cambridge greek and latin classics The satires explored in this volume are some of the tricki- est poems of ancient Rome’s trickiest poet. Horace was an ironist, sneaky smart, and prone to hiding things under H the surface. His Latin is dense and difficult. The challenges O posed by these satires are especially acute because their R voices, messages, and stylistic habits are many, and their A themes range from the poet’s anxieties about the limits C HOR ACE of satiric free speech in the first poem to the ridiculous E excesses of an outrageously overdone dinner party in the last. For students working at intermediate and advanced S levels of Latin, this book makes the satires of Horace’s S AT IR ES A second book of Sermones readable by explaining difficult T issues of grammar, syntax, word-choice, genre, period, I R book ii and style. For scholars who already know these poems E well, it offers fresh insights into what satire is, and how S these poems communicate as uniquely ‘Horatian’ expres- B O sions of the genre. O K I I EDITED BY KIRK FREUDENBURG CAMBRIDGE GREEK AND LATIN CLASSICS GENERAL EDITORS P. E. Easterling Regius Professor Emeritus of Greek, University of Cambridge Philip Hardie Fellow, Trinity College, and Honorary Professor of Latin Emeritus, University of Cambridge Neil Hopkinson Fellow, Trinity College, University of Cambridge Richard Hunter Regius Professor of Greek, University of Cambridge S. P. Oakley Kennedy Professor of Latin, University of Cambridge Founding Editors P. E. Easterling †E. J. Kenney HORACE S AT I R E S BOOK II edited by kirk freudenburg Yale University, Connecticut University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, ny 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521444941 doi: 10.1017/9781139014694 © Cambridge University Press 2021 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2021 Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ Books Limited, Padstow Cornwall A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. isbn 978-0-521-44494-1 Hardback isbn 978-0-521-44947-2 Paperback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. CONTENTS List of Maps and Figures page vi Preface vii List of Abbreviations xi Note on the Text xvi Introduction 1 1 A Second Book of Sermones 1 2 Fabula de te narratur : Satire and Self-Irony in Sermones 2 7 3 Structure, Plot and Time in Sermones 2 10 4 Manuscripts, Scholia and the Text of Sermones 2 13 Q. HORATI FLACCI SERMONVM LIBER SECVNDVS 17 Commentary 49 Works Cited 318 Indexes 1. Greek technical terms 340 2. Latin words and phrases 340 3. General 341 v MAPS AND FIGURES Map 1 The foods and luxury goods of Horace, Sermones 2, page xvii Mediterranean Map 2 The foods and luxury goods of Horace, Sermones 2, xviii Bay of Naples Figure 1 Triclinium of Nasidienus 296 vi PREFACE It has taken more than two (in fact, now edging toward three) decades for this book to “find itself” and finally see the light of day. Producing lines of commentary is time-consuming, certainly. But it is not all that time-consuming. Before I could really settle down to want to finish this book (that’s the key: not the doing, but the determining to get done), I had to find some way to make this commentary “my own” (thinking here of Horace S. 2.6.5 ut propria … faxis). Frances Muecke’s commentary on book 2 of Horace’s Sermones appeared shortly before I signed the contract to produce this one. That work set the bar very high for whatever I might “thereupon” have to say about these same poems. Paolo Fedeli’s com- mentary on both books of the Sermones, also excellent, followed shortly thereafter. The publication of these commentaries made my work eas- ier in some ways (you will notice numerous instances of ‘see Muecke ad loc.’ in the line-by-line below), but a good deal harder in others. Taking seriously the challenge that these commentaries had set, and wanting to do my own job responsibly and well, I needed to find other things to say about the poems of S. 2. Because these “conversations,” so unassuming on their surface, were written by none other than Quintus Horatius Flaccus, a demanding and meticulous poet, always sneaky smart, and never prone to dashing things off, I was sure that they had gems hiding under that surface waiting to be discovered. I just wasn’t sure how to get at them. No matter that. Having signed the contract, the second book of Horace’s Sermones was now “mine” to do a commentary on, even though the poems themselves were not, as yet, even remotely “my own.” To develop new pathways into the second book of Horace’s Sermones, I needed to put the poems aside for what turned out to be an astonish- ing long while. Gathering ideas from places farther off, I conducted a large swing through the bigger world of Roman satire, and of Roman poetry and cultural life more generally. It was there, in working on other projects, and on other poets, concerns and times, that I found what I wanted to say about these poems. Oddly, it was by following Persius down one of his rabbit-holes (a curiously improbable metaphor) that I came to have a fuller (I dare not say “complete”) sense of what Horatian irony is, and how it operates. It was through Persius that these poems came into focus for me. For, whatever else Persius was, whether as a person or poet, he was antiquity’s best reader of Horace, and if modern scholar- ship has largely disregarded the eight oddball poems of Horace’s second book of Sermones, Persius knew better than to think them half-hearted, or even minimally beneath the standard set by Horace’s other works. If vii viii PREFACE you think about it, Persius was a most unlikely fan of these food-fanatical, Stoic-mocking poems, and yet he was obsessed with them. He knew how to read them, and how to think with them. I needed to find out what was behind that obsession. Truth be told, I had no business undertaking this commentary. The unlikely chance that I was given to write it was both unexpected and ser- endipitous. In the last year of my graduate training at the University of Wisconsin I had the good fortune to overlap with Denis Feeney in his first year there. Under his direction I wrote a dissertation that I titled, rather clumsily, “Greek Theories of Comedy and Style in the Satires of Horace.” With a good deal of re-thinking and re-writing, that study became The Walking Muse. That first book of mine, which still has a few pages that don’t embarrass me (though the number of those pages has become fewer by the year), came out from Princeton University Press in late 1993. The following spring I attended a Classical Association conference at the University of Exeter, where I gave a paper on “Morals and verse-technique in two satires of Horace.” Professor E. J. Kenney (then Latin editor of the Cambridge Green and Yellows) happened to be in the audience that day, and he liked my paper. He kindly invited me to have lunch with him the following day. At that lunch he pitched two proposals over a single pint, both extremely generous and highly advantageous to my cause: (1) that I work up my conference paper and send it to CQ (which I promptly did = Freudenburg 1996 in the bibliography below), and (2) that I con- sider writing a commentary on book 2 of the Sermones for the Cambridge Green and Yellows. This took me by surprise. I had no idea what I was getting into, not a clue about the massive amount of work that the project would involve. But I was dazzled by the offer and said yes. Not knowing the ABC’s of commentary-writing, in order to produce the required sample commentary for the syndics of Cambridge University Press to consider, I promptly purchased a copy of Ted Kenney’s own Green and Yellow on Lucretius book 3, determined to use it as my guide. Looking back on that decision, I could have done no better. The pages of my personal copy of that impressive old book, by now heavily annotated and falling out, have yellowed to match the shade of its cover. That book is the wiser older brother, and patient mentor, of the one you hold in your hands. Because the Latin of Horace’s hexameter poems is often peculiar, unprecedented and/or hard to construe, in the commentary below I expend a good deal of effort in explaining difficulties of grammar, word- choice, syntax and versification. Not all commentaries take the time to do this. Often, I give two possible translations of words, phrases and passages that defy being taken as one thing and not also the other. In the volume introduction below, I chose not to add the standard section on “style and