Poets of comic mockery and satire from antiquity to the present day routinely cast themselves as oppressed by forces outside their control, and indignant that the world cannot conform to their own sense of justice.  Much of the comedy of such poetry arises from the irony and disingenuousness that so often characterizes these stances of abjection—poets like to claim they are beleaguered, but at the same time they want to persuade their audiences of their ultimate superiority.  The trick for audiences of satirical poetry has always been knowing how to gauge this irony, i.e., how to evaluate the claims a poet makes for himself.  Ancient audiences (no less than modern ones) struggled to assess how much of this “subjective” poetry was autobiographical, and how much a function of generic protocol and playfully deceptive fictionalizing. The problem was especially acute with genres such as the ancient iambus or Greek Old Comedy (e.g., Aristophanes), which often went out of their way to use obscenity and to write about indecorous people and things.  The main question Professor Rosen will address in this talk will be how well ancient audiences were able to understand the poetic dynamics of satirical poetic genres, and what they made of the often negative, ‘compromised’ stances assumed by such poets.  He will focus on the ancient reception of the iambographic poet, Archilochus of Paros (7th C BCE), famous (among other things) for his comic attacks on prominent individuals of the day, unbridled obscenity and frequent claims of abjection, although his discussion will also extend to many other ancient comic poets along the way.