34 Medical Analogy in Latin Satire any pain, but this certainly did not indicate good health. He recalled how surgeons had successfully used iron to resuscitate and reanimate even half-d ead people and aroused or restored their forces. Encouraged by this example, men should trust their minds to satirical doctors who supervised and treated the moral condition. Such doctors completely rooted out all blemishes (labes), diseases (pestis) and seeds of disorder (perturbationum semina) by using the traditional means of iron and fire (ferro et flammis). Landino had recommended the same therapy, defend- ing the satirists from accusations of cruelty by saying that they used fire and iron – the surgical knife – to heal wounds only in the most difficult cases, when other remedies had failed, and it was impossible to avoid having recourse to a physician’s care (1486, cxvii). From the Italian soil the medical discussions, which defended the usefulness of satire, spread to the North. A very successful poetologi- cal treatise was written in the sixteenth century by a Jesuit priest and gymnasium director in Augsburg, Jacobus Pontanus (Jakob Spanmüller, 1542–1626). Pontanus adopted the by-n ow familiar medical analogy in his Poeticae institutiones:3 It is reasonable to submit the diseases of the mind to satirical criti- cism, because the sickness of the mind concerns the art of satire just as pains, ulcers and sick bodies concern the art of medicine. Both these arts propose sanity as their goal. One uses words; the other, mixtures and herbs. Both prepare bitter, unsweetened and distaste- ful medicines for patients; they operate surgically and burn the flesh, without pity. (1594, pp. 171–2, Argumenta, finis, utilitas satyrae) Several times Pontanus argued that satirists should imitate physicians, especially in the use of bitter but salubrious medicine. Intellectual his- tory has preserved many passages with references to bitter but truthful words as medical potions. Plato compared philosophy with medicine and rhetoric with flattery. In his essay “How to tell a flatterer from a friend”, Plutarch stressed that at times friends needed to abandon exalting, gladdening and flattering words and instead have recourse to reproof and frankness. This frankness (Gr. parrhesia) was compared to a bitter and pungent-s melling medical potion mixed of castor, hellebore or a medicinal plant called polium, which the patient was made to drink for his benefit (Moralia 55A–B). The flatterer acted in the opposite way. If a man hesitated to bathe or eat for health reasons, then the flatterer approved of the man’s deceitful 99778800223300__222288112222__0033__cchhaa0022..iinndddd 3344 77//22//22000099 1100::1144::4477 AAMM Medical Meta-language 35 desires and did nothing to restrain him from his pleasures, as a friend would have done. Instead, the flatterer encouraged the man “not to maltreat his body by forced abstinence” (“How to tell a flatterer from a friend”, Moralia 62A; trans. Frank Cole Babbitt). At the end of his essay, Plutarch, however, remarked that the dose given to a friend should not be thoroughly permeated by bitterness. Here, again, the example of the physicians was to be followed: Just as after a surgical operation the physician treated the suffering part with soothing lotions, in the same way frank speech should be mollified by gentle words (74D). Another famous dictum describing the poet-p hilosopher’s beverages was found in Lucretius’ De rerum natura (1.936–50; 4.11–25), where in a memorable way he offered his curative verses to readers, as a doctor sugars a healthy potion with honey. This therapeutic and persuasive activity had its literary counterpart in satirical admonishment, which also offered bitter medicines for sick souls. The image was seen in Horace’s first satire (1.1.25), where teach- ers offered biscuits to children to coax them to learn. In Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiae the personified Philosophy repeatedly prom- ised to offer harsher remedies to the patient, although she never used them.4 Landino, Minturno and Pontanus all employed the locus classi- cus from Lucretius and Horace, repeating that the sick soul resembled a child who refused to listen to adults’ admonishments.5 The purpose of satirical humour and wit was to sweeten the brim of a glass so that the patient would not recognise the bitterness of an unpleasant medicine before it touched the bottom of his stomach. The bitterness referred to the salubrious content of the words and their biting frankness, use- ful but at times disturbing and frightening in their satirical language, which vividly portrayed the number and dangerous effects of vices. For Lucretius, the honey had meant the poetic form, which covered the philosophical content; here the sweetening was humour, verbal wit and the fictitious examples used to illustrate the ethical issues. These examples help us to imagine how widely medical analogies in satirical writing were adopted by early modern authors. Jacob Balde, the seventeenth- century satirist and also a Jesuit, who knew Pontanus’s poetics well, noted in his satire Medicinae gloria that “following the example of the author [Horace] who offered sweet cookies to patients and spiced with the bees’ liquor his bitter potion, we also mix in this book such diverse ingredients as absinth and honey, juice and biting vinegar” (1651, sat. 1). Balde thus characterised his stylistic choices by reference to the ancient analogy. He also emphasised the healing nature 99778800223300__222288112222__0033__cchhaa0022..iinndddd 3355 77//22//22000099 1100::1144::4488 AAMM 36 Medical Analogy in Latin Satire of his satirical poetry in the preface to his poems: I will exhibit the fearless art of writing that may be something new in our age. It is akin to medicine, which abolishes diseases of the body by using bitter but efficient drinks and seasons them with sweet juices so that they would not be rejected. Satire penetrates the mind and, by removing vices, endeavours to restore the temperance of manners. Therefore, poetry would appear horrid and frightening, unless the vividly running, chill water created by Pegasus’ hoofs that easily makes the reader’s teeth chatter had a touch of honey obtained from Helicon. (1651, Ad candidum Lectorem, p. 369)6 In De studio poetico Balde claimed that although satirists collected their words and expressions from the butcher shop (meaning that their words were harsh and crude), the shop itself was situated in the Roman Forum, and the meal was lavish, consisting of acid tastes, rustic cabbages, meat and sarcasms sprinkled with sweet dew (1658b, pp. 47–8). The flavour- ing also included a jar of pure salt, vinegar and mustard. These ingre- dients – salt and mustard – were often mentioned in medical literature among the purgatives, which were used for inducing a vomit. Balde pro- posed in the first poem of his Medicinae gloria that even if he could not heal like Persius, he would still write like Matho, composing lamenta- tions at people’s graves (1651, sat. 1). When he defended the art of satire in his De studio poetico, he also used the conventional healing verbs of sanare and urere (1658b, p. 47). Although Balde boasted of the novelty of his method, he expressed the function of his satirical poetry in words that, already in the previous century, had become commonplace. These general remarks on the healing nature of satire were often accompanied by further discussions on individual satirists as heal- ers. Thomas Drant, an Archdeacon of Lewes in the sixteenth century, translated a group of Horatian satires in 1566, giving them the title “A MEDICINABLE Morall, that is, the two Bookes of Horace’s Satyres” (Randolph 1941, p. 143; Pagrot 1961, p. 81). The edition was also prefaced with the motto Antidoti salutaris amaror (“the salutary bitterness of a salutary antidote”). In Renaissance commentaries, the primary purpose of Persius’ satires was seen as being the castigation of human vices and making people sane (sanus). Federicus Cerutus (b. 1541) wrote in a dedi- cation attached to his explanatory paraphrase of Persius in 1597 that: just as physicians are occupied in purging and curing wounds and bodily illnesses, likewise there has to be a way to treat – as if with 99778800223300__222288112222__0033__cchhaa0022..iinndddd 3366 77//22//22000099 1100::1144::4488 AAMM Medical Meta-language 37 healthy medicine – human minds suffering from vices. And even if this therapeutic effort does not turn out to be completely successful, nevertheless patients should at times be punched by biting words and at times persuaded by festive laughter to avoid wrong deeds.7 These examples are but a few of many that show the continued emphasis placed on satire’s role as curative writing. The medical meta- phor recurred not only in poetics but also in commentaries about indi- vidual writers. The healing doctor and the sick doctor Early modern discussions of Roman satire often made critical compari- sons among the three Roman satirists, especially Horace and Juvenal, who were considered significantly different in tone and in their rea- sons for writing (Brummack 1971, pp. 312–20). Authors such as Daniel Heinsius and John Dryden saw that the purpose of healing was central to Horace’s satires, a goal absent from Juvenal’s more aggressive writing. In Heinsius’s view, Horace used indirect means of teaching virtue, and his satires followed the same ironic method that Socrates had used in correcting men with false beliefs. Whereas Horace gently healed his patients by stressing the value of simple living, Juvenal wrote in terms that suggested his own sick condition. Instead of representing him as a healer, Heinsius argued that Juvenal’s satires vomited black bile (1629a, p. 172). Balde spoke of Juvenal’s indignant verses, which were foaming like an epileptic; Balde doubted whether, considering the manners of his times, his contempor- ary authors had sufficient spleen and black bile to censure its evils and imitate Juvenal. Balde expressed his predilection for playfulness rather than for bloody and serious criticism (1651, p. 369). Likewise, in his De ludicra dictione (1658), the French Jesuit Franciscus Vavassor (François Vavasseur, 1601–81) remarked that Horace influenced the mind in a gentle and playful way, Persius was ironic and philosophic, but Juvenal’s satires were crude and nauseating in their indignation; the author was queasy and so was his reader (Ch. 2.7, De Horatio, Persio, Iuvenali).8 The vomiting associated with Juvenal was a form of involuntary physical purgation and concrete evacuation; the author could only throw up when encountering the corrupted world. Thus, the satirical purging was not a pleasurable event for any of the participants. A similar distinction between Horace and Juvenal was drawn by the Dutch scholar Petrus Cunaeus (1586–1638) in his two speeches entitled 99778800223300__222288112222__0033__cchhaa0022..iinndddd 3377 77//22//22000099 1100::1144::4488 AAMM 38 Medical Analogy in Latin Satire In Horatium and In Juvenalem.9 Here, Horace was described as an author who revealed people’s whip-s carred backsides and disclosed their true faces behind their illusory masks, allowing no one to remain hidden beneath an alien skin (1674a, pp. 225–6). Juvenal, on the other hand, not only attacked vices that were ridiculous (that is, moderate and bear- able), but also censured serious improbity and actual crimes, which deserved to be violently punished and lanced (1674b, p. 244). In his essay De satira Juvenalis (c. 1616), Nicolas Rigault examined Juvenal’s fiery style and argued that Juvenal had armed himself with a horrible whip with which, burning with indignation, he painfully lashed worth- less people.10 Despite his sadistic aggression, Juvenal was not a mere executioner. Rigault saw him along with the other Roman satirists as a philosopher through satire. In Rigault’s view, stylistic differences among the three satirists were caused by their differing historical contexts. In the deep- ening degeneration of imperial Rome, the satirists gradually needed to adopt a more severe attitude and disavow the role of physician in order to be heard, to surpass their predecessors and to counter the increase in contemporary corruption. In contrast to the happier times under Emperor Augustus, laughter was forbidden during the reigns of Nero and Domitian. In Rigault’s lively description, the involuntary suppression of laughter set off a physical reaction in Juvenal. The restrained laughter first changed to indignation and pain, then gradually grew worse and finally turned to anger, leaving the impression that the poet was on fire within (velut aestuantibus praecordiis). This condition, which does not escape flatulent associations, was reflected in Juvenal’s passionate style and in his manner of chasing people’s vices with the already familiar instruments of iron and fire (ferro flammaque). The Roman satirists themselves often also appealed to a kind of a bod- ily urge and compulsory physical need that was pressing their innards and making them write satire. Persius said that he was unable to rule his spleen (1.12, petulanti splene); Juvenal noted that anger boiled in his dry liver (1.45, siccum iecur ardeat ira). Writing was a form of personal and physical release. Some modern scholars have argued that self- purgation was in fact the main function of traditional verse satire (Birney 1973, pp. 4, 13). However, the reactions that Horace’s satires elicited from the reader were considered significantly different: Pontanus praised Horace for successfully playing around the diaphragm, that is, the soul of men (1594, p. 173). When sweetly titillating the reader’s diaphragm, which, in Johannes Murmellius’s words, was the most sensitive part of the human body, Horace’s writing aroused the most pleasurable feelings (1516, xiiiiv). 99778800223300__222288112222__0033__cchhaa0022..iinndddd 3388 77//22//22000099 1100::1144::4488 AAMM Medical Meta-language 39 To return to Rigault’s discussion in De satira Juvenalis, he followed his description of the satirists with an interesting account of the physico- pathological state of Domitian’s Rome. Rigault’s words are quoted here in full in order to show his rhetorical vigour: Juvenal wrote in an age that was thoroughly contaminated by the emperors’ crimes. Laws were abandoned and the government’s voice fell silent. Once virtuous Rome was now degenerating and gradually falling into a state of enervation and nearly lethal lethargy (sopore paene letali). In awakening lethargic patients, doctors instruct to burn crude pitch, fresh wools, onions, galbanum and other substances that exude unpleasant smells, which make the patient sneeze and thus to shake his head. Likewise, satirists have to light their torches, bring them close to people, burn stinking taverns and obscene brothels and profitably illuminate the Neronian nights. Thereby, the dirt which is put into motion strikes the nostrils and the brain, and the lethargic languor (somniculosus ille marcor) which had overcome the Roman minds is dispersed by fierce indignation, as if by a sneeze. (1684, unpaginated) Satire was here compared with the burning of all kinds of fumigants, and the ensuing smoke was then thought to dispel moral ills, since it made the mind purge itself and recover its consciousness as if by sneez- ing. The therapy recommended here echoes Celsus’ advice to burn simi- lar drugs in order to promote sneezing and to cure men of acute and lethal lethargy (De medicina 3.20.1–2). The benefits of sneezing were also observed in Renaissance medicine. In his Institutiones medicinae, Daniel Sennert stated that pepper and hellebore not only irritated the nostrils, but also usefully stimulated the brain while causing the patient to sneeze (1628, pp. 966–7, 1151). Substances that excited sneezing were called sternutatoria; they were particularly strong and efficient in dis- persing even stagnated fluids. Galbanum, the medicament mentioned in Rigault’s text, was an aromatic gum resin, which was also used as a spice. According to Pliny the Elder, the very touch of it mixed with oil of spondylium was sufficient to kill a serpent (Naturalis historia 24.13.21–2). Satirists were thus advised to use strong remedies indeed, and the act of cleansing taking place by the fumigations was itself a means of traditional catharsis. Renaissance writers often expressed their predilection for either of the two moral authors, Horace or Juvenal. Among the most notable writers on poetics, J. C. Scaliger (1484–1558) favoured Juvenal in his Poetices 99778800223300__222288112222__0033__cchhaa0022..iinndddd 3399 77//22//22000099 1100::1144::4488 AAMM 40 Medical Analogy in Latin Satire libri septem (1561) and considered Persius’ poems needlessly abstruse, asking what sense did it make to attempt to amend people’s manners if such incomprehensible language was used that no one understood (III, caput XCVII, Satyra). In his De satyrae Latinae natura & ratione (1744, p. 115), a literary scholar and philologist from Padua, Giovanni Antonio Volpi (Johannes Vulpius, 1686–1766) argued against Scaliger’s high esti- mation of Juvenal by claiming that: in amending the habits of sinners (peccantium morbis emendandis) it was useless to burn with fire, to adopt a threatening pose or act like a public executioner, when the purpose after all was to cure sinful patients of their diseases. Sweet and mild remedies were more effi- cient than caustic and irritating means in curing the diseases of the mind (morbi animorum). The latter way merely exacerbated the condi- tion and day by day turned the situation to the worse, so that finally no hope of sanity remained. In his Discourse concerning the original and progress of satire (1693), John Dryden, for his part, described the two Latin authors as follows: And let the Manes of Juvenal forgive me if I say that this way of Horace was the best for amending manners, as it is the most diffi- cult. His was an ense rescindendum; but that of Horace was a pleasant cure, with all the limbs preserved entire; and as our mountebanks tell us in their bills, without keeping the patient within doors for a day. What they promise only, Horace has effectually performed. Yet I contradict not the proposition which I formerly advanced: Juvenal’s times required a more painful kind of operation [...]. (1968, p. 138) Between the lines Dryden was also criticising the medical practitioners of his time. The medical imagery was further elaborated on a few pages later, where Dryden derided readers who did not appreciate the value of good literature (Horace’s satires) or penetrate its deeper truths, which would have given them moral sanity and happiness: They who endeavour not to correct themselves according to so exact a model, are just like the patients who have open before them a book of admirable receipts for their diseases, and please themselves with reading it, without comprehending the nature of the remedies, or how to apply them to their cure. (1968, p. 141) 99778800223300__222288112222__0033__cchhaa0022..iinndddd 4400 77//22//22000099 1100::1144::4488 AAMM Medical Meta-language 41 Horace was here emphatically introduced as a doctor, but Juvenal had a different effect on his clients. Still, Dryden greatly appreciated Juvenal’s mastery, and when comparing it with his satires’ truncated form in translations, Dryden again used the violent physical (if not dir- ectly medical) image: “Yet there is still a vast difference betwixt the slovenly butchering of a man, and the fineness of a stroke that separ- ates the head from the body, and leaves it standing in its place” (1968, p. 137). Medical and body metaphors were thus applied to describe the differences among the satirists, their original texts and the translations. In his preface to Absalom and Architophel (1681), Dryden also used the above metaphor, saying that satire endeavoured to amend vices by cor- rection like a physician who prescribed strong remedies for an inveter- ate disease. This was done to prevent the surgeon’s amputation of an ense rescindendum that Dryden did not wish even on his worst enemies (Pagrot 1961, p. 149). In Juvenal’s satires the victim was decapitated as though he had been in battle. The point made by several early modern authors in comparing Horace and Juvenal was that Horace’s more pleasant, humorous and indir- ect way of writing satires resembled the work of a medical doctor, but in Juvenal’s times more bitter medicine or even verbal execution was needed. Therefore, his satires turned to outright violence, punishing the victim and causing extreme physical pain rather than healing. Heinsius and Volpi on satirical catharsis In sixteenth- and seventeenth- century poetics, the satirist’s violent intervention was described in surgical terms or justified by referring to satire’s purifying purpose. Usually, satire was discussed in terms of medical purging (purgatio). Contemporary medical literature made distinctions between different forms of purging; catharsis in the strict sense meant concrete evacuation of humours through vomiting or tak- ing laxatives (Sennert 1628, p. 1108, purgatio in specie humorum excre- mentitiorum per alvum & vomitum per cathartica evacuationem significat). However, in poetics the discussions were related to the powerful pos- ition that Aristotle’s Poetics and the concept of catharsis had acquired in these centuries, both having become “an established pillar of a peda- gogic concept of poetic art” (Meter 1984, pp. 29–30). Along with tra- gedy, attention was now drawn more systematically to other literary genres, and their poetics received new impetus through the applica- tion of Aristotelian concepts. Francesco Robortello was one of the fam- ous sixteenth- century Italian commentators on Aristotle’s Poetics – his 99778800223300__222288112222__0033__cchhaa0022..iinndddd 4411 77//22//22000099 1100::1144::4488 AAMM 42 Medical Analogy in Latin Satire commentary appeared in Florence in 1548. Robortello wrote poetics of comedy, elegy, epigram and satire as well (Meter 1984, p. 108).11 By following the analogy of tragedy, scholars now endeavoured to find a similar explanation for the effects on the reader caused by other literary genres. Comedy, for example, was said to produce relief from anxiety, sadness, tension, violent aggression and even envy.12 The idea of laugh- ter as a remedy against melancholy was commonplace in prefaces to all kinds of comic narratives, facetiae collections and parodical eulogies. For example, a collection of anecdotes entitled Antidotum melancho- liae joco serium (1668) and addressed to baron Nemo or Niemandt von Nirgendshausen, offered according to its preface “a useful antidote to melancholy that was pernicious to everyone, and turned away, repelled and repulsed the evil from individual households and doors, from thresholds and hearts, from breast and brain, indeed from the entire microcosm”. However, melancholy was never mentioned as the object of satirical catharsis, but only of the other forms of comical literature.13 In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the satiric theory was modified and modelled after the cathartic effects of tragedy proposed by Aristotle. Satirical purging was influentially defined by Daniel Heinsius in his book on Horatian satire, De satyra Horatiana libri duo (1612, extended edition 1629). Heinsius had dealt with tragic purga- tion or expiation of passions in his De tragoediae constitutione in 1611. For him, catharsis was the principal objective of tragedy. He regarded catharsis as a means of moral instruction and not merely as an aesthetic effect (1643, pp. 10–11).14 The concept encompassed the medical and therapeutic meanings given to it in the philosophy of Pythagoras, which Heinsius knew through Iamblichus’ On the Pythagorean Life. Heinsius compared tragic catharsis to the purification achieved through blood- letting, the use of emetics and vomiting by which harmful substances and fluids were expelled and removed from the body. However, he did not view such catharsis as an elimination of all the emotions, which was the Stoic interpretation, but only of the detrimental elements and excesses so that the passions and emotions were diminished to the right degree and balanced in the mind so that they obeyed reason, as prescribed by Aristotle or Pythagoras. Heinsius thus understood tragic catharsis as moderation rather than as an extirpation of the passions (Meter 1984, pp. 168–9). After having dealt with tragic catharsis, Heinsius applied the idea to satire as well. His overall interest in the theory of literary genres and Aristotelian literary theory was probably stimulated by Robortello’s studies (Meter 1984, p. 108), but the discussion of satirical catharsis was 99778800223300__222288112222__0033__cchhaa0022..iinndddd 4422 77//22//22000099 1100::1144::4488 AAMM