The Mad Poet in Horace’s Ars Poetica

1. Inspiration and the Poet’s Social Position

Horace’s Ars poetica discusses many topics, sometimes with abrupt changes and without establishing clear sequential or logical connections between themes. At the first glance the problem of (not) thinking does not seem central to the Ars. According, however, to some quite recent attempts to interpret the poem in context, it may be.

Aristotle is regarded as the founding father of literary criticism as a discipline (or the western literary system in general, cf. Miner) because he developed the method of discussing poetry within a completely rationalised frame of thought. This frame is mostly determined by his ethics, and therefore the conscious human decisions play crucial role in the analysis of tragic plots while fate or gods’ intervention, however important they seem to some readers of ancient tragedy, are only marginally mentioned, if ever. It may be true that Horace’s Ars is a capricious text, written with brilliance and humour, that plays games with the role of its constructed speaker both to undermine the teacher’s position and to destabilize the addressees’ situation, but it seems to share Aristotle’s intellectual approach to poetry insofar as it teaches, lectures, describes some rules and explains reasons why they were invented and how they work. However, he also discusses some unconscious, automatic, irrational aspects of poetic creation. It is probably also a difference of importance that he tends to speak of literature (including production, criticism, and reading) in social context.

The latter is partly the consequence of the situation the poem stages, traditionally understood as follows: a poet speaks to a young member of the Roman aristocracy, who wants to be a poet, about poetry. Maybe to dissuade him through demonstrating how difficult is to create great poetry, and how superfluous is every effort that results in poetry less than great. Whether a real commitment to poetry as a vocation was compatible with the social position of a member of Rome’s highest social élite seems doubtful (cf. Oliensis 199–223). Some literary genres were more or less monopolized by authors of senatorial rank (like historiography, treatises on agriculture, etc.), and we know of many aristocrats who composed poems as a pastime. They seem to have carefully selected the genres in which they tried their talent. Augustus is known to have started and left unfinished a tragedy called Ajax (Suetonius, Aug. 85: Nam tragoediam magno impetu exorsus, non succedenti stilo, abolevit quaerentibusque amicis, quidnam Aiax ageret, respondit, Aiacem suum in spongeam incubuisse). Tragedy, a genre sharing the top of the generic hierarchy with epic, was probably acceptable from a Roman aristocrat, while comedy was not, and that Julius Caesar forced Laberius to perform the mimus he wrote, for which act he had to lose his equestrian rank, can be regarded as a punishment for writing a mime (cf. Macrobius, Sat. 2.7). The least we can say is that writing mimes meant so basic loss of authority that he could be forced to act on stage (or be given an offer he could not refuse). Therefore, when a young Piso was taught how to create poetry, the careful selection of a genre and the social implications of possible roles of poets must have been discussed in detail. The poet’s social position among the élite was also vital for Horace himself. He was a poet who worked within that milieu, as a client, or rather a ‘friend’ of powerful representatives of the élite. He was not, however, one of them. His positioning of the poet’s role in relation to the élite code of behaviour seems problematic in many texts of his oeuvre (cf. Oliensis passim). The always delicate relationship to the aristocratic addressees of the odes, the careful selection of weak butts for his jokes in the epodes and the satires, and the repeated discussions of the social function of comic literary genres in satires, epistles, and the Ars poetica suggest a deep involvement in this theme. In the Ars poetica Horace’s persistent questions about the social standing of the poet come together with one of the...