This seminar will offer an overview of issues of humorous free speech in ancient Rome, focusing on the verse satirists Lucilius, Horace, Persius and Juvenal, as well as Petronius, author of the Satyricon (a bawdy and irreverent novel mixing prose with verse).  The satires written by these writers tested the boundaries of what could be said in a world where certain persons were not only allowed to indulge in free speech (libertas), but expected to do so, and where others were expected either to keep silent, or to let others speak for them.  The Roman world of the satirists is one where free speech belonged to certain ‘kinds’ of people, but not to others.  We will look at who had the right to speak freely in ancient Rome and who did not.  We will examine the workings of libertas, its protections and limits, by studying the changing ways and expectations of satire over time, not only as a matter of different satirists having taken up with the genre in different ways, each according to his own purposes and talents, but as matter of the Roman state’s having been made over from a republic, where libertas was a key identifying feature of noble speech, to an autocratic family dynasty, where merely criticizing the trending ways of things could be taken as an attack on the emperor’s governance and/or person, resulting in the criticizer’s social demise, if not his exile or death.  If these issues sound contemporary, that is precisely the point. By examining ancient practices and theories of free expression, this seminar aims to give historical depth to, and invite alternative perspectives on, similar questions in our own day.

This seminar will be conducted online.  Readings will be provided in advance of the seminar, and all participants are asked to complete the readings and to participate in the discussion.

Our Professor:  Kirk Freudenburg, Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Classics, Yale University

Kirk Freudenburg received his BA from Valparaiso University, and an MA in Classics from Washington University in St. Louis. He took his PhD from the University of Wisconsin, where he wrote a dissertation under the direction of Denis Feeney.

Before coming to Yale he taught at Kent State University, Ohio State University and the University of Illinois. At Ohio State he was Associate Dean of the Humanities and at Illinois he was Chair of the Department of Classics. His research has long focused on the social life of Roman letters, especially on the unique cultural encodings that structure and inform Roman ideas of poetry, and the practical implementation of those ideas in specific poetic forms, especially satire.

His main publications include: The Walking Muse: Horace on the Theory of Satire (Princeton, 1993), Satires of Rome: Threatening Poses from Lucilius to Juvenal (Cambridge, 2001), the Cambridge Companion to Roman Satire (Cambridge, 2005), Oxford Readings in Classical Studies: Horace’s Satires and Epistles (Oxford University Press, 2009), and the Cambridge Companion to the Age of Nero (Cambridge, 2017), co-edited with Shadi Bartsch and Cedric Littlewood. Currently he is writing a commentary on the second book of Horace’s Sermones for the Cambridge Green and Yellows.

Registration is now open!  Register by filling out the brief form below.