Horace's Satires

Abstract

Horace’s Satires are a collection of two books of hexameter poems that offer a humorous-critical commentary, of an indirect kind, unique to Horace, on various social phenomena in first century bce Rome. The Satires are Horace’s earliest published work: Book 1, with ten poems, was published around 35 bce, and Book 2, with eight poems, was published around 30 bce. Also known as the Sermones (“Conversations,” which seems to be the title that Horace gave them), the Satires stand out for their markedly unelevated themes and attitudes; their seemingly colloquial (but carefully composed) style; their often frank tone; and their rapid shifts of speakers, audiences, and perspectives. Horace’s primary mode of operation is to take a complex philosophical issue and tackle it in a quasi-moralizing, self-effacing, and purposefully inconsistent way. The diatribe in Satire 1.1 against people’s avarice and discontent with their own lot, for example, is obviously at odds with the fact that the poem, emphatically addressed to Maecenas in its opening line, marks the beginning of Horace’s first published collection, his move into the public eye, which (despite the poet’s own protestations in Satire 1.6) is inevitably a bid to move up to the higher echelons of Roman society. Yet, Horace employs other registers as well. He offers a dialogue between Odysseus and Tiresias (Satire 2.5), an exposé on witchcraft through the eyes of a statue of Priapus (Satire 1.8), and jeremiads directed against the poet himself in the voice of a failed businessman turned Stoic zealot (Satire 2.3) and of his own slave (2.7). He frequently explores themes usually avoided in high classical poetry, such as sex (Satire 1.2) and food (Satires 2.2, 2.4 and 2.8). The self-awareness of these poems becomes apparent in recurrent reflections on the art of writing satire (Satires 1.4, 1.10, and 2.1), in which Horace repeatedly compares himself to Lucilius, the originator of Roman satire, and laments his inability to speak as freely as his forebears given who he is, and the troubled times that he lives in. In short, Horace’s Satires embody the core idea of Roman satura, which literally means a “mish-mash of foodstuffs.” The outstanding “Horatian” quality of his poems is their imperviousness to being pinned down. In later times they were just as popular with pious monks as they were with dirty-minded epigrammatists. Today they are equally likely to be cited in studies of Roman sexuality, ancient literary criticism, and Epicurean philosophy. It is Horace’s protean slipperiness that has kept interest in the Sermones alive to this day.