Aliquid Decoctius : culinary metaphors in Persius' Saturae
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2011
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Abstract
Although Persius tackles a variety of themes in his six satires – the contemporary
literary climate, religion, overindulgence, self-knowledge, and self-sufficiency – a
culinary thread runs through all of them and serves to anchor the corpus as a whole. For
Persius, the connections between food, the body, and the mind are inseparable, and thus
throughout his satires the language of food and cooking often points directly to his
purpose in that particular poem.
By looking closely at repeated culinary metaphors in several different satires, we
will come to see how Persius exploits the language of food, cooking, and the body both to
convey the objective of particular satires and also to call attention to the complex and
often contradictory nature of the genre in which he is writing. Regardless of the topic at
hand, cooking in Persius is hardly a benign domestic activity; rather, the language of
cooking and digestion that he uses often reflects violence and is consistently taken to
extremes. The effects of food and cooking on the body are similarly taken to extremes
and are often grotesque. Persius sees bodily excess everywhere: the world around him is
fat, bloated, and swollen.
Therefore, instead of using these culinary references haphazardly, as Emily
Gowers suggests in The Loaded Table, I will argue that Persius places them carefully
throughout his collection, using them to highlight the contradictions ever-present not only
in his poetry, but also in the society around him.