Horace: Satires Book II

Description

The satires explored in this volume are some of the trickiest poems of ancient Rome's trickiest poet. Horace was an ironist, sneaky smart, and prone to hiding things under the surface. His Latin is dense and difficult. The challenges posed by these satires are especially acute because their voices, messages, and stylistic habits are many, and their themes range from the poet's anxieties about the limits of satiric free speech in the first poem to the ridiculous excesses of an outrageously overdone dinner party in the last. For students working at intermediate and advanced levels of Latin, this book makes the satires of Horace's second book of Sermones readable by explaining difficult issues of grammar, syntax, word-choice, genre, period, and style. For scholars who already know these poems well, it offers fresh insights into what satire is, and how these poems communicate as uniquely 'Horatian' expressions of the genre.

Kirk Freudenburg is Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor in the Department of Classics at Yale University. His research has long focused on the social life of Roman letters, especially on the unique cultural encodings that structure and inform Roman ideas of poetry, and the practical implementation of those ideas in specific poetic forms, especially satire. His main publications include: The Walking Muse: Horace on the Theory of Satire (1993), Satires of Rome: Threatening Poses from Lucilius to Juvenal (Cambridge, 2001), The Cambridge Companion to Roman Satire (Cambridge, 2005), Oxford Readings in Classical Studies: Horace's Satires and Epistles (2009), and The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Nero (Cambridge, 2017), co-edited with Shadi Bartsch and Cedric Littlewood.