Catherine SCHLEGEL Satirist As Son: Horace And His Fathers

In Satires 1.4 and 1.6 Horace effectively replaces the two influential figures of his poetic life, Lucilius and Maecenas, with the figure of his own father. The strategy is a master-stroke of Horatian double-dealing with both his poetic/satiric affiliation and with his poetically constructed persona. In both poems Horace’s use of his father elaborates Horace’s definition of the satirist he is and the poetry he produces; the genealogy of Horace’s poetry is traced to his father. Horace not only makes the biological figure of his father an artistic progenitor, but he remarkably dislodges Lucilius and Maecenas from their authoritative positions in his poetic life which initially he seems bound to acknowledge.

Both poems are about lineage. In 1.4 Lucilius is the direct descendant of the Old Comic poets in his activity of marking (notabant) those who deserve blame. The substance of Lucilian satire however makes for a timorous audience, which shrinks from the poet’s art, hating and fearing its critical bent. Horace’s task is to retrieve both himself as poet and his poetry from that fear, which he does by elucidating his ethical outlook. That outlook has been formed by his father, who taught Horace how to avoid bad behavior by marking (notando) the behaviors of others which Horace himself should avoid. The habit of Old Comedy that Lucilius inherits, of marking human faults, is practiced by Horace’s father for moral and pedagogical ends, and this is the habit which Horace the son internalized. The attack upon others becomes for Horace, thanks to his father’s teaching, a habit of self-attack and restraint. His poetry is left free of invective force, since, as the product of this restraint, it can do no harm. In his biological father Horace has the model of a better satirist than he finds in his literary father Lucilius.

In 1.6 Maecenas is the descendant of the Lydian founders of Etruria. The public, aristocratic life thus determined for Maecenas is one Horace cannot share, for Horace is born of a freedman father. Horace sets the account of his introduction to Maecenas, which is told in terms of birth (Horace is infans upon meeting Maecenas) and gestation (he waits nine months for word of his acceptance into Maecenas’ circle), against the refrain and its variants in 1.6: me libertino patre natum. The father Maecenas cannot be the cause of the satire Horace writes; that cause is found in Horace’s first father. The ordinary nature of Horace’s satire cannot be practiced by a man enmeshed in the demands of aristocratic public service. Horace’s satire must belong to a life which is solitary and humble in its preoccupation. The poem’s tribute to Maecenas becomes a curious statement of the poet’s distance from his patron, a distance found in the simplicity of the life Horace lives according to his station, inherited from his father.

In both poems Horace clearly presents the paternal aspect of his relation to Lucilius and Maecenas, and then articulates the way in which his biological father is the prior and more significant influence. His satire emerges as the inevitable product of his persona, acquired by inheritance. Horace’s father is the distance from Lucilius and Maecenas by which Horace defines his art. In an irreproachable move, the strains of patria potestas can be left to reside in the secondary fathers, Lucilius and Maecenas, who are then displaced by the genuine article. Horace’s freedman father frees Horace from the anxiety of influence, poetic and social, and grants to Horace’s satire a benign voice located in the Epicurean spaces of private life.