↑ sat. 1,10,48
  3. ↑ CIL 14, 4101
  4. ↑ de orat. 2.253, 3.86, 3.171
  5. ↑ Iuv. 1.20
  6. ^ Vell. 2.29.2
  7. ↑ Hor. Sat. 2,1,74 f.
  8. ↑ Cic. de orat. 2.284
  9. ^ Vell. 2.9.4
  10. ↑ cf. Cic. ac. 2.102
personal data
SURNAME Lucilius, Gaius
BRIEF DESCRIPTION roman poet
DATE OF BIRTH after 180 BC Chr.
PLACE OF BIRTH Suessa Aurunca
DATE OF DEATH 103 BC Chr.
Place of death Naples