Satiren

The six verse satires by Aulus Persius Flaccus (34-62 AD) seem like a modern text (e.g. Arno Schmidt) due to the poet's unconventional use of metaphors and intertextual references as well as the mixture of emphatically sophisticated poetic diction with colloquial language. Like the verse satires of his predecessor Horace, they are morally critical, but the instruction is ironically coloured in its own way and exemplifies misconduct through extremely realistic scenes. Apart from the prose translation in W. Kißel's scholarly commentary, the text, one of the most difficult in ancient Latin, has so far only been available in metrical translations. The new prose translation endeavours to be as literal as possible and, in contrast to Kißel's, avoids a rhythmisation reminiscent of hexameter and the classical poetic lexis of the Voss tradition. As the Bilingue is aimed at a wider audience, passages of text that are not easily comprehensible in terms of wording are explained in detail. The satires are accompanied by the Vita of Persius, probably based on Suetonius. A detailed bibliography lists, above all, more recent literature on which the bilingue's approach to Persius is orientated.

Niklas Holzberg, Munich, Germany.