satire

Picture an ancient Roman waiter presenting a platter piled with assorted fruits: that was a lanx satura, a “full dish.” Romans borrowed the image for a literary medley, especially poems jumping among subjects and meters, and eventually for writing that served up one vice after another for ridicule. The late Republican poet Ennius helped give this form literary prestige, although the fragments of his surviving work are not especially savage by modern standards. Around the same time, Latin speakers mistakenly linked satira with Greek satyr drama, helping alter the spelling even though satyrs had nothing to do with the word’s true ancestry. So satire began as a mixed dish—and today a sharp political cartoon or television sketch still serves society a platter of its absurdities.