Mayer, R. (2003) Persona Problems The Literary Persona in Antiquity Revisited - MD 50, Pp. 55-80

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Persona Problems. The Literary Persona in Antiquity Revisited

Author(s): Roland G. Mayer
Source: Materiali e discussioni per l'analisi dei testi classici, No. 50 (2003), pp. 55-80
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Roland G. Mayer
Persona<l> Problems.
The Literary Persona in Antiquity Revisited*
I am not poetic enoughto separatea man's
poetryentirelyfromhis character.
CharlotteHeywood inJaneAusten,Sanditon
Je est un autre.
Artur Rimbaud, La lettredu voyant
. Introductory
A brief preliminaryword is necessary,since my topic, the literary

personain antiquity,has been so recently and so ably handledby
DiskinClayin this periodical(1998)that it mightbe thoughtthat little new or usefiilcouldbe saidon the matter.
Earlyin 1997I delivereda seminarpaperin London'sInstituteof
ClassicalStudieson this very topic. My aim was to establishso far as
possible how Greek and Roman readers,who, significantly,often
regardedthe literarypersona, a stratcomprise writers-as-readers,
egy of reprsentationwith which they were fuyacquainted.My
vidence, which spanned many centuries, suggested that the ancient notion of the literary persona was fundamentallydiffrent
from ours. Few if any Greekor Romanreaderswere capableof conceivingof th personain the termsnow common to moderncritics.
My approachto the issue was thus diffrentfrom Clay's:he was
specificallylooking for what might be called 'pre-echoes'or analogues of the moderntheory of the literarypersona- I rely hre on
his rsumat (1998,18).In th event, he found virtuallynone - Procluswas as close as he could identify(1998,38),andhe too concluded
that the ancientsdid not entertainnotions about the personaat ali
similarto ours. So we arrivedat the same place by diffrentroutes.
But, as I wish to stress, my concern was to establish,if possible,
what the literarypersona was thought to be in antiquity,and for
that reason the vidence I have assembledremainsvaluable,espe* Audiences at the Institute of Classical Studies (London),
Heidelberg, Pisa and Rutgers, as well as this journal's two anonymous rfres, have helped to improve the prsentation of this essay. I am most grateful to Christina Kraus, th late Hubert Petersmann, Gian Biagio Conte and Lowell Edmunds for offering me platforms from which
to set out my views.
56
Kolana G. Mayer
cially th vidence of poets on their predecessors, much of which

was not utilised by Clay, since he was looking for vidence for a concept similar to ours. Such a concept he could not find, and there he
left the matter, asserting a conviction however that ancient poets
did nonetheless create the sort of personae for themselves that
modem critics so readily ascribe to them (1998, 39). He did not explain how, as writers, they managed to free themselves from the
common ancient view of th persona, which, as readers, they so often betray. His account, therefore, in my view, leaves us with a considrable aporia.
At this point then I part Company with him. I do not feel that it is
so easy to demonstrate, on th one hand, that th literary persona
was interpreted in a fundamentally diffrent way in antiquity, and
then to assert, on the other, that it still existed as it is now deemed
to exist, albeit largely unrecognised by readers (many of whom
were also writers). Granted that the diffrence is so fundamental, is
it a useful interpretational exercise to impose the modern concept
upon the ancient writers and texts, when the ancients had their own
understanding of th use to be made of the authorial mask? That is
not an issue to be dealt with axiomatically, and to it I will return in
the course of my discussion of the vidence.
2. The Problem
Poets who compose in the personal genres of lyric, elegy, and satire
do not always address their audience in their own person. We find
right from th start in the earliest Greek lyric that some writers - we
should more properly cali them 'singers' - played a rle, and in their
poem, or song, they assumed a character with its appropriate personality. This technique of self-masking was perhaps easy enough
recognized by an audience at a symposium, and even later readers
of texts in antiquity had no serious problems of interpreting th use
of the mask, as we shall see. It was left to readers and critics of the
last Century to problematize th use of th mask or persona, and
for good reason: th persona became a prominent strategie device
among modernist writers, for instance, Ezra Pound, who entitled a
collection of his poems Personae (1926), and the Portuguese poet
Fernando Pessoa, whose very name (under which he never published), weirdly, means 'persona'. The use of the mask in modernist
lyric prompted critics during the past half Century to reread personal forms of classical poetry in the belief that a similar persona or
mask could be found in them. Such a rereading seemed valid just because the Greeks and Romans themselves had a notion of the authorial persona and a concept of the use to be made of literary masks.
TheLiteraryPersonain Antiquity
57
There are in particular passages in Catullus, Ovid, and Martial

which seem to anticipate th modern view, that th writer could
distinguish himself from his work, even when he used th first person singular. But that ancient concept, before Clay, was never fully
expounded or analysed. I want in this paper to supplment Clay's
vidence for what th ancients themselves, as readers, thought
about th literary persona. We shall indeed, like Clay, find that their
view is radically diffrent from th modern, and this throws up th
problem I have just enunciated: th modern concept of th use of
th authorial persona was demonstrably unavailable to th ancient
reader or writer-as-reader, who had his own very diffrent notion
about th use made by th personal poet of masks. Now since persona-criticism is an approach to reading texts rather than a theoretical System of literary analysis (like structuralism or deconstruction),
and since it is agreed by ali that th persona is a consciously created
lment in a poem (so Clay 1998, 39), it may be urged that so far as
classical poetry is concerned th modern reading is misapplied. That
at any rate is th conclusion I am driven to.
Let us begin our investigation of th ancient view of th authorial
persona with Greek personal poetry.
3. The Greeks' Use ofthe Literary Persona
Archilochus must be our starting place, for he is credited with th

development of personal lyric into a literary form. Now this concept of literary form will be fundamental to an understanding of
how later Greeks at any rate carne to interpret his poetry, a way perhaps quite at odds with th intention ofthe poet and th perceptions
of his first audience at a symposium. The classic exposition of this
problem in reception is Sir Kenneth Dover's 1964 essay, The Poetryof
Archilochus(overlooked by Clay 1998, 11 n. 4). In that pioneering
study, Dover argued that Archilochus' lyrics remained true to their
origin in song, and he observed that songs in many preliterate cultures do not necessarily express th personality and motions of th
composer, who may adopt th character and standpoint of another
person, possibly fictional, in what may be an imaginary situation
(1964, 202). In some such traditions, th singer might not be referring to himself when he used th word I.
Dover then went on to speculate about how Archilochus might
have used a persona in his own lyric songs (1964, 206-210).He made
out a good case that Archilochus' practice may well have been very
dose to that of other preliterate singers, and that th persona
adopted may have had nothing at ali to do with th young member
of a distinguished family on th island of Paros who composed th
58
Rohnd G. Mayer
lyrics. It is worth hearing in mind too that th context for th performance of thse songs, th symposium, will hve precluded confusion and ambiguity. If a maie singer known to his audience adopted
for th purpose of his song th persona of a love-lorn maiden, his
companions knew what was going on. Only after the song became
text and was freed from the conventions of its musical performance
might difficulties arise, a point stressed later by Clay too (1998, 3032). In the course of his spculation - and it must be reiterated that
Dover was speculating - he made a point which has a fundamental
hearing on the issue of reception: the conditions which shaped
those earliest Greek lyric poems in an Aegean island community of
the seventh Centuryceased to appear naturai by the ge of Pericles
(1964, 208). Over time Archilochus came to be understood as talking
about himself whenever he used the unqualified first person singular. This is dear from the famous judgment of Critias, who blamed
Archilochus for being very criticai of himself1. Critias plainly assumed that Archilochus in speaking of his birth from a slave
woman, his adultery, lechery, and cowardice was referring to himself. This assumption was fostered once his lyrics had become literary documents, and were read as personal testaments. This is crucial, just because Archilochus was so admired and imitated in antiquity. Dover may well be right that his later readers in the wider
Greek world lacked the clue to a correct understanding of his poetry. But that possibly flawed reading nonetheless became the dominant mode of identifying the poet's character from the text. For the
rest of antiquity Archilochus was read as a personal poet, describing
his own expriences. That belief shaped the understanding and production of personal poetry thereafter. Particular emphasis must be
laid upon the later reading of his poems as personal documents, because (on Dover' s hypothesis) the Greeks themselves lost forever
the key to a rcognition of th assumed persona.
A very able discussion of th difficulty is offered by Wolfgang
Rosier, who also provides a helpful summary of the anglophone
aesthetic of th persona loquens as a thing distinct from the writer
(1985, 134-138with a critique of Dover' s position at 1985, 136). Rosier
makes the salutary point that the fonction of early Greek song
within society was not primarily autobiographical. (But nonetheless
he believes that prassi di vita e creazione poetica costituiscono [...]
un'unit, in short that there is a secure link between the real and
the poetic I).He agres with Dover that by the time of Critias the
man Archilochus was identified with the content of his poetry, and
he adds that Pindar too shared Critias' prdisposition to regard the
1. See Aelian, Var. Hist. x.13 = Critias 88
44 Diels - Kranz = fr. 295W.
59
incidents related as biographical (cf. Pyth. 2.54-56). This point of

Rosier's must be stressed, because Critias and Pindar thus assume a
fresh importance as our first examples of fwriters-as-readers\ poets
themselves who might as such hve been expected to hve an insider's special understanding of how to discount superfcially 'personal Statements. But in fact their view of what Archilochus says of
himself is exactly the same as that of the everyday reader: the poets
turn out to be commonplace readers in their belief that Archilochus
had turned some of his own expriences into the subject matter of
his lyrics.
Another example of a writer-as-readerwho, by modem accounts
at any rate, misunderstood the circumstances of archaic poetic
composition, is Herodotus. As Andrew Ford says (2002, 147), he
tends to regard lyric monodies as records "in song" of the poet's
life. So, for instance, in Histones 5.95, he relates that the poet Alcaeus in a battle won by the Athenians [...] took to flight, and saved
himself, but lost his arms [...] he made a poem describing his accident for his friend Melanippus, and sent it to him at Mytilene.
Herodotus clearly is unaware of a persona here, and he regards the
incident as fact, rather than a literary topos or an invention. Nor
does he acknowledge the probability that this poem was designed to
be sung at a symposium2. His interprtation of song as a documentary text may, as Ford goes on to suggest (2002, 147),owe something
to fifth-century lives of the poets, but presumably the use to which
he put the song would not hve struck his own audience as inappropriate or mistaken. He is thus an important witness, like Critias, of
the established tendency to regard poems as documentary records.
Alcaeus' poem was addressed to his friend, so Herodotus takes it to
hve been a sort of letter. It is just that tendency which arguably
helped to foster th treatment of poems as documents giving reliable information about their writers.
Let us now turn back to Archilochus to look at the lyrics in which
he overtly assumed a character, or persona, e.g., that of Charon the
carpenter (Fr. 22D. = 19W.), or that of a father speaking about his
daughter (Fr. 74D. = 122W.). Aristotle recognized this device
(Rhetonc3.1418B23 ff.), and it is from him that we learn how a Greek,
well-acquainted with the literature of his people, accounted for this
assumption of th mask. He believed that an author donned the
mask when it would be an error of taste to speak in propriapersona,
yet he reckoned nonetheless that the assumed personality generally
2. See the discussion of this passage by Gauthier Liberman in his Bud dition of
Alcaeus (Paris1999),vol. I, pp. xxvii ff. and then p. 11.Among his testimonia he refers to
Synesius, De Insomniis20, 156a,p. 188 Terzaghi, from which it is clear that Synesius too
regardedth personal poetry of Archilochusand Alcaeus as documentary.
6o
Roland G. Mayer
spoke th author's own mind (something expected of the members

of a symposium)3. This is a valuable testimony of the ancient attitude to th use of a persona: the mask served to express the speaker's own opinion, only by a tactful indirection4.
Solon next deserves a moment's notice, for he ingeniously had recourse to not one, but two personae in a poem of advice. The Athenians had long and indecisively disputed with Megara the possession of Salamis; defeat prompted in Athens a prohibition on speaking or writing - those words must be stressed - about a renewal of
the campaign (according to Plutarch, Solon 8.1). Solon hid away in
his home and gave out that his wits had wandered. He then reap(the sign of madpeared suddenly and, wearing a felt cap,
ness), recited in public an elegy (that is to say, he was neither speaking nor writing), in which he encouraged a renewal of conflict with
Megara. He daimed in the first words of the song to be a herald
from lovely Salamis (Fr. iW. = Aristotle, Ath. Pol 12). So there
were two personae at work hre, both assumed to elude the Athenian injunction. Solon got away with it both as a madman and as an
inviolable herald. The advice was nonetheless his own, and the personae would hve afforded him no lasting protection. If the Athenians had failed in their fresh attack upon Salamis, do we suppose that
they would hve pardoned Solon, because it was really th persona
of a deranged herald which had prompted their foray? There are
other poems too that give every appearance of being about Solon
himself, for they refer to his social and economie measures (Frs. 5,
36W.), and they were used by Aristotle in his account of the Athenian constitution (Ath. Pol. 12) as documents which corroborated
other historical accounts. There was no doubt in Aristotle's mind
that Solon was referring to his actual arrangements. There was no
place for a persona - in the modem sens - in poetry of politicai advice, and attention has been drawn to this feature of Solon's verse
by BernardKnox5.
Pindar is the last Greek singer who needs brief mention. We hve
ail encountered the running debate about the identity of the
in
his songs. Is it the chorus, or the singer, or even the victor? If the
3. For the biographical inferences Aristotle was prepared to draw from the poetry of
Solon or Theodorus of Colophon see Pol. 1296aand fr. 515Rose = Athen. Deip. 14.618.I
believe that Franoise Frontisi-Ducroix,Du masqueau visage.Aspectsde l'identiten Grce
ancienne,Paris 1995,does not recognize this 'rhetorical'account of the 'prosopon' in her
otherwise impressive survey and analysis.
4. Another motive for the use of a mask, or an assumed name, might hve been politicai; I hve in mind Xenophon's assumption of the nom-de-plume
Themistogenes of Syracuse (see Plut., Glor.Ath.345c).
5. See P.E. Easterling- B.M.W. Knox (eds.), The CambridgeHistoryofClassical Literature
i: GreekLiterature,Cambridge1981,p. 151.
The Literary Persona in Antiquity
61
singer, is th singer to be identified with th writer? To what degree

are apparently personal Statements to be regarded as telling us
something about th poet? Some think that th whole of a Pindaric
epinikion is a purely rhetorical structure with no personal lment.
This reductive view is gradually being overturned, and G. D'Alessio
has carefully scrutinized th arguments and offers his own assessment of th communicative strategy involved in th construction
of th persona loquens(1994, 121). He condudes that in this period
th construction of th poet's literary persona [...] cannot be divorced from th construction of his social persona(1994, 138). He
points out that Pindar was, for instance, believed in th late fifth
Century to have had a particularly close relationship with th gods,
because that was what he daimed in many of his odes6. Once again
we are faced with th audience's assumption that what th poet said
of himself was rooted in reality (even though here again th point
made earlier by Rosier could be borne in mind, that Pindar is not indulging in self-revelation for its own sake; th personal dtail always
serves a purpose within th strategy of praise).
Discussion of th literary persona is almost exdusively confned
to poetry. This is to neglect th important area of th persona in
prose, specifically in th philosophical dialogue. To put it crudely,
whilst Piato never expressed in writing a philosophical opinion that
is attributable to himself, since ali of his philosophical discourse is
conducted by personae, that however cd not deter subsquent
thinkers and writers from identifying a specifically Platonic contribution to philosophical thought. Aristotle, for example, recognized
Piato behind th mask of th Athenian stranger in th Laws (EN
2.3.iiO4bi2), and behind Socrates in th Philebus (EN io.2.ii72b28).
This is not a loose way of talking, but is surely th more significant
because Aristotle was Plato's pupil: his induction ought to have
been founded on knowledge rather than on guesswork. In th Roman world, we find Quintilian saying of th Gorgias:quae [...] sunt
[...] dieta [...] a Socrate, cuius persona uidetur Piato significare quid sen-
tiat (Inst. 2.15.26); th opinions are felt to be Plato's, speaking

through Socrates. In th next sentence Quintilian begins by referring to th view Socrates held of contemporary rhetoric, but quickly
corrects himself: Socratesautem seti Piato. There are undeniably nuances in th degree to which readers attributed doctrine to Socrates
or to Piato (and Aristotle himself attributes notions to Socrates that
he has found in Piato or in Xenophon), but it is sufficient for my prsent purpose to stress that ali of th later Greek systematic accounts
of Platonic doctrine are based entirely upon th assumption that th
6. D'Alessio refers to L. Lehnus, L'inno a Pan di Pindaro, Milan 1979.
62
Roland G. Mayer
personae are more or less transparent, and that behind them lies
Plato's own thinking.
4. The Roman Persona
Let us now turn to th Romans, and begin with their view of Greek
personal poets. We would not expect to find a fundamental change
of interprtation, for th Romans read th Greek poets in accordance with established doctrine exactly as th Greeks did, since their
texts were expounded to them by .
Let me offer two examples. In th Tusculans,4.71, Cicero, talking about love poetry, says
this: quid denique homines doctissimi et summi poetae de se ipsis et
carminibus edunt et cantibus. de se ipsis: their poems and songs are
about themselves; he betrays no sens of a persona. He goes on to

refer to th amatory verse of Alcaeus and of Anacreon, and con-
dudes with Ibycus: maxume nero omnium flagrasse amore Reginum Ibycum apparet ex sariptis. apparet ex scnptis: his writings betray his dis-
position. Personal poetry gives an insight into th character and

feelings of th writer.
A manifest example of Greek instruction filtering down into th
Roman tradition occurs in a scholium by Porfyrio on a passage in
Horace's satires to which I shall want to return. Horace states in
Serm. 2.1.30 that Lucilius entrusted some account of himself to his
satires. Porfyrio remarks: Aristoxeni sententia est. Rie enim in suis
scnptis ostendit Saphphonem et Alcaeum uolumina sua loco sodalium
habuisse.That is to say, a view was current that their poems were

what we should now cali confessional.
Even non-personal poetry was reckoned to reveal th writer's
character: hudibus arguitur uini uinosus Homerus, says Horace (Ep.
1.19.6), using a sort of induction universally favoured in antiquity

even by poets-as-readers7. But th Romans were of course also
aware of th assumption of a personality or role, and to describe it
used their word for mask, persona. Let us now see how they used
this important word.
There is a brief psychological analysis of th classical usage by H.
Rheinfelder8, and th Oxford Latin Dictionary provides a handy
7. D.R. Stuart,Authors'Livesas Revealedin TheirWorks:a CnticalRsum,in G.P. Hadzsits (ed.), ClassicalStudiesin Honorof]. C. Rolfe,Philadelphia1931,pp. 301-304,provides a
crisp discussion and rightly stresses that this practice was endorsed by the philosophers
too; it was not merely the trifling of biographers. It is relevant to my overall project
hre that Stuart notes that antiquity's approachto what we should nowadays repudiate
as a biographicalfallacy was pretty uniform;just another instance of how diffrent their
approachwas from ours.
8. Das Wort 'Persona': Geschichte seiner Bedeutungen mit besonderer Bercksichtigung des
63
overview until th Thesaurusreaches our word. Niall Rudd (1976,

177) makes it dear from passages like Lucretius, De Rerum Natura
3.58 enpiturpersona,manetres and Sen. Ep. 24.13non hominibustantum
sed rebuspersonademendaest et reddendafacies sua that th mask could
be a device with which to conceal th truth of things (cf. OLD 2d)9.
But that usage is far less common than th one whereby persona
refers to one's particular role in life, which circumstances may alter.
The phrases personamsuscipere/imponereuel sim. suggest that one's
character is typical but yet adaptable to circumstance10.Another usage referred to those essential qualities as human beings which we
'project*to th world. Hence th jurists' use of th word to mean a
legai person, and th sense we find in th phrase in propriapersona.
Now it is this usage which is important in literary discussions in
Rome.
Cicero, for instance, recognized th use of an assumed personality
in verse satire. At De Oratore3.171Crassus refers to Lucilius' use of
Scaevola, his father-in-law, as a persona: in quo lepidesocen mei persona lusit is qui elegantissimeid facere potuit Lucilius (there follows a
verse quotation). Crassus regards th mask as one through which
Lucilius himself was speaking: in me quidem lusit Me, ut solet; Me
refers to Lucilius, not th persona of Scaevola.
Cicero's use of masks in his dialogues was of course recognized,
and up to a point discounted, by his readers. Here are some examples. Crassus, just referred to in th De Oratore,was seen to be a
mouthpiece for Cicero's opinions: that is how Quintilian read th
text (Inst. 10.3.1):nec inmento M. Tullius hunc [stilum] optimumeffectoremac magistrumdicendiuocat, cui sententiaepersonamL. Crossi[...]
adsignandoiudiciumsuum cum illius auctoritateconiunxit Later in th
same book Quintilian hints at how he unmasked Cicero: at De
Orat. 1.155Crassus had recommended translation from Greek into
Latin, and, as Quintilian says (Inst. 10.5.2):id Cicerosua ipse persona
Ergo, Crassus = Cicero, with th additional
frequentsimepraecipit11.
weight of his own authority, an interesting sidelight upon another
motive for deploying th persona. Quintilian, agreeing implicitly
with Aristotle about th tactfil use of a mask, assumed too that Cifranzsischenund italienischenMittelalters,Halle 1928 (Beihefte zur Zeitschrift fr romanische Philologie, 77), pp. 6-17.
9. Rudd returns to the issue of th persona in ClassicalHumanismand its Cntics, Echos
du Monde Classique/Classical Views n.s. 40, 15,1996,295-296.
10. So Reid on Cic. Pro Sulla3.8; Ramsay on Pro Clu. 29.78, both cited by Wilkins on De
Orat. 1.169.Cicero's view is also set out in De Off. 1.107,115,and 3.43. More developed is
Seneca, Ep. 120.22: multiformes sumus. modo frugi tibi uidebimur et graues, modo prodigi et
uani; mutamus subinde personam et contrariam ei sumimus quam exuimus.
11. We lack the passages referredto, but it is a plausible guess that they were in private
letters.
64
Roland G. Mayer
cero in his dialogues employed others to teil the truth about his own
loquence (Inst 11.1.21)12.
Quintilian's pntration of th Ciceronian persona is also shared
by Lactantius (Inst. Div. 6.2.15),who says of an opinion put into the
mouth of Catulus in the dialogue Hortensias:quaesententianon utique
Catuli, quifonasse illud non dixit, sed Ciceronisest putanda, qui scrpsit.
So far as he was concerned, Cicero is manifest behind his persona.
But Quintilian is not prepared to read all voices as authorial; he
observed that what Antonius says at De Orat. 2.232 about naturai
rhetoric is not set down so that we will accept it as true, but as being
congruent with the man's character13.Hre there is a further twist
however. Whilst Antonius' views on rhetoric as an art did not represent Cicero's, Cicero himself endorsed Antonius' views on wit:
quae sunt a me in secundo libro de Oratore per Antoni personam disputata
de ridiculis (Farn.7.32.2)14.There could however be no ground for

confusion, since Cicero in introducing the second book made it
clear that hre the views of Crassus and Antonius would provide
complete coverage for the reader (De Orat. 2.11), and there was
nothing for them to disagree about.
A final light upon how a Roman reader might regard an obvious
persona is provided by the scholiast Porfyrio's analysis of Horace's
notorious second Epode;on Unes 67-68 he says: urbanissimepostremo
finxit haec non de sua persona dicta esse, sed feneratoris; per quod uult intelegi neminem nescire quid iucunditatis habeat uita rustica, nec tarnen
quemquam ab ea in qua consueuent posse discedere. The assumed per-
sonality is a refinement - urbanissime- which enables the poet to kill

two birds with one stone; he praises the countryside and yet shows
how hard it is to dpart from our habits. Porfyrio does not regard
the poem as at odds with the poet's own views, since everyone
agres about the charms of the countryside. It need hardly be
pointed out however that in his rcent commentary (Cambridge,
12. For this tactful form of self-praisewe might compare the way in which the olive in
Callimachus' Iambus4.64-87 employs the conversation of the birds in her branches to
rout th laurei.
13. quod non ideo ut pro uero accipiamus est positum, sed ut Antoni persona seruetur, qui dissi-
mulatorartisfuit (Inst. 2.17.5-6);he has in fact misremembered, for the speaker there was
Crassus,who offered a paraphraseof Antonius' remarks at the beginning of the second
book, 32. Quintilian's view overall is of a piece with his account of prosopopoieia in
Inst. 11;dramatists,historians and advocates ail need to acquire the skill of putting the
appropriatewords into the mouths of their speakers, and maintaining consistency of
prsentation (see esp. Inst. 11.1.39).This is an important doctrine, which has a hearing
on the construction of th personaloquens,but Quintilian is not here talking about how
we prsent ourselves.
14. We can hardly blme Quintilian for the lapse of memory noted above, for Cicero
himself has here slipped;the discussion of wit at De Orat.2.217-290is put into the mouth
of C. Iulius CaesarStraboVopiscus!
65
1995, 63) David Mankin takes a thoroughly diffrent, modern view

of th persona of Alfius15.
To dose this section, let us look at a remarkable 'reading' of a controversial use of th persona, Apuleius and his apparent identification with th 'hero' of his novel, Mtamorphoses.Lucius, the narrator
of th tale, becomes an ass; pure fantasy, we should say, and we thus
try up to a point to keep author and narrator separate. But in antiquity it was not so dear-cut an issue. In De CiuitateDei 18.18Augustine says that the common belief that men can be turned into beasts
is nonsense (though God of course can do that); still, he himself had
heard in Italy of wicked landladies who could turn men into beasts
of brden, which retained their human mind; this happened to
Apuleius, whom Augustine dearly identifies with the narrator of
the novel:
si enim dixerimusea non esse credenda,non desunt etiam nunc qui eius
modi quaedamuel certissimaaudisseuel etiam expertosse esse adseuerent. nam et nos cum essemusin Italiaaudiebamustaliade quadamregione
illarumpartium,ubi stabulariasmulieresinbutashis malis artibusin caseo
dare solere dicebant quibus uellent seu possent uiatoribus,unde in iumenta ilico uerterenturet necessariaquaequeportarentpostque perfuncta
opera iterum ad se redirent;nee tarnenin eis mentem fieri bestialem,sed
rationalemhumanamqueseruari,sicut Apuleiusin libris,quos asini aurei
titillo inscripsit,sibi ipsi accidisse,ut accepto ueneno humano animo permanenteasinusfieret,aut indicauitaut finxit.
Augustine presumably favours fiction (finxit), but he cannot categorically deny the belief in the author's own 'vidence' (indicauit).
In other words, there were people who credited the taie as a documentary aecount of a true event, and Augustine is not prepared to
rule this out categorically.
Let me recapitulate then to this point: in literary contexts persona
is used by Romans to refer both to the 'person' who is imagined as
speaking (say, Alfius) and to the writer (say, Horace). However disparate the characters of writer and speaker, nonetheless the Romans tended to believe that they could see through the mask: to
parody theological terms, they detected only a distinction of person,
not a distinction of being. Porfyrio therefore was sure that the moneylender Alfius in the second Epodewas really voieing Horace's own
opinion: quod uult intellegi neminem [n.b.] nescire quid iucunditatis
habeatuita rustica. Similarly, a speaker like Crassus in th De Oratore
was feit to be the mouthpiece of Cicero himself. For Cicero the per15. One of the rfres of this paper helpfully draws attention also to Don Fowler's es-
say, Romantic Irony, in I. de Jong J.P. Sullivan (eds.), Modern Crtical Theory and Classica!
Literature (Mnemosyne Suppl, 130), Leiden 1994, pp. 240-243.
66
RolandG. Mayer
sona of Crassus added authority to his argument, whilst for Horace

th persona of Alfius provided an amusing twist to th conventional
praises of th countryside. Roman readers seem generally reluctant
to distinguish sharply between th writer's own character and that
of his personae (rhetorical ethopoeia forms th sole exception).
5. Latin Textsofa ContraryTendency
There are, however, a number of Latin texts which, provided they
are divorced from their contexts, suggest that some Roman poets
tried to distinguish between themselves as men and what they
might say about themselves in their poems. These passages need to
be looked at in some dtail, and above ali read in their contexts. One
feature is common to ali th contexts: th disdaimers are ali stratgies of defence, and th writers had special reasons to dissociate
themselves more or less from a literal reading of their puma fade
personal writings. They clearly felt that a good number of their
readers would take th poems to be true Statements about their
own lives, and in Rome that could prove dangerous. Let me illustrate th danger with one example (others will follow later).
The life-style of L. Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, th consul of 58
B.C., was apparently described in th poems of his friend Philodemus16.Cicero made great play in a published invective with th poems' accounts of parties and love-affairs, and he knew they would
help to blacken Piso's character: th poems mirrored his life, so Cicero daimed (istius tamquamin speculouitam intuen: In Pisonem7071). As th poems had been written by someone else, Piso might
have argued that they were distortions, exaggerations, or even outright fictions; but Cicero knew how they would be taken by th average reader17.Much harder to explain away were th poems one
wrote about oneself, as Apuleius and Ovid both found. But this is to
anticipate:let us begin with Catullus.
Catullus 16 is a diffidili poem18,and so th following observations
upon its purpose are offered with some hsitation. Lines 5-6 seem to
16. For th alleged persona of Philodemus see now David Sider, The EpigramsofPhilodemos,Oxford 1997,pp. 32-39;his position is th polar opposite of Marcello Gigante's Gli
epigrammi di Filodemo quali testimonianze autobiografiche, in Filodemo in Italia, Florence
1990(Bibliotechinadel Saggiatore,49).
17. In an essay in D. Obbink (ed.), Philodemusand Poetry:PoeticTheoryand Practicein Lucretius,Philodemus,and Horace,New York, Oxford 1995, Diskin Clay speaks of Cicero's
forensicway (p. 14) of reading th poet - a neat phrase, but it is not clear that th socalled forensic way was any diffrent from th common way. On Clay's own showing
in th MD article of 1998 there was no alternative in fact, and Cicero knew his audience would take th poems th way he did.
18. See D. Fehling, Rhein. Mus. 117,1974,103. ; C.W. MacLeod, Class. Quart. 23,
67
make a distinction between the poet as a man and his self-presentation in his poems: nam castum esse decet pium poetarti \ ipsum, uersicu-
los nihil necesseest. The lines were often used out of context even in
antiquity, and have been taken in our own day, for example by
Robert Elliott, to demonstrate that classical literary doctrine assumed no necessary connection between the most intense personal
poems and the lives or personalities of their authors19.But Catullus
is not hre enunciating a generally held classical literary doctrine
about all personal poetry. If we restore the lines to their context he
will be found to have quite a diffrent, and still highly personal, aim
in view that does not necessarily disconnect his life from his art.
Two men, Furius and Aurelius, have read (legistis, 13) about thousands of kisses, and drawn their own conclusion from what they
dearly regard as a document: the poet is effeminate (male [...]
marem,13).Now the poems they read were probably 5 and 6 (not, as
some assume, the later ones asking for kisses from Juventius)20.In
them, ail Catullus claimed to want was to kiss Lesbia. In Roman
eyes this was namby-pamby, a real man wanted the nouemcontinuas
fiitutiones which Catullus himself asked from Ipsitilla, 32.8. Poem 16
was designed to correct their misreading, based on a false induction
from th poet's desire for kisses. Catullus assured them that
nonetheless he was man enough to dominate them sexually (paedicabo ego uos et irrumabo,1). But I believe that Catullus is trying as
well, and not for the last time, to redefine the relationship outside
marriage between lovers. In 16.5 he speaks of th pius poeta. Does
that not chime with his later sens of his pietas in the love-affair, expressed at 76.2 (pium), and 26? A pius amor, such as Virgil gives Nisus
for Euryalus (Aen. 5.296), is not founded primarily upon the satisfaction of lust; it is an affectionate commitment to another person.
That is something Furius and Aurelius cannot understand; for them
mere kissing is so much waste of time, a symptom of mollitia11.For
Catullus, however, it proves that his feelings are chaste (castum,
16.5), like those of th girl who lets her betrothed's appi slip from
her lap (cf. 65.20). Kissing for Catullus is symbolic of an unusual
erotic motion, which he knows he must explain to his macho readers, as he would try to explain it again in 72.3-4,where th feeling is
1973,300-301;V. Buchheit, Hermes 104, 1976,331ff and J. Griffin, Journ.Rom. Stud.
66, 1976,97
19. See Robert C. Elliott, TheLiteraryPersona,Chicago 1982,43.
20. So G. Williams in Journ.Rom. Stud. 52, 1962,39-40, who tried to relieve Catullus
of th stigma of homosexuality by claiming that the autobiographicalform in Roman
poetry is a poetic convention. Was that how Roman readers like Furius and Aurelius
took it?
21. For the Roman attitudes to and notions of mollitia see C. Edwards, The Politicsof
Immoralityin AncientRome,Cambridge1993,eh. 2.
68
Roland G. Mayer
likened to a father's love for his sons and sons-in-law, definitely not
that of the herd for their girlfriends. So poem 16 is not an attempt to
divorce the poet frorn his presumed exprience, but to darify it for
the conventionally-minded. After all he nowhere in this poem denies th relationship or its special character;he says that he wants to
describe it in an arousing way, but that his readers must not misunderstand the essential quality of the motion. A disjunction between
his exprience and its reprsentation in poetry is not to be found
here22.
Ovid, however, provides our most suggestive case of the dniai of
a connection between his life and his poetry. It is highly significant
that the dniais are only to be found in his poetry written in exile:
Tristia 2.353-546and 3.2.5-623.Now once again in thse passages we
are dealing with an individuars self-defence in a particular situation.
Ovid suffered because a significant reader, Augustus, failed to disconnect the writer's life from his poetry. And who can blame that
reader, or any other, when in Amores2.1.2 Ovid had announced himself as nequitiae [...] poeta meati Or similarly, in Amores 3.1.17-22,
where Tragoedia is trying to win him away from Elegia she remarks
that everyone is talking about his nequitia, and people even point at
th bard in th Street as someone singed by cruel love? Ovid must
try to establish a discontinuity, which did not already exist in the
generai mind of the Roman reader. His procedure is all th more interesting in that he himself shows the same bias as the common
reader in dealing with the erotic poems of his predecessors. He lists
those who did not pay a penalty for their love songs in Tr. 2.363-466,
and in a number of cases he uses language which plainly imputes to
them the activities they describe. So of Callimachus (367-368):delicias uersu fassus es ipse tuas, of some female writers: quae concubitus
non tacuere suos, of Catullus (429-430): multos uulgauit amores / in
quibus ipse suum fassus adultenum esf4, of Calvus (432): detexit uanis
qui sua furia modis, of Varr of Atax (440): non potuit Veneris furta
taceresuae. Each line contains a reflexive possessive pronoun. Ovid,

like everyone eise, took the poems to reflect the poets' lives25,even
22. For a modern appraisalof Catullus' persona see Niklas Holzberg, Catull Der Dichter
undsein erotischesWerk,Munich 2002.
23. I accept Ovid's description of his relegation to Tomis as fact, though aware that
some do not. Their agnosticism is invincible because they can say that any later Roman
who refers to Ovid's sojourn on the Black Sea, for instance the Eider Pliny (. .
32.152),has been taken in by the poet. But for my purposes here such a successali fraud
would only go to prove that the Roman reader accepted th poetic persona as gospel.
That Ovid shows first-handknowledge of the Black Sea is argued by R.H. Batty On Getic
and SarmatianShores:Ovid'sAccountofthe DanubeLands,Historia43, 1994, 88-111;Batty
notes that Ovid's account is frequentlyfar from conventional.
24. Adultenumhere means love-affairratherthan 'adultery'.
25. Exactly the same sort of induction is employed when Quintilian censured the plays
69
though such a reading is prejudicial to and inconsistent with another

of his Unes of argument. For he had stressed at the outset that the
love-affair described in his poetry was imaginary: falso [...] amore
(340), magnaque pars mendax operum est etficta meorum (355), and that
his actual way of life bore no relation to what was described in the
Amores(353-354).This daim too is part of his defence strategy. But it
was not the personal love poetry of the Amoresfor which Ovid paid
the price of exile. It was the Ars Amatoria,as he ritrtes (345).So in
his list of his predecessors among love poets he uses tendentious
language to suggest that they were teachers also (364, 365, 449, 456,
461 and 465), and that they got away with their instruction (366, 414,
415, 417, 443, 463, 466). Now it is significant that Ovid never tries to
suggest that his rle of teacher in the Ars was a pose, or a persona
that naturally imposed itself along with the didactic genre. He might
perhaps hve done this, though he had somewhat spoiled his chance
by twice saying in the Ars (2.744, 3812) Naso magistereratta phrase he
picks up at 347 me magistro(and cf. Pont. 3.3.47-48).Such a Une of defence, however, would hve broken with the tradition of didactic
poetry, which derived its authority from the writer's daims to hve
personal knowledge of what he was talking about; as Rudd (1976,
174-175) points out, Ovid had indeed daimed that exprience
prompted his work at AA 1.29. In fact Ovid's chief defence of the Ars
in Tristia Book 2 is that its doctrine was not intended to corrupt clearly a controvertible point, though earUer he had urged that his
own way of life was very diffrent (cf. Tr. 1.9.59-60 uita tarnentibi
nota mea est. sas artibus Ulis / auctoris mores abstinuisse sut).
On balance then we must see the often-cited Unes of Ovid as part

of his personal apologi. When he says that his mores are not reflected in his poetry, he is trying out a Une of defence (and he was
trained in rhetoric with a view to acting as an advocate, cf. Tr.
4.10.14), not reiterating a commonly held view of the relationship
between poetry and the Ufe of the poet. So far as we know he never
returned to Rome. His defence faed, and people, induding poets,
went on reading personal poetry as documentary.
A very similar defence to Ovid's has been universally overlooked,
and I want to draw it out of the shadows now. In his Controuersiae
6.8 th Elder Seneca recalls the 'case' (imaginary, of course) of the
Vestal Virgin accused of unchastity on the grounds of her self-incriminating erotic verses. Like Ovid she tries to urge as one Une of
defence that a personal poem is not a document: quid, tu putas poetas
quae sentiunt scriberei. The obvious reply was unfortunately, yes,
of Afranius;by induding in his farces paederasty Quintilian says that he gives himself
away: moressuosfassus (Inst.io.i.ioo).
70
Rohnd G. Mayer
most people do think just that. The poor Vestal ought to have prepared herseif for burial alive!
Martial too feit that he must dfend his salacious verses at 1.4 and
11.15;readers are warned not to take them as documents of his own
way of life. Again the wider context is crucial to an understanding of
these disdaimers. The first of them, 1.4, is programmane in some respects, but more important is the poem's dedication to Domitian,
who liked the poetry of Martial but had become censor in the year
of the book's publication, 85, a fact alluded to in line 7. The disclaimer of line 8 lascitiaest nobispagina, uita probais arguably a ploy
to exonerate the imperiai censor from possible charges of
favouritism and hypocrisy (and he was a hypocrite). The second
poem, 11.15, is also programmane, and introduces an altogether
saucier collection of poems to celebrate the Saturnalia. But as Kay
points out in his commentary on line 13 the disclaimer is more than
a literary convention, since one could get into trouble at Rome for
advertizing one's bad habits, as we know. Readers would take the
poems to be confessional, and perhaps eritieize the writer for ignominious behaviour. Martial tries to forestali this naturai reading; but
he has a reason to do so, he is not enunciating a commonly held notion of the Separationof life and art26.
Let me dose this section with th case of Apuleius - and this time
we are dealing literally with a trial. One of the charges laid against
him by Sicinius Aemilianus was the composition of erotic verse.
This triai again demonstrates the dangers that an apparently confessional writer might actually encounter. Apuleius' poems were used
as vidence of his character to his disadvantage. So he has to turn
the attack. His argument is interesting just because it is as inconsistent as Ovid's had been, as Rudd (1976, 175 n. 79) noted. When he
Starts enumerating those who have written erotic poetry he treats
their poems as personal documents. It is only after he has named
the love poets that he takes, in Apologi 11, a diffrent tack, saying
that it is crude to see in playful verses a specimenmorum.He then
quotes Catullus 16.5-6.But he does not urge that the poems have no
necessary connection with the writer's life. Indeed his interprtation of Plato's erotic verse which follows indicates that he took it to
be documentary. He urges that in such matters it is better to be
frank and open. Concealment is a sign of bad conscience, admission
is playfulness (profitenet promulgareludentisest). This language is designedly ambiguous; it is not an outright dniai of the reality of the
26. For modern appraisals of the literary persona in Martial see now Sven Lorenz, Erotik und Panegyrik: Martiab epigrammatische Kaiser, Tbingen 2002 (Classica Monacensia,
23), and Niklas Holzberg, Martial und das antike Epigram, Darmstadt 2002.
71
situation described in th verse. Such composition is fon, but not

necessarily or obviously fictitious.
These passages do not substantially alter what we know about th
normal mode of reading personal poetry in Rome. The writers discussed above are ali for some reason or other on th defensive, and
try out a line of argument which is dearly at odds with th common
perception of their readers, a perception they themselves ali too
readily share. Their claim that one's poems do not reflect one's way
of life served a restricted, locai need; it was not a generai theory of
th use of th persona27.
6. Persona in Satire
Let us finally turn to a particular genre, Roman satire, that has been
for some time now regarded as deploying a generic persona, to see
to what extent th ancient view of that genre matches th approach
now dominant among anglophone critics28.
The contemporary approach to th reading of Roman satire has
its origin in several essays of th early 1960s by W.S. Anderson29.He
virtuaUy eliminated th writer from satire by postulating th perpetuai prsence of a persona or mask, behind which th writer faded
out. He was avowedly trying to do for Latin satire what Alvin Kernan in The CankeredMuse (New Haven 1959)had done for th English satirical tradition. Kernan had aimed to reestablish th English
verse satire of th seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a literary
form, and to rescue it from th historical, biographical, and cultural
approaches which had virtually denied English verse satire its artistic status as poetry. Kernan sought a new dfinition of th aesthetic of verse satire, and one of his hypothses was a figure he
called th satirist,who was not to be identified with th writer of
27. For th sake of completeness it is worth recalling that Ausonius brought a good
deal of this information to bear in defence of his CentoNuptialis(see th concluding dedicatory letter). Odd, since it could hardly hve been taken as an autobiographical
document.
28. Dominant, but not unquestioned: for criticism of th approach as applied most recently to Juvenal see J.G.F. Powell in Class. Rev. 47, 1997,304 and F. Belandiin Rev.
Filol. Istr. Class. 126, 1998, 100-102.Other voices hve been raised against the over-use
nella satira e nell'epigramma
of this reading, e.g., M. Citroni, L'autobiografia
latino, in G.
nellapoesiagrecae latinafra
Arrighetti - F. Montanari(eds.), La componenteautobiografica
realte artificioletterario,Atti del Convegno, Pisa, 16-17maggio 1991,pp. 275-292,esp. 281
on Horace; and most recently C. Nappa, PraetextatiMores:Juvenal'sSecondSatire, in
Hermes126,1998,90-108,esp. p. 90.
29. The RomanSocrates:Horaceand his Satires(= 1982, 13-49,esp. 28 ff.), RomanSatirists
and LiteraryCriticism(1982,3-10)and AngerinJuvenaland Seneca(= 1982,293-339);see also
the index of 1982,492, s.v. persona.
72
Roland G. Mayer
the poems, thus freeing them from the sort of biographical enquiries which were undeniably as prdominant among English
scholars as among their Latinist colleagues. It must hre be recalled,
as Susanna Morton Braund pointed out to me, that Anderson's
adoption of the persona-reading was a strong reaction against
Gilbert Highet's autobiographical approach in Juvenal the Satirist
(Oxford 1954).(And it should be added in passing that Highet's autobiographical reading was his own strategy to secure greater sympathy for Juvenal, who for much of the half Century before him had
been dismissed as a mere rhetorician, not a true poet).
To return to Anderson: for him, as for Kernan, th persona of the
satirist was an invention of th poet's; he called the speaker of Juvenal's satires the writer's cration (1982, 293 and cf. 314 the poet
has [...] created a complex character). This is an important part of
th hypothesis: th satirical persona was no accident, but as much a
product of artistic craft as the language or subject matter of the
poem. Anderson moreover said (1982, 29) that in all (n.b.) personal
poetry the poet assumes a mask. His successors, Susanna Morton
Braund on Juvenal and on satire generally, and KirkFreudenburg on
Horace30,likewise allow no dropping of the mask in Roman satire.
It may easily be guessed why they ail adopt a rigourist approach: if
it is once admitted that th persona may occasionally be dispensed
with, by what means can a reader recognize the authentic voice of
the writer? Let Juvenal's sixth satire be our text. Susanna H. Braund
agreed with Anderson that the speaker of that satire was Juvenal's
cration31;she found nothing that connected him with the writer.
On the other hand, in his 1980 commentary on Juvenal E. Courtney
had already noticed the unforced admission of personal dislike at
451-456,and he drew particular attention to line 454 ignotosquemihi
tenet antiquariauersus.A run-of-the-mill misogynist ought not to be
troubled personally by a woman's knowledge of Palaemon's grammar or of old Latin poetry, except in so far as ail pedantry is a bore.
But th word mihi especially gives th line an apparently personal
rfrence, which is most naturally taken to refer to Juvenal the
writer himself: as a poet he feels inferior when a woman knows
more about early Latin verse than he does. So is there a persona or
not in this satire? It is by no means dear that the writer has created
an alternative satirist who delivers a rambling attack upon
women32.
30. See (1988),(1992),(1996a)and (1996b);Freudenburg1993.
31.Juvenal- MisogynistorMisogamist?,Journ.Rom. Stud.82, 1992,71-86,esp. p. 82.
32. A similar problem anses in the monograph by B. Frischer, ShiftingParadigms:New
Approachesto Horace'sArs Poetica, Atlanta 1991(American Classica!Studies, 27): he never makes it dear how a reader would detect the prsence in th poem of a persona,
73
The premise has to be emphasized that th persona must always

be in piace. Anderson, however, though insisting that it was th
writer's cration, offered no vidence that poets or readers in antiquity actually noticed its existence. And we might reasonably have
expected that so important an aspect of th satirical writer's strategy
would have been noticed and openly commented upon, perhaps
above ali in those defences of satire which we encounter in Horace
(Sermones1.4 and 2.1) and Juvenal (his first satire). Recently Susanna
Morton Braund has shown an awareness of this gap in Anderson's
argument, which she closes with th daim that th view of th
voices of Roman satire as a sries ofpersonae would not have been
alien or difficult for th original Roman audiences (1996, 2); she
reckons that this role-playing was most visible in th rhetorical ducation of th Roman lite (1996, 3). To be sure an orator might find
himself 'acting a part' in defence of his client, but it is worth remembering what Antonius was made to say in Cicero's De Oratore2.194:
neque actor essem alienae personae, sed auctor meae, I am not perform-
ing someone else's rle, but sustaining my own. But whatever th

case with th rhetoric of th forum, th case has not been made out
for satire specifically, or indeed for any literary kind which is puma
facie personal. It can, on th other hand, be shown that readers, and
particularly poets-as-readers of satire, did not detect writers of satire
creating masks. That is evident from th remarks of th satirists
however we understand that term about their predecessors. Let
us look first at Horace.
After having criticized Lucilius in Serm.1.4 for inartistic writing, he
revised his opinion more favourably at th beginning of th second
book, when he said that Lucilius gave satire its characteristic point
of view, namely th personal voice. Satire thus became in Lucilius'
hands a form of self-presentation in verse:
ille uelut fidisarcanasodalibusolim
credebatlibrisneque,si male cesserat,usquam
decurrensalio neque,si bene;quo fit ut omnis
uotiuapateatuelutidescriptatabella
uita senis.
(Serm. 2.1.30-34)
Horace - whether we take him here to be th writer or in Anderson's sense th satirist- plainly did not distinguish between Lucilius as writer and his satirical persona. The simile in line 33 uotiua [...]
ueluti descripta tabella is of particular importance, since a votive
tablet depicted an actual event in th dedicatori life, and was probaand he ignores lines 55-56,where th speaker assocites himself with Virgil and Varius see my review in Class.Rev.42, 1992,p. 442.
74
Kolana G. Mayer
bly painted by himself, without any artistic pretensions (so Horace

may be having another sly dig at Lucilius' dumsiness). For Horace
then th life depicted in the poems reflected reality. But Anderson,
commenting on this passage (1982, 30), asserted that Horace deliberately confused the two fonctions. And yet he offered no vidence
that Horace was aware of the existence of the sort of persona he was
postulating33;he assumed that Horace could have differentiated Lucilius the man from his generic persona as satirist.It might rather
be urged that Horace, in fact, never 'confused' the two roles, just
because he never made the modern distinction; like all Roman readers he read satire as the expression of a personal point of view (we
have already seen above that that was how Cicero read Lucilius' use
of an obvious persona). Horace regarded what he read in Lucilius'
books as the expriences of an historical person34. Indeed, faced
with this line in Lucilius: ego ubi quem ex praecordi / ecfero uersum
(670-671W. = 590-591M.),what conclusion was he to draw but that

the expressions in the poems were heartfelt? (This line cornes from
Lucilius' first poem in his first book, 26, and it is taken by Marx to be
a sort of programme poem, in which the satirist marks out his territory). Given this Lucilian tradition, when Horace became a writer
of verse satire he too ought to have spoken from the heart and of his
own expriences, especially when he made this daim in Senn. 2.1.34:
sequor hunc, which means literally, I follow him, where follow
implies 'take as my literary model' (thus resuming the point made at
line 29, that he wrote satire Lutili rituf. It therefore becomes hard
to agree with Braund when she says that the autobiographical approach to reading satire is post-Romantic (1996, 1); there is rather
every reason to suppose that that is just how the Romans themselves read it.
33. Cynthia S. Dessen claimed that there was abundant vidence in Latin poetry to
prove that the poets, induding the satirists,adopted th persona, but she failed to cite a
single instance: The SatiresofPersius. IuncturaCallidusAcri, 2ndedn., Bristol 1996, p. 7 n.
20. The study by W.T. Wehrle, The Satine Voice,Hildesheim 1992, eh. 2 Personaein Persius andjuvenal,pp. 39-70,assumes that the persona is always in place.
34. It weakens fatally in my view the persona-based reading of Horace's satires by
Freudenburg (1993) that he makes an improsperous start by failing to discuss at any
length this passage, which is merely noted on p. 6 and in n. 10. Clay too (1998,32-33)is in
difficulty with this passage: But there is another manner of reading Lucilius' satires,
and this is Horatian, not in what Horace explicitly says about Lucilius in his satires, but
in the practice of the personae Horace adopts in his own satires. Why did Horace
explicitly say one thing and adopt another, but undemonstrated, practice?Similarlyunsatisfactoryis J.G.E. Zetzel, Horace's Liber Sermonum: the Structureof Ambiguity,Arethusa 13, 1980, p. 74 n. 9: he says that we do not have to take Horace's opinion about
th use Lucilius made of his satires literally, but whyever not? On p. 61 he speaks of the
'necessary'persona of the satirist.
35. Juvenal never claims so close an affinity to Lucilius (cf. 2.20), or indeed to Horace
either (cf. 2.51);not surprisinglytherefore his satire strikes a far less personal note, as
has often been observed.
75
One of th reasons that th ancient reader of satire might have

confuseci(Anderson's word) th satirist with th writer is just this:
th satirist daims so often to be himself a writer of verse satire36.
Now this was an unnecessary and indeed 'confusing* dtail in th
persona of th satirist;th satirist need not have been presented
himself as a writer at ali. Horace, for instance, did not prsent himself as a 'writer' in his lyrics, where he is always a singer,and in his
Epistleshe no longer prsents himself as a writer of verse at ail. The
cration of a satiristwho wrote his satires in verse was bound to
fuse th poet with th alleged persona.
It seems that Horace too, like Lucilius, succeeded in giving the impression to his readers that he was personally involved in his satires.
This is indicated by what his successor Persius had to say about him.
In his first satire, Persius set out the tradition in which he meant to
write (again, if this is only the satiristspeaking, it is confusing that
he too is a writer). He referred to the ruthless tone of Lucilius
(1.114),secuit Ludlius Vrbem,whilst Horace, on th other hand, he
found more ingratiating:
omne uaferuitiumridentiFlaccusamico
tangit,et admissuscircumpraecordialudit.
(1.116-117)
Again, there is hre no suggestion that Persius thought that he was

reading not about Horace himself, but about some generic mask
created for satirical prsentation37.The juxtaposed words Flaccus
amico seem to forge an intimate relationship between poet and
reader, without the interposition of a persona, the satirist.
From thse passages it should be clear that the Romans had a way
of reading satire, a fundamental lment of which Anderson failed
to recognize, namely, that satire, as personal poetry, expressed the
poet's own views and might use his own exprience as subject matter.
what the poets said as readers of satire we may add what the
scholiasts said about them in their verse satires. They indeed refer
to th persona of the poet, by which they mean his own self, as distinct from any other character who may speak in a poem. It is for inand 10.46-48,92 libello,2.1.1, and 3.1-4,7.117;in Persius the
36. E.g., in Horace 1.4.138-139,
Prologue and 1.120libelle;in Juvenal 1.17-18,30 difficileest saturantnon scnbere,79, 152,
3.321-332.
37. It is interesting to see that in her rcent pamphlet on th persona in satire Susanna
M. Braundtwice quotes thse Unes;on their first appearanceshe says that Persius is referring to Horace (1996b, 29), and on the second to Horace (1996b, 55). Why are the
quotes dropped the second time, and why weren't they put round Persius' name at
ail?
76
Roland G. Mayer
stance a useful means wherewith to distinguish speakers in the dramatic satires, in which the writer appears in conversation with
someone eise38.But its usage nowhere suggests a reading similar to
the modern one. When a scholiast says persona Horati or persona poetae he conformed to Latin usage, sketched above, and
meant by it the person of the writer, as distinct from any other person, real or imagined. Porfyrio, dearly in the tradition of Aristotle's
views on the use of a persona to make criticisms, observes on Hor.
Senn. 2.2.1: in hac edoga sub persona Ofelli luxunosos carpii. The criti-
cism is no less Horace's for being delivered by Ofellus, whose character gives it a special authority (in that he had always held that
view, not just when he was in reduced circumstances himself). The
scholia known as Probus Valla on Juvenal 3.1 observe: urbis Romae
consuetudinem detestatur sub persona Umbnci amici sui39. The criticism
was feit to be Juvenal's, and Umbricius is a lay figure, but his intended departure from th city underscores the seriousness of his
indictment.
The satires just referred to prsent criticism through a persona,
but the ancient reader did not apparently distinguish, as the modern
tries to do, the writer from his personae. We had a glimpse of this
reading from the passage in Cicero's De Orai. 3.171,discussed above,
in which Lucilius used th persona of Scaevola to mock others.
There is another, but bizarre, dmonstration of this habit of reading
in Pliny the Eider; he noted that Horace endorsed the view that oblong eggs were superior in flavour (N. H. 10.145:quae oblongasint oua
gratioris sapons putat Horatius Flaccus). He was referring to Serm.
2.4.12-13,where it was not Horace speaking, but the persona, Catius,

and even he was only reporting his recollection of a gastronomical
lecture by somebody eise40.So difficult was it for the Roman reader
to disentangle the poet from even his obvious masks.
That the readers of satire could not easily distinguish between
writer and satirist is shown by the defence of his satire which Horace offers in Serm.1.4.78,where his critics blame him: laederegaudes,
and 2.1.1,where he says: in satura uidearnimis acer. Now if those second and first person Singularsreferred not to Horace the writer but
to his persona, the satirist, why did not Horace make this clear,
38. See Porfyrio on Serm.1.2.58-59,3.126,9.52; 2.1.39,40, 43, 45, and the scholiast on Persius 1.29.
39. There are always problems in accepting these scholia, but hre the notice is confirmed as ancient by its roughly similar appearancein the Leiden MS, which reads conuersationemfor consuetudinem.
40. Partly what lies behind his use of Horace here is the quasi-didacticform of the satire. Now in generai Pliny treats didactic poets as authorities;he regularly refers to Hesiod and Virg for agriculturalmatters (see th index of the Mayhoff-Jahndition). See
Mynors on Virg. G. 1.216.
77
and dfend himself as writer on th ground that it was not him, but
th generic persona speaking? Or, to look at th matter from th
point of view of th audience, why did people get upset with a mere
lay-figure in the first place? The answer is piain: even if the speaker
was a fiction, the writer had put the wounding words into his
mouth, and, as we have seen, the common view was that th persona expressed the opinion of the writer.
In this context it is worth returning to the issue with which the
previous section opened, namely the dangers run by those who
were deemed to describe their own bad behaviour. What happened
to those who were deemed to be criticizing others in their own persons, for instance, the composers of lampoons in the early principate? C. Cominius, an eques,was condemned for a lampoon against
Tiberius; his brother, a Senator, managed to get him off (Tac. Ann.
4.31.1). Sextus Vestilius committed suicide after losing Tiberius'
favour for an attack upon Gaius as a pervert (Tac. Ann. 6.9.2). Sextius Paconianus, a praetor and henchman of Sejanus, was in prison
for plotting against Gaius; there he composed carmina against
Tiberius, and for that he was strangled (Tac. Ann. 6.39.1). Another
praetor, Antistius, composed probrosacarmina against Nero, and recited them at a dinner party; he was arraigned for maiestas, and the
debate about the penalty is described by Tacitus at some length in
Ann. 14.48-49.Fabricius Veiento got into trouble for his attacks (they
may not have been in verse) on the Senate and priesthood (Tac.
Ann. 14.50).It is noteworthy that in none of thse trials is it said that
a plea was entered on behalf of the writer that he had used a generic
persona (that of invective now, similar to the one Horace is supposed to have used in his Epodes,not satire). Clearly that plea, even
if available, would have eut no ice with the offended prineeps of the
day. Suppose a persona was used, it would still have been th case
that the writer created it and put th abusive language into its
mouth. It is for this reason that the literary (as opposed to politicai)
satirists were so careful. The persona really offered no protection41.
This prdisposition of readers of satire persisted into late antiquity, as we learn from Sidonius Apollinaris in a fascinating letter (Ep.
41. It might be worth mentioning in passing in this respect that Galileo, despite using
the dialogue form, and keeping himself out of the conversation, was nevertheless
charged with establishingthe CopernicanSystem in his Dialogoof 1632.The use of a persona did not save him from condemnation. The problem is still with us. The Daily Telegraphfor May 1, 1999, p. 20, reported that the white American rapper, Eminem, related in one of his hit songs I just found out my mom does more dope than I do. She
threatened to sue him! One would have thought the generic persona of the rapperto be
one of th more obviously fictionalized, but where money and rputation are at stake
artisticstratgiesoffer no defence.
Roland G. Mayer
78
i.ii) about the dangers he ran when an anonymous satire in which

prominent people were attacked by name was attributed to him.
The worthies of fifth-century Arles were not to be fobbed off with a
satirical persona, they wanted Sidonius' blood. They cursed or
dreaded him ut satirographum(Ep. 1.11.8).His defence was that no
one had proved he was the writer, not that, as writer, he had created
a generic persona. One thing is clear from these final considrations:
the persona of the satirist or iambist would at best have been an uneconomical ploy, since very little advantage could be won by its employment. The writer of satires or invectives was bound to be confiised with his persona, and so might expect to pay any penalty that
attached to calumniators42.
7. Conclusions and Implications
The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.
L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between
The chief stumbling-block to th application of modern personacriticism to Greek and Latin texts is that, unlike other interpretational stratgies, deconstruction for instance, it has a prcdent in
antiquity. Greek and Roman writers and readers themselves recognized the masking of the author, and they had their own ways of
dealing with it. Where they were faced with a persona, an assumed
character who was plainly not the writer, their inclination was to
take the character's words as representing the writer's view, unless
it was otherwise clear that the writer was indulging in eihopoeia.As
Clay demonstrated, and as I hope the vidence of this essay has confirmed, there is little or nothing to suggest that an ancient reader
was in a position to recognize the sort of generic persona a modern
critic postultes as a matter of course (for example, the elegiac lover
or mistress, the didactic writer, the satirist). This fact ought to open
readings that deploy our modem notion of th persona to a charge
of irrelevance. Let me try to justify this disturbing opinion by briefly
pointing to two other cultural constructs, which antiquity understood very differently from us, dreams and sexuality.
On July 24 1895, whilst walking along the Himmelstrae outside
Vienna, Dr. Sigmund Freud had a rvlation about the real nature
and true interprtation of dreams, and he subsequently convinced a
good number of people that his theory was true. But, as any classical
42. See Paul Lejay's discussion in his dition of Horace's Sermones, Paris 1911, pp. 285287 with rfrence to Serm. 2.1.82-83 si mala condident in quem quis carmina, ins est I
iudiciumque.
79
or biblical scholar would readily point out, dreams were feit by th

peoples of antiquity to play a very diffrent rle in their lives. So far
as Julius Caesar or th wife of Pontius Piiate were concerned,
dreams were sent to them by superhuman powers to warn, advise,
or predici. There is no vidence that anyone in antiquity thought a
dream revealed something significant about th dreamer's past. Plato's Socrates, to be sure, maintained that dreams reveal th desires of th beastly and savage part of th sol, but that is rather a
diffrent matter (Resp. 9S7ic-d). To interpret ancient dreams in a
Freudian way might be interesting, but it would tell us nothing
about th sensibilities of Greeks and Romans and of their coniectores,
since a modern psychological 'reading' was entirely unavailable to
them, owing to their lack of th concept of th subconscious.
Secondly, sexuality, a hot topic in th academy nowadays. We
have recently become much more cautious about mapping modern
concepts like homosexuality upon th terrain of gender in antiquity.
We appreciate that, though that condition almost certainly existed,
it was quite simply not recognized. And that fact has at last
prompted carenai scholars to refrain from imposing our own terminology and th thinking that goes with it upon th sexual exprience
of antiquity. It is appreciated that we simply distort th picture by
doing that, and obstruct our own chance of understanding a diffrent past.
It may therefore be urged that we look upon modern persona criticism with scepticism. It undeniably fits much of th exprimental
literature of th previous Century (e.g., Pound and Pessoa), but its
applicability to th literature of antiquity is questionable, given th
manifest ignorance of its opration not only among readers, but,
more significantly, among writers-as-readers. If th persona (as
nowadays understood) were, as Clay, among others, believes (1998,
39), a deliberate construct of th writer, it is very odd that poets like
Horace and Ovid persisted in treating th works of their predecessors as documentary. Their own alleged practice of assuming a persona ought surely to have immunized them against such a gross
misreading. And yet consistently they are at one with non-poetic
readers (for example, Herodotus and Quintilian) in their assumption that, to use Horace's words of Lucilius, th life of th man is to
be found in his writings. On this matter we ought, I suggest, as with
dreams and sexuality, to do antiquity th favour of respecting its
own views.
King's College London
8o
RoianaG. Mayer
Bibliography
Anderson 1982: William Anderson, Essays in Roman Satire, Princeton and London.
Braund 1988: Susanna H. Braund, (= Susanna Morton Braund), Beyond Anger,
Cambridge.
Braund 1992: Susanna H. Braund, Roman VerseSatire, Oxford.
Braund 1996a: Susanna H. Braund, Juvenal, Satires I Cambridge (Cambridge
Greek and Latin Classics).
Braund 1996b: Susanna H. Braund, The Roman Satirists and their Masks, Bristol.
Clay 1998: Diskin Clay, The Theory ofthe Literary Persona in Antiquity, MD 40,
9-40.
D'Alessio 1994: G.B. D'Alessio, First Person Problems in Pinaar, Bull. Inst. Class.
Stud. 39, 117-139.
Dover 1964: Kenneth Dover, The Poetry of Archilochus, in Archiloque, Vandceuvres-Geneva, Fondation Hardt (Entretiens sur l'Antiquit Classique, 10),
181-222.
Ford 2002: Andrew Ford, The Ongins ofCnticism. Literary Culture and Poetic Theory in Classical Greece,Princeton and Oxford.
Freudenburg 1993: Kirk Freudenburg, The Walking Muse. Horace on th Theory of
Satire, Princeton and London.
Rsler 1985: Wolfgang Rsler, Persona reale 0 persona poetica? Uinterpretazione
dell'Ho'nella lirica greca arcaica, Quad. urb. cult, class. 48, n.s. 19, 131-144.
Rudd 1976: Niall Rudd: Lines ofEnquiry. Studies in Latin Poetry, Cambridge.

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Persona Problems. The Literary Persona in Antiquity Revisited

A brief preliminaryword is necessary,since my topic, the literary

cially th vidence of poets on their predecessors, much of which

There are in particular passages in Catullus, Ovid, and Martial

Archilochus must be our starting place, for he is credited with th

44 Diels - Kranz = fr. 295W.

incidents related as biographical (cf. Pyth. 2.54-56). This point of

spoke th author's own mind (something expected of the members

The Literary Persona in Antiquity

singer, is th singer to be identified with th writer? To what degree

tiat (Inst. 2.15.26); th opinions are felt to be Plato's, speaking

about themselves; he betrays no sens of a persona. He goes on to

position. Personal poetry gives an insight into th character and

habuisse.That is to say, a view was current that their poems were

1.19.6), using a sort of induction universally favoured in antiquity

overview until th Thesaurusreaches our word. Niall Rudd (1976,

de ridiculis (Farn.7.32.2)14.There could however be no ground for

sonality is a refinement - urbanissime- which enables the poet to kill

The Literary Persona in Antiquity

1995, 63) David Mankin takes a thoroughly diffrent, modern view

sona of Crassus added authority to his argument, whilst for Horace

The Literary Persona in Antiquity

taceresuae. Each line contains a reflexive possessive pronoun. Ovid,

though such a reading is prejudicial to and inconsistent with another

On balance then we must see the often-cited Unes of Ovid as part

situation described in th verse. Such composition is fon, but not

The premise has to be emphasized that th persona must always

ing someone else's rle, but sustaining my own. But whatever th

bly painted by himself, without any artistic pretensions (so Horace

(670-671W. = 590-591M.),what conclusion was he to draw but that

One of th reasons that th ancient reader of satire might have

Again, there is hre no suggestion that Persius thought that he was

2.4.12-13,where it was not Horace speaking, but the persona, Catius,

The Literary Persona in Antiquity

i.ii) about the dangers he ran when an anonymous satire in which

or biblical scholar would readily point out, dreams were feit by th

King's College London

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