Symbolic waters have been charted in nearly every genre of ancient poetry. Rivers and springs have long histories as literary symbols in antiquity, and the passages of Greek and Roman poetry that feature poets figuring their verses and voices as waters of various kinds (everything from crashing floods to tiny drops of dew) are too numerous to count. Augustan poetry is particularly rich in waters that signify, and that serve to spell out and particularise the qualities of the poems in which they figure; some of the more famous of these waters course through the satires of Horace (the Sermones ‘Conversations’).Footnote 1 Despite drawing inspiration from a ‘foot-going muse’ (musa pedestris), for whom Helicon's springs are generically out of reach, Horace uses images of water on frequent occasions in his satires not only to describe the emotional and poetic habits of his Sermones, their clarity, metrical flow and so on, but to figure their moral purposes, and to cast aspersions on those other poets who write in ‘turgid’ and ‘unbounded’ ways that are suggestive of a failure of self-control (verbal, metrical, emotional and otherwise).
It is the purpose of this paper to introduce new options for two of Roman satire's most programmatically suggestive and well-explored waters: the figuration of Lucilius as a river churning with mud at Horace, Sat. 1.4.11, and the transformation of that image at Juvenal, Sat. 3.62–8, where the satirist describes a trash-filled Orontes flowing upstream into the Tiber. Scholars have long recognised that behind both images is the muddy Euphrates of Callimachus, Hymn to Apollo 107–12, where the poet taunts his rivals for writing verses that run on like a raging torrent, loud and strewn with debris. The tradition of poets using images of water to capture the quality and ‘flow’ of their (and other) voices goes back at least to Hesiod, and numerous loci within that tradition have been cited to help make sense of Horace's criticisms of Lucilius as ‘muddy’ in Sat. 1.4. But what is missing from these explanations — or such is the claim of this paper — is any sense of how the satirists’ water imagery touches on realities in the Roman world; that is, how for Romans these images might be taken to refer differently, to things outside of literature, within a cultural context where water (its qualities, abundance, management and flow) was already its own powerful mode of symbolic expression.
For the Romans, the sourcing, channelling and spectacular distribution and display of water was a cultural obsession. Throughout the Roman world, and over many centuries of Roman rule, political careers were built upon the ability of magistrates, emperors and local elites to provide rivers of clean water, in increasingly unimaginable amounts, to thirsty and unwashed places. Both for those who built them, and for the masses who drew upon them, Rome's waterworks were much more than a prerequisite for human survival. They were structures to rule with and to communicate with, channelling large-scale messages about Roman power, cleverness and munificence; about modernity, wealth and the workings of effective administration.Footnote 2 As such, Rome's aqueducts, drainage systems and spectacular water displays (sprawling bath complexes, fountains, nymphaea, artificial lakes and pools, etc.) offered vivid and tangible proof of Rome's skilful and enlightened rule. As I hope to show in the pages that follow, it is precisely here, in the fantastical workings of water in the Roman world, that satire's water figurations accrue new potentials to criticise and to communicate in uniquely Roman ways.
I SATIRE'S ROMAN WATERS
Of several writers targeted by Horace for being lax and overblown, the best known and most significant by far is Lucilius, his predecessor in the genre of satire. Horace famously describes Lucilius as a river muddily raging in his fourth satire, an idea reprised from the first poem (the Aufidus image of Sat. 1.1.54–62) and repeated with slight modifications at Sat. 1.10.50–1. The opening lines of Sat. 1.4 are worth quoting in full, because they provide the larger context of Horace's famous critique:
The poets Eupolis, Cratinus and Aristophanes, and all the other ‘real men’ of Old Comedy, if anyone deserved lampooning, either because he was wicked, and a thief, or because he was an adulterer, or murderer or notorious in some other way, they would brand him with abundant freedom of speech. Lucilius depends on them totally. These are the ones he follows, changing only their metres and rhythms. A clever man, his nose wiped clean, a rugged composer of verse: that's where he was faulty. He would routinely rattle off two hundred verses in an hour standing on one foot, thinking it a big achievement. Since he flowed full of mud, there were things you'd like to remove. He would blab on and on, too lazy to put up with the hard work of writing; of writing properly, that is. For I don't give a damn how much one writes.
What needs to be observed here, though nothing has ever been made of it, is how Horace's figuration of Lucilius as muddy (‘cum flueret lutulentus, erat quod tollere uelles’, 11) extends directly from a very particular figuration of Lucilius and the Old Comic poets of Classical Athens as censor figures, angry Catos who perform a salutary public function by attacking vice, nailing it with the censor's nota (‘multa cum libertate notabant’, 5).Footnote 3 That nota, the black mark of infamy that censors wielded to deprive vicious knights of their horses, and to strike bad senators from the rolls of the Senate, was used to keep the moral condition of the state in good repair.Footnote 4 For their part, Aristophanes and Cratinus were not censors, and their comedies did not crusade against murderers and thieves.Footnote 5 To take any of this at face value is hazardous because Horace is here playing with some rather loudly touted ideas about where satire comes from, what it should take up with and the good that it is supposed to do — ideas favoured in some sectors of Horace's readership (likely by the grammarian-poet Valerius Cato), here dangled from Horace's ironic nose by being made to sound rather extreme and silly.Footnote 6 Horace does something similar in his Epistle to Florus, where he tries on the mindset of his jurisconsult addressee by speaking in legalistic terms about how a good poet polices the language of his verse (Epist. 2.2.108–23):
But if someone wants to produce a poem that is legitimate, he must take up the law tables and mind of a well-born censor when he writes. Those lacking distinction, and yet others who are frivolous and considered unworthy of office, these words he will have the daring to remove from their station, even though they are unwilling to leave and even to this day linger inside Vesta's inner sanctum. A man of good standing himself, he will unearth long-lost words for the people's use, and he will expose to the light of day lovely terms for things that were once recalled by Rome's ancient Catos and Cetheguses but now lie fallen beneath unsightly neglect and lonely old age. New words fathered by usage he will adopt. Strong and flowing, just like a pristine river, he will pour out wealth and he will bless Latium with rich language. Words overgrown he will prune back, and words too rough he will smooth with wholesome cultivation.
In order to write a ‘legitimate’ or ‘law-abiding’ poem (‘legitimum poema’), Horace says to Florus, one must adopt the mind of a censor (‘animum censoris sumet honesti’), such as a Cato or Cethegus. Bad words lacking grauitas (‘sine pondere’) need to be deemed ‘unworthy of honour/office’ (‘honore indigna’).Footnote 7 Some noble old words, like men of once great families, need to be revived, and some newly coined words, like worthy new men attempting to enter the Senate, should be approved of and allowed to enter the poetic high end of the Latin language. Some worthy words enter the language, while other opprobrious words are stricken from it. The figure is wonderfully imaginative and strange, picturing a beautifully managed ‘senate house’ of the Latin language, all purified and brought up-to-date by a poet-censor who performs a lectio senatus of the Latin language itself.Footnote 8 Having put this idea in play, Horace then goes on to describe the beneficial effects of the poet's censorial efforts, casting them in unambiguously aquatic terms: ‘strong and flowing, just like a pristine river, he will pour out wealth and he will bless Latium with rich language’ (120–1).
From talk of a censor-poet cleaning up the Latin language, Horace moves directly into a description of the clean and salutary waters that flow from his efforts. This may seem like a strange figurative turn to take, but there is a hidden rationale to be observed here; a cultural sense that comes of knowing what all Roman censors were routinely tasked with doing. Horace's Roman readers would have no problem following the flow from censorial lectio to clear-flowing water, because they knew that not only was it the censors’ responsibility to oversee the financial qualifications and moral purity of Rome's leaders, they were also charged with ensuring the purity and abundance of Rome's water supply.Footnote 9 As Frontinus points out in his treatise on Rome's aqueducts, during the Republic the task of building and maintaining aqueducts fell to the censors when there were censors actually in office, and to the aediles in years when there were no censors.Footnote 10 At Leg. 3.3 Cicero gives a complete list of the censors’ duties, and these include the iconic and better known moral functions of regulating behaviour, and seeing to it ‘that they allow no reprobate to remain in the Senate’ (‘probrum in senatu ne relinquonto’). But at the top of Cicero's list are the less glamorous, and easily overlooked, tasks of book-keeping and contracting for public works: ‘The censors must keep count of the people: their ages, offspring, families and wealth. They must keep watch over the city's temples, roads, waters and the tax resources of the treasury’ (‘urbis templa uias aquas aerarium uectigalia tuento’).Footnote 11
The oldest of Rome's aqueducts, the Aqua Appia, was built by the censor of 312 b.c.e., Appius Claudius Caecus, who also built the famous road that went by his name (another censorial project). Rome's second aqueduct, the Anio Vetus, was built by the censor Manius Curius Dentatus in 272, and a third was planned by the censors of 179, but not actually built until 144, by the urban praetor Q. Marcius Rex (thus it was known as the Aqua Marcia).Footnote 12 The Aqua Tepula, Rome's fourth aqueduct, was begun by the censors Cn. Servilius Caepio and L. Cassius Longinus in 125 b.c.e. Censors were tasked not only with building aqueducts, but repairing and maintaining them, and they were responsible for draining noisome swamps and blasting through the built-up sludge of the Cloaca Maxima, as Agrippa did in the year of his post-consular aedileship (a kind of obviously hidden censorship) in 33 b.c.e., even riding a boat through the main channel of the sewer from the big drain in the Subura right out into the Tiber river in order to declare the job successfully done (Plin., NH 36.104). During his curule aedileship of that year, Agrippa performed many of the basic tasks of a censor, even removing unworthy men from the senatorial rolls.Footnote 13
One sees, then, how the water imagery in the Epist. 2.2 passage cited above is less a figurative turn away from the ‘poet censor’ idea than it is a further development of that metaphor. And it is this same logic, I maintain, that hides inside, and helps make sense of, the far more famous construal of Lucilius as lutulentus in Sat. 1.4. As noted above, Horace begins that poem in a mock authoritarian mode by describing Lucilius as a poet who nails the censor's nota to vice. He then goes on to say that, as a writer of verse, Lucilius was himself faulty (‘nam hoc uitiosus’); he figures his verbal sloppiness and excess in terms of raging waters, churning with mud and trash (‘cum flueret lutulentus, erat quod tollere uelles’). The logic is like that of the Epist. 2.2 passage cited above, moving from one aspect of censorial responsibility to another. But in this case, the implication is that the censor poet in question is clearly not up to the job: Lucilius, the censor who actively assailed the wrongdoing of others, was himself slovenly and incapable of hard work (‘piger scribendi ferre laborem’, 12), blackened by the very filth, both moral and aquatic, that he, as censor, was tasked with cleaning up.Footnote 14 The problem of slap-dash writing is construed as a problem of incompetent and/or corrupt political practice. This is, moreover, an utterly Lucilian point to make about Lucilius, because it is the same point that Lucilius himself had made about a notoriously corrupt censor in his famous Lupus poem, the one that we now know as Lucilius’ first hexameter satire.
In that poem, the Romulus character, a recent arrival within the ‘senate house’ of heaven, functions as a comical stand-in for Cato the Censor: a turnip-eating novus homo who angrily berates his old enemy, Lucius Cornelius Lentulus Lupus, consul in 156 b.c.e.Footnote 15 Although Lupus had been found guilty of corruption and duly convicted during Cato's lifetime, he became censor and princeps senatus soon after Cato's death.Footnote 16 Lupus’ public funeral (an especially lavish funus censorium) in 125 or 124 b.c.e. is the occasion of Lucilius’ first satire. Standing before the heavenly concilium that adjudicates the recently deceased censor's bid for immortality, Romulus, in a high mock-Catonian dudgeon, denounces Lupus as the ‘Wolf’ who had so famously corrupted the office that Cato had once held. It is unclear whether Lucilius ever specifically likened his work as an exposer and disparager of vice to that of a Roman censor, but it is clear that the activities of censors, especially those of his own day whom he deemed vainglorious and/or hypocritical, were much on his mind, and that the failures and follies of censors were easy grist for his satiric mill. In fact, poems lampooning censors were featured at the front of both of his major collections: in Book 26, the first of his five-book collection of polymetric satires, and in Satire 1, the first book of his hexameter collection.Footnote 17 In those poems the satirist's voice echoes, challenges and, in its own way, makes up for the missing or hypocritical voices of the censors. As such, the poet's voice is easily construed as a version of the censor's. The same might be said of Varro, and of many of the satirist figures whom he lets loose against vice in his Menippean satires — prosimetric works written at a time when political corruption was rampant, but the office of censor was defunct and sorely in need of revival.Footnote 18
The tradition of satire, as Horace received it, is one in which the analogy of the ‘satirist as censor’ was strong: sometimes the figure was put into play in order to overdo and mock the satirist's voice (along with any other voices that happened to sound like his), while at other times it was used to authorise his voice and lend it moral weight. In most cases, given the fragmentary nature of the remains, one cannot tell how the figure is being put to work. In the two poems where the Lucilius lutulentus claim is made, we see Horace engaging in numerous quasi-censorial activities of his own, as if to suggest, tongue-in-cheek, that he has his own crusading censor's nota to wield against the ‘literary vice’ he spies in the world at large.Footnote 19 In Sat. 1.10, for example, he calls out the neoteric epic poet, Furius Bibaculus, as a poeticide who slits poor Memnon's throat, then takes an axe to the Rhine's muddy head (36–7).Footnote 20 The metaphors are comically hyperbolic, but they find Horace playing (or better, ‘playing at playing’) the censorial role that he scripted for Lucilius and the Old Comic poets in Sat. 1.4, exposing and denouncing Bibaculus as a ‘murderer’. He adopts a censor's high, disapproving tone in railing against the mixing of frivolous Greek words with solid old Latin ones (‘uerbis Graeca Latinis / miscuit’, 20–1, ‘patriis intermiscere petita/ uerba foris’, 29–30), as if this constituted a kind of illicit miscegenation, debasing a pure Roman stock. Greeks and hellenophiles are excoriated in 1.10 for deigning to smooth out and sweeten the rougher edges of a naturally rugged Latin language, thus causing decent Romans to be forgetful of ‘fatherland and father Latinus’ (‘patriae patrisque Latini’, 27). Greek names drip off the speaker's mock Catonian tongue with disdain: Hermogenes Tigellius (‘Hermogenis … Tigelli’, 80, the mixed Greek/Roman name of a freedman, but here carefully spelled out to symbolise the linguistic hybridity of his verse), Demetrius the backbiter (‘uellicet absentem Demetrius’, 79), Pitholeon of Rhodes (‘Rhodio … Pitholeonti’, 22), Pantilius the bug (‘cimex Pantilius’, 78). Along with Greek writers targeted as foreign threats, Italian writers of dubious talent are held at arms length by being marked as immigrants who have made their way to Rome from far off places: Furius from the Alps (‘turgidus Alpinus’, 36), Cassius the Etruscan (‘Etrusci / quale fuit Cassi’, 61–2), Varro of Atax (‘Varrone Atacino’, 46). Not one of the many poets who are approved of by Horace in this poem is saddled with an ethno-geographic epithet, though many of them had themselves come to Rome from distant places; for example, Maecenas from Arretium in Etruria and Virgil from the borders of Cisalpine Gaul.
All of the writers who are approved of by Horace are invested with an aura of Roman solidity, assumed to be of like mind with the speaker, and thus committed to the old Roman (here made over as ‘Romano-literary’) values that he lionises: hard work, candour, self control and knowing what it means to be a friend in a Roman world. The author of the spurious (but ancient) eight-line introduction of Sat. 1.10 that appears primarily in MSS of the Ψ family is clearly aware of the poem's central conceit treating sloppy writing as a kind of criminal offence, worthy of hard censure. Attempting to replicate the censoriousness of the poet's voice, in verses purporting to be Horace's own, the imitator begins:
Lucilius, I will prove how full of fault you are with Cato, your defender, as my witness. He (Cato) is setting out to clear your badly wrought/wicked verses of their mistakes.
It is as if a criminal trial is underway. The Cato in question is Valerius Cato, the neoteric grammarian who was Lucilius’ first-century editor. But memories of his famous censorial namesake are invoked by the combination of name (‘teste Catone’) and figuration: a quasi moral crusade against uersus male factos.
II FLAVIAN WATERS: THE CENSOR (DOMITIAN) AS POETFootnote 21
Horace is not against the use of Greek words in Roman satire. He is against their excessive and careless use. What was a freewheeling comical feature of Lucilian satire (valued by later neoteric supporters as a stylistic virtue, and lionised by them as a key feature of the genre as Lucilius had defined it) is railed against by Horace in mock Catonian tones, as if the use of Greek words in Roman satire were a kind of foreign invasion, to be deplored as such. As I hope to demonstrate below, Juvenal adopts a similar mock censorial tone in his third satire, where his angry speaker, Umbricius, deplores the invasion not of Greek words, but of actual Greeks from the east of Rome's empire, and key to that performance is his creative redeployment of the muddy river imagery of Horace and Callimachus. But before undertaking that demonstration, it will be useful to look briefly at the water imagery of the Flavian period, in order to see what new turns images of water take in an era when the emperor was himself actively channelling waters and paving roads as Rome's censor. Early in his reign, Domitian declared himself Rome's ‘perpetual censor’ (censor perpetuus). All significant waterworks, in a sense, are his. Accordingly, images of water in the poems of the period are unusually susceptible to political construal, especially when developed at length.
The Flavian period is rich in dazzling waters, both poetic and actual: magnificent bath-houses, aqueducts (leaky and icicle-dangling), flooded arenas, fountains and pools.Footnote 22 To take just one (fairly obvious) example, Statius devotes twenty-seven lines of his Via Domitiana poem (Silv. 4.3.67–94) to describing the waters of the Volturnus, a river recently brought under control as part of a road-building project cutting through the marshy terrain that separated Capua from Naples.Footnote 23 He begins the poem by making a clear connection between Domitian as the censor who checks moral vice, and Domitian as the censor who builds roads (Silv. 4.3.13–23):
He who forbids the destruction of the strong sex and as censor prohibits grown males from fearing punishment for their good looks … It is he, burdened by the people's sluggish roads, and flatlands that detain every journey, who is removing the lengthy detours and who hardens the wearying sands with fresh pavement.
Later in the poem, Volturnus, god of the river newly spanned by Domitian's road, leans against the central arch of Caesar's bridge and tells the story of his recent make-over. He had been a reckless insurgent, prone to spilling over his banks and sinking ships (‘uallibus … refusum / et ripas habitare nescientem … turbidus minaxque, / uix passus dubias prius carinas’, 73–7), but now he is forced to stay within a ‘straight channel’ (‘recti … aluei’, 74). He had once been ‘dirty and heavy with mud’ (‘puluereum grauemque caeno’, 88). He had been prone to tearing away at his banks and churning up trees (79). But thanks to the efforts of Domitian, the ‘uictor perpetuus’ (84) who set him straight, he now flows with a current that sparkles, and he challenges the Liris river in the purity of his waters (‘ferar … nitente cursu … possim / puro gurgite prouocare Lirim’, 91–3).
Here, in the imagery of a conquered and newly Romanised/sanitised former insurgent — in the transformation of the Volturnus from raging, destructive and muddy to pristine and tightly controlled — we see the infrastructural efforts of Rome's censor perpetuus construed in familiar literary critical terms.Footnote 24 Developing ideas of Stephen Hinds on ‘immanent literary history’ in the poems of Statius, Francesca Martelli has recently shown that such overt political re-purposings of known literary tropes are ‘an unusually common occurrence in the Siluae’, and she makes a point about how these reconfigurations ‘can be used to do other things than simply aestheticise the poet's social and historical context’.Footnote 25 The basic possibilities of the censor poet metaphor had been explored long ago by Horace. For his part, Statius plays it strongly in the other direction, offering a vision of a poet censor, and he is much more obvious than Horace was in showing us that that is what he is up to.Footnote 26
III JUVENAL ON WATERS ‘NATIVE’ AND ‘FOREIGN’
The most fully developed water image in the poems of Juvenal occurs in his third satire (the central poem of his first book), in the famous rant of Umbricius, excoriating immigrants from the Greek East. As the satire begins, Juvenal's old friend is spied leaving the city with all of his worldly possessions loaded onto a cart. He is heading south to Cumae in order to make a new start. As he tells it, he is being driven out of Rome by a wave of immigrants pouring in from the East. He figures that mass migration as the Orontes, a Syrian river, torrentially loaded with junk, draining itself into the Tiber (Juv. 3.58–68):Footnote 27
I'll be quick to tell you, nor will shame keep me from saying, which nation it is that our rich men find ‘most agreeable’ these days: my fellow Romulans, I cannot stand this city gone Greek. But, hell, how little of that scum is actually Achaean [i.e. from the mainland]! The Syrian Orontes has long since drained itself into the Tiber, and along with itself it hauled in its language and mores and side-slanted strings, complete with piper, and of course its native drums, as well as the girls they make turn tricks near the race track. Head on over there, if it's a barbarian whore in a flouncy coloured turban that takes your fancy. Oh Romulan, that farmer-hick of yours wears the latest pranzo-prancers, and he has victory medallions on his ceroma-smeared neck!
The Tiber is a mess, strewn with Syrian trash. As Susanna Braund points out in her commentary on these lines, this is Juvenal's remake of Callimachus’ raging Euphrates.Footnote 28 In his Hymn to Apollo Callimachus figures the poetry favoured by his critics as the ‘Asianist’ excess of a muddy and debris-strewn Euphrates, an image that he sets against the pure small spring of his own song.Footnote 29 As always in these images, the point is that you speak or sing what you drink. To drink from a simple pure spring is to sing a pure and simple song. To drink from a muddy churning torrent is to speak torrentially: rapid-fire lines that clatter along with whatever ‘inspiration’ happens to bring churning along. What goes into you, in other words, is what comes out of you.
If picked up on, the reference to Callimachus exposes a gap between the speaker's vociferous rage against the importation of eastern goods, peoples and ways, and the specific metaphorical language that he uses to express that rage: itself an import from Alexandrian Egypt. A similar irony, even more obvious, is there for the sensing in Umbricius’ complaint that Rome has recently become a Greek city (‘Graecam urbem’). As Alessandro Barchiesi has pointed out, the only other place in Roman literature where the site of Rome is referred to as a Greek city is Virg., Aen. 6.97 (‘Graia urbs’), referring to Evander's Pallanteum.Footnote 30 To pick up on that reference is to be reminded that, according to the holiest pages of Rome's own mythology, the Greeks were always already there, inhabiting the future site of Rome well before Aeneas (himself an immigrant from the decadent East) came along. Put as it is, the complaint is a study in ironic dissonances and comical self-defeat.
In its Juvenalian instantiation, as part of a self-ironising, xenophobic complaint, the old Callimachean image demonstrates a number of further referential competences that it did not (or did not seem to) have before. In being fitted to its new use, the image has picked up the neo-Catonian anger of Sallust's famous comparison of Rome to a cesspool or ship's bilge into which all the worst muck of the Italian peninsula flowed (‘Romam sicut in sentinam confluxerant’, Sall., Cat. 37.5).Footnote 31 The particular ‘draining’ word that Juvenal uses (defluxit) brings with it a distinctive pedigree as well, in the famous Graecia capta claims of Hor., Epist. 2.1, where Horace asserts that the capture of Rome by her captive ‘brought the arts to clodhopping Latium’ (‘artes / intulit agresti Latio’, 156–7) — a phrase that basks in the pious glow of Aen.1.6 (‘inferretque deos Latio’).Footnote 32 He then says that, as a consequence of Rome's cultural capture by Greece, ‘that shaggy Saturnian rhythm drained away/ran dry, and a well-groomed style displaced its heavy stench’ (‘sic horridus ille / defluxit numerus Saturnius, et graue uirus / munditiae pepulere’).Footnote 33 In essence, the shaggy and stinking farmer-hick takes a bath. The mythological frame of Horace's tale is obvious (primitive and pure giving way to foreign and stylish, but corrupt), but his message runs counter to the frame: instead of deploring the eviction of Rome's native-born poetry as a foreign invasion and a loss of Saturnian (Golden Age) innocence, Horace commends it as a kind of necessary and salubrious purgation. Seen from his mock-censorial eye-view, Rome's native poetry was a pestilential swamp that needed to be drained. As Alessandro Barchiesi has pointed out, the rhetorical framing of Horace's claims ‘presupposes a mythological vision of a vanishing Saturnian age’.Footnote 34 But the message, especially in being so utterly disdainful of life in the country, is anti-Catonian in the extreme.
The way Horace tells it, the filth flows out, and the Saturnian swamp is drained. Latin literature shines bright because the sewers are in good working order. For Umbricius, however, the filth flows into the city rather than out of it. Seen through his eyes, Rome is reverting to the stinking swamp it once was.Footnote 35 Like the cloaca that it is made to resemble, the Syrian Orontes, Umbricius says, drains into the Tiber, carrying the ‘dregs’ or ‘feces’ (faex) of peoples from the far eastern borders of the Empire,Footnote 36 as well as the exotic luxury goods that they carted with them to Rome, their language and their mores (‘linguam et mores’). Here, once again, just as had been true for Horace (the same can be said for Persius as wellFootnote 37), to find the mud is to find the satiric project: the mess that the satirist censor is tasked with cleaning up. Easterners and their exotic ways are the filth that this river churns with, just as they are the main target of abuse in Juvenal's first book (bashing immigrants is his signature comic routine). Although the detail is easily missed, there is actual mud in these waters as well, lurking in that exotic Greek word ceromatico in line 68. The adjective refers to not just any old mud, but to ceroma (κήρωμα), a particular kind of high-end mud that served as a cushiony top-layer on wrestling floors in Greek gymnasia. Juvenal has Martial to thank for this conceit because it was Martial who first troped the palaestra as a muddy place when he taunted the muscular lesbian Philainis for being ‘muddy from the crumbling wrestling floor’ (‘putri lutulenta de palaestra’, 7.67; cf. ‘luteum ceromate corpus’, 11.47.5, and 14.50.1, ‘ne lutet immundum nitidos ceroma capillos’), and Martial also was the first, in fact the only other, Latin poet to make mention of the speciality mud ceroma in his poems (six times to Juvenal's twice).
Even the mud that these easterners are caked with is fancy and sounds terribly exotic. And that is true of their drums, hats, sandals and medallions as well: tympana, mitra, trechedipna, niceteri, a list that evokes ‘a noisy cult procession from the East’.Footnote 38 These are exactly the kinds of exotic-sounding, imported luxuries that the ‘censor god’ of Lucilius’ first satire (the ‘mock Cato’ of the Lupus poem, and the earliest one I know of) rails against in a similarly long list, all the while he luxuriates in the funniness of the Greek words that he lets trip off of his tongue.Footnote 39 And it is exactly that kind of verbal luxuriance (that is, loading down verses of ‘native’ Latin satire with extravagant Greek words, whatever lay at hand, to achieve various effects, funny, eroticising, softening or whatever) that Horace took his censor's nota to in cleaning up lutulentus Lucilius in Sat. 1.10. This passage finds Juvenal ranting in a high, and decidedly Lucilian dudgeon, playing the sewer-dredging censor in precisely the same linguistically excessive and muddy way that Horace disapproved of, and took on as his Augean project.
In Juvenal's make-over of Callimachus’ muddy Euphrates, it is not just Syrian goods and words and ways that are crashing into Rome, it is the Syrian peoples themselves, decked out in all their flamboyant and confusing regional colours. One member of the hungry tidal horde excoriated by Juvenal's Umbricius is an unnamed rhetorician: a ‘starving Greek punk’ (‘Graeculus esuriens’, 78), whom he dubs ‘more torrential than Isaeus’ (‘Isaeo torrentior’). The Isaeus in question was a Syrian rhetorician, whose ability to extemporise artfully and at length, in perfect Attic style, on any topic tossed his way, is praised in great detail by Pliny the Younger in the third letter of his second book. In his Lives of the Sophists Philostratus dubbed this Isaeus ‘an Assyrian’ (Philostr., V S 74), using the same geographic designation that Callimachus used of the raging Euphrates. But there was one other stand-out sophist of the late first century, a Stoic philosopher from the city of Tyre, to whom Pliny dedicates the tenth letter of his first book. If anyone could be considered ‘more torrential than Isaeus’, it would be this man. Arriving in Rome in 97 c.e., shortly after Domitian's demise, this other fresh immigrant from Syria dazzled Pliny and his friends with a winning style of corrective moral discourse that Pliny describes as ‘varied and abundant, and above all sweetly persuasive, able to push along wherever he leads even those who push back’.Footnote 40 If that all sounds rather river-like in its figuration, that may be because Pliny is exploring the further aquatic potentials of the man's name: the sophist in question was named Euphrates. Umbricius’ trashy Orontes, it seems, has yet another trashy river riding in on its waves.
For Juvenal's Umbricius, the sewers of Rome are not just clogged and running slow, they are flowing backwards in a giant fecal tide, blocked by an inrush of trash flowing upstream. Without saying so, the image painted by Umbricius poses the question: ‘What has become of Rome's censor?!’ As always in Juvenal, things have been left to run amok in Rome, and conditions are now worse than they have ever been before. One is hard-pressed to credit how bad things have become in Juvenal, because what he describes is so outrageously, tragically, catastrophically bad —and funny for being just that hyperbolic. Juvenal loads his river with more colourful trash than anyone had before in order to give a sense of how massive and well-nigh impossible his particular censorial/satiric project is. In the end, the river he describes is the river he is stuck drinking from in Rome. It is the river that inspires him, and accounts for the way he speaks; the one loaded with all that eastern trash.Footnote 41
IV CONCLUSION: SATIRE'S CENSORIAL WATERS
The main new contribution of this paper has been to spot and explore the censorial significations of Roman satire's water imagery that have previously gone unnoticed, largely because they are easily taken for other structures, especially literary structures, which they resemble uncannily. In its own way, then, this paper concerns the peculiar workings of Roman referentiality: how one intertext hides inside and inflects another, the cultural inside the literary (or this could go the other way around) to form a continuous structure, the separate parts of which cannot be teased apart without truncating or otherwise ruining the whole. In the course of this exploration, I hope to have shown that, no matter where they come from, satire's waters are always entirely Roman (tota nostra) in what they say and do. Even when they flow in from far off places in the East, as ‘influences’ drawn from Greek sources, they are received actively and, at times, aggressively into the structures of Roman thought, and reconfigured by those structures; taken up with as ‘our Roman own’ to do with as ‘we’ please, and put to doing some very Roman work. To put this in a different way, and as succinctly as I can, the ‘Callimachus in Rome’ phenomenon is never simply a matter of Greek ideas about poetry being validated by citation, as so many pre-existing packages of thought called up from remote storage by means of referential pointing and confirming. Rather, the citing of Callimachus is always a matter of the Greek poet's being received as a Roman: of his having his poetry, his values, his figures and conceits, etc., claimed by Romans as theirs to do new things with, as foreign structures of thought and expression radically reconceived, and aggressively repurposed.
