[In the following essay, McNeill examines the history of critical debate on Horace, the man. Although there has been considerable contention in the past with respect to whether the Horace in the poetry is or is not the result of careful self-presentation, McNeill (and other critics cited by him) now focus on the depictions in the poetry rather than the poet.]

Although many ancient authors have suffered through long periods of disfavor and neglect, their literary stars rising and falling according to the vagaries of changing tastes, Quintus Horatius Flaccus has remained consistently popular through the centuries. He has stood as a cornerstone of classical education for countless generations of students; poets from Pope to Hölderlin to Brodsky have read and admired his works; ancient commentators, humanists of the Renaissance, and scholars from the Enlightenment to the present day have written prolifically on the man and his texts. Some two thousand years after his death, he continues to challenge, astonish, and fascinate his readers, whether they encounter him for the first time or discover him anew.

Much of Horace's appeal, of course, derives from the sheer impact of the lively and engaging personality that springs forth for anyone who undertakes even the most cursory perusal of his poems. Horace does not simply make frequent use of himself as a character in his works, describing his personal triumphs and travails as he goes through life. He seems to speak directly to us throughout his poetry; he talks openly about his private thoughts and experiences, inviting our scrutiny and our response. “Here I am,” he seems to say, “here are my inner feelings and quirks of personality, my strengths and weaknesses, my friendships and love affairs, my views and my ideals.” As David Armstrong has noted, “It is commonplace to say about Horace that [his work] gives us a self-portrait of a striking individuality and apparent frankness not easily paralleled in classical literature, certainly not in classical poetry. We can read at vastly greater length [the correspondence of Cicero or Pliny the Younger] without getting any such illusion that we know perfectly the person who is speaking, and could … continue the conversation without difficulty if Horace walked into our presence now.”¹ Horace himself comes across as being so likable—so genial and witty, so thoughtful and sensitive, and capable of such strikingly beautiful and sophisticated verse—that it is all too easy to assume that he is being completely open and honest with us in this presentation. The poet lives in his poetry, often dazzling his readers into a wholehearted embrace of the vital and charismatic figure he cuts for himself.²

But is this really the picture of Horace we should have? He says a great deal about himself, to be sure; but is he telling the truth? It is, after all, misleading and even dangerous to think of there being a single “Horace” in Horace's poetry. He may present what at first appears to be a persuasive and believable self-portrait, but elsewhere he continually contradicts or alters this picture. There seem, in fact, to be many Horaces on display, or else separate images that have been given Horace's name and features. Each is vivid, powerful, and highly attractive in its way, but is caught up with very different themes and concerns not easily reconciled with the others. What is more, this variance transcends those differences of self-presentation that might have been necessitated by the requirements and limitations of the literary genres within which Horace works. In every case, the poet has made his projected personality so compelling that the reader is almost inexorably drawn to accept each particular portrait as being the true one—at the time of its presentation.³

Here is Horace the client, attending and entertaining his powerful patron in return for material support and encouragement; there is Horace the lofty public speaker, exhorting the Roman people to shun the horrors of civil war and embrace their destiny as the rulers of a new Golden Age. Horace the genial moralist offers us comfortable philosophical commonplaces and amusing social commentary, while Horace the anxious arriviste of obscure origin fends off sneers and attacks as he struggles to hold his hard-won place among the highest circles of Roman society. Horace the unlucky lover is routinely humiliated by unsuccessful assignations or difficult mistresses, but Horace the political operative smoothly manages the complex large-scale organization of public opinion on behalf of the emperor himself. These images may be facets of a persona or entirely different personae, but together they do not constitute a single, readily encompassable personality. Thus, when people speak of liking Horace's character or believing what he tells us, we must ask to which “Horace” in particular they refer.

Failure to pose this crucial question has undoubtedly contributed much to the intractability of the once furious scholarly debate over whether what we see in his poetry is Horace's own face or a mask with Horace's features. In years past, this particular offshoot of the “Personal Heresy” controversy (as articulated in a well-known exchange between E. M. W. Tillyard and C. S. Lewis) attracted the attention of many classicists, including W. S. Anderson, Niall Rudd, and Jasper Griffin, among others.⁴ In essence, the choice was long either to believe that Horace's poems offer us a reasonably accurate record of his life⁵ (or a reliable index to the plausible reconstruction of his historical experience); or to treat his texts solely as self-conscious and artificial literary works, more the products of craft than of earnest self-revelation. Until quite recently, all Horatian scholars continued to make this choice, taking up positions on one side or the other of the essential fault line between what might be termed the biographical and the rhetorical interpretations of Horace's self-image.⁶ Thus, in 1993 Kirk Freudenburg advocated a rhetorical approach when he identified “Horace” as he appears in the Satires as being a wholly invented mask—one self-consciously projected by the author, based on literary and moral philosophical precedents, and not necessarily bearing any resemblance to the historical Horace.⁷ By contrast, Oliver Lyne argued in 1995 that the “real” Horace's shifts in his public and political commitments can be reconstructed through examination of his poetry and that an array of societal and political considerations directly prompted Horace to make changes in his public image over time.⁸

Open debate on this subject has largely been suspended of late, with most Horatian scholars now in agreement that any appearance of openness and genuine personal revelation in the poet's work should be recognized as the result of an artful and carefully managed process of self-presentation, which must be scrutinized by the reader with equal care. However, no true consensus has been reached. The past few years have instead witnessed a general retreat from the whole issue, as scholars increasingly turn toward treating Horace's poems strictly as literary documents. According to current thinking, it should be obvious that there is no reliable way of getting past Horace's enticing array of images to arrive at a clear picture of his “true” self. We can never be absolutely sure of what is true and what is false in his self-presentation, and as such it becomes the wrong question to be asking.⁹ Much of the latest work done on Horace thus tends to follow the path laid out by Ellen Oliensis in her book Horace and the Rhetoric of Authority. For Oliensis, “Horace's poetry is itself a performance venue”—hence her emphasis upon its most overtly rhetorical aspects. Indeed, this conviction leads her to treat Horace as an object of consideration specifically and solely as he appears within the poetry itself: “I make no clear, hard-and-fast distinction between the author and the character ‘Horace.’ Horace is present in his personae, that is, not because these personae are authentic and accurate impressions of his true self, but because they effectively construct that self … [there is a] de facto fusion of mask and self.”¹⁰

Oliensis stands as one of the foremost advocates of the view that Horace is indistinguishable from the text, since the text is all we have. Other scholars have subsequently given implicit endorsement to this line. In a recent analysis of the generic considerations that lie behind two of Horace's seemingly most forthright and personal poems, for example, Catherine Schlegel moves beyond reaffirming the extent to which Horace's “autobiographical” persona has been shaped by its poetic context, to argue that the literary requirements of this persona have a priori shaped Horace's poetry—in effect, that Horace's art has shaped his life, not (as has long been thought) the other way around.¹¹

Much vital work has recently been done through pursuit of this critical approach. Indeed, by leaving aside the whole problematic issue of Horace's “true self” to focus instead on his rhetorical and generic manipulations, we have immeasurably heightened our understanding of the intricacy and multifaceted character of the poet's sophisticated literary technique. There is an inherent risk, however, in turning away from a lingering problem before it has been thoroughly investigated to the satisfaction of all concerned. We may have gone too far in rejecting or bypassing any consideration of Horace's poems as evidence for the direct and personal experiences of this unusual historical individual. At the very least, the suspicion commonly directed nowadays toward all forms of biographical literary criticism—and toward the author as an object worthy of attention and careful study—does a disservice to those who would understand the nature of Horace's art. For Horace encourages and even demands that we as readers experience the sensation described earlier of coming to “know” him intimately. Horace's indirect and subtle methods of self-presentation force us to struggle with the mysterious and protean nature of his portrayed image, rather than either accept blithely what he tells us without question or take it all as pure invention and turn our minds to other issues. Questions of what is real and what is invented lie at the very heart of Horace's poetry. We cannot simply dismiss the “real” Horace from our considerations but must instead confront his existence, and his poetic function, head-on.

In meeting this challenge, we might draw inspiration from an appealing suggestion made years ago by Gilbert Highet: Horace's self-image reflects the man, being neither a wholly artificial creation nor an entirely truthful revelation.

The pose of naiveté and ignorance of diplomatic affairs which Horace adopts in his Sermones may perhaps be called a persona: but not a persona to be separated and distinguished from Q. Horatius Flaccus. It is a pose: it is one of the faces which the real Horace wished to present to the world … In his poetry Horace appears in many different guises—as vengeful lampoonist in the Epodes, in some of the Odes as inspired vates and in some as gay amorist, in the Sermones as critic of others and as critic of self; but each is Horace—or one part of Horace.¹²

And yet even this balanced formulation does not completely solve the basic problem; for although Highet alludes to the multiplicity of Horace's self-images, he does not attempt to explain their sheer number and variety, nor to define their strangely fluid coexistence within single works and individual poems. He recognizes but does not resolve the difficulty scholars have generally had in fitting the totality of Horace's self-presentations into a single interpretive framework without resorting to untested assumptions and preconceived notions of what is “important” in Horace's poetry. Indeed, regardless of the specific critical viewpoint or interpretation adopted, there is invariably a vibrant and fully realized image of Horace somewhere in his corpus that cannot be made to fit.¹³

Whether or not the Horace of the poems is an accurate rendering of “the real Horace,” any sense we get of being able to know this “real Horace” in some deeply intimate way is certainly deceptive. Horace as he appears is a carefully developed characterization, representing solely those aspects of a projected personality that he wanted us to see and believe in, in a variety of specific contexts. This is perhaps not so unusual; to some degree we all consciously or unconsciously monitor the way we come across in our interactions with those around us, as we manage our words and actions to suit our personal circumstances. But Horace directs every aspect of this process with a remarkable facility that is almost unique among ancient poets. The Horaces of Horace are personae, as Highest suggests; yet the poet focuses attention not on their self-contained existence as separate characters but rather on the social settings and relationships within which they are presented.¹⁴ He does more than shape the way he presents himself; he shapes the way others (including ourselves) respond to these self-presentations by tailoring his remarks and addresses to the specific interests, tastes, and expectations of a surprisingly wide array of readers and audiences.

In this context we recall the thoughtful comments made by Barbara Gold in her 1992 study of the dedicatory poems of Horace's Satires and Odes.¹⁵ Gold identifies the presence of multiple audiences within these works, noting that “from each of his audiences Horace expects to elicit different responses, and [that] it is through attention to these audiences that Horace's reader perceives all the various dimensions of his work.” Pursuit of this idea leads her to adopt the schema of layers of audience presented by Victoria Pedrick and Nancy Rabinowitz as an integral aspect of audience-oriented criticism.¹⁶ But the difficulty experienced even by so accomplished and sensitive a reader as Frances Muecke in attempting to fit the Satires into their proposed format illustrates the comparative unwieldiness of this complicated approach when it is applied to the poetry of Horace.¹⁷ Gold herself concludes that Horace's audiences must be constantly shifting in relative importance, even trading places with one another; for “if we posit several audiences (as we must for all of Horace's works), how can Horace be speaking directly to all of them at once?”¹⁸ And yet this is precisely what Horace often manages to do. What is needed is a revised interpretive model, one that offers a simpler arrangement of categories and makes clearer the extent to which Horace is able to anticipate and handle simultaneously the different reactions of these audiences.

This book thus shares with the work of Oliensis a basic operating premise—namely, that when one examines the poetry of Horace, the main subject of discussion must be Horace's depiction of his relationships with those whom he addresses. Beyond this common point of departure, however, we diverge markedly in our aims and methodologies, the organization and specific arguments of our studies, and in our fundamental difference of opinion and approach regarding the nature and significance of Horace's self-presentation. Oliensis acknowledges that she has introduced discussion of Horace's life, his surrounding social milieus, and his shifting place in society only insofar as such issues are relevant to her reading of Horace's rhetorical technique: “I am interested not in the light Horace's poetry can shed on his extrapoetic life but in the life that happens in his poetry … My focus in this study is on Horace's poems, not on his life or his times or his culture.”¹⁹ By contrast, I take an approach that is in many ways guided specifically by those ideals and goals that Oliensis puts aside, for I find Horace's poems worth studying precisely because of what they can reveal to us about the society and culture in which he purports to have operated. I embrace the idea that there exists a sharp and very real distinction between the personae on view in the poems and the poet who created them; and that, moreover, the distinction is identifiable in the very act of their presentation. But in taking as my focus this discernible gap between the poet and his poetry, I maintain that careful scrutiny of the inner workings of the poet's self-portrayal enables us to identify the basic conditions and characteristics of his actual personal and social situation—as he wished them to be understood.

I do not, therefore, advocate any return to the old and strictly biographical interpretation, with its underlying conviction that Horace as he appears in his poetry is automatically the true and historical Horace. Instead, my intention is to offer a reconciliation of once irreconcilable positions: to suggest that the biographical and the rhetorical are by design inextricably linked in Horace's self-portrayal, with both elements constantly being deployed in the other's service. In effect, I propose that we approach Horace's texts as tools of detection: first, as a means of exploring further the poet's employment of created self-images in order to shape the perceptions of those around him, and second, as a basis for reconstructing the larger surrounding social, political, and “professional” artistic situations in which these poems were written and first received. For Horace's extraordinarily self-conscious portrayal is not simply marked by his preternatural awareness of a large number of separate audiences, each with different responses to his work; it is further enhanced by his total control and constant manipulation of these same audiences toward acceptance of the specific impressions he wishes to convey.²⁰

To identify the general patterns and techniques of Horatian self-presentation and their function within the poet's immediate situation as it can be reconstructed, we must take the entire sweep of the poet's literary corpus into consideration: the Epodes, Satires, Odes, Carmen saeculare, and the Epistles (including the Ars poetica). Although the discussion is focused mainly on the Satires and Epistles, passages from each of the works are analyzed throughout so as to demonstrate the extent to which the same issues (and similar methods of response) occupied his creative attention from genre to genre across much of his career.²¹ As noted above, Horace's techniques of self-presentation essentially depend on the self-conscious depiction of his social interactions with those around him. Therefore, individual chapters examine his portrayal of his disparate, idiosyncratic, and constantly fluctuating relationships with his patron Maecenas, his audience as a whole, his fellow poets, and the Augustan Principate.

The first two chapters are designed to show that we can best understand Horace's contemporary readership as consisting of a series of concentric rings, based not so much on the relative authority or absolute social standing of each of Horace's readers as on their varying levels of intimacy and direct personal contact with the poet. I then broaden my focus in the later chapters to consider how this mechanism of concentric rings shapes Horace's treatment of himself as an author and as a participant in Augustus's program of political and cultural renewal. In each case, the evidence suggests that Horace uses his self-images primarily to comment on the social pressures and uncertainties of these relationships.²² Thus, Horace's representation of his interaction with each “ring of audience” holds significant implications for our understanding of crucial aspects of Roman society and social culture. In effect, we may employ Horace's portrayed relationships as lenses through which to glimpse the several cultural frameworks within which the “real-life” historical models for such portrayals were originally developed.

By giving powerful expression to the social, political, and artistic pressures that he claims to have endured throughout his life, Horace both articulates and shapes his relationship with the people and audiences around him. The poet presents a vast surrounding web of social interactions: a vivid and engaging world of dinner parties and country estates, love affairs and close friendships, patrons, fellow citizens, and potential readers. He creates his rich and complicated self-portraits as a part of this picture, infusing them with the liveliness and humanity that make them so compelling. Horace's genius lies in his remarkable ability to project himself precisely as circumstances—and the specific interests of particular readers—demand. Directed toward so many different audiences and covering such a wide variety of themes, his multifaceted self-presentation serves to illustrate the complexity and interconnectedness of his experience and the intricacies of the world in which he purports to have actually lived.²³ In the end, therefore, Horace's poetic self-image remains precisely that: an image created by the poet, not an unguarded insight into himself. Nevertheless, this image does possess the poet's actual features, even if it has been distorted by the transmitting medium of his poetry. When we encounter Horace in his works, we do not gaze directly on his actual face, nor are we looking at a wholly artificial mask whose features have been identified with his. Instead, we see the real Horace—obliquely, through the polished lens of his poetry, as one would see a reflection in a mirror.²⁴ In scrutinizing this reflected image, we may be able to catch fleeting but direct glimpses of the poet and, over his shoulder, the character and features of his long-vanished world.

Notes

1. D. Armstrong, Horace (New Haven, 1989), 2.

2. Indeed, there survives among scholars a strong tendency to accept Horace's account of himself at face value even in this more guarded and cautious age; see D. Levy, Horace: A Life (New York, 1997), for a recent manifestation of this impulse. On the dangers of being seduced by the force of Horace's self-portraiture, however, see, e.g., R. Ancona, Time and the Erotic in Horace's Odes (Durham, N.C., 1994), 147-50, nn. 20, 28.

3. For an astute analysis of the intergeneric links between poems, one very much in sympathy with the position I advocate here, see M. C. J. Putnam, “From Lyric to Letter: Iccius in Horace Odes 1.29 and Epistles 1.12,” Arethusa 28 (1995): 193-207, esp. 206.

4. C. S. Lewis and E. M. W. Tillyard, The Personal Heresy (Oxford, 1939); see also, e.g., N. Rudd, “The Style and the Man,” Phoenix 18 (1964): 216-31; W. S. Anderson, “Roman Satirists and Literary Criticism,” Bucknell Review 12 (1964): 106-13, and “Autobiography and Art in Horace,” in Perspectives of Roman Poetry, ed. K. Galinsky (Austin, 1974), 35-56, both reprinted in W. S. Anderson, Essays on Roman Satire (Princeton, 1982); J. Griffin, Latin Poets and Roman Life (London, 1986).

5. As typified by the staunchly biographical approach of Eduard Fraenkel in his seminal work on the poet, Horace (Oxford, 1957). Fraenkel's famous declaration that “Horace … never lies” (260) neatly captures his unyielding belief in the factuality of the Horace on view in certain poems of the Horatian corpus (as chosen by Fraenkel himself; see Charles Martindale's introduction to C. Martindale and D. Hopkins, eds., Horace Made New [Cambridge, 1993], esp. 11-13).

6. Individual views on this central question are not always openly declared; scholars often indicate their leanings only indirectly, by emphasizing certain aspects of Horace's self-image and omitting others in their reading and analysis of his works. For further discussion of this phenomenon, see Martindale, introduction to Horace Made New, 2-13.

7. See K. Freudenburg, The Walking Muse (Princeton, 1993), esp. 1-7, for his opening statement of this view.

8. R. O. A. M. Lyne, Horace: Behind the Public Poetry (New Haven, 1995); Lyne's fundamental assumptions are implicit even in the title of his book. Cf. P. White, Promised Verse (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), who argues that the external personal relationships and responsibilities of the Augustan poets affected but did not control their poetry. It is worth noting that despite this basic difference of opinion, White too takes an inherently “biographical” approach in his attempt to use the poets' works to reconstruct the nature and conditions of their historical existence.

9. See D. West, Reading Horace (Edinburgh, 1967), for an earlier consideration of this point.

10. E. Oliensis, Horace and the Rhetoric of Authority (Cambridge, 1998), 1-2.

11. C. Schlegel, “Horace and His Fathers: Satires 1.4 and 1.6,” American Journal of Philology (AJP) 121 (2000): 93-119. Schlegel makes the suggestion that Horace praises the moral training he received from his “biological father” in order to distance himself and his work from his “literary fathers”: Lucilius, his predecessor in the genre of satire, and Maecenas, his patron. This is persuasive; but her conclusion—that Horace breaks away from these literary fathers by making his biological father “the prior poetic cause” in a paradoxical act of “subtle rebellion” (117)—seems overextended.

12. G. Highet, “Masks and Faces in Satire,” Hermes 102 (1974): 321-37.

13. Thus, as Martindale (introduction to Horace Made New, 11-12) points out, Fraenkel's vision of a kindly, avuncular Horace depends on an outright dismissal of the fierce and erotic Horace found in other poems. Similarly, the learned literary theorist portrayed by Freudenburg (and at far greater length by C. O. Brink, Horace on Poetry [Cambridge, 1963]) misses altogether the lively and vivid personality that the poet himself takes such pains to project. Can these discrepancies be put down simply to considerations of genre? Inasmuch as Horace worked within many different literary forms, the respective strengths and limitations of each genre are, of course, extremely important for determining the specifics of his self-presentation. However, we shall demonstrate that there exists a remarkable similarity of self-presentation techniques throughout Horace's works, across genres and even generic groups; much the same images and tactics are employed in the Satires, Epistles, Epodes, and Odes alike. As such, this issue demands further accommodation and analysis beyond the recognition of variations based solely on genre.

14. For a detailed analysis of the way in which Horace addresses readers from many different social levels in his poetry, see M. Citroni, Poesia e lettori in Roma antica (Rome, 1995), 208-9, 241-42, although Citroni is interested in showing that Horace and the other Augustan poets were aiming for a general public circulation rather than limiting themselves to the narrow upper-class focus of recent generations of authors, and as such he does not fully explore the personal dimension of the poet's representations.

15. B. K. Gold, “Openings in Horace's Satires and Odes: Poet, Patron, and Audience,” Yale Classical Studies (YCS) 29 (1992): 161-85; the quotation is taken from 185.

16. V. Pedrick and N. Rabinowitz, “Audience-Oriented Criticism and the Classics,” Arethusa 19 (1986): 105-14; see also P. Rabinowitz, “Shifting Stands, Shifting Standards: Reading, Interpretation, and Literary Judgment,” in the same issue (115-34). The proposed audiences here consist of the actual audience (the person or people who are reading the text at any given moment), the authorial audience (the hypothetical audience the author originally had in mind at the moment of composition), and the narrative audience (the audience that is implied in the text, to whom the narrator thinks he is speaking). The last of these three concepts is the least useful for understanding Horace, since his “authorial” and “narrative” audiences so often overlap (or are identical). As a result, Gold presents a different framework of audiences (see the original text of Gold, “Openings”): (1) the primary (the dedicatee, who appears infrequently and is given only brief though prominent mention); (2) the internal (an implied naïf whom Horace has contrived to play the “straight man,” to pose as the interlocutor for his rhetorical questions, and to misunderstand the ironies of the satire); (3) the authorial, the first-century b.c. Roman upper- class writers and politicians to whose experience and values Horace appeals and who could be counted on to understand the full effect of Horace's mixed signals and ironic tone; and (4) the actual (as above).

17. See F. Muecke, “The Audience of/in Horace's Satires,” Journal of the Australian Universities Language and Literature Association (AUMLA) 74 (1990): 34-47, esp. 39-40, 44-45,.

18. Gold, “Openings,” 164-70, 173-75; the quotation is taken from 166.

19. Oliensis, Rhetoric of Authority, 3, 13.

20. Like all authors, Horace primarily wrote for his contemporaries (despite his evident anticipation of his own glorious Nachleben, as manifested in Odes 3.30 and elsewhere). Thus, he necessarily placed his accounts of his life in a world that would be recognizable to them—both in his references to specific contemporary events and individuals (and, where appropriate, to his experiences), and elsewhere in conjuring up invented scenes and figures who nevertheless required an essential plausibility to have an impact. For this reason, it is insufficient simply to identify Horace's use of a particular image or episode as a literary topos (even one with a long-established pedigree). Why did Horace choose to adapt a particular literary topos in any given instance? His choices clearly stemmed not from mere antiquarianism but because in some way the themes and motifs he included had a direct cultural resonance for some segment of his contemporary readership.

21. In most cases I have followed H. W. Garrod's edition of the Oxford Classical Text of Wickham (1901); all translations are my own unless otherwise noted.

22. It should be noted that Lyne, Behind the Public Poetry, also acknowledges that there were pressures placed on Horace by virtue of his position in society and as a poet. But Lyne envisions only one Horace—the real Horace—responding to these pressures in his poetry. I would assert instead that multiple, consciously invented self-images are at work within Horace's self-presentation. Even when these images operate simultaneously they nevertheless remain separate creations, aimed at different sections of Horace's audience. In any event, contrary to Lyne, I would say that Horace's allusions to his pressures and difficulties are undertaken as a means of calling attention to various aspects of his contemporary world rather than necessarily as a means of overtly defending himself against them.

    Lyne holds, as I do, that Horace remained under considerable social and political pressure throughout his literary career. However, he attempts to identify a single, monolithic persona that Horace constructed in order to alleviate these pressures. Oliensis, Rhetoric of Authority, similarly points to an evolution over time of Horace's distinctive “face” and strategy of face-maintenance, contending that Horace's successful career garners him increasing authority and “symbolic capital,” and allows him to adopt new strategies of self-defense and promotion. I am in fundamental disagreement with Lyne and Oliensis on these points; for Horace employs a multiplicity of self-images, with glaring mutual and internal contradictions, and separate functions within a variety of specific contexts. The social and professional pressures Horace purports to face remain substantially the same throughout his career, as do the audience-directed techniques of self-presentation that he develops in response. Structural divisions based on genre and chronology are therefore potentially misleading and comparatively less important to the discussion (though questions of genre naturally remain contributing factors). Rather than search for a gradual evolution in Horace's self-presentations, one should focus on the particular personal and social context in each case. My organizing principle is therefore to examine separately Horace's several audiences and his relationships with them; Horace himself becomes, in effect, the lens through which to view these audiences.

23. My critical position on Horace differs from the interpretive strategies of various modern schools of literary criticism (neatly summarized by Martindale, introduction to Horace Made New) and yet shares certain elements with each school. Like the New Critics, I hold that “Horace,” as he appears, represents a set of created images (I prefer to avoid the loaded term mask or persona) adopted by Q. Horatius Flaccus to establish a particular rhetorical stance or series of stances. But I also agree with the New Historicist position that Horace employed techniques of self-fashioning (or “self-positioning”) partly to construct an advantageous position for himself in society, although this self-fashioning plays an important role within his poetry as well. A “real” Horace had to select and project these images, and is theoretically distinguishable from what is presented. However, I do not support the Derridean deconstructionists' claim that this “real” Horace lies entirely outside the text and is therefore irrelevant to our understanding of it. My assertion that the overall impact of Horace's poetry depends on his simultaneous address of different audiences bears some similarity to a basic tenet of reader-response criticism, but I diverge from this school in suggesting that Horace, as author, controls and directs the responses of each of his audiences (where reader-response tends to focus solely on the perspective of modern or “actual” readers). One might attempt a synthesis of different critical approaches rather than wholeheartedly accept or reject any single one, inasmuch as each is applicable and effective within a different area of Horace's oeuvre and, as such, might fruitfully be combined into a single interpretive framework.

24. The metaphor of the mirror was also recently invoked in a sensitive (if notably traditional) treatment of Horace by the historian V. G. Kiernan (Horace: Poetics and Politics [New York, 1999]); in describing Horace at the outset of his literary career, a newcomer to the city of Rome, Kiernan writes, “[Horace] would have to hold up the mirror to society, and at the same time to himself, a self still only half formed, not much better known to him perhaps than the Rome he now contemplated” (26). Kiernan paints an interesting picture of Horace as a perpetual outsider in the world he described, one who admired Rome and its empire without ever becoming immersed in it, “a natural partisan of a genuine middle class, if he could have found one” (40). Although Kiernan oversimplifies by ignoring the heightened self-consciousness of Horace's writing (and by anachronistically applying the concept of a middle class to Augustan Rome), his essential portrait of Horace's independence of thought and perspective is compelling.