Kenney_and_Clausen B.M.W.(eds.) - Get a Free Blog

HORACE
Mevius may end in disaster. Similar imprecations are found in the so-called
Strasbourg epode, usually attributed to Archilochus, 1 which Horace almost
certainly knew. The difference between the two poems is not between the real
and die imaginary (for Mevius was a real person, whether or not he was making
a journey), but between the deadly seriousness of Archilochus and Horace's
playful malice. Epod. 10, in fact, is a literary joke, in which the kindly form of
the propemptikon (or send-off poem) is filled with grandiloquent invective so
as to annihilate a fellow poet.
In satire Horace's role was rather different. Here the pioneer work had been
done by a Latin poet, Gaius Lucilius, a hundred years earlier. That ebullient
and wide-ranging man had taken over the idea of verse miscellanies (saturae)
from Ennius. Then, by settling on the hexameter and using it to project a lively
critical spirit, he had succeeded in creating a new and specifically Roman
genre. It was, however, undeniably rough and sprawling, and Horace's contribution
was to reduce and refine it so as to meet his own, more purely classical,
standards. This meant concentrating mainly on a few central topics — in
particular man's enslavement to money, glory, gluttony, and sex; narrowing
the linguistic range by restricting the use of vulgarisms, archaisms, Greek
importations, and comic coinages; cutting down on elisions and end-stopped
lines so as to ease the rhythmic flow; and modifying Lucilius' buffoonery,
coarseness, and abuse. Yet Horace greatly admired the older satirist, and he
carried on the Lucilian tradition not just by ridiculing vice and folly but by
writing in an informal and amusing way about himself.
The main differences between the two books of satires are as follows: Book i
(published in 35 B.C. or soon after) includes a few pieces •where the ethical
element is small (as in 8 and 9) or negligible (as in 5 and 7) and the main purpose
is to entertain; the attacks on moral and literary faults are conducted by the
poet himself (sometimes with the aid of an anonymous opponent), and they
are made specific and interesting by the frequent use of proper names. In
Book 2 (30 B.C.) fewer figures are attacked, and new techniques are employed
for communicating the ideas. Thus Horace sometimes delivers the homily
himself, sometimes reports it, sometimes listens to it, sometimes appears as
a person being warned or rebuked, and sometimes withdraws completely.
Dramatic presentations are more frequent, and there is an extensive use of
parody.
Perhaps the most notable feature of the Satires as a whole is their pervasive
reasonableness. Horace assumes at the outset that we are living in a civilized
society where there is no need to handle such monstrous aberrations as sadism,
cannibalism, and incest. He also assumes that within our social and moral
1
See Kirkwood (1961) 267—82, van Sickle (1975).
376
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008