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3. Practicing Theory, or, Perils of the Open Road: Satires 1.5
- University of Wisconsin Press
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From the theoretically equivocal situation of satire that Horace presents in Satires . follows Satires ., a poem quite free of any of the rambling commentary and contradictory diagnoses that abound in the previous poem. Altogether different in kind, it tells the story of a journey Horace made from Rome to Brundisium in during the tense political era of the decade before Actium, accompanying Maecenas and other top lieutenants of the Roman world.1 The ultimate goal of the journey, not explicitly alluded to in the poem, was to effect a reconciliation between Antony and Octavian. The poet, however, is preoccupied with the material details of the trip, and his narrative never shifts its focus to the political purpose, or indeed to any purpose of the trip. Any journey, literal or metaphorical, has a goal, but in . the goal is suppressed to keep our attention riveted on the unfolding pleasures and miseries of travel, and revealed only with the simultaneous end of the poem and the journey. Though Horace is not a player in the political context of the trip, he is traveling with men whose sole purpose is political, and his remote, chatty treatment of the trip to Brundisium has left readers tantalized by absent details.2 The details the poet does give us in this satire are thick with realism, travel notes of the first century on barges, mules, sailors, frogs, rural officials and entertainment , a missing girl, bad water, good bread, burned food. Moreover, Horace’s account of the mundane phenomena of travel is further removed from the political circumstances of the journey through his adoption of a mock-epic style that conveys a certain self-parody, as if the poet endures an Odyssean journey, all the way from Rome to Brundisium. But this very self-parody, in which the satirist plays the low epic poet, provides a clue Practicing Theory, or, Perils of the Open Road Satires . to a reading of the poem that might relieve our frustration that the satire offers no political revelation. The poem’s revelation is of the narrator’s identity and disposition, which in turn reveals the poet’s satiric agenda. The poem is crafted inside a frame, the journey to the summit meeting at Brundisium. But the political goal of this journey is studiously ignored by the narrator in favor of the humdrum details of his own experience. These details form the substance of satire, for the narrator’s view is a satirist’s, and they fashion a poem that functions as a satiric recusatio of epic, a poem that denies epic and its world of public affairs.3 It is precisely by telling a story that seems inappropriate to its context that Horace can instruct us about his choice of material and narrator. The narrator defines his satiric identity in this poem with an account of his personal experience, set in a context that begs for comment on its public meaning. By inviting the reader to want what is not there, Horace can draw more than casual attention to the material that replaces the information not given and to the meaning of the poet’s willful choice. That choice denies the usefulness of political conflict, of invective, of a narrator with a harsh voice, and puts in their place an attention to life’s immediate frustrations and satisfactions, voiced by a narrator whose greatest pleasure lies in the harmony and health found in friendship. The poem has a Lucilian model, lost as a whole but preserved in fragments by the faithful grammarians of a later age;4 from what we know, Satires . seems to be a closer imitatio of a Lucilian poem than any other of the Satires. Porphyrio says, in his commentary on the first line of Satires ., “Lucilio hac satyra aemulatur Horatius iter suum a Roma Brundisium usque describens, quod et ille in tertio libro fecit, primo a Roma Capuam usque, et inde fretum Siciliense.”5 The Lucilius we know from Horace’s Satires . is the poet who created our expectation that the satirist freely note the faults he sees in others (“multa cum libertate notabant,” ..), and against whom Horace reacts in . with his debate over whether his poetry is deservedly suspectum—suspected of doing harm and causing fear (..–). While Horace has distinguished himself in both style and content from his literary mentor in the preceding poem, he is here evidently using Lucilius’s poem as his model. The model provides an...