SOURCE: "Introduction to the Poet and His Age" in Lucan: An Introduction, Cornell University Press, 1976, pp. 17-61.

In the following excerpt, Ahl explains how some Roman writers used ambiguity of expression to criticize their leaders with relative safety.

I. Gi; I. the Poet and the Principate =~ Sthe Poet and the Principate

The majority of Roman writers of the first and early second centuries A.D. take a cynical view of the world in which they live. The attacks on the abuse of power, wealth, and human life in Petronius, Persius, Martial, Tacitus, Juvenal, and Suetonius are familiar enough to even the casual reader of the classics. Often neglected, however, is the degree to which this cynicism is found, in one form or another, in writers less frequently read by the modern reader. Valerius Flaccus informs us in the first book of his Argonautica that people of his day...