Jerome’s persona satirica and the Reception of Terence’s Comedy

Abstract

This paper discusses the traditional label of satiricus that has been applied to Jerome’s literary persona through the centuries because of his inquisitive and moralizing posture through laughter in many texts. We propose an alternative interpretation that suggests that his well-humoured criticisms, intended to moralize society, often reflect another literary genre: that of comedy. Through the analysis of three cases of Jerome’s reception of, and intertextuality with, Terence, we show that being compared to a comic writer and to the specific model of Terence can be supported by Jeromian texts. Terence, in fact, ranks as a moralizer and one of the four greatest poets from Antiquity. Indeed, according to its reception in Jerome’s texts, the specific “Terentian way of writing” seems more elevated and softer for correcting society than the approach of a satirist who might be excessive and hurtful. So, the theatrum mundi commonplace is present in many works of our writer: the world is pictured as like a vicious comic stage that must be morally fixed by an author who, despite being a Christian, recreates the ludic comic mechanism to defend his opinion and provoke his readers to avoid being as ridiculous as comic characters.