The margins of satire: Suetonius, satura, and scholarly outsiders in ancient Rome

Abstract

Scholars have long been interested in Suetonius' De Grammaticis et Rhetoribus for the evidence it preserves of the history of education and philology at Rome. This article focuses on a different aspect of the work: its repeated links with satire. Suetonius' grammatici are presented both as authors and targets of satirical attacks, and fragments of their work preserved in the De Grammaticis et Rhetoribus reveal a wider, sub-elite field of satirical writing occluded in the polished, literary genre of Roman satura. Through analysis of Suetonius' biographical vignettes and related passages in Juvenal's Satire 7, this article sheds light on a vision of grammatici as outsiders who critique Rome—and each other—from the social and literary margins.