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Pasquinade is “A satire or lampoon, especially one that ridicules a specific person, traditionally written and posted in a public place” (from thefreedictionary). The term comes from Pasquino, one of the Congregation of Wits or Five Talking Statues of Rome upon which people have posted witty poems and political satires, starting about 1508. The late night comics like Steven Colbert do comedic pasquinades about Donald Trump every show.

The “members” of our Logophilia monthly meeting group are requested to be on the lookout for unusual words they encounter in their daily life. I have been reading and rereading The Stoic Philosophy of Seneca as translated by Moses Hadas, and he sprinkles his writings with an unusual words. Here is a not atypical sentence: “We confess that he [Augustus] was a good emperor and appropriately entitled father of his country for no other reason than because he did not requite with cruelty even personal affronts, which irk rulers even more than actual injuries, because he smiled at pasquinades aimed against him, because punishments seemed to pain him more than the culprits, because he not only refrained from executing the men condemned for adultery with his daughter but banished them for their safety and gave them safe conducts,” p. 150. I wrote out that whole sentence because not only was it an example of Hadas’s writing style, but it seemed to be a pasquinade aimed at possible weak minded readers. Me?

I enjoy rereading Seneca because he was dead center at the heart of the Roman Empire’s administration in those years that are still memorable in both the religious and secular worlds (BCE 4 to CE 64). Seneca is an absolute insider to real world politics of the Emperors Caligula, Claudius, Agrippina and Nero. Seneca was in Egypt with his Uncle the Chief Administrator of that country for about ten years ending in 31CE and those are the years that Jesus is active in the next door Roman administration district. 

I thought pasquinade would be a good word to begin a Logophilia series, but this post didn’t go anywhere.