Horace's Satires Research Articles

Selections from Horace Satires: An Edition for Intermediate Students by John Godwin

Reviewed by: Selections from Horace Satires: An Edition for Intermediate Students by John Godwin Anthofili Kallergi Selections from Horace Satires: An Edition for Intermediate Students. BY john godwin. London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. Pp x+ 120. Paperback, $12.95. ISBN: 9781501349904 The commentary of John Godwin Selections from Horace Satires: An Edition for Intermediate Students focuses on selected lines from three of the most famous Horatian satires: 1.1 (verses 1–12, 28–100), 1.3 (verses 25–75) and 2.2 (verses 1–30, 70–111). It offers a strong introduction, a full Latin text, some useful commentary notes and a vocabulary list not only for simple and commonly used words, but also for some more demanding and ambiguous ones that change their original meaning in the satirical context. A detailed introduction explains points of historical and stylistic interest. It opens with a reference to Horace and his times, offering some useful biographical information about his work, his life and his relationship with Maecenas. Besides that, a short section on Roman satire before Horace follows, while the next one discusses his originality in relation to his predecessors, such as Lucilius or Ennius, as well as his intertextual dialogue with Epicurean philosophy both in his Satires and Epistles. The following section has brief coverage on the rigid system of meters that are frequent in Roman poetry. More precisely, John Godwin focuses on Roman prosody, on hexameter and its differences with the Ancient Greek meters. Moreover, the introduction ends up with a bibliographical list of translations, editions and general works on Horace, as well as his Satires and the evolution of Roman satire in general. However, I believe that this list is quite brief and should also have included monographs in other languages, such as French or Italian. Going one step further, the full Latin texts follow Satires, 1.1, 1.3 and 2.2 with a short summary in English for all verses, helping the students understand more easily the ambivalent context of the poems. Furthermore, the next chapter includes expansive commentary notes of these three satires. They start with the general content of each poem, a word-by-word analysis of the Latin fragments, a summary of the conclusions and the poet’s deepest goals, in order to make the Satires more understandable, as it seems to be one of the most difficult types of poetry in Rome. The meat of this volume is the vocabulary itself. It lists every word in the text; nouns are listed with their genitive singular, the verbs are accompanied by their four principal tenses, adjectives with the ending of the different genders. I believe that despite the fact that this commentary is addressed to intermediate students [End Page 244] who have mastered the basics and intend to start reading some Latin verse in order to develop their skills on language and reading comprehension, the vocabulary should have been more accurate and laborious concerning helpful elements about grammar. For instance, the nouns could also have—apart from the gender and the genitive singular—the number of the declension in parentheses; likewise, the conjugation of each verb is necessary, as it helps the student cope with grammar exercises. In addition to this, the prepositions could have been accompanied with the meaning of the prepositional phrases they introduce in particular contexts. For example, the preposition ad might be used for declaring a location or an intention. Nevertheless, it is a useful tool for the reader, as it is worth consulting this vocabulary in tricky phrases carrying a totally different meaning in these poems from the one someone may find in basic dictionaries. Besides, satire as a literary genre is quite difficult and demanding, as far as the language is concerned. To sum up, this is the first intermediate-student edition of a selection of Horace’s Satires. Focusing on a deliberately limited number of poems, this edition is addressed to students who read the text for the first time; it also perfectly encapsulates the interest in Horace’s work inspiring its further study. I believe that the commentary of John Godwin in Selections from Horace Satires: An Edition for Intermediate Students will be a useful...

Imitating the Obscene: Henry Higden's Versions of Horace's Satire 1.2 and Juvenal's Satire 6

Henry Higden has hitherto been known, if at all, for two works of English classical imitation: of Juvenal's Satire 13 (printed 1686) and Satire 10 (printed 1687), the second an influence on Dryden. Other than a failed stage play, these are Higden's sole recorded works. This article argues that he was also the author of two closely related imitations, probably also composed in the late 1680s but circulated anonymously, and both extant in manuscript copies. Higden's versions tend to make more rather than less emphatic the sexual content of these Latin poems, providing a reason why one who was called to the bar in 1686 and well known in polite circles would not have wished to claim them publicly as his work. A text of the 313-line Horatian imitation is printed for the first time within this contribution.

Helpful Gods, Preaching Stoics, and Gossip from the Crossroads: Urban Religion in Horace's Satires and Epistles

Helpful Gods, Preaching Stoics, and Gossip from the Crossroads: Urban Religion in Horace's Satires and Epistles

An Unrecorded Critical Response to Pope's Imitations of Horace by William Popple, c. 1755

Bodleian MS Douce 201, one of four dispersed folio volumes which contain professional scribal copies of the later literary works of William Popple (1700–1764) in a form evidently intended for the printer, contains three extensive dialogues ‘between a certain … Doctor of D––y and A Critic’. The first and last of these discussions, none of which were printed in Popple's time, or have been printed since, are among the earliest critical works to address Alexander Pope's Imitations of Horace (first published 1733–8). They focus on Pope's versions of Horace's Satires 2.1 and 2.2 respectively, and their primary target is the editorial presentation of these texts by William Warburton in his edition of Pope's Works, 1751. They are closely related to Popple's own complete sequence of Horatian imitations (also largely unprinted) of the 1750s.

The Roman Adversarial Dialogue in Eighteenth-Century Political Satire

This article examines the use of the Roman satiric dialogue in eighteenth-century political verse. It studies partisan satires that pit their speakers against a cautionary interlocutor (adversarius) in imitation of Horace's Satire 2.1 and Persius' Satire 1. It begins with an overview of Pope's use of the dialogue form in his Imitations of Horace, and his shift in the later 1730s to a model of antagonistic encounter between ideological opponents in the style of Persius. Its main body is an examination of later eighteenth-century satires that find alternative political uses for Persius' dialogue form to those of Pope and the Whig Patriot satirists who followed his lead. It studies Thomas Newcomb's inversion of Pope's Epilogue to the Satires for the purposes of ministerial propaganda; Charles Churchill's variations on the dialogue form under the banner of Wilkesite opposition; and Peter Pindar's comic burlesque of the traditional postures of dialogic satire in One Thousand Seven Hundred and Ninety-Six. The article reveals the Roman dialogue to have been a distinctively flexible framework for eighteenth-century satirists, capable of accommodating positions and arguments on both sides of the partisan divide.

HOW'S YOUR FATHER? A RECURRENT BILINGUAL WORDPLAY IN MARTIAL

The primary obscenity futuo (‘the male part in sexual intercourse with a woman’) is unsurprisingly rare in literary Latin. Apart from a single occurrence in Horace's Satires (1.2.127, in a passage evoking the adultery mime), its usage is limited to the even lower genre of scoptic epigram, as represented by Catullus, Octavian, Martial and the Priapeia, though it frequently occurs in graffiti. Adams has shown how it tends to be a neutral and even affectionate term, lacking any sense of aggression, though not of the assertion of conventional virility. Nevertheless, it is used almost exclusively of recreational, extramarital and/or illicit sex. This may be in part a function of the way in which its obscenity and low linguistic register (closely equivalent to its English equivalent ‘fuck’) restrict it to the low genres which tend to deal with such subject matter, but this is a potentially circular argument and, whether chicken or egg came first, the undeniable result is an association of the verb with intercourse which is not primarily or even in any way aimed at procreation. It is striking and anomalous, therefore, when Martial uses futuo, on five occasions, in contexts relating to the production (or avoidance of the production) of children. Of course, on a purely logical and biological level, the connection between futuo (specifically the penetration of the vagina by the penis, carefully differentiated by Martial in particular from sexual practices involving other orifices and/or members, such as pedicatio, fellatio and cunnilingus) and the engendering of children is an obvious one. Nevertheless, the aforementioned strong associations of the verb with sex aimed at everything but procreation renders its use in this context jarring. This incongruity and clash of registers is, of course, characteristic of Martial's technique, and the obscenity gains an added spice from being applied to respectable marital relations. The jarring quality is an end in itself and accounts for itself. Yet I wish to argue that there is a further dimension to this discordant association of ‘fucking’ and ‘begetting’, based on a bilingual wordplay between futuo and its near-homonym, the Greek verb φυτεύω. By means of this pun, Martial mischievously suggests not only that ‘fucking’ can be mentioned in the context of ‘begetting’, but also that the two are—in accordance with biology but against all decorum—identical.

Odyssean Adventures in the Cena Trimalchionis

The Satyricon as a whole has long been recognized as deeply indebted to the Odyssey, both in its individual episodes and as an adventure narrative, and perhaps even as an extended parody of Homer's poem. However, the longest extant episode of the Satyricon, the Cena Trimalchionis, has traditionally been thought to contain only glancing references to the Odyssey. This article demonstrates the importance of the Odyssey as a primary intertext for the Cena Trimalchionis. While Plato's Symposium and Horace's Satire 2.8 are recognized influences on the Cena, Odysseus's visit to the Phaeacians and the account he gives there of his adventures are even more systematically and repeatedly alluded to, evoked, and reworked in the Cena. Petronius appropriates episodes from the adventures of Odysseus from his arrival on Scheria to his encounters with the Lotus-Eaters, Circe, Scylla and Charybdis, the Sirens, and the Cyclops. These and other episodes are transmuted and incorporated into the world and experience of Trimalchio's dinner party in a variety of ways: as clever extended allusions, as epic reworked in folktale form, as contemporary events occurring in the midst of Trimalchio's dinner party. What emerges from this discussion is the recognition that the Cena Trimalchionis is much more integrated into the overall narrative and thematics of the rest of the Satyricon than heretofore appreciated.

Latin Panegyric by Roger Rees

464 BOOK REVIEWS 35. This is not immediately noticeable since the glosses are separated by vast stretches of commentary; those students who most need help will be the least inclined to dig through the lemmata in search of help on vocabulary and grammar , which, however, is handsomely provided. Almost never did I think a reading was just wrong (but see ad 1.8.39, 47). The book well serves the advanced studentsand their instructorswhoconstitute thisseries’readership. As for today’s usual problem, I read every word and found a total of five typographical errors in the commentary, all in punctuation but one (318, line 4, for “H.’s” read “His”—Cicero’s, not Horace’s). There is, oddly, a typo in the Latin text at 5.31 (optimus has slipped in before atque, echoing line 27), and assisto at 6.114 is mysteriously italicized. In short, a miracle of accuracy in the current deplorable state of book production. Morris Zapp’s monumental work on Jane Austen, he hoped, would put an end to all further writing on the subject.4 After reading this commentary, it is hard to think what could be left to say about Horace Satires I; whatever it iswill certainly be much better-informed than before Gowers. AMYRICHLIN University of California, Los Angeles, richlin@humnet.ucla.edu ◊ Latin Panegyric. Edited by ROGER REES. Oxford Readings in Classical Studies. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Pp. xvi + 430. Hardcover,£76.00/$150.00. ISBN 978-0-19-957671-5. Paper, £29.50/$55.00. ISBN 978-019 -957672-2. dited by Roger Rees, this volume contains sixteen previously published essays spanning a century of international scholarship on the “Twelve Panegyrics”: Pliny’s gratiarum actio to Trajan and eleven Panegyrici for emperors from Maximinian to Theodosius. Rees provides a valuable resource for newcomers and veterans alike by threading together essential readings on imperial praise. 4 David Lodge, Changing Places (London, 1975) 35. E BOOK REVIEWS 465 The volume consists of “Introductions” (three chapters, 3–74), “Pliny’s Panegyricus” (six chapters, 77–220), and “Gallic Panegyrici” (eight chapters, 223– 386). These are followed by a bibliography (387–423) and a brief index (427– 30). Words and phrases in the ancient and modern languages are translated, while numbers in brackets throughout indicate the original pagination of the essays. The rich editorial introduction traces panegyric from Pindar and Thucydides to Mamertinus and Venatius Fortunatus, and surveys ancient and modern responses to praise-giving in various contexts (epinician, funerary, forensic, philosophical, etc). From the discovery of the XII Panegyrici Latini manuscript in 1433 to the present, recurrent research themes include the Classical, Hellenistic, and Republican models of the speeches, their intended audiences, the divergences between their original delivery and their written version, the relationship between panegyrist and emperor, and the panegyrist’s professed “sincerity.” Rees discerns a dominant, moralizing approach to panegyric and maps it onto shifting political landscapesand social sensibilities.A striking such example is the contrast between the enthusiastic reception of Pliny’s Panegyricus in early European royal courts and itscondemnation bytwentieth century criticism (15–16). Rees’ introduction is followed by Mynors’ 1964 preface to the OCT edition of the XII Panegyrici, which clarifies and has since authorized the manuscript tradition . Pichon (1906) respondsto the German scholarship of the late-nineteenth century, which postulated a single author for the unattributed Panegyrici. Drawing on paleography, stylistics, and autobiographical references in the speeches, Pichon establishes the Panegyrici as the product ofdiverse Gallicauthors. Section II, on the Panegyricus, variously explores Pliny’s laudatory ethics. Radice (1968) hesitantly endorses Pliny’s innovation in elaborating and publishing “stock themes,” and she claims the speech as a source for Pliny supplementary to his Letters. Braund (1998) identifies Cicero’s praise of Pompey and Caesar as nascent panegyrics influencing Seneca’s de Clementia and Pliny’s Panegyricus. Braund also underlines the normative function of Ciceronian and Senecan praise, now a guiding principle for reading Pliny and his Late Antique successors. Fantham (1999) detects in the speech oral formulae transmitting the oaths exchanged between Trajan, the senate, and the consuls; through ritualistic language Pliny solemnizes and authorizes his praise. Morford (1992) defends the respectability of the Panegyricus...

Friends, Readers, and the Uses of Literary History in Horace Satires 1.10

Friends, Readers, and the Uses of Literary History in Horace Satires 1.10

Horace's Journey Through Arcadia

Horace's Satire 1.5 encapsulates two of the Satires' major themes: friendship and aesthetics. This paper explores the poem's engagement with Epicureanism in connection with these themes. Through extended evocation of Vergil's Ecologues , several nods to Lucretian language and themes and praise of frank speaking among friends, the Journey to Brundisium meditates on Epicurean friendship in the context of life under the triumvirate in the 30s B.C.E. Horace's satiric Epicureanism dictates a golden mean delicately wended between extremes, avoiding both the blunt speech venerated in the Roman Republic and the complaisance—manifest as either silence or flattery—that puissance arouses.

Idyll and Elegy: Mörike's 'Besuch in der Carthause'

Mörike's late poem 'Besuch in der Carthause' (1861), an elegant and witty narrative poem in iambic hexameters, has suffered remarkable neglect, perhaps due to its having been mistaken for a piece of biography, or to uncertainty about its generic status, or a feeling that it is too long for its witty pointe. While it combines the idyllic and the elegiac modes, it also carries the subtitle 'Epistel', and can be seen to have an important relationship to Horace's satires and epistles. What has always been taken to be the pointe of the poem — a jocular warning that to try ignoring the fact of our mortality is fruitless — can be shown, once the poem is no longer seen as simply endorsing its narrator's view, and once the significance of the central character, the Carthusian procurator, and the central symbol, the clock, have been understood, as having a very different message about the loss of balance in the modern world and the need to regard changes and apparent advancements as themselves subject to the undermining power of time.

An English Version of Horace's Odes, Satires, and Epistles by William Popple (1700–1764)

An English Version of Horace's Odes, Satires, and Epistles by William Popple (1700–1764)

Horace: Book I Satire X of Horace's Satires

Horace: Book I Satire X of Horace's Satires

Mary Shelley as Elegiac Poet: The Return and 'The Choice'

Mary Shelley as Elegiac Poet:The Return and 'The Choice' Graham Allen The poem 'The Choice', along with 'On Reading Wordsworth's Lines on Peel Castle' and a fragment 'To Jane', was written into the back of the 'Journal of Sorrow' (Journal IV) that Mary Shelley kept in the first two years after P.B. Shelley's death. The way in whichthe poem was written into the journal is complicated. It appears to have been writtenin, then cut out, then restored again.1 Another version of the poem was left by Mary Shelley with the Hunts when she returned to England in 1823 and was first published by H. Buxton Forman in 1876 as The Choice: A Poem on Shelley's Death, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley [etc.] (Literary Lives, iv. xxx–xxxi).In the journal entry before the three poemsare transcribed, the last entry of Journal Four, Mary Shelley speaks of winter passing anda rising of spirits 'from desperation to happiness'.2 It ascribes this feeling mainlyto 'affection' for Percy Florence, and it ends, incomplete, with the following: '[? ] [? ] I now returned to [? ] [? ]'.3 A careful reader of Mary Shelley learns to register these apparently pre-significatory moments when writing breaks down or breaks off. They are frequently, infact, moments when writing makes itself most visible. This is one such occasion. Since despite missing pages, lost links, evidential signs and signatures, the apparently pre-significatory '[? ] [? ] I now returned to [? ] [? ]' can be read as a telling authorial gloss on the poem which follows. 'The Choice', in both its Journal and Hunt/Forman versions, is about returning, about the return. It is elegiac, of course. As A.A. Markley notes, giving the poem in two brief pages perhaps the most serious critical and scholar attention it has yet received, it is also (at least in terms of its title) related to the tradition of 'Choice' poem stemming from Horace's Satire Book 2.4 Markley also notesthe poem's intertextual connection to poetryby P.B. Shelley, especially Epipsychidion, and Leigh Hunt's poem 'The Choice' published in The Liberal in the year (1823) in which Mary Shelley composed her poem of that title.5 More straightforwardly, the poem is about returning. The word 'return' is placed conspicuously, both in syntactical and lineal terms, at the end of the tenth line of the first twenty-line verse paragraph.6 The word return and the concept of the return are part of Mary Shelley's voice as a writer, part of what we might call her signature. We have in this word a sign (or clue) of the aesthetic complexity which lies behind such apparently confessional and 'personal' texts as 'The Choice'. In Matilda, for example, the word occurs frequently, merging with the theme of wandering and straying to generate a complex structure which revolves around Mathilda's overdetermined relations with her father and then Woodville.7 The father's return to his daughter turns out to be a wandering from her [End Page 219] (psychologically returning her to her mother). At the point of crisis, after the father's expression of illicit love, Mathilda imagines the father wandering for another sixteen years in Europe. Mathilda imagines saying to her father: 'Go, Devoted one, and return thus! – This is my curse, a daughter's curse: go, and return pure to thy child, who will never love ought but thee.'8 By this stage of the text, it is clear that for Mathilda every return is also a wanderingfrom her. It is interesting that in Valperga, as Euthanasia leaves Beatrice to visit a sick friend, we find exactly the same combination of returning and wandering: '"Go, kind friend", said she to Euthanasia, "go; but return again".'9 We can relate these fictional expressions of the ambivalent relation between wandering and returning (noting that this temporally non-linear sequence is part of the subject of this reading) to a very clear structure in Mary Shelley's thought immediately after the death of P.B. Shelley. She says to Byron in a letter posted around 30 March 1823: 'I wait withno pleasant expectation for the result of my father's deliberations – it little matters which way...

Satire and the threat of speech: Horace's Satires, Book 1

In his first book of Satires, written in the late, violent days of the Roman republic, Horace exposed satiric speech as a tool of power and domination. Using critical theories from classics, speech act analysis, and other fields, Catherine Schlegel argues that Horace's acute poetic observation of hostile speech provides insights into the operations of verbal control that are relevant to his time and to ours. She demonstrates that, though Horace is forced by his political circumstances to develop a new, unthreatening style of satire, his poems contain a challenge to our most profound habits of violence, hierarchy, and domination. Focusing on the relationships between speaker and audience and between old and new style, Schlegel examines the internal conflicts of a notoriously difficult text. This exciting contribution to the field of Horatian studies will be of interest to classicists as well as other scholars interested in the genre of satire.

Integer Ipse? Self-Knowledge and Self-Representation in Persius Satires 4

The subject of both dialogue and satire is the foundation of criticism: Quofretus (3) does Alcibiades administer the state? Both works urge Alcibiades to disavow the superficial criticism of the crowd and the superficial beauty of his own body and to direct his gaze inward: only here is true criticism and true self-knowledge to be found. This contrast between public and private criticism is a familiar topic in Persius' satires.2 For Persius, as for Horace before him, genres of criticism are defined in terms simultaneously literary and ethical. The subject of this self-conscious satire, then, is the translation of the Socratic Know yourself into a different genre. With what voice are you to know yourself in satire? Persius' literary landscape is dominated by Roman Callimacheanism, his primary target, and by Horace. In the violence of his attacks on the effeminate followers of Callimachus and in his ugly distortion of the Horatian aesthetic Persius diverges from his predecessor and rejects the balance Horace had struck between refinement and emasculation in his satires. Persius and Horace have characteristic styles and concerns and one may generalize about the differences between them. In addition each of Persius' satires has a more specific relationship, pointed by verbal reminiscence, with one or more poems of Horace. For Satires 4 the Horatian models are Satires 2.1 and Epistles 1.16 and 2.2. After some introductory remarks on the attribution of lines to speakers in Persius Satires 4, I turn in the second part of the article to Horace Satires 2.1 and the critical language with which Horace constructs his aesthetic. As in other programmatic satires, his representation of Lucilius, whatever its relevance for reading Lucilius' poetry and its reception,3 is a vehicle of Horace's self-representation. This section

Est locus uni cuique suus:City and Status in Horace'sSatires1.8 and 1.9

Horace's Satires 1.8 and 1.9 have long interested commentators for the enticing glimpse they provide of the changing Roman cityscape in the 30s BCE In light of the recent problematization of the strict correspondence between the poet Horace and his elaborately constructed satiric persona, locations in the Satires should be read not so much as autobiographical accounts of the poet's movement through the city but rather as functions of other themes and motifs in the Satires. This paper examines the moral and aesthetic encoding of the urban landscape in Horace's Satires Book I.Satires 1.9 and 1.8 reveal that Rome's city center and the gardens of Maecenas constitute an arena for the satirist's indirect meditation about the complex relationship between his poetry and his patron Maecenas. By mapping moral and aesthetic behavior onto these urban areas, Horace comments on the viability of satiric poetry in various social situations and settings. The emerging picture presents the city center — filled as it is with human vice and folly — as a place appropriate for satiric poetry, and Maecenas' gardens — free from competition and ambition — as a place inimical to it. Thus the gardens of Maecenas present for the satirist a moral and aesthetic problem, and their specter haunts his downtown stroll in Satires 1.9 as much as does the aspirant who dogs his steps. The decorum of patronage requires that Horace show proper subordination to his benefactors. Yet the decorum of satire requires that the poet undermine status, stability, and authority. While professing that status is not an issue in Maecenas' circle, the poems reveal instead that status is always an issue, aected no less by one's physical than one's social position.

"Sic me formabat puerum": Horace's Satire I,4 and Boccaccio's defense of the Decameron

1 [And if ever I went out of my way to satisfy you ladies in anything, I'm all the readier to do so now, aware as I am that all anyone is entitled to say is that I and others who love you are acting in accordance with Nature [...] Silence, therefore, my critics! If you're insensitive to warmth, very well-stay chilled . . . ] I quote the text from Giovanni Boccaccio, Tutte le opere, Vittore Branca ed., vol. IV (Milano: Mondadori, 1976). Translations are from Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, Guido Waldman trans. (Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

Thomas Drant's Rewriting of Horace

This essay will look at a little-known figure in the English Renaissance and attempt to situate his most important literary production in the religious politics of the early years of Queen Elizabeth's reign, focusing on ideological strategies that are brought to bear on the translation of a classical text. The figure in question is Thomas Drant, and the text, A Medicinable Morall, the first English translation of Horace's satires, published in 1566. Literary history has not been kind to Drant: with the possible exceptions of A Medicinable Morall and another translation of Horace the very next year--in 1567--entitled Horace his arte of Poetrie, pistles, and Satyrs Englished, which are mentioned cursorily in studies of English receptions of Horace (if at all), almost all his other published works--a poetic paraphrase of Ecclesiastes, three sermons, a book of Latin epigrams by Richard Shacklock with Drant's commentary in Latin and English, and a collection of Latin and (some) Greek verse dedicated to Archbishop Edmund Grindal--have made the slide to oblivion. 1 It is not my job to write an extended apologia for Drant but to read the first English translation of Horace's satires in greater detail than has been done so far. I hope to offer insights into the politics of reading methods which also become the politics of writing and how understandings of genre both condition and limit such strategies; this creates room for appropriation and the intriguing afterlives of a classical text.

Horace Satires 1.7: Satire as Conflict Irresolution

Horace Satires 1.7: Satire as Conflict Irresolution