Literary history, The Wire, and soup

Yesterday and today were typical start-of-term days, when the brain bounces from one thing to another with reason but without much rhyme.  Along with working on my chapter on political judgment in Horatian satire, I've been gathering my thoughts for the opening week of my graduate course, a survey of imperial Latin literature.  When did Rome's literary history begin?  When did it end?  What do we mean when we speak of the end of a literature?  The claim can be made that Roman literature exists today, and not only because there are still a few thousand people in the world who read it.  The genres we treasure--the family sit-com, satire, political oratory, epic war stories--are Greco-Roman in flavor.

One text I've had to cut from my survey for reasons of time is Petronius' Satyricon, a marvelous prose satire that (unusually for classical literature) features a character who's worked and cheated and fought his way up in the world, who began from slavery and now lives a rich man, vulgar and boastful, full of meaty life, obsessed with death.  Sheer violence doesn't play the leading role in Trimalchio's life that it does in Stringer Bell's--though Trimalchio suffered from a daily grind of sexual exploitation whose humiliations his self-satisfied jokes don't quite mask--but because I finished the third season of The Wire last night, the two stories of men pushing their way from poverty into luxurious legitimacy resonate.  There are classical references in each tale--Trimalchio quotes epic, McNulty finds a leather-bound copy of The Wealth of Nations in Stringer's elegant apartment.  Both fear betrayal from friends.  Both insist on obedience from younger men and women who resemble them in their days of powerlessness.

The day is freezing, the coldest of the year, and ends with the comforts of hot winter vegetable soup and a friend's voice over the telephone.  As Pepys would say: and so to bed.