ABSTRACT
Literature, from Antiquity to some time in the eighteenth century, was frequently characterized by a simple juxtaposition of two Latin adjectives: utile ('useful or profitable' ) and dulce ('sweet or pleasant').i In other words, literature aimed both to please and to instruct, like the rhetoric which underlay it, and comic literature could be just as 'useful' as tragic or openly didactic literature. So even scatological comic literature (which has been very little studied because scatology was until recently a taboo subject) could have satirical, rhetorical or sociological implications.
