The satiric gaze: the physician, the body, and the mirror

Roman satirists are experts at reading the body’s signs. The satirist’s eye, like that of a physician or an expert in physiognomy, is keen at detecting indications of sickness or health, virtue or vice. That the satirist is able to “read past” the body for the condition of the soul is an idea solidly attested already in Lucilius at fr. 678W: “we see that one who is mentally ill gives an indication of this through his body.”

The principal object of the satirist’s gaze is the world of contemporary social experiences: he catalogues his society’s distortions, sometimes aggressively, sometimes with an ironic smile, but always respecting the body’s symbolic potentials as an index of moral values and internal states. This cognitive tension, by analogy, intrudes upon language by literalizing images or metaphors and reducing abstract concepts to their real or corporeal referents, thereby extracting from them a moral significance.