Quintilian famously claimed that satire was tota nostra, or totally ours, but Jennifer Ferriss-Hill demonstrates that many of Roman satire's most distinctive characteristics derived from ancient Greek Old Comedy, in an innovative study that is the first book in English on this subject. She highlights in the writings of Lucilius, Horace, and Persius the features that they crafted on the model of Aristophanes and his fellow poets; the authoritative yet compromised author; the self-referential discussions of poetics that vacillate between defensive and aggressive; the deployment of personal invective in the service of literary polemics; and the abiding interest in criticizing individuals, types, and language itself.
Jennifer Ferriss-Hill is Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Miami. She received her A.B. in Classics summa cum laude from Princeton University (2002) and her Ph.D. in Classical Philology from Harvard University (2008), where she was the recipient of a Whiting Fellowship in the Humanities and a Derek C. Bok Award for Excellence in Graduate Student Teaching of Undergraduates. At the University of Miami, she has been awarded two Provost Research Awards, a Faculty Fellowship at the Center for the Humanities, and the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Scholarly and Creative Activities. She has published in Classical Philology, Transactions of the American Philological Association, The American Journal of Philology, Illinois Classical Studies, and Paideia on Latin poets such as Catullus, Virgil, and Horace, on Sabellic dialects, and Varro’s On the Latin Language.
