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Horace's first poetic collection presents poems which interact notably with other genres — epic, both mythological and didactic, epigram, Priapean material, etc. This higher poetic material helps this book of lowly sermones show poetic ambition and react to other contemporary poets such as Vergil.

Schoenberg’s output defies easy categorization. Throughout his career he sought to blend characteristics of various traditional forms into new ones. This chapter places all the music which employs a chorus, apart from the operas, Die Jakobsleiter, the Modern Psalm, and the Genesis Prelude. The human voice—whether solo or in chorus, in speech, song, or Sprechstimme—is vital to a large proportion of Schoenberg’s music, and viewed as a whole, the choral works form perhaps the most direct means of access to his central preoccupations. The choral music reviewed here also includes Gurrelieder, Friede auf Erden, Die chinesische Flöte, Das Lied von der Erde, Der Wunsch des Liebhabers, Satires, Kol Nidre, and A Survivor from Warsaw.

This chapter introduces satire as peculiar genre, which purports to tell its audience things in the manner of an old-testament prophet but with jeering mockery like a stand-up comedian. It describes the satirist as a moralist in a bad mood with a good sense of humour, who is often intensely conservative, deplores any changes in society and manners, and longs for the good old days. It also gives an overview of Juvenal, a Roman poet, who is identified as one that has the anger of a Persius and a Lucilius and is married to the poetic skills of a Horace. The chapter focuses on Books 10, 11, and 12 of Juvenal's Satires, which talk about the folly of people who pursue money and power but end up paying the ultimate price for their misguided greed. It also mentions the state of contemporary Roman society that is full of violence and inability to trust others.

This chapter covers Book 10 of Juvenal's Satires, which provides a clear message about praying to the gods for things which would not actually give happiness. It discusses and dismisses wealth, power, long life, and good looks on the grounds that all of these are more likely to cause pain and danger than to give pleasure and security. It also talks about Book 11, which deals with issues of living within one's means in order to avoid public disgrace and ridicule. The chapter cites the first section of Book 12, which is about preparing a sacrifice to welcome home Juvenal's friend Catullus from a dreadful sea–journey. It describes the second section of Book 12 as an extended protest of Juvenal's concern for the welfare of his friend.

This chapter provides commentaries on Juvenal's fourth book of Satires, which consists of three poems. Satire 10 has a clear message: most of us pray to the gods for things which would not actually give us happiness. The poet discusses and dismisses wealth, power, long life, and good looks on the grounds that all of these are more likely to cause pain and danger than to give us pleasure and security. In Satire 11, Juvenal begins by discussing the issues of living within one's means and thus avoiding public disgrace and ridicule, detailing the excessive consumption prevailing in Rome. He then moves onto what seems to be a dinner invitation to a man whom he names as Persicus. As with Satire 11, Satire 12 is divided into two major sections. In the first, the poet is preparing a sacrifice to welcome home his friend Catullus and takes pains to describe the dreadful sea-journey from which Catullus has only just emerged and the lavish sacrifice he intends to make to celebrate the man's safe return. The second part of the poem is an extended protest that his concern is for the welfare of his friend rather than for any quest for a legacy from him.

This chapter looks at the complex construction of the relationship between author and speaker in the second book of Horace’s Satires (30 BCE). The first book of Satires (35 BCE) had (apart from one poem) been narrated in the poet’s first-person voice and provided an apparently self-revelatory poet of Horace and his career. The second book of Satires, on the other hand, introduces a succession of other speakers who take over from the satirist, either presenting poems as monologues or acting as dominating interlocutors in dialogues; a number of these speakers can be argued to represent aspects of Horace’s character, and this chapter explores the idea that characters other than the poet-narrator may in fact reveal just as much about him as his own first-person voice.

Early Japanese and Latin writers were “latecomers.” They built on the sophisticated repertoire of Chinese and Greek literary genres and diction, but also lay claim to their own literary merits. Debates about simplicity, ornateness, and decline, which could be blamed on foreign influence, became one of the arenas in which this ambiguous psychology unfolded. Japanese literature responded to the ornate poetry of the Six Dynasties Period (220-589) and most early Latin writers came from thoroughly Hellenized areas and were imbued with the mature sophistication of Hellenistic literature. This constellation, in which the literature of the younger cultures took off from the contemporaneous later traditions of their reference cultures, resulted in comparable laments in Japan and Rome that their predecessors’ uncontaminated simplicity had declined under the corrupting influence of their presumably “overrefined” reference cultures. By examining texts from Kaifûsô, Collection of Myriad Leaves (Man’yôshû), Fujiwara no Hamanari’s Code of Poetry (Uta no shiki) alongside with Cicero’s Brutus, On the Orator (De oratore), and Horace’s Satires this chapter argues that Latin writers had good reasons to be both more aggressive, more diplomatic, and more embarrassed vis-à-vis Greek precedents than their Japanese colleagues vis-à-vis the Chinese tradition.

There was one cultural achievement that Rome and Japan self-consciously lacked: indigenous philosophical traditions. This made philosophers in Rome and Confucian scholars in Japan into both exemplars of authority and targets for satirical attack. This chapter explores the strategic use of satire by Japanese and Latin authors in appropriating and attacking their reference cultures’ philosophical traditions. It compares the little-known Genji Poems (Fu Hikaru Genji monogatari shi), a re-creation of Murasaki Shikibu’s Tale of Genji in Sino-Japanese verse, to Martianus Capella’s Marriage of Philology and Mercury, a canonical compendium of the Seven Liberal Arts. Both texts play with cultural and linguistic translation. The Genji Poems translate the romantic Tale of Genji into the Chinese-style world of scholarship, boldly claiming canonicity for a vernacular tale, but also ridiculing scholarly pretensions. Similarly, Martianus translates some of Cicero’s polemics against Plato into Greek Mennipean satire—explored here through Lucian’s satires—which is playful and slap-stick, but also considers the act of making fun of philosophers to be a superior form of philosophy. Both the Genji Poems and Martianus’ Marriage show how serious aesthetic and philosophical critique joins hands with parody and satire as a tool of canonization, of cultural reconciliation, and empowering self-deprecation.

Virgil’s Eclogues were certainly performed on the stage. Sallust, whose historical works recorded ‘the deeds of the Roman People’ and the corruption of the Roman aristocracy, referred to history as a matter of speaking and listening as well as reading books. Horace’s second book of Satires, taking up the Lucilian role he had earlier refused, contains six poems in dramatic form. Virgil’s Georgics, addressing the newly settled veterans directly, were a public demonstration analogous to Agrippa’s aedileship in 33 BC, and the ‘Aristaeus epyllion’ looks like a dance libretto for that very occasion. Livy wrote for the Roman People, according to Pliny, and his eloquent speeches were designed to be heard, not just read; some of Horace’s early Odes are addressed directly to the citizen body, and like Livy’s preface reflect the anxieties of the war with Antony. The young Caesar, like his adoptive father, was the People’s champion.

Although the book’s main concern is with Latin poetry of the Republic proper, Chapter 5 extends its analysis into the “Triumviral Period” (44–29 BCE) and thus closer to the Augustan Age. As Rome fell into a new round of bloody civil conflicts through which two essentially monarchic rulers—first Julius Caesar and then Octavian/Augustus—sought dominion over the whole empire, the poetic conceit of making one’s way through disorienting circumstances became freighted with new meaning. Vergil in the Aeneid was not the only poet to adopt this conceit in response to these events. But recognizing as much requires a different understanding of how the theme of becoming lost relates to the expansion of Roman power and the interplay between Greek and Roman culture. Rather than use the motif to figure travel in far-flung areas of the empire, Horace’s Satires, book 1, with its Epicurean satirist personae vulnerable to some of the same charges of queer attitudes and behaviors as Lucretius, limits its ramblings geographically to Rome and Italy. In doing so, however, it makes them into a means of suggesting the stable—and potentially universal—power of the man already dominant in the whole of the Western empire: Octavian. Horace’s presentation involves a skillful handling of Octavian’s links to the divine, particularly the divinity of his deceased adoptive father, Julius Caesar, whose worship Octavian himself had already introduced into state-sponsored cult. Satires 1 thus reveals awareness of the empire-wide projection of power on which Octavian’s position of leadership was coming to depend.

This chapter on Horatian impotence and moderation in Petronius’ Satyricon 130 also touches upon the intertextual relationship between Ovid and Horace’s Epodes. The author argues that Horace serves as a frame of reference for Petronius far more than previously realized, noting that Satyricon 130, which has long been recognized as drawing upon Ovid’s Amores 3.7, also responds to Horace’s Epodes, which are themselves a source of influence for Ovid’s Amores. Moreover, it is observed that the problem of Petronius’ erstwhile hero Encolpius is particularly Horatian: impotence. So, too, Encolpius’ solution to the problem is also Horatian, as he prescribes for himself a course of moderation. In drawing upon Horace’s Epodes for the problem, and the Satires and Epistles for the solution, Petronius—this chapter argues argues—corrupts Horace with Horace, employing a Horatian course of moderation designed to satisfy the immoderate desires of Encolpius’ body.

After sketching the contours of the Roman literary scene at the start of Horace’s career, this chapter focuses on the two bodies of poetry that Horace produced before turning to the lyric poetry represented by the Odes: satires in two books and iambic poetry (also known as the Epodes). It is suggested that Horace’s relationship to the poetic personality required by those genres—the critic of society in the Satires and the poet of invective in the Epodes—was an ambivalent one. Several passages of Satires 1.1 are analyzed, highlighting this ambivalence and also revealing the early development of the poet’s style.

The analysis of Jupiter in Horace shows the importance of genre in assessing the poet’s “philosophy” or “theology.” Our possession of Horace’s works in their entirety lets us see the different faces Jupiter presents: satirist’s ally, desirable lover, cause and punisher of civil war, avatar of Fortune, parallel to Augustus, tribal god of Rome, and many more. The Satires show us a basic alliance between Jupiter and the satirist, both disgusted at human foibles. In the Epodes, Jupiter participates in the impotentia of a world gone awry, sometimes at the mercy of nature, sometimes the recipient of ineffectual prayers, sometimes a player in an impossible fantasy of escape, even though he created the conditions that allowed fratricide to flourish. Odes 1–3 make the god a key player in Horace’s journey from the poetics of war to those of peace, with all that implies about the ascendance of Augustus. The Epistles, the Carmen Saeculare, and Odes 4 represent a diminuendo in Jupiter’s importance as he becomes eclipsed by the new gods of the Augustan regime: Apollo and Augustus himself. In the Ars Poetica, Jupiter has all but disappeared. Perhaps the most comprehensive conclusion is essentially a negative one: Horace makes Jupiter neither a consistent locus for protest nor a consistent purveyor of “Augustan” values.

This chapter focuses on the poetry produced around the time of the battle of Actium, and argues that the poets’ deployment of divinizing imagery is synchronized with the dawning realization that a new political order is about to emerge in Rome. The chapter begins by examining Horace’s Epode 9 and Satire 2.1, and suggests that the language of ‘aboveness’ in these poems not only underlines the emergence of a power gap between Octavian and the rest but also reflects an attempt by Horace to work out and reconcile with the new regime. Then this chapter presents a reading of the shifting relationship between poet and Caesar in Virgil’s Georgics, and argues that the interactions between these two figures in the course of Virgil’s poem dramatize Rome unstoppable drift towards autocracy. The final part of this chapter fleshes out a recurrent theme in Horace’s and Virgil’s representations of Octavian around the time of Actium—namely Octavian’s growing stature as a legal authority. This theme is explored further with a reading of Propertius 2.7 and 4.11, both of which deal with Augustan marriage legislation. Here it is argued that Propertius’ divinizing language in these poems highlights the extent to which personal speech and individual action are increasingly coming under state control as Rome steps out of the shadows of the civil war.