Satire as Poetry and the Impossibility of Metathesis in Horace’s Satires

Abstract

Abstract So Horace’s comments are nearly always interpreted. But such a reading is valid only if the present text, and with it sections of the second literary satire that conclude the book, Satire 10, are taken at the surface layer of textuality. And one must be wary of accepting Horace’s words at face value.5 A close scrutiny is warranted in a poet whose “sense of irony and ambiguity”6 permeates his work, especially the satires; who was sensitive to the placement of words and their sounds as they affect textuality; who, most importantly, structured his poem, the hexameters and odes alike, into the organized unity of the scroll, the liber.7 In fact it will be demonstrated here that Horace is asserting in the above passage his right, as a satirist, to the rank of poets; that this passage gains important further meaning when read as part of the liber, that is, of Satires Book 1, and throws light on Horace’s literary critical ideas on res/verba and arslingenium-ideas for which Horace was greatly indebted to Philodemus and the Epicurean school.

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