Horace tells us far more about himself, his character, his development, and his way of than any other great poet in antiquity. The settlement of Latin colonists at Venusia after the end of the third Samnite war. Sulla’s veterans and the behavior of the centurions’ children made quite a low educational standard at the elementary school of Flavius. It made it undesirable for Horace’ s father to send his son there. Horace, in the midst of his successes in Rome and the world at large, remains the devoted son of his native region. At the height of his achievement it is his greatest pride that his bold undertaking, the revival of the old Lesbian songs in the tongue of Italy. The functions of a coactor argentarius were connected with auctions. He takes the place of the seller of the goods. The whole business is being transacted not between the seller and the purchaser, but on the one hand, between the seller and the coactor and, on the other, between the coactor and the purchaser. He fulfills the function of a banker. No son ever set a finer monument to his father than Horace did in the sixth satire of Book I. The poet knows that he owes more to his father than to anyone else. He remains one of the common people, a hard-working, open-minded, and thoroughly honest man of simple habits and strict convictions, representing some of the best qualities that at the end of the Republic could still be found in the unsophisticated society. He attended an expensive school in Rome. The reading of the Iliad was a principal item in the curriculum. At university, he studied moral philosophy and theory of knowledge. His interest in those early poets was roused in the days when he was an enthusiastic young student at Athens. Access to the many papyrus rolls must have been considerably easier in Athens than in Rome before there existed public libraries. The idea of making the writing of poetry his profession would not, of course, have occurred to him at that stage. The Athenians had a long experience in bestowing spectacular honor on tyrannicides. Brutus and Cassius ostentatiously attended the lectures, and took part in the discussions, of the famous heads of the great philosophical schools. It is easy to imagine what impression the presence of so eminent a guest in the audience must have made on the young students from Rome, Marcus Cicero, Horace, and others. They persuaded them to join their cause. So Horace, like many of his fellow- students, found himself in the retinue of Brutus. It is not known when he was given a definite appointment Finally, perhaps not long before the battles of Philippi, Brutus made him, a freedman’s son, tribunus militum. At the height of the crisis it may have seemed all-important to put in charge young men whose loyalty could be trusted, even if they were lacking in military experience. Concerning the battle of Philippi, some poets with whom Horace was thoroughly familiar and who inspired him in various ways, were Archilochus, Alcaeus, and, possibly, Anacreon. They had said the shield was a conventional poetic device, in its s relation to the actual happenings in no way different from the Homeric mist by means of which a few lines later an Olympian god whisks the poet away from the battlefield. On returning home, he lost his father’s townhouse and farm during the expropriations of land. In Horace’s writings he never tells a downright lie, but neither does he consider himself obliged under all circumstances to speak the whole truth. Had it not been for the ruin of his former expectations and the loss of his property, he would not have become a ‘professional’ poet. The chance of finding a wealthy patron who might support him was at best a very remote one. He became ‘a clerk in the Treasury’, concerned with the public finance, responsible for putting down the resolutions of the Senate and keeping records of them in the aerarium, access to certain official documents, see to it that authentic copies were made. The poet’s economic circumstances changed completely when, at some time before 3I B.C., presumably not long after the publication of the first book of his Satires, Maecenas presented him with the Sabine farm and he resigned his post as scriba. Augustus wanted a secretary to help him with his private correspondence. Horace rejected the emperor’s offer on the ground of bad health. . SATIRE IX: of course, the bore is pictured, and the picture is perfect. To suffer a disagreeable person gladly needs a saint, and Horace was far from being a saint. And yet he pictures the nuisance rather good-naturedly. . The subject of this satire is something that happened to Horace on a very ordinary day. Little did he foresee what was soon to befall him. He is at liberty to include in his satire a considerable section of his world. First short sentences pass between the bore and Horace, the color of the polite, if thoroughly conventional, phraseology favored by the educated classes. Their shallowness and quick pace give us the impression that we are catching snatches of a typical conversation in the street. The prophecy of the old woman (31-34) is a splendid piece of parody: the words quando consumet cumque are archaizing tmesis. The very last words, through the Homeric half-line at the end that memories of a great battle are roused. The ode I. 37: the magnanimity with which the defeated queen is extolled should not be taken as an isolated phenomenon. It springs from that deep respect for dignity in man’s behavior which the Greeks practiced. You ought not to humiliate your defeated enemy, and that by trying to degrade him you will in fact degrade yourself. But it is a fact, the poets, voicing what was in the minds of the best men, could, without fear of disapproval, treat the defeated enemy in such a manner at the moment when a life-and-death struggle had been decided. I. 22 gives a complete picture of the uninhabitable parts of the world, where no human being, unless specia11y protected, can hope to survive. In integer vitae it is the lover and writer of love-poetry who will be safe wherever he goes; elsewhere Horace widens and deepens this idea: the poet (not only the writer of love-poems) will everywhere and in every danger enjoy the protection of his divine guardians, the Muses, and of the gods in general. I.1 is probably one of the latest poems in the collection of the three books. Passages in other odes are in fact deliberate echoes or variations. The discussion of the various types of lifestyles and their relative merits played a great part in the treatises of Hellenistic popular philosophy with which Horace was familiar. To be accepted as a worthy heir of their poetry, to be read by those readers who still cared for the classic lyrics of Greece, that would be the crown of his life. In the epilogue of Book III, egi monumentum, let us not make the mistake of regarding the prayer at the end as a mere poetic convention. . But he felt that the inspiration which enabled him to write great poetry could not be accounted for in terms of ordinary human skill; he was convinced that it came from heaven.

Steele Commager

Horace’s Ode to Pyrrha (I.5): enclosing both Pyrrha and the slender youth is multa . . . in rosa. No adjective falls in the same line as the noun it modifies. The words are rather “suspended,” as it were, like the clothes to which Horace refers. We realize that he has not so much described a scene as created one, and that the “temple wall” is the page itself. In virtuoso passages like these Horace compels us to an awareness of the words as they are on the page and on one occasion Horace devoted a whole Ode to exploring it. In donec gratus eram tibi (III.9) so precise are the repetitions and contrasts as to produce an almost tessellated effect. Binding boast and counterboast -the repetitions are too obvious. Yet despite the powerful pairing of stanzas the two figures remain distinct. Horace speaks throughout in social terms -kingship, servitude, expulsion - while Lydia turns to the natural images of fire, stars, and water. The verbal structure thus becomes itself the structure of existence, the coupling of each pair of stanzas being imposed upon the distinct pattern of each sex’s individuality. Summarizing the passion of both lovers, the final line reshapes it for the future. It does not so much record an actual amatory situation as propose an ideal form for one. Horace’s two lovers derive as much satisfaction from their own cleverness as from the end to which it is directed.

HORACE AND THE RHETORIC OF AUTHORITY

Horace advises his young friend Lollius to steer clear in Epistles 1.18: self-assertive arrogance on one side, self-abasing servility on the other. Horace lives by this advice throughout his poetry and not only as regards his patron Maecenas. As we will see, gestures of pure deference and pure authority are much rarer in Horace's work than mixtures of the two. When he is addressing an unproblematically subordinated ''other'' such as a slave, Horace regularly cedes some of his authority, making a display of his gracious affability. And when he is addressing an undeniably superior ''other” most notably Augustus, he always takes care to safeguard his own authority, even if that means indulging in a certain calculated ungraciousness. We should be reading Horace's poems as preeminently ''polite'', a study of Horatian politeness.

Horace often avoids a face-threatening face-off by switching from the authoritative first person singular to the communal first person plual and/or from the confrontational second person to the oblique third person. And he uses rhetorical figures (hyperbole, simile, fable, etc.) not only to delight or to persuade but also to lend his poetic actions a measure of ''plausible deniability.” In sociolinguistic terms, Horace tends to hedge his speech-acts so as to render them nonactionable. Horace's strategies change over time. For Horace's face changes not only from situation to situation and from poem to poem (sometimes from one line to the next) but from collection to collection. In the course of his career, and as a consequence of it Horace's face gains value. Horace cannot assert as much or the same kind of authority at the beginning of his career as he can at its end. The more face Horace accumulates the less effort he needs to devote to maintaining it, especially against threats from inferiors. Indeed, as his face becomes better known and more widely recognized, Horace spends more time defending his negative than promoting his positive face – such is the price of celebrity. As Horace gains authority, moreover, he defers differently - paying more. deference to Augustus and less to Maecenas, for example.

Horace has several audiences, some or all of whom may be in attendance for any one poem or book of poems: the addressee, what I term the ''overreader'' (an unnamed but otherwise specified other who may be imagined as reading over the addreessee’s shoulder), the reading public, and posterity. These audiences are all potentially present.

Indirection enables Horace to make an effective demonstration of (instead of merely protesting) his values and his value. This enables Horace to say something to the overreader that he could not say to his face without injuring his own face and/or that of the overreader.'' In such cases, whatever is said is said ''off the record''. Horace can always claim that he was merely addressing his addressee, not his overreader (here Maecenas), and that his overreader was, in a word ''overreading'' - not taking Horace's words at face value. Horace always has an eye out for the impression he is making on other overreaders. In the course of his career, Horace displays a growing awareness that his poetic faces. Horace’s best defense often consists of such self-wounding gestures, gestures that can be neither taken at face value nor entirely discounted.

Horatian satire is conditioned by two contrary messages. On one side, the poet ridicules the foibles of men caught up in the pursuit of wealth or status and extols a traditional ethics of contentment; on the other, the poetry publishes and promotes the poet's own progress from the obscure margins to the shining center of Roman society. Hostile readers might convict Horace not only of unscrupulous ambition but of hypocrisy. The satirist climbs the social ladder by poking fun at social climbers; he enhances his own face by stripping off other men's masks.

Horace was acutely aware of the kinds of things that could and would be said about him.

Like Callimachus, Horace sides with Apollo, championing quality over quantity, recte over multum, exclusivity over abundance.

For Horace’s style of poetry is a good match for Maecenas’ style of patronage. As the discriminating poet singles out for satire only those who deserve it so his discriminating patron takes care to befriend only worthy men Horace selects not only his satiric targets but also his very words with the same care that his patron devotes to the fashioning of his circle. Horace is a Poet of few words. Maecenas is a patron of few men. Neither makes his selection on the basis of pedigree: Horace prefers common words to fancy poeticisms, and Maecenas does not disdain men (such as Horace) without ancestors. And both know what to do with their select materials. Horace's praise Maecenas' well-ordered circle, in which ''each man has his place'' , also suits his own verbal art: the poet's words, like the patron's friends, are carefully and hierarchically ''placed’' The analogy suggests not only the friends' like-mindedness but also the authority that poetic mastery confers on Horace. Poetry will always be the place where the ''freedman's son'' exercises his most untrammeled power.

In Satires I.5 which commemorates a journey Horace made to Brundisium in the company of Virgil, Varius, and Maecenas, among others The journey, moreover, is one in which Roman readers might be expected.to take a particular interest. As Horace reveals in passing, this is not a pleasure trip but a diplomatic mission assigned to Maecenas and Cocceius, men accustomed to reconciling friends at variance – the friends at variance being Octavian and Antony, as contemporary readers would have known. The domestic details of the journey (the weather, the food, the ups and downs of the road, the arrivals and departures of the various travelers - anything and everything, in other word, but the politics of the moment. Packed with the detritus of daily life, fully preoccupied with events'' that are profoundly uneventful, the satire omits the very history it might be expected to detail. This apolitical and domestic stance turns the poem into rnanifesto of Horatian discretion. Horace knows how to keep both his mouth and his eyes shut. In Satires I.6, Horace recounts the origins of his friendship with Maecenas. Although the poem is addressed to Maecenas, it is designed to be overread by Horace's detractors. It is their accusations whether actual or imagined of unscrupulous ambition and parasitism that call forth the reiterated proclamations of passivity and independence that contour Horace’s apologetic self-portrait. Horace begins with the issue of social mobility. Despite his own illustrious ancestry, his broadminded patron is not prejudiced against , those less nobly born - for example Horace, the so-called ''son of a freedman father.”Horace slides from a defense of social mobility to a defense of the status quo. ''The censor would remove me from the senate,’' Horace remarks, ''if I were not the son of a freeborn father.'' The implication is that Horace is indeed entitled to seek senatorial status; there are reasons to believe that Horace came of good Italian stock and that he made his own use of the inaccurate and invidious label ''freedman's son.”

The man who accuses Horace of unworthiness thereby also accuses his patron of moral laxity; and Maecenas may be a more formidable opponent than Horace's accuser is ready to take on. What was it that won Horace the favor of Maecenas? Certainly not mere enviable good luck.No, it was Virgil and Varius who first brought Horace to Maecenas' notice. The first interview between Maecenas and Horace is likewise tantalizingly uninformative: Horace gulped out a few unpretentious words. Nine months later Maecenas called Horace back and enrolled him among his amici. The criterion for Horace's selection? Not literary but moral excellence: ''I think it a great thing that I found favor with you - you, who distinguish the honorable man from the villain not by the eminence of his father but by the purity of his life and character. The point is that Horace does not represent himself using his poetry, or even allowing surrogates to use it on his behalf, to improve his social standing. In Satires I.6, Horace’s father’s contribution was to ensure that his son got proper schooling, not in backwoods Venusia but at Rome: ''he ventured to take me to Rome when I was a boy to learn the arts that any knight or senator would teach his offspring.'' But he also took care to protect his son from urban corruption accompanying him on his visits to his various teachers and thereby- “preserving my chastity, the chief ornament of a good character.

The underlying message is that Horace both merits Maecenas' friendship and has done nothing specifically to gain it. Rather, it was the very essence of his character that won him his well-deserved place in Maecenas' circle. Horace does best when he lets himself be overheard praising his patron. Horace manufactures the ideal conditions for one such ''authentic'' demonstration of his good faith in Satires I.9. Horace here stages a pitched battle between himself and his distorted double. At any rate, Horace is soon interrupted by one outstanding example of how not to behave. One consequence of this interruption is that a poem that opens in silence ends in a cacophony of ''yelling.” The satire is unequal to the contest because he cannot find it in himself to be anything but civil. There is one point, however, at which the outsider succeeds in cracking Horace's polite reserve. 'How do you stand with Maecenas?'' he asks (it is significantly he and not Horace who introduces this name into conversation). Horace replies by answering what he takes to be the ''real'' question (''how do you think I would fare with Maecenas?''): ''He's a man of limited acquaintance and of very sane mind.'' The politely rude gist is that Maecenas will not be so mad as to admit this aspirant to friendship. Horace's companion, who is not after all a fool, deflects the insult back onto his interlocutor in the form of an unsavory compliment. If Maecenas is so hard to get at, Horace must have been both lucky and clever to succeed; ''No man has made more adept use of his opportunities. Horace's companion is only following what he takes to be Horace's example, making the most of what his own good fortune has put in his way in the shape of Horace himself. Perhaps Horace can be prevailed upon to manage an introduction: He assumes, ''naturally'' (it is natural to him), that Maecenas' friends are images of himself - men frantically jostling and angling for their personal advantage. Unlike the false friend of Satires I .4, Horace immediately rushes to the defense of his friends and thereby also of himself. The spontaneity of this defence, which is represented as an outburst forced out of an otherwise reticent poet by his companion's intolerably offensive insinuations, is underwritten by the dislocated word order characteristic of authentic excitement (S. I -9.48-52). This staged rupture of discursive norms is rounded out by Horace's authoritatively and ungraciously curt reply to his interlocutor's: incredulity: ''What an amazing story, I can hardly believe it! 'But that's how it is.'' A moment later, Horace regains his self-control, reverting to the distancing, ironic courtesy that his anger momentarily broke through. Horace's companion and many of Horace's readers may not be convinced by Horace’s protestations. Horace's idealizing description of Maecenas' circle. The encounter gives Morace a chance to act the part of a faithful friend - a man who knows both how to keep his mouth shut and when to open it.

The new standards call for selectivity and refinement and Horace accordingly stresses the labor not only of writing but of erasing. The emphasis is on exclusion - of unnecessary words that clutter the meaning, and of imported words that contaminate the purity of the Latin. Hence the admixture of Grecisms; often perceived as a mark of refinement and cultivation, is here categorized as a betrayal of provincialism. “Use your eraser often if you hope to write poems worth rereading, and don’t work for the crowd’s applause; be content with a few readers.'' Horace proceeds to fill out the end of the satire with the names of the ''few readers'' he himself aims to please, a list that includes some of the most eminent men of his day. What is conveyed is not so much that Horace is selective as that Horace has been selected. He defers to the judgment of his distinguished friends. Horace recognizes the authority of men such as Virgil, Varius, and Maecenas to criticize him in turn: “It’s these men I'd like my poems to please, such as they are; I'll be grieved if they enjoy them less than I hope.'' Timing is crucial, for Caesar's ear is not always ''pricked up'' to receive verse, and botched intrusions earn his displeasure - or rather, as Horace puts it, drawing out the metaphor of the ''pricked-up ear ''If you mishandle him, he kicks out, guarding himself on all sides.'' Horace here succeeds in being at once deferential (by advertising the care with which he approaches the great Caesar) and familiar (by likening the great Caesar to an irascible quadruped). Insofar as Caesar is proposed as one privileged overreader of this satire, the irreverent portrait also advertises Horace's confidence in Caesar's good will (he will respond to the image, we are to presume, not with an angry kick but with an amused smile). The reciprocally complimentary implication is that Horace is not a flatterer and that Caesar is above needing to have his ego stroked. But the surface message of this opening exchange is that Horace's chosen branch of poetry has brought and continues to bring no advantages .

Refusing twice over to compose poetry in praise of Caesar but also by representing his poetry as a form of natural and irrepressible self-expression. The point is that it is not external but internal compulsion that drives Horace to write. Horace's poetry may please his friends, but he does not write to that end. Satires I.9. - there, the man who latched on to Horace depicted Maecenas' household as a jostle of competitors and offered to help Horace ''move all the others aside.” Horace will never publish the private interactions of Maecenas' circle.

The misogyny of the Epodes is readily processed as a variation on a traditional and familiar theme which attributes the decline of Rome to the sexual misconduct of Roman women. One foreign woman plays directly into this story - Antony's ally and mistress, the seductive queen of Egypt.

Horace’s relation to Maecenas is not the solution to impotentia but part of the problem.

It is almost as if Horace's lyric triumph were designed to eradicate all traces of his epodic humiliation. The decorous reallocation of sexual and verbal powers has cleared the way for Horace's triumph. Horace proudly submits himself here to the Muse, and to no other. Certainly not to Maecenas, nor even to Augustus. The poetic princeps is celebrating his own triumph having displaced Augustus altogether. As Caesar becomes ''Augustus,'' Horace consolidates his own poetic authority.

Where the epodes dramatized a crisis of difference within the Roman community, the odes dramatize, over and over again, the restoration of order and the end of civil war. The achievement of potentia in the self-contained measures of Horace's odes is coextensive with the restoration of the distinctions between self and other, man and woman, inside and outside; that the epodes recurrently fought and failed to maintain.

Odes I - men compete for political distinction, farmers work their ancestral lands, merchants sail the seas, and soldiers wage wars, as if the civil war had never disrupted, prohibited, or perverted these pursuits. The Republican status quo has been restored so perfect1y that not a crack remains to recall its shattering. The poet is the very epitome of aesthetic detachment. Augustus, who clears a space for the poet's grove within a pacified Italy. It is within this figurative grave, a space founded but not occupied by Augustus, that the poet exercises the imperium which will eventually earn him his laurel crown. Horace can claim the status of princeps because he is not competing in the emperor’s sphere The dignity of the traditional cursus honorum may be compromised, the rewards of aristocratic competition circumscribed, by the supremacy of Augustus. But there is no corresponding limit on the poet's ascent to glory. When he writes “beyond the boundary-stone'' (C. I .22.10-11), he activates the symbolic potential of his lyric space; as he passes beyond the terminus of the line-ending; he ritually peforms the act of territorial transgression that produces the hyperbolic travels imagined in the poem's closing stanzas. In Odes 2.9, Horace represents imperialism as analogue of his own lyric practice - the imposition of order on unruly materials.

Individuality is sacrificed for the: benefit of the collectivity. The spotless household, modeled on the maternal, doting patria, is home to women whose sexuality is entirely absorbed in the faithful reproduction of offspring.

While Caesar brings the world to its knees, his virtuous Roman retreats to a private kingdom where he pays homage to the godlike ruler who is responsible for his rustication. The mastery of desire produces charming music and refreshing shade. The gods reward Horace's ''piety and Muse.” The maternal fecundity of a ''generation fertile in crime”, Horace laments, has flooded the fatherland with disaster, contaminating the Roman home with whorish wives and pimping husbands. The Romans who defeated Hannibal were not born of such parents; they were the “masculine offspring of farmer soldiers.'' The corrupt wife of the present forms a stark contrast to the ''stern mother'' of the past, a good housekeeper who oversees the labors of her obedient son.

In Odes 1.2, Horace cannot raise his singular head above the crowd. The starry heavens are only large enough to accommodate one garlanded man-god at a time. A kind of ''exclusionary rule''-Horace asserts his authority in the absence of Augustus and effaces his authorial persona in the imperial presence. Horace represents himself as the passive vehicle of praise, not its agent. To celebrate Augustus is indeed to speak with another's mouth.

While odes such as these tend to segregate the poet and the princeps, Horace’s sequence of Roman odes brings the two together, elevating both. For most of the sequence, accordingly, Horace shuns not only the vulgus but the choral, communal first person plural. Moreover, the singular poetic ego of the Roman odes is not merely the inspired mouthpiece of the Muse but Horace's individuated authorial persona. The poet of the Roman odes never comes face to face with Caesar. Horace scrupulously avoids addressing him directly. Whereas the odes that do not mention Augustus focus on the Roman present, the odes that include the emperor's name retreat into the legendary past. And in each case, as he shifts from the present to the past, Horace yields the podium to another authoritative speaker. While Horace makes the duty of Augustan boys (as warriors) and girls (as wives and mothers) clear enough, the responsibilities of Augustus himself remain carefully unspecified. In writing before the emperor, Horace uses various devices not only of tactful evasion but also of self-restraint. The very design of the sequence offers an exemplary demonstration of deferential authority. The sequence is characterized, moreover, by a prevailing downwardness. While some of the odes begin by ascending, all of them end by returning to earth. While the sequence expresses the poet's ambition and conforms his authority, this deferential downwardness repeatedly cedes the heights to the emperor. The Muses thus form a kind of communicating wall, enabling Horace to address Caesar without directly confronting him. Horace says vos Caesarem (37) so as not to say tu Caesar. Horace says ''I belong to the Muses'' in order to prove that he doesn't belong to Caesar. The poet is not only independent of Caesar, he has also traded places with him. It is significant that Horace lists, among the perils from which the Muses rescued him, the ''battle line routed at Philippi.'' The reference may be taken, simply as an index of Augustus’ clemency. In this case at least, the Muses favored an enemy of what would one day be reconceived as an Augustan, ''Olympian'' order. Horace’s ringing declaration of the supreme god's unique power effectively demonstrates to Augustus and to the world that the poet recognizes and accepts his subordinate place within the Augustan order.

Horace musters against the defeated queen the standard themes of contemporary propaganda, recasting the final episode in Rome’s civil wars as a battle between the central Roman self and its marginalized ''other'' - between West and East, man and woman, virtus and impotentia, reason and passion, Republican liberty and monarchical enslavement. The partisans of Caesar, so the argument runs, are the true descendants of the ancestors whose wine and whose mores they have carefully preserved. By capping their celebration with a thanksgiving to the gods, moreover, they demonstrate the pietas on which Rome's global imperium is founded. On the other side is the Egyptian queen, drunk with ''sweet good fortune'' and with ''Mareotic wine'' and surrounded by a ''tainted herd of men befouled by vice. The Roman general who reduces this male impersonator to the status of a properly feminine ''soft dove'' or fugitive ''hare'' figures, accordingly, as the champion of both sexual and political decorum. If the drunken queen embodies impotentia, Caesar is the very incarnation of Roman power. Instead of ruling a herd of unmanly men, Cleopatra - or rather the ''man'' in Cleopatra now rules herself. By committing suicide, by exercising unwomanly force upon her woman's body, the once impotent queen succeeds in ending her life in perfect self-possession. She has displaced Caesar within Horace's poem. Horace uses Cleopatra, as he uses the Muses in Odes 3 .4, to fend the emperor off; he celebrates her triumph so as to avoid celebrating Caesar's. But it might also be argued that the battle of Actium did not so much destroy a tyrant as create one. Horace could have imitated Brutus and fallen on his sword after the battle of Philippi. And in this sense, Cleopatra’s suicide represents.to Horace the path he did not follow. This swerve happens just after Caesar has routed his last significant competitor may express Horace’s impulse to create a space, over against the space now occupied by Caesar, for the exercise of his own power, his own lyric fortitude. While Cleopatra avoids being displayed at Caesar’s triumph, she cannot avoid being made the subject of Horace’s song. He fashions his own triumph at the expense of Caesar’s and in the image of Cleopatra’s.

Horace’s poems support Augustus, and in the sense that Horace was in effect a supporter of Augustus. How wholehearted a supporter is a question Horace himself might not have been able to answer. Horace's political resistance may be nothing more than an after- effect or a side-effect of his poetic resistance. It may be, that is, not the cause but one consequence of his need to assert his poetic authority. But this assertion does count for something. However complicit Horace was in whatever good or evil deeds Augustus perpetrated, he has succeeded in affording his poems their measure of autonomy. The contrast with Odes I.3, which closes with Horace's proud recital of his own poetic achievements, is astonishing. Whereas the poet gains autonomous poetic authority in the course of the earlier collection, graduating from the patronage of Maecenas in Odes I.I to the protection of the immortal Muse in Odes 3.3O, he seems to forfeit this authority in the course of Ode 4. And yet if Horace begins by representing the collection as a spontaneous and purely personal production, a response to an inner rather than an external compulsion, he ends with an act of self-obliteration that leaves Caesar in sole possession of the poem.

Overreading the Epistles

In the opening speech act of Epistles I, Horace responds toy his patron's request for a poetic encore with a polite refusal, citing a prior commitment to the study of philosophy which presents a portrait of studious retirement. What was expected of Horace, what benefits was he to receive, what service if any he was to perform, after Maecenas enrolled him in his circle of friends? What passes between the two is reciprocal good turns that deserve but cannot compel other good turns. There are poems that effectively test the elasticity of the strings attaching Horace to Maecenas. Only an established author could use this negative face, a bid not for intimacy but. For privacy, as the frontispiece of a new collection. The poet who opened Odes I-3 by placing himself and his poetry under Maecenas' protection seems to have grown weary of his patron’s interest. Whereas Maecenas is identified at the start of the Epodes as the devoted friend of Caesar and at the start of the Odes as the offspring of royal forefathers, this claim to fame here is his status as privileged Horatian dedicatee. Horace's poetry no longer seems to need either the protection or the reflected luster of his patron's name - his celebrity is no longer as dependent on his patron's. Horace will take care of himself by himself. He pulls away with more force - hard enough, indeed, to risk snapping the connection. An exercise in polite rudeness or amicable hostility, the poem at once recreates and averts a crisis by renegotiating a contract that Horace can no longer honor in its original form. Maecenas is entitled to, Horace ready to supply, some measure of friendly attendance; it is not the existence but the tightness of the string binding Horace to Maecenas that is in question here. It is only if Maecenas believes that he has effectively purchased his friend's continual attendance that Horace undertakes to return the purchase price in full. Horace is staking everything on his faith that Maecenas does not in fact view their friendship in terms of a strict quid pro quo. The Sabine farm is at once the clearest reminder of Horace’s dependence and the site and figure of his independence. The material rewards of befriending a ''king'' are outweighed by the loss of freedom such a friendship entails. Horace may take pride in his connection with Maecenas, but he never represents himself as endeavoring (whether heroically or otherwise) to forge that connection. If Horace's satires aim to demostrate anything, it is that a truly virtuous.friend such as Horace does not actively seek renown and rewards (a highly dubious pair in any case). For the man who out in pursuit of them (the social climber of Satires I.9), ''manliness'' is indeed nothing more than the word with which he covers his unmanly self-basement. It is crucial for a client (not to be but) to appear uninterested in gifts if he is (not to be but) to appear worthy of them If Horace makes a point throughout his poetry of never asking Maecenas for any material thing., he succeeded nonetheless, as everyone knew, in profiting from Maecenas patronage. It is perhaps to disarm such readers that Horace, instead of ''keeping quiet about his poverty” regularly proclaims that he is blissfully content to be poor (''poor'' meaning here, naturally, comfortably well of rather than extravagantly wealthy) and that he neither needs nor wants any (further) gifts from his patron. The cultivation of a powerful friend is sweet to those who haven't tried it; a man who has is wary of it. The shift from plural to singular singles out Horace as the man who has tried this kind of ''friendship'' and found it wanting. Whereas Horace elsewhere depicts his relations which Maecenas as essentially 'harmonious, his emphasis here on the clientary virtue of compliance suggests that patron-client relations are typically characterized by a divergence of desires. It is thus open to us and to Maecenas to read this letter as retroactively revealing the internal resistance Hoarce himself had to overcome when complying with his patron’s demands, not only for poetry in this sphere Horace always retains a certain independence - but for the more mundane services Horace occasionally describes himself providing, for example the escort duty commemorated in Satires I.5. The perils of Horace's literary eminence - on the one side, the servile herd of Horace's imitators; on the other, the ''ungrateful reader'' who, though privately enjoying Horace's work, plays the severe critic in public. Horace figures here not as a client but as a disgruntled patron surrounded by inept clients. Horace disdains the traditional path to public poetic honors, neither courting the votes of the fickle plebs nor entering into competition with the literary nobiles nor soliciting the support of the ''tribes'' of scholars. As his critics recognize, if Horace declines to read his work to the theater audience, it is not because he doubts its value but because he is sure of it. Looking at the collection as a whole we can see that it repeats the pattern of Odes I-3. Whereas Horace’s first epistle, like his first ode, announces his dependence on his patron, his penultimate epistle, like his penultimate ode, effectively casts him as a patron in his own right. But Horace’s epistles are not, any more than his odes, designed exclusively or even primarily for an imperial audience. The emperor may be a privileged overreader, like Maecenas, But neither man has proprietary rights over Horace's poems. Horace declines to limit his readership by specifying it. The book wants to realize the implicit promise of its name. To be a book is to be free - which means to belong to no one, neither to the author nor to any individual reader. “You should know that I'm angry at yo,”' wrote the emperor to the poet, “because in your many writings of this sort you don’talk with me in particular! Or are you afraid that you will be branded by men to come for appearing to be closely associated with me?'' The poet is, it emerges, envious of the emperor’s anomalous invulnerability to envy. The people of Rome - ''that populace of yours'' an Horace terms them, with a nice blend of flattery and irritation – may show excellent sense in ranking their emperor above all other leaders, but they otherwise display an irrational prejudice against.everything contemporary. The folly of Augustus’ populace consists in its failure to recognize, or even to acknowledge the possibilty, that poets such as Horace will be the classics of the future. While authors who fail to please their contemporaries may have little chance of surviving, those who achieve too much favor in the present risk forfeiting it for the future. Does that mean that Horace is a poet for hire, an Angustan hack? So the invidious might maintain. Horace subjects himself to that jurisdiction by including himself in the number of ''us poets'' who foil their own assent by thrusting their work on the emperor when he is busy or tired, by shutting their ears to friendly criticism, by performing unsolicited encores of their own favorite passages, by complaining that their artistic labor passes unnoticed; and by entertaining, at the peak of their arrogance, wild hopes that the moment you learn we are composing poems, you'll graciously and of your own accord summon us to your presence, forbid us to be in want, and order us to write. The great irony of this passage is that the delusions of grandeur Horace here mocks - to be summoned, supported in suitable style, and ordered to write by the emperor himself- were, in Horace’s case completely realized. By dissociating himself from his group portrait of poetic ambition, Horace represents himself, in relation to Augustas as formerly in relation to Maecenas, as having succeeded without having made and disreputable effort to succeed. Although a poet may receive a gift as a (more or less direct) consequence of writing a poem) that gift is not an adequate measure of the value of the poem, if it is an authentic poem. But in a world where poems are sometimes exchanged for cash, the distinction between market price and poetic value may be hard to see. The right way to go about patronizing poets is exemplified by Augustus, who rewards his poets with decorously unspecified ''gifts'' in an exchange that does honor alike to the giver and to the recipient. Horace feels impelled to distance his own poetry, as far as possible, from the whole sphere of poetic offerings and imperial rewards. Like a fat poem, a fat gift may not only embarrass the recipient, it may seal his doom in the eyes of posterity. The works of a poet who is viewed as having ''sold' out'' will end up just where they originated - in the marketplace, the realm of vendors and purchasers, the place of exchanges that are finished when they are transacted, exchanges that leave no saving remainder.

Success depends on a player's ability not merely to follow the rules (by composing a well-formed iambic line, for example) but more importantly, to improvise a performance within them and sometimes to break them. The Ars poetica presents a face-off between Horace's poetic authority and his audience's social prestige. And although Horace repeatedly defers to his aristocratic audience, he triumphs over them in the end - triumphs indeed, by deferring.

Every portrait - every work of art - reflects on its maker. For Horace as for Cicero, life is essentially a theatrical performance. Whether his venue is the forum, the stage, the dinner table, or the bookroll, the performer who wants to succeed must anticipate the spectator's critical eye. The literary critic is likewise distinguished by his capacity to distinguish the slightest faux pas. ''Not just anyone has the judicious eye to spot an ill-measured poem, the difference between refinement and rusticity, and that we can recognize, with tapping finger and listening ear, the sound of poetry that obeys the laws of prosody.'' The art of discrimination is the prerequisite to success on the social stage, for poets as for senators. It is Rome’s misvaluation of the art of poetry, Horace argues, that has kept her from achieving preeminence in the field of letters. Aesthetic labor is not occasionally but always called upon to smooth the rough surface of the newly created poem. The poem that has not been thus corrected be its maker deserves to stand corrected by its readers. The poem that has not been tested against a critically ''trimmed nai1'' will earn its creator the same treatment. Not only is it not the case that the well-born and well-to-do are automatically guaranteed the status of poets in good standing; it sometimes seems as if the traditional criteria of status at rome were substantial barriers to the achievement of poetic distinction. The rich poet, so- Horace asserts, will have trouble finding an honest critic to comment on his work before he releases it to the world. Only the poet who submits his work to a disinterested professional critic (to Horace, for example) can hope to produce authentic poetry. Horace describes how the model poet will pour out his wealth and bless Latium with the riches of his tongue. Such a poet performs the linguistic equivalent of an exalted civic service. It is not only society at large but the poet who stands to benefit from his linguistic gifts. As he makes his fortune, the poet also makes himself. Contemporary poets, by contrast, have no stock of years to authenticate their claims to poetic authority. They are ''new men'' on the poetic scene, and as such they and their innovative words encounter the same social prejudice as political newcomers struggling to make their names. The decorous figure of iunctura, the art of verbal arrangement is another way of achieving novelty. It is a means at once of making a familar word strange and of setting oneself apart from the crowd: What distinguishes the poet is the art by which he transforms the famliar and commonplace (notum, medium) into something novel and distinguished.

As the word suggests invidia (a ''looking upon'') is the inescapable condition of social visibility. For those who are very much in the public eye gestures of deference can help soften envy's glare. He praises Melpomene who is the donor, Melpomene who gives the great gift, Melpomene to whom Horace is forever in debt The gift of the Muse is the inalienable gift of ingenium - something that it was not within Maecenas' or Augustus' power to bestow. But Horace also has a gift to give in the shape of his poems. And the generosity of this benefaction demands an answering generosity from the reader. It is Horace's future readers who will keep him in breath by continuing to read his poetry with pleasure.