Classical Education and Satire

"Difficile est saturam non scribere." - Juvenal (It is difficult not to write satire.)

The word satire is thought to originate from the Latin word satura for medley, and possibly influenced by Greek satyr plays. The first recorded Roman satirist was the poet Horace, although he also acknowledges Lucilius before him.

In many classical curricula, explicit mention of satire is absent; it may be because satirical literature is often felt to be a "lower" form of expression, and many works may stray over the line of propriety in their invective or ridicule.

Satire has had an important role to play in every place and time, however, and it often reflects the voice of the outside critique, and so it often reflects an important source of dissent and current for reform or change. It is not by any accident that some of the greatest satirists of the literary world had reasons why they may have felt themselves outcasts of one sort or another (Aesop was a slave, Horace's father was a slave, Pope was a Catholic in a Protestant England with a deformed spine, Jonathan Swift (Gulliver's Travels) was an Anglo-Irishman, and Byron and Orwell, Anglo-Scots), and satire with its mockery of power, has always had special appeal among young adults and the mature who might feel they are at the margins.

The boundaries between pure comedy, satire, and invective, are often blurred, but whether the Pilgrims in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales or the Chancery court lawyers in Dicken's Bleak House, well-directed satire can powerfully convict hypocrisy and deceit, swaying the tide of public opinion, and allowing individuals to see others as well as themselves in a completely different lights.

There is much that is good to be found in curricula such as Charlotte Mason's, but young satirists-at-heart will view some of her proponent's "twaddle-free" lists skeptically. And well they should. There is a lot of disagreement what constitutes Great Books, and much variability among the works of Great Authors, too. Satire has been with us throughout the Western Canon. It's been used for many purposes, to get a chuckle out of the reader, to purge the writer, to convict the guilty, and to rescue the downtrodden.

We haven't even really talked about visual satire like political cartoons or musical satire like Gilbert and Sullivan...we'll add them in some follow-up posts.

References:
Horace Picture