Classics Colloquium

In this week's Classics Colloquium, Kate Meng Brassel, from the University of Pennsylvania, will give a talk entitled, “Whisper, Squawk, Grunt, Guffaw: Reading the sounds of Persius’s Satires.”
Often thought of as a “good kid” but a bad writer, Persius left behind a small collection of poetry upon his death at the age of 28. Satires has puzzled readers with its highly negative, discomfiting, and even disjunctive style—leaving many to wonder whether we should consider Satires a book at all. Persius challenges his readers to look at Rome’s sorry state themselves and to read his words with both their eyes and, importantly, their ears as he launches a cradle-to-grave critique of literary culture at Rome—from its producers to its audiences, from sources of inspiration to its aspirations to immortality, from its methods of education to its dissemination in performance and publication. In this talk, Professor Brassel pursues the significance of Persius’s sounds and argues that the verses’ brays, squawks, whispers, and guffaws structure Satires intelligibly as a Roman poetry book (libelle, 1.120) to go toe-to-toe with any Eclogues or Sermones.