Fragments of Autobiography in Horace "Satires" 1 Author(s): Emily Gowers Source: Classical Antiquity, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Apr., 2003), pp. 55-91 Published by: University of California Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25011166 Accessed: 10/08/2009 23:11 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucal. 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University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Classical Antiquity. http://www.jstor.org EMILY GOWERS Fragments of Autobiography in Horace Satires 1 "When I was a young man, I arrived in Hollywood with very little money, checked into a cheap motel, showered, shaved, then I came here to talk to you."-Tony Curtis, asked by a TV chat show host to sum up his life so far "How one becomes what one is"-subtitle of Nietzsche's Ecce Homo The idea that Horace's Satires 1 is a kind of autobiography is far from being a new one. In 1874, James Lonsdale and Samuel Lee, translators of Horace, wrote: "We might call his works 'Horace's Autobiography.' We can see him as he really was, both body and soul. Everything about him is familiar to us."' Reminiscences about his life are a well-known ingredient of all Horace's collections of poems, and his debut in Satires 1 sets the pattern.An autobiographical element was virtually prescribed for Horace by his forerunner in satire, Lucilius,2 while the intimate disclosures he makes in the Satires about personal discomforts or mundane activities have helped to make him in turn one of the most biographized of ancient Earlier versions of this paper were given at theUniversity of Pennsylvania, Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley, and Princeton University. I am very grateful to the various audiences for their comments and advice; and would also like to thank Classical Antiquity's anonymous referees for their extremely helpful suggestions. In September 2000 the Department of Classics at Princeton University gave me the opportunity for a reinvention of my own, and its members will know what I owe to them. 1. Lonsdale and Lee 1874: 9. All references are toHorace, Satires 1, unless otherwise specified. I have used Klingner's text (Leipzig, 1970) with minor changes in orthography and punctuation; translations aremy own. 2. Contra Harrison 1987, who argues thatHorace was in fact rejecting Lucilian autobiographi cal satire in S. 2.1 when he referred to Lucilius laying out his whole life (32-34 omnis /... uita) like a votive tablet. Classical Antiquity. Volume 22, Number 1, pages 55-92. ISSN 0278-6656(p); 1067-8344 (e). Copyright C 2003 by The Regents of theUniversity of California. All rights reserved. Send requests for permission to reprint to:Rights and Permissions. University of California Press, 2000 Center Street, Ste 303, Berkeley, CA 94704-1223. 56 CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY Volume 22/No. 1 /April 2003 poets.3 As one biographer, Clarence Cary, wrote in 1904: "Lives of Horace are as the leaves of Vallombrosa,"4 and the tradition is still flourishing. Nevertheless, many modern readers of Horatian satire regard the autobiographical elements, once so affectionately cherished, with suspicion and as a superficial distraction from the real business of the poems: the putting into practice of literary and moral principles. This paper is an attempt to rehabilitate the autobiographical in Horace, and indeed to treat it as the driving force behind Book 1. My use of "autobiography" first needs an apology, since the old-fashioned tendency to take Horace's accounts of his life as gospel truth, and then proceed to fill in the gaps, has given the word something of a stigma in Horatian studies. W. S. Anderson (1982: originally 1964) was the first to oppose the words "autobi ography," in this old sense, and "art" (even though his eventual conclusion is that the two are interdependent). J.E. G. Zetzel (1980), in a ground-breaking article on why Satires 1 should not be taken literally, drew a far stronger distinction between "autobiography" on the one hand and "literature" on the other. He took as an extreme example Horace's S. 1.8, spoken in the first person but through the mouth of a garden gnome statue of the god Priapus. Since that is clearly not autobiographical, why take any other of Horace's first-person accounts as autobiographical? And yet he was adamant that Book 1 is in some sense "an imagined life" or "a portrait of Horace." Anderson, Zetzel, and more recently Kirk Freudenburg andCatherine Schlegel have established the current orthodoxy as far as Horace's account of his life goes: the personality presented in these as in other Roman satires is artificially constructed and attuned to the demands of the genre-in the case of satire, to be humble and self-deflating-and to the type of performance required by specific poems.5 The "author" is invisible behind an inconsistent and floating composite of personae based on comic stereotypes-the parasite, the buffoon, the unkempt philosopher, the cowed son, and so on.6 However, since Zetzel's article, the boundaries around theword "autobiogra phy" have softened, and the distinctions between autobiography and literature are no longer so clear-cut. These days we are only too aware that any life-story is at best partial and strategic, determined by all kinds of generic, ideological, and rhetorical demands; how it is often a justification or defense of a particular way of ending up; and how only certain episodes are chosen to support a particular effect or style of self-presentation.7 Even so, many of Horace's readers still find the 3. See e.g. Levi 1997. For the genre of writing portraits or lives of Horace throughhis poems see e.g. Shackleton Bailey 1982, Armstrong 1989. For continued speculation about childhood traumas and paternal pressures see Johnson 1993, Anderson 1995. 4. Cary 1904: 14. 5. Zetzel 1980, Freudenburg 1993: 3-51, Schlegel 1994. See also Turpin 1998 and now Keane 2002. On persona-theory inRoman satire seeWinkler 1983: 1-22. 6. Leach 1971: 616 argues against Fraenkel's assertion 1957: 153 thatHorace's observations are accurate and sincere. 7. Among a vast number of recent discussions of autobiography themost stimulating include de Man 1984, Olney 1980, LeJeune 1989, Sturrock 1993. On classical autobiography seeMisch 1950, GOWERS:Fragments ofAutobiography inHorace Satires 1 57 word "autobiography"off-puttingly simple. In Schlegel's words, "Interpretations of the satires as the poet's autobiographymistake a generically prompted strategy designed to disarm the reader for a factual account of the poet's life."-8 Others, while circumspect enough about the accuracy or completeness of the life-story Horace presents in his poems, are committed to the idea that, since personalities are unfixed in and out of literature, Horace's several poetic self-portraits are as meaningfully "Horace" as any flesh-and-blood person could have been.9 There was a real Horace manipulating the personal information he put into his poems, composing his public "face," but we have to accept that we can never reach him beyond the poetry, and that the "Horaces" he created have always been open to idiosyncratic interpretation by different ages and individuals.'0 And so, in a much more fluid definition now, theword "autobiography" is creeping back into use: Satires 1 has recently been described as "the fragments of what appear to be an autobiography," "Horace's first essay in autobiography," a collection of "autobiographical satire[s]," and a book "flesh[ed] . .out with a biography.""II When I use the word "autobiography" here, then, it is really shorthand for "partial, generically, ideologically, and rhetorically determined justification of one's life," but Iwill persist in using it for two reasons. First, while it is impossible to return to the age of innocent faith in the details of Horace's life-story, and while the current emphasis on "persona" is a very necessary corrective to more literal interpretations, there is some danger in all this of losing sight of the historical figure Horace and his connections with a particular period, the uncertain time of the second Triumvirate."2 In other words, there was a life-story to be told, an image to be fashioned, a position to be defended, even if these were tailored to generic and rhetorical demands.'3 Secondly, words like "persona" and "self representation," with their emphasis on the immediate performance, do not do enough to convey the element of reminiscence in the Satires, the gap Horace and the collections of Baslez-Hoffmann-Pernot 1993, Arighetti-Montanari 1993, Gallo-Nicastri 1995.