Model behavior: Generic construction in Roman satire

Recent scholarship on Roman satire has elucidated the genre's rhetorical strategies and identified various masks that the poets assume. There has been little comment, however, on the prominence of metaphors in the satirists' self-definition as well as in critical assessments of the genre. Satire is a mimetic genre; at least, its practitioners claim to imitate physical abuse, theatrical performance, and legal process. Moreover, the activities to which the satirists compare their genre are also common subjects of satiric narrative, which suggests that content and function are intertwined. This study argues that the satirist figure in Horace, Persius, and Juvenal is defined through often contradictory metaphors of violence, performance, and legal process. While explicit programmatic statements establish satire's connection with these activities, the poets also create characters who serve as their "alter egos" and thus as devices for self-presentation. Close readings of relevant narrative passages reveal that the satirists write a complex and tendentious astrology of satire, proclaiming the genre's antiquity and social functions. The programmatic agenda of satire is not restricted to the explicit, traditional apologia, but rather it permeates the vivid and suggestive narrative component of the genre.