Notes on Horace's Satires
A belated birthday gift to my dear friend Falstaffe, alias Hole.
In the first circle of hell, the circle reserved for virtuous pagans, Dante, the great poet, meets the “bella scola”, the greatest poets of antiquity, in Dante's view, which we may take to be the view of the middle ages at large. Among those great poets encountered by Dante is Horace, who Dante introduces as “Orazio satiro”—Horace, the satirist. Though this may appear strange—Horace has primarily been received as a lyric poet since the 18th century and his satires are perhaps the least-studied part of his corpus today—it made sense for Dante to single out his satirical production: for here Horace is not just unquestionably the greatest Roman, but he also is, as a poet, here at his most Roman.
The satires—Horace himself initially called them “sermones”, conversations. They were written and published, we assume, simultaneously with his epodes, between 41BC and 33BC; the second book of the satires was in circulation around 30BC. Thus, when Horace began composing his “conversations”, he was in his early 20s, a young man.
While the epodes present the young Horace's attempt at wrestling with the Greek models he had encountered in his schooling—an attempt we would see perfected later in the odes—, the satires see him engage with what is perhaps the only true Roman addition to poetry on a formal level—for the Greeks did not know the urban verse satire, the “conversation”. The satire is entirely the product of Roman urbanity. Satura quidem tota nostra est, writes Quintilian proudly (The satire at least is entirely ours; inst. 10, 1, 93) a century later, in retrospect. But for Horace, for Horace's age, the satire was a relatively new formal invention, and its conventions weren't yet set in stone—and it was in Horace that the Roman satire would find its “definition”. Certainly—the Greeks knew “mockery” in their poetry, there were “satirical elements”; what else is Aristophanes' version of Socrates in the Clouds; but in Greece these were always only elements in a different formal context—for Aristophanes: the comedy, and the goal of the comedy was not the goal of the satire. The Roman satire as a form removed from other contexts begins with Ennius, this father of Roman verse from Rudiae in Calabria, in the 2nd century BC. He introduces not just the form but also the word “satire”—”satura”; initially meaning so much as “full”, or, Latinate English still keeps the word stem, “satiated”. Ennius uses the term “satura” mostly together with “lanx”, meaning “bowl”: The satire is the “full bowl”, the extravagantly-filled dish of several wonders, a “potpourri”, if you want. In practice this meant, and we still see this in the later Greco-Roman tradition of “Poikilographia” or “Varia historia”, an assemblage of arguments, conversations, fables, anecdotes, quotations (“sententiae”) and the like, presented usually with the twofold aim of amusement and moral instruction. The satire as Ennius envisioned it, satura lanx, and as most Roman poets after him came to envision it, is thus, we can say, a literary product of “popular wisdom”, popular philosophy.
Of Ennius, as with the rest of his corpus, only a few satirical fragments remain. The next precursor to Horace's satirical production was Gaius Lucilius, a rich eques from Campania, of whom over 1000 satirical fragments remain. It was, judging from what we have, Lucilius who gave a general form to the satire. Firstly in terms of metre: In Ennius and the early Lucilius we see mixed metres and no consistency, but in the later fragments of Lucilius the hexameter emerges as the preferred metrical scheme; and it was the hexameter that would remain the metre of the Roman satire, even in the more inventive satirists, like Persius. In terms of internal form, Lucilius is the first in whom we see the sharp tone, the slightly acerbic character that we associate with the satire. In fact, the later Lucilius shows a spontaneity and aggression that perhaps only the aforementioned Persius could match; indeed, Cato mentions Lucilius and Persius in the same breath in “De finibus bonorum et malorum”. As a Roman knight of some repute and vast fortunes, Lucilius allowed himself to attack living contemporaries directly by name, and viciously so. He was probably the first free citizen of the upper ranks of Roman society who turned to verse rather than to prose to publically dispute with his enemies—but naturally in a form of verse that is perhaps the closest to prose, and which was not a Greek import. Horace himself gives us a wonderful portrait of Lucilius (sat. 2,1, 30-34), with verses that Goethe later used as a motto for his late collection of “Zahme Xenien”:
ille velut fidis arcana sodalibus olim
credebat libris neque, si male cesserat, usquam
decurrens alio neque, si bene; quo fit ut omnis
votiva pateat veluti descripta tabella
vita senis.
[Lucilius] used to entrust his secrets to his books, like faithful
Friends, never seeking recourse elsewhere whether things
Went well or badly: so the old man’s whole life lies open
To view, as if it were depicted on a votive tablet.
The satire as a mirror of one's own life: The Latin sentence—”omnis... vita”—emphasizes that the entirety of being, the essential quality of a man, both of the author or another, is supposed to be tackled by the satirical form. But Horace, despite all his admiration for Lucilius, had quite a few criticisms of that “father of satire”. Horace's own artistic ideals, a century of refinement in poetic means removed from Lucilius, finds much “distasteful” in the acerbic progenitor. Horace’s primary criticism is that Lucilius wrote too much too quickly with too little care for quality (sat. 1, 4, 8-13):
...durus conponere versus,
nam fuit hoc vitiosus: in hora saepe ducentos,
ut magnum, versus dictabat stans pede in uno;
cum flueret lutulentus, erat quod tollere velles;
garrulus atque piger scribendi ferre laborem,
scribendi recte: nam ut multum, nil moror.
...the verse he wrote was rough.
That’s where the fault lay: often, epically, he’d dictate
Two hundred lines, do it standing on one foot even!
A lot should have been dredged from his murky stream.
He was garrulous, hated the labour involved in writing,
Writing well, I mean: I don’t care for mere quantity.
The accusation may sound harsh, but it is hard not to agree. Even in a state where his works are practically lost, Lucilius left us, as mentioned, around 1400 fragments—accompanied by a simple philological apparatus that's enough to fill several volumes; more, quantitatively, than we have of Horace, one of the most completely transmitted ancient authors. Horace continues (sat. 1,10,56-61):
quid vetat et nosmet Lucili scripta legentis
quaerere, num illius, num rerum dura negarit
versiculos natura magis factos et euntis
mollius, ac siquis pedibus quid claudere senis,
hoc tantum contentus, amet scripsisse ducentos
ante cibum versus, totidem cenatus.
What forbids us readers of Lucilius’ writings
To ask whether it was a harshness in himself,
Or in his times, denied more finish to his verse,
A smoother flow, he who’s content merely to stuff
His thoughts into six feet, cheerfully penning two hundred
Lines before dinner, and the same after?
A rhetorical question Horace swiftly answers himself (sat. 1,10,63-71):
...fuerit Lucilius, inquam,
comis et urbanus, fuerit limatior idem,
quam rudis et Graecis intacti carminis auctor,
quamque poetarum seniorum turba; sed ille,
si foret hoc nostrum fato delapsus in aevum,
detereret sibi multa, recideret omne, quod ultra
perfectum traheretur, et in versu faciendo
saepe caput scaberet, vivos et roderet unguis.
...let’s agree, I admit
Lucilius was pleasant and witty, more polished
Than a maker of rough forms the Greeks never touched
And than the crowd of older poets: but he, had he
Happened to be destined to live in our age, he too
Would have rubbed away, cutting out whatever was
Less than perfect, scratching his head as he made
His verses, and often biting his nails to the quick.
This “rubbing away” is the poetological program of Hellenism, the ideal of Callimachus, of Catullus and his followers, and of the Augustan generation. Rubbing away, cutting out: in metre, in vocabulary, in diction. Refinement, that is the ethos with which Horace wrote his satires, and which Lucilius lacked—and which neither Persius nor Juvenal fully embodied.
Horace's two books of satires are composed of ten and eight satires each. Some less intelligent commentators have remarked that Horace may have run out of “material”, which is why book two has fewer satires—but the satires of book two are on average longer than the ones in the first book, so that book is itself 52 lines longer than book one. The shortest satire, with 35 lines, is sat. 1,7; with 326 lines, sat. 2,3 is the longest. One is so short because it presents a single joke in the context of a legal dispute; the other so long because it deals with a series of philosophical questions, among them the five different forms of what Horace calls “madness”, (insanire, insania): avarice (avaris), ambition (ambitio), opulence (luxuria), love (amor), and superstition (superstitio). The average length of the satires is about 100 lines—too long to quote or interpret or discuss a satire in full depth here, unfortunately. But we can take a brief look, nonetheless. Consider for example the famous sat. 1,9: Here Horace recounts a strenuous meeting with a certain contemporary on the Via Sacra who just wouldn't let him go on with his day. This “sketch”, as we may call it and discuss it as, comprises “only” 78 lines. Two main characters and one supporting character are brought onto a stage: the poet and his obtrusive acquaintance, and then, towards the end, a bemused friend of Horace, Aristius Fuscus, who notices the poet's unfortunate situation, but does very little to save him from it. But just as the poet got into this mess by accident, another accident ends his predicament. An everyday occurence, “social realism”, one may almost think; but beneath the surface, there is, naturally, more to this. Philologically, we note Horace's nod to the satirical tradition in the first four lines (sat. 1,9,1-4):
Ibam forte via sacra, sicut meus est mos,
nescio quid meditans nugarum, totus in illis:
accurrit quidam notus mihi nomine tantum
arreptaque manu 'quid agis, dulcissime rerum?'
By chance I was strolling the Via Sacra, and musing,
As I do, on some piece of nonsense, wholly absorbed,
When up runs a man I know only by name, who grabs
Me by the hand, crying: ‘How do you do, dear old thing?
“By chance I was strolling... musing...” is a formula that we see, like this or in other variations, quite frequently in Lucilius. It is, so to speak, a “stock introduction” for satires. Also interesting in sat. 1,9 is the wonderfully balanced structure: Almost exactly in the middle of the poem, in line 37, the two men walking along the Via Sacra, reach a point in the road, the temple of Vesta, where the separation that Horace so longs for could happen quite naturally and on good terms—but no; Horace is denied, we may say, his climax. In the last second, the obtrusive fellow changes the topic. Suddenly, Maecenas, Horace's patron (in German and French, to this day, the words for patron are just Maecenas name: Mäzen, mécène) and friend becomes the topic of discussion. The obtrusive fellow wants Horace to introduce him to the wealthy patron. After half a poem of “smalltalk”, this forced conversation turns to something fundamental: The supposed envy of others regarding his very lucrative friendship with the powerful Maecenas (who surely would have been reading these satires). And Horace celebrates that friendship (sat. 1,9, 48-52):
...'non isto vivimus illic,
quo tu rere, modo; domus hac nec purior ulla est
nec magis his aliena malis; nil mi officit, inquam,
ditior hic aut est quia doctior; est locus uni
cuique suus.'
'The life up there’s not what you think:
No house is freer from taint or intrigue than that one:
It never troubles me, I can tell you, if someone
Is richer than me or more learned: everyone has
His own place.'
But soon, Horace is met with even greater disappointment: His interlocutor, enthused by Horace's praise for Maecenas’ friendship, unfolds his strategy of getting to know the great man: bribery, even more obtrusiveness, all the things that in the “house free from taint or intrigue” are hated. And so Horace not only gives us a portrait of this obtrusive and talkative man, but he manages also to give us, in the process of praising his benefactor and patron, an idea of the virtues and mores ideally expected in good Roman society, at least in the entourage of the great Maecenas. The poem ends when an even greater being, facetiously speaking, rescues Horace: sic me servavit Apollo (thus Apollo rescued me; sat. 1,9,78). The great world and the small world, a disgusting man and the praise of honour, purity, integrity—there is no cheap snappiness, no acerbic description, no anger or bitterness, as we find it in Luculius or Persius, the two great “haters”; rather, Horace shows everything with a wry smile, an assured self-satisfaction. “Would you look at that, the Roman rabble, funny bunch, really; terribly corrupt, though”, we could imagine him saying. The Roman rabble—or the rabble of any other time and place.
Sticking with Maecenas, a recurring character in Horace's entire corpus, we may note and recommend reading the cheerful “travelogue” on a journey undertaken by Maecenas and Vergil to Brundisium, which Horace gives us in sat. 1,5. Or one may read the satire that was probably written the earliest, sat. 1,2, in which Horace discusses fornication and adultery in rather amusing directness (sat. 1,2, 68-72):
huic si muttonis verbis mala tanta videnti
diceret haec animus 'quid vis tibi? numquid ego a te
magno prognatum deposco consule cunnum
velatumque stola, mea cum conferbuit ira?'
quid responderet? 'magno patre nata puella est.'
In the face of such problems if a man’s lust were to say:
'What are you up to? In all my wildness did I ever insist
On a cunt in a robe descended from some mighty consul?'
Would he really reply: 'But she’s a great man’s daughter.'
Also surprisingly ribald is sat. 1,8: Lusty garden-god Priapus with his raging member spies on two witching women and finally scares them away in his own ingenious manner—by farting thunderously. More “serious” are the two much-quoted satires 1,4 and 1,10, which deal with poetic and poetological questions, such as Horace's relationship to Luculius' works. Sat. 2,1 also deals with poety itself. Very famous and frequently-referenced for millenia is furthermore sat. 2,6 with its little Aesopian fable about town mouse and country mouse, in which Horace praises rural living as calmer, less dangerous, and more pleasant than the stimulus-rich life in the city. The town mouse, visiting a friend in the countryside, finds all things there too simple, too dull. The country mouse is easily persuaded to come to the city, but as they are engaging in the urban pleasure of boundless dining, terror strikes (sat. 2,6,110-117):
ille cubans gaudet mutata sorte bonisque
rebus agit laetum convivam, cum subito ingens
valvarum strepitus lectis excussit utrumque.
currere per totum pavidi conclave magisque
exanimes trepidare, simul domus alta Molossis
personuit canibus. tum rusticus: "haud mihi vita
est opus hac" ait et "valeas: me silva cavosque
tutus ab insidiis tenui solabitur ervo."'
The country-mouse at ease enjoyed the change of style,
Playing the contented guest amongst all the good things,
When suddenly a great crashing of doors, shakes them
From their places. They run through the hall in fear, stricken
By greater panic when the high hall rings to the barking
Of Molossian hounds. Then says the country-mouse: ‘This
Life’s no use to me: and so, farewell: my woodland hole,
And simple vetch, safe from such scares, they’ll do for me.’
The engaged reader of Horace may notice that here he takes up the theme of the second epode; but not, as in the epode, with an ironic twist—rather we see Horace here as a man cheerful about his ability to conclusively chose his way of life (as he advises Numicius to do in the 6th epistle of the first book of letters); and Horace choses a simple rural life without glamour, dedicated solely to his musaic service, his poetry, removed, it seems, from the centers of power (it only seems so because his close friend Maecenas was one of the centers of power in Augustan Rome). The question: How should I live?—Kant calls it one of the four principle questions of philosophy—is something Horace, in monologue or dialogue, frequently tackles—and here, with the country mouse, we have his answer, which could only ever be his own. How this rural Horatian living is supposed to look like is perhaps shown to us in sat. 1,6,111-120:
...quacumque libido est,
incedo solus, percontor quanti holus ac far,
fallacem circum vespertinumque pererro
saepe forum, adsisto divinis, inde domum me
ad porri et ciceris refero laganique catinum;
cena ministratur pueris tribus et lapis albus
pocula cum cyatho duo sustinet, adstat echinus
vilis, cum patera guttus, Campana supellex.
deinde eo dormitum, non sollicitus, mihi quod cras
surgendum sit mane...
...I wander wherever I choose, alone: ask the price
Of cabbage and flour, stroll round the dodgy Circus
And Forum at evening: loitering by the fortune-tellers:
Then home to a dish of oilcake, chickpeas, and leeks.
Three servants serve my supper, a white slab holds two cups
And a ladle: a cheap bowl too, oil-flask and saucer:
All Campanian ware. Then to bed, with no worries
About early rising...
A modern reader may wonder: three servants—and he speaks against luxury! The ancient reader will pity him: only three servants—what poverty! Some of Horace's emphasis, particularly when it comes to property, has lost some of its concreteness over the millenia. What he describes above seems to be a life of comfortable idleness without any financial worry, true wealth, we may say—but it was Spartan for his day and social rank. The specific emphasis that he could walk around “alone” is only really understood when one knows that a Roman man of rank never went anywhere alone if he wanted to keep proper protocoll—he always had an entourage; Horace thus declares his social independence here. But even though times change, the tenor of this poem is legible to us, particularly in its closing lines (sat. 1,6, 122-131):
ad quartam iaceo; post hanc vagor aut ego lecto
aut scripto quod me tacitum iuvet unguor olivo,
non quo fraudatis inmundus Natta lucernis.
ast ubi me fessum sol acrior ire lavatum
admonuit, fugio campum lusumque trigonem.
pransus non avide, quantum interpellet inani
ventre diem durare, domesticus otior. haec est
vita solutorum misera ambitione gravique;
his me consolor victurum suavius ac si
quaestor avus pater atque meus patruusque fuisset.
I lie in bed till ten: then take a stroll: or after reading
Or writing work I’ll enjoy in peace later, rub myself
With oil, but not what dirty Natta steals from the lamps!
When I’m tired and the hot sun tells me to go and bathe,
I avoid the Campus and those three-way ball games.
I take a light lunch, enough to prevent me fasting
All day long, then I idle about at home. This is the life
Of those relieved of the weight of wretched ambition:
I comfort myself, this way, that I’ll live more happily
Than if grandfather, father and uncle had all been quaestors.
Some may ask: is this not more bucolic verse rather than satire? Especially if compared to Lucilius or Persius—consider how Persius begins his third satire, on a similar theme (sat 3, 1-19):
Nempe haec adsidue. iam clarum mane fenestras
intrat et angustas extendit lumine rimas.
stertimus, indomitum quod despumare Falernum
sufficiat, quinta dum linea tangitur umbra.
'en quid agis? siccas insana canicula messes
iam dudum coquit et patula pecus omne sub ulmo est'
unus ait comitum. uerumne? itan? ocius adsit
huc aliquis. nemon? turgescit uitrea bilis:
findor, ut Arcadiae pecuaria rudere credas.
iam liber et positis bicolor membrana capillis
inque manus chartae nodosaque uenit harundo.
tum querimur crassus calamo quod pendeat umor.
nigra sed infusa uanescit sepia lympha,
dilutas querimur geminet quod fistula guttas.
o miser inque dies ultra miser, hucine rerum
uenimus? a, cur non potius teneroque columbo
et similis regum pueris pappare minutum
poscis et iratus mammae lallare recusas?
an tali studeam calamo? cui uerba? quid istas
succinis ambages? tibi luditur.
It’s always like this. Morning’s already bright through
The shutters, swelling the narrow cracks with light,
And I’m snoring enough to drown the wild Falernian,
And the shadow on the sundial’s now nearing eleven.
–‘What are you up to?’ cries a voice. ‘The Dog-Star’s
Been scorching the crops, madly, for hours already,
And all the cows are sheltering under the spreading elm.’
–Really? Truly? Here, quickly, you. No one there?
The green bile’s flowing, my head’s bursting, you’d
Think all the donkey-herds in Arcadia were braying.
Now my book’s to hand, the two-toned parchment
Purged of hair, the paper, and a jointed reed-pen.
Now I groan, the liquid hangs heavily from the pen,
But adding water over-thins the black cuttlefish ink,
Groan, the reed keeps gathering up the diluted blobs.
–O you wretch, every day more wretched, is this
What it’s come to? Why not throw a tantrum, act
Like a baby bird or a little prince, demand your
Food’s cut into tiny pieces, spoil mummy’s lullaby?
And indeed, compared to raging and crass Persius, Horace—when he isn't engaged in morally instructing the reader by showing them bad men, like the obtrusive fellow from sat. 1,9—is certainly somewhat bucolic, idyllic, especially when he speaks of himself, and his life, framed in the phrases of Greek shepherd verse. We may say: Whenever Horace gets “philosophic”, i.e. dispositionally Greek, his verse also becomes more Greco-Hellenistic, more Theocritian. Persius, the great hater, always remains Roman, urban, even when he dabbles in the philosophic. But, as we've seen, Horace, too, could occassionally hate—vices. For example the very mundane vice of inheritance fraud, which he deals with in the Hades-dialogue of sat. 2,5 between Teiresias and Odysseus. Teiresias advises the now poor hero to charm old men and women to gain their inheritance and restore his personal finances. This satire in particular, set in the underworld, is probably Horace at his sharpest, at his most cynical. Juvenal would later take inspiration from it. Generally speaking, for Horace's satires the programmatic dictum laid out in the first satire holds: ridentem dicere verum (to speak the truth while laughing; sat. 1,1, 24).
For some final remarks it is time to look at Horace's satires in a broad overview and general context. The two books of satires with their 18 poems are best understood as two steps in his general corpus. The second book, written later, is almost entirely composed of dialogues and therefore much more lively than the more descriptive or monologuing first book, which is closer to the mood and form of the epodes, Horace's first major work. The second book is also remarkable in its structure: two symmetrical halves, always connected by a mirroring poem from the other half: 1 and 5 (the questioning of Trebatius, and then Teiresias), 2 and 6 (praise of country life), 3 and 7 (speeches of a slave at the Saturnalia), and 4 and 8 (satires set around dinners and dining). The praise of Octavian-Augustus in 1 and 5 also hints at this caesura and mirroring between the two halves. But this alone is not enough; Horace adds another structural layer: the first satire, more of a prologue, stands isolated, and is followed by a series of seven satires, in the mathematical and thematic center of which, in satire 5, stands the most cynical, the Hades-dialogue, with its mythological figures. Three satires of life and living, almost bucolic in parts, then the great underworld attack in the center, death, followed again by a triad of life and living connected thematically to the first triad. But now to return to the first book of satires. Here, too, we see a triadic structure: the first three satires are philosophic diatribes, the next three are personal confessions, the last three are anecdotal narrations; an epilogic satire summarizes the meaning of three preceding triads—and is in contraposto to the prologue satire of the second book. This way both books become a coherent whole, referencing, suffusing each other and structured in similar ways. Furthermore, in the first book, satires 1 and 6 have dedications to Maecenas, just as satires 1 and 5 of the second book mention Octavian-Augustus. Sat. 1,1 begins: Qui fit, Maecenas...; sat, 1,6 begins: Non quia, Maecenas... As already in the epodes, and as later in the odes, the first satire, the opening satire, deals with the choice of a way of life: soldiers, merchants, peasants, lawyers are presented and compared. The mentions of Octavian-Augustus in sat 2,1 and sat 2,5 are not yet full dedications as we see them in the odes; he is still Octavian, the Augustan Age is almost there, but not quite. The satires are the silvery poetry of an age that feels the golden age coming. The odes, Horace's mature lyric production, are then great song of the Pax Augusta.