The Satires of Horace. Horace
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“satire,” it is important to remember that Horace's Satires in the genre of satura are the product of a society that is alien as well as familiar. A sketch of Horace's social, political, and literary contexts will enhance understanding of what he was doing in these poems. Let us start with his life and times.
Horace—Quintus Horatius Flaccus, to give him his full Roman name— lived during momentous times that saw the transition from Republic to Principate. Born in 65 B.C.E., for much of his life he moved in elite circles at Rome, even though his background was relatively lowly. He was the son of a freedman—a former slave—who had made a fortune from entrepreneurship and who bought the best possible education for his son. That meant taking him to Rome from Apulia, in the far south of Italy. Horace completed his education alongside sons of the elite with a long stay in Athens. There, in 44 B.C.E., he joined the retinue of Brutus (the assassin of Julius Caesar), who promoted him to a position carrying equestrian status—the second highest rank at Rome, exceeded only by senatorial rank. But his promising career was soon checked by Brutus' rout and suicide at the battle of Philippi in 42, which had a negative impact on Horace's economic as well as social and political status. Shrewdly, he took the post of permanent assistant to the quaestors' office (scriba quaestorii), which handled public finances and public records. This position provided him with considerable influence and income. His friendship with the poet Virgil, future author of the Aeneid, facilitated an introduction first to the powerful patron Maecenas in 38 and then to Maecenas' friend Octavian, the future emperor Augustus. From that point onward, Horace's position was secure—so secure that he later felt able to decline Augustus' invitation to become his private secretary. At his death he named the emperor as heir and was buried near his patron Maecenas.
Horace's poetic output is prolific and spans a range of literary genres. His first venture was a first book of Satires, written in hexameters and published in 35–34 B.C.E. The second book of Satires, along with a book of fierce iambic poems called Epodes, followed soon after the crucial battle of Actium (31) that established Octavian in sole power. But Horace is best known for his lyric poetry, known collectively as Odes, in which he explores a wide range of political, moral, amatory, and poetic themes. In Odes 1–3, published as a collection in 23 B.C.E, Horace repeatedly demonstrates his allegiance to Augustus' new regime. Augustus returned the compliment by commissioning from him the carmen saeculare—“Hymn for the Era”—for performance at his celebration of the Secular Games in 17 B.C.E. The rest of Horace's poetic output is harder to date. At some point, he returned to the hexameter for Epistles Books I and II and for the socalled Ars Poetica (which is really an extension of his verse Epistles); his final engagement with lyric produced Odes 4, dating from 13 B.C.E. Despite some pressure and expectation, he never undertook an epic poem in praise of Augustus and defends himself (rather feebly) for this decision in both his Satires and his Odes. But both he and Augustus were well aware that Horace had celebrated many aspects of the Augustan program in other genres of poetry.
In his early poetic career, Horace experimented with two literary forms of attack—the old tradition of savage iambic poetry, long established in Greek literature, and the relatively recent Roman invention of hexametric satiric poetry. It is telling that he abandoned iambic poetry after just one book (Epodes), while he returned to the hexameter not only for a second book of Satires but also for all his Epistles, which share so many features with the Satires that many scholars follow Horace's hint (Epistles II.2.59–60) and regard them as belonging to the same genre. What appealed to him about the Roman genre and how does he relate to earlier satire? These questions are worth asking because the Greco-Roman world gave greater attention than our contemporary world does to the tradition within which an artist or poet worked and tended to measure a poet's achievements in terms of his relationship to his predecessors.
The genre of verse satire had received definitive shape about a hundred years before Horace took it up from a member of the Roman aristocracy called Gaius Lucilius (perhaps 180–102 B.C.E.). Unfortunately, only fragments of his poems survive—but enough to show the huge influence he had on Horace. It is no surprise that Horace calls him the “inventor” of the genre. After experimenting with many different meters, Lucilius settled on the hexameter as the meter for his satires. This decision to hijack the meter of epic—the most elevated literary genre in the Greco-Roman world, a form devoted to celebrating the exploits of heroes, kings and generals—must have created an astonishing conflict between form and content for the Roman audience. In his Satires, Lucilius attacked both eminent and lowly individuals for a wide range of personal failings ranging from incompetence to arrogance. He satirized city life with its frantic competitiveness and self-indulgent luxury. He criticized superstition and parodied philosophical ideas. And all this he did in the first person. Lucilius' autobiographical stance (whether or not it reflects anything at all about the real Lucilius) is a lasting legacy to the genre. So too is his unelevated style of diction: conversational, rambling, even blunt and obscene. He sometimes incorporates Greek words into his Latin and invents neologisms for effect; he sometimes indulges in epic parody. How did Horace develop the genre from the vigor and directness of the “inventor” of Roman satire?
Horace is certainly explicit about his admiration for Lucilius. Several times in the Satires (I.4, I.10, II.1) he evaluates Lucilius' poetry, and he also pays him the compliment of imitating him in several poems. For example, his account of his journey to Brundisium (modern Brindisi), Satire I.5, is clearly inspired by a Lucilius poem describing a journey to Sicily; for the ancients, imitation was a form of homage. In Horace's eyes, Lucilius was a fearless and witty critic of socially unacceptable behavior, but he was also prolix, writing too much too fast. Horace excuses his predecessor as a product of his times: “if fate could put him here today, / he would revise far more and hack away / at excess verbiage.” It seems clear that Horace regards himself as the natural urbane and suave successor to the “inventor” of the genre.
One manifestation of Horace's self-conscious urbanity is the high degree of self-irony that informs his autobiographical presentation. The self-ironic persona was something pioneered by Lucilius, but in Horace's hands it reaches new heights. For example, Horace takes a position of extreme humility by self-deprecatingly calling himself “a freedman's son” repeatedly in Satire 1.6. In Satire 1.5 he describes a wet dream after being disappointed by a girlfriend, and I.9 he depicts his feebleness in being unable to shrug off the unwanted attentions of a social climber. In several poems in Book II he depicts himself at the mercy of individuals breaking in on his leisure to deliver second-hand Stoic sermons on madness and freedom at him— a bankrupt called Damasippus in Satire II.3 and his own slave Davus in II.7. Whether the real Horace was anything like this we cannot say, but it is clear that the poet uses this stance to create a disarming position from which to launch his criticisms of Roman morals and Roman society.
The logical corollary of his humble persona is his limitation of stylistic range and his aspiration to a certain linguistic purity. Horace expels the Greek words and other colorful vocabulary typical of Lucilius and instead develops the idea of satirical poetry as “conversation,” preferring everyday vocabulary to high-flown poetic language. This fits his referring to his poems as sermones (“conversations”) as well as satura. He describes his pieces as “a chatty sort of poetry” and often obscures or complicates the verse form with frequent enjambment. This is captured very well by Juster's handling of the heroic couplet.
The most obvious manifestation of Horace's milder form of satire is that his attacks are never on famous individuals, but instead on types, sometimes named, sometimes not. This makes his satire rather oblique. For example, Satire I.1. which takes as its theme people's discontentedness with their own situation in life, is essentially an attack on avarice without targeting any specific miser.