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LITERARY CRITICISM
(41.5). They would have reached the heights of oratory if they had lived a
century before; as it is, they have the blessings of the imperial peace to console
them.
Between them, two exponents of the art of oratory, Cicero and Tacitus, said
much of what can profitably be said about oratory in general. And Cicero gives
us, in the most urbane form possible, the Greek precepts for rhetoric as well.
It was rarely to Cicero's point, and never to Tacitus', to apply their insights to
the task of criticizing individual speeches. And when we turn finally to Horace
and the criticism of poetry, we find ourselves again in the company of one who,
reacting to the controversies of the time, gives us memorable labels and influential
generalities rather than the particularities of a ' Longinus'.
Horace and poetry
Horace's Satires 1.4 and 1.10 together give us the poet's programme for satire.
His father's method of moral education had been to point to concrete instances
of vice — 'don't be like Scetanus' (1.4.112). Horace therefore does the same in
his poetry, acting as the 'frank friend' (132) to whom he says he owes any
improvement in his own character during adulthood. Those who criticize him
for malicious back-biting are wide of the mark. And Horace implicitly contrasts
himself with his great predecessor and model Lucilius, who, in a freer
age, pilloried 'anyone worthy of being represented as a bad man and a thief,
as an adulterer or murderer or some other type of criminal' (3—5). Horace deals
only with minor vices, and in any case he does not publish his satires — he only
recites to his friends, when he cannot avoid it.
In the course of these two poems Horace has much to say of Lucilius, whom
he represents as a diffuse and disorganized writer, flowing along ' like a muddy
river' (1.4.11; cf. 1.10.50), mixing Latin and Greek words with no sense of
propriety, and producing verse that stops in artistic pretension at the point of
ensuring that each line has its six feet. Horace makes no exaggerated claims for
his own poems; with whatever irony, he disclaims the very title of poet in this
genre. But he emphasizes the need for a style ' now sad, now gay, keeping up
the role sometimes of a declaimer or poet, sometimes of a wit who purposely
spares his strength' (I.IO.II—14), for care in composition, and for use of the
eraser. Lucilius was better than his predecessors, and in his turn, ' if fate had
made him a contemporary of ours, he'd be cutting a lot out of his own works,
deleting everything that goes on after the point is made' (68—70). Those who
regard poets as no more than personae, and as portraying lives that bear no
relation to anything but books, can see all this as merely the taking up of a
literary stance. But Horace represents the poems as being reactions to criticism —
of Horace's own satirical malice, and of his claim to improve on Lucilius. And
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