‘What? Me a Poet?’ Generic Modeling in Horace Sat. 1.4

“Horace still charms with graceful negligence,
And without method talks us into sense. ¹

”Pope sings an old tune here² and adumbrates a troublesome paradox: Horatian didaxis that is not quite didaxis in the sense expected, teaching us as it were glancingly. Or perhaps not really teaching, but charming us with an air of Socratic sagesse into the easy comfort of seeming to learn good things (“sense”) while avoiding issues that matter. Nowhere does the question come up more conspicuously than in Horace’s critical writing which is at once phenomenally influential and, it is often said, superficial, concerned with technique, finish, literary (and literal) politics, self interest. No systematic Aristotelian wrestling with fundamental questions of the nature of art, of its deep affiliation with the frequencies of human emotion; no reasoned theory (beyond formal matters) of genre formation or adequate discussion of metaphor or of the status of fictional representation; no (Ps.)Longinian treatment of poetry and emotional transport; no Platonic meditation on the dangers to the soul of that transport, of poetry’s lies, its temptations, its power.

On the other hand, many of his readers have not held Horace to so strict a standard. He has been for them the paradigmatic poet-critic, precursor to Sidney, Jonson, Dryden, Pope, Johnson, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Arnold, Eliot (and many others outside the English tradition), writers who speak from within their art. For the most part, we do not expect them to be systematic critics, critics with a theory; their grasp of art is intuitive, we say, and while treasuring the gems of insight they turn up, we believe that yield to be almost accidental: artists are not good explainers of their crafts. Horace thus has become in his long Rezeptionsgeschichte largely an emblem for certain critical values: good taste, balance, classicism, post-Callimachean urbanity, the labor-intensive, self-critical art of poetry. With that neat package comes, gratis, a raft of durable Horatian mots: purpureus pannus ; nec verbo verbum curabis reddere fidus interpres ; in medias res ; scribendi recte sapere est et principium et fons ; omni tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci ; dormitat Homerus ; ut pictura poesis and all the rest.

Many of us still like these turns of phrase, finding in them the kind of homely pragmatism that transcends and outlasts more rarified and systematic theories of poetry. There is perhaps nothing wrong with this, though it leaves untouched the conceptual gap between the great critics of antiquity and Horace. Ambitious technical analyses of the literary Epistles (Bk. 2 and the AP) in recent years have sought to bridge that gap, and with some success. Most prominently, Charles Brink’s study of the literary Epistles cum commentary has been an unparalleled advance in this regard; through it we have a clearer understanding than ever before of Horace’s dependence on the peripatetic tradition via Neoptolemos: Aristotle is suddenly not so distant from the unsystematic, Epicurean poet-critic.³ More recently, intersections of literary and political discourses have begun to be explored in particular regard to the Epistles, registering not only points of political pressure but places where literary-critical and political concerns meld almost indistinguishably.⁴ The other great locus of Horatian critical thought, the programmatic Satires, have too received due and productive attention. Yet for all we now know, or think we do, about the sources of, and political pressures on, Horace’s critical thought in the Epistles and Ars Poetica, about the position of Horace in debates of contemporary poetics, about his programmatic formulations in the Satires, not enough has been done to explore Horatian innovation in critical deliberation, its independence and contribution to the tradition in terms other than the familiar ones outlined above. Horace after Brink is far-better explicated, but has not become an appreciably more important critic.

One reason for this is the form of attention he has traditionally received. The obvious texts of interest, where Horace’s criticism takes on something approaching a technical character, are limited to the literary Epistles and programmatic Satires, and scholars have quite naturally flocked to them. Horace’s reaction to Lucilius, his conception of satura , his literary Alexandrianism, the relation of satire to comedy, iambic, and diatribe, its function as social criticism, the characterization of right poetry in the epistle to Florus, the struggle between ancients and moderns and poetry’s importance to the state in the epistle to the Augustus, the multiple thematic strands of the Ars Poetica; all these have been well sorted through and have become the familiar stuff of handbooks. Far less attention has been given to the Epodes and Odes, where metapoetic comment is rife.⁵ And even in the Epistles and Satires critics have tended to focus on those passages that answer to our sense of “formal” literary criticism or programmatic statement rather than on those intriguing places in our texts where art and criticism seem to meld—yet it is precisely this melding that may be Horace’s most distinguishing importance for the history of criticism, establishing the explicit model of the poet-critic thinking on his art through his art.⁶ Horace makes us realize to some extent the falseness of the old segregation of discourses; as Denis Feeney has put it, “We are not dealing with a problematic body of material (‘literature’) which can be explained with the aid of a less problematic body of material (‘criticism’): we are dealing with numerous, often contesting, strands of problematic material which interact with each other in innumerable categories of time and space.”⁷ Feeney writes here in general terms about the relation between literature and criticism; Horace is the special case where the separate elements fuse yet more dramatically into a single though multiply textured interpretandum . This is, I think, clearly the case in respect Horace’s contribution to the theory of literary genre. In which regard, Frans de Bruyn, in a good handbook article on genre criticism, comments not untypically on

…the Roman poet Horace, whose Art of Poetry reformulated and popularized Aristotelian precepts. Though not himself an original thinker, Horace is important chiefly as a bridge between classical thought and the Renaissance. Much of the Renaissance restatement of classical genre theory is guided by Horace’s urbane pronouncements. Thus, his emphasis on order and coherence in the work of art is echoed in the neoclassical doctrine of the unities (of time, place, and action), and his idea of decorum, the insistence that each genre has a subject-matter, characters, language, and metre appropriate to it becomes a central doctrine in the 17th and 18th century criticism.⁸

Histories of criticism make Horace precisely, and merely, the transitional figure we see in this excerpt: he imbibes ideas from Aristotle, Neoptolemus, Philodemus and the Epicureans, reacts to elements of the current literary climate, formulates an unsystematic, epistolary “treatise” whose effect in literary history, despite Quintilian’s early notice, only begins to be felt long after his death. Many centuries after, in fact: in Marco Gilolamo Vida and the 16th century Italian theorists, Sidney, Boileau and the French neo-classicists, Dryden, Pope, and the English Augustans.

Faced with a long and fairly unanimous tradition that has seen Horace’s value to genre theory as chiefly one of mediation between classical and renaissance literary sensibilities, it is only natural to think a little harder about what precisely Horace might have contributed in an original way as a critical thinker in generic terms. Most have sought answers in the explicitly theoretical Ars Poetica, in whose Aristotelian and Hellenistic principles many readers see a kind of personal aesthetic manifesto.⁹ But I would like to look elsewhere, scumbling just a bit the conceptual categories of Horatian critical expression, the ‘genres’ of the poet’s critical voice, by considering a paradigmatically “programmatic” poem, Sat. 1.4, in modified (to some degree other than programmatic) terms. That is, rather than seeking to comment once again on those features of the poem that describe Horace’s satiric program in contradistinction to that of his great predecessor in Satire, Lucilius, we may be able to notice some of the ways in which Sat. 1.4 addresses larger issues of generic formation and identity. Particularly the ways in which the poet Horace remakes “himself” within the poems, fashions an emblematic satiric identity that functions as calculated indicator of the tenor and generic “norm” within the literary kind he is effectively recreating. The critical yield will not be, as it might from the AP, explicitly theoretical, yet its theory-in-praxis formulation may make more potent suggestions toward an understanding of ancient genre than anything gleaned thus far from the AP. Composed perhaps before 39-7 BCE, near the beginning of his acquaintance with Maecenas and inclusion in that celestial literary circle, Sat. 1.4 shows early engagement with the tradition of satire inherited from Lucilius, and, within the drama of the first published book (balancing as it does the nuancing and resolving Sat. 1.10), signals a point of abrasive generic conflict. The Aristotelian beginning and end, 1.4 and 1.10, comprise a plot whose plotting, thick with fiction all through, adumbrates a story/mythos that will seek to account for the nature of the radically new poetry of his first book of Satires;¹⁰ Sat. 2.1 will begin again, telling another tale about that very different second book and, reflexively, the first book as well. Central to Sat. 1.4 is the (now, to us) tired old question about whether Horace really thinks satire is not real poetry (to which he ascribes ingenium, mens divinior , and os magna sonatorum, vv. 43-44)—a prominent element of the vexing burden of the first 62 lines of the poem. Though I will touch on it, I don’t propose here to try to resolve that issue directly. Or rather, it seems to me (pace Brink¹¹ and others) that “what does Horace mean by real poetry and how does satire (not) fit the paradigm” is the wrong question to ask of this poem; or rather, again, it may not be the only right question to ask. Another (perhaps right) question: how does Horace’s statement make sense within the discursive frame of this poem in particular and Horace’s reinvention of satire in general? I will try to show that Horace’s voice in this work is a designed, positioned element within a generically modeled world, and that what this “Horace,” or “new satirist,” says, has a meaning and bearing within that context somewhat different from the traditional understanding (that understanding being that the poem shows Horace the poet writing in propria persona on the art and function of his satire). The poet’s primary goal, as I see it, is not to “tell” his readers whether satire is elevated or refined enough to be called poetry, or even to tell his readers what satire ought to do, but to map the genre he is in the process of redefining, reprogramming, and to play out that very reforming gesture in the mixed impertinence, anxiety, temerity, and authoritative grasp of tradition one hears in this experimental satiric voice constructed for the occasion.

Back, then, to those familiar first 62 verses, familiar enough that a simple outline will do for starters. Horace 1) responds to the criticism of harsh invective by instancing the precedents of Old Comedy and Lucilius, 2) separates himself from Lucilius on grounds of ars , 3) claims that human folly cries out for poetic redress and that most of us for that reason resent poets, 4) asserts (lest we fret about that redress) that he is no real poet, for his plain sermo has not the fire and pitch of real art. Scholarship has long puzzled over the lines, particularly point 4 concerning Horace’s denial of the poet’s mantle, settling into familiar positions—well known, and we all have our views.¹² P.M. Brown takes a middle course in averring that “[Horace’s] real object [rather than exclude satire from the realm of poetry altogether] is to distinguish the stylistic requirements of the less elevated poetry of satire and comedy from those of grander poetry like epic, lyric and tragedy.”¹³ Recently Kirk Freudenburg and, jointly, Steven Oberhelman and David Armstrong¹⁴ have come to the conclusion that Horace, while explicitly claiming poetry to reside in generic registers higher than plain sermo (in which, metathesized, one could not find those certifying, scattered limbs of a real poet), is essentially speaking, as Freudenburg writes, through the mask of his (largely Stoic) critics, and voicing poetic principles contrary to his own. Yet in so setting out this perspective, Horace demonstrates, through his own artfully contrived word order and placement, his authority as poeta . Others take other routes to a similar conclusion,¹⁵ a common understanding that Horace means something quite other than he says in these lines. Oberhelman and Armstrong go still further in examining, through the lens of Philodemus’ poetics, pairs of oppositions: res / verba , ars / ingenium as Horace treats them in relation to Lucilius, not only in 1.4 but as well in 1.10, which offers a kind of chiastically structured resolution to the issue of what constitutes true poetry. So—and one can hardly quibble with the force of these arguments—Horace the satirist is a true poet and meant to say so through the canny misdirection of his intriguing little satire.

Yet it may be possible to maintain a degree of reservation as to whether this is all Horace meant. The modesty topos has been worked thus many times, seemingly by Lucilius himself (on which, see below), and it is possible that Horace suggests here something more complicated. At very least it might be fun to consider the prospect. Let’s look again at lines 39-48: “primum ego me illorum dederim quibus esse poetis
excerpam numero: neque enim concludere versum
dixeris esse satis neque, si qui scribat uti nos
sermoni propriora, putes hunc esse poetam.
ingenium cui sit, cui mens divinior atque os
magna sonaturum, des nominis huius honorem.
idcirco quidam comoedia necne poema
esset, quaesivere, quod acer spiritus ac vis
nec verbis nec rebus inest, nisi quod pede certo
differt sermoni, sermo merus.”

“First, I would exclude myself from those who can properly be called
poets. You would not consider it enough simply to produce
a metrical line. Nor, if a man wrote, as I do,
in a style rather close to prose, would you count him a poet.
The honour of that name should be reserved for someone with a natural
gift, an inspired soul, and a voice of mighty music.
That’s why the question has been raised whether comedy is genuine poetry,
for in language and subject matter it lacks the fire and force
of passion, and only that it differs from prose in the regularity
of its rhythm, it is prose pure and simple.¹⁶”

Hor. Sat. 1.4.39-48

Now it is easy to see irony here, especially in that ingenium, mens divinior, and os magna sonaturum, and certainly possible if one looks closely, as many have done, to see the artful arrangement of this sermo which does, in fact, distinguish it from comedy, despite the generic consonance on the level of poetic diction that Horace takes rather elaborate pains to point out. But there is another duplicity here. Long ago, “persona theory” reminded us to avoid easy assimilation of poet and speaker.¹⁷ That general caution, though far less central after New Historicism’s reconnection of poet with “context,” still has some useful purchase, though now it might be nuanced through lenses of refining distinction offered from a variety of critical perspectives. Narratological and related criticism alerts us to levels of “authority” within the text (real author, implied author, narrator(s), and on),¹⁸ and others focus on shifting dynamics of voice or “face” with respect to diverse audiences within and without the poem’s discourse—as has Ellen Oliensis recently.¹⁹ The authorial distantiation from represented voice(s) in respect to different available audiences entailed in the poem’s enactment is complex and subtle, though it will not be my purpose here, in this limited space, to address the issue in detail. Instead, my effort will be to take the critical scruple in a slightly different direction, beginning with an elementary, categorical caveat: any time we see Horace using the first person we must remind ourselves that this may be—almost certainly is, given the conventions of Roman poetic composition—at some crucial level of literary reality not Horace tout court.²⁰

The poet is hardly shy about leaving signals to this effect. He constructs a speaker’s identity defined through a conspicuous counter-typology: not forerunner Lucilius who swashbuckled his way through Roman rascality; not contemporary Stoic-poetaster Crispinus who, like the prolific Lucilius and vainglorious Fannius, shamelessly churned the stuff out. Instead we have (thus negatively described—a virtual study in negativity) shy and modest “Horace,” too abashed to swashbuckle or even recite publicly, too dim to have any really interesting thoughts. And he’s happy about it, for it keeps him off the spot: “di bene fecerunt, inopis me quodque pusilli

finxerunt animi, raro et perpauca loquentis; . . . .
. . . beatus Fannius ultro
delatis capsis et imagine, cum mea nemo
scripta legat, volgo recitare timentis ob hanc rem,
quod sunt quos genus hoc minime iuvat…”

“Thank God for giving me a timid mind with few ideas,
one which seldom speaks and then says practically nothing. …
Fannius is happy to present his works unasked, complete
with a case to hold them and a bust of himself. But no one reads
what I write; I’m afraid to give public recitations for this reason:
there are certain people to whom this kind of writing is anathema. . . .”

Hor. Sat. 1.4.17-18; 21-24

This Horatian persona has been called, quite rightly, doctor ineptus .²¹ But it is too often read as merely that, Horace putting on a buffoonish turn, perhaps cobbling this self-portrait out of his current and real insecurities. There are, however, signs of cannier intent. This voice seems fashioned to mark out generic ground in relation to established authority and school: Horace does not just happen to be not-Eupolis, Cratinus, Aristophanes, Lucilius, Crispinus, Fannius, or any of the scurrae , back-biters and scandal mongers, that come later in the poem. “In reality,” like “any human being” he and his art share characteristics with all, or most, of these; but he defines his speaker in contradistinction, and that is the salient point. We need not reason from probability: that this poet Horace is already at the time of writing beyond his early, uncertain years, has been military tribune and friend to Brutus, has survived the civil war only to land among privileged friends, poets and patrons; that such a one is anything but timid of mind or ambition and is, as any young poet on the make must be, busy giving recitations at the drop of an invitation to sympathetic audiences.²² All the reader need notice is what Horace the poet gives us by way characterization, a portrait that scarcely disguises a carefully plotted critical mapping; one that, beyond invoking the usually-seen measures (the satiric tradition of Old Comedy; the invention and characteristics of Lucilian satire; Hellenistic literary values; new comedy), creates a satirist made to order for satire’s new order. This “Horace” is meant to have definitive meaning and place within the frame of this poem, which seems so evident that it is a wonder so many have fallen for this near-Prufrock and considered him something like the real Horace saying these things, meaning other things, about his life, his art, and so forth.

Now one way to look at this self-fashioning is to go back to earlier scholarship and see it in the programmatic terms proposed by George Converse Fiske: Horace presents himself as a satirist in the later Cynic tradition, to be contrasted with Lucilius and the earlier Cynics with their fondness for obscenity and “brutal frankness.”²³ This new Cynic satirist has picked up good ideas from Panaetius via Cicero on the style appropriate to the satirist’s urbanity, free from the slashing, illiberal humor of the earlier (Old) comic and iambographic tradition, particularly that represented in the Aristotelean βωμόλοχος (buffoon). Instead, Horace embodies the satiric spirit of the “liberal jest” couched in terms of the plain style as dictated by Republican rhetorical theory. Fiske has made a good case in these terms, particularly in respect to those sections of the poem where Horace seems to negotiate the rough edges between his satire and common assumptions about the abuses and malignant spirit of iambographic poetry as popularly understood, as for example in passages spoken by a hostile adversarius: “′faenum habet in cornu; longe fuge: dummodo risum
excutiat, sibi non, non cuiquam parcet amico;
et quodcumque semel chartis illeverit, omnis
gestiet a furno redeuntis scire lacuque,
et pueros et anus.’”

“’There’s hay on his horns! Give him a wide berth! If he can
Raise a laugh he’ll have no respect for himself or his friends.
And when he has smeared some dirt on his page, he is bursting to pass
It on to all the servants and old women on their way home
From bake-house and tank.’”

Hor. Sat. 1.4.34-38

“′laedere gaudes′
inquit, ′et hoc studio pravus facis.′ unde petitum
hoc in me iacis?”

“ ‘You like giving pain,’
says a voice, ‘and you do it out of sheer malice.’ Where did you get
that slander to throw at me?”

Hor. Sat. 1.4.78-80

As this last protest would seem to indicate, Horace’s affiliations with popular ethical Cynicism, his want of malice, his desire for a sophisticated rather than common audience, his dedication to Ciceronian and Hellenistic stylistic standards, his disavowal of high poetic ambition—all seem to set him apart from the out-of-control muckraker of an earlier tradition. Horace’s self-characterization in these terms is thus a good and consistent “fit” throughout the poem.

Yet all this is no less an artificial construction, despite Fiske’s reading this satiric character as Horace’s own literary and personal apologia. The very language of the self-fashioning is a construal of a specified set of aesthetic variables, this “Horace” no more than the sum of a number of rhetorical and “philosophical” decisions presented in the context of a number of other possible decisions. Fiske’s Horace not only speaks the language of literary critical contestation deriving ultimately from Aristotle, but is a creature of that language—and of Fiske’s very local reading. As is natural enough: any self-consciously programmatic poem is bound to be a construction of the aesthetic and philosophical stuff to hand, as colored by the lens though which it is read; its biographical reliability inherently dubious—as Fiske himself comes close to acknowledging when he describes the Cynic and comic underpinnings of Horace’s notable portrait of his father (more on which later).²⁴

But acknowledging differences between real and portrayed Horace is scarcely enough. That merely tells us that we are presented with an “unreliable narration,” a narrative/dialogic space where fiction and history overlap in distractingly imprecise ways. Does Horace “mean it” when he, through his speaker, criticizes Lucilius, denies poetic status to satire, speaks of proper satire as composed of Republican/Hellenistic aesthetic values and moral force, attributes that force to early training from his stern and observant father, and so on? Or where, precisely, does invented speaker and poet’s real history coincide, and how does that matter to the poem’s program or the literary values espoused? More disconcerting still: why does Horace play the autobiographical card at all, knowing as he does that some elements of this self-presentation will be seen, transparently, as fitted out for the poem’s occasion? Lacking the time machinery necessary for an interview, we might approach the problem, with fair responsibility to its complexity, from another direction: considering how Horace plays the game of generic revision.

In simple and, I think, uncontroversial terms, Horace at very least puts on offer here something new; we’ll call him the “new satirist”—the new satirist talking about his art. Under an earlier dispensation this would be called simply programmatic, a misleading designator, for “programmatic” entails an assumption of the poet speaking directly about his own aesthetic program. Horace gives us, rather, displaced aesthetic talk. Displaced and contextualized in a way that stages a literary conversation through what is sometimes called a discursive modeling system that re-presents the larger world in a certain fashion. Bakhtin and Medvedev’s formulation goes this way: “every genre has methods and means of seeing and conceptualizing reality, which are accessible to it alone,” or, later, “every significant genre is a complex system of means and methods for the conscious control and finalization of reality.”²⁵ “Finalization” (zavershenie) suggests closure, structured wholeness, so that genre, rather than being merely the additive sum of a collection of conventions (as Bakhtin and Medvedev see formalist conceptions of genre), constitutes a literary universe not just of selected things, but as well of the “natural” laws of its operation. “Each genre possesses definite principles of selection definite forms for seeing and conceptualizing reality, and a definite scope and depth of penetration.”²⁶ Genre, as such a discursive system, selects and transfigures elements from “reality” and authorizes them as essential bearings in relation to which the generic code functions. Those bearings we most commonly associate with those conspicuous features of characterization or setting that are said to mark the genre. Examples are not merely the familiar, designating characters—clever slaves and guileless adolescents of New Comedy, the shepherds and groves of pastoral—but the different rules of interaction, competition, valorization, and so forth. Gian Biagio Conte enriches it all by pointing out that, despite clear delimitations of setting, manner, tone, and characterization, each genre is capable of reducing the larger world of experience and discourse to its own terms.²⁷ Genre translates experience to a modality of discourse. Genres’ exclusions, then, are not chiefly a means of segmenting reality (this place for lovers, this for students of philosophy) as a massive translation of a larger incoherence to a conceptualizing discourse that enables coherence. Under such a view literary genre is not, or not only, that set of thematized formal conventions that identify literature as literature and provide its differentially organized languages, but a kind of “language place” where reality and the conventions of its reception or conception are negotiated. A further dimension is described by Conte: “the sensitivity of Roman poets toward genres a parte subiecti is confirmed by the curious phenomenon of ‘empty slots.’ Within the development of Roman poetry, the tension directed toward a canon of genres is so strong that expectations are created concerning ‘unoccupied’ spaces, blanks created and delimited at the borders of already existing genres.”²⁸

It is the poet who, when he is bold enough, negotiates these margins, and Horace here, bold even in offering to public view his mask of modesty, is setting out to create a new discourse world at the margins of what he would have called traditional satire. This is crucially not the same as seeking to spruce satire up with Hellenistic aesthetics, or even to flirt with other generic manners Kreuzung-style, drawing them significantly into satire’s multiply-composed stuffing. Rather, it is to create a modeled world of language, within which things make a certain kind of sense, configure selected aspects of reality and experience coherently. Seen this way, much of what Horace does to set up his speaker’s intriguing disavowal indicates a plausible strategy—one that touches on a further necessary element in this generic gamesmanship. The speaker opens the poem by instancing “the poets Eupolis, Cratinus, and Aristophanes” for the sole reason (apparently) of invoking their satiric authority, that is, their representation of that iambographic tradition of satire—the connection represented in Diomedes: carmen maledicum ad carpenda vitia hominum archaeae comoediae charactere compositum (abusive poetry written in the manner of Old Comedy to attack the vices of humankind).

Horace writes at lines 3-5: “siquis erat dignus describi, quod malus ac fur,
quod moechus foret aut sicarius aut alioqui
famosus, multa cum libertate notabant.”

“If any person deserved to be publicly exposed for being
a crook and a thief, an adulterer or a cut-throat, or for being notorious
in some other way, they used to speak right out and brand him.”

Hor. Sat. 1.4.3-5

That old Comedy fairly represents this traditional conception of the satiric is true enough.²⁹ Yet, as others have noticed, this is only a partial reading of the generic character of Old Comedy, which is concerned with the project of attacking vice only along the way to more central concerns.³⁰ Thus comedy’s and satire’s being defensibly part of the tradition of personal and social criticism along with invective, diatribe, epigram, (some) didactic and more is no argument for generic identity or function, especially in a literary world where there is such heightened awareness of the canonicity and hierarchy of genres; Horace makes his knowing this clear in lines to follow. The question raised for us is: how are we to place this enacting, generic triangulation? Lucilius comes next: “hinc omnis pendet Lucilius, hosce secutus
mutatis tantum pedibus numerisque.”

“Lucilius derives entirely from them: he followed their lead
changing only their rhythms and meters.”

Hor. Sat. 1.4.6-7

Again, Lucilius does plausibly follow in the comic invective tradition, but Horace has it hinc omnis pendet --entirely derives from them, and this is clearly not true in one obvious sense: Lucilius did not write Old Comedy with but changed meter. The overstatement flags an issue, an awkward hitch in the logic of argument. It is apparent that this opening gambit is, again, not an attempt to define generic identities, but to designate points of relationship (conceivably focalizing that marking, at this point, via the fautores Lucili he will mention in Sat. 1.10—how that Lucilian claque might view satiric genealogy³¹) in a larger generic conversation, call it tradition. Horace, then, seems to place genres into a kind of mobility and to raise questions about where one begins and another ends—hinting at those empty spaces Conte mentioned.

But it is not just a case of one genre (problematically) leading (or not) to another, sharing pedigrees or elements. Horace’s invocation of Eupolis, Cratinus, Aristophanes, and Lucilius locates, as we have said, crucial generic relationships, and, as we have further said, the common assumption has been to see them as continuous—sharing somehow the Geist of satire’s job, a job he wants to take on in his own way. It is possible, however, to see Horace’s lumping together of four individual poets as performing an alienating rather than proximating function. Lucilius is not quite the same as the writers of Old Comedy who are themselves dissimilar in notable respects from one another. Placing them together can effectively mark out distance between an older iambographic generic identity and the new; these writers are similar in all being not-Horace. The point of (ostensible) specific difference between new and old is stylistic, with Lucilius the target:³² “hinc omnis pendet Lucilius, hosce secutus

mutatis tantum pedibus numerisque; facetus,
emunctae naris, durus componere 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 ferrre laborem,
scribendi recte;”

“Lucilius derives entirely from them; he followed their lead
changing only their rhythms and metres. He was a witty fellow
with a keen nose, but harsh when it came to versification.
That was where his fault lay. As a tour de force he would often
dictate two hundred lines an hour standing on his head.
He was a muddy river with a lot of stuff that should have been removed.
A man of many words, he disliked the effort of writing—
writing properly, that is;”

Hor. Sat. 1.4.6-13

What is overt in all this is reductionism. Lucilius is like the comic poets and Lucilius’s Latinity is, in the language of the new Hellenism, a muddy stream. Conspicuously elided at this point are the exceptional learning, the cultured sophistication, the metrical experiment and invention, prominent Callimachean influence, Lucilius’s own exacting metrical and compositional studies (Bk. IX), the stylistic ingenuity as recorded by Cicero, and the opinion represented later by Quintilian’s rejection of the Horatian characterization.³³ Horace, it is clear, caricatures Lucilius, presents him to us readers in singular, memorable, and rather down at heels dress. The bold, aristocratic swashbuckler, scourge of the city, has something of the vulgar about him—and so the vulgar poetasters Crispinus and Fannius are made to join the company, an insinuating equation between an indubitably great poet and the scribblers.³⁴ The rhetorical gambit fools no one but the most naïve (for instance, those he defends himself against in Sat. 1.10, adversarii for the occasion); Horace rather shows us the process of Lucilius’s antiquing, his speaker painting over the yellow glaze so thickly that only broad, prominent outlines show through. And behind that film, another layer, with just the shadows of Aristophanes and his generic kin—all but some vague family resemblance gone. The fun is in the doing it, demonstrating all the while how it is done. Horace, among Lucilius’s other readers, cannot but know what is left out in this portrait; and so a doubled perspective, literary portrayal as a kind of negative allusion “intended to” but of course not able to disremember a literary antecedent. The reader recalls Lucilius in some greater wholeness, despite the obliterating caricature. The distance between Lucilius and his Horatian version corresponds to that between the poem’s Horace and the poet himself. Each writer, as represented in the satire, plays a role, stands for a certain kind of generic configuration, even while the poem foregrounds the omissions necessary to enable the fictive contestation. The signal is almost flagrant: “look what fun I have with my misprision of Lucilius; now watch what I make of ‘me’ as satirist.” And so the story of the harmless, dutiful son’s satire unfolds.

But why the acute focus on, and distortion of, Lucilius qua writer? There is obviously a degree of expediency and convention in this procedure; genre’s identification is frequently managed, in classical poetics, metonymically, major genres and innovations identified by their founders or prominent innovators.³⁵ Lucilius stands conventionally for satire, and is here made obsolete in that representation: that kind of satirist, that kind of satire. But the case of Lucilius is a special one, for he, first in Latin literature, formulates the idea of poetry as personal expression ( ego ubi quem ex praecordiis ecfero versum . . . (when I bring out any verse from my very heart. . . [670-71 ROL]); for Lucilius, satire becomes the literary space in which poet can openly express feelings about himself and the world. Certainly this is how Horace reads the precedent, though he combines the notion with commonplaces inherited from the Greek tradition when he describes the intimate relation between Lucilius and his poetry books in Sat. 2.1.30-34: “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. sequor hunc³⁶

“In the past he would confide his secrets to his books. He trusted them
like friends, and whether things went well or badly he’d always
turn to them; in consequence, the whole of the man’s life
is laid before us, as if it were painted on a votive tablet.
He’s the man I follow…”

Hor. Sat. 2.1.30-34

This intense connection between poet and his verse becomes canonical in Roman satire—it is seen most vividly in Persius. One of the central elements of the satiric formula after Lucilius and Horace, thus, is the identification of author and satirist; the genre precisely invites such a reading. But we have seen Horace destabilize that self in the case of Lucilius and, crucially, misread it. Horace, then, offers a second invitation: read satire “as if” its author were speaking personally, but read it, too, suspiciously, aware that any authorial presence in the poem is (only) that made-up self the composer wants there. Satire in short must seem, but only seem, to speak from the heart, ex praecordiis. And, once again, Horace shows us how it is done: misreading and estranging Lucilius from his intended literary program, Horace creates his own (seeming) modest, poetically unassuming satiric self before our eyes in this first program poem.

And does so with remarkable literary/allusive complication. For the very self-creation that antiquates, makes obsolete, the genre’s founding master Lucilius, depends in subtle allusive chemistry on Lucilius himself. Fiske’s foundational work on the dependence of Horace on Lucilius is perhaps overly keen to locate affinities, and when finding them reads Horace chiefly as an “imitator” of Lucilian language and idea. Still, the traces are numerous enough to suggest that Horace’s rejection of Lucilian precedent is a highly qualified and canny one; again, there is much seeming here. Notable, for the purposes of this essay, is Fiske’s suggestion that in fr. 1064 ROL ( cui sua committunt mortali claustra Camenae [me, to whom, a mere mortal, the Camenae entrust their bolts (or keys)]) lurks evidence that Lucilius too denied the status of poetry to his work. The temple of the Camenae at Rome is alluded to; the epicizing diction and style mindful of Horace’s quotation of Ennius at 60-61; Lucilius, like Horace after, stands apart from the collegium poetarum.³⁷ Fiske’s argument may here seem conjectural, even thin; but there is little doubt that Lucilius preferred to call his verse anything but poetry: sermo (talk), schedium (cobbled verse), lusus (trifle) being the favored terms.³⁸ Marx’s reconstruction of fr. 1131 ROL ( qui schedium fa …) is rather too hopeful, but nonetheless suggestive of how short the distance to Horace is: ego non poeta sum, qui schedium faciam, tantum non carmina vera.³⁹

This is background noise; just loud enough to ensure that we are aware of “something” going on behind the sweeping disavowals, ensuring, in turn, that we see the artfulness of this satiric/programmatic confession. Satire will, after Horace, be a personal, confessional genre, the product of a highly visible poet-speaker; but Horace’s allusive complications, his overt misprisions, prevent us from reading that speaker naively—it is, always in Horace, the product of sophisticated artifice. So too, the satirized “world,” of which the satiric voice is seen to be both a creator and a part. For (Old Comedy’s) targets-in-life, mentioned by this speaker, are of a curiously singular character, already translated into satiric idiom, marked out for satire. Again, lines 3-5: “si quis erat dignus describi, quod malus ac fur,
quod moechus foret aut sicarius aut alioqui
famosus…”

“If any person deserved to be publicly exposed for being
a crook and a thief, an adulterer or a cut-throat, or for being notorious
in some other way…”

Hor. Sat. 1.4.3-5

The passage anticipates 24-33: “…utpote pluris
culpari dignos. quemvis media elige turba:
aut ob avaritiam aut misera ambitione laborat:
hic nuptarum insanit amoribus, hic puerorum;
hunc capit argenti splendor; stupet Albius aere;
hic mutat merces surgente a sole ad eum, quo
vespertina tepet regio, quin per mala praeceps
fertur uti pulvis collectus turbine, nequid
summa deperdat metuens aut ampliet ut rem:
omnes hi metuunt versus, odere poetas.”

“…because most men deserve a scolding. Pick anyone you like from a crowd;
you’ll find he’s plagued with avarice or else the disease of ambition.
One is obsessed with married women, another with boys.
One loves the glitter of silver; Albius is entranced by bronze.
One barters his wares from beneath the eastern sky
to lands warmed by the evening sun; he is swept headlong
through hardships, like dust raised by a whirlwind, in constant dread
of losing a penny of his capital or failing to make a profit.
Such men are all afraid of verses and detest poets.”

Hor. Sat. 1.4.24-33

The passages are prominently linked by parallel rubrics: dignus describi and culpari dignos. Muecke comments perceptively: “I take these correspondences (especially dignus describi and culpari dignos ) as showing that Horace’s position in relation to society is analogous to that of the Attic comedians and Lucilius, analogous but not exactly the same. The difference in expression indicates a difference in approach. In lines 3-5 the individuals are totally identified with their vitia , as fur , moechus , sicarius and so on. But in the later passage the emphasis is on the vitia themselves, which individuals may be taken as exemplifying, while still, we note, being named.”⁴⁰ The first part of this seems to me precisely right: “analogous but not exactly the same,” and “the difference in expression indicates a difference in approach.” But the distinction is a mechanical one, perhaps not taking us as far as it might into Horace’s satiric method. Let’s see what happens if we emphasize the verbs rather than those parallel digni , particularly following that loaded hypothetical, siquis: “this lot, if any should just happen to fit the usual profile, should be done up in verse.” Describi and culpari both designate, despite their indifferently broad general sense, a fairly specific literary response. Muecke,⁴¹ who invokes Brink on A.P. 183, observes that dignus can suggest “fitting” as in “fitting of description” and “may imply literary appropriateness as well, the characters of comedy being φαῦλοι . . . .” It is possible to understand this beyond the issue of the local case, φαῦλοι and comedy, and suggest that Horace here is designating a characteristic literary nexus: just as comedy “writes up” certain kinds of stock figures in its literary formula, so does satire (write up different kinds_), and in the writing up transforms the “targets” into a new ontological status: no longer realistic specimens of vice in society but satiric specimens as seen through, and transformed by, the generic lens.

Literary treatment appropriates and transforms. These characters are digni of writing up because they have become part of the genre’s langue. Horace thus identifies a particular relationship: a certain delimited kind of vice and poetry. “Who” gets so treated is not, from the very beginning of this poem, a matter of selection of likely candidates from the ordinary course of life—these are not, as a category or class of targets, real people. Nor are they a higgledy-piggledy gatherum from related genres: none of Old Comedy’s fantastic creatures or real-life butts of parabasis-diatribe, no tragically flawed protagonist, no extravagantly demonized object of invective derision (Tigellius and Canidia are mere cartoons in the Satires), no ordinary, reasonably complex middle class Romans who speak the prose he claims to versify.⁴² Horace, in short, creates a language world peopled by the usual sort of satiric suspects even when reading comedy’s reading of so-called real life. The usual sort, that is, as they will come to be, for Horace is, in these early poems of the first book, playing his show for the first time with this cast of characters. Here, the contrast with Lucilius is pointedly vivid. Put another way, Horace, despite the plenty of anti-social writing behind him, introduces the fiction of satire’s critical relation to society (Horace’s poem is meta-critically about Lucilius’s and his own practice), codifies for the first time a literary medium that has so seemed to gravitate to the “natural” axis of iambographic writing (Lucilius’ articulate growl) that the novelty of the thing is usually overlooked.⁴³ Horace’s satiric targets, in short, come to readers translated in this satire, generically estranged from the analogues (whether “vice” or individuals) in the real and ordinary world, as Horace himself is estranged. It is easy to see this in self-protective terms, as has too-often enough been done; or as a categorical “fictionalizing” of the verse, but the diffracting lens of genre is no real impediment to the presence of real politics (and/or other issues) in the poetry. The crucial point is Horace’s denial of naïve transparency; if we are to discern those places where Realien impinge, we will have to understand, so this “programmatic” poem tells us, the transposing generic system Horace has created for his new satire, take it into account in our reckonings of how Horace’s poetry works in his (real) world. Some, of course, won’t notice, and that suits speaker-Horace just fine: this carefully constructed satirist does not want to go out on a limb, wants to stay in his quietly sinecured study, out of the way: no ground-breaking for him. Hence, he (seems to) present his satire as the old thing all over: Old Comedy, Lucilius, New Comedy, life, his father’s moralizing lessons—all the same, really, a harmless continuum.

Why the indirection? Why this formulation from within the disguise, or more precisely, through the eyes of a character set in a constructed literary universe? Possibly because the thing really can’t be done otherwise. The overview of formal literary theory, or even the ad hoc potshots in a compendium like the AP, being rather like trying to describe a language (think here of “programmatic poems”) by setting out its grammar in full detail; one comes, through the resulting μέγα βιβλίον , to understand lots about that language, but doesn’t get the thing itself. Thus playing with the notion of generic description (rules and strictures are formulated, all right, and they are good rules: on rough versification, on copiousness, on tenor, on carelessness of all sorts), Horace demonstrates, through his ironically timorous speaker, both the insufficiency of extra-mural generic assertion—this “Horace” hand to hand with Lucilius?!—and the potency of the creating word, of the generic world, this new satire within which the new satirist lives. This is, after all, a Horace we have believed in for quite a time.

We also see in this world, beyond stock vice, the hostility generated as per satire’s formula, again Horace’s creation (33): “Such men are all afraid of verses and detest poets”: the satirist presumes to be stalking the world’s sinners and is in turn stalked by the lurking resentment of the characters of his dramatized world. So when the satirist says, I am afraid to give public recitations because certain people resent it, people who are avaricious, ambitious, love-obsessed and the rest, we know we are in a literary cityscape in which these are our neighbors; in the modeled world of elegy, or epic, or even comedy, we’d be on a decidedly different part of town.

As, for instance, we are when (at 45) the speaker mentions comedy as potentially non-poetry in response to which an interlocutor instances a stock comic scene: “      …′at pater ardens

saevit, quod meretrice nepos insanus amica
filius uxorem grandi cum dote recuset,
ebrius et, magnum quod dedecus, ambulet ante
noctem cum facibus.′ numquid Pomponius istis
audiret leviora, pater si viveret? ergo
non satis est puris versum perscribere verbis,
quem si dissolvas, quivis stomachetur eodem
quo personatus pacto pater.”

“’But you see the father
in a blazing temper because his wastrel of a son dotes on a call-girl,
refuses to accept a wife who would bring him a fat dowry,
and causes dreadful embarrassment by parading drunkenly with torches before dusk.′
But surely young Pomponius would receive
Just as severe a scolding from a father in real life?
So it isn’t enough to write out a line in plain words
which rearranged could be spoken by an angry father
like the one in the play.”

Hor. Sat. 1.4.48-56

The point made by the satirist is that wrathful words alone do not make up true poetry’s acer spiritus ac vis , that poetry’s virtus should resist metathesis, that its language should not be too base (hence the ugly stomachetur ), and so forth.⁴⁴ Yet in the apparent denial of poetry’s status to comedy, Horace demonstrates comedy’s autonomy as generic system. For this little vignette is a précis of the real thing, conspicuously: senex , adulescens , meretrix , the standard situations, New Comedy’s sons and fathers. Its characters are decidedly, again, not ordinary Romans, nor are their situations anything but the stuff of comedy. This little in-structured juxtaposition, a canonical comic situation over against its real-life counterpart (Pomponius and father) becomes deictic, gestural, marking a boundary between what falls within generic formula and what does not (despite, again, the satirist’s arguing that a common linguistic register inhabits both—as do a number of elements, hence, the old and faulty commonplace about comedy’s “realism”⁴⁵). And this is how the metapoetic trick works in this poem; comedy here is instanced, seen from without; the reader looks not through the fiction of comedy, suspending disbelief and the rest, but as it were from above, as a specimen of the way things might be formulated, composed. The same holds true, more complexly, for the generic setting that is this poem: always a double perspective pertains, the “world” seen from within, through the eyes of this interestingly diffident speaker, and the satiric world as modeled reality seen from without, through the eyes of Horace, say, or his audience(s) thinking about what is being created in this poem. The doubleness enables metapoetic implication and inference; allows the reader both to see with and look at this “Horace” writing (about) satire.

Horace’s new formulation, however, is more than the sum of this poem’s parts viewed stereoscopically. The satire creates its own foundation myth. Having established a congruency of “satiric spirit” between the writers of Old Comedy and Lucilius ( hinc omnis pendet ), he, as virtually everyone says, establishes a similar closeness of register between New Comedy and his own satire. Again, not, as in the earlier case, to establish generic identity, but in illustration of a mobile textual continuity that permits formative gestures at the margins of prior and other generic definition. Not unrelated, of course, is the thematic focus of the New Comic précis on fathers and sons and the obvious stress throughout the poem on generic parentage. Lucilius is the rejected father figure, Horace’s strong precursor, and his speaker’s anxiety of influence is conspicuous. This will do well enough for a beginning. Later in the poem (103ff.) our speaker will instance at length another filial relationship, where our speaker explains how his father’s assiduous ethical training has led him to write as he does. “      liberius si
dixero quid, si forte iocosius, hoc mihi iuris
cum venia dabis: insuevit pater optimus hoc me,
ut fugerem exemplis vitiorum quaeque notando.
cum me hortaretur, parce frugaliter atque
viverem uti contentus eo quod mi ipse parasset,
′nonne vides, Albi ut male vivat filius utque
Baius inops? magnum documentum, ne patriam rem
perdere quis velit.′ a turpi meretricis amore
cum deterreret: ′Scetani dissimilis sis.′
ne sequerer moechas, concessa cum venere uti
possem: ′deprensi non bella est fama Treboni′
aiebat…
     et, sive iubebat
ut facerem quid, ′habes auctorem, quo facias hoc′
unum ex iudicibus selectis obiciebat;
sive vetabat, ′an hoc inhonestum et inutile factu
necne sit, addubites, flagret rumore malo cum
hic atque ille?′ avidos vicinum funus ut aegros
exanimat mortisque metu sibi parcere cogit,
sic teneros animos aliena opprobria saepe
absterrent vitiis.”

“ Yet if I’m a little outspoken or perhaps
too fond of a joke, I hope you’ll grant me that privilege.
My good father gave me the habit; to warn me off
he used to point out various vices by citing examples.
When urging me to practise thrift and economy and to be content
with what he himself had managed to save he used to say:
’Notice what a miserable life young Albius leads and how Baius
is down and out—a salutary warning not to be so quick
to squander one’s inheritance.′ Steering me away from a squalid attachment
to a prostitute he would say: ‘Don’t be like Scetanus!’ To stop me
chasing someone else’s wife when legitimate sex was available:
’It isn’t nice to get a name like that of Trebonius—he
was caught in the act’…
     Recommending something he’d say:
‘You have a good precedent for that,’ and point to one of the judges
selected by the Praetor; or by way of dissuading me: ‘How can you doubt,’
he’d say, ’whether this would be a foolish and dishonourable thing to do
When X and Y are the centre of a blazing scandal?′ Invalids
who are tempted to over-eat are given a fright by the funeral
of the man next door, and the terror of death compels them to go easy;
in the same way young folk are often deterred from doing wrong
when they see the notoriety of other people.”

Hor. Sat. 1.4.103-15; 121-29

Sometimes that passage is read naïvely, as genuine autobiography; more usually, it is pointed out that the passage derives from New Comic roots.⁴⁶ For Horace’s father, as presented here, is a character drawn from comedy, specifically Demea from the Adelphoe (see especially 441-43). Neither view is theoretically exclusive of the other or of probability: a father could plausibly moralize in this way and Horace could have selected the given literary language of comedy to illustrate an obvious generic affinity, New Comedy and paternal moralizing/satire being kin. Yet there are problems: as moral education this is poor stuff. However readers might enjoy a back-to-the-fifties look at a Roman “father knows best,” this heartwarming ethical didaxis belongs in the Neverland of children’s stories. Or in the never-never land of New Comedy where precisely such facile child-raising formulae, in the mouth of the impossible Demea, come in for robust critique. The young intellectual Horace was raised on richer stuff, his father not the simple freedman of the Satires.⁴⁷ And inconcinnity is signalled; for an upright, homespun (Cynic, according to Fiske) moralizer this father is surprisingly broad minded—and strangely random: ‘if you’re after good sex, my young lad, go for prostitutes or freedwomen instead of chasing others’ wives; don’t squander your inheritance (see X); don’t become a glutton (see Y)’; and so on. We seem not to be in the land of real temptation or error, or at least realistic response to same, but of canonical vices recycled from literary precedent. So maybe this is a version of New Comedy after all; Horace as guileless adulescens hoping for a happy ending. But just as Lucilius’ satire is not Old Comedy hexametered, Horace’s version of all this is not New Comedy, with its very different literary objectives and appeals; instead, and precisely, it is a catalogue of the subject matter, the res , of his art, drawn from the various corners of the related literary past and reconstituted in satiric idiom: prostitutes, other men’s wives, squandered inheritances, scandal, gluttony, and the rest. The “moral” axis of the Satires is, therefore, as artificial as the simplified homiletics of this paternal guidance, and meant to be seen as such. Does satire address the real world? Yes, with allowances made for the obliquities and transpositions of literary space. Hence, the generic invitation to see the satirist’s voice as both poet and other. Thus too, satiric father leading satiric son (and his readers) through this poetry’s brave new world, pointing out the things satire, or the new satirist, should notice. Has, in fact, noticed, for the conspicuous self-allusion, at 111-14 to Sat. 1.2, on the subject of licit and illicit sex is a dead give-away. Even that poem’s punch line, the in flagrante surprise and disarrayed flight of this “Horace” himself is alluded to so markedly so as to be virtually transposed into the later satire. “discincta tunica fugiendum est ac pede nudo,
ne nummi pereant aut puga aut denique fama.
deprendi miserum est…”

“I have to run off barefoot with my clothes in disarray, otherwise
My cash or my arse or at least my respectability has had it.
It’s tough to be caught…”

Hor. Sat. 1.2.132-34

“ne sequerer moechas concessa cum venere uti
possem ′deprensi non bella est fama Treboni’…”

“To stop me
Chasing someone else’s wife when legitimate sex was available;
’It isn’t nice to get a name like that of Trebonius—he
was caught in the act.’…”

Hor. Sat. 1.4.113-115

Trebonius and satirist share their dubious mortification, after all, despite the paternal wisdom. Moral edification, or reminiscence of same, or even the moral force of satire’s criticisms, then, is not the point. Rather it is the making of a world in which such characters—glutton, lecher, dissolute heir, upright fathers, pious if somehow compromised sons—live. Our poem’s speaker is just such a son, being made up before our eyes, given one parent (for satire does not care for good mothers), a certain education, a certain attitude and view of life. How artificial and selective it all is.

But the objective is not realism, or illusion or persuasion, but rather the fashioning of a poetic place in which things fit. That “fit” is genre, the formulated thing. Here re-formulated: brazen Lucilius has become this amusingly modest, but literate little chap Horace presents, and he too can do satire, for he’s got the pedigree—just look at his father, not the literary fathers Lucilius or Aristophanes but this better-than-Demea-Daddy, rehabilitated for the occasion, laying down the generic rules this satirist and all of us readers of satire will live by. Of course, the language too is new. We have seen this speaker claim, alluding coyly to Lucilius himself or focalizing his remarks through the lens of those fautores Lucili that are supposed to represent, but aren’t really, his fathers/masters, that his verse is too close to prose, that it lacks “mighty music”; like New Comedy it lacks the “fire and force of passion” and differs from prose only in rhythm; it would not greatly suffer from metathesis. Believing or not believing this speaker “as Horace” on the issue is not really the point. More important that we recognize that speaker’s foregrounded self-doubt and, precisely, the unconventionality of this literary space announces errancy, rule-breaking, and thus dramatizes the instant of generic reformulation. And so another distinction is made through the poem’s dance of perspectives: one between “tradition” and generic definition; whereas tradition offers an overlapping artscape, a massive intertext of related forms and functionalities (Old and New Comedy, invective, Lucilian satire, diatribe and all the rest), genre represents moments of poised coherence in that continuum, where, precisely, there is no confusion.

When new coherence occurs at the edges of the old, there is entailed both transgression and doubt. Hence, the hard business with Lucilius, and, hence, that tentative speaker with his troubling disavowal. Horace himself, we may believe, had no doubts: his sermo here and elsewhere is the achieved stuff of genuine poetry, and Horace the poet will scarcely have believed that anyone would think otherwise. But, again, the query and hesitancy come from within the modeled, selected, strange landscape of new-minted satire, and the question thus dramatizes the moment of change: is this good satiric son’s step out of the old paradigms real poetry? Will this new generic model, shy and retiring pilot at the helm, fly? We’ll see, he says in v. 63, invoking the stereoscopic generic focus and indicating that such judgment is to be made elsewhere, from without, beyond the boundaries of the literary space he will call satire: alias iustum sit necne poema . . .