Horace and His Fathers: Satires 1.4 and 1.6

Abstract

Fere nulli alii sunt homines qui talem in filios suos habent potestatem qualem nos habemus. --Gaius Institutiones Iuris Civilis 1.55 No other ancient poet offers the sense of affectionate intimacy which Horace's "autobiography" in the Satires grants to his readers. 1 It is consequently with some initial regret that readers recognize that Horace tells us very little about his life, 2 and that furthermore the "information" he supplies is motivated by its poetic context, rather than by the impulse which Horace beguilingly alludes to, of confessing his life to his books. Satires 1.4 and 1.6 are the well-known loci of Horace's upbringing by his father, told in the context of Horace's relation to Lucilius, his satiric forebear, and to Maecenas, the man conventionally known as Horace's patron. All four figures--father, son, satiric predecessor, and patron--are artifacts of the poet's generic construction, dramatis personae structured to provide a definition to Horace's satiric art. The freedman father who so famously raised his son, by hand as it were, serves to organize the relation between Horace and the two figures Horace makes to loom in his poetic life, Lucilius and Maecenas. Paired in their respective poems with Horace's father, Lucilius and Maecenas are given a fatherly relationship to Horace only to be displaced by the biological parent. More remarkably, Horace's biological father emerges from the poems as Horace's poetic father too, and this leaves Lucilius and Maecenas deprived of the poetically crucial role which they seemed bound to assume in the satire and life of the poet. These paternal maneuvers [End Page 93] in Satires 1.4 and 1.6 make the persona of Horace the poetic cause of his art, make the constructed "self" of Horace the unshakable source of his poetry, and secure a particular disposition for his satire. Although Horace appears to subordinate art to life, extracting the causes of his persona and his poetry from his father's training and social status, the eventual outcome works in reverse, and it is the poet's life which is subordinated to his art. Satire 1.4: Who is the Father of this Genre? It is especially important to recognize the artful selectivity of Horace's self-portrait in the Satires, because the satirist's persona emerges as a crucially defining element of the genre of satire for Horace. In Satire 1.4 he uses his own persona to explain, justify, and limit the satiric poetry he writes. Although he begins the poem by distinguishing himself from Lucilius stylistically, what evolves in the course of the poem is a contemplation of human character in which poetic style is only one outcome of that character. Horace's defense of his satire in 1.4 rests on a self-description couched in ethical, not poetic, terms. The merging of poetic style and personal character produces a picture of the satiric genre which is identified with the poet himself; the poetry is the inevitable outcome of the man. When Horace asks whether his poetry is justifiably suspectum (1.4.65), he answers by telling us who he is; the poet is the answer to the question about the genre. Style and ethos are thus made indistinguishable. That art can be wholly identified with its human source is in some sense a radical view, but it is nevertheless congenial to satire, a genre peculiarly fixed in the ordinariness of life, whose muse is, as Horace says later, pedestris. 3 Satire constantly finds its wisdom, parody, or bite in ordinary material reality, so Horace's strategy of equating the poem with its material cause, the poet, is perfectly consistent with the genre's [End Page 94] orientation. It is a genre, after all, whose name is derived from a food, the stuff (so to speak) of life. 4 If the portrait of his father that Horace gives to us...