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2. Horace and His Fathers: Satires 1.4 and 1.6
- University of Wisconsin Press
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No ancient poet offers the sense of affectionate intimacy that Horace grants to his readers with his account of his father and his upbringing in the Satires. It is consequently with some initial regret that readers recognize that Horace tells us very little about his life, and that furthermore the “information” he supplies is motivated by its poetic context, rather than by the impulse that Horace beguilingly alludes to, of confessing his life to his books.1 Satires . and . are the well-known loci of Horace’s upbringing by his father, told in the context of Horace’s relation to Lucilius, his satiric forbear, 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 that they seemed bound to assume in the satire and life of the poet. These paternal maneuvers in Satires . and . make the persona of Horace and His Fathers Satires . and . Fere nulli alii sunt homines qui talem in filios suos habent potestatem qualem nos habemus. There are virtually no other human beings who possess such power over their sons as we do. —, Institutiones Iuris Civilis, . 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 that is subordinated to his art. Satires .: 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 Satires ., Horace uses his own persona to explain, justify, and limit the satiric poetry he writes. Although Horace 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 . rests on a selfdescription couched in ethical, not poetic, terms. The merging of poetic style and personal character produces a picture of the satiric genre that is identified with the poet himself; the poetry is the inevitable outcome of the man. When Horace asks whether his poetry is justifiably suspectum (..), 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 this view is congenial to Horace’s satire, which he fixes in the ordinariness of life and whose muse is, as Horace says later, pedestris.2 As satire constantly finds its wisdom, parody, or bite in ordinary material reality, so Horace’s strategy of equating the poem with its material cause, i.e. the poet, is perfectly consistent with the genre’s orientation . It is a genre, after all, whose name can be derived from a food, the stuff of life.3 If the portrait of Horace’s father is determined by its poetic context in ., as I suggest is the case with all the dramatis personae of these poems, the portrait of Lucilius is in turn determined not only by the poetic context but also by the portrait of Horace’s father. Lucilius enters Satires ., and the Satires as a whole, on the heels of the Old Comic poets Eupolis, Cratinus, and Aristophanes; Horace begins his discussion of his genre in the opening six lines of Satires . with a discussion of Lucilius’s lineage...