Satire

Satire is now popularly regarded as a mode of mass media entertainment: humor or comedy with social content. The established academic view is that satire is a literary genre. As such, satire is largely a creation of modern university disciplinary demarcation dating from the 19th century; the notion of literature as a distinct type of canonical imaginative writing has been expanded from the more venerable field of poetics. The best historical evidence for satire being a genre comes from the Juvenalian tradition of critical poetry—but this is largely innocent of humorous intent. Conversely, the wit and humor typical of Menippean satire persistently upsets the expectations of coherence on which conceptions of genre rely. A corrective to modern expectations is found in N. Bailey’s Etymological Dictionary of 1735, which defined satire as either a form of poetry, or any sharp rebuke. Even the association of satire with humor is contingent and has traditionally been secondary to claimed moral purpose. Considering the diversity of phenomena that have been taken as satiric, any single definition may be unsatisfactory—and indeed any cohesive history of satire (beyond a narrative of semantic adaptation) illusory. This entry discusses changes in the meaning of satire, as well as its purposes and targets.

The word itself indicates the difficulties involved: Satire is a metaphorical derivation from the Latin satira, a medley or stew. Quintilian (35–ca. 100 CE) claimed that satire was a Roman invention, but he seems to have had in mind poetry in Latin hexameters and may have been reacting against a Hellenistic cultural hegemony to which Romans were sensitive. One meaning of satire remained a designation for a form of poetry, most specifically associated with the Roman poets Juvenal (ca. 60–130 CE) and Horace (65–8 BCE) and this became a lively if sporadic tradition of adaptive emulation that survived beyond Alexander Pope (1688–1744). Other understandings however, would extend the range of satire to include Greek verse and especially the Attic Old Comedy of Aristophanes (ca. 450–ca. 385 BCE). During the Renaissance, philological interest in the origins of the word satire was tied to an endeavor to establish a proper meaning. This was never really achieved, but Isaac Casaubon (1559–1614) argued persuasively that the origins did indeed lie in Latin rather than in the Greek satyr plays that accompanied Attic tragedy.

Nevertheless, there remained some conceptual plausibility to belief in an ultimately Greek origin for satire, not least because the Roman satiric poet Varro (116–27 BCE) wrote in the idiom of the 3rd-century BCE Greek poet Menippus, whose diatribes are now lost. The name Menippus was used in the satires of Lucian (ca. 120–180 CE) by which time satire could be prose or—true to its metaphorical origins—a medley of prose and poetry. Lucian’s work is central to the unbroken and self-conscious tradition of humorous satire running from the Renaissance to the 19th century.