Horace - Satires and Epistles

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Translation John Davie 2011
Editorial material Robert Cowan 2011

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First published as an Oxford Worlds Classics paperback 2011

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OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

HORACE

Translated by
JOHN DAVIE

With an Introduction and Notes by
ROBERT COWAN

OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

SATIRES AND EPISTLES

HORACE was born in 65 BC. In 44 BC Julius Caesar was assassinated by conspirators led by Brutus and Cassius. Two years later, when they were defeated at Philippi, Horace commanded one of their legions. On his return to Rome he purchased a position in the Treasury and wrote satires and epodes under the patronage of Maecenas, chief adviser of Octavian. With the defeat of Antony and Cleopatra at Actium in 31 BC Octavian became master of the world, taking the name Augustus in 27 BC. After the publication of his three books of lyric Odes in 23 BC Horace returned to a form of satire with his first book of Epistles (20 BC), poetic letters reflecting on how to live well. In the course of the following decade his association with Augustus grew closer, as he wrote a hymn to be performed at the Secular Games in 17 BC, and even included a letter to the princeps in his second book of Epistles; the Ars Poetica, an epistle to the Pisos, was written around the same time. In 13 BC he produced his fourth book of Odes, largely inspired by Pindar, the most daring and sublime of the Greek lyric poets. He died in 8 BC, fifty-nine days after his friend Maecenas.

JOHN DAVIE is former Head of Classics at St Pauls School, London. He is the author of a number of articles on classical subjects and has translated the complete surviving plays of Euripides for Penguin Classics (four volumes). For Oxford Worlds Classics he has translated Senecas Dialogues and Essays.

ROBERT COWAN is Lecturer in Classics at the University of Sydney, and formerly Fairfax Tutorial Fellow in Latin Literature at Balliol College, Oxford. He has published widely on subjects as diverse as Aristophanes, Columella, Horace, Virgil, and operatic receptions of Euripides Bacchae, but his main areas of research are post-Virgilian epic, Republican tragedy, and Roman satire.

SATIRE is a paradox. It is poetry which denies that it is poetry. It is a moralizing rant which is sucked into prurience about and even complicity with the vice and folly it rails against. It is a cutting-edge slice-of-life which is obsessively self-conscious about its own literary traditions. It is free speech which tells it how it is but is always constrained by limitations on its liberty. Yet even by these standards, Horaces satire is exceptionally paradoxical. It is a finely wrought, pared-down form of a genre whose very essence is bloatedness, disorder, rough edges, a literary equivalent of the messy, chaotic world it evokes. It is a gentle, detached take on the genre of ranting, even bigoted invective, and one which advocates the virtues of moderation with fanatical extremism. In order to gain a sense of how Horace fits, or figured himself as fitting, into the traditions of Roman satire, it will be worth reflecting a little on the history and nature of Roman satire, before turning to Horaces engagementand sometimes his refusal to engagewith various themes and issues.

Roman satire has points of contact with various Greek genresthe invective iamboi of Archilochus and Hipponax, which Horace remodelled more directly in the Epodes; the socially and politically engaged Old Comedy of Aristophanes and his rivals, explicitly cited as a forebear at the opening of Sat. 1.4; the philosophical sermons, or diatribes, of Cynic philosophers, particularly influential on Sat. 1.13but, unlike epic, tragedy, lyric, and every other genre, it was neither invented by the Greeks nor did they provide its canonical poets. Satire was a quintessentially Roman genre, entirely ours (tota nostra), as Quintilian famously called it. This was not merely a paragraph of literary history or a badge of national pride, but suffused the very ethos of satire, linking to its rejection of pretension, luxury, and all the corrupting influences so readily attributed to the Greeks and its concomitant assertion of simple Roman values. When the Roman god Quirinus warns Horace not to use Greek words in his satires, he is making a point quite as ideologically loaded as when Juvenals bigot Umbricius rails against the Greek city which he claims Rome had become.