The Walking Muse (ebook)

Argumento de The Walking Muse (ebook)

In laying the groundwork for a fresh and challenging reading of Roman satire, Kirk Freudenburg explores the literary precedents behind the situations and characters created by Horace, one of Rome's earliest and most influential satirists. Critics tend to think that his two books of Satires are but trite sermons of moral reform--which the poems superficially claim to be--and that the reformer speaking to us is the young Horace, a naive Roman imitator of the rustic, self-made Greek philosopher Bion. By examining Horace's debt to popular comedy and to the conventions of Hellenistic moral literature, however, Freudenburg reveals the sophisticated mask through which the writer distances himself from the speaker in these earthy diatribes--a mask that enables the lofty muse of poetry to walk in satire's mundane world of adulterous lovers and quarrelsome neighbors. After presenting the speaker of the diatribes as a stage character, a version of the haranguing cynic of comedy and mime, Freudenburg explains the theoretical importance of such conventions in satire at large. His analysis includes a reinterpretation of Horace's criticisms of Lucilius, and ends with a theory of satire based on the several images of the satirist presented in Book One, which reveals the true depth of Horace's ethical and philosophical concerns.

Originally published in 1992.

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"Admirably clear, stimulating, and accessible to the non-specialist."--Religious Studies Review0Acknowledgments Ch. 1 Horatian Satire and the Conventions of Popular Drama Introductory Remarks: Ancient Rhetoric and the Persona Theory 3 The Persona of the Diatribe Satires and the Influence of Bion 8 Diatribe in the Age of Horace 16 The Persona and Self-Parody 21 Self-Parody and the Influence of the Comic Stage 27 Comic Self-Definition in Satires 1.4 33 The Comic Persona and His Comic World 39 The Subtlety and Depth of the Comic Analogy 46 Ch. 2 Aristotle and the Iambographic Tradition: The Theoretical Precedents of Horace's Satiric Program Introduction: The Theory of an Aristotelian Horace 52 Aristotle's Theory of the Liberal Jest 55 Aristotle on Old Comedy and the Iambic Idea 61 The Advocates of the Iambic Idea: Old-Comedy, the Iambos, and Cynic Moralizing 72 Libertas in the Age of Horace 86 Aristotelian Theory in Satires 1.4 92 Horace's Theory of Satire and the Iambographic Tradition 96 Ch. 3 The Satires in the Context of Late Republican Stylistic Theory Horace's Literary Rivals in Satires 1.1-1.4 109 The Stylist of Satires 1.4: A Most Unusual Horace 119 Simple Diction Artfully Arranged: Some Theoretical Precedents 128 Dionysius's On Word Arrangement and the Stoic Theory of Natural Word Order 132 Philodemus and Lucretius 139 Answering the Extremists: A New Look at Satires 1.4 145 Lucilius and the Atticist Theory of a Rugged Style 150 The Neoterics and Satires 1.10 163 Satires 1.10 and Lucilian Scholarship in the First Century B.C. 173 Ch. 4 Callimachean Aesthetics and the Noble Mime Morals and Aesthetics in the Satires 185 Images of the Satirist and the Structure of Book 1 198 The Low-Life Satirist and Saturnalian Exposure 211 The Mimus Nobilis 223 Select Bibliography 237 Index Locorum 253 General Index 261