Intertextuality in the Works of Ancient Roman Poets

Abstract

Intertextuality is essential in the production and interpretation of texts, as no text exists on its own. Every text is a product of cultural discourses on  which it relies for its perspicuity. A creation of poststructuralist theorizing, it privileges an unrestricted and diversified intertextual relation. In a  similar praxis the concept of intertextual strategies in classical texts, consists in quotations, sources and models. This predisposition navigates the works of poet satirists in antiquity. Earlier poets like Ovid, Vergil and Cato adopted intertextual approaches in enriching their poetry by interjecting textual tissues of past citations in such areas as epic, mythology and morality. Yet, others like Tacitus in the Annales have interrogated culture and ideologies of their predecessors. This paper however, examines intertextuality from the didactic perspective of the works of ancient Roman poets, such as Persius, Horace and Juvenal, whose satires exhibited evidence of cross-textual tissues in antiquity. The paper contends that ancient satura, as a work of literature, is a production of textual tissues comprising ideologies and artistic experiences, among others. Hence, an intertextual  reading of ancient satirical poetic texts is imperative to apprehend the wide-ranging and multidimensionality of textual interpretations. In addition, it provides a plank for inclusivity and heterogeneity of textual relations and meanings for diachronic textual interpretation. This article concludes that such reading of texts would provide an avenue to filter older texts through contemporary ones, particularly in antiquity, bringing to the front burner the ceaseless trajectory of interconnectivity of textual tissues, cultures and ideologies previously inaccessible.

Keywords: Roman satire, intertextuality, antiquity, poststructuralist poetics, ideology