Any ancient satire is, by virtue of its name, its author's own black and putrid offering, stuffed for the table with an acrid and dubious blend of spices, giving a sour or salty kind of pleasure to its recipients.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Tuesday, April 13, 2021
Ancient Satire
Emily Gowers, The Loaded Table: Representations of Food in Roman Literature (1993; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), pp. 109-110: