UCLA

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 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 1st 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.