8
FRANCES MUECKE
The Satires
Magnam rem puta unumhominem agere. Praeter sapientem autem nemo unum agit, ceteri multiformessumus.
(Consider it a great thing to play the role of one man. But nobody except the wise man plays a single role, the rest of us have many parts.)
Seneca, Epistles to Lucilius 120.22
The first monograph in English devoted exclusively to the Satires appeared as recently as 1966. On reflection, it is perhaps not surprising that this was presented as ‘an effort to revive interest in Horace’s Satires’.[1] Much to the taste of the eighteenth century,[2] the Satires had inevitably been swept aside in the age of Romanticism. Even in the mid-twentieth century, under the lingering influence upon later criticism of the Romantic interest in individuality, Eduard Fraenkel’s powerful voice had dismissed a considerable proportion of the two books as immature and ineffective Lucilian experiments and Patrick Wilkinson (in a book on Horace’s lyric poetry written for non-specialists) had felt obliged to explain why he did not get much enjoyment from the hexameter works.[3]
In the generation or two that have now passed since Rudd brought the Satires back into the mainstream of Latin literary studies, there have been enormous changes in this field, and, far from being neglected, the Satires have been recognised as offering much scope to current interpretative approaches, where emphasis is placed on dynamic relationships within genre and literary history, on the ideological dimension, and on re-integration of the cultural and the political.
Horace’s Satires, with their engagement with Roman social life, their problematization of their genre, their flaunting of powerful patrons, and their setting in the politically uncertain period of the young Caesar’s consolidation of power, are no longer marginalized, yet still elusively evade any attempt to pin them down. Probably the greatest change in the reading of the Satires has been in the evaluation of the figure of Horace himself.
Autobiography, personae and personality
Horace’s presence is pervasive in the Satires, but in different ways: as first person speaker in the ‘diatribe’ satires in book 1, as ‘example’, as narrator of his own experiences, as defender (or celebrator) of his own social or literary position, as victimized interlocutor of a ‘satirist’ figure in book 2. Introduced without much circumstantial background in the opening three satires the ‘I’ is gradually built up to become a seemingly autonomous inhabitant of a vividly realized world, as more and more incidents and people from Horace’s own life are made part of the texture of his work. The process is cumulative, and involves both selection and omission.
In any attempt to tell Horace’s life, evidence for crucial early episodes will be drawn from the Satires: his birth at Venusia (2.1.34-9), his education at Rome (1.6.71-8) despite his relatively modest family background (1.6.71) and low social origins as a freedman’s son (1.6.6, 45-6). Further events closer to the time of writing are documented in the poems, we might even say are in a way their raison d’être: his meeting with and entering into a relationship with Maecenas, his patron and one of the young Caesar’s closest supporters (1.6.54-62, 2.6.40-2), his accompanying him on the embassy to Tarentum, along with two other young and important poets, Virgil and Varius, now his friends (1.5.27-33, 39-42), the gradual growth in intimacy and impegno of the bond with Maecenas, and the benefits received, notably the estate in the Sabine hills (2.6, 2.7). There are other more private episodes, or teasing glimpses of them: his sex-life (1.3, 1.5, 2.7), his life off-duty and on-duty (1.6, 2.6), his father’s care for his education and moral formation (1.4, 1.6). The Satires offer more of such biographical information than any of his other works, and the habit of extracting it for historical purposes will die hard.
Similarly, the Satires were long taken as direct expressions of the author’s personality — his ideas, attitudes and viewpoints, his humanity. The idea that any such literary expression is unmediated by genre, ideology or rhetoric has now gone, and correspondingly there is less agreement as to the lineaments of the authorial figure being projected. Despite the great amount of attention that has been given (post Fraenkel and Rudd) to the rhetorical divorce of the historical figure of the author from his presentation of himself in his poems, and to his artistically constructed satiric voice (his persona), two recent studies demonstrate, in their very different ways, that the ‘autobiographical’ element, in the widest possible sense, is a ‘disturbing’ part of the fabric of the Satires, the source of a perpetual ambiguity ‘which cannot be eliminated by any critical intervention’.[4]
A stumbling-block for criticism in this regard has been the co-existence, especially in book 1, of satires of varying lengths, structures, and modes. Some are moralising ‘sermons’ (1.1-3), some are anecdotes or narratives (1.5, 7, 8, 9), and some are justifications of Horace’s life or writing (1.4, 6, 10). The disparity between the satires of ‘self-revelation’ and the more ‘satirical’ satires prompted varying reactions. Fraenkel’s influential enthusiasm for the ‘faithful, detailed, and lively picture of [Horace’s] own personality and his world’ was accompanied by an unconcealed distaste for the ‘diatribe’ satires: ‘the earliest satires with their diatribes on conventional topics and their somewhat mechanical invectives against a number of more or less shadowy characters’. Horace, he argued, discovered his own voice in the ‘free self-presentation’ of ‘the most perfect poems of the two books of sermones’.[5]
Rudd, on the other hand, began his book with the claim that the collection of book 1’s ‘reputation must stand or fall by the diatribes’.[6] The ‘diatribe’ satires are versions of the kind of moral discourse commonly labelled with this term, the popular philosophical diatribe itself being characterised by its moral themes, serio-comic approach, and vivid and direct language. In Rudd’s reading they have the qualities of humaneness, lightness of touch, subtle structural control and originality in their use of commonplace material. Nevertheless, he too contrasts the first satires, where we learn little about the poet himself, with 1.6 ‘in which the diatribe has been made the medium of a personal declaration’.[7] Anderson’s version of Horace’s satiric persona, a concept he was influential in establishing in interpretation of the Satires, as ‘a Socratic satirist probably quite unrepresentative of [Horace] himself’ was based on the diatribe satires.[8] The satirist is ‘a smiling teacher of truth about important ethical matters’. This persona is ‘cumulatively achieved’. Horace gives a general impression of the satirist in the first three satires before ‘letting him speak about himself’.[9]
Anderson had downplayed the ‘self-portraiture’ later in book 1, but Zetzel redressed the balance, by tracing the development of a single persona within the book from ‘a voice that is all but disembodied’ in the first three poems to ‘an increasingly vivid picture of the speaker’. He also added the important idea that the book as a whole, when the poems are read in sequence, yields a kind of autobiographic narrative: ‘a description of the speaker’s progress from outside the circle of Maecenas to inside it.’[10] This first version of Horace’s ‘master narrative … of [his] career’ in Satires 1, his ascent of the social ladder by means of both his character and his poetry, is explored with great perceptiveness by Oliensis.[11] McNeill relates Horace’s concern with self-presentation even more directly to the inevitable dilemmas of his relationship with Maecenas, seeing the new approach which arose through bringing this relationship into the foreground as ‘one of his greatest poetic innovations’: ‘his thematization of his relationship with his patron as a focus for his private concerns and social challenges sets him apart from his contemporaries in the Roman literary world’.[12] McNeill attempts, as he admits, to reconcile irreconcilable positions (the biographical and the rhetorical), or, we might suggest, he attempts to work within ‘the discernible gap between the poet and his poetry’.[13]
A further challenging move in describing the nature (and literary background) of Horace’s satiric persona was made by Freudenburg. He argued that the persona of the diatribe satires is ‘incompetent’ in the handling of Greek popular philosophy (and that therefore the diatribe satires are parodies of diatribe).[14] The satirist is also a buffoon, imported from the comic stage.[15] Freudenburg thereby took issue with the assumption, shared by most previous critics, that Horace meant his moralising to be taken seriously at some level, even if not the literal, and to portray himself as a tactful, genial advocate of moderation and discrimination behind the pose of critic of others. In contrast, Freudenburg shows us a brilliant poet, in supreme control of the range of often contradictory literary traditions he is manipulating, displacing our attention onto the inadequacies of the satiric speaker. The latter is consistently characterised in the diatribe satires alone as doctor ineptus, but in the perspective of the book as a whole is as changeable as Proteus. For in the satires from 1.5 onwards, including those usually thought most personal, the satirist adopts a variety of inconsistent roles — ‘frivolous clown’ in 1.5, ‘unassuming philosopher’ and ‘noble advisor to Maecenas’ in 1.6, ‘tactless jesters’ in 1.7 and 1.8, only coming close to one aspect of his ‘real’ self (worthy friend of Maecenas) in 1.9.[16]
In book 1 the reader’s search for ‘Horace’ among the shifting population of dogmatic moralists and characters from the comic stage (including his father in 1.4), perpetually frustrated, can never be abandoned. This multiplicity of personae is made concrete in the dialogic structure of book 2, where (except in 2.2 and 2.6) the role of adviser, satirist, or doctor ineptus is given to a cast of other figures in conversation with an interlocutor. The displacement that is constantly gestured towards in book 1 — we cannot help asking if the satiric mask fits our poet — seems to be accomplished in book 2, where the poet lays aside the mask of abusive satirist. But not the theme of self-characterisation and external reactions to the image he presents. Criticism, self-defence and implicit self-justification are still present: in the defence of himself as satirist (2.1) and friend of Maecenas (especially 2.6), in the alternative models of reaction to material loss (Ofellus 2.2, Ulysses 2.5), and in the close-to-the-bone exposés of the satirist’s personal failings by Damasippus and Davus (2.3, 2.7).[17] The implications of Horace’s shift of discursive mode between the two books will be considered in the next section.
From book 1 to book 2: genre and poetics
We have seen above how a generic approach allows critics to escape from the biographical fallacy: the poet’s personality in the poems depends on the requirements of his own and his readers’ inherited expectations of satire. This does not mean that the question of genre itself is straightforward. Genre, in that it demarcates a particular aspect of human experience, is where the literary tradition and the poet’s own responses to his world intersect. In recent work the issues of generic dependence and contemporary literary controversy which Horace himself raises in his literary satires (1.4,10, 2.1) have been shown to have a sophisticated theoretical hinterland.[18] The literary tradition itself has been broadened to include, along with the acknowledged model, Lucilius (fl. c. 129- c. 101 BC), not just the Callimacheanism of the previous generation, the Neoterics, with its new stylistic polish and refinement, but also the De rerum natura of Lucretius. Zetzel reads Horace’s choice of the Roman models, Lucilius and Lucretius, as a way of turning poetry to an engagement with social and ethical issues of contemporary significance.[19] In contrast, Ruffell argues that the generic context should be widened to include a range of forms of popular invective (élite and non-élite), which Horace excludes in his creation of his literary tradition, a move which uncovers ‘the role of Horace himself in establishing and policing generic boundaries.’[20]
The (ironically exaggerated) story Horace tells himself is of a radical re-orientation of satire from public, social, engagement to private meditation (1.4.1-6, 133-40). In the opening poem of the more inwardly-directed second book Horace even pushes back into his generic modelthis identification of satire as a private site of personal reflection:[21]
ille velut fidis arcana sodalibus olim
credebat libris neque, si male cesserat, usquam
decurrens alio neque, si bene; quo fit ut omnis
votiva pateat veluti descripta tabella
vita senis. (2.1.30-34)
In the old days, he entrusted his secrets to his books, as though to faithful friends, having no other outlet whether things had gone well or ill. The result is that the man of old’s whole life is open to view as if sketched on a votive tablet.
The loss of most of Lucilius, who survives only in short fragments, unfortunately means that our picture of Lucilius must be largely based on what Horace tells us. More concerned to point out differences rather than similarities, Horace claims modifications both in style and focus. In Horace’s hands the genre becomes one which matches his talents, the informality of sermo (conversation) enabling a skilful blend of philosophical reflections, literary criticism and parody, snatches of autobiography, anecdotes, and personal vignettes of friends and enemies.
In comparison with the prolixity of his generic model, Lucilius— who left 30 books —, Horace in his first book, his début, deliberately emphasises brevity. Sparing of speech in person (1.4.18), he makes breuitas the first of his stylistic requirements of the modern satirist (1.10.9-15). In practice, Horace’s first book is a miniaturization of Lucilius.[22] It reproduces Lucilius’s chaotic multiplicity of subject-matter — political, social, philosophical, literary, erotic, autobiographical — tremendously compressing and condensing it. It may be the case that greater consistency of focus accompanied the brevity, that is, that Horace made single poems out of topics that Lucilius used in combination with others.[23] A paradoxical result of this would be the evident diversity of the satires in book 1. Lucilius’s writings — a capacious grab-bag of a number of inter-related comic-satiric genres — must have offered many possibilities for Horace to develop. When he chooses to present his selections or ‘fragments’ in a small compass, isolated from the great flowing river which was Lucilius (1.4.11), it is as though he were making a provocative display of the incoherence of the genre as he had inherited it.
The implicit ‘plot’ of book 1, and a number of ensuing thematic and verbal interconnections, work against the genre’s intrinsic disunity, while leaving intact the impression of experimental variety.[24] At first sight nothing could be more different from Virgil’s Eclogues, with their elaborate symmetries and structural rings across a book of ten poems.[25] Nevertheless, book 1 does present some correspondences in arrangement.[26] But while Horace is acutely aware of the exquisite artistry of the Eclogues, and lays claim to his own (generically appropriate) version of Callimacheanism (1.10.31-5, cf. Virg. Ecl. 6.3-5),[27] his unruly material, mundane ethos, and ‘pedestrian’ style resist, at least initially, too high a degree of assimilation of such patterns.
Satires 1.4 raises the question of the outspoken satirist’s unpopularity and presents Horace’s satire as both more artistically polished and less publicity-seeking than that of Lucilius. The earlier satirist’s public engagement, his comic exposure of malefactors, is recognised as an essential feature of the genre (1.4.1-6, cf. 1.10.3-4), but not the only one, and not necessarily the dominant one. The transition from satire as written by Lucilius to that written by Horace is aligned with the shift from the personal attack of Old Comedy to the staging of foolish and ridiculous excess in New Comedy.[28]Satires 1.10, imagined as an after-thought answering objections to the earlier poem, and functioning as an epilogue to the whole book (‘Off with you, boy; add this at once to my little volume’, 92)[29], proudly claims an élite audience. The book’s central core (1.4-1.6) focuses on Horace as satirist and friend of Maecenas, with Satires 1.5 (modelled on Lucilius’s own ‘Journey to Sicily’) playing the double role of example of the production of the ‘new Lucilius’ as well as of (ironic) demonstration of the insignificant position of Horace in Maecenas’s entourage.[30] Horace in the last line of this satire makes a mock apology for its length (‘Brindisi marks the end of this long tale and journey’, 104). Not long even by Horatian standards, it must have been considerably shorter than Lucilius’ relaxed ramble.
As well as being more inward-looking — Rudd called it ‘a walled garden’[31] — book 2 takes new directions in formal structure and theme. The new preoccupation with food and dining allows Horace to exploit a topic that not only has a punning connection with philosophy (sapiens ‘wise, of good taste’, 2.4.44, cf. Plaut. Cas. 5, Cic. Fin. 2.24), but is also linked through metaphor with satire itself, for satura was felt to mean a ‘mixed dish’ as well as ‘stuffed full’.[32] In book 1 Horace set the ethical ideal of moderation and contentment with what is enough (satis) against insatiability as a root cause of unhappiness and other evils (esp. 1.1), and his poetics of brevity and artistic discipline against the super-abundance of the garrulous Lucilius.[33] But now the advocate of brevity, and sufferer of writer’s block (2.3.1-16), allows the previously rejected copiousness of a Stoic preacher (cf. 1.1.120-1) to swell a satire to 326 lines. Another satire, unique in the corpus, marries cynical epic burlesque (Odysseus’s consultation of Teiresias from Homer Odyssey 11) with mock-didactic instruction in the contemporary Roman ‘art’ of legacy-hunting. Satires 2.4, likewise a parodic ‘art’, this time of dining, is also more overtly didactic than anything in book 1. Horace’s strategy is to exaggerate, in the mouths of other speakers, the dogmatic, homiletic, element of diatribe, from which he had begun to retreat in book 1. The implicit split between Horace and his diatribe pose becomes an explicit split between Horace and a third-person spokesman for the doctrine, an abdication that points to a ‘crisis’ in the satiric attitude and has given book 2 prominence in recent analysis of Horace’s negotiations with his genre.[34]